Edmund Keeley.  Inventing Paradise:  The Greek Journey 1937-47.  New York:  Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1999.  290 pages.  $24.00 (U.S.);  $38.95 (Canada)
 
 


Roger Bowen


The ten years specified in Edmund Keeley's title are sadly definitive:  a path of discovery and "invention" blocked by the appalling caesura of the second European war and the Greek civil war.  Keeley's reconfigured narrative of the lives, the books, the companionship, and the correspondence of Durrell, Miller, Seferis, Elytis, Katsimbalis, and others is as much elegy as celebration.  Partings outweigh reunions;  exile defines experience for the English expatriate and the Greek citizen alike.
    The story begins with Durrell's discovery of Corfu in 1935--and his diary entries from 1937-38 which are the sources of Prospero's Cell--and continues with Miller's arrival in Piraeus in 1939 to share in the bounty of Durrell's world, a vibrant, peopled world.  In addition to Seferis and Katsimbalis, the circle of friends included Niko Hadjikyriako-Ghika, the painter;  D.I. Antoniou, the sailor-poet;  Theodore Stephanides, the doctor, botanist, poet, and translator;  Seferis's sister, Ioanna, and her husband, Constantine Tsatsos, the courageous statesman-intellectual who defied the Metaxas dictatorship as well as the Axis occupiers of his homeland.  The primary focus of Professor Keeley's engaging reconstruction is the pre-war journey of Durrell and Miller, one guided more often than not by their Greek companions;  it is a journey that reflects a "partial understanding  and uninhibited love of contemporary Greece, a country each ended up creating in his own image."  Greece is both a "real" place, defined by geography and history, and an idealized, "imagined community."  Keeley reminds us that, a century earlier, Edward Lear had pioneered this re-imagining of Greece, where the aim was to "discover a contemporary landscape that would serve the personal mythology of his art," rather than simply revere the ancient past.  And Greece in turn "inspired a poetic re-creation of itself."
    Citing Miller's journal, "First Impressions of Greece," as well as The Colossus of Maroussi, and his correspondence with Durrell and Seferis, Keeley guides us through what proved to be the American's "sacred precinct," from Corfu to Crete, from Epidaurus to the Argolid, this "miracle ground" which Durrell had urged his friend for so long to see for himself.  Keeley's retelling of a unique chapter in the history of Anglo-Greek literary relationships is neither simple biography nor travelogue;  it relies primarily on a rich knowledge of the writings themselves.  Within the first few pages the urban character, and characters, of Athens are brought to life in the entirety of Seferis' "Narration" and Bernard Spencer's "A Spring Wind."  Thereafter, quotation remains generous, and to a purpose.  As a translator of Cavafy, Seferis, and Sikelianos, with Philip Sherrard, and of Elytis, with George Savidis, and Yannis Ritsos--and this by no means completes his bibliography--Keeley brings a lifetime of dedicated scholarship to the task.  If Katsimbalis, at the helm of Ta Nea Grammata, the journal that enshrined the "Generation of the Thirties" from 1935 to 1945, presided over an emerging literary culture, then Keeley, of a later generation, strives to keep those voices heard and appreciated.
    Miller's departure from Greece, the war at his heels, and Durrell's dramatic escape to Egypt, via Crete, an experience shared by Seferis and Stephanides, undid that "eternal moment" for them all.  For those left behind, as Keeley vividly records in his chapter "Eden Burning," there was only deprivation and cruel suffering.  Yet in the midst of it all, Kostis Palamos, the unofficial poet laureate of Greece, was laid to rest in an Athens cemetery, with Katsimbalis leading the mourners and Sikelianos among the pallbearers;  Nikos Gatsos, the youngest member of the surrealist movement lead by Elytis, produced some of his best work during the worst year of the war and occupation, while the ailing Ritsos managed to chronicle those desperate times in powerfully bitter poems.
    The postwar homecomings were not glorious, as Seferis's magnificent poem "Last Stop" makes clear.  Durrell's Rhodes, under British jurisdiction until 1948 and presented in Reflections on a Marine Venus as a rediscovered paradise after years of Egyptian exile, hardly gave this ardent hellenophile an accurate picture of war's aftermath or Greece's uncertain political future.  Miller never returned, convinced there would be "no resuming where we left off."  In the years that followed many of the ties that had seemed so secure were loosened.  As Keeley explains, Durrell's hard anti-communism, nurtured during his Belgrade posting, and his government work on Cyprus, alienated him from his former Greek friends, including Seferis.  Durrell may have considered returning to Greece with Claude in the 1960s, as a resident once more, but with the increasing pressure of tourism, that familiar paradise was fast losing its original identity.  Spencer's richly remembered Athens--"her blinded marble heads / her pepper trees, the bare heels of her girls"--from "A Spring Wind" (1946), has to be contrasted with "The Rendezvous" (1957), written after the poet was posted briefly back to Athens by the British Council in 1955, when anti-British riots, fueled by the Cyprus crisis, turned a "once known and dear city" into a hostile and alien place, "with cry of crowds and doors slammed to."
    Though rarely intruding in his own narrative, there are moments when Keeley is compelled to record his own dismay at the changing face of a Greece he has known from his youth, when his father was the American consul in Salonika.  He deplores the "postwar cement city" that Athens has become, and he cites Philip Sherrard's excoriation of the tourist invasion of Corfu, its coastline devastated by "white-bodied neo-Visigoths."  But an epitaph is never fully composed, as his story of the "invention" of a Greek paradise is not quite finished.  There is more to say about later writers who caught the "contagion":  James Merrill, American poet and philhellene;  John Fowles, who taught at Anargyrios College on the island of Spetses in 1952, and went on to write The Magus.  (Fowles's essays "Behind The Magus" and "Greece" were collected in Wormholes:  Essays and Occasional Writings, 1998, after the book under review went to press.)  The pilgrimage has continued:  Rex Warner, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Kevin Andrews, Philip Sherrard.  "Their story," concludes Keeley, "is another story, in part mine as well."  We wait to hear it, encouraged by the wit and observation sparkingly evident in his recent An Albanian Journal:  The Road to Elbasan (1997).

Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000):  171-74.

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