Helle V. Goldman is the editor of the anthology When We Were Almost Young: Remembering Hydra through War and Bohemians. It focuses on the Greek island of Hydra. Goldman is the chief editor of the Norwegian Polar Institute's scientific journal.
Q: What inspired you to create When We Were Almost Young,
and what does the island of Hydra mean to you?
A: The original idea was someone else’s – Kevin McGrath. He
had been a friend of my father and was a Sanskrit scholar. Erudite and
well-travelled. A poet as well as a scholar. He came to me with the idea of a
collection of short Hydra memoirs, drawing from the well of our friends and
friends of friends.
This was just a few years after my parents had died. I was
still reeling from that loss, awash in regrets and longing, wallowing in
memories of my mother and father and of my early years on Hydra, and trying to
make sense of it all.
Hydra is where my earliest memories were formed, where I
started school, where my parents’ marriage had its first few good years and
then some bad ones, where my father kept returning year after year for the rest
of his life, where I returned for summers in my youth and then in my adulthood.
For my whole life, disembarking from the boat and stepping
onto the port has always felt like an enormous relief, a kind of settling. As
if some little thing that’s been out of whack in my cogs and gears slides into
place again, becomes aligned, with that first footfall back on those grey
stones.
I’d had an unconventional childhood, an extraordinary one,
with the good and the bad that went with being unconventional. Kevin’s proposal
gave me the opportunity to grapple with it, through my own story and through
the stories of the other contributors. For some of them, it was an act of
bravery – stepping through the looking glass back into those times, reflecting
on their youthful selves, contemplating friends and loved ones who are now
gone.
A couple of people that I knew had great stories just
couldn’t be persuaded, although I did my level best to lure them in. I
understood their reluctance. How much do you want to lay bare? What can you
write about the people – living and dead – in your life? To what extent should
their deeds and flaws be exposed? Will they – and you – be judged in the
context of that time and that place, or will the moral yardsticks of today come
thwacking down? What if you later regret what you’ve written? And so on. There was
some hand-wringing.
I sympathized since I was wrangling with these kinds of
questions myself. I wanted to write honestly about my parents, without
sugar-coating things. But I also loved and respected them. I didn’t want to
hang them out to dry. So I tried to write a nuanced memoir, weaving together
the good and the not-so-good, and I crossed my fingers that readers would get
it.
Now I can think of things that I wish I’d done differently
in my memoir in the anthology. I have some unpublished writings by my father
that I could have incorporated into the piece. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so
hard on him in my story. Maybe I should have revealed less about my mother. Or
maybe more - there are letters by her that I could have used.
And I had only barely tapped the vast journals of my
grandmother, who visited us on Hydra and who described each day of her visits
in astonishing detail, including sketches of the floor plans of the various
houses we lived in. Maybe there’s a solo book in all this.
I’m grateful for the contributions that did come through, in
spite of initial doubts some of the writers had. I haven’t heard of any
regrets. The book has made the contributors happy. It’s rekindled connections.
I’m in touch with nearly everyone who contributed. I’m also in touch with
people who submitted manuscripts that didn’t get into the book – on account of
artistic differences, let’s say.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen?
A: There were several suggestions knocking around. I finally
settled on When We Were Almost Young, which carries a faint whiff of irony or
even mystery that appealed to me.
That word – almost – it’s like a blue note. The ambiguity of
it seemed right for this collection of memoirs in which people who are long
past being young (me included) reflect on their younger selves. I was going to
say, “their younger, innocent selves”, but how dewily innocent were they even
40 or 50 years ago? Some foreigners came to the island with murky pasts, which
they magically shed as they re-invented themselves on Hydra.
But you don’t ever really shed anything, do you. It’s not
like a snake sloughing off its skin. No, you schlep your past around with you
forever. Sometimes it buoys you up and other times it’s a ball and chain.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the essays would
appear?
A: The contributions span various lengths of time and they
overlap in this respect. They’re arranged roughly chronologically, starting
with an essay by Greek author Stamatis Vlachodimitris. When he was 10, when
Greece had just been liberated from the Germans. His story takes us through to
when tourism began to transform Hydra. He was then a boatman and took
international film stars and directors around in his little caïque.
Stamatis is still going strong, by the way. I had the
pleasure of seeing him on Hydra in October, at the launch of his latest book.
The glamorous event was held on the roof of the town museum, overlooking
Hydra’s harbour. Stamatis, his son and a friend played classic bouzouki music.
His contribution to the anthology tells of a hardscrabble
youth in post-war Greece. And now here he was being fêted as an author, swanky
guests swirling around drinking wine, and the warm lights of the port twinkling
below.
I saw Stamatis again a few days later at a film festival.
Some episodes of a Norwegian TV series inspired by the story of Leonard Cohen
and Marianne Ihlen were about to be screened on the blow-up movie screen that
had been set up on the beach in the little harbour of Kamini.
Stamatis took over the mike as the episodes were being
introduced by some mucky-mucks. He regaled the audience with anecdotes about
his times – as a boatman - with Leonard Cohen. Marvelous stuff. May we all have
Stamatis’ zest for life to carry us through nine decades.
The piece by Stamatis was crucial to the anthology. I pushed
very hard to get it. It establishes Hydra as having had a history – including
terrible hardships – that preceded the arrival of the foreign writers,
painters, filmmakers and movie stars.
I think that a lot of foreigners who came to Hydra tended to
consider the island as their playground, their personal paradise. But it was
much more than that. There were many layers. First and foremost, it was an
island that belonged to the Greeks.
There are three Greek memoirs in the book. I would have
liked to have included more, but they were difficult to get hold of.
The essay by Stamatis is followed by a piece about Sam
Barclay and Marianne Ihlen. Sam had been sailing in the Mediterranean since the
war, first undertaking covert operations and later as the captain and owner of
a charter vessel.
Sam and Marianne met when she was taking a break from the
volatile Norwegian writer that she had come to Hydra with. Marianne would later
become Leonard Cohen’s longtime girlfriend. At some point in all this, Sam fell
madly in love with her, adding a twist to an already convoluted love story.
Marianne died before the book came out, but she and I talked
about it, and she threw in her moral support. I had translated – this was about
12 years ago – the Norwegian book that Kari Hesthamar wrote about Marianne’s
life.
Kari, Marianne and I were in constant contact as I beavered
away at the translation. I wanted to get it just right. The translation had to
be true to Kari’s distinct voice, and Marianne had to be happy too – it was her
life.
Through this process, I think that Marianne came to trust
me. I used to be a little half-Scandinavian blonde girl running barefoot around
Hydra, about five years younger than Marianne’s son. And now I was helping, in
my small way, to tell the story of Marianne’s life internationally.
I like the piece in the anthology about Sam and Marianne
because, apart from the poignancy of Sam’s feelings for her, there is the
maritime aspect of it. Sam was a sailor through and through, and Hydra is an
island among many beautiful islands in the glittering Med.
The sea has been sustaining countless generations of
islanders through fishing, sponge-diving and maritime trade – and, in our times
– tourism. Hydra was known in the 18th and 19th centuries for its ship
captains, its naval heroes, its fleet. You can’t talk about Hydra without
talking about the sea. Another piece in the book has a sailing slant too.
After the Sam-and-Marianne piece, the rest of the memoirs
take us through from the 1960s to the 1980s, roughly. Some of the same
“characters” and incidents make appearances in several of them. This is natural
since most of the contributors lived on Hydra in the book’s “core” period of
the 1960s–70s.
The greatest overlap is between my memoir and that of my
sister Johanne. I agonized over this at first. At one point I took out
everything in my draft that Johanne had covered in hers.
Dreadful result. It wasn’t that this purge had left me with
no good anecdotes – there were plenty left to choose from. The problem was that
the story now felt incomplete, not the whole truth. So I put nearly everything
back in.
My sister saw and recalled things differently than I did,
and details that were salient to her weren’t necessarily salient to me.
Forty-five years after being children together on Hydra, she and I have
experienced sadnesses and joys unique to each of us. She has her voice and I
have mine, and we’re looking back through different lenses.
The piece by Alison Leslie Gold – an award-winning author,
by the way – offers yet another view of my childhood and my sister’s. Alison
and her son came to live on Hydra when I was about five years old. She
befriended my family, and we’ve been close friends ever since. I stay with her
when I’m in New York. She’s a fantastic observer.
Interconnections like these link up most of the contributors
to the book. Two are cousins. Two are married. They all knew the same people,
bought bread at the same bakery, danced at the same taverna.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope the book touches readers, in some way. Maybe
something in these memoirs resonates with them. Maybe they’ll look back at
their own lives with a sense of humor and some gentleness - a bit of
forgiveness for the foolish young things that they used to be.
We’re living in polarized times, with diamond-hard moral
judgements being made all around. There is no trace of that in this book, so it
may provide some readers with few hours of escape.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: At the moment, I’m editing a dense multi-disciplinary
book about the Barents Sea, which is part of the Arctic Ocean. The authors are
mostly scientists – biologists, oceanographers, and so forth.
They do such valuable work, and they’re passionate about it,
but their ability to write about it for non-specialists, er, um, well – let’s
just say that this is where I come in. I’ve been eating, sleeping, breathing
the Barents Sea for six months. The deadline looms … This is part of my work at
the Norwegian Polar Institute, up here in Tromsø, Norway.
Not related to my job is a possible contribution to a
conference about viverrids. Viverrids are mongooses and civets and animals
related to them. I’ve done research on them in Zanzibar, where I once lived and
worked and where I did my doctoral research in the early 1990s.
Together with my frequent collaborator on all things having
to do with Zanzibari wildlife, I’ve submitted an abstract to the conference
organizers, in the UK. Now I’m waiting to hear whether it’s been accepted. I’m
hopeful it will be, so I’ve started to think more concretely about what,
precisely, I want to say about Zanzibar’s viverrids – and my adventures with
them – and how I want to say it. This gives me brief mental vacations from the
Barents Sea.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: When We Were Almost Young is set on Hydra and it
describes Hydra in (mostly) adoring detail, but Hydra is not a character in
this book. I just had to say that.
It’s one of my pet peeves – when a particular place is
important to the story in a book or a film and the cliché is whipped out that
the setting – Manhattan, the Okefenokee Swamp, wherever – is a character in the
book or movie. No, it isn’t. That cliché should have been put out to pasture a
long time ago.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
