An Anglo-Hellenic Voice from the 1930s

Although the laurels for making the English literary world aware of C.P.Cavafy go to the novelist E.M.Forster, the earliest known English poetry that responds to Cavafy’s work and suggests his influence is by William Plomer (1903-1973).[1] I had forgotten that fact, though not the name, when, in late 2019, checking over what was new and what was newly reprinted on the LGBT shelves in the Cambridge Waterstones, I discovered a finely bound selection of Plomer’s poetry. Within that new edition, brought out by Little Island Press, I found a handful of interesting poems about Greece and so bought the book.[2] As usually happens with interesting writers, one book led to another. And in the past few weeks, I’ve settled down to get to know Plomer’s life and work better.

Plomer, who was born and partly raised in colonial South Africa to English parents, is largely unknown now: in his own time, his own writing was highly esteemed, but he was also, as the reader at Jonathan Cape, the discoverer of Kilvert’s diaries and of Ian Fleming. He had a cosmopolitan outlook and was moulded by his early experiences of South Africa, England and Japan. He made only a single visit to Greece, which he describes beautifully in his autobiography - I’ve set out an extract below.[3] In 1930, accompanying the painter Anthony Butts (1900-1941), he spent some months in Athens and on Corfu, which at that time was almost entirely unvisited by tourists. During his weeks in Athens, he picked up ‘a voluminous anthology of Greek poetry’ and was captivated by the photograph of Cavafy.[4] Plomer was not only the first English poet to absorb elements of Cavafy’s work, he was also one of the first English writers to ‘rediscover’ the literary potential of Greece (Lawrence Durrell, for example, would not arrive on Corfu until 1935; Robert Liddell arrived in Athens only in 1939) and to find in Greece not so much the dead remains of classical antiquity as the vibrant possibility of contemporary erotic adventure. His experiences there would yield poems and short stories, all of which show a sharp eye for people, their customs and quirks, and for landscapes too.

 

Plomer was gay and he found working-class Greek men both to his taste and available. It wasn’t all casual and fleeting dalliance; in Athens he started what seems to have been the first serious love affair of his life with a Greek sailor called ‘Nicky’. The affair lasted some weeks but ended badly, with Nicky robbing Plomer and dumping him. But it left behind at least one ravishing poem (see below) and brought Greece firmly within the orbit of Plomer’s literary world. In those years, Plomer conducted a short correspondence with Cavafy and wrote several poems and short stories about Greece that demonstrate a knowledge of Cavafy’s poetry. Several years later, he was introduced in London by the publisher John Lehmann to the Greek poet, Dimitris Capetanakis, whose published work (in Greek and English) has recently been collated and issued in an edition by Emmanuela Kantzia.[5] Capetanakis had been swiftly accepted into the well-defined set of talented gay English writers and publishers (Forster, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Sitwell, Ackerley, Lehmann and so on); he and Plomer became friends, until Capetanakis’ early death in 1944. Plomer recognised in Capetanakis’ English poetry the merits of ‘a real English poet’, observing that ‘the growth of his sympathy with England & the English would have borne much fruit if he had lived.’ This is a connection about which one would like to know more.

Before the new Little Island Press edition, Plomer’s own work was in danger of becoming unknown by the reading public, though it has attracted some interest in recent years among academics.[6] Everything except the new Selected Poems is out of print, but most things can be found through Abebooks and the online catalogues of second-hand bookshops. From what I have been able to locate in these months when the pandemic has closed our libraries, the body of Greek work is interesting and deserves to be considered as a whole.

 

There are five short stories about Greece, published in The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories: ‘Folk Tale’, ‘Nausicaa’, ‘The Crisis’, ‘The Island: An Afternoon in the Life of Costa Zappaglou’ and ‘Local Colour’. Three of these (‘Nausicaa’, ‘The Island’ and ‘Local Colour’) depict - unmistakably but with characteristic discretion - a complex homoerotic milieu.[7] They are skilful and charming. ‘Nausicaa’ depicts Corfu in an astringent, somewhat cynical manner entirely unlike that of the Durrell brothers, and is all the more interesting for that.

 

While he was on Corfu, Plomer became interested in the character of Ali Pasha. That too yielded a book: a surprisingly fine biography published in 1936.[8]

 

There are at least twenty - probably more - poems written about Greece. The largest set (‘A Sprig of Basil’) is in the collection called The Fivefold Screen. Others can be found in the new Selected Poems or in the Collected Poems.[9] The types of poem vary. Four are translations from modern Greek. ‘The Philhellene’ (1930) is one of the satirical ballads - a genre that Plomer practically invented; it describes, with mordant humour and calculated bad taste, the illusions and disillusion of a female American philhellene in Athens: ‘She had plenty of dollars, / But felt that scholars / Alone could master / Classical Greek, / The enclitic particle / Quite defeated her / And declining the article / Left her weak’. The most memorable lines are examples of English comic writing at its silliest and most playful: ‘Then one Papayannopoulos / Took her up the Acropolis / And began to monopolize / Most of her time.’

 

‘The Philhellene’ is an amusing if clever trifle. But the serious poems are a more lasting legacy. From 1930, ‘Another Country’ expresses a debt to Cavafy’s ‘The City’, while ‘Corfu’ captures wistfully the island’s melancholic aspect (‘Across the old fortezza fall / The crystal rulings of the rain’). ‘The Klepht’ is a good poem to read in this bicentenary year. ‘Archaic Apollo’ brings a modern, gay sensibility to the ancient world; in ‘The Land of Love’ that sensibility acquires a mordant tone. But the best two Greek poems, in my opinion, are ‘Three Pinks’ (1930) and ‘A Casual Encounter’ (1972). ‘Three Pinks’ describes a delicious moment in Plomer’s affair with Nicky. It is not, I think, a simple derivation of Cavafy’s work, but stands in the same relation to Cavafy as do some of Dinos Christianopoulos’ erotic poems, being both an emanation and an extension of the Cavafian style. ‘A Casual Encounter’, by contrast, is one of Plomer’s final poems, from the collection Celebrations, published a year before Plomer’s death. It is dedicated to Cavafy’s memory and is a sure sign of his abiding, life-long influence on Plomer’s work. Both can be found in the Collected Poems and in the new Selected Poems. I have set out a fragment of the later poem below and hope it draws you too into the world of William Plomer. It’s worth spending some time there.

 

John

12 March 2021  

 

‘Moderately Grand Tour’ - an excerpt from The Autobiography of William Plomer

 

Late in the afternoon, or sometimes in the morning, we went off to Glyphada or Vouliagmeni to swim and then to come out and sit in the sun and drink retsina under the pine trees. The colour and salinity of the sea, the piny fragrance of the shadows and the piny tang of the wine, the clearness of the wine and of the white-wine-coloured sea-water, the salty warmth of the skin and of the blood, the warmth of the sun and of the sand all seemed interfused, as if the elements of earth, air, fire, and water were one element, in which life was immortal. As often in those parts, a sensuous experience of a certain complexity seemed also a spiritual or at least a suprasensory experience.

 

A Casual Encounter

 

(in memory of Cavafy, 1863-1933) - an excerpt

 

They met, as most these days do,

among streets, not under leaves; at night;

by what is called chance, some think

predestined; in a capital city, latish;

instantly understanding, without words,

without furtiveness, without guilt,

each had been, without calculation, singled out.

 

Wherever it was they had met,

without introduction, before drifting this way,

beneath lamps hung high, casting

cones of radiance, hazed with pale dust,

a dry pollenous mist that made

each warm surface seem suede, the sense of touch

sang like a harp; the two were alone.

 

To be in private in public added oddness,

out of doors in a city with millions

still awake, with the heard obbligato

of traffic, that resolute drone,

islanding both, their destination

the shadow they stood in. The place

should perhaps be defined.

 

But need it? Cliff walls of warehouses;

no thoroughfare; at the end a hurrying 

river, dragonish; steel gates locked;

emptiness. Whatever they said

was said gently, was not written down,

not recorded. Neither had need 

even to know the other one’s name.

 

…

 

 

[1] I first became aware of Plomer in 2007, thanks to Prof. David Ricks's legendary module 'Cavafy: Reader and Read' in the then MA Modern Greek syllabus, sadly now discontinued (like so many British humanities courses), at King's College London. 

[2] William Plomer, Selected Poems (ed. Neilson MacKay) [Stroud, Little Island Press 2016]. There is a good review of this selection by David Collard in the TLS no.5948 (31 March 2017): https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/benign-muscular-owl-william-plomer-poetry/

[3] William Plomer, The Autobiography [London, Jonathan Cape 1975]. Chapter 26 ‘Moderately Grand Tour’ describes the trip to Italy and Greece.

[4] Details of Plomer’s life can be found in the fine and sympathetic biography: Peter F. Alexander, William Plomer: A Biography [Oxford, Oxford University Press 1989]

[5] Δημήτριος Καπετανάκης, Έργα: πρώτος τόμος - τα δημοσιευμένα 1933-1944 (επιμελ. Εμμανουέλα Κάντζια) [Αθήνα, ΕΚΕΠ & ΜΙΕΤ 2020]

[6] There are (censorious) references to Plomer’s presence in Greece in David Roessel’s admirable In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002). Specific articles looking at Plomer’s Greek work include Konstantina Georganta, ‘“And so to Athens”: William Plomer in “The Land of Love”’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010): 49–71 and Dimitris Papanikolaou, ‘Between Philhellenism and Greek Eros: Reading Christopher Isherwood’s and William Plomer’s “Greece”’, in Evangelos Konstantinou (ed.), Das Bild Griechenlands im Spiegel der Völker [Frankfurt, Peter Lang 2008]: 421-432.

[7] William Plomer, The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories [London, Jonathan Cape 1933]. All except ‘Folk Tale’ were reprinted several years later in William Plomer, Four Countries [London, Jonathan Cape 1949]. 

[8] William Plomer, Ali the Lion [London, Jonathan Cape 1936].

[9] William Plomer, The Fivefold Screen [London, Hogarth Press 1932]; Collected Poems [London, Jonathan Cape 1973].