In a taxi up to Athens – a vast sprawling suburb between Piraeus and the city – unmetalled side-roads, dilapidated houses, palm-trees. Then we passed some orange-trees laden with glowing fruit in sunshine. Such small things are more important than all the vast monuments, so often seen before. I found the British Council, met Ball, the Educational Representative: a bespectacled, balding, brush-moustachio’d civil servant, frigid and unhelpful. He sent me off to find my new colleagues at a hotel near Omonia Square.
The next two days spent in Athens with Sharrocks and Pringle, mainly drinking and hearing their accounts of the school. Pringle is fortyish, mildly alcoholic, choleric, well-read but unwise. He talks about literature by means of his reading, by what other writers and critics think; a series of cross-references. I do not excel in such atmospheres. One can only join in by adding other cross-references; a personal opinion does not count. Pringle’s eyes are unpleasant, beady, buried in flesh. His fingernails long and filthy. He has schoolmastered in India, in the Sudan, and elsewhere. A rather forlorn failure, professing an admiration for the Roy Campbell–Hemingway attitude of revolt.fn1 And touchy about that admiration, which I mildly mocked. He told me a mass of stories about the school – its atmosphere seems decidedly strange, a constant intriguing between masters for popularity with the headmaster and with the boys. The boys without discipline, uninhibited in their curiosity, their affection or their hate. A kind of laboratory, hothouse atmosphere, where eccentricities are enormously exaggerated.
Sharrocks is tall, good-looking in a pale aesthetic way – he could carry the lily well down Piccadilly – and very suavely soft-spoken – a discreetly cultured accent with one or two Lancashire lapses – ‘wan’ for one. He appears to know Athens and Greece well, with many friends. Pringle said he lacks devil; he has stayed at Spetsai longer than anyone else post-war, because he is adept at maintaining his balance here. He is apparently a poète manqué. He seemed to treat Pringle with considerable expertise, by the difficult means of never disagreeing with him.fn2
Athens is not a pleasant city at first sight – a gigantic city, uneasy, full of movement, irregular hours, rich people – and between Omonia Square and Constitution Square, very few poor. The women are beautiful, and very feminine – the mannish, mousy face does not seem to exist; nor does the classical Greek; but the Turkish element is visible everywhere – full cheeks, oriental and languorous, expressive eyes, full lips, open and pouting. All the women are soft, look as if they would yield; none of the modern equality-ergo-sexlessness. So many Greeks have a beautiful smile with the eyes – a warm, inviting smile; sympathique. The language I cannot understand at all – it is soft, lisping, hard to catch, full of ee vowel sounds.
I went up to the Acropolis one grey afternoon. It was oppressive, muggy in the city, with a kind of dirty slime on all the pavements, which I found as slippery as ice. I walked down past the vulgar modern cathedral, and headed vaguely towards the Acropolis, through an older, poorer quarter – a street full of butchers’ shops with rows of skinned lamb and greengrocers with glowing heaps of oranges – still leafy – and other fruit. A man in rags, with bare feet and carrying a large sack, passed, chanting and staggering from side to side. I worked my way up through low white houses with tiled red and ochre roofs on to a road which led upwards under the Acropolis wall. But it was, so a boy told me, not the right road. I went down again on to the main road up to the Propylaeon.fn3
I do not know how to describe my reaction to the Acropolis – everything in it I have seen so often before – in books, photos, paintings. Yet I had not the least idea of the ensemble of the setting, which is everything. The Parthenon is so powerful, on its short slope, or from below, glimpsed over the wall. Brooding, timeless. But I found it all so sad, so past – it was cold, raining, there were only a handful of visitors, a few photographers blowing on their hands. The Parthenon looked a pale russet colour against the grey-black slopes of Mount Hymettos. The beautiful vaselike sections of distant perspective between any two columns. Especially looking down the east colonnade, northwards, at two cypresses framed in the vase-opening.
The sky was grey-black tangled with clouds. It was very cold. I watched the city below, the old Byzantine churches, the ancient Agora, the Hephaesteion.fn4 The sky cleared over the Peloponnesus – bright golden clouds, silver reaches on the sea, blue-green rifts of clear sky over the dark blue mountains. But all that was a long way off – on the Acropolis it drizzled, and the wind was very cold indeed.
The beautiful Erectheion – the Parthenon is not beautiful, any more than a man can be beautiful – feminine, graceful, poised.fn5 The huge city at one’s feet, commanded.
I walked down back to the hotel, disappointed at not knowing what to think about the Acropolis – it aroused no vivid reactions in me.
That night we drank too much – Pringle got cantankerous and dogmatic and finally drunk. S (Sharrocks) was non-committal and sober. I had nausea, was annoyed by Pringle’s pugnacity, and wanted to go to bed. But it seemed Pringle was unstoppable. We ended up in a nightclub near the hotel and there dragged out an expensive two hours. The place was largely occupied by businessmen – ‘papas’ as Pringle called them – and two or three décolleté hostesses, who were pulled about, danced with, and also drank champagne. An uglier and more colleté hostess sat with us, or with Sharrocks, who non-committally accepted her. Pringle got angry with her, and shouted at her to go away. He had fits of laughter when the tears ran down his cheeks. I watched the antics of the businessmen and the abandon of the girls; one of then had jet-black hair with a blue sheen, a heavily rouged and very pretty face, and broad supple hips. Four or five of the businessmen were trying to win her.
At last we got away at half past four. Sharrocks and I had a boat to catch at eight for Spetsai. Pringle had the room next to mine; after some fumbling he managed to get the key in the lock and get in. Then a cock outside began to crow, and Pringle started to shout at it. ‘Crow away; cock, cock, crow away … Crow away.’ And he went on droning this for minutes: ‘Crow away … Crow away.’ That was the last I heard of him.
A strange, failed, stunted yet violent personality, he had written several novels, travelled, and plainly drunk a good deal. His writing is crabbed and mean, and not very expressive – if one can judge by the letter he sent me. A highly emotional person – with no sense of objectivity, easily offended, faintly malignant, yet with flashes of intelligent and real perception.
I awoke at 6.30, feeling foul. Put out my hand for a sickness tablet, and knocked them off the shelf so that they fell down the plug-hole of the wash basin. It had no grating, and they were gone. I was lost. I called the maid, who called a porter, to see if it was by the inspection hole in the piping – but no. It had gone. I would be sick.
But I wasn’t. We got a taxi to Piraeus, and got aboard the little motor-vessel which runs to Poros and Spetsai – once Ciano’s yacht.fn6 I went down to a cabin and lay dozing for four hours. It was a lovely day and we passed through superb scenery. But I lay in the dark cabin, paying for the sin of not having resisted the Pringle in things. I came on deck in brilliant sunshine as we ran into a bay, the sea bright blue and sparkling – a bay with a small white-washed village at one end, Hermione.fn7 Brilliantly white houses in a small plain, barren mountains behind, and to the left a soft promontory covered in pines.
Half an hour later we came to Spetsai – a largish village on the north side of the long green island; the snow-covered Peloponnesus in the distance, the coast of Argolis ochre and red and smiling a mile to the north, and several bare islands miraculously poised like tops (a mirage) over the scintillating waves.
These island villages are incredibly white and clean, clustered small cubes, crystallizations at the foot of the pine-covered slopes, on the blue water’s edge. At Spetsai a small boat took us ashore to the quay. I met two masters, was much stared at. We went off to a small backstreet restaurant; a Spanish-looking guitarist came in and sang a series of Greek songs. Greek music has affinities with Spanish Andalusian and Arabic music, and of course, Turkish. A very particular, aromatic, discordant music, full of dropping notes, broken rhythms, oriental intonations. He sang in a clear, strong tenor, to a Greek just back from America who was drinking a good deal of retsina with some cronies, and who finally danced in the Greek-Turkish way up and down the aisle between the tables. The guitarist improvised a song about him, full of sly digs which were greatly enjoyed.
We went to the school. I did not expect such huge buildings. Five large blocks, several storeys high – wide, unfurnished corridors, with bare stone floors everywhere. There is a resonance when one speaks; a church, a morgue, a prison. My room is some 30 × 30 feet, sufficiently furnished.
The school is in a park by the sea, which one can hear on the shingle. The garden is full of cypress and olive-trees. There are hibiscus in bloom. A well-equipped gymnasium, a football pitch, tennis courts, even two fives courts! A school which is a dream, superbly situated and equipped for four hundred boys. But there are only one hundred and fifty, and they are dwindling in numbers. So many things could be done here – an international school, a co-educational one. Sharrocks thinks any change is hopeless.
I met the deputy headmaster – a pleasant man with crinkled eyelids and an honest smile. We ate with some of the boys. I speak no Greek, the other masters speak no English, so I could talk only to Sharrocks.
8 Januaryfn8
I went for a short walk in the morning. It was very cold with a choppy sea blowing up against the shore. I saw two kingfishers sitting on the strand, least expected of birds; a kestrel, and what looked like choughs; and several other birds. And there were many flowers. Sharrocks says there are no birds here – but there seem to me great possibilities. The variety of natural life excites me – the natural historian has a profound advantage over all other men. When I pass through a new country, the birds and the flowers and insects mean – from the point of view of my own pleasure – as much to me as the people and their artificial world. They form a kind of ubiquitous sanctuary.
I went down with Sharrocks to Spetsai to buy some utensils – we ate fried cuttlefish – very pleasant – fat olives and chips, and drank beer in a small restaurant with a moth-eaten stuffed buzzard hanging from the ceiling. The people seem so friendly; amicable – able to be friendly.
Today I met most of the rest of the staff – as yet they possess no characters, but only the nicknames I base on their unpronounceable Greek surnames.
I sat at a table with seven boys for supper – a Cretan on one side of me who was nearly inarticulate, and a Turk on the other who spoke fairly well. But it is going to be difficult to keep up a thriving conversation for a whole term on a vocabulary of a hundred or so words.
The plunge has been taken; the work seems, from the point of view of hours, easy. Four teaching periods a day, total three hours, and two duties a week, total five, which makes twenty-three hours a week. I cannot complain. The boys are ebullient, spontaneous, and eager; more feminine than English boys. I saw a newly arrived (from holidays) boy kiss a friend on the cheek. The older boys show more affection to the junior than an English boy would dare. Facially, and in habits, one might almost be in England.
The boys, however, cannot discipline themselves; there are no organized games; and the day of seven periods followed by two and three-quarter hours’ homework is too much. The teaching methods appear antiquated. The school needs reorganizing. Partly it is the lack of a University tradition like Oxford and Cambridge in England, or the Ecole Normale Supérieure/Sorbonne in France. There is no core of cultured masters. Here they seem to know their subjects, but to have few outside interests, and little except gossip in common. Rather like village schoolmasters in England.
But the island is a jewel, a Treasure Island, a paradise. I went for a long walk up into the hills inland – through the pine-trees, up stony goat-tracks in a cold bright silence. It was a perfect cloudless day with a small wind from the central Peloponnesus; with almost the warmth of a warm March day in England. The pines are loose, shapeless, small and scattered, so that the views are rarely impeded and often superbly framed. A sea of these pines is a sea of round tops like cork-oaks. What is strange in the hills is the silence; no birds (yet they are everywhere in the school); very few insects; no humans, no animals; only the still silence and the brilliant light and the blue sea below, with the Argolian plain and its small central mountains opposite. A purity and simplicity of emotion, a kind of quintessential Mediterranean ecstasy, pervade the air; the air infused with pine-resin and winter sharpness and the brine from far below.
I saw no one for a long time; one or two shepherds called in the distance – sound carries fantastically. A small boat chugging out to the daily steamer anchored off the village sounded a few hundred yards away. But it was two or three miles. I passed an astronomy station, strangely isolated in this hill-forest. On another hill further east I could see a monastery looming white among the black cypress-trees which guarded it.fn9 The view became more and more beautiful at each new stage in the climb. Opposite, Argolis, like a relief map, indented, edged by small bays with pink-orange cliffs and further inland, dark green pinewoods. But these woods are so open, so airy, that there is no sense of the sombre, the far North. You can see these woods for their trees; and they are a relief – a sanctuary from the hot, bare plains. Argolis appears well inhabited – one or two white rashes of village, and a regular speckling of isolated farms and cottages. Only the central mountains are barren and uninhabited. To the right, the beautiful islands around Hydra, and Hydra itself blue and pale-green and pink, floating in the veronica-blue sea. Massy islands, with bluff peaks, and big cliffs and escarpments, but balanced together in the distance. All the colours are vivid, but soft, pastel without being furry, aquarelle yet solid.
To the right, over the bay of Nauplia, the big mountains of the Central Peloponnesus – snow-covered, like pink clouds low on the horizon, glittering faintly in the oblique sunlight. Far hills, cliffs, villages, and the vast carpet of the sea.
I climbed up and up and came on to a rough road, and found myself on the central ridge of the island, bathed in sunlight, an undulating sea of pines falling to the southern coast, which is much more deserted than the north, and has only a few cottages and a villa or two to populate it. The sun was over Sparta; the sea between Spetsai and the Peloponnesus glittered brilliantly, variegated by small ruffling breezes. A fire far below, near a cottage, sent a column of smoke straight up into the air; but up where I was there was a small, cold breeze tempering the warm sunlight. Near by I saw a man, the first I had seen, cutting faggots. Two more men appeared riding donkeys. One of them stopped by me and stared at me and smiled, and said something sharply. He wore a stained pale blue beret and ragged trousers; his face was linseed-oil brown, like an old cricket bat, and he had a good black moustache. He repeated the same phrase as before. I stammered something. He stared back. ‘Anglike,’ I said.
‘Ah!’ he nodded, half shrugged, kicked at his donkey, and rode on without another look at me. His companion drove the other donkey, minute under a mountain of pine-branches, past me, with a friendly ‘Kal’ emeras’.fn10
‘’Emeras,’ I said, and went my way.
I walked along the road for a while. I walked through a small brake, and a woodcock flew off from under my feet. A lizard scuttled away. It was very warm, airy; I struck off the road and came to a cliff facing westwards. I sat on the edge of it, on a rock, and the world was at my feet. I have never had so vividly the sense of standing on the world; the world below me. From the cliff, successive waves of forest fell down to the sea, the sparkling sea. The Peloponnesus was absolutely without depth or detail; just a vast blue shadow in the path of the sun; even with field-glasses, no details could be seen, except in the snowy mountain-tops. The effect was weird and for a few minutes I felt incomprehensibly excited as if I was experiencing something infinitely rare. Certainly I have never seen so beautiful a landscape; a compound of gloriously blue sky, brilliant sunlight, miles of rock and pine, and the sea. All the elements, at such a pitch of purity that I was spellbound. I have had almost the same feeling in mountains, but the earth element is missing there – one is exalted and remote. Here the earth was all around one. A sort of supreme level of awareness of existence, an all-embracing euphoria which cannot last long. At the time I could not define what I was feeling; the impact and uplifting had made me lose myself. I was suspended in bright air, timeless, motionless, floating on a sublime synthesis of the elements. Then there was the fragrant wind, the knowledge that this was Greece, more than that, the spark which lit ancient Greece; and very strongly, the memory of all those grey streets, those grey towns, that greyness of England. Landscapes like this, on such days, advance men immeasurably. Perhaps ancient Greece was only the effect of a landscape and a light on a sensitive people. It would explain the wisdom, the beauty and the childishness; wisdom lies in the higher region – and Greek landscapes are full of higher regions, mountains over the plains; beauty in nature in every corner, a simplicity of landscapes, a purity which exalts a similar purity and simplicity; a childishness because such beauty is not human, not practical, not evil – and minds fed on, surrounded by, such a paradise must become its dupes, intensely attached to it, and after the initial offering of worship (the Golden Age) they must be creatively sapped by it. One created beauty to supply a lack of it; here there is plenitude. One does not create; one enjoys.
Such fragments make good shoring.
I walked back towards home; thinking of Treasure Island. The sun fell, gilding the crests; the valleys were green, gloomy. I came to a valley full of the tinkling of goat-bells. There were twenty or thirty of them; the goatherd called regularly, ‘Ahi! Hia!’ and gave a fluty, penetrating whistle. I glimpsed him making his way down through the trees, surrounded by goats, a tall man in dove-grey trousers, patched very pale grey at the knees, and a black coat. I hurried down the path to catch up with him, but I caught sight of a small plant by the side. I fell on my knees, and incredibly, there was an early spider orchid in bloom before me, a little thing some six inches high, with one large flower, its blotched purple lip insolently outspread, hooded by the pale green sepals, and the green bud of a second flower. I knelt down and took the details, the goatherd forgotten and his goats tunkling fainter and fainter away. Now it was getting dark; the mountains looked dark blue, the Argolian countryside black. The air was cold. I walked swiftly down the goat-tracks, as there was still a good way to go. At last I stood on a bluff from where I could see the school. It was studded with anemones, little plants three or four inches high, pink and mauve, nodding in what slight breeze there was.
I tumbled down through the olive-terraces, past a ruined farm, and on to the road, which led to the school in a few minutes. I think one of the most satisfying walks I have ever made. Once one knows the background, I think the school is best seen as a kind of necessary evil. But such a day – vision – dwarfs pedagogy and all things pedagogic. In the evening after dinner I had coffee with Sharrocks and Hippofn11 and the Cockroach, who chattered away at nothings. The Hippo said he had ‘a delightful walk in the town, where we had a very good time’. Shades of the great – they live on the island and do not see it. The miracle will not repeat.
But meanwhile we pale Northerners may still be slightly wrought upon.
Kesseris, 5B. ‘I like to make an archaeologist, and to light some ancient men with strange perspicacities.’
12 January
An incredibly soft, brilliant moonlit night; colours stood out plainly; the sea was opaque; a symphony of white houses and black cypresses. It being Saturday, and the afternoon occupied with a particularly Kafkaesque masters’ meeting. The main disputation was about some boys who had spent a night on Poros gambling and drinking instead of returning straight to the school from Athens. Any small item of school business has to be debated by all the masters in plenary session. Today there were two camps – the lenient, liberal school and the conservatives out for blood, the latter faction headed by the arch-Jesuitical Timaigenis, the theology master, a reeking Tartuffe. The headmaster opened the debate with the striking words, ‘We are not allowed to punish boys, but we must think of a punishment for these.’ He acted like a temperamental granny throughout, mainly bursting out against any master who cast adverse reflections on the school discipline. Sharrocks said that most of the boys regarded the public school ‘court’ as a farce. ‘Ah,’ said the headmaster, ‘but that is how we all treat courts in Greece.’ The whole atmosphere is mad.
It being Saturday, we had a meal in Spetsai, at a café where a fine guitar-player was playing. Surrounded by cronies, a Sancho Panza type of figure, sly, malicious, a brilliant improviser and wit. The café was full of fishermen and local tradesmen. We drank retsina, which as yet I don’t like – yet feel it is Greece, and must be liked – one of the minor obstacles – and ate a big meal of chips and lamb chops and liver. The guitarist sang about us, we bought him and his table beer. A raising of glasses. A tall, fat old caique skipper in a blue cap sang a duet with him; sang in a high tenor, passionately, with quavers, his face upraised and his throat vibrating, like a bird singing. A youth sang also, in a strong, melancholy tenor.
It was a relief to escape from the school, although it is not as bad as I expected – grim, but not terrible. The boys are ebullient, irrepressible, but as charming and affectionate as they are hateful. In class they all talk, they whisper, are continually jumping up, raising their hands, asking questions, laughing. Silence here is a comparative thing. Yet much of the trouble is eagerness. They want to learn. The masters are far worse – a gutless, uncultured lot of old women, uneasily perched on the system of hard work and repression.
The grounds of the school are studded with pines and cypresses, through which the veronica sea appears even more blue. One of the loveliest of shapes, the cypress; black flame, obelisk or fountain. A common weed in the garden is an Oxalis with vivid citrus-yellow flowers which only open in sunshine. They nod on fragile, graceful stems, in their hundreds, humanly.
The strange marble resonances of these stone buildings. Every sound is magnified, hollowed, echoed and becomes institutional – prison, morgue, hospital, school, barracks. Wirelesses produce weirdly remote sounds. Each floor is divided in three lengthwise, so that the central corridor is as wide as the rooms that flank it – and all the sounds gather in it. As I write, a woman is singing in Arabic on someone’s wireless – and the music sounds doubly exotic, remotely resonant, from afar, past ages, nostalgic, sad, like dead beauty.
This afternoon there was a football match. The pitch is good. The boys wore shirts of yellow and black, and red and white stripes. They played with brio, unscientifically – on the red ochre earth they made lovely patterns, as they ran after the ball, which was light and bounced high, uncontrollably. It was a championship match between two forms, and all the school was there to watch on the concrete grandstand, and many people from the village as well. The boys had toy trumpets, whistles, shouted. We, the masters, sat on a kind of royal dais in the centre of the stand, watched the game, and the line of cypresses beyond, and the white school blocks; and beyond them the mauve-blue channel, and the Argolian hills in the late afternoon light, where Mycenae and Tiryns and some gems of history are hidden in the blue, still shapes, and under the white and pink few clouds. The schoolish activity seemed antlike in such a setting; games, a prostitution of real action. School discipline, organization, prefects, referees, white lines, goalposts, a scar, scum on the everlasting.
A new English master arrives today – Egyptiadis – an old man with grey hair shaven almost bald, so that he looks likes a wrestler or ex-convict. A bull neck, wide mouth, few teeth, massive body and polite manner. He has lived in the States for nineteen years and speaks English well. And apparently many other languages. He spoke to us in several; proud of being multilingual, although his knowledge of other tongues seems mainly a matter of memorized extracts. He struck me as being something of a rogue. And no doubt his parrot-like repetition of odd fragments of prayer and proverb in many languages will soon become very boring. Unfortunately he has the room next to mine.
Tamarus, Class 4: ‘Slippers are the shoes of the night.’
Potamianos – a young sprig of smugness, with protuberant lips, downy cheeks and curly backswept hair; the air of an enthusiastic young innocent, the pride of the seminary. He is very thick-skinned, and transparently self-interested. He has got a corner in the English extra-tuition market; he naïvely tells us how all the boys love his teaching methods; and criticizes nice old Egyptiadis.
Today he came up to me in the common-room and asked how I ‘propose to affront (sic) the problem of being without women on the island’.
‘I shall use goats,’ I said.
‘Is that what you go into the hills for?’ he asked. My botanical interests puzzle him deeply.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘You know,’ he went on, ‘before I left Piraeus I spent two hours with a woman in a hotel. I did it four times in two hours. I have done three times before, but never four.’
‘Indeed,’ I said.
‘Papiriou (the gym master) and I want a girl here from Athens,’ he said. ‘Would you like to join us? My girl would come. All she wants is a room and food. And Dokos, the music master, would join us, and perhaps Mr Sharrocks, so it wouldn’t cost much if we all shared.’
And he looked at me like an amateur 50–50 Rousseau, innocent and vicious, inquiring. I kept him playing for nearly half an hour. Heard all his love life. ‘My dream is a widow,’ he said very seriously. ‘With widows one reaches more far.’
He told it all to Sharrocks later; an offensively dense young man, who imagines himself of the world. Later he was singing in the music-room; not a vestige of musical knowledge; but droning away like an undiscovered Caruso overconscious of his destiny.
This latter soirée musicale was enlivened by Egyptiadis, who insisted on giving imitations (a hollow whistle into cupped hands) of an owl, an American train and, of all things, the Eton College boating-song. Dokos, a balding, bespectacled, brown-faced clown of a man, played fragments of Rigoletto, dance-tunes, Greek popular airs, La Traviata, Strauss and finally Boieldieu, whom he seems to regard as the apogee of West European music.fn12 He plays with a kind of thumping brio, very far from perfectly as regards notes, and I suspect he must have worked at some period in a busy restaurant, against a continual invasion of noise on his music.
I am beginning to understand the peculiar flavour of existence here. The complete lack of contact with the outside world; I have not read a newspaper since I came here; no doubt one could get news broadcasts, but I have no desire to listen to them. I read a New Statesman the other day, and it seemed suddenly and mysteriously in perspective, rather affectedly intellectual; the criticisms especially seemed to me the lucubrations of unbalanced young know-alls, undergraduate stuff. The whole NS world, which so recently I found pleasantly esoteric, almost a clique – a county cricket team whose averages I cultivated – now seems a minor planet, and faintly grotesque, a narrow small heart of a small narrow faction who live in North London and Oxford and Cambridge – and nowhere else. My geographical remoteness would not, I should have thought, affect my inner standard of values. I thought they were proof against physical removals. But environment makyth man.fn13
The frustrations of a prison existence – a prison without even the benefit of more or less solitary cells, since one’s room is a very insecure sanctuary, penetrated by masters, bells, boys’ shouts and voices, and intolerably institutional in its furniture and ambiance. Yet the prison is purely artificial – the lovely island, the lovely sea is all around, a minute away. Yet the school seems (when one is inside it) to have poisoned the whole scene. Outside, it dwindles, disappears, in a few steps. Yet few of the masters appear ever to go out – occasionally they go into the village, but never into the pine-forests. No attempt to escape. And yet there is so little privacy here – especially in the boys’ blocks, where the life is much more that of the officer messing in with his men.
A hypersensitive perception of the absurd and humorous. Sharrocks and I spend most of our time in private together laughing. The other masters are so uncultured, so childish and transparent and insular in their motives that one can only laugh. Yet things happen here which make us laugh, and they are not funny – except on Spetsai. Partly the whole presence of this ridiculous great mock-British school on a gem-like Aegean island is intrinsically absurd. One has to laugh. And being English gives one a peculiarly objective standpoint from which to mock foreigners. We are uninteresting, but stable. Foreigners have no fixed standpoint, unless it be of purely private interest. They dart, move about, change. But we are set on one point, moral, democratic, wise, governing and governable, indulgently adult; and the rest of the world is precociously juvenile.
Arapangis, Class VIA: ‘I have some more to say, but time is not enough. The bell rings.’ For whom the bell –
18 January
I went into town with Hippo today to see about getting a permis de séjour. He has a way of boring into one as he walks, and my progress to the police station was very much between the devil and the deep blue sea. It was a grey day, but the mainland and islands to the east were of a beautiful silent dark grey-blue colour. The sea was a satiny grey, very calm. The Hippo regaled me with anecdotes mainly smutty – how he had been riding a she-donkey and a he-donkey mounted her. ‘So I got off and ran away – I was very much scared.’ And he described in detail the forcible mating of a stallion with a mare. ‘Very interesting.’ He says everything so earnestly, beseeching credulity, that one can hardly keep a straight face with him. He sang all the time – Italian opera, The Merry Widow and so on. A clown, a Candide.
We had an amusing half-hour with the Chief of Police in his office, laboriously filling out the vast forms. He made very heavy going of all the English names. He was a lugubrious character with sleek black hair and the face of a jaundiced bloodhound, wearing an old British Army khaki greatcoat with two large silver stars on each epaulette. He wrote heavily, in red ink, with a scratchy pen. When we came to the question, ‘Religion?’, I promptly answered (determined to be absurd in the land of the absurd), ‘None!’
‘But you must have a religion!’ said the Hippo.
‘No,’ said I.
‘He’s not got a religion,’ said Hippo in Greek to the Police Chief. That worthy looked at me then back at Hippo, and spat out something.
‘Well, look here,’ said Hippo, ‘he says you must have a religion?’
‘But I haven’t.’
‘Well look here, you’ve got a Christian name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you must be a Christian.’
I was unable to confound this triumphant piece of logic. I shrugged and said firmly, ‘I haven’t a religion.’
Hippo said something to the Police Chief, who looked at me, scratched his head, and suddenly burst out laughing.
‘What the hell’s he laughing at?’ I asked.
‘He says he’s never heard of anyone not having a religion. He thinks it very funny.’ I had bargained for a little provincial awe of the declared atheist, but not laughter.
‘Tell him I was a Protestant, once,’ I said resignedly. ‘Tell him to write down “Protestant (once)”.’
And so it was written. When the form was filled up, the Lieutenant asked me for six or eight photographs.
‘Six or eight?’ I asked. Hippo discussed this point with him.
‘He says six or seven, but six will do, and he’ll get them himself from the photographer.’
The Greeks are mad.
That same night Sharrocks and Egyptiadis drank a bottle of my brandy. Greek brandy is sweet and weaker than cognac, and the level drops correspondingly faster. Still, it was a cheap price to pay to hear Egyptiadis thundering out an endless variety of hymns, Turkish and Greek songs, novelty numbers, national anthems and lines from the Iliad, to say nothing of the quotations and proverbs. He got mildly excited, and his voice rang through the building. There were voices in the corridor, murmurs. The headmaster has the room above mine. He must have felt the tortures of the damned. Egyptiadis sings bass and tenor, very powerfully, and even a whisper in these stone rooms resounds loudly.
He drinks brandy neat, and at a gulp. In return he has offered us some superb Turkish Delight, made at Syros, and also a Turkish cake called kata, a kind of walnut paté inside a crisp shortbread envelope.
Egyptiadis has a very humble dutiful approach to teaching here. He constantly tells us how proud he is to be our colleague; writes down everything so as not to forget it; conscientiously answers every bell – where most of us come late or not at all to meals. The other day he was in my room when a boy came to say that he was meant to be teaching. He had mistaken his free period. He rushed out of my room and I saw him running in quick glides, so evidently shocked and eager to get to the teaching block. Grotesque, because he is a massive, portly figure, normally dignified and slow in his movements, and pathetic in his anxiety. Far more the latter than the former.
All his life seems to have been work; conscientious labour and learning. He does not smoke, and declares himself able to abstain from anything. A dry, frugal character, clean but garrulous, almost parsonical, in the least likely of bodily forms.
In the morning following my epic interview with the Police Chief, I went in again with Hippo to be photographed. A clear, sparkling morning, with the hills and islands brilliant and soft in the breezy sunlight. We sat in the photographer’s and haggled about prices. He wanted to charge us more than Athenian prices, which are already outrageous. At last a more or less agreeable compromise was arrived at. We went outside and I stood in a striking pose in the village square. The photographer suddenly seemed struck by grave doubts.
‘He thinks the photos may be too small for the Police Chief,’ said Hippo. ‘He may want bigger ones – more expensive.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, laughing, ‘surely he knows by now what size the police use.’
Hippo talked.
‘It depends on the form,’ said Hippo.
‘Let’s go to the Chief of Police,’ I said. So the three of us trooped through a door with a faded sign, across a garden with some small oranges on small trees, up the steps to the police station. The Chief of Police seemed little pleased to see us. There was much haggling and disputing. I smiled constantly in the background, reserving the bombshell till the end.
‘Tell them to send the bill to the school,’ I said.
‘The school!’ The Chief of Police and the photographer looked at each other, shrugged and agreed with surprising meekness. We went out into the square, the photo was taken.
Then Hippo and I went and sat at a little table on the cobbles above the small harbour. We sat under a pine-tree, by the line of ancient cannons, warm in the sunshine, eating cakes. The sea was dark blue, Hydra and the rest pink and ochre and olive. A big caique was pitching and rolling out of the lee of the island.
And I had a mild hangover.
A good night’s drinking in the village. Sharrocks and I went to the local cinema to see a film about the aborigines of Australia – Bitter Springs. The aborigines were good. The audience was not large – six. The soundtrack was in English although I did not discover that for some time after the film had started. Lengthy gaps for the changing of reels rather broke one’s concentration.
Later we went to Lambris. Sharrocks and I went to join four of the waiters. One of them, who was sitting in the back room with Dokos, the music master, was celebrating his name day. A vast dish was set in the middle of the table – fried liver and some kind of entrail, thin segments of orange and cheese-balls – from which we each speared the morsel we wanted, Arab-fashion. Sharrocks and I, having the prestige of foreignness, had pieces speared for us and delicately held out for us to bite from the fork – a charming habit. The Greeks have a graciousness which is unsurpassed; among themselves they appear greedy and egoistical. The boys at my table snatch what they need; they take the best portions; and when there is a second helping, the first boy will take far more than his fair share before he passes on the dish. Sometimes he will take the whole lot, and the others seem to regard it as normal. There is something callous, un-Christian in the Greek temperament. They do not renounce; and they respect chance. If you have, you hold on; if you have not, you are ridiculous and not in the least pitiable.
Yet with foreigners they are polite, charming and, in their way, patient. In any case, to laugh at the misfortune of others is less hypocritical than the customary English conventional sympathy; and I am not sure it does not give one a better weapon against one’s own setbacks. Here all one can do is shrug, laugh and suffer in silence, and get better as soon as one can.
There was a continual clinking of glasses. Everyone became more or less amiable and intoxicated. The guitarist Evangelakis came in and fenced with Dokos about an engagement at the school. Dokos started to show off academically, and started talking about the history of music and his own wide knowledge of it. The little guitarist, who has more music – humble though it may be – in his little finger than a thousand Dokos’s, listened to it all with a kind of sulky patience. The waiters and ourselves got the guitarist to start playing – once started he went on – a popular song, bawdy, melancholy, sentimental and brilliant improvisations which had all the waiters and Sharrocks in fits of laughter. His speed of versifying was miraculous. Dokos made one or two weak improvisations, but without a pause the guitarist answered back and much better. Nothing seemed too difficult for him. Dokos, a little sour at the guitarist’s success, and ourselves. Sharrocks is a very skilled performer indeed at the social game – not a champion, but a very good person to have on or at one’s side. Unruffled, diplomatic, amused and amusing; socially supple, which they all are here – masters, servants, boys … I cannot keep up at this high level – sometimes I fall, sag, am silent, walk out.
They sang Greek songs with closed eyes, swaying, with passion. Some of the broken rhythms affect me as Catalan music does – very deeply. At half past one we came away, and walked down the road beside the sea, which was pounding the rocks. Back through the drizzle and spray to bed and stupor.
I said last night that two more evenings like that, and I could die for Greece. Two more hangovers like this, and I shall. Retsina goes up to the head and this morning I have a splitting headache – blinding lights and jangling bells. I sat for an hour nursing my head, then took a Veganine pill and felt better. I strolled out on the strand and watched the sea beating angrily up on the beach. The sea was every shade of Antwerp blue – sun-stained, tipped with white. A superb windy day.
In the afternoon I went for a long walk to the end of the island, along sheep-tracks on the cliffs. I did not see a soul; it was windy, but mild. The cliffs are a tangle of furze and pines and weather-carved rocks. At every pace magnificent glimpses of the bright jade-green sea below. On the barer patches were clusters of bright blue muscari hyacinth – Oxford and Cambridge blue. At one place I find a large scattered colony of spider orchids, with bigger, fatter flowers than I have previously seen. Very few birds live on these cliffs. It is the north side of the island, rather cold, deserted, ominous. The cliffs are tall and steep, and the coves enclosed. One bay with a big grove of cypresses is especially beautiful.
I remember one moment of enchantment. I had been walking for hours through the trees above the sea, not seeing a soul, and the sea, being rough, was empty of boats, and then suddenly I had a kind of flash of vivid perception of the marvellous, the poetic – a tissue of the legendary, the enchanted forest, the spirits of places, nymphs in groves, partly French and medieval, partly Greek and classical, partly my own dreamworld. I stood in a glade, looking uphill at some densely obscure pines, almost aware of a new world.
Then I walked home, fast, through the trees, and again, although I was now on the road, saw nobody. But I heard a weird cry, which I thought must be some shepherd, until I was standing directly below it. I threw a stone into the tall cypress from which the call came, and a small owl flew out in the twilight. Mr Scops, I presume. The invigorating solitude had cleared me of my hangover.
Papiriou, the games master, the champion hammer-thrower of Greece – a sulky, muscle-bound athlete, beginning to run to fat. He is very body-conscious, continually throwing out his chest, flexing his muscles and so on. He slaps one on the back, and his approach is pugnacious, and usually lewd. He is genital-conscious as well, and incredibly lacking in tact and savoir faire. Or perhaps he does it because it is quite evident no one will pick a fight with him. His chest is diabolically hairy and his left eye is blinded, giving him a rather unsatisfactory expression. He is very sensitive about it, and usually wears dark glasses. The virile brute incarnate; he sets my nerves on edge.
The boys in the top form were talking today about the Communists. They had some very gruesome stories about the Civil War.fn14 Stammanoyatis said that they dug out the eyeballs of their prisoners and kept them in tins to send to Moscow; that they executed their prisoners by chopping off their limbs one by one. He described how he had seen mothers embracing the decayed corpses of their children. I was a little incredulous, but such is that streak of callousness in the Greek temperament. Perhaps it came mainly from Turkey, but one of the additions of Christianity to the philosophy of ancient Greece is precisely of the lacking quality of compassion. These boys are so bitterly anti-Communist that it frightens me. They call Plastiras – who is mildly left-wing – a Communist.fn15 When I asked them to name the four people they would most like to destroy, they said Stalin, Mao-Tse-Tung, Vishinskyfn16 and Plastiras.
The horror is in their own lack of comprehension. They have seen only the violence and cruelty of their own Communist countrymen. Because of that they are scared of any reform – and Greece needs reforming. At some future date the peasants will burst out again and the same bloody battle will be fought. The same situation in Spain, in Iraq, Persia, Italy, Egypt – masses of oppressed peasantry who are not being relieved, gently, democratically, but only oppressed more violently, more frantically. And with a younger generation like this – the ‘cream’ of Greece – solidly reactionary, there is no hope at all.
Spider orchids. I have found them scattered all over the island. Aloof, bizarre plants, with a rich brown lip, tinged gold and purple in sunlight, and delicate yellow-green wings. They grow singly, or in twos and threes, rarely more than two flowers on a plant. I have kept one in water for over ten days, painted it, and looked at it a great deal. They give me great pleasure. Upside down they have a weirdly expressionistic resemblance to a human face – a neurotic clown.
At table the favourite topics are those which border on the obscene. The boys, especially the fat little Cretan, Kabella, are constantly giggling and stammering things out to me which would gain them instant expulsion in a British school. If I get angry, they will talk in Greek; if I look shocked, they will tease me; so all I can do is laugh. Yesterday, the prefect at my table, a son of a former minister of labour, handed me the following joke which he had written out on a piece of paper.
Hotelkeeper (to honeymooning husband, the morning after): How did the whole thing go?
Husband: Very well. I liked the hole, and she liked the thing.
‘A very good joke,’ he shouted from the bottom of the table.
‘Very good indeed,’ I agreed.
‘Mr Potamianos told it to me,’ he said.
I tried to look amused.
On my left sits Asymakos, a tall, handsome boy with an olive complexion, lustrous eyes, very long lashes and a generally girlish manner. He spends most of his time fluttering his eyelashes at me, and asking me what marks I shall give him. He and the Cretan have vilifying contests. According to the Cretan, Asymakos seduced the maid at home last year; one can hardly blame the maid. As for A, he says that the Cretan boy (aged sixteen) spends all his time with ‘bad womens’ in Athens. Kabella has kindly offered to show me the night life of Athens, and the prefect has suggested that I visit him in Salonika, where he has a Buick and a Jeep and plenty of girls at his disposal.
A visit to the barber’s. Here, one is a king; and for my benefit the complete haircutting ritual was performed. Pomading after pomading; everything disinfected and re-disinfected; constant brushing away of small hairs; brilliantined three times. Artistic snippetings. An acolyte, a youth in a monkey-jacket, stood beside the barber and handed him scissors and combs and atomizers as needed, like a nurse attending a fussy surgeon. At one point he handed the barber the wrong thing, and he was brushed impatiently aside. After a while, I had to resist a furious inclination to laugh. It was good service carried to the point of worship. The gods must giggle. But what a change from the frigid attitude of democratic England, where the barber works like a machine. It is not a base servitude to do a service pleasantly. It does not imply that the server is inferior to the served. And one pays with pleasure, not because the law demands it.
The guitarist Evangelakis. He came to our table, and talked. A humble, timid, yet faintly shy person. He sang one or two songs at the end; and then one which he said he didn’t often sing. A strident, painful, intense song, somewhere between a Spanish lament and the Negro ‘blues’. He told me afterwards that it was his mother’s song, one which he associated with her death, since it was about hospitals and doctors dressed in white. The guitar accompaniment was particularly savage, discordant, melancholy, and he sang with closed eyes and a serene, almost ecstatic kind of force, bursting the words out, prolonging them, quavering. One of the school waiters, Dionysos, who was sitting with us, had the – not the nerve, the impermeability – to yawn. A very vicious yawn; Dionysos is a nice, easy-going fellow, but he seemed to represent the unmoving, immovable callous stupidity, the blindness of the masses, faced with real sincerity and beauty. The poor little guitarist saw him stifle his yawn, closed his eyes again, and went on singing his heart out.
3 February
A savagely windy Sunday; the sky kept almost clear of clouds and the sea was magnificent, steel-blue and jade, torn at by the wind. The white waves galloped up the strait and hurled themselves at the shore or went raging out and onwards towards Hydra and Dokos and Trikera,fn17 blurred in an embattled mist. The air was cold; the wind coming off the Peloponnesus snows. The cypresses bent their tips supply and their bodies hardly at all; aristocratic trees, with the old courtier’s elegance in bowing. In the morning I had a duty period for two hours, when the boys studied. It was a top room overlooking the strait and Argolis opposite and Didyma crowned with small clouds. The wind roared at the window; the shutters rattled; and the sunshine outside, in the wind, was tremendous. Poor imprisoned innocents.
In the afternoon I walked up the leeward side of one of the cultivated valleys which run inland from Spetsai village. It was wide, full of sinuous terraces, accentuating the contours like a woman’s dress; of narrow bands of green young corn; rocks; the crests pine-covered. A shepherd wandered along with his flock in the wind and sunshine; all the fruit-trees are blossoming; the terraces are powdered with pink and white dust; black stems under the flowers. I came up into the wind on the central ridge. It was blowing straight from the Peloponnesian mountains which were shrouded in storm-clouds; the sea glittered. I stood by a ruined cottage, shimmering in the sunshine. I walked down the central road which gives one superb views on both sides, till I came to another ruined house enclosed by a wall. I climbed in to look at it. There were some huge blood-red anemones there, drowned in the wind. Then down a track to Spetsai, past some cottages overlooking the curving terraces and the flowering trees, with the brilliantly white houses ahead and the blue channel, and the golden-green coast of Argolis and Didymafn18 darkly behind. I walked through the back of Spetsai – crowded cottages; masses of fruit-blossom and hedges of prickly pear; the houses are all spotlessly white and the streets clean. I came finally to the harbour. The sun had disappeared, but over Hydra and Dokos, dark blue in the dusk, were a few puffed white clouds, pink and orange and very distant. I walked back to the school, beside the sea which was still dashing over the wall across the road.
Realism. I am trying to write a Maughamesque short story; it is as necessary to be able to do that as it is for an artist to have mastered the art of drawing.
6 February
Death of King George VI – people keep on coming up to me, and gleefully announcing the sad news. When I came into dinner, all the boys at my table looked at me with a joyful smile, and the prefect said, with a broad grin, ‘The king of England is died.’ I think they were faintly surprised I was not in black, and weeping.
The death of a king no longer touches the particular, except in as much as it is a milestone, the end and the beginning of epochs. This king had no characteristics – a neutral, insipid personality. The modern king is a constitutional nobody; his only chance of being remembered is by his personality.
Now we shall be flooded under with obituaries and salutes to the glorious new Queen, with a drawing of parallels and general smugness. But Elizabethan ages, and the conditions in which they could arise, are done with; now only political epochs, and this Elizabeth is a prig, a throwback, a second Victoria.
Why does the first surprise announcement of death usually produce a smile?
Egyptiadis. He is teaching me Greek. This afternoon I knocked on his door. There was no answer. I went away. Later, when I saw him, I pulled his leg about sleeping. He was quite hurt about that. Some two hours later he burst into my room.
‘Mr Fowles, I know why I was not in my room when you knocked this afternoon.’ He has a very precise, determined way of speaking, brooking no opposition, and making no elision. He always tries to get a verb into his sentences; the professional language teacher’s hate of monosyllables. ‘Now I know why. I went away to defecate.’ He pronounced ‘defecate’ in his strongest and most determined way.
He is an original. He has an alert, bouncy way of walking, like an athletic fat lady; with small steps, yet quickly. His whole figure, massive, with long arms and an ample belly, is gorilla-like, while his shaven head, bull neck and swollen eyes given him an air of the rascally old ex-wrestler. He always shaves at night, and goes through the day with a silvery grizzle over his chin and throat. He always wears the same tie – a silk one with scarlet and grey stripes. He has two shirts, which are always tightly buttoned at the neck – this can be seen because his tie is invariably loose – and two suits, one old, one new; the latter made, he tells us, for his appointment here.
All his life seems to have been one of renunciation. He is more ascetic than many monks, abstemious, thrifty, moral, a tremendous worker. Born at Ankara, he was educated in an American mission, emigrated to America, and worked there for nineteen years in a variety of posts – as accountant, labourer, civil servant, drugstore attendant, night engineer. He says he made no friends; did not smoke; did not even drink coffee. After work, he returned home and studied. Always language; his memory is remarkable. He is trilingual in Greek, Turkish and English. His French is good. And he has smatterings of German, Spanish, Arabic and Italian. Before the war he decided to leave America and come home. He had saved money and wanted to marry. A marriage was arranged. He came home, bought a house, and the marriage was consummated. He talks of it as if marriage was a business deal. Now he has his wife, a daughter and his home in Nea Ionia, an Athens suburb. During the war he gave clandestine English lessons; after the war he taught privately, and was – according to his own stories – the ace translator of the British Police Mission.
He is the perfect master – obedient, unquestioning, full of ideas and enthusiasm, and highly punctual. As soon as a bell rings, he dashes off to meet its summons. He goes ten minutes early to meals in order not to miss grace. At all his duties, he is ten minutes in advance. He is always talking about grammar, teaching methods, what he is going to do in the future.
Above all he is a quoter, with a vast stock of fragments from many writings in many languages. His literary knowledge and interests are minute. He spends most of his free time correcting and reading the school book on English. He likes conversation, mostly in the form of quizzing – the origin of names, difficult points of grammar, rare words. If you know the answer, he is faintly hurt. He knows many songs, and when he is singing it is impossible to interrupt.
We are not without suspecting this paragon. He praises his own virtues and especially his abstemiousness, not in a boastful way, but with a kind of Socratic sagacity, with a humble sense of rightness. He judges everyone by himself.
‘Why do the boys here talk in class?’ he says. ‘When I was in class, I only wanted to learn and to hear what my teacher said. I did not want to speak to my neighbours all the time. I had nothing to talk about.’
He talks much of himself; not as an extrovert does, with self-conscious exhibitionism, but as an introvert who has seen little but his own industry and life of abstention, and so has not much else to talk about. There is a shrewdness in his smile; at times he shakes with a high-pitched laugh, and his face wrinkles like a crying baby’s, but with merriment. Sometimes he seems obtuse; he does not understand new methods. In class he is stern, unsmiling, and his emphatic, almost explosively correct pronunciation of English becomes so exaggerated that I find it hard to understand. He speaks German like a car backfiring; his Arabic is terrifyingly glottal; whilst his French, though very correct, is without any musicality; like a Mozart symphony played by a brass band.
There must be some flaw. Certainly, he likes cognac, and likes it neat; and he drinks it with expert gulps, and for a moment, the normal vacancy of his face disintegrates, and his eyes cloud over. At such moments he reminds me above all of a toad who has just swallowed a fly. Permitting himself a blink, and the faintest shade of satisfaction.
He has a glorious inconsequence in conversation, normally interrupting its flow with some totally irrelevant quiz or reminiscence. Today I was walking back at dusk with him from the school. A robin flew on the path just before us.
‘Look at that robin,’ I said. It flew away.
‘A frog, did you say?’ he asked. I felt that if I had said that frogs have wings he would have believed me. He has no interests outside his languages. He can recite the Linnaean system in Latin, but he does not know the commonest flower. He spoke then as if robins and frogs were metaphysical things, without any established entity, words in a dictionary.
Glimpses like that into his fantastic universe compensate for his less endearing qualities – dogmatism, obtuseness and simple morality.
11 February
A superb day. The weather like a new razor; a cloudless sky and a steel-cold wind, ultramontane, the mistral. It came straight off the Peloponnesus, over the sea, ruffled and Trinidad blue, or Antwerp blue. The air was brilliantly clear, and the mountains stood in a great snowy line across the sea, the snow growing pinker and pinker as the sun moved west. The sky absolutely pure, invigorating, windswept; and yet it was the coldest day I have had here. Mount Didyma, opposite the school, seemed only five or six miles away. In the evening it took on a glorious purple-blue tinge and the sky behind was lemon-blue, very pale green, rosaceous, and still astoundingly clear and transparent. The coast was silver, the cliffs burnished red ochre, the trees green and timelessly golden.
Today this supremely beautiful landscape seemed to me to be almost unreal in its perfection. It produces a tonic effect on me. The day, for some reason, was full of minor annoyances. And I did not feel well. But just one glance out of a window, or as I crossed the garden, at the magnificent petrified comber of mountains seemed to blast, to cut all petty human things away. I felt a kind of aesthetic exhilaration, a mental exuberance and keenness of perception, a complete environmental euphoria.
I was in Sharrocks’ room, listening to the news from England. Grey, chill, methodical, uninterested. All that world, as I stood at the window, staring out at the deep blue sea and the sunlit wind-tossed olives and those incredibly perfect mountains – all that world seemed minute, twisted, pettily inflated, the life one sees when one turns a stone up. And this bright perfect landscape, the upper side, I a lizard in the sun.
Yesterday Sharrocks and I went for a long Sunday walk, through the backstreets of Spetsai, which is much more extensive than it appears from the sea. Through alleys of worn rock, over small dry gulches, across small swards, past the uniformly brilliant white houses with their shuttered windows and sun-drenched air. It was very windy. The trees softened the lines and edges with their misty blossom, pink and white. We passed some lemon-trees laden with fruit. Near the western end of the village, in a grassy square, we came on a shepherd sitting with his sheep around him, brown and white rams and clean, gambolling lambs. The sun shone down through the almond-blossom, accenting the charcoal blackness of their stems. There were ruined houses around, and piles of rubble. A beautiful pastoral vignette. We went to another grassy square where there were children dancing. They laughed when S took photographs. They came around us, clamouring, with bright eyes and quick mouths, and the boys with heads shaven bald, in the village fashion – a detestable one.
Spetsai is full of ruined houses and vacant lots. It is built haphazardly, up the banks of dry streambeds, facing in all directions. As one goes in and out of the houses, along the paths, there are constant small vistas. The whiteness of the walls is entrancing; every other colour has a raised value thereby – blue, ochre, the green grass. They become softer and more intense at the same time.
The eastern end of the island is less natural, less rugged, less lonely than the west. There are meadows and orchards and vineyards and even some small fields of sprouting corn. The small island of Spetsopoula, even more of a Treasure Island than Spetsai, with wooded slopes and a central ridge, blocks out the southern distant coast of the Peloponnesus. To the west the sea, one or two small islands dropped therein, and somewhere just under the horizon, the Cyclades. We turned inland to a small estate owned by a friend of S. A small villa tucked away among olives and cypress. The owner was away, but the garden was full of small blue irises, and on the terrace there were geraniums and carnations and stocks and bougainvillea in flower. We came away, past a fowl-run, where the hens and one very majestic and very cowardly white cock stood in the shade, statuesque, immobile, watching us sideways, for all the world like the painted figures and heads in some Giotto or Carpaccio crowd.
We climbed up to the monastery, an ugly group of buildings – though redeemed by their white, cypress-guarded brilliance – and from the terrace absorbed a beautiful view down through the olives and almond-blossom to the gentle curve of Marina Bay and the dark woods of Spetsopoula. A high point over the sea; a lovely place to be buried. The sun was setting and we came down a path to the village; beside the path were another sort of iris, with three splashes of deep green-black, black iridescently green, on their glaucous green flowers.
Suddenly the wind blew cold, and clouds banked up to hide the sun. We went along the quay of the old port, full of tossing caiques and swaying masts and bitter wind. All the bright colours of the hills, the geranium reds, the greens, the blues, were muted. The far slopes of Didyma were still golden, golden against the inky black clouds beyond. The quayside, the alleyways, became bleak. The white houses looked grey. We went into the village church – the most important of the sixty-five chapels on Spetsai – a dense, incense-drenched atmosphere of icons and tapestries and ornate candlesticks; a cavern of Byzantine bric-à-brac with the red lights of the lamps glowing evilly in the darkness.
Later we went to the café of the moth-eaten buzzardfn19 and sat there talking and talking till midnight. It is at the moment occupied (in the military sense) by a film unit. They all more or less speak English. A very handsome male star, un très brave cavalier, with the smiles and manners of a faintly effeminate profile. An enthusiastic young mongrel of an assistant cameraman, voluble and American in accent. Two or three fine old priests – the film is partly religious – in their Orthodox Greek robes and with nobly bearded Socratic faces. A young man with a quite other beard, a distant echo of St Germain des Prés. A tall, journalistically dressed young artist, who had the perfect classical noble profile, and a very pleasantly fresh, shy manner. He was really more handsome than the star. Evangelakis the guitarist came in and played, showing his paces before the film company. He was at his improvising best – with a tremendous speed of invention. The producer of the film sat at a central table with a strained, grimly uninterested expression. Evangelakis danced, his fat, short figure delicately stepping and revolving with the rhythm, his arms out sideways, balancing, his fingers snapping out the time, his mouth spitting out wisecracks at each turn. Some of the local fishermen danced; three of them did a kind of drunkards’ dance, with a delightful very slow tipsy rhythm, their arms around each others’ necks, and the end man at each chorus appearing to fall to the ground and just being saved, at the last moment, by his comrades. A very athletic performance. Then another man came out in the space we had cleared and did some dance which entailed somersaults over a chair. The artist drew cartoons of S, who looked like an intellectual turnip with Fascist tendencies, and myself, who looked untidily Aryan and faintly like the Duke of Windsor, and Evangelakis, who is already a caricature of nature.
The dancing in Greece is spontaneous and often skilful. In fact, in male company in a Greek café where there is music there seems to be a point where it is as important to be able to do some dance as it is, at a similar point at a pub in England, to tell a dirty joke. Not that Greeks do not tell dirty jokes; but Englishmen never dance.
We were charged over £3 for our evening; at least twice too much. A less pleasant aspect of Greece. Our walk back to the school was doubly unpleasant; the bill angered us, and an icy wind off the mountains cut right through to our spines.
A very typical letter from Ginette Poinot. A kind of provincial faded grace and formal language. She is a natural letter-writer. Not one quarter as vivacious or quick-witted as Ginette Marcailloux, but incomparably more graceful in putting her thoughts, her love and her dreams on paper. I enjoy writing in reply.
‘Partout dans la ville, sur les terrasses des collines, des fontaines, nuages, flocons d’arbres en fleur.’ I admire my own last words.
She wants me to go with the famille thouarsaisefn20 to Spain next year. I am quite eager to do so; the journey would be good, and she, good enough company. But I feel some sense of responsibility – my only morality now being in personal relationships – of keeping her hoping – however much I destroy the possibilities; ‘Je ne veux pas voir développer une amitié chaleureuse en amour désesperé, nourri de brefs rencontres et longues tristesses.’
Elsewhere I spoke of ‘une énigme à la jolie taille’.
‘Je ne veux point vous faire mal, mais non plus vous charmer au point où vous oubliez notre situation et les plusieurs distances qui nous séparent.’
It seems that the ‘famille’ had some plan of giving a concert to raise funds to get me to France if I could not afford the fare myself. I am touched to have touched, and somewhat bewildered; to be frank, incredulous, but eager to believe.
24 February
I went off alone for the day, walking. A pure, cloudless, dreamlike day. I walked for miles – and did not see a soul. The centre of the island is strangely still, devoid of anything but plant life, aboriginal. I clambered up the steep slopes, through the solitary valleys with their pine-woods, over the brilliantly blue sea. The mountains in the Peloponnesus were very clear, standing close across the ten miles of gulf, with their snows magnificently white against the pure blue sky. The whole atmosphere was dazzlingly clear and sunny; so perfect a day that I felt strangely uneasy, almost dissatisfied. I had lunch on a bluff facing the west; the whole of the central Peloponnesus stretched out before me. The gulf between seems unreal; a stretch of glittering blue sea swamped the mountains opposite. A tortoise scuffled across the stones; I tried to feed it, but all it wanted to do was to scuffle slowly away. The wind was warm, the air scented by hundreds of grape hyacinths, humming with bees. A raven croaked high overhead. I was thirsty and an orange was doubly good. After lunch I took off my shirt, and lay under a pine in the sun and warm wind, drowsing, close to the earth, elemental. I felt erotic; sunshine and bare skin have that effect on me. Sun-worship must have had an erotic basis; the man who fell in love with the sun.
This landscape, on the westernmost high hills of Spetsai, must be one of the loveliest in this world. One can so arrange it that by a turn of the head one can include Hermione and Didyma in the panorama, and then Greece is like a naked woman, giving, as much as a landscape can to one human, all her secrets. This is the land of the Odyssey, of the wander and effort of the ancient Greeks. Blue seas, pine-trees, and snow-capped mountains; all like iced wine; catalytic, redolent.
I went down through long sunny slopes to a bay which is lovely even in this island of lovely bays.fn21 The two headlands embrace the distant Peloponnesus; a grove of pines run down to a long track. A small chapel and a cottage stand out, dazzling white against the trees. A herd of goats, small, black and agile, with tinkling bells, grazed along the edge of the sea. Outside the chapel I saw the goatherd’s long cloak and his wallet. A very lonely paradise.
I came home, a long climb and travest round the central ridge, feeling tired to exhaustion. Didyma was glowing mauve and purple, then indigo against the Ionian blue sky. I heard the school bell ring for preparation, still two miles away. Then came voices from the village, the children singing as they danced.
Later, I went into Spetsai to meet S for supper. He read out bits of a New Statesman and its editorial criticizing the Royal Funeral.fn22 Politics and kings seemed far. We went to Lambris, listened to Evangelakis and others singing, watched the film actors with four Athenian tarts, drank beer and half a bottle of cognac which the owner gave us, and finally returned far from ready to face the week.
This perfect country and climate – today is the third completely cloudless day of a divine spring. This flawless natural world is small, only a narrow layer of cream on the deep milk of reality. A terrible dissonance between the landscapes and the modern Greeks. They are blind, lost in their tiny mole-runs.
The ludicrous unreality of all the oraisons funèbres and pompous praise for the late King and new Queen. The necrophilous lingering over all the funeral arrangements; the criticism of the ceremony – criticism has become so ingrained a feature of the modern world that nature itself will soon be criticized – and the declarations of devotion. Most silly of all, the parallels with the great Queen Elizabeth. England was a family then, vigorous, but still a hierarchy; people did not mind looking up. Now the world is a hive of individual units; they look levelly; have no family national love for a monarch. If the monarchy remains, it is because the lives of the masses are so colourless that they welcome the chance of any sublimation. And the crown is a psychological anchor, a break – a sea-anchor. It keeps us dragging safely back.
Spetsai is more than a match for the diarist. The days slip by like eels, especially when the weather is fine. Things happen, I meet people, I teach, I play tennis, and nothing gets done. No month in my life went with the speed of this last February. These last few days have been Carnival – Apocryas.fn23 All the school was decorated, the walls of the dormitories and dining-room with gay figures and streamers, and everything else spruce and clean. Spetsai was full of rich parents and pretty sisters. The weather perfect. Sharrocks and I were patronized by the Govanoglous, a rich couple who spoke excellent French, and who seemed very cultivated beside the rest of the rather nouveaux riches Mamas and Papas. The President, Chairman of Governors, Sotiriou, came and did a tour of inspection of the dormitories. A little old white-haired man, very feeble and decrepit, hobbling along with a stick; the inspection was almost military. The boys stood to attention by their beds while Sotiriou and his entourage crept past, poking at the boys’ lockers and making polite remarks of commendation. Another pompous little fellow of fifty or sixty, dressed in ginger tweeds, with a military moustache, took the role of adjutant. After came the headmaster, the vice-master, the housemasters and the lengthy procession of masters, prefects and parents. All would have been well, but for the pace set by Sotiriou, a kind of funereal crawl, which reduced the more frivolous of us to helpless laughter.
On Sunday morning we sat in sunshine by Spetsai harbour, watching the unusual gay throng, drinking beer. That afternoon there was a football match, followed by a founder’s commemoration ceremony. The whole school formed up before the statue of Anargyros.fn24 Shuffling of feet, sniggers. A boy was sent to get a chair, so that the wreath might be laid over the great man’s statue’s shoulders. The chair is put in place. All is well.
‘The wreath,’ shouts the headmaster. No sound. The wreath has been forgotten. A small boy rushes off to get it. Shuffling of feet, sniggers. The small boy reappears, carrying a large wreath of laurel leaves. The headmaster stands with the wreath, bewildered. He has just realized that the old boy who is meant to lay the wreath is not there. Shuffling of feet, sniggers. A posse of old boys is seen running down the wrong path, lost. Shouts. The old boys lose their heads, and come dashing up through the bushes, over the flower-beds. Laughter. Angry shouts from the gym master. Silence. The chief old boy hastily straightens his tie, smooths his hair, is given the wreath.
‘Atten … tion!’ shouts the gym master.
Everyone is facing the school and the statue. On the school flagpole the flag of Greece begins to slowly rise. All is well till half-way, when it jams. Small tugs, it is lowered slightly, jerked up. But it is jammed. Everyone bites their lips to stop laughing.
The old boy looks at the headmaster, the headmaster looks round; shuffling of feet, sniggers. The senior old boy moves forward to lay the wreath. Apparently he does not realize what the cheer is for. He lays the wreath at the foot of the statue, and steps gingerly back to his place. Some of the boys laugh.
The headmaster and the old boys stand looking at each other; the headmaster makes a motion with his hat. The old boys look at one another in an embarrassed way. The silence becomes unbearable. Everyone had expected everyone else to make a speech.
It is the gym master’s finest moment.
He blows his whistle. The boys start talking and the parents move. A crisis is averted.
The headmaster says, ‘Good!’ The old boys bow. Everyone smiles secretly. The gym master blows his whistle again. The boys march off, laughing and talking. The headmaster pulls out a small boy and gets him to set the wreath on top of the statue. The old boys try not to look ashamed.
The ceremony is over.
Only Anargyros himself rose above the absurdity. His idealized stone head, humane, far-seeing, indulgent but noble, gazed whitely out above the ridiculous crowd. The head of a great idealist, almost a dreamer. His dream is so far from being fulfilled; but stone has patience.
The statue, incidentally, is nothing like his photograph; but the facts say that the inner man must have had features almost as fine as the statue.
10 March
The best day of the carnival was the last, when we went by caique across the channel to the mainland village – a very dirty one – of Porto Kheli. A brilliant day, with the Peloponnesus clear as a bell, the water dancing, and the sky quite cloudless. We went to a small tavern outside the village and had lunch under a carob-tree; a very Greek meal with white carnival loaves, shrimps, great succulent Kalamata olives, large winkles, onions, lettuce and halva to finish with; ouzo and retsina to drink. S and I were at a table with some parents. There was Greek dancing; everyone danced, in a ring, to a decrepit gramophone set at the tavern door. A great deal of laughter, sunshine, a small breeze. The smaller boys flew kites; somebody picked a great bunch of dark red anemones and stuck them in a glass among the debris of our meal. They stood all day alive in the breeze, most ancient Greek of flowers.
Time goes too fast; I have been in bed for a week with flu. I haven’t felt ill at all; but I don’t feel like plunging back into the furnace as long as I can stay here. Moral laxity. Thank God nothing commits me in this school. I can devote all my time to my own problems. It is almost an ideal solution. The maximum of money and pleasure for the small amount of work I do.
Excursion to Spetsopoula, a delightful small island, a mile to the south-east of Spetsai – barely inhabited, a minature gem of an island. Sharrocks and I went for a long walk round its southern side, along steep cliff-tops, eroded and sloping to the rocks, with a calm swell on the sea and the Peloponnesus stretching for miles in the distance. Hot rocks, brilliant sea. We went along a grassy path, bordered with wild pink gladioli and bright yellow mint-bushes; there were constellations of small white lilies and a delicious little wild onion, with the neat small name of triqueterous leek. We came to the high point of the island, a chain of groves surrounded by terraces, terraces suspended over the sea. Always the sea in these islands – or rather not the sea, thalassa. I saw a hoopoe, a jaunty cinnamon, black and white jay perched on a white rock. A little later there was a ferocious flapping of wings, and a peregrine falcon flashed past down the cliff. All these cliffs, these groves, these hills, terraces and pines, this sea and sky, all these are like a paradise, a totally new discovery. Every day new flowers, new birds. The landscape is there for anyone to enjoy – but that is only one dimension. The birds and the flowers are the speech, movement and dress on the bare lifeless body. Without natural history, the world is only a fraction seen. I felt this strongly with Sharrocks, putting myself in his place, not knowing any flowers, any birds. To him, as to so many, they are meaningless hieroglyphs.
We came back past an isolated farmstead surrounded by green meadows and several small ponies. A rather Irish scene. The masters and their wives had lunch in a large villa. We all sat round a long table, with the headmaster being grannyishly jovial at the head. It was a long, pointless meal. Outside the sun shone superbly on the lovely island; but we stayed cooped up in the dining-room, nibbling endlessly and exchanging schoolmasters’ wit. Dokos, the music master, a sallow balding bitter little man, very jealous and vain, and fancying himself as a clown, got up on a chair and did his one-armed conductor’s baton act – putting a finger out as a penis and holding the baton while he blew his nose. Sharrocks and I were fairly astounded; there were four or five masters’ wives present and also one or two important parents, a rather dowagery woman and her husband. But they all laughed, although some were nervous and one, to her eternal credit, had the courage to look disgusted. It says much about Greece that such a trick in such company can be performed. Dokos later told some dirty stories, all over the line for even the broadest social lunch in England. Not gaulois, but just dirty. I can’t stand the mixture of the oriental and the bourgeois in Greece – a kind of unholy marriage between the Arab and the Swiss. Egyptiadis sang his party songs and was shamefully teased by the others. His eyes had that fixed small Turkish smile which means: ‘I hate you for eternity.’ He gets a good deal of attention, and for that reason Dokos and the Hippo tease him in a bitter, malignant way.
On the whole, a day when Greece and the modern Greeks struck one of their most strident discords.
5 April
Karageorgis, 4A. A slender, faunlike child with a shock of black hair, slanting long-lashed eyes, and a small pretty mouth. He never seemed quite present – one moment gazing obliquely away into some weird distance, the next eager and irresistible. He lives at only two tempos, very slow and very fast. Small things react terribly on him: an amusing nothing makes him grin with delight, like a flower – a wonderfully charming spontaneous smile – whilst any setback infuriates him. Today he had some questions in a test which he could not answer. After looking very solemn and blank for a while, he suddenly stood up, came to my desk and slammed the paper down on it, and walked away. I called him back. His whole body was tense, outraged, his eyes anguished; I suddenly realized he was crying. Perhaps something sadistic drove me to be angry with him. It seemed such a vicious squall for so small a cause. He said he had not had time to do any revising. I told him to get out. He stood in a kind of mute young rage, almost unable to move. I tore up his paper, and told him that he would not swim for a whole week. He ran back to his desk and flung his head on his arms, face down, and began to sob. The others went on writing. Ten minutes passed. I wrote some more questions on the board. He looked up, his eyes still red, but suddenly in sunshine. He came to me and asked if he could try again. He picked up the torn pieces of paper and copied out what he had written before, and answered the other questions. By the end of the lesson he was smiling and explaining things I said to the others. Later in the break, when he was playing with some other boys, he suddenly briefly looked up, gave me a brilliantly happy, excited smile, and waved, then back to his tug-of-war. The spirit of April aged thirteen; needless to say, I did not punish him.
Here, at the end of term, I am increasingly aware of the dormant homosexual in me. I enjoy being with certain boys, have too many eyes for them, speak to them too often. It does not worry me; in fact, some of the young boys here, caught in that last budding year when their sexlessness makes them only more feminine, are very beautiful. Mischievous and exuberant and full of a green innocence like spring birdsong or fruit-trees in blossom. Sometimes I feel as if I am in a river of tenderness dangerously near to overflooding. Not that I could ever, I now believe, be swept away into allowing myself to seduce them. This is a thing of the spirit with me; to admit, indulge, since I see no evil in it, but not extend.
Common-room farce. Today the Hippo and I started to translate the dramatis personae of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into Greek, for the summer-term play programme. All went well till we came to Bottom, and I explained the meaning here was more anatomical than anything else. The Hippo said that the only Greek word was very coarse.
‘What do you say when you want to indicate it?’ I asked him.
‘A periphrasis. The lower part of the back, or the top of the leg. Something like that.’
I started to laugh. The theology master came in; the Hippo asked his advice. Timaigenis was outraged. He said something and shot out of the room, to reappear a moment later with the headmaster, talking volubly with him and pointing at me as if I was unclean. So began an argument which went on for nearly an hour. To translate ‘Bottom’, or not to translate ‘Bottom’? The deputy head came in, we all gave our points of view, other masters joined in. It was unanimously decided (with only myself withstanding) that ‘Bottom’ was a filthy and obscene term.
‘It suggests terrible things in Greek,’ said the Hippo. ‘Terrible things.’
But not only was ‘Bottom’ untranslatable; all the other names of the Athenian herdsmen were doubtful. There were the boys’ parents to think of; Mr Vrakas is not going to like it if his son is ‘Pig-faced’ (Snout). So in the end it was decided to do nothing, but leave the names in English.
The headmaster looked profoundly worried by the whole thing. His parting words were: ‘We mustn’t make the play seem funny.’ He has a horrible surprise coming.
After this highly (and typically) puritanical teacup storm about the abominable name ‘Bottom’, that same night blossomed out into one of this school’s maddest paradoxes. The Sixth Form gave an end-of-term party, to which ten or twelve masters (including the Old Man) were invited. The boys decorated a room and rigged up a band platform on which four of them played music. And then, with the headmaster’s smiling approval, they began to dance together. The tall boys took out the pretty ones; they danced sambas, tangos, foxtrots, close and with every sign of pleasure. Some were just enjoying themselves normally, and some others, it seemed to me, abnormally. These were friendships suddenly practised as liaisons. I thought it all slightly distasteful and very amusing, after the morning’s show of purity.
Further characteristics of modern Greece; the drinking-water and sewage-pipes run side by side; their mental sanitation, disinfected one minute, and stinking the next, is bewilderingly naïf. Every Greek seems to possess two quite unrelated persons inside him.
11 April
A term all but completed. At the present pace, I shall not fall out for a while. A growing dislike for the masters, the school system, and the public character (Tartuffe) of the modern Greek, is counter-balanced by my love for this superbly lovely landscape, the loneliness of this island, where often I walk for hours and see no living thing at all except plants and insects – even birds are rare – the climate and my liking for some of the boys. They have a precociousness, a cynicism which gives them a slightly faisandé quality; something corrupt in even the most innocent. The cherubic pink face of the small English boy does not exist here; the devil has had his say; a touch of the faunlike, and much worldly wisdom.
The boy on my left at table, Glaros, ‘Seagull’ (a highly appropriate name – extremely beautiful to look at, in nature less pretty), intrigues me perhaps more than any other. He has been to America, and so acts as my interpreter; or we simply talk to each other. A tall, slim boy, very dusky, certainly with oriental blood behind him, since his face has perfect Arab female beauty. Very dark expressive eyes, a soft, full red mouth, warm brown skin, eyelashes of incredible length and curve and a general air of Arabian Nights allurement. He talks all the time about girls; discusses the other masters quite openly with me and criticizes the school. The other day he even told me that he didn’t believe in the Orthodox religion. He is very precocious, self-centred, temperamental, and hopelessly out of place in such a cold narrow room as this school.
15–30 April
Easter holidays. Much needed, not so much consciously, as unconsciously; not until now, when I am back again, can I see that I was becoming in almost all ways insular.
I went to Crete, with Sharrocks. Keeping a diary was difficult. I never find myself capable of much more than jottings and one or two key phrases – keys, only too often, to empty rooms. The immediate rendition is only too often an ornate key-phrase, a kind of trap, a siren, misleading one into superfluous labyrinths. If one waits, the perspectives come; if, at the moment of writing it down, there are things which struck one at the time as being important and noteworthy and which are now forgotten, then memory has merely sorted things out. Raturer le vif, one’s own best critic.
And then Sharrocks and I are both shy of our literary ambitions; we spend a great deal of time talking about writers and writing. His world is, in fact, almost wholly literary. But we show each other nothing, never discuss our own work; and to write in the other’s presence would be tantamount to inviting an almost – so inhibited are we about that – obscene intimacy. There is a very close parallel between the self-conscious virgin and the intending young writer who has not published – tormented, deceitful and paralytically shy. In fact what very few notes I made were scribbled in the rare moments I was out of his sight. At least those rare moments when I both wanted to record and was out of his sight.
11 May
This term is different from the others. A new routine – school from eight till one, and sleep in the afternoon. Every day before lunch I swim. The weather is sultry, the sky usually half-veiled with thin clouds, the grass yellow, dust and parched earth. There are occasional breezes, but they are hot and unrefreshing. At night the air is stifling, and I am plagued by mosquitoes. The days seem heat-drenched, dry, lifeless – existence seems dull. The mountains are invisible, always hazed over. I long for rain, thunder, a chill in the air. Sometimes I seem to be only half-conscious, sunk, drugged. I have done no writing, written no poetry. The days burn on and out, on and out, remorselessly, like a third-degreeing arc-lamp.
For an hour each day I swim, with the underwater mask. That makes life tolerable, a time of daily stimulus. The minute shock of entering the water; then the drifting over the rocks and the seaweed, through the weird translucent other-world of sea-urchins and starfish, blue sand and dark crannies, green vistas and pink jelly-fish; a theatrical world, above all of the ballet or the silent cinema, where every movement is graceful, unmotivated. There are many kinds of fish – the commonest are a kind of angel-fish, varying from the size of a penny to some as big as a dinner-plate. They swim in flocks, grey silvery discs with a black spot near the tail. They even follow me, especially when I overturn rocks, like robins attending a digging gardener. There are long striped fish, all kinds of ugly, grotesque rock-fish, strange little bright red and bright yellow blennies, splendid fish with long bright emerald bodies and blue fins and tails. Green ones with orange wings and spots. One princely little creature with six legs and comparatively huge fanlike fins of brilliantly iridescent azure. Large pearly fish like salmon, with mournful eyes, who swim round and round me if I try and chase them, so near yet never quite in reach. I fear the octopus and the sharks. Only one or two people are lost each year in Greece from sharks, but it is difficult to forget them – something fascinating, something frightening in floating over deep valleys and ridges of blue-green water. Rocks in the distance often look like motionless bodies, lurking, waiting.
Mitso, the school postman, was turning over the letters today to see if we had any post from England. There was a large envelope addressed to a master who left the school before the war. I glanced at it and saw the word Bedford. It was, in fact, an Old Bedfordians’ magazine, addressed by some weird chance to this school, though Noel-Paton left in 1930-something. I read the magazine. Re-entry into a forgotten room; old names, memories. I am still not reconciled to Bedford; wish to forget it. I enjoyed my last years there. But they retarded me two years. I did not begin to grow up till my last year at Oxford. All the atmosphere of the magazine seemed to me out of date, frowsty. A naïf Victorian world of schoolroom values, old-tie sentimentality – there was news of many of my contemporaries. They seem still unemancipated, engaged in Old Bedfordian activities, still clinging together. An illusion, or 99 per cent of it; but I prefer the complete cut-off, the 100 per cent isolation.
14 May
Five destroyers and two submarines appeared mysteriously off Spetsai yesterday evening, and cast anchor. The Greek fleet on a cruise. Ominous shapes in the peaceful straits.
Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi.fn25 A vigorous tough style; but I don’t like the continually exuberant enthusiasm – in the end it sounded like a vicar trying to warm up a deadly teaparty. But Miller’s view of the modern Greek is so different from mine that I wonder which of us is right. I think I am, but perhaps I have got too certain of my own vision. At the moment I find it hard to find anything good in the modern Greek at all. Miller at least causes a re-examination.
‘Greece is now the only paradise in Europe.’ Greek landscapes are like Mozart’s music. Miller paints with the tube and a splayed thumb. But my own style seems insipid beside his.
23 May
A Milleresque moment. I went today up into the hills – burning sunlight, bright breeze and a dazzlingly brilliant atmosphere. Everything inland is parched, stone-dry – only the blue-mauve thyme plant and a kind of dwarf yellow gorse in flower. But the pines give shade. No birds, few butterflies – a multitude of wasps, bees, flies, grasshoppers. The sky was swept cloud-clear, the corn straw-ripe. On the opposite side of a small valley three girls began to sing with a tremendously powerful rhythm and stridency. Not like any singing I have heard elsewhere, in complete accord with the dryness and brilliance of the air. Part song, without subtlety, undertones, shadows – songs for an open sunburnt hill. They sang at full stretch, incredibly violent, young sun-priestesses, the mother-cult. Before they sang I could not have believed any sound could have fitted in with that landscape. Then they gave it all a voice. They walked down a path to a rock-cistern; walked back again. One of them had bare brown arms, with black hair. I could not see whether she was pretty or not. I had field-glasses, but preferred not to use them. She lifted her skirt up to her waist, to let the sun shine on her petticoat. I heard them singing still half an hour later. From a great distance.
June
Maupassant, Miss Harriet.
Reading Maupassant I felt a wave of helplessness come over me. No writer is more brilliant in the most difficult of techniques – realism. I cannot hope to ever equal the mastery of such men.
Here I do nothing. The Greeks contaminate me with their egocentricity, their long glissade through sunshine into stagnation. Sunburnt stagnation, that is life here. I have the time, but no will to use it. Dissatisfaction with all I do, have done.
The boys, the masters, the system, they all grate on my nerves. I am turned by them full of spleen, contemptuous and je-m’en-foutiste, bitter and enraged, ready to lash out at anyone. Small things, incidents upset me ridiculously. The only thing puritan left inside me is my sense of time – it has taken the place of an unhappy conscience. Now the passage of time agonizes me. The worm in the lotus bud.
4 June
Beautiful days. Hot sun, no clouds. The sky is acutely blue, the sea delicious. The school’s annual beanfeast is approaching, a whirl and chaos of rehearsals, costumes, new timetables, endless lists of things to do.
One day I went along the coast to a Byzantine bay, the sun like a comet, a wind, the cliff slopes completely deserted. No birds, no animals; few flowers, few butterflies. Even the reptiles seem to have gone. This is when one notices the island’s lack of water. The trees mean shadow, there is vegetation, but it is sparse, burnt. Now only thyme blooms profusely; I found also a colony of tall bright-pink centaury; geranium stars under the carob-trees. The bay was empty, emptier than the sky. There is a small ruined mill at one corner of the beach. I swam, watched the fish, swam out of the bay to where the bases of the cliffs fell in steps mysteriously and frighteningly away into the indigo depths. To float over the underwater precipice gives one a birdlike sensation. I ran on the beach, threw stones, stood in the sun. It seemed for an hour at the most. But there was no sign anywhere of anything human. I walked back quickly to school, to be in time for lunch, drenched in the elements. I found I was two hours late.
Walking into Spetsai. The mountains at dusk are a feline deep grey-blue, luminous against the lemon-blue pale radiance of the clear sky. Over the Peloponnesus, fiery red wisps of cloud above the black sea of the mountains. The sea breeze-ruffled, the islands ethereal, grey, pink, pale blue, mauve. The hibiscus are blood-red outside the dazzling white cottages. The village children play down the road, the older women sit and talk by their doors. We pass a crone, a bent old creature, in black with a faded blue blouse and a grey headscarf, clutching three huge unripe lemons, the colour of the western sky, to her bosom. A moment’s superb impression, unpaintable, but magnificent. Small girls in red at the sea’s edge.
We sat at George’s, a small taverna looking across the sea to Mount Didyma, and watched the landscape disappear in night. Ate fat small fried fish, many olives, a cucumber, and drank beer. Did not speak much.
There was a rehearsal of the French play in the open-air theatre – Molière extracts. Everyone was there to watch it, under the stars. People stammered out bits of French. The boys laughed to see other boys dressed as girls. One beefy boy, become Argan,fn26 stopped the show for two minutes, standing where he had entered, in purple velvet, flushed and rather angry. The play was badly done. Good for schoolboys, but Molière needs professionals more than most.
Then the choir sang – marching songs, patriotic songs, school songs. They all sounded alike. Dokos, the music master, conducted with vigour. As he flapped his arms, his coat went up and the shiny seat of his trousers flashed out. Everyone sniggered. ‘Il a de belles fesses,’ I said to the physics master. The shiny patch flickered in and out, mesmerizing us all. Then there was a Mozart sonata, some Haydn, ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ on two squeaky violins. The theology master talked in a low voice; he is a die-hard Byzantinist, and must disapprove of Mozart.
I asked Glaros how he and his friends liked the evening. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We were asleep.’ He is an attractively sophisticated, blasé little siren of thirteen. I have him next to me now at meals all the time. He at least can talk English fluently; he is mischievous, extremely pretty, possesses unbounded contempt for the school, and makes me look forward to meals. I hesitate even here to say that I am in love with him. But if he for some reason is not at table, I feel revealingly disappointed.
A strange, rather beautiful dream. I was staying in the country, in some house in a peculiar situation. In a neighbouring house, some miles away, there was a girl who wanted to hear from me. I could not go and see her. Somebody, an old man, her father, kept on ringing me to send a message, not for her sake, but some other reason – because when one day an aeroplane flew over, he allowed me to say (to whom?) that it was taking my message. I remember watching through field-glasses in the direction in which the girl’s house lay. I saw a blonde woman (Kaja)fn27 in a red mackintosh and gumboots, followed by a man, who seemed to me to be a rival, since I felt jealous, and angry. Then news came that the girl had killed herself. The next thing I remember was sitting at table one day, when Dionysos, one of the school waiters, came. ‘She wrote a poem about you,’ he said. He was holding a large sheet with many printed stanzas. I felt a sudden surge of pleasure. I do not recall feeling any sorrow for her death. The sheet of paper seemed to become a book which Dionysos handed me. It was a strange volume, full of surrealist photographs and printing tricks. The title was a silly play on words. I can’t remember it but the author was A. C. Count Rendered. To my intense regret, I saw that the date was 1916. I smiled sadly, thinking it was a joke. But when I began to read the book I saw that it was curiously printed, each page seemed covered in a cream wash – and I felt that this was renovation. Sometimes the page appeared black or with designs and print almost indecipherable below the renovation mixture. But others were clearly inked in above the wash, and there were photos which showed clearly that 1916 was not the true date. Suddenly I came on a photograph of a girl’s head of extreme beauty, a perfectly classical face, with high cheek-bones and a wide expressive mouth. It resembled Marlene Dietrich or perhaps Garbo in the rather sad expression. Also Constance Farrer, but far more beautiful; the hair was long, framing the face. She was smiling happily. The next photograph I remember was one of her much sadder, staring out of the picture while above her floated a tissue-like death’s head. Finally there was a picture of me, but my mouth seemed non-existent – the whole of the lower part of my face flat and featureless. Underneath was a caption – something like ‘The Garden Boy’ or ‘My Garden Love’. Something to do with a garden seemed to run all through this book of remembrance. The frontispiece was strange – a kind of drawing of a glass window behind which a white face was grinning. On the window was written in large letters ‘PAPADOPOULOS, A MOI LA REVANCHE!’ (An interpolation – via Dionysos – in the main current of the dream?)
The interesting thing for me in this dream was seeing the girl’s face. At once I knew her, felt a sweet romantic sorrow in the knowledge that she was dead. But it seemed to me when I woke that I had known her very well – but where? Obviously not in my life (unless C F and Brayfield). Perhaps in some other dream. I have had some other dream about her which I cannot remember.
10 June
The summer ‘At Home’ of the school, three days of parent-infested hell, is past. An incredible amount of hand-shaking, hypocrisy, intriguing, mealy mouths. The school marched down to the harbour to greet the Neraida, bringing the Committeefn28 and the main batch of proud parents. On the quay, the boys, all in white, were drawn up in two lines through which the newly-landed had to walk like newly-weds. The more deferential masters – that is to say, all the Greek staff – crowded round each important personage; an oriental scrimmage for the great one’s momentary hand-clasp. A multitude of oily smiles and false joviality. The pomposity of the Greek high official and the sycophancy of his inferiors are emetic. It makes me feel furious and farouche.
A long weekend of ceremonies, richly dressed ugly women, gross grey-suited fathers. Our parents seem all the same, bourgeois, nouveaux riches, hideous to talk to. There are exceptions; Papa Veziroglou, a delightful walrusy doctor, bubbling over with wit and good humour. Another fine old man with a very young son, the two of them touchingly in love, absorbed in each other, the old man strangely wistful, and even the boy silent, almost sad, with emotion and contentment. But the others are foul. Molière and Mozart were never so much pearls before so many swine.
There was a gym display, the stadium packed with people. Everyone stood up for the Greek flag to be hoisted. Its halyard snapped at half-mast and to the general horror, and my delight, the flag collapsed into the dust below. The Committee members – we were in the royal box – seemed furious, the boys were paralysed, the headmaster almost in tears. Another flag was hastily got and tied to the bottom of the mast. My only regret was that the flag never reached the top. It was a huge thing and the mast was as thin and whippy as a fly-rod. I am sure it would have snapped most divertingly. The boys went through their routines, but halfway through the athletics the Deputy Prime Minister, Venizelos,fn29 arrived. Everything was stopped, dislocated, the band played their ridiculous flouncy little march of welcome. The great man, about five feet tall, walked across the field like a dictator on holiday with a posse of celebrities behind him. A red-faced, sandy-haired little person, full of political hand waves, curt political smiles and a bluff political manner. A child of four could see he was inflated, a puppet, a nonentity. There was some luke-warm applause, one or two enthusiastic shouts. Everyone despises Venizelos. They know he lives by his father’s prestige and the vested interests that back him. Yet it is so typical of Greece that he is tolerated, a ‘great man’ in spite of his obvious pettiness. He has arrived, he is consecrated. What a man is in Greece is nothing beside where he is.
Sharrocks and I met the writer Katsimbalis that night for a few moments. He is the Colossus of Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi – a bad book, I now think, and more than ever after seeing Katsimbalis.fn30 He seemed falsely bluff, a self-conscious conversationalist, trying to impress. A stout, hale man of sixty or so, with a white-grey halo of hair, khaki trousers and a walking-stick. A vaguely military appearance, a stage joviality. Miller’s portrait of him seems about as accurate as his Poros.fn31
He was with the Tathams, the director of the British Council at Athens and his wife. A tall convention-bound very English Englishman – somehow one knew he had been a housemaster at Eton before he said it – with a horsy upper middle-class giantess of a wife. An affected, intelligent, ginny woman, who evidently despised him. He was pipe-smoking, the senior officer chumming up with the subalterns. I didn’t altogether dislike him; he is lucky in having such a filthy wife to be contrasted with. A career couple, celebrity snobs, but influential, so I betrayed myself and was a good public schoolboy and hearty sportsman. Literature didn’t seem to take with them.
Our play – mostly my play – went off (I think) quite well. There was a big crowd in the amphitheatre, 2,000 or so, and plenty of laughter at the clowning. I suppose it was worth the sweat and blood. Usual warm, insincere congratulations afterwards. Behind, during, panic after panic. Managing a cast of twenty Greek boys in the Midsummer Night’s Dream is no drowsy summer afternoon. The strange team thrill of being backstage. A fight against failure, and knowing the truth.
Sharrocks and I drank late afterwards till 2.30 at George’s, overlooking the sea. S unbosomed himself a little – the revealing observation that he didn’t know how to be rude to people. A timid, shy person behind the façade. He was drunkish at the end and when we got back to the school tried to set alight the open-air theatre. But when the flames had spread a few inches, he hastily beat them out. He did that twice, too much himself to let himself go. I think that is all he will ever do – burn small holes in the used décor of an empty theatre.
Now normality, and peace.
11 June
The futility of the school. Abdelides, the French master, an old, stuttering Rumanian Greek, self-centred, thin-skinned, a nervous and faintly vicious old man. He asked Athanassiadis, a droll little clown of a twelve-year-old boy with a weird broken voice, a question in Greek. A answered, so plainly without thinking, without meaning to be rude, in English. Something boiled up in Abdelides, and he started shouting and hitting the boy till he burst into tears. A completely unbalanced burst of temper. Abdelides went out past me. ‘Mais pourquoi?’ I said, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il a fait?’ ‘Je l’ai demandé’ (the grammar mistake is typical) ‘une question, il m’a répondu en anglais. Voilà le type!’ Poor little Athanassiadis sat sobbing and protesting helplessly.
Abdelides gives farcical examinations. After he has given the questions, he goes round telling the boys what the answers are, so that his own teaching results will be good. The Hippo, who had been invigilating in one of his exams, came bubbling in this morning and asked me what I thought he should do. Eager to foment trouble, I urged him to go to the headmaster. Rather to my surprise – I think he wanted the kudos – he went and asked the headmaster whether he was meant, as invigilator, to prevent the examining master from helping the boys. The headmaster said sharply that his business was to keep the boys quiet, and nothing else, and implied that Abdelides was quite right to ‘help’ the boys.
Timaigenis, the theology master, told all the boys they would get an extra mark if they wrote only one page in his examination.
Sometimes I get an attack of spleen – today I had five hours supervising study. The boys are shut in from four till nine, with only two small breaks of ten and twenty minutes. Their day at the moment is: rise at 6, study 6–7.30, breakfast, exam 8–10.30, study 11–1, lunch, siesta 2–4, study 4–9, supper, bed 10. An impossibly tough work routine – tonight they sat there glassy-eyed, rattling their papers, yawning, restless, tired. They are not even allowed to swim except on alternate days, in case they get too exhausted to study.
All the petty intrigue, the hypocrisy, the shoddiness of the system choke me. The boys, generation after generation of them, are ruined by this atmosphere of the Jesuit college. Unnaturally strict morals, too much emphasis on work, constant dishonesty at all levels. Dishonesty in ideas, marks, aims, results. The boys should have the run of the island, be allowed more control over themselves, more time for hobbies, games, with a much stricter system of marking. Above all, a harsh system of punishment. Punishment is fresh air; without it the school will always remain stifled, a hothouse of compromises, intrigues, despised by the boys and hated by the masters.
Meanwhile the cigales begin to cry in chorus, the sun is ceaseless, burning hot, and the sea is blue, caressing and brilliant as ever. Thank God the breeze still holds.
Suetonius on Nero, the best villain in his gallery. He seems to have been absolutely evil by personal choice, logically, where the others were so by tradition or weakness. Nero, one feels, had it equally in him to become a very good man – at any rate, a very good artist and thinker, either a Nietzsche or a Camus. Most of his disaster was his position. As an individual he would have been a different person, but he saw the logical end of absolute power – absolute evil.
His remark: ‘No prince has ever known what power he really has.’ The whole of the page on his death is a masterly piece of historical writing, vivid, detailed. His remark: ‘What an artist the world is losing’ must be made with regard to the practice of absolute power. That was his art. His remark on the conclusion of the fabulously expensive Golden House:fn32 ‘At last I am beginning to be housed like a human being.’
One’s relationship to the past. Nero attracts me by his complete savagery, his unique sardonic blackness. One cannot pity the age he tyrannized. It is too remote. Rather one welcomes the diversion, the colour and violence. To like history is to like the suffering of one’s fellowmen. To like the being detached, vicariously enjoying. The historian is a sadist. If we say we pity the past, it is by convention. Logically there is no sense in pitying a fait accompli which cannot be mended. However barbaric it may have been, it is now truth, and truth is untouchable, irredeemable (unremediable).
Mrs Adossides, la grande dame of Spetsai. Sharrocks and I walked across to her estate on the other side of the island – an olive plantation, and a small but comfortable house surrounded by terraces, terraces alive with colour, sunlight and shadow on the many flowering shrubs. She is a stout old lady, with white hair and benevolent hooded eyes, with that long side-crease to them which seems always to indicate great humanity. A tolerant profundity.
She is a great philanthropist, speaks five languages faultlessly, is widely read, very alive, intelligent, outspoken. A faintly cantankerous, gruesome old lady. She nursed all through the 1914–18 war and had a rough time of it in the second one, and since then has been ceaselessly occupied in the Red Cross tracing lost Greeks throughout Europe and in aiding the stricken villages of Northern Greece. A great contempt for Unesco, which issues pamphlets while people starve. She had many war stories, dwelling in detail on nomads. Pain and suffering, for all her great efforts to relieve them, seem to fascinate her.
We sat and watched the sun go down over the hills. An owl perched on a nearby cypress and called weirdly. We had dinner, a very good dinner, in the open air, by lamplight, with the stars brilliant in a velvet sky. She talked about the Resistance, the Italians, her hatred of jazz. A powerful, intellectual woman, the political matriarch-mother of thousands.
I admired her, and did not like her.
I caught a small octopus the other day. The underwater mask magnifies and it looked large. I stabbed at it with a stick but it crept under a small rock, which after great effort I managed to overheave. A group of small village boys gathered on shore near by and watched my titanic struggles in a frightened, fascinated silence. They were obviously expecting something quite unheard of. When I appeared with the octopus writhing on the end of a stick and threw it to them to beat to death their contempt was barely concealed. One of them, the smallest, picked it up and said something which sounded like, ‘Why didn’t you pull it out with your hand?’
It was only a foot long. I saw another the next day, even smaller, about as small as an octopus can be. But still I could not bring myself to pick it up. Something horrifying in the very appearance, the fluid sinuous watching shape, even in its most miniature form.
21 June
Nearly the end. Term ends in three days. The small ones leave tomorrow. A sense of change, plans, goodbyes, nostalgia and never again.
These last few weeks have been sun-drenched, nothing but sun. A warm East wind all day, the racketing chorus of tzitzikia, Greek cigales, inhabiting every pine-tree, every branch of every pine. Hours in the sea, floating among fishes. Meals with Glaros, where the atmosphere between us is almost that of an ideal (platonic) marriage. His eyes, a brilliant dark liquid brown, with absolutely clear whites, occasionally cross mine. I look under the lashes, we look into each other’s minds. I suppose he must sense something of what I feel, although I avoid all physical contact with him. I find now an increasing pleasure in entering the small boys’ block, to move among them, be with them, laugh at and with them. Now they are all sun-tanned, Moorish, uninhibited, self-centred, ebullient; nothing pink-cheeked and butter-in-mouth about them. A running stream of small limbs, precocious, not yet tarnished by puberty. I do not see anything reprehensible in my pleasure, nor my indulging it. One can stand between vice and horror of vice, live on the fringe of commitment. The boys in the Eighth, who leave this year, fascinate me. Now they are full of touches, tender smiles for the more attractive small boys. A sudden realization of all the charms of sanctuary.
I am trying to blackmail the Committee into paying my fare back to England, not without wondering whether I am killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. After all, who can complain of existence here: eternal sunshine, an average of little more than two hours’ work a day for £520 a year. No need for ideals, responsibility, with no sentiment of being ill-married to a second-best métier, since at Spetsai one can hardly think of oneself as a schoolmaster.
When I sit in the evening on the terrace over the sea at George’s, watch the sun go down over the cypresses and white sea-houses, the sea grow calm as the wind drops, the mountains of Argolis go luminously blue and then velvet-black, with the stars above them. In the silence while I chew olives and listen to the fishermen gossip at the next table I know that I live, that the body lives.
What I have found at Spetsai is a bodily plenitude; to have bronzed arms, a good appetite, to feel strong, able to swim, dive, run, walk in the sun, live among rocks and pines and sunshine. To have all that is perhaps only a skin euphoria. But one must begin by elementals.
22 June
Today all the juniors left for Athens – a silence in the school, an emptiness in our affections. The buildings seem like ruins, no longer habited, monuments to the past. An incredible poignancy in empty schools – the absence of youth, cries, running feet, bells, laughter. These buildings especially revert so easily to silence: white barracks, stone corridors, the surrounding sea of cicada-voiced olives. The whole décor is sad and soulless, despite the brilliant heat and sun.
Stammatoyannis, the top boy in English in the Eighth, came in tonight and talked about the school. He described the scene on the jetty when the small boys left. All the Eighth class went down to see them off. There were tears everywhere. Ypsilanti, the school mascot and baby, was sobbing and did not want to leave. He kissed Adrianides, his ‘boyfriend’ in the Eighth. There were other emotional scenes of parting, with all the Eighth class crying for the sorrow of the last view of all their loved ones. Some of them had to leave the jetty, unable to stand the strain. All the small boys were in tears, especially the notorious group in the Third class – Glaros, Seduxis, Ypsilanti, Kyriacoulis, Rapas, Athanassiades – who are the filles de joie of the school. As S lovingly told all the details to me, it was humorous. But the poignant last days at school seemed to be symbolized by the small boy/big boy relationship. Even the soberest members of the Eighth seemed smitten.
S talked a good deal about homosexuality. He assured me that the love of the Eighth class for the small boys, was quite platonic and pure. Pure nonsense, but I believe they do see it like that. The Greeks have an immense capacity for deceiving themselves, but not for knowing it. He says there is a good deal of active homosexuality in the school, that Kesses the housemaster knows it, and shrugs his shoulders. I know there was a case a fortnight ago reported to the headmaster and completely hushed up by him. The two boys involved even continue to sleep in the same small dormitory. Some small boys have quite prostitutional reputations, and the name for the junior block among the senior boys is the ‘brothel’.
An English master here last year, used to take his protégés to a room to do fencing and there caressed them. Bobes, headmaster two years ago, had a delicious habit of taking the pretty boys into his study and asking them whether they had washed their legs, making them take off their trousers under pretext of inspection, and then (this is where truth no doubt soars into myth) licking them all over. S was amusing about how the boys can smell a homosexual master a hundred miles off, and how they used their knowledge. We talked in the darkness – S to drown the pang of goodbye by describing it, and I because I dote on scandal, small school gossip.
The same night, the Hippo got drunk and gave us a disquisition on his love-life and his view of women. A kind of bestial clown, a mixture of brute stupidity, violent obscenity, and naïf to the point of our pure delight. The verb ‘fuck’ and its adjuncts must have been used never so often in so short a time. His complete contempt for women is almost comic in its violence. Copulation is the one object of life, and love ridiculous. In Greece he seems almost normal.
I was almost sad at leaving Spetsai. I had become attached to the small routine – the daily swims, the sun, the afternoon sleep. I was glad to think that I could come back. I talked over things about next year with the Vice-Head with pleasure, thinking of the future, the boys again, a year in peace.
I left with Sharrocks. We caught the dawn boat – a grey sea, cool air and thick heads, watched Spetsai go and then went down to a cabin to sleep all the way to the Piraeus. Athens seemed as busy, sham and dirty as ever. All the women have completely bare brown arms, sexual, sinuous. The streets seem full of naked warm embraces. I went to the Committee, found that my blackmail (my fare or my resignation) had worked, and that they had granted me a hundred pounds. I left the next day. A lonely fortnight lies ahead. I feel vaguely that my planned holiday is a kind of duty. Homage to the past.
1 July
The next morning I left for Mycenae. Bus journeys in Greece – or in any country – effectively demonstrate the difference between nationalities. Here there are no rules, schedules, routines: people come late, there are arguments, passengers missing, luggage to be loaded and always greetings to be exchanged (one keeps on meeting the same people in Greece – they all seem to know each other). No one is ever left behind.
We struck west out of Athens along the coastal plain to Megara. Past Eleusis with mountains to the north and an intensely blue sea to the south, a dark blue, the only real colour in a landscape pale with heat. Barren mountains, plains of olives, dry red earth. The island of Salamis stood softly in the sea, heat-burned. Eleusis is ugly, a squalid little place; and Megara the same. Nothing to equal the appalling makeshift ugliness of these Greek provicial towns. Past Megara, the hills came down to the sea and we swept along the red, broken cliffs where Theseus killed Sciron.fn33 Then down to the plain again, a plain traversed by dry riverbeds, profuse with pink and white rose-laurels. What are the characteristic colours of the Greek summer landscape? The parched dusty yellow ochre of sere grass and straw, the red ochre of the dry earth, the drab green of whatever plants still have sap. Only the pines and cypresses retain their intensity amid the tired, sad green – silver-grey as the leaves turn – of the olive. The grey-mauve, almost heat-annihilated mountains, stained blue where the cloud-shadows fall; and the brilliant, living sea.
We stopped for an hour at Corinth, for the bus had a punctured tyre. The town looked ramshackle, ugly, and I had neither the desire nor the energy to visit it. A pretty young woman with three children got on there: slim, very vivacious, in a bright frock and an elegant little straw hat with a bright red ribbon. Her eyes were dark, flashing, her mouth long and red, her teeth brilliantly white and gold. She laughed, talked, settled her eldest children in their seats. Then she went to sit in the shade of a nearby café and suckled her youngest child. The suckling in public and her unusually smart travelling-dress seemed so incongruous that I could not help staring.
We left Corinth, headed out south past the huge grey-red hill of the Acrocorinth over undulating country towards the moorland hills.fn34 We followed dry river-beds still choked with green vegetation, dense with bright pink rose-laurels. I watched the pretty young woman: her baby began to cry and she slipped a hand into her frock and pulled out her breast. Her husband laughed, made jokes. She flashed back answers and looked contented. The country became wilder, more hilly, and then we were running down into the Argive Plain, a kind of tiny Provence below the Lyonnais hills. Mountains all around us and the sea to the south, a plain of wide stubble-fields, barren stretches, studded with tobacco-fields, cypresses, olive-orchards and with long lines of Eucalyptus.
I was put off at a village on the main road. It seemed to consist of only a taverna and two or three cottages. ‘Mykenes?’ I asked the tavern-keeper. He pointed towards the hills. I suddenly realized I would have to walk and regretted packing so much. ‘Eine macrya?’ ‘Tessara kilometres,’ he said. I walked the four kilometres slowly, along a road shaded with eucalyptus that plumed in a bright, strong breeze.
At the village I found the small hotel, drank blessed beer, had lunch, slept, and went on my way to the ruins; at last excited now I was so near. Sharrocks had said that this was the most impressive thing that he had seen in Greece, and I didn’t want to be disappointed. I was not.
There is something sphinx-like about Mycenae. You walk up a mounting road bordered with a profusion of white and pink laurel-roses. The mountains approach, begin to tower a little, but still there is no sign of Mycenae. There is a massive fragment of bridge at the valley-bottom made by giants. Then a savage gorge comes into sight and the left-height of it is Mycenae surrounded by its walls, impregnable, like a wild animal at the mouth of its lair, regal, grimly withdrawn from yet dominating all the plain and all the past. A man and a girl passed. I stood on the road, trying to find the Tomb of Atreus, looking back. The man came out from behind a bush, buttoning his flies. ‘There!’ he shouted, and pointed up a small track behind him. I retraced my steps and climbed a little way off up the road to the entrance.
Two huge walls leading to a vast stone door: through the door, impossible to describe what is through the door. Fear, the unknown, history, history suddenly alive, death, the womb, the past, the future. A pyramid-like grandeur and massivity. In this cutting, if one is alone, one cannot avoid the awe. The door and the darkness it frames are terrifying, fascinating. I walked down to the doorway, looked at the 113-ton lintel, hesitated. It was broad sunlight; I went in. A vast cool beehive of stone. There was enough light to see by, quite a lot of light after a few seconds. A great silence. But if I stamped, a strange, clipped, reluctant echo. I saw to the right another dark doorway; in there was absolute darkness, the chapel of this antechapel. The room where the body was. I found a box of matches and not too happily went on to the threshold – a wall of blackness. I struck a match, then another – five or six, all of them went out for some reason. I stood a moment, and went outside, without having really entered the inner room. I felt oppressed, uneasy, as if something was waiting for me to wait. Even in the cutting I felt still hypnotized by that massive sphinx-like door.
An unforgettable moment, and terrifyingly ageless. Calling me back, inside. It makes me morbid, strange to myself, necrophilous.
I reached the citadel. Rock nuthatches bobbed and cried from the wall-tops. They seem to be everywhere at Mycenae, almost tame, brightly crying, half enraged at the human intrusion.
The Gate of Lions is massive, majestic, almost medieval in its animal and stone grandeur. I went in, looked at the so-called graves of Agamemnon and his family, strolled and scrambled over the citadel. I was alone. A hill of broken walls, foundations choked with sere grass and dying flowers; shards everywhere, in all the trenches, sticking out from the walls. I climbed to the top of the acropolis, where the palace was, and looked out over the hazed Argolian Plain to the heat-grey mountains opposite. Buzzards mewed in a gorge to the east. I walked round the heavy walls, still alone, glad and awed to be alone. I found the secret passage underground to the well, the passage that Henry Miller described as so dark and terrifying.fn35 I found a stump of candle and lit it. Steps lead down for a way; then there is an abrupt turn and a flight of steps going down into the darkness. I did not feel it very easy to get down to the bottom – the silence, the darkness, the feeling that someone is creeping on you from above and ignorance of what is below. I felt a little afraid, but Miller is an incorrigible romantic. There was nothing at the bottom except a dry stone-filled hole. But Miller turned back before he reached the bottom. If he had not described it so? Experiencing the opposite? Three of the nuthatches perched on the wall and called in chorus. Heralds of the spirit-reign. Then a vixen appeared and stood on a pile of stones some fifty yards away; I realized she must be the famous fox that has its earth under the tomb of Clytemnestra. But then I saw that she was Clytemnestra herself: a tall, thin, savage, beautiful creature, most unfoxlike. When I moved, she began to bark in a petulant, anxious way. At last she walked lightly off, bouncing her brush, flaunting her sins. It was not because of me that she left. Some sheep came past and after them the shepherd, a tall figure wrapped in a huge brown cloak. The sheep tunkled away past the citadel; a nightjar churred in the distance. First stars, and great silence. I started back, but some strange impulse made me turn off at the Tomb of Atreus. At first I just stood at the entrance to the cutting. The door, almost indistinguishable in the darkness, called me overpoweringly in.
I did go in, with a lighted candle into the inner tomb; I stood in its centre, daring the supernatural to manifest itself. Here if anywhere, at night, in the most ancient, most inner death-tomb, surely the dead would stir. I wanted to be profoundly amazed, paralysed with fear. But there was not the smallest sound. An all-possessing silent oblivion. I waited for perhaps five minutes. Death was as I had always believed it to be. Then I left, hurriedly, relieved and proud that the ‘test’ was over. I walked down the fragrant road. Fires burnt in the distant plain; a sliver of new moon shone out. Owls called at the Cyclopean bridge.fn36 I could just make them out through field-glasses. Their screams redoubled; Clytemnestra slipped along the masonry, paused, sniffed, yapped once hungrily and sadly, and slid into darkness. I must have Agamemnon’s blood.
Back to the village, by moonlight and flute sound. One of the shepherds out in the fields was playing his pipe, and still playing after I had eaten a meal by lamplight and finally gone to bed.
The next morning I set off for the Heraeon,fn37 the lonely temple where the Argives and their allies met. Where the Trojan war really began and Zeus married Hera. It involved walking south, along the foot of the mountains. I crossed the Argive steppes, long stretches of stubble dotted with turkeys, sheep, donkeys and ponies. This area has famous turkeys, and Homer’s epithet ‘horse-rearing’ still describes the Argive plain. I felt happy, the sun was hot, there was a breeze, I was alone. I came to a small village, asked the way. They seemed to understand me. I walked on; on and on. Past the hill where I thought it was, down into a little combe delightfully green and damp with cypresses and a lemon-grove. There was even a trough of dirty water. Two farms, a Shangri-la. I climbed up again and walked through an olive-orchard, an area rich with thyme and bees’ wings. The sun was very hot. A man appeared, riding a minute donkey. He had a very official hat and much-patched trousers. We exchanged good-days and suspicious glances. Nothing much is left of the Heraeon. The foundations of various temples, a litter of stones, fragments of Cyclopean wall. I sat on the small hill and watched a golden eagle being attacked by two buzzards. A brilliantly black and white wheatear flashed in the ruins. I hunted shards, and with overwhelming success. A cornelian bead, a fragment of obsidian razor, many fine shards, a curious little metal object in the crevice of a wall. I hunted and hunted and hunted, while the sun scorched down from directly overhead. I resigned myself to miss lunch. About two I suddenly realized I was parched with thirst. The walk home was horrible, in blinding sunlight. In the lemon-grove combe I looked vainly for fruit, but all I could find were two old lemons lying on the ground. I picked them up and ate them out of sight of the two farms. They were juiceless, slightly rotten, but kept me alive till I reached a small village and could drink two lemonades in a startled village. So home.
In the evening, I walked up to see the other tombs, dark cuttings among the stubble-backs and olive-orchards. On the hill behind the village is the beautifully designed modern museum – strangely empty and deserted. This is much the best way from the village to the citadel, along the ridge, with the indigo sea of dark mountains at one’s side. Shard-hunting, I left it late to return and had a long stumble across country back to the hotel. I passed a huge door, the entrance to a caved-in beehive tomb – a druidical piece of architecture. Mycenae has more than one tinge of Stonehenge.
There was a great deal of wind that night, rocking the shutters. I wanted to go to the citadel, but I was too tired. I did not find Mycenae dark and depressing, like many people. More a mystery, an enigmatic majesty. It is more massive, more primitive than Knossos and Phaestos.fn38 But as there, one has the impression of an ideal society in a perfect world – a cultural centre in a universe a man could easily contain and travel. Air, openness, roads above the plain. Horsemen under the Gate of Lions. Kings over the foothills on their way to the spacious Heraeon, lying sunnily on its low spur. Argos, Tiryns, a ride away. All shards.
Ascent of Parnassus. It was partly the hothouse atmosphere of the luxury hotel at Delphi – all comforts on the edge of civilization – partly the symbolism. I wanted to climb Mount Parnassus, the poets’ mountain, to have conquered it physically and thus symbolically.fn39 The best base for the attempt seemed the village of Arachova,fn40 so I went there, by bus, early next morning. At the bus-stop were other English people, laconic, humorous, discussing bills. After the sybaritic, vulgar Americans of the hotel, I found them unusually refreshing, endearing. A sudden small wave of love for the English. I arrive at Arachova, found a minute ‘hotel’, explained what I wanted. Like everyone else, they said a guide, a donkey were necessary. There was a refuge, but it was very high and cold. The son of the hotel proprietress came to help me. He spoke appalling French, about as insufficient as my Greek. I said I wanted food. He was a pale-faced, embarrassed boy of fifteen or sixteen, who considered himself, I gathered, a cut above the villagers. He was worse than useless as a help.
‘I want chocolate,’ I said. He found a shop with minute bars of chocolate. ‘Big ones,’ I said. ‘There aren’t any,’ he answered, and looked faintly disgusted. At the next shop we found large bars. The same with eggs. I said I wanted hard-boiled eggs. ‘Oeufs durs’ did not register. I did not know the Greek for ‘cooking’, let alone ‘boiled’. We went to two tavernas – they seemed angry to see him and said they had no eggs. The boy was profoundly discouraged.
‘There are no eggs,’ he said.
I was beginning to get angry. ‘For Christ’s sake, somebody must have eggs.’
‘No.’
‘Look, all I need is three or four eggs, and somebody can cook them.’
‘No. Nobody can cook them. On ne peut pas. On ne peut pas.’
He looked awkwardly down at the ground, embarrassed by my persistence. He won. I made do with a small loaf, some cheese, and chocolate.
Then we went for the key to the refuge, up a stony little sidestreet to a house where a woman was working a loom in a dark room with a barred window. She came out. Her father was away; he looked after the key. ‘When will he be back?’ She shrugged her shoulders, suggested one hour with plainly little hope. Her mother appeared above, demanded all the relevant information. A woman with a child looking out of the nearby window of a house covered in grape-vines. A girl carrying a bucket stopped and listened. A Greek palaver ensued.
‘It’s no good,’ said the boy, true to his part. ‘You can’t go up. On ne peut pas.’ I ignored him and talked in Greek. It seemed a letter was needed from the tourist office.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. More palaver. They suggested tomorrow.
‘You need a guide. Do you know the way?’
‘I know the way.’ I mentioned the name of the summer village above Arachova. This was a mistake. It was not the way.
‘Dexia,’ said the woman. ‘Ochi Kalyvia.’fn41
‘Ne, ne, xero – dexia.’fn42
That half-persuaded them. ‘I must go this morning,’ I said.
‘He doesn’t know the way,’ said the younger woman – and then to the boy: ‘You can show him.’
The boy backed visibly. ‘No, no … not this morning … then boro.’fn43 He has an impossibility fixation.
The old woman asked the crucial question. ‘You must pay 10,000 for the key.’
‘Of course,’ I said, and put my hand in my pocket. The atmosphere visibly lightened. Plainly I was a sucker.
‘That’s all right,’ said the old woman. ‘Tomorrow. Get the key.’ The younger woman came back with two keys and a door-handle. I began to visualize the refuge as a kind of Chapel Perilous, not only difficult to reach, but far from easy to enter.
But the preparing was done. I got rid of the boy, and set out, up through the vineyards above the deep wide Delphi valley, to the plateau of Livadi. These initial difficulties I regarded as those naturally attendant on the will to rise from the common ruck and an essential stage in the young artist’s development.
It was hot, windless. Soon the road below began to look small. I mounted the diagonal wide track past a shrine and a dry spring. The spring made me think of water and that of my total ignorance of the way up. I had only a page from Baedeker with a few vague lines about the route. The woman had said it was difficult. I visualized all sorts of danger: thirst, falling, Communist bandits, even the supernatural. But above all I was happy to be going. I passed many people descending to Arachova from the summer village. ‘Yassou,’fn44 they all said. ‘Yassou,’ I answered.
One of them laughed. ‘Na,fn45 there’s an Englishman going to climb Parnassus.’
‘Is it the right road?’ I asked.
They nodded, pointed to the cliffs above. I walked on, passing, though I did not know it then, the path to the refuge. I went on up the wide track, beginning to climb above the world. Opposite I could see another high plateau of bright red tilled earth and resplendent green fields. Below, far below, the sea of olives. At last the road curved round a small bluff to the top of the pass on to the plateau. The wind blew, a cooler wind. The plateau lay in a large depression before me: two or three miles of green fields and on the far side a compact little group of stone houses. To the west and north fir-covered hills, Nordic-looking hills, rose blackly up. To the east more fir-woods, great grey slopes up to a height where the trees thinned out, scattered and ended; and, above that, massive, curves and clouds, the arched back of the mountain proper. I walked along the stony path down to the level of the plateau, where small pinks and alpine parsley grew in the rocks. Wheatears flashed their tails. There seemed to be no one except at the village, and I had no idea where the path to the left was. A flock of hooded crows watched me suspiciously from a pile of stones, ominous vulturine birds. I came to the village and went up to two men standing outside their croft. Most of the cottages seemed desolate, ruined. They were helpful and inquisitive and two youths came up and showed me the path high up in the fir-woods. I set off again, began to climb up the bottom of a rocky valley towards the sound of goat-bells.
I came on a shepherd encamped with his family, a wife and three boys, under a large fir; a tanned, genial man. He told me the way, asked me to have lunch with him: tomatoes, cucumber, yoghurt, goat milk, cheese. He recited the list, pleased to be able to offer it, begging me almost. This was my first experience of the extraordinary hospitality of the shepherds of Parnassus. They all seem almost mythically kind. I saw specks of dirt floating on top of the milk, and asked for a glass of water. They watched me drink it, smiling. I looked at their shelter, made of fir-branches, stone and a bit of cloth for a roof – inside on the floor many dark pots and pans and a few carpets and blankets. Higher up, the shepherds’ encampments are tiny houses made completely of stones, erected under bluffs, with small stone-walled sheepfolds near them, but they all seem furnished with this gypsy simplicity – makeshift carpets, sheepskin blankets, a few pans. And yet they live there for all the summer.
The path led up steeply and interminably through the fir-trees. There were many birds, tits, firecrests and butterflies. A kind of re-entry into the period of spring. A blackbird flew across a clearing. At last I came up on to a rocky, hilly plateau beneath the western summit. A cold wind blew out of the clouds, which kept on burying the mountain-tops above. The path meandered, forked twice. I hesitated, lost impetus and felt for the first time discouraged. Then, I did not realize that shepherds lived as high as this. It was cold, the clouds threatened, and the mountain-face above was glistening grey, a frozen, ominous grey. It was nothing like Greece. I went a little further down one of the paths, towards a valley.
Suddenly a wisp of smoke curled out of the pines opposite. All my dismay disappeared; I walked quickly down the slope, and heard sheep-bells in the distance. The opposite side of the valley was steep, rock-strewn, a maze of fallen pines. I reached the fire, but there was no sign of life, only smouldering branches, a small carpet of creeping sparks. I looked round, half expecting to see myself surrounded by grim Red Indians – at least, bandits. But there was again the sound of sheep-bells faintly somewhere in the forest above me. I struggled up the hill, sweating and very thirsty. The sheep-bells became louder and sheep suddenly moved at the top of a clearing. In a minute I was at the shepherd’s encampment. A severe-faced but kindly-spoken old patriarch of a man received me. He wanted to know all about me. He was joined by two youths and another man. Their hut was a mere wind-break; I could see how they slept, on the ground with a few rugs and skins and heavy overcoats. They gave me a fine bowl of water. I gave them cigarettes. All the shepherds seem to delight in cigarettes. The old man asked me to lie down and rest, to eat some food. But I asked the way to the kataphygeion – the refuge. One of the youths offered to guide me. He took his crook and overcoat and led the way uphill. He walked with a kind of long casual lilt, striding from rock to rock, balancing himself with his crook. It looked so easy, but I could not keep up with him. From time to time he stopped and asked me questions; picked up some cartridge cases – a relic of the Civil War – and talked about the Communists. I gathered he was against them although he seemed to have admired the number of troops and time it took to eradicate them on Parnassus. We rose out of the trees and walked along a series of little valleys below the looming summit. I asked him how far the central peak was. Two hours, he said, two and a half. It’s a long way, and difficult to find. He tried to explain the route, but he used so many words I didn’t know that it only confused me. We passed a deep small crevice. He said there was snow at the bottom, and threw a stone into the black opening. The stone hit the sides and then there was a strange silence, eternal, as if the chasm was bottomless. As far as I could see, it was.
A few minutes later we came to the refuge, tucked away in a small goyal. A minute squat building with a round roof and a small chimney, windowless, like the chapel of some very strict sect. The door was of rusty iron, with jagged bullet-holes in it. ‘Communista,’ said the shepherd, ‘kaput.’ I tried to get the key to turn. Nothing happened. The shepherd kicked the door and it swung open; so much for the keys. Inside, bunks, mattresses, a stove, lamps, a saw, even a pair of skis. I was pleasantly surprised, even amazed, that the Greeks could organize a proper refuge. I talked with the shepherd for a while, eager to have some food, but disinclined to share it. In the end, after three cigarettes, he went away. I made an inventory and sat down to eat – a third of the cheese, a third of the loaf, a bar of chocolate. It was about three o’clock. I did not know what to do, whether to climb on or to wait till the next morning. In the end I compromised. I would reconnoitre, find the way, and go up it in the morning.
I put on my ski-jacket and set off; the wind was cold, cutting, surprisingly strong. I began to mount towards the clouds up a great rocky slope. It was steep and tiring, I had to rest every few minutes. Flowers came in increasing numbers – harebells, tiny mauve-blue gentians, delicate flowers of deep magenta-red. There were other flowers, stonecrop, campion, saxifrage in bloom, in the crannies of the turf. Suddenly, above me, incredibly it seemed, I heard sheep-bells. A figure appeared in the sky, almost in the clouds, crook in hand, overcoat wrapped around him. He climbed obliquely upwards, stopped every now and then to stare down at me far below. I saw his goats high above, where torn fragments of cloud hurtled past. I climbed on, feeling more tired at every step. I decided to traverse the slope, not to climb any more. It was much easier. I came to the ridge of the shoulder, and right into the full force of the wind – breathtaking, savagely cold, almost too much to stand in. But below to my surprise was a wide basin sloping upwards to two peaks and a col and, beyond the col, yet more peaks. To my right I could see patches of névé snow, brilliant white against the cliffs and scree-slopes to which they adhered. Below, in the basin, were stretches of green turf and, in one corner, a shepherd encampment. I had entered the paradise of the upper Parnassus.
It is a whole world by itself, a great basin surrounded by peaks, full of little valleys with lush green turf, studded with flowers, and several shepherd encampments. A mountain sanctuary. As I made my way across the scree-slopes to the col, the clouds began to clear, and the universe became superb. I felt free, fit, absolutely without tiredness. I moved over the rocks at shepherd speed, enjoying the constant need for judgement and agility. At the top of the col a whole series of peaks came in view. The problem was to find Lykeri, the highest summit.fn46 They all looked about the same, although the furthest one, on the other side of a huge basin, seemed the tallest. I could see two shepherds a very long way off, too far to go and ask. I began to compromise; this surely was as good as the ascent of Parnassus. I could climb one of the near peaks, pretend it was the highest. The sun was beginning to decline. I climbed down and up to another col. Alpine crows sceeched overhead, there were flowers everywhere, mountain asters, deep golden-yellow daisy-like flowers, and the countless deep pink stems of the geraniums. As I came to the top of this new col, the peak itself, hitherto hidden, unmistakably appeared. A regular-shaped, round-topped height, too remote to think of reaching in daylight – or so it seemed. I felt disappointed, began to lie to myself. I could tell some story about making a mistake unconvincingly over the highest peak, not being sure which it was. To the south I could see a nearby peak, and decided to head for that. Behind it was yet another valley-basin, rich in turf, with a huge flock of sheep and another encampment in it. The clouds had almost all gone and the view from the top of the peak was superb. But a mile away to the east there was still that round top rising above me, tantalizing, unconquered. I sat by the cairn and ate some chocolate. The setting sun accented all the contours, deep blue shadows and purple hills in the valleys and plains below. The sea was pale blue in the distance. I felt tired, content, but not absolutely content. I looked again at Lykeri, through field-glasses, unconsciously remembered all the symbolism I had attached to it.
And then, almost subconsciously, I set off for it, in spite of the late hour and being tired out. Preconceived determination, stronger than I had supposed, manifested itself in me, forced me on. I almost ran down the long slope to the foot of Lykeri and began to climb it at ridiculous speed. But it was too steep to be taken at a run. I slowed down, rested, saw the world at my feet. Near the top I came on beds of violets in bloom, big purple flowers, an extraordinary sight; and there was golden saxifrage as well. I ‘started’ two capercaillie, giant brown whirring partridges. The far side of Lykeri is precipitous, a huge chasm plunging down. With mounting exultation I zigzagged up to the little platform on the peak, with its stone cairn. I had an overpowering sense of victory, of self-satisfaction, a kind of atomic flash of inner pleasure. The sun was still just above the horizon. There were no clouds within twenty miles and the sky was of the purest, most serene blue, I felt immeasurably high, surrounded by air, remote from all towns, societies, troubles, beliefs, times, a central point in the universe; having entered, achieved it and now being rewarded. A natural monastery of the spirit.
There were other mountains, valleys, plains, seas in all directions, but I had no desire to know their names, only to be aware of their limitless presence below. Alpine swifts split the air down into the chasms and shadows to the east. The other peaks were gilded, striated with shadow.
Someone else had written, with a splendid classical Greek, the letters ϕωζ – light – in stones beside the cairn. Even I was fired to record. I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘John Fowles, 4 July 1952, clear evening sky, superb visibility, violets in bloom on the southern slope – alone with the Alpine swifts and the Muses,’ and put it in a tin which I placed in the centre of the cairn. The air was chilly, the sun began to sink. Still I was spellbound by the height, the absence of earth, mundanity, the majestic, divine solitude.
One of the moments one continues to live for. They repay all the months in the desert, the years in darkness. To rise out of time, to be absorbed into nature, to feel oneself completely existing among existence, as godlike as mortality can imagine.
Such adventures must be done alone. In company they lose their value. One has to pass through the dangers by oneself – the fatigue, the strange country, the silence. It is all part of the sense of victory won in the end. No guide, no maps. Alone.
I descended the steep slope. A flock of sheep appeared below, on the way back to the fold. As I reached the foot of the peak, a girl appeared and came towards me, a girl of fifteen or sixteen, with a nut-brown face and shrewd, shyly coquettish eyes. She wore an old brown coat and a brown headscarf, yet somehow contrived to appear beautiful. Her face was minxish, amused by me. We stood some twenty or thirty yards apart. She had a clear, clipped voice, had the authority, the presence of people who live on great solitudes, and used many words I could not understand. But I understood her faint contempt for me. Living under the shadow of Parnassus, the climb meant nothing to her – an hour’s walk – and my pride was ridiculous. I was made to feel that I did not belong to this high upstairs world. It seemed to me extraordinary that a slip of a girl could exist in such a remote place. Her flock consisted of two hundred sheep, slowly grazing towards an encampment. We spoke of wolves. She seemed to admire me most when I said that I was going back to the refuge. ‘It’s a long way,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dark.’ I said that I knew the way, and pointed it out. She walked parallel but distant from me for a little way. I said goodbye, and watched her go back to her flock, singing softly.
I walked fast, in spite of aching feet. Dusk came fast, and with it an icy wind, frost in the air. But my day was not yet done. I jumped off a rock on to a small path. There was a vicious click, a sharp pain in my foot. I had trodden on a wolf-trap. I had a very unpleasant five minutes getting free. Fortunately it was not toothed and fortunately it gripped me by the heel. Even so, I gave my fingers a bad squeeze getting myself free. I went on, my fingers numb, then burning with pain. I passed under a high cliff with a gigantic glacial bowl at its foot. High up on the cliff-face were white streaks of névé, and the wind roared enormously above, like the wild sea. I made my way down to a shepherd encampment I had seen on my way up. But as soon as I came near, the dogs ran out at me, fierce, snarling, barking. There were three of them, big, black, grey and white. I lashed out at them with my stick and they rushed at me. One of them caught the stick in its teeth and another went behind me. I was just getting ready to be bitten when a shepherd-boy ran up and called them off. I was badly in need of water. He took me to their hut, outside which a large block of snow was thawing into a bowl. I took, a tin cup and drank avidly. The water was ice-cold, delicious. I told them about the trap. They laughed, the boy had just set it. Yes, there were wolves, two or three. A shepherd I met the next day said there were many.
I made my way on in darkness The moon and the afterlight gave me just enough light to see by. Even so I stumbled and fell many times – and looked round many times for a long grey shape. The wind was savage, strong and cold. At last I reached the refuge. There were bells all around it, an invisible flock and a barking dog. The shepherd came down to see me – a serious-faced, thick-voiced young man in a heavy overcoat. He helped me light the lamps, but they went out, so I lit a large fire and threw huge logs on it. It was cold enough for a blaze to be welcome. I sat on a bank and talked with the shepherd. He was suffering from conjunctivitis, no wonder in that wind. Every so often he went outside and called to his sheep with a high-pitched whistle. He asked me back to his shelter, but I felt too tired to move. He went off into the night and cold wind.
A strange, unreal, remote life in 1952. It is difficult to imagine what the mentality of a mountain shepherd can be like – a life of sun-hours, counting, milking, brittle stars, silences and cold winds, constant watchfulness against wolves, an existence of terrifying solitudes, on a different plane from ours below, uniquely independent.
I sat watching the fire, too tired to eat and very thirsty, but with no water. I bolted the door, got into my sleeping-bag, and slept. I had walked and climbed up some fifteen miles of very rough paths and scree-slopes, left summer in Arachova for spring on Parnassus. At some time in the night I heard a tearing, flapping noise outside the door – a wolf or fox or shepherd-dog by the sound of it, trying to kill something. But I was too tired even to look at that. When I woke properly, the sun was high; and I had slept for over twelve hours.
I cleaned the refuge, set off down past a shepherd trypa.fn47 The shepherds, two bronzed men, were milking their sheep – one or two quick squirts from each animal. Twenty or thirty sheep gave only a bucketful. They gave me water and a slice of rich, sour cheese, which I ate with outward enjoyment and inward distaste; then a cup of still warm milk, which I swallowed with blatant haste, and said goodbye.
It took a long time to get down. My feet were swollen and sore, the sun was hot. In the pine-woods were many birds and butterflies – red-backed shrikes, cole tits, missel-thrushes, spotted woodpeckers, Dark Green and Queen of Spain fritillaries and a thousand Painted Ladies. I skirted the northern edge of the plateau of Livadi, frequently resting, still without appetite. Over the brim of the plateau down into Arachova, my feet so sore I could not walk normally, though without limping.
But Parnassus was mine; and the other if I try enough.fn48
fn1 Born in South Africa in 1901, Roy Campbell made a reputation for himself as a poet, memoirist and satirist whose targets included the Bloomsbury Group and the poets Auden, Day-Lewis and Spender. He shared Hemingway’s taste for travel and adventure, but supported the opposite side during the Spanish Civil War. His professed enthusiasm for Franco’s Nationalists in the long poem Flowering Rifle (1939) attracted heavy criticism for his supposed Fascist views. He died in a car crash in Portugal in 1957.
fn2 Denys Sharrocks would become a close friend of JF. He had been brought up in Southport, where he went to the King George V Grammar School and, then, after war service in the RAF, completed his studies in language and literature at Liverpool University. He began to teach in the English department of the Anargyrios and Korgialeneios College in 1948.
Although JF wasn’t aware of it at the time, Kenneth Pringle had in fact just been sacked from the school for having had homosexual affairs with one or more of the boys. The headmaster had asked Sharrocks to escort Pringle from the island to Athens and at the same time to meet and bring back the new teacher.
fn3 The roofed gateway to the Acropolis.
fn4 A small temple on the western edge of the Agora at the foot of the Acropolis, built around 450 BC and named after Hephaestus, the god of fire.
fn5 Built as a shrine to Athena and Poseidon-Erectheus and containing the tomb of Cecrops, the legendary founder of Athens, this temple was finished in 395 BC. Standing on the northern edge of the Acropolis, it is considered to be one of the most perfect examples of ancient Greek architecture.
fn6 Galeazzo Ciano (1903–44) was an immensely rich Italian Count who had served in Mussolini’s government as foreign minister and was also his son-in-law. After the Axis defeats of 1942, Ciano urged a separate peace with the Allies, and Mussolini eventually had him put on trial and executed for treason.
fn7 The islands of Poros and Spetsai are on the south side of the Saronic Gulf, just off the north-east coast of the Peloponnesus. The boat from the Piraeus would have stopped off at Poros, then Hermione, a town on the Peloponnese coast, and finally Spetsai. JF’s description of the imaginary island of Phraxos in The Magus accurately sets the scene: ‘Phraxos lay eight dazzling hours in a small steamer south of Athens, about six miles off the mainland of the Peloponnesus and in the centre of a landscape as memorable as itself: to the north and west, a great fixed arm of mountains, in whose crook the island stood; to the east a distant gently-peaked archipelago; to the south the soft blue desert of the Aegean stretching away to Crete.’
fn8 Looking back through his diaries forty years later, JF would comment, ‘I think we may call this early January entry the genesis of The Magus.’
fn9 The monastery of St Nicolaos, which is also the island’s cathedral, sits on a hill just outside Spetsai town. St Nicolaos is the patron saint of Spetsai and all seamen.
fn10 ‘Good day.’
fn11 The ‘Hippo’ was a nickname for Potamianos, a Greek master who taught English.
fn12 François-Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834) was the leading composer of opera in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
fn13 The motto of JF’s Oxford college, New College, was: ‘Manners makyth man.’
fn14 The restoration of the Greek monarchy in September 1946 left the country bitterly divided. In December 1946 a Communist-dominated Democratic Army of Greece (DAG)was formed out of the nucleus of the wartime resistance movement ELAS and, operating out of the mountains, it conducted a guerrilla campaign against government forces. The conflict was marked by enormous brutality on both sides, with many villages destroyed and civilians killed. By the time the war had ended with the defeat of DAG in August 1949, over 80,000 people had lost their lives. The Greek Communist Party (KKE) remained banned after the return of peace.
fn15 The then Greek prime minster General Nikolaos Plastiras (1883–1953) was leader of the National Progressive Centre Union Party and had formed a coalition with the Liberals.
fn16 Andrei Vishinsky (1883–1954), who gained notoriety during the 1930s as the chief prosecutor of the Great Purge trials in Moscow, became the Soviet Union’s foreign minister in 1949.
fn17 Three islands in the Saronic Gulf to the north-east of Spetsai.
fn18 A mountain on the mainland about thirty-five kilometres north of Spetsai.
fn19 The café was called Lambris.
fn20 i.e. the group of young students, mostly from Thouars, with whom JF had the previous year toured Switzerland, the Tyrol and Bavaria.
fn21 This is Agia Paraskevi, Holy Friday Bay, where JF set The Magus.
fn22 On 16 February 1952 under the heading, ‘The Queen’s Opportunity’, the New Statesman wrote that the ‘peremptory order for national mourning was both intrusive and silly’. It expressed the hope that the new monarch would ‘seize the opportunity to sweep away the old order at Court and substitute a way of life which matches the times they live in and the aspirations of peoples they rule’.
fn23 The Greek Orthodox version of Mardi Gras, Apocryas begins every year on the Sunday before Clean Monday, which marks the start of Lent.
fn24 One of the two founders of the school. See note here.
fn25 In 1939 Henry Miller (1891–1980) travelled to Greece to see his friend Lawrence Durrell. During a visit to Athens, Durrell introduced Miller to the writer and raconteur George Katsimbalis, a larger-than-life figure who lived in Maroussi, a northern suburb of Athens. The Colossus of Maroussi, first published in 1941 by the Colt Press in San Francisco, is an affectionate portrait of Katsimbalis, and an account of the travels that followed when Katsimbalis offered to show Miller around Greece. Miller, who fell deeply in love with the country, wrote of ‘an enthusiastic, curious-minded, passionate people’, and delighted in their ‘contradictoriness, confusion, chaos – all these sterling human qualities’.
fn26 Argan was the hypochondriac of the title in Molière’s play Le Malade imaginaire.
fn28 The school’s board of governors.
fn29 Sophocles Venizelos (1894–1964) was leader of the Liberal Party, which shared power with the National Progressive Centre Union Party. His father Eleutherios Venizelos (1864–1936), who had been prime minister in 1910–15, 1924, 1928–32 and 1933, was the most influential Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century.
fn31 In the Colossus of Maroussi (Penguin edition, p.56ff) Miller describes visiting the island with Katsimbalis and the poet Seferiades.
fn32 The domus aurea, the name given to the colossal palace Nero had built for himself after the great fire which consumed half of Rome in AD 64.
fn33 Sciron was a robber who attacked travellers and then threw them into the sea after forcing them to wash his feet. On his way to Athens from Troezen, Theseus encountered Sciron and meted out to him the same treatment. According to Ovid, the sea refused to receive Sciron’s bones, which were then transformed into the ‘broken cliffs’ that JF mentions.
fn34 The Acrocorinth was the site of Corinth’s Acropolis during ancient and medieval times. The fortified remains occupy the summit of a 500-metre-high pinnacle at the edge of the ancient city.
fn35 In The Colossus of Maroussi Miller described making the descent with Lawrence Durrell and Durrell’s wife Nancy: ‘I had two distinct fears – one, that the slender buttress at the head of the stairs would give way and leave us to smother to death in utter darkness, and two, that a mis-step would send me slithering down into the pit amidst a spawn of snakes, lizards and bats.’ (Penguin edition, p.218)
fn36 ‘Cyclopean’ is the term for the characteristic Mycenaean building style of using limestone boulders without any binding matter.
fn37 The Heraeon was the Sanctuary of Hera, the goddess who watched over the Argives. According to Greek myth, it was here that Agamemnon was chosen to be the leader of the Trojan expedition.
fn38 JF had visited the ruins of these Minoan towns during a visit to Crete the previous Easter.
fn39 According to ancient Greek legend, the mountain was sacred to Apollo and the Muses.
fn40 This small town, which is in east central Greece, twenty-six kilometres to the west of Levadia, sits at the foot of the southern side of Mount Parnassus.
fn41 ‘Right … No hut.’
fn42 ‘Yes, yes, I know – right.’
fn43 ‘I can’t.’
fn44 ‘Hello.’
fn45 ‘There.’
fn46 Mount Parnassus has two summits, but with very little difference in height between them. Lykeri (‘Wolf Mountain’) is 8061ft high; and Gerontovrachos (‘Old Man’s Rock’) is 7989 ft.
fn47 Trypa is the Greek word for hole.
fn48 ‘By which I meant literary fame, success,’ wrote JF in 1996. ‘It is from this ascent that I date some real first belief in myself as a writer. Not, needless to say, from any evidence of writing skill, but sensing some quirk of age. It was also when I knew I loved Greece.’