Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts

Thursday, April 13, 2023

Climax in Crete

‘Before we knew what was happening, the skies were full of German planes which had apparently sprung from nowhere. There seemed to be hundreds of them diving, zooming, and criss-crossing as they bombed and machine-gunned all over the place. Then a flight of large silvery machines passed low down over our heads, coming from the south-west and making for Canea. They passed as silently as ghosts with just a swishing sound instead of the usual roar, and their wings were very long and tapering. It was only then that I understood that these were gliders and that an airborne attack on Crete had begun in grim earnest.’ This is from a WWII diary-memoir by Theodore Stephanides, a Greek-British doctor, biologist and poet. He died 40 years ago today, but is still fondly remembered largely for his friendship with the literary Durrells, and, in particular for encouraging a young Gerald Durrell’s love of nature.

Stephanides was born in 1896 in Bombay (then in British India). His mother came from a British family of Greek origin (the Ralli brothers), and his father worked for them. In 1907, his father retired, taking the family first to Marseilles, France, and then to the Ralli estate in Corfu. Only then did Stephanides begin to speak Greek. He served as a gunner in the Greek army on the Macedonian front in 1917-1918, and he participated in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. In December 1921, he refused, for political reasons, to take part in a service celebrating the king’s return to Greece and was subsequently detained and court-martialed. He moved to France, where he studied medicine (including radiology taught by Marie Curie), practiced astronomy, and began translating Greek poetry into English (publishing two volumes coauthored with George Katsimbalis).

In 1928, Stephanides returned to Corfu where, along with his friend Philoctetes Paramythiotis, founded the first radiological lab in the Ionian Islands. They co-directed the facility for 10 years.  In 1930, he married Mary Alexander, the granddaughter of a former British consul in Corfu and they had one child Alexia. In time, Stephanides grew interested in freshwater biology; with support from the Greek government, he began work on what would become his magnum opus, a treatise on the freshwater biology of Corfu (not published until 1948). While in Corfu, he became close friends with Lawrence and Gerald Durrell. In 1938, he moved to Thessaloniki, though he returned to Corfu occasionally, meeting Henry Miller on one such trip. Around this time, he participated in an anti-malaria campaign in Salonica and Cyprus organised by the Rockefeller Foundation. 

During WWII, being a British citizen, Stephanides served as a medical officer (lieutenant, and later major) in the Royal Army Medical Corps of the British Army in continental Greece, Crete, the Sahara and Sicily. Meanwhile, his wife and daughter spent the war years in England, living some of the time with the Durrells in Bournemouth. After the war, though, Stephanides divorced from his wife. He worked as an assistant radiologist at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. He also continued to write and publish poetry, and to help edit books by Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, both of whom dedicated works to him. Gerald’s dedication in The Amateur Naturalist reads: ‘This book is for Theo (Dr Theodore Stephanides), my mentor and friend, without whose guidance I would have achieved nothing.’ Stephanides died in Kilburn, London, on 13 April 1983. A little further information is available at Wikipedia.

Apart from his own poems, translations of poems by others, and scientific works, Stephanides left behind some autobiographical material, in the form of memoirs. The earliest and best known of these was published in 1946 by Faber & Faber as Climax in Crete which tells of the WWII battle for the island. Although, in fact, a memoir, written retrospectively, Lawrence Durrell, who provided a foreword for the book, calls it a ‘diary’, and in parts the text reads as fresh and immediate as one. Here are some extracts from Durrell’s foreword, Stephanides’ own introduction and the main text.

Foreword by Lawrence Durrell
‘The following selection from his diary, edited by himself, gives an account of his adventures during the tragic Cretan campaign. It is not the smart, ill-informed writing of the so-called ‘trained reporter’, nor the shredded gossip of the American woman journalist; it is so bare and unassuming a narrative as to appear in places deliberately underwritten. Yet in the solid virtue of observed detail it evokes the atmosphere of Greece and Crete during the German attack with a fidelity I have not seen elsewhere equalled; and to those who were there it will no doubt come as a refreshment after the scrappy sensational prose works of the professional journalists. Certainly as a record of an epoch- making campaign it must outlive, by its very humility and simplicity and probity, more pretentious books.’

Introduction by Stephanides
‘The following brief account of what I saw during the Campaign of Crete was written immediately after my evacuation to Egypt. It was composed hurriedly, as I wished to set down the events while they were still fresh in my mind. For obvious reasons I had destroyed all notes in my possession and I was obliged to rely solely on my memory aided by some mnemonic signs I had scrawled in the margins of a pocket calendar.

It should be noted that this account does not aim at providing information of a purely military nature, as this angle has been far more competently dealt with in various official publications. My object is rather to describe the mental, moral, and psychological reactions of ordinary individuals - including myself - when suddenly confronted by a wholly unexpected emergency.

On re-reading the MS, its shortcomings were only too apparent, but I decided that it would convey a truer and more vivid picture of that grim period if left as originally written rather than if revised - and perhaps distorted - by too much pruning and correcting. No changes have therefore been made except for a few interpolations, generally to clarify the text.’

Chapter 1: The Evacuation from Greece
‘When the retreat from the north of Greece began, the 66th A.M.P.C. Group (O.C. Lieutenant-Golonel J. H. Courage), to which I was attached as regimental medical officer, returned in a hurry from Volo to Daphni. Motor- lorries brought us to Daphni Camp, about twelve kilometres north-west of Athens, on the afternoon of the 19th of April 1941. This camp, an agglomeration of tents of various shapes and sizes, was situated amongst lovely pine woods not far from the celebrated Byzantine chapel of the same name.

The next day I was able to get a few hours’ leave to go down to Athens. Everything appeared quiet and normal, except that air-raid alarms were sounding most of the time, during which all shops shut and all traffic stopped On the whole, everybody seemed cheerful and optimistic, and confident that the Germans would be held on the Lamia-Thermopylae line.

The suicide on April the 18th of Mr. Korizis, the Prime Minister, was known to everybody. The papers had reported it as ‘heart-failure’, but it was an open secret that he had shot himself.

The shopkeepers and all whom I came in contact with were particularly bitter against the Minister for War, who, they said, had betrayed Greece and ‘ought to be hanged in Constitution Square with all his accomplices’. Everybody agreed that ‘now everything will be all right as a more resolute Government will take charge’.

I saw a friend of mine, Lieutenant George Katsimbalis, who was of the opinion that the situation was very grave, but that the Lamia line could be defended. As he held a post in the Greek G.H.Q., I considered his verdict very reassuring.

On the 21st I went to the 26th General Hospital at Kiphissia to draw some medical supplies as most of my equipment had been left behind in Volo. On passing through Athens I noticed no marked signs of uneasiness, the shops and cafes were open as usual.

There was an air-raid alarm at about 10 a.m. while I was at Kiphissia and I saw a dozen German planes which seemed to be bombing the Tatoi aerodrome. There was some ack-ack fire and I saw two planes dive very steeply without reappearing above the trees which limited my view. It was impossible to say however if they had been brought down or if they were only dive-bombing. After one of these dives there was a terrific explosion and a great black column of smoke which mushroomed out at a height of several thousand feet. It was certainly something more than a bomb-burst, but I could not tell if it was the enemy plane which had crashed or a small petrol dump which had been blown up.

I handed in my indent at the hospital dispensary, housed in the Olympus, one of the luxury hotels of peacetime Kiphissia, and was told to call again the next morning for my stores.

That same afternoon we moved from Daphni Camp and were billeted in a pleasant little villa in Old Phaleron. Its one drawback was that it was situated just opposite the seaplane base, and I thought that it might become rather a hot spot if the enemy were to bomb the hangars.

Lieutenant-Colonel Courage invited Captain James, Captain Rose, and me to dine with him that evening at Costi’s restaurant. We had a very pleasant meal and everything seemed normal. The place was full of people, including British and Greek officers, and everybody appeared cheerful and confident. On our way to Costi’s, we had dropped in for a drink at the Officers’ Club just opposite the Grande Bretagne Hotel. All the officers we saw there were optimistic and they told us that the Germans were being thrown back with terrific losses all along the Lamia line. The news about the Greek army in Albania was not quite so good, but everybody seemed certain that it would be able to fall back all right and join hands with the rest of the forces.

We left Costi’s at about 11 p.m. and suddenly discovered that there was not a taxi to be seen anywhere to take us down to Phaleron. We had to walk the whole way and it was only when we had almost reached our billet that a private car passed us and an old gentleman with a white beard stopped and offered us a lift. We all bundled in out of politeness and almost immediately bundled out again opposite our front door. The old gentleman would take no refusal.

The next morning, the 22nd of April, we had breakfast as usual. None of us had the slightest inkling that an evacuation was contemplated. We even thought that we would go up the line again to Gravia in a few days’ time. I was given a small 15-cwt. truck to take delivery of the medical supplies from the 26th General Hospital. [. . .]’

Chapter III: The Battle for Crete
‘May the 20th dawned bright and fine. At about 7.30 a.m. some of the other officers and I were standing near the mess tent, chatting and waiting for breakfast to be served, when suddenly without any warning there was a terrific outburst of ack-ack fire. We all sprang into the slit-trenches, thinking that this was just another of the ordinary raids we had got so used to lately. But this time it was something very different. Before we knew what was happening, the skies were full of German planes which had apparently sprung from nowhere. There seemed to be hundreds of them diving, zooming, and criss-crossing as they bombed and machine-gunned all over the place. Then a flight of large silvery machines passed low down over our heads, coming from the south-west and making for Canea. They passed as silently as ghosts with just a swishing sound instead of the usual roar, and their wings were very long and tapering. It was only then that I understood that these were gliders and that an airborne attack on Crete had begun in grim earnest.

Shells from our ack-ack guns were bursting all around the gliders and their accompanying planes, but these were so many and our guns so pitifully few that little damage seemed to be caused. I saw one glider twist sideways with a jerk and come down behind the trees at a very steep slant, and I guessed that it must have crashed, but most of the others - about thirty, I estimated - slid serenely on and descended in the direction of Canea. They were going much slower than an ordinary plane and I reflected what a hash a few of our Hurricanes would have made of them if only they had been there.

I was just gazing at a bomber which appeared to have been hit, as it was swaying from side to side with a long plume of black smoke trailing behind it, when there was a shout from Captain Fenn: ‘Look! Parachutists!’

I spun round and saw a row of tiny black dots falling from some of the planes which were buzzing around. They seemed to have been loosed from a very low altitude, and they blossomed out almost instantly into little white umbrellas which disappeared behind the trees. Some of the parachutes appeared to be coloured green or brown, but they were too far away (luckily!) for me to be certain. Some again were much larger than the others and had a curious elongated shape; it was only later that I learnt that these were triple parachutes carrying light mortars, munitions, and other heavy stuff. The planes weaved about continuously in all directions and dropped wave after wave of these parachutes in a long arc extending from roughly south-west to north of us. Fortunately they all seemed fairly distant, but parachutists are too near in my opinion wherever they may be. It was difficult too to judge distances and to know exactly where they had come down owing to the densely crowded trees which surrounded us.

Incidentally, it was not until I had actually seen them that I realized the enormous size of a parachute. I had pictured parachutes to be four or five times as large as an umbrella, but in reality they looked twenty or thirty times that size, quite dwarfing the tiny figures of the men who dangled beneath them. When the distance is great enough, only the parachute itself is visible.

In the meantime a terrific outburst of Bren, rifle, and tommy-gun fire was added to the other noises and, what with the ack-ack, the bursting bombs, the shriek of diving planes and the rattle of their machine-guns and light cannon, the uproar reached an almost unbelievable intensity. It did not add to our peace of mind, either, to reflect that none of us knew what was really happening, that we had never received instructions what to do in a similar emergency, that nearly all our men were unarmed, and that none of us had the faintest idea as to how near the Germans really were to us. It was impossible to see very far though the trees, but the small-arms fire was very close to the west of us. [. . .]’

Friday, March 13, 2020

A bath in fish-glue

‘Days of such exhaustion, sometimes I feel as though I’ve taken my bath in fish-glue. Horrified to find no time left over for thinking: I’ve turned into a machine.’ This is from the WW2 diaries of one of Greece’s pre-eminent 20th century poets, George Seferis, born 120 years ago today. Although a career diplomat with Greece’s foreign ministry, he regularly published collections of poetry, sometimes likened to that of W. B Yeats or T. S. Elliot, which eventually earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature. Several volumes of his diaries were published posthumously, and there have been two selections translated in English.

Seferis was born in Izmir/Smyrna then part of the Ottoman Empire on 13 March 1900 (29 February, Old Style dates). In 1914, the family moved to Athens, where his father, a lawyer, worked at the university. After concluding his education, Seferis studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris. On returning to Athens, he joined the Royal Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the start of a long diplomatic career. In the 1930s, he was posted to the UK and to Albania. In 1941, he married Maria Zannou. During the Second World War, Seferis moved with the Free Greek Government in exile to Crete, Egypt, South Africa, and Italy, and returned to liberated Athens in 1944. Thereafter, he continued to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held diplomatic posts in Ankara, Turkey and London. He was appointed minister to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq (1953-1956), and was Royal Greek Ambassador to the UK from 1957 to 1961, the last post before his retirement in Athens.

Throughout his life, starting in the early 1930s, Seferis published collections of poems. According to Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard translator of his collected poems into English: ‘The distinguishing attribute of Seferis’s genius - one that he shares with Yeats and Eliot was always his ability to make out of a local politics, out of a personal history or mythology, some sort of general statement or metaphor.’ In 1963, his poetry was internationally recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture’. (Other finalists that year included Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett and W. H. Auden.) When, in 1967, the right-wing Regime of the Colonels took power in Greece after a coup d’état, Seferis took a public stand against the regime’s censorship and repression, but he did not live to see the end of the junta. He died in 1971. Further information is available from Wikipedia, The Poetry Foundation or the Nobel Prize website.

Seferis left behind at least nine volumes of a journal that spans most of his life. It was while serving in the Greek embassy in Ankara, in 1948, that he first began to arrange and edit these journals. But not until 1960 did he start to prepare the texts for publication in various volumes - all with the title ‘Days’ (probably in imitation of the poet C. P. Cavafy). However, from 1967, once Greece had entered a period of military rule, he made the decision, like other Greek writers, not to publish under the regime’s harsh censorship rules. Consequently, selections from his diaries were only printed posthumously. A first English translation by Athan Anagnostopoulos appeared in 1975, published as A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (Harvard University Press). It would be more than 30 years before another volume appeared in English - A Levant Journal, as translated, edited and introduced by Roderick Beaton (Ibis Editions, Jerusalem, 2007). This is divided into two sections: Wartime (1941-1944) and The Passing of Empire (1953-1956).

In his introduction, Beaton provides more information about the diaries: ‘In the case of Seferis, it is debatable whether one should speak of a single “journal” or a series of different “journals.” In his notebooks he himself made a clear distinction between the personal journal(s), the Days, and what he called his “Service Journal,” of which two volumes have appeared in Greek under the title Political Diary. These deal essentially with matters pertaining to Seferis’s lifelong career as a civil servant in the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which he eventually rose to the rank of ambassador. The evidence of Seferis’s personal archive, preserved in the Gennadius Library, Athens, is inconclusive as to how consistently he maintained this distinction in practice. Leaving aside the somewhat special case of the Political Diary, there are many gradations of difference even within the Days. The volume covering the 1920s, for instance, is highly literary and self-conscious in style, almost totally devoid of factual or personal information; the one that covers the early 1930s has been culled from a series of intimate letters. It is only from the mid-1930s onwards that the Days settle down, more or less, to the sharply drawn sketches and more relaxed meditations that many readers of these volumes in Greek have admired. But even here, the density and type of entry vary greatly, as does the extent of later reworking. Finally, the balance of introspection, observation, political and cultural commentary shifts from period to period, sometimes even within a single volume. As a result, even if one were to speak of a single journal, the Days, that would not be to imply a homogeneous, continuous testimony.’

Here are several extracts from Beaton’s translation of Seferis’s journals

26 August 1942
‘It must be years since last I tried to write at such an hour. From the open window, behind me, comes a cataract of sounds that I’ve never, since we came to this hotel, been able to get used to. The Arabs, the trams, the traffic, everything leaks noise. We both sleep badly. I think with bitter nostalgia of our house in Zamalek, which we lost in our mad exodus to Palestine. Panel-heaters, klaxons, engines, newspaper-sellers - it’s like the end of the world out there. I’m reminded again of the image of the ant struggling uphill with an enormous weight. It runs away from him, and he starts over, again and again. The same image as I had a year ago.

What business has a “sensitive" (in the technical sense) person in the midst of all this?

Work has been heavy, since we came, with many difficulties, and non-existent resources. Much of the time is wasted. You lie down at night and look back at your day, drained dry like a glass of water. You don’t know what’s happened, what use any of it has been.

Even in this diary I haven’t been able to write more often.

Last Saturday, the 22nd, telephone call from the British Embassy: “This afternoon at 6. To meet a distinguished person.”

Doors and portals with sentries and servitors, until you reach the inner garden. An English lawn bright green and at the end of it a triangular sail, poking up from the invisible river beyond. Various people from the newspaper world were gathered. Suddenly all conversation ceased. The signal had been given to go in. In the ballroom, a great chamber apparently in the process of being painted, in front of an exceedingly small table, hunched up like Rodin’s Thinker, except for his head that was watching and following everything, sat Churchill. He wore mauve dungarees; held in his hand, like a stubby pencil, was a long cigar. With all this crowd around him, he looked somehow smaller, as though at the far end of an enormous lecture-theater. Then he spoke and came closer. At the end, when it was time for questions, some reporter wearing a fez asked him what he thought of Rommel.

“That is the way of generals,” he replied, “sometimes to advance, sometimes to retreat. Why, no one knows . . .” ’

18 September 1942
‘To Mr. and Mrs. Lachovaris’ place. They always have company with them. A spindly Englishwoman, saying nothing, knitting. She’s going to teach Maro the language. An Englishman with fair hair and the look of an intellectual - he looks younger than he is in reality - is fairly quiet too, then bursts into speech. We discuss the life of the Arabs, old houses in Cairo, the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. He says the Egyptians don’t like it if you talk to them about this book. They think it “indecent”: they’re almost ashamed of it. But when it comes down to it, they re ashamed of everything.

Outside, it sounds like the end of the world, with shouting and soldiers singing. By now the nights are very cool, almost cold. Exhaustion every evening. Not real tiredness, more from nerves. Impression of swimming through mud. Perhaps, of course, all this may pass. Above all, there’s a lack of people. And among the few who remain, most are mad.’

14 July 1943
‘In Alexandria I met Henri al-Kayem. This time last year he’d sent me his poems published by GLM (in the manner of Jouve); but it was only now that we managed to meet. His house is bright, full of light; books with familiar spines. They offer me iced tea and black Havana cigarettes. His wife is as tiny as he is himself: she’s a Malgache. Great refinement in the movements of her hands. Both of them very soft-spoken, they almost whisper. In their house I felt crass in my movements, like a steam-roller. There’s no peace to spare, to make the most of company like theirs. This time I was sorry for it.’

23 July 1943
‘Days of such exhaustion, sometimes I feel as though I’ve taken my bath in fish-glue. Horrified to find no time left over for thinking: I’ve turned into a machine.’

7 October 1953
‘These Arab cities. Half permanent, half nomadic. Houses half buildings, half encampments. The horror of civilization chipping away all round you like a chisel, and all you can feel are the splinters. This pitiable dust in your eye: coca-cola-ism, peps i-cola-ism. Cars handled like drunken camels, and the ancient monuments, ancient beyond hope, mixed up in this inhuman muddle - sometimes it seems a pathetic nightmare.

Yesterday at the house of the doctor, the honorary consul. His wife is French, he’s very well off - with a mania for travelling the world by airplane. It could have been the ante-chamber of a modern Inferno. Photographs on the wall: the Bedouin father, face like a bird of prey or Pelecanus onocrotalus, wife at his side wearing a large cross. They’re Orthodox Chrisrians - bare electric bulbs - lacework made of nylon - a colossal frigidaire in the dining-room: Hostile walls, my God! I’m tired.’


Monday, September 23, 2013

Paddy’s broken road

John Murray has just published the final part of a trilogy by Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor concerning his epic journey on foot across Europe in the mid-1930s. The first two parts, thought by some to be classics of travel literature, were written from memory 40-50 years after the journey and not published until the 1970s-1980s. Leigh Fermor died in 2011 and never completed the third part, but the new book - The Broken Road - has been compiled from early pieces of his writing, including a diary he kept during the latter stages of his walk.

Paddy was born in London in 1915, the son of a distinguished geologist then working in India, and spent the first four years of his life with a family in Northamptonshire while his mother and sister stayed with his father in India. Subsequently, he had trouble with schools, being expelled from some, and being sent to one for difficult children for a while. Nevertheless, he managed some learning, including Greek.

By the summer of 1933, still only 18, Paddy had tired of education and decided to live in London and become a writer. A few months later, though, he was off on the first of his many travels: a walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The journey lasted from December 1933 to January 1935, and thereafter he travelled around Greece, settling with a Romanian noblewoman, Balasha Cantacuzène, first near Athens then in Moldavia.

Paddy served with the Irish Guards during the Second World War, and then joined the Special Operations Executive in 1941, helping to coordinate resistance in German-occupied Crete. He led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated a German commander. Captain Bill Stanley Moss, his second in command at the time, later wrote about the events in Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe, which was adapted into a film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with Dirk Bogarde playing Paddy.

In 1950, Paddy published his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, about post-war travels in the Caribbean, and he went on to write several further books, including Mani and Roumeli, of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. He was friendly with Lawrence Durrell, another writer on Greece (see The Diary Review - A book out of these scraps) who wrote of him in his Cyprus book, Bitter Lemons: ‘After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle. . . I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. “What is it?” I say, catching sight of Frangos. “Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!” Their reverent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes.’

In 1968, after many years together, Paddy married Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of the 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on his travels (until her death 2003) and the two were based partly near Kardamyli in the southern Peloponnese and partly in Gloucestershire, England. They had no children. Paddy was knighted in 2004, and he died in 2011. Further information can be found from Wikipedia, The New Yorker, various obituaries (The Guardian, for example, The Independent, the BBC), or from reviews of a ‘magnificent’ biography by Artemis Cooper published last year by John Murray (The Telegraph, The Daily Mail).

In 1977, John Murray published Paddy’s A Time of Gifts, often considered to be a classic of travel literature. This was a memoir of the first part of his journey on foot across Europe in 1933-1934. (Much of it can be read online at Googlebooks.) Nearly a decade later, a second volume appeared, Between the Woods and the Water; and a third, covering the final part of the walk to Constantinople (Istanbul), was promised but never completed: he laboured at this third book for years but never produced a manuscript. Now, in September 2013, John Murray (part of Hodder) has brought out a third volume edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper - The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos - by way of trying to complete the trilogy.

But this is a very different book to the first two since it is made up of two documents written by Paddy much earlier in his life, and not crafted by him to be the third book of the trilogy. The first, called ‘A Youthful Journey’, was inspired by a commission for a magazine on the pleasure of walking; and the second is a diary Paddy lost but, oddly, recovered in 1965.

In the book’s introduction - which can be read on the Hodder website - the editors provide a full explanation of the convoluted story behind The Broken Road, and some background on Paddy’s diaries. They also explain the genesis of the title chosen to indicate Paddy’s unfinished written journey, and the fact that the work is not the polished version he would have desired, ‘only the furthest in the end we [the editors] could go.’

‘One of the astonishing facts about A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water,’ the editors say, ‘is that they were written from memory, with no diaries or notebooks to sustain them. Paddy’s first diary was stolen in a Munich youth hostel in 1934, and those that succeeded it, along with his picaresque letters to his mother, were stored during the war in the Harrods Depository, where years later they were destroyed unclaimed. It was a loss, he used to say, that “still aches, like an old wound in wet weather”.’


However, in 1965, while researching an article on the Danube, he met up again with Balasha Cantacuzène, who he had not seen since the start of the war in 1939. She had saved his fourth and final diary, and returned it to him during this visit.

The editors continue: ‘Written in faded pencil, the Green Diary, as he called it, carries his life forward to 1935 after his walk was over, and is appended with sketches of churches, costumes, friends, vocabularies in Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Greek, and the names and addresses of almost everyone he stayed with. But strangely, although the diary covered all his walk from the Iron Gates to Constantinople and more, he never collated it with ‘A Youthful Journey’. Perhaps its callowness jarred with the later, more studied manuscript, or their factual differences disconcerted him. The two narratives often diverge. Whatever the reason, the diary - which retained an almost talismanic significance for him - did nothing to solve his dilemma.’

Here are three partial extracts from the diary section of The Broken Road.

24 January 1935
‘I left Salonika last night; Patullo and Elphinstone came along with me to the boat, and we bought some bread, and salami and cheese by the harbour gates. I was glad they came, as it was already sunset, and it’s very lonely starting off on these journeys alone. The ship was surprisingly small; very dirty and overloaded with every kind of cargo, all of which was hauled on board in a surprisingly unworkmanlike way. The boat was a shambles inside too, with enormous banks of coal in the passages, and peasants lying in their blankets in despondent groups everywhere. We stood in the passages and smoked, and chatted, waiting for the bells to ring to announce departure, so they could get off; but the boat was nearly two hours late, and they nearly came away with me, which would have been rather serious for Patullo has to join a troopship for Hong Kong in a day or two at Port Said. [. . .]’

27 January 1935
‘I left Koutloumousiou early yesterday, and started off downhill, the road winding beside a rushing torrent, breaking over great boulders, and dashing on in a lather of white foam. The peninsula here is entirely forested with evergreens, so that it is difficult to believe it’s only January; among the ilexes and oleanders are many olives, aspens, cypresses and cedar. The higher slopes are almost entirely fir.

Coming round a corner I saw a funny little grey-haired man sitting on the edge of an old stone well, with some big brown paper parcels beside him. He wished me good day in French, and giving me a cigarette, began to tell me all about himself. He was from Kavalla, and had lived on the Holy Mountain for four years, making maps of it, and copying ikons on wood. He showed me a few of these, they were good.

The sea soon came into sight round a bend, and the large monastery of Iviron, the high walls appearing above the trees. These walls are lofty, and have the effect of being much higher than they are long, as they are divided into sort of rectangular bastions, rising sheer to quite a height without a single window, then suddenly branching out into an overhanging balcony, with undulating tiled roofs, and the plaster painted bright colours - red, blue, green, in crude designs.

Several monks were sitting on benches in the big, sunny cobbled courtyard, half asleep, stroking their beards. [. . .]’

28 January 1935
‘I left Iviron after an early lunch yesterday, the track running close along the shore, sometimes over the high rocks, sometimes over the pebbles and sand of the beach, and sometimes winding away inland, a little footpath between the trees. It was really a succession of Devonshire combes, but full of wildly growing evergreens, with now and then a squat stone hermitage standing on a ledge of the mountainside, surrounded by dark cypresses. [. . .]’

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Awfully tortured by fleas

Edward Lear, the great illustrator and creator of ‘nonsense’ poems, was born 200 years ago today, the day after, in fact, the assassination of Spencer Perceval (see previous story). Though best known for his poetry - such as The Owl and Pussycat - and limericks, he was a very capable landscape painter and a diligent diarist, and loved to employ both talents when travelling. Much of Lear’s diary material is available online: four years worth of daily extracts have recently been published as a web blog exactly 150 years after they were written; and three highly illustrated travel journals, published in Lear’s lifetime, are available at Internet Archive.

Lear was born in Highgate, near London, on 12 May 1812 - the 20th child of Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker, and his wife Ann. From a young age, he was looked after by a much older sister, and from 15, he was already able to earn a living by drawing. In 1831, he was employed by the Zoological Society of London, and a year later published a large-scale book of his coloured drawings of parrots.

Still as a young man, Lear worked for the British Museum, and also lived at Knowsley, Derbyshire, where he made illustrations of the Earl of Derby’s private menagerie. It was for the Earl’s grandchildren that he first wrote Book of Nonsense, which became a children’s classic. By the mid-1830s, he was turning his artistic talent to landscape painting, since this was less taxing on his eyesight.

Lear suffered all his life from epilepsy, and never robust, after 1837, lived mostly abroad, firstly in Rome, and later in Corfu and Malta before settling (with his cat Foss) in San Remo on the Italian coast, close to the border with France. These years saw him publish various travel books; and, in the 1870s, he produced more ‘Nonsense’ books (including Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets which contains the famous Owl and the Pussy Cat rhyme).

Lear died in 1888 (having never married). Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, The Victorian Web, or A Blog of Bosh, an extensive website devoted to Lear which also has a list of bicentenary events.

There are thirty extant volumes of Lear’s diaries covering the second part of his life, from 1858 to 1887. All are housed in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. However, Lear himself refers to ‘60’ volumes and to the fact that he kept journals during his Knowsley years, but later destroyed them. During his lifetime, Richard Bentley published three books based on journals Lear kept while travelling. Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c. came out in 1851, and this was followed a year later by Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria &c. Twenty years on, in 1870, Robert John Bush published Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica. All of these titles are freely available at Internet Archive.

It was not until 1952, that any more of Lear’s diaries appeared in print: Journals : A Selection was edited by Herbert Van Thal and published by A. Barker. The following year, Jarrolds brought out Indian Journal (edited by Ray Murphy). It would be another 30 years before Denise Harvey published The Cretan Journal (edited by Rowena Fowler).

Otherwise, several years worth of Lear’s diaries have been published online, as a blog, each day’s entry exactly 150 years after it was written. The blog was started in 2008 - the diaries were painstakingly transcribed from the Houghton Library archive by Marco Graziosi - and the intention was to finish today, on Lear’s 50th birthday. It appears, however, as though the transcribing process is continuing beyond the targeted four years on this Wordpress site.

Lear wrote his diary at some length, especially when travelling - indeed, one wonders how he had time to paint when he was writing so much. Here are two entries. The first (taken from the blog mentioned above) is from his 50th birthday, i.e. 150 years ago today, when he was in Corfu. (I have replaced several phrases in Greek with their English translations, as given by Graziosi in footnotes, in square brackets.) The second extract is from Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica.

Monday, 12 May 1862
‘My 50th birthday. Rose at 4.20: - off by 5.15.

Long winding paths through olive groves: then dips & struggles with quite wild places, stuffed with all sorts of underwood, the old olives growing tangly all about. Frogs there were also, & rushes. A man passing, & asked the way to Sparterò - said - [Why do you want to go to my village?] I shall not tell you.” - Small miserable collection of huts are Nicori, Palaiocori, & Βαστάτινα, & I see no fun in going back by them: so having drawn the Northern distance above the last village but one - Dragolenà, & great groups of vast olives higher up - we arrived at Σπαρτηρῖο, 20 little houses scattered here & there; [goats], & rayther wretched: - the people only half polite. Nevertheless there is superb scenery all about the place. We took a boy to guide us to Ἅ. Προκόπιος - (the best place to pass the rest of the day in,) - ever winding paths, thro’ thickets, a few scared cattle. A church (in a wilderness,) & thus by 10 - or 10.30 - reached the groves of the Holy Προκόπιος. Lunched & drew in the wide grove till 1: nothing but a very elaborate study of this wood - even if that, - could convey an idea of this beautiful place: - the quiet, warmth, & semishade are delightful. The Elements - trees, clouds, &c. - silence - [All of nature that is] - seem to have far more part with me or I with them, than mankind. After death perhaps I shall be a tree - a cloud - a cabbage - or silence in the next world: but most possibly an ass. In these Προκόπιαν holy glades are but 3 very manifold colors, - the warm pale green of the floor - with long shades: - the gray uniform freckly shimmer of the roof: & the dark brown gray of the supporting pillar trunx. At 1, or 1.30 - into the Monastery, & drew till 3 - awfully tortured by fleas, & obliged to stand in the sun all the time. As soon as I got to the sea I bathed - killing 11 fleas first. At 6. Reached the Casa [Curì]: paid Dimitri 2 dollars [. . .] - 7.30 dinner - [very much too much], & I was horribly bored by a flea!

Bed by 10.15.

Kindly good folk.’

21 April 1868
‘6 a.m. - After drawing an outline of the mountains, I am picked up by Peter, G., and the trap. After three days’ stay (and I could willingly remain here for as many weeks; for what have I seen of the upper valley or the opposite hills?) I leave Sartene, and can bear witness to the good fare, moderate charges, and constant wish to oblige of Fatima, padrona of the Hotel d’ltalie. Poor Fatima, rumour says, is forsaken by her husband, and “dwells alone upon the hill of storms,” as in the literal sense of the expression Sartene must certainly be, for it is exposed to all the winds of heaven, and from its great elevation must needs be bitterly cold in winter.

Just above the town, where the high road to Bonifacio passes the Capuchin convent, there is the finest view of Sartene and the mountains; the whole town stands out in a grand mass from the valley and heights, and there is something rough and feudal in its dark houses that places its architecture far above that of Ajaccio in a picturesque sense. But to halt for drawing now is not to be thought of, inasmuch as this day’s journey to Bonifacio is not only a long one, but because in the whole distance (some fifty-three kilometres, or thirty-two miles) there is only a single wayside house, where the horses are to bait, yet where humanity, expecting food, would be severely disappointed. Hearing which, the Suliot has taken care to pack the old Coliseum sack with food for the day.

How grand at this hour is the broad light and shade of these mountains valleys! (notwithstanding that such as leave their houses at ten or eleven A.M. complain of “want of chiaroscuro in the south.”) How curious are the chapel-tombs, so oddly and picturesquely placed, and frequently so tasteful in design, gleaming among the rocks and hanging woods! At first, after leaving Sartene, the road passes through splendid woods of clustering ilex, and then begins to descend by opener country, shallower green vales and scattered granite tors or boulders, here and there passing plots of cultivation, and ever farther away from the high central mountains of the island. Now the distance sweeps down to lower hills, all clothed in deep green “maquis,” and at every curve of the road are endless pictures of gray granite rocks and wild olive.

While I am thinking how pleasant it would be to get studies of this very peculiar scenery, by living at Sartene, and walking seven or eight miles daily, Peter suddenly halts below the village of Giunchetto, which stands high above the road. “What is the matter?” says G.; but Peter only points to the village and crosses himself, and looks round at me. “What has happened?” I repeat. Peter whispers, “In that village a priest has lately died, and without confessing himself.” In the midst of visions of landscape - “What,” as Charles XII said to his secretary, “What has this bomb to do with what I am dictating?”

Farther on, near the eleventh kilometre, are some enormous granite blocks, with two or three stone huts by the road-side, and then follows a steep descent to the valley of the Ortola; looking back, you see a world of mist-folded mountains in the north-east, while ahead are “maquis,” and cystus carpets, sown with myriads of star-twinkling white flowers, broom, and purple lavender. The descent to the Ortola valley abounds with beauty, and by its verdure reminds me of more than one Yorkshire dale - here, instead of the oak or ash, depths of aged evergreen oak and gray-branched cork-trees, shading pastures and fern.

At 8, the river, a shallow stream, is crossed by a three-arched bridge; and here, near a solitary stone hut, are a few cattle and some peculiarly hideous pigs - the only living things seen since I left Sartene. Then, at the eighteenth kilometre, an ascent on the south side of the valley brings me in sight of the long point and tower of Cape Roccaspina and of the broad sea, above which I halt at 9 A.M., for the great Lion of Roccaspina may not be passed without getting a sketch of it. And, truly, it is a remarkable object - an immense mass of granite perfectly resembling a crowned lion, placed on a lofty ledge of the promontory, and surrounded by bare and rugged rocks.

The road now becomes a regular cornice coast-way, alternately descending and rising, always broad and good, and well protected by parapets; long spurs of rock jut out into the sea beyond odorous slopes of myrtle and cystus, while in some parts enormous blocks and walls of granite form the left side of the picture. Presently the road diverges more inland, and is carried through wild and lonely tracts of “maquis,” varied by patches of corn at intervals, and recalling the valleys of Philistia when you begin to ascend towards the Judaean hills from the plains near Eleutheropolis. Two flocks of goats - of course, black - and a few black sheep and pigs, who emulate the appearance of wild boars, with one man and one boy, are the living objects which a distant hamlet (I think Monaccia) contributes to the life of the scene. Occasionally glimpses of the distant sea occur; but, as far as eye can reach, the wild green unbroken “maquis” spreads away on every side.

At 10.30 “half our mournful task is done,” and the mid-day halt at a house (one of some six or seven by the wayside) is reached. The appearance of these dwellings is very poor and wretched; and a gendarme informs me that from the end of May till November they are all deserted, so unwholesome is the air of this district; and that the few peasants at present here go up at that season to the villages of Piannattoli or Caldarello - small clusters of houses higher up on the hill-side. How little cheerful the aspect of this part of the island must be then, one may imagine from what it is even in its inhabited condition.

On a rising ground close by are some of those vast isolated rocks which characterise this southern coast of Corsica - a good spot whereat to halt for Fatima’s breakfast. Looking southward, green lines of campagna stretch out into what is the first semblance of a plain that I have seen in this island, and which is exceedingly like portions of Syrian landscape. It was worth while to get a drawing of this, and I would willingly have stayed longer, but at 1 P.M. it is time to start again.

The road continues across comparatively low ground by undulating inequalities, through wide “maquis”-dotted tracts, where here and there the tall giant-hemlock is a new feature in the more moist parts of the ground. Twice we descend to the sea at inlets or small creeks - Figari and Ventilegne - in each case passing the stream which they receive by a bridge, and at these points marshes and “still salt pools” show the malarious nature of the district. Nor does the landscape painter fail to rejoice that he has chosen this method of “seeing all Corsica,” and that he is able to drive rapidly over this part of it, where there is no need of halt for drawing, for the higher mountains are far away from the south of the island, and the hills nearer the coast stretch seaward with a persistent and impracticable length of line not to be reduced to agreeable pictorial proportion. Once only, at 3 P.M., about seven kilometres from Bonifacio, I stop to draw, more to obtain a record of the topographic character of the south-west coast than for the sake of any beauty of scenery, of which the long spiky promontories hereabouts possess but little, although there is a certain grace in some of those slender points running far out into the blue water, and, though far inland, you may at times catch a glimpse of some heights of varied form; yet, be your drawing never so long or narrow, the length of the whole scene is with difficulty to be compressed within its limits.

At 3.30 I send on Peter and the trap to Bonifacio, and walk, for so many hours of sitting still in a carriage cramps limbs and head. As the hills, from the ascent to which I had made my last drawing, are left behind, Bonifacio, the Pisan or Genoese city, becomes visible; extreme whiteness, cliffs as chalky as those of Dover, and a sort of Maltese look of fortified lines are the apparent characters at this distance of a city so full of interest and history. Opposite, towards the south, a thick haze continues to hide the coast of Sardinia, and this has been no light drawback to the day’s journey, since the sight of remote mountains and the blue straits would have gone far to relieve the “maquis” monotony, driving through which has occupied so much of the time passed between Sartene and Bonifacio.

Meanwhile a space of three or four miles has to be done on foot, shut out from all distant view, as well as very uninteresting in its chalky white dryness of road, about which the only features are walls, with olives all bent to the north-east, and eloquently speaking of the force of the south-west wind along this coast. But at 4.30 P.M. fields of tall corn and long-armed olives replace this ugliness, and the road descends to a deep winding gorge or valley, closely sheltered and full of luxuriant vegetation, olive, almond, and fig. After the boulders and crags of granite, which up to this time have been the foregrounds in my Corsican journey, a new world seems to be entered on coming to this deep hollow (where a stream apparently should run, but does not), for its sides are high cliffs of cretaceous formation, pale, crenelated, and with cavernous ledges, and loaded with vegetation.

At 5 P.M. the road abruptly reaches the remarkable port of Bonifacio, which forms one of the most delightful and striking pictures possible. Terminating a winding and narrow arm of the sea, or channel, the nearer part of which you see between overhanging cliffs of the strangest form, it is completely shut in on all sides, that opposite the road by which alone you can reach it being formed by the great rock on which the old fortress and city are built, and which to the south is a sheer precipice to the sea, or rather (even in some parts of it visible from the harbour) actually projecting above it. At the foot of this fort-rock lies a semicircle of suburban buildings at the water’s edge, with a church, and a broad flight of shallow steps leading up to the top of this curious peninsular stronghold; all these combine in a most perfect little scene, now lit up by the rays of the afternoon sun, and which I lose no time in drawing.

A broad and good carriage road leads up to the city, huge grim walls enclose it, and before you enter them you become aware how narrow is the little isthmus that joins the rock-site of Bonifacio to the main land; from a small level space close below the fort you see the opposite coast of Sardinia, and you look down perpendicularly into the blue straits which divide the two islands. Very narrow streets conduct from the fortifications to the inner town; the houses are lofty and crowded, and Bonifacio evidently possesses the full share of inconveniences natural to garrison towns of limited extent, with somewhat of the neglected and unprepossessing look of many southern streets and habitations. There was no difficulty in finding the Widow Carreghi’s hotel, but its exterior and entrance were, it must be owned, not a little dismal, and the staircase, steep, narrow, wooden, dark, dirty, and difficult, leading to the inn rooms on the third floor, was such as a climbing South American monkey might have rejoiced in. Nevertheless, once safe at the top of this ladder-like climb there are several little and very tolerably habitable rooms; and, as seems to be invariably the rule as to Corsican hostesses, the two here are very obliging and anxious to please.

There was yet time to walk through the town, which I was surprised to find so extensive and populous. Some of the churches are ancient, and near the end of the rock (though the lateness of the hour, together with a powder magazine and obstructive sentry, prevented my getting quite to its extremity) a considerable plateau with barracks and other public buildings exists, and I can well imagine some days might be spent with great interest in this ancient place. As it was, I could but make a slight drawing from the edge of the precipice looking up to the harbour or sea-inlet, but from such examination it was evident that the most characteristic view of this singular and picturesque place must be made from the opposite side of the narrow channel, though it does not appear how, except by boat, such a point can be reached.

Bonifacio is doubtless a most striking place and full of subjects for painting; the bright chalky white of the rocks on which it stands, the deep green vegetation, and the dark gulf below it, add surprising contrasts of colour to the general effect of its remarkable position and outline. Returning to the Widow Carreghi’s hotel, confusion prevailed throughout that establishment, owing to its being crowded at this hour by, not only the officers of the garrison, who take their food there, but an additional host of official civilians, gendarmerie, &c, to-morrow being a day of great excitement, on account of the conscription taking place, in consequence of which event the Sous-prefet is here from Sartene, with numerous other dignitaries.

It was not wonderful that the two obliging women, who seemed joint hostesses, were somewhat “dazed” by the unbounded noise in the small and overfull rooms; nevertheless, they got a very good supper for me and my man, only apologising continually that “le circonstanze” of the full house, and of the late hour at which I had arrived, prevented their offering more food and in greater comfort and quiet. Everybody seemed to be aware that I was a travelling painter, and all proffered to show me this or that; the Sous-prefet, they said, had gone out to meet me, and the Mayor, for whom I have left a card and a letter from M. Galloni d’Istria (he lives in the Carreghi house), would come and see me to-morrow. Another of the persons at the table gave me his address at Casabianda, and begged that, if I should come there, he might show me the ruins of Aleria. The whole party, “continentals” and “insulaires,” were full of civility.

All night long there was singing and great noise in the streets, so that in spite of my camp-bed very little sleep was attainable.’

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

In Turkish/Greek waters

It is 210 years since the birth of George William Frederick Howard, a British politician who went on to become the 7th Earl of Carlisle. A cultured man, he never reached high office, though Prime Minister Palmerston appointed him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for the last years of his life. From the age of 40 or so, he kept a regular diary, extracts of which were published privately and posthumously by his sister. More interesting, though, is the 7th Earl’s diary of his travels in Greek and Turkish waters.

George Howard was born in London on 18 April 1802. His father, the 6th Earl of Carlisle, was an MP for 25 years, as well as Chief Commissioner for Woods and Forests, Lord Privy Seal, and a Knight of the Garter. George was educated at Eton, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he developed a reputation as a poet and scholar. In 1826 he accompanied his uncle, the Duke of Devonshire, to Russia, to attend the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I.

The same year, 1826, Howard was elected to Parliament for the family seat at Morpeth, and remained an MP for around 15 years, serving in several governmental positions. When he lost his seat, he toured North America for a year. He was again returned to Parliament in 1846 before becoming the 7th Earl and a peer, on the death of his father, in 1848. He was then appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Lord Palmerston, a post he held until his death with only one short interval.

Like his father, the 7th Earl was appointed a Knight of the Garter. He never married, and so the estate, Castle Howard, passed to his brother, William, who for more than 40 years was Rector of Londesborough in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia or the Web of English History.

The 7th Earl’s first foray into autobiographical writing was with Two Lectures on the Poetry of Pope, and on His Own Travels in America published in 1851 (the record of his travels in America is more of a memoir than a diary). Two volumes of bona fide diaries followed. The first was titled Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters and published by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans in 1854. A second volume of diary texts 1843-1864 - Extracts from Journals kept by George Howard, earl of Carlisle: selected by his sister, lady Caroline Lascelles - was printed for private circulation only. Both are free to view online: the former at Internet Archive, and the latter at Googlebooks.

Here is the 7th Earl introducing his journey to Turkish and Greek Waters: ‘Having written an account of my visit to the Western World, I propose to myself the like task during my projected travels in the East. It shall again assume the form of a Diary, because my experience of the writings of others convinces me that it is by far more entertaining than any other; it secures the freshness of first impressions for whatever may be recorded; and, although it undoubtedly has the drawback of a tendency to include many details deficient in the importance and dignity due to more professed authorship, it has the countervailing merit of producing a more intimate sense of companionship between the author and reader than can otherwise be obtained. I will also, in like manner, form no pre-pense determination beforehand respecting the future destiny of the pages that are to follow, whether they shall only be shown to friends, published to the world, communicated to their full extent, abridged, condensed into one or more lectures, or kept entirely to myself. They shall reflect the feeling of the moment faithfully and freely; all besides shall be reserved for after consideration.’

And here are several extracts from the same tome.

13 June 1853
‘Secured my place in the Danube steam-boat to Constantinople. Went with Lady Westmorland to Count Edmund Zichy’s. He showed us a marvellous collection, principally of old swords, of every age and clime, and of his own splendidly jewelled Hungarian dresses. We went on with him to the imperial treasury, where we saw very fine crown jewels, and various interesting relics both of German and Austrian empires, beginning with the crown of Charlemagne; then to the imperial carriages, dating not quite so far back, but there was one which belonged to Charles V; also to the Manege, which is of very august dimensions; here lately had been held a splendid carousel, or tournament, of which they spoke with great admiration; then to the library, which I imagine must be the finest room north of the Alps; it has priceless manuscripts.

I then went over Prince Lichtenstein’s Palace, which I had heard compared to Stafford House; it has nothing like its staircase, and nothing like its pictures (the prince’s are elsewhere); the ball-room is more brilliant than any room at Stafford House, and there is more lightness, and perhaps not less richness, in the gilding and decoration.

I dined at my hotel, which is renowned for its cookery. I drove afterwards with Lady William in the Prater. It is very pretty, with its green alleys, and park-like glades, and fair visitors; but I think it must generally be very damp. I admire Vienna, on the whole, extremely. In the town itself, the narrow streets, tall houses, and frequent palaces, remind me occasionally of Genoa; while the cheerful faubourg, the broad glacis, with its alleys of chestnut and acacia in fullest blossom, and the fine outlines of hill beyond, make it a very attractive city. I suppose that in the beauty of its environs it surpasses any other capital, again I say, north of the Alps.

We then had ices in the Graben. [. . .] I went with Odo Russell to the Volksgarten, where citizens and soldiers were sitting under trees, listening to the alternate bands of Strauss and a Bohemian regiment; this seems the most attractive point of Vienna life, enjoyment of open air and music. I went still on for one act of the opera Stradella, and finished a full day with listening to some animated details of Austrian history and character.’

19 July 1853
‘I was again very glad to remain quiet during the day. I dined with the officers of the ward-room, who make very pleasant society, and after sunset we went to some theatricals got up by the sailors themselves. They gave us no less than three farces, besides various Ethiopian and comic songs. The theatre was on the main-deck, and, as it was intensely crowded by the crew, not a little hot. I had three sailors sitting between my knees. Happily a hatchway was open just over my head. Some of the actors showed considerable humor; and it was impossible to look round on the manly, jolly audience without hoping that they are not reserved to be mowed down by Russian cannon.’

6 October 1853
‘There was great beauty in the sunrise gilding the long extent of the town of Scio [Chios], as we steamed in front of it this morning. We landed, and walked about with our vice-consul, Signer Yedova, a very hearty and intelligent Italian. The long line and successive terraces of town even yet exhibit an immense proportion of ruins, to attest the massacres perpetrated by the Turks during the Greek revolution in 1822 and 1826; almost the most complete and deplorable that ever occurred. Here, indeed, was one of the exceptional cases to which I have referred; but it cannot be denied, on the other hand, that the circumstances and provocations were also exceptional. The number slaughtered has been computed at from twenty-four thousand to thirty thousand, which exceeds the present population of the island. A large portion of the women and children were sold into slavery; almost every house burned, all the gardens, which had been the especial pride of Scio, destroyed. By a species of reaction, the children of many that escaped have been educated in Europe, and now constitute the most enterprising of the Greek houses in London, Manchester, and the Levant. The doomed island sustained a further loss a few winters ago, when the unusual cold entirely destroyed the orange, lemon, and mastic trees, which supplied a material share of its commerce. There now seems a considerable show of activity both in the town and harbor. The Greek population is about eighteen thousand to eight hundred Turks. There was considerable disappointment at first among the Greeks at not being assigned to the new kingdom of Greece, when it was originally constituted; but it is said now that there is no tendency to excitement among them. They are very industrious, but are reckoned extremely sharp in their dealings. This seems, indeed, the common attribute of the Greek character, and it is supposed to give them no little advantage over our English competition. We set off for Smyrna before noon, and carried thither the wife and daughter of the vice-consul. Madame Vedova has lived twenty-three years at Scio, and complains wofully of its blank and unredeemed solitude. We did not arrive at Smyrna till an hour after sunset, when we made an ineffectual attempt to induce the quarantine authorities to allow the ladies to land. It required some ingenuity to accommodate them for the night. As a sort of compensation to them, the ship’s company got up an impromptu dance, with a solitary but very efficient fiddle; and any friends who may be anxious about my health would have been reassured, if they could have seen me leading off Sir Roger de Coverley, with the vice-consul’s lady.’

9 October 1853
‘We anchored early off the town of Mitylene. The neighborhood, covered with olive groves, had a very luxuriant look, as seen from the ship. After service, which is most creditably performed by the young chaplain, Mr Rogers, we landed, mounted on mules, and rode over a steep ridge of the island, through a continuous grove of olive, mixed with oleander and poplar, and broken by views of the sapphire sea and pale blue mountains of Asia, to Port Oliviero, or Iero, a beautiful inland basin, where navies may anchor, and even manoeuvre, and which is one of the possible destinations of our fleet this winter. There is one point, with a double view of sea on each side, which is most transcendent. I have not generally been very enthusiastic about the beauty of the Aegean islands, there is such a sad deficiency of verdure, and of relief to the gray barren crag; but this old Lesbos is clearly the first in beauty of those which I have as yet seen. We halted at the house of a proprietor in a Greek village; he was a very courteous old man, who told us that he should be very happy, but was in fact made miserable by having six daughters, as, when they married, he was obliged to give each of them a dower of four thousand dollars, a town house and a country house. Some of our officers thought they could not do better than to propose on the spot. An impromptu luncheon was served to us with great nicety and cleanliness. I give its components, poached eggs, an excellent salad of sage and anchovy, olives, pomegranates, melons, water-melons, with, of course, coffee and sweetmeats. We thought there was a good deal of beauty among the islanders, extant specimens of Sapphos and Phaons.’

10 October 1853
‘One more night’s steaming brought us, on the brightest of mornings, to the fleet at Besika Bay. The sight derived additional animation from some two hundred merchantmen, with all their sails up, reflected on the motionless water, to catch the faintest indications of the breeze that might come. I left the Firebrand, which has given me such pleasant conveyance, and transferred myself to my old hospitable quarters in the Britannia; where, I need hardly add, I had the most cordial reception from the kind admiral and his officers. All are waiting with the greatest anxiety for the next directions from England, or summons from Constantinople. They had to-day been just four months in Besika Bay, which they have thought far more than sufficient. There has been a good deal of fever in some ships; not many deaths. Mr. Blunt, the Master in Chancery, uncle to our young friend, Lord Edward Russell, and Lord John Hay, dined with us.’

11 October 1853
‘We all felt considerable excitement this morning as letters from Constantinople made us think it possible that the fleets might be ordered up there immediately. It would have been almost too good fortune to have arrived just in time for such an epoch and such a spectacle. However, the more probable opinion is that the summons will not arrive at soonest before the answer comes from the Russian head-quarters to the Turkish demand for the evacuation of the Principalities within fifteen days. The young prince of Leiningen, nephew to the Queen, who is serving on board this ship as a mid-shipman, dined with the admiral to-day. He is very highly spoken of as entirely unassuming, and most attentive to his duties.’

Monday, February 27, 2012

A book out of these scraps

Lawrence Durrell, the author of The Alexandria Quartet and several highly-respected travel books on Greece, was born a century ago today. His fictional style has gone out of fashion but was revered by many - not least myself - in the 1960s and 1970s. Durrell does not seem to have been a diarist, and there is no evidence of diaries in waiting, so to speak, for publication. However, one of his classic travel books, about Corfu, is based on, and quotes from, a diary or notebook he kept when first living there.

Durrell was born in Darjeeling, India, on 27 February 1912, the son of a British civil engineer, and Louisa, an Irish protestant, both of whom had been brought up in India. In 1923, he was sent to be educated in England, and attended various schools without much success. In 1935, he married Nancy, the first of his four wives, and moved with her and other members of his family (one brother, Gerald, also became a writer) to live on Corfu.

In 1937, Durrell travelled to Paris where he met Henry Miller and Anäis Nin (a lifelong diarist - see The Diary Junction), and in 1940, he had a daughter with Nancy. On the outbreak of war, Durrell’s mother and brothers returned to England, but Durrell and Nancy stayed (having a daughter in 1940) until the fall of Greece when they escaped to Alexandria. They separated soon after.

During the war, Durrell served as press attache to the British embassies in Cairo and Alexandria, and, after, he held various diplomatic and teaching posts mostly in Greece, but also in Belgrade and Buenos Aires. In 1947, he married Eve Cohen and they too had a daughter, Sappho. She committed suicide in 1985, leaving behind a diary - published in the literary magazine Granta - with unsubstantiated accusations of incest with her father.

From 1953, Durrell lived in Cyprus, initially teaching English literature but working again, for a while, for the British Government during the Cypriot revolution. During this period he began writing Justine, the first of four novels in The Alexandria Quartet, which would bring him literary fame. During the latter part of his life, Durrell lived in the South of France (he bought a large house in Sommières, a small village in Languedoc in 1966) and this was the setting for his most ambitious work, The Avignon Quintet. Apart from novels, he also wrote several celebrated books about the Greek Islands and poetry.

Durrell married twice more, his third wife dying of cancer, and the fourth marriage ending in separation. He died at Sommières in 1990. More biographical information is available at Wikipedia, the International Lawrence Durrell Society, and a French website celebrating Durrell in Languedoc.

There is no evidence that Lawrence Durrell was a diarist, except for the few dated diary-type notes that take up part of his book about Corfu - Prospero’s Cell: A guide to the landscape and manners of the island of Corcyra. This was first published by Faber & Faber in 1945, and is part travel guide and part travel literature. The dated diary entries included are more like notes (similar to those found in some of his novels) and largely impersonal. Here are several extracts from the first few pages of Prospero’s Cell.

29 April 1937
‘It is April and we have taken an old fisherman’s house in the extreme north of the island - Kalamai. Ten sea-miles from the town, and some thirty kilometres by road, it offers all the charms of seclusion. A white house set like a dice on a rock already venerable with the scars of wind and water. The hill runs clear up to the sky behind it, so that the cypresses and olives overhang this room in which I sit and write. We are upon a bare promontory with its beautiful clean surface of metamorphic stone covered in olive and ilex: in the shape of a mons pubis. This is become our unregretted home. A world. Corcyra.’

5 May 1937
‘The books have arrived by water. Confusion, adjectives, smoke, and the deafening pumping of wheezy Diesel engine. Then the caique staggered off in the direction of St Stephano and the Forty Saints, where the crew will gorge themselves on melons and fall asleep in their coarse woollen vests, one of top of the other, like a litter of cats, under the ikon of St Spiradion of Holy Memory. We are depending on this daily caique for our provisions.’

6 May 1937
‘Climb to Vigla in the time of cherries and look down. You will see that the island lies against the mainland roughly in the form of a sickle. On the landward side you have a great bay, noble and serene, and almost completely landlocked. Northward the tip of the sickle almost touches Albania and here the troubled blue of the Ionian is sucked harshly between the ribs of the limestone and spits of sand. Kalamai fronts the Albanian foothils, and into it the water races as into a swimming-pool: a milky ferocious green when the north wind curdles it.’

7 May 1937
‘The cape opposite is bald; a wilderness of rock-thistle and melancholy asphodel - the drear sea-quill. It was on a ringing spring day that we discovered the house. The sky lay in a heroic blue arc as we came down the stone ladder. I remember N[ancy] saying distinctly to Theodore: ‘But the quietness alone makes it another country.’ We looked through the hanging screens of olive-branches on to the white sea wall with fishing-tackle drying on it. A neglected balcony. The floors were cold. Fowls clucked softly in the gloom where the great olive-press lay, waiting its season. A cypress stood motionless - as if at the gates of the underworld. We shivered and sat on the white rock to eat, looking down at our own faces in the motionless sea. You will think it strange to have come all the way from England to this fine Grecian promontory where our only company can be rock, air, sky - and all the elementals. In letters home N says we have been cultivating the tragic sense. There is no explanation. It is enough to record that everything is exactly as the fortune-teller said it would be. White house, white rock, friends, and a narrow style of loving: and perhaps a book which will grow out of these scraps, as from the rubbish of these old Venetian tombs the cypress cracks the slabs at last and rises up fresh and green.’

By way of a personal postcript, here also are a few extracts from my own diary about Durrell. As a young man, I adored his books, and, I suppose, very much wanted to be like him - though, clearly, time has proved my ambition was a little o’er-reaching. 

26 December 1978
‘Durrell completely entrances me with his writings - but completely.’

27 September 1979
‘Durrell lives and moulds our lives. I’m not given to hero worship but it’s fun to try.’

9 November 1990
‘Lawrence Durrell has died. One of my few heroes. He was 78 years old. The newspapers find a news story in his death as well as giving him a reasonable obituary. I am delighted to discover that he had written yet one more book, about Provence, which is due to come out any day now. His style of writing is so completely out of fashion but I still love it and may now be tempted to reread a novel or two.’

18 April 1990
‘[A Spanish friend who had been living in London with us in the late 1970s] said recently she had finally consumed Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet after several failed attempts. It had struck her suddenly that Harold [a close friend at the time] and I were trying to create Durrell’s world and that Mu [another friend then living in Greece but often with us in London] was a Justine figure.’

25 July 1991
‘Information today on the Reuters wire that one of Lawrence Durrell’s wives is trying to get an injunction against a woman who intends to publish the diaries and letters of Durrell’s daughter Sappho. Sappho committed suicide some five years ago when she was 33; the diaries and letters appear to show that she had an incestuous relationship as a teenager with her father.’

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Love in Pyrghos

I am in Greece, on holiday, until the 14th. By coincidence, exactly 30 years ago this week, I was also in Greece on holiday. I’d gone to visit a friend, Marielle, who had moved to a place named Pyrghos (at least that’s how I spelled it) with friends to build and live in a large communal house. So, for a change, I thought I’d simply reproduce a few paragraphs from my own diary (more of it is available on the Pikle website).

7-14 October 1978
‘The only flies I feel are flies, and the mosquitoes are the only mosquitoes, and a firefly is too hot to hold, too red to stare at, too proud to ignore. My body moves slowly, treading along pathways that maze around the village, along pathways that become doorways, houseway entrances, entrance halls; crumbling steps lead to crumbling arches lead to crumbling walls and rooves. My foot will (I know it will) disturb the grasshopper on the path that will spread its wings and reveal to a crimson fright, a crimson flight. My eyes will dart with it (I know they will, I feel them ready) to the stone or bush the other side of where I walk.

After a night of long white love, the acute essence of morning is a kaleidoscope of pure colours and sounds. Sea and sky blue, mountains with mysterious greens. Houses old and cold stone. Birds - the twitter tunes. The sun slowly rises and melts my perception or my imagination that might have come in the night. I am a receptacle for the slight sensations that will pass. The horn of the bus, for instance, becomes a sound for to fill the oceans and the lands as far as I can see. The swaying of a tree or the wind itself diverts at least three senses from the sea-wizards that dance in my head. My forehead furrows to capture, to catch a thought, my eyelids would prefer to fall and to let each lash be caressed by the grandeur of the weathers. My love is a momentary dance of tortoises, or is.

Nudity on the rocks, more than nudity, a bareness to the waves and their impressive depths, their heights and depths, the tunnels of rocks that frighten and leave you gasping with a little sense of magnificence.

Robert Crisp is blunter and more like a child this noon-time. He was a foreign correspondent, writer, journalist. He wears shorts and a bright yellow t-shirt; a napkin is tied around his neck. He sits, placed at a table for one, in front of a television; his head bent back, eyes enthralled. His hands play with a knife, fork, chips, a glass and a bottle of retsina. Here is age and freedom and the wrinkles that were moulded, hardened and set by fear. Any trembles he shows now are in the shake of the folds in his skin, not in his voice or eyes. He is fascinated by Marielle’s group, curious. He tempts the members of the group a little with his stories, or the promise of white beard wisdom.

It is four on Monday afternoon. I know it is Monday because two days ago it was Saturday, Friedl told me, and I know it is four in the afternoon because the clock in this cafe says so (even though the post office isn’t supposed to open until five, but it seems to be open now).

I am too high, too infatuated to realise the glory of this all. My stomach still flutters when I think of Marielle walking around the corner and the smile of a thousand nights missed in our separate flights, our different travels.

Morning in Pyrghos, sun shines low under the mass of grey clouds that appear so low. Contrasting against the white stone walls of the streets. Wind is expectant in gusts. A rainstorm is probable.

I awake slowly from a night of howls by sipping coffee. Above me rises a cobbled street; below, another runs to the church, and to the side another to the plaza. From the latter, a small woman comes, dressed in a black blouse, black skirt, black slippers and carrying a bundle of firewood on her back; it is twice as large as she. Away up the central alley a younger woman carries a similar bundle, but of hay this time. The wind threatens, the vines tremble, leaves form small whirlpools on the concrete.'