Cirrus@Austlit

'So here we are, alive in this mythical place, not Kalymnos, the first island on which Charmian Clift and George Johnston lived in the Aegean, but Hydra, that many-headed monster that wooed and seduced and repelled and wounded so many. ‘Oh, Leonard Cohen’s house is just up the road. You must go and see it,’ someone said to me. ‘There are old people still alive who knew the Johnstons,’ said someone else. I read recently a newspaper article about the death of that famous Cohen muse, Marianne Ihlen, and the story was accompanied by a black and white photograph of Cohen playing a guitar, a woman with her eyes closed resting up against him. ‘Cohen with his girlfriend Marianne when they lived on Hydra in the early ‘60s,’ reads the caption, except it’s not his blond Norwegian girlfriend Marianne Ihlen with her eyes closed, a rapturous expression on her face, but Australian writer Charmian Clift.' (Introduction)