A Room in Athens
A Room in Athens
Frances Karlen Santamaria
TATRA PRESS LLC
4 Park Trail
Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520
www.tatrapress.com
A Room in Athens
Copyright © 1970 by Frances Karlen Santamaria
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Josh Karlen
First published as Joshua, Firstborn in the United States of America by The Dial Press (New York), 1970, a unit of Dell Publishing Company.
Reprinted by arrangement with the author’s estate
Published by Tatra Press LLC 2016
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938746
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9776142-8-8
Jacket design by Mimi Bark
Book design by Isabella Piestrzynska, Umbrella Graphics
Author photo on page 175 by James Goldsmith
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Press (New York)
Printed in the United States of America (Thomson-Shore, Dexter, MI)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any way without written permission from the publisher, except in cases of brief quotations in reviews.
Acknowledgments
Many people have generously contributed their time and expertise so that this book might return to print after a half century and be appreciated by new readers. I wish to particularly express my gratitude to Nikos Vatopoulos, Petros Kladaki, Ada Kladaki, Fred Burwell, Cynthia Cotts, David Ginsborg, Neil Martinson, Christopher Sorrentino, and Luis Mocete and Stephane Dussud.
JK
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
A Room in Athens
Prologue
I Arrival
II Birth
III The Clinic
IV Him
V The Visit
VI The Spartan Athenian Couch
VII Return
VIII The Briss
Afterword
Postscript
Notes
Introduction
THIS QUIET, BEAUTIFUL LITTLE BOOK IS THE DIARY OF A YOUNG AMERICAN WOMAN who recorded her experiences during the better part of the year 1964 while traveling with her husband through Europe, and finally settling in Athens for natural childbirth. The young woman was my mother, and she was pregnant with me, her first son.
The book’s original title, imposed by the publisher just before the book appeared in 1970, was Joshua, Firstborn. The title was misleading, for the story is hardly about me, or the fact that I was firstborn in the Jewish sense, the Greek sense, or in any other sense, except biological. My mother’s original title, A Room in Athens, is perhaps no more precise, but it is certainly more evocative of her own adventure, contains relevant literary resonances, and has a simple beauty. The publisher’s subtitle, Natural Childbirth and Mothering—Experiences of an American Wife in Greece, lumbers nearer the mark. Yet the book encompasses far more than this would imply.
First, it is a timeless story of a young woman’s journey from the joyous day she becomes aware of her long-sought pregnancy through to childbirth and the initial months of motherhood, all framed within another journey, to an ancient, exotic country. The result is a diary that is as gripping and unified as a good novel, replete with a captivating opening (news of the pregnancy and a sea voyage to Africa); a climax (childbirth at a singular Athenian maternity clinic); and a satisfying culmination (new motherhood and the return to America and family). There is even a touch of suspense about the birth under such improbable circumstances, and whether they will attain their dream of a pastoral idyll on an Aegean island.
Second, it is a story told through prose as exquisitely wrought as the paintings on a Greek vase and which remains fresh and vivid a half-century later. For example, here is her portrait of Athens on an autumn evening in 1964:
At twilight, the sky above Athens turns orange and the light in the streets takes on the purple tone of the bare mountains that semicircle the town. Men sat drinking in cafes where women never went. The city had awakened from its long afternoon nap and Athenians were out in their numbers, going back to work, shopping, strolling. Soldiers—with custom-made uniforms hugging their bodies—passed by in the twos and threes of soldiers everywhere; there were many of the righteous priests in their black robes, their hair braided in a knot in the back like a matador’s. They had, without exception, the air of smug landowners….
The description continues, but already she has conveyed a wonderfully living picture of her new-found city. And throughout the diary she presents an array of places and people—Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, the labyrinthine alleys of Tangiers, the coast of North Africa, a Welsh writer, a London doctor—which leap from the pages as sharply delineated as the settings or characters of first-rate fiction. There is the handsome and charming Athenian hustler Vasilios, who “helps” my parents find an apartment; and there is Liesel, a young Greek woman, educated in America, who becomes a dear friend. Some characters are sympathetically rendered; others verge on harsh caricature. Here is part of a wicked dual portrait of the porters at the apartment building where they have recently moved:
Our porters were a couple; the man was slight, dimwitted; his head appeared to be somewhat pointed and he always dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit; he wore spectacles and had the usual several gold teeth. He seemed nice enough on his frequent rounds to fix fuses or check the water meter. His wife—we called her Quasimodo—was the real power. She was a heavyset woman, aging badly, with light no-color hair and a thrust-out lower jaw and hanging lip; there were gaps in her teeth. She had the loudest voice of all the gallery of airshaft speakers, and she was always yelling at someone in angry Greek.
The book abounds with such masterly renderings, although most are briefer, an artist’s sketches in a pocket notebook, composed of only a few precise, light pencil touches. It surprised me to learn how many passages, so polished in their rhythms and detail, were verbatim transcripts from the diary as she wrote them, sitting in a park, in a maternity-clinic bed, or in their Athens apartment.
My parents had settled in the Greek capital after four densely packed months of difficult travel, and they remained in the city for four more months, with the entire trip carefully recorded by my mother. Therefore, a major alteration to the diary proved to be the paring away of scores of the small, handwritten pages concerning family back home, costs of hotels and meals, routine days and nights, etc., which would lack interest for readers or distract from the focus on her pregnancy, childbirth, and new motherhood. Two stays in Paris were entirely cut; weeks touring England, Italy, Spain, and Yugoslavia were reduced to a few paragraphs. Unfortunately, this also meant purging many lovely or arresting observations gathered across Europe:
Granada, we found out, means pomegranate, and it is perfect, for the pomegranate is no more a real fruit than Granada is a real city. Granada is a fantasy spun by idle Arabs of a warm afternoon.
In Dover, packs of teenage boys on the streets with a purposeless and mean look I haven’t seen anywhere else since we left New York. They walk with the same awkward, swinging looseness of American boys.
At a Left Bank café, sitting alone at a late breakfast. Two ancient Parisians totter by, arm in arm, one with a cane leaning on the one without. Black dresses on emaciated frames, and two black hats, one with a white rose. They walk—stopping occasionally to laugh with surprising vigor, like schoolgirls—in the direction Saint-Germain des Pres.
After three weeks in Northern Europe, we fairly fled back to Paris, where life has the same pace and vivacity as the click of those tiny, impossible heels the French girls wear, and the warm breath of sex, ever-present and inde
finable, is always breathing down your neck.
A little girl, Judy, is on our freighter, traveling to Tangiers alone to meet her mother, a divorced folksinger. She is 13, with a small girl’s under-developed body, blondish hair, large blue eyes with dark lashes, a slightly receding chin, and a mouthful of braces, which she flashes in a mischievous, metallic grin. She is traveling with a ten-week-old puppy named Maggie, and she buries her nose in its soft fur. She seems to have adopted us, and I guess we’ll see a lot of her.
Other lost entries are longer, such as this vignette of a second-class train ride to Madrid through Franco’s Spain, written wearily at four in the morning when my mother was seven months pregnant. It is reminiscent to me of Maupassant’s coach passengers in his story “Boule de Suif”:
There are eight of us in the compartment, our knees touching, soot blowing in on us from the engine, our backs held straight as sticks against the proper seats. Across is a youngish Spanish nun, with the good healthy color they all have from the sun, and exquisite discipline of limbs. She neither fidgets nor sprawls through the long, miserably uncomfortable ride. Occasionally, she prays, or looks at a missal, or paperback book on child psychology. Her unfaltering good cheer is both admirable and exasperating. She reminds me, in her delicacy and politeness, of the prioress in The Canterbury Tales.
There is an old man traveling with a stocky grandson of about ten. The old man picks at his nose freely. He is redeemed for me by his great affection for his grandson. Aside from Arno and me, who make six, there is a youngish man in his early thirties who drinks whiskey throughout the trip and offers us shots of liquor and bubble gum, and a thoroughly stodgy man in a double-breasted suit and mourning button. Together we suffer a night of exquisitely designed torture. In the hot, sooty, crowded compartment, it is impossible to sleep or even relax. Outside, in the little corridor, people are rudely talking or laughing in loud voices all night long and their voices penetrate the compartment even with the door shut. On the railway platforms of the sleeping Spanish towns, the civil guardsmen patrol with rifles on their backs, their bayonets piercingly silhouetted against the sky.
By sacrificing such gems, the diary was transformed from a shapeless, private record into a crafted work of storytelling for an audience.
Additional changes were also made for the sake of cohesion: events were sequenced more chronologically, bits of needed information were inserted or clarified, and some dialogue was supplied for scenes. Most of these modifications were not done from memory, but were based on her many letters home, which were usually quite long and detailed, and served as a rich supplemental diary when she was editing the manuscript, several years later.
In the end, the book was structurally divided into dated diary entries, which preserved the original pages nearly as she wrote them, and straight narrative, which contained portions that were significantly altered. For this reason, the book may be more accurately described as a memoir than, strictly speaking, a diary; but in any case, for the reader, the two sections (which are about equal in length) hold little or no discernable stylistic distinction.
This unity of tone may, and indeed should, go unnoticed, but it is, in fact, a remarkable achievement. As an art form, the Diary is generally less like the belabored novel than like the artist’s dashed-off drawing or watercolor: its special charm is its fusion of on-the-spot freshness with graceful precision. Revisions require a light touch, a surgical delicacy: too many repairs or after-thoughts will destroy its spontaneity. Yet, somehow the reworked narrative sections exude the same ease and artlessness as the dated entries, and fuse with them perfectly. There is seldom a false or self-conscious line, or a striving for literary effect, or a sense that she is aware of a potential audience reading over her shoulder. Only occasionally might a close reader detect where a word or phrase was inserted for a needed explanation. As for the dated entries, they still hold, fifty years later, all their fresh authenticity, as the self-communion of a young woman in her journal, often alone in a foreign country in the mid-sixties. And we are sitting with her as she writes. Her conversation with herself becomes a conversation with us; she becomes a friend we have joined in this strange Athens of fifty years ago, an intelligent, witty American friend. And it’s worth noting that the book is laced with wit and many types of humor, amid its profound themes (e.g., on childbirth: “perhaps the one major event of our grown lives for which we do not have our hair done.”).
But just as it would be a mistake to consider this a young woman’s raw, unshaped diary, it also would be wrong to consider this the diary of a “typical” or “ordinary” American woman whom we might have befriended on a bus or in a hotel lobby while traveling abroad. My mother had a fine natural intelligence and insatiable curiosity, combined with a first-rate education at Antioch College—she was among the minority of American women who attended college in the 1950s—and she had a free-spirited romanticism on par with that of the Romantic poets. I could easily imagine her with Mary and Percy Shelley and their circle, blithely wandering Europe and writing passionate verse and gothic tales. She considered herself, from her earliest girlhood in Cleveland, a writer, and was fully dedicated to her craft. She read voraciously, and it would not be exaggeration to say that literature forged the course of her life and her view of the world—including her romantic expectations of Europe and Greece. During her stay in Athens, she is immersed in one book after another, and her mind continually refers her experiences back to her reading. The diary brims with wide-ranging references to writers and literature: Byron, D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Italo Svevo, A Farewell to Arms, The Odyssey, Beowulf. Even her two Siamese cats, left behind in Philadelphia, were named after the Brontë sisters.
All her life she wrote novels, stories, and plays (most of them were steeped in her belief in the mystical, which appears in her Greece diary in her fascination with dreams as portents, or in her pondering the meaning of a mysterious hurdy-gurdy on their street). And while she had talent as a writer of fiction, her work was never published, and as my father early recognized, her true gift was as a diarist. In her notebook, she is straightforward, relaxed, and probingly truthful as she was not quite able to be in her fiction. The diarist Anaïs Nin once described the journal of a writer-friend as a womb that incubated his more finished writing—she called it “the secret womb of the diary.”1 But for Nin and other diarists, such as my mother, the diary itself became, through revisions, the finished work. In Athens, my mother was pregnant both with her first child and with her book; each day, both grew and matured seemingly all of their own.
She had begun her diary at fifteen, “to relieve the burden of my own adolescence,” as she once explained, and her Greek journal was merely a small piece of this conversation with herself, which she’d already had for more than a decade and would continue, uninterrupted, when she returned to America. It was my father who convinced her of the diary’s value and encouraged her to publish it.
My father, for his part, is perhaps the only character who appears in these pages as a somewhat shadowy figure, and not an entirely likable one. While my parents shared, during their thirteen-year relationship, an intense love and intimacy, my father was a self-involved husband, and he is frequently mentioned as absent, out at Athenian cafes, or furiously writing a novel in their apartment. He seldom helps with housework or parenting, and his visits to my mother at the clinic are comically brief; he can’t escape fast enough. To my father’s credit, he acknowledged the truth of her portrayal and did not ask her to soften it. On occasion, my mother allows her resentment, or disappointment, to show, though for the most part she tries to be understanding—probably to a fault—toward her restless young husband who is clearly not ready to become a parent.
The early sixties was the dawn of postwar mass tourism, when European travel was becoming common for middle-class Americans. Nevertheless, a two-week summer trip to the Continent—far briefer than the full year my parents planned—was for many a momentous event, possibly their only glim
pse of the Old World. My parents, who were both just twenty-six when they left New York for Europe on a Yugoslavian freighter, had scrimped to afford the tour on my father’s modest salary as an editor for a travel magazine, Holiday. The magazine, launched in 1946, itself reflected the burgeoning mass tourism which was powered by America’s economic boom. Until the magazine’s demise, in the late 1970s, its monthly articles presented readers—its circulation peaked at more than one million—with thoughtful, literate writings about countries and cultures throughout the globe. Articles were contributed by celebrated authors of the day, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, E.B. White, Irwin Shaw, and Saul Bellow, to name only a few. The greatest contemporary photographers—Robert Capa, Arnold Newman, Ernst Haas, Slim Aarons—provided priceless images, many of which would end up in books and museums.
The very opening paragraph of the diary signals that my father’s year abroad will be largely preoccupied by writing for the magazine and making much-needed money, while my mother will be absorbed with her pregnancy. During their stay in Athens, my father’s absences from her might be partly excused by the demands of career and paying for their expenses: in addition to a novel (never published), he was busily producing travel pieces and book reviews. Driving around Europe, they had paused at Malaga, and he was writing his impressions of the Andalusian city for Holiday. He also was typing “The Arts in Yugoslavia” for The Nation after they spent a month in that country, and was drafting a Holiday feature on Yugoslavia, for which the great Henri Cartier-Bresson took the photographs (I grew up with a dozen photos from that assignment, which Cartier-Bresson gave to my father, on our apartment walls in Manhattan). His own diary overflows with ideas, outlines, and proposals for travel pieces.
My father brought to Europe a brilliant and sophisticated journalistic eye, but my mother brought her own gifts of observation and deep reading, and they constantly shared their thoughts about all they encountered on the winding road from Tangiers to Wales to Athens. “We sit in sidewalk cafes staring out at the blistering heat and watch and talk together by the hour,” she jotted in Madrid, in a sentence deleted from the published pages. And she inadvertently indicates their entwinement by using the first-person-plural when writing, “we are too busy involved in research for the article on Yugoslavia” to be much concerned about her pregnancy in the difficult conditions of that country. Later, when leaving Yugoslavia, she notes, “Our work is done.” As I can discern my mother’s voice sprinkled across my father’s articles, I can detect, scattered through this book, musings that probably were my father’s, shared in their talks. My mother had the benefit of touring with a writer and editor for the most respected and widely read travel magazine of the day. Although some of the diary’s cultural speculations may be tenuous or inaccurate, little escaped my parents’ notice.
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