Blue Thirst Page 2

  The poets themselves, particularly the country poets, have wonderful metaphors for the star display that comes immediately after the falling of the deep dusk. For the Milky Way they say that it’s like scattered flour and for the other stars—and such a display of stars those of you who’ve been to Greece will know what I’m talking about—simply breathtaking—they say it’s like a branch of an almond tree, a wreath of almond blossom, raised upon the night. Well, together with these poets I also met very briefly, and I can’t claim to know him very well, the author of Zorba, Kazantzakis, and a highly dramatic, flamboyant poet called Sikilianos who, with his American wife, reinvented the festival of Delphi, which for nearly 20 years was one of the most singularly spectacular festivals of Greece, and really put cultural Greece on the map. And he was a very amusing, delightful and enormously flamboyant poet of the old school, very theatrical. I heard an anecdote which illustrates that particular kind of Greek temper. One night he was dining with Seferis, my friend, Kazantzakis and himself in a little tavern near Mycenae, and he was saying how really the poet could do anything, there was simply nothing that was beyond his powers. And that Jesus was a poet and that he, Sikilianos was also a poet and that really if the poet had the thing in him he could even raise the dead. Miracles like that were no surprise. Well, he was talking in this vein and the innkeeper came out and said to him, “A chap just died upstairs, perhaps you would like to try.” Well, Sikilianos is not the sort of person to be put off by that at all—he said, “What a good idea, I’ll try; you’ll see.” And so he went upstairs. They didn’t know what he did, perhaps he murmured. Perhaps he recited poetry; they heard all sorts of incantations and so on. And finally he came down and said, “He’s so damned obstinate.”

  Now what I did was to bring along a few old and somewhat faded pictures from my scrap book in the hope of making this talk a bit actual, of illustrating it with places and faces. Well, when I asked the backroom boys to knock me up some lecture slides they looked at the quality of my prints and burst into tears. But I pinned my faith to the fact that after all this was an advanced technological institute and therefore able to perform wonders—after all, these were the people who were keeping Sky-lab in the sky. Surely they could keep poor Durrell talking? My faith was not misplaced; they dried their tears and got to work, and the magnificent results, many in color, you will see right now. So without more ado let us unleash the artwork. Behold!

  Taken by the village photographer during my first year in Corfu. Second from left my landlord, on extreme right myself next to his wife.

  The temple of Delphi where you make your big wish.

  Niko, who sails like a demon and taught me Demotic Greek.

  These marvelous monks combed their beards and sang Gregorian chants.

  Well, now, this is the white house about which I was talking. Corfu town is in the distance there. It’s a good 2½ hours on caïque. And this little white house is the place where I lodged on this promontory here which is directly facing Albania, and where at night you get the most extraordinary displays. For example, in the autumn a kind of bacteria which I’m sure you must know, is washed up into the sea. The sea becomes thick and curdled and when you dive into it you’re set on fire. I mean, you’re not scorched or anything, but this animal, I’ve forgotten it’s name, it throws out sparks so that when three or four people dive in you see figures of flame going into the water and off that point at night so frequently in the autumn we did that wondering why we weren’t burnt because if you open your eyes you really do think you’re going to be scorched.

  Here’s a closeup of the house and a bad picture of the caïque coming to take them off, and that’s my landlord up there looking wistful, I don’t know why. This was taken much later. I lived on the top floor and the family lived on the bottom floor, and we had a boat which since has sunk, which used to be attached in that boat house. In winter the sea was so rough that it really came up to that balcony and swamped it. We had to completely tear away the vine and everything there. And it’s very amusing. Now it’s a place of pilgrimage. The Club Mediterranee charged people enormous sums to go look at it as the Durrell residence and serve them Coca-Cola for even larger sums. I don’t know how posthumous you can feel, but my brother and I put on dark glasses and funny hats and we went on one of these trips, and I’ve never heard so much misinformation about our family and in such strange French. I think they were all Syrians. Anyway, we drank Coca-Cola in our own honor and sneaked off back to town.

  There is a very pleasant fancy which is a far eastern one, namely, that you have two birth-places. You have the place where you were really born and then you have a place of predeliction where you really wake up to reality. One day you wake up and it’s there, and in your inner life, in your dreams and so on and so forth, it’s the place of predeliction that comes forward and which nourishes you. It’s particularly useful in yoga to realize the difference between the two birthplaces. This my predeliction place. It’s a shrine of St. Arsenius. He’s a funny old cross-eyed saint, nobody knows much about him. He has brief mention in the calendar, but an ikon was washed up here after a storm. Naturally, a fisherman found it and decreed that it had to be housed properly, so the priest came and they built this little shrine for him and we found when we got here that this is one of those wonderful places. There’s a very deep rock pool here and a cave about as big as a stage opening through a flue on the other side so it’s fully lighted with a little pebble beach inside and reached by ducking under that lintel you find yourself in this extraordinary cave. We built a huge statue there in clay every year when we were there but in the winter the sea gets up and it licks out the cave like a hollow tooth and the statue just disappeared. Well now this is the place where I finished the Black Book and where my first poems were being selected when I was really working properly and beginning to feel my feet as a writer. It is also the place where we bathed naked all the time. We were extremely careful not to offend susceptibilities in Greece, and they were exteremely proper, the peasant girls and so on, so we didn’t do ony of the idiocies you see Swedes doing now, running about Athens all naked. It brings great shame and discredit on our nations when we do that. Anyway, we were very careful about their susceptibilities, but we used to bathe there because those rocks completely prevented anyone from getting near the place. In fact I finished the Black Book naked one day, and then later on when the war came I got a letter from a friend of mine in the British Embassy in Athens saying, “What sort of orgies are you having up there?” This puzzled me a great deal. The war was just being declared and I didn’t pay much attention, but I was living with my wife, legitimately married to her in a hamlet of four people and no orgies whatsoever, there was hardly enough to drink. And working every day at the shrine. What had happened was this. When I got to Athens and was taken on to the staff of the British Embassy I discovered a report by the local consul, who was a Greek, against me saying that I bathed naked with a woman. Now what happened was the British fleet used to visit the town 20 miles away and on Sundays they used to invite visitors aboard to have a look at the ships and during this one of the prize things to show was the range-finders of HMS Barham with a 25 mile range and they picked us up sitting there like Adam and Eve, and so the consul who was deeply shocked wrote a confidential report on me.

  My second birthplace, the shrine of St. Arsenius.

  The Ionian Bar on Rue de Rivoli—the happiest drinks, warmest sunlight…

  With Katsimbalis in Athens.

  That’s Niko, the sailor, and that’s his boat, just a little rig, old-fashioned caïque, moves like honey. He’s still there and he’s still sailing like a demon. I saw him a couple of years ago and he’s still speaking a very personal French. He’s the man who showed me all these new books, the Demotic versions of Homer, which so touched me. I owe my first lessons in Greek to him and many is the drink we had under that vine. That’s his house, actually, it’s right alongside mine, and that’s the morning caïque coming in and that’
s some unidentified child who doesn’t look at all pleasant.

  This man in the foreground is the man who shows you around and pours out the Coca-Cola with a trembling hand and says that’ll be 5 drachmas, but the place is still ravishing. You see how bright the mountain is behind it, it goes up in sort of leaps, really, to the crown and it’s all self-seeded cypresses, marvelous olives amazingly tended considering the difficulties and that’s the total crop. The main road moves there, but it’s washed out immediately when the first rains come in winter and then the sea knocks out all the caïque stuff and really, to walk to town would take you, I suppose, 8 hours, which is difficult in cases of illness.

  If you ever need any instruction about, or exactly how the Bible was considered and founded, these monks in Parakastrisa were absolutely marvelous. One of them spoke French; in those days my Greek wasn’t up to it, but I did so admire their hats and I had all sorts of questions which later I was able to put more clearly in Greek in Alexandria to the patriarch there, but they were so gracious and kind and they loved having their photographs taken. It was very amusing, every time you produced a camera they would whip out combs and fix up their beards and hair and a religious service was wonderful. Their deep, growling Gregorian chant was like a deep sea moving over pebbles or a dry riverbed. They were all courtesy and kindness because we were then among the very few strangers in Greece, we were really a rarity and an oddity and we profited by that. Hospitality was absolutely wonderful. That hasn’t changed—nor will it ever.

  That’s my bay and that is the old “dogana” or customs house where Albanian brigands used to be frisked before being turned loose in the island. Albania’s only about 4 miles over by water at the narrowest point in the north and we used to go over very frequently in the winter and shoot with my shot-mad brother, my insect-mad brother was too young, and we never allowed him to touch anything that might go off. But he used to come here on one of these craft—these are island craft—camp the night with us and we’d go off with one of these things and he would go off after wild boar. There was plenty of mallard, very good duck shooting and he did a lot of boar shooting in Butrinto. This was long before Albania got it’s own iron curtain. The calm at night was so extraordinary and then you’d hear suddenly in the olives a pipe just wheedling, just wheedling very softly and the tinkling of sheep bells. This girl used to bring her sheep down every morning and every evening walk along here.

  This is my godson, he’s called George—Jorgos. He’s now 45 and has gigantic set of whiskers and he’s got 2 children of his own and he’s doing the Yokohama run taking wood from the Greek merchant marine to some point in China, I think. I put him in there for one good reason. It’s a cautionary tale. The first thing Greeks do when they like you is to ask you to be a godfather. It’s a friendly thing and an easy thing, but it’s very much more serious than it is in our case because the laws of consanguinity are involved. In other words, if you baptize a boy and then you baptize a girl and they fall in love, they can’t marry, they’re just like real brother and sister. So, the thing, the tactic to adopt is to baptize only boys or only girls, and so I stuck to only boys and all my friends followed suit, but that way we’ve never caused any heartbreak at all.

  This is a family shot. This is my shot-mad brother. These are all characters from my brother’s book. There’s my mother looking a bit frisky—looking a little bit sad, actually. That’s Patrick Evans who writes poetry and was my brother’s tutor. That’s me trying to pretend I’m Byron, and that’s Spiro, the great fixer, the man with the raucous voice. And that’s my brother, the other brother is collecting insects just behind that shelf. That’s my wife and that’s a Swedish friend who I think got drowned. I don’t know.

  This is a very rare picture. You will never come across this again in your life. In the island of Corfu the patron saint, you probably know quite a lot about him already, his name is St. Speridian, all the children are named after him, but he’s a great miracle maker and a miracle-bringer. He can bring rain, he can do almost anything that you can think of. He actually is a real mummy and he’s kept in the church of St. Speridian in a jeweled casket and once a year he’s paraded around the town to bless all the people and to have a service and then he’s put back. I have actually seen him and he’s a genuine dried mummy, but this is very difficult to get a view of him in the general press and this as you see, my marvelous Rolliflex managed to do many many years ago.

  Procession of the mummy of Saint Speridian, the miracle-maker.

  The start of a wonderful book. Miller and the Colossus of Maroussi setting out.

  Among all the muddles and the mysteries of this enchanting island this is an ordinary picture postcard of the Rue de Rivoli in Corfu. You see, I don’t know what happens to people, but the various conquerers of the island fell dead asleep the minute they arrived there. The British arrived and they set up a very handsome government house, imitation of Malta, in red Malta stone and then they went to sleep. Then the French arrived and they said listen, this could easily be a little Paris, couldn’t it? And so they started on the Rue de Rivoli which ends just at the end of that arcade there and they fell asleep, but meanwhile, the Arcades in good Italian Levantine style got taken over by bars, and that is the Ionian Bar where you can have the happiest drinks in the warmest sunlight in the most melodious fashion in the world today.

  This should make your blood run cold. You wouldn’t sit on an atom bomb and light a cigar, would you? This young poet so pleased with himself, what is he doing? He’s leaning on the great omphalos, the great bellybutton of the world at Delphi. In those days, Delphi had no barbed wire around it and the omphalos was lying about in a field for anyone to sit on—I could have taken it home in the car if I could have lifted it. It’s the ancient Greek center of the world and of course, all the more dangerous for a poet to do that sort of thing, to take up that blood-curdling arrogant attitude because right next door is the shrine with the Pythea where the goddess of all poetic inspiration officiates, and she could really have driven him mad. If she had turned over in bed he would have been crushed like a bed bug. She must have been asleep or away for the weekend when he did that. But I thought as sort of a cautionary tale, as a cautionary warning it was worth showing you that. Phew!