The success of our search had sent our spirits soaring. Missolonghi, as we settled by the weary palm trees, acquired an unwonted aspect of hope and charm; it was a twinkling world of lights under a fading Tiepolo sky. I settled down at once to write an account of our find to my publisher John Murray (namesake and great-grandson of Byron’s friend and publisher). I enclosed the sketches and tracings, and promised to send the photographs as soon as they were developed. I also asked him to compare them with the Byron footwear in his possession—his building is an Aladdin’s cave of relics of the poet—and to consult other friends and experts, especially Sir Harold Nicolson and Peter Quennell. Then I wrote the bad and the good news to Crabbet.[6]
I wish that I had just re-read, as I did before beginning these pages, Harold Nicolson’s Byron: The Last Journey.[7] I would have discovered much to my purpose. For the author, preparing his book in the early twenties by a scholarly visit to Missolonghi, had made friends with a Mr. Aramandios Soustas, the headmaster of the municipal school in Missolonghi and a living repository of information about the poet’s last days. How had I neglected asking the local schoolmasters—even if they were no longer the same? They are usually my first resort in such cases, and seldom vain ones: “Mr Soustas,” writes Sir Harold, “was a friend of Costa Ghazis, the nonagenarian boatman, who, when a lad, had almost daily ferried Byron across the lagoon to where the horses waited by the olive grove; and Ghazis, before his death, had carefully and repeatedly recounted to Mr. Soustas...how Byron would always sing strange Western songs[8] as they punted back together in the evening, and how on the last day that he had thus conveyed the general, the latter had sat silent and shivering in the stern....” I would have read that Byron and Count Gamba, on their last ride, were overtaken by a storm; when they joined Ghazis and his canoe, they were soaked with rain and sweat; as they slowly punted home across the lagoon in the downpour the ominous shivering fit set in...the rest we know. The appendix would have told me that Costa Ghazis died in 1890.
Now our late host had said that the recipient of the shoes was called Yanni Kazis, and that it was duck-shooting that had drawn Lord Byron into the lagoon in his boat, whereas riding and swimming and shooting at bottles were, by then, Byron’s only sporting recreations; an easy mistake. Ioannis and Constantine are the commonest Christian names in Greece; shortened to Yanni and Costa, they are the equivalent to Tom and Dick, and as easily confused. Finally, Kazis and Ghazis: in certain Greek mouths, K and G can be almost indistinguishable. Costa Ghazis and Yanni Kazis are plainly the same man. Our host’s boatman and his far-wandering daughter stand forth from the shadows and the shoes themselves step lightly into authenticity.
Why, we wondered, over our mullets under the seedy palm trees, should the tracing of these unimportant mementoes fill us with such keen pleasure and excitement? The answer is that nothing to do with Byron, even a pair of shoes, is wholly without interest.
He monopolized our thoughts and our conversation all through the second can of retsina that a neighbouring tableful of Missolonghiots had sent us. On the fringe of this archipelago of tables, three old men from the hills had for some time been singing a klephtic song that I have always loved in honour of Marko Botsaris, the great leader of Western Greece in the War of Independence. Byron just failed to meet him: he was shot through the head in an attack on the Turks at Karpenisi a few hours after writing to the poet. (Byron took many of his kilted Souliots into his service and a difficult handful they proved.) It was exactly the kind of long-drawn-out and wailing song in a minor key, whose waverings, in the mouths of his Souliot retinue, bewildered and irritated Byron’s western acquaintances. To those fastidious ears, but not to Byron’s, they sounded the extremity of barbarism....No wonder we should be speaking of him; Byronic landmarks had scattered our journey through north-western Greece like the clues in a treasure hunt: Yanina, Dodona, the defiles of the Pindus, Zitza monastery, the Acheron, Souli, Parga, the Acherousian Plain, Cephalonia, Preveza, the Ambracian Gulf, Acarnania and at last, Aetolia, where, a bare fifteen years after his first wanderings, his travels stopped for good. The place-names of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were the stages of that carefree journey through Greece with Hobhouse at the age of twenty-one: travels as remote, then, from the conventional Grand Tour and as adventurous and rare (so wide an ocean seemed the Adriatic, and so daunting a barrier the Acroceraunian mountains) as a journey today from Athens to the Hindu Kush. Their little cavalcade wound its way through regions of legendary beauty and great savagery; tall ranges, plunging cataracts and tufted gorges beset their track. Epirus, at the time and all north-western Greece, was in the grip of Ali Pasha: the Vizir’s terrible Albanians tyrannized the lowlands, the Klephts and the Armatoles haunted the crags; the fastnesses of Souli were in perpetual revolt. It was a world of strife, ambush, revenge, burning villages, massacre, impaling and severed heads. This part of Greece was the scene of some of the most dramatic events in history and myth; names and reminders of the great days of ancient Greece were everywhere; above all, the Greeks still lived here. He was able to discern, among the ruins, in the seeming docility of the plainsmen and in the fierceness of the mountaineers, compelling messages of magnificence and servitude and the hint of future resurrection; a resurrection which was to happen sooner and affect him more closely than he can ever have thought. Plenty of raw material here for solitary brooding, soaring description, taunting apostrophe and incendiary peroration; and when Childe Harold came out three years later, all this, majestically thundering in those Spenserian cantos (the last foot of each stanza sounding, according to the mood, like a double thump or a distant echo), this irruption into an unknown world, the controlled fury with which it was conducted, the attack and argument and evocation and the impression of dangerous power contained, struck London, and later the world, like an explosion. Nobody had seen or heard anything like it, and his myth shot up in a night. Still, today, when we know it so well, its rhythms and its images strike with the force of a metrically transposed fusion of Delacroix and Berlioz and give us more than a hint of what its first impact must have been.
How surprised, how very surprised and mortified would Byron’s detractors in England have been, could they have looked into the future! Ever since the Greek War of Independence, England has enjoyed a singular pre-eminence in Greek affections; a feeling unique in the flinty world of international relations. Solid reasons support this flattering image.[9] The enormous voluntary loan, privately subscribed to back the Greek struggle against the Turks; the participation of English phil-hellenes—though, to the credit of the rest of Europe and America, they were not alone—in the actual fighting; the destruction at the command of Codrington of the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarino, which put an end to the long war; the policies of Canning and Gladstone; the handing back of the Ionian Islands and a consistent pro-Greek policy ever since. Recent reinforcements of these bonds, and manifestations of them, were Greece’s alliance with Great Britain in two world wars. The record is impressive and honouring to both.
But if, during the last hundred years, anyone were to have asked any Greek at random why this feeling existed, the answer, in tones of surprise at the naïveté of the question, would have been, and still would be: Lord Byron. His reputation in England has gone through many avatars. Things have been different here: the news of his death, as it spread through the dismal lanes of Missolonghi in that rainy and thundery dusk, scattered consternation; his name, famous already, soared like a skyrocket into the Greek firmament and lodged there as a fixed star whose radiance grows brighter as the years pass. “O Vyron,” “Lordos Vyronos,” or, more sophisticatedly, “O Mpaïron,” is Greek property now. Thousands of children are baptized by his name, and his face is as familiar as any hero’s in ancient or modern Greece. Every English traveller, however humble or unimpressive, and whether he knows or deserves or wants it or not, is the beneficiary of some reflected fragment of this glory. I wonder if any other figure in history has achieved such a place in
a country not his own?
Knowing voices sometimes question Byron’s feelings towards Greece. He was a scorching critic of every country of which he wrote, with England at the head of his list, and he was no blinder to Greece’s faults than were the Greeks themselves. But his resentment of shallow criticisms of the country was the reaction of a man whose affections and loyalties were deeply engaged. His life had reached a stage when death, perhaps, seemed its only logical solution. Even had this not been so, the Greek cause would have claimed him. They were the only people among whom he had been really happy. He meant to die for Greece; but he was determined to help her to the utmost of his powers. The instinctive Greek interpretation of his actions is a just verdict.
His last poem, written on this thirty-seventh birthday and shortly before he died, is surely a sincere picture of his feelings.
The sword, the banner and the field
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield
Was not more free.
Awake! (Not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake my spirit. Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!
Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!—unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.
If thou regrett’st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here:—Up to the field and give
Away thy breath!
Seek out—less often sought than found—
A soldier’s grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground
And take thy rest.
The tables by the statue of Tricoupis were emptying, and our cigarette smoke, as we talked, rose unwavering into a windless night. The neighbours who had sent us the wine and the three shaggy singers from the mountains were the only others left. One of the first group caught our eye.
“Did you find them?” he asked.
We were nonplussed for a moment. Our thoughts, lingering on Byron, had strayed from our search.
“The shoes? Did you get them in the end?”
We told them the whole story. The mountain men listened with interest.
“Eh!” said one of the wine donors. “He was a wonderful man. A true hero.”
“O Vyronos?” one of the mountaineers said. “Dikòs mas einai. He’s ours.”
“Of course he’s ours,” said another, and lifted his glass of retsina solemnly. “May his memory rest eternal. Aionia i mnémi tou.”
“Amen,” the others assented. “Amen, amen.”
POSTSCRIPT
Poets have strange posthumous careers. My old friend Tanty Rodocanaki (alas, now dead) told me the following. When Rupert Brooke died in Mudros in 1915 his body was buried in the west of Skyros, an island where he had never set foot during his life. The Skyriots are proud of his presence and though little is known about him, his name is second in honour only to that of the island’s patron, St. George. He is even mentioned in island songs. On a visit a few years ago, Rodocanaki was admiring the secluded olive-grove that shelters the poet’s grave. As he read the inscription on the tomb, an old shepherd who was pasturing his flocks in the surrounding woods addressed him. “I see you are admiring the grave of O Broukis,” he said. “He was a great poet. We are glad to have him with us. He was a good man.”
Intrigued by the conviction of his tone and curious to discover how much he knew, Rodocanaki asked him what he thought of his poetry.
“I’ve never read any of it, I’m sorry to say,” the shepherd answered. “I’m not strong on letters and foreign languages. But you could tell he was a great man. You see that old olive over there? That was his tree.”
“How do you mean?”
“He used to sit under it every day and write poetry.”
Reluctant to contradict, Rodocanaki asked him if he was sure they were talking about the same person.
“Of course I am! O Broukis used to wander about the woods in silence, the very picture of an old-fashioned English gentleman.”
“What did he look like?”
“Magnificent, sir,” the shepherd answered. “Tall, dignified, flowing hair, burning eyes and a long white beard.”
[1] Astakos, the name of the town, is “Lobster” in Greek.
[2] Byron’s daughter Ada married Lord Lovelace and he begat Lady Anne King, who married Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who begat Judith (of whom we treat), who married Neville Lytton, the painter, and he begat the present Lord Lytton and his sisters. Through her mother, Judith Blunt was the fourteenth holder of the old barony of Wentworth.
[3] I saw it next year.
[4] They were the famous Lovelace papers, which only saw the light of day in 1957, and were put to such brilliant use by Mrs. Doris Langley Moore in The Late Lord Byron (John Murray, 1961).
[5] This word—synchoriménos—together with makarítes, blessed, is a slightly more pious way of saying “the late.”
[6] The answers, when they reached me in the fullness of time, were all I could have hoped for. There was nothing whatever, as far as size went, against the authenticity of the shoes, and the lameness had indeed been, as I thought I remembered, in the poet’s right foot. Lady Wentworth was all understanding and good wishes.
[7] Published by Constable & Co. Ltd (1924).
[8] The Meeting of the Waters?; Those Endearing Young Charms?; Oft in the Stilly Night?
[9] An image, alas, which recent conflict in Cyprus has battered. The bitterness of Greek feelings during this disastrous interlude were made still more acute by the extremity of the favourable sentiments which had prevailed before. Premature to say whether things will revert in time to their previous happy state. There are hopeful signs. But lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
5. THE KINGDOM OF AUTOLYCUS
“DO NOT blaspheme against God!” The words, in bold calligraphy, was pasted on the windscreen above the driver’s seat; “Blasphemy is disrespectful and uncharitable. It is a stigma against civilization. Even the Barbarians and the demons themselves do not blaspheme.”
Who were these non-blaspheming barbarians—let alone the demons? I was sitting beside the driver, so I asked him. He was a tall clean-shaven man in a cloth cap and horn-rimmed spectacles with a long, thoughtful and scholarly face. He turned with a smile and his hands left the wheel with a dismissive sweep. “As ta daimónia!” he said. “Don’t worry about demons!” His hands regained the controls just in time to pull up. Wild as a descent of Afghan tribesmen, a herd of goats came tumbling down the mountainside and across the road and down the canyon the other side in a cataract of derision and clanking. A small avalanche followed them. “They don’t exist. Not today. Unless they mean those hornwearers.” He pointed at the disappearing rumps, and, spreading all five fingers of his left hand, shoved it energetically palm outwards after the goats in the pan-hellenic gesture of commination. “Na! They block the roads, they eat the trees, they strip the land—just look all round!—and they stink. I deflower their All-Holy-One.” We twisted up the stony ravine.
“What about the Barbarians? Anyone who isn’t Greek? Me, perhaps?”
I didn’t say this seriously, but a look of concern crossed his face; his right hand sailed perilously from the wheel once more and alighted on my shoulder in a reassuring pat.
“The very idea! I don’t know who they mean. The priests have been sticking these notices up all over the place. Perhaps the Bulgarians (bad year to them!) or the Turks.”
I told him I’d been to Bulgaria, ages ago, and that their oaths were frequent and profane; English ones, too, though they were less explicitly so than the Greek. (Greek insults invariably take the form which he had just used: “I sexually outrage your...!,” and a sacred being or object is appended. The language is brief and blunt. The victim of the outrage is very often the All-Holy-One—the Panayía, that is�
��or the Holy Name or the Cross, or, more abstractly, Easter.)
The driver was relieved to hear that the Greeks were not alone in blasphemy. “We’re terrible,” he said. “You ought to hear them in Cephalonia!” He whistled in censure or admiration. “God protect us! And yet, you know, I have my private theory about our blasphemies. When we blaspheme, it isn’t God and the saints we are insulting, only the man we are talking to.”
How did he mean?
“Listen,” he said, “I get cross with someone—those goats, for instance—and I shout ‘I...your All-Holy-One, your Christ, your Cross, your faith.’ ‘I don’t say I outrage the Cross,’ or whatever it is, but yours. Why? Because I mean that the people I am cursing don’t know what’s wcirc; that the osioi kai agioi—the blessed and the sacred ones—of such people can’t be real. Not their ones! You see? No profanity or blasphemy at all; the reverse really.” He smiled and touched his temple triumphantly with his forefinger to underline the point. “Bíkis?” (short for bíkis sto théma?, have you entered the theme?).
“Bíka.”
“All right! It’s only my theory, mind you, and here’s something that might disprove it. You’ve heard of people called mángas?”
I outlined all I knew about the mángas. They are a kind of proletarian freemasonry in the towns, especially in Athens and the Piraeus. (“And in Patras!” Andreas said, naming his own home town: “we’re famous for them.”) They are independent and moody and they talk, in guarded and slightly jeering tones, a private jargon. Bouzouki music, and the geometric dances that accompany them, are their passion. A code of their own dictates their conduct and often leads them into trouble. Bohemianism and distrust of authority make them prone to lawless doings—smuggling, hashish smoking and so on; nothing very terrible. There is a studied melancholy in their manner and posture, a rarified plebeian dandyism in their dress. Was that right?
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