He also describes the practicalities of life in the collective. They sleep on simple mattresses lying on the floor in a large building with about a dozen small rooms: that fits in with what Martin told me when we first met. A shared shower room, shared toilets — he thinks the building had previously been used by the military, and as some kind of children’s home or children’s holiday camp. The house that Herold and Hyatt live in was evidently where the permanent staff used to live, or people with varying leadership status. It is situated some distance away on a hill, and the famous couple apparently tend to keep themselves to themselves — there is no mention as yet of going to visit them in their home. For all the others there is a large shared kitchen and also a taverna a couple of hundred metres away by the road leading down to the beach. He mentions the rent: apparently they pay Hyatt and Herold a few hundred drachmas a week via somebody called Bruno. A paltry sum, according to Martin.
He also writes that Finn hasn’t yet arrived, although he had promised to spend the whole summer there. I know that Finn is Finn Halvorsen, a Norwegian and a good friend of Martin’s — and in fact the person who had told him about the notorious collective, and invited him to stay there.
But there is not much in the way of reflections at the beginning of the diary: not pregnant reflections, at least. As I read it I have the impression that Martin feels somehow overwhelmed, despite the fact that he is leaning over backwards to avoid revealing that. By the place itself: the blue Mediterranean, the white beaches, the cypresses, the scent of thyme — but perhaps above all by the people surrounding him: free-thinking hippies and citizens of the world, young men and women who seem to lead a voluntary and unrestrained bohemian existence in the classical Greek island setting without thinking that what they are doing is in the least remarkable. That they seem to have a right to it.
And they are all writers of one kind or another. Or practitioners of the liberal arts, at least. Two women — he assumes they are a lesbian couple but never says what they are called — stand up on the hill every morning, painting. ‘Until the midday sun forces them down to the sea, or indoors. They are half-naked all the time.’
Eroticism? I think. A place like that must have reeked of eroticism.
But Martin prefers to comment on the conversations. ‘Sat and chatted to Hernot and Della for a few hours,’ he writes. ‘About hermeneutics and Sartre. Bons came and joined in: he must be the most cheerful Nietzschean I’ve ever come across, but he’d been smoking too much weed and fell asleep after a while.’
The most cheerful Nietzschean I’ve ever come across? It’s not difficult to get the impression that he’s writing to impress somebody. Himself, presumably; or maybe some woman who in future happens to glance at the book which he has left open in front of her on their first date, apparently by accident. I remembered that in the summer of 1977 I hadn’t yet met Martin at that garden party in Gamla Stan in Stockholm. The summer of 1977 was when Rolf fell over a cliff above Flüeli in Switzerland, and died.
At another point — it’s the fifteenth of July and he’s been on Samos for just over a week — he writes:
Two new members arrived at the collective today. A German and a Russian, remarkably enough. The German is a poet and is called Klinzenegger [I’m unsure about the spelling here, we’ll see if he’s mentioned again later on], the Russian is called Gusov but is careful to point out that this is only his pseudonym. We had lunch together at the taverna — Elly and Barbara as well — just the usual Greek salad and a few glasses of retsina, of course, and it transpired that Gusov has been living in Greece on and off for several years, and among other things has been active in the struggle against the military junta. Claimed he spent several months in prison on that account, but that he was released when it was all over in 1974. I think he regards himself as a sort of honorary Greek citizen on the basis of his efforts. He also speaks quite fluent Greek with Manolis as the meal is being served. But unfortunately he sounds rather cocksure of himself. Too much preaching. And a shaggy mass of beard as befits a revolutionary and resistance fighter. I tried to talk to him about Mayakovsky and Mandelstam, but he didn’t seem interested. Presumably didn’t have anything much to say about them.
I yawned and checked the time. It was a quarter to one. I registered that even if the overall total was only five hundred pages, I had so far read a mere three per cent. I felt tired out, put the book down and switched off the bedside lamp.
For some unknown reason Castor was lying on the floor beside the bed instead of in it. And before I fell asleep I could hear the rain beginning to drum on the roof as the wind grew stronger.
17
It was the twenty-fourth of January 1986.
In the morning I had dropped off the children and was getting ready to travel to the Monkeyhouse. I was due to read the early evening news and didn’t need to be in the studio until one o’clock.
The telephone rang. It was Martin.
‘We have a problem,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘My sister. She’s made a mess of things again. She’ll be coming over this evening.’
‘I thought she was in Spain?’
‘So did I. But she’s evidently been at home here in Sweden since Christmas.’
‘I see. And what’s the problem this time?’
Vivianne was Martin’s only sibling, and if she had a problem now it certainly wasn’t anything new. She had been divorced three times — but no children, thank God — and she had lived her life so far on the periphery of the film world. In January 1986 she was thirty-eight, five years older than her brother. It had all begun quite early on, when she was involved in two Swedish films in the sixties while she was still a teenager: one of them was regarded as an excellent example of the new vogue of Swedish sex and was sold to several countries. In connection with that Vivianne had met a rich American producer, married him and moved to Hollywood. She made a few films, met an Italian director, got divorced, married him and moved to Rome. Made a few more films. . And so on.
She had about five nervous breakdowns and five potential scandals behind her when she met the Spanish film mogul Eduard Castel round about 1980, and a sort of stability entered her life. That is what she claimed, in any case, and what we convinced ourselves. She even made a film that was featured at the Cannes festival, in which she played the role of a woman torn between love and sexual liberation. Martin and I saw it in Stockholm, and agreed afterwards that she had played the part brilliantly.
We had very little contact with Vivianne; it was really only when she was going through one of her crises that she remembered she had a brother. Martin used to sum her up as the triple m: a manipulative, manic-depressive mythomaniac.