The Colossus of Maroussi (13 page)

OUR GRAND TOUR OF THE PELOPONNESUS WAS CUT
short at Mycenae. Katsimbalis had received an urgent call to return to Athens owing to the unexpected discovery of a piece of land which his attorneys had overlooked. The news didn’t seem to thrill him. On the contrary he was depressed: more property meant more taxes, more debts—and more headaches. I could have continued my explorations alone, but I preferred to return to Athens with him and digest what I had seen and felt. We took the automotrice at Mycenae, a direct run of five or six hours, if I remember rightly, for the absurd price of a couple of cocktails at the Ritz.

Between the time of my return and my departure for Crete three or four little incidents occurred which I feel impelled to make brief mention of. The first was
Juarez,
the American film which ran for several weeks at one of the leading theatres. Despite the fact that Greece is under a dictatorship this film, which was only slightly modified after the first few showings, was shown night and day to an increasingly packed house. The atmosphere was tense, the applause distinctly Republican. For many reasons the film had acute significance for the Greek people. One felt that the spirit of Venizelos was still alive. In that blunt and magnificent speech which Juarez makes to the assembled plenipotentiaries of the foreign powers one felt that the tragic plight of Mexico under Maximilian had curious and throbbing analogies with the present perilous position of Greece. The only true friend which Greece has at this moment, the only relatively disinterested one, is America. Of that I shall have more to say when I come to Crete, the birthplace of Venizelos as well as of El Greco. But to witness the showing of a film in which all forms of dictatorship are dramatically denounced, to witness it in the midst of an audience whose hands are tied, except to applaud, is an impressive event. It was one of those rare moments when I felt that, in a world which is almost entirely gagged, shackled and manacled, to be an American is almost a luxury.

The second event was a visit to the astronomical observatory in Athens, arranged for Durrell and myself by Theodore Stephanides who, as an amateur astronomer, has made admittedly important astronomical discoveries. The officials received us very cordially, thanks to the generous aid given them by American fellow-workers in this field. I had never looked through the telescope of a bona fide observatory before. Nor had Durrell, I presume. The experience was sensational, though probably not altogether in accord with the expectations of our hosts. Our remarks, which were juvenile and ecstatic, seemed to bewilder them. We certainly did not display the orthodox reactions to the wonders that were unfolded. I shall never forget their utter amazement when Durrell, who was gazing at the Pleiades, suddenly exclaimed—“
Rosicrucian!
” What did he mean by that? they wanted to know. I mounted the ladder and took a look for myself. I doubt if I can describe the effect of that first breathless vision of a splintered star world. The image I shall always retain is that of Chartres, an effulgent rose window shattered by a hand grenade. I mean it in a double or triple sense—of awesome, indestructible beauty, of cosmic violation, of world ruin suspended in the sky like a fatal omen, of the eternality of beauty even when blasted and desecrated. “As above so below,” runs the famous saying of Hermes Trismegistus. To see the Pleiades through a powerful telescope is to sense the sublime and awesome truth of these words. In his highest flights, musical and architectural above all, for they are one, man gives the illusion of rivalling the order, the majesty and the splendor of the heavens; in his fits of destruction the evil and the desolation which he spreads seem incomparable until we reflect on the great stellar shake-ups brought on by the mental aberrations of the unknown Wizard. Our hosts seemed impervious to such reflections; they spoke knowingly of weights, distances, substances, etc. They were removed from the normal activities of their fellow men in a quite different way from ourselves. For them beauty was incidental, for us everything. For them the physico-mathematical world palped, calibred, weighed and transmitted by their instruments was reality itself, the stars and planets mere proof of their excellent and infallible reasoning. For Durrell and myself reality lay wholly beyond the reach of their puny instruments which in themselves were nothing more than clumsy reflections of their circumscribed imagination locked forever in the hypothetical prison of logic. Their astronomical figures and calculations, intended to impress and overawe us, only caused us to smile indulgently or to very impolitely laugh outright at them. Speaking for myself, facts and figures have always left me unimpressed. A light year is no more impressive to me than a second, or a split second. This is a game for the feeble-minded which can go on ad nauseam backwards and forwards without taking us anywhere. Similarly I am not more convinced of the reality of a star when I see it through the telescope. It may be more brilliant, more wondrous, it may be a thousand times or a million times bigger than when seen with the naked eye, but it is not a whit more real. To say that this is what a thing
really
looks like, just because one sees it larger and grander, seems to me quite fatuous. It is just as real to me if I don’t see it at all but merely imagine it to be there. And finally, even when to my own eye and the eye of the astronomer it possesses the same dimensions, the same brilliance, it definitely does not look the same to us both—Durrell’s very exclamation is sufficient to prove that.

But let us pass on—to Saturn. Saturn, and our moon likewise, when seen through a magnifying lens, are impressive to the layman in a way which the scientist must instinctively deplore and deprecate. No facts or figures about Saturn, no magnification, can explain the unreasonably disquieting sensation which the sight of this planet produces upon the mind of the spectator. Saturn is a living symbol of gloom, morbidity, disaster, fatality. Its milk-white hue inevitably arouses associations with tripe, dead gray matter, vulnerable organs hidden from sight, loathsome diseases, test tubes, laboratory specimens, catarrh, rheum, ectoplasm, melancholy shades, morbid phenomena, incuba and succuba, war, sterility, anaemia, indecision, defeatism, constipation, antitoxins, feeble novels, hernia, meningitis, dead-letter laws, red tape, working class conditions, sweat shops, YMCA’s, Christian Endeavor meetings, spiritist seances, poets like T. S. Eliot, zealots like Alexander Dowie, healers like Mary Baker Eddy, statesmen like Chamberlain, trivial fatalities like slipping on a banana peel and cracking one’s skull, dreaming of better days and getting wedged between two motor trucks, drowning in one’s own bathtub, killing one’s best friend accidentally, dying of hiccoughs instead of on the battlefield, and so on ad infinitum. Saturn is malefic through force of inertia. Its ring, which is only paperweight in thickness, according to the savants, is the wedding ring which signifies death or misfortune devoid of all significance. Saturn, whatever it may be to the astronomer, is the sign of senseless fatality to the man in the street. He carries it in his heart because his whole life, devoid of significance as it is, is wrapped up in this ultimate symbol which, if all else fails to do him in, this he can count upon to finish him off. Saturn is life in suspense, not dead so much as deathless, i.e. incapable of dying. Saturn is like dead bone in the ear—double mastoid for the soul. Saturn is like a roll of wallpaper wrong side out and smeared with that catarrhal paste which wallpaperers find so indispensable in their metier. Saturn is a vast agglomeration of those evil looking shreds which one hawks up the morning after he has smoked several packs of crisp, toasted, coughless, inspiring cigarettes. Saturn is postponement manifesting itself as an accomplishment in itself. Saturn is doubt, perplexity, scepticism, facts for fact’s sake and no hokum, no mysticism, understand? Saturn is the diabolical sweat of learning for its own sake, the congealed fog of the monomaniac’s ceaseless pursuit of what is always just beyond his nose. Saturn is deliciously melancholic because it knows and recognizes nothing beyond melancholy; it swims in its own fat. Saturn is the symbol of all omens and superstitions, the phony proof of divine entropy, phony because if it were true that the universe is running down Saturn would have melted away long ago. Saturn is as eternal as fear and irresolution, growing more milky, more cloudy, with each compromise, each capitulation. Timid souls cry for Saturn just as children are reputed to cry for Castoria. Saturn gives us only what we ask for, never an ounce extra. Saturn is the white hope of the white race which prattles endlessly about the wonders of nature and spends its time killing off the greatest wonder of all—MAN. Saturn is the stellar impostor setting itself up as the grand cosmocrator of Fate, Monsieur le Paris, the automatic pole-axer of a world smitten with ataraxy. Let the heavens sing its glory—this lymphatic globe of doubt and ennui will never cease to cast its milk-white rays of lifeless gloom.

This is the emotional photograph of a planet whose unorthodox influence still weighs heavily upon the almost extinct consciousness of man. It is the most cheerless spectacle in the heavens. It corresponds to every craven image conceived in the heart of man; it is the single repository of all the despair and defeat to which the human race from time immemorial has succumbed. It will become invisible only when man has purged it from his consciousness.

The third event was of a wholly different order—a jazz seance at the austere bachelor chambers of Seferiades in the Rue Kydathenaion, one of the streets I was instinctively attracted to on my first exploration of Athens. Seferiades, who is a cross between bull and panther by nature, has strong Virgo traits, speaking astrologically. That is to say, he has a passion for collecting, as did Goethe who was one of the best Virgo types the world has ever known. The first shock I had on entering his place on this particular occasion was that of meeting his most gracious and most lovely sister, Jeanne. She impressed me immediately as being of royal descent, perhaps of the Egyptian line—in any case, distinctly trans-Pontine. As I was gazing at her ecstatically I was suddenly startled by the sound of Cab Calloway’s baboon-like voice. Seferiades looked at me with that warm Asiatic smile which always spread over his face like nectar and ambrosia. “Do you know that piece?” he said, beaming with pleasure. “I have some others, if you’d care to hear them,” and he pointed to a file of albums about a yard long. “What about Louis Armstrong, do you like him?” he continued. “Here’s a Fats Waller record. Wait a minute, have you ever heard Count Basie—or Pee Wee Russell?” He knew every virtuoso of any account; he was a subscriber to “Le Jazz Hot” I soon discovered. In a few moments we were talking about the Café Boudon in Montmartre where the great Negro performers of the night clubs repair before and after work. He wanted to hear about the American Negro, about life behind the scene. What influence did the Negro have upon American life, what did the American people think of Negro literature? Was it true that there was a Negro aristocracy, a cultural aristocracy which was superior to the white American cultural groups? Could a man like Duke Ellington register at the Savoy Plaza without embarrassment? What about Caldwell and Faulkner—was it a true picture of the South which they gave? And so on. As I’ve remarked before, Seferiades is an indefatigable questioner. No detail is too trivial for him to overlook. His curiosity is insatiable, his knowledge vast and varied. After entertaining me with a selection of the most up-to-date jazz numbers he wanted to know if I should like to hear some exotic music of which he had an interesting variety. While searching for a record he would ply me with questions about some recondite English poet or about the circumstances surrounding Ambrose Bierce’s disappearance or what did I know about the Greenberg manuscripts which Hart Crane had made use of. Or, having found the record he was looking for he would suddenly switch to a little anecdote about his life in Albania which, in some curiously dissociated way, had to do with a poem by T. S. Eliot or St. Jean Perse. I speak of these divagations of his because they were a refreshing antidote to the sort of obsessive, single-tracked and wholly mirthless order of conversation indulged in by the English literati in Athens. An evening with these buttery-mouthed jakes always left me in a suicidal mood. A Greek is alive to the fingertips; he oozes vitality, he’s effervescent, he’s ubiquitous in spirit. The Englishman is lymphatic, made for the armchair, the fireside, the dingy tavern, the didactic treadmill. Durrell used to take a perverse delight in observing my discomfiture in the presence of his countrymen: they were one and all like animated cartoons from his “Black Book,” that devastating chronicle of the English death. In the presence of an Englishman Katsimbalis would positively dry up. Nobody really hated them—they were simply insufferable.

Later that evening I had the privilege of meeting some Greek women, friends of Seferiades’ sister. Here again I was impressed by the absence of those glaring defects which make even the most beautiful American or English woman seem positively ugly. The Greek woman, even when she is cultured, is first and foremost a woman. She sheds a distinct fragrance; she warms and thrills you. Due to the absorption of Greeks from Asia Minor the new generation of Athenian womanhood has improved in beauty and vigor. The ordinary Greek girl whom one sees on the street is superior in every way to her American counterpart; above all she has character and race, a combination which makes for deathless beauty and which forever distinguishes the descendants of ancient peoples from the bastard offshoots of the New World. How can I ever forget the young girl whom we passed one day at the foot of the Acropolis? Perhaps she was ten, perhaps she was fourteen years of age; her hair was reddish gold, her features as noble, as grave and austere as those of the caryatids on the Erectheum. She was playing with some comrades in a little clearing before a clump of ramshackle shanties which had somehow escaped the general demolition. Anyone who has read “Death in Venice” will appreciate my sincerity when I say that no woman, not even the loveliest woman I have ever seen, is or was capable of arousing in me such a feeling of adoration as this young girl elicited. If Fate were to put her in my path again I know not what folly I might commit. She was child, virgin, angel, seductress, priestess, harlot, prophetess all in one. She was neither ancient Greek nor modern Greek; she was of no race or time or class, but unique, fabulously unique. In that slow, sustained smile which she gave us as we paused a moment to gaze at her there was that enigmatic quality which da Vinci has immortalized, which one finds everywhere in Buddhistic art, which one finds in the great caves of India and on the facades of her temples, which one finds in the dancers of Java and of Bali and in primitive races, especially in Africa; which indeed seems to be the culminating expression of the spiritual achievement of the human race, but which to-day is totally absent in the countenance of the Western woman. Let me add a strange reflection—that the nearest approximation to this enigmatic quality which I ever noted was in the smile of a peasant woman at Corfu, a woman with six toes, decidedly ugly, and considered by everyone as something of a monster. She used to come to the well, as is the custom of the peasant women, to fill her jug, to do her washing, and to gossip. The well was situated at the foot of a steep declivity around which there wandered a goat-like path. In every direction there were thick shady olive groves broken here and there by ravines which formed the beds of mountain streams which in Summer were completely dried up. The well had an extraordinary fascination for me; it was a place reserved for the female beast of burden, for the strong, buxom virgin who could carry her jug of water strapped to her back with grace and ease, for the old toothless hag whose curved back was still capable of sustaining a staggering load of firewood, for the widow with her straggling flock of children, for the servant girls who laughed too easily, for wives who took over the work of their lazy husbands, for every species of female, in short, except the grand mistress or the idle English women of the vicinity. When I first saw the women staggering up the steep slopes, like the women of old in the Bible, I felt a pang of distress. The very manner of strapping the heavy jug to the back gave me a feeling of humiliation. The more so because the men who might have performed this humble task were more than likely sitting in the cool of a tavern or lying prone under an olive tree. My first thought was to relieve the young maid at our house of a minor task; I wanted to feel one of those jugs on my own back, to know with my own muscular aches what that repeated journey to the well meant. When I communicated my desire to Durrell he threw up his hands in horror. It wasn’t done, he exclaimed, laughing at my ignorance. I told him it didn’t matter to me in the least whether it was done or not done, that he was robbing me of a joy which I had never tasted. He begged me not to do it, for his sake—he said he would lose caste, that the Greeks would laugh at us. In short, he made such a point of it that I was obliged to abandon the idea. But on my rambles through the hills I usually made a point of stopping at the well to slake my thirst. There one day I espied the monster with six toes. She was standing in her bare feet, ankle deep in mud, washing a bundle of clothes. That she was ugly I could not deny, but there are all kinds of ugliness and hers was the sort which instead of repelling attracts. To begin with she was strong, sinewy, vital, an animal endowed with a human soul and with indisputable sexual powers. When she bent over to wring out a pair of pants the vitality in her limbs rippled and flashed through the tattered and bedraggled skirt which clung to her swarthy flesh. Her eyes glowed like coals, like the eyes of a Bedouin woman. Her lips were blood red and her strong even teeth as white as chalk. The thick black hair hung over her shoulders in rich, oily strands, as though saturated with olive oil. Renoir would have found her beautiful; he would not have noticed the six toes nor the coarseness of her features. He would have followed the rippling flesh, the full globes of her teats, the easy, swaying stance, the superabundant strength of her arms, her legs, her torso; he would have been ravished by the full, generous slit of the mouth, by the dark and burning glance of the eye, by the massive contours of the head and the gleaming black waves which fell in cascades down her sturdy, columnar neck. He would have caught the animal lust, the ardor unquenchable, the fire in the guts, the tenacity of the tigress, the hunger, the rapacity, the all-devouring appetite of the oversexed female who is not wanted because she has an extra toe.