A Child of Thetis. Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series. 6 Christopher Kininmonth

When I visited Phaestos at the end of my stay I felt almost listless as the car swung into view of the southern plain fringed with mountains. I felt its loveliness was swamping my mind and overcharging my imagination. I would be lucky to remember more than a glimpse of it, more than a pulse of the disembodying joy that sweeps the spirit clean. The impact of Crete is a sustained onslaught and stimulation. 

 

I missed summer in Greece this year. But I drew close to the Aegean’s sparkling waters by reading Christopher Kininmonth’s The Children of Thetis: A Study of Islands and Islanders in the Aegean (London: John Lehmann 1949). This is an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing by a little-known writer, who toured the Ionian and Aegean islands between 1937 and the onset of war, and resumed in the mid-1940s after the end of the Nazi Occupation.  Although occasional references to The Children of Thetis can be found in the scholarly literature, little has been written about the author himself. He is an elusive character: he has no entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and I haven’t yet been able to trace any obituaries. He wrote two other pieces of descriptive travel-writing, Rome Alive (1951) and Brass Dolphins: A Description of the Maltese Archipelago (1957), before turning his hand to three mainstream guides, to Sicily (1965), Malta (1967) and Morocco (1972), all in the Travellers’ Guides series published by Jonathan Cape. In the 1970s, he moved on to fiction, publishing two novels: Frontiers (1971) and Maze (1974). 

 

Elements of his life must be pieced together from the dustjackets to his books. He was born in Cheshire in 1917, attended schools in the south of England and Australia, and was educated at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford. He first went to Greece in 1937 and, like so many Englishmen, fell in love with the country. During the war, he served in the Middle East, certainly in Egypt and likely also in Syria. He entered Athens in 1944 along with the troops of liberation. 

 

The Children of Thetis places Kininmonth among that well-known generation of English writers, including Patrick Leigh Fermor and Lawrence Durrell, who came to Greece in the 1930s, were evacuated at the onset of war but gained wartime experience there, and returned afterwards, not least to write about the country. Kininmonth’s travel book about the Aegean is a distillation of his pre-war, wartime and post-war experiences in Greece, and it is often quite hard to understand which periods of Kininmonth’s experiences the narrative refers to. The structure of the book is broadly geographical: there are chapters on Syros, Santorini, Naxos, Aegina, Crete and Ikaria. More thematic chapters cover the lives of islanders, allegedly Dionysiac celebrations, and piracy. The most revealingly personal of the chapters deals with Kininmonth’s participation in the ill-fated attempt to seize the Dodecanese and north-eastern islands in the wake of the Italian armistice in September 1943. 

Kininmonth’s appreciation of the islands is not unmediated. He has clearly read Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and his acknowledgements include Lawrence Durrell, Theodore Stephanides and George Katsimbalis. He falls recognisably within the thought-world of those Anglo-Americans who, with the aid of powerful Greek cultural figures, ‘discovered’ and substantially invented a model of modern Greece.[1] The opening sentence of The Children of Thetis makes this filiation clear: 'I was nineteen when I discovered Greece and lotus-eating–the intoxication of an immediate and individual enjoyment of the present.'  This is a Greece of sunlight, of glittering seas and mountainous landscapes; a Greece of the dance, the vine, the song, of sensuality and immediacy; a land where physical toil and hardship go hand in hand with vivifying pleasures that are both communal and profoundly individual.   

 

Kininmonth is at his best when entering confidently into this world created by other writers. He writes well about the famous μπουζουκτσής Markos Vamvakaris, whom he seems to have heard on Syros and in the Piraeus, his ‘extraordinary voice…, forced up from his great stomach in agonies of nostalgia’. He is a convincing writer about the pleasures of wine and of male company. There are great accounts of πανηγύρια (festivals) on Naxos and Crete, and Kininmonth associates them, typically, with the Dionysia. Here he is on Naxos:

 

In the village there was a great commotion. At booths, lit by naphtha flares, people were selling sweetmeats, roast chestnuts and sixpenny toys. Large bamboo shelters had been set up and decorated with branches of laurel where wine was served from the barrel. Tables and benches were placed round an open space for dancing. Mules and donkeys were tethered to parked trucks and everywhere there were crowds of excited people. They pushed about fetching drinks for their tables, stopping to greet friends, crowding round a dancer to give him wine or, not able to afford to drink, pressing into the centre of the fun to feel its warmth. Bands of girls wandered happily about. Children played under everyone’s feet. The table tops were wet with spilt wine. The settles, rickety on the uneven ground, tipped up the unwary. Drunks staggered around embracing all and sundry in their happiness. Shouts of provocative laughter came from the girls and the young men peacocked for them.

 

Perhaps his most memorable paragraphs are reserved for descriptions of the dance. Here he is at a household party that unfolds as part of a communal πανηγύρι on Crete:

 

The tempo slips into a higher gear. Carolling with a cracked rapture the old lady twirls with a dance step into the kitchen to refill our glasses. Petros is galvanised into astonishing life. With a whoop of triumph he begins to dance quite beautifully and with amazing agility for his years. Small Stelios, a dark youth with a soft face and big fathomless eyes, quietly joins the old man. Together they dance the butcher’s dance with complete abstraction from us. All the ragged ends of this extraordinary day, the straying, intoxicated wits, the tottering stragglers and shrill excited groups, coming and going in a drunken kaleidoscope, are softly gathered together into this small room. Everything converges in the perfect balance and subtle weaving of these steps made in concord together. The wonderful tune, a dance time that is so ancient that its origins are lost in the past of sacrificial dances, of victory and butcheries of bulls no one remembers, embraces us all in a heavy nostalgia. The last obeisance of the dance is made, the dancers come swiftly up to the poised finish. They drop their hands from one another’s shoulders to turn out of their spell. They smile. Petros thumps the table for “Wine, wine, woman!” –and the village-wide party falls apart again into its drunken gestures.

 

Kininmonth’s is, in essence, a neopagan view of modern Greece. Although he meets and enjoys meeting Orthodox monks, his knowledge of Orthodoxy is vanishingly slight and his generalisations about Greek beliefs, though hardly unique among his generation of English writers, are wide and often far off the mark. We hear too often about Dionysus, about Pan and about the Great Mother –as if all were direct presences untrammelled by the two millennia of Christian experience in Greece. The careful anthropology of a writer such as Juliet du Boulay [2] is a much more reliable guide to the complex archaeological layers of Greek popular religion. 

 

The most unusual chapter – and one which shows Kininmonth thinking the hardest about what island life really is and how it differs from western urban lifestyles – is the most clearly situated. In late October 1943, Kininmonth, who was then stationed in Alexandria, joined the small expeditionary force that was sent to the Dodecanese and north-eastern islands, which, until the Italian armistice of September 1943, had been controlled by Mussolini. The aim was to keep the islands out of German hands. This is the only first-hand account that I have ever read about this expeditionary force and Kininmonth’s description is gripping. His small fleet sailed via Cyprus and Kastellorizo, hoping – forlornly – to save Rhodes. In early November, he landed briefly on Kos, after it had already been taken by the Nazis, and was eventually disembarked on Samos, at what is now called Pythagoreio and was then called Tigani. The Battle of Leros broke out almost immediately and the surrender of that island to the Nazis in mid-November precipitated the evacuation of Samos by the allies. The expedition had proved a fiasco: the last loss of the British and the last victory of the Germans in the Second World War. For Kininmonth the loss of these small islands was strongly felt and he knew that the half-hearted British efforts had exposed the islanders to punitive reprisals. The episode, he said, ‘brutally exposed…the divergence between our ways of thought and those of the islanders’. He sees the western mind as dominated by the habit of generalisation, by majoritarian utilitarianism, by continental scale, and by abstract notions of justice, logic and science. ‘So we get a lack of humanity in our outlook and an admiration of impersonal reason. The circumstances of island life do nothing to force the islanders away from the human and the particular in all their dealings.’ He felt great shame at the British failure.

 

Kininmonth’s voice in this travel narrative is, as I’ve said above, not entirely his own. And yet, in one respect, it appears to be very personally marked. Reading him watching and describing men in physical action – drinking in the tavernas, dancing indoors and out, working the fields and at sea – I gained the strong impression that this was the gay male gaze at play. Kininmonth describes the male body not only with the objectivity of the artist (he was a trained artist), but also with the subjective interest of same-sex attraction: ‘Now, in the terrific heat, the young peasants worked in the fields wearing only light shorts. As the bus passed they were glimpsed like splendid statues conceived with the vision of a Michelangelo. As they drove their animals with the slowness of summer, their sun-burned skin had the bloom of ripe fruit so that each looked like a Creteus or Thammuz at peak of his season.’ The likelihood that Kininmonth can reasonably be considered a gay writer is substantially strengthened by a reading of his first novel, Frontiers, published four years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England. This is an unusual, overwrought fiction, set during the Second World War and informed by Kininmonth’s war-time experiences in Egypt and the Middle East, and by his pre-war travels in Greece. It is unashamedly sensual and gay, often outrageously orientalist, sometimes markedly distasteful. Its main character, Fleming, is a more-or-less openly gay Hellenist, presumably modelled on Kininmonth himself:

 

As all its lovers are, Fleming was engrossed with Greece. Its present pain was something he carried about with him as he did his regrets for home. He had spent much time in the country during the last years before the war, when it had been a good place to be very young in. It had not then been like everywhere else in Europe, hell bent on destruction. Where, in Greece, he had found life and every good thing gladly welcomed, profoundly appreciated, elsewhere these were feared, grudged and spoiled with cruelties. Had he not found Greece, he doubted whether he would have learned really to desire life, and as it was they could kill him now with their lunatic war if they must, but he could not die one of life’s paupers.

 

It seems then that we can place Kininmonth not only among the ‘mainstream’ writers such as Durrell, Leigh Fermor and Miller, who ‘discovered’ and invented Greece in the 1930s, but also among those who found in the Greece of the interwar years a form of liberation away from England’s punitive laws on homosexuality. Such writers included the poet William Plomer, the critic Robert Liddell, the archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre and the friends he attracted, including Christopher Isherwood, to his experimental lifestyle on the island of St Nicholas off Evia; the novelist Evelyn Waugh too can, with reservations, be included among this number. This separate genealogy of Kininmonth as a writer can, in fact, be traced in The Children of Thetis, the acknowledgements of which include mention of Turville-Petre, Liddell and ‘in a category by himself, though embracing all, Thanos Veloudios’.[3] David Roessel has outlined some of the characteristics of these writers in his magnificent In Byron’s Shadow, but Kininmonth is, I think, a worthy addition to the list.[4] This group of writers would surely benefit from being considered in depth as a whole. They are an important and very particular part of the English imaginary’s investment in Greece.

 

John Kittmer

Scarborough

22 October 2024

 

[1] This world is accessibly explored in Edmund Keeley, Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey 1937-47 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).

[2] See Juliet Du Boulay, Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (Limni: Denise Harvey, 2009).

[3] On Thanos Veloudios, see Francis King, Yesterday Came Suddenly (London: Constable, 1993), 142-144 (I am grateful to David Roessel for this reference). It is worth noting that it was the gay publisher John Lehmann who took and published The Children of Thetis. Lehmann’s lifelong interest in Greece had been spurred by his meeting the gay Greek poet, Dimitrios Capetanakis, in 1941. This friendship directed Lehmann’s attention to George Seferis and his literary circle. He travelled to Greece in 1946 and engaged there with the foremost men of letters. (See John Lehmann, In My Own Time: Memoirs of a Literary Life (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), 294-297, 438-446.) Lehmann would go on to publish Capetanakis, Seferis and Kazantzakis, as well as gay writers such as Gore Vidal. His interest in Kininmonth’s travel-writing is surely doubly motivated. 

[4] David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford: OUP, 2002), esp. 245-252.