Corfu, Islands and Escapism; Hydra

Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Sissi) wanted to escape to Corfu, and had the Achilleion Palace built for her.

Sadly, it didn't work out.

Paul Gauguin escaped from Paris to Tahiti in the South Pacific. His life there ended badly, as did Rimbaud's adventures in Abyssinia. Lord Byron didn't fare much better in Greece. Nor did the Australian writers George Johnston, Charmian Clift and their son Martin Johnston, who lived on Hydra.  In an interview by Hazel de Berg (23 June, 1980), Martin said:

"Life on Hydra was, as I say, better in a material sense, less good in an emotional sense. The foreign community was getting bigger and bigger, and beginning to tear itself apart with internecine squabbles and bitchery and...all sorts of sexual and alcoholic tangles, and generally beginning to be a pretty unhealthy sort of a place in which to live. My parents more and more felt this." (Martin Johnston, Selected Poems and Prose, edited by John Tranter, UQP, 1993.

Hydra - stills from British Pathe film-clip, 1964

The Cairns Regional Gallery explored escapism in the Australian tropics, the Far North, where many Australian artists like Ian Fairweather and Donald Friend escaped from the city, and from their demons, in an exhibition (and excellent catalogue), "Escape artists: Modernists in the Tropics" , Gavin Wilson (1998):

Alan Oldfield, The Voyage, First Day (1992)

How many expatriates settle in the Tropics or on Mediterranean islands like Corfu as acts of escapism?

How many find happiness, peace of mind and contentment, find what they are looking for, in the long term, after the novelty has worn off?

I wonder.

There's not so much lotus-eating these days for the average escapist stranded in self-exile on an island like Corfu.

Corfu would make an interesting case study, and a very exciting art exhibition could be mounted on the subject of "Escape Artists on Corfu".

BBC Radio 4 programme on Escapism (IPlayer)

Random Quotes from here and there:

“Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.” J. Maarten Troost.

"I will arise and go now....

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings"

W.B. Yeats

Cavafy, from The City:

Καινούριους τόπους δεν θα βρεις, δεν θάβρεις άλλες θάλασσες.
Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. Στους δρόμους θα γυρνάς
τους ίδιους. Και στες γειτονιές τες ίδιες θα γερνάς·
και μες στα ίδια σπίτια αυτά θ' ασπρίζεις.
Πάντα στην πόλι αυτή θα φθάνεις. Για τα αλλού -- μη ελπίζεις --
δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό.
Ετσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ
στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ' όλην την γή την χάλασες.


Lord Tennyson, from The Lotos-Eaters:

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, "We will return no more";
And all at once they sang, "Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam."

"A book about escapism"


"We are here, all together, on the same small island, living more or less the same way, and looking- alas!- most definitely A Foreign Group, variations on a theme of escapism".

"What are we doing here under the mad moon watching the promenade pass and repass- the linked girls, the complacent citizens, the gay tourists, the self-conscious artists, the few groups of aristocrats come down from their lofty palaces to mingle with the village people? They all have their places. They belong. Why did we have to protest, burn our bridges, isolate ourselves, strip off our protective colouring as if had been a decontamination suit? Why? Just to sit eternally and eternally around the plastic tablecloth playing verbal pitch and toss, baiting, being baited, being bored, drinking too much wine, becoming too angry or too tired to stop."

"And now, when it is siesta time for any purposeful activity, summer-time, play-time, easy-living time, lotus-eating time, we must be very purposeful indeed".

"The island died long long ago; the antics of all the smart bright people who throng the cafe tables suddenly have the ultimate obscenity of necrophilia."

"It has become an obsession with both of us to try to avoid that tainted arena of the waterfront with its traps of tables and wine flasks, where still the shafts of spite and envy and malice break and splinter, and still under the loops of naked bulbs the dislocated psyches creak and crack..."

Charmian Clift, from Peel Me a Lotus

"Love the subject and love's loss the text.
Grief breaks the heart and yet the grief comes next".

Martin Johnston, from "Grief".

("Martin Johnston, Selected Poems & Prose", ed. John Tranter, UQP, 1993)

Theresa Nicholas's novel, "Suntouched", which begins as an escapist adventure on Corfu, is full of insight as escape becomes a way of life.

"It is the vibrant 1960s, and a young woman, desperate to escape the suffocation of her middle-class English life, flees back to Greece and the arms of her older, married lover, Tasso."

It wasn't just Lawrence Durrell who felt the need to escape from 'Pudding Island'.

Theresa's female protagonist answers the question which is put to her at Brindisi: "Why are you going to Greece?" For a man is only part of the answer:

"To escape an island set in dirty washing up water where you must always say 'sorry' - for an island set in emerald and turquoise, where nobody does anything properly, and never apologises".

 Sinarades, Theresa Nicholas,

 from Corfu Sketches- A Thirty-Year Journey

On Theresa Nicholas

A review of Suntouched