From the Elephant's Back (7 page)

Personal Positions

A Letter from the Land of the Gods

1939

Dear Potocki:
[1]

IT WON'T MISREPRESENT
the reality of my enthusiasm for your work if I tell you that though I don't always like what you think, yet I do always admire and subscribe to what you
are
. There is such brightness and warmth in your prose, and so much leisurely and wicked humour that I defy anyone not to be interested and delighted by it; there are good royal colours here, and I love the self-possession which makes each thrust—like a good fencer's lunge—seem absolutely effortless. Power to your long right arm!

To be a poet is to be religious: and to be religious is to be, in some way, a royalist. Is it not so? And if for me your admiration for the Fascists seems a little excessive it is only because I feel that if the Left are wrong today the Right are not right enough for me. I don't want to barter the religion of the royal part of men for an inferior sort of totemism. And every man who feels the same will be more interested in your writing than in the prodigious squeaking and chirping that goes up from the leftist barnyards.

Damn reservations ultimately: they are the critic's drink—literary Wincarnis
[2]
with every issue of a paper instead of wine. I like men—not aggregates and contentions; and I admire the way you stand firm and speak because what you say is worth listening to. I respect the King in you and I respect the king in all men
[3]
—that is what I mean, I think; and this undercuts all dogma, which is after all only a man-made roughage.

A King for all of us then: and the king in each of us. Would you accept that as a toast?

Sincerely,

Lawrence Durrell

Airgraph on Refugee Poets in Africa

1944

Dear Tambi,
[1]

EGYPT WOULD BE INTERESTING
if it were really the beginning of Africa; but it is an ante-room, a limbo. In this soft corrupting plenty, nothing very much is possible. The Nile flows like dirty coffee under the solid English bridges. The country steams humidly—a sort of tropical Holland, with no hills anywhere to lift one's eyes to. The people have given up long ago—have lapsed back into hopelessness, venality, frustration. Outside the towns forever the sterile desert preserves its ancient cultures with clinical care. Dust-storms herald the spring; and summer comes in on such a wave of damp that the blood vessels in the body feel swollen and full of water. If one wrote poems here they could only be like marrows, or pumpkins—or like the huge pulpy Egyptian moon which rises like a sore every now and then on this fleshy sky.

Nevertheless, shiftless refugees that we are, living in furnished rooms, something is being done.
[2]
Of the foreigners still working I think only the Greeks have claim to notice. News from Athens comes in little driblets—but the latest news tells us that the Athenian poets are still at work; and readers of Henry Miller's
Colossus of Maroussi
will perhaps be glad to hear that the Colossus himself is still alive, and still wonderfully talking.
[3]

But more interesting still is the fact that two Greek poets of more than local importance are with us in the Middle East. One of them, Seferis, has already been published in English translation, and on his journey across Africa he has continued to build up his personal mythology into poems of all kinds. He is the first Greek poet to write a limerick, and his notebooks are covered with Learish
[4]
little sketches.
[5]
For him exile is really a sort of martyrdom; he is not a dramatic poet who can exteriorise himself in his verse, nor is he an empty Alexandrine interested in form and colour. Under his rather artless choice and treatment of themes there is a sharp metaphysical struggle going on—which makes him largely incomprehensible to the Greeks, for whom the personal struggle in the European sense does not exist. By this I mean that the modern Greek critic would be likely to prefer D'Annunzio to Dante;
[6]
poetry that evokes and exclaims to poetry that says something tightly and categorically. Seferis always talks: he never groans and exclaims and points; nor is he seduced by mere music.

All morning we hunted about round the castle,

Starting from the shadowy side where the sea

Was green without radiance—breast of the slain peacock—

And received us like time itself without gaps in it.

The veins of rock came downwards from above,

Ribbed vine, naked and many branched, enlivening

The utterance of the water, like the eye following them

Struggling to escape the wearisome swing,

Losing strength bit by bit.

From the sun's direction a long beach wide open,

And the light shining jewels on the huge walls.

No living thing, the wild doves having gone,

And the King of Asini, for whom we'd searched two years

Unknown and forgotten even by Homer.

Only one word in the Iliad and this uncertain

Like a sepulture mask of gold.

You touch it—remember the echo? Hollow in light

Like the dry jars in the dug earth:

And the same echo in the sea with our oars:

The King of Asini, a void beneath the mask,

Always with us, always with us, under a name

Ασίνη τε Ασίνη τε

and his children statues,

His desires the beat of wings and the wind

In the space between his meditations and

His ships anchored in an invisible harbour.

Under the mask a void.

Behind the huge eyes, curled lips, curved hair

In relief on the gold lid of our existence;

A point of shade which travels like a fish

You see it in the peaceful morning of the ocean,

A void always with us…

(The King of Asini)
[7]

The evocation is always personal and immediate in Seferis; his choice of imagery deliberately simple and pure in transcribing the Greek landscape where rock, wave, light, and water present themselves as mythological ideograms rather than material things.

And the poet leisurely looking at the stone, wondering

Among these broken lines and edges,

The points and hollowness and curves

Surely exist

Here where the passing rains meet wind and the decay,

Of those who diminished so strangely in our lives

Who remained wave-shadows and thoughts within the limitlessness of the sea…

(The King of Asini)

These fragments from a longish poem give an idea—though only an idea—of Seferis's range and tone of voice. He is difficult to translate, and my Greek is not good: but what is difficult to render in English is the limpid way he manipulates his symbols. As a poet he is difficult not because he is allusive so much as because he depends on the association of words in their context—and of course the profoundest words in Greek carry overtones unmatched by their equivalent in any European language. “Under the mask a void” is a line thousands of years older and riper in Greek than it is in English.

Apart from Seferis there is only, as far as I can see, one other poet at work who is worth a wider circulation than the Modern Greek tongue allows. This is a woman—Elie Papadimitriou.
[8]
Last year in Cairo in a refugee hotel appropriately named the Lunar Park
[9]
I discovered this intriguing and solitary authoress who had escaped from Greece with a suitcase full of short stories and one long poem called “Anatolia.” She had been working on the latter for some seven years, and it had remained unfinished; since then it has been published in a limited edition in Cairo, and has, of course, passed completely unnoticed by the neo-Hellenist quacks who are only interested in new translations of Byron. “Anatolia” is a sort of “Anabasis”—but written in demotic Greek and with a Chaucerian narrative-sense. It is a shadowplay in which recitatives are put into the mouths of various traditional characters of modern Greece. The theme is the Asia Minor disaster;
[10]
and the treatment is eloquently simple and bare. It is certainly the most important big poem to appear of recent years in Greek, and we are determined that the English shall have a translation of it some time this year.

How did the women find time to hang

From balcony to balcony the banners

That when the sun rose Smyrna was ready to take sail

With all her canvas on?

From the barges the troops land.

In heavy equipment. The slabs of the wharves

Split, and hearts at each leap delight.

First come the men of the island, from

Happy villages in Samos, Chios, Mytilini;

The first called up as green conscripts

For an archipelago division; but war

Had given them curling moustaches

Pointed at the tips like wings…

Then the Cretan soldiery:

The swaying of their hips

And the straightness of their necks

Causes the balconies around us to melt.

Roses are sprinkled on them

And the bishop in his golden stole—

O Chrysostom, doomed to martyrdom—

Stands on a cart to bless them,

And his tears stream down.

The soldiers stoop to gather the roses

And stop their gun-barrels with them….
[11]

The transition from narrative to reflection is managed with complete smoothness by the voices, and the whole poem has the quality of “speaking voice,” which gathers intensity for each recitative; “Anatolia” has what novelists admire so much—“canvas.” It is like a superbly cut film of the whole tragedy of Anatolia, where so much Greek blood was spilt. And, of course, being written now, when the new tragedy of Greece burns darker every day, it is charged with overtones of the present. Perhaps it could only be finished now when emotions of the hour match it perfectly. Or like “past grief which expresses the present.”
[12]
This is a recitative for the mad boy who succeeds in escaping back to Greece.

NO NAME FITS ME

When I stood at the tip of the cape

Everything was complete, fingernails in proper number

But no name whatsoever to condense me

So when you speak to me stand a bit to the side;

I too stand aside

And talk in a low voice…

__________

THE WOMEN

There let us pitch our tents;

Let us not go further from those islands

That look out towards Anatolia;

Their accents and their sailing craft resemble

Like next-of-kin standing near the dead.

All this was no channel but a doorstep,

Bays where we slept suddenly lost

And where to go? Are we wanted anywhere?

We are not one or two washed away

But a sinful forest cut down.

The clear night is swamped

By the grief of one cow

When its little calf is weaned from it.

How can it contain the grief of so many partings?

Will covered streets ever be empty of weeping?

Will a shadow ever fall undisputed?

These fragments are translated by Elie Papadimitriou herself, who is at present busy on relief work in Palestine.
[13]
I cannot tell whether they give an idea of the greatness of her poem. At any rate, they are an advertisement that something good has been done here; they help to keep us alive in this awful country which lies like a partly-conscious human being, dying of an internal bleeding.

Yours,

Larry Durrell

No Clue to Living

1960

ONE SUPPOSES THAT THE ARTIST
as a public Opinionator only grew up with the social conscience—with Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
[1]
He became an accusing finger pointed at the wrongs of society as well as something of a soul-consultant for his correspondents. Out of this change of preoccupation grew the truly extraordinary phenomenon of his daily postbag today; apart from the begging letters, which doubtless formed a part of Shakespeare's fan-mail as well, there come hundreds of letters asking him to take up public positions on every conceivable matter from the fate of Irish horses or homosexuals to the rights and wrongs of nuclear warfare and theosophy.
[2]
It is clear that what is expected of him is to operate as a hardened committee man, appear on boards, advise and comment on public affairs—in short to add his mite to the flood of opinionation which is slopping over the world, obscuring the inner world of values which once he was supposed to sift within himself before expressing his findings in a work of art—poems, paintings, plays. Today they want his message in capsule form. It is, of course, very flattering to see his epigram printed in
Sayings of Today
beside a message from the Pope and one from Mr. Eisenhower.
[3]
But it is very doubtful whether he has anything to say which could be more original than the other pronouncements by public figures, for apart from his art he is just an ordinary fellow like everyone else, subject to the same bloody flux of rash opinion, just as eager to lose a friend rather than forgo a jest.