The Living and the Dead in Winsford

25

It took me nearly seven hours to go through the rest of the handwritten material from Samos. The week that still remained from 1978, and the whole of the summer of 1979.

It was turned one by the time I was finished, and when I snuggled down into bed with Castor, exhausted and with my eyes aching, I said a silent prayer hoping that I would remember enough to write a summary the next morning.

My prayer was answered. After Monday’s morning walk (plus six degrees, quite a strong northerly wind, a greyish-white sky and only thin streaks of mist) I sat down in the rocking chair remembering and noting down what I considered to be the most significant things. As I did so I had a distinct feeling of being watched. That I was performing some sort of task that I had been instructed to carry out, and that the instigator — whether it was Martin or somebody else: Eugen Bergman perhaps, or the elusive G, or why not the two dead main characters, Herold and Hyatt? — was sitting like a raven, or even more than one, on my shoulders, making sure that nothing was overlooked.

Because something was afoot. Something was happening down there on that Greek fairy-tale island: one didn’t need to be a raven to understand that.

Nothing sensational happened during the rest of the 1978 stay. Martin describes the final week in his usual restrained manner: Hyatt and Herold are only mentioned in passing, Halvorsen and Soblewski rather more often. The day before Martin travels back to Sweden he and those other two go for quite a long walk along a ravine in the mountains, and Martin really does his best to record his impressions. The recurrent theme is that it is strenuous and terribly hot. And that Halvorsen has chafed feet and has to be more or less carried the last part of the homeward trek.

By the following summer, July-August 1979, the situation has changed somewhat. Martin is no longer living with the so-called collective. Instead he is lodging in a small house just a stone’s throw away from Herold’s and Hyatt’s villa. He lives there for five weeks with various different people who come and go, but Soblewski arrives after a week and is still there when Martin goes home, and not long after Soblewski somebody called Grass turns up. I guess that he might well be the person hiding behind the pseudonym G — well, I suppose in fact I decide that is the explanation, and for some reason it comes as a relief. He is a writer and media researcher, originally from Monterey in California, but currently based in Europe.

The house they share seems to accommodate up to eight people: couples or women live in two of the rooms, and after Soblewski’s arrival he and Martin share a room for the rest of their stay. There is a kitchen, a toilet and outside shower: on the whole the place is an improvement on where they lived in previous summers.

The fact that they are closer to Hyatt and Herold is obvious, and it is not just Martin skewing matters to give that impression. By this time the couple are famous and worldwide celebrities, and the main reason for this is Bessie Hyatt’s debut novel. Her second (and last) book, Men’s Blood Circulation, has been edited and proof-read and will be published in the English-speaking world in October. Martin writes that all kinds of journalists and paparazzi ‘are crawling around the pine-clad hillsides like cockroaches,’ but that Tom Herold in particular makes sure that ‘not so much as a bloody autograph-hunter crosses over the bridge.’

Grass turns out to be an old acquaintance of Bessie Hyatt’s. They evidently come from the same part of California, went to high school together, and there might even be closer ties although Martin doesn’t succeed in uncovering them. In any case there is a lot of socializing with the hosts: I gather that there is a group of six, in addition to Hyatt and Herold, who generally spend the long evenings on that famous terrace ‘with views over the pine trees, the cypresses, the beach, the sea, the setting sun: if it is true that human beings are the creatures the Creator produced so that they could observe and admire one another, this is the right place and we are the chosen people’ (sic!). The half-dozen comprise: Martin, Soblewski, Grass, the German women writers from the previous year (Doris Guttmann and Gisela Fromm) and the inevitable Russian Gusov. Occasionally also Bruno, who is still playing the role of a sort of caretaker and hence seems to be degraded to a kind of second-rate citizen. That is not something stated by Martin, but a conclusion I have reached. Other people occasionally also appear on the terrace, of course: for two evenings the icon Allen Ginsberg is a house guest, and a week later Seamus Heaney joins the party — the Irishman who is awarded the Nobel Prize sixteen years later.

And these lengthy sessions, with Greek snacks served up in a never-ending stream by the housekeeper Paula, with boutari wine and retsina, with ouzo and tsipouro and beer, with witty discussions on Existentialism and hermeneutics, on Kuhn and Levinas, Baader-Meinhof and Solzhenitsyn and the Devil and his grandmother, with guitars and bouzoukis, these orgies in hyper-intellectual exuberance and Gauloise cigarettes with or without extras — well, as far as I can judge these happenings take place every evening, week after week, and usually end up with a group of participants trudging down to the beach about an hour or so after midnight for a session of skinny-dipping. For Christ’s sake, this is heaven for a streber like Martin Holinek, a twenty-six-year-old research assistant from Stockholm in the backwoods of ultima Thule. For Christ’s sake.

And on the heavenly throne the couple themselves: the British poet that everybody was talking about, and his fifteen-year-younger American wife. ‘If anybody around this table might be considered to have come from Olympus, if any one of us were a reincarnated goddess,’ writes Martin in a moment of poetic inspiration, ‘she would certainly be the one.’

Whence Tom Herold had been reincarnated was less clear: Martin found it difficult to describe him in words. It is quite obvious that this is connected with almost histrionic respect, but it is three weeks later before a note suggests that something is not really as it should be.

‘There is something about Herold that makes me pause and think,’ he writes on the thirteenth of July. ‘There is no doubt that his temperament is a handicap, both for Bessie and for himself. Last night he stood up and left the table in a fit of anger — it was after something that Grass had said and that I didn’t catch on to, and afterwards Grass was reluctant to discuss. Bessie remained in her seat and tried to keep up appearances, but I could see that she was upset. After a while she apologized and withdrew: Soblewski and I took the opportunity of doing the same. This was the first time since I’d been on the island that I’d got to bed before midnight. Every cloud has its silver lining.’

A few days later he writes about another controversy on the terrace. A young American poet is visiting; Martin writes that he and Bessie Hyatt evidently find a lot to talk about, but that Tom Herold, after having consumed a sufficient amount of retsina, is unable to contain his irritation. Bessie apparently defends her table companion — his name is Montgomery Mitchell and Herold makes fun of the name: it all ends with Herold taking his wife by the arm and dragging her away from the table. They return after a while, ‘Bessie seems cowed and helpless,’ Martin writes. The mood feels subdued and uneasy, it’s only Gusov who fails to register the situation. He encourages all present to sing Theodorakis songs in Greek, and before long has most people joining in.

Many of the later diary entries for this last summer on Samos deal with this topic: how Martin interprets the manoeuvring between Herold and Hyatt. He speculates quite a lot as well. Is there an illicit affair in the background? Is there something going on between Bessie and Mitchell — he stays on for more than a fortnight after all? Or between Bessie and Grass? Martin talks quite a lot to this Grass character (without using the abbreviation G, however), who claims to have known Bessie inside out from his childhood onwards, and he confirms that the facts are what Martin has suspected. She is not happy with her considerably older husband, who wants to control her more and more. Grass maintains that there is both jealousy and envy involved: from a literary point of view Herold feels that he is being outshone by his beautiful wife, and no matter how much he pretends to enjoy her success, there seem to be different emotions lurking in the background. But Bessie says nothing at all about it, not to Grass or to anybody else. ‘This is going to be a disaster, that pompous poet is a bloody big time bomb ticking away,’ Martin notes that Grass commented in early August. ‘We ought to rescue her,’ he says at another point, ‘but how the hell do you rescue somebody who doesn’t want to be rescued?’

There are other things discussed in the diary notes, of course, but I find myself skipping over all the more or less strained Hellenistic observations and all the complicated discussions about life, politics and literature. Although Martin comments on Tom Herold’s moods, it is clear that he is full of admiration for the great poet. ‘What would he be without that restless, creative ocean thundering away inside himself?’ he wonders. And ‘After having read Ode to Ourselves I can see that he is presumably the greatest living poet in Europe just now. Quite simply, Herold’s poetry has a significance and a richness which is unmatched in our continent and in our century.’

But he is never on intimate terms with the great poet — or at least, there is no mention of that and I’m sure that Martin wouldn’t fail to write about it if it existed. On one occasion he has an opportunity for a rather more private discussion with Bessie Hyatt: they happen to find themselves together on the beach one morning when a group has gone swimming ‘before the heat is such that every rational person retires to the shade’. ‘Are you happy?’ she asks him out of the blue, and Martin is inspired to respond that any man would consider himself happy if he found himself sitting on a Greek beach with a Greek goddess. She evidently laughs at this, but then she asks if he thinks that she is happy. Martin says he doesn’t think so in view of the fact that she asks such a question, whereupon she nods thoughtfully and just for a moment ‘looks so sad that one would willingly sell one’s soul to save her’. Hmm. I read this somewhat obscure comment again, but that is in fact exactly what he writes. He would willingly sell his soul for Bessie Hyatt’s sake. I note that this is August 1979, and that Martin and I have been in a relationship for over six months by that time.

A few days later on the terrace Tom Herold lets slip the fact that they are going to move. All good things come to an end, he says, but they have sold their Greek paradise and will settle down in Taza in Morocco. The new owners will be moving in in September, ‘so I am afraid the bell tolls for all of you!’ Quite a lot of emotional reaction erupts all round the table: nobody is sure if they ought to congratulate or commiserate or both, but Martin writes that he happens to glance at Bessie Hyatt and that she seems anything but pleased. There is even more smoking and drinking than usual that evening, and for once Herold is at his wittiest and most cheerful. Martin writes that he ‘produces a perfect sonnet from up his sleeve, just like Cyrano de Bergerac: but instead of stabbing an opponent after the final rhyme of the fourteenth line, he pours a glass of retsina over the head of Montgomery Mitchell and kisses his wife.’ Enthusiastic applause breaks out, and not even poor Mitchell seems to have anything against it.

Needless to say there are discussions the following day about the reasons for the imminent departure of Herold/Hyatt, including one between Martin and Grass. The latter maintains that it is a coup engineered by the deeply egotistical Herold, and that Bessie has been presented with a fait accompli. It is not clear on what grounds Grass is able to make this claim, but Martin refers to him as if what he said was ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. Once again Grass expresses his worries about the fate of his childhood friend, and maintains that things will never end up satisfactorily between the ill-matched couple. Grass has evidently also read a proof version of Men’s Blood Circulation, and declares that when it is published ‘everybody with more than one brain cell in their body will realize the facts about this English verse-monger’. One might well wonder about the term ‘verse-monger’, and Martin reflects at length about Grass’s aggression. He suspects that he can smell a rat, or possibly several, and wonders if Grass is arguing the case for Mitchell, whatever that might be.

Martin leaves Samos together with Soblewski: they take the ferry to Piraeus, spend two days together in Athens, visit the Acropolis, eat and drink in tavernas in Plaka and eventually part at the airport on the fifteenth of August. Martin devotes almost nine pages to these final days, but nevertheless he concludes his 1979 diary with the words: ‘It feels as if something has come to an end. I shall never return to Samos, perhaps I shall never again meet Tom Herold and his goddess, which is a thought that suddenly feels like a millstone.’

Oh yes, I think more than three decades later. And within a year you have a goddess of much lower significance to take care of. Pregnant to boot. But even so you go off on another journey.

There are forty more handwritten pages from Taza.

Not to mention the typewritten pages. Nor the computer files. I decide to wait for a few days. I don’t feel too good when I heave myself up out of the rocking chair: walking along hand-in-hand with young Martin Holinek like this is not exactly without its problems.