The Colossus of Maroussi (28 page)
People seem astounded and enthralled when I speak of the effect which this visit to Greece produced upon me. They say they envy me and that they wish they could one day go there themselves. Why don’t they? Because nobody can enjoy the experience he desires until he is ready for it. People seldom mean what they say. Anyone who says he is burning to do something other than he is doing or to be somewhere else than he is is lying to himself. To desire is not merely to wish. To desire is to become that which one essentially is. Some men, reading this, will inevitably realize that there is nothing to do but act out their desires. A line of Maeterlinck’s concerning truth and action altered my whole conception of life. It took me twenty-five years to fully awaken to the meaning of his phrase. Other men are quicker to coordinate vision and action. But the point is that in Greece I finally achieved that coordination. I became deflated, restored to proper human proportions, ready to accept my lot and prepared to give of all that I have received. Standing in Agamemnon’s tomb I went through a veritable re-birth. I don’t mind in the least what people think or say when they read such a statement. I have no desire to convert anyone to my way of thinking. I know now that any influence I may have upon the world will be a result of the example I set and not because of my words. I give this record of my journey not as a contribution to human knowledge, because my knowledge is small and of little account, but as a contribution to human experience. Errors of one sort and another there undoubtedly are in this account but the truth is that something happened to me and
that
I have given as truthfully as I know how.
My friend Katsimbalis for whom I have written this book, by way of showing my gratitude to him and his compatriots, will I hope forgive me for having exaggerated his proportions to that of a Colossus. Those who know Amaroussion will realize that there is nothing grandiose about the place. Neither is there anything grandiose about Katsimbalis. Neither, in the ultimate, is there anything grandiose about the entire history of Greece. But there is something colossal about any human figure when that individual becomes truly and thoroughly human. A more human individual than Katsimbalis I have never met. Walking with him through the streets of Amaroussion I had the feeling that I was walking the earth in a totally new way. The earth became more intimate, more alive, more promising. He spoke frequently of the past, it is true, not as something dead and forgotten however, but rather as something which we carry within us, something which fructifies the present and makes the future inviting. He spoke of little things and of great with equal reverence; he was never too busy to pause and dwell on the things which moved him; he had endless time on his hands, which in itself is the mark of a great soul. How can I ever forget that last impression he made upon me when we said farewell at the bus station in the heart of Athens? There are men who are so full, so rich, who give themselves so completely that each time you take leave of them you feel that it is absolutely of no consequence whether the parting is for a day or forever. They come to you brimming over and they fill you to overflowing. They ask nothing of you except that you participate in their superabundant joy of living. They never inquire which side of the fence you are on because the world they inhabit has no fences. They make themselves in-vulnerable by habitually exposing themselves to every danger. They grow more heroic in the measure that they reveal their weaknesses. Certainly in those endless and seemingly fabulous stories which Katsimbalis was in the habit of recounting there must have been a good element of fancy and distortion, yet even if truth was occasionally sacrificed to reality the man behind the story only succeeded thereby in revealing more faithfully and thoroughly his human image. As I turned to go, leaving him sitting there in the bus, his alert, round eye already feasting itself upon other sights, Seferiades who was accompanying me home remarked with deep feeling: “He is a great fellow, Miller, there is no doubt about it: he is something extraordinary…a human phenomenon, I should say.” He said it almost as if he Seferiades were saying farewell and not me. He knew Katsimbalis as well as one man can know another, I should imagine; he was sometimes impatient with him, sometimes irritated beyond words, sometimes downright furious, but even if he were one day to become his bitterest enemy I could not imagine him saying one word to reduce the stature or the splendor of his friend. How wonderful it was to hear him say, knowing that I had just left Katsimbalis—“Did he tell you that story about the coins he found?” or whatever it might be. He asked with the enthusiasm of a music lover who, learning that his friend has just bought a gramophone, wishes to advise him of a record which he knows will bring his friend great joy. Often, when we were all together and Katsimbalis had launched into a long story, I caught that warm smile of recognition on Seferiades’ face—that smile which informs the others that they are about to hear something which has been proved and tested and found good. Or he might say afterwards, taking me by the arm and leading me aside: “Too bad he didn’t give you the whole story tonight; there is a wonderful part which he tells sometimes when he’s in very good spirits—it’s a pity you had to miss it.” It was also taken for granted by everybody, it seemed to me, that Katsimbalis not only had a right to improvise as he went along but that he was expected to do so. He was regarded as a virtuoso, a virtuoso who played only his own compositions and had therefore the right to alter them as he pleased.
There was another interesting aspect of his remarkable gift, one which again bears analogy to the musician’s talent. During the time I knew him Katsimbalis’ life was relatively quiet and unadventurous. But the most trivial incident, if it happened to Katsimbalis, had a way of blossoming into a great event. It might be nothing more than that he had picked a flower by the roadside on his way home. But when he had done with the story that flower, humble though it might be, would become the most wonderful flower that ever a man had picked. That flower would remain in the memory of the listener as the flower which Katsimbalis had picked; it would become unique, not because there was anything in the least extraordinary about it, but because Katsimbalis had immortalized it by noticing it, because he had put into that flower all that he thought and felt about flowers, which is like saying—a universe.
I choose this image at random but how appropriate and accurate it is! When I think of Katsimbalis bending over to pick a flower from the bare soil of Attica the whole Greek world, past, present and future, rises before me. I see again the soft, low mounds in which the illustrious dead were hidden away; I see the violet light in which the stiff scrub, the worn rocks, the huge boulders of the dry river beds gleam like mica; I see the miniature islands floating above the surface of the sea, ringed with dazzling white bands I see the eagles swooping out from the dizzy crags of inaccessible mountaintops, their somber shadows slowly staining the bright carpet of earth below; I see the figures of solitary men trailing their flocks over the naked spine of the hills and the fleece of their beasts all golden fuzz as in the days of legend; I see the women gathered at the wells amidst the olive groves, their dress, their manners, their talk no different now than in Biblical times; I see the grand patriarchal figure of the priest, the perfect blend of male and female, his countenance serene, frank, full of peace and dignity; I see the geometrical pattern of nature expounded by the earth itself in a silence which is deafening. The Greek earth opens before me like the Book of Revelation. I never knew that the earth contains so much; I had walked blindfolded, with faltering, hesitant steps; I was proud and arrogant, content to live the false, restricted life of the city man. The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being. I came home to the world, having found the true center and the real meaning of revolution. No warring conflicts between the nations of the earth can disturb this equilibrium. Greece herself may become embroiled, as we ourselves are now becoming embroiled, but I refuse categorically to become anything less than the citizen of the world which I silently declared myself to be when I stood in Agamemnon’s tomb. From that day forth my life was dedicated to the recovery of the divinity of man. Peace to all men, I say, and life more abundant!
FINIS
Just as I had written the last line the postman delivered me a characteristic letter from Lawrence Durrell dated August 10th, 1940. I give it herewith to round off the portrait of Katsimbalis.
“The peasants are lying everywhere on deck eating watermelons; the gutters are running with the juice. A huge crowd bound on a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Tinos. We are just precariously out of the harbour, scouting the skyline for Eyetalian Subs. What I really have to tell you is the story of the Cocks of Attica: it will frame your portrait of Katsimbalis which I have not yet read but which sounds marvelous from all accounts. It is this. We all went up to the Acropolis the other evening very drunk and exalted by wine and poetry; it was a hot black night and our blood was roaring with cognac. We sat on the steps outside the big gate, passing the bottle, Katsimbalis reciting and G——weeping a little, when all of a sudden K. was seized with a kind of fit. Leaping to his feet he yelled out—“Do you want to hear the cocks of Attica, you damned moderns?” His voice had a hysterical edge to it. We didn’t answer and he wasn’t waiting for one. He took a little run to the edge of the precipice, like a faery queen, a heavy black faery queen, in his black clothes, threw back his head, clapped the crook of his stock into his wounded arm, and sent out the most blood-curdling clarion I have ever heard. Cock-a-doodle-doo. It echoed all over the city—a sort of dark bowl dotted with lights like cherries. It ricochetted from hillock to hillock and wheeled up under the walls of the Parthenon…We were so shocked that we were struck dumb. And while we were still looking at each other in the darkness, lo, from the distance silvery clear in the darkness a cock drowsily answered—then another, then another. This drove K. wild. Squaring himself, like a bird about to fly into space, and flapping his coat tails, he set up a terrific scream—and the echoes multiplied. He screamed until the veins stood out all over him, looking like a battered and ravaged rooster in profile, flapping on his own dunghill. He screamed himself hysterical and his audience in the valley increased until all over Athens like bugles they were calling and calling, answering him. Finally between laughter and hysteria we had to ask him to stop. The whole night was alive with cockcrows—all Athens, all Attica, all Greece, it seemed, until I almost imagined you being woken at your desk late in New York to hear these terrific silver peals: Katsimbaline cockcrow in Attica. This was epic—a great moment and purely Katsimbalis. If you could have heard these cocks, the frantic psaltery of the Attic cocks! I dreamt about it for two nights afterwards. Well, we are on our way to Mykonos, resigned now that we have heard the cocks of Attica from the Acropolis. I wish you’d write it—it is part of the mosaic….”
LARRY
HENRY MILLER AND GREECE
FOR ALMOST FIVE YEARS LAWRENCE DURRELL HAD BEEN
urging Henry Miller to come to Greece, and in this he had a strong ally in Betty Ryan, the lovely young American artist who lived downstairs from Miller at 18 Villa Seurat. In Henry’s words, “she seduced me with her faithful, ravishing descriptions of Greece.” And his Paris artist friend and neighbor Mayo,
nom de peinture
of Antoine Malliarakis, urged him further, “Miller, you will like Greece.” In October 1938 Henry got as far as Marseilles, but in a war-induced panic he considered hopping the next ship for America instead, then returned to Paris. Finally, in May 1939, he stored his manuscripts and books and headed south again. This time he made it, and stayed for five months.
Henry Miller would never be the same again.
Greece is a dangerous land for a seeker, a visionary. Miller arrives primed for a revelation, for an epiphany. Not, to be sure, one that has anything to do with Christianity: Delphi, he considers, is the pre-Christian Navel of the World. His approach to it is indirect. He begins with Eleusis, site of the Elusinian Mysteries, traveling “along the Sacred Way, from Daphni to the sea.” It is definitely “not a Christian highway,” he says, “no suffering, no martyrdom, no flagellation…. Everything speaks now, as it did centuries ago, of illumination, of blinding, joyous illumination.” He convinces himself that he is gripped by holy ecstacy, like a Corybant: “I was on the point of madness several times…. running up the hillside only to stop midway, terror-stricken, wondering what had taken possession of me.” The book that emerged from his sojourn in Greece,
The Colossus of Maroussi,
while supposedly a portrait of his new friend George Katsimbalis, is more importantly an account of his own possession by the spirit of Greece. It was a Greece in which the ancient land he intuited blended almost seamlessly with the Greece he experienced. Indeed, his main diatribes were directed against those who wished to change Greece in their own image—Greeks returned from America who sang to him the wonders of Chicago over the “backwardness” of Greece, and the resident English: “An evening with these buttery-mouthed jakes always left me in a suicidal mood,” he raged.
By the time he arrived in Greece, Miller had an underground reputation as a controversial author largely unread because his books could not be published in the English-speaking world. Readers of contraband copies of the two
Tropics
such as George Orwell or Durrell considered him a ground-breaking leader in free expression, one who had advanced honesty of expression beyond the also-banned
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Others, including George Bernard Shaw, branded him a pornographer, one who used “verbatim reports of bad language.” Increasingly, however, Miller thought of himself as a visionary, a mystic, a holy man bent on purging the dross from existence. Looking back over his life from the vantage point of his eighty-fifth year, Miller would write, “It is strange that the countries I most wanted to visit I have never seen—India, Tibet, China, Japan, Iceland. But I have lived with them in my mind.” Miller, after seeing Delphi, could better imagine India, China, Tibet, and
Devachan,
that mythic locus that he would rhapsodize over for most of his life. Earlier he had written, “When I go to Delphi I shall consult my own oracles.” These oracles, internalized, guided the course of his life and writing.
Within days after landing at Piraeus, Henry travels by boat to Corfu and a rendezvous with Larry and Nancy Durrell. They head north to wild Kalami below Mount Pantokrator, where they “baptized themselves anew in the raw” at the isolated shrine of Agios Arsenios, and Henry finds himself adopting an easy amalgam of Christian and pagan Greek attitudes. He is fascinated by the arduous life of the Corfiot peasants, and wants to join the women carrying water from the springs so that he can like them
feel
the ache of muscles, the throb and pulse of stressed arteries. Larry sternly dissuades him: he would lose face with the natives. Then the Greek army is mobilized, and Miller and the Durrells move back and forth between Corfu and Athens. In Athens, Durrell’s great doctor friend Theodore Stephanides takes Larry and Henry to the observatory to view the Pleiades: “Rosicrucian!” exclaims Larry, another visionary.
Of course, the basic text for the impact of Greece on Miller is the
Colossus.
But there is also “First Impressions of Greece,” drafted earlier. Miller had come to Greece with the fantasy that he could give himself a year’s vacation after twenty years of continuous writing and scrambling to get by in Paris, yet writing had become perhaps even more necessary to him than discovery, food, and drink as stimulative to companionship and visions. In fact, it was tied up with all these. At the home of the painter Niko Ghika, with George and Aspasia Katsimbalis and the future Nobel laureate George Seferis, Henry notes: “Ripe, fecundating atmosphere—for conversation, dream, work, leisure, indolence, friendship and everything. Everywhere the ancestral spirit. The whiskey excellent, especially favorable for discussions about Blavatsky and Tibet.” He opens a fresh notebook and writes:
Island of Hydra—11/5/39
The birthplace of the immaculate conception. An island built by a race of artists. Everything miraculously produced out of nothingness. Each house related to the other, as though by an unseen architect. Everything white as snow yet colorful. The whole town is like a dream creation: a dream born out of a rock.
It was to be a dream trip, yet one grounded in reality. Henry gave the notebook to Seferis, inscribed “For his most sensitive majesty, King George Seferis of Smyrna!”
Part of this reality, merging repeatedly into dream, is the voice of Katsimbalis, talking, “a living organ, a voice pealing heavy sonorous notes.” Listening to his evocations, not only of Greece but also of Paris, of Shanghai (which Katsimbalis had never visited), Henry remarks prophetically in “First Impressions,” “I feel as though I may suddenly bifurcate and no longer tell my own story but his.” They are linked together as brothers, Henry claims, “handcuffed for eternity.” Together they visit many of the stupendous places of classical antiquity. Henry tries to see everything in human terms: “Epidaurus is merely a place symbol: the real place is in the heart.” His is a human-centered universe; mankind’s antagonists lie within himself: “the enemy of man is not germs, but man himself, his pride, his prejudices, his stupidity, his arrogance.” In fact, “every war is a defeat to the human spirit.” They explore Agamemnon’s Mycenae, where Henry refuses to descend with Katsimbalis the “slippery staircase” to Erebus, the claustrophobic descent into the deep cistern that kept Mycenae alive during sieges. Miller has flinched, and Part I of
Colossus
ends at Mycenae.
In Part II Henry flies alone to Crete with the purpose of seeing Knossos (“Knossus,” in his spelling). His experience of Crete seems oddly disembodied: it might as well have been entitled Forty Days in the Wilderness. It is a digression on the path to Delphi. There are no revelations. The eponymous Colossus is absent. So is, for Henry, that vivid spirit which he found everywhere in mainland Greece and its close-lying islands.
Life seems to begin again when Miller returns to Athens, and in Part III the spirit of the first part is reborn. Katsimbalis meets him every day for an enthralling lunch that blends into dinner. Finally, Pericles Byzantis, Ghika’s friend, offers accommodation at a new government pavilion for foreign students at Delphi. “It was decided,” Henry writes impersonally, as if he had surrendered all personal initiative, that Ghika and Byzantis would take him to Delphi. Katsimbalis would meet them there.
Henry records the trip faithfully. They ride in a “beautiful” Packard; stop at the Thebes museum; as the plain of Thebes rolls past and facing rearward over the front seat, Ghika recounts at length the dream of death and transfiguration that he had experienced the night before; they pause for lunch at Levadia; Ghika gets out to vomit at Arachova (perhaps seeing Greece in receding frames while facing backwards has unsettled his stomach). “From Arachova to the outer precincts of Delphi the earth presents one continuously sublime, dramatic spectacle. Imagine a bubbling cauldron into which a fearless band of men descend to spread a magic carpet. Imagine this carpet to be composed of the most ingenious patterns and the most variegated hues. Imagine that men have been at this task for several thousand years….” Miller spends half a page creating a fantastic picture of color and subtlety. “Finally, in a state of dazed, drunken, battered stupefaction you come upon Delphi.” Through the “twilight mist” Delphi appears “even more sublime and awe-inspiring than I had imagined it to be.” They find Katsimbalis, have a “scanty meal,” generously supplemented with wine and cognac, that Henry enjoys “immensely,” being “in the mood to talk”—he confides this as though it were an unusual state for him. With Delphi outside the windows, what does he discourse on? Kansas! And how empty and monotonous it is. His companions are astounded, but for Henry this is a mere subliminal image, the equivalent of an artist applying a turpentine-diluted wash to a canvas before attempting a masterpiece.
After a night of fierce rains, “It was now time to inspect the ruins, extract the last oracular juices from the extinct navel…. the splintered treasuries of the gods, the ruined temples, the fallen columns…. Suddenly, as we stood there silently and reverently, Katsimbalis strode to the center of the bowl and holding his arms aloft delivered the closing lines of the last oracle.” Miller does not say which “last oracle” this might be, but surely he had in mind the response, by tradition the last response ever vouchsafed by the Pythia, given to Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century Roman emperor attempting to revive classical Greek culture:
Tell to the king that the carven hall is fallen in decay;
Apollo has no chapel left, no prophesying bay,
No talking spring. The stream is dry that had so much to say.
Apollo is dead. The time to revive Greek culture has passed. Henry tries to thrust this deadly conclusion away: “For a second, so it seemed, the curtain had been lifted on a world which had never really perished but which had rolled away like a cloud and was preserving itself intact, inviolate, until the day when, restored to his senses, man would summon it back to life again.” Miller applies this oracular voice to his own predicament, as a drifter in the immense tragedy sweeping a world at war. Henry’s optimism is incurable, however. “I recalled other oracular utterances I had heard in Paris, in which the present war, horrible as it is, was represented as but an item in the long catalogue of impending disasters and reversals, and I remembered the sceptical way in which these utterances were received.” Henry prefers a longer view. “Victory and defeat are meaningless in the light of the wheel which relentlessly revolves. We are moving into a new latitude of the soul, and a thousand years hence men will wonder at our blindness, our torpor, our supine acquiescence to an order which was doomed.”
Miller, Ghika, and Katsimbalis drink from the sacred Castellian Spring, and Henry sees his presence at Delphi as part of a fated Plan, a continuum that has led him from 1923 to this moment. His friend Nick at the Orpheum Dance Palace on Broadway had been born near Delphi, and through his “terpsichorean instrumentations” Henry had met June who became his wife; without her goading and inspiration he would never have become a writer, nor left America, nor met Betty Ryan or Durrell, who propelled him to Greece and into the company of Seferis, Ghika, and Katsimbalis—and so on to Delphi.
Now a world at war threatened to disrupt his writing career. Very well, he would turn his back on that world, a world that had refused to heed him: some years earlier Henry had held on to a fantasy that if he could spend an hour talking to Hitler, make him laugh, the then-approaching conflict could be avoided. Miller had stayed at the Villa Seurat, talking, and never pressed for his audience with Der Führer. While at Delphi Miller, his passport stamped “Invalidated” a few days earlier, was awaiting passage on the next boat to leave Piraeus for New York.
Henry and his party visit the museum: the colossal Theban
kouros
statues, “which have never ceased to haunt me,” and especially significant for Henry, the beautiful youth Antinous, “last of the gods,” evocative of “the eternal duality of man.” He continues, “Nothing could better convey the transition from light to darkness, from the pagan to the Christian conception of life, than this enigmatic figure of the last god on earth who flung himself into the Nile. By emphasizing the soulful quality of man Christianity succeeded only in disembodying man; as angel the sexes fuse into the sublime spiritual being which man essentially is. The Greeks, on the other hand, gave body to everything, thereby incarnating the spirit and eternalizing it.”
Then, suddenly, impulsively, as if in panic, Henry wants to return to Athens. He had been in Delphi only two nights and one full day, and was expected to stay several days in all. After Katsimbalis and Ghika return with him to Athens, Henry decides that it was a premonition of the arrival of funds, and the presence of a ship that would take him to America in ten days, that had led to his desire to return, but these were quite clearly just excuses made up to cover his “imperious desire” to leave Delphi, and his rudeness to Byzantis. No, he did not wish to give time for disillusionment to set in. Delphi must be perfect
in his imagination.
Then he can preserve its idealized image intact.
Like the final situation of the travelers in E. M. Forster’s masterful short story, “The Road from Colonus”—the aged protagonist is dragged away, disappointed, from the caravansary, missing the revelation that he is sure would have been vouchsafed him had he stayed—everything that happens to Henry in Greece after Delphi partakes of anticlimax. He makes a final brief circuit with the Durrells, this time getting halfway down to the Mycenean cistern before panic sends him once again back to the surface. He might have been called the Orpheus of Brooklyn, but Henry was no Orpheus: the Underworld was not for him. He was a man of light. He and the Durrells spend a miserable Christmas in Sparta: “To me at least,” Henry writes, “it was really beginning to look like Christmas—that is to say, sour, moth-eaten, bilious, crapulous, worm-eaten, mildewed, imbecilic, pusillanimous and completely gaga.” Unlike Forster’s protagonist, however, Henry comes away rich in experience and realization.