I HAD INTERVIEWS, in Athens, with two remarkable professors who have become political figures: George Georgalas and Alexander Svolos. Both are middle-aged men of top standing in their fields, and they are typical of the Greek intellectuals who have been driven by the needs of their country to take an active part in the E.A.M. movement, the National Liberation Front, which organized the resistance to the Germans and which controlled most of the countryside of Greece before the Papandreou government, an invention of the British, took over. They present the best possible proof that that movement has not been the exclusive creation either of professional agitators or of cutthroats from the mountains. Svolos, an authority on constitutional law, was the president and spokesman of E.A.M. through the period of crisis last winter; Georgalas, formerly the head of the government geological service, is now the director of E.P.O.N., the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth, which is the junior branch of E.A.M.
Georgalas I saw in his office, just off his geology classroom in the Polytechnic School. He showed me the statistics on Greek education with the enthusiasm and energy of a man who was fighting for reforms that were obviously needed and that inevitably had to come: the rudiments of democratic training. The state of Greek education seems really, to an American, incredible. The figures for the school year 1937–38 show how bad the situation was before the general wreck brought by the war. At the beginning of that year, out of a population of 7,500,000, there were 987,000 children attending the primary schools, and before the year was done, 80,000 had dropped out. Of 231,000 children who had entered the first grade in these schools, only 82,000 were surviving in the sixth grade, so that only about a third of the ordinary Greeks (who did not go to private schools) even completed a primary education. The teaching, too, was quite inadequate: one teacher had sometimes a hundred pupils. In 1937, 3,700 villages had no school of any kind. In the same year there were graduated from the high schools only 94,920 students. Of these high schools there were five hundred to educate the less than nine per cent of the population who practiced the liberal professions, and only two to give agricultural training to the more than fifty-eight per cent engaged in agriculture. The education in the high schools was mainly based on the reading of the ancient Greek authors in a purely philological way and the study of the physical sciences in a purely theoretical way and with no direct contact with nature. “Here you Americans,” Georgalas said, “are inventing an atomic bomb, while our physicists in Greece have hardly come to grips with any practical problem!” Among the graduates of the two universities, Athens and Salonika, in 1937–38, forty-five per cent had become lawyers, thirty-three per cent doctors, seven per cent philologists, five per cent chemists, and of the remaining ten per cent, eight per cent had gone in for the physical sciences. The men from these schools and colleges that equipped them with a classical education did not want to return to the towns: they almost invariably remained in Athens to find or look for government jobs and become “parasites on the bourgeoisie.” There had in 1937–38 been 11,140 graduates of the regular universities, while at the two small agricultural schools nineteen students had been graduated, of whom only two were of working-class origin. The principal school of agriculture, founded in 1920, had been closed in 1939 by the dictator Metaxas and its faculty obliged to become part of the University of Salonika, where they had been working ever since with no laboratories.
What E.A.M. was aiming at was to provide instruction in agricultural chemistry and other technical subjects which would make it possible for the peasants to develop their barren country and raise their meager standard of living. The reactionaries had never wanted this, because they did not want the common people strengthened. There would be no real education in Greece till the monarchists were removed from power.
E.P.O.N. itself, he told me, had taken in children under fourteen from all sorts of political backgrounds, and had once had five hundred thousand members. It had organized two hundred stations, where the children were fed and given playgrounds; but all this work had been undone when E.A.M. had been outlawed by the British and its public activities stopped.
With Svolos I talked mainly about politics, and I put to him certain questions the answers to which I thought he must know. I had in my mind a fairly clear version of the incidents that had led up to the civil war. The British, in their anxiety to bring back the King and to defeat the activities of the Communists, had been alarmed by the Left tendencies of E.A.M. and by the formidable proportions it was reaching, and they had attempted to disarm E.L.A.S., its army. They had announced that they were disarming all units, of the Right as well as of the Left, in order to create a true national army; but when E.L.A.S. in good faith had laid down its arms, the royalist troops—the Mountain Brigade and the Sacred Battalion—were allowed to retain theirs. On December 3 of last year, E.A.M. held a demonstration in Constitution Square in Athens to protest against the policy of the British. They were unarmed, and many of the women had brought their small children. The British had given a permit for this meeting, but they had revoked it at three o’clock that morning in such a way that it had been impossible to call off the demonstration. I have heard the most contradictory possible accounts of how the trouble started. Having the women and children march first, as was done on this occasion, is a familiar Communist trick which makes it more difficult to use violent methods in breaking up a procession but which invites worse consequences if this occurs. The royalists, in any case, claimed that the crowd were trying to rush the guard at the government’s headquarters in the Grande Bretagne Hotel. There seems, however, to be no question that the majority of the demonstrators went on quietly marching while the royalist police fired into them and killed and wounded about a hundred people. Funerals were held the next day, and a procession passed through the streets. The royalists fired on the procession from the windows of hotels and killed or wounded between a hundred and fifty and two hundred.
I asked Svolos now whether it were true, as had been said and as might seem to be indicated by the British revocation of the permit at that impossible time of night, that the whole thing had been a British provocation intended to provide them with a pretext for crushing E.A.M. before it grew stronger. He answered that he did not necessarily believe that the British role in the drama had been so simple or so conscious as this. They had perhaps not provoked the insurrection that followed these attacks by the royalists, but they “had not been sorry” to have it happen. It was an example of the familiar British practice of half-allowing, half-stimulating actions which, though carried out by other people, would be advantageous to British interests. He said that the responsibility had to be shared, in various proportions, by the royalists, the British and the Communists. Was it true, as I had been told by an American who had seen something of what was happening, that at the time of the Lebanon conference of May, 1944, which was stage-managed by the British, Svolos had wired to E.A.M. for advice as to how to proceed in regard to a proposed program for a “government of National Unity,” and E.A.M. had directed him to make certain reservations, but the telegraphed answer from E.A.M. had been suppressed by the British Ambassador? He replied that it was impossible to say that the telegram had been suppressed but that it had certainly been sent and had never arrived. Was the impression I had correct that, at the time of the crisis last winter, the Greek Communists in E.A.M. had been acting without the approval or knowledge of Moscow—Stalin perhaps, at Yalta, in return for a free hand elsewhere, having agreed not to interfere with the British in the Mediterranean? Svolos said that he believed this to be true—that the Greek Communists had at that time sent a delegate to Russia but that Moscow had refused to see him and dispatched him straight back to Athens, and that at no time during this period had the Moscow radio made any mention of what was going on in Greece. I asked him about the atrocities alleged to have been committed by E.A.M.—mass executions of civilians murdered with axes and knives, men and women hostages marched barefoot for days in the snow till many had died of exhaustion—of which so much was made by Ambassador Leeper in his reports to Anthony Eden. Svolos did not deny that such things had happened, but said that they were not, as had been declared, mere outrages by ruffians from the mountains but a part of a long and bitter history of private revenges and political reprisals that had begun under the Metaxas regime and gone on through the German occupation, during both of which periods the Greek Fascists had been committing most of the atrocities. After the liberation, the British, who controlled the news from Greece, had succeeded in forestalling or suppressing reports of what the reactionaries were doing to the liberals. At present, as everybody knew, the jails were full of political prisoners, and every day the agents of the government were arresting more people without warrant, shooting them and beating them up on the street and torturing them to extort information. He was worried by Bevin’s speech on British policy, which had been delivered the day before. They had been hoping for an amnesty, but now Bevin, it seemed, had announced that this might be difficult, since, according to him, there were “violent criminals” mixed up with the political prisoners, and there was a problem of sorting these out.
I asked Svolos what sort of following he thought E.A.M. could now command if it were free to function politically. It seemed to be generally admitted that at the time of the civil war it had been backed by about eighty per cent of the Greeks. He replied that, since the suppression of the uprising, the Socialists had detached themselves from E.A.M., but that the Socialists and the Communists between them could still, he thought, command a following of seventy-five per cent of the people. And he pointed out that when these Left elements asked the British to allow the Greeks to form what was described as “a representative government,” they had proposed a combination which did not at all reflect these proportions but gave undue importance to the Right—the formula being one third royalist, one third democratic and center, and only one third Socialists and Communists.
I asked him why he had split with the Communists. Because their methods were so unscrupulous, he said. No non-Communist could get on with people who made a practice of double-dealing; nor could they accomplish their own aims in that way. He himself had always been a Socialist—he had been removed by Metaxas from his university chair; and now, dissociating himself from E.A.M., he had organized last April a new Socialist Party by the fusion of three other parties. Georgalas, he told me, belonged to a small Socialist group which was still a part of E.A.M. and which he believed to consist of camouflaged Communists. During my interview with Georgalas, I had had a very definite impression that I was talking to a convinced fellow-traveller, and I was interested by Svolos’ confirmation. I tried later to put my finger on the symptoms which had made me feel this. It seemed to me that I was able to identify them in the special kind of cheerfulness and certainty with which he rose to meet every problem. The middle-class C.P. member or sympathizer is transported into a kind of substratosphere, where, like the aviator who flies too high, he falls victim to a treacherous euphoria. There is no question in his mind that he has picked the winning side and is about to cash in on the stakes, and he does not need to argue about it any more than a Rosicrucian is obliged to defend his esoteric doctrine. Georgalas, no doubt by temperament a sanguine and self-confident man, had, I felt, succumbed a little to that mood of Communist blitheness which is not entirely reassuring. He had talked to me at length and with feeling about the soul-destroying pedantry with which the ancient Greek authors were taught: “Why we love Homer and Sophocles,” he said, “they would never find out from their teachers! A little niece of mine was terribly proud because she had learned a verb-form which only occurs about once in the whole of Greek literature and which, as I told her, I had taught Greek for years without ever knowing about. But that was what our education aimed at!” I demurred that this might not be entirely the fault of the reactionary powers in Greece, that, even in democratic America, Shakespeare was often taught in that way—that this was a tendency of the academic profession at all times and everywhere. But he smilingly shook his head, brushed my interruption off and went on; and it seemed to me that, in his Marxist optimism, he was sure that these stupidities would disappear so soon as the Communists should come to power. This attitude, I think, dates from Lenin, whose certainty about social developments and conviction of the rightness of his purpose gave him a kind of ironical good humor which some people found uncomfortable and which, in spite of his element of utopianism, had a relation to bitter realities. It is curious to see in such followers, as in the sects founded by certain saints, how the faith of a man of genius, which has first appeared as a natural force, communicates itself to his progeny as a mere drug that shields them from experience and enables them to disregard common sense.
With Svolos it was quite different. You could talk to him as to anyone else. He lived in the same world that I did, where there were difficulties, doubts, confused issues, conflicts between expediency and principle. He reminded me a little of Silone, engaged in a similar task: the attempt to create, out of the Socialist tradition and the survivors from the old Socialist groups, a movement that would be tough enough to stand up to the Russians and avert the kind of paralyzing dictatorship which Russian Communism has everywhere brought with it. Such people are anxious and intent; they are never unnaturally cheerful. Just before I had left Rome in July, while the Socialist Congress was going on, I had run into Silone in the street, and he had told me, excited and beaming, that he believed the pro-Stalinist Socialists were certain to be outvoted on the issue of a merger with the Communists. But this was the only occasion on which I had seen Silone look happy.
(Since I wrote this, I have sometimes been taxed with having accepted too readily in Greece the statements of the agents and adherents of E.A.M. I do not doubt that revolting barbarities were committed on the E.A.M. side or that the Stalinists, to the best of their opportunity, carried on their usual practice of murdering and imprisoning Leftists who differed from them on questions of policy. But it was not, so far as I could learn, at that time really a question of choosing between the Soviet domination and the domination of Downing Street. The E.A.M. movement might, I should think, have been detached from the Communist influence—since the Communists, though, of course, very active, were not numerically important—if the British had supported it instead of suppressing it. The Greeks, unlike the Russians, are naturally independent and, what with Metaxas and the Nazis, they had just had a good dose of dictatorship. The radical leaders in Greece were, for the most part, I believe, sincere Socialists, full of ardor for a national new deal. Even the Communists, as in Northern Italy, seemed idealists who still thought that the Kremlin was the carrier of the banner of Lenin. If England had been at all serious in regard to the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter, she would have helped the leaders of E.A.M. to detach themselves from the Soviet entanglement and keep in order those wilder elements whose fierceness, in the days of the Resistance, the British had been only too glad to abet. But that would have meant on the part of the Greeks, as any advance in Europe must mean, definite steps in the direction of socialism, and such steps were the last thing that Churchill had any desire to back. Nor is it easy to imagine that the United States, with our present administration, will be much more intelligent in Greece.)*
When I returned from our U.N.R.R.A. trip to Delphi, I saw something of Eleni and her family. They belonged to the well-to-do Greek bourgeoisie—that is, they had once been well-to-do, for few people in Greece have much money or can buy much with what they have. The V.’s lived in a well-furnished apartment on the Odos Vasilissis Sophias, among the palaces, the fine houses and the embassies of the fashionable quarter of Athens; but three generations and two branches of the family had been obliged to share half a dozen rooms, so that their life was rather hampered and constricted. There were Eleni and her husband, their two children, her mother-in-law, her brother-in-law and her brother-in-law’s wife. And they got water only, I think, twice a week and had to save it in buckets and heat it themselves.
Yet this was, for them, a period of relative security. Eleni’s husband had worked against the Germans and had had to escape to Egypt, and Eleni had had to spend a couple of years alone with the children in Athens. Their persistence through it all in the habits and the attitudes of comfortable people made rather an odd impression—especially when one remembered how completely they had been cut off from the rest of their kind in Europe. It was as if they had preserved in a vacuum an abstraction of the bourgeoisie, an essence which had never been troubled by the social upheavals going on in the world or by the ordeals of their native country. Their culture was at least as much French as Greek. Eleni’s husband had studied law in Paris, and Eleni spoke French with her children. Her mother and her stepfather, whom I met there one day, also spoke French, they told me, even between themselves. But the effect was not to place the V.’s in a larger international world: it was rather to make the French language seem like something non-conductive and insipid, a medium of intercourse which did not imply any real relation either with actual present-day Athens or with present-day distant Paris.
On the occasion of one of my calls, I found Eleni’s mother-in-law reading an old back number of Les Œuvres Libres, and she explained that they had not been able, in Greece, to get any new French books since before the war. I walked up to the large glass-doored bookcase and looked in at the paper-backs, which seemed to exhale a peculiar staleness. They were the biographies, the novels and the poetry, including much that was second-rate, of the early nineteen-hundreds and the twenties. I had already been conscious in Italy of the extent to which the war and Fascism had kept the Italians behind the times; but there the crop of brilliant paper covers that had come out last spring, like flowers, in the shop windows and the sidewalk newsstands had been rapidly making up for this. In Greece there was no similar revival. To go into Kauffman’s bookstore, the headquarters for foreign books, was almost like exploring an attic; and in Eleutherou-dakis’, the Athenian Brentano’s, you were shocked to see how rare and how precious modern books on technical subjects, such as medicine and engineering, had become. A look into the V.’s bookcase was a contact, from which one drew back, with a cultural day-before-yesterday that was somehow still a part of the present world. And near the bookcase hung a small oil-painting which seemed to me in key with the books, for it depicted, not a person or a landscape, but what appeared to be a room in a museum—perhaps one of the great chambers of the Vatican—with indistinct paintings on the walls and something in a case that one could not see. It was, I thought, characteristic of the household. Eleni’s husband knew an extraordinary amount about an extraordinary variety of things—the history and culture of Greece and European philosophy and music, as well as his profession of law—and wrote more or less on all these subjects; but his opinions (I do not say it invidiously of so agreeable and learned a man) made sometimes as dry eating as must have been the legendary steaks supposed to have been cut by the Russians from the mammoth found frozen in Siberia. He was a royalist, and, as with all such people whose position had been thus reduced, I could not but feel that his politics were founded—however subtly he might justify them—on an identification of his remnants of property and of the social prestige he enjoyed with the cultural interests and intellectual standards which were unquestionably what he most valued. Nor do I mean to sneer at this. How many similar people in the United States, deprived of social standing and financial independence—which is what the Greek bourgeoisie seem menaced with as no group in America is—could be sure of being strong enough to uphold or defend the ideals which they have been taught to admire?
Eleni, who was younger than her husband, did not, I thought, though loyal to Church and King, quite follow all the bourgeois prejudices, for she told us that some friend of hers was taking her to meet the Soviet Ambassador. She had the special sort of elegance and fineness that is not monied or aristocratic in the usual European sense but a part of some old kind of nobility, at once primitive and civilized, that still thrives in the Greek islands. I used to go swimming with them in the afternoons, and it depressed me to contrast with the beach reserved for the military Americans the “plage” at Gliphada, which had once, I was told, been the gayest and smartest of Athens. We U.N.R.R.A. men and soldiers on leave and engineers and war correspondents had a fine row of clean little houses that seemed to have been newly built, with various kinds of service, such as a woman who splashed you with water to wash the sand off your feet and a bar where they opened your PX beer and supplied you with glasses to drink it. But at Gliphada the old casino had been completely dismantled by the Germans, and there was nothing but a sordid little place where you had to take turns in the bathhouses, rather sickening with the smell of the muddy sand with which the floors were caked and of the fish which was always being fried right next to the wet bathing suits. Eleni, against this background, in a faded pink bathing costume that brought out the tan of her arms and legs and showed her slender and sinuous body, all the more attracted one’s attention by her naturalness and poise and grace; and two glimpses of her still stay in my mind as if I had brought them home engraved on Minoan seals: one of her figure going quickly up the stairs, obliquely so that I saw her in profile, pressing firmly but lightly on each of the steps with her rather long feet, showing none of the self-consciousness or vanity of a pretty woman at the beach; and the other of her standing in the water and playing with her little girl, smiling so that she made her eyes slits as she splashed with her palm tipped back at the wrist, at every splash thrusting her face forward and hissing, as if she had been some elemental creature—some siren that resembled a water snake. When I asked her what part she was playing, she answered that it wasn’t anything.
The V.’s invited me to dinner one evening to celebrate Eleni’s birthday. It was then that I met her mother and her stepfather, and I was amazed at her mother’s youth, as I had been when I discovered that Eleni had children of ten and thirteen. Eleni had been married at sixteen, and her mother when she was not much older. The stepfather was very cosmopolitan and apologized with dignity for the Greeks: they had recently been led to misbehave themselves by certain lawless and alien elements, and it was regrettable that this should have given the world a poor opinion of them. We went for dinner to one of the very best night clubs: a place such as, for gaiety and glamor, I had not seen, since the war, in Europe. It was also the first full-length meal under completely clean and attractive conditions that I had had since I had been in Greece, and for the V.’s, I think, also it was something of a treat. You got just the same dishes as elsewhere: sliced tomatoes, rice pilaff and fish, but you got enough instead of too little. The place was full of well-groomed British officers with Athenian “society” girls, some of them very pretty with their blond hair in two rolls over their temples so that their faces looked like valentines. Eleni and her mother enjoyed themselves recognizing people and gossiping about them. Some of these Greek girls, they told me, were engaged to English officers.
There was with us, also, a youngish journalist who wrote for a royalist paper: he was a tall slim man of the world, very lively and rather dapper, with mustaches in the style of George II—as Eleni said to me later, “always perfectly delighted with himself.” He was an old friend of Eleni’s husband, who loved to talk politics with him. I had the impression that the combinations and projects which these two were always discussing were among the least realistic of the many schools of café-table politics with which Athens so abounds; but it had to be admitted this evening that their hopes, from an unexpected quarter, were finding the most heartening encouragement. The journalist had just heard over the radio the news of Bevin’s speech on British foreign policy, and he relayed it to us with unrestrained glee and much gloating over the chagrin of the Left: “He said that the Labour government would continue to follow the policy that England had already supported, that they could see no good reason for a change in Greece before the Greek elections took place, and that they would make every effort in the meantime to see that law and order were preserved—that they would send a police mission.” And he described to us a visit to England, from which he had just returned. He had been gratified unspeakably, at a party, to see a fashionable English lady recognize, by a glance at his insignia, a fellow Greek who was present as an officer of the Greek Air Force. And he went on to tell us a story about another London party, at which he had had “un succès foudroyant avec trois compliments—trois seulement, mais très méditerranéens.” The first compliment I cannot remember, but the second had been detonated at the time when they were playing a game of “What famous person would you most like to be?” The lady whom he hoped to impress had, in his turn, put this question to him, and he had answered, “La ville de Hiroshima.” “ ‘Pourquoi?’ J’ai répondu, ‘Je voudrais être la ville de Hiroshima, si vous étiez la bombe atomique pour me tomber dessus!’ ” She had later returned and asked, smiling, “Dîtes-moi, qu’est-ce que vous voudriez être encore?” “Cette fois je lui ai répondu—toujours très méditerranéen: ‘Je voudrais être une cigarette.’ ‘Pourquoi?’ ‘Pour brûler entre vos lèvres!’ Le prochain après-midi, à cinq heures, elle m’a téléphoné,” etc.*
The floor-show seemed to me positively marvellous. I had forgotten how good such things could be, had hardly realized they were still going on. There were a girl who did an Oriental tumbling dance; a girl who sang in Greek and English; a couple who did a folk dance from one of the islands, fresh and animated and gone in a flash; and the great feature: a famous woman dancer who was also a romantic legend. I learned about her from Eleni and her mother. The Germans had had her on the carpet, the elder but far-from-old lady explained to me, for her well-known association with the English. But she had stood up to them with perfect sang-froid: “Que j’aurais eu un amant anglais—même deux, trois, quatre,” she was supposed to have replied, “qu’est-ce que ça fait?” She had had German lovers, too, Eleni thought; she had run through all the nationalities and always remained herself—and Eleni added with admiration: “Elle ment avec une facilité inouïe.” I saw that the myth of this performer, the great dancer who is also a great courtesan, had come to mean a good deal in Athens, which had been so much without the luxuries and so much at the mercy of the war. She was the devotee of art and love who had endured through all the hardship and conflict, and she was almost a sacred figure.
And she was extremely good: very beautiful, quick, sure and dashing, and able to get into everything she did a personality of enchanting insolence. Before one knew it, she would have leapt on a chair and would be bending down and kissing one of the diners, and then would hit him over the head with her tambourine. I had avoided such black-market places, but I succumbed to the brilliance of this night club, and, since I had been there without my long-distance glasses and since we had been sitting in a corner to the rear of the show, I decided to go again and see better. I got up another party the very next night with a man I knew in U.N.R.R.A. and two of the U.N.R.R.A. girls, and this time we had an excellent table in the middle and on the edge of the floor. The girls, who had been there before, said we were right in the spot to be kissed. This time some of the acts, seen distinctly, turned out rather disappointing; but the star dancer continued to be fascinating. Her first appearance was a ballroom number, which had its climax in a piece of business—an ecstatic start and smile as her partner, kneeling, kissed her midriff—that, for daring, style, naturalness and timing, took your breath away. When she came out for the second time, she seemed to be some sort of priestess or idol—possibly Javanese; and, exhilarated as I was by the wine—well-cooled and non-resinated—I was preparing to fall under her spell when she abruptly disappeared from the stage. The music went on playing, but she did not return. “Did you see what happened then?” the U.N.R.R.A. man asked the girls. “Yes: the thing that held her dress behind broke.” “Somebody’s catching hell back there!” he said.
This was two evenings before I left Athens, and the image was to remain in my mind as my last memory, and something of a symbol, of the world of the Greek bourgeoisie.
* See Appendix B.
* See Appendix C.