Peel Me a Lotus
Peel me a Lotus is available in a bind-up edition with Mermaid Singing, published by HarperCollins. Click here or on the book cover below to purchase.
Today we bought the house by the well.
The opening sentence (and indeed paragraph) of Peel me a Lotus expresses the sense of exhilaration Charmian Clift felt in February 1956 when she and George exchanged their entire capital for a crumbling stone villa on the island of Hydra. This sealed the couple’s commitment to living in Greece, and also to earning their living as full-time writers. In this same month, Clift received the welcome news that American publishers Bobbs-Merrill had accepted her first solo book, the travel memoir Mermaid Singing.
The sequel was already underway. While Mermaid Singing weaves back and forth through time, following only the writer’s thought processes, Peel me a Lotus follows the chronology of the months from February to October, and the seasons from late winter through spring and summer to autumn as the writer gets to know her new island-home and its people. But what a summer is depicted here! And what people! As the lotus-eaters’ sleepy island paradise suddenly become the destination of day-trippers, international celebrities, hedonistic ‘artists’, and an entire film crew, the writer wonders what on earth she has done:
Did I say I was glad to be committed? What ignorant chittering. Sometimes looking out at noon at the brazen, clanging mountains, I am secretly appalled. It is a terrible landscape. Mummified by heat, all the juices dried out of it, naked hairless country.
This was not the sort of idyllic landscape that readers wanted in a ‘travel book’. And in this genre that traditionally offers a vicarious escape, they did not want to read that
A housewife is a housewife wherever she is — in the biggest city of the world or on a small Greek island. There is no escape. She must move always to the dreary recurring decimal of her rites.
The sort of personal domestic detail that would appeal so immediately to the readers of Clift’s essays in the 1960s was anathema to readers — even women readers — in the 1950s.
Completed in April 1957, Peel me a Lotus would take two years to find a British publisher, and it would never be published in the United States. Sixty years later, readers are finally ready for it. New editions appeared in Britain and Australia in 2021, and in 2023 a Greek edition will be published.
By the end of that difficult first summer on Hydra, George was threatening to sell the house and move the family — now including the couple’s third child, Jason — back to London. But Charmian reaffirmed her commitment — not just to living in Greece, but to life itself.
Ask nothing of it and the soul retires, the flame of life flickers, burns lower, expires for want of air. Here, in the midst of all our difficulties, life burns high. Though it seems sometimes that we make no progress towards the ideal, yet the ideal exists, and our energies are directed towards it.
Photograph L: Charmian, c. 1956, at work on the terrace of the Hydra house. This led off the third-floor room that was a combined work room for the couple.
Photograph R: Charmian in the Hydra house, c. 1958
