Hydra, in 1960

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The Threepenny Opera, Kenneth Koch, white sandals, Leonard Cohen, expressionless eyes, grilled lamb, Boodie Katherine, Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery, Dionysus, Kitten Beautiful, sandy beaches
& a girl’s life. 


 

(What follows is an excerpt from a memoir about growing up in Greenwich Village–and sometimes elsewhere–in the 1960’s, with my mother, Janice, and my father, the poet Kenneth Koch, and their milieu, writers and artists of The New York School. In this excerpt I’m five years old, and it’s the summer of 1960.)

 

Did you too ever feel it, like a promise

That there could be a perfect lifetime, Janice?

Kenneth Koch, “Seasons on Earth”

Because of the playwright Arnold Weinstein’s insistence, we went by train and boat from Paris to the Greek island of Hydra, with its expatriate artists’ colony. Before we moved into our little white house, we spent a night or two in a hotel on the harbor. I could see into the blackness of the water, feel the late-night lonely hotel feeling. I stood at the window pierced by the dark longing in Jenny’s song about the menacing black freighter, from The Threepenny Opera.

I already knew that I wanted to be an artist, I had since I was three, making chalk drawings on the painter Fairfield Porter’s black kitchen floor, warmed by the coal stove.


My father had already, somehow, infused me with dreamy ideas about what a poet’s or an artist’s life could look like: living in some sort of inspired state of mind, in a beautiful place which would spread out in front of you when you walked outside your studio. 


My father had already, somehow, infused me with dreamy ideas about what a poet’s or an artist’s life could look like: living in some sort of inspired state of mind, in a beautiful place which would spread out in front of you when you walked outside your studio. You would have friends who loved making their work—the same way you were thrilled by what you were doing and thinking.

I got the idea that my life could take place on Hydra, where I would draw and paint in a café on a sparkling blue harbor. While we were there I did exactly that, with the painter Norris Embry. He and I both loved to draw and paint women, or, rather, Norris made deliciously colored, floating compositions of women’s faces; and I made colored-pencil outlines of women in dresses, whose large skirts I covered in patterns and designs.

OK, this is it! I thought, I’m going to live here forever, painting during the day and grilling lamb for my friends in my courtyard in the evening. We’re going to laugh a lot, wear sandals, live in white houses above the harbor and listen to Leonard play songs on his guitar.

Leonard Cohen, a young Canadian novelist and poet, sometimes played guitar and sang. He had been living on Hydra since the spring, and was in love with Marianne Ihlen, whom he’d met there just a couple of months before we met them. Marianne was beautiful, I remember, and later on I associated her angular, sweet blondness with Mary Travers of the singing group Peter, Paul & Mary. I thought Leonard was wonderful, good-looking, looking a little like my father. He had an atmosphere about him, courtly and funny, sharing his good humor with me. We gave each other nicknames we never forgot: Boodie Leonard and Boodie Katherine.

On Hydra I wore sandals that my mother kept white with shoe polish from our traveling medicine chest. I met a donkey face-to-face on a little cobblestone street corner, and heard the way it talked. It was a shock hearing the sound that abruptly came out of its mouth. It didn’t seem to be saying something I could understand the way I understood woof and meow. It looked sideways at me with bulging, expressionless eyes, and honked, loudly. My father laughed, happily.

I walked everywhere in my white sandals, I walked over big rocks and cobblestones, Leonard, my mother, and I walking to the other side of Hydra to swim off a sandy beach.

We walked to a courtyard where they showed movies. We saw one called Agora Koritsu, The Tomboy. In the movie a girl ran around and got on a bicycle and then fell in love. It was a boring grown-up idea of a girl’s life—of course she would be taken with some guy at the end.

But I was independent on Hydra, and didn’t need a boy.

I walked everywhere by myself. There were no cars. There still aren’t—there’s nowhere for them to go. The village goes straight up into the hills, and the houses are reached by stairs.

I learned the word for orangeade, so I could ask for it myself at M’sieu Oui-Oui’s restaurant on the harbor—“Portokalada, parakalo.”

I named the kittens we found under my bed the first night in the house on Hydra. They were tiny, with their mother. You could find cats all over the island, house cats and roaming ones. There was no electricity, so, to keep our food away from the cats, we would haul it up and down in a cage suspended from the ceiling. My mother would cook nervously at the kerosene stove. Our house was lit by oil lamps.


Leonard Cohen, a young Canadian novelist and poet, sometimes played guitar and sang. He had been living on Hydra since the spring, and was in love with Marianne Ihlen.


My mother made the kittens a cushioned box to stay in. One I named Sandal, for what people wore on Hydra; one was Veer, for one of the artists we’d just met on the island; another I named for one of the women in the group, Diane. After a little while, the mother took her kittens away, one by one, holding them in her mouth, through the front door that was almost always open. We didn’t know where they had gone.

One day, when I was walking alone from our house down to the harbor, I found a kitten on a garbage heap. It was crying and looked blind, its eyes crusted over. I told my father about it, and on our way home from the harbor I showed him the kitten, still there.

“We have to take care of it!” he said, instantly sizing up the situation. This was my father’s impulsively generous nature in action—the island might be overrun with stray cats, but if he saw one that needed help, he helped it. This wouldn’t change the general cat culture on Hydra, but he did attach himself to one kitten, and we did take care of it.

We found out she needed medicine that had to be injected. We climbed up to Marianne’s house, among leafy hills, to get a hypodermic needle.

My mother drew in her breath and injected the needle—the kitten recovered and survived. I gave her the name Kitten Beautiful. My father and I would dance with her in the little courtyard of our house, in the mornings, while she darted in and out of the box she liked to play in.

Before Kitten Beautiful arrived, I had spent my mornings alone, my only companions in the courtyard ants, and geranium petals that I tried feeding to the ants.

In the afternoons and evenings I would draw princesses with their giant skirts and play with my friend Dion around the statue that stood in the harbor. Dion’s full name was Dionysus. It made my parents happy, how their Greek friends named their children for ancient gods.

At night, the exhilarating smell of lamb and rosemary cooking on the grill would fill the air around us as we walked into friends’ courtyards for impromptu parties. Candles and torches flickered at night among the excitable guests, making their shadows move.

“Once you’ve lived on Hydra you can’t live anywhere, including Hydra,” said my father—taking directly from what John Ashbery had said (which Kenneth admired): “After you’ve lived in Paris for a while, you don’t want to live anywhere, including Paris.”

 


Katherine Koch is a painter from Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been shown extensively. Her current project is a memoir about growing up among writers and artists of the New York School, excerpts of which have been published in Hanging Loose, Court Green, and Saranac Review and online at Poetry Daily. This excerpt was originally published in Saranac Review.

Lead Photo by Christos Loufopoulos

 

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