Liddell lived half of his adult life in Greece. He joined the British Council in Athens, when it first set up shop there in 1939. During the wartime evacuation, he moved to Egypt where he taught at the University of Cairo for twelve years. Returning to Greece in 1953, he worked at the University of Athens, until retirement in 1972. After 1947, he never returned to England and spent the last decades of his life in Greece.
Liddell read Classics at Oxford and on graduating took up work in the Bodleian Library. It is clear from the three guidebooks that during those years he was travelling extensively in Greece with his younger brother Donald. In the course of time, Liddell became a fluent Greek speaker and acquired an extensive knowledge of the country, its literature, traditions, topography, religion and people. He was, therefore, extremely well placed to write the sort of learned cultural guides that are something of an exception in the genre these days. I emphasise cultural. Liddell was not at all interested in politics: Osbert Lancaster’s brilliant characterisations of the Greek political game in Classical Landscape with Figures (1947) and Kevin Andrews’s very real encounters with Civil War politics in The Flight of Ikaros (1959) are as far removed from Liddell’s approach as could be imagined. Fleeting and superficial references to the third round of the Civil War in Epirus, to the Cyprus crisis of the 1950s and to the general election of 1951, seen from distant Amorgos (‘nowhere could have been quieter’), are as political as Liddell allows himself to be. All else is loftily high-minded and Olympian.
Liddell was living in Athens when he wrote the three travel books and they represent a composite account of many years of travelling in the places described: some of the experiences come from his travels with Donald in the second half of the 1930s, others appear to date from the late 1940s, when he was resident in Cairo, or from the 1950s, when he returned to Athens. Their structure is basically topographical (like a gazeteer) but is often influenced by place-related narratives, such as myth. The opening chapters of Aegean Greece are, for example, structured around the notion that Theseus is the central figure of Aegean mythology: Liddell traces Theseus’ presence in Crete, on Naxos and Skyros, in the Argo-Saronic, at Troezen and across his adventure-strewn land journey to Attica, as he himself explores those places. In The Morea, of course, the descendants of Tantalos and Pelops (the houses of Thyestes and Atreus) take centre stage, particularly in the Argolid.
Despite his earlier travels with brother Donald, Liddell usually travelled alone, though his journeys by car were sometimes undertaken with a specially hired driver (he is amusing about the habits of his Greek driver ‘Nick’). He also travelled by taxi, by train, in buses, on the back of mules, and - in the great tradition of British explorers of Greece - by foot. Roads were often bad and public transport put him in touch with the patient, indomitable and often garrulous spirit of the people. At sea, on the Aegean, he is funny and ironic about the sufferings of ferry-passengers (‘the stewards include the best and the worst of humanity’).
Liddell was evidently an introvert exiled (voluntarily) in a nation of gregarious extraverts: he was most certainly not Paddy Leigh Fermor (‘How glad I am to be travelling alone - how cross I should be with anyone else’; ‘it is a great disadvantage to know Greek’). But his preference for his own company did not, seemingly, isolate him anywhere and he doesn’t appear to have been shy; on the contrary, he throws himself repeatedly into animated conversations, gatherings, social events, shared meals. He attends a party (γλέντι) on Siphnos and falls to wondering why obsolete English often provides the best means of translating Greek terms such as μάγκας (‘roaring-boy’) or ντερμπεντέρισσα (‘roaring-girl’). He gives great accounts of a wedding on Carpathos, ‘panegyrics’ (πανηγύρια) at Tegea and on Kasos, though he always maintains some distance (‘I did not let myself be drawn into closer participation in the feast’). On Nisyros he overhears a complex theological conversation; on Kalymnos he talks extensively to the sponge-divers (only a few years before Charmian Clift and George Johnston would head there). It’s a curiously engaging account by a diffident Englishman in a society where diffidence is abnormal.
Liddell was a pleasingly dyspeptic traveller, often complaining about his lodgings and the food. In the years of his travels, tourism was only just getting going and few places had hotels of a good standard. Before motorways, airfreight and reliable shipping, food supplies were very local and restricted, as Patience Gray would discover on Naxos. ‘Island food’, he comments, ‘is as nasty as anyone has ever said it was’. Poros has ‘the most dreadful food to offer; nor is the wine much better’, while ‘the cuisine of Syra is atrocious.’ To be fair, he didn’t like English cooking either (‘yet one never feels that English food will kill one’). In Greece, he was happy wherever there was fresh fish on offer; he gives luminous accounts of great meals on Siphnos and Kasos. Even in the 1950s, it seems, cuisine wasn’t always terrible (and, as I am happy to attest, is now everywhere miraculously transformed).
Liddell undoubtedly loved Greece: its seascape, its landscapes, its human characters and its cultural richness. Indeed, he is among those many British travellers who have seen it as the lost Eden:
To some of us who most love the Aegean, it is like a type or foretaste of Paradise. In the mountains and dry streams of these wind-shaken islands our homesickness for ‘that imperial palace whence we came’ is soothed, we almost forget that we are exiles, and we recognize places where we have never been before. Here, more frequently than anywhere else, come those unsought and unseekable moments of penetrating bliss, of Wordsworthian joy and quiet, when ‘we see into the life of things’.
Like many of us lovers of Greece, Liddell was happiest when surrounded by nature at its most sublime: either at sea or on land. If there is a mountain to climb, he tackles it (though, like me, he often gets vertigo); if there is a famous cave nearby, he enters it (though he usually gets claustrophobia and doesn’t get in very far: ‘I am something perhaps of a spelaeophobe’). He wrote enchantingly about remote places, marrying poetic, often romantic description with great topographical clarity and accuracy. Indeed, he had a topographical sense that reminds me most of William Martin Leake (1777-1860), whose ground-breaking accounts of the Morea and Northern Greece Liddell clearly knew well and admired. Like Leake, he could seemingly put a name to every mountain, every stream, every out-of-the-way classical, mediaeval and Ottoman fragment that he encountered, and yet do so without sounding pedantic or fussy. In this extract he enters the Vale of Sparta from Kalamata through the Langada pass:
Descending we entered the Langhadha or gorge of Trypi. The road has been cut or blasted as a terrace in the rock face. Here the stone is a brownish cream. Pillars rise up from the gorge and needles poke up from the sides. Perhaps there is nothing of the sort finer in Greece, with the exception of the broad calm gorge of Tempe. But the splendid Bouräikos, with its mountain torrents, must not be forgotten. The Langhadha is bone dry in summer. At Trypi there is a fine fountain. Near here is the chasm where the Spartans hurled criminals to their death, and whence Aristomenes, the Messenian hero, escaped holding on to a fox’s brush. But more beautiful even than the pass was the backward view of Taygetus, when we emerged into the plain of Sparta. This, perhaps the loveliest of the Morean mountains, with great bastions and deep mysterious clefts, rises so sheer from the level ground towards a long, jagged ridge. Whenever it can be clearly seen it is magnificent, as now when its summits, the great ‘five fingers’, were blue and bare. It is even better in early spring or in winter, when there is a brighter green on the lower slopes and the trees are golden with ripe oranges, and the peaks are besprinkled with snow.
Liddell’s knowledge of the flora of Greece was no less impressive than his topographical mastery. As he moved across the landscape, he was able to do that most human and necessary (but vanishingly rare) of things: to name the plants, trees and fauna that he sees. His eyes are particularly acute in the mountains and forests of the Pindus; his descriptions of walks there are masterful, evocative, aromatic.
Topography and mythology compulsorily set the scene. But it is his knowledge of history (ancient, mediaeval and modern), of the diachronic sweep of Greek literature, and of Greek culture in all its forms that really constitutes the tapestry of Liddell’s storytelling. In Mainland Greece, the history ranges from antiquity to early modernity: he is compellingly interesting and opinionated on the figures of the Greek Revolution (Androutsos, Botsaris, Trelawney); on Byron and Hobhouse; on Ali Pasha. In The Morea, he has material aplenty to co-ordinate several layers of Greek history simultaneously, and is particularly masterful in his use of the little-known Frankish history of Achaea. Who might have imagined that at Isthmia, where ‘at the Isthmian Games of 196BC Titus Quinctius Flaminius, the victor over Macedon, proclaimed the liberty of Hellas from taxes’, the Frankish Prince of Achaea would, in 1305AD, celebrate a great tournament, ‘sending messengers through all Frankish Greece to proclaim that seven champions had come from overseas to joust there’, such that more than a thousand knights and barons entered the lists?
In passages like this Liddell came close to achieving an ideal that I suggested in a lecture given at the Benaki Museum in 2016: the ideal of releasing from the very stones of the Greek landscape three millennia of continuous, interpenetrating, overlapping, startling, wonderfully and specifically located histories and tales. Liddell’s knowledge of literature (modern, Byzantine, Frankish and ancient) was no less compendious. Music, dance, karaghiozi shadow-plays, gorgeous liturgies - all were of equal interest to him.
Interestingly, however, we learn very little in all of this about Liddell’s personal life. As mentioned, he tells us of the tours of Greece he made with his brother in 1936-8, and we sense his aloofness as a traveller in the 1950s. Liddell was gay, but, with one exception, we get only a few passing hints of this. In
Mainland Greece, however, he tells us, unusually, of visiting a friend called Francis on an otherwise deserted island near to Evia. It took me some research to work out who this friend was. But it turns out that Liddell was a friend of Francis Turville-Petre (1901-1942), an English archaeologist who had made an important discovery in Palestine and from 1933-1938 was living on the tiny island of
Ktyponisi, in the hope of securing permission to dig a Mycenean grave-mound closeby. Turville-Petre was colourful. Openly gay, from an aristocratic Roman Catholic family, flamboyant if highly nervous, he was a friend of W.H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and had been with them in Berlin in 1929-1931. There he introduced Isherwood to Heinz Neddermeyer, who would become Isherwood’s boyfriend. In 1933, Isherwood and Neddermeyer visited Turville-Petre on Ktyponisi; the visit would be immortalised in Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel,
Down There on a Visit (1962). Liddell too visited, around 1938:
[Francis] settled upon the islet of St Nicolas the Less in the bay, where he built a bungalow. I stayed there for some three days about five years later, when the building was over and life was less uproarious, though still very odd: Francis (a self-doomed Mycerinus) lived by night and slept by day.
A small but intriguing glimpse into Liddell’s social life. It would be interesting to learn more, though this might be a tough task now. Liddell rejected the idea of autobiography and is a challenge for would-be biographers: he routinely destroyed his friends’ letters and urged them to destroy his; he left no archive. Real writerly introversion!
An Englishman who fell in love with Greece and spent the last four decades of his life there, teaching English in the university, Liddell is a great example of a very specific Anglo-Hellenic temper. His learned and absorbing travel books have deepened my understanding of places I thought I already knew; they have tantalized me with descriptions of places I haven’t properly visited (e.g. Aetolo-Acarnania). They inform and entertain, and consistently make the most interesting and surprising of connexions. Let me close with a typical piece of his writing. The excerpt comes from Aegean Greece; the author is at Phry on Kasos:
The café (owned by the dentist) is better than tolerable. I live there, reading Shakespeare - brought up on Greek poetry and English landscape, I have chosen for myself the even greater beauties (as I think them) of Greek landscape and English poetry. Notes on Shakespeare get mixed up with notes on my travels; but then, notes on Shakespeare are apt to be notes on life. Surely the Mantuan apothecary’s shop (for instance) looked, and smelt, like a provincial Greek grocer’s?
About his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,
Remnants of pack thread and old cakes of roses…
John
30 June 2021
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