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!
Here I am leaning on the omphalos, great bellybutton of the world.
And that’s of course is where you make your big wish: that’s Delphi. And that’s the temple of Delphi, always the light warp of wind in the pines, that slow-moving strange feel of leaves going all the time and the wind on your cheek, which you feel everywhere in Greece. Dry wind, dry grass. It’s not exactly refreshing, it’s monitary, as though somebody were trying to whisper something to you. You feel it in Delos. You hear the reeds moving and you feel the wind on your cheek. And in Delphi where you have these great groves of pines up on the stadium you hear this — it’s not quite sinister, but then when an eagle crosses the view and you hear the creak of its wings it matches with it and suddenly you feel your own breathing and you do understand what the Greeks meant by the panic sense. It’s the sense of something really outside yourself that belongs to the place that seizes you. It’s not altogether — well, I should say it could be fearfully disagreeable and frightening. You feel ancient Greek time passing. I’ve camped there in that place. It’s not as frightening as Epidaurus, but it is a frightening place with its huge green valley and at night when the sun goes down it’s astonishing in its deep fear really. You feel the presence of the Gods. That’s why I’m so terrified when I see myself innocently sitting astride the omphalos up there like an idiot fiddling with the safety-catch of the universe. It really is terrifying.