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“in care of the address on the letter-head” were heavily underlined
by the poet. Since the letter-head address is “Avery House, 1 Queen’s
Gate Gardens,” where I was apparently staying only “until Saturday
evening of this week,” it is likely that the letter did not arrive
on the poet’s desk in time for him to send an answer to Avery
House, and if my earlier letters addressed to the “Foreign Office of
Greece” did not make their way to him until they had been forwarded
from Athens, he had no other way of getting in touch with
me before I left England to spend the summer in Greece. A little
over one year later, I tried again, when my dissertation had been
reduced to the poetry of Cavafy and Seferis and was very near
completion: “Dear Mr. Seferis,” I wrote, “I don’t know whether
you remember me, but I am the young man who approached you
over a year ago in connection with a thesis I am writing, . . . ”
The result of this persistence was an invitation to tea in early
June of 1952 at Seferis’s apartment near Sloane Square. I was beside
myself with joy. What an opportunity to clear up tenacious
ambiguities, even if it was at the last minute. My wife and I were
received graciously by Mr. and Mrs. Seferis, he a heavy man, baldheaded,
round-faced, with dark eyebrows separated by deep frown
lines, the eyes penetrating, the mouth always on the verge of curving
into a smile, and she a slight woman with beautiful, delicate
features and golden hair. We had our tea, and then the poet and I
withdrew to one end of the living room for our talk about his poetry
and some of the remaining problems I had in understanding
it. Six hours later, the bleary-eyed poet, speech increasingly slow,
suggested that maybe we had talked enough about his work, since
it was clear that I now understood it better than he did, even if I
continued to make the mistake of seeing everything symbolically.
“Those statues, my dear,” he said at one point. “Those statues are
not always symbols. They exist. If you travel in Greece, you will
see that statues belong to the landscape. They are real. And the
stones. The stones are there under your feet, my dear, or there in
front of you for your hand to caress.”
The conversation had gone on so long because I had been unrelenting
in my pursuit of possible meanings and the poet had been
very reticent about answering my questions directly, so that I kept
feeling that his potentially valuable commentary was constantly slipping
through my fingers. Of course he was trying very hard to save
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