by Henry Miller
I stayed at Hydra a few days during which time I ran up and down thousands of steps, visited the home of several admirals, made votive offerings to the saints who protect the island, said prayers for the dead, the halt and the blind in the little chapel attached to Ghika’s house, played ping pong, drank champagne, cognac, ouzo and rezina at the Old Curiosity Shop, sat up with a bottle of whiskey talking to Ghika about the monks in Tibet, began the log of the Immaculate Conception which I finished for Seferiades at Delphi—and listened to Katsimbalis, to the Ninth Symphony of his travails and transgressions. Madame Hadji-Kyriakos, Ghika’s wife, laid a wonderful table; we rose from the table like wine casks without legs. From the terrace, which was distinctly Oriental in flavor, we could look out on the sea in drunken stupefaction. The house had forty rooms, some of which were buried deep in the earth. The big rooms were like the saloon of an ocean liner; the little rooms were like cool dungeons fitted up by temperamental pirates. The maids were of divine origin and one of them, at least, was descended directly from the Erectheum though she bore the name of a sacred cereal.
One evening, while scaling the broad steps which led to the tip of the island, Katsimbalis began talking of madness. A mist was coming up from the sea and all I could distinguish of him was the huge head which floated above me like the auric egg itself. He was talking of cities, of how he had gotten a mania for Haussmannizing the big cities of the world. He would take the map of London say, or Constantinople, and after the most painstaking study would draw up a new plan of the city, to suit himself. Some cities he rearranged so thoroughly that later he had difficulty finding his way about—I mean in his own imaginative plan. Naturally a great many monuments had to be torn down and new statues, by unheard-of men, erected in their place. While working on Constantinople, for example, he would be seized by a desire to alter Shanghai. By day he would be rebuilding Constantinople and in his sleep he would be remodel-ling Shanghai. It was confusing, to say the least. Having reconstructed one city he would go on to another and then another. There was no letup to it. The walls were papered with the plans for these new cities. Knowing most of these cities by heart he would often revisit them in his dreams; and since he had altered them throughout, even to such a detail as changing the names of the streets, the result was that he would pass sleepless nights trying to extricate himself and, on awakening, had difficulty recovering his own identity. It was a kind of megalomania, he thought, a sort of glorified constructivism which was a pathologic hangover from his Peloponnesian heritage. We developed the subject further at Tiryns when examining the Cyclopean walls, and again at Mycenae, and for the last time at Nauplia, after climbing the 999 steps leading to the top of the fortress. I came to the conclusion that the Peloponnesians were a race of builders whose spiritual development had been arrested at a formative period and who, consequently, had gone on building automatically, like heavy-handed, heavy-footed sleepwalkers. Nobody knows what these people were trying to create in their sleep; we know only that they preferred to work with the most untractable material. Not a single poet emerged from this race of stone builders. They produced some marvelous “assassinators,” legislators and military leaders. When the curtain fell on the scene the house was not only dark but empty. The soil was so saturated with blood that even to-day the crops from the rich plains and valleys are superlatively luxuriant.
When we took the boat for Spetsai Katsimbalis was still talking. The two of us were going on alone. Spetsai was only a few hours away. As I say, Katsimbalis was still talking. As we neared our destination it began to sprinkle a bit. We got into the small boat and were rowed ashore, Katsimbalis remarking that the place looked strange, that perhaps we had pulled in to the opposite side of the island. We got out of the small boat and walked along the quay. Suddenly we were standing in front of a war monument and to my surprise Katsimbalis began to laugh. “I’m crazy,” he said, “this isn’t Spetsai, this is Ermioni—we’re on the mainland.” A gendarme came over and spoke to us. He recommended us to go to the other side of the island and there catch a small boat for Spetsai. There was a rattle-trap of a Ford which served as a bus waiting for us. It already had six passengers in it but we managed to squeeze in anyway. As we started off it began to rain. We went through the town of Kranidion at lightning-like speed, half of the car on the sidewalk and the other half in the gutter; we made a sharp turn and descended the mountainside with the engine shut off. The car was falling apart and the young pig on which our feet were resting was squealing like a flea-bitten lunatic. When we got to the little port of Portochelli the rain was coming down in torrents. We waded through mud ankle-deep to get to the tavern at the waterfront. A typical Mediterranean storm was raging. When we inquired if we could get a small boat the card-players looked at us as if we were crazy. We said—“After the storm blows over.” They shook their heads. “It will last all day,” they said, “and maybe all night.” We watched the storm for an hour or more, bored stiff by the prospect of remaining here all night. Wasn’t there someone, we inquired, who would take a chance when the storm abated a bit? We let it be known that we would pay double or treble the usual tariff. “By the way,” I asked Katsimbalis, “what is the usual price?” He inquired of the barkeeper. “A hundred drachmas,” he said, if we were to pay three hundred drachmas that would be handsome. Three hundred drachmas is about two dollars. “You mean that someone would be foolish enough to risk his life for two dollars?” I asked. “What about us?” he answered, and then suddenly I realized that it might be a foolhardy thing to tempt someone to sail us over that sea. We sat down and talked it over. “Are you sure you want to risk it?” Katsimbalis asked. “What about you?” I parried. “We may never make it,” he said, “it’s a gamble. Anyway, it would be a romantic death—for you.” And then he started to talk about all the English poets who had been drowned in the Mediterranean. “The hell with it,” I said, “if you’ll come along I’ll risk it. Where’s that guy who was going to take us?” We asked where the fellow had gone to. “He’s gone to take a little nap,” they said, “he didn’t get any sleep all night.” We tried to find another fellow, but there was no one foolish enough to listen to our pleas. “Can you swim?” asked Katsimbalis. The thought of trying to swim in that boiling sea took some of the steam out of me. “Better wait a while,” he added. “No use getting drowned immediately.” An old tar came up to us and tried to dissuade us from going. “Very treacherous weather,” he said. “It may let up for a little while, but not long enough to reach Spetsai. Better stay here overnight. Nobody will take you out in this sea.” Katsimbalis looked at me as though to say—“Did you hear that? these fellows know what they’re talking about.”
A few minutes later the sun came out and with it appeared the fellow who had been taking a nap. We ran out to greet him but he motioned us back with his hand. We stood at the doorway and watched him bail out the boat and hoist the sails. It seemed to take a devil of a time; meanwhile the clouds had gathered again and there came a crack of lightning and a splash of rain. The fellow ducked down into the hatch. We stood and watched the sky some more. It was raining pitchforks again. When it seemed as if all were hopeless suddenly the fellow came up on deck and beckoned to us. The rain had thinned out and the clouds back of us were breaking. “Is it all right to take a chance now?” we asked, none too sure of ourselves. The fellow shrugged his shoulders. “What does he mean by that?” I inquired. To this Katsimbalis also shrugged his shoulders, adding with a malicious smile—“That means that if we’re crazy enough to risk our lives he is too.” We jumped in and stood up forward, holding on to the mast. “Why don’t you go down below?” I said. Katsimbalis didn’t want to go below, it made him seasick. “Well, you’ll get seasick anyway,” I said. “We’re in for it now.” We had already pushed off and were running close to shore. As we got near the open water a violent gust of wind hit us squarely. The Greek left the tiller to pull down the sails. “Look at that,” said Katsimbalis, “these fellows are mad.” We were skirting dang
erously close to the rocks by the time the fellow had pulled in the sails. The sea was running high—ahead of us was a seething mass of whitecaps. I began to realize just how mad it was when I saw the huge troughs into which we were plunging with terrifying vertigo.
We looked back instinctively at the helmsman to catch a ray of hope from his countenance, but his expression was impassive. “He’s probably mad,” said Katsimbalis, and with that a wave broke clean over us and drenched us to the skin. The ducking had an exhilarating effect upon us. We were even more exhilarated when we caught sight of a small yacht pulling up on us. It was only a trifle bigger than our own benzina and had about the same speed. Side by side, like two sea horses, the little boats tossed and plunged. I would never have believed that a frail boat could weather such a sea. When we slid down to the bottom of a trough the oncoming wave loomed above us like a white-toothed monster waiting to fall on us belly first. The sky was like the back of a mirror, showing a dull molten glow where the sun vainly strove to beat through. Toward the horizon the lightning was zigzagging back and forth. Now the waves began to strike us from all directions. It took all our strength to hold on to the mast with two hands. We could see Spetsai clearly, the buildings looking ghastly, as if they had vomited up their insides. Oddly enough, neither of us had any fear. I didn’t know till afterwards that Katsimbalis had a dread of the sea, being a highlander and not an islander. His face was radiant. Now and then he yelled—“Homeric, what?” Good old Katsimbalis! Crazy like all the Greeks. Terrified of the sea he was and yet he had never said a word about it. “We’ll have a good meal,” he yelled, “if we make it.” He had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth when a snarling, whistling spout of water gave us such a clout that I thought we were done for. But the boat was like a cork. Nothing could keel her over or push her down. We looked at each other knowingly, as if to say, “Well, if she weathered that she’ll weather anything.” We became exultant and shouted crazy words of encouragement as if it were a horse we were riding. “Are you all right back there?” Katsimbalis shouted over his shoulder, hardly daring to look back for fear he would find the man overboard. “Malista,” came the reply. What a beautiful word for yes, I thought to myself. And then I thought of the first Greek phrase I had learned—“ligo nero, se para kalo”…a little water, please. Water, water…it was running out of my eyes and ears, down my neck, into my belly-button, between my toes. “Bad for the rheumatism,” shouted Katsimbalis. “Not too bad,” I yelled, “you’ll have a good appetite.”
There was a little crowd at the quay when we landed. The gendarme eyed us suspiciously. What had brought us to a place like Spetsai in such weather…why hadn’t we come on the big boat? What was our business? The fact that Katsimbalis was a Greek and had gotten off the big boat by mistake made things look even more suspicious. And what was the crazy American doing—there are no tourists coming to Spetsai in the winter. However, after a few grunts he trundled off. We went to a little hotel nearby and wrote our names in the big book. The proprietor, who was slightly goofy but sympathetic, looked at the names and then said to Katsimbalis—“What regiment were you in during the war? Aren’t you my captain?” and he gave his name and the name of the regiment. When we had changed our clothes John the proprietor was waiting for us; he had his little boy by the hand and a baby in his arm. “My children, captain,” he said proudly. Mister John steered us to a taverna where we could get some excellent fried fish and some rezina. On the way he told us in English about his fruit store in New York, at one of the subway entrances uptown. I knew that subway entrance very well because I had once sold a fur-lined coat given to me by a Hindu to a taxi-driver for ten cents one winter’s morning at three a.m. just outside Mister John’s fruit store. Mister John, who was a little goofy, as I said, found it hard to believe that any native-born American would be so crazy as to do a thing like that. While we were jabbering away in English a fat fellow who had been listening attentively at the next table suddenly turned round and said to me with an impeccable upstate accent—“Where are you from, stranger? I’m from Buffalo.” He came over and joined us. His name was Nick. “How is the good old U.S.A.?” he said, ordering another pint of rezina. “Jesus, what I wouldn’t give to be back there now.” I looked at his clothes, obviously American, obviously expensive. “What did you do there?” I asked. “I was a bookie,” he said. “You like this suit? I’ve got seven more of them at the house. Yeah, I brought a supply of everything along. You can’t get anything decent here—you see what a dump it is. Jesus, did I have a swell time in Buffalo. When are you going back?” When I told him that I had no intention of returning he gave me a strange smile. “Funny,” he said, “you like it here and I like it there. I wish we could swap passports. I’d give a lot to have an American passport right now.”
When I awoke the next morning Katsimbalis had already left the hotel, Mister John said I would find him down the road by the Anargyros College. I swallowed Mister John’s greasy breakfast and took the road along the waterfront towards the college. The college, as well as most everything else of importance in Spetsai, was donated to the community by the cigarette king. I stood at the entrance admiring the buildings and as I turned to go I saw Katsimbalis approaching with a great flourish of the cane. He had in tow a friend of his—Kyrios Ypsilon, I shall call him, to be discreet. Kyrios Ypsilon was a political exile, I discovered; he had been transferred to Spetsai from some other island because of his poor health. I liked Kyrios Ypsilon at once, the moment I shook hands with him. He spoke French, not knowing any English, but with a German accent. He was as Greek as Greek can be, but he had been educated in Germany. What I liked about him was his keen, buoyant nature, his directness, his passion for flowers and for metaphysics. He escorted us to his room in a big deserted house, the very house in which the famous Bouboulina had been shot. While we chatted he brought out a tin tub and filled it with warm water for his bath. On a shelf near his bed he had a collection of books. I glanced at the titles, which were in five or six languages. There were The Divine Comedy, Faust, Tom Jones, several volumes of Aristotle, The Plumed Serpent, Plato’s Dialogues, two or three volumes of Shakespeare, and so on. A most excellent diet for a prolonged siege. “So you do know a little English?” I said, Oh yes, he had studied it in Germany, but he couldn’t speak it very well. “I would like to read Walt Whitman one day,” he added quickly. He was sitting in the tub soaping and scrubbing himself vigorously. “To keep up the morale,” he said, though neither of us had made any remark about the bath. “One has to have regular habits,” he went on, “or else you go to pieces. I do a lot of walking, so that I can sleep at night. The nights are long, you know, when you are not free.”
“He’s a great fellow,” said Katsimbalis, as we were walking back to the hotel. “The women are crazy about him. He has an interesting theory about love…get him to talk to you about it sometime.”
Talking of love Bouboulina’s name came up. “How is it we don’t hear more about Bouboulina?” I asked. “She sounds like another Joan of Arc.”
“Huh,” he snorted, stopping dead in his tracks, “what do you know about Joan of Arc? Do you know anything about her love life?” He ignored my reply to continue about Bouboulina. It was an extraordinary story he told me and I have no doubt that most of it was true. “Why don’t you write that story yourself?” I asked him point blank. He pretended that he was nor a writer, that his task was to discover people and present them to the world. “But I never met a man who could tell a story like you,” I persisted.
“Why don’t you try telling your stories aloud—let someone take it down just as you tell it? Couldn’t you do that, at least?”
“To tell a good story,” he said, “you have to have a good listener. I can’t tell a story to an automaton who writes shorthand. Besides, the best stories are those which you don’t want to preserve. If you have any arrière-pensée the story is ruined. It must be a sheer gift…you must throw it to the dogs…. I’m not a writer,” he added, “I�
��m an extemporaneous fellow. I like to hear myself talk. I talk too much—it’s a vice.” And then he added reflectively: “What good would it do to be a writer, a Greek writer? Nobody reads Greek. If a man can have a thousand readers here he’s lucky. The educated Greeks don’t read their own writers; they prefer to read German, English, French books. A writer hasn’t a chance in Greece.”
“But your work could be translated into other languages,” I suggested.
“There is no language that can render the flavor and the beauty of modern Greek,” he replied. “French is wooden, inflexible, logic-ridden, too precise; English is too flat, too prosaic, too business-like…you don’t know how to make verbs in English.” He went on like that, flourishing his cane angrily. He began to recite one of Seferiades’ poems, in Greek. “Do you hear that? The sound of it alone is wonderful, no? What can you give me in English to match that for sheer beauty of resonance?” And suddenly he began to intone a verse from the Bible. “Now that’s a little more like it,” he said. “But you don’t use that language any more—that’s a dead language now. The language hasn’t any guts to-day. You’re all castrated, you’ve become business men, engineers, technicians. It sounds like wooden money dropping into a sewer. We’ve got a language…we’re still making it. It’s a language for poets, not for shopkeepers. Listen to this—” and he began reciting another poem, in Greek. “That’s from Sekelia-nos. I suppose you never even heard the name, what? You never heard of Yannopoulos either, did you? Yannopoulos was greater than your Walt Whitman and all the American poets combined. He was a madman, yes, like all the great Greek fellows. He fell in love with his own country—that’s a funny thing, eh? Yes, he became so intoxicated with the Greek language, the Greek philosophy, the Greek sky, the Greek mountains, the Greek sea, the Greek islands, the Greek vegetables, even, that he killed himself. I’ll tell you how he killed himself some other time—that’s another story. Have you got any writers who would kill themselves because they were too full of love? Are there any French writers or German writers or English writers who feel that way about their country, their race, their soil? Who are they? I’ll read you some of Yannopoulos when we get back to Athens. I’ll read you what he says about the rocks—just the rocks, nothing more. You can’t know what a rock is until you’ve heard what Yannopoulos has written. He talks about rocks for pages and pages; he invents rocks, by God, when he can’t find any to rave about. People say he was crazy, Yannopoulos. He wasn’t crazy—he was mad. There’s a difference. His voice was too strong for his body: it consumed him. He was like Icarus—the sun melted his wings. He soared too high. He was an eagle. These rabbits we call critics can’t understand a man like Yannopoulos. He was out of proportion. He raved about the wrong things, according to them. He didn’t have le sens de mesure, as the French say. There you are—mesure. What a mean little word! They look at the Parthenon and they find the proportions so harmonious. All rot. The human proportions which the Greek extolled were superhuman. They weren’t French proportions. They were divine, because the true Greek is a god, not a cautious, precise, calculating being with the soul of an engineer….”
