The author’s death last month was politely – if briefly – noted in the Athens press. The reason that the usually elaborate eulogies were not prolonged would probably h ave amused that humorous man. Within 72 hours of his passing, far bigger local game fell when actor Alexis Minotis and Yiannis Ritsos went on to their respective rewards. Although the latter was over 80 (and had suffered a life of ill-health) and Minotis had entered his tenth decade, the whole country (according to the press) was “shocked”, “stunned”, “stricken”, “devastated by grief”, “prostrated with sorrow”, “plunged into mourning” and “left in a void”.
This very un-Durrellian passion for the celebration of death goes on all year round. Just in the last few months we have been reminded in 30-point headings that we are “Thirteen Years Without Callas”, “Seventeen Years Without Paxinou” and “Forty Years Without Mitropoulos”. This has led a local wit to regret our ignorance of the date of the demise of the Father of Athenian Democracy so that we might know exactly on what day we should be “2419 Years Without Pericles.”
On the other hand, the anniversaries of the births of our great men and women are ignored, giving the impression that we are happier without them than with them. This may also explain why the celebration of Holy Week here is so much more popular than Christmas. Many may remember the posters plastered up all over Athens a decade ago: “Angelos Sikelianos: 30 Years After His Death”, yet the centenary of his birth three years later passed with scarcely a peep, let alone a stanza or a poster.
War was not a part of Durrell’s Greece, either. Yet if one riffles through the 12 hefty volumes of Ekdotike Athinon’s mighty History of the Greek Nation (has the University of Pennsylvania got cold feet over its project to translate it into English?), one would imagine that so much time was spent on the battlefield or in the assembly (Pnyx or Parliament) over the course of 3000 years that there was barely time to propagate the race. Arts, crafts, literature, science, business, society and the pleasures of life are all squashed into the last chapter of each tome while the rest is given over to stirring prose and lavish illustration either of bearded gentlemen addressing crowds, or women and babes leaping off cliffs, or men – naked or armed, in fustanella or battle fatigues – running up and down mountains brandishing weapons, or expelling the intruder: Amazon or ancient Mede, Roman or Saracen, Bulgar or Slav, Turk or Nazi, NATO officer or nosy EC Commissioner – depending on the volume.
This month in particular we remember the common soldier in Albania. Fifty years ago last June the world stared in horror at wireless photos of the scrambling on the beaches at Dunkirk and the goose-stepping down the Champs Elysees. Yet only six months later, in December, it was looking in equal amazement at a snapshot of a squad of Greek soldiers in white hoods and capotes dancing a folk dance around a captured Axis cannon on some god-forsaken, snow-streaked slope in Albania. That dance of life around the presence of death is the Greek spirit that Durrell celebrated.
But this month, too, observes the Dekemvriana, those terrible events of 1944 which opened the bloodiest round of the Greek Civil War, reminding us of the sad fact that Greeks are as united in time of war as they are divided amongst themselves in peacetime.
It was December, too, that Durrell’s novel Justine first appeared in its bright dust jacket in the windows of the old Eleftheroudakis Bookshop then in the Hotel Mega on the corner of Stadiou and Constitution Square – “quite the best English-language bookstore on the Continent not excepting Brentano’s in Paris,” people used to say.
That was 1957 anno mirabile in the annals of Greek tourism: the emergence internationally of Melina Mercouri, Manos Hadjidakis and Vogue (French, English and US editions): “People are talking about… Mykonos!” And its windmills sailed into every hairdressers’ salon in the Western world bringing megabucks to Greece -and a lot else.
Durrell’s Greek travel books rode Justine piggy-back into the public eye, and it would be impossible to say how many people first fell in love with this country through his words and eyes, but it is a very considerable number. At one time his happy publishers in Russell Square had more Durrell paperback titles on their lists than any of their several Nobel Prize winners.
“If Larry ever wins that odious prize,” thundered George Katsimbalis, “I shall never read another word he writes, nor speak to him again.”
Maybe it seems strange that Durrell’s work was ever considered Nobel Prize stuff, now with these condescending obituaries. He isn’t even much found in kiosks any more, his place taken by Stephen King and Jeffrey Archer. If he’s passe, the Greece he loved is certainly passe with him. Or is it quite? For those who sighed in relief when Athens missed its Olympic bid, and for others who don’t die of envy when they see those kilometres of high-rise condominiums marching down the Costa Whatever on Spanish tourist posters, maybe Greece still conceals a bit of its old magic somewhere.
“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners, lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder -the discovery of yourself.”
Any foreigner who has come to know Greece well, knows, too, how personal that experience is and no one expressed it better than he did.
Philhellene, but no modern-day Romios, Durell was never obsessed with war or death. Wasn’t it he who pointed out that the word haire on the ancient grave steles was a parting admonition of the dead to the living, “Be Happy!”
