Blue Thirst

  Blue Thirst

  Lawrence Durrell

  PREFACE

  My first impulse when I received these two transcripts of impromptu lectures I gave in California, was the normal one, namely to sit down and rewrite them, to give the prose some shape. But then, on reflecting, it seemed to me that it would be better to leave them just the way they were, with all the hesitations and fumblings and false starts. They seemed more actual that way; I thought that if I tidied them up I might take all the life out of them. The result is that whatever small changes I have made have been only in the interests of intelligibility; there were defective patches in the transcript, and sometimes in the typing. These I touched up lightly, but careful to keep the colloquial tone, and the hesitations which are inevitable in impromptu lecturing.

  The first lecture was given in the marvelous Beckmann Auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena under the general title “A Poet In The Mediterranean.” The second was perpetrated at Claremont College, Pomona. My grateful acknowledgements go to both institutions for permission to reprint.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Paris, 1975

  An invitation to reminisce is always rather terrifying. One inevitably thinks of those old after-dinner speakers, rosy with fatuity, who somehow can’t break off. So when I received an invitation to reminisce I was a little bit tormented by doubts because I remembered also another cautionary tale—the curate, the shy curate in Leacock, a wonderful short story, where he found that every time he said, “Well, I think I ought to …,” they said “Won’t you have another cup of tea?” And he was too weak to leave. He sank back into his chair finally lingered until dinner time and they said “Do you really have to go home? We could easily give you dinner.” And he was too weak, he stayed for dinner. Finally, they had to make—they were naturally furious—they had to make up a bed in the spare room. And he stayed there for weeks in a strange delirium, sometimes rising up from his pillow he would cry, “I really think I must …” and then sink back hopelessly with a cracked laugh. Finally as you may remember, the angels came for him. I didn’t want them to come for me.

  Nevertheless I did feel that perhaps there might be some point in trying to recollect and perhaps recreate a little bit of a Greece which is not finished now and gone for good, but which has changed very much and doesn’t resemble the Greece that I knew at the age of 21 when I was a young aggressive poet. It was in Greece that I first hit the Mediterranean proper. And thinking it over I thought I might perhaps accept and have a try at repainting this not forgotten but not so terribly distant Greece in time.

  The land I went to then was not the popular one it is today—Italy was the in thing. Everybody great had given a cachet to Italy, from the Romantic poet onwards. Byron was the only person who went to Greece, but he did it for a special reason. But the Greece I met presented enormous practical day-to-day problems. It was the era before DDT. I have to remind you how recently the medicaments which make Mediterranean travel easy and pleasant are—DDT was discovered only during the last war. Greece was one large flea before then. One enormous hairy gnashing flea. And several kinds of bedbug as well, mostly elephant-size. And walking across it in the heat, the primitiveness of the country was really intimidating. It was in some ways almost as primitive as Africa. If it hadn’t been so beautiful and washed always by this marvelous blue sea, it would have really daunted even me, and I was tough and in very good health. But our Greece we learnt the hard way and we learnt it without penicillin and any of the amenities which are available now. The big miracle drugs, for example, that breakthrough was also at the end of the war: The sulphanilamides—a whole range of science that wasn’t available to us in 1934. One was deep in the Middle Ages in a remote Greek village. The actual medical arrangements were in the hands of a few kind pharmacists and women called “good women” who were kind of medieval bone-setters and also masseurs with a marvelous sense of anatomy. They really did perform wonders. I have seen miracles performed with them—and also nobody quite knows how they got their special knowledge because they have enough sense to leave a tubercular bone alone. But they were great manipulators of limbs and even today they are still there and perform astonishing cures. They are also specialists in herbal cures. In those days I elected to live in a Greek village the life of a fisherman. The house that I took is on the north end of the island of Corfu which is extremely beautiful and which I found by accident. Later on it was literally a question of putting a pin in a map and saying to my mother “You’ve got to stop spending money and start economizing.” In those days Greece was unbelievably cheap and she managed to live very satisfactorily with her family in a large house. My brother has described all this inimitably and powerfully in a wonderful book. And I think here I should say that I feel extremely pleased that I am responsible in part for two of the best books about modern Greece. One is Henry Miller’s book which is partly due to the fact that I took him there and he fell in love with it and wrote probably his best book there. And then my brother’s own book is marvelous because he literally wasn’t aware that there was an ancient Greece. It was extraordinary how he felt his way back into his 12-year-old skin to write it. Naturally in it his older brother figures as a sort of horrible Faustian figure. I was 22 and writing the Black Book at that time. And he paid off all his youthful grudges in the book, quite rightly. The book is really a masterpiece as a picture of Corfu simply because there is not a single classical reference in it. The seduction—you smile, but in fact it is perfectly true—the seduction about Greece is such that one tends towards purple prose all the time and it’s very difficult to see a Greek landscape or a Greek village without thinking of Aphrodite or a modern Greek situation which doesn’t immediately echo something Homeric. So naturally, if you have an Aphrodite in your pocket you tend to plaster it into your prose and consequently it’s just not as good as somebody treating Greece as if it was entirely new, pristine, fresh and born yesterday—a new-laid egg. And Miller deliberately ignored the classical stuff he knew and my brother didn’t know any. So between them they produced wonderful books of which I am rather proud because I took both of them there.

  It’s funny, I’ve often thought, and philosophers have frequently said, that one remembers the hard beds better than the soft ones. And those winters in Greece were extraordinarily hard, particularly living in unheated houses with no chimneys and no wood in the north of this island. The rainfall in Corfu is almost tropical in density—that is why it is so green. But sometimes one heard it for weeks on end—that and the sea pounding on the rocks below the house we lived in.

  My brother very skillfully gave the impression that I lived with the family, but that wouldn’t have been possible. You don’t know how awful they are. I always lived apart from them but I used to visit them at Christmas just to observe them. And make a few notes. But I always lived with my wife alone on the north point of the island in a very lonely and rather beautiful house. And as I say, our life was one of the utmost primitiveness—in terms of food I don’t remember what it was possible to find—apart from the few fish we caught—to eat, because the roads were washed out in the winter and apart from a few tins of macaroni I think we literally had nothing. Occasionally they killed a lamb, Greek lamb isn’t bad, it’s—well, I suppose it was horrible, our diet, but when you’re young and in good health it didn’t seem to matter very much.

  There were other factors about ordinary living which I mustn’t forget to mention, just to draw the picture of this rather primitive way of life. In this hot country, indeed in most of the Mediterranean at this time there was no refrigeration; just a few ice factories where one bought blocks of ice and crammed them into wooden ice boxes. In Corfu there was no butter and the milk was goat’s milk; the beef was non existent, there was only lamb fo
r people with small incomes but good lamb and sometimes pork. Chickens were thin and scrawny.

  The best refrigerator I know is a deep well; and for most of my island life we lowered our bottles and tinned butter down the well in a basket with a long length of line. Or shoved it into a sea cave. Sometimes it was so hot that we carried our dinner table out into the bay and set it down in the water. It was cool enough if you sat with water up to your waist while you dined. The water was so still and clear that the candles hardly moved on such summer nights. And the bronze moon was huge.

  Our heating system was mostly charcoal, which meant twenty minutes to boil a kettle for a cup of tea with much puffing and blowing. Primus stoves were very expensive and had a tendency to explode. As for light we used paraffin with its peculiar smell and though the Aladdin lamp had been invented it was expensive and was hard to obtain mantles.

  The roads were washed out in winter and the little local bus service was caïques in summer; but when the sea was high they couldn’t go. Most of you now have been to Greece or have seen enough of Greece in pictures to know those little island boats which ferry the melons and the fruit and vegetables back and forward. Well, they’re also passenger buses, and in summer we had a daily waterbus to town which took two hours flat and the same back in the evening which took two and a half hours flat according to what the wind and weather was like. This fragile line of communication was completely washed out in the winter and we were left alone on this extraordinary hillside. I started at once to try and learn Greek, which is a very difficult language. I’d only done two years of classical Greek and it really wasn’t enough. I hadn’t been interested until I got there. But there were things which struck me very forcibly and touched me very much. Mainly that when I was starting on doing Demotic Greek with the local schoolmaster, I found that in almost any Greek sentence about 3 out of 5 words—no that’s an exaggeration—let’s say 3 out of 7 words came out of Aristotle or Homer. And it was a perfectly astonishing realization to me that Greece hadn’t aged—the language that Greece used—hadn’t aged as much as our own English because we started with the old Attic grammar and while a lot of the tenses had changed, and naturally a lot of vocabulary had changed and so on, the actual structure of the language as such is quite visibly there, still. And I don’t think you could begin to teach English out of Chaucer, which would be roughly the comparison to today. And then Homer became more actual to me in this context, and I started brushing up the little ancient Greek I knew, and a whole winter, my first whole winter passed in that way, studying, teeth chattering with cold. There was no chimney in the house and finally my landlord put logs in an ordinary room there and burnt them so that the room filled with smoke and the smoke went out steadily through the ceiling. It was more Homeric than Homer. We roasted lambs on the spit and mopped up the blood. And drank retzina, the resined wine of Greece.

  But there were also other fascinating things. When I started to learn Greek it was the popular tongue I studied, the so-called Demotic. But I rapidly realized that there were two distinct Greek languages—one for the newspapers and one for the hearth. The popular one had evolved itself comfortably by peasant use, and a much simplified syntactical approach. But this was considered too vulgar to write down, and a highly purified sort of Greek had been evolved for the newspapers, thus causing a great and unnecessary problem for schools and parents. Can you imagine talking the way you do in ordinary life and yet being forced to read Elizabethan prose every time you opened the Los Angeles Times, with a classier and more classical vocabulary? This has been a real plague for the Greek poets and only now has the battle been won for Demotic Greek thanks to half a century of taming and civilizing this language for the uses of poetry. But at the turn of the century when someone suggested turning the Bible into Modern Demotic Greek there were street battles and deaths. Only a highly educated classics scholar could read the Bible then, and the priests didn’t want to let the peasants know the meaning of what they read or chanted. This battle was carried on—the battle of the two languages—and when I was there there were even two different words for ‘wine’ and ‘bread.’ Well by great luck an enlightened Minister of Education—whom you will know under the name of Kazanzakis, author of Zorba The Greek—gave permission for the Greek classics to be turned into modern Greek for the schools; and so the children of Greece came at last into the heritage of their native literature, and could read Homer and Sophocles in a good crib, as we would call it in England. Well, the two kids of my landlord were then going to the village school and were being taught Homer in a pretty storybook version. They came back at dusk usually, but one night I heard the whole family talking and laughing until the late hours. It was strange because they usually were in bed by the time darkness fell in order to save fuel. I felt that something special must have happened. The next morning the landlord came to me and said “Oh gosh, I’ve got the most wonderful story these kids are reading. I wish I could explain it to you, but your Greek isn’t good enough. It’s apparently by a man called Homeros. What a pity you don’t know Greek any better. It’s a marvelous story.” Then he began telling me the story of Ulysses, which he himself could not read—he had vaguely heard Homer’s name but he didn’t know the story. But kids were bringing their lesson books back in the evening and he was engulfing the story. It struck me so forcibly because I had the translation by T. E. Lawrence, and I had two other versions right there in the house and we were always having a look at them just to compare daily life in modern Greece with daily life in ancient Greece, and I was always struck by the degree to which we found everything up to date. I don’t believe a place like Ithaca, for example, has changed at all since Ulysses went back there. I certainly spent a few weeks there in exactly the sort of conditions that Ulysses must’ve found. But now, of course, the end is near at hand because last year they got television. (I wasn’t joking. I like television and it wasn’t a snide remark.) But when you have village manners and village customs with all the tremendous tradition and hospitality and a perfectly formal way of looking at things, town manners imposed on you by a box, which naturally entices you with the things it has to offer, naturally alter the old stately easygoing ways. It’s done it to us all. It’s done it to all our countries. And up to now it hasn’t been possible in all those mountains in Greece to get a decent television service working. But the Greeks being ingenious have managed it, and I’m afraid it’s going into action now, which means that all those very remote little villages which one used to know will now be glued to Athens. And of course Athens contains everything meretricious that London and New York can provide for it in terms of modern Greece. So inevitably it will have a radical effect on Greek manners of the old style. So this is why perhaps it’s a bit nostalgic, my reminiscences of that forgotten Greece. For example, the monuments were not ringed about. I have slept for a whole month in a sleeping bag on Sunion and watched every dawn come up icy with dew. I slept inside the lion gate at Mycenae and among the statues of Olympia. There was no tourism then and there was no money to be had from monuments. In fact, in Olympia when I asked for the museum curator he came down on a bicycle, climbed into a tree and took the key down and opened the front door of the museum for me, and when we’d had a good look ‘round he climbed into the tree and replaced the key. I could have pinched the lot. It was so easygoing and so Irish and absolutely unpretentious that one felt very much at home.

  And then there were other extraordinary matters like those recounted by Ralf Brewster, who died recently, and who wrote two or three good books about Greece. When he was a student he was studying in Austria, he went down and spent a summer in the islands—he spoke good Greek—in a caïque. And in Siphnos one afternoon they found the museum wide open and the guardian asleep under a tree. He just said, “Go on, have a look around.” So Ralf looked around and there was a beautiful little statue of a Pan lying on its back among the nettles in the garden, completely untended. And Ralf, who suffered from cupidity like us all, picked it up and put
it in a shopping basket and carried it back to the caïque and took off with it for Austria. Well, nothing was heard of this loss for a little while, but the curator must’ve noticed it was missing and unluckily for Ralf, they suddenly discovered it was one of the most celebrated examples of its period. It appeared as an illustration in all the history books and it was really a national trophy that the Greeks couldn’t afford to part with. They traced it to this youthful criminal—he was then a student at the university—and they threatened all kinds of actions against him, through the Austrian government. He probably risked a prison sentence, and he had to return this thing. Well, he returned it and he was blackmarked and couldn’t go to Greece for five years after that. But when the sixth year came he managed to get a visa and he went back and in passing Siphnos again, out of curiosity he called in to have a look at the museum and he couldn’t find this trophy anywhere in the museum and said, “Oh well, they must’ve taken it to Athens.” Then he went outside in the garden and there it was in the same place, lying in the bushes where he’d found it first. On its back.

  In this tiny community—it was a hamlet of about four houses—we had one doctor who was highly eccentric, who wasn’t a doctor at all. In the town of Corfu there were some highly trained medical people and a good surgical laboratory, a good hospital and people trained at places like Edinburgh and in Paris, but in this tiny hamlet there was one old doctor on a bicycle. At the end of the war with the Turks there was a great shortage of doctors so the Greeks took all the pharmacists in Athens and created them doctors and sent them to the front. Then afterwards you couldn’t take away their license to practice, so there were a great number of elderly men practising quite ad hoc in all these villages. And then there were the women bone-setters and herbalists who were much better than the old men and the only other literate person was Niko, the village schoolmaster. And a delightful priest who was extremely drunk most of the time. But he used to give tremendous services and excommunicate everyone from time to time and then take them back, you know. It was a small community and very tightly knit. I should suppose that you would find in an Irish island or in the Isle of Aron something rather comparable. But meanwhile, as a poet of 21 or 22, I had the most extraordinary stroke of luck—in fact the more I think of it the more amazing it seems to me—for if you cut yourself off from the ordinary literary life with all the things it has to offer you and you decide to go sit on a Greek island you would never hope to have the sort of friends I as a boy of 22 acquired almost by divine accident. I was later to call them my uncles, none of them wicked, all of them good. I had two American uncles at that time. They didn’t come at once. First, I had T. S. Eliot as a publisher who guided and helped a great deal and consoled me against the loneliness of living in such circumstances. It was beautiful but it was terribly lonely. And then Henry Miller started bombarding me from Paris with a great deal of encouragement and documentation and masses of ideas. He was full of energy and enthusiasm which were wonderful guidelines for a young man. And then the other two uncles were Greek. One of them was George Katsimbalis, the Colossus of Maroussi. And the other one was Seferis who won the Nobel Prize later on. The quality of their sort of life style was such that it couldn’t help inspiring you. I remember Seferis as a diplomat saying to me one day, “You know the old story about the pearly gates and St. Peter—I was thinking of it today at this awful reception.” He went on, “I was thinking that if when I went to heaven St. Peter asked me ‘What the hell have you been doing with your life down there?’ the only thing I could really point to excuse it was my poems, and they’re not good enough.” And then I remember Miller saying “You know I never really believed in my vocation as a writer but now I realize I’m a protected person.” It does suggest an eye out for another kind of life. And so parallel to this rather rocky life I was living was a frightfully intense interior life which was centered more or less on trying to shape myself into some sort of artist. And these people stretched out hands—touch, touch—and I felt in contact, and it’s quite marvelous to be in contact though you’re quite on your own and far away. It’s a privilege accorded to few people. And so when I met Miller in Paris I took him back to Corfu and he wrote this good book about it. And when I went to Athens I took up with Seferis and Katsimbalis and his strange friends—he had a sort of Wuthering Heights of a house where numberless barrels of wine always seemed to be leaking all over everything. And on this creaky balcony, first weekend in Athens that I was there, I took Miller and Seferis and Katsimbalis and two other writers met in the evening to read verses. It was extremely memorable because the reading got steadily thicker and thicker because of the retsina, which was extremely powerful. And at night our wives came and fanned us with leaves and implored us to stop. In those hard Attic nights, Miller, I think has given the best description of them, the extraordinary dry heat—you’re panting on the one hand because it’s hot and yet on the other hand you’re not sweating. It’s most extraordinary. You can walk at night with a clear electrical feeling. The actual violet of the dusk and the actual violet light which seems to play about Greece is something that’s always impossible to describe. We’ve all tried it. It doesn’t work in words and I don’t think it works in paint really. It’s a very peculiar thing. If you ask yourself, for example, what is Greece that Italy isn’t, or Spain isn’t, it’s just precisely that curious magnetic violet X-ray dancing light, and I suppose also the feel always of water, either spring water, which you need urgently because you’re like a thirsty dog in summer—even the electric light bulbs in a café give off so much heat that you can hardly stand them. You have to turn them off. And it’s the water and it’s the feeling of the light winds that girdle the Aegaen group of islands, which makes the nights delicious, particularly delicious, and the afternoons, with the good sailing wind that comes, the meltemi, and which sinks at dusk and allows you to bring boats in harbor perfectly calmly and sit down and watch everything settle into a pool of liquid. Cool nights, terrific stars, and heavy dew condensing like Scotch mist on your blanket. Into the sea at six, like diving into a mirror.