In the Belle Epoque world of Trelantonis, the children’s treats are loukoumi, what we call Turkish delight, prepared with mastic, and vissinada, a cherry syrup to flavor drinks beloved both in Turkey and in Greece, whose preparation by the daughters is described in one chapter. The boys’ toy soldiers go to war divided into Greeks and Turks, and when the children suffer at the hands of an English governess who tipples and scorns them as Greeks, it is the queen of Greece who, sitting in her garden, sees that the governess is drunk and informs the children’s aunt, while in another adventure, the hero, Antonis, is bitten by the Greek king’s dog, Don.
To an outsider, though, this children’s novel, with its conscious domestic realism, reads like a fantasy of another world. The children in the illustrations look like perfect specimens of European Edwardian childhood, with their sailor suits and straw hats; but at the same time there is a strong undercurrent of hostility between Greece and Europe, expressed by the struggles between the mischievous children and the malicious English governess, Miss Rice. When Miss Rice unfairly brings down a punishment on the children from their aunt, Antonis, the hero, says, “These are the kinds of things these foreigners do, the kinds of lies they tell … and they always do these things!” These handsomely turned out children are also frequently slapped, spanked, and beaten by nearly all the adults, foreign and Greek, and there is something nauseating in the relentless contempt expressed for girl characters by the boy-hero of a novel written by a woman. The girls are drawn as weaklings, prudes, physical and moral inferiors; the one who is most distinguishable from the others is the one who praises Antonis in the end for his incorrigibility, calling him a “little cockerel,” with almost erotic undertones: “I like you,” she says, “because you are unruly and you are a pallikari, a brave, daring boy. You are always making mischief, but you aren’t afraid of any punishment!” Antonis, for his part, orates with depressing frequency about the inferiority of his sisters and of all women, and in a fight with his sisters over which one will keep a beloved Greek servant when they are grown up, says with doctrinal certainty that he will have the privilege because he is a boy, and has first privileges in everything. When Antonis for the first and only time admires a girl, he says, “You are a daring boy yourself, you are a man!” The girl then invokes the names of gallant fighting women of the Greek revolution, and asks Antonis if they too aren’t pallikaria. She poses him a surreal question about the heroines—the sentence reads literally: “And these women weren’t gallant men?”
The world of Trelantonis is fascinating and disorienting, because of the strange encounter it records between Europe and the Orient; here a sailor-suited boy’s idea of a prank is to smoke his uncle’s narghile. The only narghile-smoking character I can conjure up in Western children’s books is Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar; Trelantonis, in Greek children’s literature a work of realism, reads to us more like Through the Looking Glass.
The genre portrait of a Belle Epoque summer in Piraeus does not include another dissonance that disturbed Penelope in her childhood: the resentment of the indigenous Greeks for the omoyeneis, the expatriates of “the same race” who lived and made money outside Greece, who endowed the country with civic institutions, but always lived at a higher standard than the people they were benefitting could afford to do. In the Athens of Penelope’s childhood, there were fields in the city’s center, where the Hotel Grande-Bretagne now stands, and while the “outside” Greeks wore overcoats, the Athenians still wrapped themselves in oriental shawls. “Athenian” has been as malleable a word throughout its history as “Hellene”; in conversations overheard at the family dinner table, “Athenian” and “Plakiotis,” man of Plaka (now the most romanticized, “old quarter” section of the city), conjured up covetous, jealous, hard-luck cases, ill-fated and cursed, whereas omoyeneis, expatriate, had nuances of cultured, patrician, polite. As a married woman living in an Athens utterly, unrecognizably different from the Athens of her occasional childhood visits, she remembered a bitter dialogue between an Athenian woman and a street flower seller, in which the woman coarsely drove the peddler away, seeming to almost hate the roses offered, for the pain their beauty and perfume gave her. At the Benaki dinner table, she winced hearing relatives saying they loved the Greek landscape but not the Greeks, and later, she recorded a remark of her grown brother’s, “If I weren’t a Greek, I would be a Greek-hater,” a feeling she strove to repress in herself and in others. She puzzled over the causes of the split Greek character, wondering why the same people could be both heroes and deserters, as she put it.
But for all the ambiguity of the expatriate Greeks’ relations with their own countrymen, with other foreign colonials, and with the local populations of the places where they did business, the most unstable, ambiguous, and dangerous environment Penelope ever knew was her parents’ home, where public dignity, power, honor, and lavish philanthropy coexisted with intimate cruelty and despotism. Penelope characterized child rearing in her day as strict, merciless, without developmental education, caresses, love, an upbringing based on terror and reverence, whose key phrase was etsi prepei, this is how things must be. She described her household not as a dual monarchy but a dual tyranny: her mother beautiful and unapproachable, her father “straight as a column,” with thick frowning brows, “two deities.” It was a household in which disobedience, complaint, and even terror itself were not tolerated.
Penelope was afraid of the grotesque shadows the lamplight threw on the bedroom wall at night, but she never permitted herself to call out, or even confessed the fear, because she was afraid her father would hear about it, and find some way to express his contempt for her, or punish her. Her father seemed to her the archetype of the pallikari: “Fearless, inflexible, implacable, untameable, big, muscular, proud, handsome, he represented for us all the beauty of virility. Whatever my father wanted, that was what happened. It never entered the head of anyone to resist him or speak back to him.” Penelope remembered how once at the lunch table her father berated her for biting her nails and called her to him, brandishing the carving knife and threatening to cut her finger off. She was so terrified that she couldn’t move when he told her to sit down again. She did not remember him whipping her with a horsewhip for the same habit, but her mother described it to her when she was older. When he entered the house, silence fell, and the main meal was served on his arrival at any hour. The children had to wait, no matter how hungry they were, or leave their lessons, no matter how preoccupied they were—her father himself suggested to her mother that the children eat dinner with her earlier, but she insisted that they eat with the head of the house, the source of their food. When a European governess, frustrated by the disruptions the moveable dinner hour caused, criticized the arrangement, Penelope was partly grateful for the sympathy she craved for her hunger headaches, but also disapproving of what she felt to be presumption, even a quality of blasphemy in the criticism. Her father, she wrote, was something like a cult, a religion for her … “I cried horribly on his account. I cried all my life. He dominated me always and tyrannized over me, knowingly and unknowingly … and nevertheless he remained,” she said, the great overarching love of her life.
Throughout her life, she continued to demonstrate this religious devotion to charismatic leaders like General Nikolas Plastiras, and above all, Eleftherios Venizelos, her father’s own candidate and political colleague and the most famous prime minister of modern Greece. It was as if she found a way to assent to her father’s treatment of her, and to submerge her own impermissible criticisms by idealizing masculinity, in a sense participating in this charismatic power as a sacrifice to it—if she was going to be crucified, at least her torment would be at the hand of God the Father, in whose divinity she would share. And above all, she resolutely idealized Greece, and found a way through patriotism to craft a career in a culture which barred women from any work not ultimately in the service of a father or a husband—in Greece Penelope ingeniously found a father to work for, and a way to
justify her work. If her books were created in the service of patriotism, then in a sense her work was a sacrifice, and therefore not an act of independence. Greece was a father that she could love and serve unreservedly and uncritically—the problem of painful criticism was resolved, as in her steely, heartfelt, charming, and oddly tragic political allegory for children, Fairy Tale Without a Name, in which a young prince, through leadership, and his sister, through service, set out to restore the lost perfection of their kingdom, now corrupt and degraded. The degraded condition of the kingdom is temporary, a momentary episode between a past perfection and a future restoration, and so cannot have its roots in the kingdom itself, since corruption would hardly have evolved from such perfection. The faint strain of tragedy comes through the evocation of the lost ideal, the nothingness of lost perfection which makes a nothingness of the future, a hopeless cycle in which an unattainable and unreal goodness is sought and never regained. Penelope is stymied in this book by the common problem of presenting goodness as ideal perfection, not as something living, complex, intricately, integrally, vitally connected to many qualities that are not good. And when good is seen only as an ideal quality, confused with the perfect, then evil is viewed only as a horrible flaw, a cyclical aberration, not a development that occurs in relation to other things. Critical thinking, vigilant revision, profound and lasting change, become impossible. If goodness is idealized, evil can only be repented.
Penelope’s mother was as domineering as her father, a woman whose repressed fury at her own condition seems to have been vented on her household, her only realm of power, since she was utterly subject to her husband, who even read her letters as a matter of course, as later Penelope’s husband read her correspondence—a practice Penelope wondered at only in retrospect. Poorly educated, almost pathologically without empathy, seethingly angry, but commandingly wealthy, emotionally and intellectually deprived, but materially spoiled, as a woman, abased, but as a wealthy wife, arrogant, vengeful, and self-important, Penelope’s mother ruled her household with slaps, beatings, and constant vicious criticism. She was like a corrupt regional overlord, ruling her territory in the name of an absent but all-powerful sultan. She was gentle with her children only in one of her rare good moods, or when they were sick, and for the child Penelope, the “ne plus ultra of life’s beauty” was a sentimental engraving she saw in an illustrated English magazine that showed a mother kneeling on a lawn and tenderly embracing a child, with the caption “My darling is better.” Early in her childhood, Penelope was possessed with the idea of suicide, the image of which was always mingled with the imagining of her mother’s tears, of feeling valued and loved. The thought of suicide, she reflected later, from early childhood, had never ceased to live within her. As an adult, Penelope spent substantial time in German spas seeking cures for undiagnosable ailments, cramps, and exhaustion.
Penelope imitated her mother in games with her toddler brother in which she would alternately tease him and comfort him, baiting him even as she caressed him, and becoming even more enraged as he cried. Siblings often have distinctly, and even completely, different upbringings, depending on their parents’ ambitions, fantasies, and responses to them, and of the five surviving Benaki children (one had died in infancy), Penelope seems to have been singled out for the most brutal treatment—her father seemed to see her as a competitor, and steadily undercut her intellectual gifts, telling her that with her mind she ought to have been born a boy, conveying to her that a woman’s talents only emphasized her inferiority, while her mother seemed to bitterly resent any possibility that Penelope had capacities she did not, and might not share her own fate, jealous of any interest of Penelope’s that she herself did not understand. As Penelope became more and more absorbed by reading and writing, her mother increased her household duties, so that when she was not having lessons she was nearly always occupied with sewing and other housework. Her mother hated her reading and if she discovered Penelope with a book, she would invent an errand, saying, “Stop your reading, I don’t intend to make a philosopher of you …”
Penelope had thoughts and emotions and capacities that, if not destroyed or damaged, might enable her to escape from the loveless web of the Benaki family, and it seemed they could not endure their own lives if there was a richer hope in hers. If they could force her life to resemble theirs, then the pain of their own disappointments could be contained. Her misery would make their own seem justified, not a matter of choice, or of blind chance, but inevitable, the condition of life itself.
Her situation was, too, an example of the ironic social circularity that makes the lives of rich and poor abused children mirror each other, both classes of children equally vulnerable. The maltreated children of the poor are unprotected partly because of the difficulty of marshaling the human and financial resources to monitor and rescue them; the maltreated children of the rich are unprotected because their parents control those financial resources, surrounded by people they employ directly or indirectly, or colleagues with whom they are doing business, who are unlikely to risk their livelihoods and financial and social alliances by interfering.
One particular incident, with its atmosphere of almost luxurious brutality and voluptuous violence, marked Penelope throughout her life, and the memory of it brought tears to her eyes even as an adult. One day, Penelope, aged seven or so, simply couldn’t stomach her French lesson, and declared a private holiday, drawing horses in her notebook. The next morning when the teacher asked for her homework, Penelope showed her the page with the cartoons, and told her that she didn’t have the lesson prepared and didn’t know who had drawn horses on the clean paper. She was sent into her mother’s bedroom, where her mother, wearing a white peignoir with open sleeves that left her arms bare, asked her daughter who had ruined her notebook. Penelope said she didn’t know, and her mother called her over to the bedside. Then, Penelope remembered, “The arms of my mother, white and powerful, fell on me like mallets …,” her mother striking her child’s head, shoulders, back, chest, face with unappeasable rage. Penelope screamed and fell backward, and her mother continued to beat her, wherever the blows fell. A maid restrained the mother, holding back her “white, naked” arms, shouting that she would kill the child. The floor under Penelope was soaked with the little girl’s urine; her mother noticed, stopped beating her, and ordered the maid, “Bring a mop.” Penelope, hysterical with fear, rage, and shame, was taken from the room by the maid, and later that day was set again to her lessons, shut up in the schoolroom by herself. Her mother swept in, carrying Penelope’s baby sister, and told Penelope that if her lessons weren’t neatly written she would beat her again. Then she cuddled the baby, and said to the child in her arms, “Look out yourself that you don’t grow up evil like that one.” The incident was never mentioned again, although in Penelope it lived forever, intact, undiminished, inexhaustible, as love is supposed to be. Reading her English storybooks, Penelope wondered why it was only in books that mothers loved their children, and not in life.
When Penelope became a marriageable teenager, she began to participate in the highly chaperoned exhibitions at dances and opera evenings that were a prospective bride’s work. Her older sister had been married to the son of an English partner of her father’s, and under this system, a groom’s potential as an administrator of the family business was perhaps his most important feature—his marriage to the bride was almost incidental, his marriage to her father was crucial. In addition, Penelope’s maturity coincided with her father’s developing political ambitions, so that a Greek groom would be important.
The Alexandrian community’s courtships were conducted at family dinners, at the theater, at carnival and Easter dances. Young men from Greece and Constantinople as well as from Alexandria would be present, the boys’ choices no freer than the girls’, threatened with the loss of inheritances and career prospects if they differed from their parents’ selection.
Negotiating the intricate social fissures of being Greek, the young c
ouples courted each other in foreign languages, particularly English and French, and the fragments of such courtships recorded in diaries of the period like Penelope’s give the impression that in this world of repressed sexuality, moving from language to language was itself an erotic experience, full of momentary revelations, glimpses of sudden unpredictable nakedness, charged secret vocabularies. They danced European dances, to fashionable new tunes like the “Carmen Sylva Waltz,” named for the Queen of Rumania. There were no waltzes in their own country. The dances of Greece explore, most often in circular patterns, the expression of community, or of continuity between generations—they also, in men’s solos, examine the nature of individuality, through improvisation and mesmerizing feats of movement, performed in relation to uniformly moving background dancers. But this dance-loving people’s imagination of partnered dance, of the gestures a man and woman make in a conversation of motion together, face-to-face, of physical dialogue, is among the poorest in the world. In Greek discotheques, the couple dances are necessarily foreign ones, and when I left Greece briefly for the States and went with a friend to a Latin dance club, I was shocked to remember the wit, invention, erotic courage, reflection on the relation between passion and ethics, the burnished philosophical sensuality of those dances with partners. In Alexandria, in 1894, the year Penelope fell in love with a young man called Mavrocordatos, the girls wore dance cards which hung from their waists, along with lace fans, and the boys would approach, asking to sign for a particular number on the card. Neither partner could know each other well before marriage, so the courtship was managed through glances, waltzes, and code. Suitors proposed and were rejected in the interval between numbers; large questions about someone’s ambitions and personal ethics were posed and answered on the way into the dining room for refreshments. Penelope described herself as proper to the point of priggishness, discouraging even lighthearted compliments, determined to behave correctly. She wanted both a husband she could care for and a son-in-law who would fulfill her father’s desires. When a matchmaker approached her independently on behalf of a suitor, she answered that her father must be contacted instead, because she would only reply to such proposals through him. But for all her perfect decorum, what she longed for was a marriage of mutual love, a longing made more acute by a joyless childhood. When her mother discussed with her the possibility of living somewhere less appealing than Alexandria after her marriage, Penelope said she dreamed only of being devoted to someone, of making her husband happy. “Permit me to take a husband who I will like!” she begged. “I will be so miserable if I don’t marry out of love.” Her mother was so moved by Penelope’s passionate sincerity that, in one of her caprices, she kissed her, and promised that Penelope would not be pressured when she came to make a choice.
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