Trying to find this reality in New York’s West 40s under blizzard conditions one morning in early February isn’t easy. The newsstand on West 44th Street is closed; the Greek bakery nearby has become Italian; the Pantheon Restaurant, that fount of information and gossip, is closed for renovations and the Hellenikon shop has moved. The Korean proprietor of the new sushi and salad bar there doesn’t know where it’s gone. Has Manhattan-Greek reality moved out to the fashionable suburbs?
While Greek reality is being elusive, the American one is everywhere. The morning papers are full of the foul weather and, therefore, the plight of the homeless. The number of people on the streets asking in cultured accents for money for a bowl of soup, while lines of seven-metre limousines block traffic, is astonishing. There are no bumper stickers, as in Athens, proclaiming “I Love New York” here in “Tramp City”. Last night 46 homes on Long Island burned down in a fire; in New Jersey they’ve found cyanide in tea bags. The book review says that Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, heralded 40 years ago as the Great American Novel, is today “badly written, bathetic and unreadable”. So much for the cultural front…
On the political front, the Iran-Contra scandal keeps opening up like Japanese water flowers, spilling newsprint over onto the op-ed page. The editorial itself, being more succinct, describes the present administration as “clinically dysfunctional”. It seems to be a bad time for presidents everywhere.
So where is Greek reality?
A hole in the wall, aptly call The Athenian, on 42nd between 8th and 9th Avenues, has a few Greek papers. They’re several days old. Piecing together Greek reality out of these is something of a puzzle. Looking homeward (and all Americans have learned somehow that Greece is “home” for everybody), one “angel” seems to predominate. This is Christos Roussos, whose murder of a fellow homosexual 11 years ago became the subject of the film Anghelos, which played successfully on 47th and 8th a few years ago. His 75-day hunger strike and plea for clemency (from life to 20 years), especially when President Sartzetakis intervened with a detailed account of the crime on TV dismissing the appeal, seem to have caused riots and hunger strikes among intellectuals (of which there are a great many) in Athens.
Several more days have passed. It is time to seek out Greek reality again. The American one has changed in the meantime. The weather has improved, so it is no longer news. Agnes Baltsa in Carmen at the Metropolitan has been panned mainly due to Sir Peter Hall’s staging. In the New York papers there is no news from Greece; almost none from Europe. America has lost interest in Europe.
Meanwhile the West 44th Street newsstand has reopened and they have some Sunday Athenian newspapers. Greek reality it seems has also changed in the last few days: the “angel” has fled. There is no mention of the Roussos affair except that his sentence continues to be suspended. Attention has turned to a major cabinet reshuffle in which three veteran PASOK ministers – Koutsoyorgas, Tsochatzopoulos and Yennimatas – have been dismissed. That most of the new names are totally unfamiliar one imagines is due to the ignorance caused by long distance, but we are told that some of the new ministers were so unknown that they were held up for identification outside the Presidential Palace on their way to being sworn in. For the record, this leaves Melina Mercouri as the only surviving minister of the original socialist government formed six years ago – with the exception, of course, of the prime minister himself.
One can only conclude from this that American reality and Greek reality – and one can assume that there are many, many more -are separate theatres of the absurd playing to their own special audiences, mainly for laughs of an uneasy kind. This may account for revivals on Broadway like Orion’s Loot and Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. Why else should not-so-old comedies of the absurd be resuscitated now as classics when absurdity has been plagiarized from them and promoted into policies of states?
Perhaps it is significant that Greek and American realities should meet for once this month in commemorating the career of Karolos Koun, the Greek director who dedicated his life to what is really important about ancient plays and modern ones, thus giving significance to existence. It is a pity that this meeting should have to take place on the obituary page.
The trouble with reality in the U.S. may be that the Great American Novel, or Great American Play, hasn’t been written yet, and may never be. And the trouble with Greek reality may be that the great Greek epics and plays were written thousands of years ago and still have to be lived up to.
