GREEK CULTURAL POLITICS

CALLAS vs. KAZANTZAKIS

Maria 1 - Nikos 0

by James Karas

[I wrote this piece in 2007, the 50th and 30th anniversaries of the death Kazantzakis and Callas respectively. Some members of the Kazantzakis Society of Toronto had not seen it and it seemed like a good idea to post it here]

Nikos Kazantzakis died 50 years ago. Maria Callas died 30 years ago.

Greece, the birthplace of neither but the mother of both of these famous Greeks wants to recognize and celebrate their achievements. One way of doing that is by choosing a suitable anniversary and proclaiming the year in which it falls as The Year of …. . But you can’t have more than one honouree (it tends to dilute the distinction) and George Voulgarakis, the Greek Minister of Culture, chose to dedicate 2007 to Maria Callas “because” he is quoted as saying “she is a great figure whom we have not honoured enough. We must lay claim to her and stress that she was 100% Greek”

It seems, then, that fears of losing her to someone else or fending off doubters about her 100% Greekness is the great impetus for the recognition accorded her as much as redressing our past failure in honouring her sufficiently. But who is denying that some or all of Callas was not 100% Greek that we need to lay claim on her and stress, again and again, that she was 100% Greek?

The Italians! There are Italians, according to the Minister who “consider she belongs to them.” Those spaghetti-eaters cannot be trusted with anything and nothing less than a year of Greek claims to Maria will have any effect on them. Who can forget or forgive their claim that Christopher Columbus was Italian and that the famous Greek opera composer Iosif Prassinos was also Italian. Those tricky Italians stealthily changed the name of the latter to the Italianate form of “Verdi” in order to hide the evidence of his identity. And now Callas!

The Minister could have steered away from the ludicrous and idiotic and said that Callas is one of the most famous Greeks of the 20th century. In fact she is frequently described as “the voice of the century” and she did have a significant effect on opera. She is credited with reviving the bel canto form and left behind a substantial recorded legacy.

All true. But opera is a foreign form of culture in Greece (name a famous Greek opera?) and although there are reasonably regular performances in Athens, you may not wish to try your hand at seeing too many performances in the provinces, as they say. Callas spent about eight and a half years in Greece from 1937 when she was 13 until 1945 when she was 21. Aside from singing in some concerts, she sang seven operatic roles in 56 performances. She sang in Greece a few times later but her influence on Greek opera and culture was zero. She had a famous affair with Aristotle Onassis, the ultimate Greek but, alas, she was married to an Italian.

Nikos Kazantzakis is another story. He is one of the great writers of the 20th century and he put Greece on the literary map of the world. If Greece had not worked so hard against it, he would have almost certainly received the Nobel Prize for Literature. His travel books, novels and his poem The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel, are read world-wide and explore “Greekness” or “Cretanness”, if you will, from the time of Homer to the Greek Civil War of the 1940s and beyond.

Does the Minister feel that Greece has honoured Kazantzakis just about enough and no one is laying any claim on him so there is no need to stress that he was 100% Greek therefore we can put him in the back seat of the Limo of Honour and celebrate him along with Nikos Engonopoulos and Dionysis Solomos? (The latter are “also” honoured in The Year of Maria Callas”). We may have to mount a separate campaign to defend Solomos. His first language was Italian and he never stepped on liberated Greek soil. Let’s hope the Italians don’t get wind of this or there goes our National Poet.

If Greece puts Nikos Kazantzakis in the “also honoured” tier, the rest of the world is not so stingy. The 50th anniversary of his death has provided the excuse for dozens of symposiums and conferences around the world where his work is considered and his achievement celebrated.

One of the significant events of the year is the publication of Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, Volume 2, by Peter Bien. The first volume of his study was published in 1989 and it examined Kazantzakis’s work until 1938 when The Odyssey was about to be published. The second volume deals with Kazantzakis’s work from 1938 until his death in 1957, in other words the years when he wrote the novels that have made him famous.

Bien writes in a highly readable and at times almost conversational style and is both enthusiastic and critical of Kazantzakis. He finds his book on Spain, for example, “exasperating” and states that “Kazantzakis attempted to have his cake and eat it, too.” He accuses him of duplicity for his refusal to take a stand during the Spanish Civil War. Kazantzakis refused to support either side in the war and he even presented himself “either as a full diabolist, viewing both sides with unfeeling detachment, or as an emotional partisan of one side or the other.”

Was Kazantzakis for or against Mussolini, Hitler or Metaxas? There are no simple answers but there are great uncertainties. Bien examines the question but states that “I know of no evidence showing Kazantzakis’s opposition to Metaxas.” He warns against oversimplification of Kazantzakis’s views and states that if we must affix a label on his views “artist” is perhaps the most appropriate.

Bien traces the progress of Kazantzakis’s writing for the theatre and his development as a writer and a man. Kazantzakis, notes Bien, developed an antipathy towards Greeks in his youth, but in the 1930s and 1940s he started becoming more patriotic or at least started reaching a rapprochement with his fatherland.

Bien approaches Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis’s most famous novel from political and philosophical points of view and provides an antidote to those who think the Michael Cacoyannis’s film expresses the writer’s view. The last scene of the movie where the Boss asks Zorba to teach him how to dance and they both eat goat meat and drink wine in Dionysian abandon is misleading. It gives the impression that the Boss has become like Zorba. That is not true, insists Bien. Zorba helped release the Boss from his intellectual impasse and allowed him to start writing again. He did not become like Zorba but was able to write about Zorba. More importantly, in Zorba the Greek Kazantzakis was able to reconcile East and West into a third way, the Greek Way.

Cacoyannis felt that Kazantzakis was expressing his hatred of Greeks in the novel and certainly reflects this supposed hatred in the movie. Bien argues that the novel demonstrates Kazantzakis’s admiration for the Greeks.

After finishing Zorba, Kazantzakis continued his examination of his roots and the question of Greekness by tackling subjects from ancient Greece (a trilogy of plays based on Prometheus), Byzantium (Constantine Palaiologos) and the modern era (Kapodistrias).

Kazantzakis spent World War II on the island of Aigina where he wrote the five plays just mentioned and Zorba the Greek. He has been criticized for not taking part in the resistance but his aloofness does not seem to have affected his reputation. After the liberation of Greece in October 1944, Kazantzakis went to live in Athens where he established a political party in May 1945 and in November of that year was invited to participate in a government of national unity. He resigned in January 1946 and returned to Aigina. He left Greece in June 1946 never to return except as a corpse.

Kazantzakis emerged from that tempestuous period, notes Bien, as a mature artist and went to write some of his most remarkable work in the last decade of his life. His fame spread and in 1946 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature together with Angelos Sikelianos. The nomination was controversial and unleashed a campaign of vilification by right-wing newspapers calling them “EAM-Bulgarian communists” and warning the Swedish Academy against “the international deceit whereby two perpetrators of the December 1944 uprising, two ambitious figures, ‘entirely foreign to Greece’ were supposedly representing the Greek nation.” His candidacy was opposed by successive Greek governments and of course he was never awarded the Nobel Prize.

Bien considers Christ Recrucified, written in 1948, as Kazantzakis’s most ambitious novel and his “political, religious and metaphysical summa.” He gives a detailed analysis of the book in relation to the current political situation (the civil war) and Kazantzakis’s development as an artist. He notes the irony that Kazantzakis wrote Christ Recrucified as “a lark” yet in it and his later novels he found the most mature and most enduring part of his prodigious output.

Bien writes that Freedom or Death (Kapetan Mihalis in Greek) “is probably the most lavishly praised of all of Kazantzakis’s novels” In his opinion, however, the novel “is severely flawed both aesthetically and politically.” Regardless of its patriotic appeal to Greeks, one of the basic problems is that the novel was intended as an epic but is mixed with realistic and psychological elements. With the mixing of genres “everything is likely to go wrong” notes Bien and in fact it does and the result is “aesthetic confusion.”

After Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation is Kazantzakis’s best known novel. The furor it caused among religious leaders insured the novel’s success. The Greek Orthodox Church attempted to excommunicate Kazantzakis but he was saved by the intervention of Queen Frederika, notes Bien. The Catholic Church put the book on its Index of Forbidden Books and Protestant fundamentalists campaigned to have the work removed from libraries, according to Bien. But Kazantzakis was not without religious supporters. Unitarians, Quakers and religious liberals were in favour of the book because it made Jesus so human.

In his two volumes Bien presents a comprehensive study of the work of Kazantzakis. He puts it in the historical context of events in Greece and relates it to Kazantzakis’s life and, more importantly, his spiritual, philosophical and artistic development. He examines the large and complex output of a complex man and attempts to capture his changing outlooks, his spiritual development and his political involvements. The books show a lifetime of studying Kazantzakis and anyone reading any book by Kazantzakis will profit greatly by consulting the relevant chapters in Bien’s study or, better still, reading both volumes.
_________

KAZANTZAKIS: Politics of the Spirit, Vol. 2
by Peter Bien
610 pp. Princeton University Press, 2007.

THE PERILS AND PLEASURES OF VANITY PUBLISHING

WRITE A BOOK AND PAY TO HAVE IT PUBLISHED

There can be no greater pleasure for the writer than to see his or her literary efforts between the covers of a book. His name on the front cover, his photograph on the back with some biographical information and a fulsome description of what lies inside is a consummation to be wished for and savoured.

After countless hours of looking for the apt word, the perfect turn of phrase and style, you have a work that is begging for an audience. The journey from script to published volume, however, can be pretty daunting to say the least. The chances of getting a commercial publishers to put the fruits of your labours between covers and on the shelves of Chapters are about as likely as finding a pot of gold when planting tomatoes in your back yard. Perhaps, a bit better. But writers do not pay any attention to that and they continue planting tomatoes and dreaming of being published.

If you don’t beat the formidable odds of your work being accepted by a publisher, the only means of seeing your work between covers is by doing it yourself. You go to a local printer, the script is prepared, the cheque is written (your cheque with perhaps the help of some faithful friends) and presto the volume is published.

Self-publishing or vanity publishing as it is uncharitably characterized by some is not new. In fact, in the nineteenth century what were to become prominent writers had to pay commercial publishers to publish their books.

There are a number of Greek writers in Canada who have published numerous books over the years. Dannis Koromilas, Antonis Vazintaris, Christos Ziatas, A. A. Athanasiadis and Andreas Constantinides come to mind immediately and I have no doubt there are many others. They have all published their own books and they deserve a lot of credit for their efforts and the considerable expense that they have borne.

The comments that follow are not meant to take away from their efforts but to point out some of the shortcoming of their printers (we can hardly call most of them publishers) to meet some minimum standards of a well-produced book. Some are better than others, no doubt.

Some annoying features. Most people prefer that the pages of a book be numbered. Some poets feel it is unnecessary to provide such an amenity. How about some useful information about the author so we can put the writing in context? Some of them do not provide any.

I was prompted to examine some self-published books when someone gave me a book of poetry in Greek by Christos Pantelopoulos entitled Ελεύθεροι Στοχασμοί (Free Reflections). It is a high-quality paperback and I decided to examine it carefully.

Poetry seems to be in Pantelopoulos’s blood. His poems cover a dizzying variety of occasions and people. Love, loss, friendship, the flag, a funeral, the mother-in-law, the barber, the waiter, the atheist, the cheapskate, Macedonia, the Greek Community’s 100th Anniversary and a host of other subjects are fair game for Pantelopoulos. I want to write about self-publishing and will confine my comments to the format of the book aside from the poems.

The front cover has a painting of a lion, a lamb and a dove snuggling together peacefully. Below the painting appear the words Vivlio Ekto (Sixth Book), Toronto 2009. In other words, there seems to be a publisher and a year of publication.

The back cover has a colour photo of the author with the headline in Greek “A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE POET.” We learn that this volume is a continuation of the poet’s previous book of poems “Skirtimata” which was published three years ago. After that we learn almost nothing about the author but are told that the poems express his warmth, humanity, love, the beauty of nature, the pain of immigration and nostalgia for the fatherland etc.
There is a well-done title page and you turn to the copyright page for some information. There is no copyright page and therefore no information about publisher, edition or anything. Who or what is Vivlio Ekto?

There is a table of contents which lists the titles of the poems and it is followed by a Prologue without a single blank page. The prologue consists of a single paragraph that goes on for three and a half pages. It is fulsomely complimentary, as expected, but it would have been nice if it also contained some information about the poet and the poems. Pantelopoulos, we glean among the flood of adjectives, has been in Canada for more than 40 years, is married and has raised a family. If there is much more than that hidden in the lengthy paragraph, it escaped me. The Prologue is signed by the poet’s old friend M.M.

If you must know who M.M. is you will need to go to page 312 where the poet thanks his friend Mihalis Mpatsoulis for his assistance and refers to him as a “worthy educator” who teaches in the Greek schools of Toronto. I assume that he is the same person as M.M. of the prologue.

The spine of the book is left blank.

Pantelopoulos’s book is better than most self-published volumes but the question remains: Why can they not reach a higher level of professionalism. Why do the Greek printing houses not open a few books and see what a title page, copyright page and table of contents or index contain? Why do they not get an International Standard Book Number (ISBN)? Why do they not bother inserting page numbers?

Pantelopoulos’s book does not suffer from some of these deficiencies and it is eminently readable once you get past the covers and the Prologue. Self-publishing will no doubt increase and computer technology has made lay-out easy to manage. Now if we can only get our writers and their printers to pay some more attention to the formalities that accompany the literary content, we may end up with more publishing and less vanity.

THE LUCKY CHILD - MARIANNE APOSTOLIDES NOVEL EXAMINES LIFE IN GREECE DURING WORLD WAR II

THE LUCKY CHILD
by Marianne Apostolides
204 pp. Mansfield Press, 2010.


Marianne Apostolides is the daughter and granddaughter of veterinarians. She is the author of The Lucky Child, a marvelous novel that pays tribute to both men through the prism of fiction and borrowed memories.

The novel is set in Greece between 1939 and 1943 although it opens in 1932, the year in which Taki is born, two months after his mother miscarries the first twin. Taki is, of course, the lucky child of the title.

Agamemnon, Taki’s father, is the chief veterinarian of a cavalry unit in Thessaloniki, an upright officer who uses his skills to help poor farmers.

Apostolides gives us vignettes of life in Thessaloniki before and during the war as well as descriptions of life in Zagora where Mary, Agamemnon’s wife, comes from. She uses light, sparing brush strokes. She does not go for lengthy Dickensian descriptions but is happy with economical delineations.

The story seems to be written largely from the viewpoint of Taki. He is almost seven years old when the novel begins and only eleven in the summer of 1943 when the story ends. There are certain events from childhood that stick in our minds vividly and the rest become images that we recall without too much context. This seems to hold true for our protagonist. For example, Taki recalls a number of people going by his house without too much detail but he recalls watching his father neutering of a horse quite vividly.

Apostolides tells the story through an omniscient narrator but when Taki is in the picture the view seems to be largely through his eyes or as it affects him. A good example of Apostolides prose style is her description of the tumultuous events of October 28, 1940 when Italy gave Greece an ultimatum and started invading the country in the wee hours of the morning.

The obvious choice would have been for Apostolides to come up with an outpouring of prose describing the Greek multitudes shouting “No. No, No” to Mussolini in an expression of rapturous patriotism. Instead she combines some banal acts like a boy pedaling past Taki on his bicycle, Taki being jostled by his mother’s arm and being nudged aside by neighbours. This is a level-headed and realistic description and thus more effective than prose in overdrive.

Another example of her spare, subtle narrative style is the announcement of the beginning of World War II when Germany invaded Poland. Taki is in the kitchen with his maternal grandmother. He hears the words Germany, Poland ,,, army … Hitler. The only word he understands is army because of his father and the image in his head of officers dancing in their uniforms at Easter.

Meanwhile the grandmother goes to the sink to clean some carrots. “Her shoulder blade pushed back and forth, repeatedly, back and forth” writes Apostolides. The grandmother knows exactly what is happening and what is coming and Apostolides expresses everything in a few words of simple description.

The everyday life of the Apostolides family and everyone in Greece is lived against the background of some of the most dramatic events in Greek history. First there was the declaration of war against Italy and the spectacular success of the Greek forces followed by the quick capitulation to the Nazis in April 1941. This led to the rise of the Greek resistance and the communist-dominated EAM/ELAS.

Privation and hunger followed and Apostolides provides a beautiful juxtaposition between a child’s view of reality and the mother’s knowledge. Mary does not give Taki another slice of bread because she does not want to spoil his appetite for the evening, she tells him. In the meantime she feels a sudden dizziness as she looks at the loaf of bread that would have to last another day for the entire family. No more is said. No more needs to be said.

Apostolides provides a few images to describe the life under the Nazi occupation: soldiers on the roof, the breadline, a man begging for cigarettes and food and Taki bumping into a body. It turns outs to be that of a woman, his former neighbour who is wearing a yellow star on her chest. Again no more needs to be said.

Sometimes I imagined the novel as a series of black and white photographs from the era. It is a series of images that pass across your eyes and stay there.

Apostolides’ chosen narrative method perhaps did not allow for detailed descriptions of Thessaloniki or Zagora during the war. In fact there is not a single street name mentioned and the setting could be any city in Greece.

I will not reveal what happened to Agamemnon but Taki, we are told in the Epilogue, went to America in 1949 and became a highly successful veterinarian. He was the impetus for the book and in trying to capture her father’s childhood, the author has created a work of fiction that tells the truth without being historically accurate. Her ability to create and recreate, to delineate and pay tribute and to evoke poetically the past and to fuse it with the present, makes one attribute the title of the novel to the author as well as her father.

Marianne Apostolides was born in Long Island, New York and graduated from Princeton University with a major in politics. She has lived in Toronto since 1997.

She has written a novel and not a history or a memoir but since she includes many dates it may be appropriate to correct some of her errors.

The Americans were not landing anywhere in the spring of 1941. They did not get into the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Greek trains ran on coal and not on oil in the 1930’s.

Agamemnon and his officer friends claimed in the spring of 1942 (1941 according to the novel) that they had heard nothing from the Greek government-in-exile in Egypt for sixteen months. Since Greece was invaded in 1941, Apostolides clearly meant 1942. But even if we allow for the typo there are not 16 months between the spring of 1941 and the spring of 1942.

The novel ends in the summer of 1943. Apostolides enters the narrative directly in an Epilogue where she ties up some loose ends and explains her motivation for writing the story. It is just as much a story about life in Greece about seven decades ago as it is about the fate of Greek immigrants today. Taki Apostolides immigrated to the United States in 1949 and did not want to have anything to do with Greece until he was forced to return to his youth by a daughter whose connection to that country was very tenuous.

A few words about Taki’s older sister Loukia. At age 11, Loukia visits an army hospital and is sent to feed men who had limbs amputated. She gives them soup and water until she reaches a soldier, a boy of seventeen, who is too weak to take a drink. She dips her fingers in the water and places her fingertip in the man’s mouth. She tells him to drink and he does. It is a moment of marvelous magnanimity and beauty.

In another scene, Loukia appears as the writer and director of a play about Greek Independence in the platia of Zagora. She combines childish innocence and patriotic fervour as she leads the girls in an imitation of the Dance of Zalogos where the Suliote women with their children in their arms threw themselves off a cliff rather than endure slavery!

Loukia Apostolides is better known in Toronto as Lucy Grigoriades. The child is no doubt mother to the woman and many decades later Lucy remains an exemplar of volunteerism and service to the community with few equals.

The Lucky Child is a significant addition to the growing stock of literature by Greeks of the Diaspora and their descendants.