Gauguin went to Tahiti to paint, Georgia O'Keefe holed up in a mud hut in New Mexico, Pauline Bewick spent two years in straw huts in Samoa and the Cook Islands. But who ever heard of writer's sun-block?
With the exception of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose wife, Fanny, worked her fingers to the bone to create his South Seas paradise (and Peter Mayle, who squatted in Provence to rat on his neighbours) writers have always laboured in uncomfortable rooms, furnished only with the cold imagination. They are, as the novelist Jane Gardam put it, an ugly tribe "engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chilblains, poor of circulation".
Then I was asked to conduct a writing workshop in Thailand.
The course was to take place on a beach on the tiny island of Ko Samet. The island is a forest park, similar to where The Beach was filmed. I have to come clean and confess that I undertook the assignment because I was tired as a two-day-old salad and felt confident no one in their right mind would want to write in such a setting.
The course was organised by the holistic holiday group, Skyros (whose main centre is at Skyros in Greece, where Rupert Brooke is buried). The name is bandied about by writers in tones of wistful longing or dire trepidation. Writers do not get many outings to the sun. It was the novelist Piers Paul Reid who first told me about Skyros: "I think it has something to do with the goddess Aphrodite - people holding hands in a circle in the nude, that sort of thing."
Well, I had never conducted a writing workshop in the nude. It had to be better than the several layers of thermal underwear, sweaters and gumboots, essential for creative writing classes at Arvon Foundation centres in Yorkshire or Devon.
From Bangkok, our group, wan and jet-lagged, set off on a three-hour coach ride to the coast. From there we travelled to the island by ferry. As the tiny resort of Ao Prao came into view, we transferred to a raft. For the final leg, we had to hitch up our hems and wade on to the world's most perfect beach.
Oddly enough, I was up at 6.30 a.m. to swim in the warm South China sea. I even went to Ilene Sawka's 7 a.m. class in Qi Gong on the beach. Qi Gong (pronounced "chi gong") is Chinese exercise aimed at drawing the Earth's energy into your own energy centre. A small, dusty black dog, teats sagging from recent motherhood, staggered along the sand and fell asleep at my feet. By 8.30 a.m., the sun was shining hot and hard, the sky was a Thatcher blue and my Qi Gong wasn't working. I was tired as hell and I had to go to a staff meeting. There are a lot of meetings on a Skyros holiday. A staff meeting is followed by a community meeting called Demos in which the activities of the day are discussed, then everyone holds hands and someone reads out a thought for the day.
To set the record straight, Aphrodite failed to put in an appearance. Nor was nudity a part of the package. Creative writing came as part of an activity range that included Qi Gong, self presentation courses and imagework, a sort of playful group therapy with intense undertones.
My writing students ranged in age from late 20s to middle 50s and included two journalists, a doctor, a therapist, a homeopath, two teachers, an ex-pearl-diver, and a shaven-headed young man pierced in so many places that he would never need an umbrella as the rain would go straight through.
"A short story," I quoted the late Mary Lavin, "is like an arrow in flight." I then gave my students the wisdom of my other (late) short-fiction hero, V.S. Pritchett. "The short story begins at the moment of its enactment." I set them two exercises to write and wandered off down to the beach to brood. How the hell was it really done?
Truth to tell, I was here on false pretenses. I had forgotten how to write a short story. Although I have penned perhaps half a dozen in the past two years, none was the real thing, none of them was an arrow in flight. This felt wrong, as short-story writing is the thing in life that makes me truly happy. Half an hour later, my budding authors were back in business, perspiring but eager. They had written pages and pages. It was all fresh and good and entertaining. How did they do it? There are nine hours of planned activities a day on a Skyros holiday, starting at seven in the morning and ending at 7.30 p.m. Scuba diving, surf-boarding and sailing are on offer. In between are co-listening and oekos, a foundational part of the Skyros philosophy, in which, basically, groups of strangers bare their souls to one another. And then there are the meetings. At the morning meeting myself and fellow staff members - Ilene, Dina and Chrissie - had to join hands and tell one another how we were feeling. "I feel like shit," I said. "I want to go back to bed." Old Skyros hands told me that other writers have rebelled. "What about the guests?" I wondered. People still looked wan and wary and there were a few mutinous mutterings, but astonishingly, even the most anarchic travellers were falling into line, signing up for their courses, confiding to strangers in their oekos group. Oddly enough, the men were the first to bare their souls.
Within a day, you could hardly move without hearing whispered male secrets at some table or other. And while all of this was going on, the island went about its quiet business. The raft came and went. Small groups of visitors (mostly Thai) waded ashore. On the beach, smiling villagers provided wonderful massages, hand and nail manicures and beautiful hair beading for around two pounds. Exquisite meals served in an open-air dining room were accompanied by the loud and endearing call of the gecko. Spiders the size of tea plates wove exquisite webs over bungalow rooftops, and in the evening, as the sun swooned over the bay in a riot of colour, the whole bay began to hum with a high-wire electronic energy as a million cicadas whirred in unison.
By the end of a week, the little black dog (whom we named Margarita, after our favourite cocktail, and fed on breakfast bacon) was fat and frisky and my writers were developing at a spectacular pace. Perhaps it had to do with the steamy climate (we did not write in the nude, though a scrap or two of swimwear sufficed) but the subject matter of the fiction under development included sado-masochism, the personality of penises, a massacre of crabs by cutlass and a heart-wrenching tale of child abuse by a nun. All good New Yorker stuff. Lovely fresh writing that made you laugh out loud, and not a clich e in sight. I was moved by the sight of my writers dotted about under palm trees in the blazing sun, writing away furiously, but I was jealous. In rare leisure moments I sat with pen and pad in hand, but there was no arrow in flight - only the afternoon mosquitoes zooming in. "Please wear your jogging bras," we were warned on an evening when we left our private haven to dine at a resort on the other side of the island. We imagined exciting possibilities of guerrilla assaults from sex-hungry natives. The hazard, in fact, came from a Ko Samet taxi - an open-topped four-wheel-drive with metal rails to which you cling for dear life. There are no roads on the island, just a series of rippled, ochre rocks up which the vehicle hurls itself and down which it plunges. Someone has to keep lookout and yell, "Duck!" as overhead branches attempt to decapitate the passengers.
The resort itself was a vision of hell, its only sign of civilisation a small, rickety bookshelf in a souvenir shop with a few tattered English volumes on display and a hand-written sign, "Books for hire". Each tiny bar belted out competing pop music at high levels and a spectacularly ugly species of stray dog looked like they were guardians of the underworld. It came as a real shock to discover that the island has already succumbed to trashy development. Returning to our own bay felt like fetching up on dry land after a night on the Titanic. On our beautiful moonlit beach, our little black dog was waiting, tail wagging.
By the end of two weeks, an extraordinary feeling of peace prevailed. Was it to do with oekos and co-listening (or could it have been the total absence of children?) Of course, like all holidays, it had its tensions. Someone inevitably fell in love with "the beautiful man". A Norwegian girl became traumatised by the ever-bolder presence of Margarita until she one day cried out: "Please remove the dog! I shall catch flies!" A few guests suffered stomach upsets and I was almost left for dead by the mosquitoes.
The mosquitoes are at their most rampant between five and seven in the evening. Succulent-skinned visitors are warned to stay indoors, or at least to wear limb-covering garments. But this is the hour of a Ko Samet sunset, when the brilliant blue sky dissolves into shimmering layers of pink and one feels the urgent summons of a particularly delicious cocktail, imaginatively called a Ko Samet Sunset. On the last evenings we threw caution to the winds and held our writing class outdoors in the sunset. The mosquitoes came in like a D-Day assault. Blood ran down our legs as we improvised, from start to finish, a story that began, "The day Amy left the baby on the bus she had just bought her first pair of emerald earrings." And did it matter? Well, it did, a bit. By the last morning I had undergone a peculiar metamorphosis. Both my feet had swelled up to an enormous size. I felt dizzy and weepy. Then my bottom lip (which had not been bitten) started to swell. Amused fellow guests asked if I had had a collagen implant on the beach. I crept back to bed, put my feet up on the pillows and pulled a blanket over my head. A chambermaid came in to do the room. There was a tinkle of laughter before she retreated hastily, no doubt to tell her friends about the crazy foreigners who sleep with their feet on the pillows.
I harbour no resentment towards my attackers. The tiny tropical paradise belongs to its natural inhabitants. All incomers are intruders, and should be taught a sharp lesson so as not to take it for granted. As we sailed away from Ko Samet, my bites started to subside and for the first time in years, a true short story began to form in my head. Only Margarita watched our departure with regret but when we had waded to the raft and were rowed out of sight, she skipped off on her pretty little legs, tits swinging jauntily, to ply her case to a fresh batch of crazy foreigners.
Skyros-in-Thailand holidays will resume in November. In January 2001 Martin Amis will teach a course, "Constructing a Novel". A fortnight with half board costs from £795 sterling to £935, excluding flights. Clare Boylan travelled to Bangkok from Heathrow with East Travel, price £465 (economy). Skyros-in-Greece holidays run throughout the year and are priced from £625 to £885, excluding flights. Writing tutors for this year include Margaret Drabble and Fay Weldon. Clare Boylan will be teaching in Skyros, Greece, on September 9th. Details from Skyros, 92 Prince of Wales Road, London NW5 3NE, England. Phone: 207 267 4424. E-mail: skyros@easynet.co.uk. Clare Boylan's latest novel, Beloved Stranger is published by Abacus, price £6.99.