The Colossus of Maroussi

by Miller, Henry

  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 E
rectheum. 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.

  Anyhow, Renoir apart, there was something in this woman’s smile which the sight of the young girl at the base of the Acropolis revived. I said it was the nearest approximation to that enigmatic quality engraved in the countenance of the girl with the reddish gold hair. By that, paradoxical though it may sound, I mean that it was wholly antipodal. The monster might well have been the one to give birth to that startling figure of beauty; she might because in her starved dream of love her embrace had spanned a void beyond the imagination of the most desperately lovelorn woman. All her powers of seduction had been driven back into the coffin of sex where, in the darkness of her loins, passion and desire burned to a thick smoke. Disclaiming all hope of seducing man her lust had turned towards forbidden objects of desire—towards the animals of the field, towards inanimate things, towards objects of veneration, towards mythological deities. Her smile had in it something of the intoxication of parched earth after a sudden and furious downpour; it was the smile of the insatiable one to whom a thousand burning kisses are only the incentive to renewed assaults. In some strange and inexplicable fashion she has remained in my memory as the symbol of that hunger for unbounded love which I sensed in a lesser degree in all Greek women. It is almost the symbol of Greece itself, this unappeasable lust for beauty, passion, love.

  For twenty years it had been my dream to visit Knossus. I never realized how simple it would be to make the journey. In Greece you have only to announce to someone that you intend to visit a certain place and presto! in a few moments there is a carriage waiting for you at the door. This time it turned out to be an aeroplane. Seferiades had decided that I should ride in pomp. It was a poetic gesture and I accepted it like a poet.

  I had never been in a plane before and I probably will never go up again. I felt foolish sitting in the sky with hands folded; the man beside me was reading a newspaper, apparently oblivious of the clouds that brushed the windowpanes. We were probably making a hundred miles an hour, but since we passed nothing but clouds I had the impression of not moving. In short, it was unrelievedly dull and pointless. I was sorry that I had not booked passage on the good ship Acropolis which was to touch at Crete shortly. Man is made to walk the earth and sail the seas; the conquest of the air is reserved for a later stage of his evolution, when he will have sprouted real wings and assumed the form of the angel which he is in essence. Mechanical devices have nothing to do with man’s real nature—they are merely traps which Death has baited for him.

  We came down at the seaport of Herakleion, one of the principal towns of Crete. The main street is almost a ringer for a movie still in a third-rate Western picture. I found a room quickly in one of the two hotels and set out to look for a restaurant. A gendarme, whom I accosted, took me by the arm and graciously escorted me to a modest place near the public fountain. The meal was bad but I was now within reach of Knossus and too excited to be disturbed about such a trifle. After lunch I went across the street to a café and had a Turkish coffee. Two Germans who had arrived by the same plane were discussing the lecture on Wagner which they were to give that evening; they seemed to be fatuously unaware that they had come with their musical poison to the birthplace of Venizelos. I left to take a quick stroll through the town. A few doors away, in a converted mosque, a cinema announced the coming of Laurel and Hardy. The children who were clustered about the billboards were evidently as enthusiastic about these clowns as the children of Dubuque or Kenosha might he. I believe th
e cinema was called “The Minoan.” I wondered vaguely if there would be a cinema at Knossus too, announcing perhaps the coming of the Marx Brothers.