Friday February 27, 2004
Twenty years ago I owned a slim, buff-covered, hand-sewn anthology called
Civil Service Poetry. It was part of a book collection begun and then
abandoned, one of those books that might (or so I deceived myself) one day
be useful for a political journalist, part of a plan for writing a history
(or most likely not writing it) through the works of government officials,
diplomats and politicians whose writings went beyond the inter-office memo.
Some public servants, it seemed, wrote in order to rise above the dreariness
on their desks. Others wrote in order to say what they could not say at
their desks. A few were even trying to finance the little extras in a
low-paid life of public service. In 1980 we had not yet seen much of the
"celebrity novels" with which politicians seek the fame of soap stars.
Eventually the collection grew to half a shelf of poems by good-hearted people
whom I can no longer remember, plus, for foreign reference, some Milosz, Paz
and Seferis; for historical reference, some Trollope and Gladstone and
Disraeli; plus an excess of Humbert Wolfe, for whom I had an inexplicable
fondness, variously distinguished contemporary works by Maurice Edelman, P.
D. James, Hugh Thomas and Jeffrey Archer, and the early novels of Ferdinand
Mount, Conservative guru and later my predecessor as Editor of the TLS.
Most of this is now scattered and lost. Last week I tried to find my Civil
Service Poetry. Freshly returned from Delphi where Seamus Heaney and others
had been conferencing upon foreign influence, national identity and "The
Greek Experience", I had a nagging sense that somewhere in its faded pages
was something relevant to that troubled theme. But the once-prized book,
never being exactly substantial and, like its contributors, not being
dressed to stand out in a crowd, was not to be found. When I logged on to
Google, thinking possibly of an Amazon copy, all that came back was a
cunningly disguised pornographic website.
A single short Whitehall poem was all I was looking for (I can almost see it
on the page), written in the 1970s about how the poet's in-tray might be
seen in years to come, by himself (not, I think, herself) and by historians.
Would the meaning of memos, he asked, be enhanced by distance or destroyed?
Would the troubles in telegrams just recur and recur so that later
successors, if only they knew where the answers were filed, might usefully
find them? Or would everything in the future be new? Perfect progress or sad
historical cycles? The title was something of that sort.
It contained teasing references to Seferis (the Greek name most often
mentioned at Delphi), but was not a translation. It was not great poetry,
probably not even very good, but it was annoying not to be able to find it.
Seferis's own books I did find. Greek diplomat and ambassador to London,
servant of good and bad masters as well as winner of a Nobel Prize for
literature, he was both the best of my bureaucrat bunch (not a high hurdle
to leap) and one of the boldest of twentieth-century poets in any trade. It
is still hard to consider twenty-first-century Greece without conjuring with
his name. He hung over our conference like a challenge and a cloud.
Born in 1900 in Smyrna, among the 3,000-year-old Greek community on the Asian
side of the Aegean, Georgios Seferiadis was a twenty-two-year-old student in
Paris when his homeland was "cleansed" of Christians by Turkish troops. In
1939 in Athens he formed a powerful literary friendship with Lawrence
Durrell and Henry Miller, a story elegantly told by the great American
scholar and translator, Edmund Keeley, in his book Inventing Paradise
(reviewed in the TLS, September 3, 1999). He had a day job as a diplomat
-serving indifferent Greek governments in postings from Britain to Beirut
-until eventually, in the mid 1960s, he fell foul of the crumbling
administration of Papandreou, devoted himself wholly to poetry and became a
focus of opposition to the Greek Colonels. (The story is most easily
accessible in the new biography by Roderick Beaton, Waiting for the Angel;
reviewed in the TLS, November 14, 2003.)
What would Seferis have thought of his legacy if, like my lost British Civil
Service poet, he could look back at it today? Even the most cold-eyed civil
servant would have to concede that Greece has been transformed. For any
roving Foreign Service officer or Greek ambassador, life back home still
comes with weary irritations, from petty corruption to the paucity of taxis.
Yet, however tempting it may be to mock the muck and mess of Athens,
particularly as it struggles to put on its best face for the Olympic Games
this summer, Greece is more prosperous and politically secure than Seferis
ever saw it.
It has a respected place in the European Union, guaranteeing influence for its
foreign servants and a regular chance to wield whatever power is there to be
wielded. The poet's beloved Cyprus is close to joining the EU too and, while
it is not united to Greece alone, it is on its way to union with a group
which excludes the Turks, and is likely to go on excluding them for some
time.
In 1971, the year that Seferis died, his country was controlled by a Colonels'
cabal, and his funeral became a people's protest against them. Today Greece
is in the throes of a democratic election campaign, one which, while
retaining some dis- tinctive Greek characteristics, is free -and of
uncertain outcome.
There would be the occasional curling of his poet's lip. What might he have
thought of these much-awaited Olympics? A bit bombastic surely, two weeks of
running and jumping and money-spending which was earned for Greece, against
fierce diplomatic competition, by shameless preference for the games to "go
home". Then what about the campaign to bring "home" the Elgin Marbles? A bit
better now than the stridency of Melina Mercouri and her ilk but hardly as
sophisticated, or as likely to succeed, as he would wish. Toes as well as
lips curled all over Greece earlier this year when Prime Minister Costas
Simitis was caught with Tony Blair on camera requesting that the Marbles be
repatriated to help with his party's re-election campaign. Seferis's
probably curled too -even in the grave.
And the war against Iraq? Seferis was a professional man of diplomacy and
dialogue. He knew Baghdad. He was not against violence -especially for a
noble cause in Cyprus -but he would have distrusted the idealistic claims of
George Bush and Tony Blair. This Greek civil servant would have seen cycles
of war where the Anglo-Saxon politicians saw linear progress to peace. He
would have contentedly watched his countrymen become some of the most
numerous, vocal and determined anti-war protesters in Europe. The political
face of George Seferis would be smiling at the years since his death.
For his fellow Greek writers, however, his legacy looks very different.
Gathered at Delphi under the tolerant aegis of the Athens University
scholar, Kirki Kefalea, was a wide-ranging group which included the poets
Titos Patrikios and Haris Vlavianos, the novelists Menis Koumandareas,
Thanasis Valtinos and Zyranna Zatelli, and the poet-professor, Nasos
Vayenas. They were far from fully happy with their Greek Experience. In his
Nobel lecture of 1963, Seferis warned "a sorrowful and restless young
generation" of how "the concept of duration has changed". He said that he
understood their problems in dealing with a changing world -in literature,
in politics and in its sense of the past. In resounding words which set out
that past, in both its classical and Byzantine glory, he posed a literary
challenge which has not yet been met.
The most famous utterance which Seferis left to the national literature, and
like most such utterances probably not the one he would most wish to have
left, is that "travel wherever I may, it is Greece that wounds me". The
wound is a recurrent theme. It stands for his obsession with his home, for
his traveller's ambivalence about being at home, for the eternal trope of
diplomats who, while complaining about foreign parts, angle always for the
next foreign post and the fewest dread "recalls", and for the one great
Greek story of absence from home, Homer's Odyssey, which holds all those
emotions within its epic span.
Seferis lived inside the Odyssey. It was as natural for him to liken Fascist
regimes to the grip of the Cyclops as it was to eat and drink -both of which
he also did well. His recurrent ancient companion was Elpenor, the young
sailor who drank too much, fell from the enchantress Circe's roof, was first
to meet his master in Hades and begged to be remembered by an oar hammered
in the sand. Odysseus was a man famous for going home but never destined to
be at home for long. At the end of the epic, after sorting out the greedy
suitors and hanging a few unfaithful maids, he is due to carry his own oar
inland until he finds men who do not recognize it, who see it as a fan for
drying grain. Through distance he kept his wound open. His audience liked it
that way. So did Seferis.
But a wound is also more than a metaphor. It is a livid bruise, a mark of
having been attacked, assaulted or, just as wounding for a writer, of being
ignored. The aim of the Ministry of Culture in inviting Heaney and Keeley,
the American poet Rachel Hadas, the Frenchmen Michel Deon and Jacques
Lacarriere and the German Michael Kruger was to discuss with their Greek
colleagues the ways in which foreign writers had absorbed the Greek
Experience into their work. We heard elegant expositions on Henry Miller,
Chateaubriand, Lawrence Durrell, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Mummius, Cavafy and
the crimes of 9/11 (see Hadas's poem The Gaze in last week's TLS) and
Goethe. The speakers from the Greek side struck a rather different note.
I will spare you the names and details, the lists of the Greek artists
"neglected by the outside world" and the resentments against those chosen.
The sum of the charges: we visitors take too much notice of the classical
past and not enough of the present; the classics are important but it is for
the Greeks, with their unique linguistic link, to grab a greater privilege
of saying so; Greece must reclaim for itself the great Greek writers who
have been for too long conceded to Europe and the world; Greece wants them
back.
This tone is set from the beginning. A surprisingly political introduction
from the first chairman begins with Heraclitus: "The oracle at Delphi
neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign". That, we must
understand, is the traditional Delphic warning to listen closely to the
oracle's local interpreters. The next author cited is Herodotus, and his
words about the special unity of the Greek nation, "the first nation in
history", we are told. Then comes Julian the Apostate on the true
"ownership" of Greek. This is a language which apparently has "no brothers"
(which for Indo-European linguists is a rather surprising claim), "no
children" (unlike nasty Latin) and needs, therefore, a very high level of
care.
Others demur, not so sure that this is where they want to be. Let's take a
pause here, they say; we don't really want the Greek classics back like
that. We have never done anything much with them. We have an "ancestor
obsession" but not much knowledge of our ancestors. All the finest
commentaries, all the best scholarship and translations have been done
outside Greece. This is very irritating but very true. Foreign writers,
writing from that all-important distance, grow stronger on the glories that
were Greece. For most Greek writers, particularly current Greek writers, the
glories are a ball-and-chain; the language is a prison cell inside which the
greatest works in the world might be produced and no one would know.
Greeks today must break out, feed from the present, thus regaining self
respect and global respect. The argument goes on, sometimes quietly,
sometimes less so. Deon, who has a play about Ariadne on Naxos just about to
open in Athens, gives a thoughtful, peaceful presentation contrasting
Chateaubriand's Greek tourism, during which he met mainly Turks and saw only
reflections of himself, with the travels of Henry Miller, who is described
as eating ice cream, avoiding all attempts to take him to the Parthenon,
desperately seeking shade, drinking Greek wine and drinking in everything
Greek. Lacarriere, Seferis's French translator, gives a rotund and jolly
reminiscence, precisely on the lines that the organizers intended.
But it never takes much to change the agenda. When Vlavianos is described by a
colleague as "a cosmopolitan" this is not a badge of praise. As the reporter
for the Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, wrote afterwards with dry
understatement: "while a sense of the foreign writers' deep engagement with
Greece did emerge, the concerns of the home team, marked by a pervasive
anxiety about identity, dominated much of the discussion".
No one on the Greek side greatly wanted to criticize the Olympics. After all,
this event was part of it. The Government had decreed that there should be a
cultural Olympiad before and alongside all the better-known pursuits of
drug-taking, contract-chasing, tourist-fleecing, embarrassment at one's
national anthem and the aggressive waving of flags. That was why we were all
now looking down towards the Gulf of Corinth, with the mountains of the
Peloponnese ahead and the remains of Apollo's oracle behind, talking about
poetry. That was why we were guided through Delphi's magnificent eerie
monuments which celebrate "the first united Greece", through the site which
was "the forerunner of the United Nations", a place in which "ancient
culture and sport were celebrated in perfect balance". Whatever we thought
of these claims, the Olympic hand was feeding us well: and no one wanted to
bite it.
Yet the incongruity could not be wholly forgotten. Here was Greece spending
more time, more capital, more opportunities in support of a version of the
classical past that is the biggest nineteenth-century fake of all, the
Olympic Games version. Meanwhile, although the worst excesses of the "give
us back our marbles" movement have calmed, campaigners could still be heard
in debates promoting their totem of a lost national treasure, a work of art
that would revive the national identity, a sort of "cultural Sudetenland",
as one malcontent muttered. Seferis writes of waking exhausted "with this
marble head in my hands". For him it is a passing sensation. His
successor Greeks labour less easily under the weight of those ancient
columns, stones which seem to crush more than they create.
Seferis was much called in aid as a poet who used the poets of 2,500 years ago
as though they were his neighbour, in time as well as place. Heaney
described how he did the same, how he had learnt to see himself as a "son of
Hesiod". He spoke of his version of Sophocles' Philoctetes and the fight
within that tragedy over the pain-stricken, wounded hero, the man both
abandoned by the Greek commanders on the way to Troy and the man without
whom Troy can never be captured. He spoke of that tragedy's debate between
the devious Odysseus, who puts the state interest above truth, and the
emotional Neoptolemus, who prizes most his loyalty and his word.
There were war messages here. Heaney's play is called The Cure at Troy and is
knowingly more optimistic than its model. His home audience at Delphi was
much more interested in the wound. Heaney spoke directly too about politics,
poetry and what he called his "predations" upon the Greek classics. Greece
was for "independents" while Rome was for imperialists. He himself was a
"rural bard" who had heard the Muses like Hesiod on Mount Helicon.
George Bush, he told a Greek interviewer, was less a conquering Agamemnon than
an autocratic Creon whose actions led to tragedy and whose people, like the
chorus of the Antigone, were frightened to criticize for fear of seeming
unpatriotic. He read "The Haw Lantern", his own poem from 1987, in which
"the wintry haw" becomes the lantern of Diogenes, the fourth- century Greek
philosopher who shines his light into faces to seek "one just man" and fails
and "moves on".
When Ireland's Nobel Laureate spoke so proudly of being "a predator" upon the
foreign but powerfully related past which surrounded him in Delphi, there
was a hum of dissent. It was not the fact of what he did and said that
seemed to disturb. It was the confidence with which he did and said it. He,
like Seferis, had the genius. He also had the distance. Rachel Hadas
supported him. Others looked just a little sullen. The conversation moved
on. If Greece's Civil Service Poet had been with us then, he would have seen
scabs he well knew.
In the byways of the conference, it was impossible to escape the politics of
the day. Forget art and literature for a moment. There is no controversy
about the foreigner's role in Greek electoral strategies. Tony Blair may not
be the most popular politician among the people of Greece: immediately after
the Iraq war almost 2 million came out on the streets to accuse him of being
Bush's "baby dog" and a butcher of Iraqi babies. But Blairism is a big
subject for study by Greek vote-hunters. The new "socialist" leader, George
Papandreou, rejects his party's traditional left-wing language and policies,
preferring "inclusion" (last week recruiting senior figures from the Right
and far Left to his cause), "modernization" and other familiar Blairite
mantras. His "conservative" opponent, Costas Karamanlis, whose policies are
very similar and who has former socialist ministers in his team, is running,
as Blair did in 1997, on the need for a change at the top after almost two
decades of one party sleaze and misrule. Each man claims to be newer than
new and newer than the other.
When Blair made his post-war trip to Athens last April, the man who greeted
him was the unfortunate Marbles-seeker, Costas Simitis, a forensic
accountant who, despite every jibe at his dull personality and fruitcake
complexion, has played a huge part in the Greek rehabilitation, in a
reconciliation of sorts with Turkey, progress on Cyprus, destruction of the
November 17 terrorist group, the dropping of the ever-devalued drachma and
its replacement by the harsh embrace of the euro. But Simitis is now
"history" -in the American sense. By the end of last year the opinion polls,
more decisive oracles even than those from Delphi in the better Greek days,
were clear. Simitis would lose. So Simitis has gone.
In the Greek sense, Papandreou is, in his own way, a piece of history too. His
father Andreas, founder of the PASOK party, was a dominating Prime Minister
for all but four years between 1981 and 1996 until he fell ill and gave the
reins to his new air-hostess wife and her soothsayers. He famously took a
dim view of his son's political prospects, a favour which the son is now
repaying in best parricidal mode, repudiating the old Papandreou legacy in
the closest permissible manner to the ancient cloak and dagger -wielded at a
speed which not even Blair ever attempted. Many of next month's voters may
once have cast a ballot for the candidate's grandfather, George Papandreou,
the Second World War leader whose final period in power ended shortly before
the 1967 coup.
The Conservative candidate, Costas Karamanlis, by contrast, is merely the
nephew of a Prime Minister: though for many Greeks the very name Karamanlis,
a family of originally Turkish- speaking Orthodox Christians, transported to
mainland Greece in the Greek tragedy that followed the First World War,
carries its own bitter taste of the past, the taste that Seferis knew. How
stand these old names today? As a bar to progress or a key that will unlock
the country from its prisoner status? That is the debate behind the
hustings, behind the bizarre television debates in which each candidate
shouts from different studios and from a separate quarter of the screen,
behind all the loud Olympic boasts and the quieter post-Olympic pledges.
This election, for all its antique memories, has produced a strong sense of
movement in Greece. If there is a poet hidden in the present diplomatic
corps, this should be his or her hour. The Greeks are looking out towards
the latest in a long line of new dawns. Whichever government they choose, it
will be dedicated to promising the brightest of fresh starts. In August they
will welcome the world to the Olympics. After that they will wait for the
investment, the jobs, the glory - even the return of the Marbles. For that
is what they have been promised. And at a new dawn promises come true.
Thanks to Homer, each promised new dawn comes with "rosy fingers" -though,
to say so at Delphi was to risk yet another charge of "ancestor obsession",
obsession with ancestors who belong to someone else.
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