Honour’s Mimic

Charmian Clift lived on the sponge-diving island Kalymnos for only about nine months, compared with the nine years she spent on Hydra, and yet it was Kalymnos — remote, poverty-stricken, and lacking the film-set beauty of Hydra — that provided the author with the place for a novel. Far above the island’s small port-town, on top of a bare rocky mountain, there is the ruin of a city: not an ‘ancient Greek’ ruin, with marble columns, but the deserted stone houses and chapels and streets of a city from Byzantine times.

Kalymnos also gave the author a face: ‘the actual face of a sponge diver’ that ‘haunted’ her for eight years. In an unlikely love story, this man’s fictional version — named Fotis (derived from the word for light) — is a sponge diver who has lost his nerve. (The locals have decided the Evil Eye is on him.) As his twin soul, Clift invented her wildest alter ego, in the form of Kathy, a thirty-one year old Australian woman who has left her husband and sons in London and come to the island to recuperate after a car crash.

When the two venture to the ruined city above the town, Kathy, ‘having nothing else to give him, tells him, “That car accident. I was trying to kill myself.”’

We are alike, Kathy thought. You are desperate one, too. She was incredulous that she could be so happy when it was so perfectly clear that the situation was impossible, could not possibly last, and that in any case this man was doomed already.  

As Kathy and Fotis fall in love, all other considerations become irrelevant. Drawing on the John Donne poem that provides the title, Clift depicts a passion so intense that even honour becomes ‘mimic’. While this is a far cry from the meme of the Greek-holiday-romance novel, the author further defied the genre by having the heroine love a man who is far below her on the class scale, and who is from a different cultural and ethnic background.

Written in a particularly slow and halting way over over four very difficult years, Honour’s Mimic was accepted for publication in Britain in 1963 by the publishers who had previously brought out Mermaid Singing and Peel me a Lotus. Like the latter, it was never published in America. It is currently out of print.