A Theater for Dreamers, by Polly Samson
/
A Theater for Dreamers
By Polly Samson
Algonquin Books, 2021
The late Leonard Cohen is having something of a literary moment. Last year saw the publication of Michael Posner’s oral biography focusing on Cohen’s early years before he found stardom as a singer. This fall we’re promised another biography by Philippe Girard, plus a study of how religion informed Cohen’s approach to song-writing. Now we have Polly Samson’s novel A Theater for Dreamers, in which Cohen is certainly not the main character, but an unforgettable presence nonetheless.
Samson’s narrator is Erica, a London 17-year-old who, after the death of her mother, and to escape the clutches of her emotionally abusive father, decamps to the Greek island of Hydra in 1960 with her brother and her boyfriend. The journey is prompted when the real-life Australian writer Charmian Clift, who’d been a friend of Erica’s mother, sends a copy of her just published memoir Peel Me a Lotus to London. Erica’s travelling party expands when it reaches the Athens port of Piraeus, from which they sail for Hydra, the titular theater for dreamers.
Posner explored the Hydra milieu in his recent book. Here Clift, with her husband and fellow author George Johnston, presided over a literary circle in the 1950s and ’60s. Their associates included the Norwegian author Axel Jensen and his wife, Marianne Ilhen, as well as a seductively charismatic young poet from Canada named Leonard Cohen.
Much of the advanced praise for A Theater for Dreamers—the book was first published in the UK last year—speaks to its immersive, transporting nature, and that assessment is spot on. Erica, surveying an early morning scene, notes that “the sea lies waiting, the port promises drama, the rocks clang with bells from the island’s many churches. I stand at the top of the steps and drink it all in. The hills flame with yellow flowers, the mountains are tipped with rose gold, every whitewashed wall shines crystalline with quartz.” The scenery proves a balm to Erica, suddenly adrift after her mother’s death. “This is an island that holds you steady in its lap, its mountains solid as shoulders.”
But there’s trouble in paradise. George, who had been a war correspondent before turning to fiction, remains in ill-temper for the whole of Samson’s novel. He is especially horrible to Charmian, and in Closer to the Sun, the novel he’s writing as Erica and company descend on Hydra, he intends to expose his wife as a supposed adulturer. Axel is even nastier, menacing his wife Marianne and taking up with the American artist Patricia Amlin, even though Axel and Marianne have just had a baby son.
Erica is an observant witness to this island drama, even as she processes her own trauma. Samson’s character sketches—she’s currently writing the introductions for the reissues of Charmian’s two memoirs—remain convincing and well-done throughout, as the jealousies and suspicions of her various personages escalate to a boil. After one especially bad row between Charmian and George at a late-night dinner party, Charmian bolts away to take a swim, and George calls out: “Go drown yourself!” She doesn’t, but the fight is a pretext for her and Erica to have a heart-to-heart.
Leonard, who becomes romantically involved with Marianne, hovers at the periphery of the novel, and is often referred to as “our Candian friend” or “the Canadian poet.” Samson’s passages alighting on this mercurial figure are irresistible; when he first arrives on Hydra, “Leonard is courteous, pulls off his cap. His hair is thick and wavy, his brow dark and serious. His grin is lopsided, there’s something charming in the stoop of his shoulders, a carapace of shyness perhaps, but as he says his hellos, his voice is as deep and confident as that of a village elder.” He traces constellations in the night sky with his finger, strums his guitar and holds forth about the value of poetry. He’s even tender with baby Axel Jr.
By keeping Leonard off stage for stretches of the narrative, Samson makes a gift of his every appearance. The effect is to make readers feel as if they, too, are part of this island community of artists, eagerly looking forward to their next encounter with this impossible-not-to-like poet and future musical legend.
A Theater for Dreamers successfully brings to life a lost milieu in all its scenery and personality. It’s the perfect read for this time of resurgent travel—a tad ironic since George, who died in 1970, a year after Charmian committed suicide, never stops railing at the tourists in his midst. I suspect more than a few people will make the trip to Hydra having recently read Polly Samson’s splendid novel.
Benjamin Shull is a writer and editor in Brooklyn.