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The Great Island
‘Excuse me for saying so, boss, but you’re a penpusher. You had the
chance, you poor thing, once in your life to see a beautiful green stone
and you didn’t see it. By God, I used to sit down sometimes when I
had no work, and say to myself: “Does hell exist or not?” But yesterday
when I got your letter I said, “There must be a hell for certain penpushers!”
’ It was typical of Kanzantzakis that he should have tormented
himself for not making the quixotic Zorba-like gesture, and
regarded his failure to follow the green stone as a failure of courage.
His life was a succession of such mental struggles.
Zorba the Greek is nostalgic for Crete. It gains in tension in that
Kazantzakis, the Cretan, is throughout the book divorced from the
land, isolated in a sort of mental prison of the intellectual; whereas
Zorba, the Macedonian, is a man at harmony with the land, and himself
reflects the qualities of Crete which Kazantzakis lacked. But Zorba
the Greek is almost an entr’acte in his life work. The other Cretan, novel,
Freedom and Death, which tells the story of the last days of one Captain
Michalis in the 1889 revolt, is Kazantzakis’s greatest novel. He found
in the Cretans’ attitude to life and death – their levendia – an. example
of the stance a man should take up. It was only elsewhere that he felt
bound to interpret the Cretan attitude, to fit it into his scheme of
thought. ‘Crete, for me (and not, naturally, for all Cretans), is the
synthesis which I always pursue, the synthesis of Greece and the Orient.
. . . I feel a synthesis, a being that not only gazes on the abyss without
disintegrating, but which, on the contrary, is filled with coherence,
pride, and manliness by such a vision. This glance which confronts
life and death so bravely, I call Cretan.’ 1 This Cretan attitude, says
Kazantzakis, goes back to Minoan Crete with her bull dance, which is
the supreme example of it; for man confronts the bull (the abyss) and
plays with him joyfully. So Kazantzakis thought, and if he imposed his
own ideas too rigidly on to history, if he got too much out of the levendia
of the unassuming Cretans, no harm was done. All theorizing is kept
out of the novel. And if perhaps the novel is in some ways unrealistic,
the characters too elemental, that was the price paid for the power
and range of Freedom and Death. The book was Kazantzakis’s debt to
his country, with which he was in love. In Freedom and Death Crete is
the Mother. In the Odyssey she is a mistress:
For, many-breasted, shameless, nude, Crete’s body spread
Her practised thighs amid the waves, swarming with merchants.
Kazantzakis died in 1957 in Germany. He is buried in the Martinengo
bastion of the Venetian walls which surround Heraklion. Crete is very
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