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Briefly Noted_________________ In
the 1950's I used to go to Pandelidis' bookshop on Amerikis Street for the
latest English publications as few books were published in Greece at the
time. Hardcovers were always
expensive but pocket Penguins were only 10 drachmas. Although the
offerings were limited, books with a focus on Greece and things Greek were
usually prominent. It was through those writers that I became aware of a
Greece beyond my immediate experience and schooling. I
remember leafing through Osbert Lancaster's Classical
Landscape, with its exquisite sketches of people and places. His
writing was erudite but unassuming and informative. The charming
descriptions of his travels through Greece in the late 1940's blended the
landscape with the people, the architecture with the environment, the
traditional Greek customs with modern Greece. He managed to convey the
contradictions of the classical and Byzantine heritage in the Greek mind
in such a way that one understood and empathized with the difficulties and
the chaos prevalent at the time. Recently I re-read The Colossus of Maroussi. I had almost forgotten the poignant meanderings of Henry Miller with the painter Ghikas, the philosopher Katsimbalis, and the novelist Lawrence Durrell in the late 1930's. For Miller it was a mental as well as a physical journey resulting in the discovery of himself, and a return to his philosophical and cultural roots. It was a revealing account of conditions in Greece, of the people he encountered, of Athens, and of his visits to the Peloponnese and Delphi.
Through his daily dialogues and adventures he brought out the
essence of dignity amid poverty, and the fragility of human beings in a
yet undiscovered and forgotten country.
His book made others want to come to Greece to share these
experiences. Probably
one of the most famous books about Greece was Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.
It recounted the lives of an English family living on the island of Corfu
in the 1930's. The book was magical in its tenderness towards nature and
its descriptions of island life. It created a generation of visitors to
Corfu in search of the Pink Villa where the Durrell family lived, much as
Byron's poems on Greece created a wave of philhellenism in England in the
1820's. Many
writers have focused on particular areas of Greece, as did Patrick Leigh
Fermor in his classic on the Mani; some have written novels with Greek
locations like John Fowles’ The
Magus, which was inspired by the year he spent teaching English at a
boarding school on the island of Spetses in 1952. His descriptions of
walking through the pine forests, the solemn church bells in the winter,
the wind-swept Aegean sea, bring the fragrance of pine to your nose and a salt taste to your mouth. I
went to Corfu in search of Durrell's idyll; I scoured Maroussi for
Katsimbalis, the “Colossus”. I visited the Ghikas mansion on Hydra,
now a burnt-out ruin; I studied in Spetses at John Fowles' school; I
discovered the Monastery of St. John the Baptist in the foothills of
Hymettus, so beautifully depicted by Osbert Lancaster, and read the poems
of Byron, Yeats, Eliot, Corso and others whose vision of Greece led me to
my own “ Journey to Ithaka”. |
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