The next day I opened conversation with the others—a Turk, a Syrian, some students from Lebanon, an Argentine man of Italian extraction. The Turk aroused my antipathies almost at once. He had a mania for logic which infuriated me. It was bad logic too. And like the others, all of whom I violently disagreed with, I found in him an expression of the American spirit at its worst. Progress was their obsession. More machines, more efficiency, more capital, more comforts—that was their whole talk. I asked them if they had heard of the millions who were unemployed in America. They ignored the question. I asked them if they realized how empty, restless and miserable the American people were with all their machine-made luxuries and comforts. They were impervious to my sarcasm. What they wanted was success—money, power, a place in the sun. None of them wanted to return to their own country; for some reason they had all of them been obliged to return against their will. They said there was no life for them in their own country. When would life begin? I wanted to know. When they had all the things which America had, or Germany, or France. Life was made up of things, of machines mainly, from what I could gather. Life without money was an impossibility: one had to have clothes, a good home, a radio, a car, a tennis racquet, and so on. I told them I had none of those things and that I was happy without them, that I had turned my back on America precisely because these things meant nothing to me. They said I was the strangest American they had ever met. But they liked me. They stuck to me throughout the voyage, plying me with all sorts of questions which I answered in vain. Evenings I would get together with the Greek. We understood one another better, much better, despite his adoration for Germany and the German régime. He too, of course, wanted to go to America some day. Every Greek dreams of going to America and making a nest egg. I didn’t try to dissuade him; I gave him a picture of America as I knew it, as I had seen it and experienced it. That seemed to frighten him a little: he admitted he had never heard anything like that about America before. “You go,” I said, “and see for yourself. I may be wrong. I am only telling you what I know from my own experience.” “Remember,” I added, “Knut Hamsun didn’t have such a wonderful time of it there, nor your beloved Edgar Allan Poe….”
There was a French archaeologist returning to Greece who sat opposite me at the table; he could have told me a lot of things about Greece but I never gave him a chance; I disliked him from the time I first laid eyes on him. The chap I really liked most during the voyage was the Italian from the Argentine. He was about the most ignorant fellow I have ever met and charming at the same time. At Naples we went ashore together to have a good meal and to visit Pompeii which he had never even heard of. Despite the overpowering heat I enjoyed the trip to Pompeii; if I had gone with an archaeologist I would have been bored stiff. At Piraeus he came ashore with me to visit the Acropolis. The heat was even worse than at Pompeii, which was pretty bad. At nine in the morning it must have been 120 degrees in the sun. We had hardly gotten through the gate at the dock when we fell into the hands of a wily Greek guide who spoke a little English and French and who promised to show us everything of interest for a modest sum. We tried to find out what he wanted for his services but in vain. It was too hot to discuss prices; we fell into a taxi and told him to steer us straight to the Acropolis. I had changed my francs into drachmas on the boat; it seemed like a tremendous wad that I had stuffed into my pocket and I felt that I could meet the bill no matter how exorbitant it might be. I knew we were going to be gypped and I looked forward to it with relish. The only thing that was solidly fixed in my mind about the Greeks was that you couldn’t trust them; I would have been disappointed if our guide had turned out to be magnanimous and chivalrous. My companion on the other hand was somewhat worried about the situation. He was going on to Beirut. I could actually hear him making mental calculations as we rode along in the suffocating dust and heat.
The ride from Piraeus to Athens is a good introduction to Greece. There is nothing inviting about it. It makes you wonder why you decided to come to Greece. There is something not only arid and desolate about the scene, but something terrifying too. You feel stripped and plundered, almost annihilated. The driver was like an animal who had been miraculously taught to operate a crazy machine: our guide was constantly directing him to go to the right or the left, as though they had never made the journey before. I felt an enormous sympathy for the driver whom I knew would be gypped also. I had the feeling that he could not count beyond a hundred; I had also the feeling that he would drive into a ditch if he were directed to. When we got to the Acropolis—it was an insane idea to go there immediately—there were several hundred people ahead of us storming the gate. By this time the heat was so terrific that all I thought of was where to sit down and enjoy a bit of shade. I found myself a fairly cool spot and I waited there while the Argentine chap got his money’s worth. Our guide had remained at the entrance with the taxi driver after turning us over to one of the official guides. He was going to escort us to the Temple of Jupiter and the Thesion and other places as soon as we had had our fill of the Acropolis. We never went to these places, of course. We told him to drive into town, find a cool spot and order some ice cream. It was about ten thirty when we parked ourselves on the terrace of a café. Everybody looked fagged out from the heat, even the Greeks. We ate the ice cream, drank the iced water, then more ice cream and more iced water. After that I called for some hot tea, because I suddenly remembered somebody telling me once that hot tea cools you off.
The taxi was standing at the curb with the motor running. Our guide seemed to be the only one who didn’t mind the heat. I suppose he thought we would cool off a bit and then start trotting around again in the sun looking at ruins and monuments. We told him finally that we wanted to dispense with his services. He said there was no hurry, he had nothing special to do, and was happy to keep us company. We told him we had had enough for the day and would like to settle up. He called the waiter and paid the check out of his own pocket. We kept prodding him to tell us how much. He seemed reluctant as hell to tell us. He wanted to know how much we thought his services were worth. We said we didn’t know—we would leave it to him to decide. Where-upon, after a long pause, after looking us over from head to foot, scratching himself, tilting his hat back, mopping his brow, and so on, he blandly announced that he thought 2500 drachmas would square the account. I gave my companion a look and told him to open fire. The Greek of course was thoroughly prepared for our reaction. And it’s this, I must confess, that I really like about the Greeks, when they are wily and cunning. Almost at once he said, “Well, all right, if you don’t think my price is fair then you make me a price.” So we did. We made him one as ridiculously low as his was high. It seemed to make him feel good, this crude bargaining. As a matter of fact, we all felt good about it. It was making service into something tangible and real like a commodity. We weighed it and appraised it, we juggled it like a ripe tomato or an ear of corn. And finally we agreed, not on a fair price, because that would have been an insult to our guide’s ability, but we agreed that for this unique occasion, because of the heat, because we had not seen everything, and so on and so forth, that we would fix on thus and such a sum and part good friends. One of the little items we haggled about a long time was the amount paid by our guide to the official guide at the Acropolis. He swore he had given the man 150 drachmas. I had seen the transaction with my own eyes, and I knew he had given only fifty drachmas. He maintained that I had not seen well. We smoothed it out by pretending that he had inadvertently handed the man a hundred drachmas more than he intended to, a piece of casuistry so thoroughly un-Greek that had he then and there decided to rob us of all we possessed he would have been justified and the courts of Greece would have upheld him.
An hour later I said good-bye to my companion, found myself a room in a small hotel at double the usual price, stripped down and lay on the bed naked in a pool of sweat until nine that evening. I looked for a restaurant, tried to eat, but after taking a few mouthfuls gave it up. I have ne
ver been so hot in all my life. To sit near an electric light was torture. After a few cold drinks I got up from the terrace where I was sitting and headed for the park. I should say it was about eleven o’clock. People were swarming in all directions to the park. It reminded me of New York on a sweltering night in August. It was the herd again, something I had never felt in Paris, except during the aborted revolution. I sauntered slowly through the park towards the Temple of Jupiter. There were little tables along the dusty paths set out in an absent-minded way: couples were sitting there quietly in the dark, talking in low voices, over glasses of water. The glass of water…everywhere I saw the glass of water. It became obsessional. I began to think of water as a new thing, a new vital element of life. Earth, air, fire, water. Right now water had become the cardinal element. Seeing lovers sitting there in the dark drinking water, sitting there in peace and quiet and talking in low tones, gave me a wonderful feeling about the Greek character. The dust, the heat, the poverty, the bareness, the containedness of the people, and the water everywhere in little tumblers standing between the quiet, peaceful couples, gave me the feeling that there was something holy about the place, something nourishing and sustaining. I walked about enchanted on this first night in the Zapion. It remains in my memory like no other park I have known. It is the quintessence of park, the thing one feels sometimes in looking at a canvas or dreaming of a place you’d like to be in and never find. It is lovely in the morning, too, as I was to discover. But at night, coming upon it from nowhere, feeling the hard dirt under your feet and hearing a buzz of language which is altogether unfamiliar to you, it is magical—and it is more magical to me perhaps because I think of it as filled with the poorest people in the world, and the gentlest. I am glad I arrived in Athens during that incredible heat wave, glad I saw it under the worst conditions. I felt the naked strength of the people, their purity, their nobility, their resignation. I saw their children, a sight which warmed me, because coming from France it was as if children were missing from the world, as if they were not being born any more. I saw people in rags, and that was cleansing too. The Greek knows how to live with his rags: they don’t utterly degrade and befoul him as in other countries I have visited.
The following day I decided to take the boat to Corfu where my friend Durrell was waiting for me. We pulled out of Piraeus about five in the afternoon, the sun still burning like a furnace. I had made the mistake of buying a second class ticket. When I saw the animals coming aboard, the bedding, all the crazy paraphernalia which the Greeks drag with them on their voyages, I promptly changed to first class, which was only a trifle more expensive than second. I had never traveled first class before on anything, except the Metro in Paris—it seemed like a genuine luxury to me. The waiter was continuously circulating about with a tray filled with glasses of water. It was the first Greek word I learned: nero (water) and a beautiful word it is. Night was coming on and the islands were looming up in the distance, always floating above the water, not resting on it. The stars came out with magnificent brilliance and the wind was soft and cooling. I began to get the feel of it at once, what Greece was, what it had been, what it will always be even should it meet with the misfortune of being overrun by American tourists. When the steward asked me what I would like for dinner, when I gathered what it was we were going to have for dinner, I almost broke down and wept. The meals on a Greek boat are staggering. I like a good Greek meal better than a good French meal, even though it be heresy to admit it. There was lots to eat and lots to drink: there was the air outside and the sky full of stars. I had promised myself on leaving Paris not to do a stroke of work for a year. It was my first real vacation in twenty years and I was ready for it. Everything seemed right to me. There was no time any more, just me drifting along in a slow boat ready to meet all corners and take whatever came along. Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light. I couldn’t ask for more, nor did I want anything more. I had everything a man could desire, and I knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again. I felt the war coming on—it was getting closer and closer every day. For a little while yet there would be peace and men might still behave like human beings.
We didn’t go through the Corinth canal because there had been a landslide: we practically circumnavigated the Peloponnesus. The second night out we pulled into Patras opposite Missolonghi. I have come into this port several times since, always about the same hour, and always I experienced the same fascination. You ride straight into a big headland, like an arrow burying itself in the side of a mountain. The electric lights strung along the waterfront create a Japanese effect; there is something impromptu about the lighting in all Greek ports, something which gives the impression of an impending festival. As you pull into port the little boats come out to meet you: they are filled with passengers and luggage and livestock and bedding and furniture. The men row standing up, pushing instead of pulling. They seem absolutely tireless, moving their heavy burdens about at will with deft and almost imperceptible movements of the wrist. As they draw alongside a pandemonium sets in. Everybody goes the wrong way, everything is confused, chaotic, disorderly. But nobody is ever lost or hurt, nothing is stolen, no blows are exchanged. It is a kind of ferment which is created by reason of the fact that for a Greek every event, no matter how stale, is always unique. He is always doing the same thing for the first time: he is curious, avidly curious, and experimental. He experiments for the sake of experimenting, not to establish a better or more efficient way of doing things. He likes to do things with his hands, with his whole body, with his soul, I might as well say. Thus Homer lives on. Though I’ve never read a line of Homer I believe the Greek of to-day is essentially unchanged. If anything he is more Greek than he ever was. And here I must make a parenthesis to say a word about my friend Mayo, the painter, whom I knew in Paris. Malliarakis was his real name and I think he came originally from Crete. Anyway, pulling into Patras I got to thinking about him violently. I remembered asking him in Paris to tell me something about Greece and suddenly, as we were coming into the port of Patras, I understood everything he had been trying to tell me that night and I felt bad that he was not alongside me to share my enjoyment. I remembered how he had said with quiet, steady conviction, after describing the country for me as best he could—“Miller, you will like Greece, I am sure of it.” Somehow those words impressed me more than anything he had said about Greece. You will like it…that stuck in my crop. “By God, yes, I like it,” I was saying to myself over and over as I stood at the rail taking in the movement and the hubbub. I leaned back and looked up at the sky. I had never seen a sky like this before. It was magnificent. I felt completely detached from Europe. I had entered a new realm as a free man—everything had conjoined to make the experience unique and fructifying. Christ, I was happy. But for the first time in my life I was happy with the full consciousness of being happy. It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of what concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and he done with it. And that’s how I was—except that I didn’t have the power or the courage to kill myself then and there. It was good, too, that I didn’t do myself in because there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even, something which if anyone had tried to describe to me I would probably not have believed. I didn’t know then that I would one day stand at Mycenae, or at Phaestos, or that I would wake up one morning and looking through a port hole see with my own eyes the place I had written about in a book but which I never knew existed nor that it bore the same name as the one I had given it in my imagination. Marvelous things happen to one in Greece—marvelous good things which can happen to one nowhere else on earth. Somehow, almost as if He were
nodding, Greece still remains under the protection of the Creator. Men may go about their puny, ineffectual bedevilment, even in Greece, but God’s magic is still at work and, no matter what the race of man may do or try to do, Greece is still a sacred precinct—and my belief is it will remain so until the end of time.
It was almost high noon when the boat pulled in at Corfu. Durrell was waiting at the dock with Spiro Americanus, his factotum. It was about an hour’s drive to Kalami, the little village towards the north end of the island where Durrell had his home. Before sitting down to lunch we had a swim in front of the house. I hadn’t been in the water for almost twenty years. Durrell and Nancy, his wife, were like a couple of dolphins; they practically lived in the water. We took a siesta after lunch and then we rowed to another little cove about a mile away where there was a tiny white shrine. Here we baptized ourselves anew in the raw. In the evening I was presented to Kyrios Karamenaios, the local gendarme, and to Nicola, the village schoolmaster. We immediately became firm friends. With Nicola I spoke a broken-down French; with Karamenaios a sort of cluck-cluck language made up largely of good will and a desire to understand one another.
About once a week we went to town in the caique. I never got to like the town of Corfu. It has a desultory air which by evening becomes a quiet, irritating sort of dementia. You are constantly sitting down drinking something you don’t want to drink or else walking up and down aimlessly feeling desperately like a prisoner. Usually I treated myself to a shave and haircut whenever I went to town: I did it to while away the time and because it was so ridiculously cheap. It was the King’s barber, I was informed, who attended me, and the whole job came to about three and a half cents, including the tip. Corfu is a typical place of exile. The Kaiser used to make his residence here before he lost his crown. I went through the palace once to see what it was like. All palaces strike me as dreary and lugubrious places, but the Kaiser’s madhouse is about the worst piece of gimcrackery I have ever laid eyes on. It would make an excellent museum for Surrealistic art. At one end of the island, however, facing the abandoned palace, is the little spot called Kanoni, whence you look down upon the magical Toten Insel. In the evening Spiro sits here dreaming of his life in Rhode Island when the boot-legging traffic was in full swing. It is a spot which rightfully belongs to my friend Hans Reichel, the water colorist. The associations are Homeric, I know, but for me it partakes more of Stuttgart than of ancient Greece. When the moon is out and there is no sound save the breathing of the earth it is exactly the atmosphere which Reichel creates when he sits in a petrified dream and becomes limitrophe to birds and snails and gargoyles, to smoky moons and sweating stones, or to the sorrow-laden music which is constantly playing in his heart even when he rears like a crazed kangaroo and begins smashing everything in sight with his prehensile tail. If he should ever read these lines and know that I thought of him while looking at the Toten Insel, know that I was never the enemy he imagined me to be, it would make me very happy. Perhaps it was on one of these very evenings when I sat at Kanoni with Spiro looking down upon this place of enchantment that Reichel, who had nothing but love for the French, was dragged from his lair in the Impasse Rouet and placed in a sordid concentration camp.