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Return to Asi Gonia
are the Embassy crowd, with whom one might associate those who
have, say, steady salaried jobs in companies like B.P. There are the
teachers, verging from the respectable and settled who have jobs with
the British Council or run their own institutes, to those who teach
privately and illegally (very often teaching in an institute at the same
time). There is the ‘artistic’ set, many of whom coincide with this last
group of unofficial teachers. There are the students; mostly archaeologists
at the British School. And there are the au pair girls.
Between the first class, the steadies, and the floating population of
writers and teachers, there is not much contact. In fact, the contact the
artists have is mostly with each other, and with a few pretty unrepresentative
Greeks. The results of this are unfortunate, and can be seen
by anyone who cares to go up to the ‘Nine Muses’ in the Plaka for a
few nights and listen to the conversation. Any colony of expatriates has
its phonies; but the difference between Athens and, say, Paris in the
Twenties is that in Paris, concealed behind all the nonsense and showoff,
there was a ferment of ideas and a handful of terrific talents. In a
sense the talented could feed on each other. In Greece the talented are
lucky if they find each other; they are far more likely – Durrell is the
obvious example – to feed off the land. But this is precisely why the
Athenian colony is hollow, because its members do not know the land.
The land is strange, not entirely European; the people behave differently,
they talk a language that cannot be picked up, like a Romance
language, in a few weeks from remembered scraps of school-lessons. All
this drives the floaters, who came to Greece not for the sake of the
country but for their own sakes, back on to themselves.
If there is one thing an artist needs it is roots. The philosopher
Moore once said that his inspiration came not from philosophic puzzlement
presented by problems in real life but from the puzzles set up and
argued over by other philosophers. Many writers could say the same
thing. (‘Real’ problems often seem too difficult, complicated and even
trivial to be written about.) Nevertheless such a writer, feeding on
other books, on technical problems, must be able to relate what he
finds to the life, the culture in which he is rooted. Distant memory is
an insufficient prop. The expatriates have uprooted themselves from
their own ground, and fail too often to push out new roots in Greece.
An extreme example of this is provided by an American acquaintance of
mine, who taught at an American school and lived near me on Mt.
Lycabettus. When I got to know him he had been in Greece a year,
and spoke a few words only of the language. Thus his circle of friends
was confined to those who spoke English. He made little effort to learn
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