Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  (And suddenly, setting all this nit-picking to rout—it is really an appeal for some more changes in the final canon—here comes Ezra Pound, bloodshot and furious, with a harem of dishevelled Muses waving Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and rasping, hissing and spitting out his own translation like a lunatic and monomaniac sheriff:

  What’s that screwball? Jus’lis’en a bit . . . slug, grunt and groan . . . I let out a shriek and WHIZZ! . . . [fifes, kettledrums, oboes] . . . Arf a mo,’ Ma’am . . . Let’s put him to bed on the Q.T. . . .THUNDER of God! By the black vale of Oeta, don’t weasel to me . . . hell’s full of good talkers . . . Some local bloke? . . . Blast it! . . . Tune up, you there . . . [flutes, clarinets, grosse caisse] . . . Ezakly! Thazza good start. C’est très beau. Give! [low’ cellos, contrabassi, muffled drums in gaps between the phrases . . .]

  Amazingly, it works, and leaves my case seriously battered. Best to chuck it and move on.)

  The bare thoughts, then, remain. ‘When it was a matter of wonder,’ records Landor, ‘how Keats, who was ignorant of Greek, could have written his Hyperion, Shelley, whom envy never touched, gave as a reason “Because he was a Greek.’” Of course this applies a fortiori to Cavafy, but it is not the truism it might seem. The leaf-fringed Flaxman-Lemprière world of Keats—the Titans, Saturn, the still citadels poised above the nymphs and the harvesters and daybreak slanting across a landscape of Claude—was much farther from Cavafy’s chosen field than the English poet’s. He knew all about it, of course, and revered it, but the former Greek world of which he is an honorary citizen in the Landor sense is never Olympus or Arcady and seldom Troy or the shining classical noonday of the famous city states—except for Athens and Sparta, and then only when they are in trouble or decay, or longed-for from exile—but towns and cities where the Greek genius burst into more abstruse and opulent bloom; and it is there that Cavafy, flying back through time, slips disguised into the crowd and goes native.

  The end of Athens at the battle of Chaeronea used to be the signal for Greek scholars to put back their books with a Milton quotation and a sigh. It was closing time. They forgot that Philip’s dishonest victory opened another lustrous age across the water; of course, a more garish one, a shade second-rate and not to be mentioned in the same breath as the fled wonders. But when the victor’s son, with all the East at heel, had led the defeated Greeks to Bactria and the Indies, who could blame their descendants for a certain vainglory? Alexander had founded cities as others throw coins; the language was universal; marble acanthus leaves opened in thousands above the dunes. Letters, poetry, all the arts and all the pleasures throve in the half-Oriental afternoon of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The gods of Olympus were joining hands with Osiris and Astarte and Baal. A flash, but only a flash, might reveal Apollo and Pan in the same cave as Krishna; and, for centuries, a Phidian twirl marked the Buddhas of Central Asia. No wonder the citizens of the new kingdoms yielded to every temptation: they were irresistible, it seemed. Why, in Seleucia, even one of the Immortal Gods could be seen hastening through the arcades at nightfall, bound for those lawless delights. One might have guessed.

  In an essay comparing T. S. Eliot and Cavafy in the manner of Plutarch, Seferis supplies precious clues to the stratagems of his recondite and retiring compatriot. Adroitly and explicitly, Eliot glides into the confidence of his hypocrite lecteur by installing insidious, half-mocking Baudelairean feelings of brotherhood and similarity inside his defences. Cavafy is more devious. We find ourselves, without knowing by what hidden process—unless the poet (spectacled, inscrutable and apparently ‘absolutely motionless’) has advanced on us between poems by unseen grandmother’s steps—promoted from outsiders to accomplices. The tribal feelings which sustain great poets are complicated among Greeks by an immensely long history, by rueful pride in early glories and memories of disaster and eclipse. They haunted Cavafy; they had nothing to do with nationalism in any boastful shape; very often his poems unfold in settings of decline, humiliation and the threat of servitude.

  But the blame is laid on no outside enemy; only on the victims themselves. ‘No villain need be: passions spin the plot’; they are brought low by their own failings: arrogance, mockery, shallow cynicism, infirmity of purpose, spirit of faction; by the lack, when they were needed most, of mettle, wisdom and probity. What could be deeper in irony and dark humour than citizens aghast with consternation when the barbarians fail to invade them on cue? (A Gordian slash might solve all! Or could it be blunted with flattery?) Again and again, without warning, in retrospective Proteus-like avatars, Cavafy abandons his own meditative tone to whisper dread, or to bandy jeers, to speak in lamentation or in boastful, angry or suppliant voices, through solitary masks of the past. The hypocritical reader can no longer listen with detachment. Initiated now, and an accessory, he knows he might have succumbed to the very weaknesses the poet simultaneously censures and condones. Semblable et frère, he shares the guilt.

  Cavafy had a bookworm’s knack for discovering passages in old annals from which poems could germinate. One such find gave rise to a Simonides-like epigram by an Alexandrian ‘in the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyrus’ which exempted from blame the fallen Achaeans whom blundering generals had led to defeat by the Romans in 146 BC; he published it, significantly, in 1922. It was only on reading it for the umpteenth time that it burst on Seferis that the lines were not really meant for 149 BC at all. They were a veiled threnody for the terrible 1922 defeats, for the entire destruction of Hellenism in Asia Minor; they were a cry of protest against defective leadership, an act of piety, and an anodyne. This play with mirrors and time and camouflage, once understood, deepens his poetry with a grim new relevance. Perhaps a prescient appositeness to the flux and erosion of modern times may be one of the hidden reasons for his influence.

  Not Chaeronea, then, at all, but Cynoscephalae and Magnesia and Pydna, the fields where the Hellenistic kingdoms were destroyed by the Romans, and above all, the internecine feuds of the Epigoni themselves, were the defeats which seemed fatal. Here is the end of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the brilliant hero of a score of pitched battles and famous sieges:

  When the Macedonians deserted him

  and showed they preferred Pyrrhos,

  noble King Dimitrios didn’t behave

  - so it is said

  - at all like a king.

  He took off his golden robes,

  threw away his purple buskins,

  and quickly dressing himself

  in simple clothes, he slipped out —

  just like an actor who,

  the play over,

  changes his costume and goes away.

  Admirably conveyed by Keeley and Sherard, this is the true Cavafy note. This is his atmosphere, and it follows him past all the landmarks of decline; until the Romans themselves, half in awe of their philosopher-subjects, half, like Juvenal, disdainful of the graeculi esurientes, began to crumble and fail. Christ outsoared Mithras in the zenith; Julian came and went; the desert pillars were nests for stylites now and zealots and heresiarchs wrangled in the streets. The oracles had long ago fallen silent. When, at last, the Goths destroyed the West, it is worthy of note that, through all the centuries of Byzantine splendour, Cavafy stays silent too. But when omens darken the sky over the City and the corridors fill up with desperate rumours, he finds his voice again. His times are of trouble.

  Living in post-Khedivial Alexandria and born of half-Phanariot descent in Ottoman Constantinople, no one can better assess the blight of subjection to corrupt or barbarous powers or the fears and shifts that precede them. Nourri dans le sérail, il en connaît les détours. He may forgive the triviality and the subterfuge; he blames it too; but the survival of older virtue in the midst of indignity—the demeanour of a hostage queen when Sparta’s glories have long since moulted, the symbolic content, surviving intact when a late emperor is crowned though coloured glass may have replaced all the gems—glimpses like these stir his tragic sense and his pity to their depths. ‘The
beds i’ the East are soft’; indeed; many of the poems, through various voices, extol their softness. But suddenly an utterance in his own reveals a different set of values. An ostracized Athenian—surely Themistocles?—seeks refuge in enemy Persia, and Artaxerxes loads him with gifts. Stifling among satrapies and Oriental splendours, he pines for the frugal rewards of Athens:

  praise from the Demos, and the Sophists,

  that hard-won, that priceless acclaim —

  the Agora, the theatre and the crown of laurel

  — they, not the cloying riches of the Levant, are the only wreaths worth running for. Thoughts like these keep breaking through: the waste of time which imprisons him—or his reader—like an inescapable city; the meaning of the jagged Ithaca at the long Odyssey’s end; the immanent Ephialtes ready to sell the Thermopylae of the spirit. Issued without preamble from an atmosphere of earthly delights, these warnings sound as harsh, for a moment, as the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost. His cast of mind is too diffident, too patrician and civilized for emphasis or apostrophe, but, detached in manner, by corollary almost, and as intermittently as the fragmentary sentences on his imaginary funeral slabs, a severe and didactic message coheres.

  The wisdom and the sad austerity of the emerging figure is a surprising double to set beside the decadent hedonist which many seem to think his distinguishing image. And, as for the hedonism, even back among the Mareotic vapours and the trams and the minarets of the Egypt of Abbas Hilmi and Lord Cromer, his skill with time and myth and reality is such that there is no need to follow his inclinations in order to share their interpretation in poetry. He has the gift of making private memory, passion, loss and valediction, and even the most trivial frailties, seem noble, moving and universal and akin to the ancient grief for Adonis, but with no promise of return.

  Interfering in Greece

  Review of Kevin Andrews, Athens Alive (Athens: Hermes, 1980), The Times Literary Supplement, 13 June 1980

  The writings of Kevin Andrews stand completely on their own and they are neglected at peril by anyone concerned with contemporary Greece. His latest book, however, takes us many centuries back and a quick retrospective glance is needed before we follow him there.

  Sprung from a Henry James-like background in the east of the United States, and at least half English, he was brought up mostly in England. Stoic by education and temperament at the end of schooldays which roughly overlapped with the war, he served in the United States Army and then took up a travelling fellowship awarded for a prize essay on Ancient Greece. ‘I was the only entrant,’ he typically informs us; and this eventually launched him on many recondite travels on foot in search of the great strongholds which the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Venetians and the Turks have scattered about the Peloponnesian sierras. These travels gave birth to his first book, The Castles of the Morea, which remains a classic of scholarship.

  He spent many months among the crenellations and the ravelins; they lengthened into years; and when he was not clambering about the wreckage, tape-measure in hand, he was wandering in the mountains, sleeping on brushwood and spooning up curds with his shepherd friends in caves and on high pastures. Thus classical Greek, thanks to a faultless ear, quickly slid into many varieties of rustic demotic. Airs on the flute, Klephtic songs, with all their modulations and semitones and the neumes of Byzantine plainsong, soon mounted up.

  Cloaked and shaggy, he would suddenly appear in the capital, moving for a while among the Athenians like a blue-eyed scholar gypsy, taking wing again just as suddenly for the scorching Mani, ‘a star one degree closer to the sun’; or for the goatfolds in the Geranian ranges of the Megarid, to which he was linked now by the bonds of godbrotherhood; or for one of the smaller Cyclades; or Mount Olympus.

  This apprenticeship to the mountains coincided with a time of tragic upheaval, especially in the Morea. They were the years when the pendulum of bloodshed, unloosed by fierce doings during the Occupation and kept in motion as much by thirst for revenge as by any political impulse, was in full and pitiless swing. A hint of the ancient panic flickers about Greek scenery. It was not, however, the woodland god that stalked through the mountains now, but the grim giant of Goya’s picture. The towns filled up with frightened villagers in flight from whichever side was prevailing. These bad times have only been depicted, by other writers, with journalists’ sensationalism or blind bias; understandably so, perhaps; all thoughts to rive the heart were there, but not, in this particular case, all in vain . . . What was this young stranger doing in the middle of it all? Of course he was eyed with suspicion, but never for long: good humour, transparent innocence and pure chance made him friends in turn with some of the most ruthless of these mountain figures and with their victims. His notes began to describe more than ivied keeps; another book was taking shape. Hatred of injustice prevented him, in spite of the appalling deeds he records, from any rash placing of original blame; rightly, he wasn’t there when the dragons’ teeth were sown.

  The book ends in America—exile, by now—with the author at pains to find out why so little United States aid reached the stricken regions to which, inevitably, he returned. Intuition, desperate concern, strong literary gifts, poetic flair, a marvellous knack for decanting the Greek vernacular into English—all these skilfully interwoven strands turn The Flight of Ikaros (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959) into one of the great and lasting books about Greece, and it is high time that it was reprinted.

  His next book—and the first about the capital—is dedicated to E. R. Dodds. Lurking on bookstalls in the sheep’s clothing of a guidebook and aimed ostensibly at an American newcomer, Athens (Phoenix House, 1967) appeared after further years of assimilation. Slipping into disguise among the tourists who outnumber the inhabitants in summer—lost herds, unprepared alike for the hangover of the legend and the impact of the reality—he begins with a startling picture of the growing awfulness:

  City of Perikles, home of democracy, nurse of philosophy, birthplace of tragedy, cradle of culture, Boston of Europe, republic of (wasn’t it) Plato—clear or foggy, our conceptions of Athens are the very price-tags of our civilization. Yet what do we find in the place where it all began? A highly active boom-town, but with nothing (it would seem) volcanic either in the jellied relic of the past or in the anonymous concrete waffle solidifying round it as far as the eye can see. No schoolbooks ever prepared us for this sock in the jaw, though I believe it is just the rudeness of the blow that relates most to Athens in its heyday, which fought and ruled, enslaved and banished, enjoyed itself sometimes by horrendous means and told outsiders to advance at their own risk. A description of the place may reflect this aspect of it, so read on at your own risk and look out for falling masonry and rocketing assumptions.

  And, of course, we do read on, identifying ourselves with these hypothetical tourists, while, up on the Parthenon, the stimulating near-misses crash past:

  . . . the yawning entablatures, the long and slightly convex sweep of the architraves—what carries that high, grave, unbroken trajectory of stone . . . Under it in all weathers, by the thousands every day, you, I . . . blobs of coloured clothing, figures no higher than the second level of the drums, with not much in the way of eyeballs perhaps but with the best of viewfinders . . . pass flickering from carpets of unrolled shadow into avenues of light, oblivious to the tumult of the vertical: the great rude naked spiritual rock-borne urgency of all those Doric columns.

  It is a bracing counterblast to the commercialization of the fifth century BC which plucks at the newcomer on every side and it promotes a salutary vacuum in which a truer inkling may take shape. But the pages stray down by ways of thought and history where no guide would ever lead. This brilliant iconoclastic feat disintegrates the past, the present, the tourists, the guides, the Greeks themselves and their history and reassembles them in a way that might fling a conventional reader into apoplexy.

  But the reality of the ruins, re-cohering in cobalt and blo
od-red, studded with metal, gaudy with idols, shiny with spilt honey and blood and reeking with sacrificial smoke, will have replaced the tinted ivory artefacts that had stolen their place and the void between the cutting of the flutes on the columns and the laying of the tramlines begins to fill up with people and events. The reader learns to distrust the cleaned-up, Westernized version of Greece with which the authorities try to palm him off: official folk-dances, for instance, ‘carefully resurrected, costumed in a way we shall never again see in a village, flawlessly executed and dead as mutton’; and, above all, the reduction of the actual Greeks, those ambulant cauldrons of flair, inferiority complex, megalomania, courage, energy, folly and improvisation, into evzone dolls. (Clearly, Kevin Andrews is not one of the settlers here whom love has made blind; shallow Philhellenism, as one might expect, gets it in the neck.) One of the springs of the book is the author’s anger at this doctoring of the facts all for the benefit of gently nurtured and wholly imagined foreigners: ‘We don’t want them to think we’re Mau Mau.’ Translations of the book should be compulsory throughout the Secretariat of Tourism and on the tables of every town-planner, mayor, nomarch and civil engineer in the country; all those in fact, who will only be happy when Greece, from Sunium to the top of Olympus, is safely concreted over.

  Between Athens and Athens Alive his most notable items have been a perceptive essay on his friend Louis MacNeice (mine too; perhaps this is the right moment to say that I have been Kevin Andrews’s friend for over thirty years) and First Will and Testament. This moving poem of about Waste Land length, published as a book in Athens and possibly not well known outside, is written with great poetic force and metrical skill. Autobiographical and topical in an elliptic way, it is a kind of exorcism of anguish and private trouble; and, most importantly, an act of protest and defiance, necessarily veiled, against the Dictatorship, which is when it first saw the light. The author was passionately involved in opposition to this regime, and when it suddenly came to an end he relinquished his American citizenship. So this singular figure, seated at his desk among a turmoil of papers or up since dawn like Hephaistos beating out torques and armlets on the beak of his anvil—and, in spite of his linguistic virtuosity, unmistakably an offshoot of both Atlantic shores—is now legally Greek. As the flow of nationalization is all the other way, this gesture must be almost unique. It calls to mind Henry James becoming English when his adoptive country was in a tight spot. The author is a lifelong votary of the Master.