Making a New Myth of Greece: Lawrence Durrell, Rex Warner, and the “Captain” of Modern Greek Letters

Abstract

Making a New Myth of Greece: Lawrence Durrell, Rex Warner, and the “Captain” of Modern Greek Letters AVI SHARON “One man cannot make a renaissance, but he may be indispensable to it.” —Hugh Kenner on Wyndham Lewis1 “One day . . . historians will speak of how in the late thirties , and through the two succeeding decades, a number of English writers began to discover a Greek world of a kind totally different from what had become the stereotype of the Classical tradition. They began to discover a living Greece . . .” —Philip Sherrard on George Katsimbalis2 When a character in Lawrence Durrell’s novel Tunc (1968) managed to describe the Parthenon as “the last serviceable molar in some poor widow’s gum,”3 a minor revolution was signaled. Using such a plainspoken, “modern” metaphor was more than simply an affront to the touristic view of the grandeur that was Greece. No other place or people had been so shackled by the vaunted repute of their ancient past as Greece and the Greeks. “Classic” was the operative term in most tourist accounts of the country , where visitors tend to have eyes only for the relics of antiquity , the Parthenon foremost of all. The effort to unearth and celebrate the vernacular achievements of contemporary The author would like to express his gratitude to all the participants in the Between Two Worlds conference at the British School in Athens in January 2012. A fuller version of this essay will appear in Peter Mackridge and David Ricks, eds., The British Council and AngloGreek Literary Relations 1945–1955, to be published by Ashgaate in 2016. arion 23.1 spring/summer 2015 Greek culture, buried under the suffocating prestige of its classical forebears, was a defiant and lonely task. It became the lifelong labor of George Katsimbalis (1899–1978) and was central to the rediscovery of Greece by English and American writers during and after the Second World War. Before World War II the literary and cultural life of contemporary Greece was hardly a matter of general interest outside the country’s borders, much less within those of England.4 Early signs of a mutual acquaintance between the two had begun in the teens, in a courtship which the Great War helped accelerate. In 1915, Churchill’s Gallipoli campaign brought Rupert Brooke (via his burial) to the Aegean island of Skyros, rendering a part of Greece forever England, and recalling Byronic memories among the Greeks themselves . A year later, E. M. Forster shipped out to Alexandria where he found the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy standing motionless at a slight angle to the universe. But otherwise English literary sympathy for the place remained slight. The only Greece that reached English letters in those years, apart from the old imaginary Hellas, was insubstantial and sometimes disparaged, as in Eliot’s Mr. Eugenides, “unshaven, with a pocket full of currants.” The reality of modern Greek culture was still largely blocked from view by the towering prestige of its ancient forebear, and any acquaintance with its modern poets was virtually nonexistent. Yet only a generation after those AngloAmerican modernists, England’s leading poets, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, were composing verses inspired by Cavafy and George Seferis, while Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell were celebrating the writers and landscape of Greece in their books.5 By the end of the 1940s John Lehmann, Cyril Connolly, Bernard Spencer, Louis MacNeice, Rex Warner and other members of the leading literary generation in England all shared to a large extent the feelings expressed by John Waller in his poem “Spring in Athens,” (1945) in which “Athens for me was Katsimbalis, Seferis, Antoniou / New friends for new places.” making a new myth of greece 120 This sudden and extraordinarily personal discovery of Greece by the Anglophone west, capped in 1948 by the first volume of George Seferis’s poetry to come out in English, prompted the young Greek poet and translator Nanos Valaoritis to announce from London: “George, you’ve broken through the impregnable divide. The seed has been cast beyond our borders.”6 I would argue that much of the credit for this re-discovery of Greece is due to Katsimbalis and his rapport with...