A Rope of Vines

FOREWORD

I was on the island of Venice for the Venice Biennale in 2007, at the Welsh exhibition party on the Giudecca. I was asked whether I knew the ink drawings that Brenda Chamberlain drew on the Greek island of Ydra in her biographical journal A Rope of Vines. I did not. I knew little about her although I had heard that she lived for a time on Bardsey, the island of Enlli: an island I had also visited once. There are only certain times when the weather is suitable for crossing to Bardsey, and on the day we went I had a migraine. As we approached, the sea was filled with the bobbing heads of seals. The coast seemed inhospitable, but we landed and in the distance I saw the castellated outer wall of the poet Christine Evans' house. We were offered a cup of tea. There was no running water in her kitchen, and when I went to the toilet I saw the pile of leaves used to cover what would normally be flushed into a system; and I thought about how Brenda Chamberlain

must have lived on this island.

I had seen a rather beautiful painting she had done of Dora Maar, and a series of weeping portraits of the same woman painted by Picasso. I also knew the Brenda Chamberlain self-portrait, with haunted eyes framed by long blonde hair.

Later, I was sent an old library copy of A Rope of Vines. I remembered that I too had been to a Greek Island, as a child in the early sixties. My mother and I hitched on the autostrada with our sleeping bags on our heads. We went from Piraeus by ship to Sifnos and slept on the beach.

I thought the journal would be a rather light diary of the author's observations and an account of her time on the island. The drawings seemed quite slight at first; and then I started to read the book and found it compelling.

* * *

From the first words of the introduction Brenda Chamberlain has our attention. We are riveted. With a sharp intake of breath we read on. There is an element of brutality, a desire to shock: an act committed by a friend of hers reflects the savagery of the island - he has killed a man.

The melodramatic first sentence is the condensed essence of the book: a dichotomy between the subjective violence seen everywhere in inanimate objects (the trees, the mountains) and a religious, aesthetic quest for absolution and purity. We are thrown into a Greek tragedy that weighs heavily over everything. The chorus is set, nothing good can come out of this, and all is seen subjectively as a kind of menace. This first sentence is a metaphorical punch in the stomach, how could this happen? Why would her friend do such a thing?

I have returned to the good mothers of Efpraxia while my friend Leonidas serves sentence for manslaughter of an English tourist in the port of Ydra.

There is violence and shock in this statement and the whole book is taken up with the author reconciling herself with someone who could commit such an act, accidental, but still having come out of violence. And yet there is also the element of seizing hold of the tragedy for artistic stimulus. As a painter myself; my response to experience is to make art out of life: it's what we do, how we make sense of it - somehow, as with prayer, we will make amends and turn adversity into good. It distances us from the full horror or pain.

I can't help feeling the author is expressing her own inner state of mind when she says:

This is an uneasy island, ghost-ridden and with black danger in the air.

She projects onto the landscape a sense of emotional repression, sexual tension and guilt that perhaps causes her to stay in the nunnery. We get no insight into this relationship with Leonidas. Nothing is specific; she manages to be evasive, almost deliberately excluding us from factual detail.

I can write. I have a lot to say, but the meaning may not be immediately apparent to more than a few people.

Repressed passion, menace, a sense of violence, unrequited desire and yet a Spartan religious puritanism dominate, for Brenda Chamberlain is living with nuns. It is as if, out of a masochistic desire for punishment or to empathise with her friend, she too has incarcerated herself in this monastery, living on a stony cliff surrounded by sea.

I am writing outside my cell, sitting on the wide windowsill from which the wall of the monasteri drops to a small garden of fruit trees. Below the garden, a precipice, under the precipice, the sea.

Tension is created; one feels vertigo, what if she should slip?

The language is rich and evocative and her troubled state of mind and inner turmoil is expressed in the imagery:

I have lived for many years in a world of salt caves, of clean-picked bones and smooth pebbles. Towards the end of this period of my life, I began to paint salt-water drowned man, .an armoured leg braced in silt, the loins of a body changed gradually into a stone bridge, a wounded torso.

Then the first sentence of chapter one: A dolphin leapt!

All is expectation and a feeling of excitement. She has arrived on the island. She has a servant and a house in which to stay.

The windows were open so that the air within the house was heavy with the smell of blossom. Lemon flowers, naked mountains, and prickly pear. This is my new house, Varvara will act as my maid.

In this first chapter she glimpses Leonidas who had A pale intense face and black curly hair. He is young and she, we know, was middle aged. Was she romantically projecting intense emotional feelings onto someone from afar?

The port and the people in it do not interest me. I am drawn by the monasteries on the barren hilltops.

I see a rather austere woman, aesthetic, elitist and introverted, shunning all company, glancing with hidden passion at a pale, poetic Greek man, craving companionship, torn between physical desire and spirituality:

It is clear that so great a cleavage in my nature will never be resolved, now a life of withdrawal, now worldliness.

Immediately she arrives at this place, she desires to see the monastery and isolate herself. The language is poetic prose, all is suggestive, we have no sense of time, and there are dense descriptions of stone, trees and sun- bleached land:

There was the accustomed cry for air from the shuttered white houses piled one above the other on the burnt-ochre rocks.

From inside her house she observes Sophia, the woman opposite, an old lady with a nervous tic who lives with her old mother, and she can hear their volatile relationship. The atmosphere of the place is described: the heat, the high winding roads, the insects, the mules and donkeys loaded with bundles of household goods climbing up the white steps. The tastes of wine, bitter olives and hunks of cheese are evoked, but I don't sense a great indulgence. I feel hungry when I read these passages because I feel Brenda Chamberlain eats very little. But each taste and smell is fully savoured, as a monk might experience them living in a cave on a mountain. She travels with an English family to the turpentine forest. We get no names or any intimacy with the people, yet an in-depth description of the place.

A half-moon lit the wood where we lay on a level space between the trees, each of us rolled in a blanket.

This says a lot to me about her state of mind, wrapped as in a cocoon, rolled within a blanket. There is also the contrast between her and the indigenous people, who appear savage and wild:

The wild, black-eyed woman who lives in the hovel. was singing into a black night. her grief and despair. a primitive lost cry of the heart of a savage woman.. This is the mother of Aldo, the boy who bites.

There is a recurring sense of emotion projected onto the island landscape:

Perhaps it has to do with the expectation of earthquake that so much latent violence is in the air. my heart tells me the earthquake is about to destroy us.

Her attraction and passion for Leonidas is only hinted at, and is it her own feelings at all she is describing here?

She walked in a hot red wind, the sun burning her body through a cotton dress of purple, red and dun- green stripes. she walked with downcast eyes, conscious that he was coming towards her, pretending not to see him.

There are a few exhilarating pages of heightened yet veiled emotion, nothing is explicit, and then comes the knowledge that Leonidas has killed a man and nothing is the same.

So from this highly charged sexual emotion, she incarcerates herself within a nunnery and there she is served by the nuns, one offering being:

A cup of Turkish coffee, a glass of cold...