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| Dilys Powell |
Nevertheless, I persisted and am glad I did. Early on in my time as ambassador in Greece, I read The Traveller’s Journey is Done (published 1943, but written in 1939); more recently, I’ve tackled Remember Greece (1941). This last book has particularly caused me to rethink my views on Powell’s writing about Greece and, indeed, to re-read all of the books, taking them in the order in which she wrote them. This I strongly recommend to anyone who wants to see Greece through Powell’s eyes. It sets this, in some ways, eccentric writer about Greece in a more sympathetic perspective.
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| Humfry Payne |
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| Sanctuary of Hera, Perachora |
Powell was not a classicist and had not learned modern Greek at university. But the years spent with Payne in Greece had made an irrepressible mark on her: she returned independently to the country every year from 1937 to 1939, when the first signs of war appeared in Europe. During the war, she was recruited to the Political Warfare Executive in London: part of the British Government’s propaganda effort; there her expert knowledge of Greece involved her in Greek affairs. She returned to the liberated country in 1945, and made further journeys subsequently in 1953, 1954, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1966 and 1971. She was undoubtedly well travelled in Greece and got to know much of the country well; she formed friendships with the ‘ordinary’ Greek people she met, with archaeologists of several nationalities, including Greek archaeologists, and with some of the British expat community, including the diplomatic community.
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| John Pendlebury |
Each of the four books has high value, even if for me the first two are the best. Although written in the third person with Powell appearing as ‘Elizabeth’ and her husband as ‘Payne’ – an odd attempt to achieve, perhaps, a detached narrative voice in what is a very personal memoir, The Traveller’s Journey is Done is in essence a story of two love affairs: one between Powell and Payne, and the other between Powell, Payne and Greece. Here and in Remember Greece Powell gives a compelling, often lyrical account of interwar Greece. She captures brilliantly, I think, Athens in its seasons:
In winter Athens withdraws into itself; wind shouts down the dark hilly streets, restaurants open doors to show bright lights, cafés are snug and full of smoke. But on summer evenings the city puts out blossoms. The men, in summers before the war, left off their black felt hats and their dark suits (made, if they were well-to-do, of English cloth); everybody wore a linen or a raw silk suit, and even the taxi-drivers fanned themselves with boaters. At midday the sunlight was white-hot; screwing up their eyes behind dark glasses, the Athenians walked on the shady side of the street. In the afternoon the place was asleep. The shops put down their shutters for three hours. The conductor snored in his bus at the terminus. The masons, the carpenters, the plasterers left their tools lest they should be summonsed for breaking the peace of the siesta. Rich and poor sprawled on their beds in darkened rooms. Even the society busybody barred her house to callers, even her servants could rest. But as the sun slanted down towards Salamis, and Hymettos turned to rose-colour, young men and girls sauntered out of their homes to take the air…[1]
But she is also alert to the changes that she witnessed in the capital during the interwar years:
Athens…has always since I have known it been a city with the air of a capital, gay, easy, prosperous-looking. But in 1926 the transformation from a nineteenth-century Balkan town to a modern European city was still in progress. Occasional horse-cabs still shambled through the streets, the horses wearing a necklace of blue beads against the evil eye, and taxis were still not a matter of course. There were few and poor buses; the centre of Athens was served, as much of it still is, by trams. The streets and pavements, except in the middle of the city, were full of pot-holes. There was no adequate water supply, and the best drinking-water was sold by the jar, brought in carts from springs outside Athens.[2]
She writes lyrically about life in the countryside, recognising the hardship and isolation of peasant lives and the challenge of travel in such a mountainous country. The patterns of agricultural life had not changed for centuries:
The life of the countryside flows on, rhythmic, measured, tranquil. In autumn and in spring the earth is sown. Already in May in the lowlands the corn is yellow, and men and women, girls and boys, reap the fields. If they have far to go from the village, they may camp out for days. In the summers when the British School was excavating the Heraeum of Perachora on the point opposite Corinth, we would sometimes hear voices at dusk murmuring in the fields behind our tents: a family from the village six miles away, tethering the mules, and lighting a fire, and settling down to sleep. The corn is threshed on the circular stone threshing-floors beside the fields; the Greeks give to these threshing-floors the name that they give also to a halo round the moon. The sheaves are strewn thickly over the floor, a pair of mules are harnessed and driven round and round it; behind them, like a surf-rider, bumps the driver, poised on his foothold. Sometimes a woman takes charge; and then, perhaps, a tiny child will be whirled round, standing between her ankles and gripping her bare legs.[3]
She was aware of extensive poverty and hunger in the countryside and of their impact on the lives and expectations of villagers. Outsiders, like the British School, might bring employment to such communities and, as local villagers hoped, transform their longer-term economic prospects. This certainly seemed true of the hoteliers at a popular site like Mycenae; Powell kept track of the progress of one particular family there across the decades. But even at isolated Perachora, the community was able to build a small museum (hoping that the Heraion finds would be repatriated from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens) and roads were eventually built, to bring tourists and scholars to the site (I myself revisited the site a couple of weeks ago - see my photo above).
Powell’s eye and sympathies have a wide angle to them. At the same time, she learnt about Greece and Greeks from the very particular and specialised milieu of classical archaeology. This was a milieu focused on pre-Christian antiquity. She learnt and absorbed a lot: stratigraphy, pots, tools, votive offerings, the lay-out of ancient shrines, the settlements around them, and so on. She was, however, more aware than her husband appears to have been that this was a narrow world, and not the world in which contemporary Greeks actually lived. She knew that contemporary classicists could be condescending about the Christian, Byzantine centuries and their impact on mores, values, beliefs; the shape and architecture of settlements and of lives. But despite this, she never really learned very much about Byzantium or had much interest in it (she acknowledges this as a failing in An Affair of the Heart), and seems to have understood little or nothing about Orthodoxy (though she does cover the basic rhythms of a Greek Easter in Remember Greece, p.114f.); she appears to have had no religion of her own.
She did, however, learn something of the febrile vibrancy of Greek politics. Her first visit to Greece took place under the Pangalos dictatorship: she noted with some irony the excellent road he had built from Athens to Eleusis, where he ‘had a villa’, and described the absurdity of the dictatorship as far from ‘reassuring’:
Next the Dictator busied himself with public morality. It was the time of short skirts. In Greece at least, he declared, no woman should walk about with a skirt more than a regulation number of inches above the ground. The police were instructed to measure any doubtful legs; one day, unfortunately, they investigated the skirts of a young lady of good family, and amid the uproar the decree was noiselessly withdrawn.[4]
She was present for the failed Plastiras coup of 1933 and the failed Venizelos coup of 1935. In Remember Greece, she sets out a brief summary of political events from 1922 until the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War in 1940. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had an ambivalent view of Metaxas, whom, on the positive side, she saw as responsible for the rearmament programme that enabled the Greeks to resist Mussolini. Remember Greece closes with a chapter summarising how Greeks regained their freedom from Ottoman hands and went on to create a modern state. About 1940, she has this to say:
The national identity which had been preserved through centuries with so much tribulation was threatened again, the liberty which had been won was again in danger. For the Greeks this was indeed ‘total’ war: the total war of the free people of mountain and sea, the shepherds and fishermen, the men who work in fields and vineyards and olive-groves, against the men of steel and fire: the creators against the destroyers; life against death. They chose life. We need not fear, any more than they feared, the extinction of the vital spirit. Their country will live again, and they with it. In the words of Pericles: ‘Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped not from their fear, but from their glory.’[5]
Heady words, written when Powell was working in London for the Political Warfare Executive (the first part of the quotation reminds me vaguely of Ritsos’s The Lady of the Vineyard). And yet, war and the heroism it brought forth was an evidently unwelcome intrusion of the political into Powell’s world. She generally avoided politics and wanted to play no part in them. After the war, she hoped to escape from political issues. This is very clear from the book she published in 1957, An Affair of the Heart. Her visit to Athens and Thessaloniki in 1945 was, for her, a disaster: an ‘estrangement’; she found herself ‘quite unprepared’ for the mood of the country: ‘a country full of rage’.[6] She found herself arguing vehemently – in the cities and in the villages – with liberals, conservatives and communists alike about responsibility for the civil war, and was clearly shocked that all sides tended to blame the British (though for different reasons). Perhaps this reaction of hers was inevitable. She had spent the wartime years writing propaganda for the wartime effort; the country she loved had been liberated and, as she saw it, properly kept out of communist hands. She was not in the least prepared for the reality of civil discord and the strong and hostile emotions aroused on all sides. She decided that it was ‘time for me to get Greece out of my blood’.[7]
But, as already mentioned, she was called back to Greece eight years later and, the civil war decisively won, restarted her ‘affair of the heart’. From this point on, her relationship with Greece became a non-political affair: the final two parts of An Affair of the Heart and the whole of Villa Ariadne are, in effect, exercises of nostalgia, tempered and disciplined by Powell’s continuing contacts with the country and its people. During the mid-1950s, she re-established contacts with her friends in Perachora; from 1958 onwards, she returned to Crete and renewed her connexions with the British School at Knossos. On Crete, she became increasingly keen to tell the story of the Fall of Crete in 1941 and the subsequent Resistance in the mountains, led by the Greeks themselves and the British Special Operations Executive. In both cases, Powell’s efforts to re-engage with Greece took the form, not just of enquiry and research, but also of empathetic association through hard physical effort. Inspired by the walks that she and Payne had made in the 1920s and 1930s, Powell took to her feet, becoming one of England’s legendary Greek mountain-walkers.
In September 1953, she walked a third of the way from Lidoriki in Phokis to Nafpaktos on the Gulf of Corinth; and the following month, she walked much of the way – often in the rain – from Ioannina to Metsovo across the Pindus.[8] In 1959 on Crete, she decided to walk over Mt Ida (‘Psiloreitis’) from Nithavris to Anoyeia, in loose emulation of the route taken by the British kidnappers of General Kreipe, the Nazi commander of Crete:
One wants, of course, to find out for oneself. One is curious to know what the terrain is really like – how desperate the distances, how steep the ascents and descents. Imagination alone can never conjure up the sensation of the mountains; you need the aching thighs, the thinning air, the stones under your feet.[9]
For me this intrepid mountain-hiking is one of the reasons to love Dilys Powell and to give her, as I did in a talk to the Benaki Museum in 2016, her due place in the pantheon of true British travellers in Greece.[10] She was gutsy and unyielding (she was 57 when she tackled Mt Ida), and she responded with raw honesty and deeply lyrical sensibility to the harshness and beauty of the Greek landscape:
I staggered on, zigzagging upwards, gasping for breath. When I was allowed a rest I dropped to the ground without the energy to take off my knapsack. No water, no springs anywhere, only ridge upon ridge. The cliff was behind us now, but in front I saw only the surge of the mountains, like a sea of petrified waves. Yet, in this wilderness, arid, trackless – without a guide one would be irretrievably lost – there were obstinate blossoms: pale dwarf tulips flushed with pink, their petals curling open to show a golden heart; and, its greenish-white trumpet crumpling round the yellow pistil, the tiny arum which grows on Mount Ida.[11]
Powell’s love affair with Greece was a long affair, which had tempestuous moments and moments of unhappiness, doubt and despair. But it was undoubtedly an affair of the heart, an affair of total surrender. For all their unevenness these four books count; they should be read and re-read, not just for what they tell us about philhellenic sentiments of the past but also for their inspiration to pick up the rucksack, to tie up the bootlaces and to walk today in Greece.
John
10 July 2022
[1] The Traveller’s Journey is Done (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1943), p.38.
[2] Remember Greece (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941), p.66
[3] op.cit., 111.
[4] Traveller’s Journey, p.23f.
[5] Remember Greece, p.181f.
[6] An Affair of the Heart (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957), p.28f.
[7] op.cit., 55.
[8] op.cit., p.79-84; p.110-120.
[9] Villa Ariadne (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), p.181.
[10] J. Kittmer, ‘Περπατώντας στην Ελλάδα: Τοπία / Αφηγήματα’, in M. Diamanti (ed.), Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ: Και το ταξίδι συνεχίζεται (Athens: Μουσείο Μπενάκη, 2017): p.71
[11] Villa Ariadne, p.193f.
