Here I am leaning on the omphalos, great bellybutton of the world.
And that’s of course is where you make your big wish: that’s Delphi. And that’s the temple of Delphi, always the light warp of wind in the pines, that slow-moving strange feel of leaves going all the time and the wind on your cheek, which you feel everywhere in Greece. Dry wind, dry grass. It’s not exactly refreshing, it’s monitary, as though somebody were trying to whisper something to you. You feel it in Delos. You hear the reeds moving and you feel the wind on your cheek. And in Delphi where you have these great groves of pines up on the stadium you hear this—it’s not quite sinister, but then when an eagle crosses the view and you hear the creak of its wings it matches with it and suddenly you feel your own breathing and you do understand what the Greeks meant by the panic sense. It’s the sense of something really outside yourself that belongs to the place that seizes you. It’s not altogether—well, I should say it could be fearfully disagreeable and frightening. You feel ancient Greek time passing. I’ve camped there in that place. It’s not as frightening as Epidaurus, but it is a frightening place with its huge green valley and at night when the sun goes down it’s astonishing in its deep fear really. You feel the presence of the Gods. That’s why I’m so terrified when I see myself innocently sitting astride the omphalos up there like an idiot fiddling with the safety-catch of the universe. It really is terrifying.
Katsimbalis, the Colossus of Maroussi.
With Miller in California, 1973.
This is the start of a wonderful book. It’s a portrait of Henry Miller and the Colossus of Maroussi setting off for the trip which ended with the book so to speak. The Colossus is a much heavier man now. He was much slimmer then. And that’s Miller. They’re going down the steps of Ghika’s house in Hydra and just about to step aboard the boat and then they disappeared and we saw them much later in Athens after all the adventures which Miller has recorded in his book had taken place. So it’s rather a historic picture. I don’t know whether Miller has a copy of it, I must try and get him one.
That was last year when I came. Considering his bad luck with his operations and with the state of his leg, all the more galling because this is a bicyclist, this is an athlete, you know how humiliating it is if you’re an athlete to have anything wrong with you physically. The amazing thing is that his skull is full of ideas. He’s painting watercolors, he’s writing. He’s now five chapters up on a new book. Even now, after a second and a very long painful operation I’ve never seen such courage and I’ve never seen such optimism. I learn a great deal every time I’m with him. We’re hoping to have a big birthday party on Wednesday when he’s got Anais Nin to come in and so the three Musketeers are going to settle down for a good French evening we hope.
Now this is the growling, bumbling man-mountain Katisimbalis walking around Athens. He’s trying to convince me that I ought to translate Pope Joan and I’m saying, “No. It’s a dirty book.” He has a strong resemblance to two people whom perhaps you might know. If you happen to know the French film actor Raimu, he resembled him so much both in growl and in voice and in general disposition that when Raimu died the Greek press said, “Well, thank God we’ve still got our own version in Mr. Katsimbalis.” But those of you who live here would probably understand better if I say that he is absolutely the image of a wonderful film actor called Sydney Greenstreet who also had a very deep slurring voice and also was rather grumpy and was always a sleuth of some sort or a detective. And indeed when Katsimbalis tried to come here to see Henry Miller he arrived in Los Angeles and went into a bar for a drink and a woman screamed, “Sydney!” and fell in a dead faint. He just caught her before she hit the ground and everyone in the bar was white. He tried to find out what this was about. Apparently Mr. Greenstreet had just died and had been buried that morning and they’d all just come back from his funeral when George walked in. There he is in a more characteristic vein. There he is in France. He’s found the sort of wine that suits him. Very bad influence. Very bad influence.
Now, I don’t know what sort of picture I’ve made, perhaps rather a muddled one of this scrapbook of impressions. It’s so various and the country itself is so rich and so evocative that just to have spent one’s youth there seems to be something that, well, it’s pure gold. And the people who live there echo it too. Their hospitality, their kindness and all of the communities. Indeed, I was thinking of Parga and the little Turkish community. There was one small episode which may perhaps make you smile. In Parga the Americans were marketing a chocolate laxative, called X-Lax, I think, and they had translated their advertising into good Turkish, and the slogan for the advertising campaign was “It works while you sleep.” Now, to the Turkish mind, that something should work while you are actually sleeping seemed absolutely wonderful and the sales of this chocolate probably still go on to this day under this excellent slogan. Well, of course, everyone likes something for nothing. I can think of a thousand more small anecdotes but they don’t really add up to any conclusive sense. What really echoes on in the back of my mind is the place where I was reborn, where I finished the Black Book and was photographed by the British fleet in the state of nudity, that house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall really never, never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course there may be a little element of self-deception in it because youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that’s something you can’t get over.
Propaganda and Impropaganda
I came to diplomacy very late and by accident and through the back door: and had it not been for a sudden war erupting I don’t think I would have ever been interested in it and I don’t think it ever would have accepted me, for neither by birth, nor education, nor upbringing am I the sort of person who might have made the grade as a career diplomat before the war. And even if I had wanted to do it and had tried, I think I would have failed the examinations which were necessarily very hard and I would’ve lost on all counts. But when the war broke out it suddenly became necessary for people who had languages to supplement the relatively inane diplomatic corps which had a great deal of style on the exterior but nothing much inside, and to help disguise the fact that they were full of gingerbread. And so through the orifices of the more modest but really professional consular service they infiltrated a lot of people who knew something. I had the ill luck, or the good luck, in Athens to be taken aboard simply because I knew some Greek at that time: and could write.
It’s not entirely the fault of the diplomatic service that it seems so moribund, which it truthfully is a bit nowadays. There’s always a function for an embassy where you want, for example, to have an intelligent and civilized discussion of fishing rights or to elaborate a new treaty or something like that. But what’s really made diplomacy moribund today is really the telegram and the telephone and the communications set up. Nothing is really more moving, as for example in Government House Cyprus or in any embassy, than the bound file of the reports and dispatches by the ambassador 50, 60, 80 years ago which were all carefully hand-lettered by his scribes, carefully corrected and in numberless copies were then dispatched for distribution. But by the time I reached it these days were over. I was already 12 when I was sent to England, from India it took me a month to communicate with my parents by sea and during the early years there was no air service at all. The air connections started around 1932. When I was in Corfu at the very beginning of the war there was one old sea-plane which engineered the communications with India so that what with post office delays it really took 10 or 15 days for an airmail letter to get to India. Well, you can imagine if you have a very violent situation on your hands as an ambassador has frequently and might have to act and invoke or threaten, you haven’t time to ring up Whitehall about it. Well now Whitehall opens the daily newspaper and rings you up and tells you what to do, so naturally you feel rather on the shelf all the time. But in the old days
it was very much up to you to take a decision on the spot and to act and to put up with the consequences if you were in the wrong afterwards. So it gave a backbone to people like Burton and so on. As consular officials and as diplomats were working in an excellent tradition, they felt functionally that their role was an important one. It’s less important today, and with the advent of so much nonsense about spying it’s become increasingly tricky. But relatively speaking I very much admire the old type of diplomat, many of whom I worked under when I was a junior in their embassies, who belonged to the Burton strain and who one could see the relationship with, for example, Sir Thomas Wooton who was probably a friend of Shakespeare (he wrote excellent poetry) and who announced that he had taken Venice for his consulate and when asked what he did said “I lie abroad for my country.” Of course “lying” means also in Elizabethan “I reside abroad”, but the doubletake is there because “lying” also means “lying”, and there was a good element of need at that moment what with the battle between Protestantism and Catholicism on the continent and the Armada approaching and so on, that somebody should have his lies ready in his bag, and good ones.
And then of course there was the great Tallyrand who’s probably the greatest diplomat of all. You know it’s customary before you’re sent out to your first post to have ten minutes with the Secretary of State. It’s like baptism or circumcision. It’s terrifying for him and for you equally. You don’t know what to say and so he has a tendency to say, “Well, uhum … Durrell, you’re going to … uhum … you’re going to Athens, I think.” “Yessir.” “Well, the ambassador is so and so and so …” What he doesn’t say is that the ambassador is an idiot, that his wife looks disastrous and that he’s socially really hopeless, and that you’ll have to use all your tact to get your job done without offending them. He can’t say that naturally, but he coughs and sputters breathes on you and off you go. Well Tallyrand developed this farewell technique to a fine art and when his young attachés were being posted, he always stopped them as they opened the door and were saying goodbye with the phrase, “Et surtout par trop de zele.” “And whatever you do, not too much zeal.” Which, of course, was quite right. You see, the only good diplomatic advice is to (a) shut up and (b) don’t do a thing, because fundamentally it’s really good Zen, it’s really good Taoist advice because in the final analysis you can’t do anything. Events are always moving far too fast, the personalities involved are far too unimaginative and silly, and everybody’s been carried away on a tide of absurdity so that really, though it sounds frivolous, but the best thing to do is to sit tight. You are dealing with maniacs and nuts so naturally the situations are nutty.
Of course in my particular department it was one of the things we couldn’t do because I was always posted to crisis spots where sitting tight was just not on because one was always being invaded by Russians or Germans or something like that … But I always remembered the remark about excessive zeal and I always tried to follow it to the best of my ability. And where it was possible to let my colleagues make mistakes, I let them do it. I never won any decorations out of this meritorious business but in fact I didn’t put up, as they say in the service, many “bad blacks.” And my memories of diplomatic life are coloured always by embassies with an enormous fire going in the garden. When the enemy are arriving you burn everything marked “Top Secret” and everything is. I think I’ve been in more retreats than you can possibly imagine.
I’d hardly been taken on in Athens when the Germans nearly arrived. They were 40 miles away, and they had discovered that tanks could come down the railways, they didn’t need the roads. We’d blown up all the roads, of course, but had forgotten the railways. They’d put 50 tanks on the railways and the next thing we knew there were sign posts telling them “Athens 5 miles.” So, naturally, we had to get out very very fast. Well, this always is a marvellous situation because in diplomacy to add to your own importance you mark everything highly confidential and secret because this means that your bureau is sort of upgraded, so consequently you have an immense amount of documentation, most of it from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and the Guide Bleu, and Mrs Beeton’s which is all marked secret and confidential and it’s essential to burn this because you mustn’t let it fall into German hands. When a British embassy is leaving the first thing you see is a gigantic bonfire with all the attachés, looking like attachés usually look, with kerosene cans dousing manuscripts and a huge plume of smoke going up. It’s a heartening sight. Well, Athens was my starting point in retreating and I’ve been retreating ever since until I ended up last week in Pasadena. My back is against the wall now. I’m at Caltech at the moment defending culture, whatever that is.
But the Athens episode was particularly instructive because we had an extremely bright military attaché who had not respected Tallyrand’s famous advice to his secretaries. He was full of zeal, too full of zeal, and we had far too many documents marked confidential, secret, highly this, highly that and the other, and the garden was full of them. So he put them all in a van. He said, “I have an idea,” he didn’t tell anyone what it was. He took them round to the local crematorium. Now, the Greeks are mad about machinery, but they don’t understand it very well. They had just got a brand new crematorium. The chap, who bought it on a purely commercial basis, was being excommunicated by the archbishop who didn’t believe in burning bodies. But the thing was there and working intermittently. The military attaché took all our scret and confidential documents down there. He put them into one of the crematories and pulled the lever. Unfortunately, something went wrong. The Greek attendant had in some curious way fixed the draught at a wrong angle, and all this half-charred stuff flew out of the main central flue and all over Athens, it was like a snowstorm. I was walking in Athens waiting for some transport so I could run away to the sea, and I saw things coming out of the sky. They were half-charred bits of paper like this piece with dispatches beginning “following from Churchill to Lord Halifax”… And all over the place there were drifts. But as it always happens in grave cases, people never realise when something is given to them, just as they didn’t realise the date of the Normandy landings, when they were given them by a spy in Turkey. So when the Germans came all this paper was swept up. Nobody read a single word. The whole war policy, American, British and everything else was outlined in the secret and confidential information which flew out through the flue and descended like a snowstorm.
That is why too much zeal, you see, ruins the whole shoot. The eager attaché fortunately redeemed himself by becoming a great commando and was much decorated. He’s now a very distinguished war historian. But we had so much trouble with zealots. In the old days of Sir Henry Wooton it could’ve been much different, owing to distance and lack of instant Whitehall interference. Later on, in Egypt, I met Noel Coward who had gotten so sick of this kind of rubber stamp secrecy that he had a huge one made for his manuscript which read “Highly Trivial.” But this is the mere farcical end of diplomacy. It has other more serious functions.
Nowadays what is valuable, and what I did see actually in close action as a perfectly valid operational technique is clever bargaining. Another useful thing you can do is to correctly evaluate personalities in terms of what they might or might not do; and one of the things that the ambassador who’s sensitive and clever, on-the-spot, since he has access to let’s say Archbishop Makarios or Tito or Farouk—(three cases I’m thinking of)—his dispatches are important for the Secretary of State so that he can judge whether to press a little in this way or that way to bring about the desired result. That is something that can’t be done by television or by long distance telephone. So in that sense, and in the commercial and political sense, diplomacy still has its place though it’s a very wearisome occupation. I found it terriby wearying, but I never wasted it in the sense that I was always buoyed up by the feeling that I must make notes the whole time for my novels.
I took a leaf out of the notebook of the man I admire most as a novelist, Stendhal, who wa
s also stuck as a minor consular official all over the globe, but who never relented. And it is very important to know how an ambassador behaves when he’s hysterical. If you’ve helped one on and off with his overcoat for a long time you really do get the feel. In a novelist who’s trying to describe embassy life or what it’s like in Buckingham Palace, if you haven’t been there it’s extremely hard to get away with it. Something hollow in the tone looks through. So in a sense, if I need an embassy I know where to go now. I’ve got three. One ambassador more foolish than the next. One a real genius of foolishness but a marvellous writer who really did the best paper on Tito’s psychology ever. If he hadn’t been a nut he wouldn’t have been able to understand Tito. But it was one of the most delicate and penetrating performances of evaluating whether Tito was going to go back in the fold or whether he was going to stay out on the Balkan wing as an independent and what sort of temperament he had. Really it was a brilliant psychological thing. That was Sir Charles Peake who died recently, and who was one of the vaguest men I ever met. Every time he came to see me in my office he patted a bicycle which was in the hall and said, “Hey, Budgin, how are things down in the cipher room?” In fact, I can assure you that all Evelyn Waugh had to say about diplomats in “Black Mischief” is absolutely dead true. As for Sir Charles, whom I came to love, he could also sit in a chair with his lips working, opposite me at my desk, tearing up paper into smaller and smaller bits, and after three-quarters of an hour say, “Yes. That’s what we’ll do,” and walk out without telling me what the devil it was we must do.