I’ve been noticing of late how often the woman you see in the photograph, with her head on Leonard Cohen’s shoulder is captioned as “Marianne”. In fact, this beauty is of a different and wilder nature. Her name is Charmian Clift, and she was one half of the tragic couple, cited by Cohen as his inspiration and often dubbed “the Ted and Sylvia of Australia”. It was Clift’s memoir Peel Me a Lotus, that first set me on the path to the Greek island of Hydra and to writing a novel set among the artists’ colony of which she and her husband, George Johnston, were the undisputed king and queen.

It is 60 years this month since a 25-year-old Cohen – pre-songwriting and with one collection of poetry under his belt – set foot there, hoping to finish blackening the pages of his first novel. He had left Montreal on his first trip outside North America with a Canadian Arts Council Grant of $2,000, and had been attempting to complete three pages a day at a boarding house in Hampstead.

April 1960 was unusually cold and rainy, and on meeting Barbara Rothschild at a party, he learned that she was to be married to the Greek artist Nikos Ghika, the owner of a 40-room mansion on the sunny Aegean island of Hydra where artists and writers sometimes stayed, among them Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Cohen set off right away. Unfortunately, the advice to drop Rothchild’s name fell on the hostile ears of a housekeeper who, with a Mrs Danvers’s style attachment to the first Mrs Ghika, turned him away, with the words: “We don’t need any more Jews here.” Cohen claimed he put a curse on the place and the house burned to the ground in spectacular Manderley style the following year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The house where Cohen lived on Hydra, in November 2016. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP /Getty Images

Cohen was scooped up by Clift and Johnston who invited him to stay and to work on their terrace. The Johnstons were doing exactly what Cohen hoped to do, living by their writing. In their decade in Greece, between them, they published 14 books. As Cohen later said: “They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.” When he first played Sydney in 1980, by which time the couple had been dead for over a decade, he dedicated the show “To George Johnston and Charmian Clift who taught me how to write,” and opened with the Hydra-inspired song “Bird on a Wire”.

On Hydra, Johnston took a pen to the fresh manuscripts that young Leonard brought him, and taught him the value of fierce editing. It was he who encouraged Cohen to play his first concert of his own material. Johnston’s former colleague from his war reporting days, photojournalist James Burke, was living in Athens and is responsible for recording the event with his Leica. Burke took 1,573 photographs of the colony that year, commissioned by LIFE magazine for a feature that never appeared.

From the body language in those pictures, it is hard to dismiss the idea that Charmian and Leonard might have become lovers. It’s something I discussed with Jason Johnston, who was born on the island and is the only survivor of the family. As his father was impotent from TB medication and his mother, still in her 30s, such a ravishing beauty, it was something he’d wondered himself.

Eventually George’s sexual jealousy destroyed them both. His double-standards were, I suppose, typical of the era. Before Greece, when the couple lived for five years in Bayswater and he ran the bureau of Associated Newspapers, he, rather unoriginally, conducted an affair with his secretary.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marianne Jensen holds her son, Axel Jensen Jr, with, from left, Cohen an unidentified man, George Johnston and Clift. Photograph: James Burke/LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

George and Charmian’s tragedy didn’t end when she killed herself in 1969, on the eve of the publication of his novel, Clean Straw for Nothing, in which he laid the blame for his failing health at the door of her infidelity. It was the sequel to his autofiction hit and now classic My Brother Jack, which like that book won him the Miles Franklin award, and his original plan was for a trilogy, but he didn’t live to complete the third volume. TB came for him almost exactly one year after his wife’s suicide.

They live on in their work and in Burke’s photographs, which have been instructive for the writing of my novel.

•••

The port of Hydra is often described as like an amphitheatre and 1960 was a year of high drama. It had opened with the birth of a son to the rackety Norwegian writer Axel Jensen and his wife Marianne, which should have been a cause for celebration had he not so recently fallen in love with an American painter Patricia Amlin. By the year’s end Clift and Johnston, would temporarily leave their beloved island home and flee to the Cotswolds for the sake of their marriage, their health and their sanity.

Jensen has, over the years, become eclipsed by Cohen’s fame. The “Jack Kerouac of Norway”, he was from a wealthy family, part of a fast set who raced sailing boats, threw outrageous parties, drove open top cars. When the partying became too much he took himself to the Sahara and wrote a critically lauded book, Ikarus, about it. On the proceeds of the film and translation rights in his second novel, Line, he had bought a house on the island, a BB racing yacht and a Karmann Ghia sports car. He must have been horrified in later life when he became known primarily for being the husband of Leonard Cohen’s Marianne. It seems like karma, the way he treated her.

Confused and unstable, at 15 Axel was taken to India and given acid by the father he barely knew

In the letters sold by Christie’s last year, Leonard tells Marianne how hurt he was that she still called out Axel’s name in bed and I believe she may initially have thought she was “trading down” when she became Leonard’s lover, his muse. Most of the young male writers on the island had muses, only Charmian fought for her own work. Had this been a few years later and the pill readily available, I wonder how many of these “muses” would so readily have placed little sandwiches and fresh gardenias on male poet’s desks? By the time Leonard arrived, Axel had trained Marianne for the role which was tough work, as Hydra was without much water, electricity or mod cons and it made a peasant of a muse to keep the lamps burning, to lug water and food up the hills as well as firewood on which to cook it.

In later life Jensen, suffering from debilitating psychosis, fell in with RD Laing, had a daily dose of LSD at Kingsley Hall, an experimental unit run by anti-psychiatrist David Cooper. Cohen’s poem “Tonight I burned the house I loved” was written for Jensen at the time that he abandoned Marianne and their son. In his later poem, “Days of Kindness”, Cohen writes of his own abandonment of “Marianne and the child”, and that he prays that “loving memory exists for them too / the precious ones I overthrew / for an education in the world”.

Cohen had a better sense of self-preservation than many, and was acutely aware of his own fragile mental health having witnessed his mother’s hospitalisation for depression. He knew that work would keep him sane, and during the years of writing his two novels and collections of poetry on the island, had a work ethic to match George and Charmian’s. In the end it was the children who bore the brunt. At seven years old Axel and Marianne’s son, also called Axel, had been sent away to Summerfield School in the UK. Already confused and unstable, at 15 he was taken to India and given acid by the father he barely knew, and has been institutionalised in Norway for most of his adult life.

In the four years back in Sydney before she killed herself, and true to her amazing capacity, Charmian had become a superstar proto-feminist and radical, her column in the Sydney Morning Herald was syndicated and read more widely than any other, she wrote screenplays and appeared on television. When in 1967 Greece fell to the colonels, she campaigned for the return of democracy, her advocacy so powerful that it became impossible for any of the family to return while Greece was under their rule.

Her and Johnston’s daughter Shane, who had always thought of herself as Greek, lived in the Greek quarter, worked for the Hellenic Herald and spoke only Greek. Five years after her mother’s suicide, her Greek boyfriend’s parents told them that they could never marry because Shane was not Greek. She went home and also killed herself. She was 25 years old.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jason Johnston with his parents, Marianne and Cohen on Hydra. Photograph: James Burke/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

George and Charmian’s elder son, Martin, so clever as a boy on Hydra that Elizabeth Jane Howard sought him out, and featured him as the worldly-wise child “Julian” in her Hydra novel, The Sea Change, had drunk himself to death by the age of 42. A poet and novelist of repute he is quoted as saying: “The way my parents lived has perhaps been disastrous for me in the long term, in that what they did was, they wrote very hard … they wrote from say seven in the morning until midday, and then went down to the waterfront and got pissed. And I suppose that’s a pattern of life I’ve followed ever since …”

As for Cohen, by the end of his life it seems to have come back into clear focus, the thing he’d been trying to regain since those Hydra days, before music and performance swept him away with siren song. He spent the rest of his life attempting to join colonies; he flirted with Scientology and Hare Krishna, spent six years at the Mount Baldy Zen Budhism centre, took a year out for daily satsangs in Mumbai, but in his last days is quoted as saying: “Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money, nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.” And it was blackening those pages that he learned to do with George and Charmian on Hydra in that brief, golden, period before LSD arrived and messed with heads and the pill with the availability of muses who conveniently confused love for service. Although it is sometimes attributed to Leonard Cohen, I believe it was another great poet, Kenneth Koch, also present that summer of 1960, who said: “Once you’ve lived on Hydra you can’t live anywhere else, including Hydra.”

• Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers is published by Bloomsbury on 2 April. To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com.