Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

by Lawrence Durrell

  Among his other qualities was the gift of tongues. In the course of his long consular career he had mastered some nine languages, and the greater part of his life was spent in studying comparative linguistics with the nine fat dictionaries he carried about with him in a tin dispatch case. Gideon had an imitation of Hoyle which Hoyle himself very much enjoyed hearing. It turned upon this point, for when a conversation began in Greek or Turkish it was not long before Hoyle’s eye lit with professional zeal, and he exclaimed: “Yes, now that’s an odd word, when you think of it. It very much resembles the Turkish ‘duff’ the Arabic ‘fluff’ and, come to think of it, the Persian ‘huff, puffor snuff.’” And out would come his pencil and his notebook. Whether the mountain of notes which Hoyle carried about with him all over the world will ever be refined and pruned into a thesis is another question. My own feeling is that it has become too much of a life passion. What would Hoyle do if he had no great bundle of MSS to play with, to add to, to subtract from, to rearrange, to reconsider, to prune, to shape? He would probably die. Nor, for that matter do I ever hope to see printed his great prose anthology compiled from the writings of consuls and entitled A Home from Home, which contains much good material—the fruit of unhurried choice, of considered opinion ripened in the smoke of many a fine cigar; material from writers so dissimilar as Sir Richard Burton and James Elroy Flecker.

  But here I shall permit myself a further digression in time from that hulk of Turkish masonry upon which Gideon and I sat together during that early nightfall: a digression from that garden graveyard whose guardian, the Mufti, we were soon to meet. I should mention Mills, the young doctor, who was later to be placed in charge of the medical service on the island. I do not remember how first we met—it was simply as if he had always been there. I do, however, remember an early occasion in our association when Gideon, for some reason best known to himself, decided that he was developing appendicitis and telephoned for him. (I was later to discover that excessive self-indulgence in food or drink always produced in my friend a form of guilty stomachache which lent itself to diagnosis as appendicitis.)

  Mills drove about his vast parish in an absurd little Italian sports car with enormous exhaust pipes and a bonnet held down by straps of prodigious size. He was in build short; in character voluble; in coloring blond as a kingcup. His medical equipment, loosely rolled in a piece of oilcloth that looked as if it had once held wrenches and spanners, bulged in the pocket of the blue seaman’s pea jacket which he wore when he was on duty. It would be difficult to think of anyone who seemed to be such a walking certificate for good health; it simply oozed from him, from his candid face, fresh complexion, sensitive fingers. It took him a very short time to discover little beyond an overworked liver wrong with Gideon. “Old man” he said, “You have been flogging your liver. I shall send you a bottle of castor oil and a lemon.” Gideon’s face showed a mixture of feelings; relief that his malaise was not serious combined with annoyance that it did not merit sufficient attention. “You’ve hardly examined me yet,” he said rather testily. Mills drank a glass of wine and regarded his subject with a steady and equable humor. “What can I tell you that you don’t know?” he said at last. “Smoking and drinking are your two diseases. Cut them out and you’ll live forever.”

  “Thank you,” said Gideon stiffly, struggling into his bush jacket. “No trouble at all,” said Mills. He rolled his stethoscope up into the oilskin pouch, finished his wine. “Well,” he said, “we shall meet again”; and he was gone.

  Hoyle once said: “Mills switches himself on and off like a light”—and this was an apt enough description of him, for I have never known him to spend more than two minutes in one place, nor five minutes with the same patient. Yet somehow he escaped the charge of carelessness or thoughtlessness, for Mills conveyed a feeling of perception and penetration which remained with his patients long after he himself had vanished down the road in his small car, swerving about like a drunken hornet. His diagnosis of disease seemed somehow to be a criticism, not of the functioning of one specific organ, but of the whole man. Like all born healers he had realized, without formulating the idea, that disease has its roots in a faulty metaphysic, in a way of life. And the patient who took him a cyst to lance or a wheezing lung to think about, was always disturbed by the deliberate careful scrutiny of those clear blue eyes. One felt slightly ashamed of being ill in the presence of Mills. It was as if, staring at you as you stood there, he were waiting for you to justify your illness, to deliver yourself in some way of the hidden causes of it. But over and above his skill, the breadth of his intellectual curiosity and humanity were qualities which added richness and color to our island society. He was by upbringing a Quaker. He had married a delightful Greek girl who had been his chief nurse in the UNRRA unit to which he had been attached before joining the civil administration. They lived in a small flat upon the seashore, whose rooms were crowded with miscellaneous material for all the studies Mills intended to make of people and things outside the immediate limits of his own skill. Once inside the ever-open front door one stumbled over boxes full of geological specimens, of ancient pottery, of seashells. Every time a window opened manuscripts of essays on poetry, on sex, on biochemistry, on Elizabethan music were scattered in the air. His wife found him a delightful trial. I still hear her grumbling musical tones protesting: “Mais voyons, chért” as he proposed some new field of study—such as the guitar, or the clarinet. “ça, alors,” his wife would groan. “Soyez raisonnable.” But Mills did not believe in reducing his enthusiasm to normal proportions; there was so much energy to be got rid of, life was so short … I can hear him protesting in his fluent French and Greek. And when he had left the room to bring you his microscope slides to see, Chloe would shrug her shoulders and allow herself to smile as she said: “Comme il est bizarre, lui. Mais dites-moi—est-ce qu’il est un vrai Anglais?” Like all Mediterraneans she had been brought up to believe that the hallmark of the true Englishman is an unfathomable reserve. Mills seemed more like an Italian in his bursts of enthusiasm. And listening to him sing his Greek folksongs to the guitar she would shake her head and sigh—for surely Englishmen didn’t sing in foreign languages with so much feeling? And certainly no true Englishman lost his temper, as Mills sometimes did, and threw himself with gusto into a domestic row? This, then, was Mills, and he was part of it all; indeed from points of view this is more his book than mine, since it is he who decreed the shape of it. I remember him sitting in the Villa Cleobolus one dark winter evening, roasting chestnuts before the fire, while Chloe (after her fifth attempt to make him take her home) had kicked off her shoes and gone to sleep on the sofa. I remember him repeating in his clear voice: “I do so hope you’ll write a book about the island sometime when you feel like it. I don’t feel Gideons history will ever get written somehow, nor Hoyle’s study of the dialect, but it needs a book. Not history or myth—but landscape and atmosphere somehow. ‘A companion’ is the sort of idea. You ought to try for the landscape—and even these queer months of transition from desolation to normality.” I do not remember what I answered. I realize now that he was pleading for some sort of effective monument to all the charm and grace of our stay there in Rhodes; the golden sun-washed months which only Hoyle has been left there to enjoy while the rest of us have been scattered about the earth by our several professions and that conspicuous ill-luck which, as Gideon used to say, always afflicts islomanes when they have discovered the island of their heart’s desire. In the pauses of the conversation the sea roared upon the deserted beach and the wind whistled in the pines and oleanders of the garden. “Above all,” Mills is saying, as the chestnuts burst in a series of muffled explosions on their bed of soft wood ash, “above all, introduce your main characters right away. Give the reader a chance to see if he likes them. It’s only fair. So he can close the book if he doesn’t. That’s how you should begin.”

  There is only one portrait I shrink from—that of the Marine Venus. If the reader should ever visit her
in her little cell he would know why. The presiding genius of a place or an epoch may be named, but she may not be properly described. Yet the Venus, when she was raised that sunny morning from the damp crypt in which she had lain hidden; when the packing case which held her had been broken open; when the pulleys finally raised her out of the darkness, slowly twisting on the end of her cable—why, which of us could fail to recognize the presiding genius of the place? (“A statue of a woman, period uncertain, found at the bottom of Rhodes harbor, damaged by sea water.”) I can still see the faces of my friends as they surrounded the dark trap door out of which she rose so gravely into the sunlight. Hoyle and Gideon sitting astride a plank; Egon Huber, who had helped to bury her, smiling with pleasure to see her undamaged; while Mills and Sergeant Croker and a collection of barefoot urchins grunted and groaned on the ropes which were raising her.

  She rose as if foam born, turning that elegant body slowly from side to side, as if bowing to her audience. The sea water had sucked at her for centuries till she was like some white stone jujube, with hardly a feature sharp as the burin must originally have left it. Yet such was the grace of her composition—the slender neck and breasts on that richly modeled torso, the supple line of arm and thigh—that the absence of firm outline only lent her a soft and confusing grace. Instead of sharp classical features she had been given something infinitely more adolescent, unformed. The ripeness of her body was offset by the face, not of a Greek matron, but of a young girl. We carried her, swaddled in sacking, down the Museum corridors, up a staircase, to the little room in which you will find her today. It is an ugly enough stone cabin—and chosen for her by a man who had some silly theory that she was too damaged to look beautiful except from certain angles; hence the theatrical north light which plays up the fine modeling of her back and throws those innocent features into dark relief. But in a little while your eyes will have accustomed themselves to the consuming darkness of the room, and you will be able to trace them with your finger, the cold lip and eyebrow, the stone tresses. It is as if she were made of wax, had been passed very rapidly across a flame intense enough to blunt her features, yet not materially to alter them; she has surrendered her original maturity for a rediscovered youth.

  The fishermen dragged her up one afternoon in their nets. It seemed to them to be a rich catch; but it was only a heavy marble figure of a Marine Venus, tangled in weeds, and with a few startled fish leaping like silver coins about her placid white countenance with its sightless eyes.

  She sits in the Museum of the island now, focused intently upon her own inner life, gravely meditating upon the works of time. So long as we are in this place we shall not be free from her; it is as if our thoughts must be forever stained by some of her own dark illumination—the preoccupation of a stone woman inherited from a past whose greatest hopes and ideals fell to ruins. Behind and through her the whole idea of Greece glows sadly, like some broken capital, like the shattered pieces of a graceful jar, like the torso of a statue to hope.

  * During the siege nearly all the cats of Rhodes were eaten by the starving, and this was later to result in a plague of rats which was only conquered by the import of cat reinforcements from Cyprus. At this time pets that were valued were carefully tied up.

  Orientations in Sunlight

  FROM THE WINDOWS of my office I can over-look some of the twisted streets and warrens of the old town. It is an admirable point of vantage from which to look down unobserved upon the conversations and quarrels of the Greeks. At midday I caught sight of a small procession consisting of a mother and father followed by two little children and a miscellaneous body of relations. The father walked at the head, carrying an ikon of the Virgin from which hung down a little lighted lamp. They were moving house, it seemed. The man walked with calm circumspection, shielding the flame of the lamp with his right hand lest a gust of wind should put it out and thus prejudice the luck of the new house. Slowly and anxiously the little procession turned a corner and was gone. Watching the serious faces of the children I found myself hoping that the family ikon would arrive safely at the doorway of the new house, and that the happy augury would help them build their luck confidently next year against the bitter trials of the world to come. Surely, I thought, history as chronology is woefully misleading; for the history of a place, dispersed by time, lives on in fable, gesture, intonation, raw habit. No textbook can capture it fully. Here in Rhodes, for example, one runs across songs left behind by the Crusaders, living on side by side with a belief in a freshwater Goddess whose antiquity stretches back beyond Plato.

  The Aegean is still waiting for its painter—waiting with all the unselfconscious purity of its lights and forms for someone to go really mad over it with a loaded paintbrush. Looking down upon it from the sentinel’s tower at Castello, from the ancient temple at Lindos, you begin to paint it for yourself in words. Cerulean sky touched with white cirrus—such fleece as grows between the horns of nine-day goatlets, or on the cocoons of silkworms; viridian to peacock-tail green where the sea threshes itself out against the cliffs. Prismatic explosion of waves against the blue sky, crushing out their shivering packets of color, and then the hissing black intake of the water going back. The billiard-green patch edged with violet that splashes the sea below Lindos. The strange nacreous bones of cliff at Castello. But to paint Greece one would have to do more than play with a few colors. Other problems: how to convey the chalky whiteness of the limestone, the chalk dust that comes off the columns on to one’s fingers, the soft pollen-like bloom on the ancient vases which makes so many of them seem like great plums of pure light. And when you had done all this you would still have to master the queer putty-mauve, putty-grey tones of the island rock—rock that seems to be slowly cooling lava. An impossible task when all is said and done. It is pleasanter not to try, but to lie dozing in the shade and watch Gideon working away on squared paper with his little child’s paintbox. He stops whistling only to swear and shake his fist at Anatolia which is manifestly eluding him. “I nearly had it in this one” he says. The paintbox was a present intended for his daughter; but one day, cooped up in a transit camp he decided to try the colors out. He has graduated via railway trains and one-dimensional drawings of houses and cows to sedate little watercolors of the landscapes he has visited. Some are quite good; but though I offer to buy them he refuses. “This is my diary,” he says.