Patrick White on Greece, and Love-Hate for his "Other Country".

I have always been interested in what other serious foreign writers about Greece have to say about their feelings for the country. Many of them seem to get a lot of things wrong, perhaps because they don't understand the language or the country very well (μιλάνε όλοι...)

From Lord Byron to Patrick White, one is struck by the intensity of their alternating and often jaundiced "Love-Hate" emotions and critical comments.

Patrick White (1912-1990), the Australian novelist and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature has many contentious observations on Greece in Flaws in the Glass, A Self-Portrait, 1981. 

The title essay concerns his experiences at the end of a year in Greece at the end of World War II. He was aware that some of his views might be interpreted as "elitist sentiments" at the time of publication, in 1981. "I have to admit to a bitter nature", he writes. He describes himself as "a lapsed Anglican egotist agnostic pantheist occultist existentialist would-be though failed Christian Australian". 

 “By degrees I saw myself as the beachcomber all foreigners become when they settle in Greece – tolerated, but never much more than a joke".

"When I sailed from Piraeus I was still painfully haunted by the thin trickle of a tune squeezed through the concertina-player’s chest as he stumped through the streets winding around the Lykavittos, and the almost solid blast of perfume from stocks on the fields fringing the city. All this is gone by now. Jerry-built apartment blocks stand in the fields where the stocks grew; exhaust fumes from unmufflered cars cannot escape from the labyrinth of Lykavittos. Never were there such victims of progress as contemporary Greeks. Peasants who sold their fields in Thessaly and Thrace live like battery fowls on their steel and concrete balconies, or expose themselves to television in the cells behind, in every interior the same box flickering the same message. They tell themselves they are happy. They are prosperous, at least for the time being, stuffed with macaroni, fried potatoes, and barbecued meat. Livery and neurotic. The human contacts of village life are of the past, along with those tough, golden, classic hens scratching freely amongst the dust and stones.”

On Salonika (and other later journeys in Greece, from the essay Journeys):

“Ancient ruins and Byzantine mosaics fail to distract the mind from the air of Slav menace on the city’s northern rim".

"Lacerations alternating with visions, is this what hooks the most perverse Grecophile…the Greek is never wholly unconscious of the echoes from the torture chamber in which his psyche is a permanent victim. Initiated into cruelty by Turk and German he is not above torturing his fellow Greek, which rebounds to him as self-torture".

"Most Greek eyes wear an expression of fatality, as though brooding over disasters, personal, historic, and those still in store for them".

"Those of the Greek peasantry who have resisted selling their houses and land, and who have remained locked into their traditions on island and mountain fortresses, are the true nobility of Greece".

"Over and over, during these journeys and after, when M. tells me I hate Greece, I cannot explain my love...Greece is the greatest love-hate for anyone genuinely hooked…Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her”.

Who can really claim to understand Greece? 

Patrick White had few good things to say about the UK, if that's any consolation. "It was a long time before I was conscious of connecting boredom with undiluted Anglo-Saxon blood". In "State of the Colony", an ABC-TV interview of 1981, published in Patrick White Speaks, 1990, White says,

"Today there's a political reason underlying everything that is done...Music is supposed to be apolitical. Recently I was asked to become patron of a music organisation formed in London to help young Australian musicians living in England. I was told it would strengthen the ties between our countries, I had to point out that their aim was political and that as an Australian Republican I thought these ties should be cut".

In his essay "Greece - My Other Country" (1983), also included in Patrick White Speaks, White calls Greece his other country, "not that I haven't been frequently disgusted by some of its material aspects, as those who have read my books will know". 

"Whatever Greece has endured in the past is nothing to the concert of suffering she may be called on to share with the rest of Europe".

Perhaps Patrick White's views were deeply influenced by those of Manoly Lascaris.

Vrasidas  Karalis, in his "Recollections of Mr. Manoly Lascaris", 2008. quotes from one of his own many conversations with Lascaris:

Lascaris: "You are from the old Greece and have never felt what it means to leave behind the port of Smyrna, silently saying a long and irrevocable good-bye. My family did exactly that. I live with these memories to this day. And who was responsible for this? Greek politicians! And what happened to them? They thrived and prospered and still rule the country. We are a nation unable to face the truth; isn't this enough to condemn us for ever? We have not been pierced by the sharp nails of conscience. Our forehead is wrinkled only by the sun. Thinking is not a part of our existence, We live in the mythological space of fairy tales".

Manoly told Vrasidas that he admired the Anglo-Saxon character "that frightening interiority, full of moral dilemmas and guilty secrets. We Mediterraneans have been devastated by the blue serenity of our childhoods. Even if we went through disasters and catastrophes we have remained untouched by the results of our own works. Hence we can never repent."

"We can never repent...we Greeks lack an internal life, the soul stuff, the stuff of personal history. You know that although I have tried many times, I've never found any autobiographies in Greek? This is really sad: no interiority, no internal conflicts, no sense of the dichotomy within us".

Shallow is a strangely inappropriate word Lascaris also uses.

Shallow? Kazantzakis, Cavafy, Seferis, Ritsos, Theotokis? Hardly!