IT IS A PIQUANT AND NOVEL SENSATION to travel from Naples to Athens in an army transport plane. Our airports and planes create a world of their own, an extension of the American system, that has been superimposed on Europe and makes a dissonant contrast with it. Over the blue Ionian Sea, you are handed a neat cardboard box, which contains, carefully wrapped in wax-paper, sandwiches of three kinds, each with a small printed slip that tells what the filling is—beef-spread, melted cheese or marmalade and peanut butter—so that you will know in what order to eat them; a hardboiled egg, with pepper and salt done up picnic-fashion in paper; a cookie; a small container of cut-up peaches and pears, with a miniature pasteboard spoon; a bag of fruit drops of assorted flavors; and a pasteboard cup for water.
When you look down and see the first Greek islands, you are surprised by the difference from Italy, whose dense plantings of parched yellow fields you have so short a time before left behind. Here is a paler, purer, soberer country, which seems both wild and old and quite distinct from anything farther west. The sea is absolutely smooth, sometimes violet, sometimes blue, with a softness of water-color, glistening in patches with a fine grain of silver; and the islands of all sizes in bulbous or oblong shapes—blobs and round-bottomed bottles and the contours of plump roast fowl—seem not to rise out of the water but to be plaqued on it like cuff-links on cuffs or to lie scattered like the fragments of a picture-puzzle on a table with a blue cloth cover. These islands are a dry terra-cotta—quite unlike the deep earthy clay tints to which one has been accustomed in Italy—almost the color of too well-cooked liver, and the vegetation looks like gray lichens. The marblings on the looping beaches set up a feeling of uncanny familiarity which refers itself, as one recognizes in a moment, to the patterns on the ancient Greek vases made out of this very soil. Even on the large islands and the mainland, there are visible little cultivation and few plainly cut ribbons of roads, and the country, after humanized Italy, seems grander and more mysterious. The haze of the fawn-colored foreground shades farther away into blue, where the mountains stand dim and serene. These are the “shadowy mountains” of Homer.
Swooping down upon the airport at Eleusis, you seem to be heaving among billows that do not really resemble hills, with their dry green of foliage, pale gray of stone and curious pale yellow of clay. There is a special apparent lightness of substance and absence of strong color which characterizes Greece and sets it off from other countries. As you descend into the hot airport, you have a general grateful impression of simplification and gentle austerity.
The transportation truck speeds with jolts along the Sacred Way that leads from Eleusis to the Acropolis. One is surprised and thrilled to see from the street-signs that it is still called the Hiera Hodos. The lavender mountains of Salamis make a contrast that harmonizes with the bright-blue water beneath. Above the low roofs of Athens the Acropolis rises on its pedestal of rock: astonishing, dramatic, divine, with at the same time the look of a phantom.
The Grande Bretagne Hotel, the principal hostelry of Athens, which has been taken for a billet by the British and at which transient Americans also stay, has an atmosphere entirely dissimilar from the atmosphere of Italian hotels. In Italy the porters and deskmen still think they are giving service to tourists: they bow constantly, show you places on street-maps. But something is wrong at the Grande Bretagne. You are first told by a slant-eyed Greek that there are no decent rooms left but that he will be glad to give you a room in his house at a price only a little higher than what you would be obliged to pay at the hotel. When you insist on seeing the sergeant in charge of the American side, you find an insolent equally slit-eyed fellow, quite untypical of the American Army, who also seems to be some kind of Greek. “Dere’s so many drips comin’ in,” he says, “so many generals and high-rankin’ officers—dat I’m full up all de time. I’ll have to put you in a room wit two odder beds in it.” I thought he was hoping I’d take the private room, but I insisted on staying here, and he repeated several times, as he reluctantly got a boy for my bag, “Dere’s so many drips all de time.”
The room with the three beds had been riddled by what I took to be a machine-gun, which had sprayed bullets all around the doorway and made several holes in the door. One of the shots had struck just above my bed and left a scar in the plaster. Out the window I could see blinds knocked askew, snarls of German barbed wire on the roof and other evidences of close-range fighting. The Grande Bretagne had first been occupied by the Germans, who lived in it all through the war; then it was put at the disposal of the British after the Germans had been driven out. At the time of the civil war last winter, the fatal demonstration by E.A.M. (the National Liberation Front), at which the police fired into the crowd, took place in the square just outside it; and when the battle to the death was on and E.A.M. for a time had the British at bay, the Grande Bretagne was one of the only places in Athens which the latter succeeded in holding. The bullet-holes in my door were probably made by one of E.A.M.’s guns. Later, when the royalists had won, Winston Churchill, on his hasty trip to Athens, stayed at the Grande Bretagne and held his conferences there; and some of the Partisans loaded the basement with dynamite and planned to blow the place up—thereby wiping out at one stroke, as a sympathizer with E.A.M. told me, the inspirer of the foreign policy which was backing the monarchy in Greece and General Scobie and Ambassador Leeper, who had been carrying that policy out. But someone gave the plot away, and the wires were cut in time.
The employees of the Grande Bretagne, many of whom have worked there for years, have been through a good deal. One cannot precisely know whether they are sullen or discouraged or stunned, but, with the exception of a few of the waiters, they have neglected to learn any English. They do not even expect tips: they disappear, without waiting a second, as soon as you have succeeded in catching one and inducing him to do something for you. Greek callers at the hotel complain that they are treated by the Greek employees with the utmost impoliteness.
One gets a sudden revelation, in coming to Greece from Italy, of all that was vulgar about ancient Rome and all that was trashy in the Renaissance. There is no Renaissance art in Athens and, except for some Byzantine churches, nothing between ancient and modern Greece, You have no overlay of Catholic history; the Orthodox Church, in general, is singularly unobtrusive; and I confess that it came as a relief not to find the scene incrusted with the three hundred and thirty-six churches that you meet at every turn in Rome. You have, instead, a clean and well-swept city of small buildings, white, pale gray or dry yellow, which are almost never ornate in the Mediterranean manner, but rather simple and uniform, with a dignity of classical taste; and, among these, a few ancient monuments that are perhaps the things of the kind most worth seeing in the whole Western world. You understand for the first time that it is true that, in matters of architecture, the Romans merely imitated the Greeks, and you realize what coarsening and deadening results this imitation produced. The Parthenon itself, the Erech-theum, the temple of the Wingless Victory keep a vitality, a splendor and a grace that I have never seen in any other ruins. They do not seem the bones of perished ages; they still transform the world where they shine—a world of square houses and shops that might otherwise seem chalky and meager but that, beside them, catches something of their distinction.
It has been shown that the classical Greeks had a rather uncertain sense of color. They used the same word for yellow and green, and they seem to have confused red with purple. It was the Romans who brought color into European poetry with the Italian landscapes of Virgil—as well as the sense of materials, of hardness and tightness and weight, with the marbles and bricks and bronzes that Horace and Virgil both describe in their verse and imitate by its structure. The Greeks lacked this feeling for matter, for their very mountains seem immaterial, and they worked in Pentelican marble, which gives the effect of solidified light. As soon as one arrives in Greece, one understands how a native of this country who had never seen anything else might have had no conception of a world that was painted in definite colors. The olive trees, the pepper trees, the tiny firs are indeterminately blue, green and gray; the yellow of the earth is a neutral tint which is always turning pink or brown, and the pinks and browns themselves sometimes deepen or brighten to red. What the Greeks did have highly developed—besides the architectural sense of proportion—was an appreciation of the light and shade that are the main features of visible Attica. You find it in the choruses of the plays, where things are always darkling or gleaming, and in the settings of Plato’s dialogues, when they take place on sunny days in the shade; and you find it exploited in the most masterly way in the colonnades and porches of the temples. You still have to learn in Athens to appreciate everything in terms of light.
All the American soldiers love Athens: they infinitely prefer Greece to Italy, and I have been trying to figure out why. I remember a man in Rome who kept assuring me that Athens was “a real metropolis,” which it certainly is strikingly not. When you ask them why they like it so much, they immediately say that it is “clean,” which up to a point is true—that is, the filth of the slums is kept in the back streets as they are used to having it kept at home, instead of, as in Naples, being all over the place. But, for another thing, the Greeks, to an American, seem relatively non-foreign and normal. They are much less theatrical than Italians. They are quieter and do not jabber. They are more independent, have more backbone. There are few beggars in Athens and few prostitutes—a great contrast to the state of things in Italy. I had somehow got the impression that the Athenian women were still more or less in the harem phase, but, though this really is the case in Italy, I did not find it true in Greece. The Greek women seem remarkably intelligent, and they do a good deal on their own. There are few professional sirens.
But I have finally come to the conclusion that there are other, perhaps less admirable, qualities that recommend the Greek capital to the Americans: a certain monotony of the streets, of which my French guidebook complains, and a certain mediocrity in Athens. It comes back to me that an American who had grown up in Greece once told me that Athens was “a hick town,” and I understand now that it looks more like home to the exiled and wandering G.I., because, compared to other places in Europe, it seems orderly, prosaic and new. This is unquestionably what was meant by my friend in Rome when he pronounced it “a real metropolis.”
In any case, one realizes, as one walks in the streets, that Greece now is really the country where nobody has anything at all. In Italy there are still many commodities that are being produced and sold—striped neckties, pink silk slips and lace brassières, new books in crisp bright covers, perfume and candy and cakes—and that revive some of the brilliance of the shops in places like Milan and Rome. But in Greece there is not much beyond remnants of old stocks that must predate the war, and, in clothing, a scanty supply that only meets rudimentary needs. No woman in the streets wears make-up, and they have only rather dreary cheap dresses, mostly of the national blue; none of the men has a necktie on, even when his shirt collar is buttoned. If you go to a better-class restaurant, you can get little but a slice of fish, a dish of cut-up tomatoes, a bottle of resinated wine and a slice of watermelon. The people are not riding bicycles, as they are in Italy and England; but this fact is due, I am told, not so much to the difficulty of getting them as to the scornful aversion that the Greeks have always felt toward bicycle-riding. They regard it, it seems, as undignified. The one thing that the Athenians have that the Romans and Neapolitans don’t have is quite enough light at night. They defended their electric plant and saved it when the Germans were evacuating; and it is very cheerful, coming from cities where the streets are murky and blind, to find Athens twinkling among its hills under the dry clear summer sky.
I got the impression at first of a city depleted of life (though its actual population has been increased by the influx from towns destroyed by the Germans), as if everything that was going on were at once underpatronized and understaffed. But I was told by several foreigners who had lived there before the war that this impression was partly misleading: the Athenians had always been frugal and they had never made much of a show; and the lack of organic town-life was not wholly the result of the war, since the inhabitants of Athens had always been, as a Russian lady explained, content with “une douce anarchie.” But here as elsewhere in Europe the disorganization brought by the war is generally profound. After all, out of a population of only seven million in the whole of Greece, a million have died during the last five years—six hundred thousand of these from starvation. I had not expected to find whole streets of the city as badly battered as London or Milan—full of walls nicked or speckled with bullets and of the blasted-out husks of buildings. E.L.A.S. (the Greek Popular Liberation Army, the military aspect of E.A.M.) blew up police headquarters and other strongholds of the royalist authorities, and the British retaliated with bombing raids, mortar-fire and tanks shooting-up the streets.
I share a bathroom with an American major, a former Standard Oil engineer now engaged in “petroleum rehabilitation,” who is eager to talk about his work. He is a tall energetic Westerner who is enthusiastically intent on a purpose—a purpose which is probably typical of the American approach to Europe. There are two main points of which he is anxious to convince me and to which he usually reverts when I meet him, prefacing each step of his argument with an emphatic and cogent “Aw right!,” on the assumption that I have agreed with the step before. The first of these points he immediately raised when he saw that I was a war correspondent. He flourished before me a clipping that had just been sent him from home and declared with indignation that the newspapermen had been misrepresenting the situation in Greece. The editorial from his home-town paper asserted that the present regime was a lawless and ruthless tyranny, which was arresting thousands of people on political charges and holding them without trial, and that it ill became the United States to countenance a government by terror that made democratic processes impossible. I told him that this was very much the picture that had been given me before I came, by the American correspondents who had been in Greece, and I suggested that British policy, in its brutal repression of a movement which is generally admitted to have had at the time the support of eighty per cent of the Greeks, and in its backing of the unpopular royalists, had hardly evidenced a serious concern for the extension of the Four Freedoms. Like most Americans, no matter how predatory, no matter how hungry for power, he was daunted and embarrassed for a moment by the appeal to democratic principles. But he quickly shook off these objections. Political problems did not really exist for him; he was interested in something else. He only wanted me to admit that it was best that the radicals should be kept down—the Greeks needed a period of stabilization, didn’t they?—and then to take me up with “Aw right!” and expand on the subject that he had at heart.
This subject was the favorable openings for American business in Greece—not for “exploitation” (he always made this disclaimer); no: that wouldn’t do!—the Greeks were suspicious of us, “rightly perhaps.” What he had in mind was something quite different: to develop Greek water power and oil wells by organizing international companies for which one third of the capital and the technical advice would be supplied by American enterprise, another third of the money by Greek financiers, and the remaining third be put up by the Greek employees themselves, so that they would have some real interest in the project. “Liberal labor and capital” were beginning to get together at home, and he didn’t see why they shouldn’t in Greece. He beamed with an impersonal elation behind his professional glasses. Volos, to which he had just made a trip, reminded him a lot of the Yosemite; the Greeks were perfectly fine: it wasn’t hard to arouse their interest and they would work with you in a wonderful way. When I remarked that I had been told that the government stood in the way of technical training, he violently denied this, assuring me that this was not necessarily true: he had, he said, a young engineer who was a damn sight keener and more competent than the average man at home turned out by the technical schools.
The drive of his point of view—capitalistic and engineering-minded —in the direction of the non-political and the anti-nationalistic was illustrated by a story he loved, about a German who had lived thirty years in Greece in the neighborhood of Volos and whom the Germans put in charge of the oil installations when they arrived in 1941. This oil had been owned by the Shell Company, and the Shell Company manager at Volos had been also the British vice-consul. He was now put on parole by the Germans and made to report to them every day. When the Germans were getting out of Greece and blowing up all the public utilities, the German expatriate went to the military authorities and persuaded them to spare the oil installations, pointing out that the people of Volos had done the invaders no harm and that they needed the oil for their economy. Now the British vice-consul is back in charge, the German has returned to his farm, and the Greeks have refrained from bringing charges against him, as they would have with any other collaborationist, because he has saved their oil.
This major was a likable man and I found his excitement infectious. He referred with pride to his wife, who had been getting a college degree in some such subject as sociology, and who, he said, was “a good-looking little son-of-a-bitch.”
I was fortunate in having letters from a Greek lady I knew in New York. She sent me to her mother, Mrs. D., who turned out to be in touch with many strata and departments of Athenian life. Mrs. D. is one of seven sisters who came originally from the island of Samos; her father was a classical scholar, the director of a Greek school in Smyrna. She is remarkably intelligent, as well as lively and charming; fair-haired and blue-eyed, with almost the profile of an ancient statue. You do not find often, among the modern Greeks—who run to round faces and round black eyes—these types that recall the great age, but you do see a few startling examples. The women of Samos are famous for their beauty, and the pure race is represented by these blondes who have blue or glaucous eyes, and sometimes look almost English. The innumerable nephews and nieces of Mrs. D.’s whom I met were all more or less distinguished by these Greek sea-colored eyes and these archaic foreheads and noses. They and their husbands and wives and their various family connections are active in education, in the government, in business, in archaeology, in the newspaper world, in the theater; and they include every degree of political opinion from Communism to the official conservatism. You run into them everywhere, and if there is anything I want to see or anybody I want to meet, one simply passes me on to another. These relations and a variety of friends are always dropping in on Mrs. D. When I remarked that I had met in her family every shade of opinion except royalist, one of the nieces, at my next visit, came over and whispered to me that there were two royalist ladies present—not, she hastened to add, relatives but friends.
I have several times visited Mrs. D. in a house she has rented for the summer in a residential suburb called Philothei. It is a well-designed modern villa—a pleasant refuge from the terrific, almost tropical heat, the worst they can remember, they say: white ceilings, pale straw-colored walls, large casements and green latticed blinds, cupboards of natural wood and green-and-white linoleum that imitates tiles. Among the barren and sun-baked mountains, Hymettus, Pentelicus and Parnes, it seems very much like southern California, with its comfortable outdoor furniture, its potted ice plants, its collection of cactus and its dry aromatic smell. There are a turbid green pool with big goldfish, a garden with dahlias, petunias and bushes of yellow roses, fig trees with ripe green figs and clusters of heavy green grapes draping the arbor that shades the back porch.
There have always been so many people, and they have all been so familiar and casual, that I have had to ask questions later to identify them and straighten out their relationships, but I have pretty clear impressions of the following:
A nephew, who has qualified himself to teach physics and mathematics but who has been waiting eight years for a job, in the meantime making a meager living by giving private lessons. I got from him for the first time a picture—which was later confirmed by other sources—of the miserable illiteracy of Greece. He told me that seventy per cent of the Greeks have had only the most rudimentary schooling or none, and that there are thirty-two hundred teachers out of work, while it is impossible, with the reactionary government, to establish a democratic educational system. There are only two good public libraries in Greece—one in Athens and one in Salonika—and it is an almost insuperable task to find anything you want in either of them. He is a sympathizer with the E.A.M. movement. He told me that before the war the Greeks had seen so much of the English that they had learned to get on with them and like them, but that, except for those Greeks who wanted the monarchy, the attitude toward the British was now bitter. After all, only seven British tanks—since E.L.A.S. had no tanks—had stood between E.A.M. and victory (they were American tanks, by the way); and, after all, he thought that they, the Greeks, could say that, given their equipment and manpower, nobody else in Europe had done more to stand up to the Nazis than they had and that they deserved the kind of democratic regime that most of them had thought they were fighting for.
A little niece of twenty-two, who speaks French, studies literature and is preparing to be an archaeologist. She is bright and well brought-up and has, I should say, a good deal of character. She has a sister, whom I met later, a year younger than she. This sister was out in the mountains with the Partisans and is a passionate supporter of E.A.M. I told the older one that I got the impression that her sister was a little on the Communist side. “Pas un peu,” she answered slyly. “Assez.” She herself is wholeheartedly pro-E.A.M. but her attitude toward the Communists is critical. The nuance of difference in politics between these two girls is typical of the state of things in Greece.
An old schoolmate of my friend in New York—a young woman who, before the war, had started to study medicine but had given it up when the family fortunes broke down in the general disaster. She ended by marrying a lawyer and going to live in Salonika. They had had to sell their best carpets and such other things of value as they possessed in order to get enough to eat. She seems to me an able woman who would have had a career of her own if she had not been grounded by the war and whose life is rather unsatisfactory.
Two sisters, cousins of Mrs. D. One is married to a man in the government: white suit, tan-and-white shoes, fine Panama hat; very suave, speaks English well. The other sister has all of what I found to be the typical conventional opinions of the well-to-do Greek bourgeoisie. She was appalled by the British elections—was Attlee as “intelligent” as Churchill? Churchill had saved them from the Communists, who would otherwise have won and “shot everybody.” E.A.M. had been run by the Communists, and Greek Communism was the fanaticism of ignorant people. She had asked her maid the other day what she would do after the revolution—didn’t she see that she would still have to be a maid because she didn’t know how to do anything else? The girl hadn’t thought of that: she had thought she would be a lady. That was what Greek Communism was made of!
The two royalist ladies. They had got to know each other in jail and had been good friends ever since. They had been sheltering British soldiers during the German occupation and had been imprisoned in a room with eighty women and children—where one had spent six months, the other eleven. They had not been allowed to read and were unable to relieve themselves except when a large pail was put in the middle of the room for everybody to use. Of the British they had been punished for helping, they said that the New Zealanders were nicest, the Australians somewhat “rougher” and the English “very selfish.”
Two children: a boy and a girl of about thirteen and ten, who had been left with Mrs. D. for a visit. They were serious and quiet in a way that I have never seen in any other children: it was evidently the impress of the war. I tried amusing them with a jumping mouse made out of my pocket handkerchief, with which I have usually had great success, but it did not go over very well. The boy, at any rate, seemed much more interested in listening to the political discussion. He made two rather acute observations not intended for me to understand but translated by his elders. “The Americans and English,” he said, “don’t seem to know their own language, because they hesitate and stammer over words,” and “It’s a funny thing that the English didn’t celebrate the English elections—it was the Greeks that did all the celebrating.” But when they were sent to bed, they sat up talking and giggling, like all children, and had to be hushed and told to go to sleep.
The person I talked with most except Mrs. D. herself was her son, who was staying with her, an importer with a business in Bagdad. Unlike most of the rest of the company, he did not belong to the intelligentsia, and his point of view was non-political, practical and a little cynical. He spoke English and talked about his experience in the East with the various English-speaking peoples. You were never able, he said, to get on any kind of terms with the English: you might succeed in inducing them to come to your house, but they would never ask you back. They were awfully unscrupulous in business, and his English rivals in Bagdad, finding that they could not compete with his firm, had tried to get him and his associates locked up as Nazi spies. The English, however, were quiet in public, where the Americans were most obnoxious: they apparently regarded themselves as miraculously invincible with women or privileged with some sort of droit de seigneur, for they were always coming up to unknown couples and insisting that the ladies should dance with them. (I had to recognize that this was true: I had seen an American soldier in a restaurant in Rome butt in on a party of Americans and make an obstinate attempt to carry off the wife of one of the men in the Embassy.) The Greeks now thought they loved the Americans, but he told them that they only liked them because they didn’t know them yet. He had no confidence at all, he declared, in the disinterested pretensions of U.N.R.R.A.: it would turn out that it was being used to put over American products in Europe. He swore that an American had once asked him whether the war between Athens and Sparta was still going on in Greece. The Scotch he considered cruel on account of their treatment of the Greeks at the time of the civil war. The New Zealanders were the English-speaking people who made the best impression abroad: they were quiet, agreeable and decent. (I asked a New Zealand girl in U.N.R.R.A. about this overwhelming popularity of the New Zealanders, and she said that they had somehow, in Greece, known how to “take the right tone.” They had felt that Greece resembled New Zealand—it was a small, rural, mountainous country, mostly surrounded by water—and they approached the Greeks as people like themselves.)
Young D. had been a sailor in the Greek Navy in Egypt at the time of the mutiny of April, 1944, and I asked him to tell me about it. The incident that had set off this trouble had been the imprisonment by the puppet Greek government in Cairo of the delegates sent from Greece by the Free Greek government of the mountains. This organization, E.A.M., represented the resistance to the Germans and consisted of a national council which had just been chosen by underground elections held all over Greece. It had sent a committee to Cairo to try to arrange a union between the Greek government in exile and itself. But the British, intent on the restoration of the monarchy and wanting nothing so far to the Left as E.A.M. was threatening to be, had the delegates sent to jail. The Greek fleet then mutinied in protest and would not continue fighting with the British. D. was at that time in training camp, and he and his companions refused to obey orders for thirty-three days. A Scotch officer who spoke Greek came and pleaded with them and told them that they were costing the British £25,000 a day because the Germans were sinking the ships that the Greeks were no longer convoying. The Greeks laughed and said that they were glad to hear this evidence that the English without the Greeks were helpless against the Germans. Finally, the British told them that they needed the training camp for something else, loaded them into lorries and took them to a prison camp, where they were kept for twenty-six days. At one point the British lined them up and offered to escort with bayonets any who wanted to leave. Out of eight hundred and nine men, only seven accepted. The sailors on one of the ships further infuriated the British by cutting the crown out of the Greek flag, as a result of which the British refused to salute it. Then the word got around among the Greeks that the mutiny had been engineered by the Communists, and the morale of their resistance crumbled. Sixty per cent of them, D. included, agreed to go back to the fleet. The British sorted them out in four categories, each of which was dealt with in a way that was regarded as appropriate to it. Category A consisted of sailors who from the first had not approved of the movement; B, of men who had sympathized with it but had taken no active part or whose sentiments it was impossible to determine because they had been in the hospital or on leave; C, of sailors who were definitely known to have “shouted” or done something positive (this category included also all persons who had grown beards, since the Partisans had had beards in the mountains and this was regarded as a proof of Left sympathies). To D category the leaders were condemned. D. told me about this procedure with an irony, amused but mordant, at the expense of British system and stupidity. One man who had written a letter expressing concern lest the people at home were not getting enough vitamins in their diet was consigned on that evidence to C, since it was considered by the British authorities in itself a dangerous symptom to show an interest in the welfare of Greece. A, B and C categories were eventually all set free, but the men in D were sent to the Sudan, where presumably they still were. It was afterwards said that the mutiny had been provoked by the British themselves in order to find out, among the Greek sailors, who were and who were not Communists.
During the early part of this story, D.’s young wife, whom he had married only five days before—a good-looking girl, gray-eyed and tanned—listened with the decorous quietness that Greek women usually show in the presence of males, but as he was telling of his disaffection, when he had finally become convinced that the mutiny was being managed by the Communists, she began to try to sabotage his story—she was sitting on the couch beside him—by burrowing under his arm like a setter that wants to be fed or tackling him around the waist and making as if to throw him over. “You must let me tell my version of the mutiny,” she said when her husband had finished. “She’s a Communist sympathizer,” he explained to me. “She doesn’t know what to think about anything till she gets the directive from headquarters.” At any rate, she never did give me her version. Her husband teased her for being a Communist and also teased her for being the niece of a prominent public man who had come to represent for more realistic republican opinion the most obsolete political old-fogeyism. D. himself, in all this talk of politics, was a little bit aggressively a businessman, but he was not, I think, quite satisfied with business. He asked me, with Socratic irony, whether it were possible in the United States to make a lot of money and still be honest. “It’s not possible over here,” he said. “You can make a little money and be honest, but you can’t make a lot of money without cheating or exploiting somebody.”
The atmosphere of the D. household seemed to me distinctly different from anything I had ever known before. These Greeks showed profound effects of the hardships and horrors through which they had passed, but they treated them with the utmost lightness. It was as far from the crisp matter-of-factness of the British—their understatement that is almost ostentatious—as it was from the historical consciousness which never deserts the Italians and which, once having allowed them to accept Mussolini as a reincarnation of the Caesars, now leads them to talk about recent events in terms of the age of Justinian, when the Roman general Belisarius had had to invade Italy in order to fight the Goths, and to conceive their hopes for the future in terms of the reappearance of the great figures of the Risorgimento. In the course of my visits to the D.’s, I sometimes heard of shocking incidents of the years of German occupation. There had been a gibbet at the corner of the street where Mrs. D. lived in Athens; the Germans, on one occasion, in reprisal for the killing of a soldier, had stopped a tram full of women and children on their way to the beach for an outing and shot every human being in it; one lady, whose husband had been in hiding, spoke of her nervousness in her house at night as she waited for the doorbell to ring; someone else said it was awfully pleasant to be able to have lights in the evening—the Germans had been in the habit of firing machine-guns at lighted windows and had sometimes killed the people inside; one of the men, as he was taking his leave, remarked that he had still not got used to not having to dodge the Germans when he was going home late at night. But they usually laughed about these things, as if they were speaking of such inconveniences as cranky neighbors or torn-up roads. “One day you would have a friend,” said D.’s little wife, smiling, as she told me about what the Germans had done, “and the next day you wouldn’t have one.” Unlike the Italians and the Southern French, the Greeks do not like to show emotion; and they give you a curious impression of having waited with perfect self-confidence till the barbarian hordes had passed. After all, as someone reminded me, there Xerxes had once been sitting on the top of one of the hills of Salamis waiting to see the Greek fleet defeated. So, one day, as I was walking along the Tritis Septemvriou with the girl who was giving me Greek lessons, and she was showing me how, during the civil war, the Greeks had been lined up on one side of the street and the British with their tanks on the other, she had mildly replied to my expression of horror: “Oh, no: our men showed how brave they were.”
Yet these people do differ in certain ways from any other similar group of people whose conversation I have ever listened to. They do not really make a social world, flourishing and complete in itself within its range of relations and interests, as such people usually do. They have good sense and good humor and poise. They joke about Kou-Kou-e’s and Chites, the current nicknames for Communists and royalists, accusing one another of extremism. But they have lived through shocking deprivations; they cannot see a year ahead into the future; they do not really have the security that their kind of life ought to imply. And, as one of the ladies said in some connection that I have now forgotten, “We say that we are free, but we are not free.”
The first night I spent at Philothei, I was awakened at early dawn by a loud, abrupt, strangulated cry that was evidently not human but animal. I went to the window but could see nothing, though the cry came again and again, like the choking of a dog that has swallowed a bone or the convulsive gasps of a man who is being revived from drowning. The best I could imagine was that the sound was made by some kind of monkey, though I had never heard of monkeys in Greece. Later, when the boy came out, I asked him whether he knew what it was. “He shouts like a man,” said the boy. “He jumps with his two legs. He is green.” I was trying to picture this bandersnatch when the boy, who could not think of the English word, explained that it was called vatrachos. It pleased me to think that Aristophanes’ play had been due to the existence in Greece of some species of super-frog. And I was even more charmed in a moment when one of the ladies came out of the house and remarked, “He says ko-ax ko-ax.”
I went to performances at the principal theaters: the Ethnikon and the Lyrikon. Like a good many things in Greece, they are closer to ancient Greece than you might expect them to be: the audience sits out-of-doors before a small and severe proscenium. At the Ethnikon, I saw Gogol’s The Inspector General, which seemed to me very well done; at the Lyrikon, which is definitely Left, J. B. Priestley’s And They Came to a City and a play by a young Greek dramatist, Nikos Tsekouras, called If You Work, You Will Eat. The Priestley play is feeble enough, with its watered-down Shavian satire and its thoroughly depressing picture of a well-adjusted socialist utopia where everybody is uniformly cheerful; but the people at the theater say that they have to produce what they can get. They have had almost nothing new from abroad, and they asked eagerly what was interesting in the theater in England and the United States. More than Italy even, and to a degree that has been very damaging, Greece has been culturally cut off from the West since before the beginning of the war. The little Greek play was also in the nature of a socialist fable, but, in a genre which has been standardized by the Russians, it seemed to me, as relayed to me by a Greek companion, partly redeemed by its very naïveté and by a certain unstandardized folk charm. An Athenian stockbroker and his family are stranded on the island of Rhodes and have to depend on the lighthouse-keeper to put them up and give them something to eat. But the old man who attends to the light is an eccentric and a social philosopher. He will not let the city guests pay him anything, because that is the rule of Greek hospitality; but also he will not give them meals unless they agree to work. On the other hand, the arrival of the financier brings a principle of corruption to the island. He is carrying a large sum of money, which the captain of his ship has got wind of and tries to induce the lighthouse-keeper’s son to steal. A conflict ensues between, on one side, the power of money and the parasitism it breeds, and, on the other, honest virtue and wisdom. Of course, in the long run, the rich man is cured of his imaginary ailments by his new regime of open air and exercise, while he rather enjoys the discomfiture of his spoiled and disagreeable wife; his daughter, a charming girl, takes to the simple life with delight and shows herself thoroughly competent, converting also the city slicker who is in love with her; and the young wife of the lighthouse-keeper’s son frustrates the designs of the captain by blowing up his ship so that the thieves cannot leave the island. The audience would applaud with a crash at every reference to social justice, and my companion laughed like a schoolgirl at every crack at the bourgeoisie—a form of baiting which seems to be new in Greece and these examples of which she would explain to me with evident doubt as to whether I could grasp the joke.
But there was something both serious and important in the atmosphere of the Theatro Lyrikon when this little socialist play was performed. The director and some of the actors were young people who had brought to it the same kind of spirit that one used to find back in the twenties in the Cherry Lane Theater and the Province-town Players; but certain of the older actors were among the best-known in Athens, and one of them, Aimilios Veakis, is the foremost actor of Greece. Veakis had “been in the mountains”; he had lost his daughter there when she had fallen into a ravine while riding. And a month ago the pro-government reactionaries had rioted in three of the Athenian theaters. They had broken up Julius Caesar at the Lyrikon at one of the speeches of the regicide conspirators, and The Merchant of Venice at the Ethnikon during the scene in which Shylock makes his plea for the Jews—under the impression, I was told, that these passages had been interpolated by the Left-Wing producers with subversive political intent; and they had attacked Miranda Myrat, a well-known pro-E.A.M. actress. They had shot and wounded a number of people. Miss Myrat was still in bed; and Veakis, who had also been injured, was reappearing for the first time that evening and had been hailed with a great ovation. The more radical of Mrs. D.’s two nieces was engaged to the director of the theater and took me behind the scenes to meet Veakis. He had been playing the lighthouse-keeper and had made him remarkably real. Like most good European actors, he had submerged himself in his part without exploiting his own personality, and now, with his make-up half rubbed off, the sensitivity and intelligence of his face were thrown into relief by contrast with the homely old-man mask I had been watching. He made me a little speech: he said that he was glad to meet an American because the Americans today were the only people who knew what it was to be free; the Greeks had fought for their freedom and won it, and now they had lost it again.
It was an embarrassing moment for me. It had become very plain to me since I had been in Greece that the movement which the British had disarmed and which the United States had allowed them to disarm was neither a chess play directed from Moscow nor a foray of bandits from the hills, but a genuine popular movement which had been able to recruit almost all that was generous, courageous and enlightened in Greece, the most spirited among the young, the clearest-sighted among the mature. This movement has been broken: the prisons are crammed with tens of thousands of political prisoners, and the government police have been practicing just such methods of torture and terror as had made the Gestapo hated (they have maintained the same security battalion that formerly worked for the Nazis), while the British, after calling out their tanks against E.A.M. and expressing indignant horror over outrages perpetrated by the Left, have done little or nothing to curb the Right. “What is E.A.M.?” I was challenged one day by a rabidly reactionary Greek lady. “E.A.M. is not a party. It is only a state of mind!” That is true, no doubt, but states of mind may prove more powerful than organizations—especially when they are persecuted. The state of mind of E.A.M. has been similar to that which in Northern Italy is uniting diverse elements in a formidable bloc of the Left, and it is similar to the state of mind which has prevailed to such an extent in England that, unexpectedly to Labour itself, a Socialist government has been voted in.
The people at the theater told me that they had tried to get the story of the riots sent through to the outside world, and, like many other Greeks I talked to, they seemed to have the desperate feeling that nobody knew what was happening in Greece. The only thing I could say to Veakis was that I would try to write about it.
Overheard in the open-air café outside the King George Bar: “How were the Indians?” “Oh, they’re easy meat for propaganda. They’ve begun comparing themselves to British troops—wanting to sleep with white women—that sort of thing.” A pause. “How did you people take the elections?” “It shocked me to the roots. I didn’t know that Labour was that strong.”