Villa Ariadne
Page 30
The Heraion rewarded Payne with four seasons of digging and in the second year, 1931, Powell joined her husband and his team for the summer session. While he and his colleague Alan Blakeway, along with a host of workers from the local village, worked long hours on the site, she set up her ‘office’ on the headland and kept up with her writing. She describes the village women riding down to the site ‘to look at the English’, and particularly at her as she tapped away at a typewriter in the middle of the camp. At the end of the season she describes the journey back to Athens with the archaeologists, which took them by caique through the Corinth Canal and across the Saronic Gulf to Piraeus.
Payne’s reports from these years describe a constant stream of discoveries at Perachora, while also making it clear that his fellow archaeologists were equally busy and successful in all corners of Greece. The Americans removed an entire neighbourhood under the Acropolis in order to start digging the ancient Agora. Evans’ success at Knossos continued with his unearthing of the ‘Temple Tomb’, which Payne describes as ‘the most remarkable discovery at Knossos since the finding of the Palace.’ In Olympia William Dorpfeld studied the temple of Hera; in Troy the American Carl Blegen, already famous for his work on Mycenaean Pylos, was busy stratifying Heinrich Schliemann’s 19th-century excavations. In addition many of the smaller sites were being explored for the first time: Dodona, the oracle of Zeus in Epiros, had thrown up scores of curse tablets; Winifred Lamb was making important discoveries in Chios; the Germans under Kubler were, in 1933, ‘even more successful than last year’ in the ancient Athenian cemetery at Kerameikos. The Greeks too were beginning to play a bigger role in the archaeology of their country, with Anastasios Orlandos having a particularly high profile in these years, running digs in Sikyon, Pellene and Mycenaean Malthi.
It seemed, from Powell’s point of view at least, that her husband was right at the centre of things: ‘the romantic success of the Heraion excavations, Payne’s learning and brilliance, his blond charm, combined to make him a figure in Greece. The school was regarded with new respect by the Greeks, by the other schools, even by the British colony.’ His charm and air of learning come across clearly in the photographs of the time, which show a man slightly stooping, with a diffident smile and often wearing a scarf instead of a belt to keep up his implausibly long trousers.
In April 1936 Payne and Powell visited Mycenae for Easter. They stayed at the Belle Helene Inn, which had been a dig-house for Schliemann and was a home-from-home for them as it was for many archaeologists. Sitting on the terrace on their last evening they discussed the idea that they might settle near Mycenae rather than ever returning to England and looked forward to digging again at Perachora in the summer. But neither short- nor long-term plans were to come to fruition. Back in Athens over the next two weeks, Payne complained of uncharacteristic tiredness and an aching knee. The aching got worse and he was eventually diagnosed with blood-poisoning and admitted to Evangelismos hospital. There he died a week later on May 9th. He was buried at the church of Agios Georgios in Mycenae, where his grave is still tended by the villagers to this day.
Powell’s future had been snatched away from her without warning and the focus of her life now returned, by necessity, to London. In 1939 she was appointed the film critic of the Sunday Times, succeeding someone who ‘didn’t know the difference between a film and a sponge’. She soon established herself as a well-respected critic, whose reviews were honest but sympathetic. She shared a pre-eminent position with C.A. Lejeune, also a woman, at the Observer and for a while had Graham Greene as a colleague over at The Spectator. While supporting and encouraging much of the new cinema which appeared from the late 50s onwards, she always had a particular admiration for the western, saying that she regarded ‘movement against a background as the basis of cinema’. In 1943 she married Leonard Russell, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, a marriage which was to last until his death in 1974.
However, for many years her Greek past continued to live inside her and she made frequent visits to the country, first as a grieving widow and later as a lone explorer. She made pilgrimages to Perachora twice before war broke out and then travelled more widely in its aftermath. In 1941 Remember Greece was published; part history, part travelogue, it attempts to explain and promote Greece to her compatriots at the moment that the country fell under the Germans. This was followed in 1943 by The Traveller’s Journey is Done, a third person account of her life with Humfry Payne, and in 1958 by An Affair of the Heart. In this she reviews her relationship with Greece since Payne’s death, concluding with an account of her visit to Chios in the 1950s as a journalist. Here she met Michael Ventris, recently famous for his deciphering of the early Greek script known as Linear B, which had been discovered by her friend Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos many years earlier. So Powell had, in the course of her long ‘affair’ with Greece, witnessed an entire cycle of archaeological discovery and interpretation, from the romance and ambition of the pioneers to the more considered, scientific achievements of their post-war successors. But it was always the country which really held her attention, and in these four meditations on her early life, behind and around the vivid portraits of the archaeologists, she has left us with an affectionate, insightful and timeless account of Greece and the Greeks.
Rupert Smith
Wiltshire
2015
61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL
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Copyright
First published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1975
First published by Eland Publishing Limited
61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 2016
This ebook edition first published in 2016
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1973 R. R. and C. (Authors) Ltd
The right of Dilys Powell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–78060–081–9
Cover Image: Sir Arthur Evan among the Ruins of the Palace of Knossos, 1907, by Sir William Blake Richmond
(1842–1921)/Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, UK/Bridgeman Images
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