Between two worlds: the British Council and Anglo-Greek literary interactions ABSTRACTS

Transcription

1 Between two worlds: the British Council and Anglo-Greek literary interactions Conference will be held at the British School at Athens, 27 and 28 January 2012 ABSTRACTS Britain and the Civil War in Greece Robert Holland I suppose an affection for Greece seems to most of us now something we are born with Cyril Connolly wrote in 1954 It is the one country which would appear to possess an unalterable affinity for us. Ironically, at the very time Connolly made this observation, as any kind of general truth it had for some while been eroding, though the phenomenon itself was by no means to disappear. The British experience in Greece from October 1944 through to circa 1950 will be reviewed in the context of an intimate and longstanding relationship undergoing fundamental revision at multiple levels. Included in the discussion of the British commitment to Greece under these conditions will be such aspects as: The legacy of The limits of re-intervention The changing size, nature and role of British Missions to Greece up to 1950 The regional, especially Mediterranean, framework of British policy towards Greece The place of Greek territorial claims, including Cyprus, in Anglo-Greek relations Greece and the British metropolitan press Britain policy and the search for moderation in Greek politics The roots of British unpopularity in Greece Anglo-American co-operation in Greece The state of Anglo-Greek relations at the start of the 1950s 1

2 Kazantzakis in Cambridge David Holton Kazantzakis s British Council-sponsored visit to England lasted more than three months, from 8 June to 28 September For almost half of this period, 30 July to 19 September, he was living in Cambridge. He had also visited Cambridge in June, when he was interviewing a number of intellectuals and artists to whom the Council provided introductions, and trying to involve them in his grand idea for an Internationale of the Spirit. Quite a bit of information about his time in Cambridge is contained in letters to his wife and to Prevelakis, which have been published in full or in part. (Prevelakis would follow him to London in October, also as a guest of the BC. Kazantzakis had been hoping that their visits would coincide.) From the same period there are also surviving letters to Sikelianos, Kakridis, Chrysanthi Cleridou and others, from which we can gather something of his impressions, and his ongoing concerns and schemes. It was an eventful period: he gave a talk on the BBC, published a related article, received an advance copy of Zorba the Greek, and started to explore possibilities for an English translation, while working feverishly on a projected, but never finished, novel entitled Ο Ανήφορος. He was also trying to get himself and Sikelianos put forward as joint candidates for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His views of Cambridge and its academics are ambivalent. In this paper we shall attempt to explore what Kazantzakis made of Cambridge and what Cambridge made of him. Steven Runciman in Athens: letters home Michael Llewellyn-Smith Steven Runciman s letters to his mother, Hilda Viscountess Runciman, provide a commentary on the two years he spent in Athens after the war as Director of the British Council. He arrived in Greece in the autumn of 1945 and left in June At this period in his life Runciman was working on what was to become his great three volume history of the crusades (published by Cambridge University Press in 1951, 1952 and 1954); but there is no reference to this in his letters home. The letters deal with his domestic affairs (finding an apartment, servants etc); his mission at the British Council, including visits to Patras etc; and, most significantly, the Greek social, cultural and political context. He paints a vivid picture of a city and society disrupted and unbalanced by war and incipient civil war, but nonetheless living an intense social and fruitful cultural life, at a time when Britain was top dog in culture, and still in politics (though not for much longer, given the growing influence of the United States). Steven Runciman enjoyed and was amused by the vicissitudes of life in Greece, for which he had deep affection. It emerges from his letters that he took pride in his political and cultural contacts, comparing them favourably with those of the British Embassy under ambassador Clifford Norton. He had a close and friendly relationship with the Greek royal family. One of 2

3 the interesting projects he describes is a scheme to write a biography of King George II, who died while Runciman was still in Athens. (He describes the obsequies.) The biography project came to nothing. He comments shrewdly on Crown Prince, later King, Paul and his wife Frederica. Runciman was a first-class administrator, which enabled him to guide and direct the cast of brilliant and often flamboyant characters who clustered around the British Council and Institute at this period. He knew all the eminent Greek literary figures (Seferis, Sikelianos, Elytis, Katsimbalis, Kazantzakis and others) but does not appear to have been on terms of intimacy with them, as, for example, was Rex Warner, Director of the British Institute (the cultural and teaching arm of the Council). Warner played a key role in fostering close relations between British and Greek writers. Runciman s high regard for Warner is evident from the assessments he wrote on him for the British Council in London. Steven Runciman s letters will be supplemented as sources for this paper by biographies and memoirs of Rex Warner, Maurice Cardiff, John Lehmann and others, as well as the memoir of Mr Sagos of the British Council in Athens. The paper will sketch the leading personalities and assess the character of this extraordinary period in Greek-British literary and cultural relations. The imminent end of a political epoch (an end concealed from the participants) coincided with a flowering of contacts and friendships between some of the foremost literary figures of their times. Cultural relations and the non-political problem: two political novels Jim Potts The nature of the British Council s non-political position was addressed by John Press in the December 1949 editorial of The Record: Here, in Salonika, we cannot cloister ourselves in an academic paradise. This does not mean that we should dabble in political speculation. The Record, by its very nature, is precluded from expressing any formal views on political affairs. Yet even those who fancy that their interests are purely literary or aesthetic find, sooner or later, that political implications lie folded in their subject. The Council s policy regarding staff non-involvement in political affairs was clearly stated. Writing for publication had to be submitted for clearance, though British Council-recruited lecturers and language teachers did not always feel as constrained as established staff. This paper takes a look at two contrasting novels of the period that draw on the Greek experience and put such political and artistic choices (testified to by such witnesses as Dilys Powell) in perspective. Rex Warner s Men of Stones, A Melodrama (1949) is an allegory set on an island prison. Inspired by events in Greece, the novel explores concepts of totalitarianism and freedom. Mr Goat, a young lecturer in literature attached to one of the foreign cultural missions, goes to the island, with his liberal ideals, to assist the Governor with a disguised prison reform project (in reality the Governor is a mad dictator intent on seizing power). Attending the performance is the director of the foreign cultural mission, Colonel Felson, who has responsibility for Goat; Felson thinks only of the Mission s role: more important than all else 3

4 was his simple directive- to be non-political. Goat is killed in the ensuing bombardment of the island by the Governor s political rival, which marks the beginning of civil war. In bitterly ironic words, Felson reflects that this temporary discouragement should not be allowed to affect in any way the existing arrangements for the future of the Mission. Less well known is My Son is in the Mountains (1955) by Daniel Nash (nom de plume of W.R. Loader, who served the British Council in Crete and Salonica, ). The protagonist of his novel is Derek Gordon, lecturer at the British Institute, Salonica, during the Civil War. The novel describes the Communist underground and guerrillas pitted against the Monarcho-Fascists and plutocrats ; killings, sabotage, bombings, the attempted bombing of the British Consulate-General, and attempted strikes by the Democratic Army against Edessa and Salonica. The British Council Institute features in a central way. The Director s lecture on Aspects of British Culture ends with the words: It would be improper for me to reflect on the political cleavage which now divides this country, but may I say what a great joy it is to me that here in the Institute we have one piece of, as it were, neutral territory where political opponents may come together and forget their differences in a common act of worship before the shrine of culture. Here we do not know politics. We know only the purpose of truth and the love of beauty. Meanwhile, after the murder of a schoolfriend, it begins to dawn on Gordon that political violence is more the rule than the exception in Greek history. Such novelistic treatments help to illuminate the question of soft power, both in post-war Greece and indeed more recently. The Corfiot magazine Properos and the branch of the British Council in Corfu (in Greek) Theodosis Pylarinos In this paper we shall focus our attention on the short-lived but innovative literary magazine Properos, which was published by the staff of the Corfu branch of the British Council after the branch was established in The paper will examine the reasons why the magazine was created, its main contributors and those who surrounded them, its contents, its systematic effort to combine the Corfiot and Heptanesian tradition with contemporary literature, its contribution to modern Greek literature and especially the early acquaintance of the Corfiot public with English literature, theatre and the arts, and the reasons why it was discontinued. An attempt will also be made to place it within the context of post-war cultural life in Greece. In addition, its relationship with the Anglo-Greek Review ion Athens and with Symposio in Patra will be investigated. The British Council (Corfu branch), chiefly through its director Maria Aspioti, who taught there, played a significant role in the founding of Prosperos. For this reason, the paper will examine the ways in which the Council contributed to its publication and its general contribution to Corfu, and will bring to light new evidence about its workings based on oral information supplied by an eyewitness, who was connected with its staff at the time and took part in its cultural activities. 4

5 MacNeice in Greece David Ricks This place is really the other end of the world : Am disappointed by the Greek intelligentsia whom I d heard much of but perhaps we haven t met the right cliques yet. These comments in letters a few months into Louis MacNeice s Athens secondment from the BBC to direct the British Institute in hardly breathe the Philhellenism which marked several others of those who were part of that setting; and they might suggest that a generally dyspeptic attitude to Greece prevailed on the writer s part. That, however, would be a simplification. In this paper I aim to tease out some of the implications of MacNeice s sometimes quite specific frustrations with the Institute and its uneasy existence in the immediate aftermath of the Greek Civil War. It may be that, without the pre-war or wartime experience of some of his Anglo-American colleagues, and indeed without their conversance with the modern Greek language, that MacNeice found it harder to marry his classical background with the modern experience. That would account for some of the dialogue-of-the-deaf feeling to his reports of the cultural milieu and what he felt could only be a minor British contribution to it. It may be, too as some critics have argued that the poet s Athens stay coincided with, even was intended to compensate for, a creatively dry period in the middle way of his career. But it seems worth taking seriously the fact that he did build perhaps his most carefully structured book, Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) around a view of Greece which was in some ways formed, not just by a store of classical allusions, but also by the Greece around him a Greece on which he had some sharply, though covertly, political things to say. This paper hopes to set the poems that emerged from this period in the context of, and in contact with, the work of such Greek contemporaries as Seferis. Gone native: Francis King at the British Council in Athens, David Roessel Francis Henry King died in 2011 at the age of 88 after a long career as a novelist and story writer. He spent over seven years working for the British Council in Athens, with a stint in Thessaloniki before that. From World War II to the Suez Crisis, King was the longest serving non-resident Council employee in Greece. King explained that the fact that he was able to hang on so long in Athens was merely because, unlike most of the English members of the Council staff, I was fluent in Greek. We must have at least one person who can speak the language, was the line taken. Yet King has not often been included in discussions of British writers in Greece. My paper will use King s fiction, non-fiction and archival materials (the King Papers are at the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas) to examine King s view of the British Council at Greece. At the end of the Greek section of Yesterday Came Suddenly: An Autobiography, King notes: I spent more than seven years in Athens. This was at least three more than the usual British Council period of duty.... [The Council] is convinced that any officer who stays more than a few years in a country will inevitably go native thus coming to represent not Great Britain 5

6 but the country of his adoption. The statement strikes one as odd; there were numerous philhellenes associated with the British Council who knew Greek well, starting with Maurice Cardiff in 1945, and again King never seems to be on this list. The reason, one assumes, is that King went native in a very different way from, for example, Patrick Leigh Fermor. King immersed himself in the gay community in Athens, and while many British in Greece gathered around Katsimbalis and Seferis, the center of King s Greek world was the flamboyant Thanos Veloudios. Indeed, Roger Hinks, the Director of the Council in 1956, moved King in part to separate him from his Greek lover. Hinks was not the only one to object to the way in which King went native; King was told that his novel, The Firewalkers, would have to be published under a pseudonym or he would have to resign his post (he opted for using a pseudonym for the first printing). I will examine whether the British Council objected because some of the characters might be identifiable to some readers, or it presented a view of the Council that it did not like, or simply that the book was too gay to be published by a Council employee. George Katsimbalis: An Anglo-Greek Colossus Avi Sharon The relations in myth between Albion and Arcadia may be of long standing, but real commerce between Greece and England has actually ebbed and flowed with the tides of world politics. One high point in that relationship was Lord Byron's notorious ride and fall at Missolonghi in the Greek war of independence (1824). Almost equally emblematic, Rupert Brooke's burial on the island of Skyros after his death in 1915 rendered a part of Greece "for ever England." The Second World War would provide further opportunity for the alliance to mature, and during that time Anglo-Greek relations would reach perhaps their highest point ever. At that war's end Britain would expand upon this newfound kinship by founding a British Councilsupported journal, the Anglo-Greek Review. Printed on the first page of the magazine's first issue in January of 1945, in perfect homage to both Byron and Brooke, the two patron saints of this modern alliance, was Solomos "Hymn to Liberty," in a new translation by the magazine's first and founding editor, Henry Miller s great Colossus of Maroussi himself, George Katsimbalis. The British could not have been more fortunate in their choice as editor of the Review. Present at the ceremony for the tomb monument of Rupert Brooke on Skyros in 1931, Katsimbalis had become by 1945 a mandatory stop on every enlightened English visitor's Greek itinerary. A whole school of British poets and intellectuals (among them Lawrence Durrell, Maurice Bowra, Bernard Spencer, Steven Runciman, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rex Warner and John Lehmann) shared the sentiment expressed by Stephen Spender, that Katsimbalis was their "Virgilian guide" to the country and its culture. This talk will present a mosaic of the relationship Katsimbalis had with these and other individuals at the crossroads of Greek and English literary culture during his editorship of the Anglo-Greek Review, using unpublished correspondence from the Katsimbalis archive. 6

7 Between propaganda and modernism: the Anglo-Greek Review and the rediscovery of Greece Dimitris Tziovas The Anglo-Greek Review/Αγγλοελληνική Επιθεώρηση ( and ) should not be treated in isolation, but as part of the wider cultural developments of the 1940s and early 1950s, a period marked by the re-opening of the British Council in Greece and a different kind of rediscovery of the country by the British. The periodical can be seen as part of a nexus of public lectures, visits, exchanges, translations and reviews and the wider British strategy (involving the British Council and the BBC external services) of promoting liberal democracy and offering a taste of British life and culture. A kind of soft power which was crucial at a time when Greece was ravaged by civil war and liberal democracy was at stake. One can, of course, debate whether there are any clear lines between cultural propaganda, cultural diplomacy or image making, but it can be argued that the periodical formed part of the British effort to support the liberal intelligentsia of Greece and offer them a respectable forum in which to express themselves and promote the country s cultural achievements. The Anglo-Greek Review raises a number of questions which are rather hard to answer. Was it more of a British than a Greek journal? Who determined its editorial policy? Its invisible Greek editor or the British who funded its publication? The Anglo-Greek Review is more of a critical review rather than a literary journal since it contains more critical essays than literary texts. In its first period it focused exclusively on writers who made their first appearance before the war and did not engage with contemporary literary developments. This suggests that the aim of the periodical was to present a number of English writers, mainly of the inter-war period, to the Greek public and to consolidate the canon of Greek poetry by promoting established Greek poets such as Dionysios Solomos, Kostis Palamas and Angelos Sikelianos, but no post-war poets. Taking all these things into account one could argue that the Anglo-Greek Review presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, it looks to the past and relies on traditional and conservative critics and on the other it tries to promote Eliot and Seferis as modernist poets by focusing on their relationship. To what extent then can the periodical be seen as torn between traditional and modernist poetics? In the 1940s and early 1950s there was an anthropological rediscovery of Greece supported by modern literature (e.g. the English translation of Zorba the Greek). It is important to point out that this rediscovery did not involve antiquity and Greece was emerging as a modern site of energy, creativity and pleasure and not simply a site of ancient ruins and past glories. The image of Greece as an exotic land for tourists and an earthly paradise for intellectuals has its origins in this period. The Anglo-Greek Review was part of this wider process and made a significant contribution to this new myth of Greece and its culture. 7