• PETER BIEN •

From 18 to 85

Chronicling a Fortunate Life Graced by Books, Trees, Music, Family, Quakers . . . and Greeks

EKDOTIKOS OIKOS TERPNI

Ekdotikos Oikos Terpni

207 Waddell Road

Riparius, NY 12862

© 2015, 2017 by Peter Bien

All rights reserved

DOI: 10.1349/ddlp.2572

CONTENTS

Prologue

1948

Harvard University

1949

Harvard

1950

Harvard, Haverford College

1951

Haverford, Riparius

1952

Haverford, Holland

1953

Rochester

1954

Rochester

1955

Woodbrooke College, Edinburgh, Thessaloniki, Honeymoon

1956

Columbia University

1957

Columbia

1958

Columbia, Bristol University

1959

Bristol, Thessaloniki, Athens, Riparius

1960

Columbia, Riparius

1961

Columbia, Riparius, Dartmouth

1962

Dartmouth College, Riparius

1963

Dartmouth, Riparius

1964

Dartmouth, Athens, Crete, Firewalkers, Aghia Triadha

1965

Dartmouth, Riparius

1966

Dartmouth, Riparius

1967

Dartmouth, Thessaloniki, Athens, Mt. Athos, Colonels’ Coup, Woodbrooke

1968

Dartmouth, Riparius

1969

Dartmouth, Riparius

1970

Dartmouth, Ireland, Woodbrooke, Ai Yanni

1971

Woodbrooke, Kallithea, London

1972–1974

Dartmouth, Riparius

1975

Athens College, Woodbrooke, Riparius, Dartmouth

1976

Dartmouth, Riparius, Birmingham for Videos

1977

Dartmouth, Pendle Hill, Tempe, Riparius

1978

Lubbock, Oberlin, Montreal, Riparius, Glens Falls Hospital

1979

Dartmouth, Riparius, Thessaloniki, Cruise, Athens, Woodbrooke

1980

Dartmouth, Riparius, Athens

1981

Dartmouth, Riparius

1982

Dartmouth, Riparius, Cruise

1983

Harvard, University of Melbourne, Tahiti, Dartmouth

1984

Dartmouth, Riparius, Rutgers Lectures

1985

Dartmouth, Riparius, Athens, cruise, Holland, Woodbrooke, Sweden

1986

Dartmouth, New York, London, Riparius

1987

Chicago, Geneva, Thessaloniki, Athens, Crete, Riparius, Dartmouth

1988

Dartmouth, Riparius, New Orleans

1989

Dartmouth, Kinhaven, Riparius

1990

Dartmouth, Riparius, Kinhaven, Pendle Hill, Sydney, Adelaide

1991

Dartmouth, Kinhaven, Riparius, Ireland, England, Spain, Pendle Hill

1992

Dartmouth, Riparius, Kinhaven, Pendle Hill

1993

Dartmouth, Pendle Hill, London, Riparius, Kendal

1994

Dartmouth, Pendle Hill, Riparius, London, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, San Diego

1995

Dartmouth, Pendle Hill, Woodbrooke, Glasgow, Thessaloniki, Aghia Triadha, Riparius

1996

Dartmouth, Pendle Hill, London, Athens, Hitchcock Hospital, Riparius, Glasgow, Thessaloniki, Crete

1997

Dartmouth Retirement, Pendle Hill, Riparius, London, Thessaloniki, Crete

1998

Pendle Hill, Jakarta, Sweden, Kinhaven, Riparius, Hanover, Thessaloniki

1999

Hanover, Pendle Hill, San Francisco, Princeton, Riparius

2000

Hanover, Princeton, Pendle Hill, Riparius, Thessaloniki, Sydney

2001

Hanover, Princeton University, Riparius, Pendle Hill, Vancouver

2002

Hanover, Thessaloniki, moved to Kendal, Riparius, Pendle Hill

2003

Kendal, Thessaloniki, cruise, Riparius, Pendle Hill, Athens, Crete

2004

Kendal, Princeton, Columbia University, Pendle Hill, Athens, Crete, Riparius, Kinhaven, Thessaloniki

2005

Kendal, Brown University, Pendle Hill, Riparius, Tucson, Athens, Bangkok

2006

Kendal, Riparius, Colorado Springs

2007

Kendal, Athens, University of Crete, Riparius, Würzburg, London, Canterbury, Thessaloniki

2008

Kendal, Tempe, Santa Barbara, Pendle Hill, Riparius, Thessaloniki, Crete

2009

Kendal, Thessaloniki, Crete, Pendle Hill, Riparius, Tempe, Vancouver

2010

Kendal, Santa Barbara, Riparius, Sedona, Berkeley, Pendle Hill

2011

Kendal, Tempe, Riparius

2012

Kendal, Riparius, Thessaloniki, Komotini, Kinhaven, Athens, Crete

2013

Kendal, London, Thessaloniki, Riparius

2014

Kendal, Toronto, Riparius, Santa Barbara

2015

Kendal, Riparius

APPENDIX: From 85 On

2015

Riparius, Atlanta

2016

Hanover, Riparius, Athens, Herakleion

PROLOGUE

I did not start the journal that follows—more properly, the “commonplace book”—until I entered Harvard as a freshman at the age of 18 years and 4 months. A great deal happened in the previous 18 years for which I have only the most meager records; thus there is no sense in trying to trace those years in any definitive manner. All I can do here is to elicit haphazardly from memory whatever has survived there and can now be evoked.

From the time of my parents’ first residence in Woodside, where my father established his medical practice in 1927, we do have some old 16-mm. movies. My only personal memory of those years (ages zero to about six) was of being horribly frightened by the stump of a man’s amputated arm (or maybe leg) when I glimpsed it across the street. We then moved to Sunnyside, on the other side of Queens Boulevard, occupying a sixth-floor apartment on the corner of 43rd Avenue and 46th Street, the same building in which my father now established his pediatric office, sharing the space with the obstetrical office of Dr. Bernard Davidoff. I began my elementary school education at P.S. 150, a short walk down 43rd Avenue to 41st Street. Luckily, this was one of the New York City elementary schools that included, then as still now, a “gifted and talented program” for students who qualified, which I did. I don’t remember any details, except that my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. (or Miss) Musnik (if I remember her name correctly) was exceptional.

What followed sixth grade was a problem. Normally, students from P.S. 150 would go to P.S. 125 in Woodside, apparently not a good place at all, and certainly one that lacked a gifted and talented program. My parents, teaming up with four or five other sets of parents, applied to the school superintendent, and amazingly the entire group received permission to send their children to a very special school (no. 69, I believe) in Jackson Heights for grades 7 and 8. So I traveled there by “subway” (actually elevated) every day. This school was marvelous, at least for those in the gifted and talented program. The “project method” was used. I still have the results: several books I completed owing to on-site research, one on the horrors of tenement housing on the Lower East Side, another on the excesses of people who apparently cared more for their pet dogs than for human beings. In addition, the school prepared me to do well enough on entrance exams to the Bronx High School of Science to be offered admission there. Others in the Sunnyside group who were privileged to go to P.S. 69 were Eugene Girden, Arthur Kaledin, Buzzy Oppenheim. Allen Schleifstein, Freddy Mann, and Daniel Wilkes, if I remember correctly.

Those years in what was then called “junior high school,” and later in high school, were enlivened by Friday evening square dancing in Manhattan at the headquarters of the Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park West, lots of old-time movies at the Museum of Modern Art, newscasts with parents at the Trans-Lux Theater on Madison and 60th, horseback riding with my father, New York Philharmonic Children’s Concerts in Carnegie Hall with my mother, followed by a Broadway soda in Schrafft’s, introduction to the Metropolitan Opera thanks to Uncle Bill dressed in top hat and tails, bicycle rides to LaGuardia airport to watch the PanAm clippers land on water, second row seats at Lewishon Stadium with father whenever Artur Rubinstein played Tchaikovsky, summers at Atlantic Beach until age ten, then Brant Lake Camp beginning at age eleven, and lots of tennis in the club in Sunnyside near our home—we had moved from the apartment on 46th Street to a three-storey house, 3902 47th Street, on the corner at 39th Avenue, and my father had established his own office in another house on the corner of 43rd Avenue and 47th Street, both in the famous planned community called Sunnyside Gardens, built between 1924 and 1929 and now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Our house was very special, designed by Viktor Harasty: playroom in the cellar with a ping pong table on which Paul Davidoff and I enjoyed 100-game matches; living room, kitchen, and dining room on the first floor, with an open porch extending into our small private garden in back, which was massively extended by the block-long and block-wide communal garden behind it; three bedrooms and bath on the 2nd floor; and, best of all, my huge room with Harasty-designed furniture on the 3rd floor, a large writing-table in front of the double windows that faced toward the Long Island Railroad tracks and beyond them the huge boxing ring where Joe Lewis and others fought in those days. One very negative incident came when I went to Allen Schleifstein’s birthday party and was maliciously fed whiskey after whiskey by Alien’s father. I became hopelessly inebriated but was able somehow to walk at least part of the way home, vomiting constantly in the street, and also on the nice gray carpet of our house. Two friends, maybe Buzzy and Arthur, got me upstairs to bed, where I was discovered in the morning by my parents. That very good lesson has kept me ever since then from overdrinking.

Starting, I think, at about age 13, I went every Easter vacation with some of these same friends on an extended bicycle trip, sometimes ten days in duration, staying overnight in youth hostels. One itinerary took us from New Bedford up Cape Cod to Provincetown, to Boston by boat, and then back to New Bedford. Another took us to Harrisburg and Gettysburg, still another from Danbury (I think) to Brant Lake Camp. An aborted one was with Mickey Heyman and Max Steuer, starting at Buffalo, but the gears broke on their bikes and we had to come back by train. Finally, probably in my junior year in high school, Buzzy and I cycled to Oberlin to look over the college and, deciding that we could never exist for four years on terrain that was so completely flat, turned around and cycled back without going for any of the interviews we had arranged.

I have no memories of classes at the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York City’s select schools then, as now. The principal was Morris Meister, who founded the school in 1938 and headed it until 1958. I remember no other names. My father lectured there once in the evening, probably on a pediatric subject. I do remember the swimming pool, climbing the stairs to go to class, the long subway ride every morning and afternoon, and especially the tennis—I was on the school team. There was a major problem: I had no interest in science. This was remedied, thank goodness, when for some reason that eludes me, my father managed to get me accepted to Deerfield Academy for my senior year. There I found a wonderful teacher of English literature, Richard Warren Hatch, and discovered my true interest—not in numbers, rocks, fauna, flora, and certainly not in chemistry, but in words. Deerfield for me was too good to be true, perhaps because I was there only for one exciting year, and never suffered the ennui of boys enrolled there for all four years. I debated in a tuxedo, played soccer and especially tennis (again on the team), skied a bit, wrote fanciful pieces for the school newspaper such as one on the music of steam radiators, made good friends, and graduated academically number 1 in my class. And of course that’s what led to Harvard. Mr. Frank Boyden, the legendary headmaster, simply informed me that I would be going to Harvard. I never applied in any formal way; in those days headmasters decided who would go where. I think I remember receiving four A’s in my first term at Harvard, which speaks well for Deerfield’s training. Surely the love of reading and writing that manifests itself in the journal that follows was nurtured at Deerfield by the general atmosphere and especially by Mr. Hatch.

1948

Cambridge, Massachusetts

November 28–December 31

Sunday, November 28, 1948

Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts

So much of real significance has been happening since I went to Deerfield in September 1947 that I feel I will be doing myself an injustice if some of it at least is not written down. Perhaps it is not that the things that have happened to me at and after Deerfield are so much more extraordinary than those that happened in the seventeen years before Deerfield. But whether they are or not, I think it is true that only since last year have I seriously begun to think about life and about myself and my future. No doubt this awakening has come with maturity.

To evaluate my year at Deerfield would require extended thought and analysis. All I can say now is that I think it completely changed me down to the core—brought me out of my shell, so to speak. This is not surprising, for Deerfield was the first time I had been away from home—that is, in an environment different in origin, makeup, and attitude from that in which I was placed at home, at school previous to going away, and at Brant Lake Camp. I have little doubt at this writing that what is typified by Deerfield is superior to all that was typified by my childhood associations.

Harvard is still another world. Perhaps it mixes a little of the two environments of which I have spoken. I have been here a little more than nine weeks, not a very long time. Although I feel very much at home here I still have been unable to evaluate the school and my position in it: Harvard is still an enigma to me. I think, however, that I have taken the first step toward approaching a solution, which is one of the reasons that have caused me to begin this log.

It is Sunday night and I have just finished quite a week. Last Saturday was the Yale football game, which we won handily. I took Carolyn Taylor to the game and then to a party in the room, supper, and the Freshman Dance. It was good to see the boys from Yale: John Randau, Rick Verrill, Steve Warack, Bruce Geller, Steve Stulman, Jonathan Rinehart, and Jerry Davidoff. We all, John Harvey and Steve Baran included, had a rip-roaring weekend, although only Steve got drunk. Alan Fischel’s roommate, a former Exeter squash player, John Koenig, came up, but Alan neglected to drop in on either Artie Kaladin or myself, which wasn’t a very nice thing for him to do.

Coming fast upon the Yale game was Thanksgiving, Thursday the 25th. I took the train home Wednesday night and got talking to an upper-classman whose father is a Pittsburg pediatrician. This doctor had just been at the Atlantic City convention. I knew Dad hadn’t gone. He is still too disturbed to let himself go into the rah-rah of a convention. Too bad he couldn’t have gone to Deerfield! I hope he will be convinced to make the trip to Zurich in 1950, but right now I doubt it. Anyhow, I got home about midnight. New York was quite nice at that hour. The next morning Laird Barber called, inviting me to the Philharmonic Friday afternoon, and it was with regret that I informed him I would be going back to Cambridge early Friday morning. Our conversation was cut short because he had to go to church. How much our family has missed by not observing, at least in act if not in conviction, the religious ritual. But that is a gigantic topic. I hurried over to the Davidoffs’ new apartment at 880 Fifth Avenue, to see Paul. Their place is very nice, with a splendid view, but I still do not like apartments. A man has got to have some ground at least. Paul apparently doesn’t fit in too well at Allegheny. He expressed a desire to transfer for his junior and senior years. It’s too bad. If he can get a little serious study into him he can really go places. The whole Davidoff family is very interesting. Despite Dad, I like them all very much, especially Jerry, who, incidentally, has been spending a good deal of time in Cambridge.

The purpose of my returning for Thanksgiving was, of course, to be with the family for the big banquet. This was the first time in many years that everyone was there: Abe & Irene with Emmy; Irv, Clarice & Amy; Grandma; Will, Gertrude & Peter; Joan & Jimmy, and all of us Biens. It is really a fine family, a credit to America and to Grandma’s seed. I cannot say as much for the other side, except, of course, for Dad and perhaps (although I wonder) Saul & Eddy. The dinner was superb, mother and Grandma being up to their usual proficiency as chefs. Gertrude told me she plans to send young Peter to Deerfield. I hope—I hope—that her wish may be consummated. After all, it will give me a wonderful excuse to visit the school. Abe and Irene gave me a fine edition of Thoreau’s Walden, about which I’ll have more to say presently. I stayed up quite late playing the piano—I must find some way not to let all my musical training go to waste.

As I rode back on the plane—the best way to travel—I seemed to feel a little more secure in my position at Harvard. The desire struck me to do some study of my own. If it is within or relative to the scope of my courses, all the better. If it is completely afield, no matter. First I must finish Thoreau, then read The Education of Henry Adams and Albert Schweitzer’s work on Bach. A fine project for an extended period is to drive out my sublime ignorance in the field of religion. I’ll never be at peace with myself until my religious problems are solved one way or the other. As it stands now, I plan to keep my eyes and ears open in that respect (and others too, I hope) while I am in college, exposing myself to all doctrines and denominations (this I have not carried out as the Park Street Congregational Church is my constant Sunday night habitat, along with the companionship of Johnny Taylor). Philosophy, too, I must explore: right now everything that deals with the soul, not the flesh, and therefore is more important, more profound, more satisfying, more worthwhile. I am floating further and further away from the safe landing of medicine, law, etc., etc., and am now in a sea of question marks and blindness—a precarious position—but if I float long enough and in the right direction I believe I will arrive at the unfamiliar and far-off destination: happiness and satisfaction. No, at least judging from my opinion of my biology course, I shall never become a doctor, and I think it is best that I do not.

Now that I’m back in Cambridge I think I had better get to work, at least until Christmastime.

I decided to write my theme on “Was Henry Adams a Failure?” in the form of a Town Meeting Forum. Yesterday I had the whole argument clear in my mind before playing squash, but when I attempted to write I was barren. The only thing left to do was what I always do when my mind ceases to operate: study biology. I had hoped to get to bed early and get up in time for breakfast today (Thoreau’s influence) but got involved in a discussion over the merits of classical music and jazz with John Harvey.

Up at 10:00 this morning. Thank God this wasn’t another wasted day. I listened to the Philharmonic this afternoon while reading Thoreau (at least the radio was on), and attended an evangelistic service at Park Street. The fervor of this church and congregation, the vitality of the ministers and the spontaneous response of the worshippers, is food for one’s heart. Somehow I hope that some day soon I will share their enthusiasm (I have been enthusiastic over so few things), but right now I can only look at religion with a coldly intellectual eye. I’ve got to learn more about it, anyway, before accepting or rejecting it.

I’m sure that Thoreau will influence my thinking, at least temporarily. Already (and I’ve only read a hundred pages so far) his ideas about the value of money as opposed to freedom and study have taken hold. I think I would like to go to Deerfield upon graduation, perhaps after taking a year’s postgraduate work for a Master’s degree. There, although the salary would be meager, at least I could put most of it away, for expenses could be brought down to a minimum. A few years of this would give me enough money to travel about for several years, working in various places, meeting new people, amassing ideas. Only then would I think of settling down, but I do not think I shall ever settle so far down that I cannot get up again.

Tuesday, November 30, 1948

Cambridge

The study of Thomas Aquinas has proved to be quite fascinating. Professor Beer gave one of his most satisfying lectures today in trying to explain and summarize the parts of Aquinas we are reading, but much of it is still incomprehensible to me. One very nice thing, however, is the correlation between this and Professor Demos’s philosophy lectures, for Aquinas constantly refers to, and uses, the terminology of Aristotle. Things like form and matter, particulars and universals, efficient, formal, and final causes would be utterly meaningless to me if I were not getting this smattering of Aristotle. The point of Professor Beer’s that most struck me was his plea for tolerance. “When you read Aquinas,” he said, “you must abandon your prejudices.” He said this, of course, because most of the class are Protestants. Now this is important—it is reasonable and not unusual for an intelligent and sincere person, not a superstitious or fearful person, honestly to believe in Christianity as the Catholics see it. How different is this from what I was taught at home. Now St. Thomas makes an excellent case, on a strictly intellectual level, for the existence of God (Question 2, article 3). He also shows insight into everyday problems: “. . . from the remembrance of the past, and understanding of the present, we gather how to provide for the future” (Q. 22, a. 1). This pleases me, for I can honestly say I realized its truth several months before reading Aquinas. When I first came to Harvard I was quite confused, and even now still am. There’s nothing wrong with my being in this state, provided that it does not last too long. Over the years, I have had pushed into me various facts, figures, philosophies, and other assorted ideas. There is no unity, no coherence among these ideas. My task at Harvard is not primarily to gain new and additional facts but to catalogue those that I already have, and to clean house.

A second point from Aquinas interests me. It is, strangely enough, a point of theology (Q. 23, a. 6): “God does not permit some to fall without raising others” (cf. Job xxxiv. 24: “He shall break in pieces many and innumerable, and make others to stand in their stead. Thus men have been substituted in the place of the fallen angels; and the Gentiles in that of the Jews”). No comment needed.

A third point (Q. 48, a. 1): “Evil makes better known the greatness of the good,” and similarly (Q. 48, a. 2), “God and nature . . . make what is better in the whole, but not what is better in every single part, except in relation to the whole.” I question, therefore, the utopians, the Communists, the World Federalists. The desire to eliminate evil is unnatural and therefore is evil itself. But you can carry this too far also.

A fourth point (Q. 48, a. 6): “Good consists in act, not in potentiality.” By this I am led to believe that Henry Adams was a failure, Henry Thoreau a success.

Wednesday, December 1, 1948

Cambridge

A fine day, except for squash. Professor Demos was provocative as usual: The end is not living, but thinking. Living is a means to the end of thought. Therefore, the biological necessities of life are inferior to and less important than the continuance of thought. We are led to believe that a life of contemplation is the highest pinnacle that man can reach.

Harry Osmer and I went to a fine performance of Handel’s “Messiah.” This was by the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and Orchestra, and was a truly professional performance. I liked several of the choruses better than the renowned Hallelujah Chorus.

If I had to choose whether to lose my sight or my hearing, what would my decision be? Blindness deprives you of things; deafness deprives you of human relations. It would indeed be a difficult choice.

There are three ways of preparing a term paper. The first way is Rural Free Delivery: We deliver in rain, sleet, or hail, but no material. The second way is A & P: We have the goods but we don’t deliver. The third (and best) way is Special Delivery.

I need a good night’s sleep; otherwise I’d catch up on my letter writing, which is now way behind schedule.

Saturday, December 4, 1948

Cambridge

Last night John told me about how Mr. Boyden came to be a religious man. There were two incidents. (1) When he was an undergraduate at Amherst, Mr. Boyden found, one Sunday, that he was unprepared for a Latin test the following day. But the Lord would not have him study on Sunday! If he did not study, then surely the Lord would take care of him. Monday morning, Mr. Boyden memorized one passage from the long text for which he was responsible and, sure enough, the exam was on that very same passage. (2) Soon after his arrival at Deerfield, things looked terribly bleak for the school. Mr. Boyden received the invitation from another academy to be its headmaster, at any salary he should name. What was to be his decision? He flipped open the Bible and let his finger come down at random on the page that happened to be exposed. Just above his finger he read: “Stay in the land of adversity,” and so he did. And look at Deerfield now!

Dad seems to feel that the trouble he has been having in his eye may lead to blindness. I never realized it was that serious. It would really be a terrible thing. I think in Dad’s case it would be better that he lost his hearing than his sight, for contact with people has not played an overly important role in his life. Anyhow, let’s hope and pray that his fears are unrealized.

Aquinas’s treatise on law points up some differences between the old and new testaments, or what he calls the Old Law and the New Law. (1) It belongs to law to be directed to the common good. The Old Law is concerned with sensible and earthly good; the New Law with intelligible and heavenly good. Promises of temporal goods are contained in the Old Testament, but the promise of eternal life belongs to the New Testament. (2) It belongs to law to direct human acts according to the order of justice. The New Law directs our internal acts (Matt. 5:20), controls the soul, whereas the Old Law restrains the hand. (3) Most important, it belongs to law to induce men to observe its commandments. The Old Law does this by fear of punishment, the New Law by love. This last point is one that I surmised at Deerfield after reading selections from the Old Testament and then expounded in a book review for Mr. Hatch. There is no doubt of the differences between the two testaments, even though traces of the New Law may be found in the Old Testament. Religion is taking on more meaning for me since I have studied the Catholic doctrine of medieval times, Plato, Aquinas, etc. It is really not too different from philosophy; at least Protestantism (which is of questionable “religious” makeup) is not. The outstanding difference of both Catholicism and Judaism is that they ask you to accept the explanation of man’s existence on faith; philosophy depends on reason. That is why I do not think I can ever accept Catholicism. As for Judaism, besides the argument already mentioned, there is another that makes it not for me. That is, that it demands that I have some conception of a God—an invisible, immortal, omnipotent, omniscient being who “patterned man after His own image.” Can I do this? The Christian means of bringing God into the flesh through Jesus, making Him part of recognizable experience and making Him credulous, is more acceptable. I have now arrived at the point where I definitely think religion is of importance, but only religion of the Protestant variety—that is, philosophy combined with ceremony and tradition—and as such I think I was fortunate to have received my religion from Protestant sources. Perhaps the greatest argument for the importance of religion is that Dad, always the ardent atheist, is now coming to believe in an organized ethical code—i.e., religion. I’m overjoyed that he never insisted on my receiving Sunday School training or the like. Religion is too fundamental a thing to have pushed into one at childhood when no resistance is forthcoming. Just as infant baptism is ridiculous, so is the installation of religion itself. A man must accept or reject it on his own, when he has reached the mature, rational state.

I have two big themes coming up, one in English, the other in Social Sciences. The latter of course will be on Aquinas. I’m afraid the English theme will have to be also, although if I had time I would like to write on Thoreau or Bach or on some of the other things that have been running through my mind lately. My trouble is that I do not have even a small grasp of real, genuine interest(s). I get approximately the same grades in all subjects, like or dislike them primarily because of the professor, and have not followed up one field anywhere beyond the most elementary stage. When will the “click” of which Dad speaks decide to click?

Bill King and a Washington friend came up from Yale for the weekend.

Sunday, December 5, 1948

Cambridge

Reinhold Niebuhr was guest preacher at chapel this morning. For some inexplicable reason, everyone in Harvard became religious, Memorial Church being literally filled to the rafters with standees three deep and the aisles full of eager students who spent the hour on the floor. I do not think that many came out disappointed. The sermon sounded more like one of Professor Demos’s lectures than like a sermon. Niebuhr is evidently a follower of Toynbee, for his entire expostulation echoed A Study of History. Two problems were posed: Why do the righteous continue to suffer, and how potent does the creative minority of a society have to be to keep that society from disintegrating? We have come a long way in rewarding the righteous and condemning the wicked, largely because of our systems of justice. When every jury and every judge is honest, no man has to be a coward. He can state his case and if he is righteous he will not suffer punishment. Moreover, righteousness and historical success do not always mean the same thing. The righteous man may be “punished” in the narrow sense of the word by not being a success historically, but in a larger sense he is being rewarded with the serenity and opportunity for consideration of the finer and higher questions of life that he so craves. Man must never have righteousness as an envisioned end. Many spend their lives trying to convince others how righteous they are. They see moral ambiguities in their own society and, instead of courageously and humbly fighting same, they latch on to what to them seems to solve these ambiguities—namely, Communism—but what in reality poses much greater problems of discrimination and tyranny. The same can hold true for World Federalists, although we agree that many may be sincere. A society, in the last analysis, always breaks from within, not from without. It happened to France, which has no internal proletariat willing to carry the burden of her past sins and mistakes as regards Vichy, etc. but is instead worrying about the outside. It can happen to us if we get too excited about Russia.

Thursday, December 9, 1948

Cambridge

The Union Committee held a big evening. First a jazz concert, then a movie, then speeches by the candidates for the Smoker Committee. I stayed for the jazz concert. It was really nice—all the boys getting “into the swing.”

Friday, December 10, 1948

Cambridge

Finished the first draft of a story about the owl, which is a complete plagiarism from beginning to end, but I’m sure that Mr. Leacock will excuse me. This owl affair is really one of the bright spots here. Whenever you pass by the tree it has taken for its home, people are staring up and exclaiming “There he is!” This owl apparently left his country habitat and took up residence in the Yard, where he slaughters pigeons merrily every night. The Cambridge police offered to shoot it, or remove it back to the country, but the ASPCA put up a protest. Interfering would be “against God’s law”! So the owl stayed. Students’ owl and pigeon associations have been formed. The pigeon association announced that it would appear in tuxedos yesterday at noon and shoot the owl with bows and arrows, so as not to violate any firearms law, but an emergency squad of policemen placed around the tree thwarted this attempt. The owl so far is still marauding.

Got the first letter from Bobby Gerston today. I think I’d like to go back to Camp, provided I don’t have a bunk, so I will be able to do some serious and enjoyable reading. Brant Lake’s too wonderful a place to lose.

December 31, 1948

Cambridge

Christmas vacation is almost over. This is New Year’s Eve and I am upstairs in my study, the family, Uncle Abe, etc., downstairs, from the sound of things, square-dancing. I have before me André Malraux’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli. I’ve never seen or read anything that so closely approximates myself. Disraeli as a youth, and I, have a great deal in common, except that he was a good deal more precocious.

“He was sent to school very young . . . to the charge of the Rev. John Potticany . . . There, a surprising fact was revealed to him: he was not of the same religion or the same race as his companions. This was difficult to understand. Yet Ben’s house . . . was certainly an English house. His father, with . . . his correct and pleasing speech, was an English writer. Ben had learned to read in English books, the songs that had cradled his sleep were English songs, but here, in this school, he was made to feel that he was not like the others. He was Jew, and his companions, with one exception, were not Jews. How mysterious this was! The Jews, they are the people the Bible speaks of, who crossed the Red Sea, lived in captivity in Babylon, and built the Temple of Jerusalem. Whatever had he to do with them? . . . Once a week a rabbi came to teach them to read Hebrew, an incomprehensible tongue which was written backwards, with characters like the heads of nails. The young Disraeli knew that these practices held him apart from a mysterious communion. . . . This pained him. He was proud. He would have liked to be admired in everything. . . . But the pain came especially from the fact that he did not like Sergius (the other Jew). It was hateful to be thus linked to an inferior being. The boys to whom Ben attached himself had flaxen hair and blue eyes.

“In the evening, in their study, Sarah (his sister) and Ben used often to talk of this strange problem of the Jews and the Christians. Why were they seemingly reproached with an origin that had been none of their choosing, and over which they were powerless? When they asked their father for explanation, Isaac Disraeli, the Voltairean philosopher, shrugged his shoulders. It was all meaningless. Superstitious. He, for his part, felt no shame in being a Jew. On the contrary, he spoke with pride of the history of his race. But he held it utterly ridiculous to maintain, in an age of reason, practices and beliefs that had been adapted to the needs of a tribe of Arab nomads several thousands of years earlier. Like his own father, and to give him pleasure, he remained inscribed at the synagogue and paid his dues. . . . But he believed in no dogma and practiced no rite.”

Here the narrator relates how Isaac engages in a quarrel with the synagogue that led to his request “that henceforward his name should be deleted from the list of the faithful . . .” “Although he had ceased to be a Jew, he had not become a Christian, and in this intermediate state he was quite at ease. One of his friends, however, Sharon Turner the historian, pointed out to him that it would be advantageous to the children if they conformed with the religion of the English majority. . . . Isaac Disraeli let himself be persuaded. Catechisms and prayer books made their appearance in the house, and one after another the children were led off to St. Andrews Church and there baptized. Benjamin was then thirteen.”

And further, along secular lines: “But first of all, what did he want? [This at the age of fifteen.] With the turmoil of the little schoolboy world . . . had come glimpses . . . of clear and vivid landscapes. . . . Life, it seemed to him, would be intolerable if he were not the greatest among men. . . . But who would explain life to him? Along which road should he turn his steps? Writing? . . . But so many great poets . . . only achieved fame after their death. For posthumous triumph Ben had no taste. . . .

“From the pitiless self-examination to which he gave himself over during the weeks that followed his return [from school], he first conclusion was that he was completely ignorant. It seemed necessary to reconstruct his genius, starting with the foundations. He mapped out a vast plan of work and allowed himself a year of retirement to rebuild his studies. . . . He liked the precept ‘Develop yourself: not for enjoyment but for action.’ . . . He was filled with admiration for the organization of the Catholic Church.

“[Mr. Disraeli] judged it necessary to intervene. He was anxious to direct his son to simpler and more practical ends. A friend . . ., a solicitor, offered to take Benjamin with him as his secretary. . . . But Benjamin shied at the prospect of being buried in lawyers’ chambers. ‘The Bar: pooh! Law and bad tricks till we are forty and then, with the most brilliant success, the prospect of gout and a coronet. Besides, to succeed as an advocate, I must be a great lawyer, and to be a great lawyer I must give up my chance of being a great man.’

“[Benjamin’s] reading had taught him that many great minds have failed because they have wanted to think alone and disdained the study of the mass of men. It was essential . . . to mix with the herd, to enter into its feelings, and humour its weaknesses.”

1949

Cambridge, Massachusetts

January–March 27

Bermuda

April 2–8

Sunnyside

April 10–16

Cambridge

April 17–May 4

Brant Lake Camp

Summer

Cambridge

October 29–December 12

Sunnyside

December 30–31

January 1, 1949

Cambridge

The following is part of a letter composed and supposed to go to Mr. Hatch. Whether or not I will send it I do not quite know. I hope I have enough courage to send it.

“One world was unmistakably opened to me at Deerfield, not only opened but introduced. That, strangely enough, was the world of religion. This new world presented a problem—I like to call it a problem—about which I have been thinking continually day and, I sometimes believe, at night too, in my sleep.

“I realized that I was different from the other boys insofar as I had not been raised in a Christian communion. That was all. It was entirely negative. It was not that as Jew I opposed, positively, the concept of Jesus as the Messiah or attended synagogue on Saturday instead of church on Sunday. I do neither. When you hesitated to serve me bacon when we lunched at your house, inquiring whether or not I was Orthodox, I was reminded of the ridiculousness of the situation. I am no more Jew than you are, except that I am born of Jewish parents or, to be truthful, I should say descended from Jewish grandparents. My father told you one morning that he was not religious but ir-religious. That was putting it mildly. He came from a fanatic home where religion could only be associated with unpleasantness. Every rule was observed. The head of the house was a tyrant. No playing cards, back from dates at ten, a beating for every transgression of ritual or rule—all in the name of God or, better, in the name of the utterly ignorant asses who run His affairs. As soon as Dad grew old enough to escape the family he unconditionally renounced and rejected his ancestral faith. He has remained convinced to date that theology is unnecessary and is more likely to harm than help. Yet, like yourself, he subscribes to the ethics that religion teaches.

“As a result of this, I had received no rites, no training, no indoctrination in any religion whatsoever—until Deerfield. True, I had played and lived with many Protestants and Catholics, although most of our family friends were and are Jewish, at least in birth or race or whatever you wish to call it. Again, these people differ from myself in their intense fear of the Gentile, so they are Jewish negatively, not positively, whereas I am non-Christian negatively, not positively. But before Deerfield I never regarded anyone as being Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. Those terms meant nothing to me, and in this secularized society religion was never discussed, at least not among children of grammar school age. At Deerfield, of course, I could not help feeling the difference. There I was in church singing hymns and hearing the world Christian twenty times a day and fifty times on Sundays. I must say I enjoyed every minute of my baptism, as it were. The things spoken about at the sings sounded good, the sermons, although sometimes infantile, echoed what I believed were noble thoughts and ideals that I rarely heard from any secular source. This should not be in the past tense, for my listening, my enjoying, and my being stimulated by preachers did not stop with Deerfield. For the most part (there have been exceptions) my religious experience has been through the mind rather than the heart. I am partial to religion because it does the most talking about issues that I consider vital today; because I agree in large part with Toynbee in his condemnation of over-secularization; because I think religion deserves the attention, at least the exposure, of intelligent minds; because in all fairness to myself, I must know and practice it before (and if) I wish to reject it. John Harvey’s father was a devout man. John examined the beliefs to which he was expected to subscribe, and rejected them. My father is an atheist. I am examining what was never in our household and I like it, for it is new and different and, I think, more good than bad. If I had to choose tomorrow I would accept it.

“Well now, that doesn’t sound like much of a problem. One might say ‘If you want to be religious, be religious. It’s your own affair.’ True enough, but the religion I know and like is New England Puritanical Congregational Calvinistic Protestantism. Yet I was most definitely down on Mr. Boyden’s list of Jews. There is nothing wrong with the Jewish religion, and I am sure, although I know nothing about it, that Judaism is every bit as good for its communicants as is Christianity for Christians. There are several reasons, however, why I do not believe I should join a Jewish congregation. There is my father’s boyhood misery; the fact that Christianity includes the misery; the fact that Christianity includes the whole of Judaism except as concerns the Messiah, and adds the New Testament teachings as well. The efficacy of Christianity lies in Jesus himself, whom I am willing to look up to as an example. I prefer love to retribution. I feel no allegiance or connection whatsoever with the Jewish people, although I am happy for them in the founding of Israel and respect and admire their intellectual and artistic achievements. I am living in a Christian country and a Christian civilization. Christianity is much more important than Judaism for the simple reason that it concerns ten times as many people.

“Naturally, there is a tremendous emotional conflict involved, for if and when I join a Christian denomination it will be quite a blow to my family and friends. I have more or less resolved to study and observe until I am well enough informed and convinced to make a decision. In any case, I am glad circumstances are what they are, for the decision will be all my own as it should be. What do you think?” (Never sent.)

January 10, 1949

Cambridge

Tawney’s conclusion is momentous: “Such a philosophy . . . that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success . . . may triumph or decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.” I thought it was communism and Christianity that were irreconcilable.

Listened to Don Giovanni excerpts today and want to see it.

January 11, 1949

Cambridge

I am now of the opinion that I must throw off everything I got at home as being far from truth. Security was presented as the greatest goal. I see how security defeats its end by stultifying. Frost says your life must be a wager—not your bottom dollar—but for moral stakes. Money was presented as synonymous with security. It became an end; it is an end at home. Not so. Plato knew it; Tawney after him. I’d like to make a lot of money but I want it to be incidental to whatever else I am doing. It seems now that I was often discouraged in my desires to do what I so wanted to: read, play music, think in my room. No, go out and play with the boys. Be normal. Who the hell wants to be normal? I see that spiritualization was missing, too. No man can build a life around medicine alone. Everything interpreted in psychiatric terms does naught but make a neurotic out of the listener, although I suppose science would call such a one normal. Bosh! Let psychiatry treat the mentally ill and give the rest of the world freedom to speculate. It’s trying to take over everything that biology, physics, and chemistry were kind enough to leave to the poet, philosopher, and minister. I am a reactionary and want little of it.

I must live on a farm. God give me strength enough to resist family and American materialistic capitalism enough to enjoy life. The important thing is to do and say what I want to, as I want to, impulsively. A little less rationalization and intellectualization about the future will go a long way.

Right now I’ve got to get my mind functioning again. It is overloaded. Evidence is the sudden loss of vocabulary and hesitation in speech. I’m concerned with weightier matters at present.

January 29, 1949

Cambridge

The last two weeks—that is, since classes ended and the examination period began—have been the best of the term. I have reconfirmed my belief in that one gets more satisfaction and pleasure from good intense work followed by a Friday or Saturday night off, than from the dilly-dally, half-and-half existence that we led hitherto. I did a good job on the Social Studies Review, but I’m afraid it won’t show too much on the exam. Received word of exemption from the rest of English, which pleases me very much even though I know honestly that it wasn’t deserved. Here, however, it doesn’t matter too much, for that course was a waste of time and I mean it. English C looks best to start in the fall and do all at once, so I think I’ll take Aikin’s philosophy with John. My biology, as always, is a chore, especially at review time, but I guess I owe it to myself to do well in it. One cannot really study for music. I’ll do that and the bio exam more by intuition and faith than anything else.

Deerfield has figured prominently in the last week. First, I finally, after about four months of procrastination, got a letter off to Mr. Hatch—3000 words dealing mostly with my bewilderment here at Harvard and touching briefly and superficially on the religious question. His answer was superb; it lifted me up to hope, optimism, happiness; it reconfirmed my desire to cease, at least temporarily, heading toward medicine. “And I do not think that the reaction should be to feel an urgency to specialize: that also will be a later capability, specialization, and the inevitable process of growing and maturing is something you cannot stop; it is bound to happen, and with it the sight clears, the various ways seem more distinct, and you find yourself able to make the choice. . . . The reaction should be to try to throw off the urgency of haste and pressure that is a part, an unfortunate part: that we must hurry, ever hurry, for time is short and we must grow up, must get to work, must do. It is the modern disease. . . . There will never be time enough for the active mind—never. No life is long enough to do all we want to do. No one who is athirst for knowledge ever slakes that thirst. Accept that, draw a deep breath, stow the awareness of human limitation deep, and calmly look around. Browse the field. And when and if you find reason and urge for specialization, for mastering a small corner of the field of human knowledge, then always also keep a section of the mind and a portion of the energy free for endless experimentation and forays into totally different and endlessly varied fields as a relief, as interim exploits, while you are specializing. . . . Above all, do the thing joyously and live while you do it.”

Mr. Hatch indeed has a sane and wholesome religious attitude. “. . . religion is not a church or denomination even if you chose to join one for the sake of companionship in worship or some concrete definition of creed; . . . religion is not a conversion. Because it is an inner alliance of mind and spirit, it is in its essence one’s own core and self, and so no one can create it for you. . . . The happiest people have a faith, and the feeling of a need for a faith seems to be instinctive in us. Christ’s philosophy sums up my beliefs, and the key word is LOVE . . .” Ditto!

Secondly, there was the Boston Alumni Dinner, with Lewis Perry, Mr. & Mrs. Boyden as speakers. Mrs. Boyden, in her charming simplicity and sincerity, spoke of her dogs, from Canute the Great Dane to Peter, my contemporary. The Head mourned the loss of Ed Bundy, who always called him “Frank” and left his estate, meager as it was at $1 a day, “to the boys.” Mr. Boyden described the new buildings, especially the electric-eye doors in the dining hall, which are there solely because of the headmaster’s insistence. He also sketchily recounted plans for the 150th anniversary—plans that were severely jolted by the defeat of Tom Dewey in the recent elections. Lewis Perry appreciates Deerfield and Mr. Boyden. I do too, I think. I wonder how many other alumni, teachers, and students know the privilege given them in being able to be associated with the School. “The Sons of Deerfield rally / in thoughts of boyhood days, / when in Pocumtuck’s valley / they sing thy songs of praise. / Deerfield, Deerfield, Deerfield—Hail . . .” I certainly am a sentimentalist.

The Brant Lake “Mirror” came today and was quite welcome. Goat [Bobby Gerston] will be Head Counselor. A new era has begun. I think I will go back again and see if I can’t do a lot of constructive reading. The summer of ’50 looks a good deal like Europe if we can get Dad to the Zürich conference. Perhaps that will whet my appetite for voyage and discourage me from ever returning to the beautiful serene security of BLC. I’d better get this one more year down in the Camp payroll. It may be the last for quite a while.

The coming weekend will be a humdinger. 1000 miles—N.Y., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington—in four days: parents, Tom Wilson, Jeanne Dinsmore, Eudgby [Eugene Girden], then back to Boston possibly in time to catch Jerry and Paul Davidoff before they end their Wellesley weekend.

Went to the Old Howard theater last night. Saw Rose la Rose do her stuff. She went about as far as she could go—absolutely nude. I enjoyed every minute of it and must go back. We sheltered college boys have been missing something methinks! Touché!

February 8, 1949

Cambridge

Vacation is over. The second semester has begun and I have just returned from an amazing weekend: rested, eager to begin correctly, happy, and determined to do things the way they should be done. Wow! Jeanne was wonderful. I like her immensely; she is vivacious, pleasant, intelligent, uninhibited, emotional, a good little girl. I arrived at Goucher Friday afternoon, coming from Haverford where I had spent the preceding eighteen hours with Tom Wilson, and Eugene and I had dinner with the girls. The college’s facilities, at least the interiors of the dormitories, are super deluxe; the atmosphere is like that of a prep school with the faculty making their stately entrance to the dining room before the school body, the saying of grace, the student waitresses, the perfect decorum at the meal. An informal dance Friday night was a “warm-up” for the Cotillion. Eudgby and I drove back to Chevy Chase, where we spent the night and were feasted the next day by Fritzy. We saw the Schiffs and the University of Maryland at College Park, which strikes me as being a glorified factory more on the order of Miami U. than of the great New England educational institutions. I certainly would not want to be either there or at Haverford, the wee tiny Quaker college, malgré its marvelous reputation and the enthusiasm that Tom shows for it. Harvard is more of a challenge. You have to fight to accomplish anything here, but if you win then your accomplishments are magnified accordingly, and if you lose then success at a place like Haverford is shallow.

I still—and I hope will continue to—enjoy dressing in a tux and literally bringing myself to a shine. The Cotillion was indeed fabulous, held in Baltimore’s swank hotel. But the important thing was that I was with Jeanne, for she, if I guess right, likes me very much, and what more could one ask?

Perhaps the sole blot was my hurried departure at 2 a.m. This got me in bed at Sunnyside by 6:30 a.m. Grandma and Irv were home. Grandma told us how fine she considered the Melishes of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights, whom she has heard preach. There is no doubt that what the vestry did was wholly unwarranted.

It was an amazingly full weekend, for aside from 1000 miles of travel, the reunions with Tom, Jeanne, and the Girdens, and a goodly visit home, I read, and read well: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (3 times), The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search for God by Bernard Shaw (all from John Harvey’s library), a lengthy condensation of John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, and a short story by Ben Ames Williams called “Steerageway.”

Perhaps the most memorable was Gunther’s. This was the story of the illness of his son Johnny, who was forced to leave Deerfield in ’46 but graduated, owing to home study, shortly before a brain tumor killed him. The boy was magnificent: courageous, hopeful, cheerful to the end; determined to satisfy at least part of his tremendous intellectual curiosity before the inexorable finale. His “Unbeliever’s Prayer”: “Almighty God / forgive me for my agnosticism, / for I shall try to keep it gentle, not cynical, / nor a bad influence. / And O! / if Thou art truly in the heavens, / accept my gratitude / for all Thy gifts / and I shall try / to fight the good fight. Amen.” He did. How ironical, though, that such a one as Johnny Gunther should die while the millions of worthless vulgar individuals survive. Gunther’s story makes one begin to appreciate the blessing of being alive, and to try to make oneself worthy of that blessing.

Says the author of the Rubaiyat:

Ah, fill the Cup: what boots it to repeat

How Time is slipping underneath our Feet;

Unborn to-morrow and dead YESTERDAY,

Why fret about them if TODAY be sweet!

One moment in annihilation’s waste,

One moment, of the well of life to taste—

The stars are setting and the Caravan

Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—oh, make haste!

How long, how long in infinite pursuit

Of this and that endeavor and dispute?

Better be merry with the fruitful Grape

Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

Further are interesting hedonistic expressions:

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse

I made a Second Marriage in my house;

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

For ‘Is’ and ‘Is-Not’ though with Rule and Line,

And ‘UP-AND-DOWN’ by Logic I define,

Of all that one should care to fathom, I

Was never deep in anything but—Wine.

Shaw’s Black Girl is a sane and realistic view of religion by one who questions not the teachings of Christ, but doubts that they have ever been practiced. He vehemently objects to the modern view of the Bible as sacred, as divine revelation. “. . . the Bible, scientifically obsolete in all other respects, remains interesting as a record of how the idea of God . . . develops from a childish idolatry of a thundering, earth-quaking, famine striking, pestilence launching, blinding, deafening, killing, destructively omnipotent Bogey Man, maker of night and day and sun and moon, of the four seasons and their miracles of seed and harvest, to a braver idealization of a benevolent sage, a just judge, an affectionate father, evolving finally into the incorporeal word that never becomes flesh, at which modern science and philosophy takes up the problem with its Vis Naturae, it Élan Vital, its Life Force, its Evolutionary Appetite, its still more abstract Categorical Imperative . . .” viz. The God of Noah, the God of Job, The God of Micah, lastly Jesus, “who dares a further flight. He suggests that godhead is something which incorporates itself in him: in himself, for instance. . . . the unadulterated (e.g. Swedenborg’s—that Jesus merely attempted to impersonate Jehovah) suggestion of Jesus is an advance on the theology of Micah; for Man walking humbly before an eternal God is an ineffective creature compared to Man exploring as the instrument and embodiment of God with no other guide than the spark of divinity within him. It is certainly the greatest break in the Bible between the Old and the New Testament.” Shaw proceeds to chronicle the subsequent corruption of the man Jesus: “. . . we find Paul holding up Christ to the Ephesians as ‘an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savour’, thereby dragging Christianity back and down to the level of Noah. . . . The death of Jesus helped to vulgarize his reputation and obscure his doctrine. [Jesus] was tortured and killed . . . by crucifixion . . . with the infinitely . . . hideous result that the cross, and the other instruments of his torture were made the symbols of the faith legally established in his name three hundred years later. . . . The case was further complicated by the pitiable fact that Jesus himself . . . had allowed Peter to persuade him that he was the Messiah . . . ‘Crosstianity’ became established on the authority of Jesus himself.”

The conclusion indeed confirms Toynbee’s: “The whole business is an amazing muddle, which has held out not only because the views of Jesus were above the heads of all but the best minds, but because his appearance was followed by the relapse in civilization which we call the Dark Ages, from which we are only just emerging sufficiently to begin to pick up the thread of Christ’s most advanced thought and rescue it from the mess the apostles and their successors made of it.” It is not Christ’s teachings which are at fault, but their interpretation.

I must read The Prophet again and take notes on it before trying to extract its many theses.

“Steerageway” is a story based on Mr. Boyden and Deerfield that won a $1000 prize. If this is the quality of money-writing, then the field looks good.

Saw “Symphony Pastorale” with John last night—an excellent French adaptation of André Gide’s story. Next week I shall take a vocational aptitude text given for experimental purposes by the College.

Let’s see what I can do this term! A resumption of vocabulary study would be a good sign. How about that, Pedro? Professor Demos had a heart attack and will not be able to continue with Philosophy 1. I hope Aiken’s course will suffice to replace the amazing Demos. I’ll continue, of course, with Bio, Music, and Social Science. Perhaps I’ll audit History 1—at least it will get me up in the morning.

Cory [Freshman tennis coach] didn’t send us to Linden Street after all, but merely officially declared us ineligible for the fall match, which I could not have possibly made anyway. We’ll continue at Hemenway, playing before 8:30 and receiving group instruction. This is more than satisfactory, and I only hope that I can bring my game back to the high level (for me) at which it was a month ago.

February 10, 1949

Cambridge

Read Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo at practically one sitting, and was damn glad when Socrates finally died.

Books are inordinately expensive: $5 for zoology alone, $20 in all this semester.

I’d like very much to finish the 450-page Voltaire “Age of Louis XIV,” though Professor Beer says we should read it selectively. I read every word: 215 pages of battles, and still more to come.

My picture in the “Register” is disgusting. Now for a hot shower and shampoo.

February 11, 1949

Cambridge

Dad sent me a copy of Death Be Not Proud, which I cannot refrain from poring over, notwithstanding the lengthy condensation that I devoured last week.

Got my marks today, and do not know what to think. I just cannot help thinking, however (sic), that something is wrong somewhere, either with me or with the pace of the instruction or the method thereof, when, with the absolute minimum of work that I did last term, the scads of hours utterly wasted, I should emerge from the chaos of examinations with four A’s: Biology A–, Social Studies A–, Music A, English A–. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be a wonderful thing, just as a bit of diversity, if I’d pull off a C or some such in a course instead of A’s and B’s. Yet it is so easy to get these “honor” grades. Sometimes I consider myself so utterly stupid. Now, how does this happen? What am I to believe, anyway?

Finally attended a History 1 lecture, this one being conveniently on Louis XIV. John, Don Blackmer and I walked in ten minutes late, were as conspicuous as possible while traversing the hall and ascending the balcony, and, also, upon sitting down the silverware that John had unknowingly carried away in his jacket pocket from the Union tumbled to the floor with an appropriate crash! Karpovitch was good.

Lester tells us that Professor Demos is due back shortly. Das ist gut.

I seem to be regaining my ability to speak fluently, without searching so much for the proper word. I still, however, am in a spelling relapse.

Two beautifully split infinitives in my last SS essay. Conway caught them, too.

Won an easy squash match today, defeating Menso Boissevain, whose voice is exactly that of Bill Knox’s. I’ll have to be on my toes to vanquish Humphrey next week.

Varsity squash against Army (Charlie Oliver) tomorrow, and Frosh vs. DEERFIELD!

Saturday, February 12, 1949

Cambridge

We beat Army 7–2, Charlie Oliver, their #1 man, living up to all expectations. Saw Messrs. Poor & Read plus Bob Dewey, Soapy Symington, Charlie Ufford, Dave Workman, Mike Riesner, Charlie Elliott. Only Ufford won, but what a match! Jim Bacon really wanted to take it, too, as Ufford beat him in the Interscholastics, and as he was undefeated to date. With two games all, Jim spurted to a 14–10 lead, one point to victory. But Charlie made three absolutely phenomenal recoveries and drew up to 14 all; then took three out of the next four to win. He fought beautifully. All through it Mr. Poor remained perfectly poker-faced. He would.

Read Euthyphro; part of Voltaire’s “Le Siècle de Louis XIV” in French since I couldn’t get an English edition. (Read it in a 1780 edition yesterday, where the s’s look like f’s and are terribly confusing. The old editions, however, on the good side, had the first word of the next page placed at the bottom of each page, so in reading (aloud) one did not need to hesitate while turning pages.)

Zoölogy will be worse than Botany.

I pronounced r-a-d-i-a-to-r with the a as in act or bat instead of correctly with a as in fate. John was critical. The dictionary has only the latter pronunciation.

Should write Steve Stulman about Johnny Gunther. They were the best of friends. Gil Doan, I understand, too.

Alfred North Whitehead seems to believe that modern science is less rational than religion. Aiken touched on this last Friday (yesterday). Must read Whitehead; also D. K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown” and Shaw’s preface to “Androcles and the Lion” (religious critique). I never even finished Thoreau. That’s bad.

I regretted today that I was not more than one year at Deerfield. Seeing the contingent today made me wish I could be one of them still. Don’t want to grow up, I guess. I wonder if I’d be accepted there as a teacher?

Sunday, February 13, 1949

Cambridge

Played squash and had a long talk with Dick Becker. Johnny Taylor and I went to church. Dr. Ockenga preached on Micah 4:1–10, “Power to see the King and the Kingdom.” The organist played a “Festival Prelude” on Eine Feste Burg by Faulkes, which struck me as being far inferior in ingenuity and subtleness to the chorale prelude of Buxtehude on the same hymn of Luther’s. Next week Ockenga will preach on Christianity and Communism, which should be worthwhile.

John Taylor and I both have been thinking of spending the Easter holidays at Brant Lake. A car, however, would be indispensable.

Monday, February 14, 1949

Cambridge

My squash is inspired. Beat Don Blackmer easily today. But the match that counts is against Humphrey tomorrow. I’ll play it with a racket split down the handle and with 2 broken strings!

The concept of Culture Configuration appears to me to be more and more important.

It is very important that we look for the creditable aspects of the age in which we live, as well as the disagreeable ones.

The Deerfield Scroll has discovered an excellent writer in Alan A. Burns, who did a history of the Deerfield church in the last issue.

Rhinelander is no Demos. But Aiken is good, and intellectually stimulating for the most intelligent student. He throws out ideas quite fast, and it is necessary to concentrate constantly during his lectures in order to benefit from them.

I can’t keep a secret. My four A’s are well known already.

Miriam Bien was very nice to bake a cake and cookies and send them to me. Grandma also sent cookies. We won’t have to go to breakfast for a week.

I see that my religious inquiries are beginning to incite a little alarm in “les parents.”

Usual bull session tonight. It is impossible to study between 9:30 and midnight, which is bad. The library should by all rights stay open another hour.

Visited the Poetry Room for the first time and listened to recitations by Lindsey (Congo) and Frost, as well as a good Scotsman reading Bobby Burns. The man in charge of the room is a character to behold.

Tuesday, February 15, 1949

Cambridge

Amazing! Beat Humphrey 15–7, 15–12, 15–7. I never expected it to be that easy.

Am caught up now on my work.

While I read, unless I make a specific point of concentrating, the number and diversity of extraneous thoughts that enter my mind are astounding. It is doubtlessly the subconscious awakened, and yet each impression is so fleeting, so momentary, that there is great difficulty in remembering it, more still in discovering a pattern or a purpose to the thought. This evening, for instance, I happened to think back to the Senior Banquet last year. John had promised to save me a seat. He did, but I entered through waiting-room #2 and had trouble finding him. Consequently, most everyone was seated while I still searched. And I remembered tonight, for no apparent reason, that, having at last located John, I proceeded toward him, passing by Tom Wilson and Bob MacDougall, who requested me to sit with them. But I did not. That was all.

There have been perhaps half a dozen biology lectures to date that have interested me. One of these was today’s and, sure enough, it seemed to confirm an observation that I had already made: that those lectures that found my interest were less concerned with biology than with chemistry, were explorations into the territory of biochemistry. This is significant.

I am developing, alas, another cold.

Sam Pascal now has an upright piano in his room. Why couldn’t I next year?

Wednesday, February 16, 1949

Cambridge

Chased frogs around bio lab today. Section man tells dirty jokes. Zoölogy promises to be much more interesting than Botany, which is encouraging. Wyman is a good lecturer.

Thursday, February 17, 1949

Cambridge

Dr. Davison is really amazing. He practically reads his lectures, has been giving the same ones for 25 years. Yet, with subtleties of voice he can put you into any mood he wishes. He lectured on Beethoven today, and made the entire hall feel the despair which that genius felt upon learning that he would be hopelessly deaf—then had us rejoicing at Beethoven’s unbeatable spirit and gusto.

Took “Preference Test” tonight. Was quite inconsistent, except on seeing, which got a flat rejection every time. I think I have a secret ambition to be a farmer. We’ll get the official results next month.

Friday, February 18, 1949

Cambridge

Listened to most of Caesar and Cleopatra on records in Lamont. Also folk songs, etc. I am ahead in my work and have had lots of spare time.

Saturday, February 19, 1949

Cambridge

This was a magnificent “summer” day. I couldn’t work. Walked along the River Charles with Dick Becker; finished 5000-word letter home; went square dancing with Tom Wilson’s friend Ann Pennington, a nice Radcliffe girl, and a minister’s daughter to boot. Steve’s brother spent the night with us. They are completely different. Howie is an excellent athlete, talkative, not overly intelligent. Steve is just the opposite. Variety, anyway.

If I only had a car, a convertible! Oh, I’d be in God’s country on a day like this, to see rolling fields and running brooks again. I must talk to Dad about withdrawing from the bank to buy one—something for $200–400 dollars to begin with. Dreams! The only advantage of living in the city is that it makes you appreciate the country all the more. I should settle in Vermont or New Hampshire—on ten or more acres.

Sunday, February 20, 1949

Cambridge

I heard a flock of ducks outside this morning, a sound completely incongruous with these surroundings but wonderfully redolent of Atlantic Beach.

Caught up on my correspondence while listening to the Philharmonic.

Ockenga was truly inspired tonight. He was immensely sincere, coldly intellectual, emotionally honest, and his discussion of the difficult topic “Communism & Christianity” was done with I think a remarkably sensible approach. Instead of lambasting communism, Ockenga showed that in all outward respects it is a “religion,” with the same organization and methods and goals as Christianity—e.g., prosperity, good-will, plenty for all, peace. I think the place where his argument was not at all convincing, however, was the attempt to differentiate between the two C’s on the grounds of means, citing the communists’ willingness to kill people for their cause. I cannot overlook the history of the Christian Church, not only the Inquisition (which, as being Catholic, Ockenga would recognize only as a perversion of the Church of Christ) but also the persecutions that Calvin condoned, even ordered, and the intolerance of the early Presbyterians. Communism, Ockenga continued, is trying to do what Christianity has failed to do. It is a challenge to Christians, a call for those of them who are in reality just naturalists—the Liberals—to join ranks with the Fundamentalists and against Romanism, and work with God for the betterment of mankind. Now, I question one point here. Ockenga deplored the fact that the Liberal Christians, as they hold out the same ultimate objects as do the Communists, play directly into their hands. Granted this is an ugly situation, is it not better to stick by your ideals if you think them justifiable, no matter what names you may be called? Should we reject social improvement simply because it is something that Communists desire? Another point that is corollary: I would like to get Ockenga’s opinion of Tawney’s conclusion to Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, viz.: that capitalism and Christianity are incompatible. I enjoy church very much, and think I get a good deal from it. The singing at Park Street is the most resounding and uplifting that I have heard. I only wish that I had a decent voice.

Monday, February 21, 1949

Cambridge

Dick Becker and I went to hear Professors Aiken and La Corbeiller discuss “The Limits of Science.” (John at the last minute found himself at a John Reed Society meeting whose guest was Gerhard Eisler, and he and Laci were photographed with the #1 American Communist—accidentally—, which bodes no good.) Aiken and La Corbeiller are both exceptional men: warm, personable, intellectually honest, sincere, and humble; excellent and provocative speakers. Aiken initiated the discussion by reaffirming the view that he presented to us in class, viz.: that science is limited by its first principles, like everything else. He affirmed, however, that he is a believer in the scientific method and an ardent empiricist. La Corbeiller agreed with everything Aiken said, and the discussion resolved itself not to whether or not science is valid but to what are its limits. Can the Social Sciences, for instance, properly be termed science? Is it not true that true science deals with repeatable phenomena whereas history, sociology, etc. are concerned with non-repeatable events? Is there a point of differentiation here? No, says Aiken, for although experience has taught us so far that H_2SO_4 + ZngZnSO_4 + H_2, we cannot be sure that it will always be true in the future; and also, that every time James Conant places H_2SO_4 + Zn together, a distinct and non-repeatable operation is performed. Perhaps a better point of differentiation, or marker of the limits of science, is the concept of quality vs. quantity. Science is concerned with the latter, and interprets everything it can in terms of quantity. As far as we now know, art, music, etc. are by their nature essentially qualitative, and cannot possibly come into the sphere of the quantitative. But La Corbeiller points out that, before Lavoisier, chemistry was considered qualitative (noble metal, strong and weak acids), that the mathematics of chemistry were at first laughed away. It is therefore very conceivable for him that sociology, psychiatry, even music and art may eventually become incorporated into science. Aiken denies this, and as a philosopher I do not see how he can, for when he says that music is essentially qualitative, is he not assuming that as a premise—i.e., defining music? I would say definitely that music and art can evolve (or regress) into science. We see signs of it already with the modern composers’ preoccupation with 12-tone scales and the cubist painters’ emphasis on geometric design. Considering this, plus Mr. Aiken’s professed view that perhaps Plato’s conception of knowledge being man’s only end is all wet, and the very possibility of there being limits on science, I submit that although poetry, music, and art may be reduced to sciences, do we want this? Is it not better to subsist under a delusion concerning art if turning it into science will cheapen it? Although it’s possible for atoms to be so arranged and manipulated so that they explode in an atomic bomb, would it not be better for man, subjectively, if he subsisted under the illusion that they could not be so arranged? I would ask Aiken if there should not be some branch of philosophy that would attempt to determine a point beyond which the further search for knowledge should be not suppressed but, better, re-directed? I know he could rip me apart on this, but I believe, considering the atomic bomb, that it is something to be discussed.

I got a flashing insight into the efficacy of home training during the debate. I anticipated a qualification in Aiken’s analysis, and immediately thereupon Aiken resolved that objection. Now, should I lean over to my neighbor and inform him that I had anticipated Aiken or, as Dad has tried to impress on my personality, be satisfied myself that this had occurred? Is this a key to introversion?

Tuesday, February 22, 1949

Cambridge

It is often contended that our present-day society is the cause of egregious social ills—psychological maladjustments and the like—and that the simple rural agricultural existence of our ancestors was more conducive to a stable personality. I wonder if this is true or if it is merely a reflection on the fact that the science of psychiatry is new and just beginning to grow. Is it not possible that the ancient Hebrews, the great Greeks and Romans, the early Continental Christians, the medieval nobles and villeins, the thinkers of the renaissance and Reformation, those of the Age of Reason, as well as individuals who have lived under the Commercial, Agricultural, and Industrials Revolutions, were disturbed, unbalanced emotionally, and neurotic to the same extent, and that the fact that there was no psychiatry does not mean that there were no psychotics?

What a horrible thing it would be if a person became convinced that every time he or she went to sleep a frightening nightmare would be the reward. Thus the person would be mortally afraid of falling asleep.

Talked with Leo, Tom, Pete F., John until 2:30 a.m. last night (this morning). A water pipe broke in the basement, too. This is a dreary, slushy Washington’s birthday.

I coined a new word: “incomperated,” an elision of “incorporated” and “& Co.”

Saturday, March 12, 1949

Cambridge

This hiatus is a good indication of my laziness. I remember in the dim past of the preceding weeks a Freshman Smoker, which wasn’t very satisfactory at all; an ill-fated attempt to return to Deerfield last weekend, ill-fated because of Laci’s argument with his guardian over the purchase of a new suit—stubbornness carried beyond all extremes; a wonderfully enjoyable evening at the cinema under the influences of Bernard Shaw’s genius: Pygmalion with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller; a March of Time, and to top it all, an excellent Technicolor documentary about Admiral Byrd’s last Antarctic expedition.

My four A-minuses entitled me to meet and chat with Dean Leighton and scholarship director Von Stade, both wonderfully pleasant and friendly individuals. We solved no great problems, but at last I have begun to have some contact with the faculty. Carried this further yesterday by skipping philosophy and spending two hours talking with Professor Beer. John and I must tackle Aiken soon, but we’ll have to “know whereof we speak” (Rose-la-Rose).

Muzzey’s talk about Lincoln adds to my profound respect for the Great Emancipator. He, Whitman, Twain, T. Roosevelt, Frost, Sandburg, Thoreau represent the best that is in America, that which is not an imperfect imitation of European culture but rooted in the pioneer soil of a new continent.

Random verses:

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future’s sakes. . . .

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak

A cloud comes over a sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

(“Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Frost)

ZOOLOGY

The elephant’s a ghastly beast

That haunts the countries of the East;

The hippopotamus I think

Never gets enough to drink;

At any rate, I hear the dub

Never leaves his muddy tub;

The eagle dwells upon the steep

And feeds on savages and sheep.

What’s the good of having that

Awful rot beneath your hat?

—Samuel Hoffenstein

Sunday, March 13, 1949

Cambridge

John, Dick Becker, and I went to the Harvard-Yale basketball game in the Boston Arena last night. The Freshman tussle was a thriller, being won by a miraculous goal in the last 5 seconds of overtime. Jerry Murphy played the whole time we were there, until taken out on fouls. The varsity game, however, was a farce. We lost 80-something to 40-something. But Toni Lavelli was good to see: he’s a perfected Hooks Dillon. Levi Jackson got in the game near the end. He lowers his head and charges as though he were on a football field

Stepped in on Don Blackmer and Co. on the way back, and talked until three in the morning. As a consequence missed Niebuhr this morning and would probably still be sleeping now if Laci hadn’t come in and awakened us at 1:00 in the afternoon.

Wrote to Bob G. asking for $200 this summer.

Johnny Taylor and I heard Reinhold Niebuhr in Jordan Hall on world government. It was very worthwhile because Niebuhr, who is versed in Western philosophy, theology, history, politics, and current events, has come to the conclusion that world government is impossible and even undesirable. I think he upholds this view because by nature he looks for the depths not the superfluities, the universals not the particulars, the eternal not the evanescent. Government, he says, does not create community, but presupposes it. Moreover, government cannot maintain community except by tyrannical force. A world government, even if it were possible, would have to be so ambiguous in order to beguile the nations of the world into partially or wholly transferring their sovereign power to it, that in the end it would be ineffective. And to unite without Russia would be disastrous, for then the world would be divided into two opposing forces, each endeavoring to become the “one.”

I was glad that Niebuhr selected this topic, not so much because he told me something I did not already know—I tried to convince Bobby Johnston to leave United World Federalists for the same reasons—but because it pointed up the fact that theologians are not isolated dreamers or mystics, are not oblivious to what surrounds them, are not wholly un-secular. Moreover, I see in Niebuhr’s case at least that he is a religionist not out of ignorance of all the secular forces in the world today, and the many contradictions in theological belief, but because of them. In the last analysis, he says, the insecurity in government is merely a reflection of a mass insecurity in individuals, an insecurity largely brought about by the very technological progress that was supposed to have removed it. He has his feet on the ground, even if he sometimes has his head in the sky. He is one of the best arguments for a religious attitude.

I am getting a little more insight into my difficulties. I have never really attacked a subject or hobby or study for all it is worth. All my endeavors have been superficial and as a result there is no one thing or group of things about which I can feel competent to discuss or perform or what have you. I must begin to specialize—to take my chances and throw away those things that I do not consider good for me. Certainly I may make mistakes. But not to do this is a complete impossibility to achieve the goal of expertness and competence. I must find something that I can really be interested in and that I can follow up. It does not have to be an academic subject: amateur radio operation like Uncle Will’s is the kind of thing I mean. It would be so important in relations with other people. Specialties like that are what draw others to you. There are too many ordinary people, too many students who do their required work and nothing else. I am one of them. Why do I become disillusioned with this academic life every so often? It is because for me it is 100% academic life, and nothing else. The addition of a great outside interest would help me appreciate my academic work, however paradoxical that may appear.

I will never be a student. I’m too restless. I like to work with things so much more than with ideas. And yet what kind of an adult life will I lead if I continue to hesitate to do what I want to do, or at least speed up my operations? In high school it took me three years to wake up to real extra-curricular activity. Perhaps that was too long. Perhaps, though, it is best that way. Impulsiveness, blind attack, is almost as bad as no attack at all, but not as bad. Enough.

Sunday, March 27, 1949

Cambridge

Kudor Preference Test Results:

Mechanical: high

Computational: low

Scientific: low

Persuasive: very low

Artistic: high

Literary: high

Musical: very high

Social Service: high

Clerical: low

Dined with Dr. & Mrs. Sidney Licht this noon. She is Will Schweitzer’s sister, and very much unlike her brother; he is a remarkably successful doctor and knows it. He teaches, writes, lectures. But I don’t think he is a very happy man; nor is he, in my eyes, a particularly attractive father. His two little girls, potentially the sweetest tots, are hounded and regimented, “adulterated” until they are submissive. That’s the worst part. These kids don’t even rebel against their father’s directives. They obey him implacably. He is not giving them a very good childhood. Children, all children, deserve by natural right to spend their glorious youth (ah, but it is so short) in the country, on a farm, a ranch, near meadows, hills, lakes or an ocean, and near animals. On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, what does Dr. Licht do but take his littlest to the movies. He doesn’t want to see the picture, she doesn’t want to see it, but to the movies they go. Passivity!

My tennis so far is extremely disappointing. Perhaps it is too early in the season to expect anything better, but if I do not pick up miraculously fast, I shall undoubtedly be cut from the squad. There is always the manager’s job, of course, but that would be a comedown.

John, Laci, and I have decided to room together next year and have applied to Lowell House. We’re counting on Mr. Pratt of Deerfield to get us in. This means that Steve is dropped. It was difficult but perhaps the best thing for all concerned. I never really did like Steve although I never disliked him. It was/is more or less a passive relationship. Steve is too much within himself to be really good company. And the irony is that I sometimes fear that I am basically like him. Slowly, however, ever slowly, I am emerging from introspection and inferiority, at least superficially. Lester Ward, Tom Rogers, and Pete Flemming applied with us for Lowell. We’re aiming for two three-man suites but may have to be satisfied with three two-man ones. Then, of course, there is a 60% possibility that we’ll miss the target altogether and hit Wigglesworth, Dudley, or Claverly.

My work is miserably behind schedule, and with a Social Science essay due next Friday will not be caught up. Moreover, I’ve got two more nights of aptitude tests.

The Bermuda trip next week should be quite an event: tennis, swimming, bicycling, social life, sun, and exercise. Hallelujah!

April 2, 1949

St. George’s, Bermuda

We is here! Two hours and 35 minutes on Pan American for 660 miles. Saw Sunnyside and Atlantic Beach from the air. Well planted in St. George Hotel and raring to get a little sun, air, and exercise. Bermuda is part of the green and pleasant land, except that most of the people are American tourists. Flowers are everywhere, their delicate red and yellow petals extending over and above green stone walls as if to be sure of American approval. The cobblestone alleyways between the houses of St. George’s are crooked, clean, and cleverly named. And everywhere, in the foreground of a lime-white set, are the black natives, clean, delightfully dressed, polite, happy, and speaking English that would put many an American to perfecting his own. The Negroes here are so different from those in the Great Democracy: their brows show their freedom, they carry themselves in a manner complementing their dignity as human beings. They lead the Good Life.

So do tourists: dancing, sightseeing, deep-sea fishing, deep-sea diving; aquariums, art exhibits, argyle socks, tennis and rugby matches; secluded beaches and mobbed night spots; bicycling and buggy riding. Music, laughter, and song! God’s gift to man is Bermuda.

Why do we live for ten months of the year in the filthy city, trying to compensate for the accumulated soot by two months of assorted vacationing. A man should live under the sky and on the earth, not under plaster ceilings and apartments twenty stories above, and on top of concrete—live this way for his ten months, and spend the remaining two in a metropolis. Bien will deserve no better if he makes the mistake of so many millions of his fellows. We are conditioned largely into wrong attitudes: but conditioning, thank God, can be unconditioned. A good way to do that is to sojourn for a time in Bermuda. To bed, and a week on the corals.

April 3, 1949

St. George’s, Bermuda

We explored in the vicinity of the hotel early this morning, visiting the beach and St. Catharine’s Fort, and witnessing the British fleet returning from a cruise. A very friendly colored waiter met us on our way and acted as guide, pointing out the various trees and flowers: life plant, banana tree, palms, cactus, etc.

Returned in time to attend the morning service at St. Peter’s, the oldest church in the Western hemisphere (Anglican). The rector delivered an exceptionally fine sermon, tracing the history of sacrifice from the human sacrifice made by the early Anglo-Saxons to secure their blood-kindred, to the substitution of animals (Abraham), to the final symbol in the bread or wine of Communion. Perhaps the nicest thing was that white and colored folks worshipped together, although even in Bermuda schools are segregated. “God Save the King” concluded (sic!).

A twelve-mile jaunt to the tower of Hamilton followed, with the Harvard-Barbarians rugby game as incentive. Harvard won, or better the Barbarians lost. They’d been out to sea for too long and were still a bit wobbly. Rugby is really rough-and-tumble, and lots of fun. Judging from what we saw in Hamilton, I am just in the wrong place. All of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley seem to be in and around Hamilton; all the old people are in St. George’s. Worse still, all the tennis players are there; none are here.

The colored folk are amazing. They prove to me at least that race is no final determiner of character, and that environment is. The Negroes at home are largely repulsive to me: even somehow those at Harvard. Here they are the most charming people, well adjusted, happy, polite but not at all obsequious, and as friendly and goodnatured as one could wish. Besides, they speak with delightful, cultured English accents, and a darn sight better than most Americans. I imagine that the Palestinian Jews would be somewhat analogous to these Bermudian Negroes.

April 5, 1949

St. George’s, Bermuda

A long talk Monday night with Dad led into an extremely pleasant Tuesday. Alice and I tried our skills on bicycles the day before, cycling to St. David’s lighthouse while les parents followed in a horse and carriage. Tuesday we switched to tennis, and although Alice does extraordinarily well considering her age and lack of practice, the session only served to drive home what I was missing by way of tennis. I would like to travel to Bermuda again in a few years, but with a group of tennis-conscious boys and girls of my own age and interests.

We cooled off with a swim in the ocean this time, in an ocean that is green liquid air, veil-like, transparent—in a word, delightful.

A lazy afternoon culminated in the cinema: Anna Karenina done by Leigh and Richardson, rather morbid and over-sensational. The second feature, which we walked out on, was in reality the interesting one. It was done by an all-colored cast. What we could not understand was that this Negro production, probably made in a Harlem backyard, placed the characters in the same stupid exaggerated “you is hep, chick” roles that the NAACP complains so bitterly about when found in Hollywood offerings. Here was an insipid plot, laid in a Jamaica banana plantation and opening with a “tribal dance,” capitalizing on superstition and ignorance, and not even hinting at the social and economic problems with which the Negro should be concerned. Perhaps, however, it is just as well to forget those problems. We say so when so-called “social significance” art is the topic of conversation. But at least the Negro characters should have been represented in all their dignity as human beings and not as the half-animal ignoramuses of this film. It was a grave disappointment after the fine impression that we received from the real-to-life colored folk of this island.

Family solidarity was established yesterday as it seldom has been. We really began to enjoy each other’s company, perhaps the best indication of this being Alice’s carefreeness, after two days of silent, stiff inhibition. Dad told me Monday night that she only clammed up when I came home, and that otherwise she is the most uninhibited creature alive. That doesn’t sound very good. However, Dad assured me that it was the fault of nothing conscious on my part, but more akin to the normal sister-brother jealousy over parental attention. Yesterday, of course, was wonderful for me, as it saw Alice come out of herself into naturalness. She really is going to be a delightful person when she grows up.

April 8, 1949

St. George’s, Bermuda

As departure time looms near and ugly, we begin to realize that this vacation has been a perfect success.

Today was a rather lazy one, especially after lunch, but the sun was out full force and was well appreciated. This morning I played a little tennis with Dad, working particularly on my overhead, which is now satisfactory providing I do not have to run back to intercept the lob.

Yesterday the four of us started out early, via cab, for Hamilton, where we rented bikes. Four miles of cycling in nasty weather brought us to the Government Aquarium and Zoo. There we viewed myriad tropical fish and other creatures, including squids, octopi, parrots, emus, anemones, brain coral, morays, rockfish. The sun peeked out long enough to add to the pleasure of eating a box lunch on a rolling green lawn. But it did not stay out for long, and by the time we had proceeded two miles further on to Devil’s Hole, a near-hurricane was in the wind. This Devil’s Hole was nothing much: a natural hole with some fish dumped in it. The weather was merciful enough to permit us to enjoy the return trip to Hamilton, about 6 miles, along the South Shore, which is less developed and consequently prettier than that part of the island that we had hitherto seen. Our journey was completed with an inspection visit aboard the Queen of Bermuda, a virtual floating palace.

On Wednesday, Dad and I went through the White School, here in St. George’s. The headmaster is a young chap, just ascended, after having replaced his predecessor, who retired at the age of 32. As is true with the English schools, this one emphasizes history and English, probably to the detriment of science, but that isn’t too much of a loss at that level of education. A mixture of the old and the new, the classrooms are arranged like those at Little Red, with the chairs and tables movable and in general disorder, while on the other hand caning is still practiced. Of significance was the headmaster’s remark that his brightest students are the Americans. Not many of these schoolchildren go on to college, and those that do go, of course, go to England or the USA.

April 17, 1949, Easter Sunday

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The return to the academic life was surely difficult after so fine, stimulating, and revealing a vacation. Perhaps its most memorable factor was the closeness and camaraderie among the family. We are not, nevertheless, a compact whole, and perhaps it is just as well. I don’t think that Dad will ever change, or if he does it will be so slowly that by the time he has reached a desired goal of personal and social development his stay on earth will be of such a short order that the achievement will seem in vain (in this world, anyhow). He is a very complex person, and consequently a very difficult one to understand. Primarily, he is a paradox: his motivations are almost entirely emotional; straight objective intellectual considerations play so small a part in his decisions; yet on the other hand his emotions are stifled. In terms of a cliché he is largely an introvert and must suffer the pangs of self-analysis and self-driving to which that class of humans is relegated. Above all, he is not a man of action; nor is he a man of impulse. Spontaneity is sadly missing in his life. He is more concerned with avoiding evil than he is with achieving truth: and life isn’t long enough for persons with that philosophy. Again, he is a realist, a materialist, a humanist. Not that these are appellations of derision—but realism without dreams, materialism without idealism, and humanism without a little supernaturalism are empty concepts. The best way to understand and appreciate a philosophy or a doctrine is to understand and appreciate its opposite; otherwise one’s view is mere dogmatism and cannot be intelligently supported by argumentation. For father, New Deal liberalism is conservatism at its best; he can be nothing but a conservative. Nothing for him can be a fighting, alive, revolutionary doctrine because he is not alive to it; nor can he judge it in any means other than the emotional. And for him especially, emotional decisions can hardly be most often the correct decisions, since he is emotionally weighted at one end and cannot therefore achieve balance.

It is extremely sad in one respect, but in another—and perhaps the more intelligent one—he is extremely commendable. Subjectively, Dad is a failure, a fact the impact of which is strengthened when one considers that this failure has come not from inability or environmental obstacles but from an internal inhibition that has prevented him from achieving the heights that intellectually and morally are his. Objectively, however, although seemingly paradoxical, Dad has been a pioneer, the courageous soldier who scouted the front lines, made attack possible, but never returned to see the results of his handiwork. Of course, the results have not yet been effected, and will not be until it can be determined whether or not Alice and/or I are successful. And by successful, I do not necessarily mean wealth, fame, or power—although these should come in the course of events as hangers-on—but essential happiness, whatever that means.

We returned a week ago yesterday to find our house amateurishly ransacked by a couple of youngsters who took two Racines(!), Alice’s radio, and about $15 in cash.

Sunday was a fine day. Dad and I heard John Haynes Holmes at the Community Church. Dr. Holmes attempted to prove immortality of the soul in an address entitled “Life’s Eternal Challenge,” a sermon on John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud. And a masterful job it was! More important than the particular sermon, however, is the fact that it seems to me that this church has the correct religious attitude, if by “correct” I mean one that I can accept. I suppose that fundamentally its views are similar to those of the Ethical Culture people, but unlike the latter the Community Church retains the old forms of the Christian service and retains the notion of a God, even a personal God. I think that this is a prerequisite for a religion, as the value of religion can only lie in its reminding us that we are merely finite beings in an infinite universe, in extending our horizons a little beyond humanity, which Ethical Culture does not do.

This is a religion that has benefited from the lessons humanity has learned since the birth of Christ, one that realizes the futility of clinging to dogmas that arose, and were proper for, an ancient tribe of nomads whose lives were in few ways comparable to our own. The Doxology goes: “From all that dwell below the skies / Let words of Love and Peace arise; / Let joyful songs of Praise be sung, / Through every land by every tongue.” It is followed by the Invocation, which concludes as follows: “Unto the Church Universal, which is the depository of all ancient wisdom and the school of all modern thought; which recognizes in all prophets a harmony, in all scriptures a unity, and through all dispensations a continuity; which abjures all that separates and divides, and always magnifies brotherhood and peace; which seeks truth in freedom, justice in love and individual discipline in social duty; and which shall make of all sects, classes, nations and races one fellowship of men—unto this Church and unto all its members, known and unknown, throughout the world, we pledge the allegiance of our hands and hearts.”

I went to church twice on this rainy, cold Easter Sunday. Both preachers were stimulating, but in different ways. This morning Dean Bosley of the Duke Divinity School spoke in chapel. After stating in his first sentence a sentiment that I was delighted to hear—viz., that we were not celebrating a miraculous occurrence in Christ’s resurrection, but a symbolic one even with meaning in our lives—he somehow arrived at the conclusion that capitalism and Christianity are incompatible, of which Tawney had already convinced me. A tremendous problem faces our society. We must cease to be hypocrites if we are to survive. That is the first thing. But the dilemma seems insoluble. First, we have capitalism and the regulation of production in the open market, an immensely competent mode of production that seems a shame to discard. Second, as over against capitalism there is Christianity, our spiritual hope, the means of keeping a balance between the materialistic and all other aspects of life. Third, perfectly consistent with the best of Christianity, socialism stands as the coming thing. But socialism is a false hope, and one whose fruition will most certainly result in the destruction of mankind in continued global warfare. (Cf. my “Positive Stand”.) I am confident that some progress will be made toward either reconciling these three or inventing a suitable substitute for one or more of them. But it will require some fancy thinking, and must be done soon.

Ockenga’s Easter message was stimulating in a negative way. True to his profession of fundamentalism, he attempted to convince this congregation of the historical validity of the Resurrection, using as the Old Testament counterpart Jonah’s sojourn in the stomach of the great fish. He even went as far as to describe certain sharks that are large enough to swallow a man. Naturally, I thought this was ridiculous, and, taking up a reference to myriad historical proofs of Jesus’ resurrection on the third day, wrote the following letter to Dr. Ockenga: “Dear Sir: In your evening sermon on Easter Sunday you referred to a collection of proofs of the Resurrection of Christ. Although I have been a fairly consistent attender at Park Street Church, I have not heard you enumerate these proofs and would therefore appreciate it greatly if you could send me a bibliography that will lead me to them. Naturally, it is extremely difficult for persons like myself, products of a secular society, to reconcile such supernatural occurrences as Jonah’s deliverance from the great fish and Christ’s rising from the dead with what we know about science. Somehow I feel that if religion intends to battle science on science’s battlefield—on empirical evidence—it will inevitably lose the fight. That is why I desire to examine these proofs. How can it be possible to prove a supernatural event empirically? And is it not actually repugnant to the concept of the supernatural that finite humans should be able to comprehend it well enough to presume to prove it in light of their limited experience? I am willing to accept these miracles on faith if their consequences are momentous, even though that faith is contrary to my experience. For I know that scientific truth is only probable truth and that the Resurrection, for instance, cannot be disproved. But I submit that it cannot be proved, and I venture to say that the arguments that you are able to advance, if examined not only from the view of logical consistency but from that of the premises on which they are based, cannot possibly stand against their refutations. Nevertheless, I would like to see them. I would like to be convinced. Thank you for your trouble, and for the many excellent sermons that have kept my religious train of thought continually rolling along at a rapid pace. Respectfully yours . . .” I hope that Dr. Ockenga does not commend me to the wrath of God for this heresy, but provides an intelligent and stimulating answer to the questions that I have asked.

Sunday, April 24, 1949

Cambridge

Instead of the usual service at Park Street Church this evening, Johnny and I attended that of the Mother Church of Christ, Scientist. It was quite an experience. One enters the huge, palatial “edifice,” to be escorted to one of the thousands of seats by a stiff usher with a manufactured smile and who, when he is not ushering, stands at perfect attention like a bellhop or usher in Radio City Music Hall. In fact, the essential atmosphere is that of a sumptuous movie palace. Once seated and reconciled to the stiffness and artificiality of the physical surroundings, one turns his attention to a service of worship that is equally stiff and artificial. It is infinitely worse than the High Church liturgy, for at least in the latter, especially in the small parishes, some feeling of spontaneity remains because of the simplicity of the worshippers. And again, the Christian Science service is strictly intellectual, even the hymns being done with such formality and coldness to veil their aesthetic qualities. The very nature of the service is impossible. I cannot see how it has kept so many devotees, for it is terribly difficult to take. Indeed, one needs to be extremely healthy to be a Christian Scientist.

Of course, these outward manifestations, while important, are only so insofar as they are manifestations: indications of an inner, essential significance. Thus, it is in the basic premises that I believe Christian Science has gone astray. First of all, it is a cult of idolization: the name of Mary Baker Eddy is pronounced with infinitely more reverence and feeling than is that of Christ Jesus Himself. Doubtlessly, and especially so in the light of modern philosophy and psychology, Mary Baker Eddy did have some basic insights into human nature and perhaps even into the nature of the Eternal. But to worship her is just as insane as to worship Shakespeare, who also had basic insights, and probably more of them at that. Yet although her conclusions may in some cases be true, her premises are, I believe, false; and although it is sometimes pragmatically justifiable to entertain “true” conclusions even though their premises are false, here it is not, for the damage done by the premises outweighs the possibility of benefit from the conclusions. Christian Scientists assume that disease is an illusion and, to prove this, uses the old argument that matter is meaningless. They might go as far as to state that matter does not exist, as did Berkeley; if so they are amply refuted in Hume. Again, if they admit the existence of matter, condemning all the while its essential sinfulness, they are dualists, and certainly would have been considered outside the Christian fold in the days of the Manichean inquisition.

The difficulty with Christian Science is typical: it only has part of the truth, yet believes that it has all of the truth. Certainly disease is in some cases an illusion, but in those cases the disease is mental, or psychosomatic, and although at least in the forms of the two the physical symptoms are unreal, the illusion itself is very real, and is specifically what constitutes the malady. Of course, in diseases caused by foreign organisms and/or constitutional malfunctioning, Mrs. Eddy’s analysis applies only in the case of the mental disease that may result from such organic malfunctioning.

I must not, however, be doctrinaire about this. I must admit the possibility of Christian Science’s validity. Nevertheless, it seems to me that embracing this belief is a great mistake. This is because the choice is a genuine option—luring, forced, and momentous. It is impractical to await conclusive evidence one way or the other. One must choose on what evidence there is, and on the satisfaction that is gotten. According to these criteria, then, Christian Science would be, for me at least, an impossible choice because for every testimony of faith healing there are ten of medical healing, and for every person who has derived satisfaction from the doctrines of Christian Science there have been ten who have died for lack of proper treatment.

When we examine and criticize so-called irrational, barbarian, uncivilized societies, we ought to remember the Christian Scientists, especially since they are typically among the well educated and moderately intelligent.

Genuine and harmless satisfaction can be obtained by revisiting your old school, playing tennis against it, and winning. All this I did last Friday at Deerfield as the tennis team won its third match of the year, 5–3. I went officially as manager, but at the last moment Cory decided to have me play second doubles with Dave Aldrich. We faced Charlie Neave and Soapy Symington, and I honestly thought, when play began, that we were in for a decisive defeat. But just the opposite happened. Dave played his usual steady game, making a good number of the winners, and I performed just about as well as I ever have, setting the play up for Dave to make the kill. My serve, especially, was working well, and I only double-faulted three times, once on the very first play of the match, and then twice in succession at the beginning of the second set, when fatigue was eating on me heavily. I got my second wind, however, in order to help take the match in straight sets, 6–4, 6–4.

I was received magnificently, almost as the conquering hero come home. Apparently, Mr. Poor had recited my scholastic and athletic “achievements” with due exaggeration, so that many of the small Freshmen were oohing and aahing.

Mr. Pratt was extremely optimistic about acceptance into Lowell House, and told me that if I was thinking of teaching, especially if at Deerfield, I had better stay clear of history, as that field is overcrowded. He plans to make a career of prep-school teaching.

Mr. and Mrs. Poor were very nice, but it was Mr. Hatch that I especially wanted to see, if only for five minutes. Five minutes it was. I gave him a T. S. Eliot recording in lieu of the Sandburg Musicraft Album which, by virtue of the company’s bankruptcy, is no longer available. I did not see Mr. & Mrs. Boyden, and regretted it. I also regretted not being able to say hello to Mr. McKenny, whom I noticed was watching my tennis match. He strikes me as being a lonely figure and somewhat of an unappreciated martyr. For his sake, I hope my observations are unfounded. I also saw, and chatted with, Don Dwight and others of last year’s junior class.

Friday night we slept at Amherst. I saw Dick Aldridge, Ed Brunning, Howie Burnett, Bill Burleigh, and Win Hindle, all of Deerfield, of course; and Manuel Mayer, his wife and children, Andy Heine; and, of all people, Stephen Clug, in with the Colgate track team. Steve, unfortunately, was immediately repulsive to me. As I look back on our acquaintanceship, I don’t think I ever did care very much for him. It was nice to see Mr. Mayer, however. He has much goodness in him, although never the sincerity and vitality of a Fritz Krause. He recited his admiration and respect for Bob G., his lack of use for John Long, and his dislike of Eddy Hayes. To a certain degree, he is right in all three cases, especially that of Long John.

Howie is a great guy. Everything he touches turns to gold, yet spiritually he is as poor and as wholesome as is possible. Rather, he is rich spiritually, but spends so much that to the uninitiated he appears in the character of a beggar. Oh, I also saw Marc Epstein, a fine fellow.

Amherst is a glorified prep school and too much like Deerfield. Yet is has many advantages over Harvard superficially, such as good food and good views. But, intrinsically, I think that Harvard is the sounder institution.

Our match with the Amherst Freshman was unfortunately rained out, so we returned to a steak dinner, charged up to the H.A.A., and a rotten double-feature.

As I think through the catalogue, I find thirty courses that I would like to take next year! Of these, 3 are in section 1, 3 in section 2, 8 in section 3, 3 in section 4, 3 in section 5, 5 in section 6, none in section 7, and 3 in section 8. According to this I suppose I should choose a field of concentration from among anthropology, economics, geography, government, and social relations. This concentration business does not really present a genuine option and should be postponed until it does. But one must conform somewhat to the will of his fellows, and the superior wisdom of his elders!

Must come up to date with philosophy this week, and start thinking about the next S.S. essay. Also must see Professor Beer, some departmental representatives, and Dr. Le Corbeiller.

Friday, April 29, 1949

Cambridge

I am now signed and delivered into the exalted concentration of History and Science of America, and am therefore contemplating a course of study next term that will be comprised of: English 123, Shakespeare; English 7, American literature (against my wishes); History 61, American History, dull but necessary; Chemistry 2, pure asceticism; Music 150, pure pleasure.

These Social Science essays come around with a rapidity that attests to the pace here. If I only had three weeks with no obligations other than an examination of romanticism, particularly Rousseau and Nietzsche, I should feel qualified to write on that subject. But I shall have to do the best I can in five days. Durant, Bertrand Russell, Mein Kampf, and Peter Viereck have been of assistance.

Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative is an excellent example of the verbosity of philosophy. He takes the old concept of Natural Law, divorces it from the concept of God, where it belongs, and attributes its objective, universal, consistent tenets to human reason. His mistake is that in order to do this he is obliged to credit reason with the attributes of Infinite Reason, an assumed principle that is hardly plausible. Moreover, he also assumes that being rational is the highest form of existence for mankind. This is more of a prejudice than a self-evident principle.

I think, however, that Kant had a fundamental insight when he stated that moral validity resides in the will to act, e.g. the motive, rather than in the act itself or in any utilitarian aspect of the act. Yet, this cannot be the only answer to morality, for utility, ultimately, is the determining factor in action. Studies in social anthropology, psychology, and the conditioned reflex confirm this over and over again.

I lost to Johnny (Skills) Davis in a raging wind, 6–4, 6–8, 6–4, a very disappointing performance. Aldrich and I trounced a doubles team from Brown 6–1, 6–4. Tomorrow we play Exeter. I am also managing—singles in the JV match, doubles for the Freshmen. My tennis, as usual, is miserable. I was inspired at Deerfield but I’m afraid that a similar inspiration will not be soon forthcoming.

Sunday, May 1, 1949

Cambridge

Dr. John Haynes Holmes spoke under the auspices of the Harvard Square Interfaith Council tonight. He is a brilliant orator, delivering an extemporaneous talk of exquisite consistency, clarity, forcefulness, and sincerity. He is also one of the few speakers I have heard who answer questions without attempting to escape from a predicament by slyly changing the subject or other such devices.

If I had been born in a house nominally Christian, I don’t think that there would be any question but that I would go into the liberal Protestant ministry. Can I still do it? Will I be able to accomplish my aims under the circumstances, or will it be merely a useless personal struggle, one continued solely by pride?

Once again, the difference between Holmes and the Ethical Culturists is manifest. He is entirely an emotionalist. He respects the three “proofs” of God’s existence for their worth—whatever that may be—and, while admitting that none is very convincing, even the teleological, still maintains that the sentiment that inspires them is sufficient to justify a faith in Deity.

Holmes finds much that is commendable in scientific humanism. But he takes the broad view: scientific humanism is analogous to a train that never reaches its destination. It leaves one at a dead end, hopelessly lost in the darkness of narrowness. To reject a priori the mystic experience is as dogmatic an act as those to which science so vehemently objects. Holmes told us of an interview he had with Gandhi during which that magnificent spiritual leader declared that he could have accomplished nothing in India if it weren’t for prayer. Can we throw away something the truth of which is attested to by such an outstanding authority? (I suppose “truth” must be in the pragmatic sense.)

Holmes, replying to the question “What should the Church do in the way of social action?” felt that the prevention of war must be the first and primary task. He is and always has been a pacifist of the Quaker school, and cannot but be convinced of the validity of his position by the fact that history has proved that no war has ever accomplished anything permanent, certainly not permanent good. I liked especially the (Toynbee) argument that one’s country isn’t worth dying for anyway, assuming that in the last century war has chiefly been an outgrowth of nationalism. Indeed, war as a means is never justified, no matter how fine the end. Of course, Holmes is ultimately right.

Another important stand he took was against creeds, whether they be an Apostles’ Creed or any other, as a divisive rather than unifying device. The Church, if anything, must take the lead in race relations. Why aren’t there black and yellow people abundant in every congregation where such individuals are potential members? Holmes is a fighter to this day, forty-seven years after his graduation from Harvard. He will be remembered as one of the great individuals of a decadent (alas) age.

May 4, 1949

Cambridge

Aptitude results, to be taken with a large grain of salt: Math, low; Physics, average; Applied physics, average; Chemistry, average; Geology, high; Biology, average; Anthropology, average; Psychology, high (!!!!); Social Relations, average; Economics, average; Government, average; History, average; Fine Arts, average; Architectural Science, average; Philosophy, average; English, average.

SOPHOMORE YEAR

October 29, 1949

Cambridge

Benjamin Franklin on immortality: “I . . . trust in God . . . He has provided for the continual peopling his world with Plants and Animals, without being at the trouble of repeated new creations, . . . or the Necessity of creating new matter. . . . I say, that when I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot suspect the Annihilation of Souls, or believe that he will suffer the daily waste of Millions of Minds ready made that now exist, and put himself to the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus finding myself to exist in the World, I believe I shall, in some Shape or other, always exist; and with all the inconveniences of human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new Edition of mine; hoping, however, that the Errata of the last may be corrected.”

On religion: “Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another life respecting its Conduct in this. . . . As to Jesus of Nazareth . . . I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have . . . some Doubts as to his Divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it. . . . I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that Belief has the good Consequence, as probably it has, of making his Doctrine more respected and better observed.”

Frederick May Eliot spoke on Albert Schweitzer at the Wesley Foundation. In Schweitzer’s “Reverence for Life” we have a positive ethic, as opposed to the negativism of a Schopenhauer. This is good. It must be understood, moreover, that it transcends human needs—has nothing to owe to utility—which the humanist ethic does not, as it is based on utilitarianism, on human needs. A student brought up an interesting question, to wit: If reverence for life is a positive ethic, and if it starts, as Mr. Eliot stated, with a reverence for one’s own life, extending to the lives of others and thence to all life, is it not irreconcilable with the goal of “selflessness”? Eliot solved the paradox expertly, and in a manner that gave me a stimulus for further thought. By having reverence for all life, you gain more than you lose in selflessness. Reverence for Life implies a form of selflessness, for as Emerson states in “Each and All,” “Beauty through my senses stole; / I yielded myself to the perfect whole.” This yielding to the whole is then both an ethical principle of the utmost importance, and a means of finding God or, as I like to say, of bringing out the Godhead in oneself.

This Godhead idea needs development. Just as, by having a cosmic outlook, by “yielding . . . to the perfect whole,” one comes nearer to God, because one begins to exhibit in himself, however imperfectly, one of God’s attributes; thus being a father is a way to God. God is looked to as the Father: before you know God, the Father is your natural father, then perhaps a teacher, friend, but ultimately (for those who find Him), God. But, being a father yourself is bringing out the Godhead, for you are exhibiting one of God’s attributes in a finite manner. Thus fatherhood is a happy, righteous, and goodly situation when it is a duality of son (to the true God) and father (to natural children). Here we have two persons in one person, father and son, viz.: 2/3 of the Trinity. The Holy Ghost we must leave for some other time!

December 4, 1949

Cambridge

“First Day Thoughts”

In calm and cool and silence, once again

I find my old accustomed place among

My brethren, where, perchance, no human tongue

Shall utter words; where never hymn is sung,

Nor deep-toned organ blown, nor censor swung,

Nor dim light falling through the pictured pain!

There, syllabled by silence, let me hear

The still small voice which reached the prophet’s ear.

Read in my heart a still diviner law

Than Israel’s leader on his tables saw!

There let me strive with each besetting sin

Recall my wandering fancies, and restore

The sore disquiet of a restless brain;

And, as the path of duty is made plain,

May grace be given that I may walk therein,

Nor like the hireling, for his selfish gain,

With backward glances and reluctant tread,

Making a merit of his coward dread

But, cheerful, in the light around me thrown,

Walking as one to pleasant service led;

Doing God’s will as if it were my own,

Yet trusting not in mine, but in his strength alone!

—Whittier

From: “The Meeting”: “I regard Christianity as a life, rather than a creed; and in judging of my fellow-men I can use no other standard than that which our Lord and Master has given us. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’”

That love of God is love of good,

And, chiefly, its divinest trace

In Him of Nazareth’s holy face;

That to be saved is only this,—

Salvation from our Selfishness,

From more than elemental fire,

The soul’s unsanctified desire,

From sin itself, and not the pain

That warns us of its chafing chain;

That worship’s deeper meaning lies

In mercy, and not sacrifice

Not proud humilities of sense

And posturing of penitence,

But love’s unforced obedience.

Saw yesterday an amateurish production of Sartre’s No Exit and finished the evening (which lasted until 3 a.m.) in deep and philosophical discussion with John, Rudy Atcon, and Steve. Very exhilarating.

Dad tells me that there is no immediately danger of serious injury to his eyes. Yet the specter of blindness looms constantly—with his mother’s malady, his, and the sharply decreasing efficiency of my own eyes year to year.

Tomorrow: Robert Frost and Deerfield dinner!!

Poet, enflame my soul

That I may scarce control

The life-illum’ning fire,

(The trusty guiding fire,)

That takes a poor dull wit

And shows him where to sit:—

Next all the worldly Graces;

Next all their beaut’ous faces.

Heard John Haynes Holmes in his valedictory a week ago. A disappointing morning, after my expectations; yet a confirmation of my belief that the Community Church has a sane and commendable attitude. I’ll join it if ever I reside for a time in New York.

December 6, 1949

Cambridge

Frost yesterday was humorous, captivating, etc., etc., but most of his side remarks were made last year, esp. those concerned with science. I liked his stand against the New Critics, and his perennial cry against modern methods of teaching poetry. (“You don’t memorize a poem; it memorizes itself. You don’t stick to a poem; it sticks to you. You must have a weakness for poetry.”)

Deerfield dinner was excellent. Mr. Boyden is very much like Frost: both are completely genuine. Mrs. Boyden is perhaps the most remarkable of the lot. Pictures of the pageant. Messrs. Sullivan, Suitor, Baldwin, Miller, Avirett, Lewis Perry, etc. the Deerfield alumni are a very plain-looking bunch, with a few notable exceptions.

Finished day with Rose-La-Rose, who was better than ever.

Finally completed An American Tragedy today and couldn’t eat my supper because of it. Dreiser lacks the sense of humor so important to Frost, Boyden, and Dick Hatch.

I liked James Russell Lowell’s sneer against advanced education: “Three-story larnin’s pop’lar now; I guess / We thriv’ez wal on jes’ two stories less . . .”

December 12, 1949

Cambridge

Emerson’s Credo (and mine?) “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,—but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever . . . rejoices me, and the heart appoints.”

Last night I had a feeling that true friends are those with whom you are as if alone—those who preserve and heighten your solitude—who are one with thyself. Who was it who recalled that he who announces “It is I” is refused entrance, whilst he who announces “It is thyself” is gladly received unto the hearth?

Laci and I left at 9 p.m. for Hartford and New Haven, got my car, left it at Monarch, returned to Cambridge 7 a.m. A good night’s work!

December 30, 1949

Sunnyside

Olivier’s Hamlet did not wear as well this evening as it did for me last year. His cuts are unmerciful—they confuse me more than they clarify the plot for me (the last purpose undoubtedly being their major explanation and excuse). Near the end, I was particularly struck with Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio: “Absent thee from felicity awhile / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.” How ironic is the message in this first line. What a biting commentary it is on man’s unawareness, his carousing and petty wasted attentions to the temptations of civilization!

I, like Rousseau, long to be a savage. Yet I am held captive by society with and among my family especially and my friends when I would prefer to be off to Brant Lake to chop wood and freeze. But most of all I am chained to my own indelible “mores”—my blasted culture pattern, which, alas, is immune to all eradicators. Can I say as Huck Finn does to his friend Tom Sawyer: “I’ve tried it, and it don’t work; it don’t work. It ain’t for me; I ain’t used to it. The widder . . . makes me git up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won’t let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don’t seem to let any air git through ‘em, somehow; and they’re so rotten nice that I can’t set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher’s. . . . The wider eats by a bell; she goes t’ bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell—everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it. . . . And grub comes too easy—I don’t take no interest in vittles, that way. . . . No, Tom, I won’t be rich and I won’t live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I’ll stick to ’em, too. Blame it all!”—not when I lapse into a rationalization, an acquiescence in even a positive (but fleeting) pleasure in shallow things. And yet, I would want to be a noble savage, one with a natural inclination for music, art, poetry, literature, and some degree of original inspiration in one or more of these. But they are natural to a savage. Man, in a way, comes a full circle around: from the primitive, unpleasant savagery of our remote ancestors to the achievement of the same freedom and joys they possessed, but for us this is through the vehicle of wealth and the medium of art. Only millionaires and artists are immune to the civilization of the mediocrity. But such a long way—such an unnecessary detour through ages of stagnation and morals—to reach what and only what the same journey commenced from.

“What a piece of work is a man”—and what a fool is the same!

December 31, 1949, New Year’s Eve

Sunnyside

Mom and Pop are having a party. Eugby, Fred, Arthie, Buzz, Dan are dateless and so am I. Alice and the Little Redders are in the cellar, suspiciously quiet. It is not quite clear to me just what everyone is so happy about with the closing of 1950. Things don’t look too good to me. Harvard is unintellectual or sports crazy; America is war-mad; religion is gaining more and more hypocrites as votaries (better they had stayed out); same with universities: mass education is ruining education for those few who should naturally have access to it. The one thing I would rejoice over this night is the prospect of the Catholic holy year in 1950. Catholics really have something that, I sometimes believe, adequately balances those stinking Catholic beliefs and practices that Dad continually harps upon. I have a great appreciation of individual sincere Catholics.

My prospects for 1950 are the worst of any previous year. This is assuming that the conditions of the past five months will not alter (and, alas, there is little hope that they will). Stagnation, indecision, waste! Meaningless and disinterested labor! Physical fatigue and emotional tension! Accomplishments lost; vices acquired. All good opinion of myself made questionable. Disgust, utter and complete (the more so because outwardly and even at times inwardly I am enjoying this unnatural state). Worst of all, and this is clear to me only recently: strained relations with family, Alice especially, partly their fault, and much harder on them than on me (so far).

I hope the Alaska job materializes. It may change things, add a little reality, strengthen my miserable body, perhaps even leave a clue to the whereabouts of the key to unlock my natural and predestined path.

1950

Cambridge

January 5–March 28

Sunnyside

April 1–8

Cambridge

April 9–June 12

Brant Lake Camp

July and August

Haverford

September–December 6

January 5, 1950

Cambridge

Tonight I read for the first time some of the speeches of Mr. Justice Holmes. They are gems—rare emeralds and rubies, sparkling diamonds of metaphor and phrase, pearly clarity and consistency of wit. Out-of-context quotations must lose greatly, but these few will not bear omission here:

“Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”—(the main question of a speaker) “What have you said to show that I can reach my own spiritual possibilities through such a door as this?” “If a man has the soul of Sancho Panza, the world to him will be Sancho Panza’s world; but if he has the soul of an idealist he will make—I do not say find—his world ideal.” “I say—and I say no longer with any doubt—that a man may live greatly in the law as well as elsewhere; that there as well as elsewhere his thought may find its unity in an infinite perspective; that there as well as elsewhere he may wreak himself upon life, may drink the bitter cup of heroism, may wear his heart out after the unobtainable.” “To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.” “No result is easy which is worth having. Your education begins when what is called your education is over.” “No man has earned the right to intellectual ambition until he has learned to lay his course by a star which he has never seen—to dig by the divining rod for springs which he may never reach.” “Most men of the college-bred type in some form or other have to go through that experience of sailing for the ice and letting themselves be frozen in.” “In plain words he must face the loneliness of original work. No one can cut out new paths in company. He does that alone.” “It is one thing to utter a happy phrase from a protected cloister; another to think under fire—to think for action upon which great interests depend.” “The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.” “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” “. . . the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones . . .” “Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.”

January 6, 1950

Cambridge

Holmes to William James: “I think the demands made of the universe are too nearly the Christian demands without the scheme of salvation. I long ago made up my mind that all one needed was a belief in the significance of the universe. And more lately it has come to seem to me that even that might be ambiguous. For all I know ‘significance’ is an expression of finiteness and incompleteness, and the total, if there is one, is too great a swell to condescend to have a meaning.” “I have been in the habit of saying that all I mean by truth is what I can’t help thinking.” “It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make my universe coherent and livable, not to babble about the universe.”

Holmes’s opinion in Herbert v. Shanley Co. (1917) displays his admirable sense of humor. I thought that his dissent in Northern Securities Co. v. U.S. (1904) completely a-typical. Sounded much like Sutherland or Field.

I noticed, last year, while reading some of William James’s letters, the ease and apparent unaffectedness with which he wrote passages of extreme intimacy to college, professional, or intellectual friends. Holmes does the same thing in his letters to James—e.g.,, “Oh! Bill, my beloved, how have I yearned after thee all this long time. How I have admired those brave, generous and magnanimous traits of which I will not shame thee by speaking. I am the better that I have seen thee and known thee—let that suffice.” Whether or not this type of attitude contributed to the gradual cooling of their hot friendship is an open question and most likely one incapable of being satisfactorily answered.

January 11, 1950

Cambridge

Finished Cooper’s Deerslayer and Lerner’s Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes yesterday. Read parts of Charnwood’s Lincoln today, also a poor book on Shakespeare, by G. B Harrison, unfortunately worthless to me. Tomorrow and a day or so afterward must be devoted to Beveridge’s Life of John Marshall, and Bliss Perry’s Heart of Emerson’s Journals.

Wrote first decent letter this semester to Bobby Johnston: an indication that things are improving here, only natural at the end of the term when a course assumes its full character in retrospect. I mentioned Velikovsky’s book, for (if true) it does jimmy many stout locks to mysterious doors.

Mischa’s contention that Jesus’ contemporaries hardly noticed him is apparently challenged in Fosdick’s new book, which I have purchased and hope to read. I wonder how the supposed earthquake at the Resurrection fits in with Velikovsky’s biblical analysis.

I have become more and more impatient to come to some sort of an end on this question of the universe! And particularly my relation to it. Holmes gave up the search for the meaning of the universe, becoming content to follow the call of his universe. But I am at no position to fathom either. Einstein’s new theory may be of tremendous significance. If thought is eventually prostituted to electrical impulses (though truthfully) and the universe is essentially electrical, gravitation now being linked close to electromagnetism, then the spirit and all of nature and matter are identical and subject to identical laws and regulations. In this regard, more of Velikovsky’s speculation, namely concerning the similarity of the atom (the smallest matter) to the systems of the universe (infinity)—[from Larrabee’s article}: “A charged body which rotates creates a magnetic field. The sun is a charged body, and it rotates, and charged particles arrive from it in a continuous stream; the earth is a charged body, and it rotates, and it possesses a magnetic field. If the magnetic field of the sun were to govern the earth’s motion, then after an encounter with a comet the earth could resume its rotation, though on a changed orbit. If it is true that the comet and the earth exchanged electrical discharges, as Dr. Velikovsky maintains that they did, then there may even be reason to suppose that the earth’s inertia is electrical in character. How do we know that the earth and the planets are so different from the electrons inside the atom? . . . Dr. Velikovsky willingly concedes that the behavior of the earth and the comet in his description is not in accord with the celestial mechanics of Newton. Indeed, it invites skepticism as to the infallibility of the Law of Gravitation, a law heretofore so firmly established that it has never been successfully combined into one system with the laws of electromagnetics. It is Dr. Velikovsky’s contention that over three thousand years ago Nature performed a great experiment in which it was demonstrated that the electromagnetic laws are as supreme in the heavens as they are inside the atom.”

January 12, 1950

Cambridge

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!

To spend that shortness basely were too long

If life did ride upon a dial’s point

Still ending at the arrival of an hour.

—Hotspur, I Henry IV, v.ii.82.

Expressed my anxiousness for finding a guiding principle to Stu Flealage. He too is convinced that Harvard does little to encourage real scholarship or learning among the undergraduates. Mischa sent me Marcus Aurelius.

January 13, 1950

Cambridge

I would like very much to be a judge! (Finished Life of John Marshall.)

January 14, 1950

Cambridge

Thus speaketh Emerson: “Religion in the mind is not credulity, and in the practice is not form. It is a life. It is the order and soundness of a man. It is not something else to be got, to be added, but is a new life of those faculties you have. It is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.” “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.” “It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” “You can never come to any peace or power until you put your whole reliance in the moral constitution of man, and not at all in a historical Christianity. The Belief in Christianity that now prevails is the unbelief of men. They will have Christ for a Lord and not for a Brother. Christ preaches the greatness of man, but we hear only the greatness of Christ.” “It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so quits the world of experience and makes the world he lives in.” [Interesting when compared with Holmes’s “my universe, not the universe.” Both, because they put on the blinkers, because inveterate optimists.]

Emerson selects the following as being representative of Wordsworth’s output: Fidelity, Tintern Abbey, Cumberland Beggar, Ode to Duty, September, The Force of Prayer, Lycoris, Lines on the Death of Fox, Dion, Happy Warrior, Laodamia, Ode.

Sunday, January 15, 1950

Cambridge

The Sabbath, sun clear and bright, throwing long shadows on the floor of the Lowell House courtyard. Am sending mother a bible for her birthday, since she has begun the task of reading that remarkable book. On the flyleaf I inscribed: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet, I,v.167–8. Also Emerson’s passage beginning “Religion in the mind is not credulity . . .”

John and I conjured up extra sense organs and other characteristics that would befit the Superman. We also wondered why space is arbitrarily measured by length, width, depth. Would not circular units, etc. be better? Physics is so important these days.

Yesterday I sent the following letter to Mr. Hatch:

There is a strange fog settled over the courtyard this night at Lowell House, much like the mists that hover above the sea on a sultry summer’s day. But my mind is clear and sparkling contrary to the weather. The past four months, however, have been a haze: complete disillusionment with Harvard and myself, complete lack of accomplishment.

I think the human machine must be unlike my new three-speed Webster record changer. We seem—or I seem—to operate only at high or low, 78 or 33⅓, without the intermediary 45. Before Christmas vacation, when the academic schedule here was routine, the daily obligations at a minimum, and when time was plentiful—time to play the piano, to read sages, to write to almost forgotten friends, to examine the new symphony conductor or the most recent movie—nothing was done. Energy, health, interest, enthusiasm disappeared in this irksome college. And now—now when we are madly reviewing textbooks and class notes, scrambling to find the date of the incorporation of the second United States Bank, the significance of Holmes’s dissent in the Lochner case, or diligently searching for those parts of Hamlet omitted from the current movie of the same name—now do we miraculously operate at full speed. Now I play, I write, I even think a little; now I hear Myra Hess; see the Ballet de Paris and the Brattle production of Troilus; and best of all, madly converse with my fellows, as we conjure up myriad consequences for the newest gene from Einstein’s incredible story of genius, and for Velikovsky’s amazing theories.

In short, the depression doubtlessly evident when John and I last visited you, and many times magnified since then, has left me. I am much the wiser for it, for I think I have learned the lesson that American-style mass production education must claim as its sole worthy precept: that to become learned in the wisdom and ways of the world one must cease depending on classes or reading lists and teach himself.

Whenever I pass off Harvard in this way, I receive a raised eyebrow, saying in effect, “But is it not our greatest university?” Yet I am not by any means alone in my feelings. John is in much the same situation and Steve Baran has arranged to spend next year at the Sorbonne. Rudy Atcom (A Greek who lived with the Houghtons the year before you returned and is now a postgraduate student of philosophy here) joins with us all in saying that the university provides no direct stimuli to interest or effort, that the unwieldiness of the large plant has rendered personal tutoring, section meetings or what-have-you a sham. This is, of course, most disheartening; yet the real damage is done only to those who continue vainly to seek encouragement and incitement. We who “know” are safe, but are staggered by the realization that now we are really out of prep school and will have to make our way alone. It is a challenge to be answered in full armor.

This awakening reveals anew that monster ignorance that still haunts me. “Where have I been these nineteen years?” I ask. “How many hours of self-improvement can stand against the pile of time given to indolence and waste?” But the major concern I have had (things must be pretty bad by the sound of all this, eh?) is the sense of a loss of acuteness and a deterioration of what I used to think was a fine memory. These last puzzle me. I do not know what they mean. I have read of similar lapses in men who later became significant enough for me to have read of their lapses. But as we must live in the present, I cannot but be worried.

It is interesting how courses seem meaningless all through the term and then at review time suddenly register in one’s mind. I have found this many many times. It is like the momentary crystalline symmetry that I sometimes see after concentrating long hours on a problem that thitherto was an amorphous muddle. These cosmic visitations (that is what I call them—but no matter) are so penetrating, yet so fleeing, that if you asked me to describe just how I felt or just what I saw during one, I could not. (I suppose that request could be fulfilled only by a great poet or a great musician.) They do not come gratis—that is certain. In religious terminology (alas, but it is the best), God rewards only those with abiding and deep faith. So I find that, whether in the contemplation of the Divine Essence, Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ, or anything else, only deep and concentrated thought will fulfill the conditions apparently prerequisite to the cry of Eureka.

But enough of this prattle.

You may remember that I mentioned my dislike for Harry Levin, who teaches Shakespeare here. My judgment was premature and based on superficial considerations such as his lack of spontaneity and his affected way of speaking. I now realize full well that Levin is brilliant. He displayed this best in the Hamlet lectures. It is interesting that he said nothing to the effect that Polonius’s “To thine own self . . .” speech is a copy and therefore somewhat ridiculous, as you intimated. (I keep the Deerfield Crofts Classics edition next to my brand new Harvard Crofts Classics edition.) It is evident that Olivier considers it so; and Kittredge cites Euphues by Lyly as containing the original.

The rapid survey of constitutional law that I have nearly completed has, if nothing else, added the bar—better still, the bench—to my endless list of possible pursuits. I’ve read biographies of Holmes, Marshall, and Darrow. Perhaps this is setting the sights too high.

American history is still pretty much worthless the way they teach it here; but American literature has led me to Emerson, which is something. The trouble is that once there they do not give you time to stop. Imagine: two lectures on Emerson, both horrible.

Next term I hope to resume my study of philosophy. And first thing in September: music.

The Freemans visited me both here and at home. I gave John what little advice I could about small vs. large colleges. They seemed impressed with Harvard’s physical plant, which is fine, but I hope I cured Mrs. Freeman’s false impression that all its students are extra-intelligent and extra-eager to improve their minds.

My best to Mrs. Hatch and Deerfield, etc.

Heard Myra Hess this afternoon in Symphony Hall. She played the little Mozart Fantasia in D minor that I have been dabbling with. How convenient, as I never knew quite how it should be played. Now I know. She plays with the grace, wit, and touch of a sublime angel.

January 22, 1950

Cambridge

I am inflexible. Last night I could not enjoy the very fine entertainment offered by Les Ballets de Paris because I had expected classical ballet and found something entirely different, but perhaps equally as beautiful. This afternoon Dad & Mother called, but I could not talk with them joyously or sincerely because the ring of the phone had drawn my mind and soul as it had my body from Evans Cases of Constitutional Law.

When I visited Mr. Hatch last year the thought occurred to me that it was paradoxical that this man—who professed disdain for his fellows at Deerfield, who is in all things the supreme individualist—should be so dear to all. Tonight I came across the following in Emerson: “Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. ‘To the persevering mortal,’ said Zoroaster, ‘the blessed Immortals are swift.”’

I would like to work for a few years in this Hindman Settlement School. Wonder if they would accept me.

Two thought-provoking passages from T. S. Eliot, speaking of Hamlet and his relationship with Horatio: “Such morbidly introspective characters are neither truest to themselves in solitude nor very likely to be happy in the intimacy of love—when their egoism may be either overfed, if they are the more loved, or if they are the more loving, starved. But they may find relief from the obscure and warping tyranny of self in the generosities of friendship. With their friends they can be confidently and forgetfully and transparently themselves.” “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

Dave Bevington’s mother has a poem in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. I don’t understand it.

January 26, 1950

Cambridge

Rose early this morning. Realized that I am happiest when alone with my thoughts and God.

February 1, 1950

Cambridge

For some reason, I cannot help thinking of little Freddy Parker at the Brant Lake graduation exercises this past spring. Mr. Doyle’s forgetfulness, Freddy’s disappointment at not receiving the attendance award, and the principal’s repentance would make a touching short story.

Charnwood says this about William Tecumseh Sherman: “[He] was a man of quick wits and fancy, bright and mercurial disposition, capable of being a delightful companion to children and capable of being sharp and inconsiderate to duller subordinates.” Just like the Hatch.

Contributed $15 to Deerfield’s Alumni Fund. I would rather see it go to the lending library there.

February 5, 1950

Cambridge

I must convince my parents to adopt one or two orphaned boys—a lad who started life in the Hitler Youth Movement, or an Italian waif roaming the streets of Rome, or a sharp-faced Greek boy with no home. To this effect I wrote a letter home just now. I hope something comes of it.

Skiing at Bridgton was tip-top; living in, on, and “off of” the snow was a new experience. Friday night our eggs froze, for I foolishly left them outside. We peeled the shells off and beheld the raw egg, frozen as it was, with yolk and transparent white surrounding it. It looked very much alive this way, and I felt a sickening feeling when I thawed, cooked, and ate that potential chick.

Steve was mopey—made things difficult most of the time. I imagine it was because of his total unpreparedness (if that is a word). We were right on a lake frozen one foot through, in a little shack with plenty of blankets, and an indispensable pot-bellied stove that we kept well-fueled with wood. The country is in many ways even more enticing in wintertime than in the heat of August. I cannot wait until I own my first acreage! But now it is 2 a.m. and I must sleep, against the rigors of another academic day. I learned more from Thursday-Friday-and-Saturday shivering in the Maine wilderness than I did all last term. “Fie on this quiet life; I want work.”

February 6, 1950

Cambridge

Arthur Levitt wants me to climb Redfield next week. The crazy loon! Since it has never been scaled in the winter, the Adirondack Mountain Club is offering a trophy for the first party to accomplish this insane feat. Where are my boots?

February 9, 1950

Cambridge

Bishop Neill awakened my slumbering sensibilities. He made religion so real, so gripping, so sublimely beautiful, so important. I emerged from Memorial Church wallowing in my thoughts, solely engaged with the realization that I must soon choose the way of God and regulate my life in the perspective of eternity. I emerged in a brooding mood, and, not waiting for those who had accompanied me, set out almost in a trance for Lowell House, hoping that when I got there John would be gone. But he was not, and to my astonishment, upon seeing him I felt a great joy, not only for John but for all things; and as I walked out again into the courtyard I held my face high into the misty air, thrust my hands deep into my pockets, and walked confidently on into the world. Everything seemed fine and beautiful, especially the statue of Christ on the cross that I had passed so many times before without having had any particular reaction to it. I proceeded to Putnam Square, got into my car, and just drove—to Concord and back—thinking and turning this matter over and over again in my thoughts.

February 10, 1950

Cambridge

More than anything else, I crave acceptance; yet where I am accepted I do not wish to go. I am closer to being or becoming a Christian tonight than I have ever been.

February 11, 1950

Cambridge

The psychiatrist shies from that word, “sin.” He has done wonders toward the discovery and remedy of imaginary sin in human beings; yet this does not mean that there is no such thing as real sin. —Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene.

Immortality is viewed by many as a convenient escape from the fardels of the present world; or as an excuse for indulgence and lasciviousness. But just as one works his hardest in college—and therefore “lives” during those four years at a constantly high intensity when he regards it as a preparation for fifty-odd years to come—so it must be with mortal life. Compared to eternity, our sojourn here is infinitesimal, and therefore we must endeavor to use every minute of it profitably and constructively; and direct our actions with a glimpse of the everlasting future always in the corner of our eye.

Truth, justice, and mercy are the three pillars of the state. When one of these disintegrates, the superstructure begins to fail.

Our complex society breeds “the little man”—the Charlie Chaplins of all races and nationalities. This little man is an extremely active compound; so, when combined with a dash of nationalism or hero-worship, he combines with it explosively to form a Nazi or Fascist compound. These days, men must be respected for their humanness, so that the little-man complex disappears, for no man is little in the eyes of God.

Society in 1950 is a travesty of what society should be.

February 12, 1950

Cambridge

Thoreau, speaking of his stay at Walden Pond: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

February 13, 1950

Cambridge

He is rich who can afford to do without many things.

Penned the following verses to Paul [Davidoff], who will probably never live down the fact that he is a “Valentine baby”:

On February ten and four

Jack sends Jill a Barricini.

(Only one thing she’d like more

And that ain’t Hylers, please believe me).

But if to you I plainly blurted

“Will you not my Valentine be?”

Folks would sure think me perverted—

Or even worse, as you can see.

So I’ll just send the usual greeting,

And in the same old hackneyed way:

To you, age twenty (oh, time is fleeting),

“A happy birthday,” that’s all I’ll say.

February 14, 1950

Cambridge

Last night John Sears offered Allston Flagg and myself a ride home from Hemenway. Both Allston and I found ourselves in the back seat, leaving John alone up front, as though he were a hired chauffeur. Yet this situation resulted merely from the fact that neither Allston nor I was willing to let the other sit alone in the back, and thus appear “inferior.” This unwillingness, of course, was subconscious, but it taught me that as we grow older and more experienced our stupidity increases proportionately.

February 15, 1950

Cambridge

Up early, 7 a.m. Ten inches of snow fell during the night. Thinking of this weekend made me shiver.

This afternoon I had my first “clear and present” idea of the horribleness of a soul’s eternal stay in Hell, if indeed there is such retribution after death; and I was sore afraid.

February 16, 1950

Cambridge

They say that the physico-chemical components of the body after death are worth $3.00, which at the present level of inflation would most likely swell to $5.00 or even $6.00. I suppose if you could take a dead leg, for instance, and sell it to a poor legless living man, the value of corpses would rise considerably. Doubtless, the interchangeability of dead for living parts in the machine world accounts for the grand sum of $13.50 which I received today for the body of my dear Ford, deceased yesterday; for I am sure that otherwise it would not and should not bring twice the sum now quoted for dead man-machines.

February 17, 1950

Cambridge

Shakespeare A-minus; History 61a B-plus; Government B-minus; English 7 C. Dean’s List by a hair.

February 21, 1950

Cambridge

Our little mountain climbing group got within 100 feet of the summit of Marcy, and turned back. Levitt being seized with panic upon losing his snowshoe, and several others complaining of real or imagined frostbite; plus the lack of visibility and our unfamiliarity with the proper trail up the summit—all these made this turning back probably the wisest thing, although certainly not the most heroic.

“And all things change them to the contrary” says the elder Capulet. Artie Levitt, the organizer, leader (?) and most energetic of the group going up, was the first to give way before the real test, the least stable in the face of unpleasant conditions, and the most troublesome during the descent. I remember that he acted the same way this summer when we overturned the sailboat. When the situation required real calmness and rapid action, he became a burden to all enterprise. He tipped the boat. Buddy and I pulled it (and Artie) to shore.

Cast of characters: Arthur Levitt, Williams ’52; Don (“Charlie”) Rogers, Williams ’50; Joe Hastings, Williams ’51 (Deerfield ’47); Don MacDonald, Williams ’52; Bud Friedman, Dartmouth ’52; Jay Angevine, Williams ’49 (instructor at Cornell); Peter Bien, Harvard ’52.

Evolution of the plot, temporally: Saturday 1 p.m., leave Williamstown for Heart Lake; 9:30–11:00, to Marcy Dam. Sunday 8:00 to 11:00, to Indian falls; 12:00 to 3:00, to Plateau lean-to; 3:00 to 4:00, up and back—failure!; 4:00 to 5:30, to Indian Falls; 7:30–11:00 to Heart Lake. Monday 12 midnight to 5 a.m., to Williamstown.

February 23, 1950

Cambridge

I scoffed at Buddy’s fears of frostbite atop Marcy while I exposed my hands in order to replace my snowshoes. It is I who have ended up with frostbite, alas—in my right index finger: I cannot play the piano, typewrite, and I can hardly write this entry. But the doctor says it will disappear in time.

February 25, 1950

Cambridge

Two interesting observations in Bradley’s lectures on King Lear: (1) “Good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst forms, to be a poison. The world reacts against it violently, and, in the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself.” (2) “And here adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed. It wins fragrance from the crushed flower. It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity had frozen. It purifies the soul’s sight by blinding that of the eyes. [“I stumbled when I saw,” says Gloucester.] . . . The judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us, its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free; ‘Our means secure us, and our mere defects / Prove our commodities.’ Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And nothing outward can touch that.” [The pessimistic theme of King Lear.]

Short-story subjects; 1. Jerry Parker’s disappointment—a fable. 2. Levitt’s panic on Marcy trip—contrariness. 3. Controversy over adopting DP—crushed idealism.

Sunday, February 26, 1950

Cambridge

Up early to hear E. Power Biggs’ organ recital. I know so little about Bach that I could get naught but the barest minimum satisfaction. Must study Bach—and Beethoven’s quartets.

Frostbitten finger is making me miserable. Can hardly write.

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.

They kill us [frostbite us] for their sport.

What I need is diligent work, hard work, steady work, serious work, meaningful work, sweat-producing work, muscle-building work—work, work, work, work, work.

Edward Markham plowed 20 acres of rough ground at $1.00 an acre in order to be able to buy his first copies of Bacon & Shakespeare. My Shakespeare sold for half an acre.

March 3, 1950

Cambridge

My finger is encased in a fat bandage, but I have mastered penmanship with the thumb and third finger.

Williams invited Swami Akhilananda to lecture to us. A suave, pleasant Indian whose delightful accent no doubt added to the “numinousness” (sic) of what he had to say. He pictured the true Hindu religion as believing in an intensely personal religious experience for each individual; and sanctioning the communal phase—churchtianity—only insofar as it makes possible to communicate the joy of this experience from one who has experienced such joy personally to the many who have not. Religion and philosophy in India, says the Swami, are nearly identical, for religion is the search for truth. The test of a religious experience is its expression in life. Thus theology is secondary to psychology in Hinduism. If a man’s life is not changed, although he may be the profoundest theologian and believe in an intellectual God, this is not true religion. As to the nature of the Hindu God—Reality-Truth—its attributes are familiar to us Westerners. The infinite nature of God forever prohibits finite man from approaching Him in any way; but we evade this by personalizing God. Thus God loves, God is powerful, God does this, God does that. Jesus, Buddha, Moses are God personalized. Thus they are walking metaphors. This is perhaps the most succinct argument for worshipping Jesus (or Buddha, or Moses) that I have heard. Indeed, it is almost blasphemous to speak and think of God directly and not in the form of this metaphorical Person or Son of God. Different people worship Jesus, Buddha, etc. because one or another is in a more familiar tradition and means more as a person, and therefore as a personification of God.

Now I am a nothing. “Nothing will come of nothing.” No personality, no direction, no purpose, no reason. Yet perhaps throughout my first ten to fifteen years this was not the case. I literally must be born again and become as a little child!

When the mind’s free, The body’s delicate; the tempest in my mind Doth from my senses take all feeling else Save what beats there.

Sunday, March 5, 1950

Cambridge

Spent yesterday and this morning with Dave Tyack at his home in Hamilton. Skied, talked. A warmly delightful family. Perfect understanding between mother and son, son and father, father and mother. They sing their way through life, and succeed admirably.

Saw Hawthorne’s Custom House in Salem.

March 11, 1950

Cambridge

How unexpected comes compliment. On what I considered a mediocre job at best of exam writing, this comment: “Good job. Your generalizations are sound and well documented, a nearly ‘lost art’ on big, trend questions.” And a nice A for this first History 61b hour exam.

March 13, 1950

Cambridge

Melville illustrates Hazlitt’s remark that any author worthy of the name must have an apprenticeship in Shakespeare and the Bible. Moby Dick is the apocrypha of those two works. And Ahab’s soliloquies during the three-day chase approach Lear’s in their ferocity, and this hard captain’s treatment of Little Pip smacks only of Lear’s of the Fool. The figure, entangled and mangled, of the Parsee’s corpse against Moby’s thick blubber skin is the most hideous in all literature. It makes blind Gloucester a red-painted child, ringing his eyes in jest and tomfoolery.

March 17, 1950

Cambridge

First piano lesson with Chester Fanning Smith: Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 55, no. 1, and the thirteenth 2-part invention of Bach.

March 19, 1950

Sunnyside

We can never know anything about persons or ideas until we have come close to them. Gentiles hate Jews because they have never established a bond of sympathy between Jews and what is Jewish in themselves. Dad despises Christianity as humbug because he has never tried for a year or two to be a Christian. I think we must always act out a part nowadays. Anyone can be a sturdy lad from Vermont or New Hampshire, and all should give it a try. This business of “be thyself” is the real humbug, for this is what sets one man up in opposition to his brother. Every great man has been a play-actor—”All the world’s a stage”—and has started out in life by fooling those around him to a degree; but each has learned that other men fool, and end up by playing the fool generally. Thus by indirections do we find directions out.

Every time I hear John Haynes Holmes I am re-convinced that sublime beauty controls his soul. Tonight he spoke of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise—spoke of him as a Jew and as a humanitarian, as the greatest humanitarian of the century and as a great Prophet of Israel. Our age has had great souls: Gandhi was probably the most outstanding according to amount accomplished, but I would place Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Wise, Rufus Jones, the Quaker, Norman Thomas, and especially Dr. Holmes by his side. Holmes began by stating and extolling Wise’s Jewishness: his rabbinical status, his enthusiasm for Zionism, and his championship of the threatened Jewry of Europe. And Holmes declared that he loved Wise because he was a Jew and because he adhered to the Jewish tradition (which he didn’t), adding that Jew & Christian can exist side by side as Wise and Holmes did, exchanging pulpits or marching arm-in-arm down Eighth Avenue afore 30,000 protestors against the Nazi threat. Wise never forgot he was a Jew and he would never let anyone else forget it, or that his father was a rabbi, his grandfather a rabbi, his great-grandfather a rabbi, etc. And Holmes declared that he could see no virtue in the attempt of Jews to appear indistinguishable from other people. How unexpected from Holmes, and yet how characteristic of him! Later on in the question period I was about to ask him to reconcile this statement with what—at least as I understand them—are the principles of the Community Church, but someone beat me to it. The answer was more Holmsian than what provoked the question, for its essence was that the process of unification is going on, that at best it is an extremely slow process, and that it should be encouraged. There Holmes said something that I think offers the whole solution for the future: that we must endeavor to extract from the various religious traditions those portions that are mutually agreeable and that tend to enhance one another, at the same time discarding and abrogating those portions that stand as a wall or stumbling block between man and man. This is what must be done. Distance, time, etc., no longer being a factor separating peoples, and America being the conglomeration that it is, with this tendency becoming increasingly evident in other nations as well, the old traditions must go: parochialism is no longer a reality, it is a fantasy, and universalism is being thrust on us whether we like it or not. It is incumbent on all people nowadays to know, and to form a bond of sympathy with, all other people. And the best way for this to come about is for people to worship as a community, since most communities, at least urban ones, are microcosms in that they contain a fair sampling of the races and religions of this earth.

March 22, 1950

Cambridge

Story: Harry Scripture’s supposed intrigue to poison John Hayes’s and Eddy Hayes’s mind. I wonder if this is true.

Milton Steinberg died. His poor wife.

March 24, 1950

Cambridge

Dimmy feels that men today are dead because they are imprisoned each in a specific frame of reference—daily routine, maze, rut—where all their actions are conditioned and habitual. Thus responses are no longer fitting and proper, considering the objective stimulus. The way out of the maze is to develop a psychologically mature personality, for which nothing is ever static, which experiences something new and unique each day. A person with such a personality would have nothing to do with absolutes; he would not even be absolute in his aversion to absolutes; and if he were forced to act in an absolutist way in order to accomplish a specific task he would leave one corner of his being open nevertheless to the reality outside of his particular niche.

I recalled Toynbee’s idea of stimulus and response, withdrawal and return. The reason why a place like Harvard is so stale and static, and why Deerfield is becoming so, and why the Community Church will become so also, is that these institutions, although developing originally from a flush of freshness and enthusiasm, and having represented an attempt to establish something extraordinary in their fields in order to meet a certain situation “a”, have, after they succeeded in this endeavor and established themselves, forgotten that the original situation “a” is no longer a factor. When an institution persists under such delusion or ignorance, it is doomed to rigidity and eventual death. The best example is the Puritan movement in Massachusetts.

The psychologically mature person would realize, first that situation “a” need no longer be considered and that the institution no longer has any virtue in relation to its remedying this situation; secondly, that the institution itself, let us call it “a^1”, now becomes a “situation” “b”, necessitating a new institution “b^1” or at any rate a modification of the old one if the life of the movement is to continue with undiminished vigor.

Toynbee has shown that this realization is prerequisite to the progress of civilizations. His reasoning applies, I think, to all institutions, big or small, or at least to all that at one time succeed in establishing themselves or becoming dominant in any way.

March 25, 1950

Cambridge

Fine evening of talk with Johnny Taylor. Spouted more idealism: he has a very sober mind and isn’t fooled. We two could manage a splendid camp or school. I must end my yearly epistle to Bobby Gersten: that fool place Brant Lake has such possibilities and so little to show. One little nature counselor! A genuine nature counselor! So little and yet so much.

John has written some poetry. I thought some of the individual stanzas and lines really excellent, although he often sacrifices all to rhyme. College doesn’t give him time to continue writing!!! College doesn’t give us time to think!

Received an unexpected letter from Eddy Bien. He is on the faculty of the Bellevue Medical School, apparently doing exceedingly well. Must be talented. This is fine—very fine.

Hatch’s article on Deerfield that was in the Ford Magazine was reprinted in the Alumni Journal. I was somewhat disappointed. Although done with craftsmanship, it is banal and unimaginative. Sounds more like something I would write for the Scroll!

March 26, 1950

Cambridge

Now what could be more wonderful writing that this from Huck Finn:

Soon as it was night, out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things—we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us—the new clothes Buck’s folks made for us was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn’t go much on clothes, nohow.

Sometimes we’d have that whole river to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—or a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss, about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could ‘a’ laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

March 27, 1950

Cambridge

Henry Adams writes about America and Americans: “The American character showed singular limitations which sometimes drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by his own ignorance—lost in the darkness of his own groping—the scholar finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men who seem to him ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance; who have forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that they are bored. . . . The American was ashamed to be amused; his mind no longer answered to the stimulus of variety; he could not face a new thought. All his immense strength, his intense nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in one direction, and he could not change it.”

Dad is really in a predicament, for the drug apparently does not have a permanent effect, nor will his constitution stand up to a continued application of it. Thus if he is treated, his sight returns but his body becomes useless, it is so weak; and if treatment is abandoned, the eyes become opaque as before. I shudder to think what the outcome of this will be. Pray God that Dad does not lose his spirit: that is most important, infinitely more so than sight.

“All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”—Henry Adams.

The other day during rush hour in the Boston subway, two middle-aged dames were talking incessantly to one another of the current gossip and similar trash; whereupon an adorable blonde little girl, of about five years old, I should say, who was standing in the aisle next to their seats and whose towhead therefore was level with their faces, stepped in front of the woman nearest the aisle and simply stared—fascinated—at the latter’s mobile face, with the distance of perhaps three or four inches separating the two. The two women feigned a sickening smile each, the “isn’t she cute!” smile, and continued their gab, literally giving their admirer the cold shoulder. The little girl, deeply hurt at such a rejection, appeared extremely bewildered for a time, as if desperately trying to decide what to do next. Evidently, she concluded, in her little way, that since they would not play with her she would play with herself, whereupon she commenced the most perfect and hilarious pantomime of these two gabbers, imitating their mouth movements, shoulder shrugs, and ridiculously exaggerated motions of hands, all of which could have proceeded only from such childish innocence.

March 28, 1950

Cambridge

Henry James: “Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms . . . Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”

April 1, 1950

Sunnyside

Matthiessen committed suicide. Murdock reports, according to the papers, that he was depressed for some time. A note was left, reporting something similar to: I have been most disturbed at world events; I am a Christian and a socialist, and believe in world peace.

Tonight I played the Chopin Nocturne (Op. 55, #1) before an “audience,” It was a miserable job indeed, proving to me how far I have yet to go on the piano.

Grandma’s sister was here tonight and told us something of the family genealogy. My great-grandmother lived in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and then moved to New York, where she married Adolph Honigsberg, an Austrian by birth. My great-great grandparents lived and died in Boston. Their parents, my great-great-great grandparents, came from Europe: one was Dutch, the other Prussian. This induced Dad to think back a bit, but he could not remember ever having been told of his forebears. His mother’s family, however, that is her brothers and sisters, have achieved some distinction in California, and all of them are extremely well-off. Dad thinks that we are the only Biens in the world: viz., that all others are related to us in some way.

Sunday, April 2, 1950

Sunnyside

What I like about John Haynes Holmes, Stephen Wise, Justice Holmes, and perhaps FDR is that they have been living contradictions to Nietzsche: not so much because they deny in their lives and beliefs that power is the chief motivating force, but rather because they take power and use it in constructive ways. Especially power in religion. Wise and Holmes cannot be termed weaklings; yet they preach brotherhood and humility. If I were to select an inscription to place over the edifice of my aspirations, I might very well chose the following by Justice Holmes: THE JOY OF LIFE IS TO PUT OUT ONE’S POWER IN SOME NATURAL AND USEFUL OR HARMLESS WAY. THERE IS NO OTHER. AND THE REAL MISERY IS NOT TO DO THIS.

I should like some day to write a book showing how the essential truth of Nietzsche and Dreiser need not be the cause for pessimism. For they can be fulfilled in the person of a Holmes just as well in that of a Hitler. I should also like some day to do a philosophical approach to the history of religion, Toynbee style.

April 4, 1950

Sunnyside

This afternoon I went up to see John Haynes Holmes at his home. He is a very simple person, and thus has very simple physical needs: his apartment is sparsely furnished indeed. But Holmes’s mind and personality are cluttered with thoughts and ideas, thoughts and ideas that he knows how to express. One of the things that delighted me most during this visit was his statement that it is difficult for one to realize with what ease people become attuned to the Community Church’s program. I know that Holmes’s personal magnetism is perhaps largely responsible for this; still I feel that underneath people really desire to establish connections with all mankind and with all the universe, and that they are simply waiting for someone to unlock the lock that keeps them enclosed in a particular tradition or a particular set of beliefs.

I told Holmes all, beginning with Dad’s early experiences in the synagogue and ending with the ideas of (1) the withdrawal and return necessary for progress, i.e., the escape from rigidity, (2) Justice Holmes’s power doctrine, (3) the true view of tradition—i.e., the insight that the pre-Maccabean times throws on the nature of the Jewish tradition, (4) the necessity for personifying God’s characteristics in the great religious leaders; how the Hindus expand this into a world view. In between, of course, came the story of my constantly increasing awareness of the religious truth, and of the religious experience.

Holmes seemed impressed, and said as much. He was particularly interested in the swing of the pendulum, as he put it, from grandfather to father, to son; and also from the home atmosphere to Johnny Taylor’s and Ockenga’s stark fundamentalism. His father, said Holmes, although a Unitarian and connected with the Unitarian Church in Malden, Massachusetts, used to take little John into Boston on Sunday mornings to hear the great preachers of the day: and those were the days of great preachers. The elder Holmes evinced not the slightest concern if one was an Episcopalian, or another a Methodist. Thus John received a great desire to preach, and at the same time a universal view of religion instead of a sectarian one, at least insofar as the Boston area was his universe.

I think, after all this, that the Community Church is a truly unique institution in its attitudes; moreover, that I belong there—and Holmes thinks so too.

April 9, 1950

Cambridge

The other day I remarked to a Harvard grad, Jack Stewart ’40, that Matthiessen must have been a petty cockeyed person to have ended his life as he did. Stewart retorted that anyone who does not commit suicide these days is cockeyed.

Dick Becker spent Easter vacation with me.

April 12, 1950

Cambridge

I found the following paragraph in the preface, by Rufus Jones, to Kagawa’s book on Jesus and Love: “Kagawa is one of the striking phenomena of the Christian world of today. He is not a man behind a pulpit; he is a demonstrator in a laboratory. He is showing, once more, that Christianity is not talk, it is action; it is not words, it is power. He exhibits it as soul-force, creative energy, redemptive might. We see at once how little is expressed by a census of Church membership or by an array of numbers. What counts is unquenchable personal conviction, invincible faith, an unconquerable spirit of adventure and demonstration. And here they are revealed in this man.”

Dowden, speaking of Brutus: “It is idealists who create a political terror; they are free from all desire for blood-shedding; but to them the lives of men and women are accidents; the lives of ideas are the true realities; and, armed with an abstract principle and a suspicion, they perform deeds which are at once beautiful and hideous:

’Tis a common proof

That lowliness is young Ambition’s ladder,

Whereto the climber upwards turns his face;

But when he once attains the utmost round,

He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees

By which he did ascend: so Caesar may;

Then, lest he may, prevent!

Hussah! Shakespeare knows the Arthur Levitt type:

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith;

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,

Make gallant show and promise of their mettle;

But when they should endure the bloody spur;

They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades,

Sink in the trial.

Julius Caesar, IV, ii, 23–27

April 12, 1950

Cambridge

From Coriolanus, IV, v, regarding war:

2 serv. Why, then we shall have a stirring world again. This peace is nothing, but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed ballad-makers.

1 serv. Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; nulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children, than wars a destroyer of men.

2 serv. ‘Tis so: and as wars, in some sort, may said to be a ravisher, so it cannot be denied, but peace is a great maker of cuckolds.

1 serv. Ay, and it makes men hate one another.

2 serv. Reason; because they then less need one another. The wars for my money. . . .

April 14, 1950

Cambridge

Today I purchased a bouncing venerable automobile for $125. Weight, upwards of two tons; body black; race Packard; year of conception 1937; horsepower 120; tires all new, etc. No windshield wiper.

April 16, 1950

Cambridge

Mischa says that Marc Antony’s “eulogy” of Caesar is the outstanding instance of demagoguery; that Antony was an opportunist, Brutus a fool, and Cassius a knave. He also says that I should catalogue the various pieces of information that come my way; should memorize Shakespearian passages and recite them aloud; should obtain a basic discipline in mathematics!

April 18, 1950

Cambridge

“No one who has sought God as spirit to Spirit can do a selfish or a callous act while the radiant power of that effort lasts.”—Barbara Spofford Morgan.

“All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils; my lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit.”—Job 27: 3–4.

Did not I experience this immediately after Bishop Neill’s talk? But for such a fleeting moment!

April 19, 1950

Cambridge

A young creative mind is like a seedling: step on it and it is destroyed. But an oak can be stepped on.

Attended convention of the American College of Physicians. Kendall read a paper on cortisone—out of my range. Clinics from various hospitals were broadcast over color television, very effectively. This may revolutionize teaching methods.

April 22, 1950

Cambridge

Billy Graham found a critical and unresponsive hearer in me this evening. He made Christianity a securer of everlasting bliss, and that is all. Accept Christ or, sure as he was standing on his two feet, you will roast in hell. Though this is too doctrinal for me, it is true that I have not yet thought about religion from the viewpoint of what happens to the individual after death. To me so far, the important thing has been the possession of the Spirit of God and Truth in one while he is living this life. Knowledge of such a possession remakes a man; he becomes as a little child, and he automatically radiates love toward all of nature. The Gospel of John catches these feelings better than anything else I have read. It is truly a divinely inspired document.

I suppose that on the level of the masses Billy Graham performed an identical function to that of Bishop Neill on the level of the intelligentsia. But the ugly daemon power looms before Billy Graham. There is a man who has the talents of a demagogue, yet who puts them to better use. Working up the emotions of the mob, however, is not only something that can—and has—led to Nazism or Huey Longism; but seems to me to be a relatively poor way of leading to Christism as well. I do not see how a conversion under Graham’s influence can be a secure, lasting, and fruitful one unless it is based on a serious inquiry and a rational faith (no, this need not be an inconsistency: rational faith is grander and infinitely more efficacious than irrational faith). Perhaps Billy’s great justification is that he gives the final nudge to people who have long considered their relation to God but who have never reached the point of openly testifying to this relationship—which is the sublimest and noblest in all of life.

John Mansfield is certainly not as blind as I. As we both walked through the countyard, he stopped and smelled the dogwood blossoms, whereas I had not even noticed that they were there. No wonder so few people see, feel, and smell the Rose of Sharon.

April 26, 1950

Cambridge

From Portrait of a Lady: “Madame Merle tossed away the music with a smile. ‘What’s your idea of success?’” “You evidently think it must be a very tame one. It’s to see some dream of one’s youth come true.”

April 30, 1950

Cambridge

“Everywhere in this tragic world, man’s thought, translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. . . . And whatsoever he dreams of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own destruction.” (From Bradley’s lectures on Tragedy)

May 9, 1950

Cambridge

Billy Graham, interestingly enough, seems to have the same ideas about Christianity as Kagawa; yet I hardly think that Billy is furthering the cause of religion. I suppose this leads to the conclusion that the only stable reality is the individual—and not the system or philosophy. The identical thoughts may produce progress in a Kagawa and retrogression in a Graham. Perhaps when people begin to realize this they will not only cease turning to authoritarianism or other isms, but will also, however paradoxical it may seem, accept the fact that individuals die, and instead of using this as an argument for futility, will begin to see the grandeur, miraculousness, continuity, and divinity of Life.

On this line of thought I have come to believe that the one lasting (sic) reality of religion is the mystic adventure—perhaps the most fleeting experience of any; and that churches, ritual, dogmas, and creeds are justified (1) only insofar as they induce this experience or provide the proper conditions for it, and (2) only insofar as they translate into social action the logical manifestation or result of the mystic experience—namely, love. The big question seems to be whether anything can “induce” a union with the infinite, or whether, like a mutation, it just happens. Ah, but what of mutations brought about by x-rays? Perhaps the great preacher is one whose mind is constructed like a cathode tube.

There are only two levels of education: the preparatory school level and the graduate school level. (Frank Boyden)

A college student is like a dancer doing a pirouette. While his body makes a steady and continuous advance in time and space, his head remains stationary until the body is 5/6 of the way around, and then, in the two summer months, catches up with it.

May 11, 1950

Cambridge

“Ten minutes before she [Isabel Archer (Osmond)] had felt the joy of irreflective action—a joy to which she had so long been a stranger . . .” Et moi aussi!

I am first beginning to know the character Hamlet: for reflection over this disillusion is preventing action.

Knowledge is the penetration of the truth into the entire personality.

Amherst? Harvard? Haverford? Oxford? Cambridge? St. Andrews? Princeton?

May 12, 1950

Cambridge

From Winesburg, Ohio, The Philosopher: “Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. ‘You must pay attention to me,’ he urged. ‘If something happens perhaps you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this—that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That’s what I want to say. Don’t you forget that. Whatever happens, don’t you dare let yourself forget.’”

Max Steuer’s younger brother, a sophomore at Deerfield, hanged himself from a tree in the meadow. Spring Day was glorious!

May 16, 1950

Cambridge

Confucius said: . . . The true man has no worries; the wise man has no perplexities; the brave man has no fear.

Confucius said: . . . The things that trouble or concern me are the following: lest I should neglect to improve my character, lest I should neglect my studies, and lest I should fail to move forward when I see the right course, or fail to correct myself when I see my mistake.

Confucius said: . . . I won’t teach a man who is not anxious to learn, and will not explain to one who is not trying to make things clear to himself.

Confucius taught four things: Literature, personal conduct, being one’s true self, and honesty in social relationships.

Confucius denounced or tried to avoid completely four things: arbitrariness of opinion, dogmatism, narrow-mindedness, and egotism.

Confucius cannot be belittled. Other great men are like mounds or hillocks which you can climb up, but Confucius is like the moon and the sun, which you can never reach. A man can shut his eyes to the sun and the moon, but what harm can it do to the sun and the moon?

Confucius said: To know what you know and know what you don’t know is the characteristic of one who knows.

Confucius said: Do not worry about people not knowing your ability, but worry that you have not got it.

Confucius said: A gentleman blames himself, while a common man blames others.

Someone said, What do you think of repaying evil with kindness? Confucius replied, Then what are you going to repay kindness with? Repay kindness with kindness, but repay evil with justice.

Confucius said: . . . Learning prevents one from being narrow-minded.

Tselu asked about the worship of the celestial and earthly spirits. Confucius said, We don’t know yet how to serve men, how can we know about serving the spirits? What about death? was the next question, and Confucius said, We don’t know yet about life, how can we know about death?

Tsekung asked, Is there one single word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life? Confucius replied, Perhaps the word “reciprocity” will do. Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you.

Confucius said: To find the central clue to our moral being which unites us to the universal order (or to attain central harmony), that indeed is the highest human attainment.

Confucius said: If a man is not a true man, what is the use of rituals? If a man is not a true man, what is the use of music?

Confucius said: The gentleman broadens himself by scholarship or learning, and then regulates himself by li (proper conduct or moral discipline).

Confucius said: Reading without thinking gives one a disorderly mind, and thinking without reading makes one flighty (or unbalanced).

Confucius said: A man who goes over what he has already learned and gains some new understanding from it is worthy to be a teacher.

Confucius said: That type of scholarship which is bent to remembering things in order to answer people’s questions does not qualify one to be a teacher.

I am a smiler with a dagger.

May 19, 1950

Cambridge

Taoist scraps, from Waley’s book (“Chuang Tzu”):

The crowd cares for gain,

The honest man for fame,

The good man values success,

But the wise man, his soul.

Therefore we talk of his simplicity, meaning that he keeps his soul free from all admixture, and of his wholeness, meaning that he keeps it intact and entire. He that can achieve such wholeness, such integrity, we call a True Man.

There are those who ‘betake themselves to thickets and swamps, see their dwelling in desert spaces, fish with a hook or sit all day doing nothing at all’; but the Taoist knows how to live in the world without being of the world, how to be at leisure without the solitude of ‘hills and seas’. If he ‘buries himself away’ it is as a commoner among the common people. . . . The Taoist knows how to follow others without losing his Self.’

To someone who knew how to make his mind travel into the illimitable, the ‘lands that are in communication’ would seem a mere insignificant speck.

The objection of the Taoist to war is not based on moral or humanitarian grounds. ‘To love the people is to harm them; to side with those who are in the right in order to end war is the way to start fresh wars.’ It is based on the absolute insignificance and futility of the utmost that conquest can gain or that defense can secure, when compared with the limitless inward resources of the individual.

We must ‘bind the fingers’ of the technicians, ‘smash their arcs and plumb-lines, throw away their compasses and squares.’ Only then will men learn to rely on their inborn skill, on the ‘Great Skill that looks like clumsiness.’ But the culture heroes were not the only inventors who ‘tampered with men’s hearts.’ Equally pernicious were on the one hand the Sages, inventors of goodness and duty, and of the laws that enforce an artificial morality, and on the other the tyrants, inventors of tortures and inquisitions, ‘embitterers of man’s nature.’

In the Golden Age (utopia), the two vital principles of Yin and Yang worked together instead of in opposition.

May 20, 1950

Cambridge

From William James, Varieties of Religious Experience:

. . . Not its origin, but the way in which it works on the whole, is the final test of belief. By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. [Cf. Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on Religious Affections.] The roots of a man’s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence even to ourselves that we are genuinely Christians. [I wonder. I would place the motive behind the act as paramount—after Kant. Utilitarian ethics are not sufficient; thus the deficiencies of humanism.]

The nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts to class it with psychopathical phenomena. When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. [Too many of these at Harvard.] Their ideas possess them; they inflict them upon the companions of their age.

In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce to regions of religious truth?

Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations.

Religion . . . is the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. . . . Religion is a man’s total reaction upon life. Total reactions are different from casual reactions; to get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses.

May 21, 1950

Cambridge

At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. . . . Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. . . . It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity [cf. Marxism], or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. . . . Compare Marcus Aurelius’s fine sentence, “If gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it,” with Job’s cry: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!” and you immediately see the difference I mean. The anima mundi, to whose disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved; i.e., “Where men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all things to the eternal Goodness. . . . Such men are in a state of freedom, because they have lost the fear of pain or hell, and the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent love.” (Theologia Germanica) [This answers the question as to the utilitarian motive in Christ’s ethic of the Mount.]

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice; at last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier his agony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the heredity habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that cannot save.

The results of the combined optimism and expectancy—the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort—remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation. The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. (Lutheran justification by faith; Wesleyan acceptance of free grace.) The pantheistic explanation [cf. Christian Science?] is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own ‘subconscious’ self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically (though in this instance not spiritual) ‘higher’ ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation. It lets loose the springs of higher life. The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and entrenched, those elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert.

What are we to think of all this? [mind-cure] Has science made too wide a claim?

I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The universe is a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. Why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas. Science and religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why after all may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right?

May 22, 1950

Cambridge

“There is indeed one element in human destiny,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.” He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: “Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.” [cf. Hatch’s sense of humor.]

Sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion.

Stoicism and Epicureanism mark the conclusion of what we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religion would call the purely natural man—Epicureanism showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity. The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more radical pessimism.

One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.

“. . . I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself,—and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair—the meaningless absurdity of life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.”—Tolstoy. [He was revived by a thirst for God.]

When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restitio ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes when any does come is not the simple ignorance of ill but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling block and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.

Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much.

The completest religions would seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.

The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain discordancy and heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution. Now in all of us the normal evolution of character chiefly consists in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.

The process of unification may come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered feelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come through new intellectual insights, or through mystical experiences. But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity. For example, the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion.

Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction—he says it took him two years to arrive there—that his trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in God, herein lay happiness again. “I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending”—and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.

To say that a man is ‘converted’ means that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual center of his energy.

The crisis in conversion is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption. [Thus] self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life, as far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender.

There are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger, worry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affections. One is that an opposite affection should over-poweringly break over us, and the other is by getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop—so we drop down, give up, and don’t care any longer. Our emotional brain-centers strike work, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. This state of temporary exhaustion not infrequently forms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of the sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of the soul of faith gains no presence.

But beyond all question there are persons in whom, quite independently of any exhaustion in the subject’s capacity for feeling, or even in the absence of any acute previous feeling, the higher condition, having reached the due degree of energy, bursts through all barriers and sweeps in like a sudden flood.

“The ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms of how it happens, but something ethical, definable only in terms of what is attained.” What is attained is often an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies and endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man is born anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particular shape to his metamorphosis. ‘Sanctification’ is the technical name of this result.

Personal religious experience has its roots and center in mystical states of consciousness.

Characteristics of the mystical experience:

1.Ineffability: A mystical state of mind cannot be expressed in words; thus it must be directly experienced.

2.Noetic quality: They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.

3.Transiency: A half hour’s duration is rare.

4.Passivity: The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. “I’ve heard that said all my life,” we exclaim, “but I never realized its full meaning until now.”

For those who believe in the anaesthetic revelation, it is a monistic insight, in which the other in its various forms appears, absorbed into the One. —i.e., “The subject has known the oldest truth, and he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in ‘spiritual things’. The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. We reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of us stands.”

Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods. Most of the striking cases which I have collected have occurred out of doors; e.g., “I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me; I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individualism into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable.”

Whitman: “There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without arguments, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, the revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hands of the hunter.”

In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. The yogi who has overcome the obscurations of his lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samâdhi, “and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know. Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness. There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul.”—Vivekananda

When a man comes out of samâdhi, the Vedantists assure us that he remains “enlightened, a Sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life changed, illuminated.

Incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else.

May 25, 1950

Cambridge

Mystical states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in definite philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism, and the other is monism.

Denial of the finite self and its wants, asceticism of some sort, is found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life.

In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition. The mystic range of consciousness is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states of mind.

Mystical states break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.

If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic-state are practically convertible terms.

[Re: theology] I believe that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.

(Cardinal Newman gives us scholastic philosophy ‘touched with emotion,’ and every philosophy should be touched with emotion to be rightly understood.)

(What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience? This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question. When all is said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who introduced the ‘critical method’ into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action?) [Wow! Pragmatism.]

Pierce on pragmatism: “Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits.”

If we apply the principle of pragmatism to God’s metaphysical attributes I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance. How do such qualities (i.e. God’s aseity, immateriality, indivisibility) make any definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a man’s religion whether they be true or false?

What is the theologian’s deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word ‘God’ by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contributed as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians’ hands they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves in soecula soeculorum in the lives of humble private men.

“Is there, then,” Principal Caird continues, “no solution of the contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation into realization; that instead of leaving man in the interminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinite life.”

In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.

May 26, 1950

Cambridge

Prayer in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine is the very soul and essence of religion.

“Religion is nothing it if be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulae, but the very movement of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms and doctrines, we have living religion. One sees from this why ‘natural religion’ so-called, is not properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy.”—Auguste Sabatier.

“The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, there is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the most high is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love well enough to repeat.”—James Martineau.

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism,—that to understand the causes of drunkenness as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true, and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout. Tout savoir c’est tout pardoner. The name of Renan would doubtlessly occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one’s living faith. If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’s cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

The faith-state is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces by which men live. The total absence of it, anhedonia, means collapse.

The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. It may be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air. When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief.

Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse. [Cf. Albert Schweitzer.]

Is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously? Yes. It consists of two parts: 1. An uneasiness, and 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these: The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong past there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives [Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.] the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. The practical difficulties are 1. to ‘realize the reality’ of one’s higher part; 2. to identify one’s self with it exclusively; and 3. to identify it with all the rest of ideal being. Does that ‘MORE of the same quality’ really exist, or is it merely our own notion? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in what form should we conceive of that ‘union’ with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced? All the theologies agree that the ‘more’ really exists, and that it acts. It is when they treat of the experiences of ‘union’ with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes. [In Christianity, the ‘more’ is Jehovah, and the ‘union’ is his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ.] Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its father side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. This explanation, however, is only a doorway into the subject, and difficulties present themselves as soon as we step through it, and ask how far out transmarginal consciousness carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin: here mysticism and the conversion, rapture and Vedantism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God identical with the soul of the world.

Although the religious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him, are touched. These ideas will thus be essential to that individual’s religion; which is as much as to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs.

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world un-real.

May 27, 1950

Cambridge

“The labour we delight in physics pain.”—Macbeth II,iii,55.

May 31, 1950

Cambridge

Claud.:          I humbly thank you.

To sue to live, I find I seek to die;

And seeking death, find life. Let it come on.

—Measure for Measure III,I,41–43.

Shakesepeare moralizing:

He who the sword of heaven will bear

Should be as holy as severe;

Pattern in himself to know,

Grace to stand, and virtue go;

More nor less to others paying

Than by self-offenses weighing.

Shame to him whose cruel striking

Kills for faults of his own liking!

Twice treble shame on Angels

To weed my vice and let his grow!

Oh, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

(M for M III,ii,275–286)

More on death (M for M V,I,398–404):

Duke:          O most kind maid,

It was the swift celerity of his death,

Which I did think with slower foot came on,

That brain’d my purpose. But peace be with him!

That life is better life, past fearing death,

Than that which lives to fear. Make it your comfort,

So happy is your brother.

Isab. I do, my lord.

From Edith Sitwell:

“Are not all things generated out of their opposites?” (Socrates)

It is certain that from Lear (the element of fire, the will, the pride, the passion, which are the essence of fire), generated the endless cold of Goneril and Regan. To become greater, Lear became less. Out of his madness was born his wisdom. . . . The great King who has known all splendours, all the richness of life, and their true worth, comforts the destitute—him from whom even the sight of the world has been taken:

Thou must be patient: we came crying hither:

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the ayre

We wail and cry. I will preache to thee: Mark . . .

When we are borne we crie that we are come

To this great stage of fools.

“Are not all things generated out of their opposites?” Patience from madness, the richness of the spirit from the destitution of the body.

Further, re: The Tempest (Milton Luce): He [Shakespeare] condemns the doctrine which would make knowledge an end rather than a means. . . . Whatever tends to sunder us from our human relationships and responsibilities must be wrong . . . Therefore he tells us that knowledge may be power, but a power that calls for a most careful discretion: “It is excellent / to have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant. (M for M II,ii,108) Accordingly at the close of the play Prospero’s knowledge has become the wiser power that seeks ever to disclaim itself, is exercised only for the general good, and will even be laid aside if it can subserve that good no longer.

Hazlitt, speaking of Caliban: Vulgarity is not natural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learnt from others, contrary to, or without an entire conformity of natural power and disposition; as fashion is the common-place affectation of what is elegant and refined without any feeling of the essence of it.

Received from R.W.H.: “I not only received the essays but have read them all and found them very well done. But my ignorance of Plato and Aquinas and lack of enthusiasm for dialogs for the purpose of exposition leave me a poor judge. I put Henry II and the Meditations at the top; and I would like to see you try some unfootnoted, unstudded-with-quotations exposition in a warmer manner, that is, addressed less to the professor and lecturer and more to the thinking layman. More anon . . . I heartily approve your decision. I go right along with your father. Your analysis of Amherst is shrewd and accurate. The percentage of serious students in most of our colleges is lamentably small. Everything I have heard in recent years about Haverford, near which I once lived, leads me to believe that you will find there the scholastic atmosphere you seek. I am very happy about it, and you know how strongly I hope you will find what you want. I am sure you will. I’ll see you in June.”

June 8, 1950

Cambridge

I already think that there will be too few years left for me to do that which I would. At twenty I have the intellectual attainments of a fifteen-year-old.

A death-flow is a life-blow to some

Who, till they died, did not alive become;

Who, had they lived, had died, but when

They died, vitality begun.

—Emily Dickinson

June 10, 1950

Cambridge

“Thoreau’s journal is the place where he taught himself to write.” What is mine?

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

—R. F. (from memory)

The end of “Birches” is a fresh statement of the mystical experience, coupled with a hearty avowal that this world isn’t at all bad, and need not be abandoned completely in the mystical flight:

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Youth and Age-a—euthanasia.—I must stop it!

Whitman’s mystical elegy:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love . . .

Stanza 16 of “Song of Myself” reveals Whitman the true Artist—i.e., a man with the catholic tastes of a Shakespeare, a man without antipathies, and therefore no moralist.

“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,

Stuff’d with the stuff that is course and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,

One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,

A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,

A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,

A Kentuckian walking the value of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianaian or Georgian,

A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;

At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,

At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and talking,

At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,

Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners (loving their big proportions),

Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,

A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,

Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,

A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,

Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

Sunday, June 11, 1950

Cambridge

More Whitman:

31

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chief-d’oeuvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels . . .

32

I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Whitman’s method: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”

Monday, June 12, 1950

Cambridge

Thoreau: “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. . . . When he has obtained those things that are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.”

Wednesday, June 14, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Stopped at Deerfield. Mr. Boyden wants MacLeish, himself, and me to talk over the decision next month. I am to spend two or three days with him and at MacLeish’s place.

Hatch wasn’t in, but from what Mrs. Hatch reports, he was delighted at the thought of my going to Haverford.

Ah . . . Brant Lake. . . . As I look out through the window, white needles with green umbrella tops sway with the eternal motion of the immovable. These stately birches rival the accomplished dancer as he pirouettes; and they nod their heads in a manner that I imagine only Socrates, among humans, could equal for philosophic calm and assurance.

Doris Bibby married Jack Cronin—the event of the year. But there’s more to it: a veritable Romeo and Juliet story; the Bibbys and the Cronins have been like the Capulets and Montagues, only sans violence. But the proposal angered Tom Bibby and he refused to give the bride away, turning, not to the sword in order to externalize, but to the bottle, with which modern society has largely supplanted the barbarous practices of old. Relations pleaded that for the sake of the girl he relent, and he did. But at the ceremony, just as father and daughter were to walk the aisle, father walked out the door instead. But Jack got Jill anyway.

Sunday, June 18, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

“. . . what is medicine for one man may be pisen for another, as I have noted in animils, for the bark that fattens the beaver will kill the rat. . . .” Trapper John Norton

Spent Friday night with Kitty Barton and a neighbor, Bernard McCarthy, who lives on Route 8 out of Riverside toward Utica. We talked farm life and country vs. city until midnight. Kitty’s got no electricity, no running water—and loves it. Their six colts have kept them busy. She lives better now on $25 a week than years ago in a small town when Red made $125. Farmer McCarthy tries to be as self-sufficient as possible without making a fetish out of it. He sells no farm produce except lumber, his sole means of cash income. He has been in all the States, in Europe, and Asia, but retains his primary allegiance to the Adirondacks and to the non-commercialized life. His father is 87 and in perfect health and spirits—no gall bladder or ulcers in the mountains.

Kitty says the local people are extremely reluctant to accept outsiders at first, because they suspect that the newcomers will be out to cheat them. But Kitty found that after she allowed herself to be cheated, and did not complain but instead told farmer so-and-so that he had taught her a valuable lesson that she would not forget, she and Red were accepted as brothers. And up here brotherly love is really practical and is the basis of the economy, for when one man has special or pressing work to be done, all the neighbors come to help and he is expected to reciprocate. Mac walks ½ hour through the woods to milk Kitty’s cow when Red is gone.

—When the small toads come out, it is going to rain.

—If you can stick both fists into the depressions on a mare’s rear, she is going to give birth to her foal within 24 hours.

—If you can get the second and third finger up between a hen’s pelvis bone and her tail, she’s a good layer.

—Locust twigs have two spines at the nodules.

I saw two snakes, a bunk-trapped robin, and a ground hog, and read Herodotus.

Finished Murray’s second-rate Tales.

Art Levitt wrote the Williams show and sold two songs for $700.

Monday, June 19, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Mr. Hatch on my Social Sciences 2 essay, and on ME: “My objections to the papers you have done are that they seem to be without style, written sort of in vacuo, so to speak, by the light of the late burning student lamp. I would like to see evidence of Bien. And I would like him to retain and develop his sense of humor and be easy and agreeable, even if knowing, and not quite so serious and well-read. . . . In due time report to me on the Haverford business. Let fancy and imagination have some play in your mind; be not of all seriousness made.”

Harold Scripture will sell me his property for $5000. It is worth maybe $3000 and even then has many limitations. But the taxes are less than $50 a year.

I looked a chipmunk square in the eye today, and watched it chaw away. Its face was very English. (Mr. Perkins should see this!)

Tuesday, June 20, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

This work is as yet too much for me. For about five hours of actual working, John and I find it necessary to sleep ten hours each night; and then, like just now, after meals we find it no trouble sleeping again for another hour.

Mr. Boyden wants me to come down as soon as possible. This is going to be difficult. MacLeish is willing to partake, according to the Head.

The little wild flowers here are superb. I followed a fly in his pollen-collecting chores. His coloring in the sun blended with the flowers perfectly. We filled in a hole in the tennis court, a chipmunk’s hole. He, rightfully indignant at this trespass, dug out his home once more as soon as we had turned our backs; but we, forgetful of the Frostian maxim “need before play,” filled it up again.

This robin I encountered the other day was very interesting. It persisted in flying full force against the opened, but screened, windows, denting the screen with its beak, but suffering a terrible shake-up each time. I thought, as I stood in the doorway, that these birds just don’t see very well, or that the poor thing had flown into the bunk and, considering itself trapped, was hysterically attempting to free itself. But as I stepped into the bunk to get a better view, the bird unhesitatingly flew right out the open doorway. It knew its way right well, for, as I now discovered, it had been building its nest on one of the shelves (not knowing of course that this shelf would soon be the nesting place of some toothbrush and comic book) until I appeared in the doorway, at which time it began to try to hack away at an exit for fear of being captured. And they say that the will to live and to give suck is not the primary instinct!

Saw Bobby Hayes mowing his lawn. Have not seen Bobby Hill yet. Freddy and Jerry Parker are two little birds, as Fred says. He might send them to camp. All four Parkers combine to make a delightful family. The Hayes boy is just like his father: a little queer. Perhaps these two are simply too smart for their surroundings, and can compensate only by a pitiful kind of unsociability. But I wonder. Ed says, “You meet the nicest people around here!” in his sarcastic way. I believe he sees through most everybody’s exterior (What a field day he’d have at Harvard) and, seeing most often very little within, does not waste his time even being civil to these people. His is he opposite extreme to the tea-party philosophy, and of the two I’d take his without hesitation.

Perhaps I could start a New England type academy here, taking both day students and boarders. That would be great fun. Or even teach in the Horicon school. Must see Mr. Doyle—about the future of course. Two more years of book-larnin’ and activity will have to be endured, or will they?

Wednesday, June 21, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

I hiked along the trail marked out years ago by Ed Hayes, starting just below Scripture’s and going, supposedly, to Lily Pond. It is not actually a trail at all, but merely a series of white circles painted on the forest trees. I’m sure no one has been over it in years. After walking for about two hours I came to a tree with a “T” instead of a circle, and could find no markers beyond. So I was forced to return. I encountered two brooks and three clearings, but otherwise the trip was rather drab, the predominant sight being decayed or decaying trees.

Ed Hayes has been stopping each night before going home to pick the red rambling roses that are just below “our” house. This man is certainly not insensitive to beauty.

This morning I laid some sod, and helped unload a shipment of 350 cases of groceries. Then I hiked after lunch, taking a penknife and a compass, both of which I used.

Friday, June 23, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Watched some swallows while moving trunks this morning. They are blue above and brownish-orange-yellow below, very pretty, with a forked tail. They build their nests of mud and twigs usually in eves or on rafters. These were on the lighting fixtures of the clubhouse. The male and female chase each other and alternate in bringing food to the young. I understand that in the winter these birds fly to South America.

The last of my term marks arrived. Record them for this term: Full courses: English 123 (Shakespeare) A minus; English 7 (American literature) B. Half courses: History 61a (American history) B+; History 61b B minus; Government 124 (Constitutional Law) B; History of Religions 101b B. How utterly ridiculous that I should get such good marks this year. Dean’s List and no lectures—pretty incongruous!

Sunday, June 25, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

John and I went to church this Sabbath morning—Wesleyan Methodist in Horicon. The building is so small and the congregation so intimate that one could not help but feel a sense of fellowship; yet the service inspired me little. It was rigorous to a Puritanical degree: a hymn or two, some announcements, a prayer, collection, sermon, and benediction. And no organ, just a piano. Rev. Jock explained that he worked in a creamery until he was converted, after which time the love of God constrained him to preach the Word. (Converted in a Salvation Army encampment.) The sermon was strict exegesis throughout, skillfully done, but of course suffering from what I would term self-imposed limitations. The pastor has no pretentions: he is not a learned man, but a humble one before his God. His grammar and diction are often broken or incorrect, but his heart is sound and firm in the faith. Bobby Hill and I exchanged greetings. He looked very uncomfortable in his Sunday School best.

Looked at Heer’s development this afternoon, but it is not worth further consideration: strictly tourist, summer resident.

Also visited Schonberg’s new home. This too was disappointing to me. Although it is solid enough, as far as taste is concerned I found it somewhat hideous. I think this whole venture is a lesson in how not to go about building a country home.

Hans and Amand came today and lost no time setting down to work. 38 people for dinner. Somehow the atmosphere is stifling. I am about ready to go home, and wish I could. John feels the same way. Hilton and Rudd drive one luney. Only the Point of Pines chef and his family seem to be fine people.

Hans tells me some very interesting things, especially if they be true! Viz.: that practically all mass-produced food is so treated that it is either dangerous to eat, or else loses much of its nutritive value. He traces the great incidence of sickness and feebleness to this. For instance, compare the old home-baked brown bread with the white bread of the 1950 markets. Then everything is treated to improve its appearance and lasting quality. Prunes and figs are sulfured, grapes, etc. are coated with all kinds of sprays, oranges are doctored up, apples are sprayed half a dozen times and invariably picked before they are ripe, milk loses all the good cream and butterfat during pasteurization, store meats are full of syringe-injected preservatives. This is certainly a vital argument for growing one’s own foodstuffs and raising one’s own cattle on a farm.

Tuesday, June 27, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Horicon Central graduated four last night. Jim Cronin, president. Elton Ross’s son was salutatorian—whatever-you-call-it. But Cronin was valedictorian and better. All were better than the guest speaker, an overblown egotistical ignoramus from Sienna College where he “teaches” (Sienna: Catholic school). This man told jokes and clowned round on the platform. Hardly J. Edgar Park! A Mr. Allen, new this year, proved what enthusiasm and talent can do, for he produced out of last year’s fairly miserable band a successor that I must say deserves credit. And today he accomplished the feat of having musically ignorant ten-year-olds sing Humperdinck in harmony, with pleasing results.

Jerry Parker got his attendance award this time, and it wasn’t last year’s forgotten one because Jerry didn’t miss a day all this year either. But he managed to get sick each vacation, which I think is cheating.

Met Arthur Hofstrader (? no, this is Charlie) Welfogel ?? something, from Pilgrim Camp. He tells me how the Pentecostals brought a family of four Yugoslav DPs, all brothers and sisters, over here and placed them with a Brant Lake family that has six children of its own. When I think of these parents (Sailor, their name) of six, taking four more, I wonder at my family’s inaction. Man is born in sin.

We met and chatted with Mr. Doyle, principal of the school, who assured us that one gets maximum satisfaction from teaching in this environment. He declared an especial liking for the type of child found in these parts and remarked that all four of this graduating class—Cronin, Ross, McClure, and Miss Wilson—are of above average intelligence.

Mrs. Pohl tipped John $2 for waiting on table. He feels terrible. I suggest he give it to the Methodist collection.

Tonight I feel like a murderer. After having failed to convince our tennis court groundhog to move, we are forced to exterminate him. I: the executioner.

Friends of the Steuers here tell me that religious difficulty was the basis of Clarky’s suicide.

Thursday, June 29, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Albany and back this morning. Lunch drive to Kennedy’s. Riverside to BLC via horse (20 miles) with Red Barden, Mac McCarthy, his niece, and Larry Ten Eyck. I am more and more decided to live up here. Red tells me of a neighbor of his who was an editor of Reader’s Digest, and who gave it up for farm life. He now writes for a Warrensburg paper and loves it.

Bobby Hill tells me that the reason he didn’t like camp was that he could never be alone, but always was forced to do what the group was doing. This is a most valid complaint.

Bob McDougal returned my letter. He left Princeton because of an atmosphere of New York sophistication, and the general artificiality. And he does not regret the change, for Oberlin is just right for him. This is all very nice to hear. Also, that he is still destined for the ministry.

Haverford College has accepted me, my status to be determined at a later date.

Red Barden’s ancestors settled Western Canada and his relatives are wealthy cattle people there. His father was Canadian of Irish stock, and his mother half-Indian. He tells me that the McCarthys were the original settlers in this section of the Adirondacks. Mac still has the deeds to the King’s land grants. According to Irish custom, Mac’s father, being the oldest of several sons, worked the farm so that his brothers could go to college. One is now a lawyer and the other a real estate man, and both are miserable. At 87, Mac’s father still saws his quota of wood. Mac himself is fabulous. He can do anything, including knit his own socks. He will drop his own work at an instant if someone asks him for help, and when the lumbermen are out of work they stay with Mac, who feeds them and sleeps them. And he makes less than $1000 a year. He learned how to do Indian bead-work strangely enough from an Indian. Now whenever he makes a belt for anyone he is sure to include his name in the work, for according to old Irish lore, it is bad luck for the recipient of a gift to pass that gift on to someone else, and the name makes this rather unfeasible. . . . And so it goes.

July 8, 1950

MacLeish: “Having discovered as much as you already have about Harvard, you stand a better chance staying there for the next two years than by going to Haverford, where you will have to repeat the process of orientation.” No English M. MacLeish has noted the lack of articulation in the Harvard product. He could not get lively discussions going. . . . MacLeish’s house atop the hill at Conway; uphill farm and down dale. Boyden’s degeneracy. Growing old. Ostentation—e.g., oak and maple chairs. Getting out of the mess: Hatch. MacLeish’s relaxed and magnificently intoned voice. The ease of his vocabulary. Plethora. His smooth and gracious manner. “Well, my boy . . .” His frankness: “At first I thought you were one of those people who want other people to provide the interest you lack, but I now see that this is not the case.” MacLeish’s attempt to introduce the various disciplines to one another in his essay course (now sadly lamented). Each student to use material from his particular specialty, the criterion of the essay’s excellence being the facility with which it conveys the author’s knowledge and enthusiasm in his own particular field.

Friday, July 14, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Back from 3-day Haystack climb. Rain. Made two fires with wet wood. The amazing comfort of a fire when you have nothing else.

Thursday, July 20, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

One-day climb up Algonquin peak of MacIntyre range. Marvin Schneider along. We build (rather, he builds) a Chippewa ice-box: Slow dripping wets down ferns. Evaporation cools meat. Will last for many hours.

Saturday, July 22, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Saw a white-tailed fawn on the road to the Gooley Club, Newcomb. Carl Pirkle and I checked Indian and Cedar Rivers, and the Hudson.

August 17, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

“There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.”—Prince Andrew, War and Peace, Book III, chapter 13.

August 20, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

Yesterday I learned that Jules Girden, rather than declare himself bankrupt, committed suicide.

This Sabbath morning I read this in War and Peace:

“. . . A slur on my name? A misfortune for life? Oh, that’s nonsense,” he thought. “The slur on my name and honor—that’s all apart from myself.”

“Louis XVI was executed because they said he was dishonorable and a criminal” came into Pierre’s head, “and from their point of view they were right, as were those too who canonized him and died a martyr’s death for his sake. Then Robespierre was beheaded for being a despot. Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive—live: tomorrow you’ll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?” Pierre, Book IV, chapter 6.

August 23, 1950

Brant Lake Camp

“During the first weeks of his stay in Petersburg, Prince Andrew felt the whole trend of thought he had formed during his life of seclusion quite overshadowed by the trifling cares that engrossed him in that city.” (Book VI, chapter 2)

“We often think that by removing all the difficulties of our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but on the contrary, my dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain our three chief aims: (1) self-knowledge, for man can only know himself by comparison, (2) self-perfecting, which can only be attained by conflict, and (3) the attainment of the chief virtue, love of death. Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life.” Spoken by Joseph Alexeevich Bazdeev, in War and Peace, Book VI, chapter 3.

Dad and Mother, even Uncle Abe, have sent discouraging letters regarding Mac’s farm. What am I to do? Jules’s suicide, the insight in War and Peace, Russell West’s plans—everything increases my desire (my passion?) to own this land. Grandma will see it tomorrow. If she sends a favorable report perhaps Dad will relent.

Sunday, October 1, 1950

Haverford

The first sunny day here at Haverford. An Indian summer day, hazy and close (some say from the smoke of the great Canadian fire), but reassuring nevertheless, and redolent of the crisp fine infecting pinpricks of a New England or Riparius autumn morn.

I have experienced a week of classes, two Collections, one Quaker meeting, some new friends and acquaintances, but without any feeling of the meaningfulness of these things. I am in the calm after the storm, free of mind, healthy and vigorous of body, and wary of anything that would injure this state. I feel a bit proud, I surmise, and very old and worldly, for I can say that some of life’s battles have already been fought, and that at the age of twenty and one-half I am experienced and learned in affairs of body and spirit. The rejection of Harvard, the great mystical revelation and knowledge through it that God is love, the acquisition of Triple Echo and the satisfaction in this acquisition of having completed a full circle of the rational process—i.e., the discovery and realization of a problem, the solution thought out abstractly and objectively, and finally the conversion of the abstract conclusion, via an exercise of the will and volition, into reality (Haverford and the farm)—leaves one optimistic and in a sense proud, proud that those strange electrical feelings in the brain can bring about such changes. And the optimism involves All, for the thinker now realizes his participation in the great Spirit of Everything, a consistent Spirit that, in allowing him to do such wonders, must surely not begrudge other men the same privilege and ability.

And so the world is transformed, as it was on that night in Cambridge, from a dim gloomy collection of conflicting self-centered atomistic Wills, into one grand comprehensive Spirit, governing all for the best, and integrating the (apparently senseless) activities of individual men.

I am first coming to realize all this, and yet I look to the future with a certain anxiety and dread. Certainly this cannot be the culmination, the be-all and end-all of life! Will not the rational circle be traveled again? Will not new experience create new doubts? Must not this glee and joy and Oneness that I feel meet trials in the courts of society?

Certainly a social program must come of it all. To glory in these events in the solitude and peace of Riparius would be to become a fiend. No, action on the social front will come as action on the individual front has come. And it will involve repetitions of this antithetical progression of doubt and reassurance, searching and knowledge, misery and happiness. The intensity and value of life must then be measured by the frequency and number of these stages; so that I am secretly already hoping for the next. Prolonged content of the spiritual sort brings upon itself spiritual lethargy; all things give way to their opposites.

This sense of dedication will come, I believe, but I am not yet ready for it. For I see the old self creeping under my own legs at times, so that (for instance) in my weaker moments I visualize an English-type country manor at Riparius, with magnificent gardens, etc., instead of the utter simplicity that I know (and yet will not fully believe) is requisite for the Better Life, that of the Spirit, of contemplation and study, and of vigorous social action resulting from this life. (Or perhaps the social action is the Life and these other things the preparation for it. This is a question of transcendent importance!)

Already I am inclined toward the latter alternative, and feel that one reason that so much action today is misdirected or self-consuming is because of a lack of preparation for such action, a lack of preparation for Life itself; and by preparation I do not intend to include formal classroom education, for the best that this can do is to act as the first guide, stimulus, or aid to one’s own efforts toward self-preparation. No, this preparation involves the acquisition of knowledge of Life and of the Spirit that is the substance and energizing factor of Life; it involves Living: living basically and fully so that what primordial man experienced our twentieth-century apprentice experiences likewise and as well, and what great thinkers and teachers thought our apprentice thinks as vividly and passionately, and does not merely learn about what they thought. This is why man in his apprenticeship to Life must be a play-actor, and must ignore the moralist who screeches “Be thyself, do not imitate!” We must imitate; we must become others in order that we may incorporate the thought and being of these others, and through them all, of the Great Spirit, into ourselves. He who does this is the civilized man; he who does not is the barbarian, for he starts in Life where the most primitive head-hunter started, and he ends no more advanced (unless he stops somewhere and goes through the apprenticeship) than this his despised and readily forgotten ancestor. But one remark must be added to this, and that is: Whereas our prehistoric barbarian hunted heads, there being a limit to the number of heads he could secure, that limit set not only by his physical makeup but also by his desire, our modern barbarian does not hunt heads, but starts wars, racial purges, sweatshops, and the like. And his power is fiftyfold that of his counterpart and ancestor, nor is his desire ever satisfied, for he is now “necessitated” not only to meet his own requirements for food and shelter, but to satisfy society that he should be an esteemed and valued member of it, which esteem, as in days of yore, is still unfortunately measured according to the number of heads he can render useless to their owners.

So play the play-actor, I say; become, even for a day, Jesus on the Mount, Socrates drinking the hemlock, Moses on Sinai; and (no less important) become a Russian serf mowing his field of rye, or an American pioneer building his cabin of logs and mud. Still less fear to play the criminal in his cell and about to be hanged; or the martyr on the pyre.

And then, become thyself. And it will be a self rich in the knowledge of why and how and wherefore, a self resplendent in a complex of personalities, beliefs, thoughts, yet all harmonized and inter-activating, and expressed in You; just as the great complex of Yous, each with its great complex of experiences, personalities, and passions, is harmonized in the one sublime Him.

Monday, October 2, 1950

Haverford

Had the very pleasant feeling today of knowing that I had thought out by myself last year what turned out to be practically the whole of today’s lecture by Hocking—on the criticism of Marx.

October 22, 1950

Haverford

Jacques Barzun in Life Magazine:

“Now the educated man as we have known him in the past has roots in an entirely different soil and breathes a different air. He is a product of leisure and independence, of established institutions and quiet maturing. His destination is a society of his own kind, in which his role is private and his superiority welcome. He does contribute to others’ enjoyment of life by sharing with them the pleasures of conversation and friendship and spoken wisdom, but the enrichment of his own mind is his chief concern. He can attend to this, not only because he has the time and the means but also because he does not have to justify his existence nor to issue progress reports on his life-long ‘individual project.’ Whatever he does to earn fame or money, from winning battles to farming estates, he is not so bedeviled by it that he lacks time to engage in the fundamental activities of the educated, which are: to read, write, talk and listen.

. . .

“It staggers he imagination to conceive what would happen to mankind in its present state if it were left to its own resources like our forefathers, in caves without canasta and tents without television.

“For some few mavericks, however, there is no alternative to despair or boredom except the pleasure of making one’s life a means to one’s education. Young men and women continue to be born with an insatiable desire to know, and among those, not all are bent on knowing the things that are negotiable. These marked souls manage somehow, in spite of all they see around them, to make themselves into educated persons. They show a remarkable power to survive unfavorable environments, such as advertising agencies, movie studios, and teachers’ colleges. But the oddest thing about them is that without any clear guidance from society at large, and in the teeth of all the disturbing forces of the day, they all develop very much the same interests and rediscover for themselves the original humanities. Literature, philosophy, and the arts, religion, political theory and history become the stapes on which they feed their minds. And with sleight variations in diet expressive of different temperaments, they ultimately come into possession of the common knowledge and the common tongue. . . .

“Alone though they may be much of the time, they are not so much to be pitied as the sociable creatures who must have ‘people around’ or a movie to go to. For the educated person has appropriated so much of other men’s minds that he can live on his store like the camel on his reservoir. Everything can become grist to his mill, including his own misery, if he is miserable, for by association with what he knows everything has echoes and meanings and suggestions ad infinitum. This is in fact the test and the use of a man’s education, that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

“Pascal once said that all the trouble in the world was due to the fact that man cold not sit still in a room. He must hunt, flit, gamble, chatter. That is man’s destiny and it is not to be quarreled with, but the educated man has through the ages found a way to convert passionate activity into a silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit in a room and not perish.”

Hocking told of a time in Bombay when a Swami visited him, announcing that he had come to instruct the American professor in religion. After explaining the Hindu way to “salvation,” the Swami was asked this question: “Have you achieved salvation?” He was silent, and would not answer. Afterwards, the Indian interpreter explained the Swami’s silence. “If he had said ‘Yes,’ he would have been boasting, and calling attention to his own achievement, and thus to his own self, which, at salvation, ceases to exist; and if he had said ‘No,” he might have been telling an untruth!”

I have been nourishing myself with Tolstoy (extra-curricular).

November 5, 1950

Haverford

Meeting today was fine: all speakers reinforced one theme, freeing oneself from material desire. Freedom from want is one thing, says Hocking, but freedom from wanting quite another. . . . He who shall lose his life shall save it. Current political trends indicate that spiritual freedom is no longer the prime consideration, but a freedom to earn money and increase one’s material possessions. This, at best, is a very poor species of freedom; most often it is an instrument for enslavement.

Quakers and others are being jailed in 1950 for preaching and practicing the first kind of freedom: freedom of spiritual and intellectual development.

I thought, during this Meeting, of my own spiritual progress, and how far it has yet to go. The old desires come up every day. I miss the (useless) petty diversion that harassed me so at Harvard; I dream of the farm (in my unguarded moments) as a producer of wealth, and the future sight of an English-like manor estate, whereas it must be a protest against all these things, and provide a means whereby they may be disregarded or at least reduced to a minimum.

What hope is there for the future when immediately after this Meeting the student body’s prime interest is in whether or not the Rhinies are wearing the proscibed black socks! This hurts to the point where it is nauseating.

Campus Day yesterday. I helped build a new bridge across the creek. A wonderfully successful and “constructive” tradition.

My weekend at home was a mixture of pleasure and sorrow. On the pleasurable side, the increased realization of the solidity and integrity of our family, and the joy of being part of it; on the other side, Dad’s eyes. He apparently has a hemorrhage in one, which, I understand, is extremely serious. But I was heartened by the signs that seem to show that if blindness comes Dad will be prepared emotionally and psychologically, as well as economically. This is really all that matters. We have no choice as to what happens to us in life, but we most certainly do as to what attitude we shall take toward these happenings. And with the right attitude many misfortunes will cease to appear so. Gloucester: “I stumbled when I saw. . . . I see feelingly.” The great paradox: that when we lose we gain, and when we gain we lose. Perhaps this truth is the essence of the Gospels.

November 8, 1950

Haverford

Professor Hocking gave a particularly fine analysis of the teachings of Jesus. The great insight of Christianity is the recognition of a chain reaction of forgiveness. It is this forgiveness cycle that makes possible the impossible and anti-moral invocations of the Sermon on the Mount, such as love thine enemy, be ye therefore perfect, etc. For forgiveness creates a new spirit in the person who is forgiven. Christianity is a moral of creativity, not of justice or of purity. This new spirit enables the person who has been forgiven to love his enemies—i.e., to likewise forgive. And so the chain reaction continues; forgiveness is contagious. The reaction started, of course, because God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son. God suffered for our sins, and forgave those who repented and followed Him. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

In my essay I tried to express what is (to me) the essence of religion—union with the Infinite, thou shalt love the Lord,—resulting in “rebirth” and universal Love. This is contrasted to the moralistic approach, the desire for right living, conceived as a cosmic demand, which seems to me to be at best a pragmatic religion, which must suffer therefore from the well known defects of the pragmatic faith.

Read Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Magnificent. The pathos and despair and disillusionment are reinforced by every skill the writer can muster. And such skill he has: “Why tell the woes of winter, when the birds / Lay stark and stiff, so stern was Ida’s snow?” Could any other expression send such a cold shiver throughout the body, convey the woes of winter with such completeness and vividness, and in two lines? The hymn to Zeus is justly famous:

Zeus—if to the Unknown

That name of many names seem good—

Zeus, upon Thee I call

Thro’ the mind’s every road

I passed, but vain are all,

Save that which names Thee Zeus, the Highest One,

Were it but mine to cast away the load

The weary load, that weighs my spirit down.

Mal Brown, Dick Sundry, John Hitchcock dislike Haverford, and I think their complaint is well founded. Here, one floats around on his own individual cloud, blown this way and that at the whim of the breeze. And all the little clouds go in different directions. The academic work is presented to the student more than adequately, and yet the fact that it—the whole of life here—is as if surrounded by a vacuum, detracts from the advantages of having excellent professors, facilities for uninterrupted study, etc. Nothing is delectable to the student unless he needs to fight to get it, to extract it, in its clarity, out of a mass of seeming chaos. In this process, the student learns to choose, and to place first things first. My complaint about Harvard was that it offered too much, that the complexity and immensity vitiated the individual parts of which it was made, so that, even immersed in such an ocean, the student could not drink. But perhaps it was my error not to realize that this was a challenge, a challenge to select certain things and completely neglect others, however hard that may have been.

One thing is sure: there is no vitality here, no dynamic quality. People do not get intellectually excited, or even excited over football games. There is no dinner-table education; there is hardly dinner table conversation. And yet, there is still the fact that one can immerse himself in books and become oblivious to the world. I thought that this was what I wanted. But, as Toynbee so well says, I am seeing that this “method of study makes one inclined to think of life in terms of books instead of vice versa. The opposite method, which is the Greek line of approach [the first being the Rabbinical], is to study books not just for their own sake, but also because they are the key to the life of the people who wrote them.”

I have been asked to write a letter of “advice” to one Conrad Kaplowitz, whose best friend here at Haverford, Roger Euster, has explained how he (Kaplowitz) was not admitted to Harvard last September, though assured of admittance next year, and how in the interim he is attending Colgate. Now he is not quite sure that he wants to go through with his original plans, for he is facing the problem of small versus big colleges, the alternation being Harvard and Haverford. I really don’t know how I can vote for either one wholeheartedly.

Labron Shuman also has the Sophomore blues. It seems almost universal.

I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just, because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me. —John 5.30

How can ye believe, which receive honor one of another, and seek not the honor that cometh from God only? —John 5.44

Frank Flannery and I took in the 100 masterpieces at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Beautiful Renoirs. Flannery transferred from Holy Cross. At the age of 19, he has already been through a nervous breakdown, etc. A genius-brother committed suicide. Father died. Mother a narrow-minded Catholic. A tale of woe. He is very perceptive, very serious. He lacks a sense of humor, the most necessary of all qualities, the saving remnant of an otherwise disintegrated personality.

Sunday, November 12, 1950

Haverford

To you, Tom Wood, I chant my hymn of praise

For deeds of virtue and devotion, tact

Supreme, a taste unquestioned: To the bread,

So dry, so plain you are the mayonnaise,

And to the uninitiate, the sorry

Tribe—vestless, tieless barbarians all—

The gentle goddess Athene, in male disguise

Are you, with culture, poise, propriety

Come, the finer points of etiquette,

The part of hair, the twist of tie to teach.

Your only mission is that they may learn

How and where to go, for what to reach.

For femmes délicieux, the registrar

Of that fair college, dear Bryn Mawr

Holds not a candle to our Tom Wood

For juicy descriptions of what is good.

Mimi Tripletoe nor Fifi Grew

Know hardly a jot of what is true

Until told by one who knows more than he should,

Haverford’s goddess, our Tom Wood.

For marriage, love, sexual perversion,

Naught but one acceptable version:

Whose could it be, do you suppose—

Why Wood’s, of course, the man who knows.

So is it amiss that I should sing my song

To thee, the director of my destiny?

Sound out, oh strains of praise, and rightly honor the

Goddess of form, Tom Wood, who does no wrong.

We went to Swarthmore to hear Bertrand Russell read a paper on neutral monism. Not very convincing I must say, but with further developments in physics, etc., his theory may take on better form. Russell objects, of course, to the dualism of mind and matter, and likewise to the theories that mind is really matter, or matter really mind. Both are one and the same: a series of groups of events in experience and the apparent form—whether a thing appear matter-like or mind-like—depends on the arrangement of that series. Russell prefaced these conclusions with a recitation of the problem as conceived by Descartes and others, and with a methodical breaking down of Descartes’ basic contribution, cogito ergo sum.

Monday, November 13, 1950

Haverford

Hocking gave my paper an A+ and an oral “well-done.” We shall have a chance to talk with him this week.

An example of “telepathy” that has happened before to me, and happened tonight. At precisely the instant I thought of putting in a call home, I received a call from home! I am not past believing in spiritual communion. This has happened too often to be coincidental.

Laci and Pete Flemming came to Princeton last Saturday, where I saw them. I think I shall journey to Cambridge this weekend. Will see people and buy books.

Wednesday, November 15, 1950

Haverford

Professor Hocking and I chatted this afternoon for an hour; no one else appeared at his long-awaited open house, which gives a fairly accurate indication of how much the latter-day student desires to be educated. At close range, I really for the first time became aware that Hocking is very very old. He sits in his armchair like a serene Buddha, never making a bodily movement, or adjusting his position in the slightest particular. Yet his mind has not lost its agility as has the body, although there is evidence in it of the same sereneness and desire for peace. Mrs. Hocking on the other hand is perhaps on the verge of dotage. It is marvelous to see how this wise old philosopher humors her. The two seem to me to embody the most poetical relationship of two brave souls who have very little else but each other, and know it.

We discussed Harvard. Hocking told of how he felt the encroachments of the University upon the College, with a subsequent squelching of real liberal non-professionalized courses; and how he fought this encroachment. He commented on the volume of work required at Harvard, especially in the law school—it represents the American fetish for bigness, for quantity at the expense of quality. Schopenhauer’s education was of an entirely different sort. When he attended the university, he was told to select two great thinkers and to get to know and understand them. He chose Plato and Kant. This education produced one of the clearest thinkers and most brilliant stylists that we have had.

Hocking also expressed that to entrust a student’s grade, etc. to a section man was downright immoral and unjust; but something that is unavoidable in big universities. Conclusion: big universities must go.

Ideal educational system: that of Holland, where there are no courses and no exams except a final comprehensive for the degree, which the student takes whenever he feels prepared. Whether or not this would work here with the level of maturity of our college students as it is, is entirely another question.

Thursday, November 16, 1950

Haverford

I came across the following in a back copy of the Haverford News: part of an address by Rufus Jones to the Freshmen of 1916, and well worth recording here:

“I hope that this year may bring out the deepest that is in us. . . . There are three concerns in the busy present-day college life which we should all keep before us: the care, development, and culture of our minds, the care and training of our bodies, and the care, development and endowment of our souls with power.

“The motto of an old Oxford Man: ‘Be a whole man to the one thing you are doing now,’ will be of great help in striving for these ideals. As for the first, the Haverford idea is not expressed by the sentiment that ‘Tis better to have come and loafed than never to have come at all,’ or by the admonition ‘Don’t let your studies interfere with your college education.’ One of the greatest things that you will be able to look back upon is that you are a Haverfordian, and that here you have learned to deal accurately with facts, to see the other fellow’s point of view, and have acquired magnanimous aims and persistence.

“In the second line we have some big jobs this year. We must beat Swarthmore, we must keep the soccer championship, we must ‘lick’ Pennsylvania in gym and cricket. It will take the best that is in each one of us.

“The concern for the welfare of our souls, however, is the greatest of all. If you are a whole man to the rest of your work, be one here. No man has reached complete living unless he has dedicated his soul to the highest aims. Until you are kindled, awakened, until the divine has gripped you, you are not working toward the greatest efficacy.

“There are two important aspects of religion, the cultivation of our souls through the appreciation of God, and the cultivation of the spirit of service. However your mind and body my be developed, you have not reached the fullness of manhood unless you appreciate God.”

Friday, November 17, 1950

Haverford

The anonymous author {Mal Brown) of last week’s “Across the Desk” has raised a controversy to which no thoughtful Haverford student can fail to respond. If Haverford is intellectually sterile, that is very serious indeed, and the causes must be rooted out with great haste; if it is not, we must refute the assertion that it is.

Several things are quite clearly present at Haverford: its “serenity,” its so-called lack of spirit, its apparently ineffectual weekly Meeting. And to this list it is probably permissible to add a certain absence of serious discussion—of the give and take of ideas among students—especially at dinner table. Harvard takes great pride in what it calls “breakfast table education.” Haverford’s table is notoriously non-educational, perhaps because the food here is so much better, perhaps because of the absence of tutors who eat with the student body. The question that one must ask is, “Is there nothing to talk about?” Hardly anyone will dare answer this in the affirmative. Haverford does offer stimulation and inspiration. The fault is in the student for turning a deaf ear to this stimulation.

The presence of this deaf ear is proved in a sense by what happens nowadays to the persons (and they exist) who do not turn the deaf ear. These people are always a small minority because they must be not only intelligent but also brave and religious. These rare souls are driven underground, a very unpleasant place to be. This accounts for the obvious discrepancy implied in the assertion that Haverford is non-intellectual. Haverford is not non-intellectual, nor is it lacking in brave and religious spirits, but its intellectuality is imperceptible because it is underground, introverted. This is a particularly bad state of affairs. On the one hand it deprives those who are potentially alert and inquiring from that added stimulation from their fellows that might actualize their potential; on the other, aside from the impossibility of our small minority acting as a leaven for the rest, it is itself prohibited from realizing to the fullest extent its own potentialities. The introverted, socially unacceptable intellectual is all too prevalent, with his morbid pessimism and desire to retreat into the esoteric for esotericism’s sake, into a world where pattern, form, and mechanical considerations overshadow the great moral, religious, artistic, and humanitarian values.

What we must realize is that the intellectual is in a very difficult position during his impressionable and formational years—i.e., while he is at school and college. And when we condemn his morbid introspection we must first consider the fact that perhaps he has been pushed in this direction by the large group of not-so-brave, not-so-religious, and perhaps (although not necessarily) not-so-intelligent people with whom he is forced to live in some sort of harmony.

Good hunting at Starr Book Company last weekend in Cambridge. Renewed acquaintance with Dick Becker, Don Blackmer, Dave Tyack, etc. Laci is unhappy, living the life of a hermit. Dick is well-adjusted and making strides into the mathematical unknown. Harvard is still big, active, and pleasant—but bewildering.

Stopped to see Hatch. He was at the vineyard. Mrs. H. says a new novel is brewing.

December 1, 1950

Haverford

This evening I overheard someone talking about me—and not at all complimentarily—as the “Harvard intellectual” who wears a jacket and tie, etc. Such things as this hurt very much but, as Aeschylus would say, through suffering comes wisdom. I have a good mind, and it is the cross that I must bear. Perhaps the social non-acceptance is the least of it. What is truly miserable for the intelligent person is his constant meeting up with the fact that his intelligence is limited, that he, of all people, is perhaps one of the stupidest. It takes a good mind to comprehend its own limitations, and the better the mind the greater these limitations seem; thus unhappiness is increased. One cannot help but think that God or whoever conceived of life and human intelligence determined to make it tragic and miserable, that the thing which we esteem the highest and expend most energy in cultivating is the very thing that is most unbearable.

I could not help thinking of Mal Brown in this connection. He has a good mind and he is just now realizing that such possession places him in a separate category in society. This realization hurts him, just as my critic’s remarks hurt me, and his response to this hurt is the obvious response: he is attempting to place himself in a society where he will be in the “normal” and not the “special” category. He has not yet come to know, as I have, that this is impossible. He is deluded in his belief that people anywhere else will be more receptive to intellectuality than they are here. His cross is weighing down his chest, but he thinks he can throw it off. He cannot, because it is inside.

We can never hope to feel at home in the crowd. If we retire into ourselves—God forbid!—we are despised as introverts and supercilious rejecters of what other people consider important. “Why doesn’t he do such-and-such, as we do, or does he think he’s too good to do it?” And if we embody the dynamic, inquisitive, enthusiastic intellectuality that Mal (and I) so admire, then we are despised as enthusiasts, as teachers’ pets, busybodies who refuse to conform to the accepted lethargy and blindness of the rest. In a word, we are different, and different we must stay.

December 6, 1950

Haverford

Read T. S. Eliot’s magnificent Murder In the Cathedral.

1951

Sunnyside

January 1

Haverford

February 19

Sunnyside

June 10

Riparius

July 3–25

Sunnyside

July 26

Washington, DC

July 27

Riparius

August 25

Haverford

October–December

January 1, 1951

Sunnyside

New Year’s present: I’m drafted!! The bastards.

January 2, 1951

Sunnyside

I’ve been drafted                        (shafted)

In the infantry                             oh misery

Or shall I enlist                           insist

On corps of air                          so fair

Or guard of coast                       no toast-

Ing then ’neath desert sun           nor gun

Poked down my neck—            Correct?

All receipts kindly advised.

January 3, 1951

Sunnyside

Can I make a breastwork of my knowledge,

Roll into a ball the themes of college

And place them o’er my heart—a subtle charm

To fend away and exorcise all harm?

Do bullets have an affinity

For ignorance? If reality

Is in a book, why can it not

Meet the reality of a war?

Why are theories, logical proofs of fact,

Dismiss’d in the passionate heat of act

If theories are real? And how can the hopes,

The visions of a war-torn age that gropes

For peace, be forgotten with such ease

If they be more than the fantasies

Of unrealistic minds. I ask it!

But if wars and murder to commit,

If these be real or true, naught of them

Shall I see, but with my book and pen

Shall my own world make, shall close my eye

To what is real, and love my fantasy.

January 28, 1951

Tonight the wistful fog settled itself

Over and through and in-between our buildings,

Breathing in their substance ’till forms alone—

Square or gabled prominence of black—

Remained to break its gray monotony.

Forms of buildings and trees in a plane of gray:

Sycamore and gnarlèd oak, the pylon

Elm, the greenish pine whose spines defy earth’s

Yearly call: all on tiptoe stood as though

To push this shroud up and off, or to rest

It daintily on their fingertips, whilst

With archèd back they stretch’d to fullest height.

Phantom trees, immersed in a wistful sea;

Black forms aloft, in gray monotony.

January 29, 1951

Poetry doesn’t sell very well

But it casts a spell for Jimmy and Nell.

Oh what a crime

To be a slave to rhyme.

February 19, 1951

Haverford

Pete Gardner and I have spent the last three weekends together, and all were delightful—the first with his marvelous family at their Cumberland Hill farm, the second at Riparius and climbing Marcy (blizzard made Indian Falls the point of return this time), the third at George School, where we heard a trio of finely competent Bennington College musicians.

Pete visited the Service Committee headquarters today. Two weeks from now he may be in Mexico on a rehabilitation project. I am a perfect fool not to act in the natural and not overly ruminated way Pete does: I am every bit as conscientious in my objection to war as he is—and he is entirely so—yet I seem to have too much of Hamlet in me. I fear to move and act; I think too much on the matter.

One thing is certain. I have lost Hocking and Post. What remains in sum total presents the lowest educational level possible: lectures and passivity. As at Harvard during the second half of last year, music alone lifts the spirit. (I am finally taking lessons again.) At least I do not seem to have the absolute disgust and dislike for Haverford that Harvard received from this her ungrateful son. This school is still extremely pleasant, especially in my friendships. But I am not too sure that it isn’t a pleasantness because of a vacuum, a sort of busy idleness. Indeed, I have stopped writing almost entirely—as witness this journal. Life without writing is empty, so very empty; for writing gives concreteness to experience; it is like the precipitation of sulfur in our chemistry experiments—the ingredients are all present in the beaker but it takes an added pinch of something to precipitate precipitously something that you can see, feel, and contemplate. Thus the everyday round fades into meaningless robot-like action unless it is captured and held/seen/felt and contemplated—unless it is written about.

Through everything runs this ogre of the army. I have four months only before this unpleasant form of death. And Dad is no better at all. He will go to that blasted psychiatrist (at $15/hour) for a year or two, and will snap out of this no sooner for it. If anything, his illness will be prolonged. It is sad, sad, sad. When we come to this world of fools, we cry. This world of fools. But why must the fools control the rest?

February 20, 1951

Haverford

Today I wrote to the draft board signifying my conscientious objection to war. I feel as though the labors of Hercules have been lifted from me; I just hope they are not to be exchanged for those of Sisyphus.

February 24, 1951

Haverford

A beautiful and delightful day, a day devoted to the most glorious of the arts: King Music—composing, practicing (Beethoven’s 32 variations, C minor); listening. Climax: concert of sacred music by Haverford and Bryn Mawr glee clubs: Palestrina, Schütz, Bach, Gerald Keenan (a first-rate mass), Gabrieli.

Dad (as was to be expected) was shocked and thrown into the depths of despair by my CO avowal, but Bill Schweitzer helped to quiet and reassure him. Mother seems to be understanding and sympathetic as usual, but neither has the slightest idea about acting on principle and not on expediency. Dad’s illness of course has been a revelation of many things, among them the fact that his cultural inclinations and moral doggedness were all shams. I think that the man simply attempted to go too far in one generation, from poverty, ignorance, and boorishness to suavity, restrained dignity, culture, and intellectual pursuit, completely skipping the intermediate stages (nouveau riche, etc.). All the aristocrats of the past have been proof that it takes a heritage and long line of ancestors progressing toward cultural stability and ease before one can be the true gentleman and not merely the fake actor who seeks culture because it is the “thing to do.” Where does this leave me? Am I over-intellectualized, super-saturated with culture? Perhaps not, but I most assuredly must build the earthy foundation so necessary for flights into the higher regions, and there we have that worker of miracles, that transformer, reformer: the Farm. O Lord, grant that I may spend many happy years in peace there, and that I may be released from the desire for power, position, wealth, and above all, respectability. Strengthen me to live rationally but always subject to Thy mystical and transcendent will, that I may acquire wisdom in Thy ways and in the ways of men, and act accordingly. Strengthen me especially to see through the declaration of conscientious objection that has so lightened my heart. And, dear Ruler, heal my father, breathe unto him understanding and above all fortitude, that he may be born again into a life happy and dedicated. Do so to this good man, for he knew not what he did.

February 25, 1951

From Pickwick Papers, chapter XXVII: “Wery, sir,” replied Mr. Weller, “if ever I wanted anything o’ my father, I always asked for it in a wery ‘spectful and obligin’ manner. If he didn’t give it me, I took it, for fear I should be led to do anythin’ wrong, through not havin’ it. I saved him a world o’ trouble this way, sir.”

In Book Review article: The great events of life are birth, the discovery by the youth of love, and the discovery by the adult of religion and art. Bravo! But where is the love?

February 28, 1951

Haverford

Gleanings from Carlyle, Past and Present:

❡ This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as yet made nobody rich; it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet to nobody. We might ask, which of us has it enriched? We can spend thousands where we once spent hundreds; but can purchase nothing good with them. In Poor and Rich, instead of noble thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury alternating with mean scarcity and inability. We have sumptuous garnitures for our Life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. It is an enchanted wealth; no man of us can yet touch it.

❡ Insurrection usually ‘gains’ little; usually wastes how much! One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other, by violence done, which is always rue to be injustice done, for violence does even justice unjustly. [my italics—bravo!]

❡ What is to be done? Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there. . . . O brother, we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of stone for living hearts of flesh. . . . [then] Quacks shall no more have dominion over us, but true Heroes and Healers.

❡ When a Nation is unhappy, the old Prophet was right and not wrong in saying to it: Ye have forgotten God, ye have quitted the ways of God, or ye would not have been unhappy. It is not according to the laws of Fact that ye have lived and guided yourselves, but according to the laws of Delusion, Imposture, and willful and unwillful Mistake of Fact; behold therefore the Unveracity is worn out; Nature’s longsuffering with you is exhausted; and ye are here!

❡ Fiction, Imagination, Imaginative Poetry, etc., etc., except as the vehicle for truth, or fact of some sort—which surely a man should first try various other ways of vehiculating, and conveying safe—what is it?

❡ Alas, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History, and Philosophy of History; ’till as we say, the human soul sinks wearied and bewildered; ’till the Past Time seems all one infinite incredible grey void, without sun, stars, hearth-fires, or candle-light; dim offensive dust-whirlwinds filling universal nature.

❡ By the law of Nature, all manner of Ideals have their fatal limits and lot; their appointed periods, of youth of maturity or perfection of decline, degradation, and final death and disappearance. There is nothing born but has to die.

❡ Ballot-boxes, Reform Bills, winnowing-machines: all these are good, or are not so good;—alas, brethren, how can these, I say, be other than inadequate, be other than failures, melancholy to behold? Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of Human Worth and Truth, we shall never, by all the machinery in Birmingham, discover the True and Worthy. It is written, ‘if we are ourselves valets, there shall exist no hero for us; we shall not know the hero when we see him’;—we shall take the quack for a hero; and cry, audibly through all ballot-boxes and machinery whatsoever, thou art he; be thou King over us!

❡ What boots it? Seek only deceitful Speciosity, money with gilt carriages, ‘fame’ with newspaper-paragraphs, whatever name it bear, you will find only deceitful speciosity; godlike Reality will be forever far from you. The Quack shall be legitimate inevitable king of you; no earthly machinery able to exclude the Quack. Ye shall be born thralls of the Quack, and suffer under him, till your hearts are near broken, and no French Revolution or Manchester Insurrection, or partial or universal volcanic combustion and explosion, never so many, can do more than ‘change the figure of your Quack’; the essence of him remaining, for a time and times.—‘How long, O Prophet?’ say some, with a rather melancholy sneer. Alas, ye un-prophetic, ever till this come about, till deep misery, if nothing softer will have driven you out of your Speciosities into your Sincerities; and you find that there either is a Godlike in the world, or else ye are an unintelligible madness; that there is a God, as well as a Mammon and a Devil, and a Genius of Luxuries and canting Dilettantisms and Vain Shows! How long that will be, compute for yourselves, my unhappy brothers!

❡ To learn obeying is the fundamental art of governing. How much would many a Serene Highness have learned, had he travelled through the world with water-jug and empty wallet; and, at his victorious return, sat down not to newspaper paragraphs and city-illuminations, but at the foot of St. Edmund’s Shrine to shackles and bread and water! He that cannot be servant of many, will never be the master, true guide and delivered of many;—that is the meaning of true mastership.

March 1, 1951

Haverford

❡ In those days [Middle Ages] a Heavenly Awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought and must, all earthly Business whatsoever.

❡ Thus does the Conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever of knowledge or surmise, or imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like light through coloured glass print strange pictures ‘on the rim of the horizon’ and elsewhere! Truly, this same ‘sense of the Infinite nature of Duty’ is the central part of all with us; a ray as of Eternity and Immortality, immured in dusky many-coloured time, and its deaths and births. Your ‘coloured glass’ varies so much from century to century; and, in certain money-making, game preserving centuries, it gets so terribly opaque! Not a Heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of vacant leaden-coloured Hell. One day it will again cease to be opaque, this ‘coloured glass’. Nay, may it not become at once translucent and un-coloured? Painting no Pictures more for us, but only the everlasting Azure itself? That will be a right glorious consummation!

❡ Justice and Reverence are the everlasting central Law of this Universe; and to forget them, and have all the Universe against one, God and one’s own Self for enemies and only the Devil and the Dragons for friends, is not that a ‘lameness’ like few? . . . I say, thy soul is lamed, and the God and all Godlike in it marred: lamed, paralytic, tending towards baleful eternal death, whether thou know it or not; nay hadst thou never known it, that surely had been worst of all!

❡ The great antique heart: how like a child’s in its simplicity, like a man’s in its earnest solemnity and depth! Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the Earth; making all the Earth a mystic Temple to him, the Earth’s business all a kind of worship. . . .

❡ Is not this comparative silence of Abbot Samson as to his religion, precisely the healthiest sign of him and of it? ‘The Unconscious is the alone Complete.’

March 2, 1951

Haverford

❡ The manner of men’s Hero-worship, verily it is the innermost fact of their existence, and determines all the rest. . . . Have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham reverence, and what also follows, greet it with the wrong man, then all is still, and there is nothing well. Alas, if Hero-worship become Dilettantism . . . how much, in the most Earnest Earth, has gone and is evermore going to fatal destruction, and lies wasting in quiet lazy ruin, no man regarding it!

❡ My friend, all speech and rumour is short-lived, foolish, untrue. Genuine WORK alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself. Stand thou by that, and let ‘Fame’ and the rest of it go prating.

Heard are the Voices,

Heard are the Sages,

The Worlds and the Ages:

‘Choose well, your choice is

Brief and yet endless.

Here eyes do regard you,

In Eternity’s stillness;

Here is all fulness,

Ye brave, to reward you;

Work, and despair not. (Goethe)

❡ There is no longer any God for us! God’s Laws are become a Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency. . . . Man has lost the soul out of him and now, after the due period, begins to find the want of it.

❡ The Infinite is more sure than any other fact. But only men can discover it; mere building beavers, spinning arachnes, much more the predatory vulturous and vulpine species, do not discern it well!

❡ . . . the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable, Godlike, present everywhere in all that we see and work and suffer, is the essence of all faith whatsoever; and that once denied, or still worse, asserted with lips only, and out of bound prayer books only, what other thing remains believable?

❡ The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. . . . It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, that he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over our life, is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work.

❡ The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man; how much more the done Work.

❡ Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and hellfire eyes, hacking one another’s flesh; converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure.

❡ Know thy work and do it. ‘Know thyself’: long enough has that poor ‘self’ of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to ‘know’ it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules!

❡ Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working. The rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. ‘Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone.’

❡ Liberty, I am told, is a Divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the ‘Liberty to die by starvation’ is not so divine!

❡ . . . the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only: to keep that same Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining.

❡ The Universe, I say, is made by Law. The great Soul of the world is just and not unjust. Look though, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this great shoreless Incomprehensible: in the heart of its tumultuous Appearances, Embroilments, and mad Time-vortexes, is there not, silent, eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful; sole Reality and ultimate controlling Power of the whole? This is not a figure of speech; this is a fact.

❡ My brother, thou must pray for a soul; struggle, as with life-and-death energy, to get back thy soul! Know that ‘religion’ is no Morrison’s Pill from without, but a reawakening of thy own Self from within.

March 7, 1951

Haverford

❡ Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment; and without love, men cannot endure to be together.

❡ The wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by!

❡ Despotism is essential in most enterprises; . . . And yet observe too: Freedom, this is indispensible. To reconcile Despotism with Freedom: well is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no ‘Freedom’ at all but in obeying them.

❡ In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or even will be godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men. Here—worship in the Souls of the heroic, of the clear and wise,—it is the perpetual presence of Heaven in our poor Earth.

❡ It is an endless consolation to me . . . to find that disobedience to the Heavens, when they send any messenger whatever, is and remains impossible: shew the haughtiest featherhead that a soul higher than himself is here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and worship.

❡ All misery is faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way.

❡ When Mammon-worshippers here and there begin to be God-worshippers, and bipeds-of-prey become men, and there is a Soul felt once more in the huge-pulsing elephantine mechanic Animalism of this Earth, it will be again a blessed Earth.

March 12, 1951

Haverford

From Vanity Fair, re: the victory at Waterloo: “All of us have read what occurred during that interval. The tale is in every Englishman’s mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its remembrance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alternations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil’s code of honour.”

How similar is this to the teaching of Euripides: killing is a chain-reaction whether on an individual or a national level.

March 20, 1951

Haverford

Professor Tillyard spoke here tonight on “Milton: Conformist and Rebel.” His superbly modulated voice rang out the lines of Milton with all the solemnity, force, and inspiration of a fine organ’s intonation of Bach. Here is a lecturer worthy of his audience, one who reserves the best of his thought and performance for the platform; not like Mr. Sargent, who dribbles daily, on the ten-year-old level or lower.

And Milton—lover of beauty, mystic, courageous rebel, yet basically conservative: could there be a finer idol to emulate?

Tillyard spoke of Milton as, on the one hand, the inheritor and expression of the Renaissance spirit; and, on the other, the Puritan moral sternness. But rather than a person torn between these dual positions, alternating from one to the other, and constantly fighting with his own soul, Milton was a man who fused them into a single ordered, stable personality. He was one of the few men of the race to whom no one dictated beliefs. Milton saw problems and acted accordingly, always according to his best conscientious conviction, and forever contemptuous of the consequences: in short, he was a brave and noble soul.

Another brave and noble soul (I think; I hope) is Michael Millen—priest, pacifist, mystic, evangelist—who represented the FOR peace caravan here last week. He has definitely had some contact with what he describes as the higher level of consciousness of the mystic—Paul’s “third heaven.” The lessons and truths perceived therein are his sole guide. Thus, he will pay no taxes, own no property, nor will he marry. Instead, he preacheth pacifism and the living Christ to the multitudes—to all and sundry—whoever will but hear. Do we have the makings of a saint in this ex-Methodist middlewestern (coin, Iowa) Harvard graduate?

I was especially interested to hear that Millen, upon leaving Harvard, started a small preparatory school in Maine, and achieved a unique spirit of fellowship there among both students and faculty. This he was forced to discontinue, first because the graduates all refused to pay taxes, register for the draft, etc., which does not win one new applications; and second because Millen felt that the present crisis was a real one and demanded his undivided efforts to help alleviate it. Let us hope that he and his kind will succeed. They are the Light of the world.

Mr. Swan thought the beginnings of my sonata to be good! He analyzed the thematic material and found that each unitary idea lasted about 8 measures, and that in several instances the first 4 were a statement and the second an answer or afterthought. All this of course is to the good, and conforms to the rules. But it was all done subconsciously, it never having occurred to me to limit phrases to a specified number of bars.

I had the identical experience with the little fog sonnet. I wrote it as it came, quickly for the most part, and making the verses conform to little more than what the ear and instinct demanded. And when all was done, I found each line to be ten syllables exactly, with but two exceptions, where an eleventh syllable was appended. These experiences give added meaning to the rules and dogmas of form, and in a way they prove the rules to be just and natural.

March 22, 1951

Haverford

I wrote to AFSC in this wise, applying for a position in their Mexican project:

❡ I believe that love has power to redeem and regenerate; and moreover, that the process by which it acts is one of chain reaction, precipitated by God and logically ending in the City of God on Earth. The chain reaction is opposed and often stopped by ignorance, Mammonism, dilettantism, prejudice, poverty, and hatred. Thus these must be diminished to a point where the language of love can be heard. Education is the greatest potential force for accomplishing this. Love operates constantly, if we would only see it. Educators must open myriad eyes.

❡ I have had no direct experience in the type of work you are doing. Since I have been able to think for myself I have spent most of my time and energy in strictly academic pursuits and in music. In recent years I have “discovered” art and beauty and religion and have had an overwhelming conviction that because of these things this life is not a veil of tears—that it can be beautiful and happy and peaceful, and that we must work to make it so.

❡ During the summers I have worked at Brant Lake Camp. This camp, unfortunately, is a profit-making organization and believes that if it keeps its boys well fed, healthy, and saturated with baseball, that it has done its duty by them. As director of trips, I have tried to counteract this tendency, to take the boys away from electricity, toilets, and chef-prepared meals to introduce them to the woods and mountains, to force them to utilize their ingenuity, and to undergo certain physical hardships—above all, to open their eyes to the beauty and fascination everywhere about them, to open these eyes shut by nursemaids, passive amusements, Mammon-worshipping parents. And I have found that once the natural resistance and inertia is overcome, the boys have clamored for more.

❡ This job was two-fold. One aspect was administrative. Two hundred boys left camp each week for a day-trip, divided into groups of about twenty, each group going to a new place each week. All this had to be arranged: transportation provided, destinations and personnel selected, menus chosen, food ordered and packed, etc. For the older boys, the trips were made progressively more difficult each week, and culminated in several overnight journeys ranging in length from three to ten days. This again was all my responsibility. The second aspect, of course, was personal leadership. I took the mountain-climbing trip each week. We stayed out an average of three days each week during the summer, climbing different mountains in the high peak region of the Adirondacks.

❡ Although I have felt for the most part that this work has been constructive and worthwhile, I think I now realize the greater need of the underprivileged (though in many ways the rich lads of NYC are far poorer than the most abject Mexican peon). Also, I have come to think that the community, united in a non-sectarian community church, is the answer to the evils of nationalism: the self-sufficient self-respecting community cooperating with others like it—and not world federalism. Thus I am particularly interested in Mexico, where you are working with a community as a whole, and with one that has not known what we call “the good things of life.” These of course are not the really good things of life, but I think they are often a necessary prerequisite to the latter. Certainly in a scientific and material-minded age, the very least we must do is to insure material security for all. Perhaps spiritual will follow.

March 23, 1951

Haverford

The draft board has classified me 1A again. I am beginning to realize what I am in for here, and I am apprehensive. But I think I see the directions that I must take. My stand seems more and more sensible, more and more imperative, and right. Yet it is so hard to convey these feelings and to know positively that you are doing what is best. I know that I have a long long road ahead before I reach the City of Bliss. It seems to me at times that I have just started—nay, that I have not even started, that I merely have a desire, sometimes stronger than the strongest, sometimes dilute and nebulous, to start on this road, to take this pilgrimage and to loosen the bundle from my back.

I have certainly been a most undutiful son, for I am as yet incapable of real self-sacrifice, or even of compassion, for my family. It seems as though there is little or no bond between us. I have never known them. Our bond has been a “cash nexus” but it wants to be more.

Death is life, and Life is death.

March 25, 1951, Easter

Sunnyside

I have been reading “The Imitation of Christ” with great satisfaction, especially in some of the following:

❡ For no worldly good whatsoever, and for the love of no man, must anything be done which is evil. . . . Without charity no work profiteth, but whatsoever is done in charity, however small and of no reputation it be, bringeth forth good fruit; for God verily considered what a man is able to do, more than the greatness of what he doth.

❡ He doth much who loveth much He doth much who doth well. He doth well who ministereth to the public good rather than to his own. . . . He who hath true and perfect charity, in no wise seeketh his own good, but desireth that God alone be altogether glorified. He envieth none, because he longeth for no selfish joy; nor doth he desire to rejoice in himself, but longeth to be blessed in God as the highest good. Oh, he who hath but a spark of true charity, hath verily learned that all worldly things are full of vanity. (I, XV)

❡ The clothing and outward appearance are of small account; it is change of character and entire mortification of the affections which make a truly religious man.

❡ Thou art called to endure and to labour, not life of ease and trifling talk. Here therefore are men tried as gold in the furnace. No man can stand, unless with all his heart he will humble himself for God’s sake. (I, XVII, 2, 3)

❡ Be mindful of the duties which thou hast undertaken, and set always before thee the remembrance of the Crucified. Truly oughtest thou to be ashamed as thou lookest upon the life of Jesus Christ, because thou hast not yet endeavored to conform thyself more unto him, though thou has been a long time in the way of God. A religious man who exercises himself seriously and devoutly in the most holy life and passion of our Lord shall find there abundantly all things that are profitable and necessary for him, neither is there need that he seek anything better beyond Jesus. Oh! if Jesus crucified would come into our hearts, how quickly, and completely, should we have learned all that we need to know!

I wrote to Judge Hill, who sentenced a Quaker pacifist to ten years in jail for failing to report for induction:

“I write in behalf of Robert Michener, whose unhappy fate is beginning to stir so many liberal-minded people, here and elsewhere.

“Having studied some U.S. Constitutional Law, I think I can appreciate your feeling that the draft law—qua law—must be properly administered and obeyed. But in cases like this, we must be doubly sure that the whole purpose and function of the Law be not overshadowed by the zealous defense of one of its statutes. That purpose can be none other than this: to codify and express in terms of society the noblest aspirations and ideals of individual men. To these aspirations and ideals the law itself must be forever subservient; otherwise it will degenerate into the type of inflexible legalism so easily appropriated by tyrants or dictators, who then maintain that their rule is one of “law,” that they have been “legally” elected, chosen by the people!

“I entreat you to reconsider the case of Michener, for after all he is a man who respects the Law on which all just statutes must ultimately be based. A ten-year prison term might very well deprive society of a man who no one can deny will be a constructive influence therein, even if his views be entirely wrong. For Michener, if nothing else, is honest.

“It is indeed tragic when the Law respects not honesty.”

More from à Kempis:

❡ He who loveth Jesus, and is inwardly true and free from inordinate affections, is able to turn himself readily unto God, and to rise above himself in spirit, and to enjoy fruitful peace.

❡ He who knoweth things as they are and not as they are said or seem to be, he truly is wise, and is taught of God more than of men. He who knoweth how to walk from within, and to set little value upon outward things, requireth not places nor waiteth for seasons, for holding his intercourse with God. The inward man quickly recollecteth himself, because he is never entirely given to outward things. No outward labour and no necessary occupations stand in his way, but as events fall out, so doth he fit himself to them. He who is rightly disposed and ordered within careth not for the strange and perverse conduct of men. A man is hindered and distracted in so far as he is moved by outward things. (II, I, 6.7)

❡ Make no great account who is for thee or against thee, but mind only the present duty and take care that God be with thee in whatever thou doest. (II, II, 1.)

❡ First keep thyself in peace, and then shalt thou be able to be a peacemaker towards others. . . . Be zealous first over thyself, and then mayest thou righteously be zealous concerning thy neighbor. (II, III, 1)

❡ If thou wert good and pure within, then wouldst thou look upon all things without hurt and understand them aright. A pure heart seeth the very depths of heaven and hell. (II, IV, 1)

❡ The testimony of a good conscience is the glory of a good man. . . . If thou considerest well what thou art inwardly, thou wilt not care what men will say to thee. “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (Isaiah lvii, 21); men looketh on the deed, but God considereth the intent. (II, VI, 1, 3)

❡ When spiritual comfort is given by God, receive it with giving of thanks, and know that it is the gift of God, not thy desert. Be not lifted up, rejoice not overmuch nor foolishly presume, but rather be more humble for the gift, more wary and more careful in all thy doings; for that hour will pass away, and temptation will follow. When comfort is taken from thee, do not straightway despair, but wait for the heavenly visitation with humility and patience, for God is able to give thee back greater favor and consolation. This is not new or strange to those who have made trial of the way of God, for with the great saints and the ancient prophets there was often this manner of change. (II, IX, 4)

❡ The more a man dieth to himself, the more he beginneth to live towards God. (II, XII, 14)

March 29, 1951

Haverford

I read Romain Rolland’s biography of Gandhi. Here was brought out Gandhi’s conception of nonviolence as a powerful positive instrument, not an unrealistic refusal to participate in the army or other governmental activities. Rolland puts it well: “Faith is a battle. And our nonviolence is the most desperate battle. The way to peace is not through weakness. We do not fight violence as much as weakness. Nothing is worthwhile unless it is strong, neither good nor evil. Absolute evil is better than emasculated goodness. Moaning pacifism is the death-knell of peace; it is cowardice and lack of faith. Let those who do not believe, who fear, withdraw! The way to peace leads through self-sacrifice.”

March 31, 1951

Haverford

From John XVI, 33: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

John X, 10: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

April 7, 1951

Haverford

From the preface to Culture and Anarchy: “In the following essay we have discussed . . . the tendency in us to Hebraise, as we call it; that is, to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious side. This tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur of religion, and bears affecting testimony to them. But we have seen that it leads to a narrow and twisted growth of our religious side itself, and to a failure in perfection.” Arnold goes on to state that culture is the harmonious perfection of the whole man, of all the tendencies we reveal, of which religion is but one. He applies this in defense of the Established Church, which, he says, keeps religion always in the main stream of events, and thus helps to bring about the adaptation of religion’s moral teaching to politics and government, etc.

In this vein are the following observations:

“Mr. Albert Réville . . . says that the conception which cultivated and philosophical Jews now entertain of Christianity and its Founder, is probably destined to become the conception which Christians themselves will entertain. Socinians are fond of saying the same thing about the Socinian conception of Christianity. Now, even if this were true, it would still have been better for a man, during the last 1800 years, to have been a Christian and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have been a Jew or a Sociniani because the being in contact with the main stream of human life is of more moment for a man’s total spiritual growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to him, which is his business on earth, than any speculative opinion which he may hold or think he holds. . . . The worth of what a man thinks about God and the objects of religion depends on what the man is; and what the man is depends upon his having more or less reached the measure of a perfect and total man.

“Culture, disinterestedly seeking in its aim at perfection to see things as they really are, shows us how worthy and divine a thing is the religious side in man, though it is not the whole of man. But while recognizing the grandeur of the religious side in man, culture yet makes us also eschew an inadequate conception of man’s totality. Therefore, to the worth and grandeur of the religious side in man, culture is rejoiced and willing to pay any tribute, except the tribute of man’s totality.”

I wonder if Arnold has not substituted the term “Culture” for the term “religion.” Religion demands the harmonious expansion and development of all of man’s powers, and is forever against restrictive specialization. At the same time, it recognizes the psychological and social need for each man to “find his niche”; but if this is the proper niche, it will, paradoxically, be the means through which its occupant can develop and express all his powers to the fullest. (Expand this sometime.)

“. . . for culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism—its fierceness, and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like.”

“. . . the true grace and serenity is that of which Greece and Greek art suggest the admirable ideals of perfection,—a serenity which comes from having made order among ideas and harmonized them.”

April 8, 1951

Haverford

Truth is “that which is.” When we say that something “exists,” we merely say that that something is true. Truth can have no meaning apart from reality. One cannot say, “Truth exists” without implying the tautology, “What exists exists.” The tendency to talk of Truth as a separate something that has the characteristic of existing along with various other portions of the universe, such as cows or stones, the tendency that will produce the two statements, “Truth exists,” and “cows exist” and allow them to stand together unquestioned, arises, strangely enough, from what was once a legitimate use of the term Truth—that is, where it equaled “that which is.”

The transition from the legitimate to the illegitimate use of Truth takes place when the object whose existence we wish to affirm is such that our senses cannot comprehend it. When the vast limitations of our senses are appreciated, it becomes evident that perhaps the greater number of objects fall into this category of the unperceivable. A rock occupies space and has solidity. It can be felt and seen; therefore we conclude that it exists. So likewise with a cow. Both are portions of the Truth by virtue of their existence. The Life that is in the cow, however, cannot be felt or smelt or seen. Yet, we are quite sure that it is there and that it is something different from that part of the cow that can be seen and felt: for when the cow dies, it is still a cow albeit a dead cow, and its existence as a cow cannot be questioned. The life, however, that was manifest in the cow is most definitely there no longer. To say, “That cow lives” is to depart from Truth, whereas the statement, “That is a cow” is undeniably true.

Thus we are faced with Life as a something that exists or does not exist in a particular medium. Yet when we attempt to describe Life as an object, we fail hopelessly. We can only talk around it, speak of it in terms of a beating heart or responsive brain, but we can never actually contemplate Life itself. Thus when we try to speak of Life in terms of truth or untruth, we falter. We can say, “Life exists,” yet this tells us little indeed about the nature of this something, Life, which exists. Again, we can speak of “living principles”; but here the term “living” is so vague that it becomes virtually meaningless.

Yet the expressions “full life,” “shallow life,” “good life,” “bad life” do have some meaning for us, however vague. Through these expressions, and countless others, we begin to give qualities to the unknowable object and, inevitably, to begin to think we know it, when all that we know are the qualities. And even these we know but imperfectly—for we define qualities such as these in terms of the object they are supposed to describe: thus goodness is the quality that fosters life, badness the quality that takes life away. All in all, then, when we say “life is good” we say little more than “life is life,” and we are no more edified than before.

Continue: each person searches for truth, perceives it in a state of wholeness absolute for him, relative to him. Sum: absolute—norms—alternation: faith—skepticism—renewed faith—knowledge that the term truth describes real objects.

April 10, 1951

Haverford

Matthew Arnold:

“The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man’s perfection or salvation. . . . Still, they pursue this aim by very different courses. The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. . . . The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

“Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing. Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not our own individual will, but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of this form, also, of the discipline to which we have attached the general name of Hebraism. Only, as the old law and the network of prescriptions with which it enveloped human life were evidently a motive-power not driving and searching enough to produce the result aimed at,—patient continuance in well-doing, self-conquest,—Christianity substituted for them boundless devotion to that inspiring and affecting pattern of self-conquest offered by Jesus Christ.

“. . . in nine cases out of ten where St. Paul thinks and speaks of resurrection, he thinks and speaks of it in the sense of a rising to a new life before the physical death of the body, and not after it. . . . The profound idea of being baptized into the death of the great exemplar of self-devotion and self-annulment, of repeating in our own person, by virtue of identification with our exemplar, his course of self-devotion and self-annulment, and of thus coming, within the limits of our present life, to a new life, in which, as in the death going before it, we are identified with our exemplar,—this is the fruitful and original conception of being risen with Christ which possesses the mind of St. Paul, and this is the central point round which, with such incomparable emotion and eloquence, all his teaching moves.”

Bravo! I had already been convinced that Jesus thought in this way—evidence John’s gospel—but never looked sufficiently into Paul, whom most people consider a dogmatist rather than a poet.

A speaker here today touched on the insufficiency of all our normal opinions, their being limited by our relative perspectives—and offered the knowledge of Godhead as emancipation from this relativism. The general impression seemed to be that this sort of talk would be acceptable in church, but here not so. To rise and talk of God or spiritual things is tantamount to antagonizing your audience. What we need is a new poetical expression of religion, which will supersede the vocabulary so excellent, yet so tedious through overuse, now in vogue. Prophet, where art thou?

Sunday: attended Radnor Meeting with Pete G.

Sunday, April 15, 1951

Haverford

Read Freud’s Outline of Psychoanalysis. Re-reading Wuthering Heights. Beginning Schumann’s first novelette, in F. The duet from Bach’s 78th Cantata is constantly in my mind. It is ethereal.

Wrote to Holmes and Harrington about my concern over the probability of not getting 4E. Saw Jack Cadbury of AFSC—very pleasant—and got virtual acceptance as regards the Mexican project.

Walked.

Had period of self-pity yesterday. Dad’s eyes and mind, Mother’s uterus tumor, my imminent prison sentence—but realized that brooding is the worst answer. Must work hard and courageously!

Met Peasy Laidlaw at a square dance last week. She’s peculiar but pleasant.

It seems ironic and perhaps tragic that at this time of crisis I can expect no aid, advice, or consolation from home. Perhaps this also applies vice versa.

“To act is easy, to think is hard.”—Goethe. “Necessity is the father of destruction.”—Bien

China’s in hot water,

Chang, he’s mighty glum,

Korea’s getting worser,

Like Wrigley’s chewing gum.

Rot.

Tuesday, April 17, 1951

Haverford

Today’s Collection program consisted of student music. My little Sonatina in B-flat for 3 strings was performed—rather poorly—by 3 professional musicians: nevertheless, a great and marvelous event, one’s creation made manifest.

The great joy in life is to create—to apply the power, which God breathes into us, in the devising of new life in terms of music, art, poetry, literature.

Wednesday, April 18, 1951

Haverford

Our Wednesday morning silent meetings are now in the Skating House, and appropriately so. Starting the day in this way of consecration is indeed fine. We realize how thankful we must be each and every morn, that death has given way to renewed life, replenished vigor, and we vow that the short span of life afore the setting sun shall not be spent in vain, but rather in the service and interest of truth, beauty, courage, wisdom: of God.

I have started examining “Hero and Leander” and find it delightful indeed. Read Volpone also tonight, with identical reaction.

Pete G. and I attacked the De Soto, removing the head, etc., in preparation for a complete motor job. These excursions into mechanical mysteries, though belated, are delightful and edifying—also, they serve the sovereign interest of economy.

Sunday, April 22, 1951

Haverford

Reading Return of the Native. Hardy’s prose is flowing, and his thought reacheth unto the depths. Viz:

❡ Was Yeobright’s mind well-proportioned? No. A well-proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.

❡ We can hardly imagine bucolic placidity quickening to intellectual aims without imagining social aims as the transitional phase. Yeobright’s peculiarity was that in striving at high thinking he still cleaved to plain living.

❡ In Clym Yeobright’s face could be dimly seen the typical countenance of the future. Should there be a classic period to art hereafter, its Pheidias may produce such faces. The view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution of the advanced races that its facial expression will become accepted as a new artistic departure. . . . Physically beautiful men—the glory of the race when it was young—are almost an anachronism now. The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life.

❡ . . . the more I see of life the more do I perceive that there is nothing particularly great in its greatest walks, and therefore nothing particularly small in mine of furze-cutting. If I feel that the greatest blessings vouchsafed to us are not very valuable, how can I feel it to be any great hardship when they are taken away? So I sing to pass the time.

Monday, April 29, 1951

Haverford

Donne perceives a universal law and knows that the same law governs the unperceivable as well:

From Rest and Sleep, which but thy [i.e. Death’s] picture be,

Much pleasure then from thee much more must flow. . .

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!

Tuesday, May 1, 1951

Haverford

The Collection speaker told of the present dilemma of the physicists arising from their conviction that the very act of observing an object changes the object; thus we can never examine the operations of the world and perceive them in the state they would be in if we did not examine them. This is generally accepted as part of the quantum theory, with a lone dissenter: Einstein.

A good day, at last. I need constant inspiration and compulsion, or else I do nothing at all.

Wednesday, May 2, 1951

Haverford

Dad wrote of the splendors of spring in Sunnyside, and added: “In proportion to my eyes having lost their full capacity to see clearly, I find myself noticing things that I formerly either didn’t pay any attention to or took for granted.” This to me means a cure! Hooray!

May 6, 1951

Haverford

An insect alighted in my pocket. It was an exact replica of our modern helicopters.

Saw a movie about Mr. Justice Holmes—entertaining, but did not do justice to the Justice.

May 16, 1951

Haverford

The fresh upsurge of cool air from a running stream as one crosses it on a footbridge.

May 19, 1951

Haverford

Shaw: “. . . where there is danger, there is hope. Our present security is nothing, and can be nothing, but evil made irresistible.

“Thus, you see, a man may not be a gentleman nowadays, even if he wishes to. As to being a Christian, he is allowed some latitude in that matter, because, I repeat, Christianity has two faces. Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanguinary execution after torture, for its central mystery an insane vengeance brought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of Equality, and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance, often politely called punishment or justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is tolerated. The other is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well aware of the fact that the only editor in England who denounces punishment as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his paper the Freethinker; and has been imprisoned for two years for blasphemy.”—Preface to Major Barbara, after seeing the movie last night.

May 22, 1951

Haverford

The great artist achieves unity of conception because he can conceive in terms of blocks, not individual notes, phrases, words or sentences. I cannot do this, and both my music and my writing thus show an incoherence. I am good only for a spurt at a time; if that spurt is insignificant to complete the work, then my subsequent completing will be inevitably faulty and below the standard of the original.

Heard Norman Thomas, Johnson of Howard U., Senator Flanders, and Rev. Crane talk on peace. All excellent, reaffirming for me my own beliefs, and being a bright spot in representing a section of the adult world that still has ideals and courage. My parents and relatives unfortunately are not of this select company. My alienation from them progresses apace.

Pete G. and I are now coming to the trying part of a friendship; we are re-discovering each other’s faults, and have drifted apart, to return, I hope, re-bound with hoops of steel.

May 23, 1951

Haverford

Trevelyan, commenting on the Scottish uprising of 1635–40: “the Covenant with God was renewed in 1638 and embraced all ranks from highest to lowest. In every parish men signed it, weeping and lifting their right hand to heaven. When the Scots display emotion, something real is astir within them.”

Again Trevelyan: “Was it . . . impossible for Parliamentary power to take root in England at a less cost than this national schism and appeal to force, which, in spite of many magnificent incidents, left England humanly so much the poorer and less noble in twenty years time? It is a question which no depth of research or speculation can resolve. Men were what they were, uninfluenced by the belated wisdom of posterity, and thus they acted.”

Adams on the Puritan Revolution in 1640: “In the reaction which naturally followed, the work of the revolution was undone. Constitutional development linked itself back to the results of its more natural processes in the stage which it had reached at the end of the first session of the Long Parliament in 1641. Nearly everything for which the revolution strove is now a part of the English constitution, but not as a result of its endeavor. Rather as a result of the slower and more normal process of growth, out of which in a sense the revolution indeed came but which it for a moment interrupted. In the puritan and quaker colonies of America the ideas of the revolution created the natural political atmosphere. There they were not revolutionary but became the material from which the normal constitutional life of these little states drew its strength.”

Samuel Butler: “He [Ernest] did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one’s mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little notebook kept always in the waistcoat pocket. Ernest has come to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities.”

May 24, 1951

Haverford

Samuel Butler: “I mean that he was trying to give up father and mother for Christ’s sake. He would have said he was giving them up because he thought they hindered him in the pursuit of his truest and most lasting happiness. Granted, but what is this if it is not Christ? What is Christ if He is not this? He who takes the highest and most self-respecting view of his own welfare which it is in his power to conceive, and adheres to it in spite of conventionality, is a Christian whether he knows it and calls himself one, or whether he does not. A rose is not the less a rose because it does not know its own name.”

May 29, 1951

Haverford

Optimist: “a man who has had no experience.” (?)—Archy.

May 30, 1951

Haverford

The artist is one who has developed his powers of intellectual mimicry.

June 3, 1951

Haverford

Non-pacifists tell us that we are neglecting our obligations to society. But when the Marxists say that society is greater than the individual, these same non-pacifists are the first to reach for their guns.

Reading such arguments from Mr. Hatch—who is in truth infinitely above them—makes me realize how really weak they are. It is impossible to make a good argument for wrong. Even when strong men so argue, their arguments are weak, and the discrepancy between the level of the argument and that of the speaker indicates that the speaker does not in any full measure believe in the position that he advocates. It is his duty, then, publically to renounce this erroneous position—and the performance of this duty is the real indication of his inner strength.

Non-pacifists also say that it is wrong—or at least unrealistic—to take a position that is clearly ahead of one’s time. Together with this, they extol our American independent democracy, and the liberties it bestows. Yet they forget that the leaders of the revolt against Britain were also clearly ahead of their time. Had these non-pacifists existed then, they would have counseled: Do not rush things, freedom will come in time, when the world’s ready for it—just as they say today—do not rush things, peace will come when the world’s ready for it. No doubt it will, but the world’s “readiness” in such a way will be a euphemism for its exhaustion. What I say is not meant to be a justification of the American Revolution, for no violence can be justified. But it is meant to be in praise of the “anachronistic” ideals of some of its leaders—ideals of individual self-respect and dignity—even if those ideas were implemented wrongly, and through a continuation of this wrong war-mindedness stand the chance of being obliterated forever.

From Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, a first-rate work, which I have finally gotten around to reading, in connection with a Marlowe paper. Otto prefaces his chapter “The Elements of the Numinous” with: “The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no further; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings. We do not blame such an one, when he tries for himself to advance as far as he can with the help of such principles of explanation as he knows, interpreting ‘Aesthetics’ in terms of sensuous pleasure, and ‘Religion’ as a function of the gregarious instinct and social standards, or as something more primitive still. But the artist, who for his part has an intimate personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic experience, will decline his theories with thanks, and the religious man will reject them even more uncompromisingly.”

Bravo! If the English teacher does not evoke the artistic experience—the distinctive artistic experience, viz. the numinous in art—he fulfills not his function. Teachers concentrate on the socio-historical aspects of their subject because they themselves have never had the artistic experience.

Otto remarks later that the Quaker silent meeting is the most spiritual form of worship, its character being threefold: the numinous silence of Sacrament, the silence of waiting, and the silence of Union or Fellowship. On the last, Otto says: “The silent worship of the Quakers is in fact a realization of Communion in both senses of the word—inward oneness and fellowship of the individual with invisible present Reality and the mystical union of many individuals with one another.” And, of extreme interest: “In this regard there is the plainest inward kinship between the two forms of worship which, viewed externally, seem to stand at the opposite poles of religious development, viz. the Quaker meeting and the Roman Catholic Mass. Both are solemn religious observances of a numinous and sacramental character, both are communion, both exhibit alike an inner straining not only ‘to realize the presence’ of God, but to attain to a degree of oneness with Him.”

I admire and like the Quakers more and more, and especially the silent Meeting. Today at Radnor I again felt the inner strength that comes of calm meditation and thought—the withdrawal from action, whose subsequent return is marked with renewed vigor and dedication. I wonder if joining the Society of Friends would be inconsistent with the ideals of the Community Church. Clearly a good case could be made either way, but as I recall my comments on Hocking’s Absolute Relativity, they would clearly sanction joining another group, and using its doctrines, beliefs, and traditions as the expression of the true universality that underlies all true religious belief.

❡ Otto: “. . . Above and beyond our rational being lies hidden the ultimate and highest part of our nature, which can find no satisfaction in the mere allaying of the needs of our sensuous, psychical, or intellectual impulses and cravings. The mystics called it the basis or ground of the soul.”

June 10, 1951

Sunnyside

From “Song of the Flower,” Gibran:

. . . I look up high to see only the light,

And never look down to see my shadow.

This is wisdom which man must learn.

From “Song of the Rain”:

The heat in the air gives birth to me,

But in turn I kill it,

As woman overcomes man with

The strength she takes from him.

From “Vision”:

❡ I am the human heart, prisoner of substance and victim of earthly laws.

In God’s field of Beauty, at the edge of the stream of life, I was imprisoned in the cage of laws made by man.

In the center of beautiful Creation I died neglected because I was kept from enjoying the freedom of God’s bounty.

Everything of beauty that awakens my love and desire is a disgrace, according to man’s conceptions; everything of goodness that I crave is but naught, according to his judgment.

I am the lost human heart, imprisoned in the foul dungeon of man’s dictates, tied with chains of early authority, dead and forgotten by laughing humanity whose tongue is tied and whose eyes are empty of visible tears.

❡ I am a poet, and if I cannot give, I shall refuse to receive.

❡ Humans are divided into different clans and tribes, and belong to countries and towns. But I find myself a stranger to all communities and belong to no settlement. The universe is my country and the human family is my tribe.

Human kinds unite themselves only to destroy the temples of the soul, and they join hands to build edifices for earthly bodies. I stand alone listening to the voice of hope in my deep self saying, “As love enlivens a man’s heart with pain, so ignorance teaches him the way to knowledge. Pain and ignorance lead to great joy and knowledge because the Supreme Being has created nothing vain under the sun.”

I have a yearning for my beautiful country, and I love its people because of their misery. But if my people rose, stimulated by plunder and motivated by what they call “patriotic spirit” to murder, and invaded my neighbor’s country, then upon the committing of any human atrocity I would hate my people and my country.

I love my native village with some of my love for my country; and I love my country with part of my love for the earth, all of which is my country; and I love the earth with all of myself because it is the haven of humanity, the manifest spirit of God.

Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that humanity is standing amidst ruins, hiding its nakedness behind tattered rags, shedding tears upon hollow cheeks, and calling for its children with pitiful voice. But the children are busy singing their clan’s anthem; they are busy sharpening the swords and cannot hear the cry of their mothers.

Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that Supreme Being preaches love and good-will. But the people ridicule such teachings. The Nazarene Jesus listened, and crucifixion was his lot; Socrates heard the voice and followed it, and he too fell victim in body. The followers of the Nazarene and Socrates are the followers of Deity, and since people will not kill them, they deride them, saying, “Ridicule is more bitter than killing.”

Jerusalem could not kill the Nazarene, nor Athens Socrates; they are living yet and shall live eternally. Ridicule cannot triumph over the followers of Deity. They live and grow forever.

July 3, 1951

Riparius

From New Wars for Old by John Haynes Holmes:

❡ The supreme example of the antagonism of militarism and civilization is in the case of Germany. For centuries, the German people were peaceful traders, hard-working peasants, and raptured dreamers. Political power was unknown to them, and military greatness undesired. And these were the days when her life was purest, and her spirit at its zenith of achievement. It was feeble and divided Germany which gave us the long line of noble mystics from Tauler and Meister Eckhart to Herder and Schleiermacher, Martin Luther and the Reformation, the literature of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Heine, the music of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert, the scholarship of Wolf, Strauss, Bauer, Niebuhr, and Ranke. Then, in the 18th century, came the Great Elector and Frederick, and the beginnings of Prussian militarism. Then came the Napoleonic wars, with their poisonous progeny in the persons of Stein, Scharuhorst, and Gneisenau. The days of ’48 were a brief awakening from the creeping hypnotism of the times. But Bismarck and Moltke, the veritable incarnation of blood and iron, soon came upon the scene, and Germany was lost. From that day to this Germany has been obsessed with the ideal of force, greediness, power; and from that day to this her true life has atrophied and slowly died. If 1870 marks the beginning of German imperialism, it marks as well the close of German culture.

❡ Nothing is more impressive in evolution than the gradual supplanting of the struggle for self-preservation by the struggle for the life of others. Mutual aid is the determining factor of survival. Not the claw of the tiger but the love of the tiger for her cubs is the thing that really makes for the preservation of the species. “The strength of the wolf is the pack,” says Kipling. The weaker animals, which, because of their inadequate strength, have learned the lesson of co-operation are the ones which are winning out the battle for life, and the savage animals, on the other hand, like the lion and the bear, which rove the jungle alone in the proud glory of unconquerable power, are the very ones which are losing and thus gradually disappearing. Physical force, in other words, is for some reason or other showing itself to be a failure in the struggle for survival.

❡ The struggle [of life] is not for physical survival but for spiritual fulfillment. Jesus urged, therefore, upon all those who would truly live, the great end of love.

❡ President Monroe, re: Canadian-US border disarmament: “The increase of naval armaments on one side upon the Lakes, during peace, will necessitate the like increase on the other, and besides causing an aggravation of useless expense to both parties, must operate as a continual stimulus of suspicion and ill-will upon the inhabitants and local authorities of the borders against those of their neighbors. The moral and political tendency of such a system must be to war and not to peace.”

❡ The non-resistant, in the highest and best sense of he word, is not the man who endures passively, nor yet fights rationally, but the man who loves profoundly. [Cf. Bishop Myriel in Les Miserables, when Jean Valjean has stolen his silver.]

❡ Non-resistance means one thing,—the lifting of resistance to evil from the physical to the moral plane.

❡ “With mercy and forbearance shalt thou disarm every foe. For want of fuel the fire expires: mercy and forbearance bring violence to naught.”—Buddha.

❡ “To those who are good, I am good; and to those who are not good, I am also good—and thus all get to be good. . . . To recompense injury with kindness, this is the law of life.”—Lao-tse.

❡ “The man who foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me. . . . Let a man overcome anger by love, let a man overcome evil by good, let him overcome the greedy by liberality and the liar by truth.”—Buddha.

❡ “Bless them that persecute you. . . . Recompense to no man evil for evil.”—Paul (Romans 12)

❡ “Men say that Christ bade his disciples sell their coats and buy them swords. But Christ taught not his apostles to fight with the word of iron, but with the sword of God’s word, which standeth in meekness of heart and in the prudence of man’s tongue.”—Wycliffe.

❡ “The religious man is guided in his activity not by the presumed consequences of his action, but by the consciousness of the destination of his life. . . . For him there is no question as to whether many or few men act as he does, or of what may happen if he does that which he should do. He knows that besides life and death nothing can happen, and that life and death are in the hands of God whom he obeys. The religious man acts thus and not otherwise not because he desires to act thus, nor because it is advantageous to himself or to other men, but because, believing that his life is in the hands of God, he cannot act otherwise.”—Tolstoy (“Bethink Yourselves”).

❡ The Quakers exemplify everything that is beautiful in the moral and spiritual life; in many ways they must be regarded as the very flower and fruitage of our Christian civilization.

❡ Successful instances of non-resistance exemplify the workings of two absolute spiritual laws. The first of these laws is this: that like always produces like. Reason conduces to reason, hate stirs up hate, love generates love. ‘Cast your bread upon the waters,’ said Jesus, ‘and it will come back to you again.’ ‘As ye sow,’ said Paul, ‘so shall ye also reap.’ ‘Love your enemies, and you will have none.’ And the second spiritual law is that the spirit is always superior to the flesh.

❡ “I come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly,” said Jesus, defining the standard by which he wanted his career to be measured.

’Tis life of which our nerves are scant;

O life, not death, for which we pant;

More life and fuller that we want. —Tennyson.

❡ War is never justifiable at any time or under any circumstance. No man is wise enough, no nation is important enough, no human interest is precious enough, to justify the wholesale destruction and murder which constitute the essence of war. Human life is alone sacred. . . . In the name of life and for the sake of life, do I declare that war must be condemned universally and unconditionally.

It is with war today exactly as with similar abominations yesterday. Plato thought that human slavery was justifiable, since it enabled the free citizens of his ideal republic to live the good life. Torquemada thought persecution justifiable, since it gave protection to the true faith. . . . In the same way we deceive ourselves today into believing that war is justifiable, when it is fought on behalf of political liberty, or in defense of the integrity of a nation. But some day men will awaken from this illusion to see that war is never justifiable.

❡ “Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country,” says Bahá’u’llách, “let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.”

From Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means:

❡ People prepare for war . . . because they live in a society where success, however achieved, is worshipped and where competition seems more “natural” (because under the present dispensation it is more habitual) than co-operation.

❡ Because of indolence, the disinherited are hardly less conservative than the possessors; they cling to their familiar miseries almost as tenaciously as the others cling to their privileges.

❡ Non-attachment in the midst of activity is the distinguishing mark of the ideally excellent human being.

❡ The political road to a better society is decentralization . . . [But] no society which is preparing for war can afford to be anything but highly centralized. . . . A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war, must necessarily cease to be democratic.

❡ Self-transcendence, escape from the prison of the ego into union with what is above personality, is generally accomplished in solitude. That is why the tyrants like to herd their subjects into those vast crowds, in which the individual is reduced to a state of intoxicated sub-humanity.

❡ The line of least resistance: living unconnected, atomistic lives, passively obeying during working hours and passively being entertained by machinery during hours of leisure.

❡ Soldiers must not think or have wills. ‘Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.’

❡ In our societies men are paranoiacally ambitious, because paranoiac ambition is admired as a virtue and successful climbers are adored as though they were gods. More books have been written about Napoleon than about any other human being. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

❡ Certain biologists consider that war ensures the survival of the fittest. This is obviously nonsensical. War tends to eliminate the young and strong and spare the unhealthy.

❡ It is one of the tragedies of history that the Westernization of China should have meant the progressive militarization of a culture which, for nearly 3000 years, has consistently preached the pacifist ideal.

❡ For Buddhists, anger is always and unconditionally disgraceful. For Christians, there is such a thing as righteous indignation (which, unfortunately, justifies war, so they think).

❡ War is not a law of nature, nor even of human nature. It exists because men wish it to exist.

❡ The state is loved because it panders to the lowest elements in human nature and because men like to have excuses to feel pride and hatred, etc.

❡ The new moralities (Communism, Fascism, etc.) inculcate the minor virtues, such as temperance, prudence, courage, and the like; but all disparage the higher virtues, charity and intelligence, without which the minor virtues are merely instruments for doing evil with increased efficiency.

❡ Desire is the source of illusion. Only the disinterested mind can transcend common sense and pass beyond the boundaries of animal or average-sensual human life. The mystic exhibits disinterestedness in the highest degree possible to human beings and is therefore able to transcend ordinary limitations more completely than the man of science, the artist or the philosopher. . . . The ultimate reality discoverable by the mystics is not personality. Since it is not personal, it is illegitimate to attribute to it ethical qualities. ‘God is not Good’, said Eckhart. ‘I am good.’ Goodness is the means by which men can overcome the illusion of being completely independent existents and can raise themselves to a level of being upon which it becomes possible to realize the fact of their oneness with ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is ‘the peace of God which passeth all understanding’; goodness is the way by which it can be approached.

❡ Good is that which makes for unity; evil is that which makes for separateness.

❡ European and American children are brought up to admire the social climber and worship his success, to envy the rich and eminent and at the same time to respect and obey them. In other words, the two correlated vices of ambition and sloth are held up as virtues. There can be no improvement in our world until people come to be convinced that the ambitious power-seeker is as disgusting as the glutton or the miser.

July 12, 1951

Riparius

Tolstoy uses an unusual figure in Anna Karenina: “He [Serioja] was only nine years old, only a child, but he knew his own soul and guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye.” (Part V, Chapter XXVII)

I played the Eine Kleine Nachmusik duet with Merrill Brockway at Brant Lake Camp assembly.

Possible story-subject: Mrs. McCarthy’s part in informing on activities of the previous postmistress (who illegally solicited business from neighboring hotels, etc.). Also Mrs. McCarthy and her rapist husband, Francis, whom she apparently drove to frustration. Post-office conversations, dilemma over new money-order forms; the children; talking too freely, etc. Closing up to drive the children home.

July 25, 1951

Riparius

75th log!!!

—the 80-odd year old logger who broke his leg when he was 76, walking from Warrensburg to Luzerne. “Guess I’ll stop in Eldridge’s store. . . . Never seen in Eldridge’s store. . . . Been in Morehead’s.”

July 26, 1951

Sunnyside

Dad much better. Interested in record-collecting and listening again. Physically active to an extent. But still won’t leave Sunnyside.

Drawing-room conversations. “Oh, have you seen—? Wasn’t it simply grand!” Ad infinitum.

July 27, 1951

Washington, DC

Friends Work Camp. We shall be painting, plastering, puttying old slum tenements. 13 girls, 5 boys. Nice group—varied, at least geographically.

At Riparius I learned to talk to and with myself. Now I shall communicate to others what has been stored up over the past six weeks. But one can never communicate! If he manages to understand himself it is commendable; making others understand is phenomenal.

August 25, 1951

Riparius

I feel as though my foundations were a piece of sculpture, and should be unveiled before each new visitor.

December 4, 1951

God: the force, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.

Sex: the force, not ourselves, that makes for copulation.

1952

Haverford

January—June

mid-Atlantic, Paris, Amsterdam, Brummen

July

Brummen; England

August

Leeuwarden, chez Kleefstra; Assen (chez Oort)

September

Sunnyside & Riparius

October—December

January 3, 1952

Haverford

They tell me that it is now fashionable to be a Kierkegaardian. This is all very well, but in the end it will be not so well for Kierkegaard. For now that he is “popular” and “accepted,” S.K.’s doctrine and message face the probability of being distorted, just as every other noble system of thought has been mangled by popular acceptance. This is because although the majority of men are willing, let us say, to “adopt” the Kierkegaardian point of view, still very few of them indeed are willing to take the leap that S.K. requires. Thus the core of S.K.’s message is ignored while its periphery is discussed, edited, translated, tea-tabled, and sermonized until the core disappears right out altogether, and the force of superior numbers triumphs.

So, we must guard against the fashion and against accepting S.K. as a prophet whose every word is scripture. Still, on the other hand, we must not be so overly critical as to insure ourselves as it were against being edified by the preacher, whether he offers little or much. S.K. requires this much of his reader—that he become one with the talk, at least at first, and that he lay down the categories of critical judgment. I say bravo for S.K. and for play-acting. (3:00 a.m.)

January 25, 1952

Haverford

From Allen’s Life of Phillips Brooks, referring to the religious skepticism of the 1870s (cf. Arnold’s “Dover Beach”) that resulted from the shattering by Biblical scholarship of the infallibility of the Bible, and by science of other commonly accepted religious standbys: “Under these circumstances, the pressing question was, Where lay the authority? . . . Some fell back upon the authority of tradition expressed by General Councils and long-established usage. The Roman Church was alive to the situation, and the year 1870 was considered opportune for declaring the infallibility of the Pope, in the expectation that a distracted world would be moved by the announcement. Others asserted the inward authority of the soul as divinely endowed to speak with finality upon religious truth—the attitude which was then known as Transcendentalism.”—I have read and loved Emerson, and Murdock lectured galore, but never before this did I have the slightest appreciation of the force that gave rise to Transcendentalism. Now it means so much more.

February 5, 1952

Haverford

Lines composed for mother’s birthday, January 1949 (just found):

Away, indeed o’er lands and fields

Spacèd far and near,

Strides one in search of loveliness,

Life’s requisite so dear.

Alas, in vain, though worlds be roam’d,

Expecteth he another

So loving, kind, and beautiful

As his devoted mother.

(P.S. (1952): Ugh!)

February 14, 1952

Haverford

Lunch with Horace Alexander, friend of Gandhi’s.

February 20, 1952

Haverford

Lunch with Robert Penn Warren. He said that American’s agrarian civilization, not her metropolitan, is the key to her greatness, but that it is hardly so simple a question as the nice little farm vs. the big mean city. Ralph Sergent asked him what lectures he listened to at Oxford, whereupon the “great man” replied that in the course of his two years he went to one lecture, and regretted that. I had immense difficulty repressing what would have been the most undignified of guffaws.

February 24, 1952

Haverford

This morning I heard some of the most dynamic, vivid, and moving preaching in my experience: Rev. Cunningham, at a Negro Baptist Church, 10th and Wallace, Philadelphia. Here is in all respects a match for Phillips Brooks: intellectually as well as emotionally. Also met David Richie, who radiates love and compassion. P.S. Perhaps I am too sentimental. Donald Blackmer thinks so.

March 9, 1952

Haverford

Knowing that all considerations of logic and expediency direct one to take a certain action, and then taking the opposite action is much better than taking said opposite action and being ignorant of the considerations of logic and expediency that speak against it. (Thought growing out of Pete G.’s deliberations about going home this afternoon.)

Mr. Sergent told me yesterday that, due in part to my article in the Review, he has redesigned the Elizabethan literature course, leaving out historical and sociological data, examining fewer works, etc.

Must write a short story based on Rusty’s encounter with the mud.

March 18, 1952

Haverford

Lord Boyd-Orr spoke here. He said that the challenge that our civilization must meet is the challenge of becoming One World: “Let’s join the Human Race.” This is the challenge in the sense that Toynbee speaks of challenges and responses. If this challenge does not bring a creative response, then the civilization of the West is doomed. The challenge can be met, said Boyd-Orr in his Scottish brogue, by an effort on the part of the technologically advanced West to help provide know-how and implementation for starving Asia, to keep production at a high level this way rather than by the stimulus of war and the destructive method of re-arming.

Dee and Dave announce the arrival of young Christopher, “a monster to help start schools and build houses.”

March 25, 1952

Haverford

Chatted with Charles Malik, Lebanese UN delegate, and “philosopher statesman.” He is a student of Greek through and through, especially Aristotle. I asked him about the old problem pointed up in the slaying of Caesar by the philosopher Brutus: metaphysics may act as a justification for what otherwise would be considered a moral wrong. But Malik insisted that every statesman must model his actions on a metaphysics—and, despite my objection, naturally Malik was basically right.

March 29, 1952

Haverford

Watched Kovacs upset Gonzales, Kramer eke out a close one against Segura; then Segura-Gonzales beat Kramer-Kovacs. All were three sets and very exciting. Played on canvas at St. Joseph’s College on City Line Avenue.

April 26, 1952

Haverford

Schweitzer entitles his autobiography Out of My Life and Thought. Someone should try Out of My Mind.

Douglas Steere is off to Africa to see Schweitzer.

Heard Paul Henri Spaak. Supper with A. J. Muste. Television, the myopiate of the masses. What is the wisest word in English: Sydygy. Am going to Holland this summer. Heard Art of the Fugue at the First Presbyterian Church.

April 29, 1952

New York Cit

Attended dinner at the Waldorf in honor of Frank Boyden. The Head was presented with a horse and buggy. Claude Fuess, Dodds of Princeton, and Lewis Perry spoke. A miraculous tribute to a miraculous man.

April 30, 1952

Paul Henry Láng: “Like Carlyle, Renan, and Taine: Wagner felt that modern life is opposed to the creative mission of man; that it is passive, lacking in will, and therefore inhuman. He felt that man was gradually becoming a servant of life, whereas his destiny was to be life’s master. He felt that the divergence between action and thought was swinging man to his doom, and he resolved to lead mankind back to the unity of action and thought, of body and soul, to creative action which does not know problems separate from life.”

May 2, 1952

Haverford

Peter tells me: “You can’t work well unless you get a little relaxation.” I tell him: “For you the formula should be reversed, viz: You can’t relax well unless you do a little work.”

July 10, 1952

S.S. Waterman, mid-Atlantic

Halfway to Europe. Looking back over the past two months, I see many important events, many busy days. In preparation for Comprehensives I read Láng through and through, also Prunières, Nef, etc., learning just about the whole gamut in the six weeks allowed me. Naturally, I could hope to know little more than names, trends, and dates. But apparently this was enough for the peculiar Haverford standards, and I graduated with High Honors and πβκ along with Townsend. Loblenz got simple Honors only, which grieved me immensely, since his knowledge and musical talents are far superior to mine. Dr. Swan thought my exam fugue very good, and this helped—also, of course, the quartet movement, the issue of my study of the first of the Rasumovsky quartets. I have recently also listened more carefully to Opus 59, no. 3, opus 18, #s 4 & 5, and op. 135, the 16th. All superb works, although the 16th so far leaves me mystified. I must study the score in a more detailed way.

It is impossible for me to know just how good or bad my compositions are, especially since I have no way of hearing them over and over in good performance. While writing the variations, the other trio movements, etc., I thought them very good; but after I had progressed to the quartet, I thought them very bad. Now, when and if I progress further, I shall probably feel the quartet very bad. But despite it all, Swan’s enthusiasm has been very encouraging. I owe it to myself to begin to regulate my life with a little more direction and forethought, instead of grasping things as they turn up, as I did with this European trip and with next year’s program at Harvard. I must discipline myself to study music intensively for a year at least, as a test, practicing well and regularly, and undergoing some basic training in ear, sight singing and reading, etc. If I could only have some surer idea of what will be best for me in life—whether my present idea of withdrawal and my present opposition to all the current values of success, is the best way. I feel on the one hand that I must simplify and simplify, that I am so poorly constituted emotionally, so poorly endowed in the basic values of the non-intellectual, that to pursue the typical intellectual life as a college professor or the like would merely intensify the gap between my mind’s attainments and my heart and soul, and would pass on the same immense difficulties to my children as my father passed on to me and his father to him. When I read a passage such as the following—in Sons and Lovers—it immediately strikes home: “The difference between people isn’t in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people—life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves” (p. 316 Modern Library edition).

So, I graduated; but the event was hardly a consummation in my mind—rather a mystery: a mystery that ended one mystery and began another.

I had been at Riparius, and immediately returned—my parents perturbed as usual with my short stays at Sunnyside. A few days later I returned to Park Avenue for Paul Davidoff’s wedding, on June 12th, to Rusty Miller, who impresses me not very much. Then to Cumberland Hill, where I felt very guilty in merely eating supper at the Gardners’ and then taking Peter with me to the farm. The few days with him were delightful. We finished the sheathing on the overhang, then put the roofing paper over it. Next we completed the outside nailing for chinking, and Pete helped me with most of the oakum. Two nights, after having worked steadily from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., we went horseback riding, once as far as the Black Hole, with Clare Carman. Before Pete came, I had put on most of the roofing paper, filled in the two gables with boards from the barn, and laid the two floors. After he left, I completed the chinking, including the outside cementing, all but a few logs directly under the overhang, where rain cannot enter; put in all the windows, planeing them to size and securing each with a sash lock; made and hung two doors, only temporary ones, however; and creosoted the outside up to the level of the windowsills. It was a grand month at Riparius. I worked very well, largely I think because of the relaxation and companionship in taking meals with the Carmans instead of preparing them myself, as I did the summer before. I enjoyed their conversation, simple as it was, much more than that at the Gerstenzangs, where Arthur Levitt and Karen invited me one evening for a steak dinner. The desolate, meaningless, parasitic life of those people, with their constant round of tennis, swimming, golf or boredom stands in sharp contrast with the constructive activity and deep human contact I knew over at Riparius. Even a slight incident binds people and destroys all the sophisticated superficiality that characterizes so many of the people I grew up among. Alvin Millington cut his leg with an axe, and the blood gushed out so fast that he had to apply a tourniquet (lucky thing he thought to do it). I drove him down to Carmans’, where he had left his car, and offered to drive him to Chestertown, but he thought he could make it by himself. As I expected, he began getting faint down the hill, and stopped in home so that his wife could accompany him. An hour or so later he was back at Carmans’, and his childish smile when I happened to drive by was something to warm the coldest heart. “Ten stitches,” he said, with pride; and he looked like a great honor had been given him instead of a near-great misfortune. He thanked me profusely, although all I did was drive him half a mile (at the end of which drive he had presence of mind enough to apologize for the pool of blood on the floor of my truck).

What real part the farm will play in my life yet remains to be seen. I think truly that it will always remain a place that I love and to which I will always long to return. Whether or not I shall actually live there for any extended time of course depends on many things—the most important of these being marriage. At any rate I shall have a home, for you cannot call Sunnyside or New York City a “home” and really mean anything.

The creosoting took me to 3 p.m. and it was 1 a.m. before I finally got back to Sunnyside. Dad and mother had expected me earlier and apparently had gotten perturbed when I did not show up. Mother actually came down when I arrived. I for some reason was angry because she had stayed awake. I don’t know why I felt that way. So our meeting came off very poorly. And in the morning, Dad wouldn’t even speak to me, which was a very nice send-off indeed. True, I should have come home earlier; but he instead of pouting and acting like an infant, should have tried to make the best of whatever time I was at home. Luckily the AFSC slipped up on boat tickets, I had an unexpected five days that I spent at home very pleasantly—except for Dad’s idiotic taking us to Chambord restaurant, because it was the most expensive in NYC. The food was mediocre, the waiters hovered over you constantly and made everyone uncomfortable, and the bill for three of us was $30, which really made me cringe. We went to a pleasant show afterward, however, and returned home quite satisfied—that is, with the only kind of satisfaction or love or unity our family knows: external satisfaction, which wears off in an hour or two.

The week at Pendle Hill was exciting. It is a community in the fullest sense, and a school in the fullest sense, too. It gives no degrees because it does not want students who come for degrees; it encourages independence and individual work; it brings together people of nations and thoughts diverse; and everyone washes dishes, hoes the corn.

Henry Cadbury of Harvard was there—one of those irresistible salty New Englanders, twang and all; and Chakavarty from India. Dorothy Day was to come later; I would have liked meeting her since she advocates subsistence farming. Our group heard lectures from these people, from workers in the AFSC office, and from some recently returned from Europe. We also had all the diversions—a party, square dancing, singing, walks, etc.

I am never satisfied with knowing people superficially, and therefore get to know no one, superficially or otherwise. It is the same here on the boat. I seem to remember a passage in Lawrence’s book concerning this—very appropriate: “There was always this feeling of jangle and discord in the Leivers family. Although the boys resented so bitterly this external appeal to their deeper feelings of resignation and proud humility, yet it had its effect on them. They could not establish between themselves and an outsider just the ordinary human feeling and unexaggerated friendship; they were always restless for the something deeper. Ordinary folk seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the simplest social intercourse, suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse” (pp. 183–184, Modern Library edition).

Conversations with all sorts of people at Pendle Hill, including a self-styled reformer who had everything “worked out.” What we need (!) he said, is “mutual freeing”; then he gave lengthy and involved definitions of “mutual” and of “freeing,” reading of course from his notebook. It was ridiculous.

July 13, 1952

S.S. Waterman off the southern tip of England

Final day of a ten-day trip that seems to have passed very quickly. Our passage was “uneventful,” as they say—no storms, no fog, no emergency at all. I met and chatted with many people—boys and girls—but never passed beyond the chatting stage. Read Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; heard lectures on existentialism, French theater, Camus, French music, neo-Fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany; on student life in England, Holland, Germany; attended language classes in French and Dutch; heard Mme. Oosthous do dramatic presentations: Shaw’s Saint Joan and a Chinese melodrama called The Chalk Circle—both very fine, especially since she played all the parts herself.

I did not get any real feeling for the power or even the immensity of the ocean. The ship is big enough so that on calm seas such as we have had, you hardly know that you are sailing—there is no excitement to it. I do hope that on the return voyage there will be at least one severe storm, so we rock a bit and a little water comes on deck. Also, the weather the past ten days has been almost continually overcast, so we have not been able to admire the beautiful sunsets that one is supposed to be able to view at sea. The whole idea, once again, is full and complete comfort; they fill you full of food, served à la Chambord by delightful Malayan boys; then you do nothing in a physical way; then you eat again. I would like very much sometime to travel the seas in a small boat, not as a guest, a boat where one can work and fish and feel a little salty and where the sight of land will mean more after ten days or so than it does now.

The passengers on this boat, aside from the handful of lecturers and group leaders, are almost all students, mostly going on tours or programs like NSA, Experiment in International Living, Travel and Study, etc., etc. They are a good lot, these students, serious for the most part, I think, and generally concerned about the world situation. Only I think that few would pass beyond the concern stage. Above all—and this must certainly impress the Europeans—they are all remarkably healthy-looking, fresh, pert, and well-dressed. And a remarkable number of both girls and boys are quite beautiful in face and body. I am anxious to see how the Europeans compare in all this. Also one notices the unabashed, natural sexiness of both sexes, the girls in their shorts, with beautiful (shaven) legs; the boys in tight-fitting pants. A wonderful thing all this, so like the Elizabethans in their freedom, and so much better than the prudishness and Victorian neurotic fear that sadly characterize the unconscious attitudes that my father has left with me. If I can only break the chain in this respect, and rear children whose thoughts and emotions agree naturally, I will have done a great deal.

18 juillet, 1952

Paris

Cette ville est vraiment remarkable. Je suis ice depuis Mardi et il faut que je partirai demain matin pour Michaelshoeve. Lundi, tous les QIVS sont allés à Delft, où nous avons mangés, puis à Amsterdam. Delft est petit et très joli; Amsterdam et grand, pleins des bruits, comme des autres grandes villes. Nous avons fait un voyage par bateau parmi les canaux, qui sont très intéressants. Le prochain matin, Andy a parti à Finland, Clif à l’Allemande, etc. Cinq jours étaient libres pour moi; donc, j’ai monté le train à Paris.

Là, je suis allé au bureau des Amis, et puis ici à Camp Volent, un grand ville des tentes, 7 rue Barbet-Jouy, près d’ Invalides. On paye 380 francs pour se coucher et manger deux repas, mais le nutriment est très mauvais. Donc, je mange le petit déjeuner ici, achete le déjeuner dans un restaurant, et a 18 heures, j’achete un petit bagette pour 30 fr., à peu près 100 g. du fromage Suisse, un or deux bananes, et un demi-litre du lait—tout coute à peu près 150 francs, très bon marché et très delicieux.

J’ai recontré deux Belges, étudiants de la mathematic à l’Université de Ghent. Nous avons habités la meme tente. Mardi soir nous sommes allés à la Place Pigale; et le prochain soir au Quatier Latin, où sont les existentialists. Pendant la journée, nous nous avons promenés, sur les Champs Elysées, etc., et nous avons vus Notre Dame, le Louvre, l’Arc de Triomphe, les Tuilleries, etc. Hier, j’ai monté le train à Versailles, et j’ai passé presque toute la journée là. Il ne faut pas le dire, mais Versailles est formidable. J’ai aimé tous les deux, le chateau et les jardins. Hier soir, j’ai acheté un billet pour le théâtre—une comedie musicale: le mettre-enscene était le “star” veritable. Il y a aussi beaucoup de nus, très très belles. Elles sont remarquables, les nus: on pense de la beauté, et pas de le sexe. Ce soir, tôt, j’irai voir Maurice Chevalier et Collette Marchande, la très belle danceur que j’ai vu en 1949 à Boston, dans le ballet de Roland Petit.

Mais le chose que j’aime le mieux de tout, c’est de parler le français. J’essaye le faire tous les temps, et souvent les français rirent à mon accent. Quand je comprends quelqu’un, je suis très heureux, mai je ne comprends pas beaucoup. Je ne porte pas des appareils photographique, et je m’ habille très simple—donc, c’est vrai.

July 27, 1952

Michaelshoeve, Brummen (G1), Holland

Work camp at Michaelshoeve, a home for mentally retarded children: Mongolian idiots, encephalitics, etc. The directors believe in anthroposophy, a theory of metempsychosis, and they minister to the souls of these children with loving care because they believe the souls will survive these useless bodies, and in the next incarnation will inhabit normal homes. Here is an application of the pragmatic dictum: “What works is true.” Metempsychosis works at Michaelshoeve. It gives the staff the necessary devotion and patience in very trying work. Therefore I do not begrudge the belief. Here they combine Hindu metaphysic with Christian ethics: the sense of duty toward the unfortunate.

The camp has gone very well this past week. We are living in that routinized sort of life that is very acceptable every so often and that certainly tends toward bodily health and regularity.

July 28, 1952

Michaelshoeve

Piet Tuinman left today, to enter two years of military service in the Dutch army medical corps. He is one of those very articulate chaps whose keen mind can always find something to say. A typical Dutchman in appearance—thin, not too tall, with a prominent nose and a sort of scavenger look softened by a kind smile. He says he is a sort of humanist, and that his religion is very inexpensive, since he always avoids collection boxes (in the Dutch Reformed service I attended yesterday, they collected money four times from each person). We struck up a quick friendship that softened a bit as the week drew on. He likes Nietzsche and I could go along with him there, for he thinks that the usual interpretation of Nietzsche (Nazi, etc.) is wrong, and I agree of course. Piet is studying to be a sociologist, especially from the angle of economic planning. He will work in a sociological institute somewhere and will always be very clever and very likable. He and Brad Foulds, an American girl from West Hartford, became tied with hoops of steel. She has the same Connecticut twang as Frank Pyle, only with him it was delightful, with her disgusting. It is hard to know how much there is in her, but my first impression says to me: not much, aside from all the social graces.

Riek Kleefstra plays the violin—well for a girl of 18. She is as sweet as can be, and I’m only sorry we cannot speak to each other very much because of language difficulty. White hair, typical of Friesland, where she lives.

Reinoud Oort, age 19, is extraordinary. When he first came he hardly said a word, and did not even look too intelligent. But now I have gotten to know him a bit (as well as language barriers permit). He seems to be of a noble species of humans: first in appearance—that haunting type of beauty, so different from the brazen handsomeness of the actors and movie stars: a strong, expressive face topped with curly dark hair, a face that suffers not from the first outgrowths of beard (which should be shaved) or from an occasional pimple, a face that seems constructed for every situation—for love, for concentration, for joy and laughter, for hard work—, a face of absolute individuality, once you come to know it. And a body to match: small and muscular, perfectly proportioned, brown, and always alive; a body that carries all types of clothes as any manufacturer could picture in his dreams. But behind this physical frame is a soul of utmost delicacy, a sensitive soul, a musical soul. And a soul with its element of mysteriousness, of secretness, a soul that says it likes to be alone, to think, to philosophize, to think while working, to philosophize while playing piano—with delicacy, always with delicacy. He plays very well, very well indeed; sight reads with perfect assuredness, and with real musicianship; sings the same way; and plays organ and violin as well. A lover of Bach. A lover who must play Bach. An original thinker perhaps not, a rebel neither—I do not know. More likely a faller into tradition who is not hurt thereby. A prospective minister whose father is a minister and whose grandfather was minister and professor both. Men are curious: they think too much, they go into the metaphysic; they seek beauty and are lost without it. But this makes them—I see that now, for I see here at Michaelshoeve—men without minds, and they are pets, like Pinky and Maggie—pets, no better than dogs—and really worse, for dogs can take care of themselves.

August 3, 1952

Michaelshoeve

Reinoud and Riek and I cycled toward Deventer to visit his uncle and aunt, who weren’t home. The uncle is a retired doctor who writes books on Chinese poetry and keeps bees. We left rather late and were caught in a rainstorm, so had to beg for sleeping quarters in a farmer’s barn. On Sunday we went to a big church in Zutphen; then played piano.

Gibran’s chapter on work in “The Prophet”: extraordinarily important and appropriate for work camp. Read at silent meeting.

August 27, 1952

Ambleside, Lake Region, England

Today Donella and I visited Wordsworth’s cottage at Grasmere, and I translated several of the MS’s for her into French. I was more impressed with Grasmere than with Shakespeare’s home at Stratford-on-Avon, which we saw two days ago. Of course, the Lake Country is beautiful—physically like the Adirondacks, perhaps inferior—but the man-made factors are far superior to the tourist cabins and billboards of America. All is nicely uncommercial and genuine, and it is still clearly evident that this country here is ample inspiration for the poetic muse.

Donella Gandolfi of Rome, and I left Michaelshoeve Thursday after lunch, and reached Rotterdam by hitch-hiking, that night. Next day through Brussels, to Lille. Saturday to Dunkerque, by boat to Dover, and by a lift to a town near Oxford, where we slept in a field for want of a youth hostel. The next morning, Sunday, unshaved and unwashed, we went to an inn for breakfast and overheard two very proper Britishers agree that we were the “two most savage-looking people” they had ever seen. Thenceforth we referred to ourselves as “les deux sauvages.” Then to Birmingham on Sunday to visit Woodbooke College, where I have made application. (Exchanged Waterman ticket at Rotterdam for an open one, good until June.) Then to Stratford and a pleasant Monday writing letters. Saw a performance of Macbeth that night with Ralph Richardson, a good but not extraordinary job. Yesterday to Kendal. Today here in the lakes. Tomorrow to London, I hope, to visit Lionel. Then soon back to Rotterdam, where I hope Reinoud and Riek will meet us. I wrote to Dad to send money, etc., and told him of my plans to stay here in Europe to study organ and perhaps German, to travel a bit, and then to spend either three or six months at Woodbooke. Now my greatest fear is the draft board. Hope to convince them that my studying is legitimate. I think that parents will be a bit angry perhaps—but now this is my life—and while I have control of it, I must do what is most important for me.

Arrived late last night chez Lionel, 39 Longfield Ave., Mill Hill, to find him not yet returned from the continent. His mother wailed a bit—the “only son” business, etc.—but was generous and hospitable. This morning met Brad and an American and an Australian in Piccadilly for lunch. Went to the National Gallery, where Donnella m’a fait une explication—they have an extraordinary Michelangelo. The others were mostly interested in finding the next bench to sit down. Donella and I later found this horrible temporary hostel and walked a bit along the Thames, where we saw the Parliament buildings, Westminster Abbey, and the idiot guards in front of Buckingham Palace. London in all is a horrible place, clean and pretty in places, but entirely too big and unwieldy. It is very much like New York, only worse, I think.

Donella and I have talked much and with mutual pleasure. Her parents were, and still are, fascists. But she, of course, is definitely the opposite. She is a free-thinking gal! But I miss Riek.

The English are truly insular. Everyone thought we were French, despite my accent. And one bank clerk, after seeing Donella’s passport and mine, and then hearing us converse in French, said to me, “You speak Italian very well.”

Sunday, August 31, 1952

Canterbury

Donella and I visited the extraordinary cathedral here this afternoon. It far surpasses Westminster and all the others I have seen, perhaps because the history of Thomas à Becket is very real for me. The antiquity of buildings such as this is unbelievable for Americans; parts still standing were built during Norman times. We left to reach the hostel, which required a 2½ mile walk through lovely countryside. All in all, Canterbury, both center and environs, is exquisite. No time for supper, for we just managed to get back at 6:30 for Evensong. Dean Hewlett Johnson preached the sermon. He had just returned from China, which he had also visited twenty years ago. His text was from the gospels, describing how Jesus’ first service to mankind was the healing of the sick. Then he gave a very vivid description of the unbelievably bad conditions of health and sanitation in China twenty years ago, and after that described how the new [Communist!] government has succeeded in improving these conditions remarkably. For instance, he spoke of the five-mile-long open sewer in Peking, immediately behind a magnificent temple, a sewer full of dead animals, rotting flesh and human excretion, a breeding place for flies, mosquitoes, for diseases of all descriptions. And how, recently, many thousands of volunteers dug out that ditch, laid sewer pipes, and covered the whole over with dirt.

He also described the rat-killing campaigns, the fly-catching, and the great mass vaccinations that have recently taken place, with of course untold effect on cleanliness and health.

Johnson spoke with remarkable sincerity and fervor. He was concise above all; effective. The whole service for me was a memorable one. It recalled the simple peasant folk who sat in the same places to hear Thomas preach also the brotherhood of man and the virtues of healing the sick. In all, this was a grateful relief from the bustle of London and from the atmosphere of Westminster Abbey, the grand showplace and cemetery. Thank goodness that there are not such monstrosities in America.

One of the people who gave me a lift described how, during the war, the barriers of class were forgotten, how wealthy manufacturers took humble laborers to work in limousines, and how toute de suite après la guerre all this amitié was forgotten, how the class differences suddenly returned, and how of course they have remained.

Also talked last week with many truck drivers, a coal miner, a gentlemanly army instructor, petty manufacturer, gentleman farmer, real farmer, etc., etc. Spent one day with a German, another with an Australian.

Inquired about nursing opportunities for Riek. Looks good. A girl can start when she’s 18, and she is paid £200 per year. It will really be funny if Riek actually lands in London to study. Her whole life will be changed because of going to what seemed to be a quite innocent work camp. Our kisses, and our night locked together naked in my sleeping bag in the rain, but protected a bit by the trees near Brummen, is still to me a sort of fantasy. I cannot really comprehend that I was a “participant,” so to speak. Was it wrong? No, it was beautiful. But I’m glad that we decided not to have intercourse, because if the relationship does not develop further we would both regret the incident terribly. She says she loves me. Perhaps she does. Yes, I think she does. But I think it is the first love of a child. She is really still a child. I know that I don’t love her—yet. But it is really too soon to know. Actually, we only began our “friendship” with the first kiss, a short week before I left. How I wish she were with me on this trip! But I shall see more of her in Holland, and then we shall see what happens.

September 1, 1952

English Channel

I must write more about Riek and me because I understand nothing really. We worked together quite a bit starting about the second week of the camp, cutting branches, with Reinoud also. One weekend Reinoud, Riek and I cycled toward Deventer: talked much, and all felt very free and natural because we were among free and natural surroundings. All this time I had no inkling that Riek liked me in any special way, and I don’t think she did either. Most of the conversation was between Reinoud and me, about music, or between Reinoud and Riek because then they could speak Nederlands. And even when we three made music in the evenings, the coupling was precisely the same: Reinoud and I with the Mozart 4-hands, and Reinoud and Riek with the violin and piano works. I liked Reinoud immensely. We had talked much, and frankly, about the individual’s search for faith and inner meaning, about war refusal, inner philosophy, and I liked his manner, his individualism, his spontaneity and inner strength. But of Riek I thought nothing in particular. Of course I liked her very much, her white hair and clear face, her innocence and youthfulness.

Then, the following Saturday, Reinoud left. The next day Riek and I biked, alone to the Van Gogh Museum, all the others going by bus because of the threatening weather. We talked freely and well. We arrived too early and lay down close to one another on the grass, but I never even thought of kissing her. In the museum she showed an amazingly acute appreciation of the paintings, and I enjoyed seeing them with her. On the way back she suddenly started talking about her relationship with boys, how she liked them to be “friends,” not “boy-friends,” and how when one tried to kiss her she became angry. How she didn’t believe in kissing—only when the husband-to-be was found, etc., etc. All extremely school-girlish. That was all. Soon she became a little self-conscious and we changed the subject.

A few days later we worked with Lionel. Gloria had spoken to Riek about her troubles, how she loved Lionel, etc., and Riek told Lionel. It came out that Lionel had kissed Gloria and this led Riek to again speak of kissing. She said, rather cryptically, that she had changed her mind. I said, jokingly to Lionel, that this must have implications!

The following Saturday we took a long walk, finally landing in a pretty park and forest. We lay down and slept a bit. I wanted very much to kiss her all the time but was afraid that she would be angry. We returned and played music.

The next day, Sunday, we decided to go to Arnhem by auto-stop. But luck was bad and we then decided to take bikes. Riek drew me aside and said that she wanted to tell me something, and that she hoped it would not be the end of our friendship. Of course she said that she wanted to kiss me. I said that I wanted the same. We went back to the same bit of forest outside Brummen, lay down, and kissed and embraced, long and passionately. She said that she never knew it was so delicious to kiss a boy. I don’t know what I felt. I felt the warmth of another body close-by; I felt the attractiveness of sex, of the opposite sex. But I felt no lust. Lust would be impossible with Riek. She is too pure. We talked much, and deliciously, about ourselves.

The next day, Monday, a work-day, we wanted very much to embrace again, and I told her: after supper. When the time came she thought I had forgotten; she put the frontlet on, and pretended she was going alone to Brummen. I said she was silly, and we went to the gardens and kissed again, but it was unpleasant because we feared that people would come. I told her that we must wait until Wednesday, the free night. All Tuesday I could not help but think of the next night. And she too. I thought how innocent and beautiful our relationship was, how wonderfully youthful and spontaneous. I thought of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, of Hero and Leander, and the other tales of pure, unabashed love. I wanted to experience this myself. I especially wanted to be naked, but I did not want, or at least did not think it wise, to have intercourse. So I made a G-string so that Riek should not be afraid. Meanwhile, Donella and I had decided that we must leave on Thursday, so my desire increased, as Wednesday should be perhaps our last night together.

All day Wednesday it rained, but toward evening it cleared a bit. We left after dark. I brought my sleeping bag as protection against rain and cold. When we arrived in the forest I said that it would be more beautiful to kiss naked. She drew back a bit but I assured her that she had nothing to fear. She agreed, and we both squeezed into the sack. It began to rain, but we noticed it not, locked in embrace and kisses. We talked, we kissed more; it was delicious. A dream, unbelievable, that two people should be so! It came time to return, but we noticed it not. We tried to sleep, but could not. We preferred kissing. But finally the rain came too hard; we had to return. Everything a mess and wet. We dried off, and I changed into pajamas so that she could see me naked. Mr. Hoek then came in (it was 1:30 a.m.) and chided us a bit for worrying everybody. We didn’t mind too much; it didn’t matter what other people thought!

But she is just a child. Perhaps I am, too.

On the boat, chatted with a group of English school children going to Belgium. They thought us French of course, and then one of them saw my USA address on the rucksack. “You’re not an American,” he said. “Yes, I am.” “But you can’t be.” “Why not?” “Well, you’re not chewing gum.”

September 5, 1952

Wilhelminestraat 19, Assen (Drente)

Chez Reinoud. I can stay here until I receive letters from England, and then perhaps afterwards, too. Will seek an organ teacher tomorrow. Talked with Max Kleefstra, Riek’s brother, a chemistry student at Groningen. He is very voluble on politics and other subjects. Last night at Riek’s in Leeuwarden. I don’t like the family. The father is very Babbittish; one brother is a moron; the mother is plain, but I cannot really judge her, for she speaks only Dutch, and we cannot talk. Reinoud’s family is quite the opposite. The mother, one of those solid women who keep a household together; the father a pastor and delightful person, very unclerical; sisters and brothers all very smart, pert, and pleasant. I do not know what I must do about Riek. I do not love her, and to encourage her would be wrong. And yet when she kisses me I enjoy it so! It is wonderful simply to know that there is someone in the world who wants to kiss you!

I want very much now to begin really studying again: the organ, more Greek and French, and a beginning of German. Can I do it without outside pressure?

September 6 1952

lunchroom in Leeuwarden

Arranged to take organ lessons with Mr. Batenburg, organist of Matinikerk, St. Janstraat, Groningen, at the Stedelijke Muziekschool. A one-hour lessons each week, for one year, costs f. 150, or about $0.75 for each lesson. This compares rather favorably with the $7.00 I paid last year.

Returned to Leeuwarden. Last night walked with Riek. I absolutely do not know what to do about this relationship. Reinoud says to break it off immediately, and he is undoubtedly right. But I do not seem to have the desire, or the courage. Last night, Riek and I talked quite frankly. I told her that it is too soon for me to know if I love her, but when she suggested that probably the least painful way to continue would be to stop seeing each other, I said no: that we must continue. I am so afraid of really hurting her, and yet I know that the day will come when I shall have to do so, and the longer I wait the more it will hurt. Damn it, why can’t I love her? Then we would be married tout de suite, and it would be over. But when I think of the family, I draw back in horror. It is so small and (I don’t like to say it) so très petit bourgeois! And not overly intelligent, I think.

And the difficulties mount. Since the camp, of course, she has changed, and now she does not like her parents, especially because she has to go to the office. I shudder to think that I could be the cause not only of personal misery for her, but of a permanent rift between her and the parents. If this happens, Michaelshoeve will be for Riek the most damaging remembrance of her life.

I have no doubt that she loves, but I think now that unconsciously mingled with her love is the feeling that I am a kind of deliverer, that I will rescue her from the office, from her parents; that I am the means to England, to America. This is all childish, I think. But it is so difficult to know what is this and what is that; and what must a body do!

I think I have too much of a feeling that we can talk, do things together, sleep naked, etc., for a certain length of time, and then stop and forget. She said last night that perhaps the boy can forget but never the girl. I do not rightly know, but I think she is right. She is righteous, and the thought of doing these things with another boy after I am gone would be impossible for her, at least for a long time.

Tuesday, September 9

Assen

From Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral

Thomas:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns. Sever

The cord, shed the scale. Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

First tempter, after Thomas refuses to be temped to return to his youthful indulgences:

Then I leave you to your fate.

I leave you to the pleasures of your higher vices,

Which will have to be paid for at higher prices.

If you will remember me, my Lord, at your prayers,

I’ll remember you at kissing-time below the stairs.

Thomas:

Temporal power, to build a good world,

To keep order, as the world knows order.

Those who put their faith in worldly order

Not controlled by the order of God,

In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder,

Make it fast, breed fatal disease,

Degrade what they exalt.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:

Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Thomas (to the priests, who would save him from the assassins):

You think me reckless, desperate and mad.

You argue by results, as this world does,

To settle if an act be good or bad.

You defer to the fact. For every life and every act

Consequences of good and evil can be shown.

And as in time results of many deeds are blended

So good and evil in the end become confounded.

It is not in time that my death shall be known;

It is out of time that my decision is taken

If you call that decision

To which my whole being gives entire consent.

I give my life

To the Law of God above the Law of Man.

Unbar the door! unbar the door!

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by stratagem, or by resistance,

Not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beasts

And have conquered. We have only to conquer

Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Now is the triumph of the Cross, now

Open the door! I command it. OPEN THE DOOR!

Chorus:

. . . those who deny Thee could not deny, if Thou didst not exist; and their denial is never complete, for if it were so, they would not exist.

They affirm Thee in living; all things affirm Thee in living; the bird in the air, both the hawk and the finch; the beast on the earth, both the wolf and the lamb; the worm in the soil and the worm in the belly.

Therefore man, who Thou hast made to be conscious of Thee, must consciously praise Thee, in thought and in word and in deed.

Even with the hand to the broom, the back bent in laying the fire, the knee bent in cleaning the hearth, we, the scrubbers and sweepers of Canterbury,

The back bent under toil, the knee bent under sin, the hands to the face under fear, the head bent under grief,

Even in us the voices of seasons, the snuffle of winter, the song of spring the drone of summer, the voices of beasts and of birds, praise Thee.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,

Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;

Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;

Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;

Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,

Less than we fear for the love of God.

We acknowledge our trespass, our weakness, our fault; we acknowledge

That the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saints

Is upon our heads.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Blessed Thomas, pray for us.

Finis

Today, first organ lesson with Mr. Batenburg. The organ I play on was built in 1500 (!) and is the oldest organ in Holland. Just manual work thus far: Pachebel, Cabezon, Kerll, etc. I must practice long and hard this week, for he has given me much to prepare.

Donella left this morning for Italy. Reinoud, Riek, and I have standing invitations to visit her in Rome.

I definitely must do something about Riek. This mustn’t go any further. I really think I am playing the game very foul—taking advantage of a splendid opportunity for sex, but without (yes, I am sure of it) really loving the girl.

I am anxious to hear from home. My family means more to me here than it ever did when I was in the United States.

I want to write music for the Oort family to play, for two violins, cello, voice, piano.

I am studying Nederlands a bit. It is not too difficult at the beginning.

September 10, 1952

Things move too rapidly now. Today I received an acceptance from Woodbrooke College for the term beginning September 26th and ending December 13th. This gives me a safer position as regards the draft board, but I am sorry to have to leave Mr. Batenburg so soon. Perhaps I shall return here to study in January. This latest turn of events throws yet another light on the already multiform picture of Riek. I must make good my “escape” to England without her feeling that I am in any way obliged to her. Perhaps I am a fool—when a girl loves you like that it is a rare thing. But to marry her without loving would be disastrous to us both. It is a tragic situation: one-way love. Better no love at all.

It is a bit difficult to begin study again, but truthfully I enjoy it.

My thoughts now turn to the ministry as a profession. I wish I or someone could objectively balance pros and cons (with the Jewish question a heavy weight indeed) and render me a verdict. One thing is sure: my family will be horrified, and perhaps it will mean a break, though I don’t think a permanent one. I must write to Donald Harrington and to Meadville Theological Seminary again. Now!

From: “The Peace Testimony of the Society of Friends” by Howard Brinton:

“Fox and his fellow preachers were not peace propagandists. They were wary about teaching what they called ‘notional religion,’ that is a religion based on ideas rather than on experience. They felt that a notional religion resided in that part of the mind which was, to use another Quaker phrase, ‘afloat on the surface.’ Robert Barclay writes of this insight in his treatise called Universal Love: ‘Friends were not gathered together by unity of opinion or by a tedious and particular disquisition of notions and opinions, requiring an assent to them, and binding themselves by Leagues and Covenants thereto; but the manner of gather was by a secret want, which many truly tender and serious souls in sundry sects found in themselves which put each sect in search of something beyond all opinion which might satisfy their weary souls, even the revelation of God’s righteous judgments in their hearts.’

“. . . The Quaker objection to war was based primarily on feeling and intuition rather than on rational arguments or Scriptural authority. This intuition was dynamic; it was an enhancement of life rather than a part of doctrine. The Light Within gives more than knowledge of moral values. It gives also power to act on knowledge. . . . Such direct insight into the nature of goodness combined with a sense of obligation to behave in accordance with it, is usually called conscience, but for the Quakers the Light Within is not conscience but rather that which shines into conscience. Conscience is influenced by training and environment as well as by the Light. For this reason it may reveal one way of behaving to one person and another way to another person. The individual must therefore educate and enlighten his conscience by sensitizing himself to the Light of Truth in his soul. This process of sensitizing conscience takes place most thoroughly in a meeting for worship. Yet, though conscience is an imperfect instrument for transmitting the Light, its claims are absolute and must always be obeyed, for conscience gives us the highest knowledge of the Light that we have at any one time. Because clearer and clearer knowledge may be progressively attained as the virtue of obedience grows, Friends have never declared any doctrine to be a final and unalterable creed.

“’Whensoever such a thing shall be brought forth in the world it must have a beginning before it can grow and be perfected. And where should it begin but in some particulars [individuals] in a nation, and so spread by degrees. Therefore whoever desires to see this lovely state brought forth in the general, must cherish it in the particular.’ (Isaac Penington) Such a statement expresses the willingness of a minority to take an advanced position not only for the principle involved but also to point the way to others.”

September 11, 1952

Yesterday I wrote Riek about my having to leave for England, and proposed that we meet next weekend. This morning she phoned, that we must meet this weekend also. And I had wanted to have some time with Reinoud. Now what shall we do, and how can we sleep together without arousing all the world’s suspicions?

Letter from mother: how all things seem to conspire into the instant! As if she knew my thoughts. Viz.: “I have felt very badly about your staying away, but am trying very hard to understand what you are feeling about yourself. I do hope that in pursuing the studies you have mentioned that you will gradually have a clear goal in mind as to your future vocation. I must mention here and now that I hope and trust that you do not have the ministry in mind, for that would hurt me to the core. You remarked in your letter that if you make mistakes they will only hurt you, and not us. Peter, you’ll probably not be fully aware of the fact that parents feel the impact of everything concerning their children—until you are a parent yourself!”

How much can one person take? And how am I really ever to know whether my absolute rebellion from everything in my background will be my emancipation or my destruction? It is best to cling to roots—yes, I know—but I have no roots, and in all that I do I try to find new ones, to create a life, outlook, personality and way of living absolutely different from that of my parents; to be continually alive as they are not; to thrill in life’s instincts, without shame; and yet to cultivate and adore all the nobility which man can attain, also without shame (and without pride). Above all, to raise children into the kind of human beings that human beings can be: beautiful in body, mind, and spirit; fearless of tradition or of radicalism; with strong consciences; and yet healthy consciences; with the will, power, and talent to accomplish whatever the Spirit within demands. But above all, I would see in them a constant seeking and questioning, a constant endeavor to beautify and ennoble their lives and the lives of others. Can such people exist?

September 12, 1952

Practiced on the organ last night and 3½ hours this morning. Finished Turnbull’s novel “The Bishop’s Mantle”—surprisingly good considering the plot is sort of a patch-up affair with no real ending, merely a succession of events, with Hilary Laurens, Episcopal priest, as the common focus. All the usual human problems enter: love, death, morals, so the book is tear-pulling. But it adds little to the world’s store of literature. The one really interesting idea is that all action, including that called spiritual, is really determined by fleshly beauty—by woman’s allure. I am still unsophisticated enough a reader to have been able to fall in completely with the little that the book did have to offer, so on the whole it was not a waste of time.

Walked around Assen a bit. The Dutch towns are all extremely prosperous-looking, extremely clean, and they have their own sort of beauty. I watched the children going to and from school, all on their bikes, a very pleasing sight. Yes, everything here is pleasing, everything is just right. Yet behind it all I think there is an over-powering sense of conservatism, of tradition. Life is really quite standardized. With only minor variation all Dutchmen of each economic stratum eat the same, dress the same, and live in the same kind of houses. But more important, I think they cherish more or less identical goals, the most important of which is a good family life. For everything is the family and the family is everything. Children return home after school; parents and children live together in the fullest sense, and to keep such a life going the Dutchman must have his culture: not a passive “listener” culture but an active one, especially musically. The family plays and sings together. Father the violin, son the piano, daughter studies voice, youngest son begins the cello. Also, the father helps the young son with his studies; the mother busies herself most of the day with housework and cooking. I don’t think there are very many hired servants here.

At the edge of Assen is a wood, with lovely paths, ponds, lanes, everything done with precision, symmetry, and exactness, as befits the Dutch character.

September 15, 1952

Slept again with Riek. I told her that I do not love her. Her response was to ask me to sleep with her. We agreed that when I go away we will both come to know if we need the other—so in this way I will break off with the least pain.

Catastrophe! From the draft board. I most likely will have to return now as soon as possible. I listed farm work 1st choice, office 2nd, and AFSC 3rd because AFSC is not on the list of accepted work.

From Pearl Buck’s Dragon Seed:

“This youngest son did not often come home, either, but when he came it was always to tell of some success he had had, and he told of it, laughing and proud, and he grew vain of his success and luck, and he came to believe that luck was his because he had some favor of Heaven. He would boast, ‘Heaven chose me to that work,’ or he said, ‘To that place Heaven led me’ or he said ‘Heaven put power in my hand,’ until one day Ling Tau burst out, ‘Do not say Heaven this and Heaven that! I tell you what happens on earth now is not the will of Heaven. It is not Heaven’s will that men kill each other, for Heaven created us. If we must kill, then let us not say it is Heaven who bids it.’ This he said as a father may speak to a son, and he was not pleased when he saw his handsome son lift his lip at him and sneer at him and say, ‘This is old doctrine and by such doctrine we are come to the place where we now are. We have lain dead with our ancestors instead of living in the world and while we slept others prepared weapons and came to attack us. We who are young know better!’

“Now this was such impudence as Ling Tau could not bear and he let fly his right hand and slapped his son full on his red mouth. ‘Talk to me like that!’ he roared at him. ‘By the doctrines of our ancestors we have lived for thousands of years and longer than any people on this earth! By peace men live, but by war they die, and when men live the nation lives and when men die the nation dies.’

“But Ling Tau did not know this son of his now. For the son stepped forward and raised his hand against his father, and he said in a bitter voice ‘These are other times! You may not strike me! I can kill you as well as another!’

“This Ling Tau heard with his own ears, and his hands fell limp at his side. He stared at that handsome angry face which he himself had begotten and at last he turned away and sat down and hid his own face with his hand.

“‘I think you can kill me,’ he whispered. ‘I think you can kill anyone now.’

“The young man did not answer, but he did not change his proud and sullen look. He left the house and went away and Ling Tau did not see him for many days.

“They were not good days for Ling Tau and the nights were sleepless and he thought to himself, ‘Is this not the end of our people when we become like other war-like people in the world?’ And he wished that this younger son of his would die rather than live beyond this war.

“‘A man who kills because he loves to kill ought to die for the good of the people, though he is my own son,’ Ling Tau thought heavily. ‘Such men are always tyrants and we who are the people are ever at their mercy.’

“‘I do feel our youngest son is dead,’ he told Ling Sao one night. ‘He is so changed that I feel that tender boy we had is now no more—he who retched with horror when he saw the dead, even!’. . .

“‘Are we not all changed?’ she asked.

“‘Are you changed?’ he asked in his surprise.

“‘Am I not?’ she replied. ‘Can I ever go back to the old ways? Even when I hold the child on my knee I do not forget what he has done and must do.’

“‘Can we do differently?’ he asked.

“‘No,’ she said.

“He pondered a while and then said, ‘And yet in these days we must remember that peace is good. The young cannot remember, and it is we who must remember and teach them again that peace is man’s great food.’

“‘If they can be taught anything except what they have now heard,’ she said sadly. ‘I wish it were not so easy to kill people! Our sons grow used to this swift and easy way of ending all. I sometimes think that if you and I oppose them, old man, they will kill us as easily, if they have no other enemy, or they will fall upon each other.’

“He could not answer this, but he lay sleepless long after that and so did she, for he did not hear her steady snore that always told him when she slept. And he made up his mind then that though he would oppress the enemy as bitterly as ever, he would not let it be his life. Each day, whatever he did, he would take a little time to remember what peace was, and what the life here in this house once had been.

“And the more he remembered the more he knew that for him to kill a man was evil.

“‘Let others kill,’ he thought. ‘I will kill no more.’

“Thereafter he reasoned to himself that in his own way he served, because he kept alive in himself the knowledge that peace was right. Without excuse he gave no more the sign of death in his own village, and if any wondered, he let them wonder, and he made amends by putting poisons in his pond and killing all the fish so that the enemy gained nothing from it, and when the rice was ready for harvest, he threshed by night inside the court and hid more than half of what he had, and when that crop was reaped, what the enemy took was scarcely worth their fetching and to their anger he gave only silence and made silence his weapon.”

September 16, 1952

Assen

I was stupid to send the draft notice directly to the board, for now they will see that I am in Europe. But I don’t like being “under cover” anyhow.

Letter from Carl Sibler. We can get electricity at the farm: $230 for installation with $100 refunded if I or Sibler become annual residents within five years; minimum $54 per year for the first five years; after that $12. I wrote to go ahead. The more I think of that farm, the more I love it.

Letter from Riek, which must be recorded here because it is so extraordinary, viz.:

“You shall be very surprised to receive so soon a letter but I must write you a letter now. I never felt me so lonely and so sad as I do now. I miss you terribly and I don’t know what to do when you return to America. Then I’d have nobody to whom I can speak as I did with you. This is one reason I wrote this letter, the other is, that my friend Annie talked with my father and my father told her that he had not objections that I become a nurse in January or in March. That’s good news for me. I think my parents were a bit angry because I returned so late, and I dare not ask them if I can come to Assen. But one thing is better when you come here. Here we always can go together and when I stay in Assen it’s not comme il faut never to be at house. So we only are here at the meals. This afternoon at 1:00 I went to my violin-teacher and he was very content even when he heard I didn’t study hard this weekend. I didn’t really weep for weeks, but now I did. But still there is a little hope in me that perhaps you can stay ’till January in Europe. This is again a very bad written and sad letter, but I hope I can write you later on more letters.

“My parents are very kind towards me now and that consoles me a bit. I think when you come this weekend they will be it also towards you.

“You always think I’m only 18 and that I can soon forget what is between us, but that’s not true, it’s the opposite.

“I’ve never been like I am now. I feel me terrible hopeless.

“I hope you will write me very soon and I hope you will explain your feelings too.

“Again the word hope. Now it is that I hope you had a good organ-lesson and that you study hard.

“I look very . . . very forward to this weekend and I hope you come as soon as possible.

“Yours most affectionately,

Riek”

What am I to do!

It is much easier and less complicated to have a friendship with me, for then sex does not enter. I would like now just to be friends with Riek, but when you have slept with a girl and kissed her and felt her all over naked and she you, a certain obligation exists, and one cannot simply return to how it was before physical contact. But as I wrote to Pete, marriages can no better be based on obligation than on “assurance” (see his letter below), so the best thing is to break off completely and never see the girl again. This will be the second time for me. I hope the time comes when I don’t want to break off (perhaps then the girl will—such is love and life).

But friendship with men can wax and wane freely and always be renewed and strengthened without the knowledge of bodily intimacy hanging over your heads. What I feel with Riek is that in our nights together we were animals: not that I am ashamed to be so, because we are animals and cannot deny it. But if you’ve once been an animal with someone and then stop it and try only to have an intellectual or spiritual friendship, the remembrance of the animal time spoils it all. Now I understand why the Church requires celibacy.

The beauty of a friendship with a man is that it’s more spiritual than that with a woman; that it’s untainted. Even if you admire his body you do so for its beauty and so this, too, is a spiritual admiration. A woman’s body you admire for its beauty, yes, but you think it is beautiful because it stimulates the animal in you.

Pete’s letter made me feel the warmth of real friendship. It follows:

“You never cease to amaze me. Every time I turn around your [sic] doing something entirely different from what was expected. However, it’s just that element in you which explains yourself and makes you what you are. I’m tickled pink that you’re so happy—that you’ve met someone whom you think you’re in love with [alas! editor’s note] and that you are at last getting a chance to study in the type of environment that you’ve longed for. I’m envious as all hell, but still I’m glad that it’s your chance. I had a feeling when you left that I probably wouldn’t see you for quite a while. It seems that I was right. I’m sort of selfish in that respect because I would have liked to have you here. The closer I get to another college year, the more I wish you were around because I’ve sort of depended on you. However, it will do me good to manage on my own resources.

“Your gal sounds like quite a wonderful person. I hope that you can make it work and bring her back to the Bien Plantation to set in motion a few of our dreams. Or maybe one day soon I’ll come over there and see for myself the girl and the places you’ve raved so much about. It is so queer to read in your letters that you are heading for Calais, Rome, Paris, Rotterdam, etc. It sounds like a beautiful dream. Maybe that’s only an illusion on my part, but from here it sounds wonderful.

“I’m at home now, for how long I don’t know. I’m due back at school the 22nd but for a number of reasons which I’ll explain, I might leave much earlier. Work this summer was just wonderful. I got $400 for being there and I had a great time. . . . However, having returned from there, I now have a great discomfort at staying home. One reason for that is because I’ve got a bit of wanderlust and want to get away. This part was caused by our letters, but not wholly. Another reason is—you guessed it—a woman. Yes, Pierre, I’ve sort of half done it again. I don’t know what the reason is either. For three years I’ve been completely satisfied and in love with Bobbie. Yet for the past 4 months I’ve noticed and denied within myself any sort of dissatisfaction at our relationship. My denying it to myself was a grave error for it just prolonged any sort of mix-up. However, as things stand now, I’m trying first to reestablish in my own mind and heart some sort of stability which will help me to determine what it is I’m after. For all I know at this point, there may be nothing at all wrong in Bobbie’s and my relationship. However, it was progressing toward a point “assumption” so that I assumed all sorts of things, I never really wondered or doubted my position. This bothered me because love and marriage must never run on assumption but rather on consideration. In that standpoint I missed the boat, for even in consideration I had “assumed” it. At any rate, Bobbie and I are not finished, but are biding our time. One reason is Rasa. She was a waitress at the Inn, up until six years ago a native of Lithuania and now a resident in Michigan and a student at Oberlin. From the very beginning of the summer we discovered all sorts of mutual interests and concerns which resulted in a good deal of hiking, constant playing of tennis, a very great amount of square and folk dancing, and last but certainly not least a love of music. All these activities we did together and with all the other kids up there, never realizing any special significance or emotion until the last two weeks. We then discovered that what we thought was a marvelous platonic relationship had elements of more than that. Consequently, at this point she is in Michigan and I am in R.I.—a situation which I don’t enjoy. However, you can now see why I’m doubtful as to how long I’ll be here.

“As you can see, everything is a bit confused but I have high hopes for everything turning out in one amalgamated piece. Qui le sait?

“Yes, Pete, I did receive your book and I do appreciate the thought behind it and the book more than this paper can convey. I haven’t read it all yet, but when I do, and when I’ve finished my Mass, you can rest assured that it will be done for you. . . .

“I must close now, friend, and I hope to see you either here or there sometime soon. Regards are sent to you by Bobbie, family, Rasa, and me.

Pete—le premier ou deuxième, l’un ou l’autre”

Thursday, September 18, 1952

Finished Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I think Orwell’s 1984 is better. Huxley always seems to say the most obvious things—though, granted, about strange subjects. I felt the same about Ends and Means, and remember distinctly that the writing, qua writing, left much to be desired. I wonder if Huxley would have ever been read if he hadn’t borne such a famous name. Nevertheless his is a good voice to have, but I don’t think that many people take him seriously. He is a sort of minor (very minor) Carlyle.

Letter from Holland-Amerika Lijn. I can sail on October 29th, not before. Still no word from home. Perhaps I will forget England and travel until the 29th. But I must get information soon, for I don’t wish to go all the way to Birmingham unless I can stay there until January.

When I left America I thought it would be to see all the advantages of Europe and of European culture over the crudeness of the New World. But the longer I stay in Europe the more I realize how really better it is to live in America. For everything here is fixed. Patterns of life, standards of success or failure, motifs of behavior, even diet—and fixed ten times as strongly as in America where, too (granted), there are the “normal” ways of behaving. Even the education here has its drawbacks (and no wonder, for it is the education that creates and preserves the fixedness). Whereas I once unreservedly admired the European’s grasp of language, the Classics, literature, etc., his real cultural training, I now see that although all this is duly admirable, the education does little to instill a desire for new things, for new ideas, and certainly directly does nothing to help students equate all the literature, etc. they study to their own lives in 1952. In Holland at the gymnasium there are six years of language, geography, mathematics, history, gymnastics, little else. After this, if the student is qualified for the university, he applies to a specific faculty—say, chemistry, theology—and then for 7 years does all his work under that faculty. Thus there is no general education at all, not in the American sense (which has its great faults) or in any other sense. Macaulay or somebody tells how Schopenhauer’s education consisted of knowing but two philosophers, Plato and Kant, but really knowing them. This was certainly better for Schopenhauer than Mr. Aikin’s Phil. 3 because the secret is that such specific work is really general. You cannot study Plato without a knowledge of Aristotle, or Kant without Hegel, etc. At the same time, you absorb all the teachings of the two principal men, instead of just glossing over names as in Phil. 3.

But the catch is that the non-philosophy-in-Europe-student studies no philosophy unless he reads on his own. And the non-literature student studies no literature besides the few books he had to struggle with, dictionary in hand, in conjunction with language classes. At least the American education system gives a taste and an acquaintance with what is available. Unfortunately, the American way of life does not cater to the leisurely existence needed to follow up such beginnings. But in total I think the American picture superior to the European, for at least in America, once stimulated by books, a person can carve out the type of life he desires with more facility than here in Europe, if it is at all possible here. I am glad I am not a European. For at 19 years of age or thereabouts, the student must definitely select a faculty—viz. must choose a life work—and there he is, stuck, perhaps. Oh yes, it’s good for the majority. But not for “that solitary individual.” The American system enables the majority to fall into their slots also, but it provides as well for the others and, I think, secretly admires them.

I am really for the first time beginning to realize that the “ideal” education of a country like Holland, which so surpasses American schooling with its thoroughness and culture-giving, is perhaps a delusion and a sort of sedative against any real progress in the arts or in thinking. It may explain why Holland has been so significantly unproductive in this respect for the last few hundred years. Latin and Greek are fine, but I wonder if they are really a sufficient basis for education. It seems that if you are too busy rehearsing continually the glories of other peoples and other literatures, you will not produce too much yourself.

America, I really believe and hope, can be soon the site of great original strides in the arts, in philosophy, even in religion. The place and time are ripe. We are civilized enough to appreciate our intellectual heritage, and yet raw enough not to be slaves to it and not to be afraid to deviate and produce something peculiar to our own genius.

Francis Bacon:

“Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them; and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use: that is a wisdom without them, and won by observation. Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. And therefore if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, have a present wit,; and if he read little, have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise, poets witty, the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, morals grave, logic and rhetoric ready to contend.”

Sunday, September 21, 1952

Leeuwarden

Chez Riek. I dreaded having to come here, but actually once here enjoyed being with Riek, although not with the family, which is oppressive. Today it is raining and I shall probably have to pass the entire day “thus,” which I don’t relish. For these people life must be appallingly dull. I think every day is exactly the same: a constant round of eating, combing the child’s hair, perhaps a bit of petty conversation (but not much), then sleep. On Sundays there are biscuits and black bread for breakfast in addition to the usual fare. That marks Sunday. No religion, no belief or excitement about anything intellectual or non-intellectual, except perhaps for football. The house miserably cramped and over-furnished. No taste, no originality, no suggestion of something clever or cute, but somber dark drab carpets and drapes, somber furniture, somber people. A depressing semi-poverty with nothing of the nobility that some people can attach to poverty. Poverty here is a constricting factor instead of a liberating one because the man of the house always says how poor he is, and how terrible that situation is, and how he would like to be a Rockefeller. Such an ass!

September 22, 1952

Assen

Yesterday I told Riek again that she must try to forget, that I could not marry her, etc., ad infinitum. But she still holds out hope and insists that we write until January and see if we miss each other immensely. Naturally it was a sad time for her, and for me, too. But I have learned much, for after talking in this way I thought it would be best to leave, and planned to take a 10:30 p.m. train. She, when she heard this, suggested that she could come to bed with me (which she had previously thought too dangerous in her own house). So I stayed, and when she came up I, as a matter of course, being naked, asked her to take off her clothes also, as she had done on the previous nights. She did, but what startled me was what she said on doing so: “You see, Peter, I will do anything you wish.” This really disgusted me, and brought home to me just what was happening: that she was in effect offering up her body as an inducement for me. How stupid! I was thoroughly repulsed by the whole affair, and was more or less bored with the endless embracing, petting, kissing, and the like. It’s better to do as the cocks do—1,2,3, jump on the female, fertilize, finish.

Shaw sums it up in the provoking preface to Androcles and the Lion: “In our sexual natures we are torn by an irresistible attraction and an overwhelming repugnance and disgust. We have two tyrannous physical passions: concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of sex; we become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost; unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves.” After last night I no longer need Shaw to teach me this, for I was too weak to refuse the pleasure even though it was nine-tenths disgust and only one-tenth pleasure.

September 26, 1952

Assen

Today I should be in England but for the draft board. Instead, I am still here, playing the organ, and reading French and English. Thus: From Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” (Song-offerings), #4: “Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon my limbs. I shall ever try to keep all untruths out from my thoughts, knowing that thou art that truth which has kindled the light of reason in my mind. I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart. And it shall be my endeavor to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act.”

#14: “My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals; and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through. Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked: this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind, saving me from perils of over much desire. There are times when I languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me. Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.”

#35: “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where knowledge is free; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; where words come out from the depth of truth; where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action. Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

#43: “The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for thee; and entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life. And today when by chance I light upon them and see thy signature, I find they have lain scattered in the dust mixed with the memory of joys and sorrows of my trivial days forgotten. Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoing from star to star.”

#46: “I know not from what distant time thou art ever coming nearer to meet me. Thy sun and stars can never keep thee hidden from me for aye. In many a morning and eve thy footsteps have been heard and thy messenger has come within my heart and called me in secret. I know not why today my life is all astir, and a feeling of tremulous joy is passing through my heart. It is as if the time were come to wind up my work, and I feel in the air a faint smell of thy sweet presence.

#58: Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.

#59: Yes, I know, this is nothing but thy love, O beloved of my heart—this golden light that dances upon the leaves, these idle clouds sailing across the sky, this passing breeze leaving its coolness upon my forehead. The morning light has flooded my eyes. This is thy message to my heart. Thy face is bent from above, thy eyes look down on my eyes, and my heart has touched thy feet.

#69: The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

#75: Thy gifts to us mortals fulfill all our needs and yet run back to thee undiminished. The river has its everyday work to do and hastens through fields and hamlets; yet its incessant stream winds towards the washing of thy feet. The flower sweetens the air with its perfume; yet its last service is to offer itself to thee. Thy worship does not impoverish the world. From the words of the poet men take what meanings please them; yet their last meaning points to thee.

#79: If it is not my portion to meet thee in this my life then let me ever feel that I have missed thy sight—let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours. As my days pass in the crowded market of this world and my hands grow full with the daily profits, let me ever feel that I have gained nothing; let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours. When I sit by the roadside, tired and panting, when I spread my bed low in the dust, let me ever feel that the long journey is still before me. Let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours. When my rooms have been decked out and the flutes sound and the laughter there is loud, let me ever feel that I have not invited thee to my house; let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.

#84: It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky. It is this sorrow of separation that gages in silence all night from star to star and becomes lyric among rustling leaves in rainy darkness of July. It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joys in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet’s heart.

From “Fruit-Gathering”:

#VIII: Be ready to launch forth, my heart! And let those linger who must. / For your name has been called in the morning sky. / Wait for none! / The desire of the bud is for the night and dew, but the blown flower cries for the freedom of light. / Burst your sheath, my heart, and come forth.

#L: In the lightning flash of a moment I have seen the immensity of your creation in my life, creation through many a death from world to world. I weep at my unworthiness when I see my life in the hands of the unmeaning hours, but when I see it in your hands I know it is too precious to be squandered among shadows.

#LI: I know that at the dim end of some day the sun will bid me its last farewell. Shepherds will play their pipes beneath the banyan trees, and cattle graze on the slope by the river, while my days will pass into the dark. This is my prayer, that I may know before I leave why the earth called me to her arms. Why her night’s silence spoke to me of stars, and her daylight kissed my thought into flower. Before I go may I linger over my last refrain, completing its music, may the lamp be lit to see your face and the wreath woven to crown you.

#LXXIX: Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it. Let me not look for allies in life’s battle-field but to my own strength. Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom. Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

Sunday, September 28, 1952

Assen

Last night: to the meeting at Reinoud’s school for recitations, music, etc., then criticism of each performance. Reinoud and Meika sang, and Reinoud played Grieg on an incredibly bad piano. The Dutch speakers have a great amount of poise, and they don’t go to the absurdity of memorizing as in America; rather, they learn to read creditably, which is a much more useful skill.

This afternoon: bicycled with Reinoud and had pleasant conversations as always. He is a delightful combination of the haughty egotistical artistic-type, unsocial, working in starts and bounds, according to inspiration, and of the simple frank lovable searching philosopher, anxious not only to teach but to learn.

I have been thinking and making drawings of the kitchen to my house. Perhaps it will look like this:

Gleanings from Carlyle on Heroes:

❡ Re: Norwegian paganism: “I feel that these old Northmen were looking into Nature with an open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old race of men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to be the chief element of Paganism: recognition of man, and of his Moral Duty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be the chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious development of mankind. Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her powers, wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.

❡ “The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man’s acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet.

❡ [Re: Islam] “It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,—Necessity will make him submit,—but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity has ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God’s-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was God;—that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning, it, obeying it as unquestionable.”

P.S. Regarding Necessity (though not the sort having very directly to do with the “Law of the Whole”), I feel a bit good and proud now that I stop to think what my reactions have been concerning the draft board’s forcing me to come home. I naturally was excited over the prospect of spending the year in Europe, of studying at Woodbrooke, traveling to Italy and Sweden, etc. But when it became clear that I should have to return, if only for such a stupid reason as to take a second physical exam, I accepted the fact instead of rebelling against it, and immediately began think of all the exciting things I could do in the U.S. prior to starting C.O. service: viz.: get the Haverford piano and bring it to the farm; live at Riparius until the weather gets too uncomfortably cold; work on the house; really work on improving my piano playing, and writing music; then return to Sunnyside and find a good piano- and/or organ-teacher; work hard at this, and also perhaps find a good job so that I won’t be completely parasitic. I hope that throughout my life, as with this small incident, I shall be able to take things as they come, to really live from day to day instead of always worrying about the future; and to make something exciting, productive, and noble out of any outward situation that may thrust itself upon me.

September 21, 1952

More from Carlyle:

❡ “The . . . Prophet has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the . . . Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful and the like. The one we may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, ‘Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ A glance, that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. ‘The lilies of the field’—dressed finer than earthly princes, springing-up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful eye looking-out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How could the rude earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not inward Beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying of Goethe’s, which has staggered several, may have meaning: ‘The Beautiful,” he intimates, ‘is higher than the Good; the Beautiful includes in it the Good.’ The true Beautiful; which however I have said somewhere, ‘differs from the false as Heaven does from Vauxhall!’ So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet.

❡ “A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of poetry. We are all poets when we read a poem well, the ‘imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante,’ is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante’s own?

❡ “Sceptical Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last forever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, as in all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men, all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight, hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith; believing which, one would literally despair of human things. Nevertheless high Duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;—a strange feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us,—as, by God’s blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the shows of things entirely swept-out, replaced by clear faith in the things, so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!”

Cf. also Carlyle’s emphasis on the unconscious nature of Shakespeare’s genius, and of that of other great poets, etc.

❡ “. . . Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

❡ “Men speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a life of his own to lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world’s being saved will not save us; nor the world’s being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the ‘duty of staying at home’! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of ‘worlds’ being ‘saved’ in any other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!

❡ “The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,—not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage in all great men.”

Tuesday, September 30, 1952

Riek will not leave me in peace. Yesterday she called here and insists that I come again to Leeuwarden before I return to the U.S. My whole soul rebels against going there again, yet I do not know if perhaps it is not better to save her the utter dejection that my refusal would occasion. I want this thing to be over and done with. The way I left Jeanne was the best. No questions asked, but a perfect tacit understanding on both sides.

More from Carlyle:

❡ “All substances clothe themselves in forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms which grow round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond to the real nature and purpose of it, will be true, good; forms which are consciously put round a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on this. It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things.

❡ “The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified.

❡ “Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the earth.”

Thoughts of Beethoven (from Rolland’s Vie de Beethoven):

❡ “Parmi les anciens maîtres, seuls Handel l’Allemand et Sébasien Bach eurent du genie.

❡ “Mon coeur bat tout entire pour le haut et grand art de Sébasien Bach, ce patriarche de l’harmonie.

❡ “La musique est une révélation plus haute que toute sagesse et toute philosophie. . . . Qui pénètre le sense de ma musique doit s’affranchir de tout la misère que traînent après eux les autres hommes.

❡ [sur la critique]: “Je pense comme Voltaire ‘que quelques piqûres de mouches ne peuvent retenir un cheval dans sa course ardente.”’

October 2, 1952

Assen

I congratulate myself. I have called Riek and have told her that I will not come tonight as planned, and I have told her that our relationship will be finished, although I agree to continue to write, and to remain friends. But unfortunately the motivation for this did not come entirely from inner strength; it came rather from the horrible news just received from Dave Tyack, that young Christopher died suddenly and unexpectedly of pneumonia, at the age of 11 weeks. To play the hypocrite in a lascivious bed after this would have been too much even for my weak moral fortitude.

Dave’s letter (written June 25, not seen by me until today): “I’m sorry that this long overdue letter brings heavy news. Two weeks ago Christopher died of virus pneumonia, very suddenly. Christopher was a monster of health, weighing over 15 pounds at 11 weeks when he died, and his death was completely unexpected and unavoidable. Of course, this made it harder to understand, but in a way easier to accept since he has given us, in life and death, a far greater love and respect for life.

“One real bright spot in next year’s picture is that we will be studying together, you and I. Dee has been very brave, even jolly, and now is keeping busy at Mass. General Hospital doing language therapy work. The three of us—and in the spring the four of us, we hope—will have to see a good deal of you.

“This summer I have been working on construction again, taking the old delight in the sun and exercise and new friends. I’m outnumbered by Italians and am making a stumbling beginning in their tongue, corrected in grammar with delight by those who find they can tell a Harvardman something.

“We enjoyed hearing from you a great deal. Write again when the spirit moves. We’d like to plan to visit you in upstate N.Y. in late August if you’d be there.

Affectionately, D & D”

October 3, 1952

Assen

Follows: schedules for Dutch and Danish gymnasia. The Dutch gymnasium has two divisions and emphasizes classics, & B has more science and math. But in general the gymnasium is where you study classics. The ABS school has no classics; it too has two divisions: A emphasizes modern languages and math, B includes these but has more science. The hours of study in the gym: Mon, Tues, Thus, & Sat, 8:30 a.m. to 1:05 p.m., Tues. & Fri: 8:30 a.m.—12:05 p.m., and 1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Normally, children start the gym or ABS when they are 12 or 13, and therefore graduate when 18 or 19. However, if, as a result of periodic quizzes, their marks are not good enough, they must repeat the entire year. There is no large exam until the end of the 6th year. Also, there is the lyceum, which is a combination of ABS and gym. After 2nd year you choose. Schedule in pencil on reverse is if you choose gym part. Note that Latin and Greek are postponed to 3rd yr.

Sunday, October 12, 1952

Sunnyside

Good sermon by John Haynes Holmes: “Whom Shall I Fear.” Holmes listed the following: hysteria, universal armament, the degrading of ethics and morals; the passing of militant religion.

Tuesday, October 21, 1952

Riparius

Warmed by a pot-bellied tin stove, illumined by a kerosene mantle lamp, and enjoying the fruits of much labor, here in my cabin.

Soon after returning from Europe, I drove to Philadelphia. to see AFSC about alternative service. They had opportunities in Mexico, Flanner House self-help housing program, Internesin Community Service in Chicago, and a mental hospital in Iowa. Actually, I don’t think I could stand the communal living for two years. This summer’s experience showed that for me two months is enough; then I must again have opportunity to be alone. But the problem of AFSC work is easily solved, for the government has not accepted them. I returned, after seeing Pete, who has a real sinecure with an elderly heiress in a 26-room Victorian monstrosity. He pays nothing, has delightful living quarters, with Bob Hinshaw, and earns $15 upwards per week by puttering around house and garden. We have made a tentative date to tour Europe together by bicycle. When and if! I also saw and chatted with Douglas Steere, President White, etc. Haverford now has a certain enchantment for me. I actually was a bit jealous of the others for their secure academic life as students. But I collected my remaining possessions, chiefly the old Cunningham piano, and returned. The piano came to a bad end. At first I thought to have it in my room at Sunnyside, but the movers refused to take it up. So it sat on the truck for a week or so. Then I decided to take it to Riparius. But it got only as far as 48th Street. I turned a corner too sharply, and off it went—ruined. I had to pay $20 to have it carted away.

Dad sent me to a Dr. Sverna, pathologist, who in turn offered me a job as medical stenographer in the morgue at $2300 per year. But the government (Major Matthew Dwyer) refused on grounds that COs must work away from the home area. Now I have written to various places and await replies: World Health Organization, Brethren and Mennonite Committees, hospitals at Glens Falls and Ticonderoga, State Directors in Connecticut and Maine, and to the Hinman Settlement School, Leslie County, Kentucky. In choosing a job, I must weigh many factors: first, the nature of the work itself (and the pay), 2nd whether the location and living arrangements will allow me to pursue independent studies of reading and music; whether the job can perhaps be the gateway to some further career (e.g. the W.H.O)—or work on a farm, which would give the necessary practical experience for entrance into Cornell Agriculture School. I do hope these two years will be fruitful ones. But it is up to me to make them so, despite all external unpleasantnesses.

But now I am at Riparius and feasting on the fall colors, the ever-bright stars at night, the bend of trees to the wind. Since Saturday, I have been laying the finish floor downstairs, of 5” Canadian spruce. Only five rows left. I have also filled up a few more holes, around windows, etc., in an effort to get the place reasonably ready for winter living. But the fireplace will have to wait now, for it is too cold for cement work; the mortar most likely will freeze at night and crumble to bits.

I have new neighbors, Curly Massey and wife. He is a lumberjack by trade and by all accounts one of the best there is. He works so fast and well that his typical weekly pay is $150–$200. Then comes the weekend; he goes to the bars in North Creek and buys drinks for everyone, all weekend long. He calls a taxi to bring him to the Creek and, once there, if he feels like a drink in Ti he orders a taxi to bring him there, at a cost of $25. In short, by Monday morning he has nothing, literally nothing, so that his wife often has to borrow $5 or $10 for food, from the Carmans, who employ Massey. He lives in the old Waddell blacksmith shop across the way, which Hal fixed up for the Greens. Curly has made all kinds of offers to help me—help me with the fireplace (he was a mason), help me with plowing, with this, with that. But I asked him to screw on the pipe to the pump, so he can use the pump (his well is dry), and this he has not done as yet. But he is very nice withal; showed me pictures of his son, keeps a Bible well-thumbed, and probably has lots of stories in his head that I would enjoy hearing.

Bardens are away in Darien, where he is riding master at a school. Mac is having a hard time socially, as everyone is angry at him, and he with everyone. He changed his mind at the last minute about the electricity petition and refused to sign, because by signing he would have been helping Sibler, with whom he is at odds because Sibler doesn’t want any pulp cut; Dr. Barnard, with whom he is angry, and Carman, with whom he is angry. He is not yet angry with me, but I should be with him, because according to eye witnesses, he stole a whole load of barn lumber from me, even taking the boards I had carefully piled up. I told him that the lumber was missing, and he feigned amazement that anyone would do such a thing! But I didn’t carry it further. Actually, he is more than entitled to what he took, because he helped me so willingly and well when I asked. It is only the way in which he took his due that is questionable. Also, however, it appears that someone entered the house (though I see no signs of a break-in), for a saw and hammer are missing. This perhaps is not to be laid at Mac’s door. I still think he is basically honest.

I finally met Carl Sibler, who talks and talks fast. His mother is very interesting, and a pacifist to boot.

Wednesday, October 22, 1952

Riparius

Curly Massey is quite a preacher—believes every word of the bible is Law, and that scientists and their atom smashing will possibly mean the end of the world because they are meddling in God’s business.

“Why, Pete, just think if one of them bombs landed in Turner Valley. When I worked there, 900 oil wells, must be 1500 by now, and underground natural gas that develops 700 pounds rock pressure, why if all that blew up there wouldn’t be nothin’ left.” He told me a bit of his life: “Three years I lived in Boston and made $40,000 and that’s just as true as that I’m standin’ on your land.” “What happened?” I asked. “Well, Pete, I got sick. My wife, she wanted my money. That’s all she wanted: money and money. She figured I’d die and she’d get the business. Well, I lost most all to the fellows I got to run the business. All they wanted was that Saturday check. And when I got better I just walked out. ‘Take what’s left,’ I said; ‘you can have it all.’ My wife and I separated, and then got divorced. I raised an orphan boy, Bob, since he was 14. He was the one who really taught me to be a Christian. He was a good boy, never swore, never drank, went to a dance once and when he came home he said he felt like going back and shooting ’em all dead. And he prayed, Pete, sometimes an hour at a time, and when he was in the house you really felt God’s presence, in the heart. Well, when he was about 20 he came home and said, ‘Curly, there’s a girl I like very much. Would it be all right if I married her?’ I said, ‘Bob, you know well enough if you like her enough to get married.’ Well, they got married, and two weeks later he got called to the army. He said to me, ‘I ain’t goin’ in there t’ kill anybody.’ And when he got to the camp they drilled him and drilled him, but he kept tellin’ ’em that he wasn’t goin’ to kill. They laughed, of course, but after a while they saw that he really believed the Bible, and they apologized to him. And he talked and preached and told how killin’ was wrong and how prayer would end that war, if everyone would pray from the heart; and I’ve seen two officers walk away after hearin’ him, with tears in their eyes. So, they put him in the medical corps and I heard from him from England. But after he got back, Pete, he was a gamin’, cussin’ woman-chaser. That ole army knocked religion right out of ’em. I’d thought he’d stand up, but he fell. And he left his wife and kid, and went back to Arkansas where he came from. But my son hears from him still, and I think that Bob’s coming back to the Lord. God, I hope he does. He was the nicest, finest, best-looking boy that ever lived.”

Thursday, October 23, 1952

Riparius

I went up to the high field today to cut some trees for firewood and to bring to Abe on Saturday. I wanted yellow birch, and seeing a clump of what I thought was this type, cut away. Later on I asked Curly for a horse to skid the logs down with. He came after work and went up with me and the horse. One look at the trees and he asked, “What you want these for, Pete?” “Firewood.” “Well, you’ll never burn that!” “What do you mean?” “Why, them’s popple. Just don’t burn. You could leave ’em out here to dry all winter and they still wouldn’t burn.” “I guess, then, that all my work’s for nothing.” “Pete, you’re young. You’ll learn. Give me the axe, I’ll cut you down some white birch. That burns good, and looks purty in the fireplace.” So he proceeded to fell some birch. In the process I learned that he had been raised on a 2000-acre farm in Vermont, run by his brother now. “Why that land was so flat, you could stand right in the middle of a 90-acre field and see every rock on it. . . . I didn’t get along very good with my brother. He threw me out, like I was a dog, to make my living. Well, I guess I’ve always made it.” I also learned that he cared for a little girl from a broken home, and loved her so that she always called him Papa, and when the courts demanded that her real father take care of her she cried and cried because she wanted to stay with Curly.

Called home. Several things have come in. A friend of Saul’s offers me lab work for a blood bank in Indiana; Joe Bien has given me an introduction to the head of the Episcopalian charities, etc. I have also written to the Glens Falls and Ticonderoga hospitals, with the thought of living here at Riparius and driving, which would have lots of advantages: good set-up for uninterrupted piano practice; a chance to keep the farm in order; no rent to pay; and a saving on food after next summer, when I will plant a garden. The biggest disadvantage: 90–100 miles of driving each day, which means at least two hours and much expense, plus terrific wear on the truck.

Dad wanted me to come home Friday. He seems always terrifically resentful of the farm and is firmly convinced that the time that I spend here should be marked down as wasted time. Half the time I speak with him he makes me angry, which is a percentage a bit too high for good parent-son relationship. What I must really do now is establish financial independence. Then he will have no recourse on me at all, as he does now. For instance, he feels that it is his money that I throw away on the farm, and of course he is right, except for the throwing-away part. I think that basically the farm represents to him all my claims of independence, especially as I have been in the habit of giving it as my permanent address.

Yesterday I finally finished the floor and what a difference it makes! Now I really feel protected in this house, and even confident that it will see me through a hard Adirondack winter.

November 17, 1952

Sunnyside

Reading (all at once) Anthropology by Sir E. B. Tylor; Gilbert Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion, Thoreau’s Walden, Kafka’s The Trial, André Gide’s Le Procès, Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin and Amphitryon, Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage.

Visited the Catholic Worker today, to meet Mike Harrington, ex law schoolmate of Jerry Davidoff’s, and a C.O. He gave me the Dorothy Day book, which is splendid: heroic, down-to-earth radicalism rooted in the soil instead of in ideologies. She is at her best when advocating subsistence farming and that, of course, is what interests me the most.

I have been severely temped during these weeks in New York by the money economy, so that I have thoughts of myself as becoming wealthy and thus being able to indulge in the privileges of wealth that this city offers, as do all other cities. But this temptation wears off, I am happy to say, quickly. It has taught me to be more on my guard and to think and act more on those principles and ways of life that I know to be far superior. I again feel the yearning for divinity school, for simplicity on my farm, for the cultivation of spirit, mind, and body as a full-time occupation, at the sacrifice of respectability. It is hard to think this way here at home. My father thinks of everything in terms of money, and likewise with all the other people with whom we associate. Worst of all, Dad pays lip-service to the other way, but his lips do not reveal his heart. I am very anxious to leave here and finally to break the bonds of childhood. Still, no job.

These past weeks I have been thinking almost twenty-four hours a day. It is good to have an interim period like this, if only because it is a glowing proof to the law that says that man must work. Well, I am educated enough to keep myself busy and “gainfully occupied” even when I do not work. And without the aid of radio, movies, or television. Quite a feat these days. Barzun says somewhere that the mark of an educated man is that he can sit still in a room. I have been doing much of this. I am expert at sitting still.

Riek finally wrote that she now realizes that she doesn’t love me after all! I was a little surprised that even under the circumstances of our affaire, which should have rendered such a letter a welcome relief to me, nevertheless my pride suffered. It is always easier to think that you have done the rejecting and have not been the one done to.

I have had some correspondence with Piet Tuinman, mainly about the mechanics of studying here. He regrets that he did not declare his C.O. position. I see that the weight of a moral obligation unfilled is heavier than that of prisons or unfavorable public opinion.

Also received a nice letter from Bobby Johnston. He is like John Taylor in that he basically wants to direct his life spiritually but has fallen prey to our money society. It is pathetic to see and hear at every turn the unconscious evidence of their dissatisfaction with their weakness in this respect, and yet to see nothing done about it except perhaps some vain or deluding self-promise that “in the future,” after security is won, they will chuck overboard the insurance company or U.S. Rubber and begin to “do the things they’ve always wanted to do.” Life is too short for this sort of a plan. Really, the life of a protestor, of a radical—call it what you will—is really so much fun that it is quite surprising that so few people indulge in it.

Music: continuing with Bach two-part inventions. Very discouraging progress. I have started a composition for piano, in modern idiom, and really don’t know what kind of a monstrosity it will turn out to be. I may buy the Kaledins’ piano and take it to Riparius. Of course my parents think this is insane and the first thing my father says (thinking as always in terms of you-know-what) is, “Well you can be sure I’m not going to pay for it.”

Today I saw 250 men wait three hours for the daily bowl of pea soup that the Catholic Worker gives them free, and then had to come home and hear a person complain that the chicken was too dry.

Went to the UN last week and heard the Trusteeship Council blow hot air for three hours while the British were whipping Mau-Maus in Kenya and Malin enforcing white supremacy in Cape Town. If the Negroes throw down white civilization it will serve us right.

November 18, 1952

Sunnyside

Scapin: “Je hais ces coeurs pusillanimes qui, pour trop prévoir les suites des choses, n’osent rien entreprendre.”

November 24, 1952

Sunnyside

Started The Brothers Karamazov. Finished the exposition of my piano sonata and yesterday worked from 3:00 p.m. until 10:30 on the development, in the form of a fugue. After all that time, I wrote about 8 measures only, and today even scrapped 2 more. But what was done was good, and now I can proceed at a faster clip. On the whole, musical ideas now come to me faster than I can write them down. It is the technical aspects of a strict form like the fugue that seem to require endless manipulation of melodies, and revisions. What is readily apparent is the great growth in originality, continuity, and musicality since I wrote the other sonata two years ago. I hope to finish this before Christmas and send it to Dr. Swan and perhaps also to Reinoud.

Another letter from Riek establishes the fact that we are now on workable terms—no illusions about marriage and yet no regrets regarding nights between the sheets. Her letters are cute.

I finally received a reply from the World Council of Churches in Geneva: “no places.” This leaves the Fort Wayne job, and the possibility of something with a radiologist in San Francisco. I will most probably choose the latter if it is available and acceptable. Going to California is almost like going to Europe.

I think constantly about my future, subject as I continuously am here, either by word or implication, to repeated reminders about the need for making money and in adequate amounts. I am glad that I am using this period to try to think out how a life should be led; and that I am not going more or less unthinkingly into an “accepted” profession. One thing that seems important is that in order to taste life you should not be tied to the same work for all your working years. Looking forward to retirement is a great fallacy in planning; it is better to die with your boots on. A better way of doing “all the things you’ve always wanted to do” (that horrible saying) is to make enough early in life to give financial independence to the rest of it. But here the difficult question is where to stop. You subject yourself, of course, to the temptations that show their victorious mark everywhere in our society. The opposite extreme is safer: comparative poverty, living for the day only, working when needed, taking chances. This, I think, is the Christian way. And more fun!

Aldous Huxley (newspaper clipping discovered after I wrote the above): This I Believe: “In every one of the higher religions there is a strain of infinite optimism on the one hand and, on the other, a profound pessimism. In the depths of our being, they all teach there is an Inner Light—but an Inner Light which our egotism keeps, for most of the time, in a state of more or less complete eclipse. If, however, it so desires, the ego can get out of the way, so to speak, can dis-eclipse the Light and become identified with its divine source. Hence the unlimited optimism of the traditional religions. Their pessimism springs from the observed fact that though all are called, few are chosen, for the sufficient reason that few choose to be chosen.

“To me, this older conception of man’s nature and destiny seems more realistic, more nearly in accord with the given facts, than any form of modern utopianism.

“In the Lord’s Prayer we are taught to ask for the blessing which consists in not being led into temptation. The reason is only too obvious. When temptations are very great or unduly prolonged, most persons succumb to them. To devise a perfect social order is probably beyond our powers; but I believe that it is perfectly possible for us to reduce the number of dangerous temptations to a level far below that which is tolerated at the present time.

“A society so arranged that there shall be a minimum of dangerous temptations, this is the end towards which, as a citizen, I have to strive. In my efforts to achieve that end, I can make use of a great variety of means. Do good ends justify the use of intrinsically bad means? On the level of theory, the point can be argued indefinitely. In practice, meanwhile, I find that the means employed invariably determine the nature of the end achieved. Indeed, as Mahatma Gandhi was never tired of insisting, the means are the end in its preliminary stages.

“Men have put forth enormous efforts to make their world a better place to live in; but except in regards to gadgets, plumbing and hygiene, their success has been pathetically small. ‘Hell,’ as the proverb has it, ‘is paved with good intentions.’ And so long as we go on trying to realize our ideals by bad or merely inappropriate means, our good intentions will come to bad ends. In this consists the tragedy and irony of history.

“Can I, as an individual, do anything to make future history less tragic and less ironic than history past and present? I believe I can. As a citizen, I can use all my intelligence and all my good will to develop political means that shall be of the same kind and quality as the ideal ends which I am trying to achieve. And as a person, as a psycho-physical organism, I can learn how to get out of the way, so that the divine source of my life and consciousness can come out of eclipse and shine through me.”

Frost: “Full half of our lives can’t be made a science of; the better half of our lives can’t be made a science of. . . . I have learned that the upper classes in a ‘democracy’ must take care of the lower. I have to withhold a certain amount from each paycheck, so the worker can be insured.”

Headlines, all in one day: Continued race tension in South Africa; British shoot 15 Kenya rioters; U.S. Information Service and British Embassy in Bagdad stoned and burned; Egypt to give franchise to women; Tunisian and Indo-Chinese struggles continue. The East seethes!

In his “Reminiscences,” Gorky reports the following conversation with Tolstoy:

“And suddenly he asked me, exactly as if he were dealing me a blow: ‘Why don’t you believe in God?’ ‘I have no faith, Lev Nikolaevich.’ ‘It is not true. By nature you are a believer and you cannot get on without God. You will realize it one day. Your disbelief comes from obstinacy, because you have been hurt: the world is not what you would like it to be. There are also some people who do not believe, out of shyness; it happens with young people; they adore some woman, but don’t want to show it for fear she won’t understand, and also from lack of courage. Faith, like love, requires courage and daring. One has to say to oneself, “I believe”—and everything will come right, everything will appear as you want it, it will explain itself to you and attract you. Now, you love much, and faith is only a greater love; you must love still more and then your love will turn to faith. When one loves a woman, she is unfailingly the best woman on earth, and each loves the best woman; and that is faith. A non-believer cannot love: today he falls in love with one woman, and next year with another. The souls of such men are tramps living barren lives—that is not good. But you were born a believer and it is no use thwarting yourself. Well, you may say, ‘Beauty—and what is beauty? The highest and most perfect is God.’ He hardly ever spoke to me on this subject, and its seriousness and the suddenness of it rather overwhelmed me. I was silent. He was sitting on the couch with his legs drawn up under him, and, breaking into a triumphant little smile and shaking his finger at me, he said: ‘You won’t get out of this by silence, no.’ And I, who do not believe in God, looked at him for some reason very cautiously and a little timidly. I looked and I thought: ‘This man is godlike.’”

Tolstoy: “Take care of yourself first, and you will have plenty of care left for other people.”

From The Brothers Karamazov, the Elder, Zossima:

❡ “If I seem to be happy to you, you could never say anything that would please me so much. For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.”

❡ [How can I prove immortality?] “There’s no proving it, though you can be convinced of it. . . . How? . . . By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”

❡ “Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.”

November 26, 1952

Three things that I must do: (1) Develop musically and intellectually. This means practice, study, reading and writing, and talking. (2) Develop my body. I think that this will mean a series of exercises, prescribed by someone with knowledge in the field, and diligently followed by me. (3) Develop my voice: its timbre, resonance, pitch, etc., and its interpretative qualities in the reading of poetry and prose. Perhaps this will also involve further language study. A fourth and all-inclusive aim: Develop my soul. Cultivate the desire and capacity for loving, heighten spiritual perceptions, follow the example of great religious and religio-philosophical leaders of the past. Above all, guard against the pitfall of letting “making a living” become the chief striving of adult life, as it is with so many. If necessary, live from hand to mouth; this is by far the better alternative. Avoid being placed in a niche, whether it be the academic world, the lawyer’s or doctor’s office, or that slavery that comes from owning too much. Keep the farm as a refuge and hostel, but from it travel far intellectually. Live like and associate with the common man, but cultivate and preserve at the same time the manners, morals, and spiritual grace of the aristocrat. Be ὁ ἄριστος. Make ἡ ἀρετή the time-consuming factor, not the simple needs of the body. Cultivate these things and the body will be healthy despite (or perhaps because of) plain food.

Do not do anything simply because it is acceptable. Rather, spend the early years building. People will say that you are wasting your life, but heed them not. Build, build. Do not jump immediately to “setting the world right”; rather build, and when your life forces are so vibrant and full and tingling that you can contain them no longer, then spill them out and teach, and preach, and act.

You have made a very poor beginning in all this. You are ruled by sex and by anger; you have a great deal of inner peace, but don’t quite know how to show it to others. You waste too much time; and, alas, you are a bit lazy. Life is too short and can be too sweet to waste on the Chambord. “As a full and virtuous day gives rise to a contented sleep, so a full and virtuous life will lead one to lay it down without fear or regret” (Da Vinci, perhaps a bit sententious here).

Tagore: The civilization of the West will not succeed because it “has lost faith in the personality of man and it trusts in a mechanism of power.”

Twelfth Rock-Edict of Emperor Asoka, reigning in India from 273 B.C. to 232 B.C. (condensed): “There should be a promotion of the essential elements of Religion in all religions. This promotion of the essentials of Religion is possible in many ways. But its root is restraint of speech; that is to say, there ought to be no exaltation of one’s religion and finding fault with another’s on improper occasion, and there ought to be no depreciation of another’s religion on this and that occasion. On the contrary, others’ religions should be honored in every way. By so doing one exalts one’s own religion and does service to another’s religion. By doing otherwise one injures one’s own religion and harms another’s as well. For whosoever does honor to his own religion and condemns another’s—all through attachment to his own religion—in order to glorify his own religion, is in very truth severely injuring his own religion. Concourse, fellowship with members of other faiths, is therefore commendable, to the end that they may hear and desire to hear further one another’s Dharma [religion]. . . . Emperor Asoka values neither gifts nor honors so highly as that there should be a promotion of the essential elements of Religion in all religions and mutual appreciation as well.”

I am beginning to think with regard to my attitudes in this job-hunting that I have been too much simply on the lookout for the desirable place, located well, befitting my education, with adequate pay, vacations, etc., etc. I wonder now if it wouldn’t be more consistent with my professed belief and philosophy to be an attendant, for instance, rather than a laboratory technician, since the attendant can bring cheer and comfort to the spirit, whereas the technician is merely another cog in the mechanical or scientific processes of helping the sick. Now the question of teaching comes up. Is it not too easy a way, involving no sacrifice, and certainly not teaching me humility, as a menial task would? And yet the teacher can make his impression too, especially with the young and with parents, so that perhaps it does not really matter what you do so long as it is done in the spirit of love and service. I hope that this isn’t mere rationalization.

November 28, 1952

From Hindemith’s “A Composer’s World”:

❡ This [i.e., the composer’s] approach to a problem is magnanimously comprehensive; it is at the same time stubbornly one-track. In short, it is the typical artistic way of understanding the world. It is entirely opposed to the approach of a scientific mind. To the scientist our method—or, in his eyes, non-method—of looking at everything without ever fundamentally comprehending it must seem utterly amateurish, its distinction from the amateur’s point of view being merely a considerably wider panorama. We must be grateful that with our art we have been placed halfway between science and religion, enjoying equally the advantages of exactitude in thinking—so far as the technical aspects in music are concerned—and of the unlimited world of faith.

❡ Music has to be converted into moral power. We receive its sounds and forms, but they remain meaningless unless we include them in our own mental activity and use their fermenting quality to turn our soul towards everything noble, superhuman, and ideal. It is our own mind that brings about this conversion; music is but a catalytic agent to this end. The betterment of our soul must be our own achievement, although music is one of those factors which, like religious belief, creates in us most easily a state of willingness towards this betterment. In short, we have to be active; music, like humus in a garden soil, must be dug under in order to become fertile. Composers, performers, teachers, listeners—they all must outgrow the mere registration of musical impressions, the superficial and sentimental attachment to sound.

❡ [We must begin to] understand our world as a tiny spot in the universe, its life of a moment’s duration, its matter a particle of dust. . . . [Musicians] must not become the victims of such tyrants as technique, success, pleasure. If they recognize in their greatest achievements the vanity of all earthly efforts, only then are they worthy to contribute with the full weight of their conviction to the eternal values of music. This is their genuine intellectual approach.

❡ What are the emotional reactions music releases? The composer faces the problem of musico-emotional relations with utter directness; he is always forced to solve it technically in some way or other, consciously or instinctively. The performers’ and listeners’ experiences are not essentially different from the composer’s. They repeat what he anticipated, in a weakened, diluted, less concentrated manner.

November 30, 1952

Fine concert last night. Cantelli did Two Choric Dances by Paul Creston, high point of the program. “Processional” by Frank Miller, first cellist, was also done. Insignificant music, but it was good to see Miller’s joy after it was over. Schoenberg’s violin concerto day on Philharmonic: horrible music. Much better were the recorded bird calls presented during intermission and slowed down to ½ and ¼ speeds for more detailed hearing. This is something I could do at the farm.

Met Margo Geiger, Sarah Lawrence senior, a thinker with an artistic personality. We were much in agreement over the basics in life.

Hindemith:

❡ In all the other arts it is our power of reasoning that has to be satisfied first, before an aesthetic enjoyment of an artist’s creation can be had: the words of a poem must be understood in their verbal meaning before its structural beauty or spiritual loftiness can be appreciated; the subject of a painting or its abstract lineations must enter our consciousness before any emotional reaction can take place. With music it is different. It touches our emotions first and we are the helpless victims of its attacks. Only after the emotional reaction has been released by the sounds of music can our power of reasoning take possession of the artistic impression and transform it into aesthetic satisfaction—by way of mental co-construction, as we know. This reverse mode of action in the impressional stimulation of a musical composition is the reason for the comparatively low level on which music makes its initial appeal, as has just been mentioned.

❡ What is musical vision? We all know the impression of a very heavy flash of lightning in the night. Within a second’s time we see a broad landscape, not only its general outlines, but with every detail. Although we could never describe each single component of the picture, we feel that not even the smallest leaf of grass escapes our attention. We experience a view, immensely comprehensive and at the same time immensely detailed, that we never could have under normal daylight conditions, and perhaps not during the night either, if our senses and nerves were not strained by the extraordinary suddenness of the event. Compositions must be conceived the same way. If we cannot, in the flash of a single moment, see a composition in its absolute entirety, with every pertinent detail in its proper place, we are not genuine creators.

❡ You may manage the few basic rules of construction with all their combinative possibilities pretty well, and yet the highest degree of subtlety, in which each technical item is in congruence with the respective part of the vision, again may be obtained by no one but the genius. There are relatively few masterworks in which this ultimate congruence can be felt. Even in our stockpile of classical music, which by common agreement consists of works written by superior composers, not many pieces fulfill those highest requirements. True, there are many other great and excellent works which in their artistic value are by no means less important. They may in their ability to speak as human creations to human beings be closest to our hearts, but it is in those few uncontested masterpieces that we feel the breath of universality and eternity, because their particular kind of perfection, the absolute coincidence of intention and realization, is almost superhuman. . . .

❡ The more the composer feels impelled by his moral determination to drive the technical part of his work as close as possible to the goal of congruence, the higher seems to us the work’s convincing quality. Other works, in which the composer’s moral effort cannot be perceived, need not be bad music. They may have a pleasant, entertaining, touching effect. As mere technical mechanisms they may be without flaw. They may evoke wonderful emotional images in our mind, they may readily lead us to mentally reconstruct their forms, yet they may not impress us as works of art.

❡ . . . One of the leading theses of the American way of life: enjoyment plus enjoyment gives you more enjoyment.

❡ Routine and fashion—these are the worst snarls that can entangle the creative mind.

❡ The extra-musical reason for the somewhat disproportionate regard [given to conductors] seems to be based on the following fact. In an era that leaves little opportunity in the individual’s life for the application and the display of overt despotism, the demonstration of some refined and stylized form of oppression seems to be imperative. The listener in the audience who in his normal behavior has to suppress, thousands of times, his most natural human desire of governing, ordering, dictating to, and even torturing his fellow men, projects himself into the conductor’s personality. Here he sees a man who with the consent of human society exercises a power which we would look upon as cruelty if we saw it applied to dogs or horses. Identifying himself with these activities the listener enjoys the perfect reaction of his own suppressed feelings: he now swings the teacher’s cane, the king’s scepter, and quite contrary to the effects such dictatorial manners have in real life, the result seems to be pleasant to all concerned.

❡ A world-famous instrumentalist, talking with a colleague who played chamber music as a means of musical recreation, expressed envy. Asked why he could not do the same, he said, “I cannot afford it.” Either he would have lost money wile devoting his time to nonprofit music, or his hopelessly professionalized mind could not be distracted without his losing his direction. It is the most depressing statement a musician ever made: it expresses the horrible emptiness of fame; it is the perfect illustration of the utter senselessness of a musical specialism that has lost all ground and reason.

December 3, 1952

❡ It is extremely dishonest to give every student the education that is meant to turn out a Beethoven, while we know that he will never be more than a medium-sized commonplace composer. Would it not be better, more honest, and even more economical, to provide him with an all-round technique of general validity, on which his talents may thrive?

❡ Of course, we know the difference between good and bad triangulists and nobody wants the triangle’s violent trill of the last tutti to appear in the following pianissimo subito. But one refuses to see in a sporadic triangle tinkling the ultimate purpose of a human being’s earthly existence.

❡ Something must be wrong with our teaching system. What is it? We are teaching each pianist or violinist as if he had the chance to become a Horowitz or Heifetz, although we know that the entire concert life of the civilized world can hardly absorb more than ten or twelve great soloists in each field. . . . Among those taught by our endless phalanx of pedagogues the non-professional, the man who wants instruction for his own amateurish fondness of playing with musical forms, hardly counts at all. He who normally ought to be the music teacher’s best customer has as a numerical factor dwindled to almost nothing, and as a musical factor he usually wilts away after several years of a training that, instead of flattering and fostering his layman instincts, has administered an indigestible virtuoso treatment. Thus the clan of music teachers is now living in a state of ever growing artistic isolation and infertile self-sufficiency—their teaching of teachers who in turn teach teachers. A profession based on the resentments of the frustrated concert virtuoso and not aiming at any improvement of human society’s civilization, by its very activity removed from the actual demands and duties of a real musical culture, must inevitably lead to the sad goal reached by every other kind of indiscriminate and large-scale inbreeding: after a short period of apparent refinement a gradual degeneration and slow extinction.

[Note the applicability of this analysis to other fields of teaching: English, for instance. I expressed the idea of inbreeding of teachers in my Review article last year.]

❡ Summer music clinics are a continuation of our school system’s tendency to release everyone from personal responsibility for failures. Your school teachers were entrenched behind a wall of marks and grades. They never developed a fairly accurate system of correspondences between grade numbers and the artistic and technical quality of musical exercises, yet they believe in their own arbitrary numerical decisions as they do in celestial manifestations. It is never thought to be the fault of a teacher or a teaching system if you leave school insufficiently instructed, nor is it your lack of talent or your laziness or your aversion to the way in which the material is presented that makes you an unsuccessful student; you just “didn’t make the grades.” In this purified paradise of numerical evaluation nobody will ever be responsible for his decisions. Individualities vanish behind numbers, and your college record as the inevitable forerunner of your applications for jobs gives as clear an indication of your intellectual and artistic capacities as your portrait drawn by a baby would give of your physical constitution.

❡ There is one germ that has infected our musical life and has weakened it to an alarming degree. I am speaking of the inclination towards entertainment—a trend similar to the demand for sensation, but less violent and therefore more ruinous in the long run. By entertainment we mean not only the cheapest and most easily accessible satisfaction of a desire for sensual pleasure; we include in this term our entire complex system of distributing and receiving any kind of music up to superior compositions, if it is used for the sole aim of gratifying the listeners with the amenities of sound. Music as a science has been dead for centuries. Music as an agent of moral elevation seems to have lost its position; the ethic power of music is left unused. Music as a part of religious devotion has become an empty shell. Sound and its effect on our auditory nerves apparently is the only factor considered essential.

❡ A further loss of competent listeners must be prevented. The composer’s most efficient means of accomplishing this will be to write music for the singing and playing amateur.

❡ Piano playing, keyboard playing in general, is of no use for the amateur. Amateurs’ music is essentially community music. Not only does a piano forbid any community of players—except in the professional’s or semiprofessional’s playing of quartets and quintets; it isolates the amateur pianist psychologically. Whatever your ability as an amateur pianist is, you will never enjoy it fully. You will be dissatisfied, because you know how the pieces you are playing are supposed to sound and you never have enough technique to play them with perfection. If you have, you are as good as a professional and cannot be counted among the amateurs with their peculiar desires and enjoyments. On the other hand, though you may be the worst fiddle player in the world, there will always be a seat for you in the second violin section, where you can play your few scratching tones with full enthusiasm, can improve from session to session, and will not be looked at with scorn and contempt. On the contrary, once you join an amateur group, you are a member of a great fraternity, whose purpose is the most dignified one you can imagine: to inspire one another and united in building up a creation that is greater than one individual’s deeds. Amateurs of this kind, when listening to music, will not be the stupid receivers, the targets of virtuosity, the idle gourmands of which our audiences predominantly consist. They cannot merely be fed with music of a conductor’s or a concert agent’s choice. They know what they want, and they intend to get it.

❡ The life in and with music, being essentially a victory over external forces and a final allegiance to spiritual sovereignty, can only be a life of humility, of giving one’s best to one’s fellow men. This gift will not be like the alms passed on to the beggar; it will be the sharing of a man’s every possession with his friend.

I now sent this brilliant book very appropriately on to Reinoud, as a Christmas present. I hope that the language difficulty will not cancel out his understanding of Hindemith’s lofty ideals.

December 11, 1952

“For a man to write well, there are required three necessities: to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise his own style.”—Ben Jonson.

December 15, 1952

Socrates says that an idler is not only a person who does nothing, but a person who does nothing worthwhile.

I wrote to Austin Hood concerning my idea about a page-turner for musicians, specifically asking about adhesives that might serve the contradictory functions of both holding on and letting go. He offered some suggestions, but the most interesting part of the letter related that he had given up chemistry altogether and was working for a stamp dealer, a job he liked very much and hoped to make permanent. Strange after so many years of chemical training, but for him, I think, a very wise move. It would have been a very disagreeable situation for him to have gone struggling along in chemistry, always with the knowledge that his natural endowments would forever limit him to the role of a lackey. Now in the business world he can bring into play other factors besides abstract intellectualization, and perhaps will make a success of it.

Spent an evening with Tom Forsythe (since Margo was busy). He is a farm-bred intellectual who thinks my farm plans entirely practical. Whew! One, at least. It is gratifying that with some people, like Tom, Reinoud, Margo, Pete G., it is possible to come to a level of deep mutual knowledge almost immediately. These are people who have their souls exposed as it were. How Carlyle would love them! Sartor Resartus. With them I can talk of deepest desires, hopes, and frustrations, talk freely and joyfully. Yet with others I wouldn’t dare talk above tea-party level. The factor is not how long you have known a person. Some of my oldest friends remain in the tea-party category whereas with these others communication is instantaneous and spontaneous. More of them!

December 16, 1952

William Chapman White tells a typical Adirondack story in his delightful column in the Tribune:

“Les Hathaway died the other day. He was an old guide, one of a breed that was unique in the Adirondacks. Almost all are gone. ‘Guides like me, he would say, ‘the real genuine authentic hundred percent woodticks, there aren’t many left. We was the kind that used to take a city feller into the woods, shoot his deer for him, drag it out and cut it up, then knock down any one who dared say he hadn’t shot it.’

“Like many old guides, Les had a stock of stories, good stories. Whether or not the truth was in them wasn’t so important. In his time Les had been an ‘outlaw,’ as he admitted. ‘I grew up before there was any conservation laws and when a man was hungry he went and shot a deer. And I’ve been hungry many times.’ Les used to pride himself on outwitting the game wardens. ‘They never had me once!’ he liked to say.

“He often told one story about the way some young warden kept after him, as Les knew, and finally caught him ten miles back in the woods, sitting besides a pack-basket full of fresh meat. ‘This time I got you with the evidence,’ the warden said. ‘Off we go to the judge.’ ‘Yep,’ Les agreed, ‘but you got to carry the evidence. The law can hang a man but it don’t say he has to tote his own gallows.’ The warden picked up the pack-basket, which weighed about seventy pounds, and lugged it out of the woods. Les followed behind like an obedient beagle. They got to the judge. The warden was about to present his case when Les said: ‘Judge, is there any law about not letting a man buy a calf, skin it out, and take the meat into the wood just to have handy in case a nosey warden comes along?’ At that Les opened up his basket and took out the meat. ‘You can see for yourself, judge,’ Les said, ‘that’s veal, not venison. Sorry it was so heavy, warden.’”

Socrates’ wording was better than mine. “He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed.” (Clipped from that great dispenser of wise sayings and worthwhile reading—the Ladies’ Home Journal.)

Margo has agreed to spend a weekend with me at the farm. I am in ecstasy: I have wanted to show the place off for a long time now, and am glad that she will be the first one to whom I shall do so. I suppose my going away with a woman in this fashion isn’t exactly moral in the Victorian sense, but I’m not sure I have those kinds of morals, at least I hope not. I have ideals, not morals. And I have desires!

Received a Christmas card from Laird Barber, who is studying English at Cambridge University, England. Jack Piotrow of Haverford was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship this year. He seems hardly of that caliber. How subtly fate determines our ways! Had I been class of ’53 perhaps I would have received the scholarship over Piotrow, and then would have been off to Oxford. What glory! But perhaps I am better off this way, for Oxford may have placed me in a “safe” teaching job and left me there for life.

I finally completed the movement for piano—130 measures—and sent it off to Professor Swan. It is a very poor piece of work, even vulgar, at least the first subject. But the introduction and second subjects are good, and the whole thing, I think, is quite original. The fugal exposition that begins the development section is nicely worked out, but I could not continue it, and had to fall back on passage work over suggestions of the second theme. And like everything I have written, it probably ends too soon, as I am always in a hurry simply to put three measures of coda in practically anywhere, and have it done with. I found, as usual, that it is difficult for me to write for piano, à cause de lack of technique; and quite impossible to think in large units, an inability that, of course, spells my doom as a composer of real worth. Nevertheless, I enjoy composition and hope some day to be able to turn out a continuing stream of quartets, piano trios, etc., for a small group that shall love to play them with me.

December 17, 1952

From Les Lettres du voyant, of Rimbaud, preface to Les Illuminations:

“The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He looks for his soul, inspects it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple: in every brain a natural development is accomplished: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; others attribute their intellectual progress to themselves. But the soul has to be made monstrous, that’s the point:—like comprachicos, if you like! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.

“One must, I say, be a seer, make oneself a seer.

“The poet makes himself a seer through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith and superhuman strength, the great criminal, the great sick man, the utterly damned, and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul—richer to begin with than any other! He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him croak in his leap into those unutterable and innumerable things: there will come other horrible workers: they will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed.”

December 19, 1952

Today, if all had gone well, I should have been on my way to the farm, with Margo. She had promised to go with me, and we had made all arrangements earlier in the week. I thought of little else for several days. I gathered together everything worthwhile that I have written over the past years, plus a lot of music, and looked forward to a receptive ear, and to the quiet and remoteness necessary. She, in turn, promised to bring her stories, which I haven’t seen yet. I wanted her to see the house, and the life that I have carved out up there; and I thought that she would be interested in meeting my neighbors. Somehow, I thought that we were due to leave yesterday. So I got up at 5 a.m., as planned, packed, loaded the truck, and was to Greenwich Village at 6:45. But no Margo. I gave her ¾ hour grace and then rang. She appeared in pajamas, quite surprised, and said, “But, Peter, you’re a day too soon!” Oh heavens! I asked her if she couldn’t just up and go on the spot, but no, she was needed in school and then had an appointment at the doctor’s. Tomorrow, same time. But last night she called to say that the doctor forbade her to go because of a virus infection she had during the week. So that dream, after a series of anticlimaxes, was shattered. Today I am meeting her for lunch, and we shall go ice skating.

Well, the day wasn’t wasted. I spent most of it writing a 10,000 word letter to Bobby Johnston, something I have been meaning to do for some time. I put in my say against insurance companies and against business in general, excepting perhaps a Woolman-like business, strictly limited in size, and very undemanding in time required. Then I spoke a bit about Europe, and about my draft status and plans for the future—viz.: There still remains the question of what I am going to do in life. In my enforced “idleness” here I have been thinking of this constantly. I am getting a little more realistic and know that one must have a way to earn money, not only in spurts, but more or less regularly. I get about $250 a year interest on some invested funds, but this could hardly be termed an independent income! Besides this I have the farm, which is worth about $2000, and several hundred in cash. But I find that I have a completely irrational urge to spend money when I have it in my pocket, and so it goes very very quickly. Right now my plans are something like this: You will see that they are very vague, very dangerous, and perhaps very stupid. When I work these two years I’ll probably make another $3000 or so, a little more, a little less. If I can save most of it (I think room and board will be provided) and invest it, it will bring the annual return close to $500. At this rate it really won’t take too long to bring it up to, let’s say, $1000, because after the settlement work I can get a job that pays much better. I know very well that I can live extremely well on the farm, eating like a king, having exercise, being with my library (now about 1000 volumes), maintaining a car to get to the city with, etc., all this quite easily on $1000 cash income, and probably on less. And in any case it is very easy to supplement the cash income by cutting wood, which now brings $23 a cord (an inexperienced man can cut about a cord and a half in a day). On this I can also support a wife and family, which I sincerely hope to do to the best of my ability. With this as a sort of stop-gap against inflation, I think I can be entirely free to do what I want to do, which is—to write. I will fall into that non-descript category of the free-lance writer. I hope to try my hand at fiction, but am fairly certain that my forte will lie in the familiar essay, which can cover practically anything. I would like to do biographies, accounts of movements like the work-camp one; perhaps something on subsistence farming, on education, etc. The subjects will take shape in time. As I say, I have my own library and hope to add to it. There is really no worthwhile book in the English language that cannot be obtained in good condition second-hand for under a dollar, if you know where to look. But besides this, the farm is exactly equidistant from Boston and New York, neither a very great trip; and so in reality I can add the collections of the New York Public Library and of Widener Library at Harvard to my own. By this reasoning I should have about 15 million volumes. As for traveling, I know from this summer’s experience that it is possible to get a nice room, with meals, in Europe for about $25 a month, or $300 a year. Add $300 round-trip boat fare to this, and you still have $400 to spend. And if you stay two years in a row, the second year it will be $700, since there will be no fare additional. $700 in Europe has the buying power of about $2000 here, so you see, you are quite well off! All this, of course, is figuring at absolute minimum; in actuality I hope and expect that there will be additional sources of income from the writing, from the farm, or perhaps from a small Woolman-like business that will consume only two or three months’ time in a year. If success comes, then, of course, it will be clear sailing: lecture offers, newspaper columns, perhaps even an invitation to a university. But now my sights are too high. All I really want is intellectual and physical stimulation, variety, periods of exertion and wandering balanced by periods of rest and staying at home; the necessities of life and not the superfluities. If I’m a failure, and don’t have enough brains or guts or will-power or stamina to write what I want to, well then, I tried; I’ll manage somehow and probably be happy into the bargain. Of course, I could enter medical or law school tomorrow and insure a nice cozy future of unquestioned success and upwards of $50,000 a year, but this is too easy. You may think that this is all loony. No, I don’t think you will. But it is a bit loony, after all—and who cares? I don’t know if I have any religion. But I like to project myself outside of my society and look in on it, seeing in one glance a whole life span: and already death does not seem so far off, even if it is incomprehensible to us young ‘uns. When I see a life-span as a unit, where real living ceases at the age of twenty, where from twenty to sixty-five is mere bread-winning, complicated with a lot of sham culture, superfluous animalistic gratifications such as gourmet meals, nude-women night clubs (yes, I like them, too); where the ideal of a good vacation is . . . sleep: then this seems to me a mockery of life, truly a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing—point blank zero. “Science was in error,” someone has said, “when it allocated man to a separate species. Rather it should have categorized us in the cat family, for we are tigers who stalk our prey with an almost erotic pleasure, and small kittens who fruitlessly toy with a ball of twine or lounge languidly on our backs, hoping that some benign hand will feed us or tickle our stomachs.” This is too horrible to contemplate; but not half as horrible as those countless thousands of newly arrived fashionables who have convinced themselves and their fellow travelers that they have risen above all this into the realm of gentility and culture. They are ten times worse than my country neighbors, rude drunken, barbarians, but without pretense, always honest with themselves (and often strangely and warmly human on a plane much higher than that of the neurotic upside-down-valued middle class).

So, what is there to do? Just this: I know, from my own experience and from the similar experiences that I can read about in literature, that man can live in some sort of mystic fashion on a plane entirely and beautifully human: the full man, not denying his instincts, not presuming anything either. It isn’t so much the life of intellect as we tend to think of that life—its horrible degeneracy into compartmentalized investigations, and the abominable application of the scientific method to every field of endeavor, including literature and the arts—but rather I think a life of devotion to something outside of oneself, and preferably something bigger and more important than oneself. It is disinterestedness, detachment, serenity: all antithetical to 99% of the lives and jobs in America today. It is perhaps something as commonplace as the raising of a family, for this is a form of immortality; but not raising one the way it is done now, with the father gone at 8:00 a.m. and back for supper, then out to a meeting; with the big “family” day on Sunday when all entomb themselves in an automobile and stand for hours bumper to bumper on the parkway, escaping the carbon monoxide atmosphere of the Bronx only to enjoy that of Westchester. No, I mean where a father can be with his sons, can teach them, build their bodies, have them work alongside, get to know them and they him. I don’t think many fathers do this nowadays, least of all the successful and respectable ones.

I think that if we try to regard our lives objectively and plan realistically and courageously to insure and cultivate our spiritual wellbeing and the exercise of our intellects (if we are fortunate enough to have intelligence), then the purely physical necessities will take care of themselves. Who, after all, need starve in America today? It is stupid to be concerned about this and never to give the other a thought, as is so often the case. Through science and prosperity we have the best tools in history for reducing the time spent for necessities to the absolute minimum, leaving the rest free for work for others and for the full life. I don’t think this need be naught but words; it can be practiced. There are those who have done so. You can do it; I can do it, and I intend to.

With this crash-bang ending, it is time for the concert to come to a close, but not for the conductor to take his last bow: he will be back for more later. . . .

December 20, 1952

So far, my house has cost as follows, exclusive of tools and things stolen:

cement for foundation

$15.00

floor joists 18/2" × 6" × 16' @ .080

23.00

corner posts 4/2" × 6" × 12'; 4/2" × 4" × 12

6.50

windows and sash

108.00

door & window frames 150 r,f. 2" × 6"

12.00

plate 2/2" × 4" × 20'

2.00

spruce flooring, tongue & grooved @ 140

57.00

shiplap flooring

35.00

rafters 36/2" × 6" × 16'

46.00

sheathing

45.00

asphalt roofing paper

24.00

oakum

15.00

cement & lime for chinking

10.00

nails

15.00

creosote

5.00

$418.50

I have passed through a series of anticlimaxes, but have learned a lot. Yesterday I went ice skating with Margo, whom I had pictured as a receptive and enthusiastic listener to all my writings, and for whom I had brought along the recent letter to Weasel. I said jokingly that she was lucky she couldn’t have gone to Riparius because once there I was going to make her listen to reams of my writing. Her comment was: “Oh, you write too,” as though to say: “Another one. There are too many already.” I never brought up the subject again, and wouldn’t dare giver her the letter. I don’t know whether I am simply living in a dream world, spending half a week picturing to myself gratifying scenes of other people’s interest in and appreciation of what I have done; then only to find that they show not the slightest interest; or, perhaps I am not in the wrong, for I know—turn the situation around—that I am very anxious to see something that she has written, and consider that when a person has gone to the trouble of putting down his or her thoughts, those thoughts deserve perusal and at least a fair appraisal on my part.

So, we went to the zoo, where the chimps behave, sound, and act like our Michaëlshoeve boys; then we ice-skated very pleasantly, and then—simply—parted. We ate lunch in the Automat, where she paid her own way owing to my lack of gallantry. If women have to be emancipated, they will need to suffer some of the consequences.

December 21, 1952

Sunnyside

Somerset Maugham in “The Summing Up”: “I do not believe that genius is an entirely different thing than talent. I am not even sure that it depends on any great difference in the artist’s natural gifts. For example, I do not think that Cervantes had an exceptional gift for writing; few people would deny him genius. Nor would it be easy in English literature to find a poet with a happier gift that Herrick and yet no one would claim that he had more than a delightful talent. It seems to me that what makes genius is the combination of natural gifts with an idiosyncrasy that enables its possessor to see the world personally in the highest degree and yet with such catholicity that his appeal is not to this type of man or that type, but to all men.”

Mason Morrell was here last night—the old school friend of Dad’s. He is a long-time socialist, and has a home in the cooperative colony at Shrub Oak. He was born with the name Johnson but changed it in order not to appear to be hiding the fact that he is Jewish. Quite the opposite from most name-changing that goes on nowadays.

December 28, 1952

Jacques Maritain in “the Range of Reason”: “The only authentic civilization is one where man has released the idea of knowledge in its objective purity and developed in himself the sense of truth. If civilization, which is profoundly shaken today, is to be reborn, one of the basic conditions for this rebirth must be that . . . knowledge must cease being ordained to power or being confused with power—the intellect must recognize in the whole expanse and diversity of its domain the sacred nature of truth.”

From Canby’s introduction to the short stories of Erskine Caldwell: “Erskine Caldwell is one of those rare men in human experience who have done both what they wanted and what they have thought that they wanted. He thought that he wanted most of all to ‘go places,’ to see people in a living experience of the sociology he picked up at the University of Virginia. However, he began his travelling—more accurately described as vagabondage—long before he ever heard of sociology. Then, when his reputation was made, he travelled in a big way as a correspondent, notably in Russia. But something in him wanted all this time to write. . . . The inexplicable urge which forces the born writer to symbolize life in words and create the significance which actual experience hides in a confusion of events, has done the rest. . . . Caldwell left the University of Virginia . . . after two years . . . to become a cub reporter on The Atlanta Journal, which had been his ambition, married, and began a family. But he discovered, as so many journalists have done, that newspaper work is not creative writing, and that if to write in a creative way is what you want, journalism is the wrong profession. The only way to write creatively is to write creatively. . . . So, with admirable audacity, Caldwell got as far away from his old environment as possible, perhaps subconsciously feeling the need to get it into perspective. For years he ‘holed it in Maine,’ raised potatoes and chopped wood to feed his family, ‘vowing not to come out until I had got myself published.’ But in three years he had sold a story for $350, though he would have willingly taken $50 for it if necessary, and his public career had begun.”

It seems that this volume of my journals is closing out coincident with the calendar year. A very good year for it to do so, for starting with 1953 I must reckon by the calendar and no longer by the academic season.

Read the Grand Inquisitor chapter in Dostoevsky, a brilliant and cogent piece of sustained invective, much lifting my opinion of Dostoevsky.

I practiced the recorder for a few hours, and it has become a contagion. Alice, Mother, even Dad are now blowing tunes on this very simple but lovely instrument.

Resolution for 1953: read, read, read; write, write, write.

It would be nice to build a studio at Riparius something like the one at Reinoud’s uncle’s house in Holland: round, and fanning out from a central pole or perhaps a central chimney; with but one window and one door, and with the entire circumference lined (and insulated) by books; with a desk, lamp, stove for heat, perhaps a hotplate for coffee; a couch for relaxation; and maybe a harmonium. Now that I have the barn wood, I really should continue building as much and as soon as possible, if only over weekends while I am fulfilling my two-years’ service.

In the past year I think my interests have settled down a bit, mostly in music, but not as a separated phenomenon as much as a particular way to express a general urge for creative and artistic activity. How can I know if I’ve grown at all in wisdom? In five years perhaps I shall look back on this period and be able to tell, just as now I look back on my freshman year at Harvard. At least, I have, I think, learned to value strictly academic pursuits at their true worth, and to place above them: living—in the most full and varied way possible. Now I sit here and long to start!

On the debit side: the whole sexual problem, which, I think, will solve itself very quickly and simply as soon as I find someone to marry. But the situation as it is now is not at all good. I refuse to employ prostitutes; I am not a homosexual; and I have no one with whom to have intercourse. Yet my body burns, feels all slippery inside, and wants to come apart at the seams. How futile it is to try to make our minds forget what our bodies never stop remembering. The only answer is self-gratification, a moral, physical, and mental dead end. I waste too many hours with this, and all the energy goes for naught. Sex should procreate, or at least bind a couple together. This does nothing but give temporary relief—for a day, perhaps.

The Brothers Karamazov now has me completely entranced. In reading certain sections I feel as though I were undergoing a sacrament, especially the deathbed sayings of Father Zossima. Some sections must be recorded here:

❡ . . . even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has been only grotesque. (Father Païssy)

❡ Till I’m thirty I know that my youth will triumph over everything. . . . I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself I fancy. Some driveling consumptive moralists . . . often call that thirst for life base. But why is it base? The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. . . . It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. (Ivan)

❡ I cannot expect to understand about God. . . . All such questions are inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions. And so I accept God and am glad to, and what’s more I accept His wisdom, His purpose—which are utterly beyond our ken; I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended. (Ivan)

❡ The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. (Ivan)

❡ Chapter IV, “Rebellion.”

❡ Chapter V, “The Grand Inquisitor”: Dost thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger? ‘Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!’ ❡ When man rejects miracle he rejects God too. ❡ There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were. ❡ Freedom, free thought and science will lead [the people] into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our [the Church’s] feet, and whine to us: ‘Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves.’ . . . And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves.

1953

Sunnyside

January

Rochester

February—December

January 1, 1953

Sunnyside

Dostoevsky, continued:

❡ The first birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at the windows. And looking at them and admiring them he began suddenly begging their forgiveness too, “Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too.” None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed tears of joy. “Yes,” he said, “there was such a glory of God all about me; birds, trees, meadows, sky, only I lived in shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory.” (Father Zossima about his brother)

❡ From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is precious. (Zossima)

❡ And what is the use of Christ’s words, unless we set an example? (Zossima)

❡ We are each responsible to all for all, it’s only that men don’t know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once. (Markel, Zossima’s brother)

❡ “To transform the world, to recreate it afresh, men must turn into another path psychologically. Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to every one, brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all. Every one will think his share too small and they will be always envying, complaining and attacking one another. You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have to go through the period of isolation.” “What do you mean by isolation?” I asked him. “Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For everyone strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life, but self-destruction, for instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and being repelled by them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now, and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he shall lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism will inevitably have an end, and all will understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. . . . But until then, . . . even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die.” (The mysterious visitor to Zossima)

❡ The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them, and even multiply your desires.” . . . And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants. . . . To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor, and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. (Zossima)

❡ How can a man shake off his habits, what can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less. The monastic way is very different. Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God’s help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy. Which is most capable of conceiving a great idea and serving it—the rich man in his isolation or the man who has freed himself from the tyranny of material things and habits?

❡ If you have no God, what is the meaning of crime? (Zossima)

❡ And how many ideas there have been on earth in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared? (Zossima)

❡ If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. . . . Love children especially, . . . they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us. (Zossima)

❡ It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It’s like an ocean, I tell you. . . . Do not say, “Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.” Fly from that dejection. There is only one means of salvation; then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins. (Zossima)

❡ What grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds? If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. (Zossima)

❡ You are working for the whole, and you are acting for the future. (Zossima)

❡ What is hell? . . . It is the suffering of being unable to love. (Zossima)

❡ In some cases it is really more creditable to be carried away by an emotion, however unreasonable, which springs from a great love, than to be unmoved. And this is even truer in youth, for a young man who is always sensible is to be suspected and is of little worth—that’s my opinion. (concerning Alyosha, Book VII, Chapter II)

❡ He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night unfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars. Someone visited my soul in that hour, he [Alyosha] used to say afterwards, with implicit faith in his words.

January 3, 1953

Holidays Hills, Pawling, New York

AFSC conference. Bayard Rustin spoke tonight with an effectiveness that few speakers can match. Having just returned from Africa, he described the nationalist upsurgings there, and the use of nonviolent techniques by Manilal Gandhi in South Africa. He offered nonviolence as the goal of the future, and the only chance left for averting war. Negotiation, he said, is fine; but every practical negotiator, including Stalin, knows that it is meaningless unless backed up with power. The amount of power represented by each side automatically determines the outcome of the negotiation. This means the continuing increase of military resources, in order to be ahead of the enemy, and because we are convinced that the only thing Stalin can understand is force. It is true that the only thing Stalin can understand is force, but this can be nonviolent power as well as violent. What the world must do, then, is to train itself slowly and systematically in the techniques of nonviolent resistance: for there are only three ways out of conflict situations: (1) by force, which destroys the destroyer as well as the destroyed; (2) by nonviolent power; (3) by cowardice, which is the worst of the three.

One of the things that the conference seemed to bring out was the difficulty of helping out in backward areas, for instance, unless one is really technically trained as well as rightly motivated. I am going to have to think this whole problem out very carefully, and soon, while it is still feasible for me to go back to some sort of graduate school, if I so choose.

Bobby Johnston came with me to the conference and spoke up very admirably. I think that his thinking has changed quite a bit, so that now he is beginning to feel a sense of motivation to devote his talents to a vital public good. I suggested that an acquaintance with world problems as they really exist and not as the newspapers report them, plus a knowledge of the efforts of Quakers, FOR, etc., to act positively against the evil forces, might be a valuable thing for Dave Johnston, Bob’s brother. Dave seemed to have a sincere and deep-rooted desire and need for some kind of positive orientation, for something as a goal worth striving for. Bob tells me that now his brother does very poorly at school because “he can’t seem to get interested in any of his courses.” A moral and philosophical sense of direction could give these courses their raison d’être, now lacking.

January 6, 1953

Sunnyside

“It is not upon thee to finish the work; neither art thou free to abstain from it.” (Talmud)

January 7, 1953

Mother and Dad left for Miami. They have realized now that the era of child raising is over and that they must face old age together. I think they will do very well.

I bought Dick Hatch’s Leave the Salt Earth, republished as a pocket-book with a new title, Go Down to Glory. Hatch used to tell us that after the relative failure of several novels in which he sincerely tried to speak his mind, he vowed to write something that would contain every surefire formula for popular success: thus, this book. There is passionate love, rape, incest, naked couples all over the place, and even an attempt of mob castration. Well, Hatch was right in his judgments—witness the reprinting.

The Alsops reported today a new slant to the H-bomb and the problem of scientific war. Apparently, each H-bomb explosion releases an amount of C-14, a heavy carbon isotope with a half-life of 5600 years. The amount of c-14 naturally present on the earth is harmless, but in increased quantities the isotope has been found to affect human genes, causing sterility, or the birth of “monsters.” Scientists do not agree, say the Alsops, on just how many bombs need be exploded in order to reach the radiation threshold for c-14, above which it will have these disastrous effects. But the conservative estimate is several hundred. Let us hope that discoveries of this nature will make us a bit more wary of our macabre play.

I think I am beginning to feel more my kinship with the Jews, and to have the desire, long absent, to read more fully in the tradition. Rustin brought out the fact that on every jury for a case condemning communists, the prosecution was careful to include a number of Jews and Negroes because these minority groups are almost sure to vote against the defendants. Since they already have one strike against them, they do not wish to have two. Thus in Germany the Jews were the first to help Hitler purge the communists, little realizing that they would be next, regardless. Now in turn, the Communists abroad are everywhere purging the Jews—witness the Prague trials and now the dismissal of Gerhardt Eisler. Of course, the unfortunate thing is that these people really deserve their fate, for in their time of power they murdered and purged as well. Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. André Weill mentioned that Eisler deserves no sympathy merely because of his rejection of the liberty and fair play that America offered. Thus, he jumped into the lion’s mouth of his own free will, to coin a phrase.

I have been reading, simultaneously, the following along with The Brothers Karamazov: The Folks at Home by Margaret Halsey, a rather elementary outburst against our business environment; Wittle’s biography of Freud; Male & Female, by Margaret Mead; and Dick Hatch’s sex novel, “Leave the Salt Earth,” in pocket book republication under the new title, Go Down to Glory.

I am getting a taste of what it means to be responsible for a household, since mother and dad are away, and Alice is at school most of the day. It is not a very pleasant occupation.

Also read in Byron: “Don Juan.”

January 9, 1953

I can build a novel out of McCarthy, father and son: their relationship, the prosperous farm neglected, Francis McCarthy’s raping of a local girl, desertion of his wife, and successful evasion of detection; the superciliousness of the “successful” brothers—lawyers and businessmen; Marie’s scheming to secure the post office job; the animosity between her children and Uncle Bernard; Bernard’s relations with the Bardens; with Charlie—poaching, the lame excuse of tool retrieving, the car-smashing; with Curly over the horse; Curly’s character; the Carmans; tensions between city and country folk; the episode with Rusty; Mac’s helping with the logs, then stealing wood; the Millingtons vs. McCarthy; Bucky, who smashed in old Sam’s jaw, and was protected by the priest; Sibler’s nervousness; the electricity question; Bernard and English—the daughter; Abe—a month’s free vacation, his attempt to secure a double bed in the hotel for himself and his girlfriend; Pop’s life: log running, 16-hours a day mowing with a scythe; the episodes with Cornell men: Mac and the White Horse ranch; Carman and the sheep; Joe Green, the Rabbi and his wife. Problem: how to make a coherent and dramatically evocative whole out of this mass. I must think everything out clearly before writing a word: each scene, each development of plot, each strategic event, each climax; then, when this is done, think out the chapters and write them one by one, only after every detail is in its place beforehand. Work slowly, and have patience. Perhaps something will come of it.

Today has been a day that has been fully used. I have been so weak of will in the past, sleeping 12 hours, getting up at 10 or 11 in the morning, wasting the afternoon, and then feeling so fatigued in the early evening so as to waste that too. Dan Wilkes writes from Cambridge that “the more active I become the less time work takes, the more work I get done.” I guess some people just stagnate when there are no eddies or cataracts. Or perhaps it can be explained on Bernoulli’s principle: the faster one goes, the less pressure from backlogs, conscience, conflicts of desires, etc., and the net result (like on top of an airfoil) is a lift. Just this I have experienced today (and other days and periods in the past). On less sleep I have done more: played piano all morning, traveled to Manhattan after lunch to get tickets for the Toscanini concert tomorrow, had a haircut, finished The Brothers Karamazov, sight-read with unusual alertness, cooked supper with Alice, again sight-read, read 125 pages of Hatch’s novel. Oh, also: exercised and showered in the afternoon, and snoozed for ½ hour, which was all I needed to make we now, at 1 a.m., still feel wide awake. Hatch’s book is very strong, and the sex episodes are done with a wonder at the beauty of young love, not just for exhibitionism. It would be hard to find two different techniques more opposed than those of Dostoevsky and Hatch. I would like to take Dostoevsky’s expansiveness and relaxation and combine it with Hatch’s terseness and constant tension.

January 10, 1953

Mr. Green, the music teacher at Brant Lake; Slavin, the girl, and the murder. Barden and Addison Kingsley. The hen-pecked husband and his “talking woman.”

January 14, 1953

The squeaking bed at Oorts. Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County is the most suggestive book sexually I have ever read; it puts Hatch with the Puritans.

January 15, 1953

The story Bob Gerstenzang tells about Collins’ fight against TB, his excursions with the Horicon Indian guide, his building of the “Hermitage” on the way back toward Pharaoh Lake (now the site of Camp Mead, a boy scout camp).

Margo comes for dinner tomorrow night.

I am reading Maria Chapdelaine, this time in the original French. Hémon’s explanations of life in French Canada coincide very nicely with what I have seen of life as it still exists in the Adirondacks.

January 17, 1953

From Hémon:

❡ Pour les enfants, Jésus de Nazareth était toujours “le petit Jésus”, l’enfantelet bouclé des images pieuses; et en vérité pour les parents aussi, c’était cela que son nom représentait le plus souvent. Non pas le Christ douloureux et profond du protestantisme, mais quelqun de plus familier et de moins grand: un nouveau-né dans les bras de sa mere, ou tout au plus un très petit enfant qu’on pouvait aimer sans grand effort d’esprit et meme sans songer à son sacrifice futur.

❡ Maria regardait par la fenêtre les champs blancs que arclait le bois solennel; la ferveur religieuse, la montée de son amour adolescent, le son remuant des voix familières se fondaient dans son Coeur en une seule emotion. En vérité, le monde était tout plein d’amour ce soir-là, d’amour profane et d’amour sacré également simples et forts, envisages tous deux comme des choses naturelles et nécessaire; ils était tout mêlés l’un à l’autre, de sorte que les priers qui appelaint la bienveillance de la divinité sur les êtres chers n’étaient guère que des moyens de manifester l’amour humain, et que les naïves complaints amoureuses étaient chantées avec la voix grave et solennelle et l’air d’extase des invocations surhumaines.

. . . Je voudrais que la rose

Fût encore au rosier,

Et que le rosier même

À la mer fût jeté.

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,

Jamais je ne t’oublierai. . .

Margo came last night at 6 and stayed until 2 a.m. We are two spirits united with ease, through that mysterious feeling that makes you know another person almost automatically and immediately, though in point of view of time or external experience you hardly know him or her at all. It is a union of souls and an affirmation of the occult belief that underlying each individual is a basic ingredient that is universal in character and composition.

When two such persons come together conversation turns unashamedly to innermost hopes and fears, achievements and frustrations. You talk—fast—and without faltering as though holding a conversation with yourself. She in particular spoke out, and mentioned that there were few people to whom she could speak as she spoke to me last night.

She is a little wisp of a girl, almost frail; her arms especially look deficient in flesh and thickness. Yet her face bears that unique expressiveness that comes from intelligence and that is accented by thinness and perhaps even gauntness. Withal, she is pretty, not in the sexy way of Hollywood, but hers is a face that you must look at twice, and you might expect to find it in Michelangelo; indeed, it is a trifle Italianate. She is not Italian, however; her father came from Austria when he was 14, never was able to continue very much educationally after the European gymnasium, and ended up as a salesman for Dunhill Company. The mother was a dancer, and this interest carries over to Margo’s sister.

She surprised me by saying that she is undergoing intensive analysis. I admire her for it because she was really in trouble and was intelligent and brave enough to try to cure it early. She arranged for the analyst entirely on her own, through a clinic, and did not inform her parents until it was a fait-accompli. Her troubles certainly sounded familiar to my ear: primarily sexual, the conflict between an upbringing that taught that “there are certain things that nice girls don’t do,” and on the other hand the display of sex all over the place today in books, movies, ads, etc., plus of course natural desires that could not be repressed. She had an affaire that terminated unhappily, and then in her sophomore year at Skidmore (how familiar the following!) withdrew into herself, shut herself off from the opposite sex, and even began to go in the direction of homosexuality. It was this last that probably made her realize that the situation was getting out of her conscious control. Somehow tied into this emotional picture was also the intellectual one of dissatisfaction with Skidmore, where practically none of the girls were at all interested in learning. So, at the end of the sophomore year, Margo transferred to Sarah Lawrence and began the analysis soon thereafter.

She has a delightful mind and is assuredly past that definite threshold of intelligence that divides the original and abstract thinkers and the people really capable of conceiving life forces and problems in an intellectual way, from the run-of-the-mill academic types, pedants, teapartiers, theater-goers, and second-rate professional men. Here she and I share something, and also in our mutual realization that we are not geniuses, although we have the necessary intelligence to have a “clear and present” idea of how genius functions—and yet we both also have faith in our capabilities, feel the need, desire, and ability to contribute creatively, and know that we are much better qualified to do so than a great many people active in artistic pursuits, now and in the past.

January 20, 1953

Rochester, New York

I may be able to get a job in the General Hospital here, probably as an attendant. Will know more definitely tomorrow morning. I practically burst into uncontrollable laughter in the Employment Office here this morning. A very cute girl (she looked just like the ward in The Importance of Being Earnest movie) did the preliminary interviewing. In a tone betraying the fact that she had asked the same questions in the same way several hundred times before, she proceeded: What type of work do you wish? What is your previous employment service? What is your educational background? And then in exactly the same manner, as though the next question was of a nature exactly similar to the ones preceding: How tall are you? This just hit my funny bone, and she is probably still wondering why.

So far, in all my dealings both with employment service personnel and hospital officials (and I have seen quite a few of both varieties in the past four months) I have found that when they learn that I am a C.O., instead of becoming antagonistic, as one is led to expect will happen, they seem, on the contrary, to become more friendly, or at least not to become less friendly. This almost universal reaction in my experience has been most heartening.

As a rebuke to those who conclude that the lower classes don’t think, or think differently from the intelligentsia, I overheard one waitress saying to another that she was glad that Eisenhower was finally in office (today was inauguration day) but felt, after all the shouting was over that Truman hadn’t done so badly. But her one fervent wish, and this is the point I noticed especially, was that Eisenhower should continue in good health to prevent the catastrophe of having Richard Nixon as president.

Peter Gardner showed up last Sunday afternoon and spent the night. We had a delightful reunion, talking until 3 a.m., hearing and playing each other’s music, etc. Our friendship, instead of diluting or slipping away because of separation, seems to have strengthened from the sure knowledge, born of retrospect, of how mutually meaningful and beneficial our common living had been. With Pete now, I feel no hesitancy whatsoever of opening my heart, nor do I doubt that he does either.

Well, I feel very much alone here in this room in an unknown city, and I only hope that if I do finally work here the feeling will not continue. I imagine that between the hospital itself, and whatever work I may do on the outside, in the university and or the Eastman School of Music, I will be able to gather together some friends. Life without love is not life. Perhaps in this room I will write a novel, perhaps I will share myself with others in talk, or perhaps I will dissipate all my energies and waste my precious life. Two years hence I must look back and see which alternative was taken.

January 25, 1953

Sunnyside

The job as operating room orderly in Rochester General Hospital was OK’d on the spot, and I have received official notice to report for work on February 2nd. I view that date with dread.

I enjoyed the drive from Rochester to Riparius Wednesday night, since it had just snowed and I felt very pioneerish as I moved continuously onward along the unpopulated roads. Even a flat tire outside of Bakers Mills was not too much of a calamity. At Riparius, I met “Frenchy,” and old fellow-worker of Curly’s, who had come up, slightly drunk, for a visit. He looked 50-ish, but told me he was 68 and still a healthy lumberjack. Curly also turns out to be French. His father emigrated to Canada and married a French-Canadian. Curly seemed rather more solemn and contemplative than usual, perhaps because both Sam and Tennyson had left several weeks ago, leaving Curly to carry on alone in the woods. Even his “woman” walked out on him one day, but soon returned.

Carman told me the amusing story of how McCarthy, dead drunk, let his car slide over the road bank so that all four wheels were completely off the ground. He walked back to Carman’s for help, reporting that all he needed was a slight push, since he could rock the car, but just couldn’t seem to get any traction! When Carman returned to the bank, Mac actually got in, started shifting and rocking himself vigorously in the driver’s seat, the car of course staying perfectly still. It took a team of horses to pull him out.

Pete Gardner came here again yesterday, and we went to the Toscanini concert. A fine reading of the Ravel orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition, a very imaginative work. Mrs. Gardner wants to buy a place in the Adirondacks, so I am hoping to have the Gardner clan as near neighbors.

When in Rochester I must establish a very definite schedule and make the best use of my time. If I can only convince Margo to come some weekends, or better still, to take her summer job there!

January 26, 1953

Margo is thinking not to go to Europe next year. I concur.

From the “summation” of Maria Chapdelaine:

“Maria se demandait encore: pourquoi rester là, et tant peiner, et tant souffrir? Pourquoi? . . . Et comme elle ne trouvait pas de réponse voici que du silence de la nuit, à la longue, des voix s’élevèrent.

“Elles n’avaient rien de miraculeux, ces voix; chacun de nous en entend de semblables lorsqu’il s’isole et se recueille assez pour laisser loin derrière lui le tumulte mesquin de la vie journalière. Seulement elles parlent plus haut et plus clair aux coeurs simples, au milieu des grands bois du Nord et des campagnes désolées. Comme Maria songeait aux merveilles lointaines des cités, la première voix vint lui rappeler en chuchotant les cents douceurs méconnues du pays qu’elle voulait fuir.

“L’apparition quasi miraculeuse de la terre au printemps, après les longs mois d’hiver . . . La neige redoubtable se muant en ruisselets expiègles sur toutes les pentes; les racines surgissant, puis la mousse encore gonflée d’eau, et bientôt le sol délivé sur lequel on marche avec des regards de délice et des soupirs d’allégresse, comme en une exquise convalescence . . . Un peu plus tard les bourgeons se montraient sur les bouleaux, les aunes et les trembles, le bois de charme se convrait de fleurs roses, et après le repos forcé de l’hiver le dur travail de la terre était presque une fête; peiner du matin au soir semblait une permission bénie . . .

“Le bétail enfin délivré de l’étable entrait en courant dans les clos et se gorgeait d’herbe neuve. Toutes les créatures de l’année: les veaux, les jeunes volailles, les agnelets batifolaient au soleil et crossaient de jour en jour tout comme le foin et l’orge. Le plus pauvre des fermiers s’arrêtait parfois au milieu de sa cour ou de ses champs, les mains dans ses poches et savourait le grand contentement de savoir que la chaleur du soleil, la pluie tiède, l’alchimie généreuse de la terre,—toutes sortes de forces géantes,—travaillaient en esclaves soumises pour lui . . . pour lui.

“Après cela, c’était l’été: l’eblouissement des midis ensoleillés, la montée de l’air brûlant qui faisait vaciller l’horizon et la lisière du bois, les mouches tourbillonnant dans la lumière, et à trois cents pas de la maison les rapides et la chute,—écume blanche sur l’eau noire,—dont la seule vue répandait une fraîcheur délicieuse. Puis la moisson, le grain nourricier, s’en pilant dans les granges, l’automne, et bientôt l’hiver qui revenait . . . Mais voici que miraculeusement l’hiver ne paraissait plus détestable ni terrible: il apportait tout au moins l’intimité de la maison close, et au dehors, avec la monotonie et le silence de la neige amoncelée, la paix, une grande paix . . .

“Dans les villes il y aurait les merveilles dont Lorenzo Surprenant avait parlé, et ces autres merveilles qu’elle imaginait elle-même confusement: les larges rues illuminées, les magasins magnifique, la vie facile, presque sans labeur, emplie de petits plaisirs. Mais peut-être se lassait-on de ce vertige à la longue, et les soirs où l’on ne désirait rien que le repos et la tranquillité, où retrouver la quietude des champs et des vois, la caresse de le première brise fraîche, venant du Nord-Ouest après le coucher du soleil, et la paix infinie de la campagne s’endormant tout entière dans le silence.”

January 29, 1953

Riparius

I arrived to find that on Tuesday night at 9:30, old Charlie McCarthy had died, aged 88. Bernard, sobbing uncontrollably, ran immediately to the Carmans; Harold returned with him and stayed until Walt Lee came and took Bernard down to sleep at his house. Earlier in the evening, Pop had gone to the kitchen, then returned and sat in the rocker by the fire. Bernard had asked, “Do you feel any better, Dad?”, to which Pop answered, “Yes.” Then Bernard went back to his reading. A few minutes later Pop said: “Boy!” Then his head fell back against the top of the rocker, his eyes rolled up, and he was dead. There had been no signs beforehand, except perhaps that the day before Pop was seen lying on the sofa, his face completely covered by his hands. When asked if he felt all right he said Yes, but still wouldn’t show his face.

Bernard was really very bereaved. I thought the two didn’t get along well, judging from their remarks to one another, but Clare assures me that they were actually very closely bound. On Thursday we went to the wake—in the store-front funeral parlor in North Creek. Pop lay in a plain coffin, specially chosen by Bernard. It was at the head of an oblong room, and Pop looked extremely unnatural as a result of the embalming. There were perhaps 40 people present, one or two of whom looked much deader than the deceased, and none of whom seemed to be talking about anything concerning the death or the departed. Bernard had been given $30 by the McCarthy estate to buy a dark suit with, but he didn’t like the idea, since he’d never wear it again and since it would continuously remind him of his father. Harold had come to the rescue by lending Mac a suit which had originally been a “preaching suit” of Green’s, but which had been passed on by that rather obese reverend when his tummy outgrew it. Dressed in this suit, Bernard stood near the coffin while we waited in the anteroom. Harold was frightened, and had almost backed out completely as we were driving in the truck from Riparius. I noticed that he did what I had once done when driving for that first time to Deerfield—he went slower and slower as we approached, as though that would ease the ordeal, and even finally parked at the furthest end of town from the funeral parlor. Clare, as a Catholic, had long ago learned to accept death and even find something beautiful in it. She had been to the wake of her girlfriend’s mother, and commented afterwards that the Boston embalmers seem to be more skillful than those in North Creek. As for me, I wasn’t afraid of seeing Pop, though I had no idea how he was going to look; but I was anxious about what I should say to Bernard.

The doing proved much simpler than the contemplating. We didn’t have to wait in the anteroom more than a minute before Bernard saw us and came out smiling. He greeted Hal knowingly (Hal had been the first to whom Bernard had come after the death), and asked me when I arrived. Clare commented that he looked much better than he had (which had been quite bad indeed) and he said that he had managed to sleep three hours the night before. Tuesday night he had stayed up right through. We followed him to the coffin, and stood for a moment in silence. Hal and I were fidgety, passing our gloves and cap from one hand to the next. But Clare, again the Catholic, knew how to give outward form to her inner feeling; she knelt on the little stool provided, crossed herself, and said the proper prayer, whatever it is. We were hoping that Mac wouldn’t break down. He had said outside that he had been able to control himself mostly, just choking up every so often. Now he said, “He looks good, don’t he?” pointing to the painted face. We all answered an obedient Yes. “Only his hair,” Mac continued, “it used t’ kinda fall over his forehead, but the undertaker brushed it all back straight.” As he said this he passed his hand over the forehead and hair, but just missed touching them. At this point he did choke up, but soon recovered. Then he accompanied us back to the anteroom. “The burying’s tomorrow morning,” he told us, “’cause Earl Waddell’s in the afternoon.” None of us went to the funeral.

On my last visit, just a week ago, I had stopped in to see Charlie McCarthy, exchanged a few words, and left. As I was driving to the post office I remember thinking that it was too bad I hadn’t asked him to tell me about the old log drives. Oh well, I thought, next time. A few days later he was dead. On that same visit I went to see Earl Waddell about the George Davis place. He, too, was dead when I returned yesterday. He had gone to the grain store to get some feed. As he picked up the first bag he simply fell over on his back, the life in him completely flown.

The bitter and the sweet were mixed. Hal told me that the electricity will probably come free, since the whole Millington clan has decided to hook on to the line. Also, Curly, the Carmans, and I spent a nice evening of talk, even though the burden of the conversation was on the hardships of the Adirondack life. The interesting point was Hal’s, that you don’t ever own anything. Even when your farm is all paid up, you pay “rent” each year in the form of taxes, and if you can’t meet just one year’s payment your home is sold out from under you. Curly said that it was all because of socialism, and I agreed, but probably gave myself a subversive label by adding that socialism is inevitable, and that the real cause is that our country is too big and too complex. You don’t have to preach distributionism to these fellows, for they’re distributed all right (!), but you do have to convince them that their woes are not caused simply by a group of “foreigners” who are giving our country over to the Russians.

January 31, 1953

Rochester, c/o Mrs. E. K. Simon, 1 West Avenue.

Alone again in this room, and now here for good (2 years and not a day more). I forget to take my galoshes off downstairs, and I got too much water on the bathroom floor—this is what I must learn to put up with from Mrs. Simon and boarding house life. On the very first day I made a discovery that will be disastrous to my finances: a well-stocked bookstore selling out everything at 20% off! Today I limited myself to Craxin’s book on modern art and to a little distributionist tract by Aldous Huxley. But I shall go back!

Sunday, February 8, 1953

Took Seashore test yesterday: a physiological exam in intensity, pitch, time, rhythm, consonance, and memory. But I am still having difficulties finding practice facilities. I can play at the Unitarian church until 5:00, but I must work until 4:30. I went to the Unitarian service this morning and found it lifeless. The choir was magnificent, however, since most of it comes from Eastman.

Nice letter from Dave Tyack.

I think often of Margo and wish she could sleep with me here in this big double bed. Meeting on blind date, the farm fiasco, lunch in automat when I made her pay, talk of Rimbaud and art, with a stranger at the table; ice skating; Toscanini; Howard Johnson’s; the strange people; Zero Mostel; the TV script; carriage ride in Central Park for $6.00. I didn’t kiss her till the very end. She posed for nude photographs.

The hospital nurses are uncommonly beautiful and very sexy in their tight form-fitting uniforms. But they are also very businesslike; more interested in doctors than orderlies. One of the regulars is, I think, a Lesbian, judging how she pinches the other girls; her exaggerated friendliness; her fatness.

I haven’t practiced since Tuesday, but I’ve done 13 pages so far on a short story—or better: a chapter from an unwritten novel—about Rusty and the mud. Writing is great fun. If I attempt a novel here, it would perhaps be better to try to fashion something from the summer experiences instead of Riparius scandals, which I know only second-hand.

Finished Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees. His craftsmanship is obvious; yet the novel doesn’t attempt enough to really come off.

I mentioned to Miss Newell my desire for technical training, perhaps as a surgical technician. She says in 2 or 3 months they will consider it. The orderly job is tolerable; at least it doesn’t revolve around bedpans. But I explained to her how much more worthwhile the two years would be for all concerned if I could be given some definite skill usable in the future and needed in war relief.

In inquiring about other rooming houses I have met up with several old ladies. One forced me to listen to her life history, her musical “compositions,” and ended by giving me evangelical leaflets. Another told me to keep my mind clean and I’d live to ninety! She also said (not knowing that I was one) that she didn’t like Jews because they always act superior. A third was a nice Catholic woman who out of a Christian spirit would have listened to my banging on her living-room piano every day. Out of Christian spirit, I refused, but may take the piano if I can find another place. In these houses there are many lonely men who lead lives of quiet desperation—unsuccessful this-and-thats now existing as post office workers, theater ushers, etc., with liquor and perhaps prostitutes as their only companionship.

Friday, February 13, 1953

More widows and sundry boarding house keepers. On Joseph Avenue, in a shack, I met up with a 300-pound woman, so heavy she could hardly move, her daughter, practically an imbecile, and husband, as thin as a beanpole, and almost totally deaf. For $6.00 per week they offered me an upstairs room—a shambles, rather—and use of the piano. If the piano got too annoying, Mrs. Big told me, she would simply turn up the television. No sale!

Television has made unbelievable inroads judging from the homes I visited. Every laborer has a set and turns it on as soon as he returns from work. Then the family sits silently in front of the screen, night after night, until they go to bed. There was a prize fight the other night for which probably fifty million people had ringside seats. Fortunately, I abstained.

Then there was Mrs. Keys at 106 Meigs. She greeted me dressed, or rather wrapped in, a coarse burlap covering, full of patches and holes. For shoes she had some leather flaps, held together by adhesive tape. In this costume she was about to go out into the snow in search of a large smelly cat, her only companion. We talked for several hours. She was a musician, teacher at Eastman, painter, interior decorator, aviator, pottery maker, etc., the widow of a wealthy lawyer, very pretty in her day, I should judge; a liberal in religion; objects to literalness and hypocrisy; won’t let anyone in the house who smokes or drinks. A Presbyterian, but presently studying Hebrew at Jewish Sunday School, at age of 73. She had just finished painting most of the house, but complained that she couldn’t move the large pieces of furniture. Used to have three servants. Now lives in a dingy mess, completely alone. Has a grand piano given to her by George Eastman. A sweet old woman, living a rich life of study and work.

Sunday, February 15, 1953

Attended Quaker Meeting and was invited to dine with a young married social worker who had been in C.P.S. The reception given me again points up what extraordinary people the Quakers are. The Meeting is held in the home of Mrs. Fish, which she gave to the society. During the week she provides open house for neighborhood children. I got a room on Plymouth Avenue South and had the piano moved over, but it wouldn’t go up the stairs. Now it sits in the hall. If I can find one or two others with whom to share Mrs. Keys’s flat, I’ll go there. It’s $69 per month and very attractive.

Bayard Rustin told at Holiday Hills how once in the south a Negro, pursued by a lynch mob, sought refuge in a home. The mob knocked angrily and demanded that the culprit be given up to them, or they would come in forcibly. The owner of the home opened the door calmly and said, “I’m ready. Take me.” The mob, taken completely by surprise by this act of sacrificial love, turned sheepishly and departed.

At the hospital, entirely on company time, I finished a collection of magnificently written short stories by Caldwell. They have terseness, while what I write is all over-padded and full of superfluities.

No word from Margo.

February 16, 1953

Dad and Mother telephoned. It was the familiar story: righteous indignation that I hadn’t written in over a week. (Actually, I sent a card off yesterday, and had only held off because I thought I’d be able to include a new address.) This situation is really intolerable. I told them that I refused to be tied to a schedule of writing, and would write when I had something to report or when the spirit moved me. Of course this was entirely unacceptable at the other end and merely indicated a lack of interest or love. The one thing I know for certain is that I must be on my own entirely. It is one reason I came this far from New York. At my new address, if I ever find one, I shall not have a phone, and will then no longer be subject to these calls that were perhaps justified when I was at summer camp or even at college, but now are entirely out of place. I am very much tempted now to refuse all assistance and to pay for my own lessons, even though Dad said I should send the Eastman bills to him.

February 17, 1953

A long, thoughtful letter from Margo. She is always full of surprises. Now she wants to give up writing—not entirely, but as a “commercial” or professional career.

March 10, 1953

Fourth finger of right hand still in a splint, result of falling asleep at the wheel while returning from Syracuse AFSC conference several weeks ago. I left Syracuse at 11 p.m., found the right road but went in the wrong direction as far as Rome. Returning to Syracuse, with just ten miles to go, I bounced off a stump and landed in a ditch. The whole front end was ripped off, but I suffered no injury other than the sprained finger. A farmer and family woke up and made up a bed for me, then gave me a hearty breakfast. The younger son sat dreamily at the table, little interested in his food, but raptly intent on the birdhouse he had built outside. As soon as a bird alighted, the boy rapidly identified the species. The man and wife seemed not the least bit disturbed at being wakened at 3:30 a.m. They got up as usual at 5:00, although it was Sunday morning, and had great fun trying to pull my truck out with their tractor. A winch had to be secured, and I sold the corpse to the tow-man for $75, including chains, tools, rope, etc. The next day I bought a bicycle, and am healthier and richer for it.

Another letter from Margo, unexpected. Now she had regained confidence in her writing and feels that she can enter objectively into the lives of other people, thus being able to find subject matter outside of her own personal experience. She described beautifully the New York Philharmonic Stravinsky concert, which I had heard on the radio. I hope she listened to Cantelli last Sunday. He played Beethoven’s 7th more electrifyingly than I have ever heard it.

Finished Gregg’s powerful Power of Nonviolence. He quotes some interesting lines from Whitman (from “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice”):

Be not dishearten’d—affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet;

Those who love each other shall become invincible—

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?

Or by an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?

Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.

March 15, 1953

Last night I introduced “A Time for Greatness” to an FOR audience and a group of exchange high-school students, then was invited out to West Webster by Rev. Horton to introduce it to his church group (pitifully small). My entire sympathy with this film and especially with Brinton’s book, 300 Years of Quakerism, tell me that I an unwise staying outside of Friends’ membership. The Friends have all the elements that I would want in religion: mysticism, rationality (as regards the Bible, etc., and the historical Jesus), social conscience. Unitarianism leans too much toward the rational and is thereby sterilized of ardor.

An acquaintance from the Young Friends, Dirk Spruyt, talks like Dave Bevington and even has Dave’s big head. He joined the Swarthmore Meeting several years ago and is now at the University of Rochester’s Medical School. (Connaissance de Paris?)

I am reading Coghill’s “translation” of the Canterbury Tales.

I must work, work, work, work. Enough drifting. I must learn to do something: concentrate, eliminate, narrow down!

“Aspiring Ape” by Sir Osbert Sitwell, in England Reclaimed and Other Poems:

I love in man the ape, and not the angel,

The transience that clothes abiding bones!

Kin to the sun and earth, to green things growing,

He’s not content—oh, torment of time flowing!—

With dusty chanting before timeless thrones.

To man, the ape has given love and courage,

Dexterity and patience, wit and fire,

A nameless aching of the heart with wonder,

That humble, idiot longing to aspire

Which blossoms in the arts’ vast world of thunder.

Where did the angel lurk in Helen of Troy!

(The monkey’s skull was structure for her beauty.)

What does the angel bring for our fulfilling,

Except a sense of righteousness in killing,

And brag of abnegation and of duty?

To man, the monkey brings an animal warmth,

The lovely gift of life not everlasting,

And talk and laughter and the seeing eyes;

So let no man this ancestor despise,

Who brings the arts, the customs and the trades,

And when he kills, talks never of crusades!

March 22, 1953

Aldous Huxley makes this comment in his The Perennial Philosophy:

“Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. But it also got, along with other unanticipated by-products, the Thirty Years’ War, capitalism, and the first rudiments of modern Germany. ‘If we wish,’ Dean Inge has recently written, ‘to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought upon the world . . . I am more and more convinced that the moral evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great but Martin Luther. . . . It [Lutheranism] worships a God who is neither just nor merciful. . . . The Law of Nature, which ought to be the court of appeal against unjust authority, is identified [by Luther] with the existing order of society, to which absolute obedience is due.’”

This observation is particularly interesting in light of Tawney’s work, and of Northrop’s belief that every action of a society can be traced ultimately to the society’s metaphysic. I think that a good case could be made for the connection not only of capitalism (Tawney) with the rise of Protestantism, but also of materialism in other spheres, mass war and brutality, state-worship, etc. The all-importance of Faith in Lutheranism, of Predestination in Calvinism, of literal adherence to the Bible or even to a single verse, by the small fundamentalist schism groups, and, at the other extreme, the overly rational humanistic religion of the liberals, seem to provide ample sub-strata for the ugly weight of present-day “secular” practices and beliefs.

March 29, 1953

1199 Park Avenue, Rochester

“At certain periods of our life we long to stop the inexorable ticking hand of time and mediate upon our whole destiny. But alas, in the turmoil of today it is well nigh impossible to drop out of the line and halt awhile. Our sense of honor and duty forbids us to be laggard in the fierce race. . . . Today our duty to the state forbids us to renounce the burden of life in the world, and everywhere youth is being educated in the idea that it is selfish and unpatriotic to relinquish obligations and retire from the struggle. The tyranny of the state and society will soon deprive us of all the individual’s greatest rights. We must live amid the noise and shouts of the world, and our houses must be open for all the world to see. Soon it will no longer be allowed to possess a secret room closed by a hidden key, for then the guardians of law and order would cry out that it was Bluebeard’s closet. ‘He is like a cat that walks alone,’ they will cry, ‘and we are sure that he is a suspicious character.’ And yet never was there a time when humanity more needed its moments of silent meditation. The greatest reformer of today will be the man who founds the League of Silence.”—Walter Starkie, in “Spanish Raggle Taggle.”

Toynbee (The World and the West): “The truth is that, in offering [Asians] a secularized version of our Western civilization we have been offering them a stone instead of a bread, while the Russians, in offering them communism as well as technology, have been offering them bread of a sort—gritty black bread . . . but still an edible substance that contains in it some grain of nutriment for the spiritual life without which Man cannot live.” This is exactly what the Michaëlshoeve director told me this summer: that European youth look first to America for a way out of devastation, but finding there only technology, materialism, and money, reject these things for that which is always more appealing to youth, ideological and idealistic plans, offered up in abundance by the communists.

I prepared and conducted a discussion at Young Friends on “The relation between instinct, reason, conscience, and the Inner Light.” I worked these topics up as parts of a gradual conversion process on different levels.

On Wednesday night Bob Horton drove us down to Olean, where he gave his excellent work camp lecture for a Methodist Center church supper. Good food, but such Fraternal Order nonsense: singing Down By the Old Mill Stream and similar items; the “election” of new trustees, which, as one girl commented, was just like in Russia. A bloated politician arose with a prepared speech, jokes and all, saying that two of the previous trustees would be glad to succeed themselves, and Cyrus Hill would be just the man to replace the third. Other nominations were called for, of course, but were not offered. The congregation responded by electing the slate unanimously.

April 16, 1953

Muriel Lester of the International FOR, speaking at Batavia:

In case of great catastrophe because of war, the white race will die out while the orientals, accustomed to starvation, will survive. In India, at certain times, the water in which rice is boiled, taken once every three days, is the only nourishment. Even if we “win” World War III, Europe, Japan, etc. will be so impoverished that the surviving communists will have ripe ground for sowing their seeds of discontent all over again. Why do idealistic students become stodgy, reactionary adults? Because they have not been disciplined to believe that God is stronger than Mammon. Read objective news reports, what the people think, and not just what prime ministers think. Cf. World Interpreter (De Vere Allen), Wilton, Conn.; Between the Lines, Demerest, NJ; Peace News, 3 Blackstock Road, N4 London. We are so sensitized that when a person does a Christian act (e.g., peace pilgrims, Cos) we either laugh or put him in prison. Need for understanding of non-Western peoples. We often boast of “our Western religion” but Jesus was an oriental and many oriental non-Christians follow Jesus better than we do. Need for training in nonviolence—body, mind, and spirit. Conquering of bitterness, resentment, self-pity. Four Indian teenagers decided to unfurl the national flag, which was forbidden. They informed the authorities and were met on the day by a battalion of British soldiers, young boys taken by conscription away from their homes, boys who would hesitate to show cruelty towards their pet cats or dogs but who might be commanded to kill these Indian patriots. The British officers, seeing that the presence of the soldiers was not going to stop the boys, begged them to have pity on the British soldiers, who would have to shoot them. The four said they would have to go ahead but would hold no resentment against the soldiers. Two were killed. And our people place respectability, good business, conformity above Truth. This is utter cowardice. Read the gospels as a way of life. The price we have to pay for peace is economic and social. There will be no peace while there are such terrible contrasts in living standards, social classes. While we make atom bombs, can we say “our” Father? He was also the father of the slain people of Hiroshima. Can we ask “give us our daily bread” without also asking for bread for India? We must remind ourselves every hour that God is and that He is greater than all the evils. The Communists have a large army of volunteer workers, much larger than that of the Christian Church. With all the money and nice churches in the world, we will not bring Heaven on Earth until we identify ourselves with the poor, the sinners, even with communists and atheists. Christians have to have faith that Christianity will work better than communism. 50% of Russians go to church, despite strong government pressure against religion. When Christians are persecuted, they grow in strength. American foreign policy often plays right into the hands of the communists. “Help Asians fight Asians.” Think what the effect of this must be in Asia, compounded with our throwing Chiang Kai-shek back into the laps of the multitudes who hate him, just as if some power had set up George III to rule the Colonies immediately after the Revolution. Asians think naturally: “They want us to kill each other, and yet they say they’re Christians. If that’s what Christianity is, we will be better off with Communism.” In India, 10 cents can keep a man alive for 10 days.

April 18, 1953

One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures,

One Reality, all comprehensive, contains itself within all realities,

The One moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water,

And all moons in the waters are embraced within the One Moon.

The Dharma-body [the Absolute] of all the Buddhas enters into my own being.

And my own being is found in union with theirs. . . .

The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame;

Like space it knows no boundaries

Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness.

It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it;

You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it;

And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way.

You remain silent and it speaks; you speak and it is dumb;

The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.

(from Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy: Yung-chia Ta-shih.)

April 19, 1953

Tom Forsythe writes a letter of distress: that he is losing faith in the Quaker testimonies, that he does not think he will be able to stand the sterility, pedantry, and jealous competition of the academic world; that he is interested in living “the intellectual life on a farm.” Tom seems to be completely in a dither, and in need of some reassurance and help. I replied right away.

David Lurie seems to call up and want to go to a movie every time I look forward to sitting still and writing or reading. Then he is always planning great escapades with women, climaxing of course in “a piece of ass” as he puts it. Of course they never take place. I find that he has great difficulty even getting a date. He thinks that everyone from a small town is stupid, that all “Papists” are—well—why say more: “Papists” is sufficient. And he lives under the illusion that rationality can solve and understand everything. I have tried very gently to dispel these illusions, but this is rather difficult to do solely through conversation and rational argument.

I was elected vice-chairman of the House of Peace.

Reading: Laubach’s “Wake Up or Blow Up,” which I just lent to Dotty Mills, plus “Aideen MacLennon,” a poorly (very poorly) written novel about Cos in CPS and mental institutions. I could certainly do much better. Why don’t I!!!! As I explained to Pete in a long letter, I am getting so mixed up in committee meetings, social activities, etc., that I haven’t had a chance to write anything since I left Mrs. Simon’s furnished room almost two months ago.

Steve Baran wrote from B.U. He is doing pre-medical work. John Harvey is in the army at Fort Dix, Tom Rogers does sports reporting for the NY Times, Pete Flemming is in the Navy, Les Ward, Carrington, Dick Button are at Harvard Law, Niel Hastie is at Episcopal Seminary, Laci at B.U. Medical School.

Nancy Hosenpflug played for me last night. I am so angry that I dropped piano and wasted all those college years with so much dribble and compartmentalized literature that I could read for myself later on. But the piano—now I can do nothing on it. Well, I have started lessons again. Who knows what will come of them?

April 26, 1953

“Our civilization is not only a leisure-seeking, but a masturbative society. Pleasure is relentlessly exploited for itself, without regard for the purpose, the original intent of our varied appetites.” (Wilson in Aideen MacLennon, a horribly written novel about CO experience in CPS.)

Spent yesterday with Norman Wilson, Byron Fox, and others at Syracuse, planning next year’s activities at New York State Peace Council.

Finished short story about Mac’s axe murder of Charlie Gagnon’s car.

Long intellectual letter from Margo.

One of the nurses at the hospital possesses a madonna-like face: the most spiritual type of beauty. I have admired her from a distance many times, but never got to speak to her until last Friday. I came for a patient and she started preparing the chart. Then she discovered that I was after another patient from the one she had thought. The first words I heard issue from this madonna were not exactly madonna-like: “Judas Priest,” she said, “what a hell of a mix-up!”

Rufus Jones: Spirit in Man:

❡ There is a stage in this upward climb of our strange Jacob’s ladder of spirit when we can see and can enjoy realities which to a certain degree are spiritual in their own sovereign right. I mean of course the intrinsic values of Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Love. A mind which can see and appreciate those realities has already transcended the realm of time and space and matter and sense and the biological order, and belongs already to an intrinsic, that is, an eternal order. These ideal values are the unmoved movers which shape our destiny; and in the realm of spirit they are eternal, i.e., they are time-transcending realities.

❡ Experienced time involves a comprehensive system of experience with a backward-looking aspect and a forward-looking aspect in the pulse of a living present. . . . In felt duration-time, past, present, and future blend into a momentous duration which we feel going forward, not on a measured dial, but with inward significance. . . . Significance is what counts here rather than length. The mind in great moments of decision seems to be operating as a whole rather than as a thing of parts—seriatim. The conclusion, the decision, often seems to roll out ready made, as though in this vital duration-time our accumulated wisdom suddenly functioned as a unit, without intermediate steps. . . . This comprehensive system of time-experience in us is utterly unique and cannot be explained in terms of geological or biological or physiological processes. It is known and can be known only in terms of the inner experience of persons of the spirit type.

❡ There is no use thinking of the possibility of immortal life unless we can discover something in man that is unique—viz. this comprehensive system of time-experience.

❡ If we are to have values of the intrinsic and eternal type, we must take by faith as real the kind of world in which they can be, and that is an Over-World of higher order than the one we see and touch and describe. If we are to have an immortal destiny there must be some such over-world to which we may belong and in which we may find our fulfillment of life.

❡ If our problems are ever to be solved, we must begin with a universe which includes mind—mind and nature in mutual and reciprocal correspondence. It is not a spectator mind I am talking about here—a mind observing an outside show that goes on unaffected by the peep-hold observer. It is mind that has emerged out of the process of Nature and is kindred throughout with the world of deepest reality and is in give-and-take relations to it.

❡ We are already participating in this Over-World when we are immersed in the experience of the intrinsic values of Beauty, or of moral Goodness which ought to be, or of Truth which is eternally, inevitably true, or of Love for Love’s sake. These are all typical realities which come into view only when there is a co-operating mind of what I have called the spirit-type. Only an interpretative mind, endowed with imagination and supplied with creative forms of judgment and appreciation, can create and enjoy Beauty, or have the conviction of Ought, or experience the necessary character of Truth, or love with a Love that suffers long, never lets go, is not provoked, endures and abides when everything else is “done away.” Not only do these supreme realities involve a peculiar type of mind of the subjective side; they equally involve a peculiar kind of world on the objective side. The Nature that presents the occasions for Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love is a Nature no longer exactly describable and explainable as a congeries of atoms and molecules and vibrations. It is a Nature deeply interfused with Spirit—Coherence, Order, Significance, and Meaning. It is a sacramental universe through which Deep calleth unto Deep and significant realities of the impalpable and intangible sort “break in” on us and answer to our deepest being. We reach through the veil of what we call matter and are in a higher World which is kin to our minds and to which, as great amphibians, we really belong. In fact we lie open-windowed to it and partake of it. This Over-World of Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love is as truly and obviously beyond the welter and storms of the processes of matter and the basic stuff of the universe as our minds are above and beyond the swirl of the brain paths which somehow correlate with minds and appear to be the occasion for thought.

❡ We need first of all to begin with the Intelligence that does the observing rather than with atoms or molecules or genes or vibrations which are too often taken as ultimate. We must come back to the native land of our own observing and organized mind, and start with the supremacy of the Person. The grandeur of the Jungfrau or of the Matterhorn is not to be mistaken for the sublimity of the mind of the person who feels and appreciates the grandeur of these Alpine mountains. If we could properly enlarge the empire of our spiritual estate, we should recover a new installment of faith in an eternal destiny.

❡ If consciousness were nothing but a function, a secretion, of the physical brain, the hope of immortality would receive a heavy body blow. But the evidence for a theory of brain secretion is meager and slender. Certain mind processes undoubtedly correlate with certain specific brain processes, but we are completely in the dark about the ultimate nature of matter—it may be much more spiritual at its core than we now suspect—and we are completely in the dark as to the real origin of consciousness, mind, spirit, as we know it from within, and its relation to matter.

❡ On the contrary, there are high intimations of immortality. Every stage of the life of a person carries a Beyond within it. Life itself of our kind has a principle of advance in the onward flow of it. The World that has given us our convictions of eternal values, the World that has impressed us with its Beauty and its Ends of Good, its Truth, and its Love, gives us ground to expect that there is more where that comes from. And our ineradicable belief in the final intelligibility of that World sends our minds “on loft,” as Chaucer would say, with a profound conviction that the gates of the future are open.

❡ The Universe is essentially, as Keats in one of his letters said it was—”a realm of soul-making,” a sacramental system for the nurture of persons, rightly fashioned persons, with creative and responsive spirits, co-operative with the Spirit of the Whole.

❡ A sacrament means a spiritual reality breaking through a material medium.

❡ Our famous word “individual” means something that resists “division.”

❡ “With all your science, can you tell one how, and whence it is, that light comes into the soil?”—Thoreau (Journals).

❡ “When the mind returns into itself form the confusions of sense, as it does when it reflects, it passes into another region than the sensuous one, the region of that which is pure and everlasting, immortal and unchanging; and feeling itself kindred thereto, it dwells there under its own control and has rest from its wanderings, and being in communion with the unchanging is itself unchanging.” (Plato, Phaedo 79C)

Margo: “One can feel oneself part of something bigger—working in phase with the things that Be, as you said, without losing oneself in them. I think the ability to lose oneself is something that belongs to certain moments, not to be embraced as a way of life. When contemplating beauty, as in the poem [Emerson’s “Each and All”], one forgets one’s small self and is only aware of this tremendous force around one. In ecstasy, in passion, in religion the same is true. But one has to be something other than a part of a whole, something more than an engulfed microcosm. One can be oneself, a distinct entity, and live in relation to something bigger. Relationship means being a part of, but also a whole within this something. (I’m having an awful time with terms!) I don’t think a person can be happy or feel at all significant without a sense of self and a certain appreciation of what he is.”

John Rutherford wants to marry Nancy Hosenpflug and take her back to West Virginia, where he will work for the Carbide Company. He wants her, in short, to give up her career. She, on the other hand, expects to take a Masters at Juilliard, and then go on a Fulbright to study in Europe. John, I’m afraid, would make her a poor husband, as he is quite indifferent to music. After they get tired of their rub-fests and tickling, etc., there will be very little left.

April 27, 1953

From Aldous Huxley’s marvelously written novel Point Counter-Point:

❡ Had he ever really been happy with Marjorie—as happy, at any rate, as he had imagined he was going to be, as he ought to have been in the circumstances? It should have been like “Epipsychidion”; but it wasn’t—perhaps because he had too consciously wanted it to be, because he had deliberately tried to model his feelings and their life together on Shelley’s poetry.

“One shouldn’t take art too literally.” He remembered what his brother-in-law, Philip Quarles, had said one evening, when they were talking about poetry. “Particularly where love is concerned.”

“Not even if it’s true?” Walter had asked.

“It’s apt to be too true. Unadulterated, like distilled water. When truth is nothing but the truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth. That’s why art moves you—precisely because it’s unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life. Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there’s no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrapt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure—chemically pure, I mean,” he had added with a laugh,—”not morally.”

April 28, 1953

I must re-write the ending to the car-smashing story. Have McDonald return to Farrell’s several weeks later, say, after black eye has disappeared, and there he finds another would-be helper, whom he accosts with the same line as before: “Barton and Gagnon both just up’d and left because I figures a man deserves one or two days’ rest a year!”

More Huxley:

❡ Love, he had then believed (for he was twenty-two at the time, ardently pure, with the adolescent purity of sexual desires turned inside out, just down from Oxford and stuffed with poetry and lucubrations of philosophers and mystics), love was talk, love was spiritual communion and companionship. That was real love. The sexual business was only an irrelevancy—unavoidable, because unfortunately human beings had bodies, but to be kept as far as possible in the background. Ardently pure with the ardour of young desires taught artificially to burn on the side of the angels, he had admired that refined and quiet purity which, in Marjorie, was the product of a natural coldness, a congenitally low vitality.

❡ “One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts,” Philip Quarles used to say. “What’s the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn’t the rationalization of your feelings? If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.”

❡ “People talk of the tribute vice pays to virtue,” John Bidkeke went on incorrigibly. “But everything’s permitted nowadays—there’s no more need of moral hypocrisy. There’s only intellectual curiosity now. The tribute philistinism pays to art, what? Just look at them all paying it—in pious grimaces and religious silence!”

❡ Lord Edward preferred to sit at home and read, vaguely, desultorily, a little of everything. But even reading seemed to him unsatisfactory. The best that could be said of it was that it kept his mind from brooding and killed time. But what was the good of that? Killing time with a book was not intrinsically much better than killing pheasants and time with a gun.

❡ Illidge knew that he was ugly and looked undistinguished. And knowing, he liked to remind himself of the unpleasant fact, like a man with an aching tooth who is forever fingering the source of his pain just to make sure it is still painful.

❡ “A great artist,” [Burlap] went on aloud, “is a man who synthesizes all experience. The cynic sets out by denying half the facts—the fact of the soul, the fact of ideals, the fact of God. And yet we’re aware of spiritual facts just as directly and indubitably as we’re aware of physical facts.”

❡ She took it for granted that he should be bolder with the pen than face to face. All his love—all of it, at any rate, that was articulate and all of it that, in the days of his courtship, was in the least ardent—was in his letters. The arrangement suited Marjorie perfectly. . . . She liked the idea of love; what she did not like was lovers, except at a distance and in imagination.

❡ All the same, it would be good to know what it’s like to believe in something to the point of being prepared to kill people or get yourself killed. It would be an experience . . .

❡ She took a perverse pleasure in the retrospective disparagement of her felicity.

❡ [Philip’s] intelligence—that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything including the emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by. Once, when he had been telling her about Koebler’s book on the apes, “You’re like a monkey on the superhuman side of humanity,” she said. “Almost human, like those poor chimpanzees. The only difference is that they’re trying to think up with their feelings and instincts, and you’re trying to feel down with your intellect. . . .”

❡ But of course,” Molly went on, “intelligence ought never to marry intelligence. That’s why Jean is always threatening to divorce me. He says I’m too stimulating. ‘Tu ne m’ennuies pas assez’, he says; and that what he needs is une femme sedative. And I believe he’s really right.”

❡ “Blake was civilized,” Rampion insisted, “civilized. Civilization is harmony and completeness. Reason, feeling, instinct, the life of the body—Blake managed to include and harmonize everything. Barbarism is being lop-sided. You can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as of the body. A barbarian of the soul and the feelings as well as of sensuality. Christianity made us barbarians of the soul and now science is making us barbarians of the intellect. Blake was the last civilized man.”

❡ He knew, of course, that she liked and admired him; but to know and to be told are different things.

❡ He remembered those lines of Walt Whitman about the animals: “They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.” To be a perfect animal and a perfect human—that was the ideal.

❡ “She had no right to bring me up like that,” he said. “Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree. No right.”

❡ “Your only alternatives are promiscuity or asceticism. Two forms of death. Why, the Christians themselves understood phallism a great deal better than this godless generation. What’s that phrase in the marriage service? ‘With my body I thee worship.’ Worshipping with the body—that’s the genuine phallism. And if you imagine it has anything to do with the unimpassioned civilized promiscuity of our advanced young people, you’re very much mistaken indeed.”

❡ “But there is an insight that sees deeper than the mere facts.” “Deeper insight” was Burlap’s pet name for his own opinion.

❡ “Well, as a matter of fact,” said Philip, “all these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. . . . Each sees a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is look with all those eyes at once.”

❡ The amoeba, when it finds a prey, flows around it, incorporates it, and oozes on. There was something amoeboid about Philip Quarles’s mind. It was like a sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling into every crevice, of filling every mould, and having engulfed, having filled, or flowing on toward other obstacles, other receptacles, leaving the first empty and dry. At different times in his life and even at the same moment he had filled the most various moulds. He had been a cynic and also a mystic, a humanitarian and also a contemptuous misanthrope; he had tried to live the life of detached and stoical reason and another time he had aspired to the unreasonableness of natural and uncivilized existence. The choice of moulds depended at any given moment on the books he was reading, the people he was associated with. . . . The moulds were emptied as easily as they had been filled, the obstacles were passed by. But the essential liquidness that flowed where it would, the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity—that persisted and to that his loyalty was due.

❡ Love produced a desire to be loved. Desire to be loved begot a strained precarious belief that he was loved. The belief that he was loved strengthened his love. And so, self-intensified, the circular process began again.

❡ “I must resent being condemned to extinction because these imbeciles and scientists and moralists and spiritualists and technicians and literary and political uplifters and all the rest of them haven’t the sense to see that man must live as a man, not as a monster of conscious braininess and soulfulness.”

❡ Spandrell: “Work’s no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. . . . No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big businessmen are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they’d realize that they simply weren’t there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that’s all. . . . No wonder they daren’t stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren’t. It’s a risk they haven’t the courage to take.

❡ “I like to think of the bureaucrats . . . Scribbling away, scribbling from morning till night in order that we may live in freedom and comfort. Scribble, scribble—the result is the British Empire. What a comfort to live in a world where one can delegate everything tiresome, from governing to making sausages, to somebody else.”

❡ She re-opened the book in the middle. “Every English liberty has been paid for by a new slavery. The destruction of feudalism strengthened the crown. At the Reformation we disposed of Papal infallibility, but we saddled ourselves with the divine right of kings. Cromwell smashed the divine right of kings, but imposed the tyranny of the landowners and the middle classes. The tyranny of the landowners and middle classes is rapidly being destroyed, in order that we may have the dictatorship of the proletariat. A new infallibility, not of the Pope, but of the majority, bas been propounded—an infallibility which we are compelled by law to believe in.”

❡ Everything’s incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it.

❡ A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problems. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations on any number of different moods. Another way: the novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects—emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical. . .

❡ “If you want to get rid of industrialism, you’ve got to get back to where you started. That’s to say, you’ve got to slaughter half the existing number of men and women.” . . . “But the next war and the next revolution will make [that] only too practical.” “Possibly. But one shouldn’t count on wars and revolutions. Because, if you count of them happening, they certainly will happen.” “They’ll happen,” said Rampion, “whether you count on them or not. Industrial progress means over-production, means the need for getting new markets, means international rivalry, means war. And mechanical progress means more specialization and standardization of work, means more ready-made and unindividual amusements, means diminution of initiative and creativeness, means more intellectualism and the progressive atrophy of all the vital and fundamental things in human nature, means increased boredom and restlessness, means finally a kind of individual madness that can only result in social revolution. Count on them or not, wars and revolutions are inevitable, if things are allowed to go on as they are at present.” . . . “The root of the evil’s in the individual psychology; so it’s there, in the individual psychology, that you’d have to begin. The first step would be to make people live dualistically, in two compartments. In one compartment as industrialized worker, in the other as human beings. As idiots and machines for eight hours of every twenty-four and real human beings for the rest.” “Don’t they do that already?” “Of course they don’t. They live as idiots and machines all the time, at work and in their leisure. Like idiots and machines, but imagining they’re living like civilized humans, even like gods. The first thing to do is to make them admit that they are idiots and machines during working hours. ‘Our civilization being what it is’—this is what you’ll have to say to them—’you’ve got to spend eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It’s very disagreeable, I know. It’s humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You’ve got to do it; otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we’ll all starve. . . . Don’t be deceived by the canting rogues who talk of the sanctity of labour and the Christian service that businessmen do their fellows. It’s all lies. . . . Don’t try to cheer yourself up by pretending the nasty mechanical job is a noble one. It isn’t; and the only result of saying and believing that it is will be to lower your humanity to the level of the dirty work. . . . Admit it’s dirty, hold your nose, and do it for eight hours, and then concentrate on being a real human being in your leisure. A real complete human being. Not a newspaper reader, not a jazzer, not a radio fan. The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in you hours of work. But don’t let them. Make the effort of being human.”

❡ “The only thing they’re all agreed on—Tories, Liberals, Socialists, Bolsheviks—is the intrinsic excellence of the industrial stink and the necessity of standardizing and specializing every trace of genuine manhood and womanhood out of the human race.”

❡ “It isn’t a question of myah personalities,” he pronounced. “It’s a question of general principles.” “I can’t see any difference,” retorted Gladys, abolishing at one stroke all the solemn pretensions of all the philosophers and moralists, all the religious leaders and reformers and Utopia makers from the beginning of human time.

❡ “The chief difference between us, alas, is that his opinions are lived and mine, in the main, only thought. Like him, I mistrust intellectualism, but intellectually, I disbelieve in the adequacy of any scientific or philosophical theory, any abstract moral principle, but on scientific, philosophical, and abstract-moral grounds. The problem for me is to transform a detached intellectual skepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living.”

❡ “The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive, and emotional part of a man doesn’t contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable. The low-brow of our modern industrialized society has all the defects of the intellectual and none of his redeeming qualities. The non-intellectuals I’m think of are very different beings.”

❡ “I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life—the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism—is its easiness. It’s the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life. It’s incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one’s fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one’s friends and lovers, one’s wife and children. . . . The intellectual life is child’s play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children—and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don’t die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it’s much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man.

April 30, 1953

❡ In two hours the muscles of the heart contract and relax, contract again and relax only eight thousand times. The earth travels less than an eighth of a million miles along its orbit. And the prickly pear has had time to invade only another hundred acres of Australian territory. Two hours are as nothing. The time to listen to the Ninth Symphony and a couple of the posthumous quartets, to fly from London to Paris, to transfer a luncheon from the stomach to the small intestine, to read Macbeth, to die of snake bite or earn one and eight pence as a charwoman. No more. But to Illidge, as he sat waiting, with the dead body lying there behind the screen, waiting for the darkness, they seemed unending.

❡ “ . . . Very brief and neat and complete. And, my God, what a horror. No body, no contact with the material world, no contact with human beings except through the intellect, no love . . .” “We’ve changed that a little since 1901,” said Philip, smiling. “Not really. You’ve admitted promiscuous fornication, that’s all. But not love, not the natural contact and flow, not the renunciation of mental self-consciousness, not the abandonment to instinct. No, no. You stick to your conscious will. Everything must be expessément voulue all the time. And the connections must be purely mental. And life must be lived, not as though it were life in the world of living people, but as though it were solitary recollection and fancy and meditation. An endless masturbation, like Proust’s horrible great book. That’s the higher life. Which is the euphemistic name of incipient death.”

❡ “If men went about satisfying their instinctive desires only when they genuinely felt them, like the animals you’re so contemptuous of, they’d behave a damned sight better than the majority of civilized human beings behave today. It isn’t natural appetite and spontaneous instinctive desire that makes men so beastly—no ‘beastly’ is the wrong word; it implies an insult to the animals—so all-too-humanly bad and vicious, then. It’s the imagination, it’s the intellect, it’s principles, it’s tradition and education. Leave the instincts to themselves and they’ll do very little mischief. If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession—why, I assure you, this would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation. It’s not instinct that makes Casanovas and Byrons and Lady Castlemaines; it’s a prurient imagination artificially tickling up the appetite, tickling up desires that have no natural existence. If Don Juans and Don Juanesses only obeyed their desires, they’d have very few affairs. They have to tickle themselves up imaginatively before they can start being casually promiscuous. And it’s the same with the other instincts. It’s not the possessive instinct that’s made modern civilization insane about money. The possessive instinct has to be kept artificially tickled by education and tradition and moral principles. They money-grubbers have to be told that money-grubbing’s natural and noble, that thrift and industry are virtues, that persuading people to buy things they don’t want is Christian service. Their possessive instinct would never be strong enough to keep them grubbing away from morning till night all through a lifetime. It has to be kept chronically gingered up by the imagination and the intellect. And then, think of civilized war. It’s got nothing to do with spontaneous combativeness. Men have to be compelled by law and tickled up by propaganda before they’ll fight. You’d do more for peace by telling men to obey the spontaneous dictates of their fighting instincts than by founding any number of Leagues of Nations.”

May 1, 1953

❡ “And all perverted in the same way—by trying to be non-human. Non-humanly religious, non-humanly moral, non-humanly intellectual and scientific, non-humanly specialized and efficient, non-humanly the businessman, non-humanly avaricious and property-loving, non-humanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, non-humanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity.”

❡ “Don’t allow your theoretical knowledge to influence your practical life. In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don’t therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don’t feel. If you do, you become one of those idiotic music snobs one meets at Lady Edward Tantamount’s. Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It’s exactly the same with God. The world’s full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren’t really alive, who’ve never done any vital act, who aren’t in any living relation with anything; people who haven’t the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs. . . .”

May 3, 1953

The following incident, reported by Sir Oliver Lodge in Why I Believe in Immortality (Doubleday Doran, 1929) might be good for a story-subject: [Abstracted from documents received by the British Society of Psychical Research]:

❡ James L. Chaffin, the Testator, was a farmer in Davie County, N.C. He was married and had four sons, in order of age John A. Chaffin, James Pinkney Chaffin, Marshall A. Chaffin, and Abner Columbus Chaffin.

❡ On the 16th Nov., 1905, the Testator made a will, duly attested by two witnesses, whereby he gave his farm to his third son, Marshall, whom he appointed sole executor. The widow and the other three sons were left unprovided for. Sixteen years afterwards, on the 7th Sept., 1921, the Testator died as the result of a fall. His third son, Marshall, obtained probate of the 1905 will on the 24 Sept. of that year. The mother and the other 3 brothers did not contest this will as they knew no valid reason for doing so. But afterwards, in 1925, some odd events happened, which are thus narrated:

❡ Extract from Statement of James Pinkney Chaffin, Testator’s second son: “In all my life I never heard my father mention having made a later will than the one dated 1905. I think it was in June of 1925 that I began to have very vivid dreams that my father appeared to me at my bedside but made no verbal communication. Some time later, I think it was the latter part of June, 1925, he appeared at my bedside again, dressed as I had often seen him dressed in life, wearing a black overcoat which I knew to be his own coat. This time my father’s spirit spoke to me. He took hold of his overcoat this way and pulled it back and said, “You will find my will in my overcoat pocket,” and then disappeared.

❡ Next morning I arose fully convinced that father’s spirit had visited me for the purpose of explaining some mistake. I went to mother’s and sought for the overcoat but found that it was gone. Mother stated that she had given the overcoat to my brother John who lives in Yadkin Country about 20 miles northwest of my home. I think it was on the 6th of July, which was on Monday following the events stated in the last paragraph, I went to my brother’s home in Yadkin County and found the coat. On examination of the inside pocket I found that the lining had been sewed together. I immediately cut the stitches and found a little roll of paper tied with a string which was in my father’s handwriting and contained only the following words: “Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddie’s old Bible.”

❡ At this point I was so convinced that the mystery was to be cleared up I was unwilling to go to mother’s home to examine the old Bible without the presence of a witness, and I induced a neighbour, Mr. Thos. Blackwelder, to accompany me, also my daughter and Mr. Blackwelder’s daughter were present. Arriving at mother’s home we had a considerable search before we found the old Bible. At last we did find it in the top bureau drawer in an upstairs room. The book was so dilapidated that when we took it out it fell into three pieces. Mr. Blackwelder picked up the portion containing the Book of Genesis and turned the leaves until he came to the 27th chapter of Genesis, and there found two leaves folded together, the left hand page folded to the right and the right hand page folded to the left, forming a pocket, and in this pocket Mr. Blackwelder found the will”—an informally worded document dated 16th Jan., 1919—which ran as follows: “After reading the 27th chapter of Genesis, I, James L. Chaffin, do make my last will and testament, and here it is. I want, after giving my body a decent burial, my little property to be equally divided between my four children, if they are living at my death, both personal and real estate divided equal, if not living, give share to their children. And if she is living, you all must take care of your mammy. Now this is my last will and testament. Witness my hand and seal. James L. Chaffin, this January 16, 1919.” This second will, though unattested, would, according to the law of North Carolina, be valid as being written throughout by the Testator’s own hand on sufficient evidence being adduced that it was in fact in his handwriting. [The 27th chapter of Genesis tells how the younger brother Jacob supplanted the elder brother Esau, who won his birthright and his father’s blessing. The sole beneficiary under the first will was, it will be remembered, a younger brother.] The Testator never before his death, so far as can be ascertained, mentioned the existence of this second will to anyone. . . . Soon after its discovery this document was tendered for Probate as the Testator’s real will. The case came for hearing in Dec., 1925. A jury was sworn, the hearing began, and the court then adjourned for lunch. When the hearing was continued, one of the lawyers announced that during the interval an amicable adjustment of the issues had been arrived at and that the new will would be admitted to probate without opposition. The following is taken from an official copy of the minute of the Judge presiding: “Judgement by consent. In Re Will of J. L. Chaffin Decd. North Carolina, Davie County. In Superior Court, Dec. term 1925. Judgement Decree: This cause coming on to be heard, and being heard, and the following issues having been submitted to the Jury “Is the paper writing dated Jan. 16th, 1919, and every part thereof the last Will and Testament of the deceased, Jas. L. Chaffin? Answer: Yes. And the Jury having answered said issue Yes, it is now (on motion of E. H. Morris, A. H. Price, & J. C. Busby, attorneys for the plaintiffs) ordered, Decreed, and Adjusted that the said last Will and Testament of James L. Chaffin deceased be recorded in the office of the clerk of the Superior Court of Davie County in the Book of Wills, and that the will dated Nov. 16, 1905, and probated on Sept. the 24th 1921 Will Book no. 2, page 579, purporting to be the last Will and Testament of the decd. James L. Chaffin is hereby cancelled, rescinded, annulled, and made void.”

❡ When the trial commenced Marshall the original heir had died, but Marshall’s widow and son were prepared to contest the 2nd will. However, during the luncheon interval they were shown the second will. Ten witnesses were prepared to give evidence that the second will was in the Testator’s handwriting, and the widow and son themselves seem to have admitted this as soon as they saw it. At any rate they at once withdrew their opposition.

❡ Mr. James Pinkney Chaffin’s statement concludes as follows: “During the month of Dec. 1925 my father again appeared to me, about a week before the trial of the case of Chaffin vs. Chaffin, and said, ‘Where is my old will?’ and showed considerable temper. I believed from this that I would win the lawsuit, as I did. I told my lawyer about this visitation the next morning. Many of my friends do not believe it is possible for the living to hold communication with the dead, but I am convinced that my father actually appeared to me on these several occasions and I shall believe it to the day of my death.”

See also: Society for Psychical Research, Proceedings, Nov. 1927, pp. 517ff.

May 5, 1953

One of the operations today was to remove a tattoo. I had to get the patient, and was surprised to find that the tattooed creature was a woman. The tattoo was on her shoulder, and spelled out her name. She told me that her brother had inflicted it on her when she was 8 years old, using a penknife and ink. She had a most pleasant manner, assuring me that it was I who brought her up for an appendectomy the week before, although really I couldn’t remember her at all. She had the most magnificently clear blue eyes, and was obviously of a rather low mentality. Altogether a most charming creature.

A colored man came visiting the orderlies’ room, as a relief in the vigil he had been keeping for the prospective birth of a grandson, as yet, at that hour, undelivered. He had worked as an orderly at General for some time, also spending 8 hours at Sears. Now he continues the two-job program, but he is better paid as a bus mechanic, and thus can get away with 4 hours orderly work in addition, at the Genesee Hospital. He looked incredibly young to be a grandfather, but I remembered that it is often quite impossible to guess a colored person’s age from his appearance. Their skin doesn’t seem to wrinkle up like ours. But Richard told me afterwards that he was 36. His pregnant daughter was 18, and she was born when her father was 18. He, by the way, has had 6 other children, and for all I know, may still be going strong. If each of the six promises to marry and proliferate as early as their seventh sibling, pretty soon this proud parent shall have gathered around him a brood of perhaps 36 grandchildren—all on $1.05 an hour at Genesee! More power to orderlies!

Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” practically turned my stomach as I read it. And yet I wanted very much for the “apparatus” to be used. An article in the Times book review last Sunday, commenting on the fact that Benj. Britten is a pacifist, goes on to comment that pacifist tendencies often hide deeply hidden and repressed sadomasochistic desires. No doubt! But everyone has them. This article also spoke of “the resexualization of music.” Incredible!

May 8, 1953

Started exercising according to Charles Atlas’s course on physical strength and health. The first two “lessons” seem extremely well-informed and serious. This is not the work of a charlatan, as many, dismayed by the “commercialization” and advertising techniques which Atlas uses, would believe.

May 9, 1953

Off to Niagara Falls with mom and dad. Dad characterized the good surgeon as unreflective: he must have absolute confidence in the accuracy of his diagnosis and in his skill and general infallibility. He must believe himself a prima donna, and never neglect his role. A hesitating, questioning, self-searching person will not make a very good surgeon.

May 14, 1953

From Rufus Jones, in Fosdick’s anthology, “Rufus Jones speaks to our time”:

❡ There is one approach to an infinite realm where God might be. There is one door that opens into a holy of holies. The true path is through personality. The search must begin in our own bosom: Who am I? What do I live by? What does personality involve? How am I related to my fellows and to nature? What does my sense of worth imply? What do I mean by goodness? Can I draw any finite circle about “myself”? Do I have any dealing with “a Beyond”? These are questions that take us into regions where microscope and telescope do not avail, but the full answer to them would bring us to that which is.

❡ We need to learn how to think of God as a resident presence cooperating vitally with us and in us here and now as an Emmanuel God, and at the same time we need just as urgently to see how our human lives can and do open out into a Beyond within ourselves. Almost every person who has attained to a mature spiritual life has had experiences that convinced him, at least in high moments, that he was more than himself. Help comes from somewhere and enables us to do what we had always thought could not be done. We find somewhere power to stand the universe when its waterspouts are let loose and even when they have gone over us. We discover strength from beyond our own stock of resources in the midst of our crises.

❡ Correspondence with environment is life’s main miracle. There is a fit of inner and outer, like that of hand and glove.

❡ I am not interested in any of the ways of building Babel-towers in the hope of reaching up to God, whether the towers are of brick and mortar, or whether they are of logic or of layers of Scripture texts, or of blocks from ancient creeds, or of sequences from causal proofs. All those man-built towers presuppose a remote and hidden God. The seeker, the tower-builder, on that supposition, must painfully rear his structure from below up by sheer human effort, with no sign of help, no evidence of cooperation from above. That kind of God could never be found, and such a quest would always end in confusion both of heart and of tongues.

❡ “Grace” is no hollow word of the theologians. It is not something manifested solely in a rare sacrament, or grudgingly dispensed by ordained men. It is a cosmic largess. We have been recipients all the way up from the cradle. Presentations have poured in on us from all the lovers and sufferers of the ages back to the beginning of smiles and tears. We have had the most priceless gifts bestowed for nothing at all. Love was here ahead of us with outstretched arms when we arrived and we came by birth into the richest of dowries. Every region we range over with our eyes is crammed with beauty unpaid for. Heroes and martyrs have been brave and faithful for our sake. The blood-red line of sacrifice, which has colored all the centuries behind us, comes with its redemptive power straight to our doors.

❡ Man is from the start a finite-infinite being and not a “mere” finite one. Partaking, as he does, of Reason he cannot stop his quest and pursuit of truth at any finite point, for finite truth is a contradiction of terms. If a thing is true at all it is infinitely true, though these terms “finite” and “infinite” have genuine application only in the realm of space and mathematics. They do not correspond to spiritual realities nor do they tally with the dominant issues that attach to the realm of Spirit. A wiser term for what is meant by “finite-infinite” is transcendence in immanence. “Transcendence in immanence” appears wherever self-consciousness appears. Every aspect of our deeper life is embedded in more life than we are aware of. Every thought we think is a fragmentary aspect of a personal life and purpose that sweeps beyond it. It is what it is because of its place in the total life-system that over-spans it with wider scope. Descartes was right when he insisted that we are conscious of finiteness only because we forever contrast it with an infinite that underlies all our thinking.

❡ One can as easily catch up with the horse he is driving from the buggy-seat as one can overtake the flying goal of his moral passion. To be a moral person at all is to be self-transcendent, which means “finite-infinite.” No one can appreciate music who does not rise above the seriatim notes and enjoy them together in a time-transcending now, which is a gentle breaking in of eternity into our time-world.

❡ His life, his spirit, his personality, is incomparably greater than anything he said, or did, or taught. One is always aware that there is more where his words “come from.” He is there all the time above and beyond his utterances. It was a remarkable stroke of insight that led St. John to declare that he was the truth. Truth as it is used here is not a logical judgment, or a spoken message, or a transmitted idea; it is something that a person can be. It is a life that corresponds with an ideal, a pattern, an architectural plan. A person has come at last who can be the way, the truth, and the life.

May 16, 1953

Alec Strachan and I, with the help of some others, collected the clothing we had solicited last week—clothing for AFSC to send to Europe. We got three car-loads.

A fine letter from Reinoud. He wears his soul on the outside. Also an interesting letter from Burt Pike, who, à la Forsythe, seems disillusioned with the academic atmosphere.

May 17, 1953

More from Rufus Jones:

❡ The Greeks always held that sin was “missing the mark”—that is what the Greek word for sin means: failure to arrive at, to reach, the real end toward which life aims. Sin is defeat. It is loss of the trail. It is undoing. The sinner has not found himself, he has not come to himself. He has missed the real me. He cannot say, “I am.”

❡ Our rule of life would be something like the following: to act everywhere and always as though we knew that we are members of a spiritual community, each one possessed of infinite worth, of irreducible uniqueness, and indispensable to the spiritual unity of the whole—a community that is being continually enlarged by the faith and action of those who now compose it, and so in some measure being formed by our human effort to achieve a divine ideal.

❡ One of Phillips Brooks’ favorite texts was: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” . . . It means that there is something in man’s inmost being that can be kindled and struck into flame by God and as we feed the flame with our lives we can become revealing places for God, a flame of God’s life. . . . This puts the basis of religion at the center of man’s life where it belongs. Religion . . . is not an addendum to life, not something added on by a remedial scheme to a spiritually barren and bankrupt being. . . . The task of religion is not like that of laboriously endeavoring to teach an elephant to fly; it is rather the discovery of the potential capacities for flight in a being that was framed for the upper air.

❡ Aristotle said that the true nature of any being is what it can become. The true humanism must, on the same count, be real not in terms of origins or beginnings, but rather in terms of possibility and goal.

❡ If we saw Christ vividly and truly we should all believe in God. You cannot get love revealed in the abstract.

❡ Christ is as truly a revelation of man as he is of God.

May 21, 1953

Tonight I was admitted into membership in the Rochester Meeting of the Society of Friends. Gilbert White wrote a letter recommending me. I was amused to see that one of my attributes was that I manage to “keep a farm going.” It’s not going very fast right now.

May 22, 1953

Gem of the week: Jack Murray, complaining about the noise in the downstairs apartment: It’s so distracting when I want to watch television.”

I stayed late at the hospital to watch a craniotomy. Young girl, age 26, five months pregnant, suddenly taken with severe headache and paralysis of left side of face. The surgeon first cuts a circular flap of skin, leaving it attached like a flap at one point. Then he drills holes through the skull and saws from hole to hole. Then cuts the dura and exposes the brain. This girl had a tremendous blood clot, which he found and removed. He said she would not recover.

John Rutherford tells me that Goerlitz has a habit of snooping when a couple are alone together. This is a new way of vicarious sex.

May 23, 1953

Marie: shrewish, wants job and plots to expose Jean. Jean: solicits outside P.O. for stamp sales. On her own or because of frame-up by Marie? Jean loses job, finds out why. She should expose Marie but, after all, the soliciting was illegal. Marie sneaky, yet she does need the job more because being a widow.

When Jean Barton suddenly found herself out of a job as town postmistress, naturally she wondered why. The postal inspector had come to Ironville unexpectedly that morning. He told Jean that dishonesty and government employ don’t mix. “You can finish out the week,” he said, “and draw your check. Your resignation will then take effect.” “My resignation?” Jean asked in amazement. The postal inspector had already opened the door to leave. He hated scenes and had hoped to escape, but now he turned and repeated, “Yes, that’s right, your resignation. Effective at the end of this week.” Scene between the official and Jean is interrupted by people coming in for their mail. Flashback: Jean soliciting at hotel. Sees Marie’s daughter there (acting as nursemaid). Inspector leaves and Jean knows the offense but not who snitched. How to find out? Marie comes in, obviously gloating that she’s got the job. Jean connects up the encounter with Marie’s daughter. She debates whether or not to flare up against Marie, begins to, but changes her mind because the soliciting was illegal. Possibly: show the same situation from two points of view, Jean’s and Marie’s, then have them meet. Let the reader do the moralizing. Create a dialectic and then slyly withdraw. Show Marie’s daughter returning home and telling her mother. Then trace Marie’s thoughts and rationalization for snitching. Another flashback. Create dramatic contrast of Jean’s agitated state with the pout she must put on when people come in for mail. A kind of comic relief.

I—Jean and inspector. Learns that soliciting was discovered. Flashback at hotel. Meets young Marie. Inspector leaves.

II—Young Marie tells her mother. Second flashback: Marie’s thoughts and plot. Informs inspector and gets the job herself.

III—Jean and Marie in post office. How does Jean act?

May 28, 1953

Of all the ills that human hearts endure

How few that kings or laws can cause or cure.

—Dr. Johnson

From D. W. Brogan, The Price of Revolution:

❡ It is easy to forget now what an astonishing and outrageous innovation conscription was in Britain (in 1914), how it shocked people who were not at all pacifist in doctrine and who were angered that anybody, whether he had conscientious objections or not, should be forced to fight. [Now conscription is taken for granted and accepted as though it always existed.]

❡ And it was found, too, . . . that after a time the average man gets bored with politics, with disorder, with the claims on his time and energy that a revolutionary situation makes. The party zealots do not realize this, for they are men for whom the programme or their own accession to power is the main business of life; but revolutionary rulers do realize it and, whether they are Hitler or Stalin, must keep up an artificial pressure to justify their demands on obedience and sacrifice, or provide diversions, strength through joy, rest, and culture, or do both at the same time.

❡ The revolutionary land reforms in Mexico were not necessarily the best way of providing for the management of the land or the increase of production, but they were a condition of anything like the making of a Mexican nation and the independence of that nation from its near and very formidable neighbour. The same dilemma has faced governments all over the world since then and, more and more, the work of revolution has been to create not independent self-sufficient, politically unmanageable present proprietors, but impotent servants of the new hacendado, the state.

❡ The methods of all revolutions leave a debit entry that must be paid. The Mexicans, in their zeal to get rid of foreign control, also got rid of a great deal of technical help that they needed. The Turks, by expelling the Greeks from Ionia as earlier by massacring the Armenians, lost the services of more modern-minded people than themselves. The Japanese who made their Revolution copied the West only too well. The new bourgeoisie in Japan, like the new bourgeoisie in Germany, had to do a deal with the military classes and the Choshu and Satsuma clans, with their control of the army and navy, were able to secure that the possibly more efficacious though less brilliant way of solving Japan’s problems, by becoming a nation of shopkeepers, was not given a fair trial. . . . Japan, alone among the ‘backward’ countries on whom the western revolutionary impact fell, preserved her full autonomous power of action, made her own adjustments to the necessities of the case and became, in turn, the bearer of western ideas and techniques, mostly but not all military, to her Asiatic neighbours. The final result in our age has not been a matter of rejoicing for either Japan or her neighbours, but few countries in this racked world have had much to boast of in the way of political wisdom in the past and present generation and Japan merely adapted in her own way the fashions of the modern world of technology and war. . . . All political remedies have their price; violent remedies a necessarily high price. We have seen it paid by Russia, China, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Turkey.

A lovely birthday. But Dad called from New York. Work at the hospital was particularly hard.

May 29, 1953

Jeanne becomes increasingly obsessed with guilt feelings. Scene with husband. Decides to visit Marie, “the poor widow in need of work.” Marie expects Jeanne to scorn her. When Jeanne does not, the surprise brings out Marie’s guilt feelings. She balks and begins to feel sorry for Jeanne. How to end all this? Jeanne gets false notion of who exposed her (change hotel scene). Miserable herself, she feels assuagement by knowing that Marie will benefit: makes offer to Marie. Marie callous at first, proud and disdainful of help. But softens. It comes out that Marie was the informer. Jeanne is furious at having been duped. Jeanne’s anger brings back Marie’s. And the two end in a furor. Marie never does inform; her conscience stops her. Someone else does, but Jeanne is sure it was Marie. Marie seeks the job, and this increases Jeanne’s suspicions. Too complicated! Jeanne suspects Marie, but her husband is so mortified at Jeanne’s dismissal that he convinces her that she has done a terrible thing, and that she must go to Marie and “offer” Marie the job.

May 30, 1953

More from Brogan:

❡ That the depressing results of ‘progress’ are not simply the results of political imperialism, the case of China makes evident—for there, before the late war, absentee landlordism was on the increase; . . . and the independent Nationalist government did less to protect the peasants, . . . less to deal with the problems of rural credit, than was being done, belatedly, by imperialist governments in Burma, Java, and Indo-China. “This development naturally proceeds most rapidly in the neighbourhood of great cities, in districts where the static conditions of rural life are broken up by the expansion of commerce and industry, and in regions like part of Manchuria, which have recently been settled by an immigrant population. The symptoms accompanying it are land speculation, and the intrusion between landlord and tenant of a class of middlemen. In Kwanrtung, it is stated, it is increasingly the practice for large blocks of land to be rented by the well-to-do merchants . . . and then to be sub-let piecemeal at a rack rent to peasant farmers. . . . Nor must it be forgotten that the landlord often has a double hold on the tenant, since the former is frequently the money-lender to whom the latter is in debt. . . . No reference to Communist propaganda is required to explain the no-rent campaigns and peasants’ revolts which have taken place in parts of the country. It is surprising, indeed, that they have not been more frequent.” (R. H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China, pp. 68–9, published in 1932.)

❡ One reason is common to all ancient institutions or professions with long traditions. Change is unpleasant and the people who want change can be charged, sometimes with justice, of undervaluing important parts of the traditions of the institution. Modernists are as unpopular in Communist circles as in Catholic and both groups of the formally conservative faithful can point to horrible examples of what happens to such tampers with sacred texts. . . . Sometimes they are right; sometimes the situation to which the innovators wish the institution to adjust itself is temporary and sometimes the adjustment means an abandonment of the essential spirit of the institution and of its basic principles.

❡ See also pp. 220–241, for critique of American policy.

Jeanne decides to ease her conscience by doing everything she can to insure that Marie gets the job. Marie plays along and seems grateful, until she is formally invested in the office in Jeanne’s presence. Then she tells Jeanne who snitched.

Joe, I learned something today. Soliciting is not the worst crime in the world. Come on, let’s go dancing at the hotel. I want to buy a few stamps at the drugstore over there anyway.

June 4, 1953

From Sean O’Casey’s autobiography, vol. 5, Rose and Crown:

❡ . . . streams of men, women, and children, dropping from the train that had just stopped, pouring along under the grimy roof like an underground river towards an open sluice-gate, to divide into rivulets and trickles, spreading fanwise to different parts of the mammoth city.

❡ . . . age was but crossing the crest of the hill to go down the other side of life, where new flowers grew, and charm abounded as rich and delightful as those loved and handled on the younger slope left behind.

❡ Then the young man departed, carrying himself nicely, within a top-coat cleverly caught in at the waist, and flowing from the waist around the slender legs; walking along the rumbling, rancorous street as if he were sauntering down a gilt-edged garden path. Then Sean said, Jasus! And thought, what a world without there is for this lad, but he stays at home!

❡ And no folk-art is there but is born in the gay disregard of gain, and in the desire to add a newer beauty and a steadier charm to God’s well-turned-out gifts to man; and so, out of the big love in his heart for all things comely and of good shape, the great poet Yeats explains: “Folk-art is indeed the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, and merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the first side, or sung by the roadside, or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its hour is come.” Yeats, a vic, you never spoke a truer word.

❡ “All exploitation of the life of the wealthy, for the eye and ear of the poor and half poor, in plays, in musical comedy, at the cinema, in Daily Mirror photographs, is a travesty of the life of the rich; and if it were not would all but justify some red terror; and it impoverishes and vulgarizes the imagination, showing a life that is all display and hurry, passion without emotion, emotion without intellect, and where there is nothing stern and solitary.” (Yeats)

❡ . . . a prentice understanding of events.

❡    “As down the life the wretched gyant tumbled;

His battred ballaunces in peeces lay,

His timbered bones all broken rudely rumbled,

So was the high aspiring with huge ruine humbled.”

❡ London was Carson’s damasked mistress, jeweled delightedly; full of wealth, portly with good fare, and free with gifts to those who kissed her cunningly; Belfast his wife, a puritan maid, trim; jading prayer trickling from her lips rather than the ripple of a song; afraid of charm; idealizing those who go grim for God; offering fine linen indeed, but bearing no purple to go with it; and dealing even the linen out with wary eye and sparing hand. And for London’s lure, Carson, instead of putting fight into Ulstermen, took all the fight out of them. In mass formation, bunched together, they could be hilariously brave, but not so confident or sure when scanty numbers were calmly coerced into melodious deportment by a contagious roman catholic crowd.

❡ Jesus, how these Christians love one another! Jesus said Love one another. We heard you. We do our best. Here, lads, bring them up to him so’s he can have a good look; bring up the head split open, the bleeding eye, the bruised arm, the broken jaw, the limping leg, and let Jesus have a good look. All in the day’s work, sirree, and we’ll do better one day. All in fair fight and no favour. Knock them out and do them in’s the slogan of apostolic love. Line them up so’s they can be seen proper. Papist bastards on your left, sir; protestant gents on your right. Their own mothers wouldn’t know them well. A sight to be seen. We offer the work done, sir, as a token of our esteem. Whoever did it to the fellow with half his face gone deserves a noble prize. Altogether, lads, now in harmony:

Faith of our fathers, we will love

Both friends and foe in all our strife;

And preach thee, too, as love knows how,

In kindly words and virtuous life!

And so do we. The hymn shows it. Father Faber’s mouldering fable. Speak your mind. Jesus did, and was crucified. He speaks it still, and still is crucified.

❡ It is hard to believe that either Churchill or Atlee would bend away from their business even long enough to listen to a Northumbrian playing “the Bonny Tyneside,” or listen to one singing for the ferryman to come and bring him to his sweetheart over the rough waters of the river. They’re too big for that diversion. With them it is always over the sea to Paris, over the sea to Amsterdam, but never over the sea to Skye. And yet it is these singers and pipers, allied with the dockers of the quaysides, the men and women of the farms, the workers in the big and lesser cities, who made England in the past, and will remake England in the future. The General Strike showed this, for it struck England like lightnings from the hands of Zeus. England within a few hours became a waste land.

❡ Churchill, too, was lavishly concerned with himself. He, too, had his own tormenting vanity, a belief in a Cassandrian power of prophecy that no-one paused to listen to. He carried it about with him like a hump on a camel’s back.

❡ “We are afraid of sadness, [Yeats] murmured; we have it in life, but we fear it in the theatre. You mustn’t be afraid of it, O’Casey.” “I’m not, if it tinges, or even startles, life, like a discordant note in a lovely symphony. I’m not when it has nobility. But when it comes brazen through hunger, disease, or wretchedness, then I hate it; then I fight against it, for through that suffering there can be no purification. It is villainous, and must be destroyed.”

❡ Man is busy now with a new exorcism: the expulsion of disease from man and animal and plant, defending the holy tissue of the flesh from pollution of virus and of bug; the exorcism of fear from man’s way of life that he may stand up and speak out and laugh loud. Exorcism that calls for no candle, no bell, book, cassock or stole; a church where the altar is a table, the god a microscope; the ritual a bold imagination, a peering eye, a ceaseless searching mind; so that health may be sanctity, energy prayer, and the achievements of men and the play of children most acceptable praises to God. To get rid of all that weakened or brought rot to the body; to sanction pain no more; to coffin nothing but what had lived a life to the full, a life that had no disappointed breath for a sigh at the leaving; a life that sank down, pleasantly tired, into the rest-rewarding earth. To give to the commonwealth of man the strong heart, the clear mind, the keen ear, the enduring lung, the bright eye, the stout limb, and the cunning hand—oh, Jesus, wouldn’t these things be grand for man to have! Oh, Jesus, wouldn’t there be achievements measuring as holy with, and higher than, Salisbury’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey!

❡ Here they were out to bring the boy up in the way he should go. Which way was that, now? The catholic way, Genevan way, Mahommedan way, or the Buddhist way? These were but a few of the hundred ways carved out under the feet of every stepper-in to life. Eileen chose the catholic way; a way as good or as bad as any of the others. Sean hoped that when the boy grew up he’d take and make his own way. The right way to Sean was the desire to see life, to hear life, to feel life, and to use life; to engender in oneself the insistent and unbreakable patience to remove any obstacle life chanced to place in its own way. The way of the world; the way of all flesh: no one could show Breon the way through these ways; he would have to find a way for himself. Life’s way of yesterday wasn’t life’s way today; and life’s way today couldn’t be life’s way tomorrow; no neither Sean’s way nor Eileen’s way, or Swann’s way could ever be Breon’s.

❡ Only an old crow, heavily flapping its wings through the wind and the rain, lightened the hodden-grey sky, as it cawed resentfully, and winged a clumsy way to the rooky wood, looking like one of the nuns, caught up by a divine wind, and getting carried to heaven without her consent. Indeed, when in their black habits, the nuns looked like a flock of crows, cawing carelessly, too; for they all hummed the same tune in the one key, on the same note, throughout time, in the hope that they might hum the same tune, in the same key, on the same note, throughout eternity.

❡ That night, when Breon lay in a cozy corner of sleep, Eileen told him all that had happened: the nuns had encircled them smiling, beguiling, giving a welcome to mother and child; welcome as the flowers in May; come into the parlour, dears; stormy weather. Oh, sacred charms of childhood, unto Christ so dear; and if you bring a proper fee, there’s nothing left to fear. Not a thing. One and twenty welcomes to the little lad. A sturdy little fellow. He would be a charming addition to their school, a nun said. And an interesting one, too, considering his father to be a writer, said another nun. Under God, children are the one surety of God’s church continuing, said a third nun, laying a partly-blessing hand on Breon’s head. You both must stay for tea, murmured the reverend mother, both stay for tea, murmured a nun behind the nun. Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea. Thank God for tea! What could the world do without it? How did it exist without it? Nobody knows.

❡ He had peered at the friar, looking past the habit to the man within, a man to whom all life and history must be explained by a collection of dogmatic decrees, “which,” according to Leo the XIII, “impose themselves upon all catholics, and which no man is permitted to call in doubt.” Embedded in a decree, like a caterpillar in his cocoon. And the bishops drum their way about, denouncing doom on all who disagree, or venture a doubt.

Fat bucks of bishops in a barrel-roofed room,

Yell’d out, roar’d out threats of doom—

Bell, book, and candlelight standing on a table—

Pounded with their crosiers in a frenzy of fume,

Hard as they were able,

Boom, boom, boom.

Excommunicamus, if you dare presume,

Bell, book, and candlelight will bring you what is due,

Bring you what is due and hoodoo you,

If you dare presume,

Doomday doomday doomday doom!

After two thousand years of thought, discussion, supernatural grace, and pious practice, all they can do to save man is to bind him tightly into one chair, and to bind God rigidly into one throne. Here by the fire, in a rust-red habit, with its blue girdle, sat a laddo who believed that he carried authority of life and death wherever his body happened to go; an ordinary mortal, who, because of what was called the laying on of hands, pointed out the way of thought and action to everyone else, as if born to it as he was bred to it; with little knowledge of the way of thought himself, timidly obedient to every convention, every custom, honoured by common brethren, within and without his own community of faith. Sean had met many men in various walks of life who had assumed authority while in actual service—the doctor at the bedside, the scientist in laboratory or lecture hall, the foreman watching the rise or fall of a crane’s jib: all these become common men in the give and take, the ebb and flow, of social life; but not the priest: he alone had a crystallized sense of authority that he carried with him everywhere, from the altar into all the odds and ends of social life. Pretend as he would, in casual talk, in quip, in serious conversation, the sense of rigorous, ritualistic authority over all life and all things clung to the priest, so that he could never be at one with the common man.

❡ What is the great crowd seeking, the young, mostly courting couples, prowling so aimlessly, yet so steadily, along the Great White Way? They seek the Muses, though they know it not, for these restive lights are to them

a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.

They straggle along seeking beauty which is yet a shrinking seed within them. They seek for what they know not, though they feel their need of it, and sometimes sense a twinge of near arrival within this blaze of bastard culture. Roman catholic and protestant mingle and mate with the uncomplaining, muted midgets caught in the glare of the Great White Way, unaware that outside its dazzling destitution, away in the darkness ahead, shine faint, enkindling rays from the stars of art, literature, and science. They have been told and yet they do not know; for the tale came too late, or it was told too low for them to catch the whisper. They have had no help to get away from the fairy tales of infancy, lovely in their day, but turning slyly silly when men reach the age of misunderstanding. But many of the common people are now making for something more than the savage contentment with coloured bead and strip of coloured calico. They ask for something better than these things no higher than flimsy rhyme and fainting fairy tale, without the shrewd jingle of the one or the longing beauty of the other. Even this gaudiness, blaspheming, light, wherein they wander webbed, is an outward sign of inner seeking all they feel they need. The people are beginning to realize the longing for good shaping of things; in the streets they pass through; in the buildings banking the streets they pass through; in table-cloth and crockery ware; in the homes they have to have; in pictures they see, music they hear, the single vessels they handle; in all things whatsoever which mingle man with life: a share in all the greatest the community can imagine, in all the greatest the community can do.

Many are getting rid of the dismal daydream that the good in life is something similar to Christmas in Killarney with all the folks at home. First, they are seeking and fighting to keep taut and even that umbilical cord stringing all men together—the bread line. They have long prayed for their bread, now they fight for it. May Jesus Christ be praised! They are organizing to alter the mad method of life among them and bring it into order as Lycurgus did in Sparta in the old times before them: “Where the State was overloaded with a multitude of indigent and necessitous persons, while the whole wealth of the land had centered upon a few. To the end, therefore, that he might expel from the State luxury and crime, and those yet more inveterate diseases of want and superfluity, he got them to consent to a new division of land, so that they should all live together on an equal footing; merit to be the only road to eminence, and the disgrace of evil, and credit of worthy acts, their one measure of difference between man and man.” There’s a lot in this, my people, a lot in it.

It is the taxi which commands the streets of New York; fleets of them, like gay-plumaged swallow flocks, red, yellow, green, brown, white, and black, ground-birds skimming along the road’s surface as if swiftness were all; a thrust forward tension in each of them, even when they come to rest; a sway upward and forward as the lights suddenly call a halt to the swift going, an agitated purr of an engine delayed; and, as the shadow of green appears in the lights, a slim, sliding spring ahead, and the eager bird is on the swift wing again. It seemed to Sean that the American taxi, in its indolently slim form, is a daughter of the gondola transfigured into the muse of energy while the English taxi, in its stiff box-like stand, is the son of the sedan chair.

❡ . . . their infallible awethority

❡ It was odd; the father knowing what his son was not, but tolerating the idea of a special worthiness, though in fear that strangers saw through the contradiction, puffed out his own importance, as if to assure himself that his own impressiveness was more than equal to his own importance and his son’s defects. The mother seeing the sham in her heart, silvered it over, as the oyster iridescently nacres an irritation, with a sham of her own, accepting the myth, and decorating it with gravity and praise. The spearman complacently assuring himself that he had lifted the limited lad into an eminence, deeply despising the lad with a ridiculous glory, and afforded to the parents a chance to take a tormenting interest in a son never to be so clever as his father.

❡ Bring me a grain of mustard seed, said Buddha to an agonized mother who had brought her dead child to him, beseeching him to restore it to life; bring me a grain of mustard seed from any house anywhere in which those who live in it have never suffered sorrow through the death of a loved one; and I shall restore your little one to health and strength. And the woman had searched and searched for many months, but could not get a grain of mustard seed from a house that hadn’t suffered through the death of a loved one.

Jesus, Buddha, Mahommed, great as each may be, their highest comfort given to the sorrowful is a cordial introduction to another’s woe.

❡ He wasn’t one who contented himself with the Salvation Army’s method of saying any kind of nonsense that floated into their minds; their building up of a beautiful life, here and hereafter, with a phrase “Out of self into Christ, into Glory. Simple, isn’t it?” as he heard a Salvation Army officer say once. Damned simple, right enough. Turning everyone into a quick-change artist. Becoming in the twinkling of an eye guided missiles shooting into heaven. He came across a group of them on a street in Philadelphia. There they were, large as death, ensconced under a huge umbrella, coloured red, yellow, and blue; there they were spouting out their spick and spam way of eternal life. Their glory was vanishing now. Like all the bursts-out of evangelical heat, this one, too, was beginning to cool quick. Just like the energy and enthusiasm of the first friars, black, white, and grey, launching themselves among the poor to save them from the Reformation; whose love of poverty soon lay buried under a gigantic and splendidly built rubble of riches. So, too, the Wesleyan outbursts of all-embracing piety to set aside the lukewarm decline of the Anglicans, fell, itself, into the same dead state; so badly that we can read in “Americana” the wail of a Wesleyan faithful few, keening:

The Church that God through Wesley launched

Two hundred years ago,

Is going now beneath the waves,

Down to eternal woe.

Piety has become a possessing pose. In one of the “Capuchin Annuals” (1942) there’s a grand picture of His Excellency the Most Rev. Paschal Robinson, O.F.M., Apostolic Nuncio to Eirinn, showing him in all his gallant costume of richly made undress cassock, piped and braided, with his lovely chain holding on to his jeweled pectoral cross; a gorgeously dressed cavalier of the Roman Church, and very nice, too. This gent didn’t live in a slum or shack, ate things higher than pulse and beans, refused to sit and work in fireless rooms, and never roamed about in the cold with bare feet blue. None of them do. Not till they are dead. This one, this Excellency, the Papal Nuncio in Eirinn, died a year or so ago, and in his last gasps ordered that when he was dead, he was to be dressed in a coarse garb, his feet bare, and set so as to stick out from under the shroud to show there was no deception. Tramp tramp tramp, the boy is triumphantly marching up to heaven in his bare feet. A grand example to the workers to embrace poverty for the good of their souls. Workers of all lands, don’t bother about wages, don’t bother about thin clothing, broken boots, scanty meals; remember the dead Nuncio in his bare feet. Christ, how many saints would the Ireland Sean knew have given to God, if saintship rested in pinched faces, empty bellies, and bare feet!

June 8, 1953

From O’Casey’s “I Knock At the Door”:

❡ . . . and locked away in a drawer, forbidden to be touched by anyone save the head of the house, lay a mysterious book which the father said confined the dangerous teaching of a Bishop Berkeley, and, mother added,, was all about nothing being real, and that all things we saw were only images of our own ideas, and that such books were only to be read and thought of by minds big enough to understand that they were rubbish.

❡ Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding” was all balls, said Mick, for the very look of the thing was enough to start you praying to God that the human mind would never become anything like what it was represented to be in the book.

—Note use of refrain, such as in “The Tired Cow.”

—Note the magnificent objective passages, especially about the Jewish window-fixer, and Johnny’s thrashing at school. Superb writing!

June 13, 1953

White woman has baby obviously fathered by Negro. Her husband furious and vows to lynch the father. Evidence points to an old Negro servant, who, actually, is innocent. The offender’s secret is known by town minister. Husband incites mob against the servant, whom the wife has named rather than admitting her own weakness by naming the real father, a handsome and desirable Negro. The servant gets word of his danger and flees, but the mob gains on him and he ducks into the first house he sees, that of the minister. But the real culprit is also there. The husband angrily demands that the minister release the old servant. The minister, of course, knows the servant is innocent and the other is guilty, and hardly knows what to do under the circumstances. Both Negroes are terrified and plead with him to help them, the servant because he is innocent, the other because he at least deserves a fair trial, especially since the new mother really seduced him rather than vice versa. [Perhaps show this in first part: her dissatisfaction with husband, and use of the handsome Negro in his place.] The minister makes up his mind: he offers himself! This completely upsets the husband’s equilibrium. The surprise move has the strange effect of making husband and mob sheepishly withdraw. Must show the motive for the wife’s action, as above:—circumstances that cast erroneous suspicion on the servant; some relation between husband and minister wherein husband knows that minister is aware of husband’s infidelities; the faith and character of the minister, which bear fruit in his decision.

June 29, 1953

Dave Lurie drove Alec, Sandy and me to Riparius. Sandy brought along a girlfriend so she wouldn’t be the only girl. We picked up the fallen barn siding and stowed it in Carman’s barn; swam in the brook; went horseback riding. All fine, except I had hoped to be with Sandy most of the time, and I found that she and Alec are very close, and when he was near to her nothing else seemed to matter. Hard! We had silent meeting on Sunday. I read Gibran’s passage on work: “work is love made visible!” Even Lurie was impressed—even skeptical, sarcastic Lurie. I’m writing a story about Sandy, Alec, and me. To write puts things in perspective, objectifies them, and eases the pain. If we can see ourselves as ridiculous puppets in life, then why get too sad over disappointments?

Fine intellectual letter from Burt Pike. He assumes I know German. I’d better go ahead and learn it! Are you making a mess of your life? Or are you saving yourself from dullness and mediocrity? Come back in sixty years and I’ll give the answer. . . . Read “How to Achieve Sex Happiness in Marriage.” God! A consummation devoutly to be wished. How ignorant I was of the simplest things! How my ignorance and prudishness destroyed the happiness I might have had with Jeanne Dinsmore! I want a son, to right in him all these wrongs.

July 12, 1953

You’ve set up the situation, in Part I, of the attraction between Bill Skidmore and Dotty Crain. You’ve also set up the beginnings of something that could develop from the friendship & loyalty of Dotty and Leila Hendrickson. But forget about Geoffrey and use what you’ve already got. Keep up the refrain technique, especially toward the end, à la O’Casey. Perhaps an ironical situation can be worked out. Why not map out the rest of the plot in detail before writing further? It’s a chore and you hate chores, but if you’re going to be a writer you’ll have to work instead of wasting your time daydreaming. Aim to do as well as Hardy in “Life’s Little Ironies.” Remember: style, plot, characterization, rhythm, insight, suspense. Brother!

“LIGHT IN AUGUST, 1945” BY THOMAS COLE

Women look for signs. They would have

An outward show of an inward passion: the head

Of John for Salome, the blood of Duncan for Lady

Macbeth, Agamemnon dead.

But love,

Which is private when it comes, comes in the light

Of the heart, the stillness of mind. A man may suffer

A woman quietly for fifty years and she

Would call it fortitude.

A sign.

As in the year

Of the locust, like a locust it came: thin

As a thistle, bare as a stone: Civilization’s mushroom,

Having gathered so much loveliness against

The dark. We see only the light, not

The danger in that show of splendor, after

The first gaudy tumult. Blind as Saul

And without his gift for sight, we suffer the loss

And the heat of all that fire.

Broken, an atom’s

Light will not last fifty years, will not

Outlast its few brief moments,

It is an outward sign of an inward passion.

Everywhere bright, but bitter as a toad’s stool.

July 20, 1953

Saturday night to Canandaigua—swimming with Sandy, another couple, and John, who had no date. Sandy and John left the group to talk together alone, leaving me to listen to Jim Tyson’s idiotic jabber. After a half hour or so I went up to them, rather perturbed, and they walked away together when I got to them. Then when we returned to the house it was the same—Sandy and John—and I out of the picture. I went upstairs, wondering perhaps if she would miss me and at least inquire what had happened. I lay in bed from 2 a.m. until 4:30, and no word from downstairs, I all the while burning up inside and not knowing what to do, whether to forget about them and stay up, or to go down, and then what? I went down, suggested rather gruffly to Sandy that it was time she went home, and sat silent next to her while John drove us. As we were saying good night I told her how despicably I thought she had acted. This took her by surprise as, really, she hadn’t done anything intentionally or maliciously. She just hadn’t thought. Well, I was in a rather ludicrous position myself, being “infantile,” as she put it. And I soon found myself on the defensive. All in all, Sandy is not the best one for catering to other people’s wishes. She lives for herself, and there is some truth in Marion White’s comment that Sandy “uses” other people. . . . We’re all on good terms again, I think. The really infantile behavior would have been had I continued the grudge after the first eruption. But I am really not that infantile emotionally.

Marion White called Sunday, said she was bored, and wouldn’t I come over. We bought some eggs and cooked up a nice meal in her apartment, a one-room affair on the third floor of a rooming house. The first thing that strikes you upon entering is a very amateurish pencil sketch on lined notebook paper, of a nude man with a great big penis, presumably Marion’s husband, one Helmut. Helmut, it seems, is underage, and is under the impregnable custody of his father in Buffalo while annulment is being arranged. So he is out of the picture. Marion is nice, pretty, fair-skinned, and somewhat intelligent. But she obviously has her troubles, and drowns them in drink. We talk very well together—no effort, no silences. She filled us both with two double-strength Tom Collinses, then gulped a little straight whiskey herself. I was expecting great things. Then she lay down on the soft double bed and held the electric fan near her face so that it blew her long red hair. I lay beside her, getting closer and closer and finally putting my arm around her. At this she gave me a peculiar look but then said nothing and apparently didn’t mind. But it didn’t go any further. She suddenly decided that she had to fetch her bicycle at Strong and then visit someone. “I’m a funny woman,” she said. “I like one man at a time.” I asked her if she was angry with me, and she said No, not at all, but that she hadn’t developed a “passionate interest” in me, “yet.” Encouraging! We left on the best of terms and she said she’d contact me again soon. I can’t call her because the boarding house phone is usually answered by the old Victorian couple who own the place and who think it scandalous that Marian, a married woman, should entertain any men at all. In fact, as I went down the stairs I was chastised by the venerable lady of the house. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she said. “Don’t you know she’s married!” Delicious. We shall see what comes of this little affair.

Work camp progressing. Next Friday is it.

Margot now working for Look Magazine, answering letters to the editor.

I have been doing the chest and shoulder exercises more or less regularly, and many people have commented on my muscles. This is something I should have done long ago, but it’s not too late now. Muscles develop with practically no effort—15 or 20 minutes a day.

Advised a C.O. faced with hearings, etc. Matt Herron, graduate of Princeton, Prospect Club, and friend of Weasel’s. Nice fellow. Very solid.

I am speaking a little German now with Mrs. Sartz. It is an extremely easy language—so far—(the 15th lesson in Hugo).

Harriet Crain liked my postmistress story but said the other two (the horse in the mud-hole, and McDonald & Tennyson) didn’t come off. This is encouraging since the postmistress was done last and thus should be the best.

September 1, 1953

My affair with Marion seems to be ended now, suddenly; and it is just as well. After having spent the weekend with her and her family at Chautauqua, and then helping her move to her new apartment, I returned home for supper. All day she had been most affectionate, and she was distressed at my having to leave at 6:00. I promised to try to have Vic take us all swimming later, in the night. Vic agreed, and we drove over at about 10:00. Marion’s face was pale and she showed distress and shame acutely. She announced to me that Helmut had paid her a furtive visit earlier (I’m glad I left early enough to miss him). She had to tell him that she had been unfaithful; and he, playing the role of the jealous husband (in absentia), commanded her to have no communications whatsoever with any man. So there remains a state of double communication-less-ness. She and Helmut are forbidden to see each other or even correspond, until Helmut turns 21; and she, by Helmut, is forbidden to entertain other men, as she has been doing flourishingly in the past. This manlessness will no doubt break her completely; already last night she was fairly unstable and melodramatic, refusing to talk to me (although, she said, she was terribly sorry it had to be that way, but she had to do what she was doing) then, when she discovered me trying to sleep on the couch downstairs, since Vic had driven off with sister Beth, walking outside and pacing the sidewalk for an hour or so, until they came back. For all I knew, she had gone to jump in the river, placed conveniently on the next block, but it hasn’t come to that, yet. When she first announced the new state of things, and retired upstairs, I didn’t know quite how to act. Fortunately, I had never developed the slightest attachment to her (except physical), so the news had no emotional effect on me at all; except perhaps that it meant the cancellation of an evening’s plans that included swimming in the nude at Mendon Pond, and then spending an hour or two on the beach. She went upstairs and I read for a while and then decided that I might just as well try to sleep. Besides the fact that I wanted to do this very much, it meant that I would have to go upstairs to ask for a sheet, as it was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit and I had no intention of sleeping with my clothes on. This gave me an excuse to see if she would communicate further; but she wouldn’t, except for a few tear-muffled implorations to the general effect, once more, that she “couldn’t,” she “couldn’t” see me or talk to me. I was a bit tempted to create a scene, to grab her, force her down on the bed, and make her talk it all out, or worse; but, my better half instructed that although her troubles were entirely of her own making and were doomed to come on more or less irrevocably, still there was no need to complicate matters, especially since any scene on my part would have been pure acting and would not have proceeded from a hurt or disappointment. So I merely took the sheet and made myself comfortable on the living-room daybed. Marion puttered around upstairs a while longer and then came down and, without saying anything to me, went outside, where she remained for at least two hours, simply pacing up and down along the sidewalk. When Vic came back with Beth, Marion came back in, and Vic and I left.

The two White sisters, Beth and Marion, present a beautiful picture of frustration, dissipated energy, failure, and in general disabling neuroticism. Vic, the psychologist, confirms this unreservedly. Marion doesn’t know what she wants, and drowns her sorrow in liquor, self-pity, and sex. Even the prospect of marital bliss with Helmut does not seem completely to please her. She thought, when I first met her, that Helmut’s father was having the marriage annulled. During this past weekend, however, she informed me that Helmut’s father had written her that all communication must cease between les mariés until Helmut becomes of age. This implies, of course, that once Helmut reaches 21, his father will allow him to make up his own mind; and that, as things now stand, the marriage will be resumed. (Actually, Beth doubts very much that there was any legal marriage at all—at most, a common-law marriage [and a still-born baby].) I said to Marion, when she told me, “This must make you very happy.” She didn’t look the least bit happy herself, and told me, with a frown across her brow, “I’m not too sure it does.”

Beth’s situation is much the same—if anything, worse, because she is much more intelligent and thus her lack of achievement must be measured up against much higher potentialities than those of her sister. Quite aside from a broken marriage, and a son for whom she obviously cares very little, she has pursued her marked musical talents only sporadically, taking singing lessons now and then, and merely sight-reading in a most superficial manner at the piano, instead of really working to improve her technique and interpretation. Marion says that she cannot maintain interest in any type of work long enough to stay steadily on a job, or, apparently, to select one of her talents and attempt to make a career out of it. She also tried nursing school, but was asked to leave after 14 months, presumably because she was “too straitlaced” (which is ironic, because if anything she’s a libertine)—which meant, I think, that although she got brilliant grades in her nursing studies, she didn’t know how to approach people on a spontaneous, unsophisticated level, and was thus quite unsuited for nursing. Bravo to the Buffalo Nursing School for its perspicacity!

So, she is now 32 and rather lost. She spent last year at Chautauqua, knitting sweaters, and sight-reading at the piano. She didn’t even take advantage of the many music courses at Chautauqua during the summer months. Davie, her son, she ignores completely and ruthlessly. Luckily for all, the grandmother, old Mrs. White, seems to enjoy caring for the boy. Beth is very quick to display her talents or to list her A’s and A+’s at nursing school; and she is very quick to leap into a man’s arms with an almost maniacal ferocity. The man is Vic, not I, of course, since I was occupied with her sister. But even so, when I was sleeping at their apartment, she embraced and kissed me as a means of waking me up. Unfortunately, she is extremely plain, querulous, and has a stridently loud voice. If she looked better, she could surely make a grand success as a night-club singer or even as a strip-tease artist. Better this than her present state.

I had a glorious two-week vacation at Riparius, made complete in every way by good weather, lots of work accomplished, and much socializing—the last not ordinarily a part of my Riparius stays. Dad finally got to the farm, as he and mother met me at Albany, drove up, visited for a while, and then went to the Point of Pines to spend the week, leaving me the car. The only unpleasant incident occurred when I went there for a $4.00 dinner one evening and, according to Dad, acted very high and mighty towards the people to whom I was introduced, refusing even to look at them. Dad wasn’t acute enough to realize that this “coldness” proceeded not from a disdain for the people I was meeting, but rather from the very simple fact that my face was all irritated and red and sore from shaving and showering, so that I simply looked like hell and acted ostrich-like in hiding my head in the sand. On the more pleasant side, I built a good deal of my fireplace, and did, I think, a good job. On the outside I built up the footing, then laid the hearth of firebrick, which I put on so unevenly that it looks like a genuine seventeenth-century antique hearth, and thus is very becoming; on the inside I got as far as the arch, which I didn’t complete for lack of the proper-sized arch support.

As always, I enjoyed the Carmans; but this visit I also saw a good deal more of Carl Sibler, and I met Dr. Barnard and her daughter Ann, and Jerry English, and had dinner at their house. Also met Bruce McGerry, Mrs. Brown’s boy. A Haverford freshman, John Hawkins, was Sibler’s chargé d’affaires, and we soon became friends, since he is mostly interested in music, is an organist, and a friend of Peter Gardner’s. He helped me lay rock one afternoon. Then I went over to George Davis’s place and bought the beautiful pump organ there for $20.00. That evening and one other, John and I played it far into the night. Then there was Johnny Kendal, a cute tow-haired, countrified lad from Trenton whose father knew Dr. Barnard and who was spending the summer as a “dude” at the Carmans’ ranch. He seemed to enjoy nuzzling up against me like a little kitten, though I don’t think this was evidence of homosexuality, just plain affection. He was developing at the same time a wholesome and very open interest in girls. We went horseback riding together up past Dr. Barnard’s, where we enjoyed her magnificent panoramic view, and then through the woods to Mr. Kennedy and one of his mistresses. It was always a delightful sight to see Johnny’s trim little figure, complete with ten-gallon Texas hat, sitting like an expert to a canter or trot, acting as though he’d been born in the wild West and raised on a horse.

Besides these people, I had the pleasure of seeing Mickey Heyman and wife Terry for an afternoon. He’s to begin law school in the fall. Matt Heron also stopped on his way to New England, but I missed him by about five minutes. When he came, volumes of Bach were very conspicuously evident on the organ. Matt left a note saying, “All this and Bach, too! I’m jealous.”

September 5, 1953

“Ode to Jack” (hospital orderly from Tennessee, upon his leaving General Hospital for the Genesee Hospital, where he will begin training as a scrub technician), read at the hospital farewell party:

To err is human,

But to cast away the paragon of orderlies,

The mopper supreme, the

Immaculate of immaculates;

To cast away pure gold,

Is a fault that should not be told.

(Chorus) For he’s gone to Genesee,

Gone to Genesee,

Oh, he’s gone and left us here to slave,

Gone to Genesee.

Thy mopping, thy technique

With brush, is unique.

Thy grip, the best of all, Thy swing a delight to see:

Its delicate arc and inclusive path;

Its pressure,

Regulated to each floor’s

Distinctive need—all combining

Oh! Our dear lost chief, to

Make thy rooms the

Cleanest; thy floors

To shine as did the face of Venus

When Paris picked her queen.

(Chorus)

Oh, who should we now follow,

Who can our inspiration be?

For thou art gone, dear Chief,

Gone to Genesee.

Our hearts, they are grievous,

The future we cannot see

Without our dear lost Chief—

Who’s gone to Genesee.

(Chorus)

But there thou wilt scrub,

Ay, there’s the rub—

The Genesee will prosper,

The General pine away, right bub?

(Chorus)

And now back to Cysto, Room Five,

Or other orderly quarters—

Back to a future bleak with work,

Bereft of guidance or example

In the finer points of mopping

Of which your knowledge is certainly ample.

(Chorus)

Back to a future of not knowing

Where, Why, or How—

Where we’ll exist, not LIVE,

As we did when our knowledge was growing.

(Chorus)

General, we need not call upon the heavens

For her curses on your folly;

Our poor dear chief’s absence alone

Will show that life’s no longer jolly.

(Chorus)

September 6, 1953

Last night Marion was back, affectionate as ever. Didn’t take very long. Liz also came over, and spewed forth to me her anger toward Vic for his misunderstanding her, his use, as she said, of “a load of psychological clichés to describe her condition. She complained that she wasn’t at all unstable, that circumstances had forced her to give up various pursuits in the past, and that environment permitting she really had the sticking power to see something through to its completion. This I doubt. The very way she forcibly unburdened herself on me (and later in the same way on Cliff) showed her instability. Her voice cracked, tears gathered in her eyes as she justified her actions and reminded us over and over again about her brilliant grades, her brilliant will power, the inevitability of her success, if the world would only permit her to stay at one thing for any length of time. Baloney! Here is one case where the difficulty is nine-tenths internal. Vic is right; she should concentrate now on seeing a psychiatrist.

I remember that when I went to Jean-Louis Barrault’s French theater last fall I was impressed with its great emotional effect, on me at least, despite its complete lack of realism. I had seen any number of plays on Broadway, done in the prevalent realistic mode, where plot, scene, and characters were as familiar as everyday life; yet here was Molière with archaic settings, costumes, and characters who were exaggerations of certain types—such as Geronte, whose very name indicates his function. The relief from abject realism was welcome; and the fantastic nature of the French production did not produce the effect that some might have predicted—namely, “Psish, this is just a fairytale, a nonsense anthology, unreal, exaggerated, and has therefore no emotional message for me.”

Now in Susanne Langer’s Philosophy In a New Key I find the matter beautifully analyzed and expressed. From the chapter on music:

❡ The actual opposition between the two emotive theories of musical meaning—that of self-expression and that of logical expression—is best summed up by contrasting the passage from C. Ph. E. Bach with Busoni’s statement. [Bach]: “Since a musician cannot otherwise move people, but he be moved himself, so he must necessarily be able to induce in himself all those affects which he would arouse in his auditors; he conveys his feelings to them, and thus most readily moves them to sympathetic emotions” (Versuch über die wahre Art, das Klavier zu spielen). Busoni: “just as an artist, if he is to move his audience, must never be moved himself—lest he lose, at that moment, his mastery over the material—so the auditor who wants to get the full operative effect must never regard it as real, if his artistic appreciation is not to be degraded to mere human sympathy” (Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst.)

❡ This degradation is what Bullough would call a loss of “psychical distance.” It is, in fact, a confusion between a symbol, which lets us conceive its object, and a sign, which causes us to deal with what it means.

❡ Distance . . . is obtained by separating the object and its appeal from one’s own self, by putting it out of gear with practical needs and ends. But . . . distance does not imply an impersonal, purely intellectually interested relation. . . . On the contrary, it describes a personal relation, often highly emotionally colored, but of a peculiar character. Its peculiarity lies in that the personal character of the relation has been, so to speak, filtered. It has been cleared of the practical, concrete nature of its appeal. (Bullough, “Psychical Distance,” p. 91.)

❡ The content has been “symbolized” for us, and what it invites is not emotional response, but insight. “Psychical Distance” is simply the experience of apprehending through a symbol what was not articulated before. The content of art is always real; the mode of its presentation, whereby it is at once revealed and “distanced,” may be a fiction. It may also be music, or, as in the dance, motion. But if the content be the life of feeling, impulse, passion, then the symbols which reveal it will not be the sounds or actions that normally would express this life; not associated signs, but symbolic forms must convey it to our understanding.

September 11, 1953

Re: Beth—She agrees to play with elderly couple in square-dance band, she on piano, Mr. X on clarinet, Mrs. X on drums, to raise money for some charity. Other women in church groups spread word that she is leading everyone straight to Hell. This is reinforced when a visiting evangelist gives fire and brimstone sermon against evils of dancing (also mixed swimming, playing basketball in shorts, smoking, drinking, etc.). The gossip worries Noel, her husband, and he turns increasingly to drink.

You cannot let an alcoholic know that you think he’s an alcoholic, because he already is secretly terribly ashamed of his behavior, and that would make him worse. You have to build up his pride in himself.

Interns come to nurses’ graduate ball drunk, and act miserably. Beth tells one of them later that the hospital is like the arm, where you respect the position and not necessarily the man. This, she thinks, insured her dismissal.

Marion wasn’t cleared for the Naval Ordinance, and she drowned her sorrows in sex, with me as the willing partner. No intercourse, but everything but. Helmut returns to Rochester next week. What then? He won’t live with her.

I played parts of the Bach’s B-flat Partita and Mozart’s C-minor Fantasia at Eastman and was assigned to Mrs. McKown. I scored “very high” on the Seashore, which surprised me. I had hoped to start night shift and practice in the morning; but all the orderlies are leaving, making me indispensable for the present.

October 10, 1953

From a letter by Bartók, quoted in Halsey Stevens’s biography: “Such anxious searching seems to be incompatible with calm resignation. Yet it is resignation I am striving for, and I have almost become accustomed to the thought that it cannot be otherwise. . . . We must attain to a level from which everything can be viewed with sober calmness, with complete indifference. It is difficult to acquire this faculty but, once attained, it becomes the greatest triumph we can have over circumstances and ourselves. . . . Sometimes I almost feel myself at that height, and then I suddenly fall, to start upward again. This happens over and over. But some day I shall succeed in remaining up there.”

December 16, 1953

From Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus:

❡ I go with Schleiermacher, who defined religion as “feeling and taste for the infinite” and called it “a pertinent fact,” present in the human being. In other words, the science of religion has to do not with philosophical theses, but with an inward and given psychological fact. . . . Surely a religious sense is something other than formally professed religion. Would it not have been better to hand over that “fact” of human feeling for the infinite to the sense of piety, the fine arts, free contemplation, yes, even to exact research, which as cosmology, astronomy, theoretical physics, can serve this feeling with entirely religious devotion to the mystery of creation—instead of singling it out as the science of the spirit and developing on it structures of dogma, whose orthodox believers will then shed blood for a copula.

❡ The scientific superiority of liberal theology is indeed incontestable, but its theological position is weak, for its moralism and humanism lack insight into the daemonic character of human existence. The conservative tradition . . . has a profounder, more significant relation to culture than has progressive bourgeois ideology.

❡ We dealt with the matter of our present mode of existence; and Deutschlin protested that it was poor taste for youth to explain youth: a form of life that discusses and examines itself thereby dissolves as form, and only direct and unconscious being has true existence.

❡ German deeds were always done out of a certain mighty immaturity, and not for nothing are we the people of the Reformation. That too was a work of immaturity. Mature, that was the Florentine citizen of the Renaissance, who before he went to church said to his wife: “Well, let us now make our bow to popular error!” But Luther was unripe enough, enough of the people, of the German people, to bring in the new, the purified faith. Where would the world be if maturity were the last word? We shall in our unripeness vouchsafe it still some renewal, some revolution.

❡ To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life; it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare—where others lack the courage—to plunge again into the elemental. Youthful courage, that is the spirit of dying and becoming, the knowledge of death and rebirth.

❡ . . . an intellectual achievement which deserves the name of heroic, something just barely possible, behaving like arrogant travesty. . . . a tense, sustained, neck-breaking game played by art at the edge of impossibility.

❡ Admiration and sadness, admiration and doubt, is that not almost the definition of love?

❡ He lived as a roué of the potentialities. Actuality robs from the potential.

❡ The artist is the brother of the criminal and the madman.

❡ Who knows today, who even knew in classical times, what inspiration is, what genuine, old, primeval enthusiasm, insickled critique, unparalyzed by thought or by the mortal domination of reason—who knows the divine raptus?

❡ Technique in all its aspects demands of him every moment that he do justice to it, and give the only right answer which it at any moment permits. It comes down to this, that his compositions are nothing more than solutions of that kind, nothing but the solving of technical puzzles. Art becomes critique.

❡ What uplifts you, what increases your feeling of power and might and domination, that is the truth—and whether ten times a lie when looked at from the moral angle. And I mean too that creative, genius-giving disease, disease that rides on high horse over all hindrances, and springs with drunken daring from peak to peak, is a thousand times dearer to life than plodding healthiness.

❡ Believe me, barbarism even has more grasp of theology than has a culture fallen away from cult, which even in the religious has seen only culture, only the human, never excess, paradox, the mystic passion, the utterly unbourgeois ideal.

❡ . . . what Plato had said of comedy and tragedy: how they grow on the same tree and a change of lighting suffices to make one into the other.

❡ Very strongly felt and objectively confirmed was the enormous loss of value which the individual had sustained, the ruthlessness which made life today stride away over the single person and precipitate itself as a general indifference to the sufferings and destruction of human beings.

❡ By the bourgeois tradition I mean the values of culture, enlightenment, humanity, in short of such dreams as the uplifting of the people through scientific civilization.

❡ de Tocqueville: out of revolution . . . two streams issued, the one leading men to free arrangements, the other to absolute power. [But] the very concept of free arrangements was self-contradictory: freedom by the act of assertion being driven to limit the freedom of its antagonist and thus to stultify itself and its own principles.

❡ Precisely because from the very first medieval man had received a closed intellectual frame from the Church as something absolute and taken for granted, he had been far more imaginative than the burgher of the individualistic age; he had been able to surrender himself far more freely and sure-footedly to his personal fancy.

❡ . . . a state of mind, which, no longer interested in the psychological, pressed for the objective, for a language that expressed the absolute, the binding and compulsory, and in consequence by choice laid on itself the pious fetters of pre-classically strict form.

❡ . . . how near aestheticism and barbarism are to each other: aestheticism as the herald of barbarism.

❡ . . . a man who knew the best, the highest and austerest; but for him music was music—if it just was music. He objected to Goethe’s saying that art is concerned with the good and difficult; he held that “light” music is difficult too, if it is good.

❡ It was impossible for him to think about things he had already done while in a state of incapacity to do better. The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one’s present impotence.

1954

Rochester

January–late December

Sunnyside

late December

SS Queen Elizabeth

December 31

January 2, 1954

Elizabeth White called up and asked that I come over, because of something she had to tell me. I arrived to find the sisters packing, and their mother with them. Beth and I took a walk and she told me how their father had discovered that Marian was pregnant and that Helmut had been giving her various medicines. Helmut was dragged into the police station where he admitted that he had been forcing the drugs on her, which of course is most illegal. Marian’s father said that Helmut must either marry Marian or face the music. Then Helmut’s father said that if Helmut married, he would disinherit him and take him out of school. Naturally, Helmut hedged, and did not come through with the ring. This, of course, was a blow to Marian, as in her dream world she had considered herself already married, and she never allowed herself to consider the very real possibility that Helmut had only been using her sexually all that time. So, if the medicines have not already killed the baby, Marian will be taken quietly to a home in Buffalo, where she can give birth and then put the child out for adoption. Verdict and moral: it would have been so easy to have used contraceptives!

Spent the long Christmas weekend visiting Tyacks in Cambridge and then going down to Providence to spend Christmas eve and the rest of the weekend with Pete, climaxed with our going to Meeting together on Sunday morning just before I had to catch the bus back. I continue to feel marvelously at home with Pete and with the Gardners. We have a remarkable friendship that, I hope, will continue. He seems to be interested now in a Jewish girl, or at least he says that she is in love with him: a Bryn Mawr student who comes from Boston. Her family is adamant about her marrying out of the faith, and especially to what they call an “idealist” without any recognized source of income, at least at present. Pete doesn’t love her—yet—so that is the temporary solution. It somehow is something that I never considered: Pete’s marrying a Jewess. But when I first heard of that possibility now (provided he falls in love with her), I was quite pleased. Of course, I do not know her. She may be one of those wonderfully earnest and artistic Jews who will complement Pete very nicely—or, she may be neurotic and be using him as a means of breaking away from her family and the past. This is not the first major squabble, apparently, that she has had with the family. I would literally sit down and wail if I knew Pete married into such a situation. He is much safer with a plain ordinary gentile, though there are some beauts there too!

“What’s the difference between a duck? . . . One of its feet is both wrong!”

I am writing my religious autobiography for Riek, and also today made the beginnings of what I hope will be a violin sonata for her. Not being able to see her is just about the hardest thing to bear in this service. I long so much to be near her warmth once more, and to have her with me at meals and at bedtime, when a man should not be alone. Fie on this celibate life! Well, there is a real possibility that Riek and I will make excellent mates. I have come to love her through her letters, and if this love is flamed by her person when I return to Europe in a year’s time, then she will certainly be my wife. Oh happy thought!

March 23, 1954

Overheard in a Greyhound bus at 4:30 a.m. as a drunk sat down next to a half-asleep passenger and tried to get him to wake up and converse: Passenger: “Do you want me to die from lack of sleep?” Drunk: “You’ll never die from lack of sleep. But you might from not knowing how to live!”

April 3, 1954

From Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan:

❡ “What is man?” he whispered to himself. “C’est un néant environné de Dieu, indigent de Dieu, capable de Dieu et rempli de Dieu, s’il veut.” And what is this God of which men are capable? Mr. Propter answered with the definition given by John Tauler in the first paragraph of his “Following of Christ”: “God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.” Man, then, is as nothingness surrounded by and indigent of a being withdrawn from creatures, a nothingness capable of free power, filled with a pure working, if he so desires. If he so desires. But how few men ever do desire or, desiring, ever know what to wish for or how to get it! Right knowledge is hardly less rare than the sustained good will to act on it. Of those few who look for God, most find, through ignorance, only such reflections of their own self-will as the God of battles, the God of the chosen people, the Prayer-Answerer, the Savior.

❡ This time the anger had exploded in violent abuse. It was the anger . . . of the well meaning but stupid man who is compelled against his will to ask himself indiscreet questions about what he had been doing as a matter of course. He doesn’t want to ask these questions because he knows that if he does he will be forced either to go on with what he is doing, but with the cynic’s awareness that he is doing wrong, or else, if he doesn’t want to be a cynic, to change the entire pattern of his life so as to bring his desires to do right into harmony with the real facts as revealed in the course of self-interrogation. To most people radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is accomplishing one’s duty—one’s duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the Church. For, of course, poor Hansen’s case wasn’t in any way unique; on a smaller scale and therefore with less power to do evil, he was acting like all those civil servants and statesmen and prelates who go through life spreading misery and destruction in the name of their ideals and under orders from their categorical imperatives.

❡ Only a saint . . . could be a peon and a pariah with impunity, because only a saint would accept the position gladly and as though he had chosen it for his own free will. Poverty and suffering ennoble only when they are voluntary. By involuntary poverty and suffering men are made worse. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an involuntary poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

❡ “Do you know which is the stupidest text in the Bible?” “It’s this: ‘They hated me without a cause.’”

❡ The poor fellow from Kansas [was] self-righteous, no doubt disagreeable to the neighbors, an incompetent farmer; but that wasn’t the whole story. His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational, and right. Like all the others he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants, he had learnt to equate happiness with possession, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally, like all the others, he had learnt that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true; in a semi-arid country, it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone.

❡ If individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of every human being’s efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualization of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence.

❡ . . . a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality was realized by an analogue of sensuous experience, by a kind of unmediated participation. The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality.

❡ If he serves any ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation from personality, from time and craving—whether it’s the artist’s ideal of beauty, or the scientist’s ideal of truth, or the humanitarian’s ideal of what currently passes for goodness—he’s not serving God; he’s serving a magnified aspect of himself.

❡ Better planes, better explosives—every improvement increases the sum of fear and hatred, widens the incidence of nationalistic hysteria—makes it more difficult for people to forget those horrible projections of themselves they call their ideals of patriotism, heroism, glory and the rest. And even the less destructive applications of science aren’t really much more satisfactory. For what do such applications result in? The multiplication of possessable objects, the invention of new instruments of stimulation; the disseminations of new wants through propaganda aimed at equating possession with well-being and incessant stimulation with happiness. But incessant stimulation from without is a source of bondage; and so the preoccupation with possessions.

❡ Napoleon came out of the French Revolution. German nationalism came out of Napoleon. The war of 1870 came out of German nationalism. The war of 1914 came out of the war of 1870. Hitler came out of the war of 1914. Those are the bad results of the French Revolution. The good results were the enfranchisement of the French peasants and the spread of political democracy. Put the good results in one scale of your balance and the bad ones in the other, and try which set is heavier. Then perform the same operation with Russia. . . . or take the fight for democracy in Spain. There was a fight for democracy all over Europe not so long ago. Rational prognosis can only be based on past experience. Look at the results of 1914 and then ask yourself what chance the Loyalists ever had of establishing a liberal regime at the end of a long war.

❡ What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part—as when the feelings connected with money or sex are sacrificed in order that the ego may have the feelings of superiority, solidarity and hatred which are associated with patriotism, or any kind of political or religious fanaticalism.

❡ Publicans and sinners merely fornicate and over-eat, and get drunk. The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

❡ Good is on the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level of eternity, of God, spirit. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestations of good on the other two levels. For, insofar as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are forever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. And, the same thing is true in regard to the sphere above. We worry and crave ourselves out of the very possibility of transcending personality and knowing, intellectually at first and then by direct experience, the true nature of the world.

❡ The more bosses, the less democracy. So the less self-support, the less democracy. In Jefferson’s day, a great many Americans did support themselves. They were economically independent. Independent of government and independent of big business. Hence the Constitution.

❡ Socialism seems to be fatally committed to centralization and standardized urban mass production. I see too many occasions for bullying there—too many opportunities for bossy people to display their bossiness, for sluggish people to sit back and be slaves.

❡ You can’t preserve people from the horrors of war if they won’t give up the pleasures of nationalism. You can’t save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding money as the supreme good. You can’t avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production.

❡ His elbow on the desk, in an attitude of prayer, he meditatively scratched his head; scratched it with both hands where two little spots had formed dry scabs at the roots of the hair that still remained to him, scabs which it was an exquisite pleasure to prize up with the finger-nails and carefully detach there! The scab under the right hand had come loose. He pulled it out through the thick tufted hair above his ears and, as he looked at the tiny desiccated shred of tissue, was suddenly reminded of the baboons. But after all, why not? The most certain and abiding pleasures are the tiniest, the simplest, the rudimentarily animal—the pleasure of lying in a hot bath, for example, or under the bed-clothes, between waking and sleeping, in the morning; the pleasure of answering the calls of nature, the pleasure of being rubbed by a good masseur, the pleasure finally of scratching when one itched. Why be ashamed? He dropped the scab into the waste basket and continued to scratch with the left hand.

❡ As the salary rose and the morality of what he was called upon to do correspondingly sank, the poor fellow’s uneasiness had increased, until, on the brink of reservation or a nervous breakdown, he had managed, in the nick of time, to get himself converted to Catholicism. Thence forward, he had been able to pack up the moral responsibility for his share in the general iniquity, take it to Farm Street and leave it there, in camphor, so to speak, with the Jesuit Fathers. Admirable arrangement!

❡ The valley of the shadow of death; of the greater deaths and all the little deaths. Through deaths come transfigurations. He who would save his life must lose it. Men and women are continually trying to lose their lives, the stale, unprofitable, senseless lives of their ordinary personalities. Forever trying to get rid of them, and in a thousand different ways. In the frenzies of gambling and revivalism; in the monomanias of avarice and perversion, of research and sectarianism and ambition; in the compensatory lunacies of alcohol, of reading, of day-dreaming, of morphia; in the hallucinations of opium and the cinema and ritual; in the wild epilepsies of political enthusiasm and erotic pleasure; in the stupors of veronal and exhaustion. To escape; to forget one’s own, old, wearisome identity; to become someone else or, better, some other thing—a mere body, strangely numbed or more than ordinarily sentient; or else just a state of impersonal mind, a mode of unindividualized consciousness. What happiness, what a blissful alleviation! Even for such as were not previously aware that there was anything in their condition that needed to be alleviated.

❡ But like all other addictions, whether to drugs or books, to power or applause, the addiction to pleasure tends to aggravate the condition it temporarily alleviates. The addict goes down into the valley of the shadow of his own particular little death—down indefatigably, desperately, down in search of something else, something not himself, something other and better than the life he miserably lives as a human person in the hideous world of human persons. He goes down and, either violently or in delicious inertia, he dies and is transfigured; but dies only for a little while, is transfigured only momentarily. After the little death is a little resurrection, a resurrection out of unconsciousness, out of self-annihilating excitement, back into the misery of knowing oneself alone and weak and worthless, back into a completer separateness, an acuter sense of personality. And the acuter the sense of separate personality, the more urgent the demand for yet another experience of assuaging death and transfiguration. The addiction alleviates, but in doing so increases the pains demanding alleviation.

❡ This day fifty years ago I was born. From solitude in the womb, we emerge into solitude among our fellows, and return again to solitude within the grave. We pass our lives in the attempt to mitigate that solitude. But propinquity is never fusion. The most populous city is but an agglomeration of wildernesses. We exchange words, but exchange them from prison to prison, and without hope that they will signify to others what they mean to ourselves. We marry, and there are two solitudes in the house instead of one; we beget children, and there are many solitudes. We reiterate the act of love; but again propinquity is never fusion. The most intimate contact is only of surfaces and we couple, as I have seen the condemned prisoners at Newgate coupling with their trulls, between the bars of our cages. Pleasure cannot be shared; like pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give pleasure to our lovers or bestow charity upon the needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our benevolence, but only ourselves. For the truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own power; and this we are for ever trying to do, despite the fact that by doing it we cause ourselves to feel more solitary than ever. The reality of solitude is the same in all men, there being no mitigation of it, except in forgetfulness, stupidity, or illusion; but a man’s sense of solitude is proportionate to the sense and fact of his power. In any set of circumstances, the more power we have, the more intensely do we feel our solitude.

❡ Misplaced seriousness—the source of some of our most fatal errors. One should be serious only about what deserves to be taken seriously. And, on the strictly human level, there was nothing that deserved to be taken seriously except the sufferings men inflicted upon themselves by their crimes and follies. But, in the last analysis, most of these crimes and follies arose from taking too seriously things which did not deserve it.

❡ The spectacle of brute creation provides me with almost my sole remaining pleasures. The stupidity of the brutes is without pretensions and their malignity depends on appetite and is therefore only intermittent. Men are systematically and continuously cruel, while their follies are justified in the names of religion and politics, and their ignorance is muffled up in the pompous garments of philosophy.

❡ What poetry, what statues, but on the brink of the Peloponnesian War! And now the Vatican is painted—just in time for the sack of Rome. And the Eroica is composed, but for a hero who turns out to be just another bandit. And the nature of the atom is elucidated, by the same physicists as volunteer in war-time to improve the arts of murder. On the plane of the absence of God, men can do nothing else except destroy what they have built—destroy even while they build—build with the elements of destruction. Madness consists in not recognizing the facts; in making wishes the fathers of thoughts; in conceiving things to be other than they really are; in trying to realize desired ends by means which countless previous experiments have shown to be inappropriate. Madness consists, for example, in thinking of oneself as a soul, a coherent and enduring human entity. But, between the animal below and the spirit above, there is nothing on the human level except a swarm of constellated impulses and sentiments and notions; a swarm brought together by the accidents of heredity and language; a swarm of incongruous and often contradictory thoughts and desires. Memory and the slowly changing body constitute a kind of spatio-temporal cage, within which the swarm is enclosed. To talk of it as though it were a coherent and enduring “soul” is madness. On the strictly human level there is no such thing as a soul.

❡ God is completely present only in the complete absence of what we call our humanity.

❡ Even the swarm of our passions and opinions is susceptible to the beauty of eternity; and being susceptible becomes dissatisfied with its own ugliness; and being dissatisfied undertakes to change itself. Chaos gives place to order—not the arbitrary, purely human order that comes from the subordination of the swarm to some lunatic “ideal,” but an order that reflects the real order of the world. Bondage gives place to liberty—for choices are no longer dictated by the chance occurrences of earlier history, but are made teleologically and in the light of a direct insight into the nature of things.

May 5, 1954

Dear Wils [Tom Wilson],

To hear from you (and other people similarly) that you are 2/3 through with medical school, makes me stop and ask myself “Where am I?” Sometimes I must honestly answer, “Nowhere”; but this is in the opinion of the world. On a deeper level, I hope, I am progressing, for my situation here is one ripe for character building for the simple reason that it is unpleasant at best and execrable at worst. I will be nearly 25 when I finish next February, and what then shall I know or be? Nothing or everything, I suppose, depending on criteria. I still have my dreams of small farming, writing, complete independence in a Jeffersonian or Thoreauian sense, and antipathy toward the specialization that society seems to compel nowadays. Dreams? Well, we shall see—at any rate this kind of life leaves room for surprise and variation and change. But perhaps I will take another degree, a hopelessly inefficacious one monetarily in all prospect, but one nevertheless on the very frontiers of contemporary thought and perplexities: the Philosophy and Psychology combination at Oxford for which I unsuccessfully applied under the Rhodes fund. Returning to Europe will be exciting.

The question you raise as to your dedication to medicine makes me laugh. I have known doctors at home, and I see doctors here now constantly, and I should say that your dedication is assuredly up there with the best. Real dedication is not a verbal thing, or even a conscious one: if a person goes around saying to himself before each house-call, “I am dedicated to curing humanity in general, to alleviating the pain and suffering of mankind, and of my present patient in particular, whose five dollars I shall accept with great reluctance and only because society demands that I maintain a good social standing,” then I should say that this man, however sincere, is not honestly dedicated. I prefer the person who simply carries on his work through all conditions, because it is his work and because he can do no other but help—rather than mouthing the dedication-formula as a magic incantation to heighten his ego surreptitiously by pretending that he is debasing it. There is even something to be said for the man who goes into his work with fear and perhaps distaste, but who continues in it because the need continues. There is nothing worse than the professional lover of humanity, and I say this with the full realization that some of my own tendencies have been leading in that direction.

Being an orderly has been quite an education for me, being transplanted as I am out of my element. I have fallen too much, I’m afraid, into the weakness of mentioning when I can tactfully that I am a college graduate, my father a physician, my status involuntary, etc., etc. It really would be much stronger of me if I could play the part and accept the disabilities. “Take physic, pomp. / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” To feel, not just to act for eight hours and then return to the throne room! I really don’t think it is snobbery that keeps me aloof (living in a student house, dating university girls, etc.); rather probably an inner insecurity; but most apparently the inability to converse on trivial things. I always think back to that penetrating passage in D. H. Lawrence where the author explains that Paul, his hero, is so anxious to make deep and lasting friendships and thus to avoid trivial ones, that he cannot converse on the very level of trivia that is always the prelude to things deeper and more lasting. He wants to plunge in without breaking the surface—and that, in anyone’s language, is impossible.

I think if there were one bit of advice that I were asked to give to prospective parents, it would be this: “Don’t over-intellectualize your children.” As Huxley says, the moral and intellectual and spiritual set-up of this the best-of-all-possible worlds is akin to the physical set-up: you can’t gain anything without sustaining a compensatory loss. The lesson for parents and politicians, philosophers and pedants, historians and militarists, is to stop seeing only what is, in their eyes, the gain, but as a matter of fact to calculate fearlessly the loss and then to place the two in balance to see which tips the scales. You gain by a centralized mass-production economy but you also lose. You gain by elucidating the innards of the atom, but you also lose. You gain by being a conscientious objector, but you (and society) also lose; and so forth. You gain by intellectualizing, but, oh, how much you also lose!

I am tremendously glad of one thing that this hospital experience has proved to me: that I am not interested in medicine! That is, besides a general intellectual curiosity that, I should hope, would extend to all fields, my mind does not reach out inquiringly toward further investigation in this type of science. We had pre-meds working as orderlies during the summer and they were all excited about such and such a part of a cat’s or dog’s anatomy. As for me, my greatest excitement seems to come from discovering the Greek components of medical terminology. Just an old pedant at heart! But it is really good to know that my reluctance to go into medicine has not been a mistake. It is rare that a person ever does get into a situation in which he can get the “feel” of a profession that he contemplates to make his own. When I think of the accidents of circumstance and whim that steer people into their vocations, I shudder. Perhaps all would-be doctors should mop operating room floors!

June 5, 1954

From Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge:

❡ “D’ you remember how Jesus was led into the wilderness and fasted forty days? Then, when he was a-hungered, the devil came to him and said: If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But Jesus resisted the temptation. (Thrice more the devil temped him, but Jesus resisted, and said: Get thee hence, Satan.) That’s the end of the story according to the good simple Matthew. But it wasn’t. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns, and death on the cross, thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.” Isabel looked at me indignantly. . . . “I think that’s idiotic and blasphemous.” “I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn’t matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself, man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten Son.”

July 27, 1954

Riparius

Fred tells me that Harold Smith, whom I used to visit about Pharaoh Lake rowboats, is living with his (Fred’s) niece, up North River way. Harold was a nice guy, but I remember calling for him one day and finding his wife (a big fat woman) alone with three of the sickest looking kids I’ve ever seen. Now Fred tells me that Harold’s wife tried to shoot him one night, but Harold grabbed the hammer in time and squeezed it against her hand, where the scar can still be seen. So Harold left her, because he knew that if he stayed, sometime during one of their many arguments he was bound to kill her.

I asked Fred how Harold met Fred’s niece, Caroline. He said that Sherman Frazer used to bring Caroline home (age 17) and sometimes Harold went to visit Sherman. Well, Caroline got to liking Harold better than Sherman, and so the result.

Fred also told of his own girl in Vermont. She met him for a date once dead drunk. He pulled out the next morning for New York State and now hates women.

Poor Fred. He’s so alone and hopeless. Today he pulled the radiator off his truck, going over a rock. Complains that Hal never helps him. When in this depressed mood he takes his gun and goes alone to the woods to sit in a tree half the night waiting for a deer.

Margie Rusk was here Monday and Tuesday. She knows all the birds, pets moths, which I abhor, and otherwise seems the professional nature-lover. But she’s nice enough withal and now that she’s just left I feel altogether lonely. I really work well when someone’s around, badly when alone.

Saturday night I took out Aggie again in New York. Are we falling in love? When I kiss her she melts in my arms and pulls me tighter to her, but it is not the pull of a slut like Marian or Betty MacLean, who you know immediately just want a good penis-rub, regardless of whom the penis is attached to. When Aggie muzzles up to me I feel that it is for me as a person, as a personality. And I am the same with her. With MacLean, after the first thrill of contact I am mostly repulsed. The sex play seems so meaningless and leads nowhere. It certainly doesn’t lead to knowing her more closely. Rather, it is an excuse for not knowing her, for not making any effort at all toward human outreach and knowledge and understanding. With Aggie it is altogether different. The embrace is one of tenderness, of complete affection and security, rather than just sex, penis-play. It is what a child undoubtedly feels when he snuggles up to his mother.

I wish so much that Aggie could come up here, and I have asked her, but it does look lecherous, I suppose, and she is afraid her mother will disagree entirely. My whole soul and body yearn day and night for a spiritual and bodily mate. When will I ever find one and consummate the union?

August 4, 1954

Fred finally shot a deer, expecting all to share his joy. But Hal ordered the meat out of his house, for fear of the game warden. Poor Fred was devastated, went out sulking and took the meat to his sister’s. Hal expected him to quit, but he was back to work the next day, though non-communicative. Then meal by meal he opened up again and a few days later was back to his own pleasant self.

Fred seems to have shot thousands of deer, if one would believe his stories. It’s almost a passion with him—certainly a way out in his otherwise dismal lonely womanless, liquorless life. And a good way out too. At least he is only destroying a deer now and then (he usually misses, fortunately) instead of destroying himself by drinking or his possessions by gambling, as other men do. Yes, a good solution for Fred, though certainly not a be-all and end-all. Each person seems to find his release from frustration in his own way, corresponding, I suppose, to the nature of his frustration. And who is to say, therefore, which means is moral, which immoral, which useful, which destructive?

My own frustration seems still lack of women. I think I could do everything so much better if I had a companion in life—my writing, and even the work here. Perhaps this is looking for a foolish panacea.

The chimney is growing, slowly. I really do not work very many hours, all told, and seem to start very slowly in the mornings. And snags develop, invariably. So it is almost two weeks now, and I don’t think I shall be able to finish it completely. Otherwise I have shingled about ¾ of the north gable; asbestos, so as to have a fireproof layer behind the chimney, and have built a door, which I haven’t hung yet. I love it up here as much as always. I would like so much just to settle here and try to make a living from the farm and writing. But where is the woman to do this with me? Riek writes today that she wishes she were here and that at night we could sleep together naked squeezed into one sleeping sack. But even she, with all her desire to “hook” me, insists on continuing her career—and who can blame her? How long would she be content up here, out of reach of any decent orchestra?

But this is the way to mental health for me. Man can battle with other people, with himself, and with nature and the environment. The last is the most conducive to health, and is the least formidable today. The farm gives me the opportunity to live in the way necessary for me. Perhaps this way of life will break the chain of neuroticism bequeathed to me. Otherwise I see little hope. Then, with the self-confidence and general well-being born of this competition with wind and snow and soil, one can better face the more difficult conflicts with other men and with oneself.

Of course, if I were to settle here, every one in my past would tell me I was wasting my life and my talents. In a way they will be right. It is just too bad that my talents, such as they be, cannot seem to exercise themselves freely and at highest efficiency. But the “talents” themselves are but compensations highly indulged because of the very neuroticism that keeps them at bay. Propellant and repellant are the same force. Tricky but true!

I wish to hell Aggie would write to me!

August 22, 1954

From Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza:

❡ Returned depressed from an evening with Helen and half a dozen of her young political friends. Such a passion for “liquidating” the people who don’t agree with them! And such a sincere conviction that liquidation is necessary! Revolting—but only to be expected. Regard the problem of reform exclusively as a matter of politics and economics, and you must approve and practice liquidation.

Consider recent history. Industrialism has grown pari passu with population. Now, where markets are expanding, the two besetting problems of all industrial societies solve themselves. New inventions may create technological unemployment, but expanding markets cure it as it’s made. Each individual may possess inadequate purchasing power; but the total number of individuals is steadily rising. Many small purchasing powers do as much as fewer big ones.

Our population is now stationary, will soon decline. Shrinkage instead of expansion of markets. Therefore no more automatic solution of economic problems. Birth control necessitates the use of coordinating political intelligence. There must be a large-scale plan. Otherwise the machine won’t work. In other words, politicians will have to be about twenty times as intelligent as heretofore. Will the supply of intelligence be equal to the demand?

And of course intelligence isn’t isolated. The act of intelligently planning modifies the emotions of the planners. Consider English politics. We’ve made plenty of reforms—without ever accepting the principles underlying them. (Compare the king’s titles with his present position. Compare our protestations that we’ll never have anything to do with socialism with the realities of state control.) There are no large-scale plans in English politics, with hardly any thinking in terms of first principles. With what results? Among others, that English politics have been on the whole very good-natured. The reason is simple. Deal with practical problems as they arise and without reference to first principles; politics are a matter of haggling. Now hagglers lose tempers, but don’t normally regard one another as fiends in human form. But this is precisely what men of principle and systematic planners can’t help doing. A principle is, by definition, right; a plan for the good of the people. Axioms from which it logically follows that those who disagree with you and won’t help you to realize your plan are enemies of goodness and humanity. No longer men and women, but personifications of evil, fiends incarnate. Killing men and women is wrong, but killing fiends is a duty. Hence the Holy Office, hence Robespierre and the OGPU. Men with strong religious and revolutionary faith, men with well-thought-out plans for improving the lot of their fellows, either in this world or the next, have been more systematically and cold-bloodedly cruel than any others. Thinking in terms of first principles entails acting with machine-guns. A government with a comprehensive plan for the betterment of society is a government that uses torture. Per contra, if you never consider principles and have no plan, but deal with situations as they arise, piecemeal, you can afford to have unarmed policemen, liberty of speech and habeas corpus. Admirable, but what happens when an industrial society learns (a) how to make technological advances at a constantly accelerating speed and (b) to prevent conception? Answer: it must either plan itself in accordance with general political and economic principles, or else break down. But governments with principles and plans have generally been tyrannies making use of police spies and terrorism. Must we resign ourselves to slavery and torture for the sake of coordination?

Breakdown on the one hand, Inquisition and OGPU rule on the other. A real dilemma, if the plan is mainly economic and political. But think in terms of individual men, women, and children, not of States, Religion, Economic Systems and such-like abstractions: There is then a hope of passing between the horns. For if you begin by considering concrete people, you see at once that freedom from coercion is a necessary condition of their developing into full-grown human beings; that the form of economic prosperity which consists in possessing unnecessary objects doesn’t make for individual well-being; that a leisure filled with passive amusement is not a blessing; that the conveniences of urban life are bought at a high physiological and mental price; that an education which allows you to use yourself wrongly is almost valueless; that a social organization resulting in individuals being forced, every few years, to go out and murder one another must be wrong. And so on. Whereas if you start from the State, the Faith, the Economic System, there is a complete transvaluation of values. Individuals must murder one another, because the interests of the Nation demand it, must be educated to think of ends and disregard means, because the schoolmasters are there and don’t know of any other method; must live in towns, must have leisure to read the newspapers and go to the movies, must be encouraged to buy things they don’t need because the industrial system exists and has to be kept going; must be coerced and enslaved, because otherwise they might think for themselves and give trouble to their rulers.

The Sabbath was made for man. But man now behaves like the Pharisees and insists that he is made for all the things—science, industry, nation, money, religion, schools—which were really made for him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempted to sacrifice himself to these idols. There is no remedy except to become aware of one’s interests as a human being, and having become aware, to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use the self and learning to direct the mind. It’s almost wearisome, the way one always comes back to the same point. Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, of there were another way out of our difficulties! A shortcut. A method requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some “enemy of society” to be shot. A salvation from outside, like a dose of calomel.

❡ Query: how to combine belief that the world is to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

❡ Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading Anna Karenina. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eye-strain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood.

Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry—seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principles; but in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lusts for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings—these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.

Rightly, no doubt. Because, if human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves. But meanwhile, I really can’t be bothered to read any more imaginative literature.

September 12, 1954

From Maugham, The Summing Up:

❡ To my mind, the drama took a wrong turning when the demand for realism led it to abandon the ornament of verse. Verse has a specific dramatic value as anyone can see by observing in himself the thrilling effect of a tirade in one of Racine’s plays or any of Shakespeare’s great set pieces; and this is independent of the sense; it is due to the emotional power of rhythmical speech. But more than that, verse forces on the matter a conventional form that heightens the aesthetic effect. It enables the drama to achieve a beauty that is out of the question in a prose play. However much you may admire The Wild Duck, The Importance of Being Earnest, or Man and Superman, you cannot without abuse of the word claim that they are beautiful. But the chief value of verse is that it delivers a play from sober reality. It puts it on another level, at one remove from life, and so makes it easier for the audience to attune themselves to that state of feeling in which they are most susceptible to the drama’s specific appeal. In that artificial medium life is not presented in a world-for-word translation, but in a free rendering, and thus the dramatist has ample scope for the effects of which his art is capable. For the drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect. That willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge wrote is essential to it. The importance of truth to the dramatist is that it adds to interest, but to the dramatist truth is only verisimilitude. It is what he can persuade his audience to accept. If they will believe that a man can doubt his wife’s fidelity because someone tells him he has found her handkerchief in somebody else’s possession, well and good, that is sufficient motive for his jealousy; if they will believe that a six-course dinner can be eaten in ten minutes, well and good again, the dramatist can get on with his play. But when a greater and greater realism, both in motive and action, is demanded of him and he is asked not to embroider gaily or romantically upon life but to copy it, he is robbed of great part of his resources. He is forced to forgo asides because people do not naturally talk to themselves out loud; he may not telescope events by which he was able to accelerate his action, but must cause them to occur as deliberately as in real life; he must eschew accident and chance, for we know (in the theatre) that things do not happen like that. The result has shown that realism too often can only produce plays that are drab and dull.

From Look Homeward, Angel:

❡ “If I had known. If I had known,” said Eliza. And then: “I’m sorry.” But he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself, or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon the inexorable tides of necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth. O lost.

September 14, 1954

Bhagavad-Gita:

❡ II 47–53. Let your privilege be in actions themselves; never let it be in their fruits. So be not moved by the fruits of actions; nor let inaction dwell in you. / Abiding under the Rule [Yoga] and casting off attachment, O Earth-Winner, do your actions, indifferent alike to gain or loss. Even-mindedness is called the Rule. / For actions which seek returns are far lower than the Rule of the Understanding, O Wealth-Winner. Seek refuge in the Understanding; base are they who are moved by the fruit of actions. / Under this Rule of the Understanding a man frees himself even in this life from good deeds and ill. Therefore set yourself to the Rule; skill in actions is the Rule. / For under the Rule of the understanding wise men abandon the fruits of actions, loose themselves from the fetters of birth, and reach that state which is beyond all ill. / When your understanding shall have passed through the turmoil of confusion, then alone will you come to indifference as to the things you hear and have heard. / When your understanding, that formerly swayed unbalanced by reason of what you heard, shall stand firm and moveless in awareness of the eternal Soul, then you will attain the Rule.

56–58. He whose mind is undismayed in pain, who is freed from longings for pleasure; from whom passions, fear, and wrath have fled, is called a man of steady wisdom, a saintly man. / He who is free from all attachments and who, whatever fair or foul fortune may come to him, neither rejoices in nor loathes it, has wisdom set in permanence. / When such a man draws in, his senses altogether form the objects of sense, as a tortoise draws in its limbs, he has wisdom set in permanence.

III 27. All actions are done by the forces of Nature, but he whose Self is deluded by the thought of an “I” thinks: I am the doer.

September 16, 1954

Chapter 14 in Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is very impressive. He catalogues the actions and feelings of numerous people in Altamont at 5 a.m., juxtaposing their varied lots and conditions with great drama.

September 23, 1954

Gita:

❡ VI 1–4, 29. He who does his appointed actions without heed to their fruit is both a renouncer of action and a man of the Rule; not he who withdraws, forgoes the sacrificial fire, and performs no rites. / Know, O Son of Pandu, that what men call renunciation is Yoga, the Rule of disciplined action; for no one becomes a man of the Rule without casting off selfish purposes. / Action is said to be the means for the saintly man who seeks to attain Yoga; after he has attained Yoga, serene inactivity is said to be the means. / For when one clings not to the objects of the senses and to words, and has cast off all purpose, then is he said to have attained Yoga.

With spirit following the rule, with equal vision towards all things, he beholds the Greater Self in all beings and all beings in the Greater Self.

VII 21–24. If any worshipper whatsoever seeks with faith to reverence any Divine Form whatsoever, that same faith in him I make unwavering. / Rule by that faith, he seeks to do reverence to that deity and thence wins his desires, dispensed by Me. / But there is an end to this fruit that comes to these men of little wit. They who make offerings to godlings come to godlings; worshippers of Me come to Me. / Men of no understanding think I have come from the unshown to the shown state, knowing not that my higher being is changeless,, supreme.

XII 8–12. In Me then set your mind, in Me let your understanding dwell; assuredly so shall you abide afterwards in Me. / If you cannot set your mind on Me in steadfastness, then with the practice of concentration seek to win to Me, O Wealth-Winner. / If you have not strength even for concentration, then give yourself over to works for Me; even by performance of actions for My sake you can win to perfection. / If you have not strength to do even this, then come under My Rule as in refuge, and with controlled spirit surrender the fruit of all actins. / For knowledge has more happiness than constant labor; meditation is more excellent than knowledge, surrender of the fruits of action is better than meditation. After such surrender, peace comes straightway.

XVII 14–22. Reverence to gods; twice-born Brahmin elders, and sages; purity, uprightness, chastity, and non-violence: these are called the Mortification of the Body. / Speech that gives no pain, that is true, pleasant and wholesome; likewise the regular study of the Scriptures: these are called the Mortification of Speech. / Serenity of the mind, pleasantness, silence, self-control, and cleanness of spirit; these are called the Mortification of the Mind. / This triple mortification, fulfilled in supreme faith by steadfast men of serene mind, who desire no reward for their conduct: this is called Good. / Mortification for the sake of gaining entertainment, honor, and reverence, and in hypocrisy, is said to be of the Mood of Fieriness; this is unstable and unsure. / Mortification done from a crazed conviction with self-torment, or in order to injure another, is said to be of the Darkness Mood. / That gift which is given as a duty, to one who cannot make returns, and with fitness of place, time, and persons, is a gift of the Goodness Mood. / But that which is given for the sake of a gift in return, or in hope of reward hereafter, or is grudged in the giving, is a gift of the Fiery Mood. / That which is given in an unfit place or time, or to unfit persons, or is given without proper ceremony, or with disdain, is a gift of the Darkness Mood.

September 28, 1954

“. . . Men do not escape from life because life is dull, . . . life escapes from men because men are little.”—Thomas Wolfe.

❡ He [Eugene] would go to Exeter or Sydney; sometimes he would go to little towns he had never before visited. He would register at hotels as “Robert Herrick,” “John Donne,” “George Peele,” “William Blake,” and “John Milton.” No one ever said anything to him about it. The people in those towns had such names. Once he registered at a hotel, in a small Piedmont town, as “Ben Jonson.”

The clerk spun the book critically.

“Isn’t there an h in that name?” he said.

“No,” said Eugene. “That’s another branch of the family. I have an uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way.”

Sometimes, at hotels of ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried glee, as “Robert Browning,” “Alfred Tennyson,” and “William Wordsworth.”

Once he registered as “Henry W. Longfellow.”

“You can’t fool me,” said the clerk, with a hard grin of disbelief. “That’s the name of a writer.”

October 17, 1954

Mixworthy . . . Willie Beason (Negro)—

Two boys determined to beat up a girl at Baden Street. Premeditation. Efforts of group worker to talk them out of it. Unsuccessful. Reasoning insufficient.

Experience on Tower Hill. See Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza.

Nationalist flag-raising in India, with shooting of boys. Check back in journal.

October 18, 1954

Dad called to say that I had just made $500.00 on the stock exchange. Immediately after the call I continued to read where I had left off in O’Casey’s play Within the Gates, and found these lines (!):

Ye who are haggard and giddy with care, busy counting your profit and losses,

Showing the might of your name unto God in the gay-coloured page of a cheque-book;

Storing the best of your life in a drawer of your desk at the office:

Bellow good-bye to the buggerin’ lot ’n come out

To bow down the head ’n bend down the knee to the bee, the bird, ’n the blossom,

Bann’ring the breast of the earth with a wonderful beauty!

P. S. I still like my $500.

October 19, 1954

Jean meets Iena and Jonathan at camp. Iena and Jonathan are married, she aged 21, he 19. Jean and Iena become friends, talk over each other’s love life, etc. Iena says she and Jono see each other as little as possible. Have separate interests. She wants him to meet other people. Has him do things with Jean. He falls in love with Jean. Yet Jean and Iena remain best of friends. Post-camp: Iena & Jean plan trip to the Cape. Iena to meet Jean at N.H. home. On the day appointed, Jono shows up instead. Hard for Jean to explain to townspeople. Awkward. They go to the Cape. Then Jean to Rochester. Jono visits often, unexpectedly. Jean indulgent, not indifferent to him. He has friend Michael whom he introduces to Jean. Jean likes Michael better than Jono but Michael makes no advances. Iena living with an NYU professor who is married and whose wife is on good terms with him still. Jean to NYC to visit professor. Confusion.

October 28, 1954

Clarence ~, aged 12, was found locked in an incinerator at Hanover Houses, reportedly placed there by four hoodlums who molested him while he was delivering newspapers, stole his money, and stripped him naked. He was found by a janitor coming to light the incinerator, and was presently revived and able to attend school the next day. Though Clarence suffered no major damage from his incarceration, the residents of Hanover homes and the Neighborhood Council at Baden Street Settlement considered the incident extremely serious. As reported in the newspapers, they asserted that Clarence was the victim of people from outside the Baden Street area, and that in general that area was open to all kinds of disturbances because of inadequate police protection. Quite a storm was raised about this. Now it appears, however, that Clarence, upon closer questioning by the police, admits to having started these fires in the neighborhood, one in the Settlement itself. He also now admits to having put himself in the incinerator, ostensibly to attract attention, or perhaps out of some form of masochistic exhibitionism—note his nudity. A further factor is that his father has just been arrested also, on a morals charge. It seems that for some time he and Clarence have had homosexual relations. This whole situation now puts the Neighborhood Council in a very ridiculous position. They complained about lack of protection from outsiders, when it appears that what they need, rather, is protection against themselves. Poor naked wretches; take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.

October 30, 1954

Riparius

Warming my feet in front of a truly blazing fire in my fireplace—the first fire of its career. And a foot-warming one it is, too, cackling away, spurting, blistering, now and then throwing out a dangerous spark onto the carpet, making me wish that I had not forgotten the fire screen that still lies useless in fireplace-less 3902. One log is already shriveled red from the heat; the others are encased by semi-circular leaping flames. Now the wood begins to settle a bit—dangerously. I see ashes on my clean white firebrick; soon the hearth will be black with use.

Jeanne Ludmann and I drove up last night in my “new” 1940 Studebaker. She had telegraphed her brother, a student at Middlebury College, to meet her here at midnight, spend the night, and then take her on to her New Hampshire home. He came with a friend at the appointed hour and, since the friend had to return immediately, all took off almost as soon as they came.

A log has just fallen to the edge of my too-narrow hearth. The fire is very hot now. It sears my forehead as I replace the log. Too bad Jeanne could not have stayed. She, too, was disappointed and vowed she would return. All is well.

But all is not well. I found that my cabin had been broken into, or so it appeared. The lock and lock-fixture on the back door had been sheared off. I saw immediately that someone had removed the stovepipe that projected through the south attic window. I went upstairs with trepidation, expecting everything else to be taken, but nothing was. I told Carmans and they immediately said that the culprits were four hunters living across the road, for they had needed stovepipe. The hunters came to see me. The spokesman introduced himself as Kelly, private investigator, and flashed an official-looking card indicating same. He said that he picked up the stovepipe on the road and that he never would think of entering the house. Then he asked how the “culprits” had gotten in. I showed him the broken lock-fixture. “Was that door secured from the inside, when you arrived,” he asked, professionally. “That’s the funny thing,” I said. “It was. And I can’t figure how they got out, because the front door was locked and so were all the windows.” “Doesn’t look like a case of illegal entry, then,” he said, using the correct jargon. I had to agree. We postulated that the burglars had manipulated the pipe from the outside and had drawn it through the window, using Mac’s ladder, which lay conveniently outside. I told the Carmans about Kelly’s statement and they laughed. They told me that he was a supernumerary Post Office official, the kind that delivers parcel posts and the like and that he was a private “eye” of the “send-in-25-cents-and-a-box-top” variety. Most likely he was lying. I still wondered, however, how he got out of the house, for clearly it was impossible to take the pipe off from the outside. Stovepipe sections don’t come apart that easily. I think now that he must have climbed out through the upstairs window have locked it by sticking his arm through the space in the window where the pipe had previously gone through. . . . Another log has just fallen.

Tomorrow I hope to pour a concrete slab for my chimney cap and to complete the struts that will hold it up. Also I must hang the new front door and figure a way to make the back one more secure. After this I want to make window coverings from the old barn wood. It is so wonderful here!

I sent my latest story, “We Too Are Chosen” on to Margot for “merciless criticism.” I await her letter anxiously. I was surprised to find that she still seemed happy to hear from me, and apologized profusely for not having written for so long. When I didn’t hear from her after I saw her last spring, I felt it was because she wanted to break off contact. Apparently I was wrong. Good!

Still no word from Washington regarding my early release. George Willoughby is going to inquire this week.

November 2, 1954

Riparius

Sherman, Ken, Fred, and Hal found a bee tree yesterday. Sherman braved the bees’ wrath and stole the cone, escaping with only one sting. Clare placed the cone in a large pan and heated it until the honey separated down from the wax. She then strained the liquor until it became clear: a delicious finished product. . . . I told them that I had a bee tree on my place, too, so today we all went back to the edge of the swamp to look at it. It turned out to be the same one they had found. The top had fallen off and lay open on the ground, exposing both honey and bees. The latter droned industriously over part of the cone, eating the honey that they had manufactured and stored over the past years. Actually most of the honey was already consumed. Sherman said that if we had found the tree a year or two ago we would have captured two or three hundred pounds of honey. As it was, we only got a few jars full.

November 16, 1954

Rochester

I went to borrow some butter from the diet kitchen on East III and found there a pretty blonde little thing in a green uniform who looked at me in my blue pajama-like scrub suit and opened up the following conversation by saying, “You look like a teddy-bear.” “Why thank you,” I said. “How nice of you to think so.” “I had a teddy bear when I was a girl in Germany and he had pants on just like that.” “Really!” “You’ve got a face like a teddy-bear, too.” “Yeah, but I don’t have the bark.” “Who knows; maybe you have that, too.” “Where were you from in Germany,” I asked, in order to leave the teddy-bear world. “The North, near Hamburg.” “Oh. I’ve never been in Germany but I was close, in Arnhem, Holland, just across the Rhine.” “When did you come over here?” “I’m an American.” “Listen, so am I. I got my papers last week. But where did you come from?” “I was born here. I just went over one summer to work for the Quakers.” “Where did your folks come from, then?” “My father from Austria, my mother’s family, a long time ago, from Germany, Prussia, and Holland.” “See, you look more European than American.” “That may be so.” “The Quakers are very strict, aren’t they?” “No, not so much any more.” “Well, I saw some at Niagara Falls and my father told me all about them.” “How did you know they were Quakers?” “Buy the simple black dress, buckled shoes, plain hats.” “Quakers used to dress like that but very few do now. You probably saw Amish folk or Mennonites, from Pennsylvania.” “I always thought Quakers were like that, too. What’s Quakerism like? Tell me. I’m interested in things like that. I’m a Lutheran but whenever I can fool my father I go to the Unitarian Church. My father never went to church in Germany but here he’s gotten to be a fanatic. Hypocritical, I think. . . . Don’t go away. Here, sit down.” I sat on the edge of the work-table while she pulled up a chair next to the counter and began folding napkins for the next day. “It’s a difficult sect to understand,” I said, “because we’re neither Protestant nor Catholic. George Fox thought the Catholics worshipped the pope and the Protestants the Bible. He wanted to return to a direct awareness by individual men of God, or what we call the Inner Light. So, you see, we have no creeds, no sermons, no specified churches, no prescribed belief. “Nothing to hold on to at all? Not even something like the Golden Rule?” “No, nothing ‘official.’ Naturally we follow people and rules and traditions that we think give true insight into the Inner Light, but in the end everything is left up to our own consciences.” “It sounds strange. Sometimes I wonder about the Unitarians. They talk too much.” “I agree.” “It’s good to be able to meditate sometimes.”

November 17, 1954

Pete, John Kenyon, Jeanne Ludmann, and I spent the weekend in Toronto, staying overnight at the Friends Center there on Lowther Avenue. Met Reg Smith and wife, and the Brinks. Reg was six years in China with the Friends Service Council during the war. Andrew Brink is a fine Canadian studying English at the University of Toronto, and a staunch C.O. Toronto has a flavor entirely different from Montreal or Quebec, because it is English rather than French: a sort of amalgamation of London and New York, without the class of either. We had very little time there; actually we raced around on the subway and drank beer in a nice jazz place, after eating a Macedonian meal in a little upstairs restaurant served by one tight-dressed waitress. John Kenyan is almost a character out of Huxley: clean-cut, immaculate, “innocent,” terribly aesthetic. Probably he has his Maida Vale on Thursday afternoons or if not wished he did (as I do). He is tall and slender, and accentuates this by wearing free-falling English slacks, tightly belted. His face is long and a face of contrasts. It should be a fair face but this initial impression is contradicted by dark hair and a beard that shows even when clean-shaven. Altogether a pleasant contrast: he is good-looking in a non-robust sort of way. He has beautiful long-fingered hands and one feels sometimes that the drafting board is a great compromise for them. They should rather sketch nude women in some garret, sketch them in filmy light carefree strokes, and then caress them in altogether another way. Rather, though, these hands design houses, which is always a compromise, first with the raw materials of construction, which always seem to limit fancy; second with the prospective dweller, who not only limits fancy but directs it and kills it, at least in John’s short experience. He is now doing a super-super-duper-duper ice cream parlor, or something similar, all chrome and hideousness. One night he brought a record of Dylan Thomas and we all were hypnotized by the poet’s mellifluous voice; another time John read with devotion from Eliot: on still another Jeanne and I lay on pillows on the floor listening twice to Beethoven’s 15th quartet, the one in A minor I think, which is truly magnificent, and John sketched us. This was very pleasant. He had to view me from the chin up, as I was on my back with my hands under my head, and this difficult angle hampered the result. But Jeanne lay curled up on her side, cuddling herself almost, her hands between her legs in some kind of fetal security, and this sketch came out very well. Then another time John really surprised us by playing blues on the piano—thin, but blues, very moody. A versatile man! He discusses jazz as an Oxford don would philology. But so do I.

November 25, 1954

Jeanne is very nice.; She left me a Thanksgiving card with a turkey pasted on, inscribed “To a real human Bien.” We drove to Albany with P. G. and I rode to NYC via Greyhound. Talked steadily with the man in the next seat, a writer for Macfadden Publications (True Detective, etc.) who was returning from Lake Placid on an assignment to cover the trooper murderer there. Very interesting, since this fellow was an army major, cultivated, intelligent. He lived in the woods after the murder, had a “spiritual awakening” according to Jay Ettman (the writer), outwitted all the road block people, went to Nevada in a Jaguar, was arrested there on a burglary charge and linked with the Lake Placid crime because he carried a copy of his own “Wanted” notice! A perfect story for the pulps. Ettman quit Arkansas Medical School after two years, had another false start as a doctoral candidate at Columbia, interested in the influence of the Elizabethans on Russian literature, and finally found himself in writing. Though doing pulp stuff, he loves his career and the freedom it gives. Also wrote fiction and hopes to do more.

Arrived NYC at 4:30 a.m., for Thanksgiving reunion. Alice back from college. Our family certainly nicely cosmopolitan and civilized; everyone talks of European cities with knowledge. Eddy Bien has a cute blond daughter, which proves that heredity can be capricious. Bron is more friendly, even freely so. More than Rhoda now. The hell with them all! But the family is good, really. Honigsbergs especially. Irv and Clarise had an argument over Amy. Dad says that Clarise was mainly disturbed because she allowed herself to show emotion. She is the great stone-face kind. Abe and Irene invited Amy to come to Harrison and spend the weekend with Emmy. Knowing, I suppose, that Clarise was the perfect “over-protective mother,” they dressed Amy up secretly and had her practically out of the house before Clarise was told. She immediately objected, her voice a bit broken. Irv and everyone else said she was silly: what reason could there possibly be for keeping Amy home. “She isn’t prepared,” Clarise replied. “She doesn’t have the right clothes.” The others said that this was no reason. Abe had extra rough clothes of Emmy’s that Amy could wear. “I don’t care,” was all Clarise could answer. “I simply don’t want her to go. Please, Irv, go out and bring her back.” Irv tried to argue, and did nothing. Then Grandma, as always, took matters in her hands. She went out and came back with Amy, who seemed happy enough. I later discovered that Grandma told Amy that her mother only wanted to speak to her for a minute. When she returned, of course, Clarise told her she would have to stay home and Amy cried bitterly. Clarise then promised she could go next week, “properly prepared,” Most likely she will spend $50 this week on the most fashionable children’s rustic togs. It must have been very embarrassing for Clarise, and Irv also, to have this family squabble and show of emotion in the midst of a family reunion with all the in-laws watching.

Opening paragraph from Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms:

❡ In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Magnificent writing!

November 29, 1954

I dated the “Teddy Bear” girl, whose name is Ronnie. “My father is very strict,” she told me. “He will not let me go out with anyone he has not met.” So I first had to go to meet the father and mother. The father seemed friendly enough, but Ronnie told me he always was that way to strangers, but quite the opposite at home. He reminded me a little of Mr. Kleefstra, but only because he was so self-conscious about the threadbare furniture. He seemed a man mainly intent on keeping up appearances, but who hadn’t kept them up at all and who therefore ruled tyrannically and grumblingly over a frightened family, as his last means of maintaining self-respect. We discussed the “finishing” school Ronnie is to go to in Sweden next year; and when I mentioned my interest in reaching Groningen via Bremenhaven, he sent Ronnie upstairs for a huge atlas and proceeded to give a detailed description of North German geography. All this time Ronnie sat next to me on the couch, her knee pressed surreptitiously against mine, her face betraying the most despairing look. I began wondering when the time would come when the father would announce his verdict, whether or not I could take Ronnie out. Gradually it occurred to me that the parents assumed I had merely come to spend the evening at their home. Ronnie brought out her sewing, as if to clinch the matter. She too had given up hope. We went into the kitchen to prepare some tea and I asked when we could leave. The mother overheard and, being pretty much in sympathy with Ronnie, said it looked pretty hopeless, but we could at least ask the father. This I did. “She must be in bed at 10:00 on school nights,” he said. It was then 9:00. “We’ll be back at 10:30,” I offered, and then gave all kinds of excuses about having to work the rest of the week, and leaving Rochester so soon. There was a clandestine conference in the kitchen and Ronnie emerged radiantly triumphant. We dashed off in my car to Atkinson Street and found that Al Yuriat and John Kenyon had dropped in. We all laughed at Ronnie’s plight—the Victorian father. She, I think, was rather overawed by such erudite, “aged” company. She looked very sad and lost there for a while. I suggested we leave and once outside she announced that her main distress was because she wanted to go to the bathroom. Once divulged, this was a need easily remedied. We drove home and indulged awhile in the most deliciously passionate French kisses. For a meek over-protected lassie she certainly can be passionate! I saw her again at the hospital. Tomorrow, since her father goes to night school, we shall be able to go out again, provided she gets back before he does. Two dates on school nights would be unthinkable!

November 30, 1954

I received my notice of discharge on November 26th. I shall leave Rochester this Saturday and sail to Rotterdam on the Rijndam, December 13th. I act and feel free, now that I am free! I wonder in how many operations I have scrubbed. After Friday I shall probably never do it again. I went to the record book. I’ve scrubbed in 181 operations to date. Tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday should bring the grand total close to 200.

December 19, 1954

Sunnyside

I dreamt last night about a man, whom let’s call Frank, who deposits his attractive wife each day on a pier by the sea, while he goes away to work. Tim, a young man who is in charge of the pier, arranges tackle and bait for the young wife, Jane, fishes beside her, and falls in love. One day Jane is wading in deep water while Tim stands on the pier holding his line. Suddenly a giant swordfish of some kind bites the hook and is caught. It struggles furiously as Tim begins to wind in the reel. By doing so, however, Tim brings the fish too close to Jane, who screams at him, “Reel it out, reel it out!” Too late. The fish pierces Jane’s arm with his sword. Tim rescues Jane and is frantic for fear that the fish also injected some poison. The husband, Frank, is called. He does not show much concern. Tim, however, who really loves Jane, is beside himself. Eventually Jane recovers and, realizing which man is really devoted to her, marries Tim.

Bill caught by Joe in adultery with Joe’s wife. In Gypsy custom an adulterer is required to wear the black shirt for one day. While he wears it he can be killed by anyone. If he survives the day he is free. But people who wear the black shirt never survive. . . . The elders, acting as a tribunal, sentence Bill to wear the black shirt. But Steve, the Gypsy chief, feels the offense is so serious that Bill must also pay $200, his entire fortune, to Joe. Bill does so and Joe leaves. Then Steve decides he acted too harshly. He tells Bill to go and get the money back from Joel. Bill leaves. Eventually both Bill and Joe return. They are bloody and battered, but Joe still has the money. Steve tells Joe that since he was so successful in holding on to and protecting his money, he obviously could have done as much for his wife. Since he was negligent in this respect his rival, Bill, was not entirely to blame for what happened. Consequently Steve relieves Bill from having to wear the black shirt, but since he did do wrong, makes him pay the $200 after all. —An example of Gypsy justice.

A woman comes to visit a doctor, socially. She tells, in passing, that she has had mysterious flashes in her eyes. “That’s probably from the cortisone we’ve been giving you,” the doctor explains. Nothing more is said about it. The company are in good spirits and the woman begins telling funny stories. She is very good at this. When she describes the episode of her husband and their dog, she has everyone doubled over with laughter. It seems her husband hates dogs passionately, but has succumbed to his wife’s desire to keep one. They buy a mutt, who the husband keeps at a good distance. But the wife is devoted to her dog and heartbroken one day when it disappears. She calls the ASPCA frantically, describing the animal, quoting the license number, etc. The next morning, sure enough, an ASPCA man knocks at the door and informs the wife that her dog was picked up and brought to the pound. She will have until 5 p.m. that evening to claim it; otherwise it will be gassed. The woman works in the afternoon, far from the pound. But her husband’s office is right in the same neighborhood. She will call her husband. Surely he won’t refuse. She calls. He is worn down by her entreaties and consents to rescue the detested animal. “How will I get it home in the subway?” he asks. “Make a box and put it in,” the wife suggests. “That way you’ll get in.” The husband gets the dog and puts it in the box and starts for the subway. But the dog won’t stay in the box. The husband pushes it back in. Its leg hangs out. The husband practically breaks it in two, but stuffs it in. When this is done the dog breaks out again, this time in the subway. The husband is desperate. Quickly, he shortens upon the leash considerably, faces himself in the direction of the turnstile, closes his eyes, and goes in as a blind man with a limping seeing-eye dog. When the wife comes home and sees the dog there she is overjoyed. “But why is it limping?” The husband explains, reciting the whole adventure. The woman is finished and everyone is howling, even her husband, who still hates the dog. After a few more drinks and some pleasant farewells, the woman leaves with her husband. I then go to the doctor and ask, “What was this business about flashing in her eyes. Does cortisone do that?” “Not really,” the doctor said. “Then why did you tell her what you did?” “Well, you, see,” the doctor replied, “we’re giving her cortisone and then telling her most of her symptoms are side-effects of the drug. The drug itself can’t do any good anymore.” “What symptoms? What does she have, anyway?” “We haven’t told her yet: she has leukemia.”

December 20, 1954

Margot should be in Washington State now, waiting for her army fiancé. They’ll marry and he’ll ship out soon. If he goes to Japan, she’ll follow. I spent an evening with her last week—very pleasant and free-flowing—though I was a bit jealous of the lucky fellow. Actually she doesn’t know him very well; it’s mainly a correspondence wedding. I wish them luck.

Wednesday, just before leaving Rochester, I took Ronnie out to the barge canal outside of town and we talked and necked and mooched and kissed passionately and appreciated the moon and the serenity of the waters. She was very sweet indeed. I wonder, had I met her earlier, how long this passion would have lasted.

Friday night, dressed in a tux, I called on Elizabeth Clark. She had invited me to the formal prom at University School. I felt like playing along, and accepted. I found her dressed in sweater and dungarees. She said the prom was Saturday and that I had misunderstood. I stayed anyway at her invitation and lay down on the bed to rest, for the night before Jeanne Ludmann, John Kenyon, Nancy and Peter had given a party for me and there had been very little sleep. Elizaberth Clark soon joined me on the bed and one thing led to another until she became absolutely madly passionate and I responded as best I could. She stripped and asked me if I thought she had a nice figure. I lied, “Yes.” She didn’t have a climax during intercourse, but I hardly think it was my fault, but rather the result of entertaining too many men. The next day I packed and left Rochester for good.

From Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to Benvenuta:

❡ Just as some dogs eat only when someone makes a gesture as though to take the food from their dish, we reached for each other only because there was disease in the world and incalculable danger, because someone was always dying, and because there were so many strange ways of drifting apart over all this. What joined us in this fashion must have been, above all, a kind of fear. . . . It was clear, moreover, . . . that the future was altogether unknown, and one sought to get that future into one’s power, while it was still quite small, that it might grow up under restraint, as it were, never coming to know its own untamed character.

❡ I must take my own good time in writing you, the words coming like the first heavy drops from the charged wine-press of my past.

❡ How do we spend the centuries? Where is he among us who dare speak of love? Verily, nature speaks not of love; nature bears it in her heart and no one knows the heart of nature. Verily, God bears love in the world, yet the world overwhelms us. Verily, the mother speaks not of love, for it is borne for her within the child, and the child destroys it. Verily, the spirit speaks not of love, for the spirit thrusts it into the future, and the future is remote. Verily, the lover speaks not of love, for to the lover it comes in sorrow, and sorrow sheds tears. Hush, hush—oh, it is music, then, that would speak! But when music speaks, she speaks not to us. The perfect work of art touches upon us only in that it survives us. A poem enters into language from within, in an aspect forever averted from us. It fills the language wondrously, rising to its very brim—but it never again thrusts toward us. Colors are congealed in a picture, but they are broidered into it like rain into the countryside; and all that the sculptor shows his stone is how it may most splendidly hold itself aloof. Music, indeed, is closer to our heart . . . but how much of her is beyond our reach, pushes just past us, carries right through us—and we comprehend it not!

❡ Last night I lay awake for some time, pondering the sorrows of your childhood. My heart circled them at a distance, as a lion prowls about a fire in the desert by night.

❡ The questioning and buffeting and experimenting [of children] assumes that grown-ups shall be possessed of the most wonderful equanimity, the most perfect serenity, indeed, some kind of finality.

❡ Dear girl, I shall keep on addressing to your heart this incomprehensible journal of the life I would live . . . seek to tell you about myself truthfully, make myself brutally true to you, true do you hear?—rather than worthy of being loved—as though, within your heart, I might for the first time make myself plain to God, that he know me. Lord, Lord, I would say, behold the naked metal of my being—how it has rung against the pavement like a coin tossed to a beggar.

❡ . . . remember, you are dealing with a convalescent, taking his first faltering steps into joy, gently leaning on your shoulder.

❡ . . . a powerful concentration of the mind sometimes sweeps away the sense of one’s own body, leaving only the inexhaustible effort issuing from some innermost point of existence. . . .

December 22, 1954

I was riding in the subway when a beggar woman with a tin cup walked down the aisle playing the accordion. I did not contribute, moreover felt ashamed to do so (also ashamed afterward that I did not). I wonder wherefore comes this hardening of the heart. It has happened before.

A really beautiful girl sat next to me in the subway, the kind that is usually called “dumb blonde.” She was reading the editorials in the New York Times and got off at Chambers Street. Not so dumb!

The man on the other side was reading over a Blue Cross form. He had just left the hospital. People’s pasts and hopes are thus revealed, as when I read over the Fellowship Applications.

Read and re-read Carson McCullers’ “The Sojourner.” This is really fine writing. Exceptional. The reader is really allowed to anatomize Ferris.

December 26, 1954

“Although it is often claimed that reading novels is a form of escape, this is not necessarily so. Novels provide the basis for growth, experiences that can be full and rich. For serious novels challenge us with the realities of life that are smoothed over, simplified, falsified, and ignored by the platitudes and frozen conventions of everyday life. The good and, more so even, the great novel is, then, a challenge to the reader. It truthfully forces upon his attention a segment of living experience. It does this by depicting peoples with whom we can identify. And at the same time the novel humanizes the world. It brings us back to a refreshened sense of the source of all significant artistic and intellectual effort—the struggles, aspirations, joys, and sorrows of human beings. If we are to live with quickened sympathies and with live interest in the world, we constantly need to be reminded that all of this with which we are dealing relates, in the last analysis, to men and women, to human beings. We need to restore, to deepen, and the keep clear our sense of this all-important truism.”—James T. Farrell in Reflections at Fifty.

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

day of life and love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears are awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

—e. e. cummings

“. . . the glissando of time” (McCullers, I think).

Had some new ideas for mechanical music-turner. Instead of relying on some adhesive to stick to pages, provide small metal clips that would be attached beforehand to pages. These to respond to magnetic pull of turner arm. The magnetism, in turn, could be started or stopped at will by breaking or making an electric current. The arm itself could be controlled by a cable similar to the cable releases on cameras or, better still, some simple hydraulic device. The foot pedal to push in the cable would also control the various circuits. When the arm turned the page its magnetism would have to cease, and it would probably have to lift up to clear the page and return to the original position. At this time a stationary magnet on the left hand side could be activated to keep the turned page from falling back. The arm would have to be adjustable for width of music, and the pivot bar for height. A spring would bring back the arm and thus the cable also. An oil cable would probably work better than sheathed wire, since the whole cable would be bent at several places getting from the music rack to the floor.

December 27, 1954

From Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice”:

❡ A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

❡ [He pondered] the mysterious harmony that must come to subsist between the individual human being and the universal law, in order that human beauty may result.

❡ His love for the ocean had profound sources: the hard-worked artist’s longing for rest, his yearning to seek refuge from the thronging manifold shapes of his fancy in the bosom of the simple and vast; and another yearning, opposed to his art and perhaps for that very reason a lure, for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal—in short, for nothingness. He whose preoccupation is with excellence longs fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

❡ Soon the observer knew every line and pose of this form that limned itself so freely against sea and sky; its every loveliness, though conned by heart, yet thrilled him each day afresh; his admiration knew no bounds, the delight of his eye was unending. Once the lad was summoned to speak to a guest who was waiting for his mother at their cabin. He ran up, ran dripping wet out of the sea, tossing his curls, and put out his hand, standing with his weight on one leg, resting the other foot on the toes; as he stood there in a posture of suspense the turn of his body was enchanting, while his features wore a look half shamefaced, half conscious of the duty breeding laid upon him to please. Or he would lie at full length, with his bath-robe around him, one slender young arm resting on the sand, his chin in the hollow of his hand; the lad they called Jaschiu squatting beside him, paying him court. There could be nothing lovelier on earth than the smile and look with which the playmate thus singled out rewarded his humble friend and vassal. Again, he might be at the water’s edge, alone, removed from his family, quite close to Aschenbach; standing erect, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, rocking slowly on the balls of his feet, day-dreaming away with blue space, while little waves ran up and bathed his toes. The ringlets of honey-coloured hair clung to his temples and neck, the fine down along the upper vertebrae was yellow in the sunlight; the thin envelope of flesh covering the torso betrayed the delicate outlines of the ribs and the symmetry of the breast-structure. His armpits were still as smooth as a statue’s, smooth the glistening hollows behind the knees, where the blue network of veins suggested that the body was formed of some stuff more transparent than mere flesh. What discipline, what precision of thought were expressed by the tense youthful perfection of this form! And yet the pure, strong will which had laboured in darkness and succeeded in bringing this godlike work of art to the light of day—was it not known and familiar to him, the artist? Was not the same force at work in himself when he strove in cold fury to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art which he saw with the eye of his mind and would body forth to men as the mirror and image of spiritual beauty?

December 31, 1954

R.M.S. Queen Elizabeth, mid-Atlantic

From Mann’s “Tonio Kröger,” poorly written, I think, but valuable for certain things, among which the following:

❡ To feel stirring within you the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces and to be aware that those others you yearn for are blithely inaccessible to all that moves you—what a pain is this!

❡ Happiness . . . is not in being loved—which is satisfaction of the vanity and mingled with disgust. Happiness is in loving, and perhaps in snatching fugitive little approaches to the beloved object.

❡ He surrendered utterly to the power that to him seemed the highest on earth, top whose service he felt called, which promised him elevation and honours: the power of intellect, the power of the word, that lords it with a smile over the unconscious and inarticulate. To this power he surrendered with the passion of youth, and it rewarded him with all it had to give, taking from him inexorably, in return, all that it is wont to take. It sharpened his eyes and made him see through the large words which puff out the bosoms of mankind; it opened for him men’s souls and his own, made him clairvoyant, showed him the inwardness of the world and the ultimate behind men’s words and deeds. And all he saw could be put in two words: the comedy and the tragedy of life. And then, with knowledge, its torment and its arrogance, came solitude, because he could not endure the blithe and innocent with their darkened understanding, while they in turn were troubled by the sign on his brow. But his love of the word kept growing, sweeter and sweeter, and his love of form; for he used to say that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

❡ He worked, not like a man who works that he may live; but as one who is bent on doing nothing but work; having no regard for himself as a human being but only as a creator; moving about grey and unobtrusive among his fellows like an actor without his make-up, who counts for nothing as soon as he stops representing something else. He worked withdrawn out of sight and sound of the small fry, for whom he felt nothing but contempt, because to them a talent was a social asset like another; who, whether they were poor or not, went about ostentatiously shabby or else flaunted starling cravats, all the time taking jolly good care to amuse themselves, to be artistic and charming without the smallest notion of the fact that good work comes out under pressure of a bad life; that he who lives does not work; that one must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

❡ If you care too much about what you have to say, if your heart is too much in it, you can be pretty sure of making a mess. . . . Warm, heartfelt feeling is always banal and futile. . . . The artist must be unhuman, extra-human; he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity; only so is he in a position . . . to represent it, to portray it, to good effect.

1955

Birmingham, England

January–March

Edinburgh, London

April

Assen, Amsterdam, Paris

May

Thessaloniki

June–July 17

Florence, Assisi, Rome

July 18–31

Thessaloniki, Sarantaporou 11

August 1–December 23

Paris, Hotel Garnier

December 25–29

January 1, 1955

at sea

I’ve been wondering about building a story on the Riek-Jeanne relationship. To wit: The relationship, one of youthful one-way infatuation, kept alive with Riek though without any return of love on my part—rather a desperate clinging that obviously could come to nothing. The coincidence that delayed the Holland visit, the letter to Jeanne, her almost begging off on the phone because of not wanting to have another boyfriend at hand, her arrival, and the instantaneous passionate deep love that sprang therewith.

I suppose even what’s to come now could fit into the picture—absence from Jeanne, and how to deal with Riek in these circumstances. My character could be weaker even than I am and could go to Riek again, as to a dead end, only to be redeemed at last by the real love of Jeanne. Or else, I suppose, Jeanne could die, or by an ironic duplication of his own behavior, she could string him along for a while and finally go to someone else.

Yes, there is the whole problem here of unreciprocated love coupled with sexual need and moral weakness on the part of the loved-but-not-loving one.

Of course the danger of embarking on something like this is that it is too close to my own heart. Tonio Kröger would certainly disapprove.

The Clarise-Amy story would be good to tackle next. This will be difficult, too, but for different reasons. It’s hard to delineate the character of a child, whose needs are so often un-articulate. Perhaps best to use the issue of over-protecting Amy as a source of marital difficulty between Irv and Clarise. Clarise very cold in all ways, even toward Amy. But she “devotes” herself to the child’s “welfare” as a substitute for an unhappy marriage. I don’t know where grandma should come in. Clarise resents Irv’s attentions to grandma, to whom he is very close because he was the youngest child and because he lived with her many years after his unsuccessful first marriage.

January 3, 1955

at sea

Been speaking with Wilford Wellock, who’s interested in the economic order and particularly the fact that mass production leads to a quantitative civilization whereas Gandhi’s economics—self-sufficient semi-autonomous villages—leads to qualitative civilization and to democracy. Gandhi stated that mass production makes a machine out of men, degrading their human capabilities. The machine, instead, must be the servant of the craftsman and wealth should rest on the production of creative articles and skills by people working at home and in small village industries.

The bedroom steward held forth this morning on his troubles, long hours, low pay, etc. But he told interesting stories of human character at its lowest. Once, he said, there was a beautiful girl about 20 or 22 years old in one of his cabins. The very first night she rings her buzzer and he goes to the cabin and knocks. “Who is it?” she says. “The steward, m’am.” “Come in.” He walks in and finds her stark naked on the bed, in a provocative position. She motioned to him, indicating clearly what she wanted, but he, knowing the company rule against fraternization with the passengers, refused and left. But at another time during the voyage when another steward was on duty she did the same thing. He had less willpower and he undressed and got into bed with her. As soon as he did she rang the buzzer again furiously and began screaming “Rape, rape.” Someone came and “caught” the steward. He was fired. She apparently had no other motive in doing all this than to do harm to someone, anyone—and in this case her wish was fulfilled.

Another story involved an older steward, a man of about 65, on the first class deck. A wealthy doctor was traveling with his family, which included an 8-year-old girl who had not yet reached puberty. After each trip the stewards collect things like balloons, toys, candy, etc. left in the cabins so that they can give these things to children on the following voyage. They store their collection in cupboards in the hall. Well, this elderly steward wanted to give the doctor’s daughter something, so she came into the cupboard with him to select what she wanted. She found something and left. Just as she did, however, her father was walking down the corridor. He saw first his daughter and then the steward leave the cupboard. He grabbed his daughter into the stateroom, furious. In a few minutes he called the purser to report that he had examined the child and that she had been raped. The child vigorously protested that she had not been attacked in any way; that the steward had merely given her a present. The steward, however, was immediately put into the brig for the remainder of the voyage, and then fired. The ship authorities suggested that the ship surgeon also examine the child, but her father refused. The steward, meanwhile, having had some legal advice, sued Cunard for false imprisonment and collected £350. Then he flew to America and sued the doctor and collected $30,000. Cunard offered him back his job, but he refused and with the money built a cottage on the south shore of England, where he could watch the ships sail in and out and where he and his wife lived happily ever after.

I’m quite at home on the boat now, settled into its routine and sorry in a way that we shall land tomorrow and that I shall have to make new adjustments, first in London for a few days and then at Woodbrooke. My impressions of this voyage are in a long long letter to Jeanne and thus in a place where they will be shared rather than in the closed book of this Journal.

January 13, 1955

Woodbrooke, Selly Oak, Birmingham England.

❡ . . . Matthew Arnold’s test of a true poet: that he takes a serious view of life, meaning that man himself and what concerns his real life and inward experience are of infinitely more interest to him than any outward good or material possession—viz. Shakespeare, “What a piece of work is man,” etc. —John Oman, The Natural & the Supernatural.

The Wednesday night social: • syllables from towns pinned on back: How many can you put together; • Paul Jones, two uncles, men & women, when music stops, dance with girl opposite for 30 seconds, military two-step; • stately barn-dance, lemonade, non-participants: curfew at 10 p.m.; •Goerlitz; • strip ping-pong at Brant Lake Camp; •Jim Petersen: farmer weighted down by work, resentful, wanting to study, misunderstood by family and friends, supersensitive, nervous, self-deprecating, weeps; farmer works all day, then wants nothing but sleep; work as a narcotic; interest in Tolstoy, Thoreau.

January 16, 1955

The snow came as a silent, orderly Milky Way, descending slowly outside my window and passing through the earth.

God as mother-fixation. Rest on the broad bosom of Nature.

From Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World:

❡ The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security.

❡ [The evils of the industrial revolution were] partly the result of aesthetic errors of Protestantism and partly the result of scientific materialism, and partly the result of the natural greed of mankind, and partly the result of the abstractions of political economy.

❡ The self-identity of a human being is more abstract than that of a crystal. It is the life of the spirit. It relates rather to the individualization of the creative activity; so that the changing circumstances received from the environment are differentiated from the living personality, and are thought of as forming its perceived field. In truth, the field of perception and the perceiving mind are abstractions which, in the concrete, combine into the successive bodily events. The psychological field, as restricted to sense-objects and passing emotions, is the minor permanence, barely rescued from the nonentity of mere change; and the mind is the major permanence, permeating that complete field, whose endurance is the living soul. But the soul would wither without fertilization from its transient experiences. The secret of the higher organisms lies in their two grades of permanence. By this means the freshness of the environment is absorbed into the permanence of the soul. The changing environment is no longer, by reason of its variety, an enemy to the endurance of the organism. The pattern of the higher organism has retreated into the recesses of the individualized activity. It has become a uniform way of dealing with circumstances; and this way is only strengthened by having a proper variety of circumstances to deal with.

❡ A single tree by itself is dependent upon all the adverse chances of shifting circumstances. A forest is the triumph of the organization of mutually dependent species. Each tree may lose something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival.

❡ There is something in the ready use of force which defeats its own object. Its main defect is that it bars cooperation. Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants. The Gospel of Force is incompatible with a social life. By force, I mean antagonism in its most general sense. . . . In the history of the world, the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armour.

From Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship:

❡ The worship of Force . . . is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe; it is itself a prostrate submission to evil. . . . If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good. . . . In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free.

❡ When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognize that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible to transform and refashion the unconscious universe. . . . In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death—the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature.

❡ To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be—Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity—to feel these things and know them is to conquer them. This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still flow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life’s fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered fate it is the key of religion.

❡ To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship.

From Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd:

❡ “Yes, I knew that,” she said, panting like a robin, her face red and moist from the exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off the dew.

❡ . . . his humility, and superfluous moiety of honesty.

❡ Seeing his advance take the form of an attitude threatening a possible enclosure, if not compression, of her person, she edged off round the bush.

❡ She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness so that it was hardly ill-mannered at all. “I don’t love you,” she said.

From Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (this is really good):

❡ The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

This certainly fulfills Flaubert’s injunction to de Maupassant, thus: Having laid down the truth that in the entire world there are no two grains of sand, two flies, two hands, or two noses entirely alike, he compelled me to describe a creature or an object so particularized as to distinguish it from all others of its species or class. He used to say, “When you pass a grocer seated on his doorstep, or a concierge smoking his pipe, or a cabstand, show me that grocer and that concierge in all their physical appearance and in all their moral nature so that I shall not confound that grocer and that concierge with any other, and make me see by a single word in what a hackney coach horse differs from the fifty others that go before and come after.

❡ God is the mirror which discloses to every creature its own greatness. —A. N. Whitehead.

From Rigveda, X, 126,-6.7, Hymn of Creation:

❡ Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born, and whence comes this creation?

the gods are later than this world’s production, who knows, then, when it first came into being?

He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, whose eye controls the world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows it not.

January 17, 1955

❡ Thou couldst not see the seer of sight, thou couldst not hear the hearer of hearing, nor perceive the perceiver of the perception, nor the knower of knowledge. This is they Self who is within all. —Brihadaranyaka Upanishad III 4. 2.

❡ As water does not cling to the lotus leaf, so no evil deed clings to one who knows it [i.e. the Atman]. —Chandogya Upanishad IV. 14. 3.

January 19, 1955

❡ Art without [aspiration] is only what Montaigne describes as “turfing the grave”: mere distraction to help us for a little to forget the ‘bondage of corruption’. —Oman, p. 210.

Timetable at Woodbrooke, really quite good, making for good work, relaxation at the right time, and adequate socializing. Roughly for me: Arise 7:15; Exercise 7:15–7:30; Shave and wash 7:30–8:00; Breakfast 8:00–8:30; Make bed, clean up, etc. 8:30–9:00; Silent meeting, 9:00–9:30; Study 9:30–10:45; Cocoa 10:45–11:00; Study 11:00–1:00; Lunch 1:00–1:30; Recreation, exercise, music 1:30–4:00; Tea, 4:00–4:30; Study 4:30–7:00; Supper 7:00–8:00, Study 8:00–9:45; Hymn 9:45 & cocoa; Exercise 10:15–10:30; Read in bed 10:30–11:00; Sleep 11:00 p.m.

January 20, 1955

Eleanor Good: American Gothic, wringing hands when speaking. Helen Fish: jealousy, self-righteous do-goodism, matriarch. Rolf King: incompetent blundering “intellectual” above his powers; a “student.” Workcamp difficulties. Alec and I fighting silently over Sandy. Love at last. Incidents with the Sorbonne girl. Goerlitz, Rutherford and his women. Dirk: steadiness. Elizabeth and Pudge. God, there’s so much! The hospital.

January 31, 1955

Faulkner in “Barn Burning” opens with an active dramatic scene that makes the reader want to continue on with the story; then he develops a situation (the ruining of Major de Spain’s rug) that must inevitably develop into something, given what went before. This keeps the suspense up: to see how it did develop. I’ve tended to have a straight line of development, whereas Faulkner does something more like a small rise followed by a large one that propels the story to its end. He also uses weight metaphors:

—swinging on a vine out into space and remaining there because gravity stops working; then suddenly swinging back;

—being too light to face up to the environment and change it, but too heavy to fly free and escape altogether;

In addition, Faulkner treats minor and even insignificant characters by repeating one characteristic—e.g., the bovine stupidity and obesity of the sisters; the older brother always chewing tobacco. Also of major characters, but here there is more than one peculiarity: the father’s heavy tread on his lame foot, his aspect like a piece of tin when he wore the black frock coat and hat.

February 3, 1955

From Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion:

❡ I want to show in these pages that it is not true that we have to give up the concern for the soul if we do not accept the tenets of religion. The psychoanalyst is in a position to study the human reality behind religion as well as behind non-religious symbol systems. He finds that the question is not whether man returns to religion and believes in God but whether he lives love and thinks truth. If he does so the symbol systems he uses are of secondary importance. If he does not they are of no importance.

❡ . . . religion [is] any system of thought and action shared by a group which gives the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.

❡ Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the ‘harmony’ which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. . . . Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive—and his body makes him want to be alive.

. . . Man is the only animal that can be bored, discontented. . . . He cannot go back to the pre-human state of harmony with nature; he must proceed to develop his reason until he becomes the master of nature, and of himself.

. . . There is no innate ‘drive for progress’ in man; it is the contradiction in his existence that makes him proceed on the way he set out. Having lost paradise, the unity with nature, he has become the eternal wanderer (Odysseus, Oedipus, Abraham, Faust); he is impelled to go forward and with everlasting effort to make the unknown known by filling in with answers the blank spaces of his knowledge. . . . He is tormented by a craving for ‘absoluteness,’ for another kind of harmony which can lift the curse by which he was separated from nature, from his fellow men, and from himself. . . . Devotion to an aim, or an idea, or a power transcending man such as God, is an expression of this need for completeness in the process of living.

❡ Freud interpreted religion as a collective childhood neurosis of mankind. But the statement can also be reversed. We can interpret neurosis as a private form of religion, as a regression to primitive forms of religion conflicting with officially recognized patterns of religious thought.

❡ Authoritarian religion [is] recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship. . . . The essential element is the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue of this type of religion is obedience. In the act of surrender [man] loses his independence [I question this because, for instance, in marriage one surrenders individuality seemingly but actually functions better as an individual because of the love-relationship] and integrity as an individual but he gains the feeling of being protected by an awe-inspiring power of which, as it were, he becomes a part.

Humanistic religion, on the contrary, is centered around man and his strength. Man must develop his power of reason [“reason” meaning more than “intellect,” I hope] in order to understand himself, his relationship to his fellow men and his position in the universe. He must recognize the truth, both with regard to his limitations and his potentialities. He must develop his powers of love for others as well as for himself and experience the solidarity of all living beings. He must have principles and norms to guide him in this aim. . . . Religious experience in this kind of religion is the experience of oneness with the All, based on one’s relatedness to the world as it is grasped with thought and with love. Man’s aim in humanistic religion is to achieve the greatest strength, not the greatest powerlessness; virtue in self-realization, not obedience. Faith is certainty of conviction based on one’s experience of thought and feeling, not assent to propositions on credit of the proposer. The prevailing mood is that of joy, while the prevailing mood in authoritarian religion is that of sorrow and of guilt.

Inasmuch as humanistic religions are theistic, God is a symbol of man’s own powers that he tries to realize in this life. Illustrations of humanistic religions are early Buddhism, Taoism, the teachings of Isaiah, Jesus, Socrates, Spinoza, certain trends in the Jewish and Christian religions (particularly mysticism), the religion of Reason of the French Revolution. . . . What matters in all such systems is not the thought system as such but the human attitude underlying their doctrines.

❡ [For Spinoza) God is identical with the totality of the universe. Man must see his own limitations and recognize that he is dependent on the totality of forces outside himself over which he has no control. Yet his are the powers of love and of reason. He can develop them and obtain an optimum of freedom and of inner strength.

❡ God is not a symbol of power over man but of man’s own powers—his potentiality, or what he ought to become.

❡ The real fall of man is his alienation from himself, his submission to power, his turning against himself even though under the guise of a worship of God.

❡ Just as a parent’s consciously felt or expressed concern for a child can be an expression of love or can express a wish for control and domination, a religious statement can be expressive of opposite human attitudes. We do not discard that statement but look at it in perspective, the human reality behind it providing the third dimension. Particularly concerning the sincerity of the postulate of love the words hold true: “By their fruits shall ye know them.” If religious teachings contribute to the growth, strength, freedom, and happiness of their believers, we see the fruits of love. If they contribute to the constriction of human potentialities, to unhappiness and lack of productivity, they cannot be born of love, regardless of what the dogma intends to convey.

❡ Both in humanistic religious thinking and in psychoanalysis man’s ability to search for the truth is held to be inseparably linked to the attainment of freedom and independence.

❡ It would be a mistake to assume that only those who are ‘neurotic’ have failed in the task of self-emancipation, while the average well-adjusted person has succeeded in it. On the contrary, the vast majority of people in our culture are well adjusted because they have given up the battle for independence sooner and more radically than the neurotic person. They have accepted the judgment of the majority so completely that they have been spared the sharp pain of conflict which the neurotic person goes through. While they are healthy from the standpoint of adjustment, they are more sick than the neurotic person from the standpoint of the realization of their aims as human beings. Can theirs then be a perfect solution? It would be if it were possible to ignore the fundamental laws of human existence without damage. But that is not possible. The “adjusted” person who does not live by the truth and who does not love is protected only from manifest conflicts. If he is not engrossed in work he has to use the many avenues of escape which our culture offers in order to be protected from the frightening experience of being alone with himself and looking into the abyss of his own impotence and human impoverishment.

❡ All great religions have proceeded from the negative formulation of incest taboos to more positive formulations of freedom. [Fromm expounds Freud’s concept of incest to cover all interpersonal relations, sexual or not, which tend to thwart a man from assuming his own intellectual and/or physical responsibilities in life, because he rather accepts the protection and authority of another father, God, state, club, etc.]

❡ It is the tragedy of all great religions that they violate and pervert the very principles of freedom as soon as they become mass organizations governed by a religious bureaucracy. The religious organization and the men who represent it take over to some extent the place of family, tribe, and state. They keep men in bondage instead of leaving them free. It is no longer God who is worshipped but the group that claims to speak in his name.

❡ The real conflict is not between belief in God and “atheism” but between a humanistic, religious attitude and an attitude which is equivalent to idolatry regardless of how this attitude is expressed—or disguised—in conscious thought.

❡ God is like the horizon which sets the limitations of our sight. To the naïve mind it seems to be something real which can be grasped, yet to seek the horizon is to seek a mirage. When we move, the horizon moves. The idea that God cannot be defined is clearly expressed in the biblical story of God’s revelation to Moses. . . . Moses asks for a name because a name is something one can grasp and worship (see Exod. iii 13–14), “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM” (more accurate translation: “I am being that I am being”—viz. my name is Nameless). In the development of Christian and Jewish theology we find repeated attempts to achieve a purer concept of God by avoiding even a trace of positive description or definition of God (Plotinus, Maimonides). As the great German mystic, Meister Eckhart, put it: “that which one says is God, he is not; that which one does not say of him he is more truly than that which one says he is.” No man can presume to have any knowledge of God which permits him to criticize or condemn his fellow men or to claim his own idea of God is the only right one. The religious intolerance so characteristic of Western religions, which springs from such claims and, psychologically speaking, stems from lack of faith or lack of love, has had a devastating effect on religious development. It has led to a new form of idolatry. An image of god, not in wood and stone but in words, is erected so that people worship at this shrine—. . . the deification of things, of partial aspects of the world and man’s submission to such things, in contrast to an attitude in which his life is devoted to the realization of the highest principles of life, those of love and reason, to the aim of becoming what man potentially is, a being made in the likeness of God. Words can become idols, and machines can become idols: leaders, the state, power, and political groups may also serve. Science and the opinion of one’s neighbors can become idols, and God has become an idol for many.

February 5, 1955

In Intruder in the Dust Faulkner again opens in very first sentence with the whole problem: that Lucas murdered a white man. Then Chapter 1 delineates Lucas’s character through an incident, and establishes the basis of the relationship between Lucas and the boy. Chapter 2 establishes the inevitability of the lynching attempt, so that the plot seems to be centered solely on this. Then in Chapter 3, with the magnificent jail description, people like Will Legate really alive, though minor, and Lucas always true to character: the added twist held off so long that Lucas’s gun didn’t shoot the bullet into Vincent Gowrie’s back, creating the suspense not only of will Lucas be found innocent, but how can the boy dig up the body before the lynch-mob acts. Faulkner’s chapter endings always are magnificent, like Chapter 3’s irony: “I’ll try to wait.”

February 6, 1955

Passed the Bourneville boat pond on my way back from Meeting: a nice sunny February day, and men and boys gathered round or sitting on the benches and about eight large schooners puffing forward fast or slow and almost turning over sometimes, with men holding grapples easing themselves around the perimeter, watching their homemade long-hours’ efforts cautiously lest a bow crush on the cement banks, pushing off again, setting rudders, adjusting the five-foot high sails, racing around when she goes apace, or praying for the help of a comrade across the pond if the boat goes directly across too fast; or one man with a black mustache not at all as nice as the other man with the red down-swept mustache whose boat sailed beautifully, the black mustached man looking at his angrily it seemed, as it wouldn’t go hardly at all even after adjustments and looking a little ashamed, too.

Two boys racing around the water’s edge with shovels shoveling water onto each other, dressed neatly British in coats, pullover sweaters, white shirts and tie, and short pants with knee-socks, the Sunday ones, too, pure wool—and only 5 or 6 years old—one saying after splashing, “Are they all wet” (the socks), but the other, “They’ll dry!” and shoveling some more then. And other small children with small grapples and small boats that went slow like a small boat should when compared to the others, but expecting some day to have big ones too and to work all week Saturdays included like their fathers, smelling Cadbury chocolate from birth till they’re laid in a chocolate-consecrated cemetery, then to come each Sunday except when the water’s frozen, to test the long hours’ work in basements and the design and equilibrium and strength of the sails that could easily tear at a gust of wind if they weren’t made just right; but their papas will show them, doubt it not, and this happy world will pass on the through the generations.

Thought also of Frances (Sigarowitsch) McMaster’s description of her wedding night in the Sheraton Hotel, Rochester, each room complete with television and another bridal couple in the next room, the woman screaming and imploring and fainting almost while her husband exacts his due in union, and Frances not exactly encouraged by this and Jack watching television most of the night instead of congressing with his mate; and the following night put up at uncle’s in Washington and afraid they’ll be heard, so nothing happening till the third night of marriage, but then it was nice, too, and eventually she became pregnant.

How “I say,” the Cuban anaesthesiologist, angered, whispered to Amo concerning his technique, and Dr. Field soothing over for us so he went ahead and we were friends again. (Dr. Prieto-Sanchez.)

Fairly well convinced now I don’t believe in God.

Faulkner:

❡ . . . out of the stale warm house again into the air, the morning, the sun in one soft high level golden wash in the highest tips of the trees, gilding the motionless obese uprush of the town watertank in spider-legged elongate against the blue . . .

❡ then at once he seemed to have been hearing for a long time the sheriff from a great distance saying ‘. . . boy . . . boy . . .’ then ‘Wake him up Gavin. Let him eat his breakfast before he goes to sleep;’ and he jerked, it was still only daylight, Miss Habersham was still pouring coffee into the same cup and he began to eat, chewing and even swallowing, rising and falling as though to the motion of the chewing along the deep soft bottomless mire of sleep, into then out of the voices buzzing of old finished things no longer concern of his.

❡ Then his uncle opened the door and at once they smelled the coffee and the frying hog meat, walking on linoleum toward a faint light at the rear of the hall then across a linoleum-floored dining room in rented Grand Rapids mission into the kitchen, into the hard cheerful blast of a woodstove where the sheriff stood over a sputtering skillet in his undershirt and pants and socks, his braces dangling and his hair mussed and tousled with sleep like that of a ten-year-old boy a battercake turner in one hand and a cup towel in the other. The sheriff had already turned his vast face towards the door before they entered it and he watched the little hard pale eyes flick from his uncle to Miss Habersham to himself and then to Alec Sander and even then it was not the eyes which widened so much for that second but rather the little hard black pupils which had tightened in that one flick to pinpoints. But the sheriff said nothing yet, just looking at his uncle now and now even the little hard pupils seemed to expand again as when an expulsion of breath untightens the chest and while the three of them stood quietly and steadily watching the sheriff his uncle told it, rapid and condensed and succinct, . . . and stopped and again they watched the little hard eyes go flick. flick. slick. across their three faces then back to his uncle again, staring at his uncle for almost a quarter of a minute without even blinking. Then the sheriff said: ‘You wouldn’t come here at four o’clock in the morning with a tale like that if it wasn’t so.’

❡ ‘Never nobody made me,’ Alec Sander said. ‘I didn’t even know I was going. I had done already told Chick I didn’t aim to. Only when we got to the truck everybody seemed to just take it for granted I wasn’t going to do nothing else but go and before I knowed it I wasn’t.’

Boys riding bikes down thin sharply inclined plank.

February 7, 1955

From T. H. Robinson’s History of Religions:

❡ One element in [Christian] Faith is always a belief in the spiritual world and the grasp of it through (and perhaps in spite of) the material. It is, in part, a conviction that ‘the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal’. But it is more than this. It involves of necessity a surrender, a casting of the individual spirit on God, an acceptance of him as the Father, an entrusting to Him of the whole of the self. This may be expressed in even stronger terms, and some Christians can speak of ‘dying with Christ’, ‘living no longer, except in so far as they live in Christ’, ‘abiding in Christ’, and there are other phrases which imply that Faith means a moral unification of the human with the divine. [Note the essential agreement with Eastern thinking. Also this:]

❡ In a certain sense Christianity holds as strictly to a law of Karma as do Hinduism and Buddhism, though the doctrine is not carried to the same absolute conclusion. ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap’ is the early statement of the truth, and whatever escape from the consequences of sin may be offered by the Christian Atonement, it does not include the freeing of the sinner himself (and others) from the natural results of his wrong-doing.

❡ There can be no love without at least the capacity for suffering, and there can be no suffering at its deepest unless it be inflicted by one who is loved. (p. 235)

❡ the social ethic of Jesus may perhaps best be summed up in the phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ . . . It implies the absolute, unchallenged, and unconditional dominance of the Will of God in all things human. It is a social as well as an individual ideal.

❡ It is usual to refer to the Sermon the Mount as the truest statement of Christian ethics. But this offers only a series of illustrations of the teaching of Jesus. The stress [should be] laid on essential principles:—the doctrine of self-denial. This goes deeper than asceticism; a man who denies himself is one who refuses to consider his own needs. This does not exclude the need for the recognition of his own powers and capabilities, or the demand made on him to keep himself in a state of efficiency, but he must think of and treat himself from a purely impersonal point of view—, be ready on the claim of anything in which he recognizes the voice of God, to risk and surrender everything. Through self-abnegation, true self-realization can be obtained.

❡ Such a doctrine can only be valid if there is presented some object in whose interest the surrender is made. In the teaching of Jesus this appears in a double form, the final object being God Himself, and the nearer one the Christian’s fellow men. . . . From the experience of Faith the rest follows. A moral union with God, a mystical surrender to God, will mean that he who is thus consecrated and lost in God will exhibit the character of God, in so far as he understand it, in his dealings with men. . . . God is a universal Father; from this it follows that all men are brothers, and that no distinctions can be drawn between them which fail to give due weight to the claims of personality. . . . Jesus demanded a morality of expression, one which should give free course to all human instinct, though not in its crude shape but in a ‘sublimated’ form. The good man, in His judgment, did good because his nature had been changed, and he did it unconsciously, not knowing that it was good, but simply because it seemed to him the ‘natural’ and obvious thing to do.

Faulkner again:

Chapter V ends with a new item that makes you want to continue with the book: Miss Habersham sitting at the jail door guarding Lucas, instead of an armed man doing it.

❡ The sheriff leaned above the window breathing vast subterranean sighs, not breathing hard but just as a big man seems to have to breathe. [I like this sort of observation.]

❡ They stared at each other; watching them he thought again of his uncle and Lucas in the cell last night; . . . again except for the fact that his uncle and Miss Habersham were actually looking into each other’s physical eyes instead of bending each upon the other that absolute concentration of all the senses in the sum of which were clumsy fallible perception weighed little more than the ability to read Sanskrit would, he might have been watching the last two stayers in a poker-pot. [Takes 2 or 3 readings to understand this—but worth it.]

❡ . . . to do it to preserve not even justice and decency but innocence; and he thought of man who apparently had to kill man not for motive or reason but simply for the sake the need the compulsion of having to kill man, inventing creating his motive and reason afterward so that he could still stand up among man as a rational creature.

February 10, 1955

❡ . . . where the two Negroes sat immobile as carved wood staring straight ahead at nothing and no movement even of breathing other than an infinitesimal widening and closing of the whites around their eyeballs, then looking at the sheriff again with almost exactly the expression he had seen on the faces waiting for the spinning tapes behind a slot-machine’s glass to stop.

❡ ‘Come on boys,’ the marshal said. . . . They moved then but still without haste, the marshal herding them back across the street like a woman driving a flock of hens across a pen, she to control merely the direction not the speed and not too much of that, the fowls moving ahead of her flapping apron not recalcitrant, just unpredictable, fearless of her and not yet even alarmed, the halted car and the ones behind it moved too, slowly, dragging at creeping pace their loads of craned faces; he could hear the marshal shouting at the drivers: ‘Get on. Get on. There’s cars behind you.’

From Karl Heim, Christian Faith and Natural Science:

❡ Professor Dorn recently worked out an interesting calculation in order to make clear the significance which can properly be claimed for the life and history of mankind in the context of the overall history of the earth. Let us assume, he says, that the earth is 2,850 million years old. If we consider this as a day of 24 hours, from midnight to midnight, then the end of the ‘stellar age’, i.e. the awakening of organic life on our planet does not occur until 10.51 p.m., the appearance of man only 22 seconds before midnight, and the whole of what is called ‘world history,’ including all the establishments of states, the wars between nations, the ideological struggles, the conflict of the faiths and the foundation of religions, takes place in the last three-tenths of a second. . . . today man is an infinitesimal grain of sand in the midst of an immeasurable sandy waste. For this speck of dust to suppose that it is at the center of the cosmos, and that its eternal future is the main preoccupation of the Creator of the universe, is quite as ridiculous, from the purely scientific point of view, as for a colony of aphides, clustering on the leaf of a tree in the forest, to imagine in a fit of megalomania that not merely the whole leaf but the whole earth exists solely for their sake and that the destruction of the leaf on which they have settled would mean the end of the world.

❡ The genuine secularism with which we are confronted today is neither a Promethean rebellion of mankind against God nor the expression of a weary resignedness in the face of the darkness which enshrouds our existence. It is rather the necessary consequence of a conception of the universe which precisely because of its simplicity and perspicuity and its elimination of all kinds of obscure, metaphysical, cosmic substrata, presents itself with a force of evidence to the people of the machine age who have lived through two world wars. [mechanical, meaningless, where strength rules, etc.]

February 12, 1955

What to do with Fred after Harry’s store: to work camp (cf. Pentecostal J. W. people) with perhaps love interest and disillusion with the orthodoxy—or kicked out for sleeping with the girl. Then maybe stealing à la the ex-army major in the dentist’s cabin, Lake Placid—hunt, capture, etc. or this could happen to a friend of Fred’s, or he could be suspect because a vagabond though not really guilty. Tragedy: convicted falsely. Maybe: steal carpenter’s tools in order to get work.

February 14, 1955

Faulkner:

❡ even rolling his head but about as much chance to escape that one frail narrow inevictible palm as to roll your forehead out from under a birthmark. . .

❡ ‘Yes,’ his mother said. ‘Just let go’: which was like telling a man dangling with one hand over a cliff to just hold on: who wanted nothing right now but a chance to let go and relinquish into the nothing of sleep what little of nothing he still had who last night had wanted to go to sleep and could have but didn’t have time and now wanted more than ever to go to sleep and had all the time in the world for the next fifteen minutes . . . only he had forgotten how: or maybe that was it and he didn’t dare relinquish into nothing what little he had left: which was nothing: no grief to be remembered nor pity nor even awareness of shame, no vindication of the deathless aspiration of man by man to man through the catharsis of pity and shame but instead only an old man for whom grief was not even a component of his own but merely a temporary phenomenon of his slain son jerking a strange corpse over onto its back not in appeasement to its one mute indicting cry not for pity not for vengeance but for justice but just to be sure he had the wrong one, crying cheery abashless and loud: ‘Yep it’s that damned Montgomery damned if it ain’t,’ . . . who (himself) had wanted of course to leave his mark too on his time in man but only that, no more than that, some mark on his part in earth but humbly, waiting wanting humbly even, not even hoping even, nothing (which of course was everything) except his own one anonymous chance too to perform something passionate and brave and austere not just in but into man’s enduring chronicle worthy of a place in it (who knew? perhaps adding even one anonymous jot to the austerity of the chronicle’s brave passion) . . .

—a Face, the composite Face of his native kind his native land, his people his blood his own with whom it had been his joy and pride and hope to be found worthy to present one united unbreakable front to the dark abyss the night—a Face monstrous unravening omnivorous and not even uninsatiate, not frustrated nor even thwarted, not biding nor waiting and not even needing to be patient since yesterday today and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible: One. . . . Yesterday’s sunset and yesterday’s tea both are inextricable from the scattered indestructible uninfusable grounds blown through the endless corridors of tomorrow, into the shoes we will have to walk in and even the sheets we will have (or try) to sleep between: because you escape nothing, you flee nothing, the pursuer is what is doing the running and tomorrow’s night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets: who had pretermitted not even a death to Lucas but merely Lucas, Lucas in ten thousand Sambo-avatars to scurry unheeding and not even aware through that orifice like mice through the slot of a guillotine until at the One unheeding moment the unheeding unwitting uncaring chopper falls . . .

Now hearing it listening to it, not moving yet nor even opening his eyes as he lay for a moment longer listening to it, then opened them and then his uncle stood silhouetted against the light beyond the footboard in that utter that complete that absolute silence now with nothing in it now but the breathing of darkness and the tree-frogs and bugs: no fleeing nor repudiation nor for this moment more even urgency anywhere in the room or outside it either above or below or before or behind the tiny myriad beast-sounds and the vast systole and diastole of summer night.

❡ . . . already in endless motion like the treadmill’s endless band less than an inch’s fraction above the ultimate point of his nose and chest where the first full breath would bring him into its snatching orbit, himself lying beneath it like a hobo trapped between the rails under a speeding train, safe only so long as he did not move.

❡ Perhaps eating had something to do with it, . . .: remembering how his uncle had said that a man didn’t necessarily eat his way through the world but by the act of eating and maybe only by that did he actually enter the world, get himself into the world: not through it but into it, burrowing into the world’s teeming solidarity like a moth into wool by the physical act of chewing and swallowing the substance of its warp and woof and so making, translating into a part of himself and his memory, the whole history of man or maybe even relinquishing by mastication, abandoning, eating it into to be annealed, the proud vainglorious minuscule which he called his memory and his self and his I-Am into that vast teeming anonymous solidarity of the world from beneath which the ephemeral rock would cool and spin away to dust not even remarked and remembered since there was no yesterday and tomorrow didn’t even exist so maybe only an ascetic living in a cave on acorns and spring water was really capable of vainglory and pride; maybe you had to live in a cave on acorns and spring water in rapt impregnable contemplation of your vainglory and righteousness and pride in order to keep up to that high intolerant pitch of its worship which brooked no compromise.

❡ ‘The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first (in fact he doesn’t really love that bank-account nearly as much as foreigners like to think because he will spend almost any or all of it for almost anything provided it is valueless enough) but his motorcar. Because the automobile has become our national sex-symbol. We cannot really enjoy anything unless we can go up an alley for it. Yet our whole background and raising and training forbids the subrosa and surreptitious. So we have to divorce our wife today in order to remove from our mistress the odium of mistress in order to divorce our wife tomorrow in order to remove from our mistress and so on. As a result of which the American woman has become cold and undersexed; she has projected her libido onto the automobile not only because its glitter and gadgets and mobility pander to her vanity and incapacity (because of the dress decreed upon her by the national retailers association) to walk but because it will not maul her and tousle her, get her all sweaty and disarranged. So in order to capture and master anything at all of her anymore the American man has got to make that car his own. Which is why let him live in a rented rathole though he must he will not only own one but renew it each year in pristine virginity, lending it to no one, letting no other hand ever know the last secret forever chaste forever wanton intimacy of its pedals and levers, having nowhere to go in it himself and even if he did he would not go where scratch or blemish might deface it, spending all Sunday morning washing and polishing and waxing it because in doing that he is caressing the body of the woman who has long since now denied him her bed.’ ‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘I am fifty-plus years old,’ his uncle said. ‘I spent the middle fifteen of them fumbling beneath skirts. My experience was that few of them were interested in love or sex either. They wanted to be married.’ ‘I still don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘That’s right,’ his uncle said. ‘Don’t. And even when you are fifty and plus, still refuse to believe it.’

From Sir S. Radhakrishnan, “Religion and World Unity,” in Religion in the Modern World:

❡ Tolerance has two sides, a negative and a positive. Negatively it rejects the claim that any one type of religion has absolute, final, universal and exclusive validity. The surrender of this self-assertive, aggressive claim is essential for the recognition of other forms of religious belief and practice which also bring men nearer the Divine. The positive side is a sensitiveness to truth wherever it is found, an appreciation of the values found in other religions, a creative assimilation of the elements of truth and a consequent enrichment of our own beliefs. The two are interdependent.

❡ The Hindu tradition discriminates between essential spiritual experience (sruti) and the varying forms in which this experience has in course of time appeared (smrti). While the former is universal and unifying, the latter is diverse and divisive. The kind of authority which pertains to the former does not apply to the latter.

❡ The foundation of the knowledge of God is the awareness of the mystery of God. It is a mystery in the sense that it is not susceptible of objectivication or definition. It involves the individual who attempts to grasp it and is not itself an external datum. . . . Those who have the experience express what they have found in a language of their own, a language of symbols. “Without a parable spake he not unto them.”

❡ Bergson points out that organized religion is “the crystallization brought about by a scientific process of cooling, of what mysticism had poured while hot into the soul of man. Through religion all men get a little of what a few privileged souls possessed in full.”

❡ Karl Jaspers says, “The claim to exclusivity is the work of man and not built on God, who provided man with many roads to himself. . . . When creeds are made absolute they become a kind of banner. They are the rallying points, the sign of membership in a group, the badge of an enthusiasm, a battle emblem.”

❡ Many religions are the varied dialects of the one language of the human spirit. . . . This is the religion which Augustine mentions in his well-known statement: “That which is called the Christian Religion existed among the Ancients, and never did not exist, from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity.” (Librum de vera religione, Chapter 10.)

February 15, 1955

If Fred murders the salesman (1) because the drunk salesman insists Fred take him home, (2) because Fred has spent most of his money on buying drinks for the salesman and needs cash, he can then take the salesman’s money, hide the body (in the sawdust pile behind Murphy’s mill) and drive off in his car allowing time for the body to be found, then drive the car into a lake or off a cliff or something, and hide out in the high peaks region. The only people who have seen him with the salesman are the clerk and bartender. “Description” in newspaper. Harry recognizes it, and Fred’s ma. Both lie to police, say he left the day before the murder. Fred is derelict, found on bench or something by religionist who sees Fred’s Bible, taken to a kind of Woodbrooke. Gets oriented in his views, etc., etc. Then? Maybe: gives himself up, or figure out a flaw in the murder picture that finally enables the police to find him out.

February 17, 1955

Will it never end! I sent Jeanne a Valentine signed by all the people here in their respective languages. That was on the 10th. Meanwhile her letters showed she had doubts about me; that the 3 days together in New York couldn’t compete over 6 or 8 weeks’ time with a 3000 mile separation. I wrote a whining letter even at one weak point saying I’d die if she didn’t love me (and meaning it at the time). I repented of this and wrote a day or so ago, apologizing. I also wrote a sexy letter in response to something she had said about washing dishes in the nude; repented of that, too, as always. Not knowing where we stood, wondering if I should fly home to try to save the relationship. Then yesterday there was a note in my box that Jeanne was going to call from America 9 o’clock tonight. I shuddered. Was this the end? Would she say she’d decided not to come to Europe? I felt terrible all morning. Then I suddenly remembered the Valentine, of course: She’d received it on the 15th, had called to thank me, renew our vows, found that I was in B’ham and left the message she’d call again tonight. All yesterday afternoon I felt joyous, happy ever so happy in Jeanne and my love for her, sure that the call would be about the Valentine. But this morning I got the following letter, dated February 14th): “Peter, there is an awful lot to say. I shall begin from the beginning of Rochester. I originally came here to marry Doug and get out of N.H. During last summer I was at camp rather than in Rochester with Doug. Probably I knew I didn’t like him enough to give up the camp, didn’t really want to be near him. Sept., all by myself, I got this place, Doug had a girlfriend, I had Jonathan. Doug and I made an official break in November, most amicably, just for ourselves. I met Peter G., Nancy, Albert, eventually you (coming from Riparius), then John, Donald Mole, too. I was fascinated by my new friends; I remember thinking they all were very extra wonderful, all shorter than I am, but for a change they were still much nicer than any group I’d ever met. Probably because I wasn’t romantically inclined, and partly because I was being very stern with myself, I didn’t start coupling up with any of you people. It would have broken up the group, I’m sure.

Well, I was more interested in John; finally we went out. This was the first “date” from the group that any people had made, except of course Nancy and Peter G. John and I got along just fine. I began to respect him more and like him more, to find myself very interested in his pictures of home, ex girlfriends especially, sister and parents, relationships with his friends, growing up, looking ahead. This was after your party, before your invitation to N.Y. (At this time Donald was being specific enough so I knew I’d have to have out with him that I liked him and felt he was taking this seriously enough to consider marriage.)

When you left Rochester I felt how lonesome you were. That’s why I told you to come and sit near me, on the floor near the door, remember? When you took me home, it was so revealing to find all the things to talk about that we did! I knew it was hard for you to leave, you liked all of us so well. I felt this surge of understanding and wanting to console you or hug you, and I guess I did kiss you. So much warmth! So different from the many entanglements at college! You know, goodness rather than desire. Well, you left, I liked you, you made an impact on me, left a hole in the group. And John and I began going around a lot. By the time I went to see you (1. you’d asked me, 2. I wanted to go to NY, 3. I was challenged by the letter and curious to see what it was all about, 4. no commitments here). It was delightful meeting you there. Fondness was he key emotion here, real happiness that people could be so nice, for me. Then we began this talking over. Remember I said, I’m happy about it, and you said you wanted to tell your folks. Then I should have asked what you would say, because your parents heard only “engagement” and not “with reservations.” So now your whole family is planning a wedding and mine still knows nothing. And I don’t want to be engaged. You, in England, are calling me “fiancée” and I have felt so warmly about you that I want to hug you, but I hug Peter G., and I don’t love him. I kiss you but honestly Peter I do not love you. You’re a dear new person to me. Here I am, sailing to see you this summer. I’m not a fiancée. If I sail, it will be as some crazy girl who would love to visit you, like I visit George and Theron every time I’m in NYC. I love Riparius, I’d love to dabble around there, But Peter, Peter, I don’t realize that I cannot do it unless I marry you, and I don’t want to go that far. I like the life but I don’t want to marry you. I want to be as clear as I can be. Your life of travel and writing is wonderful. I want to go, too, but now I realize it will mean another lonely summer, and back I’ll want to come. I won’t feel like marrying you. I don’t now. I can see a hiking, biking, and sleeping-out summer in Europe as pure heaven. But to do it with you, it would be a boy-girl setup and that’s all. Remember when I was on your bed with you, and I said, “This is nice,” meaning the lying there and kissing. You said, “With anyone?” Well, not anyone, but with someone I like yes, it’s lovely. I hadn’t been lying around with anyone for a couple of months and it sure was nice to do it with you. But you didn’t understand this, I’m sure. I still say it was a confirmation of deep friendship, not love in the romantic sense.

Here I am, embroiled in your family. You should have said, “We’ve been talking about marriage” or I should have said something to stop you. No, damn it. I should have heard you out, as I did, then said, “No.” But how could I expect myself to do that? I certainly never could “laugh at” anybody’s statement of love. It happens to people for me, and I fall for others, and it’s wonderful to tell, or hear, of this fine regard. But something should follow. You had plans, I had not even begun to love you. Just grand feeling, not another thing. Your family is so nice. I was really happy to be there.

To get to your proposal, when I said I could marry you in a week, it would be because I would not have to face Don or think about John. As it was, Don had to be talked with, but John had not been settled at all. I never even told you that. Poor Peter, you did not hear any of this situation, it’s not fair to you. Your parents are so good, they love you and admire you so, they want to accept me so much, I should have said, “Take it back, we must think more.” Hell. And, I want to prove that a short-term courtship can prove to be fruitful, I want to wander overseas with you, I want to develop your beliefs and writing, but I always get interested in people this way. Always. It’s the teacher-training in me. I simply cannot take care of so many people at once and I never faced it as clearly as now. I’m not ready or willing to take a job, answer to agency letters from England. I do have a ticket. I bought it to keep my promise. I should never have let you phone Elsie Bamburger. I didn’t even open her first letter to me.

Another thing, I hate to give people up. I’ve got all kinds of ex-boyfriends who I really am jealously interested in. Casually of course, but I never really give them up. Well, to say “No” to you would have snipped off all our new relationship. But I have to say No. This is the reason. I’m in love with John, and he with me. He told me long ago, and now I’ve reacted or responded. No other plans, but you must know this no matter what. There are about 5 more letters full I have to tell you.

I don’t like to do this but again—I have had this done to me. It’s my only justification. I beg your forgiveness for not letting you know in the beginning. It’s embarrassing, too, a crazy mess. I feel all kinds of responsibility, all I want to be is liked by the people I like and I go around messing things up. My dear Peter, please please please don’t feel bad. I send my love, I’m sorry, Peter.

—Jeanne

How could I have been so inexperienced, so stupid, as to leave her just when I had her thinking that nothing could happen in six months, that a lover near isn’t equal to ten far away. And I knew John was after her, too, yet thought (God!) he’d automatically stop when she announced she planned to take up with me. O folly! She and John together the whole time during our Toronto trip, him asking me later how he could get in touch with Jeanne, even saying he would like to get married, was looking for a wife. Stupid ass! Imbecile. What now? The telephone call tonight. What until then? Can I work, study about God’s all-encompassing love, talk jokingly with people here, eat a big lunch? All her doubts I appreciate. She didn’t have a chance to love me, yet I felt sure when she got here she’d learn to. It’s John that hurts. What can I do? I see why jilted lovers murder people. That’s no solution. Couldn’t there be a solution? Why can’t I cry, get drunk, scream? I didn’t even cry. I cry at pictures, I cry when I hear Bach or a Beethoven quartet. Why can’t I cry now? I’ll go have some cocoa.

I see Jórn outside swinging a pick-axe with some workmen who are chopping through an asphalt pathway. He really misses the labour of his body, I guess. He’s working like a demon out there. The workmen look a trifle embarrassed.

Sean O’Casey again. Drums Under the Windows.

❡ Tormenting himself with the fading vision of a most lovely lady whose golden hair was hanging down her back, so full of fire that a tress of it would give light to a group threshing corn in a black barn on a dark night.

❡ His highest vision is no higher than the counter in his Sinn Fein Bank. He strikes a match, and thinks it the torch of freedom. A lighter of little gas-lamps to show the Irish where to walk. The sword of light would turn him to ashes if he ever tried to hold it.

❡ Down in the deep trench, shored up with planks and cross-pieces, a long way from Ireland’s four beautiful green fields, side by side with the huge glossy black cylinders, Sean watched the broad backs of the navies bending, rising, and bending again, as they worked on making way for another length of the monster black pipe, looking like a prehistoric ebony worm that men were uncovering now after a rest of a million years; while far above their heads a dim damp dawn crept slowly over the sky. Not one of these brawny boys had ever heard of Griffith or of Yeats. They lived their hard and boisterous life without a wish to hear their names. . . . Toiling, drinking, whoring, they lived everywhere and anywhere they could find a ready-made lodging or room. . . . And yet Sean felt in his heart that these men were all-important in anything to be done for Ireland. Well, there was no sound of the linnet’s wings here; nothing but the thud of the pick, the tearing sound of the shovels thrust into the ground, the loud steady pulse of the pump sucking away the surface water, and the cries of the men handling the derrick from which the huge pipes swung, and the irritating squelch of the men’s boots as they sunk into, and were pulled out of, the thick and sticky yellow clay. While he swung the sledge hammer down on the hardy head of the bright steel wedge imprisoned in a gad held by a comrade, to break through a harder crust the pick couldn’t penetrate, he cursed himself that he couldn’t afford to spend a month, a fortnight, or even a week in a summer school at peace in an Irish-speaking district. . . . If he went up to a meeting of the Coite Gnotha, the Head Executive of the Gaelic League, and, leaning over the table they sat around keeping time in their talk to the snores of Edward Martyn, asleep in an easy chair, said, Look here, boys, I love the Irish; I’ve learned a lot; I want to spend a holiday in an Irish district . . . but I’ve no money; couldn’t you people fork out enough to fix me there for a week or two, so that my Irish may be as the rain falling on the earth, or the lightning splitting the black clouds What would happen? The giddy-minded, uninspirable secretary, Paddy O’Daly, would come over, trip his arm, lead him to the door, and say, Now, now, we’re engaged in very important business so the like of them would hurry by Whitman, spitting out of him as he leaned by a corner of the Bowery. And doing so, they’ll die, for whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud. Ah, to hell with them! —Eh, there; look out, Jack! warned his mate: the sledge near missed the wedge that time!

Rilke, “Malte”: Deaths are at present taking place in 559 beds. It is like a factory, of course; and naturally, with this enormous output, the individual death is not a very finished article. But that is not what we are after. What we want is mass production. Who cares nowadays about a well worked-out death? . . . It is becoming more and more unusual for anyone to want a death of his one. My God! That is all there is to it. One comes along, finds one’s life ready-made and needs only to put it on. . . . And one dies the way one happens to die; one dies the death appropriate to the illness one has—for now that we know all the diseases we also know that the various forms of death belong to the complaints and not to the patients; the patient has practically no part to play. (Quoted by Heim.)

February 18, 1955

O’Casey, you’re magnificent! First paragraph alone makes one want to finish the story. Sets the end in it, then goes back to Tom’s history, the reader all the while aching to know how and when he came to the sorry state of the first paragraph. Thus:

❡ Sean stood silently in the room looking long at the fearful figure of his brother, Tom, crouched in the comfortable armchair before a sunnily-blazing fire, for the night was cold, and a white frost was calmly settling down on the paths and street outside. He felt a choking in his throat, and tears trickled down his cheeks, but Tom couldn’t see them, for his eye strings had broken, and he was blind.

(Then right away the miserable wife is depicted):

❡ Then he married: married an ignorant catholic girl who in some way had influenced him towards a newer home, and a companionable bed. Agatha Cooley was a yellow-skinned, stout woman, badly built in body and mind-sly in a lot of ways, as so many toweringly ignorant persons are; her best knowledge lay in guessing what a newspaper was trying to say. She could struggle through a short letter with pain and anxiety, her finest phrase always being that of hoping all were in the best of health as that left her at present. A lid that drooped half way down over one eye gave one side of her face the appearance of falling into a jocular sleep, and watch as he would, Sean had never seen it lift or fall; it stood still like a fading yellow blind whose worn-out spring refused to send it more than half-way up on a dark and dusty oval window. She dressed in a very dowdy, slovenly way and spoke in a voice from which a rough life had mobbed even the dimmest tinkle of music.

[Instead of saying “Tom liked the pub, or went often to the pub, he says:]

❡ The smell of a pub was incense to Tom, and its portals had the beauty of a Persian garden, with an everlasting fountain of sweet waters in the midst of it.

[Even the moralizing is inoffensive:]

❡ Not a mother’s son of a gun of us knows whence we came or whither we go. Some shout that they do, and carry banners of belief in their hands; but the banners, too, will soon be dust sprinkled on the dust of the bearers. Kindly Tom, poor kindly Tom. He rushed into the brightness of the pub, the one brightness within his reach. Well, God is as likely to be there as in the Viceroy’s satin-walled residence or the Guinness’s mansion of high style and tabinet. Not a son of a gun of us knew who he’d meet or what he’d see, or a ha’p’orth when the time came to go. A bird’s flight from the ground to the roof-top and then the same bird’s flight from the roof-top to the ground, and life was over.

❡ . . . the slender gold watch-chain shyly streaking across his waistcoat like a delicate sunbeam hurrying across a somber sky . . .

[Then his use of refrain: here a twig. Thus:]

❡ Sean went back to the silent room, sat down on the cane-bottomed chair, furtively watching the hand of death quenching the last dim light glimmering in Tom’s handsome face; turning now and again to glance at the little sycamore twig moving gently up, gently down, just outside the window-pane.

[Used as the final sentence:] ❡ And he turned and left her alone with her dead husband, and with the little sycamore twig moving gently up, gently down, just outside the window-pane.

❡ . . . her bright dark eyes blinking rapidly to impede the tears that were pushing a way out of them, her brave humorous mouth aquiver like summer lightning in a violet sky.

❡ . . . the sky grew greyer over their heads and a misty rain, rather than falling, soaked the street with its chilly penetration.

❡ Now she went about everything like a near-drowned fly in a jar full of water. She entertained life under a canopy of rags and tatters; a blouse warning all of its end, a skirt slit to the thigh, shattered boots and footless stockings; and her breath of life moved faintly in the midst of it all, while her children moved round her, half perishing too, like weak and puzzled planeteens hovering uncertainly around a fast-dying sun.

❡ So behind this fair, sparkling laughing curtain that Nature let down before him many dark and evil things were lurking, or hung entangled in the bright colours and satisfying scents like decaying flies in the iridescent and lonely-patterned web of the spider.

February 23, 1955

Gewanter and his house; ride with Jeanne to Riparius, brother came, prevented sleeping, etc.

February 24, 1955

Heim speaks of time as a Now, represented in simile by a spool of rope, reeling off the past so that a specific knot on the rope recedes further and further into the mist of forgetfulness.

❡ The will is the lightning flash and the deed is the long-dawn roll of thunder which follows it.

❡ The invisible force which we designate with the word ‘will’ is not comprised within the narrow confines of our tiny human existence. For since the volitional ego is non-objectivisable it transcends the whole objective world space and all its spatial dimensions; so the will cannot be localized in the human body, this limited, objective structure—neither in the brain nor in the heart. Admittedly my volitional ego is related by my destiny to this human body. My body is my most important instrument. But the will itself, the volitional I and the volitional Thou, is prior to the whole objective march of world events to which it is related, and consequently lies beyond the range of scientific observation. Whatever can be psychologically objectivised by the will is not the will itself, but belongs already to its incipient realization—and between this and the will itself Kant makes an explicit distinction. This incipient realization includes especially those pictures of the future, accompanied by a lively sense of values, which fill the imagination—those plans and aspirations, those complexes of the individual and collective subconscious. All these are not the will itself but the objective expression and product of the will, in which the conflict is revealed between the volitional I and the volitional Thou, first of all in psychological activity before it is converted into action on the physical plane. The will itself transcends three-dimensional space and uni-dimensional objective flow of time.

February 26, 1955

❡ . . . her brave humorous mouth aquiver like summer lightning in a violet sky. —O’Casey.

March 3, 1955

❡ Dr. O’Hickey decided to take his case to Rome, and to put something of a faint flush on their white cowardice the Gaelic Leaguers started a fund to help defray his expenses, Sean handing over ten shillings that he had saved towards a new coat, and, in addition a shilling a week till he had given fifteen shillings altogether; so that a tint was added to O’Hickey’s childlike hope of finding a soft spot in the petrified piety of Rome.

Clattering machines in the Lucas factory, worked by middle-aged women who paste pictures of their husbands and children over the oily surface.

March 4, 1955

Could do a novel on St. Francis, for instance “St. Francis of New York.” Modern dress.

March 5, 1955

❡ “I worship God as Life, Truth, Light, Love, the Supreme Good. He is the ruler and transformer of the heart. He is personal to those who need his personal presence. He is embodied to those who need his touch. . . . He is ethics and morality. He is fearlessness. . . . He is purity, and may only be known by the pure in heart.”—Gandhi.

❡ The illustrious ancients, when they wished to make clear and to propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such investigation of knowledge lay in the investigation of things, and in seeing them as they really were. When things were thus investigated, knowledge became complete. When knowledge was complete, their thoughts became sincere. When their thoughts were sincere, their souls became perfect. When their souls were perfect, their own selves became cultivated. When their selves were cultivated, their families became regulated. When their families were regulated, their states came to be put into proper order. When their states were in proper order, then the whole world became peaceful and happy. —Confucius.

❡ “Luther, in his commentary on the Book of Daniel, says, ‘A God is simply that whereas the human heart rests with trust, faith, hope, and love. If the resting is right, then the God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then the God too is illusory.’ In other words, the worth of what a man thinks about God and the objects of religion depends on what the man is, and what the man is depends upon his having more or less reached the measure of a perfect total man.”—Matthew Arnold, introduction to Culture and Anarchy.

❡ . . . the D of the moon through the window. —O’Faolain.

March 6, 1955

Herbert Henry Farmer, God & Men:

❡ If by “God” we mean that final reality of righteousness and love, from which all things, including ourselves, depend for their existence, their nature, their coherence, their unfolding history and final outcome, then the whole meaning of our existence is at stake in Him, and nothing less than the whole breadth of our experience could be the appropriate and sufficient context for thinking about Him. (page 20)

❡ . . . the only thing for you to do is to give me a dose of medicine, and see to it that I do not give you a dose of medicine first, just as, I am told, in administering a pill to a horse through a blowpipe, it is well to see that the horse does not blow first.

March 7, 1955

Psalm 139 (Revised Standard Version):

O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me!

Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up;

thou discernest my thoughts from afar.

Thou searchest out my path and my lying down,

and art acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue

lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.

Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, “Let only darkness cover me,

and the light about me be night,”

even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.

For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works!

Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee,

when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.

Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,

when as yet there was none of them.

How precious to me are thy thoughts, O God!

How vast is the sum of them!

If I would count them, they are more than the sand. When I awake, I am still with thee.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Search me out, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!

And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!

March 8, 1955

Oman, glad to be released from questioning students, by death, goes to see what this St. Francis-fellow is all about.

❡ grasping the nettle with both hands. Farmer.

❡ a jewel in a swine’s snout.

❡ Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee.

Hilda Bowman-Beer’s false teeth. I noticed the gum was the wrong color.

March 10, 1955

❡ Every act necessarily works itself out in retribution in another birth. . . . Then these new actions form new Karma, which must necessarily be expiated in another existence; so that, as fast as the clock of retribution runs down, it winds itself up again. —Farquar, The Crown of Hinduism.

Ann Seeley’s ears exactly the color of her crimson sweater.

March 11, 1955

❡ Be not anxious . . . what ye shall eat; nor yet . . . what ye shall put on. . . . Consider the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap; . . . yet God feedeth them: of how much more value are ye than the birds! . . . Consider the lilies: . . . they toil not, neither do they spin; yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If God doth so clothe the grass in the field, . . . how much more shall he clothe you? —Luke 12: 22, 24, 27–28.

❡ He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?

He that formed the eye, shall he not see? —Ps. 94. 9.

❡ Search me, O God, and know my heart.

Try me, and know my thoughts:

And see if there be any way of wickedness in me,

And lead me in the way everlasting. —Ps. 139. 23–24.

❡ He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good, and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. —Micah 6. 8.

❡ Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be for ever and my righteousness shall not be abolished. —Isa. 51. 6.

❡ In him we live, and move, and have our being. —Acts 17. 28.

❡ O Thou has beset me behind and before,

And laid thy hand upon me . . .

Whither shall I go from Thy spirit?

Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? —Ps. 139.

March 12, 1955

❡ We have seen how Christ provides th fulfillment of each of the highest aspirations and aims of Hinduism. A little reflection on the material contained in this chapter will show that every line of light which is visible in the grossest parts of the religion reappears in Him set in healthy institutions and spiritual worship. Every true motive which in Hinduism has found expression in unclean, debasing, or unworthy practices finds in Him fullest exercise in work for the downtrodden, the ignorant, the sick, and the sinful. In Him is focused every ray of light that shines in Hinduism. He is the Crown of the faith of India. —conclusion to Farquar’s The Crown of Hinduism (very convincing).

March 14, 1955

budding life, hidden like crocuses under the last snow of winter

March 15, 1955

from Wordsworth’s “Excursion”:

. . . his spirit drank

The spectacle: sensation, soul and form

All melted into him.

Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired,

Rapt into still communion that transcends

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise

His mind was a thanksgiving to the power

That made him; it was blessedness and love.

Also:

I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

—Tintern Abbey

March 16, 1955

Eric: arrived unexpectedly from South Africa. Mystery man. Says he is an engineer; can get a job anytime but works only when he needs more money Sick: jaundice, suspicion of heart trouble, TB. Visits doctor, reassured OK, leaves Woodbrooke; says he’s going to friends in Amsterdam; returns again the same morning a week later; says he went to Switzerland but was lonely. No bed. Wardeness finds him in library after closing. Arrange for room at Bourneville. But he sleeps secretly in Holland House common room, steals clock, disappears.

Ole, also.

March 17, 1955

From A. Huxley, The Doors of Perception:

❡ Though but recently introduced into the northern United States, peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols of the Red Man’s right to spiritual independence. Some Indians have reacted to white supremacy by becoming Americanized, others by retreating into traditional Indianism. But some have tried to make the best of both worlds, indeed of all the worlds—the best of Indianism, the best of Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine. Hence the Native American Church. In it two great appetites of the soul—the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence—were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third—the urge to worship, to justify the ways of God to man, to explain the universe by means of a coherent theology.

Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind clothes him in front, but leaves him bare behind. But actually it is we, the rich and highly educated whites, who have left ourselves bare behind. We cover our anterior nakedness with some philosophy—Christian, Marxian, Freudo-Physicalist—but abaft we remain uncovered, at the mercy of all the winds of circumstance. The poor Indian, on the other hand, has had the wit to protect his rear by supplementing the fig-leaf of a theology with the breech-clout of transcendental experience.

March 20, 1955

From Traherne, Centuries of Meditations III 1, 2, 3.

❡ Will you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness? Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by his special favour I remember them till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts His wisdom could bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unobtainable by book, and therefore I will teach them by experience. Pray for them earnestly: for they will make you angelical, and wholly celestial. Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

❡ All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostasy, I collected again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator’s praises, and could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of he learned never unfold?

❡ The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O what venerable and revered creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine the temple was mine the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties [i.e. properties], nor bounds, nor divisions; but all properties and divisions were mine: all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

John Gay, “Song”:

O ruddier than the cherry!

O sweeter than the berry!

O nymph more bright

Than moonshine night,

Like kidlings blithe and merry!

Ripe as the melting cluster!

No lily has such luster,

Yet hard to tame

As raging flame,

And fierce as storms that bluster!

March 24, 1955

❡ Whoever talks about reflects upon an evil thing he has done, is thinking the vileness he has perpetrated, and what one thinks, therein is one caught—with one’s whole soul one is caught utterly in what one thinks, and so he is still caught in vileness. And he will surely not be able to turn, for his spirit will coarsen and his heart rot, and besides this a sad mood may come upon him. What would you? Stir filth this way or that, and it is still filth. To have sinned or not to have sinned—what does it profit us in heaven? In the time I am brooding on this I could be stringing pearls for the joy of heaven. That is why it is written: ‘Depart from evil, and do good’—turn wholly from evil, do not brood in its way, and do good. You have done wrong. Then balance it by doing right.’ —Isaac Meier of Ger., quote in Fromm, Man for Himself.

❡ The supremacy of the authority is questioned by the attempt of the creature to cease being a thing and to become a creator.

❡ But man has never yet ceased striving to produce and to create because productiveness is the source of strength, freedom, and happiness. However, to the extent to which he feels dependent on powers transcending him, his very productiveness, the assertion of his will, makes him feel guilty. The men of Babel were punished for trying by the efforts of a unified human race to build a city reaching to heaven. Prometheus was chained to the rock for having given man the secret of fire, symbolizing productiveness. Pride in the power and strength of man was denounced by Luther and Calvin as sinful pride; by political dictators, as criminal individualism. Man tried to appease the gods for the crime of productiveness by sacrifices, by giving them the best of the crop or of the herd. Circumcision is another attempt at such appeasement; part of the phallus, the symbol of male creativeness, is sacrificed to God so that man may retain the right to its use. In addition . . . man curbs his own powers by feelings of guilt. —Fromm, pp. 149–150.

March 26, 1955

YMCA Edinburgh, Scotland

Alone and restless after a delightful trip up with Chrysanthi. She said she loves me today for the first time; but confided that she had had a “special feeling” about me from the first day at Woodbrooke and that when I sat next to her at meals she could neither eat nor talk. I had no idea! But what a marvelous person she is, and I love and respect her immensely. Tonight, at the station, she was snatched away by a Mrs. Macpherson, who is to entertain Chrysanthi and who of course didn’t know of my coming. Since the train was one hour late I guess she was not in the best of humour and she made it quite clear that I could go my own way and that I could see Chrysanthi again at Meeting tomorrow. That’s good Quaker hospitality!

Am I in another mess? The difficulties concerning marriage seem immense, since in Greece family ties are so important and since also they don’t seem to marry for love but for security, with the husband custom-selected by parents. But I must not give up!

Chrysanthi is so sweet! We had a railway compartment to ourselves most of the way, and talked and made love and just looked soulfully at each other instead of the rugged Scottish scenery. And sometime she would finger through the Greek-English λεξικόν and say, “If I only knew all these words, I could speak to you.” I feel her anguish in this; yet the proof of our love is how well we know each other with only her simply vocabulary for verbal communication.

Will I, in the end, make her miserable by pursuing this further? But I think she would be happy with me, and I think I could offer her a more rounded and satisfying life than she’s likely to get in Greece. Why is everything always so difficult? Damn!

I must start selling stories!

March 27, 1955

The YMCA dormitory turned out more like a flophouse, with four or five old men reeking of alcohol curled up in their BVDs in the torn blankets, coughing, wheezing, moaning; lighting cigarettes, puffing, then immediately convulsed with coughing but continuing to smoke nevertheless. One was a deaf-mute. He offered me a cigarette and I took out my pad and wrote, “No thanks. I don’t smoke.” “You’re lucky,” he wrote underneath, then puffed again and coughed. Didn’t sleep much, between coughing and snoring. A ragged looking Irishman, young, with brown decayed teeth and a dirt-blacked shredded collar, spoke to me, asked me what I was, and I said, “I’m a farmer.” We talked a bit. He asked if I’d be going to church in the morning. Why not I go to mass with him and he’d come to the Quaker Meeting? OK. But in the morning I met an economics students from London, and the three of us walked up to the Castle (saw courts where Burns, Boswell, David Hume & Dr. Johnson stayed) and continued until just before 11, so that I had to rush off to Meeting and the Irish lad to mass, separately. Chrysanthi was at Meeting and a good one touched off by D. Beavers’ comments on Billy Graham and man’s sinfulness or lack of it. Mr. Penmore, an architect, took us for lunch to his home on the Furth of Forth just outside of Edinburgh; then to see the Forth Bridge, which we viewed close-up from the ferry across the water. A remarkable cantilever span, perfectly balanced, built of tubular steel so large that men crawl inside to make repairs.

March 29, 1955

Moved to 8 Darmaway Street, a “Georgian residence four minutes walk to Princes Street,” run as a (rather expensive) student hostel by Mrs. Sybil White, a member of Edinburgh Meeting. But more important things: Chrysanthi has been bewildered by these well meaning Friends who shuttle her from one house to the next, this tea-party to that. Poor girl, but she smiles withal. I went along yesterday also to the castle where Mary Queen of Scots was born: Linlithgow Palace, an interesting fire-gutted ruin with huge fireplaces and helping touches like a vomiting chamber outside the banqueting hall, with a flush into a moat which was then flushed by the loch which served also for drinking water! We had a philosophical guide who knew all the dates and all the relevant verses out of Sir Walter Scott, so “a good time was had by all,” which meant Chrysanthi, myself, Arnold Beavers, a professor of crystallography at the university, and a Pippin somebody, woman obstetrician just back from three years in India. Also visited Culross Palace, home of a seventeenth-century merchant. After tea I finally managed to be with Chrysanthi alone for an hour, during which time we walked to the next engagement, supper at Margaret Troup’s house, a nice old lady, 18 years a widow, and very sound, not domineering or over solicitous like Macpherson, the great rich lady at whose palatial house Chrysanthi sleeps amidst three hot water bottles and continual cuddling. We gossiped a little especially re: Margaret Gibbons, whom I first met in London. She’s a nice-looking fortyish woman with obvious strong character, a loud hearty laugh, and a personality that doesn’t hesitate to take the lead in a committee. We went the night before last to her house, where Chrysanthi spoke of the Salonica school. A nice comfortable house, and I thought at the time, what a shame such a big nice house and Margaret Gibbons not married. Mrs. Troup supplied the answer: Margaret Gibbons is married, but does everything independently, without her husband. Doesn’t even introduce him to people. Apparently she even traveled to America without him, and routinely goes up to London alone also. Mrs. Troup said that Margaret was a teacher, about forty, when her present husband really fell for her, and was insane with joy when she agreed to marry him, which she did to gain freedom from teaching, and to have security, a provider. And the poor husband, a likeable and capable fellow, is now completely in the background. Half the time he has to ask other people where his wife is.

But marital difficulties of a more personal nature were also disclosed. Chrysanthi told me all of the following while we walked. And they answered another question that I had had in my mind because although she had often described the troubles with arranged marriages in Greece, it had always been in the abstract, and I wondered how such a lovely and beautiful girl as Chrysanthi could not be involved either in (1) a love-affaire or (2) an arranged affaire, or possibly both. Now it came out. For four years a boy had loved her and she him. He wanted to marry, but was young and also wanted to finish his schooling. Her parents said no. Gradually she convinced them to change their minds, quite an accomplishment in Greece, especially for a girl. Meanwhile, however, the boy had gone to the university, gotten his degree, and his parents said that Chrysanthi was beneath him, that he must marry a girl from Athens. This verdict apparently was law, and he simply wrote to Chrysanthi that that was that. She had influenced her parents; he didn’t even try.

After that she was obviously unhappy, didn’t want to see men or anyone for almost two years. Her parents noticed this and said all would be well if she married. They chose a promising young man for her. He wooed, but she could not even like him and eventually tried to avoid him altogether. He wrote a letter a day to her in England; she never even answered. She told me that was why she came to England—to get away at least for a while. But when she returns he will be there and her parents will press her to agree to marry him and sooner or later it will be done. She actually hates him. He writes only how one day he buys a new stove, another a couch, that he has such-and-such money, etc., etc.

What a stinking situation! And here she loves me desperately and I her. She told me this is the first time she’s been happy in five or six years. Yet she thinks our marriage impossible because I am not Greek. Well, now I must meet her, for we shall spend the day together unless Emily Macpherson butts in her rich damn old head.

Later: the same. Chrysanthi and I had just time to buy material for a tartan skirt. It was to be for Chrysanthi, and she excitedly chose the pattern she liked best. Then, at the last minute, after being so happy at the prospect of having the skirt herself, she remembered that Saturday is her sister’s name-day, and she had the material shipped off to Lola in Greece, just as happy in anticipation of her sister’s pleasure as she had been in the thought of the skirt being her own. What a fine girl! I’m wild about her. Yes, and then the usual: we had to go to so-and-so for mid-morning coffee. From there Chrysanthi was due at someone else’s for lunch, where Macpherson would meet her, take her somewhere else for tea, then home for a grand supper with the bent 100-year-old-looking hag she lives with. An exciting day with Mrs. Macpherson for Chrysanthi, from 3:30 to bedtime! Oh lucky Macpherson! And I: I walked, walked, walked, to the castle, meeting there a Ceylonese student whom I had known from Selly Oak; then to the slums; gave money to beggars; walked, walked more. Edinburgh isn’t very interesting. All grey stone, the same, and shops and trains. American magazines everywhere, including pornography like nude photos, “Eves without leaves.” Walked more, walked; read lousy Gerald Kersh story on a park bench; trash. Saw Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” which I wanted Chrysanthi to see so much. Damn! It was great. I wanted her to be there so much. Having the hundredth cup of tea with Mrs. Macpherson instead. Perhaps tomorrow.

A cellist is practicing in the next room. He’s very good. He’s stopped now. I can hear him putting the instrument away. He’s whistling. The cello is beautiful—mellow, sighing, soulful, if that’s possible.

How can I do a story around what’s happened to C. and me here? Difficult. Must work in London. I’m spending money too fast. Ought to earn some. Hah! Maybe I can’t really settle down because I’m neurotic. Probably. Talents and energies and life-stuff dripping on the floor uselessly like semen spurting with no warm waiting complementary receptacle in place. Ugly simile. How will I function when C. goes off to Greece? Alone! I think I can write well if I keep at it. It’s bad to stop, even for a day; worse for a week. Should do something every day if even a description. Must think out next story, now.

April 1, 1955

32, Tavistock Square, London W.C. 1

Cybil White and her houseman at breakfast. “Ask Mr. Dean if he’ll have porridge.” He walks to my table (8 feet away): “Mr. Dean, will you have porridge this morning?” “Yes, please” (my answer audible to her, of course). He walks back 8 feet: “Mr. Dean will have porridge.” She ladles it out. “Mrs. Dean’s porridge.” He serves it. Later (every morning the same: choice between fried egg or bacon, but he doesn’t move anywhere until she says): “Ask Mr. Dean if he’ll have fried egg or bacon” (heard of course by me, 8 feet away in the same room). “Mr. Dean, will you have friend egg or bacon?” “Egg, please” (heard by Mrs. White). He walks back and relays, “Mr. Dean will have fried egg this morning.” Later: “Mr. Dean’s fried egg.” He serves it.

Chrysanthi is complex. A good deal of the difficulty re: her freedom (I think) is due to her convincing herself that she is not free, rather than actual restriction. It’s like the character in Kafka’s novel who’s accused of a crime but after that becomes his own chief accuser, pushing himself further into the hands of the authorities (an imaginary crime, of course). Chrysanthi has been babied and cuddled here of course, and made to feel that she must do nothing really on her own, but now that she is relatively free she tells me that No, she cannot. However, now it is near 10 a.m. and I cannot find her anywhere in the Friends Centre, so perhaps she has gone out alone (without her coat). But why would she (without her coat)? I don’t know what to make of it.

Yesterday she had to see Margaret Backhaus, chief of the European section of Friends Service Council, and she came away much disturbed. Margaret questioned, questioned. Where have you been? With whom? Who’s the boy? Be careful! You’re young, you know. You went to the zoo? Alone! (Chrysanthi said “alone.”) Ah. Be careful, dear child. I will help you shop. Tomorrow someone will go with you to get your tickets, visa, passport. Be careful, child. You want to go to Cambridge? With whom? Be careful, child!

Chrysanthi was really hurt, because she felt Margaret considered her guilty of something and that letters would be sent to the Lindsays in Greece, etc. She told me also that certainly one of the reasons she is receiving all the varied training here is that the Lindsays will put all the burdens of the school on her because she doesn’t know how to say No. Already before she left this process began. She’s on duty 24 hours a day, forbidden to leave the grounds except on the one day off each week; the other staff (married) retiring to their homes and every emergency falling on her. She also told me, interestingly, that she is the instrument the Lindsays use to pacify and mediate among the other (Greek) staff-members. This is a thankless task because they are all older than she, and resent not only the collaboration with Lindsay but worse having someone younger than they be in a position of teaching them (by example) how to behave.

I felt naïvely, once, that people in “backward” countries with long-ordered social patterns did not have the problems with which Western peoples are deluged. But here’s Chrysanthi, as simple and innocent as can be, and pure, beset with arranged marriages, domineering father, possessive mother, staff jealousies, inferiority feelings, etc. Perhaps, in part, anyway, the difference with the “backward” societies is that their problems are not always of their own making. The arranged marriage business, for instance. These people have rigid customs (possessive right of the mother; domineering one of the father—i.e., the parents are not neurotic, they merely conform to pattern) which they either fall in with or not; and if not, woe. If yes, woe also, but expected. For instance, C. says that no one marries the person he or she loves, which means that there is someone he or she loves. The arranged marriage breaks into this, and brings heartbreak, even if expected heartbreak. We in the “West,” with our flexible patterns, have certainly more problems, or at least as many, the difference being that we seem to make them ourselves. Perhaps this is the value of freedom, not that it makes things easier, but that at least it allows you to kill yourself instead of being snuffed out by Wyrd beyond ken or control. And with the fact of self-making, of course, always remains the possibility at least of self-extricating. Hooray!

P.S. Just discovered Chrysanthi. She hadn’t gone out, but had been helping the chambermaids make the beds. But this afternoon she promises to go see about her passport all alone, while I move into my new deluxe £1.00 per week palace out near Tufnell Park underground.

April 6, 1955

27, Anson Road, London

To Antonio’s Spanish ballet last night with Chrysanthi, after a few hours in Kew Gardens. The audience was hysterical. Antonio took 5 or 10 bows after each number. A couple were sitting next to us, talking Greek, assuming of course that no one would understand them. Chrysanthi gave me a running translation. The boy was trying to fix up a date, to go dancing. The girl said she’d tell her parents she was going to the cinema, as they wouldn’t approve of the dancing. Typical Greek lying and secrecy, Chrysanthi said. Then he asked how many children she’d like, and they spoke of marriage with or without love, with or without children, and the various combinations of these possibilities. It was all very funny because they spoke loud, as if talking of the weather or the performance, never thinking that their next-door neighbors were enjoying every word.

April 7, 1955

Last night to Don Giovanni with Klaus Hartman and Roland?. Sad partings at Victoria Embankment. I cycled the long way “home” and felt very much that I’d lived in London a long while and was part of it and it of me.

Tonight to a ballet by Delibes, “Coppélia,” in which the lifelike dolls of the doll-maker actually come to life, with interesting complications. These plots (i.e., Don Giovanni) are incredibly naïve. Wouldn’t it be nice if authors could get away with such stuff today! Chrysanthi was very nice, as always.

Some kind of doll-maker with dolls coming alive would make a nice children’s story. Must try.

Story: difficulty of seeing C. alone at Woodbrooke. Look forward to end of term, trip to Edinburgh. Same there. Look forward to London. Lady meets her at station, takes her away.

April 10, 1955

Intercourse with Chrysanthi. She has great sexual appetite. She told me of postwar developments in Greece. Not very nice. The anti-German underground, of which her younger brother was a member, tried to put in a liberal government after the war. They were infiltrated with communists and subsequently all those who were anti-German became considered communist (by identification). These people were routed by the American-financed rightists, composed of those who collaborated with the Germans. Then the so-called “communists” were slaughtered wholesale. C’s brother fled the country, but the government took her entire family into prison as reprisal and then decided to kill her older brother, who had done nothing, in the younger’s place. Then his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; then, with a benevolent whim of the government, he was released. The man who ordered him to be killed was himself killed during the civil war when the “communists” had power for a short time. This man’s daughter is now C’s best friend—ironic. But the brother does not hold her father’s verdict against her. The present government really purged the anti-Germans. C. says they even killed 14 to 19 year old boys by changing their birth certificates to age 20 (age of legal responsibility). Lovely country!

Me (showing C. my “palace”): “How do you like my palace?”

C: “Your palace is you. I look at you, not at the room.”

April 11, 1955

To Cambridge: Very impressed with the Chapel of King’s College, especially the ceiling and choir. We sat in the back, partitioned off from the main section and the altar. After the service, while the organ was still playing some eerie music, everyone in the back tried to push through the small opening in the partition in order to see the other part of the chapel. The crowd pushing and the music somehow put me in mind of hell, as though some irresistible devilish fascination were compelling the crowd onward. But the front part of the chapel was very nice also.

Chrysanthi’s mother wrote that she understands that C. doesn’t want the boy she was arranged to marry, and that her parents will not press her too hard about it when she returns.

April 12, 1955

To Greek Orthodox service. Strange. Bearded men in black robes chanting and singing Bible texts, with the priest’s intonations interspersed. The congregation small olive-skinned Greeks, few men, standing and sitting at the right time, and incessantly making the sign of the cross. Also talking during the service, admiring each other’s dresses, and the like. Not a very meaningful time religious-wise, I venture. Even C. was disgusted. She wanted me to see a beautiful service but said that this one was terrible. We went shopping, walked, talked, ate kabobs in the Greek restaurant (Star Restaurant). She’s marvelous!

April 13, 1955

Dorothy Irving, wardeness of Friends Centre, asked me where I was going after London. “Assisi,” I said. “You’re not going to York, then?” “No. Who wants to know?” “Oh, someone in Friends House was asking.” I told all this to C. and she was very upset because Margaret Bachhaus had asked her if I was going to York, she had said No, but apparently Margaret was not satisfied and had to find out through this other kind of spying. C. was angry all morning over it. We walked to London Bridge, took the underground to my flat, had intercourse again, and ate supper. The contraceptive broke. Now what? C. is very sweet and I love her. Εἶναι πολὺ γλυκὴ καὶ τὴν ἀγαπῶ.

April 17, 1955

In the sun at Hampstead Heath. C. at York.

Lewis Benson and his “Four Principles of the Spiritual Reformation”: Christ the Inward Teacher, Community, etc. Quaker worship the only way. His personal story: despair, search, relief in Spiritual Reformation, subsequent devotion to it. Study of Fox, 8 years off and on. Why doesn’t he write his book and be done? Search for converts. Disappointment at rejection by Woodbrooke staff. Perhaps he’s only satisfied while struggling. If people agreed with him perhaps it would be a disappointment. Printer by trade. No college education, but widely read, and a clear thinker within his strict limits. Never heard of Erskine Caldwell. Various jobs: librarian at Pendle Hill, warden of John Woolman’s house in Mt. Holly, etc., etc. Nice wife and son, Johnny. She from original Pennsylvania farming stock, Quaker, her family land given originally by William Penn. Supports husband’s views. (Does she really?)

Interesting contention that Quakerism is different in spirit as well as letter from both Catholicism and Protestantism, that Catholicism and Protestantism have inherent weaknesses that prohibit their attaining true Christianity. (Not just a case of Catholics and Protestants being weak; the very system a contradiction to worship in spirit and in truth; viz. programmed worship, putting all burdens on priest or minister, reliance on sacraments or Bible.) Lack of community in Catholicism and Protestantism. No corporate witness. Only corporate witness (i.e., peace) has been from Spiritual Reformation groups (Anabaptists, Mennonites, Quakers, Bruderhof, etc.). Christian practice must bring community, corporate witness; otherwise it is not full Christianity. Lewis’s devotion, enthusiasm, but complete inability to see any point of view outside of his own system; his emotional involvement; its rationalizations.

C. and I visited a Greek girl from Salonica who married an Englishman now living in West Wycombe. The Greeks are charming. So easy-going and friendly compared to the English. I felt at home instantly; but when her husband came there was strain. And he tried to make conversation, which is more than many of them will do. We rushed back to hear Rafael Kubelik conduct Janáček’s opera, Kát’a Kabanová. At first I liked the music (orchestra) but thought the vocal parts horrible and completely unrelated to anything, either the orchestral accompaniment or the plot. But later I began to see the really remarkable musical evocation of the meaning of the libretto, and the remarkable orchestral (and vocal) effects. A very moving work, if at first disconcerting. C. & I returned to the Centre, both sad at the coming parting. I went to her room and we had intercourse again, just naturally, because I hadn’t planned it and was indeed a little wary of such doings in the Quaker Centre! But it just came. Sex for her is like eating, sleeping, evacuating. It should be, and should be enjoyed. Saturday we rushed around again in the morning, shopping. I was very extravagant and bought her a Parker 51 pen for Easter. What a sly one she is! She told me all along that the train left at 12 noon. At 11:30 we began rushing for the station, and I went towards a cab. “Don’t,” she said, “the train doesn’t leave until 12:18.” “But,” I said, “you said 12.” “I know. I figured that way perhaps we’d get there on time for 12:18.” Lovely woman!

Heard from Reinoud, that marvelous man. What fortunate friends I have! Every word he writes breathes something. He’s singing, playing, drawing, loving—and studying also. He wonders if he’s lazy! God! And I got up at 10:30 this morning. I could kill myself whenever I do such stupid things. I’ll visit him next week.

Gay Van der Meer, a tall ungainly Dutch girl from Den Haag, who was at Woodbrooke, is at Friends Centre now and constantly asking Chrysanthi where I am, why I don’t come (I do, but only for C.), etc. Funny, she evidently likes me and wants to see me (no doubt about it, from what she says—her first greeting to C. was not “Hello. How are you?” but “Hello. Where’s Peter?”). So many of these people I thought didn’t like me, and yet C. tells me at Woodbrooke almost everyone did. It’s hard to know. I still can’t really accept myself. I can’t even think why or how C. should love me so desperately. When I have faith in myself perhaps I’ll really be able to work, instead of dilly-dallying around, as I am now doing. Enough!

❡ K. Mansfield, Marriage à la Mode. Thought of ideal meeting, contrast with the actual snatching away. Inner thoughts, objectified into previous conversation sometimes; mixed with the train, and observations of outside and of people in the compartment.

❡ “Curled up en escargot.” (from “Psychology”)

❡ “what fools they were—heavy, stodgy, elderly, with positively upholstered minds.” (Ditto)

April 20, 1955

This Greek friend of C.’s whom we visited at West Wycombe is also a refugee from the Greek system of arranged marriage. She didn’t want to marry Κύριος X, but became resigned to it, or at least gave that impression. She had μίαν φίλη in England and μíα ἄλλη φίλη in Greece advised her to visit England for a month, settle her mind, and then return prepared to marry. She left on this pretext but really planned never to come back, which plan, if she had told her family, would have prevented her from going at all. She came, met Mr. Z, Esq., and married! She reconciled with her family, too, and visits them each summer with her English husband. I suppose that Κύριος X found someone else. C. says that in Greece it’s easy. ‘ϒπάγω νὰ γράψω τώρα.

Make use somehow of all the description of Walter’s night at the ‘Y’. Must not be extraneous to the plot, especially in a short story. Possible end: he decides to follow her on the train to France. “Why, Walter?” “Well, I’m going to make myself into a Frenchman from a little village. Besides, trains seem to be the only place where we can be alone.”

April 21, 1955

The constant hovering of young unmarried men around Harold Carman’s young wife.

In the train to France, Walter and Nicolle alone in the compartment but then young newlyweds enter. The new husband and wife understand each other, the girls too, and the two couples kiss. The conductor passes their compartment but leaves it to last before disturbing them for their tickets.

Have Walter get bitter about everything, unreasonably so. Then put him in contact again with the mute, from whom he sees his own stupidity and stops self-pity. Then gaily to London, undaunted by Nicolle’s being snatched away again. And finally with her on the train to France. This will be good, if you can do it!

I resolved last night to cut the undertaker and the wake-scene from Kevin’s Emancipation. God, how it hurts to cut!

That strange Easter Sunday when everything went wrong.

Make something of the reference to Michelangelo.

April 27, 1955

Zoersel, Belgium

Beautiful Youth Hostel here, built in rustic style with rounded logs for all supporting members, the logs secured one to another by bolts, not flush but side-by-side. The outside posts are set in the ground like this:

The dining room chairs are also noteworthy, and very comfortable. The seat is simply four slats. Four legs are inserted at 1, 2, 3, 4. They are dowels put through holes in the slats and then wedged tight like an axe handle. They each go out at an angle from the perpendicular. Two more dowels go in at 5 and 6, for the back.

Of course the slats are beveled and polished and varnished. A design could be painted on the back, too.

Well, I don’t know wherefrom comes the energy for these observations, as I came in here really fatigué, with complaining calf-muscles and an aching right knee. Just couldn’t go any further, though it was only about 5 p.m. Came from Gent today, about 60+ miles, so it was enough. Tomorrow to Piet Tuinman at Eindhoven.

Last Saturday C. came back from York looking a little strange, and very contradictory about her week: she didn’t enjoy it, but enjoyed its usefulness, or something like that. She retired from any great social participation—dancing, talking, and the like—and thought the people there were rather frivolous. I rushed around at the last minute, as usual, but she came to “my palace,” where I packed up the rucksack; then we had intercourse and then rushed to the Festival Hall to hear Beecham do a Berlioz overture (oulalà), Dvořák cello concerto (ugh!), and the best playing of Brahms’s First I have ever heard. I shouted bravo until I was hoarse, and so did everyone else. Then he played an encore and made a little speech, something about we’d all have to travel like Mr. Pickwick in a wheelbarrow because of the coming railway strike. A lovely concert.

Rushed again Sunday morning. Had much too much baggage for my bike. Shipped knapsack to Greece and then on Monday shipped laundry-case full to Paris, from Ostende. C. And I enjoyed each other’s company, especially on the channel crossing; then I saw her off from Ostende on the Orient Express. It cost only £24 London to Salonica, with a sleeper. This biking business is so much foolishness.

Monday, Ostende to Ghent, and a look at some of the ancient building at the latter. Of course I’d been there before, and even remembered the Youth Hostel. Belgium is fantastically expensive. It costs 16 cents (USA) for a cup of coffee, but only $1.00 for breakfast, supper, and bed at the hostels. I am spending money recklessly, especially in London. When and how shall I earn some is the next question!

The houses in Belgium are beautiful; in England, absolutely horrible, except old Tudor or some Italian-imitation manor houses.

April 30, 1955

Contrast the plight of Piet Tuinman, whom I visited in Eindhoven, with the girl in the convertible at Utrecht. Piet was given a 1200 guilder scholarship but this was not enough to send him to university, he says, so all his bright ideas have been exchanged for a humdrum education course so he can teach 8-year-olds next year. The Utrecht girl: flitting around with too much money. Interesting, the contrasts: the Texan agriculturalist, the English uppity language student, the flitty Dutch girl, and me. We saw the famous old Dom and Tower, then rode and rode nowhere in the convertible, the Dutch girl trying to date up the Texan, dismayed by the fact that he was married.

Wednesday at Eindhoven, not a very special sort of city, size of Rochester, NY but much cleaner and pleasanter; very modern. One main industry: Phillips. Piet Tuinman’s father a post office official, his sister a telegraph operator. New flat, no bathroom, only toilet and douche; wash in the kitchen.

Thursday by train to Utrecht, then that evening to Assen, which is like home. Reinoud not changed; Hans grown tall. What a lovely family life, still—as it was three years ago. I envy Reinoud his childhood and youth. Now he conducts the students choir in the high school in Assen; and studies theology at Groningen, coming home each weekend. But with the theology is mixed playing in a student orchestra, singing in the chorus (St. Matthew Passion, Judas Maccabaeus) and doing chamber music.

I am beginning to regret seriously my decision not to attend the university next year. If I had had a home and tradition like the Oorts’ I would have studied medicine without thinking twice about it, and probably have been much better off, instead of flying around Europe because I happen now to have a little money that soon will be gone, and then what? Writing is good, but anti-social. I would like also to work among people. What stops me from making the decision, the commitment? And time goes. Next month I am twenty-five. My contemporaries will soon be graduated as Ph.D.’s, doctors, lawyers. And I? Is the writing another escape-latch, or can I really do it, and is it worthwhile at that? But one thing is sure: I must work; and I cannot work as I live now, going from place to place. Fool!

Withal, I’ve been having a happy time. Reinoud is splendid, as before. Today we biked 70 kilometers to Groningen and back, because he had to rehearse a Beethoven trio. Saw burial stones from tribes ca. 4000 B.C.; also a church, part of which dates from A.D. 600. The burial stones were arranged as at Stonehenge in England. Reinoud says there are several such remains in the vicinity.

Finished first draft of Walter-Nicolle story, so it won’t ramble on forever, only almost forever. I’ll try to do something short and compact now.

May 3, 1955

Assen

Drive to the very isolated cabin for skiing. Plan to meet Joan’s brother from Vermont. Describe road to him, the sign at junction. Arrive, but sign gone. What to do? No paints to make another. He’ll take care of himself until morning. We’ll sleep here. Sex. But car comes. Joan ashamed for her brother to see her as she is; runs wildly out into snow, naked. But it’s not her brother—a fugitive seeking warmth. Jimmy pleads to call Joan back. Fugitive thinks it’s a ruse. Argue. Time passes. Fugitive wants to rape her, takes a chance with Jimmy. Jimmy calls and calls. No answer. Fugitive tells him to build up fire, it’s freezing. Perhaps instead of all this fugitive nonsense, Jimmy is simply presented (when the brother does not come) with the opportunity of seducing her. What he does or does not do with the opportunity.

May 6, 1955

Groningen

Chez Pot. 26 Verlang de Grachtstraat, where Reinoud rents a lovely room @ 27.50 guilder a month. I look out the window. A lady brushes the sidewalk, sponges her windows which already are immaculate. Man comes and ladles out milk into a pot. Cart comes with vegetables, canned goods, but beautiful and clean, not like our peddlers. Lady goes from door to door asking something. Everyone says No. Perhaps she’s a washerwoman. Bread man comes; now a cart to sharpen knives. Beautiful little blond-haired boys now, coming home from school, jumping up to try to touch the fringe of the awning in front of the pastry-shop across the street.

May 7, 1955

Friesland

Jim can finally get up courage to ask her if she’ll sleep with him. She says Yes, and they prepare. But just at the wrong time, the brother comes.

May 10, 1955

Hotel Elim, Amsterdam

“The Jockey,” by Carson McCullers, w.c. 2000+. J. enters room, describe room. He sees table, expresses his contempt, etc., with clenched fingers. Describe J’s clothes. Men at table see him but he doesn’t nod. Describe men at table. Owner wants J. to table. Trainer says No, tells that J. is crazy. Owner naïve. Describe reason for J’s “craziness.” Then bit about food—Saratoga. “Wait,” he’s coming over. J. with chip on shoulder, orders drink. Looks at food, but then keeps eyes on flowers. Contrast fine dinner of 3 men with “Some people might call it that dinner of J.” Friend’s leg short. “Well those things happen”: from rich man. Three men finish dinner. Food left. J. sarcastic. Drinks. Gains weight. Alone at bar; other people in couples (entrée described earlier—two girls in blazers). Pays with $50 bill. Returns to table; seat rattles; spits out potatoes on the floor. Libertines. Out. Sylvester shrugs shoulder.

Try something with this as a model. Refugee woman in Friends Centre perhaps. The well-fed Friends there well-meaning, but have had their fill of refugees and consider this one just an annoying hanger-on, always dreaming of finding enough money somewhere to go to America. Three months in Paris, three in London because of visa difficulties. Trained psychologist, specialist in Rorschach test. Thinks she can start in a university job. I must disillusion her about that. So many young psychologists turned out. Contrast the meal and the discussion with the refugee’s plight. Perhaps discussion à la spiritual reformation. Refugee not sarcastic, but knows how to make you pity her. British people talking with American as she comes in. He wonders why they are so cold; shows he is a little angry. They explain about her. She sees he is new bait and gets him in a corner when he is alone. “How lucky you are to be an American.” “Can I have addresses?” etc. The 50+-year-old professional woman “begging” in this way from a pip-squeak student. She watches them eat always, but when they invite her she says No, she has her own resources. Wants pity, and yet won’t accept it: a kind of technique.

May 11, 1955

First half above went well this morning. Bring back Cedric and Wallis somehow. Woman must pounce on Elton during dessert until even he sees that the British attitude was perhaps justified. It will work out.

Reinoud and Brecht. Adolescent selfishness. Episode with organ. Young love, etc.

The boy and girl on the doorstep. I watched them from the Quaker Center in Amsterdam while I was typing a manuscript. First boy talked much. Then girl. Then boy silent, girl talked. Then both silent, looking at ground. Begin to notice goings on in the street, to make conversation. Newspaper is delivered, and that suffices for ten minutes or so; then awkward silence again. Boy gets on his bike to go. But doesn’t go. Just sits on bike there full half hour. Conversation waxes and wanes. Finally he goes.

Festival at Assen on May 5th. Tenth anniversary of German capitulation. Bicycle without tires, food transported in perambulators “von Amsterdam naar Assen.” Beautiful costumes, decorated bikes, floats, displays, etc. Bread from Sweden. Dank Engeland, Dank Amerika. Night before, 2 minutes’ silence all over land; bells toll. They really feel this day, and freedom is important.

May 14, 1955

Paris, 9 rue Victor Massé

Lovely walk through Sacré Coeur district last night with fellow from South Africa named Wiit, an architect studying painting. He slept a lot, early to bed and late to rise. Met Douglas Steere’s daughter at Quaker Meeting. Visited Grand-mère Giniger, qui habite un appartement très à la mode, Rue Paul Dupuy. Moved to SCI hostel, 77 Boul. Jean-Jaurès, Clichy. The International Secretary is a Dutch girl, half Indonesian, very pronounced Indonesian features, but white skin, light hair, and rosy cheeks. An odd mixture indeed. Casino de Paris very disappointing. Lousy dancing and music, and the nudity too immediately and completely nude to be very sexy. Visited Franciscan center. The monks very jolly and busy, winking to each other when a certain person entered. Père Gabriel will see if he can get me into a monastery near Paris for a week’s visit. Finished Refugee Woman story. Would like to try another now with similar technique. Tight. This one should be pared down from 3750 to about 2000 or 2500 words, but it is so hard to cut! C. writes soulful letters. Got a scholar’s card to use the Bibliothèque Nationale, after some red tape. Retrieved my laundry case after two hours through the bureaucracy à la Gare, and payment of presque 1000 fr. Extra. An expensive saving, n’est-ce pas? But the retrieving was humorous. So many papers, so many people involved with this one small item!

May 20, 1955

Paris

Sitting in Salle de Travail du Bibliothèque Nationale. St. Francis parallel to King Lear. Our emotional sympathy is entirely with him, yet one must admit that his ideas for conduct of an order, which had grown so large, were not practical. (?) Elias the big bad villain. Compare anguish of Francis’s exclamation on his deathbed with anything in Lear. “Où sont ceux qui m’ont volé mon ordre et qui ont arraché mes frères de mes mains? Si je puis aller au prochain chapitre, je leur montrerai bien quelle est ma volonté!”

May 24, 1955

Same. Francis could be treated like “Soah” in the play. Modern dress. He is absolutely impossible in the rationalistic sense (e.g., gives last psalter to buy bread for an old woman) but he enlists our sympathy nevertheless.

❡ “The most formidable liberal philosophers have called the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves the pleasures of silence and meditation.”—G. K. Chesterton, “Twelve Types.”

—Something poorly defined in thought: compare to an artist painting with silver paint on a white canvas. (Chesterton)

May 25, 1955

From Cuthbert’s St. Francis, this tale of the merchant Luchesio, whom tradition says was the first member of the 3rd Order. In his young days Luchesio was a successful merchant at Cagiano in the territory of Siena. He was known as a gay spirit with ambitions to rise in the world; and he was not above paying court to the nobles and men of influence, whom he would oblige with his money and delight with his ready wit. He married a woman of sensibility and beauty, who shared his ambitions and contributed not a little to his popularity. People named her Buona Donna, the gracious lady. . . . Luchesio was an ardent politician: he could hardly have attained to any social consideration if he had not been. Then, with a turn of the wheel, fortune went against the Guelphs and in favor of the Ghibellines, and Luchesio had to flee for safety into the friendly Florentine town of Poggibonzi. Adversity and exile chastened his spirit and his thoughts turned to religion. Thus he was prepared to listen when Francis came searching for souls. With the consent of his faithful Buona Donna, Luchesio now sold his property, all except four acres of land, and distributed the money to the poor. Then husband and wife received from Francis the colorless woolen habit of the penitents. From that time Luchesio worked his own small farm and lived on its produce. His house became a hostelry for the poor whom Francis-like he fed daily before he fed himself. Frequently he would take long journeys seeking out the sick, and finding them he would bring them to his house, sometimes putting them upon an ass, at other times bearing them on his shoulders: and Buona Donna received and nursed them. On occasions when the malaria was abroad, Luchesio would journey to stricken districts even as far as the seacoast, to distribute medicines and food. When his own means ran short he went round questing from his neighbors for the wherewithal to feed the hungry, etc. until both died about the same time: “In death they were not divided.”

May 28, 1955

Tirée d’ Albert Camus, La Peste:

❡ Ce qui est plus original dans notre ville est la difficulté qu’on peut y trouver à mourir. Difficulté, d’ailleurs, n’est pas le bon mot et il serait plus juste de parler d’inconfort. Ce n’est jamais agréable d’être malade, mais il y a des villes et des pays qui vous soutiennent dans la maladie, où l’on peut, en quelque sorte, se laisser aller. Un maladie a besoin de douceur, il aime à s’appuyer sur quelque chose, c’est bien naturel. Mais à Oran, les excès du climat, l’importance des affaires qu’on y traite, l’insignificance du décor, la rapidité du crepuscule et la qualité des plaisirs, tout demande la bonne santé. Un malade s’y trouve bien seul. Qu’on pense alors à celui qui va mourir, pris au piège derrière des centaines de murs crépitants de chaleur, pendant qu’à la meme minute, toute une population, au telephone ou dans les cafés, parle de traites, de connaissements et d’escompte. On comprendra ce qu’il peut y avoir d’inconfortable dans la mort, même moderne, lorsqu’elle survient ainsi dans un lieu sec.

❡ Le soir, dans tous les cas, le concierge délirait et, à quarante degrees, se plaignait des rats. Rieux tenta un abcès de fixation. Sous la brûlure de la térébenthine, le concierge hurla: «Ah! Les cochons!»

Les ganglions avaient encore grossi, durs et ligneux au toucher. La femme du concierge s’affolait:

—Veillez, lui dit le docteur, et appelez-moi s’il y a lieu.

Le lendemain, 30 avril, une brise déjà tiède soufflait dans un ciel bleu et humide. Elle apportait une odeur de fleurs qui venait des banlieues les plus lointaines. Les bruits du matin dans les rues semblaient plus vifs, plus joyeux qu’à l’ordinaire. Dans toute notre petite ville, débarrassée de la sourde apprehension où elle avait vécu pendant la semaine, ce jour-là était celui du renouveau. Rieux lui-même, reassuré par une letter de sa femme, descendit chez le concierge avec légerèté. Et en effet, au matin, la fièvre était tombée à trente-huit degrées. Affaiblé, le malade souriait dans son lit.

—Cela va mieux, n’est-ce pas, docteur? Dit sa femme.

—Attendons encore.

Mais à midi, la fièvre était montée d’un seul coup à quarante degrés, le malade délirait sans arrêt et les vomissements avaient repris. Les ganglions du cou était douloureux au touche et le concierge semblait vouloir tenir sa tête le plus possible éloignée du corps. Sa femme était assise au pied du lit, les mains sur la couverture, tenant doucement les pieds du malade. Elle regardait Rieux.

—Écoutez, dit celui-ci, il faut l’isoler et tenter un traitement d’exception. Je téléphone à l’hôpital et nous le transporterons en ambulance.

Deux heures après, dans l’ambulance, le docteur et la femme se penchaient sur le malade. De sa bouche tapissée de fongosités, des bribes de mots sortaient: «Les rats!» disait-il. Verdátre, les lèvres cireuses, les paupières plombées, le soufflé saccadé et court, écartlé par des ganglions, tassé au fond de sa couchette comme s’il eût voulu la refermer sur lui ou comme si quelque chose, venu du fond de la terre, l’appelait sans répit, le concierge étouffait sous une pesée invisible. La femme pleurait.

—N’y a’t’il donc plus d’espoir, docteur?

—Il est mort, dit Rieux.

❡ La mort du concierge, il est possible de le dire, marqua la fin de cette periode remplie de signes déconcertants et le début d’une autre, relativement plus difficile, où la surprise des premiers temps se transforma peu à peu en panique. Nos concitoyens, ils s’en rendaient compte désormais, n’avient jamais pensé que notre petite ville pût être un lieu particulièrement désigné pour que les rats y meurent au soleil et que les concierges y périssent de maladies bizarres. De ce point de vue, ils se trouvaient en somme dans l’erreur et leurs idées étaient à reviser. Si tout s’était arêté là, les habitudes sans doute l’eussent emporté. Mais d’autres parmi nos concitoyens, et qui n’étaient pas toujours concierges ni pauvres, durent suivre la route sur laquelle M. Michel s’était engagé le premier. C’est à partir de ce moment que la peur, et la réflexion avec elle, commencèrent.

Cependant, avant d’entrer dans le detail de ces nouveaux événements, le narrateur croit utile de donner sur la période qui vient d’être décrite l’opinion d’un autre témoin. Jean Tarrou, qu’on a déjà rencontré au début de ce récit, s’était fixé à Oran quelques semaines plus tôt . . . [Camus quotes here from Tarrou’s “diary” about the rats, etc., and ends the chapter thus:] A titre documentaire, on peut enfin reproduire le portrait du docteur Rieux par Tarrou. Autant que le narrateur puisse juger, il est assez fidèle:

«Paraît trente-cinq ans. Taille moyenne. Les épaules fortes. Visage presque rectangulaire. Les yeux sombres et droits, mais les mâchoires saillantes. Le nez fort est régulier. Cheveux noirs coupés très courts. La bouche est arquée avec des lèvres pleines et presque toujours serrées. Il a un peu l’air d’un paysan sicilien avec sa peau cuite, son poil noir et ses vêtements de teintes toujours foncées, mais qui lui vont bien.

«Il marche vite. Il descend les trottoirs sans changer son allure, mais deux fois sur trios remonte sur le trottoir opposé en faisant un léger saut. Il est distrait au volant de son auto et laisse souvent ses flèches de direction levées, même après qu’il ait effectué son tournant. Toujours nu-tête. L’air renseigné.»

❡ Le mot de «peste» venait d’être prononcé pour la première fois. À ce point du récit qui laisse Bernard Rieux derrière sa fenêtre, on permettra au narrateur de justifier l’incertitude et la surprise du docteur, puis que, avec des nuances, sa réaction fut celle de la plupart de nos concitoyens. Les fléaux, en effet, sont une chose commune, mais on croit difficilement aux fléaux lorsqu’ils vous tombent sur la tête. Il y a eu dans le monde autant de pestes que de guerres. Et pourtant pestes et guerres trouvent les gens toujours aussi dépourvus. Le docteur Rieux était dépourvu, comme l’étaient nos concitoyens, et c’est ainsi qu’il faut comprendre ses hésitations. C’est ainsi qu’il faut comprendre aussi qu’il fut partagé entre l’inquiétude et la confiance. Quand une guerre éclate, les gens disent: «Ça ne durera pas, c’est trop bête.» Et sans doute une guerre est certainement trop bête, mais cela ne l’empêche pas de durer. La bêtise insiste toujours, on s’en apercevrait si l’on ne pensait pas toujours à soi. Nos concitoyens à cet égard étaient comme tout le monde, ils pensaient à eux-mêmes, autrement dit ils étaient humanistes; ils ne croyaient pas aux fléaux. Le fléau n’est pas à la mesure de l’homme, on se dit donc que le fléau est irréel, c’est un mauvais rêve qui va passer. Mais il ne passe pas toujours et, de mauvais rêve en mauvais rêve, ce sont les hommes qui passent, et les humanistes, en premier lieu, parce qu’ils n’ont pas pris leurs précautions. Nos concitoyens n’étaient pas plus coupables que d’autres, ils oubliaient d’être modestes, voilà tout, et ils pensaient que tout était encore possible pour eux, ce qui supposait que les fléaux étaient impossibles. Ils continuaient de faire des affaires, ils préparaient des voyages et ils avaient des opinions. Comment auraient-ils pensé à la peste qui supprime l’avenir, les déplacements et les discussions? Ils se croyaient libres et personne ne sera jamais libre tant qu’il y aura des fléaux.

Et même après que le docteur Rieux eut reconnu devant son ami qu’une poignée de malades dispersés venaient, sans avertissement, de mourir de la peste, le danger demeurait irréal pour lui. . . . Il essayait de rassembler dans son esprit ce qu’il savait de cette maladie. Des chiffres flottaient dans sa mémoire et il se disait que la trentaine de grandes pestes que l’histoire a connues avait fait près de cent millions de morts. Mais qu’est-ce que cent millions de morts? Quand on a fait la guerre, c’est a peine si on sait déjà ce que c’est qu’un mort. Et puis qu’un homme mort n’a de poids que si on l’a vu mort, cent millions de cadavres semés à travers l’histoire ne sont qu’une fumée dans l’imagination. Le docteur se souvenait de la peste de Constantinople qui, selon Procope, avait fait dix mille victimes en un jour. Dix mille morts font cinq fois le public d’un grand cinéma. Voilà ce qu’il faudrait faire. On rassemble les gens à la sortie de cinq cinémas, on les conduit sur une place de la ville et on les fait mourir en tas pour y voir un peu clair. Au moins, on pourrait mettre alors des visages connus sur cet entassement anonyme. Mais, naturellement, c’est impossible à réaliser, et puis qui connaît dix milles visages? D’ailleurs, des gens comme Procope ne savaient pas compter, la chose est connue. À Canton, il y avait soixante-dix ans, quarante mille rats était morts de la peste avant que le fléau s’intéressât aux habitants. Mais, en 1871, on n’avait pas le moyen de compter les rats. On faisait son calcul approximativement, en gros, avec des chances évidentes d’erreur. Pourtant, si un rat a trente centimetres de long, quarante mille rats mis bout à bout feraient. . .

Mais le docteur s’impatientait. Il se laissait aller et il ne le fallait pas. Quelques cas ne font pas une épidédemie et il suffit de prendre des précautions. Il fallait s’en tenir à ce qu’on savait, la stupeur et la prostration, les yeux rouges, la bouche sale, les maux de tête, les bubons, la soif terrible, le délire, les taches sur le corps, l’écartèlement intérieur, et au bout de tout cela . . . Au bout de tout cela, une phrase revenait au docteur Rieux, une phrase qui terminait justement dans son manuel l’énumération des symtômes: «Le pouls devient filiforme et la mort survient à l’occasion d’un mouvement insignificant.» Oui, au bout de tout cela, on était pendu à un fil et les trois quarts des gens, c’était le chiffre exact, étaient assez impatients pour faire ce mouvement imperceptible qui les précipitait . . . [See also the rest of this chapter, pp. 51 ff. for an example of perfect writing. I’m too lazy to copy any more.]

June 4, 1955

Σαρανταπόρου 11, Θεσσαλονίκη, ‘Еλλάς, στο σπίτι Γιαννακοῦ

❡ Ce qui fait la beauté de l’histoire, c’est la lutte, et ici la lutte n’est pas entre l’homme et les éléments comme dans les temps préhistorique, entre l’homme et les animaux comme à l’aube de la civilisation, entre les nations comme plus près de nous, c’est la lutte de l’homme contre lui-même. Ce n’est pas l’homme luttant pour la vie, pour le pain, pour l’honneur, c’est l’homme luttant pour la conscience. L’unité de la famille humaine est réalisée, consacrée, vécue. Ce n’est plus la vérité tombant, mystérieuse, du ciel, c’est la vérité conquise pas à pas. —Sabatier, Études inédites sur Saint François d’Assise, p. 321.

June 5, 1955

American Farm School

—Writing the letter for the woman atop Salonika hill, ἀκρόπολις. “Tell them my husband has only one foot.” Τοὺς λέγετε πώς ὁ σύζυγός μоυ ἔχει μόνον ἕνα πόδι.

Dr. William Porter is gently awakened by his wife, who has been preparing breakfast and darning their son’s socks. It is very early because on operation days he likes to make the first incision at 7:30 sharp and he thinks now what a good wife he has to bother getting up when other women would let their husbands fix their own breakfasts at such an hour. He dresses, admiring himself in the mirror, though angry at the pouch which certainly is developing. He always makes a good impression, especially on the young beautiful nurses at the hospital. The blond, for instance, who now is absolutely goo-goo about him, though he doesn’t even know her name. He’ll string her along for the fun of it. He fixes a carnation in his lapel, admiring his steady hand. Breakfast is ready. He kisses his wife. The paper and much mail is next to his plate. There are many letters of grateful appreciation from his patients. He cannot suppress his vanity. He thinks how pleasant it is to have the world at his feet. It is time for his young son to get up, and the doctor wakes him and plays with him a bit. Family solidarity. He gets ready. His wife asks what is booked and he tells her briefly. She reminds him that they have theater tickets for the evening. On the way to the hospital in his Cadillac he thinks of the work before him, and of the problems of the patients involved. His entry, as always, is triumphal; and there is a good crowd of young doctors already gowned to watch him. (Describe gowning procedure, etc.) The blond—named Leila—is the scrub nurse. She is so affected when he enters that she drops something. He flirts with her all through the procedure. Others marvel at his calmness, coolness—to be able to flirt and joke while operating. In between operations his wife calls to ask a silly question about supper. He congratulates himself on not getting angry that such an important man as himself should be disturbed over such a trifle. He likes his wife’s dependence, her total admiration almost to the point of incapacity. He returns the admiration, but flirts more with Leila, although she means nothing to him. Lunch in cafeteria. Overhears people talking about his skill. Furtive winks to Leila. Tells other doctors, jokingly, how irresistible she is. Then to office. His schedule is filled and he is rather annoyed when Leila calls (only he doesn’t know who she is by name). She hems and haws, and he says, “Either say what you want or hang up, because I’m busy.” She hangs up. At the end of the day he returns home. Plays with his son; greets his wife lovingly. They start dinner, but in the middle Leila calls again, and he is rather annoyed. She propositions him. “Are you a man!” He is angry. He says he has no time to be bothered by practical jokers. His wife asks who it was, and he answers, nobody—some idiot. They finish dinner and go off to the theater. Next morning at the hospital Dr. Porter notices that the blond is not there. He asks where she is, still not connecting her up with the person who telephoned. Another nurse says that Leila for some unknown reason resigned the night before and left. Dr. Porter laughs. He says it must have had something to do with a boy-friend back home. Then, to the new nurse, in the same flirting tone he had used with Leila, “Well, it doesn’t matter, sweetie. You’re cute, too. Come on, let’s begin.”

—Neola and her troubles with pains and her flighty irresponsible children.

June 7, 1955

The earthquake in the village. Houses destroyed. Live in open air indefinitely, under tree-shelters, until have enough money to build again; but the same year frost ruined the fruit: no income.

❡ It is said that in place of the girdle which he had flung off (perhaps with the more symbolic scorn because it probably carried the purse or wallet by the fashion of the period) he picked up a rope more or less at random, because it was lying near, and tied it around his waist. He undoubtedly meant it as a shabby expedient; rather as the very destitute tramp will sometimes tie his clothes together with a piece of string. He meant to strike the note of collecting his clothes anyhow, like rags from a succession of dust-bins. Ten years later that makeshift costume was the uniform of five thousand men; and a hundred years later, in that, for a pontifical panoply, they laid great Dane in the grave. —Chesterton.

❡ Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, that the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank. —Chesterton.

June 8, 1955

Could end story differently. Leila propositions him, and this causes trouble with his wife, who begins to doubt his faithfulness, though he is perfectly innocent. Thus from a lovely beginning, the day ends with both his wife and Leila angry and in despair. Work out.

June 9, 1955

Or: Leila calls during office hours, says she must see him. But when. He is busy until supper, then has theater tickets. He says he’ll have supper with her. Calls wife. Goes. Returns home. His wife ready for theater. He, despondent, says he doesn’t want to go. Explanations. Confesses to wife how Leila begged him to become her lover. He refused. Holds his wife close. Wants to see Tommy. Ask about pheasants for tomorrow.

June 10, 1955

C’s mother very sad. Up at 5 a.m. last Monday, crying, begging C. not to marry me. But to me always friendly, laughing. Manners. Hypocrisy.

—Man with stick to pull in Gondolas in Venice. Tip. Yugoslavia.

—Mussolini-looking man with warts on forehead and flashy American tie. Woman on RR crews. Students on train 5 a.m. to get to university. Mutilés de la guerre. People in train with coats hanging over their faces like chimney flues in the corner. Tremendous ear lobes, eudermic like an oyster hanging from his head. Everyone wanting to help chez Pomovavlje. Stay here. No, I’ll take you to the Astoria Hotel. We’ll call. Police OK’d it. Passport demanded. Students on excursion. Blaring radio in restaurant, also RR office. Dining room bare except picture of Tito. Everyone works (?). Saw beggars, sleeping in park, station. Display photos of shiny new factories. Oriental music followed by “Lily.” Hotel clerk asked if I were laborite. In London the workers look like bankers; in Belgrade the bankers look like workers. Peasant costumes. Shoes. Everyone named Mischa. Wonderful Russian part-singing. Toolshop on “5th Avenue.” Women hoeing in fields; men sitting, watching the cows. Cows on leash out for a walk. Shepherds. Ox carts. Hotel smelled of urine. Peasant father and son on train. Gigantic mustache, horrible teeth; coarse brown costume. Son’s eyes, one completely demolished.

Italian and Greek people don’t wear sunglasses to look sexy, but because the sun is wicked!

Greek girl drugged for engagement. Afterwards, when boy finds her distrait, they say it’s because she’s so happy. Engagement broken previously. This means no one wants her. She’s loony. Younger sister married first, also very bad.

Another forcibly married to a man with one eye and one leg.

Another saw father shot in front of her face in the civil war.

Γεώργιος didn’t want C. to marry me (i.e., ἕνας ξένος) at first, but now is all for it, νομίζω.

June 12, 1955

How can I ever possibly write as beautifully as Katherine Mansfield! Just discovered The Fly and The Canary. Some similes from the former: “. . . and he peered out of the great, green-leather armchair by his friend the boss’s desk as a baby peers out of its pram”; “the gray-haired office messenger dodged in and out of his cubby hole like a dog that expects to be taken for a run”; “then the front legs waved, took hold, and, pulling its small, sodden body up, [the fly] began the immense task of cleaning the ink from its wings. Over and under, over and under, went a leg along a wing as the stone goes over and under the scythe”; [from The Stranger] “there was the great blind bed, with his coat flung across it like some headless man saying his prayers”; [from The Doll’s House] “She was a tiny wishbone of a child, with cropped hair and enormous solemn eyes—a little white owl.”

June 13, 1955

Writing newspaper stories in simple English; mimeographed stories for English students; fictionalized reports of life of Lindsay’s girls.

Alone in Paris. The park. Children. Man reading while walking. Bums. Blondes. The statues. American asking where is Napoleon. Dark hotel room. Everyone trying to sit in sun. Pigeon drippings. Policeman.

The people parading along Niki Street on Sundays. Why? No reason. Tight-mouthed, resolute, for long hours up and down. Then next Sunday to another favorite spot. Never speaking. But enjoying the purposeless, the idleness. Mainly, wanting to be seen.

Basil: his poor village. Wants to go to American to become a veterinarian. The beautiful girl he knew in Salonika. Now she’s gone away and writes that a rich boy wants to marry her. But she’ll always love Basil even though she marries the other.

The three girls from C’s school whom we met parading on Niki. Their life in a tobacco factory and basement hovel.

❡ an apricot evening sky (K. Mansfield)

❡ How beautiful she is! How simply beautiful she is! Sang Henry’s heart and swelled with the words, bigger and bigger and trembling like a marvelous bubble—so that he was afraid to breathe for fear of breaking it.

June 14, 1955

❡ The old people sat on the bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always the crowd to watch. To and fro, in front of the flowerbeds and the band rotunda, the couples and groups paraded, stopped to talk, to greet, to buy a handful of flowers from the old beggar who had his tray fixed to the railings. Little children ran among them, swooping and laughing, little boys with big white silk bows under their chins; little girls, little French dolls, dressed up in velvet and lace. And sometimes a tiny staggerer came suddenly rocking into the open from under the trees, stopped, stared, as suddenly sat down ‘flop,’ until its small high-stepping mother, like a young hen, rushed scolding to its rescue. Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, and—Miss Brill had often noticed—there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were old, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even—even—cupboards!

Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.

Tum-tum-tum tiddle-um! Tiddle-um! Tum tiddley-um tum ta! blew the band. —K. Mansfield (Miss Brill)

❡ My little sisters the birds, you owe much to God, your Creator, and you ought to sing His praise at all times and in all places, because He has given you liberty to fly about into all places; and though you neither spin nor sew, He has given you a twofold and a threefold clothing for yourselves and for your offspring. Two of your species He sent into the Ark with Noah that you might not be lost to the world; besides which He feeds you, though you neither sow nor reap. He has given you fountains and rivers to quench your thirst, mountains and valleys in which to take refuge, and trees in which to build your nests; so that your Creator loves you much, having thus favored you with such bounties. Beware, my little sisters, of the sin of ingratitude, and study always to give praise to God. —St. Francis of Assisi

June 18, 1955

C’s mother said “Yes”!

The dress-maker.

❡ The Picton boat was due to leave at half-past eleven. It was a beautiful night, mild, starry, only when they got out of the cab and started to walk down the Old Wharf that jutted out into the harbour, a faint wind blowing off the water ruffled under Fenella’s hat, and she put up her hand to keep it on. It was dark on the Old Wharf, very dark; the wool sheds, the cattle trucks, the cranes standing up so high, the little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as if for itself.

Fenella’s father pushed on with quick, nervous strides. Beside him her grandma bustled along in her crackling black ulster; they went so fast that she had now and again to give an undignified little skip to keep up with them. As well as her luggage strapped into a neat sausage, Fenella carried clasped to her her grandma’s umbrella, and the handle, which was a swan’s head, kept giving her shoulder a sharp little peck as if it too wanted her to hurry. . . . Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by; a few women all muffled scurried along; and one tiny boy, only his little black arms and legs showing out of a white woolly shawl, was jerked along angrily between his father and mother; he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream.

Then suddenly, so suddenly that Fenella and her grandma both leapt, there sounded from behind the largest wool shed, that had a trail of smoke hanging over it, Mia-oo-oo-O-O!

‘First whistle,’ said her father briefly, and at that moment they came in sight of the Picton boat. —Mansfield, “The Voyage”

❡ There sounded from above a long, soft whispering, as though someone was gently, gently rustling among tissue paper to find something. It was grandma saying her prayers. . . .

❡ But if it had been cold in the cabin, on deck it was like ice. The sun was not up yet, but the stars were dim, and the cold pale sky was the same colour as the cold pale sea.

❡ Fenella put her hand on the gate, and the big, trembling dew-drops soaked through her glove-tips.

❡ People went flitting by, very fast; the men walked like scissors; the women trod like cats. —Life of Ma Parker

The village agriculturist. Cannot talk with teacher, because if seen with her twice custom says they must marry.

June 25, 1955 Σαρανταπόρου 11

From “The Garden Party”:

❡ And the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed.

From “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”:

❡ . . . her laugh was like a spoon tinkling against a medicine-glass . . .

❡ Then a cab klop-klopped over the cobbles below, and the quiet seemed to shake into little pieces.

❡ Only the room seemed quieter than ever, and bigger flakes of cold air fell on Josephine’s shoulders and knees. She began to shiver.

—Lindsays told C. not to marry. That τα κορίτσια would think . . . what would they think!! That C. went to England to be married. Also told C. that no one in America has friends. What will she do there? etc., etc. I don’t know what they said about me.

—The episodes in getting Church permission. 1. to local priest: says all must be done through the Metropolitan. 2. To Metropole: need guarantee that children will be raised Orthodox, and certificates of celibacy. 3. To notary public for the former. Man there asks n.p. to certify he has no children (he has children) so he’ll have some claim on house of his father-in-law. (Having children apparently is evidence of the ability of self-support; thus no chance to claim house from need, legally.) 4. To consulate for latter. 5. To Metropole: they want C., too. 6. With C.; will accept consulate paper. 7. To local priest for C’s certificate of celibacy. He says mine must be stamped first to Metropole. 8. To Metropole for stamp. 9. To local priest: he says C. and I and two witnesses and father must all come together. 10. Witnesses assembled, but C. can’t come; witnesses go home.

À la “Life of Ma Parker”: something on village misery here.

June 28, 1955

O God! What a time last night! The culmination of all the difficulties with Mr. Lindsay. Saturday C. didn’t come home; Sunday she said how he had yelled at her again, said unkind things about me, that she was deserting the school, what would people think, that I was rushing her unwisely: I should return to America and return after a year if I really loved her, etc., etc. Of course this had been going on for weeks, with C. coming home absolutely broken and furious at them. But still, in her way, she would never show it to them. Saturday night also, at the Examiner’s party, Dimitrios came home fuming because he had asked for C. to return with the family, and Mrs. Lindsay had replied in a rude tone, ἄν θέλει, meaning obviously that she had better well not. Then came the question of the doctor’s appointment on Monday. C. and I had arranged for it ten days ago and I told C. over and over again to quickly tell Lindsay so she would be sure to have permission. Day after day I asked if she had told him, and she said No, but said it didn’t matter because the staff had arranged for their holidays to begin on Monday anyway. Then Mrs. Lindsay heard about this holiday arrangement and fumed and said they had no right even to talk about it until the directors decided when the work could be finished. So we found ourselves still with the doctor’s appointment, but with Chrysanthi also expected at school that day. But still on Saturday and Sunday she didn’t tell him because, she said, she was so afraid of him lest he repeat the outbursts against me and the marriage that she had suffered previously. I of course insisted that she go to the doctor’s, and she saw the correctness of my desire, since we had the appointment for ten days and needed the exam results before getting married. First C. didn’t even want to call the school, but later we thought it best, and Sunday evening contacted Loudha, a staff girl, who said she’d relay the message to Lindsays, but that C. should call back at eleven to speak to them personally. We went to Vouli’s house, and C. poured out all her resentment against what Lindsays had done to her since my arrival. Then we went with them to a village and when we returned the stores were shut and it was too late to find a phone.

Monday, at the doctor’s, C. was very worried about Lindsays. We called and called, but the telephone was broken. When we finally returned to the house we found a note from Lindsay himself: “Dear Chrysanthi, Muriel and I were surprised at the telephone message which Loudha gave us last evening. We thought that you would telephone again to know if you had permission to stay away from our Staff meeting this morning. The rest of the Staff met. How can you expect or hope for happiness if you fail in the duty and loyalty toward the school and the rest of the Staff. If you look for happiness at the expense of duty, it doesn’t happen; this is selfishness. Would it not be a good idea if you and Peter came to tell to us your plans? We do prefer to hear from you rather than from others. Our love, Charles.”

This, on top of sleepless nights, and all the afternoon on the toilet giving the doctor stool specimens, was hard to take. We decided the last sentence was an opening, and we should go. I wanted first of all to tell Lindsay how much he hurt C. and that the reason she never told him about the doctor was because she was so afraid of him. But when I told her this she begged and begged me not to do it. “He’ll suffer,” she said. “He’ll be sick tomorrow, and I can’t see that. . . . No, put all the blame on me. Please, Peter, please. We’ll just tell our plans, like he says—nothing else.” She told me that all the staff were afraid of him, that he knew it himself even. But we mustn’t say it to him, mustn’t, mustn’t, because he had so many troubles, was so sick, etc., etc. And how would she face him the next day!

Well, we ate, and started to go, with Lola also. Just then some of C.’s friends came to congratulate her on the engagement, and we had an agonizing hour talking about dresses and how well I spoke Greek, waiting for them to go. Finally they did. We took a taxi to the school, found the staff in the common room. Then Muriel came and I said we wanted to see Charles and herself. “Oh, Charles is very sick, in bed; but I’ll see.” (She returned saying that he said since it was the first time Peter had ever asked to see him, he’d get out of bed. We went. But he said he wanted to see me alone, so C. and Lola went out. Then the business started. First about the medical appointment. I said we had arranged for it ten days ago. “Ah,” Charles said to his wife, “remember that!” The tone of a barrister. “Why, I asked?” “Because C. told us she had only definitely made up her mind two days ago.” “Ah, that’s what she told you.” “We’re accustomed to hearing the truth.” “I’m sorry to disillusion you there, because this wasn’t the truth.” Then I explained why she had been so tardy with this news and had not said anything at all about the doctor’s appointment, because he had hurt her. “No, how, when, impossible!” I spoke about his temper, his screaming. They denied it. Muriel was always being difficult, saying in a self-pitying tone, “But how can you expect to be married so soon,” etc., etc. very argumentatively; and luckily Charles always told her to “shut up,” and “if you can’t shut up, get the hell out.” I enjoyed that.

It was evident that Chrysanthi would have to be called in. Muriel got her. We confronted her with my story and Charles’s, and he asked if he had ever yelled. And, damn it, she said “No.” He asked if she or Muriel ever hurt her. She said “No.” I was a little disconcerted. It put me in a very bad light. I explained how because she was so afraid she begged me not to say such things to him. He said that it was evident that someone was lying. We pressed C. more on the point of being hurt, and she finally admitted half under her breath that, yes, when he had said things against me, naturally she was hurt because we were one, and she loved me. “Ah,” said Charles, “but you told me you didn’t love him.” Another blow. God! What to believe! “You told me you didn’t love him and you had decided to marry to avoid that other arranged marriage.” This was heavy for me. It came out that she of course had lied to him, because certainly she told her family she loved me—and was trying childishly to stall Lindsay off, again because of her feeling of guilt and desire not to have scenes. C. involved herself in a whole cobweb of lies with him, and then found herself caught, as though she were the unlucky fly and not the spider who had made the web in the first place. Lindsay, believing that she didn’t love me, and that I was rushing her into the marriage, tried to do everything he could to prevent it—the whole trouble thus arising from his misinformation. “Had I known it was love,” he said, “I would have been exceedingly happy for Chrysanthi”—sorry, of course, to have her leave the school—”but I would have given my blessing. What else could I do? Love sweeps over all other considerations.”

We saw the picture of C. trying to sustain one story with her parents, another with Lindsays—and really caught between the two as it became more and more difficult to keep each story consistent with itself.

We touched other questions also, impressed on C. the necessity for telling the truth always, and this brought us to my signing the paper that our children would become Greek Orthodox. I had very little defense against the wrongness of this signing. I also quoted, as poof of Lindsay’s temper, the witness of Βούλη, Elanoula, the financée of Socrates, etc., but Lindsay denied it all, saying it was part of the Greeks’ temperament to project on someone else all their own sins. The damn thing was that I found myself believing him. C. also described how mean the staff had been to her when she returned. When C. went out later, Lindsay said that this could not be true, because he saw how the staff greeted C., and it was with joy. Later I thought of course that the way the staff would act in Lindsay’s presence and when alone might be two entirely different things, again proving their fear of him. And I remembered later also that C. had written how mean the staff had been to her. Why would she make it up? Of course she was telling the truth; but I, damn it, despite myself, believed Lindsay, at least for the moment.

Well, finally we left. We were all very quiet on the way to the Depot. It was very late. They said there would be a staff meeting tomorrow (Tuesday). I asked if C. could come on the 9 o’clock bus instead of the 7:30 one. Immediately Muriel said “No, no,” annoyed. But Charles said, “Yes, we can arrange to meet later.” Muriel had then the real opportunity to show she had a little human sympathy in her, and she muffed it. I could kill myself for not thinking of it at the time to tell her. (P.S. C., true to form, went at 7:30 despite my protests, after 4 hours’ sleep.) Later, Lola asked what had taken place, and I, rather meanly in C.’s presence, explained that it was all C.’s fault because she had never told Lindsay the truth and, considering the information they had to work with, his actions didn’t seem so demonic. C. got angry and said, “But didn’t you see the way Muriel was tonight even? How she immediately loses control of herself, and how the staff wished us good luck against the fearful tyrant?” “Yes, yes, of course I noticed it. But damn it, Chrysanthi, when I told him you had come home so hurt, and he asked you if it was true that he had hurt you or frightened you, you said No, it wasn’t true. What the hell was I to do then? You’ve got to say the truth, not one thing to one person and another to another person.” C. was very broken, and when we got home the father also asked what had happened. Lola said that I said Lindsay was right, because C. had lied to him, and then he burst out with “We’re the family here, not Lindsay! What does it matter what he is told?” C., having to listen to it all, of course, and no one caring very much to comfort her, was after all bearing more than anyone else. I went over finally and she cried openly. But the father didn’t show much sympathy. “Crybaby, crybaby, baw, baw, baw!” And they all stupidly stayed in the room, talking, talking. Finally they left. C. wouldn’t let me hold her, told me to go away, too; but I wouldn’t. Lola came back again and chatted. Oh agony. Δύσκολο! Finally she went to bed. C. still crying, not talking. I said I loved her. She sobbed no, she didn’t want love any more. “Go away, please.” I stayed. She calmed after a while, and showed she wanted me to kiss her. Finally I felt I could go. “Before I leave you,” I said, “I want you to tell me the truth: do you love me or don’t you?” It was a big mistake. She broke down worse than before. “Do I have to tell you?” she gasped. “If you don’t know now, if I haven’t shown you yet, how can I ever make you believe it by telling you?” I apologized, said of course I knew she loved me. She’d shown me more love I think than any man ever received before. “No,” she said, “You believe Mr. Lindsay. He’s a Quaker, so you believe him.” “I don’t believe him,” I said. I said it over and over and she believed me. We kissed. I undressed and we had intercourse. “If we have a baby from this,” she said at the end, “ it will be sweet, because we loved.” I left her, exhausted. Her last thought was: “Oh, how can I go there tomorrow! I hate the Lindsays. I don’t love them at all.” In the morning she left at seven, and lovingly kissed me goodbye.

June 28, 1955

The practice of binding babies.

The family that used the same large pot to cook in, to wash the baby, bring in drinking water, clean their feet, and wash all the clothes.

We went to the laboratory to give specimens for stool examinations. Another Greek girl was there—Anna—who had met C. on the train from Italy. Chrysanthi had mentioned her to me once before because of the extraordinary fact that this Anna was preparing to go to America to marry a boy she had fallen in love with via correspondence and pictures! Engaged eightee months, and finally ready to sail in September. Yes, she had met him for three days, because he flew over eighteen months ago for the engagement. Why hadn’t she gone over sooner? She had wanted to, but there were always hitches. She had even taken the medical exam for the visa 8 months before, and everything had been all right. This second exam was required since the results of the previous one held only for 3 months. Soon she must send papers to America to get the final visa, after which her husband-to-be would be granted two weeks’ leave from the Army to fly over in September and fetch her. Oh happy long-awaited day! They’d live near Durham, North Carolina. Wasn’t it wonderful! Going to America at last! I complimented her on her good accent and fluent English conversation. We went out together to purchase the laxative necessary. Of course she knew all about it, because she’d been through all this before. How long before it worked? Depends. “Me, about half hour only.” We hurried back to the laboratory in order to be conveniently near the can. Three specimens required, or rather the second and third of three shits. What the hell were they looking for anyway? Worms, she said. Very common in Greece, and you must be worm-free in order to enter the States. Newest immigration restriction: no worms allowed. Well, she’d been through it all before; it was only a formality. She went out for her “turn.” It really worked quick, the laxative. C. and I sat squirming, waiting for the pot to be free. But Anna was way ahead of us. She had donated her three specimens before we even had the pains announcing our second. How pale she looked! But then, after we didn’t see her for some time (thinking she had left), she came to the waiting room no longer pale, but sobbing red, choked with tears. What was the matter anyway? She had worms, she announced. Oh, how could she, and what would she do now? “Wait till they’re cleared up,” I said, and tell your fiancé to come a month later. “No, the Army will only free him in September and then only on the assurance that I am acceptable to the States. But now by the time I lose the worms, have another exam, and get my visa, it will be too late for him to get his leave granted. Oh misery, misery. C. and I donated our second and third specimens, and the pathologist congratulated us on being worm-free. Poor Anna. She was broken. She went home, still red, to begin her diet, and to write the sad news to that strange boy in America who had waited 18 months for a girl he had seen only 3 days in his life. And a girl with worms, to boot.

The clothes pin on baby’s nose.

July 1, 1955

Girl across the street. Could you ever think of having X as a husband!” Well, she got him. C. told how when all the girls of the neighborhood were young, they played together (ὅταν ὅλα τὰ κορίτσια τῆς γειτονιᾶς μικρὰ ἦταν, ἔπαιζαν ὅλα μαζί). The girl across the street, whom we saw sitting on her balcony with her father and her fiancé, was one of the group. The fiancé they all knew also when they were young. He was one of those boys who always wanted to do something for the girls, to carry a book or a sweater, to help them through a puddle, etc. He particularly liked Chrysanthi, though neither she nor any of the other girls could stand him at all. The girl across the street (whom let’s call Anna) thought particularly bad of this eager young man. Seeing his attraction to Chrysanthi, she asked C. playfully one day, “Could you ever imagine having him as a husband? How horrible!” and C. of course agreed. Well, in time the children grew up. Last week Anna invited C. over to the house. “Do you remember—?” she asked. “Of course.” . . . Then Anna asked again the same question: “Now, after these years, could you picture yourself with him as your husband?” C. laughed. “Of course not. How horrible!” But Anna stayed her: “Say no more, dear,” she said, showing her ring, “for I’ve got him.”

The baby at C.’s school seemed to have a very flat nose, and C. wondered what she could do to change it. “When he grows up, he won’t be pretty,” she thought, “and none of the girls will like him.” She thought and thought and thought, and suddenly one day it occurred to her that a clothespin fastened on the nose for short periods might help. But she was ashamed to have the girls see such crude therapy, and fastened the pin only after she thought they were all asleep. She didn’t know, however, that some of the girls saw her, for they were very quiet and secretive about it for a long time. . . . Some months later, when C. had entirely forgotten the clothespin treatment, the girls asked her one day: “Miss Chrysanthi, what can we do if we have a baby with a nose too flat?” It was a difficult question. C. thought and thought. “Perhaps massaging will help.” . . . “But, Miss, is there no other way?” C. couldn’t think of any. Finally one of the brave girls stood up and shyly said,, “Could we perhaps place a clothespin on the nose, Miss?” They all burst out laughing, and only then did C. remember what she had done.

From K. Mansfield’s “Prelude”:

❡ Kezia liked to stand so before the window. She liked the feeling of the cold shining glass against her hot palms and she liked to watch the funny white tops that came on her fingers when she pressed them hard against the pane.

❡ . . . they were clanking through a drive that cut through the garden like a whip-lash, looping suddenly an island of green, and behind the island, but out of sight until you came upon it, was the house.

❡ Dawn came sharp and chill with red clouds on a faint green sky and drops of water on every leaf and blade. A breeze flew over the garden, dropping dew and dropping petals. Shivered over the drenched paddocks, and was lost in the somber bush. In the sky some tiny stars floated for a moment and then they were gone—they were dissolved like bubbles. And plain to be heard in the early quiet was the sound of the creek in the paddock running over the brown stones, running in and out of the sandy hollows, hiding under clumps of dark berry bushes, spilling into a swamp of yellow water flowers and cresses.

And then at the first beam of sun the birds began. Big cheeky birds, starling and mynahs, whistled on the lawns, the little birds, the goldfinches and linnets and fan-tails, flecked from bough to bough. A lovely kingfisher perched on the padded fence preening his rich beauty, and a tui sang his three notes and laughed and sang them again.

‘How loud the birds are,’ said Linda in her dream. She was walking with her father through a green paddock sprinkled with daisies. . . .

❡ Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time, but in the morning it was intolerable. She turned over to the wall and, idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large substantial things like furniture but curtains and the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers with priests attending. . . . For there were some tassels that did not dance at all but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting. How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top-hats on; and the wash stand jug had a way of sitting in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest.

—We finally got the marriage permission from the Μητροπολίτη. Cost: 150 dr. The kind priest gave us a receipt, explaining that this would indicate why it was so expensive. Only 140 dr. to the Church and 10 dr. for charity!!! The poor poor Church.

July 2, 1955

Re: Francis. After developing the categories, set out chapter divisions and apportion each incident, saying, etc. to its proper chronological place. Merge separate sayings, like incidents, etc. into one that will put the point across.

Hood over stove like a reverse funnel:

July 4, 1955

Forgot all about Independence Day, wondered why Consulate was closed.

Sabatier recalls Jesus’ antipathy to doctors of law in speaking of Francis’s toward Bologna students. The “intolerance” of F. perhaps mirrors a like “imperfection” in Christ himself, and in doing so makes both men more real and more strong at the same time. It is completely irrational that most critics, while insisting on Christ’s mildness (refusing to recognize, for instance, any ‘noble anger’ or intolerance in him), complain when pacifists insist on imitating this mildness and inevitably cite the driving of the money-changers from the temple. Out of the context of their emotional reaction to pacifism, however, these same critics probably cannot really believe that mild meek Jesus did drive out the lousy money-changers.

July 7, 1955

De Milan, je suis venu dans une ville de nom de Pérouse, où le pape Innocent [III] venait de mourir, mais il n’etait pas encore enseveli. Pendant la nuit des voleurs l’ont dépouillé ses vêtements précieux et on laissé son corps presque nu et sentant mauvais au milieu de l’église. Et moi j’y suis allé et j’ai vu des mes yeux combien courte, vaine et trompeuse est la gloire de ce monde. —Jacques de Vitry.

The little old Jewish man in the blue shirt, ex-banker, who lost everything when the Germans came, and is now going to America, where an agency has found him a job as a doorman.

Paula’s story. How when she returned she found bits of her mother’s furniture in other people’s houses, these people insisting that they bought the furniture, whereas actually they helped themselves to it when the Germans sent the family away to the concentration camp.

I could write a whole novel just on the conflicts for C.’s mother re: losing her daughter to such a far-away land; and contrariwise, wishing her to be happy.

Read in Harvard Alumni Journal that Dave Aldrich is an assistant editor of Look. Maybe I can sell him a story on Greek village life.

I’m beginning to think that my Francis book must assume more the proportions of an epic than the limits and technique of a novel. Read Odyssey, War and Peace. Ha!

July 12, 1955

Slept through my first earthquake, dreaming that the bed shook terribly, and waking in the morning to be told by the others that the bed really did shake, as well as the whole house.

E. M. Forster, description of Vallone Fontana Caroso, in “The Story of a Panic”:

❡ The valley ended in a vast hollow, shaped like a cup, into which radiated ravines from the precipitous hills around. Both the valley and the ravines and the ribs of hill that divided the ravines were covered with leafy chestnut, so that the general appearance was that of a many-fingered hand, palm upwards, which was clutching convulsively to keep us in its grasp. Far down the valley we could see Ravello and the sea, but that was the only sign of another world.

July 14, 1955

C. in bed with temperature. I’m only surprised she’s borne up as long as she has. Now let’s hope she’ll be well for the wedding Sunday.

The other night we walked by the sea and saw the most amazing phosphorescent displays. Anything and everything that broke the surface or even came near to the surface shone as though containing somehow a hidden fluorescent lamp. The fish streaked to and fro, big ones darting quickly and nervously, small ones just lazing near the cement sea-wall. Laps of waves against the wall made a continuous kinetic glow where water met the wall; and a small rowboat, half sunk so that the gunwales were just below or above the sea depending on how the waves pitched, was outlined in glowing white. Also the rope that moved whitely just below surface like a long tranquil eel.

The village houses with sagging balconies suspended from the second storey. The old wrinkled black-dressed lady crumpled up in the shade leaning against a fence. The icons placed in carved holes in trees: picture of Christ or the Madonna, and candle. The thrashing mill: donkeys pulling a homemade contraption with a boy sitting on it to give weight. Then the grain is tossed up in the air with a fork. Tedious long work. Men playing backgammon in the cafés. The American Mennonite team in a village near Edessa. I asked them if they frequented the cafés after work so they could get to know the Greek men. “No,” they answered. “If we have any leisure we try to put it to more constructive use. We want to be an example of industriousness to the Greeks.” And thus, as I readily gathered, the Americans lived isolated in their house, not learning the Greek language or even sitting around trying to talk with hands. To my mind, then, the project failed.

The boy up in a tree, gathering an armful of branches with nice big green leaves, which he told me later they use as food, wrapping meat or rice up in them, and baking them in an oven. The laden donkeys, so loaded with branches or bound hay that they were well-nigh invisible. The woman following behind an ox. The old lady, bent and parched, carrying her jug of water. The condescension with which the policeman spoke to her. The spastic who had café concession in the village. His lovely meaningful face. So long and brown and understanding. The near-useless body, and how well he did what he could with it. Looked like a hydraulic press had flattened him out. Where was there room for lungs or viscera? The Queen’s school. Low ceilings, mud walls. Children gathered in the shade talking. All girls. One boy respectfully distant. The sweaty furniture shops of the city; the fruit stalls; slaughtered calves hanging head and all, still bloody, at the butcher’s. Blacksmiths. Horses with beaded colorful bridles. How thin and weak the horses are! Panorama πανόραμα. The cleft between the mountains, cool and damp. All else parched. View of the crescent-shaped city. The lights go on finally. Millions of twinkles.

The beach. Fishing nets strung out. Viking-like boats. The cafés—always. “Greek” music. To καινούργιο σου φουστάνι, σαν πριγκήπισσα σε κάνει. The theater: amateurish but fun. Constant sarcastic remarks toward leading politicians.

July 15, 1955

M-day minus 2.

Against from E. M. Forster, “Co-ordination”:

❡ She heard the sea; at first it was the tide whispering over mud-flats or chattering against stones, or the short, crisp break of a wave on sand, or the long, echoing roar of a wave against rocks, or the sounds of the central ocean, where the waters pile themselves into mountains and part into ravines; or when fog descends and the deep rises and falls gently; or when the air is so fresh that the big waves and the little waves that live in the big waves all sing for joy, and send one another kisses of white foam. She heard them all, but in the end she heard the sea itself, and knew that it was hers for ever.

From “The Eternal Moment”:

❡ How could he explain the peculiar charm of the relations between himself and Miss Raby? There had never been a word of marriage, and would probably never be a word of love. If instead of seeing each other frequently, they should come to see each other always it would be as sage companions, familiar with life, not as egotistic lovers, craving for infinities of passion which they had no right to demand and no power to supply. Neither professed to be a virgin soul, or to be ignorant of the other’s limitations and inconsistencies. They scarcely even made allowance for each other. Toleration implies reserve; and the greatest safeguard of unruffled intercourse is knowledge.

❡ Vorta had taken to the tourist trade. A village must have some trade; and this village had always been full of virility and power. Obscure and happy, its splendid energies had found employment in wrestling a livelihood out of the earth, whence had come a certain dignity, and kindliness and love for other men. Civilization did not relax these energies, but it had diverted them; and all the precious qualities which might have helped to heal the world had been destroyed. The family affection, the affection for the commune, the sane pastoral virtues—all had perished while the campanile which was to embody them was being built. No villain had done this thing: it was the work of ladies and gentlemen who were good and rich and often clever—who, if they thought about the matter at all, thought that they were conferring a benefit, moral as well as commercial, on any place in which they chose to stop.

July 16, 1955

I’ve spent the pre-marriage day in bed with a stinky cold. Reading.

❡’Let me have that child,’ she said impressively, ‘and I will bring him up. He shall see that they are not the vile creatures he supposes, always clamouring for respect and deference and trying to buy them with money. Rich people are good: they are capable of sympathy and love: they are fond of the truth; and when they are with each other they are clever. Your boy shall learn this and he shall try to teach it to you. And when he grows up, if God is good to him he shall teach the rich: he shall teach them not to be stupid to the poor. I have tried myself, and people buy my books and say they are good, and smile and lay them down. But I know this: so long as the stupidity exists, not only our charities and missions and schools, but the whole of our civilization, are vain.’ E. M. Forster, “The Eternal Moment.”

More from Camus:

❡ Sans mémoire et sans espoir, ils s’installaient dans le présent. À la vérité, tout leur devenait présent. Il faut bien le dire, la peste avait enlevé à tous le pouvoir de l’amour et même de l’amitié. Car l’amour demande un peu d’avenir, et il n’y avait plus pour nous que des instants.

❡ Mais de quoi, dira-t-on, ces séparés avaient-ils l’air? Eh bien, cela est simple, ile n’avient l’air de rien. Ou, si on préfère, ils avaient l’air de tout le monde, un air tout à fait general. Ils partageaient la placidité et les agitations puériles de la cité. Ils perdaient les apparences du sens critique, tout en gagnant les apparences du sang-froid. On pouvait voir, par example, les plus intelligents d’entre eux faire mine de chercher comme tout le monde dans les journaux, ou bien dans les émissions radiophoniques, des raisons de croire à une fin rapide de la peste, et concevoir apparemment des espoirs chimériques, ou éprouver des craintes sans fondement, à la lecture de considérations qu’un journaliste avait écrites un peu au hazard, en bâillant d’ennui. Pour le reste, ils buvaient leur bière, ou soignaient leurs malades, paressaient ou s’épuisaient, classaient des fiches ou faisant fourner des disques sans se distinguer autrement les uns des autres. Autrement dit, ils ne choisissaient plus rien. La peste avait supprimé les jugements de valeur. Et cela se voyait à la façon dont personne ne s’occupait plus de la qualité des vêtements ou des aliments qu’on achetait. On acceptait tout en bloc.

July 26, 1955

Assisi

Preparing to leave Assisi. The city is beautiful and medieval still to the core, but everything connected with St. Francis is extremely disappointing. Treatment of Portiuncula typical. The modest church splashed with mediocre murals outside of the saint’s exploits; and the whole enclosed in the most oversized unnecessary basilica imaginable, called Ste. Marie des Anges. Damian, less hampered, but after a monk guided us around he asked for a donation. Old Francis would hardly approve. Re: Subasio hideaway, now connected with civilization by a beautifully carved road up the mountain. Outside gate, man selling coca cola and orangeade. Inside, beautiful grounds, walks, gardens, everything manicured. Happily a poor section preserved supposedly F’s room, and also a crude stone cell set up in the entrance of a shallow cave. Of course the setting, so high, and overlooking the olive plantations of the Umbrian Plain, was impressive. I felt the peace of the birds and the quietly rustling wind. C & I also enjoyed (in retrospect) the long uphill walk. It gave an idea at least of how far F. had to walk to reach his favorite spot—about 1½ hour if he went as slow as we did; but of course he didn’t have C. to hold him back (or maybe he took Clara for a quiet weekend of spiritual love!).

C. and I spent many minutes watching the skill of the lady-grabber in the Place de Santa Chiara, who grabs you when you issue from the bus, and propagandizes for their particular pension. A very energetic worker, with long hours, we discovered, and thus a successful one.

August 3, 1955

Salonika

Letter from Alice, enthusiastically describing her work in a camp for crippled children. “There is one eleven-year-old girl whose only means of expression is by crying or smiling. The counselors have to learn to distinguish between the bathroom cry, the nurse cry, the cry when she wants to be moved somewhere else or be made comfortable in her wheelchair. She sits in the chair all day except for meals, swimming, and going to the bathroom. She can’t sit straight, but slumps limply, her arms dragging over the arms of the chair. . . . Others race around on crutches, running faster than I can. They scream and talk and laugh and get into trouble just like regular campers. It is a very moving thing to see a girl or boy put down their crutches and standing on braced legs do a dance while one of the bunkmates sings a song. Also wonderful when a badly palsied child (9 years old) holds a pair of scissors for the first time and cuts a hat out of construction paper, a counselor holding the paper and moving it so the kid won’t go out of the lines. Every day something exciting happens: a limp wheelchair boy floats on his back in the water without any support; a past polio victim takes four steps by herself not holding on to anything and not using crutches. This is the excitement that one has here.”

August 4, 1955

From Saroyan’s “Cocktail Party”:

❡ . . . a human being does not live, but is lived. . . . We have been led to believe that being alive is a personal experience, and I do not believe it is. I believe it is absolutely impersonal. No man knows himself. No man knows another. No man decides for himself who he is or who he is to be, what he is to do, or how he is to do it. Every man belongs to matter, that’s all. Matter is a large order, and every man is a small order. Matter happens to a man, and the man goes along for the ride, as the saying is. . . .

August 7, 1955

C. tells about a girl she knew in school, whom we’ll call here Helen. Helen was very slight, small, weak, and retiring. Never said anything; never showed any strength, moral or physical. But she was always very pretty. She grew up and married a boy whom we’ll call John. John’s father, a businessman, was well-off, and sent John to Germany to the university. Helen’s family, contrariwise, was relatively poor. John’s father could finance his son in Germany but not the wife too; and as her family couldn’t help at all she had to stay in Greece. John’s father really tried to do all he could to make her stay pleasant, inviting her to the house, etc., but she was consistently unappreciative and mean. Her father went into the business with John’s father. Then John’s father got sick. Helen did nothing to comfort him; instead she and her father stole the business, somehow having a court transfer the assets to them. John’s father from all this had a nervous breakdown and is in a mental hospital. Now Helen forbids John on his return even to see his family.

—McKensey.

—Socrates and Paula: their particular troubles.

August 9, 1955

The doctor said today that C. shouldn’t have a baby. She’s too weak, especially with the anemia.

I have to be careful about everything I do. I didn’t think today and said I’d go to Ritsa’s to call the doctor. This offended the family—justly—since why should Ritsa know everything and not Lola or the father speak to the doctor. Thus Lola and I went.

The other day also the same. Who to ask to give the injections? If I asked Ritsa, Eleanoula would be jealous; if I asked Eleanoula, Ritsa would be jealous. The problem was solved nicely when we found that Eleanoula wasn’t home.

I said to the family that if we had only known before the marriage about the anemia, we shouldn’t have conceived the baby. If the two doctors we visited had only said something. But of course the baby was conceived premaritally, so it would have been too late even if they had noticed her weakness. Such is the mess I am in.

C. is very apathetic, very frightened as usual, still worried about the damn school, etc. She has no life in her at all.

Her mother told me today that she told C. before the trip not to make a child (!), but of course C. never said anything to me; and it was too late anyway.

The family is very good considering all the troubles I’ve brought in my wake. Really remarkable.

But now I think an abortion is the only thing. But how?

August 10, 1955

Chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone:

❡Where is the equal of Love?

Where is the battle he cannot win,

The power he cannot outmatch?

In the farthest corners of earth, in the midst of the sea,

He is there; he is here

In the bloom of a fair face

Lying in wait;

And the grip of his madness

Spares not god or man.

Marrying the righteous man,

Driving his soul into mazes of sin

And strife, dividing a house.

For the light that burns in the eyes of a bride of desire

Is a fire that consumes.

At the side of the great gods

Aphrodite immortal

Works her will upon all.

August 12, 1955

Do something about Basil at the American Farm School: the hopelessness of his wish to get training in America; the comparison of the teaching of modern mechanical farming methods with what awaits him at home. See journal for June 7, June 13, July 14. Small farm with work for 3, but family of 13, etc.

August 14, 1955

O Γεώργιος is very temperamental. Came home last night complaining of his eyes, and pretty sad & silent all day today. Arranged rendezvous with friend of his and latter’s fiancée, but didn’t want to go alone, and asked Lola and me to accompany him. I didn’t want to particularly because I went to Antigone last night and I ought to stay more with Chrysanthi; and Lola said No also because she didn’t know the said fiancée and apparently had no burning desire to meet her, whereupon George slammed the door and burst out of the house to go by himself. What a sad situation, that such a man of 35, good-looking, intelligent, well educated, doesn’t know a girl to take with him: or rather, for perhaps this is more at the root of the trouble, that a sad situation that in Greece there is so little freedom of acquaintance between the sexes. Perhaps if George asked a girl to spend an evening with him at a café and she accepted, it would be tantamount to an engagement.

C. seemed better the last two days but today she threw up twice and again is completely listless. Θεολόγου says she should have an abortion done, as with the anemia she can’t support a baby; the family doctor says the opposite to everything Θεολόγου says, who says, for instance, that the necessary iron needed to cure the anemia cannot be given in a state of pregnancy because it will harm the embryo. A gynecologist says he thinks C. can make it, however; and a pediatrician friend of the family says: wait and see. It’s all very tense for the rest of us.

Basil receives a letter that his scholarship is denied. This means that he must return to his impossible life in the village. Make the nice American Farm School machinery, etc. analogous to the literary gentleman in “Life of Ma Parker.” Village poverty, etc. analogous to Ma’s history. Basil wants to pour out his sorrow to someone. Who? Teacher? But show earlier that teachers do not feel the plight of their students. No sympathy; inability really to understand or help, which Basil realizes. So he has no one to turn to. Show also how fellow students (1) mock his ambition or (2) think him inferior if they got scholarships themselves. Thus Basil is ashamed. There’s no one to help. Show earlier his love for animals; thus his desire to become a veterinarian. Perhaps one animal in particular—a prize horse or bull, Basil’s special care. As a last resort he walks blindly but finds himself going to the stable to unburden himself to the only creature that understands him: this animal.

August 17, 1955

❡ ‘Ah! That does me good,’ he sighed. How easy it is to laugh when you no longer expected anything from anyone. . . .’ Thus, while he was dressing, did he discover for himself the nature of asceticism, and the tuneless little song he hummed through pursed lips kept him company like a silly young nun. —Colette, “The Last of Chéri.”

August 20, 1955

C. slightly better. New pathologist says her condition is not serious. But going on three solid weeks in bed now, and not much desire to get up is a little discouraging. Poor girl: she’s having it all right,. Funny how even I, supposedly “educated” and “aware,” never conceived in the slightest the corollaries to having a child. And of course this is only the beginning. What about the process of labor and birth itself? Then the constant twenty-four hour care for so many years, not to mention the expense, which only God himself knows how I’ll meet.

—Socrates and Paula. She’s Jewish, so Socrates’s family opposed the marriage. Thus their plans: Paula going to America in December or January on a refugee visa. Socrates must find a hospital appointment for January and go also. He’ll marry her there and they’ll stay. His parents are happy at the prospect of his going to America because they don’t know that Paula is going and thus they figure that Socrates will be far away from her for two years and forget her. This explains why he must go in January also. First of all, she must, because the consulate says all the visas for Greece will be used up after that time. If she goes and he gets an appointment for July, let’s say, his parents will discover her absence, easily discover their son’s plans never to come back, and refuse to let him go. It seems funny to an American that a 29-year-old man should be daunted by his parents’ refusal, but that’s the way it is in Greece. Especially Socrates, who has lived off his father so many years (in Greece, there’s no opportunity for students to earn part of their own way), would not be able to contradict him in this way. And thus Socrates is convinced that if he does not get a hospital appointment for January, he will never go and presumably never marry Paula. She could stay here, of course, but then there would be the same problem of the parents forbidding the marriage, and the Church in Greece will not marry you without your parents’ consent.

I’ve often wondered what would be like the day of a Greek beggar or vendor who walks the streets. We hear them first, shouting their peculiar cries, and then if we care to we can lean out over our balconies and see them walking slowly smack down the middle of the street, shouting or rather singing their song, stopping, looking around and listening for any possible responses, then going on again, undaunted. They come very regularly, too. A boy comes with doughnut-like cakes precisely at seven every morning, waking me up. Another boy comes with the same about fifteen minutes later, and probably does better business, for his forerunner has gotten people out of bed. At four in the afternoon—sharp—the hour that ends the daily siesta, a profusion of calls can be heard, but above all the ice cream man, Έβρω and fast behind him another. Then there are knife sharpeners, mattress refurbishers, chimney sweeps, pot polishers, junk collectors, etc. At the bottom of the scale are the true beggars, one of whom I saw yesterday. I gave him five drachmas. He came playing, or rather poking at, an accordion, moaning something cacophonously that was supposed to be a song. A little girl, perhaps his granddaughter, led him on and collected the donations. Perhaps he was blind. I couldn’t notice from the balcony. One day also I noticed how the poor lad who came with the κουλούρια (like doughnuts) was kidded by another lad whose job was to deliver ice from a donkey cart. The first shouted κουλούρια, κουλούρια, etc., etc. and then the ice boy said, in the tone of someone who wanted to buy some: κουλoύρια. The vendor stopped, turned, and looked at all the balconies for his prospective customer. Seeing no one, he started on again. But the mischievous ice-boy again called (in a disguised voice) and once more the poor deceived mendicant stopped and looked for his non-existent customer. Poor soul!

Let’s call the girl Σωτηρία. She is 17 or 18 when she comes to live with her uncle and aunt in Salonika. All we know of her previous history is that she contracted malaria in her youth, was given Atabrine, but took overdoses that made her act wild like a person out of her senses. We also know that for some reason, in her 16th or 17th year, the boy to whom she was engaged in the village broke the engagement, which was a very serious thing to do. Girls whose engagements are broken generally have a hard time finding another boy, and that doubtlessly was the reason Sotiria came to her uncle’s in Salonika, where no one would know. Ostensibly she came to see about the family business, a hotel, but since she stayed several months and is still there as far as we know, there was the other factor involved as well. Of course the uncle, a wood-seller, knew the whole story; and he set about immediately to find Sotiria a new man. This he did; but this boy also, for a reason we also do not know, changed his mind. To make matters worse, he let things go as far as the day of the engagement ceremony itself and then, when all the guests were assembled in the wood-seller’s home, sent a note recording his decision; and they never saw him again. After this, Sotiria began to show signs of the complete nervous breakdown she was soon to have. The uncle attributed her occasional fits to nervousness, and predicted that if she could really get engaged, all would be well. To this end, he found another young man one Κώστας, a waiter. Of course he said nothing to Costas about Sotiria’s troubles; and the one time the future couple were allowed to meet prior to the engagement was a very short and well-chaperoned occasion. To tell the truth, Sotiria was getting worse and worse at the prospect. She said Yes only because she was sick and tired of the whole business,, and wanted to get joined to someone, though it didn’t very much matter who. The uncle’s chief concern, on his part, was to keep Costas from learning that Sotiria was slightly batty. He found a cooperative doctor who injected sedatives that quieted her down for three or four hours, and thus they planned to hide her illness long enough to get the ring firmly on her finger. When she came to Chrysanthi the morning of the engagement-day, she was in a hardly normal state. Her eyes were colorless, blank, starting out of her head. Her paleness and thinness contrasted with her previous village robustness. She paced up and down the room, waving her arms, and talking steadily, incoherently. First she asked for bread and cheese. “No one gives me food when I ask for it.” But later she said that when her uncle had meals ready for her she said she had no appetite, so her uncle would think her ill. Thus part of the real illness was the delusion that she was ill deliberately, purposefully—in other words, she’s only sick when she wants to be, when it’s to her advantage. (Of course perhaps this was true, and everything a magnificent act, but who knows?) She said also that Costas loved her ardently, but that she didn’t care a hoot for him because she loved another boy whom she saw accidentally standing at a bus stop, which made everything worse. “I don’t want to get engaged. My uncle is forcing me to.” Then contradictorily she describes how she secretly managed to see Costas, went to the movies with him. Then he kissed her. “If my uncle knew, he’d kill me.” “Look here at these black-and-blue marks on my arms. Costakis made those, Costakis!” (they were birthmarks or freckles.) At other times she says that she never saw Costas, only the once, with chaperones. When Sotiria left, Chrysanthi’s father went immediately to the girl’s mother, who had come from their village for the engagement ceremony. He described the daughter’s condition (as if the mother did not know), and immediately the mother screamed, “Don’t tell, don’t tell, lest the boy find out and change his mind. Sotiria’s not ill; she’s just nervous. Everything will change once she’s engaged.” Well, it wasn’t the job of the Giannakos family to interfere, so he left. At seven that evening Chrysanthi went to the uncle’s house, bringing flowers. The house was crowded with parents, relatives, friends. And, to Sotiria’s family’s relief, Costas was there too. Sweets were offered, and liqueurs. Then a plate of sweets was placed on a table beneath the icon, and the best man put the two rings in with the sweets and mixed everything together. Rice was put in the plate also. The best man then took the rings, made the sign of the cross with them, and placed them on the left hand fourth finger of future bride and groom. The couple received congratulations calmly (Sotiria well-drugged, of course). Many presents were given: especially jewelry to Sotiria. Then everyone ate from a buffet of friend fish, meat, salad, cheese, eggs, olives, with wine. After singing and dancing, the guests went home, and Costas departed with his parents. During the ceremony he had seemed sad and quiet, but perhaps it was just his appearance. Sotiria had wanted to talk several times, but as soon as she opened her mouth her uncle interrupted her, lest she reveal her condition by ill-chosen words. As Chrysanthi was ready to leave, Sotiria took her aside and said, “My life is a theater. I’m in a play. The first act is now finished, but the second act will start presently. Only you understand this, Chrysanthi. You are my audience of one.” Sotiria appeared happy withal. In fact she seemed to gloat over how well she had played her part—how well, possibly, she had deluded Costas into believing that she loved him. In other words, she ‘caught’ her man and was proud. Though perhaps all this was still part of her basic craziness. The next morning the uncle came to Chrysanthi to report that Sotiria was in the street, completely insane. She had fought off the injections, refused to see anyone except Costas. Costas, by the way, turned out to be very kind and understanding. He took her to the cinema and bought her ice cream, among other things. He loved her and had no intention of ditching her just because she seemed entirely nuts. Chrysanthi found her at Costas’s house, and when she asked her to come to the school, Sotiria said, “No, I must stay with my fiancé. If you get engaged, Chrysanthi, you’ll have to stay with your fiancé too. Don’t tell Mr. Lindsay I’m crazy. I’m all right. If you tell him, I’ll choke you: because you’re really stupid.” Eventually, somehow, they got her to a doctor’s. He asked her, “Do you like your fiancé?” “Why ask me?” she said. “Ask stupid Chrysanthi there.” Then she rambled on about another boy she loved so much. The doctor tried to inject her, but she cried out, “No, you can’t touch me. You’re a man!” “But doesn’t your fiancé touch you?” “Oh yes, yes,” said she, showing marks on her arms and pinching Chrysanthi with remarkable strength to demonstrate. “Don’t you want an injection so you can go to sleep with Chrysanthi?” “No, I want to sleep with Costas.” “How many nights haven’t you slept?” “Three.” “If she sleeps a long time,” the doctor said to Chrysanthi, “she’ll probably improve.” He got a sedative into her somehow, and she slept one day. But when she woke there was no evident improvement. Mr. Lindsay came into the room. “You’re a thief,” she said to him. “You stole a hundred drachmas. If you come any further, I’ll hang myself, I don’t love you because you’re Christ: you cry when you see me like this. And you keep all my visitors away. But I don’t want any, anyway.” When the doctor came again, Sotiria introduced Christ (Chrysanthi), a thief (Charles Lindsay), and a bag girl (Muriel Lindsay) to him. Says she loves the doctor’s son. Chrysanthi asked to have Sotiria’s jewelry for safekeeping. “OK,” Sotiria said, “but you can’t have my engagement ring, that’s final.” The next day she was so bad that she was tearing all her clothes into shreds. The doctor administered shock treatments, however, and Sotiria came out apparently returned to normal. The uncle continued to tell Costas all kinds of stories, but the doctor told him the truth. Costas, good soul, only felt more sorry for Sotiria, and remained faithful to his vow. Thus now, as far as we know, they are still engaged; and presumably some day they shall be married and live happily ever after!

August 22, 1955

❡ Domestic animals play a scarcely noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part in the education and life of children. Which of us does not remember powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkeys, milky old tabby cats who forgave us when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonizing pain? I even fancy, sometimes, that the patience, the fidelity, the readiness to forgive, and the sincerity which are characteristic of our domestic animals have a far stronger and more definite effect on the mind of a child than the long exhortations of some dry, pale Karl Karlovitch, or the misty expositions of a governess, trying to prove to children that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. —Chekhov, “An Incident”

August 24, 1955

Do something with Neola and her wayward son, only not smart-alecky à la Mansfield, with stylisms un-imitable. Just straight, style without style, like Chekhov. I used to think, after reading Hemingway, Wolfe, and other stylists, that subject matter was unimportant. Then I found, to my anger, that whoever read my stories always commented on “the way they turned out,” never on the style. Just now I am beginning to see that the writer’s job is at least two-fold: to have something to write about, and to write about it with skill. Chekhov’s and Mansfield’s stories—both—though displaying no great action, compel the reader by their accurate portrayal of character. Once the character is developed, his own personality governs in a sense what will happen to him, instead of visa versa. This is particularly developed in Chekhov.

Neola:

Son: zoot suit type. Never showing up for work in hospital laundry room. Describe work. Describe old man rolling in laundry. Fat women pressers; the one in slacks; the thin boss reading newspaper. Neola hypochondriac. Staying home herself. Thus her employers threaten to relieve her. Needs money. Separated from husband. Must support no good son because he won’t work steadily. Telephone calls while on duty (forbidden * trouble). To lover, who runs after son for her. Annoyed, but does it to please her. Describe: Neola getting old and fat and cross. But undimmed glossy red hair and girlish sexiness, playfulness when feeling well. Trouble also with Helen, the other nursing assistant, who is pretty much a neurotic character with persecution complex. Chronic complainer. Figures she’s working below her level. But thinks Neola talks too freely with doctors, should show deference. At the same time she complains about deference she (Helen) shows, but which she puts upon herself, since the doctors certainly don’t require it. Something decisive must come out of this background. Perhaps some machination for her private affairs which depends on her son showing up, but he doesn’t show up and everything is ruined. Or she exhausts patience of employer, who finally has to fire son despite Neola’s entreaties. She goes out to look for him (on company time) and thus endangers her own job. Paint Neola sympathetically. Has selfless devotion to absolutely worthless son. (Pattern after Clarence, for instance the strutting orderly: one eye, extra pugnacious, car-crazy, great lover, etc.) Helen deprecates Neola, and on the surface it looks like Helen is right. Thus employers believe what she says, and completely miss the truth: that Neola is to be admired and Helen despised, not vice versa. Helen a busybody, a gossip. Thrives by hurting other people. First show Neola without bringing in son: as employers see her. Her absences, telephone calls. Helen’s gossip. So that reader gets initial bad impression of Neola, though realizing also Helen’s obvious faults. Then show Neola with son, and latter’s problems, which come to a head, resulting that he and Neola both lose their jobs. Helen “vindicated,” and no one knows any better except the reader, we hope. Make Neola have to choose between lover and son. Lover gets sick and tired of racing after son and gives ultimatum that Neola must meet him somewhere at a specific hour. But son absent from work again. Neola had asked him especially to be there that day, but couldn’t reveal the reason, since business with lover is secret. She leaves work to look for him—subsequently misses appointment and thus selfish lover leaves her. She loses her job, and the son his. But the son is not a bit more reformed for all that. Then: end of Helen’s deprecations.

All the orderly characters at RGH. Clarence the lover. The Negro with nine-inch erection, who raped a twelve year old. Bill who changed his name, had no parents, and was going to buy an apartment house! The homosexual who smelled and who boasted of his homosexuality. His rich aunt on East Avenue: fruits of a bar and grill. The banjo player and his mate. Walter, with a grandchild in his 36th year. Silent Sam, the porter. Gregory. God! What a character Gregory would make. His faddisms, femininity, groping toward conscientious objection. Actions in work camp, spilling the mop buckets at the hospital. His lonely trips to the Adirondacks. Trip to McFadden’s health-whore-house.

August 26, 1955

A beautiful Buddhist text quoted in Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek:

❡ The Shepherd: My meal is ready, I have milked my ewes. The door of my hut is bolted, my fire is alight. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

Buddha: I no longer need food or milk. The winds are my shelter, my fire is out. And you, sky can rain as much as you please!

The Shepherd: I have oxen, I have cows. I have my father’s meadows and a bull who covers my cows. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

Buddha: I have neither oxen nor cows. I have no meadows. I have nothing, I fear nothing. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

The Shepherd: I have a docile and faithful shepherdess. For years she has been my wife. I am happy when I play with her at night. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please?

Buddha: I have a free and docile soul. For years I have trained it and I have taught it to play with me. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

Imagery from the same: ❡ His face was furrowed, weather beaten, like worm-eaten wood. ❡ I secretly watched him as he emerged from his wrapping of sleep, and saw how his eyes shone more and more brightly.

(1) At the hospital, Miss Tuttle, chief nurse, asks the nursing assistant Joan where is her co-worker, Neola. Joan answers that as has happened on several other days Neola came, used the telephone without permission and left without telling anyone. Joan complains that she must do the work of two people. (Describe Joan’s character.) The chief is angry at Neola, pacifies Joan by saying if Neola does it again she’ll fire her. “Oh, don’t do that,” Joan says, hypocritically.

(2) Neola meanwhile is making the rounds of the local bars and drug stores where her son hangs out. She finds him finally with a crony, drags him away, is furious at him for not showing up at this job. Son completely obnoxious. Has no real excuse. Neola takes him to laundry where he works, apologizes to boss, who doesn’t want son (Clarence) back, but Neola pleads with him and he agrees to give Clarence one more chance. Neola returns to her own work. Sneaks into locker room. But of course Miss Tuttle knows of her absence, and chastises her, also giving warning that if she leaves work once more she will be fired. Neola tries to explain. Miss Tuttle says she sympathizes but cannot make hospital suffer because of Neola’s personal problems. (Describe Neola somewhere, her character, her job, history.)

(3) After work, Clarence meets his crony, who kids him about how he lets his mother drag him around. Dares him to miss work next day and defy his mother. Says they’ll go driving in his souped-up supercharged car. Clarence says they’d better go out of town that night. “Why, you afraid of her?” says the other. “You got to stand up to ’er, man. You got to show ’er you ain’t no kid no more. See!” (Somewhere describe Clarence, his irresponsibility, aggressiveness; lover-boy; vanity; reactions to his “stinky” job with “a lot of fat old bitches” and the beanpole director who sits all day reading a newspaper while we slave.)

(4) Next morning at breakfast Neola makes Clarence promise he’ll show up for work that day. He lies that he will. She goes to the hospital but just to make sure calls Clarence’s laundry. He’s not there, of course. Joan complains to Miss Tuttle that Neola used the telephone. Miss Tuttle speaks to Neola. Neola says she must leave. Miss Tuttle says it will mean losing her job. Neola leaves anyway, makes the rounds of son’s hideaways and finds him, starts dragging him out. But son won’t go. He’s egged on by his friend. Neola explains what’s at stake. Son weakens, but friend teases him, sarcastically. “Show her who’s boss. It’s now or never, Clarence.” Clarence zooms off in the car. Neola, broken, goes back to the hospital and empties out her locker. Joan can be heard, still complaining.

Funny letter from Goat, who’s still got his dust-dry sense of humor: “We were extremely glad to hear about your marriage,” etc., etc. “Everything here is running smoothly. Trips, I’m afraid, are becoming less strenuous every year. [sic] Best wishes to your family. Bob and Lib.”

Evocative scene from Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”:

❡ Afterwards when they went out there was not a soul on the sea-front. The town with its cypresses had quite a deathlike air, but the sea still broke noisily on the shore; a single barge was rocking on the waves, and a lantern was blinking sleepily on it.

They found a cab and drove to Oreanda. . . .

At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea, rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spell-bound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

A man walked up to them—probably a keeper—looked at them and walked away. And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too. They saw a steamer come from Theodosia, with its lights out in the glow of dawn.

“There is dew on the grass,” said Anna Sergeyevna, after a silence.

“Yes. It’s time to go home.”

They went back to the town.

August 27, 1955

❡ I never tired of seeing with what elaborate precautions, with what gentleness, Zorba removed the cloth in which he wrapped his santouri. He looked as if he was removing the skin from a purple fig, or undressing a woman. . . .

❡ “Boss,” he said, “this is where I count on you. Now, don’t dishonor the male species! The god-devil sends you this choice morsel. You’ve got teeth. All right get ’em into it. Stretch out your arm and take her! What did the Creator give us hands for? To take things! So, take ’em! I’ve seen loads of women in my time. But that damned widow makes the steeples rock.”

“I don’t want any trouble,” I replied angrily.

I was irritated because in my heart of hearts I had also desired that all-powerful body which had passed me like a wild animal in heat, distilling musk.

“You don’t want any trouble!” Zorba exclaimed in stupefaction. “And pray, what do you want, then?”

I did not answer.

“Life is trouble,” Zorba continued. “Death, no. To live—do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!”

I still said nothing. I knew Zorba was right, I knew it, but I did not dare. My life had got on the wrong track and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.

August 28, 1955

Ὁ Γεώργιος ἔστειλε μέλι, ἀλλὰ εἰδηκὸ μέλι καὶ πολὺ ἀκριβό. Τὸ κουτί, ὅμως, ἦταν αχεδὸν ἀδειανό. Πρῶτος, εἴπαμε πώς τὸ μέλι χύθηκε. Ἄν ἔγινε ἔτσι, ὅμως, τὸ πανὶ γύρω ἔπρεπε νὰ εἶναι βρεγμένο. Ἦταν στεγνό. Τότε φαντασθήκαμε πὼς κάποιος ἔκλεψε τὸ μέλι. Ἅμα ὁ Γεώργιος θὰ τὸ ἀνακάλυβε θὰ θύμωνε πολύ. «Ὁ κόσμος εἶναι κακός», θὰ έλεγε, καὶ θὰ εἶχε δίκαιον.

Possible stories:

—from my troubles with Mrs. Jones, being sent down to Newell & Smith. Reading books on duty; reactions of an intellectual to such “degrading” work. Compensating actions: method with nurses; always talking about Harvard; reading French out loud in the corridor. Leila Wagenstein; the trio, etc.

—from couple next door at 50 Atkinson Street who browbeated baby. Marital difficulties. Trouble about who’s to clean the bathroom. Them or us! etc.

—that crazy letter of sexual frustration to Elizabeth White. She and his sister.

—two flies landed on my paper, one astride the other, buzzing loudly, as mating.

September 5, 1955

From Chekhov, “An Anonymous Story”:

❡ She came back with Orlov between nine and ten. Full of the proud consciousness that she had done something bold and out of the common, passionately in love, and, as she imagined, passionately loved, exhausted, looking forward to a sweet sound sleep, Zinaida Fyodorovna was reveling in her new life. She squeezed her hands together in the excess of her joy, declared that everything was delightful, and swore that she would love Orlov for ever; and these vows, and the naïve, almost childish confidence that she too was deeply loved and would be loved forever, made her at least five years younger. She talked charming nonsense and laughed at herself.

“There’s no other blessing greater than freedom,” she said, forcing herself to say something serious and edifying. “How absurd it is when you think of it! We attach no value to our own opinion even when it is wise, but tremble before the opinion of all sorts of stupid people. Up to the last minute I was afraid of what other people would say, but as soon as I followed my own instinct and made up my mind to go my own way, my eyes were opened, I overcame my silly fears, and now I am happy and wish everyone could be as happy!”

But her thoughts immediately took another turn, and she began talking of another flat, of wallpapers, horses, a trip to Switzerland and Italy. Orlov was tired by the restaurants and the shops, and was still suffering from the same uneasiness that I had noticed in the morning. He smiled, but more from politeness than pleasure, and when she spoke of anything seriously, he agreed ironically: “Oh yes.”

❡ “Turgenev teaches us in his novels that every exalted, noble-minded girl should follow the man she loves to the ends of the earth, and should serve his idea,” said Orlov, screwing up his eyes ironically. “The ends of the earth are poetic license; the earth and all its ends can be reduced to the flat of the man she loves. . . . And so not to live in the same flat with the woman who loves you is to deny her her exalted vocation and to refuse to share her ideals. Yes, my dear fellow, Turgenev wrote, and I have to suffer for it.” . . .

“I am not a Turgenev hero, and if I ever wanted to free Bulgaria I shouldn’t need a lady’s company. I look upon love primarily as a necessity of my physical nature, degrading and antagonistic to my spirit; it must either be satisfied with discretion or renounced altogether, otherwise it will bring into one’s life elements as unclean as itself. . . . Try and make [Zinaida Fyodorovna] believe that love is only a simple physical need, like the need of food or clothes; that it doesn’t mean the end of the world if wives and husbands are unsatisfactory; and that a man may be a profligate and a libertine, and yet a man of honor and a genius; and that, on the other hand, one may abstain from the pleasures of love and at the same time be a stupid, vicious animal!”

❡ “Why don’t you speak, then?” said Pekarsky.

“I’ve tried, but I can’t. One can boldly tell the truth, whatever it may be, to an independent, rational man; but in this case one has to do with a creature who has no will, no strength of character, and no logic. I cannot endure tears; they disarm me. When she cries, I am ready to swear eternal love and cry myself.”

❡ He finished the letter and stood up. I still had time. I urged myself on and clenched my fists, trying to wring out of my soul some trace of my former hatred; I recalled what a passionate, implacable, obstinate hate I had felt for him only a little while before. . . . But it is difficult to strike a match against the crumbling stone. The sad old face and the cold glitter of his stars roused in me nothing but petty, cheap, unnecessary thoughts of the transitoriness of everything earthly, of the nearness of death . . .

“Good day, brother,” said the old man. He put on his cap and went out.

❡ You and I have both fallen, and neither of us will ever rise up again; and even if my letter were eloquent, terrible, and passionate, it would still seem like beating on the lid of a coffin: however one knocks on it, one will not wake up the dead! No efforts could warm your accursed cold blood, and you know that better than I do. . . .

Why, almost before beginning life, were you in such haste to cast off the image and likeness of God, and to become a cowardly beast who backs and scares others because he is afraid himself? You are afraid of life—as afraid of it as an Oriental who sits all day on a cushion smoking his hookah. Yes, you read a great deal, and a European coat fits you well, but yet with what tender, purely Oriental, pasha-like care you protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical effort, and from pain and uneasiness! How early your soul has taken to its dressing-gown! What a cowardly part you have played towards real life and nature, with which every healthy and normal man struggles! How soft, how snug, how warm, how comfortable—and how bored you are! Yes, it is a deathly boredom, unrelieved by one ray of light, as in solitary confinement; but you try to hide from that enemy, too, you play cards eight hours out of twenty-four.

And your irony? Oh, but how well I understand it! Free, bold, living thought is searching and dominating; for an indolent, sluggish mind it is intolerable. That it may not disturb your peace, like thousands of your contemporaries, you made haste in your youth to put it under bar and bolt. Your ironical attitude to life, or whatever you like to call it, is your armour; and your thought, fettered and frightened, dare not leap over the fence you have put around it; and when you jeer at ideas which you pretend to know all about, you are like the deserter fleeing from the field of battle, and, to stifle his shame, sneering at war and at valour. Cynicism stifles pain.

. . . your cold, scabrous anecdotes, your coarse laughter, all your innumerable theories concerning the underlying reality of marriage and the indefinite demands made upon it . . . ; your everlasting attacks on female logic, lying, weakness, and so on—doesn’t it all look like a desire at all costs to force woman down into the mud that she may be on the same level as your attitude to her? You are a weak, unhappy, unpleasant person.

❡ Then she sat down on a low chair by the table, and, leaning her head on the arm of the sofa, wept bitterly. In the drawing room there was only one candle burning in the candelabra, and the chair where she was sitting was in darkness; but I saw how her head and shoulders were quivering, and how her hair, escaping from her combs, covered her neck, her face, her arms. . . . Her quiet, steady weeping, which was not hysterical but a woman’s ordinary weeping, expressed a sense of insult, of wounded pride, of injury, and of something helpless, hopeless, which one could not set right and to which one could not get used. Her tears stirred an echo in my troubled and suffering heart; I forgot my illness and everything else in the world; I walked about the drawing-room and muttered distractedly: “Is this life? . . . Oh, one can’t go on living like this, one can’t. . . . Oh, it’s madness, wickedness, not life.”

❡ “I can’t talk. Forgive me, I am in the mood now when one wants to be alone. And, if you please, Vladimir Ivanitch, another time you want to come into my room, be so good as to give a knock at the door.”

That “be so good” had a peculiar, unfeminine sound. I went away. My accursed Petersburg mood came back, and all my dreams were crushed and crumpled up like leaves by the heat. I felt I was alone again and there was no nearness between us. I was no more to her than that cobweb to that palm tree which hangs on it by chance and which will be torn off and carried away by the wind. I walked about the square where the band was playing, went into the Casino; there I looked at the overdressed and heavily perfumed women, and every one of them glanced at me as though she would say: “You are alone; that’s all right.” Then I went out on the terrace and looked for a long time at the sea. There was not one sail on the horizon. On the left bank, in the lilac-coloured mist, there were mountains, gardens, towers, and houses, the sun was sparkling over it all, but it was all alien, indifferent, an incomprehensible tangle.

❡ . . . Yes, my life is abnormal, corrupted, of no use to anyone, and what prevents me from beginning a new life is cowardice—there you are quite right. But that you take it so much to heart, are troubled, and reduced to despair by it—that’s irrational; there you are quite wrong.

“A living man cannot help being troubled and reduced to despair when he sees that he himself is going to ruin and others are going to ruin around him.”

“Who doubts it! I am not advocating indifference; all I ask for is an objective attitude to life. The more objective, the less danger of falling into error. One must look into the root of things, and try to see in every phenomenon a cause of all other causes. . . . Not one hair falls from the head without the will of the Heavenly Father—in other words, nothing happens by chance in Nature and in human environment. Everything has its cause and is inevitable. And if so, why should we worry and write despairing letters?”

“That’s all very well,” I said, thinking a little. “I believe it will be easier and clearer for the generations to come; our experience will be at their service. But one wants to live apart from future generations and not only for their sake. Life is only given us once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty. One wants to play a striking, independent, noble part; one wants to make history so that those generations may not have the right to say of each of us that we were nonentities or worse. . . . I believe what is going on about us is inevitable and not without a purpose, but what have I to do with that inevitability? Why should my ego be lost?”

“Well, there’s no help for it,” sighed Orlov, getting up and, as it were, giving me to understand that our conversation was over.

I took my hat.

“We’ve only been sitting here half an hour, and how many questions we have settled, when you come to think of it!” said Orlov, seeing me into the hall.

—C. got a letter from Sonoko Strong congratulating her on the marriage, baby, and prospect of going to America. Perhaps C. is in the position of Zinaida Fyodorovna, dreading these things, especially the last, and ironically being congratulated on all sides.

—Saw «Έρωφίλη» τοῦ Γεωργίου Χορτάτση, a classical Greek play from Crete dating about the 17th century, I think. A gory tale, in which the king cuts off the head of his daughter’s lover and gives it to her as a present. But extremely well acted and therefore extremely compelling.

—Received a letter from John Davison in which he describes a «crisis» brought on by his feeling of being senselessly enslaved at RGH. He says he was nearly hysterical for two or three days, but got over it.

This led to a discussion—one might almost say an argument—between Chrysanthi and me which she started by saying that John was wrong to feel so seriously about it; that other people were in the same boat, and if everyone was so sensitive to have crises, etc., what would the world be like. I tried to explain that in a way she was right, but that it was a good thing that we had at least a few people like John who reflected enough to see the senselessness of what was happening to them. She maintained that everyone felt the discomfort of being enslaved (i.e., the army), but just stoically accepted it because, as she said, “Laws can’t be changed.” I got a little heated at this and expounded very patriotically how in free America people were always yelling to have laws changed or new ones made, sometimes even with success. We took the Negro problem as an illustration. I described the FEPC, equal school business, etc. She ended up by asking, “Will you let your child play with a Negro?” which of course was the most sensible question to ask. I said of course I would, and she replied that that was all that mattered, which is certainly correct.

Then we went on to the subject of unnecessary things: clothing, cars, following the fashions, etc. C. stubbornly defended women’s right to always have new clothes, on the reasoning that it gave joy. I countered with the idea of greater and lesser joys, and she replied by saying that perhaps what I considered lesser was considered greater by someone else. This makes mockery of all philosophy. And, ironically, of Greek philosophy in particular. She gave later the example of a five year old who sees that Johnny across the street has a better or newer bicycle. How can you explain to him that having a new bicycle isn’t the most important thing in the world? True, I said, but only for a five year old. When he grows up, he should comprehend that, and if he doesn’t, as so many “adults” do not, then he is no adult, but still a child.

Then we got back somehow to Chrysanthi’s illness, or pregnancy troubles, or whatever we can call the damn thing. I got a little angry about the fact that I continually have to keep after her to take her tablets. If I don’t she simply doesn’t take them. She grew heated and said, justly, “Is that such a great trouble for you?” “No,” I said, “but you’re like a baby in this.” “All right, let me be like a baby, then!” And she cried. “Go to your room, please,” I said; “I can’t see you like this.” She wiped away the tears, controlled herself. “I’m finished now.” (We also said before: Why she didn’t take the tablets herself—because, she said, she couldn’t open the bottle. Why not? It makes me sick. I can’t see it. “Then it’s all psychological,” I said. “I don’t know what that means,” was the answer.)

❡ About Henry James’s The Ambassadors: “Page by page, James releases one more clue, one more essential contribution to the shape and purpose of the book, one more fascinating revelation of personality and relationship.”

—I felt lousy about this evening’s argument with C. and went to her tenderly to make up. Earlier I had brought peppermint life-savers, to counteract the bad taste in her mouth. I lay next to her, stroking her knee, but not knowing really how to begin, and scared to try. Then I noticed that instead of sucking the life-saver she had chewed it, thus depriving herself of having it in her mouth for a long period. I told her that she should suck it. “Oh,” she replied sarcastically, “excuse me. All right, if I have to suck it, I will. I must do everything the correct way.” I got angry again and all my good intensions went to the winds. “If you’re going to be sarcastic, I can’t talk to you,” I snapped. “I didn’t know how to use it,” she said. But I didn’t rise to this change in tone. I said “Forget it!” and went out. Now she is still lying on the bed staring blankly ahead, with the light on. She must be very unhappy. I’m finding out what an incomplete selfish ungrown-up person I am. She must be finding out also: and I’m sure neither of us is very pleased at the discovery.

Later: Well, it all ended happily, thank God. As they say, love conquered, and I really believed it did. I sat down beside her again, said something about her going to sleep. She replied why, what had she done all day to make her tired? Nothing. “You must throw me away,” she said, “like a weed in the garden.” “If I throw you away I won’t have you.” “Oh, the weeds grow again very fast. Maybe you’ll find a rose.” “You’re my rose,” I said. I leaned down to kiss her, and she pulled me to her impulsively, opening her mouth wide onto mine. Then she turned her head away, for she was crying. I kissed away the tears. When she stopped I looked at her. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, “but the most important thing is that I love you.” This brought on another passionate kiss. I eventually apologized for my cruelty earlier, but by that time, I believe, the apology was superfluous.

September 11, 1955

Dear John Davison,

Chrysanthi and I were both pleased to receive your letter, especially since you are one of the few people in America that we both know, even if her acquaintance with you is very slight. We’ve been getting so many epistles from assorted relatives, friends, etc., whose names mean absolutely nothing to my wife, that it was with real pleasure that I announced one from you and said, “Ah, you remember him, don’t you!” She did, and sends her best to you. Fortunately you held back your letter and added a reassuring note after your ‘crisis,’ so that we know that you are all right. And I have just received confirmation of that fact from Peter Gardner, who described to me much the same state of affairs that you described yourself.

I am very interested in your reactions. Before I go further, lest this “interested” sound rather barbaric and unfeeling, especially when it is in events that have caused you so much pain, I must say that I don’t mean it that way. As you may well have already imagined, my situation was somewhat the same as yours. Our temperaments and inclinations and sensibilities perhaps are somewhat the same also—and so it should be little surprising to you to realize that I felt all the things you felt, and expressed them in my own way. This way (which I’ll describe in a moment) was not what Peter Gardner calls a sort of temporary nervous breakdown, but it was just as stupid, degrading and useless—probably worse.

I’m sure we discussed in Birmingham some of the things you mentioned: the feeling of your natural talents going to waste, the ogre of slavery, even the horrible convincement that one is not fulfilling one’s commitments as a C.O. (except perhaps in useless self-sacrifice). But on the top of all this, from the point of view of anyone outside, you and I and the others in our position would seem to be having it mighty easy—not in the army, nice salary, home-life, free time, etc. How impossible it really is to explain to anyone how little these circumstances mean when one has the feeling that it is all senseless and useless waste! I might add, in the vein of the ‘outsider,’ that your job was considered by the C.O.s of ‘my time’ as the softest one in the hospital. Indeed one of your predecessors told me (good C.O. that he was) that if he had been given my job in the Operating Room, he would leave and enter the army. This amount of insincerity may seem impossible to us, but the same boy’s brother did just that. He was with me one month before he donned khaki. All the rest of us bed-pan carriers, moppers, kitchen-slaves, etc. always envied you stock-room boys for your independence (not subject to squawking old-maid nurses or irritable chefs), your sensible time-schedule (ask PG how I used to work: sometimes midnight to morning, sometimes 3 p.m. to midnight, sometimes 7 to 3, sometimes 7 to 12 and then 3 to 7), etc. Well, this is all nothing, because the important thing is not the work itself but one’s attitude toward it.

I myself have a very poor story to tell, though it may be interesting to you if for nothing else than to feel that you had a fellow-sufferer. I might add before beginning that the end was happy, that after my ‘crisis’ I adjusted better and better to my work, and now look back upon it as having been a time when I garnered a wealth of experience in people and life. In fact, I can really say (what with so much of college), it was the first time in my life I had really lived, really faced the world on my own, faced the problems that one does not find in books or in college, but that one cannot escape. Even now, in the womb-like security of Greek hospitality, I do not feel that I am as independent or fully living as I felt while enduring the ‘slavery’ of Rochester.

Well, my very first reactions were to be immensely ashamed of the work I was doing. When I took the mop I am sure my face turned crimson, for at least a few months. It was especially difficult to do such menial tasks in front of doctors, whom in my previous social status I had considered equals, and by whom I was considered an equal, but who now for me were untouchable gods. (If you think this is rhetoric, try it in the Operating Room sometime!) Another irksome aspect was in regard to the nurses. One of the things I meant above when I spoke of the freedom and really living that I experienced in Rochester, was that I wanted (and eventually came to have) some sort of free relationships with girls, which in college I had always excused myself from on the poor rationalization that I was too busy. So, here I found myself thrust from nine years of male society into an Operating Room full of the most beautiful and sexy nurses ever conceived. It did not take me long to discover, however, that nurses regard orderlies as noblemen of yore regarded their valets, and that for it to be known that a nurse was going around with an orderly would certainly not be very complimentary for her, although from the point of view of the orderlies, conversely, it would be quite a conquest (and one of which all my comrades hopelessly dreamed). My response to this situation was just about as childlike as it could have been: I readily informed everyone (unasked) that I went to Harvard (sic) (no one ever heard of Haverford), that my real reason for being in Rochester was to take piano lessons at the Eastman School, etc. As I look back at it I cannot explain why I did not also wear my Phi Beta Kappa key on my pajama-like uniform. It would really have been funny, since the doctors never tired of showing off theirs. It would have shown them, the bums! Anyway, as you can well imagine, this behavior did not ingratiate me at all with anyone, for either they considered I was lying, stuck-up, or just plain crazy. I also tried to inform people of my C.O. status as an explanation for my temporary (sic) descent in the social scale, but this I found very difficult, for no one had ever heard of C.O.s, and I never had time to explain. I elaborated on my trip to Europe (an adventure that the nurses, who, after all my idolization, were only stupid, narrow-minded adolescents from small towns and farms, who could never dream of going to Europe or even to Syracuse or Buffalo); I sat down in my ‘free time’ and read intellectual books in the halls; I even practised my French pronunciation out loud.

All this had a certain effect on the other orderlies, who called me ‘professor’ and treated me with a kind indulgence, sometimes offering to take my calls if it looked that I were in the middle of a very important paragraph. But this wore off in time.

I am explaining all this because it will make you understand what happened afterward. At first, you see, despite the humiliation owing to mopping, and the lack of success with the nurses, I was pretty much enthralled by my new life. I was established in a rooming house, unknown to anyone in the town. I was writing short stories, taking examinations for Eastman School, buying books at all the sales, reading, and enjoying my anonymity immensely. (This too wore off very quickly, and I desperately sought company.) The first few weeks at work I remember distinctly I managed to read an entire novel each week on the job, not to mention what I accomplished after work. Pretty soft, I thought. But what was the next step? Just this: from being thankful that the job offered me time to read, I soon began to feel that I was in the hospital to read, and that when I was called to fetch a patient or mop the floor they were taking me away from my most important work. When it went this far I began to get in all sorts of trouble. Mostly with myself, for, like you, I developed a very vivid persecution feeling, and got grumpier and grumpier with everyone when they called me away from my studies. This made people get grumpier and grumpier with me, which in turn made me get grumpier and grumpier with them. And before long the administration was pretty damn sick of me. I didn’t do anything except precisely what I was told (they expected you to look for work when you were not busy), and what I did I did as quickly and unthoroughly as possible, especially cleaning, which I hate, and always will hate. If someone ordered one to do something in a particularly commanding tone (which people do in the OR simply from tension, not from meaning any harm) I didn’t do what they asked at all, and pretty soon this behavior led to an ‘interview’ with the high-ups, in which they actually threatened to fire me despite the fact that that would logically send me to prison (God knows how I would have acted there).

The happy part of the story is that this ‘interview’ completely and suddenly set me on my feet. Of course I wasn’t as bad as I have described above, because along with all I mention was the constant realization of my foolishness. The interview didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know; it merely knocked me into the knowledge that if I didn’t act better mighty soon, I really would be in a mess. (Not only with the hospital. By this time I had found and established myself in the Quaker Meeting, the FOR, the work camps, etc. Everyone thought I was a perfect little angel, as they probably think you are now! What a surprise they would have had if they had known everything that went on.)

After this, I got on much better, became friendly with my ‘superiors’ and even with some of the nurses, was promoted, and wound up in a very responsible job, taking part in the operations themselves. I did not lose all my feelings of uselessness, of course, but I found better ways of expressing them; and better still, I found ways to use my outside time in such a manner that I felt my life was worthwhile. In short, my reaction was just the opposite of yours: to drown my sorrow, as it were, I brought down upon myself such a load of activity that it still makes me marvel as I look back, how I did it all. (I might mention that this was all before Peter Gardner came to Rochester; and that after his arrival his pleasant company amply replaced some of the frenzied activity of the preceding time.) One thing, though, which is important, as I look back now, to say to you is that this frenzied activity included very little creative. I stopped writing short stories after the first month and did not resume until about the last month; my piano lessons were more mechanical than anything else, and that is precisely why I liked them; I found little time to read, and the only writing I did was of letters. Nevertheless, all the activity was intensely worthwhile, as I have said; and actually it was a damn good thing that for once I got away from bookish pursuits. I had no time to feel that I was the ‘unwilling slave of a senseless power-bureaucracy’; all I knew was that my day seemed to start after I left the hospital, and I did so much with which I was pleased in those after-hours that the hospital part of my time and life receded and became relatively unimportant. It was almost a rest, especially after my tensions with the administration ceased, and I did my job as it should be done. It was a rest because it became a very routine undemanding thing, with yet enough human interest (there are fascinating people at that hospital, as perhaps you are discovering) to keep it from being boring.

Some of the things I did on the outside: First of all, I cycled a total of ten miles every day, to and from the outer limits of Park Avenue, just before Brighton. Summer and winter, rain, snow, hail, and sleet found me peddling along with my sinister poncho and briefcase of books or music on the rack behind. Secondly, I studied piano at Eastman School for a solid year, and really practiced. As I said, the practice was beautiful for me, because it was more or less mechanical, something I could do very early in the morning, or immediately after work, when I was too tired to do anything else. I really think I played two or three hours a day, on the average. Many times I got up at four and five a.m. This was delicious. Play for two hours, breakfast, and cycle in the cool air before the traffic was in the streets. (I had to be at work at seven usually.) Other things: I played chamber music with some interns at Strong Memorial Hospital; I took active part in all the meetings, discussions, clothing collections, etc. of the Quaker Meeting and the Fellowship of Reconciliation; I traveled to Syracuse no less than nine times for various institutes; I visited Young Friends at Cornell; I got interested in work camps and helped organize them at Baden Street; I made speeches at churches, at the Divinity School, etc. to win recruits to the work camp; I led a social life with the boys where I was living (a cooperative student house); I had an affaire of three months with a red-headed nymphomaniac, which I enjoyed immensely; I sent away to Charles Atlas and did exercises, nude or in a G-string in front of my mirror, as he instructed; I built a chimney at my farm, visited NYC once or twice, sung Berlioz’s Requiem with the Rochester Oratorio Society, etc., etc. I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I always got up at 5:30 in order to be in time for work. It was a beautiful life. Even now I drool as I think of it, and as I indulge strengthlessly in the Greek habits of laziness and afternoon siestas.

Why do I write all this at such great length, and why does it appear that really I am boasting so? I don’t want to boast; I am merely trying to show how one person settled problems that you are facing. You see, like you, I early thought that my job at the hospital was both senseless and that it did not even make me feel that I was doing my duty as a C.O. Like you, I wondered if I had made a mistake in seeking a job away from people, away from the type of demands that PG’s work makes on him. But I decided eventually that I was at the hospital and there I would have to stay! I stopped worrying whether or not I was in the right place. Instead, I decided that I would make up for all the lacks of the hospital job by what I did outside. Thus, my work in the work camp, making pacifist speeches, helping in the institutes and other Quaker concerns gave me a feeling that there, not in the hospital, I was doing my C.O. service; and my piano lessons, reading, socializing, experiences with people, gave me a feeling that my life and talents were not being wasted by a power-bureaucracy. The hospital became absolutely the least important part of my two-year stay. And in the slight part that it did play, the job itself became infinitely subordinated to the fascinating people I met there, especially the other orderlies (not the other C.O.s, who were either crazy religious fanatics or complete fakes). Outside, too, I met many people I shall always remember: the Hortons, the Piersols, the McKennas, the Fairbanks, Norman Whitney, Alec and Dirk (unfortunately no longer there), Dr. Farlow (an absolutely superb surgeon and man), one or two nurses, etc. Not to mention later on the pleasure of being again with PG and the group that began to form—’Club 53’—in the last few months before I left. You come into a going little community and should have no difficulty in expanding your acquaintances, whereas it took me about six or eight months to start to get settled. You have beautiful opportunities to utilize your talents and your time. What I found is that you must do this in a non-solitary way: get in with some organizations, ‘causes,’ chamber-music groups. At least this was the immediate way of salvation for me. After I had my fill of them, I was able to resume some solitary and more personally creative activity, and did not mind being alone, nor fall into morbid states, as you seem to have done in your solitude, with nothing else to occupy your mind.

September 13, 1955

War and Peace, p. 68: ❡ Natasha only desisted when she had been told that there would be pineapple ice. Before the ices, champagne was served around. The band again struck up, the count and countess kissed, and the guests, leaving their seats, went up to “congratulate” the countess, and reached across the table to clink glasses with the count, with the children, and with one another. Again the footmen rushed about, chairs scraped, and in the same order in which they had entered but with redder faces, the guests returned to the drawing room and to the count’s study.

September 15, 1955

“Is it not better to die for an unknown and even a false ideal than to live for the vain realities of an utterly unpoetic existence?”—Sabatier, speaking of the Children’s Crusade of 1212.

September 17, 1955

I feel closer to a nervous breakdown at this moment than I have ever felt in my life. Chrysanthi continues to be absolutely indifferent to me. She has not spoken a word to me voluntarily in days and days; she answers all my attempts at conversation as briefly and non-interestedly as possible; she pushes me away when I try to kiss her. Yesterday I brought home a shawl. She thanked me by shaking my hand! She is sarcastic about everything and has no opinions, enthusiasms, or interests in anything. When I said I thought we should go to America, to her it didn’t matter one way or the other. I must do what you want was in substance her attitude; but if she honestly and enthusiastically desired my good and indicated this to me, it would have been splendid. Instead, she acts like the whole world is victimizing her, and I in particular. She says she wants to die. When I ask her to talk to me she says, “What is there to say?” When I asked which country’s exhibition she wanted to see today at the Fair, she said there was no reason she wanted to see any of them. When I suggested we walk by the sea, she said, “But what can we do there?” When I told her how miserable she was making me, and how only a simply pleasant “good morning” (she hasn’t said good morning or good night to me for weeks) would brighten my day, “Ah,” she replied in her habitual sarcastic tone, “I guess all men are like that!” “What?” I asked. “Selfish, always thinking of yourselves.” I tried to show her that she was being the more selfish, because, in becoming so melancholy, in eating herself away by constantly thinking of her own illness, she was evidently, or morbidly, and wrongly, absorbed entirely in herself. Matters go from bad to worse every day. I cannot stand living with the family (not because they’re bad people, they are not, but because I don’t feel married, or free. I am pestered, all my decisions are weighed and reweighed by everyone. And last night, when finally I got C. to cook me a meal (the second or third of our marriage!) her father came in and said she was too weak. I blew up, and the meal was ruined.

C. was better from the vomitings a few days, then relapsed. I spoke to Γκινάλης, who says such a history must come from psychological reasons. I still think C. is scared stiff of having a baby. She’s never once shown any enthusiasm at the prospect—only says how the women must always suffer. She’s also still scared stiff of the Lindsays, as evidenced by her complete refusal to go back to the School to collect her belongings there. God, what am I into now! I am so unhappy! And no one to turn to in this blasted foreign land! My parents are coming. How can I show them a broken marriage only two months old?

September 18, 1955

I talked with C. a long time and finally dragged out of her the complaints that I was not courteous towards her family (certainly true at times), that I preferred Socrates’ company to George’s, etc. As always, the tonic of talking, of airing grievances, did its work, and today C. is a new girl, just as sweet and darling toward me as ever before. And her illness seems to be improving also. We’ll certainly have rough spots in our marriage (for there is a real conflict of customs, especially regarding the significance of family life); but if we can continue to talk, everything will doubtlessly smooth out. I am extremely relieved.

I learned that, at least according to Chrysanthi, a Greek never tells his troubles to anyone outside the family, always presents a smiling front, even if his mother died two minutes before. Also, when a visitor leaves, you must accompany him to the door and not close it until he is out of hearing-distance, lest he think you’re in a hurry to get back to your normal life, and thus glad he’s gone. The great attention to what other people think.

September 19, 1955

It’s so funny to hear the children playing outside calling, “Come on, Xenophon,” “That’s good, Socrates.” And yesterday at the Fair the waiters called the water-and-bread boy Ἄγγελος—that is, “Messenger,” the true meaning of our “Angel.”

September 22, 1955

Τȍ μὲν ἃρα ἡδέως ζὴν ἀγαθόν, τȍ δ’ ἀηδῶς κακόν. —Πλάτων.

❡ When Princess Mary returned from her father, the little princess sat working and looked up with that curious expression of inner, happy calm peculiar to pregnant women. It was evident that her eyes did not see Princess Mary but were looking within . . . into herself . . . at something joyful and mysterious taking place within her. —War and Peace, book IV, chapter 7.

A touching moment from Tolstoy about what happens in a previously harmonious household when someone is sick:

❡ There were in the room a child’s cot, two boxes, two armchairs, a table, a child’s table, and the little chair on which Prince Andrew was sitting. The curtains were drawn, and a single candle was burning on the table, screened by a bound music book so that the light did not fall on the cot.

“My dear,” said Princess Mary, addressing her brother from beside the cot where she was standing, “better wait a bit . . . later . . .”

“Oh, leave off, you always talk nonsense and keep putting things off—and this is what comes of it!” said Prince Andrew in an exasperated whisper, evidently meaning to wound his sister.

“My dear, really . . . it’s better not to wake him . . . he’s asleep,” said the princess in a tone of entreaty.

Prince Andrew got up and went on tiptoe to the little bed, wineglass in hand.

“Perhaps we’d really better not wake him,” he said hesitating.

“As you please . . . really . . . I think so . . . but as you please,” said Princess Mary, evidently intimidated and confused that her opinion had prevailed. She drew her brother’s attention to the maid who was calling him in a whisper.

It was the second night that neither of them had slept, watching the boy, who was in a high fever. These last days, mistrusting their household doctor and expecting another for whom they had sent to town, they had been trying first one remedy and then another. Worn out by sleeplessness and anxiety they threw their burden of sorrow on one another and reproached and disputed with each other. . . .

“Well?” [Prince Andrew] asked.

“Still the same. Wait, for heaven’s sake. Karl Ivánich always says that sleep in more important than anything,” whispered Princess Mary with a sigh.

Prince Andrew went up to the child and felt him. He was burning hot.

“Confound you and your Karl Ivánich!” He took the glass with the drops and again went up to the cot.

“Andrew, don’t!” said Princess Mary.

But he scowled at her angrily though also with suffering in his eyes, and stopped glass in hand over the infant.

“But I wish it,” he said. “I beg you—give it him!”

Princess Mary shrugged her shoulders but took the glass submissively and calling the nurse began giving the medicine. The child screamed hoarsely. Prince Andrew winced and, clutching his head, went out and sat down on a sofa in the next room.

September 28, 1955

Athens

What a glory is the Acropolis, especially after the crummy ruins in Rome. I cannot say how I felt, by seeing the buildings, all the amazing uncanny greatness of the men and the civilization that built them. And the theater below, with its carvings of the muses, its reserved seats, the sculptures all-abounding—what joy to see such art! How can we say or analyze what qualities make the Parthenon, for instance, so perfect: whence comes its lightness, buoyancy, the absolute joyfulness of the building? Why is the art museum in Philadelphia, for instance, so heavy and disgusting! Oh, the Acropolis is unbelievable; it’s a great Gothic cathedral, only better in its grandeur and the resistance with which the monuments have stood and stood since 437 or so B.C. How can the mind understand that date: 437 B.C.? The time is too great!

Met Dad and Mom, who arrived looking well, from Rome. They made all kinds of fuss (rather Dad only) about the hotel and everything else, clinging to every last shred of American comfort rather than wishing to abandon themselves really to see Greece—to soil their feet or eyes. After the poverty I’ve seen here, it is grinding to see 200+ drachmas spent for a meal, and a lousy one too, in this hotel, the King George, to which we transferred. But the room of course is nicer. I like my comforts too, but one must be reasonable, and a lot more sensitive to want than I find in my father at the present time.

Made the rounds of the offices to see about my work-permit and was told they would not issue one for teaching in the Salonika Institute, though they would if I were teaching in the one here in Athens. I think, and parents agree, that the very best thing is to come home. We’ll simply have to face the break with C.’s family, and, judging from the other troubles we’ve been having, the sooner the better. Ἔτσι εἶναι.

I’m enjoying my knowledge, which is coming in very handy here, and impressing my parents no end.

September 29, 1955

Athens

Athens, Athens. Τὶ ὡραῖα πόλις! Today we visited the Theater of Dionysus with its carved chairs and sculptures, and the magnificent column done with the masks of the dramatic art. It’s amazing to see the names of the various priests carved in their special chairs, as though it were done yesterday. Lovely!

Near the Tower of the Winds we saw a Roman bath, with privies surrounding it. Still see places to put feet while squatting. There was a baby’s bath that Dad sat in, and we photographed. The Theseum is a remarkably well preserved monument where we clearly saw how the architects made the pavement slightly convex so as to compensate for the optical illusion that would make a straight pavement seem concave. Well-preserved friezes. The excavations of the Agora lay below. The guide pointed out where Plato and Socrates talked together, and verily, tears came to my eyes. I never thought “sight-seeing” could be as compelling as it has been here for me in Athens.

The worst thing about growing up is that it seems the older I get the less possible it is for ideals to play a part in life—in making a living, for instance. They seem remoter and remoter from all practical considerations. When I view the lives of almost all the people I know and see around me, their lives really do not seem worth living: a veritable idiotic tale, with the only tangible rationale the production of children who will also have a glorious youth and then grow up to discover the same idiotic tale as their parents and all generations. Only fleeting moments contradict this sour picture: moments of beauty, of great music, of the drama we saw tonight (Euripides’ Hecuba), done in the ancient outdoor theater. But then back to stupidity, caviling, false values such as displayed by my parents (who think that I have false values). I am so disgusted with their conspicuous wealth. I have seen such poverty in Greece, such hopelessness, that to throw away money for one’s vanity and comfort is an abomination. I want to give every taxi driver, every beggar, urchin, peddler and down-and-out one hundred drachmas, which we throw away on a meal here without thinking twice. But when I wanted to give our guide today the same, as I was in a flush of excitement over the way he opened up every secret for us, my father was furious. To sacrifice the price of an extravagant meal for the revelation of the greatness that was ancient Greece is certainly no great hardship.

I only see now C.’s point of view, and why she was so angry with me, even though the ‘comforts’ I demanded were infinitesimal compared to my parents’ almost senile behavior here. I was wrong—wrong—thinking only of myself, hoarding my money, concerned that I eat before I was concerned for the others or even for my poor sick dear wife who’s as good as gold. Yes, I see it all now.

And my father erupted again on all my sins—how I wasted all my time, married out of the faith and out of nationality. Accused me of only worrying about the Yannakoses’ suffering, and not their own. We visited Ben Jacob, an Israeli here in the legation, who had some other company, an Israeli couple and a Greek Jewish couple, very nice people, and dad erupted about how nice Jews could be and why did I have to marry into stupid, uncultured Yiannakoses, because we could sit and feel right at home discussing such and such (the usual: what happened to me or you or him with the Paris taxicab drivers; food; clothes), whereas what would they (my parents) have in common with the Yiannakoses, which is true: nothing. And yet the Y’s, for all their simplicity and Κυρία’s illiteracy, have so much better characters; they have a nobility—THEY BELONG TO THE HUMAN RACE—than those who get upset at a hotel room because it isn’t deluxe! My father is neurotic, bigoted, supersensitive, and I think senile. Only nice by mail.

On the other hand, I’ve got to prove to myself that I’m not the same. I’m so completely convinced that whatever I’ll do I’ll do badly. I have none of that delicious confidence, that “conquer the world” brashness that leads to success. And I do have problems with my marriage. There are awful barriers of custom to overleap. Even C. herself once said (during the melancholy), “What can I talk to you about? What have we got in common? You like only books, and I’m practical, uneducated.” Is it true? What can we do? But isn’t there some basic human stuff more important than practicality or intellectuality? Isn’t the life we face the same, no matter how we delude ourselves about our “interests”? Can’t two people, facing this life together, find comradeship? Πρέπει.

October 5, 1955

Stories. Something on our visit to Athens. Throwing money around with the recognition also of biting poverty in Greece. The beggars, peddlers. Anger at parents and mad desire to give all to a peddler. Parents don’t think they’re extravagant. Just want to live as they always lived.

Story also on meeting of the two families. Would be nice episode in a novel. The stilted conversation. My father’s superciliousness, trepidation. Yiannakoses’ sincerity: “Now we know better the kind of environment our daughter is going into, and we like it; we’re more at ease about her leaving.” Etc.

All well here. Parents left Monday. Father neurotic, miserable, but very pleasant in his rational moments. What a difference between the way he really is and the way his patients and even his friends and relatives know him. Parents keep complaining that I’m too dependent on them, but keep offering me more money, as if trying to keep me dependent, or bribing my love. I told them my policy over three years has been never to ask for a penny, though I’ve never refused anything that was offered. Got another $500 on Monday, making a grand total of $1400 so far I’ve hauled in as gifts because of my marriage, and more to come in kind. Oh, forgot $100 from Dimitrios. Wow! It’s like collecting a dowry. Well, in Athens I felt it was infinitely better to be poor. If I were smart, I’d refuse all this money or give it all away. Would I were Saint Francis!

October 8, 1955

❡Thus I began to study the lives and beliefs of the people, and the more I studied the more sure I became that a true faith was among them, that their faith was for them a necessary thing, and alone gave them a meaning in life and a possibility of living. In direct opposition to what I saw in our circle—where life without faith in religion was possible and where not one in a thousand claimed to be a believer—amongst the people there was not a single unbeliever amongst a thousand. In direct opposition to what I saw in our circle—where a whole life is spent in idleness, amusement and dissatisfaction with life—I saw amongst the people whole lives passed in heavy labour and unprotesting content. In direct opposition to what I saw in our circle—men resisting and angry with the hardships and sufferings of their fate—the people unhesitatingly and unresistingly accept illness and sorrow, in the quiet and firm belief that all these must be and could not be otherwise, and that all was for the best. In contradiction to the theory that the less learned we are the less we understand the meaning of life, and see in our sufferings and death but an evil joke, these men of the people live, suffer, and draw near to death in quiet confidence and oftenest with joy. In contradiction to the fact that an easy death, without terror or despair, is a rare exception in our class, a death which is uneasy, rebellious and sorrowful is among the people the rarest exception of all.

These people, lacking all that for us makes the only good in life, and experiencing at the same time the highest happiness, form the great majority of mankind. I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the past and present masses of humanity, and I saw that not two, or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these men infinitely divided by manners, powers of mind, education and position, all alike in opposition to my ignorance, were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly laboured, endured hardship and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this not a vain but a good thing. —Tolstoy.

❡ We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of injuries and love of our neighbors, the law in honor of which we have built in Moscow forty times forty churches—but yesterday a deserter was knouted to death and a minister of that same law of love and forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a cross to kiss before his execution. —War and Peace, p. 594.

❡ Sometimes [Pierre] remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when entrenched under the enemy’s fire, if they had nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To Pierre all men seemed like these soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in government affairs. “Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same—only to save oneself from it as best one can,” thought Pierre. “Only not to see it, that dreadful it!”—War and Peace, p. 595.

October 9, 1955

Chrysanthi had a dream about our prospective apartment in Sunnyside, that when we came to occupy it it was full of gypsies, very dirty, with little boys running around barefooted, dressed in rags. There was a big stove in the living room, and only one very weak bulb for light. The stairs were slanted down so it was hard not to slide off each step as one mounted or descended. The rooms were fantastically big, and the kitchen was “millions away” from the living room. Strange dream.

October 10, 1955

The insect beating itself madly against the window pane that it thinks free exit to outside, while just below the other part of the window is open. Pure luck decides whether he’ll exhaust himself at the pane, or accidently fly out through the opening.

October 13, 1955

What would be more timely now than a popular presentation of the history of the doctrine of self-determination of peoples. Couldn’t I plant myself in the New York Public Library and do something on this?

October 15, 1955

Nice evening last night στȍ τῆς Βούλης. Lindsays, Margaret Backhaus (chief, European section of Friends Service Council), Nora (her secretary), a Mrs. Δημητριάδου, were also there. Margaret and Nora both immense ungainly eccentric-seeming Englishwomen, typically Quaker, the kind who seem most at home in the salon of the duchess but whose ‘advanced ideas’ wouldn’t make them flinch at a donkey-ride, rugged living, etc. Charles ‘lectured’ us about Yugoslavia, mainly whether or not the people were free to go to church, as if that were the most important thing to consider; and Margaret told a little about her trip to Russia in 1951 (with Kathleen Lonsdale and Paul Cadbury & Co.). Chrysanthi was very quiet, scared, and at one point she said she wanted to go home. Fortunately the Anglo Saxons left early. Immediately thereupon a complete change came over us all. We sighed. Κυρία Δημητριάδου said she didn’t like Lindsay, and we all laughed, congratulating her on her perceptiveness. Chrysanthi brightened into animated bavardage. We all had a hell of a good time, with typical Greek vivacity. What pleased me most was that I did not seem to dampen things as had the other foreigners. Bravo, Πέτρος.

From Maugham, “A Friend in Need”:

❡ For thirty years now I have been studying my fellow men. I do not know very much about them. I should certainly hesitate to engage a servant on his face, and yet I suppose it is on the face for the most part we judge the persons we meet. We draw our conclusions from the shape of the jaw, the look in the eyes, the contour of the mouth. I wonder if we are more often right than wrong. Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make them self-contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet self-contradictory is what most of us are. We are a haphazard bundle of inconsistent qualities. I shrug my shoulders when people tell me that their first impressions of a person are always right. I think they must have small insight or great vanity. For my own part I find that the longer I know people the more they puzzle me: my oldest friends are just those of whom I can say that I don’t know the first thing about them.

October 21, 1955

War and Peace, book IX, chapter 16 has a splendid section on the use and frunction or doctors, which expresses magnificently exactly what happened with C.’s illness, especially that visit of Γκινάλης with the ‘psychiatrist’ when C. was depressed, a visit that accomplished nothing—only reassured me and somehow helped relieve the tension.

October 24, 1955

❡ “It’s a crime that today’s art-popes make the masses believe that just because some snobs collect their works they all have to admire and imitate them. For me, the only place for the contemporary wire sculptures is in the night clubs, and abstract paintings should be on the borders of table cloths. . . . It is the tragedy of our time that most people have lost the instinct to recognize the danger of living in constant disregard to their God-given individualities. . . . Today’s man not only thinks in clichés, he also sees only in clichés. . . . As for me)—famous? I’m not famous. Only Picasso and Coca-Cola are famous. I’m just an educator who tries to be his own best pupil.”—Oskar Kokoschka.

Oedipus:

Let all come out,

However vile! However base it be,

I must unlock the secret of my birth.

The woman, with more than woman’s pride, is shamed

By my low origin. I am the child of Fortune,

The giver of good, and I shall not be shamed.

She is my mother; my sisters are the Seasons;

My rising and my falling march with theirs.

Born thus, I ask to be no other man

Than that I am, and will know who I am.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chorus: All generations of moral man add up to nothing!

Show me the man whose happiness was anything more than illusion

Followed by disillusion.

Here is the instance, here is Oedipus, here is the reason

Why I will call no mortal creature happy.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Oedipus: O dark intolerable inescapable night

That has no day!

Cloud that no air can take away!

O and again

That piercing pain,

Torture in the flesh and in the soul’s dark memory.

Chorus: It must be so; such suffering must needs be born Twice; once in the body and once in the soul.

October 29, 1955

“To be born here and in a mortal body is to begin to be sick.”—Saint Augustine.

❡ “But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards. —They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the numbers), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?” exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. “Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. . . . Ah, well, it’s not for long!” he added. —War and Peace, book X, chapter 15.

November 3, 1955

❡ “To endure war is the most difficult subordination of man’s freedom to the law of God,” the voice had said. “Simplicity is the submission to the will of God; you cannot escape from Him. And they [the peasant-soldiers] are simple. They do not talk, but act. The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden. Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, many would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing [Pierre went on thinking, or hearing, in his dream] is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. To unite all?” he asked himself. “No, not to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but harness all these thoughts together is what we need! Yes, one must harness them, must harness them!” he repeated to himself with inward rapture, feeling that these words and they alone expressed what he wanted to say and solved the question that tormented him.

“Yes, one must harness, it is time to harness.”

“Time to harness, time to harness, Your Excellency! Your Excellency!” some voice was repeating. “We must harness, it is time to harness . . .” It was the voice of the groom, trying to wake him. —War and Peace, book XI, chap. 6.

November 5, 1955

I received a letter from American Express in Paris saying they could reserve a hotel room for us for Monday and Tuesday, December 26th and 27th. I told C. and asked if perhaps we shouldn’t leave on Friday, so as to arrive the 25th. I wanted to write back and to know definitely. She was a little strange. Instead of looking up as she usually does, she continued her work and spoke in a kind of undertone, her head lowered. She said George would probably only be able to get away Friday night so we’d better leave Saturday. I was a little disappointed at losing the extra day in Paris, but I tried not show this, and saying “OK” went in to write to American Express. C. however could no longer hold back her tears. Trying to smile at me through them, she came into our room and quietly sobbed for a long time. We haven’t spoken any more about the incident, but it proved to me that her customary cheerfulness now as the departure time grows near (six weeks) is a mask that she holds up, only with difficulty. What a battle she’s making! She’s a treasure. And what a difficult thing this departure will be, whether she manages to keep up the mask or no.

November 7, 1955

I wonder if anyone has ever done a historical novel about Socrates: his life, philosophy, and death. It would also make a beautiful play.

November 14, 1955

Ὁ Δημήτριος ἔγραψε ἕνα γράμμα νὰ ἀπαντήσῃ σ’ ἐκεῖνο ποὺ πῆρε ἀπὸ τοὺς γονεῖς μου. Ἤθελε αὐτὸς νὰ τὸ μεταφράσω ἐγὼ ἀμέσως καὶ ἄρχισα. Χτύπησε ὅμως τὸ κουδούνι καὶ μπῆκε ἡ Αλίκη γιὰ νὰ ἐπισκεφθῇ αὐτὴ μὲ τὴ Χρυσάνθη. Κάθισε στὸ ἴδιο τὸ δωμάτιο ποὺ ἤμουν μὲ τὸν Δημήτριο, ἄφου ἦταν θερμάστρα ἐκεῖ. Κουβέντιασαν αὐτοὶ καὶ ἡ μητέρα. Ἀλλὰ μεῖς ποὺ ἠθέλαμε νὰ μεταφράσουμε δὲν ἀκούσαμε τίποτεοὔτε οἱ ἄλλοι. «Πηγαίνετε στὸ ἄλλο τὸ δωμάτιο» εἶπε ἡ Χρυσάνθη. «Ὄχι, σεῖς πηγαίνετε» εἶπα.

Ποῦ νὰ πᾶμε, ποῦ δὲν ἔχει ζέστα;

Ξέρω ἔγώ; Πᾶτε στὸ σπίτι τῆς Ἀλίκης.

Τότε γύρισα στὴ δουλειά μου καὴ μὲ ἀρκετὲς δυσκολίες τελειώσαμε τὴ μετάφραση. Ὕστερα ἡ Ἀλίκη ἔφυγε.

Γιατί, εἶπε ἡ μητέρα στὸν ἄντρα της, ἐκάνατε αὐτὸ τὸ μυστικὸ πράγμα μας μπροστὸ ἀπὸ τὸ κορίτσι; Τώρα ὅλη ἡ Θεσσαλονίκη θὰ ξέρῃ.

Δὲν ἀπαντήσαμε, οὔτε ἐκεῖνος οὔτε ἐγώ.

Ἡ Χρυσάνθη ἀγρίεψε. «Μιὰ φορά» εἶπε «ἕχω φιλινάδα, μιὰ φορὰ στὴν ζωήν μου καὶ λέτε να πᾶμε σπίτι της ! Διατί, ἐπίσης, δὲν μπορούσατε νὰ πᾶτε σεῖς στὸ ἄλλο τὸ δωμάτιο νὰ μὴ ἀκούῃ αὐτὴ ὅλα ἀπὸ τὶς οἰκογέννιές μας; Μεγάλο κακὸ ἐκάνατε, ἕνα μεγάλο κακό.

Σύμφωνη ! Ἐγὼ συμφώνησα μὲ τὴν γυναῖκα μου. Ἀλλὰ ἦταν πολὺ δύσκολο νὰ πῶ «μὲ συγχωρεῖς σὲ παρακαλῶ». Ἕτσι δὲν εἶπα τίποτε, οὕτε ὁ Δημήτριος. Καὶ φάγαμε ὅλοι μὲ λυπημένη ἡσυχία.

November 17, 1955

Dictionary of idioms for foreigners. It certainly could be used here in Greece. I wonder if anything like this has been done.

November 18, 1955

❡ While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth—that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores—his footgear long since having fallen to pieces. He discovered that when he had married his wife—of his own free will as it had seemed to him—he had been no more free than now when they locked him up at night in a stable. —War and Peace, book XIV, chapter 3.

❡ Pierre’s insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed “good qualities” in people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them. —book XV, chap. 5.

❡ He could not see an aim, for he now had faith—not faith in any kind of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity he had learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in Karatáev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him; when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes. —book XV, chapter 5.

November 21, 1955

Dimitrios explained a little about Byzantine music. Instead of do, re, mi, they have πᾶ, βοῦ, γᾶ, δῆ, κέ, ζῶ, νῆ, πᾶ.

Some notation symbols:

November 24, 1955

❡ All Nicholas did was fruitful—probably just because he refused to allow himself to think that he was doing good to others for virtue’s sake. —War and Peace, 1st epilogue, chapter 2.

Ἀπόψε, κατά τη διάρκεια πού ἐπήγαινα κάτω στήν πόλιν, εἴδα σέ ἕνα πάρκο τόν θείον τῆς Χρυσάνθης. Ἤταν μόνος, χωρίς οὔτε ἕνα πράγμα στό χέρι. Μήπως ἐσκέφθηκε γιά τήν κόρη του ἤ γιά τή γυναίκα πού εἴχε. Μήπως ἐσκέφθηκε πώς χάθηκε ἡ κόρη στήν μεγάλην πόλιν, πού τά κορίτσια θέλουν μόνον καλά ρούχα νά δείξονται στάν κόσμο· ἀλλά δέν καταλαβαίνουν πώς πρέπει νά ἐργάζονται γιά νά πάρουν χρήματα γιά νά ἀγοράσουν πράγματα. Τό κορίτσι του δέν μπορεῖ νά διαλέξει δουλειά. Μιά μέρα διαλέγει αὐτό, τήν ἄλλη μέρα διαλέγει ἐκείνο. Ἀλλά πάντοτε θέλει διασκέδασιν. Τί νά κάμῃ ὁ πατέρας ὁ καημένος; Νά καθίσῃ στό πάρκο, τή νύχτα, κάι να κοιτάζῃ τά δέντρα!

November 28, 1955

What a recognition scene: Socrates’s father, thinking that by going to America Socrates will be separated from Paula and forget her, discovered at the last minute that Paula is going too!

November 29, 1955

Greek home-remedy for clearing out stuffed nose: inhalation of fumes resulting from pouring a little sugar over hot coals.

December 8, 1955

Εὐρήκα ! We found the perfect name for my farm: the name of Chrysanthi’s village: Τερπνή. It has the significance of being her birthplace and also, the translation being “pleasant, agreeable,” what could be better?—ἡ τέρψις, τέρπω, τερπνός. We’ll write it TERPNY or TERPNI.

December 18, 1955

❡ The spring was rather late. During the last week in Lent the weather was still clear and frosty. It thawed during the day, but at night there were seven degrees of frost, and the ground was so hard that the carts could still drive over the fields. At Easter there was snow, but a day or two later a warm wind arose, the sky became overcast with clouds, and for three days and three nights a gentle rain came down. On Thursday the wind dropped and a thick grey mist overspread the earth as if to conceal the mysteries that nature was preparing. The ice was melting everywhere, the streams were overflowing with running water. On the evening of the Sunday after Easter, the mist lifted, the clouds dispersed themselves, and the spring appeared in all its glory. On the following morning the remaining ice disappeared in the hot rays of the sun, and the air seemed to tremble with the vapours rising out of the damp, warm earth. Green blades of grass began to show themselves, the buds swelled on the currant-bushes, the hazel-trees, and the birches, and around their branches a swarm of bees were humming. Invisible larks sent forth their songs of joy over the green fields, the peewit seemed to mourn for their marshes, submerged by stormy waters, the cranes and wild geese flew high in the air with their calls of spring. The cattle lowed as they were turned out of their stalls, the young lambs gamboled about near their mothers, children played about on the paths, covering them with the footprints of their bare feet, the merry voices of women bleaching their linen could be heard at the pond, from all sides resounded the hammering of peasants repairing their ploughs and harrows. Spring had really come. —Anna Karenina, part 2, chapter 12.

December 19, 1955

George and Dionysus are friends since childhood. Each has a sister. George’s sister is pretty and has an ample number of suitors; Dionysus’s is ugly—therefore becomes educated, takes a university degree to become a gymnasium teacher—but is always looking for a husband. Dionysus suddenly writes to George suggesting that George marry his sister. George has a conflict between offending his friend or marrying someone he doesn’t love. Finally he writes that he looks on Dionysus’s sister as his own sister, not someone he could marry. Dionysus writes back angrily, that he honored George by the offer and George offended him. George is very sorry to have strained relations with this friend of so many years. But he is convinced that Dionysus acted badly, should never have offered his sister in the first place, and afterward should have accepted George’s decision. No contact between the friends. They avoid each other. Dionysus is engaged (he told George in the same letter in which he offered his sister). One day George sees Dionysus’s financée and Dionysus passing on the street. They either don’t see him or snub him. He doesn’t call Dionysus. Later on the same day he meets Dionysus’s sister. Does she know of Dionysus’s proposition and George’s refusal? She doesn’t show it; pleasantly announces that Dionysus is engaged. George behaves as though he doesn’t know, lest she suspect letters. George writes congratulations to Dionysus and suggests that they have a rendezvous, to achieve a reconciliation.

Went to the Quaker school to say farewell to Lindsays. The three children were playing and turning somersaults, imitating each other. Angus asked C. how she knew she had a baby, then put his ear to her abdomen and said, “Ah, I hear it, I hear it!” Languages all mixed together. The staff at the school all complain terribly about Lindsay, but smile to his face.

1956

January–December

4701 43rd Ave., Long Island City, NY

January 15, 1956

New York

Dreamed about two children, a boy and a girl, who are told by a teacher that they must kill themselves. All very matter of fact. They are about to do so at the appointed time, but can’t. Later they are in the principal’s office for some reason and the teacher is too. They try to explain to the principal what the teacher told them to do, but of course it seems ridiculous. The principal doesn’t believe them. Nothing else.

Must, must start working again. This idleness is preposterous.

January 20, 1956

C.’s story of the mouse (rat?) biting the baby at the Quaker school in Greece.

Perfect squelch: the little Italian at the Greek grocery who pitied his dad because he hadn’t learned to speak English yet.

February 12, 1956

The family. C.’s comment that “friends” can never be counted on. Only family really are there to help. The disintegration of family in America, and chez Bien. Contrast with Yiannakoses. Over-protectiveness vs. over-independence.

Two high school seniors run away on the night of the prom, planning to elope. While waiting for the J.P. they decide they’re acting foolishly and return home to their frightened parents, who of course have called the police, etc. The parents, instead of praising the children for being so mature to change their minds at the last minute, berate them.

February 17, 1956

My father: picture of the degeneration of a man, sans resources, sans faith. Sits morbidly at home watching the stupidest television. A respectable alcoholism. The rise from poverty, radicalism, family troubles, earning power, money-madness, alienation from me, nervous breakdown, fetishlike faith in the psychiatrist, vestiges of stale radicalism, clinging to the psychiatric illusion of cure, life slipping by, the only pleasure in spending money at a bargain.

Theme of being too late. I wanted to help a beggar at Columbia the other day by buying some pencils from him, but passed him by on my way to lunch and thought I’d get them afterwards. But while I was eating I could see him walk sadly away.

Conrad: marvelous. Donne: ditto. Tennyson: stinks (just read “Maud”).

February 24, 1956

The party scenes with English and Indians in E. M. Foster’s Passage to India bring to mind the dinner at Vouli’s, with Margaret Backhaus and Norah and the Lindsays, and how relieved we all felt when they had gone (I being considered Greek enough, I suppose, not to matter). Ἐνδιαφέρομαι πάρα πολύ εἰς τέτοια πράγματα διά τῆς Ἑλλάδας. Νομίζω τώρα πώς ἄν καμιά φορά θά γράψω κάτι πού ἀξίζει, θά εἶναι γιά τήν Ἑλλάδα. Ἐκείνη εἶναι ὅ,τι θέλω, νά ἔχω ἕνα θέμα παράξενο. Ἄν δέν ἦμουν τόσο τεμπέλης καί τόσο ἀδύνατος!

Νά μή ξεχάσω ἐπίσης τό ταξίδι στό χωριό τῆς Λόλας ποῦ εἴδαμε ἐκεινο τό ὡραῖο σπίτι τοῦ γεωργού· πῶς τό ἔκτισε μετά χρόνια· πῶς ἦταν τόσο καθαρό μέσα· καί τό ἀντίθετο ἀπό τά ἄλλα σπίτια γύρω-γύρω. Βλέπω στόν νοῦ μου τώρα τό πρόσωπο τοῦ ἀφεντικοῦ πού ἦλθε ἀπό τά χωράφια του—αὐτό τό πρόσωπο πού ἦταν ἡ γῆς καί όλα τά καλά πού ἔρχονται ἀπό τή γῆ.

February 26, 1956

The court scene in Forster is superb. Θαῦμα! Possibilities of doing Lindsay scene like it: the interview at the school, which was a kind of court with imperial elements ranged against the disorder of love.

❡ “The victoria was safe in a quiet side lane, but there were no horses, for the sais, not expecting the trial would end so abruptly, had led them away to visit a friend.” The whole oriental mentality: compare with Greece—the shamefulness of my outrages at the station when they wanted to give us baggage things the next day, or the bank receipt. Mr. Yiannakos’s Buddha-like ability to wait! Marvelous Mr. Yiannakos! Was there ever such a splendid person?! The concepts of time are antipodal in East and West.

March 2, 1956

Ὀνόματα: Diana, Eliza, Leandros, David.

❡ The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. —Forster, Howards End, p. 149.

Useful image in Aspects of the Novel, p. 381: ❡ As women bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too. Quite wrong. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver—in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel’s success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.

—I find Howards End very tiring and even boring reading, yet the characters are real, and the thing that strikes me most is the Conradian idea of the illusion under which we must live if we are not to go insane: the Wilcoxes have their illusion, the Schlegels do not. I wonder about the writer himself.

March 4, 1956

Today, although we just heard a fiery concert by Friedrich Gulda, I am in one of those depressed moods and angry at Chrysanthi so that I want neither to see her nor speak to her. She, of course, has done nothing wrong, but I see myself accusing her in my mind of many errors of omission: her lack of industry in learning English, her failure today to give me a decent meal, or hardly even a meal at all. I want to talk to her in a technical way about music, art; but I can’t. Our exchanges of conversation get so stereotyped, so fixed; and seem to contract down into fewer and fewer. I know she misses her family very much. It’s an awful thing for her to be so far away, especially now that she’ll have the baby. And yet what am I to do, what am I to do! Oh, God, I want so much to write, and I’ve stopped. Damn, damn, damn!

March 5, 1956

Recurrent theme of Forster: ❡ “. . . and soon the glass shade had fallen that cuts of married couples from the world.

Last evening spent with a lovely couple: Malcolm and Betty MacKinnon. I certainly am snooty and snobby. I assumed, because he was working in an insurance company as an actuary that he’d be dull and “uneducated,” only to find that he and his wife are extremely well read, especially in the theater, and understand a great deal more about Pirandello and Chekhov (to mention only two) than I do. What is wrong with me anyway?

Last night C. and I had one of those spells of not talking to each other, the first disagreeableness since we came back from Greece, I think. It’s terrible, how weak I am. All the while I kept consciously telling myself “This is stupid, horrible, uncalled-for,” but couldn’t bring myself to make overtures of reconciliation. Happily our visit to the MacKinnons helped, and after it we were in a better mood. I think there is something awfully sadistic in me: I seem to enjoy hurting those nearest me, as if it proved somehow my superiority. Ugh! Oh for an illusion to get lost in!

Forster, p. 261: ❡ London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!”

March 6, 1956

❡ . . . one of the illusions attached to love is that it will be permanent. Not has been—will be. All history, all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has passed from love to marriage. All this we know, yet we cannot bear to apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable for ever and ever. Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and the novelists have seized upon this. They usually end their books with marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, pp. 86–7.

March 12, 1956

The crazy girl living in the cave in Siderokastron.

March 13, 1956

How the telephone company cut down the largest and most beautiful elm at Terpni.

March 16, 1956

Peroration to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: ❡ I see these two movements of the human mind: the great tedious onrush known as history, and a shy crablike sideways movement. Both movements have been neglected in these lectures: history because it only carries people on, it is just a train full of passengers; and the crablike movement because it is too slow and cautious to be visible over our tiny period of two hundred years. . . . If we had the power or license to take a wider view, and survey all human and pre-human activity, we might not conclude like this; the crablike movement, the shiftings of the passengers, might be visible, and the phrase “the development of the novel” might cease to be a pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important, because it implied the development of humanity.

March 17, 1956

A typical passage in V. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (p. 108): ❡ . . . But then, Mrs. Ramsay, though instantly taking his side against all the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought, intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh mole-hills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down to look, a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.

At that moment, he said, “Very fine,” to please her, and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire them, or even realize that they were there. It was only to please her. . . . Ah, but was that not Lily Briscoe strolling along with William Bankes? She focused her short-sighted eyes upon the backs of a retreating couple. Yes, indeed it was. Did that not mean that they would marry? Yes, it must! What an admirable idea! They must marry! . . .

He had been to Amsterdam, Mr. Bankes was saying as he strolled across the lawn with Lily Briscoe. . . .

They turned and saw the Ramseys. So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.

❡ Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh—that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation?

Appropriate poem by Yeats:

A CRADLE SONG

The angels are stooping

Above your bed;

They weary of trooping

With the whimpering dead.

God’s laughing in Heaven

To see you so good;

The Shining Seven

Are gay with His mood.

I kiss you and kiss you,

My pigeon my own;

Ah how I shall miss you

When you have grown.

March 18, 1956

Visit last night from John Davison. We talked about Gregory. I gave him my novel and several stories to read.

Walter Pater, in conclusion to his “Renaissance”: ❡ To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the fashion of modern thought. . . . The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? (This, says Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle is a good statement of the symbolist philosophy, also followed by the early Yeats.)

March 20, 1956

❡ . . . how small a fragment of our nature can be brought to perfect expression, nor that even but with great toil, in a much divided civilization.” (Yeats)

❡ Nor did I understand as yet how little that Unity [of Being], however wisely sought, is possible without a Unity of Culture in class or people that is no longer possible at all. (Yeats)

March 21, 1956

How people say the same thing six times over. The English woman in the carriage shop: “It’s waterproof, no it won’t wear out.”

❡ So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the waste-paper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure? —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 189ff.

❡ a thin sickle of moon like the heel print of a boot in wet sand. —Faulkner

❡ This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lake Shore Drive; where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals; where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jews, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares. . . . No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought. The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge. —Faulkner, “Delta Autumn.”

Fine performance of Uncle Vanya at 4th Street Theatre. I felt the compelling truthfulness of great art.

The visit to Tom Wilson’s uncle in Connecticut. Ex-Danish sailor, marriage to intellectual class; horror of relatives; his philosophy; the house in confusion; son and daughter; the return of daughter from New York; art student. Lack of greeting. Everyone in his own world. Outbursts from father. Dog-dirt on floor. The Model A; sinking oil wells, etc.

Chrysanthi and I visit Cambridge. Elizabeth arranging with the Egyptian brothers for tea for us. We come next day. They furious. Misunderstandings all around. King’s College; the choir. Necking couples on the lawn near the river. Idyllic peace.

March 24, 1956

C.’s village relatives. The woman dressed in black. Lame son. Operation. She sleeps in clinic on floor beside him.

George’s troubles over letter from friend re: marriage with latter’s sister. Meeting the girl at a café accidentally, later, after refusal. Rupture with friend. Friend’s fiancée. Do perhaps in subjective technique.

Steve Baran came today while C. was in labor. His work as counselor for “emotionally retarded” kids.

March 25, 1956, Sunday

Leander Thomas born, 7 lb. 7 oz., just before 6 p.m., at Boulevard Hospital. Dr. William Filler, obstetrician. Chrysanthi fine; baby normal.

March 31, 1956

Gleanings from Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

❡ Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflexion of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-colored and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

❡ . . . and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shriveled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms.

❡ Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

❡ To speak of [beauty] and to try to understand [its] nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and color which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.

❡ Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. . . . The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.

❡ To him she would unveil her soul’s shy nakedness, to one who was but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than to him, a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

❡—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

❡ I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

❡ Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 2, 1956

Good book title: “A bridge is across a river.” (Ulysses, p. 26.)

April 13, 1956

“What is nature? An exact, encyclopaedic index, or plan, of our spirit.” —Novalis.

❡ L’homme a tire tout ce qui le fait homme,

des défectuosités de son système.

L’insuffisance d’adaptation, les troubles de son

accommodation, l’obligation de subir

ce qu’il a appelé irrationnel. . . .

Toute émotion, tout sentiment est une

marque de défaut de construction

ou d’adaptation. . . .

—Paul Valéry

❡ Dans une mort d’insecte on voit tous les désastres, Un rond d’azur suffit pour voir passer les astres.

—Rostand, Chantecler

April 19, 1956

Finished Ulysses!

“Athene” Magazine will publish my story, “The Scholarship.” No payment.

April 21, 1956

“He [Joyce] did not consider Jesus Christ a perfect man.

“‘He was a bachelor,’ said Joyce, ‘and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.’”—Reported by Frank Budgen, in James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses.

April 27, 1956

Conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance:

❡ Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we press most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? . . . To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours and curious odours, or the work of the artist’s hand, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their way, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

April 30, 1956

Reading T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion puts me in mind of doing a novel using the scene of our gathered family when I returned from college that time when dad had had his nervous breakdown, and everyone was there, though no one could possibly be of any use, each person thinking of course that he knew both cause and cure of the calamity. Bringing together artificially a dissociated family: American diversity in social status and income, education, etc. Could include an archetypal woman, an outsider, etc., a guest.

Also: has anything been written of Magellan’s voyage: that would be an exciting yarn, with the Master dying, and the crew at one point boiling up old leather to eat.

The verse in The Family Reunion is very heavy, thudding and pessimistic, as in all Eliot’s “serious” works. Witness this last chorus:

We do not like to look out of the same window, and see quite a different landscape.

We do not like to climb a stair, and find that it takes us down.

We do not like to walk out of a door, and find ourselves back in the same room.

We do not like the maze in the garden, because it too closely resembles a maze in the brain.

We do not like what happens when we are awake, because it too closely resembles what happens when we are asleep.

We understand the ordinary business of living,

We know how to work the machine,

We can usually avoid accidents,

We are insured against fire,

Against larceny and illness,

Against defective plumbing,

But not against the act of God. We know various spells and enchantments,

And minor forms of sorcery,

Divination and chiromancy,

Specifics against insomnia,

Lumbago, and the loss of money.

But the circle of our understanding is a very restricted area.

Except for a limited number

Of strictly practical purposes

We do not know what we are doing;

And even, when you think of it,

We do not know much about thinking.

What is happening outside of the circle?

And what is the meaning of happening?

What ambush lies beyond the heather

And beyond the Standing Stones?

Beyond the Heaviside Layer

And behind the smiling moon?

And what is being done to us?

And what are we, and what are we doing?

To each and all of these questions

There is no conceivable answer.

We have suffered far more than a personal loss—

We have lost our way in the dark.

May 5, 1956

❡ Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative . . . it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.

❡ The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant—no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. —Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

May 11, 1956

A Catholic woman gives birth to a deformed child (no arms, legs). A nurse shows it to her the next morning and she goes into hysterics: telling the obstetrician to destroy it—she won’t feed it, won’t take it home! He—the doctor—after having delivered the monstrous child at 6 a.m. went home to bed (with what feelings!); returning, he tries to reason with the mother according to Catholic doctrine: the child has a soul that man cannot presume to destroy, etc.; besides many deformed people grew up into geniuses or in some way found constructive places in society. She’ll have none of it. Later, the husband presents an action against the doctor for driving his wife into psychosis and necessitating psychological treatment, which he wants the doctor to pay for. He couches his complaints in phrases such as “the public must be preserved from such medical practitioners” and invents a history of supposed neglect and malpractice on the doctor’s part: that he didn’t X-ray the wife during pregnancy, or examine her internally, etc.; that he forced her to take the baby, said she’d die of cancer if she didn’t, etc. Question for jury: Is the obstetrician responsible legally for the woman’s psychosis? Question for us: Is he responsible morally? Is the husband lying, just trying to collect money where he sees the chance? What way out is there with such malformed infants?

❡ From Pepys’ diary: “So to bed, where my wife and I had some high words upon my telling her that I would fling the dog which her brother gave her out of window if he [dirtied] the house any more.”

Two weeks ago I didn’t get the job as a lecturer on the Hudson River Day Line; two days ago I didn’t get the job as a mail clerk for Life, although the interviewer said my record was (sic) heavy, having gone to Deerfield, Harvard, etc. 50 or 75 people showed up for that job. How did they choose? What mysterious ritual! Today I was put on a list of available tutors for the Searing Tutorial School, at $1.80/hr., but who can say if anything will come of it. Good Humor can hire me, however, at 28% commission in ice cream sales. 60 hours a week. Ugh.

Chrysanthi and Leander are well. Leander is very beautiful now—age six weeks plus.

I discussed my Hartley thesis with Professor Tindall, who has to write something on The Shrimp and the Anemone himself for a Purdue journal.

May 14, 1956

“Is life worse living?”—James Joyce.

May 18, 1956

“If Adam and Eve had not fallen, all generations would have come periodically to Eden, that ‘capital seat,’ to do their homage [cf. Paradise Lost XI 342]. To you or to me, once in a lifetime perhaps, would have fallen the almost terrifying honour of coming at last, after long journeys and ritual preparations and slow ceremonial approaches, into the very presence of the great Father, Priest, and Emperor of the planet Tellus; a thing to be remembered all our lives.”—C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 114 (paraphrase).

Could this be the framework of a novel?

May 26, 1956

Working for Pan-American World Airways.

July 17, 1956

Our first anniversary. Chrysanthi as lovely and gracious as ever.

Letter from Vouli brings news that Lindsay is having an affaire with his secretary (Greek) and that half of Salonika knows about it, including Mrs. Lindsay. Also that the new directors of the school can’t come because of Greek-English differences over Cyprus, and that Lindsay will stay on until somehow the status quo can be changed. Quite an upstanding man and Quaker, that! And how proud Margaret Backhaus and Co. must be of him!

July 20, 1956

Chrysanthi tells a delightful story about the tea-cosy at the Quaker School in Salonika. It seems a new staff member came, very naïve, who of course had never seen a cosy before. Chrysanthi in a playful mood told her it was Napoléon’s hat, and that Napoléon’s brother, who had been very friendly with Mr. Lindsay’s father had given it to the latter as a present. The girl believed everything, of course, and lived in especial awe of Mr. Lindsay and his connections with the great emperor.

August 21, 1956

Another flare-up with dad. He returned from the country, stopped in here before going home, and everything was pleasant enough. Then he left. A half-hour later I received a telephone call from the other house. Why hadn’t I mowed the lawn (which I said I would try to do during their absence)? He gave me so much constantly and seldom asked anything in return. Did I have a bloc, etc., etc. in that whining self-pitying voice. I hung up the phone quietly in the middle of it, and refused to answer when he repeatedly called back. Chrysanthi smoothed the ground a little by explaining how tired I was from work, how I spent every spare minute on my thesis (sic); but I haven’t spoken to dad since. He seems to have a splendid facility for ruining pleasant moments.

Likewise when we arrived at Lenox the week before. Mother suggested after supper that C. and I race to Jacob’s Pillow to see the San Francisco Ballet. At this dad turned green: wasn’t I too tired! Weren’t there too many detours in the road! What an idiot mother was to suggest it! And besides, quoth he, “I want to go to the theater, did you ever think of that!” (He being there three weeks solid and we our only night—his three weeks being a continued desperate effort to distract his consciousness from having only himself to be confronted with: using radio, news broadcasts—heard twenty times daily, and always the same—; theater which he’d seen on Broadway before, etc.; mother, as always, unfortunately, abject before him, and after being ‘talked to’ outside, actually confessed that she was wrong, which of course was nonsense, he being a silly selfish neurotic senile-like fool, with a touch of maliciousness and an infant’s compulsion to direct others to suit himself.)

Funny, that Chrysanthi says (and truthfully) that I am like him, that I always must have my way! Irony. Probably my antipathy toward him stems from this realization that I am like him; and thus I chastise myself into the bargain.

June 7, 1956

Dr. Johnson: “Sir, if Mr. X has experienced the unutterable, Mr. X should not attempt to utter it.”

September 17, 1956

Διαβάζοντας στο Χάρτλη πώς ο Εύστας γυρίζοντας από το μπάνιο του, έβλεπε την εκκλησία του Ρεντεντόρε και έκαμε εματό, θυμήθηκα τη φορά όταν η Χρυσάνθη και εγώ πήγαμε στη Μητρόπολη και η Χρυσάνθη, στη μέση της λειτουργίας όρμησε έξω και έκανε εματό στον κήπο. Μήπως είναι συμβολικό αυτό; Ich kan es vielleicht benutzen.

September 20, 1956

Ce soir pendant le repas j’appris quelque chose de nouveau de mon beau-frère Georges et de çe qui l’arriva pendant la guère. Son père nous écrit comment Georges cherche l’image de sa soeur et sa mère dans la caractère de sa fiancée, Efthimoula. Celui-là n’est pas très content maintenant, dit le père, parce qu’il s’attend à voir aucune différance entre la fiancée et sa proper famille, mais bien sûr il y a assez de différences. Je remarquais, moi-même, que Georges disait souvent qu’il n’était pas déjà marié parce qu’il voulait trouver une jeune fille exactement comme sa soeur Lola, et ne l’ai pas trouvé. Je dis à Chrysanthi que c’est un phénomène très bien-connue, ça—qu’un homme qui aime sa soeur ou sa mère, quand il veut se marier, tout souvent choisit quelqu’une qui se rassemble beaucoup à la mère ou la soeur don’t il s’agit. Telles marriages ne sont pas les plus fortes, entendu.

Chrysanthi fut d’acord. Mais elle m’expliqua que Georges, à cause de ses troubles pendant la guère, a senti qu’il a dû repayer une dette à ses parents, car ils le soignèrent beaucoup pendant qu’il restait en prison. (Les Allemands le prirent parce qu’un jour un des ‘guerrillas’ décendit des montagnes pour lui demander deux cahiers. Georges fut ‘agricole’ du village. Sachant que l’aide aux patriots fut défendu, il dit qu’il n’eut pas des cahiers. L’autre, cependent, répondit qu’il fallut les trouver avant le lendemain, autrement Georges se trouverait mort. Ayant donc entre deux diables, Georges prit les cahiers et les donna. Entendu, quelqu’un de part des Allemands le vit. One le jeta en prison, seul, longtemps.)

M et Mme Yiannakos, et Lola lui firent des visites, restant dehors des murs où, cependent, leur fils put leur voir. Ils marchèrent souvent six kilometers dans la niege; ils apportèrent de la nourriture, et, plus important, ils apportèrent leur amour. Monsieur Y. pria les Allemands de délivrer son fils. Lui et Lola aussi, quelquefois souffrirent aux mains des soldats et après tout eut arrangé, Lola tomba malade: crise de nerfs.

À cause de tout ça, Georges, étant, comme M Yiannakos nous écrivit, σφιχτά δεμένος à la famille, trouve maintenant qu’il est affiance, qu’il ne veut pas quitter la maison. On pouvait dire: “Oedipus complex,” n’est-ce pas? (sans le désir contre le père).

Au meme temps, Lola va se marier avec Costas. Je me demande alors qu’est-ce c’est que Georges au fond en pense.

Ich kan es vielleicht benutzen.

❡ The three most important things a man has are briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions. —Samuel Butler.

Ich ging gestern zum Bibliothek um Artikeln von Hartley zu finden. Ich sah besonders in der Zeitung Times Londons an, wo bemerkte ich auch viel vom Krieg Griekenlands mit Deutchland geschrieb en. Dann dachte ich, wie ich—wenn vielleicht ich will einen Roman von Griekenland eine Tag schreiben—vom Geschicht Kriegs und andere notigen Sachen lernen könte, wenn ich nur die Zeitungen Kriegzeits suchen will, welche wird viel leicht zu tun.

Ich kam nach Hause zurück, und nach dem Essen, meine Frau begleitete mich zum Kino, wo wir Moby Dick Melvilles gesehen haben. Es war natürlich gut, aber war es fremd, Leute, die im Gott glaubten, zu hören Starbuck war Quaker, aber mit einem sehr schwer Beruf und mit einer schwerer Wahl zu machen, ob Herr Ahab zu schießen, oder jederman zu sterben lassen, auch ihn selbst. Ich kan nicht sagen, daß er recht hatte. Gegenteils, wer kan es sagen, daß er unrecht hatte? Herr Melville gab uns nicht die Antwort.

Ich möchte nun das Buch widerzulesen.

September 22, 1956

Names (actual): Wilfred Littlefoot, John Redhead, Dr. F. A. Iremonger.

❡The Church consists of people whose soul business is to prepare themselves for heaven.

September 23, 1956

❡ The novel as a piece of domestic and recognizable realism, has lost its fundamental subject. If it does survive in face of the contemporary tendency toward the simplification of dramatic art, I suspect it will do so only by a return to the impersonal tale from which it arose: the heroic, the romance in which the hero has no specific identity. —V. S. Pritchett in N.Y. Times Book Review.

September 27, 1956

❡ Quakerism is a movement. It was started as a protest, not as a new religion. When it ceases to move, it is dead. Are we living our testimony against war? Are we living in Christian love? Are we showing in all ways possible our belief in justice and liberty for all people? We have the power. God is our Father, in whom is all power. He is ready to give us favors. He sent the seventy unlettered men out, and they returned amazed at the power given them. It is ready for us. But all the giving cannot be on our Father’s side; we have obligations to Him.

Do not be afraid of failures. God can use them. Better to fail than not to do. What we need is not a new doctrine, but a new life. We do not know yet all the ways to be disciples of Christ. Find a need, and supply it within the scope of your own particular ability. Do something. Go preach, practice. Wherever you go, be examples. Keep your courage, and then, as George Fox said, ‘Walk cheerfully on, seeing that of God in every man.’—Anna Curtis, Eleanor Good and May Hoag, expressing the message of the Yearly Meeting of New York, 1956.

September 28, 1956

Wee are all conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombs, we are close Prisoners all; when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death. Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between New-gate and Tyborne? Between the Prison, and the place of Execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake; but passé on with such dreames, and imaginations as these, I may live as well, as another, and why should I dye, rather than another? But awake, and tell me, sayes this Text, Quis homo? Who is that other that thou talkest of? What man is he that liveth, and shall not see Death? —John Donne, To the Lords upon Easter Day at the Communion, the King Being Dangerously Sick at New-Market, March 28, 1619.

September 29,

1956

Ταρέσσει ταῖς ἀντρώπαις καὶ τὰ πράγματα, ἀλλὰ τὰ περὶ τῶν πραγμάτων δόγματα—quoted on the title page of Herder’s Eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 1774.

October 1, 1956

❡ The thought occurred to Hester that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanors, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. —Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, chapter XV.

Falls schrieb ich etwas, über des Geschicht Paulas und Socrates, könnte ich als Modell den Roman Hawthornes nachahmen, dann es gibt auch über der Schuld. Socrates würde die Schuld fühlen, weil er seinen Vater betrügen hatte—während er sein Geld fortwährend genommen hat. Paula, gegenteils, weiß, daß sie die Verantworlichkeit dafür hielt. Jederman ringt für die Freiheit, gegen die Sitte; aber auch Schuld mit Ehrlichkeit kämpfen.

The Scarlet Letter is marvelously plotted, and with so few characters! It is classic in its sparcity and intense power, Aristotelian in its perfect tragic construcdtion. I like the air of mysteriousness and symbol that Hawthorne delights in. Forster would call this «Prophesy,» Stephen Dedalus «Radiance,» or the stuff of which radiance is made. Models, models. Schaffen Sie! Ποιοῦ!

October 2, 1956

A UNE PASSANTE

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,

Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse

Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,

Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,

La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair . . . puis la nuit! —Fugitive beauté

Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,

Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! Trop tard! jamais peut-être!

Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,

Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

—Charles Baudelaire

October 5, 1956

❡ ‘A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il y a plus d’hommes originals. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes. —Pascal (quoted by Th. Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles).

❡ The grey half-tones of daybreak are not the grey half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade mjay be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went out-of-doors at once after rising, where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, acqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at midsummer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.

The mixed, singular luminous gloom in which they walked along together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did not understand them.

‘Call me Tess,’ she would say askance; And he did. —Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, chapter XX.

October 7, 1956

❡ . . . Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; Women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means toward the aims, of the to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards today. —Tess, chapter XLIX.

—The position toward the temperament puts me in mind of Edgar Parry, that compassionate Soul enshrouded in the living deathness of Pan American World Airways System, Inc., Atlantic Division, Idylwild Station, Traffic Department, job title: senior agent. Remember also John Tanner, his women on two continents (girl dead in Montréal). Try enthusiasms, anti-bourgeois sentiments, yet being strung up in the business world, another anonymity of P.A.A. Or Gene Grant, the comedian. Did he really steal the $50? The glory of his reinstatement. . . . Jacobs and smiling Murphy over the vacation. Hans Otto the perfectionist, Skalond the sadist, Hank the fool; The French-Canadian with six children and no intellect, his going to Newark with cash-register keys: Fred Babineau. Napoleonic Norman Weiner, self-deprecating Irene Barklay. Parry’s hopeless courting of Lee Kyle. Favoritism for the Germans. The front boys: Rhnaghan, Trainor, Nelson Danziger and mustache, inc. Gensaler. Ann Ruffo always on the telephone. Write-its. Joe Domichi the ex-psychologist. Felix the ex-diplomat. Leslie Richer the ex-? His wife, the television and the air conditioner—eternal triangle. Sacha the ex-squadron-leader. My temptation for the $13.60. My victory over temptation. Punching wrong, and almost having to pay $28.05! No mercy from upstairs.

Tess is overpowering. I couldn’t put the book down. A lesson in plotting, suspense. And one gets so furious with the characters for their hardness, their blunders. It wasn’t coincidence alone that doomed Tess, though that helped—but even more the characters of herself, of Angel Clare, and of Alec D’Urberville. Perhaps she joined the latter the second time because of the death of old Durbeyfield and the consequent hardship and eviction of the family, which he was in a position to alleviate. And yet one feels that she still had free will and could have refused; she could have applied to Rev. Clare instead. These things make the book real, the characdters round and alive, not just melodramatic. A marvelous work, with marvelous atmosphere-painting, symbols, occurrences—not one superfluous. A web, as Hardy would say himself, catching the flies; each strand helping in the final doom.

October 16, 1956

❡ Socialism itself will be of value because it will lead to individualism. —Oscar Wilde (Oscariana).

October 27, 1956

❡ He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woolen goods by a thousandth part of a penny in the pound—this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. —Samuel Butler, Erewhon, chapter XX.

❡ People oppose money to culture, and imply that if a man has spent his time in making money he will not be cultivated—fallacy of fallacies! As though there could be a greater aid to culture than the having earned an honorable independence, and as though any amount of culture will do much for the man who is penniless, except make him feel his position more deeply. —Erewhon. (This is typical of Butler’s position, also in The Way of All Flesh and in his own life.)

October 29, 1956

❡ A literature of wonder must have an end as inevitably as a strange land loses its strangeness when one lives in it. Think of the lost ecstasy of the Elizabethans. “Oh my America, my new found land, think of what it meant to them and of what it means to us. Wonder can only be the attitude of a man passing from one stage to another, it can never be a permanently fixed thing.”—T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism” in Speculations.

❡ All the masters of painting are born into the world at a time when the particular tradition from which they start is imperfect. . . . Each field of artistic activity is exhausted by the first great artist who gathers a full harvest from it.

❡ One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions. . . . It provides you with an elaborate and precise language in which you really can explain definitely what you mean, but what you want to say is decided by other things. The ultimate reality is the hurly-burly, the struggle; the metaphysic is an adjunct to clear-headedness in it. —T. E. Hulme, op. cit.

❡ Action: Teachers, university lecturers on science, emancipated women, and other spectacled anaemics attending the plays at the Court Theatre remind me of disembodied spirits, having no body to rest in. They have all the intellect and imagination required for high passion, but no material to work on. They feel all the emotions of jealousy and desire, but these leading to no action remain as nothing but petty motives. Passion is action and without action but a child’s anger. . . . Just as sentiment and religion require expression in ritual, so tragedy requires action. —T. E. Hulme, “Cinders.”

—Yesterday, at a party for grandma, who is 75: whole family there, including Schweitzers and Bulls, whom I hadn’t seen in years. I had looked forward to talking to Will, but at the end of the evening had not said one word to him except hello and goodbye, nor he to me. I felt extremely nothing, as though after having enjoyed the attention that everyone seems to pay to children, I have now emerged into an indifferent world, as an adult and have to distinguish myself by personality or deeds in order to be noticed. Another feeling I had at the party was occasioned by the high spirits of Jimmy Bull and Abe and Irving, who were quite full of Scotch, and to the dancing—taking of other people’s wives, etc. I saw myself another edition of my father, gauche on my feet, self-conscious, unable really to take part in the merry-making, yet ready to bore someone with a ‘serious’ conversation, only not, at least, thank God, on medicine or sickness. I always get this depressed feeling when I am among extroverts, the feeling that I don’t know how to live, and yet if I look at these people dispassionately, they seem such nonentities, so hollow, and I rejoice in my Philistinism. Irv came in a hired Cadillac with a liveried chauffeur! Joan got emotional about politics and the fact, as she says, that in the South the Jews are assimilated and even go to the same country clubs as the gentiles. She’s very anti-Semitic, which irks her father. I suppose people consider me anti-Semitic also. But I think I am beginning to accept finally my birth and see that it is stupid to try to hide it or to become something else, though I would like somehow for Leander to escape the curse of introspection and ineffectualness that seems to be inherited in my family. Even Alice is that way. I am very bad—I can’t love, I’m sadistic and cruel toward Leander and Chrysanthi, and I can’t seem to control myself, though I know very well what I’m doing when I’m doing it, and I’m disgusted. We’re very much an island here, no social mileux except my parents, who annoy me no end.

A plot. A son who does everything he can not to be like his father but who has it gradually revealed to him when he’s older that he reacts in every situation exactly as his father does, and that their personalities are unquestionably the same. Then the son cannot stand himself, just as he cannot stand his father.

November 4, 1956

He wants to arouse us to a sense of reality, to break through the veil that easy and familiar words and the ever-increasing fog of commercial propaganda spread over the human situation. . . . The contemplation of a vast display of insipid greeting cards for Mother’s Day in “the World’s Largest Drugstore” leads him through a consideration of the religious symbol of the Great Mother—creator and destroyer, the power of birth and death—that has in the course of ages been trivialized into the sentimental and commercial idol of modern America, to a conclusion that not only theologians would do well to ponder.

❡ Our religious symbols, such as the Cross, refer only to the realms of ethics and what may be called pure spirituality. We have no religious symbols covering the other aspects of the cosmic mystery. . . . Will it ever be possible to revive the Great Mother, or create some equivalent symbol of the cosmic mysteries of life and death? Or are we doomed to remain indefinitely, or until the masses lose their minds and run amuck, on the level of the greeting card?—from a review in the London Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 12, 1956, of Aldous Huxley’s new collection of essays, Adonis and the Alphabet.

November 6, 1956

Who first invented Work—and tied the free

And holy-day rejoicing spirit down

To the ever-haunting opportunity

Of business, in the green fields and the town—

To plough—loom—anvil—spade—and, oh most sad,

To this dry drudgery of the desk’s dead wood?

—Charles Lamb (letters)

November 7, 1956

Last night I had two strange dreams. In the first I was sleeping on a cot in a dormitory-like room, apparently with some other people. Then Miss Brewster (who is my pro-seminar director at Columbia, an elderly gray-haired lady) came to my bed and put one hand in my mouth while with the other she reached down under the covers, through the fly of my pajama-trousers, and grasped my genitals (much as Chrysanthi does in real life!). I began to get angry, and sat up. But she pulled something out of my mouth, a big lump with threads dangling from it. This apparently was a beneficent service, for I thanked her, and she stayed by the bed nursing me, as it were, for the wound in my mouth. . . . The second dream showed Cy, who is the garage chief at Renault, selling me a charcoal broiler for indoors. He showed me a two-part device, one part being a heavy black construction, the legs; And the other, a grate that fitted into the former. A pipe had to be arranged to carry the smoke out the window.

November 13, 1956

Another dream. I was on a kind of seashore farm, with a big mansion built of cross-ended logs but resembling, on the outside, McCarthy’s unfinished blackpaper house. I remember remarking to someone that the chinking was very good. There was another house on the property, shaped like a butterfly nut, which I remarked must have been the old farmhouse. I saw a boy enter it, wearing tight satin pants, fly-less, I think. Then I was on another building, which stood on the sea, near the border of the land. Great rocks went down onto the beach. There was a machine outside, perhaps a plow. I seem to remember it was foggy and we were afraid the machine would come into the building. At the same time, however, I saw three or four men standing on the grassy slope, fishing. The furthest among them was named Malcolm Muggeridge (we had spoken of the editor of Punch in Tindall’s class, in connection with his debunking biography of Samuel Butler), who resembled, however, Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, as played by Bert Lahr last season. This person’s penis was exposed and was in a very extensive erection. He was pulling hard at the line all the while. Suddenly he pulled a gigantic black fish out of the sea, which resembled an enormous sea-horse, or even a dragon. He fell over backwards and pulled the fish on top of him as though to embrace it, but then, suddenly revolted or at any rate changing his mind, he pushed it away and it stood up again on its haunches. At that point, the alarm clock rang.

November 22, 1956

❡The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fract a broad and rich comicality, many of the signs and values of the appreciable. —Henry James, Preface to “What Maisie Knew.”

❡ And I recited the pretty quietist Pater, Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name be hallowed, thou knowest best what suits thee. Etc.

Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex? —Samuel Beckett, Molloy, p. 229.

November 26, 1956

A few days ago, C. had again a spell of weeping—now quite rare—which upon persevering request was revealed to me as referring to her feeling that she was a slave here, a Greek, backward, and that we all expected her to do nothing but work all day without thought for herslef, and that if she neglected any of her (self-imposed) duties, she would be deemed lazy. She had felt sick, with a cold, and had decided to stay home from school, whereupon I said that it was a shame, she taking this to mean I was angry because we had spent the money and therefore she ought to go, which of course was the thing furthest from my mind. So, out of spite, she dressed and went anyway, and then came back sour-faced, refusing to get into bed as I had repeatedly requested her to do, saying that she had too much work, etc., etc. Whereupon came the weeping and the “confession” that revealed also her homesickness, her missing of her family, especially her mother, who, she felt, would have in such circumstances been very solicitous of her (Chrysanthi’s) health, put her to bed, massaged her, etc. The weeping and the confession over, I tried to explain that her ideas of herself as a slave, as inferior because Greek, were entirely of her own making, and smiles followed, plus a delicious reconciliation that was consummated in bed.

Alice home for Thanksgiving. She, despite all my father’s boasts about his «enlightened» raising of her, is just as neurotic as the rest of us and is, when home at any rate, generally an unpleasant person. Κρίμα.

A twelve-page letter from L. P. Hartley, who says he’s delighted I’m working on his books.

November 27, 1956

The McCarthys of Riparius could be material for a saga of several generations, treated as Faulkner does his landed ‘gentry’ who degenerate.

Apropos of right = wrong: the position at PAA that there was no such thing as over-sales. Personnel trained to repeat a lie and to believe it. This the ethics of business!

The strip Ping-Pong at B.L.C.

December 1, 1956

❡ I hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double one, first of harmonizing them by assigning to them their right relative status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby promoting the formation of more complete schemes of thought. It is in respect to this comparison that the testimony of great poets is of such importance. Their survival is evidence that they express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact. [p. 88] . . . I hold that the ultimate appeal is to naïve experience and that is why I lay such stress on the evidence of poetry. [p. 90]—Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Mentor edition)

December 5, 1956

Whyte has written a book on the Organization Man. This could be applied to the situation at PAA, especially the reluctance to let anyone do anything outside of his immediate task, over against the lip-service ideal of general helpfulness. PAA had a wonderful collection of individualists being crushed. Lester, the Hungarian, the Pole, John Tanner, Edgar. The sleaziness of the Special Service corps; the abdication of human dignity. Episode of the chaotic Sunday, when Fred Babineau took the cash register keys to Newark, and Genssler appeared most concerned about the failure of agents to put up their name plates. Fawning over Trippe’s son and other ‘VIPs’.

December 17, 1956

A work on St. Francis could begin like Moby Dick with an anthology of references in poetry and prose, also could include reproductions of famous pictures of the saint.

December 19, 1956

❡ “No woman who has a child is ever betrayed; the husband of a mother, whether he be the father or not, is already a cuckold.”—Rev. Hightower in Light in August, chapter 15.

1957

4701 43rd Ave., Long Island City, New York

January–September

414 West 121st Street, Apt. 63, New York

October–December

January 1, 1957

The kidnapper of Greentree’s baby was sentenced to death a few days ago. He kidnapped the child to get money to meet payments on money he had borrowed to meet other payments, etc. He, combined, let’s say, with the little struggling PAA clerk, plus Jack of Rochester General, might make a splendid protagonist for a novel. Only would it be too naturalistic à la An American Tragedy?. Δεν ξέρω. Two plots could be brought to a meeting, one involving him, the other the parents of the baby, as Faulkner handles the two plots in Light in August, only they must be made to be organic, which Faulkner doesn’t do.

January 11, 1957

Saw Stravinsky conduct his Persephone and was in tears during most of it.

January 20, 1957

Elis in Strindberg’s Easter is the typical 20th century puling weak masochistic young man who wants to suffer, and in doing so makes others suffer. Strindberg shows that his actions and attitudes result from psychological causes, not external reality, as Elis himself believes. Compare “K” in The Trial.

January 22, 1957

Today, when I got my second traffic ticket in several months, I felt like Elis: “And this too.” Actually, my personality is remarkably similar to his, which isn’t a compliment. Probably the reason is the same also: pride and selfishness.

January 23, 1957

❡ Die Integration des Menschen ist, wie die Bibel lehrt, bebunden an die Erfüllung des Gebots: “Du sollst Vater and Mutter ehren, auf daß du lange lebest und es dir wohl ergele auf Erden.” Im “Vater” ist alles Mann-Sein, echt Männliche, das Tun under Handelen, alle Verantwortung in Welt, Gesellschaft, Politik mit einbeschlossen. In der “Mutter” ist alles Kontakt der Tiefe, alle Erschlossenheit des Liebes—Kräfte, der zartesten Fühlungen und Kontakte zwischen Mensch und Mensch beheimatet. —Friedrich Heer (über Werners Hamlet). Die Furche (Wien), XII, 37 (8 Sept. ’56), seite 7.

Just got a postcard from Tindall saying my Harley essay was “first rate.”

January 26, 1957

Dreamed that C. fell physically in love with a big-penised Negro, and despite my pleadings not to abandon me because of an infatuation that would not last, she slept with him. After he won her he proved to be no good, which she soon discovered. She had an agonizing realization of her foolishness, but too late, for the resulting pregnancy resulted in her death in childbirth. What happened to the baby wasn’t included.

Nick Karayannis told us about his exploits in Macedonia fighting locusts.

January 31, 1957

The time in Rochester when I rode desperately up and down a “certain” street that Gregory had mentioned as being notorious for houses of ill fame, looking for suspicious men entering, dying for the experience myself, but in vain.

Driving on 59th Street caught a quick glance in the window of a jeweler taking off a pearl necklace from the stand in the window. The furred lady-customer unconsciously putting her hand to her neck and then, as if embarrassed to find it there, scratching beneath her chin.

C. told how Lindsay kept American and English gifts to Greek girls stored in the barn for three years, refusing to distribute them. Meanwhile, of course, most everything was ruined from the dampness and cold.

February 8, 1957

Merciful heaven!

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt

Split’st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,

Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man!

Drest in a little brief authority,—

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,

His glassy essence,—like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,

As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,

Would all themselves laugh mortal.

—Measure for Measure, II, ii.

February 10, 1957

Statt der lebendigen Natur,

Da Gott die Menschen schuz hinein,

Umgibt in Rausch und Moder nur

Dich Tiergeripp und Totenbein.

—Faust I, Nacht.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen,

Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist tot! . . .

❡ My task, then, I reflected, was to reestablish the significance of even the slightest signs by which I was surrounded . . ., long familiarity having destroyed their meaning for me. —Proust, The Past Recaptured, chapter IV, p. II 1014, Random House edition.

February 18, 1957

Passed my German exam!

February 22, 1957

The police anti-chamber. Baby-faced tall Irish cop with loud voice. Phone always busy. Dog-faced people waiting. Constant interruptions. Inefficiency. Change of judge. How bored the magistrate must be! Same things over and over.

Posit a group of young people such as Rochester club. Place them in NYC, perhaps same at Pan American. Add sex and perhaps inverted sex or such tendencies, and/or crime, e.g. smuggling, bribes, moral problem, etc.

Tone of Les Faux-Monnayeurs is superlatively good. Gide drives right into the action. Analyze and use.

February 25, 1957

Saul brings his children up the old-fashioned way, by not elevating them to thrones. The girls cook and wash dishes without complaining. Amos keeps quiet when he’s not wanted. Yesterday he slipped a bit, interrupted Saul and me to ask a perfectly reasonable question. Saul, strictly, reminded him that he was interrupting us. “Are you supposed to do that?” he asked. The child put on a hang-dog face and did not answer, but capitulated at last and answered “No.” Thereupon we resumed conversation, and the question went unanswered.

Saul’s troubles at Columbia. His obstinacy; will not mediate; wants associate research professorship or nothing. The story of the pre-med student who abandoned medicine because he felt the moral caliber of his fellow pre-meds was so low. Not a very good reason; rather a reason, if he was superior to them, for him to enter the profession as a counterbalance.

Saul tells about his marriage: forced into it, he says, aged 21. He and Minna had been “going steady for three years.” He liked the arrangement: a sure girlfriend with no responsibility. She didn’t: no freedom, and no security. She gave an ultimatum: either you marry me or let me go out with other boys. He didn’t want to marry her, nor did he want her to go with other boys—so he married her.

C. and I went to Sagamore Hill, TR’s home. Admission 75 cents. C. thought it was too much, so I went in alone, ΒΛΑΚΑΣ!

Working as Night Registrar at Columbia, 5:30–8:30 p.m. @ $75 monthly. Saul suggests I apply to Hofstra and to Adelphi for teaching jobs.

Tindall said he’d give my Hartley essay a “1.” But Brewster marks it, unfortunately, not him.

February 27, 1957

❡ The world is made up of a mass of people and a few individuals.

—D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 32.

Last evening, in the Registrar’s office, I had the feeling of what an “individual” is. A man stayed discreetly near the back wall, waiting for me to finish with someone else who was rather boisterous. The man hardly said anything, but ‘something’ about him seemed to set him apart: a dignity, worldly-sense, breeding—how can one describe it? He came to the counter and registered for a Spanish course. His name was Morrissey, and I noticed he gave his address as the Plaza Hotel—rich, I suppose, perhaps aristocratic; although he had the face and clothes of an actor rather than of a stockbroker. The impression of dignity was so evident, I wish I could analyze it adequately in order to see how it was achieved. And withal he didn’t seem cold, separate, but the opposite: warm, approachable, “civilized.”

Lawrence always tries to connect the present-day actions of his Mexicans with the civilization of the Aztecs. This could be done for modern and ancient Greeks, only one of course would not have selected the Athenian golden age as one part of the comparison.

Other aspects of The Plumed Serpent also fit the Greek situation: political solutions—socialism, democracy; brutality of the army; what happens when a people is constantly ruled by another; ignorance and filth of villagers; sinister depravity and incipient murder. The unfinished station in Salonika. Cf. “And this is Mexico. Whatever pretentiousness and modern improvements it may have, outside the capital, they are either smashed or raw and unfinished, with rusty bones of iron girders sticking out” (p. 104).

March 5, 1957

Chrysanthi tells of the old strange Jew who lived on Sarantaporou expecting any day to be taken by the Germans to the oven, and gradually distributing his belongings in the belief that he was coming back. Gave a great French encyclopedia to the Yiannakoses, with instructions to care for it and treasure it. They still have it.

For a paradigm of the Riek-Bien relationship, see Maugham’s Of Human Bondage: Norah and Philip.

Mal Brown over last night. Wants me to set up an aviary at Riparius.

March 11, 1957

Apparently the anonymity of urban life is no new thing. In Joseph Andrews, 1742, we read: “London is a bad place, and there is so little good fellowship, that the next-door neighbours don’t know one another” (chapter VI).

Visit last night with Judy Reich, a painter. Another husband: Herman, a Switzer. Painter by trade. He’s from Zurich, but never knew that James Joyce lived and worked there.

March 13, 1957

Martin Buber spoke in Harkness Theater, where I stood against the wall packed in as in the subway. He spoke of various ways of experiencing a “reality” greater or more inclusive, more unified than our everyday one. One way was that of the Gita, through trance, dream, sleep, where the individual is perfectly united with himself, and in contact with the cosmos. A second way was that of mescaline (Buber spoke at length about Aldous Huxley’s experiments). This produced a result similar to that of the Hindus. Buber said that Huxley’s perception saw the world transformed: infused with meaning, with Godhead, if you will. But strangely, this transformation did not apply to other human beings. The mescaline-eater had to avoid the presence of others, had to achieve what he could in solitude, the absolute solitude that also reigns in trance- or dream-states. Buber spoke of union with the cosmos, but of failure of union with the logos; or realization of the “I,” but of failure of the “we.” Thus he rejected both the Gita and mescaline methods, for the solitude they presuppose is inimical to true realization of “reality.” Reality is a “We” and not an “I”; it is the logos and the cosmos, not merely the cosmos. At this point, unfortunately, I had to leave to go to my job in the registrar’s office.

Jimmy Bull’s way of speaking. Closed eyes, almost a trance; no comprehension of a give and take. Joan’s anti-Semitism. She says in the South the Jews aren’t “kikey” and that they go to the Christian clubs—i.e., that they assimilate perfectly.

March 18, 1957

Carole, Mal Brown’s fiancée, beautiful, sweet, learned, simple; a fine girl.

Fielding, on the necessity for a writer to know and treat all conditions of men; rich and poor, etc.: ❡ And though it may be thought that the knowledge of either may sufficiently enable him to describe at least that in which he hath been conversant, yet he will even here fall greatly short of perfection; for the follies of either rank do in reality illustrate each other. For instance, the affectation of high life appears more glaring and ridiculous from the simplicity of the low; and again, the rudeness and barbarity of this latter strikes with much stronger ideas of absurdity, as when contrasted with, and opposed to, the politeness which controls the former. —Tom Jones, Bk. IX, ch. 1.

❡ As for my landlord, drinking was his trade; and the liquor had no more effect on him than it had on any other vessel in his house. Ibid., Bk. IX, ch. VI.

March 21, 1957

Herbert Wekselblatt and Virginia Mohammed—names. Herb’s refrain, applied frequently and to various personages: “He’s an intellectual peanut.” “But, of course, when dealing with intellectual peanuts . . .” His story about the palsied boy who announced at school that he wanted to play a musical instrument. A tuba was fitted up on a stand, and he actually got sounds out of it. The whole town began to take an interest, starting with the Board of Education. An inventor devised an electrical device whereby the boy was enabled to operate the valves by twitching his atrophied fingers, to which strings were attached that activated an electric motor that in turn depressed the valve. Now, says Herb, the boy can play all the notes, slowly, of course. And he has finally been able to do something that gives him value in the sight of others. Occupational therapy. The town, after a time, bought him a tuba. Good sentimental story. Why should sentiment be always bad?

Saw The Dutchess of Malfi, which was excellent, mainly because Nina Foch wasn’t in it to spoil it as she did Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew. But Ερωφίλη, for melodrama and sheer horror, was better. The Greeks had a way!

Motto for a privy: O cloacina, fave!

March 25, 1957

Leander’s first birthday.

The epigraph to Tristram Shandy: Ταράσσει τους Ανθρώπους ου τα Πράγματα αλλά τα περί των Πραγμάτων Δόγματα. Could be translated as: Nothing is but what thinking makes it so.

April 2, 1957

Received word from the police that Rookie Patrolman Sperakotas apprehended a drug addict in the process of making off with the portable radio in my car. He apparently had pried open the window with a can opener and was in the car when people shouted and Sperakotas came running from Morningside Park. The addict then left the radio, stepped out, threw the can opener under the car, and started walking away. He was easily apprehended. Tomorrow I must go to court. The detective advised me not to leave my car in such a bad neighborhood. It was directly in front of the residence of the president of Columbia University!

I understand the fact that the law is really a legalized means of revenge. I must go tomorrow and plead that the fellow be tried and convicted, attesting that it was my radio, that the car was locked and the window forced, etc. What the hell do I care, except for the morning that will be wasted? But didn’t I feel a warm thrill of sadistic pleasure at having this perfectly respected and accepted way of destroying somebody else? Of course!

Why did the fool do this so much out in the open, where he was bound to get caught?

April 12, 1957

❡ I feel as though I were split in two. . . . It’s just as though one’s second self were standing beside one; one is sensible and rational oneself, but the other self is impelled to do something perfectly senseless. —Dostoyevsky, A Raw Youth. Cf. My feeling when I was “out” with Chrysanthi on the Sunday preceding Leander’s birthday; and also the other few days over the week in attentiveness to my lunch.

April 15, 1957

Chrysanthi tells of a village where she interviews girls. So poor that the girls were ashamed to show their homes—mud huts without floors. When I entered one of these homes, where the mother was baking, she disappeared and reappeared with a clean apron, washed face and hands, giving the impression of spotlessness amidst sordidness. Later, the girl offered the visitors all they could: glasses of water. The tray was a piece of tin off the roof. But over it was an intricate embroidery. Δεν είχαν τίποτε εκτός από την περηφάνια τους.

April 16, 1957

Mr. Lindsay might be a potential Kurtz.

C. P. Snow deals with the problem of suspense in a simple and effective way: chapter one sets up the problem of who will be the new master. We have to read the whole book before finding out.

This thing is clearing in my mind. Narrator, writing book on St. Francis. And an airline employee. Could be doubles—i.e., airline employee is part of narrator’s personality projected. Deal with illusion: of St. Francis; of the employee’s re: air-age glories and glamor. Emloyee: frustrated, naïve. Tension: can only be relased by sneaking into a plane and taking off, resulting in crash and death. (Mechanics of this: counter-employee; but during indoctrination taken to hangars; taken back in plane; taxiing; mechanic, trying to “make like” a pilot, glibly explains controls. Employee’s obsession begins.) The unities: could take place on one day: day of crash, with badkground done by flashback. At least two points of view necessary: mind of narrator; mind of employee. How do this?

The σπουδαίο is to connect employee-theme with narrator-theme and St. Francis. Illusion and destruction. Actual moment of stealing plane. Do like the moment in La Condition humaine when Kyo is in an antique shop awaiting Chiang Kai Shek’s car. Flying off with airplane would of course be a sex-symbol. Employee must be a woman; frustrated also. Edgar Parry and Lynn. All this might be enough, without St. Francis. Narrator would correspond to the narrator in La Nausée; employee to l’Autodidacte. Employee: being inarticulate, does and feels but cannot express what the narrator, being over-intellectual, knows and articulates, but cannot do. Thus each is half a man, and together, the composite, is fullness. Therefore: doubles or employee projection of narrator’s inhibited id-libido. Each is questing completion and fulfillment. Narrator escapes through history, aestheticism, and myth; employee through physical sensation (has woman-trouble but could visit whores or be a homosexual).

Frustration: partly mental; partly naturalistic; lack of education; or of money to pay for solo hours to become a pilot; people being promoted while he isn’t, etc. Should narrator and employee know each other? Could pass same streets, etc., independent, close, but no connection. Cf. early stages in Ulysses; or Mrs Dalloway and Septimus; see same things. Narrator could read an account of the crash in a newspaper. Ironic: the destruction of his own double. How end? Could have encounter in library, perhaps homosexual. Employee part must be objective, non-analytical, quick-moving; narrator part subjective, analytical, involved.

April 19, 1957

For Terpni: Yeats’s “A Prayer on Going into My House.”

Yeats, “The Choice”:

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

When all that story’s finished, what’s the news:

In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

That old perplexity an empty purse,

Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

April 20, 1957

Despair → release. Before revelation: suffering.

The proper subject of tragedy is a man who is forced to injure someone he loves, and is thereby injured himself. We identify with a hero because we know that in doing the injury he is also suffering.

April 21, 1957

Chrysanthi suggested that the narrator contact the employee though the narrator’s desire to fly to Assisi. Perhaps this could be the occasion of the employee’s difficulties: be accused, let’s say, of stealing à la Gene Grant. Narrator would have to testify. Scruples, à la radio case. Employee could be really guilty, but be acquitted by narrator’s lying, because narrator wants to steal himself and gets vicarious pleasure from employee’s succeeding therein.

April 29, 1957

Chrysanthi and I had a lovely walk on the beach, our feet half-frozen by rushing-in waves. The sea-roar, the gong of the buoy, the birds; noises soothing; air salty-cool. Today we woke up to carbon sediment and the Con Edison Company’s pneumatic drill tearing up 47th Street.

Last night: an interesting intercourse, if deflating also. After some of the usual preliminaries in bed, we got up, turned on some slinky music, and danced, naked, in the living room. Things reached a point and Chrysanthi was on the couch, I on top of her, my penis inserted, her climax coming apace—when the music stopped. “A five-minute summary of the latest news: the crisis in Jordan, today, reached new proportions when . . .” etc. The intenseness of the intercourse deadened out any other impressions; but in that delicious coda when detumescence begins and tenderness increases, the silence of escape from consciousness was invaded by the radio voice, so that I found myself alternately off in my delicious near-unconscious reveries and back in my conscious awareness of the “news,” until, like someone in a room trying not to watch a turned-on television set, first glancing now and then at it, then more and more frequently, until his resistance gives in (unless he turns the set off, which he can’t if someone else is there with him), and he watches full time; I too listened full-time: and the realities of the political world invaded the intense private world that one achieves nowadays perhaps only in sex. It was, to coin a phrase, the last turn of the screw.

People who write books about things never seem to be quite successful in the thing they are writing about. Machiavelli never became a prince. Castiglioni was an unimportant courtier. Bacon failed to gain the highest positions. Jacques Barzun is supposed to be a very bad teacher. Doctors who write textbooks often cannot succeed in their practices.

Valency: Bradamente (character in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato) combines feminine and masculine features. She’s the prototype of the twentieth century ideal of man-woman who can beat you at tennis but still be dainty.

May 1, 1957

Rhetoric: the art of giving effectiveness to truth.

May 2, 1957

❡ By the way, do you know Greece? No? So much the better. What should we do there, I ask you? There one has to be pure in heart. Do you know that there male friends walk along the street in pairs holding hands? Yes, the women stay home and you often see a middle-aged, respectable man, sporting mustaches, gravely striding along the sidewalk, his fingers locked in those of his friend. In the Orient likewise, at times? All right. But tell me, would you take my hand in the streets of Paris? Oh, I’m joking. We have a sense of decorum; scum makes us stilted. Before appearing in the Greek islands, we should have to wash at length. There the air is chaste and sensual enjoyment as transparent as the sea. And we . . . —Camus, The Fall, p. 97.

May 3, 1957

For the employee, cf. Faulkner’s Old Man, who commits an insane train hold-up out of his need to do something, be something, and after having read dime novels about Jesse James.

May 6, 1957

Another day, another dolour.

Twenty-five dollars a night and all the food you can’t eat.

Τερπνή;

May 10, 1957

Charlotte Rhodes’ daughter, a pupil at Cherry Lawn School, told the headmistress that she had to visit her mother, and left. By coincidence, Charlotte, knowing nothing of this, called the school the same evening. The headmistress asked, surprised: “Isn’t she home with you?” “No, she isn’t.” Charlotte, after some more telephoning, found that her daughter had gone to a friend’s house under pretext of returning home. Charlotte, relating this to Chrysanthi, was in tears, rightfully so, for it must be unpleasant to be deceived by one’s own daughter.

Chrysanthi wasn’t surprised. She told me that she had noticed what kind of a character the daughter had when we all visited Cherry Lawn a few months ago. I was with the Bardens; the others went to a golf driving range in the afternoon. The daughter said that she wanted a hamburger. Leo said OK, but wouldn’t it be better to wait so that they all could have supper together at six o’clock—hamburgers, too; but of course, if she was so hungry that she couldn’t wait. . . “No, no,” said the daughter. “I’ll wait, of course.” Whereupon she went to the driving range with her friend (her parents having gone off somewhere else) and immediately ordered a hamburger.

May 12, 1957

Odysseas, C.’s brother, is in Tashkent, Russia. C. told how during the war Lola used to bring bread to him secretly. Only the children could do it, as the Germans didn’t suspect children. Lola would put two pieces of bread in her brassiere so they appeared like beasts (she was young, but old enough to be developed). This ruse always worked. Odysseas fears to return to Greece because he was declared guilty (of ?) unanimously, the three “judges” concurring, which made him an outlaw. That is, anyone could shoot him down at sight, and legally, still can.

C. tells also of the officious policemen, uneducated village boys who felt themselves important because of their uniforms. Cf. the officer who assured C. (who held her passport unobserved in her hand) that she surely could never get a passport.

May 13, 1957

Atlantic Beach

Walked with Leander in my arms along Silver Point Beach to the lighthouse. Fog heavy, seemed to be following us. Gulls and sandpipers in squadrons. Leander investigated shells and put his hands in the sea. I waded, the water saturating the bottoms of my rolled-up trousers. On the way back I sang in time to my steps, making up words, first in Greek and then in French, to the tune of La Mer, until Leander fell asleep in my arms.

May 17, 1957

Employee is driven to last rope by his unjust dismissal for stealing. His taking the plane is a combination of a childish vengeance (he half-knows he will destroy it and himself) and of a desire to fulfill himself now before he loses all chance—that is, before his shield is removed and he is thrust out, without a recommendation, to try to find a new job. Emphasize, leading up to this, that the air job constitutes the employee’s sole experience: he came to it fresh out of high school with romantic hopes of rising to pilot (cf. Hans!), was encouraged somewhat treacherously by management, but frustrated by various factors: the bureaucracy of the union, etc., demanding seniority for promotion; lack of money, consequent to this, flying lessons being so expensive. His position is worsened by the fact that (1) he is always surrounded by pilots, and envies them; and (2) he is able constantly to handle huge sums of money, but never to have any. He is tempted of course to steal, and even tries to work out a plan, but ironically he is apprehended when he wasn’t stealing, or when he was actually being compelled by conscience to put the money back in the register. This adds to his bitterness. A further factor can be his love-life. In various ways this can tie in: desire to marry, but impossibility of doing so while he earns so little; worse than this, the girls toss him over because they want the romantic pilots, or at least the pilots’ impressive salary. Further irony: other clerks steal money, even boast about it, but are undiscovered. Managers know vaguely that they are being cheated. Make him a test case: thus their insistence on his being dismissed in any case, even if evidence isn’t too convincing. The employee could be like Lord Jim, rather inarticulate. Perhaps the narrator’s function should be to articulate, as Marlow does, but also to present his own problems, fears, frustrations, which are basically similar to those of the employee—e.g., Marlow and Kurtz. Kurtz gives in to the jungle; Marlow realizes his own propensity toward doing the same, and takes precautions. In fine, we learn more about Marlow than about Kurtz. This perhaps justifies the melodrama, for Kurtz’s plot and the employee’s are perhaps too melodramatic.

I see that this novel is getting to be contemplated in such a way that only a large canvas and a complicated one would do it justice. I can’t seem to keep things simple. But sit down and write the thing, damn it!

May 18, 1957

Wouldn’t a good pedagogical method in literature be to have the student recapitulate the history of literature, so that when reading at any given stage he would have as his background the same literary background that the author had? He would start with Greek mythology and the Bible, then go through Homer, the Greek dramatists and philosophers, their Roman counterparts, then medieval romances leading to Trouvères and Provençe, down to Sicily with Frederick, up to Tuscany with Grinnizelli, Calvalcanti, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, the Humanists and epic-writers, then with the French armies up through Lyons to Paris and the Pléiade. From here it gets much more complicated. After Ariosto he can cross quickly to England and suffer the Faerie Queene, etc., etc.

May 25, 1957

A portmanteau dream I had involved the following (all at the same time): I was carrying the side door of the farm house, the one made out of barn wood, and looking for a place to leave it. I saw a barnlike shack and was about to set it against the wall in back, when some men drove up in a truck. I asked their permission. They weren’t the owners, but anyway they said I would be crazy to leave it in the open, as it would surely be stolen. “This?” I said. “It’s only an old no-good door.” I didn’t know what to do. Meanwhile the men had sat down, each in front of a wooden chair-frame, and were putting in the cane slat. One man was in front of me and the other in back. The one in front was complaining that he was so fat he couldn’t work except at arm’s-length. Then, at the same time, I seemed to be in the home of the one in back. His wife looked thin and bedraggled. She was preparing to nurse the baby. “How old is your child?” I asked. “Three years.” “Well,” I said, “you may not have the record for breast-feeding, but you must be near it.”

July 13, 1957

Epigram of Aeschylus (Agamemnon, 757), which perhaps has application chez moi: δίχα δ’ ἄλλων μονόφρων εἰμί.

Also: τίς δέ βίος, τί δέ τερπνόν ἄτερ Χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης;—Mimnermus

July 16, 1957

The biographer of St. Francis could be cynical and sarcastic, as in Lucky Jim, and drive the employee to suicide because of his (the intellectual’s) theories of dangerous living à la Thomas Mann, and also his devil-may-care attitude and his conviction that we’ll all be blown up anyway by the atom bomb. He appeals to the employee’s desire to be something, not just be a cog in the giant company’s wheel and an anonymous inhabitant of the giant city.

July 26, 1957

Recurring epigram, also a palindrome: ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟ-ΨΙΝ νίψον ανομήματα μη μόναν όψιν wash away (my) sins (and) not (my) face alone.

August 26, 1957

Alvin Millington ripped the lath out of a house he rented, to burn for firewood!

September 10, 1957

Some magically good lines from Whitman on the sea, quoted by Logan Pearsall Smith:

. . . some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of freedom-lover pent Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chaffing in those breakers

September 11, 1957

“It is most important in this world . . . to be pushing; but it is fatal to seem so.”—Benjamin Jowett

❡ Most human beings are born for harness and are melancholy when out of it too long. Like Wordsworth, they feel the weight of chance desires; the definite routine, the daily necessary task, eliminates the need for self-imposed activity, and they are freed from that irresolution, that degrading sophistry of laziness which is the curse of those whose tasks are voluntary and can be performed at any time. —Logan Smith.

❡ ἔχω οὐκ ἔχομαι—Aristippus of Cyrene. “I am taken by these things, but they do not take me in”—i.e., I take them or leave them. Good motto.

Santayana explained that happiness lies not in absolute solitude, but in the substitution of an ideal for a natural society, in converse with thoughts rather than with things. Such a substitution, he adds, is normal, and a mark of moral vigor. ❡ “To substitute the society of ideas for that of things is,” he says, “simply to live in the mind; it is to survey the world of existences in its truth and beauty rather than in its personal perspectives, or with practical urgency. It is the sole path of happiness for the intellectual man, because the intellectual man cannot be satisfied with a world of perpetual change, defeat, and imperfection.”—quoted by Logan Smith.

September 17, 1957

Striking scenes in Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνετεαι του Καζαντζάκη: the religious “cell” meeting where Manolios, Priest Fotis, etc. have confessional; the mating of Lenio and Nikolio; the pagan orgy at Elijah’s church; the meeting of Michaelis and Priest Grigoris after the archon’s death.

September 20, 1957

ὅστις τοι δοκέει τὸν πλησίον ἴδμεναι οὐδέν, ἀλλ’ αὐτὸς μοῦνος ποικίλα δήνε’ ἔχειν

κεῖνος γ’ ἄφρων ἐστί, νόου βεβλαμμένος ἐσθλοῦ. ἴσως γὰρ πάντες ποικίλ’ ἐπιστάμεθα.

—Theognis, 221–4

September 21, 1957

For a good résumé of Greek thought on divine vs. man-made law, and the duty owed by the citizen to each, see C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, the chapter on “Antigone,” especially pp. 97–102; and Antigone’s statement, lines 450 ff.

οὐ γὰρ τί μοι Ζεῦς ἦν ὁ κηρύξας τάδε,

οὐδ’ ἡ ξύνοικος τῶν κάτω θεῶν Δίκη

τοιούσδ’ ἐν ἀνθρώποισιν ὥρισεν νόμους.

For some references to Modern Greek folksongs, see John Mavrogordato in CR (Classical Review?) 1925, p. 151.

I wonder how much has been done in collecting Greek village beliefs, the type of thing that Yeats and Lady Gregory did in Ireland. But Yeats had his Lady Gregory to foot the bill; if I were to travel the Greek villages, who would be my Lady? And Yeats was Irish; and Yeats was a genius—maybe.

In looking for apartments in the area of Morningside Heights, I learned that the janitor of 160 Claremont Avenue is named James Joyce.

September 22, 1957

A good epitaph after the world is destroyed by the atom bomb:

Περιφραδής ανήρ . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Σοφόν τι τȍ μηχανόεν

τέχνας ὑπέρ ἐλπίδ’ ἔχων,

τότε μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ’ ’ἐπ’ ἐσθλόν ἕρπει . . .

—Σοφοκλέους Αντιγόνη, 347, 364-6

I read the first few chapters of Lionel Trilling’s book on E. M. Forster, and saw immediately that Trilling’s reputation as a critic is entirely deserved. The style is charming; the exposition brilliant. A good model for my Hartley dissertation.

September 28, 1957

❡ There could be nobody in the world with less dignity than my wife, and few people in less need of that attribute. —Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling, p. 91.

September 29, 1957

Διάπειρά τοι βροτῶν ἕλεγχος. —Pindar, Ol. IV. 22

Amis’s That Uncertain Feeling touched many things that I, and people in my position, know in our own lives: the problem of babysitters; what happens when daddy forgets to put the rubber pants over baby’s diaper; finding the sugar bowl always empty, the tea pot always full—of old tea leaves. Plus: the annoying neighbor downstairs; the boredom of routine; the stringencies of apartment-house living. Luckily, however, for Amis’s characters, they had a good solitary place to make love and go for swims in the nude. That would be rather hard to find in New York.

October 12, 1957

❡ . . . His marriage had been a good one, he loved his children, he was getting near middle age; yet now he was craving for a woman, as though he were a virgin dying with the intolerable thought that he had missed the supreme joy, the joy greater in imagination than any realized love could ever be, as though he were Keats cursing fate because he had not had Fanny Brawne.

In those that I had seen die, the bitterest thought was what they had left undone.

And, as a matter of truth, though it was not always an easy truth to take, I had observed what others had observed before—I could not recall of those who had known more than their share of the erotic life, one who, when the end came, did not think that his time had been tolerably well spent. —C. P. Snow, The New Men, p. 237.

October 18, 1957

Rousseau: “The man who thinks is a depraved animal.”

St. Gregory: “Ignorance is the mother of devotion.”

October 22, 1957

Look up Piaget, “The Language and Thought of the Child.”

November 6, 1957

Addendum to employer-mechanic plot: item in newspaper that several baggage room employees at Eastern Airlines had been arraigned for stealing, over a period of time, about $100,000 worth of furs, clothing, etc., taken from passengers’ luggage.

Sex: the last frontier of adventure in our sophisticated world.

November 12, 1957

What about Johnny Taylor—his rise via GI Bill from lower class to university. Desire for money. His lone mother. His fanatical Protestantism. The rupture with the Catholic girlfriend. Conflict of moral position with New York industrial and commercial picture. His job as publicity man for a true confessions magazine. Later: RCA, and (?) power.

The episode of climbing on the barn roof to show off to girlfriend.

For brutality and sadism: BLC initiations. Swatting. Tying penis and telling person to jump, etc. For vice: see article in Ebony about teenage vice clubs, both hetero- and homosexual. Cf. Millingtons’ “nest” down their road.

November 19, 1957

The brush fire at Brummen with Riek. My intensity, and the primitive pull it exerted as it got bigger, and the momentum of physical work, more requiring more. Strange that I should have remembered this while reading Iris Murdock tonight.

November 25, 1957

❡ . . . we are stark blind. —Milton, “Areopagitica.”

December 1, 1957

Stefan told this anecdote about Kreisler. Some people invited him to dinner and added, as if incidentally, “Please bring your violin, too.” “Oh,” said Kreisler, “but the violin doesn’t get hungry.”

Good subject for a children’s story: the violin suddenly sits down to dinner and stuffs itself.

December 16, 1957

John Harvey’s mother, coming from an upper-middle-class English academic family, with a country estate in Jersey, etc., coming to Duxbury, Mass., her husband dead, money frozen in England. Marriage of convenience (economic necessity) to Walter Prince, rough and ready house-moving business owner. Memories of John’s real father. His love of the pomp of the peacetime Navy; his annotations of the Bible; his cycling in China.

John Taylor’s courtship with a Catholic girl, and final breakup, ostensibly owing to religious incompatibility.

My efforts at Deerfield to imitate the broad “a” and thus prove my social acceptability. The shame I felt in doing so.

December 25, 1957

Hone asked Alice, in everyone’s presence, if she were “still going out with that midget.” This must have hurt. Ironically, we had been discussing Sid’s shortness and its effect on people’s impression of him this afternoon, not, of course, in Alice’s presence.

December 26, 1957

To cheer the ploughman with increaseful crops,

And waste huge stones with little water-drops.

—Rape of Lucrece.

At Hone’s party, when I was playing the piano for Christmas carols, Emmy’s friend, fifteen years old and just ripe, was leaning so close that her breast touched my back. Very pleasant. I took care to show no reaction, was not eager to disturb the status quo.

1958

414 West 121st Street, Apt. 63, New York

January–September 10

Mid-Atlantic

September 10–16

Prince’s Lodge, 6 Prince of Wales Terrace (Kensington), London

September 10–23

Bristol, 5 Woolcot Street

September 27 – December 31

January 1, 1958

Reinoud’s and Riek’s and my outing toward Drenthe when rain forced us to stay overnight at the pig-farmer’s, whom Reinoud could hardly understand. Reinoud and I slept in a sack on the hay; Riek inside. The farmer’s gigantic meal of slop, of which he offered us nothing.

January 2, 1958

Chrysanthi wept yesterday, which she hasn’t done for some time, and the cause was as I expected: feeling ill and in low spirits because of “her condition” (this being the 3rd month), she was despondent that her mother was unable to come to her. I cheered her up finally by telling her the plot of Jude the Obscure!

January 10, 1958

A good slogan to hang on the wall at Terpni:

From Alfred’s preface to his Grammar (translated in Cook & Tinker): ❡ . . . It behooves every man who has any good talent to make that talent useful to other men, and to commit unto others the pound which God hath entrusted unto him. . . . It is fitting that young men should acquire knowledge, and that the old should teach their youth wisdom, since, by means of learning, faith is kept, and every man who loveth wisdom is happy; whereas the mind of him who will neither learn nor teach, if he can, becomes cool toward holy lore, and thus, little by little, he turns from God. Whence shall come wise teachers for God’s people unless they learn in youth? And how can faith increase if learning and teachers fail? . . . Hence I say, not that this book may help many to knowledge, but that, if it pleases them, it may be, as it were, an opening to every language. [For the original, see Zupitra’s edition, pp. 2–3.]

January 12, 1958

Visit from Paula and Socrates Kentros. Paula showed herself as snide as always. C. was inwardly infuriated by Paula’s obvious assumption that no one was anything except herself. She actually asked if I’d gotten my B.A. yet! And she spoke of the wife of a student friend of hers working in a restaurant to help support her husband (who is a minister and idealistic) as shocking and utterly beneath anyone of dignity. Chrysanthi explained that Paula exemplifies the qualities in Salonika Jews that everyone despised, qualities of self-esteem that apparently predominated over other, perhaps more agreeable ones, which they may have had. Of course, American Jews are just the same: aren’t we brought up to believe that we’re naturally better than everyone else? It’s the greatest disillusionment to a Jew when he finds that Protestants and even Catholics can be brilliantly intelligent. Perhaps to avoid this disillusionment Jews tend to stay in intellectual ghettoes. Anyway, Paula was very annoying, and Socrates seems to have picked up her worst qualities. He is sure of his importance as a mighty surgeon, and equally sure of my unimportance as a struggling student and teacher. Of course, maybe he’s right, but one naturally doesn’t enjoy hearing such things.

January 23, 1958

Long chat with Stephan Lokos. He says I should give up everything in order to become a writer.

Incident of the beautiful but thorny bush, picked by others for us, which dad screamed should be thrown out of the car because it stuck him.

January 24, 1958

Reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road put me in mind of my wild hitch-hiking and jalopy-traveling days: the ride in the back of the manure truck, with two mad Vermonters doing 60 mph on winding Route 8; lying on the oil drums with Donella on an English lorry headed for Edinburgh; the trip in the old Ford with Tom Wilson from Brant Lake during the hurricane, with flooded roads, falling trees and electric wires all around, and never thinking it a hurricane until we saw the headline in a diner, only then getting scared and thinking what stupid heroes we’d been, and how lucky; also the mad car-driving of Sherman, with his catalogue of possessions and smash-ups and trade-ins, solemnly delivered while he was recuperating from the last escape, and him never even having a driver’s license; and the mad car-driving of Clarence and cronies in Rochester; and the Studebaker I bought for $20 and sold for $5, with no first or reverse gears, and the troubles we had with its windshield wiper. Cars, cars; the road. Kerouac has found what really is America. I felt it immediately. Also the mad trip to Keene Valley with Peter Gardner, and mountain climbing in the dark; the frozen food; the stove that wouldn’t work; the frozen beer afterwards; the invasion of the pancake place, and the mad ride back over solid ice with the defroster not working and the only vision the size of a half-dollar through the windshield.

Also thought of the Port Saïd restaurant and its vulgarities.

Last night seven of my students of G.S. English EV6a, section 16 (whew!) took me out, and we all had beers and talked about America and Europe and sex and language and books. Fine!

Incidents: Theory-mad doctors, like Mischa with his vitamins, killing a patient. Vitamins and the whole cult of artificial health production is disgusting! Isn’t it better to live life vibrantly than to worry about health? Or the advice Mischa gave Jerry Springer: not to marry his intended because she had a weak heart. And Jerry, the fool, listening to God Mischa, throwing her over, and then on the rebound marrying the idiot who is ruining his life. But she has a strong set of values and ventricles, bless her!

For Kerouac, the worst sin is yawning.

My father’s insane preoccupation with good food, and yet he doesn’t even enjoy it, but eats saccharine and protein bread and vitamins and special jam, etc., etc. His gluttony and boorishness, never waiting for others to be served, but er fresst immediately. Also his intolerance, snobbishness, refusal to be touched by Negroes or the lower classes. This all came to light over the question of buying the apartment in Morningside Gardens. Such are radicals and social reformers under the front—sometime.

Malcolm Brown’s mad driving in a Ford ’35, and Dean Freiday’s in a Willys. Mischa’s maniacally careful driving.

January 25, 1958

The sequel to the beer drinking with my students was the session, uninterrupted yesterday from 2 p.m. until 9:30 p.m., in which we marked the exams and decided on final grades. Crowell has a system. After counting the number of errors on all the EV6 papers, we read them off to him and he makes a curve. On the basis of this he assigns letter grades: A, B, C, D, or F. these we can raise or lower one step, D to D+ or D–; C+ to B–, etc. because of the student’s good or bad work during the term. Then we examined the final impromptus, which had been marked either failing, passing, or passing question-mark, where there was a discrepancy between, let’s say, a failing impromptu and a good score on the exam. Crowell read the composition and each of us, Martha, Bea, Bombose, and myself, had to vote whether or not we should fail the student, and if not, how to compromise with a proper grade: usually D. Crowell was terribly strict; he wanted to fail everyone who was the slightest bit questionable, on the reasoning that the next class, EV9, is supposed to be college level. Given his reasoning, I could see the justice of so many failures, but the reasoning itself was unjust from the students’ point of view. Many did passing work in the course but still were not really ready for EV9. They failed. In my class, Borda, Cziriak, Varga, Halpern, Glickman, Hay, Couteras all failed. I was stupefied. I at least saved Mutevally with a D, and also Devoris. These students of course—several of them anyway—really did fail the exam (making errors I would never have expected, and making me feel miserable, mortified), but this failure was arrived at on the basis of the curve where they had to compete with three other classes, two of which, the day classes, had four hours a week as opposed to our three. Most unfair, I think.

How can I explain to the students, who I am sure will receive the news of failure as a complete surprise? I certainly had given them the impression that no one would fail. I feel especially sorry about Borda and the other Hungarians who are working for degrees. How will this look on their records? And I would never have failed any of them judging merely on their performance in the class, on home compositions, etc.

When we started yesterday I of course tried to raise all the marks, and never voted against a student, at which Crowell similed and said I’d learn differently, and that everyone acted as I was acting after they’d taught only one class. But after I saw how many of my students were going to fail, I felt inclined to see that students in the other sections failed also, to balance things out; and although I’m sure I didn’t descend to vindictiveness, I’m also sure that some such feeling of revenge or hurt pride prevented me from supporting students I would normally (i.e., naïvely) have supported. This is the way we judge our fellow humans, as C. P. Snow says.

Probably Crowell was extra-strict this time because of the Report advising abolition of GS non-matric, due to its “low standards.” Our students perhaps aren’t intellectually as select as those of Columbia College, but they do have a seriousness, a sense of motivation, and an optimism that I felt strongly when I read their compositions. It’s a shame to crowd them out, for they are really desirous of education. Mrs. Bryant told me (on the Q.T.) at the party Mrs. Dobbie gave for Lois McIntosh, that a good deal of this was due to the ideas of Jacques Barzun, who, she said, is an insufferable snob, and therefore recoils before the filthy, immigrant population of G.S. He wants to make Columbia as lily-pure as Harvard and Princeton. Why doesn’t he go to Cambridge then, and leave Columbia with its best feature, its non-snobbishness? Why does anyone think himself important?

After the session, half starved, I went to Juilliard in time to hear the last movement of Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony, which quieted me somehow; then came home to find C. still up and worried where I was, whereupon we ate, and then tried to sleep.

Martha told me that every new teacher has to realize that even he cannot make mediocre students pass exams, and that I’ll become used to failing people without qualms, as time goes on. That’s nice!

January 26, 1958

Paradise Lost V, 577 ff.:

As yet this World was not, and Chaos wild

Reigned where these heavens now rowl, where Earth now rests

Upon her centre poised, when on a day

(For Time, though in Eternity, applied

To motion, measures all things durable

By present, past, and future), on such day

As Heaven’s great year brings forth, the empyreal host

Of Angels, by imperial summons called,

Innumerable before the Almighty’s throne

Forthwith from all the ends of Heaven appeared

Under their hierarchs in orders bright.

Ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced,

Standards and gonfalons, ’twixt van and rear

Stream in the air, and for distinction serve

Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees;

Or in their glittering tissues bear imblazed

Holy memorials, acts of zeal and love

Recorded eminent. Thus when in orbs

Of circuit inexpressible they stood,

Orb within orb, the Father Infinite,

By whom in bliss imbosomed sat the Son,

Amidst, as from a flaming Mount, whose top

Brightness had made invisible, thus spake:

“Hear, all ye Angels, Progeny of Light,

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,

Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand!

This day I have begot whom I declare

My only Son, and on this holy hill

Him have anointed, whom ye now behold

At my right hand. Your head I him appoint,

And by myself have sworn to him shall bow

All knees in Heaven, and shall confess him Lord.”

January 29, 1958

I add up my savings, but always I gaze

Out over the fields, craving for peace,

Hating this city, aching for my village

Where the cry isn’t always “Buy, haggle, and fleece,”

But where there is give and take and a living for all. . .

—Aristophanes cf. Dicaeopolis

February 9, 1958

Extraordinary sermon by Dr. McCracken at Riverside Church on “Maintaining Your Independence Despite Social Compulsion.” He spoke of The Organization Man, The Hidden Persuaders, and The Lonely Crowd, and minced no words as far as the congregation was concerned, composed, as everyone realized, of influential men in advertising, radio, TV, and other offending institutions. McCracken described and illustrated the spirit of conformity that rules today; called it insidious, cited the great non-conformists in the world’s religious and secular history, and chalenged us all to live according to our own inner selves, our own knowledge of right and wrong, our own bit of divinity, instead of lettng ourselves be propped up and directed like “wooden soldiers” by social forces expressed via advertising and the mass media. He ended by reminding us that Jesus was the greatest non-conformist of all. McCracken represented today the best of a courageous tradition of frank pulpit oratory, challenging, hitting social problems fearlessly, and with conviction, fervor, and skill.

I thought of the sermon in A Portrait of the Arist as a Young Man. That too had tremendous power: a good device for conveying ideas discursively in literature.

I met Crowell on the campus after Mr. Borda saw me, and reemphasized Borda’s predicament to the great Professor. “Peter, he said, “you’ve got to learn not to have any sympathy for the student.” Here endeth the first lesson.

Saul, needing a 40-page paper typed in a hurry while he was working at the VA hospital, went into the secretaries’ room—40 girls typing away and had each do one page. Thus he had he whole paper finished in 3 minutes, and treated the girls to lunch!

Yale game episode of Jeanne Dinsmore. Car breakdown. No way to get to the cabin, which had had its promise of illicit delights. The dance, and Jeanne’s hot passion, my inability to respond. John Harvey takes over. He realizes her state and does what he can for her, short of laying her right on the dancefloor.

Margot called. She’s coming with her husband Wm. Briggs tomorrow for supper. Strange, the romantic feelings I still have for my old girlfriends. How shall I feel and act tomorrow? I can’t say.

February 19, 1958

❡ A man is strictly only himself when he is fulfilling some purpose he has conceived: so that the principle is not of self-subordination, but of continuity, of development. —D. H. Lawrence, “A Study of Thomas Hardy” in Selected Literary Criticism of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anthony Beal, Heinemann, p. 193.

February 21, 1958

Possibility of a father-son relationship, the two together really representing one complete being. The father beng the mind-principle, idealist; the son bought up under this, rebelling, and discovering sensuality—at, for instance, Millington Road orgies. The father could be writing a book on St. Francis. The son would have to have an affaire, and get married probably. Then there’d have to be some reconciliation between the mind principle as seen in the father, and the body principle as seen in the son.

Mrs. Solomon, who ruins our 5th Day Meetings, is a fat old bag of guts that talks interminably. She collects Arabs, tries to direct the lives of young people, getting them apartments, dinners, jobs, etc. Yesterday she went on about her care of a pennyless African revolutionary: feeding him while he got a degree. Now he’ll go back to Uganda and work for independence. All very fine, but she’s a bore. This revolutionary got his start at Woodbrooke. I told Mrs. Solomon that the British Friends would be in a ticklish position when they learned that their protogé had torn another part of the Empire away from them. An unpleasant remark, I admit, but she didn’t at all take it as the joke I intended it to be.

Wednesday, C. P. Snow and his wife, Pamela Johnson, spoke in Harkness. He repeated his position about the need for a return to nineteenth-century realism. She added a few stupid remarks about “projecting character” and other technical devices. He was jovial and attractive, she horrible. She reminded me of Sheila! I gave Snow my paper. Geoffrey Wagner was at the meeting, looking ridiculous in a derby and stiff-collared shirt. Martha Salmon surprised me. She sat next to me and during the question period begged me to ask a question for her, saying that she was always petrified to do so. Amazing in a grown woman, and a teacher! I refused, and she finally put her hand up feebly. She spoke in such a retiring, halting way that it was hard for Snow to hear her, but at least she did speak up. John McKenna, of course, asked the best questions of the night.

February 22, 1958

A recapitulation of America’s intellectual position. Unformed boy coming from a Puritan household is first attracted to the idealism of Emerson and Thoreau, goes to the woods and builds his cabin, meets fast characters and is inducted gradually into beat-generation types of activities: brutality, speed, sex, cynicism, disillusion. Perhaps in between: a spot of political radicalism. But the biggest problem, for the character, and for America, is what to do next!

The scene in The White Peacock in which George is brought home drunk reminds me of the time when I was 16 or so and was kindly conducted home by Philip Oppenheim and Eugene Girden or Arthur Kaledin or somebody else, from Allan Schleifstein’s party where the idiot of a father had kept offering me whiskey afer whiskey until of course I was completely sick. Philip told me afterwards (since I was incapable of remembering, certainly) that I threw up all the way home, threw up on the stairs of our house (and Philip cleaned up the mess, bless his soul. They somehow got me to my room, took off all my clothes, and left me strewn naked on the bed, in which condition my mother found me in the morning. That was the first and last time (so far) that I got drunk.

February 24, 1958

To buy and to sell, but above all, to commingle. In the old world, men make themselves two great excuses for coming together to a centre, and commingling freely in a mixed, unsuspicious host. Market and religion. These alone bring men, unarmed, together since time began. A little load of firewood, a warm blanket, a few eggs and tomatoes are excuse enough for men, women, and children to cross the foot-weary miles of valley and mountain. To buy, to sell, to barter, to exchane. To exchange, above all things, human contact.

“That is why they like you to bargain, even if it’s only the difference of a centavo.”—D. H. Lawrence, “Market Day” in Mornings in Mexico.

❡ Slightly bending foward, a black gourd rattle in the right hand, a small green bough in the left, the dancer dances the eternal drooping leap, that brings his life down, down, down, down from the mind, down from the broad beautiful, shaking breast, down to the powerful pivot of the knees, then to the ankles, and plunges deep from the ball of the foot into the earth, towards the earth’s red centre, where these men belong, as is signified by the red earth with which they are smeared. —D. H. Lawrence, “The Dance of the Sprouting Corn” in Mornings in Mexico.

February 25, 1958

Opener: (?) ___ ___ was a Jew who’d become a Quaker and was now writing a book on St. Francis.

February 26, 1958

Was it Margot who told me of the girl she’d heard about—a teenager pregnant—who’d bound up her body to hide the pregnancy, suffering horrible tortures all the while, and finally killing both the baby and herself? This could be used in the mountain vice-nest scene. The girl, excited at the Millington-type seducers about illicit doings, enjoys the backwoods bothel, in all innocence as to “how babies come.” When she gets pregnant, however, and understands what is going on, the old Puritanism comes out. Society will not accept the illegitimacy she instinctively feels. And in this sense, society kills her In her naïveté, compare her to Dewey Dell in As I Lay Dying.

February 27, 1958

Life is too important to waste by always being busy.

March 3, 1958

In the airline plot: an unimportant employee could embezzle but be exonerated by the union at his hearing (cf. Gene) while a higher up, whom everyone trusted, could be found out to have been stealing regularly, with good intentions of paying back, because of family needs. (Al Miller, with his ten children.) Another theme: the shifting of personnel, the insecure life on this account, the desire to lord it overseas, etc. Also: John Tanner-type flitting on-the-road nests, with no roots, and a frustrated desire to fly. Love affairs, et al. The boss’s son, accustomed to VIPs. Injustice to Puerto Ricans. Pro-Germanism: the rise of Hans; perhaps also element of homosexuality. Change in personality when someone is raised to be a boss. Impossibility of ___’s rising beyond chief rep because of good-natured personality. The Little Dictator and his promotions. His limited Spanish. Baggage-room shenanigans.

March 4, 1958

Hero could be John Tanner-type Englishman flitting across the Atlantic & back, trying to find himself. Father wanted him to get into business. He plans to, but gets plane fever when in RAF. His French mother dies, leaving a small legacy, which he soon squanders. Girlfriend in Montreal. Plans to marry her, but learns of her death in an auto accident. Affaire with older married woman in NYC. This unsatisfactory. But can’t free himself. Plans to find a job in Europe, but is drawn back to her. Tries to advance. Goes through dispatcher’s course while working also. Strain. Passes. Then turns down a job in a remote station, flits around, lets the license expire, and is forced to work again as a clerk at $55 a week. Has vague aspirations to be a novelist but feels he has no talent. Is drawn to intellectual people but then is embarrassed because of his lack of education. One of his friends could be our old friend who’s writing a book on St. Francis: which method of escape is, if anything, worse than the on-the-road one. The two compared, etc.

March 5, 1958

M. Bédé, au séance que nous avions la dernière semaine, nous a montré l’influence sur le développement des genres lettéraires que les niveaux de la société ont joués. Par example, le chanson de geste devenait un genre des marches, de la bourgeoisie. Entrant dans les cours, il s’est transformé en roman, plus intime, qui a préféré des autres themes et methods. Puis, passant encore une fois à la bourgeoisie, un autre genre s’est developpé. Je me demande combine c’est vrai, en generale, que l’histoire des genres a suivi la meme patterne. Il s’agit de la mode. Un genre est à la mode; plus tard, un autre le remplace. La première passé au nouveau milieu, et se transforme. Après ça, peut-être, le même genre devient de nouveau à la mode, et se transforme de nouveau. Il faut demander s’il y a déjà un livre savant qui s’occupe de çe théorie.

March 8, 1958

❡ Most tedious was the close study of English literature. Why should one remember the things one reads? —D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 333.

❡ Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that all the religion she knew was but a particular clothing to a human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing,—the clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their Osiris. Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local religions into universal religion. —Ibid., p. 340.

March 9, 1958

Visit from Peter Gardner. His tape recorder and five-string banjo were stolen from his car one night while it was parked on 121st Street. Poor fellow—he’s just getting set up: put $250 into the recorder, only to have it stolen, not insured, and is reminded of it every month as the payments come due. He told me that Izzy is going to take a two-year psychoanalysis. He says she has a fear of marriage, of committing herself at any rate, something I hadn’t known. I thought it was a question of her parents, who were opposed to Pete because he wasn’t Jewish. Actually, this did sound a bit phony. A girl needn’t be too terribly strong these days to defy her parents in such a matter. Apparently, however, the real difficulty is that Izzy is afraid of marriage, with whomever the man may be. This certainly is a cake of a different color. Pete should drop her completely, but he won’t. Why do men follow these hopeless women to their own destruction (the men’s), both in novels and in real life?

Passages in Women in Love reminded me of the moonlit canoe rides on Brant Lake, and especially of the times we went naked for a swim, jumping out of the craft and then sat in the bottom, drifting. How romantic!

Pete tells me of his first experiences in show business. The promoters he has to deal with in Boston seem to have a standard proviso: that he spend the night with them. So far, he says, he hasn’t succumbed. Foul, sick, damnable world!

For conversation and inquisitiveness or camaraderie in a railway carriage: Recall the ride to Sidherokastron, where the neighbors investigated our life history. The man with live chickens under the seat; the gigantic but timid Evzone returning to his village with his album of snapshots; the family in Yugoslavia; the conductor who wanted to be friendly; and the cleaning lady at Zagreb.

March 12, 1958

The St. Francis author should be cock-sure of himself at first: full of theories, always talking, preaching—about fulfillment, etc. A walking Aldous Huxley tract. The burden of the novel must be to make him realize gradually his own emptiness until he comes to a point, as Gerald Crich does in Women in Love, where his sense of frustration and chagrin and emptiness becomes overpowering, even a physical feeling, which needs an outlet, which he finds in sex. But note how deftly Lawrence treats this kind of theme. First of all, quite aside from Gerald as a character, the reader is prepared for Gerald’s passion by the example of Birkin and Ursula. Then, concerning Gerald himself, he is prepared. He gets tastes, and mild setbacks: he has had his kissing, but not yet his full satisfaction. The kissing under the bridge, however, is enough to make Gudrun, though surprised, receptive to him when he does come to her. The melodramatic entry into her house shows perfectly the extremity of his position.

Chapter XXIII, “Excurse,” dealing with Birkin and Ursula is also magnificent in its portrayal of a woman’s passion come to bloom irresistibly. It is the closest thing to the Riek episodes that I’ve seen in literature.

The St. Francis person can get his preparation perhaps through the affairs of another—more earthly—person of whom he at first (of course) disapproves.

March 13, 1958

The St. Francis person and the earthy person can in the course of the novel change places, as it were: can learn from each other, or both approach a mean. Their friendship or union at the end would signify the union of all the elements that should be in a man if he be a whole man. Something like Stephen and Bloom (Sloom and Blephen!).

March 14, 1958

The St. Francis person’s lacks as a human being must be shown in a scene such as the motor-chair one in Lady Chatterley’s Lover or the toboggan race in The Shrimp and the Anemone. Then, after this, there can be a confrontation (which neither Hartley nor Lawrence gives), with the hero being “told off” so that he realizes his own position as well as the reader does.

1st letter: from George, tells of engagement; offers sister, Theodora. 2nd letter: from Kostas, rejects Theodora. 3rd letter: from George, furious at Kostas, says he honored K. by offering Theodora.

Café: Kostas with Eleni, his sister, and Loudha, a friend. Eleni sees George and fiancée walk by. Passing boys pay attention to Eleni. Loudha jealous; not so pretty; getting old. Kostas’s comment on ugliness disheartens her. Later Theodora appears, walking with her mother. Tells Kostas of D’s engagement. K. has to pretend not to know of it. Now must write congratulatory note.

Theodora: educated, pleasant, sophisticated, a dreamer, has university degree, but plain and ugly, fattish, old. Eleni: pretty, sleek, thin, young, wants Kostas to marry Loudha. Fiancée: very ugly. Kostas: introspective, idealistic, extremes of melancholia and gaiety. George: wrathful, a friend until crossed. Loudha: doesn’t know about Kostas and George. Aiming for Kostas herself.

Kostas’s conflicts between offending an old friend and marrying someone he’s not attracted to. Writes: that he looks on Theodora as his own sister, not a possible mate.

Background: rhythm! Symbol (expanding). Skiff with masts (phallic); dark hold (feminine, cf. cave in Sidherokastron); industry, sea, lapping sounds. Singer & band; waiters; acquaintances come to next table; see George & fiancée walk by. This sets up various trains of thought. Kostas’s thought; George’s letters, etc. Should he hail George? Did George snub him?: Vocal: “George didn’t see us. That’s his fiancée, isn’t it?” Loudha: “The fiancée is uglier than I am.” Eleni: “Good that Kostas didn’t marry Theodora.” Is Loudha interested in him?

Boy (Socrates) pays attention to Eleni. Make conversation while Kostas thinks over 2nd and 3rd letters. Theodora passes; says she’ll return shortly. Opinions of George, Eleni, Loudha, Socrates re: Theodora. Theodora returns. Enthusiastic about George’s engagement and his fiancée. Confusion: what to say?

A trip to Europe may also be used, such as the one in Women in Love. This trip can be originated by the Francis-man’s desire to see Assisi. But the trip must be dramatically necessary, and not just a travelogue.

Note Lawrence’s technique of first introducing a character and then having other characters talk about him, as Birkin and Gerald talk about Loerke. Thus we see the character, the other characters see him, and we see how the others see him. To add to this, Loerke’s speeches show how he sees himself. The picture, therefore, is rather complete.

The episode to reveal character of Francis-man could be the ascent to the Saint’s hideaway above Assisi, where Francis-man refuses to listen to reason and drags himself and wife? girlfriend? along despite her pains and fatigue. This can precipitate the confrontation scene, the girl previously having thought he was practically a saint himself.

Bill Schweitzer: browbeating Joan in front of guests; she runs whimpering upstairs. Sarcastic. Makes grandma sick while he’s courting Gertrude because of his sarcastic remarks. His father: nice, died at age 38. His mother: horrible. Bought her way into presidency of old people’s home. Everyone hated her. Finally kicked her out. She goes to California and dies. She invited Honigsbergs to her home while Bill was courting Gertrude. Door opened by butler. Invariably he announced that Mrs. Schweitzer was “in conference” (i.e. over old people’s home business). She always kept the Honigsbergs waiting an hour or two before she appeared. Bill the young lawyer; pretends he operates Nash agency in N.J. (Really, he made a killing on Nash stock.) His antagonism to me because (1) I’m undisciplined, (2) a coward (CO business), (3) running away from Jewishness. Bill himself was always anti-Semitic. But is completely uninformed and even irrational. Claims that Jesus never existed.

Theme of young man seeking a way of life in America. What is America? What traditions does it provide by which he can express himself? Most obvious: the glorified American tradition of the land; Emersonian individualism; Thoreau, Frost, etc. Hero tries this, but finds that in everyday life it no longer operates. This is a fossil of the American past. The present-day America embodies opposite characteristics. Works in a group, interested in material progress, this-worldly but also pessimistic (at least the intellectuals). The old ways of self-fulfillment are closed, exhausted, or unpopular. What’s left? Fringe groups, Catholicism, pacifism, but nothing in the main stream. Whom does the American admire? Only the rich man in successful enterprises.

Αγκαλιάσματα των παντρεμένων: η γυναίκα «τελειώνει», ο άντρας αποκοιμάται, και η γυναίκα. Ξαφνικά ξυπνάει αυτός· «άραγε τελείωσα ή όχι;» Δεν θυμάται καλά καλά. « ΄Οχι, αποκοιμήθηκα.» Τώρα πια δεν έχει ούτε επιθυμία. Η γυναίκα βαθιά στον ύπνο. ΄Ομως πρέπει να τελειώσει. Αρχίζει ή γυναίκα, δεν ξέρει τι γίνεται. Κάτι αισθάνεται στα όνειρά της. Αγάλια αγάλια καταλαβαίνει και ξυπνά.

March 24, 1958

❡ Americans have never loved the soil of America as Europeans have loved the soil of Europe. America has never been a blood-homeland. Only an ideal homeland. The homeland of the idea, of the spirit. And of the pocket. Not of the blood. . . .

Europe has been loved with a blood love. That has made it beautiful. —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, Anchor Books, p. 122.

❡ You can’t idealize the essential brute blood-activity, the brute blood-desires. The basic, sardonic blood-knowledge. . . . You can’t idealize hard work, which is why America invents so many machines and contrivances of all sorts: so that they need do no physical work. —Ibid., p. 122.

❡ Beautifully the sailing-ship nodalizes the forces of sea and wind, converting them to her purpose. There is no violation as in a steam-ship, only a winged centrality. It is this perfect adjusting of ourselves to the elements, the perfect equipoise between them and us, which gives us a great part of our life-joy. The more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces the more we numb and atrophy our own senses. Every time we turn on a tap to have water, every time we turn a handle to have fire or light, we deny ourselves and annul our being. The great elements, the earth, air, fire, water are there like some great mistress whom we woo and struggle with. . . . And all our appliances do but deny us these fine embraces, take the miracle of life away from us. The machine is the great neuter. It is the eunuch of eunuchs. In the end it emasculates us all. When we balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we partake of the mysteries. But when we turn on an electric tap there is as it were, a wad between us and the dynamic universe. —Ibid., p. 137.

April 1, 1958

The New Englanders, wielding the sword of the spirit backwards, struck down the primal impulsive being in every man leaving only a mechanical, automatic unit. In so doing they cut and destroyed the living bond between men, the rich passional contact. And for this passional contact gradually was substituted the mechanical bond of purposeful utility. The spontaneous passion of social union once destroyed, then it was possible to establish the perfect mechanical concord, the concord of a number of parts to a vast whole, a stupendous productive mechanism. And this, this vast mechanical concord of innumerable machine-parts, each performing its own motion in the intricate complexity of material production, this is the clue to the western democracy. . . . This is what makes good businessmen. And in this the American is like the Jew: in that, having conquered and destroyed the instinctive, impulsive being in himself, he is free to be always deliberate, always calculated, rapid, swift, and single in practical execution as a machine. . . . In other races the impulsive mystery of being interferes with the deliberate intention of the individual. In these not. . . . They must run on, like machines, or go mad. . . . Hence the Orestes-like flight of unrest of Americans and Jews. —D. H. Lawrence, “The Spirit of Place,” English Review XXVII, pp. 328–329.

Leander’s crying and sickness brought this tearful response from C. in the middle of the night: “I care for him so much. Why does he get sick, then? And why does he call for παππού and not for γιαγιά?

I’ve been awarded the Johnson Fellowship for 1958–59. $2200. Wow! Thanks to Tindall, I guess.

Terry Gardner’s visiting us. Last night Stefan came and we played while Terry sang bass arias from Bach and Handel. To bed at 1 a.m. after pizza and beer.

April 5, 1958

The movie Gervaise was excellent. Zola’s technique—if the movie does not improve on l’Assommoir—was especially good in the counterpoint achieved in two instances: the dinner party, with its true gaiety, but with our and Gervaise’s knowledge that Lantier was outside (this also heightened by the going out of Coupeau for a 14th guest). We all expect he’ll bring Lantier, but doesn’t. Lantier only comes later. All this is plotted brilliantly. Of less success, but also interesting, was the showdown between Gervaise and the forgeron, at the outdoor dance. To have such revelations while jigging is very poignant, and also perhaps very true to life.

C. and I had another time of stress last night, and as always I came away feeling my own wrong-headedness and also the complete inability to resist directions which I can see should not be taken. And still perhaps I am not entirely to blame, and the very having of words was beneficial. I had hoped, after the movie, to go to a club, to be jolly and carefree and not have, for once, to worry about the baby-sitter (because Leander was sleeping at my parents’). But during the movie C., whenever we want to do something, of course she wanted to go right home. I reproached her with getting sick precisely whenever we went out, as though she planned it that way. This assertion of course was probably ridiculous, but it was not the main reason for my dissatisfaction. This was rather something that I’ve felt for some time: a lack of any real demonstration on her part of affection, a disinterest in sex (until I arouse her, but I always have to be the initiator), a kind of indifference shown by failure to say good morning or good night; and also a nagging about my deficiencies as a father: that I never play with Leander or read to him (*which now she’s maneuvered me into doing); that I never wash the dishes, that I come home too late from the library, etc. Of course, this family-career tension is inevitable, and with me it’s complicated by my feeling that the family situation has sapped whatever creative energies I had. But perhaps this is just an excuse.

In any case, we drove home sullenly, not speaking except for my reproaching her for being like a “corpse.” At the garage, walking home, she tried to slip her arm in mine. I refused, walking defiantly alone ahead of her, as I remember I did once in Greece after some argument. This way in silence, all the way, I turning somersaults of reproach and self-righteousness and self-censure in my mind, combined with feelings of telling her off, beating her, leaving her, getting drunk, shouting, and other such. Finally in our room she asked me why I was angry and we went through the dizziness complaint, where of course she had all the right on her side. But she was bothered especially by my insinuation that it was a sign of some psychological trouble, as perhaps is her acne. This is a remembrance of the time in Greece when I agreed to the suggestion of our gynecologist Gianialis that her pregnancy troubles were also purely psychological, and to have her visited by a psychologist, which we did, and which, I’m sure, she has never forgotten, as the ultimate humiliation. She reproached me with it last night, saying that certainly I was probably ready to send her for an analysis. Well, we got past this part and came with difficulty and hesitation to the more basic complaints. I said she hadn’t, by her own will, put her arm around me or kissed me or come to me in bed or taken hold of my penis (I didn’t say that, alas, but wanted to), or even shown herself to me naked—ever, or in many years or months, depending on the case. She reproached me with wanting only to “get” and of course she was right. She admitted it, but I said that one has the right to expect to “get” as well as to give, and that I was sure she wanted herself to “get” as well as “give,” which she admitted. She implied that I didn’t “give” anything. In this, it turned out, she meant my working on Sundays, neglecting Leander, etc. I asked her, Didn’t she like sex? And she said No, she didn’t: so why don’t I go and get a psychiatrist for her. Then it came out that she answered in this way, she said, just to be ironic, and that of course she liked sex. “Who doesn’t like sex?” she said; and “Have I ever said No to you?” which of course she hasn’t. And also, judging from her orgasms, she seems to enjoy sex very much, once we get started. I complained that when she never made any advances or coquetry herself. I felt guilty in coming to her and felt that I was always disturbing her, that she’d prefer sleeping, since whenever I got into bed she was always like a sack of potatoes. I realized all the time, however, that perhaps the normal woman just is not aroused until the man arouses her; and also that my desire to be titillated probably shows some female sexuality in me. Perhaps homosexuality: I want to be ravished by a virile man. I don’t know. Certainly this is only a part of the story, if it is a part at all.

She justified her potato-sackishness by the hard day she has with Leander, and there is no doubt she exhausts herself with the baby. I told her she was over-indulgent and this pained her. She said she had to keep the baby as close to her as possible now, because inevitably some day he’ll leave both of us for good, and also because of all the evil influences of society, juvenile delinquency, and the like. Ridiculous argument. She’s an over-protective mother, doubtlessly. But I didn’t want to belabor the issue because, as I told her, she’d probably learn a lot after she has two children to deal with and finds that she’ll have to leave one of them to his own devices at least part of the time. I imagine most women resemble C. in this learning process.

We didn’t reach much in the way of a conclusion. She cried her bit and I went to bed—a separate bed in 3902—still feeling rancorous, and feel that way even as I write. I think, however, that as always in the past we’ll have a warm and lovely reconciliation. I know for one thing that few girls would put up with all that she has from me.

John Davison came on Friday and played his new symphony. 2nd movement quite disorganized, but first and third sometimes achieve a certain grandeur. I told him he was afraid to rest in his music. There are never any long notes, any suspensions or silences. Only motion, motion, like a St. Vitus dance. He liked my sketch, “Leaving Greece,” saying that I’d captured a Homeric flavor in the prose. He thought the ending of “A Scholarship” rather corny, which it is. He told me of his roommate in Rochester, a Texan who is disillusioned by academia (U. of R. history department) and has become “beat” to some degree, leaving school, returning, defying everyone, etc. But not producing anything as a result, which at least Kironas has done. John said he—John—believed in God, which his Texan friend did not: the cause of his troubles, naturally. We agreed, however, with our disgust with the Quakers. John now goes to conservative Presbyterians. I told him of my desire for ritual, for emotional experience, and mystery, not the political and sociological discussions of the Quakers. But where can one get mystery now? He left us a can of turtle soup as a present.

Friday night we had a riotous Seder at my parents’ with Hone drunk and Irv happy, as usual. Mother tried to make everything just right, according to symbolism, which she explained. The biggest hit were the hard-boiled eggs in salt water, the salt water standing for tears. This was mince meat for Hone’s humor. Pass me the tears, please! Grandma laughed so hard she cried, and I put the hard-boiled egg bowl under her eyes. Very reverent Seder! But the worst was yet to come: the prunes for desert. Mother also suffered inevitably from the fact that half the meal had come out of bottles, cans, or boxes. Even the fish: right out of the bottle. “Open another bottle,” Hone yelled, and recalled how in the good old days grandma chopped for a week to make this delicacy.

April 6, 1958

A cryptic book-title: “Eggs without tears.”

April 27, 1958

Yokel from Adirondacks meets NYC intellectual who believes in Thoreau, etc. They return to the mountains, where the intellectual is initiated into country life à la Eddy Hayes and Louie, or Al and his well, or Millington immorality. Comedy, satire, melodrama.

Frances at beach. She boasted that she wasn’t wearing a girdle. She keeps her stomach in, enjoys panties. Her bathing suit: latex: it caresses the body, makes you stand up straight.

Saul in Europe. Arriving 30 minutes before lecture in Geneva. Two hours in London to have shoe-fitting. Hotel complications. Single room with bath, but he can’t stay there with his wife. Thus: double room without bath. How to get a bath! Order it. Steward fills tub, etc., etc. Process takes an hour. Saul wanted to go in with Minna at the same time, to save an hour. No. Not in Switzerland. Hotel so exhausted by drawing baths for the two of them that they move them to a new room—with bath: transferring every object, including the scraps in the wastebasket.

May 15, 1958

Folks went to Constantine Kaledin’s memorial service at the Community Church. About twelve people present. Harrington read some psalms and poems and a eulogy of the deceased written by Arthur, who called his father too unaggressive, too good for this world. Harrington hardly knew K. He had seen him at a few forums, and said his face radiated “peace.” Harrington’s great insight! Such was the end, after forty years in the U.S. Twelve people and a preacher who’d seen him once or twice at a distance. My compassionate parents of course attended forgetting in their self-righteousness that my father had refused to lend Costa $100 a few months ago! Arthur said his father retained his serenity under a life of incredible frustration. This I can believe. Here was this man, born into the upper class in Russia, university student, intellectual, participant in the riots against Rasputin (and hitting the monk on the head with a snowball (Apocrypha!), forced into exile in 1917, and then forty years in a three-room apartment, trying to make a living in rare books, rare textiles—anything: and competing with the sharpest in the game. And Mrs. Kaledin a shrewish over-talkative unpleasant woman to boot. On top of this, Arthur’s ouster and his Greenwich Village sojourn, Eugene’s defection at Princeton: his experience with the evangelizing ministerial students. Also Costa’s sad ineffectiveness as a Russian language teacher, and his chagrin at Arthur’s refusal to learn.

I delighted the other day in watching Leander and noting his physical and mental progress—and his joie de vivre: and it seemed to me completely incongruous in light of the futility and meaninglessness and pettiness of adult life: the waste of it: at least of mine at this point.

I am an “alternate” for a Fulbright award, with one chance in a thousand of getting it if someone drops out.

May 18, 1958

Our visit to Shrub Oak community last year: how ludicrous the whole thing was. First of all, Charlotte, lonely, just separated from Leo, in her sloppy house, trying to keep people around her. Then the visit to the house in process of extension: new fireplace, paneled walls, etc. Cakes, ices, two families, others dropping in; the maintenance, in the country, of life as it is on Central Park West. Then, to top it off, we stop in on Mason. His house: beautiful to the last detail (not like the shabbiness of the houses of the professional people), and full, full with fat ladies and assorted relatives with mustaches. And Mason Buddha-like, taciturn, wearing skin-tight shorts around his thick belly, and his testicles sticking out when he sat down. Lovely! More food, cheesecake, coffee, noise, utter confusion. And other visitors arriving as we left. We hurried back to the peace of 121st Street.

This weekend as usual the folks arranged to go to the beach. I insisted on staying here, on pretext of studying for Dobbie’s exam. Chrysanthi went, reluctantly, but out of a sense of duty. I was supposed to take the train out this afternoon, but am still here. I’m sure there’ll be recriminations later on.

Stefan and I played the Kreutzer Sonata last night.

May 30, 1958

Mrs. Solomon never came back to Meeting. I saw her on the street the other day, but we only exchanged polite hellos. The girl involved tells me that Mrs. S. wrote a note of “apology” saying she would stay away until she learned to control her temper. By accepting the blame for the argument we had which caused all the trouble (a stupid flare-up over the virtues of the Golden Rule trip into the atomic testing area) she put us on the defensive. Wasn’t she being too horribly Christian?! I told the girl that all was well as it was and that Mrs. S. made a fortunate decision (to stay away), which she should not be encouraged to abandon. The girl also managed to escape the irksome visits to Mrs. S’s Near-East filled house. The poor students who are captured by her! Marilyn Murphy says she hears violent arguments frequently. Mrs. S’s appearance: like a potato sack filled with lumpy jelly. Her endless stories of aid to Arab students. I wonder if, after all, she is a Jew. That would really be funny. The name? But of course it was her husband’s.

Peter Gardner staying here, looking for breaks in the big city as a folk singer.

June 2, 1958

Mrs. McCarthy usually talks a blue streak, especially the first time I see her every year: all about her children, usually, and whatever else comes to mind. Today I stopped for a stamp, prepared to stay—forcibly—for twenty minutes or so, but there was no response. She cut short my greetings by asking if I wanted an envelope, and then went to the garage next door ostensibly to change some bills. Obviously, something was wrong, and I left, as evidently she wanted me to. I saw Freddie later and asked what could be the matter. It came as a shock: Bruce was killed this winter in an auto accident. Freddie said that Bruce was driving with two other freshmen (this was Bruce’s first year at college; last spring he was accepted at Dartmouth, RIT, Cornell, etc.), driving home for a weekend during a very bad snowstorm. Apparently he was going right along and attempting to pass a long line of cars despite the blizzard, on a two-lane highway. He crashed head-on into a meat truck and was killed instantly. He was a boy who had had everything in his favor and consequently didn’t have a care in the world. He was tremendous, strong, a star athlete, intelligent, and heir to all the McCarthy holdings. He was also, of course Marie McCarthy’s whole life, especially since her husband left her and small Marie went to live in Florida.

Freddie killed eight porcupines in my barn this winter. Also a bobcat which, as he says, “was sitting upon a rock just like a house cat. I had my twenty-two and I shot him right in the neck. He just rolled off the rock, kicked a couple times, and . . . that was all!”

There’s a blazing full moon to the east tonight, and a very insistent whippoorwill outside.

Harold and Clare seemed to have had a good year. Hal added two rooms to the house, added two lambs to his flock (by birth), and made his wife pregnant. He is now cutting and sawing pine which he sells to a factory that makes bird-baths.

June 10, 1958

Received notice of Fulbright award to the University of Bristol.

Today I exposed the shed sill beam and gauged out all the rot. With a good dose of creosote tomorrow, I hope it will serve.

June 23, 1958

The question came up of Alice’s living in our apartment while we were away in England. She wanted to, and said she would try to convince Judy, her prospective roommate, who apparently wanted something cheaper. Next day, mother called me to say that they, and Alice, had definitely decided against the idea. “Alice doesn’t want it. It’s too big,” said mother. Later Alice came and I asked if this were true. She responded by telling of the to-do after I left, with dad and mother, strongly reinforced by grandma, all shouting her down. Reasons for not taking the apartment: (1) It’s in a neighborhood with Negroes and Puerto Ricans. (2) If either Alice or Judy left before we returned, dad would be stuck with the rent (according to him). Grandma kindly suggested that, after all, Alice had been away for four years at college; now she should live with her sweet mother and lovely father.

June 27, 1958

Letter from Greece that Ευθυμούλα had a son on June 20. She gave birth at Serres, with a former student of Dimitrios’s as doctor. Dimitrios reached the hospital at 2:00 a.m. and as a friend of the doctor and in general as a well-known and important man in Serres, was admitted as a visitor. Efthymoula is in a private room, ensconced in assured respectability, she being a teacher and George an agriculturalist. This was the first of his grandchildren that Dimitrios has seen: those of Odysseus and Chrysanthi being so far inaccessible. He saw Dimitraki, age ½ hour, and felt that “it” was rather a blob of something very strange indeed. He had brought the traditional first present a λίρα χρυσού and tried to press it into the child’s hand but, as he wrote, the child didn’t seem to care.

June 30, 1958

Plot: a man commits a serious crime in early life, without being apprehended. He goes through life, becomes respectable, successful, and is never found out.

Party at Mary Heath’s, with most of the employees at the 5th Avenue “couture” place where she works. There was a Negro woman in a tight dress, very pretty face, with two daughters of high-school age. The mother looked all of 25 years old! She existed only for dancing (rock-n-roll, cha cha, etc.), danced every night with her daughters. Once danced professionally in a chorus (her great achievement). Called everyone “lover-boy.” The elder daughter began to take after her. There was an interesting incongruity: physically the daughter had all the disabilities of adolescence: pimples, sloppiness, a figure not really yet defined. But her manner was not at all the same. She gamboled and flirted and danced with complete assurance. She tickled me (and the others) under the chin, called us “lover-boy,” etc., without the slightest feeling of sexuality. This also was incongruous: both in her and in her mother, for the dances themselves were all sexy, consisting mostly of shaking of hindquarters; yet there was this antiseptic quality also, a kind of gymnasium quality. Perhaps these dances, rather than an excitement to sex, are a sponge to soak up the passions and squeeze them out as sweat.

I was interested also in the reactions of one of the other couture girls: a small old-maid or spinster type, quite vulgar and ugly—having apparently accepted the fact. She was in ecstasies over the mother’s dancing. “Isn’t she terrific? Isn’t she great?” she repeated in her NY accent. And then: “You should have seen her at our Christmas party. She wore a hula skirt with nothing underneath and with her long legs just like Cyd Charisse—wow! She was something!” This kind of unconscious, unabashed Lesbianism could only come out of this type of woman.

An interesting contrast was formed by the Greek people present. The party was in honor of Antonia, a 200-pound plain-looking girl dressed entirely in black. She, partly because of her obesity, seemed permanently sad—and Chrysanthi later told me her story, which explained this. She had been jilted by a boy after a ten-year engagement! This could only happen in Greece! Antonia joined in the cha-cha and rock-n-roll but with an entirely different spirit: a dignity brought about by her dancing on her toes and having the graceful, smooth movements of folk dance rather than the heebie-jeebies of the mother and daughters. Antonia was returning to Athens, her job (nurse), and her motorcycle, after having been “used” for a year by her brother and sister-in-law, who brought her over to care for their baby so the wife could work. They gave her no money at all, and she too had to work 6 to 12 in the evenings after caring for the baby all day.

Some Greek music was put on and danced to by Antonia and several others present, notably a lady of about 60, also squat and fat, who suddenly blossomed (as Antonia had done) into feathery lightness and grace. There could be no greater contrast than that between these Greek dances and the American ones that they followed. Certainly the dance must reflect time and place as well as does literature and art. The Greek dances had an element of long-suffering endurance and of communion with the earth. The feet of the dancers seemed necessarily connected with the floor below. You could see a whole slow moving persevering peasant civilization: unsmiling, yet bodily and mentally content. The American dances were quite the opposite. I observed the mother well. She would start off smiling in her beautiful way, but this would not last. The smile, as it were, was “part of the act.” The natural expression, which she soon enough fell into, was of boredom mixed with a kind of clenched determination to continue the gyrations at whatever cost. It became movement for its own sake, ragged meaningless monotonous movement whose only rational could be continuation to a state of orgiastic ecstasy, which, I suppose, sometimes does happen in the dance halls. But the American dances seem to be a means of forgetting one’s life, while the Greek ones are a means of remembering it, epitomizing it, ritualizing it.

July 18, 1958

Inscription on a temple in Rabelais V.37: ἐν οἴνῳ ἀλήθεια.

July 19, 1958.

It is possible that in the future the role of the sexes may become completely reversed. Robert Graves in The White Goddess speaks of one such reversal that took place: the arrival of Olympianism in Greece—the shift from a matriarchial to a patriarchial society. In the former, the women chased the men, goddesses predominated over gods, etc. This survives in myth and, thinks Graves, asserts itself periodically in «Romantic» movements such as the time of courtly-love, or the worship of Queen Elizabeth. The shift having once taken place (we have examples of matriarchial societies even today, which shows at least that they can exist), there is no reason why it cannot take place again. It is the logical outcome of present tendencies: and also may be forced on the world by the atomic-warfare situation.

July 29, 1958

Alexander Dimitrios born.

July 31, 1958

My father, who is keeping Leander while C. is at the hospital, took L. to the park and sat on the swings with him. But he couldn’t continue swinging because he got seasick, having forgotten (as he said in all seriousness) to bring his Dramamine.

August 2, 1958

The questing young man, looking for what can be considered valuable enough to make life worth living in the future, and growing out of the false attrractiveness of intellectualism, kultur, idealism, other-worldliness, political agitation (socialism, etc.), and/or the cult of sensation as in the beat generation, may find the answer in the simple everyday problems, joys, and tendernesses of family life: of birth, death, marriage, love of parents for children, etc. This is the feeling one gets from Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, where against all the falseness of the life in Sawston is held up Carella’s tenderness for his child, and his acceptance, and conquering, as it were, of the facts of death. Even though it is against our better judgments (our Protestant Anglo-Saxon judgments), we feel that Carella—the cad—is alone leading a worthwhile life. This novel, in its clearness of structure and perfection of realization, would be a fine model. In its way, it is perfect: and transparently so!

August 3, 1958

Le danger n’était pas que je fisse mal, mais que ne ne fisse rien. —Montaigne, I.26.

September 4, 1958

The St. Francis person can’t understand why the on-the-road person is “wasting his intelligence.” How can he be this non-intellectual thing: an airline dispatcher? Should the two be brothers? Friends? Should the St. Francis person be married, or not? Self-revelation scene: St. Francis person’s willfulness, in the logging. Result that horse is buried. Or the climb to St. Francis’s retreat outside Assisi. Cf. The mechanical chair scene with Lord Clifford and Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Styles: Nausea.

Counterfitters: letters, journal.

Huxley, for witty conversation.

Forster, for irony, lightness.

Kerouac, for crazy passions and beat generation ideas.

Lawrence, Women in Love, drowning scene.

September 6, 1958

Visits from Gregory, John Davison, Bill Watson. Gregory kept asking me if there were any “conservative” organizations such as NYA left in New York. I thought he was an ironist. But later, when I mentioned the word “subversive,” in another context, it turned out that that was the word he had wanted. Malapropism exists in real life. But of course, perhaps Gregory isn’t real life. He gave the usual story of his remote contacts with homosexuals (according to him): of girls who rejected him, etc. The funniest story was of his army career. He was inducted, taken to boot camp, given aptitude tests, declared to have no aptitude, and honorably discharged after eight weeks. Quite a nice service career! He was in NY looking around, after having done the same in Montreal and Albany. He wanted a change of job, being tired of Rochester, where he is still porter in the OR, but at a maximum salry of $1.31/hr. —not bad. In Albany he’d have to start at the bottom scale (same job). I advised him to stay in Rochester.

John played a lovely suite, quite the best thing I’ve heard of his, though it seemed perhaps even better fitted to strings than to piano, for which he intended it. I think he’s really getting good and can produce some significant music.

Bill Watson shows his four years at Harvard. His mission in life, he told me, was to illuminate the history of trade routes between Spain and England in the 13th century!

Before leaving, we had little parties with Hone and Irene, Pete and Izzy (who’ll be married in November if all goes well, Pete having had to convert to Judaism!), and all the folks on our floor. Stefan gave me a painting. I chose an abstract—very striking.

September 13, 1958

Prince’s Lodge, 6 Prince of Wales Terrace, London

Fulbright orientation program in full swing. C. And I went last night to the Embassy, a lovely mansion with lawns and gardens, right in Regents Park, and shook hands with Ambassador Whitney. His paintings are really splendid: a magnificent Cézanne still life, one of the best I’ve seen, Van Gogh’s self-portrait, and another scene with olive trees and an illuminated cloud, some Degas, etc., all tasefully placed and hung. I bought a deer-stalker’s cap at Scotts, Old Bond Street, for Professor Tindall, at his request: £3.15.0. We’ve been going round with John and Woody Wilson; he a theology student at Union, doing a project on the Independents of the Puritan revolution.

October 5, 1958

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (chapter XII) on the temples on the Acropolis:

❡ The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud—memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions—the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal.

Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs rasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing in its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the entire world.

October 13, 1958

Henry Gifford said today that he regretted the fact that the U.S. and England share a common language, since this makes the influence of the U.S. on England so much easier and faster, an influence that he views with horror—of competitiveness and rushing in the academic life, hitherto quite foreign to the English. They, for instance, don’t clamor to be promoted, or to publish.

October 5, 1958

Visited Hartley at Avondale.

October 12, 1958

Visited John Wilders, lecturer here, formerly a visiting scholar at Princeton. He refused the possibility of staying on at Princeton because he felt he could never become an American.

October 16, 1958

Reception at Professor Roger Wilson’s, for Quakers in Bristol. He told me he has all his incoming students read The Go-Between and The Shrimp and the Anemone, to learn how children think. Their house is on the site of the Royal Fort, Prince Rupert’s defense against Cromwell in the Civil War.

October 17, 1958

Tea with Henry Gifford and family. He lives in a new house, quite American-looking, in Westbury-on-Trym. Very clean and pleasant. He showed me some dozen or so letters from Thomas Hardy written to his grandfather, whose cousin was Hardy’s first wife. One was the announcement of her death; Others offered the use of his house in Dorchester, etc. Hardy’s handwriting was gorgeous. Gifford also had some letters from James Russell Lowell, then Ambassador to the Court of St. James, who gave away Gifford’s grandmother (an American) at her wedding. History suddenly seemed telescoped, as Gifford’s father, very elderly, still lives. He was a prospector for gold in Montana in the early 1900s.

I’m finally reading The Magic Mopuntain. I actually felt ill at first because of the book. Now I am at about page 300 and find it rather boring. He should have written the whole thing in 300 pages instead of 700.

October 28, 1958

Mrs. Taylor, from next door, chatted interminably, always referring to her husband (a burly police-inspector) as «him» and complaining that when he came home at night she had to sit in the salon with him, and inevitably watch him fall off to sleep in the armchair.

November 1, 1958

We spent the afternoon sightseeing in Bath: the Roman baths, the circus, Royal Crescent; 8th century elegance, now somewhat drab. The one thing I’ll remember, I think, is the lift in the station: an immense, extremely done-up one, with benches on the periphery of the rather circular shape, and a large open space in the center—made for, as the operator told us, the traffic of large bath chairs that conveyed the wealthy invalids to this resort in the 19th century.

Our trip to Wells two weeks ago was also memorable, chiefly, of course, owing to the cathedral, with its powerful west front looking over the enclosed green, and the four inverted arches in the center. Bath Abbey, however, though nowhere of the beauty of Wells, had one advantage to my mind: no division between nave and apse, so one could look clear down the full length of the building to the square block of stained glass at the East end.

Redland Meeting today was good. We heard a very colloquial and therefore effective translation of some of the moral advice Paul gave to the Romans: quite à propos today: don’t let yourself be molded by your society, but mold yourself according to the teachings of religion and virtue. Then a long sonorous expansion of this. Finally a cracked voice of an old Irishman, the confessional type of message, saying he’d been saved by prayer, and he knew prayer worked, because when Hitler was deliberating whether to invade England or Russia, he (the Irish Friend) prayed that Hitler would spare the Christians (England) and attack the heathen (Russia), which prayer was obviously “fulfilled.” Amazing that we can hear things like this still. So many critics, e.g. Willey in The Seventeenth Century Background, try to make literature more real by putting us back in the proper mentality of the time: but that mentality is often still with us, though not, I must add, in the best minds (I hope).

I am getting letters every day, it seems, from Hartley. All to the good. He is a strange combination of self-assuredness and extreme humility, of social elegance and of naturalness. But the best vignette of him was that of Cynthia Asquith, that he was a splendid leader-on talker. I certainly found that to be true. No sooner had we met and had our first drinks in our hands (and admired the view over the Avon) than did he begin heavily in his lecture-theme, the 17th century moralists, especially Richardson. He was in the middle of Pamela and very impressed, though of course bothered by the extreme length of the work. He kept telling me, “But of course you know much more about all this than I do,” which of course was as far from truth as one could get. But it illustrates his manner, for it was said in all sincerity, with not a touch of condescension or sarcasm. Over lunch we mostly talked about other writers, especially Hartley’s friends: Huxley, Eliot, the Sitwells; and about whether or not writers are mad. He held they were, saying Richardson must have been mad and citing the obvious examples of Blake, Swift, Virginia Woolf. I wasn’t so sure. Fielding seemed quite level-headed, as did E. M. Forster and many other moderns. We retired to our coffee and then it was I who delivered the questions I had set down—which, to my dismay, were exhausted only too rapidly. But he continued, thankfully, to be a leader-on talker.

The lunch was memorable for its profusion of wines, Hartley filling my glass immediately I emptied it. Also H’s extreme graciousness. The servant started the meal and then retired, and H. himself got up and brought around seconds to us. At one point Alec could be heard crying. We said it was nothing (it wasn’t a very vigorous cry), but he insisted on going up to the bedroom to investigate. Obviously he hadn’t had much experience with infants. Anyway, the servants were taking splendid care of the situation, and knowledgeably, for they were grandparents, they assured us, four times over.

With all the beauty of H’s house and garden, it must be rather deadly to live there; he said himself in his last letter that the place was normally rather melancholy.

November 5, 1958

It is one of the joys of life to discover for oneself something that is stupendously first-rate and that one had no notion existed. I remember my ecstasy last year in playing and hearing the Bach Chaconne with Stefan, and, to a lesser degree, the Kreutzer Sonata. Today, just now, I found another little masterpiece, Couperin’s Sarabande, a canon, in Schirmer’s Album of Early Keyboard Music, volume 1559. It starts off like this:

This is Guy Fawkes day. Firecrackers (mostly duds) are shooting upwards and fires crackling. Each house seems to have its own separate fire: the English keep their garden walls in force even for their celebrations. Well, now that it’s over I hope there won’t be any more boys in the street with stuffed effigies, accosting one with “Penny for old Guy, sir?”

Last night we saw Osborne’s Entertainer, a very deficient piece as drama, I thought, but tremendously interesting for its topical significance, its commentary on life in England at the present day. The old music-hall singer just goes through the motions, knowing himself that he never “feels” anything—in a medium that has long since died. At the end, however, he shows his British spirit by choosing prison over TV and automobiles in Canada. I should think that a similar kind of allegory of US life, more or less explicit, could be done. It would be better as literature than the usual open-faced novels, which are just dialogue renderings of the Organization Man. Having the Entertainer epitomize the English predicament was, I think, a splendid idea.

November 12, 1958

Who liketh loving over-well

Shall look on Helen’s face in Hell.

But he whose love is thin and wise

Shall see John Knox in Paradise.

A good inscription for Terpni would be the lines in P.L. IV 246–47

Thus was this place,

A happy rural seat of various view [etc.]

Stephen Spender, in World Within World, tells how he was attracted to a girl once because of the sparkling quality of her eyes. He got to know her better (in fact he married her, I think), and one day while they were walking together he noticed that she deliberately squeezed her eyelids together so that tears came, and then skillfully kept the tears from falling, so they gave the reflective brilliance to her eyes. One is reminded of the girl in Hardy’s Jude who produces dimples at will. Evidently this wasn’t imagined by Hardy, but observed.

Last Saturday: journey to Gloucester, where the cathedral is interesting because the nave is Norman, with big fat brickwork columns, round arches, and plain ceiling, while the choir, which was reworked in the 14th century, is Perpendicular: thin stovepipe columns, pointed arches, windows with tracery, and fan-vaulted ceiling. In parts one side of the column was refaced in the new style, while the other was left in its original Norman condition. The east window, between choir and Lady Chapel, was immense and palely lovely, the tomb of Edward II very evocative historically. We had great fun on the trains, hoisting the baby carriage into the luggage van, baby and all. And we ate fish and chips in a Tudor inn whose floor wobbled as sheets of roofing do.

Even at a very early age, I was struck by the refusal of people to admit the elements of existence out of which they make their lives. Most lives are like dishonest works of art in which the values are faked, certain passages blurred and confused, difficulties evaded, and refuge taken by those bad artists who are human beings, in conventions that shirk unique experiences. As a child, even, I wanted to know someone who saw himself continually in relation to the immensity of time and the universe: who admitted to himself the isolation of this spiritual search and the wholeness of his physical nature.

❡ Today there is more realization of problems than there is faith in solutions. Discouraging as this may seem, it means that if and when solutions are found, the public is prepared to pay a drastic price for them. After the previous war, people expected much of the League of Nations, but were not prepared to abandon national sovereignty. This time, a great many everywhere are prepared to sacrifice a great deal of nationhood and possessions which they formerly clung to, but they do not believe in the United Nations. The most important condition of change—a widespread realism—has been achieved. —Stephen Spender, World With World (1951), pp. 291–2.

Spender describes his grandmother, a wealthy widow who became a Quaker. “She lived with extreme simplicity, preferring to sit always on a three-legged wooden stool, eating, when she was alone, meals which consisted usually of stale bread or buns and a little cheese, wearing black dresses which were undistinguishable one from the other. . . .

“Her own remedy for the ills of society was simple: everyone should love everyone else. . . .

“We discussed everything, including art, religion and sex. . . .

“’Dear Stephen, say something quickly to shock me,’ she would exclaim sometimes when I came into the room. . . . I was to discover that there was a trace of duplicity in my grandmother’s nature. Like many highly intelligent but naïve people, she was not so guileless but that she did not sometimes exploit her own innocence in order to gain confidences and assert her power. . . .

“Her icy-cold flat in which the bedrooms were never heated and in which, to save electricity, little oil lamps burned along the corridors, depressed me. These lamps were by no means the least of her economies, the most impressive of which was that she retained from the First World War small squares of sweetened paper, used as a sugar substitute, which she continued to put in her tea right up to the Second World War. She often used to eat her lunch, consisting of a roll picked up at tea from a Lyons Restaurant, on a bus, on her way to Friends’ House.

“At the teas to which we went every Sunday there were always stale cakes, relics of some bygone day when cakes and buns where new. Nor could we well avoid eating these, because if, when one of us was handed a plate, he attempted to choose the least mildewy, my grandmother who was watching from her corner would immediately cry out: ‘No, darling, take the one nearest to you. It’s the stalest, and was put there on purpose.’ Breakfasts and luncheons were full of orders such as, ‘Eat that orange, darling, it’s going bad,’ or ‘You must eat every one of these lovely, lovely scones. My sister sent them from the country, and they won’t last.’

“Yet her economies could strike no one as mean. Indeed, they were one aspect of an enormous act of generosity of a woman who not only gave much away, but who, out of a sense of the wretchedness of humanity, lived in some ways less comfortably than the poor.” (pp. 15–17)

November 15, 1958

οὐ γάρ τι νῦν γε, κἀχθές, ἀλλ’ ἀεί ποτέ ζῇ ταῦτα . . . (Ἐλπίζουμε.) Πλάτωνος Ἀπολογία 161: ὁ δὲ ταῦτα ἀκούσας τοῦ μὲν θανάτου καὶ τοῦ κινδύνου ὠλιγώρησε, πολύ δὲ μᾶλλον δείσας τὸ ζῆν κακὸς ὤν καὶ τοῖς φίλοις μὴ τιμωρεῖν . . .

November 17, 1958

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near,”

And the white rose weeps, “she is late”;

The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear”;

And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

—Tennyson

November 22, 1958

George Herbert gives good advice to scholars (in ‘The Church Porch,’ The Temple):

Art thou a magistrate? Then be severe:

If studious, copy fair what time hath blurr’d;

Redeem truth from his jaws: if soldier,

Chase brave employments with a naked sword

Throughout the world. Fool not; for all may have,

If they dare try, a glorious life, or grave.

I had a sudden remembrance the other day of the most horrible and disgusting symbol of man’s smallness, his mortal state, his irresponsibility and essential lack of nobility. It was the vision I had of that time in Rochester when we had to take care of a corpse: perhaps someone who had died on the operating table (I forget). Our first instructions were to guard against his soiling by stuffing cotton up his behind, and by tying a string very tightly around his penis. Very sensible, of course. But that is hardly what we like to think the end of man is like.

November 23, 1958

A most interesting article in The Observer by A. Alvarez on the American beat-generation puts them somewhat into perspective, in an extremely interesting way. He stresses the “coolness”—i.e. the refusal to show any emotion, which can be seen in Rock & Roll dancing, where the partners must not smile or even look at each other; and in the attitude to sex, which far from being a passionate experience, is regarded as of no more consequence in a day’s affairs than, say, eating a sandwich. The background to all this, says Alvarez, is a reaction to the intense emotionalism of the early jazz-addicts. The musicians themselves, and then the auditors, tired of all the heat, began to “play it cool.” Now, any display of opinion or feeling is taboo. As an example, Alvarez says that at parties, one of the “chicks” will undress and lean over the phonograph, asking someone to change the record. The someone must do so with complete nonchalance, and if he touches the naked lady so near him he is certainly a disgrace. Alvarez speaks of another factor in the whole picture: the fantastic postwar prosperity. With everything so rich, it was inevitable for the Beats to strike out against the American “trinity” of “production, consumption, and easy living.” But if things get difficult economically, Alvarez forecasts, the bohemian philosophy will inevitably change.

Oh wearisome condition of humanity,

Born under one law, by another bound;

Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

December 5, 1958

Queen Elizabeth came to open the new Engineering building of the university. The preparations, going on in much evidence for the past ten days, seemed ludicrous then, but perhaps not so much so now that I have seen the result: a pompous (in the good sense) convocation in the Great Hall, with processions of academics and of civic dignitaries, each in proper costume and head-dress; the organ sounding Vaughan-Williams and Bach, and a gigantic fanfare of trumpets just before the royal processions entered the hall. My heart was beating, I confess it, in anticipation of the Queen, since the order of entrance was so arranged to emphasize that all this was leading up to, anticipating, being a pale show for, the real thing to come. Of course the Queen Herself is just a short woman, not very pretty, and well-powdered. Everyone had on robes of state, it seemed, except her.

University was closed for the day and the preceding afternoon, so we had to remove all our books from the library, which was used for a reception. (Sherry-stains on my desk afterward.) Other preparations including polishing the floors, vacuuming the walls, re-cementing sidewalk blocks, painting a radiator along the Queen’s path, and constructing a special room complete with wall-hangings and a white telephone, where the Queen could “retire.” Students and professors seemed to consider these preparations ludicrous and annoying, but certainly many seemed to come uncompelled in order to see the first of the preparations today. My final feeling, however, was that human beings look just as silly in robes and ermine as without them, unless seen at a great distance. It is the great advantage of the stage, or of painting, that it can make all this pomp seem credible: that it can lift people higher than themselves.

December 7, 1958

Coffee with John Hunt, an egotistical play-acting King’s College graduate who has a novel written, so he claims (though the other day it was a “mystery”). He is clever, witty, a good mimic, and says intelligent things often in the seminar, and is universally disliked by the others it seems, perhaps for these reasons.

December 9, 1958

Chrysanthi came home from the dentist’s unexpectedly minus one tooth.

This morning I read a book of Paradise Lost, and the first few chapters of Swinnerton’s Georgian Literary Scene, which I think will give me ideas for my Hartley paper. This afternoon another book of P.L., and some of Auden’s poems, which impressed me—note the Birthday poem to Christopher Isherwood. I am also reading, gradually, in Fairchild’s translation, the Aeneid, and enjoying it immensely, to my surprise. It’s fully as exciting as Malory, and would be a fine children’s story, gore and all.

December 19, 1958

Back after five days in London staying at 15 Brandon Mansions, Queens Club Gardens, Hammersmith, in the apartment of John and Woody Wilson. Woody was bubbling and delightful, while John grouched the whole time and spoiled much of the fun. It was good for me, however, to see a grouchy person from the outside, because I certainly am often the same. He buried himself in his Manchester Guardian while the rest of us talked and laughed and coped somehow with all the children. When he and I went together to eat supper in Soho he insisted on inspecting restaurant after restaurant, to find the cheapest. Finally, from weariness, we went into one with no menu outside at all, and were so late we couldn’t enjoy the meal. We were to meet Woody and Chrysanthi at St. Clement Danes for a Christmas concert, at 8 o’clock. John looked at his watch all through dinner every 45 seconds or so. Very nervous type. And yet he, who should have his head in eternity instead of in the minutiae of time, is a minister of religion. The concert, at any rate, was lovely.

The day before had been delightful, reminding me of my month in Paris. I spent the morning and afternoon in the Reading Room of the British Museum, compiling my Hartley bibliography, then went to a review with fan dancers and plenty of semi-nudity, very enjoyable. An elderly man next to me cursed under his breath whenever the patter-man came on, and purred like a kitten as soon as the naked girls reappeared. After this I met Chrysanthi at Piccadilly Circus and we went to a superb performance of a superb play: O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night”: one of the most intense evenings I’ve ever had at the theater.

On Thursday we drove with the Wilsons to Canterbury, a rather exhausting trip, only to have to rush back because we promised a Greek dinner to the Wilsons and the Sterns. Rush, rush—hardly a way to vacation. Friday, relieved of the Wilsons, we regained our leisure and had a lovely return trip. Stopping off at Hampton Court, where Leander was enticed by the king’s bed, and Stonehenge. Both Stonehenge and Avebury, where we stopped on the way up with Robin Marlyn, convey their antiquity and the ruggedness of the society they represent—Stonehenge especially, being on a windswept hillock in Salisbury Plain: very desolate, even with the National Trust ticket and guidebook office adjacent.

December 25, 1958

Christmas, with plenty of presents, a chicken dinner, a radio broadcast (yesterday) of King’s College Chapel Choir, and a communion service this morning in Bristol Cathedral, half empty as is usual with English churches. The sight of magnificent cathedrals creaking along with a dead faith is very instructive. Really, they should stop the pretense, and turn all the cathedrals officially into what they are in reality: museums.

This afternoon we went to Professor Baker’s, where his family, about fifteen people, were gathered. We had great fun with Leander. Blocks were brought down, the maiden aunt started building towers, then the professor and his nephew tried a cantilever bridge (unsuccessful) while Leander gorged himself on candies, and gleefully pushed over towers as soon as they were built, to everyone’s amusement and uproarious joy. Candles were lit on the Christmas tree, lights turned out, presents distributed. Leander got a walking-stick pencil, and a covered wagon, Alec a paper umbrella with a thimble as its tip. When we left, the aunts were still building a castle.

Good inscription for a bedroom, from Iliad VII 482: κοιμήσαντ’ ἄρ’ ἔπειτα καὶ ὕπνου δῶρον ἕλοντο.

December 28, 1958

Tea with Konrad and Sheila. Sheila’s parents were visiting. The father worked himself up in an insurance office from office boy to a high position, retired recently and was given a six-month trip to the US as a present. Konrad had warned me of the horrible conventionality and un-imaginativeness of the man, and this was confirmed. He described his trip in this way: We went from A to B, B to C, C to D, D to E. In E we stayed at the X hotel, and everywhere we went we took Grayline bus tours, since we didn’t have much time. In NYC they stayed at the Dixie Hotel in Times Square. They complained of the dirty subway and (what I hadn’t expected) of the food. Said they couldn’t get a simple meal. They liked American kitchens, and Boston, because the people there, they said, seemed to be pro-British. “On the boat,” said Sheila’s father, “I did a little reading. A biography. And then I looked at some modern stuff! Well, if that’s what they’re been writing in the last few years, I haven’t missed anything.” I could kick myself now for not asking what this revolting book was. Poor Konrad and Sheila were so on edge, having to live with these people, who didn’t even have a way with the children. And yet this man was a brilliant success in his work, probably idolized by every office boy even now.

Konrad gave me a 1775 edition of Dr. Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland—a delightful and unsuspected gift.

Irita Van Doren, editor of the NY Herald Tribune Book Review, wrote asking me to review Snow’s The Search, which is being republished. Snow, it seems, praised my article to her, and this is the result. I’m reading the novel now. It is very second-rate, but can I say that in my review?

I bought Kitto’s The Greeks and have read, so far, only the introduction. But what a splendid mind Kitto has, and what a lovely whimsy.

1959

5 Woolcot Street, Redland, Bristol 6, England

January 1–March 14

London, Ostend, Munich, Belgrade, Salonika

March 15–17

Sarantaporou 11, Salonika

March 18–March 30

Salzburg, Munich, Ulm, Friedrickshafen, Zurich, Basle, Paris, Chartres, London

March 30–April 13

32 Logan Road, Bristol, England

April 14–May 1

Stratford, Oxford, Cotswolds

May 2–May 8

Bristol

May 9–May 20

London, Paris, Marseilles, Cannes, Nice, Genoa, Pisa, Rome, Bari, Brindisi, Corfu, Athens

May 21–May 23

Ξενοδοχείον Σολόνιον, Απόλλωνος 26, Αθήνα

May 24–29

Σαρανταπόρου 11, Θεσσαλονίκη

May 30–July 16

Belgrade, Vienna, Paris, Cherbourg, New York

July 17–28

3902 47th Street, Long Island City 4, NY

July 29–August 4

Riparius

August 5–September 21

414 West 121st Street, NYC

September 22–December 31

January 2, 1959

Last summer in NY, with all windows open, a certain radio or phonograph playing Puerto Rican songs at highest pitch became extremely annoying. Sometimes, especially Saturday and Sunday, it went on four or five hours at a stretch. Many people in our building were ready to complain, but it was difficult to tell exactly from where across the street it was coming, as several buildings were Puerto Rican, and the sound was difficult to localize. I had noticed one apartment where an old man sat hours on end at the window, staring absent-mindedly into nothing, and where a man in his thirties, probably the old man’s son, often stood on the fire escape, but for shorter periods. Once, while the music was blasting, the man happened to be out on the fire escape while I was walking home, and I asked him if he knew where exactly that music was coming from. He said it was from inside, pointing into his own apartment. I asked if he couldn’t make it lower, whereupon he got angry and said he couldn’t, asking me where I lived, and saying: “You’d better call a cop!” I saw there was no arguing with him. I felt annoyed at the time, and thought of this man and of the Puerto Ricans in general as barbarians, not subject to thoughts of their neighbors’ comfort. But just now the utter desolation of the whole scene has come on me. Here they were, father, son, and probably a large family. They’d lived doubtlessly on a farm, where they’d had space to move in and room to absorb all their noises. Now they were on 121st Street. The father, quite obviously, never left the house. His one recreation was to stare across the street at the dirty gray brick opposite. The son probably worked at some menial job. On weekends, to get some air, he caged himself on the fire escape, also enjoying the lovely view oppoiste, but glad to get out of his cramped smelly living-room. Both father and son then forgot their present world by having it literally drowned out with romantic Spanish songs played over and over again. And this one escape, one joy, was then challenged by the man across the street!

January 3, 1959

Argument with Chrysanthi. We haven’t argued for ages, it seems. This was over that old problem: family versus work. She had asked me to stay with the children in the afternoon, so she could go shopping. I was delighted to do so, but then, instead of leaving as soon as possible after Leander went to sleep she lingered unnecessarily with Alec, who was also ready for bed. I asked when she was going and she said in an hour. I told her this was unfair, that she should leave immediately, which she did, being chased out, I suppose. This was followed in the evening with further unnessary encroachments and disturbances while I was reading. I reproached her this morning, and she, as usual, couldn’t see what she’d done wrong, and then embarked on the usual complaint that she was a slave and that she would never ask to go out again as obviously I needed my slave 24 hours a day, and that when the children cried I always wanted to close the doors so we wouldn’t hear them, and that I never bathed or changed the babies, as all other fathers did, etc. This mixed with tears, of course. Then she refused to eat her breakfast (she enjoys punishing herself further), and has been rushing about the house in a fever of cleanliness. This will blow over soon enough, I know. Actually, in the past few months we have been closer, I think, than ever before, and I think we have actively felt each other’s love. Perhaps this is because here in England we are more on our own; perhaps because of the three-months’ separation when Chrysanthi and the children go to Greece at the end of March.

January 4, 1959

We took the train to Avonmouth, a city of workers and factories. What fantastic faces some of the workers have, and how irrevocably separate they are in bearing and dress from the middle class. We couldn’t get to the water, as we had hoped, and had to walk and walk until finally we went all the way to Severn Beach, where we climbed up the sea wall and looked across to Wales, shining in the oblique rays of a half-hidden sun.

A PRAYER ON GOING INTO MY HOUSE

God grant a blessing on this tower and cottage

And on my heirs, if all remain unspoiled,

No table or chair or stool not simple enough

For shepherd lads in Galilee, and grant

That I myself for portions of the year

May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing

But what the great and passionate have used

Throughout so many varying centuries

We take it for the norm; yet should I dream

Sinbad the sailor’s brought a painted chest,

Or image, from beyond the Loadstone Mountain,

That dream is a norm; and should some limb of the Devil

Destroy the view by cutting down an ash

That shades the road, or setting up a cottage

Planned in a government office, shorten his life,

Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea bottom.

—Yeats

Fragments from Chrysanthi’s family history:

Her father’s mother died one year after Dimitros’s birth. His father, Chrysanthi’s grandfather, died when Dimitrios was seven. At this age, Dimitrios had to arrange the funeral himself. He loaded the coffin on one side of a doney, putting another box full of stones on the other side, to balance the weight.

Chrysanthi’s mother’s family were very rich, owning houses, hotels, etc. in Nigrita. There were, besides Magdalene, two brothers and one or two sisters. They all died in the same year, one after the other. One sister, the mother of Aphrodite, Helen, and Mimika, was operated on and making a splendid recovery when, two days before she was due to leave the hospital, she died suddenly for an unknown reason. One brother was operated on for appendicitis, and died on the table. The other died supposedly from alcohol. He had been an entrepreneur, owning several hotels in Nigrita, and other interests nearby, flitting from village to village, always anxious to make more money. Then, for some reason, he lost everything except a small inn, the one whose café he had loved to sit in. He tried to shoot himself several times, then turned to drink. The son of one of these brothers tore down the top of one of the family houses. There were two houses owned by C.’s mother and let to relatives who never paid rent. C.’s mother, furious, preferred to have the house thereafter locked and empty, but vandals got at it, so she decided to rent it to a stranger. Then it was vacant again. This son, at the time, was living in a house in back of it, and his view of the βόλτα was impaired; so, angered by not having been given a rent-free place, he chopped down the top story so, as they say, he could see his girlfriends taking their daily strolls. The other house was destroyed by the village in a street-widening project and a promise was made of another house in a favorable position as a compensation. This was never given. On several occasions, aspiring office-seekers came to Salonika and promised Dimitrios if he voted for them they would see that Magdalene got her promised house and was paid damages for the one chopped away. But Dimitrios, fed up with the whole business, found it wiser not to go to vote at all. Thus it was that although C.’s mother and her family were so rich, and C.’s father and his so poor, that during the war it was her father’s inherited vineyards, orchards, and meadows that fed the family, while nothing at all was forthcoming from the mother’s side. Also, when a large sum was needed to buy George out of prison, it was the father’s properties that were sold.

When George finished his university training he was offered the job of γεωπόνος at Nigrita, but Dimitrios dissuaded him, saying it would be suicide to be among so many relatives, all asking for favors and conferring none. Lola, too, was offered a job at Nigrita teaching, and refused. The teacher would be in almost as bad a position as the agriculturalist, with parents begging and bribing to get their children passed. Chrysanthi laughed at the thought of the kinds of presents brought teachers with this purpose, such as cheese wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief.

In the villages, apparently new headmen, if they want, can destroy all previous public records so that if you own a house or have not the deed in your possession, you’re out of luck. The falsification of C.’s birthday is another example of this juggling with records.

I told the story, as much as I knew, of Eugene Girden’s father: his basketball betting, nudist camp sympathies, Russian roulette, etc. His “big man” pose; and then being fired from Warner Brothers, no doubt justifiably, after 25 years there; how he bought, probably on borrowed money, a single theater catering to Negroes, in Maryland, and this failing took his Russian roulette pistol and shot himself in the head. And all his brothers, the famous doctors, refused to come to the funeral. I must include also how the five brothers had been such an unusual basketball team and how Jules continually as an adult lived as if he were back in this period of glory.

January 7, 1959

Leander is so cute. Now, by his decree, the whole family has new names. Leander is Topsy (the name of a dog in one of his books), I’m Lion, Chrysanthi is variously “meeow” or Tiger, and Alec is Angus.

January 11, 1959

Konrad and Sheila want to spend four weeks in Greece this summer, but must find a way of leaving their children behind. Could we do a similar thing? I don’t think so. Is their desire to abandon the children to a stranger in this way a comment on them, or is it connected with the fact that the children are adopted? Perhaps the latter. I seem to feel so little one way or other about my own natural children that I suppose if my sons were adopted ones I wouldn’t think twice about leaving them if they stood in the way of a long-cherished vacation. But I wouldn’t do it with Leander and Alec.

Tea again yesterday with the Giffords. His father was not there (we had thought he lived with them, but he doesn’t, and they seemed very happy about this), but the son, Nick, was home from prep (“public”) school: a mousy looking chap interested in making documentary movies. Also there was the teenage daughter of Professor Dickinson, in blue socks and sweater, and a lisp. “The Irish,” she said, “seemed so more foreign” than even did the French. English children talk to each other in a remarkably refined way.

Gifford himself seems to me to have very little vitality. Whenever we meet we talk of the same things: the English establishment in literature, its coming disappearance, Gifford’s article on Dr. Zhivago, the excellence of Tomlinson’s poems, the glories of Professor Knights, the Americanization of English life and thought, the shame that English people have to share their language and see it changed (mutilated?) by Americans and others.

Soon after we got back from tea with the Giffords, Denis and Ruth Chorley came unexpectedly and stayed until 11 p.m. He knows his literature very well, it seems, and yet is teaching in a Secondary School, not even a Grammar School, and a class of mentally retarded children who can hardly learn how to read. For him it is just “time-serving” and a way to make money. His real love is antique cars and racing cars. He complained that antique cars were being taken out of Britain by rich Americans. When I suggested that it was a shame for the Elgin Marbles to be separated from the Parthenon, he replied, “Why not bring the Parthenon here?”

My father’s eyesight has again gone bad. He can’t drive at all, he writes. Ethel is chauffeuring him. He is back on drugs, in controlled doses, and is waiting to see if they do any good. He realizes that he may have to give up practice very soon, but says nothing about what he’ll do afterwards. This poses a tremendous problem, as he has no interests that are not basically visual. The same problem would apply to me if I were to go blind. My life seems now to be occupied with only three things: reading, playing the piano, and building at the farm. Without sight, I could do none of these. For me, if I had to choose, it would be plainly wiser to choose loss of hearing rather than of sight.

I got clearer the story of the Yiannakoses during the war. These are some of the things that Chrysanthi told me this afternoon:

Regarding George: He was working as an agriculturalist during the German occupation, and staying out of the resistance movement; indeed, trying simply to carry on as before, without getting involved in politics. His job entailed going from village to village. His troubles started when, as he was walking to a village, two partisans sprang at him, armed, and said they needed paper for their typewriters (they knew he worked in an office and had access to paper and other similar supplies). If he didn’t give them what they wanted, they would kill him. They arranged a time, and he gave them the paper. This came somehow to the knowledge of the Germans, who immediately arrested George on a charge of aiding the partisans. There was a trial of sorts. He was asked if he’d given the paper, and he said yes, but that he had no choice, as they would have killed him otherwise. “You should have reported the incident to the police,” he was told. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and taken away to prison. But his sentence was not carried out. He didn’t know why at the time, but later realized it was because of the German officer who was commander of the prison. He and George had become friendly, since the officer was by profession an agriculturalist also. The practice at the prison was to kill only a certain number each day, and the officer kept putting George’s name at the end of the list. Eventually, this officer helped George get a new trial. Here George was helped by a lawyer and by an official in the Greek government who had been a classmate of Dimitrios’s and very indebted to Dimitrios because at school Dimitrios had always whispered the answers to the mathematics questions to him. Also it was a question of money. Dimitrios sold all his lands and vineyards and paid those who had to be paid. The lawyer at this second trial argued George’s predicament. If he had gone to the police they would have had to give him protection, which of course they wouldn’t have done. Otherwise, since his job took him out on lonely roads to the villages, he surely would have been done off with by the partisans, as a traitor to their cause. Apparently, says C., the Germans took pains to preserve the forms at least of trial procedure when they were dealing with educated people. The jury voted 4 to 3 in favor of death, of upholding the original sentence. Then, somehow—I’m not very clear about this stage—this was commuted to life imprisonment. As soon as the Germans were defeated, George of course was released.

Chrysanthi said that the picture at the end of the war was brought back to her vividly when I recounted what I had read in The Observer of Castro’s triumphant march into Havana last week. As soon as the German commander fled Greece, the partisans came down from the mountains, shouting through megaphones: “Stay in your houses. Soon you shall be free, and will see the flag waving from the Λευκός Πύργος.” Also, people issued from houses fully armed, hundreds of people whom no one had suspected were involved in the resistance movement at all. The harbor was full of German ships to evacuate the troops. What was amazing was that the partisans did not kill the ordinary German soldiers (though they were out to get certain of the leaders). Chrysanthi remembers peeping through the shutters watching across the street where Kostas’s vegetable stand is. Several German soldiers were hiding there, waiting for a chance to get down to the harbor. The partisans discovered them and merely shouted, in German, “Go quickly,” letting them off.

When the Germans were gone, the people all came out into the streets, crying, shouting, and watching as the partisans, still coming down from the surrounding mountains, marched in triumph, and while the Greek flag was raised for the first time in so many years. And yet a short while later Greek was killing Greek in civil war.

This is when Odysseas’s troubles began. He was a university student and of his clique was the only one who had been for the partisans. (Then, almost all students were from rich families and tended to side with the Germans and make what they could while they had the chance.) All during the occupation, without his family even knowing, Odysseas had been active with the underground in Salonika. Chrysanthi says that he was an almost saintly person, could never hurt a fly even, was naïve, and hitherto had centered his life on soccer. Now he was a lecturer to the partisans. He never actually fought, apparently. When the Germans left, the partisans formed the government and of course Odysseas gladly came out in the open with all his meetings and activities. His friends, meanwhile, were mostly arrested. He went, says Chrysanthi, for each one of them to the partisan authorities and vouched for them, getting them released, though he knew as well as anyone that they had sided with the Germans. But when the partisan government fell, things became dangerous. Policemen were everywhere, arresting people and shooting them. Odysseas came home to tell his mother he’d have to flee, or surely he’d be killed. But no sooner did he get in the house than 15 or 20 police came up. They had been tipped off by a certain Nikos, one of the “friends” whose release Odysseas had secured shortly before. (Nikos, C. says, is now in an insane asylum, God having punished him in this way.) Odysseas broke into the neighbor’s apartment and hid behind the bathroom door. The police meanwhile searched the Yiannakoses’ apartment, turning it upside down, looking under beds, in the bathroom, opening the trunks, etc. Not finding him, they entered the neighbor’s apartment, but apparently weren’t so thorough. All the while the poor neighbor, an elderly woman, was nearly scared out of her wits. They left. Odysseas got down to a ground floor apartment (all the people in the house were very good about helping him) and then through the garden to Ευζώνων. The next thing the family heard was that he was hiding out in a garage, dressed as a mechanic, and sleeping under a bus. He was there two weeks, during which time Lola visited him, somehow evading the police. (Lola, Chrysanthi said, was ready to die for both Odysseas and George. It was these events that led to her nervous collapse.) Odysseas was waiting for the partisans to fetch him so he could get across the border to Bulgaria. This was a very risky business, and the partisans wanted to be sure they took nobody who might be a spy for the other side. Probably Odysseas’s aid to his friends gave them cause to suspect him. But eventually he was smuggled out successfully. Of course the family only knew that he was gone. They heard various reports by hearsay, quite contradictory ones, some saying he was dead, others that he had escaped. They didn’t hear from him diretly for ten full years, 1946 to 1956. Chrysanthi’s mother was sure he was dead, because for some time befoe 1956 messages had come from others of the exiled partisans, but not from him. But now of course we know where he is, and have pictures of his wife and children. Chrysanthi’s mother says that she cannot really feel sad that he is so far away, because of the miracle that he is alive at all. She is content with this, and glad that he’s married.

But his escape did not end the family’s troubles. The government was putting the relatives of the partisans in prison. Chrysanthi came home from school one day to find that both her parents had been taken away. Lola, who was still bedridden with her breakdown, had been left. Chrysanthi went to the prison and was put in with the others, but was released after 15 days due to the intervention of Mr. House and of Doreen Gilbertson. Mr. and Ms. Yiannakos were imprisoned for one year and for ⅓ year respectively on an island in the Dodecanese: Macronisos. The condition of release was, for Dimitrios, that he give a lecture (he being a teacher) to the other prisoners, saying he abhored commnism and disowned his son This he did, after a year in prison. Magdalene refused, but in three months’ time was convinced to do the same, and so they were both free again. But the aged mother of Odysseas’s wife was just released last year, after more that ten years in prison!

And Chrysanthi’s difficulty in getting a passport was of course also the aftermath of Odysseas’s partisan acivity. No wonder, poor girl, she hates so to see policemen, even American or British ones. She says she remembers, too, durng the Occupation, how the Greek puppet police would come in the middle of the night and she would suddenly be awakened by a flashlight beam shining in her eyes, and asked gruffly, “Where’s your gun?” Then the men would look under the pillow, and proceed to Dimitrios. Chrysanthi says she can still hear the sound of the blows they gave him as a way of saying goodbye.

January 16, 1959

I dreamed of a collection of derelicts—bearded, in tattered clothes, slumped over newspapers—in the lobbies of the New York Public Library, suddenly awakened into animation by a discussion of America’s past: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, etc. Strange!

January 23, 1959

I spoke to about twenty people in Dulverton, Somerset, Secondary Model School on young people in America, and was the target of questions, especially shot by the young village rector—e.g., “Why does America fear Russia so?” “Why do the U.S. movies exalt gangsters?” and the like. The program was organized by R. Sowden, the district director of the Somerset Youth Service. I stayed at his house in Minehead, a lovely village built in a crescent around a beach and harbor, with 17th century fishermen’s cottages, 19th century hotels, formal gardens, hillside lanes, and a commanding hillside church. Very clean and fresh and pleasant—all. Sowden took me in the morning for a drive over Exmoor, where sheep graze untended and are gathered only for sheering. The moor is a vast high rolling area covered with furze, bracken, heather, with sudden valleys with brooks at the bottom, and steep cliffs covered with greenish-barked trees. Deer and wild ponies are also on the moor, but we didn’t see any. We went looking for a hunt, supposed to meet at Tarr Steps. No sign of them, but we saw at least these steps, a prehistoric stone bridge over a stream, nicely done with piers every three feet or so, and flat stones laid across. Sowden told an amusing story of a recent hunt where the hounds had made the kill in the garden of a hotel, which was bad enough, but to make things worse it was a vegetarian hotel.

We saw Dunster castle and village, where you still get the feeling of the medieval system. The castle has been owned and occupied by the same family for 600-odd years, and they still own much of Minehead, as well as most of Dunster itself. Feudalism dies hard.

On the way back I stopped at Taunton, where there is a lovely church tower and a museum in the old castle, containing prehistoric finds.

January 26, 1959

We had dinner with Ian Michael, wife, and boy and girl. The boy was dressed impeccably in a grey suit, and served the cider without complaining—perfectly behaved. The girl, who was basically ugly, like her big-bosomed mother, complained goodnaturedly of not being allowed to go with a group of friends hosteling in Sweden. She is 15. The mother didn’t think it was a good idea. Her daughter wasn’t “sensible” enough. Another guest was a colleage of Ian’s in the Institute of Education, a middleaged spinster woman. Both she and Ian go about this term observing the practice teaching of their students in outlying grammar schools. Talk centered on her greater ease in doing this since she’d gotten a car, on mileage allowances, and such things. Ian is also doing a study of grammar books from Mulcaster on down, and the influence of Latin methods on English. He seems quite alive and pleasant, and yet is so proper, probably the wife’s fault, with her impeccable dinner party and use of her son as butler! And the children went to bed without a murmur, too. Give me cowboys, please.

March 13, 1959

I would be—for no knowledge is worth a strand—Ignorant and wanton as the dawn. —Yeats, “The Dawn”

❡ Helen, when she looked in her mirror and saw there the wrinkles of old age, wept, and wondered that she had twice been carried away. —From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, quoted by Yeats as the epigraph to “The Secret Rose,” 189.

❡ If Dante had seen a civilisation that understood beatitude only in terms of cinemas and silk stockings and electric cookers and radiators and cars and cocktails, would it have surprised him to find it all of a sudden waking to the realisation that, having pursued these ideas with all its might, it was inexplicably left cold, hungry, bored, resentful and savage? Probably not . . . For Dante, the punishment of sin is the sin itself. —Dorothy Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante, p. 135.

March 21, 1959

Working on my translation of Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός.

Our first shock, on arriving here, was to see how poor and slummy the apartment at Σαρανταπόρου 11 seemed. I didn’t remember it being so depressing, and thought that perhaps I was seeing it with different eyes than I had in ’55. But after we were here a few days we learned the reason: Kostas Sphairopoulos, Lola’s husband, had presented an ultimatum a few days before his marriage: either you give me everything or I break the engagement. Then he came to the house and said, “All right, empty out!” The electric stove, beds, carpets, cushions, etc. are now all at Lola’s. Our second shock was to learn about this Kostas, that he existed only for money, for climbing the social ladder, that he begrudged any expenditure, not even giving Lola a servant in her first months of motherhood. George, who makes a practice of supporting nearly everyone on his meager income, angrily offered to pay for a girl. Apparently George hates Kostas’s guts, and with reason. Indeed, it is pitiful to see Lola, formerly so forceful and dynamic, deliberately being crushed by her husband, so that now she never even argues with him or complains, but simply accepts. When we visited them the other night I could see how they lived. We talked about types of baby carriages. Kostas said he wanted the cheapest possible; Lola said she wanted a large one. Kostas said a large one couldn’t fit in the elevator of their new apartment house. Thereafter Lola was simply cut short by her husband, who was nearly yelling “Shut up and listen to me, you slave,” whenever she ventured an opinion. I talked with him and was not surprised to hear his pronouncements that life consisted of bettering one’s financial position, that he already owned three apartments, that living in the center of the city was good because you saved bus fare, etc. And their new apartment, which they move into next week, was really super-duper. This insane desire for newness! The new apartments here are just like those in New York: shining, of course, but sinfully small. The rooms at Sarantaporou are each twice the size of Lola’s.

Our third shock was when we visited Vouli and Demosthenes. This shock was of a different order. It was because of what seemed, to Chrysanthi first and to me after we talked about it, the tragic restriction of their lives. The house was a shop-place rather than a place in which to live. Every item was just so: probably arranged and dusted three times a day. And Vouli’s life seemed to revolve around the marital difficulties, by hearsay, of her friends. Chrysanthi felt Vouli had nothing to do, because Greek society tacitly praised having nothing to do, whereas the married lady in America interests herself in so many things, in artful cooking, in social work, politics, courses, etc. I tried to point out that in the end people in both cultures were simply making a desperate effort to pass the time, so they wouldn’t be bored, but I agreed that in America one could pass one’s time in a more varied way. Then Demosthenes suggested: Πάμε βόλτα. He had a new car. We got in, and he drove us from one end of Εγνατία to the other, then out to Αρετσού and back. This was the βόλτα. It seemed so futile, so inferior in a way to the βόλτα by foot that the car supplanted. But who does not fall for new toys?

Chrysanthi seems made for an Αμερικανίδα and, since she must live in America, it is certainly just as well. As for me, I felt here not the bad things alone but many good ones: the lovely clean, clear air, the sun, the magnificent view of the bay with Olympus across the way, the lovely sailing boats, the housewives singing as they work, the children chattering in the street, the avenues full of people and life, not dead and deserted as in English suburbs. But of course there are also the ugly things such as the beggar we saw today, coming up Sarantaporou in a donkey cart, his feet extended and wrapped in a blanket, his long wiry hair completely wild, his face dirty, black Negroid-looking, his clothes just patches and tatters, calling out: Παράλυτος! Παράλυτος, and waiting.

March 26, 1959

Saw C.’s uncle, the father of Ελένη, Μημίκα, και Αφροδίτη. Chrysanthi told me what is going on in that family. Eleni is still single; she sews to make a living, and dyes her hair blonde. She and Mimika still live with their father. Mimika is married to a man who repairs damaged automobiles. We met him too: a quiet, nicely dressed fellow with black hair and a reddish mustache, and a gold-capped tooth that protrudes in front of his mouth. He apparently is a model husband and father (they have an infant daughter). Mimika, before, had been looked down upon by everyone as somewhat loose because she changed boyfriends so much. But evidently by doing so she gained the experience and opportunity to choose wisely for her husband. This man lives 100% for the family; he always helps, always accompanies his wife on walks, etc., and he and the old father have become close friends. The husband will never sit to eat, says Chrysanthi, unless ὁ μπαμπᾶς, is with him. So, they all live under the same roof, in two rooms, and in harmony.

But Aphrodite’s situation is entirely the opposite. Her husband, a shoemaker, seems to be a devil indeed. They have two children and live together with the man’s old invalid (cancerous) mother, and a cousin. The mother of course has a right to her son’s aid, but the cousin appears to be merely a sponger. Because of these two people he has to support, the husband insists that Aphrodite work. She hates her job, hates leaving her children but, as an old-fashioned Greek wife, she cannot lift her voice against her husband. The saddest part is what is happening to the children. The eldest, six years old, boards during the week μέ τόν μπαμπᾶ, Eleni, Mimika, and her husband. Eleni, when she visited us, cried and cried concerning the child’s predicament, for it has grown sad, despondent, always calling for its absent mother. When Mimika’s husband comes home from work, he goes immediately to his own baby and plays with it, while the other child sadly watches, saying, “Play with me, too, uncle,” which he does, but of course more out of pity than love. Aphrodite collects the child on weekends, but because she works out all week her weekends are too full of household chores—cleaning, cooking for the mother and cousin—for her to give much time to the child. She also tries to stop by at μπαμπᾶς’s house after work, but she is always rushed because the cranky old mother must be served dinner just on time.

Story: How Chrysanthi built up a picture of her sister’s husband (rich, giving her the good life she had always missed, etc.), and the shock to find how miserable Lola is and what Kostas is really like.

March 28, 1959

Events from Stavroula’s point of view. Arrival. Hard work. The American. Attraction. Dejection. Her father’s history. Sitting at table ignored. The theatre. Preparations for party. The party. Her desire to help me always, to serve me. . . . Impressions of George and family, of Kostas and family, of the guests, etc.

I bought an electric Turkish coffee-maker (μπρίκι) for the Yiannakoses. Kostas saw it the other day and asked them what they needed that for, and why they bought it. His attitude is that they are ready to die and therefore to buy anything is a waste of money. C. told me that one time he told them it was silly for them to keep this big apartment, that they should come live with him, giving him their pension. He’d feed and clothe them, and they’d have no worries. Mrs. Y. would wash diapers and cook, and Mr. Y., well, he wasn’t good for much, but at least he could do the shopping. That way Lola would have a maid and butler dirt cheap!

Disillusion about Efthymoula. After the honeymoon: incident—the pins and the liver. George and the nerve-wracking car. He becomes a chauffeur.

Changes in Salonika. Cafés disappear; human relationships are destroyed, because of the epidemic of new apartment houses.

The party: 40 to 50 people.

The night before, 11 persons sleeping. Mrs. Y. says the house never is too small for good people.

Attitude of the Yiannakoses: They try desperately to keep George from getting a divorce. “All women are the same,” they say. “Don’t expect anything more. That’s life.” Their attitude to Kostas’s proposal: We’ll keep our house, and die all alone, thank you!

April 5, 1959

Hotel du Genève, 30, Rue du Rocher, Paris

I’ve been traveling exactly a week now, without having written anything save numerous postcards to Chrysanthi. So: A week ago Sunday we had Leander’s birthday party. Phew! The morning was all a frenzy of shifting furniture, putting embroidered covers on chairs and beds, hiding everything unsightly, etc. And what a houseful, even before the guests arrived! Eleven people slept over Saturday night: οι γονεῖς, Chrysanthi and I, George and Efthymoula, three children, and two maids: Ελευθερία και Σταυρούλα. How sweet it was to see the house so full—the two girls busy in the kitchen with the food, the wives running after, and gossiping about, their children, and the men—well, useless and a bit restless, I suppose. Sunday morning Dimitrios and I went to Floca’s for the ice cream. 100 drachmas worth, served in a wooden barrel filled with ice. D. said we’d better go well in advance because although he had ordered the ice cream he was sure—since the restaurant people were Greeks—that it would not be ready. And sure enough we arrived at Floca’s to find out that the ice cream was still at the factory! A man was dispatched to fetch it, while we waited and passed the time eating some outrageously expensive patisseries, and drinking Nigrita mineral-water.

Finally, about 5:00 p.m., the children began to arrive, mostly from the street below (they were the only ones we knew). We stuffed them with nut-cake and τρίγωνα and cookies and honey-cake and ice cream. Then Leander blew out his three candles and they were obliged to eat birthday cake also. After the candle-blowing, Chrysanthi and the children danced the συρτό while poor Leander, completely bewildered, seemed chiefly interested in the tricycle presented him by his Uncle Kostas. Not knowing how to pedal, he pushed himself forwards and backwards with his feet, generally bumping into everyone and making us all somewhat angry.

George and Efthymoula had already left (more on George later), and we sent the children away with a piece of chocolate—but only then did the chaos begin. People, people—the dressmaker from downstairs, two sets of cousins, complete with screaming children, Aliki and her sister, Lola, Kostas, and child, and more whom I don’t remember. Feeling somewhat headachy, I served the ice cream to keep myself busy, and kept finding additional chairs: it seemed there were never enough. At around 7:00 o’clock Leander’s crankiness showed how sleepy he was, so we moved the people out of the τζαμαρία but they didn’t take the hint and sat instead in the σαλόνι. They sat and sat, and finally left at about 8:30 or 9:00. When the last one had gone, we all crossed ourselves and vowed never the have a party again!

The next day—Monday—I read a little in Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός, packed my things, and took a last walk with Chrysanthi by the sea, Leander trailing behind, hopelessly trying to pedal his new tricycle, but unable to. As usual, he occupied us so that we were hardly able to say a word to each other. Then, to add to our discomfort, we ran into Lola and Kostas at a café. Immediately Kostas began his interminable, importunate invitations: Come to us, why don’t you come to us, etc., etc. And Lola and Chrysanthi began talking, of course about children. Βαριέστηκα πια! When we returned to the house it was almost time for my train. At the last moment, Leander saw a folding hanger (for nylon shirts) in my knapsack, took it, and performed his favorite trick: threw it over the balcony. Just as when he threw my Parker pen out of 414, I got furiously angry, and more so because the hanger, unlike the pen, was destroyed. I spanked Leander hard and threw him in his room on his bed, closing his door. All this was a half-hour before my departure. I don’t know what Magdalene and Stavroula thought. I sullenly tried to fix the hanger for ten minutes or so, and then had to leave. I said goodbye to Leander as best I could under the circumstances. Magdalene told me it was right to scold the child, but she still was, I think, unhappy about it underneath. I felt extremely bad myself, and told her so, which may have helped. The night before I had explained to Leander while he was in bed, drinking his milk, that I was going away for a long long time and wouldn’t see him. I felt very sad, and even cried. He understood in his own way. So on Monday, after the scolding, all I had to do was say goodbye, tell him to be a good boy, etc. I left. I knew I would miss Leander, but I had no emotions one way or the other about leaving Alec. He still to me is primarily a urine, feces and vomit producer, not a human being.

Chrysanthi and I met Dimitrios at the station. In the waiting room, D. saw one of his old pupils, who was seeing another girl off to Munich. We were introduced. We would make παρέα for each other on the trip. On the platform we found a compartment, Chrysanthi making sure that I got a corner seat. D. stayed watching the luggage—purposefully, I think, to leave C. and me alone. We paced the platform a bit, not having very much to say. Then I had to get on the train. I leaned out of the window and Chrysanthi stood below me, trying to smile. I felt awful. I didn’t know why I was going away at all! We exchanged συμβουλές, talked a little about what I was to buy in Paris, and a little about how much bigger the children would be when I returned. Chrysanthi was as she always is when she is holding back emotion: quiet, non-communicative. We stood for several minutes saying nothing, not even looking at each other. Then the train started, and as I waved goodbye, leaning out of the window, I saw her face break in two as it does when she cries. «Τι δύσκολο να φύγουμε!» said my new acquaintance, and we were off.

April 6, 1959

This girl turned out to be a vivacious and cosmopolitan Athenian, apparently with plenty of money. She’d been before to Austria, and was now going for a month to Munich. We shared the compartment with a taxicab owner from a small city in Macedonia who was going to Germany to buy two new cars for his fleet, and with a Greek whose home was in Stockholm: a skilled mechanic in the automobile works there. The taxi driver immediately extolled the American car to me—it was the best car ever, etc. He took out his wallet and proudly produced, instead of his wife & children, him and his Chevrolet, with his other Chevrolet behind it! Lovely, we all said. We were soon joined by a fatish middle-aged man traveling Wagon Lit, apparently an acquaintance of the cab driver. He let us know soon enough that he was an έμπορος, that he came from rags to riches, that he dealt in millions of drachmas—or was it millions of dollars? —and on several occasions he produced a large wad of dollars from his pocket, nonchalantly. We were discussing the black market, the limit on exporting currencies, etc. (the others all having dinars in excess). Thomas (that was the merchant’s name) said for a man like him, who dealt in immense sums, it didn’t pay to take a chance just to save pennies. He left us, saying that a nice σερβίτσα would be waiting for him in Belgrade, where he did his business! We all laughed (after he’d left) at his middle-aged sexuality.

Rich Greek merchants are really funny. I remember the one also whom we met on our trip two weeks before. How dapper he was, with suede shoes, cuff links, etc. When he found a few of his compatriots he started showing all the things he’d bought, quoting prices, to show how well he’d done. Then, when it came time for the Greek customs inspection, he distributed his cache among seven or eight of us. To me he gave two hats, one for Leander, one for myself, which we promptly declared as “personal effects”!

On this trip also we had an interesting encounter with a Greek train conductor. We traveled in a first class compartment with second class tickets. In Yugoslavia we paid the difference. But it seemed silly to pay from Idomenea to Salonika—one hour. Besides, we had only enough drachmas for the taxi home. So we argued with the conductor. He gave in shortly, saying “Poor Greece! Yugoslavia gets the money but Greece doesn’t.” A quarter of an hour later he returned, sat down, wiped his brow, started admiring the children, produced photographs of his own family, asked me what I did for a living, and when I told him I was a student but that I taught for two hours a day and made do, he was incredulous. “I work all week,” he said, “and still haven’t enough to live.” I felt ashamed at my advantages. Imagine, I’m going on 29 years old and I’ve never really had to work yet. Is this a blessing or a curse? If a blessing, well, I’ve made no use of it. I’ve produced nothing—nothing—nothing! And I just grow lazier and more disillusioned and fidgety every day.

But back to the train to Munich. The four of us, the three Greeks and myself, had a lovely παρέα as far as Belgrade, even sleeping a bit. I was praised as usual for my fluency in Greek, but still I knew that half of what they were saying I couldn’t understand. At Belgrade we had to change wagons, and found ourselves with a German teacher of ancient Greek at a gymnasium. He spoke Modern Greek haltingly, so we got along. He was interested in philology. We talked about language and books as best we could, but soon came to Greek vs. Western women! The teacher praised the Greek wife’s devotion to her husband, saying this was unknown in modern Germany, whereupon his wife (a German) trumped him by saying “You’ve been unlucky then, haven’t you?” At Ljubljana the taxi driver and the girl paid with their black market dinars for Wagon Lit, so we were four in the compartment. But the poor German, who had immensely long legs, couldn’t sleep. He eventually found an empty compartment and moved out.

I slept at about one or two a.m. and was awakened at 5:30 a.m. by the girl, fresh after a night in the Wagon Lit. We were in Salzburg, and since I knew I couldn’t sleep any more, I decided to get off. It was nice washing up and shaving in the cold, deserted station. Salzburg is very small, and is nestled beneath sharp cliffs, with a fortress atop one of them and, below it very dramatically, the cathedral square and ducal palace. Buildings, however, rather drab, all gray stucco, and the sculpture in the palace gardens strictly amateurish. How petty these courts must have been! How really very new the Austro-German civilization. There was nothing behind it to produce the excellence of Paris or Rome.

My main desire was to see Mozart’s home, which I did. His clavier and piano are preserved, also some letters, programs, etc. It was strange to see these rooms where he studied and composed as a child, and hard to imagine why and how such genius should have appeared precisely there, in that tiny town, no bigger, I think, than say Chestertown (yes, a little bigger, perhaps even double). I was interested to learn also that he had two sons; one at least was a music teacher, and both died without having married. Thus his line ended almost immediately.

Around noon, I took the train for Munich. I found this city disappointing. It has grand monuments, squares, parks, etc., but these cannot compare with those in Paris. In general, Munich seems very American, perhaps because so much of what I saw seems new. The English Garden, famous as it is, did not impress me. But the Frauenkirk did. I entered, never expecting to see the all-white interior, devoid of ornament, with large square columns, and modern stained glass in the apse. The church interior was destroyed in the war, and rebuilt magnificently in this mixture of Gothic soaring with modern cleanness of line and functional simplicity. The trip to Munich was worthwhile solely for this church, but it was made more worthwhile by the Alte Pinakothek. I don’t know whether it was the intrinsic merit of the collection or perhaps simply the fact that it has been so long since I’ve gone leisurely through an art museum, but in any case I was strongly impressed. The collection of Rubens is superb, and there are several lovely somber Rembrandts. I felt more strongly than I have for a long time that art is the only thing in this life that seems to have any rationale, any real raison d’être. As I walked through the rooms, awed by the immense canvases and fascinated by the finesse of the small ones, I marveled at the ingenuity of man. I wanted Chrysanthi, George, Lola, and Dimitrios to be there so I could show them and say “Behold! Did you ever dream that human beings were capable of this?” And still we have wars, and still we are petty and selfish and ridiculous. For shame!

In the evening, because somewhere I’d also gotten the impression that Munich was a wicked city, I decided to go to a nightclub. I entered, and was immediately charged DM 3 to check my coat. I sat down, saw a fat, ugly girl with bare breasts do a hula dance, and was approached with the menu. The cheapest item, a half-bottle of wine, was DM 25. I wisely left. The waiter told me that two floors below was more my speed. I went, sat at the bar and made a beer (DM 2.20) last an hour and a half. There was dancing interspersed with acts: some Spanish dancers, another hula, and bare-breasted girls modeling lingerie. They were all very fat. Too much sausage and beer! This was wicked Munich!

The following day I continued on to Ulm and then to Friedrichshafen on the Bodensee. Ulm immediately strikes one as being much smaller, and in a sense much friendlier and livelier than Munich. It was particularly enjoyable shopping. The girls enjoyed my broken German and did all they could to help me. Of course an unpleasant element for the visitor is the evidence of American occupying forces. A tremendous sign in the Bahnhof reads: “To newly arrived military personnel: How to use German telephones.” The cathedral, which was of course my reason for detouring to Ulm, dominates all the other buildings. Indeed, it is advertised as having the highest tower in the world. One is truck by the effect of transparency that the designers of the tower achieved. Besides the filigree that can be seen on most Gothic structures, this was achieved by actually making the tower in vertical segments, so that the blue sky shines through the middle. It is an amazing effect when first seen. Inside, the most distinctive feature seemed to me to be the fan vaulting that was crossed just as it came up from the pedestal.

April 7, 1959

❡ Et qu’eût-on d’autre part cent belles qualités,

On regarde les gens par leus méchants côtés.

—Molière, Le Misanthrope, I. ii. (lines 355–6).

Le voilà devenu mon plus grand adversaire

Et jamais de son Coeur je n’aurai de pardon,

Pour n’avoir pas trouvé que son sonnet fût bon!

Et les hommes, morbleu! sont faits de cette sorte!

C’est à ces actions que la gloire* les parte!

Voilà la bonne foi, le zèle vertueux,

La justice et l’honneur que l’on trouve chez eux!

Allons, c’est trop souffrir les chagrins qu’on nous forge;

Tirons-nous de ce bois et de ce coupe-gorge.

Puisque entre humains ainsi vous vivez en vrais loups,

Traîtres, vous ne m’aurez de ma vie avec vous.

—Ibid., V.i. ll. 1514–1524. *la gloire = la vanité, le sot orgueil.

Ulm, continued: Also, the great Gothic “cap” over the pulpit: this is the perpendicular style carried to its ridiculous extreme. The designer just couldn’t stop, so up and up and up he went, almost to the full height of the vaulting itself.

I caught a slow train to Friedrichshafen and talked with a woman who told me she traveled to Greece and Italy the cheap and comfortable way: by reading Goethe! Perhaps she was very wise.

Friedrickshafen is on the Bodensee, which at that point is the border between Germany and Switzerland. It is a simple resort-town, with gardens and a promenade by the water, something like Minehead in West Somerset, but otherwise uninteresting. I stayed in a lovely hotel, however, with fresh flowers on every staircase landing, and a print of a famous portrait on the wall. As it was late, I had a bottle of beer, and went to bed.

The next morning I took the steamer to Switzerland—a beautiful modern boat run by the Deutsche Bundesbahn. I expected to be in the middle of the Alps the minute I landed, but was disappointed, of course, as there are no mountains in the northern part of Switzerland—that is, around Zürich. Zürich, however, I found to be truly lovely. Yes, James Joyce had very good taste in his residences: Trieste, Zürich, Paris. I walked up the winding cobbled streets of the hills, coming upon fountains and little squares, and bookstores, bookstores everywhere! This is what we miss in the new world: in the midst of a bustling city, residential streets, right in the center, that are as quiet as they were in the middle ages, probably quieter. No cars—that makes the difference. And then, of course, the bridge and park where the river empties into the Zürichersee, with rowboats and sailboats and cafés: all this was beautiful, and charming. The Cathedral is a disappointment, but instructive. It was here that Zwingli effected the Swiss part of the Reformation He was the preacher of the Zürich Dom, and thus the church is a mother-church of Protestantism. And how bare and stark and ugly it is, both inside and out! The Protestant spirit—just as I saw it in Holland, in the Zutphen Cathedral, where all the decoration had been removed or whitewashed over. Just drabness, not even luxuriating in whiteness and simplicity, as in the new Frauenkirk of München. But the Swiss, judging from the automobiles and shop windows of Zürich (wonderful furniture!) have taken advantage of the Protestant virtues, and produced—produced a high standard of living! Thank you, they can have it (say I, who live parasitically on our own high standard and never tire of condemning it).

I walked and walked, up and down the steep streets, until I was quite tired out, and then took the train for Basle. I had my supper in the park as dusk was falling, then went to a Bridget Bardot movie whose main attraction was about 30 seconds of her dancing with a naked behind. I returned to the station, to find it mobbed with English school-children on a “Swann’s Tour.” I despaired of being able to lie down, and was correct in my fears, as I traveled all night to Paris with the compartment full up.

I arrived Saturday morning, found a cheap hotel room (800 Fr.) and went immediately to the Bibliothèque Nationale, only to find that the following Monday it would close for two weeks! I got my ticket anyway, for all I wanted, really, was to see the early editions of Montaigne and Rabelais, which could be done in a few hours. I found, however, that the First Editions were in the Réserve—the rare-book collection—and that I would have to justify my need for seeing them. So I had to content myself with a lovely 1595 folio of Montaigne, and two earlier, and of course incomplete, volumes of the Essais: 1582 and 1588.

In the afternoon I went to the Concert Mayol. This is something that I think must be unique to Paris. Not that striptease and nudity do not exist elsewhere, but that somehow, though extremely sexy, the Mayol show has nothing of the risqué feeling about it, nothing of the underground or underworld. To begin with, instead of being some den, it is simply a theatre like any other, and with reasonable prices. You don’t feel that you are paying for pornography. You are simply paying to see a musical show. It is all so taken for granted, so accepted! In the lobby, a woman sells kodachrome slides of the stars, just as though she were selling chocolates. And the audience is like any other audience, with almost as many women as men. The effect of cleanliness comes, probably, from the absolute nudity of the girls. There is much more strip than tease. True, every possible type and variation of disrobing was presented: the hot, mysterious type, the jocular, the satirical, etc., but the disrobing was always relatively quick, leaving a glorious woman standing or dancing in the raw. Of course there was quite enough provocation, besides the nudity itself: bumps and grinds, one act where the girl rubbed herself against a post, writhing as in the sexual act, another where the danseuse bent over, her naked behind toward the audience, placed both her hands between her legs and caressed her crotch and buttocks, and still another where the girl knelt backwards and slowly pulled a drape over her vagina. But despite this, the net effect was more purgative than excitative, perhaps because of the saturation of nudity: one act after the next, all variations (and clever ones—human ingenuity can express itself even here!) on one theme. Certainly every city should have a theatre like this. It is so much better than the clandestine pornography of New York, with so many magazines like Playboy and the imitations with their cheap stories of some conquest described in detail. A young man, or an old man, seeing such stuff wants to masturbate, whereas someone seeing the Concert Mayol comes away with the feeling that the naked woman is a beautiful—a miraculously beautiful—creature, something to be reverenced.

Saturday night I had a delicious sleep, recovering from my train-ride of the previous night. In the morning, Sunday, I read some cantos of the Inferno in the park nearby (Place Henri Bergson), and somehow lost my packet of cards with poems of Yeats, Hopkins, passages from Dante, etc. In the afternoon I went to the Bois de Boulogne. It was a brilliantly sunny, hot day, and all of Paris was there: kissing couples, young teen-aged boys walking arm-in-arm, families having a picnic, tired husbands sleeping on a blanket. Paris is all it is said to be: everywhere beautiful, full of life and activity, fabulously rich in culture and entertainment, and good food!

Monday morning I spent reading Stendhal in the Arsenal Bibliothèque. Then I walked along the Seine, stopped in at Notre Dame, and then went to the Louvre. What I liked best in Notre Dame was the Ambulatory, and also the Choir with its fantastic stalls and decorations. Three ancient priests, all with white beards, entered and were reading their missals preparatory to a service. In the Louvre I was delighted to see Da Vinci’s “La Verge aux rochiers,” which I didn’t remember having seen there before. Really, visits to museums are worthwhile if we find one picture we really like—indeed it is exciting to have one or two favorites in each museum and to keep coming back to see them over and over, as I do with the unfinished Michelangelo in London. This Da Vinci painting is superb beyond description, especially the way he paints the light on the flesh: not realistically at all, but with an exaggerated melodramatic quality also present in Michelangelo. It is as though the light were in its essence, not the slightest bit different or hazed as in real life. How unbelievably splendid it would be to have such a painting in one’s home! Do people paint like that nowadays? Is it really true—what is so easily said—that everything was better two and three and four centuries ago? Why? We should be able to do the same—perhaps even better. (I am tired out with the scholarly attention to the past, in literature, architecture, and everywhere. Why don’t we give more energy to creating now, ourselves, and less to what went before? But the past offers a living to professors and booksellers and tourist agents. I suppose it will offer a living to me as well!)

Tuesday I read Molière’s Le Misanthrope preparatory to seeing it at the Comédie Française on Thursday. I shall also see Andromaque (Racine) and Le Malade Imaginaire, and must try to read them all.

This brings me up to date. It remains to say why I am taking this trip, and the answer is, really I do not know. Should I not have stayed another week at least in Salonika? I have no stick-to-itiveness anymore. Instead of wishing to learn one language well—Greek—and taking advantage of every day, every hour, of possible sojourn in Greece, I find myself wanting to speak German, French, and Italian all at once. But how can a tourist speak a language except the bare minimum in offices and stores? My idea of staying at a pension in Münich overlooked the reality that they were all filled up! But I must say, I am enjoying Paris, although I do feel that I must constantly keep asking myself, What should I do now? How can I pass the time? —almost like the clowns in Waiting for Godot. I miss Chrysanthi very much at times, not because I feel lonely—if any person is used to loneliness it is I—but because I feel I want to share everything with her. I feel that what I am seeing is somehow being wasted on me; I have seen it all before. She would find so much pleasure in living the way I am living (for a short while). Well, of course with the children this is impossible; she couldn’t be free even if she were here. I also grudge spending so much money—and I know this is wrong. When I tell myself, as I have to several times a day, that now is the opportunity, now is the time the money should be spent if it can somehow enrich one’s life (what does that mean?), I feel better.

Of course this year I constantly feel that I don’t know why I do anything. I certainly have very little enthusiasm left for my studies. Scholarship and professors seem such a sham, really, so parasitic, so really unimportant, and by contrast so abnormally important in their own eyes. The only thing that is important is the literature itself—art, creation—and here I have spent four years desultorily reading and trying to remember who wrote what, without having written a thing myself. I don’t really have the will, the burning desire to practice, to master, a craft. I am so afraid of failure: I want the first thing I do to be acclaimed and admired, and yet I don’t even have the patience to rewrite. Even this translation of the first three chapters of Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός is hasty, lazy. I’m sure Cassirer will reject it.

April 9, 1959

I received a lovely letter from Chrysanthi. She is so absolutely good—good in herself, good for me. Sometimes I cannot believe I was able to find such a perfect wife! Certainly in this I am extremely lucky, and I am conscious of this at this time because I am reading Tolstoy’s fantastic “Kreutzer Sonata” and don’t agree with his point of view at all. Nevertheless, much he says is true, and above all, he can write (even in the French translation).

This afternoon I saw Racine’s Andromaque at the Comédie Française. When I read it the other day I wasn’t too impressed, but seeing it is an entirely different matter. One really understands how very much depends on the actor. Well, the actors here were superb, and the drama became (even for me, who understood so little of it) intensely gripping. It was the closest I’ve seen to the purity of the Greek tragedy, and it had perhaps a greater intensity because completely unrelieved by humor (messengers, etc.) or by the digressions of a chorus. It was also intensely human; the problems presented were those that can be encountered any day and in any place, and not only in fabulous antiquity. Each character was driven by forces beyond his control. Orestes, for instance, had little choice whether or not to demand Astyanax, for he (Orestes) was acting in a public capacity. He could of course have renounced his ambassadorship, which actually is what happens in effect at the end when the Erinyes destroy his sanity. But in those days (and in ours, except in “select circles”) the state as an organism came first, and perhaps rightly so. The English-American insistence on individual freedom of conscience is probably ultimately based on the security of their bodies politic. It’s harder to be a C.O. in France—clearly.

The audience at the Comédie Française was a young one: well-to-do teenagers and younger. They looked so sweet, so brushed and superbly dressed, and quite different from the French people one sees on the streets.

Noontime in the park I saw a man in one of those wheelchairs that the occupant can propel by raising a lowering a bar. He came into the park with a girl. She sat down on a bench and then he, still in the chair, made love to her: they embraced passionately as best they could, all the while I was eating lunch.

This morning, Rodin Museum. His portrait of Balzac is immense. How shocking it must have been to the Academicians. His great patriotic statue with Miss France is also a successful defiance of tradition, less daring than the Balzac. Miss France has the vitality of a Michelangelo figure.

I sent George a copy of Brave New World (in French). I had thought to send him “The Kreutzer Sonata” but decided that this would have been unfair.

April 10, 1959

Lovely verses in the interlude between acts II and III of Le Malade Imaginaire:

Profitez du printemps

De vos beaux ans,

Aimable jeunesse;

Profitez du printemps

De vos beaux ans,

Donner-vous à la tendresse.

Les plaisirs les plus charmants,

Sans l’amoureuse flame,

Pour contenter une âme

N’ont point d’attraits assez puissants.

Profitez du printemps . . . etc.

Ne perdez point ces précieux moments;

La beauté passé

Le temps l’efface,

L’âge de glace

Vient à sa place,

Qui nous ôte le goût de ces doux passe-temps.

April 11, 1959

I saw Molière’s Le Misanthrope. It was wonderful the way the hero burst onto the stage from the very first full of his distinctive anger and righteousness. The play goes deep, for here is a man who undoubtedly is right, who undoubtedly stands alone in a world of hypocrites and flatterers, and yet he is obviously also a figure of ridicule (at least Molière means him to be) because he is completely dominated by this one “humour” so that, in a sense, he is just as blind as the men he condemns. The scene of the sonnet was most delightful.

I also saw Rameau’s Les Indes Gallantes, a great “spectacle” complete with singing, ballet, recitations, and scenic effects such as an earthquake, a storm at sea, angels descending from heaven, angels ascending from the floor, cupids with their bows (boy dancers), the Taj Mahal, the desert, leopards, etc., etc., etc. It was, to an extreme, the gratification of the French love for elegance, for the “tableau” and the spectacle. Otherwise, the music, though splendid, was unvaried in rhythm and feeling: too rococo all the way, or baroque. The choreography also, probably because of the stateliness of the music, could never become unstately enough to be really exciting. The goal was elegance, not virtuosity.

This spectacle was held in the appropriate place, the Paris opera house, which is pure elaboration, all gold and filigree, but beautiful and most impressive. I particularly admired the portion of the ceiling that is done completely in mosaics. As I promenaded in the great hall during intermission, I thought what a really democratic world this is. Here I was, here anyone could be, simply for paying 600 francs, in a setting too good even for kings. But all this elegance is perhaps after all stupefying in the end. Once you start elaborating a scheme of decoration in this way, there is simply no stopping, and the net effect is perhaps one of excess, as in the pulpit-hood at Ulm.

I read Le Malade Imaginaire with laughter and imagination, thinking how much better it is, in the same or similar genre, than Milton’s Comus.

I saw a film called “Les Strip-Girls,” billed with photographs of girls in varying states of undress. How absolutely deceptive this billing was, and how dishonest a capitalization of sex. Certainly, these scenes were in the film, but only a small part. The ludicrous element was that the film was meant to show (and did so) the sordidness of this life of demimondaines: strip-girls, semi-prostitutes, “hostesses” at cabarets, etc. A country lass gets drawn into this life because of her naïveté, and escapes it to marry a wholesome man! But the billing capitalized on the very element that the purpose of the film was to denigrate. This was really what Lawrence calls “doing dirt on sex.” The European movies seem to be doing this more and more: inserting artificially a so-called sexy scene or a nudity scene, quite unnecessary to the film, in order to be able to use this in the billing, and to attract the public. And the public, as I suppose in all ages, is never satiated with pornography and at the same time, as far as I can judge by my own reactions, never thrilled by it. Certainly the scenes in this film gave me no pleasurable sexual sensation—indeed no sensation at all. Perhaps it is that we really are satiated with all the pornography we see. There is nothing new or exciting now in viewing a naked breast or behind. And yet the public always goes with the hope, the expectation, that something more exciting will be offered. Here is the making of the decadence that we saw in Huysmans and Wilde (Dorian Gray), where the satiated aesthete must search for ever-more unusual stimulation. I, for one, certainly felt very strongly the vanity and uselessness of this kind of “pleasure,” although I felt (and as perhaps a rationale for this trip) that I must “live” more, experience life, know sordid things, etc. I conclude, after my nightclub in Münich and this film and the Concert Mayol, that I much prefer my usual pleasures: reading and playing the piano. All the while I have been in Paris, seeing so many things, the thing I have enjoyed most by far, the one thing that has really drawn me to it, is my reading of “The Kreutzer Sonata.” But perhaps all this “experience” is good simply to understand why sensitive men in all ages have fought and sweated to withdraw, how even (which seems so repugnant to us at first) they crave celibacy, purity, a life free from pornography and temptation. I think, however, one must thoroughly wallow in the sins of the flesh before he has become a really honest celibate. I, however, decidedly choose the Third Order, the life of the flesh within the family. Yes, I miss Chrysanthi very much indeed!

Stavroula’s father was the youngest child of a large family that set off from Greece to go to America. At the station he stopped to get a drink of water, and the train departed, leaving him behind. Fantastic, but she swears it is true. Can one imagine the feelings of the parents, of the child, of the onlookers? He was of course then without family, home, or village. He wandered, found work as a day laborer, eventually settled in a village and bought his own farm.

We wanted Stavroula to go out and enjoy herself, even just to take the children for a walk. But she refused, saying she couldn’t go out of the house unaccompanied since she was of marriageable age.

When she arrived from the station I shook hands with her. I remember how sweaty and clammy her hand was.

She arrived early in the morning and worked immediately and continually until late at night, washing all the diapers, preparing the meal, etc. Then we had to put her to sleep with Alec, and he of course woke up several times. This continued for a week or so, Stavroula working and working, no sleeping nights, and never once setting foot outside of the apartment. At meals sometimes we exchanged no conversation at all with her, not of course from haughtiness, far from it, but simply because there was nothing to say. (We often spoke very little even among ourselves.) How could she have felt at the end of this week? On top of it all she got a touch of flu: headache, shivers, etc. Finally we took her to the theatre and to a café for a glass of wine. I felt delighted to hear her laugh heartily at the show. We also changed her bed, put it in the salon: less private, but less noisy.

I enjoyed the way she called Dimitrios Θείος and Magdalene Θεία.

I felt that she found me very interesting. I was a phenomenon, probably the first American she’d ever seen (her father had never heard again from any of his family in the States). She also enjoyed, I think, my broken Greek. I noticed when the other girl came—Eleftheria—Stavroula brought her to the kitchen door while I was talking to George, in order to see the sight. And she always wanted to do everything for me. At table, if I suggested to Chrysanthi that we have a cup of coffee, Stavroula immediately would jump up to get me a spoon. She even, I think, once tried to help me on with my coat. But I protested. Could there have been a sexual attraction? I don’t know. Certainly she was attractive to me. Her face wasn’t pretty but it was very delicate—somewhat oriental, even Indian-looking, with fine earrings as accentuation. And she alwyas wore a tight bodice that made her lovely indeed. I always felt a certain—a great—tenderness when I was near her, perhaps what one feels more toward a child or a dog than toward a mistress. But there was also, I felt, a conscious effort on both our parts not to have our eyes meet, as though we knew we would blush if they did, and we were ashamed. It was a lovely feeling: this complete warmth and attachment between two people, yet unspoken, unexpressed. Could it have remained this way? I think of the case of Riek Kleefstra. We started similarly and all was fine until she asked me to kiss her. Can a simiar tenderness exist between friends (married people are in a different category: their tenderness can persist because they have more at stake than just their two selves)—between friends who have had a physical contact? It seems a “law” that this leads eventually to recriminations, tragedy, jealousy, despair, and all the rest. Perhaps this is why the Middle Ages tended to idealize the period before the first kiss and built all its poetry around this initial sexual, but aphysical, tenderness.

April 12, 1959

My very first impression of the Cathedral of Chartres was one of disappointment. It lacked the spectacular feeling of Wells, the sinewy length of Salisbury, the Gothic soaring of Ulm, the flowery decorativeness of Notre Dame. It seemed plain and somewhat decrepid. I soon understood, however, that the glory of Chartres is not in its architecture proper (although I suppose this would be disputed—experts point to the superb proportions, the technical feat of having so much window space, the near-suppression of the gallery above the main arches, etc.)—not so much in the architecture proper as in the decoration: the windows and the sculpture. The series of sculptured scenes around the Ambulatory are most impressive, as are the figures of saints and prophets at the West front and the north and south porches: their elongated, spiritualized bodies, the simple flow of their robes, the suffering yet ecstatic expression on their faces. Yet the stained glass is, I think, the chief feature. First of all, there is the sheer amount of it, more than in most other cathedrals, although there is no great tour de force like the great window of Gloucester. Secondly is the fact that almost all the windows have been preserved intact since their construction in the thirteenth century. The three rose-windows, petals of light against the blackness, are more like jewels than flowers: emeralds gleaming on a card of velvet. Then, around the apse, a great series of windows, each more perfect than the last; and above, along the whole length of the nave, and the four side-walls of the transepts, more and more. Of course, from the distance one can hardy see these windows in their detail, but the reproductions available (I bought five) indicate the quality of each figure, each scene. The use of colors, the design of the figures, etc. struck me as very close to that of modern painting: a subordination of “realism” to the demands of design—both the overall design of the window as a whole and the individual design of each particular scene.

Chartres itself is a pleasant contrast to bustling Paris (just as Ulm is to Münich). It is a charming, quiet, medieval looking town, with market squares, many green patches, old houses leaning over with fatigue, and above it all, the two asymmetrical towers of the cathedral.

I returned in an omnibus train packed with Saturday crowds coming to Paris. And what faces: an old, white-haired farmer resembling Harold Carman or Carl Sandburg, the back of his neck baked and cracked from the sun; a funny looking man in a beret, with big nose and dark beard; a dapper man-about-town, dressed to kill in the worst taste, his tie just right in his immaculate collar, but his two-toned shoes in need of a shine; a lady in furs and black gloves, powdered and rouged, obviously unhappy amongst all the rabble; four Algerians (I think, or gypsies perhaps); workmen, in thick leather pants and turtle-necked sweaters, with gnarled, filthy hands and dark, long, sad faces; they counted their money, read over the papers in their pockets; and old red-faced man with white hair who spent five minutes methodically opening a box of lozenges; a very old man, eightyish and talkative, who spoke to a young soldier the whole trip—a one-way conversation, the soldier obviously wishing to extricate himself but unable to; a half-pretty girl with lipstick matching her sweater and gloves, powdered with infinite care—in ten years she’ll be fat and ugly. One of he Algerians, in counting his money, dropped some coins on the floor. He recovered most of them, but one piece, I think of 5 francs, rolled behind a valise so he couldn’t see it, though I could. I was ready to get up and give it to him or show it to him, but then I thought he’d probably find it sooner or later, and for some reason I was afraid and I sat still. Eventually he closed his purse and got off the train, but by that time the valise had been moved and the coin pushed somewhere, so it was no longer visible at all.

April 24, 1959

Bristol

Robin and Elizabeth had an argument, each one being too stubborn to give in. E. moved her library position to be away from R., refused to come to tea, sitting by herself in the corner, etc. Today Karl Stead came down from London. We all went to the park for lunch, and could find only one small bench empty. Karl, to be funny, sat on E.’s lap, trying to liven her up. She, to be cruel, got up from under him and insisted she sit on his lap, while Robin, standing by, was of course meant to be—and was—infuriated.

George Hill of Cassirer has accepted my translation of Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός and will pay 2 guineas per 1000 words. Not much.

April 26, 1959

Sunday. I did ten pages of translation. A record!

Last evening we had another musicale at Becky’s. Robin, Becky, and Elizabeth sang. We did one thing that I found marvelously beautiful: Byrd’s Mass for 3 voices. The opening Kyrie seems perfection indeed. Its beauty hits you, slaps you in the face, and it’s only a few bars long, over hardly before it begins.

May 10, 1959

❡ The boy who gives least promise is one in whom judgment develops in advance of imagination. —Quintilian.

May 28, 1959

Ξενοδοχείον Σολωνείον, Οδός Απόλλωνος 26, Αθήναι.

Toward the end of Lindsay’s reign at the School a new interpreter came, a widow, and L. fell in love with her. From what reports Chrysanthi has, he did not even try to hide this affaire, but was always with her, used for instance to take the car from Yiannis and go off with her, not returning until 2 or 3 in the morning. He spent a great deal of money on her. Once Vouli was in an expensive hat shop when the widow entered. She saw a hat for 500 dr. and said, wait a moment, I must get the money. She stepped outside to a waiting car, and Vouli saw that L. was inside. Then the widow returned with the money. L. also made her dress sexily. Once, she appeared somewhere in tight bodice and tight slacks. She was told “You ought to know better than to dress like that in Greece.” “I can’t help it,” she said. “My man forces me to dress like this.” All the time Muriel was of course fully aware of the whole business, and took the opportunity to act in a Christian way, saying she cared only for Charles, and if this affaire made him happy, well, one couldn’t control one’s heart. Μπράβο της! Sooner or later the London Quakers got wind of everything and rushed Jones, who was slated to take over, out several weeks earlier than originally scheduled. L. asked the widow to follow him to England but she refused, out of consideration probably for Muriel and the children. Lindsay had to agree. Before he left he took her with him to a bank and used his influence to get her a job, or rather forced them to give her a good job. After L. left, one day little bits of paper were pinned up everywhere and passed around among the staff, and no doubt the students also: Πάρετε «Εικόνες»! Apparently the widow had written a letter to the “Problems” column of «Εικόνες» anonymously, of course, but obviously describing exactly what had happened: that she’d fallen in love with a foreigner who had a devoted wife and children, etc., that he asked her to follow him. What should she do? The answer was something to the effect that of course she should not break up the family, and although one could not outrightly condemn her actions, because the ways of love know no rules or restraints, one thing was 100% sure: that the man’s wife acted superbly.

Well, the Lindsays returned to England and Charles was made Warden of the Quaker Centre in Oxford on St Giles. Soon after, he took sick. He had cancer. How could Muriel have felt, seeing him dying, and yet knowing that his love was for this other woman? She, of course, in her super-Christian way, showed no resentment and apparently cared for him night and day for the nine weeks of the illness that resulted in his death. Seeing this, he repented, admitted his folly, and reaffirmed his love for Muriel, his gratitude, etc. Muriel wrote to the Joneses afterwards that she had never felt so close to Charles as during those last nine weeks.

Chrysanthi says that his sick-room was like a flower shop, with flowers and telegrams pouring in daily from archbishops, consuls, ambassadors, professors, and the like. He died in his glory.

Chrysanthi hears from the staff the strange statement that Lindsay’s reign was the golden age of the School (this seems incredible, when one remembers how they all hated him while he was there). They say the new man, Jones, had no qualifications at all for directing a school; he has no ideas, he can’t talk in public, etc., and he’s από Σκοτεία, whereas Lindsay, for all his nervousness, was at least vigorous and extremely quick-witted, and solicitous of the staff. He, for instance, would drive them to the depot on their days off, but Jones refuses, saying if there is no convenient bus going from the Farm School, well, it’s too bad; they’ll have to walk. On the other hand, they say, he uses the school car and the school money to drive his own children to school every morning. Note also that he sends his children to the special Anglo-American primary school whereas Lindsay sent Angus and Adam to the Greek school.

Yesterday we went to Mycenae by bus along the Saronic Gulf and over the Corinth Canal. Mycenae sits between two horribly stern and bare mountains, commanding a view of the plain and the surrounding mountains and sea that is breathtaking in its magnificence. The remains of the Acropolis are few, mostly foundations and grave holes, but the finds in jewelry, etc. were startling. We saw all those in the Athens museum the day before. Most impressive were the three beehive tombs, great underground domes in the shape of a beehive, built up with squared stones and approached by an avenue leading to an impressive entranceway. What ecstasy Schliemann must have felt when he discovered these treasures!

We ate in the government tourist περίπτερο and paid 120 dr. for a good but scanty meal. Must warn Konrad Elsden against this. Returning, stopped at Daphni to see the scowling, angry, ugly and magnificent face of Christ on the mosaic of the tholos. Then to Piraeus for a stroll and dinner in a restaurant on the waterfront, full of sailors: delicious fish. I felt like Kazantzakis’s capitalist and expected any moment to encounter Alexis Zorbas. The waiter, a young fellow, very jovial and vocal, shouted out each order with glee: Δύο σαλάτες, μάστορε. Everything μάστορε! Chrysanthi talked to me intently and at length, and I apparently was gazing longingly into her eyes, because I noticed one of the diners wink at the waiter and imitate those eyes γουρλημένα, as though to say, Αχ! η αγάπη. Να τους!

The other night we visited Mary Heath in Κηφισιά, a fashionable suburb on the slopes of Πεντέλης, with gorgeous villas and gardens, all rented to Americans! We overheard one American cussing out a Greek for some reason; he had bumped his car or something. I felt very ashamed at the almost automatic “master-race” attitude taken by these, our “diplomats” in small, weak “backward” countries. Mary’s reception of us did not seem very warmhearted and C. felt quite angry. Then we went to Mary’s fat friend whom we’d met in Brooklyn, and this was even worse. No warmth, and hardly any politeness. We talked with them a bit. The girl wanted to stay in Greece because she could work and pay a maid here to take care of her child, whereas in the U.S. she had to take care of her child herself! The boy, on the other hand, wanted to return to the U.S., the land of opportunity.

There seems to be a great traffic of people—young people—who’ve lived in the U.S. for a while and then have returned to Greece with their pockets full, and they lounge around and gradually get bored and decide to go back again to Brooklyn or Detroit. It seems they spend their time stopping Americans on the street and telling them that they’ve lived in the U.S. and plan to go back soon. Life isn’t good in Greece, etc. I came across the same thing in Italy.

June 4, 1959

Visited Demosthenes, who is recovering from a heart attack. There were two other visitors there, one a gynecologist, very clever and philosophical, the other D.’s cousin, a merchant, and quite dim, even a little μισοπαλαβός. The conversation flourished between D., the doctor, and me, with the merchant dead silent. Then the παμπόνηρος doctor asked the merchant perhaps the only question that could rouse him: Τι είχες να φας το μεσημέρι, καλέ; The merchant, without the slightest feeling that he was being teased or mocked, jumped up and started to describe his meal, which was liberally seasoned with ούζο.

June 10, 1959

They tell the story that at a tutorial Professor Knights, when confronted with Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems pointed to the line, “Now my poor bawd is dead” and said in all seriousness to his tutee: “That’s lechery! You know what bawds bring, don’t you? Syphilis!”

June 12, 1959

A Modern Greek proverb: Ποιος την γην επάτησε, και δεν εκριμάτησε; (ότι ουδείς αναμάρτητος)

June 18, 1959

To make charcoal: Fill a large pit with wood and set fire to it, leaving an opening for the smoke to issue. When the smoke ceases—i.e., when the wood has caught fully—cover completely with dirt so that no air can enter. A week later remove the dirt, and the wood has become charcoal. (Recipe supplied by Mr. Yiannakos.)

June 29, 1959

❡ Η ιδέα η αφηρημένη, η άσαρκη, η φιλοσοφική, δεν μπορεί πια να χορτάσει την ψυχή τη σαρκοβόρα. ΄Ολα καθαρά, άρτια είναι στο νου μου, μα μου λείπει η δύναμη να πηδήξω το φράχτη, να νικήσω το γελοίο. Άραγε θα μπορέσω ποτέ; Αν όχι, η ζωή μου θα’ ναι βαθύτατη, αγιάτρευτη πίκρα και προσπάθεια . . . Μάχομαι, κοιτάζω μπροστά σαν τον Οδυσσέα, μα χωρίς εγώ να ξέρω αν ποτέ θ’ άραξω στην Ιθάκη. Εχτός αν Ιθάκη είναι το ταξίδι. —Καζαντζάκης (Πρεβελάκης, σελ. 23)

July 10, 1959

Here is a passage that I think I translated rather felicitously (pp. 257–8):

❡ Καταγκρεμίζουνταν στο λογισμό ετούτον, ώρες. Ο ήλιος ανέβαινε, πυρπολούσε τον άμμο, τρυπούσε το απανωκαύκαλο του Ιησού, έμπαινε μέσα του και ξέραινε το μυαλό του, το λαιμό του, το στήθος. Κρέμουνταν τα σωθικά του, σαν τ’ αποτσάμπουρα στο αμπέλι, το χυνόπωρο. Η γλώσσα του είχε κολλήσει στον ουρανίσκο του, το δέρμα ξεφλούδιζε, τα κόκκαλά του πρόβαιναν· τ’ ακροδάχτυλά του είχαν γίνει κατάμπλαβα.

❡ He was plunged in this thought for hours. The sun came up, set the sand on fire; it pierced Jesus’ scalp, went inside him and parched his mind, throat and breast. His entrails were suspended like bunches of leftover grapes after the autumn vintage. His tongue had stuck to his palate, his skin was peeling off, his bones emerging; and his fingertips had turned completely blue.

July 12, 1959

Chrysanthi and I became godparents today to Νικόλαος Σφαιρόπουλος.

Chrysanthi did all the work at the baptism; I took pictures.

The christening was the occasion for more troubles with Efthymoula, who refused to come at the last minute. We had troubles with her the whole weekend. George came Saturday evening and first thing I warned him that Alec might be sick with measles and that his child, Dimitraki, would naturally be exposed. To me, it seemed nothing to worry about—indeed, a chance to get gamma globulin and have measles in the mildest possible form. But Efthymoula exploded: Why did we expose her darling, why didn’t we telegraph them not to come, why did we come near Dimitraki, because the disease was contagious at second and third hand. In vain did we argue with her. Chrysanthi got furious and left the room, George went to bed with a headache. In the middle of the night I heard her screaming at him, but then he hushed her, afraid we’d all overhear, and I couldn’t catch what she was saying. But I can imagine because she also screamed to Chrysanthi that George didn’t care if her baby got sick, etc., etc., didn’t do anything to help her, and she was so tired with all her jobs, etc., etc. Chrysanthi replied that she, Efthymoula, had the best husband in the world; he did everything for her, including becoming her chauffeur; that maybe she had some faults herself, etc. Well, on Sunday morning, today, the doctor came and told us after all that it wasn’t measles but a very mild contagious infection. That helped a bit. We had all gone to the beach earlier. Efthymoula didn’t want to go, but Chrysanthi convinced her, feeling if she stayed home she’d have more basis for complaining that George neglected her and the child. She came, sat in the shade with the child the whole time, not even taking off his shirt. Then she dragged us back early, because Dimitraki had to be exactly on schedule for eating and sleeping. It was when we returned that the doctor came. Efthymoula asked, of course, if her own child would catch the disease and the doctor was non-committal. Then Efthymoula asked if children one year old should be put in the ocean. I was delighted to hear the doctor answer Yes, of course, why not? Poor child! She doesn’t even let him crawl on the ground. He sits with sullen expression and drooping head with none of the liveliness and devilishness of our Alec, who is the same age exactly.

Back to the baptism. We gave her invitations to be delivered to her brothers, and now Chrysanthi tells me that she tore them up. George drove us all to the church—a car-full—, left us, and returned for Efthymoula, but returned to Lola’s alone, Efthymoula having refused to come. Chrysanthi says she couldn’t find an elastic to fix the child’s bloomers just as she wanted, but this may be a little bit of female exaggeration. In any case, it was a great insult to us all because, as Chrysanthi’s mother put it, she completely lacks σεβασμός for the Yiannakoses, while at the same time eating their food and ordering the whole house around. But she can’t go to her own mother because the two of them are constantly arguing. She is, as we say, a sad case. But what can they do? The Yiannakoses don’t talk back to her or scold her; they take everything lying down because they’re afraid—rightly—that anything they say will in the end only devolve on George. Poor George, after suffering so much in the war, and longing for marriage, dreaming of a household and children of his own, finally marrying at such an advanced age: to end up like this, with a real bitch!

July 18, 1959

Chrysanthi had it out with Kostas, telling him that the 6000 dr. were a loan, not a gift, and the money that she had worked so hard for—and that she had paid all her life for her sister, her tuition, etc., and had never kept a λεπτό of her salary for herself except this sum, which she wished her parents to have. Kostas replied that everything Mrs. Yiannakou had told Chrysanthi about him was a lie, that he would never speak to his mother-in-law again, would not even come to her grave! If C. was hard up, he could let her have one or two thousand, but as for the 6000, it was a gift: that was why he had felt obligated to give C. the fur coat and now, the ring. C. resolved to give the ring back, and to send the coat back from America, since it had gone off with the trunks.

C. told her parents about the argument but they took their usual position: Leave well enough alone. Don’t stir up any more trouble.

George told us at the beach how his parents really feel that when we leave tomorrow it will be the last time they ever see us. They both thrived wonderfully during our visit, forgot about their aches and pains, became young again, especially Mr. Yiannakos, who played indefatigably all day long with Leander, taking him to the swings in the morning, to the RR station in the evening, etc.

Another nice Kazantzakis passage: the last paragraph of Chapter XX.

September 12, 1959

Riparius

I accidentally chipped off Roy Millington’s front tooth—his best apple-eating tooth—while we were sawing wood. Took him to Dr. White in Chestertown, who put on a cap and hopes the tooth can be saved.

Saw Nick Millington again. He lost his arm in the sawmill, now has a hook, and a twitch in the left shoulder where the straps are. He’s given up his cement-ceramics and is now trying to teach himself to be an artist. He gets $145 per month from the government, so is fine that way. He mixes his own colors, and has seen great improvement, so he says, over the past year. He has hopes of going to NY and entering a school. He always talks of his cosmopolitan experience. I don’t know if it’s all through his [illegible] or not—his knowledge of French and German, his experience in Europe, etc.

I saw Alvin Millington yesterday, too. He’s a virile looking chap, much younger than I’d thought, with a prize-fighter’s nose and a scant beard. His project now is making his own bullets and loading used shells with them. He has elaborate molds and precision machinery on this, and says he saves about 80% of the cost of new bullets.

The Millingtons need to move from across the way because Carman lied to them, saying he’d sold their place to two families, one of which was going to occupy the blacksmith’s shop, where the Millingtons now live—when in actuality he hasn’t sold the place at all yet, but has received a deposit from one family, which will come only in the summer and live in the lower house. But, as Hal says, it was a good way to get rid of the Millingtons.

I like the Millington children: Roy, David, Jimmy, Dale, Earl, Catherine, and a few others. Roy takes charge of everything. Jimmy is the black sheep. David is the best looking. Chrysanthi says they’re all barbarians and corrupting Leander.

We visited the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake. They had the cabin that a hermit lived in for 30 years, and I immediately felt it would be wonderful to duplicate it for the children. It was about 5 × 8 feet and perhaps 4 feet high, with a kind of shelf at one end for a bed, strewn with pine needles. It was built almost like a tent. Poles at either end, with center-board supported on them. Roofing of strips of heavy bark. Dirt floor. Stumps for chairs. No windows.

November 6, 1959

Am I, like Stephen Dedalus, searching for a father? Is it my virtual rejection of my own father, at least as an object of respect, which has led to my interest in God, and my tendency to form friendships with older men such as Stefan Lokos, Bernard McCarthy, Richard Hatch?

November 17, 1959

Chrysanthi and I went to the dentist. C. had several very small cavities. The question was: Should they be filled with silver, which would be relatively permanent, or with porcelain, which would last only three years but would blend with the surface of the tooth and be invisible? But the cavities were so placed that you couldn’t see them anyway unless you looked very hard. C. wanted porcelain, however, despite all logic; I insisted on silver. I conceded, however, to say that if the cavities had been in conspicuous places, I would have agreed to porcelain. “Well,” said the dentist, “I’m glad to see that you’ve got a little poetry in you at least.”

A similar manifestation of the feminine mind occurred the other week when we went to buy shoes. Kreuger wanted me to take the same style as I had previously because that particular shoe was the best made and longest lasting. But Chrysanthi insisted I take an inferior shoe (at practically the same price) just because it had a different design.

November 18, 1959

Idea for a sensational novel, combining interests of the historical novel, sex and violence, plus commentary on the contemporary social scene: A group of orgiastic devotees is miraculously revived from the days of ancient Greece, and settles in a secluded region of the U.S. They continue their practices undisturbed for some time, but gradually the rest of the community gets wind and there is a scandal. Investigators are sent, indictments handed out, and the whole thing goes to the courts. In the process the investigator, starved like everyone in his society for spontaneous passion, is attracted to the cult and must fight within himself where to bestow his ultimate allegiance.

December 3, 1959

Dick McKenna here. He described the Church today, saying that it had gotten over its flirtation with pacifism and realized that it must live or act in a world of power politics. As he continued to explain its methods and organization, I felt like replying that the next thing it should do is incorporate and issue stocks and give dividends; it had all the other characteristics of a big business. It should also, of course, throw over Jesus altogether and worship a god more in keeping with its beliefs.

December 10, 1959

Tom Bartlett here. He explained his work at the UN, and the farcical representation of the U.S. owing to the awarding of places by the patronage system. His main job seems to be to keep the delegates from gumming up the works. Molly as pretty as ever: what a complexion!

December 14, 1959

Chronicle novel. Cf. The Rainbow. McCarthy’s family history. Brothers go out into the world. Mac to look after his father. Experiences with women of various kinds. But really shy. Feeling his life going to waste. Money troubles (father’s fall). Sells land. Buys car and wrecks it. Father’s death. Brothers burn down Mac’s house. Mac seen from various viewpoints, e.g. Red’s contempt because he won’t work regularly. Chorus of rustics: Sherman, Freddy (laid up; wants to quit work forever), Alvin. “Welfare” as occupation. Sherman’s courtship. Work with girl under hot sun on farm (cf. Riek & woodpile). Mystic togetherness and passionate awakening. The cold; snowed in. Baby with pneumonia. Alvin’s car. Fire underneath. Sparkplug warmer. Burning lath and flooring. Summer people’s attitude toward yokels. Sibler. Nick Millington; his artistic aspirations. Cement work. Then painting. His hook. The vulgar boys swimming naked in Cambridge park. Defying people to see them. Pancho & Tony Garcia and their creaking bed, which annoyed the virile Navy man. Tony’s paintings of phallus on pictures of G-stringed athletes. His embarrassment when caught even with his shirt off. Pancho is solicited in bar, but refuses.

1960

414 West 121st Street, NYC

January 1–May 31

Riparius

June 1–September 23

414 West 121 Street, NYC

September 24–December 31

January 6, 1960

Note: Eliot, Sir Charles (1863–1931), author of “Turkey in Europe” (published in 1901 under the pseudonym of “Odysseus”), a learned and entertaining account of Macedonia and its various races under the old régime.

January 10, 1960

Nice phrase: “believing at first ear.”

January 20, 1960

Novel in genre of Zorba. McCarthy as dynamic, Dionysian embodiment. Philosophic discussions between Apollonian me and a partner (perhaps like Reinoud). Business venture could be a foolish attempt to extract garnet; or else logging in swamp, with few big pines or birches as attraction, and humorous incident because of lack of know-how, and use of primitive methods.

January 27, 1960

❡ La corruption du siècle se fait par la contribution particulière de chacun de nous: les un y conferment la trahison, les autres l’injustice, l’irreligion, la tyrannie, l’avarice, la cruauté, selon qu’ils sont plus puissans; les plus foibles y apportent la sottise, la vanité, l’oisiveté, desquels je suis. Il semble que ce soit la saison des choses vaines quand les dommageable nous present. En un temps où le meschamment faire est si commun, de ne faire qu’inutilement il est comme louable. —Montaigne, “De la Vanité.”

Susan Fisher tells us, second-hand, that Izzy is pregnant, and that she’s been subject to fits of depression, staring off into space—feels guilty about what she did to her parents—and of her literally physical fear of the parents; how Susan had to accompany her home one night because she was afraid to enter the house. And that she didn’t want to go to California, and asked Peter, sheepishly, how they were to live. But he, despising “materialism,” refused to discuss it. Susan also said that Peter was begged by the owner of the Paper Book Gallery to become a partner. He refused instantaneously, and if anyone suggested that he was acting unwisely, he branded them as materialists and bourgeois.

Surely the baby is an accident. How gauche of them! And Peter’s career? This, it seems, will end it abruptly since all their practice had been as a team, and since he will now need steady money and probably a home. Will the marriage break up? Or will Peter, out of his sense of duty—his ridiculous sense of duty sometimes—sacrifice everything and take a distasteful job and be a good father?

February 3, 1960

Chrysanthi’s story about the boiled spinach and the starving staff at the Quaker school, and how the director discovered the spinach in a drawer.

Story of the agriculturalist who gave a basket of 100 eggs and how the girls tried to cook something nice for him. They broke 50 eggs into a pot and didn’t know what to do next. Added flour, baked, . . . and it turned out inedible.

Story of psychopathic chiropodist (female) and her gossip about a young student flirting with the 80-year-old cleaner of toilets because both spoke Turkish; and the treatment C. received at her hands during her stay in Athens.

Mrs. Kazantzakis asked me to translate the Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο.

February 9, 1960

Novel: Devon lad, son of fishermen, takes to the sea. War, torpedoing, etc. Meets girl in USO in New York. She is rich and somewhat forcefully beautiful. Marriage. (Her lover previously killed in the war, and she takes him, as it were, on the rebound.) He resolves never to go to sea again. Says he hates his previous life: its poverty, etc. Job as salesman through the wife’s father. Squabbles. Joins another firm. Wife turns out to be pampered and a spendthrift. Child: she dotes, gets red, green, brown shoes, never wears an apron, soils all her best dresses. Huge cleaning bill, etc. He, qua sailor, always likes to drink, but previously it had been for joviality; now it’s from boredom. Wife takes to drink also, gets worse and worse. Loses her beauty. Shows up drunk at parties, etc. Religious question, too: husband deprived of the simple Church of England faith of his childhood. Wife a «liberal» and refuses to go near a church, or to let him go. He suddenly begins to realize that the only time life had any meaning to him was when he was at sea. He, as a salesman, begins having girlfriends in other cities. Keeps up his spirits. How to resolve this? Go back to sea? Leave wife to return to Devon? Could be an allegory of what America does to someone. Could include the grandmother, the only “friend” the wife has, and confidante. Should she be a Jew? Or perhaps from a Quaker family: strict, like Logan Pearsall Smith’s. He as salesman, first believing in what he’s selling, and the advertisements, etc. But gradually comes to realize the dishonesty of the whole business, based on getting people to use things they don’t need. Or should he be too thick to perceive these things, and simply delighted that he can earn $16,000 a year—saying, as Jimmy Bull does, “Why, if I were in England, could I get £1000? No!” But does his $16,000 really cancel out all the other things?

February 19, 1960

Passed my PhD orals. The examiners were Tindall and Unterecker (modern), Nicolson and Schmitter (17th century), and Valency (Renaissance).

Edmund Wilson (Axel’s Castle, chapter on Symbolism) says that the French symbolists were influenced by Modern Greek.

Each person seeks to escape from the condition of life, to give himself the illusion of being God.

We must stop bemoaning the loss of a world order (medieval, Christian, Renaissance, or what have you) and try, rather, to make a new one.

Accident in truck. The vagaries of fate. Closeness to death. Getting stuck on the way to Thousand Islands. Robbed. The road gang.

February 29, 1960

Rennell Rudd, love of Modern Greece.

March 5, 1960

Spent the afternoon alphabetizing addressograph plates for Bradford Lytle at the CNVA offices.

❡ A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. . . . It’s because he has mastered the great secret: that the wheel turns. —The Last Temptation, chapter 33.

March 8, 1960

Novel: Peter G’s problems; Izzy’s maternal instincts denied. P’s sadism and cruelty. “Free spirit” vs. the bourgeois. Izzy in motel in Aspen 5 months, pregnant, while Peter skied. Sleeping in back of station wagon. The dog. Izzy’s parents. Her background: never finished anything: college, flute, piano, voice. Peter’scorn of academia and of “arty” set. They are forced to change type of songs they sing: to be entertainers, not “musicians.” Marlon Brando walks out in S.F. shrugging his shoulders; he came to be entertained, not sung in various languages and given a lecture on ethnic music.

March 29, 1960

Chrysanthi dreamed that the gas man entered early in the morning and ate a full casserole of macaroni that she had prepared for guests we were expecting.

March 30, 1960

My father for weeks had been talking about the legs on my desk, which we sawed off to make the piece look better. Now for some reason he wants to put them back on. Yesterday, while I was out, he brought the legs and a bottle of glue and, against my mother’s wishes and advice, announced that he was going to replace them. This was entirely absurd since the desk with the legs on (assuming they would stay on, just with glue) would be utterly useless because too high, whereas now the height is made perfect simply by inserting a Columbia University catalogue under each side. Well, he commandeered Chrysanthi, who felt herself in a very difficult position: she knew the whole attempt was nonsensical and yet she didn’t want to say anything because she also knew how sensitive my father is, and that he had convinced himself that he was doing this for my benefit. They proceeded, with my mother still vociferously objecting. Chrysanthi lifted one side, positioned the legs in place, and was told to keep that side steady while my father lifted the other. As soon as he did, the legs of course slipped out and the whole desk came down on Chrysanthi’s hand. My mother started screaming hysterically at my father and berating him, while Chrysanthi, embarrassed of course and in great pain, disappeared discreetly to the bath room, where she fainted. Eventually my father bandaged the hand, first ascertaining that, luckily, there were no broken bones. He felt guilty, of course, saying that his whole effort was to help Chrysanthi, and now, here, look what he’d done!

April 4, 1960

There is a lovely lyric quality in Sikelianos’s Η Παναγία της Σπάρτης. I translated it today as follows:

THE VIRGIN OF SPARTA

Immortal idol, I shall not shape thee

From brass or Pentelic rock, but from a column

Of cypress-wood, that my work may

Sweetly smell for all eternity.

And, on the hill where, like a crown of state,

The Venetian castle lies, a great church

I shall build, and enclose thee within,

Behind, an imperturbable iron gate.

Bells I shall place that will groan like a buckler

Under sword-blows and the lance’s shaft,

And others too, still higher, like rattles!

And in its windows then to shade her,

Deeply colored crystals I shall match

—And each an arrow-slit designed for battle!

April 5, 1960

I dreamed a strange dream. Germans or Russians or some unnamed enemy were bombarding the East coast, causing of course great panic and excitement, and none of the silent fortitude with which the British people met the blitz in W.W. II. After it became clear that the bombardment would continue, and most likely be followed by invasion, people began to evacuate the East and start for the West. In my dream I saw them as I have seen (in photos) Indian refugees filing along a dusty road: carrying all their possessions, or as much as they could, in their hands. Some had suitcases, some baskets, like laundry baskets, others knapsacks. Everyone seemed to be going on foot. No autos, no trains. The American people, suddenly, had become peasants and were moving once again, though in entirely different circumstances—out west!

April 14, 1960

I went to the English Graduate Union to hear Lionel Trilling last night, saying I’d be back at about 10:00. It happened that Trilling spoke at great length, and that afterwards I chatted with Paul Cornelius and Mark Flanagan, resulting in my arrival home at 11:30. When I got out of the elevator, there was Chrysanthi in the hall just returning from Chet’s. She had asked him to go to the Faculty Club to see what happened to me! When we got inside our apartment she fell to the floor suddenly: her knees had given way, she was almost hysterical over my lateness, quivering on the floor. And she didn’t sleep all night long either.

Nice situation for a short story: Susan Fisher’s embarrassing situation where she was loaded with expensive gifts (silver, a mink coat, furniture, etc.) for the wedding by members of her father’s rich Chicago congregation, and then had to face them and her father to announce, less than several months later, that she was getting divorced. I don’t remember whether she said she gave all the gifts back or not.

Novel set in Adirondacks with Army poison gas base. Gives jobs, etc. to young men. Then city folks come: F.O.R. and start a vigil. Effect of this on the townspeople. Also put in local color. Welfare. Millington with his pistol. Violence? Carl and his problems. Nick Millington. Lumberjack with hut full of pin-ups. Thievery. The Methodist camp. Perhaps rich uncle who doesn’t like Cos. Also effect of vigil on the high school students. Carman, of course, makes money out of the deal.

April 17, 1960

Easter service in Riverside Church was soupy and ψεύτικο, as always. This disjointed Protestant ritual: you stand up, you sit down, you can’t think of anything to say to God, so you recite inane poetry, and this alone would be unendurably boring, so you sing it to hymn tunes, every damnable verse. The great moment in the service, when a hush and then exaltation is felt, is when the vestrymen bring the loot of the offering up to the altar. The offering gets the best music, the central part of the service, etc. It is the most important aspect! There is no affect in this kind of service. It is too conglomerate and mechanical: an inexorable order of events that must be got through somehow and have no living relation the one to the other.

But an amusing thing did happen. Something was wrong with the public address system. During the prayer and Bible reading band music whispered in the background somehow; and when McCracken began his sermon the whole thing went haywire. First there were just voices; then as he spoke out in his huge voice about a friend who doubted immortality and, referring to death, said that when we die we simply “call it quits,” then, as he continued, the sound “quits—quits—quits—quits—quits—quits” boomed out all over the church for about two minutes. Sometime later the word “adventure—adventure—adventure” did the same, so that he whole sermon was a kind of counterpoint, until someone fixed the microphone.

The liturgy at the Greek Church, where we went on Friday night, was much better, and certainly much different. While the choir sang the passion-story for three hours to the same tune, repeated over and over again, the church was a kind of warm chaos, with hordes of people lighting candles, the sacristan blowing them out and bringing them to be resold; and a never ending line advancing slowly down the main aisle to approach the επιτάφιος before the altar. They went forward in twos, crossed themselves, bent down and kissed the gold Bible and then received a white flower. Then, flower and lighted candle in hand, the majority of people issued onto the street and waited outside, where it was cooler, for the service to be over. Drivers exiting from the George Washington bridge saw the strange sight of crowds lined up on either side of Wadsworth Avenue with candles glowing in the darkness, and the reflection of the flames in the red plastic cups, slit in the bottom and slipped over the candle to catch the wax, which the people who had been willing to pay 50 cents for a candle had received.

The hero could be a scoffer, an opt-out, but he is gradually drawn in to the aspirations of those on the vigil, and joins them, arousing great opposition. He commits some crime—civil disobedience—and is tried in court (here the issues can be presented) and sentenced.

April 23, 1960

A memorable metaphor used by one of my students (Miss Durkech) in a composition: “We are able to fill our psychic battery, start our lives with positive thoughts, and transform the energy of loss, grief and disappointment into constructive work.”

April 30, 1960

Visited Pete and Izzy. Pete is manager of the new 3rd Avenue store, personnel director for all three stores, and in charge of ordering. The boss handles the bookkeeping. Pete said Marty (the boss) made his money first by selling a gadget on 14th Street, a kind of extra-special pants-hanger. He and his wife walked up and down 14th Street and made $200 a day! Pete has—characteristic of him—had a complete reversal: now he is 100% bourgeois: he says he wants to make as much money as he possibly can in five years, then quit. Marty says the same thing. In other words, he’ll get all he can out of the store and then, when competition catches up and the going gets harder, he’ll sell out, enjoy his earnings without any headaches.

Izzy sits home all day with the dog—lonely. She doesn’t have much to do with her parents, of course, and Peter is away all day, returning only at 8:00 p.m. Nor can she go out for the whole afternoon, for the dog refuses to be confined for more than two hours at a time. One afternoon, following Peter’s advice, Izzy called everyone she knew and didn’t get a single answer. She was convinced (who could blame her?) that the world was against her.

Chrysanthi in the park the other day saw a Negro woman, when her son had committed some minor crime (I think throwing a shovel over the wall) take off her shoe and while the four-year-old stood before her shaking and pleading “Forgive me! Forgive me!” she proceeded to beat him with the shoe until blood spurted from his nose.

May 5, 1960

❡ Many of us in this continent [Europe] have come to regard the Renaissance as the fount of all that remains to us to admire in “modern” life, and the Reformation as a cataclysm that ruptured the entire continuity of our culture, and which moreover has bred successive new cataclysms, the revolutions and senseless wars which have bedeviled in particular the past two centuries and snatched from our lips those elixirs which we were supposed to derive from increasing technological dexterities. —from a review of Crane Brinton’s A History of Western Morals in the TLS, April 22, 1960, p. 259, objecting to Brinton’s so-called “American” viewpoint of the Reformation as preferable to the Renaissance.

May 8, 1960

Chrysanthi and I saw the intense and poetic “Wild Strawberries” last night in Long Beach, on a double bill with “Room at the Top.” What a super thing Bergman has done with the cinema as a medium. When we returned, at midnight, I went for a solitary walk for an hour along the beach to the lighthouse jetty, under the bright moon. My glasses were hazy from the damp mist by the time I got back, and my shirt and hair clammy.

I thought of a novel about the farm. I have a peculiar passion to chop down and bring out a great virgin pine back in the swamp. No difficulty daunts me. There is the episode of the bemired horse; then a path has to be corduroyed. A log falls on me and pins me down. Encounters with a buck, with flies and other insects and flora and fauna. Visitors could come at intervals and question me, try to get me to explain this obsession. I would of course also have dreams and be involved with local characters and probably with a girl also. What would baffle everyone would be that getting the tree out would have no practical purpose, no commercial value even. Actually (I haven’t decided the outcome), perhaps when sawing, or after the tree is felled and skidded, we may find that it is hollow inside from disease, and thus useless. An interval could be spent away from the farm, even at the Washington work camp, and this would be a means of articulating the situation and of comparing “useless” endeavors with the so-called purposeful endeavor of everyone one meets. Perhaps better: make the hero rather dull-witted and inarticulate. Perhaps like Wayne. Family runs chicken farm or ex-chicken farm. Relative: Harold Smith, renting boats on Pharaoh, and with wife-trouble. Wayne has gone to work in the city and thus meets educated people who visit the Adirondacks and get involved with him in his obsession. Perhaps he, with his cow-like placidity, and his endurance, will show up the educated cynical friend. The friend, offering to help Wayne, could get the horse bemired—an index of his egotism: he didn’t want to fail the job. His cruelty to animals, whereas Wayne, though not sentimental, of course, has an instinctive respect for animals. Include the scene of Ad Kingsley getting secret thrill out of seeing horses copulate. Also perhaps question of whether or not Wayne should move to the city and thus leave this sub-standard region. He tries a job (hospital? airline?) but decides to go back because of a kind of instinctive need for the land. The tree could not only be in a swamp. Perhaps on a steep slope, with the swamp as an obstacle on the way—e.g., topography on Carman’s, with beaver dam or stream, and a lone blue pine, which Sherman admires. Intellectual could be a technician like Dave Lurie. Could Wayne also have Mac’s energy and dynamism? Or perhaps better as a sluggish type? Should he be a Jehovah’s Witness? If so, this could be the original bond between him and the intellectual, if the intellectual were a C.O. serving in the hospital. Also, the C.O. could be all for improving the world and be sort of staggered by Wayne’s indifference. Yet it could be Wayne, not the other, who had the moral fiber.

May 13, 196

Chrysanthi told me of a village where the president’s sons, high school graduates only, took on duties of doctor, agriculturalist, and teacher. Then, there was an opportunity to have a qualified doctor come to the village, and the sons and of course their father opposed this. The people, not knowing any better, had faith in these boys, and did not object.

June 7, 1960

I had to get up to answer some complaint of Leander’s last night. Awakening from a deep sleep, I felt as though I were pulling myself with a gigantic slurp! out of a bath of clinging mud.

Saw Freddy and Sherman and entourage in North Creek. Sherman just got out of jail on bail after 44 days, for breaking into a camp at Brant Lake. The police found the loot subsequently in his car. Freddy, who had been with him and sleeping in the car, was also sent to jail, on Sherman’s squawking. They introduced me to a friend, a real tough-guy type with his chest bulging out through his T-shirt, and an air-force tattoo on his forearm. These people have no social graces. When introduced, I said “How do you do” and held out my hand. He acted as though this had never happened to him before, and looked embarrassed. Freddy complained that the new people at Carman’s place “lied” to him three times, and so he left. They wanted him to stay as caretaker, and to live in the bus, which he says is unbearable in summer.

July 9, 1960

A prankster threw 5 lbs. of sugar down the gas tank of Dr. Blodgett’s car. No motive.

July 10, 1960

❡ Education . . . is nevertheless moving . . . to the world where it is better to be envied than ignored, better to be well-paid than happy, better to be successful than good—better to be vile, than vile-esteemed. —William Golding in TLS, June 17, 1960, p. 387.

Saul and Minna visited unexpectedly. We talked delightfully about the atomization of intellectual pursuits, especially in science; and about the general decline in standards. Saul has faith that since youth have abandoned their traditional role as radicals and reformers and protestors (being now either defeated, or negativist like the Beatniks, or, in most cases, deliberate conformists) that older people will value eccentricity and outspokenness and will say what they believe and try to preserve truth, and individual virtue.

The neighbors’ boy (Frankie Deckert) came for a visit. These city boys have no imagination or initiative. Chrysanthi asked if he wanted to see my office; he said he was too tired! She asked if he didn’t want to climb a tree and do tricks. No, he didn’t. Did he want to see the sheep house? No, it was too hot outside! And so forth. In contrast to this type, the Millington children, undernourished as they are: what vitality they have; unintelligent and badly educated as they are, what imagination and resourcefulness. Surely they are superior to the products of an effete television-civilization.

July 13, 1960

Harold Carman’s new work schedule. At 8:30 p.m. he reports to Green Mansions, where he is night watchman, making rounds every two hours, and spending the rest of the time with the night telephone clerk in a little office. He returns home at 6:30 a.m., sleeps until 11:00 a.m., grabs a cup of coffee, then drives the school bus from Sodom to North Creek, picking up children for the summer playground program. Home again at 2:00, he sleeps for an hour, then brings the children home again. Returns for supper, and leaves for Green Mansions.

July 25, 1960

Buttons, our two-month-old goat, seemed sick—won’t eat. So we went to see Will Tubbs. On his lawn he has a beautifully smooth and rounded stone shaped about like an egg. He says he found it while digging a ditch, and is saving it to use as a headstone. (He is over 80 now, and a real κοτσονάτος. We found out the real story about Floyd Fish and our goat. Fish said he’d paid $7.00 for it; actually, Tubbs had given it to him, along with three other goats. Fish had complained to Tubbs that Buttons wouldn’t eat, but of course he said nothing about that to us. Now we see Buttons growing weaker and more despondent daily. He just sniffs around in a torpor, and doesn’t even bother to get into the shade. He won’t eat anything, except now and then a carefully chosen blade of grass. Of course what he wants is goat’s milk. Mrs. Tubbs gave him some and he lapped it up with joy. He won’t touch the milk we give him, though—cow’s milk; nor the grain we give the lamb.

Tubbs told me that he couldn’t stand living in cities, not even in a village. He’d farmed a big dairy farm for 30 years in Montgomery County, then bought his present place to spend his old age. The county took it in turn, in exchange for welfare payments until the Tubbs die. This old man has such a fine way of looking at his old age and approaching death. He seems as though he’s ready at any time simply to walk off the stage with a smile, at the director’s bidding. Meanwhile he raises goats and enjoys the mountain scenery and air. A great contrast to Bob Gerstenzang, whom we saw Sunday on our way back from Yearly Meeting at Silver Bay. Bob had a stroke this past winter, and looks a wreck. You can see immediately that with his whole being he’s afraid of death, and he surrounds himself with doctors who reassure him. This buoys him up for a while. It is this gnawing self-concern and cry for longer life that is so self-defeating. Tubbs, who wears a smile when he talks of his headstone, is vibrant and active and full of compassion for his goats, not for himself.

July 27, 1960

Charles Cowles, after trucking our purchases up from the Loon Lake Colony auction, told me that he had to discontinue his phone because, while he was out working, people used to break into the house and make long-distance calls for which he was billed.

A great Dionysian brute, smelling of trees.

You might wonder how I ever came to meet Wayne. Not that I’m any better than he is—no, I don’t hold with that kind of snootiness. But just the improbability of people of our—how shall I put it? —“diverse backgrounds” having anything to do with one another.

A great brute, smelling of trees. He stands in urine-splotched undershorts, frying some fish. The old man—a pile of spread out yellowed newspapers about to crumble to dust—hunches over the stove in the parlor.

Jim Mahoney, Tubbs’ neighbor, spends his time digging dirt from the bank on one side of the road and using it to fill the hollow on the other side. He also has a collection of wagons.

July 28, 1960

We cleaned the organ and saw a baby mouse crouching inside. Chrysanthi quickly went and brought the cat, who pounced. A little squeak and then silence, the cat walking methodically away with a tittle of fur between her teeth. But then Alec screamed mightily. He, poor thing, could see nothing but injustice and tragedy in this planned and well executed murder. I was reminded of the scene in The Shrimp and the Anemone in which Eustace sees the anemone devour the shrimp and, recognizing an evil principle in back of the universe, begins to wail.

July 29, 1960

A few weeks ago Towsley’s driver got stuck in the mud in the little depression leading to the south field. What followed was interesting. For four hours he dug and jacked, putting rocks in the mud-bath under the wheels, racing the motor and getting almost to the top of the incline in front of him, then racing backwards, just managing, because of the rocks, to transgress the mud, and getting almost to the top of the incline in back of him. But he wouldn’t leave it at that; no, he had to get clean out without help. Where there’s a will there’s a way. So, instead of being glad he’d gotten as far as he had, and working for traction from that point (we could have put sand under the wheels), he would rush through the mud hole once more, each time more precariously, until his tracks shifted, he slid off the rocks entirely, and got stuck ten times worse than he had been in the beginning. At this point he ran out of cigarettes, which made him nervous (though his patience was exemplary)—he was only interested in showing that he, having gotten stuck, could get out. Man against machine and nature. I think he had almost wanted to get stuck in the first place. In the beginning, when I raised the question of going to the office-site to deposit the lumber, he looked at the hollow and was very dubious. I didn’t press the matter, though I suggested putting boards down. As I was bringing the boards he, without waiting, started off, saying, “If we get stuck, we get stuck,” and so he did. Finally, after Deckert and I couldn’t budge him with our two cars (breaking all my ropes), we got Beecher Sawyer with a chain and a four-wheel drive Jeep. The driver drove off without a word after we’d split the $3.00 cost.

I’m trying to write again, but my heart isn’t in it yet. I must do something every day until the knack returns—if it does.

August 2, 1960

The story I’m writing is hopeless. Should I continue just for the discipline of bringing it to some resolution? I had better start properly, like students of painting, by copying a model. Could I do something on the plan of Simonetta Perkins but set in Greece? Simple, straightforward, with a clear-cut situation, but also an opportunity for poetry. I don’t want to write the prosaic plot-filled type of novels exemplified by one I am now reading, Malamud’s The Assistant.

Reading Κατίνα Παπά, Σ’ ένα γυμάσιον θηλέων. Possible translation.

August 11, 1960

Anglicisms: potato crisp instead of potato chip; driver’s cabin (of lorry) instead of cab.

Reading Iris Murdock’s The Bell. Περίφανο! Until quite near the end, where too many things happen all of a sudden, too much melodrama, obtrusive manipulation of the plot to draw it to a close.

August 12, 1960

After I’d picked too many of the wrong kind of black cherries, Chrysanthi told me that I was just like her father: whenever he went to buy food he came back with too much, and always the poorest quality, paid for at the highest price. Apparently he had absolute trust in the shopkeepers, and wouldn’t watch what they put in the bag; and even if he saw a rotten orange going in, he was too polite to remonstrate. The funniest parts are the scenes that followed, as Chrysanthi relates them. Magdalene would berate him endlessly for wasting his meager income, and he would sit with his Byzantine liturgy, singing all the while, his nose in the book, and every so often saying absent-mindedly, Ναι, εντάξει, έχεις δίκαιο, έχεις δίκαιο, εντάξει . . .

Couldn’t a fascinating plot be built around something like the situation Murdoch paints in The Bell, but using characters and incidents from the Polaris Action campaign? It could have excitement, sex, scenery, public issues, private, religious, and moral questions, topical interest, etc. Study The Bell carefully; also look again at Conrad for style.

August 15, 1960

From Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar (NY: Dutton, 1960):

❡ Egotism is a fortress in which the conscience de soi-même, like a corrosive, eats away everything. True pleasure is in giving, surely. p. 53.

❡ Where can a man who really thinks take refuge in the so-called real world without defending himself against stupidity by the constant exercise of equivocation? p. 113.

❡ The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art. p. 141.

❡ At the time when we knew him he was reading hardly anything but science. This for some reason annoyed Justine who took him to task for wasting his time in these studies. He defended himself by saying that the Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless (or at any rate cyclic forms in) literature. Once it was grasped they were understood too. He added: “In the Space and Time marriage we have he greatest Boy meets Girl story of the age.” p. 142.

August 17, 1960

Went to the exhibit for the auction of the property of Georges Baumann at Minerva. Baumann, chief chef at a large NY hotel and a Swiss, built five cottages at the top of a mountain and stuffed each with objets-d’art and books he collected. He built the additional houses solely for this purpose, and though nobody ever lived in them nor did he intend to have anyone do so, he installed beds, stoves, kitchens, etc. in each, to make it a complete camp. The last ten years he lived all year here, alone after the death of his wife. His books included many volumes on the American Indian, travel books on Switzerland, some standard novels, the Britannica and Larousse, and a shelf-full of books on sex, love, prostitution, etc.—Havelock Ellis and the rest. This delighted the auctioneer, who savored the title “The Art of Love by Ovid” [o:vid]; “that must be a hot one.” And “Sacred Prostitution. Now what could this be? Good title, eh!” We felt a strange feeling considering how the result of his long mania for collecting and the strange result—porcelain and paintings and amour and statuary and stained glass and books and maps and fine china and magnificent period furniture—all set away in these miserable cottages on a mountain-top with a poor substitute for a Swiss panorama: how the result was that all these vultures, ourselves included, should be tramping there, and the collection soon to be dispersed piece by piece at the hand of the ignoramus auctioneer.

August 18, 1960

One aspect of Einstein’s relativity theory is that as speed increases, time decreases. Thus time becomes part of geometry, and the universe is a four-dimensional one. A clock launched into space would tick slower and slower as its velocity increased, and the elapsed time would be much less than the elapsed time of the trip as recorded on earth.

Yesterday’s mail was rather spectacular. I received (1) a clipping from a N.Y. Times ad for The Last Temptation announcing it as “a major literary event: and quoting ecstatic reviews; (2) a request from Collier’s Encyclopedia to write an article for them on Kazantzakis; (3) a telegram from the Voice of America asking for an interview in Greek; and (4) a letter from Tindall, announcing that he has read and accepted my dissertation!

We then went to the Baumann auction and bought a beautiful mahogany bed and inner spring mattress for $15.00; and 22 books for $16.00—about 8 volumes of Conrad in a nice edition, Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, Moncrief’s translation of The Charterhouse of Parma in two volumes, Villon’s complete poetry, The Woman of Andros and The Bridge of San Luis Rey by T. Wilder, Wells’s New Worlds for Old, George Moore’s Esther Waters, a translation of Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, a Petit Larousse, four volumes of Tolstoy’s religious essays, Balzac’s Thérèse Raquin, etc.

Possible short story: Kostas and the 6000 drachma confrontation. His orphan boyhood; need for substance, etc. Contrast with American high standards, which permit more idealism.

Another: Hartley’s “Three, or Four for Dinner” transposed to a Greek setting. Finding corpse on the way across the bay. Anti-Greek attitude of one of the Americans (perhaps the wife of a diplomat). Study also Hartley’s “Podolo” for horror effect. Very deft.

August 20, 1960

Chrysanthi told me how her mother, during the war, used to keep the children clothed by ripping her own dresses (mostly national costumes) one at a time and from each making two identical dresses for the two girls.

Chrysanthi also mentioned that when Mr. House succeeded in getting her released from prison (held as a kind of hostage because of George—or Odysseas?), the condition was that she remain at the Quaker school and have no contact at all with anyone outside. Thus for a whole year she did not even go as far as the Farm School. It was a horrible year. Lola was sick in bed (nervous disorder) and the parents had left Salonika (I’m not quite clear about this). Chrysanthi divided her salary between the rest of her family, as she was the only one earning anything.

She also reminisced again about earthquakes: how, in the village, everyone spent night after night outside in their yards, rather than sleep in the house, which might tumble down. Dimitrios, on those nights, used to teach his children the various constellations.

Then there was that other time when Chrysanthi was on her way to Athens, sent first class in the automotrice by the School. There was an earthquake, sending huge boulders onto the tracks, and the passengers had to spend the night in a café in Larissa. The first class was occupied only by old, rich people, and Chrysanthi had talked to no one the whole trip. Young and shy, she naturally felt very frightened; but she discovered a young honeymoon couple in the wagon; the man turned out to be an agriculturalist and friend of George’s, so Chrysanthi spent the time with them. She says she’ll never forget when, the next day, the train proceeded over that horrific bridge in the mountains, inching along. Everyone expected the trestle to collapse any minute; the passengers were screaming and wailing hysterically.

The Woman of Andros: disappointing.

August 30, 1960

Astonishingly beautiful music in Kazantzakis’s “Tertsines.” This is gorgeous (p. 16):

Αχ, νά ταν θέ μου, εγώ πηλό να πάρω,

φλόγα και νου κι αγέρα, να σε πλάσω!

Θά σουν αγνάς, καλός, κι η κρουσματάρω

Θα γλύκαινε καρδιά, κι το άγριο δάσο

θα ρόδιζε της αδικιάς μια μέρα.

Μα τώρα, Θέ μου, πια πού να προφτάσω!

October 8, 1960

Chrysanthi is despondent over her experience so far in the city, especially the lack of graciousness and hospitality. She complained bitterly about Alice and Peter. We had entertained them so many times for dinner, and kept them two days at the farm, etc. Now that they’re our neighbors they haven’t invited us really except with a vague “come over and see us.” One day we went. Peter came home with some croissants. Leander of course immediately jumped up. Alice gave him the tippy-tippy end of one, and nothing to Alec! (Not to mention offering us nothing.) This stingyness and complete lack of an ingrained feeling of hospitality pains Chrysanthi immensely, as it does me. Her response is to resolve to become “an American” in this respect. Why do things for people, she says, when they never appreciate anything and are only interested in their own pockets. I objected. The response should not be to descend to the faults of others. I tried to convince Chrysanthi that one must be hospitable, gracious, etc., without ever expecting anything in return. Then, if someone does reciprocate, surprise will add to the pleasure.

I, too, had a heavy feeling of shock and disgust when I came back to NY. I went downtown the first day to see Korda, and felt in a different world (the day before, we had entertained Floyd Fish, after buying his mowing machine!). So many women, dressed to the teeth, staring greedily at the jewels in Winston’s window; men rushing helter-skelter. And I felt a pang for the elevator operator in Rockefeller Center. How much better off Floyd Fish is on his poor-white farm, surrounded by vibrant horses. But would any of the elevator operators exchange?

October 10, 1960

I was having a haircut when something unusual happened. A squat, baggy-pantsed Jewish peddler entered the shop and asked the barber if he wanted any nylon combs. I didn’t know such peddlers still existed; he seemed to me something out of Ireland of the early 1900s: the peddlers described by O’Casey. “One for 15 cents, two for a quarter,” he said. The barber asked how much a dozen were. The peddler seemed taken aback, as though he had to think. “All right,” he said, “a dozen for $1.60.” I figured out, sitting in the chair, that at two for 25 cents, a dozen would be $1.50, but apparently this didn’t occur to the barber. The peddler showed the combs. “I’ll give you $1.00,” said the barber. The Jew laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “Good-bye, my friend,” he said. “I came not to lose money. Good-bye.” “1.20,” said the barber. The Jew pondered. “I’ll let you have them for $1.40,” he said. “A real bargain. I usually get $1.80, so you’ll be saving 40 cents. This is my last dozen. You’d better take it. I can sell any number of dozens today.” The barber, however, did not give in, but stuck to his offer of $1.20, whereupon the peddler walked out.

Tonight, a second strange thing. A man knocked at the door—obviously a bum, with dirty shirt, and jacket three sizes too big, shoes with the soles coming off, and said he’d been given my name by someone in the 15th Street Meeting and could he come in. I said Yes. He fawned immediately on the children, and they got all excited, so it was hard for me to pay attention to what he was saying. I caught this: He was writing a book on geriatrics and needed money to finish it—needed about $400. He’d worked in the coal mining district of West Virginia during the depression; then inherited $100,000 but in a few years had given it all away. Then he got into debt and is still about $5000 in debt. But he must finish the book. Did I know of anyone—any philanthropist—who might help him. Just a loan; he’ll pay it back when he can. He knew I was of Rochester Meeting and asked about people there. I of course knew no one. I gave him a check for $10 and he asked immediately where he could cash it. Obviously he hadn’t a penny, and needed money on the spot. I tore up the check and gave him a travellers cheque. He gave his address as a P.O. box in Atlantic City. He thee’d me throughout. The only thing that made me suspicious was when I referred to the name of some Friend and said he could find the address in the Directory. “Oh, do they have a directory?” he asked. Would a Friend have said that? On his way out he said he wouldn’t go to social agencies because they wanted to take away his two children on the grounds that his wife, a manic depressive, was unsuitable to bring them up.

November 14, 1960

“Play your records,” Chrysanthi said to Leander, “and you’ll probably fall asleep.” “I don’t want to fall asleep,” replied Leander. “I just want to fall a-rest.”

November 15, 1960

Attempted rendering of Kazantzakis’s terzina, page 16:

Oh God, my God, could I but swarthy clay

Enfold to make you mind and air and flame,

Chaste and good you’d stand, all anger would away

With sweetened heart; of wrong the forests tamed

One day a rosy face would show; but now,

Oh God, my God, it’s late to voice your name.

The third line has six feet, unfortunately.

November 14, 1960

Good period for a historical novel: the times between the Testaments; the confict between Hellenism and Judaism in Palestine.

November 25, 1960.

Hone finally got a job: analyzing financial reports. He was to report to work last Monday, and spent Sunday in feverish expectation. But getting up Monday morning, racing through breakfast and to the station to catch the train, was not so easy. He managed indeed so well that he arrived at 8:45 and had to wait outside for 15 minutes. Finally he was installed at his desk. That evening Dad called him to offer congratulations on his first day of work. “Work?” Hone replied. “I quit!” Then he told how sitting behind the desk nauseated him. He got to thinking: he would have to rush his lunch, he would have to run to get the 5:15 back to Harrison, he would have to work a full year before being granted a one-week vacation At twelve o’clock, therefore, he informed the boss that he was through, and waived all salary.

Linda Bien, Saul’s elder daughter, is at Cooper Union, having left Antioch, where she had had an unhappy love affair and did poorly academically. Now she can’t sleep at night and she has allowed herself to grow horribly fat. She weighs 140 lbs.

We went last week to Harvey Springer’s Bah Mitzvah. Just a few weeks before, the boy had gone into a coma, and it was discovered that he had diabetes. So the happy ceremony was performed with somewhat forced gaity, and with underlying gloom.

Surprise visit from Paul Davidoff. He’ll get his law degree this January, the same time as I (I hope) get my Ph.D.

Reading Death of a Salesman reminded me of another aspect of Hone’s recent job. Like Willy Loman, Hone built himself up, telling my father they were so impressed with his experience, etc., etc. that they acceded to his demand to work only until 4:30 instead of 5:00. The truth was that Hone, because he wanted to get out before the crowds, agreed to a salary cut proportionate to the time not worked. Hone could be made into another Willy Loman. His drunkenness, his need for “freedom”—going to lunch with the “boys” and spending 2 or 3 hours at it; the necessity of a martini before catching the train back to Westchester; the fantasies of retirement in Paris; the parties there and (?) the philandering; the experiment of a year’s leisure, farming, etc., but the attraction soon wears thin. Remorse, perhaps, at having sold the business. Dénouement (?): suicide. The family relations could be bought in too. Emily’s refusal to go to college. Or, better, substituting Linda Bien for Emily.

November 26, 1960

Alec, falling asleep in the car, proved the brilliance of the end of the penultimate chapter of Ulysses. Alec, as I stopped for a red light, began mumbling, “Daddy stop red light, go green light.” He continued: “Daddy stop red light, go green light, stop red light, go green light, stop green light, go red light, stop green . . ., go . . . red . . . green . . .” And he was asleep!

We went to the new aquarium at Coney Island with Hillel and Miriam Black. Ate at Nathan’s. Barbaric. Crowds pushing to get frankfurters, then eating while standing on the filthy street. We leaned against the side of a building and watched Nathan’s garbage collector come by every few minutes with a huge barrel-full of discarded paper plates, cups, wrappers, etc. An old man appeared once, stood near one of the waste baskets, waiting for someone to throw in a half-eaten frank, and then picked it out and ate it. What humanity one sees at the Island! Cruel, uncultured faces, fat women stuffed with knishes, teenaged boys looking for a good time or rushing about in open convertibles, Negro pigmies running shooting galleries, etc. On the beach, I glimpsed two young boys who had taken off their shirts; their girlfriends were running their hands over the bare chests, playfully, sexily.

❡ There was a great deal of grimy infant life up and down the place. —Henry James, “Brooksmith”.

Visit the other day with Kimon Friar. The most egotistical man I have ever met, even for a Greek. The moment I stepped in he brought me to what he called his “Rogues’ Gallery”—a series of framed photographs of famous people—Edith Hamilton, Archibald MacLeish, Kazantzakis, and various actors, etc.—all inscribed to Friar. Then he showed me his scrapbook: review of his publications, invitations to lecture, newspaper photographs, the Calypso song written about him when he lectured in Trinidad, etc. Then his copies of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, about 9 or 10 in all, lined up next to one another, one copy of each edition, one of the Book of the Month Club edition, etc. Then the bust of himself made at the age of 26, because that was the age at which Keats died—Keats, his idol, whose bust stood next to the one of Friar himself. “At 26,” Friar told me, “I died too.”

The rest of the evening he spent informing me how much Kazantzakis loved him, how K. considered him his “spiritual son,” how he gave him full rights to all royalties for the Odyssey, and how Friar, out of the goodness of his heart, voluntarily returned 50% to Mme K. when she complained that K. never meant what he did and that Friar was robbing her. Friar said he had K’s letters to prove his story but that Mrs. K. wouldn’t give permission for him to translate and publish them. He pictured her as a woman intent on making every drachma she can out of K’s works, and as a paranoic. When K. died, he said that Mrs. K, although feeling genuine grief, also felt relief, for K. had been terribly difficult to live with since he had an oriental view of women: that they should stay indoors and wait on their husbands, nothing else. Mrs. K, after the death, went to Paris, bought an outfit by Dior, dyed her hair blue!

Friar said that K. was very inhumane, not only in his attitude toward women (this is what made Galatea leave him—see her novel), but also in his political philosophy. He fully accepted the idea that millions of innocent people might have to die because of the coming of the new order—communism—and he could have no compassion for these individuals because he viewed communism as bound to triumph owing to some kind of historical rule that the barbarians always descend on each exhausted civilization. When asked which side he would fight on in a war between Russia and Greece, he said he would side with the Russians.

Friar himself is a wiry man, very small. He bounces on his seat when he talks, and seems to take obvious pride in being a scholar and also a man of the earth: interested in money, in love (hetero- or homosexual?), in dancing, in travel, in glory, etc. (He told me that John Lehmann and Demetrios Capetanakis were lovers.) He wants to leave translating now, and complete his own projects: a novel, an epic. Also, he’s doing Homer into hexameters for a deluxe edition to be boxed with The Odyssey: a Modern Sequel. He had just returned from Hollywood, where he completed the “treatment” for the film Skouras is going to make of K’s Odyssey (Friar’s salary: $1000 per week for ten weeks).

He seemed to attach great importance to the fact that Max Schuster gave him a cocktail party at “21” and especially because the previous day he had gone to one at the same place given for Olivier, and was able to say, casually, “Oh, I’m having my party here tomorrow.”

I hadn’t been feeling very well the whole day, and when I got ready to go, after drinking several glasses of retsina, I felt faint, really faint. I sat down just in time, and Friar said I had really turned livid. He gave me a bromo seltzer, and I left.

December 6, 1960

Mama and Daddy Giraffe are grieved because their baby has a very short neck. “It’s your fault,” says Moma to her husband. “No, it’s from your side of the family,” the husband replies. “You know as well as I that your maternal grandmother had a short neck.” The baby grows up, is sad and retiring. All the other giraffes make fun of him, and he can’t reach the top of the trees to get the tenderest leaves. He is addicted to lonely walks in the forest, where he meets a racoon who helps him by bringing down the tender leaves. Finally, raccoon suggests that his friends the elephants might be able to help. They come, discuss the situation, and decide on a plan. Putting the giraffe’s head in the fork of a tree, they get on either side of him and pull and pull and pull, until his neck, little by little, and faster and faster, begins to stretch. By the time they stop, giraffe has the longest neck in the world. When he returns to his parents the whole village of giraffes comes forth to admire him. The elders hold a council and decide that baby giraffe must be made king, since he has the longest neck of anyone. This is done, and giraffe lives a happy life, feasting on the tenderest leaves. (Or; expand: other giraffes are jealous; they seek to learn how he achieved his expansion, etc.)

December 19, 1960

Leander put perfume on his hair, and was disappoined that he couldn’t smell it. We tried stretching his nose, but this didn’t work. The only solution: to have an elephant’s nose.

1961

414 West 121st Street

January 1–May 28

Riparius

May 29–September 10

7 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

September 11–December 31

January 20, 1961

❡ Πικρή είναι η νιότη, πικρή, ακατάδεχτη δεν καταλαβαίνει και όταν αρχίζεις να καταλαβαίνεις η νιότη έχει φύγει. Ποιος είταν ο κινέζος σοφός που γενήθηκε γέρος, με κάτασπρα γένια, με κάτασπρα μαλλιά, με τα μάτια γεμάτα δάκρυα; και σιγά σιγα, όσο περνούσαν τα χρόνια, η τρίχα του μαύριζε, τα μάτια του γενούσαν, αλάφρυνε η καρδιά. Κι όταν ζύγονε στο θάνατο τα μάγουλά του παρθένεψαν και σκεπάστηκαν με ανάλαφρο παιδιάτικο χνούδι . . . Τέτοια, αν ο Θεός πονούσε τους ανθρώπους, έπρεπε να ξετυλίγεται η ζωή τους. —Καζαντζάκης, Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο, χειρόγραφο σ. 119.

January 31, 1961

Ένα πρωί θα σηκωθείς και θα δεις ο κόσμος άλλαξε· δεν άλλαξε ο κόσμος, παιδί μου, άλλαξες εσύ, ωρίμασε η σωτηρία· παραδόσου στο Θεό και δε θα τον προδόσεις. —Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο, σελ. 284.

February 16, 1961

Wenn ihr’s nich fühlt, ihr werdet’s nich erjagen,

wenn es nicht aus der Seele dringt

und mit urkräftigem Behagen

die Herzen aller hören zwingt.

Sitzt ihr nur immer! leimt zusammen,

braut ein Ragout von andrer Schmaus

und blast die Kümmerlichen Flammen

aus eurem Aschenhäufchen ’raus!

Bewundrung von Kindern und Assen,

wenn euch darnach der Gaumen steht;

doch werdet ihr nie Herz zu Herzen schaffen,

wenn es euch nich von herzen geht.

—Faust, part 1 (Nacht)

February 18, 1961.

To Voice of America to have picture taken with Albert Rick, Mike and someone else who, in affected tones, pronounced Kazantzakis “turgid.” Then to Putnam’s. They liked the Ὥρες very much but as I expected found it too short to be publishable by itself. Wallace asked for a report, however, on Alcibiades. Mrs. Negroponte disappointed, of course. I will send the MS to Elizabeth to get her opinion, also to George Hill.

Evening: Faust. Stylized performance—witch dressed as Victorian lady; Walpurgis Night done in idiom of Brecht & Weill.

Supper with Tim Bartlett the other night. He returned haggard from the UN. They were trying to discover if Lumumba had been killed. I joked cynically as usual, asking him how he could keep from laughing at the antics of the Congolese. The next day a glance at the Times showed the horrible seriousness of the whole thing, with riots in the council chamber and all the rest. To top this, C. and I heard Mrs. Roosevelt that afternoon and she said the significance of the new administration is that it is telling America we must wake up to what is going on in the world, and to the fact that other peoples are desperate and irrational in their desire for independence and economic advancement.

Dad made arrangements with a young doctor to come to the house at 1 p.m. to talk about his taking over the office. They waited and waited and at 2:30 finally called him. He said that he and his wife had talked things over and decided they didn’t want to live in Sunnyside, and he had “forgotten” to call in order to cancel the appointment.

My father’s sudden and intense desire to move: he says trucks keep him awake at night, and the neighbors’ children during the day. He looks at dismal apartments in inner courts, his sole criterion being “quietness.”

❡ Two peoples have been destroyed by their past—the Greeks and the Jews. —Mike Landis, in telephone conversation.

March 10, 1961

Virginia told how her father finally went back to “the old country” after years of dreaming about the trip, years of the refrain, “But in the old country it’s like this; the apples are as big as melons,” etc. He was supposed to go with his wife, but she insisted on waiting until her son returned from college in June. The father wanted to see Syria in the springtime, so went on ahead, planning on a year’s stay. For this he sold one of his real estate properties in Michigan City. The mother was to join him later. He went with trunks galore, about 15 suits, numerous shirts, etc. After two months, just as the mother was packing to go, he wired, “I’m coming home. Send jet fare.” He had found the old country very unromantic indeed. He was used to a daily bath with running hot water, and in his village they didn’t even have toilets! Then his two brothers quarreled over whose house he was to stay in. Then also, all his relatives, and also acquaintances, came and asked to borrow things, including his suits, shirts, and even his underwear, none of which was returned. Also, he got dysentery almost the first few days. Virginia met him when he got off the plane in New York. He was gaunt and sickly, and had no luggage. Even the suit he had on wasn’t his, and the shirt was several sizes too big. “But the old country, Papa,” said Virginia. “Shut up about the old country,” was his reply. “It stinks!”

A fine project for days of leisure: production of a literary atlas showing and describing all geographical sites connected with literary figures, with authors and also their works. When I was in England I would much have liked something of this nature. I didn’t know, for example, that Nether Stowey was so near Bristol. What a section would be devoted to Venice!

April 10, 1961

Man fears, more than anything else, loneliness and poverty. It is this fear that makes him subordinate his higher potentialities to the demands of marriage, family, and business.

May 12, 1961

Leander at lunch today, after I suggested he might wash his hands: “I like to have dirty hands because then I can touch dirty things without being afraid of making them clean!”

July 2, 1961

Riparius

Ideas for children’s stories: 1. Scrambled egg as protagonist. 2. Child says, “I wish our house could grow each day, like the cabbage plants in the garden”—and it does.

Sylvia Austerlitz here last month for a few days with Monica and Paul. Expect the Gardners today. They are singing tonight at Crystal Lake Lodge.

I lost a lamb the morning after we bought him, because I went to get the two lambs from their shed, by myself, and while I was holding one, the other slipped out between a crack resulting from a loose board (the house having been patched together hastily the night before). The other lamb struggled furiously to escape as well, but I held on to his foot. I could hear, actually feel, his heart thumping, making the entire body quiver. It was a sudden, furious effort. I thought surely he would drop dead from a heart attack. The successful escapee stood off about 20 feet from the house, glaring at me, and then both lambs began bleating plaintively at each other. I called Chrysanthi, and we (very stupidly) tried to head off the lamb, forcing him back toward the barns. But he kept retreating in the opposite direction, and before long went into the woods. We followed him a few minutes, our shoes drenched, but soon realized we could make no headway at all. We thought that if we tied the other lamb out in the field, perhaps the lost one would come to him. But we never saw him again. We walked about the fields an hour or so later, and hearing nothing, assumed that some animal had already killed the poor lamb; but a few days later we learned that the lamb had been seen in town, near the post office on the following morning. Carson Harrington’s man saw him. Carson telephoned Betty Filkins to tell me, which she did—four days later. Carson must have laughed, because as he gave me the lambs he warned me that I would probably lose them, and I said oh no, we would be careful!

The remaining lamb must have a charmed life, however—ferocious, unpleasant beast that he is, always glaring at me hatefully with his head lowered, as though glancing over the rims of bi-focal glasses. I say so because last Sunday, as we were driving home from our swim and picnic at Minerva Beach, we saw the blackest, cruelest looking clouds I had ever seen, and rushed back home, beating the storm by just a half a minute. I had tied the lamb to the shed and left the door open, an the rain came down so furiously, with lightning and a hurricane wind, that I didn’t have time to go out to him; or rather, I was about to go to him when I saw his entire shed rise up in the air, fall again, and the next time rise and continue rising, sailing through the air like a kite and landing upside down about 60 feet from its original position. Chrysanthi, who is terrified by thunder, implored me not to go out, so I waited until the storm passed, and then ran to the field, expecting to see the poor lamb strangled. But there he was, wet but healthy, next to the shed, the rope around his neck. We set the building upright and gave him an extra dish of grain—the filthy beast! The same wind also toppled over the outhouse, ripping off its peaked roof. I had to spend the next day salvaging the roofing and making a new, shed-type roof.

Our first month here is already gone! I finished the first draft of Saint Francis and have started the revision. No time for another reading, however, My projects so far: enlarging the garden, building the sheep shed, peeling 110 cedar posts, putting in the windows in the kitchen, building a set of shelves using glue and dowel-pins, my first venture in this type of construction. Also, fixing up the chicken house and putting a fence around it. Of our five chickens, only one lays, and she only every other day. Also, we got two kittens from Mr. Tubbs, and one disappeared the other night, probably scared by some animal that came to eat the cats’ food. The other kitten, which has two club feet, couldn’t run far enough to get lost. Here is an example of where a defect aided in the battle for survival. Of all our animals, only the rabbits have suffered nothing very spectacular, although their house was also overturned in last week’s storm.

We visited Hanover early in June, saw Dean Jenkins again, and inspected our assigned apartment at 7 Valley Road. This turned out to be small, cold, ugly, inconvenient: a great disappointment to Chrysanthi. But it’s near the college, also to the grade school and nursery school. We met one of the kindergarten teachers, a Miss Cadbury, sister of the Dean of Haverford.

We had gorgeous weather last week, and as I sat under my tree writing each morning I said silent thanks for all this beauty and serenity, although sometimes I am frightened by owning so much: I felt that way as we crowded all our possessions into the cellar at 3902 when we left Morningside Heights.

Parents are in the midst of a cruise to Israel. They stopped at Piraeus last Sunday and had dinner with the Yiannakoses! How nice that such reunions are possible, even though the language barrier forbids much communication.

October 15, 1961

Hanover, NH

A good portmanteau word, the result of my typist’s slip in the St. Francis manuscript: “so that Francis would not be infurinated.”

October 18, 1961

Name: Mr. Sweat.

November 21, 1961

Robert Frost met Wallace Stevens in a Florida hotel. Stevens was drunk, and fingering the legs of the waitresses. “The trouble with you, Frost,” he said, coming right out, “is that you write about subjects.” Frost pondered this, and replied, “The trouble with you, Stevens, is that you write about bric-a-brac.” Frost says that Stevens was a strange character, fastidious and precious, and yet at the same time one who loved to wallow in vulgarity. He also told about Ezra Pound—how Pound has been writing letters recently to T. S. Eliot, telling Eliot that he (Eliot) isn’t a poet, only a critic, and repeating endlessly that his work is a lot of shit. Frost says he doesn’t care for this or similar four-letter words, and never uses them, except that he came close once when Pound said to him, “Frost, I’m sick of your witticisms.” “Pound,” Frost replied, “I’m sick of your shiticisms!” Frost also says he’s sure that Ernest Hemingway committed suicide. He placed a shotgun in his mouth and blew off the entire back of his head. He says Hemingway once offered Frost all the money he needed, if he thought this would help get Ezra Pound out of St. Elizabeth’s hospital. He says Archibald MacLeish thinks Pound’s poetry superb while Howard Mumford Jones thinks it worthless. —All this from the hour or so that about ten of us had with Frost at Dickey’s house, after Frost’s reading to the college.

Also here recently: William Golding (Lord of the Flies), who read a magnificent two pages on Salisbury Cathedral, and Anthony Powell [Po:l], who agreed with me when I said that Hartley’s latest novels show a decline, and then proceeded to chronicle Hartley’s domestic troubles, all the ones I’d heard of also. Apparently this is what Hartley has as the main subject of conversation. Poor man.

November 24, 1961

Nice phrase: “A wilderness of sweets.”—P.L. V, 294.

November 26, 1961

Sick joke: “Little boy, what do you plan to be when you blow up?”

November 30, 1961

Strangest dream last night. I was reading Hartley’s Simonetta Perkins, struggling to finish it, when someone suggested that I must cremate it. I went with several other people to the crematorium, which, as it turned out, was operated by Dr. and Mrs. Chambers, although only the latter was present. She led us through corridors to an open courtyard in the back, where the ‘pitch’ was. I had expected flaming fires, but instead, on top of the pitch, were four corpses in chairs, facing each other as though playing bridge. They were in various stages of having been consumed, and there was no smell. There was a large billboard across one side of the pitch. Mrs. Chambers kept urging me to proceed with the ceremony. I was on the next to last page, struggling to finish, struggling . . . struggling . . . struggling . . . Here the dream ended.

Mixed up into this weird story were, it seems to me, memories of Hartley (I had begun re-reading “My Fellow Devils” on Tuesday), of Mrs. Chambers (her strange voice was duplicated exactly), the ‘pitch,’ as the word is used in P.L. (I looked it up yesterday), and the account perhaps of the cremation of Shelley, recited so histrionically last week in the course of Camino Real.

December 3, 1961

A footnote on Sources. He is sic [sic].)])]. ad lib.

We have moral stigmas against cannibalism, incest, etc. Why not against mass destruction with atomic weapons?

December 15, 1961

“Culture for [Cecil] is a way of hiding his embarrassment before life.”—Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster, p. 104.

December 31, 1961

Kenneth Webb’s spongy hand. When you shake it you feel moist squeezable flesh that seems to have no bones inside it. His deformed feet.

O’Steen’s vicissitudes. Austerlitz and his mother-in-law. She cramps his style.

I spoke in Meeting today, the first time I ever spoke, except for once or twice in Rochester. Afterwards Henry Williams came up and said, “Very nice, Peter,” as though I had given a performance. This ruined the experience.

1962

7 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

January 1–June 10

Riparius

June 11–September 9

7 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

September 10–December 31

January 7, 1962

Kenneth Webb’s story about Priscilla Crandall and the school in Covington, Connecticut. Negro girl applies and is accepted. Townspeople irate. Pressures brought against P, but she does not heed them. All white parents withdraw their children. Thus P. turns school into school for Negro girls. Trades people refuse to sell her groceries. Negro father of original colored girl brings provisions regularly. Legislator rigs bill to stop school. Girls are commanded to leave, or pay fine, or receive lashes on bare back. One girl refuses to leave, refuses to pay fine, and asks to be lashed. Townspeople cannot bring themselves to do this. Nor seek other means to get rid of school. They incite hoodlums to throw bricks, etc., and finally they burn down the building. This, finally, ends the school. But many many years later the Connecticut legislature voted an official apology to Priscilla.

March 5, 1962

❡ [Leadbitter] instinctively . . . knew that one [present] was better than two: two presents robbed each other, made excuses for each other. Each hinted at the other’s inadequacy; each seemed an afterthought. Better make a bold plunge with one. —L. P. Hartley, The Hireling, pp. 204–5.

On the Absurd: (Quoted by Edward Albee in the NY Times Magazine, Feb. 25, 1962, pp. 30–31).

❡ Camus: “A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and the setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.”

❡ Ionesco: “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. . . . Cut off from his religions, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.”

❡ Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd: “Ultimately, a phenomenon like The Theatre of the Absurd does not reflect despair or a return to dark irrational forces but expresses man’s endeavor to come to terms with the world in which he lives. It attempts to make him face up to the human condition as it really is, to free him from illusions that are bound to cause constant maladjustment and disappointment. . . . For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions—and to laugh at it.”

❡ Albee: “. . . man’s attempts to make sense for himself out of his senseless position in a world which makes no sense—which makes no sense because the moral, religious, political and social structures man has erected to ‘illusion’ himself have collapsed.”

March 8, 1962

Leander, after contemplating the bones remaining on our dishes after a dinner of lamb chops: “It must be nice to be a bone, because then people don’t eat you.”

March 29, 1962

Donald Blackmer visited last week. Shanklands also, for skiing; Becky sweet as ever.

The trouble with the peace movement is that we keep to the fiction that decisions by governments are made on a rational basis. Or perhaps the trouble is that the governments themselves keep to this fiction. Kennedy’s decision to resume testing is a case in point. He argued it like a logician, but it could be argued just as well the other way. The actual decision, I’m convinced, was a direct flouting of what one knows is best; it is the expression of some primitive need for self-protection.

Excellent book re: my novel on pacifists: Gerald Heard’s Morals Since 1900.

Argument with Chrysanthi last night, about her never making the bed. She said I was the kind of person who always had to find something to criticize. The salt, the napkin, and now the bed. When I complained of her sending all the shirts to the laundry (we had agree that she would send the whites only) she screamed she would now send none! Τι ζωή!

Reading Samuel Butler’s notebooks. He is a delightful iconoclast.

April 5, 1962

I read somewhere that a typist working one hour at an electric typewriter uses up a specific number of calories less than if she were working at an ordinary typewriter. This is a good example of the placing of efficiency as a goal—what I talk about in my chapter on Facial Justice.

The famous incident in The Way of All Flesh when Theobald asserts his authority re: the dinner (just after he and Christina are married) reminds me—I hate to say—of the way I demanded Chrysanthi write the thank you letters after our marriage.

April 9, 1962

Alec: “My hands are nice and dirty.”

April 16, 1962

On village life: Joel Martin Halper, A Serbian Village, Columbia University Press.

April 23, 1962

Intercourse with prophylactic—an “accident.” We’ll see what happens. Let’s hope that Chrysanthi is not as fertile as usual.

Trip to Washington last week to give Kazantzakis lecture at Georgetown. John Cummings conducted me to a room that he had reserved, and we almost opened the door to the Jesuit cloister by mistake, but were saved from this catastrophe by a gruff priest who directed us in the nick of time to where we wanted to go. Lecture was OK. Questions came sporadically but several students seemed quite impressed and interested. Out for a beer afterwards with members of the Classics Department, all very young and most congenial. Though Catholic, they laugh at the Jesuit faculty. Peter and Alice joined us, and I went to Chevy Chase to sleep. Next day took the train to Baltimore. Had read Joyce’s Portrait on the way to Washington, and was flabbergasted to find myself among the Jesuits. Now I carried the incongruities further by going to a burlesque show and marking student themes during the intermissions. Baltimore burlesque is the rawest I’ve ever seen. One dancer appeared stark naked and paraded her vulva all over the place, and the others all gave liberal views. The place was most lively, being filled with businessmen who had come to see the baseball game, which had been rained out. Back to NY, went to see Behen’s The Hostage: very like O’Casey. Still fighting the civil war. Some memorable lines: “There’s no place on earth like the world.” “I’ll have you know my voice was trained by an electrocutionist.” And: Negro homosexual to the keeper of a brothel, as he goes upstairs with his white boyfriend: “What do you think of mixed marriages?”

April 30, 1962

The “French” romantic poet Jean Moréas was really a Greek named Γιάννης Παπαδιαμαντόπουλος. Perhaps here is the link between the French symbolists and the modern Greeks that Edmund Wilson mentions in Axel’s Castle.

May 14, 1962

L. C. Knights here.

May 15, 1962

My life is one huge, continuous solecism.

May 18, 1962

Look Back in Anger seems to bear on my projected novel about the peace crusaders. Osborne’s point is that whereas at the time of the Spanish Civil War intellectuals were able to translate their ideals into action, in the 1950s–1960s, with the hydrogen bomb impending, all one can do is rage in impotent anger. The intellectual is paralyzed, and those who continue to pursue older ways of expression have not reacted to the nature of the times.

May 29, 1962

The similes in Room at the Top are dazzling. Also Braine’s technique of showing feelings by presenting analogous incidents.

Hartley gave the go-ahead, finally, for my book. Chatto is beginning production, or so C. Day Lewis wrote today.

Chrysanthi dreamed last night that Leander and Alec came to her with a plate on which they had their penises, which they had cut off with scizzors, and said, “Look, Mommy!”

Saint Francis published today.

July 8, 1962

Riparius

A beautiful twentieth-century sight: a double jet-trail colored rose against a blue-black sky by the sun, invisible behind the horizon soon after sunset.

Jerry English, Leslie, and Dr. Barnard here for supper. Last Tuesday they had a lucky escape when sparks from their trash barrel ignited the grass, which ignited the barn. Luckily the wind was blowing away from the house. Luckily also, the barn held the fire for some time, and the firemen, who had arrived en masse meanwhile, were able to soak down the fields to prevent the flames reaching the forest. Jerry had an attack and Peg gave him oxygen and he recovered. Sis McCarthy called the fire departments, then went up the hill and directed things, feeding the men, sending Peg to town for four cases of beer to keep them going, etc. Two teenagers stood watch all night, and the next day in the afternoon the fire was officially pronounced out. Still, Roy McKee, the fire warden, showed the Englishes how pockets of danger remained underground: where the fire would travel along a root, the only sign being puffs of smoke observable at times.

Jerry told me of his dealings with Harold Carman after I mentioned how Carman invited me to store my barn wood in his barn and then stole it for his stables. I hadn’t realized that Peg and Jerry had actually lived for a time in the Waddell homestead across the road, and that Carman was responsible for them buying their own place.

July 25, 1962

Round like an “O.” Tall and thin as an asparagas. Martin Meisel in our banquet picture looked like a foetus.

I sheared a sheep the other day. Nicked him several tiems, but he didn’t seem to mind.

Mrs. Deckert feeding the pigs!

Red Barden’s friend who lost two fingers on a dare.

August 8, 1962

From Durrell’s Mountolive:

❡ his eyes were small and set in puckers, like twin cloves

❡ throats tightening

❡ flights of glittering needles pocking the waters (275)

❡ one had the illusion of time spread out flat [here in the open street of the Arab quarter] (285)

❡ they walked in a soft cloud of unknowing

❡ vitreous expanses of the lake

❡ mosquito-loud silence

❡ Suez-like a Caesarean section through which the East was untimely ripped (87)

❡ cockroach-crushing steps, plunging the toe down and turning it in the earth

❡ the first thin effervescence of autumn rain

August 10, 1962

Metaphors: Greco MS (English) 105/8, 111, 120.

September 17, 1962

7 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

The elm tree ascending out of its trunk, like multiple pestles.

September 21, 1962

Henry Williams and I were talking about Greece, and I said that the temple at Sounion was like a spiritual excrescence rising out of the material rock of the Cape.

David Mirza here last night.

This summer I built a barn! How strange that seems now, how remote!

September 23, 1962

❡ Religion is a form of insurance. It is a projection of the average man’s desire to insure against discomfort at the hands of the Almighty in the hereafter; and the premiums are paid in the form of self-mortification and self-denial, tinctured with a little wholesome boredom on Sundays.

—C.E.M. Joad, Samuel Butler, chapter 4.

October 4, 1962

Leander, after first-day school: “You know, Mother, William Penn discovered America.” “No, no, he discoverd Pennsylvania.” “Oh, yes, that’s right. George Fox discovered America.”

The rosy-cheeked, peaches-and-cream young nun in the Episcopal school. What beautiful pages Kazantzakis could have written about her and the tragedy of her divorce from motherhood and sex.

October 26, 1962

Colonel Furlong told of more of his adventures: intelligence work re: the Italian-Yugoslav border disputes in 1919, and service on the tripartite plebiscite commision re: a border dispute between Peru and Chile during Coolidge’s adminisration. He witnessd such things as: Serbians taking Montenegrian woman and tying their skirts around the ankles, after putting wild tomcats inside, then beating the skirts (the women in those days wore nothing underneath) and exciting the cats in an effort to torture the women into revealing the whereabouts of guerrilla troups.

In Chile, two longshoremen taking their cant hooks (used for loading bales of cotton) and sticking them into a Peruvian, one in the shoulder, the other in the flanks, then pulling in opposite directions. Or, putting Peruvians in barrels with just one small hole, loading them into the hold of a ship, and transporting them for three days on choppy seas, with the barrels sliding back and forth.

November 7, 1962

Chrysanthi told something I hadn’t known before about George and Efthymoula. On their honeymoon, when George wanted so desperately to divorce her immediately, she threatened to expose him to the police as a communist, delivering missives to the partisans on his περιοδείες. Since the family was already suspect because of Odysseas, he could of course never stand up against such informing, however false. Such are the workings of what Shaw calls “the life force”!

November 8, 1962

7 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

Last Saturday I went to New York to have lunch with Ange Vlachos. He is the permanent representative of Greece to NATO, stationed at Geneva, and is in New York for the General Assembly of the U.N. A most cultured gentleman, very un-Greek in appearance and manner, but very Greek in intellectual interests, as witness his trilogy of historical novels on Alcibiades, the Comnenoe, and the projected one on ’21. We talked about Ὥρες ζωῆς, which I still have hopes of publishing somehow, and then turned to other topics, among them Kazantzakis. He said, among other things, that Mrs. K. is money-mad, and talks of nothing except how she can milk some more out of K’s books. As for Κ himself, whom Vlachos knew for many years: a hard, unsociable, difficult individual, very Manichean in outlook. Vlachos told of how, once at an art exhibit, he saw Κ visibly offended by a painting of a nude, and suggesting caustically (to the artist, who was present) that the woman must be the kind that “sell themselves.” He said also that K’s attitudes found their way into his books in the form of contempt for the reader. As an example he cited K’s lack of concern over physical detail. On one page he’ll have rain falling; on the next, forgetting about the rain, he makes the sun shine. He also said that in Zorba Κ completely misrepresented Mme Hortense, who was a historical personage, and who was treated accurately in Prevelakis’s Το χρονικό μιας πολιτείας. Another thing that Vlachos objected to in Zorba was the unrealistic presentation of village life, especially concerning the beheading of the widow. Where were the police? asks Vlachos. Such a crime could never go unpunished, as Κ has it. Vlachos saw this as a kind of disrespect for Crete. I remonstrated, saying something to the effect that Κ is interested in ‘poetic truth’ rather than facts, and that Zorba is really a fairy tale—or, better, a myth played out by ‘gods’ who are exempt from such things as police action. This is necessary for the effect Κ wishes to achieve. It explains, as I told my class, why we never once feel that Zorba is a sexual maniac or a degenerate, but rather a Dionysus raised somehow above normal morality. Something of the same effect is achieved in Never on Sunday, where Ilya, hardly an accurate portrayal of a prostitute, is acceptable because she is in effect a goddess of sex. . . . Vlachos suggested a possible novella to be coupled with his Ὥρες ζωῆς, namely Τα δόντια της μιλόπετρας by Kasdaglis. . . . After lunching together, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and contemplated Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer.

This was my first glimpse of my parents’ new home, a co-op apartment at the fashionable address of 20 E. 74th Street purchased for $19,000. They sold 3902 for $30,000. The location, of course, is magnificent, but the apartment itself: what a comedown from our wonderful four-story home in Sunnyside. And all my furniture in my room is gone! Dad complained so much about the trucking noise on 39th Avenue; now he has the trucks, buses, taxis, the horns of Madison Avenue, and it was pitiful hearing him trying to convince me, and himself, how ‘quiet’ the apartment is. Then, at night, the person directly below turns on his television for four hours every day, and every word penetrates through the floor. Quiet indeed! It is pitiful, but fashionable, and perhaps the best thing for them because of its location, considering my father’s virtual blindness. We are to spend Christmas there with the children, if we can stand it.

Faculty meeting these two past Wednesdays concerning change in the Freshman English program. Dewing accused the framers of restricting the individual liberty of the members of the department. At the next meeting, Terrie made a ‘smooth’ and emotional speech ‘disproving Dewing’ and then (this was all planned out in advance, I’m sure) recognizing Brady (over Dewing). Brady moved that the proposal be adopted en bloc, Crawford seconded it, and the damn thing was almost ‘put over’ on us before we knew what was happening. Luckily, others refused to be manipulated in this way. I sat through the meeting without speaking, overcome with dismay at the thought of how impossible it is that an acceptable program should ever come out of such a meeting, where everyone was talking at cross purposes.

Going on the train from White River Junction is like traveling from the north of Europe to the tip of Italy, insofar as the further south one goes toward New York City the more ‘Mediterranean’ do the passengers become. We started out with the Anglo Saxon ‘purity’ of Hanover, but by Hartford Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Negroes began to enter en mass. One great Italian laborer sat next to me, dressed in wonderful homespun. Zoot-suited boys strolled the aisles, with their fancy hairdos. These creatures are so completely foreign to Hanover, and this is bad.

Dedication the other day of the Hopkins Center, a beautiful “home for the arts.” Speakers: Wallace Harrison, the architect, who said he was glad we didn’t have yet another “colonial” building, and Nelson Rockefeller, who struck me as a rather silly, but wonderfully intelligent in a crafty way, extrovert. Also Martin Hopkins, who reminded me of Frank Boyden, and Warner Bentley, a regular curmudgeon.

November 18, 1962

“The stoic temperament which refuses mere surrender has, after all, only two alternatives. It may elevate inaction into a principle, and look with detachment on the meaningless spectacle. Or it may act as though life did not matter, and construct a tentative and desperate humanism.”

—Albert Guerard, Jr. in Joseph Conrad (Direction ONE, 1947), p. 78. This, with the statement by Montaigne, should form the thematic backbone of my long-delayed (will it ever be written?) novel. There’s more of interest about Conrad in Guerard: “[Both] unreflective energy, good will and active humanitarianism [and] speculative apathy and cautious action . . . bring on disaster. [Neither detachment nor meddling can work.] The nature of the ego would seem, indeed, to leave no alternative of escape. The destructive element in which we are asked to immerse ourselves is no other than life itself. Why . . . is such a conclusive pessimism not merely depressing? To a certain extent, no doubt, the books are saved by their purely literary virtues: by density of style and imagination which none of Conrad’s contemporaries possessed. More important, the pessimism is conclusive but never merely passive. Conrad seldom concerned himself with accidental or uncombatted evil; he cast only a passing glance at motiveless malignancy or irremediable social abuse, and immediately looked beyond. For all his sense of cosmic indifference, he created an intensely moral universe. His heroes remain separate from the nature which threatens them, and continue their struggles to the end. . . . Finally, the charity of the pessimist, aware from the start of the perils which beset us, is always more rewarding than the disillusioned optimist’s outrage; Johnson is more charitable than Rousseau. . . . Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham. . . . There is serenity in acknowledging the worst. To define the human tragedy is not to accept it, or it is to accept it with such honesty and courage that lucidity survives the absurd.”

Marlow in Lord Jim, chapter VII, end: “A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready. To fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.”

Ned Perrin here last night, with Mansell and Laaspere. The desperation of it all; the impossibility of human communication.

December 9, 1962

“There is a permanent as well as a primitive myth in every great mythical heritage. This deals with aspects of reality which are supra-scientific rather than pre-scientific. . . . ‘Poetry,’ declares Santayana, ‘is religion which is no longer believed.’ . . . Religion, to transpose Santayana’s phrase, is poetry which is believed. Religion seeks mythically to grasp life in its unity and wholeness. This unity and wholeness can never be expressed in terms of complete rationality; for reason only observes and deduces.”—Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Truth of Myths,” in Philosophic Problems (Macmillan 1961, pp. 611, 612).

“‘Religion is forced to tell many little lies in the interest of a great truth, while science tells many little truths in the interest of a great lie.’ The great truth in the interest of which many little lies are told is that life and history have meaning and that the source and the fulfillment of that meaning lies beyond history. The great lie in the interests of which science tells many little truths is that spatio-temporal realities are self-contained and self-explanatory and that a scientific description of sequences is an adequate analysis of causes.” Ibid., p. 616.

1963

7 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

November 8, 1962–June

Riparius

June–September

12 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

September–December

January 27, 1963

Bob Daubenspeck (whose house and studio burned down last week) in Meeting this morning: “Many of us don’t mind being seen in public with friends like Tennyson and Wagner, but most are apprehensive about being seen in public with Jesus.”

February 2, 1963

Henry Williams has a collection of Quaker jokes! One tells of a weighty Friend addicted to punning. One day as he was seated in Meeting a woman dressed in satin of a brilliant scarlet color entered and sat down in front of him. He leaned forward and whispered into her ear: “Satin without, Satan within.”

February 14, 1963

Henry Terrie gave me a lift home. Bill Crawford was in the front seat with him, so I sat in the back. They were both just coming, obviously, from a meeting of the committee to revise (once more) the Freshman curriculum. And they continued their conversation, as though I wasn’t there.

“Well, do you think we’ll get the Department to accept this proposal?” Bill asked.

“There’s only one way to do it,” said Terrie. “That’s to keep quiet. If you say too much, if you explain the thing in detail, they start asking questions. So we won’t say anything this time, and maybe the results will be better.”

A very revealing conversation, showing (as I rather suspected beforehand!) that they are really interested not in improving education but in imposing their wills on their colleagues and, in the last analysis, in stymieing open discussion, and in “putting something over” on the rest of us. Terrie’s oily, emotional speech the last time, and then the rush tactics so openly and unsubtly resorted to by Crawford and Brady, gave the show away. And now we are about to have an encore!

Performed Ruth Thornburg’s “Bagatelles for Flute and Piano” with Dick Williamson at the Friday evening concert. Somehow we got rather disorganized with the 4th movement, and in effect I was improvising, and Dick simply stopped playing. But for some miraculous reason, it sounded good, and nobody seemed to notice. I continued after a while, Dick picked up a cue, and we finished safely! Ruth’s music is superb.

February 20, 1963

Broken condom last night. Should have realized it but didn’t, not in time anyway. Now we’ll see what happens. Jissim (learned that word from Wm. Burrough’s Naked Lunch, a vile book) not very abundant or propulsive. But Chrysanthi is so superbly fertile!

February 24, 1963

Just finished Orwell’s Coming Up for Air. This fits perfectly Hartley’s words about the attributres of the realistic novel. It gives us the pleasure of describing things we too have known or felt, the pleasure of recognition. The beginning is wonderfully funny, but then the long reminiscence about childhood becomes somewhat boring, and is told with too little technical sophistication. And yet the personna Orwell has created is just perfect: the 205-lb. “little man” of the suburbs, a little too perceptive perhaps, but nevertheless that wonderful combination of absurdity and depth. This book could very well be the model for a semi-political novel. The opening might be: “So I’m fat—what the hell!” The protagonist might also be a traveling salesman (à la Jimmy Bull?) who can have his fling with women, can have a rotten home life (Jim and Joan: religious difficulties, her vapid sophistication, his commercial ambitions). But the pacifist propaganda would have to be done very subtly.

February 27, 1963

Naked Lunch: a wet dream writ large.

But God’s own descent

Into flesh was meant

As a demonstration

That the supreme merit

Lay in risking spirit

In substantiation.

—Robert Frost.

March 10, 1963

Tidbits (titbits?) from Burrough’s scatalogical tome Naked Lunch:

❡ Sample menu (p. 149):

The Clear Camel Piss Soup with boiled Earth Worms
The Filet of Sun-Ripened Sting Ray
based with Eau de Cologne and garnished with Nettles

The After-Birth Suprême de Boeuf,
cooked in drained crank case oil,
served with a piquant sauce of rotten egg yolks
and crushed bed bugs

The Limburger Cheese sugar cured in diabetic urine doused in Canned Heat Flamboyant

❡ Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm. . . . Through these orifices transmute your body. . . . The way out is the way IN. (p. 229)

❡ Sir Charles Shumigton defines pain as “the psychic adjunt of an imperative protective reflex.” The vegetative nervous system expands and contracts in response to visceral rhythms and external stimuli, expanding to stimuli which are experienced as pleasurable—sex, food, agreeable social contacts, etc.—contracting from pain, anxiety, fear, discomfort, boredom. Morphine alters the whole cycle of expansion and contraction, release and tension. The sexual function is deactivated, peristalsis inhibited, the pupils cease to react in response to light and darkness. The organism neither contracts from pain nor expands to normal sources of pleasure. It adjusts to a morphine cycle. The addict is immune to boredom. He can look at his shoe for hours or simply stay in bed. He needs no sexual outlet, no social contacts, no work, no diversion, no exercise, nothing but morphine. Morphine may relieve pain by imparting to the organism some of the qualities of a plant. (Pain could have no function for plants which are, for the most part, stationary, incapable of protective reflexes.) (p. 248)

March 16, 1963

When Mike Choukas returned to Samos and went to his parental village, one day a χωρικός came to him, carrying a rock, and explaining that that day, as he was plowing, he had composed a poem honoring Choukas’s arrival, and, not having pencil and paper in his house, had scratched the verses onto this rock.

October 21, 1963

Larry Zalcman told me the story of a friend of his who wanted a bass fiddle terribly but couldn’t afford one. Then he heard of a contest: the person who could write the word “money” the most times on a postcard would win. He bought a special pen and began practicing by sending letters to his friends on the back of postage stamps! Then he executed the card, and won the prize of $300, with which he bought his fiddle. Only in America!

November 4, 1963

Dottie Campion rushed up to me at Henry Williams’s house to say how overwhelmed she had been by Saint Francis. “Oh,” she said, “I felt just like selling everything and dressing in sackcloth!” I think she meant it: that is, she really did feel that way for a moment. But her husband had just finished telling me how he had bought a Greyhound bus and fitted it out with stove, refrigerator, electric plant, lavatory, and eight bunks, for use on family skiing trips!

Yesterday at Monthly Meeting I was rather vehement about Friends’ inclination to do nothing whenever a “crisis” presented itself in Hanover. Henry said, “Yes, but we must act in love, not in hate!” What he really meant by this lovely formula was, “We’d be safer doing nothing.” But today he phoned me. He, on his own initiative, had decided to organize a group of faculty to collect money for Negro Rights outside the fieldhouse tomorrow before and after Governor Wallace’s speech. I shall be one of the collectors.

D. H. Lawrence, quoted by Graham Hough in Dark Sun, end of the chapter on “The Man Who Died” (quoting “Apocalypse”?):

❡ For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower, beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. . . . The magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. . . . That I am a part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race. . . . There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind.

December 1, 1963

President Kennedy was assassinated ten days ago, on November 22. I heard the news at the end of my English 2 class, and from then until Monday evening I shared a kind of paralysis that seemed to descend on everyone. We stayed glued to radio or televsion (at Peter Janicki’s house), compulsively, even when (i.e., most of the time) nothing new was to be learned. We also felt a need to be with people, talk to them, first about what had happened (knots of people could be seen everywhere, and always the same incredulity, the same questions could be heard), and then simply about anything, in order to forget for a moment what had happened. The evening of the assassination we had dinner guests: Colonel and Mrs. Furlong, the Kelseys, Herbolds, and Laasperes. Saturday night we went to Chauncey Loomis’s house and stayed until 2:30 a.m. talking departmental politics, but only as an excuse not to repeat what was really on our minds. Sunday we spent the afternoon with the Clancys. The Quakers had a memorable meeting Sunday morning and an even more memorable special service on Monday. I spoke of the blow to order, to stable government, and of the miracle that our government does continue peacefully even after such an occurrence. We take this too much for granted, and we should think back to the times of the Plantagenets and Lancastrians, when ordered government was the exception rather than the rule. . . . There was a good deal of sentimentality connected with Mrs. Kennedy and the children, but it was honest sentimentality. (Chrysanthi’s first reaction, on hearing the news: “Two more orphans in the world!”) There was also a good deal of the feeling of absurdity—the motiveless assassination, and then the equally motiveless (so it seemed) shooting of the assassin, and by the owner of a striptease joint! Fate, coincidence, ineptitude, and sheer gratuitous evil seemed the order of the day. Not all Dartmouth students reacted as one might have wished. One, when the news was announced in the bookstore, yelled “Hooray, he had it coming to him.”

David Mirza visited last week. His delightful stories about the stockbroker’s board room, the true microcosm, where every human emotion, every social class, is seen reacting to similiar stimuli.—From the crass opportunist (The public are a bunch of fools. You just gotta be smart and you can put anything over on ’em. Why, just the other day I cleaned up twenty grand on a little manipulation . . .) to the one who is sincerely convinced that stocks are the bulwark of free enterprise, which is the bulwark of all civilized decencies!

David also told of his father. An immigrant from Syria, he earned a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins, taught one year, and then abruptly quit. He had decided that teaching did not give him enough time to do what he wanted to do. So he spent the rest of his life as the proprietor of an oriental rug concession in a Dayton, Ohio department store. If he sold one rug a month, David said, he had enough to live on. So he spent his time sitting in his corner and chatting and philosophizing with a stream of people who would seek him out. Or he would stay up all night talking with visiting professors, publishers, and writers. He also wrote books—children’s books, retelling Persian fables.

More departmental politics, in the best C. P. Snow fashion. Last year Crawford, Brady, and Terrie & Co. pushed through a revison of English 25 after they were defeated in their proposed revision of English 1 & 2. Now, at our first department meeting, Harry Bond announced that the CDC had recommended that the revision be rescinded. Conveniently, Brady had left, Crawford was on a fellowship to Italy, and Terrie was on leave! Also, John Finch announced that he had never sent the voted proposal in to the Administration, because, he said, it was too late in the year. The skunk! Bond reminded us that according to Robert’s Rules of Order a rescinding motion could only be initiated by someone who had originally voted for the original proposal. Conveniently, Harry Schultz had changed his mind and was ready to make the motion. Someone asked about Terrie. What would he say? Shouldn’t he be present? Bond said he had talked privately with Terrie, who had also—miraculously, it seems—had a change of heart, and had given Bond his proxy. The motion was seconded and passed almost unanimously. I had been against it, but I feel that the handling of the rescinding was disgraceful. Later, the rumor went around that Bond had secured Terrie’s consent through a deal. Terrie agreed, so the story goes, to offer his support to the rescinding action providing Crawford be received back without prejudice. This brought home to me—I am so naïve—that Crawford had been awarded his fellowship, in part at least, to be gotten rid of. By going away he automatically gave up the chairmanship of Freshman English, and his position on the various faculty committees he had been appointed to during his meteoric rise. Apparently Crawford was cultivated as being an energetic, forceful, efficient person, but then he “got too many ideas,” tried to “stir things up,” offended “certain parties,” and thus had been relegated to the doghouse. Perhaps he deserves it (I, after all, side with Bond, Perrin, Hunter, Loomis, Handler & Co. against the Crawford-Terrie axis). But still . . . the whole trouble here is that hatred and conniving are all done with such gentility, such courtesy. It is all so civilized, and basically corrupt.

My Cavafy essay is finished and ready for Columbia University Press. But Dalven’s publishers are withholding the translation rights to the 35 poems I have freshly translated.

Nice letter from Jeff Amory, now in Athens for a year.

December 16, 1963

A most flattering review of my Hartley book in the Dutch periodical Literair Paspoart. Among other things the critic, C. Buddingh, says: “[Bien’s study] is een der beste kritische geschriften die ik de laatste jaren las en ik hoop dat Peter Bien al weer druk bezig is een andere romancier te becommentariëren . . .”

❡ From a scientific point of view, optimism and pessimism are alike objectionable: optimism assumes, or attempts to prove, that the universe exists to please us, and pessimism that it exists to displease us. Scientifically, there is no evidence that it is concerned with us either one way or the other. The belief in either pessimism or optimism is a matter of temperament, not of reason. —Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 759.

❡ The world of high classicism exists simultaneously with the cult of death; beneath civilization lies “Kultur,” in Naphta’s sense. The old antitheses! Yet Castorp half-awakened, is able to reconcile them. The “People of the Sun” live with such exquisite humanity and form precisely because they know of cruelty and tragedy at the roots of life; they realize the power of death but do not abdicate before it, they create form because they are aware of the strength of dissolution. Settembrini, who acknowledges only the world of light, is a Philistine; But Naphta, who has betrayed that world, is evil. Both are wrong, and their endless playing-off of death against life, illness against health, spirit against nature, is essentially meaningless. Man must be “master of the antinomies”: he must stand between them and understand life through his knowledge of death, and health through illness. Not Settembrini’s reason, but love is stronger than death. —Henry Hatfield, Thomas Mann, pp. 79–80.

1964

12 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

January 1–March 19

SS Christopher Colombo

March 20–29

Napoli, Hotel Turistico, Via Marcello 5

March 30–31

Corinth (Hotel Byron), Nauplion, Epidauros, Mycenae, Νέο Ψυχικό (Καίτη Πρατικάκη)

April 1–2

18 Οδός Βενιζέλου, Νέο Ψυχικό

April 2–23

Iraklion, Hotel Cosmopolite; Haniá, Hotel Minoa

April 25–28

18 Οδός Βενιζέλου, Νέο Ψυχικό

April 29–May 20

Langadas

May 21

Delphi

May 29–30

En route to Aegina, Poros, Hydra

June 5

Σαρανταπόρου 11, Θεσσαλονίκη

June 17–July 3

Agia Triada, home of Mitsos Rousakis

July 4–August

New York City, World’s Fair

Sept. 14–16

Hanover

Sept. 17–Dec. 31

April 2, 1964

Hotel Byron, Corinth, Greece

Class D hotel, with pillows like sandbags, and sagging beds and a smelly WC, but lovely, white, and clean. Price for four of us: 55 dr. The owners, a brother and sister, both unmarried. The sister greeted us effusively as though we were the only customers she had had in ten years (which wasn’t true). Her mannerisms were particularly childish, with the kind of self-effacing, shy smile seen in Greek adolescent girls, the equivalent, I suppose, to the self-effacing courtesy that is customary in Japan. Later we discovered that she was a γεροντοκόρη. This fit: she was somewhat grotesque, and pathetic, the adult whose emotional life and outward mannerisms had been petrified prematurely. In our room we found an embroidery on the table, obviously hers, part of the group of pillowcases, etc. she had prepared for her dowry, and had never used. Chrysanthi felt this very strongly, and explained that what with so many wars in Greece, the women far outnumbered the men, and thus many remain unmarried. The sister also hugged our children profusely, but it was interesting that she was completely ingenuous in her childish way. Δεν επαντρεύτηκα, she said, και αγαπώ τα παιδιά. The next day, when Alec returned somewhat longfaced over the death of a butterly he had found on the radiator grill of the taxi, she presented him with a fresh butterfly!

April 16, 1964

18 Οδός Βενιζέλου, Νέο Ψυχικό, Αθήνα

Alec, at his Greek kindergarten, has to say the Ἀγιος ο Θεός, άγιος ισχυρός, άγιος αθάνατος, ελεησόν ημάς. He came home proudly today and recited it, but it came out like this: Αι σκυλός, α-σχημός !

April 22, 1964

To the National theater with the Choukases and Mrs. Κακούρη. They played Τα Πάθη του Χριστού, an old miracle play from Byzantine times, probably bits and snatches of other works put together rather artlessly by the monks of the time. The work was played beautifully, but itself had little to recommend it. Christ was presented very realistically, first on the cross, from where he spoke to Mary just before he died, then in his appearance to Mary Magdalene on the third day, and finally in his appearance to the assembled disciples. Each time Christ appeared, a woman behind us in the audience spoke out spontaneously, Αχ, τι ωραίο ! And indeed it was truly beautiful the way he did appear on the stage, right out of the old icons, he seemed. The woman’s spontaneous reaction reminded me of the incident Kazantzakis relates in Report to Greco where the man is reciting the passion on the ship to Palestine, and the woman cries out Παιδί μου !

April 25, 1964

Ξενοδοχείο Κοσμοπολίτη, Ηράκλειον, Κρήτη

Kazantzakis has words for everything. Yesterday morning, just before Mike Antonakis, Jeff Amory, and I left for Piraeus to sail for Crete, I translated something very à propos: Τι ωραίο να ξεκόπτεις από τη γης που αγαπάς και να φύγεις· τι χαρά να δεις τη γη κι τους ανθρώπους που αγαπάς να αλαργήσουν. I’m botching the actual quote, but whatever it was it “spoke to our condition.”

The boat, the Αιγεύς, was to leave at 6:30. We were warned to arrive early, lest someone claim our beds (such things happen, apparently). Accordingly, we arrived at 3:30. But no boat! It was delayed, and did not get to Piraeus until after 7:00, and did not sail until nearly 11:00. While we were waiting, Alec walked absent-mindedly into the tray of a waiter in a coffee shop, and slit open his eyelid. But other than this, no further casualties. But what a boat! The whole vessel reeked of urine; the toilets looked as though they hadn’t been cleaned in six months. Our cabin was deep down in the stern, just above the propeller shaft, as we discovered once the boat started out. Cluck-cluck-crack-bam; cluck-cluck-crack-bam, all night long. But we were aristocratic in our second class comfort! Most of the passengers had only deck space. Men lined their valises up in a row and stretched out between them and the railing, so that they seemed in their coffins; one peasant lady in her black skirts and her μπολίδα was curled up on top of three large pack-baskets. Other people had claimed bench-space, or were doubled over or crouching in various corners. Early arrivals had spread blankets out to their full dimensions, thus giving themselves ample space to breathe. Two intrepid Americans sacked out in sleeping bags on the upper deck. When the boat finally got under way we went up to the deck, trying without much success to find a spot where the wind did not carry the stench of urine. Some boys with guitars were singing in harmony in one corner, not too successfully; in another, a young soldier was playing a bouzouki rather amateurishly, but was drowned out by a transistor radio. I got to talking with a young student at the University of Athens Medical School, and we stayed up till 1:00 a.m. He, as is so typical, hoped to come to the U.S. because of the lack of opportunity here in Greece either for doing research or even for practicing, since there are more physicians, apparently, than the demand requires. He had read two of Kazantzakis’s novels, which rather surprised and pleased me. . . . The boat finally arrived at Herakleion at 3:00 o’clock (it was due at 8:30 a.m.). How nice—especially after the propeller and also the terrific pitching—to set foot on land! The approach to Herakleion is very dramatic. First you see mountains: snowcapped Ψηλορείτης, cone-shaped Στρόμπολι, and to the left Γιούχτας, which, in a startling way, offers the profile of the sleeping Zeus: hair, eyes, nose, mouth, and beard flowing down (as Kazantzakis says) to the plain:

On the left, before you reach the harbor, is the rocky, barren island of Δια, completely uninhabited and uninhabitable—an immense round of solid rock that still seems to show how it formed: it seems to be the solidified state of great flows of molten stone. Then as you come nearer: the Venetian fort guarding the harbor entrance, and you have arrived.

We all felt terrible: sick and tired. But we determined to do something with the remainder of the day. Our first stop was the Historical Museum. They have a room dedicated to the heroes of the revolutions and uprisings, together with mementoes of Prince George: his desk, uniform, a large portrait, etc. Then there are costumes and embroideries, a typical interior of a Cretan χαμόσπιτο, with the τζάκι, water-bag, carved walking stick, the σταμνί in one corner for washing, the embroidery on the wall next to the high, elaborate bed, and kneading trough on the floor, the walls whitewashed and immaculate.

The main attraction for us, of course, was the Αἴθουσα Νίκου Καζαντζάκη. Here was his library and desk, plus some photos and portraits, plus the original MSS of Ὅ Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται and Ὅ τελευταῖος πειρασμός. Also some letters, including several to his father, in one of which he speaks of wanting to become a professor at the University of Athens. Another, from Moscow in 1927, describes the scene there in words almost exactly the same as those used in Ἀναφορά στόν Γκρέκο. In two display cases on the opposite wall are his various books, including the myriad translations. Over the bookshelf, it was interesting to see a rather large icon of the crucifixion. The library comprised books in Greek, Latin, English, Spanish, French, and Italian. I noted the book about Nietzsche presented to him by someone in Paris when he first went there to study. He speaks of this in Greco. Other mementoes are report cards from the school in Naxos, and a commonplace book in which K. copied out poems he enjoyed.

We proceeded from here to his grave on the Venetian rampart overlooking St. Minas, the entire city, and the sea in the distance. The gate was locked; we shall have to return tomorrow. Apparently the grave was desecrated by religious fanatics, necessitating the fence and lock.

The city itself is small and charming. Many things are just as K. described them—still. Especially the courtyards. I peeked in to many, and there were the γλάστρες βασιλικό and the tree in the middle, and the lovely smell of flowers in bloom.

Strolling near the walls, we heard music from a small tavern and saw an old man dancing with a plate on his head. It is good to know that this still exists elsewhere than in Never On Sunday!

Tomorrow I hope to see K.’s nephew Νίκος Σακλαμπάνης and his mother, who is K.’s sister.

The other day I spoke with Αλέξανδρος Σεγκόπουλος for an hour. He is Cavafy’s executor. He showed me the entire correspondence with Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace. Harcourt actually negotiated with him only for the thirty or so “early poems.” The rights to the others they bought from Hogarth Press directly—the “exclusive English language rights” unfortunately. Sengopoulos had Cavafy’s armchair, table, etc. He confirmed what has been often said of Cavafy’s charm and fascination as a conversationalist. He also said that one must be very careful of Malanos, whose books are full of lies and κακία. Apparently Malanos was an unsuccessful poet, and his attacks on Cavafy were a kind of sour grapes. Sengopoulos especially said that Malanos is not right about Cavafy’s anomaly, that he exaggerates and distorts.

April 28, 1964

en route Χανιά-Αθήνα via Olympic Airways

Sadly, we returned to Athens after almost a week of enlightenment, beauty, and rest in Crete. Even today, the last, which Mike and I had thought would be spent just killing time until departure, was spent profitably and enjoyably. We wandered around Χανιά, through its narrow lanes, down to the harbor and out onto the breakwater, and found ourselves suddenly at the central church, a strange building with a barrel-vaulted roof, and one tower a campanile, the other a minaret with the μολύβι and the μεσο-φέγγαρο missing. At the unexpected invitation of two boys, we climbed the 100 steps of the minaret and emerged on the highest of the two parapets, to see the entire city in panorama. The boy explained that the back part of the church, the present sanctuary, was originally Greek, the middle part, with the barrel vault, was originally Venetian, and the front, the present “porch,” etc., was part of the Turkish mosque. This explains the strange appearance of this disparate building.

We went next to the Historical Museum, where the directress was impressed by our knowledge of the Greek language, and also of Cretan history, which was somewhat familiar to both of us, of course, from Kazantzakis’s various books. We saw more of Prince George—pictures of the landing at Σοῦδα (Κ. was wrong in saying that he landed at’Hpἀκλειον); we saw banners and τουφέκια from the various revolutions; we saw a picture of Δασκαλογιάννης, who was flayed alive by the Turks, and about whom a ballad was written (cf. Notopoulos’s record). She told us the story of how during a bombardment of the region by a Russian battleship one of the cannons backfired, killing the Russian crew. The barrage had previously ruined the church of Ἅγιος Ἠλίας, and the czar of Russia—being a God-fearing soul—took this as a judgment by God on behalf of St. Elias, and rebuilt the little church, furnishing it with icons that we later saw when we visited the village of Agios Elias. The guide also told of the incident when the Greek banner was shot down, its staff broken, how soldier after soldier held it up, offering himself as a human staff in full view of enemy fire. As soon as one was killed, the next caught the flag before it touched the ground. According to the story, this so impressed the enemy that they ceased fire!

We spoke to this woman about the Turks. Mike asked her if they left anything good on the island, and the answer was No—nothing. She didn’t blame the sultan, though, but rather his corrupt underlings. When, for instance, the sultan lowered the head tax, the functionary collected the old tax and pocketed the difference. As the woman spoke of all this, she became more and more emotional, and seemed on the verge of tears.

A benign-looking Englishman was in one room, carefully transcribing some Byzantine musical notation. Hearing me speak Greek with the woman, he said, in a most peculiar idiom, “You have good the Greek don’t you!”

We’ve just flown over Μῆλος. The water below looks like μουσαμᾶς.

Leaving the museum, we went by taxi to Venizelos’s grave high over Haniá. The Greeks still have a genius for dramatic sites, although they’re not hard to find in Greece. The taxi driver had a new Pontiac, just three days old. He asked us how much a Pontiac costs in the States, and I said about $3000. He said he bought this for $7000! By time payments, of course. He has to pay in three years, at the rate of $150 per month—450 drachmas. How can he ever make enough to cover this?

At the grave is a simple inscription, something like: ἴσως ἔκανε λάθη, ἀλλά ἦταν ἕνας ἀληθινός ἄντρας. The father’s grave is near that of the son, Σοφοκλῆς, who died about three months ago. But the really impressive thing is the statue of liberty, with the inscription ἐλευθερία . . . ἱερόν. This is a huge female figure looking out over the plain toward Haniá. She bears a warrior’s helmet and is carrying a shield. When you walk around to the front to see the face, you are immensely surprised. For here is an ugly face indeed, a kind of Byzantine rigor, with fat cheeks and, most startling of all, two huge pointed goggle-eyes staring out at you like oversized buttons. At the statue’s base, strewn about, were the circular forms of various wreaths that had been placed there and then abandoned. The flowers had withered away and disappeared, leaving these macabre right-shaped “bones.” A shepherd was driving his flock along the steep incline just below the statue. The sheep passed by it, baaing, the shepherd-boy swishing at them with a piece of white cloth, and making chuckling noises with his mouth.

April 29, 1964

18 Βενιζέλου, Νέο Ψυχικό, Αθήνα

I am relating this trip in a most arbitrary order. The day before we returned by air from Haniá was a very interesting one, too. In the morning we went to the Archeological Museum at Iraklion, where the finds from Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Agia Triada, etc. are deposited. The actual wall-paintings from Knossos are of course but mere fragments, and it is easy to be duped by the restorations into thinking that more was discovered than actually was. The finds are in no way as startlingly beautiful as those from Mycenae, in the Εθνικό Μουσείο of Athens. But it was nice to see the snake goddess with her thimble-waist and big round breasts, and the acrobat engraved on a knife-handle, and the huge double-axes, and the large saw, almost identical with present day two-man saws.

At noon, Mike and I took the bus to Haniá, Jeff having decided to stay a few extra days in Iraklion. As usual, two people had been assigned the same seat, and there was a sudden flaring up of tempers and much effort to shift responsibility. At last a modus vivendi was achieved when the girl involved was allowed to sit in the seat opposite the driver, the one reserved for the πράκτορας. Some official protested that this was forbidden, but she remained nevertheless. Later, just before we entered a certain town apparently noted for its police, the driver politely requested her to move back, and she did.

A hawker visited us just before departure, selling material for trousers: 400 δρ. Πού να βρείτε πανταλόνια για τετρακόσια! he kept insisting, but he had a most quizzical manner, as though he himself knew—and wanted us to know that he knew—that he was taking everyone for a ride. He seemed to be playing a game in which the actual sale of his merchandise was entirely incidental. Needless to say, there was no sale.

The road from Iraklio starts climbing immediately. Hairpin turns, sheer drops, absence of guardrails! Up and up, to the very crest of the range, with beautiful views of the sea at various points, and of mountains at other points, and occasionally a fertile patch with vineyards. I feared the driver would go racing down the other side in neutral, but he didn’t. There was constant honking, at every curve, and whenever a car or truck or bus approached from the other direction both vehicles had to stop, and then inch past one another, gingerly.

The mountainsides are cultivated, wherever possble, and often far from any village. The goat tracks are visible everywhere, up and down, across and back, and the peasants must travel long distances each day to reach their holdings. It is staggering to think that out of one of these mountain villages came Domenicos Theotocopoulos, also Venizelos.

We passed Σοῦδα, where Prince George landed; Also we passed the road to the Arkadion monastery, 18 kilometers to the south. This I wanted to visit, but could not, for we were rushing to catch the last day or two, before the Easter break, of the filming of Michael Cacoyannis’s film Zorba.

(Alec today said that the sunset was “bumpy.”)

May 10, 1964

Item: re: the citification of Greeks. A family near us had help from another family nearby. The woman went back to her village, a great center of λάδι production, and brought a huge jug of λάδι to give to the family as a present, to show her appreciation. The next day, to her surprise, the jug was returned with an accompanying note saying, “We’re not beggars, we have money to buy λάδι. Thus the urban demon of self-sufficiency wins again!

Item: overheard last night at the theater where we saw Ο αντιπρόσωπος (“The Deputy”). Just before curtain time, from two ladies behind us, very chagrined because the curtain was five minutes late: Τι νομίζουν; Νομίζουν είμαστε χωριάτισσες; Νομίζουν είναι η πρώτη φορά που πηγαίνουμε στο θέατρο; One more victory for the urban spirit!

A propos of this, in today’s paper there was a long review of Prevelakis’s new novel, Η κεφαλή της Μέδουσας. Prevelakis’s prescription for our problem is a return to λαϊκός πολιτισμός. Incidentally, Prevelakis told me the other day that one of the characters in this book is modeled on Kazantzakis.

Yesterday, Chrysanthi and I visited Kimon Friar, who has a lovely apartment at Καλλιδρομίο 10. Ανδρέας Καραντώνης came in shortly after we arrived. He is known as the best Greek critic. At first I thought he was blind; he had a peculiarly blank kind of stare, and his eyes seemed all milky, as though they had no irises or pupils. He was extremely simple —on looking at him you would think he was some stolid businessman without a thought in his head except food and account books (indeed he was rather plump and well fed). We talked briefly about Kazantzakis, whom he admired but said was definitely of a past generation, and not at all an influence on contemporary Greek writers. It was especially K.’s rhetorical quality, his μεγάλο στόμα, that the moderns rejected. Even his existentialism, according to Friar, is distinctly old hat, and is theoretical and academic rather than truly, livingly, contemporary. I asked how the Nobel Prize was thought of here, and Karandonis replied that of course most Greeks had never heard of Seferis but that his fellow poets respect him greatly. His work is for the choice, the elect; it can never have the universal appeal that Kazantzakis has. Friar mentioned that in Seferis’s translation of The Waste Land, “rag” in “O that Shakespearian rag” is rendered κουρέλι!

Friar was in good form. The flat was lovely, full of art and color and books, and with a beautiful view of Athens and the surrounding mountains. Friar said that though he’d lived in the U.S. since the age of 2, he was Greek at heart, and had come here to spend the rest of his days. He wanted to die here in Greece! He said that although the amount of “culture” in NYC is so much greater than here, in Athens art is practiced, new works are written and painted, the emphasis isn’t so much on playing or reproducing the past. Also, and one is hard put to know exactly what is meant by this, Friar insisted that here in Greece “life is lived.” To be sure, he had many adjustments to make. He had to learn the spirit of δεν πειράζει and δεν βαριέσαι. He had to learn never to apologize—no Greek ever apologizes, says Friar. He quickly got used to the little annoyances, including the cheating, the overcharging, etc. He learned to appreciate the good things and to overlook the bad, a lesson that both Chrysanthi and I have yet to learn.

Friar chatted about Kazantzakis. I said I was amazed that K. had been able to write so much in such a short time, and Friar replied that the reason was very simple: K. did nothing else but write! When Friar stayed with him at Antibes he used to go to Cannes every night to dance until 3 a.m., and when he showed up at K.’s study the next morning ready for work, K. would ask him what he had done the night before. Friar would tell him and K. would say Bravo! He appreciated the γλεντζές because he wasn’t one himself.

Friar hasn’t become any less modest since the last time I saw him. He still has his gallery of famous figures on the wall. He pointed to Arthur Miller’s picture and said, characteristically, “Arthur just sent me a copy of his new play.”

The most surprising event of the visit was that Friar offered me a job as assistant editor of Greek Heritage! I had to say No. Why? If I were single I would jump at it. I told him I have a responsibility to return to Dartmouth, since the College financed my trip here. Also, I imagine that work on the magazine, although certainly having its glamorous and interesting side, would be largely the drudgery of copyediting. Friar himself said that for two years he has been so busy with the magazine that he hasn’t done any writing of his own, and this is a bad sign.

Friar told me that someone is already writing a book on Cavafy. But that doesn’t matter, he said. “You can write a better book.”

I wonder if—when Friar said that one can “live” in Greece—he meant that one can find and keep boys more easily. Also, I wonder if being his “assistant” would mean compromising oneself in any way, either in reality or in the eyes of those who know of Friar’s sexual proclivities.

May 12, 1964

C.’s mother has an ulcer. So does George. C. said that about half the girls at the Quaker school had ulcers. Here is the hidden fruit of the war! And what about that stupid cliché that only Americans have ulcers?

No, it turns out that it isn’t an ulcer but a “fallen stomach” for which an elastic belt and a special diet are prescribed.

May 13, 1964

From Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, p. 39: ❡ The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety.

(This presupposes Tillich’s distinction between fear and anxiety: fear has an object and thus calls forth courage to meet that object; anxiety has no object, “or rather . . . its object is the negation of every object” (p. 36)—i.e., nonbeing.)

May 17, 1964

Today the second annual Greek peace march took place, from Marathon to Athens. Last year the Karamanlis government prohibited the demonstration and broke it up with tanks; this year Papandreou said that although the other Western countries prohibited such demonstrations [sic] and although it transgressed the Greek constitution, he would not interfere. Nice of him!

The slogan was Λαμπράκης ζει! Grigoris Lambrakis was murdered by the Greek secret police in the open air after he gave a speech in Thessaloniki. He had apparently infuriated the Court because he organized the demonstrations against Queen Frederiki in London, calling for amnesty for political prisoners. Today his spirit was very much alive as the marchers descended on Athens shouting Λαμπράκης ζει, είμαστε Λαμπράκηδες! As they passed the Averof prison, where female political prisoners are still held although 20 years have elapsed since the civil war, the shout altered to ΑΜ-ΝΗΣ-ΤΙΑ. The women in the prison waved white handkerchiefs from behind their prison windows. At the huge congregation at the end of the march, the group was greeted by Mrs. Pauling, and also by Bertrand Russell’s representative. The latter had been expelled from Greece (as last year) upon his arrival, but apparently he went back to Rome and was somehow able to embarrass the Greek government into reversing its decision and letting him enter after all.

There was a heavy downpour yesterday afternoon, the first in months. Obviously the pious will say that God was punishing the marchers. But they, wet to the skin, entered Athens dancing and barefooted.

Last night we visited a neighbor’s house, a man who works in the τελωνείο. What one couldn’t help remarking was the complete absence of anything really Greek. He served whiskey and cocktails, also little tidbits—cheese and crackers, etc.—just as at an American gathering. He also said that he never goes to the taverna, but entertains at home. Another couple was there and we spent the evening looking at amateur movies of their babies and wives, and their holiday in Rhodes! The house itself was American style: combination living and dining room, a suite of armchairs, and a couch, coffee table, etc. Only the children were different; they sat like automatons, not breathing a word for hours. When the other couple left, the wife remarked Τι παιδί έχω· ποτέ δεν ακούει!

May 19, 1964

From Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο, σελ. 401: Επειδή η ζωή μου ήταν πάντα πολύ απλή, θεωρήθηκε επικίντυνα πολύπλοκη. (Since my life was always extremely simple, people considered it dangerously complicated.)

May 21, 1964

Λαγκαδᾶς

Feast day of Saint Constantine the Great and Saint Eleni, his mother. We took the bus last night and came to Salonika. This morning, early, George drove us to Langadas to see the Αναστενάρηδες. We went immediately to the κονάκι, which was the house of the αρχιαναστενάρης. From outside, the monotonous banging of the νταούλι could be heard, and the scratchy, monotonous melody of the Cretan lyre (played with a bow—a tiny tiny viol, like a rebec). We entered the house: hallway leading into a small dark room, low ceiling of dressed boards, one small window, dirt floor tamped hard as rock, τσάκι in the center of one wall, large bed with brass bedsteads, other bed along the wall opposite the tsaki. Dark. The only lights were from the wall opposite the window. Here, on a mantle-like shelf, were various icons. They say that these icons were rescued from the church in the πατρίδα of the chief Anastenaris’s family. The church burned, but the icons miraculously did not. Two such marvelous icons were brought here to Langadas, one to the village of Agia Eleni near Serres. The icons were on the mantel, and below on the floor, on top of a heavy, decorative blanket, was a candle-holder with many burning candles, and also a receptacle with burning incense. In this room a man was dancing. About 40 years old, and good looking, dressed in a white shirt with open collar, and ordinary trousers. He held an icon in his hand. The icon had a red cover over it, attached to which were many votive offerings, which tingled like bells. This man danced forward and backward with short steps, swaying his body from side to side and gracefully transferring the icon from one side to the other, his head inclined toward his right shoulder, his eyes sometimes closed, sometimes staring straight ahead. A woman told us that he had been dancing and praying since early morning in an attempt to make the icon of St. Constantine move (of its own accord). Every so often he emitted short shrieks—EEEK! EEEK!—grimacing his face. Several times he did this in front of the icon of Constantine. Once or twice he lifted this icon and shook it vigorously, as though trying to convince it to move. He danced inside for some time, but periodically danced his way out of the house, made a little turn in the yard, always with the same inclined head, the icon held out in his arms in the same way, and then returned inside. An older lady dressed in a μπόλια and black robe wiped his face every so often, as he was sweating profusely. Several times she implored him: Φτάνει πια! But he continued his dance, even when the music stopped. (The lyre-player endured, but the drummers relieved each other from time to time.) Finally he stopped, put on his jacket, and went out into the yard. Immediately he began talking as though nothing had happened—as though he was completely unaware of the state he’d just been in. I asked him if his σόϊ came from Thrace, and he said yes: Ανατολική Θράκη. But then an Italian television interviewer came and started pumping him with questions: What did you feel like? How long did you dance? He immediately clammed up. When asked how long he’d danced, he replied, Δε ξέρω, συ να ξέρεις. Then he disappeared inside. These Italians were particularly officious; they followed the dancers everywhere to take pictures, sitting in front of them, running along with them, etc. Later, the αρχιαναστενάρης, justifiably disturbed, passed once with the θυμιατήρι, placed it under the nose of the photographer, and chased him back a few meters!

After this short intermission, the dance began again with the same man and also, now, a young boy about 18 years old who I afterwards learned was the son of the αρχιαναστενάρης. The man held the icon again, the boy had over his shoulders the special kerchief that the Anastenarides use. Soon afterwards, an older woman joined the troupe. She danced in a slightly different way, raising her arms in spasmodic movements. Later, when another officious photographer came, this time right into the konaki, with flood lights, and shone the intense light right into her face, she did not even blink, but kept on dancing, always with the identical expression. This rapid, intense dancing lasted about three quarters of an hour, until the archianastenaris came and shouted to us all: Έχω! Έξω! We filed out through the narrow hallway. The icons were now placed on chairs outside of the house, then transferred in a procession to another site in back of the house. While all this was happening, one of the family led the cows out from their stable in the back part of the house; thus ecstasy and everyday concerns proceeded synchronously.

At this point the αγιασμός took place: the blessing of the water. A pail of water was placed in front of the icons, which were once more lined up on chairs,. The archianastenaris blessed the water, kissing the icons and throwing some coins into the pail. (The local priest naturally refused to perform the blessing, as the Church quite rightly deems all this idolatry.) The lady who danced previously approached with a little tuft of stalks, dipped them into the water, and sprinkled the surrounding people. Then the rest of the anastenarides kissed the icons and took some of the water in glasses; after them the remaining people of the village.

Immediately after this, two animals were slaughtered, a calf and a sheep. Two young boys, about 14 years old, did the butchering. The animals were flayed, dismembered, and cut into small sections, which were distributed raw to the village houses, starting with those of the anastenarides, and continuing to as many houses as the meat lasted.

After this, all the group danced in front of the αγιασμός: ο αρχιαναστενάρης, his wife, his son, the man who screamed EEEK, the woman with the spasmotic hands, plus several new initiates: a man dressed immaculately in stiff collar and shining vest and tie, and a young soldier (who had formerly taken his turn at the drum), and another young man about 20 years old, wearing a pullover, all the time with the same tune on the lyre, the same incessant beating of the drum.

Thus ended the morning’s preparations. As we left to go to have lunch, I overheard the archianastenaris say, Πάω να ταΐσω τα ζώα.

At 4 in the afternoon we took our places to await the fire-walking. George, a VIP in the village, secured an invitation from the νομάρχης entitling us to seats, and we settled ourselves in the front row, directly behind the wire enclosure. So far so good. We resigned ourselves to the long wait. The sun was beating down, but luckily we had an umbrella to shade us. Chrysanthi wrote letters; I wrote in this diary. We enjoyed looking at the people around us—lots of foreigners, including some Negroes, who aroused great curiosity in the village, and the ever-present photographers who had been so offensive in the morning. Soon the area inside the wire fence began to fill too, at first with just a person here, a person there, but soon, so it seemed, there were more people inside than out. The νομάρχης was going mad, as were the committee in charge of arrangements, although all maintained good humor. One of the men was an acquaintance of George’s, a good-looking farmer in his forties, owner of many στρέμματα, a kind of entrepreneurial peasant. Apparently each of the invited VIPs had brought cousins and girlfriends, so that the actual number far exceeded the expected number. Chairs appeared from nowhere and filled the edges of the arena. The νομάρχης paced back and forth on his lame leg, trying to satisfy everyone. Finally a group came and placed itself directly in front of us: some young men with their girlfriends. They said they were journalists. The girls sat on stools in front of us, saucy, and fat in the behinds. We razzed them, insulted them, called them all kinds of names, but they remained put. A woman in back of us stood up suddenly and screamed that she was the wife of a βουλευτής and wouldn’t stand for such an outrage, but the νομάρχης pretended not to hear.

Meanwhile, no developments with the fire-walkers. In time, however, wood was brought—slim branches, perhaps dead wood. Several of the fraternity, two old men very slow and dignified, piled the wood into a neat pyramid and lighted it, with an infinite number of photographers snapping away. The wood burned, the pyramid subsided. The men stirred up the fire, reversing the poles whose far ends remained still unburned. In about an hour there was nothing but embers, which the newspaper the next day reported were about 200° C. (392° F.) Then while we were still complaining about the three backsides blocking our view (it was a good way, after all, to pass the time), suddenly the faint sound of a drum was heard. They were coming! The huge crowd suddenly became silent. Never have I seen such a sudden shift, such tense anticipation. You could feel that we were in the presence of something that was extremely meaningful to each person, although probably no one could explain exactly why it was meaningful, something demanding concentration and respect. In a moment the troupe appeared amidst a swarm of spectators. The same lyre-player was playing the same tune, the drummer was banging away vigorously. The number of αναστενάρηδες had increased greatly. Besides all the ones I had seen in the morning, there was ο Κύριος Εμμανουήλ, a co-αρχιαναστενάρης, and three or four younger boys, including two sons of the other archianastenaris. Several were walking on fire for the first time. They were all dancing as before, each in his or her own way, yet sharing a basic similarity with all the rest. Each, also, had his or her own manner of fire-walking. The wife of the archianastenaris (she was fat, with a red face and a goiter) simply walked across in a shuffling gait, with a kind of foreward momentum seen in sufferers from Parkinson’s disease. As she did so, she rhythmically hissed: shish-shish-shish. Her husband also walked shuffling across, but in silence, stolidly. The man in the fancy clothes (by now he had discarded his necktie) was the fanciest. Waving his arms wildly, he stamped and pranced on the embers, and later, when presumably they had cooled a little, he dug his feet down into them and kicked them in the air. He, of all the dancers, remained the longest on the embers at any one time. One of the young boys was also dramatic: he entered the fire with arms spread out horizontally, and took high leaps over the embers. Another of the youngsters seemed less sure of himself. Chrysanthi said he looked extremely pale, but I could not see this. All in all the πυροβασία lasted about an hour. Before long, several of the group were sifting the embers in their hands. Toward the end, the co-chief, ο κ. Εμμανουήλ, shouted, ΄Ολοι μαζί, να τα κάνουμε στάχτη, όλοι μαζί, and the entire group danced together on the embers, chanting Στάχτη να γεν, στάχτη να γεν. Once again the devil had been conquered; good—the human soul had stamped out evil! The wives and children of the anastenarides now formed a ring about the ashes and began a συρτός. At the very end, the well-dressed fire-walker approached the VIPs and shouted triumphantly: Και του χρόνου! The miracle had been achieved, another year had gone by, and the tradition would be carried on indefinitely, just as it had already been carried on from remotest antiquity.

I have been reading Mme Kakouri’s book on this subject. She sees a direct transmission from Dionysian rites in Thrace to various heresies in the Christian period, thence to the anastenarides.

Walking away from the site of the πυροβασία, I stopped to chat with a monk who was selling napkin rings, jewelry, etc. made at the Ἅγιον Ὄρος. He was about 65 or 70 years old, with a sparse beard, all gray except for scattered black hairs. He kept scattering away children who stood in front of the display (a rug spread on the ground, with all the products spread out). I asked him if he was from the Ἅγιον Ὄρος and he replied that he was. Από ποια μονή; ΄Οχι. Εγώ μένω στην ερημιά, στη σπηλιά. I was impressed, though I found it difficult to reconcile the ερημιά with this mercantile enterprise on festival day in Langadas. He said that he’d been a monk for 40 years; he went when he was in his twenties. I tried to ask more, but couldn’t, for I then because the unwilling listener to an endless monologue—the monk went into his spiel: how this life is vain and ephemeral, how we must bend all our efforts toward getting into heaven instead of going to hell, how we must reject the false joys of the world, etc., etc., etc. Finally I extricated myself and “fled.”

Of course, the strangest part of this whole business is the fact that in many ways the monk is so absolutely right. But the absolutely literal and unimaginative version of a truth, as seen in this man, somehow vitiates that truth.

George drove us back. We spent the evening at Kostas’s and Lola’s house. It was Kostas’s name day (Saint Constantine) and the house was full of relatives: his sister and her husband, their daughter, a lively talkative girl married to a morose, taciturn young man just finishing his army service, and various cousins. Kostas’s sister said that when she saw the anastenarides she felt ashamed that such things were allowed to exist. “They humiliate man,” she said; “they make civilization go back to where it began; they resemble animals.” I of course disagreed strongly, saying that the fire-walking, rather than being an example of superstition and animalism, is an instance where man’s soul has conquered his body. I could have added a good deal more: how the capability of ecstasy, and of single-minded devotion, has gone out of modern civilization, whereas it is something natural and necessary to the religious life; how these people really practiced their faith, if in this eccentric way, instead of simply going hypocritically through the motions, like most “advanced” representatives of modern civilization. But Kostas took the cake. I had seen enough of him the last time we were in Greece to see that he very openly valued money and money alone. But even so, I was surprised at the explanation he gave for the anastenarides, an explanation that was so wonderfully in character, which could only have come from him. “It’s obvious,” he said, “that they do it all for money! They get paid plenty, don’t you worry, for putting on that show!” Ο Pappous had warned me never to try to argue with Kostas, but nevertheless I offered a little resistance to this malignant and absurd notion. “Listen,” Kostas said, philosophically, “men do things for money and only for money—don’t kid yourself.”

May 29, 1964

Hotel Pithia, Delphi

Traveled to Δελφοί with Chrysanthi and the children. Leander talkative and disobedient as always, Alec full of tummy aches, Chrysanthi breaking into cold sweats because of the mountainous road. Βρήκα τον μπελά μου! Even all this could not quite dampen the lovely spectacle of Delphi. The museum is somewhat poor, the chief attraction being The Charioteer. But even more interesting was the great stone ὀμφαλός, symbol of Delphi’s position as the omphalos of the classical world. The village—i.e., the modern Delphi—is on the flank of Parnassos, with a stupendous panorama from your hotel balcony: a ribbon of dry river-bed at the base of a ravine, a great expanse of tufty green on the plain below, thousands upon thousands of olive trees, and Itea sparkling in the distance at the edge of the sea.

We arrived at 5:30 and went immediately to see the ancient remains. The weather-gnawed columns of the temple of Apollo are visible from below; one heads towad these. Not much is left, just the paving stones, one little temple that has been partially restored, these few columns, and a great number of foundations from the various buidings comprising the oracle. In back, the sheer, cave-pocked walls of Parnassos. Aside from the setting, and the beetling mountain, the remains are not very impressive. Not yet. But wonderful surprises are in store. You traverse a short winding path in back of the temple of Apollo, mount 20 or so steps, and suddenly find yourself standing in the orchestra of Delphi’s theater! And what a sight this is! From the top row of seats you look down precipitously to the circular ὀρχήστρα, then past the remains of the temple of Athena and out and out to the mountains, the strip of plain, the sky and clouds. As so often in Greece, the site is all. Why did the ancients choose such inaccessible, dramatic settings for their cultural and religious centers? How did they build them, carve the theater, for instance, out of Parnassos’s flanks, haul the stones—conceive the idea? And what wealth must have been represented! What an accumulation and accretion of decoration and adornment, as over the centuries the rich gifts were brought to the oracle by kings and generals!

But the greatest surprise of all was still awaiting us. You are already half way up Parnassos; you look above you and see nothing but thick pine groves, and then the sheer, naughty rocks behind them, with a blackbird sitting on the topmost pinnacle and cawing-cawing. You mount a path, you don’t know where you are going, really, you pant from the exertion, you mount some more, turn suddenly in back of a huge boulder, and there, stretched out in front of you: flat, tamped, beautifully dimensioned, with tiers of seats along one side and curving gracefully around the western end, is the ancient stadium! More than at any other site, here, I believe, one can envision the ancient times. When you encounter this stadium so beautifully preserved beneath the cliffs of Parnassos, with the starting grooves still visible, and the seats so warmly rowed with grass trying to sprout in every crevasse, you can feel the crowds on all sides, and the officials in their assigned, very important-looking seats, and the splendid, naked athletes racing and jumping and hurling the discus. What crowds must have been here, judging from the theater and the stadium. Down below, near the “Tholos” and Temple of Athena Pronea, there seem to be the remains of an entire village. People desiring to consult the oracle came here first, and were questioned and examined, and had to pass several days before being granted admission. Thus the need for recreation. What else they had is hard to know—perhaps the scholars can tell better. We see the theater, the stadium, and we know that the priestesses were often holy prostitutes. Perhaps, also, the ancients took walks, as we did!

High up over the museum and overlooking the village is one of those typical, and typically horrible, Greek statues: a bust on top of a stele, both absolutely white. We approached with curiosity to see whose bust it was. “Probably the archeologist who dug out Delphi,” I said.

June 5, 1964

en route to Aegina, Poros, and Hydra

But when we went around in front of it we saw with surprise that the statue was of Sikelianos! Inscribed beneath were several μεγαλόστομους στίχους on Delphi, how it was the center of the universe, the ομφαλός της γης. How lovely it would have been if next to this statue there had been another one, of Cavafy, with lines from «Πρέσβεις απ’ την Αλεξάνδρεια»: how the envoys came to Delphi to settle the problem of succession to the Egyptian puppet-kingdom of the Ptolemies, but the oracle was given in Rome!

At night, in the Hotel Pythia, Chrysanthi went to bed early and I sat in the lobby talking to the hotel clerk and a friend of his who turned out to be a waiter. They were impressed and gratified to see an American talking Greek. They complained that no tourists were coming to Delphi this year because of the Cyprus question, and especially because, as they said, Italy and England gave their citizens the false impression that Greece was actually at war with Turkey.

At the way home we stopped for a moment and had marvelous wine, χύμα, from a huge demijohn. It was wine from Ἀράχωβα, the village just before Delphi.

One of my nicest experiences here was a visit to Pandelis Prevelakis. A most cordial man. When I called him on the telephone I started laboriously introducing myself, imagining that I would be a complete stranger. But he immediately replied: «Μα είστε ο Κύριος Μπην· βέβαια ξέρω τό όνομα και πολύ εκτιμώ τη μετάφρασή σας.» He said that he would be delighted to help me with my problems in translating the terzina “Greco,” and we arranged an appointment. He lives in Plaka, in a new apartment house. The apartment is very nicely appointed, with a huge study giving onto the street. Tables, books to the ceiling, couches, a stand with whiskey and glasses, etc. Prevelakis is middle-aged, with a funny not-ugly not-pretty face. He said he was from Rethymnon. Mike and I had stopped there briefly on our bus ride from Iraklion to Haniá. I remember remarking: What must it be like to live in a village like this? How remote! How dismal! And here was Prevelakis, in his book-lined study, beautiful paintings on the walls—the senior “man of letters” of Greece, surrounded by poets and writers—and he originated in Rethymnon! It is something to think about. I felt the same when I was pointed out the tiny mountain village that was the birthplace of El Greco.

Prevelakis showed me his treasures: the original MS of Kazantzakis’s Odyssey, comprising (I think) the 4th and 5th drafts: written out in K.’s own hand over a three-month period (i.e., just the copying). P. also has 400 letters from K. that he is readying for publication. He told me that while K. was writing the terzinas he wrote to P. frequently, expressing his discouragement or enthusiasm at each stage of the composition. Thus P. in a sense followed the writing of these poems step by step, as he did many other of K.’s writings. P. said that K. “stole” many things from him—e.g., the idea to use Mme Hortense, the wonderful expression Χριστός ανέστακας, etc. But P., in turn, “used” K. as one of his characters in Η κεφαλή της Μέδουσας.

While we were talking, a young poet called for a few moments. He had stayed up all night reading Terzakis’s Η πριγκηπέσσα Ιζαμπώ and was συνεπαρμένος, couldn’t put the book down. We discussed it a little. I said I remembered feeling a sense of drowning in details. But of course for the Greek, all the events related and historical people presented are more familiar, and do not tax the memory so. The poet left, and P. and I sat down side by side and did the Greco terzina line by line—all 160 lines! Three hours’ work! How many mistakes I had made! And how could I have known some of the expressions used? For example: να μάσεις τα αποστούπια. Τα αποστούπια, P. explained, are the pubic hairs of women. During impetuous dances, pubic hair falls to the ground. When the dance is finished, the couples depart; then those without girlfriends can, if thy wish, have the thrill of gathering up the pubic hairs—να μάσουν τα αποστούπια! What a curse to utter: να μάσεις τα αποστούπια! I was reminded of Thomas Laaspere’s expression: to go around smelling bicycle seats.

The other day, Chrysanthi and I visited Ελένη Καζαντζάκη at Κηφισιά, where she is staying at her sister’s house. She is about 55, and talks with what seems to be a slight lisp. We found her on the veranda, examining the galleys of the German translation of Greco against the Greek text to make sure that no changes or omissions had been made. She complained bitterly that the German publisher thought he could improve of K.’s style, and thus changed words and phraseology indiscriminately. This was one further indication of what seems Mrs. K.’s excessive, perhaps pathological, fear of being cheated in one way or the other. In this vein, she enlarged on her troubles with Friar, saying that he once told her that his translation of the Odyssey was better than the original. And that he is K.’s “spiritual son,” a compliment K. apparently paid him, and which he has clung too as a justification for in a sense becoming K.’s legal heir! But enough of Friar who, according to everyone’s testimony, will do anything for money. As Mrs. K. said, he is neither a Greek nor an American, but has taken the worst characteristics of both peoples.

She spoke a little of her life with K. She said that he truly wanted to “transubstantiate his flesh into spirit,” especially as he grew older. He began disburdening himself of all worldly possessions. Why do we need this? Why do we need that? he would ask. When they went on trips and Mrs. K. suggested first class tickets, he would hesitate a minute, anxious to please her, but then say, “Why go first class? Let’s go fourth class, like Albert Schweitzer!”

She also spoke of his eternal liveliness and intellectual alertness. When they were in Aegina she would go from the house to the market to do shopping, always along the same street. When she returned, he would ask her: Τι νέα; Αμ τι; Τι να δω; Μόνο πήγα στην αγορά. Τίποτε. He in the afternoon would take the same walk, however, and return full of excitement: I saw this, I spoke to that man, I noticed a new flower, I smelt such-and-such smell . . .

She described what K. suffered in his last years. He had a large chronic wound or sore on his side, and he lost the sight of one eye. Yet he worked on and on, να κάνει το χρεός του.

I asked why the film Celui qui doit mourir ended the way it did, with the pilgrims barricaded behind a rock shooting it out, the priest in the forefront. The book had nothing of this martial feeling, and indeed the resort to arms, it seems to me, negates everything the book tries to say. She replied that Jules Dassin had insisted on the new ending. “He was very leftist at the time—I don’t know how he is now, perhaps Melina [Mercouri] has changed him—and he wanted, by means of the ending, to give courage to the oppressed masses.”

Ἀναφορά στον Γκρέκο is being pirated in Greece, and Mrs. K. cannot prosecute the offenders because she cannot find them, nor can she prove their crime since they reproduce the book by photo offset and it is impossible to distinguish a pirated copy from a genuine one.

Tillich in The Courage to Be, p. 19, says something that may be valid even today as a way of explaining the difference between Greece and the Western, protestant democracies: ❡ . . . the contrast in the valuation of the individual on the part of ancient and modern humanism. While the ancient world valued the individual not as an individual but as a representative of something universal, e.g. a virtue, the rebirth of antiquity saw in the individual a unique expression of the universe, incomparable, irreplaceable, and of infinite significance.

On our trip to Crete, we went to Haniá and took a taxi out to the Κόκκινο μετόχι, the set where Michael Cacoyannis is filming Zorba the Greek. We were soon taken under the wing of a bearded fellow named Nichols, who turned out to be the public relations man for the film—an American expatriate living in Rome. We learned later that his parents were Greek; he didn’t look Greek at all, and when I told him my address, he didn’t know how to spell Ψυχικό in Greek. He spoke the language, however, and thus was perfect for this job. Cacoyannis has collected around him a polyglot, international crew. The cameraman was a young Britisher, actually a German refugee living in England since 1939. He too spoke Greek, enough at least to direct the electricians. Nichols told us he has made eight films in Greece and thus has spent a good deal of time here. He was the cameraman for Tom Jones and also for Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both superb films. The assistant director was Italian, and didn’t seem to have any function except that of looking like a director. Fat and squat, with a belted trench coat and dark glasses (even at night) and a perfect little cap, he stood around all day long, holding an immense volume which I assume was the script. He never “directed” or even told any of the technicians what to do. He just stood, and once in a while exchanged a word or two with Cacoyannis. The other two directors, both Greek and both young, had at least a function: to keep everyone quiet. One kept screaming through a megaphone before each “take”: Ησυχία . . . Ησυχιιιιιιιιαα! The other scampered around pushing people into the right places or getting rid of undesirables (children, curious peasants, etc.).

At one point, torches were needed. It was the scene where the peasants raid Mme Hortense’s house after (or before!) her death and carry off her things. These two young directors proceeded to saw off branches of the first tree they saw, which happened to be a very nice shade tree much valued by the poor woman whose house had suddenly become a movie set. She complained, but they sawed away.

The set was, as Cacoyannis himself told us later, a “real find.” He discovered it himself. It had everything—a large dilapidated building of faded red stucco, mostly peeled away, with balconies and doorways, and a great sign on the front: “Hotel Ritz” (this was added, later!), plus a yard in back for scenes such as Mme Hortense’s supper, plus a long roadway leading to a gate, for processional scenes. (The families were still living in the set, upstairs.)

When we arrived, around 4:00 in the afternoon, they were doing a short scene between the narrators and the boy who loses his girlfriend the widow and later commits suicide. This was followed by the scene of pillage, by the removal of Mme Hortense’s body on a doorway, with a procession down the passageway, and the village idiot screaming after everyone: φονιάδες, άτιμοι, φονιά-α-α-δες!

Then came a lovely scene of village feasting, with the marvelous faces that Cacoyannis found: beautiful beards, stately booted veterans, little old women, bent and toothless, dressed in new florid hats and shawls despite their 80+ years, and waving colored umbrellas. Although the scene was repeated four or five times, the same “spontaneous” merrymaking seemed evident at each take—after all, the people were enjoying themselves.

June 17, 1964

Sarantaporou 11, Salonika

George said after Kennedy’s death, wherever he went, even to the remotest villages, the people were concerned and lamenting. Illiterate peasants, who hardly knew what Kennedy looked like, grieved him as though he were their own son. This confirms an incident recorded in Αναφορά στον Γρέκο about the peasant so concerned about Norway’s fate during the war. In Greece, pictures of Kennedy are often found in shop windows, sometimes next to the king. Mrs. Kazantzakis’s sister had his picture framed on the wall of her house. In some places he has been placed on the iconostasis, with a watch-light burning in front of him.

June 20, 1964

Visited Professor Κακριδής, who collaborated with K. on the translation of the Iliad and now is continuing the Odyssey alone, since K. died. Twenty-four years he’s been working on the Odyssey, he told me. And I am so fed up with Greco after only three months! We spoke about Homer and Euripides (he agreed with me that Euripides is a sad decline after Sophocles and Aeschylus). He spoke about K.: the same impression one hears everywhere, of a man with a fantastic capacity for work—up at 6 a.m., at his table steadily until 8 at night. Kakridis also said very interesting things about τους Αναστενάρηδες and similar phenomena—namely, that there is much more in this way of survival than one would expect. He himself was aware of other villages with phallic processions, the celebrants holding the phallus to their breasts and stroking it lovingly, all in the name of Christ, and one village where on a particular saint’s day the men gather in a κονάκι, take off all their clothes and proceed, naked, to tell old tales and fairytales. This apparently coincides with ancient Dionysian ritual.

I asked him why Greeks insist on pronouncing Homer and the other ancient authors with the Modern Greek pronunciation. His answer was the only sensible one I’ve heard on this question. He said that already by the time of the Golden Age—and probably before—the pronunciation was different from Homer’s time. That is, Aristotle, Plato, etc. pronounced Homer with their own pronunciation; the Byzantines pronounced him in their pronunciation, which differed from that of the Golden Age, etc. In other words, Homer has always, in a sense, been “contemporary” literature for Greeks instead of just an object of historical study. In reading him in modern pronunciation, today’s Greeks are merely doing what their ancestors have done for 2500 years.

I also visited Ζωή Καρέλλη, a poet. Kimon Friar had given me her address. I found her with her son, a graduate of the University of California and presently a resident of Australia. Η Ζωή was really ζωηρή, full of passion and ideas and καημός. She is a poet of man’s alienation and desperation. No exit! seems to be her recurring motif. Friar has done some translations of her work—the best things I’ve seen of Friar’s yet, really a splendid job: a poem in the full sense, in English. She is a great fan of T. S. Eliot’s, and translated The Family Reunion into Greek. I voiced my antipathy to Eliot’s “solution” to problems—i.e., retreat to the fashionable church—and she censured this (quite rightly, I concede) as a very superficial judgment. It was splendid to see such a woman in Greece. A widow, probably about 60 years old, perhaps more, her mind was alive, her pen active. She never wrote poetry until after her 40th year—she and Cavafy, as she said: late developers. After she raised her children, she turned to literature. Brava! How many similar examples have we got? She was one more example of the tenacity of the few writers and artists here in what is largely an intellectual wilderness. They read, write, discuss on their own, without affiliation to universities or publishing houses. In front of them I feel ignorant and tongue-tied.

The favorite poet of everyone here seems to be Cavafy. I’ve not heard a bad word about him, and most seem to have him by heart. As I said in my pamphlet, he speaks to our condition.

July 4, 1964

Άγια Τρίας, οικία Μίτσου Ρουσσάκη

Back to the filming of Zorba: We talked with Cacoyannis for a few moments during the intermission. He said he viewed Zorba as a tragic book. This rather surprised me. First of all, he said, there isn’t a single decent human being in the story except the fool. This, I suppose, is true: the widow, the murderers, even Mme Hortense and Zorba are unethical and egotistic. But . . .! The book is tragic because love is squelched, everything goes wrong, innocence is destroyed, cunning triumphs. Yes . . . but . . .! It seems to me that Cacoyannis, like many others (Vlachos, for instance) insists on taking this book realistically. It is not realistic; it is a myth, as is clearly evident from the text itself, and also from K.’s remarks about the book in Report to Greco. We have to take the book this way; otherwise certain scenes just don’t work: the burning of the monastery, for instance, or the stoning of the widow. Cacoyannis eliminated the monastery scenes, quite rightfully, as detracting from the central focus and interest. “The viewer isn’t interested in the private troubles of the monks,” he told me. “We’ve got to keep the thing focused on Zorba and Basil.” As for the stoning scene, Cacoyannis said he tried to make it a true rape, a kind of mass psychodrama in which all the men of the village, who craved the widow sexually but could not have her, take their revenge, so to speak, by stoning her. Cacoyannis also said that he had had many objections from Cretans regarding this scene. “We don’t stone women,” they protested, “not even whores!” Who knows?

Cacoyannis impressed me greatly. He worked with quiet precision, no frills, no affectations like the Italian sub-director. He has a wonderful face, with a mop of curly, almost kinky hair, like a child’s—uncombable. A little like Dylan Thomas, in build, hair, and face—i.e., the face has something babyish about it. But his chin is more pronounced than Thomas’s. He didn’t seem to be doing anything, which was perhaps the best sign. Of course he wrote the script! Found the set! Cast the players! And doubtlessly rehearsed everything in private many times. Now it was mostly a question of bad timing, or noise from onlookers, that necessitated re-takes. Only once did Cacoyannis lose his temper. It was at night, during a scene with Madame Hortense, the time when Zorba delights her by setting the table with three plates and inviting Hortense to dine with him and Basil. The electricians had been having trouble with the lights. The transformers kept heating up. To avoid burnouts, they kept switching to an auxiliary transformer, then switching back when that one began to overheat. Each switch meant a blackout, and the trick was to finish the scene before the blackout. In other words, nothing could really be shot. Cacoyannis bore all this patiently, up to a point. But about two hours had passed without a single take: the onlookers were making too much noise, Mme Hortense wasn’t playing her scene just right, Quinn’s left elbow was too close to the lens and thus distorted when he bowed and made a flourish. Finally, Cacoyannis shouted «Βαρέθηκα, βαρέθηκα – α – α – α – α!» It was noble, Lear-like anger. I thought everyone would quail and cower (I would have). But the chief electrician screamed right back to the effect of “Why don’t you give us decent things to work with instead of this Japanese junk!” Finally the scene was shot. Somehow I enjoyed this shout of Cacoyannis’s, and I confess sheepishly that a month later, when the children had been disturbing me inordinately while I was trying to write, I rushed into the room where Chrysanthi was sewing peacefully, and shouted «Βαρέθηκα – α – α – α – α!»

One of the things I’ll remember from our trip to Crete is the ride to Μάλια in the Volkswagon of a boy Jeff had known from the AFS. We were five. This boy, the son of an apparently well-to-do businessman in Iraklio, a dealer in auto parts, tires, etc, had graduated from the gymnasium a year or two before, and was now settling down to life as a local merchant. He had with him a friend, a younger boy in the last grade of the gymnasium, very handsome, with a deep voice and engaging manner. Jeff, Mike, and I made up the rest of the fivesome. We chatted on the way, small talk about the scenery, school, girls—I don’t remember what. We visited Malia just as the sun was setting, and the guide took us the rounds. On the way back we made a small detour to go to a village named Χερσόνησος (I think), a small fishing village grouped around a crescent-shaped harbor, facing east, on a peninsula (thus the name of the village). We drove through the village and suddenly climbed a sharp hill to a little παρεκκλήσι overlooking the village, the harbor, and the sea. It was thumbsized, perhaps two or three yards square. We entered. The boys said that it was a pretty church and we should see it. We entered and looked around in a touristic manner, enjoying the site above all, as so often with Greek churches and temples. What impressed me was this: these two “jazzy” high school boys entered the chapel and without any affectation (my second thought) dropped some money in the box, took candles, lit them in front of the icon, and kissed the icon. I stood aghast. I don’t know why, really. I suppose it was because I thought only old ladies acted this way still in Greece. It was at first so incongruous to see them act the way they did—in other words, I couldn’t imagine an American high school boy doing the same. Then, after a moment, not at all incongruous, they were so natural; it was part of them, they did it without thinking, and yet there was no flippancy, but rather a true sense of reverence, an everyday kind of reverence, not something done up for a special occasion. This little incident meant more to me, by far, than the stones of Malia.

That night we visited Νίκος Σακλαμπάνης, K.’s nephew. His mother was K.’s sister; in other words, Saklambanis’s grandfather was Captain Michael! We went first to his office, a cavity in the old Venetian walls of the city, with walls five or six feet thick, and a little window near the ceiling. It was Sunday, but he had been working all day. He welcomed the intermission, and we went to his very substantial home just outside the city. He is, I think, the president of the Irakleio bar association, obviously a very successful lawyer. First he took us out on his porch and, pointing to a declivity not too far from the house, told us that people lived there in caves. He said it with an air of acceptance. There were rich and there were poor: that was that. Another typically Greek phenomenon was his maid, a girl of perhaps ten or twelve years, whom his wife—a perfectly lovely woman in all (other) respects—ordered around like a slave. We spent three delightful hours talking first about Kazantzakis, then about Captain Michael, then about demotic and katharevousa. S. told a lovely anecdote about his grandfather. When K. was young he championed the demotic tongue and was jailed for this. All his friends rushed to the jail to try to get him to “publicly recant,” and thus get himself released. Βρε Νίκο, έλεγαν, τι θέλεις; Να μιλήσουμε σαν χωριάτες, σαν αγράμματους; Thus his “friends.” K.’s father, Captain Michael, came also. Seeing his son, he said: Νίκο, εσύ είσαι γραμματισμένος, εγώ αγράμματος. Εκτιμώ τη γνώμη σου. Εσύ ξέρεις τέτοια πράματα, πού να ξέρω εγώ; Μήπως θέλεις ένα καθaρό υποκάμισο, ή μια κουβέρτα για να μη κρύωσεις; S. said how he had found K.’s early—schoolboy—work, the Συμπόσιο, and had given it to the Iraklion museum. He also spoke, like everyone else, about K.’s fortitude and diligence, his poverty. He never had any money, not even, at one point, enough to get a new set of false teeth.

I asked him about βράκες. He said they were a peasant form of conspicuous consumption. They had so much unnecessary material that they were heavy and unwieldy. Someone wearing βράκες obviously has had the money to spend for such an extravagance. Also, he has no need to work, because the βράκες are so uncomfortable that to work in them is impossible.

I asked S. what he thought about katharevousa, and he answered that he felt it had a very definite place and function. In other words, he was not a δημοτικιστής, like his uncle. I was surprised. But S. was rather persuasive. He said that katharevousa is a wonderful instrument for showing respect. There are some men, either because of their intrinsic qualities or their position, to whom one instinctively feels he must speak katharevousa. Obviously this can be abused. I suggested that it was just a form of social snobbery, but he disagreed, saying that, although this might have been true in the past, now when so many people go through the gymnasium and learn katharevousa, simply to speak it is no mark of distinction—everyone can do it. I had an experience of what he meant when we saw Ο αντιπρόσωπος in Athens. All the characters spoke demotic, until the pope appeared. He spoke the most pure of katharevousas, and it was right, dramatically and socially.

Our language has lost even the you-thou distinction. We have nothing approaching a language of dignity, only one of pomposity (except, of course, the very subtle dignity that good writers or speakers can give to our language). Katharevousa, perhaps, instead of being a curse on the Greek λαός, is one very strange expression of Greek linguistic flexibility and genius.

Other memories from Crete:

• The grounds-keeper at Kazantzakis’s tomb, who said his salary was 1000 drachmas a month.

• The griffin on the wall paintings at Knossos: bird’s head, leopard’s body, and a snake for a tail. In other words, the forces of heaven, earth, and the underworld amalgamated in one idol. A very sensible god.

• The λειτουργία at Άγ. Μινάς. Palm Sunday. The αρχιεπίσκοπος in his finery. We were sent up to the front (qua ξένοι). The ψάλτες sang with all their soul, antiphonallhy. Two desks, with a chief ψάλτης, an older man, surrounded by a chorus of men of all ages. It was good to see youths, incuding high school boys. And one of the faces I recognized as a φοιτητής who had come the day before with us on the boat. How nice to leave the university and come home to sing in Άγ Μινάς the next day!

July 22, 1964

Άγια Τριάδα

One of the tenants of George’s “hotel,” a sophisticated, plump, shrill-voiced lady of uncertain age with a slimly pretty, rather nubile daughter, lost her expensive bathing suit. This lady, called by the rest η Αθηναία, with all that connotes, possessed of course only the very best and latest fashion suit, price 500 drachmas. She hung it on the fence to dry and when she wanted it again it was lost. What did our sophisticated lady do? She journeyed to Salonika to a fortune-teller, who would assuredly inform her who absconded with the suit. But the fortune-teller, it seems, proved the more sophisticated of the two. When our lady arrived, the fortune-teller began informing her that her husband was a nervous type, that he needed calm and coaxing care, etc. “Forget about my husband,” said the Athenaia. “I want to know who stole my bathing suit.” “When did you last see it?” asked the fortune-teller. “Yesterday morning.” “Ah, then I’m afraid I cannot help you. You have to get to me less than eight hours after the theft; otherwise I can do nothing.” And she believed her! Between this Athenaia and Κυρά Πρατικάκη with her bones of Αϊ-Γιάννης, what am I to think of sophisticated Greek ladies?

But there are fine surprises, too. Next door to us is a tailor and a shriveled old lady, a κουβάρι who sits in the shade all day long and sews for him, her feet resting comfortably on a chair in front of her. All day long, sun-up to sun-down, as though her entire life she was glued not only to this village but to that very chair. But the old lady keeps eyes and ears open, it seems. Yesterday she called to Chrysanthi: «Έλα ’δω, χρυσή μου. Όταν ακόμα σου πρώτ’ είδα, σ’ αγάπησα. Είσαι απλή, κι κάθεσαι κι ράβεις κι κεντείς, κι τα παιδιά σου κι αυτά είναι απλά κι χαριτωμένα.» Then she went into a bitter denunciation of the parasitic wives we see all around us, who sit on their verandas with their high heels and fresh hair-dos while their servants run desperately after their headstrong children, trying to feed them. «Τι θα γίνουν τα παιδιά αυτά; Πώς να γίνουν τα κορίτσια νυκοκυρές καλές, πώς να φροντίζουν τα δικά τους σπίτια και παιδιά και άνδρες; Πού πάει η απλότητα; Στα παλαιά χρόνια τα παιδιά έκαναν μπάνιο στα βρακάκια τους· τώρα έχουν μαγιώ, και τα κορίτσια, πέντε χρονών, έχουν bikini κι όλας!» Then followed the most surprising statement—no, not really surprising at all—but perhaps incongruous coming from this woman who one would think never thought about social problems but sat empty-mindedly in her chair: «Ξέρεις τι θέλουμε; Θέλουμε κι μεις μια λαϊκή δημοκρατία!» The little old communist! But no: she sees the decadent capitalists and comes to a simple conclusion, optimistic about a people’s democracy solving all problems. «Σκότησαν τον Κέννεντυ», είπε, «διότι ήταν απλός άνθρωπος κι ήθελε την ειρήνη· μα και θα σκοτώσουν κι τον Κρουστέφ, θα τον σκοτώσουν κι αυτόν, διότι είναι απλός ο Κρουστέφ σαν και τον Κέννεντυ, κι θέλει την ειρήνη!» When Chrysanthi related all this to me, I told her that the middle class stinks to high heaven in all countries; the peasants and the aristocrats (i.e., those who needn’t show their wealth, and those who don’t have any to show) are the salt of the earth. In Greece, middle class children are not allowed to play in the street for fear they’ll dirty their expensive clothes or come in contact with “undesirables.” In Neo Psychiko, there was one house conspicuously larger than the rest, with a big yard. In this yard was a swing, a slide, and other things for the enjoyment of children. Leander and Alec often asked if they could go in and use the swings. They could not. So they played soccer in the street (with Chrysanthi!). The slide and swings were for the precious only child of the house. While the other children played in the street, he sat in his yard, behind the high bars, alone “enjoying his advantages”!

Yesterday a waiter in the café next to George’s house sat down and started chatting with me. He, too, was very much a leftist. It was the same story—how all those who collaborated with the Germans were given power after the civil war, how all those who fought the Germans were stigmatized as communists. He said that recently the German officer who was in charge of sending Salonika’s Jews to the gas chambers journeyed again in Greece, with a beard, but was recognized, captured, and brought to trial. In the course of the trial, witnesses divulged who had collaborated with him, and one of the collaborators was the present wife of a cabinet minister. Needless to say, she was not sentenced. This same waiter also told me that when Karamanlis was in power, at each election a policeman came to him and instructed him at gunpoint to vote EPE, or else. He said he’d vote as he pleased and be damned. He did, they examined his ballot (conveniently possible to do in the Greek system) and came to him after the election and systematically beat him up. The EKA newspaper says that the man who falsified the count in favor of Karamanlis in the last election but one is still a high official in the royal court. In the by-elections on July 5 the EDA was victorious everywhere in Greece. These elections were for local officials—village presidents, mayors, etc. Papandreou said the other day that the by-election was in no way an indication of how the people felt toward his government, because in local elections the voters do not vote on the basis of political party or creed but simply vote for their friends! Wonderful sophistry!

August 2, 1964

The other day Chrysanthi and I remarked on how filthy the beach was, full of papers, children’s feces, watermelon rinds, etc. Why, we wondered, couldn’t the village place some trash cans on the beach and hope that people would use them, as surely would be done in America, for instance at Minerva Beach, where there were more trash cans than people. Today, as if in answer to our wish, a cart came along and placed cans at intervals along the beach. They were painted a bright orange and on each, in white capitals, was written Καθαριότης πολιτισμός. America has come to Greece with a vengeance.

The other day, with Themistocles and Miranda Altas, our neighbors here, she stone blind for eight years, we went to Χορτιάτης, the village that the Germans entirely destroyed in the war. There is part of Salonika’s aqueduct system there. Two German soldiers came to put some disinfectant in the water; they were killed by partisans. As reprisal, the Germans gathered the entire village (some people had seen them approach in time and had escaped to the mountain) and burned every last soul in the ovens, then burned all the houses. There is a memorial, a painting of the village priest in the flames, surrounded by women and children, with the names of the dead inscribed below. Today the village has been rebuilt, but the shells of some of the old houses remain.

We continued on a little above the village, to a summer campground for the Salonika orphanage. A nice villa overlooking mountains and sea. This serves as infirmary. The boys are in tents and a ragged tin shack. They all have the same clothing: kaki shorts and blue shirt, and look dirty and unkempt and woebegone. Many are musicians. The orphanage prides itself on the musicians it produces—mostly players of band instruments, who then make a career of the army. The director, a jolly man, told us with pride that the present director of the army band is an alumnus. It was raining, so instead of climbing the mountain we sat inside and chatted. The director was an amateur gardener. Despite our protestations, he went out in the rain and gathered fresh cucumbers and tomatoes for us, which were served with delicious local φέτα cheese. All this came after the inevitable γλυκό κουταλιού και καφέ.

August 5, 1964

The Greek language is wonderful in its inventiveness and complexity. This morning three street-venders passed the house. Their calls were as follows: Αμερικάνικα! Μπανάνες! Αμύγδαλα! What did these mean: Αμερικάνικα = καρπούζια, Μπανάνες = πεπόνια (i.e., as sweet as bananas), Αμύγδαλα = cucumbers as crunchy as almonds.

August 12, 1964

Two vivid memories came in my sleep. (1) When the fat Negro woman clasped me ecstatically in her arms in Rochester and began to dance and sing. (I had worked in her house during the work camp, and was returning to show a friend what we had done.) (2) When Fritzi Girden, once in the basement of 3902, also clasped me in her arms and danced with me, and when I felt for the first—and last (?)—time what it means really to dance: to forget oneself, to fly buoyantly through the air.

Just now I was reworking a passage of Greco where K. describes his former classmates, pp. 169–170: κιόλας είχε περάσει η ζωή αποπάνω τους και τους είχε ισοπεδώσει. . . . Ήξεραν ποια ταβέρνα έχει το καλύτερο κρασί, πού μπορείς να φας τους πιο αφράτους λουκουμάδες και τι προίκα έχει η κάθε κοπέλα. This describes perfectly so many of the people I’ve met here in Greece. They are sunk in the mire of bourgeois nonentity. I especially remember how George knew exactly where to take us for the “fluffiest loukoums.” But on the other hand, do I not exhibit some of the superciliousness and scorn that apparently Kazantzakis exhibited, precisely on account of his high standards for himself and others?

August 18, 1964

Chrysanthi was telling Alec about the feats of Hercules. “And then Hercules caught the two poisonous snakes and killed them,” she said. “What did he do next, Alec?” “He washed his hands,” said Alec.

August 21, 1964

What the αναστενάρηδες do is a valid religious experience because it is a means of obliterating the ego, which, as the mystics all say, is the greatest obstacle standing between us and God. Cf. the Dervishes and their dancing. See Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο, the chapter on Knossos.

Today I had a strong remembrance of the time I went to Allen Schleifstein’s birthday party. I must have been 14 or 15 years old. Allen’s father stupidly fed me whiskey after whiskey. I can still feel the dizziness that descended so pleasantly upon me as I sank deeper and deeper into the armchair in their living room. After that everything was a blank. Apparently I walked part of the way home on my own two feet, vomiting constantly in the street. Somehow, with the aid of Buzzy Oppenheim and Arthur Kaledin (I think), I reached home. I vomited on the stairs, on the nice gray carpet. My friends hauled me up to my room, undressed me and left me lying naked on my bed, my clothes strewn about. This was how my parents discovered me the following morning.

Yesterday I bought an icon of Agios Menas, the protector of Crete. The artist is a little middle-aged man who has a shop on Εγνατία. He sits in the window and paints. On the wall are icons: St. George, St. Kyrillos, the Prodromos, Elias ascending in a chariot, Christ harrowing hell, etc. But what moved me the most was the very excellent self-portrait of the artist as a young man with palate and brush. What dreams lay hidden in that portrait! And now he sits in the window and paints icons.

August 24, 1964

Nicknames overheard: Θέμης (Θεμιστοκλής), Εύρης (Ευριπίδης).

Yesterday the church bells tolled in a new way. A single gong, slowly, at widely spaced intervals. Even without being told, I could realize easily enough that this bell announced death. Our neighbor, the tailor, closed his shop and departed with his wife for the deceased person’s house, for the bell announced, in effect, that the body was “prepared” and ready to be seen. Soon, from all the other homes, villagers walked in the same direction, children tagging along behind. All were going to pay their last respects and to await their own turns.

Sunday we went to the πανηγύρι at Μιχανιώνα. This village celebrates the Κοίμησις της Θεοτόκου (the Assumption of the Virgin Mary), August 15th. Then on the 9th day, as with mere humans, the Virgin presents κόλλυβο in the church.

August 25, 1964

Conversation with Alec after swimming: “Daddy, did I swim far today?” “Yes, very far.” “How far?” “A thousand meters.” “A thousand meters?” “Yes.” “Really?” “Really, a thousand meters.” “Daddy . . .?” “Yes?” “What is a meter?”

October 14, 1964

Hanover

Dad once had a patient who was by trade an engraver. He was a clever man and had invented some process that greatly simplified a certain aspect of engraving. He was also an epileptic. One day he had a seizure on the street and feel down foaming at the mouth. Even after the seizure proper passed, he was maniacal. In this state he was picked up by the police, driven to Bellevue, and placed behind bars in the psychiatric ward. When his mania waned he found himself in this predicament, with hordes of violent cases as his cellmates. He tried to convince the attending physician that he was perfectly sane. But one of the questions the doctors always asked suspected psychos was, “And I suppose you’ve made a great invention?” They asked him this, and he replied, “Yes.” This convinced them that he was indeed insane.

Lovely poetry read by James Dickey. Also Howard Nemerov a few weeks ago.

October 24, 1964

Leander this morning, after a spell of giggling, said, “I’ll get boils in my stomach from laughing.”

November 1, 1964

From James Dickey’s “Children’s Reading” (in New York Times’s Childrens Book Section): . . . and somewhere on a sea / As dark as Coca-Cola, Ulysses charges . . .

Last week J-P Sartre refused the Nobel Prize. The Times reported: “To have accepted the honor and the $53,000 that goes with it, Mr. Sartre explained, would have diminished his life’s meaning. ‘A writer,’ he said, ‘must act only with the means that are his . . . the written word’; to add to his pen the influence of an institution ‘is not fair to the reader. . . . It is not the same if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner.’ Or, as he put it in his latest book, ‘The Words’: ‘. . . with empty hands and empty pockets . . . I have set myself to work to save my whole self. . . .’“

November 4, 1964

Paraphrasing Nietzsche in section 19 of The Birth of Tragedy (Anchor edition, p. 115): In a terribly unstable epoch, pessimism naturally enlists that epoch’s strongest and most thoughtful minds.

November 23, 1964

Deerfield dinner. Mrs. Boyden remarkable as usual. She had read my Cavafy pamphlet, which Col. Furlong had gotten for her. She said she didn’t particularly like Cavafy, with all his decadence, and couldn’t really know his poetry. But she said that I made her feel how much I really knew and liked the poetry—which I think was the nicest and most perceptive thing anyone has said about my pamphlet.

We spent Saturday and Sunday in Boston. I went to a dreary meeting of the Mosher Book and Tract Committee of New England Yearly Meeting. We lodged with Tom and Becky, and who should be there by Elisabeth Marleyn, who has been here chaperoning the Bristol-born winner of DuPont’s Beauty Contest (1st prize, a five-day visit to New York, where she was taken to an interminable found of musicals and night clubs). Poor Elizabeth winced when her Beauty Queen invariably chose the worst musicals in preference to the opera, concerts, or the galleries. Becky as sweet and simple as always. We visited her parents, the Hoges, in their Boston suburb, and all had Sunday dinner together. I prowled through Thayer Hall, Lowell House courtyard, Lamont and Widener, without much emotion, except at Lamont, which had always seemed very inviting. Thayer, which was decrepit when we lived there, has been brightened considerably, and is almost unrecognizable. We all went to a concert at Sanders on Saturday night: recorder, viola da gamba, and harpsichord, very intellectual, and full of bearded students, the most disheveled of which, it turned out, were actually from Brandeis, where we saw them the next day. Brandeis is sprawling and nondescript. We visited the three tiny chapels, all rather deserted. Becky and her parents use thee in good Quaker fashion.

November 29, 1964

Tony Herbold’s child came back from catechism and asked his parents, “How many souls are there in lavatory?”

December 18, 1964

Absurd ways to die:

(a) Last spring in Greece, in a village, friends came to the memorial service 9 days after someone’s death, when the κόλλυβο is distributed. The next morning everyone was dead. Later it was discovered that the κόλλυβο had been made with agricultural poison instead of flour, the two sacks, unlabeled, being near each other on the shelf.

(b) Recently, a ceremony was held at a great bridge on the Athens-Salonika railway. This had been destroyed by the Germans, then rebuilt, reestablishing communications between the two cities. As a crowd gathered at the site, there was a great explosion that killed many people. Someone had stepped on a land mine, still active twenty years after the war.

Visit last weekend from Sarah Niles and Φώτης Καφάτος.

1965

Hanover, NH

January 1–June 15

Riparius

June 16–September 7

Hanover, NH

September 8–December 22

20 East 74th Street, New York

December 23–29

January 6, 1965

Yesterday in class I spoke of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, in connection with Joyce’s use of dream language, especially condensation and portmanteau words, in Finnegans Wake. This morning, most à propos, Chrysanthi related a dream she had last night, a dream that could have come right out of Freud’s casebook, so complete was it with blends and incongruities—yet each element taken, as Freud insisted, from (usually recent) personal experience. She saw herself back in Terpni as a girl but she was living in an apartment house (!). Her aunt was lying in bed, sick. Chrysanthi was fanning away the swarms of flies that infested the room even though everything—the linens, walls, floors—was immaculate. Suddenly her aunt, who apparently had leprosy, sat up and pointed to the distance. “There’s your husband,” she said. Chrysanthi (still a girl of about 9) turned and looked. In the distance she saw an Eskimo, dressed however in knickers. (Chrysanthi, thinking about this at breakfast, remembered (a) that the night before last when she was at Mrs. Sonnerup’s house, one of the ladies there had recounted her experiences in Alaska, with particular emphasis on the Eskimos, and (b) that last night in bed she had seen pictures of knickers in the Sears catalogue.) The Eskimo came closer, but then he wasn’t an Eskimo but instead the weird gypsy imbecile who used to clean the “square ditch” at the Quaker Domestic Science School. Here the dream ended.

January 16, 1965

❡ . . . a man must identify himself with something more tangible than his own personality, and establish his pride somewhere, either in his social position, or in the quality of the work he is obliged to do, or simply in the superiority of the idleness he may be fortunate enough to enjoy. —Conrad, The Secret Agent, chapter VI (Anchor edition, p. 104).

Weymouth’s story about Captain Nutt. He organized a cruise to Greenland to examine age-old ice to analyze the air bubbles in it. Spent money galore (his own?) and after processing thousands of tons of ice in special equipment he discovered that the ice was after all only 30 years old.

❡ The cocktail party, as the name itself indicates, was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies. —Durrell, Justine, p. 171.

January 23, 1965

A long letter to Henry Gifford:

Dear Henry,

I’ve turned your letter over to our Chairman. He had already heard from your colleague, and I imagine that he will be writing to him directly in the near future.

He asked me in the meantime to sound you out on a matter very dear to our hearts. We are interested in developing plans for some of our better students to study English literature in England or Scotland. These men would be junior English majors who would plan to spend at least two and normally three terms at their host university. We would like to know if you could admit a small group of carefully selected students from Dartmouth College. There would be many minor problems such as housing, tuition fees, and transportation, but the primary questions for now would seem to be admission and then programs. Our general experience with British universities and my particular experience with Bristol lead us to believe that our students would benefit greatly from an opportunity to study for a time in your Department.

May I also sound you out on the possibility of informal faculty exchange from time to time?

I’m glad my Cavafy pamphlet set you thinking about this strange poet. I haven’t seen your article yet, as my copies of the TLS are piled high at the moment, awaiting the solitude and dolce far niente of next summer at our farm. As for any further translations of Cavafy from my pen, there won’t be any because Harcourt, Brace & World, the publishers of Rae Dalven’s Complete Poetry of Cavafy, refused to let me use my own renditions for the excerpts in the pamphlet, and indeed have refused to let anyone translate even one line of their “property.” Edmund Keeley, Philip Sherrard and I have all protested, but to no avail. There seems to be no rhyme or reason in these matters, for Hogarth Press, which held the rights before Harcourt bought them out, was quite liberal in granting permission for new translations of individual poems, or for excerpts to be used in scholarly essays. I recently learned that the P.E.N. club discussed this problem several years ago. On the supposition that no single translation can ever do justice to a poet, and that it is therefore artistically immoral to tie up a poet for 56 years, they recommended that copyright protection in such cases be reduced to about 15 years. But of course it is a long way from recommendation to enactment. I was wondering if you and Charles Tomlinson hit up against this problem at all in your work.

When I showed your letter to Chrysanthi we both commented how fresh in our memories was the picture of you in your domestic setting: your lovely house, the fields beneath it, and your family. We wondered how the children are. Your boy must be a full-fledged artist by now; and your daughter, is she already at college? Our Leander is in 3rd grade and shows signs already of being a voracious reader and also a good musician. And little Alec, whom you will remember as just a sniveling blob of flesh, now has his mincing kindergarten personality, and is pestering us to let him begin studying the violin!

We visited recently with Tom and Becky Shankland in Cambridge (Mass.), and who should be there but Elisabeth Marleyn! Do you remember Robin and Elisabeth, with their eternal arguments? She writes the Women’s Column in the Western Daily Press and was in the States as the chaperone to Miss Bristol, who, as winner of the Du Pont, Ltd. beauty contest, was awarded a five-day sojourn in New York City. Poor Elizabeth described these five days as the most dismal of her life; they consisted of an endless round of nightclubs, champagne, ceremonies in the plush inner offices of advertising executives and cigar-smoking industrialists. All the while, Miss Bristol, whom Elisabeth described as abysmally dumb, kept a sharp eye out for some one she could marry, so that she could remain in the States. And Elisabeth herself, though certainly not enamored of the one aspect of American life she had been forced to see, was rather glum about returning home, where Robin is struggling along as an uncertified teacher in a grammar school, at a salary of £10.0.0 a week!

To turn to more pleasant matters, I wish I could sit down face to face and try to convey to you what a stimulating six months we had last year in Greece. It was the first time (although my third extended stay there) that I felt I really came to know the country and its people well, or to begin to at least. Part of the reason is that we spent three full months in a village, a fishing and grape-growing village on the Aegean, about an hour by caïque from Salonika. Living there that length of time, we were able to feel, and more important, eventually to share, the rhythm of Greek life—a rhythm that is an expression of a state of mind, a way of looking at the universe, which in turn is an expression of Greece’s topography, climate, and history. Never have I felt such a connection between the actual land and the day-to-day conduct of the civilization that developed on that land; never, also, have I felt body, soul, and mind so continually interacting in myself and in everything around me. There is a naked sense of all of life’s contradictions, all existing very much together and very much visible. The town idiot, for example, who in England or the U.S.A. would be committed to an institution and thus shut from view, is accepted as part of nature’s scheme. The toothless gaffer sits with his cane in the café and tells tales, while his dirty-bottomed great-grandchild crawls in the dust beside him. Incredible poverty—gypsies in rags, peddlers walking all day with heavy suitcases, trying to sell shoddy cottons, one-armed mountebanks with puppets or clarinas, nomads with performing monkeys and bears—all exist side by side with an ever-more-affluent middle class enjoying automobiles, tape recorders, Leica cameras, and vacations in Paris. Then I mustn’t omit to mention how nice it is—how incredible, really!—to see men rise spontaneously in the cafés and dance away their joy or grief, or in the street, for that matter. And the constant music (which can become grating while you are there, but which I missed the moment I returned home) and the constant street-cries and the constant talk, talk, talk—with all the twistings and extensions of grammar and vocabulary that I had come to know in Kazantzakis’s writings. Two or three other things stand out, in addition to our life in the village. One was the opportunity I had to meet Kazantzakis’s circle in Athens: poets, professors, novelists, book-designers, art-critics, scholars. The other was a week spent in Crete, as though at a shrine. As I landed in Iraklio I realized that I already knew so very much about it—its squares, the nature of its streets, the design of the houses, what kind of flowers were kept in the courtyards, the smells one encountered while walking up a lane (Greece is full of the most diverse smells), the icons in the cathedral, the names of the various mountains surrounding the city, the Venetian fountain with its lions, the ramparts overlooking the sea, the serene beaches nearby—all from Kazantzakis’s books, all as real to me from literature, even more real, than they could be from actual observance as a tourist. This was indeed a pleasure, and it was topped by an excruciating ride over the mountains in an ancient vehicle, to Haniá at the Western end of the island, where I had the pleasure of spending a day on the set during the filming of Zorba the Greek, and of chatting for some time with Michael Cacoyannis, the director, about the book and his interpretation. . . . The other experience that stands out was our witnessing of the fire-walking ceremony of the Anastenarides. This is something that has come down from pagan times in Thrace and bears amazing resemblance to the Dionysian ritual; it includes a wild chase in the mountains at night, for instance, also a ritual sacrifice and dismemberment, with distribution of raw flesh, which is then eaten or else plowed into the ground. It also includes self-induced trance, induced by dancing—all of which I observed. Then a fire is built, the red-hot coals raked out, and the “troupe,” when it has reached the proper intensity of ecstasy and when the saint (the whole thing is celebrated in honor of Saint Constantine on May 21) gives the signal, the troupe dances out in procession with drums and a squealing rebec, then dances on the glowing coals, barefooted, shouting “Let them be ashes! Let them be ashes!” In this way, they feel, they subdue the fiery powers of the devil, through the grace conferred on them by the saint to perform this miracle. And they insure good crops of corn and children for the ensuing year. I of course have never seen trance, much less barefooted walking on fire, and the experience was most memorable. It suddenly made all too terribly real all I had read in ancient literature about the mystery cults—this one, too, is a mystery, carefully restricted to certain families of initiates. The ceremonies were performed in secret until relatively recently. Now they have become a tourist attraction, which I imagine means that they will eventually disappear. The thing that interested me most is that the participants did not strike me as orgiastic, uncivilized, bestial, or dangerous. On the contrary, they radiated an extraordinary dignity, and in some strange way seemed more rather than less human. Perhaps I have been reading too much Nietzsche. But Nietzsche or no Nietzsche, this is what I, and many others, felt as we watched.

Lest you get the wrong idea about our stay in Greece, I should add that I also worked! The fruit of this effort was the translation of Kazantzakis’s autobiography, all 220,000 words of it. The book is called Report to Greco and will be published, I think, next fall. For me, at least, it is a beautiful beautiful book, full of the meditation of age and the exuberance of youth. I hope that you’ll read it.

Forgive me for carrying on for so long, and for mixing the personal with the “official” in this letter. To end of the properly “official” note, let me say that whatever answer you can give to our proposal I shall communicate to our Chairman. Or perhaps you would prefer to correspond with him directly. His name is Harold Bond.

Sincerely,

C. H. Gifford, Esq.

210, Hyland Grove

Westbury-on-Trym

Bristol, England

January 30, 1965

A most extraordinary thing happened at the banquet for the Alumni Council. The scheduled speakers were Norman Doenges and then President Dickey. I was scheduled to speak to the Council the next morning, along with several others from the faculty, and we had met Thursday for lunch with Doenges to hear what he intended to say, so there wouldn’t be any repetition. We decided that he would speak in general on the question of the need for faculty research and the help available for “onward self-teaching.” Then the rest of us would speak about our individual experiences, one with NSA grants, another with the Ford Foundation grant subsidizing the Far Eastern program here, and I on the Faculty Fellowships. Doenges hadn’t got anything written yet but he left with a good idea of what he should talk about. On the banquet night, when his turn came, he stood up and began, “At Dartmouth, the teacher-scholar is the honored norm,” etc., etc., the same old crap. After a few sentences, a strange noise began intersecting the words—every 30 seconds or so—an excruciating rattle, something between a death râle and the fiendish “eeek” of the anastenarides. Nevertheless he continued. John Finch, who was sitting with me, said that this was a normal mannerism with Doenges. He continued, saying nothing in so many words. Then he stopped in the middle of a sentence, stood there while we all waited, then began again. This was normal enough, the kind of pause seen in many speakers, as they gather together (so to speak) what is to come next. He began again, the râle as evident as ever (and as painful), then stopped a second time, for a somewhat longer period. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead, and I stared at my plate. But he resumed, finally. The next time he stopped, however—it was just after the hateful phrase “at Dartmouth . . .”—he just stood and stood, I’d say for a full three minutes. Finally, Dickey asked him in a whisper if he’d like to sit down. He smiled strangely, mumbled “I’m sorry,” and returned to his seat. The toastmaster speedily introduced Dickey, who handled the situation brilliantly. Before he began his prepared speech, he ad libbed: “Well, Norm, public speaking isn’t always easy. The time you really have to worry, though, is when—as with me—it becomes too easy!” Finch then asked me for a pencil, and wrote me a note on his napkin. It went something like this: “The hollow men are usually so damned articulate. Here was a hollow man who had nothing to say, but this time the gods stepped in: He was struck mute by the god!” (Note: Doenges is Professor of Greek.) Finch later said that Doenges was a sycophant and bootlicker, the kind of man who screams continually about the need to publish and has never published anything himself.

January 31, 1965

Vic McGee here, also MacCormick, Perrin, and Hillel & Miriam Black. Vic said that Doenges’s silence sounded like a minor epileptic fit or heart attack. Strange how one’s frame of reference changes (or is changed by) a whole outlook on life. Finch’s remark of yesterday came from a mentality capable of taking in the entire scheme of things—man, nature, the gods, the “circumambient universe,” as Lawrence would say. Vic’s remark cuts man off from everything. That is why science is so discouraging and the pagan vision so essentially more profound.

I think I understand now what E. M. Forster means when he wants something of “fantasy and prophecy” in his books. He wants Finch’s mentality and not Vic’s. Forster, by the way, is the only writer I can think of who would do fictional justice to the Doenges incident.

❡ What makes mankind tragic is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. —Conrad (in a letter).

After my talk to the Alumni Council, in which I told of my troubles with the word όρτσα, I was introduced to Mosbacher, the sailing ace. He and a friend, also a sailor, were delighted because they said I had given them the name for a boat: ORTSA. They also said they were chartering a yacht this May with the Dickeys, out of Πασαλείμενο. I suggested that when they board the first time and the crew lines up neatly to greet them, that they walk up to the chief officer and say, nonchalantly: Όρτσα και μη φοβάσαι. What an impression this would make!

John Stewart and his wife: divorce after she nursed him through polio; then married his wife’s best friend.

Robin Scroggs, Marty, and Ruth Thornberg: Marty in mental hospital; Robin insisted she like classical music; he took the folk music records she had and broke them!

Plumed Serpent à la grecque. Anastenarides. The life of passion against background of placid Hanover.

February 8, 1965

❡ We are all pilgrims groping our way toward divorce, which has replaced death as the redemptive horizon. —John Updike, New Yorker, Dec. 12, 1964, p. 52.

Novel: Sarah and Fotis. She goes to Greece for “ennoblement” à la E. M. Forster’s Englishmen. Romance with Fotis (Chrysanthi & me). Fotis’s attractions: dancing, ancestors connected with high positions for 1000 years. Romantic Arab strain, etc. But Fotis’s ideas are really different. They return to live in Greece. The gradual encroachment of annoyances and an alien way of thinking. (Cf. the couples that Antonakis knows—Greek God vs. goddamned Greek). Ending? Catastrophe or readjustment. Bring in conflict between Quakerism and Orthodoxy, rationalism and ritual.

February 21, 1965

A northern New Hampshire expression overheard by Jerry Carlson: “He’s up the path with a cat of dressing.” Translated: a cart of manure.

March 20, 1965

Lovely phrase in Greco, pp. 560–61 (Greek edition): “I watched the sun go down; the deserted island opposite me glowed rosily, happily, like a cheek after a kiss.” Κοίταζα στον ήλιο που βασίλευε, το ερμονήσι αντίκρα που ροδοκοκκίνιζε ευτυχισμένο, σα μάγουλο φιλημένο.

Also the Cretan proverb: Return where you have failed, leave where you have succeeded, p. 24 (Greek edition): ΄Οπου αστοχήσεις, γύρισε· κι όπου πετύχεις, φύγε!

March 30, 1965

In New York a few days ago I saw ballet, Giraudoux’s Judith, Lowell’s The Old Glory, and Albee’s Tiny Alice, bought a mandolin for Chrysanthi, visited Times Square haunts, lunched with Hillel and a visiting engineer from Tel Aviv, had a short discussion with Dad while walking through Greenwich Village before going to the Theatre de Lys to see The Old Glory, a discussion triggered by the sight of some girls wearing tight trousers, “just asking to be goosed,” as Dad put it. Also Dad mentioned a friend of his who took his daughter to a gynecologist before she left for college, and had her fitted for a contraceptive. The question of the promiscuity of this generation came up. Today, in Stuart Gilbert’s book on Ulysses I came across a fascinating insight into this problem. The behavior of the present generation is not inseparable from the Puritanism that insists that brothels are dens of iniquity. We have closed the brothels, but in effect, instead, have made all girls into whores. Instead of the professional we now have the ubiquitous amateur. This also grows out of a loss of religious outlook. Gilbert writes (p. 316): “’Brothels are built with the bricks of religion.’ [Blake] . . . The Catholic religion, upholding the inviolable sanctity of marriage, accepts no compromise and condemns the ostrich morality of those hybrid creeds which, burying their heads in the sands of seemliness, refuse recognition of the weakness of the flesh. . . . The man who . . . visits a . . . brothel cannot but know that he is committing a deadly sin; no compromise with conscience is possible, none of the callow pity which condones fornication or adultery as a romantic necessity or unpremeditated lapse. Nor, of course, are the modern devices of quick divorce and free love, promiscuity in fact, compatible with the existence of brothels. In such an ambiance the prostitute disappears; in a world of competent amateurs the professional has no place.”

July 8, 1965

Riparius

Conception (?) → April 8, also July 15 → April 15.

July 17, 1965

Recently we spoke at table of the fact that horses sleep standing up. Yesterday, coming up the road, we noticed a dead tree, and Alec asked, “Do trees die standing up?”

Visits recently from Geoff and Shelagh Ballard, which I enjoyed immensely, and from David Mirza with his new wife Leona, which I did not enjoy very much.

August 2, 1965

The other day, being as it was sunny and as I had an exceptionally full bladder, I went outside without dressing at all, and urinated on the grass. Such was the pressure on my bladder that I just “let go” and in so doing I made what seems to me a remarkable discovery: that the human male, when naked, can urinate like other animals, that is simply by spreading his legs a bit. The habit of clutching the penis and extending it is a habit necessitated by trousers. It was a great pleasure to return to the “natural” procedure.

Proust has M. Swann, in his older years, return more and more to the habits and attitudes of his Jewish forebears—something that I see very bluntly in my father. Perhaps Proust’s ways of thought illumine this very common occurrence: of a reversion to childish experience. Proust’s whole book is meant to illustrate the thesis that as we grow older we lose the child’s easy flights of imagination, his agility at creating fantasy, and we become more and more the prisoners of the drab world of “reality,” seen at its drabbest in the typical bourgeois home. Unless, that is, we escape either by art (the path of the few) or by memory. Memory transports us to that world of childhood that now, with the distance of years, seems more idyllic than it ever was. Unconsciously, the older man begins to live more and more in terms of recollection, the only terms that can bequeath some beauty and order and meaning to his life. One facet of this may be the identification with the father (hitherto considered an ogre) and the father’s narrow religious and moral views. The romance and coherence of tradition now outweigh the irrationality and cruelty of that person and his arbitrary, dogmatic adherence.

August 9, 1965

I feel as though I am running a hotel here, and am sick of it. After Ballards and Mirzas, Dagmar came with her children, then Alice and her children for 10 days, then Ellen DeCesare, two children, and an English maid for a week. They left today for Montreal. Tomorrow Suzanne Laaspere comes with her family; they leave Sunday, and Ellen returns from Montreal. Then next weekend the Doyles, and the summer is over! The routine is broken, the quiet evenings, the excitement of the single outing on Sunday to Lake Minerva, the freedom of feeling tired when one wants to, and of going naked when one wants to, and of getting up later than usual or going to bed earlier than usual—mainly: the delicious removal from people, a removal that makes us long for people . . . come September.

And most guests are very boorish; they eat your food, use up your time, and bring nothing in return. Though Ellen was, I admit, very sweet and stimulating. Each one, if he or she had been the only ones to come, would have been more than welcome. It is the steady stream that makes all of them a burden.

I find the kind of self-pity that Tony Last felt when informed that Beaver was coming to Hetton Abbey. I enjoy the self-enclosed life, the remoteness—and, I suppose, the self-centeredness—that he enjoyed. I console myself that I am not too self-indulgent, because I demand this only for two months.

Ellen told about the tragedy of a certain doctor’s wife in Hanover. This unhappy woman lost her twin sons one day in winter, when they ventured out on the Connecticut River, the ice broke, and they were drowned. This tragedy I had already known. But I hadn’t known something else: the fact that this same woman, after her fourth child, voluntarily had her tubes tied—i.e., had herself sterilized. The death of her sons, of two no less, would seem to be retribution by the gods. She offended Aphrodite, or Eros; she committed hubris; and the offended god smote her in payment.

Some days ago the forester was here, also Bill Heid, who is going to cut pulp on our farm next year. I learned a lot about trees, especially about the cycle of growth: (1) brush (alders, etc.); (2) popples, pine; (3) birch; (4) maple, ash, beech, basswood. Group (2) seeds only in open areas where there is ample sunshine—i.e., in abandoned fields. Popples and birch are relatively short-lived, but once they are established they provide shade that (a) kills off the brush, (b) encourages the maples and other hardwoods, which seed only in shade. If forests are cleared selectively, so that the operation is in effect a thinning and not a stripping, then maples, etc. will continue to seed. If too great an opening is made, the cycle will start all over again with the brush.

Popple is a very fragile wood, as anyone knows who has handled it. Popple trees, and also alders, grow and grow until their own branches become too heavy; then either the branch breaks or the entire tree topples over. This of course doesn’t happen to other trees, which die through rotting and disease. The life history of the popple was brought to my mind this morning as I read the concluding pages of Proust’s The Past Recaptured. There he speaks of aging as a process by which time provides us, as it were, with ever-increasing stilts. We grow taller and taller until we become unable to manage our stilts, and topple over.

Another analogy suggested itself recently as well. This summer we arrived at Terpni to find our house riddled with bullet holes. Someone, hunters presumably, had used the electric meter and (most ironically) the “O” of the word POLICE on our sticker, as targets. Various people who have been shown the results have commented: Well, most likely they spent a few days hunting unsuccessfully for deer and were frustrated. They had to have something to shoot at, and they got to such a point that they didn’t care what it was.

The same human reaction was apparently operative recently in Vietnam. Officials actually admitted that American marines had burned a village—i.e., women and children. (If they admitted to one atrocity, a rare thing, there must have been dozens.) Regrets were expressed, of course, but the commander on the spot, when reprimanded for letting his men do such a thing, gave an explanation analogous to the one given me. The marines had been shot at and killed for weeks by guerrillas, but had never been granted even a glimpse of their enemy. They simply had to retaliate, to use their power on something; it was a case of nerves. This incident, the full horror of it, put my incident in perspective.

August 23, 1965

Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue (318e) preaches the “successful” life. This Sophistic doctrine has come down to our own day where “rightness” is equated with success, where “efficiency” becomes the chief virtue, the chief ingredient of αρετή. By all means we must avoid inner upheaval, uncontrolled emotions, mania, ecstasy. In their place, as a sop, we can have external substitutes such as alcohol and “planned” excitements.

Crass sensuality is akin to excessive rationality in that both are “objective,” armed against emotion. They are equal negations of “humanness.” The human being is made to be prey to passion that penetrates to his core. In denying or frustrating this he denies or frustrates his humanity. Thus “love” in the Greek sense (a mania induced by Έρως) is human, whereas lust and ascetic rationality are not.

August 24, 1965

Hans Castorp has all the German-bourgeois emblems: “the good leather bags, the expensive clothes, his discreet gargle, the cigar, his sense of decorum, the eating of those good meals out of self-respect rather than appetite” (Brennan, p. 120). Knowing this, one understands Peter Buseck and his parents much better. Especially the cigar and the meals. Add to this the meticulousness over trifling things.

Laing in The Divided Self, echoing Freud, says that our civilization inhibits transcendence. Most appropriately, I have just dipped once more into the Phaedrus, with its cataloging and defense of the manifold forms of θεία μανία. Gide, Laing, Plato, Mann, Nietzsche, Kazantzakis, Freud all seem to be saying the same thing. One wonders if the more audacious sexual habits of the recent years are truly a sign that this suppression is breaking. And yet, the other night at the North Creek fair, when the band called for square dancers, only a few adolescents volunteered. The rest of the people stood around dumbly, waiting to be entertained.

“Originality,” said the young novelist Radiguet, . . . “consists in trying to be like everybody else—and failing.” (Brennan, Three Philosophical Novelists, p. 126.)

August 27, 1965

Only the mediocre are never accused and put on trial.

August 28, 1965

A chance observation in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” awakened Proustian recall in me. Speaking of Gregor’s debilitated father, the narrator writes that he walked slowly, “shuffling laboriously forward . . . and, whenever he wanted to say anything, nearly always came to a full stop and gathered his escort around him.” This evoked for me, with extraordinary vividness, my walk with Δημοσθένης Προύσαλης from his cottage near Ρέμβη to ours at the opposite end of the village. As we walked, ever so slowly, along the shoreline, Dimosthenis came to a full stop every time he replied to my words. I remember that we talked about yawning, which I said was a sign of boredom, and which he proceeded to attribute solely to a physiological need for more oxygen. I remember being surprised and perhaps even a little annoyed at these constant halts, especially since, he being so short, I had to look down onto the top of his bald head while he spoke. But then I reflected that in his concern for his weak heart, he had formed the habit of exerting himself in only one manner at a time. He could walk and he could talk, but not simultaneously.

A week pulling rocks, big ones. Plowshare broke. Difficulty in replacing it—probably outmoded. Forester here. Also Harold Hogan of the soil conservation service. We may construct a pond, assuming that the forest will pay for it. Got seed yesterday: Kentucky 31 fescue, also 10-10-10 fertilizer. My compulsion—my excitement—about plowing, harrowing, fertilizing, and seeding the fields is strange. A sense of power over nature, I suppose. “You fields, do as I direct! Stop your brush, your weeds! Produce grass!”

Saul here for a night, with Minna and Amos. What an egoist he is! He is charming for an hour or so, but I’m afraid that to most people, especially if they are forced to be with him for extended periods, he must be obnoxious. He doesn’t listen when others speak, as evidence by his interrupting at any moment to pursue his own line of thought, which usually concerns some great past, or projected, accomplishment of his. Yet I like him. He is open, like Geoff Ballard.

September 3, 1965

Dick Sipperly marked trees over 3½ acres for us to kill by girdling and application of a hormone that speeds up the leafage to such a degree that the roots cannot provide and the tree dies. This will be my first attempt at forest management.

Seeded and fertilized part of the south field. The gods were cooperative, as it rained for a day and a half immediately afterward. But just previously we lost our garden owing to frost—so the ledger is balanced. Poor bedraggled string beans lasted two nights and then gave up on the third. But the squash collapsed on the second. Dead. The tomatoes we covered and they are doing fine.

Herb and Mel Goertz came for an hour or two, bringing Herb’s father, a 75-year-old gentleman who is visiting here from Germany. Herb in shorts and sport shirt, Mel in slacks, the father dressed as for a day at the stock exchange: suit, vest, tie perfectly done, tight collar. A vision of Thomas Mann’s fastidious bourgeoisie. His elegantly carved walking-stick.

A review of Greco in the Herald Tribune said I mistranslated the title; It should have been “Report to the Greco” (imagine!) because the Greek is Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο, and that Κ. really meant Report to the Greek—i.e., to all Greeks. How can one respond to such ignorance? How easily, how off-handedly, a person’s integrity and knowledge can be called into question by people incapable of judging.

In four days we must leave Terpni. How I love it here! This farm fulfills me, expresses me. This summer, besides building the new cottage and outhouse, clearing more land, plowing and seeding, mowing all the fields, removing huge boulders, initiating a forest management program, I read twenty books slowly and thoroughly, prepared the raw materials for my course in Comparative Literature, gave Leander piano lessons and Alec recorder lessons, played the organ a good deal myself, and even did some very pleasant daydreaming. My only sense of emptiness was in not pursuing some original work of my own, either my projected study of Kazantzakis or the novel that has been postponed now for ten years. Though I enjoyed reading Proust, Gide, and Kafka, rereading the Odyssey, studying commentaries on Joyce and the other authors, examining Plato’s Phaedrus closely, etc., I did not have the sense of urgency and of real accomplishment that I always had even when I was translating Kazantzakis. Yet I do hope to be “creative” in my lectures this fall, though God only knows how I shall manage to prepare them all in time. I foresee ten weeks of frenzy and tension.

September 26, 1965

Πρωί πρωί: χρυσή Αφροδίτη άνευ της ασπίδος του Αχιλλέα. Τώρα προσευχόμεθα στη Θεά, στην Αρτημίδα, να μας δώσει τη χάρη της.

September 29, 1965

Πάλι.

Decenber 28, 1965

20 East 74th Street, New York City

Herb Wekselblatt, the other night, told me of an opera review that appeared in the paper the morning after the blackout, when the electricity failed all over the East. It praised the singers to the skies, the only trouble being that the performance had been cancelled. The review (as apparently is often the case) was written before the performance.

Vivid memories of Greece, stimulated by reading Βασιλικού, Η μυθολογία της Αμερικής.

Chrysanthi’s father’s reaction to the movie we took him to in Άγια Τριάδα—the typical peasant reaction.

The little maid at Saklambanis’s house.

The monk seen for the 2nd time at the festival for 15 August near Agia Triada.

The doctor’s blind wife.

The orphanage on the mountain.

The huckster just before the bus left for Haniá.

The museum directress in Haniá, weeping copiously.

The talk with the waiter about Karamanlis’s politics, at Agia Triada.

Easter.

Lovely feeling, last September, when I traveled to Terpni and watched the dragline and bulldozer at work building our new pond. Pride of ownership and accomplishment, of having money enough to make, as Samuel Butler would say, the steam shovel an appendage of our primitive limbs. In moments the machine cleared more land than I have been able to do in weeks. Perhaps all our notions—sentimental agrarianism à la Thoreau—ought finally to be outgrown. Why not see that man’s development also is expressed in the machines he creates? On the other hand, I often feel, when contemplating my farm, what an expression of selfishness it is. All that energy, all those man-hours of labor, all that expenditure, and only for my own comfort, and to isolate myself from the problems and congestion of the outside. Up to now I have never questioned the nobility of the work there. Building with one’s own hands, laboring with one’s own muscles, seemed good and admirable: it was self-justifying. However, when I receive letters from Mrs. Horton at AFSC asking me to apply for the directorship of a summer project, and then think that I cannot do so this summer because I must seed the banks of my new pond, continue to plow and reseed the fields, remove the stones, perhaps build a new shed for the harrow, fertilizer spreader, mowing machines and plow, plus thin out the trees as arranged with the forester, I begin to wonder. The self-justifying aspect of the whole undertaking is shaken, and that is bad because up to now I have felt the farm as something to which I could give all my energy, without hesitation or question. Let’s see what the future will bring.

This has been a busy Christmas, as always. I’ve seen old friends: Stefan, Herb, Paul, Peter Gardner. Hillel seems to be out of town, as is Dan Wilkes. We’ve gone to the theater: a wonderful work of art, a true opera—Fiddler on the Roof. Then to the opposite: an overrated cliché—Oklahoma (with the children), a good movie version of Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov; “The Devils,” adapted from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, an interesting but very faulty play, where the hero is less interesting than one of the minor characters; the Play of Herod, done at St. George’s Church on 16th Street: quiet dignity and stateliness, the old processional and pageant quality of the middle ages. The high point however was the Dali exhibit at Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art. Dali is a great painter; he combines superb technique with superb imagination. He can paint anything: impressionistic landscapes, poster art, surrealistic fantasies, “double-vision” pictures where from two feet you see one thing and from twenty feet something entirely different. I was fascinated by the obvious affinities between what he has been doing in the visual medium and what Kafka, Joyce, Mann et al. did in the novel. I also made my annual pilgrimage to 8th Avenue, the thrill of the clinic, and bought the usual magazines but the physiological results were nil as usual. Like Gide I try to redirect this predominant diversion.

A young woman, age 22 or thereabouts, is a miracle, a magnet. Peter Gardner’s new wife, Maitch (for M.H. = Mary Helen) is pretty and sexy in her way: fresh, young, with a wide mouth and wide-set, dark eyes. Was I jealous of his second chance at adolescent romance (my era of romance is so obviously past; I mean the time of real, overwhelming physical attraction as distinguished from sexual habit, when thrills can be achieved only by what is so euphemistically called “variation” and where stimulation quickly dulls sensitivity, leading to the need for stronger or varied stimulation). I begin to understand what none of my students, I know, can possibly understand—namely, the progression of satiation that leads to sexual masochism and even to self-flagellation and mutilation. There are stranger things than this in the bizarre history of mankind. The adolescent is thrown into a paroxysm of shivers when his knee touches the knee of his beloved beneath the table (as I know from my little girl in Rochester before I left there), or as he places his hand in the warm, moist hand of his beloved (as I know from rides with Chrysanthi on the top deck of the bus from Selly Oak to Birmingham and back). What can a student know, really, about what lies beyond this? What realization can he have, really, that this will end?

So Peter G. is remarried; Paul is remarried. Divorce or death raise their heads in the Garden of Eden. Chrysanthi is depressed by this. It is grotesque, somehow, to see Paul Davidoff joking and laughing, with a new wife who cooks excellent meals, services his bed, and caresses his old wife’s children. He spoke of Rusty only once last night when we visited him in his substantial house in Larchmont. “Once Rusty and I went driving on one of the your New Hampshire back roads,” he said, and then told how they got frightened and turned around lest they get lost. He spoke of her as of some acquaintance, a person he might see again from time to time, like a roommate.

And yet, what is the alternative? Should one act like Miss Havisham? No. The old customs were probably the best compromise. Two years of “official” mourning, with dark clothes or at least an armband. I like that; I like ritualized expressions of emotion. They do a job for the bereaved and also for society. He pays his respects in the accepted way, and afterwards, no questions are asked.

His wife, Linda, is the daughter of a Pittsburgh labor leader and union official. She is liberal, radical, in the Little Red Schoolhouse-Norman Thomas-socialist way. All the “right” attitudes, the noble causes—peace, equality, integration, etc., etc. The first thing we said when we entered was something like “Oh, what a nice house, what a dignified and quiet street!” “Yes,” she replied. “But Larchmont is unrealistic. It is all white upper middle class. Our children are deprived of diversity. They should know Puerto Ricans and butchers’ sons—Negroes.” “But that is very simply solved,” I said. “All you need do is move to the Bronx or the lower East side, and Paul would be closer to work into the bargain.” “No,” she replied; “we want the others to come here.” How typical! And let her bring her model, “typical” Puerto Rican or Negro or butcher, and see how they like it! But her conscience will be salved. She will be less bothered by the discrepancy between her liberal-socialist views and her bourgeois-capitalist privileged existence. But why should I talk? We are all the same.

Peter Gardner is really not settled. His job doesn’t fulfill him, he has no professional training, he is floating around, looking, looking for something. Bad. But the old joie-de-vivre is still there, and the girl is charming.

After visiting Stefan at his new home in Woodstock, I hurried to his exhibit at Long Island University. His painting has changed, improved. He is nicely representational, but always in an abstract way. A neat compromise between the two. His experiments with sand and gravel are effective; a fine texture results (of course Dali does this too—probably it is the vogue). It was interesting to see LIU, which is housed in the old Paramount Theater building on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. The huge, gilded lobby is sectioned off into a cafeteria and hallway. In the cafeteria: chaos. At some tables, individual students typing away at their papers in the midst of the hubbub; at others, girls and boys singing quietly around a guitarist. Everywhere sloppiness, dirt, strange faces, strange languages. The theater itself is the school gymnasium, and quite a sight. Half the seats were removed—that is, those near the “screen.” Here a basketball floor was laid down and, around it, a track. Groups were playing under each basket while a few runners circled them. In the background, an athlete working out on the trampoline, beneath the fantastic gilt-work of the old theater,, and the ornate ceiling, and the royal boxes. In back of the court, the rows of seats were left intact, all plush, with the original purple carpets. Also the balcony.

After I finished viewing Stefan’s pictures (hung disgracefully in a corridor on the 11th floor) I was on my way out when I heard some blasts on a trombone and an electric guitar. I followed the sound and went down a wide staircase, lined as always by the purple carpet, to what was originally the theater’s lounge—an enormous room in the basement, with a kind of series of anterooms. In one of these was the band, a group of teenagers. A sexy boy of 15 or so at the drums, chewing gum but looking cherubic rather than hoodlumic, as most drummers do, some beanpoles on the electric guitars, assorted types or auxiliaries with bongo drums or other percussion or rhythm pieces—one lad with hip-hugging jeans and hair that reached to his shoulders. But all looked rather stolid and bored. The band began to play. Inside, the students were massed, but only a few danced—in the foreground a couple consisting of two girls, one rather squat and ugly in a tight white sweater that outlined her enormous breasts. She and the other writhed and twisted, shaking breasts and thighs obscenely while the others watched. While this was in progress, two boys came down the stairs and peeked in (I was standing at the entrance). They were obviously Greek. They took one look and one said to the other, Τι βρώμικη. Πω πω! Τι βρώμικη. Ας φύγουμε. They were obviously brought up in the Church.

1966

Hanover, NH

January 1–March 18

New York City and Woodstock, NY (Lokos)

March 18–25

Hanover, NH

March 26–May 29

Charlottesville, Virginia

May 30–31

Hanover, NH

June 1–14

Riparius

June 15–September 1

12 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

September 1–Dec. 31

February 23, 1966

Parents telephoned to give us two items of news: (1) that Hone has cancer and will probably never leave the hospital, (2) that Alice is pregnant and will have her third child in about 7 months. I thought of “Ecce Puer.”

Interesting two days with György Márkus, a Marxist philosopher from Budapest who came here to speak to the Great Issues course on Marxist humanism.

March 6, 1966

To Burlington for Quarterly Meeting. Saw Douglas Steere, very dignified, unctuous, and talkative, as always. A good man.

We went to the Greek church. I know now why the priests wear beards in Greece. It is a good custom. Without a beard, the priest is a personality, Reverend So-and-so. With beards, they all look alike. Your attention is diverted to the function; the man is forgotten.

March 13, 1966

A cute typing error in a student paper, speaking of Will Brangwen: his “reactionary black studpidity which seals his mind from any aspect of the world.”

March 25, 1966

Back from a week in NYC. Uncle Hone died of cancer after a four-month illness. Knew he was going, of course. When Irving visited him in hospital, he still showed the old playfulness, greeting him with “Well, you old bugger!” When mother, on the last day of her visit, said she hoped to see him again in Harrison (he was hospitalized in Florida), he quietly took her hand and kissed it. He wrote in his will that he should be cremated and that no service be conducted. Instead, friends should be invited to the house for a kind of Irish wake. Irene followed his instructions. Irving of course was scandalized; he wanted a service with a paid rabbi eulogizing a man he’d never met (and who had been violently anti-religious all his life). Also, Irv objected to the lack of a visible remains, such as a tombstone. Hone was consistent, like Zorba. Bravo. Strange case of a man who outwardly seemed to do nothing in life but who succeeded in (a) an extremely happy marriage, (b) winning innumerable friends, (c) giving joy to many people. He will be remembered. Irene was a rock. She’d lost her mother, sister, brother, and now her best friend, Viola, is also dying of cancer. But she is devoid of any self-pity. She remembers the good days and is thankful for them. She talked, when we visited her, of the burgeoning trees and the crocuses. She asked if we’d like a willow tree for our new house. Imagine!

I learned two things about Dad’s father. One: that he cursed God shortly before he died. Two: that when he was given prescriptions for glasses by the ophthalmologist, he always refused to have them filled, but instead went to the pushcarts on Orchard Street and tried on pair after pair of used spectacles until he found lenses that pleased him. The pragmatic approach. In Lvov, I also learned, he had a bread route, pushing a cart.

We visited Stefan Lökös on the way back. Inge’s niece has come over from Germany to live with them—a buxom seventeen-year-old girl with a limp. Stefan told me that her leg had been amputated a little above the ankle; she wears a wooden leg and foot which, when covered with a heavy stocking, does not show. This was the result of an infection that set in after an operation. Will she find a husband?

Stefan and I played the Spring Sonata, plus Handel, the Mozart concerto in A major, a Bach sonata and the D minor unaccompanied suite, including the Chaconne, with Schumann’s piano version. We left at 6:30 and drove home in torrential rains, with Chrysanthi very tense and scared the whole way, arriving at about 1 a.m. Luckily there was a fascinating discussion on the radio about alcoholism with a brilliant Harvard psychiatrist named Chafez.

In Greenwich Village we saw a well-dressed man walking his dog. The dog left a nice bowel movement on the sidewalk. The man took out a Kleenex, picked up the shit, and deposited in in the gutter.

Lunched with Hillel, who is now at William Morrow. He says he’s interested in my proposed Kazantzakis book, and also why don’t I write up my lectures. (Why don’t I do a lot of things??)

Lunched with Louis Cornell, who chose Hanover, NH over England as a place to spend a year off. Some people! Still, we’ll have his viola for our Wednesday nights.

Today, saw Dick Williamson, who was away at Stanford for six months. He learned to smoke marijuana. Says he heard things in music that he never heard before, when under the influence. Also thinks he played the flute better. Insists that it is non-addictive.

March 26, 1966

I’ve been reading Throckmorton’s The New Testament and Mythology in connection with the sermon I’m to give the Unitarians on Easter Sunday. He summarizes and defends Bultmann’s thesis in Kerygma and Myth. I’d heard of Bultmann from Robin Scroggs but knew nothing directly. Now I find a kindred mind regarding the presence of the eternal in the Now, for instance. Along these same lines, Rollo May’s article in the Saturday Review recently (March 26) about sex and especially the need for Dionysian ecstasy in the experience seemed like a restatement of my lectures last fall in Comparative Literature.

Chrysanthi reminisced about the war in Greece. When the bombers first came over Salonika she was living near the Jewish cemetery. The Greek houses have no real cellars so, for “air raid shelters” the people removed the stones from the graves and hid in the graves. The only trouble was that when a bomb landed nearby the concussion sometimes causes the walls of the grave to cave in, burying the people alive.

The bombing got worse and the family decided to evacuate. They put their belongings into pillowcases and started walking out of Salonika, eventually going to a village called Ρίζα in Halkidiki. C. remembers the first night, when they slept under a tree. Then the planes came over. She says she remembers what a beautiful sight it was in Thessaloniki: the whole sky illuminated by flares, and in the light of the flares thousands of parachutists descending gracefully.

Everywhere along the march they were received graciously and given bread, because Dimitrios had former pupils or relatives of former pupils everywhere. In Riza they stayed for six months. They used to go out to the fields each day and collect daisies. Magdalini ground these up, added a little oil and flour, and this was their food, plus corn bread that stuck in the throat.

Odysseas was then about 18, an athlete, handsome, vivacious, with a huge appetite. He was always hungry. Magdalini used to hide the bread under the bed but he kept stealing it, which led to recriminations. When he was forced to leave the house later on during the civil war he hid out in a garage pretending to be a mechanic. Lola, on pain of death if caught, brought him scraps of bread that she slipped to him as he lay beneath the cars.

It was because of Odysseas, of course, that Chrysanthi and her parents were imprisoned. C. was kept about 20 days in a large cell with many other women, including her mother. No food was provided and the prisoners shared whatever was brought by relatives. She was released through the efforts of Mr. House, and went to the Quaker school, very depressed and sick. Her mother and father remained. Vouli helped very much at this point, sending Demosthenes and Creon to cheer Chrysanthi up, having them serenade her over the telephone, etc.

March 30, 1966

In preparation for my talk to the Quaker-Unitarian group this April 10, I have been burying myself these days in a study of the Resurrection and its possible meaning for our time. The main thing I have discovered is the eschatological view, strongly favored by Albert Schweitzer in his sketch of the life of Jesus and in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, also by Bultmann and Berdyaev. This of course had been entirely absent from my “liberal” Christianity. The Resurrection—indeed, everything in the Gospels—can be seen only in terms of the eschatological expectation: i.e., the coming of the Kingdom of God, of righteousness, love, beauty. Now all this must be interpreted existentially rather than supernaturally. The early Church very soon discovered that the Kingdom was not to come by an act of God. The Kingdom will come only if man brings it. This does not mean, however (as it has meant in liberal religion) the amelioration of material conditions on earth, or the pious and sentimental hope that human beings will one day become better than they now are. We must be eschatological and moral in full cognizance of the truth about human nature—i.e., we can hope for momentary intrusions of the Kingdom, for fleeting touches by the finger of God, for sporadic escape from the tyranny of necessity and death. We must not make the mistake, so brilliantly analyzed by D. H. Lawrence in his Studies, of thinking that a “negative of species” is a “new species.” That is, we must continue to think of the Kingdom as wholly spiritual, as an escape from the material—from death. (Thus the Resurrection is an eschatological event.) We must not think we are bringing the Kingdom if we improve of ameliorate material conditions. The formula for ethics becomes: Act in such a way as to bring closer the Kingdom of God. Such action, since the Kingdom of God is antithetical to the conditions of the Darwinian world, inevitably means suffering. Suffering, therefore, becomes a sign of religious behavior, though it should not become an end in itself. Regarding all this, compare the ethical section of my Liberal’s Credo, which makes a lot more sense when linked with eschatological ideas. I must read Bultmann directly; so far I’ve only gotten him second hand through Throckmorton. Also must see Robin Scroggs on all this.

This is all extremely relevant to pacifism.

April 24, 1966

Leander played C. P. E. Bach’s “Solfeggietto” at the school variety night and was introduced as playing a piece by P. E.—that is “Physical Education”—Bach! The whole evening, except for L. and the boy who played the recorder, and some acrobatics and gymnastics, was terribly ugly: rock and roll, etc. Our culture!

John Rassias, back from Africa where he hired teachers for Peace Corps orientation, was interested in what Africans consider sexually attractive in a woman since so many African women appear publicly with bare breasts. He was told that three things are valued especially: extremely white eyeballs, extremely black, sleek, oily hair (a sign of cleanliness; otherwise the hair is dusty and drab), and round, meaty hips.

From Exiles: ❡ Robert [to Richard]: You have that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart of Swift. You have fallen from a higher world, Richard, and you are filled with fierce indignation, when you find that life is cowardly and ignoble. While I . . . have come up from a lower world and I am filled with astonishment when I find that people have any redeeming virtue at all. (p. 58.) ❡ Richard [to Robert]: Have you the luminous certitude that yours is the brain in contact with which she must think and understand and that yours is the body in contact with which her body must feel? (p. 57.)

May 4, 1966

Alfred Alvarez spoke, and reminded me a little of Stephen Dedalus. He spoke of the commercial quality invading the arts: the fashion, the instant success made possible by mass media adulation, etc.—all this having the effect upon the artist of making him consciously a public entertainer and even buffoon going through his paces . . . for a price (à la Allen Ginsberg). Well and good. But here was Alvarez himself speaking for a fee of $600, obviously unprepared, substituting personality for real involvement in the subject matter, or real dedication to the craft and responsibilities of criticism (read: “poetry”) and, as he as much as said later, hardly believing in his own pronouncements. Stephen Dedalus all over again: the poseur, the juggler and mountebank fooling his audience members into believing they are receiving something profound.

With Alvarez there was, however, a rationalization not present in Stephen Dedalus. His flippancy, his nihilism, lack of values, his reversion to posturing and smart cynicism were all predicated on a firm belief that the world will be blown up by H-bombs in ten or fifteen years. So, at the same time that he sees flippancy and nihilism in modern art for this reason, he himself strangely exemplified this flippancy even more than the artists. Perhaps we should (I wonder) at least give him credit for being thoroughly honest in refusing to aspire to anything more than buffoonery. As he said, writers (and presumably critics too, judging from him) have nothing to lean against, no stable wall of values from which to lament the absence of values in the world about them. They participate in that absence. If this is the case, we are back at the nihilism from which the existentialists tried to rescue us. Even worse, because contemplation of modern life in people like Alvarez produces not despair (in despair there is paradoxically a seed of hope) but instead simply a giggle, and a dedication to “getting away” with as much as possible . . . before the big bang.

May 8, 1966

Weekend in Riparius. Chrysanthi angry and morose on Saturday but softened a little by Sunday. She is furious because I seem to prefer my students and my work to my family. Maybe I do! We went with the hope of seeding the area around the pond. All I succeeded in doing was to get the tractor stuck in the mud! Bill Heid came and pulled me out.

Joycean epiphany: Harold Carman, speaking of Jane’s latest boyfriend: “His father’s a doctor.” Clare (not quite attuned to his desire to impress me): “Yes, he’s going to pull two of my teeth tomorrow.”

May 11, 1966

Leander suggested that cows, when milked, should give not milk but bubble gum.

June 15, 1966

We went to North Creek at 7:00 p.m. to pick up my tractor tire, which I’d left at Alexander Bros. garage to be fixed, and were told that it had not been looked at. But this disappointment, and the wasted trip, was compensated for when we went to the dump. A row of people was standing at the lip of the trench, most peculiarly, as though the dump was now the new place for meeting one’s friends. But when we came closer we understood the reason. A huge black bear was slinking around in the undergrowth just behind the garbage. This was my first view of an Adirondack bear.

June 16, 1966

David Mirza and Leona arrived with a Frenchman and his family on the way back to Caen in Normandy where he teaches English at the lycée and directs the summer language institute. His name: Jean-Pier Fichou. He told me of his admiration for André Malraux, and especially for the Maisons de Culture. These are established in all cities over 100,000 population. For a fee of approximately $1.00 per year, subscribers are given the opportunity to attend a cultural event every night of the year practically. There are concerts, professional theater troupes performing classic plays, lectures, classic films, and even an opera once a month. The hope was to attract workers though so far only a small minority of the audience is form the working class. But the important thing is that the events do not play down to the cultural level of the audience but rather try to raise that level. Jean-Pierre told me that the Director of the Caen Maison has written personal letters to every citizen of the city outlining the advantages and opportunities of the Maison.

I also met an interesting and friendly Frenchman when I went as external examiner to the University of Virginia: Claude Richard of the University of Montpelier. He was spending a year at Virginia finishing a dissertation on Poe.

June 27, 1966

There is a gent from Kalamazoo

Who likes to appear out of the blue.

Afraid of hard knocks

He dabbles in stocks

While writing his goddamned thesis too.

June 30, 1966

Yesterday I was greeted at my “office” by a browsing deer. Today, as I sat reading Toda-Raba, a huge dragonfly perched on the edge of the table with a small brightly colored insect hanging from its jaws. It devoured this insect leisurely, then flew off.

Kazantzakis’s letters to Prevelakis are one more revelation, one more confirmation of K.’s genius, his insatiable curiosity, his knack for turning all experience to account. The letters are full of memorable sayings. For instance, after describing the disparity between an ugly petroleum village and a young dancing girl—a disparity that suddenly for him became a unity: a symbolic representation of the twofold nature of man, the drabness of the flesh, of material necessity, on the one hand, and the miraculous grace of the spirit, on the other—he writes: Τούτη είναι η μεγάλη ελπίδα του ταξιδευτή: να βρει στα πέρατα της γης τις εικόνες που εκφράζουν την ψυχή του και τον βοηθούν να σώσει και να σωθεί. (p. 61, letter 42.) K.’s relation to Prevelakis is intense and obsessive; he almost clings to this man 26 years his junior. But at this point he gives a plausible and touching reason: Όταν θέλω ν’αναζήσω την αγάπη μου αυτή σε Σας, την αποδίδω σε καθερά εγωιστικά υπερήφανα αίτια. Είναι σα να μιλώ στον εαυτό μου, τον εικοσοχρονίτη . . . και βλέπω τον εαυτό μου έφηβο ν’ αγωνιά και να θέλει να κυριέψει τον κόσμο.

I saw this in my own feelings for Larry Simms recently. He wrote a fiery letter, all impatience with pretense and stuffiness (à propos of Dartmouth’s graduation) and just about the time I received it I was rereading some of my own letters and writings of my college years at Harvard and Haverford (all stored in boxes here). I was terrified at myself! As K. would say, Τι θεριό ήταν αυτός; Τι τον έτρωγε;

July 1, 1966

❡ “You remind me of the poor philosopher in the boat,” he said. “The philosopher said to his boatman, ‘Do you know philosophy?’ ‘No.’ ‘No? then half your life has been lost.’ A little while afterward, a violent storm came up. ‘Oh, philosopher,’ called the boatman, ‘do you know how to swim?’ ‘No.’ ‘No? Then your whole life is lost.’” —Toda-Raba, p. 34, chapter 3.

Alice and my parents have been here for a week. Peter Buseck went to N.H. for a chemical congress. Father pathetic as usual—dead. Conversation: “How tired I am!” “Did you sleep well?” “Are you rested?” “I took a nap this afternoon.” The other subject: food.

The oven broke again yesterday, and I rigged up a kind of improvised Dutch oven in order to bake the bread that Chrysanthi had already kneaded. Very successful. This “accomplishment”—the substitution of primitive ingenuity for modern conveniences gave C. the greatest pleasure she’s had (or shown, at any rate) since our arrival. (She’s been melancholy owing to morning sickness on account of her pregnancy.) Perhaps this is the great joy left to modern man: to revert—in play—to primitivism, and thus to show himself, or fool himself into believing, that he is not a slave to his own conveniences.

Our pond is full, and delicious. I read until lunchtime, then cooled off with a quick plunge. At last I’ve found a place where I can swim with nothing on, or just a cover-up.

Leander and I have been playing duets—Kuhlau, and now Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Joy. Also, we’ve begun sight-singing and theory. Everything takes so much time: hours. But this is important, and also wonderfully enjoyable.

Kazantzakis’s schedule: rise at 4 a.m., write. Lunch of milk, eggs, butter, potatoes. Siesta of two hours. Write again. Evening: walk. It is strangely disconcerting for me to spend my mornings with Kazantzakis, that flaming soul, and my afternoons with my parents and Alice, those cold ashes.

Kazantzakis’s remarks on communism in Letter 92 apply perfectly to our side as well. The gist is: life is very complicated and into this complication comes a slogan—for example: proletariat vs. bourgeois. It is only after the slogan is formulated that the two classes really develop, or that class-consciousness appears. In other words, the simplified slogan actually transforms reality, making people think in simplified terms that formerly did not exist. The same with our own slogans of west-versus-east, freedom vs. communism, etc. This will only serve to produce a cleavage that of itself would not develop.

Kazantzakis also sees Russia’s great ideal to be, paradoxically, the USA—i.e., the goal of materialistic comfort for all, worship of the machine. Thus communism is a logical end to the bourgeois era of civilization that replaced religion with science. The chief difference is that the communists seek a more just distribution of material goods. (But we are now doing exactly the same.)

July 4, 1966

The thoughts in Letter 92 are supplemented by the manifesto reproduced in Toda-Raba, pp. 116–120. One phrase appeals to me especially. In speaking against the materialism of our age (a materialism shared by West and East alike), K. gives one symptom as “the outrageous over-estimation of commonplace know-how.” Does this not say worlds about our situation in the United States?

Coleen Sibler spent the weekend with us, bearing sad news of a precarious marriage. The chief villain seems to be Ora, who—says Coleen—is more married to Carl than she (Coleen) is! She told us of a Thanksgiving dinner the three had together. In the midst of it, Ora had some kind of a fit . . . supposedly. She began screaming, “She stole my son, she stole my son!” Carl called a doctor, who prescribed some pills, presumably a sedative. Coleen saw Ora put the pill in her mouth, but conceal it in her cheek instead of swallowing it. She then asked for a Kleenex to wipe her lips, and deposited the pill in the Kleenex, surreptitiously. Coleen of course discovered it there, and they forcefully administered another pill, and thus quieted Ora down. Coleen turns out to be a simple and probably naïve girl from South Carolina who was “rushed” by Carl—married him before she knew anything of the relationship between mother and son. Now they are separated; Carl lives with Ora on 24th Street and commutes to work in Yonkers; Coleen lives in the apartment they found in Yonkers and commutes to work in Manhattan! I felt compassion for her all weekend—that is, in her exposure for three days to a family: grandparents, brother and sister each with spouses, lots of children, all reasonably close and amicable; and the parents not, really, interfering in the children’s lives. We swam in the pond, went to the Riverside Church supper, picnicked at Minerva, talked a lot, listened to music (home-made), ate, drank. (Also, Peter Buseck and I got a good start on the thinning project in the woods: tedious work in 90°+ heat.) I enjoyed Peter’s company immensely. He has a lot of vitality, and is (without even trying) a constantly pleasant, good-natured fellow.

July 5, 1966

Kazantzakis’s prayer, in a letter to Eleni, June 30, 1928 (in Toda-Raba, p. 213): “God grant that you will experience great joys and great griefs with me, and never mediocrity or boredom.”

July 8, 1966

Prevelakis remarks (p. 117) that change of place is equivalent to removal in time. How true this is! When we go to Greece, for example, we transport ourselves back 50 or 75 years in time. I am constantly delighted because I see things there that I remember from my youth: trolley cars, pushcarts, open markets, hurdy-gurdy men with monkeys.

July 10, 1966

Geoff and Shelagh spent the day here yesterday. Geoff solved the mysteries of my new pump—it was simply a problem of air seepage in the suction hose, and of proper priming. We talked about ponds . . . and people. Everything in nature (for instance the total life existing in a pond) tends toward equilibrium, said Geoff. Man is the only creature who constantly wishes to upset nature’s equilibrium. Carp, perch, bass, trout, frogs, plant life, oxygen supply, etc. will all, in time, establish an equilibrium. But man, dissatisfied, does not welcome this.

July 13, 1966

Culture has crept close to Riparius. The new Saratoga Festival presents the NYC ballet for an entire month! We went last night and saw Divertimento, Tarantella, Agon, and Stars & Stripes. The Agon is haunting, terribly sensual, with the jagged, disconnected rhythms and gestures of our times. Suzanne Farrell was superb, as I’d heard; the men were adequate. On the way back, a hot pastrami sandwich in Lake George!!

Whenever I thought of Jim Clancy and his life as a director I always felt aggrieved that such splendid efforts should be so ephemeral. The show is on the boards for a week, and that is all; it can never be resurrected in the same way again. But reading Kazantzakis’s Odyssey, with its re-enforcement in the letters, throws new light on this. K. says that the supreme creativity is to create and then obliterate—leaving the slate clean so that you can begin again. We tend to think of the artist as someone who strives for permanence: Shakespeare’s sonnet about the poem being the most lasting monument, etc. But for sheer creative élan, at least in K.’s view, the impermanent medium is superior. He develops this theme especially in relation to the cinema.

Yesterday, a deer and two fauns on the banks of the pond.

July 19, 1966

Neither C. nor I gave each other presents on our anniversary on the 17th. Nor did we say anything. Today we explained why, and laughed. I had thought far ahead and had ordered a pair of shoes for C. from Sears, but—as always!—they had been out of stock, and it was too late to send in another order. C., in her turn, had baked a very special lemon pie, but it had turned out so badly that she threw it away.

Lou Smith came to fix the oven. Marie told me that he is a bird fancier, so much so that whenever he finds a dead bird of an interesting species he takes it home, wraps it carefully, and stores it in his freezer.

Reading a TLS lead article about Lucien Goldmann yesterday, I suddenly had insight into my perhaps fanatical attachment to Terpni. Goldmann, echoing Marxist orthodoxy, talks about the alienation or “reification” contingent upon industrialism. The whole problem is that men “do not recognize themselves in their work.” And that is the whole secret of this farm. Everywhere, at every turn, I recognize myself! Every field was hardly a field until I re-cleared it, every path is kept open by my sweat, every building was designed and erected by me, every rock in the chimney fetched, lifted, and placed by me. I thought also of how non-alienating is the job of professor, where each classroom session or lecture is a “product”—ephemeral, granted but so are automobiles and refrigerators—that bears upon it the full impress of its designer and executor and packager: me. Or at least it ought to be so, and if it is not the failure is in me and not in any impersonal economic, social, or “historic” force.

Yesterday, at the dinner table, we were having one of those conversations that is like a waking day-dream: talking about whether we’d take the boat or the plane to Europe, whether we’d go to England first or directly to Greece, etc. Of course, Leander expressed himself emphatically on all points, and I became a little annoyed because of the frivolousness of the entire proceedings; there seemed something irresponsible and immoral about this serious debate over which pleasure should be preferred to another, while so many people had no pleasures at all to chose from.

Today I read in Time and Free Will something that throws a new light on our discussion of yesterday, and alters my attitude. Bergson says (chapter 1, pp. 9–10): “What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal. The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”

July 20, 1966

The lovely naïveté of children! We were talking at table about the provenance of bacon and ham. “But how does the pig give bacon?” asked Alec. “Is it like a cow gives milk?”

Coleen here again. As Marie said last time in her sarcastic way: “Firmly attached! Firmly attached!” The situation with Carl doesn’t seem to be any better. Coleen works, lives alone, Carl doesn’t support her, and he visits her only when he wants sex.

Dad sent me a sermon from the Ethical Culture Society called “Neither Gentile nor Jew,” taking up from Paul’s statement to express a bland kind of eclecticism where people would identify with the “human race” rather than with this group or that. I used to be taken in by such wish-washy liberalism, but am not any more. The whole point of Paul’s plea was that there was another strong, dynamic and meaningful identification, namely Christianity, which could embrace both Gentile and Jew, and make the smaller divisions meaningless. By the same token, communism or any other great force unites diverse people so long as that force remains alive. But the “human race”? That is no rallying cry, and will never be, at least not until we have to unite qua humans to battle the apes or the angels or the Martians instead of each other.

❡ The beliefs to which we most strongly adhere are those of which we should find it most difficult to give an account, and the reasons by which we justify them are seldom those which have led us to adopt them. In a certain sense we have adopted them without any reason, for what makes them valuable in our eyes is that they match the colour of all our other ideas, and that from the very first we have seen in them something of ourselves. —Bergson, Time and Free Will, chapter II, p. 135.

❡ We estimate the talent of a novelist by the power with which he lifts out of the common domain, to which language had . . . brought them down, feelings and ideas to which he strives to restore, by adding detail to detail, their original and living individuality. —Bergson, ibid., p. 164.

July 22, 1966

❡ Hence there are finally two different selves, one of which is, as it were, the external projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social representation. We reach the former by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming as states not amenable to measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in duration has nothing in common with juxtaposition in homogeneous space. But the moments at which we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are rarely free. The greater part of the time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colourless shadow which pure duration projects into homogeneous space. Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we ‘are acted’ rather than act ourselves. To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration. —Time and Free Will, pp. 231–2.

July 23, 1966

Ballet again. The Cage, L’après-midi d’un faun, & Halinquinade. Stravinsky, for me, is a continuing revelation; the others were very ordinary. Hope to see Firebird on Thursday.

Coleen told us that Carl has discontinued her telephone now, and has changed his Esso credit card so that her name is removed, etc. She is living in the Yonkers apartment with no furniture, eating off a card table, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. She comes from a South Carolina farm, one of seven children. Father raised tobacco, cotton, melons. He now plants cover crops for which he collects a federal subsidy.

Daniel Tisdale here for ten days: Leander overjoyed. Tomatoes luxuriant, also corn and string beans. Hens laying five eggs per day. Cornucopia. Even the wild irises we dug up on the roadside and transplanted are thriving. Hummingbirds frequent the purple flowers given us by Peg and Jerry English some years ago. I finally replaced the amplifier that I built (with Peter Gardner’s help) in Rochester in 1953 and that insisted on buzzing instead of playing. It’s nice to make the acquaintance again of old disks. Also, Leander is becoming proficient in sight-reading the pedal parts to my organ pieces—and we play away. He is doing well in his solfège, though he says he doesn’t like to sing. Laudato si mio signior “peer tutti” (= per tutte).

Bergson is sobering in his insistence that the intellect was given us for practical purposes: adaptation to the surrounding world, and not primarily for contemplation, artistic composition, etc. I should remember this when I (it is a malady common to my class and profession) turn up my nose at businessmen, engineers and the like. Bergson, p. 145 of Creative Evolution, says: “As regards human intelligence, it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments, that the inventions which strew the road of progress have also traces of its direction. This we hardly realize, because it takes us longer to change ourselves than to change our tools. Our individual and even social habits survive a good while the circumstances for which they were made, so that the ultimate effects of an invention are not observed until its novelty is already out of sight.” . . . “If we could rid ourselves of all pride, . . . we should say perhaps not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber.” (p. 146)

July 26, 1966

Idea for a novel (I never give up!): “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” à la 1966 at Dartmouth, with the whole truth of “identity crises, fraternity hell nights, mutual masturbations in the common room, student government resignations, faculty squabbles over basic approaches and liberal arts vs. technology and/or science vs. humanities, plus nice things also: the sudden awakening to new ideas, religious conversions or de-conversions, a beautiful evening by a fireside with a girl, solving all metaphysical and political problems. . . . Now, with my perspective of 15 years, I might perhaps be able to write intelligently of student life, putting into the book my own experiences of that stage in life (drawing on diaries, letters, etc.) and also what I have seen, at Dartmouth, from the outside. . . . But when—when? . . . Now: back to Creative Evolution!

I like Bergson’s formulation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics: “all physical changes have a tendency to be degraded into heat, and . . . heat tends to be distributed among bodies in a uniform manner. . . . It tell us that the instability to which we owe the richness and variety of our solar system will gradually give way to the relative stability of elementary vibrations continually and perpetually repeated” (pp. 256–7).

The end of Chapter III (pp. 280–286) is a composite statement of Bergson’s philosophy—or rather, a call, a Cry (Κραυγή) for a new religion that would be a humanism possessing a supra-human dimension.

Bergson is very sensible on the question of life on other planets (pp. 269–70), especially when we remember that he was writing over 50 years ago. He refuses to worry about the presence of an atmosphere, appropriate temperatures, signs of green vegetation, etc. because he carries things back to their fundamentals. Life is a process whereby available energy (i.e., sunlight) may be stored and then utilized. In our system the storage depends on oxygen-carbon chemistry, but this was a mechanism developed by the élan vital to meet particular conditions. Given other conditions, other mechanisms were no doubt developed. Thus the likelihood is not so much that there are other worlds that duplicate the conditions of this world, but that there are completely different forms of life that grew up under the contingencies of different conditions.

July 27, 1966

I started Galatea Kazantzakis’s Άνθρωποι και υπεράνθρωποι. What a terrible picture it paints of Kazantzakis, and yet it does seem plausible, from the evidence of K.’s own books, and also from remarks by Friar.

My Alec is a little old man whereas Leander is a real child: a devil. Alec is punctilious in everything; he infuriates me in this; but of course he is doing everything “correctly”—he is the pride of the house because he never forgets to brush his teeth! Galatea describes this situation very nicely (p. 31): Η Δανάη μεγάλωσε χωρίς να σταθεί ποτέ της παιδί. Δεν είχε κανένα από τα χαρακτηριστικά που ξεχωρίζουν τους μικρούς από τους μεγάλους και που το κυριότερο απ’ όλα είναι η ξενοιασιά.

July 29, 1966.

We put a second floor down in the attic room and painted it a bright red. Transformation. A dingy garret became a cozy bedroom.

Galatea gives a lovely description of the arrival at Χερσόνησος (where Jeff’s friend drove us to see the little chapel, on the way back from Μάλια). She catches especially the tone of the women with their children, the same that I observed at Άγια Τριάδα:

Το λιμάνι ήτανε μεγαλούτσικο, γεμάτο κίνηση. Βάρκες και καΐκια λικνίζονταν στα νερά, μια μπενζίνα αγκομαχούσε πέρα κει, και ξυπόλυτοι χωρικοί, με ανασκουμπουμένες πάνω απ’ τα γόνατα μπλάβες ξεθωριασμένες πάνικες βράκες, σφιχτοζωμένοι τα κόκκινα ντόπια ζουνάρια, οι πιότεροι δίχως πουκάμισα, φόρτωναν μεγάλα σακιά χαρούπια στις μαούνες, μέσα στο λιοπύρι. Από τις πόρτες των σπιτιών, σ’ όλο το μάκρος της παραλίας, έβλεπες γυναίκες μπαμπουλωμένες σ’ άσπρες μπολίδες. ΄Αλλες έπλεναν, άλλες κλώθανε, άλλες με το σταμνί στον ώμο έφερναν νερό, άλλες με τις κατσίκες ξοπίσω τους πήγαιναν να τις βοσκήσουν. Πλήθος παιδάκια έπαιζαν στο γυρογιάλι ή κολυμπούσαν. Κι άκουσες τις μανάδες:

—Μπρέ συ Γιωργιό! Ε, Γιωργιό, έβγα μπλιό μωρέ συ αντίχριστε από τη θάλασσα, γιατί θα σε σκοτώσω στο ξύλο σα γυαγίρεις. Γροικάς ίντα σου λέω!

—Ίνδα εδά θα βγω μα! Να λίγο-λίγο ακόμη και βγαίνω! (σελ. 121

August 1, 1966

Tom and Becky here over the weekend, also Richard Dellamora with eight boys from the ABC program. Typhoon!

Tom and I did some more “practice B-10: chemical thinning.” Tom, like Peter Buseck, was surprised that I didn’t want to have the forest pure and untouched. Why don’t I? Somehow I like the idea of exploitation. I wouldn’t have felt this way 10 or 15 years ago.

In the afternoon we raked the north field, which C. and I had mown last week. Slow work with hand rakes. Tom commented on the inefficiency of this practice. I replied that I didn’t do it because it was efficient or inefficient, but because I enjoyed raking: the sun, the cool breeze the lovely smell of the hay. Also—and especially—the rhythmic narcor, the mindlessness. I thought of Malraux and of Gisors in La Condition Humane—Gisors and his opium: the human need for forgetfulness. Does physical work, especially this type, accomplish the same for me? Is it my opium? Is this why I devote so much time to it, when I ought, perhaps, to be continuing with my studies? If it is an opium, it seems to me a good kind—healthy rather than debilitating; and, in its own way, constructive, the effects being always visible.

Reading Galatea’s book this morning I thought again of the unconscionable affluence and comfort of our lives here. I am really ashamed now that we have the pond, and the farm takes on more the aspect of a private estate with every provision for enjoyment. Galatea, in her rather unpolished way, describes the period of the Occupation: people dying like flies in the streets, from hunger. I thought by contrast of our steaks and chops, our delicious local cheeses, our fresh vegetables from the garden, our liberal consumption of beer, our blueberry pies and fresh baked bread. Now, with Ashline’s store so near and so cheap, also with my salary up to the colossal figure of $12,000, we are more liberal than ever. Yesterday I bought a porterhouse steak for the Shanklands and us, the first we’ve ever had. We ate lunch at 2:30, planned to go to hear country music at the Warrensburg jamboree, so had to have supper at 6:30 when no one was really hungry. Nevertheless: beer, salad, steak till we burst! I feel the extravagance of all this (especially in such close proximity to the ABC boys), but I also feel something quite opposite: the conviction that it cannot last, that some immense catastrophe will change everything, and that in the meantime we should enjoy, enjoy!

Now that I think of my salary, I am amazed at how fast it has risen. It is now, at the end of my 5th year at Dartmouth, exactly double of what it was when I began. If I remember correctly, the figures are: Instructor: 1961–2, $6000; 1962–3, $6700. Assistant professor: 1963–4, $7500; 1964–5, $8500. Associate professor: 1965–6, $10,000; 1966–7, $12,000. Plus 16% each of the last three years paid into TIAA-CREF.

Kay Horton is still pressing me to submit an application to lead a Quaker project. Will I ever do this? Will I give up my comforts? Is my farm surreptitiously becoming a weight around my neck?

Becky, yesterday, said that I obviously like people. I was astonished. I am like Leander: people must come to me, on my terms, under my hospitality. I always feel reluctant to go to them.

The jamboree at Warrensburg was very enjoyable and very memorable for many reasons. First the entertainment: “Doc Williams” and his country music. This was the usual group—guitars, bass, banjo, and “country” fiddle, plus Doc as vocalist. In addition, a clown who doubled as drummer, fiddler, bassist, and guitarist! The banjo player was tall and gaunt, a young Abe Lincoln; he wore a vermilion shirt with fringes hanging from shoulders and sleeves. The others all had string ties. I was delighted by the music. This is just what we see in Greece today: commercial, composed music firmly rooted in folk and ballad tradition. There was a ballad about a farm boy who says “I’ll be home in the morning,” gets shot however and is brought back in a wagon, whereupon his brother tells Ma: “I’ll be back in the morning (i.e., after he accomplishes his revenge). Another comic song about a husband locked out of his house by his headstrong wife Hannah. Another in which the violin imitated the whistle and chug-chug of a locomotive. Another which was a “sacred number” one by special request. The clown was a first-rate mime; he could do wonders with his tongue and mouth, make all kinds of grimaces and noises: belches, farts, squeaks, howls; and he made good use of his baggy pants. The jokes were all from burlesque, but good—e.g., “I saw a boy and girl playing checkers on the slope of a mountain, in the dark.” “Checkers in the dark! Impossible!” “Well, it must have been checkers.” “What makes you think that?” “Well, I heard the girl say to the boy: ‘You make another move and I’ll crown you!’” Or: “Skirts are going up and up, necklines are going down and down.” “That’s true.” “I’d sure like to be there when they meet.”

The audience howled. All farm people. Gaunt American Gothics, grizzled grandpas, little bony women in worn skirts of $2 dresses. Teenagers in their best jeans. It was so good to see live entertainment carrying on, still demanded, still appreciated, with a real warm close proximity between performer and spectator, with ad-libbing, microphone troubles, complete informality. All that is deadened with television, the opiate of the masses. It was good, too, to see a folk culture still surviving, how I don’t know. Doc Williams was the main attraction, but there were many others. The rides, of course: Ferris wheel, spinners, railway merry-go-round. A fat—huge—man-boy, with a tiny stupid-looking head, spun himself interminably in the spinner, cruelly, self-destructively. He more than filled the little cockpit. He went again and again and when he finally emerged was staggering and bleary-eyed. David Millington ran up to me to say hello. I didn’t recognize him, he’s so big now. He gasped that Roy had just crashed his Dodge into a telephone pole but had escaped unhurt. “He drinks,” David said; “beer. Dad told him not to, but he does. You know Roy, the one with the buck teeth.” “How’s your mother?” “Fine. She’s working seven days a week now. I’ve been here all day. I’ll come up and see you” and off he went with his friends.

Besides the rides: gambling—small time stuff, a nickel a throw. And food: franks, chips, sugar candy (aghh!) and beer; thousands of empty cans of Carling everywhere. You waded through them.

Finally, the greased pole. I’d never seen this before. At the top, pasted on one next to the other, ten $1.00 bills. When we arrived, it was the time for “married women” to try. They didn’t get far. Hefty, mature girls clambering one on top of the other up to a limit of three tiers, whereupon the poor girl at the bottom would give way and the others come sliding down, their skirts and blouses smeared with grease. The men took over. What persistence! First they found that no one could shinny up. Next they found that they couldn’t just stand one on top of the other, because no bottom man could possibly support more than two or three above him, and to reach the top required at least five or six tiers. So they began planning. A dozen men ringed the base to give support. Then the next tier climbed up, two or three this time; after that, one for each tier. They clung to each other, stepping on heads, eyes, shoulders, hips, for footholds. Soon all had removed their shirts. They looked like a cluster of grapes, all arms, legs, buttocks intermixed, like some scene out of Dante’s Inferno, especially against the dark background of the hillside, and illuminated as they were by the glint of the full moon. Finally another bright idea: use children for the top tiers. Two young boys about twelve or thirteen were impressed, one in jeans, the other in what looked like red tights, both shirtless. They scampered up and up, how many times, but always, just short of the goal, something happened and the whole cluster disintegrated, first slowly, inevitably, then with acceleration, and all were back on the ground again. But discouragement? None! All over from the beginning. We arrived at 8:30; it wasn’t until nearly 10:00 that they finally reached the top and “harvested” the $10.00. Perseverance! Strength, agility! You could see how much more svelte some were than others. Soon only the best were performing. Completely tireless. They weren’t even enjoying themselves, not after the first few times (the collapsing was really hilarious for participants and audience alike). Certainly the prize was negligible—at most they’d get $1.00 each. They were filthy, hot, their clothes were being torn. Why? Why do this? Irrational. Simply the need to accomplish what cannot be accomplished. Not to have to go home and say, “We tried but didn’t make it.”

Galatea’s book is disturbing, perhaps because in the portrayal of Alexandros. I see bits of myself, with the crucial difference of course that Alexandros (Kazantzakis) was somewhat justified by the facts of his genius and his productivity. There is the same scorn for the middle class based at least in part on a pathological shyness and a feeling of inadequacy and insecurity. The same abhorrence of sickness that leads to a callous treatment of the sick person. The same willfulness and egotism. Kazantzakis, for instance, made “Danae” accompany him on long walks, sometimes up mountains, oblivious of the fact that whereas his indomitable health made these walks pleasant for him, they were tiring and painful for his wife. I remember dragging Chrysanthi after me up that terribly long road to Saint Francis’s hermitage outside Assisi, disdaining automotive transportation because I felt that if Francis walked it, I should too. But Chrysanthi was sick and queasy with her first pregnancy (although I didn’t know that at the time, not until we reached Rome and went to the doctor). In short, there is the same απανθρωπιά, a fundamental inability to love, to “feel with,” να συμπαθώ.

August 3, 1966

Suddenly, reading Kazantzakis’s Rock Garden (like all of his books, it can’t seem to avoid being good: fascinating) I renewed my desire to write a “guide book” to Salonika, a very personalized one, like Kazantzakis’s various Ταξιδεύοντας and like Forster’s Alexandria. I already have much material: the journal entries from Άγια Τριάδα, the trip to Χορτιάτης, the episode of Paula and Socrates, the behavior of the new middle class (Danae’s husband), theaters, restaurants, episode with George and the barbecued chickens, knowledge of menus, resorts, etc. Also, of course, the Αναστενάρηδες, a word about the Quaker School and the American Farm School, the material about German destruction of the harbor in Vassilis Vassilikos’s Οι φωτογραφίες, contacts with poets, with Kakridis, the murder of Lambrakis, St. Paul’s letter, the churches, Pella, the museum, the funny chrome-plated campground near Άγια Τριάδα, the saints’ day at Μιχανιώνα. I should also investigate Pappas’s new factories; get another letter of introduction from Mr. Boyden. Also, a king was assassinated in Salonika. Decimation of Salonika’s Jews (interview Paula maybe). The dancing at Ρέμβη. Visit leather factory (C’s relative; maybe rug factory; also tobacco processing plants, etc.). Also red light district (my reception when I came on the bicycle). The entertainers in Agia Triada: the “one-one band”; the lovely dance he did in the café, with castanets. The bears and monkeys; the hawkers. Street cries. Παράλυτος!

❡ If you believe you have found salvation, you have found it; if you believe you have not found it, you have not found it. (The Rock Garden, p. 145.)

❡ A man never travels except around the edges of his own soul. (Ibid, p. 62.)

August 5, 1966

Χαίρουμαι τώρα διαβάζοντας Ο αλήθινος Ζορμπάς κι ο Νίκος Καζαντζάκης του Γιάννη Αναπλιώτη—είναι λίγο σαν μυθιστόριμα, όλο ανέκδοτα. Ο Ζορμπάς στην αλήθεια βγαίνει όπως τον έχει παραστήσει ο Καζαντζάκης στο βιβλίο του: γλεντζής, χωρατάς, γυναικοφαγάς, δουλευταράς, με όρεξη ζωής κι ενέργια ακαταμάχητη. «Δεν άφηνε ούτε λεφτό να περάσει χωρίς κάτι να κάνει, ούτε δευτερόλεφτο να πάει χαμένο. Όταν δεν δούλευε στο κάρβουνο, καταπιανόταν με κάτι άλλο» (σ. 58). Πώς θάθελα να είμαι έτσι κι εγώ! Είμαι λίγο σαν τον Καζαντζάκη (μήπως γι’ αυτό μου ελκύει τόσο;)· φοβάμαι τους ανθρώπους, είμαι κλειστός, φεύγω από τον κόσμο διότι δεν θέλω να τα βάλω με τους άλλους—ενώ ονειρεύομαι να τα βάλω με τους άλλους, να γίνω ένας που μπκλέκεται στο πάρε-δόσε της καθημερινής πραγματικότητας, που έχει μυρίους φίλους (εστώ κι εχθρούς). Όμως στα αλήθεια . . . εδώ κάθουμαι στο χωράφι με συντροφιά τα πουλιά, κι μιλώ—γράφοντας—στον εαυτό μου! Γίνουμαι όλο κι πιο πολύ κλειστός. ΄Αμα γυρίσω στο σπίτι, πάντα το ίδιο: οι σακλαμάρες των παιδιών, κι ότι είναι χίλιες φορές χειρότερα, τα παράπονα της Χρυσάνθης, που έχει χάσει όλη τη ζωηρότητά της. Τώρα ακούω το ίδιο refrain από το πρωί ώς το βράδυ: κρυώνω, κουράζουμαι, πονώ. Ενθουσιασμός, καννένα. Ζεστασιά, τρυφεράδα, λιγοστά. Με τα παιδιά, όλο μη! μη! μη! Δεν τους διδάσκει, δεν παίζει μαζί τους, δεν τους χαρεί όπως προηγουμένως. Μόνο κρυώνει (στο καλοκαίρι πια!), κουράζεται, πονάει. . . . Καλά ’μαι εδώ, στο χωράφι, με συντροφιά τα πουλιά.

August 6, 1966

Kazantzakis says, via parable, what I tried to say to the students at the Tucker retreat last spring. This is in his Αγγλία, cited by Anapliotis, p. 109:

Κάποτε ένας ανατολίτης σοφός είδε μερικούς σκοινοβάτες να πραγματοποιούν με τα κορμιά τους τις πιο επικίνδνες τόλμες. Και ξέσπασε σε κλάματα.

—Γιατί κλαις; τον ρώτησαν.

—Γιατί συλλογιέμαι, αποκρίθηκε ο σοφός, πως αν όπως γυμνάζουμε έτσι τα σώματά μας, γυμνάζαμε και την ψυχή μας, τι θάματα θα μπορούσαμε να κάμουμε!

August 8, 1966

Saturday night. Beers-Barnes circus in North Creek. A pretty small affair: two elephants, some trained horses, camels, seals, dogs, two boring clowns, a lady juggler. Also sex: a woman with a whip, snapping into two various objects held by a gorgeous young girl in a leotard, followed by a comedy routine—the worst kind of burlesque type—where the clown holds a baton-like roll of paper between his legs and she threatens to cut it shorter. The high spot, for the men (judging from whispers heard behind me, and also my own reaction) was a pretty blond aerialist in stage hose and a costume that exposed most of her buttocks (The French style dancing costume; I remember gasping when I saw Mille Marchard like this in the Rolland Petite ballet in Boston, when I was at Harvard; I went with John Harvey, I recall). The sweet tyranny of the flesh!

August 9, 1966

Overheard while I was working upstairs and Bruce McCarthy-Pitkin (age 5) was downstairs with Leander:

Bruce: Leander, am I your best friend?

Leander: No. I like Jeff Daley better.

Bruce (devastated): But I want to be your best friend. I don’t have many friends. I’m all alone.

La condition humaine!

Our hotel continues to operate at capacity. We now have Ellen DeCesare with two children and Doreen. Ellen talks constantly about food: exotic recipes. I am putting moldings in the kitchen, finally. Also bought cedar shingles to finish the south gable.

The whole impetus of America toward leisure, sport, vacation, retirement, even culture, is dissipated beneath the Marxist critique and the Marxist goal, as expressed by Malraux, for instance, in the letter at the end of La Condition Humaine: Une civilisation se transforme lorsque son élément le plus douloureux—l’humiliation chez l’esclave, le travail chez l’ouvrier moderne—devient tout à coup une valeur, lorsqu’il ne s’agit plus d’echapper à ce travail, mais d’y trouver sa raison d’être.

That is a real text for many sermons.

Regarding the above: men’s pride asserts itself no matter what the conditions. Our neighbor Moyer, for instance, worked for a while on the Thruway (he’s a carpenter, so they say, and I think they had him making forms for poured concrete). When I saw him one day at Ashline’s, he came up looking very pleased and said proudly, “Our bridge was voted the best of the section!”

Terpni

Riparius, N.Y.

August 9, 1966

Dear Pete,

It’s Sunday morning, about 10:30. I’m sitting under my huge spreading yellow birch tree in the south field—my “office.” Usually I stay away on Sundays, but as I have to take Chrysanthi to the doctor tomorrow morning for a monthly checkup (she’s pregnant, the fertile myrtle; one of those things, you know), I thought I’d spend an hour or so today finishing up a book, and then go back to work on the house. But instead I’m going to write this long-overdue letter.

My life here doesn’t need much elaboration; it’s pretty much as you must remember it. In fact the nice thing about the farm is that things do not change. The quiet rhythm of established routine—not a deadening routine in this case, I hope, but a fertile one. Five good hours of reading in the morning. This is a real pleasure for me, because it becomes less and less possible to do while I’m in harness at Dartmouth. Five hours: uninterrupted. No telephone, no students asking questions, no mail. I’m like a goat at present, chewing up thousands of pages and really beginning to learn something about that demon Kazantzakis. It’s a scholar’s dream—and nightmare. You are led half way around the world, you have to chew Greek, French, German, and English, the political and social history of Europe and Asia from the 1880s onward, philosophy, theology, aesthetics. And controversy. To one he’s a saint, to another he’s a monster; to one his writings are the new holy scripture, to the other they are awful drivel. Both sides are right—that’s the trouble; and I, somehow, have to walk a tightrope between them. How to do this, and what form my book will take, I still don’t know. I’m really just at the beginning and there is so much to digest: newly published letters, reams and reams of essays by and about him in journals and newspapers, going way back to 1905; a few unpublished (and unpublishable?) manuscripts; all kinds of journals, notebooks, worksheets. I shouldn’t continue with the list, because I become more and more frightened! Ten years’ work, which I hope to finish in two. Most important, and most difficult, I want to make my book literate and wise, not just a dry collection of facts, dissertation style. I want it to be a true “judgment,” enthusiastic but not fanatical. The tightrope again. Timetable? Hard to say. The research, at least, should be finished in eighteen months—we’re going on leave next March, as I probably told you, but we’re going to be able to stay now longer than I anticipated: until the following December, nine months in all. Most of this will be spent in Greece, with maybe one term in Woodbrooke, though that looks somewhat doubtful now because I lost the chance of getting accommodations there, owing to my procrastination. How much of the actual writing will get done, I can’t say. Probably not much. And nothing at all can be done during the school year: that I’ve discovered, and am reconciled to. Which leaves the ensuing summers, and the farm.

The farm, as always, is a blessing. It’s too good. It can’t be so good, but it is! You would find it now very different but also very much the same. The fields are cleared and mowable, and I’ve begun to plow and reseed slowly. The guest house is occupied a good part of the summer (too much to my liking); the cabin is getting close to completion (but don’t worry, it’s far from completed, and still has tarpaper on two sides, in case you suspect we’re getting too fancy). This year we had an infestation of bird lice in the attic; this made us empty out the room; and this, in turn, pushed us to do what we’d been planning to do for so long—put down a solid floor, and finish off the gables. So, at long last, all the junk is removed—kerosene stoves and lamps of yesteryear, scraps of roofing shingles and the rest—, the floor doesn’t sag like a trampoline when you step on it, the gables are fly- and mosquito-proof (maybe), and the whole place gleams with fresh red and blue paint. I also stuffed plenty of insulation wherever I could, still laboring under the fear (the hope?) that we may choose, or be forced, to live here at colder times of the year. But this gives Chrysanthi goose pimples and we don’t talk about it. . . . The decisive change this year, though, is the pond. Yes, imagine! It’s really full of water. Now, in August, it’s fairly cool—you’ll enjoy knowing this, down in Texas—and one doesn’t feel such a strong desire to swim; but in June and July, when the thermometer was in the 90s day after day, what a newfound pleasure to stop work at 1:00, run down to the pond, strip, and jump in before lunch. And even more pleasurable: to swim after the afternoon’s physical work, to lose the sticky feeling of sweat, to become clean. Cleanliness, as you probably remember, is something we didn’t have very much of around here in former years. But now we are all resplendent—except Chrysanthi, who, even in 90-degree heat, complains that she is cold, and asks when summer is going to arrive so that she can go swimming! Floating on my back, looking at the sky and the birches and pines around the border of the pond, I keep asking myself what I have done to deserve all this; I see myself as some reprehensible filthy capitalist, wallowing in physical pleasure, monopolizing the great luxuries—time, freedom, peace, privacy—that are denied to so many. Then I try to console myself by remembering that all this does not represent a huge horde of capital. And when I am in a particularly lively state for rationalization, I say to myself: “Why, you are doing just what the Marxists say a man ought to do. The whole trouble with the world, according to Marx, is that in the industrial system men no longer see themselves in the products they create. What have I done here, if not create a product in which I can see myself?!” This is sophistry, I know, but also profound in its way. Indeed, the more I think about this, the more I conclude that this is the key to the happiness I have enjoyed here all these years, and also in my teaching and writing. A student came up to me last fall—one of those deliciously morose and inquisitive freshmen who have not learned yet to be a Dartmouth “type”—and asked me after a lecture (I think it was on Thomas Mann) why I stood on the platform every day and talked. Imagine! He was very serious, though; he wasn’t being impertinent or sarcastic; he wanted to get to the bottom of motivation—maybe that was what I had been lecturing about, I don’t remember. He obviously had no motivation himself as yet to do anything, even to remain at college, as I discovered later. I asked him what he thought the motivation might be, and he gave the most obvious and also the most superficial answer. Well, he said, I probably wanted to “convert” the students, to make them see things the way I saw them, maybe even to lure them into the professional study of literature. I told him that if he thought that he was an idiot. How can anyone but a fool, a Don Quixote, persevere with such motivation? Even the dullest or most idealistic teacher learns soon enough that no one is converted, that hardly anyone even listens. Or at best, one in a thousand. To go through the drudgery for the sake of this one, to be buoyed up by him alone against the down-drag of the other 999, is obviously impossible. I answered the student that I lectured with (what I hoped at least was) enthusiasm day after day simply because I had the motivation of an artist: the non-utilitarian hope to make a perfect work, for the sake of perfection alone; and although lectures are not novels, they too are “aesthetic” arrangements of ideas, or at least I tried to make them so. The student was very skeptical about all this; first time he’d heard any such nonsense. Why, where he came from people did things for a reason, something you could put your finger on and touch, something that was worth something, could be sold, something you could calculate: such as, “I converted x, y, and z last month.” . . . I think I was honest in my answer; in other words, I stated the motivation as I saw it at that time. But now I would answer him differently, or at least I would append a second and more fundamental motivation—precisely what I said before: the need to produce something in which I can see myself. For surely this is the case in these courses; that is the beauty of literature. I always used to think that I chose books because they were “the best,” or because they were classics, etc. Now I know better. I choose books that answer some need of my own, that correspond to my own predilections or dreams. It is all very personal. And beyond that, once the books are chosen, the way of approach, the interpretation, is entirely reflective of these same personal needs and predilections and dreams. So that the whole is a lengthy, indirect projection of the soul of Peter Bien. Why not? If they are willing to put up with it (or are duped into thinking it is something else such as the explanation of what Mann or Gide or Kazantzakis or Joyce were trying to say), why should I care?

I was talking about happiness. A conscious sense of a satisfaction that (I hope! I hope!) is something entirely different from inertia or lethargy or the absence of conflict. (Goodness knows, the conflict is there, both in the family and professional sphere, but the balance falls on the positive side, always.) At the same time, I am more and more haunted by some dreadful premonitions of catastrophe. It is all too good, it cannot last, it is out of keeping with the conditions of the world around us, with the very metaphysical facts of life. The thought of atomic war never leaves my mind; the shame of Vietnam makes me weep for my country and feel that the retribution cannot be far away, and will be deserved. Everywhere: automobile accidents, illness, fires, calamities. Why not here? When? How long? All very morbid, I know. . . . I also have the continual sense of being on the periphery of things; this is heightened of course here at the farm, but exists also at Dartmouth. I see very clearly and very personally that one can’t have his cake and eat it. I want now, so much, to go for example and work again in a Quaker project; at the same time I want my nice house and family, and my “time, peace, privacy.” I’m well established at Dartmouth, with good salary, esteem, some small kind of influence not to mention the children’s school and circle of friends, and it would seem too decisive to throw all this over for two years, say, and then have to start again, probably somewhere else. But in any case, the worm is working inside me, and we shall see. All I can say now is that I’ve been in touch with the personnel division of AFSC—the person in charge, by the way, is Kay Horton, formerly from Rochester. Did you know her while you where there? I was quite involved with both her and her husband.

It is an understatement to say how wonderful it was to see you again last year in New York, also to learn of the new venture in Houston. Of course it was strange, as you must have felt too. Especially for Chrysanthi, who only knew you after you were married, when you were one half of a couple: Peter & Izzy. Both of us were close to you only in the early part of the marriage, when things seemed to be going well—though we were aware too of difficulties. The divorce came more or less as a sudden announcement, and then, in New York, as a palpable fact. We couldn’t suddenly wipe Izzy from the slate and convince ourselves that she no longer existed, especially as we both always liked her and enjoyed her company. I am being very frank, because I know I can be with you, more so, I think, than with anyone else in the world. And that is something to cherish and preserve! In any case, it’s finished, and Maitch is vivacious and charming and talented. How well you picked up again. My sadness for what happened was more than balanced by my happiness for the present and the future. I only wish that we could be nearer so that we could get to know you—and I mean you in the plural: Maitch for the first time, and you yourself for the second (or third), because you are bound to be different now; one assimilates somehow to his wife, and she to him; otherwise it’s not a true marriage, just two lonely individuals who happen to be eating and sleeping together. But this, I fear, will remain only a wish, at least for now. We shall obviously be at Dartmouth for another two years, until my leave is over, and right now I see no reason why we shall not remain longer. You, on your side, from all I can gather, are remaining in Houston, especially that the new school has been opened. So be it. Perhaps you’ll come to New York again periodically. Actually, this next Christmas Chrysanthi will probably be having her baby, so we shall remain in Hanover, and next Easter we’ll be leaving for Europe, and the following Christmas we’ll be on the boat returning from Europe. Which means that if you do come East, perhaps you will see your way to visiting Hanover—that is, if it is before next March. But all this, I know, is unlikely. Letters . . .? We’re both very bad, and getting worse. A few weeks ago, while cleaning out the attic, I spent an afternoon sorting the barrels of junk and papers there, and came across hundreds of letters—all my letters to Jeanne Ludmann, for example (which she dutifully returned). Good god, what letters! Where did I find the time, the energy? I saw in them a person that I no longer recognize, but that I’d like to resurrect. I can’t write letters like that any more—but maybe I could! It’s no good to write “state of the nation” epistles like this one. It’s little things, everyday things, that really communicate: even a postcard’s worth, “Dear Peter, a deer with two fauns walked within ten feet of my office today, obviously thinking I was a tree. Keep well. Sincerely, Peter.” . . . “Dear Peter, a condom broke last night and I am in a cold sweat. Will let you know what happens.” . . . “Dear Peter, I just spent another three hours in a committee meeting, arguing futilely over the amount of graduate study Dartmouth can assimilate without detriment to the undergraduate curriculum. Words. Hot air. I am so disgusted, I want to—. . . Hope you are fine.” . . . “Dear Peter, there are moments when I feel so lonely, all alone in the world, surrounded by people, even those supposedly closest to me, who do not understand, do not understand. . . . Then it passes. Some nice music, a kind word, a caress, a successful class, maybe a little extra wine at dinner, and all is well again in the world.”

With love to you both,

Kazantzakis speaks in Journey to the Morea about the primitive lying that is hidden in each of us and that comes to the surface at certain times—for example, when there is a fire. We are drawn to a conflagration by some primordial survival: of the caveman buried beneath the “trapdoor,” as K. would say. I experienced and observed this most recently when the men came to burn our brush pile last June. There is a mystique about a fire; something deeply soothing.

❡ Today’s Greeks must love sport and the body through loathing for the spirit. For them the body is not sacred because it holds the spirit; it is admired as a reaction against the spirit. Socrates would never go fishing for souls in today’s gymnasiums.” —Journey to the Morea, p. 101.

August 11, 1966

❡ Malgré la contraction des commissures des lèvres, ce corps affolé de soi-même s’éloignait de lui sans espoir; jamais, jamais, il ne connaîtrait les sensations de cette femme, jamais il ne trouverait dans cette frénésie qui le secouait autre chose que la pire des séparations. —Malraux in La Vie royale, p. 232, cited by Claude Mauriac in Malraux, p. 82.

August 12, 1966

❡ Je sais maintenant qu’un intellectuel n’est pas seulement celui à qui les livres sont nécessaires, mais tout homme dont une idée, si élémentaire soit-elle, engage et ordonne la vie. —Malraux, in La Lutte avec l’ange, p. 25, cited by Mauriac in Malraux, p. 179.

August 13, 1966

Ken and Susan Webb were here on Thursday for supper. Ellen and entourage took off for Montreal. Ellen talks about nothing besides food. The useless lives these women lead. Compared to Susan, running her camp! Ken annoyed me a little by pointing out all the things I was doing wrong, such as feeding the hens too much, planting the corn only in a single row, which discourages pollination, leaving the squashes on the vine too long, not weeding the garden. But of course he was correct on all points, so I tried to conquer my amour propre. He is a fine conversationalist and has an active, alive mind, though he’s a little dated, as I will be too when I’m sixty, no doubt—if I’m not already. He also keeps talking about the 5th freedom: to be without clothes. He developed some land in Vermont, selling plots with the double proviso that the men be (a) interracial and (b) that nude bathing be allowed for those who desire it. I forgot to mention to him what happened when the ABC boys came. Three or four had forgotten to bring bathing suits, also one of the tutors. I said they could go in nude, since our pond was completely private. None did. They preferred not to swim. It also is strange to see everyone in the gym talking showers with bathing suits on.

Finally finished the upstairs room. Chrysanthi painted the floor bright red and the walls “wedgewood.” It looks like a bridal chamber. I felt a little embarrassed when the Webbs told me of Henry Cadbury’s camp on Indian Lake. No electricity, no road, and they live in tents.

Lukács is as brilliant as everyone claims. I am reading The Meaning of Contemporary Realism and find it marvelously fresh—so compact, so sparse and incisive.

Ken said that I had created a rare accomplishment—brotherly love—as he watched Leander and Alec playing. Maybe.

Lukács on the post-WWII period, and the cold war: “The opposition of socialism gathered momentum and was soon transformed into an ideological crusade which, though nominally concerned with the preservation of democracy, was really nourished by a growing fear of the threat which mass society poses to the ruling élite.”—The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, p. 62.

Lukács really speaks directly to the questions I have been putting to myself for several years, but in such an un-thoroughgoing halfhearted way. How, for example, escape the solipsism of modern writers, how return to a sense of community, of the human’s involvement in his environment, instead of a desire to flee his environment. I chose Golding’s The Spire as a novel that transcended angst, but it still does not really confront the contemporary scene. Lukács writes: “. . . acceptance or rejection of angst? Ought angst to be taken as an absolute, or ought it to be overcome? Should it be considered one reaction among others, or should it become the determinant of the condition humaine? . . . The crucial question is whether a man escapes from the life of his time into a realm of abstraction—it is then that angst is engendered in human consciousness—or confronts modern life determined to fight its evils and support what is good in it. The first decision leads then to another: is man the helpless victim of transcendental and inexplicable forces, or is he a member of a human community in which he can play a part, however small, towards its modification or reform?” (pp. 80–81)

August 15, 1966

❡ Hegel once formulated . . . the social purpose of education under capitalism as follows: “During his years of apprenticeship the hero is permitted to sow his wild oats; he learns to subordinate his wishes and views to the interests of the society; he then enters that society’s hierarchic scheme and finds in it a comfortable niche.”—Lukács, p. 112.

Actually, I seem to be enjoying the great envisoned benefit of the communist society: I am able to consume according to my needs, and society is, I think, extracting work from me according to my abilities. . . . Lukács differentiates between socialism, i.e., the first stage, and communism (classless society, withering away of the state): In communism each man, because of adequate production, consumes according to his needs; in socialism he only consumes according to his work. “There is also that new morality which, as Marx said, sees in work not just a means for ensuring the necessities of life, but ‘one of the requirements of life itself.’” (p. 130)

October 17, 1966

12 Ledyard Lane, Hanover, NH

Geoff Ballard here for a few days, with an air force group negotiating with CREEL. He went through a month-long course given by the army on the U.S.’s foreign policy regarding war, particularly in Vietnam. He told me something that I’d heard for the very first time and that I found rather interesting. According to what he learned at the conference (and the participants were all cleared for classified information) the rationale of U.S. policy is as follows: At all costs the U.S. must prevent red China from gaining control over any of the underdeveloped countries in Asia. Why? Because such control would drain China’s resources and divert its energies from the production of consumer goods and from generally raising the standard of living for its own people. Our theorists seem to argue that if only China can achieve a decent standard of living, she will think twice about using the atomic bomb for two reasons: first, she’ll realize, as Russia does now, that she will have more to lose than to gain; secondly, as her people gain economic independence, they will have more say in government, more power. Right now, Mao says that China could lose ⅔ of its population in an atomic conflict, and still have more people left than any other nation. In other words, he is saying that he is willing to sacrifice ⅔ of his population. He can say this because the masses are in poverty, they are illiterate, and cannot object to being used in this way as cannon fodder. But a more advanced population would not tolerate such a policy. The theorists, in short, contemplate the same progression of attitude for China as has apparently taken place in Russia, and the same thaw.

I also asked Geoff about the munitions makers he encountered, and especially about scientists engaged in chemical and biological warfare. How can they, morally, do what they do? The munitions people, he said, just refuse to face the issue. If they didn’t produce the arms, they argue, someone else would. But the biologists and chemists have clear consciences. This of course surprised me. They have clear consciences, he said, because their search for effective chemicals and/or microbes for warfare has one main purpose: to enable them to develop antidotes against these same agents, to protect our own population when and if such weapons are used against us by the enemy. Apparently no one contemplates using such things. (I wonder. Haven’t we heard this story before?) Geoff also added that the chemists in particular are actually engaged in humane work, since their greatest efforts at present are directed toward the development of an incapacitator (à la James Bond!) that would paralyze or hypnotize whole populations temporarily, without doing permanent harm. What a world to live in!

November 17, 1966

Sometimes one wonders whether art imitates life or life imitates art. Yesterday afternoon I saw Orson Welles’s splendid film of Kafka’s The Trial. This morning an FBI agent came to my office, asking about Andy Jackson, Stoney’s son. The first thing he said was something like “The case started four years ago, and it’s just been reopened.” I didn’t sense the correlation until later, while I was walking home. But to make the whole episode even more absurd, I realized about half the way through the interview that I had confused Andy with Chris, Stoney’s younger son. I thus answered all the questions in terms of the wrong person. And when I realized this, I simply kept on as before. Actually, what I would say for Chris would certainly apply to Andy.

December 10, 1966

Chrysanthi is nearing her time. This morning when I came for breakfast I asked her how she felt. She answered: “I can’t lie down, I can’t sit, I can’t walk, but otherwise I’m fine.”

December 13, 1966

“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”—Robert Frost.

December 16, 1966

Daphne Madeline born. Chrysanthi very radiant and relieved. She was sure that she would die in childbirth, that the baby would be deformed, or both.

1967

12 Valley Road, Hanover, NH

January 1–30

20 E. 74th St., NYC

March 19–22

At sea, NY to Le Havre, SS United States

March 23–28

Paris, Quatier Gare de Lyons

March 28–29

Geneva, Zurich, Salzburg

March 30–April

Kolokotroni 13, Thessaloniki

April 4–June 11

Omonia Hotel, Athens

April 16–24

Aghia Triadha

June 11–Aug. 30

Agion Oros

Aug. 7–11

Thessaloniki to Amsterdam, then to Birmingham

Aug. 30–Sept. 4

Fox Hill Close, Birmingham

Sept. 4–Dec. 13

Birmingham, Boston, Washington, Dublin, Birmingham

Oct. 24–29

At sea, Southampton to NY, SS Queen Elizabeth

Dec. 14–19

20 E. 74th Street, NYC

Dec. 19–21

12 Ledyard Lane, Hanover, NH

Dec. 21–31

January 4, 1967

❡ To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives; it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely. To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earth things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one’s powers for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God. This is what man’s journey is about, I think. —Lillian Smith, The Journey.

January 29, 1967

❡ A man must identify himself with something more tangible than his own personality, and establish his pride somewhere, either in his social position, or in the quality of the work he is obliged to do, or simply in the superiority of the idleness he may be fortunate enough to enjoy. —Conrad, The Secret Agent, pp. 116–117 (Anchor edition).

January 30, 1967

Leander’s awful “I love you” while I was beating him! Anguish!

March 30, 1967

Hotel les Lions, Genève

Mrs. Kazantzakis very cooperative, indeed ebullient as usual. We went—the whole family—to her apartment at 32 Ave. William Favre. Without really any hesitation, she gave me her copy of Όφις και Κρίνο, and also the only existing manuscript of Ξημερώνει, and the one printed copy of Ο πρωτομάστορας that she knows of. Also the διατριβή on Nietzsche, which is hard to obtain now. But best of all—this I had never expected—she gave me the τετράδια that Prevelakis keeps referring to. These are extraordinarily rich. They go back to 1907 and record K.’s lecture notes and readings while he was in Paris; his dreams; his later readings arranged under headings such as Θρησκεία, Φιλοσοφία, Λαογραφία, Τέχνη, as well as his preparations for Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός and Ο φτωχούλης του Θεού, his plans for future works such as the Ακρίτας, etc.

Luckily, I was able to have the whole lot photocopied at a cost of 467 Swiss francs or about $110.00, to be paid for I hope out of the $400 grant that Gramlich and Rieser gave me from the Comparative Studies Center funds. I was thus able to return the originals to Mrs. Kazantzakis. She naturally did not want them to leave Geneva, and still for me to have the documents to work from, at my leisure. And quite a job it will be, to read all this material. The handwriting is one problem, and of course everything is in Greek, French, or German.

Mrs. K. spoke, as always, of how K. was, and is, misunderstood in Greece and elsewhere; also cheated, financially, for example by Goudelis, the editor of Καινούρια Εποχή. She said that K. was never primarily or firstly an artist. His basic drive was the search for God—γυρεύει το Θεό—and his artistic production was really a kind of tool in this search. She said this is why he seems to be so able to communicate to all peoples, always in translation—to Japanese, Chileans, etc., as well as to French, Germans, and Americans. In other words, it is his search for God that speaks to this universal need in all men; and his work does not lose because of transposition into another idiom. K.’s effectiveness doesn’t depend on stylistic effects but rather on passion and on visual imagery, both of which remain intact in translation.

I remonstrated that K.’s language, despite all this, is truly “stylistic,” and certainly the possessor of a beauty that is lost in translation. I noticed this even in the first work, Όφις και κρίνο, which reads with the smoothness of Virginia Woolf. It is very symbolistic, probably Parnassian. Mrs. K. suggested that it was à la D’Annunzio. She said that K. loved the Parnassians when he was young, and loved Baudelaire all his life, though he lost his taste for Mallarmé. In this early enthusiasm he confirms Karandonis’s remarks about the intellectual climate of Greece during the decade 1900–1910.

April 12, 1967

Κολοκοτρώνη 13, Θεσσαλονίκη

I had an early taste of the political climate here. The first day I went to read in the βιβλιοθήκη των καθηγητών του Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλονίκης, a huge group of students gathered outside for a demonstration. But already the place was full of policemen, and truckloads of soldiers kept arriving. The group was dispersed, και πολλοί έφαγαν ξύλο. Many of the students entered the university building itself and soon they were surging through the hallways, shouting Αίσχος! Αίσχος!, the girls giggling, the boys rushing hither-and-thither somewhat comically. They marched from one end of the hall to the other, shouting—of course no one was there to hear, except themselves—and then they marched back again to where they had started.

It was very amusing to go to the toilet, and find in the stall not the usual graffiti one expects—crude drawings of genitalia, dirty words, etc.—but rather complete political manifestoes. In the stall nearest the window was written Κάτω ο Βασιλεύς, Ζητώ ο Λένιν, Βασιλεύς προδότης, plus much more in the same vein. In the stall next to it: Ζητώ ο Βασιλεύς. Κομμουνισταί προδότηδες, and much more in the same vein. With a shudder I realized that perhaps someone watches to see which stall one uses!

Η Ευθημούλα went to her school one day wearing a red blouse, and the principal reprimanded her and forbade her to wear red to work in the future. Γεώργος experienced the same at work when he wore a red tie!

Overheard in a tiny hardware store, as a well-dressed man came to buy a large flower pot:

—Πόσα έχει η βάζα αυτή;

—Πενήτα.

—Δεν μου τη κάνετε πιο φτηνή; Κάτω στην αγορά είναι πιο φτηνές. Θα πάω εκεί.

—Τι λες! Εκεί κάτω τις περνούνε από μας. Εμείς έχομε το εργαστήριο.

—Θα σας δώσω σαράντα-πέντε.

—Καλά. Πάρτε τη.

April 21, 1967

Hotel Omonia, Omonia Square, Athens

I awoke today, went down to have breakfast as usual at about 8:15, and was surprised to find the dining room full up; the other days it had been quite sparsely populated. Also, there were no waiters; the busboys and elevator boys were trying to serve the crowd. The reason for this was soon apparent. During the night, at about 3 a.m., as I later learned, the army had taken over the country and martial rule had been declared. Omonia Square, usually swarming with people at this hour, was deserted, as were all the streets. Instead, the square was manned by tanks, army trucks, squad cars. At each corner a soldier with a submachine gun. Ranks of soldiers with rifles and bayonets along the sidewalks. More soldiers on the roof of the hotel. The radio gave some succinct announcements, but no explanation of why this was happening and when it would end. The announcements consisted of Απαγορεύεται sale or purchase of gold liras, or changing of money, until Monday. Απαγορεύεται all traffic, automotive and pedestrian; all schools closed, etc. In short, everyone stay home until further notice. After the announcement, the radio broke out into a lovely Greek song, and the Greeks around the table sarcastically commented: Ω πα!

Everyone congregated in the lobby and entranceway to the hotel; everyone had his version of what was happening and how long it would endure. Προλυπτικά μέτρα, enabling the authorities to round up the EDA, because secret word was received about a demonstration tomorrow. This seemed the general opinion. Also, Papandreou was scheduled to give a speech in Salonika, and there was to be a cavalcade of 200 cars going from Athens to Salonika. Apparently this, too, was a threat to the King’s party.

It soon became clear that the situation would last beyond the morning. In the afternoon the radio announced that a new government would be sworn in a 7:00 p.m. with a member of the Areios Pagos as prime minister. Also that there would be martial law indefinitely, that all letters would be opened, etc. Right now the radio is playing stirring patriotic songs, and there is no further news.

The opinion of the Greeks I spoke to obviously was very various. Some seemed delighted that the “reds” were finally getting it, and felt that Andreas Papandreou ought to be the first to be arrested. They felt that both Papandreous had wrecked the country, after the prosperity under Karamanlis. Others simply sighed at the chaos of Greek political life. Πηγαίνομαι ένα βήμα μπρος και δύο πίσω, έτσι είναι η ζωή μας.

Around 6:00 o’clock we were ordered away from the windows. Firing began—rifles and small cannon—but apparently in the air: a show of strength. One of the elecric wires was hit, and fell to the ground. Let’s hope this is the only casualty!

Everyone in the hotel is very jolly. Groups are playing cards, others talking quietly. The greatest deprivation seems to be the inability to get cigarettes. So far the hotel has seemed able to feed everyone—I don’t know how. The poor help must be exhausted. The people on night duty were pressed into service all day, since no one else arrived. The chambermaids still had not eaten at 4:00 p.m. They shouted from a balcony near me to one of the soldiers below: Φρούρε δώσε μας κανένα ψωμάκι! I don’t know what happened. Let’s only hope that by tomorrow morning some of the normal life of the city will resume. Among other things, I wonder how I will get back to Salonika. If transportation resumes, the crush will be terrible, since all the foreigners will want to leave. Also, the Easter exodus will be starting next Wednesday, if not before.

Today I was supposed to visit Τέα Ανεμογιάννη and to pick up the ξένες κριτικές that she had from Mrs. Kazantzaki. I was also supposed to visit Kay Cicellis. All this was impossible—and no way of contacting anyone. Also no way of course of contacting Chrysanthi. No telephone service at all.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to have lunch with Πάρης, Αμαλεία και Αυγούλα Τζιφοπούλου. I doubt that this will take place. I’d like to hear what they say. Actually, I fortunately arrived in Athens early enough to get a great deal done. I flew down Sunday night. On Monday I started research at the Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη in the morning, met Edward Bradley, a future Dartmouth classics professor, for lunch and then went with him to examine the suitability of the Hotel Stanley for our Dartmouth Program in Greece. In the evening I visited Prevelakis and sat with him for three hours, discussing my translation and also Kazantzakis in general. Everyone tries to convince me that he was Kazantzakis’s best friend, most trusted confidante, chief solace, etc. I had just come from Ζηζή Αργυροπούλου, a second cousin of Mme Kazantzakis’s, and she spoke of her relation with Kazantzakis in this way. Then I went to Prevelakis and he said the same. Also went on at length about how many events, characters, etc. Kazantzakis had taken from Prevelakis’s books, also that when Prevelakis gave adverse criticism regarding certain works K. would rewrite or scrap accordingly—e.g., a whole act of Christoforos Columbus. Also, he said that Kazantzakis didn’t know the elements of poetry when he started writing the Odyssey and that he—Prevelakis—had to give him lessons in the difference between anapests and trochees. Later on in the week I went to Friar, and he, too, claimed to be K.’s “spiritual son,” just as Prevelakis had! Έτσι καταντήσαμε!

On the way home from Prevelakis I called on Karl Kroeber, a professor of literature at Wisconsin, here on a Fulbright grant, and a friend of Martin Meisel’s. Among other things he seemed to be suggesting that I come to Wisconsin sometime as a visiting professor. Let’s see what happens. I left the door open.

Tuesday, after a morning at the library, I visited Friar at 6:00. He is just the same—talking exclusively about himself. He is doing translations of Greek poetry for an anthology. His apartment is decorated with photos of pretty boys. While I was there a university student came; he had heard Friar lecture on Kazantzakis the day before and wanted to talk further. He had read Askitiki twenty times, Greco ten times, etc., and had seriously considered quitting the university (he as studying engineering) under K.’s influence. Obviously Friar was pleased, as rightfully he should have been. Soon afterward another young fellow arrived, also of university age—this time obviously Friar’s lover of the moment. He made eyes at Friar and practically drooled over him and held his hand. Friar also told me of a poet-novelist named Merrill who was his protégé, and also, I would guess, his lover. He had dedicated a volume of poems to Friar, and had recently published a novel with Friar as hero. The whole situation, the poet surrounded by young male admirers, of course reminded me of Cavafy and his poem Ηρώδης Αττικός. Obviously, Friar loves this!

Afterwards, I called on Rodney Rooke. He is an Englishman, now married to a Greek girl. She was unbelievably ugly, but very lively notwithstanding. He finally came home, about a half hour after I’d arrived, and a sudden pall descended on the house and on our conversation. Then the wife started rolling on the bed, complaining of a stomach ache. I left.

Wednesday morning I called on the people in the bank referred to me by Elenitsa, in regard to the Dartmouth house or apartment. One gave me the address of a Ξένων Νεότητας in Βύρων, Καλλιπόλεως 20. I went, met the warden, Δημήτριος Βακάλης, and concluded very satisfactory arrangements, I think, for the group. Let’s hope that Wiencke agrees. Απόγευμα διαβάζοντας. Evening to a Greek revue, very lively, with political satire pro and con Papandreou and Karamanlis, which becomes somewhat gruesome in light of today’s events.

Thursday: reading again, and then to Carolos Koun’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming—Ο Γυρισμός. Very well acted and very touching especially at the end of the first act when the horrid old father cries out, tears in his eyes, “So you really loved your old father, you really loved him!”

April 23, 1967

Athens airport, waiting for a late flight

Ο Πάρης cleared things up somewhat yesterday. He came home at 2:00 p.m. after having spent the night in the Veterans’ Hospital because of the emergency situation. (He is an army doctor, with a commission.) According to him, the coup was entirely that of a particular section of the army, and by no means the whole army. Secondly, it did not emanate from the king. On the contrary, the king was forced to sign the decrees declaring martial law, suspending various articles of the Constitution, etc. Also, the government as now constituted, with Kollias and the other ministers, is only a front; the real power is elsewhere, in the army. Paris said that G. Papandreou and the head of the EDA were under house arrest; that Andreas Papandreou, Kanellopoulos and others had been brought «επάνω», i.e., to a detention building, a school or other public building, where all the prisoners were being kept. During the night there had been systematic ferreting out of all “enemies”—communists, recalcitrant journalists, politicians, etc. Paris said that they came to the hospital in the middle of the night and went to each superior officer, asking Είστε μαζί μας ή όχι; If they said Yes, they stayed at their posts; if No, they were taken «επάνω». All this was confirmed by others I spoke to. One taxi driver said that many had been taken during the night from his neighborhood. Another said that Ψυχικό, apparently a hotbed of leftists, had been heavily raided. Tea Anemoyanni said that that very morning many journalists had been taken, and that only Eleni Vlachou of Kathimerini was left alone. (This was probably an exaggeration as four newspapers came out today.) She—Tea—also knew that one of her relatives or acquaintances was being hunted and was in hiding. All the while I was in her house, about two hours, from 5:00 to 7:00, friends and relatives kept coming in to see what had happened to their mutual friends. Today’s papers clarify the situation somewhat. The prohibitions against banking, money changing, etc., have been lifted. The articles of the Constitution that are suspended are printed in full, frighteningly: habeas corpus, freedoms of speech, assembly, right to civil trial, etc. The government asserts its right to enter homes by day or night, to imprison people, and to try all prisoners by courts martial. It forbids all assemblies of over four people! It imposes a 1:00 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. curfew. It denounces “yellow” journalists, etc., etc. All this is very clearly proclaimed in the papers and on the radio, without mincing any words.

All the people I spoke to—that is, all the “simple people”: waiters, cabbies, chambermaids—were in a state of despair. Τι χάλια! Πάει η ελευθερία! Δεν μπορούμε ν’ ανοίξουμε το στόμα τώρα. And not only simple people but also of course Tea and her whole circle. Among those who came while I was there were a young fellow and girl, both very handsome, vibrant, and articulate. He was big, with coarse features and a huge smile. She was delicate, with a strong, bony face, very angular, and broad motherly hips. She was wearing the new net stockings now in fashion; her legs were most appealing. It was a somewhat delicate situation. I was there to talk about Kazantzakis; they were there because of the gruesome events. There were whispers at the door, Tea Anemoyanni assuring them that they needn’t be put off by my presence. They came in briefly, left for a moment, then returned and stayed. We began talking about Kazantzakis. And the boy said quite categorically, Για μένα, ο Καζαντζάκης είναι ο χειρότερος συγγραφεύς που έχομε! I asked him to explain, and he did, at length.

—Kazantzakis creates people and devises stories that are basically antisocial, that take no account of the needs of community life.

—Kazantzakis’s books, book after book, are just elaborations of his own anguish, and we get tired of this completely personal dimension.

—In his attempts to get outside of his own personality and to depict, objectively, the world around him, he is unsuccessful. Indeed, he is a ψεύτης. The Greece he paints—the villages, the people, the life—never existed. (Here, Tea Anemoyanni disagreed strenuously. Later she told me that the boy felt this way chiefly because he, being urbanized and sophisticated, never knew the villages, especially the Cretan villages.) In any case, the boy said that Kazantzakis was meaningless to him because he did not find, in his books, a Greece that he could recognize, either a present or past Greece. In contrast he cited Palamas, who, he said, brought to life an entire quarter-century of Greek existence. He also saw Kazantzakis as terribly behind the times, immersing himself in Nietzscheanism, a philosophy that was alive and creative 75 years ago, not to mention the nature of that philosophy! Lastly, he questioned Kazantzakis’s treatment of women, a treatment, he claimed (and I have to agree) that could emanate only from someone very sick in this domain, maybe even a suppressed homosexual. The sole element he agreed to praise in Kazantzakis was his language—surprisingly, for me. Both he and the girl agreed that Kazantzakis’s language can be truly startling, and that his talent for simile and metaphor was extraordinary. I was glad to hear them affirm that the figures of speech that seem so fresh and original when translated into English are just as original and fresh in Greek. They are not Greek clichés.

The lovely girl spoke in much the same way. What use is a writer like Kazantzakis to us now, she asked. He always fled social and political problems, ran from them into fantasy and negation. Who cares about ελευθερία από την ελευθερία and other metaphysical subtleties, when in the real life of our country freedom is taken from us? We need writers who are politically engaged, and who fight with the pen for liberty, concretely, not abstractly. We need writers who aid society instead of writing σχόλια on themselves. . . . I immediately thought of course of Lukács’s view, and of the early Malraux, and she agreed that the Malraux of La Condition humaine was her ideal.

I obviously agreed with both of them up to a point, but differed because I don’t think that writers can be made to order, either social or antisocial. A writer expresses what he is, which lies so deep in his being that it cannot be changed. The beauty of Kazantzakis is that this is precisely what we see—namely, a writer trying to be something else, but failing, and always consciously, with a bitter-sweet resignation, returning to his own deepest self.

When they had left, Mrs. Anemoyanni went on about Kazantzakis, with whom she had spent much time at Antibes and elsewhere. She said that he had a marked fear of ageing; he could not stand the fact that his physical and mental powers would inevitably diminish (cf. Odysseas). This, she said, is what made him so reluctant to see his former friends when he returned periodically to Crete, or elsewhere. Seeing his friends, he would comprehend how they had aged and, by analogy, how he too had aged. This need to prove continually to himself that he was still young and that he could endure hardship is what determined him to take the trip to China, much more than curiosity to see the new régime. She also noted that this trait was characteristically Cretan. The Cretan is always a παλλικάρι. She said that during the period of the German occupation, men of 85 had taken to the mountains with their rifles, to fight!

I asked her about Galatea. She said that Galatea in some ways was a wonderful woman and very important for Greece. Apparently she was one of the first, and strongest, of the Greek “bluestockings.” Her behavior in Iraklio was unheard of: living with a man, reading books, associating on even terms with intellectuals, etc. But she was completely incapable of appreciating and compassionating Kazantzakis’s very real inner turmoil. She thought he was acting. Also, at heart she was very bourgeois. She wanted her nice furniture and her regular meals. (This is of course is quite evident in Άνθρωποι και υπεράνθρωποι.) Another problem was Kazantzakis’s powers of concentration. He could work for 8 or 10 hours with absolute single-mindedness. When you spoke to him, he didn’t hear, and Galatea, not understanding this, took it for rudeness.

Tea said that the book by Elli Alexiou, Galatea’s sister, is good in places but full of very significant factual errors and misinformation.

I asked about Kazantzakis’s reputation in Greece in the early years, a reputation that seemed both great and immediate, judging from my reading of old newspaper clippings this past week. She agreed, and said that it was all owing to Palamas. From the very first, from Όφις και κρίνο, Palamas recognized the young Kazantzakis as a writer of extraordinary genius, and encouraged him, saw that he got published, etc.

I think that I enjoyed Tea Anemoyanni more than any of the others of the circle. Why? Because not once did she claim to be Kazantzakis’s best friend, truest disciple, or only solace. She spoke of him, not of herself.

9:15 p.m. We just arrived over Salonika. I could see the promenade clearly. Then it was announced that we would have to return to Athens because strong winds below prohibited landing. So back we go. This trip began at 5:00 p.m. at the Athens office. The plane was due to depart at 6:00; it finally departed at 7:45. An excursion!

My week in Athens, which now seems about to be prolonged, was very pleasant and full, to say the least. How nice, really, to be away from the constant pettiness and nagging of family life, where insignificant things are continually popping up in the form of crises. The freedom to come and go—to have quiet—is beautiful. But not, obviously, forever.

I did a great deal of talking during the week, and visited with many people, so did not feel isolated or lonely. In the hotel the day of our enforced stay there, I spent time with two Englishmen whose names I never got. Both had come to Greece to take part in the annual march of the Λαμπράκηδες to Marathon, a march that never took place this year. One was a farmer from Warwickshire, the other is what we’d call a professional peacenik, secretary of the “Committee of 100.” I’m sorry that I didn’t get his name. I was struck by how completely ignorant they both were of all respects of Greek daily life or of the characteristics and culture of the people. And yet they were here to intervene, to encourage. Much as I sympathized with their pacifism, I found this ignorance disturbing. Also the secretary showed himself somewhat as categorical and narrow-minded as he feels his opposites are. In talking on Friday, we found one man, obviously a very cosmopolitan businessman, who seems quite content with the προληπτικά μέτρα, very antagonistic toward Papandreou, etc. This one our English friends immediately labeled as “a real right-winger and a fascist.” Sad.

Sunday morning I went to Agiou Konstandinou, near Omonia. The priest screamed and gesticulated during a long sermon, but I couldn’t really understand enough to be quite sure what he was saying. He of course said the expected: that Christ was the true king and that the people of the time had realized this and signified same by crying Hosanna. He also said (I think) that although the Jews crucified Christ once, the true-baptized Christians crucify him over and over. Whether there were political overtones here or not, I don’t know. The congregation showed no outward sign of anything out of the ordinary. But the sermon’s vehemence seemed extremely out of the ordinary to me. Quick visits to Benaki, National Museum, and Acropolis filled out the day. It was ironic to go through the various rooms in the Benaki dedicated to the signing of the Constitution in 1844 now that the Constitution had been abrogated.

The Acropolis was startling and grand, as always, especially in the strong wind and scuffling clouds. I had no idea that the same strong wind would be responsible for my μετέορα position at the present moment.

April 24, 1967

Salonika

Went back to the Omonia Hotel last night, Then chanced on a κέντρο full of young working-class people, mostly boys. Orchestra, Greek dancing, χασάπικο, ναυτικό, etc., though the dancers weren’t really very good. Struck up conversations with two young fellows. One was from Serres, another from Nigrita (!). The one from Serres was currently trading in cars. He had worked in the coal mines of Germany for 26 months, then began driving German cars to Greece and selling them. He said the Greeks were forced to leave the German mines because the U.S. undercut the German price, thus decreasing the demand. He was a rather low type, a little drunk, but very convivial. He insisted on buying me beers. Though married and the father of a one-month old baby, he was on the make. Said he couldn’t sleep with his wife for 40 days after the birth. The waiter told him of a place across the street, and he left, only to return instantly. It was closed owing to the coup d’état. Toward the end of the evening he grew rather argumentative, and I was glad that the 1 a.m. curfew drove us all to our homes. The other lad was younger, maybe 22. I asked him what he thought of the political situation, and to my surprise he said he liked it. Why? Very simply, the leftists, he said, were all τεμπέληδες. As for him, he wanted to work, not to sit around talking politics. But the past two years, what with strikes and stoppages, he’d been able to work only a small part of the year. He was in building trades, installing heating and air conditioning units in new apartment houses. He said he makes about 7,000 drachmas a month and lives very comfortably: 1,000 for rent, about 1500 for food (all in restaurants), and the rest remains. He actually was a native of Salonika, and had been six years in Athens, but was leaving tomorrow to return north. This explained the way one of his friends left him at about 11:30 p.m. He rose, and the two pressed their cheeks together with exquisite tenderness—20-year-old boys.

It’s amusing how a régime is favored or opposed by the common man for purely personal reasons, often completely non-political and certainly non-abstract. Here was this lad who favored the régime because (he hoped) it would give him steady work. Then there was the taxi driver whom I asked:

—Τι εντύπωση έχεις από τη κατάσταση αυτή;

—Χάλια.

—Γιατί;

—Δεν βλέπεις; Τέτοια ώρα, πριν, η Αθήνα είχε μεγάλη κίνηση. Και τώρα;

In short, he opposed the régime because it frightened people off he streets, imposed a 1:00 a.m. curfew, and thus gave him less business.

On the plane this morning I met a Κύριος Πέτσας, director of the Salonika museum, who had just returned from the U.S., via Rome. He said that all the Roman papers had made much of the coup d’état, and had the suspicion that the Italians were secretly happy about the new situation, since it would force tourists to avoid Greece and go, presumably, to Italy instead.

It is so strange the way life goes on exactly as before, at least on the surface. And yet, then one comes suddenly upon indications of what is happening underneath. Walking past the central Telephone and Telegraph office in Athens, for example, and seeing a soldier in the doorway, wearing a camouflaged steel helmet and carrying, not a rifle, but a submachine gun! Or what Chrysanthi told me today: how, Saturday morning, the school near Lola’s house, where the captured leftists were interned, was surrounded by wives and children bringing scraps of bread to the men inside—and weeping.

Last night, in the hotel, I heard shooting again. Who knows how many have been killed, wounded, interned?

April 26, 1967

Today ο Παππούς returned from the café and said that he heard that Θεοδωράκης had been killed. My heart sank. We are living through the Germany of 1933! Later, Kostas and Lola came, and said that the BBC and other stations said that Theodorakis had been exiled to the Dodecanese—i.e., incarcerated as a political prisoner. I don’t know if this is true and if true if it is much different or better, really. G. Papandreou, they say, is critically ill, in the hospital; Andreas is “under custody,” and wounded in the leg. Kanellopoulos has renounced politics. The newspapers are disgusting—all spouting propaganda for the new régime; all dissenting newspapers have been silenced. Papandreou was supposed to have made a speech in Salonika on Saturday, before Palm Sunday. To welcome him his supporters had amassed enough laurel leaves (cut on Mount Athos) to pave the entire way from the airport to the city. He would have entered as Christ himself! Today, the “official” news is that papers were discovered in the offices of the EDA showing that violent incidents were planned, to stir things up, on the day of the speech. Thus the προληπτικά μέτρα of the army were justified!

What strikes me most is how, on the one hand, life can seem to go on so normally—movies, I in the library, children in school, bread and milk, songs in the tavernas, theaters, concerts, everyone leaving town for the Easter holidays—while, on the other hand, these unbelievably fascist horrors are perpetrated, people are hunted down, imprisoned without trial, others are thrown out of their jobs, separated from their families, harassed. But to speak up, to resist openly, is impossible. The Nazis, all over again.

Today, ironically, I was reading Theotokas’s account of the last fifty years of Greek history. He described the horrors of the Metaxas régime—the censorship, how all free discussion ceased—and then added (he was writing in 1958) Μακάρι να μη ξαναδούμε τέτοιες μέρες. But here they are! “The seim anew.”

April 27, 1967, Holy Thursday

The government officially banned mini-skirts for girls and long hair for boys. Will offenders be subject to courts martial? Also, every child must go to communion. Church and State hand and glove. We went to the reading of the Gospels at Aghia Sophia: church full to bursting, but later, around 11:00 p.m., the streets were nearly empty, which is abnormal for Greece—very. Visited Θέμης Άλτας to get a prescription for more penicillin for my damned throat. The other night I thought I would die of suffocation. Couldn’t swallow. Phlegm running continually, and thus hard to swallow. Agony. Daphne constipated, waking every hour and bawling. Chrysanthi wonderful, as always, all patience and self-sacrifice.

How frank and communicative the Greeks are! The first time we visited τον Δημοσθένη και τη Βούλη, he told me at great length how low and pessimistic and lethargic Vouli had become, mostly the result of not being able to have a child. He encouraged her to find a way to make her life useful to others, and especially to get out of the house. So she began teaching again after finishing her Cambridge certificate. One meeting, and the important things were out in the open, whereas with couples like the Williamsons or Goertzes, whom we’ve known for years, the same subject, obviously a very crucial one in those cases, has always been buried. Same with Pappous. Immediately he spoke of his life since retirement, his chagrin at being forced, while still healthy in body and soul, to lead a parasitic existence.

Every householder in Salonika—in all of Greece—was told yesterday that he had to register with the police the names of any guests in his home, within 48 hours, or else face a court martial. Likewise, all possessors of radio transmitters. Yet the newspapers try to give the impression that life goes on as usual. Especially, they don’t want to lose the tourist trade.

Strange how Americans are followed by the lowest trappings of their way of life. Constitution Square is full now of books, in English, on Lesbian love, and of pin-up girlie magazines, muscle-boy and nudist magazines, and Playboy. I wonder if the government will ban these, or still cater to the needs of their sick American guests.

Just heard, via foreign radio reports, that they executed the former hero of Greece, ο Μανώλης Γλέζος, the man who lowered the German flag from the Acropolis. Now, of course, he was a communist—so, boom! The radio says 5000 communists were captured in all. How many of these will be shot after summary trials? Αίσχος! The same as after the 1922 catastrophe: they shot the entire government. And what did that solve?

April 30, 1967, Easter Sunday

Apparently ο Γλέζος wasn’t shot. Yesterday’s papers had a picture of him being interviewed by reporters in “the hotel where he is being detained.” The “official” press release—the same one is carried in all the papers—said that the men in question, including A. Papandreou, had no complaints regarding their treatment, food, availability of medical assistance, etc. [!] Naturally. The word now is that Gromyko personally intervened on Glezos’s behalf, telling the Greek ambassador in Moscow that it would be a barbaric crime forever held against Greece if she executed this “hero in the struggle for democracy.” Who knows? In any case, the minister of the interior issued a long statement, carried of course in all the papers, to the effect that all this about Glezos and the rest was owing to the perfidy of the BBC and the foreign press in general, that Greeks were not assassins, that no one would ever be executed without a trial (court martial) [!!!], that the government loved liberty, etc. As George Orwell so well knew, words easily lose their meaning. Double-think is here; slogans have replaced reason.

Fortunately there have been some small signs of resistance. Yesterday, upon waking, the Athenians found handbills everywhere saying: Death to the Fascists. How was this managed? And Lola, in church on Good Friday, overheard something else. The soldiers who have such a prominent part in church services here were all wearing a black arm band, signifying their mourning for Christ. As they passed, one young wag in the congregation turned to his friend and said, “Who died?” The other answered: «Ο Κόλλιας»!

I asked George if he was in any way endangered. Chrysanthi said, for example, that in such situations there is always a complete reshuffling of posts. If some close adherent of the present régime felt that he wanted George’s post, he could remind the authorities of George’s past, and have him bumped. But George laughed this off, and said there was no danger. His reason was very telling. There will be very little of this sort of thing, he said, and very little of squealing, turning stool pigeon, etc. Why? Because Greeks have learned over the last fifty years that the wheel turns. Those who inform on others under one régime will most likely meet a very unpleasant end come the inevitable day when that régime falls and is replaced by another. Who’s in who’s out is a game whose rewards are so short-lived, so bound to expire and boomerang, that the game is no longer worth playing. Perhaps this knowledge and experience, also, explains the strange (at least outward) insouciance that I see around me. Life goes on because, the faces seem to be saying, time itself will do it work. This will pass; the wheel will turn.

Yesterday I noticed that all the anti-royalist graffiti in the john at the university had been meticulously erased.

Easter, this year, was complete anguish and disappointment for me. I felt nothing, no emotion except disgust at the superficiality of humans. Perhaps it was the big city, and the crowds, and loss of immediacy and intimacy—practically impossible to get into the church; church like a bus; everyone pushing for position; trying to enter or leave. Perhaps it was the omnipresence of soldiers and guns. In the great parade on Friday, the epitaphios, first came the band (boys from the orphanage we visited on Panorama last time with Themis Altas), the boy scouts in uniform, then girl scouts, then army, then navy, all with fixed bayonets, helmets and all, although the guns were turned nozzle backwards; then finally one or two priests with Bible and cross. In the Μητρόπολη, where we went afterwards να προσκυνήσουμε, again soldiers, policemen. A group came in together; they removed their helmets, revealing brutal faces. They kissed the icon and then emerged, ready to kill again. Saturday night, the Ανέσταση, was just as bad. Navy men with bayonets lined the avenue from Aghia Sophia to the Mitropoli. The square around Aghia Sophia thronged with people. Ropes to keep people in place. Police everywhere. Couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. No sense of the service that was ensuing. The whole thing simply a second-class carnival, parents bringing their children as if to a circus. The moment of the Ανάσταση, when the priest chants the wonderful hymn Χριστός ἀνέστη ἐκ νεκρῶν, θανάτῳ θάνατον πατήσας, καὶ τοῖς ἐν τοῖς μνήμασι ζωὴν χαρισάμενος, was unbelievably vulgar. The military band immediately began the national anthem [!], the officers standing at attention and saluting at the same time that a few rockets went off with muffled poofs while children and adults scrambled to get a light for their candles. What was somewhat touching, however, was the exchange of handshakes and greetings that followed: χρόνια πολλά, χρόνια πολλά. Each παρέα kissed and greeted. I enjoyed seeing the soldiers shaking hands likewise, with broad smiles, like cousins and uncles. Then everyone brought out the dyed eggs and each person cracked his egg against someone else’s, to see who would have luck—namely, the one whose egg remained uncracked. The soldiers did this too, with great ughs & ahhs coming from the losers. Then most people peeled and ate the eggs. In a few moments the crowd was dispersed, everyone still holding his lighted candle; the custom is to keep it lighted until you reach home. In a flicker the restaurants had filled, the spits were turning with οβελία και κοκορέτσι, people were tearing huge hunks of bread and drinking copiously, their lighted candles on the tables in front of them. Also, flowers everywhere, especially πασχαλιές. I brought some home, along with three carnations; the house filled with perfume. . . . I insisted on going into Άγια Σοφία for a few minutes. The crowds were now gone, although the ναός was still half full. The two choirs were chanting beautifully. I felt a little—oh so little—of the mystery of the service. Then taxi, haggling over price, children whining and fighting about their candles, and bed.

May 4, 1967

Kazantzakis in his letter of March 7, 1933, to Prevelakis writes: Τη στιγμή τούτη μαθαίνω . . . πως έχομε Golpe de estado [coup d’état] και στην Ελλάδα. . . . Όλος ο αιώνας τούτος θά ’ναι αιώνας διχτατορίας. . . . This was the abortive coup headed by N. Plastiras, organized during the night by the army. Very familiar. Reading this, I suddenly entered the Greek mentality, suddenly understood the seeming indifference, the fatalism, the determination to lead normal lives despite the dictatorship. The reason is very simple: it has all happened so very frequently in the living memory of the people here, in the 20s, in 1933, in 1936, etc. Cavafy was right: the seim anew, the wheel turns, and returns. Knowing this, the people carry on, and wait. This sense of change as the lower level of a higher stability, the turning wheel, is unknown to Americans. Suddenly what I had learned intellectually, through reading, became a felt, tangible experience, and thus true knowledge for me. The problem now becomes: how, despite this acceptance and fatalism, to act in such a way as to make the wheel turn faster. Perhaps here, in a very concrete historical example, we have the dilemma faced by Kazantzakis’s Odysseas and all his other characters.

I remember Prevelakis’s remark when I tried to convince him to lighten the weight of the 400 Γράμματα by removing, in the English edition at least, some of the details of the correspondence—e.g., where Prevelakis was when he received the letters, etc. He replied that he wanted this to be a record of his life as well as of Kazantzakis’s. Δεν με θεωρούν μεγάλο τώρα, μα καμίαν μέρα ίσως να με θεωρούν μεγάλο, γι’ αυτό.

One of the men I chatted with on April 21 in the hotel turned out to be in Athens as representative of several of the monasteries of Mount Athos. His business was to find buyers for several μετόχια, to be sold as wholes, at 3,000 drachmas per stremma, obviously to someone who would then “develop” them for tourists! The monasteries, he explained, will do much better by investing the proceeds of the sale in apartment houses in Salonika. I asked him how the monasteries were faring. The Russian one, he said, has 30 monks, and 1000 cells. He thought all the monasteries should eventually be turned into hotels! I asked him whether there were any young monks. Δεν παίρνουν νέους, είπε. Γιατί; Προκαλούν σκάνδαλο. Παίρνουν άντρες 25-30 χρονών.

Kazantzakis says, after meeting the Jewish wife of Renaud de Jouvenel, Οι Οβραίοι έχουν κρυφά μια νοσταλγία Ανατολής κι ένα ρομαντισμό vehement (400 Γρ. #183). How true! Maybe this is why Jews like Kazantzakis’s work and Anglo-Saxons do not.

May 5, 1967

—Έχετε εφημερίδα, παππού;

—΄Οχι.

—Γιατί;

—Δεν αγοράζω εφημερίδες πια. Είναι όλες του κράτους. Κάνω παθητική αντίσταση. Και δεν αγοράζω λαχεία, να μη βάλω λεφτά στην τσέπη της κυβερνήσεως.

These are small ways of resistance. Also today when the Greek fleet came to Salonika and the sailors paraded through town (a show of their solidarity with the army that effected the coup), people lined the streets as always for such parades but stood stock still, mutely, refusing to applaud as the troops passed. Παθητική αντίσταση. A recent government decree dissolved the EDA and also all the Λαμπάκηδες groups.

May 7, 1967

The government has now ordered that the classes in History of Democratic Institutions in the high schools be disbanded, and replaced by classes in History of the Army!! At the same time, Kollias insists when speaking to the foreign press that this is not a fascist government and that the whole purpose of the intervention was to lead Greece back to democracy: «Ἡ κυβέρνησις ἐπιδιώκει ἐφαρμογήν πολιτικοῦ καὶ κοινωνικοῦ προγράμματος μεταρρυθμίσεως, τὸ ὁποίον θὰ καθεστᾶ δυνατὴν τὴν ἀποκατάστασιν ὁμαλῶν συνθηκῶν καὶ ἐπιστρφήν εἰς τὴν κοινοβουλευτικὴν δημοκρατίαν» (Kollias in an interview with Velt am Suntag, Bonn). The government also has plans to alter the Constitution, according to yesterday’s paper. Also, they abolished the permanent civil service so that all government employees, including schoolteachers, can now be dismissed for political or other reasons.

Last night to theater to see the sexy blond “bombshell” of Greek stage and screen, Αλίκη Βουγιουκλάκη. After a mix-up regarding our seats, which had apparently been sold twice, we settled down and the show began, about ¾ of an hour after the scheduled time. A farce, with a κοσμική κυρία, a maid speaking in malapropisms, a γεροντοκόρη with a huge φωνάρα. Plot made up from extraordinary coincidences, exchange of identity and clothes, and deepening confusion, until all is suddenly solved and the couples involved live happily ever after. Like early Shakespeare, without the poetry. The lovely thing was that it still works on the stage, as sheer entertainment, though certainly not as art. It requires, to be sure, an audience like that of last night: completely responsive, laughing uproariously at every joke, gasping at the successive costumes worn by the heroine, ah-ing and gasping again at the sudden revelation of a coincidence—e.g., the employee’s wife is putting on a big dinner for the boss to help her husband get a promotion; she goes to buy pastas and then, trying to get a taxi, gets into an argument with a man who wants the same taxi, ending up calling him χαϊδούρι, he calling her καμήλα, etc.; then, the boss comes to the house while the wife is still inside, dressing, and explains to the husband that he just had the most awful argument with a woman over a taxi, she called him χαϊδούρι, he called her καμήλα! Gasps in the audience: Αυτός ήτανε, αυτός ήτανε! The husband is distraught. How can the dinner now proceed? Conveniently, the boss has to go out for a minute to buy pills, and in the meantime the husband gets an idea: let the maid and his wife change positions, he’ll present the maid as his wife. Here, the complications really begin, as the boss is stimulated sexually by the “maid” (i.e., the employee’s wife). Φούσκωσα, he says, in an obvious pun, and swallows his pills. (Little Andreas, at that point, asked naïvely, Τι φούσκωσε, μπαμπά, τι φούσκωσε;) It goes on in this way for three acts, relentlessly. The point is that this kind of play works for this kind of audience. I can now see the Shakespearian groundlings gasping at every coincidence, every false identity suddenly revealed. How delicious!

I dared to eat κοκορέτσι after the theater and had violent diarrhea an hour later.

The hordes of children and relatives, the paucity of intelligent conversation, the super-bourgeois round of eating and acquiring makes me very nervous and, as Kazantzakis would say, suffocates me. How different from the people I met in Athens, who have ideas in their heads, who read, and express themselves.

May 8, 1967

Αινίγματα:

Η θάλασσα τρώει το φίδι και το φίδι τρώει τη θάλασσα. Τι είναι; (Kerosene lamp.)

΄Ενα πράγμα άμα το δέσης, τρέχει, κι άμα το αφήσης λεύτερο, στέκεται. Τι είναι; (παπούτσι)

May 13, 1967

Εκδρομή στο Σταυρό με τον παππού και τη γιαγιά. Chrysanthi wanted to go because she had once gone there on a school εκδρομή when she was 12 or 13 years old. Reliving her childhood. Village between sharp mountains and the sea, with a beautiful group of huge plane trees, each one like the Buttonball at Deerfield. I rented a car and we drove. We suffocated from the heat on the way there, and it wasn’t until the return trip that I discovered I’d had the heater going full blast. Alec and Leander were already there, having gone with the Σχινά group. Ο Κύριος Γουργούτης joined us for an ούζο. 1922 πρόσφυγας, διορίστηκε τη 1923 and is still teaching. The huge, fat, manly δασκάλα με τη φωνάρα της, like the comic character in the play the other day. Ο παππούς και η γιαγιά φοβήθηκαν (ρεύματα!); thus we sat in the square instead of by the sea, but Chrysanthi and I walked later under the plane trees. Very idyllic. Pappous said he wanted to show us a beautiful placed called Κυανή Ακτή, the Côte d’Azur of Greece. We drove and drove, and finally came to a stony beach—no trees, no houses, burning sun: horrible. The Κυανή Ακτή!

Μαυ 14, 1967

Εκδρομή με την Ἐταιρεία Μακεδονικῶν Σπουδῶν στους Πειρήνες, Δίον, Τέμπη, Πλαταμώνας, led by Mr. Petsas. On the bus from Athens to the airport I had sat next to him and chatted a little; he was returning from the USA, University of Wisconsin classical congress. Then Chrysanthi and I went to his lecture on recent finds in Macedonia and here we learned about the excursion. A fine day. Good conversation, interesting people. Among others the poet-λόγιος Γ. Θ. Βαφόπουλος. We chatted for a long time after lunch. He is a great admirer of Friar and Friar’s translations; says that Kazantzakis’s Odyssey in the original is unreadable and that Greeks prefer the English version! Also doubted that more than a dozen people had ever finished the epic. He praised the writer Παναγιωτόπουλος, said that he had encouraged Βασίλης Βασιλικός after his first book (Vasilikos is probably in prison now; he wrote a novel about Lambrakis) but that Vasilikos wanted to “make it” too fast and compromised his gifts with rapid and slipshod publications. We all agreed that the book on America is mediocre. Vafopoulos strongly censured Karandonis, said he also is πουλημένος, and certainly very much of a clique, always playing the same tune: Γάτσος, Ελύτης, Σεφέρης. Said that Seferis is really not a great poet because all he did was transpose T. S. Eliot into Greek. As for Kazantzakis and Sikelianos—both—he said they are absolutely dead as far as today’s Greek writers are concerned. No one reads them, no one is influenced by them. Strange how these reputations go. I am sure, however, that a segment of Greek youth still reads Kazantzakis and is inspired by him.

On the other hand, two young fellows, one an archeologist and the other a philologist, confirmed what Vafopoulos said. They disliked Kazantzakis intensely, said he had no experience of life, and wrote only from his mind. They praised Myrivilis’s Ζωή ἐν τάφῳ by contrast. I asked them what American authors are read here. The favorite seems to be John Steinbeck. I had my revenge by telling them that no one reads Steinbeck in America. So it goes.

The excursion made its first stop at the plain of Πειρήνες, where the Romans defeated the Macedonians. Petsas read from Plutarch, who describes the terrain exactly. There was a lively discussion afterwards as to why the Macedonians were defeated—probably because they had lost Tempe, which they knew how to defend, and were forced to give battle on an open plain. But there were other factors, ones that Cavafy would appreciate: (a) there were many Greek soldiers in the Roman army, (b) many of the towns, e.g., Βέροια, gave up without a fight. «Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους». After all, the Romans were some kind of a solution!

Also in this area are prehistoric mount tombs, not yet excavated.

We then stopped at Katerini for a coffee. We sat with Θεοδώρα Κουμβαγκάλη, Altas’s aunt. She was wearing slacks, had short hair, a gruff voice, etc. A villager at the next table was obviously listening to our conversation. Finally he asked her where she was from—from Πόντος, which village, such and such. Well, he was from there also. Then he kept calling her συμπατριώτης, trying to continue the conversation. In other words, he thought she was a man! Otherwise he would have said συμπατριώτισσα.

Next stop, Δῖον, beautifully situated just under Olympus. Here there is a Hellenistic tomb very well preserved. Also a small museum. The villagers turned out to meet us, and enjoyed having their pictures taken by me. Chrysanthi and I walked through the streets: tobacco, pigs wallowing in mud, no electricity, naked children, lovely breeze. We talked to a γιαγιά μαυροφορούσα. Σας αρέσει το χωριό μας; Ναι, πολύ. Βέβαια. ¨Οποιος μένει εδώ, θα κερδίσει δέκα χρόνια ζωής. Then she told us about her nephew, who went to Salonika and was constantly sick; then he returned to the village and will live 10 years longer than his allotted time as a consequence. And indeed, it must be a healthy life!

We ate at “Maxim’s,” situated on the Athens-Salonika highway, with a splendid view of the sea and the κάστρο της Πλαταμώνας, then went to τα Τέμπη, where there is a church, Άγια Παρασευή, built into the rock, and an άγιασμα. Also a huge sign on the roadway explaining why no right-minded Greek should be a communist. A group of teenagers on the river, dancing and eating. Coolness, rushing water, huge trees, foliage, shade.

Finally, back to Platamonas and the Kastro. Good lecture by a professor explaining how it was built on top of walls of a prehistoric town, and was the site of a Hellenic and Hellenistic acropolis as well, then the present structure built by the Franks, preserved and used by the Turks until the end of the nineteenth century, when cannon fire rendered this kind of fortification obsolete; lastly, it was used as a refuge by retreating New Zealanders in 1941. Unfortunately, the Germans destroyed them. The entire spectrum of the violent history of this strange land of contrasts.

The return trip in the bus, for two hours: singing. About 100 different songs, with Petsas leading. One of the men also started dancing the Γερακίνα in the aisle, but the driver told him to sit down. We returned at 9 p.m., exhausted, having left at 7 in the morning, and gotten out of bed at 5:30 a.m.

May 15, 1967

To the Αλλοδαπών in the morning to get our άδειες παραμονής. Α milk-toast-like man, very skinny, in patched trousers and ragged shoes, with an old broad-brimmed hat: he had overstayed his visa, but wanted a renewal. The Προστάμενος very gruff. Why didn’t he come before? I was sick. Sick for six months? Yes. A likely story. If you can’t produce a doctor’s certificate I can send you to prison. Get out! He went to the waiting room and sat with hanging head, very dejected. I thought of the scenes drawn by Kafka. The poor always suffer. Maybe he couldn’t read the wording on the visa, maybe he just postponed, naïvely, as Greek do, maybe he really was sick, etc. Our hearts bled for him. But in this case we were probably wrong. We wondered what he was. A Yugoslav? Bulgarian? Later we saw that he was a gypsy, because his mother (or wife or sister) arrived in gypsy costume. They knew damn well what was what, and he wasn’t a meek little man but had a very caustic tongue indeed.

May 20, 1967

Special service in the Rotunda marking the end of classes at the university. Five priests, beautiful voices, wonderful acoustics. Very stark and moving: this huge bare structure. I thought of Dartmouth. Our great buildings are constructed for sports events; the Greeks have the old churches still. Once upon a time, at least, they expended money and labor on something entirely spiritual. There was something very meaningful in this παμπάλαια λειτουργία. In the midst of the political instability of Greece, the Church is something solid and unchanging. The service goes on in exactly the same way as though oblivious of outward events—of Turks, Franks, dictators, communists. I see why many Greeks welcome this one-and-only force for stability and continuity. But decorum is very fragile. After the service ended and a priest began to speak to the students, everyone began to leave. There was such a commotion that the poor speaker couldn’t be heard. Officials at the door, turning the students back and making them stay, only made matters worse because of the arguments that arose. Thus the end of the “program” was entirely disastrous . . . and extremely funny!

I went to a dermatologist for my finger. His waiting room balcony afforded a view of the courtyard of a γυμνάσιον, and the boys were outside learning how to dance. Συρτός, κλπ. How awkward they were, all going in different directions, and yet how nice. The young men in Greece are very sexy and beautiful, the girls not at all: fat, short-legged, with hard, cruel faces.

May 24, 1967

Sometimes Kazantzakis is really divine, for example in his letter of 28-2-50 to Prevelakis (400 Γράμματα, no. 359): Τι ευτυχία νά ’σαι καλά, νά ’χεις ήσυχη κι αγαθή την ψυχή σου και νά ’χεις ένα σκοπό που η πραγμάτωσή του να κρέμαται μονάχα από σένα, και κάθε μέρα να κάνεις ένα βήμα ομπρός και ν’ ανηφορίζεις! 65 τώρα χρόνια πάω κι έρχομαι και σεργιανίζω στο σκοτεινό αυτό μπουντρούμι, με τα δυο παραθυράκια, που το λένε άνθρωπος, και κοιτάζω από τα παραθυράκια τον κόσμο και δεν τον αποχορταίνω. Δεν ξέρω πόσο καιρό θα βαστάζει αυτή η ευτυχία κι η δύναμη κι η γονιμότητα, μα κάνω σα νά ’ταν να βαστάξει αιώνια· γιατί ξέρω τι θα πει αιωνιότητα. Είναι ποιότητα, δεν είναι ποσότητα—αυτό ’ναι το μεγάλο, πολύ απλό μυστικό.

And think how much right Kazantzakis had, considering all he had suffered at the hands of others, to be embittered or fatalistic or negatively ironic or sarcastic in his old age.

May 25, 1967

Went to Λαγκαδάς on Tuesday to see the third and last day of the αvαστενάρηδες. I was allowed into the konaki again. Many new faces. The most εκστατικός was a middle-aged man who obviously didn’t know the dance, but just tramped back and forth moving his arms and staring into space with the whites of his eyes. Later I learned that he had come especially from Athens to take part; he was a bank clerk whose father and grandfather, however, had been αναστενάρηδες. Apparently he too danced without being burned. It was interesting, however, to see how he, who did not know the beautiful shuffle-like dance, lowered the proceedings greatly. His first time across the coals he gave a shout, Άντε μπρος! and heavily, clumsily strode across to the applause [!] and laughter [!] of the crowd. This applause and laughter was repeated each time, and the δέος was lost; the ceremony degenerated to the level of a stunt, as far as he was concerned. Not with the others, however. They possessed the same θεία μανία as when I saw them previously, and, to me at least, this abnormal condition was in some way more elevated, more dignified than the normal. Obviously the rhythm and beauty of the dance wherein the spastic irrational movements of frenzy are tamed and beautified by “Apollo” was the deciding factor. Unfortunately, politics entered the event. The Υπουργός Βoρείας Ελλάδος with his retinue was the “chief” spectator, and the αρχιαναστενάρης came up to him and shouted Ζήτω η Ελλάς, ζήτω ο Βασιλεύς, ζήτω ο Διάδοχος (the queen had given birth to a son on May 21), ζήτω ο Στρατός. But toward the end of the πυροβασία, one of the αναστενάρηδες—the same one I had seen three years ago shrieking in the konaki—went up, icon over shoulder, to one of the high army officers in the front row and just stood in front of him for what seemed an interminable time, staring into his face with ecstatic black eyes. Then, suddenly, his whole face contorted and broke, like a piece of ice that suddenly cracks and melts, and he began to weep. But just as suddenly, again, he recovered, and danced away with the usual calm, dignified step. It was almost a scene out of Marat-Sade.

I took some pictures in the konaki, but the candle-lady came up and asked me to stop. Θα θυμώσουν αν βγάλεις φωτογραφίες. Εδώ είναι εκκλησία. The πυροβασία was delayed until after dark. I took some more pictures but I doubt that they will come out.

In the afternoon, after leaving τον παππού και τη γιαγιά να ξαπλώσουν in the local hotel, in a room next to the βόχα of the toilet, we walked with George two kilometers along a lovely road, to the λουτρά of Langadas—natural hot springs. There is a lovely hotel with garden, private baths, and a large public bath sunk below the ground and full of steam, like the harem baths shown in the movies, or the old Roman baths.

Poor Chrysanthi couldn’t enter the “grandstand” with the baby, so while we waited for four hours in our seats for the pyrovasia to begin, she roamed the streets with the carriage, enjoying herself, as she said, because she had a few hours free from the constant bickering of the assembled relatives, each simple move requiring complicated and endless discussion before any decision is reached.

Tuesday was the αγορά στο Λαγκαδά. I admired some beautiful samovars but they wanted 1500 to 2000 drachmas for them. Also very imposing braziers.

May 26, 1967

Saw Kakridis for a few minutes. He too seems to have lost his great enthusiasm for Kazantzakis. He surprised me by saying that Kazantzakis is no Shakespeare, no Tolstoy, but he . . . he . . . has a place in the history of Modern Greek literature. After all, he was the one who introduced Nietzsche to Greece [!]. I expressed my amazement at the persecution Kazantzakis had received in the later years of his life (I’d just been reading his awful letters from Antibes at the time the government wouldn’t even give him a visa to travel to Italy for a holiday). Kakridis reminded me that Kazantzakis wasn’t the only one who had received such treatment. Hourmouzios and others, including Kakridis himself, I surmised, suffered likewise. Kakridis attributed a good deal of it to what he described as an inferiority complex on the part of the persecutors. Not having the qualities that Kazantzakis possessed, this is a way they could assert themselves against him. But Kakridis also stressed that Kazantzakis himself didn’t help matters. He was a very difficult man socially; found it very difficult to associate in a relaxed way with others. This probably explains the warmth of Kazantzakis’s correspondence, and also his need for disciples/admirers/friends like Prevelakis.

Spent the evening with Γρηγόρης Τζατλάνος, who married Chrysanthi’s old friend Δανάη. He is a lawyer, very witty and bright, the first person I’ve met here in Salonika who had a broad outlook and a truly inquiring mind. Among other things he was the first ever to ask me to explain Quakerism. I was also glad to see him joking constantly at the expense of Παττακός although he is probably a βασιλόφρων. He, and everyone else, takes it for granted that the coup d’état was really engineered by the C.I.A. All the key figures, Παττακός και Παπαδόπουλος at least, are graduates of U.S. military schools. Also, they say, on the night of the coup the U.S. fleet was outside Athens—i.e., in case of failure, the leaders could have taken refuge aboard our ships. What a mire politics is! Later in the evening we were joined by a young engaged couple, both just finishing their degrees as γεωρπόνες. The girl was fresh and delicate and soft, ripe for plucking, with beautifully projecting teeth, but rather fat legs. The boy was chic and assured. He drives a Thunderbird, owns hotels, huge farms, and is heir to a dealership in pharmaceuticals. The rich get richer, the poor poorer.

May 28, 1967

My birthday. 37. How awful! Chrysanthi sent flowers.

June 4, 1967

“The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism,” as Hannah Arendt once wrote, “is not that they are wrong but that they could become true.”—A. Alvarez in TLS, March 23, 1967, p. 232.

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

—Sylvia Plath, quoted by Alvarez, ibid. p. 231.

June 11, 1967

Άγια Τριάδα

Saw an old grandmother, dressed in black, of course, and sitting in a kind of stupor, as they do, on the front porch. But this one had a full-grown, neat, extensive, black moustache.

June 16, 1967

Kazantzakis speaks somewhere of the young girl who lives on unchanged behind the withered features of the old crone. This I experienced today. Our landlady Κυρία Μαριάνθη is bent and withered, with the typical crackily voice of the old. But today I heard her singing quietly in the back yard, and her singing voice was delicate and sweet and clear: the voice of the sixteen-year-old girl.

The other day I received a letter from the Danforth Foundation saying that I had won the Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching. What nonsense! They ask me to choose whether I want $10,000 outright, or two terms’ leave at full salary. I thought of poor Kazantzakis’s struggles to make a living. The money would have been better spent on him. But now it’s too late.

Prevelakis writes, abruptly, that the publication of the 400 Letters is all off. He is returning his advance and tearing up the contract. Mrs. Kazantzakis demanded royalties; Korda demanded that Prevelakis share his with her; Prevelakis refused. Thus, no book, and I am suddenly out of a commission and $5500. And I had spent a week in the library looking up the difficult words, allusions, etc. But I feel more sorry for Kazantzakis and for Prevelakis than I do for myself. These damn Greeks, they can’t get along, they’re always fighting. Damn individualists.

Chatted yesterday with the village priest. Eventually he was joined by his wife and son. He introduced his wife as η Πρεσβυτέρα μου. I shook her hand and was shocked at its coarseness; the palm was like sandpaper, from washing clothes and dishes. The son turned out to be the boy who has been so ready to make friends with Leander and Alec, and whom our neighbors have warned us against, saying that he steals, uses bad language, etc. His name is Απόστολος.

June 18, 1967

George very depressed and melancholic. Fears that the government will dissolve the ή Aγροτική Τράπεζα in order to appropriate its huge ταμίον (the government apparently is in desperate need of money already). Also, each γεωρπόνος is now required to write a biography giving, in detail, everything he did since 1940—i.e., whether or not he was with the popular resistance, his status in the civil war, etc. How many will lose their jobs remains to be seen. Obviously there will be yes-men who desire these places and who will be elevated into them, the same that happened in German universities and elsewhere under Hitler. Speaking of universities, Lola says that the same thing is happening there. Suspected professors are being given six-month “leaves” that will obviously be “renewed” indefinitely, this of course without pay (actually ¼ salary). The yes-men will not be waiting to fill the positions. Apparently Kakridis will be among the first to suffer. He has already been relieved of his position as head of the Εκπαιδευτικό Συμβούλιο in Athens. Horrible, unthinkable.

Despite the propaganda in the newspapers, things are not going well. Tourism is almost zero. Our friends here in Aghia Triadha confirm this. Pavlos’s father’s hotel is almost empty; there are only a half dozen campers at the plage. When the Israel-Egypt crisis started and American citizens had to be evacuated, 1500 were brought to Athens, because all the hotels there were empty. The U.S. embassy took over 24 hotels—at the height of the tourist season! Kostas says that his businessmen friends are moaning. A wholesale distributor of wine and other drinks says his business is 20% of what it was last year. People are afraid of their jobs, of the future, and thus are hoarding their money instead of spending it.

George went to an επιθεώρηση in Salonika. These revues always thrived on political satire. Now they must satisfy a censor before opening. There were one or two lines about how good it was to be rid of chaos, and well, we didn’t want elections anyway, but no one applauded.

Jokes at government expense are springing up. Here are two examples:

΄Ενας αξιωματικός κάθεται πλάι σε μιαν κυρία στο λεωφορείο. Ξαφνικά η κυρία του δίνει έναν μπάτσο στο μάγουλο. Τότε σηκώνεται ένας άντρας απέναντι κι αυτός του δίνει έναν μπάτσο. ΄Υστερα από το βάθος του λεοφορείου ένας άλλος κύριος σηκώνεται, προχωρεί στο διάδρομο και του δίνει έναν μπάτσο. Τους τρεις όλους τους παίρνουν για στρατοδίκη.—Γιατί εσείς κυρία μου του εδώσατε του αξιωματικού έναν μπάτσο; λέει ο πρόεδρος.—Διότι με πείραζε με το χέρι του, απαντάει εκείνη.—Κι εσείς, κύριε;—Διότι η κυρία είναι η γυναίκα μου. Τελευταίος, ρωτάε τον κύριο που σηκώθηκε από το βάθος.—Εγώ, κύριε πρόεδρε, λέει αυτός, είμαι ο πιο ένδοχος. Νόμισα πως έπεσε η κυβέρνηση.

΄Ενας πτωχός πάει στον Παττακό και του ζητάει μια φωτογραφία.—Ευχαρίστως λέει ο Παττακός. Την παίρνει και γυρίζει στην πατρίδα του. Σε λίγο, όλος ο κόσμος εκεί πέρα ξαφνιάζεται. Αυτός ο πτωχός, ο οποίος δεν είχε παρά κουρέλια τόσα χρόνια, τώρα φοράει ωραία ρούχα, έχει αυτοκίνητο, κλπ. Απορούν όλοι πώς έγινε παμπλούσιος έτσι γλήγορα και μια μέρα ένας τον ερωτά:—Τι έκανες εσύ, που δεν είχες τίποτε και τώρα έχεις απ’ όλα; Πώς τά ’κανες;—Ήταν εύκολο λέει ο τέως πτωχός. Τά ’κανα όλα με μια φωτογραφία. Τη δείχνω στον κόσμο και λέω: 2 δραχμές το φτύσιμο, 3 δραχμές το χέσιμο.

Yesterday was πανηγύρι στην Άγια Τριάδα. I took the children to church. Five ψάλτες από την Πόλη, όπως μού ’πε ύστερα ο νοικοκύρης μας, ο κύριος Αλέκος, που είναι κι αυτός πρόσφυγας απ’ την Πόλη. Η εκκλησία κάτασπρη, με το μόνο στόλισμα ο Παντοκράτορας στον θόλο απάνω. Κόσμος μπαίνει, βγαίνει, θόρυβος, κίνηση, παιδιά ντυμένα άσπρα-άσπρα, κορίτσια με λουλούδια και φανταχτερά φορέματα. Τη θεία τρέλλα που περιγράφει ο Ε. Μ. Forster στη Passage to India, στο τέλος. Κανείς δεν άκουε τη λειτουργία, όμως κατάλαβαν κάτι, με άλλο είδος αντίληψη από τη δικιά μας τη δυτική. ΄Επειτα, περιφορά, στη βροχή, με μουσκικάντηδες του στρατού παίζοντας στρατιωτική μουσική που δεν είχε καμιά σχέση με θρησκεία, μα δεν πειράζει. Στρατός και εκκλησία: και τα δύο είναι Ελλάς, ας πάνε μαζί τότε. Also a double line of soldiers with expressionless faces and robot-like movements, dressed in battle helmets and sporting rifles with fixed bayonets. The whole σύμπλεγμα, τόσο αταίριαστο για εμάς, ήταν ένα σύμβολο του ελληνικού χάους, ή, αν θέλαμε, του ελληνικού ταλέντου για το συνδυασμό αντιθέτων πραγμάτων.

Το βράδυ: γλέντι. Σε ένα καφενείο μια μεγάλη παρέα τραγούδισε ύμνους—«Η ζωή ἐν τάφῳ» και άλλους, με αδρές φωνές. Σε άλλο, μια ορχήστρα: βιολί, κιθάρα, μπουζούκι, κλαρίνο, με τραγουδίστρια. Όλο λαϊκή μουσική έπαιζαν, αμανάδες ανατολίτικες, και σιγά σιγά οι ακροαταί ήρθαν στο κέφι, άρχισαν οι παρέες να χορεύουν, πρώτα ζευγάρια, με σεμνό χορό, το συρτό, ύστερα πήραν θάρρος τα παλικάρια και τι χορούς δεν έκαμαν! Κλέφτικους, ναύτικους, χασάπικους, λογής λογής, με πηδήματα, μαντηλάκια· χόρευαν μόνοι, και δυο-δυο και τρεις-τέσσαρες. Ύστερα ένας γέρος σηκώθηκε και αυτός χόρεψε ένα κλέφτικο σαν νάταν νέος. Χειροκροτήματα, γέλοια, κέφι. Η ορχήστρα όλο κι έπαιζε πιο ορμητικά, εκστατικά. Ο αμανές θα άρχιζε σιγά σιγά, σαν θρήνος, και ξαφνικά θα άλλαζε ο ρυθμός, θα προσπαθούσε να πηδήξει και αυτός και θα συνέχιζε όλο κι πιο ορμητικά ως το τέλος. Και το τέλος δεν ήταν οριστικό, όπως σε μας. Καθόλο, καθόλο coda ή cadence. Αντιθέτως, ξαφνικά ο ρυθμός, η μελωδία, το μέτρο αποσυνθετίζουνταν, έσπαζαν, και το τραγούδι κατέληξε σε κακοφωνίες και χάος. Το ίδιο ο χορός. Δεν τελείωσαν τα παλικάρια θετικώς, οριστικώς, μα ελύγιζαν ξαφνικά, μαζί με τη μουσική, σαν να έλυωναν τα ωραία κορμιά τους, και γύριζαν στις θέσεις τους.

Καθόμουνα εγώ και τους θαύμαζα ως τα μεσάνυχτα, μόνος, διότι η Χρυσάνθη είχε πάει σπίτι για να κοιμηθεί τότε που κοιμόταν το μωρό. Όταν μπήκα στο δωμάτιο, την βρήκα ξυπνητή. Γιατί; της είπα. Πώς να κοιμηθώ με ανοιχτή η πόρτα; Γιατί άργησες τόσο; Ετσι καταντήσαμε.

June 23, 1967

❡ Ο ύπνος θρέφει το μωρό και το κρασί το γέρο. —Ο Πρωτομάστορας, σελ. 14.

June 24, 1967

Πήγαμε με τη Χρυσάνθη τη δεύτερη μέρα του πανηγυριού και καθήσαμε μαζί με τον Μήτσο και δύο γέρους. Έπειτα ήρθαν και ο κύριος Αλέκος ο δικός μας ο νοικοκύρης και του Μήτσου ο αδερφός, ο Στέφανος. Πάλι χοροί, κέφι, ως τις 2:00 π.μ. Πίναμε νομίζω 22 μποτίλια μπύρα! (Εγώ τους τα κέρασα τα πιο πολλά.) Τα παλικάρια χόρεψαν κι οι γέροι χόρεψαν κι ο Στράτος, απέναντι με μια Αθηναία ξετσίπωτη·χόρεψαν κι ο Μήτσος κι ο Αλέκος ένα χασάπικο. Εγώ τους καμάρωνα. Μιλούσα μαζί μ’ έναν από τους δύο γέρους (κι οι δύο πήραν τα μάτια τους κι εξαφανίστηκαν πριν ήρθε ο Στράτος για να πληρώσουμε). Είπαμε τα μυστικά μας, δηλαδή ότι κι οι δύο αγαπούμε την ελευθερία και μισούμε την τωρινή κυβέρνηση. Ο γέρος, 72 χρονώ, κοτσονάτος. Η Ελλάδα είναι πτωχή, λέει, αλλά έχει πλούτο και καρδιά. Σύμφωνη! Μου αρέσουν αυτοί οι απλοί ΄Ελληνες, οι χοριανοί που με κυκλοφορούν ιδού πέρα, μα δεν μου αρέσουν καθόλου οι πλούσιοι αστοί που βρήκαμε στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Σαν να κρέμουνται αυτοί· δεν είναι ανατολίτες, δεν είναι Ευρωπαίοι· τα πόδια τους δεν ρίζουνται σε καμιά γης· είναι μετέωροι.

Ο μαέστρος ήταν από τη Νιγρίτα, παλαιός μαθητής του παππού μας. Μιλήσαμε. Όλα μακεδόνικα τραγούδια έπαιζαν, όπως τη προηγούμενη βραδυά, σαν αμανάδες. Καθόταν μαζί κι ο άλλος γέρος· δεν ήταν από το χωριό αυτός. Αγόρασε ένα οικόπεδο εδώ, κατάγεται από τη Θεσσαλονίκη. Αυτός πολύ δύσφορος, κατσούφης, όλο και έχαλνε το κέφι. Μια φορά, παράγγειλε χορό και όταν ήρξε η σειρά του κι άρχισε η μουσική, καθόταν και αρνήθηκε να σηκωθεί να χορέψει. Άλλη φορά σηκώθηκε για χασάπικο μαζί με τον Μήτσο και τον Αλέκο και τον άλλο γέρο. Άρχισαν να χορεύουν. Πολύ ωραία, γοργά, ζωηρά, μα αυτός ο δίστροφος, να τον σε λίγο να κάνει σημάδι με το χέρι του και ν’ αναγκάζει τον μαέστρο να πάψει. Δεν με κάνει τόσο γλήγορα, λέει ο γέρος. Ξανάρχισαν πιο σιγά μα εν τω μεταξεί οι άλλοι είχαν χάση το ρυθμό. Έχασαν το κέφι τους· κάθισαν. ΄Ετσι απέτυχε ο χορός τους, με τον γέρο τον αίτιο. ΄Υστερα πάλι, άρχισε μεγάλο καυγά με έναν άλλο που κατέφτασε—τον συμπέθερο τού κυρίου Στεφάνου, έναν παχύ μα σφιχτοδεμένο, με χαμόγελο και φωνή του λέωντος. Η τραγουδίστρια κατάγεται από τη Νιγρίτα ή από τη Βέροια; Αυτός ήταν ο καυγάς. Ξαχλαμάρες. Έτσι τέλος ο παχύς είπε να βάλουν στοίχημα και έβγαλε δρ. 500 αμέσως και τις κατέθεσε. Ο γέρος δεν είχε, κι όλο και δίσταζε και τέλος άλλαξε τη κουβέντα για να καυχιωθεί πως ξέρει δεκαπέντε γλώσσες (ήταν ναύτης φαίνεται). «Ξέρεις τα ρωσσικά;» «Πώς!» «Τα γύφτικα;» «Πώς!» «Τα βλάχικα;» «Βεβαίως! Πώς θες να μην ξέρω και τα βλάχικα!» «Μήπως ξέρεις και τα αμερικάνικα;» «Αστείο έβαζες; Τα ξέρω, τα ξέρω, όλα.» «Για πες δυο λόγια στον κύριο Πέτρο εδώ, να δούμε πόσα ξέρεις.» Στράφηκε τότες σε μένα και είπε με βαρειά προφορά, “Fucking you! Fucking you! I fucking you!” Έτσι απέδειξε τη γνώση του!

Πέρασα πολύ ωραία. Γυρίσαμε με τον Αλέκο, τον Μήτσο και τον Στέφανο στο σπίτι την ώρα 2:00 και έπεσα να κοιμηθώ. Η Χρυσάνθη είχε γυρίσει πιο ενωρίς και κοιμόταν. Την άλλη μέρα μου ρώτησε αν ήμουν μεθυσμένος, αν έχω πονοκέφαλο, κ.τ.λ. «Όχι, είμια μια χαρά. Πέρασα πολύ ωραία.» «Ήσουν με το στοιχείο σου!» μου λέει και γελάσαμε με τη ψυχή μας.

Ήταν στο γλέντι και το village idiot and the village hunchback. Ο μωρός—ένας παλικάρι με ωραίο σώμα αλλά με το άδειο κουτό χαμόγελο ενός μωρού. Κάθε τόσο σηκωνόταν κι αυτός για να χορέψει. Πηδούσε λίγο, χαμογελούσε. Πρόσεξα με τόση τρυφεράδα όλος ο κόσμος συμπεριφέρονται μ’ αυτόν.

June 25, 1967

Σήμερα ο βασιλεύς ήλθε στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Ο Γεώργος ο καημένος έπρεπε να χάσει και μια άλλη Κυριακή να παρουσιαστεί στον Λαγκαδά, όπου ο βασιλεύς θα επιθεωρήσει τους εκεί στρατιώτες. Η Ευθυμούλα, άφου είναι δασκάλα, έχασε κι αυτή την Κυριακή, γιατί έπρεπε μαζί με τους μαθητάς της να παρουσιαστούν στο δρόμο, να πούνε Ζήτω όταν θα περάσει ο βασιλεύς και η ακολουθία του. Όλοι οι μαθηταί των γυμνασίων πρέπει έτσι να φανούν, να κάνουν μεγάλο πλήθος δλδ. για να μπορέσουν να γράψουν αύριο οι εφημερίδες πως όλος ο λαός αυθόρμητος [!] παρουσιάστηκε για να δείξει την αγάπη του προς τον πρώτον ΄Ελληνα. Είπα εγώ μια στιγμή να καταβούμε με τα παιδιά στη Θεσσαλονίκη για να δούμε κι εμείς, μα τότε μετάνοιωσα. Γιατί να χάσω το καιρό μου για τέτοιες ψεύτικες τελετές; Αντί να πάμε εκεί, πήγαμε εδώ πέρα στις επιδείξεις του δημοτικού σχολείου. Πριν αρχίσουν κρυφάκουα μερικά απ’ τα παιδιά να κουβεντιάζουν μεταξύ τους. ΄Ηταν γύρω δέκα χρονώ, στην πέμπτη τάξη και ξαφνιάστηκα από τη σοβαρότητα της κουβέντας τους. Ο ένας έλεγε (πού το έμαθε δεν ξέρω) ότι στον Καναδά δεν είναι υποχρεωτικό να πας στρατιώτης, ενώ στην Ελλάδα είναι. Τότε μιλούσε για τους Έλληνες σε Κύπρο και σε Βόρειο Ήπειρο, και τι θα γινόταν αν άρχισε ένας πόλεμος. Τα άλλα λόγια δεν άκουσα πολύ καλά· τότε όμως ήρθε κι ένα άλλο παιδί και το άκουσα καλά-καλά να πει: «Ελεύθερος; Εγώ δεν θέλω να είμαι ελεύθερος! Αμ τι, νά ’μαι ελεύθερος να πάω στρατιώτης στο Βιετ Ναμ και να σκοτωθώ; Αυτό θα πει ελευθεριά;»

June 26, 1967

When Kazantzakis was in Aegina in the 1930s, penniless, he wrote to Jouvenel about his house, the sea, his beloved μοναξιά, and concluded: ΄Οπως το ετόνισα κιόλας, είμαι εδώ σχεδόν ευτυχισμένος: μοναξιά, θάλασσα, δουλειά, δεν λείπει από την ευτυχία μου παρά το ουσιαστικό: η δυνατότητα να φύγω (Νέα Εστία 72, σελ. 1572). How true. Even in Paradise, man cannot be happy unless he knows he can leave when he wants.

June 27, 1967

Alec is sensitive in a lovely way. While we were still in Salonika we made the mistake of walking with him through the meat market, where the carcasses of course hang in all their gore, large sheep-eyes looking at you imploringly from skinless heads. For weeks afterwards, Alec refused to eat meat.

Today, the father of Ούλης took Alec and Leander fishing. Alec of all people was the one who caught a small fish. At first he was elated and ran with it to the house. But soon he became all too aware that it was dying or dead and he began to cry, and to reproach himself for murdering it. What could we say? Actually, we said the one thing worth saying: that he should run quickly back to the sea and replace the fish in its element. He did this and, miracle or miracles, the fish revived and swam away.

In the “Greek Park” vaudeville in Salonika the master of ceremonies, at one point, asked the audience to give him five or six words: two with accent on the last syllable, two with accent on the next to last, two with accent on the 3rd from last. Then he asked for a theme, and it was given: miniskirts. He said “Thank you.” After the next act he returned a read a poem he had composed on the set theme, using the given words as line-endings!

Last Sunday I helped George get rid of a pile of wood, storing it on the τεράτσα; also trimmed the lower branches from the pines he had planted, and had a lesson in pruning grapes. He was very melancholy, as usual. Says that all the γεωρπόνοι are on tenterhooks, στα αναμμένα κάρβουνα, waiting from day to day, not knowing if they will be among those to be “released” from their positions for political reasons. The initial “release” is for six months, at ¼ salary! But how much hope is there of reinstatement after that?

Thursday, June 29, 1967

The name day of Peter and Paul. The king’s son, Παύλος, ο διάδοχος, was baptized today. Αργεία, γιορτή, πολύς κόσμος εδώ. Χθές είδαμε τον Μάριο τον Καρασάβα.

❡ Ο άνθρωπος πρέπει προτού φύγει, να κάμει τρία πράματα: να φυτέψει τουλάχιστο ένα δέντρο, να γεννήσει τουλάχιστο ένα παιδί, και να γράψει τουλάχιστο ένα βιβλίο. —Kazantzakis, cited in Elli Alexiou, sel. 162

Nature. Man. Spirit.

❡ Υπάρχει τίποτε αληθινότερο από την αλήθεια; Ναι, το παραμύθι· αυτό δίνει νόημα αθάνατο στην εφήμερη αλήθεια. —Kazantzakis.

July 1, 1967

Sleep is strange. This afternoon, in my midday sleep I suddenly found myself composing a limerick:

There was a girl from Nigrita

Who didn’t like dandies to greet her.

She gave them a bop

They never forgot

And now they run when they meet her.

July 2, 1967

What a blessing is liberty, mutual trust, stability. These “patriotic” slogans that I always found sentimental and “stupid” when I heard them in America, now have an intense meaning and value. Here, everywhere there is fear. You can’t speak, not even to your friends or relatives. Everywhere are paid spies and informers. Η Θεοδώρα, η θεία του Άλτα, was telling Chrysanthi last night about the εταιρεία where she works, some kind of αντιπροσωπεία ζάχαρης. Every day, it seems, people who had been there for years suddenly no longer appear. Somewhere, among supposed friends, or in a café after a few beers, or at work in a moment of laxness, they said a word against the government. Immediately they are reported to the αστυνομία, και πάνε και αυτοί! The other sad thing is how easily people change allegiance. So many, nominally liberals previously, now have nothing but good words for the Pattakos régime, the end result being that you don’t know what they really believe, nor how to act in front of them. In any case, it is foolhardy to express any opinion whatsoever. The other day ο πατέρας του Νούλη, ενός παιδιού που έπιασε φιλία με τον Λέανδρό μας, μας εκάλησε να φάμε μαζι στη Ρέμβη. Είναι chauffeur αυτός, έχει μεγάλο φορτηγό και κουβαλάει ύλη για την κατασκευή δρόμων—πέτρες, άμμος, κ.τ.λ.—όμως έχει μεγάλα ιδανικά για τον μονάκριβο γιο του, το Νούλη. Έβαλε και έρχεται ταχτικά στο σπίτι μια δασκάλα αγγλικής γλώσσας, ο γιος μαθαίνει, είναι έξυπνο παιδί, ο προορισμός του είναι να πάει στο Κολλέγιο Ανατόλια και από πέρα ίσως έξω στο εξωτερικό να γίνει γιατρός. ΄Ετσι πάντα είναι το ιδανικό τετοίων ανθρώπων. Είναι καλό, με τη διαφορά ότι κι ο γιος και ο πατέρας τώρα καταφρονούν τον αγγάμματο. Ο Νούλης έρχεται στο σπίτι μας, πιάνει τον Λέανδρο και τον λέει «Ελα να παίξουμε μαζί να μη παίζεις με αυτά τα άλλα παιδία του χωριού· είναι πρόστυχα, δεν ξέρουν γράμματα, δεν ξέρουν αγγλικά, είναι καλά μόνο να σκάβουν στα χωράφια, τι τους θέλεις!» ΄Ετσι, και είναι μόνο 11 χρονώ. Λοιπόν, ο πατέρας του προόδεψε πολύ επί του Καραμανλή, φυσικά επειδή ο Καραμανλής έπαιρνε χρήματα πολλά από τους φίλους του τους Αμερικανούς και έφτιανε δρόμους. ΄Υστερα, ήταν σταθερή για λίγα χρόνια η πολιτική και, σε μερικές περιπτώσεις, αυτούς τους δρόμους και άλλα έργα που άρχισαν, τα τελείωσαν. Κοντολογής, ο πατεράς έβγαινε τα λεφτά του. Επί όμως του Παπανδρέου, οι απεργίες, σχεδόν ατέλειωτες, τα έκανε θάλασσα. Το αποτέλεσμα είναι ότι αυτός ο άνθρωπος τώρα είναι υπέρ τον Παττακό. Έστω. Μπορώ να καταλάβω την αιτία. Μιλήσαμε π.χ. για τον τουρισμό. Πρέπει να συνέχιζει ο τουρισμός, λέει, και δεν μπορεί να καταλάβει γιατί δεν έρχονται οι τουρίσται. Είναι οι Ιταλοί που μας έκαναν το κακό, επειδή εδημοσίεψαν ψευτιές στις εφημερίδες τους. Δεν είναι αλήθεια αυτά που λένε για την Ελλάδα. Τίποτε δεν έγινε εδώ. Είναι όπως πριν, ελευθερία έχομε . . . Θέλει να πει: εγώ δουλεύω όπως πριν και καλλύτερα γιατί τώρα η κυβέρνηση μετακινεί και βουνά για να αυξανθεί ο τουρισμός και γι’ αυτό φιάχνουν ένα δρόμο από τη Θεσσαλονίκη στην Άγια Τριάδα, και κουβαλάει τα ύλη αυτός. Ας λέει όλα αυτά. Μήπως είναι κουτός και τα πιστεύει; Μήπως είναι opportunist; Ποιος ξέρει. Το κακό είναι ότι ούτε εγώ, και οπωσδήποτα κανένας Έλληνας, δεν μπορούμε να τον αντισταθούμε, δεν μπορούμε να πούμε τη γνώμη μας, πως πολλά άλλαξαν και μάλιστα τα πιο ιερά και σημαντικά. Πάει η ελευθερία, δεν μπορούμε να τον πούμε αυτό, φοβούμενοι μήπως είναι και αυτός σπιούνος πληρωμένος, και να τρέξει στην αστυνομία να μας καταγγείλει. Αυτή είναι η κατάσταση.

Λένε ένα αστείο. Δύο σκυλιά συνάντησαν στους δρόμους της Αθήνας. Το ένα είχε στο στόμα του ένα μεγάλο κόκκαλο. Ήταν τακτοποιημένο, θρεμμένο. Λέει το άλλο το σκυλί, «Εσύ βρε τα έχεις πολύ ωραία. ΄Εχεις τη μεγάλη την αυλή σου και το κόκκαλο, ούτε ψείρους δεν έχεις.» «Μπα, ξέρω έχω όλα αυτά, βρε φίλε μου, μα πάλι είμαι πολύ δυστυχισμένο.» «Εσύ δυστυχισμένο; Πώς;» «Βρε συνάδελφό μου, μα θέλω να γαυγίζω!»

Ο Γεώργος μας είπε ότι προχθές ήλθε ένας αξιωματικός στον Λανγκαδά για να βγάλει λόγο μπροστά στους δασκάλους και τους υπαλλήλους της τραπέζης, κτλ. Τέτοιοι λόγοι γίνονται τώρα ταχτικά· η κυβέρνηση προσπαθεί να «φωτίσε» το λαό. Σήμερα αυτός μήλησε προπαντώς για τα σχολεία. Είπε πως οι δάσκαλοι τώρα πρέπει ν’ έχουν ως σκοπό τους να βάλουν τα παιδιά να καταλάβωου ότι ο στρατός έσωσε την Ελλάδα, που βρισκόταν στα χείλη της αβύσσου. Να φροντήστε αυτό, λέει· αυτό τώρα είναι τα εθνικά σας καθήκοντα. Και τελείωσε την ομιλία του με το σύνθημα: Αυτά που θέλει η Ελλάς είναι όχι μορφωμένους, μα ΄Ελληνες!

In the Stadium της Θεσσαλονίκης, the army gave great στρατιωτικές επιδείξεις, δωρεάν, και μάλιστρα ήλθε και ο Κόλλιας. Ο κόσμος έτρεξε, γεμάτο το στάδιο (δηδ. η παθητική αντίσταση απέτυχε, αυτό τότε μπορούσε να πει η κυβέρνηση). ¨Ηλθε ο Κόλλιας, ο κόσμος σηκώθηκε και φώναξε το Ζήτω. Δύο νέοι, μάλλον φοιτηταί, δε σηκώθηκαν, δε ξεφώνισαν τίποτε. Κάποιος βέβαια τους παρατήρησε, σε λίγα ήλθαν οι χωροφύλακες και τους πήραν στο τμήμα. ΄Ετσι είναι η Ελλάς! Και κάθε μερα διαβάζουμε στην εφημερίδα ότι οι κύριοι τάδε και τάδε καταδικάστικαν σε φυλακή επί 4-5 μήνες δια χλευασμό εναντίον του βασιλέα.

The newspapers published a list of forbidden books by communists, native and foreign. Ο Pappous, passing by a bookshop the same day, saw policemen plucking the offending titles from the shelves and throwing the books into the street. Authors on the list were Γαλάτεια Καζαντζάκη, Βάρναλης, Έλλη Αλεχίου, Βασίλης Βασιλικός, κλπ. but not Nikos. Marvelous! Εκεί κατάντησε!

We were very miserable. Chrysanthi depressed and nervous, full of hatred for Greeks and everything Greek. I all too conscious of the discrepancy between my project and the environment in which I am pursuing it. We spoke of leaving Greece. All this was just before we moved to Aghia Triadha. “I cannot stay,” Chrysanthi said. “I cannot see my brother suffer like this.” We spoke of leaving then and there, instead of moving to the village. But where to go? I sent hurried and somewhat dramatic letters to Reinoud Oort, Shanklands (in Newcastle for the year), Konrad Elsdon, and Gifford. In the meantime, as must happen in Greece, the whole family gathered to discuss the matter. George, Lola, even Pappous (who the night before had agreed with Chrysanthi) said stay, stay. . . . So, we decided to stay, partly out of inertia, partly out of fear of not finding a place to live elsewhere at such short notice, partly in order not to disappoint and offend the family, break our agreement with the landlords in Aghia Triadha, and partly, I must confess, out of curiosity (on my part) to spend some more time here and have that much more direct experience of what it is like to live under fascism. The very next day we moved and of course were consoled somewhat by the beauty and friendliness of the village. Soon afterwards came the replies from various friends: First a telegram from Konrad—“Come immediately Huddersfield. Wire time & place arrival”—followed by a letter saying that his house was at our disposal. Then from Reinoud, the same. We have a large house. Come, stay as long as you like. Then we can look for a seaside cottage. And from Tom & Becky: we’re leaving the keys of our house with a neighbor. Come. Stay. We’re going to Switzerland for a few weeks. Occupy our house in our absence and then we’ll see what happens. From Gifford, not quite so much, but at least some newspaper clippings showing available cottages in the West of England. How nice to have friends! I wrote them all, rather embarrassed, that it was a false alarm but that I felt warm at the thought that I could address myself to them, and hoped that they would always feel equally as free to address themselves to me in time of need.

July 3, 1967

Nice remarks by Kazantzakis:

Ωραία πολιτεία το Βερολίνο, μα έχει πολλούς . . . Γερμανούς. (From Alexiou, sel. 329.)

. . . αλάτι ο θάνατος και τη ζωή τη νοστιμίζει . . .

. . . δύο βόδια: ο ίσκιος μου κ’ εγώ, μπήκαμε πάλι στο ζυγό και οργώνομε το χάος. (From Alexiou, sel. 331.)

July 11, 1967

Good motto: “When in Rome, do as the Greeks do!”

To Salonika yesterday, shopping. Returned to Χαΐμ to get little samovars. He was wearing short sleeves, and on his left forearm, just above the wrist, was tattooed a star and a number—from the concentration camp. Now he has a son in Anatolia College, hopes he’ll go abroad, wants him to study electrical engineering in the U.S.

July 12, 1967

People like to romanticize street vendors—how lovely their cries, etc. This morning I heard a childish voice hawking sandals, beach clogs, etc., in a lovely singsong. A boy of about 12 passed, carrying 2 heavy valises, one in each hand. Πέδηλα, τσόκαρα και γυναικήσια έχω, πέ—δη—λααα, τσό—κα—ρααα . . .

July 20, 1967

How history repeats itself. Here is Kazantzakis in 1922, writing to Galatea (letter #45) re: the coup d’état of General Πλαστήρας after the Asia Minor catastrophe: Όλη η αθλιότητα του ρωμιού. Απαζημίωσες, συκοφαντίες, οι ίδιοι που σώπαιναν και ζητωκραύγαζαν στο άλλο καθεστώς, τώρα προβαίνουν πάλι υπερασπιστές της επανάστασης. Είμαστε αμόρφωτοι, δειλοί, μικροί. (σελ. 123)

Letter 49, sel. 140: ❡ Θαρρώ πως οι αρετές της ράτσας μας αναδείχνονται μόνο έξω από κρατικά καθεστώτα. Ως κρατικός ο Έλληνας είναι φρικαλέος· ως Οδυσσέας, περιπλανόμενος, εργαζόμενος, εμπορευόμενος, σκεπτόμενος, χωρίς δικό του κρατικά σύστημα, σαν τους Εβραίους, είναι μοναδικός στον κόσμο. Μπορεί, όπως οι Εβραίοι, να γίνει δραστικότατο προξύμι για ν’ ανεβεί η γης.

July 21, 1967

Kazantzakis’s hyperbole is sometimes delicious. Too bad he didn’t exploit his sense of humor more. Here is a description of Naples: Και παντού μια ακαθαρσία royale, λάμπουσα μέσα στον ήλιο, όλοι φτύνουνε, κατουρούν όπου βρούν, χώνουνε όχι τα δάχτυλα μα τα χέρια τους σε τεράστια, ελαστικότατα ρουθούνια.

His description of the library in Naples: . . . οι άνθρωποι φτύνουν κάθε στιγμή κατάχαμα, φωνάζουν, από τη διπλανή πόρτα μπαίνει ασφυχτική η μυρωδιά του ουρητήριου. Τι διαφορά από τη Γερμανία. Τούτοι εδώ είναι χειρότεροι από τους Έλληνες. (Letter to Galatea no. 80.) A little better, but not much. I think of the toilet in the Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη in Athens. What filth, smell! No lock on the door, no paper, flies in swarms—though it was a little better this time than three years ago. And the couriers who are supposed to fetch the books. How lazy they were! Every time I gave them a slip they made me feel that I was some unspeakable monster. And most of all they scowled when I ordered the large bound volumes of newspapers, because they were heavy and smothered in dust.

Η βιβλιοθήκη των καθηγητών in Salonika: opposite me, the professor of Old Testament, chatting for hours, receiving his lackeys, figuring out how much money was to be collected from his mimeographed publications that all the students have to buy. Across the aisle, a fat, greasy professor forever clearing his throat or spitting into his handkerchief with the most excruciating sound, as though exhibiting his phlegm to the world. The librarians—talk, gossip, the weather, recipes. The chief librarian: respectable, necktie, long fingernail. All movements with utmost leisure and lethargy. And they only work from 8 till 1:30. All afternoon free.

July 22, 1967

To Salonika with Miranda and Themis to see Koun’s production of Βάτραχοι. What imaginative combination of ideas, spectacle, mystery, farce, music, dance! Everything was done with Pantagruelian exaggeration. Heracles was dressed in a weight-lifter’s jersey and trunks, with 50 medals pinned to his chest, and a huge moustache with waxed ends, which he kept twisting. Dionysus was old and degenerate; he looked like Cavafy’s death-mask. Ξανθίας, the slave, was a leering hunchback mixed with a comédia dell’arte buffoon. Euripides was a modern smartaleck, very sure of himself, Aeschylus an old-fashioned pompous “patriarch” yet somehow dignified withal. There was a delicious and meaningful use of anachronisms. The chant of the funeral procession obviously sounded Byzantine; Euripides when he prayed to the gods crossed himself; the chorus hopped and jerked to jazz-like (or, more accurately, Marat-Sade-like) movements; and best of all, chorus, Euripides, Aeschylus and Dionysus had a few “numbers” when it was a question of 5th century B.C. political satire, which employed the catchy rhythmic format of the Greek “revue” B. P. (before Pattakos).

This was the first production of Aristophanes I’ve seen. One realizes immediately, and with a strange blow of astonishment, what a decisive influence this form has had right to the present day, without even mentioning the Latin comedians. We see Aristophanes written all over Molière, for instance. And Peter Weiss, in trying to revive the theater of ideas, has found a modern way to employ the chorus, music, dance, plus intellectual and topical debate, which Aristophanes combines so well: and also, in Weiss’s case, to return a sense of the “nouminos” to the theater. It is a sad commentary when we realize that this is provided, in his case, by lunatics, and the debate between a psychopath and a political fanatic, the insane asylum in the 20th century replacing Olympus or Hades of the Greeks.

We are about to have a girl come in to live with us: Susanna, a second-year student in the university, formerly a gymnasium pupil of Efthymoula’s in Siderokastron. This is so that Chrysanthi can finally get some sleep at night, which is fine. But still, I look with great displeasure at the prospect of a ξένος άνθρωπος in the house, and also the prospect of a maid, which I suppose is the final capitulation to the bourgeoisie. She asked for 2,000 drachmas, which is about double what such servants usually get in Greece, but still not very much by our standards: about $13.00 a week! George came very apologetically and confided that it was doubtlessly «αυτή» (i.e., Efthymoula) who propagandized the girl and gave her the courage to ask so much. George apparently lives a continuous martyrdom with this very disagreeable wife of his, but he disliked her even before they were married, and went into the union with open eyes, out of weakness and inertia probably, or maybe sexual blackmail. Who knows? Chrysanthi told me the detailed story last week when the two of us went together (i.e., alone) to Μηχανιώνα for a few hours and sat in the café surrounded by grizzly fishermen playing τάβλι.

Sudden report that Danae’s husband, Gregory, is in prison. No details.

Theodorakis sentenced to 8 months in jail, commutable by payment of a fine of 200 gold pounds sterling per day, a total of 48,000 pounds sterling! Reason: abuse or “insult” of the Αρχή (authorities) by his telegram of 9.10.65 to the president of the Βουλή and various newspapers—i.e., for a crime of speech, not act.

In Μακεδονία, 9 July, there was an article on the απαγόρευσις των κομμουνιστικών βιβλίων, a good example of the doubletalk and doublethink that George Orwell knew so well. After describing the “willful blindness” toward the communist menace of all the parliamentary governments before April 1, it goes on: Την απόφαση της επαναστατικής κυβερνήσεως να απαγορεύση την κυκλοφορία των κομμουνιστικών θεωριών, οι αληθινοί δημοκράται υπεδέχθησαν με ανακούφιση. . . . Το αντίθετο συνέβη με τους κιβδηλοποιούς [counterfeits] της δημοκρατίας. Αυτοί έβγαλαν αναστεναγμό και μίλησαν για δίωξη της σκέψεως! . . . Λοιπόν η απαγόρευση της μαρξιστικής σκέψεως δεν αποτελεί δίωξη του πνεύματος, αλλά μ έ τ ρ ο ν α υ τ ο π ρ ο σ τ α σ ί α ς. Και μέτρο αναπτύξεως των δημοκρατικών ιδεών. Γιατί κάθε θεωρία . . . έχει το δικαίωμα να προστατεύη εαυτήν από τις υπονομευτικές παρενέργειες [side-effects] της αντιπάλου κοσμοθεωρίας. Δηλαδή, σ’ ένα ωρισμένο στάδιο της αναπτύξεως και της εμπεδώσεώς της [of its consolidation, establishment] η δημοκρατική κοσμοθεωία έχει κάθε δικαίωμα να αχρηστεύη [make useless] τον αθέμιτον [illicit] ανταγωνισμό των μαρξιστικών ιδεών. Τούτο δ ε ν α π ο δ ε ι κ ν ύ ε ι α δ υ ν α μ ί α των ελευθέρων ιδεών της δυτικής δημοκρατίας . . . αλλά α π ό λ υ τ η σ υ ν ε ί δ η σ η τ ο υ κ ι ν δ ύ ν ο υ που . . . αντιπροσωπεύει η ο λ ο κ λ η ρ ω τ ι κ ώ ς αναπτυσσoμένη . . . κομμουνιστική κοσμοθεωρία. And so forth.

In the same issue there is an article with a statement by the government strenuously denying reports that the Athens Festival had been censored, and that works by ancient Greek authors had been deemed unsuitable for the new establishment. As proof: a letter from Αλέξης Μινωτής, director of the National Theater. He said that the repertoire remained unchanged, except that the incidental music written by Theodorakis for some of the plays would no longer be used. As witness to the democratic spirit of the “revolutionary government,” he cited the fact that one of the plays, Euripides’ Πλούτος, I think, will be done, as planned, in the translation by Κώστας Βάρναλης.

July 26, 1967

Ο Θωμάς, ο εγγονός της αδελφής του Δημητίου, ήλθε σήμερα. Είναι ηλεκτρολόγος και δουλεύει σ’ ένα εργαστάσιο που κάνουν οργανικά λιπάσματα. Τον ρώτησα για τις συνθήκες. Λέει ότι είναι τρομερές. Έπειδη η πρώτη ύλη του οργανικού λιπάσματος είναι απορίμματα, υποφέρουν όλοι από μια βόχα και μύγες και σμάρια κουνούπια. Αυτοί που δουλεύουν την ύλη αυτή τη δουλεύουν με γυμνά τα χέρια τους και υποφέρουν πολύ. Ο μισθός τους, 80 δραχμές την ημέρα, επάνω-κάτω 400 την εβδομάδα, 1600 τον μήνα. Αυτός, ως ηλεκτρολόγος, πληρώνεται κάπως καλύτερα, μα όχι πολύ. Αναγκάζεται να δουλεύει και στα μέγαρα που κτίζονται, ύστερα από τις ώρες του στο εργοστάσιο. Δουλεύει μέρα-νύ-χτα, 20 ώρες την ημέρα, και βγάζει 5.000 δρ. το μήνα το πιο πολύ. (Λέει ότι ο διευθυντής του εργοστασίου είναι ένας Αμερικανός που έρχεται μια φορά τον μήνα.) Το παιδί αυτό φυσικά θέλει να φύγη από την Ελλάδα. Ήλθε να μεταφράσω ένα γράμμα που πήρε από τη Αυστραλία, που τον καλεί να έλθη, και στέλνει μικρές αγγελίες της εφημερίδας, απόδειξη ότι οι ηλεκτρολόγοι ζητιούνται πολύ. Θα πάει ασφαλώς για δύο χρόνια σα δοκιμή. Όμως, όπως λέει το γράμμα, πρέπει να δώσει εξέταση στην αγγλική γλώσσα για να πάρει την άδεια να δουλεύει ως ηλεκτρολόγο. Δεν ξέρει τ’ αγγλικά, όμως κάνει προσπαθίες και θα τα μάθη. Λέει ότι θά ’ναι εύκολο διότι σπούδασε λατινικά στο γυμνάσιο και γι’ αυτό ξέρει τα στοιχεία. Καλα! Όμως τι κρίμα να σπουδάσει ένας έτσι υποχρεωτικά τα λατινικά, που είναι νεκρή γλώσσα και άχρηστη, αντί για να σπουδάσει τ’ αγγλικά ή τα γαλλικά στο σχολείο; Τι καλό έκανε ο Παπανδρέου, τι καλό για τους εργαζόμενους, όταν άλλαξε το σύστημα και πέταξε τα λατινικά! Μα τώρα με την επαναστατική κυβέρνηση αυτό το βήμα μπροστά καταστρέφεται και η εκπαίδεψη κάνει δύο βήματα προς το πίσω. Πάλι θα σπουδάζουν οι μαθηταί τα λατινικά υποχρεωτικά.

Ο Μάριος Καρασάβας ήλθε με τους γονείς του. Ο πατέρας είναι, και φαίνεται, ετοιμοθάνατος. Χωρίς στομάχι· μόνον πετσί και κόκκολα. Πρέπει να τρώει συνέχεια από λίγο ψωμί και τυρί, φτύει πάντοτε και παντού, τα μάγουλα είναι φαγομένα, τα δόντια λείπουν, το αυτί δεν ακούει. Και ήταν κάποτε αυτός στρατιώτης, αξιωματικός, πολεμιστής!

Ήλθε και ο Richard Cross με τρεις φίλους, έναν άλλο, τον Peter Lehmann, που σπουδάζει οικονομικά στο Πανεπιστήμιο του Sussex, και δύο Αμερικανούς που σπουδάζουν στο ίδιο μέρος. Τους πήγα στη Μηχανιώνα. Υπάρχουν εκεί δύο καφενεία, το ένα βλέπει στη θάλασσα και δεν είχε ούτε έναν πελάτη, το άλλο είναι αυτό που καθόμασταν με τη Χρυσάνθη προχθές στη πλατεία, χωρίς θέα, μα ήταν γεμάτο. Τους είπα, Τι προτιμάτε να δείτε, τη θάλασσα ή τους ανθρώπους; Προτίμασαν τη θάλασσα οι άτιμοι! ΄Ηταν όμως καλά παιδιά, όλα, και διασκέδασα κι εγώ. Μιλήσαμε για ώρες· τους πήγα ύσερα στη Ρέμβη για να φάμε. Μιλήσαμε πολύ. Οι δύο κοιμήθηκαν στα κρεββάτια των παιδιών, ο ένας στην αυλή, ο τελευταίος στο αυτοκίνητο. Σήμερα έκαναν τα μπάνια τους· φάγαμε όλοι μαζί στην αυλή, μακαρόνια, και φύγανε για την Αθήνα.

Η Σουζάννα πέθανε από ενδιαφέρον, ήθελε να μιλήσει γαλλικά μαζί τους και ήταν γελοία αυτή με τα ελληνικά της. Ο Peter Lehmann με την αγγλική του προφορά και άγνοια προσπαθώντας και οι δυο να μιλήσουν γαλλικά. Αποτέλεσμα μηδέν. Μα πώς λαχταρούν τα κορίτσια εδώ ν’ ανταμώσουν άνδρες, πώς θέλουν να δέσουν σχέσεις με ξένους και να φύγουν απ’ την Ελλάδα, όπως προσέξαμε όταν ήλθαν και οι ναύται και τους έστειλε ύστερα το ερωτικό γράμμα αυτό που εγώ το μετάφρασα για το κορίτσι που κάθεται και δουλεύει στο καφενείο του Αρίστου. Και η Σουζάννα η καημένη ήθελε να πάρω τη διεύθυνσή τους, να πιάσουν αλληλογραφία. Μήπως στα γαλλικά!

Πόσο απελπισμένος είναι ο κόσμος εδώ! Ο Θωμάς, τα κορίτσια που γνωρίσαμε, η Φωφώ, η Σουζάννα, ενώ εμείς έχομε όλα και παρ’ επάνω παίνω υποτρφία $10,000 από το Ίδρυμα Danforth χωρίς να κάνω τίποτε, σχεδόν να μη σηκώσω δάκτυλο. Τώρα καταλαβαίνω, θα κατέστρεφα τους καθηγητάς πρώτα απ’ όλους.

Ο Θωμάς made it very clear why the factory is able to employ men in such filthy repulsive work and yet pay them only 80 drachmas a day. It is because outside the factory, every day, are lines of other men, the unemployed, begging for a job at any wage. The unemployment in Greece is bad, naturally for the unemployed but it is also bad for the employed. And now, of course, since all labor unions have been abolished, things are worse than ever.

c/o Demetrius Yiannakos
Kolokotroni 13
Salonika, Greece
July 26, 1967

Dear Larry [Simms],

I cannot tell you how truly delighted I was to receive your card, the one sent from Amsterdam. Delighted and embarrassed, because I’ve been planning to answer your fine letter of Bloom’s Day 1966 (!) for over a year now, and have procrastinated and procrastinated. My excuse is that I wasn’t sure of a valid address. I knew that the Cambridge, Mass. address in the letter was only temporary. Actually, sometime last year an investigator came to me, doing a routine check on you in connection with your work in the Navy (FBI man, I should say, instead of the euphemism “investigator”) and I asked him for your address. Now, your postcard with the stamp U.S.S. Essex confirms the address he gave me, and thus this letter, which I hope reaches you safely, wherever you are. The FBI asked about your “character,” I think; I told them the truth as I saw it—that you were not at all docile, but very headstrong and impulsive; also very sincere and open. Whether this did you good or did you harm I of course cannot know, but one does his best with these interrogations, and the only method, really, is to be completely honest and frank.

Unfortunately, I shall not be able to see you when you come to Greece. First of all, we are not in Athens, but in a village about 30 km. from Salonika; secondly, we’re leaving the country the last week in August, to go to England until Christmas. (Address: 4 Fox Hill Close, Selly Oak, Birmingham 30, England.) The S.S. America spent some days in the harbor here last week, and some of the crew came to the village to go swimming. My son was enlisted as an interpreter in a dispute about the bill at the café, and some of the sailors began dragging and pulling him, swearing, etc. (they were drunk, and probably ruffians to begin with anyhow), so that it all ended with him in hysterical tears and they leaving without paying their bill. This is our recent impression of the U.S. Navy.

I wish I knew Athens better and could give you a long list of off-beat places to visit. But I can’t. We lived there for three months several years ago, but what with children didn’t do much touring and night-clubbing. I am a sedentary bourgeois, aware of my Prufrockian bald spot, and trying not to develop a beer-belly. . . . In any case, I would say the following: National Archeological Museum, of course—this is magnificent, with all the treasures dug up at Mycenae, and a marvelous selection of classic age sculpture, including the Ephebos of Marathon and a stirring Poseidon. Acropolis, of course. Plaka (old section; taverns, tourist-traps). Piraeus, by subway from Omonia Square: fish dinner in Tourkolimano there. These are the things everyone does. Aside from this, I like the Benaki Museum because downstairs in the basement, almost hidden, they have a splendid collection of Greek peasant costumes, displayed on mannequins; upstairs are mementos of the Greek War of Independence, the granting of the constituation (ha! ha!), etc. This wouldn’t mean much to you, especially as the captions are in Greek, but the costumes are worth a visit. The Monastery of Daphne, just a little outside of Athens, has a fine mosaic of the Pantokrator, a very fierce and Jehovah-like Christ. There is supposed to be a really good taverna (singing, food) on Mourouzi Street, which is just after the Royal Gardens, the far side, away from Constitution Square. Beaches you’ll hear about yourself. If you can get outside of Athens for a time, go to Delphi. This can be managed in a day if you leave early, but staying overnight makes the whole enterprise much more pleasant. On the way, stop at Arachova, the town just before Delphi, and ask for some wine on tap—the Arachova wine is one of the best in Greece (my other favorite is Samos-Moschato). . . . Then of course there is the Athens Festival. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to see an ancient tragedy or comedy played outdoors. . . . But enough of this. I sound like Baedeker, and you’ll manage very well on your own.

You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here. Working on Kazantzakis, of course. What else? And coming to realize every day how much more, really, I like Joyce! This statement is not irrelevant, because the two started out with exactly the same problems: loss of god; discouragement with all the pieties of bourgeois society; a tremendous urge to fill the void with something of their own making; a romantic, adolescent sense of their own supposedly unlimited powers; a scorn of human contact—they could very well spend all of life without a single friend if their “principles” demanded this; an arrogance and egotism and pride that indeed did isolate them from the human community, etc. But Joyce, even in the Portrait, realizing that this was self-defeating, took pains to show that the “superman” in Stephen is just, really, a mask, although Stephen himself doesn’t know this yet. And of course in Ulysses the next step is taken, and Stephen himself faces this truth. But Kazantzakis spent forty years fooling himself and producing, for he most part, completely artificial and fabricated works because he dealt only with the mask and rarely with the true face underneath. There are of course slips, moments of chagrin or surprising sincerity, and these are the great moments in his books, but they are buried in so much else that is unbearable. For forty years he was just like pimply Dedalus, dreaming of sending his epiphanies to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria (!) and hardly realizing that his works were hysterical and monotonous and repetitious to a degree probably unique in literature—all the faults of D. H. Lawrence, the same idée fixe, with few of Lawrence’s virtues. And a great part of the trouble lay in the fact that Kazantzakis insisted on writing in verse despite the truth that he was a very poor poet. So he had Lawrence’s faults without the redeeming feature of Lawrence’s great handling of the language. Then, suddenly, in his 60th year (imagine!) he found himself, and this is of course what makes him so exciting to investigate. First, he switched to prose, though still feeling that this was “beneath him”; second, for some reason, perhaps simply age and repeated failure, he began to remove the superman mask, to come to terms with his own weak humanity, to feel the need of connection with the rest of weak humanity, which formerly he had despised, and, best of all, to draw his material from his own experiences as a boy (before Nietzsche got hold of him), and to make use of his marvelous natural gifts as an observer of life. Forty active years of writing, all in the wrong direction!

These are the sorts of things I am discovering thanks to my stay in Greece, where naturally I’ve been able to read everything he wrote in the long period before he became internationally known. I’ve driven the people in the National Library in Athens (you might take a peek into this building) batty, I’m sure, by demanding volume after volume which, judging by the amount of dust, hadn’t been looked at in decades: huge bound volumes of newspapers and periodicals from 1906 onwards; then the same in Salonika. Added to this is a whole pile of musty manuscripts, notebooks, commonplace books, lecture notes, and copies of early works that he renounced and are now unavailable—all made available to me by Mrs. Kazantzakis in Geneva, which was our first stop. I have all the workbooks for The Last Temptation and Saint Francis, for example, showing exactly what Kazantzakis read in order to “work up the subject.” He was a very scholarly fellow, actually. Then there are also his early notes about what should go in each chapter, what characteristics to give to the various characters, etc. I have his lecture notes when he was a graduate student in 1907 at the Sorbonne, showing exactly what he read by Nietzsche et al., and what impressed him; I have volume after volume of random jottings, including detailed working-out of planned books that he never had time to write, including dreams that he recorded, strange words that appealed to him, etc. All the raw materials that, as he would say, had to be then “transubstantiated” into a work of art. In addition to this, I have been able to read the most important articles and books written about Kazantzakis in Greek, a good deal of it either just slander or adulation, and largely worthless, but some of it of first quality; and all in all giving an idea of the artistic currents during the fifty years of his career.

From all this you’ll be able to conclude correctly that our stay in Greece is not at all very romantic or exciting. I hate to say this, but I spend my days reading and taking notes, first in the libraries, now at home in our village. And Sunday? Sunday I write letters, like this one! Unfortunately I still read Greek very slowly, and have to concentrate all the time, so progress is slow. Now, after about three months of this, I have a “loot” of some thousands of pages of notes, with the result that I am becoming more and more frightened about the next step: i.e., what to do with them. Somehow, it’s easier to go on reading than to stop and try to extract the quintessence from what you already have. Of course, things aren’t quite so dull as they may sound. First, it was fun to spend three days in Geneva with Mrs. Kazantzakis, talking with her, and running around furiously trying to get everything photocopied. Next, my trip to Athens at the end of April was by coincidence timed exactly to give me an eye-witness experience of the coup d’état. Indeed I was confined to my hotel (Hotel Omonia, Omonia Square, at the very center) for 36 hours while outside the square was deserted except for tanks and soldiers with machine guns. Inside, you can imagine: uncertainty, speculation, every kind of fantastic idea about what was going on, who was overthrowing whom, when it began, when it would end, what would be found for us to eat, how we could get home, how to send assurances to wives (all telephone and telegraph service was cut for several days), etc. I also had the experience of visiting some of Kazantzakis’s circle the day after the coup, and seeing the effect. All this may sound very cruel to you, as though to me it was just “an experience,” “something to be observed,” “excitement”; this is not at all true. Quite the contrary. If I felt myself free, I could explain to you why not, and in great detail, with examples of particular people. But unfortunately I am not free to do this, as letters are censored, and I am taking a good deal of chance merely saying this much. I’m hoping that the censor will become discouraged by the length of this letter and no get this far. Let me just say that one of the most illuminating moments was when two young people, about twenty years old, cursed Kazantzakis violently, and with long and rational and detailed justification, saying that he was an example of precisely what is wrong with intellectuals: their ultimate refusal to take a position, their “ironic” stance that puts them above politics, or enables them always to see both sides. They of course were Marxists, and their ideal of a writer was of course André Malraux (before he became a right-wing apologist for General de Gaulle). In any case, aside from my human involvement in the consequences of this coup, I am also “benefiting”—what a horrible word, in this context—from it, because I really now, for the first time, understand the Greek climate, the climate in which Kazantzakis functioned for forty years. What I mean to say is that this sort of thing (it took me a while to realize this) is what is normal; the few years of democracy and parliamentary government were entirely abnormal. Also, one realizes to what an extent politics invades every aspect of life, and of course especially for someone who was such a public figure as Kazantzakis was. When the government changes, everything stops, first of all; then everybody in high position is fired and replaced with new people who are followers of the junta in power. Everything that has been accomplished in the old régime is rejected out of hand, simply because it was done by the old régime. The net result is that everything, in the long run, remains at a standstill, or goes backward. This is especially true in education. At every change of government, all the textbooks are changed, history is rewritten, the very language (“pure” or “popular”) alters, etc. Faculties, especially at university level, are juggled. I begin to understand, really for the first time, the splendor of our division of powers between the federal government and the states. This local autonomy may mean that Georgia’s education lags behind New York’s, but it also means that those who want to experiment and go forward can do so without fear of intervention from the federal government. I am almost becoming a patriot—almost!

I can’t resist telling you a little about our village; it is so different from Hanover and indeed from any American environment, and so idyllic in its way. First of all, the entire rhythm of life is different. We rise early, walk barefooted on the dirt streets to the baker and buy a loaf of hot, fresh bread. This, with honey, makes breakfast. Then, for the next hour or so my wife runs in and out buying provisions for the day; it is strictly a day-by-day affair; you get just what you’re going to need for dinner, and no more. I say she runs in and out because an endless succession of street-venders passes, each with his cart and his specialty: grocer with tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, okra, string beans; fish man with last night’s catch (this is a fishing village); fruit man with watermelon, strawberries, cherries, pomegranates, and (soon!) grapes: this is a grape village, too. Then, if you need a piece of cloth, or an extra dish, or some underpants or sunburn lotion, you wait for the appropriate vendor, and buy. All this is changing, of course, with the influx of refrigerators and preserves, also with the building of good roads and the establishment of decent bus service, which enables people to go to the cities to shop. It is the last gasp of the old system (how old? thousands of years) whereby you stayed put and the wandering peddler came to you—also, in the old days, and still to some degree here, the wandering entertainer (Homer?). In this category, things have degenerated somewhat. All we get is gypsies with trained monkeys or bears, singing to the accompaniment of tambourines. But I haven’t got much beyond breakfast! From 7:00 or 8:00 until about 2:30 is the “morning.” I establish myself in my chair under the acacia tree in the back yard; the boys begin their lessons (alas, they have to keep up with the American mathematics they missed, since we put them in a Greek school for the spring term; we also have a piano and violin, and they practice); Chrysanthi prepares the midday meal and tends to the baby—I forgot to mention, we have a daughter now, aged seven months and named Daphne. At about 1:30 we all go for a swim in the Adriatic; at 2:30 we have our big meal, Greek style (string beans with tomatoes and onions, or fried fish, or eggplant and squash, always with beer or wine—30 cents for a half gallon—and fruit. Then—ah, wonderful—we all go to sleep until 5:00 in the afternoon (all except Daphne, but we try to get her to cooperate). By this time, the heat of the day has subsided, the fishermen are preparing to go out for the night, the shadows are long and sweet. The day begins, as it were, all over again. The children play, I reestablish myself in my chair under a different acacia, and eventually the sun sets. At about 9:00 we all go to a café and have some yoghurt or maybe caviar and oil, for the evening meal. Then: walks, conversation, letter-writing, or just sitting, the latter seeming to be the Greek national pastime. All this is in a semi-tropical setting, which is probably not so strange to you, being a southerner. Our garden has acacias, plums, mulberries. All around us, besides the grapes, are figs, dates, some palms, olives, and of course cypresses. In the fields, just beyond: wheat and acre after acre of vineyards. Life in general is more elemental and certainly more in touch with sun, sea, soil, than we are accustomed to. The meal, as I described above, is a daily concern. The toilets, most often, are Turkish style: namely a hole in the floor, rigged to a flushing system. You squat, like a Chinaman. The weather is a subject of constant concern. If it rains, it’s good for the watermelons but not for the grapes and tobacco; if it doesn’t rain, the water supply runs out and the watermelons don’t swell; if it hails—two months ago we had hail stones as big as plums—it is disaster for tobacco, peaches, cotton. If it’s too hot, everything dries up; if it’s not hot enough, tourists don’t come to the village to go swimming, and the cafés don’t do business. Everyone is philosophic. “Life is hard” is the constant refrain, the expression of a fatalism and endurance built up over centuries, and extending to political as well as meteorological difficulties. So the net result, the final reaction, is not to worry excessively, but rather to eat, make children, laugh, dance, sit, and talk. In this way, time passes; the wheel turns; good, one hopes, eventually establishes an equilibrium with bad.

I found to my great relief that Greeks still dance—just like in the movies! But you have to be in a village at “panegyric” time; or, if you’re in a city, you have to go to the real dives, where tourists don’t go. And that reminds me: how could I have forgotten, when listing all those safe and customary places to go to in Athens, if you can fight your way past the prostitutes, you’ll see Greek dancing, not very expert dancing, I’m afraid, but nevertheless very spirited. It’s in a cellar more or less opposite the back entrance of the hotel; there isn’t a sign, but you’ll hear the music. Don’t bother going before 10:30 or 11:00 o’clock; it takes time for things to warm up. The place is frequented by young fellows in their teens and twenties—working class: plasterer’s mates, electricians’ helpers, bellboys, traveling salesmen, gasoline attendants, and the like. They spend their evenings getting drunk on beer, and dancing. If they have enough money and feel in the mood, they go across the street for a girl (more correctly, a harridan); but mostly they just sit in a kind of narcotic torpor, staring at the band, and then suddenly, as though waking from a dream, rising, flinging a 50- or 100-drachma note at the musicians, and dancing. Eventually they all go home to sleep, ready to face another day at work—or, which is just as likely—unemployment.

Fortunately, we were here in the village when their annual festival took place, and I sat in the café until 3:00 a.m. All the women had long since left, and the strange Greek fraternity of the male sex established itself. This is really the extraordinary thing about Greek dancing, at least as compared to dancing as we know it, which is always somehow connected with courtship. Here, it is completely and exclusively male, an expression of masculinity and, somehow, a wordless expression of the fatalism or endurance I spoke of above; perhaps of the rubric “Life is hard.” I never realized how local these dances are, or how many of them exist. Here, most were Macedonian, which I had never seen or heard of before. Each area, almost each village, has its own. The variety is striking; there are solitary dances of various types, terribly sinuous and oriental, performed not only on the ground but on top of chairs placed on top of tables; there are duos, where two men, linked together, function as one, defiantly kicking the ground, leaping, dipping, circling; and there are the less exciting group dances, where only the first in line really does anything, and the others simply follow, dancing a very elementary step, until it is their turn to be first in line. The other nice thing about these events is that all ages take part. There were grizzled old fishermen, with gray hair and drooping moustaches, leaping and pirouetting with the youngsters. There was also the village hunchback, who did not dance; and the village idiot, living in a blissful world of his own, who got up every so often and joined the others awkwardly, usually interfering with them, and was always repelled with exquisite gentleness. When I returned home in the wee hours, my wife turned over in bed and said, rather sarcastically, but half in her sleep, “I see you were in your element.” Unfortunately, she was wrong. Like the Boss in Zorba the Greek, I don’t know how to dance.

As the old saying has it: those who can, can; those who cannot, teach. This is painful to accept, and yet there is a truth in it. Teaching, perhaps like the monasteries in the middle ages, provides a refuge, one fortunately honored by society and of social usefulness, for those who lack a certain vigor and outgoingness, and who probably could never succeed as businessmen, admirals, or politicians. Really, the more I progress in the profession, the more I realize how “soft” and insulated it is. After the first little battle of getting a job and holding it, there is nothing more—only comfort, security, and adulation of post-adolescents who are ever-ready to accord standing ovations to second-rate performers; and an insured pension. It’s an immense, caressing, warm featherbed into which one sinks easily, voluptuously, and remains. The whole thing is like a strange dream; not only the parade in those silly robes on graduation day, which revolted you, as indeed it ought; not only this, but the entire proceedings. As Kazantzakis says when he is in his nastiest and most Nietzschean mood: there are two kinds of people, (a) the young, healthy, developing ones who lunge upon the prey of their choice, immorally, and devour and conquer in order to find their place in the sun, to exert their overflowing instincts and strength; and (b) the older, satisfied, satiated, who have already conquered, who have plenty to eat, and whose one urgent desire is now simply to preserve themselves in the comforts that they have attained, and keep others from interfering. The bad dream that I speak of is to see oneself pass inevitably and hopelessly from (a) to (b), knowing that such passage is insidious and wrong, and yet doing nothing about it. It is as though the person who has made this passage, and who now wallows so contentedly in his materialistic insulation, is someone else, a phantom quite distinct from the startled mind that sees how wrong this all is, and yet it is not a phantom: it is you! Things are always relative, of course. That is why a sojourn in Europe, or a knowledge—such as I have gained recently through both experience and my researches—of, for example, the continued struggles of honest men here in Greece, or of Kazantzakis, the most struggling man who ever lived, I should say—gives one a base from which to judge, relatively, the absurdity, the fantastic injustice, of the comforts that we enjoy in America. I’m not arguing from the point of view of the socialist or social ameliorator, who wants better distribution of wealth, and who accuses the comfortable merely because their neighbor is in want; but rather from an absolute point of view that realizes that comfort, in an absolute sense, is he great temptation presented to a true man’s manliness: to his vigor, assertiveness, independence. When I think of the way I and my colleagues live in Hanover (and worse, what the students take for granted as their material rights), I can only see us as so many emasculated Turkish aghas, bloated and narcotized, sitting in our splendidly insulated, heated, and air-conditioned buildings on French provincial couches beneath reproductions of Holbein and Gauguin, while pretty servant-boys administer opium to our egos. Yet, as the saying goes, ya gotta giv da public vot it vants.

Well, I mustn’t continue in this bitter vein. I merely wanted to say, in all honesty, that I have an increasingly vivid sense that life has been much too good to me, and that everything has been much too easy. I say all this because I feel, with you, the same freedom that you so graciously say you feel with me. You apologize in your letter for possibly “boring” me with your comments; I am replying at this inordinate length (which I had never intended when I began this letter) because I know very well that you will not be “bored” by what I have to say, just as you knew all too well that I would not be bored by your letter, nor by the letters that I hope will follow. Perhaps you’ll send me your impressions of Greece in September; you have the address in England that will find me from September through Christmas; or mail can always be sent to Dartmouth. Better still, I’d like very much to hear about the Navy: what you have done and not done, what the people are like, and what your future plans are. You say in your card that you are anxious to go back to school. Does this mean, as before, religion/philosophy/literature? Or have new directions established themselves? I’m sure you have much more to write about than I do.

Sincerely,

P.S. Regarding your comments about the Swedish girl you met in Cambridge, I agree fully about the superiority of European women; that’s why I married one! . . . John Weston renounced law school at the last minute, and is going to Columbia to study literature. Somehow, I still see him as the man to manage my trust funds, not the man to teach me to love beauty.

August 1, 1967

Suzanna told me that her father, a farmer in Siderokastron, was paid 1 drachma per kilo for string beans—i.e., not enough to pay even for the transportation to market. Potatoes are worse. Crops remain unpicked. All the villages are being emptied. Chrysanthi went to the hairdresser’s. The girl there—she had studied in Paris and was an accomplished practitioner—is paid 2500 drachmas per month. She manages to live only because she rooms with her parents and thus pays no rent. They have a common pot for meals, etc.

We are playing royal hosts to visitors. Elizabeth Keller, Chrysanthi’s roommate at Woodbrooke, has come from Heidelberg; Reinoud and Brechtje Oort have come from Den Helder. On top of this, Lola and Kostas are now living in Aghia Triadha, and I rented a room so that Pappous and Yiayia could stay here also. Reinoud is complete with beard and the beginnings of a stomach, but still a fine pianist (also plays recorder, violin, organ) and a true intellectual. As he said, we seemed to take up where we left off 15 years ago, as though no break had intervened, with theological and philosophical discussion. He is a liberal in theology, believer in the higher criticism, etc., but is not always in liberal surroundings in his previous church and in the present one. I should think that his life is very disagreeable, always being expected to be so completely proper and conservative, subject to reproach by the elders, etc. At one point, the other minister of the town was discreetly told not to visit Reinoud lest he be corrupted! Aside from this, the weekly preaching on a text from the Bible, the prayer meetings, catechism, visits to sick and dying, etc., seem (to me at least) an unbearable way to live. How much better to be in the university, with a freer range and with an audience of young people who appreciate new, fresh ideas, passion, creativity, and who hate stuffiness. But I suppose the main thing is the question of belief. Does he really believe in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior—i.e., what he must preach week after week? If so, then I suppose all else has meaning and is a joyful service. But if not . . .!

Brechtje is not very pretty, though pretty I suppose as Dutch girls go. But she is very feminine and tender and intelligent. She loves to read, and embarrassed me by her questions relating to all the English and American novels she had read and I hadn’t (including Peyton Place, which Reinoud read too, and admired as a λαογραφικό of small-town American life). I told him about the police court in Lebanon and the experience of Peter Gardner’s brother-in-law in Whitehall.

We talk, spend long hours over meals, long hours in the water swimming and talking. Today, up to our necks in the Salonika Gulf, we discussed Bergson, Kant, biblical criticism. We play the piano: Mozart symphonies 4-hands with me trying desperately to do my half decently, and of course failing. Tomorrow they go off to Thasos and Philippi. Next week, after Konrad Elsdon arrives, if all goes well, we’ll spend some days at the Ἅγιον Ὄρος.

August 2, 1967

Noel Jones, ex-president of the Quaker School here, appeared unexpectedly with his daughter Katherine, now an immensely overweight balloon of 16 years. We talked politics and old times. He said that Bruce Lansdale told him that a British MP (Noel-Baker) told him that the British ambassador told him that the CIA was not directly involved in planning this particular coup on this particular day, but that certainly in a general way the CIA, as well as Bruce and lots of other people, knew a coup was coming. Apparently the CIA at least made the colonels feel that the U.S. would support such a move should it be the last ditch stand against communism. But this is obviously all 10th hand if that.

What amused me more was Jones’s belief that I had chased after Chrysanthi on a motorbike and had driven on this mythical bike all the way from England to Salonika in a record time of three days. I explained to him the reality on which this lovely Lindsay-created myth was based—that I had an old policeman’s bicycle that I had purchased for £1.0.0. This I shipped across to Ostend, where I saw Chrysanthi off for Greece. Then I cycled through Belgium and southern Holland, placed the bike on the train and went to Assen to see Reinoud, then by bike to Groningen, Leeuwarden to see Riek Kleefstra, then down the dike to Amsterdam, where I stayed, then to Rotterdam for three days, then to Paris for a month doing research on Saint Francis in the Bibliothèque Nationale and living in the Service Civil camp in Clichy, until finally—that is, about two months after Chrysanthi and I had parted—I traveled to Greece by train with my bike but did indeed ride it from the rail station to Sarantaporou, where I appeared in a state that might have led people to believe that I had indeed cycled all the way from England in three days!

Asked why I didn’t follow Chrysanthi directly, I told Jones that I had to give her two months at least, to prepare Lindsay and her parents for the shock of my arrival and my intentions.

The moment Noel Jones left, Konrad Elsdon arrived with Sheila, Felicity, Roland, and Nikos, after five days driving in hot weather—exhausted. Sheila very nervous and ornery, as before. Almost ready for a mental hospital, I’d say: depressive type, melancholy, eats up her own soul, especially about unimportant things. All day long the question is whether or not she is going to buy a bikini. She had nagged Konrad apparently for the whole trip, crying she wanted one, and then when he said with a twinkle in his eye, let’s go and get one, she reneged and could not be persuaded. But no humor, no deep laugh—acts as though the world came systematically out to destroy her. Usual hypochondriacal aggravations as well: bad back, she can’t help with the tent, or lift anything, and then of course immediately after arriving in Greece: diarrhea.

Konrad copes beautifully. Humors her, knows when to concede a point, when to try to change the subject, etc. He is another hero of the marital war. He is now an HMI: Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools, like Matthew Arnold, what the Greeks would call ένας ανώτατος δημόσιος υπάλληλος, top rank in civil service, the policy-making level. Talks freely and fluently about his own affairs and accomplishments, but isn’t a good listener. Apparently he holds a position of immense prestige. Noel Jones had met him once at a conference, and when I mentioned Konrad’s name and said we were expecting him, Noel looked up with awe-struck eyes: “He’s an HMI, you know!”

August 3, 1967

To Κερδύλια with Ζήσης Γιανούρας to see Ritsa and Stereos. When we returned, Elizabeth told me that she had read a book in German about the typical German businessman of these times, and that Ζήσης seemed to fit the description even though he was Greek. They form an international breed. Conversation consisted of how close he was to the big boss, how the latter was about to visit him, how they were on a first-name basis, how cultured the owners were—hours full of books, archeology as a hobby, etc. How cultured he himself was: loves music, goes to Salzburg every year (well, not exactly every year). At home he has 200 records—200!—and 4000 books. I wanted to ask when he had last counted them, but restrained myself. He’d been to Beirut six times. I asked Elizabeth if she’d been to the Casino, or had seen the greatest show on earth or knew such and such a hotel, never realizing that she hadn’t gone on an expense account. Also, repeated talk about his desire for responsibility, the millions of marks that passed through his fingers, etc. He worked 72 hours a week but it was worth it because he wanted, and had, responsibility. Yet, withal, such a fine chap, and so wonderfully hospitable. He outdid himself for us, rented a room so we could sleep, and this afternoon insisted on treating us all to lunch, though it was really my turn, etc. We spent a truly lazy day, Greek style: sat and talked, then swam, ate, slept, sat, drank coffee. Chrysanthi was away from Daphne for the whole day, the first time in seven months (no, except for the εκδρομή with Petsas). We came back a little later than expected and her parents rushed to the car crying «Γιατί αργήσατε, γιατί; Είπατε να είστε εδώ στις 7 και είναι τώρα 9:30». Chrysanthi lit up at once: «Περάσαμε θαυμάσια μέρα, πρώτη φορά που έφυγα από τη Δάφνη και τώρα μου τη φαρμακώσατε!» Of course peace was restored quickly, since Dimitrios, like Chrysanthi herself, has the wonderful quality of giving way easily, not standing on his dignity. But afterwards I mentioned to Chrysanthi, «Να μάθης από αυτό, γιατί πολλές φορές αυτό που σου έκανε ο μπαμπάς σου εσύ μου το έκανες εμένα».

Next to Ritsa’s cottage came another businessman, the holder of the exclusive franchise for northern Greece of the locally made τρίκυκλα. He was ugly, fat, with breasts like a woman’s, but very pleasant and, as often with Greeks, strangely and unexpectedly tender with children. I asked him if it was true that business was bad under the new régime, and he said, “Yes, it was indeed very bad. Why? Because they won’t let us steal and cheat anymore—that’s why!”

Surprises come. Three years ago Noel Jones sent his daughter Katherine and son Christopher, then about 15, to us here in Aghia Triadha to go swimming and spend the day. Yesterday, when he came with a metamorphosed Katherine but without Christopher, whom they had left in England, he told me that Christopher had remembered that day as the most splendid of his whole stay in Greece. Strange! Maybe because I talked with him man to man, “intellectually”? I can’t think of any other reason.

August 4, 1967

Speaking with the local representative of the grape-growers’ cooperative. Last year the farmers got 1.75 drachmas per kilo for the grapes sent to Germany. The state gave a subsidy of 0.50, making the total 2.25. They sell in Germany for about 4 marks per kilo, or 30 drachmas. The Greek grapes have to arrive early in August before the Italian, because the Italians can undersell. Italy has some thousands of refrigerated freight cars for shipping; Greece has only a handful. Last year was a particularly bad year. This year, with the rains and now the great heat, they hope to do better—that is, to earn 2.50 or 3.00 drachmas per kilo.

August 7, 1967

Salonika–Ouranoupolis

To Ouranoupolis with Reinoud by bus over twisting, frightening roads, forests, plains, now and then a village, up a mountain via reverse curves, then down gradually. Women in the seat opposite throwing up copiously. As Konrad says, that is part of the feminine mystique in Greece. Suddenly, at the foot of the descent, the extraordinary town of Αρναία. Central square surrounded by old style buildings with hanging balconies, but on each balcony a full grape arbor, hanging clusters of grapes just turning purple. Yesterday, lying on the beach at Aghia Triadha, we were discussing happiness. I mentioned Peter Janicke’s report. Who is most happy? The Greek with his uncertainty yet his lovely extroversion and ability to entertain himself, or the American with his emptiness, health, and opportunity? In Αρναία I felt that true happiness is to be able to walk out onto your balcony amidst flowers, in August, and pick ripe grapes from the arbor above your head.

After Αρναία, the sea, first just a glimpse, then you are on top of it, hanging over it, on top of a cliff, afraid the bus will topple over. Finally, nearer to Ουρανούπολις, you ride comfortably beside it, 22 km of dirt roads, narrow, through trees, twisting through villages. The end of the world, it would seem, but suddenly the sight of a taxi belies this. Ξενία hotel; signs in English. Then the tower, which stands on a promontory: Mrs. Locke’s tower, build by Andronicus II for his wife to wait in while he contemplated on Athos. We arrived at 2:30 and ate in a café by the sea. Sitting there, luckily, was Ηρακλής ο μαραγκός, who directed us to Konrad. They were sleeping. The νοικοκύρης obligingly told us to help ourselves to any shady tree we wished, and to lie down. Which we did, beneath an olive. Noises. To the left, chickens laying, roosters boasting. To the right, donkey hee-hawing. Straight ahead, bus driver and friends laughing. I tried to sleep, my handkerchief over my face. “Real Greek style,” as Reinoud commented. He, not yet Hellenized, began writing up his diary. Too soon, Konrad appeared. Welcome, etc. Immediately, however, the strange bad news. Sheila was having her fits. Her diarrhea had continued a little, was now improving, but despite this she insisted that they return at the end of the week to England. They had come for a month! What to say? She is a manic depressive and belongs in a psychiatric clinic. In any case, Konrad would come with us to Athos. Good!

Where to go? We’d have to go to the tower and consult with Noel Jones, who was planning a boating party tomorrow, swimming on the island opposite, or maybe around Athos. Sounds like an E. M. Forster novel. To the tower. Met Mrs. Locke, whose memory comes and goes. Didn’t really recall Chrysanthi. Her rugs on the walls in a lovely room in the tower, with western view over the sea; books, chairs, trunks. It was time for tea. We were in England. “Do you take milk or lemon?” asks Mrs. Jones. I was stuffed from my large Greek lunch, but I took lemon, American style. Noel Jones, who had been very effusive and demonstrative while alone with us in Aghia Triadha, was strangely transformed in his all-English tearoom in Andronicus’s tower. Proper, deliberative, restrained. Other “celebrants” were Mrs. Locke’s Swiss “companion” and a Greek gentleman from the Bank of Greece. Where to in Athos? Big deliberations. Maps. Konrad announced solemnly: Our objective is (a) architectural, (b) artistic, (c) historical. Jones added details of distances. We had the guides in front of us, full of information. Suddenly I said, “Let’s go where we feel like, when we get there: ότι μας καπνίζει. The Greek gentleman lit up: Bravo! Greek versus English mentality. I obviously am “Greek,” as I discovered bluntly when I entered this “tearoom.” To shout, gesticulate, be indiscreet, etc. is a thousand times better than to be efficient and dull.

Swimming on Ouranoupolis’s beach. Rocks full of sea urchins. We changed on a balcony of Mrs. Locke’s tower. The W.C. is a hole in the stonework, leading to where no one knows. In use 500+ years and not yet full.

Met Konrad at 8:00 p.m. by arrangement to have dinner. He said that Sheila was in one of her “states” again, and had decided she had to clean the house. She’d meet us later. Restaurant on the street, outdoors, because Konrad doesn’t like jukeboxes. Crowded. Owner-waiter pressed, but incapable of moving faster or more efficiently because he is a Greek! After the meal, this sweet man came and apologized: δεν μπορούσα να σας περιποιηθώ. As Konrad says, the Greeks have a lovely dignity and grace. We, as usual, behaved more like barbarians, calling repeatedly for the water that he had failed to provide, the retsina he’d forgotten, etc. Sheila arrived, and a pall fell over the company. Did she want to eat? She didn’t know. Konrad very gentle and saintly as usual. Children quiet, obviously understanding, and embarrassed. These meals are nice to have over. Konrad went home; rendezvous 6:00 a.m. the next day.

Reinoud and I hadn’t decided whether to rent a room for the night or to sleep on the beach. Earlier, we’d asked the tavern keeper for a room. Now we asked again, but also asked if one could sleep on the beach. I liked the way this man, who stood to gain a night’s rent, suddenly glowed and said: Στην άμμο, στην άμμο να κοιμηθήτε. Κι εγώ, αυτές οι νύχτες που κάνει ζέστα, παίρνω τα σεντόνια μου και κοιμάμαι εκεί δίπλα στη θάλασσα. So we chose our site, like two dogs ready to urinate, circling every tree. Stars, the soft lapping of the waves, utter silence. I placed my T-shirt on the ground, rolled up my shorts for a pillow, and stretched out on my stomach, deliciously. But soon the wind rose; cold; no blankets, no sweaters (Chrysanthi had told me to take my heavy shirt, but I “knew better”). We moved further back on the beach, to a more protected spot, and managed to sleep several hours. Up at 5:00 a.m. Barefoot, trousers rolled up, I washed in the sea, tasting the salt water. The soap wouldn’t lather; it felt like soft leather on my face. But this, and then shaving in the sea, was a great pleasure. A βάρκα came from the island opposite. A family. The mother and father jumped out, playfully, knee-deep in the water. The children, the oldest perhaps 12, turned the boat around and putted back home. A lovely scene at 5:00 a.m. The elements of transportation, a scene repeated for thousands of years, with the only difference being the motor.

The night before, in the café, sudden laughter. The village idiot, a dwarf, had jumped up and begun dancing to the jukebox music. A strange amalgam of grace and childish spasmodic motions. He kicked, circled, shrieked, enjoying the laughter and encouragement of the others. Another primordial scene: pre-television. The village and its “theater”: the fool. Reinoud thought it cruel that the others should laugh at him; I didn’t. He was finding his place, his own kind of esteem in the village context. Better than having him in an institution, by far.

Tuesday, August 8, 1967

Ouranoupolis–Daphne–Karyes–Iviron

The boat carries a few monks, one with sacks of sugar and a big roll of garden hose; many tourists. The captain enjoyed having his picture taken by Reinoud and asked to have a copy. Primitive steering: the rudder pole directed by frayed cords on double pulleys, so the captain could lean over the side and see what was ahead. Single cylinder diesel engine, vibration unbearable at first, but how quickly one becomes accustomed. Konrad and I sat in the stern. After a little prompting, he told me about Sheila. Single child from a “deathly respectable” loveless divorced home. Incapable of giving or receiving love. She had a complete breakdown in 1955, was confined to bed for months, helpless, then another bad time last year when she had a “bad back” for six months and was in traction in bed. Refuses all help; won’t take tranquilizing drugs; won’t see psychiatrist, although she was an outpatient for a time in 1955. Has always refused to go on vacations, but has often enjoyed them once she had been convinced to start out. But not this time. She has sabotaged it from the start, and now insists they go home. Worst of all, she is taking all her spite and desperation out on Konrad, and has now begun, for the first time in this long sad history, to try to turn the children against him, to make them feel that they must choose between the two parents. In any case, Konrad was glad to get away from home for a few days. Perhaps his absence will provide some temporary relief, perhaps the reverse. What a hell, such a life!

Daphne. Soldiers, police, customs inspectors. Hardware store. A trinket shop, café, cases of beer, ouzo, brandy. The chaos of embarkation-disembarkation. Our passports, the papers we got from Αλλοδαπών. As always, there was someone who had no papers, but they let him pass: a Uniate Catholic priest who had his letter from the Πατριάρχης but no letters from the Υπουργείον. Then there was the American student in curls down to his shoulders. Δεν επιτρέπεται! He bought a hat and stuffed his hair inside, and looked much better. A French boy had shorts. Δεν επιτρέπεται! He bought a pair of trousers, ridiculously too large and baggy for him. I was in my T-shirt. Δεν επιτρέπεται! I put on my good shirt. Later, this same old man whose job was to insure the respectability of the “pilgrims” was reprimanded severely by a policeman for pushing (gently) one of the foreigners into the bus. Οι ξένοι δεν θεν σπρόξιμο. Obviously the new government was at work here, with a reformed constabulary.

There were too many people, so we couldn’t all fit in the small, ancient bus that now goes between Δαφνή and Καρηές on a road built by the army for the millennium celebrations in 1963. The police said a truck would come down and get us. After an hour, still no truck. I went to the policeman. “The prettiest police station I’ve ever seen,” said Konrad, and indeed, though the building was unexceptional, the balconies were filled with flowerpots and vines: flowers, grapes, happiness. We ate; eventually the truck came. Reinoud very restless, but I told him we had now entered a new time scheme, that of eternity, and he should learn how to sit and wait, like a Greek. We ate γεμιστές, μπάμιες, beer. Down came the truck. The driver descended, filled a bucket with water a few times, and cooled the radiator by heaving the water onto the radiator screen. Side-racks and benches, about 20 people, some cargo: the frightening ascent, mostly in first gear, along the twisting road. Sheer drops, no fences, rocks and sea below. Bouncing; mules on the road; another truck coming in the opposite direction. We held our breaths and prayed. But the views were extraordinary: the boundless, calm sea, here and there a fishing boat, Athos with its forests, ravines, an occasional skete. Then suddenly a view of the peak itself, rising abrupt to a point, like the diagram of Dante’s Mount Purgatory. The truck climbs continually. You pass one large monastery, Χεροποτάμου: olive groves, terracing on the mountainside. Then sharply up again. Wilderness, impossible terrain. And then, over a hump and a gentle decline, whereupon, miraculously, in the middle of nowhere, incongruously, appears Καρυές—a whole city, it seems, dominated by the immense monastery in the center. Domes, Byzantine τρούλοι, tiled roofs. Narrow streets. Shops, scaffolding, construction in progress. A restaurant-café. We proceeded to the police and were issued a paper to take to the προτάτον. But because we had missed the bus it was now noon and everything was closed. More sitting. Reinoud becoming increasingly reconciled. Café. Πορτοκαλάδες. I struck up a conversation with a farmer who had come from near Νιγρίτα to see a monk. The usual questions: Οι μαύροι στην Αμερική, τι θέλουνε, γιατί φωνάζουν; Γιατί δεν τους δίνετε την ελευθερία που θέλουνε; I tried to explain. The conversation turned to Christopher Columbus and American Indians. He also told us tales that turned out to be Aesop, although he claimed he was illiterate. We passed the time. At 3:30 the προτάτον. It was a surprise to see all the lay people in Karyes: shop owners, workers, kinds of servants. Also young boys, adolescents. The boy who served coffee to the Holy Fathers in the protaton was indeed young, fuzzy-cheeked, very dangerous for the monks! Finally: papers all in order. Fee of 100 drachmas. We ran to catch the bus to Ιβήρων.

So far, our trip had been anything but efficient. We had spent almost two full days, and by 4:00 p.m. of the second had just managed to obtain permits to visit the monasteries, though of course the “getting there” was also tricky. But our luck now changed for the better.

The entrance to Ιβήρων is astonishing. You turn a corner and suddenly are faced by grandeur. At this particular moment, the courtyard in front of the monastery was filled with pack mules, each with its bell. Sweet tinklings in the air. The πορτάρης greeted us. Ευχαρίστως, μάλιστα, μπορείτε να μείνετε εδώ. Θέλετε να πάτε στο ξενώνα, ή στην εκκλησία πρώτα; Στην εκκλησία, we answered. We passed into the inner courtyard. At that moment the campanile began to sing. One huge booming bell, boong, boong; one carillon playing a lovely melody, and two or three high-pitched ding-dongs like the mixture on an organ, all going at once. I felt chills down my spine. The peace, the beauty and strangeness of the monastic buildings, the monks, who seemed creatures from some other world, all added together, produced this perhaps sentimental yet very moving response.

We had arrived at the moment when the daily Vesper services were beginning. The church, like the one at Karyes opposite the protaton, is absolutely staggering in its richness. Frescoes on every square inch of wall space, a benign Pantokrator in the dome (no dome in Karyes), baroquely ornate solid-gold frames for the icons, candle-holders of gigantic proportions, and, hanging from the ceiling, a huge Byzantine crown perhaps twenty feet in diameter (also in Karyes).

The service was beautiful, although it lost its effect for me because of its length. We were very few: the celebrant, in a brilliant green surplice; the two choruses, left and right, a rather indifferent and sarcastically smiling monk who only yodeled the Χριστός ελέεισον, a few older monks in the shadows, in various corners and about twenty visitors. We all sat in the στασίδια. The chant and the psaltery were entirely different from what is heard in Orthodox churches “in the world”—perhaps a more pure survival of the Byzantine rite. Very beautiful. The monks had fine rich voices. One very old man, in particular, boomed out his sections as though his life depended upon it. The church reverberated his words. Another monk, even older, insisted on persevering when two younger monks next to him offered to take the text and relieve him. Though he faltered a bit, he brought his section to a close. Cf. Yeats: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.” The service includes an impressive, stylized candle-lighting. From all over the ναός the candelabra are lowered on their cords, which are rigged to pulleys and controlled by the monks in the shadows in various corners. Candles are lit; then the cords are drawn up and secured. At the end of the service, the monks extinguished the lights, again in a stylized way, with huge fans at the end of poles blowing them out, in effect. The singing, the monks, the building are all as though from some other world, the fabled Byzantium of Yeats’s poems. The men that created and now continue this expression of the human spirit seem a biologically, qualitatively different species from the men who built New York. Both are beautiful, each in its own way, but this seems a dead tradition interested only in preserving itself in face of the intrusions of modernism. Yet it is infinitely touching to be here in these monasteries, where so many of the monks are elderly and the others well past middle age, and to realize that an expression that has lasted here 1000 years and grew up during a period of at least 800 years before these monasteries were founded, is soon to be extinguished. I asked a monk about this, a talkative old man on the caïque to Daphne. He said the only thing that he could say: that God, and in particular the Virgin, will provide the solution. A way will be found to preserve the monasteries by divine means. And if not, that will be God’s wish too.

We visited the Ιβήρων library; ο πάτηρ Αθανάσιος, aged 82, presided. When we entered, he was reading a Salonika newspaper, and he grumbled openly at being disturbed. We scattered like mice over the cases, ready to nibble. These libraries are treasure houses, full of manuscripts, incunabula, early printed books. I was opening a fine copy of an early Venetian gospel in Greek, when Athanasios suddenly threw us all out, unceremoniously. The monasteries here, in the summer months, have become small scale Eifel Towers; every day the crowds (15 to 25) come, are ushered hurriedly through the libraries, and καθολικάς εκκλησίες, told that this is the 10th century, that is so-and-so’s grave, this is one of two extant copies of Dioscurus’s Biology, etc. Then they leave, without even a thank you. The monks are reduced to becoming guides for several hours a day, and it is no wonder that so many that we have met are sullen and glum toward the visitors.

The guest-master, however, was all κέφι and courtesy, serving us λουκούμι, raki, water—young, bouncy, fluent in broken German, with a smattering of English words: “OK, boy!” We later learned that he is Ιωάννης Διαμαντόπουλος, studying for the priesthood in the monastery only for six months and destined to go to the seminary in Boston (!) shortly. I gave my address, and hope to return the hospitality he showed us. . . . Supper: lentils; olives; hard, dry bread; water. After supper, cigarettes on the balcony. Long talk with a dark bespectacled Greek who turned out to be a theologian. From him I learned a good deal about the Ορθόδοξο πνεύμα as against what he called the δυτικό πνεύμα. It was strange to hear a young man so conservative. Orthodoxy’s mission, he said, is to defend and preserve ορθή δόξα, correct doctrine, against all invasions and influences. This means a firm belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible, in the holiness of the saints, in the incarnation, the efficacy of the sacraments, etc. From these basic dogmas, he said, Orthodoxy will not and must not budge an inch. He was scandalized recently, he said, to hear of a Protestant minister who, from the pulpit, suggested that the resurrection was a myth invented by the first Christians. He condemned the western spirit of individual inquiry, rationalism, scholarship, saying, quite rightly, that this breaks up the unity of any body and destroys one’s deep roots in faith. Orthodoxy has those roots, he said, and also has a strong unity—indeed, it is monolithic, all of one piece. It doesn’t want individual inquiry, nor permit it. It is sure in its beliefs, and thus sees no need of change. I tried to say that the conditions of the middle ages are no longer valid in an age of science and that the western churches recognize this fact and try to make religion rational to some degree, or at least to speak with new symbols, new phraseology that the contemporary man can understand. He replied by saying that the astronauts verified, as they circled the earth, that God must exist: the universe was so overwhelming. At this point, the discussion really could not go much further. We both learned that we have mutually exclusive ways of thought, and perhaps gained some respect for the opposite camp, even though disagreeing. In addition, I realized more deeply than before why the Church had to oppose Kazantzakis, also that the opposition wasn’t necessarily stupidity and bigotry (it is so easy for us to substitute slander for argument) but rather the outgrowth of a way of thought wholly antithetical to Kazantzakis’s and strongly opposed to his western freethinking. Insofar, also, as the Orthodox Church does form the Greek culture—its unity, its assuredness about its own values, its past and its history—then the Church was quite correct in saying that Kazantzakis was anti-Greek and non-Greek in spirit.

Sleep. Thin mattress over rough boards. Very tired. I slept through, soundly, while the monks, from 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 or 6:00, recited the liturgy. (They sleep afterwards in the morning hours, before noon.)

Wednesday, August 9, 1967

Iviron-Vatopedi-Lavra

Rise at 5:00 a.m. Boat to Vatopedi. By now we had found friends along the route, people who had been on the boat from Ouranoupolis and had followed the same route as we had. Three Americans: a young professor of Slavic from Cornell, with a nice moustache; a Cornell graduate student with a beard; and another Cornell student with a beard and also hair down to his shoulders. All Jews. The last very Semitic looking, like an orthodox rabbi. All three had been in prison in Greece for 20 days, where the professor had learned much Greek. They wouldn’t tell me the offense. Also a Uniate Catholic priest with a red beard, whom we talked with at Lavra; two sexy French teenagers in jeans and cowboy hats; a Greek high school teacher from Salonika and a friend of his, with whom I had a long talk on the last day as we went from Άγιος Παύλος to Δαφνή.

Vatopedi’s entrance is also beautiful. The πεζούλι, the pavilion outside in which the monks or visitors can rest and cool off before entering the monastery; the huge oleanders; the placid mules with their tinkling bells, grazing or carrying piles of wood strapped to their sides. The ritual of welcome: coffee this time, no raki or γλυκό. We went off to the library, which is one of the most impressive on Athos. Several storeys high, everything catalogued and ordered, rare books in cases—unlike Iviron. The βιβλιοθηκάρης gave the usual speech: This is an eleventh-century gospel; this is an octateuch; this is a parchment book of hours of the twelfth century, and so forth. Afterwards he asked what faiths we were. He said it didn’t matter, that Protestants are human too, all Christians have some value even if they haven’t been baptized (i.e., are not members of the Orthodox Church). All the monks showed a kindly tolerance toward us “heretics,” their kindness based on the firm assurance that they alone were following the true road and that the truth of this road was so evident that heavy proselytizing was not even necessary. All one has to do is think, reflect, study the Holy Fathers, and it will be evident to any reasonable man that Orthodoxy is the true way (so the Αρχοντάρης at Άγιος Παύλος told me). I also asked the librarian how he felt when the fire broke out last year in the cloister next to the library (I had seen a photograph projected during Petsas’s lecture in Salonika). He replied: “If God had wanted the library to be burned, it would have been burned. I wasn’t frightened because I knew that whatever happened would be God’s will.”

The τράπεζα, not used now in this idiorhythmic monastery, is beautiful and unique. Also very modern in feeling. There are marble tables, each a slab shaped like a backwards “D,” surrounded by benches with indentations in various places around the periphery, perhaps because in the old days the food was deposited directly on the stone and the monks, over the years, wore away the marble with their spoons. Frescoes everywhere. Two modest saints, naked, with long beards covering their private parts. A raised pulpit for the αναγνώστης. Apse for the abbot and his elders. We spent much time here, together with the French lads, because it was the feast of Saint Pantoleimon and the monk in charge of showing the church was absent, off somewhere in a κελλί saying his devotions. We waited several hours for him, talking, sitting outside on the πεζούλι writing this journal. The cat with her kittens. There are some females on the Holy Mountain!

Frescoes on front of the καθολικόν. Especially the sections on the last judgment. Rivers (literally) of blood cascading the sinners down into the jaws of death and hell. Beasts—jaguars, salamanders, lions—devouring people; they’re depicted with a head or a hand or a foot still sticking out of the beasts’ mouths. The faces of the people being devoured are strangely blank and expressionless; they are like wooden dolls. True “primitive” art by unschooled and unskilled painters, although the composition is effective and the sadism and love of the macabre are bewitching. Finally we were taken hurriedly through the καθολικόν by our guide, who obviously found this very distasteful.

Hospitality at the Holy Mountain varies considerably. Gold, Byzantine splendor, baroque clutter. Famous icons: the Βηματάρισα, η Εσφαγμένη. Relics: splinter of the true cross, girdle of the Virgin, cranium of Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki. “Those who wish to do obeisance, do so; the others may pass and look.” As always, the priest had to keep people from crossing in front of the Holy Altar, which only the priest saying the mass may do. One has to be vigilant, careful not to infringe rules of behavior, dress, posture. No crossed legs, no hands behind the back, no exposed flesh in church. The crowd, this time, was full of officious Greeks who wanted to be shown everything—and quickly. They probably “count monasteries” and relics too, so that they can go back home and give a quantitative account of their experience: “I visited 16 monasteries and venerated 72 relics!” But not all were like this. I had a lovely chat with an old monk.—Πότε ήλθατε εδώ, πάτηρ;—(fresh laugh, twinkle) Πόσα χρονώ είσαι, παιδί μου;—Τριάντα εφτά.—Λοιπόν, είσαι ακόμα μικρό. Εγώ ήλθα εδώ σε 1905!—Σας ενοχλούμε ασφαλώς. Τι εντύπωση έχετε του τουρισμού αυτού; He then began telling a story about Turks and Greeks. I thought he had not understood, or that his mind was wandering. But no. It was a parable to illustrate what he wanted to say in reply to my question: Μας ενοχλείτε εάν δεν οφειλείτε. Εάν όμως καταλαμβάνετε κάτι από τη ζωή και την πίστη μας, χαιρόμαστε.

We were then given our lunch of bean soup and olives. I hardly ate. The bread was dry, hard, tasteless; it seemed to fill your mouth with ashes. No wonder the monks develop such pouches. It isn’t that they overeat; it’s that they eat so much starch. Also, their posture in the στασίδια tends to make the abdomen distend.

Midday. Κάψα. We went to the pavilion to await the μοτοράκι. Reinoud left us to walk to Iviron, but soon returned, having lost his way. The conversation with the stuttering πορτάρης, the only stutterer I’ve encountered in Greece; the Belgians; Reinoud’s joy in being able to speak his own language. I stretched out on the bench, a handkerchief over my face. Mule bells; smell of oleanders; divine silence. Afterwards we refreshed ourselves at the fountain, and descended the rocky path to the quay. Reinoud left us at Iviron because he wanted to return to his wife. Strange how soft and feminine and uxorious he is. When I returned, Chrysanthi, who had of course spent the days with Brechtje, told me how she herself laughed at her husband’s concern. He was all hesitations about leaving her for three whole days, whereas she was happy to be alone, though of course she couldn’t say this. How easily we disguise our own weakness and need by convincing ourselves that we are harm to others!

Konrad and I continued on to Μεγάλη Λαύρα. The restored tower on the seashore is strange: poured concrete. Weary from a day of fasting, hot, with headache, I started to climb to the monastery. But after a few yards we came upon a roadside full of the lopped branches of a mulberry tree, full of huge, ripe mulberries. Konrad and I were shameless in our plundering of these branches. Berries had, for me, always been a delicacy; now they were almost a necessity. Instead of the usual leisurely hike on full stomach, looking for berries, this was a meal sent to the starving, as though from heaven. While the other visitors continued up the path, Konrad and I gorged ourselves, gleaning every last ripe and edible fruit. My hands were blood red, my lips, my handkerchief—I looked as though I’d been severely wounded. Fortunately there was one of the fountains one always finds near the monasteries, and I was able to wash most of the stain away.

As we approached the entrance, we saw a monk driving a huge Mercedes Benz bulldozer. Lavra was the great disappointment of the trip. First, it is architecturally very ugly, an inorganic oversized mass of disparate buildings; secondly, it is always visited, and thus besieged by crowds. The guest-master was gruff and perfunctory; we were herded around like a busload of tourists in Paris or Rome. Rush to library, a new, separate building. Usual spiel, made comical-annoying by the presence of an officious Greek who insisted on elaborating—e.g., explaining to us in detail who Plutarch was, that he had written a book called Plutarch’s Lives, etc. (we had been shown a manuscript of Plutarch among the other treasures). Konrad was very annoyed. By now it was very dark. We were herded off to the καθολικόν, which could hardly be seen any more. Frescoes, icons, two-minute tour. A Greek man kept rushing in and out, trying to convince the guide to hurry us over to the “treasure room” before darkness set in completely. Two-minute tour of the church; then to the treasure, all in a new museum with glass cases. Crosses, stoles, Fokas’s dress uniform, Fokas’s crown. Konrad, completely fed up by this time, chose to wait outside. The only thing that sweetened my heart in Lavra was the gigantic cypress tree, supposedly planted by Saint Athanasios himself (his tomb is in the church) and dominating the central courtyard. Planting trees is a good thing to do, something I should do more of—a way of temporary, relative immortality, of being remembered maybe, if you’re lucky. Kazantzakis says that there are three things every man should do before he dies: plant a tree, build a house, and write a book.

Supper of beans again. Poor me! Hard bread. Bad wine. Conversation on the balcony. Konrad and I sat with the Uniate Catholic, a young fellow from Canada, of Ukrainian background, in appearance something like a Brethren or Mennonite. All through our stay, what marvelous conversation! Not a superficial thought; everyone seemed pared to essentials, as though aware from the very atmosphere of Άθως that only essential things matter. What joy to turn to people one has never seen before and to plunge immediately into the great questions: What is God, where is the world headed, why are you here, what are we doing or failing to do with our lives, which kind of religious expression is most valid? Not a moment of the desultory chitchat of the outside world, the horrible groping for contact that occurs normally when strangers or near-strangers come together and have to talk to one another, as at Hanover dinner parties. It was the spirit of a pilgrimage, and strangely I realize this only now, as I write this a few days later in Aghia Triadha. At the time, it did not occur to me, and I am glad, for I was too much inside the experience to have been able to look at it as though from outside and say to myself, consciously: now I am on a true pilgrimage, with other pilgrims. Together, we are searching for something we can call spiritual, for an essence, and finding it perhaps first and foremost in our own intense concern.

My Uniate friend—they are really Orthodox in tradition and rite but have joined with the Catholic Church—tried to explain to me the true significance of icon-worship and why this is so vital in the Eastern Church. “I’ve always seen this,” I said, “as a kind of left-over paganism, or the debasement of a truly spiritual religion. The pagans wanted gods who were tangible, accessible; icons provide this in the Christian context. But the pagans had the advantage of openly desiring such tangible gods while the Orthodox Church, on the one hand, preaches a God who is “spiritual,” not of human form, completely “other,” and on the other hand offers idols to its communicants because of their need for the tangible and accessible. This is less than sincere.” “No,” he said. “The icons, most deeply, are not a concession to man’s inability to derive consolation from a God who is wholly spiritual. Nor,” continued my friend, “are they pagan survivals in Christianity and at odds with the true spirit of Christianity. On the contrary. Christianity’s unique and central dogma is this: that God became flesh.” “But only at a single moment in history.” “Yes, at a single moment in history, but also in a way that transcends that moment. The saints, for the Orthodox Christian, are a continuous reconfirmation that the divine can reside in the mundane and that spirit can be discovered in the flesh. This is why the saints are venerated. When we think of the entire communion of saints, which stretches across history and from one land to another, giving us feast days all through the year, we can sense the continuity of this divine miracle and can know that the historical incarnation, while historical, is also vital to us today, and living, and meta-historical. This is what the Orthodox worshiper feels when he approaches and venerates the icon. The saints, for him, are living; they are friends; they are close to him; he has his “favorites”; he identifies specific saints with specific occasions or problems. And, most centrally, they reconfirm to him the central Christian fact: the incarnation of God.”

To bed. Konrad on his air mattress, on the floor. He is 6 foot 4 inches and cannot fit into Greek beds. One of our companions, a Greek, couldn’t resist a remark about Procrustes. The officious Greek, the one who had lectured us about Plutarch, kept referring to me as ο γαμπρός της Ελλάδος. Quiet, the lamp turned down. Stifling heat. Someone in the corner tossing continually; the bed squealing at full voice. I kept being bitten, on the ankles, arms, head, but didn’t hear the sound of mosquitoes. Fleas? With this thought, I couldn’t sleep. I think they were mosquitoes, after all.

The gruff servant roused us at 4:00 a.m. so that we could catch the συγκοινωνία. Konrad and I had decided to retrace our tracks and return to Iviron, rather than continuing around the tip of Athos, mainly because to do the latter we would have had to wait until 2:30 in the afternoon, and we did not want to spend any more time at Lavra, which had given us such a poor reception (though really the fault was not the monks’ but simply the fact of too many visitors all at once). I dressed, washed, shaved. Complete darkness, the lamps still burning. Down to the courtyard. The monks had been worshiping since 2:00 a.m. We went past St. Athanasios’s tree to the καθολικόν. How beautiful to enter a church in the darkness! Low chanting from the depths; the only illumination comes from a few candles. Left and right in the shadows, hardly discernible, are the monks, supporting themselves in their στασίδια. Patriarchal figures. Their gorgeous faces, long white beards, dignified habit. They seem to be sleeping with heads bent over and resting on their arms, or lowered. But they cross themselves, and rise, or sit, at the appropriate moments. They seem like wraiths in the obscure, incense-filled church. They are immaterial, all spirit and no flesh, as it were. Their flesh (as Kazantzakis would say) has been transubstantiated into worship.

Here at Athos, more strongly than anywhere or anytime else in my life, I felt the true meaning of the expression “to die to the world.” Strange how words, so often mouthed or read, can suddenly become alive. They are charged with explosive force, but so very rarely to they explode, show forth their meaning, achieve their epiphany. It is so easy to say, furthermore, that we in the world are concerned with what matters and that the monks have fled to a fake paradise, a vast dream-escape. Even now, my mind tells me that this is the case. But at Athos I felt differently, almost in spite of myself, in spite of my “Western liberal’s” social concern, my “advanced views” and all the rest of our comfortable slogans. What I felt, in spite of myself, was that the monks, here, were devoting themselves to “what matters” and that we, in the world, were drowning in inessential details—what the philosophers have always called “vanity.” Perhaps it is merely the colossal simplification of the monk’s life. He has one purpose: to praise God. He does not fret about what he will do on Saturday night, or become angry because he cannot secure good seats at the theater on short notice, or crave an automobile as luxurious as his neighbor’s, or keep remodeling his house and burying himself in further comforts. He is not scheming to raise himself in a social hierarchy, or to obtain a better job, or avoid income tax; he does not worry what he will eat tomorrow, or even if he will eat. He does not have the nuisance of the machines with which we have surrounded our lives, breaking down and leaving us—heaven forbid!—on our own resources. He does not fret about being too cold or too hot, because he knows he will always be too hot in summer and too cold in winter. I became aware, because of the colossal simplification of the monk’s life, of the colossal complication of our own, but a complication that so often is completely petty and indeed vicious. We wallow in insignificant details. We worry, not over large things worth worrying about, but over nothings. We expend our vital energy so uselessly, squandering it. Of course one feels this most strongly upon returning “to the world.” As I stepped into our house—after a lovely, warm greeting, I must admit, children rushing into my arms, Chrysanthi full of kisses and embraces, even Susanna jumping up and down—all too soon the details of everyday life reasserted themselves: Leander whining because he had to put on a sweater, Alec whining because Dr. Altas said he couldn’t go swimming for one more day, until his cold was fully healed. Also, one becomes immediately aware of the real boredom of so much of our lives, the constant search for something to fill up the time (or to hide ourselves from ourselves): “What shall we do now?” “How can we ‘enjoy ourselves’ tonight?” All this is eliminated in the monk’s life. His every moment is directed and meaningful, part of a whole, contributing in one way or another to his purpose, and best of all his purpose is sure, clear, simple, always evident. His views are narrow, his mind closed, but he has a health, a dignity, a happiness that we lack.

Monasticism is not a solution that I could take, alas! Yet I feel that one must strive even in the context of the “world” to eliminate the details that can so easily bury us and keep us from facing ourselves. How to approximate the monk’s single-mindedness, his intense sense of purpose, yet somehow move in accord with the conditions of the modern world: that is the great problem. The monk is not an anachronism, fully. He shows us what we, too, need and must achieve. Insofar as he does this he is relevant to the modern world.

Am I being shamelessly romantic and superficial about these monks? Ο Κύριος Αλέκος tells me that they are all ex-criminals, outcasts, failures. Furthermore, and here he is obviusly quite correct, they are reactionary, hierarchical, aristocratic. They do nothing for the people. Christianity, says Alekos, was once, and ought to be still, a revolutionary movement, a people’s movement for liberation from the land of bondage, whether that land be Egypt or Rome. But the so-called Christianity of these monks is a comfortable alliance with the overlords, a selling-out to the status quo. The monks are fat, rich, and secure; they are an arm of the repressive state, the privileged and oppressing class, and always have been, except in the very early days before Christianity became the offical state religion. All this is may be true; still, there is a beauty in their lives. We are left with the contradiction—as always.

Thursday, August 10, 1967

Lavra-Iviron-Karyes-Daphne-Saint Paul’s

How nice to walk down the stoney mule track from Lavra to the Tower, at 4:30 a.m.! The sea glassy-dark, merging duskily with the sky. Konrad wanted to plunder the mulberries again, but it was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish the ripe from the unripe. Caïque back to Iviron. Then back to Karyes. In the first street we encountered Reinoud! He had had a good night in a monastery nearby. Strange to pass the small street of shops and hear one of the monk-clerks say Ορίστε and try to motion me in. This was very distasteful and out of keeping. But I enjoyed being remembered by the keeper of the next shop, where we had bought Loch’s book and some handicraft.

To the one-and-only restaurant. The surly cook-waiter, a layman. I shaved. Simple pleasures: coffee, decent bread, cheese—our first protein! how nice to eat again! At 8:00 the bus left for Daphne. Inside, the icon had an electric bulb instead of an oil lamp with a wick. The light worked only when the ignition was on, but, as Konrad said, that was when we needed the saint’s protection! Next to me, Γρηγόριος, with a huge pouch, and a kind of carpetbag to carry his things. When we got out at Daphne, Grigorios nodded with disdain to a factotum waiting there: a tiny, heavy-set man with the stupid, blank expression of a demented mouse. This man shuffled up to Grigorios with an obsequiousness I have never before seen; he bowed, he scraped, he kissed the monk’s hand, he backed away, and took up the baggage, which was very light, and could easily have been carried by the owner. In this, we saw another, and far less encouraging, side of the monkish existence: the hierarchy and privilege that doubtlessly exists within the monastery among the various classes of monks themselves, and that manifested itself in an extreme form in the relation between the fat Grigorios and the sniveling factotum. This last, however, must have been an extreme case. Later, as we were waiting for the caïque in the customs shed, I noticed that the other lay servants kept teasing him mercilessly. They took his straw hat, for instance, and threatened to cut out the crown. He, too dull to see that they were just playing, took this with utmost gravity, protesting that the hat cost such-and-such, and scowling and cursing in his impotency. Finally, the others grew tired of their pet monkey and returned the hat.

Beer: another worldly pleasure received with thanks. In the small παντοπωλείον where I went to buy some tinned meat, there was an old monk talking with the παντοπώλης:—Για πού, πατέρα μου, με το καλό; Γιατί φεύγετε;—Με έδιωξαν από το κελλί. So this happens too. The monasteries are short of monks, but not so short that they keep all and sundry. And they must collect some very difficult types indeed. There must be some truth in what every Greek will tell you (Θέμης Άλτας και Θεία Θώδωρα told me this humorously, after I had returned): that the majority of those who become monks are either fugitive criminals or draft dodgers. To this we could add those who are simply down on their luck and give up trying—like Zorbas. To think that any great number have a true religious calling is sheer naïveté, at least so far as those in the monasteries are concerned. Perhaps the hermitages and sketes attract a better sort. There are all kinds of stories à la Boccaccio and Chaucer. Last year two monks fought, and one murdered the other with a knife. Θώδωρα says it is common knowledge that they row across to the island opposite Ouranoupolis, where there are several “cabarets.” As she says, they go lustily, and return exhausted. And Chrysanthi remembers the time when she and Βούλη spent the night in Νέα Ρόδα when they were at the Quaker School. An Athos monk—young, lusty, handsome, with glittering black beard—registered, and immediately the landlady came to the two girls and advised them to lock their door! This is all quite aside from the homosexuality that apparently flourishes on the Holy Mountain. An English boy, Oxford graduate, with whom I traveled on the bus back to Salonika, told me that a friend of his had been propositioned by one of the monks. All this, obviously, is part of the “contradiction” implicit in every human manifestation (I begin to sound like Kierkegaard), and does not invalidate the good part. Indeed, now that conditions are generally better in Greece, the Holy Mountain may not be such a refuge for the down and out, who can just as easily go to work in Germany.

At 11:00 a.m. the caïque left for Άγ. Παύλος and Άγ. Άννης. Spectacular views of Σιμόπετρα upon its rock, and of Διονυσίου. Splendid rock-formations: geological strata, veins of marble, caves, faults, monstrous slabs splitting gradually from the cliff and hovering over the sea. The water, as always, clearer than clear.

I struck up a conversation with a youngish monk, about 25 or 30 years old. He belonged to the skete of Άγ. Άννης. He explained the system: a year’s noviate before you are officially accepted as a monk. Then, at a certain age, 25 I think, you may be chosen to become a deacon. This is the first step toward the priesthood. At about 30 you may be ordained. “Can anyone become a priest?” “No, not at all. You must have special qualities. Good heart, good mind. The priest has great responsibilities. He gives communion; he confesses the other monks.” “Do many advance to the priesthood?” “No. Few. Very few. It is a great honor.” “And you?” “I am a deacon now. I will become a priest if I am worthy.” I then asked him the question: What will happen to the monasteries? Can they keep going? I received a very strange answer: “No, the entire Holy Mountain will cease to exist in a short time.” “You mean that no young monks will come to continue the traditions, none at all?” “No, not that. There will be a great cataclysm, a third world war, and the epicenter will be Greece. It is all written in a prophecy.” “Where?” “In a book in the monastery, from the tenth century. It says there will be two great cataclysms, like the first two wars, and then a third and final one. A black cloud, it says, will descend from the north. That is of course Russia. The Russians will invade and occupy Constantinople. At the same time, the Turks will invade and reoccupy Greece, but then there will be a great naval battle and the NATO forces will win. We know this because the book speaks of a force speaking 18 languages. But in the end everything will be destroyed.” “And doesn’t this make you sad? What you say is terribly pessimistic, yet you don’t seem to see it in a pessimistic way.” “No, it does not make me sad. Because it will be not only an end, but also a beginning. Like the flood. If only one just person survives, there will be a new beginning.” “I think that two will be needed.” “And the Holly Mountain will see a new age, with new monasteries, new monks. All will be cleansed.” I thought of Kazantzakis’s ferocious “Leninism”: the world must be burned to ashes, so that a new and more just society can rise out of those ashes. His ferocity and “Leninism” are really much more Biblical and apocalyptic than communist. I also thought how avidly these monks cling to prophecies. Although they claim to flee from the world and from the arguments arising from practical experience, they are eager to find practical “proofs” of the wisdom of the prophets of old. We had another example in Άγ. Παύλος, in the library. The βιβλιοθηκάρης, obviously an educated man (I was told later that he had taken his university degree in economics but had subsequently abandoned the world), showed us a drawing from an ancient book. It was a representation of the apocalypse. Objects dropping from the sky, buildings toppling, people taking refuge in caves. “You see,” he said gleefully, “it is an exact prediction of the bombing raids of the second world war. The only discrepancy is that the bombs are just falling directly out of the sky and not from airplanes. But when I showed this to the German governor of Athos during the occupation, he told me that this was not a discrepancy at all, for the Germans had indeed invented, and were using, rocket-bombs that dropped out of the sky precisely as shown in the old picture.”

Αγίου Παύλου has a stunning location directly beneath the jagged peak of Athos in a cleft that had at one time seen a flood and now is a river-bed of stones. We disembarked with two Greeks, one an agriculturalist, the other a student of mathematics at Athens University, both from Olympia, and both—I at once perceived—very rightist politically: θρήσκοι, καθαρευουσιάνοι, and the rest, the usual complex of conservative expressions. But pleasant chaps and nice companions. They warmed up considerably as the day wore on. There was a monastery servant at the quay. He told us it would be a shame for us to walk up to the monastery since the truck was here and the driver would be coming shortly; he had gone for a swim. Poor Konrad, once again cheated out of an opportunity to hike! We shared our watermelon with our new friends and waited for our leisurely swimmer. But waiting in Greece is always pleasant if you have company. How easily the conversation begins, and rolls on. No hesitation, no embarrassment, no shy withdrawal or haughty standoffishness. It begins with the basic “vital statistics”: where are you from, what do you do, are you married, how many children, how much do you get paid, how is business? Once all this is known, the talk can become more specialized and appropriate to the individuals involved. The agriculturalist immediately began probing the monastery servant on how much wood they cut each year, was it all chestnut, how much did they get per kilo, did the monastery have other sources of income (it gets 200,000 drachmas per year from the state, in payment for some real estate—μετόχιες—that the state expropriated), etc. Then the questioning and answering goes in the other direction. The servant has a grape vine but the grapes are sickly. What kind? Do they have a whitish mold on the tops? Does he spray them? With what? When? How often? Then the servant told, at length, with narrative skill, the legend about how the wife of the sultan, in the fifteenth century, landed here bringing the monastery the gold, frankincense, and myrrh brought by the Magi. But as she climbed toward the monastery she heard a voice out of heaven, the voice of the Virgin Mary, protectress of Athos. The voice told her to halt. She did so, and the monks came down to accept the gifts. There is now a chapel on the spot.

In this way the time passed. Not a word about the weather, or about food, or about “What I saw in Paris last month,” the usual topics of conversation, and these terribly forced, between a group of Americans who do not know each other and even, alas, among groups that do know each other.

In St. Paul’s, we gleaned a better feeling for the actual life of the monks than elsewhere. Also, it was considerably friendlier than the other monasteries, perhaps because fewer people visit it. You enter beneath a long and lovely grape arbor. Outside the gates, as always, are the pavilion and the πεζούλι. A decorative fountain, and beneath the arbor another one with a trough for the mules. Copious water, cold, sweet-tasting, as from my well at the farm. The Πορτάρης greeted us, Καλῶς ὁρίσατε, and shook our hands (the first time we had experienced such a welcome). As usual, we were shown to the αρχοντάρικο, up a flight of stairs. The building is new, built after the old one burned down. Wide hallway, rooms on either side. Victorian atmosphere, very evangelical, as Konrad said. Reminds one of a Salvation Army mission. Texts on the wall: “Love Christ” “Do Unto Others . . .” etc. The sitting room: portraits of various Greek kings, and of two Russian tsars, and in the place of honor two pictures of Metaxas, one a portrait and the other a signed photograph! I kept mum knowing the politics of our two Greek companions. The toilet was delightful: a hole, Turkish style, in a balcony. Through the hole one could stare down the full length of the huge foundations, to the ground below, which had received the offerings of generations of monastery visitors!

We arrived at a bad time. The monks were sleeping. In addition, the previous day and night and that very morning they had celebrated their great feast-day, and were exhausted. Eventually a monk and a lay-servant emerged sleepily from two little cubicles adjoining the sitting room. The lay-servant was coarse looking and rather gruff at first, but only because he was sleepy. The monk later told us that he—the servant—was a garçon, but he had been here many years and by now was “almost a theologian.” How sweet! This monk, the guest-master, was the reverse of the lay-servant: petit, refined, fair-skinned, jolly, a practiced conversationalist. The usual opening questions—what nationality? Protestant or Catholic? What are the Quakers? Do they believe in the divine inspiration of the gospels? “Yes and no,” I stammered. Do they baptize? “No.” I began my lecture on inner baptism, the spirit versus the letter, etc., but didn’t get far. Our guest-master tried to be logical in his illogicality. “All one needs is study,” he kept saying. “One shouldn’t believe blindly; one should investigate, read, think, and determine what is the correct road.” But it soon became apparent that he meant by this: One should read, exclusively, the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. You will then learn that you cannot be a Christian unless you are baptized. The talk turned to the split with the Catholics. “We must investigate, study, the causes,” said our logical friend, “in order to determine objectively who was at fault. It will then be seen that the Western Church was at fault. This is why we cannot, and must not, be reunited with them. Unless they come to realize their faults and desire to reenter the Orthodox communion. For instance, they will have to accept baptism . . .” “But surely the Catholics have not abandoned baptism,” I objected. “The Quakers have, to be sure, but not the Catholics.” He smiled condescendingly and lovingly at my ignorance. “The Catholics sprinkle,” he said. “That is not baptism.”

Strange, this mixture of conservatism/fundamentalism/punctilio and friendliness in this monastery. They did not permit any flesh to show, except faces and hands. We all had short-sleeved shirts. I had to put on my jacket, despite the heat. The others were provided with long-sleeved shirts, although the one Konrad put on was so small for him that it was not much different from a short-sleeved shirt. He finally remembered that he had his pajamas, and donned the tops. Thus, decently dressed, we were able to emerge into the hallway and enter the church. Vesper service, not as colorful as the one at Iviron, but very beautiful, still. A monk reprimanded me when I crossed my legs in the stall. Our lay-servant reprimanded Konrad when he placed his hands behind his back, an attitude of relaxation in the Greek culture, and thus not permissible. The stalls, when the seat is in the upper position, are a good compromise. You sit and yet do not sit; you are uncomfortable, and yet it is better than standing. Best of all, you cannot help but look as though you are paying attention.

The church is new, and undecorated. The whole plan of the monastery attests to its function. The entire courtyard is occupied by the church. On three sides, dormitories and the trapeza. In back, a huge wall in the shape of an arc, with crenellations on top, to keep out enemies and also the winds descending from the mountain. A church, with facilities for those serving it—that is the “plan.” It is sparse, economical, very unlike Lavra with its sprawling buildings in every direction.

After the service, the monks went directly to the trapeza. We joined them for their meal. This was the first cenobitic monastery we had visited. It was a fine experience for us to observe the way in which the monks eat, instead of being fed separately, as we were in the idiorhythmic establishments. The meal was already on the tables: individual servings in tin dishes, of fish-in-sauce, wine, bread, feta cheese, and watermelon. The bread was hard and dry, as always, baked in individual loaves about ¼ the size of a normal kilo-loaf. At the head of the room, at a moon-shaped table, sat the abbot with his committee of elders. Near them, standing behind a reading desk, the αναγνώστης. Not a word is spoken. We sit down, the αναγνώστης begins reading. This time it was the account of how St. Paul founded the monastery. I kept looking around to see at what stage in the meal the monks were, fearing that I would not be able to finish in time. Then, about 15 minutes after we had started, the reader concluded. He went to the abbot, asked forgiveness lest he had read poorly. The chefs (all monks) came from the kitchen and asked forgiveness of the abbot lest they had cooked badly. The abbot gave them all his blessing. A small bell rang once, and all stood up with a single motion and immediately left the hall. Most of the visitors were only half way through their watermelon. The monks, as they passed out, told us to stay and finish, which we did. It was nice, then, to be witness to the commotion that followed: clearing of tables, collecting of uneaten bread and unpoured wine, piling of dishes, all done by monks assigned to these particular duties. The commotion was much more human, somehow, than the meal that had preceded it. But eating, under this system, had taken on a liturgical, ritualistic significance. The meal was not, as it is so often for us, a casual relaxation, nor was it a convenient way to pass the time, for bored and empty people; nor was it the sheer gluttony and “fleshly enjoyment” that it so easily becomes; nor the way of displaying largesse and wealth (I think of the ridiculous Greek custom of taking people out to an expensive restaurant at night, after they have already eaten a large meal at midday) and forcing them to stuff themselves with μεζέδες, ούζο, entrée, salad, wine, and fruit, chiefly as a proof that one is rich enough to pay for it all). Here, the meal is reduced to an elemental significance. It is a necessary refueling, to be accomplished as briefly as possible; and it is an opportunity for silence and learning. It is also a kind of offering. Instead of being extended and desultory, as at our dinner parties, it is concentrated and single-minded: one theme is expounded, briefly, but one hopes that the theme acquires large dimensions because of its relevance to the particular day in the church calendar.

We went off to the library. Educated librarian. The usual guidebook kind of information about the particular treasures. The picture of the end of the world, and the librarian’s exposition of this as a prediction of the second world war. Stories of the educated and well-meaning Germans who governed the mountain during the war. Hitler, we were told, issued a personal decree protecting Athos. The monks seemed to have acquired the knack of dealing with all potentially hostile powers, sultans and Nazis both. The librarian said that he personally had served the German governor when he was tried at Nuremburg by sending a letter attesting to the governor’s decency. It was nice to see that the library had modern books as well as dusty parchments; the Μεγάλη Ελληνική Εγκυκλοπαίδεια, the Eleftheroudakis Lexicon, which is full of articles by Kazantzakis, language dictionaries, works on the classical authors, grammars, a rare book on social psychology, brought by a brother who had studied at Zürich, even a volume on photography. I asked if any original writing now issued from the monastery. Not much, I was told, but some. On the writing desk was a manuscript in progress, a treatise on the Eucharist, by one of the monks, an attempt to show that this divine mystery was at present largely misunderstood by the Greek church. Intellectually, these monks are moths fluttering around the light of Christ in their narrow orbits. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Sunset, 7:00 p.m. our time, 11:30 monastery time (they are 13 days behind our calendar, 4½ hours ahead of our clocks: that is true divorce from the world). The monks have a few moments’ freedom. They gather outside, sit on the πεζούλι, singly or in groups, and talk or watch the sea or stroll back and forth. We approached a heavy-set monk whose robe was opened at the neck, revealing his flannel undershirt. He nervously tried to do himself up, but the robe kept opening. I had noticed him in church at vesper time, also with the undone robe, and continually fanning himself with his hat or with a handkerchief. It was the only time I had ever seen a monk show visible discomfort because of the heat. Now I suddenly put 2 and 2 together: he was the chef, he had come from the kitchen to ask the abbot’s blessing after the meal. This explained why he was so hot. He spoke to Konrad in a slow, deliberate English groping for words and opening his mouth wide in order to push out the unfamiliar syllables. “Here is quiet,” he said, “here is . . . is . . . ἡσυχία . . . πῶς το πῆτε εσεῖς . . . ah, yes, calm . . . here is calm. . . . I was in Australia, a sailor, in Greek merchant marine.” “Why did you become a monk?” “I no like life as sailor. I want peace. Here is peace, here is calm . . .” “Do you find friendship here?” “What?” “Friendship. Φιλία.” “Ah, yes, φιλία. Well, yes, φιλία. Yes, a little. Friendship. Ah, yes.” Suddenly, without saying goodbye, he rose and strode into the monastery. I had a strong, intense feeling that he was a very unhappy man, even an outcast in the monastic society.

A bell rang. Most of the monks rose and went inside. I went quickly to drink and wash a little at the fountain, after the mules, who were drinking. A monk then asked me where I was from and what products grew there. I said corn (maize), καλαμπόκι; he didn’t know what this was—must have entered the monastery before corn was introduced to Greece. A monk banged disagreeably on the door as a final warning and we all slipped inside. The gates closed for the night.

The mattresses were crawling with bedbugs, but luckily Konrad had had the presence of mind to bring along some DDT. Sweet sleep in a room perched upon the rocks and overlooking the sea.

Friday, August 11, 1967

St. Paul’s-Daphne-Ouranoupolis-Salonika-Aghia Triadha

Up at 5:00 a.m. Darkness. Konrad had gone down to hear the end of the matins and I joined him. Once again, the eerie sight of monks standing like wraiths in the stalls, heads bowed, crossing themselves, or going forward to kiss the icons. (In the vespers I had seen, for the first time, what in Greek is called να προσκυνήσεις, να κάνεις μετάνοιες: a dipping motion, knees down, hands just touching the floor, three times, accompanied by the sign of the cross, very oriental, like Mohammedans prostrating themselves, forehead touching mother earth.) The service ended. We tried to offer the monks some payment for their hospitality but they refused (the other monasteries had accepted). We said we would give the sum to the poor when we returned home, and they felt this was a fine idea. Δωρεάν, δωρεάν, they kept repeating as we tried to make them accept. (When I returned home I sent a check for $100 to the Friends Meeting, part to go to the AFSC in their name.) The lovely parting words: Στο καλό, στο καλό, αντίο σας, στο καλό.

We descended the rocky path, past the sultan’s wife’s shrine, to the quay, to find it already crowded with people waiting for the caïque. Among others were a troupe of about 10 German boy scouts who had angered us because they had arrived late the night before and had departed immediately the next morning, obviously using the monastery as a free hotel—only. Konrad was particularly bitter against his ex-compatriots. “There is nothing,” he said, “to match the arrogance, and efficacy, of Germans when they join together. Singly they are bearable, but in a group they are repulsive—like Americans!” Full of unchristian malice, we hoped that the caïque would leave them all behind, but it didn’t. Somehow we all fit. Indeed, a new crowd surged on at the next stop, Διονυσίου, including some familiar faces: the sexy French lads in their tight jeans and cowboy hats; the Salonika gymnasium teacher and his friend, etc. Many were herded into the hold by the exasperated captain. The gunwales were only six inches above the water, but somehow we proceeded.

More talk. Really, how we talked on this trip! Continually, deeply, refreshingly. This time with the friend of the gymnasium teacher, a man about my age, connected with a factory in Salonika and spending his two-week holiday, all of it, on the Holy Mountain. He and his friend had gone around the nose of the peninsula and had climbed up to Καρούλια and St. Anne’s, which apparently are spectacular. He had seen icon-painting monks. He had seen hermits. He described with glee how their group approached one of the solitary holy men. All of them were trying to be serious and duly reverent. But the holy man, who was so holy that he could afford to be irreverent, greeting them with laughter, bubbling good humor, and off-color jokes. Fools of god still exist. I was glad to find that my friend, although impressed with what he had seen on the Mountain, was not a rightist. He bemoaned the narrowness of the monks’ political and theological views, and had no illusions about their relation to the status quo. Yet, and this was wonderful, the inevitable contradiction did not destroy for him what was good and truly venerable here.

Daphne again. Another wait, now in café seats that had become very familiar to us. Coffee. Biscuits. The customs shed, with a crude sign and a depressing interior. “Have you any icons or rare books?” “No.” “Open your backs [sic], please.” Perfunctory groping. “Next, please.” The captain, who had brought us down from Ouranoupolis, recognized us, and we felt we were in friendly hands. Off we went, surrounded by the German boy scouts, who spent the trip playing cards. More talk, this time with a “pilgrim” who had grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness and told me the story of his life, alas! and how and why he had abandoned the J.W.s, mostly because of their authoritarian methods and refusal to allow free opinion. We spoke of the state of the world and were both very pessimistic. Self-interest, hypocrisy, violence, boredom, jealousy, ugliness: these ruled the world. The only consolations, especially for Greeks, were sea and sun, which remained unspoiled, virgin. On this note, I left the Holy Mountain.

Mrs. Loch was leaning out of her window, watching the caïque arrive. Jones was still sitting. Various Americans were bathing languidly and effeminately admiring their own babies. I was back in the tearoom, with the dull and proper. The pilgrimage was over. Stupid questions: “How many monasteries did you visit?” Sheila came, with the children. Poor Konrad. “What have you decided?” he asked her straight off, meaning: were they going to continue their holiday or go straight back to England? I didn’t catch the answer. Sheila looked very bad; eating herself up with self-pity, her bloodless lips seemed made of acid. I was eager to escape this sad reunion and went down to eat with the Uniate Catholic and a Greek friend of his, who turned out to be an actor in the Κρατικό Θέατρο Βορείας Ελλάδος, and a fascinating chap. Straightway, more good talk. Theater. Cavafy. Poetry. I expounded on the connection between Cavafy’s homosexuality, historical view (endless repetition), and metaphysics because my new acquaintance had seen the poetry only as a personal confession. We continued in the bus, for hours, while others were throwing up copiously. Eliot, Beckett, the virtues and vices of Koun’s style and the State Theater’s. The Uniate also spoke beautifully about Kazantzakis, how much of his vision came directly from Byzantine attitudes and liturgy, how truly Christian he was in spirit, and of how, in Greece and Turkey, for the first time in his life, he had understood that people can truly care for one another. There was also a young Englishman, just out of Oxford, and a student of Byzantium but just in an amateur way, as he was going into advertising. He was rather superficial, but he impressed me by describing his sudden feeling of reverence, almost in spite of himself, when the abbot of Dionysiou, a man renowned for his sanctity, had spoken to him and, in a sense, had confessed him.

August 14, 1967

George, Kostas, Lola, etc., assembled, asked me about Mount Athos. But the only thing they were really interested in was what I was given to eat!

August 25, 1967

Greeks love to philosophize, and Kazantzakis catches the flavor and even the metaphors of their talk. Today, ο Γεώργιος, the milkman, was moaning tons about the government, or τα γεγονότα, as he euphemistically has it. I suggested that time will heal, and he agreed, saying «Βέβαια, από τη βρωμιά έρχεται πάντα η καθαριότης».

August 26, 1967

❡ Αφέντη, αν κομματιάσεις μια δύκολη πράξη, θα δεις πως είναι καμωμένη από χιλιάδες εύκολες·. . . Αν κομματιάσεις έναν εύκολο στοχασμό, θα δείς πως είναι καμωμένος από χιλιάδες δύσκολους. —Ο Μανταρίνος, στον Καζαντζάκη Βούδας, σελ. 627.

August 27, 1967

Ο Νικήτας told me that I would appreciate the truth of the slogan that the present government “saved Greece” only if I had experienced what he, and all Greeks, had experienced in 1944, to emerge from their homes after the Germans had left, ready to celebrate the liberation of Greece, and to see on the mountainsides and in the towns instead of the Greek flag, the Red flag!

September 13, 1967

Fox Hill Close, Selly Oak, Birmingham 29, England

Thinking of my own “success” at Dartmouth, culminating recently in the Danforth award for Distinguished Teaching, with its lovely grant of $10,000, I could not help but agree with Kazantzakis when he says: «Όλο μυστήριο είναι η επιτυχία ή αποτυχία ενός ανθρώπου. Αρίφνητοι, απροσδιόριστοι συντελεστές συνεργάζουνται έξω από τον άνθρωπο και μέσα του, και συχνά η αξία του δεν παίζει το μεγαλύτερο ρόλο.»—Ταξιδεύοντας Ισπανία, Β ΄εκ., σ. 61-62.

September 17, 1967

Excursion to Litchfield with family and my parents. Dr. Johnson’s birthplace. Dad kept insisting that Boswell wrote Pepys’ diary! (And that Johnson was Ben Jonson.) In the square was a van with the letters: S. Johnson Electrical Contractor, also a plaque with the names of various people burnt at the stake under Queen Anne. Best of all, “George Fox the founder of the Society of Friends or Quakers shortly after his release from prison at Derby at the beginning of the winter 1651 stood without shoes on a market day in this market place and denounced the City of Litchfield.” Cathedral very heavy, black, dingy. We lunched at the Swan Hotel and were all in a good mood after Dad told his story about the woman who was asked on her 50th wedding anniversary “In all those years, did you ever think of divorce?” “No, never, not once in all those years. But I thought lots about murder!” Daphne very quiet and cooperative for once.

Last night to Χρήστος Αλεξίου, who teaches Modern Greek here. His wife is the daughter of George Thomson, Professor of Classics. Nepotism. Both Alexiou and Thomson are reputedly Marxists. He told me, interestingly, that the language of the ancient dramatists, even the choruses, was fully intelligible at once to the audiences because the choral sections employed diction and syntax not, it is true, of common speech, nevertheless familiar to everyone because this was the language of religious liturgy. As though the “difficult” parts of contemporary drama were in King James’s English.

The night before to “A Man for All Seasons.” Simple, unpretentious, marvelously powerful. I joined a risqué “cinema club” in order to be able to see Ulysses.

Our last days in Greece were moving and sad, as always. Ο Παππούς έγραψε έπειτα: «Ο αποχαιρετισμός τούτος μας κόστησε πολύ». I remember the evening on the beach with Themis and his Cretan friend who tried, unsuccessfully, to teach me mantinades, then singing in a deep bass voice; our little recital, violin and piano, first for Altases, then for Yiannakoses; tears in Ka. Marianthi’s eyes at parting, and in Miranda’s. Such warmth! The old man carrying the refrigerator all by himself, on his back, up four flights of stairs; returning the piano to the awful Κα. Χατζή on the 7th floor; last-minute meeting (twice) with Marios; barbecued chicken for George and Efthymoula; Chrysanthi’s accident, dropping the sewing machine on her foot, and luckily not breaking any bones; lunches out at Nounios’s; last-minute reading of Galatea’s poor story about her reunion with Kazantzakis in the University of Thessaloniki’s φροντιστήριο.

Through Yugoslavia by train. The rich Greeks going to prep school in England. “My father has a Jaguar!” The Yugoslav shepherd (moron) who masturbated furiously and exhibited himself as the train passed. The boys jumping off the bridge into the shallow river, almost naked. The marvelous “shock” of the Austrian landscape and Alps, after the dryness and poverty of Greece.

Munich. Elizabeth met us. Baggage lost temporarily, then recovered. To New Pinakothèque. Not very impressive, but some nice Matisses and a lovely Van Gogh. The French had it all over the Germans! Changing Daphne in the English Gardens. Taxi to Nymphenburg. Flowers, pools, quiet. Schwäbing. Restaurant. I was brave and had calf’s foot. The full cafés. Youth!

Night train to Rotterdam. The new city center, astounding. I felt that it reconfirmed man’s abilities. He can do so much that is beautiful and good and functional if he only tries; he can make his cities livable instead of dreary hells. One feels this also in Amsterdam, where we stayed three days. The old houses preserved and modernized, instead of falling into decay. The quite decent “new suburb” that we visited, not really beautiful or inspiring gaiety, yet much better than most. Rijksmuseum is of course extraordinary. The veneers, the play of light and dark. And Rembrandt is only one among many. We also visited a diamond exhibition (and fell prey: I bought Chrysanthi her long-desired ring); took a boat ride through the canals; did the Museum of Modern Art: lovely Van Goghs, but also lots of Klee, Mondrian, and a whole wing full of pop art that delighted the children. The hilarious fat women with huge behinds, made out of plaster of paris.

Night boat from Hoek of Holland to Harwich. Train to Liverpool Street. How bleak England is! Taxi to Euston. Train to Birmingham. The new civic center: another reconfirmation of man’s potential and his capabilities for good. Fine house at Fox Hill Close. Rush to get Leander and Alec settled in school. Visit to Mr. Sheen, the headmaster of Kings Norton Grammar School. I started out by calling him Mr. Lewis! Buying Leander’s “kit”: blazer, emblem, school tie, shirts, gray trousers, black shoes, cleats, jersey. He is delighted, loves to tie the tie. The pressures of conformity! Alec is in Bournville Junior School, a lovely building in Bournville village. We went the first day and observed the moving prayers and hymns that both children like. Their appreciation of discipline matches mine at Deerfield. And yet there is something so sheepish about all these Englishmen, with their queues and innumerable “pleases” and “thank yous.” They seem imprisoned in their own propriety. Also, strangely, they seem sexless. The women have no breasts; the men have no thighs and buttocks. All is drab and bleak, the faces as well as the weather. Perhaps it is the sudden contrast with Greece that makes me feel this way; or perhaps it is the industrial Midlands.

It is difficult to start working again. I’ve been doing so desultorily: reading Kazantzakis’s Ισπανία and now his Ιαπωνία-Κίνα.

September 19, 1967

Kazantzakis in Ταξιδεύοντας Ιαπωνία-Κίνα, σελ. 40, puts his finger on the secret of life at Mount Athos or any secluded place: Η ζωή σ’ ένα μοναστήρι, σ’ ένα βαπόρι, σ’ ένα κλειστό απομονωμένο χώρο μπορεί να γίνει αληθινά αβάσταχτη αν δεν είσαι κυριεμένος από ένα μεγάλο πάθος. . . . Αν δεν έχεις ένα σφοδρό πάθος ή αν δεν έχεις νικήσει όλα τα πάθη, περιορισμένος σ’ ένα κλειστό χώρο, είσαι χαμένος.

(σελ. 54: the ideal of a Japanese samurai:) Μπροστά στούς άλλους να στέκεσαι χαμογελαστός—μπροστά στον εαυτό σου να στέκεσαι αυστηρός—Στην ανάγκη να στέκεσαι γενναίος—στην καθημερινή ζωή πρόσχαρος—Οταν σε χειροκροτούν, να στέκεσαι απαθής· όταν σε σφυρίζουν, ασάλευτος.

September 20, 1967

Sometimes we suddenly realize how much our lives resemble a dream, or how difficult it is to separate what is dream from what is reality. Kazantzakis quotes a Chinese poet: Ονειρεύομαι, και βλέπω πως είμαι πεταλούδα. Ξυπνώ, και βλέπω πως είμαι άνθρωπος. Ποιο ’ναι τ’ όνειρο; Ο άνθρωπος; Η πεταλούδα; ΄Ισως μήτε το ένα μήτε το άλλο. Λέω: ξύπησα· μήπως άραγε πρέπει να πω: μεταμορφώθηκα; (σελ. 209)

Τέσσερα είναι τα μεγάλα πάθη του Κινέζου . . . : τα τυχερά παιχνίδια, η σαρκική ηδονή, το χασίς και το θέατρο. Κι όλα τα πάθη τούτα αναβρύζουν από τη λαχτάρα να γλιτώσουμε από την πραγματική ζωή, να δώσουμε φτερούγες στην καθημερινή πεζότητα. Η ζωή του Κινέζου πλαντάει μέσα στην ανάγκη· ποια άλλη χαρά λοιπόν του μένει από το μεθύσι; (σελ. 221) Why only the Chinese?! When I race to the theater or movies at night to escape whining children and ετοιμοθάνατοι γονείς, isn’t it the same thing?

September 21, 1967

Usual depression whenever I’m in prolonged contact with my father. Particularly hard to stomach him after days—months—of reading Kazantzakis! Because he is a perfect example of all that Kazantzakis despises: someone whose “flesh” has dragged the spirit back down into sluggishness, torpor, hypochondria, and materialism. Topics of conversation have been the usual ones: how the hotels were all terrible, what this cost and that cost, how much noise there is everywhere, how tired he was and is—and then: the stock market! Last night I was solemnly informed the prices of all my stocks, all three of them. From memory. He knew exactly what he had paid for them ten-odd years ago, how far they had descended or risen during that time, and where they stood now. I felt like exploding, trying to make him understand that my whole life I had struggled, and am struggling still, to conquer the desire for money and the obsession with present and future security, and rather, like Virginia Woolf, to take advantage of the fact that I am comfortably off, by allowing my mind to go to other things and by not wanting to be more comfortably off. But I didn’t have the heart, or perhaps the courage, to express all this. Instead I merely said upon hearing that all my stocks had risen: “Good, now I’ll sell the whole lot and be rid of them.” But he didn’t catch the full meaning of this, though he did catch the tone of anger. Instead, he said, “Yes, it would be advantageous for you to sell now and reap the profit. On the other hand, you could keep them, continuing to collect the dividends. You sold General Motors at 110, which was good, but it then went to 118, which was better. Also, it went down to 68, at which time it would have been wise for you to buy again.”

September 22, 1967

Sightseeing with parents and family in rented car. Very pleasant day. In the morning Chrysanthi and Mother went to Marshalls and Snelgrass and bought a lovely pink suit for Chrysanthi, who came home beaming. Then we drove off for Warwick Castle. Paintings: Reubens’ two heads of Saints Jerome and Peter, a wonderful Rembrandt portrait, a Reubens portrait subsequently enlarged by Sir Joshua Reynolds; the famous portraits of Henry VIII and of the young Queen Elizabeth I; the “haunted room” with the pictures of the two friends and poets, Fulke Greville and Sir Philip Sidney. Armor, including a suit for a child; the hangman’s eerie mask; Oliver Cromwell’s death mask, clearly showing the wart over his eye. Unlike most castles, this one looked obviously lived in, and it was pleasant for us to have arrived just as the Earl of Warwick’s niece was having her wedding reception: bridesmaids in stunning colors, men in tails, Rolls Royces: the world of Evelyn Waugh. They were to have a discotheque later on, after the ceremony and food. The well-groomed, well-nourished aristocracy, looking very much as though they owned the world. We had lovely sun and enjoyed the gardens, peacocks, and high society.

From there to Kenilworth, and what a difference! Sir Walter Scott, the gothic novel, eerie ruins jutting into the sky, all the romance of Elizabeth and Leicester. Leander and Alec ran joyously through the dungeons, up and down the stairs, along floors where walls had been blown up in the Civil War, up to the parapet, playing cowboys and Indians.

Thence to Coventry, where the shopping precinct, and especially the new Cathedral next to the shell of the old one, are marvels of beauty and functionalism both. Epstein’s sculpture of St. Michael is memorable. But of course one sensed the disparity between the great building and the emptiness. Religion itself is what is truly the empty shell in the twentieth century.

Next day, Sunday, to Worcester, where King John is buried in the cathedral. Service, communion, angelic voices of the boys’ choir. Again, an empty church. We had a fancy meal in a fancy restaurant, feeling very out of place because of Daphne. Also (I at any rate) because of the senseless and self-indulgent ritual connected with food, not to mention the overeating.

Parents flew to Paris on Monday. I delivered them to the airport, returned the rented car, and went immediately to London by train.

September 25, 1967

London, National Hotel, Bedford Way

British Museum for odds-and-ends of Kazantzakis materials. I finished in a day and a half, nothing very startling. Good to see Parthenon marbles again: how extraordinary they are, and how nice to be able to put your nose right up to them, even though they belong, I suppose, on the Parthenon itself. Evening: swinging London, the casino, very good striptease with one girl more beautiful than the next.

September 26, 1967

British Museum. At night saw Ralph Richardson in The Merchant of Venice. I never realized what a bad play this is, although the performance was splendid. The first part is stunning; the last half mechanical, unimaginative, and self-contradictory. Shakespeare first arouses sympathy for the Merchant, then does him in fully, and makes him a Jewish monster of revenge, in comparison with the merciful Christians. As though we had two separate plays yoked together by force. . . . Afterwards, more of swinging London.

Wednesday, September 27, 1967

Morning: University of London library looking at Rodney Rooke’s bibliography of Kazantzakis; then mummies; then National Gallery from stem to stern: Virgin of the Rocks; the unfinished Michelangelo Virgin that I had so liked previously but that didn’t impress me very much now; the marvelous Rembrandt heads of old men and women. And, best of all, the fiery El Grecos, especially Christ chasing the money changers out of the temple, a larger canvas than the one depicting the same scene in the Frick Collection. Lastly, to Chatto & Windus to see Ian Parsons, Norah Smallwood being away on holiday. He received me cordially and had flattering things to say about my L. P. Hartley book although at first he referred to it as my book on E. M. Forster! They had made money on it; Hamish Hamilton had thought them crazy to publish it. As for Kazantzakis, no one knew of him, Parsons doubted that any of his books were even in print, besides Zorba; a publisher must feel he can make ends meet, etc., etc. Eventually I discovered that he thought I had come to ask for an advance, which of course I hadn’t. After this was cleared up he became much more cordial, and suggested what I’d hoped he’d suggest—namely, that it would be wiser to work in the first instance through an American publisher, in which case he’d promise to buy 500 sheets, maybe more. He then dictated a letter to Korda to this effect. Marvelous

Chatto have their foot in the Art’s Council door. Day Lewis is chairman and Parsons is on the board. We spoke of Eberhart, an old friend of Parsons’s from Cambridge days: his sweetness, his complete absence of malice and his monolithic devotion to poetry. Lastly, Parsons informed me that a Herbert West, friend of Eberhart’s, had invited him for lunch the next day. I refrained from telling him about West. Let him find out for himself. He also said he’d lunched with L. P. Hartley at the Garrick Club the week before, and that Hartley looked well. I neglected to call him because I still hadn’t read The Brickfield and The Betrayal, and it would have been too embarrassing to meet him this way.

September 31, 1967

Woodbrooke opening. I plan to take Hugh Doncaster’s course on Quakerism and Chrysanthi will do Tucker’s on the USA and the UN, plus embroidery and crafts. Mrs. Schaeffer, secretary of the Friends World Committee, wants to play violin-piano duets. We start on Thursday.

Finished The Brickfield. Boring ¾ of the way, then suddenly compulsive reading. All about an 18-year-old boy’s one and only, first and last, relations with a girl, after which he became a writer, and bachelor. Poor Hartley.

October 9, 1967

Daphne slept through the night for the first time!! Age 9 months, 2 days.

Weekend of 7th and 8th spent at Huddersfield with Konrad and Sheila Elsden. He is so masculine, jolly, forceful when alone, but the moment he enters the house he puts on an apron, cooks, washes dishes, reads stories to the children, and in general takes orders from his wife. Sheila, however, was in fine spirits, and actually quite pleasant at times. But we didn’t do very much. Drove up with Konrad Friday night, sat around all Saturday morning and afternoon until 4:00, when we walked on the moors. Saturday night showed slides of Mount Athos. Sunday morning, Quaker Meeting. Met the remarkable Alice Robson, age 87 and still a vigorous, useful Quaker lady. She spoke beautifully, and Konrad offered a fine prayer. Huddersfield not as bad as Konrad had pictured it to us, but still very grimy. Wolverhampton, which we saw from the train on the way back, was the worst of all the awful Midland towns. What horrors they are! And how decent they could have been, as proved by Cadbury’s Bournville.

October 12, 1967

I addressed the International Forum at Woodbrooke: subject: The Greek Coup: Before, During, and After. I tried to show why something was inevitable, and why a military dictatorship is just as much an honest expression of the Greek “essence” as is parliamentary democracy.

October 14, 1967

To Cambridge in a rented car to visit with Richard Dellamora, presently a student at Queens. Then to Robin and Ruth Scroggs—fine dinner, fine conversation. He is very depressed about U.S. foreign policy, and also the specter of Reagan as a presidential candidate. Ruth said something touching while we were alone for a moment: that it has taken her this long to “get to know Robin well enough so that I can feel sufficiently at ease to compose music while he’s in the house.”

Sunday we visited Noel Jones and Cathy and Chris. Chris and Cathy amused us with their repartee when the girl that Chris had thrown over the night before telephoned to ask if she could come to visit Cathy, though she’d do so only if she wouldn’t have to meet Chris. Both children had a delicious simplicity and straightforwardness that is rare. Chris passed cigarettes to Ruth Scroggs. Ruth: “No thank you. I only smoke when I’m writing music.” Chris: “Oh, that’s interesting. Whose brand do you smoke?” Noel produced a copy, translated, of the form all Greek civil servants have to fill out. The most horrendous loyalty oath imaginable. Have you ever been a member of the C.P. or a front organization? Do you know any members? Have you relatives in communist countries? Etc.

October 21, 1967

Article in the Manchester Guardian describing how the police are treating political prisoners and suspects in the Bouboulinas headquarters in Athens. Exactly the same, even the same building, as the description of Gestapo treatment in Ange Vlachos’s Ώρες ζωῆς. The seim anew.

October 24, 1967

Birmingham-London-Washington, DC

Train in the morning to London. Flight Pan Am London-Washington, DC leaving 2:30 London time and arriving Dulles airport 5:30 Washington time, or really 10:30 London time. My first jet flight, and of course remarkable. Marvelous cloud formations, all different patterns and consistencies. Like cotton stuffed together at times, at others thinned to fine wisps. It was remarkable, of course, to keep flying, and yet for daylight to persist when my watch told me it ought to be getting dark outside. Only at one or two moments, across the Atlantic, did we have clear sky so that we could see the ocean below, unobstructed. And at that height, 32,000 feet, with no clouds or land mass against which our motion could be compared, the plane seemed to be standing still, although it was of course proceeding at 600 mph. I had a sudden “experiential” realization of the fact that I was also whirling around on the earth, yet without any sensation of motion. Taxi from Dulles airport to Annandale, $13.00, the largest taxi fare I’ve ever paid. Sheila Ballard greeted me with a luscious hug, bless her Irish soul. Geoff was gracious and talkative as always, the boys handsome, sweet, well behaved. Geoff still has his moral sense, even after 14 months in the Army Materiel Command, but he also has picked up a lot of the Army reasoning. For instance, it is a strange sense of morality and public decency that keeps the generals from waging the Vietnam War the way they really would like to. And strangely, the way they suggest would very likely be more “humanitarian” than the ways public morality tolerates. For the public, it is all right to bomb the enemy, even sporting, because our pilot has a good chance of being shot down; but it is not all right to use nerve gas, which would give the entire population of Haiphong, for instance, diarrhea, long enough for us to occupy the city, and would then leave them as healthy as before. Nor is it “morally legitimate” according to the public to dig a half-mile side trench through the jungle, using atomic explosives, after having evacuated everyone—a trench that would make an impassible demarcation line and help greatly to bring about some clarification to the struggle. Geoff reiterated what he told me last time I saw him, about basic U.S. policy. The government feels, apparently, that the Soviet Union has “matured” to a point where they realize that a full-scale war could never be in their own interests, indeed would be suicidal. China is, in this respect, still “primitive” or “youthful.” The government policy is to occupy China in small wars that are just short of total (a new version of Dulles’s “brinkmanship”) for a period of 25 to 40 years, by which time she should have “matured” to the position now occupied by Russia, a maturation that will come only when she carries through her plans for industrialization, improves her standard of living, educates her masses, and in general reaches a stage where she would have more to lose in a total war than to gain.

Geoff hopes to be appointed director of the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research Lab eventually, and return to Hanover. Meanwhile, they are leading a strange, but typically American, life. The children go to football practice, Little League, every afternoon directly after school and don’t get home until about 7:00. Then on Saturday morning one has a game, on Saturday afternoon the other. The parents spend their time transporting them to the field. Every Saturday is football day, like it or not. Slaves! Then there is the commuting problem. Geoff rises at 6:00 a.m. in order to get to work at 9:00. In the afternoon it is the same: bumper to bumper for an hour or more. No social life because by the time he comes home he can’t face going across town again to a friend’s or to a movie. Also there is the babysitting problem. No wonder they long to return to Hanover. We had dinner, then talked until midnight, which of course was 5:00 a.m. for my poor body.

October 25, 1967

Washington, Shoreham Hotel, 2500 Calvert Street, NW

More talk. A shower—how lovely, after so many months. Geoff and I walked for a mile or so, briskly. Edward got “lost” and parents searched frantically, until of course they found him playing tranquilly in the rain under a tree. In the afternoon, Geoff drove me into Washington and we stopped at the Pentagon. Inconceivably huge. 30,000 people work there; the parking lots hold 20,000 cars, most likely. Geoff says that it takes a half hour just to get out of the parking lot when work is over. Do people mind, do they rebel? Most don’t. They welcome this way to spend their time, so they don’t have that much more leisure in which they have to be creative in spending their time. The Pentagon is a whole city: banks, post office, restaurants, shops, and miles and miles of corridors with offices. Chiefs of staff, Secretary of Defense, and all the lower ranges. The nerve center of an armed forces that all in all probably has 5,000,000 people on the payroll.

4:00 p.m. The Shoreham. Deluxe room at $18.00 a day. How lovely! And what an elegant, warm, tasteful hotel, with its gardens out back, its tasteful décor, its unostentatious luxury. At 6:00, group picture, then cocktails. Victor Butterfield; Merriwell Cunningham, who is the president of the Danforth Foundation; members of the selection committee; Joseph Heizberg of the New York Times; reporter from Time Magazine; editor of National Observer; and the ten lucky winners. Margaret Johnson, the administrative secretary, told me a good friend of hers was married to Malcolm Brown, his second wife. He had 3 children by the first, now 2 more. He remembered the foundation-building at Riparius. Is now at Barnard. Fellow from Reed told me they were considering Leonard Rieser for the new president but that Rieser had refused, bless him. A man from Pomona said that their presidential search committee was considering Rieser, Seymour, and Smallwood. We had a fine dinner. Then Cunningham explained the work of the foundation and Victor Butterfield made the rounds, in the style of honorary degrees, with “clever” citations. It was a bit corny. We broke up, and some of us sat in the bar for a while: De Mott from Amherst, who is a real joker, and Greenberg, very “sympathique.” I was exhausted but didn’t sleep very well.

October 26

Washington-Boston-Dublin

Up at 7:00. Breakfast of juice, poached eggs and coffee, for $1.65! At 8:30 we gathered to begin our discussion. Since we were to go to the White House, and since Butterfield in announcing this the night before had said that he would fully understand if some of us preferred not to go (he is a Quaker, they say; everyone went). I suggested that we discuss something relevant to this—namely, why we intellectuals are embarrassed at being patriotic, and in general why we have such an impoverished “community life.” I said that our colleges preach individualism in the grand Protestant manner: individual moral responsibility, individual intellectual inquiry, individual self-fulfillment, etc., without realizing that the individual is a fiction: every person is part of a stream going back into history and forward into the future; and part, also of an environment: family, college, nation, as the case may be. We—that is, the “intellectuals” and “sophisticates” deny this environment; we can do without it: it is our subject to which we give allegiance, and the college is considered almost inanimate, like a chair that can easily be given up for another chair; the same with country: we are ashamed of belonging, and try to act as though we needn’t belong at all if we so wished. All this, of course, was exacerbated in my mind because of what I saw and experienced in Greece. I realized how deeply I was an American, and how thankful; I realized, furthermore, that although there are various expressions of the community life that are repugnant to us—namely, fascism and communism—this should lead us to try all the harder to develop a creative and compelling third way, instead of denying that community life matters, or even need exist.

This was discussed, though not, I am afraid, with much continuity or coherence. There was one fellow, Reddich, who spoke in long Germanic sentences, with lengthy subordinations and qualifications, spouting them out as though by compulsion, and discouraging us all, although his articulateness was extraordinary. There was another, De Mott, who had a ready wit; he described colleges like Dartmouth and Amherst as wearing fleece-lined hair shirts, and said he was damned glad that students paid no allegiance to them, and that he, as teacher, considered his first duty to be to disengage the student intellectually from this, and other, unworthy environments.

At 10:30 we loaded into taxis and went to the North Gate of the White House. Police checked our identifications against a list; we entered the presidential office wing and went directly into the Cabinet Room. Bust of Kennedy; portrait of F.D.R. as a young man; plaque on the huge table: “Presented to FDR by Jesse Jones”; French doors leading into the private, and lovely, gardens behind the White House. The chairs each with a plaque indicating a cabinet ministry, and in the center a large chair for the president. We were introduced briefly to John Gardner, secretary of health, education and welfare, who seemed to be an old friend of Victor Butterfield’s; then we all sat down—I in the secretary of defense’s seat!—to await the president. We were chaperoned by Douglas Cates, presidential assistant with special responsibility for educational problems. Since we had about a half hour to wait, we continued our discussion. Cates asked about the publish-or-perish problem, and were there any “disincentives” for the man who did not publish. I told him I thought his word lovely, but its soft sound shouldn’t make us forget that there was indeed a very definite “disincentive”: the fact that you were fired! After a time, Reddich began one of his labyrinthine speeches, in the midst of which, at 11:00 a.m. sharp, in strode Lyndon Johnson. We all leapt to our feet. He sat; we sat. Victor Butterfield made a short introductory comment, saying who we were and why we were being honored, and what the Danforth Foundation was. Then the president spoke, actually for a full half hour, at first from some notes he had on a card, but then much more informally. It was a monologue, completely. I got the feeling that he is used to hearing himself on such occasions, and doesn’t expect any dialogue. He said, really very graciously, how glad he was to meet with us; that he had three engagements that morning: us, a meeting of the security council immediately afterwards, a reception for the president of Mexico. And we were just as important as the security council and the president of Mexico because education was the backbone of a country: nothing, but nothing, was more important. Then he went into old, and rather saccharine stories, which I’m sure are dragged out on all educational occasions—how he owes everything to a certain professor at Texas State Teachers College: if not for him he wouldn’t have done what he’d done; he’d probably be digging ditches instead of having 12 years in the House, 12 in the Senate, 3 as vice president and 3 or so as president. He then expanded on the accomplishments of his administration, in just 3 years, in education. “Eighteen education bills passed,” he kept repeating. “Eighteen.” And more money for education than was spent for the entire U.S. budget in the year—. (How deceptive these statistics are, as they don’t take into account the dollar’s decline in value!) He also regretted that we have to spend so much money on Vietnam; we’d be willing to stop if the other side was, but they’re not, so what can we do? It’s easy to see Vietnam, he continued, but not so easy to see what we’ve been doing more quietly, with the Soviet Union: 3 major treaties in my administration—non-proliferation of atomic weapons, treaty on outer space, and now a consular agreement whereby their people will be spread out over this country and our diplomats over theirs. And then there was Mrs. Johnson, who’d been out helping colleges and had just returned at 1:00 a.m. that night. And if you want to see what a woman can do in the interests of beauty, just take a look at the White House gardens. It was a sad performance though he of course has a certain charm. Fortunately for him, he had to stop. He stood up; we stood up; and he went round the table while each of us in turn introduced himself and shook the president’s hand, his left hand, his right had suffered a burn, and he kept it in his pocket. When he came to Prof. Biggers, a Negro from a small, poor college in Houston, the president of the Danforth Federation noted to the president that he—Professor Biggers—was the only Texan among the group. The president said he was especially glad to see him there. At 11:30 the president left and we were shooed out so that the security council could begin. As we were leaving, the garden door opened with a neat click and in came a man meticulously dressed and groomed, as though made of wax. He said “Hello” to us in a clipped voice: it was McNamara. (Geoff told me that McNamara is absolutely brilliant, a mental giant.) We were told later that the initiative for this visit to the White House came from Harold Howe in the department of education.

Back to the Shoreham. Lunch. Walk in the sun. Chat with De Mott in the lovely garden in back of the hotel. He had taught in Birmingham for a year, so we had common experiences and impressions, mostly about the weather. The afternoon discussion centered on direction versus indirection in teaching. De Mott held that we should deliberately cultivate amateurism, dilettantism, that the student should see the work as meaningful to him before he needs to understand its every nuance, struggle over technical matters, etc. Pretty much the problem of whether classics should be taught in the original language or in translation, applied to all fields. De Mott was of course against the New Criticism. The other side was defended by Greenberg and others. I tried to bridge the two fanaticisms by suggestion that all is true only in a given time and place. In contexts where students venerate the tradition we can go ahead and teach it “professionally”; in contexts, today’s for instance, where they are disaffected, we must be amateurish enough to interest them, to show them that the tradition is meaningful to them.

We broke up at 4:00, said cordial goodbyes. Taxi to National Airport. I telephoned my parents, also Ellen DeCesare. Lovely flight to Boston. How different the crowds were at Boston airport. Irish-Americans waiting for Aer Lingus; Italian-Americans; no more of the Washington Anglo-Saxon flavor. Night plane to Shannon & Dublin. No sleep. Sat next to an Irish mine worker returning after 11 years in Canada, to work in copper mines in the west of Ireland.

October 27, 1967

Dublin, Central Hotel, Exchequer Street

Coming into Dublin: Howth Head; the hills in Phoenix Park; the reclining Finn MacCool; sheep looking like grains of white rice scattered over green tablecloths. Post office. Statue commemorating the Easter Rebellion. AMDG St. Francis Xavier’s Church (Gardner Street), Mother Most Admirable Sodality, Special Retreat. For Men Whose Working Hours Prevent Their Attendance at Parish Retreats. Rev. Joseph Couran, S.J, Retreat Director. The Confession also, each with the priest’s name: Father Patrick O’Sullivan, etc. Browne & Nolan, Ltd. printers. Westmoreland Row Station. Merion Square. St. Stephen’s Green. Shelburne Hotel. Yeats memorial, an “attribute” by Henry Moore. The school children; the sniggers. How poor Dublin is: beggar women and children; slums; no new housing estates; general drabness and dirt; very depressing. St. Francis Xavier’s Church in Gardner Street—wasn’t this Father Conmee’s? I went to Eccles Street, my heart beating. But number 7 isn’t there any more. Numbers 1 to 5 are intact, but 6 and 7 are victims of what looks like a recent fire. Nothing stands but the front doors, with an empty shell behind; and the upper storeys collapsed. Mr. Bloom had to be rather athletic to climb over the railing and drop down to enter through the basement kitchen. It’s quite a drop, about 15 feet at least.

October 28, 1967

Dublin, Central Hotel, Exchequer Street

Saturday. Bus to Dalkey and Joyce’s Martello tower, which was closed for the winter, alas. But I saw the Forty-Foot hole in operation: a group of 8 or 9 men in their 50s was swimming with the temperature outside about 55, and me bundled in pullover and scarf. Lovely view from the tower: sea, strand, Howth Head in the distance. On the return trip I got off at Sandymount Strand, which was just as Joyce described it in Proteus: the cockle lake, the pools on the sand, stray couples accompanied by dogs. Quiet, fresh air—a lovely place to meditate. Passed H-E-L-Y-S on Dame Street: a large stationary store. Walked along the quays, past the Customs House, to see the Pigeon House in the distance, and returned along the Grand Canal, one of the four crossed by Mr. Bloom on his way to the cemetery, in Hades. Lots of walking. Dublin looked a lot better today, with sunlight and blue sky. I was the only one with an umbrella and scarf. In the afternoon I bought Chrysanthi a hand-knit sweater and beret. Then off to Phoenix Park, by bus. Lovely park: greens, lakes, swans, flowers. Saw the Wellington Obelisk; the placard thanks Wellington for “saving Europe and Asia.” Big words. To Little Britain Street to see Barney Kiernan’s, but it isn’t there any more. Also Nelson’s Pillar is gone, having been blown up by a bomb in 1966. But I found Belvedere College, which is indeed very impressive and plush, in a fashionable part of the city. As Simon Dedalus said, “Nothing but the best for the Jesuits.” Now to the Abbey Theatre for Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, a rollicking adaptation of his autobiography. The actor who played the mature Behan was an amazing likeness, both in looks and in voice. A young actor played the sixteen-year-old Behan, who was sent by the IRA to Liverpool with dynamite, was apprehended, and sentenced to three years in a Borstal. The play shows the pervasive prejudice against the Irish “micks” and “paddies,” but also how Behan’s good spirits, love of song, natural eloquence, and general pluck won over the others. It was well staged, well acted, with ballads, slapstick humor, pathos, and a wonderful rapport between stage and audience. It was of course thrilling to be in the famous Abbey Theatre, even if the building itself is new, the original one having burnt down. Dominating the main foyer, as you enter, is a lovely, huge portrait of W. B. Yeats in middle age, with his youthful face and mop of gray hair, like a patron spirit looking down upon his creation. There is also a portrait of George Russell (AE) by John B. Yeats, the poet’s father. The audience stood and listened to the national anthem before the performance. With Irish independence so relatively recent, and won at such cost, this was a moving experience and not just a formality, at least for me.

October 29, 1967

Dublin-Birmingham

Sunday. Walked to see George Moore’s house in Ely Place. Then to Quaker Meeting, Eustace Street. Very evangelical spirit: Bible readings, very Christ-centered—the most evangelical of the four Dublin meetings, as I learned later. The members were very friendly, talking to me; and the Lambs invited me to lunch. Harold Lamb, the patriarch, and one of his sons, not Douglas, but the young son, with his three children; wife was home with four-month-old baby. We all went to the Clarence Hotel for a simple and lovely dinner, with an easy flow of talk. Thence to the airport just in time for the 2:45 plane to Birmingham.

Behan in Borsal Boy: Priest to young Brendan: “You can come to confession, son.” Young Brendan: “But I haven’t sinned, Father.” Old Brendan: “Yes, and that means, I suppose, that clean boys don’t have to wash!”

November 3, 1967

To London for meeting in Friends’ House about possibility of aiding families of Greek political prisoners. Chairman was the FSC head of the “Europe Committee.” Joy Jones and Muriel Lindsay were present, and some others. We concluded that an approach might possibly be made through the new archbishop, who is familiar with Quakers because he visited the Salonika school. Nothing definite decided, however.

After the meeting I rushed to a concert by the Theodorakis ensemble, in Red Lion Square, a lovely corner of London. Met there Peter Cadogan, whom I had seen at the Omonia Hotel on the day of the coup. He is secretary of the Committee of 100 for non-violent direct action, and was organizer of the concert. It was a very emotional evening with a very good audience clapping, snapping fingers, shouting bravos. Theodorakis’s music becomes a bit wearisome in such a large dose, however. It was touching that this concert should be going on while he is languishing in prison, and facing a possible death sentence. Also Ritsos, the poet, author of many of the lyrics, is in jail. Awful!

I heard one Greek student, obviously long resident in England, say: “My people are the most lethargic in the world. Why, on the day of the coup there weren’t 20 people in Athens, there wasn’t even one, to go out to Constitution Square and cry Bravo for democracy.” How naïve he is! He should have been there himself, to get a belly full of machine-gun slugs.

November 11, 1967

Drove to Eastwood. There is a small plaque on the house where D. H. Lawrence was born. The house is still occupied as a residence. The street, or rather the neighborhood, with its rows of absolutely unadorned, identical homes, door by door, one room in front, one in back, two upstairs, is the most dismal I have ever seen. We glimpsed into one of the “parlors.” Minuscule. Filled to capacity by the usual “suite” of two huge armchairs and a settee. Out back, the kitchen, and the toilet outdoors. A plot of garden. Coal smoke belching from all the chimney pots. The pits are still operating, or at least some of them are. These rows, we were told, are all pit houses—still—that is, owned by the company. Some young men issued from the awful doors, which are of course without bells or ringers of any kind. Burly, black-faced, with huge chests and biceps. Yet the children are sweet tow-headed ragamuffins “killing each other” with toy sub-machineguns. Some of the girls were pretty, with nice legs: well fed. Yet what a childhood! What an awful awful place in which to grow up, with the fathers going off every morning to chop at the coal, returning filthy, and on Fridays spending their pay to get drunk—certainly they were justified—and then beating their wives.

Lawrence’s “chapel” was down the street, as dismal as all the rest. His sense of being trapped, of being a sensitive “freak” in an alien environment, must have been overwhelming. And it is certainly shallow and heartless of anyone to condemn Lawrence for his sensitivity or need to rebel, or his fervent hatred of mines, slag heaps, and mine owners. By comparison, Joyce, in Dublin, was living in a modern Athens, the cultural center of the world. His “professional sensitivity” may seem to us a bit precious and affected, perhaps, his rebellion overdone, even psychopathic, but not Lawrence’s. He was fighting, almost physically, biologically, for his right to live as a “human” instead of a “mole.”

We drove to one of the pit heads, which of course is much more mechanized than it could have been in Lawrence’s day, with huge elevators, loading devices, storehouses, etc. Unfortunately nothing was in operation, as it was Sunday.

Back on the M1. Tea in the Motorway service area, which made us feel we were in America, and also sense the very real attraction of certain American ways: the newness, clean lines, spaciousness, large windows, and of course the efficient heating.

A full day ended with a musicale at Woodbrooke. Blanche Schaeffer and I played the first two movements of Schubert’s 1st Sonatina, in A major. What a splendid piece, and so simple to play, really. There were songs in Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, German, English, Swedish, and Camaroons. Choir; recorder group; John Kaye singing the executioner’s song from the Mikado, and the Camaroon students, the one who is a minister, and a colleague of his, also a Presbyterian, got us all singing a jazzy song that meant Thank Thee, Lord. The same rhythms and flavor as the gospel music of the American south. They also got us all dancing spasmodically and jerkily in a dozen different kinds of twists. To conclude, the choir group sang a hymn in divine harmony.

What a gift to be able to entertain oneself wholesomely in this way. I remember this from the Woodbrooke of 1955 also; none of the freshness has been lost over the years. The place seems to attract resourceful, concerned, talented and above all wholesome people. The Dartmouth student drinking himself into a lonely stupor on a Saturday night is a sad comparison.

November 27, 1967

“The rule of ethics [is] that one could only wish for oneself to be good and for other people to be happy.”—L. P. Hartley, The Betrayal (London), p. 81.

Spoke to the Ελληνικός Κύκλος of the University of Birmingham Classics Department on Kazantzakis and demotic. Nice group. They actually give a B.A. in Modern Greek, and all classics students are required to take a term of Modern Greek. Those who wish can spend time at the University of Thessaloniki. All this because of the drive of Professor George Thomson, the father-in-law of Χρήστος Αλεξίου. The Reader, Willets, was also very much for the “continuity of Greek language and civilization.” The evening was “Greek” and relaxed. Dinner at the house of the department secretary, a young girl with a three-year-old boy, separated from husband. Too much food; nice wine; all the officers of the Κύκλος there; talk about Athos, Byzantium, Kazantzakis, the Pattakos régime. At the talk itself, ρετσίνα. No hurry to begin. Afterwards, long discussion (argument?) about Kazantzakis’s virtues and defects, with the usual responses, especially by the Greeks present: that his characters aren’t believable; that he retreats to metaphysics instead of confronting “reality.” Humorous incident on the way home. The girl-student who drove me (Judith Herrin) was short of cash and hadn’t filled her gas tank. So we ran out of petrol half way home; all then pushed the car (luckily a Morris Minor) to the nearest station, which of course was closed. I returned on the bus.

Later saw Willets, Alexiou, etc. again when Father Peter Levi, S.J. (!) spoke in the university’s Byzantine series. What a bizarre Jesuit. In dog collar, lecturer’s gown, and a bright green pullover. Very homosexual, I felt. But brilliant, and able to converse easily in δημοτική. The Jesuits send him to Greece every winter for 4 or 5 months because his health is too delicate for the English climate. And in his Jesuit college at Oxford, Campion Hall, he has no duties, no students. He is just maintained: to write, think, worship.

Also heard Rev. Κάλλιστος Timothy Ware in the same series. He’s English to the bone, a convert to Orthodoxy, and now a παπάς with beard, hairdo, and all. He spoke well on St. Gregory Palamas and St. Symeon the New Theologian, but had none of the charming eccentricity of Peter Levi, who spoke of the church on Poros as a haystack of ice cream, dressed in 300 white petticoats.

Two trips to London for the Europe Committee of FSC, trying to send relief workers to Greece. Alun Davies, the very capable chairman; Joy Jones, Muriel Lindsay, a woman named Baker who remembered me from Haverford (I hadn’t the foggiest idea who she was); she even remembered that I was planning to “retire” to my farm in the Adirondacks. On the first trip (November 3rd) I stayed for the Theodorakis singers and met the Executive Secretary of the Committee of 100, who had been in the Omonia Hotel with me on the day of the coup. Afterwards, cabaret, very good

All through term, I played chamber music with Blanche Schaeffer, a very indifferent violinist, but capable and energetic director of Friends World Committee. How I wish I could speak French decently, to communicate with her mother! We did Bach, Mozart, and performed (!) the first Schubert Sonatina (B-flat) at a Woodbrooke musicale. Towards the end of term I did a Sammartini piece with Patt Hibbs, an oboist. We also tried a very difficult Hindemith piece, with a modicum of success. She is a strange, vibrant, intense creature; looks exactly like the anemic long-necked woman in the pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Birmingham museum.

Saw a fine production of Pier Gynt at the Birmingham Rep. Very much like Kazantzakis’s plays: metaphysical, a cry for freedom from the bourgeois. Fantasy fused with reality. But Ibsen got, and gets, performed. Poor Kazantzakis!

December 4–5, 1967

Lovely excursion to Oxford. Pretext: the Danforth dinner. We stayed in luxury at the Randolph Hotel, the boys baby-sitting while Chrysanthi and I ate: sherry, hors d’oeuvres, plaice, roast duckling, sweet, liqueurs, coffee. Sumptuous. They toasted the queen, lugubriously. No one toasted President Johnson, for fear that too few would deign to rise. I sat next to a gorgeous blond, about 22, recent graduate of Mt. Holyoke, reading English lit at Oxford. How young girls exhilarate me! Beauty! The only disappointment—no, not really a disappointment—was that who should we meet there but the Lanhams, she, not he, being the holder of a Danforth fellowship. I disliked him intensely at Dartmouth and he perhaps me, but here, as so often happens, we were “old friends.” It was only later on, when he got Merriwell Cunningham and us together for drinks, and monopolized the conversation in his whining Brooklynese voice, that I confirmed my earlier dislike. What a thoroughly unpleasant creature!

Earlier, we visited Muriel Lindsay and John Garrard. The time with Muriel, strangely, was rather stiff, though she certainly did her best, and was very smiling and warm. I think it was Chrysanthi who maintained the reserve, which is rare. Had a pleasant tea with Garrard in his little home south of Oxford. His wife is Vietnamese, from Saigon, obviously very well placed. Her brother-in-law is presently a cabinet minister. I asked her if she favored the American presence, and she replied, “Of course I do. The Americans are all we’ve got. If they leave, ‘we’ [meaning of course her class] all get killed.” “So,” I said, “it’s really desperation. You know that your days are numbered, and you’re using us to postpone the doom that is practically unavoidable.” “Yes, it’s desperation,” she agreed. Garrard surprised me with his anti-British feeling, since he’s British himself. “Oh, but they’re so inefficient,” he kept moaning. Yet he liked his Merton College atmosphere, dining in; high table; sitting next to great scholars and all the rest of the lovely inefficiency.

Oxford gorgeous, nicer than Cambridge because it’s more grouped, clustered, and gives a more genuine medieval feeling. But this is balanced with a sparkling modern shopping street: all plate glass and chrome; a bit of Americana where it’s needed, as long as it doesn’t one day predominate.

Tuesday morning we walked to Blackwell’s, the Sheldonian, the great library. Then went for lunch with George Hill. Found him married. Hadn’t seen him since 1959 when he had just commissioned my translation of Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός. Now the one-man operation is a “two-man” one; his wife is a cultivated German Jewess, extremely pleasant and gracious in a plump sort of way. He: all hospitality. The books are all doing well, especially Zorba, which of course was helped by the film. He rejected Antonakes’s dissertation as too “dissertationish.” Told me the same stories as last time: How the Swedes changed the Agha’s boyfriend to a girl in Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται, and how, when he submitted the manuscript of Friar’s Odyssey translation to Bowra and T. S. Eliot, he received a flourishing euphony from Bowra—the greatest work of the 20th century—and from Eliot one word: “unreadable.” I made propaganda for my work-in-progress, although I’d rather have Chatto do it.

The great surprise “plunder” from this visit was a typescript of Mme Kazantzakis’s letters/biography in Amy Mims’s translation. I had written to Mims seeking a copy, had received no reply, and here, unexpectedly at Cassirer’s, was a duplicate carbon copy that he simply handed to me to keep.

We also caught a glimpse of Angus Lindsay, who came to us at the Randolph. He’s about 19, six feet tall, and very gentle and sweet. Wants to come to the U.S. for six months before entering university next fall. Muriel came too, and our second visit with her had the true warmth and glow, making up for the strange chill of the first.

Returned through Stratford. How lovely the countryside between Stratford and Oxford, and how different from the Midlands. Dragged the children to the various sites, after dark. Culture or die!

As soon as we reached home, I rushed out again to go to the Ελληνικός Κύκλος to hear Litterdale lecture on Μακρυγιάννης, whom he has translated. He made him out very neurasthenic, pathological, seeing him from an Englishman’s point of view. Subsequently, Alexiou read me aloud from the preface to the Memoirs, and here Makriyannis, far from seeming an oriental maniac, reminded me of the Augustan men of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment, so symmetrical and polished was his style: full of balance, antithesis—a beautiful prose. And he taught himself to read and write, just so he could embark on the book. A remarkable man.

Litterdale’s wife, a beautiful Ελληνίδα. We talked. She was born in Σιδερόκαστρον but came early to Salonika. Before long, I’d discovered that she’d worked at the Quaker School, and knew Chrysanthi at least by name. I told her that we’d just that instant come from visiting Muriel Lindsay, expecting her to be delighted and inquisitive, which she wasn’t—and this perplexed me. When I returned home I understood why. Chrysanthi remembered her. She worked as Lindsay’s translator the final year of his tenure at the School, and he fell in love with her, much to the chagrin and embarrassment, no doubt, of all the goodly Quakers in Friends’ House. No wonder she wasn’t enthusiastic about having news from Mrs. Lindsay!

December 10, 1967

We performed again at Woodbrooke. Leander played “Darktown Strutter’s Ball” and “St. Louis Blues.” Alec and Leander did a violin-piano duo; Chrysanthi sang Μανούλα μου, to which we all danced the κλέφτικο, myself included. On a previous occasion the boys had also done Theodorakis’s Όταν θα πας στον ουρανό. We concluded with Chrysanthi and Alec dancing to the Zorba music played by Leander. All this was for the annual Christmas party given by Woodbrooke for the old and infirm of the neighborhood. A very heartwarming event, although (the rest of) the entertainment wasn’t very stirring.

December 12, 1967

Goodbyes at Woodbrooke. The Warden, to whom I hadn’t said more than two words the entire term, surprised me by the warmth of his farewell and good wishes, and his remark, “It’s nice for us to have a family like yours, one that really holds together. Don’t see that very often.” Blanche Schaeffer sent Daphne a birthday card that we found on the boat, and the Woodbrookers a joint card for all of us.

Memories: Hugh’s good lectures and discussions, where I played devil’s advocate. John Kaye the retired schoolmaster and amateur actor-director. John Mawston, who after two weeks was engaged to be married to Helen, who had gone off to Algeria, and was increasingly melancholy afterwards. The strangely ugly but lovable Molly Porter. Rachel from Dublin. Ruth Brand, lummucking around like an awkward male, yet ravishingly beautiful if she’d only take care of herself. Eric Tucker with his strange accent, always worried about getting speakers for his forum; very cold and unapproachable. Our tutor, Muriel Poulter, smiling old maid who lectured on St. John’s gospel and British churches. Jesse, who couldn’t stop talking. Denys, the retired jeweler, living on his coupons on Majorca, and full of Hellenic verve. Mary the social worker, being very “advanced,” able to talk about sea, etc., but what did she practice, poor thing, as she slowly was passing from youth into old maid-dom.

December 13, 1967

London

Lovely walk along the Thames, in front of the Royal Festival Hall. While we were waiting for the boat train we saw a headline about Constantine’s counter-coup in Greece. Very excited. But all our predictions turned out wrong.

December 14–19, 1967

SS Queen Elizabeth

Smooth crossing. Even Chrysanthi attended all meals but one. I read practically all of Mme Kazantzakis’s letters/biography in typescript: an extraordinary document that shows Kazantzakis as an entirely different man that one would suppose from other accounts: as loving and lovable, very attracted to some, very warm and solicitous. And how he can write!

I went to the cinema every day. Each and every film was about war and violence: medieval knights slaughtering each other like gladiators; modern crime, sadism.

December 19, 1967

20 E. 74th Street

Home. Dad recovering well after the gall bladder operation. Bought a new car. In the evening, we received a call from Bubbles. Sidney had fallen, and she couldn’t lift him. Dad and I hastened downstairs. He was on the floor, in a half-extended, half-crouching position his head elevated, resting on a low stool. He looks 95 years old, is just a living skeleton, the result of his cancer, which is literally starving him to death. No flesh, no muscles, no strength. “I’m like a dying horse,” he said to my father as he lay there, unable to rise. We lifted him gently. When I placed my hands beneath his armpits there was no flesh, just skeleton covered by a film. It was impossible to grasp him without causing him pain. As we were maneuvering, trying to devise the best way to raise him (we decided to do it in two stages: first to seat him on the stool, and from there to lift him upright), my father made small talk to divert him. We had just called Alice in Arizona and Dad mentioned how pleasant these calls were, but how deceptive the time—or how easily, and expensively, it elapsed. The last call had cost $9.00. Sidney, still on the floor, looked up and said, “You know, Adolph, somewhere in the Talmud there’s a prayer: Dean God, forgive me for the pleasures I denied myself.” We placed him in bed, and his noble wife spent ten minutes adjusting his helpless body so it could be comfortable. He wanted to urinate “if the gentlemen don’t mind,” but was too weak to void anything. “Have you ever been so weak?” he asked my father. Poor man, he has never been told of the cancer, and believes he will get well. Finally Bubbles gave him some codeine, and he slept. This has been going on for a year. She is a saint, full of good cheer, patience, indulgence. She told Dad on one occasion, “I am a fortunate woman: first for having had such a fine life with this wonderful man, and second for being able to see him out of life, and to help his passage in any way I can.”

December 21, 1967

Hanover

Drove to Hanover. No lights on car, except front headlights, but it was just a fuse. How beautiful New Hampshire and Vermont are! How nice to return to such scenery! No snow. Warm. I was able to get the storm windows on, and to rake the leaves.

December 23, 1967

We have been warmly received by friends, the Williamsons and the Rassiases especially. The Taylors stopped in. Chrysanthi is going to teach Modern Greek in my stead, using John Rassias’s Peace Corps techniques.

December 25, 1967

Music and carol singing at the Vances. Bill Vance and Alec on violin, Leander on piano, Bennet Vance on ‘cello. Ehrmann was there with his grown sons, one of whom is an assistant director-trainee in Hollywood, and very desirous of letting everyone know. I found him obnoxious. Afterwards, turkey at Williamsons’. Lowell Schwartz was there with his new wife.

On Sunday: Meeting. Nice to return to that home also. I spoke about Jesus’ sense of being a son to an ever-meaningful Father, combining what I’d learned from Muriel Poulter and from Lossky’s book about emptying: κένωσις.

December 27, 1967

Lunch at the Barclay Joneses’ in South Pomfret. Their son and daughter were there, with spouses and children. The house is more modest than I had expected.

December 30, 1967

Kazantzakis to Börje Knös, July 10, 1955 (in Eleni’s book, typescript p. 704): “At present you too are resting in the country. What does ‘rest’ mean for us? It means: We are working at what we want, and not what external necessity demands.”

Kazantzakis on Naples: ❡ . . . Everywhere a filth royale, glowing in the sun. The people spit, piss wherever they happen to be, shove not their fingers but their entire hands into colossal nostrils of infinite elasticity. (Επιστολές προς τη Γαλάτεια.)

❡ Sadness. How brightly the big eyes shine, all fire in the midst of rags and laziness. This spirit is all wasted. For lack of use, it evaporates in flamboyant improvisation, jovial ballads, futile exhilaration. . . . “Why should we think?” one pale, magnificent youth said to me. “All’s in vain in the presence of so much beauty.” Here thinking would break the harmony. The people of the north think in order to protect themselves: for their own self-preservation, to replace the ugly world around them with the world their own brains invent. Here, thought is superfluous. —In Eleni’s letters.

1968

Hanover

January 1–June 17

Riparius

June 18–September 3

Hanover

September 4–December 31

January 18, 1968

Good Meeting this morning. Elizabeth Ballard, who is a poet at heart, spoke of the difference between the fingers in a musical composition and the spirit. With our spirit we hear it one way; with our fingers we play it another—and inferior—way. To concentrate on getting our fingers right seems to neglect and impede the spirit, until we realize that only through the fingers can the spirit of the music be realized.

I spoke also, of my melancholy since returning to the U.S. Like Virginia Woolf I meet this by observing: by observing my own despondency. Maybe all this is simply the entry into middle age. When you are young you are necessarily self-centered; you want to assert yourself sexually, then to get a good job, be admired, be secure, etc.—all in terms of personal assertion and fulfillment. Perhaps middle age begins when this process concludes. Now is the time to expand our awareness to society. The focus should no longer be: what am I dong to utilize my potential, etc., but rather: how does my personal solution fit into the larger picture, into the context of society, and ultimately of God. So, I concluded, perhaps it was the insufficiency of groups that has been causing my melancholy, an insufficiency that is particularly galling as I enter middle age and try to see myself in a context larger than the personal one. Many are discouraged by the U.S.: how can this be a meaningful context for us any longer? And Dartmouth? Only the Quaker group functions spiritually, drawing out the best in the individual.

I don’t want to meet the problem by retreating to five-finger exercises, burying the problem in busyness. One is buoyed up, of course, by the little joys: a baby’s smile, a lovely sun, a student with his arm around a coed’s waist; but this isn’t enough, especially when you feel that all meaningful groups have been undermined and made irrelevant. Something I read yesterday, however, in Teilhard, has given me encouragement. He says that the very turning inward to self that is at the root of our modern isolation—that is, the very increase in self-consciousness that has come with the Renaissance and Reformation is a necessary stage in evolution, leading back to valid groups and indeed to the first time in history when men have consciously been able to think in terms of one world. Even the materialism, especially cars, planes, televisions, is a collaborator in this process, making for a degree of psychic intercourse and interpenetration never before possible or conceivable. Hence the finger-exercises, so to speak, although seeming at first to deaden the music, will eventually produce the spiritual result that is desirable, and our present obsession with self, a kind of societal youth, will lead to a meaningful sense of the group, and the hump of middle age will be crossed.

Teilhard also says that love is simply the affinity of one body for another, so that one molecule can be said to be in love with another when it joins with the latter to form an aggregate. In this sense, also, all the various forms of love: heterosexual, homosexual, friendship, filial, paternal, maternal, are also subsumed. Like dogs, we are attracted to each other. And this, even in its most sordid manifestations, is that wonderful thing: love.

January 21, 1968

We received word that Δημοσθένης Προύσαλης died. Strange, I felt nothing and Chrysanthi didn’t seem to either. We have entered the downward curve, when we must now begin listing the deaths of people we have known or loved, until someone lists ours.

March 11, 1968

Absurd world. Paul Buseck was on one of his business trips. He left his hotel in Dallas, Texas, went to the parking lot to get his car, and was buried under a building that collapsed on top of him.

May, 1968

Modern Greek symposium at the University of Maryland. Μιτσάκης, Friar, Keeley, Λαούρδας, and others. Met Tom Doulis, Andonis Decavalles. Reunion with Ευρώ and with Sarah Niles Kafatos. My embarrassment in thinking that Ευρώ was Sarah. If a young girl ever did fall for me (as I in my ignorance thought perhaps Sarah had), I would be helpless. The revolutionary students, wanting to kill in order to oust the junta. Met Ambassador Palamas. Exhilarating three days. At the end, we founded the Modern Greek Studies Association.

Summer (Terpni), 1968

Lots of haying. Wrote essay on Kazantzakis and politics for Panichas’s anthology. Also completed chapter on Kazantzakis and demotic. Fine visits from Williamsons, Ballards, Carlsons. Also Richard and Aina Taylor with two mothers-in-law. Trout all died at once. Hedgehogs: trapping, hitting them over the head with a baseball bat. Two lambs, which I slaughtered together with Bill Heid. Shingled side of house with Jeff Amory, who stopped just before returning to Hong Kong. New neighbors: Ralph and Milly Morrell (Sibler’s place). Alas, they are “developing it.” Sibler’s many visits, with Ora, and his new girlfriend and the nice Italian lady d’un certain âge. Coleen estranged. She wanted to visit, too, but we had to warn her off, lest she meet Carl. Visit from Dr. Barnard on her way to a California home for the aged. Leslie now married and radiant. Visit from Carmans. He’s built another home. Visit even from Rabbi Green, who presented me with a little book he published in Israel, in Hebrew. Vanity. Parents, with Alice’s children. Unusual problems. Alice caught in Prague the day the Russians invaded. Got out to Frankfort after three days.

September, 1968

Lovely visit from Peter Gardner and his second wife, Mary Helen (Maitch). Our friendship still very warm. They both were enthused by Hanover, making me realize how fine it is to live here. I submitted Peter’s name as a candidate for the assistant director of Hopkins Center, but nothing came of it.

Fall term, 1968

Work on “Negro Committee” and COP regarding ROTC problem. Chairmanship of Comparative Literature. Wellek’s visit.

November 8, 1968

To Montreal with Rogers and Soong Elliott. First time Chrysanthi and I had been off alone in how long! Eat eat eat. French food, Chinese food, Brittany food. Hot baths. Sleep. Croissants leisurely in Aux Delice’s on Ste. Catherine Street. All this made possible, of course, by our having the au pair girl, Rosemary Chedburn, for the year.

November 15–16, 1968

To Cambridge (Massachusetts). Lunch with Keeleys, Prof. and Mrs. Cedric Whitman, and George Seferis and his wife. Tour of the Greek collection at Houghton and Widener libraries. Mrs. Paul Buck, the curator, wide-eyed Philhellene, Ο Κύριος Σταύρος, ο υπουργός from Cyprus, who got a little drunk toward midnight and started dancing ridiculously. The “group” all there: Νικολόπουλος, Ευρώ, Keeley, Decavalles. Seferis’s reading splendid. Keeley read in English, then Seferis in Greek. I liked especially “The King of Asine,” and “Helen” (very appropriate for Vietnam), and a little poem about art, roughly: “As the wind-blown tree retains the shape imposed on it by the wind, after the wind has left, so words retain the shape imposed on them by the soul of the writer, after he has left.” I felt the desolation of realizing how I am wasting my life in frivolities. Only art matters. Only creativity. Michael and Ellen Antonakes were there. He shared this feeling. (How he glows when he dances!) Party afterwards at the home of the Damascos. Met Vrettos, novelist who admired my Greco. Also had long conference with Προυσής, who offered detailed corrections and suggestions for my Kazantzakis and demotic chapter, showing how I tend to generalize from insufficient evidence. Breakfast next morning with Bob and Ilona Bell. He, too, is so nice. There are many fine people in my life. Deo gratias! Seferis’s humor, a kind of defense.

1969

Hanover

January 1–June 15

Riparius

June 15–September 20

Hanover

September 20–December 31

February 23, 1969

Talking for several hours today with Peter Sorlien. I realized how wrong I was in giving Stephen Cox an Ε last term. No, I had known this before, but I suddenly realized something else, perhaps because I’d just finished lecturing on Under Western Eyes—namely, that the bond of trust established between Cox and myself, or rather Cox’s trust in me, was more important that the fact that Cox infringed the rules, did not fulfill requirements, etc. I upheld one group of values but in the process betrayed something else that was more vital. Sorlien also suddenly illuminated the problem of grades for me. The whole system is based on the ingrained American need for producing something. The student takes the course so that it may “produce” something—namely, the grade. He cannot take the course in and for itself because American life doesn’t value anything in and for itself. Athletics must produce a prize; study must produce a published article, and so forth. This whole syndrome also accounts for the taciturnity of students in class. Because they are worried about what their performance will produce and because they view the teacher as someone with power over them, not as a fellow-explorer in learning, they are circumspect, preferring to remain silent rather than take the chance of saying something silly. Nor do they enjoy talk for its own sake, intellectual exchange for its own sake, wit for its own sake. The question remains, of course, what to do about this. The revolutionists, somewhat naïvely and irresponsibly, say: Destroy the system. But they do not say what we are to replace it with, and do not explain why people will act any better under a new system. And surely it is folly to expect that the educational system, especially on the college level, can be changed unless the systems in high school and grade school are also changed, and ultimately the entire system of the country itself.

My own thinking at present, as expressed most recently in my chapel talk on values, is that we must somehow convince the present system to support something that is, in a sense, its own negation but at the same time its flower, and proof of its “bigness.” In other words, we must convince a system based on productivity to support a remnant, a leaven that rejects productivity, just as we must convince a system based on violence to support a remnant that rejects violence. Somehow, the system must come to view these “useless,” “parasitic,” “irresponsible” remnants as necessary for the system’s spiritual health, like the salt that keeps the meat from rotting—just as the feudal system viewed the monasteries. The great danger, of course, is that the system in so doing will “outsmart” itself, and in supposedly tolerating these remnants will really use them as a kind of front to hide things that need hiding. Thus the toleration and recognition, I suppose, must always be precarious, must always seem to be a threat to the system; otherwise the use of the remnant as a front will be almost inevitable.

February 26, 1969

Jonathan Mirsky, who was a witness at the Spock trial, told me that the judge was 86 years old, born the same year as FDR. Jonathan, from the witness box, could see that the old man had a hot water bottle under each foot, and that as soon as he seated himself he surreptitiously undid his garters, whereupon his socks crumpled down around his ankles. In the interval, two fresh hot water bottles were brought.

March 27, 1969

❡ The Modern Greek language can be said to have suffered a stroke. Vowels, the full oi’s and ei’s of classical days, have been eclipsed to a waning, whining ee. Obsessive jumbling of consonants in the dark speech of a brilliant, impaired mind. A crime committed in the name of Grimm’s Law. —James Merrill, in The (Diblos) Notebook, p. 94.

April 28, 1969

Attended meeting of the SDS group in Parkhurst last night. About 200 students crowded into the hallway of Parkhurst Hall, which they had “occupied” all day long. Looking at them, I had an epiphany: they were adults, not boys. Finally, they were doing something that was real. They were attempting to move mountains, and ready to take the consequences for failure. In another epiphany I saw them as like the guerrilla bands gathered in the Greek mountains. The same quiet dignity yoked with an incipient ferocity and even brutality. The same ritualistic postures: music, camaraderie, free sex, equality of male and female, respect for the other so long as he made sense and displayed παλικαριά.

Their meeting was conducted on a plane higher than that of the faculty meeting. The chairman was better. (They rotate leadership, which, as in Quakerism, produces many good leaders.) They spoke to the point, without wasting time. When someone began to say something irrelevant to the motion on the floor, he was shouted down. In many things, especially minor questions, there was a splendid efficiency. “I’ll hear one speaker pro and one speaker con,” said the chairman. After the two speakers, the vote was taken.

One thing I conclude after all this is that we have prolonged our educational process unduly. These men are playing silly games when they should be in the world making true use of all their energy, wit, and moral fervor. We scream that they are immature, but it is we, through a huge systematic conspiracy of coddling and overprotection, who have forced them to grow up immature.

May 1969

Sit-in by students. State troopers, mass arrest at 3 a.m. Trial. Thirty days in jail and $200 fine. Of those I knew or had taught, the following were in jail: Sandy Mackie, Steve Tozer (freshman advisee), Dan Taggart (the one who wrote such an open, confessional paper in a course the year before), Frank Reynolds (Deerfield graduate, English 2, Greek 11, English 59), Dan Daley (Deerfield), Steve Stoci, Ed Levin, David Green. My involvement included (chiefly) writing an essay “Myth, Metaphysics and Politics” treating student unrest in terms of Bergson and Georges Sorel. This essay achieved a vogue on campus; I distributed about 300 copies. Prison visits. Mr. Tozer overnight, came to visit his son in jail. Then the return, and the “internal trials” with poor Bill Ballard in an impossible position as chairman of the committee on discipline. A disturbing (and fascinating) term, but very disruptive of my work on Kazantzakis

I was promoted to full professor at a salary of $16,000 plus 16% TIAA-CREF.

July 23, 1969

Riparius

Reinoud Oort came to America for a clergyman’s congress in Boston, and as part of sightseeing arrangements was taken to Burlington, Vermont. We drove up to get him, returned to Terpni via Champlain ferry and Ausable Chasm, spent the day and the next. He walked in the woods, helped to mow, talked. I had always told him how much I wanted him to see the farm, but had never dreamed that it would become a reality. Now we must visit him in Den Helder.

July 25, 1969

Bob Bell and Ilona spent the weekend. He is taking his Ph.D. orals next year.

Kazantzakis book going fairly well. I am up to 1940, with the middle section written out and the first ⅓ still in outline.

The Modern Greek Studies Symposium looks good. We have great names lined up: Δημαράς, Τερζάκης, Σαββίδης, Λορεντζάτος, Μιτσάκης, Peter Levi, Bouvier, and others. Let’s hope those in Greece will be allowed out. Mike Keeley and I have been the coordinators.

August 2–3, 1969

Kinhaven, Weston, Vermont, one night at Markham House

We visited Leander. Alec, Daphne, Chrysanthi, Mother, Father, and myself. Saturday night was a remarkable concert by the staff: fine performances of fine, and very varied, music. Imagine, in one evening, to hear the following: Bach cantata solo for soprano with oboe obligato; sonata by Petil for brass quintet; woodwind quintet by a contemporary composer; 16th century music for two recorders, gamba, and percussion; Gesualdo madrigal; Villa Lobos quartet for oboe, flute, horn, and clarinet; and the Dvorák piano quintet. The next day, Sunday, the students performed, less expertly, of course, but they did music that was just as varied and interesting. Selections by Byrd and Farmer for full chorus; sonata for two trumpets, two trombones, and horn; CPE Bach trio for flute, clarinet, and piano; Haydn piano trio, played by Leander at piano; Mozart quartet in G for strings; Mozart Divertimento for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn; trio for winds by Mrs. Dushkin; frippery for brasses; Morris Dance fantasy for 2 recorders, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, 2 violins, cello, piano, percussions; Stamitz quartet; Milhaud suite for oboe, clarinet, bassoon; Beethoven trio; Rossini quartet; Boccerini quintet for guitar and strings; Hindemith quartet for piano, clarinet, violin, cello (marvelous music); Chavez toccata for percussion (!), and finally a composition for full orchestra composed and conducted by a sixteen-year-old student, Bruce Adolph, a fine, mature piece.

Leander played with delicacy and sensitivity, although he had to fight a fly buzzing round his head, and muffed an arpeggio near the end. He is very sensitive and self-conscious, reminding me of a tennis player who hurls his racket when he misses a shot. But he seems to be thriving in the camp, with lots of friends. Certainly his musicianship has improved considerably, the fruit of good coaching and a conducive environment. I had an overall lovely feeling at the camp that civilization is not dead (though some, I suppose, would call this a fossilized remains). Here were people banded together to produce something beautiful. They were all vibrant and energetic, with a kind of renaissance youthfulness, and also an old-fashioned appreciation of hierarchy, for it was all too clear that the adults were superior, had something to teach, and that the students had lots to learn. A true university.

The Schultzes delivered Jerry McLane, who then returned with us to Terpni, while my parents stayed on for a week at the Blue Gentian Inn in Londonderry.

September 8, 1969

Chrysanthi and the children are in Hanover, and I have returned to the farm for 10 days to try to continue my book without interruption. Lonely at first, especially after dark, but I am quickly getting used to that. Also keeping busy, painting the living room floor. The weekend I spent in that graceful city, Montreal, going up Friday afternoon. Stayed in the Queen’s Hotel instead of the Windsor, which is too expensive. Chinese dinner. Evening in “Gay Paris” watching poor striptease. One of the dancers, the loveliest of the lot, joined me and asked if she could order a small bottle of wine. It came, with a bill for $16.00. I sent it back, and she had to be content with 2 cocktails at $3.50 each. I drank beer! She turned out to be a native of Worthing, England, with English father and French mother. Came to Canada at age 5. Divorced, with 2 children. I asked her how she spent her days. “Taking care of my children and going to court.” “To court? What for?” “For mingling.” She seemed sweet and decent; hadn’t finished high school; completely and magnificently bilingual. After her dance she went to another table. Maybe she got her small bottle there. Saturday morning to Aux Delices for café-croissants. As I was finishing, a heavy person with a pot belly asked me the time, then if I was from New York, then if my name was Peter Bien, then if I remembered him, which of course I did. It was Gregory, the porter at Rochester General Hospital when I worked there as an orderly, and also the most faithful participant in our work camps, both years. We had lots to reminisce about, all the doctors and nurses: which were married, which dead (Dr. Farlow, Dr. Killip, both gone), Miss Hoover married, poor thing, etc. Also the orderlies: Jack, Tony (garbage collector), Garcia, Richard (doorman at Paramount Theater). Gregory’s own career: went to NY for 6 months as orderly at Rockefeller Institute; returned to Rochester, Iola Hospital, then to State Hospital for the Aged; fired for kissing the old ladies. “When they’re senile they’re cute,” he told me. Unemployed; then 4 years ago took a job as Pinkerton Guard (nights) at the Eastman School. Works 12 midnight to 8 a.m. All alone in the building, except for cleanup men. Nothing has happened in all the four years. Routine. Lives with father and brother. Eats continually. We talked about Peter Gardner, Jeanne Ludmann, Nancy Fairbank, Woody and Merrlynanne Thomas, Mrs. Fish (now dead), who didn’t like me at all, and thought me dishonest; Chris and Charles Piersol, Dean Freiday, the “leader” who came to run the workcamp the second season. Gregory remembered all the names, also all my various addresses. We walked up Sherbrooke Street, bought some Babushka dolls, wandered through the McGill campus, then through Ville Place St. Marie, and I left him finally (!) at 7 p.m. He planned to stay another day and then take the bus for NYC. I drove back, with my plunder: 2 dozen croissants, a huge baguette, and a dozen snails (canned).

1970

Hanover

January 1–March 30

Ireland: Shannon, Sligo, Cork, Dublin

March 31–April 6

Missionary Guest House, Selly Oak, Birmingham

April 6–July 15

London, Paris, Milan, Venice, Belgrade, Thessaloniki, Larissa, Volos, Ai Yanni

July 15–19

Ai Yanni, Piliou

July 19–25

Kolokotroni 13, Thessaloniki

July 25–30

Belgrade, Paris, London, Birmingham

July 30–September 1

Kingsmead Close, Birmingham

September 1–December 31

Monday, March 30, 1970

Boston-Shannon

Drove to Boston. Shipped trunks via air cargo. Boston Science Museum; transparent lady; supper in Greek restaurant in Cambridge; toured MIT activities building; showed Widener to the children, also Thayer Hall, Lowell House. Wait at Logan for plane, delayed 1 hour owing to “sick-out” of dispatchers. Talked with “Bob,” a dropout from UVM in senior year, on his way to settle in Europe and study in Munich Pleasant but pathetic; he was reading “Lyrical Ballads” and writing a poem about a friend he’d just left; thought that Gaelic was an early form of English!

Tuesday, March 31, 1970

Shannon

Sunrise from plane, above cloud-cover. Landed at Shannon about 11 a.m. Hired car from efficient Mr. Jones. Goodbye to Bob, who began to hitchhike to Dublin. Three miles along the road, saw Bob thumbing. Stopped. He stayed with us all day, practically. Drove through County Clare: Ennis, Ennistymo, Kinvara to Galway, where Bob left us finally. On the way we admired the “Burren” fields of stone along the coast, and the perpendicular cliffs of Moher, which we saw from a hotel on a rise. I chatted with the owner. He lamented the departure of the English, whom he called “our best friends,” and said that teaching Irish youth Gaelic is a farce, since 90% have to emigrate to England or America. “All our best minds have left us,” he said. I asked if people on the Aran Islands still spoke Gaelic. (The islands were visible from where we stood.) “Fifty years ago they did,” he replied, “but no one does any more.” “What do they do for a living?” “There are 200 people on the island, and all except two draw relief checks from the government: taxpayers’ money. The two who don’t are the postman and the teacher.” When I asked if Ireland wasn’t better off with the English gone, he replied, “There was those who did well of the revolution. Some high ones fell low and some low ones were raised up. That’s the only difference.”

On to Sligo via Tuam. Rooms at Grand Hotel. Terrible dinner of greasy food, then out to see the Feis (pronounced Fesh) Shligigh in the Town Hall. Lovely singing and some not so lovely, by both children and adults. Fine dancing. We saw the competition for the Hornpipe. I was reconfirmed in the poverty of American culture. Our children have no grace, no attributes; drugs are their chief excitement, aside from ugly music. These Irish children were poised, proud, and accomplished. But how drab all the audience were dressed and how dilapidated the assembly hall. We have so much—I was ashamed of Daphne’s fashionable cape—and yet so little. To bed finally at midnight after a full day and only a few hours’ sleep on the plane the night before.

Wednesday, April 1, 1970

In the morning, back to the Feis. Youngsters around 10 years old competing in Jig. Also some singers including 3 girls singing in Irish, and a choir doing a hymn in Latin, led by a nervous priest. The judge made little speeches, deploring the fact that more girls were entered in the contests than boys, and that older people seem not to sing. Here too it is a struggle, apparently. Drove north to Drumcliff to see Yeats’s grave beneath Ben Bulben. “Cast a cold eye on life and death / Horseman, pass by.” The setting is spectacularly beautiful, the church a dream, sitting as though on an apron of grass and flowers, beneath Ben Bulben’s strength. Then to Lissadell, the home of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Countess Markievicz. We were shown around the house by their nephew, Mr. Gore-Booth. How pathetic it all was! The house cold and unused except for the room with the windows overlooking the bay, the room mentioned in Yeats’s poem. And Mr. Gore-Booth, hanging on, giving his dismal tour for 3/8 a head. Nothing of note in the house, except memories. All the old masters were reproductions, bought on the Grand Tour. The originals were dismal paintings by the Gore-Booths themselves. But in the dining room Count Markievicz had painted four gigantic cartoons of gentlemen, very grotesque and amusing. Mr. Gore-Booth lamented his isolation. Nothing ever comes here; all Ireland is cut off, and the West of Ireland most of all. We get tourists, nothing else. He said that the family had to choose, after the revolution. They weren’t Irish but they weren’t English either. And they chose to stay on. How could they leave Lissadell? Now, apparently, all they have is their pride. He said that Yeats himself felt this dilemma, since Yeats was so very English and had lived extensively in England. But he said that the two “girls” did not end as grotesquely as Yeats indicates in his poem. Eva was frail, it is true, but did not wither away. Mr. Gore-Booth asked if we were musical, and he asked Leander to play on his magnificent-cased but badly out of tune piano. I was glad to leave because of the pity of it all. Ξεπεσμός γενιάς, Chrysanthi summed it up. We ate sandwiches on the estate, overlooking the bay. Then drove via Ennis and Ballina, by-passing Galway, and proceeded to Gort. Supper at Glynn’s Hotel, which was full. Night at the lovely Tara Guest House run by talkative Mrs. Maloney.

Thursday, April 2, 1970

To Yeats’s tower, three miles north of Gort. Closed, but still nice to see the setting. Calm, next to a stream, with fields all around, and with Yeats’s poem about his restoration of the tower inscribed outside. Thence to Coole Park, seat of Lady Gregory, now just a ruin. But the yew walk is still discernible, as is the huge tree where Yeats, GBS, AE and others inscribed their initials. We were saddened by the jagged half-walls, all that’s left of the barns. No sign at all of the house.

South via Ennis, Limerick, Killarney to Kenmore. Saw lace display in the Convent of Poor Claires, and paid far too much for a souvenir. Jolly nun showed us the wares. Thence to druid stone ring in a field in town, past two Irishmen digging in a garden, who made me feel uncomfortable for being a tourist, with my leisure, car, money, wasting time to see old stones. Drove then through gorgeous mountain scenery to Bantry, a charming seaside town. Wretched supper. Night in Barry’s Guest House, overlooking the harbor. The scenery from Killarney to Kenmore was also spectacular.

Friday, April 3, 1970

Uninteresting drive to Cork. Bantry cattle market in progress in the square when we awoke. Pig market is on Thursdays, cows on Fridays. Peasants still travel in carts, though some have tractors. The scene reminded me of Hardy—Mayor of Casterbridge—and I don’t imagine the life has changed very much. From Cork to Blarney. The castle very rugged. Dungeons, places where boiling tar was poured on besiegers; everything to appeal to our boys! Side tour to interesting rock and tree formations. Back to Cork. Lodging in Gongane Bara Guest House, Western Road. Chrysanthi and I went to a performance of “Stephen D.” that was amateur in some ways yet very moving and sincere. Small theater, no sets really, no frills, full and appreciative audience. The play missed most of the nuances of the Portrait but captured the themes in a coarse, blunt way, adding long passages from Stephen Hero and even “Gas from a Burner” to make everything explicit. The part emphasized was Joyce’s rebellion against Ireland and the Church. The audience took this without a whimper. I noticed several young clerics in the audience, one with a girlfriend! No tomatoes or catcalls. Joyce is respectable!

Saturday, April 4, 1970

Drove from Cork to Dublin via Waterford, Wexford (nice waterfront), Gorey, Rathoram, Bray, Dalkey, Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Dun Lóri), stopping to see Joyce’s tower at Sandycove. It was closed. Men were swimming at the 40-foot hole. Lodging at Phoenix Guest House, Parkgate Street, just at the entrance to Phoenix Park. Rushed to Abbey Theater to see a play by Dennis Johnston. Terrible, full of every cliché (bossy servant, even), yet throwing a certain interesting light on Irish problems, for example on an extremist group wishing to keep Ireland agrarian and backward in order to avoid the evils of industrialized nations. We left after the second act.

Sunday, April 5, 1970

Attended Meeting at Eustace Street. Met Harold Lamb again and his son Edmund and family. Took Edmund and wife and children Alvin, Charlotte and Roger and the baby to lunch at Clarence Hotel. Then took his children to the zoo with ours, and drove out to their farm north of Dublin to stay for tea. His family produces jams and jellies with “Fruitfield” label. The farm is lovely, with acres of apples, blackberries, currants, strawberries and raspberries immaculately cared for. The Meeting, like last time, was very Christ- and Bible-centered, with some strong, very practiced ministry.

Flew at 6 p.m. to Birmingham.

April 6, 1970

Martyn 2, Missionary Guest House, College Walk, Selly Oak

Marvelous performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Visited Louis Ullmann, who will teach Alec violin again. Leander will be taking piano from his accompanist, Mrs. Brooke. Very jolly. She assigned him Beethoven’s Sonata in D minor, opus 31.

April 11, 1970

Visited Margaret and Christos Alexiou. He was very eloquent as always about injustices done the Greek communists. Accused Sherrard and Woodhouse of prejudice in this regard. I tried to interest him in our book, Demotic Greek. Their twins, alas, seem subnormal. One, although 2½, doesn’t talk or understand; the other does somewhat better. They sleep at 11 and rise at 5. Μαρτύριο!

Sunday, April 12, 1970

Meeting at Selly Oak. Good ministry, all about the fact that spring cannot be far behind, even though it has rained, sleeted, or snowed almost every day so far in April. Muriel Poulter was here, also Margaret Worsdale. Learned that Blanche Schaeffer’s mother is very ill.

April 13, 1970

Took the boys to visit Mr. Hearne, the deputy headmaster at Kings Norton Grammar School. Mr. Sheen, alas, has an incurable cancer, discovered suddenly sometime after our last correspondence.

I finished my essay for Couloumbis’s anthology on Politics and Society of Modern Greece: “the Mellowed Nationalism of Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek.” Writing it was a torture. Now that it’s finished, I think that it probably distorts the book terribly.

Met a man named Murray who is a native of the Seychelles Islands, of all places in the world. A businessman, looking half Negro, half Arab, on holiday here, while his wife completes a course in secondary school administration. The islands are about 600 miles from anywhere, but will soon have an airstrip . . . and then . . .

Reading at Woodbrooke, spring term 1970:

George Thomson, tr. Kostis Palamas, The Twelve Lays of the Gipsy

Richard Clogg, “The Correspondence of Adhamantios Korais with Thomas Burgess 1789–1792”

Richard Clogg, “The Correspondence of Adhamantios Korais with the British and Foreign Bible Society”

Νικηφόρου Βρεττάκου Όδύνη

Τάσου Αθανασιάδη Η αίθουσα του θρόνου

Καινή Διαθήκη: Α ΄Θεσσαλονικούς, Hebrews, Colossians

Ἅγιος Ἰωάννης

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison

Reading at Woodbrooke, fall term 1970:

G. W. Anderson, The History and Religion of Israel

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Amos, Hosea, Isaiah 1–11, Micah 1–2, Jeremiah, Isaiah complete

A. P. Herbert, The Secret Battle

Δ. Σολωμού Διάλογος

Ezekiel, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings, Genesis

Μ. Τριανταφυλλίδη Νεοελληνική γραμματική Α ΄. Ιστορική Εισαγωγή

Robert Browning Medieval and Modern Greek

July 22, 1970

Οικία Αντωνίου Κοριαζή, χωρίον Άγιος Ιωάννης, Πηλίου-Βόλου

Long conversation last night with Λεοντάρης, schoolmate of George’s in Serres, now an official in the Εθνική Τράπεζα, but an amateur of λογοτεχνία. Has published studies of Kazantzakis’s philosophy in Ελληνικά Γράμματα, also essays on philosophy, sociology, etc. His wife, a φιλόλογος, said that the Kazantzakis-Kakridis translation was never adopted for use in the schools. Says that teachers find ways to get around the decree about καθαρεύουσα. If you speak καθαρεύουσα in class, the children heckle you. Thus one starts and then “forgets”—i.e., lapses into δημοτική. Also, the καθαρεύουσα that is taught is ἁπλή. Leondaris finds Kazantzakis’s language τραχή, όχι στρωτή. So did another φιλόλογος I spoke with here.

July 24, 1970

Lola says that if you go to any official office to request something and speak in demotic you are immediately suspect. You must say τῆς πόλεως, not της πόλης. Demotic is now a provocation! She also says that the readers for the early grades are filled with chauvinistic propaganda, and especially with exultations of war, patriotism, bravery, heroism, etc. All sensibility, all refined feelings, have been eliminated.

Myrivilis speaks of the sponges swaying helplessly to the rhythm of the sea. Today, wearing a mask, I surveyed the sea-bottom and saw clumps of rock-plants (I don’t think they were sponges; maybe they were) swaying precisely as he described them: slowly, rhythmically, with a grace, a peacefulness, but also a helplessness—forlorn.

Sunday, July 26, 1970

Good advice in the novel by Τάσος Αθανασιάδης, Η αίθουσα του θρόνου, σελ. 372, as a father prepares to send his son to Europe for postgraduate study: Θα σε στείλω δυο χρόνια στην Ευρώπη. Αν το επιθυμείς, μάθε κάτι περισσότερο. Αν όχι, ζήσε, για να μη βαραίνει αργότερα την ψυχή σου η αρρώστεια που τη λένε «άζητη νιότη».

Monday, July 27

Long discussion with Κύριος Νικαλοΐδης, φιλόλογος, who teaches in the Πειραματικό Σχολείο Θεσσαλονίκης—i.e., the special school for university preparation, to which Δημητράκι will now go. He has always been a δημοτικιστής. Nevertheless he did not agree with the program of Παπανούτσος-Κακριδής επί του Παπανδρέου. His reasons were convincing. In the previous καθεστώς, he told me, i.e., when katharevousa was still taught in the high school, he himself introduced demotic by its side, teaching from the Triandafyllidis grammar. This was known by the «διευθυντή σχολείου, τον επιθεωριτή, κτλ., και κανείς δεν μού ’κανε παρατήρηση». In short, he was more or less free to do as he pleased. With the Παπανούτιος καθεστώς he wasn’t. Demotic was taught, and nothing but demotic. So far so good. But look at the sequel. The narrowness of the demoticists provoked a corresponding narrowness in the Colonels, who threw out demotic and restored katharevousa alone, από πείσμα. Νικαλοΐδης feels that if only the fanatics on both sides could be ignored, the problem would solve itself. In short, ο λαός would solve it. Indeed, it is already being solved, which can be seen by comparing today’s απλή καθαρεύουσα with the καθαρεύουσα of Metaxas’s time or earlier. Even the newspapers, today, write in a language that is really closer to demotic than to Koraïs.

Tuesday, July 28, 1970

Strange how life goes on. Lola told me that Αριστούβουλος Μάνισης, who has been expelled from the university and exiled to a village, is now free. Lola saw him with his wife, and Kakridis, at a concert at the H.E.N. (YWCA) recently. Previously, Lola had met Mrs. Manisi once in church and had asked her about her son while he was still στην εξορία. The mother said he was well and that they were allowed to talk to each other on the telephone. Notice that the propaganda periodicals in England reported him as “gravely ill.” The problem now is that, although he is free (though perhaps he has to report daily to the police), he has no job. Worst of all, he was denied a passport, and thus cannot take up a university post outside of Greece. The concert in question, a piano recital, was given by the wife of a lawyer who is one of the prisoners on Aegina. Obviously his wife is free to pursue her career. Lola said that the husband has been translating books from French while in prison; these are printed and are on sale as far as she knows, but she wouldn’t dare go to Morphos’s to buy one, for fear of being implicated. An interesting touch is that after the concert the pianist was presented with a huge bouquet—a really startlingly huge bouquet. Lola learned that this had been sent collectively by all the prisoners on Aegina, in her honor.

Lola’s own situation is most unpleasant. After the coup, all teachers had to fill out various forms and, in addition, comments were solicited from all present and previous headmasters. The headmaster with whom Lola had had such difficulties, including a law suit, when he cheated her of her salary, reported that she had strenuously supported Papanoutsos’s program of demoticization. On the basis of this, Lola’s license to teach was revoked. Apparently there is a review procedure, and Lola had submitted an appeal, but so far (three years after the coup) nothing has been done.

Immediately after the coup, when Lola was still teaching, she was obliged to read aloud each day the newspaper editorials extolling the Colonels for having saved Greece, etc. The students were skeptical, at best. After one such reading of particularly repulsive chauvinism, one girl on the way out approached Lola and said, “What’s the matter with you, M’am? Don’t you listen to the BBC?”

Wednesday, July 29, 1970

Alec’s birthday, celebrated with candles bought in church (and removed), then stuck in pieces of baklava. Boisterous gay party with all of us, and the lovely family of Nikaloeidis, the φιλόλογος from Salonika. He sang a few verses of Η Σαμιώτισσα στην άκρη καθαρεύουσα! We all howled. Επιπόλαιο μου λες, γιατί πάω με πολλές, at the top of our voices. Η Θεανώ Νικαλοείδη showed us a nice version of the συρτάκι, and we all danced, including ο Παππούς, who also did an energetic waltz with Efthymoula. We ended with charades, which included George playing the waiter and I the customer, trying to get served at the Aigaion Hotel.

Saturday, August 1, 1970

Long talk with George. I asked him how agriculture was progressing now in Greece, and especially what effect the new government was having. He was extremely optimistic, and also had much praise for the Colonels. In general, agriculture is extremely healthy. Greece has reached the stage where it exports many products: wheat, grapes, tomatoes, etc. In addition, many new processing factories have been created, for tomato paste, for example, which is now exported all over the Near East, and even to America. There is no longer the problem of wastage owing to the scarcity of immediate markets. Previously, the fruit rotted on the ground; now it is canned, or exported fresh, where feasible. This has been facilitated by the government’s policy of friendly economic relations with all countries, and especially with the Eastern Block (contrary to the government’s fierce anti-communism). There is lively trade with Russia, which receives a proportion of the Greek tobacco crop, which previously remained partially unsold. Also wheat. Previously, the government bought up wheat at low prices and stored it. Now the wheat is exported and the prices are better. Trade is carried on with Bulgaria, Romania, etc., and even with Albania, from which the Greeks buy heavy machinery. The government, says George, has solved the wheat problem entirely. It was able to do this because it instituted revolutionary and radical measures that no previous government was willing to do, because of fear of vested interests. Here it was a question of trade guilds, the bakers’ guild and the millers’ guild. Previously these were “closed professions.” No one was free to open a “furnace.” In each neighborhood or village the number of establishments was controlled; the same with mills. When, and only when, the baker or miller died or retired could another man (usually the son) take over the business. In effect, each baker’s shop or mill was a monopoly guaranteed to have no competition. This situation was perpetuated because trades could apply sufficient pressure on M.P.s to make any change impossible. When parliament was abolished, however, the new government, coming as it did from a sector having no previous political entanglements, was able fearlessly to take measures. In short, they made both the millers’ and the bakers’ trades “free” and open. The result is: more bakers, more millers, and better bread at cheaper prices. Also, the millers previously used foreign wheat because it was cheaper; now they use Greek wheat and make a smaller profit, with benefits to the economy and the consumer. Another trade previously closed and now open is that of the chemist. George also praised the government’s policy of ample loans to farmers. This of course is a continuation of previous policies, but under the Colonels the loans have been liberalized. For example, farmers can now get loans to build themselves new homes. This was not possible before. The interest is only 2 percent.

There is a great exodus from the mountain villages where farming is uneconomical. George sees this as a healthy development. In fertile and level regions, irrigation and mechanization have revolutionized agricultural practices.

The government is also encouraging tourism in an efficient and enlightened manner. ΟΤουρισμός gives loans for the construction of modern hotels, for example. (The good taste of the new hotel at Άγιος Ιωάννης.) Prices are strictly regulated. There is also an active campaign for cleanliness. Every so often Pattakos flies over resort towns or beaches in a helicopter and woe to the mayor of an area that is found to be covered with litter.

But there is also, of course, the other side of the coin. I asked George if he knew of anyone who had been imprisoned, or of the families of such. Yes, of course, of course. “How many are imprisoned?” “No one knows. No one asks such questions.” “Are there more people or fewer in jail now as compared to the early stages of the coup?” “As far as I can tell, more, many more. Especially army officers. Every day there are lists in the paper of those who have been relieved of their posts. They’re jailed and then if they sign certain papers they are pensioned off.” “How do the families live?” “Who knows? They manage on their savings.” “Does anyone help them?” “Are you kidding? If you help them you land in jail yourself. But perhaps some people help them secretly.”

What impressed me most about George’s observations was his emphasis on how silent everyone is. No one talks about political matters. No one expresses any opinions to anyone else. “We don’t trust a soul,” he told me. “Not even our closest friends. So we keep quiet.” He said that in the three years since the coup, no one had ever asked him, nor had he asked anyone else, the questions that I had posed, especially about the number of prisoners. In three years he had never discussed the subject with a soul.

Saturday, August 15

τῆς Παναγίας

George was again very eloquent and emphatic about the “psychological torture” under the present régime. The imprisonment, maltreatment, etc. mustn’t detour people’s attention from this. Nor must the manifestations of ordinary everyday life—the eating, dancing, buying, etc. Because underneath is always this lurking fear. “The horror,” he says, “is that from one day to the next I don’t know whether I’ll be holding my job when I wake up in the morning. The horror is that there is no law, only the whim or will of the rulers. I can be fired on the spot, and for no reason, or for false reasons supplied by sycophants. And there is no recourse. Everyone in Greece—and especially of course civil servants, which means all teachers, priests, agriculturists, policemen, etc.—lives with this fear. Thus no one, but no one, will ever tell anyone else, especially a foreigner, that life is bad. “We’re fine,” they’ll say, and will change the subject. And outwardly they are fine: they smile, eat, enjoy themselves. But inwardly they are holding on for dear life and living from day to day. Thus the situation is intolerable for all intellectuals, all people with ideals and visions.

For George, the situation is complicated by the continued specter of his brother, Odysseas. George feels, indeed knows, that this fact has hindered his career. Indeed a functionary in the Ministry told him as much: it’s the rules! Father, mother, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins. If anyone has a “bad record,” this is taken into account. George has received promotions and salary increases according to the regular scale. But everything above and beyond has been denied him. In particular, he twice took examinations for fellowships to study in France. Both times he came out first among the examinees, with a grade of άριστα, but the fellowships were given to someone else. On the other hand, he perhaps is the beneficiary of the old-time Greek system of nepotism. (We’ll see.) His application for transfer back to Salonika so that he could be united with his family was never acted upon until one day Efthymoula, by accident, discovered that one of her distant cousins was a high-ranking officer in the inner revolutionary clique, indeed serving in the palace as an adjutant to the Regent. They went to see him. He of course did not know of George or of Efthymoula, but as soon as he heard of the family relationship he was more than willing to help. “The Revolution does not believe in separating families,” he said. “This is disgraceful.” In the event, he succeeded in having George transferred (maybe) but only to Χαλκιδική, 50 km. from Salonika. To be more exact, he assured George that the διαταγή had been written. It had to pass pro-forma through the Council. . . . George is still waiting.

George said that this cousin assured him very vigorously that Papadopoulos is not a fascist, and that he basically believes in the parliamentary system. He admitted however that some of the other members of the government do not share this view. One needs to be careful in every appraisal because everything is rather subtle. Because decrees are issued, for example, does not necessarily mean that they are honored. After the constitutional referendum a law was passed subjecting to punishment all those who did not vote. This was later rescinded. Yet when a friend of Themi’s applied for a passport after the rescinding, he was denied it because he hadn’t voted. What is one to think, accordingly, of the new regulation lifting the ban on all the books proscribed since the beginning of the Revolution? I asked a bookseller what this would mean in practice. “How can it be applied?” he answered me. “We are all afraid. Who will be the first to display these books?” To make matters worse, the decree states that no book may be sold if it has “propagandistic content.” In short, the situation is now probably worse, for the decision is left up to the bookseller, who knows that “propagandistic content” can mean anything that a tribunal wants it to mean. Before, things were definite and you knew what could be sold and what could not.

Regarding the constitutional referendum, ο Παππούς told me how it was conducted, at least in Salonika. There was “secret balloting.” You were supposed to be given two ballots, one saying Yes and the other No. Then you were supposed to go behind the curtain, drop one of them into the box, and destroy the other. Fine! But in the event the voters, when the entered the polling place, were handed only the Yes ballot. If they wanted the No ballot they had to ask for it. This obviously no one did, as their name would be recorded on the spot by the attending policeman.

Fear is the keynote, especially for anyone, like the Yiannakoses, who have a “blot” on their record. We invited both Lola and George to come with their families to England, taking advantage of our presence there. But will they? The chances are no. Lola, for example, will be very reluctant to apply for a passport because this will remind the authorities of her existence!

Re: education. The gymnasiums still have up to 70 in a class. Some say that the government plans to restore the Lyceum system instituted under Papandreou, and to raise the school-leaving age once more. But there are no rumors even about a change in the linguistic policy.

Pappous has lovely stories to tell, including some about his military service. He never shot a gun, or hardly saw one. When he joined up he was asked immediately, Έχετε γράμματα; Since he did, he was sent to Salonika, given the stripe of an υποδεκανέας, and put in the quartermaster’s department issuing clothes to the new recruits. This of course was Venizelos’s revolutionary army. They had nothing: no offices, no facilities, literally no toilets. The recruits were rounded up in the villages and brought to Salonika in chains. He would issue them their full equipment: boots, greatcoat, shirts, guns, canteen, etc. They’d then be placed on trains heading for the front But a good many of them would jump off the trains and return to their villages. There, they’d be rounded up again and brought to the quartermaster. Έλεγε ο Παππούς, «Εσύ, βρε, δεν είναι δεύτερη φορά που σε δίνω;!» They would smile sheepishly at each other. In this way, some Greek villagers brought a goodly supply of clothing home to their families.

August 25, 1970

(written in the British Museum on September 26)

Η μέρα της αποχωρήσεως. Ξηκωθήκαμε πρωί-πρωί, η ώρα 5:00. Ο Παππούς φυσικά ήταν ξυπνητός από τις 4:00, και κατεβήκαμε στο καφενείο του Κυρίου Νίκου, δηλ. του στεκιού του Παππού, για να περιμένουμε το ξεκίνημα του λεωφορείου. Ήταν ακόμα νύχτα. Καθήσαμε εκεί, δίπλα στη θάλασσα και παραγγείλαμε καφέδες, ψωμάκια με βούτερο και καφέ, που ήταν το συνιθισμένο μας πρωινό όλο το διάστημα που καθόμασταν στον Αι Γιάννη. Εκεί που τρώγαμε, ένα κουβάρι φωτιά άρκισε να προβάλει μέσα από τη θάλασσα, καταντίκρυ μας. Ήταν, νομίζω, πρώτη φορά που είδαν τα παιδιά το ανατόλισμα του ηλίου. Ανέβαινε ανέβαινε τόσο γρήγορα που μπορούσες να αισθανθείς το γύρισμα της γης. Σε λίγο καθόταν επάνω στον ορίζοντα αναπαυτικά, σαν νά ’θελε να μένει έτσι για πάντα. Δεν έμεινε όμως. Όλο ανέβαινε, ωσπού να ζυγιάσεται ακροβατικά στο ουρανοθαλάσσινο σχοινί. Τότες έδωσε ένα σαλτάκι κι άρχισε να πετάει λεύτερα μέσα στον αέρα. Πριν ήπιαμε τους καφέδες μας, βρισκότανε σ’ ένα μπόι ύψος. Γλύκανε ο ουρανός, έφεγγε, άρχισε κιόλας να ζεσταίνεται. Καταλάβαμε ότι ήταν μερα, ότι θα μας κάψει ο γήλιος όπως πάντε. Μπήκαμε την ώρα 6:00 στο λεωφορείο. Αυτό ανέβηκε, έκανε τις τρέλλες τις στροφές ψηλά ψηλά πάνω από το χωριό και τη θάλασσα, πέρασε γκρεμνούς, δάση, νερά, βράχους και όλο ανέβαινε. Φτάσαμε ύστερα από τρεις ώρες στον Βόλο, ζαλισμένοι κατά βάθος. Η Χρυσάνθη δε μπόρεσε σχεδόν να σταθεί στα πόδια της. Συνήλθε όμως. Περάσαμε από το σπίτι του Γεώργου, όπου μας περίμεναν ο παππούς και η γιαγια. Εκείνοι είχαν φύγει με φορτηγό κατά παραγγηλεία του Γεώγιου και μαζί με τις αποσκευές. Ηε γιαγιά ήταν βέβαια χάλια. Μας πρότειναν να μείνομε εκεί ως το απόγευμα, και να πάμε στη Σαλονική με το βραδυνό. Δεν θέλαμε. Αφού αρχίσαμε τα βάσανα, ας τα τελειώσουμε πια. Έτσι μας πήγε στο σταθμό η Ευθυμούλα, και φύγαμε μόνοι μας. Στη Λάρισσα κατεβήκαμε. Φάγαμε ωραία στο εστιατόριο του σταθμού, απολαμβάνοντας τη μουσική. Στον Αι Γιάννη δεν υπήρχε μουσική κατά διαταγή του Τουρισμού. Όπου νά τους πάλι: ο παππούς κι η γιαγιά μαζί με τον Γεώργο, την Ευθυμούλα, το Δημητράκι και τον Ανδρέα. Γι’ αυτό φύγαμε όλοι μαζί για τη Σαλονίκη.

Εκεί περάσαμε τρεις-τέσσερες μέρες. Ο Θέμης ο Άλτας φρόντισε το πόδι του Αλέκου, ο οποίος χτυπήθκε άσκημα λίγες μέρες πρι φύγουμε απ’ το χωριό. Ύστερα πήγαμε μαζί με τους Άλτα στον Μηχανιώνα όπου είχαν αγοράσει ένα οικόπεδο, ενάμισο στρέμμα, μέσα σ’ ένα μποστάνι. Έχουν φτιάξει κιόλας δυο καλύβες από άχυρο κι ψάθες, και ένα υπόστεγο πάλι με ψάθες. Μαζέψαμε μπόλικα σταφύλια από το αμπέλι δίπλα, κόψανε τα παιδιά καρπούζια από το μποτσάνι, κουβεντιάσαμε με τη Θώδωρα, που τη βρήκαμε βάφοντας τη φράχτη. Περπατήσαμε εγώ με κείνη στη χώρα ενώ ο Θέμης πήρε τους άλλους στο αμάξι του. Καθήσαμε πάνω απ’ τη θάλασσα, φάγαμε γύρους, μήδια, κόκκινες πιπεριές, μπύρες κι χορτάσαμε, παραχορτάσαμε. Πόσο φιλόξενοι είναι οι άνθρωποι εκείνοι! Ήλθαν ύστερα στο σταθμό κιόλας να μας προβαδίσουν τη μέρα που φύγαμε για την Ευρώπη.

Στη Θεσ/νίκη εγώ αγόρασα αρκετά βιβλία, σαν από μανία κατακτήσεως. Περάσαμε πολλές ώρες με τον Κώστα. Πήγαμε μαζί σε μιαν ωραία ταβέρνα ν’ ακούσουμε τραγουδάκια. Τι ωραίο, πόσο αναπαυτικό! Πόσο έιναι φτωχά το έθιμά μας που δεν έχομε τέτοια μέρη για να περνούμε τις ώρες μας στην Αμερική. Τη παραμονή της εκθέσεως, είδαμε τα πυροτεχνήματα· κατόπι, αφού είχαν φύγει οι επίσημοι (ο Παττακός έβγασε λόγο αντικαθιστώντας τον Παπαδόπουλο). Μπήκαμε όλοι μέσα, βάλαμε το παιδιά στα ηλεκτρικά αυτοκίνητα και τη Δάφνη στις κούνιες, χαρήκαμε όλοι. Πήγα και εγώ στα αυτοκίνητα μαζί με τον Αλεκάκι και σπρώξαμε το Λέαντρο και τον Νίκο.

Ήλθε η μέρα να φύγουμε. Ολόκληρος λαός στο σταθμό. Ο παππούς με τη γιαγιά ήθελαν να μας προβαδίσουν μέχρι στην Ειδομένη· έμαθαν όμως την τελευταία στιγμή ότι δεν επιτρέπεται. Ο παππούς, χωρίς να ρωτήσει, χωρίς να αντισταθεί, πήρε απόφαση και αρνήθηκε να πάρει πίσω τα χρήματα των εισιτηρίων. Στην Ελλάδα πια η διαταγή δεν σηκώνει αντίσταση! Έτσι φύγαμε οι πέντε μας, μέσα στο θαλαμάκι μας του Wagon-Lit χωρίς κλάματα τούτη τη φορά. Συνηθίσαμε. Ο παππούς, στη γραμμή, κουνούσε τη ψάθα του σαν τρελλός, φαινότανε από πολύ μακριά κιόλας σαν κίτρινη σημαία που τη δέρνει ένας δυνατός αέρας.

Στον Αι Γιάννη η Kate Harvey που ήθελε τόσο πολύ να μας επισκεφθεί, δεν μπορούσε. Ήλθε όμως στα καλά καθούμενα ο Ιάσων ο Μεταξάς, μαζί με τη θεία του και τον άντρα της, που είναι γερμανικής καταγωγής. Φαίνεται να ανήκει αυτή στον «καλό κόσμο». Η μια αδελφή έκει το σχολείο Μεταξά στην Αθήνα, η άλλη είναι στο ραδιόφωνο, διαβάζει ιστορίες για παιδιά κάθε πρωί. Είχαν δώδεκα χρόνια να δούνε τον Ιάσωνα. Δεν κατάλαβαν μάλιστα καλά καλά τη φιλοδοξία του να γίνει ηθοποιός. Έπρεπε να γίνει . . . γιατρός! Ύστερα μάθαμε ότι ήταν γιατρός η ίδια, ενώ στα νιάτα της ήταν ηθοποιός για λίγο διάστημα. Οι γέροι ξεχνούνε εύκολα.

Τι κάναμε στον Αι Γιάννη; Πολλά μπάνια. Τι άλλο; Φάγαμε χιλάδες μερίδες μοσχαράκι ψητό. Εγώ δούλευα· μετάφρασα 280 σελίδες του Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ». Tο σπουδαιότερο, ζήσαμε με τον παππού και τη γιαγιά. Τα παιδιά είχαν ευκαιρία να γνωριστούνε με μιάν άλλη γενεά, εκείνοι να γνωρίσουν τα εγγονάκια τους. Ευτυχώς ο παππούς είναι σπάνιος άνθρωπος εξαιρετικός. Το καλοκαίρι αυτό τού ’κανε καλό. Πρίν, ήταν ακόμα φοβισμένος από το δυστύχημα πού ’χε. Σιγά σιγά όμως παράτησε το μπαστούνι του, άρχισε να κοιμηθή πάλι τη νύχτα, ξανέπιασε ακόμη και το μαντολίνο, πρώτη φορά σε 15 χρόνια. Τραγουδίσαμε όλοι, χορέψαμε, παίξανε τα παιδιά χαρτιά, τάβλι, σκάκι· ακόμα κι η Δάφνη έμαθε φάντης λιγάκι. Μου βοηθούσε πολύ ο παππούς με μερικές δύσκολες λέξεις στο βιβλίο, προπαντώς τις τούρκικες. Μα πώς μιλάει ο άνθρωπος εκείνος! Για κάθε λέξη έπρεπε να διαβάσει όλο το κείμενο, να δει «τι λέει τα συμφραζόμενα» ενώ τα συμφραζόμενα τις περισσότερες φορές δεν μας βοήθησαν καθόλου να καταλάβαμε τη σημασία της λέξης. Με βοήθησε φυσικά κι η Χρυσάνθη. Καθήσαμε το βράδυ στη βεράντα ή κάποτε κάτω στη θάλασσα, στο «Αιγαίο», και κάναμε τη δουλειά μας. Σαν όμως να μην είναι δουλειά, γιατί ήταν κάτι να μοιραστούμε πια, ήταν για εκείνη μια απασχόλαση που να τη βοηθήσει να ξεχάσει τα παιδιά για λίγο. Γενικά, δεν περάσαμε πολύ καλά το καλοκαίρι· ήταν μακριά από μένα και στενοχωρημένη, δε ξέρω γιατί. Μαλώσαμε. Τη μάλωσα μια φορά που δεν φρόντισε σχεδόν καθόλου για να φάω το βραδυνό, σαν να μην υπάρχω. Της είπα ότι αξίζω δέκα λεπτά φροντίδα την ημέρα. Παραπάνω δεν ζητώ. Μας έκανε καλό ο καυγάς αυτός. Γλύκανε πολύ προς εμένα, ελπίζω να γλύκανα κι εγώ. Αλλά αυτές οι βελτιώσεις είναι πάντα προσωρινές. Γυρίζει εύκολα αυτή στη συνιθισμένη της αδιαφορία· γυρίζω εγώ στη συνιθισμένη μου σκληρότητα.

Κάθομαι και γράφω όλα αυτά στην αίθουσα αναγνώσεως του British Museum. Προχθές τελείωσα πια, στο Birmingham, την πρώτη γραφή του «Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ». Έφυγα αμέσως για το Λονδίνο για να αλλάξω ατμόσφαιρα, για να φύγω μακριά από τις γκρίνιες τις συνεχείς της νοικοκυρικής ζωής.

Εκνευρίστηκε η Χρυσάνθη ίσως γιατί έφυγε ο Λέαντρος. Τον έστειλα σε ένα public school που λέγεται Leighton Park. Είναι των Κουακαίων και λένε πως είναι πολύ καλό σχολείο. Ήθελα να γίνει πιο ανεξάρτητος ο Λέαντρος, να πιάσει φίλους, να δει και να μάθη καινούργιους τρόπους, να μπλεχθεί με εκλεκτόν κόσμο. Μακάρι να πραγματοποιηθούν αυτές οι ελπίδες. Θα δούμε. Ἐν τῳ μεταξεί η Χρυσάνθη είναι φυσικά πολύ στενοχωρημένη που τον έχασε, παρ’ όλο που συμφωνήσαμε και οι δυο μας να τον στείλουμε. Αρπάζει τα άλλα τα παιδιά, μπας και θα τα χάσει κι αυτά. Αμελά εμένα. Αμελώ εκείνη. Εκεί καταντήσαμε.

Την αγαπώ όμως φοβερά, όπως πάντα. Μα δε μπορώ να της το πω, ούτε να της το δείξω. Είμαι όλο σκληρότητα. Η δουλειά μου είναι ένα καταφύγιο. Δεν θέλω διακοπή, φοβάμε την ανεργία, σαν πανούκλα. Ίσως είμαι στενοχωρημένος ετούτες οι μέρες γιατί ήλθαν κι ο πατέρας μου με τη μαμά. Πήγαν στης Αλίκης στον Οξφόρδι, κατόπι σε μας. Έμειναν μια ’βδομάδα. Ήλθαν μαζί στο Reading για να παραδώσουμε τον Λέαντρο στα χέρια των δασκάλων του, ξαναγύρισαν στον Οξφόρδι διότι η Αλίκη ήταν άρρωστη, έπειτα ξανγύρισαν σε μας. Με ξεκαρδίζει ο άνθρωπος αυτός γιατί καθε φορά που τον βλέπω καταλαβαίνω πόσο τον μοιάζω. Αυτός κλειστός, χωρίς κέφι, χωρίς πρωτοβουλία, χωρίς αυτοπεπείθωση, πολύ οκνός άνθρωπος—όπως είμαι και γώ. Προσωπικότητα καμιά. Όταν μιλάει, κανένας δεν ακούει. Δειλός. Ωραίες ιδέες πολιτικές κ.τ.λ. αλλά πάντα κρυβότανε πίσο από απραξία. Και φροντίζει μονάχα τον εαυτό του. Κατσούφος άνθρωπος, ανάβει αμέσως· υπερβολικά ευαίσθητος, όπως κι εγώ. Κοντά στον παππού της Ελλάδας, είναι τιποτένιος. Ήταν ποτές πατέρας μου; Ήταν η μητέρα ποτές μητέρα; Θυμάμαι μονάχα την απουσία τους, σαν νά ’τανε φαντάσματα μέσα στο σπίτι, χωρίς υπόσταση και ουσία. Τόσα χρόνια χωρίς ούτε ένα τραγουδάκι, χωρίς να μου σηκώσουν ούτε μια φορά στα χέρια τους, να μου χορέψουν. Χωρίς να παίξουμε μαζί, να διαβάσαμε ιστορίες. Μονάχα μου έπαιρνε ο πατέρας στα εκλεκτά εστιατόρια τον καιρό του πολέμου (που μας στέρησε τα σπιτικά τροφήματα κι είχαμε δελτία σισσίτιου) για να μάθω να τρώγω εκλεκτά φαγητά. Μου έπαιρνε και στο σινεμά και—όταν ήμουν πολύ μικρός, δλδ ούτε 10 χρονώ—για να περάσουμε καμιά ώρα καβάλα. Τίποτε άλλο. Τη μαμά μου, τη θυμούμαι ακόμα λιγότερα. Πού βρισκότανε τόσα χρόνια; Πώς τα κατάφερε να γίνει τόσο περίφημο φάντασμα; Έστω. Είναι περισμένα αυτά τα χρόνια. Είναι όμως και κληρονομία μου. Αλλοίμονο! Το κακό είναι ότι τα δικά μου τα παιδιά θα πούνε το ίδιο για μένα, ίσως χειρότερο, κι ας τα χόρεψα κάμποσες φορές. Ευτυχώς έχουν και τη Χρυσάνθη, που είναι σωστή μητέρα. Ευτυχώς έχουν και όλους τους συγγενείς στην Ελλάδα, που δείχνουν την αγάπη τους με τόση δύναμη κι απλότητα. Ας είναι καλά όλοι τους!

Στην εξωτερική ζωή περνούμε μια χαρά. Γυρίσαμε σ’ ένα ωραίο διαμέρισμα, στο Kingsmead Close. Είναι πραγματικό σπίτι, εστία. Την πρώτη μέρα ήλθε η Blanche Schaeffer με ένα cake με τα γράμματα Welcome επάνω του. Ήλθε και η Muriel Poulter για να μάθει μήπως θέλω να δανιστώ το αυτοκίνητό της, και να μου πη ότι θα μας καλέσει σε λίγες μέρες να γνωριστούμε με τον καινούργιο τον καθηγητή της Ελληνικής, τον Rees. Η Αγγλία πια, σαν νά ’γινε πατρίδα μας. Θαυμάσιος πολιτισμός. Θαυμάσιοι φιλοξενούμενοι άνθρωποι. Ο μεν Αλέκος ξαναγύρισε στο Kings Norton Grammar School. Φαίνεται νά ’χει φέτος καλύτερους δασκάλους. Δουλεύει σκληρά, αλλά πάει καλύτερα. Άρχισε και να πηγαίνει στο Birmingham Youth Orchestra. Τον βάλανε first violin! Ετοιμάζουν το Nutcracker Suite και ένα violin concerto του Bach, για τη συναυλία των Χριστουγέννων. Ο δε Λέαντρος θα έχει μαθήματα και στο πιάνο και στο organ, στο Leighton Park. Πήγαμε μεμιάς στο θέατρο. Είδαμε ένα είδος επιθεώρηση, Forty Years On του Jonathan Miller, που σατυρίζει τους public schools και διάφερα άλλα έθιμα της Αγγλίας. Για μένα, η παράσταση αυτή ήταν σαν φρέσκο άνεμο για να καθαρίσει το θολό μου μυαλό. Είχαν πάει τα παιδιά με τη Χρυσάνθη, τον παππού και τη γιαγιά στο Fiddler on the Roof. Πήγα εγώ, μόνος, στο Stratford να δω το King John. Μου άρεσε η απλότητα του έργο και το ηθικό του περιερχόμενο. Εδώ στο Λονδίνο είδα μια φάρσα γαλλικού τύπου που ήταν χάλια, αν και γέλασα λίγα. Είχε γυμνές γυναίκες σε μια πισίνα, γι’ αυτό τραβάει το κοσμάκι (κι εμένα). Την άλλη μέρα όμως είδα ένα πολύ καλό έργο, Home, με John Gielgud και Ralph Richardson. Παίξανε δυο γέροι σταλμένοι σ’ ένα ψυχιατρικό ινστιτούτο. Άλλαξαν ξερές κουβέντες παράταιρες, όλα αναθυμίσεις του παρελθώντος, ενώ απέφευγαν από τη τρεχόμενη κατάστασή τους. Ήταν και δυο γυναίκες πολύ χυδαίες αλλά—η μια τουλάχιστο—πολύ απλόικη. Οι άντρες, από μοναξιά, από πλήξη, έπιασαν φιλίες μ’ αυτές. Αλλά στο τέλος, αφού είχαν αλλάξει μερικές στοιχειώδεις κουβέντες, δεν τους έμειναν πια τίποτε να πούνε. Κατάντησε η ζωή νά ’ναι τίποτε παραπάνω από τα φαητά που έτρωγαν. ’Οπως είπε ο ένας, “The advantage of a late lunch is that it brings you that much closer to tea-time.” Είδα και του Fellini Satyricon, που δεν μου άρεσε καθόλου. Καταλαβαίνεις ότι ο σκηνοθέτης πασχίζει να σε συνεπάρει, και γι’ αυτό ακριβώς δεν σε συνεπαίρνει. Εκείνο που λείπει από το έργο είναι η απλότητα.

Προχθές στο Birmingham φάγαμε με τον Χρήστο και τη Margaret Αλεξίου και τον George Ross. Πόσο μιλάει ο Χρήστος! Και πάντα τα ίδια, για τα γουρούνια που κυβερνούν την Ελλάδα. Είναι όμως καλός άνθρωπος με πολύ δυστυχισμένη ζωή και μου αρέσει πολύ. Έχουν οι καημένοι ένα παιδί ανώμαλο. Από έλειψη οξυγόνου στη γέννησή του, πέθανε ένα μέρος του μυαλού. Επομένως δεν μπορεί να μιλήσει. Η Χρυσάνθη κι εγώ, πάλι, καταλάβαμε πόσο είμαστε τυχεροί, πόσο η ζωή μάς έχει δώσει ως τώρα το κάθε καλό.

October 11, 1970

In Selly Oak Meeting today a speaker said something very familiar but that nevertheless struck me forcefully and freshly. We tend to speak of life’s journey, he said, as from the cradle to the grave. But this is not a very useful formulation. Rather, we should think of life’s journey as that from complete self-centeredness to complete selflessness, which means, he continued, from the vanity of time to the riches of eternity. This is a rich text since it has deep meaning not only psychologically and morally, but also metaphysically.

November 20, 1970

The shepherd in Winter’s Tale (III.iii.59) speaks à propos of our times: ❡ I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.

I am reveling in Shakespeare. In the last two weeks saw Winter’s Tale at the Aldwych, Tempest at Stratford, and a magnificent Twelfth Night at the Aldwych, with Leander, who came in from Leighton Park. We spent the afternoon in the B.M., had a huge and expensive Chinese dinner, then Shakespeare, and spent the night in the Great Western Hotel. On Sunday morning Leander went back to school and I took the train via Oxford to Brum.

December 11, 1970

A.m., sitting at the rear of the B’ham Town Hall attending the dress rehearsal of the B’ham Schools Symphony Orchestra in which Alec is in the first violin section. This is in lieu of the concert tonight, which C. will go to but which I shall miss, having to pick up Leander at Leighton Park and escort him to London so that he can take the U.S. Secondary Schools admission test tomorrow morning, poor fellow!

What a joy to sit here and see these musicians: full orchestra, plus senior and junior choruses for the Christmas carols part of the program. The orchestra itself is doing the Nutcracker Suite and the overture to Rosamunde. They have been rehearsing every Saturday morning since September, and Alec has had an exceptional, and certainly unexpected, training as a result. When we auditioned for Mr. Adams last June, he said he wished Alec could stay for the next four years. Would that he could, that we all could, for the level of culture here, musical and otherwise, is decidedly superior to that in the States. The Schools Symphony is one small example, and explains why adult Englishmen take to classical music naturally, because they start young.

To London, early afternoon. Checked in at the English Speaking Union and then walked, probably two miles at least, to Paddington via Marble Arch and Edgeware Road. This entire section of London was in darkness because of the electricity workers’ work-to-rule. The ESU had candles in all the rooms and on the landings, and a hurricane lamp at reception. Some places had lit the old gas lamps. Candles have been at a premium, not to mention flashlights (torches). Chrysanthi was asked 13/ for a single candle the other day in Birmingham! Needless to say, everything was difficult during the blackout. No traffic lights, no street lights. This caused great confusion, and one took one’s life in one’s hands just trying to cross the street.

Paddington to Reading. Leander was all ready when I arrived. We didn’t go to the school concert after all—couldn’t have done so if we wanted to, since the hall was completely filled. I heard a little through the window, and watched Mr. Hughes conduct Bach dispiritedly in a tempo rather too slow. The violins were fine; the horns completely erratic, but of course Leighton Park doesn’t have 500,000 people to draw from, as does the Birmingham orchestra. Still it was nice to see this little ritual of the Christmas concert. Leander said that he had been commandeered a few days earlier to work up a movement of a Mendelssohn trio at a day’s notice, to play at the Collect marking the departure of John Ounsley, the headmaster. God only knows how it sounded. He says that the violinist and ’cellist he plays with are first rate. Mr. Hughes tells him that he probably can take grade 8 in the Assoc. Board exams if he stays next year. He seems to like the organ. I’m eager to hear him. But where can we find an organ in Birmingham?

December 12, 1970

Shall he stay or not? That will be a difficult choice. It is so tempting: an obviously fine school that he really likes (although he’s still failing physics!). Yet he can’t be an Englishman most likely, unless he stays on for the whole time, goes to Oxford, and settles here. Tempting. This morning, taking him to the room for the Secondary Schools Admissions Test, I felt nausea at the American children gathered there, irrationally I know. Yet they were so brash, and dressed so garishly! I’m really becoming an old stick-in-the-mud. Yet . . . Should he stay one more year, do his O-levels and then come home? That is what he wants. But at the end of the second year the question will inevitably come: Why not a 3rd, and then, of course, a 4th? Also, if he goes two years here he will have very little chance of entering an independent school in the U.S., for they like to take students in the 10th, not the 11th grade. Yet the life in Leighton Park seems very healthy and wholesome. No need for drugs, no great campaigns for self-rule, etc. The hierarchical society brings children gradually into responsibility. They know that in the 6th form a great change will occur, and they seem content to wait for this. Thus there are no twelve-year-olds on school committees!

The last three weeks—incredibly; how long everything takes—I’ve spent revising my Princeton manuscript, going systematically over the comments made by Trypanis, Mrs. Kazantzakis, and Christos Alexiou, making changes and additions. The worst part was carrying the history of the diglossia back from Koraïs’s time to Hellenistic times, but this had to be done. In the process I came in touch with the source materials that I should have used earlier: Κορδάτου Ιστορία του γλωσσικού μας ζητήματος, Τριανταφυλλίδη Νεοελληνική γραμματική· ιστορική εισαγωγή, Browning’s book, etc. An interesting study. But time-consuming. Now only the typing remains. In addition, the pamphlet for Columbia has been shipped off and I await their reaction. This was terribly difficult to do; I felt at the end of my tether, as though I were 80 years old with no real intellectual energy left. But after a catastrophic revision, in which I seem to have shifted every paragraph to a different location, the thing assumed some unity and coherence. The whole problem was how to be enthusiastic about Kazantzakis without inflating his achievements.

If I can spend the rest of the Christmas holidays checking out all the απορίες still remaining in Ή ζωή ἐν τάφῳ then I can begin fresh on the politics book when Woodbrooke resumes in January. The time grows less and less. The other day Peter Saccio wrote from Dartmouth saying he had just been presented with 130 term papers of 20 to 40 pages each. This shocked me into fearing my future. What a joy, what a gift, this free time has been!

Nice weekend some time ago with Noel, Joy, and Catharine Jones, who drove over from Cambridge. We sat up until 2:30 a.m. talking vigorously. Haven’t done that in a long time. But the organism doesn’t assimilate such irregularities as it used to. Being over 40 has begun to show!

Met Will Lee by chance when we went with the Woodbrooke group to The Tempest at Stratford. He seems 40 already, though he’s all of 23. He spent the summer touring Europe for the first time: Germany, Spain, etc. I asked him how he liked it, and he answered, “It was tiring”!

1971

Kingsmead Close, Birmingham Quaker pilgrimage, March 27–29

January 1–July 9

Οικία Γραμματέως Κοινότητος, Χωρίον Καλλιθέα, Κασσάνδρας, Χαλκιδικής (Μάλτεπε)

July 12–August 26

Κολοκοτρώνη 11, Θεσσαλονίκη

August 26–29

Salonika—Munich

Aug. 29–30

Friends International Center, Courtauld House, Torrington Place WC1 London

September 1–2

c/o Helen Strange, 62, Priory Gardens, N.6

Sept. 3–6

Fly home

Sept. 6–7

January 15, 1971

Leander back in school after an enjoyable month at home. We saw a reasonably good Major Barbara in London, a superb recital by Stephen Bishop, all Beethoven, including the Diabelli Variations, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, 1066 and All That at the Brum Rep, had a visit by Will Lee, 3 days with Busecks including Edith, a memorable trip with them to Coventry Cathedral. I did Woodrow Wilson interviewing in London, with Sir Sidney Caine and Professor Ford of Rochester University, whose child goes to the Mountain School. New Year’s Eve at the Alexious, with Ritsa Papatheophilou and her charming sister from Athens (one arm; all vivaciousness and grace).

In this period I revised my demotic book for Princeton, posting it on December 24, then wrote an introduction for the MGSA volume Modern Greek Writers, finally turned again to Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ, tracking down elusive words. And so Woodbrooke began again. Another term, and how nice it is to be back at my desk there! I’m doing New Testament Greek with Curtis (Mark and Hebrews), the Pauline epistles with Muriel Poulter, and David Robson’s Quakerism course. Quite enough, also Maurice Creasy’s Monday night seminar on ministry. On music night a few days ago Leander and I played some Brahms waltzes 4 hands, and the 1st movement of Mozart’s piano concerto K. 466. Alec did a Telemann trio sonata with Maurice, and Leander played a prelude and fugue from the Well Tempered, Book II, doing the fugue very nicely. The Mozart concerto was an ordeal for me, but I got through it somehow.

Yesterday met an interesting chap from Fircroft, Don P., friend of Professor Thomson’s through the Communist Party, of which he is a member. Has worked in factories all his life; now has quit and is studying English literature at Fircroft and hoping to go to university. He told me of experiences that were uncannily Proustian: life mirroring art. Age 5 he was evacuated to a village in Wales, and had no real memories of it. Age 30 or so he went back there actually with his mistress, on a last fling (he’d resolved to leave her and return to his wife). He couldn’t remember any details of his experiences at age 5 until, entering one of the village houses, he smelled a certain smell. Then, in a flash, everything came back, in amazing detail. Also, he felt that being there with the mistress he was reliving, with variation, what had happened before, because at age 5 he had felt estranged from his mother; now he was estranging himself from this girl. Again a Proustian repetition with variation. Lastly, he told how going to work on the train he noticed primroses growing along the track. They struck him with great force, and suddenly he connected them with primroses he’d seen 25 years before in the Welsh village, also actually growing (primroses are normally seen as cut flowers in florists’ shops). I tried to convince him to read Proust. We also talked about Joyce (he’s doing Finnegans Wake!) and about Mann’s “Death in Venice” and Kazantzakis. A very enjoyable two hours over tea, in the Woodbrooke Common Room.

February 14, 1971

Drove to Reading. Got Leander, who was playing in a soccer match, and then traveled first to Salibury Cathedral and then to Stonehenge. Alec had just been studying “English perpendicular” in school and was very knowledgeable. Deposited Leander back at school and proceeded to Oxford, to Peter and Alice.

February 15, 1971

Oxford

Very enjoyable day. Met Tom Doulis in the morning at the Randolph Hotel. (But first, Peter showed me how he magnifies his crystals 200,000 times in the electron microscope.) Tom and I talked continuously and enthusiastically for three hours, on Greek literature. While we were in a coffee shop, Bill McCurrine saw me through the window and burst in, all smiles. I hope to have him come to B’ham, had forgotten that he was at Oxford, on a Rhodes. Then Peter and I lunched in the Senior Common Room at University College. The masters sitting across the table asked where I was from and as soon as I said Dartmouth there were smiles and then enthusiastic conversation especially about Bob Reich, whom they admired, and about Bill McCurrine, and also Isaacson (Bob Bell’s brother-in-law), who they said did not have a 1st class mind, which Reich definitely had. Nice feeling of academic contact and warmth.

Reading at Woodbrooke, 1971.

L. P. Hartley, My Sister’s Keeper

Galatians, Thessalonians, Corinthians, Romans

Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

Σικελιανού Ο Δαίδαλος στη Κρήτη

Tsoucalas, The Greek Tragedy

Γιώργου Θεοτοκά, Πνευματική πορεία

Μακρυγιάννη Απομνημεύματα (selections)

Καζαντζάκη Καποδίστριας, Κωνσταντίνος ο Παλαιολογος, Σόδομα και Γόμορρα, Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται

Ζήσιμου Λορεντζάτου Μελέτες

The Salonika Front, painted by Wm. T. Wood, described by A. J. Mann (1920)

February 20–21, 1971

Tom and Nancy Doulis here with their 3½ year old. More talk. Supper with Christos, Meg, Ritsa, and Alexis Dimaras, a crisp, wiry character with a fine mind.

February 24, 1971

Mike Keeley telephoned from Princeton. (The British postal strike is now in its 5th week.) I worked hard, got the MGSA manuscript ready by Thursday, and gave it to Judith Herrin, who’ll mail it in Paris.

February 25, 1971

Leander was accepted at Mount Hermon with $1000 scholarship and $500 loan.

February 26, 1971

Leander home. We all went to the Theodorakis concert at the Odeon Theatre, New Street. He played settings of Ritsos and of Seferis’s Μυθιστόρημα. Also a stirring cycle of songs written by Theodorakis himself while he was in prison. And then an encore, the Zorba music in a stirring arrangement. Μαρία Φαραντούρη was the energetic soloist. She has an intriguing throaty voice, very robust. Theodorakis is a giant. When he conducts he is like a bare oak tree swaying in the wind.

March 4, 1971

To London to a seminar at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. The speaker was C. M. Woodhouse, who gave a splendid paper on the relation of Capodistrias with the Φιλική Εταιρεία. We chatted afterwards. I told him about Kazantzakis’s play, which, by coincidence, I am now working on. He has just completed an entire book on Capodistrias. He told me his interest was first aroused in the mountains of Greece in 1942 before the sabotaging of the Gorgopotamos viaduct. He, Zervas, and Aris toured the villages, making speeches, and Aris’s favorite speech was a denunciation of Capodistrias.

March 10, 1971

Much Ado About Nothing at the Crescent Theatre with Chrysanthi and Alec. Letter and photo yesterday from Odysseas from Tashkent, the first direct contact Chrysanthi has had with her brother in 25 years!

March 14, 1971

Sakuma, the Zen Buddhist, told Maurice Creasy he should meditate on the following: the stream stands still, the bridge flows.

March 17, 1971

Nice lusty performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor by the Oxford Players at the Alexandra. I never knew that Tolkien’s man of “middle earth” was Falstaff in the fairy scene.

March 19, 1971

Γιώργος Σικελιώτης, the Greek painter, came to us for supper along with Ritsa Papatheophilou, Christos, and the Doulises. Sikeliotis is a grand figure, an ex-μπακάλης turned successful artist. Former μπεκρής, smoker, etc., he now abstains from everything, except good spirits. I mentioned somehow, something about waiting until the κέφι came, and he answered good-naturedly, Εγώ, έχω πάντα κέφι! which was true. He was full of jolly stories about his eating-drinking companions, especially George Savides. Also about his love for painting, and how the Ford Foundation in Athens is subsidizing artists and writers. Κάσδαγλης, Cicellis, etc. We had a grand time. Sebastian and Helen Brock were also with us. The Brocks, Tom Doulis, Christos and I had spent the last day and a half at the University of Birmingham Byzantine symposium, a series of eight papers on the subject of early Byzantine asceticism, chiefly on the monks of Egypt and Syria—Simon Stylites, etc. Bryn Rees spoke, as did Brock, and a charming ascetic-like scholar from All Souls, Peter Brown, bravely living with his stutter. These concentrated short courses are extremely good, though exhausting. A whole new understanding of this asceticism was opened up, at least to me, especially the communal, social role played by these men whom I had ignorantly thought of as “drop-outs.” They flourished because they were needed. Another interesting insight, this time negative, concerned the disastrous effect of monasticism upon the liturgy. The meaningless repetitions, the reading of the Psalms and lessons in order throughout the year without relationship either to the time of year of the needs of the congregation, all stem from rigid monastic practice later imposed on non-monastic worship. It was a day full of talk and learning.

March 20, 1971

The Doulises stayed overnight. More talk—steadily from 10:30 in the morning until 4:00, when they left. How easy it is to talk . . . with some people.

The previous Thursday, the day before the Byzantine symposium, I went to London. Spoke on the BBC Greek program on Kazantzakis, under the direction of Yolanda Terenzio, then went to the School of Slavic Studies to hear Professor Dakin lecture on the attempts to form a state in Greece ca. 1824–1831. Long chat with Tappe, who’s editing the Romanian series for Twaine. Then home with Richard Clogg and supper there. They’re a nice couple. Young, pretty wife, ex-American. I missed my train back, stayed over at the English Speaking Union, and the next morning settled our travel arrangements with BUNAC, thanks to a tip from Clogg. Very useful day. Then to B’ham for the Byzantine congress and another useful and enjoyable day.

March 27, 1971

End of term. Left this a.m. on Quaker Pilgrimage with Woodbrooke group. David Robson, Chris Lawson and family, the Walkers, Shasti, Beat, Tashio, Ruth Tassoni, Robin Wilkinson, Robert Hewison, etc. 32 in all. We drove to Downham village, I at the wheel of a 12-seater coach. Lovely village. Lunch by a stream, with hens and ducks. Then we all climbed Pendle Hill, in various ways. Leander, Alec, and Jaimie Walker went through bogs, encountering sheep skeletons: very romantic. The rest of us went round back, and up a path to the top. Daphne walked all the way, resolutely. On top, a crowd of children, all with transistor radios, listening to pop music and football games. So much for George Fox and religious δέος. But that evening at Yealand Conyers, Elfrida Vipont Foulds inspired us with her account of Fox’s activities in this area. The Meeting at Yealand was established in 1652. And Robert Hewison read the passage in the journal where Fox was moved by the Lord to climb Pendle Hill, where he had his vision of the great people waiting to be gathered. We are staying in Elfrida’s house, built in 1603 and occupied by the same family until after World War I. It is a rabbit warren of a place, very gracious now and warm, filled with books, Chinese vases, engravings, and a huge piano. Mrs. Foulds spoke quite beautifully last night, as we all sat in her sitting room in front of the fire. She is an enthusiast, in the best sense of Quaker history, yet never willing to think that the history is its own justification. Its only justification comes if it can be a living impetus today, in us. Hard, hard.

March 28, 1971

Chez Elfrida Vipont Foulds, Yealand Conyers, Carnforth, Lanc.

Meeting here at Yealand Conyers. Very lovely meeting house, absolute plainness and simplicity. Friends around all four sides, very lovely feeling of intimacy and warmth. But the Meeting itself was disappointing. All old people, as usual. One ministry, longwinded and pretentious. Later, I learned that the members are not native Westmorelandmen. This has become a favorite place of retirement for elderly Friends, and the members are all “sophisticated” Friends from the south. I expected something more genuine. But the atmosphere was still nice. The closeness. I could imagine the early Friends gathered together as in a place of refuge, with the silence electrically charged, with persecution and danger hovering always in the background.

We then drove to the Meeting House at Brig Flatts, built in 1675 and kept in a good state of repair despite woodworm. Again, a tiny, simple building, very reminiscent of the old Friends. The village that used to have 70 families now has only 2 or 3, a victim of the industrial revolution, for the village was a center of cottage industry: flax growing and linen making. George Fox slept in the farmhouse adjacent. We drove, next, to Firbank Fell, where he preached to a great multitude of 1000 seekers for 3 or 4 hours. We were greeted by a great multitude of sheep—hundreds, all converging upon our vehicles and ba-ing. The new flock! The fells have a wild splendor. Fox came here to a chapel, now gone, and used a rock for his pulpit because the crowd was too large to fit inside. We returned by Sedbergh, where he preached under the yew tree of the Sedbergh church at the time of the Whitsuntide hiring fair, and made such a great impression. Behind the church is a nice view of the Lune River, painted by Turner and praised by Ruskin. (No, this is behind the church at Kirkby Lonsdale, not Sedbergh.) We had a nice tea; then Beat played Beethoven sonatas. Tonight we’ll have music after the meeting with Elfrida Foulds, and the epilogue.

March 29, 1971

To Prestonpatrick Hall, near Yealand. The farm just above was the home of a Quaker named Camm who preached in Oxford, convinced only one man, and considered himself a failure. But this one convinced Friend then went to Ireland, where he was heard by a young boy. Many years later, the same boy, remembering him, heard him once more when he was preaching in Cork, and became a convinced Friend. The boy was William Penn! The Hall itself, built in the 1300s, still operates as a manor farm. The courtyard, exactly as it was in medieval times, was all mud, cows, manure. The house itself, very simple, with a courtroom at one end (the lord of the manor was also traditionally the magistrate). The owner, a Friend, took us around. She was very tweedy and fine. I envisioned all the county squires of literature. Then on to Ulverston, and Swarthmore Hall. The building is quite ugly, but half of it is gone. Judge Fell’s parlor and the great hall are restored. Here Fox found refuge, and completed his journals. From here, Margaret Fell went out to preach. In the town is the Meeting House left by Fox in his will. Very plain and lovely. We also saw the old burial ground where Margaret Fell is interred, overlooking Morecambe Bay, the sands of which Fox used to cross at low tide, to save time. We then drove a bit through the Lake District, visiting the Meeting House near Lake Windemere and crossing the Cabe by Ferry. Lots of singing and good spirits in the coach along the way.

July 25, 1971,

Καλλιθέα, Χαλκιδικής

Φύγαμε από το Λονδίνο τη 10 Ιουλίου και ήλθαμε στη Θεσσαλονίκη, μέσω Dover–Ostend–Munich. Μας πήραν από το σταθμό ο παππούς, η γιαγιά, η Λόλα, ο Κώστας και ο Γεώργος. Φάγαμε, ξαπλώσαμε λίγο, κι αμέσως φύγαμε πάλι για τηνz Καλλιθέα, με το λεωφορείο της επικοινωνίας. Φτάσαμε κατά τις οχτώ το βράδυ. Το σπίτι μας βρίσκεται στο δημόσιο δρόμο, λίγα βήματα από τα καφενεία του χωριού. Είναι πέντε δωμάτια σε σειρά· από τα πέντε, κατοικούμε εμείς τέσσερα. Από μια πλευρά είναι ένα είδος αυλή· απ’ την άλλη, μπαλκόνια που βλέππουν στη θάλασσα, που είναι 200 μέτρα μακριά. Tο σπίτι κάθεται στην άκρη-άκρη ενός γκρεμού. Έτσι βλέπομε όλο τον ορίζοντα. Στο δρόμο, κοντά μας, είναι τα εστιατόρια, καφενεία και καταστήματα του χωριού. Κάτω, στην παραλία, είναι ένα ξενοδοχείο πολυτελείας, μια ωραία πλαζ με λεπτή άμμο, και δύο κέντρα. Μπροστά στο σπίτι μας, στο κάτω μέρος του γκρεμνού υπάρχουν και ανασκαβές. Βρήκαν εκεί ένα αρχαίο ναό του Άμμωνος Διός. Ως τώρα έχουν ξεσκεπάσει τις μεγάλες μαρμάρινες πλάκες του πατώματος του ναού. Βλέπομε τους εργάτες από το μπαλκόνι μας και θαυμάζομε την προσεχτική τους δουλειά. Τώρα σκάβουν και στις πλάγιες του γκρεμνού. Σε μια μεγάλη τρύπα που άνοιξαν, προβάλλει κάθετως μια κολόνα.

Μόλις φτάσαμε, εγώ άρχισα να δαχτυλογραφώ το βιβλίο μας, Demotic Greek, που το επεξεργάσθηκα στην Αγγλία. Έφτασα στο ενδέκατο μάθημα και βαρέθηκα. Ήταν δύσκολη δουλειά, που μου έφαγε δυο ολόκληρες ’βδομάδες. ΄Υστερα η Θεοδώρα Κουμβακάλη μου σύστησε δύο κοπέλλες στη Θεσσαλονίκη, τους ετοίμασα το επόλοιπο του κειμένου, και τους το έφερα. Έτσι γλίτωσα, ελπίζω, από τη σκοτούρα αυτή. Κατά τη διάστημα αυτή αισθανόμουν την αγωνία του Καζαντζάκη όταν αναγκαζότανε να χάνει το καιρό του με hack work ενώ λαχταρούσε να καταπιαστεί με δημουργική δουλειά. Οσο για μένα, είχα σκοπό να δουλεύω το Μυριβήλη όλο το καλοκαίρι, αλλά μέχρι τώρα ήμουν απασχολημένος με το Demotic Greek επειδή το ζητάνε μερικοί και βιαζόμαστα.

Μέχρι τώρα είχαμε αρκετά “social life.” Βρίσκονται εδώ φυσικά ο παππούς με τη γιαγιά, η Λόλα με το Νικάκι. Έρχονται συχνά να μας επισκεφτούν ο Γεώργος με τη γυναίκα του και τα δυο του παιδιά. Ήλθαν μαζί τους μια μέρα ο κύριος Νικαλήδης, που γνωρίσαμε πέρυσι στον Αι Γιάννη. Είναι καθηγητής αυτός στο Πειραματικό Σχολείο και τώρα διορίστηκε επιθεωρητής και μεταφέρθη στη Καβάλλα. Πήγαμε με το Γεώργο σ’ ένα ξενοδοχείο στην άλλη άκτη της Κασάνδρας και μιλήσαμε για εκπαιδευτική ιδεολογία. Αυτός φαίνεται να έχει προοδευτικές ιδέας αλλά με την τωρινή κατάσταση δεν εφαρμόζονται. ΄Υστερα από λίγες μέρες ήλθαν και ο Θέμης κι η Μιράντα Άλτας με τη Μαριάννα, μαζί με τους φίλους τους τον κ. Μανώλη και τη γυναίκα του, που είναι κι αυτή τυφλή σαν και τη Μιράντα. Τους είχαμε γνωρίσει πριν από τέσσερα χρόνια στην Άγια Τριάδα, εκείνη την ωραία μέρα που πλαγιάσαμε όλοι στην άμμο και τραγουδήσαμε. Αυτός ο Μανώλης είναι ένας «παλαβός» από την Κρήτη, υπερβολικά εξώστρεφος, και με ενοχλούσε λίγο με τις φωνάρες του και τις απανωτές αγκαλιές. Είναι όμως ένας καλός άνθρωπος. Η δε γυναίκα του, η κυρία Κούλα, η τυφλή, είναι το αντίθετο, σαν πεθαμένη. Δεν μιλάει, δε γελάει, δεν χαμογελάει. Το πρόσωπό της φοράει πάντα μιαν έκφραση κουτομάρας ενώ δεν είναι καθόλου κουτή, έχει πάρει δίπλωμα στην Αγγλία από το Royal Institute for the Blind και διδάσκει τώρα στη Σχολή Τυφλών. Έφυγε όλη η παρέα αλλά σε λίγο οι Άλτες ξαναγύρισαν, ενοίκιασαν δωμάτιο, και έμειναν δέκα μέρες, για να περιθερίσουν μαζί μας. Έτσι είχαμε παρέα κάθε μέρα. Κάναμε το μπάγνιο μας μαζί το πρωί, και το περίπατό μας μαζί το βράδυ. Άλλωστε έφερα εγώ απ’ τη Θεσσαλονίκη το μαγνητόφωνο του Θέμη και αρχινήσαμε τις καινούργιες ταινίες για το βιβλίο. Ο Θέμης έχει εξαιρετική φωνή και ηχογράφησε για το χατίρι μας όλους τους διαλόγους του βιβλίο! Ήλθε κι ο Κώστας αλλά ύστερα από λίγες μέρες είχε φοβερό καβγά με το Γεώργο και έφυγε πάλι. Η αφορμή του καβγά ετούτου ήταν ο Λέαντρος που έδωσε μια γροθιά στο Νικάκι όταν έπαιζαν ποδόσφαιρο. Δεν ήταν τίποτε μα ο Κώστας, θέλοντας εκδίκηση, φοβέρισε το Λέαντρο. Τότε ο Γιώργος δεν κρατήθηκε, είπε τον Κώστρα άναντρο για να θελήσει να χτυπήσει ένα παιδί, ο Κώστας αγρίεψε, όλο το μίσος που έχει ο ένας για τον άλλο βγήκε στην επιφάνεια, κι όπου φύγει φύγει. Τώρα όμως, ύστερα από μιαν εβδομάδα, καταστάλαξαν τα πράγματα. Είχαμε τη τρικυμία μας, αλλά περάσε . . . για το παρόν.

Είχαμε και το πανηγύρι μας. Του Αγίου Πανταλείμμονος. Μουσικάντηδες, χοροί, γλέντη μεγάλη. Δυο μέρες βαρειά λαϊκή μουσική.

Γνώρισα τον παπά του χωριού. Πήγαμε με τον παππού στη λειτουργία· ύστερα καθήσαμε στο καφενείο να πιούμε τον καφέ μας, να φυλλομετρήσουμε την εφημερίδα, και να μιλήσουμε με τους άλλους εκεί για τους αστροναύτες, την απόφαση του Νίξον να επισκεφτεί τον Μάο, κ.τ.λ. Ο παππούς κάλεσε τον παπά να καθήσει λιγάκι μαζί μας, και μιλήσαμε αρκετά. Είναι πολύ νέος, με τρία μικρά παιδιά, με κομμένα γένια, και πιστεύει ότι η εκκλησία πρέπει πια να γίνει πιο σύγχρονη. Έτσι συντομεύει αυτός τη λειτουργία. «Αυτό που προηγουμένως βαστούσε δέκα λεφτά», μου είπε, «τώρα το κάνουμε σε τρία λεφτά.» Είναι και ο δάσκαλος του χωρίου. Διδάσκει όλες τις τάξεις σε ένα one-room schoolhouse. Όμως η γλωσσικές ιδέας του δεν είναι τόσο προοδευτικές. Είναι καθαρευουσιάνος. «Η καθαρεύουσα», μου είπε, «είναι μια πιο μεγαλοπρεπής γλώσσα, έχει παράδοση.» Όσο για λογοτεχνία, πιστεύει ότι η πιο σημαντική λογοτεχνία απ’ όλη την ελληνική παράδοση είναι τα συγγράματα των πατέρων της εκκλησίας!

Η ζωή εδώ είναι ωραία, αλλά στενή. Όπως μοὔπε προχθές η Χρυσάνθη, όλο σκέφτουνται φαΐ. Κι ο Λέανδρος μοὔπε κι αυτός ακόμα: «Δεν ξέρεις πόσο χάρηκα, μπαμπά, σήμερα το πρωΐ, ν’ ακούσω λίγο κλασσική μουσική στο ραδιόφωνο. Την επιθυμώ πολύ.» Πόσο χάρηκα κι εγώ να ακούσω τα λόγια του! Ο Λέανδρος φέτος έκανε μεγάλη πρόοδο στη μουσική· παίζει τώρα πολύ ωραία το πιάνω. Έπαιξε συχνά στο σχολείο. Την τελευταία μέρα, που είχαν συναυλία, έπαιξε ένα Nocturne του Chopin και ένα Trio του Mozart με clarinet και ’cello. Χάρηκα πάρα πολύ να τον ακούσω.

7 Αυγούστου, 1971

Είναι μια ’βδομάδα που άρχισα πια την επεξεργασία του Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ. Σήμερα—το Σάββατο—θα δακτυλογραφήσω τις σελίδες, περίπου 40, που τελείωσα μέχρι τώρα. Είναι σκληρή δουλειά, τρώει πολλές ώρες, αλλά μ’ αρέσει. Σηκώνομαι στις 6:30 η ώρα, τρώω λίγο ψωμί με μέλι, πίνω το Nescafé μου και κάθομαι στις 7:00 π.μ. στο γραφείο μου, δίπλα στα μισοκλεισμένα παντζούρια (ο πρωινός ήλιος είναι από εδώ). Δουλεύω μέχρι στις 12:30, τότες γδύνομαι (αυτό είναι εύκολο γιατί δεν φορώ παρά T-shirt και σορτς μ’ ένα pouch για εσώρουχο, πάντα ξυπόλυτος είμαι), βάζω και το μαγιό μου, φορώ και τα γυαλιά του ηλίου, κατεβάζω τη ψάθα στη κεφαλή μου και ξεκινώ για τη θάλασσα. Εκείνη βρίσκεται κάτω-κάτω. Σκαρφαλώ τη φράχτη του σπιτιού, κατεβαίνω κάτι πρόχειρες σκάλες που μας έβαλε ο νοικοκύρης μας, και τραβώ μπρος. Στο δρόμο, περνούμε από μια βρύση, ένα από τα αραιά αχνάρια της μονής που βρέθηκε εδώ μια φορά κι ένα καιρό. Φτάνω στην άμμο, που βρίσκονται η Χρυσάνθη, ο Νίκος και τα παλικάρια μας κάτω από την ομπρέλλα, ξεπλωνομαι ανάσκελα να κάνω ηλιοθεραπεία κι ύστερα από λίγο (γιατι ο ήλιος καίει πολύ) κάνω το μπάνιο μου. Η θάλασσα εδώ, αφού είναι κόλπος, είναι συνήθως ήσυχη· είναι και πολύ ρηχή, το πάτο στρωμένο με άμμο, που και που μερικές θαλασσινόπετρες με φύκια και αχινάρες στις χαραμάδες. Προχωράς μεσ’ στη θάλασσα, προχωράς ακόμα, ακόμα, και το νερό δεν φτάνει παρά στη μέση σου. Λίγο πιο μακριά όμως και δεν πατάς πια. Είναι μια θάλασσα κατακαθαρή και έξοχη. Γυρίζω σιγά-σιγά στο σπίτι, να μην ιδρώσω στον ανήφορο. Το τραπέζι είναι στρωμένο. Συγκεντρωνόμαστε όλοι στο δωμάτιο του παππού—είμαστε εννέα άτομα—και τρώμε φασολάκια ή μελιτζάνες, πάντα με σαλάτα, ύστερα καρπούζι, πεπόνι, ροδάκινα. Τότες πάω αμέσως στο δικό μου δωμάτιο και πέφτω σαν πεθαμένος στο κρεββάτι μου. Αποκοιμούμαι κατά στις 4:00 μ.μ., βάζω το κεφάλη μου κάτω από τη βρύση να δροσιστώ λίγο, πίνω ένα καφέ, και κάθομαι ξανά στο γραφείο. Η απογευματινή θητεία βαστάει μέχρι στις 7:30, όπου άρχίζει να σκοτεινιάζει ο ουρανός, και βγαίνουν και τα κουνούπια. Σχολάζω τότε, βάζω πανταλόνια και πουκάμισο, και βγαίνω έξω στο καφενείο να πιώ ένα ουζάκι με «περιποιημένους» μεζέδες. Κάθε βράδυ κάνουμε και το περίπατό μας με τη Χρυσάνθη. Ξαπλώνω πάλι, κάποτε διαβάζω λίγο Proust στο κρεββάτι, ως που με παίρνει ο ύπνος.

Η επεξεργασία πάει καλά. Η γλώσσα του Μυριβήλη έχει λυρικά στοιχεία, σαρκαστικά στοιχεία, ωραιότατες περιγραφές, κ.τ.λ. Με σπρώχνει να βρω τη σωστή απόδοση στ’ αγγλικά.

Ἐν τῳ μεταξεί πήγα δυο φορές στη Θεσσαλονίκη, ταχυδρόμισα τις μεμβράνες που είχα δακτυλογραφήσει, ετοίμασα το υπόλοιπο του κειμένου, το παράδωσα στις δυο κοπέλλες που βρήκαμε στην Ελληνική Βιομηχανία Σακχάρεως, αγόρασα ταινίες, έφερα σπίτι μας το μαγνητόφωνο του Θέμη. Ηχογραφήσαμε κιόλας το μισό του βιβλίου. Έτσι οι δουλιές προχωρούν.

Προχτές με ειδοποίησε η Mary Rassias ότι έλαβε τις μεμβράνες και θ’ αρχίσει αμέσως η πολυγραφία. Καταντήσαμε εκδότες!

Έφυγαν οι Άλτες, αλλά θα ξανελθούν και σήμερα για το Σαββατοκύριακο. Περπατήσαμε ένα βράδυ με τον κύριο Μανώλη, που είναι δικηγόρας και βοηθός στο πανεπιστήμιο. Μου διήγησε τα χάλια των πανεπιστημίων, που σχεδόν δεν λειτουργούν πια, ένεκεν στερήσεως προσωπικών. Δεν υπάρχουν καθηγηταί. Όλοι ή παύτηκαν ή φύγανε μοναχοί τους. Στη θέση τους έβαλαν οι αρχές ανθρώπους που δεν αξίζουν και που δεν μπορούν να κάνουν διδασκαλία. Άλλωστε έχουν πνίξει οι συνταγματάρχη δες την οικονομική τις χώρας. Κάνουν πολλά δημόσια έργα για να δουλεύουν οι εργάτες, αλλά δεν έχουν τα χρήματα που χρειάζονται. Επομένως βγάζουν ομολογίες που οι δημόσιοι υπάλλαλοι είναι αναγκασμένοι να αγοράσουν. Κι η κυβέρνηση και ο κόσμος ζει από δάνεια. Πάει να πει ότι τα επιφανιακά πλούτη που μπορεί να τα παρατηρήσει ο ξένος επισκέπτης δεν έχουν βάση—είναι όλα φεύτικα. Αυτή η κατάσταση μπορεί να βαστάξει για κάμποσον καιρό, αλλά δε γίνεται να βαστάξει για πάντα. Σιγά-σιγά θ’ αρχίσει ο πληθορισμός, ώσπου να πέσει το κράτος σε μιαν κρίση οικονομική. Έτσι λέει ο κύριος Μανώλης. Ο δε Γεώργος, πάλι, ισχυρίζεται το αντίθετο. Λέει αυτός ότι η κυβέρνηση έχει λεφτά, γιατί φορολογούνται τώρα όλοι οι πολίτες, ενώ πριν οι πλούσιοι εύβρισκαν χίλιους τρόπους να αποφύγουν τις υποχρεώσεις τους. Ποιος ξέρει;

Χτές βράδυ γιόρτασε ο παπάς του χωριού και πήγαμε στο σπίτι το να του πούμε «χρόνια πολλά». Ένα ωραιότατο σπιτάκι, πλούσια επιπλομένο, μα χωρίς επιφάνηση. Μάθαμε λίγο για την ιστορία του χωριού. Οι κάτοιχοι είναι όλοι προσφύγες από το Μάλ-τεπε της Κωνσταντινοπόλεως. Ήταν στην αρχή τρακόσιες οικογένειες μα πολλές απ’ αυτές έφυγαν αμέσως για τη Θεσσαλονίκη επειδή ήταν εμπορικές οικογένειες και δεν μπόρεσαν ν’ αρχίσουν μιαν αγροτική ζωή. Πρίν έλθουν, δηλαδή πριν από το 1922, όλα τα χωράφια γύρω-γύρω ανήκανε στη μονή του Αγίου Πανσελείμμονος. Ο Βενιζέλος, για να δώσει γη στους πρόσφυγες, πήρε τα χωράφια αυτά από το μοναστήρι, που δεν μπορούσε πια να συνεχίσει, και διαλύθηκε. Γι’ αυτό δεν υπάρχει πια το μοναστήρι. Μιλήσαμε και για τις αρχαιότητες που βρέθηκαν εδώ. Οι αρχαιολόγοι ήξεραν ότι πρέπει να υπάρχει εδώ ένα ναό του Άμμονος Διός, γιατί αναφέρεται στις αρχαίες ιστορίες. Όλο το μέρος αυτό έπαιζε σημαντικό ρόλο στ’ αρχαία χρόνια. Η Ποτίδεια, που την κρατούσαν αποικία οι Αθηναίοι, ήταν η αφορμή του Πελοππονισιακού Πολέμου. Η Άθυτος (δίπλα μας είναι η Νέα Άθυτος) ήταν αρχαία πόλις, επίσης η Όλυνθος. Ήταν πάντα σημάδια εδώ του αρχαίου ναού. Όταν ήλθαν όμως οι μοναχοί από το Άγιον Όρος να στήσουν μετόχι εδώ, πήραν τις πετρες και τις έβαλαν στα δικά τους κτίρια. Άλλες τις κουβάλησαν στο Όρος. Έτσι δεν απόμειναν παρά τα θεμέλια, τα οποία με το καιρό σκεπάστηκαν. Τώρα τελευταία, όταν έσκαβαν να θεμιλίσουν το καινούργιο ξενοδοχείο, έτυχαν να ανακαλύψουν αυτά τα αρχαία θεμέλια του ναού του Άμμονος Διός. Έβαλαν το ξενοδοχείο λίγο παράμερο, και άρχισαν τις ανασκαφές.

Ο Λέανδρος βρήκε παρέα. Τόνε πλησίασαν μια μέρα μερικά παιδιά, αγόρια και κορίτσια της ηλικίας του, που ήθελαν να μιλήσουν αγγλικά. Από τότες πια, είναι αξεχώριστοι. Κάνουν τα μπάνια μαζί, παίζουν ποδόσφαιρο, σεργιάζουν, πίνουν τις πορτοκαλάδες τους, βάλουν πλάκες στα κέντρα να χορέψουν, κάθουνται στο σπίτι να μιλήσουν, κ.τ.λ. Είναι μια μεγάλη παρέα από τη Θεσσαλονίκη και την Αθήνα. Έχουν τα παιδιά δικά τους σπίτια εδώ και έρχονται κάθε καλοκαίρι. Έχουν και τον παππού και τη γιαγιά τους, που κατάγονται από το χωριό αυτό. Έτσι έχουν χωράφια, καλαμπόκια, μποτσάνια, αμπέλια—όλα τα αγαθά. Ο παππούς κάνει δικό του ούζο, λάδι, ψωμί. Πήγα προχτές η Χρυσάνθη και τους βρήκε μαζευμένους στου παππού το σπίτι, εκεί που έψηναν ένα λαγό πάνω στη φωτιά. Ο Λέανδρος είναι μέσα στη χαρά του. Εμείς όμως δεν τον βλέπομε πια. Φεύγει μαζί τους το πρωί, γυρίζει το μεσημέρη να τσιμπήσει κάτι, χωρίς πολλή όρεξη, ξαπλώνεται, φεύγει ξανά, έρχεται πολύ αργά να κοιμηθεί. Και δεν κλείνει μάτι. Είναι όλος αναστατωμένος. Πολύ ευαίσθητο παιδί είναι, δεν είναι ήσυχο πλάσμα καθόλου. Είναι τόσο χαρούμενος που βρήκε παρέα, έτοιμος είναι να αρρωστήσει. Περίεργο!

Να αλλάξω κουβένα, πρέπει να σημειώσω εδώ πόσο χαίρουμαι που ξαναδιαβάζω το Proust. Μπήκα στο βιβλίο—είναι ο τελευταίος τόμος—σαν να έμπαινα σ’ ένα κόσμο πολύ γνωστό, που τον είχα επιθυμήσει για πολύν καιρό. Τι έξοχη γλώσσα! Τι ωραία μετάφραση (διαβάζω την καινούργια μετάφραση, από το οριστικό κείμενο). Τι οξύτατες περιγραφές ανθρώπων και τοπίων! Τι αφοσίωση στην ομορφιά και στην τέχνη, δηδ. στους μόνους παράγοντες της ζωής που μπορούν να αποχτήσουν μιαν «αιώνια» αξία. Μα φλυαρώ. Είχα σκοπό σήμερα το πρωί να δακτυλογραφήσω τις επεξεργασμένες σελίδες του Μυριβήλη. Μπρός! Δουλειά!

August 20, 1971

I think I have discovered why Greeks talk so much. It is to keep them from having to think.

1972

Hanover

January 1–June 16

Riparius

June 16–September 1

Hanover

September 1–December 31

1973

Hanover

January 1–June 16

Riparius

June 16–September 3

Hanover

September 3–December 31

1974

Hanover

Jan. 1–June 15

Riparius

June 15–September 1

Hanover, Niagara Falls, Oberlin, Riparius, Hanover

Sept. 1–6

Hanover

September 7–December 31

July 7, 1973

Riparius

I am despondent and self-critical for two reasons: (1) I am reading George Giannaris’s book on Theodorakis, and cannot help but see my own lack of energy, cowardice, compromise, and comfort, compared to a man like Theodorakis; (2) a small incident last night confirmed to me my constitutional meanness. We went to Schroon Lake with Jacques and Hilda Grunblatt to see a performance by Indian dancers. Afterwards we went to a bar to have a beer. The “barmaid,” a harridan of middle age with a body like a prizefighter’s, was first very slow in serving us, and then got the order completely wrong. I reacted with feelings of self-righteous scorn for her but Dr. Grunblatt, as naturally as Leopold Bloom, said, both to me and to her, “It’s been a hot day,” which it had: 90 degrees in the shade. He was naturally, nonchalantly compassionate. I was not. (One could develop the resemblances between Grunblatt and Bloom.)

Nice visit over the weekend by Noye, Dee, and Ann Johnson.

July 15, 1973

To Kinhaven with parents and Dick and Irene (Frowenfeld). Leander played beautifully a Piston sonata. For the first time I had a sense that he could go ahead professionally. He played with sureness and grace. Alec was a little stiff (in his playing, not his personality) and timid, but did much better the second time round when he was second fiddle in the Mozart Dissident quartet. Both boys are flourishing. Afterwards: supper with Rachael Steuermann and David Ostwald included. Vast damage from floods in Weston and Londonderry.

July 16, 1973

Reading Mary Gianos’s translation of Dimaras’s History. Translation scandalously bad. Letter yesterday from Stangos. Ritsos and Alvarez both like my revised introduction. Δόξα σοι ο Θεός!

I love these lines by Palamas, in the collection Οι Λύκοι):

Τα πάντα αν περνούν, θα περάσει κ’ εκείνη·

Ειρήνη σ’ εφέ και γαλήνη!

Also these lines from the poem «Αριστοτέλης Βαλαωρίτης» in the collection Δειλούς και σκληρούς στίχους:

Με φέρνει υψώνοντες ο γοής χορός των εκατό σου χρόνων

εκεί όπου φλοίσβος μουσικός γίνεται ο βόγγος των αγώνων,

στών ποιητών και στων ηρώων τους παραδείσιους κόσμους, όπου

δε φτάνει ο πόνος κι ο δαρμός ο πολυτάραχος του ανθρώπου.

There is also a touching, heartfelt sonnet of excellent technique by Γεράσιμος Μακοράς in Dimaras’s History σελ. 422, called «Δύο» and addressed by the childless poet to his childless sister as they both can “look forward” to nothing but death. The last, bitter, tercet is:

Άχ! την ημέρα πού και τούτη πάψει,

αν ένα μόνο δάκρυ ο κόσμος βγάλη,

το ζωτανόν, όχι τον άλλο, ας κλάψη.

July 18, 1973

I am reading Linos Politis’s History of Modern Greek Literature, which is interestingly different from Dimaras’s. He cites some graceful, and wise, verses from the Ερωτόκριτος (885-888):

Απ’ ό, τι κάλλη έχει άθρωπος, τα λόγια ‘χουν τη χάρη

να κάνουσι κάθε καρδιά παρηγοριά να πάρη,

κι οπού κατέχει να μιλή με γνώση και με τρόπο,

κάνει και κλαίσι και γελούν τα μάτια των αθρώπων.

July 23, 1973

Extraordinary: a man was murdered on Waddell Road, near Route 8 (thank God). The police found his body this morning, in the declivity on the western side of the road, knifed to death. This all began last Sunday when, on the way to Kinhaven, we noticed a car parked in the road. We concluded that it was someone fishing in the stream and thought nothing more, but it was still there when we returned late that night. I didn’t go out on Monday, but when we went out on Tuesday to go supper in Montcalm South, the car was still there, and I began to worry lest the man got lost in the woods. Returning from Lake George we took the license plate and called the police. Next day (Wednesday) they had traced the plate and discovered that the car belonged to a young man who had gone off for the weekend with his girlfriend. They were expected back on Sunday night but of course had not returned. On Thursday an airplane cruised the area. On Friday scores of troopers and forest rangers searched the woods, discovering the body of the male but no trace of the girl. Today (Saturday) they’ve been using bloodhounds but still have not found anything further. The speculation is twofold: (a) the girl killed him and took off; (b) they had picked up a hitchhiker, who killed the boy and either made off with the girl or killed her too. Nothing like this has ever happened before on Waddell Road!

July 24, 1973

À propos: Kimon Friar, in his introduction to Modern Greek Poetry (p. 67), which I am now reading with just admiration, quotes a statement by Seferis, presumably in his essay comparing Cavafy and T. S. Eliot. Both poets, says Seferis, warn us “not to be self-satisfied, not to fool ourselves with the belief that our life, our tidy and calculated life, is somehow out of reach of the spectacular and terrible.” Personally, I have continually felt that my life has been so charmed, thus far, so extraordinarily lucky and blessed that some great extraordinary catastrophe must be lurking in ambush, ready to pounce.

July 25, 1973

W. H. Auden, in “Eros and Agape,” The Nation, CLII, June 28, 1941, p. 757 (cited in Lillian Feder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry, Princeton 1971, p. 346): Eros is “the basic will to self-actualization without which no creature can exist and Agape is that Eros mutated by Grace, a conversion, not an addition, the Law fulfilled, not the Law destroyed.”

July 28, 1973

I’m reading, finally, the essays that Christos wrote for his B’ham B.A., right now the second essay on Sikelianos. On p. 134 he quotes Varnalis’s devastating attack on the Delphic Idea, as a retreat from reality into a vague occultism, and speaks of other kinds of retreats in a way that hits me as well, and that I feel (the quote is from the original source, Varnalis’s Αισθητικά-Κριτικά Β΄, 1958, σελ. 236-240): Αυτή η φυγή είν’ η μόνη σωτηρία των αδύνατων ανθρώπων. Ο ένας λαχταρά να φύγει από τον κόσμο και ν’ απομονωθεί σε μιάν ερημιά «καλλιεργώντας το κήπο του» [that’s me!], ο άλλος το ρίχνει στον έρωτα και στο κρασί, ο άλλος στον πεσσιμισμό, κι ο άλλος στη μαγεία. Ο καθένας φεύγει από τον αγώνα της ζωής . . . Varnalis’s own ideals are also clear: Ο άνθρωπος που κρατιέται γερά από την πραγματικότητα κι αγωνίζεται μέσα σ’ αυτήν για την κατάχτησή της με οδηγό την επιστήμη, είναι ο άνθρωπος της προόδου κι ωφέλιμος στους άλλους . . .

1974

January 4, 1974

Forster on Mr. Fielding in Passage to India (p. 191, chapter xx): “After forty years’ experience, he had learnt to manage his life and make the best of it on advanced European lines, had developed his personality, explored his limitations, controlled his passions—and he had done it all without becoming either pedantic or worldly.”

At the MLA in Chicago last week we interviewed a candidate, Melissa Cannon, who recited the whole of “Lapis Lazuli” to us and wept in the middle, after which she composed herself beautifully. We were all impressed with her (Gaylord, Epperson, Terrie, Walker) not only because of this but because of her general excellence. But Blanche Gelfant objected, saying that she misinterpreted the poem, the point of which is that we must not weep. What Blanche failed to recognize was that the girl wept, I’m sure, not because she thought the poem sad but because she thought it beautiful.

January 5, 1974

❡ Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form. (Passage to India, p. 211, ch. xxiv.)

❡ It was . . . the old, old trouble that eats the heart out of every civilization: snobbery, the desire for possessions, credible appendages, and it is to escape this rather than the lusts of the flesh that saints retreat into the Himalayas. (Ibid., p. 241, ch. xxvi.)

❡ It’s only one’s own dead who matter. . . . How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only be men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there. (Ibid., pp. 247–248, ch. xxvi.)

Forster says in Passage (somewhere) that only the East knows leisure; the West knows only Work or idleness.

❡ The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary . . . (Ibid., p. 282, ch. xxxii.)

January 7, 1974

Marlow in “Heart of Darkness” (p. 529): “No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”

January 23, 1974

Most extraordinary dream just before I awoke. I was walking along a dirt road with someone, and suddenly we came across a small, shack-like house. My companion told me that Nietzsche lived there, and sure enough as I looked in (the front was an enclosed sun porch), there he was at a table in the corner, writing. I nodded and waved to him, in homage, whereupon he began to sing at me, loudly, with an inscrutable smile, like Godbole.

Conrad is so terribly relentless. Here he is on love—the love of young people and of old, speaking of Dr. Monygham’s late-flowering love for Mrs. Gould (in Nostromo, p. 573, part iii, chapter xi): “. . . With the utter absorption of a man to whom love comes late, not as a most splendid of illusions but like an enlightening and priceless misfortune . . .”

I’ve been reading again this term. It’s nice. So far: A Passage to India, Aspects of the Novel, “Youth,” “Typhoon,” “Heart of Darkness,” “The Secret Sharer,” Nostromo—my entire course!

Daniel Carson is driving me insane. Now he has stopped work again. Really, he has no interest in doing his novel, and is simply paralyzed by his own arrogance and neuroticism. For me, alas, this might mean denying him his Dartmouth degree. What a way to end after so many years, and with probably the brightest student we’ve had here!

Leonard Rieser approached me recently, asking me to submit my name as a candidate for the Third-Century Professorship in the Humanities. I have no real interest in doing so, but will probably let myself be directed by this aspect of fate, in the flabby expectation that fate can mold my life better than I can myself. Weakness, utter weakness.

Leander was accepted to Oberlin Conservatory. He said that the feeling he experienced afterwards—i.e., after the period of waiting—was not really glee or even self-confidence, but rather a kind of delightful emptiness, as after the discharge of a large, overdue bowel movement. His fate is taking form, also.

Lovely music last night. Lewis, Allan, Alec, and myself. We played Schubert’s “Adagio and Rondo,” something very romantic by Bruch, and parts of the Brahms piano quartet. Imagine!

I find the extraordinary omission in this Journal of the ten days in which Christos visited me last November: here, then in New York for the MGSA symposium, then back here (with Mario Vitti in tow), then back to New York again for the demonstration at the Chrystal Palace in Astoria for Hatziemmanuel. My goodness, we talked continually, five or six hours on end, without stopping. The tragedy that man bears (the two children, defective and hopeless) is almost unthinkable. We made plans for the future: collaboration on a second volume of Demotic Greek, and a joint effort to publish an anthology, with translations, apparatus, and introduction, of δηοτικά τραγούδια.

The Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies is now a reality, since we’ve signed the contract with Blackwell’s. Nicol is editor, I am co-editor, and the board is Sherrard, Bryer, and Clogg in England, Keeley, Petropulos and Vryonis here.

Here is a fitting motto for any teacher: “Our daily work must be done to the glory of the dead, and for the good of those who come after.” (Conrad, Nostromo, p. 582, end of part iii, chapter xi, thought by Mrs. Gould.)

May 28, 1974

I was elected Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities. Strange.

July 9, 1974

Riparius

Ο Δημόκριτος κατά τον Διογένη τον Λαέρτιο σ’ ένα βασικό του ηθικό απόφθεγμα γράφει: «Σκοπός της ζωής είναι η χαρά, όχι όμως η χαρά της ηδονής αλλά εκείνη που γεμίζει την ψυχή του ανθρώπου με γαλήνη και ηρεμία, που πραγματοποιείται όταν ο άνθρωπος δεν κατέχεται από φόβο, δεισιδαιμονία, ή άλλο πάθος.» (Νίκος Πολιόπουλος, Ο Νίκος Καζαντζάκης και τα παγκόσμια ιδεολογικά ρεύματα, σελ. 212.)

My new (old!) Steinway upright has its problems. My old piano was tuned too low for the flute. This one was tuned too high. So, with Al Zalan’s appearance imminent, I let necessity energize me into a new skill: piano tuning. I lowered all 200+ strings so that A = 440. The result was horrendous, but we played anyway. The next morning I attempted the “fine tuning” with much better results, and we played again, with much pleasure. In my old age here is a new profession.

Yiayia and Pappou here, with Lori and David Buseck, two lovely children. Alec is back at Kinhaven. Leander is a junior counselor at Camp Timberlake and loving it.

July 10, 1974

❡ Ο αγώνας του ανθρώπου της εποχής μας . . . δεν είναι απλώς οικονομικός. Η οικονομική χειραφέτηση είναι μονάχα μέσο για της ψυχική και πνευματική χειραφέτηση του ανθρώπου. (Καζαντζάκης, «Απολογία», 400 Γράμματα σελ. 227 [?], cited in Pouliopoulos, p. 235.)

Evening. Extraordinary ballet: Prokofiev’s “Prodigal Son”: so sparse and moving in Balanchine’s version, which all seven of us saw at Saratoga together with Webern’s “Episodes” (in one part, he orchestrates a six-part fugue from Bach’s “Musical Offering”) and the ever-exciting “Firebird.” In the afternoon we watched the rehearsal: bare bones, with all costumes, scenery, and orchestral color subtracted.

July 11, 1974

Something always to remember, although it seems so simply and obvious: Kazantzakis’s definition of saving our soul: να τη σπαταλήσ[ουμε] για ένα ανώτερο σκοπό (Ισπανία, σελ. 53, talking about Don Quixote and Saint Teresa).

July 15, 1974

Kazantzakis’s definition of God is also striking in its simplicity: ο Θεός, δηλαδή . . . η απόλυτη ελευτερία. (Report to Greco, σελ. 547.)

Repaired the pump. The leathers had worn out and I had to purchase an entire new cylinder because of stripped threads. Rigged up a scaffolding and used a fence stretcher as hoist, which made the procedure much easier and safer than 10-12 years ago, when we simply lifted the whole rig, all 25 feet of it, upwards out of the well.

We decided to spend next Summer Term (26 April–12 July) at Woodbrooke, preceded by five or six weeks in Greece. Μακάρι να γίνει!

Surprise visit from Tom Wilson and son and a friend, who had just climbed Marcy and were returning to Love Lane, Lake Pleasant.

July 16, 1974

❡ “Le problème, a dit Malraux, pour un agnostique comme moi, c’est qu’il semble que l’homme ne puisse pas vivre sans une transcendance.” Je pense qu’ aucune question ne concerne plus directement Kazantzaki qui n’a cessé de rechercher et de rejeter tous à tour une transcendance comme nous l’avons vu. (Marie-Louise Bidal-Baudier, Nikos Kazantzaki: comment l’homme devient immortel, p. 204.)

July 17, 1974

Our nineteenth anniversary. I gave Chrysanthi some colorful slippers, which she liked.

July 18, 1974

It’s clear—as if it weren’t clear before!—that my two loves are language and music. How thrilling to sit under my tree reading French again, and Greek. And how pleasant to sight-read Schubert sonatas last night (mauling them, of course), on the piano. This had been professionally tuned yesterday morning. It is still not without problems, twangs and the like, but playable. The tuner of course thought I had been terribly cheated. “You paid for the name.” The piano was manufactured in 1900!

July 24, 1974

Vassilis Vassilikos wrote from Paris asking me to translate his novel Ο μονάρχης in time for the English edition to coincide with the release of the film by Costa Gravas. Attractive. But I read the novel, which was really valueless as literature, and had nothing truly to do with Greece. A commercial undertaking probably written, even beforehand, with cinematographic possibilities in mind. I was tempted: the money (maybe), a chance to collaborate with Vassilikos, a foot in the door of that glamorous world of the cinema, etc. But Chrysanthi was firm: Don’t waste your time with other people’s work, and third-rate work at that! Do your own work! Κοντολογίς, I refused.

July 26, 1974

A lovely day. Leander arrived last night with his friend Todd Engstrom, a fellow counselor at Timberlake, and an expert on birds, trees, and wildlife. This very impressive youngster instructed us in all kinds of wonders this morning as we hiked about five miles through the woods on the Baker property: that a torn twig of yellow birch smells like wintergreen, for example. We saw bear droppings and tracks, deer tracks, elderberries, ironwood, basswood. I learned the difference between striped maple and other varieties, and that what we’ve been calling salamanders are really newts. We returned, plunged into the pond to refresh ourselves, piled into the car and drove, all of us, to Kinhaven, where Alec was concertmaster in an Ives’ piece of great interest, and then played superbly in the Haydn piano quartet, with a force, authority, and virtuosity entirely new to him. Colin has been teaching him how to transfer the weight of his arm to the bow, with good results. We took Alec out to dinner on this lovely occasion (also his birthday is on the 29th) with Larry Morse and another violinist and strikingly good looking boy going next year to Queens College, Philip Τ—. Then back home, with Manon Price who’ll spend the week with Daphne. Chrysanthi was ecstatic at Alec’s playing and rightfully so. He was very impressive indeed.

Several days ago Gizikis handed the Greek government over to the politicians and Karamanlis returned. End to dictatorship, and so suddenly. Chrysanthi wept copiously at the vision of the imprisoned returning to Piraeus to be reunited with their families. We all wished we could have been in Greece at that moment of ecstatic joy. Η Ελλάς ανέστη!

August 10, 1974

Something to remember in these days when everyone is scrambling for a higher salary: Όποιος δε βρίσκει την ανταμοιβή μέσα του είναι σκλάβος. (Καζαντζάκη Αγγλία, σελ. 146 quoting a Tibetan ascetic.)

Last Sunday, August 4th, another lovely concert at Kinhaven. Alec did a Krenek trio. We also picked up Leander at Timberlake and all had supper at Echo Lake Inn. Leander played in the F & W string band (!) for folk dancing in Hanover; also concerts in Newbury and (today) on the green at Weston. At our trustees’ meeting I offered the F & W paradigm and said I’d push for quicker transfer of the Dushkins’ property to the School, endowment notwithstanding. Francis Cabot asked to step down as chairman, which is good, because he’s been too busy with other things to give the proper attention to this. J. Malcolm Forbes took over.

So much needs doing at the farm: stove wood for next winter, pruning, fixing up a new dry well, haying, the garden, finishing the mowing, replacing rotted boards on the porch, paneling the anti-room. What first?

I’m amazed that I’ve made no mention in this journal of the three-day visit paid us on May 13, 14, 15 by Eleni Kazantzaki. We picked her up at Logan airport and drove home for supper with Stelios, Dimitris, Nikos and our family. She got into a strong argument with Nikos Nikolaïdis over Cyprus, he being anti-Makarios. Then a student came from the “D” to do an interview, and things sweetened. Oh how she talked, how we all talked, continuously from 4:00 in the afternoon until midnight. The next day Chrysanthi took her around, especially to Daphne’s school. I took her to lunch with Gary Sutherland, who’d come all the way from Virginia for the occasion. Then an interview broadcast alive on WRCR. She did splendidly; she always deprecated her English, which is excellent. A tour through the Hop, walk home, a few minutes’ rest for both of us (she was less worn out than I was), then lots of people at home. She particularly enjoyed David Martin, who told her about his prison experiences. In the midst of this, Daphne got bit by a dog. So while Chrysanthi gallantly continued to play hostess, I rushed to the emergency room of the hospital. Quiet supper. Then Mrs. K’s lecture in Filene, which was filled nearly to capacity. I introduced her, speaking of the true collaboration between her and Nikos. She spoke of his quest for freedom. Not a terribly good talk, really, but authenticated by the personality behind it. Afterwards, all the questions—and there were plenty—were on politics. She laid it into the audience: You’re young. Why don’t you do something? Why do you accept injustice and killing? Shame on you! Leonard Rieser told me afterwards, “Fine! Just what they needed!” She was also very open about her adoration of Mao and China; she had recently returned. Then to International Center for refreshments and more questions and discussion until midnight again. The next day we returned to Boston. On arrival, previously, she had said she’d heard that the Museum of Fine Arts had a fine Chinese collection, so we all went there. After a while I got museum feet, but Mrs. K. marched indefatigably from hall to hall commenting learnedly on all the exhibits. At 4:00 p.m. we rushed to the airport and saw her off. She had exhausted both of us for three entire days, yet seemed tireless herself. And I remember her saying to me once, “Nikos exhausted me. I can’t understand where he got all that energy.”

August 14, 1974

Among the many brilliant observations of Helène Cixous’ book on Joyce, many of which go far beyond the narrow subject of Joyce or indeed of literature, is this: Why do so poor, desperately poor, families have so many children? It’s because children in large numbers are their only riches. They can “acquire” children—nothing else. (p. 24.)

August 15, 1974

If we were a myth-making nation we would soon create a legend, or even a cycle of them, out of the fall of Richard Nixon. It would be a kind of obverse of the Parnell legend created by the Irish. But we are not a myth-making nation, nor even an artistic one, and Nixon will find neither his mythifier nor his Shakespeare.

August 17, 1974

The perfect epigraph (or epitaph?) for my forthcoming English Composition Resource Center: “I fear that we cannot rid ourselves of the notion of God, because we still believe in grammar.” Nietzsche (encountered by chance in Cixous, p. 330).

Afternoon: to Timberlake for their annual Fair, a most ambitious and imaginative affair with homemade Ferris wheels, dunking stools, crazy rides, food stands, dancing, etc., all ruined by a continuous downpour. They persevered, all drenched to the skin (literally to the skin because many had little else on except their skin). Leander was justifiably morose, having just served for two hours in the rain, when we arrived.

On to Weston for the final weekend. Alec played 2nd violin in the Brahms clarinet quintet. Very musical and fine. Philip did the Dumky, but not as excitingly as Alyce Coguetta, John Richmond, and Leander did it several years ago. A girl approached me in wonderment. “Are you Professor Bien? . . . Peter Bien? . . . The Peter Bien?” “Ah, yes.” “I studied Greek from your textbook!” “Λοιπόν, μιλάς ελληνικά;” “Ναι,” whereupon she explained to me, in very good Greek, that she had just finished a year at College Year in Athens. How nice! I conspired a little with various trustees.

August 18, 1974

Very spirited playing of the Academic Festival Overture and of course the concluding Bach motet was so touching. Back home at 6:00 with Alec. I began immediately repairing the mower. For supper we had our first corn. Delicious! Pappou and Yiayia spent the weekend with us.

August 19, 1974

Joyce (Critical Writings, p. 205): “. . . the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.”

August 20, 1974

Five hours’ haying in the hot sun. Followed by delicious swim, leisurely supper, playing a Mozart sonata with Alec, bed.

August 26, 1974

This place has been suddenly transformed into a conservatory. Leander returned last night bringing Tom Miller, and right now (10:00 a.m.) Leander is practicing the piano in the living room, Tom is practicing the bassoon in the guest house, and Alec is practicing the violin in the barn. Daphne is despondent because she can’t practice the piano simultaneously. How warm and lively Leander is compared to Alec.

August 28, 1974

Yesterday we cut several dozen trees, among those that I girded last year in the thinning operation. The boys dragged them to the path, helped by Tom Miller. Today I skidded them out with the tractor and we began sawing them up for firewood. Very satisfying work.

John Tallmadge arrived with one-third of his work-in-progress, a book on his experiences in the Sierras. He read to us last night the opening poem on the estuary, and several prose sections: the first week, an encounter with pseudo nature-lovers, etc. How nice to hear language so well used! I exhorted him, as I have so many times in the past, to muster up the willpower to finish!

The University Press of New England might publish Life in the Tomb. Nothing sure yet, but it looks good.

Harrowing letter from Christos, who is still delinquent with his general article for the Columbia Dictionary. The situation with the children has driven Meg into such hysteria, bitterness, self-hatred, etc. that she lashes out at Pavlos violently and also at Christos, so that the marriage is foundering. At the same time, Meg reacts with increased professional zeal, neglecting the children for her research, writing, for lectures, classes, etc., so that a disproportionate amount of the burden falls on Christos. Poor man! Such a tragedy, all because of that utterly stupid incident whereby oxygen was not available in the delivery room. If only the children had died in infancy! Now they are an inexorable curse, all the more so because Christos refuses to consider them a curse.

December 10, 1974

The first University Seminar met with Roger Masters speaking on moral and legal implications of psychosurgery. A very stimulating evening, bringing together medical school people, psychiatrists, and engineer, sociologist, literary scholars, etc. After it, I took the train to New York.

December 11, 1974

Observed a fine class at the American Language Project, Columbia. Richard Faust remembered me from “the old days.” Then lunched at the faculty club with Mary Dobbie and Dan Dobson. He remembered sitting on my Ph.D. defense on L. P. Hartley. Amazing! Mrs. Dobbie the same as always. She showed me round her tutorial center, and gave me lots of ideas for Dartmouth’s equivalent. Then on to Professor James Gutmann and Mrs. Mayer of the University Seminars, he a venerable gentleman, classmate of Jonathan Mirsky’s father, she a German (refugee?) who runs the show, really. They were so proud of Tannenbaum, the founder, who obviously left something to be remembered by.

December 12, 1974

Off to CCNY to observe Mina Shaughnessy’s excellent program. She was most gracious to Bill Cook and me throughout the day. We observed two classes, a teachers’ meeting, the tutorial center, and lunched with Prof. Quinn, the chairman. I then took Bill Cook home to 20 East 74th for dinner.

December 14, 1974

A day of cultural feasting. Spent the morning at the Metropolitan Museum seeing the centenary exhibit dedicated to Impressionism. Marvelous placards throughout enable one even without the catalogue to understand what Impressionism was as a movement, what it was fighting, what success and failure it had. Then to Lincoln Center. First lunch with Steve Scher and wife in O’Neal’s Pub, opposite the Dante statue. Then to the Met to hear Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice with Peter Pears, and Brian Pitts as Tadzio. In the intermission had a fine reunion with Herb Wekselblatt, whose tuba played the “cholera” leitmotif throughout. Herb said he did it so well that his colleagues assured him that they all felt sick! Virginia died about one and a half years ago (I knew this, of course) and Herb is managing. The Britten opera was a feast of beauty: music, literature, décor, and especially ballet, all amalgamated. Brian Pitts as Tadzio was Beauty itself: one begins to realize why the Greeks extolled the ἔφηβος. The nuances—e.g., Tadzio taking the posture of Michelangelo’s Adam on the Sistine ceiling—were sophisticated. The whole was on the highest level of artistic endeavor, yet readily “available” to the audience, and a mixture of thought and feeling each abetting the other. Mann would have approved. . . . AMTRAK back to Hanover, arriving at 4:30 a.m. Sunday.

December 15, 1974

At Meeting, reunion with Bill Symonds, back from Oxford to go for job interviews as a journalist. 5:00 p.m. to Heffernans’. Nice talk with Boghosian, whose dealer is in the Parke-Bernet Galleries building near 74th Street. Symonds already insufferably conceited. How easily people delude themselves. I was dumbfounded when I read his account of his clarinet playing in his vita, since I had actually heard him. He can’t play at all. Now he’s ready to start at the top: New York Times or Washington Post.

December 21, 1974

To Boston: Goya prints in the Museum of Fine Arts. Marvelous Picassos. More Monets to flesh out last week’s Impressionism exhibit, including Rouen Cathedral and some water lilies. But I most love Picasso’s series on the bull, starting realistically and going by stages to just a line here, a line there. The Goya views of the Peninsula War are horrifying. Men are incredible beasts. No, beasts don’t deserve that appellation; they are better.

Afternoon and evening with MGSA: business meeting in Philips Brooks House, then executive committee meeting at Parthenon restaurant. I spoke at length with Mrs. Koumanianou, who was discouraging about money being available, although Nicolopoulos continued to encourage. He is a faker, though. He told me to write to Mr. Feather at Blackwell’s to say that the Greek government would purchase numerous copies of BMGS. Feather responded, writing also to Trypanis, to the British Embassy, etc. I asked John what he had written back. “Oh, I didn’t write back,” he said. “Why not?” “O, Trypanis or someone will write back.” Φρίκη! . . . We planned another seminar, in California; also worried a lot (too much) about Julia Loomis’s amour proper. . . . Scary drive back, amidst snow flurries. I arrived at 2:00 a.m.

December 24, 1974

To New York for Christmas and MLA.

December 26, 1974

Saw the new production of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Very compelling story of a ne’er-do-well alcoholic who actually is the only moral person in the cast.

December 27, 1974

Equus, by Peter Shafer. Better than Hunt of the Sun because it takes the same concerns and applies them to a realistic situation. Beautiful mixture of stark realism and ultimate stylization. Also a successful blending of thought and feeling. Themes are universal ones: guilt, evil, temptation, sexuality, maturation, pagan versus Christian.

I met Allan Brick at MLA and had lunch with him. After a decade in the peace movement (AFSC, FOR, etc.) he rejoined the teaching profession by winning a job from 800 other applicants to direct freshman English at Hunter. Daughter Pamela goes to Oberlin. Full of humane and practical ideas about teaching. Also met Willis Barnstone finally. Very self-effacing. I had expected someone aggressive, I don’t know why. He has a Greek wife. Poulakidis was there, looking middle-aged. Five years ago he was a youngster. Mike Keeley liked my Ritsos introduction.

December 28, 1974

Ballet: Nureyev in Apollo. The best was Paul Taylor’s choreography of Handel in the ballet “Aureole.” Brilliant. . . . Met Laird Barber and walked in the park. He doesn’t seem to have much energy, but there’s a glimmer somewhere, I think. . . . Some good papers at MLA and some rather heated discussion, especially in Spanos’s seminar on post-modernism. . . . Went to Museum of Modern Art with Leander yesterday. He’s beginning to awaken to culture, slowly.

December 29, 1974

Interviewing in morning. One young girl, Ann Gates, has already published stories in The New Yorker. Afternoon to City Center matinee of the American Ballet: Les Gatineurs and La Fille mal guardée, both insipid. The star of the latter was the new Russian defector, Baryshnikov, who didn’t seem so terribly extraordinary to warrant all the fuss. In the evening Alexis Levitin called and spent some time with us. Still without a job, as are so many. Still talk-talk-talk, but with an attractive naïveté. Leander and I went to the Frick. My favorite Rembrandt. Overheard one of the guards, a young boy, telling someone that he preferred this job to going everyday to some horrible office.

December 30, 1974

Morning to Butler Library to see if they had Ριζοσπάστης on microfilm. They do, and much more. On the way home to Hanover we stopped finally at the Adlers’ in Briarcliff Manor. Paintings and sculpture everywhere. Oozing with taste and creativity. Sharon home from Wesleyan. Jack came early from the office especially for us and we exchanged smiling hellos, not much more, since we still had to reach Hanover before midnight, which we did, barely.

1975

Hanover

January 1–March 15

Boston, Frankfurt, Athens, Κολλέγιο Αθηνών, Τ.Θ. 5, Ψυχικό

March 15–16

Κολοκοτρώνη 11, Θεσσαλονίκη

March 17–24

Athens College

March 25–April 29

Κολοκοτρώνη 11, Θεσσαλονίκη

April 30–May 4

M.M.S. Guest House, Flat 02, College Walk, Selly Oak, Birmingham B29 (Woodbrooke)

May 5–July 18

Birmingham, Dublin, Shannon, Boston, Hanover/Norwich (overnight chez Rassias), Timberlake, Kinhaven, Riparius

July 18–19

Riparius

July 19–September 1

Hanover

Sept. 2–October 28

MGSA symposium at UCLA, Claremont Hotel, 1044 Tiverton Ave., Los Angeles

October 29–Nov. 2

Hanover

November 3–Dec. 28

Washington, DC. APA/MGSA meetings

December 29–30

Hanover

December 30–31

March 16, 1975

Κολλέγιο Αθηνών, Athens

Arrived via Boston & Frankfort. Daphne vomited as the plane stopped taxiing at Frankfort; otherwise the trip was uneventful. In Athens College they placed us at the very top of the main building, the Μπενάκειον, in a nice flat. John Lincoln welcomed us. The flat was filled with notes of welcome, bottles of wine from Steward Flory and his wife, a full icebox, etc. Very nice indeed. But then we called Thessaloniki to say hello and were told that Chrysanthi’s mother was in a coma and we should come immediately.

March 17, 1975

Flew to Salonika. Magdalene a little better. Immobile in bed, except for a mouth that requested water and a hand that clutched, like an infant’s. Πετσί και κόκαλα. Hard to say if she was aware of our presence or not. When Pappous told her that Chrysanthi had arrived, she asked, Ποια Χρυσάνθη. Ο Παππούς very embittered about life, yet still the possessor of his wonderful smile when we took his mind off Magdalene, who had been a burden to him for three years. She hung on until Friday night, or rather Saturday a.m. the 22nd. She lay in state in the house early Saturday, with two giant candles at her head and feet, and very many callers, relatives from Salonika and the village, neighbors, friends. Then we all went to Aghia Triada for a short but moving requiem, thence to the new cemetery for an equally rapid burial, and lastly the δεξίωση at the cemetery, when I saw Marios again and we talked about his summer home at the tip of Κασσάνδρα. The next day, Sunday, the whole clan ate together, roast kid, my treat, and then Kostas tempted me to go to a soccer game. So much for the dead in the grave! On Monday, in rain and gusty wind we returned to the cemetery to spread κόλλυβα and wine (from a Pepsi Cola bottle) over the grave, sliding in the mud. It was hard to call any of this sad since she had been sick for three years, and house-ridden for long stretches of that, and had lost her memory. Once, during our stay, when she was a little bit herself and was asked how she felt, she replied: Καθόλου σαν άνθρωπος. She had to be cleaned like a baby, and even in death, after having been dressed in clean clothes and laid out in state, she defecated and had to be cleaned again. So endeth the farce. The family disposed of all her things—mattress, bed, clothes—and as she was carried out the door in her coffin, broke a glass on the threshold, να σκορπίσει το κακό. Now Pappous remains alone, as shall we all. He, too, has long losses of memory, but remembers enough to be tormented by these losses. His one dream is to see Odysseas return home from Russia, and he has even rented an empty apartment in the same building, against the day.

During this period, I saw George Savidis briefly. He liked my Introduction to Ritsos, and asked me if I’d ever like to come as a visiting professor to the University of Thessaloniki. I responded enthusiastically. I worked each day in the library of the Εταιρεία Μακεδονικών Σπουδών. Also had a very interesting evening at Vouli’s house, with the archbishop elect of Australia, Στυλιανός Χαρκιανάκης, who asked me if I’d like to come to Australia for a celebration of the Archdiocese emphasizing Greece’s literary culture. (I responded enthusiastically.) Harkianakis is a poet, and a very good one. He recited for us that evening. Also a great admirer of Ritsos. Indeed when he first met Ritsos, by accident in a bookstore, he, the bishop-abbot-archbishop elect, kissed Ritsos’s hand! He invited me to accompany him to Mount Athos for 25 March, but I declined because of Yiayia’s death. He was previously the abbot of Μονή Βλατάδων on Salonika’s acropolis. Accompanying him was his successor, a roly-poly gentleman of advanced age who said that his taste in poetry lies with . . . Drosinis! Harkianakis, a wild Cretan, is a lover of Kazantzakis. He told a lovely story about a party during Lent when he was tempted despite himself to join in the dancing. Before doing so, he made a speech about Zorbas, concluding that it was all right for him, the abbot, to dance during Lent, since Zorbas taught us that dancing is the transubstantiating of flesh into spirit!

Also saw Themis and Miranda Altis. She is in mourning for her father, and very desolate; he is doing his best, as always—killing himself with work, probably as a refuge.

March 25, 1975

Telephoned Leander on his birthday.

March 28, 1975

Visited Πέτρος Χάρης concerning Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ. He’s proud of the huge row of Nea Estia on the shelf, forty-five years under his direction. He was polite, but very brief.

March 20, 1975

Alec arrived.

March 31, 1975

Second visit to Ελένη Βλάχου in her office at Καθημερινή. The first time she was unexpectedly gracious, but this time rather abrupt. She corrected proof all the time I spoke. Said that she preferred to read Myrivilis and Kazantzakis in English because έχουν τη δική τους γλώσσα, κι εσείς [δλδ. οι αγγλόφωνοι] έχετε μονάχα μια γλώσσα. Said she was 99% certain she’d publish Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ if I freed myself of other ties.

April 3, 1975

Learned from Χάρης that the Academy has agreed to subsidize ‘ζωή ἐν τάφῳ via the Ouranis Foundation, according to the terms proposed by David Horne. Μεγάλη ανακούφιση. (But remember what happened later!!)

April 6, 1975

Jerry McLane left at 5:15 a.m. after having stayed with us ever since our arrival. He flew into Athens unexpectedly while we were in Salonika, and had to be housed by John Lincoln. Very embarrassing for all. A flabby boy without energy, not even enough to enunciate clearly. Not an idea in his head, in great contrast to some of the Greek boys, who are so naturally intellectual. Ο Στάθης, for example, a high school freshman here, who said that he’d read Zorba five times, thrice in Greek and twice in English, and who excitedly brought me Kafka to learn if I’d heard of him! All this outside of school, of course, despite the twelve subjects they carry.

Some fine people here. John and Mrs. Lappas; he’s the θεολόγος. Peggy and Danny Danforth, who hope to spend all next year in Αγ. Ελένη, Σερρών, studying the Αναστενάρηδες.

Today, Sunday: archaeological museum in he morning, which leaves one aghast at the achievements of the ancients; Acropolis; lunch at Τουρκολίμανο; then βόλτα at Πασαλίμανο, most of this in the company of the Rassiases, who are beautifully installed in Katharine Butterworth’s parents’ apartment in Ilysia.

April 23, 1975

Spent two hours with Γιάννης Ρίτσος at his home in Οδός Κόρακα, an apartment filled to bursting with his famous “stones,” two of which he gave us, his paintings, the male nudes of Τσαρούχης, and the extraordinarily beautiful editions of his books. Ritsos himself is, as everyone says, όμορφος, proud, with a warm smile and gracious manner. But as soon as he begins to talk—and how he does talk!—a kind of demonic glimmer invades his eyes; he is off in another world, reciting almost. His vocabulary, and the expressive means at his disposal in the oral word, are extraordinary, making one realize with a jolt what a meager part of their language most people utilize. What a gift to be able to think, and then to express one’s every thought consummately, effortlessly, unhesitatingly.

We of course ranged over many topics. He was very complimentary regarding my little piece on Φιλοκτήτης, which surprised me because it was really so slight. He plans to have it, along with my introduction, printed in a volume of criticism of his work. Μακάρι!

What surprised me, although obviously it shouldn’t have, was the degree to which he is immersed in the classics, the degree to which he sees himself continuing what was begun by Homer. This came out in many ways. I asked him, for example, about the dramatic monologue form, whether he was influenced at all by Cavafy, say, or by Browning. He looked very surprised. Of course not, he said. The dramatic monologue derives from Homer, where the poet so often hides behind his characters. Then there is the ancient drama, which started with one actor, expanded to two, then three. His “dramatic monologues” are not monologues; they always have one person addressing another, even if that other is relatively silent—but the other is a factor. Thus he sees his poems as continuing the modes established by the ancient tragedians and by Homer.

Similarly, when we came to the question of myth, he began by vociferously denying what many critics have asserted: that Ritsos used mythic subjects in order to “hide” his political message and thus be able to publish despite censorship. This is absurd, he said. First of all, many of his mythic poems were written and published when there was no censorship at all. No, what fascinates him is the adaptability of myth. Any given myth, in ancient times, took different forms from locale to locale and probably from decade to decade. In other words, the basic story was always altered to fit specific conditions of time and place, while still retaining enough of its basic characteristics to be recognizable as that myth and not an entirely new one. It is this adaptability and versatility, clamped together with an extraordinary stability, that Ritsos wishes to exploit in the twentieth century, just as the ancients exploited it in the Golden Age. So, when Ritsos rewrites the Philoctetes story or the story of Electra, he is trying to discover what form will be given the eternal myth by twentieth-century Greece. The question of hiding political innuendos is entirely irrelevant. The question of working within the Greek tradition while at the same time renewing it, is the relevant one. And Ritsos with great pleasure showed us a Spanish translation of Sophocles’ Electra with interludes from his own “Electra” in the same volume.

This devotion to the ancients extended itself even to the “problem” so often noted by critics: that Ritsos writes too much. When I asked him about this he was far from apologetic. On the contrary, he sees himself as visited by the gods, as gifted with a talent not given to other men. “How can I sit and not use that talent?” he asked me. “I need 700 years to say all I want to say. How therefore, can I let a single day pass without creating something, and what use is creativity if it is not offered to others? I don’t write too much; on the contrary, I don’t write enough. Those who criticize me are lazy; they sit doing nothing, and for that reason are jealous of those like myself who work, instead of going every day to the καφενείο. Think of the ancients. We know that Homer, besides the Iliad and Odyssey and perhaps other epics, wrote 33 hymns. Aeschylus—that strong, unbending spirit who refused to adopt his language to the Athenian public—wrote 70 to 90 plays. Euripides wrote 92. I haven’t come close to them yet.”

Interestingly, even Επιτάφιος he looked upon as a continuation of the ancient mode. First of all, it is in dramatic form, the poet “hiding” behind his character, the bereaved mother. True, it takes the form of the δημοτικά τραγούδια, but it also recalls the laments in ancient drama and epic. Indeed, Ritsos was careful to depart from demotic tradition, where the rhymed lines are always end-stopped, and to utilize instead a great deal of enjambment. [Check this; I may not have heard correctly.] He added that the enjambment in Homer is probably an indication of the degree to which the poem is not entirely oral.

As for meters, he has never been silly enough to try to reproduce an ancient meter exactly in his poems. There is no need to do this in such a pedantic way because all the meters he uses—iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic—are of course ancient.

I didn’t ask about diction, unfortunately. It would be worthwhile to examine one of the poems to see the degree to which ancient and Byzantine forms are employed.

In general, Ritsos has a very “mythic” view of poetry in another way as well. A poem, he said, “can never be explained. Each explanation suggests another—the more the better. But the deepest truth is that the only guarantee that the poem is a true poem is this: that beyond all the explanations, beyond even the sum total of all the explanations there remains something entirely mysterious, something that leads us into another realm entirely, beyond that of human logic.”

April 26, 1975

To a play by a Chilean author: Η Χιλή θα νικήσει. Rather primitive artistically, but very strong, and very “appropriate” for post-Junta Greece.

April 27, 1975

Chrysanthi tried to fly to Salonika but the Olympic 24-hour strike foiled her at the cost of a whole day back and forth between Athens College and the airport, Athens College and Syntagma.

April 28, 1975

Chrysanthi and Daphne left. I stayed in order to meet with Lambis Myrivilis, who was very understanding and patient about the saga of Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ. He invited me to dinner; thus I met the famous Κέϊτη Μυριβήλη, representative in Greece of the Ford Foundation. The two of them live in Κολωνάκι but strangely are far left-wing socialists, maybe communists. But it seemed mostly talk to me, and my goodness how much talk! There also was a chap named Nikos Chadzinikolaou, a Greek who was part of the παιδομάζωμα—the children kidnapped by the escaping αντάρτες and taken behind the Iron Curtain—at age 13. Now, after twenty-five years in Poland, with a Polish wife, he teaches Polish literature in the university and is himself a poet, in Polish. He had returned to Greece for the first time in twenty-five years and wept at the airport, but prefers to stay in Poland where everything, according to him, is marvelous. No one is hungry, no one is without a job; the state subsidizes poetry, and so forth. Afterwards, Katy said to me privately that he reminded her of the Greek-Americans: their basic insecurity makes them paint their adopted country all white. He was present because he is the translator, into Polish, of (guess what!) Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ.

July 29, Riparius

Scandalous that I made not a single entry during our stay in England! A good interview with George Thomson, however, I wrote up separately and included in the Philoctetes materials.

What did I do from May until mid-July? Among other things:

• Learned ancient Greek better than ever before, by reading Sophocles’ Philoctetes carefully, word by word, three times. Very nice feeling. Among other things it helps with modern, especially with a poet like Ritsos, who uses ancient words to such good effect.

• Wrote a little (but, I think, a very good) analysis, in Greek, of the symbol of the cow in Ritsos’s «Ορέστης», to be published in ΑΝΤΙ. The occasion for this was a request by one of the University of Birmingham students to elucidate the poem.

• Read scores of articles on Sophocles’ Philoctetes in connection with my proposed Freshman seminar and the IPA meetings next Christmas.

• Finished, and posted, finally, Christos’s articles for the Columbia dictionary.

• Finished the definitive version of the dialogues for Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος after Christos corrected his corrections!

• Followed Harry Newton’s course on Marxism and Trevor Blackwell’s on views of culture, both at Fircroft College. Got to know also Bob Milman and Terry Murphy, the other two tutors, and Harry’s wife Liz. (Address: 1 Witherford Way.) Also met Corfield, the principal, and became involved, on the sidelines, in the “revolution” at Fircroft whereby the principal was expelled by the students, who then designed their own program, with the tutors’ cooperation, held mass meetings when the governors (Christopher Cadbury, chairman) threatened to close the place down) and were finally evicted by the police. Met some interesting students at Fircroft, including a London cabbie who prided himself on getting theatergoers to their shows on time, and an embittered IRA Northern Irishman, Victor Hetherington, very bright but paranoic. Also assorted members of the British Communist Party and other leftist groups.

• Lectured twice to the Woodbrooke short course on Community and Authority directed by Chris Lawson (my paper on the Dartmouth revolution, 1969). Nice follow-up with an industrialist named Moses!

• Played the piano a bit, helping Margaret Evans’s daughter prepare for her grade VII violin exam (Bach G major sonata; Mozart). Performed slow movement of Beethoven opus 10, D major, for Epilogue and played the hymn each Wednesday night.

• Edited (i.e., practically rewrote) Loring Danforth’s article on Karaghiozis for BMGS; and somewhat (verifying references mostly) for Linda Myrsiades’s article.

• Met on two occasions with Donald Nicol at King’s College re: the journal. First time with Clogg, Sherrard, Mackridge; second time with Bryer. Attended Clogg’s seminar on the Greek civil war after the first meeting.

• Negotiated another two years of BMGS with Mr. Feather at Blackwell’s, Oxford, together with Anthony Bryer.

• Heard Kimon Friar’s “Odyssey” talk (again) at the University of Birmingham. Supper afterwards with Christos.

• Heard Bryn Rees’s nice talk about Charles Raven at the evening Meeting at Bournville. Afterwards learned that Liz Bryer is Raven’s granddaughter.

• Visited the Marquis of Hereford’s stately home outside of Alcester. Tea on the lawn, with Ritsa (Ragley Hall). Also a Catholic manor near Kidderminster; a Safari Park (with Ritsa); some lovely gardens in the Cotswolds (with Klaus and Nina Wedell); all of the Shakespeare houses, including Anne Hathaway’s cottage for the first time since I went with Donella Gandolfi in 1952); David and Gwen Robson’s lovely farm in Wales, just west of Llangollen, together with a score of Woodbrookers, for a weekend; Joy and Noel Jones in Cambridge for a weekend (the Cambridge fair); Danny and Bettina Wilkes outside of Bury St. Edmunds; saw the abbey there where the barons met in 1215 to decide to approach King John for the Magna Carta; John Meny and his wife in their digs in Cambridge; lunch in the rooftop restaurant of the theatre.

• Theatre: Henry IV, part I, at Stratford with Christos and Meg; Henry V at Stratford (Woodbrooke group); Henry IV, part II, Stratford, with Wedells and Ritsa; Importance of Being Ernest at Birmingham Rep with Ritsa; Travesties (Stoppard) at the Aldwich; Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Aldwich, starring Ian Richardson; Stoppard’s Jugglers at the B’ham Rep; John Gabriel Borkman at the Old Vic, starring Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Wendy Hiller, with Chrysanthi and Daphne; Ο Jerusalem by D. Edgar at B’ham Rep (about plague in medieval times); Pilgrim at the Rep with Ron & Lura Adeney, David Holton and wife, Christos (mock musical based on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress); Britten’s Death in Venice at Covent Garden, starring Peter Pears (2nd time); a poor Tempest in London wit Paul Scofield as Prospero; Shaw’s Heartbreak House in National Theatre production on tour at B’ham Rep, rather tedious; Love’s Labour’s Lost and Henry IV part II were superb, also the Ibsen and of course Death in Venice.

• In London with Chrysanthi and Daphne one weekend heard Liverpool Philharmonic (Franck’s symphony) at Royal Festival Hall and stood four hours in the Horseguard’s Parade to see the Queen, Philip, Charles, Earl Mountbatten, and all those marvelous horses in the Trooping of the Colours. Never again!

• Chrysanthi and I served as unofficial marriage counselors for Christos and Meg, whose relationship is horrendous. Hours and hours with Christos, who refuses to see his own faults. On July 6 Meg attempted suicide by swallowing 27 sleeping tablets. Christos luckily became aware immediately and got her to the hospital in time. We visited her there the next day; she was cheerful. It cleared the air. Three days later she was off on a holiday in Wales, without Christos, fortunately. I see little hope of the marriage surviving. But separation, for them, presents as many problems as does staying together, so that at present there is an impasse.

• Helped arrange for Meg to come to the MGSA symposium in California next October.

• Visited twice with George Thomson (58 Billesley Lane). The first time, Daphne fell in the garden and broke her arm. The second time I went alone, after Meg’s attempted suicide, at Thomson’s request to know my prognosis regarding the marriage. We, thankfully, turned to other things eventually. He told me that Bachtin was largely responsible for his own turn to Modern Greek.

• Relaxed talk with Helen Vlachos at her London townhouse, 28 Bryanston Square, regarding Myrivilis. In the end she decided that she could not publish it.

• Visited Adeneys at their home in Sutton Coldfield, together with Harry Newton and wife. Visited Joan Tyers again. Supper at Wedells. Tea with Chris Lawson & family. Went to University of B’ham Greek Department banquet for external examiners, and farewell for Bryn Rees. Saw Peter Mackridge there again. Lunch with Chrysanthi and Peter Ricketts (linguistics), who’d like an exchange year at Dartmouth. Lunch one Sunday with Alexious at the Bryers’. Spent one Sunday with Peter Dronke and family and Alexious. Went horseback riding at Clant Hills.

• Inspected the television centre at the University of Birmingham; saw the videotapes they did of Christos teaching and another of the Acclamations in Byzantine times, done for Bryer. Discussed with Paul Morby, the producer, the possibility of videotapes for Demotic Greek.

• Heard David Holton’s seminar on early Greek printing in Venice.

• Played chamber music with Maurice Creasy and Dorothe Klein, and performed at the united service.

• Spent several hours in Dillon’s University Bookshop, Torrington Place, selecting books for our Composition Centre. These were mostly brought to my attention during our stay at Athens College.

• During this period Daphne went to Bournville Junior School and had a marvelous teacher and lots of friends (some from nursery schools days four years ago). Chrysanthi took social work courses and Fircroft courses and basketry at Bournville School of Art. We ate our dinners at Woodbrooke and talked with various interesting people there, as always. Very much at home, as always.

Alec, when Athens College closed, went on a Peloponnesian tour, then by train to Salzburg, Vienna, Munich, Geneva, Zurich, Nice, Marseilles, Paris. Many many adventures. Returned to Hanover via Montreal, penniless. Leander tried to establish himself in Hanover on his own, was overcome by loneliness, and after several days of agonized expectancy, was given a last-minute job again at Timberlake, where he is flourishing. Yesterday we visited him there and heard Alec play Prokofiev at Kinhaven. All’s well that ends well.

Last week: to Saratoga for Program II of the new Ravel Festival. Balanchine’s inventiveness remains unstaunched.

August 2, 1975

Just had an insight; I wonder if it is true. My insight was that my admittedly irrational and excessive and certainly cruel antipathy toward disease (evidenced now, once again, that Chrysanthi has “sprained her back” and I am furious instead of compassionate) is connected with, based upon, my very deep antipathy toward my father. Perhaps poor Chrysanthi is the unwitting victim of a father-son battle being played out, now, on “symbolic” levels, with an antipathy toward someone who is sick being, in effect, an irrational fruitless “blow” against the man who always cared for everyone’s sickness. Interesting.

Leander was here the other day for less than twenty-four hours on his day off from Timberlake. He is very proud of his successful first year at Oberlin. We’ll see what happens in the future. Certainly his dismal experience on his own for two weeks in Hanover should be a clear warning, confirming something that we have known ever since Leighton Park—namely, that Leander functions only in groups, not on his own.

My parents are in an adult-education program at Skidmore. We met them last night at the ballet (“Swan Lake,” which bored me to death; “L’après-midi d’un faune”; Farrell and D’Amboise in “Meditation”; “Cortoise Hongoise”); Sunday they are coming here, something to which I hardly look forward, especially with Chrysanthi in her completely incapacitated state. My father babbled on about this person and that, everyone being “so well informed,” as usual. Mother is better, δόξα σοι ο Θεός.

Alec called to say, with enthusiasm, that his final assignment is the Brahms piano quartet, the one we “murdered” one night at the Bonds’ with Wiggy, Nancy, Alec and myself (!) at the piano. Yesterday he did something by Ibert, after only four days’ practice.

I should record here that I am presently translating Ritsos’s poem “Φιλοκτήτης,” about 100 lines a day. In the evenings I am reading George Thomson’s strange book that interprets all the basic facts of nature and man according to axioms laid down by Marx, Engels, and Mao.

August 4, 1975

Pappous, Yiayia, Daphne and Chrysanthi are in the house. I am in the field, in my “office,” translating Ritsos (and reading the Iliad in Greek in the intervals: how delightful to be able [almost!] to manage it now, after putting myself to school with Sophocles at Woodbrooke). A furious thunderstorm is in progress outside (outside! I am outside) with noble Zeus-heaved lightning bolts dancing off the treetops and great rolls, claps, machine-gunning, cannonades of thunder reverberating through the mountains. The rain is coming in driving buckets-full, so welcome after weeks of drought and 90+ degrees temperatures. My roof is doing well, thanks to the extra tarring of last year; but a huge puddle is gathering at my feet, since a stream has developed beneath the sills. I’m saved from discomfort by several boards that float upward as the depth increases. It is really too dark to look up words in the dictionary, so I’ve taken a rest. I am much relieved (whether I should be or not is another question) by the two lightning rods on my roof here.

Yesterday, after a similar but less dramatic storm, we were without electricity for eleven hours. Thankfully, Art and Kris Perryman came and we passed a pleasant evening by candlelight.

Chrysanthi’s back seems to be improving. She developed a rash, plus constipation, from the drugs prescribed for her, so is now continuing just on aspirin.

August 5, 1975

Joseph Losey, teaching at Dartmouth again this summer, wrote to me saying he’d like me to read, and comment upon, the script for his projected movie of À la recherché du temps perdu, prepared by Harold Pinter. Losey hopes to begin shooting next spring, in France. I spoke to him on the telephone. He seemed glum: disgusted by the apathy and machismo of Dartmouth students, and worried about his own future—he is 67 and has so much he wants to do! He wonders will he ever finish the Proust. . . . This anguish about mortality is, of course, something I too am beginning to feel more and more. From this point onward everything is really so uncertain. Every day is a reprieve.

I’m on the second draft of Φιλοκτήτης, trying to render it in English verse. On line 200 now; it goes very slowly—20 or 30 lines a day.

August 16–17, 1975

Very full and enjoyable weekend. We left Saturday a.m., Chrysanthi’s back not being very hardy, and drove to the Blue Gentian Lodge outside of Londonderry. Then a nice lunch at “The Garden,” which is like a pub; then to Alec’s concert at Kinhaven. He did the Brahms D major piano quartet with Peter Calabbro at the piano. It was well played, but somehow not inspiring. We left the concert early in order to rush up to Timberlake to see Leander and the annual fair. Lovely day this time; last year it rained continually. Leander bursting with health. Saw Ruth and Jack Hunter, and Addison Cate and Bruce Koloseike and the Brezee girl and Stettenheim’s daughter Wendy, so felt very much at home. Piglets, sky-rides, dunking bowls. Even a demonstration of how to raise a teepee in nine minutes flat, presented by the campers of Flying Cloud, lovely blond teenagers in the usual F & W loincloths. Then back down route 100 again to Kinhaven for the second concert, or most of it. Then sleep in good, hard beds. Sunday: the third concert, including the orchestra under Jerry Bidlack in a very good performance of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, and a fine Mozart piano quartet with Kathy Southworth, whose parents, sitting behind us, had obviously been won over to the magic of Kinhaven. Farewells, tears, the usual. . . . Lovely drive home. Steak and corn on the outdoor fire in honor of Alec’s homecoming. No sooner were we in the door than Jacques Grunblatt called: let’s go to a concert! Chrysanthi started to say that we’d just been to three in two days, but I said “Let’s go!” So we went to Schroon Lake to hear Claude Frank in the Boathouse: three Beethoven sonatas including opus 190 and the Waldstein, done magnificently. Irv and Fran and Al Zalen and Mary were there, too, so we had quite a party; also Mark Grunblatt, who’ll be starting Haverford in a fortnight. During the concert some “pranksters” removed the fuses and the lights went out, but Frank continued without a stir and afterwards joked about the value of low stools, which bring you close to the keys. At the conclusion Jacques invited the whole group for pizza. A very pleasant time. We got to bed at almost 1:00 a.m. I should add that Daniel Carson telephoned during supper and threatens to camp in our house for a week in October: the smudge that set off the beauty of all the rest.

August 19, 1975

Short, nice visit from Bob Bell, now very pleased with his job at Williams. More music with Al Zalan in the afternoon; then Alec and I played for Bob at night: Corelli, Bach, and our usual schmaltzy favorites.

October 29, 1975

Hanover

Meg Alexiou: near crash landing, her plane diverted to Kennedy. I finally caught up with her in Chicago. On to Los Angeles.

October 30–November 2, 1975

Claremont Hotel, Los Angeles

Sightseeing at Universal Studios; walk through Beverly Hills. MGSA symposium at UCLA the next two days, organized excellently by Speros Vryonis. Met Robert Browning, among others. Meg’s paper superb. UCLA and Westwood so beautiful: like Greece. Mediterranean climate, sunshine, architecture. My first view of fabulous California.

November 3–6, 1975

Hanover

Meg here; delivered two papers, both well received. The separation from Christos is now definitive.

December 19, 1975

From Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton, 1974), pp. 303, 305:

❡ . . . in all three great Levantine faiths sharing the Biblical concept of divinity (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), where the godhead is regarded as a transcendental personality outside of and ontologically distinct from his creatures, a logic of duality is maintained, and the religious aim is not to achieve an experience of identity with godhood but to establish and maintain a relationship of some kind by virtue of membership in a social group believed to be supernaturally endowed: the Jewish race, the Christian church, or the Mohammedan Sunna.

❡ The aim of Indian yoga, on the other hand, is a realization of identity. . . . The yogi is to penetrate and cast aside . . . the whole spectacle of phenomenality—forms, names, and relationships—letting only that which shines through all as undifferentiated consciousness remain to his contemplation. (p. 305 ff.)

❡ Pick up, for example, any object at all. Draw mentally a ring around it, setting it off from the world. Forgetting its use, forgetting its name, not remembering that it was made, or how, or that names are given to its parts; not knowing what it is, but only that it is, simply regard it. . . .

❡ Anything at all, any stick, stone, cat, or bird, dissociated from every concept this way, will be seen as a wonder without “meaning,” a beginning and an end in itself—like the universe. . . . As James Joyce states in Ulysses: “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods” [p. 409].

1976

Hanover

January 1–February 8

Cincinnati, c/o Peter Topping

February 9–11

Washington, AHEPA Educational Foundation

May

Riparius

June 28–September 1

Hanover

September 1–October 28

Chicago, MGSA symposium

October 29–November 1

Hanover

November 2–December 7

Birmingham, Norfolk Hotel, 263 Hagley Road, B’ham B16 9NA

Dec. 8–22

Hanover

December 23–31

February 3, 1976

Letter from Athanasiadis-Novas announcing the decision of the Ouranis Foundation to subsidize Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ up to $4500. Hooray! David Horne accepts!

February 9–11, 1976

With Peter and Eva Topping in Cincinnati. I read my Philoctetes translation, mostly to members of the Classics Department, and lectured on the γλωσσικό ζήτημα and Kazantzakis to Topping’s seminar. Very nice break. Learned lots about Cincinnati; visited Taft museum, etc.

June 18, 1976

❡ Our age reminds one vividly of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gives it validity no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic—tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on. (Kierkegaard, “Either/Or,” in Kierkegaard Anthology, pp. 81–82.)

July 9, 1976

Riparius

Lovely visit from Tom and Nancy Doulis with Dion and Yanni. The last time we saw all of them together was in Oxford in 1971. Talk talk talk. Eight hours steadily on the day of arrival. The next day we went to the “Patriots Day” parade in Minerva. Beautiful Belgian horses perfectly matched in a team; floats; bands; fire trucks; revolutionary costumes.

July 12, 1976

Finished haying the front field and the pond. Donna Trautwein took all the hay for mulch.

Alec is working at the C & A Pizza place in Hanover. Leander is at Camp Timberlake again. No more Kinhaven, alas.

July 13, 1976

❡ The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it. (Dr. Samuel Johnson.)

I tightened the fan belt on the tractor so efficiently that it broke away the fan sleeve because of too much tension. So off came the cowling and the entire water-pump assembly. I’ve brought it to Mr. Savage in Johnsburg to see if he can weld it. So far the Allis-Chalmers has had nine-plus lives. We’ll see.

At the post office I met an old man who said he used to hay on the old Mauston farm with Charles McCarthy.

July 14, 1976

I am finishing a large doll house I built for Daphne, complete with balcony and railing made from coffee stirrers and toothpicks

❡ (Ρώτας writing on Kazantzakis in 1978; my Kazantzakis notes p. 1536): Τίποτε άλλο δε μου κάνει τόσο εντύπωση όσο αυτό το θαυμάσιο παράδειγμα ενός ανθρώπου, που έχασε το Θεό του, έψαξε να τον βρει και τον βρήκε, γιατί ο Θεός φαναρώνεται άμα ψάξεις να τον βρεις. Ο Καζαντζάκης, όταν ο Θεός πέθανε μέσα του, αντί να κάνει ότι έκαναν όλοι οι άλλοι, δηλαδή να το κρύψει και να προσπαθήσει να ζήσει τη ζωούλα του με το ψέμα . . . αυτός πήρε το ραβδί του άθεου προσκυνητή κ’ εξεκίνησε νἄβρει το θεό.

July 15, 1976

Leander here overnight on his day off from Timberlake. Looking healthy.

Idea for a novel: Political embroglio ca. 1969 with leftists of various degrees (Audrey Logan’s daughter, Quakers, etc.) rightists (use Jeff Hart’s essays), and those caught in the middle. Cf. Kazantzakis’s statement in 1935 (notes 1656–1657) that only those who take sides are “fertile”; those in the middle are sterile. Trial scene (Bill Ballard, Alverson, etc.), Rieser’s dilemma, various students: Sorline the ομορφονιός, attractive to women—and men! The homosexual who confessed to me his crush on Sorline, went to him, was welcomed to his bed, and was impotent, so the only thing that happened was that Sorline scratched his back! Sorline’s ostentatious sex life with Rogers Elliott’s niece.

Am listening systematically to Ulysses read by Alexander Scourby. Marvelous. Chapter 1 is a masterpiece in itself.

Tractor part too far gone for welding. Maxwell’s in Lyme is sending a new part; we’ll see if it fits my 1939 antique.

July 20, 1976

Ballet with Jacques and Hilda Grunblatt and Donna Trautwein. I liked only Benjamin Britten’s “Fanfare”: brilliant musically and choreographically (Jerome Robbins).

July 21, 1976

Kazantzakis has a fine passage on art that I should use in my teaching. It’s from a 1937 interview (Katsimbalis #188; see my notes 1880ff): Η σχέση της Τέχνης με τη ζωή είναι σχέση διαμαντιού προς το κάρβουνο. Το διαμάντι είναι συμπυκνωμένο, από τεράστια πίεση, κάρβουνα. ΄Ενα διαμάντι είναι το δάκρυο ολάκαιρου ανθρακωρυχείου. Κι όμως τι διαφορά! Το ένα εύθραστο, καίγεται, φθείρεται, μουτζαλώνει· το άλλο λάμπει σκληρό κι αχάραγο και παίζει με όλα τα χρώματα της ίριδος. ΄Ομοια, με τεράστια πίεση κι αγωνία, βγαίνει και το έργο της Τέχνης από τη ζωή. . . . Η Τέχνη είναι η συνθετική όψη της ζωής.

July 26, 1976

❡ A proper historical sense should not lead to relativism. There is a common humanity which makes all art available to us, from any age or country. (René Wellek, lecturing at Dartmouth several years ago—I just rediscovered my scribbled notes.) The above is of course the finest justification for comparative literature.

August 7, 1976

To Kinhaven for a staff concert, more specifically to see Charlie Hamlen play Dvorak’s piano quartet, which I didn’t much like, thought of course it was well played. Afterwards, the staff chamber orchestra did a Stravinsky suite, very neo-baroque and humorous, especially the double bass’s “solo.” The usual spirit, of course, was well in evidence. Alec came over from Hanover with Cathy Emery, his girlfriend, so we had a little reunion. Also with Kay and Bob Moore, Jerry Bidlack, MJ, Mr. Dushkin.

August 8, 1976

Daphne looked so forward to bacon for breakfast (as did I) but then had diarrhea and vomiting and couldn’t eat. We continued on from Weston to Timberlake—familiar ground—and arrived in time to attend Meeting at the camp. Ministry from Slonaker and another counselor, but also from a thirteen year old camper, who spoke simply and movingly about the ability to live with few and simple gifts of God: firewood to keep warm, for example (it was a wet day and the upper Lodge had a roaring—literally—fire). We saw Leander’s cabin, right by the lake, met his campers, took him out for a nice lunch, which was a treat for him, and then all went to visit Ken and Susan Webb at “Brooksend.” Susan is running for re-election to the Vermont House, and had just returned from a morning of handshaking, but was energetic and talkative, as was Ken, as always. Beautiful home right on the lake, with an English-type garden in back. Ken is still writing the history of the camps. On the return trip we stopped at Proctor and saw the extraordinary marble exhibit there, not to mention the town itself, which has a Greek temple: all marble; even marble sidewalks! Finally, we stuffed ourselves at the Montcalm.

The previous week my parents were here, and also Βούλη Προύσαλη for two days. On the first evening, Jacques Grunblatt brought over a professional writer he’d met in Puerto Rico, a man who does pulp romances “to order” and makes lots of money. Print order is 100,000 minimum. I asked him how he got his start. “Pornography,” he answered. A vocation missed.

August 10, 1976

The kind of day I really like. Reading all morning. Then directly after lunch to the woods, logging. A fine breeze kept the bugs away. I haven’t been logging all alone like this for many years.

Renewed contact with Peter Gardner. I’d dreamed of him, saw him going into the subway in Boston with a haggard face, and wrote accordingly. He responded at length. My dream was not inaccurate. He is presently unemployed, and his wife has left him! He confessed that his reluctance to communicate all these years came from the sense that I had done what he had failed to do and wanted so much to do: establish a career and a stable household. This, too, I had sensed over the years—that is, the reason for his silence.

August 12, 1976

Full house. John Tallmadge came for a visit, and Leander arrived from camp on his day off, with Todd Engstrom. I invited the Shapiros and Perrymans to hear John read from his “work in progress,” which is progressing very nicely indeed. Irv Shapiro showed his excellent movies on (a) a trip down the Yampa River, (b) mule-train through the Sierras. But, through it all, Chrysanthi was chiefly preoccupied by another bat inside the house!

August 14, 1976

LAZYBONES (EL PEREZOSO)

They will continue wandering,

these things of steel among the stars,

and weary men will still go up

to brutalize the placid moon.

There, they will found their pharmacies.

In this time of the swollen grape,

the wine begins to come to life

between the sea and the mountain ranges.

In Chile now, cherries are dancing,

the dark mysterious girls are singing,

and in guitars, water is shining.

The sun is touching every door

and making wonder of the wheat.

The first wine is pink in colour,

is sweet with the sweetness of a child,

the second wine is able-bodied,

strong like the voice of a sailor,

the third wine is a topaz, is

a poppy and a fire in one.

My house has both the sea and the earth,

my woman has great eyes

the colour of wild hazelnut,

when night comes down, the sea

puts on a dress of white and green,

and later the moon in the spindrift foam

dreams like a sea-green girl.

I have no wish to change my planet.

—Pablo Neruda, from Estravagario (1958), tr. by Alastair Reed in Selected Poems, ed. N. Tarn (Delta Books, 1972), p. 379.

ODE TO THE TOMATO (ODA AL TOMATE)

The street

drowns in tomatoes:

noon,

summer

light

breaks

in two

tomato

halves,

and the streets

run

with juice.

In December

the tomato

cuts loose,

invades

kitchens,

takes over lunches,

settles

at rest

on sideboards,

with the glasses,

butter dishes,

blue salt-cellars.

It has

its own radiance,

a goodly majesty.

Too bad we must

assassinate:

a knife

plunges

into its living pulp,

red

viscera,

a fresh,

deep,

inexhaustible

sun

floods the salads

of Chile,

beds cheerfully

with the blonde onion,

and to celebrate

oil

the filial essence

of the olive tree

lets itself fall

over its gaping hemispheres,

the pimento

adds its fragrance,

salt its magnetism—

we have the day’s

wedding:

parsley

flaunts

its little flags,

potatoes

thump to a boil,

the roasts

beat

down the door

with their aromas:

it’s time!

let’s go!

and upon

the table,

belted by summer,

tomatoes,

stars of the earth,

stars multiplied

and fertile

show off

their convolutions,

canals

and plentitudes

and the abundance

boneless,

without husk,

or scale or thorn,

grant us

the festival

of ardent colour

and all-embracing freshness.

—Neruda, tr. by Nathaniel Tarn, from Odas Elementales (1954), Ibid., p. 319 ff.

Seferis, in his journal Μέρες του 1945–1951 (σελ. 199) recounts his return, in 1950, to the house outside of Smyrna he had left as a boy: Τα τζάμια του κάτω παραθύρου σπασμένα, η σιδερένια πόρτα φριχτά σκουριασμένη· δε θα την ξανάβαψαν από τα δικά μας τα χρόνια. ΄Εχω ακόμη το κλειδή της στην Αθήνα. Ο Μιχάλης ο Μπουγάς, που φύλαγε το σπίτι τον καιρό της καταστροφής, μου το παράδοσε στα ’34. Ήταν το μόνο πράγμα που έσωσε, μαζί με τη ζωή της γυναίκας του και των παιδιών του, όταν κατάφερε να ξεφύγει το διωγμό πάνω σε μια σχεδία. . . . I thought immediately of what Tom Doulis told me earlier this summer during his visit: that his father, at the time of the καταστροφή, had left his house with only the key. But, as he made his way toward the harbor and looked back and saw the flames of the great Smyrna fire, he threw the key into the gutter.

August 15, 1976

Leslie English here for two days. I’d never known that Jerry English is buried on McCarthy Mountain under a cairn. I’ve always wanted to be buried at Terpni. Silly. Leslie is sewing beautiful robes, is modeling nude for art classes, is getting an abortion every so often, when needed, is editing for IBM, and still speaks Greek like a charm. We had a nice visit, because I, for once, was relaxed.

Dick Raskin got changed into a woman and is now “Renee Richards.” So I read in the New York Times, when Renee won a trophy in a girls’ tennis tournament, and is now being challenged regarding eligibility!

August 19, 1976

Simplicity: a nice maxim by Kazantzakis in his Τετράδιο VIII.58: Όσο λίγα κι αν έχω, με φτάνουν· όσο πολλά κι αν έχω, δε με φτάνουν. Another, ibid., p. 63: Ο Barrès σ’ ένα νέο που πήγε να τον συμβουλεφτή: Je vois bien quels sont vos projets, vos idées, vos croyances; mais quelle et votre soif?

Copied out by Kazantzakis in London, 1946. Τετράδιο VIII.127: ❡ I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. —Newton

August 21, 1976

A full day touring. Indian Lake, Blue Mountain Lake, and the very fine museum there. Raquette Lake—to the former estate of Durant and then of J. Pierpont Morgan, now in disrepair (pretext: meeting there of the Nature Conservancy, which we missed). Of interest was the Adirondack Camp architecture—e.g., siding of spruce bark. Of greater interest were the furnishings displayed in the museum at Blue Mountain, especially the sideboards, etc. finished with birch bark. On to Long Lake, Tupper, Lake Placid (very beautiful). Supper in the Elm Tree Inn at Keene, where we encountered Martha Schultz and Mrs. Nye from Hanover. Returning home at 11:00 p.m., found a stranger waiting on the porch. This turned out to be the Dartmouth student sent to me by John Rassias—Dana Moody.

August 22, 1976

All day, literally, talking to Dana Moody. He is a former ABC and Bridge Program student—black—who graduated, majoring in philosophy, and who wants to go to Woodbrooke for a term. Impressive person, but terribly handicapped by an inability to write clearly. I was reinforced in my sense of mission for our Resource Center for Composition (it could have helped him, for example). His hope is to minister to children, orphans especially, in order to create a future for them. He is “into” meditation, monasticism, occultism, etc., but withal levelheaded and rational. At 4:00 p.m. I drove him to the Route 149 turn so that he could hitchhike back to Hanover. Nice swim with Daphne at 6:00. For supper, we picked our first corn, but it wasn’t ripe.

August 25, 1976

Problems. The Guest House, I observed earlier in the summer, is no longer level, but tilting toward the forest. I had assumed that the foundation piers had sunk on that side. Today Alec and I dug around the front pier with the thought that we’d simply jack the building up and shim it. We discovered, however, that the top block of the pier had broken off and was resting at a 45-degree angle and that the entire building had slipped to the right! We also discovered that that side of the building is a veritable swamp. Our hole filled immediately with water. Impossible to work there, to get any footing from which to jack. I ordered a treated beam from Murphy’s, and tomorrow we’ll try to position it beneath the sill as a temporary measure.

Installed a new stove in the kitchen, a cast-iron box stove for heating: one of life’s small pleasures.

Split wood in the afternoon, after we gave up on the Guest House. I still feel healthy and strong (at times).

August 27, 1976

❡ Il boit, mais il était fait pour l’opium: on se trompe aussi de vice; beaucoup d’hommes ne rencontrent pas celui qui les sauverait. —Gisors, speaking of Clappique, in La Condition humaine, p. 77 (ed. Cecil Jenkins, University of London Press).

❡ On ne possède d’un être que ce qu’on change en lui . . . —another of Gisors’ sayings; ibid., p. 86.

Yesterday in Braley & Noxon’s, North Creek: Peter: “I’d like some 16d nails.” “How many?” “Let’s see: they’re big, so there won’t be too much in a pound.” Ernest Noxon: “No more than 16 ounces.”

September 1–5, 1976

Hanover

We returned from the farm on Wednesday, September 1st. Alec, who had spent the last ten days with us, began to prepare for college. Leander was already in the house, having come to Hanover directly from Timberlake. Thursday: spent shopping and packing. On Friday Alec, Chrysanthi and I took off for NYC while Leander and Daphne stayed. We slept over at 20 E. 74th, and then left early for Philadelphia. I drove down Broad street, Locust, Market, etc., to give them a sense of downtown Philadelphia. We even went past the Liberty Bell (and perhaps would have been the three millionth visitor if we’d gotten out, since the three millionth was announced later as having come on that day. Thence to Haverford. Alec is in Barclay Hall, with an Epstein and a black Liberian as roommates. Leander warned him in advance against “rich New York Jews”: how bizarre life can be! He (Alec) is in a cell-like single in a suite, so has some privacy. The poor Liberian, who hadn’t arrived yet, will occupy the living room in the center. Haverford still looks nice. The “custom man,” Jaime Dunbar, was gracious and helpful. We met Mark Grunblatt on the lawn. He was with a girl. (Then we met him again at lunch. He was with another girl!) Mother made Alec’s bed, hung up his clothes: the last ministrations. Tears at the departure of the last son had been shed the day before in Hanover, so this occasion was tearless, yet moving. We left Alec after lunch, and drove via Wilkes Barre, Scranton, Binghamton, and Utica to the farm, arriving at 9:00 p.m. In the full moonlight, we loaded the car with wood, so as to be able to leave early on Sunday, which we did. Breakfast at the diner in Chestertown. Mrs. Millington was there, on the way to work at Bolton Landing at the Sagamore Hotel. Also, I left some books for Donna Trautwein in Riparius. We arrived in Hanover at 10:30, unloaded, piled the wood, had lunch, and got back in the car, this time to drive Leander to Springfield, Mass., to catch AMTRAK for Elyria. Then, finally, back to Hanover. We’d driven 1200 miles since Friday.

September 7–10, 1976

Trevor Blackwell arrived for a visit that turned out to last four days. He was the lecturer at Fircroft whose class Chrysanthi and I attended. The Fircroft situation is worse than ever, with the principal, Tony Corfield, having been reinstated by the Governors while all the tutors have been fired. Meanwhile, Trevor had one year with full pay and practically no duties. This coming year he’ll manage nicely on unemployment insurance and savings, while the tutors contest the decision in the courts. A very nice man, product of working class family in Lancashire, with an MA in history and then a second MA under Richard Hoggart in sociology and literature at the University of Birmingham—in other words, “culture and society” à la Raymond Williams. We talked a great deal over the four days, and also had him meet Pat and Mary Scott Craig, Walter and Miriam Arndt, Dee and Noye Johnson, and Harry Schultz. Trevor is now interested, in his personal life, in combining political activism with mysticism—he’s spent a year in India, is an admirer of Christopher Isherwood, etc. I suspect that he’s gay, or at least “bi-”; hard to tell. I of course told him about Kazantzakis, especially the Ασκητική. Trevor has very definite and well-articulated ideas about education, ideas that found a context in Fircroft. He is squarely against the elitist concept exemplified (in part) by Dartmouth, and against the concept of a meritocracy. Education should aim, he feels, not to serve the most talented but rather to maximize the diverse potentialities in every person. Thus it cannot be narrowly “academic.” The anomaly, of course, is that he as a person and as a teacher is academic in the best sense, intellectual in the best sense. He is a Marxist, and far to the left of the Labour Party in Britain, as were all of the lecturers at Fircroft. Harry Schultz pointed out to him, over lunch, that the meritocracy itself is very democratic, since it was that concept which broke the exclusive hold that the aristocracy had over Oxford and Cambridge. Granted, but we must now move ahead, says Trevor. Interestingly, he said that the debate between meritocracy and education of all for diverse talents is precisely the debate now being waged in China—and a very practical one at that, since the outcome will govern the nature of Chinese universities. Trevor lives in a “cooperative house” in Mosely, B’ham 13 (36 Anderton Park Road). Five or six people, otherwise quite unconnected, pool resources for cooking, washing up, etc. . . . I walked him over the length and breadth of the Dartmouth campus, showed him Norwich, Lebanon, White River Junction, etc.—best of all, drove to Franconia Notch and the Old Man of the Mountains, and thence to my favorite place, Franconia College, which always makes me feel that to teach at Dartmouth is a form of decadence and cowardice. Franconia is Trevor’s sort of place, peopled by men and women who “graduated” from the Civil Rights Movement, etc. We had a long and enlightening talk with one of the students, a chap who’d dropped out of UNH and had spent four years in the Navy. Asked what they study at Franconia, he replied, “We study ‘survival.’” The place is a large “cooperative house,” with students and faculty ordering the food, cooking it, washing up, etc.

October–December, 1976

Lots of non-recorded events to catch up on, but not now. For example: Item: Trip to Providence with Chrysanthi, to lecture on Ο Χριστός ξαναστανρώνεται at Rhode Island College and at Brown. The gay host, Professor Wyatt, the Mylonases, the extraordinary university guest house with its bevy of octogenarian eccentrics. Item: MGSA symposium in Chicago, October 28–31. Banquets. Mr. Parry’s lakeside villa. Julia Loomis. My taped interview for radio, by F. Litsas. Parry’s nice daughters. Mrs. Papanikolaou’s moving talk about Greek laborers in the West. Tom Doulis. Item: Life in the Tomb, proofs read and corrected. Item: Leander’s new teacher, Frances Walker, whom he likes. Alec installed at Haverford, Our trip there for Parents’ Day with my parents. All children and my parents in Hanover for Thanksgiving. Item: my clerking of the Meeting. Item: elected to Board of Pendle Hill, to begin in January. Continuing on Kinhaven Board. Met in October. Mr. Dushkin announced his retirement in two years, at age 81. Jerry Bidlack is heir apparent.

December 9, 1976

Norfolk Hotel, Birmingham

I am here—believe it or not!—with John Rassias to make videotapes of Demotic Greek in the Television Studio at the University, run by Paul Morby. Christos has assembled an all-star cast of local Greeks. Morby’s sets, made by his staff, are superb. Yesterday we arrived in Birmingham by rented car, visited the Missionary Guest House (Mr. Mudd no longer there), saw the new wardens at Woodbrooke (Priestmans), where we bumped into Muriel Poulter, who is now more or less a nursemaid to the failing Ann Park. Everyone disappointed that Chrysanthi wasn’t along. Christos resplendent in beard and suede jacket, but still very hurt and melancholy over the separation from Meg. Morby was in London but came to see us at night at the hotel. All three very tired. We worried about protecting our copyright. John has visions of money-money-money. I feel so “at home” in Birmingham, as though I’d never left. This morning John and I are going downtown to shop. Then a session with Morby this afternoon. Christos has a couple of Greek graduate students living with him rent free at 52 Haunch Lane, to help with Pavlos. Pavlos is a bit larger, but unchanged. Still does not speak, poor thing. Still restless, pacing back and forth, climbing over furniture like a caged animal. But understands “Don’t,” as a cat or dog understands it.

On the plane from Boston, dozing fitfully, I saw the outlines of a novel I could write about various aspects of my B’ham experience. I was stimulated by Philip Larkin’s Jill, which I had begun. This is so simple and autobiographical; not great literature, yet it captures something. In any case, I saw Christos and Meg incorporated into the Fircroft situation. I saw some marvelous characters. Harry Newton and Liz, George Thomson and family, David Robson, various other Quakers, Sir Robert Burley, the official inquiry in London, Cadbury, the extraordinary meeting we had in George Cadbury Hall, with the young “progressive” who accused Harry Newton of betraying the left. The principal and his horrible wife. Fircroft students: the taxi driver, the IRA bomb-thrower, the secretive and apathetic African revolutionaries, all ex-political prisoners asylumed in England. Various other eccentrics, perhaps Willets, with his vehemence against American action in Vietnam, yet his own warped sense of values, his alcoholism, etc. And above all, Meg and Christos, and Ritsa.

Friday, December 10, 1976

We worked in the hotel with Christos until late Thursday. The same dissentions as always, yet always solved amicably. Off to his office this morning. More work, on Lesson 4. Then we observed a class on Δωδεκάλογος του γύφτου. Christos, despite all his worries—not the least of which is the change of mind of various actors for our “epic” (as Keith the designer calls it)—conducted a fine class, analyzing the poem with acuity and passion. Everything is done in Greek, and everyone understands. I rushed off to Woodbrooke for lunch with Maurice Creasy, who will retire in June along with David Robson. Only Chris Lawson will be left, of the original staff. (I bumped into Muriel Poulter on Wednesday; she retired last year.) Maurice is still fighting his old battle, saying that Quakerism is unthinkable without Christianity. Met Tom Bodine briefly. His niece Lucy, whom Leander used to like, is now married and living in England. Saw Chris Lawson and his wife Christine, who is now the librarian. Talked with Joe Charlesworth about the sad situation at Fircroft. Harry Newton has sold his home and is going to live in London. Bob Milman is studying law via correspondence. Terry Murphy took a job in Africa. Only Trevor Blackwell seems to be fixed for a while in B’ham. They’re suing the Governors for making them redundant illegally, claiming that it was “dismissal.” The trade unions are financing the case.

In the afternoon we had our first run-through with the actors. Morby magnificent, running the show with gusto. John “dynamic.” “Now we shall have fun—have fun—have fun—have a blast—have a smashing time.” Morby’s sexy secretary Kay gracing the proceedings. (Her all-England rugger husband, the policeman, 6'5" and 14 stone.) Keith and Vincent and Peter Whittaker and the engaging sound man. Keith, afterwards, called the whole thing one of their “epics.”

Saturday, December 11, 1976

Work, work. We arrived at 52 Haunch Lane at 9:30 a.m. and worked intensively with Christos, revising the text and drills in preparation for shooting. Christos cooked lunch, φασουλάδα, alas, and let out his injured soul. We resumed. Inevitably, at 3:30 or so, guests arrived: Stelios, an Englishman married to a Greek girl—they’d just come from the consulate, where they had to sign a document that they would raise their children Orthodox, i.e. baptize them—and one of Christos’s students, Theano. Lively discussion about idealized “Golden Ages.” John fidgeting all the while, said he had to telephone the States. I was annoyed; told him that he had fulfilled Chrysanthi’s prophecy, that he couldn’t go three days without phoning. When we finally left, however, he explained that it was a ruse to extricate us. As we left, Meg appeared with the children. She delivers them and leaves, without talking much to Christos. Φρίκη!

We returned to the hotel. I typed out some of the materials. Then we went to Meg’s for supper. She has a nice flat in the Pershore Road, and is developing a new life. Lots of friends in the apartment block. She’s thinking, however, of applying for the new chair in Modern Greek at Sydney. She doesn’t have the great bitterness that Christos vented at lunchtime; but he, of course, is the aggrieved party. Both of them, because of the children, are beset by problems that would have driven me, long ago, to the insane asylum. How lucky I am, and most of those I know! How blessed and favored!

Sunday, December 12, 1976

Worked in the hotel until lunchtime. Then went for dinner at Paul Morby’s. Lovely wife, headmistress of a girls’ school. Son, Valentine, doing Α-levels; another son, Ben, working in the Mint. The latter spectacularly handsome, but married to a dowdy girl who said not a word all afternoon. We were terribly late, since I had to go to King’s Heath to pick up Christos in our Avis car, and then Christos gave Pavlos and Dimitris the presents I had brought, and then I got lost trying to find Morby’s house (20 Clarendon Road, near the hotel). Lovely meal. The two boys completely at ease in company, unlike my Leander, who always looks as though he’s got a headache and diarrhea at once. Paul played us one of his Edison cylinders (he’s a collector) on one of his many original “His Master’s Voice” machines. In this one, Edison himself delivers a little lecture against American chauvinism ca. 1919–1920, saying that it wasn’t just the American soldiers who won the Great War, but also the Belgians, British, and French—all were needed. The great man’s voice was clear and firm. We left, and went back to Christos’s for more work on the text, and also to rehearse John’s Greek—he’s suddenly discovering that he doesn’t know the language! Working with Christos is tedious; he’s a nit-picker. But usually he’s right. He discovered a way for us to have the Taverna scene without music or a singer, since Morby refuses to record a phonograph disk, breaking equity regulations regarding plagiarism. Back to the hotel. Dinner in a nearby pub-restaurant. The food everywhere is tasteless, except at the Morbys’ dinner table, where we even had Christmas pudding! Sleep . . .

Monday, December 13, 1976

Our first day of shooting. Chapters 1 and 16 in the morning, with more of Chapter 16, plus Chapter 2 and a try at the drills in the afternoon. Morby’s team is shipshape, everyone doing his bit. The actors are beautifully cast, though “Nikos” couldn’t stop giggling, and ruined a few scenes. The real problem, alas, is that John Rassias doesn’t know Greek very well. The drills were the worst of the various sequences. The class was stiff and John didn’t catch some of their mistakes. We’ll have to do this sequence again. At lunch, Paul, who is the soul of graciousness, introduced me to David Lodge, the novelist, who has just gotten a chair here. Paul sees himself as a kind of hub of the wheel, bringing together far-flung parts of the university, who may never have known of each other’s existence, but who have one thing in common: they’ve made films with Paul.

After shooting, Christos struggled on the telephone to secure a παιδί να φέρει καφέ στον κ. Παυλάκη. Then to the hotel, and a nice supper with Paul. More talk about camera angles, about putting music into the Taverna sequence (Paul is understandably hesitant about “plagiarizing” a phonograph record). Good spirits. Then, late into the night, cutting and pasting in order to get the drill scripts ready for John and the first-year students.

John is unspeakably lazy and insensitive and spoiled. I’m getting to know him better, naturally. He is also unspeakably vain. He has to believe that everything he does is superlative; otherwise he can’t function. On the other hand, he has a καλή καρδιά, a warm heart, and for that reason is always simpatico.

Tuesday, December 14, 1976

Another full day of shooting, after which we drank four bottles of expensive wine in the Staff House bar, were almost forcibly whisked off to a quick supper at the Burkharts’ (friends of Paul’s), thence en masse to Ron and Jane Willetts’, where Ron and Burkhart had a classic set-to about the merits and demerits of the current vice-chancellor. Lots of good talk, eloquence, invective, British style, completely foreign to our experience in America. For example: Burkhart: “I think the V-C is a bloody fool.” Willets: “The adjective isn’t deserved.” They also told the story of Churchill and Atlee after an acrimonious debate in the Commons just after the war. Both retired to the loo, and Churchill ostentatiously went to the urinal the farthest away from the one Atlee was using, whereupon Atlee called across some conciliatory words, like “Come now, Winston, we’re all in this together,” or some such. Churchill, not appeased, kept his place, replying, “I’ll keep my distance. Whenever you see something big, you want to nationalise it!”

Wednesday, December 15, 1976

John feeling better today. Part of his loginess was due to a bad stomach, which he bore heroically. The afternoon session was very rushed, since Paul had to give a lecture on Caruso to the Dante Society this evening. Consequently, we were forced to accept a Taverna scene that had some bad acting and some verbal slips. This completed all the scenarios. The cast was dismissed with profuse thanks. We did 13 scenarios all in all, a total playing time of about 30 minutes. This required three full days of shooting and ten days previously preparing sets, and will require a week of editing later on. But how good the results are, generally! . . . We all went to Paul’s lecture afterward. He is an aficionado of opera, the kind who knows who sang what at La Scala and the Met on 18 December 1906! Lots of old recordings of Caruso and others, taken from Paul’s own collection. Then back to the hotel, where I finished typing the questions for Part Four, and John worked with Christos on his pronunciation. Tomorrow we begin the drilling.

Thursday, December 16, 1976

Drilling sessions all morning, with John’s new technique of the “oracle,” conceived last night in the hotel lounge. Lunch, organized by Ron Willets, in a private dining room, with Professor North, the pro vice-chancellor, Paul, Christos, John, Peter Whittaker (head of the TV and Film Unit), and Professor Dudley, the professor of Latin. Not as stiff as I had feared. Good wine, gracious service. Everything on time. Hot food. We tried to make the pro vice chancellor realize the uniqueness and excellence of the Modern Greek program here. He later came to the studio and saw one of the tapes. It was a good day because Christos had just received a letter from the Ouranis Foundation granting £5000 per annum for three years—i.e., paying for a lectureship.

“Working is the curse of the drinking classes”: another of Hugh Burkhart’s aphorisms. We had dinner there, a superb meal cooked by wife Diana, who is a computer scientist and great admirer of Kemeny and Kurtz. They live at 20 Wentworth Road, Harborne, in a home attached to no. 18, which is occupied by Alec’s former violin teacher, Louis Ullman. There was another couple, Peter Satterthwaite and wife. No connection with Quakers. He actually comes from the village of Satterthwaite in the Lake District, as did apparently all the Satterthwaites at one time. He teaches history in the 6th form of a comprehensive school in Manchester, and his lovely wife (what a complexion! what cheeks! what a beautiful voice!) teaches French in a primary school there. The Burkharts’ children were in evidence. Again, self-assured, at ease with adults, good conversationalists. It all starts young.

Paul Morby works like a demon all day long, with only a very light lunch, with a drink and cigar. But at night he relaxes. Also weekends—gardening, watching television (!), working with his collection of operatic cylinders and early disks.

This evening in the Great Hall of the university, Yehudi Menuhin gave a lecture on “Happiness.” One of Morby’s men set up the microphones from the BBC. When Menuhin began to speak there was no amplification. General consternation. But John Moseley set it right after he was fetched in the quarters of the Television and Film Unit directly beneath the Great Hall.

Friday, December 17, 1976

What a day! Our last chance to finish the drills—9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. In the morning session we did only three. Among other things, the vice-chancellor himself came down to see Paul about the “shambles” (the word used in the B’ham Mail) of the Menuhin lecture. That left six to go in the afternoon. But we did it—or, more accurately, John did it, finishing at 5:55 p.m. John lasted admirably, gathering a second wind about 4:00 p.m. The students were marvelously cooperative, as was the oracle and also the Greek cast, several of whom returned at 5:00 so that we could end with a καλαματιανό after the drill: Μια και ήρθαμε, ας χορέψουμε!

John, Christos, Paul, and I had supper together at the hotel, after which we all went round to Paul’s house for wine and Christmas cake and lots of talk. Another of Paul’s sons came in, an older one, who works in the Midland Bank in Selly Oak. It was lovely to sit by a warm fire with a bottle of claret, relaxing. None of us can believe that the thirteen sequences are actually recorded, considering all the various disasters that could have ruined the project in part or in the whole: power failure, strikes, equipment failure, absenteeism among the actors, sickness, arguments, etc. But everyone persevered until the end, in a spirit of cooperation.

Professor Sinclair, the linguist, came down for a while to observe. He’s the one I had met in 1970 or 1971 at the Thanksgiving dinner given by the Whitfields. Also we had lunch with David Lodge, the novelist, and a very pleasant discussion. David spent some time in the studio also.

Saturday, December 18, 1976

How strange not to be televising. I spent the morning in B’ham, buying Christmas presents, also part of the afternoon. Saw my friend Lucifer in the museum. Called home and spoke with Daphne—all’s well there. Went to visit Trevor Blackwell in his dank, dark, unaesthetic “commune” in Moseley. He is still pressing for redress; the Fircroft tutors’ suit for reinstatement will be heard by the tribunal in January. Called Liz Bryer, who was rather cold and distant, sounding very harassed and lonely. Spent the rest of the evening at Christos’s house, with Stelios. Maria, Stelios’s wife, cooked us a full dinner: σουσουκάκια. The weather is miserable: sleet, snow, damp. I am catching a cold. Spoke to Alf Vincent on the telephone. He is visiting from Australia. Arranged to meet him and Rosemary Bancroft at Oxford on Tuesday. To bed at 1:00 a.m.

Sunday, December 19, 1976

To Selly Oak Meeting. All the old faces were there. Only Wilfred Littleboy and wife were missing, and I feared they had died. But after Meeting, the clerk read a letter from them: Christmas greetings from Jordan, where apparently they are now living. Muriel Poulter was there with Ann Park, who is indeed very frail, and can hardly walk. Mr. and Mrs. Lawson were vivacious, as always, though he is now on elbow-crutches. She ministered eloquently. Even Doris Newman was in her usual seat, unchanged, unaged. Anthony Wilson spoke about the work of FSC and Friends House in Geneva in relation to the Rhodesian situation (after Meeting). Many people recognized me immediately and came up with warm smiles, including Hilda Jenks. I had called Nina Wedell the previous evening and had been invited to Sunday lunch. She was there with her daughter Cathy. After Meeting, coffee and Christmas carols. Then off to the Wedells. Lunch with their lovely children. Klaus in fine form. He’s just been promoted to be a Reader, along with Bryer. Once again, I observed children who had an articulateness, grace of speech, and self-confidence unusual in American children. Klaus and children went off tobogganing in the newly fallen snow; I finished my coffee with Nina and then drove to see David Holton (60 Taylor Road) and his wife and adopted baby Christopher. His wife is now pregnant in her own right. He is continuing in an administrative post and earns about £5000 a year. They live in a house much like ours in Bristol. Lastly, John and I joined the Morbys, Harry David (lecturer in Italian) and fiancée, and Stelios and Maria at Christos’s house for a Greek banquet and lots of pleasant talk. Morby is a great talker, but I don’t think he impresses his wife any longer.

Our time here is coming to an end. I am beginning to be eager to return home. Received two nice letters from Chrysanthi and Daphne. Tomorrow John and I must “negotiate” with Paul and Peter Whittaker.

Monday, December 20, 1976

In conference all morning with Morby over the opening and closing captions. John being very difficult regarding “copyright” of the “Rassias Method,” which Morby claimed had no originality except John’s vitality and the open chair. John finally agreed to allow his credit to be placed at the rear instead of the front. Christos and Paul will proceed with final editing at the end of January. During lunch I conferred with Christos’s student Θεανώ. These poor Greek post-graduate students are trying to write Ph.D. or M-Litt. dissertations without having had any previous experience either in research or in essay writing. Bizarre. Obviously, and understandably, she was very confused and apprehensive. She is the lovely girl who played the «ωραία γυναίκα» in the Taverna scene, Lesson 17. Then back to the studio for still more negotiations, this time with Peter Whittaker and John Mosely, regarding marketing. The financial prospect is bleak. It will cost us a lot to convert the TV signal to American Standard—£170 per hour in Great Britain—and even more to market the tapes. A thirty-minute cassette costs £10 or £11, and we’ll need 13 of them. We agreed that the University of Birmingham would distribute in the UK, Europe, and Australia at a nominal charge, provided there weren’t too many requests, and that we would worry about the U.S. and Canada. Any further developments, on either side, especially those that bring in a profit, will be subject to mutual agreement. We were told that the studio we used rents out normally at £1000 per day, exclusive of the salary of the producer! This means that our five days in the studio, plus Paul, plus the ten days previous required for scenery, plus one week in January-February required for editing, would amount to perhaps £7000 or £8000, which was in effect a grant from the University of Birmingham to us. Not bad! Now, both John and I are eager to see the results. Back to the bar, the ever-important bar, for final drinks with the whole crew, though I was off to one side conferring with another of Chistos’s students, Nikos (the oracle) about his projected dissertation on Φώτης Κόντογλου. Supper with Christos at the hotel, then farewells at his home to Stelios, Mary, and Christos himself. Lots of hugs and kisses.

Monday, December 21, 1976

Shopping in the morning. I picked up the nice suit I’d ordered. Flared trousers, very daring! Drove to Oxford. Shopping at Blackwell’s Music Shop, which isn’t anywhere as good as Patelson’s. At 6:00 sharp we met Alfred Vincent and Rosemary Bancroft Marcus, and passed three and a half pleasant hours learning about Alf’s life in Sydney and Rosemary’s discouraging life as the wife of a physicist in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She knows Eleni Rigopoulos; told me that the Rigopouloses are separating. Poor thing, how can she be a scholar of medieval Greek in Oak Ridge? How bizarre for the two of us from New Hampshire to meet Alf from Australia and Rosemary, in Oxford. Alf is full of the excitement of his work, despite the overwork. He would love Meg to receive the chair and go out to Sydney, too. . . . Final leg of the journey. I confused Beaconsfield with Maidenhead, but we finally arrived at the Crest Motel, Beaconsfield, at midnight.

Tuesday, December 22, 1976

To Heathrow early a.m. Very easy and efficient disposal of the Avis car that served us so well. I’m writing this in flight over the Atlantic at noon. Tonight: sleep in my own bed!

1977

Hanover

January 1–April 10

Princeton, Pendle Hill, Haverford

April 11–16

Tempe, Arizona; Grand Canyon, El Tovar Hotel

April 17–22

Washington, DC, New York City

April 23

Hanover

April 24–June 21

Riparius

June 22–August 25

New York City

August 25–28

Riparius

August 29–September 5

Hanover

September 6–December 31

Pendle Hill

October 15

Madison, Wisconsin

November 17–18

Chicago, MLA

December 27–29

February 20, 1977

Hanover

From G. B. Shaw, Preface to Man and Superman (Penguin, p. xxxii): ❡ This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality. . . .

March 18, 1977

Lovely visit with Peter Gardner in his home in Belmont, after so many years. Last summer I’d seen him in a dream—haggard. I wrote. He replied that he was indeed haggard. He’d lost his job, was living on unemployment insurance, and his wife had left him. Now, six months later, he has a new lease on life. He’s employed in a consulting firm again, is building up a small practice in counseling, does some professional work as a photographer, and in general seems in good spirits. We talked for five hours about past, present, and future, as though no interval had intervened in the relationship. How nice!

March 25, 1977

I held Life in the Tomb in my hand. A beautifully printed, designed, and bound volume. Finally! But no palpitations of the heart, as when I published my first books. Yet, reading some of the chapters over, I was extremely moved.

April 3, 1977

Gary Sutherland’s girlfriend called to deliver the shocking news that Gary had committed suicide. The funeral is tomorrow. His poor mother! No note, no explanation. And his last letter to me had been so cheerful and optimistic, as was his visit several months ago. The girlfriend thought he was beset by financial problems and that his new sideline—advertising—wasn’t going well. Among other things, he had never paid his full tuition to Goddard, and I had apprised Goddard of his current address—which doesn’t make me feel any better, alas. But why suicide? Surely something much more serious must have happened. Poor fellow. I can’t quite comprehend it, yet.

April 16, 1977

Pendle Hill

Story told in Meeting for Worship this morning. An old feeble-minded man for years was seen leaving his house every morning with a package under his arm and returning that afternoon with a different package. Every day the same. The local boys taunted him continually, asking what was in the package, and were told it was none of their business. Finally, they snatched the package from him one day. He went into a frenzy, but couldn’t retrieve the package. However, next morning he was seen leaving home as usual with a new package. The boys, meanwhile, had opened the filched package. Inside they discovered . . . a stone. The feeble-minded man had been sent every day out in the town with one stone, to deliver to relatives on the other side of town, when he was given a new package also with a stone. Yet this gave meaning to his life.

En route via TWA, Philadelphia to Chicago, later on April 16th: On Sunday, April 10, I left by AMTRAK for Princeton with a lecture (uncompleted) on the Political Comprehensiveness of Kazantzakis’s Christ Recrucified. Met at Princeton Junction by Bert Sonnenfeld. We had a long chat over coffee; it turns out that he has had experience with Doria of Royalton College, so we swapped anecdotes. I worked furiously on my lecture in the gorgeous library, finishing it and then ruthlessly cutting it to about sixty minutes. Taught a class on Ritsos’s Φιλοκτήτης in the afternoon. I wasn’t too prepared, but did the whole thing in Greek. Danny Danforth was one of the students. Supper with Danny and Peggy and the students of the class. Then my lecture. John Weatherby, a former Dartmouth student now doing anthropology at Princeton, showed up; also Wayne Arden ’80. About 15 to 18 people in all. I think it went well. Some discussion afterwards. Home then to the Keeleys’. Mike, in good form, recounted his early experiences at Oxford, and his meeting with Mary. Slept in Palmer House very elegantly.

On April 12th, suddenly gregarious, I telephoned Joan Wilson, went to see Dr. Tom Wilson at work in his office—a fine-looking pediatrician. Then visited Woody (Ruth) Wilson and finally had a good lunch with Jim Fernandez. On to Haverford in my Avis car. Took Alec out for supper and had a nice chat. Then to a teacher’s house, a Mr. Partridge, interested in Greece. Slept in a motel. On April 13th, read in Fox’s journal, then visited with Douglas and Dorothy Steere in their house, then a long lunch with Douglas, who briefed me on Pendle Hill affairs. He is splendid, as always, very warm and impressive. Attended rehearsal of Alec’s quartet; they’re doing Haydn’s “Lark” on Sunday—three girls, not too hot, and Alec. Then supper with John Davison and wife Elizabeth and their very precocious son, age 5, who speaks like a fifteen-year-old and gave me a whole lesson on dinosaurs: tyrannosaurus rex, allosaurus, etc., while John yawned. John somewhat cold, but trying. Slept at Pendle Hill. On April 14th, breakfast with Steve Stalonas, a staff member, and Mrs. Hallam Tennyson (!), who had visited Gandhi in India. Marjorie Sykes was also at Pendle Hill but I didn’t meet her. Very nice to be there, as though at Woodbrooke. Went to Eugenia Friedman’s class on the Hasidic Tales collected by Buber. These are excellent for teaching purposes: very brief and meaty. Then to a class on Zen, rather diffuse. Meeting people all the while, left and right. Then to a very poor class on Friends Educational Principles conducted by Marian Sanders. Then to Haverford to take Alec out to dinner with two Greek students, Gerasimos and Eleni. Lots of nice conversation, mostly in Greek. On April 15th, to Bryn Mawr—what a superb environment, very manicured and classy! Coffee and donuts for all at 10:00 a.m. in Thomas Great Hall. Then a lecture on the houses of Pompeii—competent; then a French class—terrible, fully dead, the teacher delivering a monologue for the entire hour; then lunch; Haverford’s troubles with minority problems; then a superb class in fugue by Mr. Boatrite, using Alfred Swan’s method of teaching theory via composition—the class did the first section of a fugue, communally, everyone shouting suggestions, Boatrite brilliant throughout. Nice walk with Alec to Haverford Meeting, my old haunts. Alec seems reasonably happy, though the French is certainly a washout. then back to Pendle Hill, another superb environment, though hardly so manicured. Supper; then my first official meeting as a new Board member. The curriculum committee. Lots of impressive talkers. I made some speeches as usual. On April 16th, property committee’s tour of the facilities, led by Mather Lippincott, architect of the newer buildings; then business in the afternoon. What good speakers Quakers are! Every one of them. Eloquent, forceful, clear, articulate. The Society really does breed ministers. I was placed on the Publications Committee and the Admissions Committee. Douglas wanted me to be on the Curriculum Committee, however. Saw Emily Wilson, who is getting round only with difficulty, can’t walk but can drive, in good spirits. Also Howard Reed, who speaks Greek and Turkish, and Teresina Havens. Also Yuki Brinton, acquaintance from Woodbrooke. The trustees seem terribly caring and efficient. They really do nurture Pendle Hill. . . . To the airport, and now en route. I turn again to Fox’s journal.

April 18, 1977

El Tover Hotel, Grand Canyon, Arizona

We drove here yesterday from Phoenix, with a stop at the so-called Montezuma Indian caves, an Indian habitation ca. A.D. 600–1100 carved out of a natural rock face. Then past the spectacular “red rocks” of Sedona, extraordinary formations jutting into the sky, and finally to the Grand Canyon, which is fully as spectacular as one expects. Peter Buseck was always able to explain the geological history, which was very helpful. We circled the rim, going from vantage point to vantage point, each one of which offers new marvels—side canyons, precipitous drops, new colors, a glimpse of the Colorado River below. The canyon is one mile deep and, I think, about 250 miles long. We fed the children (Susan and Paul Buseck, Daphne Bien), left them watching television, and then treated ourselves to a leisurely gourmet dinner in the restaurant. Very pleasant indeed, and unexpected. It is still strange to be here. This morning, pulling back the curtains at 6:00 a.m., I looked out over the canyon to the north face, bathed in the light of sunrise. Alice, Daphne, Susie, and I then took the mule trail down into the canyon, leaving Peter Buseck behind with Paul, who had a slight fever. We of course didn’t go all the way down to the campsite (a 4 to 5 hour trip just to get there) but did go far enough down to get an entirely different feel of the canyon, as we gazed up at the precipitous cliffs above us, beetling over their bases. Despite the constant traffic down and up, one can still feel, as well, the vast stillness of the canyon, with the imperturbable sky overhead and a huge inertness all around one. The solitary flight of a raven or hawk from one cliff-face to another becomes a major, and beautiful, event.

Back in the car after two hours in the canyon, we proceeded for further views along the rim and then left the National Park. Peter took us next to the gorge or canyon of the “Little Colorado,” as deep as the Grand Canyon but very narrow, like huge, bottomless cracks in the earth, making one fearful to look down. This was in Navaho land, their Reservation. At intervals were the miserable huts of the Indians, and at the overview where we stopped about ten Indians all competing for the sale of the identical jewelry. Some were in pickup trucks, or sitting on mats making more jewelry. They seemed stolid and hostile, and so very sad. Their “land,” I now can understand, is hopeless. A desert, scorching hot in summer, biting cold in winter, incapable of producing crops, and hardly capable of sustaining a few sheep or heifers. What a contrast to the marvelous man-made environments (white-man made) that we saw later, such as Taliesin. From here we proceeded to some strange, huge “lumps” in the desert, each about as high as a house. Peter climbed up to the top of one with a hammer and extracted numerous slivers of petrified wood. It seems that each lump has formed around a fallen tree in prehistoric times. When the land all around eroded, the area around the tree resisted, forming these strange mounds in the middle of the flattest, most desolate expanse of wasteland. One final wonder on this day was “Sunset Crater,” a huge volcanic mountain pitch black except for pinkish hues at the top. It is formed of ash from the eruption, and the area all around is black from the same ash. Most remarkable of all was the lava flow: solid lava all crumpled and jagged as it began to cool on the surface but not underneath, and turned under upon itself. An expanse of ten or twenty acres—who knows how thick? —of this black, jagged tangle. Peter says they brought the astronauts here for training.

April 19, 1977

I spent the morning and afternoon in the Carl Hayden Library of Arizona State University, reading George Fox’s journal. The university is beautiful, with excellent facilities, or so it seems—especially the plantings, which set off the buildings and form numerous promenades of green. Automobiles are entirely excluded from the central campus. Golden lads and lasses everywhere. At noon I ate in the faculty lunchroom with Peter. Their facilities make Dartmouth’s faculty lunch look a shambles. Peter explained his work, and gave me a tour of his laboratories. Electron microprobes, computers, intricate mechanisms of all descriptions. He seems to be doing very important work in air pollution, analyzing the composition of the minutest particles. In the evening we saw the rehearsal of a Suzuki violin recital: 125 children ages 2½ up to 10 or so playing wonderfully on pitch and in unison, with a symphony orchestra as back-up. Very impressive. A couple teach them all, year after year.

April 20, 1977

Out to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, about twenty miles from Phoenix, nestled under the mountains. Our tour was conducted by Kamal Amin, one of the architects. It’s a school for apprentices, a working architectural firm always executing commissions, and a kind of wealthy commune, with all tasks performed by the members. They also have musicians, painters, etc. for home-made entertainment. All the flowers were in bloom, and the walkways were radiant. From there we went to another architectural commune, that of Salieri (?), who has grandiose ideas about a fully organic self-sustaining community for 3000 that is already being built in the desert, in the middle of nowhere. Strange designs, all in reinforced concrete, but innovative and imaginative. Then to Scottsdale, with its dazzlingly beautiful shopping centers, all lined with date palms and flowerbeds. We bought a lot of goodies and made a grand dinner for Yiayia and Pappou for their 50th wedding anniversary, which falls on July 3rd of this year. Their entire progeny was present, except for Alec and Leander.

April 21, 1977

Alice drove us to downtown Phoenix, where we spent several hours in the Heard Museum of Indian culture. Beautiful displays of pottery, textiles, baskets, and spectacular dolls dressed in the various ritualistic masks and costumes. The West does this homage to the Native Americans after nearly exterminating them. So many of the pots rivaled the Greek ones. Thence to the Arizona Biltmore, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1926 and refurbished recently by Taliesin Associates. A sumptuous “complete resort” that reminded me of von Aschenbach’s Grand Hotel des Bains at the Lido. Wright’s pastel colors were especially striking, and also the grounds—a paradise of greens and blossoms. Phoenix attracts the wealthy in a way I hadn’t realized, but five minutes in the Biltmore is testimony to a way of life for . . . some. I then attended Peter Buseck’s weekly luncheon colloquium, in this case a presentation by a second-year graduate student on the problems of air pollution. He demonstrated that the so-called standards imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency are entirely inadequate, almost farcical, chiefly because they’re based entirely on mass rather than the nature of the particles present, and also because their filters are incapable of catching the small particles, which are precisely the worrisome ones, since they remain so very long in the atmosphere. Then to the library, more Fox, preparing for our seekers’ meeting a week from Sunday. Supper, and a quiet evening at home including a long talk with Lori about Thomas Hardy. The Busecks’ children—Lori, David, Susan, and little Paul—are all delightfully warm, affectionate, and bright. Peter seems to combine the efficiency, drive and brilliance of a scientist with the ability to relax and play that probably is necessary for a good father (and which I lack, of course).

April 22, 1977

More wonders. Spectacular houses perched on Camelback Mountain, including a castle brought stone by stone from Europe and rebuilt. Then to the Desert Botanical Gardens, with their thousands of varieties of cacti, all colors and shapes, plus an infinity of other desert plants: yucca, mesquite, rubber trees, etc. I then had lunch in a Greek restaurant—γύρος, no less—with Peter and a colleague named Manin Fisher, presently chairman of the ASU English Department, formerly, for two years in 1961–1963 Fulbright lecturer in the University of Thessaloniki. We of course had many mutual acquaintances, and stories to swap. He seemed a cynical chap, very down on ASU’s commitment to the humanities. On my final afternoon I toured the Gammage Auditorium, Frank Lloyd Wright’s last major design, again a gorgeous structure all in the pastel colors of the desert—sixteen different shades of the same desert red. Adjacent is the new Music Conservatory, likewise circular, with practice rooms around the circumference and recital and concert halls, and the library in the core. At the top is the Bolton (?) collection of primitive musical instruments, a fine way to understand how our marvelous violins, organs, flutes, and pianos got started. Turtle shells covered with a skin, bows (i.e. from bows and arrows) made into an instrument by the attachment of a gourd, which is then pressed against the performer’s body so that the body itself becomes the resonator. The organ started as a series of reeds with stops, all connected to a hollow bone serving as a blowpipe. A final session with George Fox in the library, then supper and another leisurely evening of talk, until Peter, Alice, and Chrysanthi drove me to the airport for a 12:35 a.m. flight to Dulles Airport, Washington.

April 23, 1977

Dulles Airport

So here I am, writing all this at 8:45 a.m. while waiting for ground transportation into Washington. What a nice two weeks since I left Hanover on April 10th for Princeton! I dread returning to Hanover, where everyone will descend on me, wanting this, wanting that. Life in Phoenix was difficult at first, the high temperatures, high altitude, and low humidity made me feel very tired for about four days, but then everything began to fall into place. It’s a gorgeous environment, especially now, before the great heat begins. It’s really a “new town”—the entire city in its present form, with the exception of a few areas, dates from after World War II. The problem is sprawl, but right now, with the city still a manageable size, and not like Los Angeles, everything is manageable. From Tempe to downtown Phoenix is 15 to 20 minutes, and from Tempe to the desert is less. Then there are the university campus and buildings, the magnificent civic centers and parks in Tempe and Scottsdale, man-made environments that make one feel that civilization has not degenerated, nor capitulated entirely to hucksterism.

April 23

Pennsylvania Station, New York City

Went to Leila Washburn’s at 11 a.m., as scheduled, but the door was locked and no one home. The girls in the Greek Consulate across the street told me that the meeting had been re-scheduled for Sunday! I took the 12-noon Metroliner for New York. The usual. On Broadway, a horde of Hare Krishna chanters, with tom-toms, jumping up and down, singing vociferously Hare Krishna (Let me serve Krishna), Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare (Rama = the pleasure potency of God). They were mostly men: young college-age boys with shaved heads and a pigtail, but some older men, too, the leaders black, all the rest white, one woman carrying an infant wrapped in woolens. After the chanting, one of them announced that they were devoted to the Truth, which means not the lies given us by science but the truth that God made the world. This was followed by a primitive attempt at street theater. A girl purported to be a radio announcer interviewing two scientists after man’s successful landing on Mars. What a triumph! etc., etc. What cooperation was necessary for this great feat! But as the script continued, the truth of the scientists’ motivations becomes evident—pride and self-aggrandizement. The two colleagues end by trying to choke each other, with great gusto. At this point, the narrator stepped forward to point the moral: Don’t follow science. To be happy, to conquer all one’s problems, all one needs do is chant Hare Krishna. All together now—whereupon the dancing and jumping recommenced.

June 28, 1977

Terpni

Back in the old, delicious routines. Yesterday, for example, worked at my “office” under the yellow pine for four hours, reading Pinchin’s Alexandria Still for a Books Abroad review. After lunch: gardening, chain-sawing, mowing with the Allis Chalmers, transplanting. Then a swim with Daphne. After supper, reading the TLS and To Βήμα της Κυριακής with Beethoven’s 9th on the newly installed pick-up.

Clea in Durrell’s eponymous novel (p. 56) says, “Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.” That is true in a way, a nice way. I felt it last night, listening to Beethoven’s 9th while Chrysanthi sat crocheting. And one feels it with Leander, music in his case providing an excuse for a failure of human intercourse (part of the time). But what would David Dushkin say? Surely Kinhaven shows that music is a bridge between one loneliness and another, at the very least.

June 30, 1977

The mating behavior of the praying mantis: a male praying mantis will not completely mount and fertilize its female until she has bitten off its head! . . . May this be kept a secret from all feminist agitators!

July 12, 1977

Shakespearian jokes: A Shakespearian actor went to a brothel. When he took off his pants, the whore in bed gave an appreciative whistle. He said, “Madam, we come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” Graffito in the toilet stall in Sanborn House: “Out, out, vile jelly!”

Yesterday, with Chrysanthi’s help, I removed a huge rock in the north field, one that had been impeding our mowing for years. Very satisfying to see it gone. I’ve been trimming around the edges of that field, trying to get back to substantial trees, cutting away alders, etc.

Reading, simultaneously, Herzog, and Mina Shaughnessy’s book on remedial writing, Errors and Expectations. Found, and threw away, my manuscripts for The Last Temptation, Saint Francis, L. P. Hartley. Why keep them? But I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth a bit as they went into the trash.

Another small satisfaction: to be having more and more trouble starting the tractor, and then, instead of fighting with the crank, as before, to patiently clean the carbon off the contact points in the magneto, and to gap and insert a new set of spark plugs, whereupon the beast started on the first crank! Sometimes things do work correctly.

We had a stupendous harvest from our cherry tree, the first. It took ten years, at least. And one of the plum trees has fruit this year, too—about five plums!

Nevertheless, I’ve been basically morose all summer. The reason, I am convinced, is a massive conviction of squandered talents. Once again, instead of attacking the magnum opus, “Kazantzakis and Politics,” I am doing one small, inconsequential job after another—and yet these too need to be done. So, one feels trapped. Yet I spend the afternoons in physical work on the farm, unwilling to give that up, while I still have the physical stamina (as I still do, remarkably).

July 13, 1977

John Dewey’s definition of education: ❡ . . . the transformation of natural powers into expert, tested powers, the transformation of more or less casual curiosity and sporadic suggestions into attitudes of alert, cautious, and thorough inquiry. —cited in Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations (New York, 1977), p. 274.

July 14, 1977

From Bellow’s Herzog:

❡ The dream of man’s heart, however much we may distrust and resent it, is that life may complete itself in significant pattern. Some incomprehensible way. Before death. Not irrationally but incomprehensibly fulfilled. (p. 303)

❡ . . . neurosis might be graded by the inability to tolerate ambiguous situations. . . . Allow me modestly to claim that I am much better now at ambiguities. I think I can say, however, that I have been spared the chief ambiguity that afflicts intellectuals, and this is that civilized individuals hate and resent the civilization that makes their lives possible. What they love is an imaginary human situation invented by their own genius and which they believe is the only true and the only human reality. How odd! But the best-treated, most favored and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful. Ingratitude, however, is its social function. Now there’s an ambiguity for you! . . . (p. 304)

July 21, 1977

Re-reading Kazantzakis’s Ξημερώνει in connection with my paper on Kazantzakis and myth, I suddenly thought again of Gary Sutherland, who took the path of Λαλώ in the play: suicide. Yet in the play the reasons are spelled out, clearly, and at length. Gary’s suicide, so far as I know, was a mystery. No note even. I wrote to his mother, and never received a reply. His girlfriend seems to have no inkling, or so she says. He passed out of my life as peculiarly as he came into it three years ago.

I’ve begun the Iliad in Lattimore’s translation. How fresh, how vivid it is!

Evening: picnic supper at Saratoga with Bob and Ilona Bell. Then Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Kazantzakis, viewing Greek statues in the Louvre, characterized them as hymns to strength, to life. The bodies of the youths seemed to be praying “Be beautiful, intelligent healthy, rich.” They represented an ideal—that you should be near the gods . . . (all in the Parisian dispatch Χριστουγεννιάτικο). The same pagan freshness and strength seen by Kazantzakis in these statues is conveyed also by ballet. It is a pagan art form: a hymn to mindless strength and beauty—yet a strength that is always controlled, never dissipated.

July 22, 1977

Worked on Kazantzakis and myth in the morning. Spent five hours (five!) removing two large boulders from the fields in the afternoon, with a slight break when Jackie (?), Bruce Girton’s niece, rode up on her horse in mid-afternoon. Hard to tell who was prettier, the horse or the rider. Read Book IV of the Iliad at night, and slept, very tired.

July 26, 1977

A huge mob here: my parents, Paul and Susie Buseck, Leander and his roommate Jim King. Nine at every meal. Leander, Jim and I shingled the north roof of the cabin in twelve hours, all going well. Leander and I will tackle the south roof next. George Johnson, the former police officer in North Creek, came up last Saturday, still looking for the bee tree he’d seen 25 years ago (and of course was still unable to find it). When he arrived I was in my office, so he saw Chrysanthi and asked, “Where’s that boy who owns this place?” Time has obviously been standing still for George Johnson.

July 31, 1977

Finished the south roof. Alec came for the day, and helped. We also celebrated his birthday. Charlie Hamlin came over from Kinhaven, and after supper we had some Mozart violin-piano sonatas.

August 24, 1977

D. M. Gaunt, speaking of Homer: ❡ It does not of course follow that the original audience were always aware of the true force of such epithets. Like a stimulating teacher, the bard offered more than most of his audience would consciously absorb.

I should always remember the last sentence when students complain that my lectures are too full or go too fast.

Jay Parini was here last week with his nice girl-friend Katharine. He told me, among other things, of a Dartmouth graduate who is quickly becoming recognized as a major poet. Kenney, I think his name is; he dates from 1967 or 1968. This Kenney told Parini that it is in my classes that he first sensed the true existence of the intellectual life. That is a nice compliment.

Some things to remember over the previous month: C. M. Woodhouse reviewed Life in the Tomb most favorably in the TLS, July 22. Leander and I rebuilt all the footings for the Guest House, using field-stone instead of cement blocks. Leander crashed the car slightly after the brake fluid ran out, but was uninjured. Repairs totaled $400. We had nice visits from the Adlers, including lots of music, and also from Al and Mary Zalan, when Leander, Alec, and Al played trio sonatas all evening. Alec arrived last Sunday and is leaving next Sunday for Haverford. We canoed up a tranquil river off Lake Pleasant, with Fran and Irv Shapiro. Tramped around our boundaries, marking them against the Deckerts’ woodcutter expected this winter. I wrote 100 pages of manuscript on Kazantzakis and myth, in preparation for my talk at Lubbock, Texas, next January. Read the Iliad slowly, savorily, in Lattimore’s translation—quite an accomplishment (the reading, not only the translation). Re-read The Nigger of the Narcissus and am now reading An Outcast of the Islands (for the first time). Heard a terrible concert with André Watts pounding out reprehensible Liszt, preceded by Saint-Saens’ boring Organ Symphony. Pulled out some whopping rocks from the fields. Did all the mowing once again (και του χρόνου said Chrysanthi as we finished). Alec tired after a summer playing show-tunes on the Hanover Inn patio, after four hours baking pizzas each day in C & A’s. Leander did summer school in Oberlin and is now nursing a tricky knee hoping it won’t interfere with soccer season (he is co-captain). We had my parents for ten days—father difficult, as usual—with Paul and Susie Buseck, who are sweet. Alice never said “Thank you” even, when she honored us with a short telephone call after she returned from her two weeks in Europe. Chrysanthi finished a gorgeous patchwork blanket for Alec, begun (but not finished) with wool from our own sheep. Daphne made some fine sketches, showing improvement, after being stimulated by the Adlers and the Zalons, all of whom are artists. Judy Keller, Leander’s friend from Oberlin, was here for a few days. Another artist. We cleaned out the organ properly for the first time, and repainted the part despoiled about twenty years ago (!) by a mouse-next. Things move leisurely at Terpni. Patched the leaking roof of the shed. That will probably need to be redone entirely next summer. Garden OK after two killing frosts, the last on June 6th! We expect another one any night. We’ve never had so much lettuce. Also good beets, snow-peas, beans, rhubarb. A giant head of cauliflower. Some broccoli, etc. The cherry tree bore copiously for the first time, and the plum and apple trees bore sparsely, also for the first time. I transplanted the grapes to the south side of the house, hoping they’d be more protected. Cut back the brush and overhanging branches along the borders of the fields this year, so that we now have stretches where the border is better defined by established tree-trunks. Cleaned up the mess caused by the heavy snow last May, which toppled many trees, including two large old maples at stone piles on the south field. Luckily, “my” yellow birch at the office withstood the worst and seems entirely healthy. Installed bookshelves in the guesthouse and loaded them with volumes taken from my room at 3902 47th Street when the house was sold, and stored up to now in boxes. Threw out many manuscripts of books and translations published. No regrets. Good riddance. Paul Morby & colleagues completed the editing of our videotapes. They should arrive any day. Leonard Rieser and Dean Manuel invited me to address the freshman class—the students’ first real contact with faculty during orientation week. I’ve already sketched out what I want to say: a kind of “Idea of the University.” I was approached by Marquis publications for inclusion in “Who’s Who in the World”—how ridiculous. Severe drought this summer until just recently. The pond lower than ever. I pulled out some of the cattails but not very successfully since very few came up with the roots. Our well held out once again—old faithful. Pooka, our black cat of many a year, walked off the 3rd day after our arrival and never returned. Lots of mice in the house, not to mention the usual bats, and wasps.

August 26, 1977

To Albany-Rensselaer to deliver Leander to the AMTRAK station. Back to Oberlin for his final year, to study again with Frances Walker and give his senior recital in November. His first teacher was Arthur Dann, who had a stroke and had to retire; then came Bob Black for the sophomore year, and Walker for the last two years. What will become of Leander musically is hard to say. He seems to have only a modest talent (for that league), and I find it difficult to imagine him succeeding as a performer. He’s interested in accompanying at the moment, which is perhaps more realistic, and also more sociable. After a month here at the farm he concluded that it was a lovely experience to be here again, really for the first extended period since he was 12 years old. We had the usual frictions—he is so nervous that he makes everyone else nervous—but also many pleasures, especially when working on roofs, foundations, removing rocks, etc. That, after all, is what the farm is all about, at least according to my “ideology.” . . . From Rensselaer, we continued down to Manhattan.

August 27, 1977

A day in New York City. Marvelous exhibition of Thracian archaeological treasures dug up in Bulgaria, at the Met. I was thrilled especially because of having just completed the Iliad, where the Thracian artifacts are vividly described. And there they were! Including matrices for casting scepters and “embroidered” spearheads. Usual dissipations in the afternoon, then to the theater at night: “Sly Fox,” an updating of Volpone, very effective, very funny. Went with Chrysanthi and Alec.

August 28, 1977

After a lazy morning reading the Sunday Times—how scandalously poor the Book Review is compared to the TLS—delivered Alec to AMTRAK, launching him into his second year at Haverford. He was apprehensive, especially about the need to select a major this year, but he has good courses scheduled, and should I hope be stimulated. He’ll be serving as a “Customs Man” in Freshman Orientation and wants to audition for the Schneider Christmas Youth Orchestra, which I doubt he’ll make. Strange: Leander is hyperactive, a kind of incipient manic depressive, and Alec is always yawning, moving about as though he were dragging a hundred-pound ball and chain. Very lethargic character. I have to keep reminding myself (or being reminded by Chrysanthi) that these are “difficult years” for both boys: post-adolescence, or whatever. Drove back to the Adirondacks in 90-degree heat, stopping for dinner at the Montcalm. How extraordinary to be one night at the theater on Broadway and the next night in our cabin.

August 29, 1977

Back under my tree. Finished Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands, an interesting book especially in view of future technical feats, and the establishment of the obsessive themes of isolation and romantic self-deception. Conrad at this point was fascinated by a white man falling apart, morally.

Alec made a good comment at the Thracian exhibit, which traced Thracian art from prehistoric through Greek and finally to Roman times. The Romans, he said, were interested in realistic depiction; that is why their sculptured faces are often so pudgy and ugly. The Greeks subjected realism to stylization, to an abstract ideal of grace and beauty. . . . Another highlight of last Saturday’s visit to the Met was the retrospective Degas exhibit, showing work in various media throughout his life. What a thrill I always get in the presence of first-rate creativity. And, at the same time, how inadequate I feel as I review my own “achievements.” The new Lehman wing, which we also saw, struck me as essentially vulgar: an assertion of culture by stockbrokers, displayed over-ostentatiously in relation to the true excellence of the objets d’art, many of which are second rate. There is to be a retrospective Cézanne show at the Museum of Modern Art in October. Must see that. Reading Woodhouse’s new book on the Greek civil war, and working on my speech to the freshmen. One week left.

August 31, 1977

Something for all of us to remember, always: ❡ . . . it can hardly be denied that it is not their own deserts that men are most proud of, but rather of their prodigious luck, of their marvelous fortune: of that in their lives for which thanks and sacrifices must be offered on the altars of the inscrutable gods. —Conrad, in the “Author’s Note” to the volume Youth in his collected works.

November 23, 1977

Hanover

I like Joyce’s simple definition of love: “Love (understood as the desire of good for another) . . .” (in his notes to Exiles, p. 113)

1978

Hanover

January 1–May 25

Lubbock Texas, Texas Tech University, January 25–28

Oberlin, Leander’s senior recital, February 18–21

Montreal, chez Linda and Iman Amin, March 25–26

Riparius, Niagara Falls, Oberlin, Riparius

May 26–30

Hanover

June 12–23

Riparius

June 24–Sept. 1

Glens Falls Hospital, July 18–27

Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, Hanover, August 13–17, 23

Hanover

Sept. 2–Dec. 31

February 8, 1978

Hanover

We’ve had immense snows. Ralph Rodgers, a NH native who teaches woodworking in the Hopkins Center shop, told me about his father, who ran the plows and snow-rollers in North Haverhill 40 years ago: “Used to show off by turning the whole rig around, six horses and all, in the covered bridge.”

February 12, 1978

❡ . . . the universal need for a way out of the mentality of acquisition and production, mercantilism and domesticity . . . (p. 126 of John D. Lyons, speaking of Artaud: Intoxication and Its Double, Yale French Studies 50, 1974, pp. 120–129)

February 19, 1978

Oberlin, Ohio

Leander’s Senior Recital went very well. He never played better. Full control, musicality, presence. The program was Mozart’s Sonata in C minor, Κ 457, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, George Walker’s Theme & Variations from Sonata #1, and Schumann’s Carnaval, op. 9. The whole family was there. Chrysanthi, Daphne, and I arrived via AMTRAK from NH and Alec came from Haverford. This meant a lot to Leander. We had good talks with his lovely teacher, Frances Walker, both after the recital and at a leisurely breakfast the next day. She said that all Leander needs is self-confidence. He certainly sounded like an assured professional at this event.

June 10, 1978

Having just finished Volume I of Virginia Woolf’s Diary, I am immensely embarrassed at the sporadic nature of this diary. I didn’t even record Leander’s graduation on May 29th or our trip: en route to Oberlin, first to the farm with Alec and Katy Van Dusen, to plant the garden, then to Niagara Falls, where we took the Maid of the Mist boat and cooled off on that immensely hot day. At Oberlin I met Howie Burnett; we talked for five hours non-stop as though the thirty years since Deerfield had never elapsed. He is totally conservative in politics, ethics, and life-style, but I let that pass. Leander, now a B.M., is reaping the glory by working as a laborer in the Pepsi Cola bottling factory in Loraine, at $4.30 per hour. But he’s accepted into Manhattan School of Music starting September.

Virginia Woolf wrote up her diary every day, or almost every day, after tea; so it became a routine, or a habit, which she therefore missed when something intervened. She wrote at breakneck speed, without worrying about spelling or punctuation. She didn’t strive to record her inner life, but rather her outer life, which of course in her case was usually immensely interesting and intellectual, as is mine, to a lesser degree. Will I be able to “form the habit”?

Today is the day before Commencement. I am awaiting the students and their parents whom I’ve invited (if any come): Steve Taylor, Brian Pastuszenski (who did honors projects with me), Walter Meeker (good in English 59), Michael Carroll, Conrad Duncan, Ann Hurwitz (Resource Center tutor), Bob Gray (ditto), Anne Tierney (violinist), Jim Ockenfels (Quaker), John McGrath (arms-control), Steve Holland, Tobey Simpson, Stu Gasner, Fred and John Kutscher. Daniella Veiser-Baron’s father, the Israeli ambassador, was extraordinarily ugly, yet full of charm and graciousness. Steve Taylor came with his fiancée, a retiring puff of purity, much like himself. Brian never showed up.

Then we had a dinner party: Lafayette and Mayme Noda, Jack and Kathy Shepherd, and the Davenports. Jack Shepherd has just finished a book on running; he’s training for the New York marathon. Next week he’s going across country to be on TV shows, etc. to publicize the book. A very attractive man, full of energy, and very liberal in his attitudes. Haverford graduate; Quaker.

June 11, 1978

Commencement was held in good weather. End of my 17th year! The student valedictorian mortified us all by saying that he and his classmates were now “men and women,” which meant that they had outgrown their adolescent intellectual idealism and were ready to enter the job market. If only he were saying this ironically! But he wasn’t. John Rassias marched in ahead of me, embraced and kissed by half the girls in the row of students we passed, while the rest of us just marched solemnly by. Kemeny spoke beautifully, as always. In the afternoon, Chrysanthi protected me, thank god, from a visit by Kristin Lord, which would have lasted hours. I finished the first draft of my Virginia Woolf review. Then Noye and Dee Johnson came to dinner and I was able to rehearse with him, unexpectedly, the defense of humanism against technology that I have to give tomorrow. It was their 25th anniversary. Good people. He’s fighting for standards in grading and discipline (CCSC), etc.

Burns Chalmers telephoned. He wants me to go with him as part of a Quaker delegation to Governor Meldrum Thompson, preceding the Seabrook confrontation. . . . Joe and Emily Connelly have replaced me as Clerk of the Meeting.

July 12, 1978

Hanover

I took part in a panel discussion for Thayer School alumni on “Engineers—Part of the Problem, or the Solution?” I was supposed to represent the humanities. Fred Hooven spoke for the engineering profession, as did a student. Sam Florman, author of the Existential Pleasures of Engineering, moderated, and very well indeed. A luncheon preceded. I developed only one idea (I was limited to ten minutes), viz: that engineering developed when teleological thinking was prevalent; thus the engineer worried about his product—the end—and not about the process—the means—of making the product. Factories producing things meant for the betterment of mankind were themselves hellholes destroying our cities, etc. Now, I continued, existential thinking has superseded teleological, but not in engineering. Technology itself is not evil, but technology coupled with teleology can be very evil indeed. . . . A good discussion followed, and the whole thing was rather fun for me.

Afterwards, I oriented yet another prospective tutor for the Resource Center: Steve Wheeler, a bright lad who caught on quickly.

Tonight, John Rassias is coming to work on Ο ιπτάμενος θαλαμος, if he ever comes. We are about to begin the apparatus for Chapter 9, which I’ll have the pleasure of typing into the computer tomorrow. I also have to write a short review of the French translation of Kazantzakis’s Ταξιδεύοντας Ρουσία for World Literature Today.

Leon Black telephoned from Wall Street. He’s coming up for his fifth reunion; we’ll have lunch on Saturday. John Tallmadge is also expected sometime this week.

July 2, 1978

Riparius

In my “office”! We’ve been here a week and I’ve recorded nothing. But today is Sunday. Al Zalon and Mary and the Shapiros are coming later. We’ll play music, then go to North Creek for the July 4th fireworks. Dr. Grunblatt is coming, too. So the day is somewhat different, even though I worked this morning, reading Καραγκιόζης for the ανάγνωση of Chapter 10 of our Ιπτάμενος θάλαμος, then beginning the revision of my translation of Ritsos’s «Η σονάτα του σεληνόφωτος», which Jay Parini is going to publish in his new review.

The final days and weeks in Hanover were hectic, as always at this time of year. Reunion time brought John Tallmadge, Will Lee, Leon Black, and Henry Hart to the house for various meals, and hours of talk. We had our annual commencement party for graduates and parents. I participated in a Thayer School seminar, speaking on the humanists’ critique of engineering, etc. But most of the final week was spent preparing MSS for BMGS. What a painstaking job! Then cleanup in office and home, which is even worse. Finally: in the car! Release!

Terpni beautiful and peaceful, as always. My tractor is still on blocks, though, since one rear rim rusted through and has to be replaced. The fruit trees are all laden this year: cherries and plums. Garden survived the frost, more or less. I’ve spent mornings in the office, still editing for BMGS, but this is now nearly finished. Afternoons “on the farm.” Not much to do, really. I replaced the pane broken by burglars, I started to build a new bench next to the fireplace, I mowed with the Jari and sharpened its knives after having to break four rusted bolts with a cold chisel. Chrysanthi and Daphne are busier: picking strawberries, canning, making bread (Daphne is learning how to cook with lots of enthusiasm). Alec is fine in Avignon. He wrote a long, fine letter in French, and I replied in French. Leander isn’t doing so well. He quit his job at the Pepsi Cola factory because his hands were so sore he couldn’t play the piano. Then he wanted to leave Oberlin entirely and come here, but at the last minute he was offered a job bartending, and decided to stay. Leon Black gave us a lead on a nice apartment in NYC that we are pursuing for Leander’s school year.

I must go now and limber up my fingers with scales and arpeggios in preparation for Al Zalon.

Tuesday, July 4, 1978

Al came twice. We played Handel, Mozart, Debussy, Corelli. Very nice indeed, but I wish that our piano were better. It gets worse each year.

Sunday dinner with Irv and Fran, Al and Mary. Then the annual ritual: July 4th fireworks at North Creek, with Jacques and Hilda Grunblatt; then drinks in their house.

I’m revising «Η σονάτα του σεληνόφωτος». It needed a lot of work. Also reading Proust again, which is a real pleasure. Berma’s performance of Phèdra, de Norpois, etc. How subtle and understated Proust’s humor is.

A woodchuck came and visited me in my office, within two feet, without fear. I suppose he mistook me for a tree.

Donna Trautwein is here tonight, talking incessantly about nothing. She never leaves. I’m doing the best I can, trying to concentrate. Proust is being sacrificed to Donna, alas.

Sunday, July 9, 1978

We’re here two weeks, without a drop of rain. Severe drought. Forest fire in Brant Lake region. Gardens languishing. At Saratoga yesterday, the grass all brown and parched.

I neglected to record earlier that our large elm, what the boys call “the talking elm” because of its creaks, succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease. It’s standing bare now in front of me as I write this in my “office” beneath the (still healthy, thank goodness) yellow birch. Our great ash next to the house also looks sick, and another elm, near the outhouse, is clearly dying.

On Friday we drove to Lenox to leave Daphne with Yiayia and Pappou for a week. They’re staying at Mrs. Veselick’s again: “Garden Gables.” Met a CBC music producer and a documentary-maker, a Britisher and a French Canadian, vacationing there. They knew Hopkins Center, Joe Losey, etc. They apparently were a very content gay, middle-aged couple. Went immediately that evening to Tanglewood to hear Brahms’ German Requiem, which really I don’t like very much; I prefer the Verdi and the Berlioz even, not to mention the Mozart. Dinner in a nice restaurant near Garden Gables. Chrysanthi and I were at Lenox and Tanglewood the first summer after our marriage, she remembered vividly. Leander was four months old, I was working for Pan Am at Idlewild Airport, and had a week’s vacation or a long weekend. My parents had rented a cottage on Stockbridge Bowl. We drove up, went to a concert with Leander in the carriage, left the child with grandparents, and then came to the farm, which she hadn’t seen before. So this was a kind of reunion, or nostalgic return to beginnings. To make things more complete, the Perkells, a couple who are friends of Yiayia’s and Pappou’s and whom we visited there in 1955, were still on Stockbridge Bowl, and we had another visit, after twenty-three years. Saturday morning we attended a rehearsal at Tanglewood, Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting, the Soviet pianist Mark Zeltzer playing the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto superbly—very clearly and powerfully. I still don’t like Tchaikovsky, however, although the scherzo, the middle of the slow movement, was quite stunning. Then they rehearsed Tchaikovsky’s 4th symphony, but we left after the first movement, which was all stop and go, and not much fun. Tanglewood groups still beautiful, the crowd a delight to see—all kinds of déjeuner sur l’herbe. The newly married son of the Stockbridge Bowl Perkells works in the bookstore. We left Daphne and drove back, straight to Saratoga. Two festivals in one day! Leisure buffet in the Hall of Springs, very pleasant, then a good program: “Ballo della Regina” (Verdi), a new ballet in traditional style, very exciting; “Four Temperaments” (Hindemith), among the best I’ve seen, abstract (despite the programmatic music), profound, leaving one with the feeling that one must see it again, immediately; “Vienna Waltzes” (Strauss, etc.), the poorest of the lot, but nice mise-en-scène, massed effects, scenery, etc. A prosperous gentleman in front of me sat stolidly throughout the entire performance, not applauding once, the brute. Home to Terpni at 12:30 a.m. to find garbage tipped over again by . . . a bear? . . . a coon (more likely)?

Bob McGrath telephoned from Dartmouth to invite me to be co-leader, with him, of a Dartmouth Alumni College cruise (chartered yacht, etc.) in Greece in October 1979. I think I’ll accept.

Am re-reading Dubliners, along with Proust.

Thursday, July 20, 1978

Glens Falls Hospital

Surprise! I’m in the hospital, scheduled for an operation tomorrow to have my gall bladder removed. On Monday, July 17, our anniversary, we went for dinner at the Grist Mill in Warrensburg. That was the first mistake. The second was to order Wiener schnitzel with baked potato and sour cream. The third was to overeat. Afterwards I felt bloated but not really uncomfortable. I went to bed at the usual time and slept easily. But at about 2 a.m. I awoke with excruciating pain in the upper abdomen. It felt as though the whole intestines were in spasm. My tummy was hard as a rock. After about two hours of this, Chrysanthi called Jacques Grunblatt at 4 a.m., poor man (he’s supposed to be retired!). He came and diagnosed an acute gall bladder attack. Meanwhile I had vomited profusely, broken into a hot sweat, then into a cold sweat and chills. Jacques called the North Creek volunteer ambulance. They came in about half an hour, installed me in the vehicle, and then the vehicle wouldn’t start! Dead! I forgot to mention that throughout my travails in the cabin, four bats were flitting about in the living room. I didn’t know that at the time, but Chrysanthi told me afterwards. They didn’t make her feel any better. We called the reserve ambulance and arranged to meet in Wevertown. We all piled into Jacques’ car—Chrysanthi, myself writhing in the back seat, Daphne, Jacques, and two ambulance drivers—and drove to Conway’s store, where the other ambulance met us very promptly. I was still very uncomfortable all the way down. A Dr. Morrissey confirmed the diagnosis and turned me over to a young surgeon, Dr. Tucker (who has a brother-in-law who’s a Dartmouth graduate). He gave me Demerol, which stopped the pain. Then some tests began: first a die swallowed, which was supposed to make the gall bladder show up on an x-ray. It didn’t; the gall bladder failed to absorb it. Next, such are the wonders of science, they used ultrasound to make a “sonar gram,” a kind of x-ray produced by the passage of high frequency sound waves through the body. This did show up the bladder and indicated that it was full of stones. So, an operation was definitely in order. What happened in the attack was that the gall bladder, after that fatal meal, was called upon to secrete bile into the intestine to aid the digestion of fats. It squeezed, and one of the stones was forced into the duct, which eventually grew too narrow to let it pass. The stone caused the duct to dilate, and this caused the pain.

After all this happened, I remembered a similar incident three or four years ago. We were in Weston, at the Inn, on the occasion probably of the final weekend at Kinhaven. At night, again at 2 a.m. or thereabouts, I had the same exquisite pain, the same spasm and hardening of the abdomen. Chrysanthi was sleeping in another bed, and I was able to weather the whole thing without waking her. Eventually, after three or four hours, the stone must have either popped back into the gall bladder or out into the intestine, and I felt fine. Stupidly, I suspected nothing more than a severe case of indigestion, and forgot the incident completely, without mentioning it to anyone. So, given this previous attack and the one the other day, one could conclude that I’d have similar attacks in the future. Thus the decision to operate.

I’ve been in a large lounge converted to a ward, with two others. One, Charles Ovitt of Corinth, had a piece of glass removed from his wrist. It had caused a cyst to develop. He is a farm boy turned carpenter and small contractor doing remodeling jobs on apartments. Nice young man, very sensitive and responsible, with high professional standards of honesty and integrity, or so it would seem. We had good talks. The other man, aged 67, is French, but he’s been in this country off and on for 20 years. He owns and runs the French restaurant Chez Pierre on Route 9, and apparently is a professional accordionist. Very thin and spry, speaking nice Parisian French, and broken but adequate English, but a mess physically, with no stomach, emphysema, aneurysm, etc. He, too, had a violent attack, and they are trying to discover what caused it.

Fran and Irv Shapiro came down with Chrysanthi and visited the first day. So did Jacques and Hilda Grunblatt. Pappous and Yiayia of course telephoned from NYC and discussed the case with Dr. Tucker. Even Peter and Alice Buseck telephoned from Tempe. I feel very pampered.

Last week, on the 12th, we went to Saratoga again with Jacques and Hilda, meeting Bob and Ilona Bell for a sumptuous picnic and then another splendid night of ballet. “Ivesiana,” “Afternoon of a Faun,” and the Prokofiev waltzes. Bob now has tenure at Williams and is very relaxed; Ilona resigned her job at Smith, exhausted from maintaining two residences and commuting. She’s writing a book on George Herbert. Bob has turned his hand to short stories, having given up his projected book on autobiography—he says that he really does not have a genuine drive to be a scholar. At least he’s entirely honest about it.

Before the attack, I finished Dubliners, continued with the Prevelakis translation and some remaining manuscripts for BMGS that had to be edited, and, most importantly, began my speech for the MGSA Washington symposium on the effect of 1940–1941 on Kazantzakis. Alas, the attack came just as I’d gained some momentum on this; I hope that I can get back into it without too much delay. The large project, the full book on Kazantzakis’s politics, daunts me and tends to paralyze me. I am beginning now to realize that it won’t get written unless I write it (!), and to realize, in other words, that I may never write it, especially if I procrastinate and divert myself, as I’ve been doing recently. The cruise in Greece is one more diversion, but yesterday I turned down an offer to be a consultant in a series of radio programs on Homer’s Odyssey; that made me feel good. I’ve got to say No more often, at Dartmouth, too. Maybe last spring’s experience with the Search Committee for a new Director of Admissions will teach me a lesson. I thought I could really do some good; everyone told me, “You’re wasting your time. No matter what the committee says, they’ll promote the current Associate Director, Al Quirk, who is mediocre at best.” In the event, they promoted Al Quirk. My long and impassioned letter to President Kemeny obviously made little impression. Maybe the time has come to stop wasting valuable hours on such futile committees.

I am reading Proust in the hospital, “Mme. Swann Receives” at present. Competition exists from television and visitors, general hubbub, but I’m managing. It does seem a little overblown: every emotion and incident and character is analyzed at such inordinate length. But, as Proust himself insists, the redeeming factor is style. The metaphors and the sentences themselves, even in English, are exquisite.

Letter yesterday from Peter Gardner (Chrysanthi brought the mail). He is now installed in his new house together with his ex-wife! A miserable human arrangement endured because it’s a splendid financial and practical arrangement, apparently. Poor Peter—such a good personality and such a charmer, yet he’s had two disastrous marriages whereas I, with none of his attractions in my personality, have, so far, had a stable and happy marriage. Obviously the main reason was that I found a woman who is willing to put up with me.

The last thing I did at the farm was to make a cemented “lump” containing the pipe to hold the clothesline so that it would stand up straight. Also touched up the cement on the piers of the Guest House, which still look rather precarious. Every bit helps, but I doubt if I’ll do any more this summer. I’ll be lucky if I can finally secure the new rim for the Allis Chalmers so that it can be put into service next year.

9:30 p.m. I’ve been prepped, instructed, showered, and am ready for the sacrifice. Chrysanthi was here again. Another telephone call to Pappou and Yiayia. Good wishes from everyone. I feel coddled and flattered. Leander, too, was informed and offered to come home immediately, but Chrysanthi dissuaded him.

I read considerable Proust this afternoon, and when Chrysanthi arrived with my Creighton dictionary and the text of Prevelakis’s speech on Kazantzakis, I did another two pages of translation, very easily and efficiently, that made me feel better. If all goes well, I’ll continue after the operation. Perhaps I can write again in this book—not tomorrow, in all likelihood, but on Saturday. I like Myrivilis’s ending at this point: Τέλος και ἡ δόξα τῷ Θεῷ.

Wednesday, July 26, 1978

Glens Falls Hospital

❡ I felt in her presence that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. —Marcel, after viewing a pretty girl on the station platform during his train ride to Balbec, in Place-Names, the Place (Random House, p. 498).

Thursday, July 17, 1978

Glens Falls Hospital

Marvin brought me pajama bottoms along with the usual gown this morning, inaugurating a new, and final, stage in the hospital portion of my recuperation. Yesterday, Dr. Tucker removed the Penrose drain from my abdomen, pulling it out sleekly like a fish coming out of water, so now I have just a protective screen over the incision, which healed very rapidly indeed, and a 4 × 4 over the drain hole, which this morning was clean. Last night I slept five or six hours at least and was comfortable throughout, whereas the previous night I had lain awake constantly and had rolled futilely from side to side, wracked with gas pains. Of course my roommate here, a plucky old geyser from Fort Edward called Ray Gorham, wretched phlegm as usual (I am almost used to it now), and at one point someone across the hall fell out of bed and began screaming “Help!” maniacally. For ten minutes I felt I was in Bedlam. Then quiet descended again.

The worst moment yesterday was early in the morning, when I sneezed, sending an excruciating pain through my abdomen.

Dr. Tucker assures me that the operation was “a massive insult” to my abdominal organs and that I should be forbearing with them if they seem to take weeks or even months to behave normally again. I will tire easily—I feel that right now, although my total activity today, so far, is to have risen, changed gowns, washed, shaved, walked three times “around the circle,” cut my fingernails, gotten back into bed, and written out this much of today’s entry. But unbelievably, my eyelids are drooping. I’ll have to stop.

Later: Dr. Tucker is encouraged; says I may be able to go home tomorrow. Chrysanthi showed up early in the morning—with Leander! He regaled us with his experiences as Pepsi Cola factory worker and then as bartender at Prestis’s of Oberlin.

Friday, July 28, 1978

Glens Falls Hospital

Thomas Mann was brilliantly right to set the bizarre events of Der Zauberberg against a backdrop of utter routine. The early-morning thermometer, the reading of the pulse, the question “Did you move your bowels yesterday?” begin life anew each a.m. Add to these beginnings so many other “events” that occur in a particular order and at a particular, almost identical, hour, each day, and we get the warp against which runs the web of the patient’s improvement or decline. Marvin arrives with a fresh gown, towel, and washcloth. Someone empties your urinal and enters the amount voided on your chart, opposite the amount imbibed. A lady in green empties the wastebasket, inserting a new, immaculate, plastic liner. At 6:00 a.m. or thereabouts the menu for the following day arrives, so succulent in its nomenclature when compared to the actual objects that arrive on the tray, and you circle your choices. Then there are the shifts of personnel. The night nurse examines your wound and leaves. Then fat Mary Smith, and Ellen, and Marvin and the rest arrive promptly at 7:00. At 3:00 another group comes, including the sweet Angie Barber, and is briefed about each patient’s progress. At 11:00 the night-shift takes over, but by that time you have received your sleeping pill and—more importantly, the ultimate indulgence—your back-rub with crème and then talc, and are fast asleep.

The patients, too, those who are ambulatory enough to be visible, form their little habits and routines that add to the total. I myself have become a “sight,” since I circle the hallways so methodically and so often, always with smiles of encouragement, or friendly jibes, from the personnel. “Wanna race, Pete?” (I move slower than the proverbial tortoise.) “When ya gonna start jogging, Pete?” A group of farmers, fat and growly voiced, sits at the end of one hallway in what I call their “club,” a man with no nasal passages who breathes through a necklace-looking mechanism on his throat, stands sword-straight in the hallway in a white bathrobe and smiles benignly at passers-by. He has no larynx and cannot talk except through his stomach, so to speak. An officious young man with a huge beer belly stares frowningly at television. Aristocratic Mr. Cameron, next door, plays cards with his wife, who seems to be sleeping insofar as I can tell. Still more aristocratic Edith Hudnut, in the middle of the hall, emerges once a day for seven or eight halting steps with a walker. She has an obese private nurse who is colossally bored, sitting hopelessly for hour after tedious hour in the armchair as nonagenarian Mrs. Hudnut sleeps away her days.

Then there is the newspaper boy each morning. “But where is he today?” people ask. Perhaps yesterday’s driving rains prevented the papers from being printed. Instead comes the despairing little offer from a volunteer lady of something from her “craft cart.”

But by far the most important event each day is the arrival of one’s doctor—if he arrives. Dr. Tucker hasn’t missed a day since Monday, though once he didn’t show up until late in the afternoon, which was a real trial.

And so, against these regular, habitual recurrences, one gets better . . . or worse. I of course am getting better. And how remarkable it is to think of the body making all those new cells and fusing together the muscle that was sliced through as definitively as a steak when we divide it into several portions. Today, for example, on my walk around the halls, for the very first time my wound did not hurt at all as I strode tortoise-like on my rounds. Also, I am much less tired now at about 8:30 a.m.—having risen, washed, shaved, walked, and written in this diary—than I was at the comparable moment yesterday. I look forward to my breakfast with a lusty appetite.

Thursday, August 3, 1978

Terpni

This is the first morning that there was no drainage from my abdomen. The drainage hole is beginning to scab over. It is two weeks since the operation and one week since my discharge and return home.

I’ve been working in my office again, but have lost the momentum and strength to do original writing . . . so far. I’ve spent my time on the Journal and on the Prevelakis translation. But I continue to read Proust with pleasure and concentration, and I have begun to listen each evening to Alexander Scourby’s reading of Ulysses. Yesterday I felt an extreme fatigue in arms and legs, and had to take three naps during the day; but other days I’ve had a little more energy than this, though still of course greatly less than normal. All this is consistent with the doctor’s forecast; thus I can assume that my recuperation is proceeding normally.

In the hospital I had written to both Leonard Rieser and President Kemeny to voice my disappointment over the selection of Al Quirk as Director of Admissions, and I also mentioned my illness. Yesterday, to my surprise, I had telephone calls from both—how kind of them. The president assured me that the situation would be improved because he had given the vice president of student affairs, Ralph Manual, much more supervisory power of the admissions office than had existed previously. Cold comfort! Also, it was the trustees that pressed for an appointment. I told Leonard that mediocrity seems destined to win, and that I was fed up with academic politics. He said that nice things were also happening at Dartmouth—specifically Saul Bellow’s address to a packed house the other day. Sorry I missed that. Bellow, among other things, hit out at academia, saying that when novelists—for example, Herman Melville—write, they write because they want to be read by a large public; they do not write in an effort to titillate super-sophisticated critics. In other words, academia has made a fetish of “interpretation” and in so doing has denigrated the novelist’s art.

I read a strong statement against universities by Parker Palmer, director of studies at Pendle Hill. What he wants is “Christian community,” not the upward mobility and elitism fostered by our universities. I must write to him.

Sunday, August 6, 1978

Terpni

Maybe this is the hardest part: the waiting. Jim Eppersen wrote and said, “Be patient.” I find this hard. Indeed, for the first time in my life (that I can remember, at least) I wake up in the morning wishing that the day didn’t have to exist. It’s not that I contemplate each new day with dread—that would be a gross exaggeration. It’s not so much a negative feeling as the absence of any strong positive feeling. Obviously, one should awake in the morning thinking, “Fine! I can’t wait. There’s so much I want to do and experience between now and nightfall. Hurry!” Such thoughts are entirely absent in me now, even though each day I do do a little of this, a little of that. Maybe it’s the change in the color of my urine that has me worried and depressed. Is there blood in it, meaning internal bleeding? Or is the concentration of bile naturally higher, since no bladder exists now to store the bile? Tomorrow morning I’ll call Dr. Tucker.

Alec telephoned from George’s house in Salonika last night. He’d just arrived in Greece and was tremendously excited. He doesn’t know about my operation yet, but I wrote him the other day. Leander signed a one-year lease for an apartment on Riverside Drive and 108th Street.

Monday, August 14, 1978

Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, Hanover

Incredibly, I’m back in the hospital, this time in Hanover. All was going well; I even had a kind of pleasure feeling my strength return, being able to work longer hours without fatigue, experiencing simple pleasures anew, such as sleeping on my side again after two weeks only on my back—all was going well when, on about August 4 or 5, I noticed that my urine was darker, indeed very dark. On Monday the 7th I reported this to Dr. Tucker, who told me to get a urinalysis. This indicated the presence of bilirubin in the urine, and the conclusion everyone came to, provisionally at least, was that I have another stone, this time in the common duct, and that this is partially blocking the flow of bile so that bile is backing up, being absorbed in the blood stream and thence finding its way into the urine. Hepatitis, and/or jaundice are in the offering, if not complete blockage of the duct with dire results. On Friday the 11th I visited Dr. Tucker, who felt that I should go back in the hospital, and who indicated his readiness to operate again if the tests indicated the need. But my father discovered that at none other than Mary Hitchcock Hospital are two renowned specialists in this area, Dr. Thomas Almy and Dr. Karl, the surgeon. It made sense for me to go to Hanover, obviously. So Leander, Chrysanthi, Daphne, and I piled into the car yesterday and came. Leander is camping out in the Meeting House, Chrysanthi is staying with Trix Officer, Daphne with the Rassiases.

Since I arrived here yesterday afternoon I’ve been questioned or examined by an intern, a surgical resident, Dr. Lou Matthews, and Dr. Almy. Dr. Karl hasn’t come yet. The tests have begun. They say that they ought to know one way or the other by Wednesday. The brightest sign, unless I am clutching at straws, is that yesterday and today my urine has been much lighter. Dr. Almy said that stones sometimes do pass through naturally. (Prayers and supplications.) Almy, by the way, is an eminent researcher in this field. He has a $5 million grant and has reached the point where he can dissolve stones chemically and where he thinks he is beginning to understand precisely what malfunction in the kidney makes bile lithogenic. But, he told me, the side effects of the chemical treatment still preclude its use; also, a patient would be dependent on the chemical for the rest of his life. In short, surgery is still preferable. But what exciting work Dr. Almy is doing! If he’s lucky, he’ll find all the answers, for which surely he should get a Nobel Prize in medicine. None of this, of course, will help me between today and Wednesday, yet it may help my children.

John Rassias came by last night. It’s nice to see familiar faces. The girl who came in to do an EKG was a former Dartmouth student whom I recognized, and the technician who drew my blood this morning was Arnie Hawk, who came to Mary Hitchcock in the ’60s as a CO and lived in the Meeting House, then stopped coming to Meeting when his service ended and he no longer needed us. I always felt angry toward him, but when he arrived a few moments ago I overcame this easily and we had a very nice visit. His CO service obviously directed his life in a way that seems permanent; he’s still here, married, has just built his own house in Thetford, etc.

News came that Jay Walker died in a motorcycle accident in Greece. I’m not surprised. Previously, he had “totaled” a car and seemed to be proud of this accomplishment. Then he took to motorcycling. After his last leave-term, when he returned he greeted me with the words “27,000 miles!” This summer he took off again, presumably aiming at another 27,000 miles on that suicidal machine. Suicidal man. Somewhere in the Bronx he has an old mother, I believe. He was our colleague in the English Department for five or six years or more, but never allowed us to get to know him. He was always gone, either in Washington with his Black Studies off-campus program, or in various exotic places.

In the past week or so I finished Proust’s second volume, with great pleasure. One gets into a rhythm reading Proust. The passion for precise analysis is really carried to an extreme and is almost exasperating, yet always so brilliant. Then I began Joyce’s Portrait, with undiminished admiration, although this must be the tenth time I’ve read it. Also, every night we’ve all been listening to Alexander Scourby reading Ulysses. Saturday, before coming here on Sunday, we reached the great climactic end of Circe. If all goes well, I’ll be able to hear the Nostos at the farm before the summer is done. (Prayers, supplications.) It’s been a pleasure for me to have initiated Leander, and even Chrysanthi, into the Ulyssean mysteries. Leander seems quite taken with the book, and even Chrysanthi is able to understand the essence of it. Of course most of this is owing to Scourby’s magnificent reading. What an instrument his voice is, and how consummately he plays upon that instrument!

I finally secured a new rim for the tractor tire. Now we’re trying to get a tube. That problem, too, with luck will be set right by the end of the summer. But my poor fields will not be mowed this year.

My illness has, as always, brought out friendships and decencies that were perhaps latent. How nice to receive sensitive letters from Darrel Mansell, Bill Cook, and especially from Harry Schultz; also Fred Berthold, Leonard Rieser, Ellen Rose, Jim Eppersen, Jim Heffernan, Ned Perrin, Jay Parini, and others. Brenda Silver’s was predictably egotistic and infantile. People reveal themselves at such moments.

I have a ferocious attachment to the farm—to Terpni. I realize, especially now, that there is where I want to be. I want to recuperate there, to get well there, to be able to exercise my strength once again—there! I don’t feel that way about Hanover, al though I do like Hanover, too, in many ways. But it’s not mine; I don’t belong. The farm has my imprint; it is me and I am it to large degree; it has molded my ideals and strengthened my body all these many years. When I say “I want to go home,” I mean there, not to 12 Ledyard Lane.

On Saturday, as a last fling between operations (if indeed I am condemned to the second operation), I wrote a review for World Literature Today of Stylianos Harkianakis’s volume of poems Χώμα και στάχτη. How fine they are, and what an unusual man wrote them—a sophisticated intellectual, bon vivant, lover of earthly joys, yet a mystic, believer, possessed of an otherworldly perspective, and withal a prince of the Church: Archbishop of Australia! I would like to try to translate some of the poems; maybe I could place them in the TLS. I’ve written to “His Eminence” asking for permission.

What did not get done this summer, alas, is the talk I am supposed to give at the Washington MGSA Symposium in November. Somehow, I’ll produce it. If only I can escape this second operation and have two or three productive weeks before we return to Hanover.

Leander is going to do a recital at the Hart School with Alice Cognetta, and has been practicing the Franck violin-piano sonata. They’re also going to do the Kreutzer.

Tuesday, August 15, 1978

Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital

The tests conducted yesterday haven’t produced many results. The bilirubin is at 2.4–1.5 is normal. But it could be a lot worse. The ultrasound showed nothing, because apparently the dye doesn’t work when bilirubin is elevated. Today they apparently have some more tricks up their sleeves. So, in one way, yesterday was a disappointing day. In another, it was encouraging, since the urine remained clear and the ultrasound was negative, showing a duct that is not swollen, and no sign of a stone.

Audrey Logan came. They’ve sold their huge house in Meriden and are looking for a smaller one. Miriam Arndt visited, more with Chrysanthi than with me. Leonard Rieser came too, with his huge smile. We talked about Jay Walker. And—lo and behold!—Werner Kleinhardt, recently back from a year in Mainz. Peter Cohen, now a third-year medical student, and just beginning his nine-week tour on the surgical service, visited twice, and stayed and stayed. He’s a fluid talker, and turning into a real scientist. He enabled us to understand how really primitive medical science is; what they can do is dwarfed a thousand-fold by what they cannot do and do not understand. And even in the areas where they can do something, very often they don’t understand why they are doing it.

In some scattered moments I managed to read a little. I’m in Chapter 5 of the Portrait now, and learning lots on every page. It’s a great solace in a place like this . . . or anywhere.

Dr. Karl, the chief surgeon, showed up finally, yesterday. A huge imposing handsome man exuding power and self-confidence. I suppose that’s a characteristic of the breed. Dr. Almy returned and gave me a formal examination. I liked the concentration and intensity on his face as he listened to my chest. It must be very pleasurable, really, to practice medicine when your attitudes are good ones—i.e., when you’re interested in the patient as a human being and in the disease as an intellectual and scientific challenge. Almy, among other things, was the first doctor who ever looked at my feet. (I’m thinking of the inadequate general physicals given me by Lou Matthews and by Dr. Wright, before him.) Almy was worried about a little mole he noticed on the sole of one foot; apparently moles in such a location are susceptible to metathesis. I must have a dermatologist look at it.

Wednesday, August 16, 1978

MHMH, Hanover

Nothing happened at all yesterday except another blood test that showed the bilirubin at the same level, and the unwanted enzymes still in the liver. This morning Dr. Storey, the resident, said that Dr. Karl will probably want to do a transhepatic colangiagram next. This is a procedure in which the dye that didn’t do anything when introduced intravenously, is now inserted directly into the liver by means of a needle through the flank. This ought to enable them to x-ray the entire biliary system and, if there’s a stone, to see it. They do this in the OR, because they have to be prepared, says Storey, to operate immediately since the dye sets up pressures, etc. that lead to . . . consequences. Very pleasant! I have had dreams of grandeur from my childhood onward, envisioning myself as conductor of the Philharmonic, as a Nobel Prize laureate, etc., but I never dreamed of becoming Prometheus—and now this dream is about to come true: chained to the OR with a surgeon pecking at my liver. Since the procedure requires OR time, it may not happen until Friday or Saturday. Apparently Dr. Karl will be in to see me today.

The intern was in, and now I understand things better. The danger with the transhepatic colaniogram is, of course, that they are poking more-or-less blindly with the needle and may cause internal bleeding that will require immediate attention by means of an incision, and tying off the vessels. Very nice! He also gave me a better understanding of what is happening in my system. The red blood cells (RBCs) of the body live about 120 days and then die and have to be cleared out. When they die, they become bilirubin; thus there is always a certain concentration of bilirubin in the blood. This goes into the liver, where the bilirubin is combined with certain other chemicals so that it becomes soluble. So it enters as non-soluble bilirubin and leaves the liver as soluble bilirubin. It leaves through the hepatic ducts that join in the common duct; then it goes into the colon, turns the feces brown, and is excreted.

When there is a blockage in the hepatic ducts, the soluble bilirubin backs up and is reabsorbed into the blood. That is what is happening with me. The soluble bilirubin was 1.8 yesterday; it’s meant to be 0.3 or so; the non-soluble was 0.8 (I think), making a total of 2.6. The total, in other words, is not as important as the amount of soluble, which is high, indicating an obstruction.

He said that there are two leading possibilities for the cause of this obstruction. The first is of course our old friend the stone, which is probably embedded in the wall, causing a constriction. The other might be a swelling at the site of the former gall bladder duct, where the sutures were placed by Dr. Tucker.

I’m not sure what the treatment would be for the latter.

Later: Dr. Karl came. He definitely wants to do the transhepatic colangiagram. It will be this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Then, in all likelihood, they’ll operate. But there is also a possibility that the procedure won’t work, that the die won’t enter the ducts. If this happens, they’ll try the tube down in the duodenum; there’s a 60% chance of that working.

Lots of visitors yesterday: Dick Williamson came twice, John Rassias came again, but I missed him because I was talking to Karen Sheldon in her room; she’s having a hysterectomy this morning. Mayme Noda, Andrey Logan, Emily and Joe Connelly all came, too, and Ann Ludwig just for a minute, on her way to her natural childbirth class. Darrel Mansell came, too; such a good man. The only one who angered me was Mary Rassias, who came and then proceeded to talk to Chrysanthi the whole time as though I didn’t exist. Maybe I’ve forgotten some others. I was told that Pat Wykes called the hospital and was informed that I wasn’t here! The Schultzes also, I was told, left a note, which I’ve never received.

Leander is going to telephone Schroon Lake today to check on the tractor tire. It’s good to continue to be concerned about life’s unimportant things; they are what give a sense of stability and continuance. Similarly, Chrysanthi is worried lest the string beans all mature with no one there to pick them. And the plums, tomatoes, corn. Life’s little pleasures suddenly seem inordinately large.

I began The Last Temptation. To my relief, I like the translation, although I shuddered to find “Land of Slavery” instead of “Land of Bondage.” But everything is so hyperbolic, so overblown (I mean the way Kazantzakis wrote it, not the way I translated it). Probably the reason why The Greek Passion is his best is the presence there of humor and relaxation, to set off the romantic excesses of emotion, anguish, and ecstasy that seem to be constant in The Last Temptation. Yet the novel has a vividness that is remarkable. One sees, hears, smells, feels the characters and the setting.

Midday: Tom Almy came in with a new theory. One enzyme in the liver function test does not conform to the hypothesis of a stone, but rather to the hypothesis of jaundice caused by an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic I received, named Halithane (or Fluithane). So, they now are going to wait a while, to postpone the transhepatic colangiagramn, and to watch the blood analysis for a few days. If it is a reaction to the anaesthetic it will pass, and probably without doing any permanent damage to the liver. Μακάρι!

More visitors: Dick Williamson again, the truly faithful friend. Jim Heffernan, Ned Perrin, Fred Berthold. Eleanor Horne telephoned. The Schultzes sent a note; the Wykeses sent flowers.

I should add that Almy telephoned Dr. Tucker to find out what anaesthetic I’d received. Tucker, he said, was a bit peevish at first, but then cooperative. If it turns out to be Halithane (= Fluithane) I should be very careful to warn any future anesthesiologist with whom (as I hope not) I have to deal.

Thursday, August 17, 1978

MHMH, Hanover

Long talks with Peter Cohen yesterday. He is so excited about the frontiers of medicine, it’s a pleasure to see. He also chided me, graciously, for my self-pity when I arrived. The point is that my troubles, even with another stone, are nothing compared to what he sees every day. À propos, Lafayette Noda, who visited last night, told us about Tom Pinder, also a friend of Ned Perrin’s, a young man in his 40s who had just set himself up as a carpenter in Thetford when cancer was discovered in his spine. Now he’s in a wheelchair, at best, and he’ll die in short order. It all started from a mole on his back. And, across the hall, a lady died last night. Another man had an entire lung removed, etc., etc.

Audrey Logan, who sold her house and is systematically disposing of accumulated furniture, is in effect going to furnish Leander’s entire apartment. He has ordered a U-Haul truck for September and will move his belongings plus all of Audrey’s gifts down to Riverside Drive to set up house. How exciting!

Soapy and Ole Amundsen peeked in last night with a vase of flowers but wouldn’t stay. They thought that Peter Cohen was a doctor and didn’t want to interrupt. A sign pinned up on the hospital wall is all-too-appropriate for my case: “You see only what you look for; you recognize only what you know.”—Merril C. Sossiman. “Positive diagnoses are made at the expense of conscience.”—Sir William Osler. “Every self-respecting arhythmia has at least three possible interpretations.”—Rosenbaum’s aphorism.

Karen Pelz and Tim Burke visited. How nice! Tim, who is going to be my Head Tutor in the Resource Center, got a little scared when he saw the Personnel Department’s advertisement for the job. I explained to him that this was required by law, and is just a formality that is unavoidable.

Dr. Porter, dermatologist, looked at my moles. No problem, he assured me. But I have dry skin, should bathe infrequently (which I do), and coat myself with Nivea after the bath, baths being better than showers.

Don Pease visited. My stay has led to many surprises. Jay Parini came again, then Soapy again, then Susan Chambers with a painting to cheer me up. Brenda telephoned to say that she and Paul would be by later. But around 5:00 p.m. Dr. Karl suddenly appeared and said I probably should go home! Hooray! He wants some time to elapse in order to see where the bilirubin level is really going (today’s level, alas, was up a bit, from 2.1 to 2.3). So I’m scheduled to have blood drawn at 8 a.m. next Wednesday and to see him at 2:30. If the bilirubin is down, he’ll do the intravenous colangiagram again, after which we ought to know what’s what. Then three possibilities still remain: a stone, inflammation caused by the operation at the point where the cystic duct was severed, reaction to Halithane.

So, without further ado, we gathered up Leander and Daphne and drove back to the farm. How beautiful it was, with clouds scudding across the face of a full moon and a fresh breeze swaying the foliage.

Friday, August 18, 1978

Terpni

Good night’s sleep in my own bed. Morning in my office. I took up work on my Washington symposium article where I had left off, and wrote a few pages, not without some feelings of weariness, however. Fresh tomatoes, lettuce, onions from the garden for lunch, and a fresh plum from our tree for desert! Leander has gone off now to try to retrieve the tractor tire. I rested after lunch; my temperature is normal. We’ll pray now that friend bilirubin is going down, down, down.

Saturday, August 26, 1978

Terpni

I saw a heron flying across the sky this morning with its thin neck stretched forward and its huge wings flapping ever so slowly and effortlessly. And last night we most certainly had a bear right outside the house, under the ash tree. Chrysanthi heard a “large animal” moving outside, and we all went out with a lantern but of course saw nothing. But this morning we found the characteristic droppings: large, and full of undigested berries. Sherman Frasier visited in the evening and confirmed the finding immediately. Undoubtedly it was also this bear that ate Astro’s food the other night, and perhaps raided the garbage cans last month.

Last Tuesday evening we drove again to Hanover so that I could have another blood test at 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday the 23rd. We slept over in Bill and Madeleine Smith’s house, ignorant of the fact that the Baums had left our house precipitously because of the illness of his father in NYC. I then saw Dr. Karl in the afternoon, and he told me the good news that the bilirubin was down to 1.1 (1.0 is normal). The enzymes were also down a little, the one indicating allergy quite a lot, and only the serum amylase unchanged. Dr. Karl took me down to the pathologist, who explained that most of the elevated enzymes did not necessarily indicate current malfunction, since they have long half-lives and simply circulate in the blood until they break down chemically. The amylase, however, with a half-life of only a half hour or so, indicates a current malfunction, this time of the pancreas—i.e., of the digestion of starch. In any case, no one was very worried, though we’ll check the blood again in a few weeks. Given the low bilirubin, Dr. Karl ordered another try at the intravenous colangiagram. This took almost one and a half hours. The dye invaded the liver nicely but was slow in going into the ducts; nevertheless, they were able to get a view of the ducts which, though poorly visualized, displayed no dilation. Conclusion: no stone. Hurray! Dr. Karl sent me home again, warning me against another dose of Halithane. Subsequently I tried to get more information about liquid paper, which may have sensitized me to the anesthetic. The Liquid Paper Corporation is at 9130 Markville, Dallas, Texas 75231, telephone 214 783-2600. I called, and the chemist, very defensively, said that the formula is secret but that it contains no fluorocarbons. He assumed that Halithane (Fluithane) might contain fluorocarbons.

How nice both Richard Karl and Tom Amy, not to mention Lou Matthews, were to me throughout the ordeal! Karl gave me a truly princely treatment, and it was the first time that I felt glad to be the Third Century Professor in the Humanities, since this obviously made me seem very important in his eyes. Also, Dr. Aaron Feder in New York, a former colleague, had written to both Karl and Almy saying how close he was to the Biens, etc. So, although the doctors still don’t know what happened to me, I feel much gratitude for their care and have written them all accordingly, stressing the collegiality I observed at every stage of the proceedings.

Today, for the first time since July 17th, I put on my boots in the afternoon. I raked a good patch of hay and felt none the worse for it. How fine to be active again! Tomorrow Leander, Alec, and I will have to tar the shed roof (which is leaking again) in an effort to preserve it until next summer, when we can re-roof it properly. And apples and plums have to be picked, hay moved into the garden and spread as mulch, the house closed up, etc., all within the next week, when I also hope to be able to finish my Washington Symposium talk in its first draft.

Alec flew home from London today and telephoned from New York. He’ll be here tomorrow with lots and lots to tell us.

I finished The Last Temptation this afternoon. It’s certainly not a masterpiece, but it isn’t bad, really. I wish I’d done some of the translation differently—“land of bondage” instead of “land of slavery,” “Why do you persecute me?” (re: St. Paul) instead of “Why do you pursue me?” maybe even “Thy will be done” instead of “Your will be done,” but that would have created a terrible mess with all the other times that “you” is used when addressing God.

Sunday, September 10, 1978

Hanover

We returned on September 1st, with Leander going ahead in the Dart, fully loaded, and Alec, Daphne, Chrysanthi and I following later in the Buick, also fully loaded. Alec had been with us for a week, full of stories from Paris, Avignon, Brindisi, Athens, Salonika, Dover, and London. He had splendid summer. In the last few days at the farm we had the Grunblatts (including Mark), the Shapiros, and the Perrymans over for farewells. And Mark took Leander and Alec to Lake George for a spree. We did more roof tarring, last-minute mowing, mulched the garden, etc. And what a garden this year! Lots and lots of tomatoes, corn, spinach, string beans, peppers (for the first time), squash, onions, parsley, lettuce, beets. Then there were the plum trees, too. They all bore, and one of them bore in abundance. (The coons ate everything on one tree.) Sherman Frazier visited one day, too, with a buddy. We talked old times, and the boys marveled at the kind of company I kept before I was married.

In Hanover—packing, packing, packing. Leander rented a huge truck, which they filled with the furniture he’d gotten from Audrey Logan and their own things. Peter Carman came to join them, bringing more things. Supper with his father, professor of religion at Harvard, very quiet at first but by the time dinner was half finished he was delivering a full lecture on the Moonies. Alec managed to get the Dart passed inspection at an “easy” station in Orford. Now I’m trying to sell the heap, which won’t start half the time. The boys left at 7:00 a.m. (!) on Tuesday, September 4th, drove to 355 Riverside Drive (apartment 4S), unloaded Leander’s things, whereupon Alec and Peter C. continued on to Haverford. Daphne went off to school on the same day; now in 7th grade.

I spent the week in revising The Moonlight Sonata once again and typing the changes into the computer (my addiction!), also in attending to queries in the Prevelakis translation, organizing the office, etc. Procrastinating with course preparation.

On Thursday we went to Peter Smith’s for supper in Strafford, with Paul and Margaret Clifford, Paul Clifford of course being the president of Selly Oak Colleges. Very pleasant. We talked about Fircroft. My letter, which, he said, made Christopher Cadbury rabid; the dismal sequel; the place is still closed; the trustees are totally intransigent. Mrs. Clifford, an enthusiast for things literary, is interested in Dryden. I introduced her to David Wykes the next morning, while taking Paul around to see Fred Berthold and others (Rob Oden) with like interests. The contact whetted my appetite for Woodbrooke again.

Yesterday, Saturday, Brenda Marder came. Very vivacious. Hopes to see us in Greece. She told how Bruce Lansdale almost lost his job at the Farm School in a battle of fundamentals with the trustees, who now are businessmen without any idealism. Bruce won this time. It’s the same old story: organization vs. community. À propos, the Harvard Magazine had a piece on F. O. Matthiessen. His letters are now available. He committed suicide, of course, in my sophomore year, and I remember old-stone-face Kenneth Murdoch weeping in class the next day. Matthiessen’s trouble—naturally!—was homosexuality. Poor man. If he’d been born twenty years later he’d not have felt so guilty and secretive about it perhaps, because of the gay liberation movement in the ’70s. In any case what interested me in the article—especially in light of my experiences and frustrations on the Budget Council last year, where I saw the organization men at work—was M’s obsession with the “community of scholars,” with the university as an organism and not as a cost-effective machine. I was fascinated to learn that he hated Conant and protested to him and opposed his policies during this period, fascinated because it was precisely Conant’s policies that made me feel that Harvard was such a “mechanical” place, and induced me to go to Haverford, which I (luckily) found to be an organism and a community still, not an organization or machine.

Sunday October 1, 1978

Hanover

Robert Gerrow, who killed the young man on Waddell Road in 1973, escaped from prison (!), throwing all our neighbors into consternation. Donna Trautwein even telephoned us here in Hanover to warn us against visiting the farm. But on September 11th Gerrow was found by the police. He opened fire on them (how had he obtained a gun?!) and they killed him. Finis.

So much activity in the last three weeks! I can’t even remember much of it. Setting up the Resource Center again; training new tutors; finishing my translation of Prevelakis’s “Nikos Kazantzakis: Life and Works”; lecturing on Kazantzakis in Comparative Literature 48 (how pleasing to find four of my students from the Freshman Seminar with me again: Bill Vitalis, Andy Lewin, Allison Pingel, and Kristin Lindgren). Guests and more guests. Michael Tobias, a “Zen mountaineer,” who edged out John Tallmadge for the job in Environmental Studies. Bert Minkin, who came to read the poetry of Dimitrios Capetanakis. Ellen de Cesare Kahn. Yiayia and Pappou. Maybe others, too. Bob Daubenspeck came one Sunday and varnished the icon I bought last Christmas in Chicago. Now Leander is here for a long weekend, fleeing his cockroaches. His lessons with Robert Goldsand are going well, and he was selected to accompany one of the violinists on the faculty—so he is pleased, so far. My health is fine. I’m as active as ever, without fatigue. The timing was propitious, since almost up to the moment classes started I felt the need of an afternoon nap. But psychological factors were playing their part, too, I’m sure. One nice evening was spent at the Skiway Lodge for a kickoff dinner for Jay Parini’s New England Review. Robert Penn Warren read his latest poetry and Eleanor Clarke read from a novel, a delightful vignette about their Vermont neighbors and their fetish of tidiness. Very clever. Another pleasure was a series of Pinter sketches done by our students extremely well, with Peter Smith also on stage. A “review” with Sondheim songs followed—and such talent! One student’s baritone voice was a dream: so effortless, as though reverberating in a deep cistern. And just two days ago, Chrysanthi, Leander, and I went to hear Andy Jennings and Andrew Rangell play violin-piano sonatas in the Hop: Mozart, Ives, and César Franck—gorgeous renditions of all three, but the Ives was the most interesting and moving for me. After it, curiously, the Frank seemed tawdry. Last Sunday I took Yiayia and Pappou on a drive up to Newbury on the Vermont side and then down through Haverhill and Orford, to see the leaves, but there wasn’t much color.

They are laying a gigantic drain along Ledyard Lane, finally. Repairing is scheduled for next year. Mrs. Serafini, our octogenarian neighbor, complained to the selectmen. She’s been waiting twenty-five years, she said, and she doubted that she’d last another twenty-five.

Jay’s poem on “Luk,” a student killed in an airplane crash, is gorgeous. A major elegy added to the language. Fresh wine poured into a very old bottle.

Another visitor was Dia Philippidis, newly appointed at Harvard to teach Demotic Greek—using our method and book, happily. A brilliant and delightful girl. So bright! We put her through John’s workshop, showed her the videotapes, etc. She’s done work on the computer and knows Steve Waite. At the same time Alistair Reid, up for Jay’s New England Review supper, slept with us, and we had a nice breakfast together. He’s installed in NYC now as a full-time writer for The New Yorker. A pleasant man.

1979

Hanover

January 1–June 21

Riparius

June 22–September 1

Hanover

September 1–15

New York City

September 15–18

Θεσσαλονίκη c/o Γιώργος Γιαννακός, Πλαστήρα 1Α, Αρετσου

September 18–October 4

Dartmouth Alumni College cruise:

October 5–22

Athens (chez Marder, then Grande Bretagne),

Corinth, Mycenae, Nafplio, Epidaurus, Delphi,

Katokolo, Olympia, Navarino, Pylos, Agrigento,

Messina, Tauromina, Iraklio, Knossos, Kritsa,

Agios Nikolaos, Santorini, Rhodes, Aspendos (Antalya),

Perge, Side, Cos, Ephesos, Didyma, Miletos, Delos,

Paros, Piraeus, Athens (chez Marder, Δημοκρατίας 61, Π. Ψυχικό)

Athens, London, Birmingham

October 23

Woodbrooke College,

October 24–December 14

1046 Bristol Road, Selly Oak,

Birmingham B29 6LJ, New Wing, flat Β

20 East 74th Street, New York City

December 15–17

Hanover

December 18–31

January 7, 1979

Elise Boulding spoke in Meeting to tell us that upon her return to Montgomery House she found that Mrs. Montgomery had introduced into the living room an “authentic prisoner’s pallet” from a Georgia jail, purchased at an antique shop, to serve now as a coffee table! Elise developed this theme beautifully. Should she leave the pallet in place, as a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man? Should she banish it to the cellar—i.e, try to hide this reality?

Elizabeth Ballard also ministered interestingly. Her son sent her a Christmas message consisting of the drawing of a plant. Next to one leaf was a balloon with the message: “The leaf asks.” Next to the plant as a whole was another balloon: “the plant holds the answer.”

Monday, February 19, 1979

We finished the text for Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος tonight—John Rassias, Chrysanthi and I—after seven years! Grammar parts remain.

Wednesday, June 6, 1979.

Cited in a footnote in V. Woolf’s Letters, vol. IV, p. 356:

Miss Buss and Miss Beale

Cupid’s darts do not feel.

How different from us,

Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

Friday, July 13, 1979

Riparius

Sitting at my table beneath the yellow birch this afternoon I saw a huge fox, as big as a large dog, promenading nonchalantly at the edge of the field. He saw me, and discreetly retired into the woods without accelerating his pace.

August 23, 1979

Riparius

Supper with Edna Michell re: music-poetry-dance for the opening of the winter Olympics. Lukas Foss has been commissioned to do a composition; Yehudi Menuhin and the Cancilena Players will perform it. She asked me to suggest poetry. I gave her Odyssey VIII, Odysseus at the Phaeacian games, and Iliad XXIII, the funeral games for Patroclos.

Possibility of an electric power line across the farm.

Saturday, September 8, 1979

Leander and Wiggy Bond played well in Rollins Chapel. She did a Bach unaccompanied cello suite; then together they did a Debussy sonata, Beethoven’s 3rd cello-piano sonata (magnificent) and Fauré’s “Sicillienne.” Lots of rehearsals previously, with coaching by Norman Fisher of the Concord String Quartet (and advice from me).

I’d finished the first draft of the fourth lecture for the cruise, thank goodness. The other three lectures were done at the farm.

Saturday, September 15, 1979

Worked all week on BMGS, editing the articles in hand, even though the future of the journal seems poor. Blackwell’s have raised the price 25% in one swoop.

To NYC today. Tenants in our house.

Sunday, September 16, 1979

20 E. 74th Street

Leander and Wiggy repeated the concert at International House. Chrysanthi went, I didn’t. Supper with Charlie Hamlen. Leander very pleased about the performance.

Monday, September 17, 1979

We all went—Chrysanthi, Daphne, Yiayia, Pappou, Leander—to Robert Goldsand’s recital at the 92nd Street Y. A prodigious program lasting two and a half hours, all romantics, played with brilliance and a lovely idiosyncrasy. Leander is justifiably proud to have him as a teacher. Met Wiggy there. Coffee afterwards. Late that night, Wiggy telephoned Leander to say that she is madly in love with him. But he doesn’t return the sentiment, alas!

Tuesday, September 18, 1979

Working up to the last moment on my lectures, at the Yale Club, a marvelous refuge. 6:15 p.m. we fly to Athens. Alec drove us to JFK and then kept the car.

Wednesday, September 19, 1979

Πλαστήρα 1Α, Θεσσαλονίκη

Athens; then connecting flight to Thessaloniki. Everyone at the airport. We met Odysseas for the first time, and his wife Λένα (Ελένη) and daughter Τούλα with her husband Σταύρος, musicians both. Ο Παππούς healthy and vigorous, but with total loss of short-term memory. Dimitrakis (George’s son) is a man now: 3rd year in the university, studying civil engineering. Andreas is in France, touring. We began a round of dinners at George’s, Lola’s, Odysseas’s.

Saturday, September 22, 1979

Supper at Lola’s. I asked Odysseas about Zachariadis vs. Markos, and got a good, long answer: that no single person was responsible for the communists’ failure; chiefly it was lack of supplies when Tito closed the border and Stalin refused to help. Odysseas and Lena are extremely pro-Russian. Their thirty-three years there left splendid memories, chiefly of the kindness and generosity of the Russian people, and also of the care lavished upon all by the state machinery—health protection, vacations, free education, pensions, no unemployment, etc. A very positive picture of the communist way of life. Odysseas was also eloquent regarding the immense destruction of life and property after WW II, and the great achievement of reconstruction. . . . Also saw Θέμης και Μιράντα Άλτας.

Sunday, September 23, 1979

Went with George and Efthymoula to Halkidiki. Maltepe (Καλλιθέα) is now transformed into a kind of Lake George Village, with rows of “Greek art” shops (with, however, very fine reproductions of ancient vases and statues). We bathed at Sani Beach, where I got a bee-sting in the toe that later swelled and produced an allergic rash. Thence to George’s single stremma near Φόκες, with cypresses, apple trees, and poplars.

Monday, September 24, 1979

In the morning, to the museum with Odysseas and Eleni to see the new discoveries at Vergina, King Philip’s tomb. One of the views excitedly assured me that the pair of greaves of different sizes was proof positive, since tradition depicted Philip with one atrophied leg.

Spent the evening with Vouli and Nancy (?), an Egyptian Greek now in Australia, a choreographer attempting to keep Greek folk dances alive. She knows Χαρκιανάκης well, and has translated some of his poems.

Thursday, September 27, 1979

The other evening we watched, on television, the annual Festival of Song connected with the Salonika fair. Ten songs were heard, and committees all over Greece sent in their votes by telephone. There was romantic trash, and in general the music was wholly derivative an uninteresting. But Greeks listen for words. The winning song was a strong assertion that if Christ returned to earth he wouldn’t have to suffer a slow, torturous death because modern man has found so many ways of instantaneous obliteration. Good for the Greeks! Could popular culture in America ever have reached this level? The runner-up was also indicative: a song by a boy soprano about the hopes and frustrations of children.

Everyone I’ve come in contact with here seems to be a communist, or at least a socialist. Last night we were with Themis and Miranda Altas again. Themis praised Hungary, which he visited recently, as a society far superior to Greece, and ventured that change would occur elsewhere only by violent revolution. His daughter, Mariana, published a purely Marxist analysis of “freedom” in the University of Thessaloniki law review: freedom can exist only when one class ceases exploiting the other, and this can happen only in socialism. Odysseas and Eleni, and Dimitris Yiannakos, are also convinced that Soviet Russia has solved the pressing problems of modern society better than any other culture. Andreas Yiannakos, who is still in France, is from what I hear a flaming radical.

Γιαγιά—that is, the mother of Λένα Γιαννακού, the mother-in-law of Odysseas—was fifteen years in Averoff prison because she refused to sign a declaration of repentance concerning her daughter. Now, as Odysseas told me today, she is again “in prison,” this time in Κολοκοτρώνη 11, where she has to keep a constant eye on Pappous, literally day and night, while the others are out at work. Yet she bears up under this cheerfully, without feeling self-pity, because compared to the earlier suffering this is nothing. A splendid example of Greek fortitude!

Stavros, husband of Toula, comes from a village in Western Macedonia where he continued the gymnasium after returning in 1963 from Russia. He walked twelve kilometers each day each way, and had to endure the sudden shifts of educational politics whereby demotic (under Papandreou and Papanoutsos) reigned briefly only to be replaced by katharévousa when the colonels took over. He seems a gifted musician and an intellectual despite his lack of very much formal training—also a fine painter, and automobile mechanic. He and Toula have established a thriving business in just over a year: an Odeon with upward of seventy pupils at present. Stavros, who already plays guitar, accordion, and piano, is taking cello lessons! Toula went through the standard Russian conservatory training, which, from her description, sounds very systematic, with clearly defined goals for each stage, as in England and France, and (of course!) not in America, where each one is for himself in education as in other matters.

Tonight we dined with Tad and Bruce Lansdale at their home at the Farm School. Vouli was with us, and they had another guest who turned out to be the daughter of Lincoln MacVeigh, a middle-aged woman of great vitality and with a very complete knowledge of Greece going back to the 1930s. Tad struck me as not too bright, struggling nobly to be a Greek + American hostess. Bruce is very powerful and self-assured. A girl served, an old-style υπηρέτρια, looking very unhappy: natives serving their conquerors. Conversation mostly stupid chit-chat, though with moments of breakthrough to something more substantial. A noticeable difference from Greek homes was the failure to pay much attention to Daphne. For Greeks, children awaken a kind of primal delight in youthfulness. This was missing last night, completely.

Tuesday, October 2, 1979

Θεσσαλονίκη

“To the question: ‘How much time in a collegiate course of study should be given to the study of languages?’ I answer as Charles V justly observed to Francis I: ‘With every new language one acquires a new life’; for by the knowledge of the language of a foreign country we are able to get acquainted with its literature, its manners and customs . . .”—Henry Schliemann, as quoted (imagined?) by Irving Stone in The Greek Treasure (NY: Signet, 1976), p. 34 (useful for Rassias introduction).

Thursday, October 4, 1979

Thessaloniki / Athens

Grand sendoff at Thessaloniki airport after some tense moments when we couldn’t find a taxi to get us to the airport. George, Odysseas, Eleni, Takis, Stavros, and Toula saw us off. Other farewells were made yesterday and the day before. We lunched with Kostas and Nikos, saw Vouli, Altases, Pappous, etc. At Hellenikon, Brenda Marder was waiting, and drove us in their immense American station wagon to their home: Δημοκρατίας 61 (renamed from Βασιλίσης Φρειδερίκης!) in Παλαιό Ψυχικό. Gorgeous home, property of the United States government. Learned to our surprise that Everett will leave the job in June; they’ll return to the States and he doesn’t know what will happen next. Lots of good talk with Brenda, mostly in Greek. In the evening they had a reception for us—the “visiting dignitaries!” Those I remember who came were Jean Demos, the Phylactopouloses, Mr. Johnson (?) from Athens College, who got me to sign all my books in their library, Nikiforos Diamandouros, George Giannaris, Lefteris Prevelakis (the historian), Frank Walton (retired head of the Gennadion), Sloan Elliott (editor of the Athenian), Katherine Butterworth, Alison Pingel (my Dartmouth student, now with Study in Greece), Olga and Ioannis Lappas (friends from Athens College), the new president of Athens College, assorted professors from the University of Athens, Peter Allen, here on a sabbatical, John Rexine (ditto), somebody from a ministry, and others who escape me for the moment. Oh, of course, Kimon Friar. It was very “uplifting” for the ego, to say the least.

I got George Giannaris to agree to look at my nephew Andreas Yiannakos’s poems. Andreas, just back from Spain a few days ago, spoke of art and literature in a way that clearly showed an artistic sensitivity, yet he is forced to study law, and hates it. I wasn’t surprised when he confided to me secretly that he writes poetry and also prose (βιώματα). He asked me to help him find ways to publish. I had given him a letter of introduction to George Savides, while in Salonika. Now, perhaps, Γιάνναρης will also help.

There was also a nice Greek army general (retired by the colonels) who had been Everett’s instructor in the War College. Very liberal.

Friday, October 5, 1979

Athens

Saw Ninetta Nakrinikola and Athena Kallianesi at Kedros. Corrected proofs of the introduction to my Ritsos book, which is now being printed, finally. Kallianesi said she’d like to publish the Columbia UP pamphlets on Kazantzakis and Cavafy. All in all, a profitable morning.

In the afternoon we transferred to a room in the Hotel Grand Britannia, to begin the Dartmouth Alumni College. There have been lots of sudden shifts of gears these past weeks, all handled smoothly (proof of abiding youthfulness?). Lunch with Bill and Elizabeth Ballard. At 5:00 I gave the first lecture of the College, in the ballroom of the hotel, speaking on (a) the decline of Athens, and what that should teach Americans about the probability of our own decline, (b) the Greeks’ ability to surprise and revive over fifty centuries, and how that should perhaps encourage us to retain our identity no matter what happens. It was well received, from all that I can gather. Cocktails followed. Everyone was gay, despite the jet lag. Dinner in the hotel, with Harry and Mary Schultz.

Saturday, October 6, 1979

Athens

To the Acropolis with the group. It still moves me: the scale, the approach, the view over the city. And more so, now, since I know the background better. To see Salamis in the distance and remember how the Greeks watched the old temples being destroyed by the Persians was memorable. And I’d never been in the museum. The “Blond Boy” or “Kritias Boy” is splendid, a transition from the archaic Kouros type to the classical type.

We had a nice supper at the Delphi restaurant, Οδός Νίκης, with Sandy McCulloch and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Don McKinley (these are the two Dartmouth trustees on the trip), and an Athenian family, he a top official in DEH, the daughter a Brown graduate (where she met Sandy while waiting table at his luncheon club). The father: a cosmopolitan, cultured Greek. We discussed Herodotus, whom he’d just been reading! And, inevitably, politics. The daughter, very sweet, did classics at Brown and wants to specialize in the restoration and presentation of antiquities.

In the morning, Bob McGrath gave the first of his series of lectures on Greek art and its effect on later art in Europe, a fascinating subject beautifully presented with paired slides.

Sunday, October 7, 1979

Athens

A.M. to the Agora. The museum in the Stoa of Attalos is fine, showing as it does many scenes of everyday life. At noon we met Takis Yiannakos and had a quick lunch with him, after which he accompanied the group to the Archaeological Museum. I think I am beginning to like the Kouroi and Kores for the first time. The Santorini room will be more meaningful after we see the excavation at Akrotiri in Santorini. The Schliemann finds reverberated for me in a new way because of my recent reading of Irving Stone’s The Greek Treasure, a vivid portrayal, novelistic in form, of Schliemann, his wife, and the excavations at Troy and Mycenae—all the frustrations, the impediments, and Schliemann’s fanatical self-assertion despite everything. It was fun to see his mansion around the corner from the hotel; it’s now the Άρειος Πάγος.

It was also, of course, an “experience” to spend three days in the fabulous Hotel Grand Britannia. I reminded everyone of Churchill’s conference here at Christmastime, 1944. In the evening: an επιθεώρηση built around Theodorakis’s music.

Monday, October 8, 1979

En route

Early departure via bus for the Peloponnesian tour. Corinth has a good sixth-century temple—rather, the remains of one—very different from the grace of the Parthenon. Also, we think of course of the sack of Corinth, with so much being carted off to Italy (Cavafy has a nice poem on this). Mycenae didn’t send chills down my spine this time, as it did the last time. Yet the placement is dramatic indeed, with a splendid view of the Argolid plain and indeed of the citadel of Argos in the distance (Argos obliterated Mycenae in classical times). We climbed up to the palace level; the alabaster of the floor still shows in places. Nafplio we hardly saw because it was just a lunch stop in the new (ugly) Ξενία Hotel high over the town. But the theater at Epidaurus continues to exercise its charm even on repeated viewing, chiefly because the Romans didn’t build over it. Thus the full circle of the orchestra is still intact, as is the dirt floor of the orchestra. We proceeded thence to the port at Palaia Epidaurus and there found our floating hotel, the SS Stella Maris II. Travel Dynamics treated us very well. We have a deluxe stateroom on the top deck, and Daphne has her own stateroom one deck down. A fine meal completed a very full day.

Tuesday, October 9, 1979

SS Stella Maris II

This was one of the high spots of the trip. We sailed overnight through the Corinth Canal (which we saw from the sea yesterday as we passed before nightfall) to Itea, the port of Delphi. A lovely, calm bay to which people came from the four corners of the known world, in olden days. The buses took us up the steep road through a huge olive grove that, from above, looked like a silver-green sea invading the plain and the sides of the enclosing mountains. We went straight to the stadium carved out below Parnassus. There I gave my second lecture, with the group (about 160 people) seated at the curved end of the stadium. The acoustics were adequate, and the whole thing seemed to go quite well despite the inevitable distractions of children running back and forth, other tourists stopping to listen, etc. I tried to show that, despite what we may think at first, the Delphic oracle was a manifestation of Greek rationality. I spoke of the nature of the god Apollo, of the mottos Γνώθι σ’ εαυτόν and Μήδεν άγαν, of the political and moral influence of the oracle, etc., but concluded by acknowledging the presence of Dionysus at Delphi as well as Apollo—i.e., rationality’s recognition that it, too, must not be carried to excess. The Greek guides on our trip, four remarkable ladies named Nota, Vana, Maria, and Cleo, were most enthusiastic, which pleased me because I arrived at my interpretation of Delphi by examining original sources (Thucydides, Plutarch, etc.) and not by secondary reading. We then descended to the Sanctuary of Apollo, the treasuries, the polygonal wall, the stylobate of Apollo’s temple, and also went down to the area of Athena Pronaos. Both in its actual splendor and in what it represents, Delphi remains extraordinary for the visitor.

Wednesday, October 10, 1979

SS Stella Maris II

How could I have forgotten the magnificent Dipylon Vase at the Εθνικό Μουσείο, which wasn’t there before, or which I didn’t notice or couldn’t have appreciated anyway, not having taken Jerry Rutter’s course?

Today we docked at Κατάκολο and went by bus to Olympia. The ruins are not too impressive; the stadium at Delphi is much more complete, for example. But the museum is extraordinarily rich. Praxiteles’s Hermes, in reality, is a hundred times more impressive than its photos; one never imagines its monumental scale, nor can one fully appreciate the sensuousness of the marble, until one is face to face with this wonder. I ought to have mentioned the Charioteer at Delphi as well, so different and yet so haunting. Also the “portrait” of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, whose face and body seem to appear again and again. But at Olympia the major attraction is the pedimental sculpture: the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs so beautifully described by Kazantzakis, and the Gigantomachy. These were available only in plaster casts, pending their removal to the new museum, but even in plaster they were magnificent, especially the lordly Apollo who extends the hand of rationality over the scene, awarding the victory to the Lapiths. Memorable, too, in a different way, is the scenery around Olympia—verdant, calm, lush.

Next we sailed down the coast to the Bay of Navarino. Sphacteria is, visibly, exactly the place where the Athenians and Spartans fought at the first climax of the Peloponnesian War. The bay, of course, saw the defeat of the Turkish and Egyptian fleet, some 600 ships, I believe, by Cochrane’s English fleet of about 200 ships, owing to a ruse. Cochrane tricked the Turks into firing first so that the English could then attack “in self-defense” (!). A bus ride took us to the bluff where the palace of Nestor at Pylos may be seen—foundations, mostly, but much more than at Mycenae. The Linear Β tablets, so crucial a proof that the Mycenaeans were Greeks and that they occupied Knossos in the final phase, were discovered here in huge hordes.

Thursday, October 11, 1979

SS Stella Maris II

All day at sea, sailing eastward toward Sicily, just as the Greek colonists did in the eighth century and afterward. I lectured again—on the Odyssey, this time from the point of view of colonization and literacy. Bob McGrath continued his lectures on Greek art and the European classical tradition.

Friday, October 12, 1979

We put in at Porto Empedocle on the south coast of Sicily. The look is entirely different from that of Greece. On the pier, waiting for me, was Peter Falzone, the student I’d had in English 5 about seven or eight years ago, and his mother and father, all now living in Agrigento. Earlier, we’d seen Ames Abbot in Athens; he’s at Athens College. The Falzones trailed after us to Agrigento, the valley of the temples (archaic Doric, like the one at Corinth, and a huge temple to Zeus, mostly in ruins) and then through the museum, which has marvelous vases, and one of the giants that stood like Caryatids on the façade of the Zeus temple. Our Italian guides were very poor, however, and this detracted. The group went on to see Roman mosaics at a villa about two hours away, while we stayed with the Falzones. They took us to their decaying mansion, one of two, the other being now uninhabitable, and Peter walked with us over the neglected farm that sits on a bluff overlooking the sea. The family had been absent in America for thirty years, during which various relatives managed to expropriate part of the land, ruin the houses, etc. Mr. Falzone told me the whole sad story at lunch in his broken English, impassioned. Peter added more details. The scene reminded me of a plantation scene after our civil war. Following a huge lunch (spaghetti in abundance, marvelous bread, leathery meat, succulent fruit), Peter took us to the Casa Pirandello, where the master had lived and worked, practically next door to the Falzones’ “estate.” Then we toured Agrigento, visiting Peter’s sister, who has a lovely apartment in what seemed an otherwise dismal environment—dirty, unaesthetic. Peter is at medical school in Palermo. They do anatomy without corpses, chemistry without labs, medicine without patients. He says that after his six years are completed, he’ll have a license to kill! In any case, this was a memorable and most unusual afternoon, since we entered Sicilian life in a way we never could have done otherwise. The meal in the old tumbledown house, despite the great good will shown me, as Peter’s professor, was truly “spooky,” perhaps because of the old grandmother, whom the father accused of betraying him in his thirty-year absence.

Tonight the sea kicked up; winds were gale force. I went to supper but couldn’t bear to eat anything. I was in a sweat from head to toe. I went out on deck with the wind in my face, and this helped a bit, but after a while I threw up, copiously, and felt much better. As the ship pitched along, the crests of the waves reached almost to the railing where I was standing. Finally I crept into bed. Chrysanthi had been wiser. She avoided supper, remained horizontal the whole time, and did not get sick.

Saturday, October 13, 1979

We entered the straits and docked at Messina, a city much more presentable than Agrigento (because largely rebuilt, I think, after an earthquake). Then by bus to Taormina, a European “watering place” in the grand style. The theater, originally Greek, was converted by the Romans for gladiatorial contests, lions eating Christians and god knows what else. A pit (maybe the origin of our orchestral pit) contained crocodiles who devoured unlucky humans, who could then be conveniently flushed out. We went to a Dominican monastery converted into a luxurious hotel filled with old furniture, tapestries, and paintings. But the actual meal was mediocre: pot roast and pasta. Only the prices were exceptional.

Sunday October 14, 1979

Another full day at sea. Again, Bob McGrath and I both lectured, and one of the guides gave us a briefing on Knossos. My lecture concerned the Odyssey and Iliad as complementary opposites, the former treating a very human hero who manages to survive, the latter treating a more-than-human hero whose strivings guarantee that he will not survive.

Monday, October 15, 1979

I awoke to a view of Γιούχτας from our stateroom window. The morning began excitedly for me, since our first stop was Kazantzakis’s grave. The group lined up, and I spoke briefly, for about five minutes, on Kazantzakis, emphasizing his need for a philosophy of life. I gave the simile of the rower going downstream while he attempts to row, hopelessly, against the current, and who then ships the oars and faces the abyss joyously as he approaches the waterfall. And I concluded with the meaning of the epitaph Δεν ελπίζω τίποτε, δεν φοβάμαι τίποτε, είμαι λεύτερος. Apparently I spoke well—succinctly, movingly—from what various people told me afterwards. In any case, it was a moving and unique experience for me.

Knossos, which I had seen in 1964, really came alive because of our excellent guides. We were led through this veritable labyrinth with its light-wells, its modern sanitation system, its multiple levels. Then we toured the Iraklio Museum, where the frescos are displayed, not to mention the marvelous little figurines of the snake goddess and bull jumper, the tools (axes, saws, adzes, etc.), the tripods and cauldrons and pottery.

In the afternoon we drove east along the shore to Kritsa, where there is a small Byzantine church with fine frescos. The village itself, though quaint, has become “touristy.” But around the church we saw real aspects of village life: peasants returning from the fields on their donkeys (or motorcycles). We then proceeded along a lovely bay to Άγιος Νικόλαος, where Βασίλης, the Travel Dynamics chief representative (and Vasos’s brother-in-law) treated the McGraths, Biens, and the three other Travel Dynamics representatives to a fish dinner on the waterfront: shrimp, then red snapper, and then (by this time we were all stuffed) still another course with a different kind of fish. (Before Kritsa, we went to Gournia, a Minoan small town, well preserved: homes, streets, central square.)

Tuesday, October 16, 1979

How exciting to enter the harbor (I should say the crater) of Santorini! The villages are like a capping of white snow on the very top of the huge cliffs. We went in on tenders and then ascended the 600-odd steps on muleback, amid a welter of confusion, because 600 Mormons were going up and down as well. One of our group caught his leg in the stirrup and fell to the ground; I helped him up. At the top I heard a loud “Professor Bien!” and was greeted by a Dartmouth student who graduated last June and was “doing Europe” with a girlfriend on a Eurail pass. He was one of the tea-pourers in Sanborn. The village of Thera, at the top of the cliff, like Kritsa, is quaint but too touristy. I loved the church, however, and also the streets, courtyards, and floors made of a mosaic of pebbles. We went by bus to Akrotiri, seeing the back part of the island, which has the gentle slope of the original volcano. The fertile ground is all lava—black earth. At Akrotiri are the excavations begun by Marinatos, who died on the site from a fall and is buried there. A whole city was unearthed under a huge layer of pumice: streets, homes, frescos, sewers, a public square. What struck me is how the modern towns in the Cyclades resemble these ancient towns. Akrotiri was presumably destroyed almost instantaneously by a huge eruption ca. 1500–1400 B.C., producing the tidal wave that destroyed the Cretan palaces.

Wednesday, October 17, 1979

We sailed into the harbor of the town of Rhodes, getting a fine view of the famous medieval fortifications, like those at Iraklio. Then by bus to Lindos, which has a very distinctive and beautiful acropolis combining crusaders’ fortifications with ancient Greek temples. A long climb to the top, but worth it.

The day was boiling. Fortunately we were able to swim at Lindos beach before lunch. I was proud of the group, because when the escorts offered to let one of the four buses remain so that people could swim all afternoon instead of touring the town of Rhodes, only two people voted for this. So we all returned. The guide showed us the walls, gates, moat, and the Street of the Knights; then the hospital of the Knights of St. John, and the museum, which has a few very fine pieces: a marble grave stele with a woman in marvelously transparent and clinging drapery, for example. Rhodes was beautified by the Italians, who were here until 1947.

Thursday, October 18, 1979

Turkey! From the port of Antalya we went first to Aspendos, one of the many colonies in this section, the ancient Pamphylia. The theater is splendid, though Roman, mostly because the scene building is almost completely intact. You feel indoors, veritably, as though you were in a building with a huge skylight, as in the theater on Πλατεία Αριστοτέλους in Salonika.

Perge had more extensive remains: a stadium, avenues, etc. Also Side. It’s good to see all these Anatolian Greek cities, to realize how extensive the colonization was.

In the evening, after dinner, I read Greek poetry to a tired group: Cavafy, Ritsos, Seferis, arranging the poems in three cycles: (1) those dealing with Anatolia and with Hellenistic times in general, (2) those surveying important landmarks in Greek history, (3) those picking up themes or incidents from Homer. This was one way of emphasizing the continuity of Greek culture.

Friday, October 19, 1979

What a coincidence! The first thing I heard upon rising was that Odysseas Elytis had just won the Nobel Prize, for continuing the Greek poetic tradition that began with Homer! I stood up at breakfast and announced this to a pleased group.

Today we spent in Cos. The contrast with Turkey is remarkable. Turkey, despite lots of activity, is depressing. It strikes me as being today the way Greece was 25 or 30 years ago, when I first saw it. But Cos, beautified by the Italians, as was Rhodes, is sparkling and exhilarating. We concentrated on the magnificent Asclepion, the huge center—an extensive complex of buildings and terraces that received those who came for cures. And of course we heard all about Hippocrates. The museum, like that of Rhodes, has some very fine individual pieces.

Saturday, October 20, 1979

Back to Turkey, this time to the port of Kuşadası, which is fairly attractive. A hyperbolically enthusiastic Turkish guide led us to Ephesus, which is truly καταπλητικό. So much is to be seen! One really gets a sense of the entire city in its magnificence. The Library appealed, in particular, to Harry Schultz and to me. Much was made of the brothel, and also of the communal latrine, a 20- (or 30-) seater. By coincidence, I was suffering from stomach cramps at the time, and left my contribution in one of the many little rooms nearby! The theater, too, is spectacular. And the Basilika of St. John carries the history into Christian times.

The afternoon was less impressive—or was it? Didyma has an immense temple to Apollo, with columns about seven stories high. It was the Δίδυμα (twin) of the temple to Artemis, even larger, at Ephesus, of which practically nothing remains.

Tonight we had our captain’s dinner: formal dress, and a lovely menu: black caviar, barbecued shrimp with strips of bacon wrapped around, filet mignon, baked Alaska, all served with great aplomb, after which the captain said a few choice words (as they say), the waiters were applauded, and the chef made his appearance and paraded around the dining room acknowledging the applause like a returning general after an immense victory. Luxury is pleasant!

Sunday, October 21, 1979

This morning we landed at Delos, by tender. Again, the Greek guides were most helpful in making us understand why, at one point, 30,000 people lived on this barren rock, which was, in effect, the banking center of the Aegean. The lions were lovely, and the two huge phalluses in front of the shrine of Dionysus made an expected impression on everyone. As at Akrotiri, Gournia, and Ephesus, one could really sense the ancient city with the walls, plumbing, cisterns, lovely pebbled flooring, frescos, courtyards, narrow streets. The harbor—rather the kind of bay between Delos and the neighboring island, afforded a safe anchorage in all weather for ancient sailors.

Last stop, Paros, another lovely Cycladic town, the modern equivalent of all the ruined towns we had seen along the way. The Kastro, and parts of the large church, were obviously built from squared blocks and also column drums taken from ancient temples. We walked along the promenade in the lovely Aegean quiet.

Final night aboard. Amateur night. Lovely skits: parodies of McGrath’s lectures, and a parody by Bill Ballard of the Fall of Boston à la Thucydides, with limericks, doggerel, Dartmouth songs rewritten to apply to Greece, etc. I went last with a “newly discovered epic,” the Dartmouthiad, in which all our “tribulations” were transformed into Scylla and Charybdis, the Cyclops, etc. Writing it, in bits and snatches during the preceding week, I gained insight into how the Homeric poems must have developed. First of all, it was comparatively easy to apply readymade formulas to the new situation, weaving a tale by means of frame technique; secondly, I understood the compulsion the old bards must have felt to include their audiences in the story, making slight changes as needed.

Monday, October 22, 1979

Early arrival at Piraeus. Taxi to Athens. I spent the morning depositing money and mailing books. We spent the day again with the Marders, and walked through Psychiko to Athens College. Late at night Ritsa Papatheophilou came, and we had a nice visit.

I’ve hardly mentioned any people on this trip, and this gives a wrong impression. Obviously, the people were as important and enjoyable as the “stones.” Everyone was exceedingly friendly (except Bill Ballard). We passed fine moments with the Schultzes, with Elizabeth Ballard, Mrs. Gass (a psychiatric social worker), Mrs. Beatty (grandmother of Eric Beatty, my student), Ned Yost and his wife and remarkable mother, the McCullochs, the McKinleys, William Robinson (editor of Yachting Magazine, a Princeton man on the trip as a “spy” for the Princeton Club, which wants to do something similar), Vasilis, Vasos, the four guides, the three tour attendants. I also enjoyed the McGraths on occasion, though a barrier always seemed to remain. And the Marders were exceedingly kind, before and after.

Tuesday, October 23, 1979

I’m writing this in an Olympic Airways airbus as we sit at Athens airport. The captain has just announced a delay because of “minor technical reasons.” The plane is totally full, and getting hotter and hotter. To get on—checking baggage, getting a seat number, paying departure tax, waiting on line after line—took a full hour and was most disagreeable. I have a headache; Chrysanthi is melancholy. Τελείωσε το όνειρο.

Wednesday, October 24, 1979

Woodbrooke College

The flight left an hour or so late and was routine thereafter. Our spirits picked up immediately upon arriving at Heathrow. How civilized and organized everything is, especially compared to Greece! Everyone polite, solicitous. England always lifts my spirits. We rented an Avis car and drove smoothly to Birmingham, arriving at Woodbrooke just in time for supper. We are installed in Flat B, formerly Muriel Poulter’s, and Daphne is across the hall in her own room. On the first evening, already, I heard an interesting account of South Africa’s problems by Muriel Ohlen, a white native, and met Godfrey, a black Kenyan whose father had four wives and who turned out to be a devotee of Kazantzakis! He’d read the Saviors of God and considered it his spiritual guide.

Thursday, October 25, 1979

Woodbrooke is as international as always, with people from India, Japan, Thailand, Colombia, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany, France, Canada, USA. Nette, a vivacious Hollander, has been in India for decades; a British woman has been serving in Africa for eighteen years as a physician. Many of the young people here are preparing to go out to Africa at the end of term, and are here to improve their English before departure.

Sunday, October 28, 1979

Selly Oak Meeting. The Wedells have removed to London. Too bad. But other people remembered us, and a girl remembered Leander’s jazz-playing at the Young Friends’ Encampment in 1971. Winifred White was there; she’d been decades in Madagascar.

On Thursday I visited Christos Alexiou at the university. Looking well, despite all his problems.

On Friday we joined him at the home of Αγλαΐα and Δημήτρης Λυπουρλής. She is Savidis’s assistant at Thessaloniki; he teaches ancient Greek, specializing in scientific literature (Hippocrates, etc.). One of Christos’s postgraduate students was there; he turned out to be a self-styled “intellectual rightist” and lover of Franco, also a heavy drinker of Scotch. And as the evening wore on the political discussion grew increasingly heated, with Christos’s communist voice gaining ten decibels at each riposte. Also there was Ανδρέας?, the man who used to manage the Burlington Restaurant downtown, a Cypriot by birth, now unemployed. His wife teaches Greek, using our book.

Folk dancing Saturday night.

Monday, October 29, 1979

To Christos’s home for dinner. Lypourlides, Andreas, etc. plus Katerina Davis and her husband, who teaches Italian. She is, I find, antipathetic. Christos’s boys are the same: Pavlos still doesn’t talk, Dimitris still talks only about buses, in his peculiar way.

Wednesday, October 31, 1979

I found Roger Hunckle, a fine violinist, to play duets with. We’ll try the Spring Sonata, Handel, Corelli, etc.

Thursday, November 1, 1979

To the university to see Bryer about BMGS. On the phone to Nicol and Clogg in London. We plan to meet with a Blackwell’s director in Oxford. Lily Macrakis is coming from America. Let’s see if we can save the journal. Concert in the evening: Mendelssohn violin concerto played well by Wystan, and a fine Eroica, especially marvelous second movement. Russian conductor. We sat behind the orchestra, beneath the huge bass pipes of the organ that had been played by Mendelssohn himself when the Town Hall was dedicated.

Paid my respects to Epstein’s “Lucifer” in the Birmingham museum, miserably exhibited amongst teapots. And Moore’s “Warrior with Shield” is behind two pillars as though being hidden from the public instead of displayed.

The B’ham library is truly a wonder. Registering, I stood behind a dignified Sikh in his turban and beard. How beautiful to see Indians and blacks in the library!

Friday, November 2, 1979

To Stratford with Woodbrooke group to see Sinden’s Othello, an adequate though not distinguished production. His Othello generated into a pitiful bundle of nerves under the pressure of his jealousy, but then regained his stature majestically after strangling Desdemona.

Saturday, November 3, 1979

Writing all day. I finished my section on Κοῢρος a few days ago, and today commenced the section on Χριστόφορος Κολόμβος, which I find to be a splendid work, whereas Κοῢρος is forced and sterile. Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης is next—a much larger undertaking.

Fancy dress party at night. Chrysanthi and I went as gypsy and Turk. Then British games: rolling peanuts along the carpet with one’s nose, etc. Wholesome enjoyment, so different from Dartmouth fraternity alcoholism. Followed by bonfire and potato, for Guy Fawkes Day.

Sunday, November 4, 1979

Today I completed my week’s service as chief dishwasher! Each day, and all day Saturday and Sunday, I and the team did all the plates, glasses, silver, and cooking pots, with of course the help of an efficient machine for the plates and glasses.

To Chris and Christina Lawson for tea. Their children are very outspoken and vivacious.

Then coffee in Elizabeth Holmgard’s flat, with Muriel Poulter. She is the slave—willing—of her cat. Depressed and lonely after Ann Park’s death and her retirement from Woodbrooke. A strange relationship they must have had.

Earlier, while trying to play the piano, I had a protracted conversation with Godfrey, who told me more of his Kenyan customs—how the rituals and ceremonies of the clan are being destroyed by modernization and Christianity. He’s the one who admires Kazantzakis.

Letter from Harry Schultz, almost embarrassing in its praise, regarding the Greek cruise, which now seems so far behind.

Tuesday, November 6, 1979

Elizabeth Topley, the doctor who is about to return to Nigeria, invited Woodbrookers last night to listen to Bach with her on the gramophone. She told me that tapes disintegrate in the African climate, that radio either can’t be heard or doesn’t have classical music, that even a pick-up is not feasible to have. So, about to return, she wanted to hear Bach for the last time, and share the pleasure with friends.

Nette Bossert, who serves in India, is similar. I found her playing Beethoven sonatas, rather well, on the piano. “Do you have a piano in India?” I asked. She then explained the incredible impediments to having a piano in India. Import duties that more than double the cost, to begin with. Lack of tuners and repairmen. But basically, the sense of extravagance. The cost of a piano would feed a village for a year, etc. So she does without.

To the university to hear a boring lecture on Malia by Henri van Effenterre, professor at the Sorbonne. Saw Colin Davis, former dean, Peter Ricketts, who teaches linguistics, Ron and Jane Willetts, and, unexpectedly, Paul Morby. He was as dashing as ever, and accompanied, of course, by his young secretary (not as sexy, however, as the one we knew when we did the television series). He’s coming to hear me tomorrow when I talk about Kazantzakis.

Yesterday we visited with Meg Alexiou.

Wednesday, November 7, 1979

I lectured to the Modern Greek Seminar at the university, introduced by Christos. Subject: Kazantzakis and Politics: work in progress. Met Ritsos’s daughter, who is a student here. Also Roddy Beaton, the Ouranis Foundation Fellow. Then to dinner at Bryer’s with Christos and a Mrs. Petrides, doing her Ph.D. here. Liz Bryer very friendly this time. Bryer convinced Christos to buy BP shares, making him instantaneously a capitalist!

Thursday, November 8, 1979

Heard Mairead Corrigan, who spoke at Central House. An extraordinary experience. She is the young Catholic woman who, together with Betty Williams, a Protestant, began a people’s movement for peace, reconciliation, and nonviolence in Belfast. For this she received the Nobel Peace Prize. She was eloquent, and exuded a “soul-power” that really made me believe, once again, that Christianity is a living force in the world, and that the essence of Christ’s message is Love—do not kill. It’s as simple as that, as she said. Yet the churches themselves speak of “just war.” The pope helped recently by declaring “Murder is murder, no matter what name you give it.”

She was moved to do something after her sister’s three young children were killed in an ambush. She called all peace-loving people to come out onto the streets and display their conviction that the violence must end. And they came, Protestants and Catholics both. Her message is all too simple: you cannot solve anything by violence. Violence just creates more violence, more hatred, more fear and polarization. At the same time, she doesn’t scorn or condemn the IRA boys or their Protestant counterparts; she understands what drives them to resort to violence, and she admires, in many cases, their dedication and selflessness. In short, she herself is loving; she sees that of God in every person.

She also believes in the power of the individual. We must never sit back and say “the forces are too big and complicated; little people like me can do nothing.” On the contrary, little people with convictions can do much. As the chairman put it at the end, she is an extraordinary ordinary person, which means that what she has done we all can do. (But what have I done, except be comfortable and secure and self-satisfied for the last twenty years?)

Finished writing on Χριστόφορος Κολόμβος the other day; re-read Κωνσταντίνος Παλαιολόγος and wrote a short section about that this morning, as a bridge to Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης, which I now begin seriously considering.

After lunch, violin-piano with Roger Hunckle. Bach’s “Chaconne” with the Mendelssohn piano accompaniment (which is totally superfluous), Mozart’s Α-major violin concerto, some Bach violin-harpsichord sonatas. I think we’re developing a rapport now, after some awkwardness earlier.

Friday, November 9, 1979

Professor Henri van Effenterre here; he teaches ancient history at the Sorbonne and has excavated the town at Malia, Crete. I accompanied him to the Central Library, where Frances Williams showed us the Mingana Collection of Syriac manuscripts paid for by Edward Cadbury (George’s brother), the Greek papyri (catalogued by Enoch Powell!), the incunabula, the 1613 edition of the King James Bible, the ninth-century Koran, the Ethiopian Coptic scroll, etc. A marvelous treasure—all. One papyrus, on display and translated, was a letter from a Christian to his mother saying that he was in good health but asking for a new coat. It sounded exactly like the letters sent back home by simple soldiers in Life in the Tomb. Rowena Loverance, Bryer’s assistant, was with us. Then we returned to Woodbrooke, had lunch with Tony Brown, attended the staff coffee, where goodbyes were said to Tom Bodine, who came to Woodbrooke for one term and stayed three years (Muriel Poulter on Bodine: “independently wealthy, a homosexual”). Then we saw Woodbrooke’s Erasmus Bible, first edition, and the Κύριλλος translation of the Bible into Demotic by Maximos, 1638, etc.

Saturday, November 10, 1979

Four-hand piano with Sam Wong after lunch. Then Christos came with Aglaïa and Dimitrios Lypourlis. I showed them the sailing pond, Bournville Village, the Cadbury factory. They left, and at supper time Meg Alexiou joined us and stayed the night, talking. Epilogue by Rowena, who played Leonard Bernstein’s hauntingly beautiful Chichester Psalms: boy sopranos against deep pedal-point on the organ, very Beethovenesque.

Sunday, November 11, 1979

Service at 9:30 by the Indonesian pastor, with Bible reading by the Malagasian pastor. Third world Christians, newly converted, truly convey the power and fortitude of the early church. He told us about the nature of his call and the opposition of family, teachers, friends. And he gave an exemplary sermon.

Meg came at 10:40 and drove us to the new house she has purchased in Vivien Road, Harborne, an old worker’s house that she got cheaply and is fixing up considerably: new floors, wallpaper, carpets, heating. Thence to Bryer’s. He, Liz, a friend called Morris Burne, Rowena, and the Biens (except Daphne) set out for the countryside. First a manor house, Hanbury Hall, very elegant. Then a small twelfth-century church at Holt with a nineteenth-century mosaic copying one in Ravenna; opposite it a castle, still occupied. Thence to Worcester, to a friend of the Bryers who lives in a mansion in Victoria Square, a lovely early nineteenth-century home. Lunch of soup, cider, cheese, biscuits, chocolate. The man is a curator in the Birmingham art gallery. I complained to him about the display of Epstein’s “Lucifer.” He said that they hope to do better next year, which is Epstein’s centenary. They have the statue because the Tate refused it. Thence to Stanbrook Abbey, a Benedictine nunnery famous for its printing shop and for an abbess, now dead, who was great friends with G. B. Shaw and Sir Sydney Cockerell. Gorgeous printed books and broadsides. One of the nuns illustrated various passages on trees, including (!) one by Kazantzakis from Report to Greco in my translation. I bought a copy of the engraving.

The same evening: supper with Winifred White, whom we remembered from 1955 at Woodbrooke. She’s in a tiny house, having retired from her teaching in Madagascar. We saw slides and learned in a fascinating way about her life there and the country’s problems. A fine Madagascan item at Woodbrooke makes all this more real and especially the situation of Christians in that country. The Quakers were allotted a certain region to missionize, the Presbyterians another region, Lutherans and Catholics others. This, to say the least, confused the natives. Then, still the same day, I rushed back to Woodbrooke with Chrysanthi to do the epilogue, reading the passage in The Last Temptation where Jesus begins his ministry (parable of the sower, sermon on the mount) and is hooted and misunderstood for his pains.

Monday, November 12, 1979

Another epilogue, this time Chrysanthi and I, helping Ted and Rachel Benfey, read excerpts from T. S. Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock,” the two families teaming up to create an antiphonal effect. As always, I understood the poem for the first time, reading it aloud. It’s tragic and strong.

Tuesday, November 13, 1979

In Uver’s German car, borrowed, to Stratford to see Twelfth Night, delightful as always: a splendid Malvolio, Olivier, Cesario.

Wednesday, November 14, 1979

To Christos’s seminar at the university on the poetry of Karyotakis, followed by a huge discussion, all in Greek. Marvelous articulateness about . . . nothing. Christos returned to Woodbrooke for supper and we worked afterwards on Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος, which, thank God, he is not correcting too much.

Thursday, November 15, 1979

To Staff House at the university for lunch with Bryer and Peter Levi, whom I’d last seen almost ten years ago, in Princeton at the MGSA conference. He’s now rotund, no longer a Jesuit, married. Attached to St. Catherine’s College but earns his living by writing: journalism and coffee table books on Greece. He told me that the TLS sent books out all during the strike. Levi is very Oxfordian: supercilious, clipped speech, gossip about other poets, etc. But he’s done marvelous things—e.g., his Pausanius, which I used in preparing for the Greek trip. Bryer also kindly introduced me to a man in the Department of Education who can help Alec next year.

Friday November 16, 1979

To Christos’s house for supper. Paul Morby came, also Λυπουρλήδες, Bryers, and, later, Christos’s students. I had a long talk with Ritsos’s daughter, who is here studying American literature! Her enthusiasm for Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Cooper, even Crèvecoeur was infectious. She’s yet to read Melville and Faulkner. Another Greek student was an aficionado of Pynchon; for him Gravity’s Rainbow is child’s play. I was pleased, and embarrassed at my own ignorance.

Christos’s children are the same, of course. A desperate situation, no διέξοδο. Morby has aged a bit. Somber; seems basically unhappy; but is still doing creative things in the TV studio.

Saturday, November 17, 1979

Woodbrooke excursion to Ironbridge, on the Severn. Here, a Quaker named Darby discovered that iron could be cast with coke (previously, charcoal had been used, and the forests were depleted). This made possible the industrial revolution: steam engines, rails for trains, etc. The process was carried to the Lehigh Valley in America by another Quaker, and the iron and steel industry began across the sea. Across the Severn is the first iron bridge, made of cast iron members, not much to look at now but a huge improvement over the wooden bridges that preceded it. We saw all this, including the Quaker graveyard, industrial exhibits, the original blast furnace, and old pottery works on a drizzly damp day, chilled through. Also a mine head, with the elevator still working with original machinery (no safety devices), and mine tunnels—horrible—the men having to bend over for eight to ten hours, and a miner’s cottage, again horrible, worse than squatters’ shacks in the Adirondacks.

Sunday, November 18, 1979

Service led by Bill Oats, who spoke very well on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Tea with Muriel Poulter and her cat. She has a magnificent painting over the mantle done by Epstein, purchased by Ann Park. We were subjected to memorabilia of Ann’s: letters from C. Day Lewis, one from Isherwood on the day before departure for America, etc., and a saccharine “book of the dead” eulogizing her fiancé killed in World War I. The relation between Muriel and Ann probably does not bear looking into.

“Muriel” reminds me that we saw Muriel Lindsay here last week when Council met. Very friendly.

Monday, November 19, 1979

Off to Oxford with Bryer. Met Lily Macrakis in Blackwell’s bookshop at noon. Repaired to Bailliol College to talk and have a greasy lunch, thence to Blackwell’s Publishers for a 2½ hour meeting with Messrs. David Martin and David Taylor about BMGS. We got them to bring the price down a bit. They want us to issue it twice a year, 112 pages maximum each time, and to include review articles, etc. Very encouraging meeting. Lily returned with us to Birmingham and slept at Woodbrooke. She told us how all the rich people in Greece are smuggling their money out to Swiss banks, and how we, through her own stockbroker, could get our drachmas out.

Tuesday, November 20, 1979

Lunch at Staff House with Bryer. More talk on BMGS, preparatory to Friday’s meeting in London. Lily is also in touch with Cambridge University Press, which is eager, it seems, to “steal” us away from Blackwell’s.

Wednesday, November 21, 1979

Seminar on structuralism at the university. Quite poor. Then Christos returned to Woodbrooke and we continued with Ιπτάμενος.

Thursday, November 22, 1979

Seminar by Ševčenko at the university on Blamires. Very lively indeed. He is rather magisterial, but apparently has very few students at Harvard because of Bowersock’s machinations. Bryer’s advice to me: beware of Bowersock. Thence to the Town Hall to hear Ashkenazy play Brahms’ 2nd piano concerto. His control is magnificent, but somehow the music neither excited nor moved me, perhaps because we were sitting again behind the orchestra and the sound was distorted. But we could watch his marvelous left hand!

Friday, November 23, 1979

To London with Bryer. Lunch at King’s with Nicol, Clogg, Macrakis. Donald wasted two hours with drinks and small talk. Then we got down to business at 2:30 and were asked to leave at 5:00. Discouraging. No agenda. Donald not enthusiastic about changes. Wants to publish #6 with Blackwell’s in the old way. But we got a vote in principle for moving to two issues per year after #6. Also decided to add Meg Alexiou, John Iatrides, and Nikiforos Diamandouros to the board and to remove Philip Sherrard. Bryer and I enjoyed a glass of wine in the “super loo” at Euston so much that we forgot to go down for our train and had to wait an extra half hour, which brought us late to Paul Morby’s for dinner with Liz Bryer, Christos, and that awful Hugh Birkhart (mathematician) and his wife Diana (computer scientist), who made Rassias and me BLTs on toast in 1977 when we did the videotapes. Dymphna Morby was very sweet and gracious. One of their boys just got divorced and is leaving tomorrow for Australia, so a cloud hung over everything and at one point Paul lost his temper unreasonably over a remark about strained relations between him and the boy. He cooked rabbit and all the trimmings, with gusto, then played us recordings of old singers, including a castrato: interesting quality. Strange how empty he is, outside of the studio. His hobbies (old phones and records, Edison) seem all there is. Beyond that, very little conversation. And he asked, as he did last time, if we’d like to watch television after dinner!

Saturday, November 24, 1979

Called Lily in London. Her meeting with Cambridge UP was very encouraging, but still no £.s.p. Dinner with Peter and Monika Ricketts, a very strange couple with strange children. Daphne came, too, unfortunately, and was utterly miserable.

I’ve forgotten that last week Roger and I played in public! Corelli, Beethoven’s Romance, and Purcell. I did better than I’d expected, but still had a chilled, clammy left hand that refused to move properly. Nerves.

Sunday, November 25, 1979

Worked on my review of Virginia Woolf’s letters, volume 5, for World Literature Today. The letters are getting rather tedious, after so many volumes, yet there are still wonderful turns of phrase, occasionally. David Holton, wife, and children came for tea. He’s now a kind of executive officer for the Faculty of Law at the university, having left Byzantine Studies. Our social life this past week (and wait until the week after next!) is getting so extensive that I’m beginning to feel like Virginia Woolf: “July was like being a biscuit attacked by rats.”

Monday, November 26, 1979

I copyedited Terry Douglas’s “log” for the Woodbrooke Log. Many hours wasted. Also began to read Christos’s book on Seferis, in typescript. It’s surprisingly good. What fits that man has, and what fortitude under conditions that are appalling. Yet he still produces—somehow—whereas my colleagues at Dartmouth have everything the heart desires and do nothing. Not all of them, of course. We were reminded of Larry and Sheila Harvey recently because Katy, out of the blue, wrote to us saying she is doing fine, after so many years of mental breakdown. She’s living in a small religious community in Connecticut. I immediately wrote back a warm, encouraging letter, and she replied at more length, stating how thankful she was that we still felt kindly toward her (why shouldn’t we?) but that she was loaded with guilt. She continued by saying that her family did not feel kindly toward her. Prodigal Son, all over again.

Θεανώ, Christos’s lovely student (who plays the “fat” girl in the taverna—lesson 17—on the videotape) was here, worried about her thesis on Βάρναλης, which she is finally—after five years—about ready to submit. I reassured her as best I could.

Tuesday, November 27, 1979

I thought that perhaps one day might pass without any social obligation, but the Oats asked us for coffee after dinner. At least it’s here at Woodbrooke.

Last night I heard Alban Berg’s quartet on BBC3. Marvelous. I’d never listened to it before.

Spent the day reading Christos’s typescript. I’ve got to go back now to Καπετάν Μιχάλης and try to write something before we leave. There are fewer than three weeks left.

Friday, November 30, 1979

Sam Wong and I are practicing Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 four-hands for Log Night. I’m supposed to do something “American” for International Night but so far can’t think of anything.

To Christos’s in the evening. We finished going through Ιπτάμενος Θάλαμος, incorporating his suggestions, which continue to be good. I had read his MS on Seferis and politics: how he produced this, given the conditions of his life, is amazing. It’s extremely good in places, hurried in others. He hopes to expand and revise it, and submit it for a Ph.D. Much of the evening, as always, was spent listening to his complaints about Margaret’s unreasonableness regarding the divorce, which of course they haven’t yet obtained because they cannot agree. Meanwhile she has taken a lover in the department whom Christos is forced to see every day, which doesn’t make life any easier. The child Pavlos was there, still totally autistic, although calm and somewhat affectionate. He understands much, says nothing. I couldn’t live under such conditions. Christos is extraordinarily brave. He is building up a cash reserve for the children out of his meager salary, somehow. But this is being whittled away by inflation. His only hope for the future is to move both children to Greece and establish them somehow in Volos with his sister and brother-in-law.

Saturday, December 1, 1979

Wrote some more on Kapetan Mihalis in the morning. Then to London to see Measure for Measure at the Aldwich. The first half was superb, certainly one of Shakespeare’s greatest accomplishments, though this does not sustain itself throughout. The Duke was played as a young, excitable man caught up in the enthusiasm of his various manipulations, instead of as a dignified, godlike man who controls human lives with imperturbable wisdom. But the problem was created by Shakespeare, not the director, since the Duke needs to be otherworldly and godlike, on the one hand, but then capable of getting Isabella to marry him, on the other. Today’s Duke showed his attraction to Isabella throughout, which made the marriage work well but lost the lovely sense of a moral “given” that is represented in him.

How nice to walk down Southampton Row again, into Bloomsbury Square. Russell Square, though much changed, retains its charm. I proceeded afterwards down the Strand to Charing Cross, thence to Trafalgar Square and then to Leicester Square, indulging in some of its attractions. Then a Chinese dinner followed by the Nell Gwyn club, Bean Street, and a Guinness on tap. A night on the town. . . . Nice chat with a Britisher at half time in the Aldwich, about the play.

Reading William Golding’s latest, Darkness Visible. The first chapter is masterful, but I find the remainder rather pretentious and tedious, so far. David Gray lent it to me.

December 8, 1979

I read the following, and some more, from Carl Sandburg, at the International Evening:

Now it’s Uncle Sam sitting on top of the world.

Not so long ago it was John Bull and, earlier yet, Napoleon and the eagles of France told the world where to get off at.

Spain, Rome, Greece, Persia, their blunderbuss guns, their spears, catapults, ships, took their turn at leading the civilizations of the earth—

One by one they were bumped off, moved over, left behind, taken for a ride; they died or they lost the wallop they used to pack, not so good, not so good.

One by one they no longer sat on top of the world—now the Young stranger is Uncle Sam, is America, and the song goes, “The stars and stripes forever!” even though “forever” is a long time.

Even though the oldest kings had their singers and clowns calling, “Oh king you shall live forever.”

—stanza #14 in “Good Morning, America,” Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950), p. 332.

Reviewing the past week:

Sunday, December 2. Coffee with Mike and Betty Lee, who bought Harry Newton’s house at 1, Witherford Way. He gave a good lecture the other day on Quakers and industry, believes that we must use money well rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Tea with David Holton and family at their new house. Supper with a Dartmouth grad now teaching at B’ham: Lee Bridges, friend of Harry and Mary Schultz.

Monday, December 3. A splendid production of Julius Caesar at Stratford. Brutus was marvelously characterized. I was cast back into Roman times through the magic lantern of art. The battle at Philippi seemed “near” because of its proximity to Thessaloniki.

Tuesday, December 4. A lovely supper at Katerina and Harry Davis’s, with the Bryers, Lypourlises, Christos, and the girl who played Aphrodite in our video series. I liked Katerina better this time. And she’s a fine cook.

Wednesday, December 5. Christos, Ritsos’s daughter, Lypourlis, and I saw the Ritsos video in Paul Morby’s studio. Ritsos stiff, obviously not enjoying the experience at all, though of course he read well. Christos’s introduction much too long, though fine. Then to the Modern Greek seminar, where Μίτσος Λυπουρλής read a fine paper on understanding Greek adjectives properly as secondary formations from nouns which, in their turn, had been formed from an earlier form of the same adjective. For example, αριστερός-ή-ό (left) ➝ ο αριστερός (leftist) ➝ αρι-στερός-ή-ό (pertaining to leftists). Thence to Ron and Jane Willetts’ for supper. He is due to retire in two years; fears that the Greek chair will disappear owing to declining enrollments. He warmly urged me to return for a longer period.

Thursday, December 6. Lunch with Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys, here from Sydney, Australia. He works with Alf Vincent; she is unemployed. Both very stiff and properly English at first, then warmed up. Heard all of this and part of her paper at Bryer’s seminar, thence to Stratford with Meg Alexiou, Chrysanthi, and Rowena Loverance to see Cymbeline, the first time I’d ever seen the play. A strange play, about guilt and remorse, constancy (Imogen) vs. intrigue, all with a happy ending. Having seen Julius Caesar the other day, it was easy to return to Roman times (the reign of Octavian). Judy Dench was a fine Imogen.

Friday, December 7. Sam Wong and I rehearsed Mozart’s 40th, which we’ll do on Log Night; also a nice arrangement of “Country Gardens.” Supper with Tony and Jean Brown, who live in one of the Bournville Estate houses. He does jewelry and collects tin soldiers; she does embroidery and collects doll houses! Daphne went off to a disco at Dame Elizabeth Cadbury School with Sarah Brown; we stayed and talked about Greek καθαρεύουσα (Tony is fascinated with κοινή and subsequent developments).

Saturday, December 8. Henry Hart came from Oxford at tea time and stayed until 8:00 p.m. He has completed his M. Phil. on Geoffrey Hill and hopes to stay on to do the D. Phil. with Richard Ellmann on Tate, Ransom, and Hill. Likes Oxford now, finally. But he’s stopped writing poetry for the present (he says)—another victim of academic pressure. At the international evening Daphne and Cathy Gray did the Zorba dance, Chrysanthi read “Awaiting the Barbarians” in Greek, I in English, and I represented America with a selection from Carl Sandburg, who is a remarkable poet unduly neglected.

Sunday, December 9, 1979

Meg brought us to her parents’ house. George Thomson was feeling well (he’s often depressed, apparently), and described his new translation of the The Bacchae and the introduction he is writing together with a specialist in drugs, who is certain that the states described in the play result from the use of strychnine or something similar. Thomson asked me to help him find a publisher in America. We then went to a pub outside of Henley-in-Arden for a lunch of Guinness and paté. Very nice. Rod and Fran Beaton arrived at the same moment, coincidentally. We’re having dinner with them at Woodbrooke tonight. Meg then offered us coffee in her new house, 90 Vivian Road, Harborne, a Victorian row house built in 1894 (?) and very nicely redecorated by her in white with brown carpets. We hope to see her in Philadelphia for the MGSA congress on women in November.

Monday, December 10, 1979

I treated myself to a three-piece all-wool suit, gray striped, £59. Dinner with Mitsos and Aglaïa Lypourlis, very nice new friends. He was πρύτανης of the University of Thessaloniki during the Mitsakis embroglio and talked at length about the extraordinary opportunism of that character, who strikes me as being an “academic Richard Nixon” in personality and neurosis, a kind of mythomaniac like Clappique in Malraux’s novel.

Tuesday, December 11, 1979

Not a single social engagement! Marvelous! I’m writing away, systematically, on my chapter on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης—that is, its flaws. I won’t finish completely, alas, before we leave Woodbrooke but will have thought out and outlined everything so that the remaining writing can be done, I hope, in New York and Hanover before Christmas. Thus I’ll be able to start the new year fresh, with the next chapter.

Donald Nicol still hasn’t contacted Blackwell’s. But I contacted him and he promised to do so this week. He has vetted and copyedited all the MSS for #6, so they’ll be ready to go as soon as MGSA gives its approval, as I hope it will, at the December meeting.

Wednesday, December 12, 1979

Christos came at 5:00 and stayed for supper, which we shared with Tony Brown, who I hope will establish contact with Christos in the future. We finished his vetting of the Ιπτάμενος Θάλαμος, talked as usual about his problems and future, and then went down to epilogue, which was done by Daphne and Cathy Gray, reading an interminable portion from Winnie the Pooh, lengthened by fits of giggles.

Friday, December 14, 1979

Woodbrooke

The last morning at my cherished desk in the Quaker library. I did 140 MS pages all told in these 7½ weeks. Not very impressive numerically, but not bad if we include the conceptualization of three different chapters: Κοῦρος, Χριστόφορος Κολόμβος, Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης, plus reading, in Greek of course, of those three works and also Κωνσταντίνος Παλαιολόγος and Prevelakis’s Παντέρμη Κρήτη, Ο Κρητικός Α΄—το Δέντρο—και Β΄—η Πρώτη λευτεριά. . . . Coffee after lunch with Tony Brown, who surprised me with a draft-chapter for teaching New Testament Greek based on our Demotic Greek. Οῦτος ἔστιν ὁ πάτηρ ὁ Ἰωσήφ, etc., ὁ ὑιός ὁ ᾿Ιησός, ἡ μήτηρ ἡ Μαρία . . . This is the first fish snapping at the bait I’ve held out to various people over the years: to develop a New Testament course using Modern Greek pronunciation and the oral-aural technique.

I should have mentioned that yesterday Chrysanthi did the epilogue, reading a moving passage from Jason Demos’s translation of Mrs. Tsatsos’s war journals, about trying to feed starving children during the πείνα of the winter of 1941–1942.

In the evening we had our Log Night. I selected the passages to be read. The log was almost totally composed by Terry Douglas, who has an observant eye and a lovely sense of humor. We divided it into four sections: first impressions, fun and games, “overheard” comments on personalities, and concluding thoughts, with a different reader for each. I read the last section. Also I played the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 four-hands with Sam Wong, plus a nice arrangement of Country Gardens, again with Sam. It went reasonably well; actually, I didn’t have the jitters at all. Daphne and Cathy sang a song accompanying themselves on guitars. Warm goodbyes were said all around, to the many extraordinary people we’ve met here this term. By and large I’ve felt at ease, socially, more so than previously.

Eric Priestman told me that Fircroft is finally going to open again; next September they’ve advertised for a new principal and three (not four) tutors.

Saturday, December 15, 1979

B’ham-London-New York

Early breakfast. More goodbyes. By Avis car with our voluminous luggage, to Heathrow. Flew on PanAm flight #1, the “round the world” flight. I said to Chrysanthi, and I think I meant it, that of all our sabbaticals, this was the “richest”—mostly because of the Greek trip, of course.

Saturday, December 29, 1979

Hanover

MGSA Annual Meeting in Boston. Lily Macrakis and Mike Keeley, long ago, had “conspired” to have me elected the next president. I was duly elected to the executive committee, but lost the presidency to Keeley. He was in California at MLA and four or five members there had sent in proxy ballots for him. These, added to votes cast in Boston, won him the day. It was good practice for me to apply principles about the pettiness of ambition. I wanted the post but rationally must now praise my fortunes for having been denied it, since it probably would have interfered catastrophically with my writing this year and have ruined the sabbatical. I’ll continue as associate editor of BMGS.

1980

Hanover

January 1–June 25

Riparius

June 26–August 28

Hanover

August 28–December 15

Philadelphia, MGSA, November

Athens, Hotel Electra, Ερμού 5

December 16–23

Hanover

Dec. 24–25

Houston, Texas

Dec. 26–30

Saturday, February 2, 1980

Hanover

Ernest Renan waxes enthusiastic over Jesus’ response: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” (Math. 22.15ff, Mark 12.13, Luke 20.20) The background is a movement led by a certain Judas the Gaulonite that held that to pay taxes was a sacrilege since it in effect acknowledged Caesar as equivalent to God. Jesus’ response of course was a way of avoiding the snare. The Pharisees wanted to implicate him as a follower of the Gaulonite and thus be able to denounce him to the Roman authorities on these grounds. The response has been interpreted, in later times, as an excuse for complying with the requirements of the state—e.g., for rendering military service even though one is a Christian. But Renan shows the other side; he sees Jesus’ response as the first clear statement of separation of church and state—i.e., as a declaration freeing conscience to act independently of the state. Renan sings out: “Mot profond qui a décidé de l’avenir du christianisme! Mot d’un spiritualisme accompli et d’une justesse merveilleuse, qui a fondé la separation du spirituel et du temporal, et a posé la base du vrai libéralisme et de vraie civilisation! (Vie de Jésus, p. 348.)

Thursday, July 17, 1980

Riparius

Our 25th wedding anniversary. Chrysanthi gave me a bar of Cadbury chocolate, to remind me “where it all began.” Daphne and my mother conspired to make a huge meal, secretly, and to invite Jacques and Hilda Grunblatt. It was all very pleasant, especially considering the very eloquent letters that arrived—in time, even!—from Leander and Alec. Lots of round numbers: 50 years of age, 25th anniversary. Will there be a 75 and a 50th? And what good, different, and constructive will happen in the next 25 years, if 25 are granted?

Saturday, July 19, 1980

Riparius

This journal has been scandalously neglected since our return from Woodbrooke more than six months ago. If nothing else, I must simply list certain things, viz:

—My first book in Greek, Αντίθεση και σύνθεση στην ποίηση του Γιάννη Ρίτσου, was published finally, after much delay, by Kedros in Athens, in a very lovely format. I was thrilled to hold it in my hand, and to read the Greek. Various people have written me about it, including Zissimos Lorentzatos, and it has received some notices in the Greek press.

—Leander gave a trial run of his Master’s recital in Hanover in April, then the real thing in New York during the transit strike. He didn’t play very well either time, alas (though some pieces were fine), but he did it. Later, at the last moment, he learned and performed (in studio) Beethoven’s 2nd piano concerto, his final requirement, and graduated with all A’s. We met Robert Goldsand at the recital. He seems to have faith in Leander, and assured me that he is really better than that recital showed. Let’s hope so. At this moment, Leander is living in Alec’s apartment in Ardmore, Pennsylvania (Haverford Park Apartments) and working 6:00 to midnight at the Haverford gate, checking incoming cars. Pending is a possibility to be a musician-sailor on the Travel Dynamics cruises next winter (Red Sea) and spring-summer-fall (Mediterranean), along with Alec. Vasos Papagapitos initiated this, but we still don’t know if the job will actually materialize.

—Alec graduated with his B.A in music (with honors) and psychology from Haverford in May. He, too, previously, gave a senior recital—his honors project—in which he coaxed and cajoled two others to do justice (sort of) to the Dvořák Dumky piano trio. The graduation was on a rainy and then steamy-hot, humid day, and was rather unpleasant, except for the marvelous Meeting that preceded it, in which Steve Cary spoke eloquently, and many others, including my father, added their own sentiments. The Grunblatts were there, for Mark’s graduation. After the ceremonies, we helped Alec move down the street . . . in the heat. Some time before, Alec and I came to an impasse in our relationship when I wrote to him openly against his girlfriend Elizabeth, sending him, stupidly, some choice excerpts from Act III of Man and Superman about predatory women. He told me, grossly, to mind my own business. All this by mail. It made for a very awkward meeting in New York at Leander’s recital. But later, I was in Pennsylvania for a three-day retreat of the Executive Committee of the Pendle Hill Board of Managers, and had supper with Alec on Sunday at the conclusion, giving us a chance to talk things over and reach what I think was a mutual understanding of our positions. In any case, everything seems OK now, though I keep silent about Elizabeth. Alec, upon graduation, began work the very next day for Haverford’s grounds’ crew, learning a lot about landscape gardening and enjoying the black and Italian “regulars” whom he was assisting. Now he’s gone out to Eastern College as a drill-master in John Rassias’s program for teaching French to thirty Americans about to go to medical school in Lille.

—Winter term, Chrysanthi taught Greek and I was the “spouse.” I avoided Dartmouth affairs very well indeed, except tenure meetings (Ellen Rose was denied, along with A. B. Paulson. Brenda Silver and Peter Travis are now tenured; Lou Renza got our recommendation but was held up by the CAP). I worked well in Study 709 of Baker Library, finishing and revising the Kapetan Mihalis chapter in light of some splendid books on Venizelos and Cretan history loaned me by Lily Macrakis, then beginning The Last Temptation chapter. This became a monstrosity, over 600 MS pages, I believe, because to do it right I survey everything Kazantzakis had written previously on the Christ-theme: Κωμωδία, Ξημερώνει, Σπασμένες ψυχές, Χριστός, Νικηφόρος Φωκάς, parts of Οδύσεια, etc. But I think I found good, new, original things to say about Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός, and especially about the relation between religion (eschatology) and politics. This involved going over Kazantzakis’s own sources, such as Renan, and much more, plus trying to understand the Bible somewhat better. I didn’t work very rapidly, but I like the results. This continued into:

—Spring term: Thankfully, I finished the Τελευταίος πειρασμός chapter just before leaving for Terpni, enabling me to start fresh here with Ο φτωχούλης του Θεού. But a great deal of spring term was spent in Kiewit typing all of Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος into the computer, using the new capability developed recently by which I can get Greek out of Rem1 in the same building, and can mix Greek and English even on the same line. Marvels of technology! The only sadness in this connection was John Rassias’s indifference. When he returned from France he didn’t even call to find out how the book was progressing. Meanwhile, I’d worked intensively with Bob Daubenspeck on the illustrations (now completed), wrote additional grammatical sections and drills, incorporated the suggestions of Χρήστος Αλεξίου, Dia Philippides, and Danny Danforth into the text, etc. Hundreds of hours of work. But UPNE is set to publish it (New director, Tom MacFarland).

Spring also saw some further negotiations with Cambridge University Press to take over BMGS from Blackwell’s. Mike Keeley, Lily Macrakis, and I lunched with Sue Porter and Mark Sexton (who turned out to be Haverford ’53) in New York, and Mike went to London to iron out remaining differences with Donald Nicol, but at the very last minute CUP got cold feet—for financial reasons, so we’re told—and backed out.

—In May, Chrysanthi and I had a lovely few days in Québec and Université Laval. I gave a paper, in Greek; all the rest were in French. We dined with Jim Day, who is now first-chair violist in the Québec Symphony. Our hosts, more or less, were Jacques and Mme Bouchard. Spoke some French, heard lots, returned with four dozen croissants and six baguettes.

—Pendle Hill made me assistant presiding clerk of the Board, and I ran one of the Board meetings, apparently with success. Now they want me to give a short course on The Last Temptation. I’m resisting, so far. The Retreat was a good opportunity to know some of the key people better, like Mather Lippincott.

—Dartmouth gave me a 9.5% raise to help with inflation. That brings me to $37,400, I think.

—The job held by Peter Mackridge at King’s College London is now open, and Nicol invited me to apply. But to go from professor to lecturer, from almost $40,000 to about $20,000 (if that) . . .? Am I stagnating in materiality, despite what Saint Francis teaches us? Yes, obviously: materiality, family, ease.

—All this brings up, of course, the question of the next twenty-five years (if I live that long). I’m now 50. The first 25 were occupied by growth and education; the second 25 by marriage, family, career. Now what? Can there be a new phase, or just a continuation for half that period with subsequent dwindling? Chrysanthi says that it all depends on health. But health, so largely, depends on psychic energies or their absence.

—Now, to see if the tractor will start!

Sunday, July 20, 1980

Terpni

A hot, lazy day. I copyedited Nette Bossert’s essay on Ibn . . . in the morning, a possible Pendle Hill pamphlet, written this year at Woodbrooke. Took my parents to the bus after lunch. More Bossert, then tried to improve our driveway by dumping several wheelbarrows-full of dirt in hollow spots. Mowed where the disk harrow had been. Swam. Read Charles Osborne’s biography of W. H. Auden after supper. I like what Auden once wrote about the qualities of a good teacher (p. 84): “For a teacher to be of real value to his pupils, he must be a mature and above all a happy person, giving the young the feeling that adult life is infinitely more exciting than their own; he must be prepared to give them all his powers of affection and imaginative understanding when they want them, yet to forget them completely the moment they are gone, to be indifferent to them personally; and lastly he must have no moral bees-in-his-bonnet, no preconceptions of what the good child should be; he must be shocked or alarmed at nothing, only patient to understand the significance of any piece of behaviour from the child’s point of view, not his own; to see in the perfect little ape his most promising charge, and watchful to remove as tactfully and unobtrusively as possible such obstacles to progress as he can.”

Earlier in the same book I liked Auden’s remark (p. 24) that a good teacher is one who is “ready . . . to give the adolescent all the comfort and stimulus of a personal relation, without at the same time making any demands for himself in return . . .”

Irving Shapiro called. He’s already back from Toronto, where he underwent a hernia operation only three days ago. Drove all the way himself.

Friday, July 25, 1980

Terpni

Wrote sixteen pages today! Then shopping, laundry, and garbage in Chestertown: one’s weekly ritual. Daphne has a friend, Sarah Wilson, from Albany, and is delighted. Last night at Shapiros for supper, and slides of Galapagos, Peru, and Amazon River. Full moon tonight, and totally clear sky.

Jay Parini wrote and among things said the following (is it true?): “I must say congratulations on the 25 years together. To both of you! It’s no small accomplishment to stay wedded for a quarter century in this particular age! I always love to be around the two of you, mostly because of that stability of affection you display, an affection that seems durable but not dull; there’s still electricity there, a flow, and it radiates. I’m glad for both of you.”

July 29, 1980

Alecs’s birthday. We had a nice talk on the telephone. He and Leander have been given the job by Travel Dynamics to cruise to the Red Sea in January, February, and in the Mediterranean from May to September.

Wednesday, July 30, 1980

Terpni

A typical day at Terpni. All morning and half the afternoon in my “office” struggling to write my minimum of ten pages on Saint Francis. Unsettled weather—scudding rain clouds, rumbling thunder, but no rain. Next: chain saw, maul, and wedge, sawing a stump down to ground level. Repairing barbed wire on the garden fence. Filing the saw chain, with much improvement. Then the delicious wash in the basin outdoors, in cold well-water. Then (Chrysanthi said cryptically that she had a surprise for supper), harvest of string beans. Delicious! Then “relaxing” with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Finally BBC news and special programs on our new, miraculous shortwave receiver.

Yesterday we had Daphne’s friend Michelle Parsons here, and we returned her to Lake George at 10:00 p.m. and then had a walk around town. Plus a pastrami sandwich!

Monday, August 4, 1980

A good-sized fox came out in front of me at the “office” and stood not ten feet away before sauntering off. (Later): Described the supposed “fox” to Art Perryman. It wasn’t a fox; it was a coyote.

Tuesday, August 5, 1980

Jerry Gardner, son of the editors of the North Creek newspaper, came for supper with his charming French wife, age 22. Afterwards she and I played piano four-hands: Ravel’s “Mother Goose.” What joy!

Wednesday, August 6, 1980

With the Shapiros to Galamian’s summer school, Meadowmount. Heard students do Chopin (cello & piano), Prokofiev (solo violin sonata), and Brahms’s sextet for two violins, two violas, two cellos—a marvelous experience. We filled ourselves with pizza on the way up, in Schroon Lake, and then gorged on Fran’s cake and jam afterwards. At Meadowmount we met old friends of my parents’ from Sunnyside, the Pincuses, eightyish and very well preserved.

Thursday, August 7, 1980

Very good session writing this morning, on the “ladder of love” in Saint Francis. Then shopping in Chestertown: the routine—laundry, supermarket, dump, hardware, back to laundry; milkshake and ice cream cones (90+ degree heat). Then from 4:30 to 7:30 on the roof, a long, hard session of shingling, and laying the aluminum flashing at the junction of shed and barn. I’ve done this roof very messily, I’m afraid. Chrysanthi was utterly exhausted afterwards, yet as always we had a lovely dinner (supervised by Daphne). Reading (TLS), radio (BBC), delicious sleep.

Saturday, August 9, 1980

Worked all morning and most of the afternoon on the new roof and finished it. Chrysanthi exuberant, mostly because of relief she wouldn’t have to be up high any more (her acrophobia; after four days sliding on her behind she actually stood up today). Because of this and also Daphne going to camp tomorrow, we celebrated by going out to dinner to the (former) Alp Horn restaurant. Superb. Chrysanthi “treated” me (but I paid). Afterwards to Shapiros’ for desert. Met David Frost from Schroon Lake. He is a free-lance medical writer, ghost writer, editor, and a very interesting man.

Sunday, August 10, 1980

To the Canaan, New Hampshire, Cardigan Mountain School, to deliver Daphne to the New Hampshire Youth Symphony Orchestra camp. The kids were bunked a mile away in real old-fashioned cabins: no lights, etc. Daphne in good spirits; we left her, with ease. Then to Hanover (xeroxing, mail). Then to White River Junction to Daubenspeck’s to see Ιπτάμενος pictures. His house is an old garage, but he’s making it livable. How strange for a man to be totally alone and with practically no resources at age 55+.

Friday, August 15, 1980

Finished the chapter on Saint Francis. Enough!

Sunday, August 17, 1980

Nice concert. Edna Michell, Raphael Hillyer, Glazer, and a cellist did Brahms’ masterful piano quartet. Reception in Leland homestead on Schroon Lake; he was Ethan Allen’s second at the battle of Fort Ticonderoga. Real Jewish spread: chopped chicken liver, ham, chocolate cake, etc. Talked to Hillyer, who grew up in Hanover and had Leslie Dewing as his first teacher. Asa and Isabel Rothstein were there with their children; lovely people. The son graduated from Haverford in 1970. Also Jerry Gardner and wife were there; he is writing a review. Met head of the Seagle Colony. They employ two pianists every summer.

Monday, August 18, 1980

Finished outlining the Saint Francis chapter. Now: entering G&M in Notes in the filing system, plus some book reviews, I hope. Mowed path into the woods, a hard job. Chrysanthi discovered three good wild apple trees that I’ll clear around and prune now.

If I could only muster enough energy—: Adirondack novel. What splendid material I have: Gerrow the maniac. Art Perryman (vice ring in North Creek; his church, fundamentalists). Lou Curth and Co., knee-jerk environmentalism. The Hudson River controversy: Niagara Mohawk’s power line, under or over. Jacques and Hilda. The Nazi propagandist in North Creek. Roy Millington, raping the old lady Tubbs. And so much more.

Saturday, August 23, 1980

Burt Pike came yesterday at 1:00 p.m. We talked, literally without stop, until 11:30 p.m., ten and a half hours; then again this morning from 8:00 a.m. until 10:30 or so, when he returned to New York. How nice! Subjects: Kafka, Thomas Mann, Haverford, politics, literacy . . .

Sunday, November 23, 1980

Hanover

“Capitalism will be destroyed, but not by the working class. It will be destroyed by the development of national defense in each country and replaced by the totalitarian state.”—Simone Weil, in a letter (cited in Carol Murphy, Four Women, Four Windows on Light (Pendle Hill pamphlet manuscript).

1981

Portland, Maine

February 27–29

New York City

March 18–20

Riparius

July 2–August 29

Hanover

August 30–December 20

New York-Montreal, December 4–6

Portland, Maine, December 12–13

New York City

December 20–31

Wednesday, July 15, 1981

Terpni

Breck Trautwein, now separated from Donna, has taken to Buddhism. He gave me a book obtained at the Buddhists’ monastery in the Catskills: Namu Dai Bosa, by Senzaki, Nakagawa, and Shimano. Lots of good thoughts—e.g., “Man is like a bicyclist: He is safe from falling only as long as he keeps on going. If we hold our will like an iron wall against all kinds of trouble; if our breathing is in harmony with the rhythm of right-mindedness, every action of ours will become part of the progressive current of the universe . . .”—Nyogen Senzaki (p. 61). Later: Breck came for supper. I had set four traps around a woodchuck hole in the garden (right in the middle of the string beans) and when Breck arrived we found the animal lamentably caught in three of the traps. He snapped and snarled at us once or twice but then, as Breck said, bowed his head in a kind of Buddhistic equanimity concerning his fate. Breck dispatched him with a sharp blow across the back of the neck. “He was consuming food; now he becomes food,” enabling the life-chain to continue. Despite all this philosophizing, we tossed him unceremoniously in the woods for the foxes, and then sat down to our own obligation toward the food chain, fricassee of veal.

Today was also momentum in that I finished the glossary for Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος after about two months’ work of the most exacting and exasperating kind. Some of it still remains to be entered on the computer, but this is relatively pleasant, compared to checking and double-checking the meanings of 4000 words. I truly began to understand the difficulties confronting anyone who attempts to make a dictionary. Here, at Terpni (!), I have a portable computer terminal, which I hook into Kiewit via telephone. Each morning from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m (when the rates are the cheapest) I “keyboard” for an hour, before breakfast.

A technological miracle of a slightly lower order is the Rube Goldberg device I arranged, using a fence stretcher, to operate the mower from the tractor since Chrysanthi can’t mow this year on account of her operation. Fine. Works beautifully. But on the first day of use I misjudged a stump, didn’t lift the bar, and ended up by breaking the tongue.

I should note here, in this lamentably sporadic diary, that Chrysanthi had surgery on June 3rd: hysterectomy. What was thought to be a cyst of the ovaries turned out to be just a fibroid, totally benign, so we are very pleased. Her uterus and ovaries, now somewhere in a garbage heap, did their service and are gone where they can cause no more mischief. Menopause had set in about two years ago, so this was relatively non-traumatic. In any case, the recuperation has been going well, with lots of solicitude from various good friends, in Hanover and here.

The boys are at this moment on the SS Regina Maris in the employ of Vasos Papagapitos of Travel Dynamics as a violin-piano duo. Itinerary: Great Britain, Scandinavia, Leningrad, coast of France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey. Leander will stay through to the end. Alec will leave at Venice to return to Philadelphia to take up his post as a sixth grade teacher of French and English at Friends Central School (headmaster, Tom Wood, Haverford ’52). Leander plans to go to Helsinki afterwards to be with Outi, the girl he met at Woodbrooke this past winter.

His year (more or less): Down and out in Philadelphia feeling unwanted; miserable housing arrangements; employ as night gatekeeper at Haverford, then as “picker” in Theodore Presser warehouse in Bryn Mawr; rescued by me and sent to Woodbrooke in January; splendid experience including love affair (history repeating itself); then to Greece; lived with Stavros and Toula; practiced; gave recital in the hall of Μακεδονικών Σπουδών; return via Salzburg, Bonn, London; short stay home; then off to the cruise.

Alec’s year: employ as gardener at Haverford; teacher of French in Rassias program for medical students, Philadelphia; attendant in school bus for handicapped; school bus driver, Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania; teacher of English in Rassias program in Bourges, France (included reunion with his “family” in Avignon, and sojourns in Paris with Helene Rassias, and quick trip to Woodbrooke to see Leander; return home briefly; off to cruise. Still living in Philadelphia with Elizabeth Dean, unfortunately, but determined to break away (?).

My year: very difficult to return to teaching after five years at half time as Geisel Professor and then a full year’s leave. But I coped. Did Iliad and Paradise Lost in Frosh Seminar plus Joyce-Proust-Mann-Kafka in the fall, Conrad-Joyce-Beckett plus English 5 (Walden, Bertrand Russell, Dubliners) in the winter, Finnegans Wake seminar in the spring. Mad, lovely trip to Athens just before Christmas for language conference; then to Houston, Texas just after Christmas for MLA. Saw Izzy (Gardner) Lipschutz there, and her new husband, Abby, a diamond merchant originally from Amsterdam. Continuing service on Pendle Hill Board. Short course at PH on The Last Temptation, attended by (among others) a Vietnam veteran who entered the Methodist ministry afterwards and said he was chiefly inspired by Kazantzakis. I did this in collaboration with Mary Morrison, who did the Gospel side.

Daphne is currently at Kinhaven, and ecstatic. I have gone back on the Kinhaven Board.

At Dartmouth next year I’ll be chairman of IAS (Intensive Academic Support).

My Αντίθεση και σύνθεση στη ποίηση του Γιάννη Ρίτσου came out in Athens, and I actually collected royalties from Kedros! Jenny Mastoraki is translating my Cavafy and Kazantzakis pamphlets for publication there. Also, the Penguin volume on Ritsos came out in Athens (in English), as a reprint.

Worked hard all year with John Rassias and Chrysanthi on Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος, which is about to be printed. Bob Daubenspeck did the illustrations. But I did nothing on my Kazantzakis book save lecture on The Last Temptation for Pendle Hill and Queens College.

In November we spent four days in Philadelphia at the MGSA symposium on women. Phew! Had a stupendous Chinese meal downtown with Alec, Elizabeth, Kristin Lindgren, Kostas Kazazis. Meg Alexiou came, and was in Hanover previously. In February, nice one-day conference in Portland, Maine. Supper with Danny Danforth and Peggy Rotunda, such sweet people. Met a real live Shaker at the conference.

In Houston, lots of time with Alexis Levitin, besides Izzy.

BMGS had a difficult year. We tried to negotiate with Johns Hopkins after the Cambridge UP offer fell through. Bryer, Keeley, Diskin Clay, and I in Baltimore. But they want us to assume full liability. Risky. Nicol very angry, etc. #7 in press, including Lavagnini’s presentation of the new poems by Cavafy on Julian, translated by David Sices and the cause of numerous international cables and the loss of ten years, I think, of my life. Glen Bowersock has a piece on all the Julian poems. But #8 is suspended indefinitely for lack of money.

Nice increase in salary, up to $42,000. Chrysanthi promoted to Senior Lecturer.

The December meeting in Athens 1980 deserves extended memorial; it was exhilarating and continually fascinating. Here follow some notes done on the spot.

Monday, December 15: all-night flight. Huge long conversation with Theofanis Stavrou.

Tuesday, December 16 (day of arrival): Smuggled calculator printer through customs, for Dimitris Yiannakos. Bank. Dinner. Ritsos’s apartment with Christos and Maya (girlfriend?). Theater “Da” with Manos Katrakis. 350th performance. Ομιλίες. Σανοδινού, κτλ. Archimandrite Ζήσης Σκάρος in next seat. Finish 1:00 a.m. Then τραπέζι: meal, Cretan dancing; finish 3:00 a.m.

Wednesday, December 17: Πρωθυπουργός, καλός, για τη γλωσσική μεταρρύθμιση. Television; lights; press corps. (I was on television that night.) Thomson’s message. Ψωμιάδης. Siesta. 5:00 p.m., call from Brenda Marder. Τελετή για το Ζήση Σκάρο, on completion of 3rd volume of trilogy; all leftists. Φωτιάδης, Ritsos’s lovely poem, touching. Saw Γιώργος Γιάνναρης, Νικέττα Μακρυνικόλα, Αθηνά Καλλιανέση. Σκάρος, Ρίτσος, Κατράκης, all in στρατόπεδο together. Supper. Coffee at Zonars. Angry at Frangopoulos’s article in Kathimerini against Modern Greek studies in USA. Midnight to 1:00 a.m., with Christos, going over his paper and mine.

Thursday, December 18: Παρουσίαση ενός νέου διδακτικού βιβλίου.

Friday, December 19: I chaired one of the sessions, with Vlandes, Bibkur, MacBain, Peter Thomas, Dora Sahayan. Evening, reception at hotel, marvelous food, saw Raïzis, Kimon Friar, etc.

Saturday, December 20: morning, good session on dictionaries with Κριαράς, Πολίτης, etc. Then research: I read my talk on the article; seemed well received; special lunch catered by Ministry at Dionysos restaurant, just below Acropolis. Another session, then Εθνικό Θέατρο, very poor play, modern version of Odysseus’s return, how the myth is more important than the reality.

Sunday, December 21: last day of symposium; lunch with Nikiforos Diamandouros re: BMGS. Found Tom and Nancy Doulis and children waiting at the hotel. Tom joined us for lunch. Not finished with trilogy, but he has finished volume 1—first novel. We’ll have to extend the five-year plan. After lunch, very bad επιτροπή, dissention, no progress.

Final session; awards: I read λόγο for Ίδρυμα Ουράνη. Πέτρος Χάρης came to receive it, but in middle of session ο Αθανασιάδης-Νόβας came, about 95 years old, could hardly walk; very distinguished appearance αλλά ετοιμοθάνατος. He spoke after I did, accepting; barely comprehensible; but very συγκινητικό. Front row: 3 Academy members, Minister of Culture (Ανδριανόπουλος), head of cultural relations: Βασιλόπουλος. Κουτουχέρης, MP for PASOK, spoke about το μονοτονικό. Awards to Arpajolou, Thomson, Vlavianos, Georgacas, Ίδρυμα Ουράνη. Kazazis, the master of ceremonies, forgot to praise Anna Farmakidis at the end!

10:00 p.m., final meeting of committee. Again, deadlock on everything because Anna wanted things her way; decision to vote; we controlled her on an issue (support for computer project on frequency count); afterwards, she whined and complained, still. I said, “Anna, we can’t do only what you want!” She then acted like a six-year-old: “I’ll resign if I’m pressuring you. I’m insulted, etc. I have no business here.” We convinced her, barely, to stay. She sat inert with closed eyes; refused to take part. We continued to act, efficiently now, using parliamentary method, but with a sense of dissention and sorrow that it should all end with such divisiveness. Kazazis and Bien the villains! Others present: Vincent, Mackridge, Messing, Vaporis, Petrounias, Psomiadis, Karaminea, Stavrou, Maskaleris. Decided to publish an information bulletin. 12 midnight to 1:00 a.m., Kazazis and I alone, discussing the sad events.

Monday, December 22, last full day: Kedros, Nanetta, δρ. 7.000 royalties; Stangos-Bien Penguin Ritsos to be reprinted; telephone contact with Jenny Mastoraki. Shopping, Gaïtanos; bump into Petrounias. Bank. Πληρεξούσιο for Leander. Hotel: met Nikiforos Vrettakos and his son, a film-maker. Vrettakos gave me his latest book of poetry. Lunch with Jenny Mastoraki, “my translator”; 1:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m., nice discussion; she was Allison Pingel’s tutor. Samarakis at next table; jovial. Rendezvous 5:00 p.m. with Kostas Asimopoulos; offer of apartment in Athens, set aside in a lady’s will for use by visiting intellectuals; gift of his novel. With Christos, Maskaleris, to Παγκράτι, to Athens Center of Creative Arts, near Seferis’s house; talk with director re: helping Dartmouth students on our foreign study program; they have flats, etc. Other “symposiasts” arrive. Film by Vrettakos’s son, on the flooding of a village and an excavation site by a man-made lake created by a dam. Then demonstration of teaching methods for Modern Greek by Butterworth’s former faculty member (now in U.S.A); left early however because Dimitris Gounelas picked us up. To Gounelas’s house in Αγία Παρασκευή, slopes of Ημεττού. Monastery of St. John ο Κυνηγός visible (one faint light) in the distance. Peter Mackridge, George Giannaris. Gounelas’s wife: New Zealander, Ph.D. Oxford, teaches Modern British Literature at Deree-Pierce; colleague of Γιάνναρης. Κουβέντα ως τη 1:00.

Tuesday, December 23: taxi to Hellenikon with Nomikos Vaporis, with stop along the way to pick up some modern icons. Good flight. To LaGuardia; then Boston shuttle. Leander drove to Logan to fetch me. Arrived Hanover 3:00 a.m. on December 24th, utterly exhausted.

Thursday, December 25: Christmas at home.

Friday, December 26: left for Texas. Rental car frozen, couldn’t start; Alec drove a group of us to Hartford airport in nick of time. Houston 70 degrees.

Thursday, July 16, 1981

Riparius

The hearings on the power line crossing the Hudson were apparently hilarious. The law states that such lines must be “substantially invisible.” What does that mean? Niagara Mohawk argued that they would occupy less than 1% of the visual field. The lawyer for the environmentalists then cross-examined the NM witness: “Do you like salad?” “Yes . . . but . . . what does that have to do with electric wires?” “You’ll see . . . (more questions, establishing a luscious salad; then) “Would you like a cockroach in your salad?” “Of course not . . . but . . .” “Supposing the roach were hidden beneath a lovely green leaf of lettuce, with only one teensy-weensy feeler sticking out, so little that it occupied less than 1% of the visual field—i.e., of your view of the salad. Would you feel like digging in and eating?” “No, but . . . er, I . . .” “Your Honor, I rest my case.”

I forgot to record our saga with Jacques Grunblatt. In April he and Hilda came to Hanover to stay with us while he attended a Spanish Civil War conference at Dartmouth. On the eve of the conference he had a heart attack at 3:00 a.m. We accompanied the ambulance to Mary Hitchcock Hospital. For 3 or 4 days he was in intensive care, unconscious. All the children came: Jesse from Alaska, Mark from Delaware, Ellen from the Midwest. We housed everyone, and also Bill Watson (Haverford ’53), who was a speaker at the conference. Afterwards, he recovered nicely; the children left and he and Hilda finally returned to North Creek after about two or three weeks. In the course of all this, I arranged with Jack Shepherd to attempt to market Seven Hells by Thaddeus Stabholz, the book that Jacques had translated the previous winter from Polish. It’s about the holocaust. Hilda spent her time typing while she was in Hanover—the perfect occupational therapy.

Friday, July 17, 1981

Terpni

Our anniversary, the 26th. Went out for supper to Pilak’s. Very nice. First full sexual intercourse since Chrysanthi’s operation. Her capacity for orgasm unimpaired despite absence of ovaries and womb! Mine still exists, too. First penetration without a condom since early days of the marriage when we desired children.

Saturday, July 18, 1981

Supper with Irv and Fran Shapiro. Talk talk talk, easily, until late hours. We are blessed in our neighbors.

My Rube Goldberg device enabling me to mow without Chrysanthi is not working too well. A few days ago I broke the mower tongue when I misjudged an obstacle. On Thursday I replaced the tongue, getting a beautiful splinter under my fingernail as a reward. Friday had this extracted in Chestertown. Today improved the pulley system, placing the pulley more directly under the lever-arm, so that the rope doesn’t rub and break, as before. Mowed the south field satisfactorily.

Sunday, July 19, 1981

Yesterday a doe and her fawn walked past me and into the woods. Today two hummingbirds flew within a yard of my head and hovered around Chrysanthi’s hanging pot of flowers on the porch, sticking their stiletto-like beaks into the exact center of each flower to extract the nectar. Up close, they look just like mice.

After supper, to the Grunblatts on the occasion of Ellen’s “official marriage” (in Glens Falls temple) to Dr. Steve Bien. He turns out to be my second cousin once removed, as follows:

My father remembered that Nathan and Jenny owned a grocery store in Coney Island, and that Isadore, the “M.D.,” was a criminal abortionist and “anesthesiologist” with a fake diploma from some supposed medical school in Tennessee. Stephen’s father, Robert, who was at the Grunblatts’, remembered meeting Fanny. Otherwise there doesn’t seem to have been much contact, if any. They pronounce their name Bi-en, in two syllables.

On Saturday, Walter Joyce, a programmer at Kiewit who’s making a glossary-alphabetizing program for my individual Greek glossaries, drove over from Hanover, bringing some print-outs. He’s finally getting the thing to work.

I’m reading J. H. Randall, Jr.’s Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis. Fascinating. Shows how Christianity really betrayed the message of Jesus in order to make a viable synthesis of Greek, Jewish, Syrian, etc. cults.

Monday, July 20, 1981

Terpni

Hal and Claire Carman visited; special treat was Jane, always a favorite of mine, now married with a replica of herself in Rebecca, aged 4. Sweet people. But burdened with tragedy since Hal, Jr., age 16, committed suicide a few months ago. Inexplicably. No troubles. No reason. No note. No forewarning. Parked his car and calmly jumped off a bridge. They are very family-oriented people, too. Hal is retired from the oil company where he serviced oil burners and now deals a bit in used cars in his retirement. Jane is tax collector for the town in Massachusetts where she lives. Her husband works for a Pyrogas distributor. We talked, as always, about old times: Kitty and Red, Sherman and Freddy, Rabbi Greene and his sons, Anne Barnard. We showed Jane the cellar hole and well across the way. Hal tells me there’s a revolver at the bottom of the well that he threw there after someone living in one of the outbuildings got drunk and threatening.

Same day: supper with Lou and Inge Curth. We sat down at 7:00 p.m. and didn’t get up until 1:00 a.m.—six hours of steady conversation. Both very interesting (and interested) people; good talkers; good listeners.

Tuesday, July 21, 1981

Barbara Ras telephoned from UPNE. The tape has gone off to the printer’s. We expect galley proofs in two weeks. I must forge ahead with the glossary and front material.

Reading Peter Brown on The World of Late Antiquity.

Tuesday, October 31, 1981

Hanover

Peter Levi, former student, stopped by yesterday. I asked what he’d done in the past four years and he answered that, among other things, he’d spent time with an Indian tribe deep in the Amazon jungle. I thought immediately of course of Waugh’s Handful of Dust. But Peter had a better reception than Tony Last had. Peter went because his roommate’s parents, the Johnsons, had been missionaries there for twenty years. Peter was introduced as part of their family, so to speak. “And,” he continued, “this meant that the Indians received me cordially because in their language there is only a single word for the two meanings ‘family’ and ‘friend.’” Bob and Ann Watson were here last night, and I told them this à propos of their efforts to keep a strong family together in the face of the general breakdown of the family in our society.

Last Monday Chrysanthi and I drove to the Fernwood Fish Hachery in Gansevort, got 100 trout fingerlings and then successfully transferred them to our pond without a single loss. What fun!

Last Saturday: MGSA meetings all day, then a nice supper with Alec in the Pantheon Restaurant on 8th Avenue and 43rd or 44th Street. He is doing beautifully at the Friends Central School in Philadelphia, teaching French, English, and a little music to sixth graders.

My father had a kidney stone that is still there, but not causing any discomfort.

Leander is in Hauho, Finland, at the home of his girlfriend, Outi Maula. He says he hopes to return with her to the US. No mention yet of marriage.

It seems that our service planned for next fall will go forward, after various impediments made my participation doubtful. But Alan Gaylord and I have now worked out a modus vivendi for my teaching schedule (Alan is our new chairman).

Jay and Devon Parini may rent the Shapiros’ house next summer and thus be our neighbors.

In NYC, walking down lower 5th Avenue, I stopped to watch a colossal crane, stationed in the middle of the avenue, lift a boiler to the roof of a 40-storey building. The company consisted of Italians who looked like they all got off the boat from Sicily yesterday. A lovely sight, along with much else in the Big Apple, which is always a feast for eye and ear.

Monday, December 14, 1981

Hanover

Zeph Stewart called to confirm my appointment as visiting professor at Harvard for spring semester 1983.

Leander is here with his Finnish girlfriend, Outi Maula, who is delightful.

Previous weekend in New York, Montreal, MGSA business, plus meeting with Irish Browning re: fundraising for Kinhaven. Montreal with Anna Farmakidis, Harry Psomiadis, and Prof. Messing re: language. Overnight with Linda Bien, Amin, and son Daniel, a handsome fourteen-year-old with sophistication of an eighteen-year-old and lots of rebelliousness. This past weekend: in Portland, Maine. I spoke to the Classical Association of Maine on the Odyssey in the twentieth century. Dinner with Danny Danforth and Peggy Rotunda. Very pleasant. Then Sunday drove to L. L. Bean (!), bought new boots, and showed Daphne Bowdoin College, which she liked immensely. Portland is charming.

December 30, 1981

New York City

Elected president of the Modern Greek Studies Association to replace Mike Keeley.

Nice sojourn in NYC. Saw two plays: The Dresser and Cloud 9; attended 15th Street Meeting on Sunday; walked from 44th to 15th Street and back, visiting the Penington on 15th, Gramercy Park, etc. Two nights at the Yale Club with Chrysanthi; very nice. Wrote an essay review on Elytis and shortened my Buddha introduction for the forthcoming publication. Saw John Tallmadge, Will Lee, Henry Hart, Burt Pike, and others at the MLA convention.

1982

Hanover

January–June

Terpni

July–August

Hanover

September–December

Dartmouth Alumni College: October 4–6, Rome,

Raphael Hotel, Largo Fevo 2, Piazza Navona;

October 7–8, Venice, Hotel Kette, San Marco;

October 9, Ravenna; M.V. Illiria: October 10, Split;

October 11, Dubrovnik; October 13, Mistra; October 14,

Patmos, Ephesos; October 15, Pergamon, Troy; October

16, Istanbul; October 17, Αγίου Διονυσίου, Άγιον Όρος;

October 18, Θεσσαλονίκη, Πέλλα, Βεργίνα; October 19,

Μετέωρα October 20–21, Athens, Hotel Electra, Ερμού 5.

October 22–23, Θεσσαλονίκη

New York, 20 E. 74th Street

December 22–26

Los Angeles, Hyatt Regency Hotel

December 22–29

Philadelphia

December 30

Sunday, January 31, 1982

Hanover

Christos Alexiou telephoned from England to announce with glee, «Ο Παύλος μιλάει!» This miracle he attributes, quite rightly, to αγάπη, specifically the love lavished on the boy by Christos’s sister Katerina in Greece. He said that even Margaret has begun to “see” her own defects, by comparison. In any case, his crisis with the university has subsided, and he and Meg seem to be cooperating more gracefully.

Ten days ago we had an earthquake: 4.8 on the scale. We were having supper with Genevieve Williamson. It was as though the AMTRAK train had passed just outside, or beneath, the house: a huge rumble, and everything rattling and shaking. No damage, however.

Thursday, April 15, 1982

Hanover

Hugh Kenner, as always, is brilliant on literature, and life. I’ve been reading his chapter on Exiles in Dublin’s Joyce. Here he is on Richard Rowan’s refusal to marry Bertha properly (p. 87): “Richard’s way of neither swearing nor expecting eternal fidelity surrounds himself and Bertha with the constant demands of a moral reality too strong for man. We have neither angelic wisdom nor angelic supplies of energy; we cannot live forever on the passionate qui vive; to be neither encouraged nor forbidden at every point is the condition not of human liberty but of human paralysis. Richard rapt himself and Bertha out of a community of paralytics, only to immerse himself and her in a paralysis still more naked; hence the dead stop to which Exiles grinds. The guidance of a habitual communal order is not an evasion but a human necessity.” (Amen!)

Wednesday, June 16, 1982

Signed new wills and created the Peter A. Bien trust on Bloomsday. A good omen. But forgot to have kidneys for breakfast.

Monday, June 21, 1982

Dimitrios Yiannakos died on Sunday, June 13, aged 90 we think. News came by letter today. As Chrysanthi said, she was grateful that I was able to know this great man in his prime.

Summer 1982

This was one of our best, and most varied, summers at the farm. Alec was with us for almost six weeks, Leander for almost two, before leaving for Helsinki, where he’ll be living with Outi Maula and studying piano at the Sibelius Academy. He spent the previous eight months in new Haven teaching children and adults. After initial help from John Iatrides, who recommended the first pupil, the others followed quickly. In short, he made a success of it, but as expected he didn’t much care for what he was doing, even though in spite of himself he admitted on occasion that he did get some pleasure from being appreciated so much. Outi was with him until May: that helped immensely. As for Alec, he had a good first year as a teacher in Friends Central School, living with Elizabeth Dean. The moment his year finished he went off to Teachers College, Columbia, as a Kligenstein Fellow for a three-week course. Then, in his new pick-up truck, he drove to the farm. His aim: to build a log cabin just like mine (almost): 16 × 20. We started by clearing the upper field of wiregrass, a job facilitated greatly by my power scythe. Next project was to build a well. We thought to get a dowser, but he was too expensive. I suggested a site halfway up a slope, in order to get gravity flow. There were alders but no water on the surface, and Alec gave up. Art Perryman suggested digging in a very wet spot low down. Water everywhere. Alec then dug a ten-foot hole five feet in diameter, which is much harder than it sounds, considering that he had hardpan to contend with, and giant boulders (I rigged up a tripod and we hauled them up with a come-along), and that he was often standing in water up to his knees. Also, the water came in so fast each day that it took him two hours or more to empty it (using buckets) before he could begin, until I bought a small gas-powered pump. With the hole dug, the next question became how to line it. Everyone suggested an aluminum culvert, but I found this idea repulsive. Silvus Daubenspeck came one day and suggested concrete culverts, but these turned out to be too heavy for us to handle. So, to my great pleasure, Alec decided to do it the good old way, with fieldstones. Luckily he had Leander to help him by this time, and a friend from Haverford and Friends Central named Bill Belt. He worked meticulously, and in ten days the job was done. So now we have a cistern with 700 gallons of beautiful water. I got an old pitcher pump working (more or less), so we could pump from the well up on the field 100 feet distant. Water was never appreciated so much. As all this had taken us well into August, we then rushed to start logging before it would be too late to use a spud to remove the bark. Alec cut a new road back into the old balsam stand that I had used (now sadly depleted because of a beaver dam) and could actually drive his truck most of the way. Art Perryman then arrived with his skidder and winch, facilitating everything. I felled the first tree—the expert! Alec and Leander, sometimes with Art, sometimes alone, did the rest, with me skidding what I could with the tractor. Sometimes we had to drag logs inch by inch with the come-along in order to get the chain to them. Chrysanthi (and later Daphne), also Fran Shapiro, helped with the debarking, which was difficult because of the lateness. We cut balsam, pine, poplar and hemlock, about fifty trees in all. Now they’re all lined up on the field, drying. Next project: the foundation. Alec dug a beautiful trench from the well to the field, for his water pipe. We moved one huge boulder using two come-alongs. The foundation trench was easy: four feet deep, then filled part way with gravel. Art lent us his cement mixer, but the motor failed. I made a truly Rube Goldberg arrangement, driving the cement mixer with the Jari! What a sight! But it worked beautifully. One day we worked about seven or eight hours continually, mixing and pouring. As a result, the foundation is now complete up to ground level. As a final touch, after we’d returned to Hanover, I went back one day and sowed a bushel of winter rye grass on the cleared area

But that wasn’t all. As soon as Alec left, we did a new roof on the east side of the barn. And the vegetable garden was superb. And the Allis Chalmers worked perfectly all summer. Unbelievable! On the intellectual side, I did the following, as well as I can remember now: (1) Final draft of the Χαρκιανάκης poems, plus entering changes on the computer (I had my new “GG” terminal upstairs in the loft); (2) a complete essay on Cavafy’s final period, for the periodical Grand Street; (3) all corrections for the Ιπτάμενος workbook, entered on computer; (4) proof-reading for large sections of Ιπτάμενος as the pages came from Steve Waite; (5) lots of background reading for the cruise; (6) two and a half of the three lectures for the cruise, the remaining half finished in early September in Hanover. The lectures were: Pagan Heroism—Alexander the Great; Christian Heroism—Monasticism; Christian and Pagan Heroism Reconciled.

In addition, work for Kinhaven continued. Three visits (Daphne was there this summer), drafting of the budget for 1983, etc. We also managed two trips to Saratoga for ballet, several concerts in Schroon Lake, and even a trip to New York City (Astoria) to meet with Loukas Skipitaris and six to eight Greek actors in order to coach them in their rehearsal for recording the tapes for Ιπτάμενος. Another special pleasure was a trip to Upper Jay to visit with Professor Bernstein of Haverford’s Philosophy Department, the contact being his remarkable son, who was one of Alec’s pupils at Friends Central. The boy visited us on the day we did our haying and was the perfect person to climb up on the wagon and stamp down the hay, which he did with great glee. Then we returned the visit, delivering him in the process. They have a modern-type house at the upper edge of a huge field giving them an unobstructed view of White-face. We found them very simpatico. The professor himself cooked a Chinese dinner—his specialty. He’s the one who was the cause célèbre when he was denied tenure at Yale. Very lively, bright intellectual. Over the summer we had visits from Audrey Logan, Mayme Noda, and Sydney Jarvis, Bob Daubenspeck and his son, repeatedly from Shapiros of course, Kitty Barden, Lou and Inge Curth, Jerry and Rosine Gardner, Al Zalan and Mary, a friend of Shapiros who turned out to be the mother of the Mary of Peter, Paul, and Mary, even from Roy Millington, who is still trapping. Also Harold and Clare Carman, looking well after their son’s tragic death last year; Frankie Deckert, Sherman Frazier, who brought along his neighbor, a Negro who’s had a house in Olmsteadville for two decades, a jolly, fat man who works in New York. And of course the Grunblatts. Saw Norman Fisher and Andy Jennings at Schroon when the Concord played a concert, also Edna Michell. Also visited Rothsteins and met a couple who live on the Garnet Lake Road: Vincent somebody who has annoyed Alec, trying to get him to go rock climbing (Alec was climbing below earth, not above). Visited Don Kurka, the artist, who gave us perennials from his lovely garden. His portrait of Eakins was superb; it encouraged me to go to the Eakins retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts just before we left for Europe.

Sunday, October 3, 1982

To Boston, to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Eakins exhibit, spurred by Don Kurka’s fine portrait of the artist, which we saw this summer in Bakers Mills. Eakins was a splendid technician who refused to prettify his subjects. By serendipity, the museum had an exhibit of Bernini, who did the fountains in the Piazza Navona.

Monday, October 4, 1982

Roma

In the Piazza Navona, Rome! First stop, Bernini’s fountains. Stupidly credulous, when the taxi driver told me that cabs were on strike and he couldn’t use the meter. He charged 25000 lire! What a way to begin our stay! But the rest of the day was marvelous. St. Peter’s (garish, ostentatious, certainly not to my taste, except for Michelangelo’s Pietà). Spanish Steps lovely. Stopped in Keats’s house. Room where he died; kitchen balcony overlooking the Spanish Steps. Trelawney’s letter re: the burning of Shelley, etc. Lovely memorial. Then to the Trevi fountain, another surprise in the midst of nowhere. But the best sight and site was the Pantheon, infinitely more impressive aesthetically than St. Peter’s. The dome is so clean, the space achieved so remarkable. The twelve empty niches aloft must have been for the Olympians, displaced of course when Christianity conquered. Supper in Piazza Navona outdoors, European style, watching humanity pass by.

Tuesday, October 5, 1982

Roma

All morning in the Vatican Museum. Highlights for me: the extraordinarily graceful Apollo Sauroktonos by Praxiteles, and, surprisingly, the Raphael rooms. Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling loses its impact because it is so far away and the details are hard to see. But The Last Judgment, which one can see both close-up and at a distance, is breathtaking in the completeness of its vision. However, the ostentatious wealth and grandeur of the Vatican, not to mention St. Peter’s, repulsed me; there is too much Quaker in me to find this sort of “magnificence” impressive, especially since it is so totally contrary to the life message of Christ.

In the afternoon: Piazza Venezia, which takes the cake for grandiosity. One can easily understand why Mussolini was the way he was, given this environment. Also, as shown in the Venezia monument and also in the murals of Roman history in the Capitoline Museum, the grandeur is almost exclusively militaristic. The more people you killed the greater a hero you were. Next: Foro Romano, with the Arch of Titus—very nice until one remembers that it commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70! The Coliseum of course completes this picture of Roman barbarity, dedicated as it was to mock naval battles, gladiatorial contests, animal fights and the like, not to mention the Christians who were thrown to lions there. We climbed the Palatine Hill, now a park, and also toured the two palaces on the Capitoline Hill, designed by Michelangelo. Here is the lovely Capitoline Venus, the dying Gaul, the Thorn-Extractor, and the murals of Roman “greatness” mentioned earlier. Overwhelmingly, especially in the Capitoline Museums, where there is so much Greek sculpture, one feels the Romans as magnificent robbers, invading everywhere, conquering, plundering, bringing home art and culture in an attempt to civilize themselves. It’s easy, also, to see their obsession with bigness: the various colossi exhibited in the Capitoline, for example—statues with feet as large as a house, so hideous when compared to the Apollo Sauroktonos. . . . Dinner in Piazza Navona again, a lovely setting.

Wednesday, October 6, 1982

Roma

All three of us slept like dead until 9:45. Rushed downstairs so as not to miss breakfast. Then to see Michelangelo’s Moses in San Pietro in Vincola, off the Via Cavour. Moses, with God’s commandments under his arm, stares with disdain at his backsliding people, while at the same time radiating the serenity of a man who has been vouchsafed a divine message. His strength, spiritual and physical, is also conveyed so easily by this marvelous statue. But I don’t know why Michelangelo gave Moses two horns on the top of his head. Then we continued, walking always, to the Baths of Caracalla. Chrysanthi remembers having gone to the opera here in 1955. I don’t. Splendid space, mosaics; again “bigness.” Then out to the Apian Way to the Basilica of St. Sebastian. This was most worthwhile. All history comes together. Sebastian was martyred under the persecution of Diocletian. Afterwards, the remains of Sts. Peter and Paul were placed here temporarily. Then Constantine in the fourth century erected the basilica to commemorate all this. The catacombs underneath incorporate earlier pagan burials (via cremation); lots of inscriptions in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew still visible: Christ, pray for so-and-so. Literally miles and miles of catacombs on five separate levels: a true maze. Luckily they do not allow anyone down without a guide. We walked a bit further along the Appian Way, now a busy thoroughfare, as it was then. Then we returned foot-weary to the hotel. . . . At midnight, to Venice via wagons-lit.

Thursday, October 7, 1982

Venice

Such swirling life in the Rome RR station, full of school children singing and laughing. Sleeper infinitely superior to AMTRAK. Quiet, No rattles. Coffee served in the morning. All seemed familiar, although we’d been here only three or four hours in 1955. Miserable hotel but well located. Directly to Doge’s palace. What gorgeous Titians, especially the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, and its companion piece of the Muses. But, again, one is reminded that all the wealth came from plundering others, shamelessly. Nota bene the fresco glorifying the fourth crusade, which in reality was sheer robbery and greed. By the time we were ready to proceed to St. Mark’s, the waters of the lagoon had begun to flood St. Mark’s Square and elsewhere. The narthex of the church was six inches deep in water. We removed our shoes and socks and waded. Bizarre sight: priests in full regalia, with rolled up trousers and bare feet. Tourists wandering through the church in bare feet. St. Mark’s lets us envision how the Basilica of St. John in Ephesus must have been; the plan is the same. The mosaics, some of which you can see from close up, are as delicate as Raphaelesque paintings, with swirling draperies in ambers and oranges. Yet, as Chrysanthi said, the church as a whole seems somewhat heavy. We’ll see if Hagia Sophia is different. The Byzantine influence is obviously everywhere, including in the treasure room, which, once again, reminds one of the plunder that took place, especially in the Fourth Crusade. By 3:00 p.m. the waters had begun to subside. We went off in the vaporetto to the Lido—no, not in a gondola with its soft seat into which one can relax as though in a coffin! I sought out the Hotel des Bains, which sounds like von Aschenbach’s even though it probably wasn’t. Very disappointing. Like one of the seedy establishments left over in Saratoga Springs. But the beach is lovely and the Lido as a whole, with its rich villas, its casino, its fancy shops, is still an attractive resort. Home to the hotel momentarily and then out to a sumptuous supper at a restaurant on La Giudecca: Carpaccio’s, with the McGraths, the MacMillans, Sally Freschette, Jane?, and the Ballards. I spent $68, which made Chrysanthi angry!

Friday, October 8, 1982

To the Greek Institute. Luckily, Manoussakas was there and let us tour the museum, which was closed. An icon by El Greco’s teacher in Crete; a fourteenth-century manuscript of the romance of Alexander, in Greek, with later additions in Turkish; a papyrus roll from the reign of Justinian, written half in Greek, half in Latin by a man in Ravenna, listing certain donations; remarkable icons, including one showing the donor, Western style; an elaborate wooden bible-stand inlaid in mother-of-pearl, ivory, and tortoise shell, done at Ἅγιον Ὄρος. The Greek community is now almost extinguished; the church continues for four or five people. The Institute has four or five scholarships per year. . . . Later, walking in Venice; lunch in working class restaurant, spaghetti and clams; water-taxi to pier. I gave my first lecture, on pagan sensibility. Most people present.

Saturday, October 9, 1982

Good lecture on Ravenna mosaics by Bob McGrath. Then ashore to see them. St. Apollinare in Classe first, outside the city in the old seaport established by Caesar Augustus. Then St. Vitale and the tomb of Galla Placida, then the Baptistry, finally St. Apollinare Nuovo. In the church at Classe a beautiful apse with the theme of Christ as shepherd: all green, pastoral, filled with sheep. St. Vitale like a peacock’s tail. St. Ap. Nuovo with its two processions: 22 martyrs and 22 virgins plus the 3 magi in their Persian caps and leggings. And in St. Vitale in the apse, of course, the two panels on either side, Justinian on the left with his retinue, bringing forth the holy bread, Theodora on the right with her retinue, bringing forth the wine. The stones in all these churches are laid so the surface is irregular and can thus catch and reflect the light in different ways when it enters from different angles. The San Marco mosaics in Venice have a regular, smooth service, which is why they look so much more like paintings.

Sunday, October 10, 1982

Split. Diocletian’s palace, built in the late third century, is still the middle of the city, incorporated into more recent structures of every era. His mausoleum is today’s Roman Catholic cathedral. I continued my lectures, the three of which are: (1) Pagan Heroism: Alexander, (2) Christian Heroism: Monasticism, (3) Pagan and Christian Heroism Reconciled. . . . Quaker Meeting in the morning, aboard ship. Beautiful.

Monday, October 11, 1982

Guided tour through Dubrovnik in the morning. A walled city with gridiron street patterns, beautifully preserved. In the afternoon Daphne went swimming and Chrysanthi and I walked clear around the walls, with spectacular view of the city and the sea. Many good discussions at mealtimes, deriving from my lectures.

Thursday, October 12, 1982

All day at sea. Trypanis’s morning lecture—mediocre, as I had expected. Lunch with trustees McCulloch and Freschette, Bob McGrath, and Bill Ballard, to discuss Dartmouth problems.

Wednesday, October 13, 1982

Mistras is a marvelous site and sight. The plain of Sparta below, Taygetos above, the exquisite pastels of the frescos inside the tiny churches, the patterns of brickwork on the exteriors. I had lectured previously a little about George Gemistos, Plethon, and it was nice to see where he flourished and where Constantinos Palaiologos was crowned. Sparta is disappointing: nothing but a modern town.

Thursday, October 14, 1982

Monastery of St. John the theologian in the morning. They have a sixth century book on parchment, with letters brushed with silver. I asked one of the monks what the seventh seal of the Apocalypse revealed, and he didn’t know. Said that the entire book was a mystery meant to be understood in time, in the future, not now. I read from Revelation on board, later, and the text came alive for me for the first time. Ephesus in the afternoon. So much more has been revealed since we were there three years ago. Bob McGrath read beautifully from Acts in the stadium. In the evening I read to the group from Sphrantzes’s “Fall of Constantinople.”

Friday, October 15, 1982

Pergamon. The best part is the Asclepeion down below, with its extraordinary tunnels. The famous Acropolis is mostly stirring because of its elevated location and its commanding view of the plain. Only the theater, huge and steep, is there intact. Of course so much is in the museum in Berlin. To Troy by bus in the afternoon. We started with my reading aloud from Arrian and then from the Iliad: bits of books 6 and 9. How nice to recite Homer to appreciative students in this way and in this place! The ramp reminded me of Mycenae. Here and there the walls are impressive. But generally there isn’t much to see, except what is most important: the Hellespont in the distance, and the plain of Troy where the battles took place. The entrance to the site has a hideous “Paris and Helen Café” with drawings making Achilles look like John Wayne. Behind this: a monstrous wooden horse! In the evening, Dan White gave a fine lecture on the Gallipoli campaign.

Saturday, October 16, 1982

Exciting to sail down the Dardanelles and to see before us the domes of Hagia Sophia and of the Blue Mosque opposite. We went immediately to the Hippodrome. How extraordinary to see there the spiral foot of the tripod of Apollo from Delphi, and the base of the obelisk, with reliefs of the Byzantine emperor viewing the games, and a tall shaft stripped completely of its valuable facing by the Fourth Crusade (!). Then into the Blue Mosque, past a gauntlet of urchins and adults hawking tourist objects. Bill Ballard, with his ready wit, commented, “Now I understand why Christ expelled the money changers from the Temple.” Blue Mosque is lovely and grand. But of course there is no representational art, consistent with Muslim prohibitions. The contrast came with the Χώρα church, with its intact mosaics from (I think) the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. A gorgeous Ανάστασις—stunning—plus an entire cycle of the Life of Christ in the narthex. We passed the Theodosian walls along the way—the walls that Mehmet scaled. In the afternoon, to Hagia Sophia. My reaction was very mixed, perhaps dominated by disappointment. The grandeur is still there, obviously, as is the marvel of engineering. But the building is so completely desecrated and stripped that one wants to cry. I made the mistake of accusing only the Muslims, having read Sphantzes’s commentary the day before. But in reality it was the Byzantines themselves, in the iconoclastic centuries, who first stripped the church. Restoration came, magnificently, after the iconoclasts lost; but the Muslims took care of this. Nothing remains but a few fragments, very beautiful, in the gallery, not one scene in the endo-narthex. The low point of the day came next in Topkapi Palace, where the ostentation and crass, vulgar materialism of the Ottomans is on view. The most interesting part, the harem, we missed. In true Turkish style, we were then deposited in a carpet emporium, where Chrysanthi and I gave way and purchased not one but two Turkish carpets.

Sunday, October 17, 1982

A lovely visit to Μονή Αγίου Διονυσίου at the Ἅγιον ῎Ορος. It’s next to Αγίου Παύλου, where I was in 1967. It’s not what we saw, although once again the natural beauty is something I felt to be unsurpassed, but it was the conversation we had with two monks, both young, that was memorable. Both radiated serenity—I should say απάθεια, αταραξία—unmistakably. One had been a bank clerk in Cyprus. Realizing the futility of his worldly pursuits, he studied the Christian message and renounced the world. Tears came to my eyes.

Monday, October 18, 1982

Thessaloniki. George, Lola, and Odysseas met us at the pier. Chrysanthi and Daphne went off with them. I went with the group to Pella (mostly disappointing, except for the mosaic of Dionysos and the panther) and Vergina. Philip’s tomb was closed to us, but I was glad to see the huge palace of Aigai and below it part of the theater where Philip was assassinated. We also saw the Hellenistic tomb called the tomb of Romaios after its excavation and were able to enter it. We’d been here years ago, I think, on the excursion with Petsas. In the afternoon I left the group to go to Αρετσού and have lunch with George, Efthymoula, and Andreas. Andreas is in acting school. Hooray! Parents seem reconciled if not happy. I then took Don White to get an x-ray (he has pneumonia), and visited Themis Altas briefly. Then coffee with George and Odysseas and Chrysanthi. In the evening, “Show and Tell” night. I read a parody of Revelation that I’d composed, and accompanied Arthur White in a Haydn violin concerto. How nice! Beginning to feel like Woodbrooke.

Tuesday, October 19, 1982

From Volos to Meteora. As happens so often, the photographs give only the barest indication of the true beauty and startling magnificence. We visited only one monastery: Βαρλαάμ, which I did not find very interesting except for the fresco of a saint contemplating the ματαιότητα της ζωής by gazing at the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great with its glass top revealing Alexander’s skeleton. But the placement of the monastery—of all the monasteries—is extraordinary. The monoliths are like colossal teeth of smooth sandstone, shaped and polished by the prehistoric lake at whose bottom they once stood. Every moment of the ascent offers a fresh marvel in each direction. To add to the natural phenomenon, a shepherd with his flock was descending from the pastures on the tops of some of the pillars, each sheep with a bell, making a symphony of tinkling in the distance.

At night, the captain’s final banquet, with baked Alaska for desert. I toasted the waiters, assuring them that they would all go to a heaven where they would sit at ease forever and be served by passengers, always smiling. Chrysanthi got angry when I said to Mrs. Trypanis in jest that she loved gossip, and this spoilt the occasion. We ate with Constantine and Aliki Trypanis, and Donald, Joan, and Arthur White. These, and many other people, were most gracious and friendly on the cruise, which all in all was, I think, a success. My attempt to reconcile the pagan and Christian views is, however, something that I wonder if even I believe in.

Wednesday, October 20, 1982

Athens, Hotel Electra

Chrysanthi and Daphne went back to Thessaloniki. I went to Kedros and Efstathiadis. Received coldly at Kedros. The translations of my Cavafy and Kazantzakis pamphlets still haven’t been completed. Ninetta was in the USA. But a nice surprise: Θεανώ Μιχαελίδου was in the office, working on the Varnalis archive. Lovely reunion. Received warmly and courteously by Θεώδορος Ευσταθιάδης, who agreed to publish my Cavafy, Kazantzakis, and Ritsos introductions in English. Then met with Kitromelides, Peter Allen, and Nikiforos Diamandouros regarding (1) the MGSA summer seminar and (2) possible merger between BMGS and the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora. The building where Kitromelides has his institute is an old αρχοντικό being restored by the Ministry of Culture. Next door is the home of the Seferiades clan and now of Τσάτσος: Οδός Κυδαθηναίων. Very useful meeting. Strange to go so immediately and easily to business from the unreality of the cruise. I was also able to visit with Πέτρος Χάρης regarding possible help from the Ouranis Foundation for BMGS. He was very gracious, but everyone says he’s an old fox not to be trusted. Finally, I got George Savidis on the telephone regarding the Harvard exposition next term. A useful day. Λουκουμάδες for supper, on Panepistimiou, where we always go. A 2nd rate Austrian movie to pass the evening.

Thursday, October 21, 1982

Athens

Returned to Kedros and collected 7,000 drachmas in royalties. How nice! The book has sold 600 copies, almost as many as my Kazantzakis book in America with twenty times the population! Then back to Efstathiadis to sign the contract for Kazantzakis-Cavafy-Ritsos. They hope to have the whole thing set in type by Sunday so that the proofs can be delivered to me at the airport. What a difference from Kedros! Book-buying at Ενδοχώρα. Deposit of my royalties in our account at the American Express Bank. After lunch I walked to the Ναός του Ολυμπίου Διός, which I’d never really seen. One column is toppled, just like a pile of dominos pushed over. Acropolis in the distance, the Parthenon covered by scaffolding.

Friday, October 22, 1982

Thessaloniki

Met at the airport last night by Βούλη and Chrysanthi. We went straightway to a taverna and ate souvlaki. Vouli is young and energetic. Talked about Chris Lincoln, Paula Xanthopoulou, Irish Browning, Bruce, the School—κοινά ενδιαφέροντα—and especially about my Harkianakis translations. Vouli says that the archbishop is truly pleased. Today: an exhausting round of visits and meals. Saw Andreas briefly last night at George’s house. The prodigal son. He and his parents do not communicate. He has left law school and is in his third year of acting school. George therefore calls him άρρωστο παιδί. Dimitris has taken his degree and is now in the army. Efthymoula is λυκειάρκισσα. George is διευθυντής τραπέζης ATE. We went to the market to buy an extra valise for the rugs and all the books I’ve accumulated. Then to Themis and Miranda Altas. Their daughter Marianna has grown fat (somewhat); she’s now a lawyer doing an apprenticeship. Rather neurotic girl with fits of dizziness, one of which took place as she entered the house to meet us. She is serving on Sunday as a certifier of the authenticity of ballots in the by-elections. Themis talks about retiring after a few years from his position at the orphanage, but he’ll continue private practice. He’s moved his office across the street. Thus blind Miranda is all alone. Φρίκη. Next: to Lola, Kostas, and Nikos. They went to Russia this summer. Full of enthusiasm. (Later we understood that George’s family and Odysseas’s never even knew about this journey; obviously one member doesn’t talk to the other.) Exchanged a few words with Nikos. That’s the best one can manage, since Kostas does all the talking. Fortunately, the usual Greek diarrhea wasn’t too bad this time. Then alone to Kolokotroni 11. Found Eleni and Γιαγιά. The latter full of vigor. Asked me how much I understood από τα χωριατικά μου. I said τα μισά. Eleni showed me a photo of Dimitrios in the coffin at the funeral. Very moved. He always spoke very well of me, they assured me. I of course always returned the compliment. He was very resistant to the end—didn’t want to believe or admit that he was weak; kept tearing out catheters, etc. Eleni took me to the Attikon Odeon. Nice sounds: Beethoven, Chopin. Stavros emerged from a lesson looking just as much a slob as always. But he and Toula work like slaves and have a following. Now he’s opened a store to sell pianos! He imports them from Korea. He has also translated some music books from Russian into Greek and plans to begin a series of publications. Toula is still sweet and youthful. Her students are progressing; they don’t take beginners now. Takis came. In the dumps. He graduated from the Polytechneio in June and is now unemployed. Said he “detested” his years at the school. In the entire course they never did practical exercises. He also realized how shoddy the Greek building practices are. Everything is done quickly and cheaply, to realize the greatest profit. Everyone we encountered so far is delighted with PASOK and Papandreou. What a difference from the views expressed by Trypanis, but no surprise. Thence to Vouli’s for dinner with Bruce and Tad Lansdale, Vouli’s mother, and Κυρά Κούλα. Ι asked Bruce about Chris Lincoln. He said, “Wait a minute,” and pulled a notebook out of his pocket, in which he had a graph called “Happiness Quotient” for newcomers in Greece:

In short: an initial surge of glee followed by utter despondency in which everything is found to be horribly wrong. This lasts for six months at least, with minor ups and downs. Then, with luck, there is a zigzag path upward again. Chris just didn’t have patience. Bruce said he’d hire him again if he showed up. Tad liked my Harkianakis translations, which apparently Vouli had showed her. Superb dinner (as usual chez Vouli). Bruce planning for retirement; bought a house in Florida. Back to George’s after midnight, to start all over again because Dimitris had arrived from Tripolis, where he’s doing basic training for the air force. With him Tilda, his fiancée (as I learned afterwards). She’s got one more year of medical school. She’s the girl that George has resisted so bitterly because she’s Jewish (!). Suffers from migraines, like Outi. Obviously very self-possessed and intelligent. To bed at 2:00 a.m. for four hours of sleep.

Saturday, October 23, 1982

Thessaloniki

Up early to go with Daphne to Anatolia College for PSAT exams. Spent two hours talking with Bill McGrew about the school and Greek life. His dissertation is on methods of recording land ownership (or not recording it). This grew out of his employment with Litton Industries for development schemes that never materialized, επί χούντας. Litton inefficient if not corrupt. He explained to me the historical reasons why Greeks cannot understand our concept of a non-profit school or society. In Greece, everything is either for profit or κρατικό. Nothing in between. If a school isn’t κρατικό they assume it’s for profit, and also a screen for CIA, spying, etc. Much of this goes back to the Caesaropapism of Justinian and all the successors in Europe, the Napoleonic codes, etc., as opposed to the Anglo Saxon traditions that we inherit. Nice man. Great supporter of MGSA. Returning to George’s I took Andreas out for a cup of coffee and we talked for two hours first about the possibility of his studying acting in America and then about his poems, on which I commented line by line. They are not very good, alas, something that he realizes. When I returned, George cornered me: “What did he say?” Alas, son and father don’t communicate directly. Efthymoula, to my surprise, is much more tolerant and rational about the situation. She’s saving her salary each month to help him. In the evening, Kostas and Lola came and again we had hours of talk, plus food of course. Talked about Terpni, where they still have first cousins. The house where they were all born still stands, but is unoccupied, with broken windows, etc. Two rooms and a large courtyard, that’s all. We heard the news on television and I understood everything now that demotic is used.

Sunday, October 24, 1982

Takis stayed up half the night in order to get Stavros’s car to help us transfer baggage to the airport. Good lad! In Athens, Nick Eliopoulos of Efstathiadis was waiting, as promised, with the galley proofs of my forthcoming book “Kazantzakis-Cavafy-Ritsos.” Unbelievable! The whole thing finished in two days and delivered into my hands! “We believe in the American system,” he told me. (Μακάρι να γινόταν έτσι στην Αμερική!) Met the Rixtons, who are ticketed on the same TWA flight home. Difficult to think that tomorrow there’ll be the usual: bills to pay, bank, post office, stove to light, cat to feed. My first project is clear: finish the proofs, add my own translations of the Cavafy poems, getting rid of Dalven’s finally, prepare up-to-date bibliographies, send a short curriculum vitae and a photograph for the back cover. Then, I hope, Kazantzakis. Will I ever finish?

December 12, 1982

Hanover

Overheard in Howard Johnson’s at 5:00 a.m. while I was having breakfast after returning on AMTRAK from the MGSA annual meeting in NYC: local teenager having breakfast with three others (boys and girls); they’d been at a disco all night. A piece of his bacon dropped on the floor apparently, and he remarked with dry Vermont humor: “Didn’t change the flavor none.”

December 23, 1982

New York

On the way up Madison Avenue to the Met: Blind man resolutely striding, with cape, and with stick sweeping back and forth. Hesitated at curb. I took his arm and offered to help. Out came gruffly, in heavy German accent, “79th Street, I know!” Blindfold over face. Bizarre. Beckett’s Pizza alive on Madison Avenue.

Saw Alex. Exhibit again at the Met. Disappointing after Boston. Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit even more disappointing. Better in the printed bulletin.

Made inquiries re: Australia.

December 24, 1982

To theater with Alec, Daphne, Mother, Chrysanthi to see “Good,” a powerful play on the way in which an intellectual is sucked into Nazism almost in spite of himself, gradually; from acceptance of the benign he moves to defense of the horrific (holocaust). The breakdown of rationality and its replacement by casuistry.

December 25, 1982

We all walked and walked. Everything closed. Hoped to board the aircraft carrier Intrepid at the Hudson River and 46th. Closed. Walked clear across town to the East River. United Nations Plaza. Temperature an unbelievable 65 degrees. Sweating. We stopped in a coffeehouse and I ordered cappuccino (memories of Rome!). Suddenly Chrysanthi exclaimed, “Look a sheep!” I twirled around to see this unlikely sheep in UN Plaza, knocking over my valuable cappuccino. But it was only a “ship” sailing up the East River. We all guffawed heartily.

December 26, 1982

To Meeting at 15th Street. After a few platitudinous messages about how good Jesus was, etc., a man stood up and said, “I don’t believe in God, don’t believe in Jesus. We’re not the center of all creation, as Christianity teaches; we’re a speck along with billions of other specks in an immense universe, and it is completely indifferent whether we exist or do not exist.” He went on, becoming somewhat digressive. An elder said to him, sotto voce, “Make thy point, friend.” He replied, in full voice, “I’ll make my point at my own speed, and it’s going to take a long time.” At this, several people walked out. Others stood up, until about 15–20 were standing, a way of signaling him to sit down, apparently. He vowed to keep standing and talking. Someone approached him. “We’re not going to have violence here, are we?” he asked, and the person withdrew. He dwelt on the Quaker openness to all forms of truth, accusing his opposition of hypocrisy. Finally, he stopped, threatening to stand in silence as long as others stood. The others sat. He stood, but eventually sat. At break of Meeting the man who’d first eldered him shook his hand. After the Meeting I saw the two of them conversing. Not bad, considering! Quakers do have remarkable forms. An added touch: the one black person at Meeting approached me afterwards: “Professor Bien, etc.” He was my student years earlier, a sweet, diffident man, now a journalist in Newark, and a convinced Friend.

December 27, 1982

To Los Angeles via Chicago.

December 28, 1982

Los Angeles

At MLA, Hyatt Regency Hotel. Lunch with Thanssis Maskaleris, Demetris Liappas, Leo Papademetre, Maria Herrey. Then our session, which I chaired in Dia’s absence. Herrey’s paper on Sofianos was splendid. Ditto for Leo’s on alternate forms of the imperative. Evris Bakiridis’s less compelling, and Salamone rather digressive and old hat on katharévousa in Papadiamandis and demotic in Kazantzakis. Lots of discussion; good flow. We had ample time, for once. Went from 1:45 to 5:30 p.m. Then off to Santa Monica to TV studio for interview with Thanassis. Done very well by a Greek (Cretan) lady who turned out to have marched in Kazantzakis’s funeral as a child. Dinner in a seafood restaurant. The lively waitress whom I thought typically Californian turned out to be a transplant from New York.

December 29, 1982

Los Angeles

Breakfast with Maria Herrey. From 7:45 a.m. to 11:30! We got thrown out, since it was lunchtime. How nice to talk at such ease for so long. A rare pleasure. P.M. saw the promotional for John Rassias’s new movie series. Flight left at midnight. Exhausting.

December 30, 1982

Philadelphia

To ΑΡΑ congress at Franklin Plaza Hotel. Dropped in at Quaker Center on Race and 15th, my first visit. Saw Betsy Balderson there. Looking for Lorama Pixton and Steve Cary, but both were out. APA/MGSA session well attended. Papers by Levitt (poor), Kolakidis (good), Athanasakis (fair) and ? from West Chester State College (poor).

December 31, 1982

Hanover

Exhausted after 2nd sleepless night. Up until 2:00 a.m. at Rassias’s New Year’s eve party. The first without Yiayia, whom I toasted.

1983

Hanover

January

Commuting to Cambridge,

February-May

John Winthrop House K31

Hanover to Cambridge, Cambridge Friends Meeting

June 5

Boston–San Francisco, All Seasons Hotel,

June 6

419 Stockton Street, 94108 (415 986-8737)

Berkeley, supper at home of Michael and

Teresa and Jane Heyman

San Francisco–Honolulu

June 7

Honolulu, Friends Center, 2426 Oahu Avenue

June 8

Honolulu–Townsville–Sydney–Melbourne

June 9

(became June 10 as we crossed the international date line)

Melbourne. Town House Hotel,

June 10–13

701 Swanston St., Carlton

876 Swanston Street, Carlton 3053

June 14–August 31

Sydney, University Motor Inn,

25 Arundel St., Broadway, July 23–27

Melbourne–Sydney–Papeete, Tahiti,

August 31–September 1

Hotel Tahiti, P.O. Box 416, Papeette,

Tahiti, French Polynesia, tel. 2-95-50

Los Angeles, Hotel Claremont,

September 2–3

1044 Tiverton Ave., 90024, 213 208-5947

Hanover

September 4–Dec. 31

NYC, MGSA conference, Prince George Hotel, 14 E. 28 St. 10016, 532-7800

October 27–30

Philadelphia chez Alec

October 31

Washington, Library of Congress Kazantzakis celebration, Embassy Row Hotel, 2015 Mass Ave. NW 20036, 202 265-1600

November 1

Philadelphia, Pendle Hill

November 18–20

NYC

December 12

NYC for MLA

Dec. 25–30

January 1, 1983

Hanover

Nodas here for New Year’s lunch. Audrey also and Corindias, etc. Games afterwards. Alec here with Randy, a fellow teacher at Friends Central, an Oberlin grad who has taught two years in China (ESL). Nice, lively person. Alec and I played Bach, Mozart, and Schubert after everyone had left. Joy!

January 2, 1983

I’ll record here, again, some notes taken two years ago when we learned of Ellen Grunblatt’s marriage to a distant relation of ours. Upon inquiring I discovered the following:

Nathan and Jenny ran a grocery store in Coney Island. Isidore was a fake MD, a self-styled anesthesiologist, really an abortionist with a mail-order degree of some kind. Mean and selfish according to my father. Some roots!

February–May, 1983

Harvard

From February 1st until the end of May I was visiting professor of classics in the Seferis Chair at Harvard, living comfortably in John Winthrop House K-entry #31 (top floor of a neat little private house on the river, incorporated into Winthrop), thanks to the good offices of Jim and Martha Davis, formerly of Dartmouth, now masters of JWH. Scandalously, I wrote not a single entry about the Harvard experience while I was there. Rather, as this extraordinary year (cruise—Harvard—Australia) drew to a close, and we were flying back home to Los Angeles and then Boston—i.e., to work and reality—I recorded some of my memories, working from my appointment calendar for February, March, April, and May. My job was to teach two courses, one at 9:00 a.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays called Kazantzakis and Politics, the other at 10:00 a.m., same days, on Odysseus Across the Centuries (Iliad, Odyssey, Pindar, Ajax, Philoctetes, Metamorphosis XIII, Inferno 26, du Bellay, Tennyson, Cavafy, Kazantzakis’s Odyssey, Ritsos, Seferis, Joyce’s Ulysses). The first had about eight students, mostly very sleepy—lots of absenteeism. But Mike Antonakes audited faithfully and kept up my morale. Lily Macrakis’s daughter Michelle also came as an auditor and lowered my morale because she was so hopelessly passive. The course really didn’t go very well, chiefly because of the early hour and also because I had to rush to the next class at 10:00 and couldn’t extend the discussion. But there were some very interesting students, including one taking it for graduate audit. (I’ve just had a strong reaction, which shows up, also, in my handwriting.) The other course was entirely different. I’ve never had such good students in profusion, and such good discussions. We went officially from 10:00 to 11:30 but often to 12:00 since no other class was scheduled. I was amazed at the devotion, the preparation, the intelligence of the students. Also, I had a graduate assistant, a student of Albert Lord’s, who corrected all the exams and papers, and made all the arrangements, etc. In short, I was completely spoiled. I commuted each week, leaving Hanover on Mondays at about 1:30, arriving in Cambridge for supper, then leaving immediately after “Greek Table” in Lowell House on Thursdays and getting home at about 11:00 p.m. Strange to return to Lowell House in this fashion, after having been stranded there in 1949–1950. But my lodgings in John Winthrop K 31 overlooked the river. Secluded, roomy, with refrigerator and hotplate. At Harvard I became gregarious. Perhaps it was memories of eating alone in Lowell House when I was a student. So, this time I arranged almost every meal with someone. I’ve never had so much social life. Hosts at John Winthrop were James Davis and Martha, co-masters, whom of course I knew when they were at Dartmouth. They were most gracious, introducing me to people, inviting me to luncheons, etc. Each 1st Thursday of the month there was a faculty lunch where one could meet people—so different from Dartmouth. I also had of course the friendship of Dia Philippides, who was my supporter from start to finish. In sum, although at first I was hypersensitive about being alone, I managed beautifully. I had more stimulation at Harvard in the form of interesting people encountered and intellectual conversation, splendid students, in these three months than I’ve had at Dartmouth in the past ten years. But I have to realize that my situation was special, as a visitor. If I were there permanently, perhaps I’d be just as isolated as at Dartmouth.

What fun to be in George Savidis’s office, Widener 175, with of course access to the stacks. I spent my first year at Harvard, 1948–49, in the Widener reading room. Unchanged.

Now, some details.

February 8, 1983

Lunch with Antonakes. How nice that the hard feelings and awkwardness following the failure of his play have disappeared. Met former Dartmouth student Ben Benami and his new wife.

February 9, 1983

Began going to Quaker breakfasts at Lowell House. Went two or three times but didn’t continue. Felt a little out of place. All the others are students; I was the only “adult.”

February 10, 1983

Helped in an interview for Marshall Fellowship. I’m glad they’re using me in Winthrop. Greek table at Lowell tonight, each Thursday. We try to talk Greek; then I rush off to the Greyhound terminal and catch the bus to Hanover.

February 14, 1983

Supper with Martin McKinsey, a young translator of Ritsos, Elytis, etc. Very talented. Auditing the Ulysses course.

February 15, 1983

Comparative Literature Department luncheon. I met Walter Kaiser. Very friendly. Also Cynthia Stallman, Ph.D. candidate who trained in Melbourne under Roger Scott and Graham Harten. Supper with Lily Macrakis, the first of several meetings devoted to our MGSA publication on historiography (Anatolia Report) and also, later, issue #1 of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. She proved a difficult person with no conception whatsoever of how to edit properly. But I had to humor her, and to try desperately to remain on good terms.

February 16, 1983

Lunch with Kristin Lindgren, Dartmouth graduate living in Cambridge. Sweet girl who’s become a little attached to us. Sent her to Greece last year. Supper with Peter Gardner. Very pleasant. He’s planning to remarry, for the 3rd time. Says he’s doing well as a “therapist.” But I was deeply disappointed because, although I invited him twice (the next time with his fiancée) he never reciprocated.

February 17, 1983

One of many meals with my teaching fellow, Randy Eldevik, a huge Norwegian woman from Minnesota. Very reliable and bright.

February 22, 1983

Kristin Lindgren brought Daniella Wieser-Varon with her for supper at a local Greek restaurant. I asked Daniella to request her father’s aid in publishing Jacques Grunblatt’s translation of Seven Hills, on the holocaust. Her father was formerly in the Israeli delegation to the United Nations, and ambassador to Paraguay. Later he contacted me and we lunched at the Faculty Club. He gave some leads but so far nothing has happened that I know of.

February 23, 1983

Went to observe the Expos program. The old English A. Richard Marius, the chairman, turns out to be a Greek-American. Chris Flug, in JWH, is involved. Supper with Ames Abbott, Dartmouth student who got a job at Athens College through me.

March 2, 1983

Marvelous lecture in Sanders Theater by Carlos Fuentes, on Marquez. Superb. I never heard him all the time he was at Dartmouth, although I sat next to him once at a dinner thanks to a friend in the Spanish Department, and talked about Vassilis Vassilikos. Went with Will Lee, then to his apartment for supper. He’s remarried happily, to an Italian-American.

March 8, 1983

One of many meals with Leo Papademetre, whom I just met in Los Angeles last Christmas. Bright young Greek, Ph.D. in linguistics from Brown. I’m trying to help him. He’s helped me on the revisions of Demotic Greek I.

March 9, 1983

Lunch at the Faculty Club with Chris Flug, who seems to have taken a liking to me. I got her invited to the Ivy League Conference at the Minary Center next October.

March 10, 1983

Albert Hendricks, chairman of the Classics Department, took me to lunch. Pleasant, but no one in the department has gone out of his way to be particularly friendly, not even Zeff Stewart, with whom I negotiated. Big smiles, hellos, etc., but nothing further.

March 17, 1983

Alice Buseck here with daughter Susan, interested in Harvard. Found the daughter very stuck-up and disagreeable. I took them to supper at JWH.

March 21, 1983

Invited Sarah and Fotis Kafatos to JWH dinner. He is professor of biology, a Cretan whom we’d met in 1964 or so. Now helping to set up the University of Crete.

March 23, 1983

Lunch with Angeliki Laiou, professor of Byzantine history. A little stiff, but loosened up in subsequent meetings.

March 25, 1983

Drove to Colebrook, Connecticut, to meet Bill McNeill, the new editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. John Iatrides came, too. Then to MGSA meetings in NYC, and on Sunday to the Kinhaven Board meeting in the Riverside Drive apartment of the musical patron Ann Ratnor. One of the nice memories: Arriving on the bus from Hanover around 5:00 p.m., taking MBT to Park Street and buying a donut to eat on the MBT to Harvard Square.

April 4, 1983

Classes resume, after a week’s recess. Supper with Irene Kacandes, my graduate student in the Kazantzakis and Politics course. At her home. Husband is an accountant, very “square.” Strange.

April 5, 1983

Ihor Ševčenko took me to lunch at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sat next to the famous philosopher Quine, who turns out to have known Tom Vance. Also met the editor of Daedalus, former employer of Daniella Vieser-Varon, interested in doing an issue on Greece. Ševčenko most gracious. I’d been unreasonably frightened by him when I first met him at Oxford, with Bryer, and then in B’ham. Told me that the “immortals” of the Academy treated me very well; they can be biting, apparently. Met a youngish assistant professor of Norwegian saga named Steve Mitchell. Albert Lord thinks highly of him.

April 11, 1983

Arrival of Rev. Bob Wessman, whom I’d met at the weekend on Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός. He’s come to Harvard to audit my course for two weeks. Great addition in class and out. Announced to class at the first meeting that he had killed so many enemies and friends in Vietnam, he’s stopped counting. But Kazantzakis made Christianity possible for him. Michelle Macrakis greeted him the next day by saying, “Ah, here’s the killer!” I could have killed her.

April 12, 1983

David Wingrove, one of the most memorable students in the Odyssey course, invited me to a student-faculty dinner at Lowell House. He’s a Canadian, son of English emigrants.

April 13, 1983

Lunch at the Faculty Club with Jim and Martha Davis. Drinks at 5:00 with Stratis Haviaras, poet-novelist who runs the Poetry Room at Lamont. Just finished a second novel. To Ševčenko’s seminar at 8:00, at his home in Follen Street. Wife Nancy very friendly. Speaker was Roger Scott of Melbourne. Cynthia Stallman of Melbourne was also there plus two Melbourne seminarians at St. Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox monastery. Also at these seminars is Ambassador MacVeigh’s daughter, whom we met once at Bruce and Tad Lansdale’s house at the American Farm School.

April 19, 1983

Lunch at Kennedy Center with Bill Beld, Alec’s friend who helped Alec at the farm last summer (1982) and now is doing a master’s degree in education at Harvard.

April 20, 1983

To B.U., guest of Steve Salamone, an obese, frenetic classicist doing wonders there for Modern Greek. Saw how they’re cataloguing the Lagoudakis collection. Met Vouras, who’s in charge.

April 21, 1983

Lunch at the Faculty Club with Mike Antonakes, Bob Wessman, and Mike’s friend Bill Wesselooski—three fans of Kazantzakis. Forgot to say that in March Anna Farmakidis came down to Hellenic College for a meeting of the Inter-University Colloquium, and I had her and Dia and Chrysanthi to supper at the Faculty Club. Trying hard to make peace with Anna. Today Donald Nicol talked on Greeks in Byzantium. Angeliki Laiou invited me to the dinner afterwards. Then Donald and I walked around the Yard for two hours and had a coffee together. Very cordial reunion. We both regretted the split that occurred in BMGS, but felt that we could remain friends. He’d been in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Greece during World War II. Knows Donald Swann. Was captured by the αντάρτες during the Dekemvriana, released unharmed.

April 25, 1983

Georgia Noble took me to dinner.

April 26, 1983.

Conference with Judy Anderson, super-excitable student in the Ulysses class. As soon as the first paper came due, she collapsed, dropped the course

April 22, 1983.

To Boston for a drink with David Godine. Commonwealth Avenue all in bloom, magnolias magnificent. “One of the great streets,” David said. He took me to his club, founded by Parkman and others.

May 3, 1983

To Boston for supper with Steve Scully, now teaching under Steve Salamone at B.U., and his wife, daughter of Robert Penn Warren. Small salary; the usual problems. Lunch with one of my students, John Kelly, a poor boy from Cambridge who made it into Harvard. Randy and I gave a party for our class. Greek μεζεδάκια and wine, held in the Tomkins Room of JWH. I didn’t feel like doing anything for the other class. Forgot to say that in this same room, at one of the Thursday luncheons, I had the most marvelous conversation with a young psychologist about how the brain functions or fails to function (on pretext of Jerry Bidlack’s son Benjy, hit by a car and now hardly functioning mentally and nervously).

May 10, 1983

Drink with Gregory Nagy, my neighbor in Widener. All smiles like the others, but nothing further. I had to invite him. Supper at Martin McKinsey’s girlfriend’s with an assortment of strange and fascinating people.

May 15, 1983

Dia held a party for us in her flat: Zeff Stewart and wife, Ihor and Nancy Ševčenko. Nice of her. On the 16th I talked on Kazantzakis 19th century 20th century romantic before an audience of about five at the European Center, arranged by Sarah Kafatos. Pouring rain didn’t help. (But I used the same lecture twice in Australia, once in Melbourne to about 200 people, and again in Sydney to about 30. Also plan to use it in Cambridge at the Kazantzakis Celebrations next September-October, and again at the Library of Congress in November, so I shouldn’t complain of wasted effort.)

May 17, 1983

Great pleasure to have Randy and my “A” students to dinner at the Faculty Club.

May 18, 1983

Savidis is here. I treated him and Lily Macrakis to dinner. He surprised me by complaining about the victory of demotic in Greece. “Our students can’t read Papadiamantis. They don’t know katharévousa.”

May 20, 1983

Gave exam; then flew to Philadelphia for the Pendle Hill board.

May 24, 1983

John Iatrides at Cambridge to discuss MGSA bibliography project. Lunch with Walter Kaiser.

May 25, 1983

Lunch with Laiou and her son. Suddenly she seemed human.

May 26, 1983

Visited Jan Ziolkowski and his lovely wife at North House. Steve Mitchell also. I tried to interest Jan in Donald Swann’s bestiary songs, without success. Forgot to say that previously Mitchell had Ziolkowski, me, and Albert and Mary Lord to dinner. The moment I saw Lord, he said with a smile, “Lubbock, Texas!” I enthused about computers. Lord wants to do his next book on a word processor.

May 27, 1983

My last obligation: another exam. Lunch with Mr. Vieser-Varon, who pledges to help re: Grunblatt’s translation.

I have of course omitted much, especially the scintillating discussions on Homer, Joyce, etc., another occasional “breakthrough” in the Kazantzakis class, the adventure of living a quasi-bachelor existence with the freedom involved. On the other hand, the joy of returning to Chrysanthi after periods of absence (on one occasion, nearly two weeks, when I went to Philadelphia on the weekend instead of returning home). Working up lectures until 1:00 a.m. the night before, continuing at 6:00 a.m. the next morning; the stamina is still there! Occasional meal alone at Chinese restaurant down the street. Häagen Dazs ice cream in my room, for nightcaps. Talk, talk talk! Cambridge-Harvard must be one of the most stimulating environments in the world. It spoiled me for Dartmouth, alas.

June 7, 1983

Today I am in San Francisco, waiting for a limousine to take Chrysanthi, Daphne, and me on the next leg of our journey to Australia—namely, San Francisco to Honolulu. Three years after being approached by Stathis Gauntlett of Melbourne, who asked whether they could put in my name for a Fulbright grant, the grant came through. Indeed, the morning following our horrendous 25-hour return trip from Athens in October, the phone rang to announce my success and ask if I was prepared to journey to Australia! I am to teach Cavafy, Ritsos, the το γλωσσικό ζήτημα, Kazantzakis’s drama, and miscellaneous other things Greek. Chrysanthi is meant to teach the language to elementary students (from Demotic Greek I, which we revised this year and actually printed—Steve Waite did the job) and to intermediate students, from Demotic Greek II, Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος, which I saw through the press this year also, not to mention its accompanying workbook, done by me on the computer, as was the text itself, the Teacher’s Manual, done by John Rassias, and two cassettes: one with the scenarios read by Greek actors of NYC under the direction of Nikos Skipitaris, the other with dictations produced by Paul Morby and Christos Alexiou in Birmingham, with “Maria” (Kasdaglis’s daughter) and other students there doing the readings. Daphne will play in the Melbourne Youth Symphony and the International Festival Orchestra, and maybe study Greek.

In any case, here we are in San Francisco, on the way. The date of departure was determined mostly by Daphne’s victory in the Young Artists’ Competition of the Hanover Chamber Orchestra. Her concert was Saturday, June 4th; with the other winners (Joy Clendenning and Laura Sices) she did a Vivaldi concerto (nicely) and the Dvořák Bagatelles (not so well). I spoke with the conductor, James Yannatos, permanent conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, who turned out to be a lover of Kazantzakis who is writing a “mass” in which he wants to use passages from Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο. Alec turned up for the concert, having driven from Philadelophia following graduation exercises at Friends Central School. Ellen DeCesare also arrived with her stunning daughter Martha de Cheï-sa-reï, a blond beauty who obviously attracted Alec’s eye immediately. (He has broken, I hope, with Elizabeth Dean finally.) Ellen will house-sit for us for the month of June, until Bob and Elborg Forster arrive for July and August.

On Sunday the 5th Alec and I attended Meeting (a good one, warm and deep). Then Ellen drove us to Cambridge, where we stayed overnight at the Friends Center. Too bad that Ed and Marian Sanders weren’t there. The person who “greeted”us was as disagreeable as could be, and made me sick at heart. But we slept well in their beautiful guest room in Longfellow Park, rose at 6:00 a.m. and took a taxi to Logan. Good flight to San Francisco. We were meant to stay again at the Friends Center and drove there in a taxi but found it so far out that we decided to stay in a hotel in the center instead. Miraculously, we were able to get to the Berkeley Art Museum by 7:00 p.m. to meet Michael and Teresa Heyman by prearrangement, and their son James, a student at Williams College. The event at the museum was a reception for two interesting artists who made art out of newspaper reportage, the hows and whys of which they explained at great length. Walked through the Berkeley campus a bit beforehand; Not as lovely as I’d expected. The “mythical” park of 1969–70 was there, of course, not looking very mythical any longer. (Compare with Greek sites. Why do they retain such an aura?) Mickey took us to the Chancellor’s mansion (they’ll be moving in next week) and treated us to a sumptuous dinner. How nice of him, in honor of an old friendship! I compare this with Peter Gardner’s indifference after I’d invited him twice in Cambridege. We talked mostly about computers as it turned out. James drove us back to the hotel.

June 8, 1983

San Francisco

Sightseeing with a vengeance! Grayline tour in the morning. Fisherman’s Wharf; walking at leisure. A nice city, but not as spectacularly nice as I’d been led to believe. The parks are lovely, and the civic buildings and civic core are exceptional. I remember the civic official I met recently in Cambridge and how proud he was of his city’s government. Flight in the evening to Honolulu, 4½ hours. The SF airport was like a teeming oriental city, filled with Philippinos and Singaporeans. The Australians are all very robust and blond and jolly on first impression; the plane is full of them. S.F. is filled with Japanese. A Japanese family ran our hotel; Japanese served in the adjacent fast-food restaurant; a Japanese girl found us our hotel at the bus depot, etc.

June 9, 1983

Honolulu

We slept in the Friends Center, where Gail gave us a properly Friendly welcome, waiting up until 12:30 a.m. to receive us. Jet lag helped us sleep soundly. In the morning, we took the no. 6 bus downtown, enjoying the oriental faces who borded. This left us at a huge shopping center: open mall, so-called. Lovely! With lush plantings, goldfish pools, etc. A true αγορά, truly a meeting place for friends, not just an emporium, and all possible, of course, because of the climate. Called Al Manoa, I think. From here we boarded a no. 52 bus, all still on the same 50-cent fare used on no. 6. This took us on a rather exhausting five-hour journey around the entire island. Again the faces on board were the most interesting “scenery.” But I saw bamboo for the first time, and coconut palms, and bananas, and sugar cane, and hundreds of acres of pineapples (Dole Co, and Del Monte), and papaya trees. The afternoon we spent deliciously on Waikiki Beach, a delightful place with perfect sand, cleanliness, pellucid water, scenic scenery, and lovely young bodies in profusion. The shopping centers, also, are imaginatively attractive. We also saw some Banyan trees, huge matriarchs spreading their arms. Passed Pearl Harbor, where the “Arizona” lies sunk and visible. (In San Francisco, I viewed a submarine, WWII vintage; it had a Remington Standard typewriter exactly like the one I still use at the farm, the one that was my father’s in the office.)

At this point we are six hours “wrong.” But the worst is still to come. Another eight hours or so before we reach Australia.

June 10, 1983

To Melbourne via Townsville and Sidney. How stupid of me not to have planned a stopover in Townsville to see the Great Barrier Reef, but I didn’t even realize that we were stopping here. Arrived at 5:30 a.m. in the dark and saw the sunrise while in the airport. Thence to Sidney—immigrations, and, with a change of planes, to Melbourne. A Mr. Frank de Greet, obviously a womanizer, took a shine to Daphne and then to all of us, filling us with bits of information. At the airport, Stathis Gauntlett met us, with his Greek wife Maria and child Loukia. He is Welsh on his father’s side, Greek on his mother’s. Grew up in South Wales. Did his degree in French and Modern Greek at Oxford. Our house is not ready, so he put us up in the Town House Hotel for three days. We walked around the university. The whole site and sight, at first, seems very much like Birmingham. Equally drab and ugly. University very unattractive, visually. A hodge-podge of “red brick” Victorian and Oxbridge pretentiousness. Pavlos Andronikos joined us for lunch. He is an Anglo-Cypriot, grew up in London, did his degree in B’ham. I’d met him there at a seminar in 1979. Later, Meg sent me his (poor) translation of Ο Βασίλης ο Αρβανίτης. Now he’s junior faculty here. After lunch, we walked downtown as far as the river, saw shopping areas, the municipal library, etc. Everything as though lifted up from B’ham and transported here. Around 6:00 p.m. we were so tired that we all collapsed into bed.

Saturday, June 11, 1983

Melbourne

We’re all waking up at 5:00 a.m., no matter when we go to bed—part of the jet lag still. In the morning we walked to Victoria Market, a huge affair very European in flavors: meats, vegetables, clothing, poultry, hides, cheeses, etc., a wealth of produce. In the afternoon we took the tour to Phillip Island. Saw Koala bears in their eucalyptus trees on a preserve. Lethargically ingesting leaves while perched high up on a branch, their hind legs wrapped around the branch, their front legs used like human arms and hands. They are marsupials, one of the species preserved here and nowhere else, because of Australia’s isolation. Then to the “Penguin Parade.” The fairy penguins fish all day, swimming long distances. One of each pair stays in the burrow with the children while the other fishes. The next day they alternate. The fisher, upon return, regurgitates its catch for the child. At dusk, all the fishers emerge en masse from the sea, in successive groups. Apparently they belong to tribes. As soon as the tribe comes out of the sea, they line up like soldiers until all ranks are filled. (If not, they turn round, go back into the water momentarily and start all over again from the beginning.) When the ranks are successfully filled, they then march in file up the beach, waddling cutely, and make their way along special paths to their own burrows. Just like commuters returning home from work! We saw all this on the floodlit beach. Hundreds emerged, paraded, marched. Later, we saw them in their burrows, cooing and gurgling. A unique spectacle.

Sunday, June 12, 1983

Melbourne

To Quaker Meetng. Messages very familiar. Met Peter Jones, an English “wanderer,” full-time peace worker, who’d been at Woodbrooke and Pendle Hill, stayed overnight with the Bouldings in Colorado, been in Mayme Noda’s affinity group at Seabrooke! Small world. Also an American couple transplanted to Australia. About forty people in Meeting, including young people. Singing and lunch afterwards. It’s way over on the other side of the city, which will make for difficulties in attendance, alas, unless we get a car. Walked afterwards in the beautiful parks. Saw Lonsdale Street, the Greek quarter. A store had my Efstathiadis Ritsos book! Saw a Greek wedding in progress in a church. The bride arrived in a dress so elaborate that she seemed to be held prisoner within. An older man outside the church told us with pride that he was the cutter in the dressmaker’s establishment that had created this “cage.” The girl seemed truly to be a sacrifice being led to slaughter, and she looked very very unhappy.

Monday, June 13, 1983

Melbourne

A Bank Holiday, celebrating the Queen’s birthday. Beautiful blue skies. The air feels just like Birmingham’s on a nice day. We walked to the zoo: koalas, kangaroos, wombats, exotic birds. Saw male kangaroos playfully jabbing at each other and kicking while bracing themselves on their tails. A marvelous zoo, with simulated natural conditions, especially in the gigantic aviary divided into rain jungle, wetlands, and grasslands. Pelicans galore, ostriches, giraffes, zebras, a lovely lion with his harem. But we missed the platypus, open only after 1:00 p.m. Another time.

Stathis picked us up and took us south of Melbourne to his village home. Two sweet girls, Loukia and Katerina. Wife Maria, a Cypriot. She likes it here, as does Stathis. Beyond their home, farther south about one mile or less, the furthest reach of the horrendous bush fire they had last summer. Charred trees. Their house escaped by a hair’s breadth, really. After lunch we drove to Mt. Macedon (named by a surveyor who wanted to match it with Phillip’s Island). Charred, devastated forests, homes in rubble, with only the hearth and chimney standing, families in caravans on their land where homes had been. From the top, a huge patch of black, destroyed, surrounded by the almost Vermont-like green of the land that had escaped. For three days it had been entirely out of control. The top of Mt. Macedon looked like the rim of the sun, with huge tongues of flame shooting into the sky.

I finished Myrivilis’s Ο Βασίλης ο Αρβανίτης finally. Very disappointing. Nice writing, of course—that lovely prose!—but as a “story” it’s so episodic and unsophisticated. Stathis liked my translation of Ή ζωή ἐν τάφῳ and actually remembered with glee the passage about “pale and hardy.”

Tuesday, June 14, 1983

Settled in our house in Swanston Street across from the Uni. Large. Too large. Centrally heated after a fashion (but we really haven’t been cold here). Bedroom faces the street, so we have traffic sounds to adjust to. Lunch with the department. Michael Osborne is the new professor: an epigrapher, whatever that is. Robin Jackson has been at Marlboro. The secretary, Loukia, fled Cyprus after the invasion. Her husband, there a solicitor, here teaches high school. John Burke met his Greek wife in Thessaloniki. John Martyr started Modern Greek by getting money from the Colonels. I have an office (Roger Scott’s), a Xerox, etc. The library has an ample collection of Modern Greek materials.

Wednesday, January 15, 1983

Took Daphne to University High School, where she enrolled to do music, English, and art. She was brave enough to stay the first day. Next week she goes off to a week-long music camp in the country. Computer demonstration by a Roland Sussex who’s doing here what folks were doing at Harvard: developing programs for CAI (Computer Assisted Instruction) in different alphabets. They use GG terminals. He mentioned programs in Russian by Barry Scherr of Dartmouth. Supper in Lonsdale Street with Peter Jones, the Quaker peace worker in Australia. Subsistence living (earns $100 a week to stay below the income tax level); strict vegetarian—in short, a counter-culture type, very bright, Oxford B.A. in history, reads continually, debates in colleges and schools, writes position papers on peace and environmental issues, travels all over Australia (and occasionally the world). A true intellectual leading a meaningful life. I felt parasitical. His copy of A. J. Muste’s Pendle Hill pamphlet was confiscated by the Russians when he went through Soviet customs. I hope to get him another. Fine, cheap supper: στιφάδο followed by baklava and Turkish coffee in a ζαχαροπλαστείο, Also, our first rides on the famous Melbourne trams.

Thursday, June 16, 1983

I’m sitting in my new “study” at home—in the bedroom, as usual—reading Mario Vitti’s introduction to Ο Βασίλης ο Αρβανίτης and writing this diary. Traffic roaring outside but there’s a lovely green lawn opposite to look at. A strange way to be beginning the summer! Would we have been better off in Riparius? So far, this is not a very different or exotic experience. The main impression is of similarity, and of admiration for the British, who spread their language and culture truly around the world.

Friday, June 17, 1983

Settling in to routines. I placed my desk in our bedroom (as usual!) in front of the large windows. Started revision of Fratricides chapter; Bill McNeill wants part of it as an article for the Journal of Modern Greek Studies by the end of July. Lunch with an Australian Greek poet, Δημήτρης Τσαλουμάς, here since the 1950s, presumably a leftist who fled. Taught French here in high school and hated it; children didn’t want to learn. Now retired. One book is translated and published here; he gave me two others, in Greek. Stathis arranged all this, of course. Told me about Mitsakis, how he wrote the infamous letter to the colonels because they wouldn’t let him out of Greece otherwise to take up his post at Oxford. Then returned to Θεσσαλονίκη under the colonels because his wife had refused to accompany him to Oxford and he had to get back to Greece for this reason. Δικαιολόγια; Ίσως.

In the afternoon, my first function, the staff graduate seminar. The paper was offered by Pavlos Andronikos, on narrative technique in Ο βασίλης ο Αρβανίτης. Not bad, but delivered without energy. I almost went to sleep. He accuses Mario Vitti (rightfully) of equating the narrator with the author, and claims that the fictional narrator is an important part of the story. I’m not too sure.

Saturday, June 18, 1983

A nice, restful day. Worked on Fratricides all morning. Here, the telephone doesn’t ring. The “girls” went to Victoria Market. I walked in the afternoon. Here, as opposed to America, weekends are taken seriously. Everything is closed, including the computer center at the university. (I’m going to get my user number on Monday.)

Rented a car. We went across town to Monash University to hear a concert by groups from the Melbourne Youth Symphony, Percy Granger Youth Symphony, etc. Pieces by a British composer, John Hurd, were done. Extremely uninteresting. One was a kind of cantata on Jonah; the boy-narrator enlivened it for me with his pronunciation: And then God spike unto Jonah . . . and Jonah saw a great while, and the like. Beautiful hall at Monash, like Spaulding Auditorium five times as large, with a modern-style organ dominating the stage. Audience (mamas and papas) unsophisticated, clapping during breaks in suites, etc. Level of performance excellent for each level: middle school and high school.

Sunday, June 19, 1983

In our rented car, out early to the Royal Botanical Gardens. The British have such a genius for landscape architecture, while all the buildings in this city are as ugly as sin. Strange. I loved the grass palms; they look like New Guinea huts or masks. Also liked the way they train roses, using a tall pole with a hoop at the top, and a lamp. The roses grow up and then out and down to form an umbrella effect.

Thence to Meeting. People try to be friendly. The caretaker, Peter Cook, remembered me from last week and said, “Glad to see you, Peter.” Ministry not very inspiring, but better than last time. I thought of Kierkegaard, as did someone who ministered. When I told Peter Cook that I’d come half way round the world only to find myself in Europe, he replied, “Thank Goodness!”

Then fifty-odd kilometers to Healensville to the wild life sanctuary. Wonderful display of the platypus, a lone survivor of prehistoric development: aquatic but no gills, breathes air above water, lays eggs and sits on them like a bird; webbed feet for swimming but webbing retracts to allow claws to be used; beak like a duck’s, for grabbing worms, etc. Males have venom for defense. They dig burrows like otters and beavers. The hole is so narrow that when they squeeze into the burrow all the water in their fur is squeezed out, and thus they entry dry. We also saw a lyrebird at arm’s length, very regal. Lots of parakeets brightly colored. Squawking geese in profusion. Koalas sleeping as usual. Wombats. Kangaroos roaming around with the people. Flying forms that look like huge bats. Eagles. Owls. Ostriches. And a lovely display of nocturnal mammals and marsupials, some like tiny kangaroos just as big as the palm of your hand.

Dinner in a trendy Italian restaurant in Carlton. I dared Wiener schnitzel! (It wasn’t very good.) Tomorrow Daphne is off to music camp for a week, run by University High School.

READING WHILE IN MELBOURNE

Nikos Kasdaglis, Shaved Heads, tr. Tom Doulis.

Σ. Μυριβίλης, Ο βασίλης ο Αρβανίτης.

Ν. Καζαντζάκης, Ο πρωτομάστορας.

Γ. Βελουδής, πρόλογος στην του Ρίτσου Επιτομή.

Π. Πρεβελάκης, Ο ποιητής Γιάννης Ρίτσος.

Γιάννης Βασιλακάκος, Μελέτες στη νεοελληνική λογοτεχνία.

Lawrence Durrell, A Smile in the Mind’s Eye.

Ο. Ελύτης, Προσανατολισμός. To Άξιον εστί. Ο ήλιος ο Α΄.

Λούλα Ρίτσου-Γλέζου, Τα παιδικά χρόνια του αδελφού μου Γιάννη Ρίτσου. Γιάννης Βασιλακάκος, Η ταυτότητα.

Ατάνζιο Κατράκο, Ο φίλος μου ο Καβάφης.

Molière, Tartuffe.

Herman Prins Salomon, Tartuffe devant l’opinion française.

Γ. Σεφέρης, Χειρόγραφο Σεπ. ’41.

Γ. Ξενόπουλος, Μητρυιά.

Robin Boyd, The Puzzle of Architecture

Sunday, July 3, 1983

Melbourne

Huge surprise today. Last week Daphne went for the seating audition with the Festival Orchestra and emerged convinced that she’d never played worse. We half expected to receive a letter denying her admission to the orchestra. Today she went for the first rehearsal. When she returned she announced that they’d made her concertmistress! Strange.

Chrysanthi and I spent the afternoon at the Victoria Gallery. They have some nice paintings: a Rembrandt self-portrait, some fine Constables, and a very impressionistic Turner; a lovely Matisse nude; Pissarro’s famous scene of the Paris boulevard, an early monument of impressionism; a Tintoretto portrait of the Doge, even an El Greco but not a very striking one. Most of the museum is chinaware, costumes, etc. A poor showing, really, but they started late—obviously. We attended the afternoon concert in the Great Hall: Stamitz, Haydn, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, not very exciting. Then cappuccino and baklava in Lonsdale Street in a ζαχαροπλαστείο mobbed by Greeks. That passed the time.

Last night, dinner with John and Elsa Burke and Pavlos Andronikos. Returned at 2:00 a.m. and watched Wimbledon on the telly. Nice evening: good, unforced conversation. Mrs. Burke is a Greek-American from Seattle who went to Thessaloniki and taught night-school Greek, where she met John, one of her students. She remembers Mr. Svarnas, or rather his widow and daughter. He was my boss at the Επιμορφωτικό Ινστιτούτο, along with Socrates Papadopoulos. How did I ever remember those names?

Friday I gave my paper on aesthetic defects of Καπετάν Μιχάλης to the staff-graduate seminar. Last Monday I lectured for two hours on Cavafy at Monash University, a dismal experience because of no contact whatsoever with the students. I was wheeled in, spoke, and wheeled out again (so to speak). Horrible. I was depressed for a day. But the staff-graduate seminar is different. It meets each week. I know the people. One of them, John Vasilakakos, asked us for supper next Friday. The week before, Alfred Vincent gave a splendid presentation on scholarship past, present (and future) on Cretan renaissance literature. We were to dinner previously. He’s cold, but warmed up after half a bottle of wine. Divorced. Apparently his wife embraced Lesbianism and left him. Seems a sad person, very cut off. We’ll visit him in Sydney. We also had dinner with Pavlos and Andria Andronikos in their cramped house in an insipid suburb: she a sweet English girl loaded now with two children. She seemed like a trapped bird to me. Really, to live in a commune would be preferable to this martyrdom in suburbia. It’s the worst of all possible worlds. No extended family to help. No freedom that is meant to compensate for the loss of the extended family.

I typed my Fratricides essay on the computer and am about to send it to Bill McNeill for the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Of course it is too long, as always—at least 10,000 words. Will do the footnotes tomorrow.

Working on Ritsos lectures now. I want to try to give them in Greek.

July 19, 1983

Opera: Eugene Onegin at the Palace Theatre, St. Kilda Beach. Lovely voices and orchestra, not very impressive mise en scène or ballet (stage too small probably). Preceded by superb Chinese dinner. In this way we celebrated our anniversary (which both Chrysanthi and I had forgotten completely two days earlier) and also Daphne’s very nice results in her most recent SATs.

July 22, 1983

A busy day. At noon I gave the final of my six lectures on Ritsos, speaking this time on Philoctetes and then the period under the Junta, especially «To διαζευκτικό ή» and the collection Θυρωρείο. With luck these six lectures, all written out in full, will be of use somewhere else sometime. They cost me three full weeks of work, but it was nice to go back to Ritsos after so many years.

Lunch in Staff House with Pavlos Andronikos, an Anglo-Cypriot who is tutor here and has responsibility for the Ritsos course. He’s done a translation of Ο Βασίλης ο Αρβανίτης and was a student at Birmingham.

Next, the staff seminar, given this time by the department chairman, Professor Michael Osborne, on ancient Greek epigraphy, the pitfalls of attempted restoration of texts, how inscriptions may be dated by style of lettering, etc. Very technical, and expertly delivered.

Next, ceremonial supper in Staff House preceding my lecture. I had paté, filet mignon—a rare treat, since Daphne’s vegetarianism sees us eating mostly string beans at home—moca ice cream, expresso coffee. John Burke on one side, Stathis Gauntlett on the other, Pavlos Andronikos across the table; also Nikos and Loukia Aloneftis (she’s the secretary, he’s a Cypriot refugee, trained as a lawyer at home but teaching Greek school here; Maria ? from La Trobe; Chris Fifis from Victoria; Yannis and Maria Vasilakakos from Victoria College; Kostas Prokopiou from Victoria; Chrysanthi.

Huge audience for the lecture, probably about 150+ people. I spoke on Kazantzakis as 20th century 19th century romantic. Afterwards, the questions kept coming without hesitation, good questions that I felt I could answer, so all in all it was, I think, a successful event. Various people came up afterwards, including someone who’d come out from Australia to our language conference in Athens in 1980 and is about to depart for the second one next month in Boston.

Saturday, July 23, 1983

I’m writing this on the Intercapital Daylight Express, en route from Melbourne to Sydney. We left at 9:00 a.m. and are due to arrive at 9:47 p.m. for a four-day stay with Alfred Vincent and Michael and Elizabeth Jeffreys as hosts.

Time to record some things that have happened: Nice dinner at our home with one of the classics professors in the department, John Martyn, born in South Africa, educated in England, came out here for his first job and has remained. Australian wife. It was he who got the Modern Greek program going, by (a) systematically collecting money and good will from the Greek community—AHEPA, church, clubs, etc.—, going to all their functions, working slowly, cultivating; (b) convincing the vice-chancellor about the need and viability of the program; (c) working with school boards. The schools wanted to introduce Greek but couldn’t do it until the subject was recognized at university level. The university authorities complained that they couldn’t move because there was no Greek in the schools! So, he had to work on both fronts at once. When he’d made progress here, he then went to Greece, under the colonels, and got money from the Ministry of Transport (sic). This was about ten years ago. The key, as always, was individual contacts, friends of friends, persistence, patience.

On another day, I went out to lecture on Cavafy’s Alexandrian cycle at Monash University, with Gavin Betty as host. He has translated Samarakis and, as a classicist, is extremely open to Modern Greek. Afterwards, in the car returning to Parkville, long talk with a linguist, Thanasis Spilias (?), who’s just done a survey of the Melbourne school system and who told me that Modern Greek is the number 1 language studied, above French. Ten years ago there was nothing. The problems are the usual ones: inadequate training of teachers, paucity of teaching materials. But workshops are held regularly as a method of on-the-job training.

Also had lunch with Michael Osborne, Rob Jackson, Dennis Pryer (Pryer served in the Friends Ambulance Unit). Osborne thinks that Modern Greek belongs in classics because classicists must come to realize that life didn’t ever stop in Greece. Yet true intellectual cross-fertilization is minimal at Melbourne, although honors students can cross boundaries and do. The real problem is that hordes of Greeks enroll for an easy grade and not because of true desire for the subject. He finds this demoralizing and doesn’t know what to do about it because they also have to keep numbers up or be threatened with loss of funds. A familiar dilemma. The problem is complicated because, ironically, the presence of a majority of Greek speakers in the language classes makes those classes too difficult for the Anglophone beginners, who are discouraged and don’t enroll in great numbers. An attempt has been made to stream the two groups.

Other recent events: Last Sunday a ridiculously huge lunch at Loukia and Nikos’s, a real Greek lunch followed by Greek songs by Mimis, another Cypriot who is very clever on the guitar, and a reasonably good singer. His wife is Salome, another Cypriot; she teaches Greek and French in a high school. The previous day we’d had Dennis and Beverly Dorwick to supper. They stayed overnight and then drove us to Meeting. They are Americans who came out here about fifteen years ago to teach school, among hundreds of US and British teachers systematically recruited and who stayed. They’re at Geelong, he at a fancy prep school, doing music, she at a nursery school.

The previous week, we went to a Chinese restaurant with Yannis and Maria Vasilakakos. He is a sad sack type—writes short stories, has done a play, etc. Caught between two worlds. Came out here as a child, went back to Athens with his parents, bought an apartment, realized that he couldn’t survive there, returned here to finish his education, then got a job . . . and stayed. The apartment in Athens, fully furnished, is locked; they don’t rent it because they fear for their belongings. Here they haven’t bought a home because they think—one day—they’ll occupy the home in Athens. Misery! He’s my age, and I compare his life with mine. Among other things, he just got married six months ago. No children, a few publications but nothing very substantial, mediocre job. Yet bright and sensitive. But caught in the diaspora. Unable να πάρει απόφαση, that he belongs in either one place or the other.

When the Greeks came out here twenty-odd years ago, they were miserable. The whole town closed down at 8:00 p.m. Dead. No place to go, to eat, to sing. No one spoke Greek, or cared. Now of course there is a tremendous difference. Greeks, Italians, etc. have transformed the eating habits, nightlife, etc. of the urban Australians. Translation schools provide personnel for hospitals, courts, and the rest; you don’t have to speak English to become an Australian citizen.

We also met our neighbors, Bill Grundmann and family, Americans from Iowa. He’s been here for two years, teaching landscape architecture. The whole department is Americans. He says we’re way ahead of them in this field, which is strange, considering their superb public gardens.

Met Dimitris Tsaloumas, an Australian-Greek poet who is considered the best of the lot.

Sunday, July 24, 1983

Michael Jeffreys, now professor of Modern Greek at Sydney, took us around the city in the morning: Opera House, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (lovely park), the Greek Archdiocese (Harkianakis is away in Greece, alas); over the Harbour Bridge, then over another bridge that Daphne had studied in school because it is the world’s longest single span concrete bridge. Lots of photos. Elderly men and women playing bowls impeccably decked out in their whites. Home to the Jeffreys’ for lunch and to meet Elizabeth and Catherine, the daughter, aged 9. Elizabeth, whom I remember from our encounter in England as stiff and forbidding, was nothing of the sort: warm, smiling, hospitable. In the afternoon she replaced Michael and drove us around: to Vaucluse House (unimpressive) and then to the Heads: the entrance to Sydney Harbor, facing the wide Pacific. How beautiful and exciting. Then Michael, again as chauffeur, took us to Alfred Vincent’s for an awkward, long supper of desultory conversation.

Monday, July 25, 1983

I sent Daphne and Chrysanthi down to the Opera House to get tickets for Otello. At 11:00 a.m. I gave my paper on Cavafy’s Three-Stage Development into Detachment before the Modern Greek staff. Well received, I think. Lots of questions. Dimitris Gounelas told me afterwards that it was a breath of fresh air because they have no intellectual stimulation at all from the outside. Lunch in the Student Union, quite attractive. Then I dashed to the harbor and did the Opera House tour, the best part of which was the delicious blonde who led it. They speak so beautifully, too! The Opera House really is an amazing conception overall, and magnificently located, surrounded by harbor-water on three sides (why didn’t anyone think of this for New York or Boston?). But the actual theaters inside are not so impressive, except for the concert hall, which ironically is larger than the opera hall. On the other hand, the acoustics are perfect, which of course was not the case for Philharmonic Hall in New York City. Rushing back, I made it in time for our meeting with three school teachers, and Chrysanthi and I tried our best to promote Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος.

Supper with Dimitris and Ruth Gounelas, and Michael Jeffreys. What lovely people! I remember so well the supper we had in Αγία Παρασκευή in December 1980. But tragedy has struck them. Ruth has completely lost the sight of one eye and was a hair’s breadth from losing the sight of the other—saved miraculously (for the moment) by laser therapy, for which they had to go to San Francisco. Somehow, a fungus was lodged in the eyes and this causes the blood vessels in the retina to rupture. Each time this happens, an area of vision is lost. The laser apparently seals off the vessels, preventing loss of vision, if the treatment occurs in time. In any case, for the moment the vision is stabilized. She can read, although with difficulty. She has her Ph.D. from Oxford in English literature and is determined to complete a book on three women writers including the New Zealander Katharine Mansfield (Ruth is a New Zealander). They met when Dimitris went out there as a μετανάστης and was working as a waiter. Only afterward did he decide to enter university. As if this were not enough, Dimitris is unhappy in Sydney and has tended his resignation. His old job at the University of Crete awaits him, but Ruth’s job in Deree is only an informal promise, and the question of course is whether her eyesight will hold out. We had several long talks; we find each other very simpatico, apparently. I told him about Pappou’s refusal to accept his visual impairment to the point of learning new skills. Ruth, no matter what happens, should learn touch typing, then Braille, etc., so as not to be at a sudden loss if the condition turns worse. Dimitris’s problem here has been chiefly a personality clash with Alf (who turns out to be quite neurotic and difficult for everyone, alas), inability to do his own research, general lack of intellectual stimulation. So, he’s determined to return, even though a tenured position awaits him here. At the dinner, Ruth was lovely and charming, their 2½ year old daughter sweetly obedient, the meal a treat (roast lamb, Pavlova). Ruth spoke openly about her case, but with complete optimism that she was now cured. Μακάρι!

Tuesday, July 26, 1983

Today I had to speak to a class, plus staff, on Some Modern Greek Responses to the Glory that Was Greece, then repeat the same talk to the second section of the same class later in the day. The first time I was greeted by silence, but the second time there were a few good questions. In between, Dimitris showed me the Great Hall and Panayota Nazou her linguistic dissertation, all kinds of tables and percentages re: various forms of the Greek verb. The university is lovely in appearance, with the Great Hall, the Quad, and other aspects constituting a huge act of faith when they were erectred in the mid-nineteenth century. The Quad is transplanted Cambridge pure and simple.

After my second talk: a race downtown to the Opera House to meet Chrysanthi and Daphne and our guest, Elizabeth Jeffreys, to see Verdi’s Otello. Alas, the lead role was the weakest in the cast, though Desdemona was excellent and Iago OK. So, all in all, the performance lacked the magic that I’d felt in Eugene Onegin the other night. In this case, the Opera House was better, alas, than the opera. But it was good to see Verdi’s treatment, which, as usual, is just the bare bones of the original literary work. At the end, Iago kills himself and Othello is simply forgotten.

Wednesday, July 27, 1983

This was a day of walking. We left the motel leisurely, walked down Paramatta Road into George Street, bought the Ladybird Book of Bridges for Daphne’s physics teacher, looked at lovely arcades, at buildings old and new, at the cathedral, etc. Then down to the harbor—Circular Quay—and the ferry to the zoo. Lovely, sunny day; Harbor breeze. It was as though we were cruising in Greece, off the boat, onto a bus, up a hill, then into a site: but in this case to see not dead stones but live monkeys, wombats, parakeets, elephants (bathing!), ostriches, sleepy tigers, wonderful southern fish—anemones, polyps, starfish, electric eels—all in a setting that allows for glimpses of the harbor and city across the water. Foot-weary, we returned to a cup of tea in the Harbour Restaurant of the Opera House, then no. 440 bus back to the motel. Supper (filet mignon!). Daphne and Chrysanthi to Central Station to take the Southern Arrow home. I to the university to lecture on Kazantzakis: Twentieth Century Nineteenth Century Romantic to a fairly good audience, but nothing like the one last week at Melbourne. Afterwards, an enthusiastic Cypriot took Michael, Alf, and me to dinner (!) again, at a Chinese restaurant, the Cypriot club being closed after 10:00 p.m. We all unwound a bit. To bed at 12:30.

Thursday, July 28, 1983

Sydney–Melbourne

Michael Jeffreys unburned himself to me for one and a half hours: losing Dimitris Gounelas, Alf’s neuroticism (masochistic workaholic, alienating others, destroying his marriage through neglect), Michael’s own desire to accompany Elizabeth to Dumbarton Oaks next year balanced against his need to be here. Poor man, βρήκε τον μπελά του. The department seems to be demoralized. He told me that my presence was refreshing because I seemed so sane! Yes, I think he’s right. He continued by saying that I took for granted that the study of literature was something fascinating in its own right—i.e. self-justifying—as opposed to the situation they have, where everything seems to be measured against its “usefulness” for the Greek community: for ethnicity.

Then Dimitris Gounelas drove me to the airport and we had a long talk. Πες μου, είμαι τρελός που θέλω να γυρίσω στην Ελλάδα; We weighed all the factors. Poor man, he’s caught in a classic squeeze play. But I think he must go now. All depends on Ruth’s eyes, her ability to work again at Deree (if she gets the job).

Flight to Melbourne. In the afternoon, I gave a class on Kazantzakis and το γλωσσικό ζήτημα. Κώστας, one of the few students I’ve come to identify by name, came up afterward and said, “I’m so glad you’re still here; we all thought you’d left after the last Ritsos lecture.” That was nice. This lad turns out to be Australian born, but the family moved back to Greece and he went to high school there. Denied a place in the Greek universities, he returned here, on his own, to get his degree. He wants to teach, poor fellow. Having just come from Gounelas’s impasse, I was doubly saddened by the realization that so few of these lovely people who want such a career will ever realize their desire.

Supper, at home for a change; bed.

Friday, July 29, 1983

Melbourne

At 8:30 a.m. the telephone roused us. Yiayia and Pappous called from New York to report that Leander returned last week, stayed with them a few days, and then went to New Haven to find an apartment, staying temporarily with his friends the Applewhites. Pappous, normally so critical of Leander, spoke very positively, saying he looks and sounds wonderful, has realistic goals, and apparently is now doing well with Outi, who will come to the U.S. again in December for a visit. So be it!

Saturday, July 30, 1983

Last night, supper at the John Martyns’. They have a mentally and physically defective son aged 20 who occupies most of Alexia’s time. He was at the dinner: able to converse, but with a certain strangeness that grows on one, and an almost childish graciousness and openness that then takes the form of monopolizing the conversation. John explained the role of the Governor General, how he once sacked a government.

Today, lunch with David and Susan Chandler. He is Trix Officer’s cousin, an expert on Southeast Asia. Harvard ’54, then army, then foreign service in Cambodia, then graduate school (Yale) and directly to Monash University because of a job opening precisely in his field and no openings in the U.S. Directs a SE Asian institute. Knew David and Atossa French in Thailand. His wife went to Northfield and Oberlin. Also at lunch, John?, an Australian specializing in Australian history. Chandler told a good NYC joke. Seems a British philosopher came to lecture at CCNY on linguistics. “You know,” he said, “it’s noteworthy that in the English language we can put two negatives together to make a positive, as in ‘I will not do nothing,’ but we cannot put two positives together to make a negative,” whereupon a CCNY professor in the back row said under his breath, “Yeah yeah!”

August 3, 1983

Yesterday I had what John Martyn here calls a “breakthrough” in research. In writing on Fratricides I emphasized (a) the Macedonian question and (b) the rivalry between Markos and Zachariadis/Ioannidis, saying that perhaps Kazantzakis didn’t intend these emphases but nevertheless they are there, and help us understand the civil war. My hunches were right. Yesterday I discovered two letters by Kazantzakis I’d not known about, thanks to Yannis Vasilakakos’s paper on Fratricides last Friday at the staff seminar. In the first letter, Kazantzakis asked an informant in Greece to send him everything possible on the Macedonian question. One chapter is half-finished, Kazantzakis continued, and I need these materials before I can go further. In the second letter he announced the completion of his first draft and then added: it is neither the gospel according to Markos nor the gospel according to Ioannidis. How nice!

Stylianos Harkianakis called from Sydney last night, very friendly and enthusiastic, bringing greetings from Savidis, Prevelakis, etc. He thinks we can publish his book here. We’ll see him this weekend. He asked me if I liked Australia and I was not very enthusiastic. Δεν έχει πολιτισμό ενδιαφέρον.—Σύμφωνοι! Δε συγκρίνεται λέει με την Αμερική. How nice, at last, to be able to feel that we Americans are more advanced than someone else roughly comparable. Η Αυστραλία είναι θάλεγα ο αμερικανικός πολιτισμός του γλυκού νερού!

In the evening, Daphne’s concert in Melbourne Concert Hall, a sumptuous interior much nicer than the Sydney Opera House’s interior. Fun program. Daphne was concertmistress. Her group did a Walton overture, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and Verdi’s Te Deum with a huge chorus. All OK; nothing very inspiring. Before, in the foyer, the University High group, including her Vietnamese friend Hung, did Mendelssohn’s Octet, one of my favorites. The exotic part consisted of songs and dances first by a group from Tonga, then Papua, then Bali, then India, all lovely except that the Balinese music was bad, just warmed over French. After the concert an American college group did jazzy songs that repulsed me, but the leader turned out to be a jazz trumpeter of genius, really. He “sent” me, as they say. Finally, we took Hung and Daphne to the Concert Hall’s coffee shop, overlooking the Yarra, for late-night pancakes. Then the tram home.

Friday, August 5, 1983

Spoke on Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται to the staff-postgraduate seminar, my last obligation.

Saturday, August 6, 1983

Rigoletto. So infantile as a story. But the music!

Sunday, August 7, 1983

Stylianos sent a priest to fetch us and we spent a nice three hours in lively conversation at the Archdiocesan headquarters in South Melbourne. He is simple and unspoiled. Lively mind; gregarious. Sees poetry and prayer as equivalents. We talked a lot about Βούλη and Δημοσθένης, also about Kazantzakis. I worked most of yesterday and all of this morning on the poems, trying to improve the translations a bit.

Monday, August 8, 1983

Lunch at the Carousel overlooking Albert Lake, with Stylianos and the other priest. I handed over the manuscript. In the evening, he took us to the home of a Cretan living here, and two other Cretan couples came. They still live in a fantasy world attached to the πατρίδα. One man is glum because his company poured three cubic meters of cement and then came a downpour that all but ruined the job.

Tuesday, August 9, 1983

To a student production of Oedipus Rex at the Guild Theatre. They did Teiresias as a paralytic who went into spastic trance and then prophesied in an entirely different voice. But the overall production was slow. The Arnott marionettes had the correct speed for this play.

I’ve reduced my Fratricides article to 8000 words for Bill McNeill.

Wednesday, August 10, 1983

Lunch at the Carvery with Stathis. Discussed the big conference on “The Meaning of Neohellenism” that they’re planning for August 1985. He wants me to return.

Thursday, August 11, 1983

Bought an opal with Chrysanthi. An antique ring, very nice. Lots of gold. Five small opals. $325.00.

Friday, August 12, 1983

Took Pavlos to lunch after his final lecture on To Άξιον εστί and Εγγονόπουλος. He wrote it at 4:00 a.m.! Not very impressive, but generally he’s bright and capable.

Supper at the Concert Hall with Stathis, Maria, their daughter, and a friend of theirs who works in the chemical industry. Then the Gala Final Concert of the youth festival. The highlight was an orchestra from Japan—110 children aged 8 to 12 who performed magnificently (much better than the Kinhaven orchestra). There are 350 such orchestras in Japan. They rehearse every day, once before school and once after. Total precision. Remarkable musicianship. Daphne’s group also did well, repeating the Walton. Exotic dances again from Tonga and New Guinea, plus Balinese singers. The New Guineans, who resembled naked savages on stage, turned out to be capable of conversing in effortless English when I overheard them in the lobby afterwards.

Stylianos—now I remember—was full of jokes. One went: Do you know what ΔΕΗ, OTE, EOT means in Greece? Δεν Έχουμε Ηλεκτρισμό, Ούτε Τηλέφωνο Έχουμε. Έχουμε Όμως Τουρισμό. ΔΕΗ is of course the electric company, OTE the telephone company, and EOT the National Tourist Organization!

Working on my Kouros chapter, which is now ready to be typed into the computer.

Saturday, August 13, 1983

Marxism and literature conference. The first paper was given by Terry Eagleton of Oxford. I had a meal with him when he visited Dartmouth, hosted by Donald Pease. He spoke brilliantly on the history of criticism from a Marxist standpoint: how it developed in the coffeehouses in London in the 18th century as a movement of Universal Reason against the authoritarian judgments of the State, and was at the same time an expression of the emergent bourgeois class. He carried this forward through the 19th into the 20th century. Whereas in the 18th criticism had reflected and consolidated social forces, and been a force in the public sphere, in our own day it is sealed off in the university and is irrelevant: a coterie speaking to itself. Questioned on this, he backed away, saying he wasn’t gloomy and that intellectuals in the universities still had a role to play by analyzing, etc. However, their hermetic situation won’t be changed by them, but rather only by a radical change in the nature of society, which change will never come from within the universities. He spoke of F. R. Leavis’s attempt to break out of the hermetic seal and to resemble the 18th century critics, but judged this attempt doomed from the start because originating from within the university, not from without. The result: another vituperative coterie.

What I’ve been wondering is whether any of us, any more, can claim to be the spokesmen of universal reason. Modern thought tells us no, yet we continue to yearn for this.

He gave insight into a phenomenon such as Jeff Hart, who—although I suppose in a degenerate form—is trying to be a latter-day Addison & Steele, speaking broadly to all of society’s concerns, with a strong literary component. Also, he helped place Kazantzakis in the nineteenth-century milieu, where it was common to project fulfillment into a remote future, to be accomplished, as Eagleton said, by “spectral agents.”

In the evening, with Μίμης and Σαλωμή, Λουκία and Nikos and children, and another couple, we went to Stavros’s taverna. Chrysanthi danced a bit. Mimis sang. Good bouzouki. Lots of noise. I was OK for the first two hours; the next two were not so enjoyable. Loukia’s small son, Petros, spent four hours next to the band, strumming an imaginary guitar. He was the best part of the evening.

Another joke told by Stylianos last week, appropriate for John Rassias: Two women meet. The one is famous for talking only about herself. True to form, she does this for a half hour solid, then suddenly stops and says, “But I mustn’t talk only about myself. Let’s give you a chance. How do you like my hat?”

Sunday, August 14, 1983

Meeting in the morning. I ministered for the first time, using Pat Scott-Craig’s talk on “Give us this day our daily bread.” Nice talk afterwards with a theologian teaching in Melbourne. Soulia drove us home. Walked to Melbourne baths, just reopened after renovation: pools, gym, whirlpool, sauna. Lovely.

Monday, August 15, 1983

Die Fledermaus. Amazing how limited my education has been in this sort of area. The music is so familiar, yet I never knew its origin.

Tuesday, August 16, 1983

To see Tartuffe, with Rob Jackson (classics teacher here) and his girlfriend. What a splendid play! And how contemporary, alas!

Wednesday, August 17, 1983

Began to read Tartuffe in French. It’s not too difficult, especially now. Continuing with my Kazantzakis book, right now doing the 2nd draft of the chapter about his two-year stay in England and then Paris, June ’46–June ’48. Typing each day in the computer center.

Thursday, August 18, 1983

I lectured on Some Modern Greek Responses to the Glory that Was Greece, to the Classical Association of Victoria. Dinner before at Staff House with Ken McKay, Peter Connor and wife, Roger Scott. Small audience, but some good questions.

Friday, August 19, 1983

Incredibly, we had seventeen people for dinner: Stathis, Maria and their children Katerina and Loukia; John and Mary Vasilakakos, Soula from the Quaker Meeting; Pavlos, Angela and Nikos and the baby; Loukia, Nikos, George, and Petros; Mimis and Salome, who brought Pavlova!

Saturday, August 20, 1983

To the eighteenth-century exhibition at the Gallery. Nice Bouchards and Gainsboroughs. Then to Stylianos. We telephoned Vouli in Thessaloniki and all three spoke to her. Paula Xanthopoulou had just left Vouli. No news yet from Queensland Press. The poetry editor is on vacation. In the evening: taverna with Μαρία Ιρωδότου, who teaches at La Trobe. I sat next to a charming girl from Tasmania, a nurse. Her fiancé, a New Zealander, works on helicopters, servicing off-shore oil rigs in Western Australia, etc. Good conversation. Also some good dancing by pros, after which everyone joined in. We returned home at 1:30 a.m. to find Daphne and boyfriend still sitting in the living room. I called a taxi and sent him home. It’s starting!

Sunday, August 21, 1983

Meeting for Worship lovely. Someone spoke on life and meaning, saying that modern science shows us that meaning is not separate from life but implicit in it. Vitalism invading Quakerism! Bill and Marjorie Oats, whom we knew at Woodbrooke, were there. Also a visitor from Jesus Lane Meeting in Cambridge, who knew Joy and Noel Jones, and Christian Lord. He is the bursar of Pembroke College. Then to the barbecue of the Pan-Cretan Society as Stylianos’s guests. Out of town. Six acres with sheep that they kill for food when needed. Building a clubhouse. Food, music, lovely dancing again, this time Cretan soustas, etc. Stylianos uttered μεγάλα λόγια about me and my contributions, and I had to make a short speech in Greek to 300 Cretans. We returned home exhausted, mainly from the noise.

Tuesday, August 23, 1983

Dinner party for Michael and Dawn Osborne, John and Alexia Martyn, John and Erse Burke, and Stylianos Harkianakis. The archbishop had quite a different personality in English.

Denise Harvey wrote from Athens. They’re still interested in Χώμα και στάχτη, though they want a subsidy in the form of guaranteed sales. We are also dickering with Queensland University Press.

Wednesday, May 24, 1983

Finished the revisions of my chapter on “Sodom and Gomorrah.” I must be strong: cut, cut, cut! Now all the computer programs—Fratricides, Sodom and Gomorrah, London-Paris—must be transferred to tape.

Tasis and Popi Tamis took us to an expensive lunch at the Ilios in Lygon Street. He is a tutor at Monash, specializing in linguistics. Came to Australia for three years as a journalist and never went back. He’s written an M.A. thesis on Macedonian folksong.

In the evening, I presented Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος to the Greek Teachers Association of Victoria. Good turnout. Mimis Sophocleous introduced me. Kypros Kyprianou is the president. Good question period afterward.

In the afternoon we walked in the Botanical Gardens with the Tamises, hoping to see spring flowers. Too early.

Thursday, August 25, 1983

To Lara to see Dennis and Beverly Dorwick. An extremely interesting day. Morning at a nearby sheep farm where we dug out of a hillside a “cutting stone” sharpened and shaped by the Aborigines. Nice husband and wife, he from Tasmania originally, she farm-bred but now teaching English to Cambodians, etc., in Lara, for extra income. The land reminded me of Ohio. Among other things, there was a McCormack horse-drawn mower just like mine. Afternoon at Geelong Grammar School, where Dennis teaches flute. Like Andover, very posh, entire building for music. Lovely location facing the bay, but they now have a Shell refinery next door.

Telephoned Alec and Leander at the farm. Alec is building a foundation wall and creosoting the logs. He’d just come from a swim. They were cooking steak outdoors for supper. We must begin adjusting to the northern hemisphere.

Friday, August 26, 1983

Marvelous performance of Antony and Cleopatra, the first time I’d ever seen it. It all came back, as though I’d had it memorized subliminally. Duty vs. passion. Reason vs. will. Our good sense tells us that duty and reason should prevail, but in the end passion is more beautiful and Enobarbus learns, to his dismay, that to be irrationally faithful is best.

Saturday, August 27, 1983

Lunch with Stylianos, who’d been in bed with neuralgia but was up. He read some of his newest poems, read them very feelingly. I suppose I’ll keep on translating, but let’s see what happens with Χώμα και στάχτη first.

Lovely performance of A Winter’s Tale in the evening. How nice to be able to book the same day, to sit up close, and to have splendid British or British-trained actors on stage! It’s a story about the blessedness of repentance, I’d say. The king, although a tyrant, repents so sincerely that all is restored to him at the end: daughter, wife, friend.

Sunday, August 28, 1983

To Quaker Meeting for the last time. Made some nice friends there, though the clerk is really insufferable. Goodbyes to Soula and to Dennis and Beverly. To Concert Hall at night for an entire evening of Greek folk dancing by dozens of different groups from different regions. Overkill for me. Started ¾ hour late à la grecque.

Tuesday, August 30, 1983

The department had Chrysanthi and me to lunch and presented us a huge coffee-table book of photographs of Australia, very handsome, with everyone’s signature. Saw Paul Tuffin at last. Apparently we were appreciated in the department. I wrote a final report trying to be honest about some of the faults. John and Mary Vasilakakos called after supper to say goodbye.

Wednesday, August 31, 1983

Melbourne–Sydney–Papeete

Mimis drove us to the airport. Morning spent frantically filling in Chrysanthi’s income tax return in Collins Street. I got my computer tape to bring home: all the programs I wrote at Melbourne. Flew to Sydney and then onward to Papeete.

Wednesday, August 31, 1983

Papeete, Tahiti and Moorea, Tahiti

It’s Wednesday the 31st all over again. We left at 5:15 p.m. and arrived at 6:30 a.m. the same day! No sleep, of course. Saw the movie Tootsie in the plane. A huge man nicknamed Tiny taxied us to Hôtel Tahiti. We were given Bungalow 27 and entered it to find someone already inside, asleep! Shifted to Bungalow 15 with more luck. Took Le Truck to Papeete-town. Struck up conversation with two charming native youths about 18 years old, in French, of course. They’d finished high school; the girl was working in an office; sister and brother. I felt like Captain Cook all over again, they were so friendly and “simple.” Then took the “Keke III” launch to Moorea. Lovely setting for a swim and lunch. The girls are beautiful, a kind of statuesque, classic beauty. The waitresses at the hotel all wore the single-piece wrap of native fashion with no evidence of anything at all underneath! We saw lots of coral, sun-fish, goldfish, eel-like things, a starfish moving around, anemones everywhere; also bougainvillea, hibiscus, la folie des jeunes filles (another flower), coconut palms, banana trees. Flowers everywhere, and always in the girls’ hair. Youths thatching a cottage. I snoozed deliciously in a lounge chair, gazing out across the lagoon to the waves breaking on the coral reef. Chrysanthi picked up bits of coral to take home. Walked around Papeete again in the evening in a light rain. Supper in a hamburger-pizza joint. I paid in dollars and the proprietor credited them at the proper rate instead of the scandalously low rate imposed by a Chinese owner earlier when we bought Daphne a T-shirt. Vous êtes honnête, I said to him. Oui, he answered, ou stupide! Then he crowned Daphne with a wreath of bougainvillea. We slept like the dead in our comfortable bungalow after listening to Tahitan music for an hour and drinking their exquisite mélange des jus.

September 1, 1983

Hôtel Tahiti

French bread and French coffee for breakfast. Chrysanthi et moi, nous avons pris le truck pour aller en ville. Nous avons fait des achêter: une toile pour Chrysanthi, avec des fleurs polynesiens, aussi une corale blanche, très delicate, aussi un baguette et du fromage pour le déjeuner. Alors, nous avons mis les maillots pour nager dans le piscine devant le lagoon, avec le massif de Moorea en bas. La piscine est plein des garçons et jeunnes filles qui parlent français; au bord se trouvent des femmes à demi-nues qui font le thérapie du soleil. Partout on trouve des fruits dans les arbres—c’est vraitment le paradis où on ne travail pas pour manger. Je me suis inquiété au petit dejeuner quand on a annonce que tous les vols était en retard aujour’hui jusqu’à vingt heures. Alors j’ai téléphoné à l’agence de Quantas, où on m’a dit que tout ira demain à l’heure. Nous verrons. . . . J’ai découvert que je n’ai pas oublié le français! C’est bon ici parce que les gens vous parlent avec beaucoup de volonté, n’importe qu’on ne parle pas bien.

Au marché aujourd’hui nous avons vu aussi des fleurs tropicals partout.

Dans l’après-midi nous sommes allés dans le bateau au fond de verre. Le guide était un Tahitan beau come Apollo. Il nous a mène dehors du coral reef, ou on voit des corails, des sea cucumber, des anemones, des sea urchins (blanches et noirs), et—bien entendu—plusieurs espèces des poissons polychromatiques. Au fin de la tour, notre Apollo a entré la mer avec oxygène. a descendu au fond avec de la nourriture pour les poisons, et nous a coupé un sea urchin que nous pouvons examiner après. A la termination du tour, nous sommes rentrés en ville pour faire un promenade avant de manger dans un restaurant français. J’ai pris un filet mignon magnifique, Chrysanthi a pris un poulet délicieux, et Daphne, qui est devenue végétarienne, a pris une salade. À l’hôtel nous avons finis le jour avec un autre mélange de jus.

Vendredi, 2 septembre 1983

Tahiti–Los Angeles

Le vol était trios heures en retard. Monsieur “Tiny” est venu à l’hôtel pour nous conduire à l’aerodrome. Je lui a demandé s’il y a un movement contre les Français ici. Il m’a dit que les gens qui veulent l’indépendence ne font que deux percent de la population. Tout va bien pour nous, il dit. Nous ne payons aucun impôt. Les Français, avec des impôts que viennent de la France, construisent tous les chemins, les écoles, les hôpitals. Tous le monde a d’ assurance maladie gratuite. L’éducation est gratuite. Si un élève veut continuer à l’université, il va à Paris où il étudie gratuit. Les hôtels sont américains, mais la plupart des profit mène ici parce qu’on ne peut pas exporter de l’argent. En somme, c’est paradis!

Saturday, September 3, 1983

San Francisco

At Hotel Claremont 1:30 a.m. after hours in the airport finding a locker, etc. Mob scene. Chaos. Today I took Daphne and Chrysanthi to Universal Studios. Then Tim Golden drove us around the city, and finally to Venice to walk on the beach. Supper at his home on Pacific Palisades. Other guests. Father a psychiatrist. Tim drove us to the airport to catch the “red-eye” to Boston.

Sunday, September 4, 1983

Avis car to Hanover. Home!

September 23, 1983

Cambridge, Massachusetts

I delivered the address at the first event of the Kazantzakis Centennial celebration, in Boylston Hall, which was packed—standing room only in the aisles and back. Good audience. Laughs, applause, enthusiasm. Overnight at the Harvard Club with Chrysanthi. Nice to see Harvard friends again. Daphne interviewed. I set her up with various students and she responded so positively that she decided to withdraw her early action application at Yale and to submit it instead to Harvard.

October 8, 1983

Hanover

Nice celebration for Henry Ehrmann: a festschrift, etc., etc. honoring him on his 70th birthday.

October 10–11, 1983

Minary Center

Ivy League Conference of writing directors. Chris Flug here from Harvard, and Richard Marius. Jennifer Joseph, Alan Gaylord, Karl Krum from Dartmouth. On the 11th Chris returned with me and I set her up to learn about English 2 and Intensive Academic Support (IAS).

October 13, 1983

New York

Went to O’Neal’s Bar on 43rd Street with mother, to see the show Marisa Smith has produced, with her husband as star. A cabaret review. Mediocre, but with some good moments.

October 14–15, 1983

Wallingford

Pendle Hill General Board. I clerked. Apparently it went well. My desire has been to avoid the stiffness and farce of the Haverford Corporation.

October 16, 1983

Weston

Kinhaven Board. We dispensed with the services of Palmer Goodrich, another move toward Board independence. But lots of flack from Lelah Dushkin regarding the budget.

October 27–30, 1983

New York, Prince George Hotel

MGSA symposium on Greece in a European context. As president, I spoke at the banquet, before Mrs. Kazantzakis, and at the summing up on Sunday morning. Brademas, who opened the festivities, was awful; Stavrianos was incorrigibly leftist. But the regular panels the next few days were fine. I was gratified, since I organized the literary side. Interviewed Carabas and Papademetre for Sydney.

October 30, 1983

Philadelphia

To Alec’s, then to Tom Wood’s for tea. He is taking leave from Friends Central to direct Alan Cranston’s campaign in the Philadelphia area, as a Quaker concern. He wondered why I didn’t apply for a college presidency. Thence to Philadelphia. Academy with Joan Tyers. Magnificent concert by King’s Singers: sacred, secular, barbershop, cabaret, everything superb.

October 31, 1983

Lunch with Alec in Narberth. Then Kinhaven finance committee at the Hilton with Jerry, Alice. Then train to Washington.

November 1, 1983

Washington, Embassy Row Hotel

In luxury, thanks to the Greek Embassy (George Varlamvanos). I spoke, as did Mrs. Kazantzakis, Patroclus Stavrou, and Thanasis Maskaleris, at the Library of Congress, Mumford Room, James Madison Building. David Kraus chaired. Good audience but not so good as at Cambridge last September. Keeley, Decavalles, and Veïs spoke in the afternoon on other poets. Saw Michael Tobias’s video on Kazantzakis. Όχι πρόστυχο, as Mrs. K. commented. Stavrou expatiated on her woes, how publishers cheat her, etc. (Later we learned that he’s her heir!) AMTRAK home, with Κατερίνα Αγγελάκη-Rooke.

November 2–4, 1983

Hanover

Katerina here. Gave poetry reading (good!) on Thursday night. Dick Eberhart was impressed. I drove her to the airport at 6:30 a.m. on the 4th, but the plane was canceled. Put her on a bus to Boston. She arrived in Ithaca 20 minutes before her lecture there! Nice visit.

Friday, November 18, 1983

Philadelphia

At Haverford. Lunch with Ellen Rose. Her tears after telephone call from A-1 scholar coming to the college to be interviewed for Ellen’s job. Drink, afterwards, in University of Pennsylvania Faculty Club with Don White. He is persona non grata in Libya because he is publishing findings of his dig not there but here. His belongings, house, etc. will be confiscated. Looked down on our cruise as a kind of pandering and prostitution to the bored rich. Then: board meeting at Pendle Hill. In the middle Charlie Brown turned pale and all but collapsed. Ambulance came within ten minutes. P.A.s, etc., so solicitous and efficient. The best side of America. Long walk with Andy Towl after the meeting. He walks one or two miles each night before retiring.

Saturday, November 19, 1983

Philadelphia

Pendle Hill board in the morning. Then to Centrum Philadelphia publishers. Dalia Miller. They want to specialize in Greek. Eva and Peter Topping were there also. Toured the establishment. Then nice lunch in the Belview Stratford Hotel on Broad Street (the legionnaires’ disease hotel, where we took Joan Tyers!). Joan had gone to Seneca to demonstrate against missiles. Sign: From England, with love. We send them missiles and they send us love!

Nice to see Donald Swann at Pendle Hill again.

Thence to NYC and the usual.

November 21, 1983

Hanover

Mr. Fisk of the New York Times interviewed me (and others) re: the use of computers in the humanities. An article should appear.

November 24, 1983

Pleasant Thanksgiving except that parents didn’t come. My father felt that he couldn’t make it, alas. Alec and Leander are here. Also Irv and Fran Shapiro, Walter and Miriam Arndt, Jay Parini. Shapiros showed slides of their Ireland trip. Then Scott Samuelson, Alec’s friend, came in with Joan, his sister. She’s the one who placed first in the Boston Marathon two years in a row. Trying for the Olympics next. We all told stories of encounters with presidents: Irv with Nixon, I with Johnson, Joan Samuelson with Jimmy Carter at the White House. Carter came out best, by far. Joan runs 15 to 20 miles a day, training. Such a modest, sweet girl, but she must have an extraordinary drive hidden somewhere. John Rassias came along also, after dinner. We are scheming to produce a TESL book together, and I also have a New Testament Greek method up my sleeve. He’s off tomorrow to Hollywood—has just finished another film. After everyone left and the Shapiros retired, the boys and Chrysanthi and I talked far into the night, mostly about Chrysanthi’s life in Greece under the Germans and during the civil war.

November 25, 1983

Hanover

Finally, got my Fratricides article off to Bill McNeill for JMGS. Ivar Ivask asked me to write a lead article on William Golding, who has received the Nobel Prize, to everyone’s surprise.

The Shapiros stayed, because of a snowstorm. Irv spoke to Leander at length about Outi, who appears to be the worst kind of feminist, espousing principles out of hatred and neurosis.

November 26, 1983

Worked all day on Harkianakis poems.

November 27, 1983

Kate Harvey appeared, out of the blue. Svelte and beautiful, as we’d known her a decade ago before she entered the cave of mental illness. She hopes to become a registered nurse eventually—will be taking the exam for nurse’s aide this week. I think she’s still on medication and perhaps has relapses, but yesterday she seemed fine. Sheila was beaming, of course.

The Harkianakis poems are now much better, I think, but still no publisher.

English 2 teachers were here for pot luck supper, with Jennifer Joseph and son. Also had to play host to Sean Black, son of Don Black of San Francisco, whom we met on the cruise.

December 21, 1983

Daphne was accepted by Harvard, early action, one of 1600 out of 13,000 applicants over the past few years. Thank goodness; otherwise our Christmas would have been ruined. She had 20 classmates here for supper after which they all went to a formal dance. It’s starting!

December 23, 1983

With Chris Brown, Gary Mitchener, Mayme and Lafayette Noda, I visited Senator Rudman in Concord to protest U.S. military aid to Central America. He is most impressive; a forceful speaker; intense; knowledgeable. He told me that he reads a book a day; he’s an insomniac, sleeps only four hours a night; doesn’t go to parties. Reads reads reads. Gave us a sense of what it’s like when you have to make decisions rapidly, on the best evidence available, even though you know full well it’s incomplete or biased. He got angry when Mayme implied that he just followed the Reagan line. No, he voted with Reagan sometimes, against him other times, and also against his constituents—e.g., on foreign aid. A most educational visit, more for us than for him, I fear.

Continued on to Boston, bought Daphne a Harvard sweatshirt (!), relaxed over a sherry in John Williams House Senior Common Room, then met Βούλη at Logan Airport. She’s arrived from Greece to spend the holidays here.

December 24, 1983

Telephoned Stylianos in Sydney. Chrysanthi, Daphne, Vouli, and I spoke—rapidly! Daphne asked, “How is your hat?” (the old joke).

December 25, 1983

Off to NYC for Christmas dinner. Vouli, too.

1984

January–December, Hanover

Philadelphia, Pendle Hill

January 20–21

Boston, NYC for MGSA

January 27–29

Boston

February 3

Philadelphia

February 20

Boston, NYC

March 1–2

Boston, NYC, Philadelphia

March 8–11

NYC

April 8

New Haven for Yale, Princeton

April 12–15

Cleveland

April 27–29

Commuting between Riparius and Hanover

June–August

Rutgers

September 20, October 18, November 15

Cambridge, Providence, Cambridge

November 1–3

Cambridge

November 30–December 1

NYC, Washington, Du Pont Plaza Hotel

December 25–30

February 6, 1984

The faculty passed our COP recommendation against the reinstatement of NROTC—almost 120 to 50. My heart was going pitter-patter. I was in large part responsible for the final draft of the COP report, having edited what the committee wrote. Apparently the report convinced our colleagues. McLaughlin will be furious, of course.

March 16–17, 1984

Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys, from Sydney, were with us overnight with their daughter Catharine. Nice party on Saturday with Charlie Wood and Peter and June Travis. Steve Scher flew in to leave his cappuccino machine with us for safekeeping while he goes off to Hungary and Germany. I took the Jeffreys to Town Meeting in the morning and was proud of our democracy, the quality of the debate, the excellence of the moderator.

The new Quaker meetinghouse is almost ready—43 Lebanon Street. It will be beautiful. Let’s hope that even those who have been complaining about the way the decision was made will repent.

For the first time (!), I got really adverse criticism regarding my course in Conrad-Lawrence-Joyce, together with enthusiasm in some quarters, it is true. Students complained that I was too scholarly, read my lectures, spoke above their heads. One was furious at the exam, the short answers part. Others complained that the discussions didn’t go well, which of course must have been their fault, too.

Daphne was accepted at Haverford but seems to be inclining toward Harvard so far. Haverford is safer for her, Harvard more risky, but more of an adventure probably.

This was a grueling term. English 3 wore me down. I never knew what to do in the class periods. Then there was ROTC—hours and hours, followed by the search committee for a dean to replace Hans Penner. Probably I didn’t give as much effort to the novel course as I should have. Now it’s break period. I’ve spent most of it doing my income tax for 1983 and preparing for an audit of the return for 1982. Some holiday! But the day with the Jeffreys was different, and pleasant.

Next term should be better; only one course, a senior seminar.

One bright spot this term was the presence here of John Tallmadge as visiting professor of environmental science. We lunched and dined repeatedly, always with an easy flow of conversation. He introduced me to his colleague and “roommate” Grant Phelps Thompson, a Washington lawyer also teaching as a visitor in environmental science, and a Quaker: clerk of Florida Avenue Meeting. Nice man, very mellow. We exchanged clerking stories. I’ve asked to be relieved at Pendle Hill. Enough is enough.

I was asked to lecture at the inauguration of the Elytis Chair at Rutgers next fall. Three lectures on Modern Greek poetry, for $5000! Big time!

Dia has accepted a job at BC. Diana Haas will replace her. George Savidis will stay an extra year. Meg Alexiou is all but appointed as his successor, owing in some part to a very strong letter from me, according to Greg Nagy and Albert Henrichs.

I’ve been negotiating with Stephen Graubard, editor of Daedalus, for a MGSA/Daedalus conference on Greece and Turkey. All this came about because of our chance meeting when Ihor Ševčenko took me to lunch at the Academy last spring. Now we’ll see if the MGSA Executive Committee will accept. They may find the big time too threatening.

Tom Wood, Alec’s headmaster at Friends Central, was here for the NH Democratic primary. Of course his candidate, Cranston, did miserably. I voted for him, out of embarrassment.

Leander came with Outi, newly arrived again from Helsinki. She’s much more open—smiles, talks, jokes. I took her to lunch at the Inn and had a splendid tête-à-tête, which of course was misunderstood by Chrysanthi, causing us a few days’ hostility. But we got over it. I’m all for Outi while Chrysanthi is 100% negative. She’s threatened by a woman who thinks and who has feminist views.

Saw three Beckett one-actors in New York recently: Catastrophe, etc. Haunting if not always comprehensible. His vitality (even if it expends itself on moribundi) is extraordinary. Always new ways to say the same thing.

April 23, 1984

Cleveland

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a magnificent El Greco, the Crucifixion, and another one almost as startling: Mary, Christ, and Mary Magdalene, in which Mary’s blue robe dominates. The Crucified Christ in the first canvas is weightless, already ascending on high. Also a nice Rembrandt: “Old Man Praying.” I went with Annouska Remmert and her friend Donna, after a nice lunch of escargot and paté. Then I spoke on “the Glory that Was Greece” to the Hellenic Cultural Society. Seemed to go well. So many doctors, surgeons, some confessing to me a starvation regarding literature. One, a Cretan, actually pulled out an epic on ’21, in the scansion of Erotokritos! How warm the Greeks are! Contrast the Dartmouth crowd of last night (though they were very gracious). I spoke about “Why I Teach at Dartmouth.” They dined me at the Theatre Club after—the new complex designed by Philip Johnson. Our Dartmouth affair was across the street from Fenn College, now part of Cleveland State. Memories of ’61! Annouska is a vivacious Greek from Thessaloniki, married to a stolid American. I hope I don’t seem that way to outsiders. Probably do. She craves the noise of Athens, languishes in the dullness of Cleveland. But the city is reviving. Even the lake is no longer lethal. Ανάσταση!

April 29, 1984

Hanover

After flying in from Cleveland, I visited 43 Lebanon Street, our new meetinghouse. Treat Arnold designed it well. The meeting room is cosy, intimate, and has lots of character, yet is utterly simple.

Daphne is going to Harvard. We had to say no to Haverford. Let’s pray that this wasn’t a mistake. But I’m hopeful.

May 3, 1984

Stavros Souliopoulos is here, the first of our Greek «relatives» to set foot in the new world. A fine, ambitious person. Leander came with Outi and two Finnish friends. At lunch at the Faculty Club we had the bizarre situation of two Finns at one end of the table who spoke no English or French, and one Greek at the other end who likewise spoke no English or French. Leander was in his element, translating the menu (more or less) into both Finnish and Greek.

May 11, 1984

To Manchester to the Harvard Club dinner for new matriculants. Professor Fairbank, the Sinologist, spoke marvelously about the Chinese Revolution. We sat with the Schumanns. Saw Jim Shanahan’s parents afterward. I felt pleased for Daphne, to be in a place with people the caliber of Fairbank. He said that not one top official of our government had ever lived abroad. How do we expect them to deal with other peoples with any understanding?

May 12, 1984

Supper at the Schumanns’. One guest turned out to be Paul Sanderson, my Deerfield classmate. We didn’t realize this at first, but after we “connected,” out came wonderful stories about Mr. Boyden. Sanderson was headmaster of Suffield Academy. Now, “retired,” he sends high school children for periods abroad, and brings Europeans here, placing them in U.S. independent schools.

May 13, 1984

Dedication of our new Meeting House at 43 Lebanon Street. A fine meeting. I ministered, talking about the two El Grecos—the madonna so colorful, the crucifixion so wan, birth and death, spring and winter. The paintings hang side by side in Cleveland, and we, I suppose, hang in the middle, or should, partaking of both. Tom Ewell, new field secretary of NEYM, spoke afterwards. Lots of singing; good food; very festive. Only Bob Daubenspeck boycotted us. Even Becky Williams came. Joe Connelly, dying of cancer, tried to smile, but broke down once and cried, as did Emily. We’re having a special meeting for him tomorrow.

Dwight Lahr was chosen as the Dean of Faculty. Nice to have him in the Meeting.

My photo appeared the magazine section of the New York Times in an article about computing in the humanities at Dartmouth and elsewhere. The caption read, “Professor Roger Masters of Dartmouth conducts a government class”! A mopnth ago my photo appeared in the Daily Dartmouth, and the caption read, “John Noble.” I’m getting lots of ribbing about this, but I think I did better than Masters!

I have shortened and revised my old Columbia seminar paper on D. H. Lawrence’s criticism, for presentation at the MLA next December.

Next, I pulled out the essay I did on Thomas Mann’s séance scene in Der Zauberberg and am revising this for possible publication. It’s fun to work with the German, which I remember as if in a dream, but really do not remember. However, the novel is marvelous. What fun to go back to it, as to an old friend.

May 14, 1984

Lunch with Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel laureate Polish poet. Lawrence Davies was there (he’s editing the Conrad letters), and some students. Milosz talked about realism vs. subjectivism, praising Polish poets for avoiding the latter. He read some fine poems from his anthology of Polish poets. Afterwards, I asked him if he scorned America and Americans (he had accused American poets, from Whitman onward, of being too subjective). He said Yes, he had, at first, when he arrived after the war. But then he confirmed, interestingly, “Yet I came to realize that in every nation, including America, there are huge demonic forces. These were evident—all too evident—in Europe, obviously. But they are also evident in America. Just go to New York. There you see them willy-nilly. So I could no longer scorn America as being naïve and unreal.” He went on in a manner that I found especially illuminating. “In Poland and many other European countries,” he said, “the demonic forces find their outlet in the political life, through police surveillance, repressions, arrests, general fear, etc. In America and other capitalist nations, these same forces find their outlet in economic life, via poverty, the bums and bag ladies sleeping on the streets in New York and met with indifference by the general populace, etc. In communist societies, fear takes a political form, and the attempt to overcome this fear also takes a political form. In capitalist societies, fear takes an economic form. No one in Poland worries about starving or being ill housed, or being abandoned in old age. In America these fears are real. The attempt to overcome such fears takes the form of the acquisitive drive that of course is blessed by society. Deep down, the compulsion we see in America to make huge sums of money, and then still huger sums, derives from this fear, though probably subconsciously. And this, most deeply, is why American society will never eliminate economic fear by providing the kind of social assurance given by socialist countries—why, because once the economic fear is removed, the acquisitive drive will have lost its psychological justification. Somehow the elite know, perhaps subconsciously, that their position depends on the maintenance of economic fear and injustice at the other end of the social spectrum. This is the form taken by demonic forces in America.” He added that this basic psychological problem is really what divides us from the communists and they from us, making attempts at cooperation futile.

Same day: dinner with three of my best students: John Van Aalst, who is writing an autobiographical novel under my direction, Mark Schoening, and Paul Agostinelli, who got A’s earlier this year. John is most interesting, a born-again Christian, gentle, caring, extremely talented. His mother is a Palestinian Arab; he grew up in India.

May 17, 1984

Sloan grant meeting. We are going to move ahead with our computer projects.

Daphne played solo in the first movement of “Spring” from Vivaldi’s “Seasons.” This was her last concert with the Hanover High School orchestra and also was Helen Goodwin’s retirement concert after 32 years struggling to keep music alive in Hanover. Tributes, a cake, flowers, etc.

My student Richard Colman turned in a brilliant play about a Vietnam vet in Queens who goes manic because of his drug habit, at a Christmas party with his family.

Last night, the film “Bounty,” about Bligh, Fletcher Christian, and of course Tahiti. Μέτριο!

June–August 1984

Commuted from the farm to Hanover to teach English 57. Lots of visits to Kinhaven as well, since Daphne was a student and Leander a piano instructor. His amazing student is Ignat Solzhenitsyn, son of the author, an eleven-year-old prodigy. Also funny Walter Chestnut, son of the band conductor.

September 20, 1984

In Penn Station, a man tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’m Lloyd McNeill. I recognized you by your voice.” I last saw him in 1964. He played flute with our group, and left a painting of Allan Munck, John Stewart, himself, and me, also transformed into Negroes. I went to Rutgers to give the first of my lectures inaugurating the Elytis Chair. Dinner with the president (Blaustein) and Archbishop Iakovos, etc. Iakovos, afterwards, said that, contrary to my thesis, there was nothing mysterious about poetry. He wanted to keep το μυστήριο his own specialty, apparently. He was also intrigued, as was Bishop Silas, with my statement that Romanos the Melodist was of Jewish origin. Alec came to the lecture. The next day I spoke at the ceremony honoring Andonis Decavalles on occasion of the publication of his collected poems, translated by Kimon Friar. Very warm occasion. Dinner afterwards with Poppi and Andonis.

October 18, 1984

Second Rutgers lecture. On folk song. They objected when I said that the Κλέφτες weren’t patriots. Alec came again. Next: to Pendle Hill for the General Board session on the Pendle Hill pamphlets. I am the new clerk of the Publications Committee. Van Gogh exhibit at the Met.

November 3, 1984

To Harvard for Daphne’s Parents’ Day. Also to Brown for tutors’ conference. Ken Bruffee spoke brilliantly on the conceptualization of the “peer tutoring revolution,” placing it in the context of structuralist philosophy. We brought twelve tutors. Then back to Cambridge for dinner with Steve Baran, whom I hadn’t seen since 1950, and his wife Bernin, with Chrysanthi and Daphne. He is a social worker but not doing case work, rather consulting research, etc. Spoke of Neil Hastie, who was too radical for the Episcopal Church, wears his collar but has no congregation. The usual!

November 15, 1984

Third and last lecture at Rutgers. Faithful Alec came again and endured despite a stomach upset. I don’t think the audience understood much, except for one young man who came up afterwards to chat. He has asked for all three lectures in hard copy. Actually, Rutgers wants to publish them. Party afterwards. A man lectured me for 45 minutes on Arnold Toynbee as a traitor to the Greeks. Students made an ice cream cake with a poem by Elytis and a ευχαριστώ to me. Fun. But exhausting. Tonio Tripolitis gave me my fee of $5000 (!) on the spot. Will pay for the NH tax-exempt bond I just purchased.

Earlier, lunch at Yale Club with Chrysanthi and my mother. Mother clearly now held prisoner, almost, by father. He is pathetic. Won’t do anything because of his self-pitying self-absorption. If she suggests anything unusual he gets palpitations and accuses her of vile intent, just about.

November 16–17, 1984

By AVIS to Kendal at Longwood, with a stop at the Brandywine Museum for the Andrew Wyeth exhibit. His “touch” is very evident in every painting. Lovely setting by the river. At Kendal, 1½ hours with Lloyd Lewis discussing his philosophy and also the chances of developing a similar center in Hanover. Then lunch at Crosslands with Anna Jones. Saw Emily Wilson and Marie Condon accidentally. Anna looks splendid. Walks three miles each day, goes to Symphony fortnightly, had 16 family members to dinner last Sunday. Lloyd says that Kendal/Crosslands puts five to ten years on people’s lives. What a contrast to my parents! I’m very tempted to register. Chrysanthi seemed impressed as well.

Long drive back to Philadelphia to return the car. Fire at 30th Street stopped SEPTA. Luckily Alec came and got us, drove me to Pendle Hill. Chrysanthi went with him to a Friends Central play. At PH saw Steve Stalonas after six years. Impressive man. Talked about the nature of silence. My view of the sacerdotal quality of silence is not true to early Quakerism, he says. For them, the silence had no value in itself; it was just an empty receptacle, and the important thing was for it to be filled with enlightenment. Also talked about why God cannot have a name. He says it’s anthropological, the move beyond Shamanism. Boring Board meeting Friday night. Ice cream with Colman and Astrid Dorsey afterwards, and Barbara Parsons: we woke up at last. Saturday better. I talked about PH pamphlets, lessons from past meetings of the General Board.

Alec and Chrysanthi arrived. We drove to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the Jonathan Borovsky show. Fascinating. He creates his own world of fantasy that is at the same time “real,” touching our political lives and also our dream lives.

November 18, 1984

At Meeting, I ministered on the life and witness of Ken Webb, who died ten days ago. Nice to see Henry Williams at Meeting after a long absence owing to illness.

November 30, 1984

Impulsively, drove with Chrysanthi to Cambridge to hear the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (with Daphne playing violin), Jimmy Yannatos conducing. What a fine sound in Sanders theater. They did Smetana’s The Moldau with a senior as guest conductor, doing beautifully; then Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra—such a fanciful work—which the orchestra did splendidly, since they have spectacular section leaders for the main instruments displayed. The second half: Brahms’s 1st, the 4th movement especially was sonorous and deep in every way. We had other pleasures, too. The person sitting in back of me tapped me on the shoulder and identified herself as a Kinhaven graduate who remembered Leander and Alec, etc. Dale Pratt. Then Steve Mitchell rushed over to say a warm hello. We caught up on some of our news. Also saw Christine, his girlfriend. Plans for a dinner next time. Betty Clendenning was there, too, to hear Joy. And Scotti, Daphne’s friend who spent Thanksgiving with us. And Marie, Daphne’s roommate, whom we took for a Chinese supper before the concert. Daphne went off to a party in Lowell House afterwards. We had croissants and cappuccino in Au Bon Pain, with folk singers blaring outside, then walked to Brattle Street. The whole square has been beautifully refurbished.

December 1, 1984

Slept over in the Harvard Faculty Club. Worked in Widener in the morning, reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary, the last volume, also Dimaras’s History for an article I’m doing for Ivask on Greek poetry vs. prose. Lunch with Daphne in “The Garage.” Then we discussed her paper on Olympia as a religious manifestation. She’s doing this for Expos. I gave her lots of ideas on how to relate it to the Olympics just passed in Los Angeles, etc. Also discussed her next paper: on Saint Francis. She wanted to do Francis and Giotto but I urged her to do Kazantzakis’s interpretation.

A lovely twenty-four hours: mini vacation. At home, sent Daphne basic information on Sabatier, the Little Flowers, etc.—my old self coming back

Pappous fell last week and broke his leg, which has now been pinned. He’s in New York Hospital, complaining as usual. Alice is in New York for a few days. My parents’ situation is desperate. One thinks of how different it would have been at Kendal. I wrote for the brochure of the new Quaker home being built outside of Haverford, which seems the most attractive of all. The Arndts are signed up for Guilford, North Carolina.

Working with Elise Boulding and Leonard Rieser to institute a Peace Studies program here, in response to the threat of returning ROTC. Andy Towl gave me a lead—the Bakers—who might give money. We’ll visit them in New York in January.

Tuesday, December 25, 1984, Christmas

Drove to NYC with Daphne and Chrysanthi. We brought the entire Christmas dinner this time; my mother was not up to it. Father totally blind now, and very depressed after breaking his leg. Walks with a walker but since he can’t see has to be directed: “Two steps forward, turn 90 degrees, one step back, the chair is in back of you, sit.” Awful. At night he’s urinating continually, can’t find the urinal, spills the urine in the bed and onto the floor. Mother has to get up each time, so has no sleep. Truly we become infants once again. But the worst of all is his depression. He keeps calling himself worthless, a jerk, says he wants to die. Physically, he’s doing well, healing. . . . But . . .

Bubbles came for coffee, “bubbling” as always. At least mother has her in the building.

Wednesday, December 26, 1984

Worked on my MLA paper in the Yale Club. Chrysanthi and Daphne went to the Van Gogh exhibit at the Met. We all converged at the Plymouth Theater at 2:00 for Stoppard’s play “The Real Thing.” Including mother. Jeremy Irons acted superbly in the lead. Good theater in general, about the convergence of “art” and “reality” . . . maybe.

After the show, they went home and I went to the Sloan-Kettering Institute at Memorial Hospital to visit Paul Davidoff. He was scheduled for chemotherapy on Thursday. He told me that the cancer had infested his lungs. But he still was active, had worked regularly since the operation, was about to start litigation against the town of Long Beach for zoning discrimination against the poor, etc. He’d lost his hair from previous treatment. Said he’d also tried “alternative” cures: faith healing, diet, etc., including one man who’d subsequently been indicted as a crook. Tomorrow he was going to receive a new type of chemotherapy not even approved yet by the federal regulation agency. Would return in three weeks for another treatment. Carla was there, and Dan, and the other boy, and Linda. We sat for an hour or so and had a jolly time reminiscing about Atlantic Beach and other common experiences. Surely it was his way of saying goodbye forever, though this was not mentioned. He’d given a huge party the week before—another way, I think.

Thursday, December 27, 1984

For Alec, bought Racine’s Oeuvres completes downtown in a French bookstore on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street. Wonderful place. Third floor all fine bindings. Worked at the Yale Club. Lunch there with Chrysanthi and Daphne. Then 8th and 43rd. Club car to Washington. Dupont Plaza Hotel. Renewed acquaintance with the marvelous D.C. subway. MLA. Serendipity: discovered Benny Hill on TV late at night.

Friday, Decmeber 28, 1984

MLA all day. Supper with Grant Thompson, Sandra T., and John Tallmadge at Grant’s house. Very compatible. It’s nice to know that it’s still possible to make new friends at this stage.

Saturday, December 29, 1984

MLA in the morning. Lunch with Steve Wheeler, former student, now doing disarmament work in D.C. Talked about placing students for internships should we develop a War-Peace Studies program at Dartmouth. He has hung on for four years, barely subsisting. MGSA session on theater was run well by Stratos Constantinidis. Then I dashed to the other hotel to give my paper on Lawrence’s Critical Philosophy. Brian Gallagher was there, also Dick Dellamora. Well received. They want to publish it. Dashed back to MGSA session: business meeting. Addie Pollis arrived. She told me that Paul had died! Shock. Apparently early Thursday morning. He went into convulsions while receiving the chemotherapy. This means that I was the last one, apart from family, to see him alive. But the show had to go on. My presidential address/valediction after a three-year term. Election to Executive Committee. Elections of new officers: Diamandouros, Confoudakis, Hartigan, Chioles. Plans for Columbus Symposium. I left at 7:30 to have supper with Constantinidis and another speaker. Then at 10:00 p.m. went for a beer with Dellamora, now openly gay but no matter. Also saw Mary Dobbie, earlier.

Sunday, December 30, 1984

Breakfast with Brian Gallagher and Marian Askin and Ann, 2¼ year old. Train to NYC. Met Iatrides and Pollis. In Penn Station she called about Paul’s memorial service, but we had missed it. At 20 E. 74th I learned to my relief that mother and Chrysanthi had gone that morning. Drove to Hanover. My mother distraught at our departure. We’ll probably have to bring them to Hanover.

Monday, December 31, 1984

Party at Genevieve Williamson’s. Saw Louis Cornell, whom Mary Dobbie wished to be remembered to. Then to Rassiases’ for the annual feast of snails. John knew of my friendship with Paul and had kindly telephoned NYC when he read the obituary in the Times. We’ve been feasting together for fifteen years. How nice!

1985

Hanover

January–May

Jan. 9–11, Amherst

Jan. 18–19, Philadelphia

February 15–16, Cambridge

February 23, NYC

March 1, Cambridge

March 5–6, Columbus, Ohio

March 9–13, Philadelphia

March 22–24, NYC

April 19–22, Philadelphia, Amish country

April 25–26, Cambridge

April 29, Washington

May 11–12, Amherst, Riparius

May 17–19, Philadelphia, Fellowship Farm

Commuting between Riparius and Hanover

June–August

Boston, Rome, Athens

August 28–29

Greece

August 29–September 20

August 29–30, Hotel Grande Bretagne, Athens

August 31, Delphi, Hotel Amalia, Hosios Loukas

September 1, Mycenae, Epidauros

September 2, Pylos, Bassae, Olympia

September 3, Mystra, Monemvasia

September 4, Santorini

September 5, Lindos, Rhodes

September 6, Ephesus

September 7, Troy

September 8, Istanbul

September 9, Samothrace

September 10–12, Athens, Esperia Palace Hotel, Stadiou 22, Athens 10564, tel. 3238.001

September 12–20, c/o G. Giannakos, Plastira 1A, Kalamaria, Thessaloniki

Vienna, Pension Arenburg, Stenbeuring 2 (Olympia restaurant, Kartnerstr. 10)

September 21–23

Paris, Hotel Jeanne d’Arc, rue Jarente 3, Paris 75004, tel 887.62.11

September 24–26

Driebruggen, Holland, c/o Wim Bakker

September 27–28

Woodbrooke College,

September 28–December 16

1046 Bristol Road, Birmingham B29 6LJ

October 21–22, Göteborg, Sweden, Hotel Lindson, Hvitfeldtspatsen 4, S-411 20 Göteborg, tel. 031.10 19 20

October 23–25, Stockholm, Host Hans Ruge, Stiftelsen Wenner-Gren Center, Sveavägen 166, 133 46 Stockholm, tel 08 15 17 00

October 25, Uppsala

October 26, Copenhagen, Hotel Astoria 4, Banegardspladsen, D-1570, Copenhagen V, tel 01 141419

October 27, Copenhagen, Göteborg, Heathrow, Birmingham

October 31, Oxford, chez Peter Mackridge

November 2, London

November 7, Oxford

November 11–12, Leeds and York

November 14–15, Cambridge

November 25, London

November 30, Bristol

December 15, London

Birmingham, Heathrow, Boston

December 16

Hanover

December 17–31

Tuesday, January 1, 1985

Quaker party at our house. Nodas, Audrey Logan, Soderbergs, Corindias, and also Ellen Kahn and Don Stewart. Μεζεδάκια, multiple desserts, then silly games and Audrey’s Trivia game. Very relaxing and friendly.

Wednesday, January 2, 1985

Students back today. Classes tomorrow. Ugh! I’m tired already. Outi telephoned from Finland. Where is Leander? I told her: in Greece. She’d expected him somehow in Helsinki.

Well, as the new year begins, I’m no longer an officer of MGSA (although still on the Executive Board and still associate editor of the journal, which will get Ernestine Friedl as editor beginning in September), and no longer on the Kinhaven Board and no longer clerk of the Pendle Hill General Board. All these withdrawals I’ve desired, to free me for next year’s push on the Kazantzakis book. But will I be left high and dry in the long run? Problems of retirement begin to assume more reality. Lloyd Lewis is coming on February 14 to talk about the proposed Quaker retirement community for this area.

January 9–11, 1985

At Hampshire College for a conference on peace studies. The new dean at Hampshire, Harmon Dunathan, turned out to be a kind of double: we shared so many things in common—Haverford, Kendal, even a Greek wife! Leo Marx was the chief speaker: don’t teach contemporary technicalities, teach history, the background to misunderstanding. A horribly liberated woman said that masculinity was totally to blame. I countered by invoking hermaphroditism and was called old-fashioned. Dinner at Adele Simmons’. She’s the president of Hampshire, very involved in peace issues: lovely, small children, a very different kind of woman. Afterwards, lunch in the Lord Jeff with John Petropulos. Ansia is at the New School. John never finished his history of Greece. He says, half jokingly, that he wants new experiences in life. Instead of writing books, to go to Nicaragua and cut sugar cane. But he really wants to write on the Greek αντίσταση.

January 18–19, 1985

Pendle Hill Publications Committee, then Board. Andy Towl briefed me on the Bakers, whom we’ll be visiting next Saturday. Nice walk with him after the meeting. Colman Dorsey and Astrid on strict diets: no more ice cream parties. Saturday, Alec came and we went together to visit György and Maria Márkus at Haverford, after nineteen years! He has a beautifully resonant voice, with heavy accent. She is a Pole, blonde, youngish, intellectual, professional. I asked him what happened. His group (he, Maria, about five others) had protested the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That put the authorities against them. They were forbidden to teach students, and were “kicked upstairs” to the Academy, to do research, but with restrictions on publishing. All the moderation came because Lukács, whose pupils and disciples they were, was still alive, and the authorities could not risk an international scandal. When Lukács died (1971), György and the others were removed from all employment. They subsisted on translations at slave wages for about four years and resolved to emigrate. The authorities were delighted to see them go. So, when an opening came for a colleague at Melbourne, he and his wife went. They helped Márkus to be offered a post in Sydney, and he went. Maria secured a place in the College of New South Wales. Now the friends are about to transfer to the New School in NYC but Márkus has no job here. He’d prefer New York. Sydney is OK, but too far away, too provincial (but they do like Australian nature). Dick Bernstein at Haverford is a warm friend; They met at congresses abroad, and work in nearly the same areas of philosophy. We talked merily over a glass of whisky for three hours: about Hungary, Australia, America. I gave them Life in the Tomb and Introduction to Three Greek Writers. Then down to Chinatown for a nice meal with Alec, recently back from Greece. And AMTRAK home.

March 15, 1985

Mother is here to look at condominiums for a possible move because of the difficult situation with Pappou. Senseless. If they’re going to be on their own in an apartment, better stay put. But The Greens, a group home across from a nursing home, attracted her more.

Saturday, March 16, 1985

I looked at The Greens. Too bad it’s out of town. Mother sees it for herself but knows that Pappous will be miserable surrounded by old ladies and will make her miserable. We all went to the Parish Players at night to see David Storey’s Home with Tyler the ex-Congregational minister. Not bad, but too much like an old people’s home (!) for comfort. Leonard and Rosemary were there, also Nick Jacobson, who knows Gwineth Walker, whose music Leander played.

Tuesday, March 17, 1985

Finished a translation of Seferis’s essay Πάντα Πλήρης Θεών involving some nice literary detective work, especially in the discovery of a passage by Ruskin. Darrel Mansell helped me.

Friday, March 22, 1985

New York City

Breakfast at the Yale Club with Chrysanthi and Leonard Rieser. Then Leonard and I visited John and Elizabeth Baker again regarding help with the War and Peace Concentration. After the obligatory ritual they agreed to give $20,000 this year with more to come, perhaps, next year—in memory of Ford Sayre, who apparently was a pacifist. We had hoped for $100,00 but at least did not go away with nothing. Rousseau exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in the afternoon. Then we met Daphne at Penn Station and went to O’Neill’s Strange Interlude with Brenda Jackson. Compelling, amazing play, so tedious at the start, and then so addictive. All of Nina’s men—Charlie, Sam, and the doctor—are meticulously characterized.

Saturday, March 23, 1985

New York City

To the Guggenheim in the morning to see the last of the three Kandinsky exhibits, this time carrying him up to his death in Paris. What a surprise to learn his admiration for and indebtedness to Rousseau, because both painted from a “dream self.” There was also a splendid letter about a fish and a line: is there any difference? In life yes, says Kandinsky, because the fish swims, eats, and is eaten, but in art, no. Each can be defined artistically in relation to its surroundings. In art he prefers the line, although on the dinner table he’d probably prefer the fish! Then took mother to Sydney Ballet at the City Center. Stunning ballet on Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” to Messiaen’s music, wonderful allegorical effects reminding me of Milton’s—e.g., Marriage of Death and Lust, battle of Lust and Love for von Aschenbach’s soul, etc. A very masculine ballet, predictably. Two masterpieces in two successive days!

Sunday, March 24, 1985

New York City

To 15th Street Meeting, alone. Another crackpot speaker, also a sane one who said that we were living in a military dictatorship (!). Afterwards, letter writing in the Yale Club. I have to go to NYC it seems to find the serenity to catch up on letters.

Mrs. Kazantzakis has offered me the Τετρακόσια Γράμματα to translate. I’ve written to say yes, probably, but that I’d prefer a volume of Selected Letters.

After Mother said no to The Greens, I had a brainstorm. Perhaps the Quadrangle being built in Haverford would admit Pappous in his stage of senility. I called Renata Harrison, the director of admissions, and she encouraged me. So we’ve sent in the $1500 deposit for them. It opens in April 1987. Will they be able to hold out?

Monday, March 25, 1985

Hanover

Leander and I are here alone; Chrysanthi and Daphne are still in NYC. I took Leander to the Inn for supper (it’s his birthday). Nice, easy, relaxed conversation. Then he returned to Amherst.

Tuesday, March 26, 1985

Term is beginning. My eleventh straight without a full vacation. Senior Seminar on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses with eight or fewer students. Not bad. Nursing four Comparative Literature majors through their theses. Ted Eliopoulos in Greek reading course. Plus Comp. Lit. chairmanship. Enough! But I do hope to start systematically again on Kazantzakis and Politics, to begin to gather momentum for next year.

I should note the nice, rapid trip to Columbus to lecture at Ohio State on March 5. Vassilis Lambropoulos and Mr. Kozyris were my hosts. Nora, Fran Shapiro’s daughter, showed up in the audience. I gave my critique of Kapetan Mihalis and had a very fine question period afterwards. What a pleasure and how rare! Flew back early the next morning via People Express to Burlington, in time for tenure meeting. We said yes to Pat McKee and no, alas, to Marion Singleton. Sad.

Elise Boulding has made me co-chair, with her, of the War/Peace group, temporarily, since I’ll be away next year.

April 21, 1985

Overheard in AMTRAK club car, two children aged 3 or 4 having heated discussion. One reaches a negative stage and asserts “No way!” whereupon the other replies “Yes way!”

Alec, Christine McCall, Chrysanthi, and I spent today touring the Amish country, specifically Morgantown and Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Saw buggies, men with beards, children in black trousers playing baseball, etc. Not as romantic as the movie “Witness” but, as Chrysanthi said, plowing with horses isn’t very new to us. Christine’s mother, only 45 years old but the victim of an aneurism, came with us from the nursing home. Christine was very tender with her. Sad.

Yesterday, Friday, General Board at Pendle Hill. I spoke on the new plans for PH pamphlets and other publishing ventures. Wallace Collett is the new clerk. Bain Davis and Colman Dorsey may give some money to Dartmouth for War/Peace Studies.

April 22, 1985

What a day! Arrived at 4:00 a.m. in White River Junction. Breakfast with Chrysanthi at Howard Johnson’s. Worked until noon. Lunch at Thayer with a student, Bruce Brown. Office hours in the afternoon. War/Peace Faculty Seminar and supper. Then my class. Finished at 10:00 p.m.

Mrs. Kazantzakis wants me to do an edition of Kazantzakis’s Selected Letters in translation. Had a good talk with Lawrence Davies re: his experience editing the Conrad letters.

Working daily for a few hours on the Kazantzakis book—finally. Just bibliography so far, but that’s a start.

May 11, 1985

Nice day in Amherst with Leander. I turned pages for him in the Amherst (town) library as he and the violinist, violist, and cellist that make up the U. Mass piano quartet played Loeillet and then the Schumann piano quartet. Four to five people in the audience on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, but no matter. Fit audience though few. Bester, the department chair, was there. So we met him. And last Wednesday we met Adele Alevsky at the Hop. She played the Franck violin-piano sonata with a superb violinist from Berlin. She called Leander “a dear.” We also saw Saarinen’s amazing fine arts building, all concrete, hanging in the air. But the inside is drab. Snack afterwards with Leander and the cellist, Elizabeth Rose, a very sweet girl. Leander seems to be recovering from Outi, and seeing other girls, chiefly Liz. (Outi sent me a long plaintive letter to which I have to respond, and she’ll be at Woodbrooke next autumn.) Then to Deerfield for reminiscences. A nice dinner with Leander, and drove to the farm.

May 12, 1985

Started the tractor with three turns! Found a way to keep the water barrel “alive” over the winter, so it was tight, ready for use. Small triumphs!

August 28, 1985

Logan Airport, Boston

Waiting for TWA flight to Athens for “Ancient Perspectives” cruise. Last diary entry was in May, I think, omitting the entire summer. So, some recapitulation is in order.

We spent the summer commuting again between Terpni and Hanover since I had to teach: one course, English 57 (Forster, Conrad, Joyce, Beckett, with 15 students, not too onerous). As happened last summer, this was rather pleasant, with lots of meals in restaurants on our weekly trip east on Monday and west on Thursday.

At the farm, the major project was Alec’s cabin. He had two periods: about ten days before his six weeks at Middlebury (where he received his M.A. finally) and about three weeks afterwards. We started in June from floor level and erected the walls to about three ranks below the lintels of windows and doors. (I’d made the window- and door-frames, mostly.) Paul Buseck was with us for ten days before we delivered him to Kinhaven. When Alec left, we spent our time mowing and keeping the tractor running. I’m proud of myself for a “magical” repair job to the magneto after the beast died in the middle of the south field. Minimal garden, since we knew we’d leave too early to harvest much. Lots of visits, as usual, with Shapiros. Also saw Perrymans, Grunblatts, Rothsteins, and met some more of the Shapiros’ friends. During this period, Alec brought some of his French friends from Middlebury: Annie, who had come the previous summer; Claude, the theatrical director; others. Leander was at Kinhaven. We ventured out to Middlebury once to see Alec in M. Claude’s production of Tartuffe, Alec playing M. Loyal very credibly, one of only two non-native French speakers in the cast. We also went to Kinhaven to hear Leander do the Brahms’ Horn Trio on Saturday night with Caroline the hornist, and a superb new violinist, Ava. Ike Patch was there; said it was the best thing he’d ever heard at Kinhaven. Ignat Solzhenitsyn turned pages and wept afterwards with emotion. It was very good Brahms. Sunday’s children’s concert was OK, nothing special. Jerry Bidlack ebullient as always, still battling with Lelia. Both sides have finally gotten appraisals, one at $400,00, the other at $425,000. But the Dushkins still don’t want to sell. We brought the Shapiros. Had a lovely supper at the Blue Gentian, by ourselves, and a Sunday picnic with Ava and her Australian husband, Rachel Feuermann, Paul Buseck, etc. Kinhaven continues to charm me. Jerry wants me back on the Board. I said 1986–87, maybe.

Meanwhile, in mid-summer Mrs. Kazantzakis wrote asking me to translate the 400 Γράμματα στον Πρεβελάκη. I replied with an alternative proposal, to do a volume of selected letters. She agreed readily. So part of the summer was spent writing up a proposal for Princeton University Press and then adapting it, in a frenzy just before flight-time, for a Fulbright grant. Lawrence Davies, who is editing the Conrad letters, was very helpful re: editorial principles. I would hope to start in 1987, when Kazantzakis and Politics is finished (μακάρι!).

We also traveled to New York, to bring Daphne to JFK and send her off to the Ionic Center on Chios for three weeks of intensive Greek with Evris Tsakarides. This seems to have worked well, judging from her postcard in impeccable Greek. We’ll see her tomorrow at the Grande Bretagne, Θεοῦ θέλοντος. She waitressed at Hanover Inn in June and July, and for ten days was an assistant drillmaster for John Rassias’s French program for alumni children, at Mount Moosilauke Lodge, a good experience. Also she was accepted to John Winthrop House, her first choice. She did Group I work in the Freshman year: A– in Greek and Bs in everything else.

The other purpose of the New York visit was to see Yiayia and Pappou. My father is clearly dying . . . slowly. And life for mother is strenuously depressing. He wakes her every two hours all night long, and plagues her with obsessive questions repeated ad infinitum. Little by little, very slowly, she is realizing that she won’t be able to cope alone. She now has night nurses as well as day nurses. I visited the Life Care Center Doncaster at Hartford on their behalf, but they are unacceptable there since Dad cannot care for himself. So, they’re stuck. Mother says that she’ll move to Hanover in January when we return and probably put Dad in the nursing home, if he lives that long.

One nice relief came thanks to Alice, who, having returned from Sierra Leone with Peter (Lori is in the Peace Corps there) volunteered to spend some days in New York with Pappou, so that mother could come to the farm, which she very much wanted to do. She stayed four days. Let’s hope it’s not the last time.

By this time, Alec had finished at Middlebury and returned to the farm. Dick Williamson came with his new “house-mate” Georganna (ex-Appleton). We’ve also begun playing music again, after two years’ interim. Alec’s friend Fred from Middlebury came, too. And the old reliable: Brittles (James McBride). Also Alec’s mechanic friend from Philadelphia, Bob, and his brother Mike: good workers. Also Gerasimos, not such a good worker. With Dick, we got the large plate logs up over the windows and doors. Then I helped Alec design the roof rafters. Peter Buseck came for this moment, as he had for the roof-raising of the barn many years earlier. There were some tense moments as I thought the first two pairs of rafters would come apart and crash down on top of us. But all went well, and we framed the entire roof quite quickly. I should add that Leander had arrived by this time from Kinhaven, and took part in the roof-raising.

The sheathing went more slowly, because Alec wanted 8-inch ship-lap, which will be visible from beneath. Then came the corrugated iron roofing, which was quite difficult, especially as it had begun to rain, and the insulation beneath it wasn’t meant to get wet. So we got the whole of the back side “tacked” with minimum nails, to cover the insulation. Then came three days of rain, so Chrysanthi and I went back to Hanover where I labored valiantly to (a) finish the Macintosh drills so that I could leave them ready for fall term, (b) complete the Fulbright application, (c) pack, (d) clean the office. At the same time, our Buick sickened and we decided to sell it at the last minute and to order a new Buick for our return in December.

As of today, Alec says that he’s closed in the gables. We also put in the windows on the ground floor. The cabin really looks like a house now. Tomorrow (Thursday) Leander will be back at the farm to help Alec with the second side of the roof. So at the end of the summer the building should be well protected from the weather.

What fun watching this cabin go up! A replication—with significant variations—of the work I did 35 years ago. I am even more thankful for the farm as a way of life that has clearly become attractive to Alec especially, to Leander also though to a lesser degree, but not, I fear, to Daphne.

Intellectually, this summer I spent time with την Άλωση, preparing my final lecture for the cruise, reading widely and writing a rather long account treating the siege itself but, more importantly, the educational consequences—the flight of Greek scholars to Italy and France, with such important consequences for the Renaissance. I also re-read Thucydides with great pleasure, and reworked my Iliad/Odyssey lecture slightly. All this means that Kazantzakis and Politics got slighted (as usual). However, I did spend considerable time preparing the prospectus for the Selected Letters. Princeton University Press is interested.

This coming academic year I have no teaching, after twelve terms in a row. So, it’s do or die with Kazantzakis and Politics. At Woodbrooke I hope to complete the final chapter on Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο and also to revise MS pages 304–630 comprising Julian, Jardin des rochers, etc. If I can be strong and resist diversions in winter, spring, and summer, I should have a MS ready. I refused my invitation to teach next summer. It’s better to be at the farm working on Kazantzakis and the cabin.

But first comes the diversion of this cruise, some days in Athens, more than a week in Thessaloniki, and tourism in Vienna, Paris, and Amsterdam—a full month before arriving at Woodbrooke on September 28.

A word more about my father. Even Mother agrees that death is the only solution. As she says repeatedly, it’s distressing to see a once vibrant man reduced to physical and psychical debility. He is so much like an infant: totally self-centered, virtually helpless. But he isn’t naïve. He understands his condition, hates it, hates himself, hates everything, and fervently wants to be released by death. My own wish echoes this, with the hope that he will go quickly, while Mother still has some strength left, so that she can have a few final years of peace. By the way, she continues to paint, and thrilled us by taking us to Lever House on Park Avenue, where she has two canvases on exhibit in a show of art by senior citizens.

September 4, 1985

Santorini

I’m writing this in a café on the black volcanic beach at Santorini, after a long swim with our “students” on the tour. Morning at Akrotiri. All these wonders aren’t as startling to me the second or third time as they were on initial encounter, yet they’re still fine. But Monemvasia, yesterday evening, was new. I climbed to the citadel at the top. Charming medieval, walled city below. But the high spot was Ritsos’s house, just inside the gate on the left, up a little alleyway. There is a plaque. The house is still owned by him, but is unoccupied. A resident said that he returned and saw it recently, after 40 years, the tears streaming down his face. Two of my books were on the local stand, the Penguin Ritsos and the Efstathiadis Three Generations.

September 5, 1985

Rhodes

We went to Vasos Papagapitos’s parents’ house in Lindos, high up in town. Beautiful pebbled courtyard. Living room embedded in the old fortress wall. His mother complained about the tourists. His father met the ship and sat with us at lunch. The government now prohibits construction of more hotels, in a move to save the town’s picturesqueness. Ten thousand Italians, or so it seemed, all disgorged from a Russian ship we saw later in Rhodes-town. Very hot day. Exhausted. Dehydrated. Rhodes-town is like Lake George village: a commercial horror.

I liked Μυστράς a few days ago. Climbed up to the citadel this time. Knew more about Γεμιστός and Κωνσταντίνος Παλαιολόγος. The previous day, got to Bassae. The temple is disappointing (as they all are, after the Parthenon). But the ride through Arcadia is spectacular. Poor humanity, eking out a living from a few square meters of ground terraced with infinite pains. At Olympia the pediments and metopes were back in the museum. Magnificent. I read Kazantzakis’s commentary: how they reflect the Persian War. Apollo’s expression is breathtaking. Also new, the day before, was Όσιος Λουκάς. Not as good as Karyjes; but a fine Pentecost over the apse. At Delphi I read my lecture again in the stadium. At Epidauros, Bob McGrath, Bob Keeshan (the Captain Kangaroo of television) and I did the ending of Sophocles’ Electra, eliciting laughter but not tears. I had diarrhea just then, but managed to find a toilet just before, thank God. I loved the Acropolis Museum in Athens; some of the Parthenon frieze is on display. Tomorrow: Ephesus.

September 6, 1985

Ephesus excavations have progressed greatly, but we still couldn’t see the “apartment complex” with the frescoes. The communal privy is well restored. They had clean water to wipe themselves! Also, we could now go inside the Library of Celsus—what richness and detail!

Dinner with the captain. I thought the boy on board was his son and said so, but it is his nephew. Embarrassment. He is unmarried. But he handled it well. Lives with his mother, is 46, looking like an eternal bachelor. Afterwards, Greek dancing and singing, in which the captain participated, as did Chrysanthi. Even I did a syrtos.

September 7, 1985

My big day. I lectured on “Homer as Temporal and Spatial Geometrician” in the morning and on “The Fall of Constantinople” in the evening. In the afternoon we went to Troy from Canakkale, a relatively unspoiled town compared to Kuşadası. Troy still has some charm. Touching to see Gallipoli across the straits. I read from the Iliad in the theater. People felt the magic, I think, or so I was told.

September 8, 1985

The aesthetic height of Istanbul is always the Kariye Müzesi, especially the frescos in the side chapel. The head of St. Michael seemed to me to be the continuation of the pagan Apollo.

September 9, 1985

Samothrace, a new site this time, along with Bassae, Osios Loukas, and Monemvasia. A wonderful surprise. Good ruins in the middle of a forest, with the sea on one side and a huge craggy mountain on the other. I stressed how the private mysteries had formed an essential link between paganism and Christianity. The Rotunda seems to have been the original of the U.S. Capitol in Washington via the Mausoleum of Hadrian in Rome.

In the afternoon we had a final “Symposium” with four students leading off with their reactions (and doing very well). Hal Darbee spoke of the polarity between Greece and India and hoped that we’d achieve a balance between the former’s devotion to symmetrical form and the latter’s acceptance of unformed multiplicity. Don Black spoke well; Steve McCarthy reminded us that tourism flourished in ancient times as well as our own; a philosophy teacher from Wellesley spoke of Plato’s distrust of poetry and questioned my thesis that Homer is geometric.

The final supper was a huge banquet: caviar, soup, lobster, sherbet, roast beef, salad, baked Alaska, champagne! Then came talent night. I wrote an updated version of Philoctetes, with Professor McGrath being tricked to return to Hanover with his slides and knowledge to preserve traditional Main Street by defeating the Galaria shopping center. He protested, preferring to be taken by Neoptolemos to the beach at Santorini, to worship Diana. (The beach was very topless, and sometimes bottomless.) To my chagrin, I’d forgotten that Jack Britten’s wife is called Diana and that she had swum topless. I hope she didn’t take it personally. Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) played Odysseus, Nuni Bodomer played Neoptolemos, Bob McGrath played Philoctetes, and Dan Lyons was Hercules (i.e., Captain Parisisi)—when the captain speaks, men listen.

September 10, 1985

Athens

Back to reality. Taxi strike! We dragged our luggage to the Esperia Palace Hotel on Stadiou. Met Christos by pre-arrangement. His situation is still desperate: unemployed, living on ⅓ of his Birmingham salary. Some prospects, but not very encouraging. He has a girlfriend, Έρη Σταυροπούλου, who teaches Modern Greek literature (19th century, mostly) at the University of Athens.

I visited Chip Ammerman at the Fulbright office. His Greek wife taught at Halandri for years. He’ll probably support my application, but my recent Fulbright will be against me. All meals in Συντριβάνη, Οδός Φιλελλήνων. Our steki. Met Evris Tsakarides there by accident. Walked in Plaka.

September 11, 1985

Athens

Good luck securing Kazantzakis materials at Kollaros Bookstore. Went back to the Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη after so many years. Improved service. Lunch with Christos after Chrysanthi went to the airport. Then to Efstathiadis. Discovered that he’s published the first two novels of Myrivilis’s trilogy; he didn’t know that Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ was translated. I think I’ve found a way to get it in paperback. I wrote immediately to Tom McFarland. My book sold 1000 copies and I collected 15000 drachmas in royalties.

In the evening Christos took Eri and me to a production of Aristophanes’ Acharnes by Koun’s troupe, outdoors in the Roman agora. Perfect setting under the Tower of the Winds. A lively performance, Aristophanes mixed with Karaghiozis and επιθεώρηση. Lots of phallicism, as expected. A bit disjointed. Yet I appreciated the theme: the attempt to secure peace between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. Too bad I didn’t assign this for the cruise. Met Σπύρος Ρέπουλης, the new Διευθυντής Μορφωτικών Σχέσεων του Υπουργείου Πολιτισμού, by accident, through Christos. Also met Koun afterwards. He seemed very old. A great man.

September 12, 1985

Athens

Visited Repoulis at the Ministry for 1½ hours, talking about MGSA. Good to have personal contact. He is warm, enthusiastic, wants to do an effective job despite the entropy of bureaucracy. I went to a few wrong offices by mistake; nowhere did I see anyone working. And they all go home at 2:00 p.m. every afternoon.

Spent the afternoon in the National Library writing letters and this journal. I must also begin to translate my Χρίστος Ξανασταυρώνεται lecture into Greek for Amsterdam.

Supper with Isidore Kechagioglou, direcrtor of the Ionic Center. An interesting man, from an Asia Minor refugee family on Chios. Went to America to study physics at Olivet, became more interested in philosophy of indeterminism, Buddhism, etc. Wrote a dissertation on the process of writing dissertations, and was denied the Ph.D. (When I told him about Christos looking for a job without a Ph.D. he was sympathetic.) Founded a «Delphic Institute» at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, but decided he wanted to return to Chios and become active there. Founded the Ionic Center as a philosophic school first; Later expanded it to include language, folklore, etc. Great opposition at first. Distrusted because of “queer ideas” (e.g., Buddhism). The original εφορία completely politicized although his scheme was totally apolitical. But he slowly made it work. He talked about my participation, possibly in the summer of 1987.

That evening, flew to Thessaloniki.

September 12, 1985

Chez Yiannakos

Visited Mimis and Aglaïa Λυπουρλής. Hope to get a letter from him for the Fulbright application. She has one desk in a room with 20 others, as her office! Pitiful. 60,000 students in the university. In ten years, they’ll all be unemployed lawyers and engineers. Evening with Βούλη and Κυρά Κούλα. Κούλα uses language nicely. Said that the hardboiled eggs were κοτίσσια—i.e., from chickens.

Saturday, September 14, 1985

Worked on translation of my Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται essay into Greek, for Amsterdam. Evening to cemetery for Τρισάγιον for Παππούς. Odysseas, Lola, Chrysanthi, Efthymoula, and I. The priest sang the service. Totally impersonal, and was paid on the spot. Odysseas cleaned the marble, lit candles, refreshed the oil, cleaned the photo. George watered some plants he’d planted on the grave. Pappous lived 88 years, 1895–1983. Then we went to the grave of Efthymoula’s sister, who died in her 50s of a heart attack. A different priest, holding a black umbrella over his head (against the sun, presumably) the entire time. He spread petals on her grave, spoke the service rather than singing. Again, totally impersonal. They ask the name of the deceased and then begin immediately, without even speaking to those gathered at the grave.

Supper at Odysseas’s. Eleni, Yiayia. They’ve fixed up the house. Odysseas is building in Καρπενήσι, Eleni’s home district, with his προίκα. An οικόπεδο is all that’s left of Eleni’s home, burned by the Germans in the Κατοχή and then finished off by someone else. Odysseas and George never see each other—only when we come, it appears. Nikos Sphairopoulos wants to specialize in athletic medicine. He’s going to be an orthopedic surgeon.

On the way back, we stopped at a celebration by PASOK youth. There was an EAM/ELAS display, with photos of Aris, Markos, and the rest. Σαράφης most impressive. Everything free now. Saw a man reading Rizospastis openly in a restaurant in Athens.

Spoke with Ruth Gounelas. Her sight has stabilized and even improved. Hopes to get a job here, now that Dimitris will be teaching at the University of Thessaloniki.

Sunday, September 15, 1985

A very special day. With George, Chrysanthi, and Odysseas, went to Terpni and Nigrita. Met about 25 relatives, the sweetest people. First George, the son of Pappous’s sister, and his large family. One fat, jolly son named Mimis is a house-painter. A son-in-law is a surveyor. The father, like everyone in Terpni, grows tobacco. Another son, not present, is a schoolteacher—i.e., the only educated member, and much admired. We stayed a short time, then began the rounds. ΣΤΑΡΤ ΗΕΡΕ First to Stergios’s house: brother of George. He was in bed in the kitchen, dying of cancer, his wife trying to control her tears. His son is now the tobacco farmer and has two little boys and daughters. Thus three generations were present, from small children to a dying grandfather. Very touching for all. The son has a huge Ford tractor. Tobacco was neatly threaded and hanging to dry in the ground floor rooms; the people live on the second floor. Next: to the mother of Thomas, who wanted to go to Australia years ago. Again: sweet, warm, excitable old ladies in their village dresses; wizened, quiet men, blushing young girls. Always a shady spot in the yard. Always a treat: a sweet, a coffee, a liqueur. Then to still another old lady, renowned as a bon-vivant dancer in her youth, now a γριά but with a wonderful smile. Then her sister, also a dancer and a former village beauty. Somehow in the midst of all this we saw the village church where all the children went (i.e., Chrysanthi, George, Lola, Odysseas), and their home, now a wreck, only half standing, with a half-ruined roof. But the original yard is there, now occupied by someone else’s new house. Generally the village is unexpectedly prosperous. Apparently tobacco brings a high price, and all is sold, nothing remains. Then back to George’s for lunch. First τσίπουρο (ouzo) and milk-curds and meat, outside, only for the men. How nice! Mimis very expansive. Then indoors for lunch with the women. In the midst of this, Thomas arrived with his brother. He’s now a baker with his own φούρνο; does electric work only rarely. Then to Nigrita to see the 2nd Demotic School, where Pappous was headmaster, unchanged from the days when he was there. Then to the Λουτρά to taste Nigrita water. Then to another relative, again an old woman, recently widowed, who was a beauty in her youth (we marveled at a photograph). Nigrita is a small city; she lives in an apartment but spends most of the year in Thessaloniki near her children. Then back to Thomas’s mother to meet Mimis. Then with Mimis to still another village to see his house, the most splendid of the lot, with three bathrooms, central heating, a study room for the children, etc. He has a smart daughter and aspires to have her educated—i.e., to escape the village. She’s already learning English, at age 8. He drives her to Nigrita twice a week for lessons. Devoted father. Of course they have television, a car, etc. He grows corn as a sideline, after his job as a painter. Also has grapes, makes wine and τσίπουρο, grows apricots, has chickens, etc. Everywhere, μας τάιζαν! Sweets, halvah, more sweets. George said that he feared going to the village until the PASOK government took over, because of Odysseas’s history. But now there is no problem.

The whole day (my idea at first) was extremely moving for George, Chrysanthi, and Odysseas, and I think enjoyable for the people we visited, who work very hard all week and really do rest on Sunday.

Rather exhausted, we returned at about 5:00 p.m. Good road. Beautiful Serres valley. Flat tire just before Βαρδάρης Square. Found Dimitris and Tilda at home when we arrived, but they were on their way out. She is like ice, haughty. Said she learned nothing from a year’s obligatory service in a village (she’s a recently graduated M.D.). Great contrast with the sweet, open people we found in the village. Finally, a friend of Dimitris’s appeared, bringing a wedding gift. Works for OTE. We had an interesting discussion about telephones.

Monday, September 16, 1985

Working every morning on the Greek translation of my essay on the political comprehensiveness of Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται. My Greek comes and goes. When I’m tired, I stumble badly. But sometimes all the words seem to come out all right.

In the afternoon, met two students of Lola’s who want to study in America and are applying, among other places, to Dartmouth. One, Κυδωνάκης, is very impressive. Superb English. The other is OK but more hesitant. Both want to study physics and have no use for our concept of a broad education. Both want to live permanently in America. Strange. I’ll write testimonials on their English.

In the evening, supper at the apartment of Μίμης και Αγλαΐα Λυπουρλής, friends whom we met in Birmingham thanks to Christos. They live very comfortably in 40 Εκκλησίας, a stone’s throw from the university. Living room cluttered with “collectables.” Summer home in Πήλιον. They invited Sifakis’s wife (he’s in Australia), some colleagues of Aglaïa’s in the Modern Greek department, a historian named Γιάννης Χασιώτης, who, it turns out, is currently writing on Γιάννης Σταυριδάκης and the Greek mission to the Caucasus, using ministerial documents, etc. He says that Kazantzakis did practically nothing, just sat, while the subordinates went out to the villages. Talkative man, monopolized dinner table conversation with his account of the establishment of the Department of Music at the university. The party was not very different from our own. Mimis is going to send me a letter of invitation. (But do I really want to live in Thessaloniki for four months?) Mario Vitti telephoned me at the Lypourlises’ to say hello. We’ll meet in London in March.

Tuesday, September 17, 1985

Another full day. Translation in the morning. Midday meal in a restaurant with Themis, Miranda, and Marianna Altas. Marianna is engaged. Met the boy briefly. Very slight, almost invisible. Seems to be a factory worker; they cut the subject after I’d asked. Marianna is practicing law. Far too many professionals in Greece—lawyers, engineers, doctors, architects. Few have work. Good conversation. Miranda is starved for intellectual stimulation, like so many housewives. Themis is cutting down, working fewer days each week, looking forward to retirement. They have their second home in Νέα Μηχανιώνα still. Theodora is very old but still gets about. Miranda’s blindness is much more visible than previously.

In the afternoon, Vouli picked us up and brought us to the American Farm School for tea with Bruce and Tad Lansdale, and, as it turned out, their daughter Christine, who teaches ceramics there and is preparing a huge ceramic mural for the renovated Princeton Hall. The school is a remarkable oasis: green, well planned, shaded. The city is encroaching always. There are even factories now on the road to the school, and a superhighway being built on one edge. The huge question is: Who will replace Bruce when he retires and, as Vouli always insists, who will replace Tad. He hopes to spend six months in California and six months in Metamorphosis, their summer retreat. One of his boys is doing agricultural aid work in Honduras. Another is discovering a way to reforest eroded mountains. I told Bruce that he and I are both ministers manqués. “Not so manqué,” he replied. He gave me the advanced proofs of Mike Keeley’s new novel A Wilderness Called Peace, about Cambodia. I like how playful the students were with Vouli. «Γυρνάει η ρόδα σου!» shouted one in mock-distress as her car began to move. «Άϊ στο διάβολο!» was the proper, and proffered, reply.

We barely made it back to Kalamariá before Δημήτρης Γουνελάς appeared to take us to dinner with Ruth in their new flat in Panorama. They have one daughter, and a beautiful flat that costs one half of their income each month. Couldn’t find anything else. Ruth’s eyesight is stabilized. She drives, and can read with ease. Working on Katharine Mansfield still, and other New Zealand writers. She and I share a love for Samuel Butler; she worked on his papers, which—lo!—are in Williams College. Dimitris is about to begin at the University of Thessaloniki, teaching Sikelianos and Palamas to classes of 200 to 400 in lecture halls. No contact with students. Lots of time for research, apparently. He still can’t figure out why he felt he had to leave Australia, but is glad he did. I told him about Leo Papademetre. One day I hope we can invite Gounelas to an MGSA conference in the USA.

Wednesday, September 18, 1985

Surprise. Elinitsa Athanasiadou telephoned Efthymoula and learned we were here. She came over immediately. Old friends are the best. Her son is getting a Ph.D. in sociology in Germany. She described the new Σχολή Κουφών that she managed to get the state to build, and then drove us there. It’s way way up on the very highest point in Panorama. Delicious! She has a marvelous way with the children. I remembered the extraordinary επιδείξεις that we saw years ago. From sixty-odd children in cramped quarters downtown they’ve gone to 200+ in this marvelous facility. Seeing these deaf and dumb children one instantaneously realizes that we must not take our own normal faculties for granted. Everything is a gift, undeserved. The struggle and accomplishment of these children puts our own grumblings into perspective. They read lips perfectly, and speak in a way that even I could understand—much more easily, for example, than Jim Farley’s English on the cruise. He’s had a laryngectomy and uses a mechanical voice-box, like Benjy Bidlack. (Farley told me that he hates McLaughlin.)

We’d had a date with Bill McGrew and his wife (name?) at Anatolia College, and wanted him to meet Elenitsa. She got invited to dinner as a result. Tour of Anatolia. Another oasis. Saw photos of the buildings when they were originally erected, in an ερημιά. Sheep pastures or worse. What foresight and faith! This is the 100th anniversary of the founding in Asia Minor. McGrew was very cordial. We spoke about possible affiliation with his summer school. Chrysanthi could teach Greek, for instance. We could possibly live there if and when we come in the spring of 1987. McGrew, if he ever gets time, wants to study the shifts in population from mountains to plains after the War of Independence, especially in the Peloponnesus. Anatolia College is flourishing, but the American administration doesn’t exist, as far as the State is concerned. It’s a phantom. Every official contact is with the Greek principals of the four schools. They also have a new Junior College with lessons exclusively in English. Students gain acceptance to Boston University, etc. afterwards for the final two years, and save a great deal of money in the process.

Thursday, September 19, 1985

Lunch with Lola and Costas. Conversation mostly about their trip to Russia. They were very favorably impressed. Their son Nikos is now doing a kind of internship. He wants to become an orthopedic surgeon specializing in athletic medicine—i.e., working with young people instead of old folks. In the evening, Stavros and Toula took us to a restaurant in Panorama. She just returned from Naples where she played her M.A. recital successfully: Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, etc. Stavros kept insisting, Έπαιξε σαν άντρας, meaning that she had vigor and strength. She complains about an Italian teacher who wanted to change her technique, learned in Russia, so that everything comes from the fingers instead of the shoulders. They have moved to a new apartment and have enlarged and renovated the music school, now called the Αλεξάνδρειον Οδείον. Easy to talk to them. Stavros is a marvelous autodidact. Reads, thinks. Also totally diverse. Works on his father’s farm in harvest time, with tobacco. At home is obsessed with computers. Has an IBM PC plus another, is learning to program, etc. I should send him software for music education. We talked about Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Ritsos. They, and everyone else, said that when Daphne was here all she wanted to do was sleep. Strange.

Friday, September 20, 1985

Marios Karasavvas called and came. Old friendships again. He’s married now with children, building a house outside of Thessaloniki and still has his summer place in Χαλκιδική. Struggling to find work; too many architects. Together we visited Dimitrios Yiannakos’s office downtown, set up by George, of course—large, airy, light. Silver spoon. I deposited our remaining drachmas in the American Express Bank, picked up some photocopies kindly left for me by Hasiotis on Mimis Lipourlis’s desk, wandered through the university. Ugly, dirty, covered with political graffiti. No grandeur. Unimpressive architecture. Sad. I think that the political πάθος ruins everything. Chris Woodhouse, in Melbourne, said that the Greeks are “politically immature,” and caused a furor. They are! And yet there is that irrepressible vigor, and love of talk, and company.

Lunch at George’s—ο μυστικός δείπνος—with George, Efthymoula, Dimitris and his fiancée Tilda. She distant, squeaky-voiced. George is depressed instead of elated at the approaching wedding. But we made the best of it. Drank a bottle of champagne, very good champagne, given us by Travel Dynamics when we boarded the Illyria. She wants to specialize in ophthalmology, as second choice after pediatrics, which apparently has no places. Right now she’s waiting for a residency, doing nothing. The newlyweds will move into her mother’s large apartment, with everything ready. Two silver spoons.

Finished my Kazantsakis translation, 60 pages of manuscript, despite recurring diarrhea (olive oil!) and all these visits.

Vouli came to say goodbye. She’s very critical of Greece and Greeks. Everything is wrong. Greek youth is passing through the stage that we experienced in America in the 60s and 70s. She said that it was a μεταβατική περίοδος and I read her the conclusion of my essay about Kazantzakis’s theory of the αμετάβλητη μετάβαση. She brought me the fourth edition of the libel on Kazantzakis by Λιλή Ζωγράφου. Alas, people are reading this. Even Toula, who doesn’t know Kazantzakis’s works, asked if he were really so terrible. And she distrusted Cavafy because she supposed he was a pessimist!

Chrysanthi was at a party given by Αλίκη Καλογραία for her and old schoolmates. She returned and we went off to Odysseas’s for supper and goodbyes. Present was Nikos?, Odysseas’s κουμπάρος from Tashkent. Married to a Russian, he chose to remain. He and Odysseas fled Greece to Yugoslavia after Varkiza, then returned and fought at Vitsi and Grammos, then fled to Albania and from there to Tashkent. Both were in officers’ training school in Russia. Nikos went to university and became καθηγητής μαθηματικών. His three children all finished university and are satisfactorily employed. He had hemorrhages in the retina recently and was flown to Moscow where he received laser treatment, all free, of course. He has a four-room apartment in Tashkent. The city is beautiful, he says, with wide boulevards and lots of parks and gardens (it was completely rebuilt after a serious earthquake). There is a full, high-level cultural life. People don’t worry about old age or losing their savings, or whether the stock market will fail. As a Greek, he never felt discrimination; all avenues were open to him. They practice their religion freely, with baptisms, liturgy, etc. He travels freely to Greece whenever he chooses. How nice to hear all this! We must always resist our own propaganda. Regarding PASOK, Odysseas said the one truly positive achievement is the end of the police state. But the other aspects of the αλλαγή haven’t occurred. Σιγά-σιγά. Γιαγιά is marvelous, as always—so warm. Beautiful smile. Ο Τάκης came briefly. Handsome. Worried about lack of work, though for the present he has a non-governmental position with the δήμος. He left in order to go with friends to the taverna, as always. Stavros and Toula came after a long day at the Odeon, where Odysseas also was working from morning until 9:00 p.m. Final goodbyes.

Saturday, September 21, 1985

Thessaloniki–Vienna

Lola came with Nikos. He’s specializing in orthopedic surgery with hopes to do athletic medicine. Much more energetic than I’d known him. Apparently he wants to be a really knowledgeable physician, not just a time-server.

In the afternoon, George took us to the airport. Stavros appeared at the last minute with the Άπαντα του Βάρναλη, because we’d talked about it previously. And—what a miracle!—lunch in Thessaloniki but at 7:00 p.m. the same day we were in the Vienna Opera seeing Cosi Fan Tutte. As always, Austria seemed familiar, European, our own, whereas Greece seems somehow outside and beyond. And how poor and άθλια it is when you compare it with Vienna. Ideal city. Clean, no traffic, parks everywhere, exploding with culture, efficient, trolleys instead of filthy buses. And the opera was superb. Such voices! Now I see how provincial Melbourne is, and even Sydney, at least musically. We were high up, near the stage, but saw almost everything by leaning over the railing. Tickets cost $5.00 each!

Sunday, September 22, 1985

Vienna

A day of museums. First the Academy collection. A striking Bosch triptych: the Last Judgment. Wonderful Titian Tarquin and Lucretia. Then hours in the Kunsthistorische. I remember the Cellini saltcellar, scores of Breughels (the elder), especially a beautiful village and river; Cranach’s famous panels of Adam and Eve, Dürer portraits, Giordano’s Michael driving Lucifer & Co. into Hell, Caravaggio’s David with the head of Goliath, Bronzino’s Holy Family with an ivory-skinned Madonna, Titian’s Ecce Homo. Afterwards, the Ephesus museum was a disappointment, since very little is there, although beautifully displayed. There are tiny bits from Samothrace, also. Highlight in both cases are the reconstructions, including an entire mock-up or model of Ephesus.

At 6:30, we met Waldemar and Trude Zacharasiewicz at the Landsmann café next to the Burgtheatre and opposite the Rathaus. Steve Scher had introduced us at Dartmouth. He teaches American literature, especially of the south; she teaches English to foreigners. They were interested in my Macintosh programs, which I delivered to them safely. Also in the party was the newly arrived Fulbright professor and his wife, from the University of Texas at Austin. He’ll teach black-American literature in Vienna. Not a word of German. Zacharasiewicz says that the university is terrible because of a kind of open admissions, and free education for all. Thus there is no incentive to work hard and finish. Also, as usual, there is very little contact with students, at least with undergraduates. And yet this kind of education, in an environment such as Vienna, seems to produce an aesthetic, literate populace, whereas our “superior” education produces . . . (?).

We walked afterwards along the lovely pedestrian-only street, Kartnerstrasse. Ate Wienerschnitzel without consequences (!) at Olympia Restaurant (Kartnerstr. 10).

Monday, September 23, 1985

Vienna–Paris

In the morning, Traüm und Wirklichkeit exhibit in the Kunsthaus. Loos, Hoffmann, social democracy. Schiele, Kokolska, and of course all the musicians: Mahler, Schoenberg, especially. Plus Freud, the first world war (the archduke’s bloodstained tunic after Sarajevo). Theodore Herzl and Zionism. Posters from the Hitler era regarding pogroms. Frank about Viennese anti-Semitism. Workers’ flats and communities constructed by the socialists after the huge crisis in the 1920s. Model of Ringstrasse and explanation of how this filled the space occupied previously by the city’s walls and moat. Brilliant town planning by the emperor not too long before the debacle. Schiele’s ugly expressionism memorable. Reaction against fake nineteenth-century conventions. Earlier expressionists reminiscent of our Kaufmanns.

Flight to Orly.

Tuesday, September 24, 1985

Paris

Hotel in nice neighborhood, between Bastille and St. Paul’s, 4th floor, no elevator. But toilet and bath. Chrysanthi remembered previous experiences in similar hotels and insisted on putting a towel over the pillowcase, which she assumed to be filthy. (It wasn’t.) Lots of walking. First to Hôtel de Ville: Victor Hugo exhibit following his entire career; his love of Paris, involvement in revolutionary politics, exile in Belgium, return to campaign against Napoleon’s son (le petit Napoleon), apotheosis, burial in the Pantheon. One follows much of Parisian history via his life, including the destruction of the old Paris he loved, in order to build the grand boulevards, and then the burning of so many public buildings during the political insurrections later in the century. All this vividly presented. Next: Ile de la Cité. Notre Dame disappointing. Heavy. The spirit doesn’t soar in this lugubrious temple. My heart leaped when I entered the Blue Mosque, but not here. I prefer the Byzantine style, somehow. Simpler. More to the measure of man, yet also spiritual. Palais de Justice. Tried to see a trial, but it was lunchtime. Across to the Quartier Latin, Boul’ Mich, Boul’ Ste. Germaine. How my memories returned! Librairie Gilberte still there! Sorbonne. Collège de France. Holy ground trod by Bergson, Renan, Psiharis. Tried to get tickets to Molière’s Misanthrope in the Comédie Française but it was the wrong night. Settled on Follies Bergère hélas. Bateau mouche. Killed time in Galeries Lafayette, expensive but the Galleria is impressive. Follies execrable, amateur, unimaginative, repetitive, excruciatingly loud. Just one dance number after another with the same cast, either dressed or undressed. Not even sexy. The best number was when trained dogs replaced the people. Dommage!

Paris noisy, strangled with traffic. Very noticeable difference after Vienna. But Parisian neighborhoods and back streets are still charming.

Wednesday, September 25, 1985

The museums were open today, so we started with the Jeu de Paumes, recommended so highly by Alec. Long line. Fortunately, we had, as always, the Περιεκτικότητα του «Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται» to pass the time. Splendid museum, all impressionists. The best surprises were the paintings I’d seen already in retrospectives in America—e.g., Monet’s five views of Rouen Cathedral, Van Gogh’s Dr. Paul Gachet, Manet’s Olympia (with the black cat balanced against the black servant) and of course the Déjeuner sur l’herbe and others. Alec’s favorite was there: Cézanne’s Joueurs de cartes. I also remember Degas’s L’absinthe, with a working girl sitting abstracted and tired in a café in front of her glass; Pissarro’s Wheatfield, Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette (of course), and Rousseau’s nightmarish La Guerre, which we saw at MoMA recently in New York. Jeu de Paumes is small, cosy.

Not the Louvre. Its grand gallery with huge French canvasses leaves me cold. No wonder the impressionists reacted against mythological subjects. But of course the marvels exist also. For us, having just come from Samothrace, it was good to see the Νίκη on her boat. The Aphrodite of Milos has a haunting face, a head strangely too small for her body, and an awkward yet beautiful bodily position. And there is a Roman copy of the Praxiteles Apollo Sauroktonos, not as fine as the one I love in the Vatican, yet graceful. Also some fragments from the Panathenaic procession on the Parthenon. The other highlights for me were the Michelangelo slaves carved for the tomb of Julian II, characteristically emerging from the unworked block of marble. They symbolized provinces that Julian had brought under subjection by the Church. Ugh! The less one knows the better, Art, alas, beautifies and thus distorts truth, unless we’re dealing with a Schiele. Of the paintings, I value the Spanish the most: Murillo’s Young Beggar, Velazquez’s Infanta Margarita, and a single marvel by El Greco: Saint Louis King of France, an unforgettable face. Of course we did obeisance to the Mona Lisa, but the other Da Vincis are just as nice.

Worked a little on my Kazantzakis translation in the Tuileries and then went by Métro to Porte d’Ivry to dine with Annie Camp, Alec’s friend and teacher at Middlebury, and her boyfriend Jacques Martin. They live at the edge of Paris in an attractive high-rise development complete with a wonderful supermarket (65 varieties of cheese), restaurants, etc. They had other guests: Jacques’ uncle, an ex-sailor in the French navy, a niece from Toulouse. I struggled to make myself understood in French; they did the same with their little English, except for Annie. I asked Jacques for his impression of America. Vous êtes fou! he replied. Said our culture is just as foreign for him as African or Hottentot, but worse because we don’t expect this to be the case. He couldn’t understand our fetish for athleticism. The uncle had been everywhere, of course, including Tahiti and the first explosion of a French atomic bomb. We had a taste of a veritable repas français, in this case a southeast recipe for duck, preceded by salad with fried liver and followed by three cheeses, champagne, and biscuits. They live simply. He is an auto mechanic, travels on motorcycle; she teaches learning-disabled children. Practically no furniture in the apartment. One couch for us. Everyone else sat on the floor. No beds. Mattresses on the floor. I felt disgustingly rich, a stinking capitalist. Everything is relative. We enjoyed this entrée into French life. Taxi back to the hotel, at 80 mph or so it seemed.

Thursday, September 26, 1985

Paris–Utrecht

Tried to see Centre Pompidou in the morning. Closed until noon. But the outside is striking enough: the end, I suppose, of the tendency begun by Adolf Loos and others to emphasize function in architecture instead of façade. So, every structural element is visible. We walked to Ste. Chapelle, another “must” recommended by Alec. Light, soaring, wonderful glass. Nicer by far than Notre Dame. Origins go back, however, to the capture of Constantinople in 1204, to Baudouin and his successors, i.e., to events better not remembered. A successor king paid a huge sum for the crown of thorns, three times what it cost him to build Ste. Chapelle as a fitting home for the relic. And the masses starved, of course. We walked back to the 4th arrondissement via Île St. Louis, a quiet, aristocratic neighborhood.

In the afternoon: by train to Utrecht, via Rotterdam. Finished την επεξεργασία του κειμένου μου, επιτέλους.

Interesting, after seeing Manet’s “Olympia,” to read the following in the TLS review of T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life (TLS August 9, 1985): “The argument of Chapter Two is that, in depicting a prostitute . . . , Manet was dealing with modernity in one of its most poignant and difficult aspects. ‘When social practice is soaked right through with duplicity, when nothing is spared from the role of illusion . . . , prostitutes are purveyors of essential goods.’ . . . the picture of Olympia ‘altered and played with identities the culture wished to keep still.’ It discomforted because as a painting it ignored the ruling artistic conventions and substituted the particular for the general. Olympia is a person, not an image. She is bare, and not nude; her nakedness is intrusive . . .; her matter-of-fact detachment is not a sign of artistic transcendence, but of the terms of her trade.”

Local train from Rotterdam to Utrecht. Coming into Rotterdam on the Paris train, we crossed the harbor, precisely where I’d first landed in Europe in June 1952. I wonder if Mary Viëtor’s father’s tugboats are still operating. The local train was delayed for one hour, unheard of for Holland. Wim Bakker met us in Utrecht. The delay was only until Gouda. By car to Driebergen, his village. His wife Joyce is from Chicago. Compulsive talker, platinum blond. Nice house. Slept in their son’s room, under the roof, with open skylight.

Friday, September 27, 1985

Amsterdam

Train to Amsterdam Centrum with Wim. Short walk past Dam to Nieuwgrieksseminarium, Nieuw Doelenstraat (where Rembrandt’s Night Watch hung, as we learned later). Attended Arnold Gemert’s class: επισκόπηση λογοτεχνίας 120–150 αιώνων. His Greek beautiful. Greek wife. Spoke of the tendency after 1204 to cling to roots; thus the return to αρχαΐζουσα γλώσσα. But 100 years later, with Greeks back in Κων/πολη, demotic raised its head again. Literary history: not very imaginative, but necessary, I suppose. The exhibits are the various “novels” (romances). He didn’t know about Meg Alexiou’s work on the romances. Afterwards, he took us around town nearby—to an old cloister for unmarried women, preserved today as it was in the seventeenth century and still used for the same purpose; also to Kalverstratt, a shopping mall, nice, but drab compared to Vienna. At 1:00 p.m. we attended the class given by Κώστας Διμάδης on Πλασκοβίτη To φράγμα. The students spoke beautifully, στα ελληνικά, εννοείται. Δρεπόμουν για τη δική μου αμάθεια. They get a good basis here from Bakker and Gemert, using mimeographed materials (they began with our Demotic Greek I, but eventually produced their own text); then they go to Thessaloniki and, like Daphne, come back speaking. But so well (those we heard; the silent ones presumably were not so adept). Good class on explication de texte. Dimadis, however, was too doctrinaire, forcing his views on the students. At 3:30 I spoke in the theater on Η πολιτική περιεκτικότητα του «Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται». 70 minutes, alas. Stumbling a bit over the Greek, and once saying “nineteen” instead of δεκαεννέα. I felt a bit silly. But I got to the end. A few questions. Dimadis very complementary, but justifiably questioned my use of the terms εθνικός and εθνικιστικός in opposition. Afterwards, wine and cheese downstairs. Three students were ceremoniously given their first year’s certificate. I spoke mostly with three students who had begun Modern Greek after doing classics. One had used my Cavafy monograph and was delighted to meet the author. How nice that these people who are continuing to teach ancient Greek in high school (gymnasium) will also have a sense of Modern Greek history and literature! Fine dinner afterwards in a Dutch-style restaurant. Waiters with white bibs. Walls covered with dark paneling. Mussels, braised beef, candied raisins and ice cream, waffles. Gemert and wife, Bakker and wife, Chrysanthi and I. Kostas was invited but didn’t show. Wim said that the students liked my lecture because I’d referred to so many historical periods that they had studied. So be it! Back to Driebergen very late, 12:30-ish, Joyce talking continually all the way.

Saturday, September 28, 1985

Amsterdam–Birmingham

We’d changed our tickets so as to have most of the day in Amsterdam. A small, cozy, sensible city. Tram to Rijksmuseum. Museums are best remembered for a few favorites that will always be waiting for one upon return. My favorites here are two magnificent Rembrandts: Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, and the Holy Family (done à la Dutch, with an old woman reading by candlelight that casts a huge shadow, the babe sound asleep, another woman holding a rope connected to the cradle lest he stir). Of course there is the Night Watch, too, with a very helpful explanation of the conditions before and after the commission. I also liked Jan Steen’s Feast of St. Nicholas, with the warm smile of the old woman reaching out to children (like the γιαγιάδες in Τερπνή), and the sniveling boy on the left. “Our” Vermeer is there, too. But the other side of one’s visit to the Rijksmuseum is sadness at Holland’s loss of so many of its great paintings to other countries. Even the Rembrandt self-portraits here, as grand as they are, fall beneath the one at the Frick.

The new Van Gogh museum, down the street, is an extraordinarily spacious building for relatively few paintings, so it is very relaxing, as compared for example to the awful Louvre. Again, so many splendid Van Goghs are elsewhere. Yet some beauties are here: the Potato Eaters, various self-portraits; seven small scenes of reaping à la Millet which are stunning, the old Arlesian woman in her splendid blue headdress and robe, Wandeling in de Herbst that suggests German expressionism in its eeriness, the Yellow House at Arles, with vividly deep perspective and triangular composition best seen from a distance, and, the greatest surprise, the Pietà à la Delacroix, with a virgin in rich blue.

We walked a bit, heard wonderful jazz in the street, saw dried flowers galore, took a Rondfaart boat through the canals, and went to Schiphol for the flight to B’ham. Amsterdam is dull in its exterior; it mirrors the commercial, somewhat puritanical nature of its past. What miracle produced the seventeenth-century painters in this basically non-aesthetic culture?

October 14, 1985

Woodbrooke College, Birmingham

Meeting with Bryer, John Halton, and Michael Orsinus regarding the future of the department at Brum. I counseled leading from strength, meaning literature and history rather than a full program in literature, which will be impossible with only one instructor (Meg’s post is being replaced, Christos’s is not). Orsinus, a German, is an Ottomist; he’s teaching Turkish to the Greeks!

Supper at Paul Morby’s. Bryer and Liz, Morby’s secretary, Diana (wife of Hugh—the ones who really saved Paul when he was suspended), Christos, and a philhellene librarian. Italian meal, of course. Christos and Bryer had had another argument, which I’d tried to smooth over in the afternoon. They chatted in private but I doubt that it helped. Everyone here seems angry at everyone else. Katerina Krikos-Davis (she and Harry kindly took us to Stratford yesterday) doesn’t talk to Meg. Meg doesn’t talk to Bryer, and so on.

My paper at Brum last Thursday, on Ritsos’s Painterly Technique, was very well received. Everyone encouraged me to publish it. Bryer said that it was the best they’d had, etc. Last week I gave Kazantzakis, Twentieth Century Nineteenth Century Romantic for Roddy Beaton at King’s. Twenty-five people in a large hall, but they listened. Rowena Loverance showed up, delighted with a new job at the British Museum’s education department. BBC asked for an interview. Roddy and I had supper after the obligatory hour in a pub with students and staff. He thinks he was turned down at Harvard because of his conservative politics.

Mayme Noda came here the other day for two weeks. I accompanied her in the Verdi Stabat Mater. Am playing occasionally with a good Finnish (!) violinist, Lisa.

Am teaching the Iliad. But half the class doesn’t do the reading, so far. Sandra Cronk says the academics are more serious at Pendle Hill.

October 22, 1985

Göteborg, Sweden

I lectured last night to about 100 people on Seferis and Elytis—in English, of course—to Bo-Lennart Eklund’s students, plus members of the Swedish Hellenic Society. Good audience. Enough questions afterwards. English seems to present no problem. Anita Eklund, Bo-Lennart’s wife, particularly liked my reading of the poems. Huge party (παρέα) at “Olympus” restaurant afterwards: retsina, μεζεδάκια, αρνί. This morning at the department. Bo (pronounced Bou) is mainly into linguistics, not literature. He’s doing a computer analysis of the occurrence of interval augment in Greek verbs in the newspaper Τα Νέα. He’s also interested in early translations of Greek texts into Swedish. He told me about Knös and Kazantzakis. There are letters in the library at Uppsala. Bo has programmed everything himself, using Basic, sort files, and the like. More than I ever did. Spoke to the Professor of (Ancient) Greek, who fears that his position will be frozen when he retires and that Ancient Greek will be restricted to only one university in Sweden. Just like England. My theory is that the Greeks themselves will have to train Hellenists and Neohellenists in the future. The impetus deriving from the Renaissance is suffering from entropy elsewhere. It’s ironic that just as classics should occupy the magnificent building that they enjoy, the specialty should be deemed a luxury by the authorities.

We walked to the harbor and saw a “tall ship,” a three-master used as a training vessel, thence to the museums and cultural center via the commercial district and opera house. This city is like Vienna in that it’s uncongested, clean, quiet, civilized. Only 500,000 population, but all the urban amenities are present, and some of the horrors. Parks everywhere. Shopping streets closed to traffic. Separate bicycle lanes. Public transport everywhere via tram. Municipal library filled with books and newspapers of all languages, including Greek of course. We went to the new building of the fine arts faculty in the university. Charming Scandinavian design, simple, yet not sterile. Long talk with the director of computing; saw projects tagging Swedish language samples to determine trends in syntax. Ate in student cafeteria; sat next to a charming girl who’d been in San Francisco and loved it; wants to go back. The Swedish girls are sometimes utterly stunning, gorgeous! Through the Art Museum with Amilia Eklund as our charming and knowledgeable guide. Swedish painting follows predictable European styles but has its own character somehow. Quite sensual despite the northern coolness. Afterwards we bought some Swedish crystal, but not any computers, though tempted.

Supper at Bo-Lennart’s and Anita’s apartment two miles from the center. Again the simple scan-lines in formation, as in our charming hotel room: everything white. Lovely meal with good conversation. She especially is a dear.

October 23, 1985

Göteborg–Stockholm

By train to Stockholm. Not much scenery, really. Rather, the landscape looks exactly like Southern Vermont, or Washington County, New York: rolling farmland, hay rolled in the same way. Massey Ferguson tractors, barns looking just like ours. We were met at the station by Hans Ruge, a thin, ultra nervous German (Berliner) who came to Sweden as a boy—his father was killed in the war. Our language of communication: Greek, which was nice. Apparently he’s in his third marriage and already having a row at home, so we never saw the third wife or the home (for which he apologized profusely). The second wife is his secretary! (We never saw her, either.) He enthused about Stockholm, especially in comparison to Göteborg, while taking us on the bus—he has never owned a car—to our three-room apartment (!) in the Wenner-Gren center at the end of Sveagäten, the main boulevard. A huge center for visiting scholars, mostly scientists. Our entry had families from China, Poland, etc. All facilities. Apartment exquisitely designed and furnished, as we’ve come to expect in Sweden. I telephoned Bo’s former student Thomas Anfält in Uppsala regarding the Kazantzakis letters to Börje Knös in the library there. We’ll go on Friday. Hans showed us how to walk to the university, through the green belt park—no danger—just a few harmless homosexuals in the daytime. Bicycle paths everywhere. Green grass everywhere. No congestion. No traffic even in rush hour. Eight million people only in the whole of Sweden; maybe 1½ million in Stockholm. I lectured on Kazantzakis as a twentieth-century nineteenth-century romantic. The Greek consul, present in Göteborg, came again. Hans’s colloquial assistant, Άννα Κυριακίδου, was hyper-enthusiastic; says she adores Kazantzakis. About sixty people, more than Hans had expected. Some good questions, including a brilliant one from a student who asked if Jesus’ acceptance of Judas wasn’t really the same as Mr. Bloom’s acceptance of the suitors, and if so, why is Kazantzakis so different from Joyce? I had a hard time answering! Afterwards, another Greek meal in a Cypriot restaurant near our apartment. Hans, Anna, a Swede who teaches Modern Greek at Lund, another woman. Fun! No shortage of conversation, all in Greek.

October 24, 1985

Stockholm

We walked all the way downtown to meet Hans at the Obelisk-Centrum. He then walked us all over this beautiful, grandiose city with its numerous islands connected by bridges. Why do other cities make such good use of water whereas New York’s water is hardly visible? We ended in the old city, itself on a small island or peninsula, and ate in a German-style pub/restaurant. Hans kept emphasizing the German presence in Sweden from the times of the Hanseatic League onwards. But I didn’t like the German church at all—too Baroque and cluttered. He left us, and we shopped for Swedish crystal (Kosta Boda and quilts for our bed. Bought opera tickets for tomorrow. Returned to our luxury flat via subway (functional, not beautiful), showered, walked again to the university. Lectured this time in a seminar room to maybe twenty-five, on Modern Greek responses to the glory that was Greece, in English, of course, as last night. This presents no problem. The audience got all the jokes. Good questions afterwards, including one from the Finnish girl, who wondered why the Finnish epic didn’t play the same role in Modern Finnish literature as does Ancient Greek literature in Modern Greek. (She had spent four months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as it turned out.) We left Hans to his domestic problems and returned by ourselves this time to the same restaurant—delicious μουσακάς, which of course turned my stomach a bit afterwards (olive oil?). All these pleasures are paid for, of course, by the ample fees given me for these lectures.

October 25, 1985

Uppsala–Stockholm

Breakfast in our apartment. No. 52 bus to Central Station. No traffic at 8:30 a.m. Train to Uppsala to see the letters to Knös.

Börje Knös brevsamling

University of Uppsala library

Custodian Thomas Anfält

Call no.: G 137a + volume

Volume 12, p. 191.

From Kazantzakis, 24-11-46, Paris, Rue de l’Echelle 4, chez Segrédaki

Cher Monsieur Knös!

Je viens de recevoir avec gratitude Vos oeuvres que je me mettrai aussitôt à lire avec joie. Le figure de Janus Lascaris m’a toujours été chère avec celle de Marc Unsuros et au-dessus de toutes, celle de Pléthon. Une étude sur ce grand homme de notre renaissance qui a voulu réaliser la grande synthèse de l’hellénism et du christianisme, serait précieuse; c’est une des personalités les plus fascinantes et les plus prophétiques de la culture néo-grecque.

Je commence à me mettre en contact avec des Universités américaines pour la fondation de l’Institut de la Culture Néogrecque. Je voudrais, moi aussi, que cela pût être installé à Paris; mais qui pourrait alors le financer? Le Grèce, impossible; la France, elle a maintenant, elle aussi, d’autres chats—et quels chats!—à fouetter. Pourrait-il être installé en Suède? Je ne sais; mais aux États-Unis, paraît-il, la chose est faisable; on veut attirer là-bas—et ils le peuvent, hélas!–font ce qui subsiste encore de sain et du spirituel sur cette vieille Europe décrépite: ils ont hâte de transmuer le dollar en esprit.

La situation en Grèce devient de jour en jour plus tragique; l’intelligentsia la plus pure est persecutée; il faut tâcher de sauver la flame vaillante; voilà pourquoi moi qui suis resté toute ma vie retiré dans une solitude profonde, je sens à present le devoir impératif de sacrifier ce Bonheur pour courir à l’aide de la race en danger.

10-12-46 [same letter, new page]

Veuillez m’excuser, cher M. Knös, du retard; je viens de rentrer de Bruxelles ou j’ai été rencontrer quelques personalités intellectuelles et visiter l’exposition du peintre Van Gogh que j’aime beaucoup.

Je m’empresse de Vous expédier cette letter tant retardée et Vous remercier, encore une fois, de Votre amabilité de m’envoyer Vos livres.

Bientôt j’espère pourvoir Vous envoyer la suite de Zorbas; je crois que ce roman va être publié en France sous le titre: “Sur un rivage crétois.”

Veuillez, M. Knös, recevoir l’assurance de mon amitié profonde.

N. Kazantzaki

Volume 12, p. 192.

Postcard to Knös, Freiburg, 20-12-54:

Πολυ αγαπητε φίλε, καλα Χριστούγενα, καλο ειρηνικο, εφτυχισμένο 1955. Σε λίγες μέρες γυρίζουμε στο Κουκούλι. Σας έχουμε πάντα στο νου και στην καρδια μας.

΄Εχω πολα να Σας γράψω, μα όταν θα γυρίσω στην Antibes. Απο την Ελένη κι απο μένα εγκάρδιες εφχες στη γυναίκα Σας και Σας, πολυ αγαπητε φίλε!

Ν Καζαντζάκης

Letters from Eleni to Knös, all in Volume 12.

p. 124: 19-11-57 from c/o Παπαϊωάννου, Ομήρου 6, Αθήνα. Clearly 1957 because she refers to her terrible loneliness, and asks if Knös wants any photos of Nikos’s funeral. Yet the date looks like 19-11-51 (November 19, 1951) and is placed in sequence in the Uppsala collection as 1951, not 1957. . . . Θέλετε όταν πάω στο Antibes να σας γράψω στη μηχανη τα Γράματα στον Γκρέκο να δείτε αν θα τα μεταφράσετε; . . . Η εξομολόγηση αφτη στον Γκρέκο δεν είταν η τελευταία γραφη. Είναι η δέφτερη. Νομίζω όμως πως πρέπει να την τυπόσωμε.

p. 127: Antibes, 16-10-56. Ίσως να σας ενδιαφέρει να μάθετε πως αν κι ο Νίκος απαγόρεψε, τις προάλες, το B.B.C. να διαβάσει από την «Αγγλία» του (τους έγραψε πως τόρα πια άλαζε γνώμη για την Αγγλία που καταδυναστέβει την Κύπρο) λοιπον το B.B.C. εκανεάφτη την ομιλία 2 φορες συνεχες.

p. 128: Antibes, 17-12-56. Says that Kazantzakis’s health is very bad.

p. 129: 3-8-57, Hôtel Slovenski Dom, Rogaška, Slatina, Slovenia, Yugoslavia. Says she’ll copy «Ήθελε λέει να μείνει ελέφτερος· Σκοτόστε τον!» Είναι εντελος τελειομένο απο το Νίκο. . . .

p. 130: 26-8-57, from Rigshospitalet Pavillon 61 Copenhagen. Kazantzakis hospitalized after his return from China.

p. 131: 17-9-57, from Universitätsklinik v. Müller, Freiburg. Kazantzakis’s arm still μια φοβερη πληγη although his temperature is decreasing.

p. 133: 25-9-57. Heilmeyer optimistic. But the arm is still swollen. Kazantzakis cannot write. Φτωχούλης sold 30,000 copies in France in French translation. In Holland, Xρ. Ξαναστ. has reached 50,000 copies. But in Scandinavian countries Xρ. Ξαναστ. και Καπ. Μιχ. πουλιούνται πολυ σιγα.

p. 134: Freiburg, 20-10-57. Nikos is well. Writes about the Nobel. Φιλελεύθερο party officials support Kazantzakis (prime minister: Karamanlis). Telegram sent by Averoff to the Greek ambassador to Sweden, Alexis Kyrou. Tsatsos also supports Kazantzakis, as does Queen Freiderika. Yet the rumor is that only the communists in Greece support Kazantzakis. Eleni fears that this rumor is the work of Kyrou and Pindar Ανδρούλης, ambassadors and their wives. Kazantzakis has been translated into 24 languages, approximately. Kyrou (αδελφος Κύρου Εστίας) συκοφαντουν συστηματικα τον Νίκο.

p. 135: Antibes, 30-10-57. Writes that Kazantzakis has died. . . . Je n’oublierai jamais que l’oeuvre de Nikos a été conue gràce à vous.

p. 137: 29-11-57 . . . θ’αρχίσω αμέσως ν’ αντιγράψω στη μηχανη την Αναφορα στο Γκρέκο να σας τη στέλνω . . .

p. 145: Antibes, 2-4-58. Again confirms that Ambassador Kyrou ruined Kazantzakis’s chances for the Nobel, despite Knös’s efforts.

p. 146 (page 2 of the same letter) . . . in the 9 years since Knös first knew Kazantzakis, who had then written only Zorba, this sick man wrote Xρ. Ξανα, Καπ. Μιχ, Τελ Πειρ, Francis, Κούρος, Κων. Παλαιολόγος, Chris. Columbus, Fratricides, Γράματα στον Γκρέκο [note the title]. Kazantzakis translated into 27 languages, she thinks.

p. 147: 25-4-58, Antibes. Ο Νίκος, στην α ΄ του γραφη στα «Γράμματα στο Γκρέκο» βάζει ολόκληρα τα 3 ταξίδια του—Πελοπόνησο-Άγιον Όρος-Σινα. Δεν πρόφτασε να τα συντομέψει. Τορα που αντιγράφω το Σινα (μέσα στα Γράματα στον Γκρέκο) βρίσκω πολυ μικρες παραλαγες. Κρίμα μεγάλο. Γιατι οι λιγοστες γραμες που πρόστεσε ή άλαξε είναι πάντα στο καλύτερο . . . έξοχες!

Αν μπορέομε με τον Πρεβελάκη να βρούμε μια λύση! Πως να τυποθει αφτο το χειρόγραφο; 1) Έτσι όπως είναι; Με ολόκληρο τα 3 ταξίδια; 2) Αφαιρόντας τα ταξίδια; προσθέτοντας μόνο μια σημείωση . . . 3) αφαιρόντας τα κομάτια που βγήκαν στο γαλικο βιβλίο; [She means Du Mon Sinai à l’Isle de Vénus.]

Πάντως εγώ αντιγράφω το χειρόγραφο και θα σας γράψω τη γνώμη του Πρεβελάκη.

p. 154: Antibes, 27-7-59. Says that the French translation of Ασκητική was done by Kazantzakis himself, and that he introduced some corrections.

p. 170: Athens, 22-2-1960. Clear that Prevelakis and Kasdaglis are preparing the MS of Report to Greco, the last 70 pages at this point. Eleni will type them and send them to Knös. . . . Jeune, il n’a pas eu peut-être le courage de demander à hauts cris d’être envoyé à la primière ligne, pendant la guerre. A la guerre de liberation de 1941–45 il a demandé à plusieurs reprises de monter au maquis. Mais les maquisards, envenimés par ses enemies le considéraient comme Intelligence Service, tandis que les royalists le calomniaient comme agent secret de l’Angleterre. Ainsi on lui refusa cette joie et cet honneur de se mettre activement au service de la liberté.

Knös was Sous-Secrétaire d’Êtat au Ministère de l’Instruction, Publique et des Cultes—Statssekreteraren.

Πέτρος Μαρκάκης (b. 1912) in 1951 was Γενικός Γραμματεύς Συνδέσμου Ελλήνων Λογοτεχνών.

Max Tau (b. 1897) in 1951 was Littaraer Avdeling at Johan Grundt Tanum Forlag, Oslo.

Tomas Anfält was Assistant Librarian, Manuscript Division, Uppsala University Library, Box 510, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden.

I sat absorbed in the Knös correspondence from 10:45 a.m. until 3:45 p.m. with a break for pineapple pizza (!). Tomas Anfält was very helpful. I brought to his attention the letter dated 1951 that must have been written in 1957 since Eleni refers to Kazantzakis’s burial. He didn’t know that Knös had returned the Kazantzakis letters in his possession, at Eleni’s request. They are published now in Ο ασυμβίβαστος, also I believe in Νέα Εστία. When we get back to Dartmouth I’ll send Anfält the bibliographical data.

Uppsala is a very small university town, like a New England campus, especially now in the autumn when the leaves are falling. The cathedral, the largest in Scandinavia, is beautiful—i.e., not Baroque for once, except for the pulpit. Lovely paintings throughout and nice contrast between brickwork and stucco. We had our daily café au lait and pastry, and returned to Stockholm on the 5:05 p.m. train. How lovely the Swedish people are; I see their features everywhere in America now that I think of it.

In the evening we went to the State Opera in Stockholm to see Handel’s Julius Caesar. Not one of Handel’s masterpieces, to be sure. Yet it has a relentless heaviness that weighs (sic) on one, faute de mieux. The production compensated for lack of superb music (and superb voices) by introducing lots of good “business” in the acting, mise-en-scène, scenic effects, etc. Ptolemy (presented alas as 100% Egyptian, not Greek) was made abominably cruel; Cleopatra a sweet little conniver. The plot treats her affair with Caesar and her eventual siding with him against Ptolemy, her brother. The tickets, obviously subsidized, were about $4.00 each! The theater was half-empty. We had to leave after the second act, to catch the 9:35 sleeper to Copenhagen.

October 26, 1985

Copenhagen

I was under the roof in a three-tier 2nd class sleeper, but the bed was fine: wide, soft, and covered with a quilt. When the conductor awakened us we had just crossed the water and were in Helsingør, near Hamlet’s castle. Walked around Copenhagen from 9:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. Not as nice as Stockholm, Amsterdam, or Vienna, but maybe it was the gray weather. Nothing playing in the State Theater, no ballet, no opera, just a play in Danish. No concert in the Concert Hall, and it’s Saturday night. Stores closed at 2:00 p.m. and the crowded shopping area quickly became deserted. As expected, wonderful design in ordinary things: coat racks, coffee tables, restaurant décor, etc. But the older (19th century) buildings are ugly. The cathedral, however, heavily influenced by the Hellenic revival, and complete with Doric columns, a frieze, and a pediment, is very pure: all white. Lovely. Christ is in the apse, and six of his disciples line each wall of the nave: so the whole family is there, so to speak. We saw the university quarter—lots of bookshops—, the pedestrian shopping streets, the round tower (climbed to the top and saw practically nothing), Nyhavn canal, the docks, the Queen’s palace, with changing of the guard, the Museum of Applied Arts (coffee tables looking like Piet Mondrian paintings), an exhibit of 25 contemporary New York artists, which drew great crowds of Danish viewers; the Greek collection in the National Museum, and various parks, squares, gardens (the Tivoli is closed at this time of year). The palace, changing of guards, etc. seemed a bit pretentious for Denmark’s size and status. The museums are poor, compared, say, to New York. In a way, we have to wonder why we came here, but it satisfied curiosity of a long-time standing. I shouldn’t forget to say that the best sight of all, throughout the day, was the people, who are very beautiful when young. Girls just like delicate flowers, with skin that is translucent. A city full of Renoir models. It’s strange then that Danish painting is so poor. And Thorvaldsen, the “great” sculptor, is a pitiful imitator of Greek classicism, with everything “prettified” until one wonders whether he lived in the real world.

Supper in the grill of the RR station. Roast beef, delicious. But we sat next to a couple who smoked continuously—both—and witnessed a little drama. He was obviously beginning what was meant to end in love-making after the meal. But she had a child with her, maybe nine years old. By a previous marriage, evidently. He gave the child small change to “go and get lost” for a time. Fine. When the child returned she demanded her mother’s attention continuously, to the man’s chagrin. We forwent our coffee, walked, looked at more Danish furniture in the windows of Den Permanente, and had coffee in the McDonald’s-type restaurant in the hotel. In the evening, there being no ballet or opera, we bathed, watched a good television program (in English: magician, jugglers, etc.), and read Homer’s Iliad.

October 27, 1985

Copenhagen–Göteborg

Huge breakfast in the Astoria Hotel. Cheese, ham, salami, jams, butter, rolls, and all kinds of wonderful Danish pastry. I recalled the Danish pastry chef at Brant Lake Camp (Jack?). He was pleased to see a tall blond boy, Richard Aldrich, when we cycled once to camp ahead-of-season, instead of all those dark squatty Jews. Probably was a homosexual.

Train to Göteborg. How nicely they manage the crossing from Helsingør to Helsingborg! Three wagons go directly on the ferry, with wonderful precision. You can sleep right through it, as we obviously did on the way south Friday night.

Met by Lennart and Anita Eneroth. They, and she especially, became friendly with Alice when all were studying together at the University of Michigan in 1956–57. Subsequently they visited the Busecks in Arizona, my parents in both Sunnyside and Manhattan; and the Busecks visited them in Gothenburg. So we were just another in the series. He is a periodontist and district director of the State dental service. She is a painter and agent for other artists. They drove us to a lookout spot to see the whole city; then to a little harbor near their suburb; then home to a gigantic house filled with strange objets-d’art for sale. Three sons were home; they have four, all blond beauties. She served us a festive meal of fish soup and reindeer meat, which tasted like venison.

Flight to Heathrow and Flightlink bus to B’ham, arriving 1:00 a.m. Long day!

READING AT WOODBROOKE

Homer, Iliad, tr. Fitzgerald.

Racine, Phèdre.

Edmund Keeley, A Wilderness Called Peace.

Philip Butler, Racine, a Study.

Martin Turnell, Jean Racine: Dramatist.

John Milton, Paradise Lost.

Royston Tester, “The Hartlean Male Protagonist. A Search for Self (Ph.D. thesis, McMaster University).

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.

David Jones, In Parenthesis.

Γιάννης Ρίτσος, Φαίδρα.

October 31, 1985

Woodbrooke

Taught Iliad in the morning, the last session. Next week, Paradise Lost.

Train to Oxford, hastily preparing for BBC interview tomorrow. Hour in Taylor Institute Library; thence to 47 Wellington Square and Peter Mackridge. Librarian greeted me, “Ah, Professor Bien, we know you from your books.” How nice! Lectured on Ritsos’s Painterly Technique. Jeffrey Doyle was there with his wife Nancy. Also Oliver Taplin, whom we’d met in Chris Wolff’s home at Dartmouth. Lecture was “attacked” afterward by a rather pugnacious Greek, and also some others. I defended myself adequately, I think. Actually, they’re probably right: that my distinction between temporal and spatial in poetry is overdone.

Oliver then took me off to Magdalen for dinner. A ceremony. Sherry in the SCR. Then in procession to Hall, gown on (not for me). Grace in Latin, everyone standing. Dinner of prawns, plaice, stuffed chicken, ample wine in decanters. Grace again in Latin. Off to a special room for desert. Redistribution: new partners. Two by two. Port, Madeira, and Sack passed in decanters. Fruit. And snuff, my first time. You pinch it with your fingers, then place it in the hollow behind your thumb, then pass the back of your hand beneath each nostril in turn and . . . sniff! Nice sensation. Pure nicotine instantaneously in the bloodstream, so they said. We sat in horseshoe configuration. At the wide end of the horseshoe a “machine” for sliding the decanter of wine from one end of the horseshoe to the other, so no one had to rise. Then off to still another room for coffee and the weighing machine and the “setting book.” At dinner I talked mostly with Oliver, feeling very knowledgeable about the Iliad at the moment. He is just completing a book on Homer. Over port and fruit my “host” was an elderly biologist, very tall and eminent. Turned out to be the teacher of Sir Peter Medawar, and the collaborator of Sir Peter’s early researches into nerve transplants. So we had that in common, since I’d had supper with Sir Peter at Dartmouth. All in all a relaxed evening, very different from the meal at University College in the 1980s when Peter Buseck took me. This lasted from 7:30 until 10:30. Reminded me of Harvard, of course—i.e., the chance to meet and speak to people in other disciplines. On the other side of me was a visiting German, also a biologist. Another man a professor of Portuguese.

Taxi to Mackridges’. More talk with Peter and his wife Jackie. Peter will try to protect MG interests in Brum. He’s on the search committee but without a vote. Christos has finally been allowed to serve, despite Bryer’s connivances to have him excluded.

Friday, November 1, 1985

Letter from Tom Brown inviting me to apply for the position of Executive Clerk at Pendle Hill. Of course I refused, or declined. Sonny Cronk and I had a good talk about it. Chrysanthi said, “Are you out of your mind even to consider that?” Yet I’m haunted by all the times I declined chances for Quaker service in order to remain well paid and comfortable at Dartmouth. I hinted to Tom, however, that if I ever were to come to PH it would be more appropriate to be in an academic as opposed to an administrative capacity.

Mother telephoned from New York. My heart sank. In her last letter she asked us to come home early. She reported that Dad is now in the psychiatric section of Mt. Sinai suffering from severe depression. It’s a special geriatric service; they think they can help him. The best help would be to let him die as quickly as possible. Mother in turmoil, of course. But at least he’s no longer in the apartment, where it had become impossible to cope.

Yannis Karavidas of the BBC Greek Service showed up as planned at lunchtime to interview me. He uses our book in evening classes and loves it. He asked questions, submitted in advance, on Kazantzakis and Ritsos. Then we improvised on MGSA, MG studies in America, etc. It will be broadcast on ERT in Greece at 1:00 p.m. on the Saturday after next.

Saturday, November 2, 1985

Lovely day in London. First to BM. Saw special exhibit on Buddhism, lots of Egyptian mummies, then the splendid show on the Parthenon and its restoration prepared by the Greek Ministry of Culture. What a pleasure then to see the frieze of Bassae, since we’d been to the site. Lapiths vs. Centaurs, Greeks vs. Amazons, both showing victory of civilization over barbarism. Thence to Elgin Marbles, slowly, with full appreciation of the two great processions meeting at the center with the gift of the peplos: horsemen, and chariots, sacrificial animals. And the wonderful pediments, too, what’s left of them. Especially the rising horses of Apollo, so vigorous, on one end and the falling horse of the evening on the other, eyes bulging from fatigue, mouth hanging open. The metopes of Centaurs and Lapiths, again, are also gorgeous.

Taxi to the National Gallery. The demonstration in Trafalgar Square against Apartheid. Gallery showed Francis Bacon’s favorites, including Michelangelo’s Entombment and Rembrandt’s old crone with withered hands. We went directly to the Spanish gallery to see El Greco’s Christ Chasing the Moneylenders, a larger version than the one at the Frick, and not quite so powerful. There’s also a fascinating study for a large painting in the Escorial: Adoration of the Name of Jesus (ΙΗΣ) showing the Doge of Venice, the Pope, and King Phillip II of Spain kneeling at the base and the name emblazoned above. Other paintings I appreciated especially were Pissarro’s Blvd. Montmartre at night, the one that Daphne liked so much when we saw it in Boston; Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies; my favorite Michelangelo the Madonna and Child with St. John and Angels (unfinished); Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, of course; Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne; Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait age 34, Balshazzar’s Feast and the famous Woman Bathing in a Stream. Finally we enjoyed Vermeer’s Young Woman Standing at a Virginal—our Vermeer, that hangs in the bedroom in a reproduction that I bought on 4th Avenue for 25 cents.

Tea in the Strand. Then walked to the Aldwych to see Brenda Jackson play Racine’s Phèdre (in English, of course). Not much linguistic joy, but dramatically strong: stunning, although Racine pales before the ancients because the chorus, and thus the lyrical element, is missing. However, the psychotic element of Phèdre did come across. Brenda Jackson seems to like psychotic women: Is Phèdre so different from the heroine of Strange Interlude?

Delicious shrimp scampi and then to Euston and “home.”

Sunday, November 3, 1985

Nice conversation at breakfast with Donald Bodley, former actor-director-producer, about Phèdre. And with Peter Ivory on D. H. Lawrence. Afterwards Eileen King stopped me in the hall and went on about things we’d been saying in the Iliad class. All this before 9:30 a.m. Then devotional led by Michael Staines. He read, leaving intervals for meditation between each passage, seven or eight passages from the Old Testament, New Testament, Quaker Faith and Practice, etc., all having to do with water as a metaphor for the spiritual life. Moses giving he thirsty Israelites to drink during the Exodus. Jesus asking for a drink. The Philistine woman: offering her living water. David refusing to drink the water obtained for him at the well of Bethlehem by soldiers at the risk of their lives. Jesus gasping “I thirst” on the Cross. John of Patmos speaking of the river of God descending.

The German biologist who sat near to me last Thursday at Magdalen did research on equilibrium. We spoke about seasickness. He said it’s caused by a disparity between what the eye registers and what the inner ear registers regarding stability. The worst thing is to be in a situation aboard ship with the eye registering stability—e.g., to be in one’s cabin, reading—whereas the ship is actually pitching. It’s best to be outside on deck, not because of the fresh air as is commonly thought, but because the eye then registers the same instability registered willy-nilly by the inner ear. I asked him if any studies had been done regarding seasickness in blind people. He found that a fascinating aspect of the problem and doubted that anyone had investigated it.

November 7, 1985.

To Oxford again. Another Ritsos lecture, better received this time. Saw Christopher Robinson and Roger Green. Nice cream tea with Peter Mackridge at Brown’s. Afterwards, supper with Nancy Langston and Jeffrey Doyle, plus one of Peter Mackridge’s students, a nice American named Van Dyck who, like Nancy, has a Marshall. She turns out to be the granddaughter of Philadelphia Quakers who are now in Kendal. And they summer in Londonderry and love Kinhaven concerts, so we had lots to talk about.

November 8, 1985

Spoke after worship with Adam Curle, who is here for Council. Again at lunch. I’d just bought his book, True Justice. He is currently negotiating in Sri Lanka; has been back and forth eight times this year. Spent a decade as professor at Harvard. Disapproves of the way his successors are doing Peace Studies at Bradford, because they concentrate too much on disarmament. Curle has a broadly sociological approach; wants to learn how to detect warning signals of forthcoming international violence and then to learn how to “cure” the troubles before they erupt. Katerina and Harry Davis came for supper and we invited Milena, the Venetian, afterwards for coffee.

November 9, 1985

Peter and Monika Ricketts for supper and “silly games” afterwards. Successful evening. Peter seems a real friend and Monika, despite her prim, even prissy, exterior, is warm and fun-loving. I made the same mistake initially about Elizabeth Jeffreys. Also, I suppose, about L. C. Knights. I told Peter about Knights’ “confession” to me once at Queens College Cambridge when he poured out his regrets for ever leaving Bristol and his hatred of the pettiness and incessant in-fighting he’d found at Cambridge.

November 10, 1985

No Meeting today, because I was on wash-up. Afterwards, did a report on a Ph.D. thesis on L. P. Hartley’s works. Strange how close and familiar they seemed, even after so many years. I remembered everything.

Telephoned Mother yesterday. Alice is there, thank God. Dad’s psychiatric drug therapy had to be halted for the moment because he’s running a fever. He’s in Mt. Sinai, having had a breakdown: severe depression. With luck he’ll expire there. Otherwise, Mother plans to move him and herself to Hanover. We’ve alerted Audrey Logan and Mary Rassias, should this happen before we arrive back on December 16 or 17.

November 11, 1985

To Leeds to lecture to John Smart’s pupils. It’s a nice city. The audience was mostly classicists, including one named Arnott, and a Viennese who grew up in Bournville. Tough—good—questions afterwards, but very friendly. Relaxed dinner in an Italian restaurant. Good talk. Jollity. Slept in former mansion now owned by the university.

November 12, 1985

“British breakfast”! Taxi driver told me his two children are in university. Bemoaned absence of Brontës from school curricula. Said he’d been to Haworth many times. I chose York instead, regretfully.

Lovely city, but the Minster is cut in half by the rood screen. Fire destroyed a transept last year; all blocked off; also West Window. Memorials on south aisle trace history of the British Empire. This one fell at a mutiny in India; this one in Egypt; this one in South Africa, etc. And one fell from his horse in Phoenix Park! Chapter House gorgeous, huge, gay. I walked the walls, saw the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall, and the splendid exhibits at the Castle Museum, whole streets reconstituted as they were in the 19th century. Military section showed the battle of Marston Moor, with Fairfax and Cromwell against the Royalists. I’m reading Paradise Lost! Alas, missed the famous railway museum. York, and even Leeds, reminds one of how dumpy Birmingham is, really.

Returned in time to do epilogue. Played the first movement of Brahms’ Horn Trio. The nice Dutch girl, Ingrid, who works in the Groningen Polemological Institute, had to leave. We had a coffee party and all the men made sure to kiss her!

November 13, 1985

Worked on Greco chapter in the morning. Played with Liisa (violinist) after lunch. Tutorial with Dorothy Farrant at teatime. She’s completed her radio play on John Woolman. I hope that Donald Bodley will “produce” it in a bench reading.

Supper at Jean and Tony Brown’s, with Milena. Tony is editing a Byzantine text, a dialogue of Christians and Jews never before published. His hobbies are amazing. Has a super model railway all homemade. Continues with silver jewelry. Jean collects dollhouses obsessively. Strange.

November 14, 1985

My class in Paradise Lost, Books IV–V. Then off to Cambridge with Chrysanthi. Lectured on Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται for David Holton. Cambridge is lovely. Nice new “campus” for arts faculties. Classics has its own building, with a huge library. Met Alexis Vlasto afterward, sons of Πέτρος Βλαστός. Brian Phillips came. Also Noël and Joy Jones. Supper with David and Ann Holton afterwards. She’s a bit of a pill, but he’s mellow.

November 15, 1985

Lectured on «Επιτάφιος» in the morning. We were housed in David’s college—Selwyn. Croissants for breakfast. Then an hour with Brian Phillips. He’s writing his dissertation on Philip Noel-Baker and Quaker problems at the end of the nineteenth century. I hope to get a Pendle Hill pamphlet out of him. Lunch with Noël and Joy. Lots to talk about! Greece, children, future plans, Vouli, Farm School . . . They drove us to Ely Cathedral. Stunning. No rood screen to cut the view in half. Train to Peterborough. I wanted to see the cathedral because of memories from L. P. Hartley. Lovely cathedral square and shopping precinct, but the cathedral itself is not as interesting as Ely’s. Evensong in progress. No one in the congregation. Zero. (Ditto for Selwyn Thursday evening. A strange anachronism.) By train back to Brum. Dinner in Indian restaurant. Nice to return to “home”—Woodbrooke—and be missed. Oscar Wallis with a big smile: “You’ve been away!”

November 16, 1985

Didn’t leave the building. Kazantzakis’s Greco in the morning. Nice talk with Frank from Sierra Leone. Read Troilus and Cressida in the afternoon. Practiced piano until accosted by a man who’d been here with us in 1967 and had subsequently joined a charismatic movement. He told me his life story at great length. Then Kathy Gray appeared with a boyfriend. She’s doing hotel management at Manchester Polytechnic. Hasn’t lost her big smile. Jasmyn did the Epilogue with a very touching account of how she “tamed” her students by means of understanding rather than caning. Talked with David Acqua about work camps in Ghana and elsewhere. He’s known Dave Richie.

November 20, 1985

Accompanied a singer in César Franck and Handel. John Punshon’s class in the morning, and Liisa in two Finnish compositions for epilogue. I’m finally getting over the jitters accompanying piano in public but not quite. Also played hymns at Central House service a few weeks ago.

November 21, 1985

Taught Books VI, VII, and VIII of P.L. Some of the class are now converts. Lovely to have Muriel Poulter in class. Had tea with her last Sunday. She has an Epstein original, and a newly acquired David Jones drawing. A real intellectual.

In the afternoon sent a “FAX” testimonial—i.e., a whole page via electronic transmission like a photograph—to Sydney for Stratos Constantinidis. Then University seminar. Μιχάλης Χρυσανθόπουλος on Viziinos’s “Moskov Selim.” How nice to have Ottomanists present! Indifferent dinner in an Indian restaurant.

November 22, 1985

Discovered Monika Niederlauf: flautist. She’s good. We did a Mozart concerto, and Fauré. What joy! Ernestine Friedl telephoned re: JMGS. Crisis: no articles. I’ll solicit here.

Saturday and Sunday, November 23–24, 1985

What a lovely weekend! On Saturday Meg came and we went to Stratford with Jasmyn. Superb production of Troilus and Cressida, which I’ve never seen, and which was a particular treat after reading the Iliad so recently. How delicious to see all those august characters demythologized! Juliet Stevenson as Cressida was magnificent. The play is so strange, so varied. It’s high tragedy at moments (when Cressida learns that she has to go to the Greek camp), low farce at others, and everywhere cynical. All the characters undo themselves, so to speak—i.e., prove themselves trivial and disappointing—except Pandarus, who is that way from the start and therefore is paradoxically the only one with “integrity.” He is really what he is: a trivial skunk. The others pretend. Achilles is demolished totally: a narcissistic faggot and coward. Ulysses is predictably slick, Agamemnon barely competent, Nestor sententious and prolix, Troilus a nonentity, etc. I was drained after the performance, from laughter, tears, wonder at the miracle of good theater.

Met Rodney Morgan in the lobby.

Nice lunch in the theater. Good talk with Meg, Chrysanthi, and Jasmyn. Coffee by order in the interval. All very civilized.

Then we all returned to Woodbrooke to have supper with Meg and Tony Brown so they could meet. Chrysanthi went down to lead Saturday night games.

After everyone left, I worked a bit more on the lecture on Ritsos’s long poems for London on Monday.

On Sunday: Fine Meeting at Selly Oak. Muriel Poulter ministered, as did Tom Bodine. A gathered Meeting. But I am usually restless in Meetings; it’s difficult to center down. I doubt that I have very much faith. More work on the lecture; getting the handout ready. Then flute and piano with Monika again in the afternoon: Fauré and lots of Bach. After supper, Stuart did a “presentation” using Roland and June Ellis, the Wardens. The idea is that each presents five beloved pieces of music, each of which is associated with a period of their lives. It’s really an excuse to tell one’s life-history, selectively. They added some slides, too. Meanwhile we were treated to Mozart, Beatles, Verdi, Hatzidakis.

November 25, 1985

To London. Nice lunch with the BBC Greek service team: Yannis Karavidas and the head, Paul Nathanail, who did the Routledge dictionary. Nathanail may tour US Modern Greek programs and do a broadcast on them sometime. He was very complimentary about my interview and my Greek. It was broadcast on ERT last Saturday and rebroadcast on the BBC the same day in the evening. Before meeting them, I put last minute touches on my lecture (“The Long Poems of Ritsos”) in Friends House library. Saw Marjorie Sykes sitting at another table; must be ninety years old; very alert mentally and physically.

The lecture went well. Donald Nicol didn’t stay. I met him in the Strand at 4:45 escaping. Said he hates Ritsos. Karavidas asked good questions. Pub afterwards with Roddy, Karavidas, and Eleni Γιαννάκη, a graduate student from Rethymno. I’m trying to get them to submit papers, quickly, to JMGS. Ernestine telephoned. She’s desperate.

Read in Paradise Lost on the train back.

November 26, 1985

Sent off my “Kazantzakis Twentieth-Century Nineteenth-Century Romantic” to Ernestine.

Princeton University Press has written accepting my proposal for the Selected Letters of Kazantzakis and offering an advance contract. Success on the first try! I wrote the good news to Eleni, Prevelakis, Lawrence Davies, Anemoyannis, CIES, and Chip Ammerman. Let’s see now if the Fulbright comes through; this should increase the chances.

November 28, 1985

Taught Books VIII and IX. Good class. Last night Oscar Wallis at Epilogue played a splendid reading on BBC of the death of Socrates from Plato’s “Phaedo.”

This is Thanksgiving Day. We had turkey, cranberry sauce, corn, and pumpkin pie for supper.

November 30, 1985

To Bristol to visit Henry Gifford and his wife Rosamund. With great good luck we also discovered our house. I’d forgotten the name of the street (it is Woolcot Street, number 5, Redland). “The Shakespeare” is still opposite. The whole row has been brightened with fresh paint, the coal dust removed. Gentrification, no doubt. Didn’t seem depressing at all. Bristol itself is still quite recognizable after twenty-six years, though of course it has some new buildings. Gifford morose (in his jolly way) about contemporary England, everything going to ruin. He retired nine years ago—he’s now 72—to avoid being made dean. Says he’s never been happier, doing what he wants to do: write. Gave the Clark Lectures last year. Interested in Seferis; will have a piece in Grand Street forthcoming. Krishna Kalia sends him Christmas cards; he’s just retired after teaching English all these years in India. He told me that when Queenie Leavis first encountered L. C. Knights on the streets of Cambridge, she greeted him “Hello, Professor Judas”! Poor man. Professor Joseph died jogging in Central Park. Tomlinson is still at Bristol. Willett is at Oxford (or London?). Kitto and Sophie Tucker are dead. Gifford’s daughter is a professional guitarist married to a violinist. She plays on BBC3, etc. Their son is in films.

The train was delayed one hour owing to signal failure. We had a swell Chinese dinner in Brum, next to the old B’ham Rep. in Station Street.

December 1, 1985

Dinner at Harry and Katerina Davis’s. Ron Willetts and Jane there. Willetts had his book of poems “Argo” for me; he expects me to do a review (I’d received it by post already). I asked him how he is and he replied “Geriatric!” He sees only out of one eye, but reads and writes still. Talked with a charmer, Catia Galatariotou, who’s just done a thesis on Neo-photos. Aglaïa Kasdagli was there too (ex Maria Pavlaki!); now married to an economist. Also Desmond Costa, a lecturer at Brum.

December 2, 1985

Tony Brown and I went to the graduate seminar at Brum. Paper by Michael Stewart, Ph.D. candidate at Oxford, on Modern Greek marriage and ancient Greek initiation: a bit anthropological, on the significance of diving into a well, or the sea, and of rings and circle dancing and veils, etc. Interesting. We arranged with Catia to sup at Woodbrooke with Tony and me next week. Meg finally got the infamous green card.

Attended staff meeting at Woodbrooke in the afternoon. Agenda: courses vs. “community.” I said that community cannot be “organized”; should derive from courses if these are taught in Quaker style—i.e., with true concern of teacher for student. I remember what E. M. Forster said about Cambridge.

Muriel Poulter for supper. Told her I failed to appreciate David Jones’s “In Parenthesis.” She brought a disk with him reading. She seems very appreciative re: Iliad and Paradise Lost.

December 3, 1985

Supper with Chris and Christina Lawson and their son Peter. Chris told me the amazing fact that Harry Newton, after his death, was discovered to have been an agent for the British M-5 (their FBI or CIA) for thirty years, reporting on the doings of leftwing groups including CND! A double agent, in effect, although he’d left the CP after the Russians invaded Hungary. I was stunned. For his sake I’m glad it didn’t come out until after his death. His wife must have felt like Winnie Verloc in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.

December 4, 1985

An exhausting morning and afternoon in Peace Studies devoted to South Africa. Somehow the presentations, including a video, were emotionally draining. Everyone felt this. Resource people included Celeste Roberts; the AFSC representative in Namibia (lawyer turned Catholic priest turned lobbyist for South Africa, turned AFSC representative), the FSC reps in Southern Africa, and a South African white living in exile for five years in the UK and active in the revolution, a black South African. We discussed the pros and cons of sanctions (mostly pro) and of divestment (pro). But Celeste kept reminding us to compassionate the whites who are caught in the middle, between their own government and the coloreds/Indians who are revolting. Also described internal dissent among the oppressed. The question is: What happens when the coloreds win? David Acquab said that blacks in Africa generally were not vindictive after liberation and realize that they need the whites’ skills. Others feared a bloodbath. An Indian said that the myriads killed after the Raj withdrew there is the price we had to pay for freedom and stability. Quakers weren’t too happy with this. Celeste, who saw friends and familiar locales in the video, was almost ready to throw up, she told me. Aileen King was unable to function for the next twenty-four hours. . . . Strange.

The same evening: Liz and Bryer for supper. We managed, mostly because Bryer is such fun. Liz and Meg barely on speaking terms. They’ve shortlisted the position: Tziovas, Krikos-Davis, Chrysanthopoulos, Dimertzis, Ricks. Bryer saw Christos in Athens and he agrees. Bryer just back from St Catherine’s, Sinai; he brought 250 tourists there. Αίσχος! He reminded me that it was Rendell Harris who first deciphered the Codex Sinaiticus, a palimpsest. Harris sat out in the sunshine in the desert with a magnifying glass and read the Greek beneath the upper layer.

December 5, 1985

Vetted and copyedited Karavidas’s paper for JMGS. Practiced chamber music. Did my part (Woolman as narrator/journal-writer) in Dorothy Farrant’s play, which we’re going to do at Epilogue on Monday. Then to John Punshon’s home. Wife Veronica, son Don (in hotel management course), daughter Sophie, all plump. Saw 1936 film by the post office called Mailtrain about the daily express from Euston to Scotland with mail. Music by Britten, a poem by Auden recited by him in the clicky-clickety rhythm of the train. The poem is anthologized for schoolchildren in the UK It’s called Mailtrain. Then out to a shabby Pakistani restaurant in Mosely, where we ate with our fingers. Nice to see some Muslims and an Englishman dining together at one table. Then to a Hindu sweetshop for betal-leaf (pan) and spices as a “digestive.” (I was nearly ready to vomit at this point). Then to their home again for more sweets. Punshon very friendly. He turned down a job at Earlham School of Religion because, he says, he feels he has a mission here in the UK, to help the Society of Friends achieve renewal. By this he means renewed spirituality, the ability to pray, the ability to feel with the heart as well as to think with the mind and also a revival of corporate living: communes and the like. He is encouraged, thinks the Society is on the verge of something very important.

December 6, 1985

Mostly wasted. Vetted Helen Giannakakis’s piece on Eroïca and Ε. Κ. Brown and had to send it back as unpublishable. . . . Practiced. Out for Chinese dinner with Jasmyn, Jonathan, Hazel, Chrysanthi. Performed Bach, Loeillet, and Fauré at Epilogue with Liisa and Monika. Heard the tape of my BBC broadcast in Greece. Not bad. It really made sense.

Brian Phillips finally sent his essay on “Quaker Political Culture and the Empire 1989–1901.” John Punshon will read it and, with luck, give Brian some advice.

Listened to David Jones reciting from Anathemata. Muriel gave me the record. It doesn’t send me.

December 7, 1985

Library in the morning. Chrysanthi and I went to the Science Museum in the afternoon to see the giant locomotive “City of Birmingham” plus all the other machines. Lovely. It all started here in the midlands. Bought Christmas pudding and fruitcake to take home.

After supper, played piano for two hours on the lovely Bechstein. My old Beethoven sonatas. The first time I’ve done this in five years or more, I’m sure. Yet, if anything, I played better than ever. Sight reading is improving. And I can play in public, at least at Woodbrooke, without getting the jitters, ice cold hands, etc. It has only taken forty years!

December 8, 1985

Sunday. Celeste Roberts did the devotional. A beautiful ritual on the subject of peace. An appropriate hymn, a reading from the O.T., a short sermon (interpreting Christ just as Kazantzakis did), a reading from Isaiah 53, the suffering servant. Then: she asked us to stand in a circle. She took a lighted candle. She said she would pray, either silently or aloud, as she held the candle. Then she’d pass it to her neighbor, etc. About 10–12 of the 40 people, including me, prayed out loud, I for Celeste’s children and all our children, that they may live out their life span without knowing war. Then another hymn to conclude.

Rowena Loverance came for lunch. She’s working in the educational department of the British Museum.

Read Ritsos’s Φαίδρα in the afternoon.

Supper at Peter and Monika Ricketts’. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

December 9, 1985

Meg’s paper on MG methodology. Lunch afterwards with Christos. Diana Burkhardt saw us; we then got a demonstration of their project linking computers to video and voice production, for language teaching.

In the evening, did Dorothy Farrant’s play on Woolman. I played “Woolman’s Journal.” Donald Bodley directed. Nice to see a pro at work.

Long talk with Marianne Katappo about her dissatisfaction with Woodbrooke. She said the Jesuit community in India was much more genuine because everyone had a vocation and a similar direction.

Catia Galatariotou passed her viva and is now a Ph.D.

December 10, 1985

Catia here for supper with Tony Brown and us. We showed her the Cyril Loukaris Bible, 1638, and the Erasmus first edition, which is rebound (the binder reduced the size of the leaves, slicing some marginal comments in half). I hadn’t realized that it was Rendell Harris who’d transcribed and published the Codex Sinaiticus, Syriac version, reading it beneath the superimposed extraneous text (the Codex is a palimpsest) and with infrared equipment, of course. Hoping that Catia will come to Dumbarton Oaks next year.

December 11, 1985

Rehearsed two Christmas songs with Sheila Smith, soprano, a real “kouk” with a double chin slit from ear to ear with a scar from an operation, maybe thyroid. I did much better than last time, because I listened to her and modified the accompaniment to match her ritards, stringendos, etc. Also did six Christmas hymns, all in John Punshon’s class.

December 12, 1985

A busy day, more like home than the serenity of Woodbrooke. Taught my final class, Book XII of P.L. plus students’ final reactions. Chrysanthi recited a long children’s story based on Adam and Eve in Paradise. Donald Bodley brought the house down with a “letter” from a pagan Greek steeped in Homer to Miltonius, a Roman who’d sent him the MS of an exceedingly long and often boring epic ostensibly modeled on Homer. Muriel Poulter surprisingly did nothing. Scottie had written much in her diary but wouldn’t share it. Ann Howard spoke of primary and secondary epic. Others passed. But we got a general discussion going on the nature of epic, and ended strongly. All in all a good experience. Oh, Dorothy Farrant wanted to read “On His Blindness,” but I’d unwittingly done it first.

To the university MG seminar, given by Saunier of the Sorbonne on folksongs, modifying the Beaton-Herzfeld revisionism and pleading that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I sat in the back and discovered next to me Friar’s new anthology of contemporary Greek poets (with Harkianakis missing) and the catalogue from the exhibit of German Painting at Burlington House. How I’d like to see this, but how?

Meg delivered the MS of her exaugural, for JMGS.

Rushed back to Woodbrooke. Late supper. Then to Martineau Teachers Centre for an evening given by the Greek Language Club. Christos there, also Monika Ricketts, also? Prokopiou. And what a surprise! They did a play, with costumes, scenery, props, based on the Χαραλάμπης song in our Demotic Greek I. All British actors of course. The υπόθεση of the song was simply spelt out in dialogue and action: how X., an aged groom, decides at the last moment to cancel the wedding. Bride frantic. Her brother and parents threaten X., etc., who relents. The wedding is performed (crowning, Dance of Isaiah, etc.) and all join hands for a συρτός. At one point they even played the song as recorded on our tape in John Rassias’s basso profundo! A great surprise and joy. And how well they all spoke their parts.

December 13, 1985

Another full, frantic day. Spent most of it copyediting Meg’s paper, which was as sloppy as usual, but also provocative and sensible (as always). Got it in the post to Ernestine. Rehearsed Corelli Pastorale with Monika and Liisa for Log Night, something we hadn’t been asked to do but was nevertheless placed on the program. Then rushed to the university for Meg’s “celebration party”—i.e., farewell. I was the speaker, and I think the talk was well received. Got a few hearty laughs at least. Bryer was pleased, wants to publish it in The Gazette. I took pains to refer to Christos as well, and offered a final toast to both, not just to Meg. Previously, from 2:00 to 5:00, the search committee had interviewed candidates for Meg’s job: Ricks, Davis, Chrysanthopoulos, Tziovas, Dimertzis. They chose Tziovas, and everyone seemed pleased, except the losers, of course. And Chrysanthopoulos and Davis were there and able to smile bravely. Tziovas apparently did brilliantly in the interview. Peter Mackridge’s part of the committee was pleased, as was Christos. Also David Lodge, another member. I had a nice talk with him afterwards. He had Tziovas in his “theory” class, also Vassilis Lambropoulos, and called them both brilliant. I told him how I’d supported Lambropoulos despite all the negative feelings toward him. Lodge is very sensitive to Meg’s situation because he has a child with Down’s Syndrome, aged 19. But they also have two normal children. He said that the English Department just had to revise curriculum drastically to meet a 20% cut: classes increased in size, fewer offerings, cut in personnel. Everyone totally demoralized. No nobility in the profession. Departments are frozen with the same people, who daren’t leave for fear of unemployment. Also saw Mrs. Thomson, who was very friendly. Fortunately I’d given George Thomson the appropriate prominence in my speech. She remembered Daphne (who’d broken her arm in the Thomsons’ garden!). Dimitri Alexiou was there, telling everyone that there’s to be a bus strike on Monday. Christos accompanied me to the bus stop and we had an affectionate farewell, both of us thankful for the unexpected extent of our contact, first in Athens, then in Brum during the past four months. His prospects look slightly better now, though nothing is definite yet.

Another late supper at Woodbrooke, including a late-night surprise: Pavlova. Then Log Night, with me as master of ceremonies. This went better than expected because half the “acts” listed on my program were wrongly placed, or canceled, or with different people, making my announcements a kind of comedy routine that the audience thought “part of the script” and thus rather clever, whereas in truth it was just chaos! Fun! There were some nice moments, including the staff skit. Monika, Liisa, and I played our Pastorale reasonably well.

December 14, 1985

Typed up the “Meg Celebration” speech and sent copies to Meg and Bryer. Woodbrooke goodbyes, with some unexpected warmth—e.g., a huge hug from Imma. The sadness on this score concerns Outi, who has been avoiding us, and nearly everyone, bathed as she is in her own self-pity. Ευτυχώς γλιτώσαμε!

Off to Stratford in the afternoon, by coach, to see Nicholas Nickleby, Part 1 (four hours). A high-class soap opera, full of incredible sentimentality, exaggeration, villains and heroes, moral regeneration, etc. The first act was tedious in places, yet the portrayal of the school in York is searing, horrid. The second act picked up, and ended deliciously with Dickens’ parody of the provincial acting company doing Romeo and Juliet, complete with a happy ending! We were all in stitches. I left with a tremendous appetite for Part 2, but will have to forgo this. Back late, 1:00 a.m.

December 15, 1985

More goodbyes: Milena, Jasmyn, Elena, the Finnish girl who’d visited us in Hanover. Huge hug: she can be warm. As for Liisa . . . ! Outi again in hiding. So we’ll part without a farewell. Like Milton’s Satan, she carries her hell with her.

The last fling. Off to London, after all, to see the exhibit of German art at the Royal Academy. This covers 1905 to 1985, starting with Die Brücke. Along with the familiars—Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Nolde, Beckmann, Grasz, Ernst—were new wonders (at least for me): Franz Marc’s pastel horses, Ludwig Meidner’s terrifying series of apocalyptic landscapes and cities ca. 1913 unwittingly anticipating Hiroshima and . . .(?) New York. Then these wonderful sculptures: Barlach’s “The Refugee” and “the Ecstatic One,” in oak, with all attention directed to the faces, the remainder of the body draped blockishly yet also suggestive of movement forward and upward, respectively. Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Contemplative Woman” has a gorgeous face that speaks to you; his elongated “Ascending Youth” is a cross between El Greco and Modigliani. And his depressed and falling men are so sad. Unexpected sculptures were Kathe Kollwitz’s “Pietà” and “Tower of Mothers,” both in bronze but looking almost like oak: small, squarish, with the figures breaking out of the central block of material. Lots of political suggestiveness in Schlemmer’s “Fallen Figure with Column,” the column, tottering, symbolizing the disintegration of European culture. Ernst’s “Europe After the Rain,” actually painted in Sedona, Arizona, where he had fled the Nazis, again suggests disintegration, in a totally different mode. Among the more recent—the post WWII abstracts—Günther Uecker’s three “Nail Objects” were lovely: nails hammered in a board in a swirling pattern, looking like the back of a porcupine abstracted. Another memorable political statement is Schönebeck’s “Majakovski,” which, as the catalogue says, “comments ambiguously upon Socialist Realism.” Joseph Beuys’s sculpture is interesting, like the rusted tram-track next to a canon, suggesting the ruination of civic amenities, I suppose.

We walked from Burlington House to Piccadilly Circus, up Shaftesbury Avenue to Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road into Torrington Place and via Gordon Square to Euston, very familiar territory. It was nice to have a glimpse of London as a final impression, after dingy Birmingham.

1986

Hanover

January 1–March 31

Philadelphia, Princeton, New York City, Hanover (via ambulance!)

March 17–20

London, Wellington Hall, 71 Vincent Square SW 1

March 20–27

Hanover

April 1–June 8

Riparius

June 8–September 3

June 20–22, Albany, Philadelphia,

Minneapolis, Northfield, Albany,

Hanover, Riparius

Hanover

September 3–December 31

December 27–29, New York City

January 1, 1986

Hanover

About to visit Graham Wallis in the hospital and bring him some clippings of poems, but this one I don’t want to lose:

DEAD SKUNK

I buried a skunk in the garden.

He was beautiful, dead on the lawn.

Nobody knows whether a dog or poison

Left him there in the beginning of Spring.

I purposefully made his grave shallow

To keep him as near to life as possible,

Just barely under the stuff of the earth.

We should not bury death too deeply

But keep it as if with us.

This was a beautiful of God’s creatures.

Striped body, black and white,

A white, conclusive tail.

I put a rock over the place

As if to say resolutely

I honor your life, I mark your death,

And know little of either.

—Richard Eberhart

January 2, 1986

Drove to New York with Alec in his truck. Good talk about his hair problem (sudden, accelerated balding). I cited the example of Bob Reich, how he always disarmed interlocutors first by joking about his dwarfishness before they have time to feel uncomfortable. This clears the air perfectly. Dr. Clendenning attributes the hair loss to “shock” (maybe parting from latest girlfriend?) and hopes it may reverse itself. Also talked about Alec’s restlessness in his job, his desire to have “adventure” now, before settling down. I suggested service in Francophone Africa: some way to exploit Alec’s French.

January 3, 1986

20 East 74th Street

Mother is still hesitant about moving to Hanover and The Greens, but I tried to be firm, and talked her back into it. She set up a trust with Alice and me as executors, finally. The hesitation had always concerned Peter Buseck, who is money-mad. She told me that she’s worth about $600,000 and Pappou over $300,000, so roughly one million, exclusive of the apartment, which is another $300,000. We’ll see how much is left after Pappou’s illness.

To Mount Sinai by bus. Mother lost her balance stepping up. Luckily, I was behind. How long can she continue on her own? That’s the whole problem. Dad was in a reasonably good mood despite his loss of the Foley catheter this morning. He’s calmer, almost placid. Doesn’t fidget, isn’t so self-pitying (though this remains; said he wanted to die, etc.). Troubled by memory loss. Yet remembered Outi and asked me about her. For a time the conversation was perfectly Pinteresque: life imitating art. But then it improved. He also walks now, actually rather vigorously, with the walker, but says his legs hurt. All in all, better than when I last saw him (July?), owing of course to the drug.

Met Blaise Greenwald, the psychiatrist in charge. Young; nice smile. Compassionate. At first he argued against nursing homes. They always aggravate depression. But I think I convinced him that Mother cannot cope at home with Dad. He came to the position that the quality of contact (short and sweet) is important, not the quantity. The plan now is to keep him a few weeks more, then transfer to Hanover’s psychiatric unit, stabilize, then prostate operation, then (?) nursing home, with Mother in The Greens. But how many times has this plan been reversed! We’ll see. . . . Afternoon, my usual pursuits. Supper with Mother and Alec in the Three Brothers. Viennese-Greek παρέα at the next table. The sophistication of NYC. We’ll all enter a new phase when the apartment is sold. It’s sobering that neither Dad nor Mother has ever lived outside of NYC. Come to New Hampshire to die! Strange. . . .

All these burdens make me despair about the Kazantzakis book. Since returning from England I’ve been unable to concentrate, have not touched it. Will this continue?

January 4, 1986

Hanover

Read Frank Kermode’s excellent, even brilliant Forms of Attention (University of Chicago Press, 1985), about canons. Some quotes:

❡ There is at this very moment an important argument in progress between scholars who wish to restore the virtues of canonicity, and those who think objective historical method the sole road to truth. That truth is also likely to be imperfectly consistent with the assumption that the biblical texts report things as they really happened, which is why modern New Testament critics are showing some interest in secular literary theory, and especially theory of fiction. It is even argued that the future of Christianity may depend upon a new understanding of fiction as a form of truth. Perhaps this is to be thought of as a new way of opposing virtue to fortune in the interests of preserving the valued object, enabling the canon to survive. (p. 78)

❡ God’s world is [one] in which sequence is reduced as far as may be to simultaneity, . . . a world in which trivial events and encounters have great figural power. (p. 91)

❡ We hold our present beliefs because we think they are supported and supportable. We recognize, however, that if new evidence to the contrary arises, we would be willing and likely to change our beliefs. Until that time, there is no reason for not believing what we believe. The belief that beliefs change does not therefore mean that no belief is possible any longer. (p. 93, quoting D. C. Hoy, The Critical Circle [1978], 1980 edition, p. 139)

Some recapitulation:

On December 16, 1985, we traveled from Birmingham airport to Heathrow and then via TWA to Boston. Arrived with all luggage missing: it had never been transferred at Heathrow. So the meeting with Leander at Logan (he’d driven to Boston expressly to help with the luggage) was not so exuberant as planned. Yet it was nice to go directly to Winthrop House (via Friends Center) to see Daphne’s room (F-22), with river view (!), to bump into Jim Davis, Lee the senior tutor, Chris Flug, and the house secretary, and be remembered. Walked Leander rapidly around Harvard. It is so impressive! Home that night.

Christmas in Hanover with all three children: different from our practice of so many years of being in NYC. We had to absorb Alec’s melancholy re: his hair, set up appointments with Bill Clendenning, etc. Daphne announced that she was going to Florida to see a boyfriend. Chrysanthi despaired. More trouble. Daphne was quasi-morose the whole holiday. Let the cat out on a freezing night (I felt sure that it would be fatal, but it wasn’t). I exploded at her. More trouble. Jumpy with Chrysanthi, too. More trouble. But we managed. The usual New Year’s Eve chez Rassias. John in bad form—backache, etc. Yet the continuity is important. New Year’s Day at Nodas. Better. Played a good game: composing poems on the basis of abab rhyme words given in advance. Leander very adept. Staughton Lynd’s son and daughter-in-law were there, new neighbors of the Nodas. Audrey Logan. Ellen De Cesare (now Bebis) with her man, Don Stewart, a morose clarinetist. Kesaya.

Nice to return to Meeting. Some people actually seemed pleased to see us. New couple: the Warings. Bob Metz reports much progress on the Kendal at Hanover scheme.

I spent these 2+ weeks clearing up mail, throwing things away, taking care of promises to send things, etc. to people we’d met in Europe, setting up my study, and getting the office neat—i.e., housekeeping. No Kazantzakis, except I started to put the Greek version of the Christ Recrucified lecture on the computer. Also catalogued and summarized all the L. P. Hartley letters. Marvelous letters. I’d forgotten them completely. How gracious and accommodating he was from start to finish! Also spent considerable time arranging Rommel Roberts’ visit next week on the South Africa issue.

All the children are gone, finally. What a relief!

Oh, we also got a new car, another Buick Skylark, ordered in advance and waiting for us. That was fun. Then the furnace broke, and soon afterwards the refrigerator had to be replaced. Expensive time!

January 6, 1986

❡The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.”—Milton Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 91.

January 10, 1986

I brought Rommel Roberts here to talk about South Africa. Nice to think back to Woodbrooke. I ran him ragged (and he me) with TV, radio, student meetings, meeting with the New Hampshire state legislator, faculty seminar. He stunned the radical students by advocating non-violent methods and by insisting that the Afrikaners are by-and-large moral.

Saturday, January 11, 1986

Arnie Alpert took Rommel off to Manchester to speak at NH College. Back for Tucker Foundation supper.

Sunday, January 12, 1986

Breakfast at Meeting. Rommel talked steadily from 8:00 a.m. until 10:30, and movingly. Meeting most impressed. Wants to contribute to his Meeting in Capetown.

January 13, 1986

COP breakfast meeting with Dean McCollum of the Medical School, explaining his woes.

January 14, 1986

My first meeting as a member of the Dickey Endowment governing committee, in Leonard’s new quarters. Nice group: Strickler, Scher, Baldwin, Navarro, Stanfeld, etc.

January 15, 1986

Ted Eliopoulos is doing an honors course with me on Cavafy and Έλλην versus Ρωμιός. Slow beginning today, but he will improve.

Friday, January 17, 1986

At Pendle Hill. Nice to be greeted with warmth by various friends who said they missed me. Ice cream with Barb Parsons afterwards. The one real issue was postponed—whether a homosexual couple should be allowed to cohabit.

Saturday, January 18, 1986

PH in the morning, then to Princeton. Three quarters of an hour with Mike and Mary Keeley. He’s in a difficult position in Athens because everyone comes to him for favors and pull now that his brother is the ambassador. We might be in Thessaloniki together in the spring of 1987. Very friendly. Dubious about Meg Alexiou’s alcoholism. Described how he lost a brother in convulsions during anti-alcoholism treatment.

Then to Princeton University Press editor Robert Brown. Dinner at Nassau Inn. Discussed contract for the Selected Letters. All’s well except Prevelakis’s opposition. What to do is not clear, except to wait.

Back to Manhattan. Evening show at 46th Street. Saw Charlie Hamlen walk in (how can one miss him, he’s so tall). So, secrets . . .

Sunday, January 19, 1986

In NYC. Peter Buseck visited. We brought valises to Mt. Sinai.

Monday, January 20, 1986

Mother and I at Mt. Sinai by 8:00 a.m. final conference with Doctors Greenwald and Pearlmutter. Ambulance at 9:15. I rode in front, Mother in back with the attendant. They reached Hanover in four hours and fifteen minutes, including a stop in Bellows Falls! Excellent reception at Mary Hitchcock. Dad installed quickly and comfortably in the mental health section. How nice, says Mother, to be in a small, intimate hospital. Charles Solow, psychiatrist, and Jim Strickler, internist-gerontologist, will be in charge. Mother installed in sewing room.

January 24, 1986

Lunch with Richard Hyde. He’s pursuing his lawsuit against the Dartmouth Review. Currently unemployed. Did the season in California at Esselen, etc. . . . Strange . . .

Interviewed Richard and Jennifer Joseph’s son Mark for Harvard. Such a lovely boy, sure of himself. What did we (I) do wrong with Leander and Daphne to make them so filled with hate and self-hate?

We bought a television set—for mother. I’m coveting the 11:30 hour for Benny Hill.

Alec’s baldness is unchanged. Doctors stumped. He’s going to try an ointment that restores hair in some cases. We recommended a homeopath. His beard, also, is still refusing to grow.

January 27, 1986

Dad operated on: prostate. Hope is to restore his ability to urinate. Spinal anesthetic, thank goodness. We all agreed on “no heroic measures” just in case. Also managed to get him to sign (!) powers of attorney last Friday. John Boswell, the lawyer, came over to witness and notarize them. All this was against the advice of Irving Honigsberg, who says that we mustn’t make Mother feel old!

January 28, 1986

Richard Bewley is here from Crosslands. I set up a series of meetings re: the Kendal at Hanover project. Bob Metz is ill, alas, at this crucial moment. Elise Boulding is here, too.

January 29, 1986

Elise, Leonard, Rosemarie, Richard Bewley for dinner. Elise and Leonard want me to coordinate the War/Peace Studies program. Here I go again! That, and Kendal, and Pendle Hill, and the journal. My poor book . . .

February 1, 1986

Leo Papademetre here for the day, full of news and gossip from Sydney and Melbourne but basically pleased he went (phew!).

February 2, 1986

Dad back in the mental health unit. So far the operation is a failure in that the ability to urinate has not been restored. The obstruction caused by the prostate is gone, but the bladder won’t contract. They’re trying other means—injections. The outlook does not look good. Mother is getting used to the idea of the nursing home as the next step.

Monday, February 3, 1986

Breakfast meeting of COP called by President McLaughlin re: students who tried to demolish the shanties on the green. Last Monday the faculty, led by Mel Spiegel, called for a vote of no confidence, but the motion was defeated and we’re going ahead with the governance report.

Monday, February 10, 1986

Playing music regularly again, with Dick Williamson. Flute and piano. How nice!

February 13–20, 1986

A whole week lost in bed with the flu.

February 24, 1986

Richard Bewley here again for the Kendal project, which is going along beautifully.

February 26, 1986

I introduced Bewley to Hanover Rotary at lunch in the Tavern Room of Hanover Inn. Males only. They salute the flag and pledge allegiance. Extraordinary! Also grace before meat.

February 27, 1986

My annual physical with Paul Gerber. Have a slight, very slight, hernia. Take care. Blood pressure super. Also cholesterol. Worried about urination problems.

March 7–8, 1986

Pendle Hill Publications Committee again. Nice to see Rebecca Mays after so many months. I’m back in the old routines again, I guess. Took a month to get adjusted again after Woodbrooke.

Douglas Steere ministered in Meeting on Saturday. One sentence: “God’s wind always blows, but we have to raise the sails.”

March 9, 1986

Crucial Meeting for Business on the sanctuary issue. We have three Guatemalans illegally in the US. I spoke for. For once I was hoping that the Meeting would act according to its principles. Julie Childs ran the meeting well. Chrysanthi opposed, of course. Also Audrey, Mary Soderberg, the Warings. But they stood aside. I cited Douglas’s message of yesterday.

March 11, 1986

Mother and I and Alice (who’s here this week) at the Dartmouth National Bank’s Trust Department with John Boswell and Mr. Hamilton. Question of custody account. Mother goes back and forth on this, and everything else. I’m trying to get her to write a new will with a trust arrangement.

March 14, 1986

Alice treated to dinner at the Hanover Inn. Can’t warm to her much, but she’s well meaning. Played piano four-hands.

March 17, 1986

With McLaughlin again. He’s worried sick about the rightwing students and threats of lawsuits.

March 20, 1986

Lebanon to Logan, TW to London. Sat next to a Filipino student at Harvard Business School about to confirm a job in London. Talked about Marcos, etc.

Friday, March 21, 1986, London.

Started the day by losing my Lloyds card in the machine. Teller returned it, breaking the rules. Settled in Wellington Hall, Vincent Square, very nice. Huge playing field in front. Building threadbare but adequate. Worked on Kazantzakis chapter a little. Very tired. Jet lag. Walked to the Abbey and Parliament Square. Evening: Raymond Bar beautiful and sophisticated. Echo is about to be unveiled again in Piccadilly. Was shrouded.

Saturday, March 22, 1986

London

Worked well on Kazantzakis in the morning. In the afternoon saw Shaw’s The Apple Cart with Peter O’Toole. Scintillating, witty, serious, civilized. A pleasure! Bought David Lodge’s Small World to read about myself! Hamburger in Wendy’s overhearing a Swiss woman tell a stranger repeatedly how she wouldn’t be caught dead in such a dump back home.

Saw Jim Poage on the street.

Met Yannis and Elaine Karavidas at the theatre to see Interpreters, a mediocre play but superbly acted by Maggie Smith. Afterwards to a Greek restaurant. Very nice. Ate καραβίδα (crayfish)! Lovely company.

Sunday, March 23, 1986

Worshipped at Westminster Meeting. Met Thelma Babbitt there. Nice Meeting, in St. Martin’s Lane.

Amazed to be greeted by John Burke of Melbourne when I returned to Wellington Hall. We walked and talked and ate supper together for five hours. Unexpected pleasure.

Monday, March 24, 1986

Mario Vitti and wife Alexandra at breakfast. Also the novelist Τηλέμαχος Κώτσιας, and Gina Politi, and John Smart, and Yorgis Yiatromanolakis, and and and . . . Strange feeling seeing people I’d been with in England only a few months before, as though I lived here. Most thought I’d stayed on, said I belonged in England anyway. Saw Peter Mackridge, David Holton, Roddy Beaton, of course. Also the B’ham and London students, and Karen Van Dyck, the Oxford student, etc

Telephoned the John Rylands Library in Manchester. They had received the Hartley letters I posted on Friday. Now they owe me £700. Apparently they have some of my letters to Hartley also.

Donald Nicol opened the conference. Very friendly and talkative this time. Morning session had Mackridge and Eleni Yannakaki, the student (very poor). But the novelists afterward were fun. Lunch with Yannis Karavidas across the street in the BBC. Then he interviewed me on the rise of the Greek novel, which I connected wiith the bourgeoisie. In the afternoon session, Vayenas was controversial on Seferis’s Six Nights on the Acropolis, which he thought very poor. I gave my paper, Nikos Kazantzakis’s Attitude Toward Prose Fiction. Well received. Got invitations afterward to speak in Scotland and at the University of Crete! Reception. Then home with Richard Clogg. Supper with him and Mary-Jo. They’re very critical of Meg Alexiou, think she’s a skunk. Clogg now involved with the controversy over the BBC film on the civil war. The film distorts it toward the leftist perspective, he says. By the way, Mrs. Serafis is at the symposium.

Tuesday, March 25, 1986

I chaired the morning session with papers by Vitti, Mihalis Chrysanthopoulos, David Ricks, and Bill Wyatt. All rather good. But Gina Politi’s was the best, a stunner! I concluded with the prologue to Lodge’s Small World about people who go to conferences on the modern form of the medieval pilgrimmage! Lunch with Mario Vitti. He says I’m wasting my time doing the Kazantzakis letters. I should supervise and have a student do the actual work. By the way, Prevelakis died, solving my problem. Buffet supper at King’s plus music with Roddy Beaton on folk violin. Saw his wife Fran, after many years. Also people from Groningen. Nice talk with John Smart.

Wednesday, March 27, 1986

Final session. Banquet at King’s for lunch. Sat with Mario again. Talked about children and family. He says we’re both remarkable to be married to the same woman we started with. Karl Stead wrote me the same from New Zealand recently. In the afternoon, went to see Mr. Pickles at Quartet Books, Goodge Street. They’re doing the paperback of my Life in the Tomb translation. Young man wiht a ring in his left ear, hair tied in a bun at back, office a shambles, no place to sit down practically. But he knows what he’s doing; wants Peter Levi to write the preface. Then to British Museum to meet Rowena Loverance. She took me to her boss, who showed us the icon the BM is trying to buy. Looks like any other icon to me But they’re trying to raise £200,000 for it! Crazy! We were there after closing, and wandered in the galleries in the semi-dark. Like the movie Topkapi.

Supper at the Penn Club—more presentable than I remember. Theatre: Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. American. Raw. Sarcastic. Obscene. The obverse of G. B. Shaw’s The Apple Cart. Superbly acted by the National Theatre, including credible American accents. Afterwards we went across the street to a pub and the cast came in. The head actor assured me that Mamet loves the U.S. when I said I felt ashamed as an American at what the play showed. Mamet wants to expose the rot and hope for a cure. The dialogue is superb.

Thursday, March 27, 1986

Heathrow to Logan. The same Filipino was on the plane, returning. Greeted me with a big smile. He got the job. Sat next to a British woman, a professional stone cutter. Talked for three hours interestingly. Read PH pamphlet submissions and David Lodge. Precision flight cancelled owing to fog at Lebanon airport. Just caught Vermont Transit bus. Chrysanthi very warm and loving. It’s useful to go away! This week was a godsend after the tensions of my mother’s indecisiveness, and how it infected my relation with Chrysanthi. Beautiful reunion.

Friday, March 28, 1986

Hanover

Alec here. He got the job in Jakarta. I gave him Conrad’s “Youth.” Coals to Batavia! His alopecia areata is no better but we still hope it will reverse itself. So far the cortisone treatment has not produced renewed growth of hair. He chopped down the mountain ash in the back yard, which is diseased and dying. Pappous very agitated. Urine infected. To Guthrie Theater doing Great Expectations. So poor compared to London. I’m spoiled.

Saturday, March 29, 1986

What a life! Had to drive to Boston to Lily Macrakis’s for MGSA endowment committee. John Petropulos and George Frangos. Nice to see Macrakises back in their home. Michelle came in. As strange as always. Still existing as a photographer. Then I went to Cambridge expecting Daphne to be returning from Florida. But she didn’t show up. Met Chris Flug, who says that Daphne is very much liked at Winthrop, and by the right people. Chinese dinner seul.

Sunday, March 30, 1986

More at Meeting re: sanctuary. I helped set up a relationship between the woman and Lou’s Restaurant. She’s supplying them with tortillas. Went to The Greens and hung paintings in Yiayia’s apartment.

Monday, March 31, 1986

Yiayia signed the contract for The Greens and purchased the bond. She moves in tomorrow. So we enter Step 2 of this great saga. Let’s hope it works. The Madison Avenue apartment is now up for sale. All our lives will change.

April 4, 1986

To Amherst: Hampshire College for a War/Peace Studies conference. Stayed with Harmon Dunathan. Alan Rozycki also there from Dartmouth. Nice woman, Martie Daniel, longtime AFSC Hartford now at Juniata College. We had John and Elizabeth Baker in common. Chrysanthi went off to hear Leander’s Longdon Quartet do Mozart and Brahms, chaperoned by Nigel Coxe.

Saturday, April 5, 1986

Amherst

Alan and I agreed to try to have the next conference at Dartmouth, if Leonard helps with $$. Met interesting Indian who teaches Gandhi-ism. Said India fell apart because Gandhi allowed himself to become the center of a personality cult. When he was assassinated, all the power went out of the movement. Interesting. Was Jesus the same? Somehow no.

Supper at a Japanese restaurant with Nigel Coxe, Chrysanthi, and Leander. Coxe a great talker. We touched on L. P. Hartley among others. He’s convinced that England is going down the drain; stressed the “other London,” the one I didn’t see last week—i.e., the London of hopelessness, unemployment, the perpetual dole.

Sunday, April 6, 1986

Lunch at The Greens with Mother. Mrs. Bernstein made a festive “dinner party” for three families. She and I have much in common. She’s a Quaker; knew Ellen Rose, etc.; granddaughter applying to the Peace Corps. I told her about Lori. Fine atmosphere. Mother is lucky in this respect.

Tuesday, April 8, 1986

Rand Jones, whom I first had in English 2–3, took me to lunch. He’s a regular intellectual now. Loves Joyce. Lives in Stonington, Connecticut, where James Merrill lives.

Wednesday, April 9, 1986

Lunch with Daniyal Mueenuddin, my half-Pakistani half-American student who is doing an honors thesis on James Merrill. I began reading Merrill for the first time. A marvelous technician. influenced greatly in the early years by Kimon Friar.

At the Dickey Endowment in the evening with a Mexican gentleman, director of their equivalent of the Collège de France, set up after 1936 to house refugee intellectuals from Franco’s Spain. We’re trying to involve the Dickey Endowment in US-Mexican contacts.

Thursday, April 10, 1986

Bill Cook and I gave our lecture cum poetry reading in the War/Peace Studies course. He’s incorrigible. Undisciplined. Garrulous. Ate up all the time and left no time for students to write poems at the end. But he’s totally unaware of this defect. Without notes or planning he winds himself up and spouts. Yet the students love it.

Friday, April 11, 1986

A very special day. To Cambridge in the afternoon with Chrysanthi and Mother. (Father stabilized after many crises last week with his catheter, and signs of returning into the nervous breakdown of last November, but Solow’s drugs seem to control him. Also, slurring of speech—maybe more strokes.)

Supper at the Harvard Faculty Club with Peter Gardner and his new (third) wife, Susie, plus Daphne, of course. Then at Sanders Theater we heard the premiere of Jimmy Yannatos’s “Trinity Mass,” a marvelous achievement integrating modern concerns (chiefly that of nuclear holocaust) to the ancient formulas in the Latin Mass and also the Latin requiem. I recalled so vividly the Berlioz Requiem that I sang in Rochester. Yannatos’s work is devastating. It captures and re-projects all the guilt that America feels, or ought to feel, for mass destruction. Yet it was never cheaply propagandistic or even political, but genuinely aesthetic in the best sense—i.e., beautiful but at the same time “engaged” with the basic issues of our day. The performance, too, was stunning: huge orchestra, multiple choruses, soloists (Charlie Hamlen’s Lucy Shelton, and Jon Humphrey and Sanford Sylvan, all of whom we saw in the St. Matthew Passion at Marlboro. Even Robert J. Lurtsema showed up, in one of the parts. Daphne, alas, was in the audience with us, not in the violin section, but I’m hoping that she’ll rejoin the orchestra next year. She’s just got a job editing two “Let’s Go” books for Harvard Student Agencies, on Greece and France, for the summer.

Ice cream at Steve’s with Laurie’s parents—D’s roommate. Saw last year’s roommate, Marie. Also Steve Ledbetter with the woman who’s going to review the Trinity Mass for the Boston Globe. Forgot to mention that two of the sections were to texts from the Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο, well sung in Greek by Sanford Sylvan. I was cited in the program as the translator. Saw Jimmy afterwards and conveyed my wonder and congratulations. I didn’t realize that he had all that in him.

Saturday, April 12, 1986

Telephoned Charlie Hamlen early to urge him to hear the Trinity Mass tonight when they do it again at St. John’s in New York.

Sunday, April 13, 1986

Good Meeting. Raking leaves in the afternoon. Mother for supper. We are slowly settling her affairs. Arranged to begin to equalize her and Dad’s assets by transferring stock. Still waiting on Boswell to do the new will and trust provisions.

April 26, 1986

To Amherst. Supper with Rhoda and Bron. She is loud, but nice. He is slimy . . . but he tried. Stopped at Deerfield on the way to show Mother. Leander played a concert: flute and piano with Patty Harper (unimpressive), then piano four-hands with David Abbot (very nice). Ignat Solzhenitsyn was there with Mrs. Shin and his Babushka. Big smile from violist in the quartet, Leander’s erstwhile girlfriend.

May 2, 1986

Hooray! We signed the wills. Pappous did beautifully, made a good signature and knew what was going on, despite his confusion at times. John Boswell came to Hanover Terrace for the occasion. Audrey Logan came as one of the witnesses. What a relief!

Yesterday, superb lecture by Professor Holton, historian of science at Harvard. Leonard Rieser urged me to go. Just my style: all emphasis on the material, not on the speaker.

The previous evening: grand supper party with the Riesers and Kenneth and Elise Boulding at Café La Fraise. Ken is living at the Penington. He is so good natured and lively.

I’m creeping along with the Toda-Raba chapter. Seem to do less each day, but the revision is almost finished.

News from Athens. I was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship for March–June 1987. My third Fulbright. For the letters. Prevelakis died, which removes an impediment. Still no contract however from Richard Brown at Princeton.

May 3, 1986

Meg Alexiou here. We went to church at Newport. Ανάσταση. Wonderful priest. No ψάλτης, just a reader; rather primitive. Actually, like the early church when probably no one knew what to do. So much better than the perfected “performance” in large Greek Orthodox churches. I was especially moved by the Beatitudes in relation to the Sanctuary Movement. To sleep at 3:30 a.m. Much good talk with Meg.

May 4, 1986

To Meeting. Grant Thompson there. No news yet re: John Tallmadge. Gwyneth Walker introduced herself—the composer whose music Leander has played. I ministered on the Beatitudes and the Sanctuary group just convicted in the southwest: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake. Easter lamb. Meg, Ted Eliopoulos, Michael and Elaine Gaylor and their son, now 14 and beautiful; Daphne with a new boyfriend, Lori + a Cypriot friend; Mother, Mary, Helene, Veronica, Athos. Beautiful meal and fellowship.

Long walk afterwards to Storrs Pond with Meg and Chrysanthi. Then visited Father. Very garrulous. Remembered Meg and the two autistic children. Started on me and Deerfield. He let out that the motivation was anti-Semitism. He didn’t want me to stay at Bronx Science and end up just another yid (his word, half-suppressed) with a Bronx accent. Remarkable man! We finally broke away and visited Mother for tea. Then supper at Jesse’s and home for more good talk.

I’d finished revising the Toda-Raba chapter on Saturday, so was ready for this nice break.

June 20, 1986

Albany airport

En route to Pendle Hill and then tomorrow to John Tallmadge’s wedding in Minnesota. Just left a full house at Terpni: Alec, Leander, even Daphne. Leander was offered an administrative post at the Brattleboro Music School; he’s dickering with Putney School to teach two classes a week; is off to Kinhaven on Monday. Alec’s hair is growing back on his arms and legs and nape of the neck and temples; his beard is normal. Still bald, but hopeful. He’s building the shed off the back side of the cabin and is excited about the impending trip to L.A., Hawaii, Singapore, Jakarta. He read out loud to us fascinating cultural details about the Indonesians from the guide book I got him. He does the cabin very poorly, with no forethought, no sketches, no research, just trial and error, with lots of error. Still, it works somehow. We creosoted some more logs and he is fearful re: another attack of alopecia. Daphne arrived last night after a week in Los Angeles at a boyfriend’s. She looked very Californian with her tan and big smile. She’s in the midst of editing the “Let’s Go” volumes for Greece and France, and is exhilarated by that responsibility.

Saw a deer bound across the lower field the other day. That’s always reportable. Also a large turtle, and a rabbit. Went to a meeting of the Upper Hudson group at Jacques’: Dennis Conroy, chairman, Mr. Green, and a Smith. The K135 power line is coming through, and will cross the Waddell Road below us. I’m praying. But there are surveyors’ ribbons by our old shed, which frightens me.

Exhausting but productive morning yesterday. Up at 6:15. Breakfast. Then lit the brush pile. Then went round with the tractor and dragged the piles we’d cut previous days, on the edge of the front field. These went on the fire and burned too. Finished at 12:30, non-stop. I napped, and then sat at the Macintosh computer for hours finishing the typing of the Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο chapter so that I could bring it to Hanover this trip and transfer it to Kiewit.

Revised my Columbia University Press Kazantzakis pamphlet and sent it to Scribner’s just before moving to Terpni. Since then, I revised the Columbia University Press Cavafy pamphlet and hope to send it next week. Also sent off my “Kazantzakis and the Novel” to Beaton just before leaving. The British Classical Press wants me to do a Kazantzakis book for sixth formers. Draft contract arrived form Princeton UP finally; I’ve sent the terms to Mrs. Kazantzakis with a request for a more liberal allowance for me.

Pappous has diarrhea. Strickler hopes it will go away, doesn’t want to subject him to disagreeable tests for possible cancer of the colon.

It’s so good to be at the farm. One’s whole body responds to the exercise, clean air, simplicity, reduced pace. What a tonic! And we’re not isolated (I love the isolation, but Chrysanthi chafes). Saw Shapiros several times, ditto Grunblatts. At Shapiros one night even the parents of Feld, the choreographer. Interesting to hear about his career. He has classes for slum children, and two have been offered contracts with his company.

I’m struggling along with Kazantzakis and Politics. The documentation is getting out of control. I don’t have a good system, yet. How to comprehend the entire scope of that book, to avoid repetition and contradiction, will be the trick. I feel daunted, but must keep trying. It will be my magnum opus if it ever gets finished.

Department banquet last night. Henry Terrie retired. Nice testimonials, including one by his bosom friend Jim Cox. I sat between Dick Eberhart and Cleopatra Mathis and naturally enjoyed myself. My own birthday party came the next day, with Audrey Logan, the Nodas and Corindias. Nice.

June 21, 1986

Philadelphia airport

Good Publications Committee meeting yesterday. We accepted more manuscripts, including a very good one by a Vietnam veteran who went back this year to Hanoi and Saigon. Also, provisionally, one by Bill Edgerton on non-violence, “pacifism revisited,” which brought back memories to Mather Lippincott and me when he described the influence that Gregg’s book had on him.

Supper. Sat next to Steve Cary. Talked about Haverford, which continues to treat him poorly, it seems; also Alec, and sanctuary, and work camps. Discovered that Corbett was acquitted in Tucson because the FBI tapes that would have convicted him themselves were so illegal that the government declined to press charges.

Farewells to Ned North, Dyke Vermilye, and some others, who are leaving. Dyke and Avis are going to South Africa. I told them that I had a telephone call from Rommel Roberts the other day from Cape Town; we’ll try to send him another $500. Ned has no plans. Free and loose. New charmer at Publications Committee yesterday: Julie Cadwallader Staub. That beautiful Quaker wholesomeness, plus brains. Why don’t Leander and Alec meet women like this?!

Breakfast this morning with two refugees from Czechoslovakia—Prague—now living in Indiana. He’s a Unitarian minister. They were pleased that I teach Kafka, who is much read in Prague, they said.

Meeting: We had the AFSC board as well as our PH board. In effect the Meeting was a memorial service for Jim Harvey, a black member of the AFSC directorate who died suddenly. Steve Cary (as expected) spoke particularly well. He said that Harvey had the gift of truly trying to persuade people in confrontational situations, instead of “scoring points.” An example: Once they were closeted with the administration of the Campbell Soup Company in a strike situation. One of the vice-presidents said that he could empathize with the strikers because when he was at college he worked for one summer picking tomatoes. Only later did the AFSC group discover that Harvey had been prohibited from going to college because of poverty, and went instead to work for two years for the Campbell Soup Company picking tomatoes in South Jersey and working in the processing plant. He could have “scored a point” against the V-P by up-staging him with the information. But he resisted the temptation. It would have been a cheap, and temporary, victory, and probably would have caused resentment. When, however, the V-P learned this info later and realized that Harvey had refrained, he (the V-P) felt great respect for him. He was thus in a better position to persuade.

Northfield, Minnesota. Mr. Tallmadge picked me up at the airport. Unhappy about Dartmouth; wants the Indian symbol returned, voted for right-wing trustees. Delivered to home of a psychology professor, Woehrlin, who supports John. Grant Thompson there, and John Elder. Also Elliott Lee, Will Lee’s brother, whom I mistook for Will. Toured Northfield: not much to see. Carleton campus is beautiful, like Swarthmore. Wedding in Presbyterian church. Such good music: Bach, Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. No stupid wedding march. Organ and harp. Reading by John Elder, with harp accompaniment. Young, eager minister. John wrote the litany of responses between the couple and the congregation, uniting us all under God. Full vows, no excisions. Everyone held hands for the final prayer. Decency and solidarity through ritual. Beastly hot; easy to weep, since faces all running with sweat. Reception in the student dining hall. Suddenly Bob and Dagmar Tisdale appeared—neighbors from 12 Valley Road, ca. 1965–66. He’s now chairman of Carleton’s English Department. Lovely to see them. They took me to their home, all wood inside and out, deep browns, in an oasis of green trees and grass. Dinner at the reception was a whole roast pig. Delicious. Wedding cake, three tiers. Champagne, strawberries, dancing.

June 22, 1986

Minneapolis

John Elder’s teaching method. He explained a class procedure as we drove to the airport in Grant Thompson’s rented car. Students write one or two pages for every class session. Generally this is a kind of journal entry about their reading assignment for that day. Among other things, this enhances discussion enormously. Everyone has at least one idea or reaction, and John doesn’t have to struggle to get the discussion going. Also, constant writing sharpens the writing skills. Also, having to write focuses the reading experience. These scripts are collected, but never graded. They can be read quickly. Comments where appropriate are returned. At intervals during the term, students develop one of these scripts into a regular essay. John has in the meantime suggested which are “pregnant” and which are duds. The essays are still not graded, only annotated. (I forgot to say that the short scripts are circulated among the students, enhancing the classroom fellowship.) At some point later in the term, students choose from one of the essays, to rewrite for a graded paper. So, a process of revision is built into the whole affair. Even at this stage, students may elect to rewrite the graded essay for a revised grade. John has been doing this for three years and is very pleased. Class solidarity is enhanced; the power relationship between teacher and student is minimized. Writing is improved; class discussion is improved. Grading more accurately reflects a student’s total involvement on a continuing basis, as opposed to an all-night stand just before the paper is due.

November 24, 1986

Hanover

I congratulated my student David Dodge on being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. His reply startled me: “It’s just another commodity.” Good for him! He pierced through to das Ding-an-sich!

December 27–29, 1986

New York City

A nice beginning to MLA. Lunch with Dick Dellamora, then to Metropolitan Museum together to see the Van Gogh show—his last year—at the asylum and a bit in Paris, before he killed himself. Then with Dick, still, and John Tallmadge to the Juarez Restaurant. John still has no prospects, only one MLA interview, at Idaho! My intervention at Haverford and UNH produced no result. Then with John to Metropolitan Opera to see Fidelio, with Vassilis Lambropoulos, Artemis Leontis, Gregory Jusdanis: my treat. All this largesse was meant for Meg Alexiou, who had to beg to be excused because of a crisis with Dimitri in Brum (he couldn’t exist in Greece and had to be returned to England, to live with the Thomsons). Fidelio is so extraordinary. The music! The third Leonora Overture always lightweight-seeming when I’d heard it in a concert, i.e., out of context, now became scintillating as an interlude before the last scene. Hoped to find Herb Wekselblatt but there is no tuba. What a rich day!

On Sunday, to the 15th Street Meeting, then to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Klees. We’re to have a faculty seminar on Klee in January. On Tuesday, our MGSA seminar with me in the chair: Vassilis, Artemis, Gregory. Went well. Lots of discussion. “theorists” vs. non-theorists; Chioles playing devil’s advocate. Took them all to lunch at the Yale Club afterwards.

Christmas, just before my trip, was in Hanover, of course. No more 20 East 74th Street. Though Pappous had come to our Thanksgiving meal and had eaten and enjoyed himself, the Christmas meal was too much. So we had Yiayia, Daphne, Leander.

December 31, 1986

Hanover

New Year’s with the Rassiases. Snails and lamb as always. Very gemütlich. Our little rituals.

In New York, during MLA time, I had Daphne’s boyfriend Greg Tebbe to supper. How handsome he is! He told me all about Wall Street.

1987

Chicago c/o John A. and Ilyana

January 31–February 1

Damianos, 2921 Covert Rd.,

Glenview, Illinois 60026

Geneva, Hôtel de l’Etoile,

March 11–13

17 Vieux-Grenadiers, et chez Bertrand

et Michelle Bouvier, 9 Encyclopédie

1201 Genève, 44.81.16

Zurich, Hotel Limmathaus, Limmatstr. 118, 8005, 01 425240

March 14–15

Θες/νίκη Στατίστης 18, 40 Εκκλησίες,

March 15–June 30

546 36 (Street name changed to Βιζύης-Βύζαντος). Landlady: Zoë Rebelos,

2200 Columbia Pike, #805, Arlington, VA 22204

April 11–12 Hotel Mirto, Litohoro, tel 0352 81398.

April 25–May 1, Ξενοδοχείο Αχιλλέας, Οδός Λέκκα 21, 01 32.33. 197.

May 18–23, Lató Hotel, 15 Epimanidou 712 02 Ηράκλειο, 081 22.81.03

May 25–28, Hotel Ξενία, Γιάννινα

Thessaloniki–Frankfort–New York–Boston–Hanover

July 1

Hanover

July 2–3

Riparius

July 4–September 1

July 17–21, Hanover, Weston, Hanover

Hanover

September 1–December 31

Sept. 18–20, Philadelphia/NYC. Pendle Hill, MGSA

Oct. 3, Rindge, NEYM Committee Day

Oct. 17–18, Kinhaven

Oct. 22–25, Kendal, Pendle Hill, Haverford, NYC

Nov. 5–7, Cambridge, Providence (MGS)

Dec. 3–5, NYC & Philadelphia, PH

Dec. 26, Cambridge (theater)

January 4, 1987

To George Goodwin’s in Amherst, for Kinhaven’s “Governance Committee,” which I chair. Trying to rationalize the administration. Alice Henkin, Joe Contino, Bill Polk, Jerry and Nancy Bidlack.

That evening, crisis in Pappous’s health. Massive pneumonia. To hospital emergency room. But they won’t let him die. Stuffed him with IVs, antibiotics, and brought him round. Nevertheless, I rushed to make funeral arrangements: cremation, burial of ashes in urn at our farm. Wrote obituaries for various papers and medical journals. All in readiness.

Just remembered and want to record: I went to the farm in November with Merlin Evans to put the piano back together. He brought electric heaters. So: no electricity. Conductors dangling off the top of the pole. Sunday, too. But I called the company and a morose crew appeared within two hours. Hooray! Heroes! “Isn’t this the way it’s supposed to be?” grumbled the foreman. So our big fire was supplemented finally with electric heat, and with light. Still, Merlin didn’t finish. We’ll go back in the summer, With luck the piano will now be workable.

Leander coached Ignat and took him home to Cavendish, and entered the Solzhenitsyns’ home. But Aleksandr had just gone to bed. They appreciate Leander very much. I wrote to Ignat to ask for info on isbas, for Wyatt’s translation of Βυζηινός, and got a wonderful reply full of information, supplied by Aleksandr.

January 10, 1987

To Haverford. I’m on the Corporation committee. Revised governance with the object of enhancing Quaker values. Nice to meet Morris Evans, and Mrs. Harrington, whose daughter I taught at Harvard. Also Wallace Collett’s son, who left a fancy college to teach at an alternative one. After the meeting, Ellen Rose picked me up for tea. She is thriving, finally, at Drexel. Loves Philly. Just bought a home. Working on two books at once. Confident about tenure.

January 16–17, 1987

To Pendle Hill. I continue to appreciate this contact. Margery Walker asked me for ice cream afterwards. Alan will do the study on aging. Two of our books are published: Daisy Newman’s and Mary Morrison’s.

January 22, 1987

To New York for Kinhaven again. Met in Alice Henkin’s law firm, 35th floor, 50 Broadway, just south of Trinity Church. Swirling snowstorm. Thunder (we thought the end of the world was nigh), lightning. Leonard and Rosemarie Rieser joined me at the Yale Club for supper. All stranded. AMTRAK came two hours late and arrived 5½ hours late, but I taught my class on the Portrait on Friday.

January 24, 1987

Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a pianist managed by Charlie Hamlen, stayed overnight with us. He’s a master, truly. Aged 23. All Chopin program, including the 24 preludes. Ligeti’s Mephisto Waltz as the encore. Such effortless technique. But, more importantly, such intellectual understanding, such precision and restraint combined with sensitivity and emotionalism, to create a romantic music that is totally fresh. Long talk with him the next day at breakfast. He’s delightfully modest and unaffected. Grateful to Charlie for taking him on.

January 26, 1987

Met Kate Emlen. I thought she’d be good to design my War/Peace Studies brochure, but she’s too expensive. Wants $600–800 just for her fee. She did magnificent designs for AFSC and for Pendle Hill, the cover to Daisy Newman’s book.

January 27, 1987

Leander back from Germany and Greece. Good concert with Toula, four hands. Then three concerts in Germany with Eva Grüsser. Her parents and brother very hospitable. Afterwards they blew their wad on a wild drive to Vienna and a night in a deluxe hotel. But no word of any romantic involvement. Alas, Eva is living with someone else, at least for the present.

Leander will be going to Bethlehem three days a week to teach piano at Lehigh.

Lunch with John Van Aalst. After all his efforts working at prose fiction to prepare himself for an MFA, he now announces that he’s going to medical school.

January 28, 1987

Dinner party at Tom and Nardi Campion’s. Ned Perrin there. Also John Sloan Coffin’s brother, Ned, who lives in Stratford. Also Dick?, former publisher of Country Journal, who had called me about Kendal.

Apropos, the NH subcommittee, which looked like it was to sabotage Kendal completely, voted today 5 to 4 (!) to proceed to develop separate standards for CCRCs, which gives us a chance. The reversal of our fortunes is owing to a consultant we retained and to a lawyer in Malcolm McLane’s firm, all this the result of the serendipitous dinner I had with Malcolm and Susan McLane at Rockefeller Center a few months ago, the time when Roddy Rockefeller hauled me over the coals for War/Peace Studies.

January 29, 1987

Working on my speech for Chicago on Η τρωτότητα των ελληνικών γραμμάτων. Good War/Peace seminar. Then to Spaulding to hear the second half of Andy Rangell’s 4th Beethoven recital. He did Opus 31, no. 3, which I used to play, and the strangely magnificent Opus 100. He’s good, but after Thibaudet . . .!?

Good modernism seminar the other day on Klee, led by Jim Jordan. Klee’s treatise is very useful for literary modernism. I’ve already got a student writing a paper on it.

January 31, 1987

Drove to Boston and flew to Chicago. Overnight at Damianoses.

Mustn’t forget last Friday when, after returning so late on the train and teaching my class, we drove to Cambridge, supped with Daphne, and went to the Rep’s brilliant production of PIrandello’s Tonight We Improvise, the play that Kazantzakis translated and then copied in Ο Οθέλλος ξαναγυρίζει. It was a delicious evening of modernist theater, with all distinctions between stage and audience, director and actors, fictions and real life broken down.

Chicago, continued: dinner at Damianos’s with Bishop Iakovos, Θεανώ Παπαζόγλου-Μάργαρη (a short-story writer and journalist who lives in Chicago but writes exclusively in Greek and publishes in Athens), and other friends. Some remembered me from 23 years ago in Chicago.

Sunday, February 1, 1987

To St. Demetrios’s for liturgy sung by the bishop. Church full. All ages. Lots of men, lots of children. The full treatment. Altar boys. Psaltes. Chorus. Organ. Assisting priests. Communion sweet, with the spoon going into the mouths of little children with their upturned faces. Then the αρτοκλάσια in honor of the Τρεῖς Ιεράρχες: Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Christostomos. Lunch for 400 people in the Great Hall. I sat next to Andrew Kopan. Good conversation; very friendly. Talked about bilingual education; problem of Greek vs. English in church, etc. The program had everything: girls singing folk songs, little children reciting poems, skits, speeches by dignitaries like the Greek consul and of course the bishop, who speaks beautifully. I was the major attraction and seemed to be a “hit” (standing ovation), many compliments afterwards. One man said, Συγκινήθηνκα από τα λόγια σας τόσο πολύ που έκλαψα. I in turn was moved, once again, by the sight of the rituals and communal life of the Greek population, compared for example to the isolation of my parents. When my father dies, no one will know or care, whereas here, in church, there were 40-day, 6-month, and 12-month memorials with widows, children, and grandchildren placing candles in the memorial cake. At the end, as the bishop congratulated me and said he wanted to publish the lecture, I complimented him, sincerely, saying, Είστε ποιμένας αληθινός των ψυχών. His answer was touching: Αγώνας! Αγώνας! I can imagine all the backbiting that goes on underneath.

Return to Damianos’s house. She chewed my ear off about her father, the journalist Γιώργος Φτέρης. John Damianos told me how a ne’er-do-well from Chicago who’d written a letter in praise of Κόλλιας was made Minister of Economics by the junta. They couldn’t find anyone else. This fellow couldn’t pay his own bills on time. He eventually became prime minister just before the junta’s fall.

February 7, 1987

To NYC with Leonard Rieser. Visited with the Bakers again. Result: another $25,000 for War/Peace Studies. We celebrated by going to the Century Club for lunch; sat next to Senator Moynihan. Then to MGSA Executive Committee. Meg not there because George Thomson just died. Drinks afterwards with Dia, John Rexine, Elizabeth Constantinides.

Leonard, while we talked, said that of all the members of the faculty who had not been a dean I had changed Dartmouth the most. I told him I had two more projects: to put War/Peace Studies on a firm footing, and to build Kendal at Hanover.

February 11, 1987

When the Bakers’ checks arrived, they totaled $41,000 instead of the promised $25,000. In other words, they brought our endowment up to $100,000. Sweet people!

March 9, 1987

Told Andy Rangell that I couldn’t go to his concert on the 11th because it would be the eve of our departure. So he brought us home and played the Hammerklavier Sonata for us, Leander, and Susanne Brown in private. What a savage, frightening piece, especially in the confines of a living room! Andy makes it totally demonic: a fragmented nightmare, in a way. I’m not sure he appreciated my view when I told him afterward.

A few days ago, we saw the Guthrie Theater in Shaw’s Candide. Very slow; lots of fuss about—well—not nothing, but almost nothing (for a modern audience). The preacher, though “exposed” by the poet as a windbag, didn’t seem so bad. It was the poet who was reprehensible, though Shaw clearly wanted us to favor his unconventionality. It’s only Candide herself in the last act who “works,” as she chooses her husband over the poetic lover.

A few weeks ago, in New York City, I saw an adaptation from Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” “Metamorphosis,” “A Country Doctor,” and passages from the diaries. Very poor, although sincere. The only really interesting part is when the blond Anglo-Saxon actress playing Gretta, Felice Bauer, etc., became a kind of Jewish mama as the impresario in “The Hunger Artist.” The venue was St. Clement’s, a radicalized Episcopal parish heavy on sanctuary, the peace movement, etc. On the bulletin board was a clipping quoting an East German pastor who said that he wasn’t a communist in East Germany but that if he lived long in New York he’d surely become a communist.

Next day to Haverford. The committee again: Mrs. Harrison, Henry Satterthwaite, Bill Ambler, etc.

Last week: to Manchester to dinner of the NH democrats. Mayhem. At table, sat next to the wife of a British expert on China. He knew Jonathan Mirsky, who is now divorced. Also the colorful moderator of a town near the seacoast, and several residents of Seabrook. Lively conversation. One is in the General Court. He laments the plight of democrats in NH. Impossible to do anything. The main speaker was Dukakis, who’ll probably be a presidential candidate. Good speech, not just clichés. He spoke about his immigrant Greek parents. Nice that they, and he, though also successful in America, didn’t become reactionaries. Outside: pickets shouting “Dukakis hates gays!” . . . Continued to Cambridge, overnight in the Quaker Center. Next day, March 7th, Junior parents’ weekend. Convocation in Sanders Theater. Greg Nagy spoke well about liberal education. Chrysanthi told him afterwards, “Now I understand the different between Dartmouth and Harvard.” “How nice that Daphne is here,” he replied. Then met Daphne and went to Professor Alfred’s lecture on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Charming but chaotic and episodic. We left in the middle. Lunch at Winthrop with Daphne and her friend Haviaris. My former student, Peter Folger, joined us. He has finally finished Harvard. Hopes to go to the Peace Corps. He’s the only one from the Kazantzakis class who kept in touch. But recently I saw Emily Harrison, from the Odyssey class. Afterwards I corrected bluebooks in Winthrop Library. What a paradise! Also looked at Dia’s bibliography, which needed some editing. Then met Meg Alexiou and her live-in boyfriend Michael Hendys, Daphne and her boyfriend Greg Tebbe. To Pier 4 for sumptuous, relaxing dinner. Meg in good form. Michael is her savior, φαίνεται, despite continued problems with Dimitris. George Thomson died a few weeks ago.

March 11, 1987

Grades in, record time. Andy Rangell ready to move into our house, together with his own Steinway grand. Leander drove us to Logan. Daphne was there, too. Nice send-off. Flew overnight to Geneva.

March 12, 1987

Hotel de l’Etoile, Geneva

This hotel, which we found in Let’s Go Europe, seemed totally disgusting at first—tattered, cramped, the hall toilet filled with shit and stuffed. Actually, it turned out to be clean, with sweet ladies in charge, and very cheap. In any case, all the good hotels are full up because of the auto show. Telephoned Mrs. Kazantzakis immediately; fixed for 4:00 p.m. tea. Meanwhile walked around Geneva a bit: the English Garden with its clock, remembered from last time, etc. Mrs. K. very cordial, a little forgetful and garrulous. Luckily (a) I’d sent her a list of desiderata several weeks in advance, (b) George Anemoyannis was with her last week and agreed to prolong his stay in order to prepare my holographs. Thus I was presented with a portfolio containing 153 letters that were available among those that I requested—299 pages, all in all. She dropped some interesting bits of information that I’ve recorded in my Kazantzakis notebook. At 6:00 we returned to the awful hotel, rested a bit and then took a bus to Encyclopédie 9, the home of Bertrand and Michelle Bouvier. Bertrand had spoken at the 1969 MGSA Symposium and we had corresponded regarding his essay for Modern Greek Writers. Very accommodating. Lovely house, indeed extraordinary residence literally in the middle of the city, with a huge garden, etc. Met a man cataloging Baud-Bovy’s archive (he died, a suicide, a few months ago). Michelle Bouvier gave us all dinner, including Mrs. Kazantzakis. More complaints regarding how awfully all Greek behave and behaved toward Kazantzakis, how her publishers cheat her, etc. She’s about to go again to China; there are now some Chinese Neohellenists, sent to the University of Athens for two years to learn the language, which they did beautifully. To Do Back in America (also see “To-do” file)

Send my offprints to Bouvier; also to G. Saunier, Paris. Ask Keeley if we can bring Bouvier, Vitti, Levi, Lorenzatos, etc. to the MGSA anniversary. Book (present) to Δημ. Ντούτης, e.g. Linguistic Revolution. Offprints to Λυπουρλίδες. Matisse blue/green dancers from walls of Barnes Foundation to Christine Lansdale-Willis. Jack Shepherd’s writings on Africa to David Willis (Farm School) if Jack hasn’t sent them. Cavafy offprint to Ξενοφών Κοκόλης. Use Κοκόλη Θερμοπύλες in Greek 13 + the method. My study of Zorba and politics to Παπαθανασόπουλος, also books for his museum. Offprints to G. Saunier, ditto to Ερατοσθένης Καψομένος at Jannina. Vouli wants copies of Stylianos’s cassette, sent from Sydney, Leander’s settings, my BBC interview, my Salonika interview. For Zisi Yannoura: info on Plethon, Toynbee, my lecture, etc. Kaz. αnd Linguistic Revolution to George Stefanakis. My Ritsos lecture to Christos Alexiou. Send to Keith Dickey, Dept. of Classics, Bryn Mawr, notice for Demotic Greek II, so that his girlfriend Natalia can act as drillmaster and help him improve his Greek. Be sure that UPNE sends paperback Life in the Tomb to Lambis Myrivilis; he complained that no one wrote to him. Send Bill McNeill my article on Kaz’s Cristoforos Columbus, and data on Eng. tr. of the play, for his work on Columbia 50th anniversary commission. My Report to Greco chapter to Φαρίνου (address in foreign address book). Gift (a book) to Χασιώτης. Parinis want to rent in the Adirondacks June-July + 1–10 August; quiet, secluded. Send notes 2040–41 to Yorgos Anemoyannis.

March 13, 1987

Geneva

Bertrand met us at 8:45 a.m. on his bicycle and we went directly to the university to do photocopying of the 311 pages using two machines in the hall, interrupted now and then by students, secretaries, etc. Then I sat in the library and checked page by page. Good to have these holographs—for example, to see the stationary that Kazantzakis used, to correct mistaken dates in the published version, to learn that letters published as separate were sometimes actually one letter written over several days. Took valises to the Bouviers’ mansion at Encyclopédie 9, named for Voltaire, of course. Bertrand arranged for us to have a special tour of the Voltaire museum by the curator, Virag, a former student of Bertrand’s. Voltaire occupied this house for about ten years, used it occasionally for a theater, etc. Good holograph letters, a manuscript, letters from Frederick the Great (who spoke French, not German), interesting editions of Voltaire’s works with false dates and provenances to fool the censors. Wax effigy of V. at his writing desk. His ironic smile.

Walked more. Saw the great monument outside the university, to the reformer, Calvin. Quickly through history and art museum. Three superb Rembrandts, especially the one called Christ and the Fishermen; reminded me a little of the Lokös landscape we have, only so much better. Then to Mrs. K. again for another tea. She delayed her trip to Greece just for us; she leaves on Sunday and then later in the month goes to China. Bouvier then called for us and we went to a favorite restaurant of his, as Mrs. Kaz’s guests: Auberge de Coutance, Rue de Coutance 25. Lovely pepper steak and mouse with Swiss wine. Sehr gemütlich. Bouvier is doing an edition, with translation, of the apocryphal gospels.

March 14, 1987

Hotel Limmathaus, Zurich

Bertrand drove us to the airport. Huge crowd: skiers. (He has his chalet, too. Nice life!) We thought we’d miss the plane or at least the baggage would, but no! Swiss Air is so efficient, everything was OK in Zurich. And such cleanliness, such organization! Zurich airport a dream. Direct rail connection to the city and everywhere else in Switzerland. Five trams in 11 minutes. Someday must go to Davos Platz: three hours by train from Zuricher Flughafen.

Immediately, after Hungarian goulash lunch followed by inevitable diarrhea, tram to Funtern Cemetery, next to the zoo, to find Joyce’s grave. No one there. It had snowed the night before and we tramped through two inches of snow, discouraged, finding only recent graves. Then, on our way out, having given up, Chrysanthi noticed a little sign at the entrance showing the grave’s location. And what a surprise! Next to the grave is a lovely statue: Joyce sitting, smiling κάτω απ’ το μουστάκι του, holding his “ashplant,” and a small cigar, with his thick spectacles, dreaming up a sequel to Finnegans Wake no doubt. So, we did our business. Then back on the tram. Despite the cold, we walked through the old town, the famous Bahnhofstrasse, Zwingli’s church, the Rathaus over the Limmat. A lovely city. Then out to the Opera, by the lake. Luckily we got the last two seats, a box over the stage, very expensive. Hamburger (!) for supper. Then saw a stirring performance of Madame Butterfly. What a good libretto! It’s the first opera I’ve seen that has a sensible libretto, with literary merit. We were practically able to touch the singers’ heads, and could also watch the conductor from head-on, a young man very much in charge. The Italian singer playing Pinkerton actually walked and stood like an American, and his despicable wife Kate looked just like the wife of a Dartmouth alum! We do have a national image. If this had been a Greek tragedy, Butterfly would have killed the child as well as herself. But it’s more touching and memorable, actually, to see Kate hustling the child away from the slain mother.

Number 4 tram took us directly back to the hotel. How easy!

March 15, 1987

Zurich–Θεσσαλονίκη

Tram, train, airport; So easy. Baggage carts everywhere. Spent our last franks on Swiss chocolates. Saw a couple bound for Greece reading Daphne’s Let’s Go Greece.

Our apartment at Στατίστης 18 is lovely. Attractive and completely furnished; nice neighborhood; much more pleasant street than Κολοκοτρώνη because the houses are only two stories high, mostly. Walking distance to the university and the city. Right on the number 15 bus line. George and Efthymoula came. They’re happy because Andreas is finishing his law degree.

March 16, 1987

Θεσ/νίκη

Walked to the American Center, Μητροπόλεως 34, corner Πλατεία Αριστοτέλους. Δημ. Ντούτης, Εκπαιδευτικός Σύμβουλος of the Fulbright office, had my money—90,000 drachmas—for “settling in” plus a monthly allowance of 21,600. All this I duly deposited in the American Express bank. Met another Fulbrighter, David Acker, who’s at the American Farm School in the role of helping Bruce set up a short course system for Africans and Asians. Also met the Center’s director, Mark Crocker, who interestingly admitted that he listens to the BBC for the “real news” and to Voice of America for the “party line. N.B.: He is employed by the USIS. Soon to go to China for three years. Knows Turkish and has been in China before. Good USIS library. Sublibrarian is the wife of John Koliopoulos, whose article I edited for JMGS. Ντούτης, as we entered, was counseling Greek students who wanted to study in the USA. Συγκινητικός. A girl wanted to do Νεοελληνική λογοτεχνία in America! He did not encourage her. Wednesday Ammerman is coming and we’ll meet other Fulbrighters. Thursday there is an official lecture by the U.S. Cultural Attaché in Athens on black Americans’ contributions to American culture.

Lunch in Αγίας Σοφίας. Walked back to our house. I was exhausted. Lay down for ¾ hour and slept for three hours.

George and Efthymoula visited us in our house in the evening. Looking well. Much relieved about Andreas, who’s going to finish his law degree. Cold cold weather.

Tuesday, March 17, 1987

To Odysseas and Eleni and Yiayia for supper. They showed us the video of Leander’s concert with Toula. Very poor. Static. No life. Toula’s Mussorgsky mechanical, boring, colorless. Ditto for four-hand pieces (C.P.E. Bach, Bizet) with Leander. Strange. When we spoke to Toula and Stavros she showed that she understood. She was under great strain to do well (i.e., not make mistakes, not have a memory lapse) because the audience were mostly her students.

In the morning at the university again. Aglaïa most helpful. And Mimis. I have a desk in the Σπουδαστήριο των Κλασσικών. Library privileges, etc. Met Μαρωνίτης, just back from a celebration in Athens (μνημόσυνο) for Karolos Koun. Said he loves New York because one is relieved from the weight of tradition! Kept referring to his time in prison επί χούντας.

BOOKS READ IN GREECE, MARCH 15–JUNE 30, 1987

Dimitrios Tziovas, The Nationism of the Demoticists and Its Impact on Their Literary Theory

Παντελή Πρεβελάκη, Μνημόσυνο στο Βασίλειο Λαούρδα. Σε: Πρεβελάκη Δείχτες πορείας

Παντελή Πρεβελάκη, Ο ποιητής και το ποίημα της Οδύσσειας Ξ. Α. Κοκόλη, Θερμοπύλες και Πάρθεν

Virginia Woolf, The Collected Essays, volume 1

Bernard F. Dick, William Golding

Κώστα Βάρναλη, Η αληθινή απολογία του Σωκράτη

Γιάννη Ρίτσο, Το νεκρό σπίτι, Η ταφή του Οργκάθ, Η Σονάτα του Σεληνόφωτος, Το τραγούδι της αδελφής μου, Ορέστης

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey, cantos 1–17

Από την αλληλογραφία των πρώτων δημοτικιστών, II

BOOKS READ IN RIPARIUS

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

T. Alibrandi, Privileged Information (on Garrow)

Jay Parini, The Patch Boys

Wednesday, March 18, 1987

At university. Bob Jones, from Missouri, read his poetry. Quite nice. Frostian. Alert to nature. He’s teaching American Literature this year, in the succession that goes back to 1949. Greece was among the very first to have a Fulbright program. This is the 40th anniversary; it was conceived in 1947. Met Ruth Gounelas, who has a position in the English Department and is very happy. Her eyes are fine. New baby. Afterwards Chip Ammerman took the Joneses, Biens, and Dimitris Doutis to Χάρκας taverna in Nea Smyrna for a feast culminating in καραβίδα (crayfish). Very expensive. More than Pier A in Boston. Miraculously, my stomach survived.

Thursday, March 19, 1987

Lecture in the American Center on the Contribution of Black Americans to American Technology, by a Black woman, cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy. Very attractive; good speaker. Started in fine Greek to show that she could. She mentioned, among many others, Ernest Just, a Dartmouth graduate. But in all cases she omitted the sufferings and setbacks and humiliations of all these people, stressing the few recognitions they’d received. I mentioned this to her afterwards and she said that she didn’t want to be depressing. It’s nice that the Black cause has moved to the stage where the negative can be overlooked and the white guilt overlooked, so that Black people of achievement can be discussed just like everyone else. . . . Expected to see Harry Psomiades, who had not shown up at Χάρκας yesterday, nor today. Suspected he was ill. Afterwards I went to the City Hotel and called him in his room, and indeed he was confined there owing to arthritis, although he managed to travel to Veroia to see a man who had a Pontic archive. He’ll be in Athens until May. Met John Koliopoulos at the lecture. I told him about my episode at Rutgers re: the klephts, all on account of him! Also met a woman who’d hosted Mike Keeley and me in Houston after the MLA, years ago. She’s here teaching French.

On the way home, we stopped for supper and had αρνάκι σούβλας. And that did it! Diarrhea, etc. Chrysanthi, too, though she had something else. Must be bacteria, because we’ve both avoided water and oil (but how can you?).

Friday, March 20, 1987

Aglaïa and Mimis here. Christos telephoned earlier from Volos. He’s going to B’ham for three weeks at Eastertime to tend Dimitris. I read part of Mimi’s new book, Ἐν παρόδῳ, a series of meditations on short texts, e.g., from Thucydides. There’s one on Thucydides’s awareness of the misuse of language in wartime. I told him about George Orwell and about my Thucydidean comparison of the US and USSR with Athens and Sparta. Aglaïa has published an account of Μακεδονικές Ημέρες, a periodical important in this city’s literary life. Βούλη came too, for a while. She’s helping me with the Museum in Iraklio; her niece knows the director.

I’m reading Tziovas’s book, to review it for JMGS. Must get down to serious work here. A week has gone by already. I’ve prepared a form letter for about fifteen people who have Kazantzakis letters, asking them if they’ll cooperate. We’ll see. Λευτέρης Πρεβελάκης is the key one, of course.

Saturday, March 21, 1987

Stomach still χάλια. Diet of tea and παξιμάδια. Supper at George’s and Efthymoula’s: τυρί και τσάι. The sea is being cleaned. Previously, all sewers flowed directly into the bay, from homes and factories. Now everything will go through a processing plant and be piped way out into the ocean, with the result that the bay will once again become swimmable, fish will return, etc.

Heard that Dukakis declared for president.

Sunday, March 22, 1987

Raining. Stomach still questionable but better. Lunch at Lola and Kostas’s. Τσάι και παξιμάδι. Nikos there; specializing in orthopedics. He drove us to their new house in Aghia Triadha: magnificent, huge. The village is not too changed. “Our” street is just as before. Alekos the tailor is still alive; his wife Marianthi is dead. Too nasty to walk. Mimika and Nikos came. He’s an automotive mechanic. He told us about his six years working in Libya with a Greek firm building roads, bridges, etc. Greeks in charge; laborers from Turkey, India, Pakistan, etc. He said that Gaddafi is very good for Libyans, has made enormous progress there. He is convinced that the aim of American bombing was to kill him, but that he was tipped off in advance and took refuge. Furlough 10 days every 3 months. Complete village in the ερημιά: doctors, x-rays, canteen, etc. Lived in a trailer. Common language: English (sort of). Made enough money to buy an apartment here. Wants to go again for another two years.

Then to the American Farm School. Reception for Africans in a Reading University M.A. program on development. Greece is an example of success: thus their trip here; a week at the Farm School, a week in Athens. Speeches by dignitaries—e.g., deputy Greek minister of agriculture. Chief address by Bruce in his lovely style. He’s a preacher manqué, but not manqué—he’s found the equivalent. He defined “management” as “doing what you want with what you’ve got.” And/or, as POLKA: planning, organizing, . . ., . . ., adjusting. Happiness, which should be the goal of development (as opposed to money, goods, etc.) = to believe in what you are doing now, to love someone (as opposed to being loved), and to believe in the future—i.e., to be working toward an aim not yet realized. He made us all clutch a coin in our fists and then try to caress the person next to us. Not very effective. Then we discarded the coin, and the caresses worked much better! He of course told a Hodja story, about a miser who was roasting a goat on a spit. A poor man placed himself downwind and “filled himself” with the smell, whereupon the rich miser demanded payment for the smell. The poor man protested and the case went to court with Hodja as judge. Hodja made the poor man produce the few pennies he had in his pocked, and asked him to hand them over. As he placed them in Hodja’s hands Hodja let them drop on the floor. Then he turned to the rich man and said, “Did you hear the coins hit the floor?” “Yes.” “Fine. The sound of the coins hitting the floor will be ample payment for the smell of the goat.”

Met a nice young British vice-consul, stationed in Athens, here for a day or two: Jeremy Hart. He looks after British tourists mostly, and the 19,000 British subjects permanently in Greece. He is also director of the British Council here. Cold. Has 25 permanent teachers of English, all British, doing the Cambridge certificate. Wife nicer. They met at Birmingham University. He lived in Selly Oak.

Bruce introduced me to everyone as “the” Kazantzakis translator who stole a Greek girl from the school! Asked me to inscribe my PH pamphlet. I did as follows: “To Bruce, who does what he can with what he’s got, but who also has a vision.” The other day he’d told me that that’s what he likes so much about Kazantzakis: the vision. What I should have added is that Bruce fulfills his own definition of happiness.

Monday, March 23, 1987

Raining. Slight diarrhea continues. Spent all day writing 1200 words: review of Tziovas’s book on nationism and demoticism. Hard to get started again.

First response to my letters: Stamos Diamantaras telephoned. He’s more than delighted. Has letters to himself and also to Kazantzakis’s father.

Tuesday, March 24, 1987

Raining still. Interesting debate yesterday on television: clergy vs. the minister of education regarding appropriation of monastic lands and goods that the government wants. I sided as did Chrysanthi with the Church. Why make the state all-powerful? It’s no better than the Church and can do much more harm.

Wrote out a clean copy of the Tziovas review by longhand. From computer back to pen and ink.

Στις Πρεβελάκη Δείχτες πορείας, σελ. 19: Η αφορμή του σύχρονου δράματος είναι ο «θάνατος του Θεού». Αυτή την περιλάλητη έκφραση, ας την εννοήσουμε ως το θάνατο του Ανθρώπου, δηλαδή ως τη χρεωκοπία μιάς κατ’ άνθρωπον ερμηνείας του κόσμου κ’ ενός συστήματος ηθικής συμπεριφοράς.

Returned to flat. Couldn’t open the door because the inside key was in the lock. Went to Οδός Βιζυηνού. Sat for two hours reading the TLS and watching patriotic rhetoric on television. Παραμονή της 25 Μαρτίου. Φριχτό!

Wednesday, March 25, 1987

Holiday. Stomach OK even after the pizza. It’s taken a whole week. Went to Πειραιά with Stavros and Toula in their ridiculously luxurious car, a huge Audi that cost Stavros 4,300,000 drachmas used! $32,000 (but if we consider the differential in earning power: more like $64,000), the entire savings of the Odeon, as Stavros told me, up to now! But he has that need. In any case: nice afternoon. Lunch in a ψαροταβέρνα—μήδια, οκταπόδι, καλαμαράκια, κτλ., all bathed in oil, but no ill effect. Long walk on the waterfront. Then to Αφροδίτη for coffee: at the end of the splendid new παραλία, near Luna Park. Lots of good conversation, effortless. Stavros combines a boyhood in a totally primitive village with fifteen years in Russia that made him a cosmopolite. The quintessential αυτοδίδακτος, now with computers.

Returned in time for fifteen minutes’ ξάπλωμα before Mimis and Aglaïa picked us up to take us to the Θέατρο Αμαλίας to see a production of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan. Very well played, though a bit tiresome in the first act, which lasted for a full two hours. Yet the Lypourlis children and assorted cousins sat through it all φρόνιμα. A haunting play, longwinded to be sure, but combining fantasy and exoticism with contemporary social problems in just the right degrees. The Good Woman cannot remain good in today’s world and must split herself into a fictional cousin who is evil but “successful,” until the stratagem is undone by her pregnancy. The three gods who descend to earth looking for a single—just one!—good person were delicious.

This city has much to offer!

Thursday, March 26, 1987

Fascinating debate on TV between two priests, on the one side, and the Minister of Education and the legal adviser to the prime minister on the other, over the government’s efforts to appropriate belongings of the monasteries. I sided with the priests, who were eloquent and extraordinarily articulate. But the two sides spoke across one another because the basic axioms were so different. The minister kept invoking Η ΠΟΛΙΤΕΙΑ and his ευθύνες προς τούτο. The priests objected that we are all citizens of God. It was wonderful to see how a sordid squabble over land and money brought out the most basic theory of the conflicting secular and sacerdotal interpretation of the human community.

Friday, March 27, 1987

Surprisingly, ο Γιάννης Γουδέλης telephoned to offer his full cooperation. He owns the letters to Galatea! He’s writing a book in which he proves, he says, that the entire πυρήνας of Kazantzakis’s work was his sexual impotence! Bitter against both Eleni and Prevelakis, both of whom distorted Kazantzakis for their own purposes, he says. Another call, from Margarita Λυμπεράκη, to say that the Φέξης archive, alas, is lost. I stayed in all day, reading Prevelakis’s Ο ποιητής . . . , which I hadn’t realized was so critical of Kazantzakis’s alleged nihilism in the Οδύσσεια. I’m also realizing how poor my Greek is. I’m looking up every fifth word, it seems. Started keeping a little vocabulary notebook again, as in the old days. How beautifully Bouvier spoke! I felt like an imposter.

At night, Prime Minister Papandreou on TV reporting to the “cabinet” on the latest Turkish provocation in the Aegean regarding oil. Very serious. War possible. People have emptied the stores of canned goods. (We have barely a loaf of bread in the house, though a huge bottle of τσίπουρο from the village of Αγία Τριάδα.) Papandreou ανέστειλε—suspended—the American bases. Saw Ambassador Keeley, Mike’s brother, being briefed. Papandreou called for νηφαλιότητα (calm). I had visions of Thessaloniki being bombed. Θεός φυλάξει!

Projects for the future, possibly: Greek translation of Joyce’s Ulysses, obviously collaborating with someone. Biography of Sikelianos’s first wife, Eva Palmer. In both cases, I have good qualifications. But would I ever dare to quit Dartmouth and exist as a writer full-time?

Saturday, March 28, 1987

Finished Prevelakis’s book. Started going through my “volume 1” for mentions of Οδύσεια. I like what I’m reading (Δόξα σοι ο Θεός!). If I can finish the chapter on the Odyssey at least, before we leave Greece.

Chrysanthi and Κυρά Κούλα went round the city taking photos for C’s class. Also, C. is taking cooking lessons from her, in order to teach Greek cooking at Lebanon College.

Evening: to Βούλη for supper. Had γεμιστές μελιτζάνες, the first fruit of the cooking lessons. Superb! A masterpiece! Then to Κρατικό Θέατρο Βορείας Ελλάδος for Pirandello’s Έτσι είναι αν έτσι νομίζετε, written in 1917—that is, fairly early. Six Characters dates from 1921 and Tonight We Improvise very late: 1930 (he died in 1936 at the age of 69). Apparently Έτσι είναι was among the first in which he moved beyond realism, and it is a fascinating blend of the usual drawing room comedy with the later Pirandellesque elements of subjectivity. The new element enters only toward the end of the first act, although there are hints before. The key is the uncle, Laodizi, who, starting as a character in the play, becomes increasingly a chorus outside the play, even a kind of “director.” (In the curtain calls, he applauded the other actors.) Philosophically, the play questions the assumed positivism of the characters and audience—i.e., that the truth can be known, that evidence will show something to be either one thing or the other, whereas Laodizi keeps insisting that it’s both at the same time though the two choices are contradictory. Alternatively, it’s έτσι αν έτσι νομίζετε—i.e., subjectivity governs “truth.” In this early play Pirandello had to employ a chorus figure to tell us all this; a little like the Doctor in Kazantzakis’s Ξημερώνει or some of G. B. Shaw’s “spokesmen.” In later plays, he was able to dispense both with the overt spokesman and with the leftover drawing-room situations. How brilliant he was first of all to make the breakthrough seen in this play and then to proceed beyond, avoiding self-repetition.

The Turks backed away from their position owing, say the newspapers, to διεθνείς πιέσεις. Good!

Sunday, March 29, 1987

Chrysanthi awoke with tears and fright after a nightmare in which I was lost and then killed. She seems to have put together the political situation (she was afraid yesterday to go to the American library, afraid that someone would throw a bomb into it), the picnic we’re about to go on with Dimitri and Ruth Gounelas at Χορτιάτι, and the ghost (or was it a ghost?) of the dead woman (or was she dead?) who appeared at the end of the play last night. She calmed down. We tried to call Alec in Indonesia but didn’t get through. Chrysanthi went off to church before we left.

Wednesday, April 1, 1987

Heard George Savidis lecture at Τέχνη on deficiencies of Greek scholarship, shoddy editions, etc. The villains: Κατσίμπαλης and other amateurs. Chief exhibit: the Άπαντα του Παλαμά. Αίσχος! Poor man. He sweated throughout. Still obese. But lively, graceful. We exchanged a warm handshake.

Thursday, April 2, 1987

Finally finished the copy-edited typescript of my Cavafy essay and returned it to Scribner’s. Actually did well in finding source materials here, in the central library, σπουδαστήριο, από ιδιωτικά χέρια, and at the British Council (E. M. Forster, Bowra). Ξενοφών Κοκόλης gave me his essay on Θερμόπυλες. Excellent; wonderful teaching method that I can use in Greek 13 next spring.

Chrysanthi all day at George’s; sewed a blouse with Efthymoula. Very pleased. George came later, explained why the government is right to “expropriate” the Church, because the Church refuses all audits of its funds. Bishops, etc. grow rich at the people’s expense. We talked about our two traditions—separation or non-separation of church and state.

Can’t see Pirandello tomorrow because the lead player επιστρατεύτηκε λόγῳ των γεγονότων της περασμένης βδομάδας.

Mother wrote that Dr. Ham died. She kept vigil with his wife in his room, the corpse in front of them, until Dr. Strickler arrived. It’s so good that she’s in that environment in which the reality of death is no longer hidden, and she can get used to it gradually, to be prepared for Dad’s turn, which she said she hopes will be as peaceful as Dr. Ham’s.

Sachinis sent me three letters, two unpublished, and all very good. Exciting!

Friday, April 3, 1987

Worked on 400 Letters all day. 5:30 to Γαλλικό Ινστιτούτο to hear Valentini Pappadopoulou lecture, in French, on Proust and psychoanalysis. Pleased because I understood most everything, though much less when the native-speaking Frenchmen asked questions afterwards. She saw Marcel’s delight in the triadic arrangement of the Martinville steeples as a return to infancy—i.e., as infantilism—because of its (alleged) equivalency with the comforting triad of mother-father-child. Then she linked Swann’s love for Odette with this, describing him as infantilistic in this (like a child clinging to his mother), and in this (as in other ways) an alter ego for Marcel. Chatted with the director afterwards in my French such as it is.

Previously, walked on Σαρανταπόρου. Actually, number 11 still stands, rather proudly, among the modern horrors. Afterwards, to the university for the tail end of the day-long symposium in honor of Kriaras’s 80th birthday. He was there, frail but alert, from 10:00 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. I heard Παναγιώτης Μουλλάς speak on the epistolary novel, engagingly, but without any analytical depth. Afterwards, I told him my thoughts: (a) that the form derives from exile, as in Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto, and that this tradition survives in Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ, where the sergeant in the trenches is, in effect, an exile from all he loves and is forced to write letters as a kind of psychological lifline back home. When we come to the eighteenth century, the secret is that the reading public for novels was feminine, chiefly. The women in such novels are “exiled” in their own homes, forbidden to externalize their passions or intellects, and thus they too have recourse to letters (and diaries). Afterwards, Dimitris Gounelas spoke on linguistic theories of Dr. Johnson vs. Coleridge (classic–romantic) and demonstrated the different treatments of the same theme (Ψαρά) by Kalvos and Solomos. Then a Byzantinist revealed documents pertaining to Slavic monks in the eleventh century at Athos; they had diarrhea! At the end, Kriaras said a sweet “Thank you.”

Saturday, April 4, 1987

Finally finished going through 700 pages of the 400 Letters looking for omissions, in preparation for the meeting with Lefteris Prevelakis in Athens. Two and a half days’ work! Walked with Chrysanthi up and up past the end of the 40 Εκκλησίες into the Δάσος Σέϊ-Σου, με θαυμάσια θέα του λιμανιού. Supper with Aglaïa and Mimis. There also was Hans Eideneier and his son Alekos, just arrived in Greece from Cologne. He is Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Philology and the University of Cologne. Knew my work, he said. He works on language, and on oral literature, the influence of orality on written texts, etc. Present interest is Πτωχοπρόδρομος. Φωνακλάς! The typical extrovert type. His first words to me were: «Α! Βλέπω ότι και οι δυο μας έχουμε φαλάκρα». Lively discussion about Church-State relations (tomorrow there will be a huge demonstration in front of St. Demetrios’s). Mimis explained at some length why the bishop we saw arguing so well on television is a genuine bastard. The problem is the Church hierarchy, which collects huge sums and undergoes no audit. Church properties are neglected, or sold indiscriminately; church lands are under-cultivated, etc. The present compromise is for the monasteries to keep their properties but for parish councils to be elected instead of appointed, as at present, by the bishops. This the hierarchy is fighting tooth and nail—for obvious reasons. I discovered a Greek comic who calls himself “Harry Kleen” and whose record is called Πατάτες. We heard a bit. Nowhere as good as Flanders and Swann. But who is? Typical: Πελάτης στον ταξιτζή: «Είσαι λεύτερος;» Ταξιτζής: «Όχι, παντρεμένος».

Sunday, April 5, 1987

Spent the whole day talking. Chrysanthi said she was proud of me. First Ρήτσα Γιαννούρα came with her husband Ζήσης and drove us to Αγία Τρίαδα, where we met various friends of theirs and ended, of course, by drinking numerous cups of coffee, ouzo, etc., and then eating endless plates of μήδια, χταπόδι, κολοκυθάκια τηγανιτά, κτλ. Ζήσης peppered me with questions about Kazantzakis, Quakerism, etc., and we talked at length about the current debate re: the Church. They’re all for the State, although they’re not against religion per se. Zisis is a Freemason, believes in immortality of the soul, feels all genuine religion is the same because based on love. What a good life they all lead. Lots of R & R, so it seems. Got home at 4:45; barely time for a 30-minute siesta, when Σταύρος, Τούλα, and Stavros’s younger brother Βασίλης came. Two and a half hours’ talk in the living room; then all of us to Αφροδίτη for another two hours. Vasilis is a journalist for Ακρόπολις, Athens, and has a bi-weekly radio program on the Φωνή της Πατρίδας for emigrants in Germany, etc. He wants to interview me. Told about their village when they were young. No roads. No communication. To take a sick person for medical help: bullocks and a cart for six hours. Their labor they once calculated brought 20 drachmas per hour. Now everything has changed. Their father made money by working as a furrier in Kastoria. Now they have tractors, autos, roads, telephone, etc. Described how the whole village would ostracize a man who left his wife, forcing him either to return to her or to leave the village. Such people took to the mountains, joined together, and became bandits. They had no choice.

Tuesday, April 7, 1987

Yesterday I read Dennis Carroll’s novel—four chapters plus epilogue—that he sent me in the US. Not bad. Satirical regarding upper middle class American life of power and wealth, with the hero rebelling. I wrote a long critique and sent it off today. I’d been remiss with so many other MSS he’d sent over the years, and was glad to be relaxed enough here to do this.

Telephoned Μάνος Χαριτάτος, who apparently has the Kazantzakis letters to Φράσος Καστανάκης—the political ones. He told me they’d been published by Αλίκη Σουλουγιάννη, whom I reached finally at the Ministry of Culture. She was very pleasant and cooperative, knew my work, etc. She’ll send photocopies. She plans to publish more shortly. We’ll see each other in Athens.

Christos called to arrange for my lecture in Yannina, at the end of May. He’s off to England to try to deal with Dimitris, etc. Meanwhile, here, Pavlos is exhibiting a great sexual drive, naturally. What to do? Αδιέξοδο!

To the university in search of Archbishop Chrysanthos’s memoirs. Miraculously found them in the Σπουδαστήριο Ιστορίας. Χασιώτης very friendly (he gave me the reference last year). And behold! There was an account of Stavridakis’s death in Tiflis, plus an insider’s recital of the whole problem leading to the Caucasus expedition. Minimal mention of Kazantzakis, but some. A surprise: a photo of a bloated general, Παρασκευόπουλος himself, the original of Balafaras in Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ.

In the απόγευμα went to Nakas’s music store to look for piano music by Greek composers, for Leander. Pitiful. Essentially nothing. A few by Κωνσταντινίδης, which I bought, and a piano concerto by Καλομοίρης, which I did not buy.

In the evening, transcribed (μετέγραψα) the three unpublished letters that Apostolos Sachinis so kindly sent me. All three are superb. One is probably the best statement of all regarding the Odyssey. The other stresses Kazantzakis’s religious orientation, with art in the service of vision of the Unknowable. The last says that he thinks that he wrote the best prose of his life in Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός. I of course have agreed ever since I translated it 2½ decades ago.

Late at night, read a few more of Mimis’s παράγραφους, these on the problem of ancient Greek in the schools, and scanned the Virginia Woolf collected shorter essays that I have to review for World Literature Today.

Wednesday, April 8, 1987

Worked all day on outlining my chapter on the Odyssey. Tedious but necessary. At night: to Farm School for δείπνο για τους δωρητάς. We got out of the taxi at the old girls’ school, just to see, but it was locked. Looks manicured. Later I learned that it operates only in the mornings, as a day-care center for children of working mothers: άσυλο παιδιών. Walked along the now very busy highway, to the Farm School entrance. That beautiful view from the girls’ school of fields going down to the sea is now broken by highways, factories, apartment houses, all in a jumble.

Bruce and Tad just back, literally a few hours earlier, from Labouisse’s memorial service in New York. Lovely reception in Princeton Hall. We got a tour from a woman who learned Greek in Oregon from our book. A whole room is full of IBM computers. Sewing room. Weaving room. Library. Ceramics studio. Cooking classroom. Typing room. Talked with David Acker again and with the chap from Rhode Island, Clair Cheer, a chemist on a research grant. He’s not doing much here because the computer is so slow. Learning to relax, he says. Met Norman Gilbertson, finally—the British founder of the girls’ school, after coming to Greece to work with UNRRA after the war. (Chrysanthi went to the school in 1946.) They hadn’t seen each other in 40 years. Both looked the same! Lovely dinner for the donors. The δήμαρχος της Θεσ/νίκης was there. We sat with Norman, talked about Quakerism, his Meeting is Hampshire Meeting in London but he lives in Brussels. Their Meeting struggles because they seem increasingly to attract people because Quakers “believe in nothing”! We were joined by a man whose family has supplied bread to the school since the 1920s, and by the recreation director, the one with the stentorian voice who got the Africans dancing the other time. The program consisted of Βούλη as master of ceremonies, Bruce, who told his obligatory Hodja story and then eulogized Labouisse, and, best of all, five Farm School students, who described the experience of being at the school, emphasizing the lessons that come from having to live together in community, and the rare pleasure (in Greece) of having human contact with their teachers. They spoke beautifully. Then the Πρεσβυτέρα led twenty-odd students who comprise the chorus in Greek songs. Met the priest afterwards, Father George, born in America, served in Newton, Rochester, Annapolis. Here in retirement and loving it. Christine and David invited us for Πάσχα with the Lansdales and Keeleys, but we’ll probably be with family.

Thursday, April 9, 1987

Worked all day. Started my Odyssey chapter. Very slow. But it will accelerate.

Βράδυ: Party given by Γιάννης Χασιώτης, professor of history with special interest in Armenians and Pontians. Μουλλάς there, Λυπουρλής, κα. Φαρίνου, who gave a paper at Beaton’s conference in London (and told me that the proceedings will not now be published by Bristol but are meant to come out in November somewhere else), some others whose names I didn’t catch, and Κώστας Πύρζας, whom I talked to most. He studied English literature, taught for a while, and is now a bookseller in the Βιβλιοπωλείο Κοτζιά, Τσιμισκή 78. (Mimis told me afterwards that he was imprisoned and tortured by the Junta.) All his family are in Melbourne; they went in the 1950s, like so many other leftists, after the civil war. He knew my books. Said that Kazantzakis continues to sell—not spectacularly, but steadily. He’s a “classic.” Ditto for Myrivilis. Mimis mentioned à propos of the Hippocratic Oath (I told him about Strickler’s administration of it at our graduations), (a) that it isn’t by Hippocrates, but must be a Pythagorean compilation dating about a century later than Hippocrates, (b) that it includes a clause in which the prospective doctor promises never to cut—i.e., never to perform surgery—and is thus inapplicable. Also includes a clause prohibiting abortions. Interesting.

A postcard came from Mary Rassias. John went to China and Mongolia and back without incident, then drove into a ditch on Cliff Street in Norwich and had to be pulled out by a tow-truck. His explanation: swerved to avoid an elk! (Maybe it was a gnu.)

Mother wrote that Dr. Ham died quietly in his sleep. She sat with Finney Ham in the room, with the corpse, the next morning, until Dr. Strickler arrived. She hopes that Dad will go as peacefully. It’s good that she’s in such an environment, to share death with others, to support them and in turn to be supported. More and more I keep hoping that our projected Kendal at Hanover will materialize. Mother also wrote that Alice’s week with them was very pleasant. It’s good that children and parents can make their peace . . . finally! Alec sent us a postcard from Thailand of an elephant lifting logs. What we need at the farm! He went to Singapore and Thailand on his spring break.

Friday, April 10, 1987

Four telephone calls today: two from Athens, one from Adelaide, Australia, one from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two from Athens were from Ευσταθιάδης and Κέδρος. I have royalties: dr. 12,000 and dr. 5000! Good. Will talk with Ninetta Makrinikola about publishing Kazantzakis and Politics if it ever gets written. The one from Australia concerned the “chair” in Adelaide, which they’re about to advertise for yet the third time. Do I know of any candidates? How would Kimon Friar do? Hans Ruge turned them down, finally, as did the infamous K. Mitsakis. Was he hinting that I might be interested? Might I? Chrysanthi, quite sensibly, said No! Why? Our children are in limbo, nobody settled yet, we can’t walk out on them. So be it. A propos, the call from Cambridge was from Daphne. She’s coming here in June, with Greg. She’s been offered a summer job with INC magazine in Boston and at the same time has accepted the managing editorship at Let’s Go. I told her it’s nice to have such problems. She’s also still in the running for the Simon and Schuster trainee’s position, after graduation.

Received a letter from the son-in-law of Γιάννης Χατζίνης, now dead, offering assistance. He has some letters.

Dimitris and Ruth Gounelas came for supper. Chrysanthi made the stuffed eggplant she’d learned from Κυρά Κούλα. Ruth, a New Zealander, would like to go to Adelaide but Dimitris, after one bad experience in Sydney, isn’t interested. He thought that Xenophon Kokolis might be. I thought of Kostas Dimakis in Amsterdam. We all then went to the Κρατικό to see a ballet do two works by Ritsos: Η γερόντισσες κι η θάλασσα, and Ρωμιοσύνη. French choreographer, some French dancers, others Greek. Wonderfully imaginative. Not much Ritsos in the first, just isolated words subjected to electronic transformations à la Beria. Music varied, from Bach to rock and roll and Stockhausen. Girls dressed as ants and other insects, representing earth, I suppose. Boys representing sea, practically nude, with strips of red wrapped around legs and torso. Spasmodic, yet beautiful, dancing. Romiosyne was the Theodorakis version, which always makes me nervous. But the dance avoided all clichés and bombast. Hints of traditional Greek dances. Everything for the whole ensemble, no solo sections, in keeping with the communal nature of the poem. Saw Aglaïa and Mimis in the interval, with their three girls, whom they like to take to the theater. By mistake we’d gone first across the street to the πρώην Βασιλικό, and found ourselves watching To Βουκάλι by Ζιώγα, Beckett-like, until I realized what happened and we shifted to the ballet.

Dimitris bought for me the Greek translation of Ulysses, which unfortunately exists: so that ends my project. It seemed rather good, just from a quick scan. Yet I shuddered when I saw “ineluctable modality” rendered as αναπόφευκτη μορφή instead of μεταβολή or ροή. Also: the diaphane was rendered as το διάφανο instead of the Aristotelian το διαφανές. Also, when Bloom is dozing off at the end of Ithaca the translation doesn’t rhyme the Sinbad the Sailor Tinbad the Tailor, Jimbad the Jailer passage, missing the whole point, but translates literally as Σίνμπαντ το Ναύτη και τον Τίνμπαντ το Ράφτη και τον Τζίνμπαντ το φύλακα . . . Δύσκολο!

Saturday, April 11, 1987

Litohoro

Το Λιτόχωρο with Ritsa and Mimis. Rain and hail all the way, but the weather cleared later on. First glimpses of Olympus behind the clouds, snow-capped, spectacular. The village is extraordinarily beautiful, like something in Switzerland: clean, picturesque, well maintained, with parks, recreation facilities indoors and out, swimming pool, clubs, lovely churches. A feeling of well-being and prosperity everywhere. Couldn’t avoid comparison with North Creek, which is so ugly and miserable. After lunch, a delicious siesta. Then walked through the village, then sat in the hotel lounge and talked talked talked with our hosts and the daughter of the proprietor, then to a lovely tavern on the main road for, thankfully, a sensible meal and more talk talk talk.

Sunday, April 12, 1987

Ξενοδοχείο «Mirto», Αιτόχωρο.

Another lovely day. After breakfast, to church. Palm Sunday. Των βάγιων. The church full to bursting, men on the right, women on the left. Standing, old style. Beautiful church with frescoes, rich chandeliers. Service transformed because the priest now uses a microphone, and everything that used to be mumbled behind the rood screen is now audible. Greece is so contradictory. On the one hand, this extraordinary unity of a single religion with the communal feeling that this brings; on the other, the well-known factionalism, which continues. But freedom is certainly now the rule here. In Λιτόχωρο, in the main square, placards in huge red letters from the KKE decrying the recent increases in phone and electricity charges, etc., and large cartoons satirizing Uncle Sam.

We then went by car up a long, winding road with hairpin turns, to one of the καταφύγια maintained by the E.O.S. (Ελληνικός Ορειβατικός Σύλλογος), of which Zisis was vice-president (Salonika branch) for some years. Right up the flanks of Olympus. Actually, the peak was visible, snow-covered, from our hotel balcony in the morning, after the mist lifted. Wonderful sight. Like being in the Swiss Alps. At the “refuge,” the sign outside proclaimed “Bean Soup”! They make simple meals and have dormitory style beds, with fireplace, etc., like a chalet. The “keepers” are all friends of Zisis’s. Complained about salary, etc., in village pronunciation, like that of Eleni’s mother. Four rugged, weather-beaten men, about 35–45 years old, used to walking up and down the mountain when the road isn’t passable. We had a coffee and then continued on, traversing a narrower, more scary road through an immense canyon, with perpendicular, craggy walls on both sides, and stripes of remaining snow in the gullies, over fords with rushing water, to another, simpler καταφύγιο called τα πριόνια, at a trailhead leading to still higher refuges and then to the triple summit. Here was another friend of Zizis’s, a forest ranger; the building is merely a shed, very rustic, made of logs with vertical poles for walls. Rushing stream, fountain for drinking, snow-capped summits, but not the summit, visible. We were the only visitors, except for one couple who had pitched a tent. . . . Returned to the original καταφύγιο and went on a path through the forest, walking. At this height, exactly 1010 meters (about 3300 feet) the trees resembled ours at home; we walked over a bed of pine needles and dried oak leaves. Bubbling out of the path at one point was a spring of cool, mountain water. Here and there the first wild flowers: daisies and anemones. Returning, we found a herd of goats grazing around the καταφύγιο, their bells tinkling. Herds and shepherds are still the rule here. There are no fences. Zizis’s friends placed us next to the fire, inside, and served the famous φασουλάδα, with a pork chop cooked over the coals for me, and bread toasted on the coals. Then the long ride down, with lovely views of Λιτόχωρο itself, the plain, the sea. Finally a stop at the seaside “villa” maintained by the Club, just opposite the ancient Dion, whose excavations we did not visit. Home at 4:30. Siesta.

Then George and Efthymoula, and theater: Gregory Xenopoulos’s Στέλλα Βιολάντη, beautifully acted by Andreas Zisimatos as the domineering father and Lena Kouroudi-Kompselidou as the lovesick but deluded Stella. Fascinating first two acts, expertly developed, of a clash of wills between the equally obstinate father and daughter when she falls madly in love with a telegraph operator and the father is scandalized because he of course believes that he should name her financé, who must be rich and socially acceptable, etc., etc.—all this taken, probably quite truthfully, from the Zakynthos situation in about 1884. The language is superb, with peppering of Italian and English as is proper for that class in Zakynthos, and Xenopoulos lightens the pathos by introducing the comic-ridiculous, foppish brother, Dandis, and softens it with the sympathetic Θεία Νιόνια. In a little blurb in the program, the director, Κώστας Τσιάνος, says quite rightly that this surpasses melodrama because it is not just a clash of wills between a villainous father an a love-struck adolescent daughter turned into an Antigone, but rather an examination of how both father and daughter are prisoners of their middle-class ethos, in the name of which the father destroys his own happiness. As for Stella, despite her rebellion in asserting that she should marry whom she wishes and not whom her father wishes, she cannot go as far as to run away (though the idea occurs to her). She, too, takes for granted her family obligations and positions. She wants her fiancé, but she also wants her father to accept him. Dramatically, all this is developed with consummate skill. As Tsianos says, «Stella Violandi is not just ένα ηθικογραφικό αισθηματικό δράμα. Ο Ξενόπουλος, έχοντας αφοιμοιώσει τις επιρροές του από μεγάλους συγγραφείς όπως ο Στρίμπεργκ και ο Ίψεν, με τη Στελλα, του άγγιξε το θέατρο χαρακτήρων και ιδεών. Συχνά μάλιστα καταφέρνει να χρωματίσει τους ηρωές του με αρκετές ποιητικές πινελιές. Με μια εκπληκτική τεχνική στη δομή του δράματος και με καλπάζουσες δραματικές συγκούσεις ξεπερνάει το σκόπελο του απλού αισθηματικού έργου.» Fine, but then the whole thing is vitiated in Act III where, without sufficient development, the ending comes much too quickly and melodramatically as Stella, hearing that her lover, after being rejected by her father, has simply switched to another fair damsel who, unlike Stella, ξεπόρτισε with him (eloped, ran away from home), simply keels over and dies. Curtain! Ξεψύχησε is the last word, uttered by the sympathetic aunt as she bends over the corpse. We have no opportunity to feel the daughter’s agony or to observe her feelings as she absorbs this new shock: that the lover was a fake, just after her money, as the father of course suspected all along. After which . . . well—Shakespeare would have known what to do. I was so amazed that I thought perhaps several scenes had been cut, but speaking afterwards to one of the troupe I was assured that every word was played. The only change was to do Acts I and II without intermission. A shame. In any case, it was good to see the kind of theatre that Greece was producing, as a background to Kazantzakis’s productions.

Afterwards, after interminable discussion in which I finally begged Chrysanthi to keep quiet (for which she bitterly reproached me of course when we got home), we ended up going for λουκουμάδες in a place on Aristotelous—dingy, with blaring television, deserted. And Efthymoula wanted to show off her clothes. Κρίμα. Managed a little conversation nevertheless, enough to learn that George really misses his work, which he loved and with which he has no contact whatsoever now except, as he says, to go once a month and collect his pension, and that Efthymoula, true to form, has no regrets whatever. Teaching for her was just a pain, apparently.

The return to Salonika after Olympus was a shock. One has to go away to realize really how inhuman cities can be—smog, noise, outrageous prices (900 for 4 portions of λουκουμάδες) whereas in Λιτόχωρο we had a sumptuous dinner for four, including a bottle of wine, for 2000! Yet the city has the Κρατικό Θέατρο playing Ξενόπουλος!

Monday, April 13, 1987

Worked all day, rather well. What a gift, to sit at my desk morning, afternoon, and night, without other responsibilities! Diarrhea again, however. Καταραμένη!

Price increases in effect today. Postage to U.S. jumped from 46 to 60. Electricity, telephone, airways, etc. all going up considerably. At night, Valentini Papadopoulou came. She grew up here, went to a French high school in Salonika, emigrated to Melbourne, finished the Uni there, married, lived in Queensland, then came to the U.S., and is Professor of French at the University of Houston, but is now finishing her second year as visiting professor here in Salonika. She tells us that all the girls in her classes (and they are 80% girls at least) would jump at a chance to emigrate, and especially to the U.S. Why? No opportunity. A graduate in French might get a school appointment in eight years! If they want to do graduate work they must find a professor to accept them, and the professors tend not to, because it’s extra work. Then there’s the economic problem. The standard of living, despite all appearances, is very low. Pay for a full professor, at the start, is δρ 120000 a month. I’m getting 216000 from Fulbright, which is ⅓ of what I get at Dartmouth. Yet autos, gasoline, manufactured goods in general, even clothing, costs the same here as in the U.S., and often much more (e.g., Stavros’s used Audi, $30,000!). Valentini is caught between taking a 65% cut in income, if she stays herε permanently, and going back to Houston, which in comparison to Salonika is uncultured and insufferable. Here she has hundreds of students hanging on her every word and very advanced in French; there she has a handful whose French is shaky. She feels she belongs here, can offer something here. Yet . . . And she thinks of her husband, who teaches at Rice, gets $60,000 a year, and has three students! We talked lots about Proust, following up on her lecture several weeks ago.

Alex McCormick telephoned from Dartmouth re: the student I failed. He told me that the new president has been chosen; he is the current president of the University of Iowa. Let’s hope . . . !

Πέτρος Χάρης telephoned from Athens to say “Yes.” Also Στεφανάκης, who has lots of letters published and unpublished.

Tuesday, April 14, 1987

Received another fine letter, this one to Χατζίνης, expressing his dialectical system of thesis–antithesis–synthesis–new thesis, etc. I immediately used it in the Οδύσσεια chapter.

Odysseas and Eleni here for supper. More insight into the relative poverty here. Takis, their son, a graduate engineer, gets δρ 60000 a month from the city, his employer, and has to moonlight to make ends meet. Eleni, when she retires in June as a nurse, will have a pension of 35000 from her clinic and 10000 from the πολιτεία, totaling 45000 a month! Impossible to live. Again, we enjoyed the impossible coincidences that have brought Toula, a Russian-trained pianist, and Leander, an American, to play four-hand recitals together.

Wednesday, April 15, 1987

No gasoline in Salonika: strike by haulers of barrels. Massive demonstration this a.m. at the Καμάρα by employees of AHEPA hospital asking for improved wages and conditions.

Nice letter from Leander. He’s reading Schweitzer on Bach, my birthday present. Plans to keep Moravian job and probably live with Alec in Philadelphia. Rangell is enjoying our house; he wrote directly and also to Leander. Both Chrysanthi and I are a bit homesick. He savors C’s spelling errors, especially the Boston Glob! Also heard from Carol Weingeist re: Kendal at Hanover. Vermont certificate of need is progressing nicely, as expected. NH one, though it seemed that things were going from bad to worse, took a turn for the better at the latest meeting of the sub-committee. Carol said that the people were almost rational!

I’m finding—transcribing Kazantzakis’s holograph letters into my notebook—that I can actually read his handwriting now with very little difficulty.

To church in the neighborhood for Μεγάλη Τετάρτη service: το Ιερό Ευχέλαιο (I think). I understood bits and pieces of the Ευαγγέλιο in the original Greek, of course. The δεξιός ψάλτης had his son in the “box” with him, a ten- or twelve-year-old with thick glasses and a lovely, clear face. The boy followed the psalmody as his father sang vigorously, sometimes resting his hands on the boy’s shoulders. How nice to grow up with all this! Church full, reeking of incense. The church proper here in 40 Εκκλησίες still isn’t ready; service in basement hall. They’ve been building it for fifteen years, and are near completion.

Afterwards: pizza, beer, sweets, coffee—and stomachache!

April 16, 1987

Μεγάλη Πέμπτη

Awake to a telephone call from Sydney. Archbishop Stylianos! He liked my Chicago speech, and also says he always listens to Leander’s setting of his poems—keeps the cassette in his car. He’s coming in June. Maybe he’ll see Daphne με το καπέλλο της! He has started a theological college; teaches in it and does the administration. Wants to teach theology the modern way, not as in Athens. Obviously he’s got to do this to insure the future. He asked me if I’d received his last collection of poems. Yes, but I’d never written. I told him, Άμα γλιτώσω από το Καζαντζάκη ίσως να ξανακαταπιαστώ με το Χαρκιανάκη. Another translator, in Australia, is interested in his poems, so maybe a book will come, after all.

Ο Κάσδαγλης telephoned. He has a few letters regarding the printing of the Odyssey, but he hid them all during the Junta period and now cannot find them. Maybe I’ll consult him regarding the method of the edition.

At 8:00 to Lola’s, then to Αχειροποίητος for today’s service: the 12 gospels. The church was deserted, bare, stripped. Mosaics only in the arches between the Corinthian columns. Full house: we stood for two hours. It’s so amazing to see teen-age boys, for instance, regular “guys,” come in, kiss the icon, light a candle, cross themselves, stand reverently. The cantors were wonderful, as they were yesterday. How they must enjoy this! (Kostas told me that in another church both cantors are communists!) What whining sadness as they recount the passion! . . . ἔθηκαν ἐπὶ τὴν κεφαλήν μου, στέφανον ἐξ ἀκανθῶν. . . . Τοῦ νῶτόν μου ἔδωκα εἰς μαστίγωσιν, τό δε πρόσωπό μου, οὐκ ἀπεστράφη ἀπὸ ἐμπτυσμάτων . . . ὁ ἥλιος ἐσκοτίζετο, καὶ γῆς τὰ θεμέλια συνεταράτετο . . . After the 5th gospel (Matt. 27.3–32), ending καὶ ἀπήγαγον αὐτόν εἰς τὸ σταυρῶσαι, the chandeliers are turned off, the church falls into darkness except for the candles, and the priests and laity in procession carry the giant crucifix through the aisles, thrice, to the sound of funeral bells, until it is placed in a stand in the central aisle, whereupon the congregation rush to kiss Christ’s feet. All the while, throughout the day and service, flowers and being collected; on the street we saw children with bouquets, all headed to church. At the end of the service the women of the church will use these flowers to deck the επιτάφιος for tomorrow.

April 17, 1987

Μεγάλη Παρασκευή

Daphne telephoned at 7:00 a.m. to announce with glee that she’d been given the job at Simon and Schuster, the first Harvard applicant to be successful in this competition. No details yet. I think it’s for after graduation in 1988. If she’s in NYC and Alec and Leander are both in Philadelphia that will be a new development. We begin to regret selling 20 East 74th Street.

Vasilis Soliopoulos brought a huge list of questions for the series of radio interviews he wants to do with me. We set next Tuesday as the time.

Η Βούλη visited. Δημ. Γουνελάς telephoned, confined to bed with temperature. We had a long, flowing conversation. He’s becoming a welcome friend.

At 8:00, to the neighborhood church. Τα Εγκώμια sung by children’s choir, very stiffly; congregation silent. Disappointing. But all three στάσεις still make one’s heart flutter: a) ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ, b) Ἄξιον ἑστί, c) Αἱ γενεσαὶ νῦν πᾶσαι / ὕμνον τῇ σου / προσφέρουσι, Χριστέ μου. And I love the moment at the end, when the thrice-repeated verse is Ἔρραναν τὸν τάφον αἱ μυροφόροι μύρα, λίαν πρωῒ ἐλθοῦσαι and the priest goes around the aisles sprinkling us all with myrrh. Then after more readings, culminating in the assurance that the Son of God πάλιν επανελθών, δια της Αναστάσεως, εδωρήσατο ημίν ζωήν την αιώνιον, ως μόνος αγαθός και φιλάνθρωπος, the procession around the neighborhood—the cross, children with metal rods topped by circles, the priests censoring, then the Epitaphios flower-bedecked, carried by eight men, then a policeman to keep order, then us. We went everywhere in 40 Εκκλησίες, it seemed. Nice to see people on the balconies, in houses that always seemed shut up and unoccupied. Some showered us again with myrrh, most had candles. We all passed back into the church by crouching beneath the Epitaphios. The ending is particularly beautiful, beginning with the priests carrying in the embroidered representation of Christ that had lain in the Epitaphios, carrying it on their heads, circling the altar thrice with it, and concluding first with the prophecy of Ezekiel, where the Lord exhorts the people: και γνώσεσθε ότι εγώ ειμι Κύριος, εν τώ ανοίξαί με τους τάφους υμών . . . και δώσω πνεύμά μου εις υμάς, και ζήσωθε και θήσομαι υμάς επί την γην υμών, και γνώσεσθε ότι εγώ Κύριος· ελάλησα και ποιήσω, λέγει Κύριος Κύριος, and secondly with Matt. 27.62–66 regarding the Pharisees’ fear that Jesus’s followers, through some trick, will empty the tomb and thus make the people believe that Jesus truly rose from the dead.

April 18, 1987

Μέγα Σάββατον

Re-read Daniyal Mueenuddin’s honors thesis on James Merrill. A mature, polished work by a truly gifted, yet very humble, student. What a contrast to Ted Eliopoulos! Wrote him a long letter. He’s in Pakistan already, about to run his father’s chicken farm.

Chrysanthi says that she’s a little sad this Easter because she’s not doing anything. In America she dyes eggs, makes τσουρέκι, anticipates visits from the children; here she has bought everything and there are no children (although we spoke to Leander today on the telephone and to Daphne the other day; can’t seem to get a line through to Indonesia for Alec). We’ll have μαγερίτσα tonight with George and Efthymoula, and dinner tomorrow, and another dinner with Lola and Kostas on Monday, but it isn’t quite the same. And we both continue to have recurring diarrhea, which obviously cuts into one’s enthusiasm.

Thought of, and wrote to, Marian Singleton today. I hope that she isn’t dying of cancer, although this is the likelihood. Her case seemed nearly hopeless when I saw her in the hospital in Hanover before we left.

Chrysanthi and Lola went to Odysseas and brought him to George’s, thanks to Nikos and his auto. Thus the four αδέρφια were together for a brief time. This is precisely what should happen on Πάσχα. Then Nikos picked me up, too, we passed by their house, Kostas loaded the car with μαγερίτσα and the κατσικάκι, and off they went to Αγία Τριάδα, dropping us at the Farm School for the Ανάσταση. Before the service, I saw Jeanne Demos, looking wonderful at 85. She’s still on the Board of the College Year in Athens. I told her about my recent Harvard experiences; she remembered the party at the Marders’ where we last met. When I marveled at her health and spirits, she said, “The secret is to keep going, keep going!” The service was disappointing, especially when Father George admonished the crowd, Δεύτε λάβετε φως—λάβετε όχι αρπάζετε! So the church was darkened and in good, proper order we all “got light.” The best part was when we all went outdoors, and at 12 midnight exactly burst into Χριστός ανέστη εκ νεκρών, θανάτῳ θάνατον πατήσας, και τοις εν τοις μνήμασι ζωήν χαρισάμενος. George, Εfthymoula, and Andreas had joined us. It was nice to hear George singing along with the psaltes in the early part of the service; he knows the hymns by heart. Outside, we all cracked eggs, kissed, wished each other και του χρόνου. And the mystery was accomplished. Saw Mary and Mike Keeley. Mike told me that NYU now has $15,000,000 from the Onassis Foundation for a new Greek Studies Center, six endowed professorships, etc. All this is of course Brademas’s doing; he’s on the board of the Onassis Foundation among other things, besides being president of NYU. He’s already saying that they have the greatest Greek Studies Program in the world, whereas at the moment they have nothing. We’ll see. Mike also said that Princeton’s $3,000,000 has grown to $7,500,000 and they are planning new posts and courses. Also saw Bill McGrew and family; very friendly. We’ll call them after we return from Athens.

To George’s then for supper at 1:00 a.m.: μαγερίτσα, lamb, sweet, coffee. Will our stomachs endure? Andreas strange, but civil; not an easy conversationalist, to be sure. Of course one couldn’t raise the truly important subject: that he’s given up the theater (or has he?) and is sweating out the remainder of his law degree, just as papa and momma have wanted, after years of rebellion. He’s a strange-looking young man with bad posture and a hard, cutting sort of face, more like Efthymoula’s than George’s. But we made conversation without too much difficulty, and the evening went well. To bed at 2:30 a.m.

April 19, 1987, Easter Sunday

Worked on the answers for the radio interview on Tuesday. Then to Kalamariá for Easter dinner with George, Efthymoula, Andreas. Went very well. Lots of lively conversation, including a prolonged, friendly debate on why Judas betrayed Christ (George had seen a television production of Angelos Vlachos’s novel on Pilate, and also knew Kazantzakis’s treatment in Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός), whether or not Pilate was guilty, how and why present-day bishops, etc. are betraying Christianity (O Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται), why the Minister of Education, Ο Τρίτσης, is a hero and martyr, etc. Every time George touched the αντάρτικα, Κατοχή, etc., Efthymoula changed the subject, but we managed a lot, including his impassioned defense of EAM as a panhellenic movement that the communists, for their own selfish purposes, have tried to make seem a communist movement. He also made me realize that all the PASOK ministers are resistance fighters, people jailed and tortured by Papadopoulos, etc. How different from our own pampered culture and our politicians! Andreas was civil and interested, but excused himself after dinner to study for law exams. After more good talk over coffee, we drove to τα κάστρα, lit a candle in the chapel of Μονή Βλατάδων, walked in the upper town, which is like a village, drove to the gates of the infamous Επταπύργος prison, then down to Αγίου Δημητρίου, where the saint was imprisoned and is buried. The original church is now a wing of the new basilica. Huge; plain; service in progress. It occurred to me how utterly strange a Greek Orthodox service must seem to a Westerner the first time. (When we spoke of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver, earlier, I remembered that at the precise, holy moment last night when Father George was chanting Δεύτε λάβετε φως and the church was dark and hushed, one could hear the clinking of coins at the candle-sellers’ stand: they were counting the money!) Finally, home exhausted . . . for more conversation. Thirty-minute siesta at 7:00 p.m., and Chrysanthi announced that we had to visit Odysseas and Eleni and Yiayia. They’d been alone all day and were melancholy. So, out again! But it was a joyous visit. Takis came (on command, apparently) and, like last year, stayed ten minutes. Διορίστηκε—i.e., he’s got a cushy lifetime job as a civil servant with the City. Draws plans, working with an architect, for all civil projects in one section of the city: kindergartens, parks, playgrounds, gymnasia, etc. Lots of plans, but few projects. They used to have 100 workmen; now they have 25. He complained about his salary. But he works on the outside, moonlighting. He does the plans, someone else signs them and takes 15%. At the city office he works from 7:00 until 3:00 with a half-hour break. 60000 per month plus a 120000 yearly bonus. Not much. . . . Yiayia described Pappou’s death: sweet, calm, peaceful. Such a fortunate man, she kept repeating. At the end he thought Odysseas was still in Russia. All through the last years he kept enthusing about me: Έχω ένα γαμπρό υπέροχο. Κάθε φορά πούχουμε πρόβλημα, λέει «Δεν πειράζει»!

Monday, April 20, 1987

It’s still a holiday. Streets deserted. We took the bus to Αγία Τριάδα and dined with Kostas and Lola. Goat this time. I nibbled, hoping to survive. Αγία Τριάδα still the same, almost, or actually improved despite obvious signs of tourism. “Our” street unchanged. We found Αλέκος ο ράφτης bent over a hoe, weeding in front of his house. He tried hard to remember us but didn’t succeed, I think. Κα Μαριάνθη died years ago. Τι να κάνω, μας είπε· περνάει η ώρα. Συγυρίζω. Ο Μίτσος still lives in the house next door, he told us. But the old café is gone, replaced by a huge building with rooms for rent upstairs. In the summer it’s apparently bedlam—mostly Germans. Closing up, Kostas left the inside key in the lock and in effect locked himself out. So we were all a bit subdued on the bus trip home.

To Zisis and Ritsa at 8:00. Good talk. He’s consumed, nicely, by Masonism. Talked about Hermes Trismegistus’s Emerald Tablet. Imagine! He read me the credo where “As above so below” appears. I also discovered that his Στοά is named in honor of Gemistos Plethon, one of my heroes. Talked about Bessarion, Ficino, Plethon’s school at Mistras, the Greeks’ failure to have a renaissance. Then a nice “tea,” English style.

Tuesday, April 21, 1987

Wrote out a clean copy of my review of Virginia Woolf’s Collected Essays, volume 1. Started reading Bernard Dick’s book on William Golding, also for review. In the evening, Vasilis Soliopoulos came for the radio interviews, one on my work on Kazantzakis, the other on my impressions of Greeks in America. I’d prepared my answers and more or less read them, but very haltingly, alas. My Greek seems to get worse the more I learn.

Saw a television program commemorating the twentieth anniversary of 21 April 1967: the Junta’s coup d’état. Interviews with Salonika residents who were affected. Among them were Θρασύβουλος Μάνασης, who used to live above the Yiannakoses in Σαρανταπόρου 11, a professor of law who recalled the pressures put on university people and finally his dismissal and exile. He recalled his last class: 800 students. He spoke about constitutional liberties, citing Pericles’ Funeral Oration. He praised his colleague Maronitis, who then also appeared on the screen. He was sent to prison. He’s a communist today still. Maronitis spoke about how difficult it was to rally all the faculty to partake in the resistance. Most wanted to protect themselves or their families.

Surprisingly, Jules Dassin answered my letter of inquiry, via his secretary, saying that he had no correspondence from Kazantzakis since all their correspondence was oral.

Wednesday, April 22, 1987

Wrote a review of Bernard Dick’s book on William Golding, which has a fine explication of Darkness Visible but otherwise is mediocre. Finished the “chart”—i.e., plan—of the next big stage of my Odyssey essay, the middle stage and largest, in which I’ll treat the text itself. The last part will be critical judgment. Η Βούλη discovered in To Βήμα της Κυριακής a whole page devoted to Kazantzakis’s letters to Αγνή Ρουσοπούλου, με παρουσίαση Ανδρέα Παναγόπουλου, the professor who spoke against my version of the klephts when I delivered the speech at Rutgers! He has 72 letters. I immediately wrote him. Vouli also gave us the text of Stylianos’s article against government action, surprisingly very poor. Rhetoric; not much thought.

This is the first day since our arrival that I felt sick. Headache, fatigue, listlessness. Some ἰός! But I also have something new: a peculiar tingling in the right leg. Previously it’s been localized at the hip joint. This morning the entire leg went numb for a while, like falling asleep. Something wrong with the circulation? Όπως είπα στη συνέντευση σχετικά με τον «Καζαντζάκη και τα πολιτικά», ελπίζω να αντέξω!

Todd Rheingold wrote that he’s been accepted provisionally as a transfer student and would I send a testimonial to Al Quirk, which I did, of course, with enthusiasm. Just the kind of student we need, I said—i.e., an intellectual, sufficiently so that he doesn’t get good grades! The others are all little machines doing everything right, and will never open a book after they graduate. Todd wrote that he, Peter Converse, and Julie Davis continue to enthuse over my Comparative Literature course last fall. How nice!

In the evening to Themis and Miranda Altas. Mariana was there with her fiancé, Dimitris. Lovely, slight, polite young man. Family is disappointed that he isn’t μορφωμένος—i.e., isn’t practicing a profession. Mariana is doing OK as a lawyer. She said the divorce rate in Greece is 40% or higher. Narcotics are everywhere in the secondary schools and above, with heroin addicts abounding. Also burglary is common in apartments in Salonika, muggings in elevators, etc. Welcome to Western civilization! We went out into a huge traffic jam, just to prove it. Then to their latest discovery, the ψησταρία «Κοντέσσα» for γύρος and κοκορέτσι. Θεός φυλάξει! Conversation sporadic but occasionally interesting. Themis described his medical training in 1942ff. επί Κατοσχής. The Germans ocupied half of the offices and lecture halls in the Φιλοσοφική Σχολή (the only building in the university at that time). Themis’s class was the first in the newly founded Medical School. They had lectures in Αγίας Σοφίας, Αχειροποίητος, cinemas, etc. No books. Everything had to come from lecture notes.

Thursday, April 23, 1987

Του Αγίου Γεωργίου. Chrysanthi baked an apple pie, bought a potted plant, and off we went in the pouring rain in a taxi. George was μέσα στη χαρά του. Lots of people coming and going: Efthymoula’s relatives, ο Μάριος Καρασάβας and wife, several γεωπόνοι, συνάδελφοι, a high school teacher (loudmouth) just back from εκδρομή στην Αμερική, Οδυσσέας, Ελένη, Ανδρέας, Δημήτρης, Τίλδα και η μάνα της. Chocolates, liqueurs, pittas, pasta, lemonade. Talk talk talk. Marios as bitter as always: no work, οι πελάτες δεν μας σέβουνται, wants pension next year at age 58; he’ll have 45000 and his wife’s 30000. Tilda scathing at lack of opportunity for doctors. She waited a year and a half before being taken to do a residency in ophthalmology. Thousands of doctors in Salonika (and lawyers and engineers) with nothing to do. Thought of going to a small city repugnant: no hospitals. “The most I’d do would be cataracts!” They’d just returned from Budapest: gorgeous, wonderful, gallery with El Grecos, etc. George’s colleague has his daughter in high school in America and wants her to stay there and have opportunity. “Here, the parents have to support children until they’re 45!” Talked about acid rain, nuclear energy (Tilda is “for,” uncompromisingly; she doesn’t listen very easily to argumentation). Odysseas, who really belongs now to the working class, was very ill at ease in this company. Went into the other room and turned on the television. At 11:00 p.m. we left, after one more wish Χρόνια πολλά! Όχι μόνο πολλά, καλά! added Efthymoula, wisely. The συνάδερφος gave George a huge kiss on the cheek. How nice! Obviously, George is a συμπαθέστατος άνθρωπος, όπως είπε ο συνάδερφος.

Friday, April 24, 1987

Η Άννα Σικελιανού telephoned and spoke a long time about how Angelos and Kazantzakis were estranged for so long, how she went with him to stay with Kazantzakis on Aegina in 1942, then they were together in Athens—no reason for letters. The only letter she remembers was when Kazantzakis wrote from Antibes proposing they share the candidacy for the Nobel Prize. Και είχε πικραθεί πολύ ο Άγγελος. She doesn’t have that letter; perhaps it’s in the Sikelianos Archive at the Benaki Museum.

In the evening, Λένα Δασκαλοπούλου picked us up and drove us to their swank villa in Panorama. She’s the mother of Dimitris, our Dartmouth student. Ήθελε να μας περιποιηθεί! Sweet lady; huge supper, etc. Her sister and brother-in-law live upstairs; they joined us. She teaches English in a gymnasium in Pella; he teaches in the Hotel School. In all three years of English instruction they don’t use any literary texts. Only φτιαγμένα κείμενα για τουρισμό, σύχρονη ζωή, και παρόμοια. They were all interested, I think genuinely, in my involvement with Greek letters.

Saturday, April 25

Ξενοδοχεία Αχιλλέας, Οδός Λέκκα 21 (01 32 33 197), Αθήνα

Αγουροξυπνημένοι. Η Βούλη μας πήρε στο αεροδρόμιο. The hotel is perfect: lovely room with balcony and private bath on a narrow, quiet street, and only δρ 430 a day. At 5:00 p.m. we were in Lefteris Prevelakis’s apartment in Μουρούσι, going there by the Piraeus-Kifissia subway. Athens is very attractive despite what people say, but probably because it is Saturday and there’s very little traffic. Went first to the Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη and found all my needs in the card catalogue. Hope to find time to read the Ιστορία μιας προσπάθειας by Σβώλος. Prevelakis and his wife extremely affable. First coffee and apple tart. Chrysanthi spilled the coffee on their carpet but no matter—no stains left after much scrubbing. She and Madame then went off together; Madame definitely δεν κάνει κουμάντο. Lefteris ordered her around, left and right, but very softly. He has heart trouble, a by-pass; they moved here for quiet and clean air. Desk in living room. Private library, of course. He’s going to give all of Pandelis’s books to the Φιλοσοφική Σχολή, Παν/μιο Κρήτης, Ρέθυμνο, and they’ll be housed in a special Prevelakis Research Institute. Ditto for the Kazantzakis letters, etc. We then set to work, going through the fifty-odd letters with omissions, to see what Kazantzakis actually said—i.e., whom he cursed. In almost all cases, the ἐν λόγῳ άνθρωπος είχε πεθάνει, and Lefteris had no objections. But the ones pertaining to Πέτρος Χάρης he retained, and also two pertaining to Γεώργιος Παπανδρέου. We agreed that in a few years, when I actually decide which letters to include, perhaps things will have changed. He gave me some of his books, one with a lovely old map of Crete, which might be good for endpapers for the edition. I promised to send my article on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης in return. Affable conversation until we finished, about 9:30. They drove us to the station. We’ll do the photocopying on Monday. He is a careful, well-trained scholar, with an Oxford degree. He taught for a time at Athens College and knows Στέλιος Ορφανουδάκης.

Returned to Ομόνοια. Λουκουμάδες in our old haunt on Πανεπιστημίου.

Sunday, April 26, 1987

Athens

Lots of telephone calls in the morning without much success. Finally reached Στάμος Διαμαντάρας, who said Έλα! Taxi to Νέα Σμύρνη. The “old warrior” (communist αντάρτης) welcomed us with hugs and kisses literally. Γλυκαίνετε τη μοναξιά μου, είπε. He was full of stories about his days at the Πυρσός publishing house, where, among other things, he supervised the production of the 1938 edition of the Οδύσεια, of which he proudly showed us his inscribed copy. He also insisted that we take a huge photograph of Kazantzakis in his possession. Talked about the sarcasm of intellectuals when the Odyssey appeared. People used to go to the shop and order ½ οκά Οδύσεια. In the Κατοχή, Kazantzakis decided he’d fight with the pen and not with the αντάρτες, who in any case feared he was a spy, etc. Diamantaros kept insisting that Greece is still not free, at least not for leftists. He related huge, enthusiastic anecdotes about η γενιά του 30, all of whom πέρασαν από το κατάστημά μας. Also related his first meeting with Kazantzakis. He was 22, Kazantzakis 52. He went to Aegina and they spent the whole day in deep, wonderful discussion, after first taking a nude swim. (Mrs. Kazantzakis told us in Geneva that Kazantzakis always went swimming without her; liked to be by himself in the water, and always nude.) Diamantaras has two sets of letters, one to himself and one to Καπετάν Μιχάλης. Tomorrow we’ll xerox them.

Lunch at Συντριβάνι. We then went to the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum. How marvelous each and every time! The scaffolding is off the west end now, which has been cleaned. Cranes are inside; pillar drums are being reassembled, etc., all funded by the European Community and the Ministry of Culture. Four maidens of the Erechtheion are safely in the museum.

Evening: a delightful κωμωδία με Γιώργο Παντζά. Σαχλαμάρες βέβαια αλλά παίζουν με πολύ κέφι και η γλώσσα—για μένα τουλάχιστο—ήταν πολύ ωραία. Γέλασα με την καρδιά μου.

Monday, April 27, 1987

Athens

I met Mrs. Prevelakis while Chrysanthi went back to Diamantaras to do the xeroxing. Mrs. Prevelakis and I carefully did the fifty-odd letters from the 400. Then I went to the Benaki Museum and discovered to my surprise and gratification a whole collection of letters to Sikelianos not only there but impeccably catalogued and filed. These I looked over quickly, and ordered to be photocopied. Total cooperation. Went through the museum as an extra bonus. There’s a painting ca. 1800 of the Caryatids by a British traveler, showing their gowns colored, their facial features still sharp.

Goudelis on telephone: call back tomorrow. Πηγαίνω στο δικαστήριο . . . κ.τ.λ.

2:00 p.m. to Άλκη Σουλουγιάννη in the Ministry of Culture. Ενθουσιώδης τύπος. She had ready photocopies of letters το Καστανάκης that she’d published, some of which I have, others not. Hopes to publish others. She had a good report of us from her former boss Γιώργος Μαραγκίτης, who visited us in Hanover and who arranged the Lebanon College tour.

5:00 p.m. to Γιώργος Ανεμογιάννης in a messy office on Σταδίου. Less cooperative. “I have so much, it’s impossible to do anything. If you have a specific need, let me know,” etc. Finally, after much jockeying, I discovered that he has unpublished letters to Γιάννης Σταυριδάκης. He said that he’d xerox these for us.

7:30 to the lovely Πλατεία Βικτορίας to see Απόστολος Σαχίνης and his wife, both of whom had been at the MGSA Symposium in Washington. Very good discussion for several hours re: method of the edition, his impressions of Kazantzakis, etc. He remembers Kazantzakis as enthralled by ideas: ένας στοχαστής! Loved intellectual discussion. Showed me letters to Παλαμάς just published. We’ll pick up a copy at Ίδρυμα Παλαμά tomorrow. Also said he’d speak to Δεσποτόπουλος at the Academy regarding the Έλλη Λαμπρίδη archive. He returned to Athens when he retired because, in a sense, he had never left. He’d grown up on this same corner and had played in the square. The whole time in Thessaloniki he lived in one room and considered Athens his home. Now he seems to have a full life with Academy affairs, etc. Of course he decried the current department at Salonika: all the young ones are worthless, there because of their politics, etc. A fruitful, civilized, enjoyable visit.

Tuesday, April 28, 1987

Called Goudelis again. Again: call tomorrow. To Kolonaki in the morning. Walked past the American and British schools on Σουηδίας, then to the Γεννάδειος Βιβλιοθήκη, where I haven’t been since we visited Evro and Billy-Jim Layton there years ago. The mysterious blond girl I first saw in the professors’ αναγνωστήριο in Thessaloniki was reading there. No Kazantzakis letters, or so they told me. A relief! I’m now dismayed when more come to light.

First appointment with George Stefanakis just off Kolonaki Square. Young lawyer, aged 42. Pleasant, cultured, energetic. Eight months practicing law to make a living; then four months on Spetses: literature, reading, etc. Also has a weekly column in a newspaper. Stood for parliament. Was fascinated by my work. One of the few people we met who didn’t talk exclusively about himself. Wants my writings. Forgot to xerox the letters he has (Kazantzakis to his sister, etc.); too busy in court. Come again on Thursday.

Then rushed to Θουκυδίδου in Plaka to see Emmanuel Kasdaglis in the beautiful office of the Cultural Division of the Bank of Greece. His daughter Aglaïa played Maria in our videotape. His letters are “somewhere.” Says they’re unimportant, but as we talked they seemed interesting—e.g., when Kasdaglis discovered that the Odyssey lacked four or five verses from the magical 33,333, and Kazantzakis wrote him to compose them himself. Ditto when he found verses that had 15 instead of 17 syllables, or sometimes more than 17. Kasdaglis hid these and other letters during the Junta years. I’ll keep trying, he said. But we had a very good discussion of the philological method of the edition: questions of footnoting, punctuation, dating, capitalization, division into sections, etc. I was mad at Savidis for refusing to see me; I wanted to consult him on all this. But I actually did much better, I’m sure, with Kasdaglis, and also yesterday with Sachinis.

Next to Melissaris, off Λεωφόρος Αλεξάνδρας. He started with a nice smile, saying “Tell me about yourself” and then I’ll tell you about myself.” I did. His turn: He is a disciple of Nikos Pouliopoulos insofar as law is concerned. But there are no letters—all lost or hidden irretrievably in 1967 owing to Pouliopoulos’s leftist orientation. But he had ready for me three issues of Ελληνική Ανεξαρτησία, a periodical published by Pouliopoulos during the Cyprus crisis, all with good materials on Kazantzakis. These we’ll xerox and return tomorrow. Best of all, he telephoned a friend who’s a judge who had written a book on Kazantzakis and, he said, included letters. The judge, very busy apparently, said we should come over immediately.

So, without any lunch, 2:30 in the afternoon, we went to Judge Παπαθανασόπουλος. He was in pajamas. Welcomed us effusively. Turned out to be another “secret” litterateur, author of many volumes of poems, criticism, etc. He had my book on Kazantzakis and everyone else’s. We went through his library carefully, so I could note everything new to me. He of course gave me his own book. Then came the usual gossip. Γουδέλης: κακό στοιχείο (which is true). Ελένη: Διαστρεβλώνει την αλήθεια, όπως και η Άννα Σικελιανού. Σεφέρης: φασίστης! (I should tell Vassilis Lambropoulos!) On his desk he had dossiers for about thirty divorce cases that had to be judged. Άσ’ τα! Μ’ ενδιαφέρει η λογοτεχνία! With difficulty we broke away at 4:00, and rushed to Καλλιθέα for the next appointment.

Luckily, 15 minutes for a τοστ και καφέ. Then to the home of Γιάννης Χατζίνης. Upstairs to Φρόσω, his daughter. Very strange, with a whining voice and (Chrysanthi thinks) sightless eyes, and her husband Γιάννης Πετριτάκης, the craziest of all the enthusiasts we saw today. Another two hours of monologue at 160 decibels. Γ. Π. In a blue serge double-breasted suit with the inside button secured and the outside not. Oily, effeminate, strange. A lawyer specializing in canon law; gave me his many monographs on church affairs, plus his poems, plus poems by Froso. He declaimed many of his own, fewer of hers. Then he made her sit down and play the piano. Tchaikovsky, miserably. Next, he took us round and explained the origin and meaning of each of his paintings. Then downstairs: where Χατζίνης used to live and that will become the Hatzinis Museum. Desk, eyeglasses, library, bust, armchair, etc. Miraculously, he also had some letters ready for me.

We returned to Οδός Λέκκα exhausted after five visits with four maniacs (more or less) and one sober customer (Kasdaglis). Went to a Chinese restaurant across from the hotel. Not bad; not good either. Small portions, very expensive. The Chinese waiter spoke English to communicate with the Greek waiter.

Wednesday, April 29, 1987

Called Goudelis. Have to go to my shop. Employee sick. Come at 9:30 and θα φιξάρωμε κάτι. I sent Chrysanthi off to get my royalties at Efstathiadis, see about Who’s Who, and return Melissaris’s periodicals. Goudelis is a grotesque, fat, drawn caricature of the handsome youth of the 1950s photos. Big growth on his left eyelid. Kept saying Δεν είμαι έμπορος, δεν ξέρω τίποτε για το κατάστημα τούτο, and when customers came in, indeed he didn’t know where anything was. In between customers he delivered yet another monologue about the book he’s writing on Kazantzakis’s personal relations with Zorba, with Sikelianos, and especially with women. Says that Kazantzakis’s father kicked the boy in the genitals and rendered him impotent. Never copulated with either Galatea or Eleni. Etc., etc. Πάλι, κατηγορίες για την Ελένη, τον Πρεβελάκη, κ.τ.λ. How much Kazantzakis liked Goudelis. When he first saw him he put his finger on his head and made him turn around (like a top, slowly). Κούκλα! ΄Εχω κούκλα εκδότη! I kept referring to the letters and he kept changing the subject. Finally he let it be known that he “owned” the letters to Galatea and Rousopoulou, and of course if I wanted them I’d have to pay. Δεν είμαι έμπορος! He snatched up my gaff when I mentioned that Katerina Anghelaki had published excerpts. He’s ready to sue, I’m sure. Also xeroxed my copy of the Βήμα article on Rousopoulou’s letters. Gave me one letter! Saying how wonderful Goudelis is! I kept trying to leave. “But you’ll have to come to the house, to see the collections.” Εντάξει. Θα τηλεφωνηθούμε. Έχω άλλο ραντεβού. Finally escaped. And right outside bumped into Chrysanthi. Μεγάλη σύμπτωση.

Together with Νινέττα Μακρυνικόλα at Kedros. They wouldn’t be interested in my “Kazantzakis and Politics.” Can’t do “fat books”; they don’t sell. Greece doesn’t have 1000 libraries to guarantee that a publisher covers his expenses. Collected δρ 12000 in royalties. Bought 20 copies of my own books. Met the new owner. They have a lovely shop, arranged like a supermarket, with wagons.

1:00 p.m. to Πέτρος Χάρης. He complimented me on my Greek: ΄Οση ώρα μιλούσατε δεν κάνατε ούτε ένα λάθος! I said: Περιμένετε. Of course he said that he has no letters, gave them all away, etc. The liar! But everyone knows him. He lamented the presence of the PASOK government. A doddering gentleman who won’t let go of Νέα Εστία.

Chrysanthi meanwhile went back to George Anemoyannis, who gave her a good collection of letters to Γιάννης Σταυριδάκης.

I rushed to the Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη after lunch to try to read the Ιστορία μιας προσπάθειας by Αλέξανδρος Σβώλος. Luckily, this turned out to be a 45-page pamphlet, not a book. First edition of Τι είδα στη Ρουσία couldn’t be found. They had Ο Κύκλος with an early version of Οδύσεια, but not Ναξιακή Πρόοδος, so my task was simplified.

Then at 7:00 to the Hotel Intercontinental to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Fulbright Program. Saw Δημήτρης Ντούτης at the entrance, and the black cultural attaché. Then was surprised to see Speros Vryonis inside. His conference was fine; he’s planning another next year at NYU. Maskaleris couldn’t get off Crete because of the wind. Ditto for Katerina Anghelaki—stuck on Aegina, no boats. Sat next to Harry Psomiadis, who’s been working on the Pontic independence movement. Two speeches. Πρίτζης, the Minister of Education, who remembered his Fulbright grant that brought him to Washington, and Brademas, who spoke very well (how bad he was at MGSA in NYC, how unprepared) on Fulbright’s vision, the general need for broad educational vision, language learning, etc. (he cited the Perkins’ commission report), ending with his plans for a Greek Cultural Center at NYU.

At the reception afterwards I had a nice, long talk with Bob Keeley, the ambassador (Mike’s brother), mostly about copyright re: letters. He was interested in the recent verdict in favor of Salinger. Even longer talk with his wife Louise, who ended up ordering tapes for Demotic Greek 1 (she’s been using the book). Keeley of course speaks Greek well. Louise says all the other ambassadors come to him for inside info. The Italian ambassador has had eight years in Greece and doesn’t speak a word. McClosky hated Greece and never learned, but Stearns did learn. I also met Gene Rossides, young and pleasant; thinks Dukakis does have a chance . . . maybe. Thinks U.S. government is crazy to think that Turkey is strategically advantageous to us, let alone everything else. Also met MacCann, the new president of Athens College, and his wife; they invited us to use their guesthouse any time. Mike Keeley explained his new book: on the presumed assassination of Polk, an American newspaperman in Greece who “knew too much.” Non-fiction. When I asked him what Maskaleris is doing on Kazantzakis, he replied with his nice humor: “I’m afraid it’s a critical book.” Mike and Mary drove us home. He’s removed the American plates from his car and has replaced them with fake Greek plates. An American car in Kolonaki is sure to get a bomb under it, apparently. (Yesterday, a whole busload of American soldiers was blown up.)

Thursday, April 30, 1987

Athens

To the Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη to finish Svolos. Then to the Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας to buy books. Χάος! How do they ever do business? But they’re well stocked. Then to Κατερίνα Αγγελάκη-Rooke. She caught the 8:00 a.m. boat. Ουζάκι, κουβέντα. Then the file of Kazantzakis letters, unorganized. She trusted me with it, and I went around the corner to have everything xeroxed: a treasure—letters from 1917–1918, 1922, the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 185 xeroxed sheets in all. She’s having to do translations to make ends meet. But Rodney recovered from his stroke. He works part time in the Δοξιάδης library at a very small salary. How do they manage? How blessed I’ve been never to have worried about money!

Stopped at Air Universal to see George Marangidis, who’d telephoned to say hello. But he’d left for the day. I wrote a warm note. Έρη Σταυροπούλου, Christos Alexiou’s new girlfriend, left the bibliography of translations that she’d finished. Good job. I’ll see that it’s noticed in the MGSA Bulletin and journal, etc. Zenelis should review it.

Next: train to Kifissia to see Γιάννης Κακριδής, now aged 86 and suffering from deafness and bad sight. But still alert. He enjoys the solicitude of thousands of former students. When he went to Australia a woman embraced him and afterwards reminded him that he’d failed her eight times and finally sent her down without a degree, but she respected his standards. Είμουν πολύ αυστηρός, είπε. His letters on Iliad/Odyssey have gone to Anemoyannis, but he had a few extras for me, and some clippings on the reception of the Iliad translation. (His Iliad is now officially in the school curriculum.) He trusted me with the originals. We’ll xerox them in Salonika on Monday. He had my Linguistic Revolution on the shelf. Nice!

By bus back to Omonoia. Λουκουμάδες. Then got the last two tickets to Koun’s Θεάτρο Τέχνης production of Η ήχος του όπλου by Λούλα Αναγωνστάκη, about an eighteen-year-old boy who comes to Athens from the provinces, gets involved with a girl, gets her pregnant, but desperately wants his independence, and resolves to go to New York, deserting her. She too wants “freedom”—i.e., not marriage, but now is desperately afraid, wants to keep the child and to get married. His mother comes and makes things worse. Finally after a furious argument with him she has a heart attack and dies in front of him, making him realize for the first time that people cannot exist on their own terms, “free,” something that the girlfriend had already realized. All this against a background of mania for rock and Beatles, a bit of alcoholism, the έξαρση of Greek politics. Superbly directed and acted. A bit too relentless: everyone continually έξαλλοι. (But Greeks can be like that in reality.) I thought of the huge contrast with Scandinavian and Russian plays of domestic conflict, where everything is externalized. In this play, as so often in Greek life, people speak instead of thinking.

Friday, May 1, 1987

Athens

Πρωτομαγιά At breakfast met a Dartmouth student. The group had come in last night and was off to Eleusis today. Missed Jerry Rutter. At last, no appointments. Spent all morning in the hotel putting my “plunder” in order and marking each page, as a precaution should they get out of order. The Anghelaki-Rooke horde is the most impressive of the lot, probably, in bulk and range. But what a nice surprise to get Sikelianos and Stavridakis letters unexpectedly!

Chrysanthi went out to Syntagma. The whole square is red, she told me. KKE everywhere. Thousands of workers protesting price increases, conditions of work, etc. Work to rule, and/or short strikes in all sectors. We finally left at 2:30 and had a huge, leisurely meal at the Delfi. It’s nice to be optimistic about stomachs at long last. Bus to Ellinikon. The city is deserted. The airport is deserted. Most flights cancelled because of the strikes. But ours, at 11:00 p.m., is supposed to go. Waited comfortably in the deserted airport for seven hours, writing and reading. It’s as good as spending the day at the beach.

Chrysanthi very upset when we returned home and found no mail from Alec; we haven’t received any letters since we left America, just one postcard from Thailand. Tried to telephone. Impossible. Called Leander to call Alec. But Daphne’s letter brought good news that she’s been given a one-year internship at Simon and Schuster for 1988–89 plus a $6000 scholarship for 1987–88 at Harvard. The first Harvard student to be so honored. Richard Marius was on the screening committee and made sure that she be shortlisted at least, so she says.

Saturday, May 2, 1987

Alec telephoned in the morning. He’s fine. Says that he wrote lots of letters, none of which have reached us, apparently. He’s coming to Greece on June 23.

Spent the day recouping from Athens, organizing my “loot,” writing letters, cataloging the Kazantzakis letters I’ve accumulated, and finishing Varnalis’s H αληθινή απολογία του Σωκράτη, which I don’t find so very extraordinary, although it has some strong sections, especially in the beginning (prologue), middle, and then at the end, when Socrates satirizes the Periclean democracy, insisting that all its freedoms and glory are «τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμφέρον» (in the interests of the strong—i.e., of the ruling class). Their rhetoric is designed to make the weak think that what benefits the strong benefits the weak as well—i.e., patriotism. Θεός, Αγαθό, Δικαιοσύνη, Πατρίδα κι Ομορφιά . . . δεν είναι μήτε πρώτες αρχές μήτε κ’ έσχατοι σκοποί . . . μα πλάσματα καιρικά, με νόημα τρεχούμενο κι άπιαστο, μέσα ταπεινά, που με δάφτα κάθε κυρίαρχη φάρα στραβώνει τους υποταχτικούς της και πνίγει την ψυχή τους. Οι άνθρωποι χωριζόμαστε σε κείνους που διατάζουνε, και σε κείνους που κάνουνε θελήματα . . .: σε χορτάτους και σε κορόιδα (σελ. 84, 4^0 μέρος, §7). After the klepsydra runs out, all the judges rush away to collect their fees; during the apology they’ve been napping and yawning. Only Plato remains to lead Socrates off to prison.

Would it be worth translating this? A glance at the new Βιβλιογραφία μεταφράσεων νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας του Έρη Σταυροπούλου tells me that it’s already been translated. In any case, this was appropriate reading for Πρωτομαγιά, with the Greek middle class χορτάτοι—cars, summer homes, etc.—and the workers painting Syntagma red and shouting for a fair wage.

At 9:00 p.m. to the Κρατικό Θέατρο Βορείου Ελλάδος for Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” Marvelously directed by Δημ. Μαυρίκιος, with Δημ. Καρέλης as the father, Λίνα Λαμπράκη as the mother, and Κώστας Σάντας as the director. Greek actors are so well trained! Perfect! The play is a delight, especially after seeing “Tonight We Improvise” and Έτσι είναι αν έτσι νομίζετε. The themes of course are familiar: Τι είναι; Ψευδαίσθηση ή αλήθεια; Παράσταση ή ζωή; Και τι είμαστε εμεις; Πρόσωπα ή άνθρωποι; Ποιος είσαι εσύ; the father asks the director. Are you one person? Aren’t you many? And of course all the six actors wear masks that go off and on. The only chance missed was at the end, when the “dead” boy stood up and took a curtain call instead of remaining “dead” on the boards, as in Cambridge (where an ambulance stood waiting outside the theater also, in most performances). Pirandello himself apparently viewed the work as a kind of ancient tragedy, with the actors being the chorus and the six characters the personae. The chorus members (i.e., the actors trying to continue their rehearsal) are human and thus ephemeral. But the six characters are artistic creations and therefore eternal, though they take different outward forms under different circumstances. They are Platonic ideas (cf. Varnalis, where Socrates defends his search for eternal ideas) whereas the contemporary actors are the true ψευδαισθήσεις. Each has a central characteristic: Father–remorse; mother–sorrow; daughter–revenge; son–scorn. Pirandello once told Κώστας Ουράνης that he was of Greek descent, his real name being Πυράγγελος, which became distorted to Pirandello in Sicily.

Then to taverna for γύρος, ρετσίνα, βιφτέκια. Η Βούλη related how, when Κακριδής came to Salonika for his 80th birthday, all his students fêted him, but the παν/μιο απουσίασε. Apparently he is a persona non grata there. As usual!

Monday, May 4

Θεσσαλονίκη

Catalogued the results of the Athens trip. I counted 221 holograph MSS of unpublished letters and 140 of published letters, plus 74 printed items new to me: 435 letters in all. . . . Started entering the αποσιωπήσεις in the 400 letters. Kazantzakis was a fluent curser, but a polite one: nothing worse than «To ζώο!»

George and Efthymoula came. George is in the blues again, now because Andreas is virtually locked in his room, studying presumably for the law exams he has to take in June, but refusing to talk, go out, associate with anyone, barely eating. In sum: depressed. They fear suicide. Asked our advice. What to say? The root may be girlfriend trouble. He lived with someone for several years, and now they’ve separated, it seems. He left the theater of his own will, not under pressure from parents, so they say. When they departed, we realized how blessed we are in our own children. Went out for a pizza to celebrate!

Thursday, May 7, 1987

Working on the Greek version of my lecture on Ritsos’s “painterly technique,” originally conceived in Melbourne (in Greek), revised in England (in English), and now revised yet again (in Greek). Slow work.

Anthony and Lena Daskopoulos, parents of Dartmouth student Dimitris, took us to a fancy piano bar for supper—the best food I’ve ever had in Greece, probably frightfully expensive. Fortunately, we arrived early (i.e., around 10:00 p.m.!) before the band started full blast + singer and we couldn’t hear ourselves think. Despite that, we stayed until 2:30 a.m. He is an industrialist, manager of Salco, industrial and commercial foods. Fascinating conversation on the Greek economy, which according to him is very weak in productivity, although for fifteen years the growth was phenomenal. The problem is that all the prosperity we see around us is based on huge amounts borrowed from abroad. The economy rests on debt (like ours). He’s extremely anti-PASOK or ψευτοσοσιαλισμός. The policy of equal wages eliminates incentives; people have no desire to work hard or well. The percentage of government employees has increased dramatically; the economy is shifting from industry and agriculture to service as its leading component. What impressed both Chrysanthi and me was how very nice these people are, and what a nice son they’ve produced. In this case, wealth doesn’t seem to have corrupted its holders.

Saturday, May 9, 1987

7:00 p.m. Finished the revision of Η ζωγραφική τεχνική του Ρίτσου—57 pages in Greek. Three days’ work.

Stavros and Toula came for “tea” and theater: Theotokas’s To παιχνίδι της τρέλλας και της φρονιμάδας at the Κ.Θ.Β.Ε. Again, magnificently produced, with sets and costumes and lighting that were magical, actors worthy of the Royal Shakespeare Company, yet the play itself is so mediocre. It’s a Shakespearian imitation in large part but in prose and with none of the magic of the Shakespearian comedies. Indeed its problem is that it mixes the Shakespearian elements—history, comedy, and even a few tragic touches—in a hodgepodge that adds up to aesthetic confusion. Key elements fail (perhaps in the production, but I think in the text, too). The comic waiters at the banquet aren’t comically rustic enough; the village girl placed in the king’s bed isn’t sufficiently stupid, etc. No one character “lives” in his or her own right, not even Andronikos the Don Juan of Byzantium or Αρετή the clever virgin. And the bird of the folksong is overdone: once is enough. Then at the end the release of Andronikos from τα σίδερα is too easy. None of this stuff works if an overall fairytale atmosphere fails to be established and maintained, as in this case. So much theatrical talent wasted on a mediocre text!

Bifteki, etc. afterward in Πλατεία Ναβαρίνο. Stavros and Toula talked freely about Russia. The Greek community in Tashkent was a ghetto. The Russians gave land and the Greeks built a self-enclosed quarter: shops, schools, etc. Odysseas zealously kept Toula from any contact with Russian girls and especially boys, fearing that if she married “out,” he wouldn’t be able to bring her back to Greece, which was his dream from the start. So: no parties, no excursions. Σπίτι! The Russians in their turn were kindness itself, extending various privileges such as entrance to university without examination, vacations on the Black Sea, etc. Stavros, earlier, played a cassette of a Russian children’s choir, ages five to ten. Magic! Such clarity of tone, timing, precision, harmony.

Monday, May 11, 1987

Lunch in Όλυμπος Νάουσα with Zisis and Ritsa. It still functions, somehow. Apparently the State keeps the building from being demolished, and even subsidizes the restaurant. But it’s closed at night, and the food wasn’t anything special. Too bad: another tradition fallen.

Dartmouth students arrived; most had been in Chrysanthi’s Greek 11–12 class. We went for supper with them in the Elvetia restaurant, Αγίας Σοφίας και Εγνατίας. Nice group, but Jerry Rutter says that they show no excitement about what they are doing. (Yesterday we took the students for supper in Πλατεία Ναβαρίνο.)

Tuesday, May 12, 1987

Still struggling with this awful lecture, which is consuming a week of my life. It’s still too long.

A letter finally from Alec. It took a month to arrive from Jakarta. He’s well, but increasingly concerned about his baldness. He fitted some wigs in Singapore. They feel hot to him (in that climate) and uncomfortable. He’s trying to be philosophical—saw a woman in the bus with a severely deformed face and realized that other people get through life with worse burdens, accepting them. He’s at this point happy to be leaving Indonesia. One of the best Indonesian “friends” of one of his American friends stole $1000 from the latter. Alec now realizes why the average foreigner is so wry of the natives, whose smiles and solicitude are untrustworthy, apparently. Yet he doesn’t feel drawn toward the expatriate group either. So, he’s ready to come home. Meanwhile he had another good tour of Thailand (with a girl, of course), and a fine excursion to another city in Java with three couples.

Daphne’s letter on the other hand shows her and her circle to be (so far) “golden lads and lasses” in their enchantment. She writes so well, with humor and style. As I said to Chrysanthi, “She’s had a good education.”

Met Jerry Rutter again. He’s so happy to have someone to talk to. He’s increasingly bored and frustrated with his students, who are like zombies during the archeological tours. As Alec said in his letter, in this world there are the haves and the have-nots. Alec, even with alopecia, is a have. So are our Dartmouth students, but they’re blasé. No excitement. Jerry is considering another job, in Cincinnati. “How can I face another twenty years of this?!” he asks. We walked to see Σαρανταπόρου 11, then had supper, then went to the Amalia Theater to see the Θεάτρο Τέχνης in Marivaux’s «Η φιλονικία». Superbly acted, as always. And what a sophisticated, brilliant play, confirming my opinion that the Theotokas play we saw the other day is trash. A lord of the French court (18th century), by magic, presents to a lady the nature of love: two boys and two girls, unspoiled children of nature, are allowed to meet. At first all is idyllic; they discover each other and themselves. But then jealousy, self-esteem, and violence begin to govern this “pure,” basic society; the women switch partners, the men’s friendship is vitiated, etc. It’s all done with brevity, with enchantment. No wonder there is a Marivaux revival.

Walked back along the παραλία with Jerry. Coffee and ice cream in overpriced placed on the waterfront. But good conversation. How nice to be in a city!

Still no date for my lecture. Aglaïa is trying to set it up. Mimis had an attack of kidney stone.

Wednesday, May 13, 1987

Still working on the Ritsos lecture, shortening and tightening it. This is ridiculous. Losing time from Kazantzakis. But at least I’m slated to give it three times.

Nice dinner with Bill and Titika McGrew. Things going much better at Anatolia College apparently. The government is not pursuing them actively, although their official policies haven’t changed. Students less paranoic and restless than in the 1970s. Bill says that the universities, however, are a shambles. He is fascinated by Frank Boyden, having just read “The Head.” I supplemented this with many anecdotes.

Thursday, May 14, 1987

They changed the name of our street. Suddenly the placards outside say Βιζύης-Βύζαντος instead of Στατίστης. Κα Θεοδώρα explained. The people in this area are refugees from Βιζύη in Thrace, indeed from the area called 40 Εκκλησίες. Thus the main street is Βιζυηνός. Βύζας was a Byzantine general, she thinks (not the founder of Byzantium, who was an ancient Greek from Megara), born in Βιζύη like the author. Στατίστης is connected with Παύλος Μελάς and thus has no meaning for the residents.

Lola kindly came to hear my lecture and to correct the Greek. There were some booboos. But not many.

In the evening, to the American Center to hear Valentini Papadopoulou lecture on transactional analysis, which seems a brilliantly conceived neo-romanticism, the American reaction to Freud. She gave a good exposition of the theory, and then showed its application to the interpretation of plays and novels.

Friday, May 15, 1987

Gave my lecture on Η ζωγραφική τεχνική του Ρίτσου. I think it went well. Vigorous discussion afterward chiefly from Πάνος Μουλλάς. Σηφάκης ήρθε και Αγλαΐα και Μίμης, Πετρούνιας (γλωσσολόγος), whom I met at Vryonis’s conference in the 1970s, also Τσαντσανόγλου, etc. Lunch afterward at “Tiffany’s.” In the evening the worst theater so far this year: Daphne de Maurier’s “Autumntide” (Φθινοπωρινή παλίρροια) with Μυράτ. Chrysanthi sick afterwards, wretched all night.

Saturday, May 16, 1987

Chrysanthi sick. 38° C. temperature (104.5° F.). Nausea, dizziness. Doctor came, prescribed suppositories to empty the stomach. We’ll see. Still hoping to go to Crete on Monday. I started to revise my little article on Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ that Meg Alexiou is encouraging me to publish together with her piece on Δασκάλα and Γοργόνα. Ρίτσα Γιαννούρα very kind; kept telephoning all day, and it was she who sent the doctor, ο Γιάννης Βακόλας, τηλ. 317.256. He didn’t want to accept payment; finally I prevailed and he took δρ 3000. Youngish, 40s, came in dungarees. Very professional yet personable, caring.

Sunday, May 17, 1987

Chrysanthi decided not to go. Too risky. I cancelled the ticket five minutes after the deadline; they wanted 30% forfeit. Called Zisis, whose niece works for Olympic. She discovered that they’d cancelled my ticket as well as Chrysanthi’s. Rushed to the office. Finally everything OK, including 100% refund.

Monday, May 18, 1987

Hotel Mirabello, Iraklion

To Athens alone. Waited six hours in the airport. Read Kazantzakis’s Odyssey. Rather pleasant, except for cigarette smoke everywhere. Nice flight to Ηράκλειο at 6:00 p.m. Cyclades visible from the plane. Stelios Orphanoudakis met me. How nice to see him here! He’s a “king”: chairman of computer science at the university, with double salary, from the university and also from the State institute in Iraklio, not to mention Yale. Showed me the university. The only university building I’ve seen without graffiti. Well equipped with mainframe and PCs. They do research, have undergrads also, and train schoolteachers in computer applications. Nice set-up. He took me to the Hotel Mirabello, where I’d booked “in the dark.” Depressing place. Noisy, empty. Then to a nice restaurant run by Cretan villagers with Cretan specialties: Οδός Γ. Γεωργιάδου 6. Ate with some German visitors saying with Stelios. Message from Chrysanthi when I returned to the hotel, that she’s coming tomorrow evening.

Tuesday, May 19, 1987

Iraklion

No sleep. Scooters, traffic, barking dog all night. Up early. Bus to Rethymno. The new road is a dream compared to the terror I remember. Flowers in bloom on the roadside, at one point a whole “wall” of red blooms. The sea below, terraced fields left and right. Got off at the university, a little before the town. Vayenas had warned me not to be appalled. It looks like a prison, but one new building amidst the converted old ones isn’t too depressing. They have a central library for the entire Φιλοσοφική Σχολή, instead of the σπουδαστήριον system. Not bad. All of Aris Diktaios’s books are there in a special collection. Pandelis Prevelakis’s will be arriving shortly. The librarian is very proud. Met Puchner, an Austrian who teaches permanently in Crete. Also Στυλιανός Αλεξίου, who was very kind. His wife published Kazantzakis letters to Στεφανίδης. He’ll call her to give me a copy. His father, Λεφτέρης Αλεξίου, had many Kazantzakis letters but when he and Kazantzakis had a falling out Lefteris destroyed the letters out of spite. Only three or four remain, and these from later years, when the two men were reconciled. Thanasis Maskaleris joined us. He’s living in Rethymno, working on Cretan information about Kazantzakis. Hopes I’ll come to San Francisco State as a visiting professor sometime. Vayenas says I have an open invitation to visit for a semester in Crete: 2 classes, salary of about δρ 140000. Not very attractive except maybe as a way to improve my Greek. The lecture went well. I feel much more assured now. Lots of questions afterwards, including two from undergraduates (who are all female, it seems). Vayenas says the level is low, since the best go to Athens and Salonika. Alexiou said that I should use ειδύλλιο instead of βουκολικό to render “pastoral” in my translation of Keats. Afterwards Vayenas, Maskaleris, and I had a fish dinner—octopus, βαρβούνια—in the old harbor, which is charming. Thanasis walked me around the old town. Knocked at Michael Herzfeld’s door, but no answer. Returned to Iraklio with a check for δρ 16000!

Chrysanthi arrived, looking healthy. Stelios came and we spent four to five hours together, part of it looking for a place to eat in the DEH blackout (strike). First went out beyond Knossos to a tavern where, in the dark, the owner had just put the night’s lamb in the stone oven, which had been heated before with coals. He closed the mouth with a stone block and then sealed the edges of the block to the oven proper with mud, as in ancient times. Since there were neither lights nor food we went back to Iraklio and then out in another direction beyond the airport, by the sea. Again no lights, but lots of candles this time. I had shark (γαλέος). OK, a bit sickening. Stelios helped us transfer to Hotel Lato, near the harbor. Iraklio has been ruined architecturally. The waterfront is unavailable to citizens; no park, no παραλία. The old houses are replaced with apartments. More noise than on Madison Avenue. A few remains of grandeur: Morosini fountain, a teenage hangout; the Venetian Loggia (now the town hall), some parks. The bastions unconnected. Can’t walk around the walls, as in Chester.

Wednesday, May 20, 1987

Ηράκλειο

9:00 a.m. to the Ιστορικό Μουσείο in the mansion of Καλοκαιρινός, opposite the Ξενία hotel. Λουΐζα Καλοκαιρινού came shortly after. «Συγνώμη λίγα λεφτά. Με ζητάει ο διευθυντής μου.» We waited. Finally she bought us to the office and introduced the διευθυντής, ο Ανδρέας Καλοκαιρινός, who grunted. He’s the orphan (Vouli told us) whom the great Kalokairinos family adopted so that their name would not be erased. Repulsive barbarian, also a bit senile perhaps. “What did I want?” (I’d sent all that in advance, of course.) They don’t have προσωπικό, can’t do photocopies, no machine in the museum. Why don’t I get them by mail, later? I protested. Finally he said they’d try. He had no idea what they possessed. Had never heard of Διαμαντάρας. Louisa told me afterwards that the letters to Galatea were “lent” to Goudelis for publication and were never returned, so those are gone, too. We examined the two rooms devoted to Kazantzakis, copied some letters from the showcases, were allowed inside to look at the books. Not much of interest. But next door, in the Αίθουσα Τσουδέρου, I found three good letters from Kazantzakis to the prime minister on display. We copied two of them and a little of the third. 1:00 p.m. Closing time. Louisa, outside the ogre’s office, said with luck we’d have some photocopies tomorrow.

Lunch by the sea: swordfish, very good. Short nap. Then taxi to Βαρβάροι. I was taken the long way and cheated, but no matter. Τιτίκα Σακλαμπάνη was waiting for us. The museum is beautiful, tasteful, rich. She’s very proud. Took us round personally. Luckily, no one else was there. That morning they’d had a load of schoolchildren, and Friday will be bus after bus of tourists. Emphasis on theater because of Anemoyannis’s interests. Scenes, costumes, programs, all kinds of manuscripts, photos, publications in many language. A fifteen-minute slide presentation with recorded narration in a choice of language. Tasteful but too much on the man, little on the works themselves. And too adulatory. Also some factual mistakes (written by Patroklos Stavrou, of course). Titika put us in care of Maria, the warden. (Later learned that this young girl was left a widow with two children when her thirty-year-old husband was killed in an automobile crash. Brave soul!) Frantically copied texts as Chrysanthi read them, hoping to finish before the 8:00 p.m. deadline. Did . . . almost. Just at the end, two good letters on politics, one to Sofoulis, that I could only summarize, not transcribe. OK. Don’t be obsessive! Relax! All the showcases, here as in Irakleio, are closed with numerous screws and virtually non-openable. No way to see the reverse side of a page.

Question of how to return. A man, one of the σύμβουλοι, was supposed to drive us to the crossroads at Σκαλάνι to catch a bus (no buses go to Βαρβάροι). But he disappeared. So we relaxed. Sat down at the café. Immediately treated to καφέ, then to τσίπουρο και μεζεδάκια, by a farmer. Lively conversation about crops, the weather, Cretan παλληκαριά. A man from the next table joined in. He had relatives in New York; the children don’t know Greek. I explained what happens. Then the σύμβουλος came, talked about the museum, its hopes, its accomplishments. He’s an accountant, works in a large fruit processing co-op in a nearby village. Maria came. More talk. Of course we missed the bus. No matter. Another man turns out to have a taxi. He’s in no hurry. Neither are we. More τσίπουρο. Finally we left, with Maria, who travels every day from Iraklio. The ταξιτζής didn’t want money, but we prevailed, for once. Finished with καφέ και καταΐφι στην Πλατεία Ελευθερίας. Must get Daphne to include this museum in the next edition of Let’s Go Greece.

Thursday, May 21, 1987

Ηράκλειο

Της Κωνσταντίνου και Ελένης. Chrysanthi tried to call Kostas. Hard to get a line. Finally got through, but not to Lola.

To Knossos early. How nice to be there without crowds and without a guide! Getting to be a familiar site to us: third time. British archeologists are continuing the excavations. We watched the workers scraping away dirt with brushes, picking out shards. The palace is unbelievably immense and complicated, truly a labyrinth. They say that a river led to Knossos from the harbor they used; boats could come to the palace gate. Also that all the hills were heavily wooded, so there was a watershed.

Back by local bus. Went to the Βικελαία Δημοτική Βιβλιοθήκη in Morosini Square, to untangle my quandary about Μουρέλλος και Διαλυνάς και Νέα Εφημερίς ca. 1925. Very disagreeable librarians. Finally I opened a volume of the paper and saw that Mourellos was the owner and Dialynas the editor. Simple! The director, more polite, took us upstairs to the magnificent quarters that will house Maro and George Seferis’s books. A girl is cataloging them. Some, with inscriptions, are displayed. And also displayed is a letter in beautiful Greek from George Thomson to Seferis saying he understands Seferis’s reluctance to write a συστατικό for Thomson’s son-in-law (Christos Alexiou!!) and that other people, people who know Christos, have written. Small world.

Next, back to the Historical Museum, just in case. Louisa greeted us with a smile: “I have good news for you.” “You finished the photocopies?” “No, but we discovered a whole file of letters from Kazantzakis to his family.” (Previously she told me that the only letters to the family were those on display.) Then she did hand me a packet of photocopies: 54 αυτόγραφα του Καζαντζάκη προς την Edvige Levi. If I get nothing else out of them, the trip will be worthwhile because of these. The ogre then appeared and affirmed that it would be out of the question—αποκλείεται!—to do any more photocopies on Friday, since they were short-handed. Maybe Saturday. Chrysanthi and I finished copying the third letter to Tsouderos, and looked around the rest of the museum: memories of Καπετάν Κόρακας, risings, Prince George’s arrival, the German war, lots of photos of parachutists descending. What do German tourists feel when they see all this? They even had the Firman guaranteeing full compliance with the Organic Statute.

Long siesta after a lousy lunch. Coffee in Οδός Δαιδάλου. Open market, to waste time, but bought some μαχλέπι to take to Hanover. At 6:00 to Stylianos Alexiou’s wife, Martha. They live just off the Morosini Square in a house that’s now surrounded by the dregs of tourism and commercialism. The usual large living room with desk at one end and bookcases up to the ceiling on all four walls. Martha very bitter about the ruination of Iraklio. They have another house in Rethymno and spend the summers there. She gave me the issue of Αμάλθεια where she published Kazantzakis’s letters to Stefanidis, a school day chum. (Actually, I have this at home, but never paid enough attention to it.) She explained who Stefanidis was: lived like an άρχοντας, never accomplished much. She told us a little about the original Στυλιανός Αλεξίου, from the village of Κράσι, and about her father-in-law, Λευτέρης. Ιδιότροπος άνθρωπος. Intellectual families like this, the few, must feel totally isolated in a place like Iraklio. Thank God Kazantzakis left; he would have been stifled otherwise.

Walked afterwards to the Martenego Rampart, to Kazantzakis’s grave. Very disappointing in comparison to Joyce’s. The famous epitaph is hardly visible; it should strike one. Kazantzakis’s name and dates are nowhere. The site is overgrown, unattended. Total disappointment.

Supper in the γνήσια κρητικά εστιατόριο where Stelios had taken me the first evening. We were the only customers. The lights went out again—more DEH strike. The waiter sat down with us and we lamented together about the Cretan economy and the state of the world. Afterwards I had a real old-fashioned stomachache of the particularly Greek kind. But survived intact. The stomach seems to have acquired a defense system.

Friday, May 22, 1987

Iraklio

To the Archeological Museum. Followed a group of Finns and listened to their strange language. Nice to see old favorites: the snake goddess, the ivory acrobat in midair, the helmet of boar’s teeth, the delicate pendant representing two bees, the frescos of processions, bull rituals, porpoises, etc., the huge replica of the entire palace as it presumably was at its prime. We “did” the collection leisurely, properly. The Finns had long since been whisked off to Knossos, presumably.

In the hotel at breakfast each morning we see a solitary, elderly old lady, a hunchback. Looks American or English. We’ve been in the elevator together as well. She seems very alone. But we haven’t talked to her. Why?

After the museum I sat in the Βικελαία and looked over the Levi letters while Chrysanthi went on a shopping spree. Some of the letters to Edvige Levi are splendid. Kazantzakis poured out all his passion to so many people. It would be interesting to see the letters that they sent to him. Were they so fulsome, so warm and pleading, as it were, for companionship?

Lunch beneath the Βικελαία in a non-touristy restaurant. I’m so tired of being “propositioned” with “Bitte, café, drink, sandwich, sit down please!” In the afternoon, read Kazantzakis’s Odyssey on the hotel balcony. Gusty wind. Like being on shipboard. Watched the two ferries depart, rounding the west coast of Dia. Walked with Chrysanthi out along the long breakwater of the old harbor, past the Venetian fortress, which is so foursquare and magnificent, with marble lions on both sides. Saw flying fish, appropriate for Knossos. A ship tied up to the mole was bringing sulfur in sacks to be used in spraying grapes. It returns to Piraeus with sand used to make cement. A fisherman was selling off a huge βλάχος, which looked to me like a tuna, slice by slice, on the jetty. When we started our walk, it was almost all there; when we returned, just a few hunks were left. Other fishermen were going out for the night, the lead boat with two or three others tied behind to spread the nets.

Just behind the hotel is a street we took to try to reach the harbor. We went down it, turned to the left, wound around, came to a dead end, turned to the right, wound around another way, turned some more, came to another dead end, and finally emerged through a crack in a wall. The name of the street: Οδός Λαβύρινθου! One of the (few) charms of Iraklio is the way they name the streets. Each has an “explanation” below the name—e.g., Οδός Καζαντζάκη: κρητικός συγγραφέας· Οδός Κνωσού: Μινωικό παλάτι· Οδός Βενιζέλου: κρητικός πολιτικός ηγέτης· Οδός—: κρητικός αγωνιστής λευτερίας.

Saturday, May 23, 1987

Iraklio–Thessaloniki

Read a little more in Kazantzakis’s Odyssey. It isn’t bad, really, if you go slowly. An abridged version would be an improvement. Went out again to the Koules Fortress guarding the harbor; it was open now. What a masterful construction! All based on arches. Walls fifteen feet thick. Beautiful and functional. Skylights admit light. Long slits for cannons. The courtyard above is used now for a theater in the summer. Next, went back to the Historical Museum. The Ogre thankfully was on his way home. Louisa handed me Kazantzakis’s correspondence to his family. The Rahel correspondence was a false lead: it’s hers to him, not vice versa. Diamantaras’s cannot be found. Galatea’s is gone! I told her about Goudelis. She’ll keep in touch if anything else turns up.

A little sad leaving Iraklio. It’s ugly but charming in its way and has oases like Theotokopoulos Park, in full bloom today. Easy trip back nonstop to Salonika in 55 minutes. At home, mail from Alec, which took five or six weeks to arrive from Indonesia, plus a photo. He’s hairless again, alas, and lost weight. But smiling. Lefteris Prevelakis wrote a warm note saying he and his wife had read my book and found it excellent. How nice of him! Diamantaras also wrote, and Sachines sent one of his books. Papathanasopoulos had written earlier. It’s nice to meet new friends at this stage in life! Elizabeth Ballard sent an encyclical. She’s back in her home doing physical therapy to regain use of her paralyzed side. Brave soul! Kendal at Hanover is collecting funds-at-risk to take an option on land even before the C.O.N. is granted. I sent $500.

Watched parliament for 1½ hours on television. Government crisis. Mitsotakis calling for elections, Papandreou refusing. How vile they are toward one another, especially Mitsotakis, who is a real demagogue. One is worse than the other. Papandreou is clearly losing his grip, and Mitsotakis is like a bloodthirsty vulture sinking in his claws. Θλιβερό!

Louisa Kalokairinou told us in Iraklio that workers in excavations get δρ 33,000 per month. But so far in her dig they’ve gone two or three months without being paid even that, because the government has no money. I’d thought that δρ 70,000 for a civil engineer was scandalous. 1000 a day. A cup of coffee, for tourists, in Iraklio costs 125. A bus ride is 40, a newspaper 50.

Sunday, May 24, 1987

Papandreou got his vote of confidence, as expected. I visited the Festival of Books with Vouli. So many publishers and titles! How do they all survive? Do Greeks buy these books? I bought Ritsos’s novel, Kordatos’s History of Modern Greek Literature, and a fancy Λεύκωμα Καβάφη, full of pictures of Alexandria.

Monday, May 25, 1987

Hotel Ξενία, Γιάννενα

By plane to Ιωάννινα. The airport is a strip parallel to a huge mountain range. First impression of the city very negative, but later saw the lake, κάστρα, etc. Πλατεία Ελευθερίας was full of green; huge plane trees everywhere; acacias in bloom; luxuriant roses. Statue of Venizelos. When Yanina was liberated in 1913, paintings of King Constantine, who as head of the army rode into the city on his horse: imagine the feelings after 400 years under the Turks and Ali Pasha and his successors! Actually, Ali Pasha’s revolution against the Sultan and his attempt to make a separate Balkan confederation was precisely what convinced the Greek revolutionaries that this was the right time to try to win independence at last—i.e., at a time when the Ottoman Empire was having internal disputes. After walking aimlessly through the town and reaching the lake, we went to the university and had a good talk with the chairman, Ερατοσθένης Καψομάνος. He’s the one who edited the first volume of the demoticists’ letters. Another colleague joined us: Sonia—, an émigré from the Soviet Union, married to a Greek novelist and teaching Cavafy, etc. Finally Christos arrived (he had a class on Palamas from 7 to 9 p.m.). Hugs, kisses, instant renewal of an old friendship. Each time we see each other it’s as though no time had intervened. We went off together to eat in the Εστιατόριον Όασις, on the square. Long recital of current difficulties. Demetrios is fingering all the women he sees, including old ladies. Rejected by the school Meg hoped to place him in. Christos has hopes of a half-way house, but in this case the boy’s family should be nearby. If Christos moves now to England he’ll have no job there and will also lose his Greek pension. The position at Yanina is OK and could be renewed, but sudden opposition has appeared in the form of Βελουδής, who is using gossip and misinformation to discredit Christos, saying he has no degree, no publications, etc., never taught literature at B’ham. Ugly business. But relations with the rest of the staff are excellent. And Meg continues to balk at helping. She protests that her Harvard salary is $36,000! Despite all this, Christos carries on with the same remarkable fortitude. He has even begun to publish: a piece on Kazantzakis’s Prometheus. He gave me his lecture on Sikelianos and the Eleusinian mysteries to read.

Tuesday, May 26, 1987

Yanina

Breakfast with Christos. Then to Δωδώνη (Dodona), a spectacular ride over the crest of a mountain range and into an enchanting saddle between this and the next crest, a true Shangri-la. Gorgeous. The site is thrilling. A huge theater, 18,000 seats, in good condition. Modified by the Romans, but still has astonishing acoustics. An oak planted to remind one of the early form of worship. Various foundations of the oracular complex. As so often is the case, the major thrill comes from the placement, the location.

Then to the Μουσείο Κερινών Ομοιωμάτων «Βρέλλη» in a nearby village. A kind of Madame Tussauds but with scenes from Greek history: the κρυφό σχολιό, the martyrdom of Διονύσιος ο Φιλόσοφος in the seventeenth century, the oath sworn by the Φιλική Εταιρεία in 1814, Κατσαντώνης, the famous Epiriot klepht, klephts and armatoli in their hideout, the beheading of Ali Pasha in 1822, and his consort Κυρά Βασιλική (Κυρά Φροσίνη he drowned in the lake). Very touching, realistic reminders of hundreds of years of slavery and hardship, which continued until very recently: Yanina was “returned” to Greece only in 1913 when King Constantine made his triumphant entry into the city. And when the Germans invaded in 1941, Yanina was heavily bombarded.

Spent the afternoon re-reading my lecture and reading Christos’s on Sikelianos. My lecture went well, I think. Small audience (total lack of organization; no notices until the last day, etc.) but a good one by and large. Lively discussion, as on previous occasions. The topic seems to be a provocative one. Afterwards, ten to twelve people to dinner in a taverna. Had a nice talk with Sonia, and with Γιάννης Περυσινάκης, a classicist who has written on Kalvos. He reminded us that the ancient Greeks, certainly Herodotus, had a synchronic concept of history. The diachronic concept was introduced into western culture by the Hebrews and of course through Christianity. I was pleased that they all knew of and admired Bergson.

Wednesday, May 27, 1987

Yanina

Christos with me at breakfast again. We all went off to the marvelous cave at the head of the lake, at Perama. The guide, a beautiful boy of about eighteen, told us that it takes eighty to ninety years for one centimeter of stalagmite to form. Thus the scientists estimate that the cave’s formations have taken about fourteen million years to reach their present heights. We went through galley after galley: huge halls, tiny passageways, every stalactite-stalagmite formation different: so many of them “suggest” object such as people, candles, fish, shells, statues, bridges, etc. Earthquakes have dislodged some of the rocks so that the process has started all over from the beginning in certain galleries. From here we went to a mosque, now a museum, inside the walls. Again: so many reminders of the 400 years of Τουρκοκρατία. Chrysanthi bought a silver-plated tray: traditional craft of the area.

To απόγευμα: to the Isle of Yanina, a lovely experience. It’s mainly the village itself, quite aside from the sites. No cars, scooters, motorcycles. Houses and squares in the old style, unchanged. Huge plane trees, running fountains, cobbled streets. Hens, roosters, sheep, a forest at the top of the hill. They show the floor with the bullet holes that attest to the way Ali Pasha was wounded before being decapitated. A document on the wall has his “signature”—the stamp of his ring (he was illiterate). The Greek co-signers list themselves as his “slaves,” including the local bishop. Portraits of Κυρά Βασιλική everywhere, plus a lovely idealized painting of Φροσίνη about to be drowned. A girl of about twelve recited her prepared litany for us about the historical events. Then we climbed up to the Μονή Αγίου Νικολάου των Φιλοανθροπινών. Marvelously preserved frescoes covering every square inch. We once saw this in Crete as well. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings. One porch has all the ancient philosophers as well: Plato, Aristotle, Solon, etc., in a row, like saints. The little room where the keeper stays is like an old Turkish living room, with low couches and overstuffed pillows.

To βράδυ: to Christos’s lecture on Sikelianos and the Eleusinian mysteries, sponsored by the Ηπειρωτική Στέγη Γραμμάτων και Τεχνών. Christos recited Sikelianos’s poetry beautifully. Good lecture, delivered in a scholarly manner. Afterwards, drink with the president and secretary of the Στέγη. The president is an ΕΛΑΣ veteran, it seems, probably communist. His eyes lit up when Christos began talking of his activities in the mountains επί Κατοχής και εμφυλίου. The younger man is a writer of verse. Both know Sikelianos’s poems, Kazantzakis’s novels, Cavafy. How nice! There’s an intellectual life in Yanina. Christos waxed eloquent on Sikelianos’s metaphoric power and began reading one stunning metaphor after another from Λυρικός Βίος. Then the three of us went off to the Oasis for our last meal. Returning to the hotel after midnight, we encountered, by the oddest of coincidences, Tassos Boundis, a graduate of Dartmouth who has returned to become a math professor at Patras. He was delighted and flabbergasted to see us, asked about the children. We reminisced about other Greek students at Dartmouth: Stefanides, still in Minneapolis, Orphanoudakis in Crete, Pavlakis sort of lost, probably still in the U.S.

Thursday, May 28, 1987

Yanina–Thessaloniki

My birthday. Chrysanthi gave me presents at breakfast. Zisis and Ritsa had come the night before, returning from Corfu. We rode back to Salonika with them, pleasantly (by pre-arrangement). Stopped at Metsovo, where aged shepherds sit in the square with their γλίτσες, then at Meteora, at a place where floccati rugs are made, at the Κατάρα (in the mountains, before Metsovo), passed the Platamona fortress, went through the Vale of Tempe between Ossa (= Kissavos) and Olympus. Mail contained a nice letter from Leander indicating some new opportunities opening for him at Moravian. Birthday supper with Chrysanthi at the Tiffany Grill.

Friday, May 29, 1987

Δημήτρης Ντούτης kindly let me use an IBM typewriter at the American Center, and I typed a clean copy of my little piece on the “Accidental Modernism of Ἡ ζωή ἐν τάφῳ” to send to Theofanis Stavrou. George Anemoyannis sent more letters: some splendid early ones to Ιωάννης Ζερβός. I sent an angry telefax to Melissa Zeiger about her delay in reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s thesis on James Merrill; she’s had it over six weeks. Θανάσης Παπαθανασόπουλος kindly sent the program for the Έκθεση on Prevelakis that Kasdaglis prepared. Αποθέωσις. Greeks go all the way . . . in both directions. In the evening Daphne telephoned from Athens. She’d arrived, with Phil. Wants to come to Thessaloniki immediately to see us. Chrysanthi and Lola went to the airport. Daphne not on the 8:00 p.m. plane. They returned. Daphne telephoned; she’d be on the 11:45. Chrysanthi went back to the airport with Vouli. Finally at 12:45 a.m. they arrived, Daphne looking wide awake despite the trip. Lots of conversation around the table; lots of good Metsovitiko cheese consumed. Pappous with high temperature again, not very lucid. Will he survive until we return is the question. Yiayia in good spirits, however. Leander drove Daphne and her belongings back to Hanover from Harvard. Visited the farm with his Finnish friends. The house full of Andy Rangell’s boxes of unopened belongings, but habitable. The car inspected. Daphne’s double interview at Simon and Schuster, cordial with the director of personnel, cold with the director of “corporate communication.” Finally at 2:00 a.m. we all slept.

Saturday, May 30, 1987

I remember when we went to Dodona the taxi driver told us about the celebrated swindler Γούτης (or something like that) who had cheated scores of people out of billions of drachmas all by borrowing and lending (i.e., usury), until finally the bubble burst and he fled to his Swiss bank account. Τον βάλανε τραγούδι! Whereupon the taxi driver recited delicious couplets singing the brilliance of this cheat. Thus poetry lives on. On a similar note, Papathanasopoulos sent me the satires by Βαφόπουλος, which are clever and biting: e.g., Η Ελλάδα ολόκληρη μια κολυμπήθρα. / Απ’ άκρια σ’ ακρια γίνονται βαφτίσια. / Φτάνει και μια μονάχα δαχτυλήθρα, / τα «στραβά» μας βαπτισθούνε σε «ίσια». Skimmed the first volume of Ritsos’s nine-volume prose set Εικονοστάσιο ανώνυμων αγίων. Disappointing. Short meditations with none of the imagistic power and pungency of his poetry. I continued to read in Kazantzakis’s Odyssey, Books VII–VIII. So much stuffing and blather. If only he’d had an Ezra Pound to use the blue pencil! Went with Daphne and Phil and Chrysanthi to the Λευκός Πύργος museum. Disappointing. The parapet is closed. Exhibit spaces had a miscellany. The inside of the structure has none of the raw grandeur of the Koules in Iraklio. Michael Herzfeld called from the airport on the way back to Crete. I’d missed him in Rethymno and he missed me in Salonika. We were in Yanina when he gave his lecture a few days ago. Too bad. He also missed Bo-Lennart and Anita Eklund for the same reason.

Sunday, May 31, 1987

Read Christos’s long article on Kazantzakis’s Prometheus trilogy and wrote him a long letter à propos. He is a good writer: so lucid. And he has definite ideas. So it’s so nice to see something by him in print. The Sikelianos piece I hope eventually to translate for JMGS.

Last night Nikos took Daphne and Phil to a bouzouki taverna, whereupon in walked Τάκης, recognized Daphne (so Daphne thought) and came over with hugs and jollity. Today at Odysseas’s house we learned what actually happened, which is very funny. Takis is a womanizer. He walked into the taverna, saw a beautiful woman in the corner, said to himself, “I’ve got to talk to that babe!” went closer, saw Nikos sitting next to her, and then thought to himself, “Damn it to hell, it’s that bum Nikos, and the babe must be Daphne, my cousin!” Anyway, after that he still said hello, and promises to take her out to a dancing taverna tonight with Stavros and Toula.

Spent the day fulfilling obligations (then read a canto of Kazantzakis’s increasingly tiresome Odyssey). To Αγία Τριάδα μεσημέρι, to lunch with Nikos, Kostas, Lola. Home on the bus. Then Dimitris Yiannakos visited to see Daphne. I found him insufferable. A compulsive talker and loudmouth; knows everything. You can’t contradict him and have a discussion. Then one hour to get to Κολοκοτρώνη to visit Odysseas, Eleni, and Yiayia, who are always so very nice. Stavros and Toula came later. They’re even nicer. Spaghetti supper at midnight. Walked all the way home. Daphne’s Greek is not bad. She forgets words but has a good sense of grammar. She’s delighted with her Let’s Go job this summer. Also is pleased to see things in Greece (e.g., αγγεία in the museum this morning) that she has studied in class. Very eager to return to the Parthenon after having studied it in such detail. Phil is a classics major but is going to go to law school. We’re teasing him about his ancient Greek pronunciation. His father is Professor of Religion at Florida State and likes Kazantzakis.

Monday, June 1, 1987

Supper with Vouli, Norman Gilbertson, Tad Lansdale, Joann Ryding (from the Farm School), Daphne, Phil, Κυρά Κούλα, Κυρά Στέλλα. Ι got Norman to talk at length about the girls’ school. Joice Loch founded it originally as a refuge for tubercular girls but after a year she realized that an educational program would be needed and it became a school. Joice and Sydney had met in Quaker relief work in Poland in the first world war. Then they gravitated to Greece, settled in the Πύργο in Ουρανούπολη. After Hitler invaded Poland, she helped Polish refugees escaping via Greece and Turkey. Norman and Doreen came right after liberation, sponsored by Friends Service Council but assigned to UNRRA. Full of stories about escapades, close escapes, especially during the civil war. The girls were brought down each night to sleep in the Lansdales’ house, behind barbed wire. He remembers the extraordinary emotion when the boys kidnapped by the αντάρτες returned to the school. As each entered, the assembled staff and other students cheered, tears streaming down their faces. He was very negative about the communists, having experienced the horror of the παιδομάζεμα. Said that Gage’s book Eleni all rang true. Also told stories about Charles Lindsay, who was a terror—egotistic, adolescent, spoiled, arrogant. When Norman told him that one had to adjust to Greek ways, he replied, “No, Greece will adjust to my ways!” (Cf. Stephen Dedalus.)

Tuesday, June 2, 1987

To RR station with Daphne and Phil. Very little sleep. They took the 8:00 a.m. to Athens. Such memories from that station! In the evening Daphne telephoned to say they’d had a splendid trip, talking the whole way in Greek with various people. Now happily installed in Ξενοδοχείο Αχιλλέας. They witnessed a bit of the Νέα Δημοκρατία rally that I saw on television: Mitsotakis in the rain before hundreds of thousands. Θέλουμε αμέσως εκλογές! Huge boos whenever he mentioned Κύριος Ανδρέας Παπανδρέου. . . . Chrysanthi went out to have a facial treatment. I stayed home and read Kazantzakis’s Odyssey (now in Canto XII). It’s so bloated, so self-indulgent, so . . . awful! Yet I plough on.

Wednesday, June 3, 1987

Halfway through Canto XV. XIII is the worst of the lot. XIV and XV are better—very imaginative. . . . Βασίλης Σολιόπουλος (Stavros’s brother) brought the cassettes of my two interviews on ERT short wave. They’ll be broadcast to Europe and America—one on Kazantzakis, the other on Greek immigrants in America and Modern Greek studies in the USA. I expected much worse, and actually was rather pleased at what I heard, although of course my accent is heavy. But there were few χοντρά λάθη, damaging hesitations, etc. By and large, the discourse flowed satisfactorily.

Thursday, June 4, 1987

A quiet day. Hot. Finished Canto XVI of the Odyssey and am pleased to be able to stop for now. It’s insufferable, a bloated self-indulgent monster, out of control. If it were cut to ⅓ the size it might have some strength, but even then the defects would abound. The “naturalistic” part is the worst of all. No characterization; no attempt at believable plotting. Dei ex machina always descending. In the “City” he decrees free love, communal raising of children, no family life, and a few pages later speaks of married couples, forgetting. The transmutation from activist in Canto XV to ascetic in Canto XVI takes place instantaneously: no development, no strain. . . . Why am I wasting months of my life with this όγκος?

Coincidentally, read Kordatos’s very negative chapter on Kazantzakis this evening. He calls a spade a spade. Τι νόημα βγαίνει από την «Οδύσεια» του Καζαντζάκη; Γιατί έγραψε τόσες χιλιάδες στίχους; Ποια είναι η κεντρική του ιδέα; Απαντήσεις δε μπορούν να δοθούν, γιατί το ποίημα αυτό δεν έχει αρχή και τέλος. Αν ο Καζαντζάκης έγραψε το έπος τούτο για να εκφράσει έμμεσα τις ιδέες του, την κοσμοθεωρία του—ή το «δράμα του ανθρώπου»—δεν το πέτυχε. Και ο πιο καλοπροαίρετος αναγνώστης δε μπορεί να βρει το νήμα των διανοημάτων του. . . . Η «Οδύσεια» του είναι δυσνόητη και ακαταλαβίστικη. . . . Φαντάστηκε τον εαυτό του Δάντη. Όμως μπροστά στο γίγαντα της Φλωρεντίας αυτός είναι ένας νάνος. (Vol. 2, p. 566, 1983 reprint of Ιστορία της νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας.)

Spent a few hours in the Central Library of Α.Π.Θ. using the Who’s Who 1979 for people mentioned in the index of the 400 Letters. . . . Mrs. Χατζή telephoned from Athens. She’s preparing 40+ letters to Elli Lambridi for publication. Will send me a copy. If I get these plus the 72 to Rousopoulou, I’ll have collected about 600 items as a result of this trip. Not bad. . . . Sore throat suddenly. Tired. First illness so far, except for stomach. But I also have a recurring numbness in the right leg, like the foot going to sleep. Some circulatory problem perhaps. Must see Gerber about this when we return. . . . Lola finished marking her exams. Came looking refreshed, in a new spring suit. So nice to see Lola and Chrysanthi together so regularly.

Friday, June 5, 1987

Sick. First time, except for stomach. Bad throat. Stayed at home all day. It got worse. Started the continuation of the Odyssey chapter after making extensive charts. In the evening Bob Jones and Dimitris Doutis came for “tea.” Chrysanthi burned the πίτες she’d bought, but no matter. Good conversation in English. Jones a very inventive teacher. I got lots of ideas for English 5, which I’ve filed in the “Dartmouth” file. Mail today indicates that David Kastan is leaving the department; probably appointed to Columbia. If so, it’s strange, because he has not distinguished himself via publication, to be sure. Τα μέσα, τα μέσα . . .!

Saturday, June 6, 1987

Still sick. No temperature, though. Chrysanthi got me to gargle with raki. I like that. Made some headway on the Odyssey chapter, slowly. Evening: to the apartment of Βασίλης και Μερσίνη Σολιόπουλος, Stavros’s brother. Journalist for Athenian newspaper Akropolis, the sad remnant of Gavriilidis’s once great paper. Lovely people. He returned from Russia when he was five years old. Showed a photo of his father in αντάρτης uniform, 25 years old, looking 18, big smile. How could he have known what would follow? Twenty years in Tashkent. The hardest thing was to adjust from Tashkent, a sophisticated city with all the conveniences, to their village with fifty houses and no road in winter. But Yiayia wanted to die in Greece. Vasilis remembers the exiles in Tashkent, when they heard a Σοφία Βέμβω record, shedding huge tears. Such was the nostalgia, although logically they were much better off in Russia. No one had any problem earning a living. Education was superior, etc. They also had a much higher standard of living. When they returned with their TV set and refrigerator, they brought them to a village with no electricity—electricity didn’t come until around 1969 επί χούντας. Vasilis is doing radio programs on the side (such as my interview). He likes oral history, λαογραφία. Has one text that sounds like a story by Γιώργος Βιζυηνός, about a Greek girl being abducted by two Turks in order to place her in the Aga’s harem. About a village with no καφενείο, where every Sunday everyone came to the square and danced, singing the music since there were no instruments. Such a nice man, αυτοδίδακτος like his brother. Reads! Had the diplomatic memoirs of Άγγελος Βλάχος. We talked four hours straight without sensing the passage of time.

Sunday, June 7, 1987

Writing. Throat better. Stomach still a bit unsettled. In the evening, George and Efthymoula: I can’t stand her; gives me the creeps. She wants to come to America for a month! Θεός φυλάξει! Walked in Panorama. George melancholy and distraught because of Andreas, and rightfully so. Told me he feels totally powerless. All he can do is suffer silently. Actually, Andreas took his first exam and even talked a little afterwards. Maybe the whole thing will end on the 26th, after the last exam. If not, there’s real trouble ahead. For the moment, a psychiatrist advised George to humor the boy and not pester him about eating, talking, etc.—my advice, too.

Monday, June 8, 1987

George telephoned. Had terrible pains all night. Couldn’t sleep. Does he have an ulcer? That boy is destroying him. Doctor gave him a sedative.

Daphne called. She, Phil, and Greg are in a swell villa on Poros, taking side trips to Hydra, Galata, etc. She’s speaking lots of Greek and getting to know people already. How nice!

Toula and Stavros came, and we did a very strange thing for Greece: stayed home. Sat on the balcony and talked from 9:00 until 1:00 a.m.

Tuesday, June 9, 1987

George frantic. Convinced that Andreas is going to commit suicide. Efthymoula went to Athens to speak to the girlfriend of five years’ standing whose defection may be the major cause of Andreas’s depression. George himself will go again today to the psychiatrist. Everyone feels helpless.

Walked to Tiffany’s to have supper with Odysseas and Eleni. On the way saw a sad sight. Children here, after their exams, tear up their textbooks and scatter the pages in the street. I saw scattered everywhere half-pages from Homer’s Odyssey, the Kazantzakis-Kakridis translation. Kakridis was so happy that his book was being used. But do students value Homer??

Sore throat has returned.

Wednesday, June 10, 1987

Girlfriend telephoned Andreas. She’s coming tomorrow. Andreas resurrected. Shaved, showed interest in European basketball championships. Apparently he drove the girl away by demanding she be subservient. He plays the agha and wants a harem. . . . Dia called. How I enjoy talking to her! Was just ready to write on Heidegger and Kazantzakis when George and Efthymoula came. Alas! Sat in pizza place on α main street. Deafening noise from traffic and youths celebrating Greece’s entry into the quarter finals in basketball. Urbanized Greece can be a nightmare, especially in summer, when you sit outside.

Thursday, June 11, 1987

I think we’re both ready to go home. Chrysanthi unconsciously answers me in English when I speak Greek. I’m slowed down by the heat and humidity. No breeze these days. Went early to Α.Π.Θ. Central Library to finish with the Who’s Who. Found the article that Kazantzakis read with such amazement on Heidegger, and by accident a useful article by George Theotokas explaining why Σπύρος Μελάς was such a bastard. Am trying to apply phenomenological ontology to the Odyssey to prove that it’s not nihilistic. Good luck! . . . Evening: Mimis and Aglaïa Lypourlis plus Ξενοφών και Μαρία Κοκόλης. A good party. Lively talk and lots of food, even ice cream. Learned more about the ins and outs of dealing with a Ministry of Education, which people in Mimis’s position need to do constantly. Turns out that Κοκόλης has been in Melbourne. He’s a friend of John Burke’s. He’s lively and cultivated. They say that the group in Athens is insufferable. Toadies, crypto-καθαρευουσιάνοι, etc. When they were consulted by Tritsis about reintroducing ancient Greek into the gymnasium, they of course agreed, with histrionic approbation: Κύριε Υπουργέ, γράφετε ιστορία! Mimis thinks the whole plan insane. The arguments are exactly the same as used by Kazantzakis in 1909 or 1910. We go round in circles.

Friday, June 12, 1987

Keith Dickey, a former student of mine and Chrysanthi’s, now doing a Ph.D. in classical archeology at Bryn Mawr, came to lunch with his exquisite Greek girlfriend, Natalia, who graduated Thessaloniki in archeology and now is also at Bryn Mawr. Why can’t Alec and Leander find girls like this? That special Greek beauty. Quiet; lots of personality. Keith will be Jerry Rutter’s assistant at the digs in Nemea.

Evening. I watched the whole of Greece vs. Yugoslavia in the semifinals of the Euro basket. Greece in early lead, then Yugoslavia ten points ahead at the half, then Greece crept up, two points difference two points ahead, then seven, and they won! Pandemonium. Θρίαμβος! Αποθέωση ! shouted the announcer. Everyone in Greece was watching on TV, apparently. Every time Greece sunk a basket huge shouts resounded down Βιζύης-Βύζαντος. City deserted; no traffic. But what bad sports the audience in the stadium is: booed and hissed every time Yugoslavia got the ball. Afterwards the whole city poured out into the streets, including me, and Chrysanthi, who was at Vouli’s. We met at the Kamára. Streams of traffic in both directions on Egnatia all horns ablaze, flags waving from windows. Scooters buzzing with drivers draped in Greek flag, horns blasting. Groups of youths singing cheers off key. Poor little Greece! So insignificant on the world scene, and everyone knows it. So the semifinals in Euro basket are a huge psychodrama counteracting inferiority. Δεν είμαστε μια υπερδύναμη, είπε ένας παίχτης ύστερα, σε συνέντευση, αλλά νά: βάλαμε κάτω τις υπερδυνάμεις. I can begin to understand now what Greece must have been like during the Αλβανικά. That “electricity” that everyone writes about.

Something else in the Greek character, connected I suppose with this same feeling of inferiority: the inability to admit a fault, even an inconsequential one; the way it is covered by evasion. Vouli had invited us both tonight, but then something came up and she had to go elsewhere at 9:00 o’clock, meaning that Chrysanthi could go early but that I couldn’t go after my work. When we spoke on the telephone, Vouli couldn’t tell me this straightforwardly: θα τηλεφωνηθούμε, etc. The same with the museum at Varvari: no one, including Anemoyannis, said outright that there were no archives. Instead: you’ll have to get permission from Patroklos Stavrou. And Stavrou: “You’re seeking too much,” shifting the blame to me. Chrysanthi does the same all the time. I think it’s a national character trait.

Saturday, June 13, 1987

Very very hot. No breeze. Lots of humidity. Getting close to the end of the Odyssey chapter. With luck will finish tomorrow. . . . In the evening went to Anatolia College (how beautiful!) to a barbecue, invited by Γιάννης Κολιόπουλος and his wife; she works at the American Center library. Lots of professors from the Φιλοσοφική Σχολή—historians, philosophers. McGrews. American girl married to Professor Kazazis; Ted Couloumbis’s wife. Most had studied in the U.S. As Koliopoulos said, Salonika is small, and we’re able to see our friends all the time. It seems like a circle of interesting and interested intellectuals. At my table, at any rate, the conversation was unforced, about ideas, facts, analysis. Fun! And I can do this now in Greek without strain, provided people speak clearly and don’t lapse into the half-pronounced words of the “inner circle” language. Fortunately, I’ve been keeping a little notebook in which I write down new vocabulary. Invariably when I add a word, I hear it a day or two later, and of course then recognize and understand it. Tonight that happened with επενδύσεις. Also, I was able to use επέτειος correctly, with a feminine article.

Sunday, June 14, 1987

In the morning, finished my Odyssey chapter. 202 A4 pages. This leaves only chapter 1, and volume 1 will be ready. Started revising. So far so good: it’s logical. In the afternoon, Eurobasket finals between Greece and the USSR. An extraordinary game. Greece behind near the end, in the last minute tied the score. The Soviets scored a basket with one second to go, but this was ruled out because of a foul. So they went into overtime. Again the Soviets led until just near the end, when the Greeks tied the score again. With 36 seconds to go, a Greek was fouled. Everything then depended on him. He sank both shots! They won! The miracle-worker was Nick Gallis, born in New Jersey! Also the giant Φασούλας, so good on the rebounds. His Russian counterpart, 7 feet 2 inches high, looked like an overgrown caveman. As the announcer kept repeating, it was David against Goliath, a nation with 8½ million against one with 250 million (at least). Papandreou and Sartzetakis were there; they hugged and kissed all the players afterwards. Yannakis, the captain, raised the bowl high in triumph after it was awarded, and kissed it. The crowd ecstatic. Dancing in Omonoia Square. . . . Little Greece had won its place on an international scale. . . . Strange: when America placed a man on the moon, no one went out into the streets to celebrate.

Monday, June 15, 1987

Working on the second draft. Very slow now. Dimitris Doutis brought me an article of his to vet. Nice letter from Kimon Friar, gloating because a 31-year-old (male) has agreed to be his “secretary.” The old goat! Περίπατο στην παραλία το βράδυ με το Γεώργο και την Ευθυμούλα. Andreas threw all his poetry into the trash. His girlfriend came, which perked him up a bit, but he scarcely paid attention to her. George’s great uneasiness continues.

Tuesday, June 16, 1987

Beastly hot all day. How to work? But I’m up to page 93 on the second reading. To supper in Panorama with Dimitris and Ruth Gounelas. Sweet child: Angelica. He’s hoping to write on Kazantzakis’s existentialism in Κωμωδία. I want to send him the Heideggerian analysis I’ve been doing of the Odyssey. Talked about the interesting errors in the Greek translation of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Wednesday, June 17, 1987

Hooray! The heat wave is over. This morning: breeze. Thermometer down to 25° C. . . . Norman Gilbertson invited us for dinner at the Χάρκας fish tavern in Νέα Σμύρνη, with Vouli. And Glen Grant and his wife Gail. Glen is on the Farm School board and heading the search for Brace’s successor. Also was for five years an assistant to Mickey Heyman at Berkeley. Very small world. They’ve excluded Greek-Americans (unofficially) from consideration because they want someone who can appeal to the Protestant establishment that has always been the schools’ philanthropic base in the U.S. Norman is charming. Runs a health-food store in Brussels. . . . Duncan Rice, dean at NYU, wrote about the Onassis Center. I recommended Speros Vryonis and Mike Keeley for the directorship.

Thursday, June 18, 1987

Parties continue. To Titika and Bill McGrew’s for dinner with Bill and Elizabeth McNeill. How nice to see them again after our work together on JMGS! Also Koliopouloses, Ted Couloumbis and wife, and a Mr.?, a trustee of Anatolia. Ted is flourishing in Salonika. McNeill is writing a biography of Arnold Toynbee and is on the Christopher Columbus 500 anniversary celebration commission, which already has Italian- and Spanish-Americans squabbling. Thankfully no one is trying to claim CC was a Greek! Bill explained Toynbee’s sudden rise to fame. The agent was Henry Luce, who in the 1940s felt that Toynbee’s view of history explained why the twentieth century was “destined” to be the American century. So he put him on the cover of Time, etc., and that started the snowball rolling. Then a few decades later Toynbee caught on in Japan because the conservatives found him the only possible answer to Marxism. Bill wasn’t much interested in my latest Toynbee enthusiasm: Toynbee’s claim that the West’s ecological mess derives from Judeo-Christianity and therefore we should return to Paganism. His hero: Gemistos Plethon. And mine! The problem with Plethon, says Bill, i.e., the problem for a historian, is that his major work was destroyed. Bill did write about him in his book on Venice, however. . . . Elizabeth, it turns out, was in the first USIS team in Greece, in November 1944, and had to be shipped back to Egypt during the Δεκεμβριανά. Bill was here then, right after liberation, when the αντάρτες were everywhere in Salonika wearing German uniforms with the Nazi insignia ripped off. He remembers Harold Reed, too.

Friday, June 19, 1987

Dinner again. Λένα και Αντώνης Δασκόπουλος, parents of our Dartmouth student, Δημήτρης. Pleasant. Caviar, shrimp, the works! Nice prelude with their sister and brother-in-law. She’d heard my radio interview while riding in a taxi. Α Κύριος Αγάπης there; math teacher at Anatolia. Andonis held forth on how awful the Soviet Union is. And it does seem awful from such stories. At the end, very sincerely, they told us how touched and pleased they were to get to know us because for them we represented the care and level of culture to which they had sent their son. How nice! I returned the complement: we see lovely children with good values, good training, etc., and rarely get to know the parents and family environment that produced them. They were touched.

Saturday, June 20, 1987

Amazingly, we went nowhere. I even read a little after supper. Αγαθόν το εξομολογείσθαι, a journalistic collection of the writings of Γιάννης Τσαρούχης on art and architecture. He’s rather good on neoclassic houses and the horror of contemporary Athens and Piraeus, which he rightly attributes not to government neglect but to the greed and philistinism of the άρχουσα τάξη. Vouli gave me the book. Stylianos telephoned from Athens. Says that the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue went well this year. Met someone who’d heard my lecture in Chicago. We’ll see him on June 30.

Sunday, June 21, 1987

Telephoned Mother. All’s well. Telephoned farm. Leander is visiting James McBride but Tod Angstrom answered, a friend from Oberlin days. Leander goes to Kinhaven tomorrow. I reached page 189 on the second draft. George and Efthymoula came at night but there was a μπόρα—rained cats and dogs and we didn’t go anywhere. She’s afraid of getting her hair wet. George thinks that Archbishop Iakovos is conspiring with Mitsotakis and King Constantine and the Turks to have himself elevated to the Patriarchate. And that if Mitsotakis is elected he’ll restore the monarchy. Θα δούμε . . . Ο Στυλιανός has an article in Βήμα about the Junta and everything else, very journalistic. Why do good minds prostitute themselves? Chrysanthi began packing. A good sign.

Why is George so furious at all “fascists,” δεξιοί, etc.? I think it’s maybe because he of course fought on the side of the δεξιοί in the civil war while others took to the mountains first in the resistance and then in the εμφύλιο. All this “black-baiting” is perhaps an unconscious compensation now for that guilt. All his real values are totally bourgeois, at least as evidenced outwardly by his apartment, the way he raised his children, etc. Or perhaps this is all his caving in to Efthymoula.

Monday, June 22, 1987

Hooray! Finished the second draft. We’ll put it on the computer now, in America, and see.

Lola came in the morning. George telephoned. They spoke, and soon a furious argument blew up. What a family! The central villain seems to be Efthymoula, who is an egotistical snob who has ruined George’s life and poisoned the family relations. Everyone views her children’s behavior as nemesis she well deserves, but why should George suffer too? Chrysanthi explained all this at length, and also disputed my analysis of George’s “black-baiting,” saying it has more to do with Efthymoula: he can’t hit out at her, so . . . Also, during the war he was suspected by the king’s forces and actually imprisoned, never given a gun, etc. The problem is that Efthymoula considers Odysseas and Eleni peasants and won’t speak to them. Odd, because Eleni is a real aristocrat compared to Efthymoula. The problem is, you can’t talk to her. She knows everything in advance; she doesn’t listen, doesn’t discuss. Her children are just like her.

Read and vetted Dimitris Doutis’s article on Henry Miller’s view of Greece, which JMGS rejected—correctly.

To Panorama with Zisis and Ritsa. Their son won δρ 36,000,000 in the λαχείο, and has treated them to a trip to Singapore.

Tuesday, June 23, 1987

Alec telephoned from Athens at 7:00 a.m. Chrysanthi went to the airport to meet him. He arrived looking wonderful, loaded with two violins (the second delivered into his hands at Jakarta airport by the young violin-maker who gave it to him as a gift). Spent three or four days in Bangkok and environs with a girlfriend (!), and three or four days in Singapore, before arriving here. Full of anecdotes and information about life in the East. Great respect for Buddhism in Thailand, how all the youths shave their heads and beg for three months while receiving instructions in their religion. Loves the quiet of the East. People don’t shout. We talked continually all day exclusively in Greek (he does so well!). Odysseus came. Then George and Efthymoula, and we all went out to Πλατεία Ναβαρίνο. But we started το μεσημέρι just Alec, us, and Vouli at Tiffany’s.

Wednesday, June 24, 1987

Alec: talk talk talk. How good that I finished my Odyssey chapter! This week will be a vacation, more or less. . . . Started reading the 562 letters to Γιανίδης, Δραγούμης, Εφταλιώτης, Παλαμάς, Πάλλης, Ταγκόπουλος, Ψυχάρης, in order to write a review. Βράδυ: στο Χάρκας ψαροταβέρνα by the sea with George and Efthymoula and their friends Τούλης και Μανώ Δημητριάδης, who’ll come to America with them. Planned the dates and itinerary of their trip: mid-September. God help us! . . . To the αγορά in the morning with Kostas to wholesale and retail jewelers to buy an anniversary present for Chrysanthi. Very greasy people.

Thursday, July 25, 1987

Mailed presents to seven people: copies of my books. Τελειώνουμε. Takis took Alec στα μπουζούκια το βράδυ. Returned at 4:00 a.m. Odysseas came to share last meal; he goes to Καρπονήσι later today. Was supposed to get a diploma as participant in the αντίσταση ως παρτισάνος tomorrow, but the ceremony was postponed until July. Too bad. We’d planned to go, even though George warned me not to, since, he said, the CIA would be everywhere and they’d know I was there. (Sideline: in Greece, Archbishop Iakovos is known as SIAKOVOS, i.e., CIAkovos.) Odysseas gave Chrysanthi δρ 10,000—insisted—to buy herself a present. I learned he’d given Daphne 5,000. Τι να κάνουμε; Έτσι I had to reveal my secret necklace, in case she wanted to exchange it for something more expensive.

Spent the evening with Ξενοφάντας και Μαρία Κοκόλης at their apartment and then at Πλατεία Ναβαρίνο. Maria presented me with yet another Kazantzakis letter, a note to Manolis Triandafyllidis re: Σύλλογος Δημοτικιστών ο Σολωμός. Their lovely daughter, Alexandra, age 13. As Henry Miller says (in Doutis’s article, which I vetted the other day), Greek women have “something”: an old world or even primitive γοητεία that new world types lack completely. Little Alexandra was 100% feminine already, yet also a budding intellectual. Talked four hours non-stop without difficulty. Great Greece! We’ll miss it. But a year here and I’d weigh 175. Food and socializing go together. Gypsy boys played clarion and drum: haunting oriental melodies. We walked home and fell exhausted into bed at 1:00 a.m.

Friday, June 26, 1987

Long, nice talk with Alec in the morning. He’s open and communicative about his alopecia, but no one knows what to do, really. By last February he had grown lots of hair, but then it all fell out again. . . . In the afternoon, went to the circus. Italian. Elephants, lion-tiger tamer, chimps, trained dogs, jugglers, acrobats galore, stunts on horseback, beautiful half-naked women on trapezes. Passatempo, grilled corn on the cob. Audience of children, parents, παππούδες. Then Alec went to Dimitris and Tilda. She was “tired,” so the two men went out together and ate κοκορέτσι. Chrysanthi and I went to Eleni Tsantsanoglou. Moullas, Aglaïa, Κυπ. Τσαντσάνογλου (classics). Moullas told me about Ritsos’s revisions: the poems we see in Ποιήματα are commonly revised versions of the original publications, but always have the dates only of the original publications. Scholars beware! To bed at 2:00 a.m.

Saturday, June 27, 1987

Up at 7:00 a.m. Chrysanthi to “facial treatment.” Alec and Takis to Halkidiki: μπάνιο. Finished review of the demoticists’ letters. In the evening: to Θέατρο Δάσος to see an epitheorisi with George and Efthymoula: Σκουπίδια. Squirmed on the concrete seat for 3½ hours. Μέτριο πολύ. Satire of working class μισέρια in Athens. After Flanders and Swann, nothing pleases any more. George confided what has been obvious all along: that he doesn’t want to come to America in September, really, because of Andreas. Πολύ σωστά. Said the trip is in fulfillment of what his parents never did: travel to see how their daughter lives. Revealed that the other couple really aren’t his friends. The man is δεξιός, κ.τ.λ. Λυπηρό. The other day when Odysseas was here with George and told about the ceremony of award for being a partisan, George’s immediate response was, “Why didn’t they invite me?” I think he is inventing his past. . . . Dimitris telephoned to invite us for lunch tomorrow with Tilda, after 3½ months. We refused. Feeling strange about the trip home on Wednesday. Will we adjust back to American life? Of course we will—and quickly. That is our way. Yet we really have assumed different bodily and psychical rhythms (such as eating supper at 11:30 p.m., like tonight).

Sunday, June 28, 1987

Re-read my “Orestes’ Cow” article and liked it. Carman Karka wants it for reprinting in a journal issue devoted to Ritsos. I’ll put it on the computer this summer. Re-read the poem itself partially on the bus to Αγία Τριάδα. Waterfront still rather nice although they say the sea is polluted. Children swimming; very few adults. Lunch with Kostas, Lola, Nikos, and Joanna, Nikos’s cousin, a first-year student in forestry and ecology. Goodbyes. Interlude of a few hours, then out for pizza with George and Efthymoula, Dimitris, and Tilda. She actually was pleasant. Very sophisticated, but stuck-up. Goodbyes. We’re disengaging. Alec returned late, after a weekend of Halkidiki with Takis, Stavros, and Toula. I started looking at Chapter 1 of my Kazantzakis and Politics—the old Panichas article, which has to be joined now with the Nietzsche article plus an explanation of Bergson, etc.

Monday, June 29, 1987

Started revising the Panichas article, which will become Chapter 1 of my Volume 1. Slow going. I’m removing all the excessive adjectives. Ammerman and Doutis called to say goodbye. Doutis very appreciative regarding my vetting of his Henry Miller article. Είναι η μέρα των Αγίων Παύλου και Πέτρου. Lola brought a present. Κυρά Κούλα τηλεφώνησε Χρόνια πολλά. Long talk with Κα Θεοδώρα, who liked my Kazantzakis pamphlet. Maria Kokoli telephoned with more data for Kazantzakis’s note to Triandafyllidis. Alec spent the evening with Nikos. I met Chrysanthi at the Kamára. Πιναϊρλή with Lola and Kostas. Nine telephone calls in the evening while I was trying to work.

Tuesday, June 30, 1987

Chrysanthi ready to return to the U.S. after spending two hours in the bank because they didn’t have any money. (We wanted to give Alec drachmas; he’s going to fly to Iraklio to spend a few days with Annie Camp and Jacques Martin.) . . . Nice evening, the final one, with Vouli and Στυλιανός Χαρκιανάκης at Χάρκας Ψαροταβέρνα. Stylianos surprised us by his enthusiasm for the Turks. What progress, diplomatic cleverness (playing U.S. off against Russia), good manners, etc. He told us about the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, which went well this year. The basis agreed upon is that Christ’s churches are like the different persons—υποστάσεις—of the Triune Monada that is God: equally different yet at the same time mysteriously all the same, and part of God. The problem, however, is: once you’ve gotten this far, how can you justify the pope? They’ll worry about that next year. He is delighted with the theological school that is now operating in Sydney. Also, his great pleasure, he says, is in convincing couples bound on divorce to try living together again. It’s like building a new church, he says. The sad news is the politicization of the Greek programs in the universities in Australia. (So what else is new?!) As for Greece itself, he feels that it is in deep crisis spiritually, morally, not to mention economically. Too rapid urbanization and “modernization,” I suggested. We also talked about Kazantzakis’s nihilism or non-nihilism; he agreed that Prevelakis overstated the case but I think he still sides with Prevelakis. And of course we talked about mutual friends in Australia and here. A nice final evening.

Wednesday, July 1, 1987

Thessaloniki–Frankfort–NYC–Boston

Stavros took us to the airport in his father’s pick-up. Waited an hour on line before Olympic employees showed up. George, Efthymoula, Toula, Alec, Vouli came to say goodbye. George very low; told Chrysanthi he had a feeling he’d never see her again. And he certainly won’t come to the U.S. in September because of Andreas. He also once watched Alec and me talking as “friends” and told Chrysanthi that he never had that pleasure with his children. Sad. . . . Flight one hour late. Chaotic. No reserved seats. Sit wherever you want. Crew mute, robot-like, incommunicative. Αίσχος. Arrived Frankfort late. PanAm said we’d have to stand by. Overbooking. We waited and waited; at the last moment were allowed to board, placed in business class and offered a glass of champagne. OK! Very tired. I brought work to do, but no appetite. However, it was nice to get out of Greece. Spoiled on the way back: lobster or filet mignon for dinner. Wide seats; smiling hostesses. Star Trek movie, a brilliant satire on American life. More chaos at JFK but we finally got to our small prop-driven plane for Boston, together with fourteen teenagers from Finland, all smiling and talkative (Leander had to meet the melancholy type). Stifling heat. Daphne at the airport. Lovely. Upbeat. We deposited our luggage at the Friends Center, saw Kesaya, who’s finally graduated from Harvard Divinity School. Went off for a late supper on Church Street. What a contrast between Cambridge and Greece! Everything is so neat, manicured, ordered. Daphne in fine form. Exhausted; to bed about 6:00 a.m. body-time.

July 2, 1987

Cambridge–Hanover

Croissants with Daphne and Lori in their apartment on Frost Street. Then to Hanover in a rental car. Coffee at Hojos in Manchester. Nice to reestablish the old rituals. Found Andy Rangell in our house, which doesn’t look too awful. Attended to necessities: picking up tapes at UPNE; bank; checking ORC copy at registar’s; post office, etc. Then to Yiayia and Pappou. Mother overjoyed to see us. Pappous looking the same, reasonably alert, but very short attention span. Supper in Lander’s. Slept at the Friends Meeting. Hugh and Rhea have adopted twins about six weeks old.

July 3, 1987

Hanover

Woke at 5:00 a.m. Still on the old schedule, body-time. Morning in the office. Mail. Saw Darrel, Brenda. Lunch at the Greens with Mother. All the familiar faces. Life goes on. We planned to take Mother out for dinner for her 60th anniversary, but she suggested wheeling Pappou into her apartment and bringing Chinese food in. This was a great success. Pappous ate with relish and was patient.

July 4, 1987

to Riparius

Saw deer grazing by my office as we arrived. Everything looking good, thanks to Leander. Piano plays! How strange to be here after Greece! Fran, Irv, Al, and Mary came in the afternoon and we went there for supper. It’s started. We skipped the fireworks.

July 5, 1987

Al and I played flute and piano. Bach. He’s getting better and better; I’m getting worse and worse. Can no longer blame the piano for missed notes. I’m getting my office set up. Must start tomorrow revising the Scribner’s version of my Kazantzakis pamphlet, which has been copyedited to death, scholastically.

Tuesday, July 7, 1987

Visit from Art and Chris with little Arthur. Art is involved in town politics, opposing James Mead’s autocratic methods. A citizens’ group now attends Town Board meetings. Our taxes went up 130%! Art foresees condominium developments everywhere, soaring land prices, etc. Waddell Road will probably be widened and paved. We’ve had 37 years of peace, but how many more? All because of skiing. North Creek is about to become a huge ski center.

Wednesday, July 8, 1987

Working very poorly. Hot. Muggy. Tired. Haven’t got a routine yet. I worked so remarkably well in Greece. But the new routine will come. The Kazantzakis Scribner’s revision is torture.

Very bad news today: Noye Johnson has cancer of the prostate and elsewhere. Bad. Undergoing chemotherapy. This is why I’m so eager to publish my Kazantzakis book. After age 50 we all live on sufferance.

As solace, went to Saratoga to the ballet: Swan Lake, Ravel Piano Concerto, Fanfare (Britten’s child’s guide to the orchestra). Marvelous sets and costumes. Dancing always professional, but never really exciting. Mel and Herb Goertz were sitting directly in front of us. She’s now a peace activist.

Thursday, July 9, 1987

Finished the damned Scribner MS except for the bibliography and some checking of facts. 90+ degrees. Oppressive. I went for my first swim in the pond. Supper with Shapiros. Chrysanthi using us as guinea pigs for the new dishes she learned in Greece. But they don’t taste the same here.

Saturday, July 11, 1987

Jacques and Hilda Grunblatt for supper. Jacques’ memoirs of the Spanish Civil War are anthologized, excerpts only, in a memorial volume. Not very literary, I’m afraid, but they document what happened. It’s a miracle he’s alive: he survived the war, then he escaped from the internment camp in France (where the Nazis would have found him otherwise), then he managed to get out of Vichy France via Casablanca. Said that the real reason behind the swimming pond fiasco in North Creek was Sterling Goodspeed’s greed. Without the pond, ORDA must draw water in a pipeline on land that Goodspeed sold to them. Son Jesse is now in Kenya for two years.

Sunday, July 12, 1987

Visit from Sherman Frasier—toothless, high blood pressure, disabled, but chipper. I always find him intelligent and sensitive. He spoke of the beauty of Adirondack views: mountains and valleys, color in the fall. Red Barden is dead; Sherman’s colored neighbor is dead. But Freddie is back in the area, also disabled, living on the corner of Route 9 and the Igernia Road. We remembered the Waddell Farm before the house burned down. Sherm lived for a while in the red blacksmith’s shop before that collapsed. What a beautiful place! Now it’s a tangled jungle.

Monday, July 13, 1987

Heat continues. 90 and 95 and even 100 in the sun. Humidity. I’ve been pruning the yellow birch at my office. Prune—orange shellac—tar. A healthy new oak is thriving in back of the lean-to. Heard a deer in the woods. Snorting and then galloping; sounded like a horse. Swimming every day in this heat. The first day I could hardly do two strokes. Each day more. Water warm: like a bathtub. Working on 1st chapter. Expanding the Panichas piece. Found the typescript for that, dated Riparius 1968. Nineteen years ago. And I’m still working on the same damned stuff. Chrysanthi is beginning to index the letters; I think she can manage that.

Visit from three men from Niagara Mohawk re: the 115 KV power line. Yes, it’s coming through. They’re approaching Chestertown at the moment. Will be working here next fall and winter. Told me that the magnetic field for 115 KV is only two feet; no danger. I worry that they’ll cut down all the trees along the road and spoil it.

After a few days’ problem, I’ve established the new routine. Work 8:00 or 8:30 to 1:00; light lunch; nap to 2:30; Work until 5:30 (6:00, 6:30); change clothes; farm work until 7:30; swim; supper at 8:00; computer 9:00–10:30; TLS or something until midnight; BBC news; bed.

Tuesday, July 14, 1987

To the Lake George Opera. Rigoletto. Superbly done. We last saw it in Melbourne. Harry Teahan is still the timpanist. He offered complimentary tickets for the Mikado. Chinese dinner with the Shapiros beforehand. Very pleasant. We are beginning to live here, too, like Greeks!

Friday, July 17, 1987

Drove to Hanover last night and slept in Friends Meeting. Spent most of the day at a terminal in Baker Library typing in corrections to my introductory chapter for volume 1. Lunch with Mother and Maisie Wilson at the Greens. Visit to Father in the afternoon. He’s more alert than ever, beginning to listen to “Newsweek” again, and to music. Kept asking me “How is our financial condition?” Supper at Dee and Noye’s with Trix and Chuck. Noye has cancer: prostate, shoulder. But he was in good spirits, having heard today that it’s not in the bone marrow. Going to special cure in Quebec next week. The evening was not at all lugubrious. We had champagne and drank to our anniversary. I gave Chrysanthi the necklace and medallion I’d purchased, with Kostas’s help, in Greece.

Saturday, July 18, 1987

Weston, Vermont

To Kinhaven with Chrysanthi and Mother. Board meeting in the morning. George Goodwin wants me to be president but is willing to wait one year. The purchase agreement has been signed: $500,000. After fifteen years’ struggle. I’ve brought Paula Xanthopoulou and Jimmy Yannatos onto the board. Reunion with Leander. As though we’d never been separated. Nice nap on the grass on the afternoon. Then to Ike Patch’s rebuilt house for trustees’ dinner. Old faces: Mr. Rudolph, Mr. Smith, all the Dushkin children. All previous trustees were invited. Message from the governor, etc. Ike has a fairy castle in the woods, surrounded by nature trails of his own making. Memorial concert afterwards for David Dushkin. Leander played a Bach sarabande and a Chopin nocturne, very well. (I received many compliments.) Fauré Requiem somehow dead. Some of DD’s own compositions played; like Bartok mixed with Rachmaninoff. Two pieces by Dorothy Dushkin, worse than mediocre. But the general spirit very peaceful, in keeping with DD’s spirit.

Sunday, July 19, 1987

Lovely breakfast at the Blue Gentian, as always. Board meeting in the morning, mostly on question of the proposed Richter TV film. Picnic lunch for all the guests. Children’s concert. Orchestra played Shostakovich’s Festival Overture very effectively. My committee’s recommendations: Executive Secretary and Development Secretary have been implemented, with noticeable improvement. Good supper with Leander afterwards. He’s looking forward to living with Alec in Philadelphia.

Monday, July 20, 1987

Finished putting Chapter 1 on the computer. Unexpected lunch with Ned Perrin and Nardi Campion. I seem to be the only one who resents Dartmouth’s award of honorary degrees to David McLaughlin and his wife Judy. Am I that vindictive? Ned approved heartily. Drove home in time for Chrysanthi to go folk dancing in Wevertown.

Tuesday, July 21, 1987

Riparius

Terribly hot again. Our newly painted kitchen floor looks splendid. Supper with Shapiros again, this time at George’s Restaurant, Monument Square, Glens Falls. Then Mikado. First time I’d seen it. Very funny, with topical emendations in “I’ve got a little list . . .”

Wednesday, July 22, 1987

Chrysanthi continues to make experimental meals at the Shapiros’. Then slides of Budapest and Prague and the ones Κυρά Κούλα made for us in Greece. I spent the day typing my “Orestes’ Cow” article into the Macintosh for Carman Karka, who’s going to publish it in The Charioteer. Late at night Alec called from Philadelphia. So now we’re all home. He met Jacques and Annie in Crete as scheduled, and stayed in a mountain village. Had a fine time in Paris. Changes in Friends Central: Tom Wood is leaving. No sense yet of what happened.

Thursday, July 23, 1987

Hard to get back to Kazantzakis. I’ve discovered so much that was left out of the introductory chapter. How to interleaf it all is a problem. The next big task is to write the section in Chapter 2 about Kazantzakis and Bergson. Another huge topic. Where to begin? Where to end?

Saturday, August 1, 1987

Riparius, Weston

Yesterday I read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in one sitting, and today Privileged Information by Frank Armani and Tom Alibrandi. Two books in two days—in the evening, after 7–8 hours writing my Bergson chapter, which, happily, I finished today in first draft. Bloom’s was recommended by Irv Shapiro. It’s an analysis of what’s wrong with the university and with American culture, from a conservative position. Recommends Great Books! Standing up to universities with demands, etc. Haute vulgarization. He’s always invoking Plato, Locke, Mill, etc., which is bound to impress somebody. Privileged Information was much better: a novelistic account of the Gerrow case. Armani is the defense lawyer appointed by the court. I hadn’t realized what had happened. He found out from Gerrow where the bodies of Petz and the other girl were, and actually found the bodies, Petz’s down an air shaft in Mineville, but withheld the information because of the rule of confidentiality between lawyer and client. For this he was (later) vilified by the public, press, colleagues, threatened with disbarment, etc. A terrible business; impossible dilemma. He describes an interview with Mrs. Petz in which, though already knowing the girl was dead, and her body decomposing in the air shaft, he had to deny any knowledge. I remember the same Mr. Petz driving up to our farm, speaking to me and then breaking into tears, not to mention the search for her body here along Waddell Road with helicopters, dogs, and squads of men tramping each square yard of ground. Happily, Waddell Road is not mentioned by name; it’s just “a country road near Wevertown where he tied Porter to a tree and stabbed him to death.” Lots more that I remember is well evoked: the blood lust of the public, people leaving the area or else arming themselves, the consternation during the ten days or so when he eluded the State Police in the woods around Speculator. It all happened in 1973, fourteen years ago. I, of course, was the one who discovered Porter’s car parked on Waddell Road and reported it to the police, which led to the discovery of his murder. I remember Yiayia and Pappous were here and when I drove them out to take them to the bus at Pottersville the road was swarming with State troopers. What a time! In any case, Armani, though despising his client, tried to uphold the rules of the legal system and ended up with a heart attack.

Drove to Weston in the afternoon. Met Daphne, Lori Buseck, and Alec at the Blue Gentian. Nice supper, good talk, in Londonderry. Alec related all his adventures in Crete and France. When he went to Bαρβάροι to the Kazantzakis museum he arrived at 1:00 p.m. just as it was closing. He told the woman turning the key (it was Τιτίκα Σακλαμπάνη) that he was Peter Bien’s son and had come all that way to see the museum, whereupon she threw her arms around him, turned on all the lights again, and told him to take his time. Nice!

After dinner: to Kinhaven staff concert. Leander did the Beethoven Archduke Trio. So sensitively. I love listening to music more at Kinhaven than anywhere else. Nice talks with Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who’s about to go off to study in London, and with the Van Winckles. Jerry Bidlack came over and we sat together for a while. I told him that Lelah should be cast as Katisha in the Mikado.

Sunday, August 2, 1987

Weston–Riparius

Relaxing morning at the Blue Gentian pool reading TLS, including a good piece on A. J. Ayer that I can use in my Bergson chapter. Daphne and Lori went back to Boston. Lunch with Alec and Leander, who’ll be living together in Bryn Mawr next year and are very pleased. James McBride and his jazz group are playing tonight at Kinhaven at Leander’s invitation, but we drove back to Terpni in the afternoon.

August 18, 1987

I was hit in the face by a bat’s wing, in the house. It was soft, even soothing. Not at all repulsive.

Alec and I replaced the leathers in the pump, stupidly applying rust remover to the joints in the cylinder. So now we have rust remover in our drinking water.

August 24, 1987

Sent water to Queensbury for chemical analysis. It’s full of coliform bacteria and unfit for drinking. Thus the diarrhea we’ve been having. What to do next?

August 26, 1987

On direction from the State Department of Health, treated well with Clorox to disinfect it, pumping for half an hour and recycling the water into the well, to mix the chlorine. It’s probably a dead mouse or frog, or worse, unless it’s the dry well leaking into the well. Drinking water from Shapiros and Perrymans.

Alec and Leander are working on Alec’s cabin. Alec built a fine front door, and we’ve put in a lock. They also finished the gables, board and batten.

Leander’s gotten a job at Moravian College as well as at Lehigh. And for this semester he will sub for the “artist in residence,” getting all the best students. He and Alec will share a house in Bryn Mawr.

August 27, 1987

Jerry and Rosine Gardner for supper. He’s got a job teaching French in Moriah in Essex County and is leaving North Creek. They hope to sell the newspaper. Rosine is a compulsive talker, very tiresome.

Friday, August 28, 1987

Nice dinner at Smith’s with the boys and the Shapiros. Leander’s last night. He leaves tomorrow and Alec on Sunday. And: I finished rereading chapters 3 to 7 of volume 1 of my book, thus completing everything I’d hoped to do this summer, at the price of no mowing, no projects. Now it all has to be corrected on the Kiewit computer. I’ve also got all 200 pages of Chapter 8, written in Greece, on the Macintosh now, ready to transfer to Kiewit. By the end of September I should have the MS in the mail.

Saturday, August 29, 1987

Marty Cooper, lumberman from Chestertown, came and we walked through the woods. He identified a tree I’d always wondered about: whistle wood. It’s the small tree with candy-striped bark and huge leaves. Worthless. We didn’t see much timber, but Marty will return and walk off the logging roads next time to see if we’re ready for cutting.

For supper, Alec’s friend from Philadelphia and his new wife: Bob and Lori. Bob is the auto mechanic who has helped Alec so much. They’re renting the Perrymans’ flat in Schroon Lake. Chris and Art came for desert (plum tart, from our tree, which suddenly revived this year and produced); then we all drove to Schroon. Dismal flat, but right on the lake, which is glorious.

Sunday, August 30, 1987

Alec left in the morning. We’re closing up. Very easy this year. No tractor to worry about. Started reading Jay Parini’s novel, The Patch Boys. I like its humor, but some of the chapters are mere fillers, and tedious. Jay and Devon and Will and Oliver spent an overnight with us about two weeks ago; very pleasant. Jay and I went swimming at 11:00 p.m. in the dark; haven’t done that in ages. His next novel is going to treat Tolstoy’s last year, when he left his estate and finally died in a railway station. Using the numerous diaries that record the last year from, obviously, different perspectives, Jay will fictionalize everything except Tolstoy’s own diary.

Andy Rangell called. He will be out of the house and is even going to move his piano, tomorrow.

Daphne called, a little apprehensive about the minor gynecological procedure she’ll have done tomorrow. But work at Let’s Go is proceeding splendidly. It’s just like Kinhaven, she says. She can’t wait to arrive at the office each morning. All 27 people are like a happy family. Poor thing. Wait till she gets to Simon and Schuster next year!

October 21, 1987

Hanover

Catching up:

• It took all of September to do the final documentation, etc. for my Volume 1. Finally mailed it to Richard Brown at Princeton around October 10. 750+ pages. Much—much—revision. I made better sentences, I think.

• Then did translation of Η ζωγραφική τεχνική του Ρίτσου back into English. Rather difficult. Sent this off to Costas Myrsiades.

• Nice lunch in Vermont with Jay Parini. He still hopes to spend the summer in the Adirondacks.

• One night we awoke to crashes and discovered a raccoon in the boys’ room, climbing up the bookcase and walls, dislodging everything. I called police at 4:00 a.m. He caught the beast in a quilt from behind as it climbed the bookcase again. It had come down through the chimney, ending in the basement. Mercifully ignoring the ground floor, it had come up quickly to Daphne’s room, thence to the boys’ room, and had panicked. One sign: kaka in huge pieces everywhere. Like humans, they shit when frightened.

• Saturday, at the farm with Alec, I pruned and fertilized fruit trees. He put preservative on his gables. Had two Friends Central students with him. Supper in Smith’s Restaurant, disappointing. Coincidentally Daphne was in North Creek the next day. On excursion with her geology class.

• To Kinhaven two days in a row, October 17–18, first to meet with Lelah re: buildings and grounds, then for the regular board meeting. The Steinway still isn’t right. We’re going to start all over again from the beginning. I’m convener of the nominations committee again, and am also continuing with administrative reorganization, this time concentrating on buildings and grounds.

Wednesday, October 21, 1987

Hanover–Kennett Square

Leander has been here for a few days. Listened together to recording of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” which he’ll be doing with Jan di Gaetana in April. Incredibly difficult. Even he is scared. Lovely drive with him to Bryn Mawr. Good conversation all the way. Stopped in Bennington to pick up Nancy Bidlack’s cello from Cox, the repairman in the woods. Reached Bryn Mawr in time to find Alec and Tom Corindia still at supper in a nearby restaurant. Joined them. Then I borrowed Alec’s truck and drove with Tom to Kendal at Longwood.

Thursday, October 22, 1987

Kendal–Bryn Mawr–Pendle Hill

Kendal Management Board at 7:30 a.m. Breakfast with Dr. Perera, Carol’s father. Board laid down the Blue Hill project; that was a shock. But Hanover had the pleasure of reporting our successful negotiation with Mrs. Ferguson and the option we signed: $25,000 down, one year to purchase. 64 acres at about $17,000 an acre for a total of $1,071,000. But it was the right thing to do, we all feel. The Board seemed perfunctory. Lloyd Lewis and Alan Hunt officiously control everything. Merely report. No discussion or give and take. Yet twenty-odd influential people were there at 7:30 in the morning. Quaker service!

Returned to Bryn Mawr. Spent a few hours in the Bryn Mawr public library—such a nice facility. Then to 951 Sargent Avenue to interview Stevie Smith, applicant to Dartmouth from Friends Central. Back to the library. Then Alec and I drove to town, dined in style at the Hershey. Filipino waiter; Alec had lots to say to him. Then to the Academy: Symphony: Roger Sessions, which I liked very much; Haydn, very crisp. And a Schumann symphony, 2nd rate, even Mendelssohn is better, I’d say. Saw Alec’s colleague Jim Davis, who disparaged the Sessions. Drove Alec home and continued to Pendle Hill in the truck.

Friday, October 23, 1987

Pendle Hill

Seven hours in the Publications Committee: regular meeting first, after caucus with Rebecca Mays; then book committee afterwards. We’ve already got four manuscripts in hand. Doing well financially this year. Supper. To Yuki’s for desert and coffee. Lloyd Lewis there, so we could talk more leisurely about Kendal at Hanover. General Board meeting. Shared a room with Wallace Collett, the Cincinnati millionaire. Very sweet man, active at Haverford as well as Pendle Hill.

Saturday, October 24, 1987

Haverford–NYC

To Haverford for the Corporation meeting—the results of our Interim Committee reorganizing the Corporation. Still rather stuffy. The women on the committee (Priscilla and Eliza Harrison) furious because the new advisory committee is so skewed toward the usual respectable males. John Cary came up and we stepped out and had a cordial visit. Tom Wood outside as well. He was so complimentary about Alec. Said he—Wood—had stayed on at Friends Central too long, seventeen years, and had gotten stale. He’ll be working at Princeton with a firm that places teachers in independent secondary schools. Lunch with Lu Bennett, etc. Stuffy. Then Leander and Alec drove me to 30th Street Station. Leander is practicing Stravinsky’s Petrushka four-hands to perform in November with Sandy, the other Kinhaven pianist, at Southern Connecticut State College.

NYC. Yale Club. 46th Street mostly boring. New York State opera: Tosca with “supertitles.” Excellent.

Sunday, October 25, 1987

To the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hudson River School. Lovely view of Lake George. The famous painting of Schroon Mountain. Also Adirondack woods. I bought posters for the boys and us. Then to the new wing for contemporary art. Bloom’s view of mines and boys jumping in the river recalled Jay’s Patch Boys. A remarkable “sculpture” of the Last Supper, in wood, with marvelous facial expressions. Next to MoMA: Frank Stella retrospective. Nice to see his development into the third dimension.

Return via Eastern Express (the Montrealer is defunct, alas). Antipathetic. Terrible pressure in ears coming down, like knives stuck into my skull.

Monday, October 26, 1987

Hanover

Trying to get started on my Bristol Classical Press Α-level book. But first I’m finishing the filing of everything brought back from Greece. Chrysanthi is working continually, filing the letters.

Problem of who’s going to teach War/Peace Studies 1 next year when Alan Rozycki stops. I’ll ask Jack Shepherd.

Wednesday, October 28, 1987

Paul Simon on education in the morning. Impressive. Introduced by John Rassias. Simon: “If John were only a little more enthusiastic, he might be effective.” General laughter.

The stock market is down hundreds of points but we’re trying to keep calm. Perhaps this will force the government to do something, at last, about the deficit.

Bartholomae: fine lecture on teaching of remedial English. Dinner afterwards.

Kendal at Hanover overseers. Treat will resign because of conflict of interest since he hopes to be appointed as architect.

Thursday, October 29, 1987

Lunch with Jim Jordan. Very cordial. We’re sharing an honors student, Matt Streeter, doing Time in the Modernist Novel and in Painting.

Evening: David Wykes’s lecture at Howe Library on “She Stoops to Conquer,” which I read this afternoon for the first time.

Friday, October 30, 1987

I convinced Matt Marshall, manager of the Hanover Inn, to give a 20% discount to University Seminar dinners. Hooray!

November 2, 1987

Started the Bristol book, two months overdue. Doing the Zorba chapter, largely from preexisting essays.

Roddy Beaton arrived from London.

Tuesday, November 3, 1987

Beaton’s lecture on nineteenth-century romanticism in Greece a great success. Good audience in the Wren Room. Lots of questions. Thirty-odd people at home for supper afterwards. Another success. Cordial and relaxed. Chrysanthi’s cooking much appreciated.

Wednesday, November 4, 1987

Took Roddy to Andy Rangell’s for a private concert. Froberger, Bach, Beethoven’s Op. 31 no. 1, Busoni’s arrangement of Carmen. Andy in top form, explaining his view of the music before playing. The Beethoven is a kind of parody, a simple theme transformed. Dinner; then with Mother to “She Stoops to Conquer.” Well done, especially the second half.

Thursday, November 5, 1987

Widener Reading Room

Up at 6:00 a.m. To Cambridge to go to the Robert Coles’s lecture with Daphne. He’s a preacher; liberal; compassionate. Spoke of exploitation of underdogs by top dogs, Harvard Club’s disgusting “ritual” of boxing match in the dining room; South End Boston kids entertaining the establishment by eating roast beef while dressed in tuxedos. Coles is anti-academic in content and style. Dirty khakis, open collar, rambling lecture, distrustful of “proper methodology,” etc.

Lunch with Daphne. She’s flourishing. Courses are splendid. She’ll do a research project on the “corporate dynamics” of Harvard Student Enterprises: the Let’s Go staff last year and this.

Afterwards, Meg’s mini-symposium. Herzfeld spoke on status of anthropology and Hellenic studies, Emily Vermeuel on status of archeology, very negatively, Greg Nagy on philology: an incomprehensible arabesque, as usual. Lots of familiar faces: Tziovas, for instance. How nice to see the Seferis Chair active in this way.

Supper in a new Chinese restaurant near Pistaccio’s, with Daphne, Lori (her roommate), Roddy. Then on to Providence.

Friday, November 6, 1987

Providence, Rhode Island

Spectacular opening session. Speros Vryonis covered ancient, medieval, and modern Greece and the sea magisterially. Roddy followed this hard act bravely and well. Ed Malefakis reminded us that the Greeks had never achieved anything comparable to the Portuguese. The rest of the conference, at least the literature section, was anticlimactic. Dreary papers for the most part. But nice to see friends. Vassilis very supportive re: my NYU candidacy. Yannis Karavidas jolly and rolly-polly as always, etc.

Banquet grand: three senators (Sarbanes, Pell, Chafee), an ambassador, and the president of Brown. Sarbanes referred twice to me in his speech. Intertextuality! Chrysanthi and I sat with Ernestine Friedl and had lots to say: nice opportunity to visit together.

Saturday, November 7, 1987

Karavidas interviewed me again for the BBC on the founding of MGSA and the status of Modern Greek studies in the U.S. Surprise: reunion with Brenda and Everett Marder. He just finished law school. Is practicing in Boston. What a man! Drove home with Mary Rassias, comfortably, listening to a cassette of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds.”

Wednesday, November 18, 1987

Thom Gunn read his poems in the Wren Room. My first contact. They are precisely my type. Straightforward in language, nothing obscure, yet marvelously crafted, including many in rhyme. I loved “Moly” and the one about the snail, and a still unpublished one about a fly being sucked into the “oublitette” of a pitcher plant.

Sent my Zorba chapter off to Bristol Classical Press. The rest is going very slowly, alas, but a little happens every day.

John Tallmadge wrote a long letter. He found a job. Associate Dean of a college in Cincinnati.

Fan mail from Peter Werner, the television director. Says he remembers my courses twenty years ago and wants to recite Cavafy’s “Ithaca” in a speech.

Matt Streeter, my honors student working on “Time in Joyce and Modern Painting,” left a note instead of appearing for his tutorial, saying that the recent demonstration about South Africa left him feeling so guilty that he was thinking of dropping out of school, and couldn’t work. So Dartmouth does have students like this, after all. A propos, two days ago our department met with the new president, James Freedman, and almost everyone sang out his or her resentment at the typical Dartmouth student, the philistine and often anti-feminist jock.

November 19, 1987

Finished the first draft of my Introduction for the Bristol book, combining the talk on the novel form given in London two years ago with Kazantzakis as a romantic.

Peter Demetz lectured on Italian futurism. Very “professional,” as one would expect. Afterwards dinner at the Inn. I had good, long conversation with Steve Scher, recently back from China. “20,000,000 bicycles!” he kept repeating.

Saturday, November 21, 1987

The Dartmouth Symphony played Jimmy Yannatos’s “Tunes and Dances. An Overture for the Uncommon Man,” commissioned in 1981 for the 200th anniversary of Harvard’s chapter of ΦΒΚ—thus “the uncommon man.” Jimmy came for supper. We opened the superb Scotch that Roddy Beaton had brought. Genial evening, with Mother, and Lori Buseck also. But the piece was raggedy, never really got going. Sad. Purely coincidental that it was played the day before Dartmouth’s celebration of its 200th for ΦΒΚ.

Wednesday, November 25, 1987

I lectured to John Rassias’s bankers on Pagan and Christian Heroism, the Μέγας Αλέξανδρος lecture. It went well, I think.

December 2, 1987

Graduate seminar for Arthur Kantrowitz’s Thayer School engineers on science/technology vs. humanistic views—i.e., my Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article of a decade ago. Kantrowitz has implicit faith in “progress,” science’s power to alleviate pain, etc. He predicts cities in space shortly. Students still felt that engineers are morally neutral, and that harm is done by others. Alas! I protested.

December 3, 1987

By bus to NYC, now that AMTRAK is defunct. What a comedown!

December 4, 1987

Publications Committee at Pendle Hill, then Book Committee. Nice to be back in charge again. Rebecca Mays intense, as always. Supper with Alec in Media Inn. He went off to play in the West Chester Symphony. PH board afterwards.

December 5, 1987

Return to Hanover by bus. Eleven hours from PH. Like returning from Europe. The beatnik traveling to Sunapee to see where his rich parents spent their holidays.

December 6, 1987

Went to Meriden to see Fiddler on the Roof, chorus and solo voices trained expertly by Mayme Noda. Very moving.

December 8, 1987

Good meeting of Kendal Overseers with John Clancy. Jim Strickler will lead the group of doctors at the Medical Center in their negotiations with us. We’re about to get the Vermont Certificate of Need.

December 11, 1987

Breakfast with Martha Solow and Tom Almy. They want me to be the “humanist” in their scheme to bring theatrical productions around the State to convince people to anticipate old age.

Lunch with Ben Bennani. He says he’ll print a book of Harkianakis’s poems if I produce one. He loves what I’ve already done.

Supper at Jesse’s with Ned Perrin, who has just finished yet another abortive affair, with a writer in Washington. He says that he wants to remarry but I think that he likes going from affair to affair. He is writing a piece on AMTRAK.

December 13, 1987

Leander and Sandy’s four-hand concert in New York went well. They did “Petrushka.”

December 16, 1987

Father fell out of his wheelchair and landed on his face, on his glasses, which shattered and lacerated him deeply over the eye. So at night we were again in the emergency room.

December 20, 1987

Father has pneumonia again. Jim Strickler and colleagues again ask if we want “aggressive” treatment. No treatment means death by morning. Mother can’t face this. We decided to keep him in Hanover Terrace, not take him to the hospital, and therefore to go the middle route. No intravenous antibiotics, only oral and via muscular injection.

December 21, 1987

Father better again!

December 22, 1987

Brought Jackie Baas to see our paintings, especially the Benton.

December 23, 1987

Noye Johnson’s cancer is bad. I visited him after his operation. He lost 25 pounds. Can hardly stand. But out of pain, at least.

Tea at the Arndts’ with his sister and brother-in-law from England, and the Sheldons.

December 24, 1987

Christmas eve with Sally and Louis Cornell and Genevieve Williamson, with Steve and Tom Cornell, both rescued from drop-out and doing well.

December 25, 1987

Nice Christmas with Mother and all the children. Got snowshoes for Leander and Alec.

December 26, 1987

Alec went to Davenport, Iowa to get the violin he had brought from Jakarta. We’re all full of suspense.

Chrysanthi, Leander, and I traveled to Cambridge to see Gilette at the American Repertory Theater. Disappointing first act, but gained power in the second act, and has a lingering power.

December 27, 1987

Noye died at 5:00 a.m. Dee asked me to write the obituary. I consulted Chuck Drake and Bob Reynolds, to get the scientific part, which is spectacular. What productivity! Noye was the first to identify and name “acid rain,” for example.

December 28, 1987

Got the obituary to the Valley News in time. They printed it in its entirety, and we got a photo in as well.

Drove to Weston for Kinhaven Nomination Committee at Ike Patch’s, but Ike had forgotten and was gone. Saw his strange daughter, with a beard on her chin.

December 29, 1987

Alec is home, with the violin. It has a beautiful sound but needs repair. He drove to Douglas Cox in Brattleboro and was told it is worthless! Alas!

Ike, contrite, came here for nominations. George Goodwin wants me to be president next year.

Noye’s memorial service included a period of Quaker silence. I ministered, remembering the time he’d returned from Pakistan with a jaw 9,000,000 years old.

Stelios and Ava here yesterday with their two sweet girls, who grow nicer and nicer.

Tonight Andy Rangell here. What a talker! He wants me to read Coppard.

December 30, 1987

Finished “Nikos Kazantzakis, Novelist” for Bristol Classical Press. 75,000 words. I’ll post it tomorrow. They’ll probably find it too “difficult.”

We went with Alec to Gregory Wylie to get another opinion on the violin. Much more favorable. Said it’s worth $5000–$6000, which is exactly what we thought. But it needs $1000 worth of repairs. We left it. He lives now in a converted one-room schoolhouse above Bradford, with a baby named Cameron and an African parrot that talks in a bass voice and sings in a soprano one.

December 31, 1987

To Genevieve’s annual party. Then to Rassiases for lamb, βασιλόπιτα, σαλιγγάρια. Nice.

1988

Hanover

January 1–June 19

Jan. 6, Cambridge (theater)

Jan. 14–16, Pendle Hill

Feb. 14, Cambridge (theater)

Feb. 26–28, NYC

March 4–5, Pendle Hill

March 24, Cambridge (theater)

April 2, Putney (concert)

April 7–10, Guilford College, North Carolina; NYC

April 15–17, Pendle Hill, NYC

April 30–31, Wellesley, Cambridge

May 31, Cambridge (theater)

June 2, Kinhaven

June 8–9, Cambridge: Daphne’s graduation

June 16–19, Pendle Hill, NYC

Riparius

June 19–September 5

June 16–20, Kinhaven, Hanover

August 6, Kinhaven

Hanover

September 6–December 31

Oct. 8–9, NYC, Father’s memorial service

Nov. 12–13, Princeton, MGSA 20th anniversary

Dec. 27–29, New Orleans, MLA, Hotel Meridien

Dec. 30, Boston–Cambridge

January 1, 1988

Quakers here for brunch cooked by the men. Lafayette made ham, Roger turnips and fruit salad, I did hashed brown potatoes, Alec bacon, Leander omelets. We were applauded. Afterwards, silly games. Even Yiayia joined in. And Roger laughed!

January 4, 1988

Began teaching after nine months’ leave. English 53: Hartley, Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, Waugh, Orwell, Golding. No difficulty lecturing. It comes back, like riding a bicycle. In fact, I’m more relaxed than ever, less glued to notes.

Leander was here with a new girlfriend, Jean Martin, a French hornist. Her parents are both organists. A mainline American girl, mature, feminine, mellow. I like how she sits placidly in the evening and knits. We’ll see . . .

January 6, 1988

To Cambridge to deliver Daphne and go to Pirandello’s Right You Are (If You Think You Are) done splendidly at the American Repertoire Theater. Seated next to us were Jimmy Yannatos and his wife.

January 10, 1988

To Amherst for Kinhaven board. Jerry very lively. Such a nice group.

January 12, 1988

Lloyd Lewis and John Clancy here for Kendal meetings. Our Overseers group was briefed on financial and other plans for the immediate future. Scheduled opening (pray!) is now Fall 1990.

January 13, 1988

Very busy. Lunch with President Freedman and the Comparative Literature Steering Committee. Lecture. Tutorial with Elizabeth Keenan, working on Joyce, Forster, and Woolf. Faculty seminar: Kathleen Corrigan on icons, how they were introduced to counteract the Monophysicists, a heresy claiming that Christ had only a divine nature. Icons were meant to remind believers of his human nature as well. So iconography ceased being symbolic (the lamb) and became realistic. Then the balance swung too far the other way; people forgot His divine nature, causing the iconoclasm of the eighth century.

Then to Kendal dinner at the Inn. Then to Kendal open meeting in the high school. Lloyd spoke well. Lots of questions from the floor.

January 14, 1988

Taught at 1:00. Raced to Springfield, Mass. In the car to catch the train to Philadelphia. Club car from New Haven. Not bad. Got to Pendle Hill at 11:00 p.m. Slept in Walkers’ house.

January 15, 1988

Good Publications Committee meeting. Three MSS discussed. Tom Brown keeps telling me that I clerk it well. Rebecca Mays is so nice to work with. Now she wants to study Κοινή. Supper in Media with Alec. He’s more restful now, less dismayed by the readjustment to U.S. after Indonesia. But he still cannot accept the extinction of that experience; wants to find some way to connect it to something here and now.

January 16, 1988

Board meetings on salary policy. Should a uniform salary exist for all—teachers, cooks, groundskeepers—since each is infinitely valuable in Quaker sight? Fascinating. Alan Myers approached me at breakfast. He was at Hanover Meeting years ago. He’s now separated from his wife and picking up the pieces at PH. I’m working to bring PH on the road to Hanover. Janet Shepherd and Peter Crysdale will be the leaders.

Lift to 30th Street by Lee Bennett, about to return to the Franklin Institute to host 900 boy scouts overnight.

January 17, 1988

Mother’s birthday. I gave her a hurricane lantern as a present. Splendid supper at the Norwich Inn with Mother, Chrysanthi, Daphne, Leander, and Audrey Logan. Audrey is going to vote for Dukakis. The rest of us are in a quandary.

January 18, 1988

Film “Passage to India” shown for my class. Brenda Jackson is so sexy and spiritual simultaneously. Too pretty for Adela. The ending is totally changed and distorted.

January 19, 1988

To hospital for class on aging for 4th year medical students, at Tom Almy’s invitation. Jim Strickler was MC. Parish Players did the play that we’re going to take round to curious audiences in NH under the auspices of H.U.B. I spoke about CCRCs and Kendal. Then lunch with Aris Damianos.

January 21, 1988

War/Peace Faculty Seminar. Oran Young on the Arctic program and the Soviets. We hope to have him direct College Course 1 next year.

January 22, 1988

Lunch with Steve Scher. He brought me a beautiful edition of Ritsos from East Berlin.

January 23, 1988

Finished re-reading The Rainbow. What an experience! I never appreciated its monumentality so much.

Robert Brown at Princeton University Press, on the basis of readers’ reports, wants me to shorten my MS drastically. First reader very insistent. Second reader much more positive. Apparently there is a good chance of acceptance if I do this.

January 24, 1988

After Meeting, Jack Shepherd spoke on his recent experiences with Palestinians in Gaza. Lunch at the Greens with Mother.

February 21, 1988

Bob Daubenspeck in Meeting: “A good Meeting should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Alec came last week wearing his new hairpiece. He looks fine, just fine, and feels much more at ease. But he’s still eager to leave Friends Central.

Leander came again with his new girlfriend, Jean Martin, a hornist from Atlanta, Georgia, very calm and mature, it seems. I like the way she sits and sews contentedly.

To Cambridge last weekend to see Heiner Müller’s Quartet (based on “Les Liaisons dangereuse”) at the American Repertoire Theater. Strange postmodernist production, more choreography than drama. Brustein lectured as prologue, saying we’re meant to be drawn into a trancelike response, and should not worry about meaning.

Marian Singleton died of cancer. She was born in February 1930, the same year as I.

February 27, 1988

(From here to July 6 is an attempt to catch up, written under my tree at the farm, after the fact.)

To NYC, now alas by driving to Springfield, Massachusetts and taking the train there, since the Montrealer is defunct. Met with George Goodwin, Jim Quinn, etc. re: Kinhaven’s capital fund drive. Quick supper with Paula Xanthopoulou; then to Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Palace Theatre, a restored “ruin,” for a magnificent production of The Cherry Orchard: pure magic from the opening moment.

Sunday, February 28, 1988

Chrysanthi and I walked to 15th Street to the Penington to see it and discuss the possibility of Daphne’s residing there next year. (Unfortunately, Daphne isn’t interested.) Like the Penn Club, but the inhabitants are younger, more off-beat. Then a quick turn at the Met, and afterwards the Frick, where I was reminded that Whistler’s portrait of the Duc de Montesquieu (“Charlus”) is in the concert hall. There’s a gorgeous Constable of Salisbury Cathedral in the study. I’ve been teaching Golding’s novel in English 57.

Other activities: on the 13th, attended Helmut Schumann’s 70th birthday at Hanover Inn. Dozens of people to a mediocre dinner, orchestrated for self-esteem. But he’s nice withal. Have been speaking to Arthur Kantrowitz’s engineering class re: the humanists’ quarrel with technology. Kantrowitz still believes that all problems can be solved by science. It just takes patience. Civilization is getting better and better, etc. His students seem to agree, more or less, except Eric Frietz, who has been attending Quaker Meeting.

I’ve also been meeting with student groups wanting to hold a work camp this summer. Hope to get $$ for them from the Meeting.

Other activities: Worrying about a successor to Alan Rozycki for College Course 1. Perhaps Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. Very complicated administratively. Been meeting with Leonard, Tim Duggan, and the Dean of Faculty. Leonard says I’m too much in a hurry, that I have a low tolerance for ambiguity.

I gave the work camp students lots of leads for possible projects in the area, a better project, one hopes, than last year’s at the College Grant. Dottie Campion gave good ideas at a party at the Officers’.

Another project: Pendle Hill on the Road at Hanover Meeting. This is scheduled for April. Janet Shepherd will be the leader, assisted by Peter Crysdale. I’ve been trying for years to get PH to do On the Road in a big way. They resist, but this is a pilot program and therefore it’s important that it work.

Of course Kendal at Hanover also continues. We have Overseers’ meetings each month. Slow . . . slow. Lloyd Lewis told me that all the bureaucratic arrangements for Kendal at Longwood took seven months. We’ve already been working for two years, and there’s no end in sight.

March 1, 1988

Lunch with Tom Corindia at the Faculty Club. At the last Kendal Overseers meeting we resolved to gather a “wish list” for the new facility. I’m coordinating this and entering everyone’s contributions on the Macintosh. Tom and I went over our respective lists. What fun!

Then, alas, to Aquinas House for Larry Harvey’s memorial service, led by “Father Joe” Devlin very joyously. Betsy Harvey said we should all remember her father the way he was before the last ten years when Alzheimer’s was destroying his mind and character. Sheila also spoke movingly. Everyone sang Larry’s favorite song, “Dance Dance Dance.” Afterwards, in the reception, Kate, who was standing silent and alone, as beautiful as always, and I exchanged a huge hug.

At 4:00, met with my honors student, Elizabeth Keenan, a bright, high-strung girl from New Orleans who is working on the moral vision of Forster, Woolf, and Joyce. Her history with me is panic near the end of any project. We’ll see.

March 2, 1988

Meeting with David Wykes and Matthew Rawlinson re: English 17, the second half of the survey course—eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. I’m quaking. It’s like going back to graduate school. This will begin in a few weeks but my lectures luckily don’t come until May.

Did I note anywhere that Princeton returned my “Kazantzakis and Politics,” volume 1, with a strong endorsement from one reader but equally strong complaints from the second reader that the work is far too long. So I’m systematically shortening it, and having to agree that this is improving the MS considerably. I wanted to display all my research and this just is not good.

March 3, 1988

I’m championing Jack Shepherd as coordinator for College Course 1. Today he spoke well to our Faculty Seminar on his experience in the Palestinian camps. Walter S-A will do an advanced seminar on the morality of nuclear defense if Jack does CC1.

March 4, 1988

To Philadelphia. No publication committee, so I arrived in time for supper with Alec. Met him at Overbrook Station. Then he delivered me to PH for the board.

March 7, 1988

Jean Brophy is here, a candidate for the administrator of Kendal at Hanover. She’s a Lesbian, was accompanied by her “spouse,” a delightful woman. We all had lunch and I showed them the glories of Dartmouth.

March 10, 1988

My sister Alice is here to visit Yiayia and Pappou. Lunched with her today.

March 11, 1988

To Ned Perrin’s for waffles, as always. His daughter quite sociable.

March 18, 1988

Tiles in upstairs bathroom failed. Water pouring through them into the dining room ceiling. Gene Boisvert wants $1000 to install a new shower. We got a man to regrout the titles for $35. Boisvert then charged $70 for his consultation!

Sunday, March 20, 1988

To Cambridge for the American Repertoire Theater. First lunched with Daphne at Pistaccio’s. Then Six Characters in Search of an Author. Such a pleasure! Such fine acting! We’ve finally discovered this theater. Will we keep going after Daphne graduates?

Did I note that the monograph “Nikos Kazantzakis, Novelist” that I did for Bristol Classical Press was also returned, this time also because it’s too long but in addition because the language and concepts are too complicated for the projected audience, most of whom will not be native speakers of English. So I’ll miss publication this July but will be scheduled for July 1989 with co-publication by Caratsas here in the USA. So this, too, needs to be rewritten.

Still another project, a fruit of the luncheon with Jean Brophy. I want to abridge Elizabeth Gray Vining’s Being Seventy, concentrating on the parts applicable to those contemplating entrance in Kendal at Hanover, just as she, when she wrote the book, was contemplating entrance in Kendal at Longwood.

March 23, 1988

Breakfast with John Van Aalst, whom I continue to enjoy. He has given up the hope of being a full-time writer and is preparing for medical school, but he still hopes to do a novel based on his two years with Palestinians in Jerusalem.

A few days ago I spent two whole days doing a “Hypercard” training program for the Macintosh.

March 28, 1988

Spring term. I have the survey, and also Greek 13. Enrollment: 7 students (today one dropped; 6 left). I’m frantically trying to get books for Greek 13. The Nathanail dictionary is out of stock. I telephoned Yannis Karavidas in London (BBC) to send me some. And Pavlos Andronikos’s translation of Ο Βασίλης ο Αρβανίτης has never arrived from Australia. But I’m starting with Ritsos, using photocopies, and will then go to Cavafy before reaching Myrivilis.

March 31, 1988

Peter Martin gave the annual Beebe Lecture, about the South/West News Service. An ego trip galore, unplanned but charming in its unabashed self-glorification. He even brought his high school teacher, who first taught him to write beautiful sentences, to exult in his success. Afterwards, more of the same at the banquet. I sat next to Barbara Gilbert’s husband, which was fun.

Friday, April 1, 1988

Stood with the Nodas, Barbara Bartley, and others, at our annual Peace Vigil on Main Street. This always gives me a good feeling, but I suppose we seem ridiculous to our fellow Hanoverites.

First meeting with Frank Stanbach, the student who is meant to create Hypercard programs enabling me to have a computer supplement to Demotic Greek I.

Crisis: Alan Rozycki seems to have had an aneurysm or slight stroke. What to do about CC1? Leonard and I met. We’ve convinced Tom Powers to coordinate it at least for two weeks.

April 3, 1988

Visited Alan in hospital. He’s fine but apprehensive re: cat scan results. Tom Powers was there and we had a good talk afterwards. It was he who brought Alan into the peace movement.

In the evening: to Putney with Yiayia, etc. to hear Richard Goode play an all-Beethoven program at Landmark College, the old Windham College. A superb concert, utterly exhausting emotionally. Made even more pleasant by the discovery of Ignat Solzhenitsyn in the audience, with his mother and grandmother. We had a nice reunion, hugs and all. Ignat is happy with his teacher in London but homesick in other respects for the USA. Mr. and Mrs. Shin were there, too.

April 5, 1988

I had to introduce Tom Powers to College Course 1 and tell them about Alan. We’re all rooting for him.

Evening at Hopkins Center. Four British actors (4!) did A Midsummer Night’s Dream brilliantly. The second half was poor, obviously unrehearsed: Shakespeare vs. Shaw. But one of their quotes from Shaw is a perfect epigraph for my Kazantzakis book since it enunciates a vitalistic view of religion. Now I have to locate it.

April 7, 1988

ταξιδεύοντας

Early flight to Greensboro, North Carolina, to attend the Quaker education conference. What a day! Took 14 hours to reach Guilford College. First fog at Lebanon; missed connection. Plane took off finally for Boston instead of New York. Motor trouble. Returned. Waited two hours. Next flight to Boston. Shuttle to NY delayed. Missed the last flight to Greensboro. Got on a plane for Charlotte on a dare. Missed the last connection to Greensboro. Took a plane to Winston-Salem. Then a thirty-mile taxi ride to Greensboro, in time for the evening presentation, more or less.

April 8, 1988

Greensboro, NC

Alec is here with others from Friends Central: Joe Ludwig, the acting headmaster (Tom Wood stepped down last December), Doug, and one other: engaging people. Reunion with Bob Hunter after many years. Also saw David Martin, now a mason in Greensboro. And David Gray from Woodbrooke. Opening session brilliantly done by David Mallory of Friends Council on Education. I must use his techniques in my section of English 17. Visited Friends Homes, the retirement community across the road. Drab. Discouraging architecture. What Kendal at Hanover must not be like. Mather Lippincott (also here) told me it was extremely low budget. Workshop with Sally Scattergood: her sex and drug education project in Philadelphia—the quintessential “Quaker lady” doing good works. Len Cadwallader of Farm and Wilderness was sitting next to me. Nice to meet him after so many years. Another workshop, very well done, led by Don McNemar; also nice to see him again. Then a terrible one with Leonard Kenworthy, who subjected us to a monologue for 1½ hours. At one of the committee meetings the man who founded and ran William Penn House in Washington told me about being briefed in the White House by Dinash DeSousa (!) on the pinko-faculty at Dartmouth who suppress conservative opinion, etc, etc.

Tonight is Leander’s big concert at Lehigh: Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” with Jan Di Gaetana.

Sunday, April 10, 1988

Greensboro, NC–Hanover

Routine flight back, thank goodness. Stopped at NYC, met Leander, attended Richard Goode’s Beethoven recital at the 92nd Street “Y,” the same concert that I had heard at Putney, but this time I was unmoved. Strange. Saw Peter Smith and Ned Perrin, also in the audience. Nice supper with Leander. His concert went very well, he says. 9:00 p.m. flight home, via Keene.

April 14, 1988

Hanover

Bill Cook and I gave our annual “war poetry” extravaganza (son et lumière) in College Course 1. Alan Rozycki, mercifully, is fully recovered and back in charge.

April 15, 1988

Philadelphia

Pendle Hill Publications Committee. We’ve accepted another of those terrible “touchy-feely” pamphlets, against my better judgment.

April 16, 1988

Pendle Hill–NYC

Went to Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest in a church on Park Avenue. Semi-amateur performance but adequate. The play still has charm.

Sunday, April 17, 1988

NYC

Kinhaven Board in a Park Avenue apartment. Jimmy Yannatos thought it was yesterday. It seems that I am going to succeed George Goodwin as president. Θεέ, βοήθεια!

April 19, 1988

Hanover

Dinner for Overseers of the Tucker Foundation. A woman came up and threw her arms around me. Katy Van Dusen! After so many years! She’s married to a biologist she met at Monte Verde in Costa Rica and who is studying at Cornell. After that they aren’t sure. Meanwhile she’s an overseer of the Tucker Foundation. As is Dave Webber, another old acquaintance. Katy and I gabbed all night, but also listened to the impressive presentations by interns, especially one wisp of a girl who’d spent four months with convicts on death row in Alabama and had found them, all murderers, very “human.” Asked why she chose such an internship, she said that she’d gone to a Quaker school (George School, as it turned out) and had always heard that the death penalty was wrong. Afterwards, Dave Webber and I had a long drink at the Inn and caught up on much news. He told how splendid David McLaughlin was as chair of the Board of Trustees.

Friday evening, April 22–Sunday noon, April 24

Pendle Hill On the Road at Hanover. Full house. Alan Myers came from Maine. Others too, from Dover, NH and from Massachusetts. Janet Shepherd spoke for too long, but at least she spoke well. The small workshops were the best, however. Peter Crysdale complemented her nicely. Very little organization, but somehow it worked. People felt rested, and loving. It was particularly nice for several young mothers in our Meeting, enabling them to get a furlough from family responsibilities. But did any of this have anything to do with religion? With God? Hard to say.

Saturday, April 30, 1988

Wellesley–Cambridge

To Wellesley for a Peace Studies conference. Bill Durland there from Pendle Hill, bitter against Margery Walker’s style of administration. The place is in turmoil, according to him. Everyone is leaving. The “beloved community” isn’t very beloved. And trustees like me seem the last to know. Ditto with Dartmouth trustees and David McLaughlin.

Met Chrysanthi and Daphne afterwards in Cambridge for supper and then another splendid performance at the A.R.T. This time Uncle Vanya directed by David Mamet. Pamela Gien, a sexpot, in “Six Characters” and “Gilette,” was miraculously transformed as the spinster sister: gray hair, sloping shoulders. But the Doctor stole the show.

May 4, 1988

I should note that chamber music continues. Dick Williamson, Allan Munck and I have met most Wednesdays this year. It’s a great pleasure, as always.

May 9, 1988

Annual check-up with Dr. Paul Gerber. He says that I’m in the pink of health. Lost ten pounds since last check-up. With luck my cholesterol will have gone down also, thanks to the strict diet imposed by Chrysanthi.

At 5:00 to Lucy Briggs, Mrs. Ellis Briggs, wife of the former ambassador to Greece, in order to meet a couple called Fox from Kimball Union Academy who are about to go off to the American Farm School, which has an exchange with KUA. I lent them Brenda Marder’s book with my introduction.

Then to a fancy dinner at Wethersfield Inn hosted by the Classics Department for Stephen Lattimore, Richmond Lattimore’s son, who gave an excruciatingly boring lecture this afternoon. But the dinner was fun. Doenges, Rutter, Wiencke, Tatum, Bradley, Tomkins. Wine galore. Then the bill: $40 per person.

May 10, 1988

To Alumni Hall with Ned for a luncheon honoring the fifth anniversary of the Dickey Endowment. A Chinese story-teller “performed” (in Chinese). Then we all filed out to the plaza in front of the Hop to welcome the Secretary General of the UN. Leonard Rieser and Sandy McCulloch said appropriate words. At 5:00 the Secretary General spoke to a good crowd in Thompson Arena. Chuck Braun and I sat together. The Secretary General was “diplomatic” in criticizing the US’s failure to honor its obligations to the UN.

May 12, 1988

What a week this has been! Today: Nice lunch with Dan Tomkins. Then to President Freedman’s for supper with Saul Bellow, whom I hardly spoke to—he was at the wrong end of the table. But he seemed jolly and humble and simple. Lots of good anecdotes about William Faulkner, etc. No one dared ask him about Allan Bloom! Said the Nobel Prize didn’t mean much to him; the one prize that really meant something was his first, the National Book Award, because this showed him that he really could make a career as a writer. Then we all filed off to Cook Auditorium to hear a jovial lecture/reading full of impish humor, followed by portentous questions directed at him by Blanche Gelfant and Don Pease.

May 13, 1988

Still more! Went to hear Helène Cixous at a feminist symposium. Very disappointing. She’s brilliant, but seemed to get trapped in her own cobweb. I left in the middle.

May 15, 1988

More! Steve Scher’s symposium on music and literature. I went to the final session today, with Joseph Kleman and Hayden White. White spectacular despite a kind of stutter. Then Karin and Panos Rodis arrived, to replace Laura Gouthreau (from the Adirondacks) in our guest room. Panos bushy-haired all-too-Greek, but Karin rules the roost, I suspect. She’ll direct our writing program; he’ll be unemployed.

May 16, 1988

Kendal Overseers. Lloyd Lewis and John Clancy are here. Plus architects and engineers.

May 17, 1988

Lloyd, John, Tom Corindia, and the director of Mediplex (which is providing the venture capital) met with Bob Field and Cary Clark re: Kendal. Field half asleep, but Clark wide awake. Helped us considerably on questions of sewer and water (he’s a director of the Water Company). Mediplex man very impressive. Lloyd isn’t, in public, but his accomplishments speak for him. Kendal public meeting at 5:00 in the high school auditorium. About 300 present. We’d been briefed yesterday on the site plan, which is a brilliant accommodation to the sloping terrain. Now the drawing was on display for all.

May 18, 1988

Frank, the student supposedly doing my Hypercard program, has disappeared. The project is aborted, it seems.

May 19, 1988

I lectured at 9:00 a.m. Then we jumped in the car and drove to Riparius to plant peas, lettuce, radishes, etc.

May 20, 1988

Elizabeth Keenan collapsing, as expected. She says she has gone to her room and wept every day for a month.

Sunday, May 22, 1988

Lunch at the Greens with Mother. Then we all went to Andy Rangell’s to hear a preview of his next concert. Played early Beethoven sonata most eccentrically. But I liked his version of Schumann’s Carnaval.

May 23, 1988

Good! My cholesterol is down, almost to normal.

Seamus Heaney lectured in the afternoon on Joyce. His great preference is for Joyce over Yeats. Read hilariously from the opening chapter, which is so funny if savored, slowly.

In the evening we brought Mother, Muriel Bernstein, and Clay Sykes to Heaney’s reading of his own poetry. Stirring, wonderful stuff, consummate in technique, yet so simple and human withal. The opposite of Cixous & Co.

May 24, 1988

War/Peace Faculty Seminar: an interesting man who had worked in the Pentagon. He assured us that all arms reduction efforts are purely to satisfy public opinion. The government does not wish to reduce arms.

Rushed home to confer with Leonard Bain, the financial consultant we’ve retained. He’ll project out my retirement prospects for thirty years.

Worried about AMTRAK Montrealer. The ICC will be ruling soon on the effort to force the Boston and Maine to sell their track. I wrote to the Valley News urging people to encourage the ICC to rule in AMTRAK’S favor, and of course wrote my own letter and got others to write.

May 28–29, 1988

Children home for Pappous’s and my birthdays, mostly Pappous’s. He’s 86, I think. We brought him home for a meal and it went fairly well, as well as can be expected. He’s sinking slowly . . . slowly . . . in mind and body.

Princeton now has a revised report from the reader who objected to my book’s length. He is much more favorable, though he keeps insisting that my question “Was Kazantzakis really a communist?” is a red herring. In any case, Bob Brown will present the revised MS to the Princeton board on June 20.

May 30, 1988

We’ve had some stirring faculty meetings this term, particularly the special one called by petition (instigator: Jon Appleton; I signed) re: the Cole case, vs. the Dartmouth Review. Appleton denounced Jeffrey Hart from the podium. Jeff in defending himself only made himself seem more ridiculous. The best part however was Jim Freedman’s brave denunciation of the Review as poisoning our atmosphere. The students have been suspended. Their sentences were not revised. None of the cowardice shown by McLaughlin, who caved in under weight of alumni and trustees. Freedman is now a total hero for all of us. Thus today we willingly granted him his reorganization scheme.

Outdoor picnic for the Tucker Foundation under a tent at 29 Rope Ferry Road, now Jim Breeden’s residence. I spoke on the international work camp movement, competing against thunder, lightning, and pelting rain.

May 31, 1988

To Cambridge and the A.R.T. with Leander to see ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, not one of their successes, alas. Played in Mussolini’s Italy. The claims for this text, as an avant-garde statement of existential freedom, seem bloated. What came across was the murderous antics of a sex-maniac/psychopath. Robert Brustein and his minions were sitting near us, in the last row, feverishly taking notes during the performance. They presumably know it doesn’t work and are trying to salvage something.

June 1, 1988

Annual Comparative Literature luncheon. Farewells to Kevin and Marina Brownlee, who have been seduced away by the University of Pennsylvania. False friends, both. Lew Renza is stepping down as chairman, to chair the English Department, replacing Peter Saccio, who resigned in pique. He’s never been one of my favorites.

June 2, 1988

To Weston in the morning to meet with Lelah, Joe Contino, and Pat re: buildings and grounds management. Pat wants no janitorial duties. We humored him.

Then back to Hanover to the town’s Planning Board hearing on Kendal, with Carol Weingeist, Tom Corindia and John Clancy. Chief in the Board’s minds as a problem seems to be traffic congestion.

June 5, 1988

Wonderful exhibit at the Hood: Paul Sample. Among others is the original of the reproduction that I grew up with and that is now Leander’s—of the hunters in the snow, eerie, with no footprints. Learned for the first time that it is an allegory of a passage in Lamentations. Bob McGrath, who mounted the exhibit, said they started it as an act of piety and only later discovered that Sample was truly a significant painter.

Wednesday, June 8, 1988

Cambridge

The great day: Daphne’s graduation. Drove early to Cambridge with Mother, Chrysanthi and Leander following in his car. He stayed at Kesaya Noda’s apartment on Wendale Street. We started with a picnic in the Yard; met the Carys. Then Class Day exercises. Tom Woolf was the speaker, and a fine one. Said that the total breakdown of civilization, morality, the death of God, etc. in our age should be considered a challenge. How lucky we are to be able, perhaps, to fashion something new ex nihilo. Student speakers amusing, self-assured.

Then to Masters’ reception at Winthrop House. Jim and Martha Davis, Chris Flug, old friends. I of course felt very much at home. By this time, actually during class day, Alec had joined us; he’d come up from Philadelphia by train. I dashed off to Emily Harrison’s tea party in a huge house near Porter Square. Met her father, who spent many years in Pakistan, and saw Eliza Harrison again; she’s still on the Haverford Board, and is just a bit apprehensive about the new president; she obviously supported someone else. Emily is going out west to be outdoors! Interesting to see this wealthy Philadelphia Quaker clan; scores of uncles, cousins, etc.

Then to the Faculty Club where I hosted dinner for eight: Mother, the five of us, Greg Tebbe, and Daphne’s girlfriend from B.U. A fine event in just the right place; not the least bit hectic. Afterwards we all trooped off to Meg Alexiou’s in her new home, very Victorian, just like the one in Brum only in much better repair. Meg vey strange at first, as though drugged (drunk?), but afterwards she warmed up and became her old self. She allowed as she thinks she should help Pavlos’s upkeep financially! Dimitri will be coming here for a spell later in the summer. Classes are going well at Harvard but students rate her poorly as a lecturer: boring. She’s content-oriented rather than process-oriented. Diana Haas is leaving, to Meg’s relief, and one of her own gang is coming, which means that Demotic Greek I & II will be restored at Harvard after the Farmakidis interregnum. We toured the house; the third floor is Michael Hendys’s, full of Ottoman treasures, like Topkapi Palace.

Thursday, June 9

Cambridge

Rain! Slight, but a continuous drizzle. Armed with doughnuts and coffee, we arrived at the Square at 8:15 a.m. to discover about 5000 people who had done the same. Waited 1½ hours on line in the rain, to enter the Yard finally, too late to get anywhere closer than Widener. But I wandered off and Alec and I eventually discovered a fine escape from which we could see and hear everything—see in other words the tops of 5000 umbrellas. Chrysanthi and Mother joined us eventually. President Bok was marvelous in his citations. The various groups were stirring in their enthusiasm: Business School waved dollar bills; Public Administration grads waved red tape. A good show, even in the rain. Then picnic in Winthrop courtyard, Gore Hall, with the rain having stopped. Then degrees, announced by Chris Flug and handed by Jim Davis, after which Martha hugged everyone. Lots of hugs and kisses all round: very intimate and touching. They did the alphabet backwards, so Daphne was one of the last of the 160 or so grads. She signed the book, and that was that.

We loaded Leander’s car for the apartment in New York and our car for Hanover. Alec went to South Station, Greg to Logan Airport, and Daphne and Leander took off for the city while Chrysanthi, Mother, and I headed home. Listened to continuation of the ceremony. Arias Sánchez, President of Costa Rica, was the speaker. Said that he earned his doctorate (he’d just been awarded an honorary degree) the hard way. Stirring speech about Costa Rica’s experiment: no army. And about the obligation of Harvard grads toward the millions of the less privileged in the world.

On Interstate 93 on the way back I dozed; the car struck the guard rail on the left and bounced off, waking me (of course). I didn’t even stop. How lucky! We could have flipped over or smacked into another vehicle and all been killed. Mother and Chrysanthi very shaken. Stopped at the Riverside Grill for supper and saw that the impact had been absorbed by the left front hubcap, which had been ripped off. Front light smashed; scratches along the door and fenders. That’s all. Close call.

Friday, June 10, 1988

After all that happened in the last two days, very draining emotionally I had no energy to go today to my Deerfield 40th reunion, even though Bill Knox had telephoned a few weeks ago, strangely, without identifying himself at first, to see if I’d be there. I hadn’t spoken with him for almost 40 years! He’d had a nervous breakdown at Princeton but had pulled through. Is now a professor of sociology, married, with family. I remember visiting his apartment in NYC and being glared at by his aristocratic grandfather. Also Bill throwing his clothes on the floor to be picked up by servants, as in Hartley’s The Go-Between. All those people are now dead, he tells me, and the apartment has been sold.

But we did go for a lovely, long supper at the Covered Bridge Inn in West Woodstock, with Michael and Teresa Heyman. He’s always jolly and sociable; she is strange, but civil at least. Lots of good conversation about the David McLaughlin situation among others, and Sandy McCulloch’s amazing growth under this crisis. Michael is apparently still thriving as Chancellor at Berkeley despite all the travel involved, jockeying with the State legislators, etc. He asked me especially about Czeslaw Milosz, who of course is on his faculty but difficult to get to know. I told him of our interesting lunch, when Milosz had spoken so decisively of the similarity between the capitalist and socialist systems, both motivated by fear of mortality, but reacting in different ways, capitalism through the accumulation of wealth as a supposed insurance against contingency, socialism through state guarantees at the expense of individual freedom and initiative. I also recounted Julie Childs’ observations when she accompanied her ex-husband to see her father-in-law get a Nobel Prize in biology: all the gaiety and joy of the occasion, except for Milosz, who brought a pall to everything, even there.

June 12, 1988

Dartmouth graduation, which I skipped, although I ought to support Freedman. Tragically, a girl graduate, Stacey Coverdale, whom I taught in English 2–3 four years ago, was killed in an auto accident a few hours after receiving her diploma. Again I realize our good fortune the other day when I’d dozed at the wheel.

June 14, 1988

Kendal Overseers. Alan Hunt came to explain the contract, and we were able to point out some discrepancies, etc. The application for the Certificate of Need will go in shortly. We are resolved now to purchase the land when the option expires in October. I presented the Vining abridgment.

Thursday, June 16, 1988

NYC

Drove to Springfield with Mother, although she is afraid to drive with me now. She’ll visit Irving and Clarice tonight, and Amy and Roy, will sleep over, go by chauffeured limousine to Gertrude tomorrow, then have supper with Bubbles, stay at the Yale Club, and visit Edith Buseck on Saturday, then meet me at Penn Station.

I went to Mamet’s Speed the Plow, brilliantly performed. It’s about a movie mogul confronted with the temptation to do something worthwhile as opposed to something lucrative—and almost, but not quite, succumbing. Just three characters. Marvelously responsive audience.

June 17, 1988

Philadelphia

Publications Committee. Rebecca astounded me by revealing that she’s separated from her husband. She too! This wholesome Quaker woman! They’ll try once more, this summer, to make it work.

After the Board, long visit with Margery and Alan Walker. I tried to console and encourage her re: this year’s problems. She’s not ready to resign, she says. Will keep trying. They’re eager, and apprehensive, about Kendal.

June 18, 1988

NYC

To Kinhaven campaign meeting at the Chamber Music Society of America, 8th Avenue and 38th, sleazy neighborhood. David Bury, Jim Quinn, George Goodwin. We’re making progress. Quinn is wonderful.

Relieved to find Mother at Penn Station as planned. She did everything. Saw Gertrude presumably for the last time; she’s very old and very sick, with round the clock nurses, but still compos mentis. Irving also looking old and sick. Mother had no regrets when she reentered 20 East 74th Street. George Goodwin and a daughter accompanied us on the train; then we delivered them to Amherst and got home by midnight.

Sunday, June 19, 1988

Hanover–Riparius

Kent Hatch and family for breakfast. He’s working for GE in Cincinnati, editing their in-house magazine, having left the teaching profession. To Meeting. Jean Brophy there, newly arrived with her “spouse” to take up the administration of Kendal. Jack Shepherd will be the new clerk (and also the new convener of College Course 1). I’m still archivist. Peter Stettenheim looking well after his triple by-pass operation.

Daphne home after settling in at 220 West 93rd Street. House full of her Harvard friends for a last fling, including the estranged roommate Lauri, who decided to be pleasant at the end.

Frantically packed for the summer. Waited for Dick Dellamora, who’ll be occupying the house for six weeks. He came and we left at 5:00 p.m. Rendezvous with Leander (already at the farm) at Montcalm restaurant. Free at last!

Monday, June 20, 1988

Terpni!

Today the Princeton board meets on my book. ICL has met several times on AMTRAK, always favorably. But the big decisions come at the end of the month. Couldn’t start the tractor, even though I’d spent $50 on the magneto, as usual. Smoke, but that’s all. Probably faulty timing. I’ve resolved to get a new one. We have $18,000 surplus because Daphne is no longer in college, plus raise of about $7000 in our combined Dartmouth salaries. Went immediately with Leander to look at a Ford in Queensbury, then a Ford in Granville. Leander continued on to Kinhaven to begin the season there.

(Forgot to mention the crisis there between Jerry and Pat as a result of our committee supporting Pat’s abhorrence of janitorial duties. Head-on collision. Jerry ended by hiring a cleaning agency. Pat threatened to resign but didn’t.)

June 21, 1988

Looking at tractors. To Schroon Lake for John Deere. Prices vary considerably. Meanwhile we’re also worried about the well. Is it still polluted? Took a sample to the lab yesterday. Spoke to Art Perryman about tractors.

Wednesday, June 22, 1988

To Bud Rodick in Schroon at Art’s recommendation. He has Kioti tractors, imitation Kubotas made in Korea. Quite cheap. Went to Keith Leggett in Chestertown, who bought one and is happy. But I fear an upstart company. Who knows if they’ll exist 30 years from now, or 5. But Rodick has a six-foot used sicklebar mower for $800. We’re going to buy this instead of a rotary. Lead, via Art, on a John Deere place in Hudson Falls.

Thursday, June 23, 1988

A great day! (1) Purchased a new 1988 No. 850 John Deere tractor from the Glens Falls place and received delivery a few hours later. (2) Received a letter from Bob Brown saying that the Princeton board had accepted my book, unanimously. Also Tom Trezize’s on Beckett’s Trilogy, which I had recommended to them.

But the well is polluted. Can’t win. It is undoubtedly the dry well for the kitchen sink, which I’d stupidly placed 15 feet from the well, thinking all water followed the ground course of the water table toward the Hudson River.

I’ve started preparing my MS for Princeton. The computer version can be sent to them over Bitnet. But I’ve got to put in all the Greek with the Macintosh.

June 24, 1988

Jacques and Hilda Grunblatt for coffee. They’re finally going to publish one of Jacques’ translations.

June 25, 1988

To Johnsburg high school graduation at 2:00 p.m. because Ellen Grunblatt was the speaker. She spoke well about women’s lib, sweetly and rationally, not angrily. Then to picnic at Art’s: surprise party for his 50th birthday. Long talk with Ann’s husband, a dairy farmer south of Syracuse. Lots of his neighbors are Amish and they all get along beautifully. His farm never jeopardized, like those in Iowa, because he and his father before him never bought anything on credit. It’s as simple as that, he says. Also met Jim Smith, who’s running for town board on the Republican ticket. Formerly head of maintenance at the Sagamore; now a sign painter, locally. And Sarge Van Keuren and his wife Alice, whom we haven’t seen for ages. And Arnold, who makes Art’s frames and is a fellow Republican councilman.

Sunday, June 26, 1988

Alec arrived, excited about a marvelously stimulating conference at Westtown run by David Mallory. He explained it all over dinner at Smith’s, where we ran into Jerry and Rosine Gardner, newly arrived home after Jerry’s ill-fated year as a French teacher in Moriah. All our stomachs are queasy owing to our polluted well. Chrysanthi is boiling all the water, but we’ve got to start importing drinking water from elsewhere.

Monday, June 27, 1988

Daphne starts work today at Simon and Schuster in their offices at Columbus Circle, in the “travel book” section. Actually, they’re trying to develop a competitor to Let’s Go.

Driving the John Deere and studying the manual. It’s complicated.

Wednesday, June 29, 1988

Mr. Frank West of NiMo (Niagara Mohawk) came to discuss the possibility of electricity for Alec’s cabin. Best bet is for us to dig a trench and lay the cable. Bud Rodick delivered and hooked up the mower. I’m mowing! Six feet at a time, effortlessly (but it’s still work, of a sort).

Michael Dixon, a friend of Alec’s from the Westtown Conference, is here for two days. A black raised in the inner city of Cleveland and appalled by crime, violence, drug addiction, etc. Currently teaching on the Kentucky border of Ohio in a vocational school—white hillbillies totally antagonistic to education of any sort. At Dartmouth and at Friends Central we are in a different world, and don’t always realize this.

Van Keuren will give me an estimate on a septic system. Says we should drill a well; will never salvage our existing one. I hate the thought of this modernization. Even the John Deere seems wrong here, to tell the truth.

July 2, 1988

Alec is putting a collar around his well to keep out rodents and ground water. We should do the same. Marvin (Pinky) O’Dell, electrician and general handy man, will put in a service entrance. He’s a character: born-again Christian whose business card declares “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” He’s about to sell his house and go off with family in a trailer to be a carpenter/electrician missionary, donating his services for subsistence to worthy causes.

July 4, 1988

No fireworks for us this year, thank God. Chrysanthi went folk dancing and Alec and I went to Art’s cabin to meet Richard Stewart, the man who writes so many letters to the North Creek Enterprise. Lots of good gossip. He hoped we’d keep our dug well and restore it.

July 5, 1988

Heat wave. The pond is delicious. We traveled back on the NiMo cutting yesterday as it goes toward North Creek, all the way back on Waddell Road to the end, then maybe another mile through this path through the forest, a remarkable feat of engineering. But it suddenly stops. Presumably they’ll come in from the other end to do the remainder. Richard Stewart was scathing about the high-handedness of NiMo in dealing with individual landowners. We luckily escaped by a hair’s breadth. They could have cut our farm in half, as they did the Waddell farm across the road, rendering it worthless.

July 6, 1988

Chrysanthi went to Granville to pick strawberries with Chris Perryman. I was telephoned by Adam Seessel in Raleigh, NC to be interviewed for his newspaper re: the forthcoming movie of The Last Temptation which, even before release, is exercising the fundamentalist Christians, who are denouncing it. I sent him my PH pamphlet. Some haying when it cooled off. Then a delicious swim, then violin-piano with Alec: Corelli, Brahms, Kreisler. How nice! I’ve finished going through the Kazantzakis MS and must now enter the changes on the computer when we go to Hanover.

July 7, 1988

To Saratoga to ballet matinee with the Shapiros. [This brings the diary up to date.] Picnic lunch joined by another couple with three obnoxious grandchildren: two sullenly silent girls and a boy who declared that the only reason he came was to get away from his brother for the afternoon. The program was “Interplay,” which Jerome Robbins did for Billy Rose’s Ziegfield Follies in 1945: abstract, colorful, delightful; then “Tea-Rose” to music by George Gershwin that I found consistently third-rate, but nice dancing, and some humor; lastly Balanchine’s extravaganza “Stars and Stripes” to music by John Philip Sousa, with a lovely pas de deux by Kyra Nichols and Jock Soto. As always, ballet carries one out of this world to a fairyland of abstract youthfulness, weightlessness, and harmony, which is why it’s so satisfying. Saw Mel and Herb Goertz during intermission by accident, just as we had last year.

Home to hamburgers with Alec. Then to Johnsburg Town Council under the new Supervisor, Bill Montfort, and the new openness (Glasnost!) that encourages observation and participation. Held this time in Wevertown Town Hall; fine until the mosquitoes invaded through the screen-less windows. Norma Rawson gave me a warm “hello” at the coffee break. Hilda and Jacques were there, of course; and the dowser, Ted Kaufman; and Arnold, Art’s friend, who read a prepared ordinance very impressively; and Mrs. Rodney Sargent, whom I asked to convey belated thanks to her husband for the ambulance service that saved me when I had the gall bladder attack; and the new highway superintendent, Fred Hitchcock, very young. It wasn’t at all as grim as Art and Jacques had led me to believe. On the surface, at least, Montfort seemed to have a cordial relationship with the Councilors (all Republicans): Leon Prouty, Art Arsenault, Helen Cornwall (she came up to me with a big smile and said how nice it was to collect my taxes for 27 years). The Councilors spoke, didn’t just glower in silence, as I’d been told. Montfort garrulous and repetitive, but bright, dedicated, well prepared. The chief issues were recycling and garbage collection; ORDA was not on the agenda.

July 12, 1988

So many visitors, all in one day. Marty Cooper came to say that our forest really isn’t ready for cutting. He’d walked it last fall. There’s a good stand of pine along the road, however. Then Michael and Laura Gouthreau showed up to see Alec’s cabin (the electric wiring is almost complete, although we’ve decided to go the route of a generator, which means gas stove, lights, and refrigerator); then Irv and Fran and then Rosine in the evening to convince Alec that turning 30 isn’t so depressing after all.

Carson Bunker will come in two weeks to put in a septic tank and seepage pit (dry well). I’m resisting a drilled well, however. I want to keep us pumping by hand, resisting mechanization even if in inconsistent, symbolic ways (the tractor is the other side of the coin, of course).

Last Sunday, in Alec’s truck, we explored the new high voltage line all the way back on Waddell Road and then through the forest, on and on, until it suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere. Presumably they’ll come in from North Creek and meet in the middle. An amazing feat of engineering, although horrible in that it’s all generated by skiing, as Michael assured us: he sits at the top of the gondola and runs the electric motor, now at the limit of the capacity of the existing amperage.

Mowing progresses. We’ve had 98° weather for a week, which slowed everything down, but now it’s better. I’ve done ten hours on the new tractor and must service it today

Finished a spate of books on World War I and its literature. What a horror! Yet we’re ready to repeat at any time. I’m encouraged in my pacifism.

July 13, 1988

First trouble with the mower. A rock knocked the blade 30° out of line. But I discovered later that this is a safety measure—i.e., it’s meant to happen. So Alec and I restored things to normal.

July 14, 1988

Ballet again with Irv and Fran. Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” short ballets with music by Cage and Gottschalk, then Balanchine’s “Who Cares” to songs by Gershwin, starring Patricia McBride and Robert LaFosse. Lovely, as always, and varied. Met Donna by accident, on an afternoon’s break from a conference. With her the head of mechanics’ training at BOCES. Told me that no one is simply a mechanic any more. Motors are too complicated. They graduate with specialties in electric, hydraulic, ignition, etc.

July 15, 1988

Sir Ernst Gombrich says that “the humanities are the memory of culture.” Cited by Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention, p. 27.

Saturday, July 16, 1988

Up early. Breakfast in the diner in Lake George, another one of our στέκια. To Blue Gentian Lodge: another στέκι. Swim in pool. Sweltering heat. Board meeting. The big question is: should Kinhaven run for five weeks to ease recruitment? If so, it could add a two-week program for pre-teens. I’ll be in the middle of this controversy as the next president.

Supper at Ike Patch’s, elaborately catered (alas). Met Jim Quinn’s wife and daughter. Then faculty concert. Leander played only briefly, a modern piece for piano, trumpet, and trombone.

Sunday, July 17, 1988

Board, a.m. Alec brought Yiayia from Hanover for the children’s concert. Very fine groups. Shostakovich’s symphony stirring. James McBride also in the audience. He’s now a songwriter/jazz musician. To dinner with Alec, Leander, Yiayia to celebrate our 37th anniversary. They even paid the bill!

To Hanover. Dick Dellamora is renting our house. Nice to catch up. He’s disgusted with the petty politicking of the School of Criticism, especially the feminists.

Monday-Thursday, July 18–21, 1988

Working hard on the computer to prepare the final version of my MS for Princeton University Press. Finally transmitted the entire book to Princeton via Bitnet. But Greek passages have to be entered on hard copy by hand. Lots of trouble printing them out on laser printer because of incompatibilities in the “system.” Ordered books for WWI course in the fall and for English 2. Dinner Wednesday with Walter and Miriam Arndt. He is suffering physically somewhat (muscle disorder) but still witty and playful; she compulsively talkative.

I altered the preface to Being Seventy because Mrs. Vining wrote to say that she has 14 honorary degrees, not 13! Thursday p.m. drove directly to Saratoga. Alec met us for dinner in the Hall of Springs. Then delicious ballet, especially “Space,” which ended with dancers in furious orbit, like planets, around four dancers in the center. Also on the program: Copland’s “Bounding Live,” and Bernstein’s “Fancy Free,” all part of the festival of American dance.

Friday, July 22, 1988

Riparius

Back here after almost a week away. Started pasting in the Greek on hard copy. Alec’s “quartet” arrived: two young Japanese, Naoko (viola) and Matsuo (violin), he a research biological engineer working for the Olympus Company and placed in the University of Pennsylvania for three years. Lovely couple. We played after supper: Haydn, Mozart. Later came Steve and Diane, psychiatrist and obstetrician. He’s the ’cellist.

Saturday, July 23, 1988

Finished pasting. MSS are wrapped and ready to be posted on Monday.

Big controversy re: the film of The Last Temptation. Campus Crusade for Christ is trying to ban it, to buy up and destroy all copies. Αίσχος!

Played Haydn and Mozart again, this time with the ’cello. Worked on the slow movement and the Mozart Quintet. Then mowed.

In the evening, we “performed” for Shapiros, Gouthreaus, Gardners, and Perrymans (plus Art’s sister Diane and her beau, Phil, a Kentucky lawyer), and assorted children. The living room has never been so full. I played without the customary nervousness. Phil is interesting. He was stationed as a Navy lawyer during the Vietnam War. Obsessed with the East. Suffered depression upon return, as did Alec. Identified with the Marlow figure in Apocalypse Now.

Sunday, July 24, 1988

Alec’s quartet is chinking the cabin. It’s now about ½ done, with okum, that is, and wire mesh for the mortar. Later in the day Leander arrived with Larry Wright (trumpeter) and Caroline (hornist). We had a jolly supper—two huge steaks—and were then kept in stitches by Caroline’s good humor. Richard Hyde, former Dartmouth chaplain, whose book I vetted recently, came last of all. Full house.

Monday, July 25, 1988

A larger crew is chinking. Nice company, except for Hyde, whom Chrysanthi despises as a sponger and egomaniac. But I enjoy him intellectually if not morally. We had a lovely conversation this afternoon, both floating for an hour in the pond. He understands perfectly Kazantzakis’s major point: that when a culture begins to fall apart ethically, the cause is the lack of a viable myth. Everyone left by suppertime, to Chrysanthi’s great relief. Then Art Perryman and I drove to Blue Mountain Lake in Art’s Cadillac to hear Bob McGrath lecture most excellently on Tait’s and Homer’s depiction of the sporting scene in the Adirondacks. Bob is wildly enthusiastic about Winslow Homer, calling him the equal of Cézanne, etc. On the way back, however, Art was perceptive about Bob’s probable excesses of interpretation—e.g., that Homer’s flying trout depict a Darwinian rather than a providential universe. Asa Gray rather than Louis Agassiz. Returned to the Perrymans’ and talked until after midnight. They’re going to set up a trust fund to insure that taxes and upkeep on their Adirondack property are met.

Big controversy re: the movie of The Last Temptation. Campus Crusade for Christ and that ilk want to destroy all prints and prevent distribution. Universal Pictures printed a full-page ad in the Times reaffirming freedom of speech, multiplicity of truth, etc. My PH pamphlet is totally relevant, but of course no one at Universal ever heard of it.

Finished mowing. Και του χρόνου!

July 26, 1988

Reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. Brenda Silver exhorted me to include it in the WWI course, to give women a place. It’s mediocre on literature, and flat stylistically, but poignant “informationly.”

To Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at Lake George Opera, complementary tickets furnished by Harry Teahan, the percussionist and my former student. So deliciously funny, a romp, able to mask over all cares . . . temporarily. Proceeded by dinner at the Jade Palace with Fran and Irv and Aser and Evelyn Rothstein.

July 27, 1988

Finished Vera Brittain. Bob and Susan McGrath stopped for lunch on their way home from Blue Mountain Lake. Bob is genuinely enthusiastic about my cabin, and appreciative of its Thoreauian origins.

Yesterday, at supper, Mrs. Rothstein asked if Alec and Chrysanthi had read my Kazantzakis and Politics in manuscript, and I had to reply, “No. No one in my family reads anything I write.” So be it!

July 29, 1988

Alec’s birthday. Age 30. He’s done all the caulking with okum and has almost finished with the metal mesh. Next comes the cement chinking. I gave him a large toolbox plus some trowels—very timely.

Reading Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The Peaceable Classroom, submitted to Pendle Hill. Very fine. For example: ❡ I think the question for each of us—doctor, lawyer, storekeeper, priest—is Does your daily work contribute to peace and justice, or does it not? This brings us . . . to something like the Buddhist concept of right livelihood. “Select a vocation which helps realize your ideal of compassion,” as the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nh’at Hanh phrases it. And having selected it, select it again every day, lest you get bogged down in bureaucracy and paperwork and forget what you are doing.

Another heat wave. Worked with the Jari around several rock piles. Carburetor needs adjustment. Exhausting work. But I’m not over-extending myself any more. Stopped when my heart was pounding, and took a delicious swim.

July 30, 1988

Yasuo and Naoko are back. We had a long conversation over breakfast about life in Japan vs. America. Am working today on JMGS business—a response to Vassilis Lambropoulos’s critique of MG scholarship, and a review of Kazantzakis’s children’s novel At the Palaces of Knossos. I feel impelled to write a long letter to Bill Knox, my Deerfield classmate who surfaced last month after 40 years.

July 31, 1988

Removed a nest of worms from behind the barnwood sheathing of the kitchen. Used our new gadget, an electric-powered “weed wacker” from Sears: a trimmer.

Aser and Evelyn Rothstein for supper. She’s a blabbermouth but he is extraordinary. Not only a world class scientist but one with the gift of explaining his work clearly to a layman like myself. He brought us up to date on the amazing breakthrough that occurred in his institute: the location of the mutated gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. This is presumably what causes a malfunctioning in the cells of the trachea and pulmonary passages, preventing them from secreting sodium chloride (salt), which in turn attracts water, which lubricates the passages, allowing mucus to pass up and down freely. Aser’s own research involves the mechanisms (involving hormones, chiefly) that trigger the passage of chemicals through the cell walls. The problem now is to find precisely where, along the chain of cause and effect, the defect occurs. That’s still a mystery. But knowing the gene enables doctors to identify foetuses with cystic fibrosis and to give the mother a chance to abort them. I felt, as Aser went on in his totally lucid manner about all this, that truly there must be a God. What a wonderful machine is the human being!

Queried about alopecia, Aser said that scientists now firmly believe, through lots of evidence, that the immune system is affected by psychological states. Thus the likeliest explanation for Alec’s disease is the breakup with his girlfriend, not the creosote applied to his logs.

August 4, 1988

I’m writing an op-ed piece for the New York Times on Scorsese’s film of The Last Temptation, more precisely on the fundamentalist opposition to it. Finished Barbusse’s Under Fire, very good toward the end. Yesterday read H. G. Wells’s Mr Brittling Sees It Through, useful for the civilians’ point of view of the war. This afternoon Alec and I spent six hours putting in outlets and switches.

August 5, 1988

Finished the wiring of Alec’s cabin. To Shapiros for supper with the Adlers. Daphne is coming. She’s unhappy in her apartment; the landlady seems to be a kleptomaniac. I’ll try to convince her to go to the Penington. Must start work on a talk on nature to be given to the Rotary in North Creek next Wednesday.

Milly Adler showed us her latest work after supper, a series of portrait-heads of imaginary people, all “typical,” and most destitute, old, tired, tense. “Today’s world!” as Art Perryman astutely commented. Wonderful work, inexhaustibly imaginative. Milly confessed that at age 16 she was sure that she would make the world a better place through her art. Ah . . . fond dreams. But, as Shaw says, such art does teach us to see better, to feel more sensitively. All these faces are evident daily on the New York subway (where Milly sometimes furtively sketches), but we gaze downward or bury our own faces in the newspaper.

The Scorsese imbroglio is getting more acute. Zeffirelli called the film disgusting but Scorsese says that Z. never saw it. My op-ed piece is good, I think.

Daphne is in better spirits than we expected. She evidently has recuperative powers. She’ll put a lock on her door. Now she suspects one of the men—Shaun—as the light-fingered one, and hopes that he’ll move.

August 6, 1988

Working on the nature talk for the Rotary. Then dove to Weston, alone, since Chrysanthi chose to stay here with Daphne. Dinner at the “Inn at Long Last,” in Chester, Jack Coleman’s place, with Ned Perrin and Janet Alquist. Then to Kinhaven concert. Leander and Sandy played Mozart four-hands very nicely.

August 8, 1988

Riparius

I’m in contact repeatedly with Howard Goldberg, op-ed editor of the Times, regarding my piece against the critics of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation. Goldberg at first gruff and hurried, but loosened up gradually; eventually confided that he’s married to an old friend of mine, Beatrice Tauss! (No longer teaching at Juilliard; at home, writing.)

August 9, 1988

Bob Morse, real estate agent in Wevertown, invited us to supper to see Don Kurka, here on a visit with his son. Nice reunion. He’s painting, as always; hopes to build a cottage on the land he wisely retained when he sold his house. Also there: Tortora and wife, father of Julia, whom I uncharitably call the “putana.” More telephone calls to Goldberg. He has made me add a new first paragraph to come in more angrily at the start.

August 10, 1988

We’re continuing to pump out the well, but it fills up more quickly than our little pump can drain it. This afternoon I dug out the offending dry well and put a temporary pipe to another hole far away, behind the privy. Swam and then joined Art Perryman to go to Rotary, where I spoke on “The Nature of Nature.” Electricity went off as we started dinner, plus the air conditioning, but luckily it came on again in time for my talk (which would have been impossible otherwise, since I read it, of course), then went out again soon after we’d finished. Lucky. Kurka and his son came, also Tortoras, Grunblatts, Jim Smith, Art and Chris, and lots of people I of course didn’t know.

Meanwhile, people keep calling me about The Last Temptation. Apparently Scorsese on television said he didn’t like the translation: too flowery. My piece will be in tomorrow.

August 11, 1988

Telephone call from a Boston rabbi at 8:00 a.m. to say he liked the piece but wished I hadn’t slurred the Pharisees who, ironically, were devoted to interpretation, not literalism, as I implied. At least I used a lowercase “p.” . . . Visit from Rev. Giles, Methodist, born-again, vacationing in the campgrounds in Riparius, to try to explain the horror of true Christians at what Kazantzakis/Scorsese had done. Courteous young man. Said that Renan, Higher Criticism, etc. were what misled everyone: the whole truth is in the gospels. Period! Calls from California, Boston, and NH Public Radio for interviews. A busy time.

August 12, 1988

Nice letter from Bob Oden praising my piece. Also from the editor of Adirondack Life. Telephone call from Warder Cadbury, whom I’d been thinking about recently. Other letters, all supportive, except one from a born-again Christian. Letter from Donald Swann in London. I sent him my piece; he wants to publish something in the UK re: the controversy.

Christos Alexiou has a daughter by Eri Stavropoulou, out of wedlock. What next? I’ve written my congratulations and have sent my op-ed piece.

Saturday, August 13, 1988

We’ve finished building up the well a bit to raise it above ground; made a cement lip to seal the cap. Started the plywood form for the cap. Can’t seem to empty the well, however, with our little pump; it fills in too quickly. No matter. Maybe repeated Clorox treatments and removal of the offending drywell will do the trick.

Sunday, August 14, 1988

In the morning, Pinky O’Dell rushed in, all dressed up for church, to check Alec’s wiring. All in order, he says. Next project: installing the chimney and stove. Doug Ross is here with Jeremy and Ann, his two beautiful, exemplary children. He’s loving, warm, but at the same time firm when he says No, a winning combination, it seems. He and Alec are cutting a hole in the roof for the metal stovepipe.

Monday, August 15, 1988

Yannis Karavidas telephoned from London to arrange a BBC interview. Three questions: (α) Τι ήταν η άμεση αιτία του σκανδάλου, (β΄) Τι έγινε όταν εκδόθηκε το βιβλίο; (γ΄) ο Καζαντζάκης είναι δημοφιλής στην Αμερική; The interviewer will be Εροφίλη Μαρωνίτη, κόρη του καθηγητά. I have until Wednesday to prepare.

Reading Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War, utterly delightful and brilliant.

Tuesday, August 16, 1988

Caught Alec’s cold. Headache, sore throat, fatigue. Horrors! But I’ve finished the cap for the well; worked all day yesterday, practically, mixing six batches of cement, using reinforcing rods, wire mesh, etc. Now it’s so heavy, we won’t be able to lift it.

Wednesday, August 17, 1988

All day in bed, except for the BBC interview, which went well enough, I think, since I’d prepared extensive answers. Leander arrived, enthusiastic over the best Kinhaven session since his first year. The little girl from Honduras was a brilliant success, ending with a fine performance of the Trout. At first she could hardly play, and was totally withdrawn. The whole school cheered. Leander had given her a lesson every day for two weeks, and she worked and worked. Now we have the problem of whether to go to a five-week session. The staff are opposed, Jerry and Nancy in favor, and I, as president, will be caught in the middle. Our first meeting is on September 11.

Nice letter on my op-ed piece from Bob Gersten at Brant Lake Camp, another from former student Bruce Brown.

Thursday, August 18, 1988

They’re stringing the wires on the high tension line. Also, the town has finally come to scrape our road, which has been chopped up terribly by all the construction this summer.

Feeling better. A day in bed does wonders. Nurse came this afternoon to examine me for TIAA life insurance: $150,000, recommended by Leonard Bain, our financial consultant. My net worth is over $1 million, which of course doesn’t mean much these days but still sounds nice.

Friday, August 19, 1988

Another full day. Began by going to Chestertown Health Center for blood test associated with the TIAA exam. Returned to drag former well covers, by tractor, up to Alec’s well, where they’ll serve temporarily. Then the three of us (Alec, Leander, and I) tipped the new well cover up on end and removed the wooden mould, and turned the cover over on the other side so that that half could cure. Then tried again, egged on by Alec, to empty the well. First with pails-full, hauling the pail up on a pully, the rope pulled by Leander and me as though by two yoked oxen. Chrysanthi was in hysterics. Then tried with the little gas pump we have, but it wouldn’t draw, so we lowered it into the well where it drew but filled the well with CO_2. So we placed a fan at the lip to draw out the fumes. All of this accomplishing practically nothing since the pump draws so little. So Alec called various people in various local fire departments, and finally got John Armstrong to promise us a pump at 5:00 p.m. from the Riverside Fire House. This Alec got, but the intake hose barely reached to our water level. Finally we got it to work. It spewed out gallons and gallons all over the ground, there being no outlet hose. A mess. But we got the water level down to about 15 inches from the bottom. By this time it was 6:00 p.m. and we were due at Jerry and Rosine Gardner’s for dinner at 6:30. Called them and explained. Lowered a ladder. Then John Alexander drove up with his two adorable children and helped. Alec went down the ladder and into the water and felt around. Nothing. No carcasses, no dead bodies. Raised the ladder. Washed and dressed. Returned the pump to the fire station. Appeared at the Gardners still shaking. Their children, Simon and the girl—hyperactive, relentless, undisciplined—drove me to distraction. But somehow we got through the meal and crawled home thankfully into bed.

More nice mail re: my op-ed piece. A lovely letter from a former student who said I’d taught him to appreciate literature twenty years ago.

Saturday, August 20, 1988

Everyone sick. Alec’s throat culture came back positive. Strep throat. He and Leander went off nevertheless to Hanover to see Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s recital tonight. But Alec landed in bed and we got Jacques to telephone a prescription for antibiotics to Eastman’s.

More mail, including a lovely note from Jim Clancy.

Still sick, but no strep throat yet.

Yesterday Elizabeth Marleyn telephoned from Bristol to interview me. She and Robin are well. He’s retired at age 50.

Today a student from the “D” interviewed me. We’ll see what gibberish he makes of my statement.

Jacques and Hilda came for supper.

Started reading Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa.

Sunday, August 21, 1988

Cold worse. All day in bed. To lose a day like this is horrible. At least I typed up my BBC interview to send it to various people. Telephoned Leander. Alec still sick, in bed. Leander met Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Ignat’s concert. He was all smiles, very gracious. Pappous fell again. His legs can’t support him at all now, just collapsed under him.

Monday, August 22, 1988

Long phone conversation with Tom and Becky Shankland, to get Elizabeth Marleyn’s address. Both of their children went to Harvard but didn’t know Daphne. Becky teaches 12th grade high school and advanced placement. She’s very happy in Los Alamos.

Cold a bit better. My eyes didn’t burn this morning.

Saturday, August 27, 1988

James McBride is here for the weekend. He liked my piece in the Times. Is now a song writer, doing journalism sporadically. Whole family went to the movies in Queensbury.

Tuesday, August 30, 1988

Carson Bunker has finally arrived to excavate for our septic tank and seepage tank. A “character”—tragic (lost two daughters to muscular dystrophy, a third barely survived leukemia) but irrepressibly joyous. A noble spirit: honest, simple, grateful. Very religious. Convinced that leukemia survival was a miracle engineered by God. A marvel with his machine; makes it veritably human. The huge hole he dug for the septic tank was perfect on the first try: walls vertical, size exactly right, bottom precisely level. We all appreciated his language: after a beautiful maneuver with the backhoe, picking up a huge boulder as though it were a pebble, “Darn bit better’n a hand shovel!” Anything great in quantity or quality is “more than you can shake a stick at,” etc.

Wednesday, August 31, 1988

Carson back. Plus Sarge Van Keuren to lay the pipes. The tanks were meant to be delivered at 12:30 from Greenwich. Carson, Sarge, another local, and I “chewed the fat” until the truck came finally at 2:00 p.m. The tank weighs five tons; the trucker lowered the two sections with precision and delicacy, articulating one onto the other exactly right. Who says machinery dehumanizes the worker? These men exult in their skill; they are craftsmen just as much as a medieval worker was. Sarge fitted the sewer line to one inlet on the tank, and the seepage line to the outlet, connecting to the seepage tank, out beyond the electric pole. 90 feet of pipe all told. I mapped everything so we’ll know if and when the tanks need to be cleaned. Carson also excavated for our future bathroom (which I really don’t want, and which Chrysanthi, who demanded it earlier, is also now no longer so eager to have).

Thursday, September 1, 1988

Carson again, to finish the back fill and smoothing out. Again, beautiful work. He waxed enthusiastic about Mosher’s Diner, where the daily special is only $3.95. We thanked him profusely (and also paid him $1500). Leander wants to write a thanks to be published in the News-Enterprise.

Friday, September 2, 1988

Half asleep last night, I thought of a kind of extravaganza to write about Carson, and typed it out this morning:

Watching Carson Bunker on his backhoe makes me remember what we often forget in these days of high-tech: that tools and technology are extensions of human or natural capability.

What is the bicycle, after all, but a better pair of legs to run with? What are binoculars but better eyes to see with? As for digging, the gopher carves out a tunnel lickety-split with two incisors, and a mole can burrow more than seventy-five yards in a single night with its tiny forepaws. But the backhoe, combining as it does the gopher’s teeth with the mole’s claws, puts both to shame. And when Carson Bunker is at the controls, it becomes positively human—a twenty-foot anthropoidal extension of our puny arm, complete with elbow and wrist joints, capacious palm, and talons that make your blood run cold.

Carson’s backhoe has all the emotions of the human hand. It slaps, scratches, bangs, and punches when it’s angry; but it can also caress, pat, and smooth with the tender delicacy of a mother putting her child to bed.

Enough of the fashionable reaction against machinery! One hears that pride in work is passé and that craftsmanship is dead, all because of technology. Carson Bunker refutes this nonsense.

Watching him on top of his monster, smiling from ear to ear as he fingers the controls with divine assurance, I finally understand how God created the earth. It was with a backhoe. A backhoe sporting a neck three hundred million miles long.

God climbed up onto his machine in heaven and saw the mess below. “What chaos!” he exclaimed. “We’ll have to do something about that.” So he gathered the waters under the heavens into one place and let dry land appear. And he smiled just like Carson, because he saw that it was good. Then he exalted the mountains and debased the valleys. And in a moment of inspiration, with one huge swipe, he carved out Lake George, swung the arm round to North Creek, and dumped the fill to make Gore Mountain, loading it with garnet on the inside and ski-slopes on the outside as a sign of his supernal beneficence. And the angels applauded. “Darn bit better than a hand shovel!” quipped God, smirking from ear to ear. Then, to show off, he dug more septic-tank holes than you can shake a stick at—60,000 in ten minutes, with his eyes closed, working the levers with his toes. (“Look, seraphim, no hands!”) And he said to the Archangel Gabriel, “Hop into the bucket and I’ll deposit you in the holes so you can check them.” And Gabriel went down into the holes and found that each and every one had walls absolutely vertical, angles absolutely square, and a bottom absolutely level, on the first try. And God stood up on top of his machine to get a better view and he saw that they were mighty good.

But even God makes a bit of a mess when he works. So he swiveled the seat on his three-hundred-million-mile backhoe, turned round the other way, and sped down to earth to put things right. He scooped up all the unwanted stones into his front-loader bucket, packed down the back-filled trenches so they wouldn’t settle later on and spoil people’s lawns, and smoothed the earth until it shone like glass. Then he loaded his machine onto its carrier and sped back to heaven. But half-way home he had a sudden notion to turn round again. “Drat,” he exclaimed to himself, “I forgot to excavate a natural swimming hole beneath Gore Mountain. That means they’ll need a dam.” But he continued on his way. “Better let them deal with that on their own,” he decided with divine wisdom, “and not get myself into hot water.”

And God returned to heaven, satisfied. And it was the end of the sixth day. So God rested from all the work that he had done, taking a wee nap. But at suppertime he decided to celebrate. So he treated himself to the Saturday night special at Mosher’s Diner—chicken and biscuits, a heavenly bargain at only $3.95!

Saturday, September 3, 1988

Decided to eat at Mosher’s Diner to verify menu and price. Met Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald, who invited us to their table. Spent a pleasant two hours. When I recited my Carson Bunker piece to them they warned me strongly against publishing it, saying it would be misunderstood, perceived as ridiculing Carson rather than praising him, and also perceived as blasphemous toward God by Carson and other fundamentalists. I got the message.

Monday, September 5, 1988

Mother called that Father had pneumonia again. We agreed not to move him to hospital but to treat him in the nursing home. Likelihood that he would die. We did all we could to close the place, and returned home late.

Tuesday, September 6, 1988

Hanover

Father still alive. I confirmed all the funeral arrangements, made during the first pneumonia in 1986. I want to bury the urn at the farm. Mother likes the idea. Chrysanthi doesn’t. By evening, his temperature decreased.

Wednesday, September 7, 1988

Riparius

I skipped back alone to Riparius to finish closing. A long day, 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. Fertilized area that we reseeded, over the excavation. Completed putting up the tractor, after having gotten some rust inhibitor, etc. from Tim Havens in Hudson Falls. Took care of the barrel, etc. Nice Italian dinner in Lake George; beautiful blonde waitress. Life’s small pleasures!

Thursday, September 8, 1988

Hanover

First obligation: meeting for freshman advisers. Boring. Letter from Donald Swann, who sent my New York Times piece to the Manchester Guardian, whose editor wrote a large editorial citing it and, in effect, plagiarizing most of it. Same day: letter from Herb Wekselblatt, long lost friend. Also one from . . . David McLaughlin!

Friday, September 9, 1988

Working steadily on the shortening and simplification of my Bristol MS. As always, the result is better. Mother and I had long talk over supper. She admitted that she was actually disappointed that Father didn’t die in the past few days. He wants to die; we all want him to die. His life is no longer meaningful; he is almost totally unresponsive to us, hardly acknowledges even Mother’s presence; can no longer walk or hardly talk. We agreed that henceforth there would be no antibiotics, just aspirin. Later, his temperature went back up. I instructed the doctor as we had decided; Mother concurred.

Saturday, September 10, 1988

NYC

To Amherst to see George Goodwin, who turned over the Kinhaven files. Chrysanthi felt she should stay home, to support Mother. I concurred, although we’d planned the weekend with Daphne. AMTRAK to New York. Daphne and a friend met me at the Yale Club. We had a nice supper and went to the theater: “M. Butterfly,” a startling reversal of Mme Butterfly in which the one who is humiliated turns out to be the Western male rather than the oriental female. Daphne is a lovely companion, bright, talkative, a charmer. Fortunately, she likes New York. She likes spending money, going places, parties. The job at S & S is immensely satisfying so far. Only the living arrangements are disappointing, but bearable.

Sunday, September 11, 1988

Kinhaven ad hoc committee: the “5-7” committee on the question of whether we should keep the 7 week session or change to a 5 week one. This is my first official time as the new president.

Monday, September 12, 1988

Father still alive when I returned last night. But Mother and Chrysanthi had a hard time yesterday. Trying to feed him, they were petrified when he choked, turned purple. Nurse had to suction out phlegm. Decision henceforth not to try to feed him. I saw Jim Strickler by chance at breakfast at Anchovies with Jean Brophy about Kendal matters. Later he called and I hastened to the Terrace. Father very agitated, sweating, gasping, looking very uncomfortable. Jim the exemplary physician. Told us it was the end. Mother concerned solely that Father be peaceful. Jim said he’d administer morphine, not a lethal dose, but enough to bring “euphoria” and also, perhaps, to strain the heart of a man of that age. We agreed. Took Mother across to the Greens for tea. Father much calmer an hour later, but breathing heavily. Jim administered oxygen to help. We went home. At 11 p.m. they called; he had died. We all gathered in the room. He was on his back mouth open . . . quiet. Mother said he looked just like he did when he slept in the old days, always with his mouth open. Mother very brave. No hysterics. The nurse who’d been sitting with him when he died, told me, “He must have known, because at the very end he shed a tear from each eye.”

The worst part was seeing the body removed. We waited for Mr. Ricker of the funeral home. He was very compassionate. The body was placed in a sack and wheeled away on a stretcher. In four days we’ll have an urn with ashes.

I reached Leander, who sobbed, “I’ll miss Pappou.” Also reached Alec. Telephoned Alice in Norway. We’ll arrange a memorial in New York City, somehow.

Tuesday, September 13, 1988

Reached Daphne. Susie Buseck arrived late last night and is with Chrysanthi and Yiayia. I telephoned in the obituary to NYU Medical School, Queens County Medical Society, NY State Medical Society. I placed the following obituary in the New York Times:

BIEN, ADOLPH F., M.D., 86, on September 12, 1988, in Hanover, New Hampshire, after a long illness. Survived by his loving wife Harriet, children Peter and Alice, and seven grandchildren. Much admired as a skilled and compassionate pediatrician in Queens from 1927 to 1962, he was forced to retire early because of blindness. A lover of books and classical music, a lifelong liberal in politics, a freethinker in religion, he was exemplary in his intellectual curiosity, service to others, and devotion to wife and family. A memorial service will be arranged in Manhattan.

Retrieved insurance policies from the vault; told the bank trust department; told John Boswell.

Wednesday, September 14, 1988

To Boswell with Alice. Learned about the intricacies of probate. Jim Strickler visited Mother again—the perfect physician. Bill Spengemann let me off grading English 2–3 papers.

Thursday, September 15, 1988

Freshmen advisees all day until 3:30, then dash to Burlington airport.

Friday, September 16, 1988

Pendle Hill

Agreed to donate $1500/year for three years to the capital campaign. Coleman Dorsey “dunned” me. Publications Committee rejected everything except a good piece on Thomas Kelly, and Carol Murphy’s journal. Spoke to staff for an hour on my adventures with The Last Temptation. I seem to be a celebrity more or less. Supper with Leander and Alec, both doing well. Then Executive Board.

Saturday, September 17, 1988

PH–Hanover

Executive Board in the morning. Took me ten hours to fly home. Found Karen Van Dyke and Charles Stewart here, plus Daphne. Karen turns out to be a Rhoads, and is a 2nd cousin of Carol Weingeist’s. They were up for Rassias training, at my invitation. To bed at 1:00 a.m.

Sunday, September 18, 1988

Chrysanthi infuriated me by suggesting that my Frosh advisees eat their lunch standing up in the kitchen so they couldn’t dirty the living room carpet.

To Meeting. Peter Stettenheim surprised me by writing warmly about Father’s death. Also nice letters from Len Rieser, Tom Almy, Helmut Schumann. Azaleas from Comparative Literature (Kay Wegner’s touch, I conjecture). At Meeting, I spoke briefly about Dad (as I did at PH): how he voted for Norman Thomas, spent a day in jail for supporting COs in WWI, stood by me when I declared CO status despite pressure from Bill Schweitzer, etc. An unspectacular life, yet one spent largely in service to others.

After Meeting, I was approached by a woman whom I did not recognize. She turned out to be Jeanne Ludmann Kenyon! After 33 years! Divorced from John Kenyon. Three children, all carpenters and the like. Lives in California. We talked for an hour. I kept looking at her trying to comprehend that we were once, ever so briefly, engaged to be married! She didn’t look so bad after thirty-odd years. Good genes. Her mother is 92 and still going strong.

October 2, 1988

Weston

My first full Kinhaven Board meeting as president. Went smoothly. We voted the six-week session.

Saturday, October 8, 1988

NYC

Memorial service for Adolph F. Bien, M.D. in 15th Street Meetinghouse, all arranged by me. About 110 people in attendance, with most staying for the catered lunch afterwards. We did it Quaker style, of course, and there was no shortage of testimonials. Leander’s was especially fine. Dr. Aaron Rausen spoke about Pappous as a medical educator. I read several letters sent by folks who couldn’t come, and spoke at some length about Pappous’s values, all handed down to children and grandchildren. Among those came were Mason, Pappous’s oldest friend, I imagine; Al Silbert, 93 years old; Blaise Greenwald, the psychiatrist at Mt. Sinai; Henry Stern, NYC Commissioner of Parks, Peter Buseck’s cousin; Herb Wekselblatt; Charlie Hamlin; James McBride; Danny Wilkes; folks from the 92nd Street Y; slews of relatives, even Joan Bull; Jerry and Mildred Davidoff; Linda’s son Danny from Montreal; all the Buseck children of course and their grandmother; Rhoda; Ruth Cafarelli; and John, Mary Helene, and Veronica Rassias. Such good friends! I distributed this:

ADOLPH F. BIEN, M.D.

May 29, 1902–September 12, 1988

The heart asks pleasure first

and then excuse from pain

and then those little anodynes

that deaden suffering

and then to go to sleep

and then, if it should be

the will of its inquisitor,

the privilege to die.

This memorial meeting for Adolph Bien will be held in a spirit of quiet peace. Natural sorrow there will be, but we should also feel thankfulness for a career of service that touched the lives of others in uplifting ways.

Please gather in silent meditation. There will be no “program,” no pre-arranged eulogies.

Everyone who feels moved to speak about the life of Adolph Bien should consider it his or her duty and privilege to do so.

Please stand and speak briefly. Let your words emanate out of the silence, not interrupt it. In this way, the spoken messages will flow back again into the spirit of quiet peace, enhancing it.

At a suitable time, a member of the family will end this memorial meeting by shaking his neighbor’s hand. Please shake your neighbor’s hand then as a gesture of our fellowship with each other and with the deceased.

Lunch will be served afterwards in the cafeteria.

Mother took it very well. She, too, rose to speak, very briefly. Rhoda told me afterwards how important Dad was for her, because he proved that the family could escape its origins and rise into the educated classes.

Afterwards the Biens and Busecks gathered for a Chinese banquet at China Peace on West 44th Street, and then a group of us and Dan Wilkes went to see Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which I found rather mediocre, a failed attempt, sincere but just wrong—actors miscast, language too colloquial, no charisma in Jesus, etc. Very “Hollywood” despite the low budget. Gandhi was so much better.

Sunday, October 9, 1988

Busecks and Biens breakfasted at the Yale Club. I went to MoMA, then enjoyed the Hispanic Parade: music, costumes, dancing on Fifth Avenue, with the Roman Catholic archbishop greeting the marchers from a throne outside St. Patrick’s.

November 9, 1988

A great event. Our department is about to vote a four-course load per year. This means that in any given year I’ll teach two terms only, have one term as vacation and one as an “R” term: residence—committees, honors’ students, etc.—but no teaching. Immediately, this will help immensely in progressing with the Selected Letters of Kazantzakis.

Working hard on my new course: Literature of World War I, chiefly improvisation. Nice to teach Myrivilis finally.

Trying to finish “Nikos Kazantzakis: Novelist” for Bristol Classical Press. Going slowly. Hope to submit soon, with publication slated for spring. Princeton will do my Kazantzakis and Politics, volume 1, in the spring.

With the four-course load, I’m encouraged not to retire until age 65.

November 11, 1988

NYC

En route to MGSA: afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum, Degas exhibit. He isn’t as startling as Manet, Van Gogh, etc., yet the retrospective was, as always, a unique opportunity to trace an entire career. Saw Alexis Levitin, at home last week with his Portuguese poet, Eugenio de Andreade, who was slated to read except that Alexis, confused, came one day late! So we had a dinner for Andreade in his absence, with Ridge Satterthwaite, now teaching Spanish, formerly head of Farm and Wilderness Camps, and others. The next day, another dinner with Andreade, who spoke with me in French, Alexis in Portuguese, and Joy Kenseth in Italian. A European gentleman of the old school. Too bad we missed his reading.

Λοιπόν, after the museum: lovely supper with Daphne and Chrysanthi at the Yale Club. Daphne continues to do well at Simon and Schuster. She’s now in sales. She’ll go to London to see Greg (and Ignat Solzhenitsyn) in London over Thanksgiving. Then we continued on to Princeton.

November 12, 1988

Princeton

Breakfast with Michael Herzfeld and Victor Papacosma. How nice to see old friends and colleagues from MGSA’s history; we are celebrating the twentieth anniversary. The biggest surprise: Tom Doulis. We laughed about our “Five Year Plan” established in 1976: a free beer to whoever published within five years. Neither did. I’m about to bring out ½ of my Kazantzakis and Politics; he’s still working on his trilogy-novel, now reduced to a diptych. Other old timers: John Anton, George Yiannaris, Anna Farmakidou, Kostas Kazazis, Jim Warren. Dia Philippidis introduced me to her venerable mother, an aristocratic matron full of dignity. Julia Loomis was present. Elizabeth Constantindes, recovered from an operation, says we should visit in NY with her and Daphne. It was she who got Daphne the room in 220 W. 93rd Street. Others from the past: Peter Topping, Andonis Decavalles, Professor Sanders, Mike Keeley, Ernie Friedl, Bill Wyatt, Theofanis Stavrou, Meg Alexiou, Danny Danforth, Dorothy Gregory, Lily Macrakis, John Iatridis, Irene Kacandes.

In my talk, I tried to bridge the gulf between the old-timers in literary criticism and the Lambropoulos revisionists, calling self-scrutiny healthy if sometimes painful.

November 13, 1988

Princeton

I spoke qua ex-president: a plea for some response to what I project as a post-nationalistic age. Senator Sarbanes was in the audience. I wonder what he thought. (Had supper with him last night at the banquet, but he was at the opposite end of the table, monopolized by Lily Macrakis.) The talk, I conjectured, would fall on deaf ears. Yet several people came up afterwards and assured me of the opposite.

Then we were whisked away by John and Woody Wilson, who are now masters of a Princeton House. Lovely reunion. He is chief of the Princeton church and state project. We reminisced about the Fulbright days in England in 1958–59.

November 22, 1988

To Kendal office to speak with Jean Brophy re: Mother’s apartment. Mother wants a studio but Jean says these are for people with modest means and Mother is rich enough for a one-bedroom apartment. Chrysanthi and I both agreed with the Kendal philosophy and said that although the studio was all that was needed, we honored the overall policy and would accept the one-bedroom apartment even though the initial fee is almost $50,000 more. Mother concurs.

November 25, 1988

A particularly joyous Thanksgiving, celebrated with the Rassiases and Mother. Only Daphne missing; she flew to London for three days (!) to be with Gregory. Fun and games, charades, etc., afterwards. We all laughed and laughed.

November 26, 1988

Kate Harvey for supper, with our boys. She is “back from the dead,” so to speak. And radiantly beautiful, as she was before her illness.

November 27, 1988

To the farm. We cut a Christmas tree; I pruned and fertilized our “orchard”; we surveyed a path through the woods to Alec’s cabin; the chain across the front entrance was stolen. Otherwise everything OK. The day beautiful, warm. Super at Smith’s Restaurant. Then Alec and Leander continued on directly to Philadelphia while Chrysanthi and I returned to Hanover.

November 28, 1988

Comparative Literature 1, “Literature of World War I.” A marathon class, four hours, at home, with break for a snack. Fine reports. One of my more enjoyable classes. One of the students wrote in her evaluation: “At last, a class in which the students listened to each other and not only to the professor. A class in which friendships developed. A class in which you got out of it only what you put in.” I was pleased, also, to be able to use my Myrivilis translation.

December 9, 1988

To PH. Publications Committee as usual. But I skipped the Friday board in order to go to Alec’s Christmas concert at Friends Central. Leander came too. And Naoko. Met the new headmaster, David Felsen. John Davidson came over and said hello. Concert quite respectable, with Kinhaven type chamber music well coached and the orchestra doing a symphonic movement. Chorus led by Jim Davis, orchestra by Alec. A nice environment.

December 10, 1988

PH board. Then to NYC. Supper with Herb Wekselblatt, Daphne, and Greg. Then to the Met. Herb took us backstage. Madame Butterfly very well sung.

December 11, 1988

Yale Club breakfast with Helmut and Karen Schumann. A nice surprise. On the train, finished Comp. Lit. 1 essays. Another term finished! Next year we start the four-course load. Only two terms of teaching a year. Heaven!

My Bristol Classical Press book is in the mail. My Princeton UP book is being copyedited. A productive year. .

December 12, 1988

Began “Can a Minor Discourse Produce a Classic?” for MLA. Hard to get in this mode again. All day just thinking.

December 17, 1988

Finished, at least in first draft. Relaxed by going to supper at Steve Scher’s with Oxenhandlers. Pleasant.

December 18, 1988

Excellent Meeting today. Turned down offer to speak at all–NH Friends Gathering in January on Quakerism and the arts. Too bad. Conflict with PH.

Lunch at Soong and Rogers Elliott’s. Lucille Smith gave tips on New Orleans. Long talk with Leaton, who just came back from Australia.

Reading the collection of essays by grad students assembled by Vassilis Lambropoulos. Irene Kacandes cites a marvelous poem by Cavafy, one he rejected (!):

ΟΔΗ ΚΑΙ ΕΛΕΓΕΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΟΔΩΝ

Το περιπάτημα του πρώτου διαβάτου·

του πρώτου πωλητού η ζωηρά κραυγή·

το άνοιγμα των πρώτων παραθύρων,

της πρώτης θύρας—είναι η ωδή,

ην έχουν την πρωίαν αι οδοί.

Τα βήματα του τελευταίου διαβάτου·

του πωλητού του τελευταίου η κραυγή·

το κλείσιμον θυρών και παραθύρων—

είναι της ελεγείας η αυδή,

ην έχουν την εσπέραν αι οδοί.

ODE AND ELEGY OF THE STREETS

The gait of the first passerby

the lively cry of the first vendor

the opening of the first windows

of the first door—compose the ode

of the streets in the morning.

The steps of the last passerby

the cry of the last vendor

the closing of the doors and windows—

compose the sound of the elegy

of the streets in the evening.

December 25, 1988, Christmas

We celebrated with the Rassiases since, for the first time in twenty-odd years, we’ll miss our New Year’s Eve with them. (They’ll be on a Caribbean cruise.) Alec is in France, but Daphne and Leander are home, as are Veronica, Athos, and Helene Rassias. Escargots and lamb, as always. Then a jolly time doing charades. We laughed and laughed. Afterwards to the movies.

December 26, 1988

Lunch with John. He still wants to do a Rassias-Bien English language text for China! I’m willing.

December 27, 1988

Hanover–New Orleans

Leander and I drove to Cambridge and Logan; flew to New Orleans. Hotel Meridien. We entered to Dixieland jazz. Leander oohed and aahed regarding the luxury of the hotel. We couldn’t resist, so took our first turn through the French Quarter, especially Bourbon Street. What a lovely experience!

December 28, 1988

New Orleans

I gave my paper at the MLA: “Can a Minor Discourse Produce a Classic?” Others: Gregory Jusdanis, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Artemis Leontis, Mary Layoun, and Gene Holland as respondent. Our discussion was fluent and interesting, until noon; then off to lunch in the Sheraton Hotel.

In the afternoon, Leander and I took the St. Charles Street trolley out to Tulane to see the wonderful mansions and gardens. Then walked to Jackson Square and the cathedral, a European scene. Then a splendid meal: frogs’ legs and oysters Bienville. Then more jazz, culminating in the experience of Preservation Hall. $2.00 admission; audience cross-legged on the floor; musicians old and stiff, sleepy, hardly able to rise off their chair; yet as soon as they start blowing their clarinet or trumpet or strumming their banjo they seemed youth itself, with wonderful exuberance. The man who sang “Georgia” was especially poignant. And “When the Saints Go Marching In” galvanized the house.

December 29, 1988

New Orleans–Boston

Leisurely breakfast with Bob and Ilona Bell. She has a Bunting in Cambridge. He is writing a book on humor in Joyce, and will start with a quote from me. He and Groden are my two Joycean protégés. Also saw Jay Parini, who I fear is a false friend . . . but I keep trying. Leander and I took a last stroll down Bourbon Street, saw a children’s band; that’s how they start. Then: more oysters at Felix’s, and Creole shrimp. Delicious. Uneventful, pleasant flight back to Logan. I read Homer’s Odyssey. Overnight in Friends Center.

December 30, 1988

Boston

Sightseeing. We walked from Government Center to Copley Square. Freezing cold. Lovely incident on the Common. The city is making ice sculptures for the celebration tomorrow. A derelict came by, shouting drunkenly: “Ice! It’s winter! Who needs more ice?! Spend the money to get the homeless off the streets!” . . . Organ recital in the church on Copley Square. Steve Scher’s lecture has infected me: I see humor now were it wasn’t intended. In other words, the variations on Adeste Fideles were ridiculous. I had to suppress my laughter in the sacrosanct atmosphere.

At 1:40 we met Chrysanthi and Alec. Lunch in the Park Lane Hotel. Alec recited his adventures in France. Then we took the “trolley tour” of the city, with a witty guide. Dinner in Cambridge, Chinese restaurant with the sweetest oriental doll as a waitress. Then to A.R.T. to see The Serpent Woman by Gozzi, commedia dell’arte. Overdone, much ado about nothing. But still fun.

December 31, 1988

Hanover

Ignat Solzhenitsyn came for lunch. He played a Mozart concerto for us, not bad, but not spectacular, certainly. We talked politics: he mimics his father, surely: Gorbachev is a fake, seducing the West to lower its defenses, etc. The French and English are giving him huge loans, with which he’ll build tanks and missiles to destroy the French and English, etc. Perestroika is incomplete so long as Solzhenitsyn is still banned, etc. His mother is up at 6:00 a.m., typing; his father works sixteen-hour days. The lost history of Russia is almost completed. Now the English translator is beginning, and that is a huge headache.

New Year’s Eve feast with Helene and Athos. We nicknamed him “Mount”: Mount Athos. Pleasant, warm time with good friends. Leander also saw David Noda after many years. He’s the vice-president of a bank in California. I made baked Alaska for dessert.

1989

Hanover

January 1–June 17

Jan. 14–15, NYC, Kinhaven Board

Jan. 20–21, Philadelphia, PH

Jan. 22, Cambridge, theater

Jan. 25, Glens Falls, Grunblatt memorial

Mar. 4–5, Cambridge, theater

Mar. 9–12, Philadelphia, PH, New York

April 13–16, Philadelphia, Bethlehem, New York, PH, Leander’s recital, Kinhaven

May 16, Haverford

May 19–21, Pendle Hill

June 8, Cambridge, theater

June 15–17, NYC, Philadelphia, PH, Joyce, Annenburg

Riparius

June 18–September 4

June 26–28, Hanover–Cambridge

July 15–16, Kinhaven

July 24–25, Hanover

July 27–28, Hanover

Aug. 9–10, New York

Hanover

September 5–December 31

Sept. 8–10, New York

Sept. 22–25, PH, Wilmington, Hotel Du Pont

Oct. 1, Weston

Oct. 2–3, Cambridge

Oct. 11–13, New York, Rye, Scarsdale

Oct. 20–22, Minneapolis, Radison University Hotel

Oct. 26–29, Cambridge, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Boston

Nov. 3–5, NYC

Nov. 14, Baltimore

Nov. 19, Concord

Nov. 28–29, Riparius

Dec. 7–10, Pendle Hill, NYC

Dec. 11, Court, North Haverhill

Dec. 18, Court, North Haverhill

Dec. 23, Monterey, Mass: Gould Farm

Dec. 28–30, Washington, MLA, Dupont Plaza Hotel, 1500

New Hampshire Ave., NW 20036

January 1, 1989

Late lunch with the “gang”: Nodas, Soderbergs, Sydney Jarvis.

January 3, 1989

Conference with Panos Rodis to try and coordinate English 3 better than we did English 2.

Kendal hearing before the Planning Board. More on traffic, sewer lines, etc. Boring.

Wednesday, January 4, 1989

Music, at long last, with Dick and Allan. Baroque + Haydn. Our first meeting since last June.

January 5, 1989

Meeting with Oran Young and Jean Hennessey re: Northern Studies University Seminar + War/Peace collaboration with their project of the Arctic as an International Zone of Peace. Now I need to convince Leonard, Jack, and Al Rozycki.

January 6, 1989

Good class and discussion of Odysseus’s traits as seen in the Iliad.

Screening of The Last Temptation in Spaulding. I did the program notes. Packed. Hundreds turned away. Chrysanthi and Mother had to sit in the projection booth. I liked it better this time, but still felt that Barbara Hershey was terrible as Magdalene and Dafoe very artificial as Jesus. Here are the notes I wrote:

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST
(USA 1988)

Jesus

Willem Dafoe

Mary Magdalene

Barbara Hershey

Judas

Harvey Keitel

Saul/Paul

Harry Dean Stanton

Pontius Pilate

David Bowie

John the Baptist

Andre Gregory

A Universal Pictures and Cineplex Odeon Films Production. Produced by BARBARA DE FINA. Executive Producer: HARRY UPLAND. Screenplay by PAUL SHRADER based on the novel by NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS. Photography by MICHAEL BALLHAUS. Music by PETER GABRIEL. Edited by THELMA SHOONMAKER. Directed by MARTIN SCORSESE. (163 minutes)

When a movie is based on a novel we usually affirm the cinema’s right to distort its source even if we lament departures from the literary work in question. There is no need to do this for THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. Although advertised as a personal statement by Martin Scorsese, it is almost 100% Kazantzakis. Despite some minor omissions, substitutions, shifts of emphasis and one addition (the bizarre moment when Jesus removes his bloody heart), the movie offers a message identical to that in Kazantzakis’s novel.

What message? It is that Jesus is just like us. Does this deny his divinity? Certainly not, for in Kazantzakis’s view we are all partly divine. Indeed, we fulfill ourselves (attain salvation) in proportion to our success in transcending the bodily part of our being in the interests of the spiritual part, which is identical to divinity. We do this with difficulty, and so does Jesus. Because he is just like us, he is tempted to resist the call to spirituality. He agonizes at every stage in his ascent from ordinariness to non-bodily fulfillment, makes choices, sometimes regrets them, but in the end succeeds. Kazantzakis’s point is that we can do the same. The novel presents a model whom we are meant to follow.

According to Kazantzakis, Jesus’s career has four major stages, each of which is clearly shown in Scorsese’s movie. The first stage is the attempt to remain ordinary. Jesus does not wish to be the Messiah. On the contrary, he wants his life to be governed by happiness rather than meaningfulness. So he resists the call to spirituality in the most blatant way he can, fashioning crosses to help the Romans crucify Jews. (This is where Kazantzakis, but not Scorsese, includes a travesty of psychoanalysis, making Mary take Jesus to a rabbi to be cured of his “neurosis.” Kazantzakis himself was once instructed by a famous Freudian: “To search in order to find the world’s beginning and end is a disease. The normal person . . . gets married, has children, and does not waste his time in asking whence, whither, and why.” This foreshadows the last temptation, when Jesus, on the cross, momentarily imagines a normal, “healthy” life for himself instead of a “diseased” life of spiritual striving.) In the second stage of his career, Jesus ascends to vocation, overcoming the temptation to remain ordinary. Instead of agonizing about his own happiness, he begins to do God’s work—i.e., to toil for the salvation of everyone. He exhorts his fellows to love one another; but no one listens except a small band of ineffective, doubting disciples who join him for the wrong reasons. (Kazantzakis strives to reconstruct the career as he imagines it really developed, not as it is presented by the Gospels, written as they were after the fact to convince people to believe.) Having failed as a pacifistic idealist, Jesus enters his third stage, in which he joins Judas in preaching violence as the best way to attain God’s kingdom. (Here, Kazantzakis uses the Gospel story to mirror the belief of certain idealists of our own day that Communist revolution is the only effective means to overcome evil.) But Jesus fails again; he is no more successful as a revolutionary than as an apostle of love. So the one path remaining to him is abdication; this is the sole power he can still exert. Only by freely willing his own death can he overcome the forces of evil. Abdication is the fourth and last stage, the one in which (to cite Kazantzakis’s favorite formula) Jesus fully “transubstantiates flesh into spirit” by sacrificing his biological existence. But then Kazantzakis appends the epilogue that gives the book its title. On the cross, between the cries of “My God, my God” and “why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus fantasizes about the normal, healthy life of sexuality, domesticity, and fatherhood that he had renounced. Yet he ultimately resists this temptation too, choosing vocation over ordinariness, meaningfulness over contentment, spiritual goals over bodily gratification. Reaffirming his mission, he attains salvation in death.

It is not surprising that this interpretation of Jesus’s life has aroused so much opposition among fundamentalist Christians. Kazantzakis does not pretend to offer a gospel that is orthodox in belief. (As for the official church, his scorn for its self-serving hypocrisy is conveyed in Jesus’s hallucinatory interview with Saint Paul, the quintessential organization man.) But neither Kazantzakis nor Scorsese aims to denigrate the life of Christ. On the contrary, each presents this life, deliberately altered so that it corresponds more directly to contemporary thought, as the strongest possible metaphor for spiritual accomplishment.

—Peter Bien

Peter Bien is a professor in the English Department and translated Kazantzakis’ novel from the Greek.

January 7, 1989

Received the following letter from Leander re: our days in New Orleans:

Jan. 5, 1989

Dear Dad,

Now that I’ve had a chance to reflect upon the time that we spent together in New Orleans, and now that I’ve returned to all which constitutes my world (Bethlehem, practicing, teaching, cold weather, bills, and phone messages), I am all the more grateful for having had the opportunity to take that little all-expenses-paid journey into a new realm of sight, sound, smell, and taste. I really enjoyed myself more than I can remember. Why go abroad? New Orleans is right around the corner. Everything we saw and did was so interesting, so informative, and so stimulating. I really feel as if I took a piece of that vibrant culture away with me when I left. The images of the Preservation Hall players will not fade quickly, and of course I will never listen to Dixieland jazz in the same way from this day on. I came away touched by what I saw and heard.

I hope you feel as if your time was better spent carousing about the French Quarter than attending seminars at the MLA. When next the convention occurs in Cleveland, you can make up for it! I really enjoyed your paper, and the topic was all the more interesting to me after you’d explained it ahead of time.

I can’t imagine having had a better time with anybody else. We really “hung out” and got our fill of all we wanted. Thanks for making it possible for me to go with you, and thanks for being a great companion! Next stop—Nashville!

The Auburn football team lost on Monday. Too much Dixie beer and oysters and not enough practice, I’d say.

See you soon,

Love,

Leander

To Kay Wegner’s art exhibit in Lyme. Lovely watercolors. Long talk with Murray Washburn, owner of Peter Christian’s, mostly about The Last Temptation, and Kendal.

January 8, 1989

Meeting, Business Meeting, lunch at The Greens with Mother. Three Greek students for supper.

January 9, 1989

We’re revising the Comparative Literature curriculum, yet again. I’m rewriting course descriptions for Modern Novel, Major Authors, Modernism, Postmodernism. Marianne Hirsch is now chairman, and a fine one.

January 10, 1989

Lunch with President Freedman and some other senior professors. He’s worried about his image, that he is remote, inaccessible. Wants to have informal meetings with faculty and asked our advice re: format, etc. Tom Campion tipped me off that the president and Sheba, his wife, are despondent over the latest reversal re: The Dartmouth Review. One of the reinstated students, John Sutter, the Review’s managing editor, joined my Odysseus class the first week, came twice, and never appeared again. He seemed a morose character; told me how much good journalistic experience he’d gained while on suspension, working for the Herald Tribune. I’ll end up failing him, of course.

To the White Church to attend the memorial service for Marsha Baldwin, who died of cancer. Same age as me. I embraced Lee and lamented that it’s always the nicest people who get hit.

Next to Dickey Endowment to convince Leonard to let War/Peace join forces next year with Oran Young in emphasizing the Northern Zone of Peace. Leonard voiced all sorts of objections; that’s his style. But I said that this could become a kind of metaphor for others, New Zealand for instance, or various seas. He came round in the end, and Jack Shepherd, afterwards, congratulated me “on the way you handled Leonard.”

January 12, 1989

Memorial for Seth Feldman ’92, who died of a brain tumor over the holidays. One of my Frosh advisees. His parents were dignified. I spoke to them of Johnny Gunther, who died at Deerfield before going to college. Seth at least had one term at Dartmouth and very much appreciated that. Poor service; disorganized rabbi; Bill Cook reciting an irrelevant poem (“Fern Hill”) at great length. But one of the students spoke genuinely, as did both parents.

January 14, 1989

New York

Lovely supper with Daphne. She’s a charmer. Still flourishing at Simon and Schuster. Then to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, about New Hampshire, but more reminiscent of North Creek. We both felt like insiders. It’s a strangely static yet effective play. He found a new way to treat all the old clichés: adolescent love, domestic boredom, tragic death.

January 15, 1989

Brooklyn

Out to Grand Army Plaza, Flatbush Ave., to Alice Henkin’s apartment for Kinhaven board. We had to set new salaries for Jerry and Nancy. I let off the “bomb” that maybe Jerry wasn’t performing very well. I’d like to institute evaluations, but how, without making the place a hotbed of suspicion? Joe Contino, George Goodwin, and I mulled all this over on the drive back to Springfield.

January 16, 1989

Made enlargements of two nice photos, one of me on the John Deere, another an aerial shot of the farm taken by Sarge Van Keuren.

Karen Van Dyke here with her boyfriend, Nelson Moe. Nice to have a “Greek” colleague for a change; we share so much. Rand Jones showed up at the same time, awkwardly.

January 17, 1989

Mother’s birthday. We went to Norwich Inn with Audrey Logan, like last year. A nice “tradition.”

January 20, 1989

Pendle Hill

Promotion Committee, Publications Committee, supper with Alec and Helene Rassias, Executive Board. I enjoy these people so much. Long talk afterwards with Margery Walker about evaluation procedures (thinking of Kinhaven).

January 22, 1989

Cambridge

Drove to Cambridge with Leander and Chrysanthi for A.R.T. production of Chekhov’s Platanov, a play he wrote when he was about 20, very accomplished, but he put it in a drawer and it was discovered only posthumously. It’s an early version of The Cherry Orchard, same subject, some similar characters, only much more “busy,” without the later play’s silences and also without its central symbol. Seeing Platanov was like going to an exhibition of early Picasso or Kandinsky, fascinating because of one’s knowledge of what came later.

Met Warren Thompson at the Cambridge Meeting House. Also Andy and Merrilie Towl, she looking cadaverous.

January 23, 1989

Kendal Overseers. Herb Schiele has joined, also Erica Brinton.

January 24, 1989

Lunch with Shirley Williams, British M.P., in the Dickey Endowment. She’s a live wire, so very articulate, and rational; very liberal, appalled by Thatcherism but admiring Maggie’s persistence. Her problem is her training as a scientist: no appreciation of humanities at all. She’s a 100% technocrat.

Hanover Planning Board hearing on Kendal. Everything went wrong. Our figures for traffic on Route 10 differed from someone else’s. And the chairman, Bud Eaton, harped on our desire to “escape” taxation. We emerged despondent. Long talk with Jean Brophy afterwards about strategies. I’ll draft a letter attempting to rebut Eaton’s position that it’s immoral for an over-65 to escape taxes in Kendal while another over-65 pays taxes in a private home.

Hilda called. Jacques died in Mexico last Saturday. Heart attack. But he was comfortable at the end. Thankful that he could die “in Paradise.” She asked me to speak at the memorial tomorrow. Had to cancel our usual Wednesday music with Dick Williamson and Allan Munck.

January 25, 1989

Glens Falls

Rushed to Glens Falls after teaching. Strange to be in that area at this time of year, but so pleasant. It’s like going home to a foreign country. Service in synagogue. The rabbi spoke very well. Others were Dr. Shalita, a Glens Falls doctor, Dennis Coney of the Environmental Action Committee, and me. I likened Jacques to Odysseus. Whatever you say about him, the opposite is also true. Universal man. A fighter in war yet propagandist for peace. An exile yet very much at home. A model husband yet a lover. A man of the body (eating, swimming) yet an intellectual. A loner, set apart, yet exemplary citizen. At the end: Odysseus a model for the future, so is Jacques. I’m so glad that my children knew such a man.

Nice to see Jesse, Mark, Ellen, Ellen’s husband (a Bien), Jaime (from Spain), Art Perryman (who told me that Jacques used to coach soccer), Mrs. Morse, Mrs. Sargent, Laura, Janet Greene, Donna and Chandra, etc. We will all miss Jacques Grunblatt. I implored him for years to write his memoirs, but he always refused. Now it’s too late.

January 28, 1989

Party for Larry Radway’s 70th birthday. A mob scene at the Outing Club. His wife made a quilt containing everyone’s signature.

Then to the Arndts for supper. Walter has cancer but is productive still. Just published a translation of the Letters of Bruno Schulz; about to begin translating another Pole. I told him about Basia Nikonorow, my student last term.

Sunday, January 29, 1989

Lunch at The Greens after a very good Meeting.

Conference call to agree on papers at the Minnesota Symposium of MGSA. Michael Herzfeld orchestrated it very well. Others on the line: Χουλιαράς, Παπακοσμάς, Λαμπρόπουλος, Σταύρου. Big controversy over Danny Danforth’s paper about Greek suppression of Macedonians. But we agreed we could not suppress it since we believe in academic freedom. If there are consequences, we’ll face them.

January 30, 1989

Jean Brophy and I went to the Selectmen’s meeting, but were told that Kendal wasn’t on the agenda. Instead, I’ll write yet another of justification, to be sent to the Selectmen.

January 31, 1989

Lunch with Carl Thum, whose Reading Skills program is blossoming. I filled him in re: all the gossip about our new regime headed by Karin Rodis, which is quite stimulating.

John Finn and Michael McClennen sat with me re: the Greek computer project, which had aborted and now seems to be about to be reborn.

February 1, 1989

Department meeting. Reappointment of Matthew Rowlinson. Lou Renza, very new chair, is a relief after some of the previous ones.

Music, as always.

February 5, 1989

Mother and I sat over her records and I did her income tax once again. I seem to be doing three or four nowadays.

February 7, 1989

Tea with Professor Peter Burian, visiting from Duke. He’s interested in Italianiate Modern Greeks like Foscolo. I told him about Solomos, Kalvos, etc. Will lend him Mario Vitti’s book.

February 8, 1989

Theater: Dartmouth Players’ production of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, a delightful farce, so British! I wish Benny Hill had been the lead.

February 9, 1989

I arranged a lunch with Walter and Basia. Very cordial. I learned more about Walter’s Polish phase. A rich relative wanted the young Walter to become an engineer and take over the relative’s factory. Same as Bill Schweitzer’s desires for me.

Supper at Faculty Club for War/Peace Seminar. Visiting professor who’d been three years in North Africa, including Libya (he’s Belgian, so could get in).

February 10, 1989

Breakfast with Paul Schrader, the film producer and scriptwriter who wrote The Last Temptation of Christ. The Dartmouth Film Society showed his latest last night and honored him. I had him all to myself this morning for one and a half hours, driving him to the airport for his flight. He did The Last Temptation in 1981, when Paramount was interested in producing it. His own background is fundamentalist, Calvinist. His family were not allowed to go to movies. He graduated from a Bible college, majored in Christology, and has written a theological book. He’s no longer a believer, but the background is important. His own father was one of those active in the campaign against The Last Temptation. He prepared for his job just as Kazantzakis did, by reading extensively on Christ and by traveling to Israel and walking over all the ground in question, accompanied by a Biblical scholar he hired to act as consultant. He and Scorsese wanted to make Christ Jewish, to place the events firmly in their Jewish context. Israel then was one of the commercial crossroads of the world, with people of all races and religions intermingling. This is why it was such a fertile place intellectually. The mix is shown in the scene of men waiting for Mary Magdalene’s “services.” I commented on the disparity of the Nordic faces chosen for Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and Schrader agreed. “We should have had Latin types,” he conceded, “but Scorsese took who he could get, and we were lucky to get an actor as good as Dafoe, a white boy from Minnesota! The problem was that this was a low budget film shot under difficult circumstances. The actors had to agree to spend three months in Morocco at minimum wage. This limited our choice.” In preparing, Schrader made a catalogue of every single incident in the novel, spread out his notes on the floor and then systematically excluded the scenes not directly relevant to his particular interests, which were: the Jesus-Judas conflict and its larger implications (love vs. the axe), Jesus’s hesitations and agonizing, the last temptation itself. This is why so little was done with individual disciples beyond Judas. He admitted that the relation with Magdalene was not satisfactory in the movie because he’d eliminated the antecedent action in which Jesus had spurned Mary Magdalene in marriage. (Scorsese ruled all antecedent action out of bounds.) I lamented the absence of the Rabbi and therefore the satire against psychoanalysis, which helps explain the last temptation at the end. Regarding language, the script had more “poetry” than actually survived into the film. Scorsese forbade any biblical language at all on the theory that people hear only the words and not the meaning. Schrader attempted therefore to reword everything so that it might be in the current vernacular. (To my mind, this was a big mistake, for the biblical language would have come to life when coupled with the visual impact of the scenes—an opportunity lost.) I explained my own quandaries re: “Mandarin” King James overtones and how to create a vernacular without seeming both parochial and ridiculous, which is what happens in the film, alas. The music was by a rock composer who recorded a lot of Moroccan musicians and then incorporated this into his score. Actually, Dafoe is a kind of rock star type. That’s what Scorsese’s “demotic” Jesus comes down to. Regarding the “angel” at the end, who of course is really the devil, they couldn’t keep it Kazantzakis’s Negro because they’d be accused of prejudice. Scorsese’s point was that the devil ought to be the very picture of an innocent angel: thus the sweet girl straight out of paintings. But Schrader couldn’t defend the disparity in accents: he merely said weakly that Scorsese tried to minimize the accents and failed. As for success, they are not discouraged. Only 40% of film receipts now come from theaters. 60% comes from television: network and VCR. They expect that the film will do well on television and have a lasting impact. But the industry is mad at them because it feels the film got “unfair” publicity via the opposition. Thus it’s being passed over for all awards. (Weak argument.) Both Scorsese and Schrader were, on balance, delighted with the controversy. As Schrader said, “Imagine, questions that once concerned Church councils in the 4th century were spread across the headlines again” (referring to the debate about whether Jesus was truly tempted). He was negative toward film students. “In my generation [1960s], we saw the cities burning, we lived through Vietnam, we wanted to use film to make statements, to say something. Today’s students ask, as their first priority, “How can I get an agent?” Why should they have an agent if they have nothing to say?”

February 11, 1989

To Thetford with Chrysanthi and Mother to see the Parish Players in Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca. Static, but nevertheless moving. No technical interest. Could just as well be a radio play. No theatricality. Yet the plight of Miss Helen, being urged to go into an old people’s home by the Afrikaans minister and urged to protect her independence and creativity by a disillusioned British woman much younger, was real. Miss Helen forges out an existentialist religion of hope (fantasy) to replace the moribund Afrikaans Church. Her physical debilities are sentimentalized, but it works. We feel she is right in refusing the old people’s home.

Mother found it painful, remembering our experiences with Dad at Hanover Terrace. The solution, of course, is a CCRC: Kendal!

February 12, 1989

I ministered in Meeting based on the Fugard play, which replaces love with trust as the central religious principle. This is perhaps what Jesus meant when he told us to become like little children—viz. to emulate their absolute trust. But in whom can we place absolute trust? Only in God (cf. Kierkegaard).

Lunch at The Greens with Mother. This afternoon, at tea, she is going to play violin duets with Bunny Little for the group. How nice to go back to the violin after sixty-odd years! Maybe there’s hope for Daphne.

February 13, 1989

Chaney Brokaw, Barbara Gilbert, Erica Brinton and I met with Jean Brophy to vet the new Kendal brochure prepared by Barbara Parsons. And good we did, because it needs lots of improvement.

February 14, 1989

Saved by the skin of our teeth! After the Planning Board debacle two weeks ago, Jean and I struggled over how to react. She drafted a letter to the Selectmen. I didn’t like it very much, and drafted my own. She liked this. We showed it to Overseers, to Lloyd, etc., and revised it a bit, and got it to the Selectmen yesterday. Today Jean telephoned. Last night the Selectmen read it and approved our position that the Health Center should not be taxed. Then we learned that, if this had not happened, and had not happened in time, Dr. Eaton at the Planning Board tonight, was prepared to say that the Town was not yet ready, financially, to bear a Kendal, and to call for public hearings on whether we should be taxed or not. This would have been a disaster for us because of the confrontational nature and, chiefly, because of the delay. However, given the Selectmen’s decision, Eaton is now not going to do this. He’ll strike Kendal from the agenda tonight and put us on for February 28, by which time the KMS Board will have agreed presumably. They meet tomorrow, and Alan Hunt says he’ll recommend that they do agree. Then on the 28th, with the tax situation settled, we’ll have only traffic to consider, and we hope to receive our preliminary approval. Phew!

February 26, 1989

Dinner party: Elliotts, Scotts, Laasperes. I made oysters Bienville for hors d’oeuvres. Success.

February 27, 1989

President Freedman telephoned to say that I came in first in the faculty election for CAP and would I serve. I agreed. It will be nice to be close to him in this way for three years. I’m of course gratified at the confidence shown by the faculty.

Kendal Overseers met. The architects now have detailed drawings. Over 150 apartments are sold. Sandy Stettenheim wants me to take over clerkship of the board. We’ll see. Tomorrow we go back to the Planning Board.

Carol Weingeist visited afterwards. She and Jean Brophy don’t get along, alas. The first signs of the Devil’s intrusion.

Speaking of the Devil, I ministered yesterday at Meeting à propos. The impetus was Reese Prosser’s excellent description of Star Wars at our War/Peace Seminar last Thursday. We concluded (some of us) that scientists, who listen to the “voice of the Lord” telling them that all research is in God’s service, are really being deluded by the Devil.

Leonard Rieser, Alan Rozycki, Oran Young, and Jack Shepherd, and I met again to try to see where War/Peace can lead next. Leonard is resisting the Arctic proposal, so we’re back to square one.

February 28, 1989

Planning Board gave Kendal its preliminary approval, easily. Phew!

March 3, 1989

Poetry reading jointly by Cleopatra Mathis and Tom Sleigh, both very accomplished. Cleopatra’s about her Greek grandmother was especially memorable.

March 4, 1989

To Cambridge. I worked in Widener, checking references for Pieris’s submission to JMGS, a disgustingly sloppy job with everything misquoted, undocumented, etc. Fun to be in Widener. Lunch in the terrific hamburger place across the street. My old haunt.

Supper with Mother (who’d returned from Tempe yesterday), Chrysanthi, Lori Buseck, and her boyfriend Clive, a computer programmer. Then to A.R.T. for “Mastergate,” a satirical farce with Oliver North & Co. as butts. Clever for the first half hour, then repetitive.

Overnight at Cambridge Friends Center.

March 5, 1989

Supper at Jean Childs’s and her new husband’s, John Schumaker, who owns Gnomon Copy. We’re happy for Jean, who finally got married. John is a Vietnam vet and a coffee fancier.

March 6, 1989

The computing seminar convened, finally. I’ve tried for one and a half years to get Chris Jernstedt to move. Finally he did, and gave a brilliant presentation on the psychology of learning.

Wednesday, March 8, 1989

Music continues every Wednesday night with Dick and Allan. We’re doing lots of Haydn, and it’s wonderful. I think we’re actually getting better, especially Allan, who is always off-key.

Friday, March 10, 1989

Pendle Hill

Publications Committee went well. Poor Rebecca Mays. Her marriage is on the rocks. She’ll be another single parent. . . . Supper with Alec.

Saturday, March 11, 1989

Philadelphia–NYC

Lee Bennett drove me to 30th Street. He’s a good friend. Supper with Daphne and Greg. (Daphne is so relieved to have him back.) Then theater: Driving Miss Daisy, brilliantly acted by Earle Hyman and Frances Sternhagen, about a wealthy Atlanta woman who in old age needs a chauffeur companion, black of course, resists at first, but then finds that he is her best friend.

Sunday, March 12, 1989

Yale Club

Daphne came and we did her taxes. Then brunch. Long talk about Gregory. She sees the next few months as the real test of their relationship, because for the first time their contacts will be frequent and more or less normal, instead of commuting between Cambridge and NYC or NYC and London.

March 13, 1989

Lafayette Noda is in the hospital. Visited him today. He had blood clots in the lungs, but is lucky they didn’t go to the brain. De-coagulants seem to be working. He’ll be OK.

March 15, 1989

I spoke to the Hanover Rotary Club about Kendal. Nice to be in this totally different group and atmosphere. Roy Banwell brought me greetings from Paul Abramson of Sunnyside.

March 16, 1989.

Good inaugural lecture by David Montgomery on science and ethics. He said plasma physics used a Greek word meaning “jelly.” Wrong, of course. It means something shaped or formed.

March 17, 1989

Dinner at the McGees at their new home in Sharon, an extravaganza, not to my taste. As we grow older we should simplify, not build mansions.

March 18, 1989

I seem to be doing everyone’s income tax thanks to the computer program I got for my Mac.

March 20, 1989

Steve Scher’s NEH applications, vetted by him, Bill Summers, and me. How lucky we are at Dartmouth compared to the poor souls exiled in Tennessee or Kansas or teaching 15 hours a week!

March 22, 1989

Drink with Jean Brophy to plan agenda for next week. I’m now clerk of the Overseers for Kendal.

March 23, 1989

Carl Thum and wife Lisa to supper to talk about Greece.

March 24, 1989

Leander has been here all week, practicing diligently for his April recital. Tonight we made oysters Bienville for his birthday (actually tomorrow).

March 25, 1989

To Warren, NH, to Nancy Ševčenko’s for supper with her, Meg, and Michael Hendys. He was the chef, as always. Meg in good form, although both she and Michael drank themselves soporific by the end of the long long meal. She told me that if Michael got a job somewhere far away, she would leave Harvard. “A relationship is important.” It is! So far he has nothing. A brave man, to give up his post at Birmingham.

March 26, 1989

Brunch with Rassias children and Mary. Easter.

March 27, 1989

Off to the farm with Alec, who is here for the week. We plotted out the position of the new storage building. Supper at Mosher’s Diner. Alec remained; we returned. He’s had an offer again from Jakarta and seems to want to go. His current girlfriend, it turns out, has genital herpes, an incurable venereal disease highly contagious. If he goes to Indonesia, it’s a way of ending that relationship. She is wonderful in every way . . . except . . .! He understandably feels that he doesn’t want to spend his life dealing with her disability when he has his own, his alopecia, to concern him. Friends Central, alas, is no longer a challenge. They sent him for an MA and then never used his training; he’s still doing elementary French year after year.

March 28, 1989

We gave supper to Lloyd Lewis and the entire Kendal Board of Overseers and Jean, Carol, and Naomi. Then Overseers meeting.

March 29, 1989

Kendal “Founders’ Luncheon” in Alumni Hall. I spoke briefly on the Quaker aspect of our endeavor, but decided not to start lunch with silent grace, since Barbara Gilbert had such imaginings last night. Lloyd fielded questions afterwards. At 3:00 we transferred to Hanover High for another meeting, this time for people on the priority list. We’ve sold more than 160 apartments.

March 30, 1989

Lunch with my student Basia Nikoronow. What a charmer she is!

March 31, 1989

With Mother to theater at the Hop, a surprisingly superb production by the Houston Alley Theater of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Such a strong play, perfectly crafted, a modern Greek tragedy about Italian immigrants trying to adjust. Alec and Lori Buseck came, too.

April 4, 1989

Planning Board. First hearing for final approval. Another hitch owing to new regulations voted at Town Meeting re: zoning that excess land cannot be more than 25% of it in slopes of 75%. We don’t qualify. Our lawyer is going to devise a strategy. We meet again next Tuesday.

April 5, 1989

Leonard and I are still trying to come up with a proposal for an additional War/Peace course. The newest version will go to the Steering Committee next week.

Alec has decided to go to Indonesia. Chrysanthi is pleading with him to sign only a one-year contract. We are both despondent, somewhat irrationally, I suppose.

April 7, 1989

Finally sent agendas for both Kinhaven Board and War/Peace Studies Steering Committee, both next week.

Sunday, April 9, 1989

Interminable monthly meeting over State of Society report. Poor Jack Shepherd, the clerk, wanted to go home to do his taxes. The meeting went from 11:30 until 3:30. I left at 1:30. I ministered earlier on the “justice” that led to John Sutter’s separation from Dartmouth. I gave him the final E! The court case intended to injure Dartmouth and aid him ended by injuring him so much that he lost his chance for a Dartmouth degree. It is difficult not to gloat. (Even George Fox gloated when his enemies were laid low.)

Reading Πλασκοβίτη Το φράγμα, which Kedros want me to translate. Unexciting. Vassilios Lambropoulos wisely advised me to say No and concentrate on Kazantzakis, volume 2. Actually, to accept this commission would have been a not so subtle way, self-destructively, of postponing the more important project.

April 11, 1989

First of the sections for English 17. I had the students write “birthday poems” imitating Swift’s to Stella, or mock epics like the Dunciad, or Modest Proposals. They are so clever. Rhymed tetrameter or pentameter they do in stride. Then they all become stockbrokers when they graduate.

George Kennan, testifying before Congress, said that communism is finished. “Why?” asked Claiborne Pell. “Because it has no answer to the problem of death,” said Kennan. Wise man. The latest joke in Moscow is: “What is communism?” “I don’t know, tell me.” “Communism is the longest possible road to capitalism.” Kazantzakis predicted this in 1929!

I lectured to John Rassias’s City Bank students on pagan and Christian heroism. One of them, ¾ the way through, revealed that he didn’t understand the word “monk.” He’d thought I’d been discussing monkeys! Sometimes I feel like a trained monkey on occasions like this. My definition of Christianity in the lecture is surely impossibly narrow. A few nights ago we had two of them to dinner: Joy from Taiwan and Juan Maria from Argentina. Such lively, friendly, bright people, especially the Chinese woman. Taiwan is prospering enormously, from all accounts. We had a long discussion on the position of women, which apparently is quite equal now, which means that children are in day-care, like here.

At 2:30 Ross Waller for tutorial, his third course with me. He is re-reading Ulysses very enthusiastically. We’re setting up a “Bloomsday” reading but not on Bloomsday, of course. President Freedman will read “Calypso.”

At 3:30 another candidate for our Renaissance position. I can’t work up much energy or enthusiasm any longer for departmental affairs. All three candidates so far have been repulsively arcane.

Supper with Walter and Miriam Arndt in good spirits. Hospital reports say that nothing has metastasized. They are going to enter Friends Homes in Guilford, and will withdraw from Kendal, which is four times as expensive.

Planning Board again. Blair, the lawyer, solved last week’s problem about slopes by deciphering the statute’s actual meaning. We pass. More delay re: easement for environmental protection. However, Bud Eaton said at the end of an hour or so that, in effect, we are approved! They’ll draw up the exact language and give us the certificate on April 25. Hooray! We all went to the Inn and drank champagne. Now we need to (1) secure financing for construction, (2) sign on a contractor, (3) finish the architectural drawings, (4) buy the land—and, with luck, break ground in July. Eaton asked us to name all the internal streets. That will be fun.

April 12, 1989

8:00 a.m., breakfast meeting of the War/Peace Steering Committee. We commiserated with Elise re: her dying daughter-in-law. She was excellent in focusing our proposal to the Hewlett Foundation for a 2nd core course. Jack Shepherd, Alan Rozycki, Leonard Rieser, and Lee Baldwin all spoke helpfully. We have 70 students in College Course 1, double any previous enrollment.

Spent the rest of the day administratively, sending out notices to all University Seminar leaders for next year’s ORC, and formulating a new Hewlett proposal in light of this morning’s discussion.

Dick came by to beg off music tonight; he’s got a sore throat. We went to Collis together and had lunch with Martin Arkowitz, to whom I showed Sanborn’s treasures afterwards. How lucky I am to spend my professional life in these paneled precincts instead of in the cinder block environment of the Math building! As for the people in Sanborn . . . well, some of them are nice, but there has never been any real intellectual community in the English Department.

Pot luck supper at the Meeting House in Elise’s honor. Peter Stettenheim very friendly for a change. Elise optimistic about world affairs and especially about renewed respect given the UN.

Thursday, April 13, 1989

Hanover–PH

En route to Philadelphia via AMTRAK from Springfield, This a.m., last minute phone call to Jack Casey re: insurance for the Kinhaven van and to Barbara Lloyd re: ventilating the concert hall. Ignat Solzhenitsyn has written from London to say that his parents are experiencing financial straits and he doubts they can give much to the Kinhaven Capital Fund. Well, I tried.

Arrived at Pendle Hill at 7:30 p.m. Glad that Mother saw it finally. To the Walkers’ for ice cream—our ritual. They had a friend from Alaska, a lively black woman, a lawyer, new to the Board.

Friday, April 14, 1989

PH–Bethlehem

Book Committee. Gay Nicholson very appreciative of my support. She’s finishing Elise Boulding’s MS on the family. We accepted Sonny Cronk’s on apophatic theology, which got rave recommendations from me and from four other readers including a Russian Orthodox monk in St. Vladimir’s Seminary. Breakfast earlier with Anne Thomas and her husband. So-so meeting.

Publications Committee, but just before it Paul Alexander sequestered me as part of Rebecca’s annual review. She’s slacking off, poor thing, distracted by a marriage on the rocks. Late on correspondence; one pamphlet had to be completely reprinted because of embarrassing mistakes. I said that when people begin to be obsessed with how overworked they are it’s perhaps time for a change. Cf. Barbara Parsons. If they didn’t spend so much time discussing their overwork, they’d be able to do what they say they cannot do. But Rebecca is still delicious in her enthusiasms and devotion to Quaker faith.

Good Publications Committee. Cate Van Meter came in with her new baby. She’ll resign. Can’t continue now.

I played hooky for the remainder of the Board meeting. But George Peck said he’d read my translation of Ritsos’s “Peace” at the show and tell Saturday night. Heard Oliver Rodgers practicing his violin selection—awful. But he’s such a nice man.

Alec picked us up and we drove to Bethlehem. Daphne and Helene Rassias drove in from NYC and joined us. Leander’s recital was fine. He did an original composition: hymn tune he’d encountered at Woodbrooke, followed by jazz variations, Mozart four-hand with Sandy, much more forceful and seasoned than when we’d heard it at Kinhaven last summer, Rautavaara’s “Fire Sermon” sonata, electrifying; 2nd half, Beethoven’s opus 7, OK but not seasoned, very strong forte-forte, lots of abrupt changes, as though Beethoven were a madman, definitely not Mozartian or “classical”; then Petrushka with Sandy, again electrifying. Full house, including Pat Wood, Tom Wood’s wife, Masuko and Naoko, who got lost and arrived at the interval, their Japanese friend who is Leander’s current girlfriend, very silent and sexy; also Jerry and Nancy Bidlack. I thanked Jerry “for making all this possible.” Mitch, the Bethlehem Steel engineer who will take us round tomorrow; the Greek garage owner who said he’d bring the entire κοινώτητα; Moravian Music Department chair and her husband; Larry Wright and pregnant wife. Leander has a following. The chairwoman spoke to me at length. She so appreciates Leander’s versatility. So few pianists are able to do both solo and chamber music, “And he’s such a superb accompanist, too.” I expanded on my philosophy, my dismay at the emphasis on solo repertoire in conservatory. Pat Wood very gracious, too. And others. Whenever Leander goes he makes friends and inspires admirers. “And he’s so modest,” said the chair. It was a very respectable recital: an unusual program, varied, scintillating.

Afterwards, drinks at the Hotel Bethlehem. Sleep.

Saturday, April 15, 1989

Bethlehem–NYC

Breakfast all together, including scrapple. Then “Mitch” took Leander and me to Bethlehem Steel. What an experience! We saw the oxygen furnace where the molten iron is converted to steel through reduction of carbon content and addition of alloys. Huge caldron fired with oxygen. It was like the sun itself. Then they pour off the slag and add aluminum, which combines with the oxygen, removing it. Other alloys are added, depending on the individual order. Then we saw the huge caldron carried on a crane, placed over the forms, which are filled one by one with molten steel to make huge ingots. These, when cooler, are removed from the forms.

Next, we went to the rolling mill, where the ingots, reheated, are put through presses that shape them, as though they were clay or bread dough, into girders of specified lengths, widths, shapes. We visited the control cabins, with surly, burly workmen (all seemingly of a similar body type) before computer screens, televisions, etc. showing every detail of the operation, how each pass decreases the girder by ⅜ inch. Previously, a man had somehow fallen on one of the red-hot girders and been horribly burned. Another had been killed when a caldron exploded. We saw a caldron that had cracked, oozing molten steel. Dangerous business. (We had on hard hats and goggles.)

Each order is custom: specific girders for a particular building.

Then at the end of the huge mill we saw the finished girders set out to cool under a spray of water.

One part of the factory was built in 1908 and powered by steam engines still functioning. Adjacent to it was a new mill built in 1980, automated.

Initial impression: I was back in Birmingham! Identical architecture, smog, even the fine rain.

The plant made $100,000,000 profit last year, after many years of difficulty. But it is operating only at about 60% of capacity.

What a wonderful opportunity, thanks to Mr. Mitchell, father of one of Leander’s favorite students.

Bus to NYC. Yale Club. In Port Authority, homeless bums. One shouting, another with drugs. New York New York!

Oasis in the Yale Club. I went to the bar and ordered a bloody Mary.

Nice supper at La Maison Japonaise with Daphne and Gregory. I recounted my experience at Bethlehem Steel. Then to Roundhouse for Member of the Wedding. Well acted all round, and well directed, but oh so slow, so non-dramatic. But slowly it did grow one as a portrait of adolescent trauma. The black-white themes, and the atom bomb, however, did seem to be introduced somewhat gratuitously.

Sunday, April 16, 1989

By taxi to Grand Army Plaza. Breakfast on Flatbush Avenue—what different, interesting people (compared to Hanover), including black-white couple having a most literate, intellectual conversation, and old ladies sharing breakfast, or single men with NY Times, lingering over their bacon and eggs.

Then Kinhaven Board at Alice Henkin’s. Jim Quinn led us through the campaign, which isn’t making great strides at this point. David Bury wants still more money to solicit foundations actively. Paula Xanthopoulou dubious. We’ll receive a more concrete proposal in July. At the full meeting, beginning at 11:00, we welcomed Dr. John Austin, who I think will be a very good addition. Irene Mendelson is doing wonders with the annual fund. The main substantive question was the one I raised regarding evaluation. Janet Greene spoke strongly against, from the staff’s point of view, but not seeing the full picture, and especially not that our real purpose is to evaluate the director. But others supported me, especially Alice Henkin and George Goodwin. We decided nothing, but will try to let the trustees’ position be known to the staff this July.

Irene drove me to Penn Station. Missed the 4:14 but made the 4:59. Daphne, Mother, and Chrysanthi were waiting; they spent the day walking in the rain and visiting Daphne’s apartment after a leisurely breakfast at the Yale Club.

May 12, 1989

Dwight Lahr telephoned to say that the CAP has elected me the first Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing. No time off, but it does include a yearly fund of $1000 for research.

Yesterday heard the celebrated Grace Paley read her short stories. Very slight. But her personality, the real Jewish mama, is large.

Heard Chief Justice Rehnquist lecture on Daniel Webster in Spaulding. Jim Freedman’s introduction was the better of the two speeches. He said afterwards that the Chief Justice would graciously answer questions, but only on the topic of Webster. (The Court is considering a possible reversal of Roe vs. Wade on abortion. I’d attended a rally previously, again with Grace Paley.) So a student asked, “What would Daniel Webster have thought about Roe vs. Wade?” Rehnquist rose to the occasion, answering, “Webster would have sided with whichever faction paid him the most.”

This was followed by a dinner in Alumni Hall to honor Charles Wiltse upon his completion of the Webster Papers, after 22 years. Sad to see Wiltse in a wheelchair, a cadaver. But his voice was young and vibrant. Thumbing through the Papers, I opened accidentally to Webster’s 1824 speech defending the Greek War of Independence.

May 13, 1989

Dinner at the Schers’. Diana Taylor there with her husband, Eric Manheim, M.D., who’s hoping to do a geriatric study using Kendal.

Mother’s paintings on exhibit in Howe Library are OK, nothing great, but she enjoys this diversion. Also, she’s taking violin lessons after 70 years and playing string quartets.

May 15, 1989

Busy day. Breakfast with Jean Brophy to discuss the Kendal agenda. Lunch with the Comparative Literature Steering Committee. Afternoon at the Meeting House for Finance Committee, watching Sandy Stettenheim try to put together a budget. 7:30 again at the Meeting House for Kendal Overseers.

May 16, 1989

Lectured at 8:45 a.m., then drove to Manchester airport to fly to Philadelphia. Plane delayed one hour. Disagreeable moment at Philadelphia airport when another man went up front before the seatbelt sign was off and I followed him, hoping to save time getting off. We were vilified by other passengers and returned sheepishly to our seats. Alec met me and drove me to Haverford, where I was 45 minutes late for the Corporation Nominating Committee but still able to contribute something. John Jones, Tom Kessenger, Bennett’s wife, others I didn’t know. Told Kessenger about Alec’s return to Jakarta. Alec drove me back to the airport just in time. A whole day traveling just for a two-hour meeting.

May 18, 1989

Alice Wright read her MALS project, an autobiographical novel about a girl growing up with very little love from her parents.

May 19, 1989

Off again, to Pendle Hill, which I always enjoy.

May 23, 1989

Peter Burian and Nancy Bekavac for dinner. She’s Lloyd Lewis’s friend, fellow trustee of Swarthmore, now assistant to Jim Freedman. A live wire! Lovely intellectual personality. . . . Earlier, Dickey Endowment meeting. We’ve applied for $75,000 to start a new War/Peace course in conflict resolution.

May 24, 1989

Lunch with Tom Corindia, whom we see so seldom now because of his sudden burden of four children. He’s in the thick of the hospital’s complicated growth.

Spoke in College Course 1 on conscientious objection, along with Tom Waring (who did CPS) and an impressive man from Norwich who was a medic in Vietnam. Resurrecting the past is strange—bittersweet.

Then to hear Mary Beth Basile defend her thesis on Vergil and Milton.

May 25, 1989

Jon Laaspere’s wedding, on a riverside meadow in Norwich. Bride and groom arrived in canoes. The service was disappointing; no music. Unitarian female officiant. All ritual gone.

War/Peace Seminar addressed by Israeli writer-activist Yoram Kaniuk, who argued persuasively for an independent Palestinian state.

May 26, 1989

Dashed to Terpni to clean the outhouse and plant the garden. How nice!

May 28 1989

My birthday. 59. Chrysanthi and children banded together to get a single present: a VCR. Now I can watch Benny Hill!

May 29, 1989

Pappous’s birthday, the first after his death. Sad. Dr. Radebaugh asked me once after Meeting if I missed my father, and I said “Yes, but not in the state in which you saw him here in Hanover.” Mother went to the grave and wept a little.

Lunch with Mr. Scherman, the man who in effect raised the $1,000,000 for the Beebe Chair. Formerly chief financial officer for Newsweek, which Beebe owned.

Drinks with Jim Tatum to worry together about Basile’s thesis, which is surprisingly bad, after all the ballyhoo.

May 30, 1989

Lectured well, I believe, on T. S. Eliot, the end of English 17. Lunch with Steve Scher and Jim Jordan to see if we can revive Scher’s Faculty Seminar. Then to party for the retirement of Charles McLane and Larry Radway.

Evening: “Installation” of Karen Sheldon as tenured priest at St. Thomas’s. A huge affair, very “high church,” with chanting and good music. Some nice, touching elements to the service, especially the “gifts” presented to Karen by Peter Camp, the bishop, students, etc., each with a real and symbolic purpose. The whole Sheldon family in attendance, including their six-foot eight-inch Marine son who looks so grotesque.

May 31, 1989

Met with Susan Tenney, who is replacing John Finn as director of my computer-drill project. She is businesslike; he is flaky, but firm. Under him, all year, we accomplished nothing.

Ceremonial Comparative Literature lunch with majors, including Johannes von Moltke, who also helped with War/Peace Studies.

Afternoon: Kendal open meeting in Alumni Hall. Surprise: Dorothy and Oliver Rodgers came from Kendal at Longwood to describe their emotions upon entering. Also some others, all effective speakers and sweet people. Oliver admitted that, notwithstanding the joy of unloading possessions, he had hired a storage space. I then hosted a dinner for all concerned at Jesse’s, after which Oliver and Dorothy came home for a bit. What a nice couple! They are my ideal Quakers.

June 1, 1989

Lunch with Karin Rodis discussing our future cooperation now that I’m the Beebe Professor.

Surprise invitation from Sheba Freedman to dine at D’Artagnan with her, Sandy McCulloch, and Jared Freedman. A pleasant occasion. Sandy is becoming increasingly liberal in his old age, a delight to see.

Trouble with Basile. She wept for an hour in my office because of the B+ we gave her. I counseled her to accept “injustice Christlike.” But she’s a scrapper. She complained to Bradley and got a week’s extension to rewrite, incorporating our suggestions. Her subject is Fama (glory). She seems to have incorporated some herself—the need, that is.

June 3, 1989

John van Aalst’s wedding to Cynthia Cook, at Rollins. Very exuberant, as always, given the Fellowship. Ritual here is not lost. Lunch in their new church. We sat next to Bob Beck and learned much about the success of the movement. They’ve formed their own parochial school.

June 5, 1989

Computing seminar. Fascinating on how nerves transmit impulses, and how this relates to machine intelligence.

June 6, 1989

Basile’s revised thesis is much better, thank goodness. She told me that she learned more in the last four days than all term long.

Supper at the Kleinhardts’ with Dimitri Gerakaris and wife. He has evolved from a blacksmith to a sculptor in iron, doing monumental works for parks, shopping malls, etc. Truly, an alternative life style that has worked.

June 7, 1989

8:30 a.m. Tatum and I gave Basile an “A.”

9:00 a.m. English Department meeting, disagreeable as always. Haggling over awards. Too bad that I’ve spent an entire career with a hateful department, but there have been compensations in other quarters. Basile ended up getting the Perkins Prize.

Retirement party for Bill Smith. Long talk with Marisa and her husband, who is a literary agent. They encouraged me to do the Kazantzakis biography and offered to try to place it. But I’ll need to write a sample chapter. I’m getting tired! For Bill, OISER did, appropriately, a video with lots of gags. E.g., Q: “What will he leave behind?” A: “His parking space.”

Dee Johnson is in hospital with cancer of the uterus. With luck they’ll remove all the affected parts before it spreads.

June 8, 1989

Leander and I drove to Cambridge. Nice supper with Peter Gardner, who astonished us by announcing that he is going to have a baby with his third wife, via artificial insemination, since he had a vasectomy years ago. One can now “shop” for precisely the right quality of sperm! Brave New World. Then Leander and I saw a brilliant production of Molière’s The Miser with Alvin Epstein in the lead.

Previously, met with “communications group” and Greg Prince to devise an approach to a rich alumnus, Jerry Goldstein.

Andonis and Lena Daskopoulos arrived from Salonika.

June 9, 1989

Took the Daskopouloi around Dartmouth. Nice to talk Greek again.

Dinner at the Sheldons’. Met Professor Mike Manheim from Toledo, but he lives in Strafford. He went to Columbia with me, etc. Coincidence after coincidence, as with Harmon Donathan.

June 10, 1989

Ayoko Kano visited. She’s the Japanese who did so spectacularly well in my Ulysses course some years ago. I recommended her for graduate school. She was accepted everywhere and chose Cornell, where she starts next week.

Our usual “at home” was very nice. Martha Boss came with her parents. So did Eleni Tsacopoulos with Angelos and her stepmother, arriving in a stretch limousine and chauffeur. He seemed childishly simple and genuine. Eleni was ecstatic about her Greek study-tour. Ross Waller came, too, and the infamous Basile, all smiles. And lots more, e.g., Peter Converse.

Daskopouloi took 14 people to dinner: Don Nielsen, Dimitri’s friends, and us.

June 11, 1989

Graduation. I went, for a change. The address was a good one: on boredom, by the Russian poet and novelist whose name I’ve forgotten. Surgeon General Bork got a standing ovation. Obviously, a public official who bravely demonstrates integrity is now a rarity.

Afterwards, to the Drews’ in Vershire for a picnic with Daskopouloi, etc. They have a lovely apple orchard.

June 13, 1989

Peter and Evie Dale for lunch with Nicole, their daughter who just graduated.

June 15, 1989

To NYC with Chrysanthi and Mother. Supper at the Yale Club with Daphne and Greg. Very pleasant. Daphne is excited about a possible new apartment on Madison and 63rd, discovered by our cousin-in-law Roy Bernstein.

June 16, 1989, Bloomsday

To Philadelphia to the last day of the Joyce Symposium at the Curtis Institute. Nice talk with Morton Levitt, but Ellen Rose wasn’t there. Papers uninspiring Joyce and Bakhtin, etc. Then to Philadelphia Art Museum. Met Alec and saw the Annenberg collection of impressionists. Then to the PH board. I harangued them about Pendle Hill On the Road. Dorothy Rodgers will take the responsibility again and try to resurrect it. This year nothing happened.

June 18, 1989

Riparius

To the farm. Finally. Leander already here. Lots of mowing done, despite all the rain. Garden intact.

June 19, 1989

Leander is off to another Kinhaven season. I started the John Deere tractor without difficulty. We’re boiling water, just to be sure. And I have a filter that’s supposed to eliminate all coliform bacteria.

June 20, 1989

Busy preparing Kinhaven agenda. Trying to induce the Board to accept internal evaluation. Also complicated insurance questions. And, as always, how to escape the Dushkins.

June 21, 1989

Second proofs of Kazantzakis, Politics of the Spirit arrived. I’m reading them with an eye to the index, also looking for typos. The English is fine, the Greek horrendous, as always.

June 26, 1989

To Hanover. Alec there, having moved everything from Philadelphia.

Kendal Overseers. Good news. The Bank of Ireland (!) will guarantee our bonds, so financing is now possible. And the contractor’s price seems OK. We’ve set August 29 for groundbreaking: a party.

June 27, 1989

Bradley, Greg Prince, Lu Martin, and I met to plan strategy for getting another donation for Greek from Mr. Tsacopoulos. I’ll write a case statement, part 1, and Edward will do part 2.

To Cambridge with Alec and Chrysanthi to see Calderón’s Life Is a Dream at the A.R.T. Another splendid production, with Cherry Jones, Derek Smith, J. Geidt, Thomas Derrah, Pamala Gien. A problem play; emphasizes the illusory nature of reality but then undercuts its own thesis in the 2nd half as Segismundo comes out of the dream. Also, really ought to have been a tragedy rather than a romantic comedy.

June 28, 1989

Back to the farm. Materials delivered for the pole barn. Interesting driver, son of an Amish family. At age 16 when his father offered him his own horse and buggy, he said he wanted a car. So he left. And now he drives a tractor-trailer rig.

To dinner at Merill McGee House in Warrensburg with Shapiros and Laura Gouthreau, and Alec. Very un-Adirondacky, as Alec said. But nice. A leisurely 3½ hour meal, with easy conversation the whole time.

June 29, 1989

Late. The crew arrived to build our pole barn. Foreman: Randy. Though it was dusk, they started at once, squaring the site, stringing the lines.

June 30, 1989

The crew back at 7:30 a.m. Six young men, aged 18 to 32. Such vigorous, coordinated workers. Randy never walks, always runs. By 9:30 they had the holes dug and the poles lined up. By 11:00 a.m. lunch break the building was almost completely framed. They resumed at 12:00 and went steadily until 6:30, finishing! We stood in awe. They wanted to avoid another night in a motel and be able to get home (around Elmyra, NY) for the weekend and July 4th. The building is surprisingly beautiful—lovely blue walls. It’ll have to add some “embroidery” to compensate for the irregularities in the land, but otherwise it’s ready. Cost: $5800 only.

July 1, 1989

Finished proofreading my book. Now have to transfer all marks to the master proofs.

July 3, 1989

Finished the transfer. Now: the index. Al Zalon came at 2:00 and we played flute and piano all afternoon. Bach, Vaughan-Williams, Fauré, Rachmaninoff, Albéniz, Prokofiev. Alec returned from a weekend in the Catskills and visiting Tom Wood. In the evening Al returned and we played trios. My cup runneth over.

July 4, 1989

The index is a terrible chore, but must be done. I continue to encounter errors in the text. Discouraging.

July 6, 1989

Up at 6:30 a.m. to get in four hours of work before leaving for Saratoga with the Shapiros and Evelyn Greene. A wonderful afternoon, starting with “Apollo” with Ib Andersen. I was extraordinarily moved by both the music and, of course, by Balanchine’s brilliant choreography. Mozart “Serenade” by Peter Martins was disappointing. No imagination at all. But “The Four Seasons” (Verdi, not Vivaldi) redeemed the afternoon. Jerome Robbins this time, with brilliant execution by Kyra Nichols, Mock Soto, and a newcomer, Gen Hariuchi, a tiny Japanese, who was electrifying as the faun.

Alec, meanwhile, took our old Packard organ, built in 1893, to Barre, Vermont, to be rebuilt. Thanks to Vic McGee for the contact.

July 7, 1989

Worked 13 hours upstairs on the computer and finished the index! Alec and I are going to build a fake foundation in the pole barn to keep out animals (and humans) and a real foundation for the projected bathroom off the porch. For a moment I weakened and thought to hire a contractor (a man who came for the well and told us to chlorinate it—the only remedy), but then I remembered the spirit of this place.

July 8, 1989

Annie, the French girl who teaches at Middlebury, is here for the weekend, looking lovely. We last saw her and Jacques in their apartment in Paris. Ordered the cement blocks for our projects, cheaper delivered from Hudson Falls than picked up at Murphy’s. I’ve been picking up loose ends before turning to the Tatum project. Kinhaven Board affairs for next week, PH pamphlet affairs (possible revision of Francis Nicholson’s essay on money), JMGS proofs. Everything has come at once.

Alec and I prepared the ground for the bathroom, leveling it and squaring it by triangulation: a^2 + b^2 = c^2.

July 9, 1989

More French people. Alec’s professeur from Middlebury and his wife, also a professeur. We spent six hours talking in an equal mixture of French and English on a huge range of subjects: Proust, Beckett, the EEC, Japanese economic imperialism, mushrooms, rustic country homes, the parking problem in Paris, Middlebury’s defects, etc. They left at 5:30 and I promptly took a delicious swim. Spent the morning writing letters to Dick Dellamora, Tony Manousos, Alice, and others, all long overdue. Also reviewed my “Ritsos’s Painterly Techniques,” which I still rather like. Hope to send it to Morton Levitt at JML, after a few corrections are added.

July 11, 1989

Delivery of 10-inch and 8-inch cement blocks, the former for our new extension (bathroom), the latter for a skirting around the pole barn. Yesterday we squared off the bathroom site, 8 feet by 6 feet, and leveled it, more or less. Today we began the first course. I’ve decided to confine my Tatum article writing to the mornings, and to work with Alec on the foundation in the afternoons. Chrysanthi is joining in, too, with customary good humor. We make a good team.

Jerry and Rosine Gardner here for dinner. Lots of gossip about town politics.

July 13, 1989

We’re on the third course. Going well. Of course each of the walls has a little twist, or curve, or bend, but no matter. We are amateurs. Also, we’re proceeding without plans or a permit, as in the old days (per Art Perryman’s advice). The code says this, the code says that (e.g., to start four feet beneath ground level). We started at two and a half feet.

Hilda Grunblatt for supper. One of Jacques’ translations is finally in print, full of misprints, of course, since Fischer-Galati is the publisher (remembrances of Stewards of the Land).

Mr. Carpenter delivered his proposal for chlorinating the well. $700 instead of the $300 I’d foolishly expected. Don’t know what to do. Art says to wait. . . . Dinner at Mosher’s Diner.

July 14, 1989

Fourth course finished. We need a fifth. Daphne and Greg arrived from New York for a late supper, and a delightful one. Daphne has signed the lease for the apartment on Madison Avenue and will move on August 1st. She’s reading lots of books, all the new S & S list: a potpourri of fiction, exposé, health advice, etc. She’s also enjoying the beach house Greg has rented. He continues to strike me as decent but empty-headed. I think his major interest is sports.

July 15, 1989

Up early. A woodpecker pounded away on our roof, seemingly since 5:00 a.m. Daphne slept in her old bed, we of course on our new inner-spring mattress extravaganza. Off to Kinhaven for board meeting. I’m writing this next to the swimming pool at Blue Gentian Lodge. Chrysanthi did not come, owing to Daphne’s visit (plus Mary and Veronica Rassias are expected), but said how she regretted missing this little vacation. As expected, I’m the only one in the motel.

Full board meeting with good attendance. We passed the new Junior Camp, appointed Nancy director, and gave her a salary; also hired David Bury to do twice as much fund-raising, now extending to foundations. More tomorrow. The school provided lunch and dinner, very credibly. It was nice to see Nicolas, the boy who had auditioned at Dartmouth when he was a Kinhaven student, now back as a violin teacher. Also, Ardis Chapman told me that Eric Beatty, now a professional mime, is living in the Bidlacks’ home in Bethlehem. Such a small world. Lelah officious as always; kept telling us to wash our mugs. Dorothy’s sister Trudle was here, a sweet woman, retired twenty years from the Smith College music faculty. Ike Patch came for supper. He’d followed up my lead re: the Soros Foundation, for assistance with Russians and will go to Tashkent in September to try to arrange for next summer. The concert was varied, as usual. A Mozart quartet with Albert Tan, Leander’s partner, as second fiddle and a delicious first violin. The Stravinsky “Ragtime,” not the best Stravinsky, but fun. Then Leander in Poulenc’s Trio for piano, oboe, and bassoon, with Mary Watt. Fun. The rebuilt Miss Mann piano is splendid. Then percussion ensemble in a piece by Varèse, with Jerry doing castanets and Peter Schultz taking out all his aggression against the tympani. I sat next to Paula and caught up with her. She’s struggling, now managing 21 singers. After the concert, watched the delicious dancing that is now a Kinhaven tradition. Even Leander was dancing! With his little piano student, the one who, he says, is better than Ignat. Lastly, to the Inn at Long Last in Chester with Leander, Albert Tan, Sandy Dennis, and Carolyn Wall, for a beer. Jack Coleman was there; said he remembered Alec and me. We talked about the Haverford Board and he said that in his presidency the difficulty in securing Quakers arose largely from regionalism; they never looked further than the northeast corridor. Nice talk with Albert, who makes his living as a computer programmer for a New York bank and does free lance violin.

July 16, 1989

Breakfast at the Blue Gentian. I was alone in the dining room, our little private hideaway. Board 10:00 until 1:00. Controversy again about evaluations. Jerry made a speech against; I spoke strongly about the dangers of self-congratulation and carried the day. But will Jerry do anything—that is the question.

Children’s concert a delight, as always. Leander has a particularly good pianist this year; she did the Mendelssohn trio with aplomb, making a professionally assured recovery at one point after her fingers turned to jelly. I made a little speech in the intermission, telling about our adventure with the Russians, and about the Junior Camp. Afterwards, two gentlemen came up to say how impressed they were with Kinhaven and could they make a financial contribution!

Supper in Ludlow afterwards with Leander and Albert Tan. A long, leisurely meal with lots of good conversation. The sorrow is that Jerry is not at all respected musically by staff and also by most students. What to do is the question. Will our evaluations help or hinder? Tan was concertmaster of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra just before Daphne started. Gave up violin for a year afterwards, then resumed. He said the best tactic is to join an orchestra so you can play without having to hear yourself—i.e., how awful you are.

July 18, 1989

To Saratoga to celebrate our 34th anniversary. Stuffed ourselves in the Hall of Springs. Program started with Mozart’s Divertimento no. 15, Balanchine. Perfect congruence between dance and music. So much better than the Mozart we saw last time. Then a new work by Michael Torke scored for two pianos, two marimbas, and orchestra. Much better music than David Glass, although it too was minimalist in that its basis was repetition. Peter Martins’ choreography very imaginative, with especially fine numbers by Jock Soto and Heather Watts and then Damian Woetzel and Kyra Nichols. Last came “Firebird” with the Chagall costumes and scenery, danced by Valentina Kozlova, who is electrifying. Of course the piece as a whole is quite static, based more on tableau than on dancing, somehow, except of course for the middle when the magicians and animals suddenly overwhelm the hunter. I like “Apollo” better.

July 19, 1989

The cellar for the bathroom is finished. Alec and Chrysanthi started laying cement blocks in the gaps in the pole barn. Alec slept last night for the first time in his cabin, under mosquito netting (Jakarta style). He’s put a blue carpet on his loft floor and moved his desk upstairs. Home sweet home.

I am slowly getting the Ford mower ready to use, making (or tying to make) all the adjustments described in the manual. Nothing was done last year. But our Jari is “sick.” Took it to Dave Whitty, whose son now does the work; it needs a valve job, probably.

I can’t decide whether to proceed with Mr. Carpenter’s proposal for the well. Procrastinating.

Long visit from Mary Fitzgerald, who is on the town’s Democratic Committee, and is learning the secrets of politics, she says. She’s clearly for Bill Montfort.

Working each morning on “The Re-emergence of Greek Prose Fiction in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” for the Tatum conference next week.

July 21, 1989

Naoko and Yasuo arrived: Alec’s Japanese friends, the violist and second violinist in his quartet. Chamber music immediately. How nice that our piano is now in such good condition!

July 22, 1989

Steve, the cellist, and his wife Diane arrived. They rehearsed Mozart’s Dissident together and then Dvořák’s Bagatelles with me (but no viola). At the same time Jim Dwyer was here for the well. I’ve said No to Les Carpenter. Dwyer says: Pump it, chlorinate it, pump it again, test it, then decide.

For supper we had 25 people! Perrymans, Mary Fitzgerald, Laura and Michael. Then we performed the Mozart and Dvořák. In my old age I am finally able to play piano in public without going into a total funk. Life’s little victories!

The Jari is dying. Motor shot, body about to collapse. I’m wondering what to do.

July 24, 1989

To Hanover after lunch, for Kendal Board. Previously, met with Susan Tenny re: my hypercard computer project, which is finally going well. She already has some prototypes.

At the Kendal meeting we named the various clusters of buildings, but my nomination “Come-to-Good” was rejected as “too difficult.” Groundbreaking is now September 5th and looks definite.

July 25, 1989

Back to the farm. More info on a new Jari from Joe’s Equipment. Lafayette has a Kinco that he likes. Yasuo is off to the Gordon Conference. Naoko, Alec, and I played piano-violin-viola. Alec in my absence cracked the Pitman rod on the Ford mower by stupidly backing up into it, and broke off the swathboard. He feels terrible and swears to set things right.

July 26, 1989

Struggling to shorten my talk to twenty minutes.

July 27, 1989

To Hanover again, alone.

July 28, 1989

Met Meg Alexiou on the street just before 9:00. Our session also included Roddy Beaton and Ole Smith. I read mine quickly, in twenty minutes. Steve Scher came to listen: a true friend. One paper was in French but we had transcripts and thus could understand perfectly. Afterward, a three-hour lunch with Meg and Roddy at the Faculty Club; very cosy. Dimitri is in a group home in Oakfield Road, Birmingham, and doing very well. He can stand outside of himself, so to speak, and say things like “I used to be like that” (pointing to a totally autistic person). But Pavlos in Greece is not improved: still totally autistic.

Picked up a modem to make me capable of e-mail at the farm.

Drove back with Mother.

More chamber music, again with Yasuo, who returned from his conference. Carol Weingeist came over from New York Yearly Meeting at Silver Bay, for supper.

July 29, 1989

Alec’s birthday. I gave him a helmet and earmuffs for use with his chain saw. He went off to Kinhaven with Yasuo and Naoko, to hear Leander and Sandy play Petrushka. Mowed: nothing broke. Supper at Mosher’s Diner followed by indigestion.

August 1, 1989

Tarred the outside walls of our new foundation. Beginning to work on the Kazantzakis letters, finally.

August 2, 1989

Filled in the dirt around the foundation, and landscaped the ground. Picked apples. Extraordinary amount of fruit this year. Chrysanthi made applesauce—tons.

August 3, 1989

Alec and Chrysanthi drove to Hanover with Mother. Mother’s a good sport, even went swimming yesterday. But says she can only take the outhouse so many days. Alec has to make last-minute arrangements in Hanover, doctors’ appointments, etc., prior to leaving.

August 4, 1989

I’m alone here. Got used to it very quickly, actually. Results of well test came back. Still polluted. 5 coliform. The lowest yet, but not good enough. So the contamination is clearly in the water that’s entering, since all this was new water. Jim Dwyer pumped the well dry twice last week.

Went to Chester Diner for supper. A loudmouth local there kept saying how boring his parents were. But he had to condescend to spend an hour or two with them on Saturday night, poor fellow. I wish I’d been brash enough to tell him that when he gets sick his parents will be the ones who tend him whereas all his “interesting” friends will disappear.

August 8, 1989

Finally solved the ground fault interrupter mystery. Tried new outlet at start of line (behind red couch). Didn’t work. At first I thought the outlet defective; then the refrigerator. No, still didn’t work even with refrigerator disconnected. Tried it in outlets further down the line. It worked. Then realized the trouble was probably in the refrigerator outlet, which I’d rewired for a three-pronged receptacle. And sure enough, opening it I found that the ground wire had broken in two. Repaired it. Reinserted the ground fault interrupter device. And it worked. Good sleuthing combined with patience.

Alec put up his truck and closed his cabin. His time approacheth. Leander is now here, after a good summer at Kinhaven. But they lost 35 tuition checks. And Jerry was confronted with his incompetence in orchestra and in a way apologized publically. Things are developing . . .

I’ve been editing S. Francis Nicholson’s pamphlet on “Quaker Money” to make it acceptable for the PH series.

Alec’s second hairpiece arrived via UPS, just in time.

August 9, 1989

Riparius–NYC

Morning in my “office,” reading the Παπαθανασόπουλος letters. Then we all drove to NY, stopping for lunch at a McDonald’s. In the Yale Club by 5:00. Daphne and Greg joined us. Leander as usual fulminated against Ivy League necktie-wearing elites and I tried, gently, to tell him how enmeshed he is willy-nilly in the capitalist system. He is snobbish (reverse snobbery) and very immature on this issue, as on others. Nice dinner on the roof at this capitalist haven. “The Last Supper.” Then visited Daphne’s new flat at 717 Madison Avenue, between 63rd and 64th Streets. She dropped her keys down the elevator shaft, but otherwise everything was fine. A nice pad, with a terrace out back looking upon brick walls. Amazing location. She’s delighted but discouraged in her job because of insensitive boss. We all drove to JFK and waited with Alec as he checked in at Korean Airlines for the flight to Seoul via Anchorage; then change planes, to Singapore. Overnight. Then to Jakarta, where he arrives at 4:00 p.m. on Friday the 11th (equals 4:00 a.m. our time). A hall filled with hundreds of Koreans, Indonesians, Filipinos, as though all of New York were oriental. Few Caucasians. Finally, at 11:45 p.m., we kissed goodbye. Chrysanthi shed a few tears (afterwards) but generally bore it well. Alec had a catch in his voice, appreciating our presence. And off he went. Then we returned via Gregory’s key; he had tried unsuccessfully to duplicate Daphne’s neighbor’s key. To bed at 1:30 a.m.

August 10, 1989

Yale Club–Riparius

Delicious shower. Breakfast with good conversation with Chrysanthi, trying to cheer her up. I’m writing this in the Yale Club library, my delicious home away from home. Met Daphne and Leander for lunch in a delicatessen: pickles, chopped chicken liver—i.e., New York! Then up to Simon & Schuster’s offices. Met Roz, the difficult boss; she was swell with us, on her best behavior, Daphne said later. Temperamental type; blows hot and cold. Most in the office were charming and gracious, especially Eileen, Daphne’s special friend, who left a higher salary at Merrill Lynch in order to taste the glamour of publishing. “We talk to Reagan, to Nixon!” she exclaimed. Daphne seems appreciated. A civilized environment, quiet, carpeted, full of books. Only the publisher, McEwen (I think) was a boor: no manners, cold as ice. Everyone hates him, Daphne said, but admits that he’s a good worker. Mike Korda was out to lunch, so I couldn’t say hello.

Then to Bancroft’s on Madison and 45th to buy a suit for my anti-elitist son (and another for his elitist father). Left Manhattan at 3:30 and arrived home around 9:00 after Italian dinner in Lake George. Lost: one hubcap and one Cross ballpoint pen.

Friday, August 11, 1989

8:00 a.m. promptly the telephone rang and it was Alec calling from the Strand Hotel in Singapore. A good trip, only about four hours delayed; stopovers in Anchorage, Seoul, Bangkok. . . . I mowed in the afternoon.

Saturday, August 12, 1989

Rain all day. I’m filing Kazantzakis data. Very tedious work. Letter from Bob Brown at Princeton says that there are already 500 advance orders for my book. I’m becoming frightened. Peter Mailloux sent his huge biography of Kafka with a dedication thanking me for first introducing him to Kafka—at Dartmouth.

Sunday, August 13, 1989

Alec telephoned from Jakarta. Delighted, even thrilled, to be back; knows so many people. They’re all in a hotel initially for orientation complete with cocktail parties, ambassadorial receptions, and the like.

Gary Wolfe and Jim Dwyer here. I ordered a drilled well.

Went to visit Jacob Stern on his island in Schroon Lake, Robbins Island, his wife’s family. He’s a classics professor at CCNY, friend of Burt Pike’s, Diskin Clay’s etc. Nice family. We rode in his speedboat to Adirondack, past Camp Redwing, now defunct. Drank wine on his porch. He says after four or five days he longs for Manhattan!

Wednesday, August 16, 1989

Wonderful full eclipse of the moon from 9:30 p.m. to midnight in clear skies. We sat on the Shapiros’ deck with them and Milly and Jack Adler, gazing through Irv’s binoculars. The shaded area of the moon seemed so globular, just like a ball.

I’m contriving a Rube Goldberg device to stabilize the swathboard on the outer shoe of the Ford mower. So far it’s not working very well.

The new Jari came yesterday. I assembled it carefully and then couldn’t start the motor.

Thursday, August 17, 1989

The Jari to service center in Glens Falls. The problem is damage in transit. Trying to get shippers to reimburse me.

Alice and Peter Buseck arrived. Lots and lots of talk over supper and far into the night.

Friday, August 18, 1989

Swathboard works, finally.

I’m doing the boring job of filing Kazantzakis letters. But thinking at the same time of the talk on Kazantzakis’s religiosity to be given in Wilmington in September.

Peter left. Alice, Chrysanthi, and I supped at Mosher’s, met Michael and Laura there for their ritual ice cream.

Leander has chronic abdominal pains. Jim Strickler suspects a hernia or muscle bruise with possible need for surgery. Ignat called. His father’s “Gulag” is meant to appear in Novy Mir momentarily.

Wednesday, August 23, 1989

Princeton page proofs of references arrived. Still mistakes in the Greek. I want the book to be clean.

Thursday, August 24, 1989

Finished mowing. Και του χρόνου!

Very sociable. Dinner party at Bob and Marilyn Morse’s with Rothsteins, Paul and Nancy Cormack, Les and??. Morse and Cormack are real estate developers; Les is an M.D. who is retiring here and is already on the Planning Board. Morse is supporting Thomas for supervisor. Thinks Montfort a disaster. We learned all the latest, including the imminence of Monter’s Oven Pond development in Michael and Laura’s “front yard.” Nice crowd. After dinner, all the men told how they came to the Adirondacks and found their wives.

Friday, August 25, 1989

Wrote review of Kavadias’s poems translated by Gail Holst. Took Ford mower off the tractor. Needs a new guard and some bushings. It’s so much more “delicate” than the old McCormack mower; everything has to be in perfect adjustment. Cut down cherry tree by the well; lots of memories went with it, but it was ant-infested and nearly dead.

More socializing, this time at Gore Mountain Motel buffet. Maureen and Mary Fitzgerald invited us, but when we arrived we found Bill Montford and his wife also, so we had a fascinating three hours of Democratic politics to balance the Republicans of last night. Bill is so resentful of Jerry Gardner who, he says, distorts all the news. He finds Thomas a menace because of all the people who are backing him—all those who want their power returned as it “used to be.”

August 27, 1989

Decided to let Gary Wolfe drill a well for us. He’ll do it in September or October. Mary Fitzgerald came to dowse the site. Does she really believe this nonsense? I perhaps can give credence to the “action” of the rods above a good vein, but when she began asking them, “Is there water at 500 feet? 400? 300? 350? 325? between 325 and 300?” etc., I became a total doubter. Suppose one talked Greek to the rods?

August 28, 1989

Art Perryman is very ill—bleeding ulcers. He vomited much blood, was rushed to the hospital, treated with cauterization. We had a long talk in his living room, next to the huge sculpted deer, now mounted rather grotesquely on an even larger root. His ethos of manliness interferes greatly with his willingness to treat himself sensibly.

August 30, 1989

Jari repaired! Miracle! We retrieved it and brought back Chinese take-out to celebrate. Leander went off a few days ago, first to Bethlehem and then to Minneapolis to his new girlfriend, so we are alone, which is rather nice. With the Jari finally operative, only the organ remains μετέωρα.

August 31, 1989

Picked up all needed parts for Ford mower repair from Bud Rudick, ready for next year. Tractor is now ready for the winter, always a chore.

Art had a relapse: palpitations, etc., heart straining to pump an inadequate supply of blood. We traveled to Glens Falls to visit him in hospital. Looking better after three transfusions.

September 4, 1989

Riparius–Hanover

A full day doing last-minute chores, such as covering the new foundation with boards to keep water and snow out. Home by 11:00 p.m. to face piles of mail.

September 5, 1989

Hanover

A great day. Groundbreaking for Kendal at Hanover. I was master of ceremonies—speaking, then introducing Lloyd Lewis, Sara Townsend, Joe Parks, and Alan Hunt; then putting the first spade into the earth. When I tossed the dirt high there was a great cheer from the crowd. Lloyd, to whom I sent my speech earlier, censored ❡2 in its original version, since I referred to him as the sperm and me as the egg. The revised version depersonalized the metaphor and made it less obviously copulatory. But the extended metaphor, especially the mitosis, seemed to work well. The text, more or less, was as follows.

REMARKS AT KENDAL AT HANOVER GROUNDBREAKING

(revised 8/28/89)

Peter Bien

Occasions like this tempt us to divide time into lumps instead of considering it a continuous flow. Everything before today was the past; right now is the present; the moment Kendal at Hanover opens—that will be the future.

Today we are not celebrating a birth; that will come in roughly twenty-six months and will undoubtedly occasion another celebration. Today we are celebrating the beginning of embryonic development: mitosis, the process by which a fertilized egg divides in two and then four and eight and on and on until it becomes a viable fetus still dependent on its umbilical cord (in this case, The Kendal Corporation in Pennsylvania), and then finally, at birth, an independent although still fragile being.

In the language of John’s Gospel, we are celebrating the Word becoming Flesh. That is happening in the present. But what about the past? John helps us again when he writes: “In the beginning was the Word”—or, in the original Greek, “In the beginning was the Logos,” the outward form by which an inner idea is expressed.

To return to our embryonic metaphor: In the beginning was a shared idea that put a gleam in various people’s eyes in Pennsylvania and in various other people’s here in the Hanover Quaker Meeting. The Pennsylvanians’ idea was an eager desire to plant the original Kendal seed in northern New England; ours was a corresponding receptivity: an eagerness to have our potential activated.

The union of those two ideas took place in the autumn of 1985, exactly four years ago. Between then and now the fertilized egg has lain dormant while the amount of activity on its behalf, and the number of people dedicated to its nurture, have multiplied and multiplied. In those four years we secured Kendal’s future home—this land; insured its financial support; protected it from regulatory forces eager sometimes to see it aborted; prepared its layette, hired its governesses, and recruited an extended family of hundreds of foster-parents to guide it through its future difficulties during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. How can we even begin to say a proper “Thanks” to all of these good souls? To Lloyd Lewis, to Alan Hunt, to Richard Bewley, John Clancy, Dick Dewees, Barbara Parsons, Tom Miller, and others in Pennsylvania; to Bob Metz, Tom Corindia, Sandy Stettenheim and all the local Quaker Overseers; to Carol Weingeist, our first full-time employee on site, to Jean Brophy, to our wonderful secretary, Naomi; to Steve Marion, who helped us so much in securing our Certificate of Need from the State of New Hampshire; to those at Dartmouth who were always ready to listen to us: Bob Field, Cary Clark, Gordie DeWitt; to Susan and Malcom McLane, who guided us with their wisdom at a crucial moment; to Governor Lane Dwinell; to our architects and engineers; to Jim Strickler, Lou Matthews, and others in the medical community; to Mrs. Ferguson and the Hanover Improvement Society; and to all the Founders, for their faith in something that, until this moment, has remained nothing more than a Word, an intangible idea, rather than tangible Flesh. Without a single line of advertising, but simply by word of mouth, we have developed a family that currently numbers, besides the Founders, over 500 individuals or couples on the priority list for future entrance, and a mailing list of 1500 others who have expressed interest.

What about the future? Although opening is more than two years away, it is not premature to think ahead to our life with this new creation when it becomes an independent although still fragile being. Those who have raised children know that this endeavor can give meaning to their existence as well as to the child’s. What we hope is that the experience of living in Kendal at Hanover after its birth will challenge our Founders to develop it into a supportive community appropriate to their own stage in life and to the fact of mortality, a community enabling them to share both joy and bereavement. What Kendal offers each of us is the chance to continue to control our life in its final third or quarter, just as we have attempted to control it in youth and maturity, instead of feeling increasingly controlled.

In any case, now in the present let’s celebrate the inauguration of mitosis, give thanks to those who protected the dormant egg for so long, and hope that the Flesh to be born will be healthy, beautiful, civilized, and temperamentally serene.

Afterwards, the Overseers and the Philadelphia visitors ate at the Meeting House. I had a long talk with Delmar Brock, a Dartmouth and Tuck graduate who is chair of the new Kendal at Hanover Corporation. Alan Hunt seemed standoffish. Maybe I hurt him, jokingly calling him a Philadelphia lawyer. After the ceremony, Mr. Ferguson, husband of Mrs. Cummings-Ferguson, who sold us the land, came up to say that the metaphor ought to have included something about mothers who see their child being taken from them. That is how she felt, at least partially. I enjoyed meeting three bankers, two from First New Hampshire and one from the Bank of Ireland, its owner, and guarantor of our loan via a letter of credit.

The whole thing was very emotionally exhausting.

Wednesday, September 6, 1989

Nice supper with Dick and Karen Sheldon, and Mother. Mother’s Aunt Eva died a few days ago, aged 95. “Big Yiayia” was the oldest of nine children. With Eva’s death, only one remains: Trude Deliman, 88, who lives in Florida. Mother has been asking her about the family background, which is so vague. We now know that my great-great-grandmother came from Holland, and great-great-grandfather from London. They settled in Pennsylvania, apparently.

Thursday, September 7, 1989

Daphne still suffering under Roz, her boss, who seems to be an insensitive sadist.

I’m slowly getting things organized. Hope to work well this term, my “R” term without teaching, on the Kazantzakis letters. Finished going through the complete file at the farm, checking index cards against xeroxes in the loose-leaf folders. Many xeroxes are missing. Lots of dates are imprecise (let alone the O.S./N.S. problem), but occasionally finding where a stray piece belongs is very pleasurable.

Friday, September 8, 1989

Hanver–NYC

To Yale Club via AMTRAK from Springfield. I’ve been reading Walter Arndt’s latest, The Best of Rilke, beautifully produced in a bilingual format by UPNE. Must get to work, however, on the Wilmington talk on Kazantzakis’s religiosity. But a lot of time for this was spent instead of preparing the Kinhaven agenda for the October 1st meeting.

Supper with Daphne. She’s complained to the publisher about Roz. Publisher very frank: others have complained, the situation is well known and familiar: a job too big for her, so she persecutes her subordinates. At the same time, Daphne has been offered an editorial position, but still hopes to stay in marketing. Afterwards we walked to 717 Madison Avenue. The apartment has lots of potential but needs to be furnished and decorated.

Saturday, September 9, 1989

Yale Club in the morning trying to chart out my Wilmington talk.

Greenwich Village in the afternoon to Paula’s flat on Greenwich Street, a monumental building just off Christopher with its male boutiques! George Goodwin, Jim Quinn, David Bury, Jerry Bidlack. Paula in effect told me we needed to proceed more professionally. So we’ll spend more money in order, with luck, to collect more.

Supper at Orzo, very expensive but good, on Restaurant Row, 46th between 8th and 9th. Greg, Daphne, Chrysanthi, and me. Then to an effective farce/comedy Lend Me a Tenor full of ridiculous fun against the stirring music of Verdi’s Otello.

Sunday, September 10, 1989

NYC

Leisurely breakfast on the roof, reading the New York Times. The last fling before work. Then nice two hours with Vasos Papagapitos of Travel Dynamics, unshaven and in sneakers, having just come from tennis with his brother George. The business is going well, despite competition. If only we were rich, we could go on the Indonesia tour they’re planning for March.

September 12, 1989

Hanover

Support Committee for Jo Ann Unruh at Meeting. She’s divorcing after ten years. I felt honored to be asked.

September 13, 1989

Spoke at Comparative Literature open house, with Marianne Hirsch and Lynn Higgins, on my involvement with Kazantzakis à la Comparative Literature.

September 14, 1989

War/Peace open house. I did a mini version of my war poetry lecture, with Jack Shepherd.

September 17, 1989

Lunch at The Greens with Mother and Maisie Wilson, who recalled Leon Black and his father’s suicide—the whole catastrophe. I said I’d write to Leon, who now is married, apparently, and is vice president of a brokerage house that is being accused of illegal activity. This man, who had so much money, vowed to devote his life to making more. What a travesty! Our education is worthless, it seems. . . . In Meeting ministry: “We are not called to succeed. We are called to be faithful.”

September 20, 1989

Nice lunch with Tom Corindia, weighed down by diabetes and four infants, but coping.

Department meeting. Lou Renza, now chairman, has developed logorrhea, contrary to all expectation. It seems to accompany the chairmanship. I vow to be terse when I conduct meetings. Am I?

Alice Swersey has responded positively to my pleas for her to rejoin the Kinhaven Board and head up the development program.

September 22, 1989

To Pendle Hill. Margery fired Coleman Dorsey. She is really embattled. The “perfect community” is full of recrimination.

September 23, 1989

Philadelphia

Nice meeting with Rebecca Mays and Gay Nicholson re: Publication Committee concerns. Let’s hope that the Francis Nicholson pamphlet on “Quaker Money,” which I edited this summer, will be accepted.

September 24, 1989

Philadelphia

John Gray and two other Woodbrookers are at PH. Nice reunion.

Lunch in downtown Philadelphia with Ellen Rose. But first, Central Philadelphia Meeting, 15th Street. All the ministry was about the two homeless people whom the Meeting had forced to leave the day before. Afterwards, explanation. They’d vowed to evict them non-violently. They were urinating on the steps of Friends Center, and breaking into cars in the neighborhood. Friends were under pressure from the neighbors. They formed groups to hold vigils round the clock, telling the two that they had to leave by a certain hour. Then they confiscated their cardboard boxes, etc. The two hesitated but did not resist, and finally left. Friends have tried to place them in shelters. It’s clear that Quakers are basically conservative; we render unto Caesar but not at the expense of principle. The removal, after all, was nonviolent. They did not call the police; they used “soul-force.” . . . Nice Meeting. Lots of young people. The man in front of me turned out to be a former Dartmouth student who remembered me.

Ellen Rose is flourishing. When I told her that Kate Brandenburg, dean at PH, had asked me to teach in the fall of 1990, when I have a sabbatical, she was enthusiastic. “Do come! Philadelphia is wonderful. You and Chrysanthi will flourish here.” I was encouraged.

Then to Wilmington and the super deluxe Hotel du Pont, built in 1913 by the du Pont Company to house their visitors. Their offices are upstairs. Tom Clark, my host, is a lawyer for du Pont but a closet intellectual who seems frustrated writing contracts for a living. Dinner with him and Coleman and Astrid Dorsey. Then to “du Pont country” of estates, wealth and more wealth, to an Episcopal parish built by the du Ponts. They’re just replacing the organ for $900,000! Good crowd, including Elizabeth Vining and Bain Davis and Don Pease’s father (a vice president at du Pont). I lectured on “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision.” Then back to the Hotel du Pont with Coleman and Astrid to hear the worst about his clash with Margery and his firing. Whom to believe? She told me that he was incompetent; he told me that she was incapable of patience, that he was cultivating people, which takes time. Now he has to rebuild his law practice, which had foundered during the years at PH.

September 25, 1989

Wilmington–Philadelphia–Manchester–Hanover

Flew back to Manchester. Met Curt Torell on the plane. We had a good lunch together, during which he enlightened me re: Kendal’s policy toward research. Then dinner with him and Jean and Carol and Chrysanthi. Then Kendal Board of Overseers, in which he convinced everyone, including me, that the current proposal for research from Rosenberg, Manheimer, Gerber is premature. The Founders themselves ought to be the ones to decide. We’ll have to wait until the facility opens. But I stressed that we mustn’t appear to be against research.

September 26, 1989

Lunch with Bill Scherman and Karin Rodis re: the Beebe professorship. He’s going to bring Art Buchwald in the spring, the same day that I give my inaugural lecture.

Susan Tenney demonstrated the good work she’s done on the Hypercard software for Modern Greek drills. Now it’s up to me to type in the drills. We’ll be the first to have computerized instruction in Modern Greek, I believe.

To the president’s house for dinner with three authors, including Arthur Herzberg, published by Simon and Schuster: a history of Jews in America. The other, Jill Ker Conway, was a former president of Smith College who was raised on an outback sheep farm in Australia and has written an account of how she escaped the restrictions (especially for females) of that environment.

September 27, 1989

Takis Metaxas demonstrated to me a very good computer program for doing Greek.

September 28, 1989

Lunch with Kate Cohen. Such a fine student!

September 19, 1989

Lunch with Ned Perrin. His marriage is going well, so he says. We lamented together the imminent death of the Faculty Club.

September 30, 1989

Breakfast with Kate Cohen’s sister, a Yale classics student who has discovered Modern Greek and wants to combine MG studies with classics in graduate school. I counseled her regarding the opportunities here and abroad.

Noon: lunch at Hanover Inn with David Dushkin, Jr. and his Danish wife Maria. Very cordial, despite my refusal to let his son have a rock concert at Kinhaven last June. He wants to contract to occupy the main house in exchange for a large financial contribution that will help him tax-wise.

October 1, 1989

Kinhaven Board at Weston. Afterwards, Bill Polk, Jerry, Alice Henkin, and I easily rejected David Dushkin, Jr.’s proposal. Now I have to write to him.

October 2, 1989

Cambridge

To Cambridge to hear the 25-year tribute to James Yannatos. Concert of his works, old and new, including a new solo for horn and dancer performed well by his daughter. Not brilliant music but very competent, with lots of variety and imagination. We saw him and embraced.

October 3, 1989

Cambridge–Lynn–Boston

By “T” and taxi to Lynn to see Mike Antonakes about our collaboration on the Kazantzakis letters. He’s willing to play a subordinate role. We laid out expectations for him from now until February. He’ll select the letters from 400 Γράμματα, Eleni’s Ασυμβίβαστος, maybe also Επιστολές προς τη Γαλάτεια. I’ll do all the rest.

By bus back to Boston. Chrysanthi and I lunched in the Parker House. Then to Cambridge. Quick “research” in Widener, xeroxing some Kazantzakis letters. Then consultation with Charles Stewart, whose family turns out to be friendly with David Buseck’s fiancée in Cincinnati. Then to Kirkland Street to lecture on “Residual Orality in the Re-emergence of Greek Prose Fiction in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” the full version of the abbreviated talk I gave at Tatum’s symposium in July. Greg Nagy was there, also Ihor Ševčenko, and of course Meg and Irene Kacandes. Nice to see old friends. Bumped into Chris Flug in the Yard, as well. Some helpful comments afterwards from the professors, and more informal contact with some of the students. Harvard is always extraordinarily stimulating for me.

Supper with Meg and Charles Stewart in a Thai restaurant, not very appetizing, actually. Saw Michael Hendys briefly, but he did not join us. Meg revealed a schism in MGSA with Speros Vryonis the villain. Alas! Alack! Hendys, without work, may return to Scotland. Then what will Meg do?

October 4, 1989

Drove back to Hanover. Glorious color around Sunapee. Turkish carpets spread across the landscape.

October 5, 1989

Long hours trying to date Kazantzakis letters in the 1909–1911 area. So many pitfalls. In one letter, in the printed version, he speaks of the φιλολογικό βιβλίο he was writing at Krasi. But when I checked the holograph I found that this was an error for φιλοσοφικό. I thought it was the Nietzsche dissertation, and assigned it to 1909, but he wasn’t in Krasi then. So it must have been “Bergson,” and I assigned it to 1912. Later, in another letter, to Zervos, I found the answer: neither Nietzsche nor Bergson but a book on relativity—the long-lost book on William James, it seems. Still how to date this? I’ve not put it in 1910 or 1911. All this is fun, like a jigsaw puzzle. But very slow.

October 6, 1989

ΦΒΚ Steering Committee with Jere Daniell and Hilda Sokol. We’re inducting John Rassias as an honorary member this year. Also voted to induct Boghosian, Laurie Snell, and Gene Lyons next year.

Lunch yesterday with Jeanne West, new acquisitions editor of UPNE. She actually wants to do a series of Modern Greek translations. I vetted one for her: of Terzakis’s Violet City, full of errors but possible.

Walter Arndt has done his essay for JMGS on verse translation, lifted largely (ipso facto plagiarized) from his Rilke book. Poor man! Saw him on the street, with sores on his lips. His cancer is enervating him slowly but he jokes about it and works 3–4 hours a day, his limit now.

October 8, 1989

I ministered in Meeting on the homeless evictions in Philadelphia. Business Meeting afterwards. Ricardo and his brother were arrested for disturbing the peace while alcoholic, and the Border Patrol was notified. The Meeting is in a tizzy. Telephone calls flying round at 4:30 a.m. Bob Watson advanced $1000 for bail. They’re now in the Meeting House, sleeping. Meeting decided to admit them into sanctuary. I visited Bob afterwards. He continues to support them against the authorities even though he might be in jeopardy as Ricardo’s employer.

Jane O’Connell from North River here overnight. She came to see how we do our peer tutoring and run the Composition Center. She’s at Green Mountain State College at a salary of $18,000 a year. Her husband walked out on her last March and she’s all alone in a house on the river, commuting to Poultney, poor thing.

October 10, 1989

John Lanzetta died. Funeral in Rollins today. A poor, emaciated service led without spirit by our chaplains Gwen King and Jim Breeden. Mostly music. Lots about Jesus saving us and ensuring eternal life. (I think of Kazantzakis and his Comedy, which I recited in part in Wilmington recently.) One “remembrance” by a colleague. Nothing spontaneous. No testimonies from those who obviously could have spoken so well about him. A hollow ritual with neither the age-old reverberations of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish service, nor the genuineness and spontaneity of the Quaker one. A Protestant shell: empty. I told Chrysanthi that when I die I hope someone will do better by me.

October 11, 1989

NYC

7:30 a.m. in the dentist’s chair. I now have a gold crown. “A nugget,” as Dr. Logan called it. Very impressive, but hidden in the very back of the mouth where no one can see it.

Drove to Springfield; AMTRAK to NYC. Met Margaret Devlin in the Yale Club. She wants to talk about another cruise, next fall, following the trail of St. Paul.

Then to Anne-Marie’s Cooking School, 30th Street between Park and Lexington, for a private dinner with the Kendal team, underwriters, Bank of Ireland, First NH Bank, Bank of Australia, lawyers, etc., all involved in the closing. Actually, things did not go so well. One of our people (Blair Wood, in Stebbins’ office) hadn’t prepared. But with lots of champagne, and a very nice dinner (at probably $100 a head), spirits were lively. Anne-Marie explained each course as it arrived, telling us at the start that she’d cooked for kings and presidents, etc. The best were the soup and desserts. Afterwards: speeches. I read Jacques speech on the seven ages of man from As You Like It. The others talked “sense,” about money, interest ratings, marketing. They seem to feel that our project is exceptional. Nice long talk with the banker from Dublin about James Joyce, his city, the British Empire.

Managed in the afternoon to read a little from the translation essay I’m preparing for MLA.

October 12, 1989

Yale Club

Breakfast with Lloyd, Jean, Alan, Nancy Webber, Bill Yost, and others from the Kendal team, all at the Yale Club as my guests. Saw Jim Freedman in the corner and introduced him to the lot. He’s on our priority list, of course.

Nice message from Daphne: “Welcome,” with her new telephone number at work.

Worked on translation essay in Yale Club library in the morning, finding Jusdanis’s book useful. Then to East 70th Street for lunch with Vasos, George, and Margaret. Emerged from the subway in the midst of Hunter College with students outdoors on a beautiful day, eating hot dogs. What a different look they have from Dartmouth students, the boys mostly with earrings, the girls in skin-tight jeans, and of course a preponderance of swarthy and dark skins. Travel Dynamics has a gorgeous brownstone between Lexington and Park on one of the nicest streets in New York. The house across the street, Vasos told me, is owned by the Mellon family—a beauty. We lunched on the top floor in the paneled conference room, discussing a cruise/tour that might be based on St. Paul’s travels, but more broadly on the conflict of Hellenism, Hebraism, and Christianity. I could teach Cavafy, Matthew Arnold, use Peter Brown’s books, etc. We thought of a second professor: Bob McGrath again, or Kathleen Corrigan, or even Rob Oden if he could leave Hotchkiss.

Then to Camera Repair Company headed by my new-found cousin Rick Rankin, whom I luckily caught just as he was about to go out for lunch (at 3:00 p.m.). He’ll make my Leica like new, he tells me. I accompanied him to Pig & Whistle on West 48th and had a gin and tonic while he ate . . . and talked . . . for 1½ hours. The taciturn man of last weekend’s visit turned out to be voluble. He started as a commercial artist, then took up photography, answered a want ad 27 years ago for the Repair Company, and now owns the company. He is proud of his Scots ancestry, loves Scotland, returns there often. Their son James is an extraordinarily gifted boy. I encouraged him to think of St. Paul’s summer program, or an exchange year in England, followed by an Ivy League college.

Then an interlude on 42nd Street and return to the Club. Daphne came and we went to a Korean restaurant. She’s delighted with her new boss, Fred Hills, and her new work, which involves reading proposals and submissions sent in by agents and winnowing them, plus all sorts of arrangements and contacts with the agents and the authors themselves at each and every stage of the publishing process. She works hard but also seems to have many diversions: dinners, trips to California with Greg, evenings with the Bemelmans, museum visits, lunches with friends; and she likes her new apartment on Madison and 64th. So, all’s well.

Returning to the Yale Club via 46th Street, I found a note from Jean: “Thursday, 2:00 p.m.: Peter, time to celebrate!” In short, they signed the closing.

October 13, 1989

Yale Club

I faxed my congratulations to Jean. Then read a PH pamphlet submission in the Club library. Then to MoMA for the Picasso-Braque exhibition “Pioneering Cubism.” Disappointing because the canvases leading up to cubism and inching toward it via a Cézanne-like lack of perspective, etc. were more pleasing than the cubist works themselves. Indeed, room after room of cubist paintings, most looking exactly the same, was boring. A touch of color in one corner, after a half dozen years, inaugurating a new phase of cubism, was a major relief. I particularly liked Picasso’s “Friendship,” “Farmer’s Wife,” “Woman with Vase of Flowers,” “Reservoir at Horta,” all pre-cubist, and, of the cubist paintings, “Violin and Pitcher” (1910) and “Violin and Grapes” (1912). Braque left me cold. But seeing this exhibit helps one “place” the constructions, collages, etc. of Boghosian, what the catalogue calls “a complete break with the monolithic tradition of carved or modeled sculpture,” not to mention “the transposition of banal, mass-produced elements into ‘fine art,’ . . . one of the major aesthetic strategies of Cubism,” and “the teasing, delicate balance between abstraction and representation.” Lunch in the Members’ Restaurant using Daphne’s card. Overpriced, bloated lunch obviously popular with socialites.

Mother, Chrysanthi, and Daphne showed up at 6:00. We dined at the Club, then walked cross-town to see The Heidi Chronicles, well acted but not very well crafted as a play, yet with some intellectual content, which is so rare—about the feminism of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, its delicious impetus for young women but also the consequences of loneliness and childishness that overtakes these young feminists/Lesbians when they reach their 40s. Heidi in the last scene adopts a baby that she raises as a single parent. Greg joined us, somewhat haggard after a day on the Street in which the Dow fell 197 points.

Saturday, October 14, 1989

Commuter RR to Rye, taxi to a spectacular temple, for Lisa Schweitzer’s Bat Mitzvah. Since Gertrude is too sick, Joan alienated, Irene and Clarice uninvited, we were the only “Honigsberg” relatives. Lisa’s Negro nanny arrived from Brooklyn, transported in a limousine provided by Peter and Susan. The rabbi went to Brant Lake Camp and has a house there; fishes with Bob Gersten in the early morning; says they were talking about me last summer re: The Last Temptation controversy. The service was long but lovely, with a glorious soprano as canter, and two male voices and organ; stunning music that somehow avoided becoming “entertainment.” Lisa in resplendent white dress and high heels (!), was sweet, poised, intelligent, reading all the Hebrew passages with ease and making a little speech about helping the homeless, avoiding waste, spreading resources. In effect the Bat Mitzvah welcomes her ritualistically into the diachronic and synchronic life of a “People” and challenges her to play a role in that People’s future. Very touching.

Driven to the Schweitzer mansion in Scarsdale by one of Susan’s brothers (I think) in a huge Mercedes, seemingly the standard vehicle in this crowd. Peter drives a Rolls Royce! But he has one or two Mercedes for the kids! Lovely house and grounds, with an abstract sculpture by Gertrude on the lawn, tennis court, pool. Three busloads of Lisa’s classmates were fed in a tent with a dance band and dance floor the 12- and 13-year-old girls all in high fashion much too prematurely. 60 or 70 guests fed inside in a catered meal the epitome of the waste condemned by Lisa in her speech. Δε βαριέσαι. The irony was that it wasn’t even tasty. Peter has very few Schweitzer canvases; he seemed uninterested. Ritual cutting of bread in the garden. Interesting people. Susan’s other brother is a high-level bureaucrat in the office of the president in Washington. Another relative is a senior researcher in ETS, Princeton. Many folks told us of Peter’s remarkable fatherliness, how he took Susan’s three children under his wing and gave them a true home. Susan very appreciative of our presence.

AMTRAK home from New Rochelle station. Listened to the remainder of Moby Dick in the car.

October 16, 1989

Hanover

Spoke with Marty Cornish about the cruise. Kip Soteres for lunch. He wants to spend three years in Greece and “become a writer.” Then to Kendal office for “Donations Committee.” Carleton Chapman wants to give us his huge electronic organ: three manuals. Delightful! We accept! Pot-luck supper at the Meeting. We’re continuing to support Jo Ann Unruh in her divorce. Turns out she was raised a Mennonite. So was Rich Kremer, who was at Meeting yesterday. I told him all about John Baker and Peace Studies.

Wednesday, October 18, 1989

Delightful lunch with Nancy Bekavac, an intellectual, enthusiast, easy talker. It’s bracing to experience a meeting of minds now and then.

Continuing every day with the letters. I’m now at 1917.

Dick and Allan for chamber music. Bach, Martinu, Haydn.

Thursday, October 19, 1989

Lunch with Jan Tarjan. Very touching in her appreciation of my teaching, years ago. She’s the chief force behind the Tucker Foundation’s outreach programs, including the International Work Camps, which I’ve been supporting financially. Told me about her ancestral farm in Blue Hill, Maine. No electricity or plumbing. Her aged grandmother still lives there, somehow.

First meeting of CAP. Freedman and Jim Wright very efficient in covering the agenda. Lee Baldwin and Chris Wolff there—old friends. Afterwards I spoke to Freedman again about the Faculty Club, but it’s hopeless. He confided that he and Sheba are invited nowhere. He’s bitter about this. Strange.

Friday, October 20, 1989

Minneapolis

Drove to Logan. Weather too foul to fly from Lebanon. Good flight. Minneapolis so attractive. First face I saw at the symposium: Tom Doulis. He’s rejoining MG studies after a decade.

At 5:00, met Leander (here for the weekend) and his girlfriend Deanna Lee for supper. She’s a large, squarish Chinese with a very funny face and a strange malformed nose. Unattractive, actually (physically). But mature, easy-going. We talked about the Jerry Bidlack mess, about Juilliard, orchestras. Her father migrated from Taiwan, penniless, no English. Ended up with a Ph.D. in engineering and has worked for decades for Boeing in Seattle and Washington, top secret military work, alas. Deanna’s mother died; father went to Taiwan and returned with another wife, by arrangement, a “house slave/servant.” Deanna was a prodigy. They sent her to NYC to live with a relative and study at Juilliard Prep. Somehow she survived. The entire family is very success oriented, also very ethnic. She’s the only one who associates at all with Caucasians. (All this told me by Leander, afterwards.) She went off to a concert. Leander and I had a long talk, very easy and open. He likes her, she likes him, but marriage seems very difficult. He’s not ready to give up his situation at Moravian and start again from scratch. She may be open to leaving the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, but only if she can get a job in the Philadelphia Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic. For now, they look forward to a solid month together in the summer. After that, who knows?

Then to Constantine Boucalas’s keynote speech. Passionate and intelligent.

Saturday, October 21, 1989

Minneapolis

A full, enjoyable day at the symposium. My session had one very poor paper, two good ones. I, as the respondent, spoke about misuse of “theory” for theory’s sake, the trouble with the first paper. Then a long lunch with Ernie Friedl and Michael Herzfeld discussing the transition of the journal to me as editor, beginning September 1990, and Michael as associate editor. I hope I can sustain this job. All these years I’ve been comfortable as associate editor, which may be my proper level. If I am overreaching as editor, at least I can escape after three years.

Lots of good conversation with old and new friends. Among others, Norman Gilberson telephoned. He’s married. His wife lives in Minneapolis and they have a commuting marriage between Minneapolis and Thessaloniki! Says Bruce and Tad are fine. The new director is in place and OK. Bruce hopes to go to Africa next year—i.e., not to hang around the Farm School. Vouli is fine.

Banquet. Sat with Tom Doulis. Met Aristeide Caratzas, my publisher, who despite the bad reputation of his firm turned out to be charming, intelligent, cultivated. Also Lars Baerentzen from Copenhagen. Also a scholar from Jerusalem who told me that the current Israeli ambassador to the UN is named Bien, which they pronounce Bein (báïn). Speaker: Eugene McCarthy. Terrible. Anecdotal, unprepared. But he did know George Seferis. Afterwards, Tom insisted on paying off his debt, the beer he owes me for our five-year (become thirteen-year) plan. I published first. I upgraded it to a Scotch. We were joined by Caratzas and Baerentsen and by a stunning blonde from Copenhagen, Caratzas’s mistress, Christina, who manages a restaurant in Soho. She described the hopelessness of Swedish and Danish society for anyone not satisfied with mediocrity, which is why she fled. Also met Stathis Trahanatzis, the icongrapher, whose work I’d bought in Chicago in 1976. He embraced me and brought greetings from Sophia Tsacharopoulou, who has his work too, and recognized mine when she was in the house last June from Eleni’s graduation.

Long talk with Thanassis Maskaleris, who just lived through the Oakland earthquake. He wants me as a visitor at San Francisco State in 1991 or 1992.

Sunday, October 22, 1989

Minneapolis–Boston–Hanover

Business meeting. Official announcement of my editorship. In the panel, I spoke out again about perfunctory use of theory and of course was misunderstood as being against theory. Δε πειράζει. Quick lunch in the airport with Meg Alexiou and Irene Kacandes.

October 24, 1989

I had to officiate at the ΦΒΚ induction, reading the nominating committee report. John Rassias was inducted as an honorary member and gave his usual speech about passion in teaching, sweeping all and sundry off their feet.

October 26, 1989

Cambridge

Interviewed for a “profile” of me to be sent out to Beebe donors. I spoke about the musicality of words, mostly. Drove to Cambridge with Chrysanthi and Mother. Overnight in Friends Center.

October 27, 1989

Boston–Philadelphia

To Logan early. Chrysanthi and Mother went off to Cincinnati, I to Philadelphia. Met Jane Zavits on the plane. All day meetings at Pendle Hill. My heart pounded during debate on Francis Nicholson’s “Quaker Money,” which I worked so hard to revise, because it seemed they were going to reject it as “not sufficiently spiritual” (which it isn’t, but who cares?). But they took it, provided a preface be included. Book Committee afterwards. Then a ceremony honoring Carol Murphy, who has written seventeen pamphlets. A strange, shy, private, lonely woman almost out of a Tennessee Williams play, with a fine mind that somehow sustains her. Rebecca said she was uncharacteristically voluble afterwards; she normally doesn’t say a word. I continued “negotiating” with Kate Brandenburg over next autumn; it seems that we’ll come, even if we do the cruise as well. Then still another meeting with Rebecca and Gay Nicholson, who is going to be editor pro-tem for three months while Rebecca unwinds.

Saturday, October 28, 1989

PH–Cincinnati

Invigorating breakfast with John Gray, who’s become interested in illegal immigration and sanctuary; hopes to meet Jim Corbett and to visit the Mexican border. I gave him Corbett’s pamphlet that we published. Then by Avis to the airport; flight to Cincinnati; message at the hotel that Chrysanthi and Daphne and Mother had gone to the zoo! John Tallmadge picked me up, showed me his offices at Union Institute, where he’s associate dean setting up programs for students who are pursuing the Ph.D. part-time while continuing to work. A fine solution to his problem. Then to his home, suburban and totally bourgeois. We laughed. Pam holding the baby Rosalind in her arms, obviously a full-time occupation. His minister and wife came. Lover of Kazantzakis. Preached a sermon in favor of The Last Temptation. I read it; remarkable comprehension. It’s so pleasing to meet people like this where there is a total meeting of minds. Wife had grown up with Paul Schrader and also attended Calvin College. We had a lovely tea. Then John drove me to the dinner arranged by the Levine family with four other couples. Huge mansion, nouveau-riche with a vengeance, in horrendous taste. Closet full of fur coats. But met lots of people, including of course the bride, Linda, totally extraverted and thus very un-Bienlike. But David Buseck seems equally extroverted. Met Eksteins and others from Tempe who’ve been so kind to the Busecks. Also Levines’ friends the Stewarts, Charles Stewart’s parents. He’s a developer; cornered me complaining that academics are too much in ivory towers, should be instructing business people in anthropology, psychology, etc. D’accord! Finally dinner at 9:00 p.m., disappointing. As at Schweitzer’s, great expense, meager quality.

Sunday, October 29, 1989

Cincinnati–Boston–Hanover

Walked around Cincinnati’s downtown, remarkably reconstructed with “skywalks” enabling pedestrians to escape traffic. Wealth everywhere. Even exquisite bus-stops. The city filled with people having brunch, preparatory to a football game. I do think that Americans are a happy race, but the wealth is obscene. A PH pamphlet we considered yesterday described a meal in India. People sit on the floor. The food is placed on banana leaves. You eat with your fingers (right hand only). No furniture, no plates, no silverware.

The wedding took place at 12:30 at a club called the Phoenix. More wealth. But a thoughtful service under the chuppah (wedding canopy) which symbolizes the couple’s future home. The vows were sweet. And it ended with the traditional breaking of the glass, a reminder of the fragility of marriage and also of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. Then L’Chaim! To Life!

We sat at a table with the Stewarts and, unbelievably, four other businessmen and their wives, all of whom had been hired originally by the Dartmouth alum Irvin Bettman, with whom I served on a committee. I danced briefly with Mother. She was in fine spirits, and obviously very “prominent” throughout the festivities. Now the ice is broken. Who will be next? Leander? Alec? Daphne? Lori? Susie? Paul? Also Olivier, Emily’s daughter, now a student at Antioch. Long flight back. Home at midnight, amid impenetrable fog.

Monday, October 30, 1989

Breakfast with Jean re: agenda for Kendal Overseers. At the meeting, I presented my concern that we do something for the broader community; we will be, after all, an enclave of the rich. Not much response . . .!

October 31, 1989

Working now on the article on the appropriation of Cavafy by the gay community, concentrating on E. M. Forster. For MLA.

Saturday, November 4, 1989

NYC

Yale Club overnight. To David Erlanger’s for meeting of the Evaluation Committee to consider feeling by both staff and students that the weakest link in Kinhaven’s structure is the director/conductor, Jerry Bidlack. What a mess! But at least we are not now in the position of other boards, being the last to know anything really important. Good meeting with David, Alice Henkin, Robin Hendrich. We developed a strategy to try to break the news gently to Jerry. Walked across the Park with Alice and her husband. Splendid day. People everywhere. Civilized and serene, despite what one reads. At the Met I saw, with great emotion, the Velasquez exhibition. Here is a painter the equal of Rembrandt in native genius and psychological penetration, though probably more limited in range of subject matter. His portraits are uncanny in their ability to penetrate to the character of the sitter, whether it be the innocence of royal infants or the hauteur of Philip IV’s second queen.

Then to Daphne’s. Leander arrived at 6:00. His concert with Albert Tan last night was so-so, he says, because Albert, although an elegant violinist, is severely limited in expressive range. They did two Mozart sonatas, one early, one late, followed by Beethoven’s first trio, with Nancy Bidlack on ’cello. Before the concert, when Leander was in the men’s room, an elderly gentleman entered, recognized him, and said he’d come specifically to hear Leander, because he played “in the old style.” Dinner at China Peace, then to see the Three Penny Opera with Sting and Alvin Epstein. Slow first act, but it then picked up. The lyrics are amazing, the music even more so. Every convention is inverted. Lovely spoof on operatic conventions, on conventional morality, on romance. The moral seems to be “food comes before morality.”

Sunday, November 5, 1989

Back to the Met, quickly through Velasquez, this time blissfully free of crowds. Then to Canaletto exhibit. Quite different. Again, an extraordinary technician, but he never painted individuals, just huge compositions chiefly of Venice, with people appearing as “urban species.” The wonder is the simultaneous ability to produce extraordinary details, so many “pictures within the picture,” and an overall composition that is perfectly right. But Canaletto was trapped in his own success. He did one thing so well that he couldn’t grow.

Leander, Daphne, and Greg joined me for brunch at the Club, relaxed and sumptuous. Greg continues to bore one every time I see him, but let’s hope he is more interesting to Daphne. Leander is now speaking openly about Deanna. She has decided to return to Kinhaven this summer rather than taking up her fellowship in Italy. The web thickens.

Worked a bit on Forster and Cavafy yesterday. A varied, rich weekend.

November 6, 1989

Hanover

Met with Bill Scott re: the cruise. He’ll go. He wants to emphasize the Roman Empire. I’ll do pagan-Christian conflict and Hebraism-Hellenism.

November 7, 1989

Met with Jack Shepherd and Alan Rozycki re: strategies for War/Peace Studies. Leonard Rieser is re-submitting the grant application to Hewlett for $75,000 for conflict resolution. I revised the letter, under pressure of deadline, as always.

November 8, 1989

Observed the English 2 class of John Donaghy. Mediocre. He has a Greek girl and a Bulgarian boy, a Dane, two Chinese.

November 9, 1989

To the University Press re: reprint of the Workbook for Demotic Greek I. It needs careful revision to bring it into conformity with the new edition of the text. Meanwhile, Takis Metaxas is typing its drills into our new Hypercard drill system.

November 10, 1989

Gertrude Schweitzer died. Mother is now the last, very last, of the Honigsbergs. Leander is here. He took her for dinner. She wept; they talked; it was good. We went to President Freedman’s for a dinner with the trustees. Nice to see Mickey Heyman, who told me he is going to quit the chancellorship and return to teaching. Ten years are enough. He wants to leave while he still feels good about everything. Also, he says that what he set out to accomplish is done. Rosy Rosenberg was there, too—my Deerfield classmate. Nice conversation with Douglass as well. At long last, with Freedman’s arrival, I feel part of the “senior professoriate.”

November 11, 1989

Leander, Mother, Chrysanthi and I to the Hop to see an excellent student production of The Taming of the Shrew. What fun! But the director wrote an essay about women’s lib, to make sure that we didn’t see only the fun.

November 12, 1989

We all made a surprise birthday party for Mayme Noda. She was invited to our house for supper. Arrived. Saw table unset. We said we were lazy and we’d all go to the Norwich Inn instead. There, Treat and Molly, Sydney, Mary and Roger, and Audrey were waiting, with a reserved dining room. It was splendid.

Today’s Times had the following on Gertrude: GERTRUDE HONIG SCHWEITZER, 79, AN ARTIST [note the “Honig” instead of Honigsberg!]. Gertrude Honig Schweitzer, an artist whose works are in collections at several prominent museums, died Friday after a brief illness, at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, N.J. She was 79 years old and lived in Colts Neck, N.J., Palm Beach, Fla. and Santa Fe, N.M. Born in New York City, Mrs. Schweitzer graduated from the Pratt Institute. She was elected to the Outstanding Women Artists of America and has won several awards, including the American Watercolor Society Medal, the Philadelphia Watercolor Prize, and the American Artists Professional League Medal. Her paintings are in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Chicago Institute of Art, among others, and her sculptures at Columbia University, the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, and the Society of Four Arts in Palm Beach. Surviving are a daughter, Joan Bull of New York City; a son, Peter, of Scarsdale, N.Y., a sister Harriet Bein [sic] of Hanover, N.H., and five grandchildren.

There was also an obituary in the Times, as follows: SCHWEITZER, Gertrude Honigsberg, of Colts Neck, NJ., Palm Beach, FL, and Santa Fe, NM, passed away November 10th, 1989, in Long Branch, NJ. She was the widow of William P. Schweitzer, an Officer and Director of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. She is survived by her sister, Harriet Bien, of Hanover, NH. Mrs. Schweitzer is the beloved mother of Joan Bull, of New York City, and Peter William Schweitzer, of Scarsdale, NY, and devoted grandmother of Penelope Forest; Sally, Michele, Lisa and Robert Schweitzer. She was born in New York and attended Girls High School, Brooklyn, NY, and graduated from the Pratt Institute. During World War II, she directed the Arts and Skills Corps of the American Red Cross, Ft. Jay, Regional Hospital, Governor’s Island, NY. Among her accomplishments, Gertrude Schweitzer was elected in 1975 to the Outstanding Women Artists of America, and has won such stellar prizes as the American Watercolor Society Medal, Philadelphia Watercolor Prize, and the American Artists professional League Medal. She has been represented by the Hirschl Adler Gallery in NY, Galerie Charpentier in Paris, and the Hokin Gallery in Palm Beach, FL. Her works are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in NY, the Chicago Institute of Art, the High Museum of Atlanta, GA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, NM, the Society of Four Arts in Palm Beach, FL, and the New Britain Museum of Art in New Britain, CT. A stainless steel sculpture adorns the grounds of Columbia University. Interment will be private. The family will receive visitors on Monday and Tuesday from 3 p.m–8p.m. in Scarsdale, NY.

November 14, 1989

Baltimore

Flew to Baltimore from Manchester, leaving the house at 5:30 a.m. Met Michael Herzfeld in the Hotel Belvedere on the main square near Peabody. Taxi driver told horrendous things about this city: murders, muggings. But life goes on. After lunch, in which we discussed JMGS, we went to the Johns Hopkins University Press to meet with Denise Plowman, Marie Hansen, and the new typesetter. I’m going to try to introduce computerized Greek. They’re willing. We’ll see. The Greek keyboard they use is totally insane; thus all the typos. Marie of course wants to do a “campaign” to get more subscribers. But is it worth it? We have about 600 subscribers, which isn’t bad. Home at midnight. A long long day.

November 15, 1989

Spoke to Alex Ogle about House Party’s conflict with Kinhaven. We still haven’t resolved it. We’ll meet tomorrow.

November 16, 1989

Ogle very pleasant. We had drinks at the Inn. They’ll accede to our needs this year, but may look elsewhere in the future.

To Boswell’s because Mrs. Cook’s probate figures and mine don’t agree. What a bother!

Susan Tenney has upgraded the Hypercard program. She’s a dream. So efficient and pleasant.

Working daily on Kazantzakis letters, right now in the middle of the letters to Galatea, all of which I want to include. Chrysanthi, after reading the 400 Letters to Prevelakis, concludes that Kazantzakis was a damn nuisance.

November 17, 1989

Breakfast with Jean to plan the Kendal Overseers meeting. She is worrying about sales. We have only 165 units sold and we aim to fill the place by opening, which is now scheduled for July 1991.

In the afternoon, Fleet Bank Trust Department with Mother; Mrs. Neily and Don Vogel, discussing investments. Trust + Mother’s custody account, etc. comes to about $1.1 million. Very comfortable.

Sunday November 19, 1989

Concord

Nice outing after Meeting to Concord to lunch with Douglas and Susan Marshall and their daughter Laura. They’ve built a new, very modern house on a hilltop 10 miles from Concord. She’s a lawyer working for the State government; he teaches Greek at St. Paul’s School but is spending this year at Dartmouth, where of course he started out. Nice people.

November 20, 1989

Lunch with Bill Sherman, Karen Rodis, and Sandy Gregg to discuss my inaugural lecture, now set for March 28. Art Buchwald will deliver the Beebe lecture the same night, gratis. What am I going to say? I’m collecting ideas and filing them, but haven’t found a path yet.

November 21, 1989

With Jean and Brokaws and Earl to Carleton Chapman’s to see his organ, which he wants to donate to Kendal. It’s glorious, even if electronic. Three manuals. Can sound like a harpsichord. Can be tuned up and down by turning a knob. Can be played silently, with earphones. Naturally, we accepted.

Lunch at the Inn with a charming candidate for a professorship in Spanish. I told her about my love for Unamuno, which she shares.

Chapman, by the way, had Greek inscriptions on the molding of his library—like Montaigne. As a youth, he was an avid student of Greek, and of the organ; then he entered “the medical thing,” as he called it.

November 22, 1989

Breakfast at the Inn with Margaret Devlin (from Travel Dynamics), Bill, Mardy Cornish. We established “conversion” as the cruise theme. Itinerary: Istanbul, Philippi, Thessaloniki, Veroia, Meteora, Athens, Santorini, Patmos, Ephesus, Istanbul (more or less), with a three-day option before in Jerusalem and a three-day option after in Rome.

At 11:00 Susan Tenney presented the Hypercard results to David Bantz and Larry Levine at Humanities Computing. Thus phase one is nearing completion. For phase two I have to involve Dia again.

Crisis with Rassiases. Veronica fell in love with the son (David) of the owners of Gould Farm, where she was sent by Mennonites. John is furious. “The boy has a beard!” he screamed in our house. “He’s a clodhopper!” Et cetera. David, although he did three years of college, is a general handyman, carpenter, etc. on the farm. John, a snob, wants money and position. A mess! Mary is afraid to speak.

November 23, 1989, Thanksgiving

To the Rassiases to meet David. John cool and distant. Athos offensive. David himself struck me as cultivated and charming, a very Quaker type but not John’s style, obviously. They want to marry on December 23 and John is determined to convince them to wait, at least. Of course he is grooming someone else for Veronica, probably a stockbroker. Poor girl. Daphne here, and sympathizes.

November 24, 1989

We had a second turkey with Daphne, Mother, Kleinhardts, Officers. Very jolly. Very different from yesterday. But this morning we had Veronica, David, Mary, and Helene for breakfast to plan the wedding with Chrysanthi’s help. They can’t do it in their own house. Later, Helene broke down and wept. She’s caught in the middle.

November 27, 1989

John convinced Veronica to postpone, and she left all the wedding paraphernalia at home. But when she and David reached the Gould Farm, she telephoned to say that no, she would not postpone, but would defy John and would Mary send all the items by post. Good girl!

November 28, 1989

Riparius

To the farm. Gary Wolfe called last night. He’s ready to begin drilling the well. I arrived at noon on a rather warm day to find Gary, his father, and his helper (Richard Stewart’s stepson, a jazz drummer) all standing round with some visitors. They’d gone 65 feet. By the end of the day they’d gone 120, all with casing (which means $17.00 per foot). So far no ledge: lots of hardpan, then sand, then gravel. Gary works beautifully. The “rig” is a marvel of ingenuity. Each new section of casing is welded to the previous one, then driven down by the rig. This will continue until ledge is reached.

House in good order. I lit fires in kitchen and living room. Kept the electric heater going, and actually was quite comfortable. Snow threatened but never came. I got the kitchen up to 50 degrees, which felt wonderfully warm compared to outside (about 33). Leisurely supper in the Route 28 diner. Sat by the fire and read three Quaker MSS for PH pamphlets.

November 29, 1989

Riparius

Slept quite comfortably with sleeping bag on the convertible couch. Temperature 0° F. when I got up at 7:00 a.m. Gary had come at 6:30 to start his motor, then left and returned at 9:00. Kitchen was 30; I warmed it again to 50. Made coffee. Ate donuts. All the comforts of home, except that I’ve got two layers of thermal underwear on, a heavy sweater and lined parka—indoors! Cold brilliant day; sunshine. It warmed up to 10°. Garry had to thaw out all his lines. Finally at 10:30 he got everything working again. But I doubt that we’ll reach water today. Flies are coming out of the woodwork, seduced by the 50° heat in the cabin.

Some talk about local politics yesterday. They’re all cynical. Devil take the lot attitude, especially re: Sterling Goodspeed, who apparently was almost a crook. They’re resigned to the Republican victory because the chief factor is, they say, “nativeness.” Montfort was resented because he came from Brooklyn. That’s worse than being a Democrat.

Returned to Hanover in time for Kendal Overseers meeting, trying to enhance the marketing of the remaining flats. We’ve still only got 165 more or less committed out of the 248 total.

Gary telephoned at 10:00 p.m. He’s down 200 feet, all with casing (thus $17 a foot) and still in the crumbly rock. He’ll continue tomorrow . . . and tomorrow. . .

December 1, 1989

280 feet; no water. Rock beginning to harden as of last night. But at 10:30 p.m. tonight Gary telephoned to report success. Hooray! 40 gallons a minute; enough, as he said, for 15 houses. This was achieved at 365 feet, 280 of which are with casing, 85 drilled through the rock. Cost: 280 × $17 = $4760 + 85 × $10 = $850, total $5610. Of course there’ll be more for the pump, trench work, etc. But the pump can go in at 150 feet because the whole system is now filled with water.

Telephoned Alec the good news. He was washing his car (there it was Saturday morning).

December 6, 1989

The Meeting received a tax bill for $3000. We were astounded. Sandy Stettenheim and I went to see the new tax assessor, Don Monro. He began by telling us that he’s a Quaker! The rest of the interview went very well, the tax being reduced to $210! The larger figure was simply a mistake.

December 8, 1989

Pendle Hill

To New York last night with Chrysanthi, who got off at Penn Station carrying a βελέντζα for Daphne’s apartment while I continued on to Philadelphia. Met Gay Nicholson this morning. I’ve rewritten Andy Towl’s introduction to “Quaker Money” by Nicholson, but Gay seemed reluctant to use it. Perhaps I’m stepping on her toes. Andy wrote to me last week that the introduction was the last thing he and Merrilie did together. They’d finished it, and the next morning she went into a coma and died in a few days. Good Publications Committee meeting. Lots of people seemed pleased that I’d be teaching Milton next autumn, although they don’t all like the idea of my hiding to do my own work. Speaking of work, Bob Brown wrote from Princeton that my book has already sold 900 copies. It’s got a smashing cover. A pile is in the Dartmouth Bookstore already, in time for Christmas. Big snow today, canceling the Executive Board. We had coffee at Jim Thomas’s, then a nice sing in the Reading Room. Good visit again with John Gray, who’s helping AFSC re: position paper on government and refugees. I finished Ann Armbrecht’s (Ann Forbes’s) book on Tibetan refugees in Nepal. Not well written, alas, but nevertheless informative. Joy Heinrichs wants me to do a profile of Ann for the Alumni Magazine. We’ll see. Started re-reading Under Western Eyes; somewhat disappointing this time. I fear my students won’t find it very compelling. But it’s so much better than the Katharine Mansfield stories we listened to on tape in the car on the way to Springfield. So mediocre! And to think that I used her as a model when I was trying to craft short stories in the 1950s.

Saturday, December 9, 1989

Pendle Hill–NYC

Stimulating breakfast, as always, with the diverse “characters” that PH attracts. Executive Board did meet this morning. We raised tuition 5%, alas. Then to Manhattan and David Erlanger’s for Evaluation Committee meeting with Jerry. He was relaxed and in good humor. I doubt that the real message of all this got through to him or, if it did, he masked any apprehension brilliantly. He treated deficiencies as failure of logistics and facilities: unruly behavior in brasses because acoustics are so bad they can’t hear him. He never has similar trouble in the Bethlehem Youth Symphony, etc. He agreed, however, to seek out a guest conductor/composer for a session. Also to one day off (in six weeks) for the staff. So, we didn’t really accomplish our purpose (yet) but we did start a process, at least. Will the Board be brave enough to make a signal via salary in January? Our committee couldn’t confer separately afterwards, and I had to run to meet Chrysanthi and Daphne for supper. As events turned out, our rendezvous was vitiated because of my lateness but we managed a quick dinner at China Peace and then went to Maugham’s The Circle with Rex Harrison, Glyns Johns, superbly acted “entertainment,” second-rate G.B. Shaw in its attempt as social satire.

Earlier, stopped to see Benton murals at the Whitney annex downtown. Disappointing. Too mannered, distorted, predictable. Orozco much better.

Sunday, December 10, 1989

Nice overnight at Daphne’s flat, which is looking better and better now that it has some furniture. I hammered in holders for curtain rods. Now she needs paintings. Returning last night, we of course had to acknowledge directly outside a homeless man lying on a grate, a “permanent resident” there, Daphne says. Croissants and coffee “at home.” Then to the Whitney for the Benton exhibit. Better than the murals. I especially liked his portraits of his daughter when he wasn’t trying to “say” anything. The “statements” seem mannered and forced.

Monday, December 11, 1989

Jury duty in North Haverhill. Bill Cook and Bob Russell, too. I was chosen for a kidnapping case, then excused on a peremptory challenge, feeling paranoic, especially since Cook and Russell were retained. But then I was chosen again for a Driving While Intoxicated case, and retained. It starts next Monday.

December 18, 1989

I finally served on a jury. Sam Smith, accused of DWI. The three troopers who testified, especially the first, were antipathetic, and Smith was pitiful. The defense lawyer was golden-tongued, the State’s attorney ineloquent. In the jury room 9 were for guilty, 2 undecided, and I—one—for “innocent.” But my arguments were just as inconclusive as the others’. Thus I deferred. Afterwards, and only afterwards, we learned that this was a second offense and compounded by various other offenses. The judge congratulated us (privately) for a just verdict. I’m glad I deferred.

December 20, 1989

Reading a fine book, submitted to PH, on A. J. Muste vs. Reinhold Niebuhr in Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, and pacifism.

December 23, 1989

Monterey

Drove to the Berkshires to Veronica’s wedding at the Gould Farm. John looking weary, suffering from flu. But he made a semi-coherent speech at the wedding and embraced bride and groom. Rev. Smith, David’s father, and director of the Farm, very impressive. Wants to go abroad to teach English to foreigners when he retires. Daphne and Leander joined us there, arriving from NYC. A very simple ceremony. David: open-necked shirt and suspenders, no jacket, no rehearsal. Smith spoke very meaningfully of the four traditions of the four grandparents: Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Presbyterian, and Mennonite. Long talk with David’s brother, who is working with Guatemalan refugees in Texas. He gave tips on our situation in Hanover with Ricardo.

December 24, 1989

Hanover

Good Meeting today. Deep silence and good ministry. I spoke on Muste and Niebuhr. Afterwards, Tor came up and said he liked “sermons” in Meeting occasionally. Leander came! Even stood up and introduced himself. Daphne stayed home. (Patience!) So many lovely people showed up for Christmas: Bob and Mary Metz, Ellie Cadbury, Ann Wentworth, Len Rieser (Jr.), Kesaya Noda—a warm group. Afterwards, lunch at The Greens with Mother. Then giving Chrysanthi her birthday presents. I got her a videotape exercise program.

December 27, 1989

Leander and Daphne still here. Audrey wrote Leander about deciding re: Quakerism. He can’t stay a junior member forever. We must talk. I feel he should be honest and discontinue membership. Too bad! Evening: to the Meeting House to hear Christine Shepherd, folksinger. Her songs are good but execution needs much improvement. Sweet personality. Long, lively talks with Leonard Rieser in the library. Then AMTRAK Montrealer to Washington. My first time since restoration. Two hours late at White River Junction.

December 28, 1989

Washington

Union Station gleams. How different from the last time I saw it. Shops, cinemas, a true αγορά. After our session at MLA I took the Red Line to Silver Spring to dine with Grant and Sharon Thompson. Both unemployed. He told me the horror story of his ouster at the League of Women Voters after three and a half years owing to enmity of one person, the president, whose regime has resulted in mass exodus of staff. Grant hopes to become director of D.C. Red Cross at over $100,000 a year. Meanwhile he’s consulting at EPA and drawing League severance pay. We had a relaxed, lengthy dinner with easy flow of conversation. Regarding Jerry Bidlack, he advised me to be “up front” with both Jerry and the board, and to suggest a mere 3% salary rise. Hard, but necessary.

December 29, 1989

Washington

MGSA/MLA session began at 8:30 a.m. One of the best I’ve ever experienced at MLA. Karen Van Dyck’s paper excellent, the others all interesting and different: Gail Holst, Helen Kolias, Stratos Constantinidis, Irene Kacandes. Mine was on “Gay Appropriation of Cavafy.” The only disappointment was the respondent: long-winded and unprepared. He accused me of homophobia. Why? Because I tried to place Cavafy’s specifically gay outlook within a larger modernistic outlook favoring process over result. Lunch en masse afterwards; nice talk with Mike Keeley, who’s working on a new novel about the Nazi invasion of Thessaloniki. Then Mike, Mary, and I went to the Phillips Collection. My first time. Highlights: the two versions of repentant Peter, by Goya and El Greco. El Greco stunning and mystical, but Goya superior in psychological insight. John Sloan’s 3rd Avenue El and Staten Island Ferry. Calder’s Mobile/stabile. And of course the spectacular Renoir, “The Luncheon of the Boating Party.” Afterwards, cappuccino with Martin McKinsey and his nice wife, a technical editor. I think he is the best translator of all. Then more MLA followed by a meeting with a grad student who wanted to know about Dartmouth and by extension four-year colleges. Then supper at my hotel with Bruce Brown and Dick Dellamora. Bruce has a Mellon Grant for graduate study but it deferring it to intern at the Washington Post. I’m hoping he can get me a review of my Kazantzakis book. Dick is enjoying Toronto and his liberated self. We spoke openly of his gayness and of Cavafy and my theory about the establishment co-opting even gay liberation as a way of neutralizing it. How nice to sit around a supper table for four hours (last night and again tonight) without the least sense of strain or tedium. Late at night, I discovered for the first time the attractions of “pay television.”

December 30, 1989

Washington

Checking out, encountered Randy Eldevik, my Harvard TA. She’s teaching in Oklahoma and has a baby. I sat with her for a second breakfast, catching up on Harvard gossip. Then to the National Gallery for the wonderful Hals show. I’d never appreciated him before, but now, perhaps prompted by Velasquez, I’m more alert to the magic of portraiture. My favorites were “Young Man with a Skull,” ca. 1628, and “De Regentessen van het Oude-Manneshuis,” 1664, when Hals was over 80. In the East Building, there was a huge retrospective of Frederic Church. His “Niagara” (1857) is magisterial. There’s also an interesting “Parthenon” done in 1871. And of course the famous West Rock, New Haven, and other Hartford, Connecticut valley scenes. The National Gallery is of course filled with treasures. I loved Rembrandt’s “The Apostle Paul” and El Greco’s “St. Martin and the Beggar” (two versions), “Laocoön,” and “Christ Clearing the Temple.” But the Gallery’s self-portrait by Rembrandt (1659) isn’t as penetrating as the rather similar one in the Frick. There was also an expressionism show. I liked Otto Dix’s “Hugo Erfarth with a Dog” (1926) and of course Grosz’s “Metropolis” (1916). The East Building tower had the Bolton Landing sculptor David Smith with nice photos of his snow-covered field filled with welded pieces. Museums are a joy!

My 4:20 Montrealer loaded all its passengers and then remained in the station for three hours while a faulty engine was replaced. I stretched out in the dark in my roomette and dozed. Once moving, we were fine. Supper in the roomette, time to read, sleep until 7:30 because of the lateness.

December 31, 1989

Hanover

Meeting. I’m working on Canadian contacts for our Guatemalan refugee, Ricardo. Spoke to Linda today, who says her husband Iman is expert at placing illegal Egyptians in Montreal, so why not Guatemalans? We skipped Genevieve Williamson’s party owing to icy roads, but did make it to the Rassiases. John tells me that our New Years together began in 1969. I told him that 1989 was special because for the first time we had a married child: Veronica, with David Markwood Smith. And Helen was there with her beau, Phil, very different: a Dartmouth B.A., Harvard M.B.A. now working as a management consultant. But after Dartmouth he wore a pigtail, worked in a home for delinquent teenagers, rode a bicycle from coast to coast, and threw pots in Berkeley. Nice man. Helene, strangely, looks beautiful now. We had a jovial time. The coin in the Βασιλόπιτα went to Mary. Chrysanthi and I ended the year and the decade with the rites of love.

1990

Hanover

January 1–June 15

Jan. 3–4, Cambridge, Boston

Jan. 13–14, NYC

Jan. 19–20, PH

Feb. 10, NYC, MGSA

Feb. 17, Weston

March 4, Weston

March 9–11, Ithaca, Philadelphia

March 17, Cambridge

March 24, Cambridge

April 8, New Haven

April 20–22, Philadelphia, NYC

April 23, Weston, Londonderry

April 27, Cambridge

May 4, Haverford, Princeton

May 7–8, Cambridge

May 11–13, Bethlehem, Hotel Bethlehem

May 18–19, Philadelphia

May 20, Riparius

May 26, Cambridge

June 5, Chester

June 7, Weston

June 15–16, Mystic, Connecticut

Riparius

June 16–August 31

June 24–25, Hanover

July 12–18, Hanover, Weston

July 21–23, Hanover, Weston

July 31–Aug. 1, Hanover

Aug. 28, Kinhaven

Hanover

September 1–12

Sept. 1, Weston

Sept. 12, Pendle Hill

Travel

September 13–October 18

Sept. 13, NYC

Sept. 14, Los Angeles, Comfort Inn, 2815 Santa Monica Blvd, Santa Monica (213) 828-5517

Sept. 15, Qantas to Sydney

Sept. 16, Adelaide, chez Leo Papademetre

Sept. 19, Adelaide–Melbourne. Lygon Lodge Motel, 230 Lygon St., Carlton, Vic 3053 (03) 663-6633

Sept. 24, Melbourne–Sydney

Sept. 30, Sydney–Singapore, Sea View Hotel, Amber Close, Singapore 1943 65 345-2222

Oct. 1, Singapore–Jakarta

Oct. 3–4, Jakarta–Singapore–Athens–Istanbul

Oct. 4–8, Istanbul, Ramada Hotel, Ordu Caddesi 226, Laleli, Istanbul 34470

Oct. 9–14, Kavalla–Philippi–Thessaloniki–Volos–Kusiaci–Ephesus–Patmos–Amorgos–Santorini–Piraeus

Oct. 15–17, Athens, Hotel Grande Bretagne

Oct. 18, Athens–New York–Philadelphia

Pendle Hill & NYC

October 19–December 15

Nov. 11–12, Wilmington, Hotel DuPont

Nov. 18, NYC

Nov. 24–25, NYC

Dec. 15–16, NYC

Hanover

December 16–31

January 1, 1990

Hanover

Our (now) traditional New Year’s Day party with Quakers: Audrey, Sydney, the Soderbergs, the Nodas. Relaxed and jolly. And the men didn’t have to cook this time.

January 2, 1990

Chrysanthi and I talked about Leander’s dilemma. Should he request regular membership in the Hanover Meeting or give up his membership? Audrey has told him that he really cannot continue as a junior member at age 33. This led Chrysanthi to remark, “I’m not a Quaker and yet I am. Just the way I’m an American and not an American, a Dartmouth professor and not a Dartmouth professor, an English speaker and not an English speaker. The only thing I really am is a Greek Orthodox . . . but no, I’m not that either.”

January 3, 1990

It’s nice to be teaching again. I have a large class of about 60, for Conrad, Joyce, and Beckett. Rushed to Cambridge to sup with Dia and go to A.R.T.’s Twelfth Night, a free interpretation with much mélange of chronology, costume, etc., superbly acted by Cherry Jones as Viola/Orsino. They did it very sensually, filling it with homosexual and Lesbian overtones. Met Jimmy Yannatos and wife. His poor daughter pulled a muscle when we saw her dance and hasn’t danced since.

January 4, 1990

Boston

To Boston College with Dia to meet Michael Connolly and see his computer program for annotated texts, and show him and Dia ours for Greek drills. Nice man. So gracious. Then to Anne Forbes’s (after a quick turn in Widener that produced another Kazantzakis letter) to interview her about Tibet and Nepal and the Dalaï Lama. She said that my course (probably the Conrad-Joyce-Beckett one) helped arouse in her the sense that she had to seek meaning instead of merely receiving it ready made.

Chrysanthi furious that I kept her waiting 45 minutes. Αλλοίμονο.

Listened to Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover,” a compelling story beautifully read by Leslie Caron.

January 11, 1990

Craig Nova, novelist, here as a candidate for our creative writing position. I had lunch with him qua CAP member. Turns out to know David Major, the Harvard student with whom I breakfasted so frequently in Winthrop House and who is now sheep-farming in West Westminster, heading up a spinning cooperative. Nova’s reading was superb, like Cheever but better.

January 12, 1990

Breakfast with Jean. We cleared up the problem re: combined Kendal-WISE benefit. Channey and Chrysanthi complained about the favoritism. Kendal now has 181 units sold. Richard Bewley, the first coordinator from Kendal in Philadelphia, is now back in Kendal and will be coming again to Hanover. Nice memories of going to Rotary with him three years ago.

I taught at 1:45 as usual, then raced to Springfield and arrived in NYC in time for 46, very satisfying, also TV at midnight, strangely.

January 13, 1990

Visited John and Elizabeth Baker with Jack Shepherd, whom they wanted to meet. They are well preserved, still. Delighted to tell them that Elise has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by AFSC. John Baker waxed enthusiastic about Jean Monnet and, of course, about Eisenhower, whose Brethren mother, says Baker, accounts for his anti-war stance. Baker also chastised the peace churches for doing less than the Roman Catholics nowadays. Good, cordial meeting for two hours. They rarely go out, and enjoy visitors. No one talked about money. We’ll see . . .

Then to Kinhaven Development Committee meeting in George Goodwin’s hotel. Alice Swersey is back on the board. Jim Quinn is going to step down, as am I. New blood needed. For the first time, I heard sentiments that we should get a mortgage and buy the property soon, instead of waiting. Big affair scheduled for Cambridge in April; hope for another in NYC next fall chez Mrs. Emmerich.

George, Jim, and I went to dinner joined by Daphne. Pleasant and relaxed. Daphne is very good with “adults” despite Chrysanthi’s admonitions to me not to involve the children with our own friends. Then we walked to West 52nd Street to see the musical City of Angels, sold out at $50 and up a ticket. I’m a snob. To me it was vulgar junk; mediocre music; clever book but only intermittently so. But well acted and sung, and with lots of ingenious stage machinery. But the critics rave. Awful!

Walked home with Daphne and visited a bit in her charming “pad.” She seems happy and fulfilled in her job and is enjoying social relationships.

January 14, 1990

Brooklyn

To Alice Henkin’s for Kinhaven full board. Apprehension because the agenda included the evaluation report with its condemnation of Jerry. But David Erlanger handled this beautifully, and I of course had prepared Jerry by showing him the report in advance. Then Bill Polk, without any prompting from us, recommended only 4% increase for the director’s salary and 0% for the conductor’s (we had hoped to get away with 3%). The board agreed readily. We also secured a day off for the staff, a rise in base salary to $1500, practice sheds, a rental home for married staff, ventilation of the concert hall, and other “victories.” Now I’m going to work on getting Jane Siepmann to donate her piano, April and July meetings . . . , and I’m done!

Drove to Springfield with Joe Contino and George. Joe’s marriage is on the rocks; he’s living in a neighbor’s house, alas.

Discovered on return that Charlie Brown’s talk at Meeting went well, with good attendance. But at Business Meeting afterwards Tom Waring complained that it hadn’t been “a spiritual journey.” Channey spoke well, I’m told, in defense of Brown. Waring can be a pain.

January 16, 1990

Hanover

Interesting students in my course, including an Indian straight from the subcontinent, and a recent graduate of Germantown Friends who is all tied up in interesting intellectual knots.

The dean asked for the title of my inaugural address. I still don’t know what to say. But I had to give a title that would allow flexibility. Thus: “Thoughts on Literacy, Past and Present.”

To Becky Williams’s with Audrey and Mary Soderberg to look through Henry’s books and take those that will be appropriate for the Meeting. He has a rich collection of Quakerana, including that wonderful long poem, “Peaceable Kingdom.”

January 17, 1990

Music with Allan only. Beethoven’s 1st cello sonata. Great improvement over last week. If only I practiced . . . !

January 18, 1990

Lunch with Leander. Talked about Audrey’s letter. He rightly feels that to maintain Quaker membership without participating or feeling a need to participate would be hypocritical. I urged him to resign his membership, accordingly. Then, surprisingly, he said maybe he would try the Bethlehem Meeting and see if he liked it. By indirections we discover directions. So the plan is to wait a few months and see how he feels in May.

Lecture today on “The Dead.” My enthusiasm for Joyce grows and grows.

Department meeting trying to choose among the four candidates. Bogged down in legalities, desire for a black colleague, desire for a woman colleague . . . We ended by doing nothing.

To the Norwich Inn to celebrate Mother’s 85th birthday (actually yesterday). Leander, Chrysanthi, Audrey, and Kay Wegner as a surprise. Very gemütlich. A relaxed, jovial occasion.

January 19, 1990

Boston–Philadelphia

Up at 4:30 a.m. after a night with indigestion. Drove to Boston to catch an 8:50 flight to Philadelphia. Reading Kaster’s Guardians of Language as possible help with the inaugural. Listened to Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” on tape. It’s terrible, so pretentious, so unfocussed, so self-indulgent. A great disappointment. Ditto for Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, which I “audited” on the last trip. But Nevil Shute’s “A Town Named Alice” was more skillful.

January 23, 1990

Practicing Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum” to play with Dick. Chrysanthi came into the room and burst into tears. “I must tell you about that song,” she said as soon as she had regained control. “When my mother and I were in prison, every day we used to hear a child in the apartment building across the street singing it in Greek. The whole experience comes back to me now, as if it were yesterday.”

January 28, 1990

Sydney Allrus, Harry Teahan’s ex-girlfriend, gave a recital in Faulkner. She lost weight and is now beautiful. Lyric soprano. I sat next to Nancy Bekavac, an added pleasure.

But this morning’s Meeting was dreadful. Shirley Waring gave her “spiritual journey” in a near-hysterical manner, self-absorbed. Toward 10:00 a.m. Elizabeth Ballard, finding the door closed to Meeting because Shirley was still talking, became truly hysterical. Jean Brophy rose to let Elizabeth enter. Tom Waring told Jean to sit down. Jean refused. Shirley selfishly continued. We were all appalled.

January 30, 1990

Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, spoke to our Literary Criticism seminar. A sweet, modest man. I liked his story about the people who asked if it’s still possible to view tribal customs in Nigeria. “Where do you live?” he asked. “Scarsdale.” “Well, he replied, “you have no need to go to Nigeria to see tribal customs.” He is very negative regarding “Heart of Darkness” as presenting the blacks as savages. His essay against it is important, but not the whole story.

February 1, 1990

To North Haverhill to Probate Court for a hearing before the judge on Pappous’s estate. Still some minor questions that needed input from John Boswell’s office and then we should be done. The judge looked bored and was certainly unfriendly, indeed officious.

February 3, 1990

Moving memorial service for Tim Duggan, who died of a heart attack at age 61. Lots of jokes about his sense of humor . . . and his alcoholism.

February 6, 1990

We toured the Kendal site. They’re using immense jackhammers to chip through frozen ground seven feet deep to be able to pour footings for the community center. Work much slowed owing to the weather, but progressing.

Nancy Bekavac for supper. What a talker! We continued until 11:00 p.m.

February 8, 1990

War/Peace Steering Committee breakfast. We’ve secured the $75,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation for the Conflict Resolution course.

February 9, 1990

Dave Lemal, Lee Baldwin, Ray Hall, Mary Jean Green, and I have been meeting with lots of candidates, owing to our CAP positions. Today met with a black man from Texas, just him, Ray, and me. First time I’ve experienced two blacks together like this; they’re like two Greeks meeting in Fiji. They sense an immediate affinity that sets them off from the dominant group—in this case, whites. A separate culture or sub-culture. But this man was “all for #1.” Reprehensible.

February 10, 1990

Nice lunch near Penn Station with Daphne. A lovely companion, as always. Then to the New School for MGSA. I’m the editor-elect of JMGS now, but not on the executive board. Got them to agree to a subscription campaign by Hopkins. Meg Alexiou helped swing the vote. Theofanis Stavrou was officious, as usual. Said we’d published an article already published in his Yearbook, but wouldn’t name the author.

February 11, 1990

Lunch with John and Mary Lincoln. John seems to have discovered Quakerism.

February 12, 1990

Meeting with Mardy Cornish, Bill Scott, and Kathleen Corrigan to agree on final itinerary for the cruise. I brought Kathleen “on board,” thankfully.

Clearness Committee over supper for Jo Ann Unruh, who’s going through a divorce.

The Kendal Overseers. Richard Bewley is back.

February 13, 1990

Good open meeting for Kendal with Richard Bewley.

Planned out Hewlett War/Peace strategy with Leonard.

February 14, 1990

Breakfast with Richard Bewley. He’s urging me to check up on Jean, in a legitimate way. Discussed Jean’s relationship with Carol Weingeist.

Department meeting. Tenure for Ivy Schweitzer. Splendid teaching but somewhat weak on scholarly side.

February 15, 1990

Flurry of activity because the Hale House, directly across from Kinhaven, has come on the market. Bill Polk wants to buy it for Kinhaven.

Good student theater. Anouih’s Antigone, a fascinating re-evaluation of Sophocles. I remembered the Sophocles we saw in the X.A.N. basketball court with Irene Pappas and Manos Katrakis—electrifying.

February 17, 1990

To Weston to view the Hale House with Bill, Barbara Lloyd, and Chrysanthi. It’s simple but would be a splendid addition.

Dinner for Andy Towl. Arnolds, Brokaws.

February 18, 1990

Andy spoke to the Meeting about “Quaker Money.” Claudie and Lynmar Brock attended. Then we all had a leisurely lunch. Lyn told me afterward, “What stimulating conversation!” If this was stimulating, I despair regarding his normal level of conversation in Philadelphia.

February 19, 1990

Clearness for Susan Stark, who is languishing in various ways, artistically, financially. I’ll try to get her a booking at Kinhaven.

February 20, 1990

Lit. Crit. seminar on Adorno and Habermas. What rot! So much convoluted language for so little result.

February 23, 1990

Beveridge Webster and his wife Frances and son Michael at home with invited guests: Christian Wolff, Jim and Sheba Freedman, Dr. and Mrs. Almy, Dr. Clendenning, Sheila Harvey. Websters were here for their Kendal interview. Afterwards we had a splendid old-fashioned soirée. Bev. played Bach-Busoni, Schubert’s “Moments Musicales,” an extraordinary Debussy, then Brahms’s 1st clarinet sonata with his son Michael, then lots of Chopin encores. He is 82 and had been up since 5:30 a.m. with no nap. Lots of chatter in between. Michael and I hit it off immediately. Bev of course doesn’t play the way he used to, but for age 82 he’s a wonder. When we passed the punch afterwards, Frances whispered in my ear, “There’s no alcohol, is there?” That’s the problem: he’s an alcoholic.

February 25, 1990

Leander’s piece for two pianos, flute, and trumpet was performed in Bethlehem tonight.

February 27, 1990

Kendal Overseers. Long meeting on the Websters. We reaffirmed our rejection of the Walkers, who showed themselves as bigots and liars. But the Websters were more complicated. I argued for his contribution to the community. Others accused me of favoritism, saying it was un-Quakerly. Jean very negative toward alcoholics from her family experience. Finally we agreed to accept Frances and to reevaluate Bev’s application at opening if he enters a care program immediately and sticks with it.

March 1, 1990

Met with Edward Bradley. He wants us to set up a Foreign Language Program with Modern Greek. Tsakopoulos says he’ll subsidize it up to 50%.

March 2, 1990

Oliver Taplin here. We walked to the river and back. He’s just published Greek Fire, based on a BBC series. I gave him my Kazantzakis and Politics. Then we lunched with Bob McGrath and Ada Cohen, a Greek Jewess who is being recruited for Art History. Ada is a delight. We met earlier, talked for a half hour in Greek. She’s an Athenian. Graduated from Pierce College, then Brandeis and Harvard.

Supper with Officers and Greenleys. Then to Parish Players to see Dottie Campion in The Glass Menagerie. Passable. Sheila Harvey, too. Then to Lee Huntington’s to pick up Huntingtons’ brother-in-law from Haiti, a fascinating gentleman with an extraordinarily sexy daughter. Here for the memorial tomorrow.

March 3, 1990

Bill Huntington’s memorial. In the Norwich Congregational Church, but dominated by Quakers, and using silence and impromptu ministry in part. Steve Cary came, also a Friend who worked with Bill in Algerian relief. A life of Quaker service, including a time at the Quaker UN mission. Good music, too, especially Rochester a cappella singers. But Don Stewart’s accompanist for Mozart was “like me”! Bill’s brother, the convert to Catholicism, and now a priest, spoke poorly. He’s too old. The sexy granddaughter barely managed. Lee, the widow, very dignified and aristocratic. Susan Stark sang as her ministry.

March 4, 1990

Special Kinhaven board meeting to consider the Hale House over Alice Swersey’s objections. We met in Sam and Barbara Lloyd’s house. Everyone was for the purchase except Alice, and she acquiesced gracefully. Bill Polk a marvel of lucidity and articulateness, as always.

March 6, 1990

Nice talk by Angus Fletcher of CCNY. Dinner afterwards at Peases’.

March 7, 1990

Breakfast with John Rassias. Ken Smith of the Gould Farm has been fired, but David and Veronica can stay on. Veronica is pregnant. John was snooping re: Edward Bradley’s proposal to us for a LSA in Greece.

March 9, 1990

Manchester–Ithaca–Philadelphia

Flew to Ithaca from Manchester after sleeping in a motel last night. Met at airport by Gordon Messing. Lunch in Cornell Faculty Club makes me triply mad that our Faculty Club is being discontinued. I chaired a session in a conference on women’s lib in Greece organized by Gail Holst. But spent most of the afternoon visiting with Katy Van Dusen and her husband and baby, and Ayako Kano, my former student. Supper with Messings plus the delightful mother of their son’s wife. Lift again to the airport. Reached Pendle Hill late, but in time for ice cream at the Walkers’!

Saturday, March 10, 1990

Pendle Hill

Book Committee. I was not very enthusiastic about Doug Gwyn’s MS—poorly written, needs lots of revision. But I liked the other one, on Muste and Niebuhr.

March 12, 1990

Supper at Sheila Harvey’s with Jim Knowlton from the University of Reading, who is writing a new biography of Beckett. The Oxenhandlers also. He says the Deidre Bair biography is “dreadful,” mostly because she doesn’t discuss, or understand, the works.

March 13, 1990

Lunch at the Inn with Margaret Devlin from Travel Dynamics to wrap up the cruise itinerary, finally.

Met with Leonard to secure $1000 for Maura High to help Jack Shepherd in War/Peace Studies, which now has 130 students (last year 72, previous years 25 to 30).

March 16, 1990

Leander here. His piece went very well. Other composers congratulated him. He brought a tape but I accidentally erased the beginning. But we heard most of it. It’s minimalist à la Philip Glass, but better than Philip Glass in my opinion. Where did Leander get this gift? He’s a slow developer, but there’s lots to develop.

March 17, 1990

To Cambridge to A.R.T. with Leander and Yiayia and Chrysanthi to see Strindberg’s harrowing tragedy The Father, brilliantly acted by Christopher Lloyd, who turns out to be Sam Lloyd’s brother (Sam and Barbara Lloyd were drawn to Weston because of the Weston playhouse). It’s an anti-feminist diatribe, showing how women, lacking overt power, possess all kinds of covert power that is far superior to a man’s.

Listened to Archie and Mehitabel on the way down. I can use the Spider and Fly for my inaugural lecture. .

March 20, 1990

Horrible toothache. I had to have root canal work on it. Pain!

March 22, 1990

Lunch with Bill Scherman to firm up Beebe plans for the 28th. Then to Karen and Pano Rodis for supper in their new house in Sharon, built largely by Pano. A real accomplishment. But they’ve got their hands full with two babies. No sleep for either parent.

March 23, 1990

Surprise visit from Mary Layoun, who’ll be Book Review Editor for JMGS. She’s a Palestinian, I discovered. What a strange team we now have: Bien–Herzfeld–Layoun for this journal of Greek studies.

March 24, 1990

To Cambridge again, this time to see Major Barbara. Again superb. Cherry Jones as Barbara was perfection, and Jeremy Geidt was at his best as Andrew Undershaft. What humor and intellectuality and typicality! I’m full of admiration for Shaw. Saw Michael and Elaine Antonakes in the theater. He’ll review my Kazantzakis and Politics for Balkan Studies.

March 26, 1990

Finished my inaugural, thank God. Now I have to shorten it.

March 27, 1990

Kendal Overseers at 7:30 a.m. but nothing controversial this time. Then my WWI literature class. We’re doing Remarque and Tuckman first. Then I was interviewed by an Alumni Magazine reporter. Then to the Hop for Abbey Theatre, Dublin doing O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten. I walked out at the interval. A.R.T. spoils me. This was turgid and badly paced and sentimental. Bad play acted well but not well enough. Spent the rest of the evening shortening my talk for tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 28, 1990

Inaugural

The great day! Of course I taught Greek 13 as usual. Then at 3:30 to 3 Rockefeller for my inaugural lecture. The hall was packed—bigger audience than at my previous inaugural, I was told. Jim Wright did a nice introduction. My talk went very well, from everything I was told afterwards. Best of all, it was short enough to allow questions. Tom Laaspere started by asking if we should allow infinitives to be split. This allowed me to expand in sorts of interesting ways, and also to end the question period by saying, in response to Alan Gaylord’s question about the future, that in the future there would be many more split infinitives! Afterwards I was introduced to all the Beebes who were present. Then a reception at the Inn. Jim Freedman said he hadn’t heard the talk because, arriving late, he couldn’t get into the room; people were standing five deep in the doorway. Then a huge dinner. I sat with Andrew Beebe ’93, Ned Perrin, Tom and Nardi Campion, etc. At desert I MC’d a program: Jay Davis and Kate Cohen did splendidly; Karen Rodis, Jan Tarjan, and I spoke briefly about Carl Thum’s efforts and Steve Calvert’s, and introduced all the other English Department members who were present. Then to Webster Hall to hear Art Buchwald’s hilarious talk on politics (nothing whatsoever about the Beebe subject). Then to the Inn bar for an hour with Colonel and Mrs. Brent (she’s Fritz Beebe’s widow, now remarried), and Beebe’s sister, etc. They seemed very pleased, invited us to their apartment in New York, etc.

March 29, 1990

No rest. Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke arrived. I had a long CAP meeting. Dinner party for Katerina, with Vera Vance, Cynthia Huntington, Takis Metaxas. I was late but caught up. Katerina read to a full house in the Wren Room, with me introducing her. Read very well indeed. Her poems are real poems, even in English.

March 30, 1990

Bus strike. Had to buy air ticket for Katerina. But got her off at noon, just before a snowstorm.

Nice letters about my inaugural from Brenda Silver, who says it was brave, Bill Scott, David Montgomery.

April 1, 1990

Director of Nursing at Kendal at Longwood met with us and was very illuminating on how the nursing service will work.

April 2, 1990

Good meeting of the new Steering Committee for War/Peace Studies’ new course on Conflict Resolution. Lots of good ideas, especially from Oran Young and Gene Lyons.

April 3, 1990

Werner Kleinhardt lectured on European utopia. Awful. He has a strangely twisted mind. But he’s interesting!

April 4, 1990

Music went well even though I don’t practice. Chrysanthi practices violin religiously every day for ½ hour.

April 6, 1990

Working on the Greek conversion for Hopkins. Splendid production at the Hop of Aristophanes’ Clouds.

April 7, 1990

Spent all day getting the Hopkins conversion to function. Finally succeeded around 5:00 p.m.

April 8, 1990

New Haven

Kinhaven board meeting. I’m getting tired, I see. But we persevere. Poor turnout. The board is viable because of only three or four responsible people.

April 9, 1990

I’m vetting Chuck Officer’s book on geological change. He’s aiming for a best seller. Fascinating material, but it’s so badly written.

April 10, 1990

Steve Calvert wants to develop a literacy program for adults involving Kendal. We had a working breakfast.

Bantz got the Sears grant. I’m a participator. Project involves Greek texts on the computer.

April 14, 1990

Ann and Peter Forbes here. She showed a marvelous BBC video on Tibet, with films of the old culture now destroyed by the Chinese. Dinner afterwards with them and Jack and Kathy Shepherd. Peter Forbes is doing environmental work. Such a fine couple!

April 15, 1990

Long talk with Peter Stettenheim after Meeting, on deficiencies of scientific writing.

April 16, 1990

Faculty Dining Committee. Impossible to save the Faculty Club. Ned and I are reconciled to a change. We toured the Faculty Lounge as a new lunchroom possibility. Committee chose this over Thayer.

April 17, 1990

Conflict Resolution meeting. Jack worked up a rather poor proposal, but we’ll go ahead in any case. Had to get all the faculty together to discuss it. We want Jimmy Carter (!) as the visiting fellow.

Lunch with Tom Corindia at the Faculty Club. He keeps admiring my efficiency in answering letters. Wondered whether I wasn’t compulsive. Am I?

Jim Cox lectured on Henry Adams, and then digressed to everything else. Very chaotic, but force of personality carries the day, alas.

Supper with Lucy Briggs and her grandson and daughter. Daughter an old maid, poor thing, and looks it. Grandson a fitness freak, and looks it. She told stories about Ernest Hemingway, whom she and Ellis knew when Ellis was ambassador to Cuba. How Hemingway doted on children.

April 18, 1990

Met with Leonard to try to iron out $$ for Conflict Resolution. Getting him to act is a chore. But he acted with alacrity on making me a subscriber to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

April 19, 1990

CAP; then to Manchester hotel, where I discovered the pleasures of video.

April 20, 1990

PH

Marathon Publications Committee meeting, five hours. Nice interaction at supper with Donald Swann and his “companion,” Allison. Donald is rejuvenated, creative, euphoric, composing again. Last time I saw him he was depressed and sterile. Lots of talk about The Last Temptation film in the UK. Turns out that he and Allison love Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis as well as The Last Temptation. Too bad I’ll miss his concert tomorrow.

April 21, 1990

Meeting at PH, then to NYC. Met Daphne, Chrysanthi, and Daphne’s friend Eileen. Caffe Cielo for an expensive (!) dinner, but pleasant; then to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in a superbly acted and directed production. Slept in Daphne’s apartment very comfortably.

April 22, 1990

Breakfast provided by Daphne. Then we walked down Sixth Avenue to see Earth Day celebration. A festival! But lots of litter despite cans everywhere for recycling. Home by Ambus: train to Springfield, bus to White River Junction.

April 23, 1990

To Londonderry for closing on the Hale House. It’s ours now. George Lamb donated his services. Bill Polk sanguine about getting a donation from Bay or Paul foundations.

April 24, 1990

Kendal Overseers at 7:30 a.m. We toured the property, which now has foundations and structural steel and electric conduits. Lilla Bradley has objected to our purchase of General Electric dishwashers because GE is a military contractor. What to do? We said we’d speak to the contractor but doubt whether any change can be made.

April 25, 1990

UPNE is reprinting Demotic Greek I again. I’ve submitted some minor changes.

To Fleet Bank Trust department with Mother for financial review. The estate is now $1.2 million. Vogel wants us to sell Kimberly-Clark but I’m resisting.

April 27, 1990

Lunch with James MacPherson, Pulitzer prize author, who is being recruited by Dartmouth. Says he’s burnt out, doesn’t want to teach writing.

To Cambridge for Kinhaven benefit in Jock and Ariadne Forbes’ mansion at 3 Gerry’s Landing. They have three acres in the middle of Cambridge, an immense house built in 1912, with two similar houses belonging to cousins on either side. But strangely, maybe no money. Bare walls, no paintings, no carpets. All inherited. We had trios, quartets. I made a speech; then we all sang Kinhaven rounds and madrigals, effortlessly in four-part harmony. They they put together a Brandenburg, the 5th. Forbes’ girls are splendid cellist and violinist. All very stimulating. But few people came. George Goodwin remarked afterward, “That was the most pleasant and disappointing affair I’ve ever been to.”

April 28, 1990

Three-hour breakfast & coffee connection with Meg Alexiou. Dimitri is now well placed in a halfway house in Brum. But Pavlos is not doing well in Greece. Christos is legally married and well employed half by the University of Central Greece, half by the Ministry.

May 1, 1990

Planning for Humanities 1–2 with Jim Tatum, Marsha Swislocki, Chris Wolff, Fred Berthold, Walter Stephens.

Jay and Devon Parini here. I missed his lecture, but saw them at dinner at Don and Pat Pease’s. His Tolstoy book is forthcoming.

May 2, 1990

War/Peace Steering Committee with Elise Boulding to report on the new course.

Meeting Finance Committee. Sandy Stettenheim is a responsible treasurer. But donations are off. I gave another $300.

May 3, 1990

Ugh! Root canal work, so disagreeable. After the Novocaine wore off I had so much pain I resorted to codeine. Drugged, sat through CAP. Then to War/Peace seminar to hear Elise on pluralism. I said in the question period that I thought assimilation was still a significant goal in many people’s lives. Dinner; then to Manchester again.

May 4, 1990

At Haverford for 9:00 a.m. meeting of the Corporation Nominating Committee. John Jones cold, impossible to converse with. But Tom Kessinger was gracious. Afterwards visited SWAIN travel in Ardmore; they’re working on my round-the-world ticket. Then to Princeton. Lunch with Ernie Friedl and her step-daughter, who teaches ESL at Queens College. Nice woman. Ernie walked me through all her routines and systems for JMGS. She is remarkably organized. By comparison I am a slob, even though Tom Corindia considers me compulsive.

May 6, 1990

At Meeting, met Mike Kehoe, new marketing manager of UPNE, a Friend.

May 7, 1990

Cambridge

To Harvard for Alec Shuldiner’s viva. Meg, Kimberley Patten (senior tutor) and another smashing blonde from Holy Cross. I found his thesis mediocre and his oral defense the same. Lots of articulate gab, but weak on facts and on real analytical powers. But the others were more charitable. He’ll get a low magna. Nice supper afterwards with Meg at a Spanish restaurant. She gave me good advice re JMGS.

May 9, 1990

Showed up at OIS video studio to record my opening lecture for Paradise Lost for Pendle Hill next fall. Strange to see myself “in action” for the first time. Dartmouth provides such extraordinary amenities.

May 10, 1990

Chrysanthi organized the Howe Library senior citizens’ art show again. Good work. Mother had two paintings, “Trudging Toward Spring” (representational) and “Occum Pond” (somewhat cubistic), which I liked best.

May 11, 1990

Hotel Bethlehem

Left at 7:30 a.m. for Bethlehem. Leander met us at the hotel in good spirits. Lovely dinner. Then across the street to hear Leander and Martha Schrempel and two percussionists do Bartok’s “Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.” A demonic piece of genius. So driving! Beautifully played. Earlier, we’d gone around the historic district—“God’s Acre,” etc. Lovely. Talked with Schantzes afterwards and met “Mitch” again. Also Naoko and Yasuo arrived in the nick of time. Very old-homelike. Then to Larry Wright’s for a drink. Larry’s sister was there, an Episcopalian priest, with “boyfriend” who teaches Italian at Hunter College. A strange, improbable pair.

May 12, 1990

Leander took us to a working class diner for breakfast. People look different here. I had scrapple despite Chrysanthi’s disapproval.

Lunch with Nancy and Jerry Bidlack to talk Kinhaven business while Leander, Chrysanthi, and Mother went shopping. Then to Packer Chapel for the “B-minor Mass,” which I’d last heard here in 1950, with Peter Gardner. Eva Gürstner concertmistress. We had a long, cordial talk both before and then during the interval. But the performance was lackluster, except for beautiful instrumental solos. I was much more moved at Marlboro four or five years ago. Orchestra full of Kinhavenites: Mary Watt, Eva, Paul Chao. Long dinner afterwards with Leander.

May 13, 1990

Another breakfast haunt. Then to Central Moravian Church for the “Love Feast” service. Very good music, directed by the Schantzes. Brass quartet. Bell choir. But the music usurps the religious part. Love Feast involved about 12 hymns, then biscuits and cider distributed to everyone in the pews. A show, but not for me. Afterwards, talked with a church official about Moravians, the oldest surviving Protestant denomination; started in fourteen hundreds under Jan Hus. Also met the president of Moravian College, a Quaker.

At 2:00 p.m. Leander’s students’ recital again. Peter (Πέιτερ) Hall. Very moving to see Leander’s products. Brenda, the fat wife of a coal miner, flubbed a bit but displayed her musicality. A Korean high school student played with absolute self-assurance. Wonderful to see these people, predominantly adults, so immersed in Beethoven, Scarlatti, Schumann, etc.

Trip home very long. Huge traffic jam before the George Washington bridge. I turned around and went circuitously to the Tappan Zee bridge. Another traffic jam, but not so serious. Finally reached Hanover at 1:00 a.m.

May 14, 1990

8:00 a.m. breakfast with Jean to plan the Kendal board meeting. She didn’t like my initiative in writing to Lilla Bradley about the GE washers. All letters have to be approved!

May 15, 1990

8:00 a.m. cruise meeting. Professor Richard Grant of Chicago, a celebrated scholar of early Christianity, will be joining us.

9:00 a.m., George Demko and Elliott in my office asking advice on setting up a College Course.

10:00 a.m., Bill Cook and I did our annual poetry reading in the War/Peace course. Better this time than ever before because we were strong and cut out enough to allow us to finish. Thunderous applause!

12:00 noon, Comparative Literature Steering Committee followed by a cup of coffee with Laurence Davies.

2:00 to 5:30, conferences. English 7 students preparing their projects. Nice to see the class jelling.

6:00, pot luck at the Meeting for Kendal overseers and the six Crosslands/Kendal residents who’ve come to speak at our open meeting tomorrow.

8:00, theater with Chrysanthi and Mother. “Widows,” about Pinochet’s oppression of dissidents in Chile. A somewhat tedious and overly long and unsubtle political statement, but very well acted by our students.

May 16, 1990

The Kendal meeting went well. But afterwards Carleton Chapman asked me, “Why do we always hear only the good? There must be something bad.”

War/Peace x-hour. As usual, some students wrote brilliant poems stimulated by our presentation yesterday.

May 17, 1990

For the first time, I went to CAP unprepared. No time to do the reading. But it hardly mattered.

May 18, 1990

Pendle Hill

At Book Committee we decided on a moratorium until the review is completed next year. The real problem is that Rebecca is burned out. Too bad! I was hoping we could do Letts’ book on Muste and Niebuhr.

Spoke at length with Mimi Wright, who wants to live in a Greek village. Καημένη.

May 19, 1990

Pendle Hill

Moving ministry at Meeting. A woman spoke about pottery class. She fashioned a clay hand but then felt compelled to pierce it with a nail to suggest Christ’s hand. At first she had planned to remove the nail, leaving the hole. Then she decided to leave the nail as well. Why? As an indication of what we, today, are doing to God.

May 20, 1990

Riparius

To the farm. Planted, using the new frost protectors for tomatoes that Bob Watson told us about. Cleaned out the outhouse. Started the new Jari. Saw Jim Dwyer, who has already buried pipe and cable for the pump, and installed two hydrants, one for the garden and one for Alec’s cabin, next to the henhouse. The place is a mess after the backhoe work, of course. I’ll need to harrow and then re-seed.

May 21, 1990

7:30 a.m. to 11:00 at Dr. Logan’s in session 1 for two crowns, one over the root canal tooth, the other over its cracked neighbor. Listened to Beethoven’s violin concerto twice on Walkman, played beautifully by Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Meg Alexiou got hit by a car as she crossed the street looking the wrong way, British style. But she’s OK, merely fractured her thumb.

Jack Shepherd showed a student-made video about the 60s at Dartmouth. All those people and scenes came back: Quaker vigils on the Green, Peter Sorlien ceremoniously quitting ROTC, Donald Pease going to Canada, etc. Ned was one of the narrators, juxtaposed with . . . Jeffrey Hart, who of course belittled everything.

May 22, 1990

Kendal Overseers at 7:30 a.m. We’ve sold 195 units. David and Atossa French will join us next month.

Out to Quechee for a premature birthday supper for my 60th. Mother treated. Allan Munck, John and Mary Rassias. John in good form.

May 23, 1990

Music with Dick. Three Bach sonatas plus a modern piece he’s studying.

May 25, 1990

Lunch with Pano Rodis. He’s working for John Rassias in Language Outreach. Says it’s totally chaotic: no planning, no materials. How does John get away with it, year after year? Answer: charisma.

More charisma at the department dinner. I was resplendent in my 1948 tuxedo, which still fits. Retiree: James Melville Cox. Lou Renza, Henry Terrie, Horace Porter, Blanche Gelfant spoke warmly of his friendship, which certainly was never extended to me. Jim spoke digressively, as usual, calling upon us to value teaching over research and dwelling movingly on his farm in Virginia where he lives again, in the house in which he was born. “We are all failures,” he said, in that we accomplish much less than we had ever hoped for ourselves. At dinner I chatted with Ernest Hebert, who grew up in a French Canadian family in Keene, and with Ned. Ned’s retirement dinner will be in 1992. Mine? 1995 probably. Will anyone come? Will anyone speak with warmth? Doubtful. What will I say? It’s very scary.

May 26, 1990

Cambridge

Wonderful day. Superb production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the A.R.T. with Cherry Jones, now my favorite actress, as Grusha. A zany mixture of sentiment, vaudeville, acrobatics, music, spectacle, mise en scène. The moral is easy: devote oneself to a helpless child rather than to ego, wealth, and position; justice comes from unofficial magistrates, not from the establishment, etc. Just missed Brustein’s introductory talk. Too bad. Daphne, looking beautiful as always, drove up with Greg. Afterwards we supped together in Concord. Daphne’s job at Simon and Schuster is still varied and stimulating. She’s now re-writing (more or less) a book called “20-20 Vision” about financial projections. Greg, too, is stimulated in his very different field of trading foreign currencies. He expects to be sent to Tokyo for a month or so in the fall. It seems that he’ll be moving in with Daphne in Madison Avenue, too. What comes next?

On the way home, Chrysanthi had violent diarrhea from the meal.

May 28, 1990

Another birthday gathering. Corindias, Nodas, Daphne, Greg.

Greek 13 class for supper with Τάκης Μεταξάς και Ειρήνη Γεωργακούδη. Susan H. was such a fine student; also fun to have Sean Hemingway (Ernest’s grandson) as an auditor. But Nick Mourlas and Ji Yeon Choi were terrible. Hopeless. Still, I enjoyed a new, close look at Seferis and Cavafy.

May 29, 1990

Last class. Students gave reports on WWI books. A good group. I have 16 term papers coming.

Retirement dinner at Quechee for Matt Wiencke. He basked in love and esteem.

May 30, 1990

Bought a new car. Another Buick. Skylark, but this time with air conditioning and cruise control and automatic windows for Chrysanthi’s arthritis. But obligatory automatic shift, my first.

May 21, 1990

Dinner honoring Kathleen Corrigan’s tenure, at Bob and Susan McGrath’s. Bob read an “epic” of praise. Long talk with Peter Travis, who is separated from June, poor fellow.

June 4, 1990

Breakfast with Jean Brophy. I urged her to interview Peggy Hebert, who is losing her job at the Faculty Club. Lunch with Steve Scher.

CAP. I spoke at length to Jim Freedman and Jim Wright about the advisability of retaining Marianne Hirsch. How good she is for Comparative Literature, and how important Comparative Literature is for all of us. Then CAP dinner. Pleasant but a bit forced. But I really like Karen Wetterhahn, the new associate dean for sciences.

Jim Freedman mentioned that President Arias of Costa Rica might like to visit Dartmouth. I’ll write recommending him for a Montgomery Fellowship, so we can use him in War/Peace Studies.

June 5, 1990

Chester

To Chester, Jack Coleman’s “Inn at Long Last” for dinner with David Bury, Fred Bay, Bill Polk, trying to get Fred to pledge a substantial gift to Kinhaven. We failed.

June 6, 1990

Lunch with Jim Jordan, who wants to buy the house next door. He started as a painter, I discovered.

Afternoon: Meeting Finance Committee. Sandy Stettenheim, at our urging, has balanced the budget for next year.

June 7, 1990

Weston

To Weston to the Bidlacks’ to meet with David Bury and his nice assistant Allison, and Lelah, to go over the planning document. Fred Bay as an onlooker. Fruitful meeting.

Dinner at Schers’ with Ray and Pam Sobel.

June 8, 1990

Went to Julie Davis’s film, her Senior Fellowship project. Sat with Steve Scher. Both of us sighed and sighed as it went on and on, tediously. Subject: French occupation, anti-Semitism. Pretentious and too overly moralistic, but interesting camerawork. Julie wrote, directed, and filmed it. She’s off to Hollywood next year to try her luck.

June 11, 1990

Dr. Logan’s. He finished my two crowns. The end of the root canal saga. Price: $1500.

Supper at the Brokaws’ in Strafford, with David and Tossa French. Brokaws’ view spectacular. But what a crazy place to live. Frenches will join the Kendal Overseers.

June 15, 1990

Mystic, Connecticut

To Mystic in our new, air-conditioned car. In comfort. Sumptuous buffet lunch at the Inn at Mystic. Then toured Mystic Seaport. Fascinating whaling ship; exhibits about shipbuilding, caulking, etc. A nice holiday.

Supper with New England Foundation for the Humanities. Then I delivered my “literary” talk. Question period somewhat antagonistic, accusing me of omitting oral aspects and stressing writing over reading. Steve Calvert organized all of this.

June 16, 1990

Riparius

Mystic to the farm. At last.

June 17, 1990

Alec arrived. We raked and harrowed the field that was dug up for the water.

June 18, 1990

Finished seeding, after liming and fertilizing. Perrymans visited.

June 19, 1990

Started work with Alec on the bathroom extension. First project: the deck and trapdoor over the foundation.

June 20, 1990

To North Creek high school for open forum on Commission on the Adirondacks. Audience extremely hostile, except for Art and Chris and Mary Fitzgerald and Evelyn and Don Greene, etc. Natives are appalled at thought of a year’s moratorium, what they call 2000-acre zoning, etc. Alas, the report is treated as all black, whereas some of its 200-odd provisions are good, others not so good.

Thursday, June 21, 1990

Jim Dwyer here again with his helper-apprentice Larry Mozer. We have running water now in the kitchen!

Art Perryman’s birthday. He drove me back to his cabin, which he is remodeling very expertly. He told me, however, that his winter was awful because he has no direction, no clear desire to do anything. His art, alas, has slackened although he did a little sketching.

June 22, 1990

We’ve got two walls framed and created for the bathroom.

Hours and hours of talk with Alec after supper about Indonesia. Among other things, he participated in a small Meeting for Worship in Jakarta with four or five other Quakers. How nice! Leander too, against all probability, elected to retain his membership. He sent the following letter to Ministry and Counsel:

❡ After some debate, I have decided to transfer my Junior membership at the Hanover Meeting to a Senior membership. For some time I was uneasy with the thought of retaining my membership in Hanover when I am so infrequently present. But it seems logical that until I find sufficient need or cause to join another Meeting or to attend a different church, I should keep my ties with the “family” of Friends here in Hanover.

❡ I’m sorry it has taken me so long to respond. I had hoped to experiment with the Meeting in Bethlehem, PA, this spring, but have not made a real effort to do so. It is fairly clear to me that the Hanover Meeting is the only religious setting which provides me with any significant degree of moral and sacred inspiration. Perhaps in future years I will develop a great commitment to faith. For the present, I feel fortunate and honored to retain my ties with such an extraordinary body as the Hanover Friends.

❡ Thank you for your understanding, and I’ll look forward to seeing you the next time I’m at Meeting in Hanover.

He was here briefly with Deanna Lee on the 18th on their way from Minneapolis to Kinhaven. She turns out to be very lively, smiling, playful. We liked her.

June 25, 1990

Hanover

Quick trip to Hanover for me to meet Μαρία Παντελιά, who is here on John’s DANA program. I’m her “consultant.” She’ll extend the drills I did on Hypercard. She teaches Modern Greek at Hellenic College and Ancient Greek at UNH. Says that at Hellenic College the students still cannot speak a sentence of Greek even after three years of classes. But they know the grammar!

June 26, 1990

Terpni again

Supper with Fran and Irv. Fran pulled her Achilles tendon and is in a cast. But in good spirits.

Alec and I are working every day on the bathroom, which is now looking quite handsome. It will have red cedar shingles outside, and vinyl tile on the floor. Alec is building a beautiful door. I cut through the wall of the kitchen to “realize” the door I planned three decades ago.

Saturday, June 30, 1990

Yiayia is here with Lori, who was last here when she was about ten years old but says she remembers.

Laura and Michael Gouthreau came for supper. They have gotten Eliot Monter to abandon the golf course that would have engulfed their home. Michael now has a completely functional system of solar-generated electricity.

July 2, 1990

Alec and Chrysanthi drove to Montreal to pick up Jacques Martin at the airport, but he telephoned from France later to say he wasn’t coming because of a strike. They couldn’t even go shopping because it turned out to be Canada Day and everything was closed. But they heard a jazz festival in a Montreal deserted by traffic.

July 4, 1990

We treated ourselves to ice cream sundaes at the new Stewart’s in North Creek. Ah, the simple pleasures!

July 5, 1990

Jacques arrived finally. His French is the real Parisian patois, difficult for me to understand.

July 6, 1990

Again to Shapiros for supper, this time with Jacques. Laura and Michael came for dessert, and slides of Mexico.

July 10, 1990

Jacques left for Washington. He did the entire east wall of the bathroom in cedar shingles, beautifully.

Art and I went to David Moro’s in North Creek for a meeting of those who support the Adirondack Commission. Erwin Miller was there, also Evelyn Greene, one of the ΑΡΑ commissioners (John Collins), two of the staff for the governor’s commission’s report, a staff member of the Adirondack Council, and many locals. Moro is gifted and assertive but also quite domineering. Agenda: name the group, agree on central principles, consider how to respond to specific proposals in the Commission’s report. An intense time for 2½ hours. Then more talk on the street afterwards with Art and two conservation officers (I learned that Scaroon Manor was meant to be a campsite, but then they ran out of money and just let it grow wild). Then still more talk at Art’s house, going over his presentation for the next meeting. A good group. The controversy is a nasty one, with lots of name-calling.

July 11, 1990

Delicious evening at the ballet, with dinner at the Hall of Springs. Alec’s intestinal inflammation (colitis), brought from Indonesia, is now fine; he had a full meal. Met Donna Trautwein. Shandra is at Haverford. Nicky is a striking, tall adolescent. Donna is about to complete her doctorate. Lots of miracles. Ballet is still, for me, the “purest” art form; it transports one into a faerie world of abstract beauty.

Alec returned to the farm whereas we drove to Hanover. To bed at 2:00 a.m.

July 12, 1990

Hanover

Chrysanthi started her Rassias ALPS Greek program. I started translating my Myrivilis article for Νέα Εστία. Also, printed and mailed the first installment of checklist of Kazantzakis letters to Wim Bakker, for Mandatoforos.

July 14, 1990

Weston

Kinhaven board, my last as president. In the evening, Leander played Brahms’s clarinet trio. Lovely, but just a bit tentative. He said later that he was petrified the whole time, which is unlike him. Pizza later with Leander, Alec (who came from the farm), Deanna, and Caroline. Fun! Overnight at the Blue Gentian. Dick bedridden with osteomyelitis of the spine, poor fellow.

July 15, 1990

Weston

Board continues. David Erlanger, Paul Rudolf, and I, the Evaluation Committee, urged evaluation this year. Jerry is doing better with discipline but is still not respected musically. John Austin will be the next president. What a relief! All our financial eggs are now in one basket: Kresge Foundation. Lelah officious as always. But the place is still physically and spiritually beautiful. Children’s concert fine.

Returned a bit early, craving a milkshake, which I bought finally and then spilled all over our new car.

Spoke after supper to Chrysanthi’s ALPS class (7 students) about Greek literature, το γλωσσικό ζήτημα, etc. Read some Cavafy and Ritsos. Interesting group, including a family of Americans that converted to Greek Orthodoxy.

July 16, 1990

Hanover

Kendal picnic at Storrs Pond, a large turnout. Mother says that everyone is friendly and in good spirits. Kendal construction is now spectacular: huge buildings taking shape. We’ve sold 197 units. Bill Lederer showed up; hadn’t seen him since the mid-’60s when he went to report on the Colonels in Greece. Now he’s writing about CCRCs for Reader’s Digest. Nice to see Lloyd. Long talk with Kate Emlen’s parents. Bob and Mary Metz there, too, and Frank Fetter, looking very old, and sad. Dinner later. Lloyd and I were able to cover lots of ground, chiefly about Pendle Hill, Alan Walker’s MS, etc. Lloyd wants to build a Kendal at Lehigh. Alan Hunt’s wife greeted me with, “Thanks for being so nice to Alan.” Strange.

July 17, 1990

Hanover

Full day. 7:30 a.m. at the Meeting House for Kendal Overseers with Lloyd, Alan, and Sally Worth, our original Kendal Corporation member. Very useful on intricacies of governance.

Then met with Patrick Kearney about Meeting archives. He’s replacing me as archivist, thank God.

Then lunch with Faculty Dining Committee. Our latest scheme is to have faculty lunches in the big dining room of the Inn. Ned was there. Said, “Are you back from the Catskills?” (sic). He’s a very if-y friend, alas.

Then to Steve Calvert to discuss his Alumni Writers’ College idea. Also talked about Teeter’s obsessive opposition to my talk at Mystic; he threatened to resign on account of it, etc. Steve complained that Jean Brophy was very cold and unfriendly toward Patti, who wants to be a geriatric nurse. Alas, Jean can be cold and unfriendly. I told him I expected he’d find Carol Weingeist quite different when she returns.

More work on the Myrivilis translation. And, oh yes, I purchased a FAX machine and now have to learn how to program it.

Then to the Norwich Inn for supper hosted by Alec, for our 35th anniversary. When I awoke this morning and said “Happy anniversary” to Chrysanthi, she responded, “Don’t remind me. It’s been so long, and so short.” Alec, Yiayia, Audrey Logan, Leander, Deanna. A jolly time, talking about life with Alec and Leander as babies. Audrey gave us a set of blue and white towels for the farm bathroom. Daphne sent a “jade” (color for 35th) address book. Nice.

July 21, 1990

Riparius–Weston–Hanover

To Kinhaven to hear Deanna play in Dvořák quintet. She’s a fine violinist, obviously, but lacks the magic of an Eva Gürstner, for example. Met Bruce Adolphe. David Erlanger and Bruce himself are pleased at the guest composer/conductor experiment. Bruce would be willing to come for two weeks next year. But how will Jerry react? Adolphe’s piece played by staff wasn’t all that spectacular.

July 22, 1990

Worked on Meeting archives. Mobs at Meeting all eating pancakes to raise money for First Day School. Saw Anna Jones. Corrected Myrivilis translation according to help given by Takis, Maria, and Chrysanthi. My Greek is poorer and poorer, alas. Supper with Tom and Nancy Corindia. They’ve enlarged their house, another palace. Another non-simple Quaker.

July 25, 1990

Started working in my “office” under the tree. Half the summer gone. I’m still catching up on correspondence. But we don’t build bathrooms every summer, either. Working now installing the insulation. Gary from Murphy’s up for lunch. He’s totally against the Adirondack Commission proposals, of course. The plywood we ordered for siding was out of stock, and he personally drove some up in his truck. Nice man. Also, we measured Alec’s windows and ordered No. 2 common pine for inside frames as a birthday present.

July 26, 1990

All day in the office. Then a quick swim. Then with Aser and Evelyn Rothstein to the Hall of Springs and ballet. Lovely, as always. Aser brought me up to date on the cystic fibrosis breakthrough in the institute he used to direct. The Chinese scientist who heads the team was hired by him, and indeed it was he who decided eleven years ago to concentrate on genetic diseases. The problem is one amino acid in a chain of a thousand or so. He described the extraordinarily complex process by which the team narrowed things down to this. How meaningful it is to be a scientist! At times like this I feel my life wasted in triviality. On the other hand Evelyn told me of a physician they know who had me at Dartmouth years ago and remembered the class with extreme gratitude. And recently I received a letter from another physician (as it turns out) saying much the same. But what is all this in contrast to discovering the secret of cystic fibrosis? Aser also recounted the recent experiment with fish proving Darwin’s theory of evolution for the first time in nature itself as opposed to the laboratory. The fish, over 160-odd generations, changed gestation lengths, number of offspring, etc., in response to a change in environment: a different sort of predator.

July 27, 1990

Applied inner wall to the bathroom. I’m eager to have something to show when Alec returns tonight.

Yesterday re-read the extraordinary letter Eugenia Friedman sent me narrating the horrendous circumstances of her upbringing as a Greek-American, with a father who was a chauvinist, a mother (arranged marriage) who hated everything Greek and ended in the insane asylum, grandparents illiterate in both Greek and English, a Greek school at church in which nothing was learned. This is the kind of story that needs to be acknowledged, along with the myths of family solidarity, etc., etc. in our ethnic communities.

July 28, 1990

Daphne and Greg here. I’m getting used to Greg more. He’s moving in with Daphne next month—no choice. He’s a good worker. Mowed without complaining. We worked on interior finish of the bathroom, painting it with polyurethane. Alec started positioning the shower. I began the electric wiring. Lamb dinner for Alec’s 32nd birthday, actually tomorrow. We gave him a credit at Murphy’s for the frames and trim of his cabin windows. Chrysanthi made Alec’s “traditional” blueberry pie. All very festive. Then to Perrymans. A long day.

July 29, 1990

Alec finished leveling and plumbing the shower-stall. I cut out the four-inch diameter hole in the floor, which luckily came between rafters. Also inserted the medicine cabinet, given as a castaway by Andrea Leskes and Tommy, our erstwhile neighbors on Ledyard Lane. Started the electric also. Jay Parini telephoned; he and Devon will visit in August. He’s being lionized over the Tolstoy book. Says that he read my Kazantzakis book cover to cover and admires it. But where are my reviews?

Greg and Daphne here this morning; helped with the Jari and the bathroom. Then I drove them to Bolton Landing to catch a bus. They seem increasingly like a very nice couple. I’m getting used to Gregory.

August 3, 1990

Frustrating day. Tried for hours to get two three-way switches to work with the overhead light in the bathroom. Nothing. Finally reasoned out the system and concluded the switches were defective. Only then did Alec look at the box and discover he had wired them wrong. Now everything is ready: shower installed, lavatory mounted, electricity finished, toilet purchased. We await Jim Dwyer for the hookup.

August 4, 1990

Satisfying day. Mounted mower, lubricated it, fixed a bushing (with difficulty), and, after much trial and error also improved the release-problem so that I mowed half the front field without incident. Also, Alec and I built a scaffold for the new roof we have to put over the kitchen willy-nilly.

Right now, as I write this, Alec is playing Mozart’s Dissident Quartet with Naoko, Yasuo, and Matola (?), a Japanese friend (doubling) and Saul Schwartz, the ’cellist from Schroon Lake. Before, we did Shostakovich’s lovely suite with me at the piano. Fun. This follows a hearty meal of hamburgers outside on the picnic table.

August 7, 1990

Leander came yesterday with Deanna. She’s a good sport; helped in the garden, etc. We played the lovely Shostakovich piece, with Chrysanthi joining in. Leander, Alec, and I started immediately on replacing the kitchen roof.

August 8, 1990

Fifteen people in the house tonight. Jay and Devon Parini came with Will and Oliver; Mother came with Susie Buseck; Al and Mary Zalon showed up at the Shapiros, too. So, after a day on the roof, quick swim with Jay, picnic supper, and then wonderful music: highlighted by Deanna and Alec doing Bartok duets, Alec elevated to new heights owing to Deanna, and then Deanna and Leander doing a Mozart sonata and finally, at my request, the first movement of the Spring Sonata. She plays like a dream, rich, full tone, total precision. Yet she’s modest and complimentary to us amateurs.

Jay’s book on Tolstoy is a sensation, but he’s strong enough, I think, to survive the adulation. He read my Kazantzakis book and liked it, he said. He even inquired at Holt re: my second volume, but Holt asked various members of the Greek community (who?) if anyone was interested in Kazantzakis, and the replies were all totally negative. So, I’m working on someone who is passé. Alas! But no surprise. Jay was kind in feeling confident that the cycle will revolve and Kazantzakis will have a revival . . . some day.

We’d hope to have toilet, etc. operative for Mother, but not yet.

August 9, 1990

Got up early to hear an interview with Jay on public radio, but it was bounced owing to the Kuwait crisis. Guests departed, finally. Leander and Deanna left to drive to Minneapolis via Niagara Falls. Alec and I finished the roof. Jim Dwyer finished the bathroom. So we now have toilet, shower, and washbasin. All three of us took hot showers and then went to Smith’s Restaurant to celebrate.

August 10, 1990

In my office, finally. No summer has ever been like this. Wrote a long letter in French to the Société des Amis de Nikos Kazantzakis, summarizing my book. Then a long letter in Greek to Stylianos. Alas, I still haven’t translated any more of his poems. Supper with Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald at Gore Mountain Inn Buffet, four hours of heated conversation. North Creek is like a primitive society, Scotland in the heyday of the clans. Everything hinges on class and family affiliation.

August 13, 1990

“Last supper” with Alec at Copperfield Inn. The décor is totally inappropriate for North Creek and the clientele vulgar and New Yorkish. But the food was superb. Long talk with Alec afterward about his teaching. The orthodoxy there is no grammar or spelling, only “individual creativity.” Alas! He demurs. I told him this is irresponsible.

August 14, 1990

Alec left. Chrysanthi handled it well; very few tears. We had long long talk, went out for dinner, visited in bed. I told her that what Alec needs to give his life direction is a wife and children. He rationalizes now by saying he’s helping cultures to understand one another. Fine, but for how long in the present circumstances?

August 16, 1990

Finished this year’s mowing and detached the Ford mower, which performed beautifully now that I’ve adjusted it better.

Leander arrived. Saw Alec off at the airport last night, with Daphne.

After supper, to Bolton Landing for Town Meeting arranged by David Moro’s Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks. Well done. Generally friendly audience. Honest-to-goodness Adirondackers testified in favor of the Commission’s report. Opposition was silent for the most part. We expected fireworks and there were none. I sent David a process evaluation à la Pendle Hill board, afterward.

August 17, 1990

The cruise is definitely going. Received Grant’s books. I started working on my lecture on Hebraism and Hellenism, reading Matthew Arnold and Vassilis Lambropoulos.

Figured out that the whole water and well and bathroom and septic system will cost about $15,000. But my pocketed take-home pay is now over $1000 a week, so $15,000 isn’t too bad.

Wednesday, August 22, 1990

Sandy Dennis called Leander to say that Benjy Bidlack stopped breathing, was taken to hospital in Hanover, continues in a coma in intensive care. Poor Nancy is coping—rehearsing, directing Junior Camp, which doesn’t end until Sunday. I wrote all the trustees.

August 24, 1990

Leander felt he should visit the Bidlacks in Hanover. We offered them the use of our house. Leander had been Benjy’s chief friend at Kinhaven: took him to the movies, on outings, etc., and also experienced several occasions when he couldn’t breathe. But Jerry, being present, knew what to do. The other day, no one was present. Leander is very moody, couldn’t practice, mad at the world, at me, at Moravian for exploiting him. But probably Benjy’s plight is the cause. At midnight we spoke with him. The nurse at Hitchcock told him that Benjy is brain dead and will be a vegetable if he lives. Alan Rozycki is the pediatrician. Jerry is already speaking about donation of organs; apparently they’re resolved to let him die peacefully. Leander said also that he was so glum because of having to leave Terpni. Understandable. This place is obscenely beautiful. As for the new bathroom, it still strikes me as a miracle every time I use the toilet, wash my face, or take a shower. How fine that we experienced the “sanitary problem” and its solution step by step, and built our own facility, instead of simply purchasing something ready-made. It’s high-tech in a way, yet also in keeping with the Terpni ethos. Of course, speaking of high-tech, I of course now have not only my computer, with e-mail connection around the world, but also my new FAX machine. Today, for example a FAX came in from Singapore, just like that!

Went to Glens Falls this afternoon to take water samples from the two wells for retesting, to buy more oakum, and to get a Los Angeles tour book from AAA. Supper in Chestertown diner, another “discovery.”

A few days ago, visited Jacob Stearn again on Robbins Island. He had Alan MacCormick as a guest and it was fun reminiscing about Dartmouth in the 1960s. MacCormick teaches two days a week at City University and lives in the Berkshires. Obscene.

August 25, 1990

Making new shutters for bathroom windows. Serviced Jari and put John Deere up on blocks. Need to flush the cooling system this year, the 2nd of service. In the house, we’re fighting the invasion of mice, chipmunks, and bats. Poison and more poison. Tried to tape up gaps in insulation in our bedroom.

Daphne and Chrysanthi both want to cancel their trip to Greece owing to the crisis in the Gulf. Too bad. I’m still hoping the cruise will be cancelled, but Travel Dynamics seems determined to run it, even though there are only 35 registrants. I continue to work on Hebraism and Hellenism, thanks mostly to Vassilis Lambropoulos’s MS book on the subject. Will two weeks be lost and wasted if the cruise is cancelled? Perhaps it could be reworked as a Pendle Hill pamphlet with applicability to Quakerism.

Sunday, August 26, 1990

Sitting under my tree writing and reading. What a blessing! Yet this summer has been so anomalous. For six weeks I was here under the tree only twice, I believe. The bathroom took precedence. We drove on, first to do the deck, to cover the tank, etc. Could have stopped there. But no, we then started the walls, which meant that we had to get a roof over it to close it in, against the weather. Could have stopped there. But no, we did the exterior shingles, the interior insulation, floor, and finished the inner walls. Could have stopped there. But no, it must be functional. So we installed shower and sink, purchased the W.C., did the electricity, got Jim to hook everything up. And then, finally, we did stop. Much more interior and exterior finish remains, but that will occur next year (maybe). The result: I did nothing on the Kazantzakis letters except send a short bibliography to Wim Bakker; I did nothing on translating more Harkianakis poems; I did nothing on preparing for Humanities 1–2 next winter; I read only two books to review them, and lots of material for Hebraism and Hellenism, which may never be used. I did nothing on my address to the conference in Sydney. Oh, yes, I did translate my Myrivilis article into Greek and did send it to Νέα Εστία. And I surprised Maria Pantelia (after a fashion) in Rassias’s DANA program. But the mowing was accomplished. That’s good. Και του χρόνου! And poor Alec, good Samaritan, did nothing on his own cabin. But, the noble bathroom is there, a monument to his self-denial.

August 27, 1990

Kate Cohen came with her boyfriend and we discussed their “home-sitting” at 12 Ledyard Lane and, more importantly, Kate’s work as my copy-editor/assistant for JMGS. For once I hope I can delegate some work and not do everything myself.

August 28, 1990

To Kinhaven to hand over my presidential archives to John Austin. David Bury came too. He’s upbeat re: the Kresge grant. More importantly, Chrysanthi and I visited Jerry and Nancy in their bereavement; Benjy died a few days ago. Found Jerry mowing the lawn. “It’s good to mow the lawn,” he said ruefully. He looked pale and tired. But Nancy managed a smile. We muttered appropriate consolations and learned about arrangements for a memorial service next Saturday.

Wednesday, August 29

Daphne’s ticket is non-refundable. Chrysanthi decided to go after all.

We’re frantically closing up because we’ve decided to leave three days early, in order (a) to go to Benjy’s service and (b) to see Daphne and Greg in Hanover over Labor Day weekend. Lots of delay servicing the tractor because my antifreeze gauge was broken and I (erroneously) thought I had to keep strengthening the antifreeze concentration to prevent freezing over the winter.

Thursday, August 30, 1990

Drained the new water system for the first time. Irv came over and showed me good techniques for the toilet. The whole process is not too difficult, but I still feel very ambivalent about our capitulation to electricity and high-tech systems. The outhouse and hand pump have a solidity, an immemorial quality, that our new plumbing lacks.

Saturday, September 1, 1990

Hanover–Weston

Drove home last night with the car full of Kazantzakis letters that I’d never opened, and computers. Off to Weston this morning. The service was conducted by Ardis Chapman’s husband, a minister. Half-programmed, half Quaker style, with impromptu testimonials. We all stood under Benjy’s favorite tree, with the family facing and the rest in a semicircle. Rev. Chapman excellent—laconic, non-rhetorical. Readings were from the Psalms, emphasizing God’s goodness despite everything—“Though I walk in the shadow of darkness”—and from Ecclesiasticus on “a time for living and a time for dying”—that is: everything, even tragedy, is “ordained.” For the testimonies, Leander sent a tribute that I read for him, recounting his friendship with Benjy and the latter’s sense of humor, and utter honesty about his feelings. Others spoke less formally, recounting dialogues and incidents. At the end, Jerry played an audiotape that Benjy had recorded of the Kinhaven students doing three Bach chorales. An honest, effective service, more a tribute to the parents, in a way, than to Benjy. And the attendance itself was such a tribute. Lots of staff came from afar, Charlie Hamlen came, lots of board members, friends from Bethlehem, etc.

Nice supper afterwards at Jesse’s with Daphne, Greg, and Yiayia.

Sunday, September 2, 1990

Lunch at The Greens. Yiayia in fine fiddle. Meeting today was fine. I ministered à propos of Benjy’s service recounting how I’d asked Nancy, at its conclusion, if she could feel, despite everything, that God was good. “I don’t think so,” she replied, “but I’ll keep trying.” Probably that “keep trying” is better than an untested, unwavering optimism.

September 4, 1990

Gamma gobulin shot for the trip. Dentist. Peter Armstrong re: foreign study possibilities at Anatolia. He was encouraging.

September 5, 1990

They’ll allow me to keep my Baker study. But Sheehan will be in my office. Both Chrysanthi and I are frantically cleaning. Susan Tenney is preparing a final version of the Hypercard stacks for me to take to Australia.

September 6, 1990

Paul Buseck here, visiting Yiayia. He’s an inquisitive, gentle soul. Wears a shaggy pigtail. As Peter Buseck says, “That’s 1000 times better than drugs.”

September 7, 1990

Managed to get to the opening of Ray Sobel’s exhibition at AVA gallery. Remarkably “clean” and inventive reinterpretation of Greek myths, in cast iron and steel. Met Mary Scattergood there and had heart-to-heart talk. She feels Quakerism as utterly oppressive because of the family history.

September 8, 1990

David Bury finally sent part of the Kresge application. Sloppy in details, needing lots of editing. But, as he described it, “Strong without being rhetorical.”

September 9, 1990

Chrysanthi picked up Elizabeth Ballard from Hanover Terrace. She can barely walk, poor thing. She spoke “thrice” in Meeting and we all thought of Henry Williams, who surely would have eldered her good-naturedly. Her first message was, “I’m 78 years old today and I still feel that I was put on this earth in order to do some good for others.”

Supper with Trix and Chuck Officer at Dee’s house. Nice to be with familiar friends. Last night we were at the Nodas, with David and Kesaya both home, and Audrey. Kesaya is beginning a Ph.D. in Shintoism at Harvard.

Tuesday, September 11, 1990

Again supper with the Nodas, an elaborate Japanese meal that made both of us slightly ill. Somehow, we’ve finished packing and the car is loaded.

Wednesday, September 12, 1990

Hanover–PH

Our ritual of breakfast out at the Polka Dot; then drove pleasantly to Philadelphia listening most of the way to St. Paul, read so meaningfully by Alexander Scourby. Romans I and II, Corinthians, Galatians. It’s good to hear it all at once instead of chopped up into verses or just set pieces like I Cor. 13, which really has very little to do with all the rest. He repeats himself in order to reiterate that keeping the law is not what matters. What matters is belief, faith. In the best interpretation: what matters is an inner condition rather than an outward exhibition. The rest is his struggle to keep unruly groups together. The early Christians, it seems, were as bad as the later ones.

We settled into Room Β in Main House, a large room with a private bath (for me). Books in place; desk ready. But Chrysanthi convinced me not to install a telephone.

Thursday, September 13, 1990

PH–NYC–Los Angeles

Breakfast with the new dean, John Anderson. Margery very friendly, as always. Left my videos for Rebecca. At Meeting it occurred to me that this was the last meaningful event before my trip, and that upon my return the first meaningful event would be, again, Meeting. I developed the analogy of the Meeting as a fishing boat letting out a net in which experiences were caught but then withdrawn back to the ship—to the Meeting—in order to be “processed.” Also, the ship/Meeting always mends the nets before they are cast out again. In this way, our lives are not merely linear but also circular.

Trinity Limousine to JFK over the Verrazano Bridge. What a soaring beauty! Daphne arrived at 5:30, driven in a Simon and Schuster company car. And so we parted with kisses and admonitions to be careful.

In LA, at the Avis desk, I realized that I’d deliberately left my driver’s license home. Fool! But they gave me a car, illegally. Overnight in an unpleasant Comfort Inn on Santa Monica Boulevard.

September 14, 1990

Los Angeles

How beautiful Santa Monica is! Palm trees, Spanish architecture, perfect weather, an esplanade, endless beaches, smart shops. I drove along Lincoln Avenue to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. A transplanted Mediterranean villa with olive trees, terraced landscape, herb garden, vista of the sea. The Greek antiquities are fine; the paintings strike me as second tier with some notable exceptions: a wonderful Van Gogh “Irises,” an interesting Rembrandt Saint Bartholomew, and Millet’s famous “Man with a Hoe.” There’s a wonderful miniature Greek satyr in bronze; also a life-sized bronze athlete, one of few bronzes to survive more or less intact. I asked the attendant if Getty had left sufficient funds to maintain all this (the museum is free, and was creeping with groundskeepers and curators). “That’s an understatement!” was her reply.

Drove then to Venice Beach to see the weirdos, as Daphne would say. Most people looked quite normal. Most memorable was a beggar or “bag-man” dressed in a bikini bathing suit, stopping to survey each trash can. He looked about 60 or 70 years old—a Californian gymnosophist. On “muscle beach,” yes, there was one perfectly built blond specimen in a g-string and an overall tan.

What most strikes me about L.A. is the Mexicans. They seem to hold all the menial jobs; blacks are not in evidence. And at the airport the lines for Air Mexicana were immense, with everyone exporting huge boxes of TVs and the like, similar to the scene at Korean Air when Alec left.

I finished Professor Grant’s second book, the one on Christianity from the death of Augustine to the death of Constantine. Too detailed for my taste. He was A. D. Nock’s student and tries to emulate the master, but doesn’t have Nock’s magisterial quality.

Sunday, September 16, 1990

Sydney–Adelaide

Fourteen hours via Qantas non-stop to Sydney. They give you ear plugs and an eye mask, and I slept rather well. Also, wrote a bit of my keynote address for the Sydney conference. Transferred to Ansett at Sydney airport at 8:00 a.m. Met at Adelaide airport by Leo Papademetre, who has turned gray in the five years since I last saw him but otherwise is happier than before, well-placed here in a lively department and a country house. We talked talked talked all morning, lunched, then drove down to the city center, which is both quaint and lovely. Parts look like the set of a western movie, parts like Fifth Avenue in New York, parts like London. Lots of green, parks, ponds. Arts Center, huge municipal library, museums, Adelaide University right in the middle of town. Then five kilometers to the sea, a kind of Lido with hotels, promenade, Luna Park, restaurants galore. Beautiful people, no slums, no homelessness. But there is crime. Leon double-locks his house and car.

All this I weathered splendidly, with practically no effect of jet lag, probably because of the feast-fast-feast-fast system I followed (more or less).

Monday, September 17, 1990

To Flinders, a beautiful campus on a green hill overlooking hills, city, and sea. Met Dimiroulis, the professor: young and energetic, a book collector who has amassed a significant library of MG books in less than two years. Wonderful what money, efficiency, and perseverance will accomplish. Also met Dimitris Kapsalis, a “reader” for Kollaros/Estia, trained in lit crit at Georgetown, who is here temporarily on a fellowship. Will send him my Kazantzakis book in hopes for publication of a translation. Lunch in spacious faculty club (ah! what they did to us at Dartmouth!). Some time by myself in their library. Then my lecture on Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision, to a reasonable audience. Some good questions. But never really on the central issue I was discussing.

Tuesday, September 18, 1990

Chris Fifis at La Trobe wants me to do Ritsos’s Painterly Technique tomorrow. Changed Ansett flight to an earlier one: 6:25 a.m. Today to the College of Advanced Education downtown with Paul Hellander as host. He’s a Norwegian who settled in the UK, finished at B’ham, came out here, married a Greek woman who insisted on returning to Tasmania with their children. He does classes on translation and interpreting; teaches students not only to translate properly but to format their translations on the Macintosh, to reproduce the original. Very practical work for future jobs in the social service sector. Met Κυριάκος, an older man who fought in the Αντίσταση, finished Φιλοσοφική Σχολή Θεσσαλονίκης, διορίστηκε, and ended up here to join his family. Teaches Greek language and literature. Reunion with Paul Tuffin, remarried with a new family, now working for the state government developing uniform testing procedures for languages. Hellander gave me lots of computer software: Greek fonts, a complete Macintosh system in Greek, laser drivers, etc. Lunch at a Greek restaurant. I gave my talk on Cavafy’s Alexandrian cycle, which was supposed to be for beginners but turned out to be for an audience including people like Καψάλης, so I was a bit embarrassed at the introductory nature of the talk. Large audience. Afterwards walked downtown to Greek restaurant where we feasted with about twenty people as guests of the students. A lively bunch. They want to set up a worldwide Association of Greek Students, have exchanges, etc.

Wednesday, September 19, 1990

Adelaide–Melbourne

Up at 5:00 a.m. to catch 6:25 flight. Met at airport by Chris Fifis and another familiar face. He drove me to La Trobe where immediately I encountered Loukia (now Lucy) Aloneftis, who is their secretary now. Big hug! Immediate questions: “How is Daphne doing with her violin?” “She doesn’t play any more.” Consternation. I try to explain. Also why Chrysanthi didn’t come. I’ve discovered a good reason: If she visited Alec in Indonesia she would in effect by that act somehow bequeath legitimacy to his residence there, whereas by refusing to visit she’s saying in effect that his residence is temporary and abnormal and of course displeasing to her. Maybe I’m right. Others there: Μίμης Σοφοκλέους, Τάμης, και φυσικά ο Παύλος Ανδρόνικος. I did “Ritsos’s Painterly Technique.” Not much discussion, but some. Lunch in Faculty Club with the Dean of Humanities, whom of course they want to impress with their international visitor. Pavlos drove me back. He’s mellow and more settled, writing poetry, trying to develop a semi-independent program at Monash. My motel is in Lygon Street—very familiar. Lovely reunion with Stathis Gauntlet and John Burke, also Scott, whose office I had occupied. John Martyn was away in Portugal. Too bad. His son Simon, the one who was defective, has died, I was told. Michael Osborne is now vice-chancellor at La Trobe. They’re happy to be rid of him. John Burke in front of his Macintosh. It’s fun to see everyone with Mac-Pluses. I gave them my Hypercard program and received various software packages in return, especially from Pavlos and of course yesterday from Hellander. Robin Jackson was lecturing but I skipped this, having been active since 5:00 a.m., treated myself to a Malaysian meal in Lygon Street, and sleep.

Thursday, September 20, 1990

Carlton

Work in the Uni’s library. Such a nice environment. Lunch with Stathis and John. Supper with Stathis, Anna Hatsinikolaou, the one who’d come to Ithaca and lost her luggage last spring, and Dimitris?, who’d been a student here in ’83 and is now an assistant lecturer. I lectured on the Re-emergence of Prose in John Vasilikakos’s course; small audience but a good one. Stathis reminded me about Koraïs’s Ο Παπατρέχας, which I’d omitted. To a pub for some beers afterwards, with John. Good, easy, relaxed conversation.

Friday, September 21, 1990

Carlton

Re-did my Cavafy in order to incorporate Greek texts. Lunch again with Stathis, trying to convince him of certain omissions in his draft constitution for the new association. Didn’t get far. Robin Jackson came over to say hello. Married and a father. Then we sat with the department: Peter Connor, some new ones, Scott, Roger Just. In Modern Greek, everyone knows everyne else, internationally, which is so nice. Talked at 4:15 on Cavafy and homosexuality. Large crowd this time, people standing in the aisles. Good questions. Afterwards, drinks in Staff House. Met a bookseller who imports Greek books. Lively fellow, Διονύσης Μυλωνάς, a bit obnoxious. Discussion about why Demotic Greek I has been virtuously dropped by schools here. More chance to get to know Roger Just, the anthropologist. Then most of us went downtown to the Malaysian restaurant with a stunningly beautiful waitress like a miniature doll with perfect features, complexion, posture.

Saturday, September 22, 1990

Carlton

To translators’ conference with Stathis. People doing Aboriginal texts, Romanian, Russian, etc., as well as French and German. A Romanian playwright complained that actors changed his lines. Not much sympathy from the crowd. I was asked to speak about the situation in America. Some of them thought that translation was thriving there as compared to Australia. I disabused them of this fantasy.

Lunch in a Malaysian restaurant in Lygon Street; repeated the delicious spinach but not the waitress. Then Pavlos Andronikos came to bring me home to his family for tea, after a quick look at the Suleimann the Magnificent exhibit downtown; everything from Topkapi Palace’s collection, and somewhat familiar to me. There was a festival of Turkish dancing too; lots of Turks now in Melbourne. Pavlos has a lovely British wife, Angelica, and three sweet children: Niki, Roberta, and Kimon. Roberta, only 6, types long documents on the computer and reads like a high school student. Remarkable. It was a lovely household swarming with the children’s friends in and out. Angelica stopped working in order to be a mother. Pavlos demonstrated to me the computer programs and synthesizer he uses to compose songs. They are called “Deluxe Music Construction Set” (Electronic Arts) and “Performer” (Mark of the Unicorn). Basically, they enable him to produce a written score of what he composes, and also to compose one line at a time, hear it, add to it, subtract, alter, etc. It is terrific. I’ve written to Leander à propos. But poor Pavlos is still struggling academically; hasn’t finished his doctorate and is non-tenured, and rather bitter.

Sunday, September 23, 1990

What a day! Bev and Dennis Dorwick picked me up in the morning and we drove to the Quaker Meeting in Toorak. How cold they were, compared to all the Greeks! But friendly in their own way, I suppose. In the introductions after Meeting I of course mentioned my association with Pendle Hill. Afterwards a woman, Kathryn Officer, I believe, told me at length how meaningful her sojourn there had been, how “healing.” It’s wonderful how a more-or-less sick organization like PH can nevertheless appear to function healthily.

Then Nikos Aloneftis came and drove me to the northern suburbs to dine with Lucy and their children, George and Peter. Nikos, as in 1983, embittered and frustrated, only more so. Trained as a lawyer in Cyprus, he was reduced to teaching Greek and legal studies when the Turkish invasion forced the family to migrate to Australia. He has a dim view of the Australian secondary school system, as do many others. Says that teachers feel trapped, unstimulated, etc. by students who care nothing for education. But laws have changed, enabling him to receive more credit for his previous training, and he hopes to qualify as a solicitor in Australia. The boys are charming. George is a first-year student in medical school. He was very curious about the USA. As usual, I was stuffed with food and had to beg Lucy to stop. The back yard is Grecian in its tropical lushness: apricot, lemon, and peach trees; swimming pool even. Nice family; communicative children who don’t seem alienated or bored with adults.

Nikos then drove me to the Archiepiscopate in Dorcas Street to see Stylianos. He was in good form, despite a headache. Also present was Bishop Ezekial, a lovely, gentle man, Stylianos’s first appointed bishop. Immediately we telephoned Vouli in Thessaloniki. She reported that Daphne and Chrysanthi have had a nice visit, staying in Aghia Triadha, visiting Bruce and Tad in Metamorphosis, the Drapers in the Farm School, etc. At that moment, Daphne was at the airport for her return flight. No strikes, thank goodness.

Regarding Stylianos’s poems: the selection of 100 was made by Pentzikis, not Stylianos. I have Stylianos’s permission to include others or to exclude. We’ll explore Leros Press in Canberra as a possible publisher, but he’d prefer Paintbrush if that works out. I tried to explore the difficulty between Stylianos and the Department of Greek at Sydney. He grew very heated. It seems to boil down to Michael Jeffreys’ refusal to hire Pieris and his general neglect of Modern Greek literature as opposed to Renaissance and Byzantine. Έχει μια σειρά ανθρωπάκια, λέει. Stylianos is particularly chagrined because he feels that his original support of Jeffreys was crucial in Jeffreys being chosen as professor and that there had been a promise that MG would be fully represented. Stylianos now adamantly refuses contact, even though Jeffreys has repeatedly invited him to the conference next week. For similar reasons, Stylianos doesn’t want to come to America, because he finds Archbishop Iakovos “disgusting” and could not pretend to be friendly. Stylianos is of course fascinated with words in their own right, their etymologies, original meanings. He’s doing poems on individual words. . . . Then we all drove to another suburb, Fawkner, to the inauguration of the Fourth State Youth Conference with the theme Παιδιά σήμερα, γονείς αύριο. Stylianos was enthroned in full regalia during a short service, sweating and obviously very uncomfortable. But the reception afterward was rather joyous. I was impressed by how friendly the parishioners seemed to be with their priests, so different from Greece. Then, of course, Stylianos made me speak. I told him that any time I’m with him βρίσκω τον μπελά μου. I said something like this: Σχετικά με το θέμα σας, παιδιά σήμερα γονείς αύριο, σκεφτόμουνα πόσο είμουν τυχερός που παντρεύτηκε μιαν Ελληνίδα, που μεγάλωσε με τόση μητρική στοργή τρία ωραία παιδιά [applause] και βάσταξε ο γάμος ως τώρα τριάντα-πέντε χρόνια [laughter] που, ξέρετε, είναι λίγο δύσκολο στις συνθήκες της Αμερικής. Σκεφτόμουνα επίσης το μεσημεριανό φαγητό σήμερα που τρώγαμε κοιτάζοντας τρία πουλιά σε κλουβί. Έμαθα ότι οι δύο ήταν οι γονείς που γέννησαν πρόσφατα το πουλάκι τους. Έμαθα πόσο θαύμασαν οι κάτοικοι του σπιτιού αυτού τη στοργή της μητέρας και τη συμπεράσταση του πατέρα. Εμείς οι άνθρωποι καυχιόμαστε συχνά ότι είμαστε ανώτεροι από τα ζώα, ότι έχουμε ψυχή. Ωστόσο σας λέω ότι τα ζώα είναι συχνά πιο ανθρώπινα από τους ανθρώπους. Όσοι θα γίνουν γονείς, ας λοιπόν μιμηθούνε τα ζώα. Lots of nice conversations after this, including one with a Κύριος Παπαδόπουλος whom I’d met in 1983 and who reminded me that he was the first to introduce Demotic Greek I as a text in the Melbourne extension division. He doesn’t use it now because it’s seldom that the students are beginners needing the oral-aural method. Also long talk with the outgoing Greek consul in Melbourne—being transferred to Germany—who had a very low opinion of Australians as uncivilized brutes incredibly ignorant about the rest of the world.

Meanwhile we’d been joined by John and Mary Vasilakakos. They have a baby now and another on the way. Ioannis is stuck in Australia permanently, he now feels, whereas seven years ago he still dreamed of settling in Greece. His play Η ταυτότητα ran over 100 performances in Melbourne. But I doubt that he’ll do much more; he doesn’t seem sufficiently driven. We all adjourned to the home of the local priest: Yiayia, seven children, one girl recently married, with her husband, two other priests, the bishop, Stylianos, Vasilakakides, and myself. Again, what a lovely atmosphere, with the blessings, the easy, gracious conversation, the compliments on the food (κοκορέτσι!!). And such a strange feeling in church, earlier, with 20-odd priests present, the archbishop, the bishop, the full-throated ψάλτης. Was I in Australia? In Byzantium? The coziness, the security of all this is marvelous. As is, of course, the language of the Ακολουθία that was sung, e.g.: Τῆ Ύπερμάχῳ Στρατηγῷ τà νικητήρα, ὡς λυτρωθείσα τῶν δεινῶν εὐχαριστήρια, ἀναγράφω σοι ἡ πόλις σου, Θεοτόκε (To thee, the Champion Leader, do I, thy City, ascribe thank-offerings for victory, for Thou, Mother of God, have delivered me from terrors.) Δόξα σοι τῳ δείξαντι τὸ φῶς (Glory to thee, who hast shown forth the light) Ελεήμων γὰρ καὶ φιλάνθρωπος θεός ὑπάρχεις καὶ Σοί τὴν δόξα ἀναπέμπομεν, τῷ Πατρὶ καὶ τῷ Υιῷ καὶ τῷ Αγιῷ Πνεύματι, νῦν καὶ ἀεί καὶ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνες τῶν αἰῶνων (For Thou art a merciful God and lovest mankind, and to Thee do we send up all Glory: to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever and to the ages of ages). Αμήν. Back to Lygon Street at 11:30 p.m. A full day.

Monday, September 24, 1990

Melbourne–Sydney

Taxi to airport. Long conversation with the cabbie re: crisis in Iraq, which is hardly reported in Aussie news compared to sports. Met at Sydney airport by Michael Jeffreys and spent the rest of the day at the Jeffreys’ home with Elizabeth and their daughter Catherine. Shortened my Reemergence lecture. Lots of talk about the situation in Sydney and hopes for the conference. Telephoned Daphne easily via ATT card. She was back in the office and reported a good stay, mostly at Αγία Τριάδα with Lola and Costas, swimming. George very depressed and peculiar. They had to invite themselves to a meal. Daphne thinks he’s greatly in debt and can’t extricate himself. Chrysanthi doing well. Daphne said that lots of her Greek came back.

Tuesday, September 25, 1990

Sydney

To the university. Found George Markus immediately. He told me about their tragedy: son George, Jr. who’d just finished a Ph.D. in philosophy, hit his head in a soccer game, was in a coma for 2½ months, and emerged with severe, permanent brain damage. Impaired vision, practically no speech, inability to walk and go to toilet, a semi-vegetable. We’ll have supper together tomorrow. Today I gave my Reemergence lecture at 11:10 to a small audience, mostly of staff. Then lunch, then my Painterly Technique at 2:00. Alf Vincent asked if I’d submit it to Yofiri and I guess I’m trapped. Alf still neurotically withdrawn. He and Michael have a modus vivendi but no real friendship or intellectual camaraderie (same with Stathis and John Burke).

Wednesday, September 26, 1990

Blue Mountains

Excursion with Michael to the Blue Mountains, a two-hour drive. There’s a huge canyon, like our Grand Canyon. We went to Govett’s Leap, a high waterfall, and walked down to an overlook partly down the canyon. Then for cappuccino in Hydro Majestic Hotel, in Medlow Bath, an Edwardian gilt-edged curiosity on the edge of a cliff, former spa now full of Japanese honeymooners. Then to Hartley, a town developed in the mid-nineteenth century chiefly to prosecute recaptured convicts who had succeeded in crossing the Blue Mountains. Sandstone courthouse à la Doric temple. English-style churches and cottages. A curiosity. Finally to the Paragon Restaurant in Katoomba, a former tearoom, very beautifully paneled. I’ve been overeating scandalously, have already gained five pounds since leaving the farm. Michael was last there with Bryer, so it’s a sort of ritual for foreign visitors. Lastly to an outlook to see parrots in the wild. Saw some parrots, but many more Japanese.

Then to George and Maria Markus for supper. They introduced me to the invalid son, who smiled and grunted. He was watching television. He’s totally blind in one eye and has 35% vision in the other. He can apparently play cards very well, and chess very badly (he used to be a whiz). Then they closed the doors and left him in front of the television. I didn’t see him again. Later, the other son came for dinner and afterwards put George to bed, helping his mother. Their lives are completely controlled by this tragedy. One or the other parent must always be at home, and both have professional lives. George has given up research since he cannot now go to Germany, where his materials are. But they all plan to go to Hungary next year, George, Jr. included. No desire, however, to resettle there permanently. George has been reinstated in the Academy but Marxists are not now in favor of course. What a sad, tragic life! We spoke of our meeting in Haverford (probably 1985), twenty years after our first meeting at Dartmouth, when I chaperoned him when he came to speak to Great Issues. To cap everything, his office at the university was set on fire by an arsonist, and he lost valuable books. All of us who have escaped these vicissitudes of fate, politics, etc., and have children uninjured, surviving, productive, happy, are so fortunate.

Thursday, September 27, 1990

Another full, eventful day. In the morning I was interviewed by Βάσω Μόραλη, a young journalist from EPT in Athens, serving in Sydney for a year, for a Sydney Greek newspaper. Pleased at my Greek, which is serviceable if I’m not tired. Then Stylianos’s deacon picked me up and took me to Redfern to the Archiepiscopate. I hate the obeisance that surrounds Stylianos—υποκλίσεις—and so does he, I believe (does he?). Again, I asked if he’d relent and make an appearance at the conference. No way! Out came the same complaints, that they’re Marxists, that they trash Το άξιον εστί, saying that it has no relation to the Church, that they underplay modern literature, that they refused to employ Pieris, and then he revealed that he knew I’d voted against Pieris when I vetted the dissertation! So much for confidentiality. (Jeffreys told me later that he’d given my appraisal to Pieris—stupid! No name, but the spelling made clear that it was an American. By process of elimination he determined that I was the culprit. This was why he was absent when I lectured in Crete. Too bad. Maybe he would have been the best person, after all.) We went off in a chauffeured car to a ferociously expensive fish restaurant on the shore, owned by a Greek. I started speaking Greek to the waiter without looking at him. All laughed, since he was Chinese. Lovely lunch: oysters, soup, fish, chocolate cake. Stylianos very pleased with St Andrew’s Theological College, which he has set up, with ordaining priests and elevating them to bishoprics, etc. But he won’t step inside the Modern Greek Department at the University of Sydney. The deacon, driving me back after we returned for coffee and a tour of the theological college, told me that he’s taking a correspondence course from Arrendell to improve his Greek, because Stylianos forbids him to register next door at the university. Κρίμα και ντροπή!

I had just enough time to go over my talk once more, then walked to Sancta Sophia College for the conference. Leo there of course, and Δημηρούλης, and lots of others I’d seen on this trip or the previous one. Supper in hall. Then my Keynote Address on the MGSA and what lessons we can learn from its successes and failures. The Greek consul-general in the front row seemed to listen intently. Jeffreys told me that when the conference was organized the consul was furious because of the decision to bring me instead of a Greek from Athens. I hope I proved to him the logicality of the choice.

Friday, September 28, 1990

Conference all day. Ansett air strike prevented Stathis and John from coming to Melbourne, but otherwise the attendance and spirit were fine. Initial session on the constitution resulted in Michael, Pavlos, Toula, and me being appointed a drafting committee to produce an improvement over Stathis’s draft. Then we all trooped in a convoy across Sydney to the consul’s palatial house—disgusting!—for a reception. Long talk with a sweet girl, Patricia, I think, a Greek-Australian who spent a year in Thessaloniki doing Cavafy under Παναγιώτης Μουλλάς. Also nice chat with Αντώνης Δρακόπουλος. Then back across Sydney to the Cretan Club, an extensive premises with bar, slot machines, dining room, dance floor. This is typical here. They dined us for free, very nicely. Heavy, delicious food. Good talk with Toula, a “character” who does adult education, mostly English to foreigners, and loves it. How women especially—Yugoslavs, Greeks, etc., after 20–30 years in the home raising children—have “come out” and want to learn English finally. Tired, somewhat inebriated, our drafting committee moved off to another table to finish the constitution. My idea of a nominating committee was adopted, among others. Tired. To bed.

Saturday September 29, 1990

Sydney

Final day of the conference. Toula chaired the constitutional session with massive authority (she told me she learned it in the labor movement), getting our draft approved despite some attempt to amend it. Phew! Then we proceeded to implement it, first with elections to the Executive Committee, a session that I ran, then with the formation of working groups: bibliography, computers, conferences, newsletter, journal, teaching materials, Greek-Australian literature, etc. And, while my back was turned, tabulating results on the blackboard, Elizabeth nominated me as the new association’s first Honorary Member. Extraordinary. And also nice, these days, to have people say that they read my writings, especially the ones in Greek, on Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Ritsos. They are occasionally even set texts in courses. But Demotic Greek I is no longer used, it seems. But there was great interest in my Hypercard stacks for Greek drills, demonstrated before 15–20 people. I left copies here and in Melbourne.

So, the conference accomplished its objective. The Modern Greek Studies Assoiation of Australia and New Zealand now exists. I told them that I hope they can look back in 2010 with as much satisfaction on their first 20 years as we were able to in America after our first 20 years.

Across the city again, this time to the Kastelorizo Club, equally resplendant, for a press conference with Βάσω and others. Again, we spoke at length; she recounted her experiences with Stylianos’s obstinacy and narrowness in various areas. Then Leo, Toula, Diane (an American living in New Zealand) and I went to a fancy fish restaurant for a leisurely dinner and good talk. I said I’d be leaving Sydney without seeing the Opera House. So Toula kindly drove to Circular Quay and toured downtown a bit. I find Sydney generally ugly and congested compared to Melbourne, but Markus says it’s the only place to live in Australia. The three cities I visited were small–medium–large. Adelaide is beautiful but restricted. Melbourne is just right, for my taste.

Sunday, September 30, 1990

Sydney–Singapore

To Sydney Friends Meeting downtown. Meeting House built in 1903. Five people attended a decade ago; now 50 and growing, as the city center is rebuilt and attracts people again. A lovely quiet. The clerk quoted John Punshon afterwards. And a lady, talking to me about the Pendle Hill pamphlets, said she particularly enjoyed the one about the author—you know—the same one that did Zorba the Greek. I revealed my identity as the author and she asked for three more copies. Nice. A pleasant group. I feared the Meeting would be moribund, but it clearly is not.

To the airport. Fond goodbyes to Elizabeth and Michael, with mutual thanks. I enjoyed them. Michael is a worry wart and a bit of the nervous type apt to fly into a rage over a trifle. Elizabeth controls him masterfully. She’s the more gifted, clearly, and he knows it. They’ve made a good relationship out of a situation potentially disastrous.

Monday, October 1, 1990

Jakarta

Overnight last night at Sea View Hotel, half way between Changi airport and downtown Singapore, so I never saw the city. But the airport is spectacular, putting us to shame: huge halls, fountains, potted plants, amenities such as showers . . . And the drive into the city is lined by parks on both sides, not used car lots, as in Queens. This morning I arrived in Jakarta. Temperature 95° F. (34° C.) but it’s really no different from Philadelphia in the summer. I was reasonably comfortable. Alec looking fine—healthy and vibrant. We spent the morning touring. It’s a national holiday: Pancasila Sanctity Day, celebrating the “national ideology” that prevailed over the communist coup in 1965 and previously against the Dutch colonizers in 1945. We went to the National Monument. Lots of people, mostly young. One-hour wait to go to the top, so we skipped that. But we went to the huge lower hall that has a series of dioramas depicting Indonesian history from prehistoric times to the late 1960s. A series of aborted insurrections against the Dutch, who obviously don’t get very good press here; then occupation by the Japanese; then independence; then communist coup in 1965 and its suppression, leading to the present dictatorship of Suharto. A refreshing mineral water outside in the shade. Then to the city’s industrial fair, the Indonesia pavilion, which exhibited not only various handicrafts but also actual craftsmen demonstrating their skills. Saw actual shadow theater puppets and talked with a girl in that booth: how the puppet theater is chiefly for weddings and festivals. The characters look very much like Καραγκιόζης and his crew. From there we went to a hotel for lunch. (Alec had played cocktail music here last Saturday, filling in for the usual violinist.) He’s wanting to show me how “civilized” the city is. Indeed, it has many Western features, but generally is a hodge-podge without unity. Then we drove around wealthy neighborhoods with huge mansions, all nouveau riche ostentation. Then to Jakarta International School, which was mostly deserted because of the holiday. An excellent campus with tennis courts, swimming pool, a huge gym, outdoor cafeteria, arts center with two theaters. All new and very manicured. Indonesian servants everywhere, cleaning, watering the plants. We spoke with one who’d been seventeen years with the school and loves to work overtime. The people here have beautiful open smiles and are extraordinarily friendly. Finally, Alec took me to the supermarket where he shops: exactly like an American one, with many of the same products but also dried fish, etc. that we don’t have. Spotless and hygienic. Then home to Alec’s house, which is huge, and beautiful. He has a self-contained apartment with bedroom, bath, and study. Andy has a similar apartment. There are two living rooms, a dining room, porches, gardens front and back, and servants’ quarters. Watti left; there is a new couple. I showered—how lovely! And rested a bit in my air-conditioned bedroom. At 6:30 guests arrived for a dinner party: (1) an old woman, recently retired, widow, her late husband a businessman, descended from a Sumatran king; they lived abroad, years in Holland, Japan, etc.; she taught Dutch at JIS; now substitutes; a compulsive talker, with fluent English, but interesting; she brought a gift for Chrysanthi. (Someone else sent a huge bouquet of flowers for me; someone else Chinese sweets. Alec’s friends are gracious.) (2) and (3) a couple: wife teaches Indonesian and French, husband is professor at Jakarta University specializing in systems for infrastructure at the village level: drainage, water supply, transportation, etc. They, too, like the older woman, are cosmopolitan Indonesians with experience in the Netherlands. (4) a young man, a violinist who’d just returned from the International Youth Orchestra Camp in Kuala Lumpur. Of Arab background, I think. He removed his shoes at the door. Complained that the British in the orchestra were very snobbish. We talked about racism. The older woman felt that the JIS children look down on Indonesians, whom they encounter of course as drivers and servants, not as equals. “We are their hosts,” she vociferated, “and we’re just as good as them.” Andy joined us later; he’d gone to Pizza Hut with his Indonesian girlfriend. (Why doesn’t Alec have a girlfriend, native or foreign?) Nice conversation with Alec and the violinist after the others had left.

Telephoned Travel Dynamics. The trip is still going forward, despite State Department warnings to Americans about possible terrorism in Europe. Alec telephoned Chrysanthi at Lola’s. She was very emotional. We really miss each other. She’d just been to lunch with Lena Daskopoulou. Never received any mail from me because there’s a postal strike (also garbage, buses, hotel workers). Says she wants to go home. So do I, but the blasted cruise is still scheduled, with about fifty people. And I still have two lectures to write.

Tuesday, October 2, 1990

Jakarta

Alec gets up at 5:30 a.m. I was given until 7:00. Servant laid out breakfast. Driver came to bring me to school. Immediately saw the older lady from last night and the young teacher of Indonesian and even the cleaning woman. Nice to be familiar. Alec set up a day-long schedule for me. Started by meeting Constantine and Diane Georgiades, she an Ohio farm girl (“I grew up haying and castrating pigs”), he a Samiot who’s doing a Ph.D. in history at Ohio State. They met in East Africa. He read Kazantzakis appreciatively in the 1960s, told me that Kazantzakis was neither far right nor far left, and that was so refreshing when everyone else was polarized. I convinced him to join MGSA. Then to Alec’s 7th grade English class. Students from Holland, Brunei, USA, UK, Hong Kong, Philippines. The children had written riddles as an exercise in perception. They each described a favorite food but kept its identity secret. Today they trooped off to a primary school class where each of Alec’s students read his riddle out loud and the smaller children were asked to “solve” the puzzle. And they did very well indeed. They speak English clearly, with total ease, although in many cases their first language is of course something else. And both classes were so totally attentive, disciplined, bright-eyed.

Next: to high school strings rehearsal. Vivaldi and Bach. All these beautiful oriental faces, plus a few Anglo-Saxon ones. Alec gave them some exercises in bow control, simultaneity, etc. Then they began, sight-reading, as I learned later. Under Alec’s useful direction, a raggedy Vivaldi became a much more controlled Vivaldi forty minutes later.

Then to another section of English. Students this time from Holland, Yugoslavia, UK, Canada, USA, Brunei, Philippines, but most had lived in four or five countries, e.g., Kenya, Saudi Arabia, etc. A different world from Hanover. They had a good discussion of the contrived elements (i.e., unconvincing bits of characterization and plotting) in the novel they were assigned. Then they were turned loose to question me on my career as a writer. This they did intelligently and sweetly. Did I rhyme rhymed poetry? Wasn’t I bored doing page after page? How long did a novel take? Could I translate from English into Greek?

Along the way, I met with Diana Kerry, Alec’s close friend. She does drama. Then lunch devoured in the midst of a Middle School faculty meeting, held fortnightly, in which teachers raise problems with administration, pedagogy, etc. Then quickly to Middle School orchestral rehearsal, this time Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, again produced with increasing precision in tempo and intonation owing to Alec’s energetic direction. At the end he switched to a Schubert piece and I played the piano part on the school’s new Yamaha upright. Alec is obviously a very good conductor/coach at this level, and he told me that he loves this part of his job exceedingly.

Then home for a wash and short rest. Back to school for my lecture: Thoughts on Literacy Past and Present, the Beebe lecture adjusted a bit to focus on secondary rather than tertiary education. Luckily in the teachers’ meeting earlier today they had distributed some statements of goals, all of which were oriented toward “truth” rather than power; this enabled me to “personalize” the lecture. Lots of questions at the end, starting with one from the headmaster, John Magagna, about the literacy crisis in the US. Afterwards, people told me that the lecture was a tonic because they have so little stimulation from the outside at JIS, Jakarta being off the “circuit” for just about everything.

We then went to Magagna’s home, palatial, of course, for drinks, hors d’oeuvres (including venison he’d brought back from Pennsylvania), and a nice dinner, Western style, ending with ice cream and strawberries. His young Korean wife, pregnant when I saw her in NYC, now has two children, very sweet and beautiful. Other guests: Mr. and Mrs. Solomon, he a former Deerfield master, she a vivacious Brahmin educated at Smith, I believe. Her father in India has the task of rewriting all the English-language schoolbooks after independence, to make them reflect Indian, not British, reality. Another couple, Scotch, the man with a thick brogue, in the oil industry, the wife a teacher at JIS. He said Indonesia’s resources are enormous, not only oil, coffee, and rubber, but tea, rice, copper, tin, coal, etc. Magagna told me how highly Alec was esteemed by Tom Wood, and also by the relevant principal at JIS. He’s a born, gifted teacher. He’s also almost unique in his success in penetrating the native culture, something that I’ve been witnessing, of course. How long will he stay? From speaking to others, I conclude that six or seven years is about maximum. The headmaster himself is leaving after seven years. He said what bothered him most was having nowhere to go and nothing to do on weekends, except the office, because of his inability to penetrate the local culture.

At 8:00 p.m. the day was not yet over. We got in the car and went searching for the house of Ibu Tiwi, a rich Indonesian woman whose parents had been in the IMF in Washington and who had graduated at an American high school. She is an expert on gamelan music and traditional dancing; she trained as a dancer herself, starting at age 5. After some difficulty Alec calling other JIS teachers in the neighborhood to his assistance, we found her and drove clear across town to see the Ubiyang Orang, traditional dancing, in a small, almost empty theater. Gamelan orchestra in the pit: gongs of all sizes, dulcimer-like instruments, flute. The “show” is a combination of oratorio, drama, opera, and dance. Narrator, singers, dancers male and female. We arrived during an interval in which four clowns were lounging on stage cracking jokes, all with painted masks. Then the drama resumed. Ibu Tiwi explaining it to both of us since the language was Javanese dialect (Java is pronounced Jawa here). Basically: good guys vs. bad guys. Bad guys want to molest a good girl. Her brothers react. Both sides appear before a guru who questions the motives of each. Then a series of danced battles in each of which the good guy downs the bad. Costumes extraordinary, all gold, intricate design. Huge head-gear, masks, skin powdered to appear white. Boys effeminate; girls impersonating boys. But also some gorilla-like men with long scraggly hair (wigs, of course). The guru done comically: half-clown. Gamelan players have no music; they improvise, as do the actors, to some degree, over a predetermined template, as in jazz. Each night there’s a different story, in repertoire. Dancers are paid about US $3.00 a day. Part of their training, from childhood, is to bend the fingers backwards unnaturally in a curve; this gives extraordinary grace to the gestures, which are so important. Torrential rain for ½ hour or so while we were inside. This is the pattern of the rainy season, which will begin in a few weeks and last into December.

Indonesians, from what I’ve seen, are extraordinarily gracious, with huge smiles. They are also very quiet people. Alec says he’s never heard anyone screaming at anyone else. No φωνακλάδες here. In other respects, however, the entire scene is so completely reminiscent of the Greece I knew in the 1950s and 1960s. . . . Home at 11:30. To bed!

I’ve said nothing about food. We ate “Sate” at the hotel and also at Alec’s dinner party last night: meat and chicken on skewers, with pungent sauce, and rice. Hors d’oeuvres of bean sprouts and other vegetables immersed in chicken soup, with spicy pepper sauce spread on top. Delicious.

Wednesday, October 3, 1990

Jakarta–mountains–Singapore

Another rich day. Although my stay in Jakarta will have been ridiculously short (I’ve been told this repeatedly), I’ve probably done more in 2½ days than many visitors do in a fortnight. Today Alec and I drove north on the new toll road to the volcanic mountains, about one hour away only. First, near the summit, we stopped to see tea plantations, stretching beautifully in all directions, often on almost vertical slopes. Then we found a group of peasants harvesting the tea leaves and stopped. A beautiful, vivacious girl of about 17 explained how they pick only the leaves at the very top, the new, fresh, tender ones. The older, more brittle ones are avoided. They grab the leaves in clumps, fistfuls, and dump them into large wicker baskets. The leaves are then baked in an oven, processed through a machine, and packed for shipping. The plants produce for five years, then must be cut down, and the field replanted. Alec took a nice photo of me with her, wearing her hat. When I reached into her basket my finger encountered a razor-sharp knife and cut it, but we applied alcohol and antiseptic. Then we continued up another steep mountain to a European compound: country villas for Phillips and other industries, and JIS’s cabin, actually a deluxe country villa that sleeps eight. Perched at the very top of a crag. Clear air. Coolness. View of terraced rice fields, volcanic peaks. The caretaker, Alec’s friend, greeted us with the typical broad smile. We then followed him to his village, a ½ mile away. This is the other side of Indonesia. Poverty, but community, dignity, tranquility. No streets once you leave the main road. No electricity. Narrow paths following the water channels, which were full and racing. These, by a system of sluices going to each family’s plot, flood the rice fields. By closing the sluice the field is then drained while the rice matures. We then left even these paths, passed a house (they have rattan walls, dirt floors, tin roofs) with old grandfather in a fez, toothless, a grandma minding the baby, continued on the narrow strips of raised ground, a considerable distance, to our guide’s cottage. Kerosene stove, no chairs; they eat on mats, cross-legged. His daughter was there and grandmother and grandfather. His wife works as a servant for Japanese in Jakarta. It started to rain, and the oldsters hurried and gathered up the sheaves of rice that had been laid out to dry, putting them under cover. It’s chiefly a barter economy. One rice field feeds them; the others are used to trade for needs. No money is exchanged. When the rice plants are pulled up, he does need money (almost US $5.00) to rent a water buffalo and driver for a day to plough under the old plants. He showed us rice in various stages of readiness: four months to harvest, two months, and post-harvest. He had an umbrella in the house, so we formed an unlikely procession on the way back, with me as honored guest under the umbrella and the others behind, hoping not to slip in the mud. Saw a coffee tree with branches hanging over the lane and a solo bean.

We then had a quiet lunch of sandwiches in the car, parked on another back road, watching children returning from school. Then drove directly to the Soeharto-Hatta airport. It was a good visit, short and very sweet. I can see now that Alec has a normal, interesting, useful existence, with a remarkable relationship to the host country. He told me, for example, of a school servant (there are hordes of them, drivers, guards, gardeners, cleaners, an assistant in every classroom, busboys, etc. in the cafeteria, dressed in black bow ties) burned her face in boiling water and just disappeared. No one cared or noticed. But Alec inquired, found she’d gone to a miserable local witch doctor, and personally escorted her to the Western clinic used by the expats. I felt best not to query him about future plans, but from his own conversation two things seem clear: (a) he’s not going to stay here forever, (b) he’s not going to return home next year. He spoke about returning for 1991–92.

Sitting now in the extraordinary hall of Singapore’s Changi airport. Planes going to Moscow, Bangkok, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Dakar. Lovely Singapore Airlines hostesses much in evidence, in their parti-colored gowns, tight bodices, slit in the front. Arabs and Japanese much in evidence plus Africans, Chinese of course, and lots of European types. Each day the newspaper speaks of Iraqi preparations for terrorist acts against Americans, and yet we are going ahead with this inane and unnecessary cruise. Chrysanthi and I will both feel immense relief when we touch ground at JFK on October 18th.

Thursday, October 4, 1990

Athens–Istanbul

Arrived Athens around 4:00 a.m. local time after an uneventful flight of about twelve hours. Athens airport a shambles, especially compared to Singapore. As the porter in the men’s room said when I asked if there weren’t a plug for electric razors, “Τι λες, βρε; Οι προεστάμενοι, μόνο χρήμα θέλουν.” Upon inquiry, since my afternoon Turkish Air flight wasn’t posted on the departure table, I learned that there was a morning flight via Olympic, and took that instead, driven to the other terminal by a surly driver. The terminal was lined wall to wall with tourists sleeping in sleeping bags or on nothing on the floor. As I was checking in, a voice sounded in utter astonishment, “Professor Bien, what are you doing here?” Turned out to be a Greek who did his B.A. at Yale and heard me when I lectured there. Then he did an M.E. at Thayer. Knows Stelios, of course. Nice interlude. Flight to Istanbul with miserable excuse for breakfast because Olympic catering is on strike.

Taxi to Laleli district of Istanbul, Ordu Caddesi, downtown. Horrendous traffic, bumper to bumper. Talkative driver but of course I didn’t understand a word. Lots of sea wall in evidence driving along the Bosporus. Ramada very fancy, superb architecture. Restoration that joined together four older apartment buildings. But I discovered to my shock that my extra day is at my own expense at $140.00 a day plus $12.00 for breakfast. Lovely shower and change of clothes. Nap. (Jet lag in evidence; I didn’t pursue the feast-fast-regime at all.) Then: quiet working time in the room, writing my “Cavafy on Conversion” lecture. Walked outside a bit. A vibrant city, very modern yet still somewhat oriental with outside bazaars, etc.

Friday, October 5, 1990

Istanbul

Telephoned Ünsal family. We’ll have supper tonight. Telephoned Father Meliton at the Patriarchate. Told me to come anytime between 9 and 4 including Saturdays. Worked more on the lecture. I picked up lots of material, some by design, some accidentally, in Melbourne and Sydney. Almost finished. Travel Dynamics group arrived later in the afternoon. Bill Scott, Kathleen Corrigan, Laura Borzumato-Kalogris from the TD office, and Peter Croyle, the trip director. Also Robert Grant, University of Chicago professor, and his wife. Change of plans (failure to provide slide projectors) made me the first lecturer. So, from 6:00 to 7:00 I gave my stirring account of the Άλωση, from the Greek point of view, of course, spending lots of time on the last mass in Αγία Σοφία and also on the transfer of books and manuscripts and knowledge from Constantinople to Italy, France, and England as a result of the Fall. Sleepy audience, but most seemed awake. Then cocktail reception, during which Mr. and Mrs. Ünsal appeared. I extolled their daughter to them, truthfully, because Selen (from Σελήνη) is truly a remarkable student and human being. They took me to the Kúmkapι section, like the square in Thessaloniki with all the restaurants, only more so. Young men on the street corner took charge of parking the car; traffic and parking downtown is very bad. Good system. Hundreds of restaurants, one next to the other; thousands of customers around tables on the sidewalk, and inside. Mostly men, παρέες of ten to fifteen; much camaraderie. Street musicians wandering from table to table, gypsies mostly. Aout (like a huge mandolin, with curved neck, held against the chest), clarion, drum, tambourine, violin played without being tucked under the chin. We went to Selen’s favorite, the Kör agop restaurant, Hos Geldiniz Afiyet Olsun, which was mobbed, but they found a table for us upstairs. Mr. Ünsal obviously very important. Owner obsequious and efficient. Found ourselves in a room occupied mostly by a wedding party. Groom in tuxedo, bride in flowing white gown. No menu. Mr. Ünsal ordered—mezez, delicious of course, all kinds, wave after wave: shrimp, squid, salad, cheese; then a delicious baked fish served in the ταψί in which it was cooked. All this done very leisurely, over several hours. As Mrs. Ünsal said, all these diners were overcoming stress, so why hurry? When the gypsies arrived and began to play, the groom jumped up and began to dance, soon joined by others, including the bride. Dances very similar to what I know in Greece, but no circle dances, rather men dancing individually face to face with the partner, male or female. Sexual gyration of abdomen à la belly dance. This got wilder and wilder (with several intermissions) until the groom’s bow tie and jacket had been shed and he was dancing on top of the tables, as were several others. But the bride retained her clothes and decorum. Tremendous youthful vitality. I thought to myself, No wonder the Turks make such good soldiers! Put a gun and bayonet in these hands and . . . watch out. Our youth is so flabby by contrast, sleeping all morning, drinking to soporific point. Here there was dance, song, laughter. No alcohol (except champagne rather late in the evening).

Saturday, October 6, 1990

Istanbul

Tour to Αγία Σοφία, Blue Mosque, Hippodrome, Topkapi. The first two fail to move me now as they did when I first saw them, although I continue to appreciate, of course, the wonder of Αγία Σοφία. Much of it behind scaffolding didn’t help. When I mentioned to Kathleen how shameful it was for the Venetians to have plundered Constantinople, she replied that if they hadn’t we would probably no longer have the wonderful horses, which would have been melted down. Topkapi I liked this time immensely, whereas previously I hadn’t. Reasons: I took the harem tour with Bill and Kathleen. A whole world: 400 rooms, most of the walls covered with decorative tile in colorful patterns. Here the wives and concubines lived with their Negro eunuchs; here the sultan’s children were educated. Swimming baths, outdoor porticos. But I enjoyed the rest as well, because done more leisurely than in the past, and I skipped the porcelain. The pavilions overlooking the Bosporus are delicious.

The three of us then had an adventure trying to find the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Fener district. The cab driver didn’t know exactly where; he dropped us in a street, and pointed uphill. So we started uphill. Neighborhood just like Naples, swarming with children who all had a sentence or two of English to try out on us. Laundry, including Turkish carpets, strung out across the street from building to building. Everyone gave us a different direction, and we went round in circles until a tiny girl asked “Orthodox?” and very authoritatively led us in the opposite direction, to the right place. A strange enclave of comparative splendor in the midst of the pullulating poverty. (Also, we saw one of the Phanariot mansions nearby, now fallen into ruins.) Guard at the gate. Courtyard. Some priests old and young. Asked for Father Meliton, Patriarch’s secretary, whom I had spoken to on the telephone. Βγήκε. Strange coldness; no one approached us to speak. So we stood awkwardly while the 4:00 o’clock liturgy began in a totally empty church. But a half hour later, sudden commotion and in strode the Patriarch and Meliton and others, back from the airport, as we later learned. Patriarch imposing. Everyone doing obeisance, kissing his hand, groveling. He walked past us without taking notice. Meliton approached. He’d forgotten yesterday’s telephone call. Αύριο, είπε. Είμαστε πολύ απασχολημένοι σήμερα. Στις 4:00 η ώρα. So we left.

Then the Ünsals came again, this time taking not only me but also Bill and Kathleen out to dinner to a very sedate restaurant, meat instead of fish, way in the northern suburbs. How well the middle class seems to do here! For coffee we adjourned to their comfortable apartment, filled with paintings. Mr. Ünsal expressed his fear of the Islamic fundamentalist movement that threatens the secular state set up by Kemal Atatürk, and indeed at that moment, turning on the news, he heard that a liberal MP who’d been outspoken against such fundamentalism, had just been assassinated. Returning, he drove us through the campus of Robert College, which is adjacent to their apartment on a slope overlooking the Bosporus.

Sunday, October 7, 1990

Istanbul

Morning excursion to Suleiman Mosque (disappointing), then to Church of the Χώρα, where the ascension fresco is breathtaking. Nice to see this monument again. But I now realize the definite Westernization of post-iconoclastic mosaics. Viewed the walls on the way back and then got out again at the Fener. More of the same. Ο σκοπός outside hesitant. No, Meliton wasn’t there; everyone was gone on a picnic. He found an old monk inside whom he called Παππούς, and somehow got permission to take us round, although it was forbidden. So he opened doors to rather resplendent rooms: the throne room where the Patriarch receives δεσποτάδες, the refectory, and a room with portraits on the walls of the entire succession of patriarchs from the start to Δημήτριος today, including of course Χρυσόστομος and the other greats. Outside: the black door from which Γρηγόριος was hanged in 1821 or thereabouts. I asked the σκοπός πού πάει ο Ελληνισμός της Κων/πόλεως. He answered: Δε μας πειράζουν αφού είμαστε λίγοι . . . και αν μας πείραζαν οι Αμερικανοί θα διαμαρτυρούσανε. Interesting. Did he think of emigrating to Greece? Όχι. Τι να κάμω εκεί. Δεν ξέρω καμμιά τέχνη. So here he has his little unskilled job and is OK. As for my two συστατικά γράμματα, we slipped them under Meliton’s and the Patriarch’s office doors, respectively. Του κάκου!

Monday, October 8, 1990

Istanbul–at sea

Morning excursion up the Bosporus past resplendent palaces, past Robert College, past the Rumeli Hissar fortress built by Mehmet in 1452 to control the sea passage, beautifully preserved. Then by bus over the Bosporus bridge to the Asiatic side and back again. Nice lunch with Bill and Kathleen. Boarded the Illiria later in the afternoon. The stewards are now all stewardesses—Filipinos. Didn’t know anyone; different captain. Only Vane, our guide in ’79 and ’82 ran up to say hello. They’re allowed to have ⅓ crew not Greeks, and they hire Filipinos because they can pay them less.

Tuesday, October 9, 1990

Καβάλα, Φιλίπποι

Nice tour of Philippi. I remember the huge load of corn (kernels only) being loaded onto a boat at Καβάλα pier, exported by Greece and made into corn oil elsewhere. At Philippi: the stream where, supposedly, Paul preached and baptized; Lydia Hotel (!), remembering his convert Lydia; Roman forum with two huge basilicas, one just foundations but the other with central pillars and arches intact, very impressive. Telephoned Chrysanthi. She’ll come to the boat tomorrow with Lola. Bob Grant lectured interestingly on Paul in Salonika, stressing that his language shows him speaking to Jews much more than to Gentiles. Grant’s point is that Paul thought like a Jew, not a Greek, although he tried to think like a Greek just a bit in Athens, in order to appeal to a very different audience.

Wednesday, October 10, 1990

Θεσ/νίκη

Chrysanthi and Lola pulled up in a taxi just as we docked. Nice reunion with lots of hugs and kisses. Breakfast aboard. Then they went shopping and I went to the American center in Metropoleos to begin thinking about my Hebraism and Hellenism lecture. Saw Δημήτρης Ντούτης. Long talk; he’s fine, still doing college counseling, and teaching a bit, working with the Fulbright office. Also Mrs. Koliopoulou, the librarian. Nice to be remembered so readily by people. Met Chrysanthi and Lola. Όλυμπος Νάουσσα with Costas, Stavros, Odysseas, and Nikos also there. Odysseas the most lively. Nikos doing orthopedic research and hoping for more time in Birmingham. Stavros now doing offset printing and desktop publishing. Then to Vouli’s to meet the Drapers, new heads of the Farm School. Bill McGrew was there as well; we discussed the proposed Dartmouth Neohellenic Foreign Study program, which now seems possible. He actually knows Tsacopoulos. Norman Gilbertson there as well, but not his young wife. After September 1991 they’ll be back in Minneapolis. Bruce and Tad telephoned from Metamorphosis to say hello. They’re flourishing there in retirement. Drapers exceedingly nice. All had learned Greek from Demotic Greek I and were most appreciative. Chance to see Vouli more intimately after they left; also her mother and Κυρά Κούλα. Talked about Stylianos, of course, but I held back the degree of his obstinacy. Chrysanthi’s goodbyes very easy and unemotional, with family earlier and now with Vouli. She’s delighted to be leaving Greece, it seems. Later, in the boat, she expanded on the hateful relationships in the family, especially regarding George, who seems now to be psychologically sick although he pretends that it’s Andreas who is sick. It’s a mess, full of gossip and misunderstanding and enmity. Good to escape. And Lola and Costas’s life, now that Lola is retired, is utterly boring. They talk about food, watch television, gossip about all the χωριάτες και αγράμματους that they can look down upon, etc.

Spoke with McGrew about the new “universities” proliferating in Athens and Salonika. Very suspicious and exploitative, he says, confirming what I’ve heard from others. Caveat emptor.

Thursday, October 11, 1990

Volos

Skipped the Meteora trip. Worked on Hebraism and Hellenism lecture, but the highlight of the day was a visit to Christos Alexiou’s sister Κατίνα Καψάλη, where we found as well Christos’s mother, aged 90, his other sister, and, of course, Pavlos. Pavlos is a hulking, hairy 24-year-old. We found him eating. Then he rose with some grunts and jumped up and down and paced back and forth (as he used to). But we learned that he is perfectly sweet and benign now. Also, he understands everything in both Greek and English, can translate, can do arithmetic, etc., and also has self-consciousness; he knows that he cannot talk and that this sets him apart. But he can talk. Like a deaf person, with minimal skill at forming the sounds. He says his name (more or less), his father’s name, etc., when asked. But he doesn’t initiate conversation or, indeed, put entire sentences together. Katina, who is fiercely intelligent and articulate, although virtually uneducated, went on at great length, and with fervor, about their life. The difficulty of his puberty—people told them to take him to a prostitute; they refused. Now, as Katina says, he relieves himself via masturbation in the toilet and has no idea whatsoever of the connection between his desires and women. If he sees a woman in bed he cuddles up to her as a child to a mother, and goes to sleep. He is therefore inoffensive to women on the street, which is a blessing. Katina was eloquent about her role. She is 65 and has had him for fifteen or so years. She was unable to give birth to her own child, so Pavlos is a substitute. She is resolved that he’ll never go to an institution. She feels, quite rightly, probably, that if she’d had him earlier his condition would be considerably better. She wants to “give,” not to “take” in her life, and she connects these ideals with her early involvement in the Αντίσταση and then the εμφύλιο, where both she and her husband were captured, imprisoned, tortured. She is lame. I think she was mutilated under torture, but she is such a beautiful, strong spirit today despite, or perhaps because of, privation. Her witness should be more widely known. If only Christos could write the whole story . . . or why not me?

To return to the spoiled, overfed clientele of the cruise is difficult.

Friday, October 12, 1990

Ephesus

I’m writing this actually on October 15 on a balcony of the Grande Bretagne Hotel in Athens while a newspaper photographer photographs me for an interview in the Greek Herald of Sydney. In any case, it was good to visit Ephesus again. I read from Acts in the theater and this was much appreciated.

Saturday, October 13, 1990

Patmos, Amorgos

The library at Patmos has a volume by Janos Laskaris on display; I’d forgotten that. Also several Aldine press books, à propos my lecture on the Fall of Constantinople. We talked with a twenty-year-old monk who joined the monastery at age sixteen and was very sweet and content. He is from Patmos. When Chrysanthi said how nice it was that he could be close to his family, he replied that he wished he were further away. I read from the Apocalypse in St. John’s cave. People seem to appreciate these on-site readings.

Then to Amorgos, totally non-touristic. Maybe the high spot of the trip. We had rough seas that delayed our arrival until almost 5:00 p.m., near sunset. Long bus ride in a rickety bus with garrulous driver who kept taking his hands off the wheel to gesticulate, making everyone nervous because the road has hairpin turns and precipitous cliffs without guard rails. Forgot to say that the tender that brought us in had a rudder no different from that on Odysseus’s ship; the boatman stood on the back deck holding the rudder in one hand and manipulating four strings attached to various levers on the engine, as though he were holding the reins of a horse. The bus deposited us finally on the opposite side of the island, high above the water, in an area totally desolate. Then one begins the ascent of 400 steps. And lo! about ⅓ of the way along suddenly the Hozoviotissa Monastery comes into view, a totally white teardrop glued to the cheek of the cliff. The whole thing is about five storeys high but only ten feet wide. It’s built into a kind of depression in the rock. When we arrived the sun had set and the monks (only 5 now out of a possible 35) had lit candles and oil lamps—no electricity up here. We ascended narrow stairways to a reception room where the traditional loukoumi and lemon brandy were served with great diligence. Then to the chapel to see the wonder-working icon, and to the “museum” to see incunabula and manuscripts, but nothing approaching the treasures of Patmos. Darkness descending apace, we left hurriedly, and barely got down in time as the light faded. The bus trip back was just as frightening as the trip up, but uneventful. An extraordinary site as well as sight, totally different from any other monastery. . . . I lectured on “Cavafy and Conversion.”

Sunday, October 14, 1990

Santorini . . . Piraeus

We got into the caldera but the gale-force winds prevented the tenders from operating and the captain, unable to anchor because of the water’s extreme depth, was most uneasy as the ship kept being blown this way and that. So we decided to go directly back to Piraeus.

Monday, October 15, 1990

Athens

We didn’t go with the group to the Peloponnesus. Went directly to the Grande Bretagne Hotel with the amazing “Clem” sharing our taxi. Βάσω Μώραλη came with a photographer to interview me for Ένα magazine, mostly on Kazantzakis’s letters. Telephoned Mrs. Kazantzakis, but she couldn’t remember my name; she has lost her memory, poor thing. Reunion with Christos at the hotel, then at his flat, with Έρη Σταυροπούλου and their delightful child Ασπασία-Μαρία. Christos still in the dumps. His positions, both at the υπουργείο and the πανεπιστήμιο, are threatened. He doesn’t know from one year to the next if he’ll be renewed. And the problem of Pavlos remains very difficult because Katina and Thanasis will grow old and die, and what then? No care in Greece at all, practically, for defective children. This is Christos’s assignment in the Υπουργείο but there’s no money. But their child is a great pleasure and Eri is an intelligent, productive scholar in the Παν/μου Αθηνών. Christos wants to help me find a suitable publisher for a translated Kazantzakis and Politics.

Tuesday, October 16, 1990

Athens

To Ευσταθιάδης to collect my royalties: δρ 21,000 in three years, about $45.00 a year! But he had my book displayed in the shop windows, which is nice. Stopped at Θεμέλιο, Γνώστης, και Κολλάρος à propos of translation projects, but the director of Θεμέλιο was very cold, the director of Γνώστης resides elsewhere, and Καψάλες wasn’t in yet (at 11:30 a.m.) at Kollaros.

Acropolis tour with the group. Bill Scott’s lecture this morning was excellent: Periclean Athens, the triumph of human rationalization over bestial instinct. Lunch in Συντριβάνη with cruise people. Rested in the afternoon; bad cold. Then λουκουμάδες with Christos. More talk about publishers and about people to act as Greek representatives for JMGS.

Wednesday, October 17, 1990

Athens

I lectured on “Hebraism and Hellenism.” Good response. A general of the US Army attended as a guest. Then the interview with EPT, Athens radio, about the Dartmouth group, my work as a translator, etc. Then rendezvous with nephew Andreas and his bride Βέτα for lunch, but they never showed up although they sent a gift and a card expressing expectation to see us. George went to Lola in Salonika and Lola telephoned earlier conveying George’s instructions to us not to try to contact Andreas. All very strnge. So we ate alone in Συντριβάνη, where we are treated as “regular customers” already. Nap. Bad cold, cough, maybe temperature. Then Ιάκωβος Τσαλίκογλου picked us up and drove us to his comfortable villa in Psychiko, his wife’s ancestral home (her parents winter in Lausanne). Sweet family, including a daughter at Campion School who speaks Greek with British intonation on the vowels. Their son was rejected from Dartmouth and is attending Connecticut College. Iakovos has a love-affair with Dartmouth. Says it formed his moral character (cf. what Matt Wiencke says about Eleazar Wheelock’s purpose). He’s teaching now in La Verne College, which he says is fully legitimate, unlike so many other “colleges.” He and his wife are thinking to develop a book-supply service to England and the US. He gave me some leads for JMGS contributors, etc.

Going to his house for supper, we missed the farewell dinner at Delphi Restaurant for the cruise participants. People seem pleased. But this trip didn’t stretch me, personally, the way the previous three had done. And Chrysanthi keeps saying that she has no desire whatever to visit Greece; she’s disgusted with her family, unjustly because the only real problem is in George’s household.

In the morning I visited Ninetta Makrynikola at Kedros. She says they don’t do criticism any more; sales are too low. So she wasn’t interested in my books. I collected the grand sum of 9000 in royalties for three years!

Thursday, October 18, 1990

Athens–Paris–JFK–Pendle Hill

Up at 5:00 a.m. for final breakfast at the Grande Bretagne. Forgot to mention that yesterday at breakfast we encountered Norman Gilbertson and his young wife Diane, just arrived on the overnight train from Thessaloniki. She is charming. She’s a painter, but is here on a Fulbright to study Byzantine painting’s treatment of women. He looked handsome and dapper, and half his age. Said that Draper is a very good thing for the Farm School because Bruce, although creating a terrific atmosphere, was a poor manager and Draper is a good one. Draper’s Greek is coming along nicely. Faculty meetings are normally in Greek, and he manages.

Friday, October 19, 1990

Pendle Hill

Traveled 22 hours yesterday. Very lucky; landed at JFK before the severe storm that would have complicated things, make us miss our limousine, etc. But everything worked fine. This morning: breakfast at 7:30. Meeting at 8:10. Class on Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 1, at 9:30. I have about fifteen students as a result of the two videos I prepared for the two previous Fridays. Good class. But jet lag set in afterwards a bit.

Saturday, October 20, 1990

Daphne came to Philadelphia. Met her at 30th Street Station. Brunch at the New Orleans Café I know near Curtis. Walked to Penn’s Landing. She’s fine, still prospering in her job at S & S. Planning on going to Tokyo with Greg over New Year’s. But we’ll all convene at Pendle Hill for Thanksgiving.

Monday, October 22, 1990

Jack Wright is my “consultee.” He was in CPS, then went to a work camp in Finland, slept with a Danish girl there, married her two months before the birth of their first child, spent forty years in Sweden teaching English to foreigners, and now his wife wants to divorce him! Sad. What am I supposed to do? He says he wants to study philosophy, to catch up with all those lost years. But John Anderson, the nice dean here, says all he needs is a friend, someone who can listen. I’m going to put him in touch with John Tallmadge for a possible correspondence course.

Going through piles of mail. Paying bills. Back to reality.

After supper, Monday, Wednesday, Friday I sweep and/or mop the dining room with teammate Ted Webster.

This place is extraordinarily beautiful. Wide lawns, old trees, a mile-long path through the woods. Also, nice shopping center nearby. It’s a pleasure to have a car here. Meeting people, slowly.

Oliver Rodgers asked me to be clerk of the search committee for Margery Walker’s replacement. I accepted. Here we go again!

Set up computer, printer, and FAX. Home, sweet, home.

Leander sick in bed with a cough. We’ll see him when he gets better.

Friday, October 26, 1990

Class in the morning. Then Publications Committee from 12:00 to 4:15. Mopping the dining room. Then General Board. A full day.

Saturday, October 27, 1990

At Haverford Corporation in the morning. Told Tom Kessinger about Jakarta. He may ask me to be Quaker visitor at Haverford. Spoke to Tom Wood about Alec, hoping he’ll tempt him to return home. Tom spent ten years overseas himself, in Greece, then mostly in the UK. Not too sympathetic to our parental yearning. Lee Bennett very friendly. Also Wallace Collett, who’s just remarried a professor of Greek archeology who is digging at Troy. Also his son. Haverford prospering. They don’t have the curse of the Dartmouth Review.

Very nice PH program tonight. Reminiscing by Dan and Rosalie Wilson, Mary Hoxie Jones, others (e.g., Dorothy Steere) who knew Anna Brinton and Lydia Cadbury. Lots of laughs at the foibles of these great ones.

At afternoon session I presided over a helpful discussion of the problems of governance, hierarchical vs. Quaker, as they pertain to the selection of a new director.

Sunday, October 28, 1990

After Meeting, to Philadelphia to see the matinee of Les Miserables. Chrysanthi harangued me about taking on the clerkship of the search committee and neglecting the Kazantzakis letters. Etc., etc. Then laughed and said she really resented sharing me with so many others! Tension relaxed. The show mostly bored and annoyed me, because such mediocre music and sophomoric lyrics are so successful. But I warmed to it toward the end. Voices inadequate to the demands of the music. Good mise en scène, however. The story is simplistic (convicts are ethical, policemen are ogres), yet compelling despite all its artificiality. Supper in Chinatown. It’s nice to be in a city again.

Monday, October 29, 1990

I’m into the letters again. Jack Wright asked me why I elected to do such drudgery. Edward Bradley has gotten the go-ahead for the Modern Greek program at Anatolia. I’ve submitted a prospectus now for the required committee approvals. Thanasis Maskaleris wants me to be visiting professor at San Francisco State in 1992. But I think I’ll say No. Too much work (3 courses) plus I’d lose my “R” term at Dartmouth.

Tuesday, October 30, 1990

Dinner at Media Inn with Margery Walker. It’s a treat to escape PH occasionally, as nice as it is.

Wednesday, October 31, 1990

Our men’s group showed a video starring Robert Bly, who’s obsessed with the proposition that males, in our culture, are incapable of feeling. He’s blown a half-truth into a simplistic absolute.

Life in one room is no problem. I project to our future time at Kendal. Both Chrysanthi and I are easily adaptable, it seems. “But what will you do with all your books?” asks Chrysanthi.

November 3, 1990

Leander here with Deanna for supper. He’s bought a grand piano. Also, one of his compositions was played on the radio. He and Deanna will do the Kreutzer Sonata in April. I’ll send him Tolstoy’s story.

November 4, 1990

Swarthmore Meeting. John Moore there, and Paul Mangelsdorf. I sat with Oliver and Dorothy Rodgers. Huge meeting house built in the 19th century by the College itself. The College grounds are sumptuous, like a country estate. Avenue of oaks planted 100 years ago. Rose gardens.

Then to Longwood Gardens with Larry Ingle and his wife. He’s writing a new biography of George Fox. Chrysanthemum festival; orchids. Lovely. Then showed the Ingles Kendal.

November 5, 1990

Paul Lacey lectured tonight. Rambling 1¼ hour long. Disgraceful, although he had twenty minutes worth of good material on the “inner teacher.”

November 9, 1990

Last Temptation video screened here. I spoke before and after. Video has been cut, compared with the film. Many of the shocking episodes are excised. Much improved, but still too long. Yet I liked the film more and more.

November 10, 1990

A nice anecdote from Kazantzakis’s letter of February 8, 1932 to Istrati: ❡ Au moment où Abdoul Hassan, le grand ascèse musulman, agenouillé, priait Dieu, il entendit une voix qui disait: “Abdoul Hassan, Abdoul Hassan, si je révèle aux hommes tout ce que je sais de toi, ils te tueront à coups de pierres!” Et alors Abdoul Hassan répondit: “Eh Dieu! Prends garde! Si je révèle aux hommes tout ce que je sais de toi, malheur à toi!” Alors la voix du seigneur si fit entendre: “Chut, chut! mon cher Abdoul Hassan! Garde bien ton secret, je garderai aussi le mien, ô mon frère!”

Dinner with Bernie Haviland and Jim and Susan Thomas. Mrs. Haviland is a Lamb. She stupefied me by saying that the Lamb business dissolved. It no longer exists, owing to mismanagement by a hired director after Harold Lamb got too old. Also, the Bewley tea shops went bankrupt and were bought by someone else. So, the two most established Irish Quaker businesses in Ireland are no more. Havilands are saddled with a more-or-less delinquent grandson who refuses to stay at home because he hates his stepfather. Poor people! He sleeps on their living room floor and causes them no end of worry.

Sunday, November 11, 1990

To Kendal Meeting. Very touching. Probably 60–70 Friends gathered in the Kendal library. Good ministry. Leonard Kenworthy, Mary Hoxie Jones, Elizabeth Vining, Dr. Perera, the Metzes, the Rodgers, the Bain Davises—these are folks I knew. Met Francis Nicholson, author of “Quaker Money,” wheeling out Mrs. Jacobs, who was celebrating her 99th birthday. Nicholson a bit foggy regarding our collaboration on his pamphlet, but not at all foggy re: complaints that people hadn’t written to him praising it after it was published (!). Then to lunch with Bob and Mary Metz, preceded by drinks in their nice flat. Bain and Mrs. Davis joined us. A nice meal—small, sensible portions, served by high school students. Bob suggested we visit a du Pont estate called Winterthur. We did. They show period furniture from America: colonial, federalist, etc., stage by stage. Interesting but extremely pretentious.

Continued on to the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington. Supper with Tom Clark. I lectured this year on “Paradise Lost: Still Meaningful or Just a Dead Classic?” Twenty-five came from Kendal, in a bus. Good questions afterward. I used Hellenism/Hebraism material from the cruise, plus a TLS article on Toulmin’s ideas about Cosmopolis. A relaxed beer afterwards at the hotel, which was “jumping” with two wedding parties and a fund-raiser for Jewish refugees. Pianist playing Chopin in the lounge for three hours, poor soul.

November 12, 1990

Consultancy as usual with Jack Wright. Such a strange man, cut off from wife and family after 41 years. Very good lecture by Char Madigan, who runs a shelter for the homeless in Minneapolis, a nun, also nonviolent peace activist and practitioner of civil disobedience. Great admirer of Dorothy Day. Such a “whole” woman, capable of true mourning for the injustices of American life, but equally capable of raucous, infectious laughter.

November 13, 1990

Lecture-demonstration by Dimitri Pokrovsky, a troupe of dancers/singers from Moscow. The names! Sasha, Masha, Siga, Piotr . . . They did folk songs, but the most beautiful was part of the Orthodox Easter service: a female “narrator” against a background of five or six male voices, very low, à la Boris Godunov. So sad, so expressive. Many of the folk songs and dances resembled Greek ones, but always with differences. It was extremely moving, partly because so intimate. But it’s frustrating not being able to have long conversations with Sasha, Masha & Co. They don’t know English.

November 14, 1990

To Kendal again, this time to Oliver and Dorothy Rodgers. Drinks (non-alcoholic), dinner, then chamber music: Fauré, Bach, Corelli, Telemann. He’s a good violist, plus a violin maker. In his retirement he’s continuing a study of the physical properties of sound in relation to the violin, writing research papers, etc. What a nice man! Once a week he spends as a volunteer at AFSC in Philadelphia. Once a week he spends at Pendle Hill (after quartets in the morning). Thrice a week he’s in his acoustics lab at the University of Delaware.

November 15, 1990

Four-hour supper at Media Inn with Rebecca Mays: a sweet but very complicated woman, scarred by abandonment by her husband after they’d had two children together. She helped me understand the staff dissatisfaction at PH, among other things. The major problem seems to be inflexibility: the “fetish” (my word, not hers) of “community.”

November 16, 1990

Conference with John Anderson, the dean, regarding the Executive Secretary search. I want the staff to be more involved, and he agrees. We’ll solicit nominations from staff.

John gave me a second conferee: Reinhold Schroeder. Another sad case. Cared for his invalid mother for fifteen years. Then a half-brother appeared, got her to give him power of attorney, and promptly removed all her money from her bank account, leaving Reinhold in effect disinherited. He’s a man in his late 40s or early 50s, without any skills. A Quaker “in the spirit,” often ministering in a semi-hysterical way at Meeting for Worship. He’s only skill: caring for the aged. What am I supposed to do?

To Haverford in the evening for Alfred Swan memorial concert. He was born in 1890 and would have been 100 years old. John Davison played with a cellist, and solo. Then the Haverford/Bryn Mawr chorus and Dickinson College chorus did liturgical selections for Russian Orthodox liturgy. As I expected, the music seemed exceedingly unexciting and mediocre. The choral works better than the instrumental, but still unexceptional compared, for example, to the Paschal liturgy we heard the other night. The real fun was to see Jane Swan again. She remembered me, hugged me, remembered that I’d been working for Pan American Airways (!), knew about my translations, etc. And there was Ayosha (Alexis), whom I’d last seen at age 2. Also Al Clayton, still teaching at Germantown Friends. John Davison unfriendly, as always, but we made some conversation. Jane is remarried, to a wealthy man again older than she. They live most comfortably in Haverford with a backyard swimming pool, etc. She served vodka at the reception. Davison follows Swan’s pedagogy only partially, he admitted.

November 18, 1990

To NYC to David Erlanger’s for Kinhaven Evaluation Committee. Alice Henkin there with her four-month-old baby. John Austin, Paul Rudolf also. Reports are kinder toward Jerry this year, but still quite critical, especially re: the chorus. We must begin to think about replacing him . . . gradually.

November 19, 1990

Reading Jay Parini’s novel on Tolstoy. It’s superb, so “teasing.”

Have I recorded here that Deckerts’ land is up for sale? Mary Lou died last summer and John is eager to sell. Asking $500 per acre. Chrysanthi is opposed. Alec is in favor.

John Anderson lectured on his battle to insert holistic medicine into medical school curricula. I thought of Dr. Bill Chambers, who was such a prophet in this regard, and so disregarded by his professional colleagues.

November 20, 1990

Men’s group: George Kramer, Ignatio Monreah, and me. It’s a lovely format: men gathered together to talk about their “maleness” without reference to business. Inspired of course by the women’s group, which meets concurrently.

November 21, 1990

Mother arrived via AMTRAK. Gorgeous summerlike day here. We went together to Longwood Gardens to see the chrysanthemums and orchids again. Then to Kendal. Dinner with Oliver and Dorothy Rodgers. Tour. Mother uneasy, afraid of so many people she’ll have to get to know when she enters Kendal at Hanover. But she didn’t balk when I suggested this view of Kendal at Longwood. I think she’s failing ever so slightly, alas. Certain inconsistencies in her discourse that I never noticed before. Lastly, to Margery and Allan Walker for dessert. Their new home in Groton, Vermont, is looking lovely. Their niece, Maria Cox, was there; she’s a Lutheran pastor in the DC area, very vivacious.

November 22, 1990, Thanksgiving

Daphne arrived in the morning, as did Leander. Lovely to have everyone together, except Alec, of course. Leander is enjoying his new piano. Daphne is excited about forthcoming trip to Japan courtesy of Goldman Sachs. Fun at 1:00 p.m. Storytelling, singing, Doug Gwyn’s satirical song about an incurable addiction to . . . cheeseburgers. Douglas Steere greeted me with a smile: “So now you’re in charge of everything!” (referring to my clerkship of the search committee for the new executive secretary). One hundred twenty people for turkey dinner at 2:00. Very jolly and relaxed and delicious. Chrysanthi made spanakopita for the vegetarians: a treat. We walked the path afterward, talked and talked, about the Deckerts’ property among other things.

November 23, 1990

Pendle Hill–New York City

Good Meeting today. About joy coupled with sorrow. I held my class, although half the students were absent. Free discussion; went well. Tutorial (consultantship) with Reinhold afterwards. He’s better now; convinced that he is doing the right thing by leaving at term’s end. Then to 30th Street to deliver Mother to the Montrealer. Continued by car with Daphne and Chrysanthi to Manhattan. We’re really making this into a four-day holiday. Supper at Daphne’s new favorite, Vagabondo’s, on 62nd between 1st and 2nd. Very Italian, as though run by Mafia. No menu. Bowling alley in one of the rooms. Checkered tablecloths. But good food honestly priced. Overnight in Daphne’s apartment at 717 Madison, freshly painted, with posters on the walls, looking quite nice now.

Saturday, November 24, 1990

Worked all day at the Yale Club on Addie Pollis’s article for JMGS, miserably written, alas. Supper with Chrysanthi and Daphne at China Peace on West 44th. Then to Brooks Atkinson Theater to see the play about C. S. Lewis, Shadowlands, beautifully acted by Nigel Hawthorne and Jane Alexander. It opens with Lewis lecturing on suffering as good because it forces us out of complacency. The point, however, is that for Lewis these are just words. His comfortable academic life has insulated him from suffering and indeed, in a way, from life itself. The play is actually a devastating critique of Oxbridge complacency, reminding me of the Senior Common Room experience I had with Oliver Taplin at Oxford. But into Lewis’s life comes a brash American admirer, and an attachment develops that he tries to prevent. When she suddenly comes down with cancer, however, he marries her and they experience a few months of joy before she dies. Then Lewis rages against God. This suffering does not seem just, does not fit within the neat justifications mouthed by Christianity. Yet when all is said and done he retains his faith, by a hair’s breadth. At the end he delivers a lecture like the one at the beginning, but with the huge difference that he now feels what he is saying.

Chrysanthi spent the day with Daphne, talking about Gregory. Daphne is still hesitant. She says that he is wonderful, with good values, caring, sober, etc., but has one defect: he’s not warmly demonstrative of his love. He’s like me, she says. She wants someone more attentive, etc. Chrysanthi “lectured” her, as usual, saying that to desire perfection in a husband is ruinous and praising Greg for the virtues he does indeed possess. We’ll see . . .

Also regarding Shadowlands, Chrysanthi differed from us, and from the critics, in concluding that Lewis, as depicted, was still only intellectual, that he never entered a non-mindly relationship with his wife. Again, I see myself as the target of all this, alas.

Sunday, November 25, 1990

Yale Club again. More work on JMGS, this time Artemis Leontis’s article. Chrysanthi and Daphne met me and we lunched at the Skating Rink in Rockefeller Center. Then Daphne left us and we two saw Maggie Smith in Peter Schaefer’s Lettice and Lovage, which is really about architecture, I suppose, also about myth vs. history. But mainly it’s a vehicle for a bravura performance by Maggie Smith, with very fine support from Margaret Tyzack. Sophisticated comedy, not really as good as GBS but worthily in that vein. The audience rose en masse to give a standing ovation, something very rare in super-sophisticated NYC.

Monday, November 26, 1990

Back to reality. Mail. JMGS. Jack Wright consultancy. Piano practice. I sight-read the Pathetique Sonata for the first time in years. Actually, my playing is getting better despite my neglect. Swept and mopped the dining room after supper.

Tuesday, November 27, 1990

Supper at Kendal. Music with Oliver Rodgers again. Very satisfying. He’s a splendid partner. In our search for the Executive Secretary of PH we now have two candidates: Dan Seeger and Edwin Hinshaw. We’re hoping that Asia Bennett will also apply.

Returned at 10:00 p.m. to hear the telephone ringing. It was Daphne overjoyed, to announce that Greg had proposed and she had accepted! “I’m going to get married!” Chrysanthi and I overjoyed. Chrysanthi justifiably pleased with Saturday’s lecture. Wedding to be in the summer so that Alec will be here. In Hanover. Chrysanthi and I are so excited, we couldn’t sleep all night. I faxed Alec.

Wednesday, November 28, 1990

Alec telephoned congratulations to Daphne, saying that with luck her action will speed up his own. Let’s hope.

Reading Books X and XI of Paradise Lost. How fine Book XI is! One truly senses how lamentable human sin is, given the possibility of human perfection that we sense but cannot attain.

Discovered bv accident:

There was a kind curate in Kew

Who kept a large cat in a pew:

There he taught it each week

A new letter in Greek—

But it never got further than mu.

December 1, 1990

Dinner at Tom and Pat Wood’s mansion in Wynnewood. And of course Alec telephoned from Jakarta, prearranged by Tom. Interesting crowd, including an American woman born in Beirut who had lived recently in Kuwait. Said what Saddam really wants is an outlet to the sea, and to save face. Another woman, an archeologist, has lived for decades in Athens and is now translating from Greek to English. Tom wonderfully cordial. Seems to have “adopted” both of our boys. Never had children of his own, although now he has step-children.

December 2, 1990

Beautiful ceramics and jewelry at the Art Center next door. All locally made by craftsmen. Supper with Naoko and Yasuo in a Japanese restaurant on City Line and Haverford Avenue, next to the Jewish delicatessen that Alec took me to some years back. Neither Chrysanthi nor I much liked the Japanese cuisine, but it is a sort of experience especially with Japanese friends. They’ll be moving to Stony Book in June.

December 4, 1990

Lunch at Haverford with Ed Bronner. Tom Kessinger wants me to be the Rufus Jones Associates’ visitor this year and I’m scared stiff. I seem to be turning into a “weighty Friend” and this is not deserved. Met Emma Lapsansky, Ed’s successor in the Quaker collection. Charming. She knows Alec; her kids went to Friends Central. High opinion of him. She’s joining the PH Publications Committee.

December 6, 1990

Asia Bennett came to talk about the Executive Secretary opening. She’ll apply but wants it hush-hush until next year so she doesn’t become a lame duck at AFSC.

December 7, 1990

Hectic day. Final class 9:30 to 12:00. I stressed Milton’s teaching that Adam (i.e., we) must avoid both despair and euphoria as we experience the world’s evil, on the one hand, and God’s loving-kindness, on the other. What’s required is balance, patience, endurance. Then Publication Committee until 4:00. Again we rejected all MSS submitted, including John Tallmadge’s, alas. Then Kate Cohen from 4:00 until 7:30, going over the articles for the next JMGS. She’s done a good job as copyeditor. Then PH Executive Board from 7:30 until 9:30.

December 8, 1990

Executive Board in the morning. Supper at Kendal with Oliver and Dorothy Rodgers and then chamber music. Delightful. Schubert, Bach, Vaughan-Williams.

December 9, 1990

To the Jewish delicatessen for omelet with lox and onions. Then to Bethlehem. Leander’s piano, a used grand, is fine although far from perfect. Attended Moravian College Christmas vespers in the Central Moravian Church. Dick and Monica Schantz, choir director and organist, respectively. An exquisite two hours: brass choir, mixed chorus, bells, winds and strings, soloists, moving prayer by Clarke Chapman (Ardis’s husband, who officiated so well at Benjy Bidlack’s service). A “show” yet it transcended this to become truly a service of praise at Advent. Dick’s sense of contrast is exquisite. And when all stops seemed to have been pulled out, then he introduced a boy soprano soloist to top everything. Candlelight service at the end, with the huge congregation holding lighted candles in the darkened church and raising them in exultation toward the illuminated Star of Bethlehem over the altar. Such joyous and mellow singing by the congregation! We were extraordinarily moved.

Flat tire on the way home. But we pulled off the road into a floodlit parking lot, the perfect place to change it. So, the day ended well.

December 10, 1990

Lunch at Kendal with Lloyd Lewis. He’s furious at Pendle Hill for proceeding with the extension to Brinton House, and has resigned. I told him that his resignation has had a powerful effect. We are doubly attentive to shunting money now back into programmatic areas. But he is convinced that we’re robbing the endowment all the same. Regarding Kendal, he’s mildly apprehensive about Jean: her inflexibility and coldness. Actually spoke of perhaps firing her, but hopes this can be avoided. She alienates subordinates and won’t obey the wishes of superiors. But Carol couldn’t replace her; not enough experience or skill.

December 11, 1990

I arranged for three scholarly papers to be included in Festival Week: Larry Ingle’s on George Fox’s source of funds and whether one can “like him”; mine on Paradise Lost as meaningful or just a dead classic; and Doug Gwyn’s on Fox and Covenant. Gwyn was poor, Ingle excellent, and mine seemed to go well. Lots of compliments afterwards and requests for copies. Alas, not much else of a scholarly nature has been produced this term. After supper, to Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music, with Margery and Yuki. Sibelius’s 7th and Beethoven’s 3rd.

December 12, 1990

Trying to help Daphne plan her wedding. When, where, how? Festival events today included Jack Wright on Mary Webb’s poetry, and Richard Sanders on concepts of freedom. John Reader on Captain Cook’s Quaker artist. Doug Gwyn singing satirical songs.

December 13, 1990

Had a mirror cut to fit Chrysanthi’s oval mirror-frame in ceramic, one of many objects made under Sally Palmer’s guidance.

1991

Hanover

January 1–June 14

Jan. 5–6, Hanover

Jan. 12–13, Harrison, NY

Jan. 18–20, Pendle Hill

Feb. 21–22, Haverford

Feb. 23–24, Cambridge

March 8–9, Pendle Hill

March 22–23, NYC, Kinhaven

April 6–11, Bethlehem, Haverford, NYC

April 14, New Haven

April 18–19, Pendle Hill

April 26–28, Kendal at Longwood

May 12, Cambridge, A.R.T. King Lear

May 17–18, Pendle Hill

June 6–7, Cambridge, Londonderry, Kinhaven

Riparius

June 14–August 31

June 22–25, Hanover

July 13–14, Kinhaven

July 15–16, Hanover

July 29–30, Hanover

August 1, Indian Lake

Aug. 8–12, Hanover (wedding)

Hanover, Europe

September 1–September 19

Sept. 2–6, Boston, JFK, Dublin, Galway, Dublin

Sept. 7, Ayr, Alloway, Kirkoswald, Culzean Castle

Sept. 8, Heysham, Lake District

Sept. 9, Wales: Fishguard, St. David’s

Sept. 10, Bristol, Bath

Sept. 11, Scilly Isles

Sept. 12, Dorchester

Sept. 13, Zeebrugge, Paris, Talge Express

Sept. 14, Madrid, Toledo, Hotel Carlos V, Plaza Horno de Magdalena 1, 45001 Toledo (825) 222100/05

Sept. 15, Toledo, Madrid

Sept. 16–18, Madrid, Hotel Madrid, Carretas 10, 28012 Madrid 91 5216520

Sept. 19, Madrid, NYC, Boston, Hanover

Hanover

September 20–December 31

Oct. 6, Kinhaven

Oct. 26–28, Pendle Hill, NYC (Kinhaven)

Oct. 31–Nov. 3, Gainsville, Florida (MGSA)

Nov. 7–9, Harrisburg, PA (Morehouse Publishing)

Nov. 24, Cambridge: A.R.T.

Dec. 6–7, Pendle Hill

Dec. 13–15, Amherst, NYC (Kinhaven)

Dec. 28, Riparius

Dec. 31, NYC

January 21, 1991

Hanover

Alec telephoned from Jakarta. A bomb was discovered at the American ambassador’s residence (and defused). This led to the closing of the Jakarta International School as a precautionary measure, but the school will reopen tomorrow with increased security. Also, they’ve removed the school’s name from all the vehicles that transport students. This is the closest that the Iraqi war has come to us, personally.

Deanna auditioned all day today for the Boston Symphony. Last week she was one of 50 applicants and survived to the short-list of 3. Today she survived again to the “finals” of 2. Then she was selected as the winner, only to be told at that point that the job would not be offered to anyone! But they invited her back in October and said that she could start at the semi-final stage. The bastards!

I was at Pendle Hill last weekend. Warm welcome, all hugs, from lots of last term’s students. How nice! Our search for a new director still has only three viable candidates, Asia Bennett, Ed Hinshaw, and Dan Seeger, all of whom are also applying for the FWCC position. We’ll start interviews on February 8. Last Saturday was a full day. Executive Committee in the morning, Publications from 12:30 until 4:00, Search Committee from 4:30 through supper until 8:00. But then Oliver and I adjourned to Upmeads and played music for two hours. What a lovely tonic! In Publications Committee we started the reappraisal of the book publishing venture. Over the years it actually made money and I thought that this could make things easy. But various members—Nancy Strong, and also John Anderson, who is not a member—felt that we should lay down the experiment and concentrate exclusively on pamphlets. I made an impassioned speech when things seemed at their worst. We stopped in the middle, leaving as possibilities “an occasional book” or “zero to two books a year.” At least we approved two pamphlet manuscripts, finally, one by Sonny Cronk on “Gospel Order” and one by George Peck on appreciating the Psalms, the latter after its fourth submission.

I spent Sunday morning at Pendle Hill beginning a re-translation of Stathis Trahanatzis’s speech on Byzantine art that he’s due to give at Dartmouth in February. The translation that someone else did for him is pure gibberish. This chore continued most of today, a nuisance but, as always, good practice.

January 22, 1991

Hanover

Faculty Dining Committee: Ned Perrin, normally Gene Garthwaite (but he’s in Iran), Bruce Pipes, etc., meeting with Matt Marshall to assess the new Faculty Club arrangements we devised. Working well, apparently. Ned is pressing for a common table, I for a second choice with half-sandwich and soup. We got both.

January 23, 1991

Another one of those days with three classes in a row. 12:30, section of English 53 on The Rainbow; then rush to Humanities 1 section on Paradise Lost at 1:45; then back at 3:00 for second English 53 section. Exhausting. But the students seem willing to talk this term without excessive prodding. Finished at 4:15. Then a student conference. Then to Hanover Inn for a drink with Panos. Then home for supper and chamber music.

January 24, 1991

Bill Scherman keeps pressing me about the Beebe Professorship. Can we raise more money? What am I doing with it? Etc. Lunch with him and Karen Rodis to plan our moves.

January 29, 1991

Jim Breeden wants to start a University Seminar in ethics and religion. I told him about the old Tucker Fellowship that lasted for 35 years. He’ll never do anything, though.

Dinner at Carpenter Street with Leonard and Rosemary Rieser. He has in many ways been my patron since I arrived at Dartmouth, although he constantly ribs me. Without him I couldn’t have “invented” War/Peace Studies, to cite just the most recent collaboration. He’s a strange case of a man who really never did anything as a scientist yet established a huge reputation for wisdom and integrity, well deserved, as an administrator and kind of scientific statesman: head of AAAS, etc. and now of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (he took out a subscription for me). He’s a terrible namedropper, but he does seem to know “everybody” important. Nice man. A real, tested friend (but who can tell, as my experience with John Rassias on New Year’s Eve showed).

Saturday, February 2, 1991

Daphne here, with Greg. He now hugs me, awkwardly, and calls me Peter instead of Mr. Bien. We “checked out” the Norwich Inn again; a better dinner this time. Took them to Pierce’s. Greg likes it, so we’ll have the rehearsal dinner there. But they are unadventurous concerning the ceremony. They’ve vetoed my inclusion of Greek Orthodox στέφανα and also my hope for a time of Quaker silence with spontaneous testimony. Must keep pressing to have some of these elements at least.

Wednesday, February 6, 1991

Influenza. 103° F. No energy, not even enough to read. I skipped class today, the first time in my thirty-year career. Felt OK about it because I’d expected the BBC video on Paradise Lost would be shown but learned later that OIS goofed and the students had to be dismissed. I’ll type up my lecture and distribute it later.

February 9, 1991

To Dr. Gerber for my annual checkup despite the flu. Generally I’m truly healthy, he says. Enlarged prostate, incipient hernia, hemorrhoids are the only chronic difficulties. Good blood pressure, heart, etc. Reasonably high cholesterol but not disastrous. Slightly overweight. I was beautifully trim at the end of the summer, but two weeks in Australia and the cruise fattened me up again.

Friday, February 8, 1991

Still in bed, instead of traveling to Pendle Hill for Search Committee interviews all weekend with Seeger, Bennett, and Hinshaw. And I’d planned to speed up to NY tomorrow for MGSA Executive to talk about JMGS. All cancelled. No matter. People did very well without me.

Monday, February 11, 1991

Teaching again, but still sick and weak.

Tuesday, February 12, 1991

Long breakfast meeting with Jean Brophy concerning Kendal, which will open now in July, ahead of schedule. Even the negotiations with Hitchcock Clinic are going well. Essentially, all our desires of two years ago, when the Clinic was so standoffish and arrogant, now seem acceptable to them.

Wednesday, February 13, 1991

Breakfast with a computer science candidate named Felia Makedon who turns out to be a Greek from Thessaloniki. She was amazed at my Greek, etc. She seems a master at self-advertisement.

Kathleen Corrigan’s lecture on the development of icon-worship started our Byzantine mini-celebration. Later, Stathis Trahanatzis arrived; I picked him up at Lebanon airport. What a charmer! The stereotype of the artist in his beret, cravat, and small mustache. He brought as a present a large lithograph of the Adoration of the Magi, but not something I like or want to frame, alas, because he has mixed Western stylistic motifs into the Byzantine and the result is kitsch. Too bad.

Thursday, February 14, 1991

All day with Stathis. Tour in the morning. Lunch with Aris Damianos and Don Sheehan, who is studying iconography in the Russian style. Also Kathleen. Then Stathis’s lecture, which went quite well, considering that he couldn’t pronounce many of the more abstruse English words I introduced into the translation. But he spoke “feelingly” and the message somehow got conveyed that Byzantine painting is a religious not just an aesthetic act. When at the end he projected slides of his own work, the audience gasped, they were so powerful.

Reception and dinner afterwards, all very pleasant.

Friday, February 15, 1991

Brought Stathis to the Hop at 9:00 a.m. for his “practicum.” Again, success. Forty to fifty people attended, and he was still there at 1:00 p.m. after having painted a saint’s head from start to finish, with meticulous commentary at every stage. He left after lunch with effusive thanks.

Attended talk by Bill Gavin of CCCO on the draft and conscientious objection. Scary. If the war continues a draft could be begun instantaneously; all the mechanisms are in place. And draftees will not know what hit them, or what their options are unless they receive counseling ahead of time. Quakers, as usual, are mobilizing to be ready to offer such counseling.

February 18, 1991

Steve Scher and Ulrike for dinner, without his cappuccino machine! I received the ultimate compliment: praise from Steve Scher for my coffee.

February 19, 1991

Kendal open meeting. As opening nears, many people are saying kind words to me. Mother got cold feet and decided not to enter until she got a touch of flu, couldn’t find Dr. Strickler, couldn’t get to the clinic without Chrysanthi driving her in the snow, etc. This convinced her that Kendal will be right for her, after all. Overseers’ Executive Committee lunch afterwards. We’re writing by-laws for ourselves, and going through a self-study akin to an accreditation exercise. Dick Brokaw is becoming increasingly useful in all this.

Wednesday, February 20, 1991

I’m in the conference mode, with English 53 classes suspended. 78 conferences plus repeats for people like Diana Polley, who must have come six times.

Thursday, February 21, 1991

By train to Haverford. Slept on the third floor of 1 College Circle, Tom Kessinger’s house. Nice to talk to him about Jakarta International School, John Maganga, Tom Wood.

Friday, February 22, 1991

Nominating Committee of the Haverford Corporation. Steve Cary took me aside to sing Asia Bennett’s praises re: the PH directorship and to worry about Dan Seeger who, he says, ran his own show in NYC and didn’t cooperate very well with headquarters in Philadelphia.

Saturday, February 23, 1991

To Cambridge. Saw matinee of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken directed by Robert Wilson—or rather saw a new play by Robert Wilson. Robert Brustein in his lecture preceding the show said that Ibsen and Wilson are a perfect match because of the “apocalyptic symbolism” of both, or some such phrase. I found Wilson’s version full of Wilson clichés, breaking up the text so that language loses its semantic value and displays mostly rhythmic and tonal values instead, conveying meaning (?) by suggestion rather than statement. Everything is choreographed, nothing even remotely natural. It is his revenge against the Ibsen of A Doll’s House, with a vengeance. Strangely, I found a similarity between Wilson’s work and the Indonesian traditional theater/opera/ballet/oratorio that I saw with Alec in Jakarta. Except that that evolved organically and somehow expresses a community whereas Wilson’s expression seems to be chiefly the product of an individual consciousness that is totally self-conscious in wishing to progress by revolution rather than evolution. The three interludes of blues singing/vaudeville with Honey Coles were the most enjoyable part, and a brilliant touch.

To Huntington Avenue after supper for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. My first time in the hall, I believe. Could I never have gone during my two years at Harvard? Too many trips to the Old Howard in Scollay Square, instead! Actually, it’s a rather cramped hall, without the μεγαλείο of the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Simon Rattle, guest conductor, did Mahler’s 7th Symphony, not my favorite, but nevertheless an “experience,” and beautifully performed.

Sunday, February 24, 1991

Cambridge Meeting very gathered. Several heartfelt testimonies about the Gulf War and/or previous wars. Saw Andy Towl briefly. Then Janet Shepherd convened a Pendle Hill “event” at which I was the principal speaker, recounting my impressions as a teacher and board member. Good audience, mostly of people who had been to PH and were already full of enthusiasm, but also a few who hadn’t been and wanted to know more.

Went to a Greek provision store for ταραμάς, etc. in Watertown but it was closed on Sunday afternoon. Next time.

Monday, February 25, 1991

Met with Nancy Davies and Otmar Foelsche re: Sears grant and “annotated texts.” It’s advancing slowly. They want me actually to type in some Greek samples now. I’ll get Takis Metaxas to do this. David Bantz has gone to Chicago and everyone seems relieved.

Ed Hinshaw phoned to announce his withdrawal from the PH race. I think he was turned off by the staff, who apparently were very mean to him. This leaves Dan and Asia. I wrote to each saying we’d really have to know before April 8 if they’d take the job if it were offered to them.

Lloyd Lewis here, this time with this son Paul, who is to become Jean’s immediate superior. Lloyd is still worried about Jean, mostly in the marketing area. He spoke to me glowingly about Dan Seeger, whom he’d heard at the Pendle Hill interviews I had missed. “Will we be brave enough to choose Dan over the totally competent but ‘safe’ Asia?” he challenged me. Overseers had a lovely dinner in the Norwich Inn, Lloyd and I yapping constantly together at the head of the table.

Tuesday, February 26, 1991

Important Overseers meeting. The major question was: Should the Overseers remain 100% Quaker (we’re drafting our by-laws or guidelines) or allow a percentage of non-Quakers? Audrey, Mayme, Sydney, Barbara, Lafayette (i.e., all those about to enter Kendal) strongly for 100%. Chaney and Dick Brokaw against. Lloyd at Longwood had told me he was for, but today he argued that Quakers no longer go into banking and business; thus it’s hard for an all-Quaker board to get the necessary skills. We went back and forth for an hour or more; it was a difficult clerking job for me. Finally we decided to remain 100% Quaker. This can of course be changed later via the amendment procedure. Chrysanthi is only an attender, but everyone agreed to overlook that and grandfather her in.

Still having conferences with students. Also, the oral reports are starting. Eight sessions with 10 to 11 people speaking at each. Endurance. Yet how well some of them speak! Second paper due today. Thank God I have Bob Ransom to grade ½ of them.

Telephoned Dan Seeger. He wants to visit here in order to meet me and talk. Next week.

Friday, March 1, 1991

Sandi Adams came last night to start the mediation workshop in College Course 1: Conflict Resolution. I’d heard about her at Pendle Hill. She moved from Philadelphia to Montpelier in January, so she was perfect for our needs. And what a delightful, bubbly young woman! We took to each other immediately over a long breakfast that ended with a spontaneous hug. Someday she and Nancy Bekavac should be brought together into the same room, and then we’d watch the fireworks! (Lloyd, by the way, says he’ll try to make Nancy the next president of Swarthmore.)

Tuesday, March 5, 1991

Long, good breakfast meeting with Jean about self-study process for Kendal, etc. Then at 11:00 a.m. Dan Seeger appeared at my office, as arranged, and we talked steadily for five hours without repeating ourselves. He is so sharp! His analytical powers regarding the group and individual dynamics at a place like Pendle Hill are refreshing; he probes right to the root instead of hovering at the periphery. At the same time his intellect is not at all cloistered; his life has been devoted to Quaker activism. He writes with great facility; I’ve heard that he’s a great public speaker. He’ll be so good for PH. But will he frighten them, intimidate them? That is the question.

Thursday, March 7, 1991

Good meeting of the Dickey Endowment advisory board. Leonard is trying to determine future directions in advance of his retirement.

Friday, March 8, 1991

Pendle Hill

The fateful meeting of the Search Committee. Five hours. We went back and forth between Asia and Dan, then discussed what PH itself needs, whether strengthening of the internal aspect, the community, or outreach beyond to affect the entire Society of Friends. I of course stressed the latter and therefore Dan, whereas those who stressed the former preferred Asia. The lineup started as follows: Eirené and I for Dan; Hal Cope (absent, but he’d telephoned me to say he was for Dan); Gordon Browne for Dan; Ellie White for Asia, Betty McCorkle for Asia; Oliver Rodgers for Asia. So, four for Dan, three for Asia. Then Gordon Browne made a long, surprising speech in which he concluded: Although I favor Dan I recommend that we appoint Asia. Again, for “safety.” So: four for Asia, three for Dan. Then Eirené, although 200% for Dan, said she’d also be happy with Asia if the committee went in this direction—i.e., she’d capitulate. Then I said I would not capitulate, at least not yet, that Dan was too good to lose, that PH could stand some lack of safety internally in exchange for making a real impact outside. Deadlock. Gordon suggested that we go out for a walk and then enter silent worship. Fine, agreed, whereupon Oliver said, “Listen, let’s offer the job to Dan first, and if he turns it down (as Oliver felt he would because of the low salary) then we’ll offer it to Asia. Miracle! Everyone agreed. Finis! We went for our walk anyway, Eirené and I jubilant, then entered the silence, then cleared up minor matters of timing and procedure. Top priority: secrecy, until we’d determine who would actually accept.

At Executive Committee in the evening, we received authorization to offer Dan up to $10,000 besides the stated compensation, and to make the appointment of either Dan or Asia without reconvening the Executive Committee.

Saturday, March 9, 1991

Pendle Hill

Not so successful with Publications Committee, which again failed to reach unity regarding book publishing. At the end we asked Nancy Strong and myself to try to break the impasse and report back next month.

Sunday, March 10, 1991

Back at 5:00 a.m. on AMTRAK. Student exam at 9:00. Full class in the afternoon. Meeting in the morning and lunch with Yiayia. Our saving routines. Leander here, practicing hard for the Ravel trio and the Kreutzer.

Monday, March 11, 1991

Huge telephone conversation with Dan Seeger trying to negotiate salary and compensation. He’s going to TIAA to see what his retirement pension will be, given different levels of compensation. I’m having the Personnel Office here research the same. Poor guy wants to be able to afford Medford Leas in ten years.

Tuesday, March 12, 1991

More vigorous negotiations with Dan. We hope to “break through” by tomorrow. Dan is convinced, after speaking to Oliver, that Oliver is antagonistic, really hoping he’ll withdraw so that Asia Bennett may be appointed. Possible. I’m trying to convince Dan that he, too, must give way somewhat.

Lunch yesterday with Jim Jordan, our yearly ritual. Spent most of the time telling him about Kendal.

Lunch today with Tom Corindia, whom I hope to get back on the Kendal Overseers once the negotiations with Hitchcock are completed. They are going well. Kendal was clearly a factor in Hitchcock’s decision to accept Medicare assignments, one of our original conditions.

After some difficulty regarding timing, I’ve managed to secure Jim Freedman as a speaker at Kendal’s ribbon-breaking ceremony in July.

Wednesday, March 13, 1991

Dan will yield somewhat in his demands for a pension of a certain size. Oliver is encouraged. They’ll try to agree on a contract letter today.

Thursday, March 14, 1991

Success! Oliver turned around, after Dan had yielded, and actually granted him more than he’d asked for. Asia has been informed, also Margery. But no one else must know until Tuesday, by which time Dan will have informed his staff.

Sunday, March 17, 1991

All weekend spent grading essays. It gets harder and harder. But on Sunday I did fifteen!

Monday, March 18, 1991

All day computing grades. Handed them in at 5:15 p.m. What a relief! Such a difficult term, and the worst of all is that the course evaluations for English 53 are shocking. Many are positive, of course, but the negative ones are greater in number than I’ve experienced before and also greater in anger. Many accused me of not honoring viewpoints different from my own. Many objected to the diaries, the sections, the orals (which were, of course, tedious with 78 students); many objected to an assistant grading their papers—justifiably. And some said that I never spoke about the books themselves, only about background and authors’ lives. Unfair! One accused me of inflicting D. H. Lawrence on him (or her) for two whole weeks. Well, if the net effect is to reduce the enrollment to 35 next time round, so be it.

Trying with Nancy Strong to move forward on the PH book publishing problem. My idea is to co-publish with a house that could take over marketing, sales, and distribution. She likes this idea.

Tuesday, March 19, 1991

Vacation! Wonderful. So I spent the morning doing my income tax! Earned over $100,000 (in inflated dollars) this year for the first time.

Lunch with Jack Shepherd and Leonard Rieser to plan agenda for War/Peace Steering Committee. We hope to inaugurate a mediation group on campus. Sandi Adams has already set these up at Haverford and Swarthmore. We need to re-resurrect the University Seminar, which is moribund under Alan Rozycki’s leadership. We might want to move forward administratively to enable students to get a certificate in War/Peace Studies as a minor subject.

Oliver announced Dan Seeger’s appointment at PH today, after Meeting.

I’m reading Tom Luxon and Roman Jakobson in connection with my Haverford Rufus Jones lecture, which is coming all too soon.

Wednesday, March 20, 1991

Chamber music with Dick only. Allan is in bed with a bad back. Played particularly well: Mozart’s flute concerto.

Saturday, March 23, 1991

NYC

Kinhaven Development Committee. We really all hope to purchase the property in June; we need a $400,000 loan. Bill Polk is working on this. I’ve been asked to write to Mr. Van Dusen (Katy’s father) and to Jill Conway, both Kresge Foundation trustees, to alert them to our application.

Went to Fauve exhibition at the Met Garish colors inspired by Van Gogh, but deliberate anti-rationalistic misapplication—e.g., yellow sea-water, green sunsets, etc. The movement lasted only three or four years, around 1903–07—Matisse, de Vlaminck, Derain—and gave way to cubism. Then some of my old favorites: two magnificent El Greco’s (Toledo in the Storm and Christ Healing the Blind Man), Rembrandt’s self-portrait and his Aristotle Admiring the Bust of Homer.

Sunday, March 24, 1991

Daphne here. She rose at 6:00 a.m. and we talked and talked, mostly about her trip to see Greg’s mother’s relatives in San Francisco, and various wedding plans. Leander doesn’t want to play; says he’ll be too emotional. Actually, for him to play at the end will be tactically difficult because of the need for photos. But I hope to convince him and Deanna to stay on the program at least in the beginning. We’ve gotten to the stage now of designing the invitations. What a “production” this is! Quaker simplicity is obviously abandoned. But Daphne already dissociates herself from Quakerism. Didn’t come to Meeting with us this morning, for instance. I say nothing. She may return fifteen years from now, like Mary Scattergood. But she says she wants to go to the Ανάσταση with us in Bethlehem two weeks from now. In the afternoon I helped her with her income taxes, remembering at the very last minute that she can deduct her IRA, saving her a cool $560 on the taxes. We had fun.

Channy Brokaw found lots problems still with the Overseers’ guidelines, and I had to make yet another draft for Tuesday’s meeting.

Monday, March 25, 1991

Beginning of spring term. Light teaching load, just Humanities 2 with Jim Tatum, Walter Stephens, and Marsha Swislocki. Odyssey, Ulysses, Don Quixote, Princesse de Clèves, Nietzsche. My immediate need: to finish my lecture for Haverford. Then comes next issue of the Journal. Will I do more on the Kazantzakis letters this term? And there will be a heavy CAP load.

Leander’s birthday. For Christmas we gave him $300 to buy a bed—his first. He likes it. Now I gave him $250 to get a humidifier/dehumidifer for his piano.

Tuesday, March 26, 1991

Overseers still unable to complete our guidelines. Jean impatient, under great pressure from Lloyd to do marketing. We now have 38 empty units. We’ll lose more as well, because people will die before entering Kendal, and some will withdraw because they can’t sell their houses—e.g. Lily Paxson (whom I’m happy to see excluded). We’ll hold a special meeting in April just for the guidelines. But we did adopt policies: no alcohol, smoking, and tipping. I wish we could have wine at table.

Wednesday, March 27, 1991

Classes started. So soon! I’m doing only Humanities 2, however, with three colleagues: Jim Tatum, Walter Stephens, and Marsha Swislocki, so I can’t complain. Four teachers and twenty students! Odyssey, Nietzsche, Ulysses, Princesse de Clèves, and Don Quixote. Went to see Mike Choukas, Jr. about writing to alumni about Kendal. He’ll probably refuse. But I got Jim Freedman to agree to speak at our opening on July 16th.

Doing income tax. Also working on my lecture for Haverford, stimulated by Tom Luxon’s book in manuscript about the similarities between linguistic theory—“code” and “message”—and theological conceptions of “the Word” and words. It’s going well. I do believe that Quaker worship, its mixture of silence and speech, is an amazingly pregnant ritual that simulates our existence as creatures in a larger pre-creaturely context.

Lunch with two AFSC fundraisers. They’re trying to convince me to set up an annuity at AFSC.

April 2, 1991

Finance Committee at Meeting. Sandy Stettenheim is an energetic treasurer, but she talks too much. Al Converse, Tom Corindia, and I were half-asleep, listening.

Went to hear Andy Rangel with Mother. Wonderful programming: in the first half, four examples of theme and variation: Sweelinck, Nielsen, Christian Wolff (on a Beatles’ song), and Beethoven’s variations on an original theme. If Andy would only do the Diabelli sometime! All played with his characteristic dynamism and cleanness. Then four Chopin mazurkas, which didn’t sound very Chopinlike as interpreted by Andy. Second half: the big Schubert sonata, which left me cold. But the first half was scintillating.

Thursday, April 4, 1991

I hosted Tom Campion, David Bury, and Kit Van Winkle at lunch. She has agreed to be past parents’ chair of the Kinhaven annual fund. Tom gave some good ideas, and lectured us about our tardiness in aggressively pursuing our campaign. Amen! Turns out Richard Van Dusen, Katy’s father, was a devoted “Dartmouth parent.” I wrote him re: Kresge grant (he’s a Kresge trustee), afraid he’d remember the tempestuous dinner at our house when he got so mad at Audrey Logan because of her liberalism, but he remembered it only with pleasure. I got the kindest letter back from him.

Saturday, April 6, 1991

Hanover–Bethlehem

Drove to Bethlehem with Chrysanthi and Mother. Hotel Bethlehem, as before. nice supper there with Leander and Deanna. Leander tense because the vibraphonist didn’t learn his part and Leander had to spend the whole week coaching him to the detriment of practicing himself. At 11:00 we went to the huge Greek church for the Ανάσταση. Packed. Standing in the aisles. Good ψάλτες. Terrible εικονογράφιση. Poor Stathis would cringe. All messages—e.g., from Archbishop Iakovos—were read in both Greek and English. Noumenal quality of the immanent Ανάσταση ruined by the priest talking at length about how to clear the hall in orderly fashion and be sure to return afterwards. But some of the magic did break through despite everything when the church was darkened and finally the priest emerged chanting Δεύτε, λάβετε φως and we all sang Χριστός ανέστη εκ νεκρών, θανάτω θάνατον πατήσας. The congregation, if they stayed, would have a dinner at 3:00 a.m. We went home to bed.

Sunday, April 7, 1991

Bethlehem

A memorable day. I started by attending Lehigh Valley Friends Meeting. A good group; lots of young couples and children. One man had been to Hanover and spoke to me. All the ministry was religion and impersonal, real messages instead of private emotings. Even some intellectual content and metaphysical speculation. One of the ministers was the president of Moravian, whom I’d met last year. Afterwards, they went around the room, asking each person for any sort of comment, announcement, thought. They do this each week, and it helps greatly to knit the group together. We should try it at Hanover, perhaps once a month.

Daphne and Greg arrived in time for a sumptuous brunch at the hotel. Greg’s firm gave him two tickets to Wimbledon as a perk, and they’ll be going to London for four days. Talked about changing apartments; they’re looking at one on 21st Street between 9th and 10th, in Chelsea. A shame to leave Madison Avenue, but it’s too small for the two of them. Daphne got a stellar review, again, from Fred Hills, and has been promoted at Simon and Schuster, with a 10% salary raise, which is very good in this economic climate.

3:00 p.m. Leander’s concert, this time in the big hall, Foy Auditorium. Lots of friends in the audience: Brittles, Yasuo and Naoko, Larry Wright, Nancy and Jerry Bidlack, the Schantzes. A good crowd especially for a Sunday afternoon with brilliant sunshine and 80+ degree heat. The first half began with a baroque warm-up for Leander and Deanna: Zanni, very fine, with a gorgeous slow movement that might be just right for Daphne’s wedding. Then Leander’s romantic pastiche, again for piano and violin, amazing, with its quotes from Saint-Saëns and Chopin. Sonorous, intellectually interesting because of its form. Where did Leander suddenly get this talent as a composer? Out of the blue, certainly not the result of any instruction in conservatory or afterwards. Brittles says that his work is really superior, should be published, played by others, etc. The work also has extraordinary variety. Next came a trio for piano, flute, and vibraphone, totally different, a touch of minimalism, as in last year’s piece for trumpet and percussion, but just a touch. Robin Kani (Larry Wright’s wife) played masterfully, and the vibraphonist, although appearing very tense, seemed to have mastered his part more or less. The second half was devoted entirely to the Kreutzer Sonata, which from the very first double-stopped chord on the violin was electrifying. In the variations, the fast one for violin, each time Deanna rose higher and higher to conclude with an impossibly high note on the E-string, the man sitting next to me gasped. And I, of course, from beginning to end was sniveling and weeping with aesthetic joy. An amazing piece played with appropriate freshness. Nice reception afterwards and then we all went off, twelve of us, to supper at a restaurant. A true παρέα. I sat at the head with Larry Wright on one side and Naoko on the other, with James McBride next to her. Brittles, besides composing songs, is writing a book on his mother. He told us more about her life, how she was totally disowned by her Jewish family for marrying a Protestant black pastor. We all indulged ourselves: roast beef, beer, mud pie even. Delightful. Yiayia said afterwards that it was the nicest day of her life.

Monday, April 8, 1991

Bethlehem–Haverford

To Haverford College with Mother and Chrysanthi to begin my service as Rufus Jones Associates Distinguished Visitor. They gave us a tour of the refurbished Founders Hall, serviceable and simple in Quaker style, but with a touch of grandeur in the Great Hall. They kept some of the old door- and window-jambs, crooked and caked with paint, to preserve some of the feel of the original building. Then lunch in the faculty dining room with John Cary. Of course, as expected, I was queried about the Dartmouth Review. The atmosphere at Haverford is so different from that at Dartmouth, so liberal, with Amnesty International materials at the center of the dining room lobby, with notices about non-traditional employment opportunities (in the non-profit service sector) on every table in the student dining hall, with sign-up sheets for work projects in local hospitals, nursing homes, etc., filled up to overflowing.

Then to Pendle Hill. Chrysanthi was greeted with whoopees and hugs by her many friends there. I went into conference immediately with Rebecca, who looked awful, having just had another bad incident with her estranged husband. Supper with Steve Cary, then listened to his Monday night lecture on “Pacifism.” Like me, he cannot argue that pacifism works. More importantly, it is a position required of one irrespective of practical considerations. Nevertheless, he did remark about the practical side that the challenge to pacifists is always posed at the end of a bad series of events—e.g., Hitler about to invade Poland. What can pacifists do? The question should have been posed at the beginning of such a sequence, in this case during the Versailles Conference. Pacifist responses at each step may have prevented the military outcome.

Tuesday, April 9, 1991

I started as guest speaker in Emma Lapsansky’s class on Quakerism. About 40 students, swelled by Max Carter with another dozen from Guilford on a study tour of Amish and other intentional communities. My topic: Service. It was a nice opportunity for me to think over my own involvements (and avoidance of involvements). My chief point is that Quaker service should and can be in all circumstances not just in work camps or AFSC, etc., but in one’s job whatever that may be. I cited Mr. Bloom for this aspect, and Vince Buscemi for the narrowly Quaker type of service.

Lunch afterwards produced only two or three students, but an older man, a college drop-out now returned at age 34, a Black, was interesting to have. Also, Elisa Harrison came.

They placed a Macintosh in my quarters in 1 College Circle, very posh. I spent several hours improving and shortening tomorrow’s lecture.

Formal dinner at Tom Kessinger’s. John Davison extremely friendly and even talkative. Strange. Douglas and Dorothy Steere, Steve and Mrs. Cary, John Cary and wife, Emma Lapsansky, whose mother is about to go into a CCRC and is terrified. We talked about Elizabeth Vining’s On Being Seventy, which I abridged for Kendal. I’ll send Emma a copy for her mother.

Then we all gathered for a screening of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I spoke about the controversy and the film’s major structure and points. I like it better and better each time. Visually, it’s beautiful. Even the language doesn’t bother me any more. But it’s still too long, especially the dream sequence. Good comments and questions at the end, but Tom cut it short at 11:00 p.m. The heat was oppressive, and people probably wanted to get to bed.

Wednesday, April 10, 1991

Haverford

Worked all morning on my talk, shortening it, and incorporating something from Bowman’s book, which Larry Ingle told me about on Monday when I encountered him in the Quaker Collection. They’ve given me a Macintosh in my room in 1 College Circle, very sumptuous. Lunch with Peace Studies people, led by Harvey Glickman. Sylvia, the pianist, remembered Alec and Leander well, she told me. She now is a publisher of music composed by women, using a Macintosh to print it. I’m going to try to interest Leander. Then an hour with Dean Matthews Hamabata to find out more about the mediation program here, to help when I try to introduce it at Dartmouth. Hamabata extremely positive, says that normal adjudication never teaches anything whereas mediation does. I took extensive notes and will write a memorandum for our War/Peace Steering Committee at Dartmouth. Big formal dinner in my honor. I sat at table with Louis Green, very lively still, and Steve Cary and wife, and several others. Good talk about Last Temptation, etc. Then to Stokes for my talk: “Quaker Silence Reconsidered from a Literary Point of View.” I think it went very well indeed. It’s a script that came very easily to me, perhaps because it was composed directly on the computer from extensive notes already on disk. In any case I saw John Davison beaming and applauding enthusiastically afterwards. He told me later that the talk was “like a piece of music,” probably because I’d stitched leitmotifs throughout. Many people hoped it will be published. I’ll try through PH pamphlets. Hopped in car after the reception in the Quaker Collection, and drove to the Yale Club to sleep. It was nice to have Douglas Steere and Dorothy in the audience. When he congratulated me, I returned the compliment, saying that it all started with him, which it did.

Thursday, April 11, 1991

New York

Chrysanthi and Yiayia had come to New York on Tuesday. They spent time dining with Greg and Daphne, entertained Bubbles and Clarice and Amy for lunch, and went shopping and to the Met to see Fauves. Pretty good for an 86-year-old. We had an easy drive home listening to The Scarlet Letter.

Friday, April 12, 1991

Elizabeth Keenan came up from New York to see me. Very much the aristocrat, as always, a little ashamed at the outpouring of confidences about her problems that she sent me via post last fall. Apologetic for disappearing from Dartmouth without saying goodbye. She wants to go to law school now, after working for the family shipping business for several years in New York. Poor thing! It’s difficult to be a woman of breeding and intelligence in today’s society, but it was equally difficult in yesterday’s.

Saturday, April 13, 1991

Memorial service for John Dickey: sterile and contrived. No sense of the human being. Only one detail: that he liked to have chocolate ice cream for breakfast. Jim Freedman, who never even met him, spoke in platitudes. Dave McLaughlin did the best he could with his limited intelligence. The three children merely lauded Dick’s House. Leonard Rieser read Frost’s “Birches” but said nothing about Dickey and Frost. And of course there were hymns, organ music, a string quartet, and the glee club singing the Dartmouth Song. Trustees in gowns, etc., etc. It was putrid. We have lost the skill for rituals.

Sunday, April 14, 1991

To Kinhaven, Bodines’ home, for momentous Kinhaven Board meeting. We voted to purchase the property in May to avoid paying this 1991 rent. Bill Polk has gotten a bank to agree to loan us $410,000. Lelah is still difficult, haggling over the tractor, furniture, etc., but basically glad that the sale is proceeding.

Monday, April 15, 1991

Inauguration of Steve Calvert’s Elder Hostel scheme, Dartmouth’s adult education program, called ILEAD. I’m going to teach Paradise Lost at Kendal in the fall. Steve announced that the board had nominated me as an Honorary Founder. Nice of him.

Tuesday, April 16, 1991

Extra meeting of the Kendal Overseers to continue with the guidelines. After much discussion we decided not to open membership to anyone, with a majority being Quakers, but stretched the Quaker requirement to include “long-term attenders” as well as members. This of course legalizes Chrysanthi. Guidelines still need to be scrutinized in Pennsylvania.

Wednesday, April 17, 1991

Paul Lewis and Carol Weingeist for lunch. He is now the Pennsylvania “boss” for Kendal at Hanover, to whom Jean reports. He came up to tour the site and be present at the open meeting tomorrow.

CAP meeting. Jim Freedman opposed tenure for Andrew Garrod saying his “scholarship” (if you could call it that) didn’t rate. We differed, as did outside reviewers. His own departmental colleagues, Faith Dunne and Mitchell, voted against him. CAP voted for him nonetheless, and Freedman said he’d abide by our decision even though he disagreed. After this, Ulli Rainer’s tenure went through flyingly, despite an irrational letter (or maybe because of it) from Werner Kleinhardt.

Friday, April 19, 1991

Pendle Hill

Overnight in Manchester last night. USAir to Philadelphia, “frequent flyers,” no charge. Another exhausting, interminable meeting of the Publications Committee re: books. Denny O’Brien and John Anderson are now both clearly opposed. Nancy Strong is willing if we can distribute better. Larry Ingle is strongly for, as were some others. Rebecca weaseling as always. Finally we agreed on a minute saying we’d concentrate for five years on reprints of Quaker classics, but be open to some original titles. This is meant to be approved by staff, who mustn’t feel that our effort means diminishment for their efforts. Anderson will obviously sabotage this process.

In the evening session I spoke on the Search Committee process and then introduced Dan Seeger, distributing a two-page bibliographical sketch of him. He spoke at some length, and well. There were nice words from Mather Lippincott about the Search Committee and my work, and appreciation from Fran Taber regarding involvement of staff. It went well. Moving program afterwards. Gordon Browne dared to speak of the need for “intellectual rigor,” bless him.

Saturday, April 20, 1991

Pendle Hill

I was meant to play Mendelssohn’s “Song Without Words” at coffee hour tonight, with Oliver. We even rehearsed it. But I feared I’d miss my flight and Oliver said that Dorothy could accompany him. So I rushed to the station after Executive Committee, rode in with Ken Carroll, who told me all about the George Fox conference in England. Caught earlier flight, 3:30, with 30 seconds to spare. Home in time for supper. Charlie Brown in Meeting spoke movingly of being with his father, whose father had fought in the Civil War, and then with his grandson, who crawled into bed with him. What a feeling! Four generations. I said I’d send him Joyce’s “Ecce Puer.”

Tuesday, April 23, 1991

Prepared agenda for War/Peace Studies meeting on May 1st, including résumé of my meeting with Hamabata about mediation at Haverford. Lunch with Takis Metaxas, who is quite sure he’ll take the job offered at Brisbane. And he and Stella will be married. She’s a dear.

Patti Kane, 1985 student, returned to consult about going to medical school. A sexpot then and now with skintight jeans and shirt, legs spread wide. Is she a tease or totally unaware? Told me her mother was a manic-depressive. Her brother, a drug addict, is reformed, thanks in part to Patti’s efforts. She is unbalanced a bit, yet so brilliant. A truly philosophical mind. We had a deep discussion about . . . metaphysics. She wants to do psychiatry using literature as offering the best insights. I told her about Robert Coles.

Friday, April 26, 1991

Pendle Hill

Jim Tatum telephoned in a panic at 1:15 to say that he’d forgotten at home the tapes and slides he’d prepared for today’s lecture. What to do? I volunteered on twenty minutes’ notice to lecture on the end of Sirens and on Circe. And did so. Then jumped in the car with Chrysanthi to catch the 5:10 USAir to Philadelphia.

Met with Margery re: John Anderson’s opposition to books. She’ll do her best, but he seems entrenched, fearful of new ventures. She says he’s also against Pendle Hill On the Road. Supper in Plumtree Inn in Media, where Alec took me a few times.

Saturday, April 27, 1991

Kendal

The first all-boards meeting: Kendal Corporation, Kendal at Hanover, Kendal at Oberlin. Jim Emerson of Presbyterian Homes in Florida was the keynote speaker: excellent. Learned a lot from Alan Hunt, also, about challenges to 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Alan also announced Lloyd’s resolve to retire as CEO of Kendal-Crosslands and to concentrate on the Kendal Development Corporation prior to full retirement in a few years. Met people from Oberlin and renewed acquaintance with lots of K-C staff including Barb Parsons and Astrid Dorsey. David and Atossa French came, too, from Hanover, also Dick and Channy Brokaw. Learned that our Overseers’ guidelines are still not complete. For example, we are meant to review the administrator’s performance annually. Jean will love that! Supper with the Frenches at Kendal: filet mignon. Then Chrysanthi and Dorothy Rodgers went to a play-reading, Oliver and I to their apartment to play music: Brahms, Britten, Bruch, Haydn, Mendelssohn, a good session, tireless, from 7:30 until 10:00. I’m greatly energized when I play with him. Drove back to PH at 11:00, having left at 7:30 a.m. Met Mel Kaiser by accident in the kitchen. He and his wife both teach at Guilford. He confirmed the need for reprints of classic Quaker texts.

Sunday, April 28, 1991

Pendle Hill–Hanover

Good talk with Larry Ingle at breakfast. His book is half-accepted by OUP. At Meeting, moving testimonial from a woman who’d been a student “guru” at Kent State in 1971 and whose sister had been killed in the encounter there with the National Guard, after which this woman retreated to private endeavors—cultivated her own garden for almost a decade, before her spirit was healed sufficiently to begin again to become involved in public issues. We also heard that Bev Hershey, who’d been “married” to Renée in a Lesbian arrangement, had gone into a psychotic depression after their relationship foundered. She nursed Renée through a near-fatal illness and was then betrayed. Sandy Olsen explained to us that Lesbian couples often have great trouble because they are too close; they can’t establish individual boundaries. So, when the arrangement falters the shock is even worse than it is with a heterosexual couple.

Nice talk with Jim Thomas, who’ll be moving to Colorado in retirement. He was in the midst of reunion of the AFSC team that had been with him in Africa, including a couple who love Kazantzakis. She’d read Odyssey three times, Spiritual Exercises, Last Temptation, Greek Passion, Saint Francis. Both said how meaningful the Last Temptation had been to them in the turbulent 1960s. He now runs work camps in Washington, DC, collaborating with Peter Caldwell of Vermont. He agrees with me about AFSC’s negligence in youth work. I told him what Steve Cary told me last week—that work camps are being sabotaged by gay-Lesbian issues. Another acquaintance (from Woodbrooke?), an Indian, kept saying that I must go out to India. Why not?

Flowers and blossoms extraordinary this weekend. Brilliant dogwood, cherry, wisteria, apple blossoms, magnolias, azaleas. Yesterday we took an hour between Meeting and supper to go to Longwood Gardens. Tulips tulips tulips: black, scarlet, purple, and white. A feast. . . . 3:30 flight back to Manchester.

April 29, 1991, Hanover

Elise Boulding here. Pot luck at Meeting. She’s as ebullient as ever, despite two broken arms and last year’s operation that replaced her entire cancerous nose.

Otmar and David Greenfield demonstrated “Annotated Texts,” now called “Textra.” I’m going to add sound to the computer disk-player, specifically Ritsos reading Η Σονάτα synchronized with the verse on the screen. It’s a technological marvel.

April 30, 1991

Cook/Bien extravaganza again in war poetry recitation in Jack Shepherd’s War/Peace course. Went well. But again we didn’t finish. I added the “Arts of Death” speech from Man and Superman.

Wednesday, May 1, 1991

War/Peace Steering Committee breakfast with Elise, Sandi Adams, and Diana Beaudoin, guests, to testify re: mediation project. We got the go-ahead for this, and also for adding a certification possibility to War/Peace Studies. More work for me. But I feel this as a Quaker concern and do it gladly.

Good music tonight. Allan came also for supper since Claire is in Switzerland.

Thursday, May 2, 1991

Humanities brought Odds Bodkin, professional storyteller, who did Odyssey, part 1, beginning through Cyclops inclusive, marvelously, with guitar. A master musician, narrator, and singer; a true ἀοιδός.

Saturday, May 4, 1991

At noon, fifty-odd friends gathered in the Faculty Lounge to give Walter Arndt a surprise on his 75th birthday. By pre-arrangement some of us brought poetry to read. Miriam had remembered the soirée I’d had years ago with Jay Parini and Alistair Reid, and Walter. Mostly they read from Walter’s translations. I did six Harkianakis poems, and apparently they were very effective. People asked me for the written text afterwards. Encouraging. But when am I going to start on the 100 Selected Poems? Perhaps this summer? Nice to see David Arndt again; his daughter recited her own poem; and Robbie, now editor of Aramco World, which I receive thanks to the Arndts.

Sunday, May 5, 1991

Tour of Kendal. The carpet is down in the dining room. Two apartments are furnished as models. They seem disappointingly small, alas, not as spacious as Mother’s in The Greens, although the bedroom is bigger. Oh well. . .

We gave a dinner party, now a rare occasion. Laasperes, Elliotts, and Jonathan and Caroline Crewe. He’s now in the department, a South African, talkative, good guest.

Monday, May 6, 1991

Edward Bradley and I went to the Executive Committee to testify on behalf of the proposed new Foreign Language Abroad program at Anatolia College. Easy. It was 6:00 p.m. and everyone wanted to go home. I explained to what degree Anatolia is a college in our sense and not a high school. So the program is now “official.” But will we find any students?

Tuesday, May 7, 1991

Sheila Harvey invited me to lunch to meet Geraldine North, an Australian who is setting up a peer-tutoring center at New England College. I promised to show her our center.

Supper with Sheila, again, and Sheba Freedman, glad to dine with company since Jim is in Japan.

Wednesday, May 8, 1991

Lunch with Jim Hornig, Lee Baldwin, Jack Shepherd to discuss certification in War/Peace. Lee announced his forthcoming marriage to Anne Sa’adah.

Thursday, May 9, 1991

Dickey Endowment lunch with the speaker in our War/Peace course, a man who has worked in the Pentagon. Says generally he finds military men much more pacifistic than civilians.

Mother has two paintings at the Senior Exhibit at Howe Library, arranged again by Chrysanthi. The one done in Tempe is lovely.

Friday, May 10, 1991

Met with Jean Brophy. She’s under great pressure from Lloyd to fill Kendal up, poor thing! Yet we’re losing people through death and withdrawal. She doesn’t come to Meeting because people pounce on her about Kendal and she needs to escape.

Brenda Silver lectured on the reception of Virginia Woolf. Well done.

Saturday, May 11, 1991

Daphne and Greg arrived at 10:00 a.m. having left NYC at 5:00 a.m. Plans for the wedding continue. Now all the men must wear rented tuxedos. They rejected the apartment in Chelsea, 23rd and 10th Avenue, and are looking on the East Side.

Sunday, May 12, 1991

Daphne and Greg met again with Karen Sheldon and lunched with Yiayia while Chrysanthi and I drove to Cambridge to see A.R.T.’s King Lear. Mediocre. Even Alan Epstein as Gloucester was poor. Director’s fault. Too much “business” (including dousing Lear and the Fool with water in Act III), not enough poetry, timing, pacing. Saw Jimmy Yannatos. His daughter is dancing again. Can’t tell whether he’s truly friendly or just pretending.

Monday, May 13, 1991

Chrysanthi met with Lynn Benjamin, caterer for the wedding. Soaked seeds. At 5:00 we took off for the farm. Supper with the Shapiros.

Tuesday, May 14, 1991

Terpni

Garden fence down. All cedar posts are rotted. Propped some up temporarily with steel posts. Planted tomatoes, beans, etc., using Remay and “walls of water” to protect against frost. For tomatoes I used the “mound and trench” system that Bob Watson likes. Started pump, very easy. But one part of the flush system in the toilet froze and cracked because I didn’t realize last year that I had to drain it. So, no toilet for now. But we took delicious hot showers at the end of a long, hot day with swarms of black flies. The water is still miraculous to us both.

Thursday, May 16, 1991

Otmar programmed in Ritsos’s voice to correspond with “Moonlight Sonata” excerpts in Textra.

To Lebanon high school to observe Kendal “job fair.” 100 people, it seemed, filling out applications. All department heads spoke, describing available jobs but also speaking very well about Kendal’s values. I joked with them, saying that one week’s training at Longwood has made them all sound like birthright Quakers. AMTRAK to Philadelphia, delayed three hours because the engine lost its headlight and had to be replaced. Paul Paganucci and wife went home in disgust, but I waited.

Friday, May 17, 1991

Pendle Hill

Arrived at PH at 12:32. In time. Long breakfast conversation on the Montrealer with three Québécois. Executive Committee approved, with some modification, the ongoing publication of books, thanks mostly, I believe, to Margery, who more or less forced Denny O’Brien to put $30,000 in the budget for start-up costs. But a co-publishing arrangement is still desired, and PH will want to review everything next year. John Anderson, who’d been so opposed, said nothing; indeed, after the decision he ran up to me saying that he hoped we’d reprint Douglas Steere’s “Work and Contemplation.” Strange world.

Saturday, May 18, 1991

Cadbury Scholarship Committee at breakfast. We had to turn down Rebecca, whose proposal was unfocused and even a bit hysterical, poor thing. . . . I returned via NYC for a short stopover for Chinese supper, and a load of bagels and bread to take home.

Sunday, May 19, 1991

Hanover

Meeting. Lunch with Mother at The Greens. Then meeting at home with Sandi Adams, Diane Beaudoin, and Jack and Kathy Shepherd, for planning the mediation endeavor. Sandi extremely helpful. We had them all for supper afterwards.

Tuesday, May 21, 1991

Kendal Overseers with Paul Lewis visiting. He is now Jean’s boss. Open meeting afterwards in Alumni Hall about insurance. Paul told me in passing that there is dissention at Longwood between staff and administration over the “development” initiatives. So, once again, “paradise lost.”

At 5:00 p.m., meeting for students interest in Greek LSA. Four showed up. Three football players and a taciturn female. Failure. But Edward says that we must keep trying.

Thursday, May 23, 1991

CAP. Horror story—stories. What to do with Mark Bedan and Sally Sedgwick in Philosophy? Supported unanimously by ad-hoc committee including Penner and Berthold, but obviously mediocre, just barely tenurable. And Fogelin, who was in Italy and did not participate, wrote a separate letter damning them with faint praise. All this is complicated by Sedgwick’s martyrdom at the hands of the Dartmouth Review last year. We tenured Sedgwick and voted promotion without tenure for Bedan. But in the doorway on the way out we felt that this was unfair and requested another meeting to reconsider. Also on today’s agenda, Mara Sabinson in drama, opposed by her colleagues, favored by everyone else on the ad-hoc committee. I pushed her tenure despite accounts that she is an impossible person. But students adore her, and she stirs everything up intellectually and artistically, which is more than the others do.

Friday, May 24, 1991

Met with the Accreditation Committee for the English Department. I regretted discontinuance of team teaching and lack of courses that are truly “advanced.” In the afternoon, Peter Cosgove lectured on Gibbon. I then met with President Freedman (and, by chance, with his new assistant, Peter Martin, who turns out to be a former student of mine who remembers being invited home with his family at graduation) about our mediation endeavor.

Saturday, May 25, 1991

To Louis and Sally Cornell’s farm in Fairlee. They now keep 25 sheep. The home used to be Forrest Boley’s. They built a huge addition and in effect have two houses attached. Pretext for the invitation was to greet Stephen Cornell’s new wife. All the boys were there, and seemed to remember us with fondness, as we them. In this “Vermont hill farm” the hors d’oeuvres, I learned, were all from Zabar’s! I’m embarrassed because I haven’t asked Louis again to play music, but Dick, Allan, and I do so well, just the three of us, and a viola would require a violin. Met Edna Pierce’s lovely blond daughter, now living with a sous chef of Hanover Inn, a Black, whom she met at cooking school in Boston.

Sunday, May 26, 1991

After Meeting, I delivered my Haverford lecture on Quaker Silence to a “fit audience but few.” People hoped I’d publish it. Ditto. Then to Sunapee to Frenches’ tree farm. Her father, a Norwegian immigrant, became a wealthy NYC physician, bought a huge tract of lakefront property in the early 1900s. Now they have just about 25 acres and nothing on the lake, but close, with dock rights. David is amazing for an 80-year-old. The occasion was to welcome them into the Meeting (or back into the Meeting). With us were Stettenheims and Drysdales.

Monday, May 27, 1991

We took Takis and Stella to supper at Jesse’s. She’s a dear. He’s choosing between job offers in Australia, Louisiana, and . . . Dartmouth.

Tuesday, May 28, 1991

French Department gave a reception for John Rassias to celebrate his 25th year at Dartmouth. I felt like boycotting it after our falling out last New Year’s Eve, but went anyway. Speeches by Neal Oxenhandler (who is soon to retire) and Mary Jean Green. John very moved, especially considering his long-term estrangement from the department. Afterwards, he and Mary came to the house: a gesture, I suppose, of reconciliation and of reestablishment of our special relationship. So be it. It’s terrible to lose a long-term friend.

Wednesday, May 29, 1991

Breakfast with Steve Calvert, to say goodbye. He’s taking a job at Carnegie Mellon. It was Steve who put us on three cruises (although the first recommendation came, I think, from Bob McGrath), and Steve who developed ILEAD, the new adult education initiative that I’ll be teaching in next fall. He leaves because Dartmouth really has no interest, he says, in adult education.

Reception later for Dee Johnson, who is retiring early. Too bad.

May 30, 1991

Comp. Lit. annual senior lunch. Now the advisers talk about advisees. Pleasant.

CAP again. Jim Tatum and I argued that to promote two mediocre people in a small department like Philosophy would be to guarantee the department’s mediocrity after the senior people retire. CAP then reversed its earlier decision, deciding to terminate both Sedgwick and Bedan. We know that a storm of protest will follow. With bad taste in our mouths, we went off to the Inn for the annual CAP dinner.

Friday, May 31, 1991

Had Graham Wallis and John Kroll to lunch to try to get them to breathe new life into the War/Peace Seminar. I think it may work.

Saturday, June 1, 1991

Daphne arrived on AMTRAK. We didn’t go to our last A.R.T. play; gave the tickets to Charles Stewart and his girlfriend. Daphne and Greg have taken a co-op sublet on E. 79th Street and Second Avenue.

Monday, June 3, 1991

Reception at Kendal for overseers and department heads. Jean tells me that we’re having a new row with the town over taxation. Then to ILEAD reception at the Coolidge. Lots of enthusiasm for this new venture. Tom Campion is in charge. Then directly to Terpni.

Tuesday, June 4, 1991

Terpni

Started the tractor and even mounted the mower, but it broke after five minutes’ use. Started the Jari by pouring gasoline into the cylinder to prime it. Fixed the toilet. Swept. Watered the tomatoes.

Thursday, June 6, 1991

Cambridge

Finished grading in Humanities 2. Then faculty lunch joined by Peter Saccio, who’ll be added to the course next year. Then to 4th Council to plead the case for renewal of College Course 1; they worry about its lack of coherence. Then to Cambridge. Supper with George Goodman. Then together to Mimi Berlin’s house for meeting of the Boston area Capital Campaign Committee assembled by Jock Forbes—an impressive lot, including Bill Lipscomb, the Nobel Laureate in biochemistry. I gave the introduction about Kinhaven’s past, present, and future. George handled details of the campaign: who solicits whom, and for how much. People seemed willing. Forbes is interesting: an aristocrat apparently without money—i.e., cash—his home and summer home are worth millions. Drives a rusted out old pick-up. Contributed $200 a year to the campaign. But his name is magic, apparently. Afterwards, George and I drove back to Amherst. His second cataract operation was successful; he can see again, with one eye (an earlier cataract operation left the other eye totally blind). Nice man.

Friday, June 7, 1991

Amherst–Londonderry–Weston

A banner day. Drove to Londonderry to act as witness for the purchase of Kinhaven by the School. John Austin signed. And Lelah, of course. All went well. We borrowed $385,000 (a $25,000 last-minute gift from the Erlangers reduced the original amount of $410,000) in order to both mortgage the Kinhaven 26 acres and re-finance the five acres plus Hale House that we bought last year. Then with Bill Polk and John to Kinhaven to devour a bottle of champagne and to share lunch with Lelah. Also, the revolving fans are installed in the concert hall—my gift. Lelah may wish to exchange her wooded acres south of the property for a smaller plot on the north side, near the soccer field. Bill and I walked this; we are wary because of our own needs for future expansion. On the drive home, I bought a milkshake to make good the one that spilled all over the cassette tapes last year in the same spot. . . . Supper at the Officers’ with Sheila and Dee.

Saturday, June 8, 1991

Hanover

I sweated in the sun in my black robes for 2½ hours at the Medical School Class Day exercises and then rose to recite the Hippocratic Oath in Greek (using modern pronunciation). This was the idea of the new dean, Andy Wallace, who served previously under a Greek-American dean who always did this. I gave a short introduction about Hippocrates and the oath itself, originally a contract between a medical student and a teacher assuring the teacher that the student would pay his fees. People seemed to like this innovation.

Alec arrived at JFK, greeted by Leander, Daphne, and James McBride and his girlfriend Stephanie Payne. But his luggage was left behind in Seoul.

Sunday, June 9, 1991

Alec and Leander arrived, Alec’s luggage having reached JFK by the next plane. Alec in good shape, especially compared to last year when he returned home so sick. He speaks about returning to graduate school in educational administration in September 1992, which would mean only one more year in Jakarta. Amen.

Leander is working to finish the score of his “Panoply for Brass Quintet” to submit to a competition. Score done via computer thanks to Jerry Bidlack, but Leander had to do it again because of transposing instruments. He played a tape of the piece—strong, good music, although a bit over-long to my taste. I bought an extra Mac-plus to help encourage Leander to use the computer, finally.

Tuesday, June 11, 1991

To the Norwich Inn to see the manager re: irregularities in our wedding reservation. She’s been charging full rate instead of our agreed-on special price. She apologized and vowed to do better.

Wednesday, June 12, 1991

Marsha Swislocki visited. She and Walter Stephens complained to Jim Tatum, because I agreed to re-read some papers graded by them when students approached them. I did so in full naïveté, but they saw it as impugning their competence and, in Marsha’s case, as fortifying the students’ anti-feminist bias. I agreed that I should have consulted with her first. We parted amicably.

Sent off IBM conversion disk to Carla Heath after much work converting the files from Macintosh. Lots of help from Nancy Davies, bless her. And Volume 9, no. 2 of the journal went off to Carol last Friday. I did this issue single-handedly since Herzfeld was in Europe and so was Cohen, my student assistant. Lots of negotiation, as when Keeley objected to Ole Smith’s review of his Polk book; of course he shouldn’t have seen the review in the first place, and as when Ernie mistakenly assigned two people to review the same book. I rewrote it, combining both and got their permission to print this version. And the papers submitted by Gail Holst and Nancy Sultan needed so much re-working and retyping. And Mary Layoun really does not edit the book reviews adequately. Oh well . . . I’ve fallen woefully behind on the vetting of MSS, but at least both #s 1 & 2 of Volume 9 were submitted to Hopkins on time.

Thursday, June 13, 1991

CAP mess again. A campaign of letter writing on behalf of Sedgwick accused us of insensitivity to the plight of women in the sexist Philosophy Department not to mention the College. We split 3 to 3 on the vote to reconsider, with Jim Tatum again speaking for termination. I voted with him, as did Ray Hall. John Walsh switched his previous vote to vote the other way this time, joined by Lynn Mather (of course) and Chuck Braun. Jim Wright refused to break the tie, so the vote to reconsider failed. Then we turned to Bedan, where some new evidence encouraged us to vote for reconsideration. Then the Dean said that differentiating was impossible, so he’d now vote to break the Sedgwick tie, thus opening up her reconsideration as well. Exhausted and confused, we felt that to proceed now would be inadvisable, and set yet another meeting. Over all this hangs the threat of court action by Sedgwick. What a mess, and all because some of us had the courage to place the long-term needs of the College above the easy way out, and the humane way of granting tenure.

Friday, June 14, 1991

Hanover–Terpni

Finished my final obligations, submitting ORC copy to the Registrar for War/Peace Studies, College Courses, and University Seminars after a week’s effort to contact numerous people especially about the Seminars. As for War/Peace, decided not to include certification procedure, since the 4th Council continued College Course 1 for only one more year, pending a further investigation of the entire enterprise next fall. In University Seminars I spent 154% of my budget, mostly because of the demise of the Faculty Club and increased use of the Inn. Must go begging next fall. Felt a tremendous lassitude after this and went home to listen to Leander’s and Deanna’s wonderful performance of the Kreutzer Sonata while lying in bed. Later, drove to the farm. Supper at Smith’s; the old rituals. Shopping in the new Grand Union in North Creek.

Saturday, June 15, 1991

Terpni

Already received a Fed Ex packet: brochure for the September cruise. Why do I always say Yes to everything? Spent the day opening shutters, removing wasps’ nests, setting up “office,” mowing with the Jari, disassembling a broken part on the Ford mower, setting up computer and FAX, caulking gaps in the bathroom before removing the shutters, writing at long last to John Waterlow about Sir Sydney’s Kazantzakis materials. Another delicious shower at day’s end, and a superb spaghetti dinner made by Chrysanthi entirely from fresh vegetables picked from the garden.

Sunday, June 16, 1991

Leander and Deanna arrived from Minneapolis, Deanna together with her new violin, a late 1700s Italian make purchased from a Chicago dealer for $120,000! She sold her previous one for $40,000, however. She played it. It’s “fruity”—sounds almost like an organ voice. Gorgeous.

Tuesday, June 18, 1991

Our first live view of the infamous Mr. Morris, who wants to subdivide 27 acres (the old Baker woodlot) at the end of Waddell Road into 19 lots to be built upon, he claims, exclusively by his children and grandchildren (he has ten children). Everyone here regards him as either a psychopath or a crook, or possibly both. Is he trying to get round AΡΑ regulations this way, family, in order to sell the plots later on the open market? Or is he just a self-destructive paranoiac? Originally he wanted all the plots around the “lake” (actually a swamp created by beaver dams) but ΑΡΑ refused this because of wetlands management. He will have to pump sewage to high ground, construct his own road, bring electric in from our pole, etc. It’s insane. Now he has a lawyer, Fred Monroe, the co-leader of the Adirondack Fairness Coalition opposing the Governor’s Commission. Fred is slick and devious. Kept talking about the 2000 acre provision, which is already a dead letter. Claimed that Morris is no longer under ΑΡΑ jurisdiction. Discussion centered on the future of Waddell Road. It would need to be rebuilt to be two lanes wide so that two fire engines could pass on it, etc. Morris said he’d like it to remain as is. The Board shunted him over to the Planning Board, which next meets on July 1st. Nice that I knew everyone on the Board except Gene Arsenault. I’d spoken to the Supervisor earlier. He handled the meeting very well. Dennis Conroy of UHEAC was taking copious notes. Don Greene, now on the “master plan” board, was listening carefully; ditto for Bob Nessle. As we left the hall and encountered Morris and entourage outside, I didn’t say hello, which was a mistake. Finished with a hot fudge sundae—life’s little pleasures.

Started mowing with the Ford mower but the balance spring bolt snapped in two. Disassembled the linkage and brought everything to Bud Rudick in Schroon.

Thursday, June 20, 1991

Alec left for Hanover yesterday and today he’ll go to Logan Airport to pick up Lydia Lee, the violinist who’s coming to Kinhaven from Jakarta International School. She’s a Singapore Chinese living in Jakarta. Also to be picked up was a Honduran bassist sent to Kinhaven by Betty Clendenning. How nice.

Beveridge Webster called. “I’m still an alcoholic” was his opening. But he described how he has been faithfully attending AA and is about to go to California for a month’s intensive cure at RR (“Realistic Rehabilitation”). He desperately wants to enter Kendal. Franny, his wife, has vowed to come in any case and is backed in this by the children. I began to negotiate with them for two pianos; Franny will donate her Steinway if we place it in a lounge near her apartment. Beveridge will bring along the nine-foot Baldwin loaned him for life by the Baldwin Company, and place it in the auditorium. Audrey Logan, Dick Brokaw, Jean Brophy, and I will meet next Tuesday as the Donations Committee and report back. I’m eager to have Webster admitted but fear that Jean will demur. She probably had an alcoholic father and is too rigid on this issue.

Working on JMGS backlog, the pileup of manuscripts never sent out for review, etc.

Friday, June 21, 1991

Grand supper at Gore Mountain Lodge buffet in honor of Rosine Gardner, who graduated with a B.A. from SUNY after seven years of part-time study. Her father came from France; he kept hopping around taking pictures like a Japanese tourist, never spoke to anyone. Nice to see Kelly Nessle again; her daughter’s in Bryn Mawr. Met Pete Smith. Mrs. Smith is a guidance counselor in the North Creek school. Michael Gouthreau looking well, proud of his solar energy system. Certain victories against Eliot Monter & Co.: no golf course, but the Oven Mountain Development is still happening. Afterwards, drove to Hanover.

Saturday, June 22, 1991

Hanover

Daphne and Greg arrived in the morning and got their marriage license, visited Sally at the Norwich Inn and then Karen Sheldon again to settle on the form of the service. I discovered that Campion’s is going out of business. So, no tuxedos from them for the wedding. Bought two sports jackets at half price. Also, there were two murders in Hanover during the week of our absence. A visiting Ethiopian man slaughtered two Ethiopian women with an axe, with premeditation. Met with CAP again (!), the fourth time, about Bedan and Sedgwick. We reversed ourselves yet again, granting promotion without tenure to both, with tenure review in two years, teaching and scholarship for Sedgwick, just scholarship for Bedan. So the process was: first decision: promotion without for Bedan, tenure for Sedgwick; second decision: termination for both; third decision, as stated. There was a terrible furor on campus over Sedgwick from all the women, but we discounted that. Jim Tatum and Ray Hall were the only ones who continued to want termination. John Walsh and I shifted our votes to promotion without tenure. It was the basic question of (a) compassion for the individuals, both of whom just qualified for tenure, barely, or (b) protection of Dartmouth’s future by trying to avoid a mediocre department when the two control it as senior members.

Nice supper with Daphne, Greg, Yiayia.

Sunday, June 23, 1991

Daphne, Greg, and Chrysanthi drove to Boston for Daphne’s shower hosted by Maria Martin. I went to Meeting; ministered about our mediation attempt vs. legalism, then lunched with Yiayia and Bunny Little, who frightened me by saying that Beveridge Webster had just died, but she had confused him with another musician named Beveridge.

Vigorously trying to civilize my office. Two years worth of course materials were just piled on a shelf instead of being re-filed.

Watched Itzhak Perlman and ? (the violist) on TV with a hilarious interlude with Victor Borge in an all-Mozart program. Then a program on the I. M. Pei concert hall in Dallas that Daphne and Greg had just seen when they visited Greg’s father last weekend.

Tuesday, June 26, 1991

Kendal Overseers meeting for the first time at Kendal itself. Workmen are frantically trying to finish the Community Center, etc. in time for Monday when folks begin to move in. None of the furniture has arrived yet. Pauline Yost showed us the kitchen she designed. Everything strikes me as just a little too small, but the total is still most impressive. We now have a big problem again with the Town regarding taxation. They increased the land valuation from $770,000 to $5,000,000 and are taxing us almost $500,000 a year instead of the estimated $330,000. We’re all meant to write to the Selectmen. Our lawyer is preparing an application for abatement, and we are resolved to enter litigation if necessary. What a shame! We also approved Webster’s pianos but hope to arrange with the Baldwin Company beforehand what will happen to the nine-foot piano after Beveridge dies. I walked through the facility a bit afterwards. What a pleasure to see it really here six years after the idea hatched between Lloyd Lewis and myself.

Drove back to Terpni. Went back on Waddell Road to try to find Morris’s lake. Failed. But walked through his property, which is everywhere posted (!), and marked with surveyor’s tape, and has percolation holes here and there, left open, and thus very dangerous.

Wednesday, June 26, 1991

Back on telephone for three-quarters of an hour with Franny Webster. She unburdened herself to me. Fifty-two years of marriage to Beveridge apparently hasn’t been all pie and ice cream. She’s now resolved to look out for her own interests—i.e., to enter Kendal even if he cannot. What a mess! Kendal shouldn’t be breaking up families. Yet Lilla Bradley is moving in without David because their marriage is already effectively ended although they continue to occupy the same house, so in this case Kendal is a solution. Franny says she could never speak this way to Jean Brophy, whom she found cold. But she loved Barbara Gilbert, and also felt comfortable with Naomi Hartov, our new Director of Admissions

John Austin telephoned. Kinhaven has been granted $75,000 by the Kresge Foundation. Hooray! I expect that my letters to Dick Van Dusen and Jill Conway helped. But David Bury’s application was exemplary. Now we have to raise more than $300,000.

Got new part from Bud: $42.00 for a bolt. Reassembled it with Alec’s help, doing a careful adjustment of the mower for the first time so that the outer shoe weighs only 25 pounds. Tried the inner shoe adjustment but couldn’t the because the adjusting nut is frozen to its bolt. So the inner shoe comes down with 300 pounds of pressure instead of 80, which is why I had trouble mowing last year. But we can compensate by raising the shoe just a bit off the ground with the hydraulic lift.

Back into Morris’s property with some better directions this time from Dennis Conroy. Found the “lake,” which is large, in the midst of a swamp like the one where I cut my balsam logs. Difficult footing complicated by lots of slash. And in the midst of all this, a stretch of sheep fence. The whole area had been cleared at one time.

Thursday, June 27, 1991

Called Rebecca Mays to find out what happened at the PH Publications Committee yesterday. Relieved to learn that my essay on Quaker Silence was accepted. There are some suggestions for revision but no need for the committee to see the text again. We planned for the new cycle of book publishing. I’ll write to Paul Niebanck, Sonny Cronk, Gay Nicholson, and Bill Taber to see if they’ll join the Book Review Committee.

Ordered a plastic owl and an inflated snake to help keep birds away from our blueberries, but Chrysanthi got hysterical about the snake.

Friday, June 28, 1991

Finished lubricating the mower and tractor. Managed to extract the screw portion of a broken zerk and replaced it. Mowed front field with no difficulty whatever. Mower behaved perfectly.

Last night, Shapiros here bringing guidebooks for Spain. I’m trying to arrange our travel with Travel Dynamics.

Tonight, I went to the weekly dancing for the first time. Evelyn Greene is the teacher. She’s superb, very relaxed. Shapiros, Evelyn, and Don (who danced in his ungainly way a few times), Hilda, somebody called Virginia, and us. I didn’t do too badly, they said. Fun. Frozen yogurt and cordials at Shapiros afterwards.

Saturday, June 29, 1991

I’m catching up on long-overdue correspondence, and six months of unread TLSs. Played through the Kreutzer Sonata with Alec the other day after replacing a damper on the piano. Hacked through it, rather. Starting to read Nancy Frankenberry’s Religion and Radical Empiricism, which has caused such a stir. Leander called. He’s playing the Ravel trio tonight and Deanna is doing one of the Bartok quartets. Alec is going, but Chrysanthi and I will stay home. Daphne and Greg are moving today to 308 E. 79th Street, Apt. 15F. Too bad to give up that dream apartment on Madison at 64th, but it was too small, really, for the two of them, and without a real kitchen.

Saw a doe, the tiniest fawn, all spotted, in midday right in our driveway whence they proceeded to steal apples from our tree.

Cherry tree produced but is dying. Next year I must expand the orchard: more apples, another cherry or two, some plums in the hope they’ll produce.

Daphne and Greg moved to 308 E. 79th, giving up that unbelievable (but also alas too small) flat on Madison and 64th Street.

Monday, July 1, 1991

To Planning Board for Morris hearing again. Quite subdued and rational this time. Their entire strategy is to escape ΑΡΑ jurisdiction, so they’ve reduced the subdivisions to sixteen, are not building on wetlands, will have individual septic systems, etc. And the deeds will restrict ownership to family for something like 100 years. It’s totally insane, of course, but Morris is a monomaniac. He introduced himself afterwards and we had a friendly chat, also with his wife. Said he fell in love with that land and wept after finally purchasing it after three years’ delay. Then the customary paranoia started, re: ΑΡΑ, etc. I’m told that he also thinks that the town’s planning board is infiltrated by communists and pinkos. I doubt he’ll ever build anything; he looks too sick.

Wednesday, July 3, 1991

Apparently my strong letter to Hanover Selectmen re: Kendal taxation has raised some tempers. Kirk, the chairman, accosted Jean about it at Rotary yesterday, but I don’t know further details.

Jerry Gardner for supper. He’s trapped by the newspaper, which continues to lose money yet really cannot be sold. And Rosine refuses to help him, so he does the whole thing alone. Advertisers refuse to pay, etc.

Dancing again. It’s fun. I’m trying to practice before the wedding.

Daphne and Greg flew today to London to see the semi-finals and finals of Wimbledon. Some life-style—his, of course, more than hers. The tickets were a gift from his boss.

July 4, 1991

Naoko and Yasuo arrived. Lots of good talk despite their linguistic handicaps in English. Went to visit Gary and Wendy McGinn at their home on Schroon Lake, ten acres, all that’s left from his grandfather’s farm that was cut in two by Interstate 87 and the new Route 9. Then to Independence Day parade, a vision of America that is very foreign to me in the elitist enclave of Dartmouth, Yale Club, etc. Born-again Christians extolling family and Bible, super-patriots welcoming the boys back home, volunteer firemen by the score. Pizza at the Narrows; then took down a huge wasps’ nest under Alec’s porch which turned out to be empty; then played chamber music: Bach and Telemann. Piano behaving nicely. I replaced several dampers two days ago.

JMGS galleys arrived. I have no help from Michael, who’s in Greece, or Kate. With luck Mary Layoun will pitch in.

Wednesday, July 10, 1991

Skipping dancing this evening. Alec and I sight-read the Beethoven violin concerto. I’ve heard it dozens of times, of course, but its brilliance never registered before as deeply as it did today because of actually playing it.

We felled a large dead pine on the pond bank, landing it “square on a dime” by using the come-along. Only 31 years old. 15-inch diameter 16 feet up. We’ve sawed several 18-inch sections to use as stools and one for stabilizing fireplace wood that has to be split. There’s a six-foot section that we sawed again longitudinally and Alec is making into two benches.

Friday, July 12, 1991

Supper at Don and Evelyn Greene’s, next to the Hudson on River Road, North Creek. Pleasant. He was remarkably talkative (for him). They have a good, varied life even here, because they are both so creative. Afterwards, drove directly to Hanover to deposit Chrysanthi there while I attend the Kinhaven Board this weekend.

Saturday, July 13, 1991

Weston

Our first board meeting as owners of the property. Lelah thankfully absent. The Main House fully occupied by staff (including Leander and Deanna). We reacted negatively to Lelah’s desire to swap six acres of our property to build a house, with six acres of her woods. We need to raise $300,000 in order to get the Kresge challenge grant of $75,000. In the staff concert, Leander, Deanna, and Wayne played the Arensky trio, second-rate Mendelssohn. I found it boring, but Deanna played well, although somewhat lifelessly compared to Coke, afterwards, in the Beethoven opus 132. She despises his style and vice versa. Overnight in the Blue Gentian. Dick Kidde died of cancer over the winter and his wife is trying to carry on alone. Very discouraged, since the entire Magic Mountain is about to close.

Sunday, July 14, 1991

Weston

Lunch with Leander and Deanna. They say that Jerry is worse than ever: morose, distant. The place is somewhat demoralized. In the board meeting he spoke strongly against the guest composer idea, saying it’s disruptive and that the staff, too, are opposed. Of course Peter Schultz then echoed him. Leander says just the opposite is the case; the staff are clearly in favor. Jerry is threatened, of course. But I must admit that the orchestra sounded fine in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.” Yet Leander says that the best students generally elect not to return because of the poor experience in orchestra. Last night, at staff concert, nice talk with Lydia Lee, the thirteen-year-old violinist who came from Jakarta International School because of Alec. A little “lady” already with marvelous English and total self-confidence, an accomplished conversationalist. Karen Van Dyck and her husband Nelson Moe came last night. He turns out to be the son of the professor of choral conducting at Oberlin; he grew up with Arthur Dann’s children, etc. So he and Leander had lots to talk about, as did I and Karen. They returned today with Jacob, their baby, and I drove them to Norwich after the concert. Karen likes my Ritsos’s Painterly Technique essay and wants to cite it in relation to something she’s doing now with women’s poetry.

Monday, July 15, 1991

Hanover

Met with Lloyd Lewis at Kendal. He’s still unhappy about Jean, says she alienates and humiliates her underlings. He wants me to join him in December in her evaluation interview. Μπελάς!

Went for pizza in Lebanon with Chrysanthi and ran into Jim Freedman just back from Berlin, Prague, etc., and fully cognizant of his speech tomorrow. Also Lee Baldwin and Anne Sa’adah, looking radiant after their marriage on Saturday.

Tuesday, July 16, 1991

Hanover/Kendal

A great day! Started at Kendal at 8:00 a.m. with Admissions Committee. Then at 8:30 joint boards: Directors and Overseers. Very good discussion of the tax imbroglio. We decided to fight it, but non-aggressively and non-publicly, with no more letters, but working quietly with town officials. Also made some more adjustments to the Overseers’ guidelines.

Jean and I divided up the “thank yous” for this afternoon and I rushed to the office to get a clean copy printed. Hot dog lunch on Main Street. Chanced to meet Cary Clarke, who gave good advice regarding taxation, especially don’t by-pass the tax assessor by going to the Selectmen. Work with the assessor and the Town Manager. Strive for principles rather than dollar amounts.

At 2:00 p.m. we had our ribbon-cutting ceremony under two large tents in Kendal’s central courtyard. Huge crowd. I was master of ceremonies, giving thanks, then introducing, in turn, Jean, Lloyd, Jim Freedman, Alan Hunt, and Lynmar Brock. Jim spoke well, lifting material from my letters to him about how the Kendal concept is new in the whole history of Western civilization because it enables older people to reshape their lives in a meaningful way instead of simply declining and vegetating. I concluded with a mini-sermon on “Control”: how, paradoxically at a time when we seem to have lost control because of physical decay, we actually have more control over the direction we want our life to take. This was well received. Then Lynmar and I cut the ribbon, with video camera recording and . . . the door stuck! Finally pulled it open. Everyone entered to explore. We went up to the third floor of Mary Dyer to see no. 301, Mother’s apartment, still unfinished, and then enjoyed the splendid hors d’oeuvres prepared by Paulette Yost and the chef. Lots of conversation with excited, happy people. Best of all, both Alec and Leander came for the ceremony.

A few moments in the office gathering things for the farm, then back to Kendal for dinner in the dining room: a fine meal, delicious. Nice to see Peggy Hebert hostessing there. Then drove back to the farm. To bed at 1:00 a.m.

Wednesday, July 17, 1991

Terpni

To NYC ballet on our anniversary, with Alec. Daphne sent a lovely card, saying she hoped her marriage would be as good as ours. Fine show: a Japanese-style ballet (Balanchine), Dances at a Gathering (Robbins, to Chopin), then a wild west extravaganza (Balanchine again). Weightlessness is the miracle. Escape from contingency.

Thursday, July 18, 1991

Very hot. I swam for the first time (I’ve been reveling in the shower up to now). Shapiros and Adlers for supper. Milly brought a striking painting for Daphne. Irv and Jack both helped me re: the Lloyd-Jean problem, counseling an active program to help Jean before the evaluation takes place.

Friday, July 19, 1991

Jean faxed an angry letter from Kirk, the Selectman, saying that our letters irritate the Selectmen and serve only to harden their position. Also that a minority think that Kendal is still under-valued. Much trouble ahead.

Train tickets to Madrid arrived. I’m getting excited about our first trip to Spain.

Sunday, July 21, 1991

Morning: Reached 1947 in selecting and dating the Kazantzakis letters. The final decade remains.

Afternoon: Finished mowing. Και του χρόνου!

Evening: Supper with Aser and Evelyn Rothstein. They took us to a feast at the McGee House in Warrensburg, their treat, an anniversary present.

Monday, July 22, 1991

Received the following remarkable letter from Stylianos:

Φίλτατοί μου Peter καί Χρυσάνθη,

Μέ πολλή συγκίνηση ἔλαβα τό ἀγγελτήριο—προσκλητήριο τῶν γάμων τῆς Δάφνης καί τοῦ Gregory, καί σπεύδω νά ἐκράσω ἀπό τώρα ὁλόθερμες τίς εὐχές καί τήν προσευχήν νά τούς ἀξιώσει ὁ Θεός, ὄχι μόνο νά ζήσουν χαρούμενοι, ἀλλά καί να ἀντιγράψουν δημιουργικά ὅσο περισσότερα μπορέσουν στοιχεῖα ἀπό τόν δικό Σας εὐλογημένο γάμο.

Ἄν οἱ ἀποστάσεις ἦσαν μικρότερες καί οἱ ὑποχρεώσεις λιγώτερες, μήν ἀμφιβάλλετε ὅτι θά παρευρισκόμουν αὐτοπροσώπως σ’ αὐτή τήν μεγάλη ὥρα τῆς Δάφνης, γιατί γνωρίζετε τά ἰδιαίτερα αἰσθήματα πού μοῦ ἐνέπνευσε αὐτό τό παιδί, γνήσιο ὁμοίωμα σέ παράσταση καί φρόνημα πρός τό μυθικό πρότυπό της.

Ἐσωκλείνω, τελείως συμβολικά, ἐπιταγήν ἐκ US$500 νά τῆς τό προσφέρετε ἐκ μέρους μου γιά ένα μικρό δωράκι τήν ἡμέρα εκείνη. Ἐπίσης θά ἀναλάβετε νά μοῦ τούς φιλήσετε σταυρωτά καί τούς δυό τήν ὥρα τῆς στέψεως.

Εὔχομαι μέ τό καλό καί στά ἄλλα παιδιά Σας.

Μέ τό ἴδιο ταχυδρομείο Σᾶς στέλνω τήν τελευταία μου ποιητική συλλογή «Ἡ Ἄλλη Ἐκδοχή», καθώς κι ἕνα ἄλλο βιβλίο μου πού ἀφορᾶ τήν περιρέουσα ἀτμόσφαιρα στό θεολογικό Διάλογο.

Εὐχόμενος νά μήν ἀργήσουμε νά ξανασυναντηθούμε, Σᾶς κατασπάζομαι όλους, καί διατελῶ

Ἐν Σύδνεϋ τῇ 12ῃ Ἰουλίου 1991

Μέ βαθειά ἀγάπη καί νοσταλγία Στυλιανός

I translated the letter as follows and sent it off to Daphne.

Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia

242 Cleveland Street

Redfern

Sydney, N.S.W. 2016

Australia

Dear Peter and Chrysanthi,

I was extremely moved to receive the announcement and invitation for the marriage of Daphne and Gregory. I hasten to express this instant my ardent blessings and the prayer that God may grant not only that they live together in happiness but that they creatively copy as many as possible elements as they can from your own blessed marriage.

If the distance were not so great and my obligations fewer, have no doubts that I would appear in person at this great moment of Daphne’s, because you are well aware of the special feelings inspired in me by that child, who is the genuine image—in performance and in wisdom—of her mythical prototype.

I enclose, in an entirely symbolic way, a check in the amount of US$500.00 so that you may present her, on my behalf, a tiny little present on that day. In addition, please undertake to embrace both of them for me on both cheeks at the moment of their coronation.

With wishes for the same luck with your other children.

I’m sending by the same post my latest collection of poetry, “The Other Aspect,” as well as a book of mine that treats the current atmosphere in our theological Dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church.

With hopes that we shall meet again soon. I embrace all of you, and remain,

With deep love and nostalgia, Stylianos

Chrysanthi is teaching me how to waltz in preparation for the wedding.

Job now: cleaning out the weeds from the pond, a few each day.

Tuesday, July 23, 1991

Lloyd Lewis telephoned to report a crisis at Kendal: (1) Jean refused to come to the quarterly retreat at Longwood and forbade Carol to go either. (2) Bev Fuller, food services manager, insulted Paulette Yost, said she wasn’t supposed to be directed from Philadelphia but only by Jean, etc. Lloyd says he’s going to command Jean to go to Philadelphia and, if she refuses, fire her. He’ll keep me posted.

Wednesday, July 24, 1991

Cliff Vermilye, Hanover town manager, telephoned about Kendal taxes. Of course he sees them as fair, exprensive only because everything is expensive. I telephoned Jean and was relieved to hear that she’d gone to Philadelphia.

Folk dancing at night. I’m all “toes.”

Thursday, July 25, 1991

Lloyd called. He confronted Jean with accusation that she’s not a “team player.” She denied this. He confronted her about the Fuller-Yost blowup. She pleaded ignorance. He told her she must deal with it, by firing Fuller after a hearing.

Friday, July 26, 1991

Paul Lewis, Paulette, and Jean presumably confronted Fuller today. I don’t know what happened. What a shame! I thought we’d have at least a «honeymoon» of 100 days. I emphasized to Lloyd how demoralizing this could be for other heads of department unless they are made to understand fully what happened. So, all the beautiful food produced for the 16th was done by a staff at odds with the “help” sent from Philadelphia.

Gave Alec a belt sander in advance for his birthday, to use at once on the rustic bench he’s making. We replaced a fence post in the garden. He’s rebuilding the garden gate. Ewe and faun directly in back of the house eating Chrysanthi’s flowers and looking very interested in our garden. I shooed them away.

Mailed galley proofs of JMGS volume 9 #1 to Carol Hamblen.

To ballet. Supper there with Rothsteins. Stravinsky’s “The Cage” was breathtaking; choreography by Jerome Robbins. Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony” also lovely, but Peter Martins’ “Four Gnossiennes” (Erik Satie) was very slight and Robert LaRosse’s “Waltz Trilogy” too traditional for my taste. I had a better feeling overall on July 16. Still, “The Cage” made it all worthwhile.

Sally at Norwich Inn finally sent prices for the wedding dinner. $20.00 each plus wine. We expect almost 100 guests.

Saturday, July 17, 1991

Long talk with Meg Alexiou. Mike Keeley has resigned from JMGS board and Meg and I thought about his replacement: Tziovas (1st choice), Dimiroulis, Van Dyck, Jusdanis, Ole Smith maybe.

I’ve vetted and re-vetted Alec’s statement to submit to Harvard Graduate School of Education to study administration of independent schools. It’s getting better.

We worked on the garden gate. Dinner with Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald at their home in North Creek.

Tuesday, July 30, 1991

Hanover

In Hanover so that Chrysanthi can attend Admissions Committee discussion, again on the case of Beveridge Webster. I stayed away, assuming that my presence would be counter-productive. Chrysanthi reported that the group split down the middle. Head nurse Eileen and Mayme were legalistic: no alcoholics allowed. We gave him a year and he didn’t cure himself; so, no admittance. The person from Kendal at Longwood, and our new social worker, and Chrysanthi were more humanitarian and compassionate: He’s trying. Let him in. See what happens in a year. Jean silent, abashed, all smiles and solicitude for Carol (she must have really been hauled over the coals last week). When asked her opinion she turned all red and sided with the legalists. She also said that I was trying to insinuate them via the promise of donated pianos. Horrible. And so un-Christian. Holier than thou; pharisaical. Christ would have seen this as an opportunity to save a soul, not as a pretext for wallowing in one’s own self-righteousness. Then Dick Brokaw suggested that maybe Franny Webster is trying to get rid of her husband. So they are now both going to have to appear again at Kendal for another interview, before the social worker, who will make a recommendation.

Supper at Casual Crossings with Mother and Chrysanthi. Irene Frowenfeld is now interested in Kendal.

Bev Fuller was fired.

Wednesday, July 31, 1991

Richard Dellamora arrived from Hanover where he was once again a participant in the School of Criticism. Nice man. He’s making a career now out of his homosexuality—i.e., in gay studies. Chrysanthi has stayed in Hanover to worry about the wedding, so we three men had a “bachelor party”—lots of good talk over dinner, after 1½ hours removing rocks from Alec’s path, and then having a swim.

Yesterday, saw Daphne’s wedding dress for the first time. I’m becoming increasingly disgusted by this pagan ritual with its ostentation and conspicuous expense. But I must keep mum.

Thursday, August 1, 1991

Indian Lake

Dellamora left. Then a surprise telephone call from Tom Brown and Warder Cadbury. Would I come to Camp Backlog for lunch? So Alec and I drove to Indian Lake, then south on Route 30 (which I remember as a dirt road full of potholes and mud, from my youth) to the campsites, where they met us in a boat. They own 150 acres completely surrounded by State land with no access except by water (about a 20 minute ride into the south lake) or by a 1¼ mile footpath from the campsite. Bought by Tom’s great-grandfather around 1905 or 1910 from a lumber company. Three families own it jointly by means of stock in a non-profit corporation: the Browns, the Cadburys, and the Bortons, all intermarried of course. No electricity, no indoor toilets (their privy is called The Oval Office). But they have a generator for power tools and to pump lake water into a storage tank that then works by gravity feed. They also have a telephone; the cable comes underwater. Drinking water from a dug well. They live in tents, each with a fireplace in front containing a huge “backlog.” There’s a nice Adirondack-type lodge, a kitchen that is now winterized, outbuildings for storage, etc. Everything—all food, supplies, building materials—must come in by boat. About 30–40 people were there, four generations. Plus a Black cook, an old family retainer. A bell rang and everyone gathered under a canvas roof for lunch preceded by Quaker grace of course, holding hands. Warder is a good conversationalist (with Philadelphia accent), waggish. But his brother, Henry Cadbury’s other son, said nary a word. Turns out that Warder was on a relief mission to the Peloponnesus in 1946, transporting cattle. The captain of their liberty ship, drunk, backed the propeller into the wharf and laid the ship up for two weeks’ repairs. Dick Dewees was there, too. He married into the family. He’s hoping to apply for Lloyd’s position at Kendal. Infants in arms, teenagers, college students, young couples, all the way up to Tom and Nan Brown, who must be in their seventies, and seem very spry. We talked steadily from 11:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., and then walked out through the Forest Preserve. I’m going to ask Mark Grunblatt about the advisability of the corporate system for Terpni.

Working on my “reading” for Daphne’s wedding: the end of Molly’s soliloquy in Ulysses. Do I dare? Will I be able to get through it without breaking down? I’m combining it with Kierkegaard on the aesthetic, ethical, and religious basis for marriage then using Molly as an example of the religious based on gratitude rather than gratification or commitment.

Monday, August 5, 1991

Alec made a fine new gate for the garden fence. We replaced some of the cedar posts, using “new” ones from the pile I stacked thirty-odd years ago.

Wednesday, August 7, 1991

Tom Persons called to say that Deckerts’ other parcel has been sold and the northern one, opposite us, 168 acres, has been reduced in price. He thought that Deckert would accept $260 per acre. Chrysanthi’s in Hanover preparing for the wedding. Alec, Leander, and I tramped through this property. Lots of timber: white pine, hemlock on the south end; lovely wetlands with a large beaver lake; birds flushing continuously, deer tracks everywhere; northern end heavily lumbered and a mess. Met a man from Friends Lake, also interested. We’re encouraged but still undecided.

Thursday, August 8, 1991

To Hanover. Supper at Quechee with our new in-laws: Lucia Tebbe, Greg’s mother; Graham and Caryn Tebbe, his father and step-mother; Carl, his brother; Vaughan, his sister. Went very well. Lovely, warm people, obviously very happy with Daphne. Lucia is a lawyer specializing in battered children. Carl is a carpenter, the black sheep of the family, earring and all. Graham seems to be “in finance” in some way. Caryn runs a travel agency in Dallas. Καλή αρχή.

Friday, August 9, 1991

Rehearsal tedious but Karen Sheldon and Jane Helms were very patient. The Corindia children refused to go down the aisle with the rings and the flowers.

Rehearsal dinner at Pierce’s Country Inn. Lovely. About 80 people. Toasts, fun, good cheer. Met Greg’s step-sister Kendal, a southern debutante type, also Lucia’s roommate, another lawyer specializing in appeals. Lovely woman. Met Bemelmans’ grandson again, and other friends from Harvard, including the roommate, Lori. Earlier, met Fred Hills, Daphne’s boss at S & S, and his wife and two children. Turns out to be a Columbia graduate, very unassuming and friendly. He told me that everyone loves Daphne. Later, Leander interpreted that as resulting from her Quaker upbringing even though she keeps her distance now from things Quaker.

Dick Williamson came to deliver a present and harangued me (nicely) regarding the Deckert land: Don’t think twice, buy it! So, Alec and I decided to make an offer: $38,000, or about $225 per acre.

Saturday, August 10, 1991

Daphne’s wedding. Shriners’ parade in Hanover on the same day: a circus. Photographer at Norwich Inn at 1:00 p.m., beforehand, a good idea. Even Carl Tebbe in a tuxedo. Daphne a beautiful bride of course. Service at 3:00 in Norwich Congregational Church, full, about 200 people. Nicki and Emily Corindia did go down the aisle this time. Brittles and Stephanie arrived at 3:00 just as Daphne and I were ready to march. We both controlled our emotions, more or less. Karen conducted the ceremony beautifully. Leander and Deanna’s music set the mood, substituting for Quaker silence. Lucia read from 1 Corinthians 13 on “love”; I read the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, also on love, but a bit different. I prefaced it with Kierkegaard’s aesthetic–ethical–religious modes. People seemed to like this “daring” intrusion. I wanted the ceremony to be dignified but not sterile. The only part that didn’t work was the silence inviting testimonials. Margery Walker was the only one who rose. Afterwards I superintended the certificate as people signed. The “mob” went to the reception room to gorge on Chrysanthi’s trigona, dholmádhes, and baklavás. Champagne. Cutting the wedding cake. Gifts piled up. Flowers everywhere. A short break; then to the Norwich Inn for supper. I hosted 106 hungry eaters to roast beef. Dancing, toasts, the best by Fred Hills, who spoke warmly of Daphne’s career and concluded with: “If you find someone who not only has a career but can keep house and cook, marry him!”

Sunday, August 11, 1991

Open house for brunch at 12 Ledyard Lane. Another mob. Nice to see Jay and Devon, and Ned (yesterday). I took Shapiros on a tour of Kendal. Alec, headed for Indonesia, left with Brittles. Everything at once: Yiayia hosted fourteen for supper at Kendal, including Irene Honigsberg-Frowenfeld, who is interested. Another tour. Daphne and Greg left earlier, for Switzerland and Italy.

Monday, August 12, 1991

Hanover–Riparius

Lots of things to do, still. Return the tuxedos, bring the certificate for framing, get certified check for land purchase, think about cruise lectures. Chrysanthi driving herself, and exhausted. Finally we left in the late afternoon. Lobster supper in Fair Haven.

Tuesday, August 13, 1991

Terpni

The Busecks are all at Garnet Lake Lodge in North River. David, Linda, Lori, and Paul came to see the farm; then we went to North River for supper with all of them, including Omi and Yiayia. No word yet from Persons regarding the land.

Wednesday, August 14, 1991

Finished 1954 in Kazantzakis letters; only 1955, 1956, and part of 1957 remaining. Supper with Busecks again in North River. We’re eating ripe tomatoes at lunch every day. Very hot and humid. Enjoyed swims today and yesterday.

Thursday, August 15, 1991

John Deckert accepted our offer of $38,000 for his 168 acres—i.e., $226 per acre. So we now own 168 + 120 = 288 acres. Closing scheduled for the end of August.

Busecks here, also Yiayia, eager to “test” the new bathroom. Bushwacked to our new wetlands with Peter, Alice, and Lori. I cooked Italian string beans for supper, to everyone’s amazement.

Friday, August 16, 1991

Busecks left. That ends the eight days of wedding irregularity. Our apples are ripe. I picked them. Chrysanthi will put up apple sauce. Also began pruning the apple tree and three plum trees. We lost the cherry tree this summer.

Sunday, August 18, 1991

Finished this reading and selection of the Kazantzakis letters. Very sad to read the last ones in 1957. He had so many projects, such κέφι, such desire to finish translating Homer’s Odyssey. And his death was so haphazard and weird and unnecessary.

Marie McCarthy for supper, then Shapiros for dessert.

August 28, 1991

Purchased 168.5 acres across from us, the former Waddell farm. In Alec’s name.

August 31, 1991

To Arleen Perryman’s wedding in Glens Falls in the morning. Interesting to compare with ours: more garish, very much more Christian, indeed Christocentric, with nice symbolism of two small candles lighted by the two mothers and then a large candle in the middle lighted by the newlyweds from the mothers’ lights.

To Hanover. Daphne already there for the weekend, lovely, calm, refreshed by Greg and her travels to the Swiss Alps, Lake Como, Lake Garda, etc. Leander all absorbed in his new Mac computer that I bought him. Supper with Yiayia and Audrey at Kendal. Beveridge Webster has been admitted, with conditions. Audrey and I conspired how to raise $6800 to buy the nine-foot Baldwin that the Baldwin Company has loaned him for three decades. Frenzy trying to catch up with mail, pay bills, etc.

Sunday, September 1, 1991

Again, frantic in office trying to come up to date with JMGS. Lunch at The Greens with Yiayia. Good she’s leaving. Place demoralized. Seven empty apartments.

Monday, September 2, 1991

Boston–New York

By bus to Logan. Met there by a French Ph.D. student coming to interview me on her subject: Greek-American literature. Unpleasant woman who wasted valuable time by complaining how little time she had with me. But I tried to be pleasant. At JFK met the cruise group: David McCullough, lecturer from Book of the Month Club and a mystery writer; Gail Godwin, the novelist; Sue Leng, tour director; Alice van Straalen, representing Book of the Month Club. Pleasant flight except. . .

Tuesday, September 3, 1991

Ireland

. . . couldn’t land at Shannon on account of fog. Continued on to Dublin and barely managed to land there. Huge breakfast paid by Aer Lingus and then transportation to Galway by bus (they almost put us on the plane headed back to New York with a stop in Shannon; if again we’d been unable to land we’d be back in New York). Bad jet lag (cheated on fast feast fast feast). Slept in overheated hotel room. Lectured on Yeats at 6:00 p.m., reading lots of poems as well as explaining them. Compliments. Lovely hors d’oeuvres and drinks that constituted supper. Then to Galway by local bus. Dirty central square, no grandeur, lots of people and lots of kegs of Guinness and lots of men reeking of beer. Everyone here seems young. I was told that 50% of the population is under age 25.

Wednesday, September 4, 1991

Connemara

Bus tour, very leisurely and pleasant, to ruined friary of Ross Errilly, then long village lunch in a beautiful hotel, village of Clifton, apparently settled by Quakers. Connemara region peaceful, slow, totally rural: peat bogs, heather, fishing, sheep, cows. Ross Errilly standing without any fence or tickets in the middle of a field, with five bulls awaiting us at the gate and looking very suspicious. Lynch crypt with skulls and other assorted bones. One Lynch was a judge whose son committed murder and had to be sentenced to death by his father. No one would then execute the sentence and the father had to execute his own son by hanging him. Grotesque! Some Gaelic spoken here. The University of Galway gives degrees to Gaelic speakers. The guide, Carmel, is excellent and very careful not to talk too much.

Evening in Galway again. Looked at a shopping center incorporating part of the old city walls. Better impression of the city than last night. I’m glad I saw “the West” if only superficially, because of the romantic attachment to its ways in Irish literature, especially in “The Dead.” And Nora Joyce came from Galway.

Thursday, September 5, 1991

Galway–Dublin

To Clonmacnoise Monastery in a lovely setting on the River Shannon. Another medieval “university” training monks from Poland, etc. Then to Castletown House, restored by the Guinness family but not all that grand, really. The Irish aping the English. Boarded the Illiria. Some crew members the same; one remembered Daphne. Lift back into Dublin by the assistant harbormaster, an Englishman, who kept insisting that The French Lieutenant’s Daughter (sic) was by Thomas Hardy! To the experimental part of the Abbey Theatre, called the Peacock, to see three Yeats plays very well done with sensitivity and imagination in the acting, choreography, and music. They were Deidre, A Full Moon in March, and Shadowy Waters, all directed by James W. Flannery. Symbolistic with touches of Noh-drama. Not readily comprehensible. Very avant-garde even today although Deidre dates from 1906.

Friday, September 6, 1991

Dublin

To Trinity’s Long Room to see the Book of Kells. I am trying to see if W. R. Stanford’s archives are in Trinity. But the manuscript room was still closed. Then to St. Patrick’s to see Swift’s death mask, epitaph, etc. Then to Sandycove to Joyce’s Martello Tower, closed when we came here the last time, twenty years ago. Surprised how small it is. They’ve set up a splendid Joyce museum, with good letters, bits of manuscript, and lots of photos. Climbed up to the parapet, could see “swerve of bay and sweep of shore,” and Howth Head, not to mention the 40 Foot, complete with nude male swimmers.

Lunch with David McCullough and Alice van Straalen of the Book of the Month Club, her treat. Ate at Foley’s on St. Stephen’s Green, just beyond the Shelburne Hotel. Got to know how BOMC works. Tried the manuscript room again at Trinity. No Stanford archives. I’ll need to contact Dr. Dillon at the Classics Department by post. Wandering in Grafton Street, encountered a Bewley’s Café by chance. Bursting with activity, just the place for an afternoon tea. The business is over 150 years old but apparently is no longer in Quaker hands.

Lectured on Joyce, doing my best to cover the career for an audience that had read nothing. Treated Joyce as of the classical mentality, accepting dear dirty Dublin, as opposed to Yeats, who was of the romantic mentality.

Huge dinner with boring company.

Saturday, September 7, 1991

Scotland

Landed at Ayr via tender. Ayr, as in Ayrshire. To Alloway, Burns’s cottage, along the Tam o’ Shanter trail. My first real encounter with Burns. It was fun. Then to the exquisite Brig o’ Doon overlooking meadows and gardens, a medieval bridge much like το γεφύρι της Άρτας in design and shape. Then to Kirkoswald to Souter Johnnie’s Cottage. Lastly to Culzean Castle (pronounced Culeán; -z is often silent in Scottish names). Exquisite home designed by Robert Adam. Discoverd origin of expressions «straight as a ramrod» and «flash in the pan,» both from the flintlock pistol. Also (earlier) of “Keep it under your hat”: Tam o’ Shanters were actually money-purses, with secret leather compartments.

Suddenly realized that Robert Starer, who seems to be Gail Godwin’s «man», is the composer we knew at 414 W. 121 Street when I was at Columbia. Sure enough! He has just retired. Left Juilliard long ago to teach at CCNY. He says he might be interested in the visiting composer position at Kinhaven.

Sunday, September 8, 1991

Lake District

Gail Godwin lectured last night on influences on her work: George Eliot and Jane Austen. How they characterize through money, houses, etc. This morning, David McCullough lectured amusingly on mystery writing saying at the end very perceptively that people read mystery novels because such novels assume a logical, just world.

Docked at Heysham and drove past Morecambe Bay, with its Quaker associations, also past Kendal, Coniston Water, Carmel. On to Wordsworth’s “Dove Cottage” in Grasmere. I’d last been here as a hitchhiker in 1952, I believe, with Donella Gandolfi. Today was gorgeous sunshine. Very simple house that must have been extremely crowded and uncomfortable, yet Wordsworth did his best work here. We proceeded then to Rydel Mount, a grand mansion with four acres of gardens laid out beautifully by Wordsworth himself. By this time, of course, he was a “national institution.” I have a grudge against the romantics. Because of their adulation of the countryside they became responsible, I believe, for our lack of attention to our cities.

Finally to Hilltop Farm in Near Sawrey, home of Beatrix Potter, author and illustrator of Peter Rabbit, etc., all the little tales we used to read to the children.

The Illiria had gone down fifteen meters since we left on account of the receding tides that also expose vast expanses of sand in Morecambe Bay, with small boats “beached” until the tide rises again.

Monday, September 9, 1991

Wales

Docked at Fishguard, Norse for “Fish-yard,” the site where “Under Milk Wood” was filmed with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, but nowhere as picturesque as Greek seaside harbors. Huge tides here, as yesterday in Morecambe Bay. Amusing guide with a BBC voice; told about a fabulous pirate who operated from here dressed all in scarlet and with a symphony orchestra on board. When he boarded a victim ship his orchestra would play. His crew all had to sign papers certifying that they would not drink, gamble, or whore, etc. After robbing the victim, he would insist on having tea with its captain. Because of his handsomeness and his scarlet dress the French called him Le joli rouge, corrupted in English to “The jolly Roger.”

Continued on to St Davids. Road sign indicating Haverford West. Guide told me that the name is Norse. Ford = fiord = inlet. Haver = wheat. So: Wheat inlet. Cf. Haversack = wheat sack. St Davids has the large twelfth-century cathedral of St. David, which was a pilgrimmage site until the time of Henry VIII, because two trips to St. David’s were deemed equal to a trip to Rome, and three to St. David’s equalled one to Jerusalem. David is the patron saint of Wales, Patrick of Ireland, Andrew of Scotland, and George of England. Interesting building, with sanctuary fourteen feet higher than the West front. Wooden roof over the nave. Supposed relics of St. David. Chapel to Saint Nicholas, who gave gifts to girls needing dowries. Became Sant’ Niklaus, then Santa Klaus, Santa Claus. Guide spoke of Eurocrats (i.e., EEC officials) replacing bureaucrats.

After lunchtime, pupils from a primary school, aged 6 to 11, came aboard to sing for us. Angelic faces. Music hath charms. Their songs of belief and goodness and hope were an interesting contrast to my gloomy lecture on Thomas Hardy this morning. Before supper, Gail Godwin spoke interestingly on the process of writing beginnings, middles, and endings of her novels. After supper, Chrysanthi and I had a long chat, in Greek, with Captain Daskalakis.

Tuesday, September 10, 1991

Bath

Avonmouth, through the lock made necessary by the extreme tides, to Bristol. Under Brunel’s bridge, which I hadn’t seen since 1958. Center of Bristol more or less the same; couldn’t see the university. We drove straight through to Bath and had a fine tour of the baths, the Pump House, the crescents, etc. Large pedestrian precinct. Went into Marks and Spencer’s out of nostalgia. Lunch in the Francis Hotel, but I couldn’t eat because I’ve been suffering from diarrhea. Afterwards, settled in a park by the river, with a statue of Edward VII (1901–1910) labeled Edward the Peacemaker. What a beautiful city Bath is! Squares, trees, parks, flowers everywhere. A model of town planning. Asked the guide if she knew where L. P. Hartley’s home had been, but she’d never even heard of L. P. Hartley.

Wednesday, September 11, 1991

Tresco, Scilly Isles

I never thought I’d be here. Off the coast of Cornwall, no autos, bleak, healthlike landscape (or moonscape), wind-distorted trees. And in the center, bizarrely, are the Abby Gardens, a kind of Longwood Gardens, all outdoors, that started as one individual’s passion. Lots of oriental specimens; palms; cactuses. But not much was in bloom. The temperature is moderated because of the gulf stream. Spoke to a native, wife of the chief gardener. She says they have a lovely community, with everyone caring for everyone else. The entire island is owned by one man, a kind of feudal lord to whom all pay rent. Visited the graveyard—David McCullough’s graveyard obsession has infected others.

Captain’s dinner party, much reduced for me because of bad stomach. Δασκαλάκης is young, handsome, a real παλικάρι. He knew Βάρναλης and Καβαδίας.

Another good talk with Robert Starer, who is quite nice. But Gail Godwin is totally anti-social. . . . In the morning I lectured on T. S. Eliot.

Thursday, September 12, 1991

Weymouth, Dorchester

Weymouth, the original seaside resort on the south coast, patronized by George III. Still impressive buildings along the quay. Many sites here used by Hardy. The guide rattled off Hardy characters and situations: this took place in such-and-such a building, which however Hardy moved to a different street, etc. Even more of this in Dorchester (= Casterbridge) itself. Nice statue of Hardy, and his study and various photos in the museum. Max Gate not open to the public, but we glimpsed it through the trees. Bad cramps afterwards.

Friday, September 13, 1991

Zeebrugge–Brussels–Paris

Travel Dynamics bussed us to Gare du Midi, Brussels. Train to Paris with lots of conversation in our first class compartment. One lady, French, an official in EEC working on consumer protection in all EC countries. She says that Greece is the worst. A French-Canadian young woman who is a professional flutist, more precisely a baroque flutist, about to perform the B-Minor Mass in Montréal. An older lady from Holland. All very cozy.

What a super-delicious ham sandwich on a baguette in the buffet of Austerlitz Station! But getting there on the Métro was horrible. 5:00 p.m., Friday afternoon; squeezed in like sardines. Only now do we appreciate the luxurious convenience of a Travel Dynamics tour, where everything is done for one so comfortably.

I’m writing this in the first class sleeping compartment of the famous Talgo-Madrid express. The whole train looks shiny and new, and goes very fast, but it’s nice to realize that the AMTRAK first class sleepers are far superior. Talgo has no toilet, straight-backed uncomfortable seats, no towels or soap provided, and the porter was extremely surly. Nor was there the wine and snack that AMTRAK provides, or the free breakfast. Curious in the Talgo is the little pitcher-like potty with a warning “liquids” (i.e., urine) only. A bit hard on the ladies, but well used by me. Another defect of the Talgo is that in the morning you can’t put the beds up. Also the track was very mixed: smooth for long stretches, bumpy for others. But we arrived in Toledo almost on time.

Saturday, September 14, 1991

Toledo

Wonderfully baroque train station. I still had diarrhea (mild) and relieved myself in the station toilet: no paper, no soap, and Turkish-style, for squatting. So much here is reminiscent of Greece. No taxis. We took a local bus to town. Very easy. Then with some difficulty found the Hotel Carlos V, just off the central square, Plaza de Zocodover. Chrysanthi coping well with her diffident Spanish.

I’m writing this at the outdoor café of McDonald’s (!) in Plaza Zocodover after a good day of sightseeing. Started with the magnificent cathedral, so monumental and so well preserved, but we were too late to see the Treasure and Gallery because it closes for lunch at 1:00. “Diarrhea” lunch of bread and apples in the hotel room. Nap. Out at 4:00 p.m. First to Casa y Museo El Greco, not the way Kazantzakis described it, because it’s now flooded with tourists. But the extraordinary portrait of St. Peter is still on the easel upstairs, with the saint’s eyes glistening with tears, presumably of remorse. The high spot, I suppose, was the startling surprise of The Burial of Count Orgaz in San Tomé, surprise because it is so big and so brilliant (obviously it’s been cleaned). An extraordinarily complicated yet integrated “symphony” by a transcendent composer with Christ at the very top governing everything below. The figures watching the burial are, I’m told, El Greco himself and Cervantes, among others. Then to a Jewish synagogue built in the 1300s (the expulsion was in 1492) with Hebrew inscriptions around the walls: a huge rectangular hall with embossed wooden ceiling miraculously intact. Another synagogue nearby confirms this as the Jewish quarter, where El Greco chose to live. San Juan de los Reyes, a Franciscan monastery, fifteenth century, is less impressive, but one must remark that the Franciscans by this time were obviously “doing well”! Then we found the Convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo with difficulty. Decorated by El Greco with three paintings that we couldn’t see up close because a wedding was in progress, with the congregation all French and the service in French. Then back to the Cathedral, this time with ability to see the Treasure and Gallery. The Treasure is repulsive: the ostentatious wealth of the Church. But the Gallery has a dozen or more El Grecos, including the huge El Expolio, and portraits of the apostles, my favorite being St. Luke, who stands with an open Bible showing an illustration of, I think, the Virgin and Child. But this remarkable gallery also has Titians, Raphaels, a Goya, a Velasquez, Van Dykes.

Back to Zocodover. Ordered an orangeade which didn’t come in a bottle, so Chrysanthi didn’t let me drink it. Back to the hotel for supper: banana sandwich, apple, aqua minerale. Then to the Square again to watch people; the Spaniards talk and promenade, like the Greeks.

Sunday, September 15, 1991

Toledo–Madrid

More surprises in this extraordinary city. First, the view from our hotel window over thousands of rooftops, with the cathedral nearby and a glimpse of the hills beyond the city walls. Started with the Museum of Santa Cruz, just off Zocodover Square. A splendid building again with an embossed wood ceiling. This was filled, again, and with El Grecos. Oh the head of the Met must die with envy when he comes to Toledo. The huge Ascension of the virgin at the end of the room is clean and brilliant. My favorites were “The Two Saint Johns” (the Evangelist and the Baptist, young vs. old, cultivated vs. fierce) and “La Veronica,” with a gorgeous female face.

Then outside the walls to the Tavera Mausoleum. Nice guides (speaking only Spanish, of course, but we are beginning to understand a little). The church with Cardinal Tavera’s sarcophagus, then the crypt with the sarcophagi of the Dukes of Lerna. Perfect echo from the center, below the tholos. The Down Syndrome child coping with her gentle father. Then, another miracle: the Dukes’ palace adjacent, with Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, and El Greco’s “Holy Family,” “Saint Francis,” and another lovely “St. Peter,” all painted very late in life. Also ancient books on parchment, psalters mostly.

Enough. Too hot to go also to the Alcazar, the one besieged for seventy days by the Republicans in the civil war. We saw the outside, of course. Taxi back to Zocodover. The driver recognized us; he’d picked us up also at Santo Domingo el Antiguo yesterday—we must be memorable! Good to get out of the Carlos V room: too hot, very noisy last night because over the square where the city’s teenagers congregate, like Πλατεία Ναυαρίνου σε Θεσσαλονίκη. How lucky they are to belong to such a culture; our youth always need artificial outlets—sports or drugs or wild parties, or the drug of television. These youths just meet, boys look at girls, girls at boys. They all talk continually, spend no money, and are satisfied. Same with oldsters: they sit on benches in Zocodover and “help time to pass,” watching the passing scene. No expense. No loneliness.

No. 6 bus to the station. We really know our way around now. Should return here some day, and be able to eat. I’ve had nothing but acqua minerale and tea and banana sandwiches the whole stay.

But today has been better. No diarrhea or discomfort at all. Washed. Air conditioned, thank God. We’re both strapped into money belts, carrying nothing because of the scare of thievery. Walked the length of the Gran Via, combination Fifth Avenue and Times Square. Madrileños look much more sophisticated than Toledoleños; provinces vs. capital. Snack in Kentucky Fried Chicken (!): buttered corn. Then a ham and cheese sandwich and . . . acqua minerale. Let’s see what happens tomorrow. . . . Walked more, to Paseo del Prado, very grand. Temperature 93° at 9:00 p.m. Palace Hotel charges $30 per person for paella. It seems that if a nation wishes to prosper it must conquer and exploit others—i.e., build an empire: thus Athens, Rome, Byzantium, France, England, Spain, Portugal, even Holland and Belgium, and of course the USA although in a slightly different way.

Monday, September 16, 1991

All the museums are closed on Monday. But we had an interesting day nonetheless. Temperature 23° C. (= 73.4° F.) in the morning, 32° C. (= 90° F.) at 5:00 p.m. Started with the Real Fábrica de Tapices. Nice tour with Spanish-speaking guide whom we managed to understand more or less. First, rug-making, with actual rugs being made on looms by mature men and women arranged in a row. One square meter takes three months. Showed Spanish knot (once around) vs. Turkish knot (wrapped around two of the cotton vertical strings). Back is jute, pressed down horizontally. We saw this process decades ago at Mrs. Locke’s tower in Ουρανούπολις. Even more impressive is the tapestry making. The factory was established in the eighteenth century originally at Santa Barbara; it’s now under the ninth generation of directorship by the same family. Craftsmen work from age 15 to 70. Apprenticeship is five to eight years. Apprentices alas are few; the art will die. A square meter takes four months and sells for about $900. The cartoons are often copies of paintings in the Prado, typically by Goya, who started in a tapestry works. Others are by Raphael. The factory museum had gorgeous examples of finished tapestries old and new, bright and distinct, unlike those one sees in museums. Huge tapestries are not done in sections but in one piece on huge looms.

From here it was good luck to go next to the Palacio Real because its chief attraction, at least for us, was its tapestries. (Remember: $900 per meter.) From the palace—but also from the city as a whole, with its boulevards, posh neighborhoods, numerous parks—one is reminded of Spain’s immense power and wealth, at least in the past, if not now. All this is newly coming into my consciousness. One should remember the names of the conquered places: Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Argentina, etc. Otherwise, the palace was the usual display of ostentatious wealth in furniture, rugs (made in the Santa Barbara factory), tabletops, chandeliers, mirrors, ceilings by Tiepolo al fresco, etc. More interesting was the armory with dozens of knights fully armed on horses fully armed. Also carved shields. One very interesting showed the Spanish motto Plus Ultra with depiction of Heracles knocking down his pillars—i.e., inviting passage through the Straits of Gibraltar out into the Atlantic and thus into the new world. Compare Dante’s story of Ulysses’ hubris in going out into the Atlantic, and the older slogan, Non Plus Ultra. Sir Peter Medawar used this motif when he lectured at Dartmouth about the scientific revolution (and I picked it up in something I did later). The whole thing depended of course on belief in a global earth rather than a disk.

Afterwards—the ultimate daring—our first hot meal. McPollo at McDonald’s with . . . acqua minerale. Delicious siesta. Out at 5:00 p.m. at 90° F. To basement supermarket in huge department store just off Sol. Total luxury: all kinds of cheeses, fresh fish, delicatessen, wines, liqueurs, meats, etc., better than anything I’ve ever seen in America. We bought ham, cheese, bread, apples. Then to the Egyptian Temple of Debod, moved here from the Nile Valley when the Aswan Dam would have submerged it. Dismantled stone by stone and reassembled. We arrived fifteen minutes after closing, but at least saw the exterior and the setting, with reflecting pools front and back, exquisite stone-work, pillars with Greek-like capitals, in a large park, where we sat in the shade and ate our ham and cheese sandwich and apples. Then to Plaza (Platha Mayor), a colossal square with red buildings and an arcade all around, totally enclosed, an oasis in the busy city. Then to a cafeteria for . . . acqua minerale. But I had tortillas with chocolate sauce and café con leche.

As in Greece, waiters here, no waitresses. In tuxedos. One can order very little and sit for hours.

Tuesday, September 17, 1991

Madrid

Five hours in the Prado, morning on the 2nd floor (Italian and Spanish), cafeteria (paella finally, but found it nothing special), 1st floor in the afternoon (Dutch, etc.). All in all, found the Prado disappointing, after all the hype. But of course there are individual joys to discover. Temperature when we left the hotel, 32° C. = 89.6° F. But the Prado was cool. What I want to remember (and perhaps see again some day) are: Raphael’s “Virgin of the Rose,” with features reminiscent of Michelangelo; Titian’s “Carlos V at Mühlenberg,” the king’s jaw jutting forward with confidence but maybe also with tension, grinding his teeth. Yet a truly majestic majesty, which is just what he wanted from Titian, of course. Tintoretto’s “Baptism of Christ.” The El Grecos, all in one room, I found less moving than those in Toledo. (Or is El Greco wearing on me?) Better than the huge canvases, I liked the small face of Christ, the study for the Expolio we saw in Toledo, and Christ Carrying the Cross, in which he really isn’t carrying anything because the cross seems to have no weight and his feminine, delicate hands to be hardly grasping it. The point, I suppose, is that El Greco spiritualized the story so that one senses its symbolic rather than carnal content. The huge annunciation is colorful and dynamic but a bit garish to my taste, and inferior to the Burial of Orgaz. Then we came to Velásquez, whom I remember from the special exhibit at the Met some years ago, where many of these Prado canvases were on loan. “Las Meninas” is of course fascinating, with the King and Queen, ostensibly the subject, relegated to reflections in the mirror in the background, and the Infanta, dwarf, and dog occupying center stage, not to mention Velásquez himself, palette in hand. (By the way, we saw three or four artists copying paintings and could appreciate how a painting, however large, is simply an assemblage of individual brush strokes patiently applied). Velásquez’s many portraits of Philip IV are fun because the king seems so ridiculously stupid and inane, and one senses the painter’s difficulty in balancing honesty with the need to flatter. His “Vulcan’s Forge,” shown at the Met, is the best, however, with the wonderfully modeled smiths standing aghast at the angel among them. I found Ribera and Murillo less interesting. A surprise was a beautiful Caravaggio, “The Lute Player,” on loan from the Hermitage; it shows a girl playing her lute. Last on the top floor: Goya. For us, after the tapestry factory yesterday, his scores of cartoons for tapestries were fascinating: so much better than the usual design for this purpose. Then there were the two war scenes, “The 2nd of May,” showing the slaughter of Spanish in revolt against Napoleon’s occupying forces, which happened in Puerta del Sol, and the companion pieces, “3rd of May,” showing the execution of the leaders, one praying, another raising his arms in defiance. Brilliant records, so much more meaningful than the records of royalty and semi-royalty that occupy so much space, disproportionally, in the Prado. The “Black paintings” that were in his house toward the end of his life are also moving. And of course “La Maya Vestida” side by side with “La Maya Desnuda” are fun. In each she is almost ready to wink at the viewer.

Actually, the ground floor, played down by the guidebooks, had more delicious surprises. There is a Rembrandt self-portrait, but not as evocative as the one in the Frick. The Rembrandt “Artemisia,” however, is superb. There is a splendid portrait of the Duc de Lerna by Rubens; we saw the burial vault of the Dukes of Lerna in Toledo. But outshining everything else are the great Adam and Eve of Albrecht Dürer, not engravings but larger than life-size paintings. Both are post-adolescents, about eighteen years old, and obviously too innocent and inexperienced to know better. Both, and especially Eve, are very Germanic in racial features. These made the day worthwhile. But as bonuses: Brueghel’s “Triumph of Death” and Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Delights,” and one other similar composition: “The Hay Rack,” showing in triptych fashion Paradise on the left, worldly life in the center, and hell on the right: past, present, and (alas) future.

Tired but courageous, we walked back toward Sol, had—actually!—an acqua minerale, and went next to the Real Academia de las Tres Nobles Artes, housed in a palace. A higgedly-piggedly collection but with some nice surprises—e.g., Picasso’s “Suite Vollard,” exquisite, and his “The Frugal Meal,” just right for Peter and Chrysanthi in Spain, as its bottle obviously contained . . . acqua minerale, its dish is empty, and next to it is a package of παξιμάδι, dry rusks, precisely our fare (until today, more or less). There’s an El Greco St. Jeronimo penitent, gazing at a crucifix, and an unusual El Greco, “the Artist’s Family,” showing his “wife” (and usual model), son, and servants. Very nice. Also, two very special Goya self-portraits, one showing him standing at the easel, the other full-face. Then there’s the carnival scene: “El entierro de la sardina.” Although I didn’t pay much attention to either Ribera or Murillo in the Prado, here I liked Ribera’s Magdalene; she’s in a tattered blouse being carried up to heaven just as she is, by a host of cherubim. Murillo’s is also a Magdalene, repentant and praying. I also noticed Morales here, more than in the Prado: his Pietà. Christ is a waxen doll, totally lifeless, although blood still flows from the wound in his side. The Virgin cradles his head in her arms and has an expression of insupportable grief.

In 96° F. heat we returned to the Egyptian tomb of Debod. No information given at all, but inside was a disparate stone with a Greek inscription saying that Ptolemy Philometor had dedicated this to the temple of Isis, and mentioning Queen Cleopatra. But the temple itself has hieroglyphic inscriptions. It was below the second cataract and would have been submerged behind the Aswan dam if it hadn’t been rescued by UNESCO and brought here. Must find out more about these Nubian tombs when we return.

A wash, a coke, a walk, a sweet, sandwiches for tomorrow, more money changed (everything here is very expensive), and back to the comfort of our air-conditioned room. Tomorrow: Escorial, to see the “Martyrdom of St. Maurice.”

Wednesday, September 18, 1991

Madrid—El Escorial

Very slow train from Atocha Station to El Escorial through olive groves and barren land. The monastery is tucked beneath a mountain in what now is a rather nice touristic village. Nowhere as huge as one is led to believe by the guidebooks, whose hyperbole strikes me as increasingly disturbing. Nor is the art so remarkable. The first thing one sees upon entering is El Greco’s Martyrdom of St. Maurice, a huge canvas in which St. Maurice himself is relegated to tertiary importance and all focus seems to be on soldiers and civilians disputing. (Later, reading about the painting, I realized my error. These “soldiers” are actually Maurice and other Christians awaiting their turn to be executed. But you’d never know it—thus Philip’s displeasure.) Philip II rejected it as too secular for El Escorial. This apparently is what sent El Greco off to Toledo. He had come from Italy with the hope of being commissioned to do extensive painting at El Escorial, then under construction. Failing, he looked elsewhere, but not before having designed four or five statues of kings (Solomon, etc.) that were executed by someone else and stand now above one of the courtyards.

The other paintings were an anticlimax after St. Maurice. There are a half dozen early El Grecos: portraits of saints; St. Eugenio is particularly nice. There’s a fine Titian of St. Margaret and the Dragon. But the prize goes to a real surprise: a statue in marble by Cellini, a superb crucifixion in the huge church, done for the Medicis and given by them to Philip II. The library, too, is remarkable, although not much is displayed for the tourist. One MS supposedly has St. Augustine’s autograph in it; it was displayed in reproduction. The crypts beneath the great church are piled with marble sarcophagi of the Spanish kings, queens, queen mothers, princes, nephews, nieces, children who died in infancy, etc.—a huge ego trip for the Bourbons and Hapsburgs. The church is interesting in its lack of decoration; Philip liked the bare granite in the dome, etc., but the altar is huge and elaborate. There are four organs. The guide said that Good Friday services are electrifying. Everything is draped in velvet to symbolize Christ’s death. At midnight the velvet is removed and the organs blare forth triumphantly and, she said, you are in heaven.

Lastly, we watched a video about Don Carlos and Sophie, the restitution of the monarchy after Franco, the shootings in parliament in 1981, etc. All in all, it’s a miracle of rationality that Spain made such a successful and relatively peaceful transfer from dictatorship to constitutional monarchy. The whole trip, now concluding, has opened my eyes not only to the art of El Greco, the original purpose, but also to the existence of Spain.

I thought back to my abhorrence of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and my abysmal ignorance. When Valency asked me in the orals something about Philip II, I was unable to answer. Now, thirty years later, I have Carlos V, Philip II, the Armada, etc. (and who can forget Philip IV after Velasquez?) clearly in mind, à propos as we approach the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.

To celebrate, we had our first non-frugal supper: onion soup and a “combination”: veal, mashed potatoes, omelet. But now it’s time to go home. We are weary travelers . . . much enriched.

September 19, 1991

Madrid–JFK–Logan–Hanover

Our TWA flight was posted four hours late. We were able to switch to Iberia. Exciting to be able to read so much of the Spanish in the flight magazine. JFK–Logan flight delayed one hour because of a storm in Boston, but we arrived at Logan in time to catch a Vermont Transit bus home. Slow but sure! Hamburger and onion rings and milkshake at the Greyhound terminal in Boston. In our own beds at midnight, 7:00 a.m. Madrid time.

September 20, 1991

Hanover

Started immediately with a talk on the nature of comparative literature to Freshman open house. Student from Sophia, Bulgaria. Steve Scher joined with me, just back from Budapest. Says life there is still difficult and terrible, but in different ways.

September 21, 1991

Mother paid the balance of her Kendal entry fee and obtained her key yesterday. Today we brought plants and bibelots to the empty flat, #301 in Mary Dyer building. Lovely view of Vermont hills changing color.

September 22, 1991

The final Sunday dinner at The Greens. Mother very popular. Maisie Wilson joined us. Lots of regret at Mother’s impending departure. But it’s good she’s leaving because The Greens is increasingly depressing. No new people are coming; seven apartments are empty. And all the remaining people are becoming decrepit or dying. A bad atmosphere. Contrariwise, the lady in 303 at Kendal is 60ish-looking and energetic.

Monday, September 23, 1991

Freshmen advising, mostly women. I always enjoy this; they’re so eager. I “seduced” two into doing Modern Greek. And one into Humanities 1-2. Bought a Macintosh Classic for Leander; he’s now at the top of the list re: hardware. I inherit his Mac Plus, so I now have 3 Macintoshes and the old Gigi terminal. In touch with Rebecca Mays re: Pendle Hill book committee. Everything is starting again.

John Waterlow, Sir Sydney’s son, graciously sent me a holograph Kazantzakis letter written to Sir Sydney in French in 1940 after the “Albanian miracle.” Plus a holograph synopsis of Ακρίτας. Mrs. K. never offered me the slightest scrap, the bitch!

In addition, Rae Dalven discovered 15 letters that she’ll be sending me.

September 24, 1991

7:30 a.m., Kendal Overseers meeting. We are getting Beveridge Webster’s nine-foot Baldwin grand for $6800 despite Jean’s silent opposition. Audrey took over during my absence and arranged everything beautifully. We got a $100,000 windfall in the form of a rebate from the electric company and decided to start a Residents’ Association Fund with it. Next item: we granted assistance of $550 a month to one of the residents—i.e., the entire proceeds of the $100,000 at 5½% interest. Jean still under great pressure from Lloyd and Paul Lewis to bring occupancy up to 95%. We’re now at 85%, holding strong owing to new contracts that counterbalance numerous withdrawals owing to deaths, etc.

Resumed music with Dick and Allan. Haydn and some modern composers.

Friday, September 27, 1991

Leander arrived to help Mother move. We all converged upon apartment 301 at 1:00 p.m. and after the movers left we began immediately opening boxes, putting things in place, hanging pictures. Then had supper all together in the Kendal dining room. Mother happy but also a bit apprehensive. It’s like going off to college, where one doesn’t know anyone and has to make friends and especially worry about whom to eat with. But Peg Hebert, the hostess, tries to put people together so that no one eats alone.

Saturday, September 28, 1991

Preparing for Paradise Lost class, adult education, to start at Kendal on Tuesday. Also my appearance at Graham Wallis’s engineering and morality class, where I’ll do poets’ reaction to science and technology.

Met with John and Samantha Emmerling. He is one of Daphne’s authors: a charming, very successful advertising executive. His daughter wants to come to Dartmouth. First question, predictably: “What about the Dartmouth Review?”

Then to Mother’s to hang more pictures. Supper at Kendal remarkable. Dining room full. Fifty Dartmouth grads, class of ’33, hosted by Jack Manchester. Charming waitress, a Dartmouth undergraduate. Filet mignon. The dream has become reality.

Leander is practicing for an engagement with a leading singer as accompanist in Atlanta in October, with $1500 plus transportation and expenses. A nice break for him. Also very excited about his new Mac Classic, which we set up. The spelling checker of course couldn’t cope with “Leander,” suggesting “oleander,” “lender,” “leader.” We guffawed.

Sunday, September 29, 1991

A lugubrious Meeting, with ministry about loss, alcohol addiction, wasting illness (Betsy Waite: multiple sclerosis). But a concomitant feeling of gratitude that the Meeting’s “forum” exists for such things.

Surprise note from Sara Hope Amundsen, for a decade confined to a psychiatric institute. She noted the announcement of Daphne’s wedding, and wants to send a painting. Her voice came as though from beyond the grave.

Hung more pictures for Mother. She’s almost all settled; only the large bookcase remains to be mounted.

Tuesday, October 1, 1991

Started teaching Paradise Lost at Kendal as part of the ILEAD program of adult education. Mother is in the class, as is Ned Coffin, Sloan Coffin’s brother, three or four from Kendal, the rest from the community, including Bill Durant. Will they last? We’ll see. I gave them a “pep talk.”

Friday, October 4, 1991

I presented a class on technology and poetry to Graham Wallis’s graduate engineering course. Two Chinese, one Peruvian, etc. I started with Sophocles (Antigone chorus) and Book of Genesis; went up to Odes to Locomotives by Spender, etc. Now they’ll write poems.

Sunday, October 6, 1991

To Kinhaven. Mountains surpassingly beautiful; autumn color. Bill Polk thinks we’ll “meet” the Kresge challenge. But how? $250,000 to raise. Traveled there and back with Kip Van Winkle, a new, enthusiastic trustee. I’m head of the planning committee, and worry about Jerry’s successor. This annoys Leander, because Jerry and Nancy, suspicious of me, take it out on him.

Thursday, October 10, 1991

Kendal affairs all day. Breakfast with Jean re: next agenda, her persecution by Lloyd, etc. She says that Lloyd was forced to resign by the Alan Hunt faction. Lunch at Kendal with Aris Damianos, now a fully fledged MD, to “proselytize.” Evening at Meeting for Business trying to get approval for a minute I drafted asserting Kendal’s independence from Hanover Monthly Meeting, to counteract Georgia Rese, who appealed to the Meeting to reverse our decision not to admit her to Kendal.

One hour doing Dartmouth business. My honors student, Geoffrey Watson, who’s doing “Epiphany in Early Joyce.” A very good topic.

Saturday, October 12, 1991

Marvelous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by John Houston touring company, at the Hop. How nice to see American actors who have mastered voice projection, mime, movement, etc.

Sunday, October 13, 1991

Deep, gathered Meeting.

3:00 p.m. to 9:30. I participated in Sandi Adams’s six-hour follow-up training for our cadre of mediators, doing lots of simulation in which I “impersonated” an aggrieved party. Exhausting and fascinating. Having 30+ years of marriage experience, I knew more about irrational disputes, and also their resolution, than the 18-year-olds. They are a good lot: athletes (football, rugby), salt of the earth types.

Tuesday, October 15, 1991

Breakfast with Lloyd Lewis. He’s still pressuring Jean to “market” until we’re 95% full. Paul Lewis and I will have to conduct Jean’s evaluation sometime after the New Year.

To Montgomery House for War/Peace seminar with Rabbi Meyer, who lived in Argentina. Knee-jerk liberal full of condemnation of everything done by the USA. I found this most disagreeable. Jim Breeden, who worked with Dukakis in the 1960s, says everybody, then, knew he was a fake liberal. Interesting.

Thursday, October 17, 1991

Meeting at Kendal with Kirk, head of Selectmen, and Vermilye, Town Manager, re: taxation of Kendal. Kirk gruff and barely cordial, Vermilye more civil, but insists that the increase is owing entirely to the general increase in the tax rate. They really don’t know how to evaluate us. It’s meant to be on market value, but that’s meaningless in our case. So they’ve done cost plus extra for amenities enjoyed by residents, similar to the system for condos. This means that they tax, indirectly, the Health Center and Cadbury Center, which are meant to be tax exempt. We agreed to disagree. We’ll probably have to go into a grievance procedure. This year’s tax is $520,000! Over $2000 per unit.

Next: Jean and I met with Georgia Rese, who is aggrieved because she’s been rejected from Kendal. She rambled irrelevantly for half an hour but, after we tried to explain that Hanover Monthly Meeting is not responsible, she said that she felt more at peace with the decision. Very trying.

Then canvassed with Jack Shepherd re: meeting tomorrow with Lee Pelton, the new dean, about our mediation program, and our submission to the Fourth Council re: re-accreditation of College Course 1.

Friday, October 18, 1991

Pelton seems to like the mediation idea. Says he’ll support it, but we had agreed in advance not to ask him for money . . . yet.

Met John Waterlow, as arranged, for lunch. He is Sir Sydney Waterlow’s son, and in his own right an internationally known nutritionist. He’d come over from England to give a paper at a nutritionists’ congress in Waterville Valley on the amount of protein proper for children in third-world countries. And he telephoned and said he’d like to come to Hanover to meet me. How nice! He brought with him a first edition of Ασκητική (1927), which he gave me, and a typescript of his father’s translation of same, curiously using the first edition text, plus a letter (xeroxed) from Virginia Stephen turning down his father’s proposal of marriage (!), and several letters from T. S. Eliot. His father was intimate with Henry James as well, and with Morgan Forster. John Waterlow himself is charming, humble, gracious, and an effortless conversationalist, someone who has lots to say, says it well (briefly), and listens to his interlocutor. Rare. We talked non-stop for ten hours.

Saturday, October 19, 1991

Took Waterlow with Yiayia and Chrysanthi to see Aeschylus’s Agamemnon done by a British troupe. OK, but too much screaming and not enough poetry. The chorus was a single actor: no singing or dance, which made the play more like Ibsen than Greek tragedy. Yet the evil of Clytemnestra came across (even though she possessed a justification). Took John afterwards on a tour of Kendal.

Sunday, October 20, 1991

Chrysanthi and I drove John to Waterville Valley, which we’d never seen. And he treated us there to a lovely brunch. Fond farewells; invitations to visit him in London; hope to meet again. He had raked leaves for us yesterday and we, embarrassed, assiduously raked leaves in the afternoon after we’d returned. Then, for supper, we had Selen Ünsal and a new fresh-woman, Itir, from Istanbul, also a graduate of Robert College and, like Selen, extraordinarily vital, sophisticated, self-assured, with spectacularly good English and an infectious smile. Both thought Ozal a crook. Also at this party, Bissera, newly arrived from Sophia, Bulgaria. More subdued, older, a woman rather than a girl. She’d been educated in a special gymnasium on the German model, with four years of Ancient Greek and seven of Latin. Said that the communist government simply ignored this expression of elitism. Both of her parents are university professors. Also another guest, Kate Cohen, whom I see less of since Ben King has replaced her as my JMGS assistant. Bissera brought her boyfriend, a nonentity or so it seemed: silent throughout. God save her from a hasty marriage! So, we had a kind of pan-Macedonian congress. Actually, both Bissera’s ancestors and Itir’s had come from Thessaloniki, which could have ended up a Turkish or Bulgarian city, not to mention a Serbian one.

Monday, October 21, 1991

E. Allen Kelly called from Morehouse Publishing. They’re willing to take on Pendle Hill and act as our distributor. They get 35% of the net proceeds of each book sold, with books on consignment, so we pay only if and when an item sells. It’s a good opening. Now I have to convince John Anderson & Co.

Tuesday, October 22, 1991

Kendal Overseers. Tax situation no better. We’ll probably go to court. Budget in very good shape so far. New food manager hired.

Visit from David Larson, who had headed the Fulbright Commission in Athens when we were at Athens College in 1975. Now he heads Goucher College’s study abroad program. The Greek one is run by Katharine Butterworth!

Rushed to Kendal to teach Paradise Lost IV and V, or, rather, to listen to Ned Coffin teaching IV. Poor Bill Durant was supposed to do V but is confused about most things and couldn’t. How sad to see these vibrant people in old age (and Bill isn’t so old physically). Harlan Logan, with Alzheimer’s, was thrashing around in the Health Center trying to strike everyone with his cane. And Quakers do not employ restraints! Betty Eberhart is hobbling behind a walker and poor Dick is “in and out,” as they say, and miserable because he had to leave his Webster Avenue home.

Then rushed to President Freedman’s house to announce ΦΒΚ nominations, including Bob Norman for honorary membership. I had to keep this secret from Bob while gathering his CV. Afterwards he expressed his immense pleasure. His wife is ΦΒΚ and now he is, too.

Wednesday, October 23, 1991

Music is so unpredictable. Tonight, with Dick, I played better than ever before (for me): Prokofiev sonata, and three Handel sonatas, and Fauré. Of course, practice helped, even the minimal amount I do.

Thursday, October 24, 1991

Leander is playing in Atlanta tonight, accompanying the famous tenor, David Gordon. A significant breakthrough for his career, paying $1500 clear plus expenses. He’ll be in white tails! I flew to Philadelphia and had a good reunion with Dan Seeger before sleeping. He says that the Pendle Hill staff couldn’t be nicer to him: everyone is courteous and helpful. Described the chaos at Quaker Triennial in Kenya, where he was presiding clerk. No water, no food, everything ankle deep in mud. The European Friends quickly organized “relief and rehabilitation” committees and set things right, more or less. (But could do little with the three Turkish-style latrines, without water, serving 400 people.) Afterwards, they felt heroic, whereas the Africans and South Americans were unaware that anything had been wrong. A fine commentary on cultural differences. Dan has an electric piano; we’ll play four-hands tomorrow.

Friday, October 25, 1991

Pendle Hill

Leander’s concert went well. He wasn’t at all nervous. Impressed with the sumptuous hall. Beforehand, they rolled out three Steinway nine-foot grands and said, “Mr. Bien, which would you prefer?”

Rebecca Mays whining as usual. She works too hard, is paid too little, etc., etc. Tiring. She’s sloppy and negligent more and more. But also still attractive with her intensity. Says she believes in the book project but cannot do it on her own. Warns me about John Anderson’s hesitations. In the morning I introduced new board members to the Publication Committee’s work. Then we convened the Book Committee with John present. Chose Quaker Caravan as the first reprint. Interested in a collection of reprints of early Quaker women. John not negative; wants Steere’s work on contemplation reprinted, as do I. But he stressed the need to integrate marketing plans (when I announced the Morehouse offer) with the new attempt to revise Pendle Hill’s overall publicity system. Good Publication meeting afterwards. Rather hysterical manuscript on cruelty to animals provoked good discussion. Max Carter, when cornered by Rebecca and me, agreed to serve on the Book subcommittee.

Met the new teacher replacing Jim Thomas, a Franciscan nun. She was excited when I told her about my honeymoon in Assisi and my translation of Kazantzakis’s Φτωχούλης. Chris Ravndal has replaced Gwyn, and is delighted. Numerous people told me how exciting it is to have Dan at the head. Really, Margery’s administration was full of trouble and it’s a blessing she left. Typical greeting to me: “Where’s Chrysanthi?” After supper, Dan gave “A Vision of Pendle Hill”: ideas roll off him apace, some far-fetched, like a PH annex in Moscow (!), some wonderful, like PH “think-tank.” Afterwards, we played four-hands: Schubert, Mozart’s 40th, Beethoven’s 5th, Fauré. He’s about my level. A bit imperious at the piano: he unseated me at the treble when I faltered with the Schubert, and put me on bass, where I’m more comfortable. And he kept counting out loud throughout. No matter. We pushed a switch and the piano became an organ so one could play a Bach toccata. Afterwards, over tea, he told me about his foster son, a Cambodian he met initially when the boy came to do yard work in Dan’s Brooklyn home. Lots and lots of problems with the boy’s mother and sister (his father was killed in the civil war). But now he has almost finished college. Dan, childless, is a doting “father.”

Saturday, October 26, 1991

Pendle Hill–New York

I was one of the four respondents to Dan’s “Vision.” A bit daunting, with so many “weighty Friends” in the audience, including Kenneth Boulding (who wants us to reprint his poems and essays). I elaborated on the PH think-tank idea and offered the Daedalus model for rethinking all basic concepts such as light, holding someone in the light, inner light, God, that of God in every person, since these are now little more than empty slogans without depth or content. Small group discussion; then Executive Board. John, Oliver, Rebecca, Judith, and Denny all want to visit Morehouse if I can arrange it.

Train to New York. My rituals. Supper in China Peace, Hunan lamb. Slept in Daphne’s new apartment at 308 E. 79th. She’s in Boston and Greg is in Tokyo. A large apartment in a good building; nice neighborhood. But lacks the “class” of the Madison Avenue pad. Yiayia’s wedding present, the coffee table with tiles, is the only decent piece of furniture. And the walls are still almost entirely bare, although she has many pictures. The ethos is always one of “the temporary.” Reluctance to settle.

Sunday, October 27, 1991

NYC

It’s so nice to be in New York. Breakfast in “the Greek place” on 1st Ave. and 79th: juice, eggs, ham, home fries, and toast for $2.79! To Metropolitan Museum, eager to see Spanish tapestries and armor from the Royal Palace, as a reminder of our recent trip. The tapestries on display here are of course the very best: huge, amazing compositions with adequate captions, placards giving historical background about Ferdinand and Isabella (who united Spain, driving out the Moors and Jews); effect of gold imported from the New World; Spain’s acme in the 16th century under Charles V and Philip II, and the tapestries as “proof” of grandeur and wealth. One group is from Segovia, not Madrid: Los Honores. On display: “Fortune” and “Fame,” Fortune dispensing joy or pain to those who deserved each, Fame honoring Petrarch, Ovid, Homer, Alexander, Salust, Virgil, etc. I thought of my PL class at Kendal, for the poem ushers us into the Renaissance world-view so splendidly displayed in these compositions. Next, the Apocalypse series from Madrid—e.g., St. Michael slaying Satan, the seven-headed dragon, see Rev. 12–14. In the next room, Hercules shouldering the Ptolemaic heavens; and on the crupper of a horse’s harness, Hercules’ life on one side, Samson’s on the other. Cf. Milton’s effortless amalgamation of pagan and Biblical sources. Thence to the Seurat exhibit. He was a genius most of whose work was unknown to me. Died at age 31 from diphtheria. As always, the Met mounted a beautiful retrospective, showing Seurat’s interesting amalgamation of conservatism and radicalism: radicalism in painting technique, conservatism concerning his models. After a traditional training, drawing plaster casts, etc. at the École des Beaux-Arts, he began extraordinary dark, brooding drawings in charcoal. The pointillism came later, almost as a way of adding some glimmer of light to the dark of his paintings. Everything is abstract and generic; he said he was emulating Greek friezes. Often there are no human figures at all in his landscapes and cityscapes, which are all lines and squares, anticipating Piet Mondrian. A splendid exhibit. Of course I bought the catalogue, plus a crossword puzzle of “Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte” for Chrysanthi.

Thence to David Erlanger’s for Kinhaven Evaluation Committee followed by Planning Committee: John Austin, David, Janet Greene, Lauren Zalaznick, Barbara Dickey, and the poor conductor from Long Island who is dying from a brain tumor but is still plucky. Jerry Bidlack came for the Planning session. Evaluations are better, although Jerry remains the weak spot. In Planning, I tried to convince the others that we need a fulltime year-round resident at Weston. But it seems too soon. The group decided to close down Main House, drain the water, etc. Individual staff members will be asked if they want to run retreats for their instruments next spring. John Austin drove me to LaGuardia for the return flight to Lebanon.

Monday, October 28, 1991

Conference with Nancy Davies and Otmar Foelsche re: marketing by Apple of my computer program “Greek Drills.” Saw Jonathan Mirsky in the distance outside but didn’t care to stop to speak to him. Spent most of the day with Cynthia Wigington, whom I’ve hired to type the catalogue of Kazantzakis’s Collected Letters. She needs some training but is a quick learner.

Visited Tom Sleigh’s English 5 class on PL IX. Fine class energetically discussing God’s foreknowledge vs. man’s free will. How nice! Lunch afterwards. Tom’s new wife is about to open an “installation” at the Whitney annex on 42nd Street—big time.

Wednesday, October 30, 1991

Cynthia already doing much better. She’s finished three years’ worth. Only 52 to go.

My honors student Geoffrey Watson is doing an interesting study of the background to “epiphany” in pagan and Christian thought. Today we went hunting together for a Greek text of Dionysius the Areopagite’s Divine Names to see if what are translated as “the good” and “the beautiful” are the same word in Greek: το καλόν. But Baker Library does not have the Greek. All we found was a sixteenth century edition in several other libraries. We’ve ordered it via interlibrary loan.

Music with Dick not so good as last time, but still fun, and satisfying. Fauré, Mozart. Dick stayed late, talking about Dartmouth politics, which don’t interest me very much any more. Indeed, I’ve decided to retire in three years, a year after my last sabbatical, precisely on my 65th birthday. Stupid? We’ll see. Chrysanthi fears I’ll have nothing to do and will hang around the house puttering. She already says that I remind her of my father in the way I set the table for breakfast each morning. A propos, I finally bought a cappuccino maker that works: inspired by all the café con leche we had in Spain. Life’s little pleasures.

Thursday, October 31, 1991

Boston–Gainesville

Drove Chrysanthi to White River to catch the Ambus to New York. She’ll spend the weekend with Daphne, who is lonely owing to Greg’s long assignment in Tokyo. I drove to Logan, listening to a cassette of Walt Whitman’s diary of the Civil War. Dan Seeger wants to celebrate Whitman and Whittier as Quaker poets in 1992, stretching things for Whitman. Yet the Civil War diary shows Whitman acting in a very Quakerly fashion insofar as he always ministered indiscriminately to the wounded and dying on the Confederate side as well as on the Union side. Also, his extreme horror at warfare is everywhere evident. The end of the tape has a moving speech given in 1875 about Lincoln’s assassination.

Flew to Charlotte. Waiting for flight to Gainesville: a dozen MGSA folks. So it began μεμιάς. Συζήτηση, κουβέντα. Jim Warren greeted me in his accustomed fashion: Πετρόμπεης! Up until 1:00 a.m. at the hotel. Talk talk.

Friday, November 1, 1991

Gainesville

Stimulating sessions. Fun to meet new people and to renew acquaintance with old acquaintances. Supper with Vangelis Calotychos, his new assistant, and Στάθης Γουργουρής, a graduate student, and others, at a Japanese restaurant where they cook right in front of you. The hotel is idyllic; reminds me a little of Tahiti. Palm trees, large pool, lake with exotic birds, Spanish moss. Temperature 75°. Lots of fine papers for the journal, especially Eva Konstantellou’s on the neo-orthodoxy objection to progressive Europeanocentrism, drawing on Zisimos Lorentzatos.

Saturday, November 2, 1991

At the last sessions, the Macedonian question again caused a commotion. Michael Herzfeld strove nobly to deflect journalists and later to reassure the Greek ambassador that MGSA wasn’t a propaganda conduit for the Slavo-Macedonians. The ambassador spoke, competently, the official line at the banquet. Saw Jill Dubisch, the woman I met last year in Sydney, the anthropologist; she told me about Brooklyn College, now a mess owing to Black-Jewish tensions.

Sunday, November 3, 1991

Gainesville–Boston

Useful breakfast with Θεοφάνης Σταύρου re: Leander’s forthcoming time in Minneapolis. He wants to publish my catalogue of Kazantzakis letters. He himself expects to receive Laourdas’s archive shortly. MGSA meeting afterwards, with special session arranged by graduate students, who want representation on the MGSA Executive Committee. John Iatrides is talking about a special issue of the Journal, including the controversial article on Slavo-Macedonians. Long lunch with Jim Warren, who’s had a fascinating career in Greece, Vietnam, etc. and is currently instructing foreign service personnel scheduled for Greece.

Thursday, November 7, 1991

To New York. Supper with Daphne at the Yale Club. She talked to Fred about her future at Simon and Schuster. No future. But he’ll help her get placed elsewhere. His advice: become a specialist in a certain kind of book—e.g., psychology. I continued on to Pendle Hill.

Friday, November 8, 1991

Harrisburg

By car to Harrisburg with Rebecca, Judith, John Anderson, and Denny O’Brien to visit Morehouse Publishing. Leslie Merrill, operations manager, took us on a tour. Allen Kelly there; turns out that I had his son in class. We asked lots of questions and got lots of good answers. Then toured the warehouse, huge impressive operation, and then the printing plant, where we met the chairman, Stanley Kleiman, very proud re: his complicated, advanced machinery to do four-color printing. Saw this amazing machine in operation. Then lunch back in headquarters with Kelly, Kleiman, and Merrill. They suggest a two-year trial. Rebecca and Judith whined about additional workload but I think everyone is convinced that this would be a good experiment. I was pleased. Kelly and Kleiman drove me to the AMTRAK station in the latter’s Cadillac, and I returned to Hanover via the Montrealer.

Sunday, November 10, 1991

I ministered about the relationship between music and silence, with Elizabeth nodding approval throughout.

Monday, November 11, 1991

Cynthia Wigington is typing the catalogue of the Kazantzakis letters for me. Doing very well indeed with the Greek. I’m working vigorously now on the next issue of JMGS.

Yesterday at a cocktail party at the Freedmans’, Fogelin told me that to retire at 65 is stupid: I should take leaves of absence and teach at my own speed. I still feel impelled to retire at 65, indeed am immensely relieved owing to the decision.

Dickey Endowment Advisory Committee met concerning Leonard’s successor. Strobehn will appoint the committee and control things rather undemocratically. Jim Wright tried to bring the Endowment under Arts and Sciences rather than under the Provost. Squabbles. Steve Scher recommended me as the next director. That’s all I need! I spoke in favor of an independent institute not under Arts and Sciences. Jim Hornig afterwards thanked me and said he agreed. Everyone wants a new director who’ll consult more than Leonard did.

Wednesday, November 13, 1991

Allan Munck is away. Dick and I are playing Fauré mostly. When pieces are in one’s fingers like the Fauré (from Woodbrooke), they go so much better.

Thursday, November 14, 1991

Lunch with Miriam Richards, who teaches English 5 in our department. I observed her class yesterday. She wonders why the students are dead. Because she doesn’t give them a chance; she lectures at them most of the period. Has no techniques for encouraging discussion. I tried to give her a repertoire of tricks.

Friday, November 15, 1991

Supper at Trix and Chuck’s. His book was accepted by Oxford University Press, after he got a collaborator to fix up the writing—just what I told him. He is thrilled. Lee Huntington was there. Regaled us with the story of how Christopher Huntington got in the bus in Hanover to go to Logan airport and then to England, didn’t know he had to change at White River Junction, and ended up in Springfield, Massachusetts, with his luggage on the bus to Boston.

Sunday, November 17, 1991

Lunch at Kendal. Mother is doing better and better. We ate with Franny and Beveridge Webster. Then to gamelan concert at the Hop. Pieces by Wayan Sadra, visiting Indonesian composer, vocals by Jodi Diamond, an American whose “thing” became gamelan after she lived in Indonesia. Can’t say that I particularly liked this music, I fear.

Monday, November 18, 1991

Lunch with Jodi Diamond, her husband Larry Polansky (a composer), and Wayan Sadra. They hope to contact Alec and would like him to program pieces by Indonesian composers. They put me on to Indonesian novelists, specifically Mochtar Lubis and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I found Toer’s The Fugitive in Baker Library, but lots of other translations by both in the Union Catalogue. It’s a repressive state. These writers and most others are semi-underground.

Tuesday, November 19, 1991

Last ILEAD class. We actually finished PL XII. I ordered a huge cake with frosting saying “O Felix Culpa”! General jollity at the end. I’m glad it’s over, but teaching PL to adults seems to have become a sort of mission for me.

Thursday, November 21, 1991

Christian Wolff, Jim Tatum, Walter Stephens, and I met with Jim Wright and Bruce Duncan to defend Humanities 1–2, which they plan to eliminate in order to save money. We’ll see . . .

Wonderful student performance of The Tempest. Saw two of my ILEAD students there, the two who had been most resistant to Milton’s poetry. They confessed that now they want more poetry. The Tempest is still delicious. The interpretation kept 1992 in mind—the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in America. The spirits were Native Americans, Ariel was dressed in buckskins, etc.

Friday, November 22, 1991

Lunch with Steve Scher. He’ll be lecturing on Mozart in Minneapolis and hopes to see Deanna.

Heard Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. lecture on American multiculturalism, bravely defending the assimilationist, melting pot side of the debate (I agree) while refusing to go to the extremes advocated by the right wing, who were there in force, since the affair was sponsored by the Hopkins Institute. He referred to his father as “a better historian than me,” and I told him afterwards how memorable his father’s course was for me at Harvard.

Saturday, November 23, 1991

Paul Jolly visited from Pendle Hill. I had expected he wanted to dun me for a contribution but no, he just wanted my opinion on various issues.

Sunday, November 24, 1991

Cambridge

To Cambridge with Chrysanthi and Mother, in time for Meeting. Afterwards, after I’d introduced us all, a woman rushed up with greetings and embraces. It was Sarah Kafatos! We also saw Ted Webster and of course Warren Thompson. Rushed off to meet Lori and Clive for lunch. He seemed more relaxed than usual and actually took part in the conversation. Then to A.R.T. for s superb production of Hamlet, so fresh, so imaginative, playing Hamlet as a “student,” Gertrude and Claudius as sex-pots, Ophelia as smitten by Hamlet. A scintillating three and a half hours. Draining, refreshing. Ate at a Greek restaurant in Manchester: lamb, enough for three days.

Tuesday, November 26, 1991

Kendal Overseers. A long, important meeting. The first without Jean (on vacation). Jay Woolford explained the mistake that produced the sound transfer between floors. Last week I wrote to Lynmar Brock my personal experiences of frustration with ventilators, etc., and Lloyd was furious and chewed me out. But Lynmar said that such letters were fully in order. Overseers censured Jean (mildly) for allowing Carol and herself to be away at the same time. I was asked to try to get Tom Corindia back on the board. Spent most of the rest of the day writing the minutes and follow-up letters.

Wednesday, November 27, 1991

Allan is back. Good music and then an hour-long conversation with him and Dick stemming chiefly from my reactions to Darwin’s Origin of Species, which I listened to on the way to Cambridge last Sunday.

Thursday, November 28, 1991

Thanksgiving. Started by sharing breakfast at Kendal with the Websters and Michael and Leone Webster. She is the acting first flute in the Boston Symphony. They explained Ozawa’s reluctance to make hiring decisions. It’s a long story of the inability to make up his mind, and also of lawsuits against him by several whom he has dismissed.

Turkey dinner wit Daphne, Greg, Audrey, Allan and Claire Munck. Delicious and genial.

Friday, November 29, 1991

Lazy, relaxing holiday. Saw the Marx Brothers in “Animal Crackers” on home video. That’s where Groucho speaks about the elks who don’t want a waterhole because they prefer elkahole. Greg was more relaxed, even talked a bit.

Monday, December 2, 1991

New University Seminar in “Spirituality” organized by Jim Breeden. I went to the opening meeting. Interesting group of faculty, including two rabbis, an Iranian, and a disillusioned Lutheran.

Tuesday, December 3, 1991

Met with Jim Wright to discuss how to continue the University Seminars after I retire. He suggests an advisory committee of the three third-century professors.

Wednesday, December 4, 1991

Lunch with Tom Corindia. We want him back on the Kendal Overseers and he wants very much to do this but Jean is worried about conflict of interest.

Thursday, December 5, 1991

Breakfast with Jean. She was hurt by the Overseers’ reprimand about the administrator and assistant administrator both being on holiday together. Felt it had harmed her in Philadelphia. She stressed that Kendal is a “business” and operates on business principles only (as opposed to Quaker ones). Alas, alack!

Department dinner. Spoke with Tom Sleigh’s new wife, Ellen Driscoll, an artist who has an “installation” currently at the Whitney annex in the Philip Morris building on 42nd Street. I hope to go. . . . AMTRAK to Philadelphia.

Friday, December 6, 1991

Pendle Hill

Oliver is sick. I clerked not only Publications Committee but also the Executive Board. Publications Committee endorsed the Morehouse proposal. So did the Executive Board. Phew! Long talk with Rebecca, who ended by weeping. She’s in the dumps, poor thing. Burnout.

Had hoped to play Mendelssohn and Shostakovich with Oliver. Instead played four-hands with Dan: Poulenc, Brahms, until 12:30 a.m. His “honeymoon” is over; he’s had problems with Gay and Tom Nicholson.

Monday, December 9, 1991

Jim Freedman gave Dick Eberhart an award at Kendal and Dick read beautifully: “The Groundhog,” “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment,” etc. I bought his collected poems and had him sign it. He is 87 years old. Jack Manchester, sitting next to me, said that he hadn’t understood a word. (We literati must remember that.)

Tuesday December 10, 1991

Overseers, all about noise. We approved new ceilings costing almost $300,000.

Wednesday, December 11, 1991

Lunch with Paul Lewis. Agenda: Setting up Jean’s evaluation. I’m to draft guidelines for her self-evaluation, as a start. I summarized the pluses and minuses in my view, emphasizing that on balance we find her excellent.

Friday, December 13, 1991

Amherst–NYC

To U-Mass/Amherst to examine students studying Modern Greek. All Greek-Americans. Very moving: their desire to learn enough to speak to Yiayia, function in Greece, etc. . . . Train to NYC. Took Daphne, Greg, and Leander out to dinner in Daphne’s new neighborhood. Her apartment is much improved, now that paintings are hung.

Saturday, December 14, 1991

To David Erlanger’s for Kinhaven Evaluation Committee. We’re still trying to get a visiting composer, but Jerry is finding excuses. David dared to speak about Jerry’s eventual retirement! Slow and easy is our strategy now.

A quick look at Driscoll’s installation at the Whitney annex. A camera obscura in a dark shed commemorating the dark attic in which a run-away slave spent seven years. with only a peephole (like the one in the installation) to connect her with the outside world. Then to Daphne’s. She cooked dinner, I being their first true “guest” in a formal way. A success.

Sunday, December 15, 1991

Early to the Met. Seurat again and tapestries. Then Stuart Davis retrospective. A revelation. He and Thomas Benton were the premier muralists of the period. I bought a stunning poster of a New York mural, for Daphne’s apartment.

Thursday, December 19, 1991

I’m interviewing for Haverford again. Today saw a young man whose family breeds and trains llamas on their Vermont farm. An idea for us?

Dinner party with Lee Pelton, the new dean, a Black married to a lovely white woman, Kristin Wilson. He was head tutor at Winthrop House and knew Greg and Daphne and me through Harvard. He’s been here only four months and says he is so . . . so . . . so . . . tired. Jerry and Sally Rutter were here, too, and Tom Sleigh, but his artist-wife was unfortunately in Holland.

Friday, December 20, 1991

Dinner at Jonathan and Cathy Crewe’s, with Andy Rangell, who still suffers from tendonitis and can play only one hour a day, and Faith Beasley, the woman who was threatened and harassed by Dan Price, our schizophrenic graduate.

I’m working assiduously to get JMGS 10 (1) ready. Lots of interchange with Deborah Tannen, who has a fine article on the nuances of Greek conversation.

Saturday, December 21, 1991

To Vera Vance’s in the afternoon. Saw Hume and his wife. Talked about Tom Vance, fondly. Then to supper at Don Anderson’s in Etna. He and Felitsa Macedon are getting married. Quick work! Takis and Stella, and Felitsa’s brother, and a son by previous marriage. Lots of exuberant Greek conversation.

At midnight, Leander arrived with Alec and Eyi. They’d flown in from Tokyo earlier. Eyi is a diminutive Indonesian play-school teacher, very sweet, with a lovely smile, and not much English. But we managed. They were very tired, having not slept for two nights.

Sunday, December 22, 1991

Meeting at Kendal. Louisa Alger, age 98, ministered about Christmas during the first world war when allied soldiers and German soldiers exchanged cigarettes and embraced in no-man’s land before returning to their respective trenches to kill each other on the morrow. Lunch with Yiayia. Emergency meeting of Kendal Overseers about flooding because the sprinkler system malfunctioned. Alec and Eyi went to “The Revels” later. I’m showing her Dartmouth, gradually. She is adjusting beautifully. Doesn’t seem even to be cold. She’s a Moslem, originally from a village in East Java, in the mountains, where the temperature drops to about 40° F.

Monday, December 23, 1991

Meeting at Kendal concerning flooding and noise. All the bigwigs present including a partner of Ewing Cole, a vice president of Carlson Construction, a partner of Fleck and Lewis. They groveled, admitted mistakes, vowed to rectify them. Very edifying! Residents reasonable, cooperative, even when told they’d have to vacate for six days to get new ceilings. Only Ruth Adams is acting like a two-year-old: sulking, refusing to leave her flooded apartment. Her “things,” meant to give pleasure, are now making her miserable.

Wednesday, December 25, 1991

I entered the house for lunch whereupon Chrysanthi became hysterical, beating her breast and lamenting Alec’s liaison with third-world primitivism. What to say? I remember Chrysanthi’s scorn of Cypriots as small and dark. Now this is applied to Eyi, surely the best of the girls Alec has brought home over the years.

Good music with Yiayia and Alec, then with Alec alone, then four-hands with Leander: Brahms’ 4th, plus 5th Brandenburg. I’m getting better, strangely, as I age.

Saturday, December 28, 1991

Riparius

To Riparius with Alec and Eyi. Brilliant, sunny day, 30–35°. Everything in order. We walked full length of the forest path and up Waddell Road to the border. Good extended conversations with Alec. Listened to Andy Rangell’s stunning recording of the Hammerklavier on the way home.

Sunday, December 29, 1991

To Quaker Meeting with Alec and Eyi. She said that she felt “peaceful.” Lunch at Kendal. Now the roof is leaking, pouring water into the exercise room. Visited Lafayette and Mayme in their apartment. Leander praised their rebuilt Steinway, done by Bill Ballard. Then to the Hood Museum to see the Jonathan Borofsky installation, most imaginative. Daphne called. She had lunch at the Harvard Club with Tom Doulis. She has his novel in hand, but fears that it has slim chances at S & S, alas.

Monday, December 30, 1991

Eyi took me aside and said she wanted to express her “feelings.” She expressed tearful gratitude for my care, the time I’ve been spending with her, the things I’ve shown her. She said she felt that I was like her father. (She lost her father when she was two years old, thus never really knew a father.) I asked about the “future.” She and Alec certainly have not decided to marry so far. She says she’s unsure of whether she wants to marry him. But she’d like to live in the United States; she’d like to leave Indonesia (!). She worries, justifiably, about what sort of employment she could find here. She knows that her English is deficient and needs lots of work. She claims to feel “at home” in the US. I explained as best I could, given her rudimentary English, that her experience so far in the US is hardly typical of what it would be like to live here.

Tuesday, December 31, 1991

To NYC

Yesterday we went for pizza to Lebanon with the Nodas and Audrey. Kesaya is just recovering from an operation; she decided to quit Harvard. David Noda, Lafayette, and I spent the time going over the Kendal proposed budget. David, as a banker, knows what to look for. He was most helpful. Today I typed up a memo for all the Finance Committee members detailing our discussion. We’ll see what happens on January 7th, when we meet.

Drove to Springfield to get AMTRAK to NYC to spend New Year’s Eve with Daphne and Greg. Just Chrysanthi and me. The others are driving with Leander, all the way. On the trip Chrysanthi vented her feelings. She is utterly opposed to Eyi as Alec’s possible wife, opposed to his linking himself with someone from the Third World. “He should fight with lions, his equals, not with lambs. He should marry a woman with a profession, with education, someone he can be proud of. And he shouldn’t marry a Muslim. If they do get married, he’d be better off spending his life in Indonesia than here. Think of the difficulties a small, dark, oriental child of theirs would have in the American schools. I brought him up to be an American, and now he wants to save the world.” Etc., etc. I kept silent. How can one argue with such opinions? But apparently Leander has been urging him, too, to return home at the end of this year. Should I say anything? Should I tell him how much distress he is causing Chrysanthi? (She can’t sleep or eat, is all tied up in knots.) As for me, I try to view the situation rationally (my problem, says Chrysanthi) and therefore cannot oppose Alec’s lifestyle or choice; I’m interested in the individual human being he wishes to marry, not whether she’s dark or Muslim . . . or whatever (although these differences, I realize, could cause problems). Well, we’ll play out the rest of this holiday and then see.

Dinner at Daphne’s. Champagne, lamb, all the trimmings. Opening of presents. Toasting. Very pleasant, but hard to engage Gregory in a serious conversation except about football.

1992

Hanover

January 1–June 12

Jan. 1–2, NYC

Jan. 12, Harrison (Kinhaven)

Jan. 16–18, NYC

Feb. 1, Cambridge

Feb. 22–23, NYC

Feb. 29, Cambridge

March 7–8, Philadelphia, Princeton

March 20–22, New York

April 9–13, Pendle Hill, Bethlehem

April 17–19, New York

May 5, Amherst

May 8–10, Terpni

May 15–18, Philadelphia

May 23, Cambridge

May 26, Terpni

May 30, Kinhaven

June 7, Cambridge

Terpni

June 13–September 7

June 24, Hanover (Overseers)

July 17–19, Kinhaven

July 24–25, Hanover (Overseers), Saratoga

Hanover

September 8–December 31

Sept. 10–13, New York (Kinhaven, etc.)

October 11, Kinhaven

October 15, Harvard

October 16–17, Pendle Hill

October 26, Boston, AAHA

December 3–7, Washington–Philadelphia–New York–Amherst

December 18–19, Cambridge for A.R.T. Commander Hotel

December 30, NYC for MLA

Wednesday, January 1, 1992

Yale Club

Long breakfast with Chrysanthi and Leander, all about Alec. Leander very scornful and worried about Alec’s musical involvement because he doesn’t understand how unprofessional he is, how untrained. He can get away with it in Indonesia but never could here at home. Chrysanthi of course is totally against Eyi as uneducated and unskilled. Both a bit annoyed with me for being so nice to her. We’re going to try to talk to Alec—alone.

Telephoned Alec; he came. We remained calm, more or less. Examined Chrysanthi’s very great antipathy to Eyi. Basically Chrysanthi is a snob, wants an educated white woman for Alec. We all agreed that if he married he’d be better off living permanently abroad. He waxed eloquent about his accomplishments at JIS in making the school more appreciative of the culture in which it is embedded. This is Alec’s mission: bridge-building. We hoped that he would enhance this mission by entering the graduate program in educational administration of international schools at either Harvard or Columbia. He wants to defer this for one year. We fear that the one year will become two, three, four . . . and he’ll be too old to apply for jobs. Leander thinks Alec has a need to protect and rescue the weak, in this case Eyi. Chrysanthi is down on Eyi because she farts openly and because she openly said she had bought tampons for her period. Cultural differences, obviously—a delicious openness, in my view, regarding natural functions.

We went back to 79th Street finally for lunch, then walked on the lovely esplanade going up the East River to Gracie Mansion. Afterwards I worked on my Tatum paper, a month overdue. Then back to 79th for a supper of leftovers, and small talk. Leander drove off to Bethlehem at 2:00 p.m., got as far as Newark Airport, remembered he’d forgotten his briefcase, drove all the way back again, furious. Poor boy. Nice phone conversation with James McBride, whom we had hoped to see with Stephanie, but who has the flu.

Thursday, January 2, 1992

Daphne came for breakfast at the Yale Club. But we couldn’t engage her in serious conversation about Eyi and Alec. We met Eyi and Alec at the Metropolitan Museum. I “guided” them through Seurat, Spanish tapestries, Stuart Davis, Rembrandt, El Greco, French impressionists, abstract expressionists, Indonesian bronzes, Greek and Roman, Rodin’s Burghers, Ugolino . . . all in two and a half hours. Probably not very meaningful for Eyi, who’d seen none of this before. It becomes meaningful by repetition, when one visits and re-visits “old friends.” We rode the subway to Bowling Green, lunched in Wolf’s delicatessen (chopped chicken liver!) and then walked down Wall Street, saw George Washington’s statue, passed the Stock Exchange, and went to the floor of the Goldman Sachs building on Broad Street, to visit Greg. He was busy, heavy trading, but he gave us some time, explaining via computer graphics how they try to predict the future behavior of currency in order to enter into option deals. Greg in this setting is forceful, articulate, not the kind of wet rag he seems at home (perhaps from sheer fatigue owing to this awful awful job with its constant tension). Eyi, in passing, remarked how afraid she was of the black people she’d seen in New York. Obviously she doesn’t think of herself as “black” although others would, alas. We said goodbye, hugged and kissed, and drove off in a taxi to try to buy an overcoat for me—Yiayia’s present. Barney’s wanted $1100 for one on sale! But we found a beautiful cashmere one at the discount place on Madison and 45th, Daffy’s, for $139.00! Train to Springfield; car to Hanover listening to Bruckner’s swollen 3rd symphony. No wonder the audience hissed it at its première.

Friday, January 3, 1992

Working on my “Tatum essay.” Lots and lots of revision needed. Nice talk on the telephone with Kostas Kazazis. Strange how it’s easier to be close and intimate on the telephone with some people than face-to-face. Phoned Renée Hirshon in England about her delinquent essay. Journal material must go to Hopkins net Thursday, latest.

No more catastrophes at Kendal.

January 6, 1992

Chrysanthi smashed our car driving down Main Street. A young driver backed out of his parking place into our front end. No injury to Chrysanthi, but the car is a mess.

Tuesday, January 7, 1992

Kendal Finance Committee. Next year’s budget. Jean is angry because we consulted with David Noda, breaking confidentiality, she says. David French responded that one doesn’t break confidentiality talking to one’s own children. We are urging a lifeguard for the pool; Jean says there’s no money.

Thursday, January 9, 1992

Finance Committee again. We agreed on a 4.0% rise in fees, but then jumped it to 4.5% to enable one additional FTE comprised of an assistant physical therapist and a lifeguard.

January 12, 1992

Kinhaven Board. Miraculously, we met the Kresge challenge. I’m heading the Planning Committee concerned with winter use. Deadlock. David Bury broke it by suggesting that we integrate planning with development. He’ll submit a proposal. Drove home with Kit Van Winkle, pleasantly.

January 14, 1992

Overseers brought the 4.5% fee increase down to 4.3%.

January 16, 1992

New York

A whole day in the Rare Book Room of Butler Library examining Kazantzakis’s letters to Max Schuster, and also Eleni’s. Very interesting. Some complimentary mention of me, even. Schuster very impressive: eloquent, educated, well-read.

Dinner with Daphne. Then to the Metropolitan Opera to see Pavarotti and Battle in L’Elisir d’Amore. It was glorious. Battle’s voice is angelic. Pavarotti is obscenely fat, but his tenor still effortlessly pure.

Friday, January 17, 1992

Morning: back at Columbia. Finished the Schuster archive. Lunch at the Harvard Club with Daphne. So different, strangely, from the Yale Club.

Saturday, January 18, 1992

Carol Weingeist’s 50th birthday party. Long talk with Jim Freedman, who turns out to know Bill Clinton who, he says, is smart, honest, and extraordinarily eloquent.

Sunday, January 19, 1992

Dinner for Mother’s 87th birthday with Audrey and Nodas, very pleasant.

Tuesday, January 21, 1992

To Kendal to meet John Diffey, the new CEO of the Kendal Corporation. Very pleasant. Interested in literature, even Joyce. Supper at Kendal; then everyone came to Ledyard Lane for dessert and cappuccino.

January 24, 1992

I testified before the Fourth Council regarding College Course 1, which they feel is incoherent. It is trying, but I hope I saved the course. Then ran to class and lectured on “The Dead.” Returned home to find Chrysanthi in bed. She’d fallen on the ice, hitting her head. All aches and pains.

January 25, 1992

Fun lunch with Takis and Stella Metaxas, talking Greek, laughing over their stories about Don Nielsen in Athens, who is more Greek than the Greeks. Stella will do some Greek typing for me.

Then dinner party. Sheldons, Officers, and Dee Johnson. Everyone in good spirits. Officers will vote for Clinton.

Alec was accepted to Harvard Graduate School of Education. I faxed him and he replied that he will attend, rather than deferring a year. No sense of what this will mean for his relationship wit Eyi. JIS tried to convince him to stay, and invited him back after he finishes his M.A. Let’s hope he stays in the US. I’d love to see him headmaster one day of a Quaker school.

January 30, 1992

Such a good class this morning, the Freshman Seminar. One girl, Portia Passey, really awoke to the fascination of Ulysses. Then I saw her in my afternoon lecture to the other class, where she’d come voluntarily. So: one of life’s little victories . . .

. . . balanced however by a defeat. My testimony to the Fourth Council regarding College Course 1 produced a certification for only one year. I told Leonard I was despondent and he replied, “Don’t be despondent over a reversal in a faculty committee. Despondency should be saved for something more important.” Good. What a nice friend!

Good music last night with Allan. I’d practiced Beethoven’s 1st cellopiano sonata, 2nd movement, and what a difference that made! We lumbered through it the first time but the second time it actually began to sound like music. What an exciting pleasure!

Reading Shaw’s Misalliance in preparation for A.R.T. on Saturday. I like Lord Summerhays on governance: ❡ Justice was not my business. I had to govern a province; and I took the necessary steps to maintain order in it. Men are not governed by justice, but by law and persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both. I used both when law and persuasion failed me. Every ruler of men since the world began has done so, even when he has hated both fraud and force as heartily as I do. . . . (Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. IV, pp. 190–191).

Saturday, February 1, 1992

Cambridge

Miraculously, our car was ready last night after 3+ weeks in the garage. To Cambridge this morning. Lunch with Fotis and Sarah Kafatos. Chrysanthi hadn’t seen Fotis since the early 1960s, I since 1983. Warm and pleasant. He is ¾ at Harvard, ¼ at the University of Crete. They had a guest, an Israeli Sabra who advocates two separate states and disapproves of settlement policy. Then to A.R.T. for a scintillating Misalliance with Candy Buckley stealing the show as Lina Szczcpanowska. A cry for the dignity of women. Shaw turns everything topsy-turvy. The males are wimps, the females full of political, athletic, and sexual vitality.

Leslie English was here for supper last night with her daughter Nadia, now a roly-poly little girl of about 12. She (Nadia) clung to me as though she needed a father (which she does). Leslie is editor/producer of four journals in the Russian field, doing everything at home: desk-top publishing. She says she can’t face returning to the homestead of Peg Barnard and Jerry English because it’s too emotional: that’s why she doesn’t visit the Shapiros. Peg and Jerry are both buried there—their ashes, that is.

Wednesday, February 5, 1992

Nice lunch with Ned Perrin, whom I see less and less. He has cleared out his office in Sanborn and moved to Environmental Studies. His current passion is electric cars, the subject of his latest book.

Jean asked to see me. Weeping, she complained bitterly that I had suggested to Paul Lewis that it would be lovely if Jean came to Meeting. We’d like to know her as a full human being. She interpreted this as an invasion of her private life. Said she was about to return to Meeting but now would not.

Chrysanthi and I are favoring Bill Clinton in the democratic primary. Heard Tsongas the other night. He’s honest and intelligent but has no right to be running for president. Too little experience.

February 10, 1992

On stage at Kendal for open house following our announcement of increase in fees by 4.3%. Audience mild. They asked about the extensive repairs to ceilings and sprinklers. Would they be paying? Jean and board responded with circumlocutions, as usual. I stood up and told the truth.

Returned to meet with Robert Binswanger, Deerfield classmate, now teaching in our Education Department. He has been school principal in a Boston slum. Very plucky. Wants me to lecture in his course next term. I’ll try my Beebe lecture again.

February 11, 1992

Several compliments from Kendal regarding my honesty yesterday. Seminar here on electromagnetic fields from power lines. Are they harmful? I was relieved to hear the verdict: they are not.

February 16, 1992

TV debate. Jerry Brown and Bob Kerrey don’t listen to questions but merely repeat idées fixes. Tsongas and Clinton do better. The 5th from Iowa, Harkin, is in the Mondale, Humphrey, FDR line—i.e., the bankrupt tradition of the Democratic Party. I’m still for Clinton.

February 19, 1992

President Freedman invited a dozen senior professors to lunch to brief us on the proposals for revised curriculum, which include a requirement (!) for a “culminating experience” in the major. I annoyed Jim Wright, I’m sure, by announcing my doubts about requiring such an experience and also about the hyperbole of the terminology.

February 21, 1992

Jim Breeden’s seminar on spirituality: we agreed to proceed with an investigation of the meaning of the word “spiritual” especially in relation to what happens in universities: “spiritual values” an the like. Earlier, my annual lunch with Jim Jordan, the art historian. A nice, rather remote friendship.

February 22, 1992

NYC

To NYC for MGSA executive. I begged for an extra $700 to $1000 to add either 16 or 32 pages to the journal this issue, and was given $3500 over two years, thanks mostly to Peter Allen, who complained that we had too much money in our endowment fund and should spend some of it.

Met Daphne and Greg in an expensive French restaurant and then went to a fascinating evening at the New York City Ballet, with two postmodernist ballets. The first, composed by Charles Wuorinen, was jagged and abstract, the music always “quoting” earlier composers. Μέτριο. In between came Balanchine’s “Davidsbündlertänze” to Schumann’s music, brilliantly choreographed with every nuance of the music represented in the dancers’ movements. Then came the other postmodern piece, by David Glass, “Glass Pieces,” choreographed by Jerome Robbins. Iteration, round and round. Brilliant equivalent in dancers striding aimlessly from one side of the stage to the other, with minor variations. The point, of course, as in the Beckett novels I’m teaching at the moment, is to convey meaninglessness, and it is done very “meaningfully.”

Sunday, February 23, 1992

NYC

To David Erlanger’s for Kinhaven Committee with David Bury et al. but without the Bidlacks. David mapped out a campaign and growth strategy. I keep stressing the need for someone in residence in Weston.

To MoMA afterwards to see the Paley show. Some lovely pieces, especially Cézanne’s “L’Estaque,” Picasso’s “Nude with Joined Hands” and of course the celebrated “Boy Leading a Horse,” a Matisse “Odalisque,” Ben Shahn’s wonderful “Silent Music,” an orchestra’s chairs and stands without any players, and John Kane’s “Industry’s Increase.” Even more interesting, though, was the show on modernism with a very fine brochure that I find very close to things I’m saying in class.

February 24, 1992

Carol Weingeist has been fired, although it’s going to be made to appear like a voluntary resignation. Lloyd and Paul tell me that she was incompetent and that staff complained bitterly about her inefficiency, etc. Her talents are in people-to-people contact, not in “administration.” Of course Jean emerges the victor in this little feud. What a shame! Carol is 50 and without immediate prospects. She built a life in Hanover—and now if she’s to find work will she need to move, will she be able to sell her house easily, etc.? A mess.

Wednesday, February 26, 1992

Dinner with Bill Lederer, the columnist. But I couldn’t hear his talk because it’s Wednesday: music night. Paul Erlich, a violinist, has joined us. When Dick can’t come we’ve been doing trios: the Archduke! Schubert B-flat. Mendelssohn.

February 29, 1992, Cambridge

A.R.T. Seagull, enchanting, with Mark Roylance as Treplev, but Christine Estabrook stealing the show as Arkadina. Of course Jeremy Geidt always fine, this time as Sorin. The play documents Chekhov’s breakthrough into modernism, with its abandonment of the “well-made plot,” its incorporation of fragmentation, symbolism, silences, inconclusiveness. It was magical from the very first moment when Masha entered moaning, enervated.

Met Φιλίτσα Macedon and her daughter Popi. Lively trip home with uninterrupted chatter, mostly gossip about the Math Department. She’s nice and the daughter is a charmer.

Sunday, March 1, 1992

Gordon Browne with his wife Edith in Meeting. He spoke afterwards about the Friends World Gathering in Honduras. Did it so well, as I said in thanking him, that he not only made us feel that we ought to have been there but made us feel that we were there. Emphasized non-Anglo and non-programmed nature of most Friends now. Afterwards I took them on a tour of Kendal.

Friday, March 6, 1992

Pendle Hill

A marathon day at PH. Publications Committee, 12:00 noon until 5:15! First an interminable meeting over three manuscripts, all of which were rejected (I would have accepted one at least). Then Book Committee with Rebecca whining as usual that she works too hard and can’t cope. We divided up manuscripts to read. This is really not the way to run things. Then a “post-mortem” with Rebecca. Then Executive Committee after supper. John Anderson wants to evaluate publications yet again. Then to Dan Seeger’s for ice cream and talk, but couldn’t stay to play four-hand piano because of need to rise at 5:30 a.m. tomorrow.

Saturday, March 7, 1992

Princeton

Caught Septa at 6:11 a.m. and arrived in Princeton by 9:00 a.m. Greeted by Mike Keeley. Spent all day with past presidents of MGSA, very nostalgic, discussing the future and fundraising. John Iatrides’ position, etc. Keeley, Lily Macrakis, Van Coufoudakis, Adi Pollis (current president), Michael Herzfeld, plus Iatrides. Diamandouros missing (in Greece), also John Petropulos (no longer interested). We hope to hire a fundraising consultant. I’ll contact Irish Browning and Mike will one of his PEN contacts (he’s current president).

Best part of the day, a surprise, was a leisurely lunch wit Deborah Tannen, with whom I’ve been in contact so regularly via e-mail but haven’t seen for fifteen years. She’s basking in her success: months on the best-seller list, often number 1. Yesterday she lectured to twenty senators about gender differences. She’s married to Michael Macovsky, who was railroaded out of Dartmouth but remembers me as supportive and a friend.

Sunday, March 8, 1992

Lunch with Mother. She heard Horowitz play Schumann’s “Träumerei” (Horowitz in Moscow video) and wept, she said. She says she wants it played at her memorial service—Quaker type—by Leander. She is attending Friends Meeting regularly at Kendal.

Wednesday, March 11, 1992

Department meeting for a tenure vote on Tom Sleigh and Matt Rowlinson. Sleigh easy; he’s such a good poet; Rowlinson had his book on Tennyson accepted yesterday by a press, and that swayed us. But he is very marginal. I kept quiet. Since I hope to retire in three years, I have no right to influence the department’s future.

March 12, 1992

Annual checkup with Dr. Gerber. He says I’m amazingly healthy. Of course I have enlarged prostate, hemorrhoids, a hernia, mild arthritis. And now, as he finally discovered, a fungal infestation (yeast) on the glans penis, something that’s been building for two years. Finally he’s given me an anti-fungal cream that ought to help. He wasn’t so good in diagnosing Chrysanthi’s knee problem, however. Told stories about inadequate care, and lots of complaints, at Kendal. . . . Nice supper with Panos and Karen Rodis.

March 13, 1992

Supper with Nodas at Kendal and then to their apartment for a surprise birthday party for Lafayette. Saw Kesaya in Meeting last First Day, looking radiant. She’s abandoning the Harvard Ph.D. in religion, as I predicted she would.

March 14, 1992

Supper with Rogers and Soong Elliott.

Friday, March 20, 1992

NYC

10:00 a.m., finished my grades after reading 53 term papers in English 53 plus 7 in Comp. Lit. 7, about 1000 pages of student writing. Martyrdom! An hour later, off to New York via Springfield. Telephoned Theofanis Stavrou; says he wants to publish catalogues of the Kazantzakis letters in his Yearbook.

Met Daphne and Lucia Tebbe at Il Vagabondo, E. 62nd Street. A little awkward, but I hope we “hit it off.” Greg couldn’t join us because of tennis exhaustion. But we returned to the 79th Street apartment for dessert and coffee, and visited with him, too. Daphne’s apple pie an especial treat. Lucia very active in securing the claims of battered children in court.

Saturday, March 21, 1992

NYC

Read Wuthering Heights in the morning at the Yale Club, preparing for Humanities 2 lecture. Then to Merce Cunningham ballet. All electronic music, including a piece by John Cage: like a pneumatic drill piercing one’s ear, then long silence (with dancing continuing), then another stretch of strident screech. The choreography jagged, an undoing of every traditional step. This was called “Inventions.” The other numbers were “Neighbors,” by Kosngi, a première, and “August Pace” by Pugliese, with similar choreographic motifs. I prefer the NYC Ballet if only because they offer a mélange of styles whereas this was all the same. Still, a very fine example of postmodernist deconstruction of meaning.

Daphne and Chrysanthi went to Connecticut to Maria Martin’s shower. I met them for supper. Earlier, we’d had breakfast with Daphne at the Yale Club. She’s working on three fine projects for Fred and has ever-increasing responsibilities.

Afterwards, Daphne met Lucia and Greg at the Met to see Rigoletto while Chrysanthi and I went to Ibsen’s The Masterbuilder. Solness was played interestingly but eccentrically by Earle Hymn, who played the chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy. A strong play, still, because of its marriage of naturalism and symbolism. Hilde Wangel, to “work,” really needs to be chiefly a symbol of Solness’s psyche, a replacement for the gods (in whom he no longer believes). The play seems to depict symbolically mankind’s senseless need to aspire in a universe that is indifferent to such aspiration, and the harm caused to others when we pursue our “highest ideals.” In a godless world we can construct no longer churches but only castles in the air. Yet not to aspire to do this, even though such aspiration is senseless, is harmful to others and reduces us to automatons without free will. A bleak picture, to be sure.

Sunday, March 22, 1992

Leisurely morning at the Yale Club. Breakfast with the New York Times. Then to the library to continue with Wuthering Heights. At 11:00 Claire Mylonas, a senior history major at Yale, showed up to interview me on her project, a history of the Gospel riots in Athens of 1901. Of course she wants me to read her draft by next week! I have the Wuthering Heights lecture on Monday, the Onassis Center lecture to write on Ή Ζωή ἐν τάφῳ, the Pendle Hill lecture on Jesus, plus income tax, besides teaching two courses.

Then Yale Club brunch with Daphne, Greg, and Lucia, very relaxed and deliciously decadent. Lucia hopes to come to Hanover next Christmas. Wants us to come to Santa Barbara—but when?

Snow on our drive back from Springfield, 40 mph all the way. Cars off in the ditch, etc. But it wasn’t a bad storm. Daphne had left a message on the machine, very worried since in New York the snow was totally blinding, and a plane had crashed at the airport. How nice that she cares—a kind of reversal of roles, child fretting about parents.

Tuesday, March 24, 1992

Haverford’s Class of ’52, preparing for its 40th reunion, sent a questionnaire that I filled out as follows:

What do you think Haverford did for you?

Haverford introduced me to Quakerism, which has been a central part of my life, in various ways, ever since. It also gave me a good technical and aesthetic grounding in classical music—something else that has remained an important part of my life. Lastly, it offered stunning examples of both very good and very bad teaching: models that I have attempted to emulate and avoid, respectively.

Career History:

While still enrolled for the Ph.D. at Columbia, I taught English literature there in the extension division and also English for Foreigners.

Upon completion of the Ph.D. I was hired as an instructor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College, where I remained. I went up the academic ladder in the normal way and now hold an endowed chair. I have been active in Comparative Literature as well as English. In addition I am co-coordinator (with Jack Shepherd, also a Haverford alumnus) of Dartmouth’s offerings in Peace Studies. I founded a peer tutoring program at Dartmouth for English composition. I also founded Dartmouth’s University Seminar program, modeled on Columbia’s. My most recent endeavor has been to introduce a peer mediation training program, modeled somewhat on Haverford’s, again in collaboration with Jack Shepherd.

In the scholarly community, my chief involvement has been with the Modern Greek Studies Association of which I am a founding member. I served as its president for two years and currently am editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Association’s journal.

Community Service:

—Various involvements with Hanover Monthly Meeting including serving (twice) as clerk, as clerk of Ministry and Counsel, and as Trustee.

—Currently serving as clerk of the Board of Overseers of Kendal at Hanover, a Quaker continuing care retirement community that opened in July 1991.

—Longtime service on the Board of Pendle Hill, including time as clerk of the General Board, member of the Executive Board, and clerk of the Publications Committee.

—Trustee of the Kinhaven Music School, including service as president.

Leisure-Time Activities:

—Weekly chamber music with friends. We have met almost every Wednesday for 30 years.

—Management of 288 acres of paradise in the Adirondacks. This includes building a log cabin, harvesting timber, mowing, haying, gardening, pruning, helping son Alec build his own log cabin, swimming, folk dancing—a life very different from the academic routine at Dartmouth.

—Museum-going.

—Theater-going. We travel five times a year to Cambridge to attend performances of the American Repertory Theater.

In the Future, What are your plans for the use of your time in the years ahead?

Current plans are to retire after three more years of teaching, at age 65. Afterwards, I hope to:

—finish at least two large writing projects currently half-finished;

—serve as visiting lecturer occasionally in other universities;

—continue as editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies;

—continue community service, as noted above;

—play chamber music as usual, but having practiced more;

—play a more active role in forest management on our farm.

Supper at Dee Johnson’s with Vic and Marie McGee, who are leaving tomorrow for Japan. Nice to be at Dee’s again; so many memories of suppers there when Noye was alive.

Cynthia Wigington finished her four-month project for me, typing the catalogue of Kazantzakis letters. Such a sweet, vivacious woman. I’ll miss her.

Wednesday, March 25, 1992

Finished Wuthering Heights. It’s so long since I’ve read a novel (except via audiotapes—e.g., Candide this past weekend on the way to Springfield and back in the snow). Now, how to lecture on W.H.? I’ve got to start off Humanities 2 next Monday with this strange novel.

Thursday, March 26, 1992

Good two-hour lunch with Jack Shepherd. He lost 30 pounds in Kenya but is healthy. Arrived in South Africa a few days before the elections. Had breakfast with Nelson Mandela, followed De Clerk around as he campaigned, and witnessed the remarkable vote. We planned the inauguration of the mediation program this term, plus strategies for Peace Studies.

Monday, March 30, 1992

Chrysanthi had arthroscopy surgery on her knee. Torn meniscus. They removed the shredded cartilage. Hope is that blood supply will now increase, and fiber cartilage will form. She’s home, on crutches.

Friday, April 3, 1992

From the Center for Defense Information Bulletin: ❡ “Mature Use of Power”: A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness. —Walter Lippmann (1965)

Saw Billie Whitelaw in solo performance of Beckett. So powerful. She did “Not I” (on video) plus excerpts from “Footfalls.”

April 6, 1992

I lectured as a guest in Robert Binswanger’s Education 20 class. Did my Beebe lecture again. Nice to see Robert after so many years.

April 7, 1992

Kendal tax hearing before the Board of Adjustment. Cliff Vermilye, Bob McLaughrey, a horrible woman selectman, the assessor, Dick Birnie, Paul Young absent. Our lawyer very poor; didn’t even know what CCRC stands for. Selectmen kept insisting that we were no different from an apartment house. I made a speech about our contribution to society, tax-exempt status, etc., not at all appreciated by Jean, who wanted the thing to be argued on purely legal grounds. We expect to be rejected, of course. The tax is almost $500,000.

April 8, 1992

My inflammation on glans penis is finally subsiding. Gerber said it was a kind of “athlete’s foot”: growth of a fungus/yeast. Chrysanthi is doing well, in a wheelchair at first, then two crutches, then one crutch, then a cane.

April 9, 1992

Lunch with Nicolette Van der Lee, a graduate of Jakarta International School, now a Dartmouth sophomore. In my section of Humanities 2 I have a girl from Singapore and a lad from Manila. I feel connected with Southeast Asia vicariously through Alec, of course. . . . Drove to Pendle Hill with Chrysanthi and Mother.

April 10–11, 1992

Pendle Hill

Publications Committee. Books Committee. Cadbury Scholarship Committee. Wow! Also some four-hands with Dan.

Sunday, April 12, 1992

Pendle Hill–Bethlehem

To Bethlehem using the new Blue Route, which is wonderful. Leander and Deanna played and Leander premiered a new composition for trumpet, percussion, and piano. Saw “Mitch” and “Manny” and the Schantzes. Communal supper afterwards. Then visit to home of Leander’s friends Schorches (?); he’s a ship designer. Very interesting, hospitable people; they slept L. & D., and gave them use of a car for their stay in Bethlehem. Daphne and Greg came for the concert.

April 13, 1992

Bethlehem–Hanover

Breakfast in Hotel Bethlehem with Dick Schantz. Then drove to Hanover.

April 14, 1992

Hanover

Full day. Breakfast with Jean to set Kendal Overseers’ agenda. Ben King and Geoff Watson in the morning. Greek 13, four-hour CAP. Spirituality seminar at Breeden’s. 8:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. without a break.

Friday, April 17, 1992

To NYC

My lecture on Ή Ζωή ἐν τάφῳ for the Onassis Center. I invited Burt Pike. Daphne and Greg came. And Michael Landis plus others from the distant past. Diana Haas chaired. Vryonis out of town. Afterwards, in the question period, I got attacked because I had mentioned the “Macedonian language.” “There is no Macedonian language,” shouted a rabid Greek nationalist. “Macedonia is Greek. You shouldn’t use that word.” A man assured me that the so-called Macedonian language was really a dialect of Greek. A woman said she was from Florina and knew for a fact that only Greek was spoken in the vicinity. Finally we deflected this and turned to literary matters. Nationalism is an ugly disease, making people lose all contact with reality. Orwell’s Newspeak was triumphant this evening. Afterwards, lovely relaxed supper in a Village restaurant run by Albanians, it seemed. Nice to see Burt again.

Saturday, April 18, 1992

NYC

Theater with Daphne and Greg. A cute comedy about a mousy academic playwright who gets mixed up with the Mafia when he seeks backers.

Sunday, April 19, 1992

NYC

Brunch at the Yale Cub with Daphne and Greg. Accidentally met Vasos there and George, planning another Travel Dynamics trip. He recommended me for a Smithsonian Institute tour of UK but I declined.

Monday, April 10, 1992

Hanover

Did Jean’s evaluation together with Paul Lewis. Most unsatisfactory. Jean responded to none of the criticisms—i.e., acknowledged nothing wrong. But maybe in her heart she registered something.

Tuesday, April 21, 1992

Susan Chambers staying with us for a few days. I guest-taught in Heffernan’s Ulysses seminar. Chris Chen, in the back row, had his eyes closed the whole time, but was not asleep, I think. He hates Heffernan, and vice versa. Good class otherwise.

Kendal reception. John Diffey, etc.

April 23, 1992

Good meeting with John Diffey about Jean’s response. He’s mellow. Reminded me that this was a “first time” for both sides. Next year we should be able to develop a better evaluation and perhaps she’ll be able to respond better. We also talked about an Overseers’ retreat for next year.

April 24, 1992

Lunch at Norwich Inn in strange company—elderly physicians honoring Bill Chambers’ memory, and Susan. There is an annual Chambers lecture. I spoke with the lecturer about Kendal, which interested her greatly.

Chris Chen wants to leave Heffernan’s class and finish the term with me in an independent project. He’s fascinating, but awfully neurotic. I’ll give it a try.

Supper with Lincolns, Bill Scherman and wife and also the former president of Middlebury, James Armstrong, now at Kendal, a classicist. Nice.

April 25, 1992

Μεγάλο Σάββατο. We went to the service at Newport taking Bissera, the freshman from Sofia, Bulgaria, and my adult auditor in Greek 13. A strange, awesome beauty, even without ψάλτες.

April 27, 1992

Clearness committee for Deni Elliott at our house. James, her husband, and Jack Shepherd. She’s agonizing over whether to accept a job offer in Montana. She’d prefer to stay at Dartmouth but can never have tenure here and is thus precarious. Endless repetition of the same points; tears; impasse. Jack and I both feel that she should leave.

April 28, 1992

Nice supper with Robert Binswanger. He hopes to stay on as a visiting professor next year.

April 30, 1992

Cook-Bien poetry reading again in the War/Peace Studies course. Again we didn’t finish; ran out of time, mostly because Bill sang the whole of “Dooleysprudence”! Then Jack and I hurried to the Fourth Council meeting to plead for the course’s certification and again failed. Gene Garthwaite complained that it didn’t do justice to Arabs. Keith Walker complained that it didn’t do justice to Africans. Someone else complained that it lacked “theory.” Dick Birnie said that the exams were not rigorous enough, etc. I made a speech saying that incoherence is a virtue and that I wish we could have no exams at all. This of course drove the last nail into the coffin. Jim Hornig, our only ally, hardly spoke. Marianne Hirsch distinguished herself by being absent. Most discouraging.

Overseers’ dinner at Norwich Inn for Carol Weingeist, without Jean, of course. Carol is in good spirits despite everything.

May 1, 1992

Another meeting with Deni Elliott, this time in Bernie Gert’s office. More of the same. She should go.

Bill Scherman and Karen Rodis at lunch to discuss Beebe possibilities. Karen always smiles but clearly she has no interest in cooperating.

I’m using the Dartmouth Dante project’s computerized variorum to work up Dante lectures. How exciting to be reading the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso again, the first time since Columbia. I’m using my Columbia notes, also.

A children’s video, “Bob and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” uses a flying telephone booth to transport the students into historical periods! I viewed it tonight. John Rassias wants to prosecute for copyright infringement.

May 2, 1992

Amos Bien here from Costa Rica. His “Rara Avis” is an experimental rain forest, the point being to prove that a forest owner can make just as much money by exploiting the forest itself in various ways as by cutting it down. Amos says that the scheme is working, more or less. He still hopes we’ll visit.

Supper with Φιλίτσα. Her mismatch to Don Johnson is peculiar. She a total extrovert, he the total opposite.

May 5, 1992

Amherst

To U-Mass for Greek exams again. Then to Rhoda Honigberg. Bron died and we offered condolences (Chrysanthi and Mother came with me). Rhoda’s two sons were there, both married and both lawyers; one of the wives is also a lawyer. It was good to have Bron at Daphne’s wedding last August; he was at his best and very pleased.

May 7, 1992

Again with Bill Scherman regarding Beebe professorship plans. This time with Andrew Beebe, the grandson. I said that if money could be secured I’d stay on a final two years in the flexible retirement mode to inaugurate new projects. But do I really want to do that? Probably not.

May 8–9, 1992

Terpni

Found one panel of insulation down in our sleeping loft and repaired it. Planted peas, lettuce, etc. Started the Jari (my trick now is a teaspoonful of gas poured down the cylinder, to prime it). Supper with Shapiros, who had a fine trip to Greece last autumn.

May 10, 1992

Supper at Lee Baldwin’s with his new wife Anne Sa’adah, and guests: the young expert on Cambodia, originally from Melbourne, with his Cambodian wife. We shared very much. Ben Kiernan by name.

May 11, 1992

Ben Kiernan’s talk on Cambodia. He knows everything to know but is a boring lecturer, droning on and on. Lots of trees, not enough forest.

May 13, 1992

Leonard Rieser’s retirement extravaganza. At 4:00 p.m. in the Hood Museum; formal speeches by Kemeny, Bill Doyle, etc. Fun to see lots of old-timers—e.g., Frank Smallwood, Fritz Hier, John Hennessey. Then a grand supper in the Boathouse with informal toasts and speeches and a spoof video done by Bill Smith. Leonard, Jr. sat at our table. He’s a lawyer in Philadelphia. Very slight, like Rosemarie. I admired Leonard because at the very end (after all this had been going on since 4:00 p.m.) when he rose to give his final response to everyone, he spoke exclusively about someone else: Walter Burke, who of course was present. Reminded us of Purgatorio, how Dante quashes his own pride by giving the last words to Arnaut Danièl, and in Provençal. Leonard has been a real friend all these years, also a kind of patron.

May 14, 1992

Jack and I had breakfast with Dick Birnie to try to “reach” him re: War/Peace Studies. He was largely unreachable; kept talking about the committee’s “responsibility.” Jack and I have agreed to stop fighting them, and to capitulate and do what they want. . . . Flew to Philadelphia in the evening.

May 15, 1992

Pendle Hill

Publications Committee in the morning. Mary Helgesen let me use her Mac. I’m rushing to finish my lecture for Monday night.

Saturday, May 16, 1992

Pendle Hill

Work on lecture. Barbecue at Dan’s for supper with two NYC friends of his, one the head of the Bayard Rustin Fund, the other an orderly in a hospital, a Filipino who cooked us the most delicious meal. Nice to reminisce about Rustin and A. J. Muste. Earlier: piano-viola with Oliver Rodgers.

Monday, May 18, 1992

Pendle Hill

Worked on the lecture steadily yesterday and today. Yesterday ministered in Meeting, on Dante. Music with Dan in the evening. Tonight’s lecture, a good audience including some old friends from Kendal: Bain Davis, Mary Morrison. My subject: “Artistic Transformations of Jesus.” I used slides (helped by Anne Cohen, Joy Kenseth, Kathleen Corrigan) showing very “shocking” Jesuses, including ones with erections: “the risen flesh”! Then spoke about Yeats’s play “Resurrection” in which Jesus is counterpointed against Dionysus’s rebirth; and of course D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Died,” where Jesus is transformed into Osiris. Cited Dante also, the point being against literalism and arrogance, the belief that we can know the nature of Divinity. The other view is that every representation of Divinity, including what we are told in Scripture, is merely a representation, adequate for human understanding, of something that by definition defies human understanding. Of course I spoke also about the Scorsese film imbroglio, as an example of literalism at its worst. Dan Seeger asked the first question, throwing me off my guard: If all this interpretation is so important, what then can we say about Quakerism, which excludes all artistic representation? I answered weakly that I’d already written about the nature of Quaker silence. Actually, however, the silence is, in effect, an “artistic” representation of the quality of heaven. . . . Afterwards, marking papers.

Tuesday, May 19, 1992

Pendle Hill–Hanover

At breakfast, people spoke well about the lecture, especially Irené, who said it had a beginning, middle, and end. . . . A quick stop at Staples; then flew home just in time for Elise Boulding’s potluck at the Meeting. She’s vigorous and stimulating, as always. I briefed her about our War/Peace troubles.

Wednesday, May 20, 1992

Kendal Overseers. Jean, urged it seems by John Diffey and Paul Lewis, responded to the Overseers about the evaluation, her voice quavering and the veins standing out in her neck. But she insisted that Carol’s departure was entirely Carol’s decision! And regarding her “coldness,” she wondered if she’d be so labeled if she were a man. So, small gain. We have two new Overseers: John Radebaugh and Lee Huntington. Sydney Jarvis, Audrey Logan, and Erica Brinton have rotated off.

Elise’s seminar at 5:00 p.m. plus supper. Afterwards we spent an hour at the Inn discussing the War/Peace problem. She recommends compromise and adjustment.

May 21, 1992

War/Peace Steering Committee. Again, the problem. Good group, very helpful. We’ll think about starting a minor the year after next.

Dinner at home with the new Overseers and the Brokaws, to orient them. John Radebaugh gave me two trout flies as a present.

May 22, 1992

Saw the new movie Howards End. Beautiful, well acted, but lacks Forster’s whimsy. Too heavy-handed in its social commentary.

Saturday, May 23, 1992

Cambridge

Met Meg at Sarah Kafatos’s, where we were meant to have lunch. But no Sarah—some mix-up. So, better, had a lovely long lunch at a Thai restaurant. Then to A.R.T. to see Hedda Gabler —a wonderful play, but miscast: Hedda was always smiling! Here met, by pre-arrangement, Charlotte Waterlow, John Waterlow’s sister. Drove home with her. She hand-delivered another Kazantzakis autograph. How nice! Like her brother, an effortless conversationalist, full of anecdotes and stories about her father (very austere), life in Greece when she was his social secretary after getting a first in history at Cambridge, the British males’ fear of intellectual women. . . . Kazantzakis, when he met her, said, “Only three or four people have reached the philosophical heights that I have reached, and no woman can ever do that,” whereupon she promptly lost all interest in Kazantzakis.

Sunday, May 24, 1992

Charlotte and I went to Meeting. She ministered. She told me afterward that she’d been refused membership in a Meeting in England because they said she didn’t believe sufficiently in Christianity.

Monday, May 25, 1992

New crisis at Kendal. Sixty-five residents signed a petition condemning the food. Jean tore it up. The instigator demanded an apology and threw her out of his apartment.

To the farm after 5:00 p.m.

Tuesday, May 26, 1992

Planted tomatoes and beans. Got the John Deere running.

Wednesday, May 27, 1992

Breakfast at Kendal with Neil Ratliffe and the Websters. He still goes routinely to Greece. Remembers Leander fondly. He is collecting Beveridge Webster’s papers for the piano archive he directs.

Honors dinner with Geoff Watson, who appeared at my office unshaven at 5:55. He’s been up two nights in a row. Turned in his thesis, but it’s really not finished. Sat also with Kate Cohen, who says that she regards me as more her mentor than her official mentors. Also next to Beatriz Pastor, who caught me up on Dwight Lahr’s life: still suffering from partial paralysis of his leg. Leonard was the speaker, at his best, full of soft humor. Subject: Albert Einstein.

I am as bad as Geoff. I won’t get this issue of JMGS in on time. Carol has given me a week’s extension.

May 28, 1992

Last CAP. I’ve finished three years. Banquet followed. John Moore and I became real friends through this contact. Then to hear Cathy Choi’s senior violin recital: Bruch—nice, but stiff.

May 29, 1992

Charitability Committee for Kendal: Lafayette, John, Chrysanthi missing. We have some good ideas for outreach.

Music: Dick, Allan, Paul. Paul can’t count. It’s getting annoying.

May 30, 1992

To Kinhaven. Lelah oversaw the interment of Darby’s ashes on the “Knoll.” David, Jr. conspicuously absent; apparently he hated his mother. Nadia Macintosh there, plus “Toodle,” the sister. George Goodwin, too. But Glen Sproul was the nice surprise. We went off and talked for an hour during lunch. We’d worked well together during his presidency; he appreciated the support I’d given him.

May 31, 1992

I’m on Ministry and Council again for the Meeting. I asked them to visit with Jean and Nancy to see why they have stopped coming to Meeting.

4:00 p.m., piano recital by my Chinese student, her family much in evidence. It was excruciatingly bad. Played all the pieces I used to play. Started with Mozart, the first mistake. As Bill Summers said, “That’s like going to a fancy ball in an evening dress held together by temporary stitching.”

June 1, 1992

We took Aris Damianos and his fiancée Fran out for dinner at Café La Fraise. They’re getting married on the 14th but we cannot go to the wedding. He says his parents are reconciled now to his marrying a non-Greek. But they’re having an Orthodox service.

June 4, 1992

Lunch with Kate Cohen, perhaps the end of a nice student-friendship. She seems very grateful.

June 5, 1992

Lunch with Jay Parini halfway between Hanover and Middlebury. I met him by chance the other day at Kendal as he was about to visit Dick and Betty Eberhart. Jay’s Tolstoy novel is being turned into a film with Anthony Quinn to play Tolstoy (!). Jay did the film script and had to accept many compromises—e.g., excluding all views of poor people (“American moviegoers, paying $7.00 each, don’t want to see poor people”). But he drew the line when the agent urged him to have Tolstoy engage in a sword fight.

Sunday, June 7, 1992

Cambridge

To A.R.T. for Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, a hilarious romp. Mother came, and we met Lori for lunch, then returned to her lodgings to see if they might be suitable for Alec. They’re disgusting. A pigsty. Goldoni is an amalgam of vaudeville, Καραγκιόζης, commedia dell’ arte. Pure entertainment of the best kind.

June 8, 1992

Hanover

Lunch with Tom Corindia: always a chance to gossip about Kendal. I probably talked too much, failing to observe confidentiality. Told him about Jean’s evaluation, step by step.

Chen continually postpones turning in his paper. Dare I fail him?

Thursday, June 11, 1992

Chen turned in a 12-page paper, interesting but skimpy. I told him I’d grade him a C+ and his dismay convinced me to raise it to B–.

Supper with Jack and Kathy Shepherd, very friendly. We’ve had a fine collaboration.

Last minute scramble to submit ORC copy for the University Seminars, War/Peace Studies, College Courses. I have three new University Seminars for next year.

Sent in JMGS issue last Monday, a week late. What a relief!

Friday, June 12, 1992

Farewell lunch for Leonard at the Dickey Endowment. Again we worried about the disparity between Dartmouth’s protestations in favor of international students, and the reality.

Drove to the farm. Nice Italian dinner in a restaurant we’ve not tried before. We pride ourselves on having eaten in every restaurant between Hanover and Riparius.

Saturday, June 13, 1992

Started right away on Pendle Hill obligations. I did the printed version of my Jesus lecture two weeks ago and sent that in. Now I had to write an introduction for the reprinting of Howard Brinton’s guide to Quaker practice, explaining the changes: inclusive language, etc. “That of God in everyone” instead of “every man” is OK. But isn’t the suppression of “Kingdom of God” going a bit too far?

Monday, June 15, 1992

Read Helen Hole’s essays for PH Book Committee. I couldn’t recommend them. Then read Paul Lacey’s new essay on spirituality. Ditto.

Tuesday, June 16, 1992

Read “An Account of the Life and Travels of Samuel Bownas.” Again: negative recommendation. Too many trees; not enough forest.

Alec arrived, chauffeured from JFK by Leander. He was in good spirits despite the break from Eyi necessary before he left. Chris and Art came over to say hello.

Deanna auditioned for the National Symphony in Washington and won, so she’ll be leaving St. Paul and setting up house with Leander in Maryland next September. Leander will keep the Moravian job for the time being. We’re all very pleased.

Forgot to write here that Dan Seeger asked me to be Quaker in Residence at Pendle Hill sometime. After retirement, perhaps.

Don Blackmer telephoned. He’d been reading my write-up for the 40th Harvard reunion book and noted my interest in Kendal, which may be right for him and Joan.

Sent everything off to PH via express. Turning now to neglected correspondence. These past six months I was a first-class procrastinator with the Journal and other obligations.

Thursday, June 18, 1992

Leander broke the Jari. He’s got a mild ulcer; also tendonitis in the right shoulder. Deanna’s new arrangements will force him to give up his engagement to make a CD of the Elliott Carter cello sonata in St. Olaf’s next September; his obligation to support Deanna in her move comes first. Alec said nothing about Eyi to us, but we heard it all from Leander. He realized that a continuing relationship with her would just be too restricting.

Friday, June 19, 1992

John Peck here from the county soil conservation agency. He, Alec, Leander, and I walked our property, which has now been surveyed for fresh use. Lots of areas where we could begin thinning and even cutting.

Took the Jari to Dave Whitty’s. Miraculously he fixed it on the spot.

The garden is very sickly owing to a heavy frost while we were still in Hanover, but we’re watering it and hoping.

Picked Daphne up in Lake George. Greg is in London again and she came on the bus to spend the weekend with us. She’s discouraged at Simon and Schuster. No way to advance. Wants to prepare a résumé and start looking for another job. But Greg may be transferred to London for an extended period, which would be perfect timing for Daphne. We’ll visit them! He should know one way or the other in two weeks. We all had a late dinner sitting outdoors with a view of the lake. Very “European.”

Saturday, June 20, 1992

Nice to have all three children together for a few days. It’s rare now. Daphne favored steaks for supper and we feasted and cooked on the fire outdoors, of course. Unseasonably cold. I made a fire in the living room and we all sat by it, reading and talking. Sighted a ewe and faun earlier, very close.

Sunday, June 21, 1992

Took Daphne to catch her bus in Lake George and preceded this with a lovely pizza, again outdoors with a view of the lake. Walked on the lakefront to the steamer dock. Saw ducks and ducklings, all in formation.

Monday, June 22, 1992

Mowed around the pond. Got power scythe working again after some difficulty. Leander left for Kinhaven, reluctantly, saying this will be his last summer there; he wants to spend six weeks at the farm in 1993. Afterwards, Chrysanthi, Alec, and I drove back on Waddell Road to see the Morris development. He has built a road to the beaver pond and has drilled a well. Extraordinary beaver work: huge lodge, huge dam, and two smaller dams downstream. Evidence of beaver-fallen trees all around. We even heard the famous slap of the tail on the water to warn of intruders. Then saw a blue heron resting on top of a dead tree, its nest nearby. It flew off majestically.

Tuesday, June 23, 1992

I’m caught up now on the journal, more or less, very embarrassed by my procrastination. Some MSS have languished for six months without being processed. Also caught up on correspondence, mostly. But I have six months’ worth of TLSs to read. . . . To Hanover in the evening .

Wednesday, June 24, 1992

Hanover

Overseers 7:30 to 10:15 a.m. Got nowhere with Lafayette’s outreach report. I had hoped we’d establish priorities. Also got nowhere with the question of supplementary electric generation for power outages, when none of the elevators runs and people are stuck on the third floor. Jean reported the food petition briefly. Overseers approved going to court over Hanover taxes. I raced to Kiewit to buy a “Powerbook”—i.e., laptop—computer for Alec; over $2000. Then back to Kendal for lunch. We waited 35 minutes to be served. Food cold, unappetizing. I began to understand the petition. David French, like me, disagrees with Jean’s peremptory refusal to receive or read the petition. . . . Met Jay and Devon at the entrance and gave them a quick tour. Apparently Jay had really listened when I spoke to him about Kendal at lunch recently.

Franny Webster stopped me in the hall to say that Beveridge has gone nine full months, his entire stay at Kendal, without a drop of alcohol. She is so pleased. They are going to try to get him full status as a contractual resident when his first year is up—i.e., soon. He played a splendid recital to an overflow crowd in Hopkins Center and was at top form, according to Mother and others.

Last night at 4:00 a.m. the phone rang. Indonesia. Ines delayed. Arriving at 2:00 on flight 800, Delta. How lucky we were here. Today I called Delta. No flight 800. No arrival at 2:00 at JFK. Consternation. But when we finally discovered Ines’s last name from Nancy Bidlack and finally and luckily reached Alec at the farm, this was cleared up. 800 was Garuda, as was 2:00, not Delta. Delta had been changed to American. How lucky we got the call. Otherwise Alec would wait for her 6:00 a.m. arrival on Delta tomorrow, find no one, and not know what to do next.

Thursday, June 25, 1992

Terpni

Nice supper near Pico last night: Italian. Got blitz today from Chris Chen. Education is so complicated and fascinating. He had sort of pressured me into raising his grade from C+ to B–. Now he wrote his regret at this, saying it wasn’t a Taoist thing to do (correct!) and that I should have given him a D for his presumption. So, self-education has occurred. Interesting man. He told me that I have unusual modesty. Perhaps. Don Pease when we were at dinner a while ago said I have unusual gentleness. Perhaps. I hope that these are Quakerly qualities.

Alec the other day went back to the Morris’s beaver dam, sat silent for an hour with his camera ready and eventually saw the beavers at work, also the heron feeding its chicks.

Today Alec picked up Ines satisfactorily. Close call.

Friday, June 26, 1992

I’m working on Païvanas’s piece on rebetika, which needs extensive rewriting. I seem to be turning into a copyeditor. It’s an interesting skill. . . . Mowed some more on the lower field, a crime because of all the wildflowers and berries. Also, as Chrysanthi said, I ruined the deer’s meals. Mower broke; main spring came loose.

Saturday, June 27, 1992

Used the power scythe to clear next to the tree-line in the lower field. These sunny, cool, beautiful days are so peaceful. Should finish Païvanas tomorrow. On Thursday we ate at the Merrill McGee house in Warrensburg with Fran and Irv. Delicious. Special coupons: 2nd entrée free. Irv is getting continually grumpier and opinionated.

Monday, June 29, 1992

Finished copyediting Païvanas and sent it off to him in Australia. My God, half a week! Piano tuner came. The old Steinway sounds wonderful now and all the keys work, for the moment. Read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel The Fugitive, about the very last days of the Japanese occupation of Java. Melodramatic, without much depth of characterization, but sensitive regarding what people find themselves doing in wartime, with hardly knowing or caring—e.g., collaborating with the enemy, betraying even their loved ones.

Tuesday, June 30, 1992

A grouse chick wandered into my office beneath my feet, and then the mother appeared just outside with the rest of the brood, looking like a wild turkey

Stupidly broke the Ford mower by adjusting the lift spring too tightly; the housing sheared off under the pressure, where it had been welded. Called Bud Rodick, who says he’ll pick it up and fix it.

Wednesday, July 1, 1992

Used the tractor, now without the mower, to remove rocks in the lower field. Of course they’re always three times as big as they seem. One we couldn’t budge after up-ending it, so we left it, a miniature Stonehenge. I am gradually civilizing that front border where there is so much slash from the clearing of the electric line.

Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald came for supper. Maureen surprised and saddened me by denigrating Jacques Grunblatt after I suggested that the new beach and pond be named for him. “We’re tired of being asked to honor Jacques,” she complained. He took more from the town than he gave. And others did much more than he to help restore the pond, but he was the loud-mouth,” etc. Too bad. Maureen also commented, drawing from her career in the Navy, that a ship without complaints is an unhealthy ship. I must tell Jean.

Thursday, July 2, 1992

Galleys arrived for JMGS 10 (2). Another three days of my life. I hurriedly skimmed and then wrote a review of Ο λόγος της απουσίας by Παναγιώτης Μουλλάς, 40 letters from Fotos Politis to his parents and three times as much excursus on the “problematicism” of epistolography. Very nice, actually, because done partially with tongue in cheek. This review is meant to fill up some blank pages in the issue.

Supper at Copperfield Inn with Evelyn and Aser Rothstein. North Creek is surely different. Waiters in tuxedos, elegance, fine food, reasonable price. Rothsteins extremely friendly. Spent most of the three hours telling me about their trip to Indonesia: Java, Bali, Sulawesi, where they saw extraordinary death rituals.

Friday, July 3, 1992

Rosine Gardner paid a visit. Poor Jerry can’t make any money with the newspaper because advertisers don’t pay. Last winter he ran a cigarette ad that paid, but had to drop it because of moral indignation from Evelyn Greene and others who claim that the ad recommends suicide or murder.

Alec is absorbed with the marvels of the laptop computer I bought for him, an Apple Powerbook. It is remarkable, as is Microsoft Word 5. We played chamber music for a bit: Purcell, Vivaldi, Toselli’s Serenade, Schubert, Handel. Delicious spaghetti and homemade rolls for supper.

Saturday, July 4, 1992

Up at 6:00 a.m. to burn the brush pile, because it rained yesterday and last night. Chrysanthi worried because I didn’t ask for a permit. It went up like a huge torch and was down to the ground in thirty minutes. We cut various dead, unsightly trees around the pond and added these to the embers.

Conference call the other night from Jerry Bidlack, John Austin, Janet Greene, David Erlanger, and Bill Polk regarding strategies for the July Kinhaven Board. I’m glad that I’m going off it, finally. July should be my last meeting.

Sunday, July 5, 1992

Rainy morning. Wrote letters on the computer: to Izzy Ganz/Gardner/Lipschutz, Martin McKinsey, several students; wrote book review for World Literature Today on Fakinou’s The Seventh Garment, quite remarkable; read TLSs, which Daphne now wants me to send to her after I’m finished. Weather cleared in the afternoon, and Alec and I went with spraypaint to mark our boundaries. OK on southern line until it disappeared beneath a beaver pond. So we walked northward beneath some magnificent ledges until, luckily, we tripped over the remains of the northern fence, and marked about ½ of this, ending at Waddell Road. Previous markings all but gone. The problem will be the new property, which has no southern fence at all.

Chrysanthi went to a potluck at Wevertown Town Hall. Alec and I telephoned Michael Gouthreau and met him at Mosher’s for supper. As Mike says, Mosher’s has one flavor of ice cream and one flavor of dinner. Whether you order ham, turkey, scallops, or veal, it all tastes the same: great. But we had a nice visit. Saw Jim Dwyer there sporting a luxurious mustache, and also Gary McGinn’s small boy, on an outing with his cousins. Mike told us that the Twin Pine Diner closed so suddenly because the owners had been cheating on payment of their meal taxes, and were shut down by State inspectors.

Practicing a Mozart sonata to play with Alec.

Monday, July 6, 1992

We’re marking the borders, still. Got around to the western border and luckily discovered the old fence. It’s very high up on the ridge most of the way. We followed it southward; it slopes precipitously and ends in the swamp, where we of course lost the fence and couldn’t find the SW corner. Some fine timber, ledges, wetlands.

Wednesday, July 8, 1992

Bud Rodick’s man brought the Ford mower back, welded. But in taking it off his trailer he noted another break in a weld, so I sent it back. Nice man. One of ten children born on a Johnsburg farm. Farm sold, but they’ve kept the house. Eight children still in the area, two were killed. I didn’t ask how.

I’m still clearing on the eastern edge of our front field, where the men clearing the power line made such a mess. I’ll get it eventually so it can be mowed easily. And I’m exposing the large tree-trunks for looks.

Nice supper at Mary and Maureen Fitzgeralds’. Maureen has a splendid computer.

Friday, July 10, 1992

A day of contrasts. Headwork in office in the morning. Manual labor in the front field in the afternoon. Then suit jackets and neckties and off to the ballet in Saratoga. Met Donna and Ed for supper in the Hall of Springs. Ed and Alec had lots to talk about since Ed is a teacher, formerly also a professor in SONY School of Education in Albany, now the head of a consortium of schools for handicapped children. Donna is still an assistant superintendent of schools at BOCES but unhappy because her boss is possessive, etc. Nicky is about to go to the Manhattan School of Music to do jazz saxophone. Shandra will be a senior at Haverford majoring in physics. Haverford has worked well for her, which pleases me since I was a factor in her decision. Donna also spoke about Breck, who came to Nicki’s graduation. He is going back to school, finally, doing an M.S. in geology at UNH. Has been living as a carpenter all these years, but also is living with a woman who has a good job and supports him. Shandra is involved in the Christian Fellowship at Haverford. I asked Donna if this bothered her, since she’s Jewish, and was surprised to hear “Not at all.”

Ballet exquisitely beautiful, as always, especially Balanchine’s “Square Dance.” I love it because it’s the quintessence of rationality transformed into aesthetics. During the interval a voice said, “Aren’t you Peter Bien?” A former student, class of ’71, said I hadn’t changed a bit. He was in the Parkhurst occupation and remembers me bringing textbooks to him and the others while they were in jail. He’s still a bit of an activist, he says.

Sunday, July 12, 1992

A nice lazy day. Translated some letters. Read Το Βήμα. (I’ve finished my backlog of TLSs.) Practiced Mozart. Worked in the front field pulling a stump. Showered. Wrote a long letter to Bill Edgerton, who had written me all the coincidences that link us. Then Shapiros and Evelyn and Don Greene came for supper. Don is a 46er, twelve times over. Spent yesterday bushwhacking up one of the 46 in the rain. He’s an MIT dropout; left because he refused to complete his athletic requirement. Finished, or rather, as he says, “bought my degree,” at Tucson, where he spent most of the time camping in the desert in 115° heat. I gave Evelyn a TLS review about depletion of water resources. Expect to see some of it in her next article in the North Creek newspaper. Irv told us that Al Gore has been chosen as Clinton’s running mate, something we hadn’t known. If they can only win!

Monday, July 13, 1992

Called Steve Warne, the forester. He came in the afternoon and talked for three hours. We’ll next contact a consultant forester and join the Tree Farm Association. Warne sees “protectionists” as a political lobby out for self-interest. We’re OK. We’re “conservationists.”

Tuesday, July 14, 1992

Chrysanthi went off with Alec to Hanover to teach for ten days in the Rassias Greek program, leaving a turkey, etc. in the fridge and exhorting me to eat it and not go to restaurants. Leander called. His right hand is in severe pain. He may have carpel tunnel syndrome, otherwise tendonitis. I telephoned Allan Munck, Paul Gerber, Jim Strickler for guidance. All responded graciously, advising Leander to see Dr. Forst Brown at Hitchcock. Leander will have an electromyogram tomorrow to help confirm the carpel tunnel diagnosis and then proceed. He has a Beethoven trio scheduled for this Saturday and his own piece for the following Saturday. He is reluctant to cancel. But after that he can rest pretty much until October, when he has a CD recording in Minnesota.

Wednesday, July 15, 1992

I took Jerry Gardner to the ballet. We met Alec and the Hall of Springs, had a lovely supper, also saw Donna and Ed during the interval. Ballet ethereal: “Swan Lake” danced superbly by Maria Calegari and Adam Lüders in Balanchine’s choreography. Then Bach’s “A Musical Offering” choreographed by Peter Martins, premiered last year. Classic, restrained, a bit dull, none of the razzmatazz of “Swan Lake,” of course, but “pure” art. Finally, Verdi’s “Four Seasons,” which has everything: costumes, humor, athleticism, variety, all possible ways for both male and female dancers to show off. My favorite was “Fall” with Darci Kistler, who is gorgeous, Damian Woetzel, and Gen Horiuchi, who jumps like a jumping bean.

I remember seeing “Swan Lake” at the City Center in the 1950s with André Eglevsky and Maria Tallchief. Eglevsky was extraordinary, although already quite old.

Jerry was more optimistic than usual. His financial problems were so bad he can only go up now. Severe cash-flow problems, advertisers who don’t pay, competition with other local papers—everything. But he thinks it will get better. He is now sole owner, owing to his father’s stroke. His biggest problem, alas, may be his wife, Rosine, who seems not to help at all and generally to be a demoralizing force. I told him how unusual the paper is in expressing the pulse of a community, especially through the letters to the editor and the accounts of Town Board meetings.

Heard the Democratic convention in the car on the way back. Clinton is now officially the candidate. Everything upbeat, but they expect another “negative campaign” from Bush, and the effect of Peron is anyone’s guess. What a miracle if Clinton and Gore can end in the White House!

Friday, July 17, 1992

To Kinhaven

Stupidly forgot about Friday’s concert and missed Ines playing Saint-Saëns. She is spectacular by all accounts, a real prodigy. Leander says she learned the entire piece, note-perfect, in one day. She is musical as well as technical. How nice that Alec made possible this opportunity for an Indonesian with no financial means. He helped raise $6000 from the Rotary Club, etc.

Supper with Leander. He’s wearing a splint but is still able to play. Had electromyogram earlier today. No results yet. Appointment with Forst Brown at Hitchcock for Thursday.

Board meeting. I’m still convener of the Planning Committee but had to remind John Austin that I’m leaving the board. Lauren Zalaz agreed to replace me. I was told confidentially that Jerry objected to my continuing on the board because of Leander’s role as a staff person. There is some sense in this, I suppose. But it’s also ungracious.

Watched late television in the Blue Gentian re: the election. Bush is going to blame everything on Congress, it seems. But his manager said that the Republicans won’t wage a negative campaign. We’ll see . . . Mrs. Kidde is carrying on, hopelessly. No business, yet she can’t sell the place. So, she’s stuck. I was the only lodger.

Saturday, July 18, 1992

Kinhaven

Dorothy Dushkin memorial celebration. Lots of “old-timers” came: Jim Quinn, Jock Forbes, Bob and Kay Moore, for example; also Ted Schultz, Mr. Pappenheimer, etc. I did the presentation and planning, and clerked the discussion. Some good ideas came out of this. Leander played a Beethoven trio, opus 70, very “late” sounding. Staff did some Dushkin pieces after a nice talk by John Austin and also by Lelah, who was in the best of spirits. Then Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” which I found tedious as scored for a small orchestra. The version for full orchestra has the tonal color that the piece needs. Nice talk with Leander, Larry Wright, and Put Goodwin afterwards.

Sunday, July 19, 1992

Kinhaven

Breakfast in Ludlow with Leander and Sandy. This is a Sunday ritual for them. They’re good friends, intellectually and musically, but not carnally, for she’s a Lesbian. Final board meeting, devoted mostly to the quandaries of short- and long-term planning. Nice talk with Bill Polk at lunch, about Kendal.

Student concert; started with the orchestra doing vivacious finale of Sibelius’s 2nd symphony—terrific for the trombones. Jerry in control. More Dushkin of various qualities. But the ending, her “Canaan Bound” for orchestra and chorus was very moving. I noticed that Ines had everything memorized, also when the chamber choir did madrigals in Latin, French, and English, whereas the other students needed their scores.

Vile supper in Rutland. Listened to Kathleen Battle on the way home. Alec still awake. Was able to tell him about Leander’s hopes to have Ines play for Gary Graffman at Curtis.

Monday, July 20, 1992

Terpni

Forester Jim Farrar came at 8:00 a.m. and we walked through “compartment 9” of Steve Warne’s plan for us, near the northwest corner. He’s fascinating to hear regarding strategies for enhancing the long-term quality of the forest. He felt that we could proceed with a cutting this year. But his fees are rather high. So we telephoned Chris Geaswar, who came in the afternoon and did the same tour with the opposite recommendation: to wait five or ten years instead of tearing up the forest and gaining mostly pulpwood—i.e., nothing. We’re leaning in his direction. He can mark borders, so we may at least do that. Farrar says we should look into the 480A tax-relief plan for managed forests.

Went off in the evening with Alec to hear Bob McGrath lecture at the Adirondack Museum on the exhibit he put together there, “A Wild Sort of Beauty,” tracing painterly views of the Adirondacks from Thomas Cole’s romantic “Schroon Mountain” in the 1820s or 1830s to postmodernist works of recent years. Bob was excellent, showing how visions of the Adirondacks have been a metaphor for larger agendas and issues in American life. He’s divorced from Susan now, and had an attractive blond in tow, his current companion. Warder Cadbury and wife were there, as suspected. Had a nice talk. He wants us to come to Camp Backlog next week.

Alec and I feasted on ice cream sticks in North Creek on the way back, in torrential rain.

Tuesday, July 21, 1992

Wakened at 4:00 a.m. last night by a telephone call from Andros: Miranda Stavrinou, who never received galley proofs. I faxed all fifteen pages to her brother in Athens College. Alec said he’d been up half the night because of the mice who build nests in his roofing insulation, alas, directly over his bed. We don’t know how to counteract this. He has sawed away the rotten exterior of a huge “bole” we found in the forest yesterday to reveal some sound wood with lovely grain. Will use it for a tabletop,, maybe.

Picking peas this morning in the garden. I stood still while a hummingbird stuck its long beak quickly into a dozen peaseblossoms no more than a foot or two from me.

Called Corey Smith and invested $12,000 in Waste Management Corporation and also in a new company making medical products.

To ballet with Alec and Mary Fitzgerald, who used to usher at SPAC for a decade. What a treat to see Balanchine’s brilliant “Apollo,” first done in 1928 chez Diaghilev. Lindsay Fischer was a bright, blond sun-god, and the three muses were crop-haired, unisexed maidens of exquisite skill. Stravinsky’s score is of course brilliant, too. Compared to this, the Ravel “Concerto in G Major” choreographed by Jerome Robbins seemed slight, a jeu—indeed the dancers seemed to be having a rollicking good time. I preferred the contemporary dances, both premiered in 1992: “Herman Scherman” by William Forsythe, with electronic music by Thom Willems: very jagged and immensely active, with dancers in black, and “Mercury,” to a Haydn score, choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett. Again, immensely active, but no longer black; on the contrary, bright.

Previously, in the afternoon, Alec and I were in the forest trying to deal with an immense bole that Alec had discovered, a globe of wood four feet in diameter, caused by illness. Mostly rotten, especially in the interior, but the perimeter is sound. Has beautiful grain. He wants to use it for a tabletop. We cut off a relatively small section but even that was too heavy to carry out by hand. We’ll wait for some dry weather and then try to get the tractor in. Actually, it’s directly on one of Bill Hyde’s old logging roads.

Wednesday, July 22, 1992

Oran Young blitzed me the latest version of the Hewlett proposal. He and Jack are completely changing War/Peace Studies, trying to integrate it with the new Dartmouth curriculum. I think it’s time for me to resign as co-coordinator and let others carry on.

Still struggling to clean up the JMGS galleys. Ben King sent in his set with yet more errors discovered. All authors have responded except Stavrinou. I faxed her set to her yesterday (the Hopkins copy never arrived).

As I approached my office this morning there was a whoosh and a cloud of dust. A wild turkey chick was actually in the office, and I had flushed it. Several others, outside, whooshed away with equal élan, but the mother just perched on a branch and surveyed the scene calmly before joining her brood in the adjacent woods.

Leander visited Dr. Forst Smith at Hitchcock and was told that he has a very mild condition just at its start. He needs proper exercise, rest, and care, and should be OK. He has written to Graffman about Ines. His old girlfriend, the horn player, Jeanne Martin, was in the ballet orchestra. Alec recognized her and they spoke. I seem to remember that she was psychologically imbalanced, but perhaps that is what we invent for people whom we simply do not like or wish to discard.

I translated two letters today, one to Stefanides, one in French to Victor Serge, a remarkable one in which Kazantzakis assures Serge that he (Kazantzakis) is not a Marxist. When I told Bob McGrath the other night that I was translating Kazantzakis letters, he groaned and said, “Aren’t you ever going to escape that man?” Touché!

Off now to deal with the ant infestation in the ash tree just back of the cabin. Then to Wilderness Lodge for supper, guests of Jerry Gardner. The Lodge doesn’t pay its bills for ads, so it keeps giving Jerry vouchers for free meals.

Thursday, July 23, 1992

To Hanover

Supper at Kendal with Mother and Beveridge and Franny Webster. He lacks the score for Ravel’s “Gaspard de la nuit.” I’ll try to xerox it for him from Paddock tomorrow. He said he played it for Ravel himself in Paris. We were joined by Mary Bunting-Smith, former president of Radcliffe, a sweet old lady still showing her patrician side. Afterwards, long talk with Mary Schaffner, new president of the Residents Association, former headmistress of Lincoln School, a Quaker boarding school. She said that residents feel very negative about all the construction defects and are sure that they are paying for the reparation. She was also somewhat cynical about the dream of “community.” I urged her to be candid when she reports to the combined boards tomorrow.

At 10:00 p.m. met with Sterling Perrin, my new student assistant for JMGS. He seems eager and scrupulous.

Chrysanthi finished her Rassias class very successfully, she feels. Four students, all now speaking some Greek.

Friday, July 24, 1992

Breakfast with Jack Shepherd. Learned that Elizabeth Ballard died, peacefully, of a second stroke while listening to music in her kitchen. Lucky she didn’t survive as a vegetable and live on for a decade, like John Dickey. She was the last surviving founder of Hanover Monthly Meeting. Jack is disgruntled regarding the search procedure for the Dickey Endowment. We both fear Gene Garthwaite’s candidacy. We made plans to go back to the Fourth Council for approval of College Course 1.

Dentist. Then met Don Blackmer at Kendal to show him around. Lunch with him and Mother. He’s eager to retire because, as he says, one cannot be a Soviet historian any longer. Joan, his wife, now prefers to live alone. Too bad. He’s contemplating Kendal because of its proximity to his summer home in Vershire.

4:00 p.m., joint meeting of Hanover Directors and Overseers. Alan Hunt gave a good presentation on trustee response, diverse role of trustees and staff. Lloyd Lewis officially placed Kendal at Hanover under the care of the Kendal Corporation, no longer the Development Organization. So Jean will report to John Diffey now, no longer to Paul Lewis. We’re one unit shy of 90% occupancy—only 13 more to go for 95%. Mary Schaffner was much milder and less candid today than with me in private yesterday, but a few things did get a discussion going on Kendal at Hanover’s future, without much success. But we got some good ideas for the retreat we’ll hold in 1993. Then a reception with sherry and wine (!) in the Bridge Lounge, and I presented Jean with a box of chocolates and said we all loved her! Then dinner for all 26 of us, fortunately a very good dinner. We sat with Lynmar and his wife.

Saturday, July 25, 1992

Saratoga

To Saratoga. Met Bob, Ilona, Caitlin, and Amanda Bell, plus Daphne and Greg and Alec. Picnic on SPAC grounds. Daphne and Greg full of plans for their move to London at the end of September. Bob Bell gracious and humane, as always. The ballets were Donizetti “Variations,” a 1960 Balanchine piece that left me rather cold although Margaret Tracey was beautiful; then the new “Jeu de cartes” by Stravinsky with Peter Martins’ choreography. Music much better than Donizetti, but the dance didn’t move me. Then came the Prokofiev-Balanchine masterpiece “Prodigal Son,” first done in 1929 when Balanchine was 24 years old. So moving! So restrained! Helene Alexopoulos was a seductive Siren and Peter Boal a pathetic/energetic prodigal. Scenery by Georges Rouault, from the original Diaghilev production. This and “Apollo” were the highpoints of this season, for me.

The Bells left and we had a light supper with Greg and Daphne in one of the old Saratoga hotels, outdoors, in back on a patio. Will Daphne find a job in London? That’s the question.

Fun shopping in Price Chopper in Glens Falls on the way back. Alec went off to Kinhaven to hear Leander’s composition for piano, trumpet, and percussion, the one we heard in Bethlehem last spring.

Sunday, July 26, 1992

Terpni

Alec said that Leander got lost in his piece, but the audience was unaware and Leander showed up for supper. Gary Graffman has responded; he’ll hear Ines at Marlboro next Saturday.

I’m worrying about the ant infestation of the big ash tree in back of the house, so deep that my Stihl blade couldn’t reach it all.

Monday, July 27, 1992

An owl hooted all day today. I started mowing again; did almost all of the north field until the moldboard wire broke. Delicious porterhouse steak cooked on the fire outdoors for dinner. Alec, Chrysanthi, and Leander went to the Narrows for ice cream and miniature golf; I stayed home to write letters and read the TLS.

The ‘c’ on my computer keyboard won’t print and I’m “deprived”—couldn’t blitz Leo Papademetre in Adelaide about the forthcoming MLA.

Doing one or two Kazantzakis letters daily. They really are disgustingly self-centered.

Tuesday, July 28, 1992

Alec said he couldn’t understand my “Words, Wordlessness” essay. Leander said the same. I must remember that most people have no philosophical training.

Meg called; she wants me to start off the Harvard lecture series next October. I’m also booked for the Foreign Service Institute in Washington for December, thanks to Jim Warren.

Wednesday, July 29, 1992

Our doe appeared without her faun. Has she lost him? I heard various animal screams today, and panting. They say that rabbits scream when they’re being killed.

Dinner at Bob and Marilyn Morse’s. One of the guests was the woman who wrote the book on Jean Roberts Foster (or Foster Roberts). Marilyn read one of Forster’s poems: touching and memorable on an Adirondack woman who walks out on her husband and family (à la Nora in Doll’s House) because she’s tired of being a slave to them. Marilyn’s brother turns out to be a yodeler. So he yodeled for us. Then we all sang songs with me at the piano. No one knew any, so we ended with the Methodist hymnal.

Thursday, July 30, 1992

Dinner at Shapiros with Laura and Mike Gouthreau. Alec showed his Indonesia slides, a good indication of the richness of his life there. Obviously we are selfish in making him feel that he should exist at home, not abroad.

Friday, July 31, 1992

Yasuo and Naoko arrived. They’re doing well at Stony Brook. They seemed excited when I said I might come to Japan in three or four years to teach at Keo University. After supper, lots of good music, especially a lovely Telemann. And I accompanied Naoko on a Vaughan-Williams suite that she’d never played previously with the piano. But Doppler, as usual, ground everyone to a halt.

Saturday, August 1, 1992

Alec left at 6:00 a.m. to fetch Ines at Kinhaven and take her to Marlboro to audition for Gary Graffman. Yasuo, Naoko, and I played music again, joyously, and how nice that the piano was repaired! Then I took them back to Morris’s property to see the beaver lodge and dams. The herons are gone, both nests abandoned. They left to go to Kinhaven. Chrysanthi and I had pizza at the Narrows, which is always a visual as well as a culinary treat.

Yesterday, translated from French a super letter of Kazantzakis’s to E. Levi. Exciting. Most of the time, however, I find this translation job exceedingly tedious.

The other day we had a woman here to give us a quote on lightning rods for Alec’s cabin and the pole barn. $1300. Can we do it ourselves, perhaps?

Also, a lumberman walked the forest and said that our logs are prime for veneer and boards and that they’ll decrease in value if they get bigger. What to think?

Today, also, I finished the year’s mowing. Και του χρόνου! The mower behaved perfectly.

Sunday, August 2, 1992

Saw our doe with her faun this time. Next to my office. Relieved!

I finally figured out what was wrong with Adi Pollis’s entry βιολογική άξονες. Άξων is masculine. So: βιολογικοί άξονες. How embarrassing if this gaffe had been published! Michael Herzfeld, good man, returned his galleys from Rethymno, very helpfully. But Mary Layoun did nothing. Will I have to ask her to resign? Sterling Perrin, my new student assistant, seems eager and capable.

Telephoned Kate Cohen regarding Daphne’s job at Simon & Schuster. Kate would be perfect. But she plans to go to Italy after a year.

When we saw Laura last Thursday she said that she is always inspired simply by the thought of how much I accomplish every day. Silly woman! At night, around 10:00 p.m. I now find I can hardly stay awake any longer.

Chrysanthi went to church today, at the Riverside Institute. Outdoors, under a shed.

Wednesday, August 5, 1992

With my new, professional compass, Alec and I were able to mark off the northern border of the new land, accurately, for our line coincided perfectly with various border trees and the few ribbons that were already there. We went as far as the wetlands. Lots of timber for the future, especially pine.

Thursday, August 6, 1992

Ditto for the southern border, again accurately, for we coincided perfectly with long stretches of stone wall. Surprisingly, the land goes much further south than I’d imagined. We have quite a lot on the south side of the power line. Not so much timber on this end, but some nice stands of pine that will be fine in ten to fifteen years.

Read Άσμα ασμάτων, maybe for the first time, in order to check a reference made by Kazantzakis in a letter to Anghelakis. It is so beautiful, and so shamelessly sensual, as Kazantzakis says. It surely is not an allegory about a believer’s love for the Church! It if were, why would the Church be so enamored, erotically, of the believer?!

Friday, August 7, 1992

My afternoon project: a four-way rotating stand for dictionaries to use in Hanover when I’m translating. Less bulky than the similar stand I made in 1960 or thereabouts for my original Kazantzakis translations. This one is secured by screws, not nails, using the splendid portable Black and Decker screwdriver and drill that we now have. Fun.

Am reading Stylianos’s new book of poems Στή δοκιμή τοῦ φέγγους. Many are quite good. I’ve been very remiss in translating his work, despite promises. What’s needed is a time in Australia just for that, with opportunity to consult him.

Chrysanthi finished her furiously difficult jigsaw puzzle, Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte,” after vowing repeatedly to abandon it. She’s reading James’s Ambassadors and finds it “very funny”!

Monday, August 10, 1992

Bill Thomas’s son Matt, an electrician, came. I’ll have him properly ground our system, tie in the waterpipes, and run a line through a trench to the barn, so we can have power tools eventually.

Ines auditioned for Miss Olga in Cleveland and was accepted on the spot. They accept only ten students worldwide. Alec had to delay her return flight one day; he’s in Cambridge in his room, and luckily already has a telephone. We’ve been buzzing back and forth—Riparius–Cambridge–Cleveland–Jakarta—all for Ines. Leander, who arrived from Kinhaven, explained that she has a huge talent but was never taught discipline, how to practice, etc. That’s what Gary Graffman said she needs before she should apply to Curtis.

Leander has a new booking, in a prestigious series in Minneapolis, to accompany the Bartok violin sonata in the 93–94 season. We listened to it with the score; it’s “inaccessible” at first, and furiously difficult. He’s doing the Elliott Carter cello sonata at St. Olaf’s for a CD this October, also ferociously difficult but quite accessible because in traditional sonata form whereas the Bartok seems to have no form at all.

Leander is stewing because Deanna is so petrified at the move: giving up tenure at St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and worried that the National Symphony, which is running a $4 million deficit, will not keep her. But they meet on Wednesday to go to Maryland to find a house.

I’m feeling less and less energized by such problems. I want my peace, and projects like my four-way dictionary stand, the trench we must dig for the wire to the barn, and tree surgery on the ant-infested ash outside the cabin.

Did some research on lightning rods, which seem no longer to be recommended. Good. That saved us $1300.

Tuesday, August 11, 1992

Susie Buseck arrived with Yiayia. Susie is entering Berkeley to do a law degree combined with social work. Mother in fine shape.

Wednesday, August 12, 1992

They stayed an extra day. We went to the Narrows for pizza and then Alec and I played violin-piano duets for them. The lightning rod lady reduced the price to $1100 and came down still further to $1000 when I asked. But Alec is resisting; says I am paranoic about this.

Thursday, August 13, 1992

We started digging a 12-inch trench for the wire to the barn, working in a slight rain with pickaxe and shovel.

Marie McCarthy for dinner. Talked so constantly, I felt totally exhausted. I learned tht Bernard McCarthy died recently in Alaska. She spoke also about her run-away husband, Francis McCarthy, and about her dead son, Bruce, and about Sis’s marital vicissitudes, and about grandson Bruce, who is flourishing as an industrial chemist.

Yesterday I cut a new, clean slice in the bark of the ash tree, exposing the sap wood beneath, and coated both with orange shellac, per directions for tree surgery. Must now make the filler from asphalt and hardwood sawdust.

Rebecca wrote from Pendle Hill that my pamphlet is drawing many nice comments. I received fan letters from Carol Weingeist’s father, Dr. Perera, very nice, and from Andy Towl, who says he’s been lending his copy to various people until they can get their own. Lovely! I hope someday to write another one about “light,” using Dante, etc.

Friday, August 14, 1992

Washing this morning, I saw “our” deer grazing by pond-side, its body reflected in the water. And Marie told us last night that at the clearing on Route 8, over the bank next to the stream, are piles of deer pelts, severed deer legs and other evidence of human bravado. And Roy Millington killed seven deer last season, including does, but at least he eats the meat. And others jack deer out of season. Hunters!

Saturday, August 15, 1992

We had lightning rods installed on the pole barn and on Alec’s cabin at a price of $950, which the installer said was a remarkable price. Alec is proud of his bargaining skills.

Finished digging the trench for the electric wire to the barn.

Wrote a long letter to Stylianos, in Greek, and chose some poems to translate.

Sunday, August 16, 1992

Leander and Deanna arrived from Maryland, where they succeeded in renting a house in Silver Spring. Found Deanna charming: jovial, warm, efficient. She’ll be touring Alaska with the National Symphony in October, and Ignat is going to be the piano soloist. We all went to Fran and Irv’s for Greek slides with Laura and Michael. I gave Michael a copy of Ulysses to read on the mountain this winter. We split our sides laughing at Irv’s jokes, especially this one: A priest and two acolytes come to the counter to buy air tickets to Pittsburgh. The employee was a beautiful young woman with a low-cut dress. The first acolyte, turning all red, said “I want two pickets to Titsburgh.” Retreating in confusion, he asked the second acolyte to replace him. The second said, “I want my change in nipples and dimes.” He, too, retreated in confusion, whereupon the priest stepped forward and admonished the woman: “When you apply to get into heaven, St. Finger will shake his Peter at you!”

Monday, August 17, 1992

Alec and Leander discovered a beaver meadow, lodge, dam, etc. on our new land.

Met Roy Millington in the Grand Union, not recognizing him at first. He says we have a cave in our ledges.

Tuesday, August 18, 1992

Visit from David Harris, Dartmouth 1967, a member of Hanover Meeting. Wants his daughter to enter Dartmouth. He, his wife, and daughter were obnoxious at lunch, wolfing down huge amounts of food. They left, finally, after 2½ hours.

Chris and Art for dessert. I gave Chris The Scarlet Letter for Arthur to read.

Wednesday, August 19, 1992

From Kazantzakis’s letter to Eleni, 22-11-1926 (or 1923?): Είμαστε καλοι άνθρωποι, πιστοι στρατιώτες του Θεου μας, γιατι γενναία πολεμούμε κ’ οι δυο να σώσουμε την ψυχη μας απο τη μικρολογία, απο την αρρώστια, απο την ψευτια και τη νάρκη.

In the afternoon, Alec, Leander, and I started along the north border of the new property. Previously, we’d marked the border as far as the power line. We now crossed this through a morass of blackberry brambles and proceeded accurately to Vly Brook, crossed this at a narrow point thanks to a bridge built by beavers, and continued up the mountain opposite, looking for the border of the State land, which is our eastern border as well. No sign. Kept going up and up; reached the top; started down the other side, and luckily ran out of surveyor’s tape. Retraced our steps, looking again for the State border, which Alec found by accident (very faint yellow paint) way way down near the beginning. So Leander ran back all the way and removed the tapes we’d placed on State land (!). We marked our border carefully and were pleased that the compass readings show it at an exact 90° angle with the State line—i.e., accurate. Returning across the brook, with time out to eat some blackberries, we got back home at 8:00 p.m. Chrysanthi of course was furious and hystrical, but she calmed down and we had a nice supper. Exhausted, to bed.

Thursday, August 20, 1992

A NiMo crew is surveying for Mr. Morris’s power line, to go up the east side of Waddell Road, partially on our land. No one asked permission, of course. Alec is concerned. Art Perryman says it’s our land and no one has a right to set foot on it. Property, our social right. I’m not so sure. We are ephemeral trespassers at worst, stewards at best.

Jay Parini’s new novel arrived. He’s phenomenal.

I pruned most of the leaves off our tomatoes. This summer has been so cold and rainy, we have not a single ripe tomato whereas last summer we had one on August 1st. Began to close up, putting away the hoses, etc. Finished tree surgery on the ash. Let’s hope. Saw a similar dual-trunked ash in the woods yesterday in which one half had fallen over.

Friday, August 21, 1992

Finalized September Board meeting wiht Jean, and also Kinhaven Planning Committee agenda, with Lauren. Art came to walk the woods and give an opinion, yes or no. JMGS page proofs arrived, and I have five blank pages and Layoun hasn’t sent me a single book review.

Picnic supper with Gary and Wendy McGinn and their children Marcus and Katey, on Schoon Lake followed by a spin in their sumptuous motorboat on this gorgeous lake. They’re born-again Christians with good values and are raising alert, well-behaved children. A loving, cohesive family. We talked about our own feelings toward Terpni, how it is “home” at least for me and Alec, more than anywhere else because of the continuity it represents, the sweat we’ve put into it, and the awareness we have here of life’s cycles.

Art came earlier and walked the woods with Alec. He advises us to proceed. Alec agrees with me on Jim Farrar as the consulting forester.

Saturday, August 22, 1992

Telephoned Stathis Gauntlett in England. He’ll try to send me a review.

Jim Farrar telephoned. He’ll start marking trees on August 31.

Alec and Leander are completing the path to the beaver meadow on the new property.

Matt Thomas arrived, finally, and is putting electric in the barn.

I finished reading page proofs for JMGS 10 (2).

Pruned our tomatoes way back yesterday, hoping that some of the fruit will ripen before frost.

Sunday, August 23, 1992

Up early. Met Irv, Fran, Michael, and Laura at Indian Lake, with canoe strapped to top of the car—Irv’s of course: he organized all this. Drove just south of Tupper Lake, then on 421 to Horseshoe Lake and then to the canoe-access point for the Bog River. Much bog and little river! Twists and turns (I luckily was in the small, manoeuvrable one-man canoe that Laura owns, made here in Olmstedville). Beaver dam in the middle; we had to get out and pull the boats over. Fran fell in the water, cheerfully. Gradually the river opened up a bit, but then we had a headwind and adverse current. But the day was beautiful: dry, cool, sunny. Reached Hutchin’s Pond and, at its head, the upper dam built by the man who used to own all this and who generated his own electricity. Starved. Beautiful picnic lunch sitting in the chasm. Other interesting canoeists, including three couples, the men all paunch, beer drinkers and macho types, the women smokers. They’d been in only one night, and proudly showed the sack of probably 200 cans of soda and beer they’d consumed. More river, then Lows Lake and a nice picnic spot for a snack. The boys swam. We saw a loon in the distance, and a faun grazing on the way back. Adirondack wilderness, mostly bog, including a “floating” bog on the lake. Very tired. At the end, back in the serpentine Bog River, not enough water in places to paddle. So we walked in the muck, pushing the canoes (with Chrysanthi queen-like in the middle seat). Leander bitten by a leech. Huge meal afterwards in Long Lake. We’d met at Indian Lake at 8:30 a.m. and we passed that spot on the return at 8:30 p.m.—12 hours. Then thankfully to bed.

Monday, August 24, 1992

Leander and Alec finished their path in the new property, to our own beaver meadow. They saw a blue heron, too.

Leander is practicing hard: the Elliott Carter sonata. It’s annoying, of course, but what can he do? Probably I should get an electronic piano, with earphones.

Wednesday, August 26, 1992

Clayton Faraday arrived and will stay until Saturday He’s 80 years old, just moved into Crosslands. He’s “Mr. Friends Centeral,” there as a student 70 years ago, then as a biology teacher, principal, acting headmaster and now as archivist. He’s Alec’s guest, a very easygoing, enjoyable guest. Much good conversation about education . . . and life.

Seeded the filled in trench in which we laid the electric cable for the barn.

Saturday, August 29, 1992

Repaired the upstairs shutters. It’s such a good feeling to make things shipshape. In back of one of one of the other shutters a sleeping bat that squirmed very humanlike when I moved the shutter and then went back to sleep, its wing over its eyes.

Dinner at Marie McCarthy’s with David Moro and his wife Jackie Sullivan Moro, Marie’s granddaughter. David runs a special station in NYC for Russian emigrés. He was fascinated by my account of Ignat, etc. Jackie is a piano teacher and a blue-eyed Irish beauty I told her all about Bernard and Charles McCarthy, about whom she knew nothing. I’d like to take her to Kinhaven next summer. Thankfully Marie kept quiet and let all the rest of us do the talking.

Faraday left and Alec’s friend Paul Hollings, a Haverford classmate, arrived. He’s the administrator of a nursing home in Cambridge. Says he’s related, distantly, to Virginia Woolf and Ethyl Smyth.

Sunday, August 30, 1992

Our first red tomato! A full month behind last year.

Alec still bothered by mice in his roof, trying all means of eradication but without success.

Quite an adventure this afternoon: Alec, Paul Hollings, and I left at 1:45 to try to mark the eastern border of Alec’s land. We took a tape because we know that it’s 2850 feet long. Starting at the corner we’d previously discovered, we followed the State land border—that was the easy part—and found its corner at 968 feet. From then onward I had to sight for Alec at 20° off north. This plus the measuring became increasingly difficult because we found ourselves on bare, precipitous ledges. But we managed. Then thunder began, but luckily far away, and rain, but luckily light and brief. At several points we had splendid views of the entire valley with Gore Mountain and other peaks in the distance, and our large beaver meadow, a veritable lake, below. As the land leveled we had new difficuties: slash from Deckert’s lumbering, and blackberry brambles. But, miracle of miracles, at just about 2850 feet, only about 15 feet off, we hit the corner tree (well marked already) precisely. By now it was 5:30 and we didn’t want Chrysanthi to fret again, so we stopped work (the south border remains to be marked from this corner to Vly Brook), and headed home at 30° off north. Now we had to traverse a swamp, climb up another hill, and carefully descend an avalanche of boulders, again with lovely views. We crossed Vly Book easily just below the beaver meadow and found ourselves at the end of the trail that Alec and Leander had made. Home at 6:30 p.m., exhausted and wet. Shower. Dinner. Then Art, Chris, and Arthur came, Art to look at the lumber Alec had bought for his flooring, #2 pine with a bevel for paneling. Art encouraged him to use it. Conversation until 10:30, BBC news, a bit of the Sunday Times (a rarety for us, brought by Paul Hollings), bed.

Monday, August 31, 1992

Jim Farrar came and we signed the contract and went into the woods together to watch him begin to mark trees. It’s an art as well as a science. He worried about the corner we never found, the one in the beaver meadow, the SW corner. So Alec and I followed the line (20° off north), finding fence here and there in the swamp, and eventually locating the corner itself. This means that all corners are now marked, and that the only remaining sections unmarked are (1) a short length of the south line from where we stopped, westward to this newly discovered corner, (2) eastward on the south line from Vly Book to the SE corner that we found last Saturday.

I repaired two of the shutters, replacing rotted wood. Must accelerate the closing process now, alas.

Saturday, September 5, 1992

Finished all the Kazantzakis letters I’d brought this summer, seven years’ worth, 1925–1931. What a huge job.

Painted the porch yesterday. Spent this afternoon closing. Last night nice supper with Mary and Maureen at the new Italian restaurant in North Creek. Maureen asked me “What do you publish in order not to perish?” I explained, at length. Everyone was there. Michael Gouthreau and wife, Jerry and Rosine and children, and us.

Daphne got a job in London with the British branch of Simon and Schuster. In the New York office she’ll have a two-year leave of absence, continuing to receive their benefits, etc. She’s thrilled. She hopes to receive $30,000 a year. Fred Hills must have been a significant factor in this.

Sunday, September 6, 1992

Helped Alec do his finish floor: pine boards, wide, V-grooved. He has a machine to do the nailing in the tongues, a big advance over my “primitive” methods. Alec is a perfectionist, to a fault. Slow work but the result is satisfying. Shapiros for dinner and goodbye.

Monday, September 7, 1992

Final packing, etc. Showed Alec how to drain the water system. He belligerantly boasted he could do it himself, without me, but I suspect he realized this was hardly true, the first time. He (and Leander, too) is very touchy about being treated as a baby, etc. Chrysanthi lectures me regularly, saying how intimidating I am. . . . Easy to leave, relatively, because the day is so bad.

Tuesday, September 8, 1992

Hanover

What a change! So many people, cars, commotion. It’s like entering the eye of a storm. We voted in the primaries. I shopped in Rich’s. Then to the office. Darrel very friendly. Stathis’s FAX was waiting, but with page 2 missing. Will I be able to locate him in Greece? Supper with Yiayia and Audrey, very jolly, then drinks in Audrey’s apartment. I tried to tell Irv’s three-part joke about ordering tickets for Tittsburgh but could remember only parts 1 and 3. Audrey says that Brenda Jordan left in duress, alas. The dining room is still noisy despite the acoustic panels we had installed.

Wednesday, September 9, 1992

I found Stathis. He sent page 2 and I typed out the whole review, sending it at the last minute to Carol. Amazing, owing to FAX and e-mail, of course.

Thursday, September 10, 1992

NYC

By car to Springfield and train to NYC. I’m re-reading Dubliners with immense pleasure and admiration. “A Little Cloud” is stunning. To City Opera: Barber of Seville. Count Almaviva (Paul Kelly) wasn’t very good, alas, but Dr. Bartolo (Jan Opalach) was a splendid commedian and Rosina (Kathryn Gamberoni) was a fine soprano voice. City Opera lacks the glamor of the Met—half the seats were unoccupied, for instance—yet it was a good show. Marvelous score, written in an incredible three weeks by Rossini.

Friday, September 11, 1992

Slept in Daphne’s apartment, 308 E. 79th Street. They will be giving it up in a few weeks, but Vaughan Tebbe is moving in. Marvelous visit to the new Ellis Island Museum of Immigration. The names Bien and Honigsberg are both listed in the 200,000 on the wall, although they’re not specifically our family. The bravery of those coming to America, the expectations, the anguish of leaving parents behind, usually for ever, are all poignantly conveyed. So is the ordeal of passing inspection at Ellis Island. If you had glaucoma you were sent back, for instance. A woman was asked, as part of the intelligence test, “If you were to wash a flight of stairs, would you start at the top or at the the bottom?” She replied, “I didn’t come to America to wash stairs!” The museum stresses the crucial contributions of immigrants to building the railroads, for example, and also the question of Americanism, but probably does not stress the anti-immigration movements althugh some reference was made to this, including a photo of the Ku Klux Klan. The movie at the start was particularly moving. And yet neither Chrysanthi nor I felt much emotional identification with all this, Chrysanthi because her case is so different; she did not come as an immigrant seeking her fortune, and I because (probably) my father had distanced himself so much from his origins and wished to obliterate them.

We felt doubly like tourists as we went next to admire the World Trade Center and World Financial Center, the lovely plaza between the buildings and the even lovelier atrium and restaurants and shops. Supper on the terrace of the Yale Club on a beautiful evening. Then to theater to see Guys and Dolls: fine dancing, singing, mise en scène, and a book that is clever enough. But the chief attribute is incessant energy.

Saturday, September 12, 1992

To the Greek café to meet Dan Wilkes for breakfast. But he never showed up. Then to Lauren Zalaquick’s on E. 9th Street and 3rd Avenue for Kinhaven Planning Committee. She’s taken over the chair from me—a relief. Jerry, Nancy, David, Lauren, Barbara. We planned insulation, building repairs, and, with luck, our first off-season program: a chamber music weekend next June.

Supper in Café Un Deux Trois on West 40th, lovely food but so noisy and crowded, people almost in one’s lap. Then to Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, a delight because of the superb acting. Laughs, tears, social significance, psychological realism. Two child actors, superb.

Sunday, September 13, 1992

Breakfast with Dan Wilkes by re-arrangement. This time it worked. He’s in a bed-sitter, all alone, with very restricted means. Sad. Two boys, however, are graduates of Cambridge, one with a first in history. Still married but of course separated although friendly with his estranged wife in England. Heard about Freddy Mann and Gene Girden.

Then to Magritte exhibit at the Met. Fascinating. There’s method—much—in his madness. Chiefly: the idea that reality is just as much an artificial construct as is art. So, why not confuse and/or equate the two, which he does repeatedly by means of the most brilliantly conceived visual metaphors. He may be the quintessential postmodern painter.

To the Yale Club via 42nd. I’m re-reading Dubliners with great pleasure. Saw Jeff Hart in the distance in the second floor lounge, and avoided him by retreating to the library.

Returned to 308 E. 79th at 6:30 to find Greg and Daphne already returned from Lake Tahoe. Nice supper together. They leave for London in about two weeks and are very excited. We hope to visit, perhaps, in March 1993.

Monday, September 14, 1992

New York–Hanover

Stopped at Deerfield on the way back. Met the headmaster by chance: Mr. Kaufman. Saw the new dorm that Rosenwald built. Everything so lovely, still.

Stylianos sent me a sermon he gave in English, about the fear of God. This is very good: “. . . the fear of God is not the worry concerning possible negative actions to be taken by Him against us—this was the feeling of the very primitive man towards the blind and impersonal natural forces—but rather our spiritual anxiety not to become unworthy of His providence and protection. In other words, it is not any eventual punishment by God that is the object of our fear, but rather His undeserved love; and precisely because this love is undeserved, we are worried about losing it. ”—From “The Fear of God As Integrating Factor of Education and Spiritual Progress,” given at Perth in 1992.

September 17, 1992

Αρχίζει. Twenty-five placement exams to evaluate for exemption in English 5 and English 2. Frosh picnic; none of my advisees showed up. Saw Dave Lemal with a huge beard started on an Adirondack canoe trip with Ray Hall, an act of compassion on Dave’s part for Hall in his depression following divorce.

Friday, September 18, 1992

I went to Comp. Lit., Classics, and War/Peace open houses, not to English. In Classics we are trying to interest students in the trip to Thessaloniki in Spring 1994. Two students asked about it.

Felitsa brought a Greek woman computer scientist and husband. There are also a few more in Thayer.

Saturday, September 19, 1992

Another service for Elizabeth Ballard. This time at the Meeting House. Bill came and was very friendly and talkative; said that, trained as a scientist to value the rational faculty above everything, he had to learn the value of the heart from Elizabeth. He was choking with tears as he recalled the solidarity of their family around her deathbed. I spoke about her as an oral poet transmuting the details of material existence into spiritual value, prompted somewhat by an appreciation sent me by Kristin Lord, who couldn’t be present.

Sunday, September 20, 1992

Chrysanthi went directly from New York to visit Leander and Deanna in Silver Spring. Today I picked her up at 5:00 a.m. at the AMTRAK station. Ned Perrin and wife were on the same train. She’s been very ill but is now OK. We went to Dunkin’ Donuts together. They’re building a camp on a new piece of land purchased half-way between their individual farms.

Went to Ministry and Counsel; my first meeting. I worry about Jean Brophy’s continuous absence from Meeting.

September 21, 1992

Started working with Jennifer Lynn Patterson, my honors student. She’s doing narrative technique in Joyce.

September 23, 1992

Daphne and Greg fly to England today. She telephoned, very excited and optimistic.

September 24, 1992

I talked again with Myra Johnson about my retirement. The three-year Dartmouth Flexible Retirement seems to make sense, although in the short run I do better simply retiring at 65 and collecting pension and social security. I’ll speak next with a TIAA adviser.

September 25, 1992

Outreach Committee at Kendal. John Radebaugh has a really good idea: to use the Farmhouse for a pro bono “Good Neighbor Health Clinic” staffed by volunteer physicians, for people without insurance. Many impediments, but we hope to pursue the idea.

Saturday, September 26, 1992

Lecture on the Panathenaic exhibit at the Hood Museum, followed by dinner at the Inn. I met the Hood’s director and told him how much I miss Jackie, so much that somehow I have an aversion now to the museum—irrational, of course. Also met the folks who actually handle the objects d’art; they spoke about their fear of breakage. What if they dropped a Greek vase?!

Sunday, September 27, 1992

Went to the Panathenaic exhibit with Chrysanthi and Mother. Minimal, but some nice pieces. Few pots invite actual inspection; many invite the opposite. To Andy Rangell’s at night. He wanted to play for some friends—Stravinsky, Haydn, Schubert. He did the first two but felt best not to continue. His hands function now, obviously, but still give him trouble. But he’s playing a recital in Washington in October. We were so pleased to see him functioning (more or less) again.

Tuesday, September 29, 1992

Ceremony in the Wren Room to inaugurate the Thomas Vance book fund. Georganna did a lovely bookplate. Saccio and Heffernan spoke, reading tributes from students. Vera expressed her appreciation. Walter Arndt was present, walking on two canes but still in good spirits. Then to supper at Vera’s with Nick Jacobson and wife, and Maurice Rapf without his wife, who has cancer. An odd crowd, and odder food, almost inedible, although we did our best. Rapf vain and garrulous. His father was a “Mogul” in MGM and he has never gotten over it.

October 1, 1992

Chrysanthi says I’m a martyr because I spent 75 minutes with Kristin Lord over lunch. Then to Tim Wright to talk about my retirement plans. The trickiest part will be insuring the continuation of the University Seminars.

Really good music tonight with Dick and Allan. Played up to speed: Beethoven and Haydn.

October 2, 1992

Nice Italian supper at Power House to celebrate Mayme’s birthday (73rd?). Treat and Molly Arnold, Audrey, Barbara and Roger Soderberg, us. One nicely feels something special and different with Quaker friends because we all share so much—the life of the Meeting.

October 3, 1992

Department cocktail party. Met Cynthia Huntington’s husband, who is interested in the Adirondacks. Cordial talk with Mary Kelley about McLaughlin, Sandy McCulloch, etc. She says they’re no longer on speaking terms. Then to Kendal. Beveridge Webster (or Bev Web as he calls himself) telephoned earlier to say he’d play Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit if I came. I assured him I would. He did the Moonlight Sonata and also Beethoven’s Sonata in D major, indifferently. But the Ravel was spectacular. Unplayable, I should have thought, but he did it effortlessly and with all the French finesse that it needs. He “mentioned,” of course, that Ravel and he had worked together on the piece. Afterwards he, Franny, and Barbara Rice had coffee and cookies in Mother’s apartment. Franny tells me that he hasn’t a sup taken since entering Kendal. She hopes that we’ll put him on regular contract. I’ll speak to Naomi.

October 4, 1992

Kinhaven

My last Kinhaven board meeting. It’s been a long time. But John Austin wants me to stay on the Planning Committee as a co-opted member. Leander wants me to cease and desist because my presence compromises him. Bill Polk and I arranged for a lunch at Kendal with a prospective resident. Beautiful fall colors on the way over. The board has some strong members now: Lauren, David, John, Barbara, and some new ones. Even Jerry seems more organized and responsible.

Supper at Kendal with Felitsa and Don and the Greek couple, followed by a tour. Felitsa’s energy is such a pleasure. But the “queen” is her daughter Poppy, my little favorite.

Monday, October 5, 1992

Outreach Committee again over breakfast at Kendal, this time with Barb Parsons. Lafayette is the convener; I’m the recorder. Barb will help us in strategies for building up the Reserve Fund. We all visited the Farmhouse afterwards: spacious but in very bad repair. John Radebaugh again stimulated our enthusiasm for a Good Neighbor Health Center there. But where will we put guests?

To Fleet Bank Trust Department in the afternoon, with Mother. Cindy Neily has been replaced as our consultant but Jeffrey Harris continues. He wanted to sell more Kimberly-Clark and I refused, for sentimental reasons. We’ll buy $100,000 of tax-exempt municipals. The combined trust and custody accounts are 1.2 million.

Tuesday, October 6, 1992

I conducted Graham Wallis’s class again: Poetry and Technology. Added Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” and Robinson Jeffers, etc., thanks to suggestions from Tom Sleigh.

October 7, 1992

A Mr. Balli from Jakarta International School came to the office. We had met in Jakarta. He’s on his way to see Alec; wants Alec to head the Arts Division of a new school he’s establishing in Jakarta for Indonesian youth. This is the 2nd “feeler” Alec has had, and he has only been at Harvard for three weeks. The other was from a Quaker day-school in Detroit’s inner city. 100 pupils, 50% black. Alec not interested, apparently.

October 8, 1992

Long lunch with Barb Parsons. Fun to gossip about all the Pendle Hill and Kendal people we both know.

Then to Jay Heinrichs, Alumni Magazine editor, to encourage him to do an article on aging or retirement. He said he remembered my earlier appeal and has been keeping two files: one on alumni in retirement, the other on emeriti professors. He wants to do two articles in the same issue. Also wants to do something on translation, in which I’d be interviewed.

October 9, 1992

Rushing to get handouts ready for my JMGS report to MGSA Executive Committee in Princeton tomorrow. Finances look good: only $650 deficit instead of $1950.

But when I went to board the Montrealer I was told that it was cancelled. Engine failure just south of the Canadian border. So I turned around and went to bed in Hanover, after faxing the handouts to Dimitri Gondicas in Princeton. I had arranged to see Mike Keeley and Tom Wilson. Too bad.

Saturday, October 10, 1992

Telephoned Mike. Long talk. He’s as eager to retire as I am. Last summer in Greece he received a death threat from November 17, which confused him with his brother, the former ambassador. He finishes this year as president of PEN. Also spoke to Joan Wilson and discovered to my great pleasure that she and Tom plan to enter Kendal at Hanover in 2000.

Supper at Kendal. Bev played again—Mozart and Schubert four-hands with Franny. Terrible, because she’s so totally unmusical. But then he, alone, did the monumental 5th Brahms piano sonata, sensitively and effortlessly.

Sunday, October 11, 1992

Alec came home and we had lots of long, cordial talks. He’s enthusiastic about three of his four courses—not bad. He’ll intern at the Belmont School, an old-fashioned grammar school, boys only, coats and ties, prayer, etc. We tried to feed him amply, at home and at Sheridan brunch.

Presidential debate: Bush, Clinton, and Peron. Clinton OK, not great, Peron sometimes brilliant in a folksy way. Bush tired and predictable.

Monday, October 12, 1992

The squash coach attended my Joyce class; he’s an aficionado. Afterwards he told me how blessed I am to be concerned with art, morality, beauty, etc., via Joyce. It’s important to be reminded. Am I a fool to want to retire?

To Kendal to be interviewed by Crosbie Deaton from a consulting firm retained by John Diffey. Turned out to be Haverford ’51. He quizzed me on my vision and hopes and fears for Kendal at Hanover plus the Kendal Corporation over the next five years. At our December 5th retreat we’ll apparently have a report of the findings.

Wednesday, October 14, 1992

Long visit with Paul Gerber regarding my enlarged prostate. Actually, the latent PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) level in the blood is down, not up. He counseled “watchful waiting.” If I decide to do something, the next step will be a sonar exam and if this shows “irregularities,” a biopsy. The whole diagnostic procedure is extremely imperfect, he admits. But statistics are on my side. However, he fears that the Benign Prostate Hyperplasia (BPH) will cause me real trouble in five years or so, perhaps necessitating surgery to ease urination. “Your prostate,” he says, “is aging much faster than you are.”

I bought two croissants for tomorrow’s breakfast and went home looking forward to music. We did Handel, Bach, Beethoven: very ambitious but not very expert. Long chatter afterwards about poor Chuck Braun’s mysterious illness, politics, etc. Then a scramble later at night to get my Ritsos lecture ready for tomorrow.

Thursday, October 15, 1992

To Cambridge by bus to start Meg’s lecture series with my “Ritsos’s Painterly Technique in Short and Long Poems,” which she remembered from Birmingham (in 1985) and asked to have repeated. Nice audience including George Pilitsis, and the woman who did the Dana project with me two summers ago, and Sarah Kafatos, and others whom I’d met at various conferences. Dinner afterwards at Dalí, a Spanish restaurant on Kirkland Street: Meg, Vangelis, Eleni, teaching in Comp. Lit. at Harvard, and Alec, who couldn’t come to the lecture but joined us afterwards. He walked me to the “T” in Harvard Square. To South Station and AMTRAK’S “Night Owl.” Cambridge is so heady; the place in front of Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square is filled with amazing people.

Friday, October 16, 1992

Slept poorly. Up at 5:00 a.m., tired. Used the new Metropolitan 1st class lounge at 30th Street Station—at least a clean place to sit and wash up. Arrived at Pendle Hill at 9:30 a.m. and didn’t stop for a moment until 5:30 p.m. Meeting with Rebecca, Book Committee (we decided to reprint Kenneth Boulding’s Nayler sonnets, quickly, since Kenneth is doing very poorly, health-wise). I’m supporting the Doug Gwyn submission; others will read it and will decide in December. We’re also thinking of reprinting Elizabeth Gray Vining’s The World in Tune, a collection of quotations each followed by a meditation. I’m assigned a reading, along with Bill Tabor. Then Publications Committee: accepted an essay that turned out to be by Bill Tabor. Then viola-piano with Oliver on Dan’s electric keyboard. Then twenty minutes’ rest—everything helps—in my room in the Steere Wing of Brinton House. Then celebration for the publication of Jessamyn West’s Quaker Reader. The Publication Committee’s “living theater” for the entire board. We gathered in a circle in the barn and went through our usual procedure for the Gelassenheit essay, ending up by rejecting it. I was one of the few unqualified supporters. (Dan whispered that he hoped the clerk would practice Gelassenheit! Touché!) All my revision work for nothing. But some people came up individually and said they supported acceptance. Ended the evening by playing four-hands with Dan. He divulged that they’re nominating me to go back on the board next year and hinted that he wants me to replace Oliver as clerk of the Executive Committee. That will be difficult from a distance (if I’m asked) but Andy Toll did it and so did Charlie Brown. Θα δούμε, όπως λέει ο Καζαντζάκης. In Publications Committee, Rebecca forgot at home the vettings by absentees.

Saturday, October 17, 1992

Philadelphia

Morning session of the board was devoted again to publications, well organized by Rebecca. Results of surveys, etc. People want “Spiritual Journey”!! I started reading Vining while others broke into small groups to discuss specific issues. Good report so far from Morehouse; they’re selling books. 200 advance orders on Quaker Reader.

SEPTA ride with Ken Carroll, as active as ever in numerous Quaker affairs. Then to the Art Museum to see the exhibit of da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, on loan from Windsor Castle. He was obsessed with discovering just how the body was put together, and did so, in part, by dissecting humans and animals. The draftsmanship is superb, of course; the drawings are surrounded by copious notes and comments. A glimpse into one side of this multitalented genius. The museum also has, to my surprise, the Brancusi “Bird in Space,” and three versions of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” and some nice Picassos, Matisses, etc.

Sunday, October 18, 1992

Hanover

Ministry and Counsel considered how the Meeting should act, or react, concerning couples undergoing separation or divorce, and not only married couples but unmarried (i.e., gay) ones. We’ll bring it now to Business Meeting.

In Meeting I ministered on Douglas Steere snoring in the Pendle Hill Meeting yesterday. How a Douglas Steere has triply earned the right to snore in Meeting in his 92nd year, and how we should view people not just in their spatial dimensions but always with the fourth dimension—time—added.

Supper with Sheila Harvey and Mother at Kendal. Kate Harvey has had another breakdown, it seems, gave up her courses at the University of Connecticut, gave up her job, and is living in her trailer in Mystic, Connecticut, without resources and without the willingness to go into therapy again. Bev and Franny joined us. He played the first book of Debussy preludes last Saturday and they did together the Schubert Fantasie, which Dan and I slaughtered at Pendle Hill on Friday night. Next week Haydn, Mozart, and César Franck with a visiting violinist. The process to make him a full contractual resident seems to be moving forward. Jean called him in to speak about the financial obligations. He told me he’s 84½ years old.

October 19, 1992

Daniyal Mueennudeen visited. Back from Pakistan. Wants to go to law school now.

October 22, 1992

Tom Campion and John Lincoln took me to lunch. They want me to be a consultant to ILEAD and a liaison with the Dartmouth faculty. I accepted. Music with Christian F., a student in Comp. Lit. 37. Not a very good violinist, alas; can’t count.

October 24, 1992

Bev Webster played with a violinist: Bach, Beethoven Op. 30 # 3, and the Franck sonata, which is nice to hear performed. Violinist so-so.

October 26, 1992

Boston

Drove to the Convention Center with Lafayette and John Radebaugh. AAHA convention. Morning session useful on boards: how to get rid of dead wood. I was told that boards typically serve as grievance committees in disputes, contrary (of course) to Jean’s position. Afternoon session tedious. Super at Grendel’s in Cambridge with Alec, Kesaya, David Noda, Lafayette, and John. Nice to see Lafayette enjoying his two children. Alec left early to go to play in the Cambridge Community Orchestra.

October 27, 1992

Lunch at Kendal with Bill Polk and a ninety-year-old prospective resident from Londonderry. She liked Kendal better than other places she has seen, but wants her bed made every day, not just every week.

October 28, 1992

Kendal Outreach. We’re stuck and see no way to reach out into the community. Drink with David Godine. He’s still in business, remarkably. Does well with children’s books, especially.

October 31, 1992

Dress-up Halloween party. I wore a tux (my father’s) and a paste-on mustache. Charades. Laughter.

November 4, 1992

Clinton won. Hooray!

November 7, 1992

Party for Trix Officer’s 65th birthday. Chuck drunk—sort of. Nice conversation with Vic McGee.

November 8, 1992

I had bet Ned that Bush would win. Delighted to have lost that one. The bet was a meal at Panda House, where I treated him, Anne Lindbergh, and Amy Perrin.

November 12, 1992

Gerald Suntenallo of Sherston Lehman visited. He’s Bob Metz’s stockbroker (says that Bob calls him every day) and Carol Weingeist’s, highly recommended.

November 13, 1992

Two and a half hours with Jean at Kendal. Agenda, etc. Strategy for fund raising. She said I treat her harshly. I do criticize her.

November 19, 1992

Nice to visit with Tom Corindia over lunch. I do wish we could get him back on the Kendal board, but the conflict of interest remains.

“Blues for Mr. Charlie” by James Baldwin, done by the Dartmouth Players. The black actors very committed, not just acting. Remarkably directed. Not a very successful play, really; too long. But a devastating critique of white intolerance.

November 20, 1992

With Jack Shepherd to visit Dean Pelton to try to renew his offer of support for the mediation effort.

November 23, 1992

John Diffey at Kendal. Asked me if I still had problems with Jean (in her presence). I complained about her handling of the Webster case recently, taking it out of the Admissions Committee. I wrote him a long letter afterwards. Jean cannot take criticism. She becomes defensive even before anything is said about her. Also, she rewrites history. She said the word “harsh” the other day was mine, not hers. Totally untrue. I’ve written all this to Diffey. Also Jean never admits she’s made a mistake. Never. Even Bush wasn’t so bad.

November 24, 1992

“Cooper” (Jason Cole) read his short stories. He’s the student who was so antagonistic and abusive toward me two years ago, but I vowed to respond with love and understanding, and it worked. Now he’s civilized and grateful. Supper with him afterwards with Cleopatra and Pat McKee and Ernie Hebert. Cooper loved it, smiling “under his mustache” the whole time.

November 25, 1992

Leander, Alec, and Deanna are here. We went to see the movie “Malcolm X.” I recounted my memories of seeing Malcolm in 1965 a month before he was killed. Superb movie, all 3¼ hours of it. It never lags (compare The Last Temptation).

Thursday, November 26, 1992

Pleasant Thanksgiving dinner with Alec, Leander, Deanna, and Yiayia. Audrey came for dessert. Afterwards we showed slides of Alec, Leander, and Daphne as babies. Everyone overwhelmed at how beautiful Chrysanthi was in the 1950s.

Friday, November 27, 1992

John and Mary and Helene visited. Lively. Laughter. Then Alec showed a video of Jakarta and the Balinese cremation ritual. Deanna burst into tears when the fire was lighted under the corpse. “My mother was cremated just like that in Taiwan!”

Sunday, November 29, 1992

Saw Michael and Leone Webster at Kendal. Told Michael of Jean’s disposition of the Webster case. She agrees to put him on contract if he remains sober throughout his second year in residence. I’m not going to fight it, for fear that my opposition may make her withdraw this guarantee.

December 2, 1992

Last day of classes. Enough! I have a full set of English 2 papers coming tonight and a set of Comparative Literature 37 next week! Harder and harder.

Drink with Pano. He’s demoralized regarding English 2. Karen is still suffering from the loss of the baby and is going for therapy. I fear for their marriage.

Thursday, December 3, 1992

To D.C

AMTRAK to Washington. Leander and Deanna met us in Union Station. Nice supper there: oysters and crabmeat. Then to Kennedy Center, which is grand. Concert in honor of the 75th anniversary of Finland’s independence. Finnish national anthem plus Star Spangled Banner. Sallinen’s “Shadows,” Tchaikovsky violin concerto played by Vladimir Spivakov. Great tone and technique. But I don’t like it as much as the Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or Brahms. Then Sibelius’s 5th. Rostropovich conducting. Deanna took us backstage. Musicians find Rostropovich a very poor conductor and are delighted that he’s leaving. So contrary to the hype in the program.

Drove to their house in Silver Spring. Very cosy. Glad to see paintings on the walls. Leander’s “studio” full of electronic equipment. Read in the Washington Post that Angelou, whose autobiography we listened to in the car on the way to Springfield this morning, has been asked by Clinton to read a poem at the inauguration.

Friday, December 4, 1992

D.C.–Philadelphia

Drove to Rosalyn. Met Jim Warren in the Foreign Service institute. I lectured on “Greek Politics as Seen Through Poetry.” About ten diplomats ready to go to Greece on assignment. Lively questions. I even played Vamvakaris’s Ήμουνα μάγκας μια φορά, τώρα θα γίνω το σοφό Σωκράτη. Lunch with Jim and two others. Then to Pendle Hill just in time for the book committee. We said yes to Doug Gwyn’s even though it’s not finished. Also yes to Vining reprint and a reprint of Quaker 18th century women’s journals. Four-hand piano afterward with Dan: Schubert and Debussy. Dan is down on Peter Crysdale now, wants to shift him out of Extension. I was asked to rejoin the board next year.

Saturday, December 5, 1992

Bryn Mawr–NYC

To the conference center in Bryn Mawr for a full day retreat of the Kendal Corporation: Kendal at Hanover, Kendal at Oberlin, etc. Run by Crosbie Deaton, a consultant. Some nice techniques. The object is to do “strategic planning” for the next five years. Lots of ideas for our own Kendal retreat in July. John Diffey took me aside privately and said that my complaints against Jean are echoed by others. I’m not alone, it seems. . . . To the Yale Club. Met Chrysanthi, who had come from D.C.

Sunday, December 6, 1992

NYC–Amherst

To the Matisse exhibit at MoMA. Met Andonis Decavalles and Popi. Andonis looking very old suddenly. The Matisse retrospective is immense, about forty galleries. I liked many of his early pictures, e.g. the lovely portrait of his daughter Marguerite (1906) done in more or less traditional style. He was a marvelous draftsman in traditional modes before he became more interested in color than form. Actually, his quintessential form was his last: the paper cut-outs, because now for the first time he didn’t sketch, then fill in with color, but rather cut out colored paper—i.e., the color came first. Other pictures I particularly liked were the Blue Nude 1907, the Young Sailor II, 1906, the Nude Black and Gold 1908, of course Dance I and II (1909–10), probably the coup for the museum, because next to Dance I, which is in the MoMA collection and was merely a study for the final version done for the Russian patron’s house, they now have the latter, lent by the Hermitage. It’s more orgiastic. Generally, Matisse’s portraits are stunning, and very unique. Others: Interior with violin case, Nice 1918, the White Plumes (a portrait), 1919, the book illustrations for Mallarmé and for Paliphaë (linoleum cuts), and the famous Tree of Life design for the stained glass window of the chapel at Vence, done with paper cut-outs.

The exhibit was exhausting but a great opportunity, as are all these retrospectives. Throngs of people in the first galleries but they thinned out afterwards.

We then took Andonis and Popi to brunch at the Yale Club. Sad memories of Elizabeth Constantindes. Popi’s sister, the pianist, is now blossoming, doing CDs, etc. after years of stagnation. Andonis is editing Rae Dalven’s translations of women poets (Rae, too, died recently, but she was in her late eighties).

To Amherst, overnight at Rhoda’s. She’s a compulsive talker in a very loud voice, but warm and good natured. She’s 67 years old, looks 45. Wept at thoughts of Bron and accounts of how important his scientific papers are for other parasitologists.

Monday, December 7, 1992

Amherst

Examined students doing Modern Greek language at U-Mass, this time with Chrysanthi present. Finished grading my English 2 papers. It gets harder and harder. But English 3 awaits me next term!

Tuesday, December 8, 1992

Hanover

Breakfast with Jack and Kathy Shepherd. They visited John Baker last Saturday. Baker says that he wants to make a “substantial” gift to War/Peace Studies at Dartmouth. We’re planning strategies, chiefly how to keep Dartmouth fundraisers from swallowing up “our” money.

This afternoon I became one of the panelists on the Council for Academic Freedom and Responsibility, convened for the first time (it was set up in the early 1970s). We are meant to adjudicate a dispute between Andy Wallace, the Medical School dean, and Dennis Thron, who is accused of refusing to teach. Dennis says he was highhandedly told he had to use different teaching methods, in violation of his academic freedom. I hope that this won’t be too prolonged, or painful.

Dimitri Yiannakos’s and Tilda’s twin baby, age 2, was operated on today for a sarcoma of the kidney. In London. Daphne saw the child over the weekend. The child outwardly is robust, full of humor and energy. It’s so sad, because she is mortally ill. The surgeon was not very encouraging; indeed at first he had refused to operate. If he finds the cancer spread beyond the kidney he’ll sew her up again. If by a miracle it’s confined to the kidney, he’ll remove the kidney. Tomorrow we should know.

They called here to inquire if there was any sense in traveling to the USA. Alan Rozycki helped me by querying the local pediatric surgeon, who said they were probably in the world’s best place, London, where they are.

Wednesday, December 9, 1992

The baby’s tumor wasn’t in the kidney after all, but in the back. The surgeon removed 80% of it; couldn’t get the rest. Bad news, obviously. But perhaps chemotherapy and/or radiation will help.

Friday, December 11, 1992

Finished reading Comp. Lit. 37 papers and grading them. Another term done! I’m counting the remaining ones like a prisoner counting days left in his sentence. One more this year, two next year, and two the year after: five!

Went with Chrysanthi to the Nodas’ farm and cut a Christmas tree and set it up in the living room. It’s beautiful. Presents are already gathering underneath.

Saturday, December 12, 1992

All day: recommendations. Everyone wants to go to law school. Yale accepts 175 out of 5000 applicants.

Supper at Jesse’s. Surprise birthday party for Chrysanthi engineered by me in collaboration with Trix, who invited us as a ruse. When we got there, we found a huge table with the Nodas, the Soderbergs, the Arnolds, Audrey, and Sydney! Chrysanthi’s first reaction was “How dare they go out without inviting me?” But of course there were two empty chairs, for us. For dessert a huge birthday cake brought by singing waitresses. Very jolly.

Sunday, December 13, 1992

I spoke in Meeting about the sadness at losing Deni Elliott, who has taken a job in Montana. Afterwards, Kristin Lord: has a scheme for teaching the Greek alphabet, which I had to tell her wasn’t very compelling. Lunch with Mother. She says not to celebrate her 88th birthday next month, but when she reaches 90 we have permission to celebrate. She looks and acts 70 at most. She’s trying to help Leander. Will give $10,000 now and $20,000 after January 1st.

Monday, December 14, 1992

Finished the recommendations. Started in a concentrated way on the next issue of JMGS. Lots of work. Long talk with Mary Layoun about her future as book review editor. Her husband has been ill and depressed, and she was told she had cancer (she doesn’t). That’s what paralyzed her. She wants to split the job with someone else doing social science, but Meg and Michael prefer a single editor. Will have to work this out. I’ve written à propos to Addie and John.

Jack Shepherd and I have sent the letter off to John Baker, hoping he’ll give War/Peace a “substantial gift.” But Jack is looking for a job elsewhere. If he leaves, the whole burden to rescue the program will fall on me, just when I’m trying to free myself from this and other attachments.

Supper with Σπύρος και Τούλα και Πόπη (της Φιλίτσας). Lovely to talk Greek for three hours. Κέφι!

December 15, 1992

I got an Apple laptop Powerbook 145 paid for by Dartmouth College! Will use it at the farm, take it to England, etc. But the first place will be at MLA on December 30.

December 18, 1992

Otmar Foelsch is helping me master Annotext in order to display it properly at the MLA. It’s quite amazing, especialloy when Ritsos’s voice begins to accompany the Moonlight Sonata text.

To Cambridge with detour in Manchester to Staples to buy a chair for Alec. Nice lunch at a Main Street restaurant, the kind frequented by old ladies. Owned by Greeks, of course.

Check-in at the Hotel Commander and encountered Helmut Schumann in the elevator . . . with a woman! Very embarrassing.

To “Black Swan” at the A.R.T, adapted from a Bulgakov novel. Not much as a play, but vigoroujsly acted. A bitter satire on the pretentions of Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater.

To Alec’s room afterward. Quite civilized. Met some of the housemates, one from China, another from Poland. All are Harvard grad students.

Saturday, December 19, 1992

Breakfast at the Commander with Helmut. He assured us that he was not the lover of the lady in question. They are merely doing business. He is attempting to purchase a clinic that’s doing holistic medicine, and she is the business manager. He is using his money to try to convince doctors to use alternative strategies.

To Logan Airport to pick up Daphne and Greg, who arrived from London looking rested. Lots of good conversation on the way back to Hanover.

Sunday, December 20, 1992

Dinner at the Campions’ with Daphne, Greg, and Leonard Kent and his wife. He was in my Milton course. Then to St. Thomas’s to hear Willem Lange’s Christmas Carol, very well done, and very moving. Alec arrived later. The house is filling up.

Tuesday, December 22, 1992

Another session of the Thron inquiry. Bernie Gert drives me to distraction; he talks so much, so loudly, so stridently. How can we function as a body with him usurping time like that?

Alice called about tents and toilets for Lori’s wedding at the farm. Chrysanthi doesn’t want to help, but I sent information from the Yellow Pages. Lunch with Walter Stpehens, planning Humanities 1 already. Leander arrived.

Wednesday, December 23, 1992

All the Sheldons: our entire family and theirs—Katy, John, and the two younger ones. So nice to mix adults and children like this. Karen hadn’t seen Daphne and Greg since their wedding. Lucia Tebbe arrived from Santa Monica. The party is now complete.

Thursday, December 24, 1992

Christmas Eve dinner at Kendal. Celebrated Chrysanthi’s birthday with presents and a cake. Lori and Clive here, too.

Friday, December 25, 1992

I made breakfast for everyone: home fries, fried ham, shirred eggs. Then presents, four hours of it. So many, because of course so many people. Everyone pleased. Alec gave me a Word 4 Manual. Leander gave me The Best of Benny Hill and a video with Victor Borge. Daphne brought English marmalade, Cadbury chocolates, paté, digestive biscuits. I got her CDs of Beethoven quartets and piano sonatas, and gave Life in the Tomb to Greg and The Last Temptation to Lucia. Feast at 5:00 p.m. Muncks and Schumanns afterward.

Saturday, December 26, 1992

Supper at Sweet Tomatos, then Jack Nicholson movies about the marines.

Sunday, December 27, 1992

Alec and Leander came to Meeting. Daphne refused. Nice to see David and Kesaya Noda, Cynthia Wigginton, and others. Lunch at Kendal. Then Lori and Clive left. I gave Lucia a tour. She is just like one of the family. She left.

Monday, December 28, 1992

Greg left. The party disperses.

Tuesday, December 29, 1992

Leander and Alec left, Leander for Seattle for Deanna’s sister’s wedding on New Year’s Eve. 500 Chinese! Daphne goes tomorrow to NYC.

Wednesday, December 30, 1992

NYC

MLA. Breakfast meeting with other representatives of Allied Organizations with Phyllis Franklin re: timing of MLAs, not enough room for everyone. Then to the Yale Club. Reading Μάτεσης, «Η μητέρα του σκύλου» for David Godine. MLA/MGSA session 1:45 to 5:30. Met Leo Papademetre, here from Adelaide. Martin McKinsey, too. Karen Van Dyck, Dorothy Gregory, a poet named Samaras, Vangelis Calotychos, Helen Kolias, Kacandes, Hadzi Chronoglou. Computer demonstration went well, much aided by Otmar, who explained the technical parts. John Rassias attended, too. Nice supper with Leo and Martin. Leo wants me to come to Adelaide again. Fine! After I retire.

Thursday, December 31, 1992

Hanover

I had Chrysanthi fib to Genevieve saying I was still in New York so I could skip her party. For the first time, neither Rassiases nor Biens had any children with them on New Year’s Eve. Mary came and had supper with us. John is still in New York. No snails.

1993

Hanover

January 1–June 14

January 2, Cambridge for A.R.T. “Heartbreak House”

January 15, Pendle Hill

February 5–6, Cambridge/Boston. Mrs. Bragg’s, 205 Mt. Auburn, (617) 547-1804

February 11–13, Washington: CIA

February 20, Cambridge, A.R.T.

February 27, NYC: MGSA

March 5, Pendle Hill

March 8, Boston–London, chez Daphne & Greg, 4 Sprimont Place, SW3

March 11–12, Oxford

March 15, Birmingham

March 28, London–Boston

April 17–19, Bethlehem

April 23–25, PH, NYC

May 7, Amherst

May 8–9, Riparius

May 12, Philadelphia

May 17–20, Princeton

May 21, Pendle Hill

May 22–23, Cambridge

May 26, Riparius

May 30, Cambridge

June 10, Cambridge

Terpni

June 14–September 7

June 15, Philadelphia

June 22–24, Hanover (Kendal)

July 7–8, Hanover (Kendal)

July 15 & 22, Sarotoga

July 23–25, Hanover, Squam Lake (Kendal Board Retreat)

Aug. 6–7, Hanover, Tunbridge

August 20, Kendal at Longwood

Hanover

September 7–December 31

Sept. 18, NYC for MGSA

Oct. 21–23, Pendle Hill

Oct. 28–Nov. 1, Berkeley, Calif., Berkeley Marina Marriott

Nov. 6, Kendal at Longwood

Nov. 23–27, Potomac, MD (Leander’s)

Dec. 3–12, Pendle Hill, Princeton, Washington

Friday, January 1, 1993

Supper with the Nodas and Audrey, to keep up the tradition, so to speak.

Saturday, January 2, 1993

Cambridge

A.R.T. Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Not a superb production, but adequate. Jeremy Geidt fine as Captain Shotover. Supporting cast weak. But how nice to see these plays! When I taught my WWI course I wasn’t even aware of Heartbreak House as relevant. Alec and Yiayia were with us. Alec said he’s changing his mind about applying for an administrative position. What next?

Leander arrived home shortly before we did. Sick with flu. But enthusiastic about Deanna’s sister’s wedding. Deanna’s mother’s side of the family he found extremely cultivated and sophisticated. They came from all over the US and from Taiwan. It looks like the Deanna-Leander wedding will be next. Leander has to ask her father first . . . in the old-fashioned way.

Reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

January 6, 1993

Dee Johnson died after lying three weeks in a coma. Just like Noye. That lovely family is cursed. The two girls are orphaned now.

January 9, 1993

Memorial for John Kemeny. Michael Dorris spoke movingly about Kemeny’s support for Native Americans. Kemeny’s son was very confessional about his revolt against the father and gradual reconcilation. Ruth Adams read from Kemeny’s draft autobiography: how he wanted to change the world somehow, and felt he did. All very moving and appropriate. Great contrast with the service for John Dickey, which was so sterile.

January 11, 1993

Service at St. Denis’s for Dee. The priest spoke well, as did Trix. Ann and Debbie are bearing up bravely. We’ll miss her.

January 12, 1993

Kendal Overseers meeting. We set the fee increase at 4.5% and salary increases at 3%. Heard an electrical consultant explain the technology of a plan to install censors to regulate electricity and heat and to save us money. Budget is tight because our bonds pay 8% but we collect only 3% to 4% from invested funds. Plus health care rooms are empty. We hope to balance the budget barely, rather than to achieve the $400,000 surplus projected in the feasibility study.

Supper with John Diffey, Jean, and Chrysanthi, planning the July retreat. I think that Jean and I are feeling better about each other now. Diffey said he’s continuing to try to mentor her and noted the friction between her and other administrators at Longwood. But she is a good manager. This budget was well done. Accreditation has been postponed a year, however. Too great a burden on the staff.

Last Monday I sent off the disk for JMGS volume 11, no. 1. A great relief. But the lead article, on Macedonia, will create a storm of protest, I fear.

January 13, 1993

Yiayia, urged by us, is “divesting” a bit: $10,000 to each of the children plus $10,000 to each of us, which we plan to pass on to Leander. Alec is pursuing an opening in Friends Select in Philadelphia. Let’s hope. Bill Clinton is sending his daughter to Sidwell Friends School in DC. What a tribute to Quaker education!

January 17, 1993

Yiayia’s birthday: 88! We went to supper at Jesse’s. Then to Bev and Franny Websters’ for cake and coffee, with some other Kendalites, including Audrey. Beveridge asked me to play a duet with him. I tried to squeeze out of this, but he kept asking. We did a Mozart sonata, and actually I did reasonably well, keeping the time throughout and playing most of the notes. Franny commended me on the triplets afterwards.

January 18, 1993

Greatly enjoying the pre-inaugural “theater.” Clinton seems wonderfully human, compassionate, gregarious. The symbolism is compelling. I can’t believe this is happening. Such a renewal! To have a young man and a liberal in office, and a true populist. Amazing!

January 20, 1993

Inauguration day. The speech was OK only. But he had a poet read first! And he got out of the limo and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue part way. And at the ball in the evening he played the saxophone.

January 21, 1993

Clinton received 2000 people in the White House. Such an outpouring of affection and respect for him.

Jack Shepherd and I appeared yet again before the Fourth Council to try to win approval for College Course 1. Again opposition and nitpicking. Dick Birnie’s liberalism. But also some support. They voted after we left. Jack and I had a drink afterwards and unwound a bit. I’m getting sick of all this. And of teaching in general, although I enjoyed lecturing on The Last Temptation yesterday and then immediately afterwards on Philoctetes.

January 26, 1993

Tea with Lee Huntington in her house in Norwich. She’s very shy, very artistic. She felt terrible, she said, because she failed to contribute to Kendal’s Reserve Fund, and I had said how important 100% participation is. We’re trying to keep her on the Overseers.

January 29, 1993

Meghan Dunleavy is my new editorial assistant for JMGS. Very eager. She keeps touching me, innocently, I think.

Open house for the Modern Greek Foreign Language program. We showed a tourist video. Motley group of students showed up, precisely the ones we don’t want. Chrysanthi and I are hoping the program will fail.

January 30, 1993

Service for Maureen Pierce at St. Anthony’s in White River Junction. She died at age 50 of scleroderma, miserably. Such a nice woman. Full church. Her daughter spoke beautifully and then sang “Abiding Grace” is a mellow contralto. So moving! The church was full of Dartmouth administrators and professors who, like me, had grown to love her constant good humor. Jim Wright spoke well, and for all of us. My thoughts were this: that when Maureen telephoned, it was always to announce another chore. Yet, coming from her, this never seemed an imposition. There was always banter and a sense of common purpose. In a way she reminded me of Ernest Noxon. Dick Sheldon rode back with me, and I remarked that in thirty odd years in Hanover this was the first time I ever participated in the life of our neighbors in White River Junction or other surrounding areas.

February 2, 1993

Took Peter Gilbert, Jim Freedman’s associate, to lunch at Kendal followed by a tour. After supper, went with Dave and Shirley Montgomery to the Coalition for Homeless Volunteers to pick up the overflow for Headrest, take them to a church, and sleep there with them, then return them to Headrest for breakfast. One of the volunteers was Finney Hamm, aged 88, who used to feed Dr. Hamm, blind like my father, at Hanover Terrace at the same table where Mother fed Pappou. Extensive report and statistics about wife-bashing locally. Terrible. The human being must be biologically violent.

February 4, 1993

Jean has started a task force at Kendal to develop a five-year plan. Nice to be integrated with residents: Walter Frank of the New York Stock Exchange, a retired professor from Harvard Business School, a retired economics professor, a retired school principal.

February 5, 1993

Cambridge

Overnight at Mrs. Briggs’s on Mount Auburn Street—bed and breakfast. Met Alec for supper. He’s been offered a job at North Jakarta International School and is very interested. He got mostly A’s at Harvard last semester.

February 6, 1993

Cambridge

Morning with Meg, Michael, and Eva Constantellou sorting out MGSA material, particularly Mary Layoun’s failure to produce as the book review editor. Eva says she’ll take over. Now I have to convince the executive committee to accept a single reviewer instead of one for humanities and one for social science, which is what they want.

Afternoon: to the Northeast Section of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. Fascinating. A different world. Mostly men. Different body types: hefty and burly. How articulate they are! The project manager for NY-Boston electrification was superb. Carl Fowler, the MC, ditto. The worst was a Harvard professor (!) who advocated buses in low density areas and got heckled mercilessly. The engineer of the Boston connection between North and South Stations was also excellent, and fascinating. The Montrealer is selling more seats but I was told that AMTRAK management basically doesn’t like it. Everyone is apprehensive about Clinton’s economic recommendations to be released on February 17. Will there be provision for rail?

Met Alec and Chrysanthi at South Station and ate again, with a woman friend of Alec’s, a former teacher at Jakarta International School (JIS).

February 9, 1993

War and Peace Steering Committee breakfast to try to decide what to do about the Fourth Council’s rejection of College Course 1. I narrated the sad events, not hiding my feelings about Dick Birnie. We suspect political and/or financial motivations. The whole process has been Kafkaesque. I offered my resignation, as did Jack, but we were given a vote of confidence and asked to continue. Various strategies were discussed. Jack and I will meet again next week.

Wednesday, February 10, 1993

To Washington

Music with Dick and Allan. Then to White River Junction. Chrysanthi and I both in a single compartment, but it worked fine. Very cozy.

Thursday, February 11, 1993

Washington

Lunch at Union Station with Dennis Carroll, now married and a father. He has written another huge novel that he threatens to send me. Still working at the General Accounting Office. His father, Admiral Eugene Carroll, will retire in a year or two from the Center for Defense Information, which needs new blood, especially a new director to replace La Rocque.

Afterward to the Space Museum. Fascinating. Then to the National Gallery. The El Grecos are lovely: “Laocoön,” “Madonna with Saints Martina and Agnes,” “St. Jerome,” “St. Martin and the Beggar” (twice). I also loved Constable’s “Salisbury Cathedral,” of course, and Turner’s amazing “Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight.” Then to the Natural History Museum, where we looked especially for a display on beavers. Metro to Ballston in Virginia for overnight at a Holiday Inn.

Friday, February 12, 1993

CIA

Joan Schwartz of the American Council of Education met us at 7:30 for breakfast. Then to the CIA, next door. All morning we listened to tapes of oral exams and decided (a) if the grading was equitable, (b) if the exam itself was well done, (c) what the CIA levels mean in terms of Dartmouth’s levels. Then lunch with the teacher, who uses our first book. All afternoon doing a similar job for the written exam, which was ferociously difficult. The CIA trains its agents for 44 weeks, 8 hours a day. At public expense, of course. Lots of security, especially regarding my laptop computer (which I used beautifully on AMTRAK coming down). To go to the toilet I had to be escorted. Finished at 4:45. Metro to Forest Glen, where Leander picked us up. Out in Bethesda at a seafood restaurant, long chance to discuss Leander’s very real problems, professionally. Getting a doctorate in composition doesn’t make sense, it seems. He hopes to take some part-time courses at Peabody in electronic media, which is really what interests him now. Says he’s got to join the wave of the future. Hopes to attract private pupils, but only adults. Will continue at Moravian, alas. . . . Deanna is more optimistic about the National Symphony. They’ll be touring Russia next September. Leander demonstrated all the miracles of “Finale” with enthusiasm. At the restaurant, by coincidence, we ran into Deanna’s aunt, a very sophisticated Chinese lady, and her husband, a Scarsdale gynecologist.

Saturday, February 13, 1993

Silver Spring

Leisurely morning correcting English 3 papers with my Powerbook. Then to Phillips Gallery. Saw the Georgia O’Keeffe-Alfred Stieglitz exhibit. She was remarkable. Much of their work was done at Lake George. AMTRAK home to New Hampshire.

Monday, February 15, 1993

Breakfast with Jack Shepherd. He wants to move War/Peace into Environmental Studies, partly to protect himself. At the same time, he is applying for jobs elsewhere. I fear for War/Peace Studies.

In the afternoon, heard Isabel Allende lecture. Very “naughty,” a sort of blue-stocking; aristocratic, of course. She captivated her audience. I had supper with her afterwards and with Jim and Sheba Freedman. Very kind of them to include me. She is thinking of Quaker schools for her “delinquent” child. At 9:00 p.m. watched Clinton preview his economic package very persuasively.

February 16, 1993

Nice lunch with Michael Webster, Beveridge’s son. We talked about Leander. Michael’s life has been somewhat similar. He gave up a secure job to marry a woman with an orchestral position, earning a salary while he earns nothing regularly. All depends, obviously on the attitude of the woman.

Thursday, February 18, 1993

War/Peace seminar with Joel Sax, a Quaker peace-activist who has been in Serbia and Bosnia. He gave a very different story from what we hear. Also interesting on Skopje and the Macedonian question. I told him about Karakasidou and our forthcoming article. He said that many Serbian soldiers are mortified by the atrocities they are forced to commit. Some have killed themselves in remorse.

Saturday, February 20, 1993

Lunch at Meg’s with Ole Smith and some of Meg’s students. Then to A.R.T. to see Ronald Ribman’s Dream of the Red Spider, and interesting treatment of dictatorships. Not great, but worth seeing, I suppose.

Forgot to note Michael Webster’s concert on the 16th, with Sally Pinkas and a soprano. A delicious evening, Pinkas is superb. So is Michael. They did Brahms’ opus 120 no. 1 and a Schubert sonata, plus “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” with Michael’s clarinet obbligato. Lovely.

Sunday, February 21, 1993

Joel Sax for breakfast. Turns out that his wife is a Greek-American and studied from our books.

Conference call among MGSA publications committee concerning ratification of Eva K. as our new book review editor. We planned all this beautifully previously.

Friday, February 26, 1993

Leslie English visited with her daughter, Nadia. Leslie is bitter because her father’s house, now Shapiro’s, was never offered to her, even though she didn’t have the resources to buy it. Peg Barnard bought it plus 200 acres for $2500! Sold it for $10,000.

Saturday, February 27, 1993

To NYC for MGSA executive to confirm Eva as book review editor. All went very well. No opposition. But they begged me not to start a “responses” column now, for fear concerning the Macedonian article. Gondicas invited me to Princeton for three weeks with full support and no duties! The Kimon Friar letters are there. Mary Keeley is desperately ill apparently. Too bad for Mike, just as he was beginning his retirement.

Alec is in town for a school convention. We met at the Yale Club, had a drink, then went together to visit John Magagna, then had a delicatessen supper. Basically Alec made no progress this weekend. And he lost the Williston job, coming in second. They want someone with experience. Magagna very cordial and reassuring about the new Jakarta school.

Wednesday, March 3, 1993

Got JMGS galleys in the mail. What a job! So many changes! I worked five days straight on them.

Friday, March 5, 1993

Philadelphia

To Pendle Hill for the Publications Committee. Dan Seeger wants me back on the Executive Committee next year. I assured him that I was enjoying my sabbatical. Drove back to Philadelphia with Steve Stalonas and Kenneth Sutton. Kenneth is gay, and “married.” Having trouble because his partner lost his job.

Forgot to record, à propos of marriage: clearness committee last week for Susanna and Jim, who live in the Meeting House. Bob White, Tom Waring, Chrysanthi, and I. The problem is that Susanna doesn’t want to be married in any way, legal or religious, and Jim does. We tried to be very “liberal” about all this.

Saturday, March 6, 1993

Dinner with Ned Perrin and Anne Lindbergh. She, poor thing, is still in danger owing to a brain tumor. Ned said it took him sixty years to find happiness. Their daughter Amy, who loves Anne, found a man in New Zealand, and they are delighted. Daughter Elizabeth came home for the first time in a decade and actually asked to embrace Ned, a rare event. Those children were ruined by their mother, alas. Dartmouth Symphony afterwards. A new conductor, the orchestra transformed, and full of students now, many oriental of course.

Sunday, March 7, 1993

Ministry and Counsel. Rhea McKay put us through a fine exercise. My partner was Peter Stettenheim, in thinking how the Meeting could be enriched.

Lunch with Yiayia, just back from Arizona, plus Audrey. Harlan is in a bad way, having fallen and broken his hip.

Leander called. He visited Neil Ratliffe, who told him he has AIDS. Also that Washington has hundreds of unemployed pianists!

Spoke the other day with Charlie Hamlen in New York. It’s a wonder that he doesn’t have AIDS. He is now concentrating his management on musicians with AIDS.

Alec called. He accepted the Jakarta offer. He’s very happy. He interviewed at Moorestown Friends but they, too, want someone with experience. So, he’ll get his experience in Jakarta.

All packed and ready to go to England tomorrow.

Monday, March 8, 1993

In the morning, hurriedly prepared journal articles to send out to readers. Then a nice final class for English 2–3 in which I asked students to reflect on the experience of the course and the methods used. Their testimony was most encouraging. Then final Humanities 1 class, the plenum, for which I stayed only a half hour but hated to leave because the students’ involvement with the material seemed so genuine and deep. In the plenums we ask each student, and teacher, to select one favorite passage, read it, and explain why it was chosen. I did Odyssey 16.203ff. where Odysseus and Telemachus recognize each other and their wailings are compared to the cries of ospreys when their young are stolen from the nest. Limo for Logan Airport at 2:30. Uneventful flight to Heathrow. We did the feast-fast-feast-fast-feast routine, cheating just a little.

Tuesday, March 9, 1993

London

Arrived at 7:00 a.m. Underground to Sloan Square, so attractive, and thence to Daphne’s house at 4 Sprimont Place SW3. That, too, so attractive. Daphne welcomed us and hastened to work. We went to St. Stephen’s Gate, Palace of Westminster, after a hurried look at the Abbey, to join the Woodbrooke on-the-road course on “Knowing Parliament.” David Gray and Margaret leading it. We learned about Kathy. Tour of Westminster Hall, where Charles I was tried and condemned, and where Winston Churchill et al. lay in state. Then a fine video explaining parliamentary procedures and traditions. Then we were able to get into the Commons. I peed in the members’ toilet, perhaps used by Churchill. First, lots of questions to the Secretary of Defense about nuclear armaments, etc. At 5:15 John Major entered amid cheers from the Tories. His 15-minute question time was pandemonium, with healthy roars, guffaws, and screamed charges and counter charges between Major and chiefly, John Smith, Labor’s leader. Very contentious. A circus. Theater. Then we visited John Body, the only Quaker in Commons, who explained that this is not where work gets done (obviously!). It gets done in committees, where members are civil to each other and often cooperative across party lines, precisely because they don’t have to create and sustain an image for the public. He said, furthermore, that “the right honourable gentleman” is not just hollow words. MPs attack each other’s opinions, but not each other’s integrity, or “honourability.” He was also interesting in his view that politicians must never “waffle” in public. They must take a definite stand, and support it until it is either discarded or adopted. Finally we heard Matthew Hamlyn, clerk of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. He read English at university and said that most clerks are arts grads, having done English or classics or history. Ditto for civil service and diplomatic corps. Apparently nineteenth-century tradition follows. It’s his job to make sure that everything works smoothly, that effective witnesses are invited, that members are briefed, etc.

All in all, a fascinating afternoon. We returned to Sloan Square, bought some bread, cheese, fruit tarts, and returned to find Daphne and Greg already home. Nice reunion over dinner. Greg likes his position here better than that in NYC, chiefly because London is now “where the action is,” owing to the uncertainties over the Maastricht Treaty. Daphne alas has no esteem for her boss and says that Simon & Schuster London is a shambles. It doesn’t do good books and those it does do it fails to promote adequately. What a shame!

Orlando is playing in the cinemas here. I should see it, considering that I taught the novel without having read it since the 1950s.

Wednesday, March 10, 1993

London

A full tour of the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament). The enshrinement of history: rebuilt at the heyday of the empire under Queen Victoria. I was most stirred by paintings, plaques, etc. referring to the civil war and restoration, i.e., the Stuart period, pilgrim fathers embarking for the new world. Afterwards, we went to two standing committees, the first discussing an act attempting to preserve (illegible), the second the question of allowing sales and employment on Sundays. The rituals of debate are so important; the respect shown via “the honourable member,” the bowed head to the chairman, etc. And how well the members speak! Also, the convention is to address each other in the third person, not the second person. Another useful convention allows interruption: “Will the honourable member give way?” And they usually do. This would be wonderful at Dartmouth, to mitigate verbosity.

In the afternoon we met with a Quaker peer, Lord Taylor of Gryfe, formerly Tom Taylor, elevated to a life peerage by Harold Wilson to represent labor and Scottish views in the Lords. He was a C.O. in WWII. I asked him if this ever impeded his career. “Not at all,” he replied. Remember that Fenner Brockway, too, was in parliament, and he went to prison as a C.O. in WWI. He spoke about the role of the Lords, which is to scrutinize legislation, fix legal technicalities (all justices of the High Court are Lords). Also, Lords can immobilize a government in its final year, before mandatory elections, because it can tie up legislation for one year. We then went into the Lords, where there was a debate on agricultural products and merchandising. A few Lords asleep, but most attentive. Lord Taylor had told us that most of the active members are life peers, not hereditary peers. This system puts people of all sorts of careers—actors, authors, military people, etc.—into parliament, which is very nice. Lords also are freer than MPs because they don’t have to worry about reelection. In many ways, this system is superior to ours, with a democratically elected upper house.

Then to Friends House to hear a standing committee clerk, who was rather boring. Then bought posters at Friends Bookstore, for Kendal meeting and our own Meeting.

Leisurely dinner with Greg and Daphne. We each recounted our day’s activities. Greg told how trading in the morning was affected by fear that Yeltsin’s power could be eroded by the Russian parliament, then by news that the vote in Moscow had been in his favor. In the afternoon, trading was influenced by the rumor that the Japanese equivalent of Alan Greenspan was about to be fired. So the yen fell, then rose again as the rumor proved unfounded. Billions of dollars were traded, as usual. Daphne was involved with worry over libel actions against Simon & Schuster because of two books that Daphne is overseeing, one on “Fergie,” the other on Mick Jagger. She has a low opinion of her colleagues, says that her days range from “mediocre to awful.” Today was mediocre—i.e., not so bad. We laughed, because she’s considered a woman of “steel,” but also of tact. Late at night: read over my lecture for tomorrow. I hope that no one asks an embarrassing question since I’m very stale on this subject.

Thursday, March 11, 1993

Very nice presentation about the European Parliament, at the British headquarters of the European Commission. Talk by the EC press officer, then an excellent video. Afterwards I learned that there is a Quaker House at Strasbourg that serves a very fine purpose as neutral ground. How exciting to be part of this unification of Europe! I’m jealous of people like Stelios Orphanoudakis, who is involved in all this.

Walked to Westminster from St. James’ Park, where the EC offices are. Attended a Select Committee on foreign affairs taking evidence from witnesses on the military role of the UN in Bosnia, etc. Then a Select Committee on privatization of the railways, where a labour amendment to protect the RR was defeated by 15 to 14. The highlight for me was seeing and hearing labour MP GLENDA JACKSON (!) speaking in her beautiful voice for the RR. That was thrilling. We ended by being led through ornate corridors into the Speaker’s private residence, part of the palace, for a reception hosted by Betty Boothroyd, the speaker. She’s unusual in being a woman, of course, but also in being from the opposition party. Obviously Tory MPs voted for her, not just Labourites. I asked her about the poor blokes who pop up expectedly trying to get recognized and never do. She said that if they slip her a piece of paper she’ll try her best to recognize them. But she knows in advance who is likely to have something to say on a specific issue.

In leaving, I told David Gray that I wish I knew as much about my own Congress as I now do about Parliament.

Lunch. Circle line to Paddington. Mad rush to buy tickets. Made the 2:20 to Oxford with 30 seconds to spare. Nice reunion with Peter Mackridge in Wellington Square. I lectured on “Reemergence of the Greek Novel in the 19th and 20th Centuries” to a fairly large audience (for such things). A nice surprise was that Paschalis Kitromelides, on sabbatical here, was present, as was Zeta Farinou, whom we remembered from Thessaloniki. After the reception, Peter, Zeta, Jackie Mackridge and I went to St. Cross College for a sumptuous meal, begun and ended with a Latin grace. Very formal, with seating arrangements, etc., preceded by sherry at which I met the master, an American graduate of Williams College who, by accident, got into Turkish studies as a post-grad at Oxford, went to Turkey, returned to Oxford, married an English woman, and never left. He said that being American never really interfered with his career here, and that people are generally very cosmopolitan and tolerant.

Friday, March 12, 1993

I’m writing this while sitting in the chapel of Magdalen listening to the organist practice. We walked into town with Peter, cashed my honorarium of £60, and proceeded to St. Antony’s to meet Paschalis (and Jackie) for coffee. Paschalis wants to be active in all ways with JMGS, as a reviewer, etc. He’s a “dissident” regarding Greece’s Macedonian policy and told us that it’s very difficult to speak out in the current climate.

We walked clear across town to Magdalen, to lunch with Oliver Taplin. We had a pleasant, although hurried, meal in College. Oliver will be coming to Cornell next year and I hope to invite him to Dartmouth. He’s working on comedy.

All in all, a lovely visit in Oxford. We returned to recount all of it to Daphne and Greg and to hear about their doings and eat fried trout.

Saturday, March 13, 1993

A full day. Started marking papers and writing my report on the Quaker Parliamentary Tour (requested by David Gray for “The Friend”). In late morning we all left, walked to Cheney Row to see Carlyle’s house, and also discovered Smollett’s and Leigh Hunt’s, and learned later that Turner lived here, too (and Seferis resided in Sloan Avenue around the corner from Sprimont). Then over a bridge to Battersee Park, all the way to the Tate Gallery, with a delicious stop in a pub for a lemonade. The Tate is not my favorite museum but of course the Turners are plenteous. Actually, it’s more fun to see one Turner at a time; then it seems utterly eccentric in a marvelous way. Seeing sixty of them side by side negates this pleasure. My favorite is “Snowstorm, Hannibal Crossing the Alps” (1812). The other highlight in the Tate is the room filled with Blake drawings: the series of engravings on Job, exquisitely detailed; the watercolors illustrating Dante, my favorite being the spectacular “Newton,” a male nude, seated, bending over with a pair of compasses, drawing a circle on the ground. Also “The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve.” Also “Winter,” illustrating Cowper’s verses from “The Task.” Enjoyed seeing the series of Matisse dancers recently in the MoMA show in New York. And Jacob Epstein’s monumental sculpture in alabaster, “Jacob Wrestling the Angel,” and the room full of Henry Moores, especially the “Family Group” (1949).

Taxi to Fortnum and Mason, symbol and reality of a posh department store. The clerks in cutaways. Bought paté and orange marmalade. As Antony Bryer wrote in The Times, a Birmingham accent in Fortnum and Mason is out of place! Then to Lillywhites’ sporting goods store in Piccadilly to buy trout flies for John Radebaugh. Then slowly to Chuen-Chenku’s Chinese Restaurant in Wardour Street, which I remembered from the 1970s and is still there. Then on foot via Covent Garden to the Aldwych to see Maggie Smith as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Ernest. Not quite fast enough; it needs to rattle away like a machine gun. But quite effective, with marvelous sets. Lady Bracknell done as a horrible snob and social climber by Smith. Gwendolyn a viper who’ll end up just like her mother. Many of the jokes and jibes are dated, but not all, e.g., those about education—still, alas, too true. Home and gratefully to bed at 10:30 with aching feet.

Sunday, March 14, 1993

With Greg and Daphne to Kew Gardens. Not at its best outdoors, although narcissus, daffodils, and some rhododendrons were in bloom. Next month will be spectacular. Longwood Gardens are just as nice, actually. I remembered the gigantic palm house from our previous visit, probably in the 1950s. Nice lunch in Kew.

Monday, March 15, 1993

To Birmingham

Visited Dimitris Alexiou in Oakfield House, where a lovely woman, Julie, looks after him. He is as crazy as ever, and as brilliant, writing rhymed verse, knowing every bus route and number, playing piano, etc. We talked about buses, and Daphne, and Christos, and Pavlos. He swims, lifts weights, goes to Greece each year (and speaks Greek), goes around on buses each day for a few hours. He has a private room with a telly, and the House has a lovely garden out back. What a splendid solution! It was very moving to see him after so many years.

Then to Woodbrooke. A whooping hello from Linda Lyman, who is Friend in Residence. Nice reunion with Chris and Christina Lawson. Chris is head tutor. We talked about my possible return. Tony Brown is about to retire. Muriel Poulter is a captive of “depressive illness.” David Gray would welcome me as his replacement in Spring 1994, but I’m already committed. Stuart Morton still there. Plans to build an entirely new library and shift dining to the present Common Room, etc., if money can be raised.

Then to the university. Good audience for my talk on Reemergence. Tziovas, Goutsis, Katerina Davis, some students I knew from before. Helpful questions and comments. Supper in a Chinese restaurant near New Street. B’ham much changed, with pedestrian corridors in the center. Used my Powerbook on the train both ways for annotating English 3 papers.

After the talk, to Staff House to see Bryer and Liz. He’s in a cast for a broken leg, the result of reaching for a book on a high shelf! He’d welcome me back to Brum as Honorary Fellow. Reminisced: we’d invented “Bumgas” together at the Staff House bar. Tried to find Paul Morby earlier at the TV unit and was told that he’d retired several years ago. Telephoned him. At first he didn’t remember me, but then did and was very cordial. Dympna is working with homeless children in Romania. He’s doing TV things for schools and developing his opera museum.

Tuesday, March 16, 1993

All day correcting English 3 papers. Then to Kings to lecture at 5:30. Roddy very cordial. Met David Ricks again. Large audience, including Rowena Loverance and her mother, and Daphne, and a girl from Dartmouth, and a man who’d roomed with Stelios Orphanoudakis at Athens College! I think I presented Reemergence better this time, shortening it. But comments, especially from Roddy, show that it’s already dated. I’m glad this was the last “performance.” Supper afterward with Rowena, etc. plus a stunning undergraduate girl.

Wednesday, March 17, 1993

Humanities 1 exams arrived by Federal Express. I graded them and faxed in the grades. Will finish with the other course tomorrow. Then to Routledge’s in New Fetter Lane to pick up Gail Holst’s new book for David Ricks to review. Walked to Haymarket. Dinner with Daphne and Greg. Then Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” with Pinter himself playing the alcoholic has-been writer. Vintage Pinter: gorgeous language going nowhere. Non sequiturs. Cross purposes. People caught in isolation, autism, fragmentation. Wonderful use of silences. A kind of macabre poetry of dissolution.

Thursday, March 18, 1993

Finished English 3 papers and faxed in the grades. Τετέλεσται! To the British Museum. Lunch in staff cafeteria with Rowena Loverance, who is flourishing in her job. She showed us new acquisitions in the medieval room: beautiful icons, plus rooms being prepared for exhibition, with curators experimenting with different colors on the walls. So much planning goes into what we take for granted when we see the finished exhibit. Then on our own: Elgin Marbles, which now have very helpful placards. The great destruction came in Morosini’s explosion, alas. Such extraordinary attention to detail in the frieze of the procession! Also saw the sculpted drum from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus that I have a photo of on my bedroom wall. Museum full of schoolchildren, especially in the Egyptian rooms, all making drawings. Saw the Rosetta Stone. Then to the Penn Club to work on my lecture for Saturday. Then to National Gallery, a new Sainsbury wing; went directly to my favorite, the unfinished Michelangelo Madonna. The skin tones are extraordinary. All the texture of the natural skin is there. Other highlights: Van Eyck’s marriage portrait, Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks with the cartoon also, Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in Stream and Belshazzar’s Feast, Velazquez’s Toilet of Venus, which inspired Goya’s Majas, which we saw in the Prado. Then a milkshake in McDonald’s in the Strand. Then met Roddy at Charing Cross and went out to Elthorne (associated with Chaucer). Fran very warm. Two lovely young boys who hugged him deliciously. Full dinner with easy, nice conversation. He’s a good friend. His history of the 19th and 20th century Greek literature will be published by Oxford next year.

Friday, March 19, 1993

Practiced reading Greek poems for tomorrow, and presenting the computer drills. Then started translating Kazantzakis letters from 1932, a long one in French to E. Levi and an even longer one in Greek to Prevelakis. Then at 4:00 with Chrysanthi via bus to Daphne’s office. Hyde Park resplendent in daffodils and crocuses. S & S is in an Arab neighborhood, Bank of Kuwait on the corner, cafés, sweet shops, all newspapers in Arabic. We walked to Grosvenor Square and through Mayfair, past Claridges and Boodles to Soho. Dined in an Indian restaurant and then saw Peter Shaffer’s new play Gift of the Gorgon, magnificently acted by Judi Dench and Michael Pennington. A moving show: mix of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, layered, with huge set speeches, epiphanies with gods and running theme of retribution vs. pacifism, the story of a self-centered and self-consuming playwright who destroys his own career and then himself: Perseus unable to destroy the Gorgon. Shaffer has a formula for presenting intellectual elements passionately—a theater of ideas married to a theater of cruelty, majesty, and noble declamation. We’ve seen three shows so far: the Wilde, Pinter, and Shaffer, each entirely different, each excellent in its own way. But this is clearly the most compelling.

Saturday, March 20, 1993

To King’s for the annual Greek day, sponsored by SCOMGIU. I addressed the opening plenary session using my Foreign Service talk on poetry and politics, but reciting the poems in Greek, which was great fun. Then I demonstrated our two computer programs, Greek drills and Annotext, using the Powerbook. Chrysanthi then did a Rassias method demonstration which, as always, was a great hit. I heard Philip Carabott speak on the Macedonian question in Greek and had no problem whatsoever understanding. Lunch with David Ricks (who knows Henry Gifford), Peter Mackridge, David Holton, and the Cambridge MG librarian on a boat moored in the Thames behind Somerset House. Steak and kidney pie plus a bitter (the latter kindly paid for by David Ricks). In the afternoon, Mark Mazower gave a fine presentation on archival material and George Varontsakis spoke in Greek on Aspects of Greek Nationalism. So I was able to listen to 2½ hours in Greek. What a pleasure! And also to take part in the discussion in Greek. Jane Cowan, who’d been on a panel with me in Providence, as she reminded me (I’d forgotten, of course), ended the day with a talk on Music and Politics, playing samples from Savvopoulos, rebetica, etc. Lots of fun. And I made good contacts for JMGS. All this ended with a sumptuous supper in the Great Hall.

Sunday, March 21, 1993

To Westminster Meeting. Fine ministry, mostly about women, and all integrated with the need to meet challenges and the fear involved in doing so. Ministry so much better than in Hanover Meeting, which is so self-indulgent. Westminster Friends are involved, feeding the homeless, in education, with Friends and the arts, etc. An active group. Glad to see that they take our Pendle Hill pamphlets, and the librarian said how much she appreciates Pendle Hill books.

French fries and a hamburger in McDonald’s, then to the Royal Academy to see the Rouault show—the early years, 1903–1920. One tends to see only his later work. But the early work is extraordinarily moving, the product of a genius. His clowns depict the way humans hide their sadness in loneliness behind masks and costumes. His horrendous “filles” (= prostitutes) depict “the fallen Eve” in all its realistic pathos. But there are also wonderfully tender scenes, e.g., Maternité (vieux faubourg), 1912, and the two versions of Christ mocked. His self-portrait as a clown, an immensely sad clown, is heartbreaking. The ceramics he did have lovely colors, and his 1903 bathers are the equal of Cezanne’s. What a treat to have all these images brought together from museums as far away as Tokyo, and from numerous private collections!

Returned to Sprimont, picked up Daphne and Greg and we all went to see the Sally Potter movie of Orlando at 5:00 p.m., a sumptuous pageant, extremely moving, clear in its feminist message, not so clear perhaps in its theme of continuity (the house) versus change. The scene with Swift, Pope, and Addison (who is never identified) was particularly delicious. Why hasn’t someone done a film of Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse?

Finished the evening with Benny Hill!

Monday, March 22, 1993

Finished Quakers and Railways by E. H. Milligan, purchased at Meeting last Sunday. I was unaware of Friends’ important contribution to the growth of railways in Britain. A Friend invented the rail ticket, Bradshaw (of Bradshaw’s Handbook) was a Friend. Friends were CEOs of Midland Railway for most of its nineteenth-century life; Friends were prominent in other railways, etc. Was the same true in America?

Tuesday, March 23, 1993

Terrible time in the morning trying to decipher one of Kazantzakis’s letters to Anghelakis and to translate it. Three hours spent on one letter. In the afternoon went to Friends House to buy pamphlets for our Meeting and the Kendal Meeting. Started looking for books on Quakers’ testimonies regarding employer-employee relationships. The librarian told me that Rowntree would be more helpful than Cadbury, and I discovered B. Seebohm Rowntree’s The Human Factor in Business: Further Experiments in Industrial Democracy, 3rd edition, 1938. In addition there is an excellent series of Proceedings from periodical meetings of Quaker industrialists at Woodbrooke to discuss precisely such matters. Spent two hours taking notes and will return tomorrow with my Powerbook.

In the evening, went to see Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. I’d always thought Coward a second-rate author, and this confirmed my opinion. It’s what the Greeks call a “farce,” a well made play based on exaggeration. A little like the old plays of humours, I suppose. About pretentious artist-types who are all solipsists, and what happens when they inadvertently invite four guests to their country house. Lots of laughs, but it doesn’t add up to much, really, and technically is a nullity. But the satire is, I suppose, somewhat memorable. I can see why he was so popular. He made the British feel good because they were giving approbation to something that criticized their faults. Yet the criticism is sufficiently shallow and “clever” that none of it ever really hurts.

Wednesday, March 24, 1993

Letters in the morning, then back to Friends House library, this time with my computer, to take notes on Seebohm Rowntree’s account of Quakerly business practices. What a beautiful account! Would that all businesses, or even half, could have had such principles and such direction! Of course many of the policies pioneered by these Quakers in the 1910s and 1920s are now commonplace, but not all. I hope to argue for some changes at Kendal à propos, particularly regarding procedures for disciplining or dismissing staff. Of course Jean will object because she’s an autocrat at heart. But, as Kazantzakis keeps saying, “We’ll see . . .”

Thursday, March 25, 1993

Letters in the morning, then to Daphne’s office with Chrysanthi. Lunch in a pub. Cottage pie, which gave me diarrhea later. Daphne very nervous because she thinks she’s about to lose the first book she thought she had bought. The author keeps demanding more and more, and S & S is unwilling to stretch the contract. We walked across Hyde Park to the Serpentine. How beautiful! Then to Harrods, a showplace, to see the famous food halls and buy a present for our hosts. I’ve never seen so many varieties of cheeses. But the whole phenomenon struck me as very decadent, considering all the poverty in the world, and indeed at Harrods’ doorstep.

Later, Daphne home triumphant. Her author agreed to the terms proposed. And, on the same day, she purchased her second book. The first is about the royal family, the second is about teenage psychology. Greg explained how Goldman Sachs today sold billions in options to the central bank in Taipei. Taiwan agreed to buy fighter planes from France in six months, paying in francs. But their own resources are in dollars. Because they fear the dollar will weaken against the franc, they’ve bought options to protect themselves should the dollar’s value go down.

Friday, March 26, 1993

Translating until 4:30. Then with Chrysanthi to the National Gallery’s East Wing to see the modern painters we’d missed last time. A feast of Cézannes, Seurats, Van Goghs, Monets, Manets, some Picassos (the little girl with the dove, from the Blue Period, is sweet), and Degas’s fine Spartan Youths. Met Daphne and Greg. Italian dinner. Then a splendid production of Cyrano de Bergerac, acted with Shakespearian quality by Robert Lindsay, with Stella Gonet as Roxana; directed by Elijah Moshinsky. Splendid fableau, mise en scène, scenery, but especially that wonderful voice production that comes with training in Britain. The A.R.T. seems amateur by comparison. Cyrano is a sort of Zorba mixed with Nietzsche and Don Quixote. The play has everything: humor, pathos, sentiment, wit, action, contemplation.

Saturday, March 27, 1993

Walked all around lovely Chelsea with Greg and Daphne. Each street is a new surprise. Tea nearby: scones heaped with “clotted” cream; lemon cake; Assam tea in a private pot. Then another long walk, ending in Dillon’s Bookstore. Message from Leander upon return. He has proposed to Deanna and has given her her ring. Drove to Franconia to do it (they’ve been in Hanover a few days). Wedding in March 1994 probably. Let’s hope it works!

Sunday, March 28, 1993

Home

Arrived Boston 2:00 p.m. London weather. Drizzle, fog, miserable. Pilot landed with zero visibility. Remarkable. Then five hours to reach Hanover on bus fully loaded with students. Dinner at Panda House. Sleep at the equivalent of 3:00 a.m.

April 6, 1993

Hanover

Chrysanthi had a barium enema to try to see what’s wrong with her stomach, etc.

Buried in accumulated mail during the past ten days. Thank god I’m not teaching this term. Journal page proofs, arrangements for Constantinides Translation Prize, Kendal Overseers, more trouble re: the Websters and Jean; planning for Kendal retreat. Nothing done on Kazantzakis letters. I need to be in London for that, it seems.

I’m invited to be in residence in Princeton for a month. Will go for four days in May.

I’m invited to apply for headship of the Onassis Center at NYU. I said OK but I’m not seeking the job. I’d love to change it into a center for post-doctoral research and for subsidizing publications.

April 8, 1993

I had a sigmoidoscopy: examining the large colon for cancer. Results: all clear, everything normal. Very disagreeable procedure, involving the need to have repeated enemas in preparation. Last night I was in a cold sweat, hadn’t felt that way since my gall bladder attack.

April 9, 1993

Tried to speed up Bev Webster’s contract, but Jean is adamant. Almys went to see her and she said it wasn’t because of alcoholism but something else that she could not divulge. And she reneged on her promise to me to regularize him next October. I spoke with Michael and with John Diffey. Hard to know what to do next.

April 11, 1993, Western Easter

Chrysanthi went to Aquinas House, desiring ritual and music. I went to Meeting, which was totally silent until Susan Stark rose and my heart sank. But she was mercifully brief. Nothing on Easter. I wanted to speak but hesitated. I’ve not ministered for months. Then a nice lunch at Kendal with Mother and Nodas, including Kesaya.

If I’m ever to write a novel, Kendal would be a perfect subject. A new Magic Mountain. The material is inexhaustible—e.g., Lesbian Jean and her temper, screaming at residents; the whole problem with Bev Web: alcoholism, wife-beating (?); Kellogg, the Alzheimer ex-diplomat, charming the nurses with incoherent French and wandering off to “Bermuda,” “Morocco” (he died the other day); Harlan Logan, the other Alzheimers, defecating on a chair in the dining room, falling, Audrey’s anger over the refusal to use restraints; the whole saga of the Eberharts, and Richard Eaton the leech; various Overseers; the food petition; emergencies: flooding of apartments; Ruth Adams, who won’t eat in the dining room because she requires a smoke and a whisky; John Gilbert wasting away with heart disease, then operated on, with minimal chance of recovery, and rejuvenated remarkably.

Saturday, April 17, 1993

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

To Bethlehem via AMTRAK from Springfield to NYC and then bus. Listened to Pride and Prejudice in the car. Worked on JMGS using the laptop on the train. Chinese dinner with Leander and Deanna, now engaged, of course. Discussion of when to hold the wedding. Depends mostly on Alec, because he’ll be in Indonesia. Leander is very discouraged about the concert for tomorrow. He hasn’t practiced enough. Wanted to go to Ανάσταση service at midnight (it’s Greek Easter) but Chrysanthi was too tired.

Sunday, April 18, 1993

Hotel Bethlehem

To Moravian service. Beautiful music (Dick and Monica Schanz of course). Readings from various gospels on questions of faith: how disciples believed or did not believe that Jesus “was still among them.” Doubting Thomas rebuked. Readings interspersed with gorgeous anthems. Sermon on the same subject: how failure (Peter, Thomas) can open up a window of opportunity to grow—for us, too. Long talk with Monica afterwards up in the organ loft, about Leander’s predicament.

Alec arrived. To the recital at 3:00. Corelli, Mozart’s Ε-flat major K. 481, J. E. Brown’s Sonatina, Brahms’s D minor op. 108; varied and moving. Of course Leander afterwards thought he played terribly, struggling just to get the notes right; didn’t enjoy a moment of it. But the audience enjoyed. Old faces: Howard Mitchell (“Mitch”) and wife; he’s still at Bethlehem steel, which is still in business although losing money every year. Jean Storch, Leander’s host. Robin Wright and daughter (who’ll be flower girl at the wedding), Brenda, the obese piano student, a Chinese piano student; some familiar colleagues. A nice annual ritual.

Then to “Manny’s”—the Greek garage operator—for lamb on a spit plus all the μεζεδάκια. His daughter is reading The Last Temptation. He told us his life story. Failed at school, sent out at age 15 to learn a trade in Athens. Came here. Prospered. Children all in college.

We adjourned to the hotel for coffee. Leander very discouraged about his future in Washington, which is overloaded with pianists. Orchestra contacts are no good because so many players, already, have pianist spouses who want help. He doesn’t practice, then hates his playing and feels less like practicing. A vicious circle. Burn-out. Wants to stop performing. Hopes to take on private students to make money. I told him he’d be miserable doing this alone, without performance. Basically he’s paralyzed. He’s done nothing to further his career since we last saw him. The Moravian job, which he clings to, is exploitative and unsatisfying and immensely inconvenient because of the commute. So, it’s hard to know what will happen next. I’m going to try to see Charlie Hamlen and to ask his advice.

Monday, April 19, 1993

Bethlehem–Hanover

Long, leisurely breakfast with Dick and Monica Schanz and Leander and Chrysanthi. Lots of laughter. Dick is going to retire from Moravian but will stay in the church. Leander drove us to Penn Station. AMTRAK to Springfield; car home, to piles of mail, of course.

Tuesday, April 20, 1993

Hanover

Cook/Bien poetry extravaganza in the War/Peace course. Spoke to the dean, Jim Wright, about the 4th Council and College Course 1. He helped me by describing a possible new scheme for multidisciplinary courses with a new committee for certification and oversight, just right for us (if they’ll have us).

Ada Cohen lectured on rape in Ancient Greek art. I had trouble staying awake. Then to hear Tom Powers on his book on Heisenberg and the German atom bomb project. Fascinating. Tom feels that Heisenberg deliberately slowed the German efforts. In effect after 1942 they did nothing.

Interview with Jim Wright regarding College Course 1 opened a new possibility. The COI is thinking to establish an entirely new committee to oversee multidisciplinary courses. With luck we could come under the committee and escape the 4th Council.

Thursday, April 22, 1993

To Philadelphia

I’ve spent this entire month working on the journal. Have done nothing with the Kazantzakis letters since leaving London, alas. Also I see Frazier Miller weekly; he’s studying Beckett’s poetry and keeping a reading journal. Samantha Stoddard is developing into a splendid editorial assistant for JMGS. Meghan Donleavy is good, too, very conscientious.

Breakfast meeting with Pam Gile and Sherri Buckman at Kendal. Subgroup to consider employee relations. I gave them my summary of the Rowntree book.

To Manchester. US Air plane diverted to Boston. But they found us another aircraft flown in empty with a very tired crew. Arrived at Pendle Hill very tired at 11 p.m.

Friday, April 23, 1993

Pendle Hill–New York City

Breakfast with Peter Crysdale and then Nancy Frommelt, who is teaching Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis this term. She says that Matthew Fox’s theology will go with The Last Temptation for my religion and literature course next year. Silent meeting. I’m still very dry. Someone told me about Woolman, who felt he had ministered out of vanity and who then kept silent for six months. Good meeting with Rebecca, who affirmed that she feels at ease working with me. John Anderson is still causing trouble with books: “Peter railroaded it!” But Morehouse sales figures are encouraging, and Allen Kelly is very upbeat about the collaboration. An hour in my room to read more Cadbury applications; then meetings from 12 noon until 7:30 p.m. without a break. Publications 12 to 4: Jack Monger bitterly opposed John Punshon’s realignment piece but we hope to salvage it. The favorite this time was Carol McCormack’s on wicca = witches! Then Cadbury Fellowship Committee. We gave the award to a British woman who will study the role of American Quakers in the Spanish civil war. Then Book Committee over supper. I convinced them to do the poetry submission by subscription only, to guarantee the expenses. Surprisingly, the group was lukewarm about a reprint of Douglas Steere’s writings but we’re going to read some and decide. Doug Gwyn’s book got a very good review from Sonny Cronk. We expect it in finished state a year from now. Reevaluation of book publishing and Morehouse next January with John Anderson and Denny. Judith Randall is leaving the bookstore to do hospice work. Tom Brown resigned owing to age, his wife’s health, etc. Too bad. Rebecca is going to ask folks if they feel at ease with me continuing as clerk. I concurred, assuring her that the clerkship is not an ego trip for me.

SEPTA delayed, but I still made the 9:24 to New York.

Saturday, April 24 1993

Yale Club, NYC

Breakfast with Charlie Hamlen. He explained Classical Action, his company that will raise money, via donated concerts, to care for AIDS patients. They’ll do soirées in large private homes, and a German festival is giving a whole day as a benefit in Leonard Bernstein’s memory, etc. What surprised me was Charlie’s confession that he felt unfulfilled in his previous position. His management had grown so huge, so successful, so international, that he, as director, was no longer in real touch with the artists, but was mostly in the office pushing papers. He decided he had to quit, and did so even before Classical Action was thought of and established. In other words, he was willing to take the chance. When we spoke about Leander, he advised the same. He should quit the job at Bethlehem and accept being unemployed for a time. Charlie thinks he should move to some collateral occupation involved with music. But to cling to Moravian, an excuse for not actively pursuing other possibilities, and also to think that private students will satisfy him, are mistakes. Charlie promised to talk to Leander and also to contact acquaintances, e.g., the director of the Kennedy Center. The important thing is that Charlie himself has passed through a period of self-doubt and near paralysis, similar to Leander’s; thus he can empathize. I asked him about Paula Xanthopoulou. Her management business failed. She is now devoting herself, in various ways, full time, to Lesbian concerns.

Charlie was on his way to visit another friend dying of AIDS, aged 40-ish, a Greek. His mother came here, from Athens, to watch him die.

Then to the Met to see “The Greek Miracle” exhibit. Yes, “miracle” is the right word for these exquisite sculptures. What detail, naturalistic and yet at the same time the figures are abstracted beyond the particular to become icons of the universal. My favorites are the grave stele of a little girl kissing her pet dove, her little arms puffy, and an amazing stele of a young man whose hand-knuckles are almost alive. It was interesting to see the Kritios Boy here at the same time that, in the photography exhibition, there is a photo of it and some other pieces shortly after they were discovered buried in debris on the Acropolis.

Havemeyer Collection disappointing because the best pieces are already in the Met and thus I see them regularly—e.g., El Greco’s View of Toledo. Photography exhibit a fascinating view into history—e.g., the photo of Lincoln taken in 1860: such a homely, ungainly man. Finally, a very quick tour through the Daumier prints. Encountered a former student in a deli where I was having lunch.

In the evening, Mamet’s play Oleanna with Treat Williams and Mary McCoun. 8th Street and 2nd Avenue, just off St. Mark’s Place, which I hadn’t experienced before on a Saturday night. It’s a separate, exotic world! The play, about a university professor whose tenure decision is reversed because he is accused, mostly unjustly, by a female student of sexual elitism, and even attempted rape, was very “close to home” in its exposure of the professor’s desire for security, his use of inflated language, his insensitivity to the power he holds over students via grading and, more insidiously, his messages that students are “stupid.” But, although based on some slight provocation, the female student’s accusations are egregiously distorted, a projection of her own anger and self-hatred. At the end, the professor is helpless, for the tenure committee accepts all the charges and suspends him. A black drama indeed, brilliantly acted. And with Mamet’s characteristic expertise in dialogue, especially unfinished sentences, non sequiturs, repetitions.

Sunday, April 25, 1993

Worked on Samatas’s essay using the Powerbook. Then to MoMA to see Max Ernst exhibit, the most memorable canvas, for me, being the 1926 “Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter.” The 12-year-old’s red bottom is at the center, with a determined Virgin raising her hand for yet another blow. Her halo is intact, but the child’s has fallen off and is lying on the floor. It was nice to see photos not only of Ernst but of Breton, Éluard, Man Ray, and Tzara.

Burt Pike met me for Yale Club brunch. He is disillusioned with the profession and thinks about retirement, as I do, but I’m way ahead of him, it seems, in having a post-retirement plan. He has no outside interests or involvements, he openly confessed. Thus retirement frightens him. He ought to become interested in a CCRC. It’s nice in any case that we enjoy seeing each other, since he is my only Haverford friendship, seeing that Peter Gardner acts so indifferent. Oh yes, there’s also Tom Wilson, whom I’ll probably see next month in Princeton. But Burt and I share professional interests and experience, which makes friendship easier.

Uneventful trip home; flight to Manchester. But when I drove into the garage, intent on leaving enough room for the bicycle on the left, I went too far to the right and ripped the side-view mirror off. Oh my! But, as Chrysanthi so wisely says, Μη χειρότερα!

Once home I learned that poor Audrey Logan is in despair because Harlan fell again. They’ve put him to sleep now on the floor so he cannot fall out of bed.

The IRA bomb in London’s financial district was near Greg’s office, but since the explosion was on Saturday no one was working, thank goodness, except cleaning ladies. Huge damage, however. The dean of St. Paul’s said that if Hitler could not quell our spirits, surely the IRA won’t succeed.

Wednesday, April 28, 1993

Long breakfast, 7:30 to 10:00, with Lloyd Lewis, very cordial. He was frank about his dislike of Alan Hunt, whom he sees as self-serving, avoiding all sorts of conflicts of interest. Hunt tried to sabotage Paul Lewis, too, and probably pushed Lloyd out of the directorship, more or less. Lloyd is 65, will go on half-time now, and continue to develop new communities. He is pleased with his ability so far to disengage, allowing John Diffey to run his own show. Lloyd also lamented Carol Weingeist’s fate and stated that Jean never gave Carol a chance, but drove her into the ground, creating such tension that Carol became paralyzed. He is still trying to find a position for her.

We laughed about Nancy Bekavac, who is an “FOB” (Friend of Bill’s). She was in Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton. She’s doing well. I told Lloyd about Leander and he, contrary to Charlie, stressed that Leander should not resign his job at Bethlehem. Employers always hesitate to hire unemployed people. It’s much better to find another job while still holding a previous one. Then one can quit. He mentioned that Richard Bewley is currently unemployed, as is Dick Dewees. How sad!

Alec’s headmaster at Jakarta has offered to upgrade him from Middle School Principal to Assistant Headmaster in charge of Κ through 8.

I’ve been invited to go to China.

Long lunch with Robert Binswanger. Morgan is now in the Department of Education, grade 12, at age 26. Regarding the War/Peace mess, he said that the dean will expect me to be a pushover since I’m mild and inoffensive. Thus I should fight, scream, really object. Then they’ll cave in. Bob has lots of experience in such things. This afternoon the 4th Council met on College Course 2 and gave Jack a hard time again. I fear for the verdict.

Thursday, April 29, 1993

An unpleasant morning. I’m part of a panel of “judges” hearing the dispute between the Medical School and Dennis Thron, whom they want to fire because he refuses to teach in the pharmacology course. He says that his refusal is justified because his academic freedom was impaired owing to arbitrary decisions for the course, made by the chairman without properly consulting Thron. What a sad situation! I pleaded with them to forget the past and allow an outside arbitrator to help them find a rapprochement that may still be possible. But Dennis especially kept harping on the past. Tomorrow we meet “in camera” to make our recommendation to President Freedman.

Friday, April 29, 1993

As usual, I was the most lenient. Bernie Gert was the most stringent, really nasty. Ed Berger and Gert Assmus were in the middle, and the chair, Hoyt Alverson leaned a bit toward Gert. They all felt that Thron was guilty as charged—i.e., of unjustifiably refusing to teach even though they recognized the provocations involved. The only thing I could do for Thron was to sway the others, actually without too much difficulty, to reject Dean Wallace’s recommendation of termination and to substitute for it mandatory flexible retirement beginning next year (Thron is 62). Gert then insisted on adding another clause: that if Thron refused any teaching assignment, termination should be the consequence. So, he can retire at 65 with some dignity unless he continues his intransigence, which is noble, but also self-destructive and perhaps even a bit pathological. Poor man!

In the evening, Rhea McKay and I conducted a Ministry and Counsel survey at Kendal with about 25 participants, asking what they desired of the Meeting. It didn’t work too well because enough of them hardly knew what a Meeting is.

Mother wanted to attend but she had severe dizziness and vomiting the night before—a virus. The Kendal care was exemplary. Within minutes she was in the Health Center. She’s feeling very good about the move to Kendal at the moment.

Saturday, May 1, 1993

Rosine Gardner is here from North Creek for a Rassias workshop. Poor Jerry is still struggling. Rosine says that the newspaper nets only about $5000 a year. No gossip about Mr. Morris.

Went to Kendal for lunch, saw the Websters, and Franny told me the unbelievable news. Bev is to be granted a regular contract. He signs it on Monday. This was decided by the administrative group that Jean convened. Of course Jean did not have the courtesy to tell me. Bitch! But our strategy worked. Probably sending the Almys did the trick. Also my restraint, keeping mum and orchestrating things behind the scenes. Must write to John Diffey.

Jean is mortified by Audrey Logan’s campaign throughout Kendal against an inflexible non-restraint policy. She wants me to convince Audrey to meet with Jean and me. Apparently Audrey cannot stand her. So far I’ve not been able to find Audrey.

Sunday, May 3, 1993

Ministry and Counsel, then Meeting. I ministered—the first time in so very long—on Charlie Hamlen’s Classic Action and the extraordinary cooperation he has received, as proof that human beings can indeed cooperate, whereas the news seems to indicate that all they can do is kill each other.

Worked on Samatas’s essay for JMGS all afternoon. I’ve spent a week of my life fixing his abominable English.

Supper with the “gang.” Mary Soderberg’s birthday. Lafayette, Mayme, Mary, Roger, Treat, Molly, Chrysanthi, Audrey. At the Shaker restaurant at Lake Mascoma. Afterwards I extended Jean’s invitation to Audrey. It was refused. Audrey won’t see her. Says she’s inflexible, as is Audrey, too, of course.

Michael Webster telephoned to say thanks for his parents.

Monday, May 4, 1993

Kendal Task Force. I presented my Quaker Business Practices à la Rowntree, and of course they rejected them. Not peremptorily, but “watch and wait.” “If dissatisfaction is shown by an employee questionnaire, then perhaps we can move in that direction. But why create expectations among the employees unnecessarily?” Ugh!

Jean is planning her annual review; wants me involved again. Will it do any good? I had to tell her about Audrey.

Umberto Eco lectured on “the search for an ideal language.” Amusing. Mostly, people thought it must be Hebrew—what Adam spoke (!!). The Tower of Babel ended the paradise of a simple language. But, when all is said and done, Babel is good. Adam must have been multilingual and multicultural. I thought of Serbia today. Supper with Eco later, and other professors including Tatum, who has been at a march in Washington over the weekend. Eco loud and exuberant and “multicultural/multilingual.”

Tuesday, May 4, 1993

Walter Stephens gave a brilliant and provocative lecture on witches in Humanities Forum. I wanted to get a copy for Carol McCormack, who wrote on the Wicca movement for Pendle Hill and had none of the depth of Walter’s analysis. But he demurred; wants to see it published first. Awful!

Visited Tom Luxon’s class on Burke and the French Revolution. Interesting analysis of the material, but absence of teaching techniques, as usual.

To Lui Lui to celebrate Walter Arndt’s birthday with Corinne and her children and Dick Sheldon and Dave Lemal. Corinne is flourishing after her disastrous first marriage to an alcoholic.

Wednesday, May 5, 1993

Mary Kelley’s inaugural lecture on women intellectuals in the 18th and 19th century—how they read, kept commonplace books, etc. I thought of my practice of encouraging students to do this. Frazier Miller is keeping a beautiful diary right now on Beckett.

Thursday, May 6, 1993

Lunch at the Norwich Inn for the annual William Chambers lecture. Susan was there of course, but also Wim and the two girls. What a strange family! Dr. Sox presented a private reprinting of Bill’s two Haverford lectures. I’ve ordered copies for Haverford library and for the Meeting House. Sat across from Dr. and Mrs. Waters; he treated Daphne years ago.

Friday, May 7, 1993

Amherst

To Amherst to examine students taking Greek. They varied this time: A to D. But it’s still a nice process, and an easy way to make $300. Elizabeth Mazzocco wants our cooperation in an interactive video project recording Greek pronunciation.

Saturday, May 8, 1993

“Terpni”

Beautiful day. Waddell Road has been “raped” by the Electric Company, thanks to Mr. Morris. Beyond our entrance there’s now a 25-foot swath filled with fallen trunks. At least they piled some chips for us. Their truck got stuck in the lower field and chopped it up horribly. Chrysanthi and I worked hard to redistribute the sods that were ripped away. But I’ll need topsoil and a harrow or bulldozer to get it all even again. Couldn’t start the Jari; that’s a disappointment. But the water turned on fine. The house looks fine. I dared not walk into the forest to see what left of it after this winter’s lumbering.

Sunday, May 9, 1993

“Terpni”

Serviced the John Deere and started it without trouble. Worked on Pscharopoulos’s article last night on my marvelous Powerbook. Lovely dinner in an Italian restaurant near Rutland: Luigi’s. A Mother’s Day special. Learned that Mother’s Day was started by Julia Ward Howe as a pacifist expression for mothers’ sorrow in warfare.

Monday, May 10, 1993

Hanover

Elise Boulding for supper, with Audrey Logan. Elise gave me the collection of Kenneth’s unpublished sonnets. He was writing one a day, right up to his death. About life’s simple pleasures and experiences. Very moving. She hopes that Pendle Hill can publish them.

Tuesday, May 11, 1993

7:15 a.m. breakfast with the Dean, Karen Wetterhahn, and the associate dean of Thayer School, Carol Muller, who want to set up a university seminar on women in science. Discovered that Wetterhahn grew up in the Adirondacks. She actually knew where North Creek is.

Big luncheon banquet for ILEAD. Dr. Koop spoke about medical crises. Very discouraging. He has little faith in Clinton’s efforts. But Tom Almy told me, later, that Koop is just embittered because Clinton isn’t asking for his advice. Tom Campion in his element as toastmaster. Nardi Campion showed me her ILEAD recommendations: 1st choice Paradise Lost taught by Peter Bien!

Meghan Dunleavy re: JMGS and Frazier Miller re: Beckett in the afternoon.

Wednesday, May 12, 1993

Philadelphia

8:00 a.m., War/Peace Steering Committee meeting with Elise. More discussion of how to salvage the program. I wish that Elise had been here to speak to the 4th Council instead of me. Every avenue is problematical.

Adjourned at 9:30 a.m. and caught the 10:30 a.m. flight to Philadelphia via Boston, traveling with Walter Frank, founder of Walter Frank Investments and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, now 85 years old. An extrovert, conversationalist, jokester; delightful companion. We were together from 10:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. and thoroughly enjoyed it. At airports he of course brought us to the first class lounges for drinks, etc. At Philadelphia we were picked up by a Kendal driver. Out to the Development Corporation for a meeting of the long range task force on mission and goals. We agreed that the Corporation should diversify, not restrict itself necessarily to Type A CCRCs.

Thursday, May 13, 1993

Taught Jim Heffernan’s Ulysses seminar on Oxen of the Sun. The two hours flew by. Supper at Kendal to celebrate Bev Web’s 85th birthday. Sat with Tom Almy, Mary Bunting, Franny Webster, Mrs. Chapman. Learned that Carleton Chapman had been Andreas Papandreou’s personal physician. Oh, and the lady I sat next to at the ILEAD lunch on Tuesday was Senator Fulbright’s mother-in-law.

Settled the next agenda with Jean and also some procedure for her evaluation. She has still not said a word to me about Bev Web. Barbara Gilbert told me that Jean’s brother is gay and that there was probably sexual abuse by the father, an alcoholic. John Diffey and I spoke briefly yesterday. He says that some of the staff are driven to tears by Jean, but that Dan and Brent have learned how to deal with her.

Friday, May 14, 1993

Got my Powerbook finally operative, with lots of help from Kiewit. I can now send and receive faxes with it, and sign on to blitz mail, bitnet, etc. Amazing!

Lunch with Luxon about his class. He’s very genial and open.

Final meeting with Alverson, Ed Berger, and Gert Amunson about the Thron verdict. Bernie Gert was absent, thank God. In his absence we all agreed to make the verdict less severe and vindictive, recognizing the administration’s fault in all this. We’ve asked merely that Thron be put on mandatory flexible retirement. He’s 62. He’ll retire at 65. That’s a humane way to deal with the situation.

I sent in my registration to go to China in September.

Pleasant supper at Jesse’s with Chuck and Trix Officer. High school students were next to us in tuxes and evening gowns for their prom. One girl was deliberately provocative in her low-cut gown. The girls whispered to each other behind their menus and disappeared to the bathroom for long periods. The boys were boorish behind their elegance.

U.S. News and World Report telephoned regarding Kendal. They want to photograph Mother and me, when I return from Princeton.

Saturday, May 15, 1993

With Sycha and Bill Spengemann to Ruth Adams’s flat at Kendal for drinks. We invited her to supper but she refused. She never eats in the Kendal dining room. We tried! She was cordial. Lovely apartment. Full of anecdotes, of course, deriving from her time as president of Wellesley, and then her time here under Kemeny helping to settle women in. Nice supper with Mother and the Spengemanns. He’s incensed because the college is trying to eliminate our London foreign study program. Then Bev Web’s concert: Bach sonata in D minor, Schumann Papillons, Debussy Reflets dans l’eau and Isle joyeuse, Chopin’s Berceuse op. 57 and Fantaisie op. 49. Bev in top form. The Debussy Reflets was scintillating, the Schumann too. The Chopin tender, brilliant, sonorous. Only the Bach was a little muddy. I was tremendously moved, as was everyone else, although his audiences are shrinking.

Monday, May 17, 1993

Princeton

Relaxing ride via AMTRAK with Chrysanthi. The train reminds me of the old Orient Express through Yugoslavia: stop, go, creep, stop, go, creep. But we arrived. Chrysanthi continued on to Washington to visit Leander and Deanna. I proceeded to Princeton, where I’ve been treated as a V.I.P. Installed in the Hellenic Studies guest room two blocks from the library, introduced immediately by Dimitri Gondicas to the curator of rare books—i.e., custodian of the Friar collection—then to fancy lunch at Prescott with Mike Keeley and Dimitri. George Kennan came in. We gossiped about the Onassis Center and the like. Mary Keeley is doing much better now; she was at death’s door a month ago.

Spent all afternoon examining the Friar archive. Very rich. Not just letters but all of Kazantzakis’s glosses on the Odyssey in response to Friar’s queries. Also Eleni’s letters as Kazantzakis was dying and after he died. Also, full correspondence of both Eleni and Kimon showing the break-up of their relationship owing to money squabbles chiefly. Horrible! I’m having the letters photocopied.

Then a grand supper at a restaurant with the Modern Greek contingent, Neni and Stathis, and Karakasidou, who wrote the Macedonian article, and others whom I hadn’t known before, and Mike and Mary, of course. To bed, finally, at midnight.

Tuesday, May 18, 1993

Princeton

Breakfast with Sandra Cronk and her mother in their comfortable home. Sonny’s institute for spirituality is flourishing; she’s also teaching people again how to “elder” responsibly. Worked on the Friar archives some more. The extent is much greater than I had imagined. Lunch with Judith Herrin, very cordial, fond memories of B’ham days, going in her car and running out of gas! She’s very happy here, but her husband Anthony is in England and involved in efforts for constitutional revision (working with Glenda Jackson among others) and can’t come here. Long interview afterwards with Gonda (= Honda) Van Steen, a grad student who wants to work on Greek theater. I was able to help her with leads. Then Dimitri Gondicas presented me with six essays for the journal, the result of a symposium held here, among them Danny Danforth’s on the Macedonian issue and something by Mouzelis and Tsoucalas. Big guns. More archives. Supper alone in a Chinese restaurant. Watched an excruciatingly funny movie on TV about an American boor who inherits the British throne and has to be “civilized”! Leander telephoned, all exited. They’ve found a house they want to buy. $250,000 with a 7¼% thirty-year mortgage. Who would have thought?! Chrysanthi saw the exterior and the neighborhood, and approved. He wanted my advice on the mortgage. What could I say? I just hope that his forthcoming marriage lasts and that he finds a way to make money.

Wednesday, May 18, 1993

Arranging to have topsoil delivered to repair damage at the farm. We’ll need to use the harrow and then I’ll seed the area. Morning at the archives again. Interesting responses from people to whom Friar sent the published Odyssey: Edmund Wilson’s printed card: E. Wilson does not . . . (list of items, e.g., read other people’s books, with a check mark next to that one). William Carlos Williams, M.D.: I’ve had a stroke, can’t read it. Dick Eberhart, polite but uncooperative. But kudos from L. Durrell, Bowra, etc. And what a saga to complete the publication, with Friar in Chile. If I do the article for the Princeton Library Journal I’ll need to return here next autumn.

Lunch at Prospect with Stathis Gourgouris, who also is very happy here: flourishing. Then an hour with an undergraduate, Ioannis Mentzan, whose father is Greek and mother Japanese and who grew up in Japan. We wants to go to grad school in comparative literature to do Greek and Japanese. I told him about Harvard, Ohio State, NYU, Birmingham, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris. More archives; then to the Keeleys’ for an end-of-term party with lot of lovely food and drink. All the “young” were present, plus others: a granddaughter of Tolstoy and a half-Greek half-Russian scientist, and a Yugoslav professor of Byzantine art, and Karakasidou again and Judith and Gonda. Good talk and fellowship. Mary Keeley says the doctor will allow her five or six weeks in Greece. Mike has given his archives to Princeton. He wants me to give my translation manuscripts and typescripts and early versions of Demotic Greek, etc. Also to come back here for extended periods of teaching sometime.

Returned to my quarters and accessed telephone messages. Shocked to learn from Issy Ganz that Peter Gardner died. The service was today; obviously I learned too late to go. No clue as to what happened. Also, Dick Brokaw telephoned to say that he and Channy are very disturbed about the materials I sent out for Jean’s evaluation. Trouble ahead. My Powerbook now sends faxes and I’ve made use of this. It also can access blitz mail at Dartmouth.

Thursday, May 20, 1993

Princeton

Finished with the archive, for now. Dimitri wants my collection of Kazantzakis letters deposited here, along with everything else. Visited with Bob Brown, my editor at Princeton University Press, who shocked me by saying that the Press is changing direction; it will publish moneymaking books instead of scholarly monographs. The typical monograph now sells only 500 copies. My Selected Letters and volume 2 of Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit are endangered, although he hopes that subsidy from the Seeger fund will make them pass. He advised me to hurry with the Letters. Alas, alack! How am I do to the Letters plus the journal and teaching?! He says we’re heading for books on demand. Booksellers will produce a book for a client from electronic copy.

Supper with Joan and Tom Wilson. They plan to move into Kendal at Hanover around 2000. Joan teaches recorder and plays gamba. We’ll have baroque chamber music, with me playing her harpsichord. They went back to Egypt recently, where Tom’s father worked. There’s still a University of Chicago Center, started by his father. We talked about his father’s death. Tom scattered the ashes in their yard; he didn’t want any tombstone. I said that life should be like theater or live music: it occurs, and then disappears without residue. As Kazantzakis says, we come from a dark abyss and return to a dark abyss. Why not simply accept this, even celebrate it?

Friday, May 21, 1993

Pendle Hill

Denny O’Brien did the financial summary for the Morehouse collaboration. Not bad. He figures we’re $1800 in the red, chiefly because of large sales (!) to Quaker bookstores, sales that we would have made at a higher profit without Morehouse. But several thousand books were sold elsewhere, which means “outreach.” Sonny Cronk’s book did particularly well. This means that if we continue we’ll need to think about books that will sell to the wider religious audience, not just to Quakers. Allan Kelly of Morehouse apparently is very pleased with the scheme.

Dan Seeger, whom I saw briefly, said that he experienced his first “disastrous” term, with student dissatisfaction sparked (he’s sure) by staff. I got no details, except the hint that “feminism” is involved. No surprise. Oliver Rodgers is stepping down as clerk of the board and will be replaced by Mary Wood. Dan is very apprehensive. The board is old and weak. Hal Cope and George Peck are “failing,” as Dan puts it, and he doesn’t respect Vince Buscemi. He wanted me for clerk, or Nancy Strong, but we were both rotated off the General Board by the by-laws. I go back on the General Board in October. Mary Wood could stay for eight years!

The Publication Committee surprised itself by actually accepting three manuscripts, a record. I gave Ken Boulding’s sonnets to Rebecca. They are extraordinary.

I enthused to Patty O’Hara about the Parliament on the Road. She tells me that the board will consider advancing her on-the-road job to 40% of her time because it’s going so well. Hooray!

Nice visit with Kenneth Sutton on the SEPTA back to 30th Street. Met Chrysanthi in her compartment on the Montrealer. Leisurely supper in the dining car, hearing all about Leander’s and Deanna’s plans for the March wedding, going slowly, and for buying a house, going faster. $250,000. Imagine! And Leander earns $12,000 a year. They’ll be dining with Neil Ratliff on Sunday. He has AIDS and is declining. Charlie Hamlen telephoned Leander but I don’t know what came of it.

Saturday, May 22, 1993

Cambridge

Arrived at 5:00 a.m. Mail. Telephone messages. Brokaws object to the evaluation plans for Jean. I spoke to Dick, trying to mollify him. Drove to Cambridge. Chrysanthi and Alec went off to lunch. I went to Eliot House to lunch with Zeta Farinou. She’s in C11, F. O. Matthiessen’s old room. Eerie. His library is preserved there, plus framed photos, book reviews by him, etc. I vividly remember when he jumped out of the Boston hotel window when I was an undergraduate. Two hours of conversation in Greek with Zeta. She’s working on biography as novel, or vice versa, a subject not yet exploited in Greece, and is including Kazantzakis. They’re all under pressure now to publish à la Americaine; that’s why I’m getting articles for the journal.

Oh, at Pendle Hill, Lisa Lewis, Lloyd’s wife, just returned from an elder hostel in Greece. She said that “everybody” there knew of me; apparently she encountered people whose articles I have been publishing.

Then to the A.R.T. for the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Orphée based on Cocteau’s film. Actually I liked the music. The first act was somewhat static. But the 2nd act was almost magical in the way it metamorphosed the myth of descent to Hades and return into a modern idiom.

I then helped Alec install his software for fax and modem and to send, successfully, his first fax. He’s elated. We dined at a Japanese restaurant in the old Sears Building in Porter Square. He had had breakfast with Robert Binswanger, who told him that Bob McGlynn says I was the brightest student he taught at Deerfield in his 40-year career there. (He never taught me, of course; Dick Hatch did.) Alec is disgusted with NiMo’s “rape” of Waddell Road; wants reparations. Strange how we differ in such things. I’m more passive and accepting. He’s off tomorrow to Washington to visit Leander and Deanna and to see the new house they hope to buy.

Walked to Au Bon Pain with Chrysanthi and had a lovely coffee. Cambridge on a spring Saturday night is a carnival. Like Πλατεία Ναυαρίνου in Thessaloniki, or Greenwich Village.

Worked on a journal article until I nodded.

Sunday, May 23, 1993

Overnight at Cambridge Friends Center, now transformed. The guest rooms are much smaller, but still very convenient. Breakfast with Dia Philippides and Meg Alexiou. Dia is married now to Wim Bakker, but he still lives in Amsterdam. She’s vivacious, as always.

Monday, May 24, 1993

The photographer from U.S. News and World Report came to Kendal. He spent 1½ hours taking four rolls of Mother and me talking to each other outside the front entrance. This is supposed to appear in the June 7th issue. He kept calling me “Tom” the whole time—we’ll see what caption appears. Rushed back to Dartmouth to talk about censorship to Joe Medlicott’s ILEAD class. Beckett’s Murphy at 5:00. Then to Jesse’s to sup with John Diffey, Jean, Chrysanthi and Barbara Gilbert, to continue planning the July retreat.

Tuesday, May 25, 1993

Good Overseers’ meeting. Brokaws complained about the consensual mode of evaluation for Jean, saying that evaluation should be determined solely by the CEO, whereupon the CEO reiterated that he desired the consensual mode. Voilà! Met with Lafayette afterward about the scheme for low-income housing, which he is pushing. Another huge project . . . perhaps. Then to dentist for cleaning. Then to lunch with John Rassias to talk about China. He discouraged me from going, saying that they are exploiting us. If they want exchange so badly, they should pay our way. He is quite bitter about his own experience there, it seems. I am torn. Chrysanthi is very opposed, too. Met at 5:15 with the new IDS representative, Donald Small, yet another financial counselor. I now have Corey Smith at Prudential, Hank Elitzer at PayneWebber, Jerry Santanello at Sherston, and Jeffrey Harris at Fleet Bank! . . . Then by car to Riparius.

Wednesday, May 26

Terpni

Planted tomatoes and string beans. Started the Jari (Alec had fixed it). Then back to Hanover to play von Weber trio with Dick and Allan. It’s getting better. We’re learning our parts.

Thursday, May 27

Working on the journal, as always. I told Prof. Stavrou that I cannot produce the Kazantzakis checklist this year—again. I’m reduced to correcting other people’s work rather than producing my own. Yet the journal is now “taking off,” I believe. Maybe it’s worthwhile. Mike Keeley said I was sacrificing myself.

CAP dinner. Nice talk with John Walsh and Ray Nash. Poor Ray is now ostracized by his three daughters, who side with their mother in the divorce. John and I reminisced about Oxford. Lots of talk about Jeff Hart.

Friday, May 28, 1993

My birthday. Chrysanthi gave me a pair of shorts with 34-inch waist, my size now, after 40 years of 32-inch. Cards from the children and Mother. Department banquet for Barbara Cunningham’s retirement, black tie. Nice talk with Ned (Ann’s condition is improving, but Amy’s romance in New Zealand is over and she’s back home), with Lynda Boose about her visit to Vietnam, Susan Brown about Andy Rangell. Even Jim Cox was friendly, probably half drunk. Jim Heffernan recited some clever doggerel modeled on Paradise Lost. The refrain, of course: the xerox machine.

Saturday, May 29, 1993

All day working on the journal. Supper with Karen and Dick Sheldon and Bob Watson. Karen’s birthday is 29 May, so we opened a bottle of champagne and toasted both her and me. A relaxed evening with delicious swordfish.

Sunday, May 30, 1993

Cambridge

To the A.R.T. with Mother. Lunch with Alec. He described his visit to Washington and the house that Leander and Deanna are hoping to buy. Listened to Leander’s CD of Elliott Carter’s cello sonata on the way down. It’s monumental, and both musicians play superbly. Spoke to Leander later and he said that he visited with Charlie Hamlen, who is going to mention Leander to various people in Washington. They also supped with Neil Ratliff, who was in good form, all in a Greek restaurant where Neil is in his element. Our play at the A.R.T. was “Cakewalk” by Peter Feibleman, an autobiographical/biographical “memoir” about Lillian Hellman and their tempestuous love affair. Superbly acted by Elaine Stritch as “Lilly” and John Slattery as “Cuff” (i.e., Feibleman). The narrative mode was well used, setting up vignettes of power and sentiment. The decline of Hellman—blindness, stroke, senile irascibility—was very touching. Supper at that funny Indian-Greek restaurant on Main Street in Concord. We were the only customers. Home by 9:30. Sent Alec a fax so he could test out his new capability on the Powerbook; then he sent one to me. It worked.

Wednesday, June 2, 1993

What a day! So varied! Started by driving to the hospital for PSA blood test, routine for benign (one hopes) prostate hypertrophy. Then in the office finishing computer conversations for JMGS’s IBM disk, discussing Maria Yiannakos’s cancer at length with Dr. Eric Larsen, the pediatric oncologist here, in order to fax information to Dimitris, whether it makes sense to bring her here for treatment or a second opinion. Larsen very pessimistic; probably she’ll die, alas. Then signed license affidavits for Kendal, to go to the State of New Hampshire. Then was interviewed by The Manchester Guardian regarding Kimon Friar, who died last week. Then tried to copyedit more JMGS reviews submitted in atrocious English. Then to a Comparative Literature lunch, a nice interval with Diana Taylor, Steve Scher, etc. Then with Nancy Davies in the office as she helped me remove unnecessary software from my hard drive. Then with her to Humanities Computing to do the IBM conversions. Then more copyediting. Telephone from NYC. I’m late with Diana Haas’s recommendation. E-mail from Greece: what is the verdict on X’s submission? E-mail from Peter Mackridge praising Karakasidou’s article on Macedonia—how nice! Fax from Athens: Charalambis’s charts again. Telephone to Lisa Ritter (Laaspere), who is redrawing the charts for me. Telephone to Better Business Bureau in Chicago and the Human Services Department of the State of Illinois to register a complaint against Federal Pharmaceutical for mail fraud. Bill Spengemann telling me my white dinner jacket is the most beautiful he’s ever seen (it’s Deerfield vintage, of course). Stopped at Serry’s and bought a proper tuxedo shirt. At home, making Demotic Greek cassettes. Talked at length with Audrey Logan re: Barbara Bartlett, whom I’m supposed to recommend somehow to Pendle Hill. Talked at length with Felitsa Macedon, in Greek, about all her troubles re: housing, location, etc.

Monday, June 7, 1993

The U.S. News and World Report issue on retirement did not print the photo of Mother and me. The part on Kendal was awful, emphasizing how expensive it is and little else, although they did quote me as saying that life there is “creative”!

Jack Shepherd is going to Cambridge (England). So now our War/Peace courses have no teacher.

Sent an obituary for Friar to Athens.

Tuesday, June 8, 1993

Lunch with Steve Scher. He never goes to graduation because of May Day in Hungary when he was forced to parade.

June 10, 1993

Cambridge

Arrived last night. Slept in Cambridge Meeting House’s new guest room. Such a let-down after the old one. Lined up at 7:45 a.m. to attend the morning ceremony. At least we got seats this time in the Yard, and it wasn’t raining. I was even under a tree and shaded. The ceremony, for me, lacked the excitement of Daphne’s graduation. Protestors with balloons saying “Lift the Ban” objected, politely, to Colin Powell’s presence. Afterwards, to the Ed School for an interminably long ceremony ending finally at 2:30, and we still had not had lunch. Katia, Alec’s Russian friend, joined us with her child; that was nice, and we picnicked finally. I went to the Business School to deliver one of Daphne’s papers to Professor Hackman and to request a recommendation sent to her quickly for use at L.S.E. but he wasn’t there; he’s on sabbatical. I spoke into his answering machine, explaining everything.

Upon our return, we greeted Mr. and Mrs. Ünsal and Selen. They had arrived from Istanbul at 2:00 a.m. the night before. Easy, relaxed exchange with them. Such a lovely couple!

Friday, June 11, 1993

Finished proofing my article for Jim Tatum’s book. Then took the Ünsals to Quechee to lunch and to see glass blowing, then to see the Ray School (what a delicious sight!), then the hospital, then Kendal, which they found very inspiring.

Music with Dick. We played the von Weber, just flute and piano. It’s hard for me when up to tempo. Also did Schubert songs. Alec arrived, having twisted his ankle, and went to the emergency room for X-rays. Leander has tonsillitis and conjunctivitis; he had to cancel a concert and teaching at Kinhaven’s pre-season program.

Saturday, June 12, 1993

Fax from Daphne. Hackman faxed her saying how wonderful that fathers are so devoted to their daughters. (He’d do the same for his.) He got the materials and fed-ex’d the recommendation. Hooray! Did something right for a change. . . . Finished Anita Brookner’s Fraud and wrote a 500-word review.

Afternoon “at home.” Visits from Irene Georgakoudi, David Engstrom, John Van Aalst, Jen Patterson, Ben King, Frazier Miller, Selen Ünsal, all with families. Very nice. Then supper at Kendal with Audrey and Mother and Alec.

Sunday, June 13, 1993

Dartmouth commencement. Saw Mickey Heyman, who’s retiring as chair of the board. He told me that his eldest son died of AIDS. Poor people! He is retiring from Berkeley to go to Washington, to the Department of the Interior, to develop a policy for use of federal lands. He hopes that we can visit more, now that he’s relieved of the chairmanship.

Lovely, leisurely supper at Molly’s Balloon with the Ünsals and Selen’s boyfriend, Charles, who seems so dull compared to her. Chrysanthi agrees: it’s strange the partners that people pick. All in all, having the Ünsals was delightful and very educational. It’s despicable the way the average Greek, or the Greek press, treats Turkey, condemning the people and the entire civilization for the excesses of the government. We are of course invited to Istanbul to be their guests.

Monday, June 14, 1993

To Terpni

Finally able to leave around 2:30 p.m. Arrived in time for supper with Alec, who also arrived. He’s obsessed with the “rape” of the road, as is Chrysanthi. I’m finding their concern rather tiresome. But Morris is clearly a “psycho.” Alec drove back on our road earlier and encountered a man in a parked pick-up. Talking to him, he discovered that he works for Morris and had been instructed to record the license numbers of vehicles headed for the Morris property.

Tuesday, June 15, 1993

Longwood

Up at 6:30 a.m. Drove to Albany airport, only 1½ hours away. Lunch in Longwood Inn with Crosbie Deaton, facilitator for our Kendal retreat in July. He had some good ideas for diversifying the format. I “briefed” him re: our impasse in outreach, and my desire to distribute my Rowntree notes + Greenleaf’s pamphlet “Institution as Servant,” which discusses hierarchical vs. egalitarian forms of governance. Then to Crosslands for the Task Force’s final recommendations and review of the mission statement, which needs changes. Nice to see Walter Frank again. He returned to New York in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, of course. Nice man, wealthy and powerful but at the same time humble. I also like John Diffey more and more. . . . Electrical defect in the USAir plane. We boarded, then disembarked and waited 1½ hours. Nice conversation with an engineer who’d built a small hydroelectric plant in Quechee and favors nuclear power, sensibly. Furious rain and lightning at Albany. Returned home slowly. No electricity. Pole down in Wevertown.

June 16, 1993

Terpni

Still no electricity at 10:00 a.m., making the outage 14 hours so far. Used the pump to wash and used the outhouse as in old times. Total outage 17 hours, thanks to Mr. Morris. I’m catching up on correspondence. Daniyal Mueenuddin wrote with glee to announce that he’s been accepted to Yale Law School, Oliver Metzger to complain that he’d been rejected from all law schools except Texas, the only one that didn’t require faculty testimonials. I’m reading Daniel Carson’s “Taps for a Dead White Male,” one half of a novel he proposes to make 1000 pages long. It’s very adolescent, pandering to sex and violence. Poor Daniel. He does have talent, but . . . How am I going to say this to him diplomatically? Gave up on reading Peter Wilson’s novel; it’s just too much.

Thursday, June 17, 1993

Art and Chris came over. Art bought three new horses after one of his died. He’s riding and training them instead of painting.

The tomatoes look sickly, but I gave them more fertilizer. Cut down large pine branches overshadowing the garden to give it more sunlight.

Catching up on correspondence delayed for six months in some cases. Daphne faxed her statement for LSE and I vetted it for her and returned it by fax within three hours—to London. Not bad. It will be terrible now if she’s not admitted, given that she has already quit her job.

Friday, June 18, 1993

Ordered ballet tickets. It’s a Balanchine festival this summer. Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald here for supper—steak on the outdoor grill. They haven’t given up on Clinton, bless them. Maureen didn’t know what the European Parliament is, or what’s happening in Macedonia. I explained (the journal educates me). Nanos Valaoritis telephoned from Paris re: the changes I made in his almost illiterate book review. Happily, he wasn’t angry. I wrote to Daniel Carson; he’ll be unhappy, of course. But I didn’t say that the novel is adolescent. I wrote a long letter to Outi in Sweden. Leander still refuses to answer her letters, so she gets her news from me. She has a little girl, but who knows if there is still a husband! She met Jack Wright, my PH advisee, at the Quaker Meeting in Stockholm. Small world. I still feel for her.

Saturday, June 19, 1993

Spent most of the day preparing a report on outreach for next Thursday’s task force, using the excellent materials distributed at Crosslands last Tuesday, plus, of course, the minutes of our Outreach Committee. We’ve floundered for months and months. Talked to Alec about Kendal governance. He found the Rowntree material inspiring and he agrees that democratizing the work force is the way to go. I showed him the Kendal staff survey, which shows so much dissatisfaction.

Alec and Chrysanthi spread the new mulch paper around the blueberries and covered it with wood chips. Looks very neat. We must now surround the blueberry plants with pine needles to give the soil the proper PH. Spent time writing to Better Business Bureau in Chicago complaining about Federal Pharmacal’s negligence in filling my order, not so much for the lost $26.00 as out of curiosity to see if anything happens. Also to the Attorney General of Illinois and to the postmaster where they have bulk mail privileges, accusing them of mail fraud.

Michael Gouthreau came and he and Alec sawed up a load of firewood as a present for Jerry Gardner. Rosine gave each a penny as pourboire (!) after they stacked the wood, with the children standing and watching instead of helping. Oh well. . .

Sunday, June 20, 1993

It’s raining. I’m in my office with the Powerbook (what a difference!) finishing correspondence and looking at some material on management that Alec had at Harvard. Must get back soon to the Harkianakis translations, and practice von Weber. And go round the edges of the fields picking up debris to prepare for mowing.

Leander arrived at 8:00 p.m. full of enthusiasm for the adult workshop just concluded at Kinhaven. He hopes to propose a piano workshop for next June. He was very disturbed when he heard that I’d been invited to “think-tank” there in July, because of his delicate relationship with Jerry. I offered to withdraw. He also regaled us with wedding plans, which are proceeding. The officiant will be the minister of the local United Churches of Christ congregation, not Karen Sheldon. He wants some Quaker elements and also Greek Orthodox ones. I’ll try to help with information. He talked non-stop for four hours, as usual, including an hour (almost) trying to figure out how to deliver Alec’s truck to Washington so that Leander can use it for moving. Also said that both he and his children have vowed to discourage their children from going into music as a career.

Monday, June 21, 1993

Dimitris Yiannakos telephoned at 8:00 a.m. from Greece. They are desperate, because Maria is going to die, it seems, from the rhabdomyosarcoma. Dimitris heard of a rhabdomyosarcoma society in America, with its president based at the University of Virginia, and asked me to find a precise name and address if possible. I discovered the name quickly and that the physician is now in Houston. I spoke with him later; he was discouraging. Only 40% survive, and these are the ones who respond to the initial treatment. Alas!

Sunday, June 27, 1993

Daphne sent me a cute Father’s Day card showing father and daughter sneaking out of the house for a hot fudge sundae while mother looks on and frowns. So we went tonight to the Narrows for pizza and hot fudge sundaes, and as a bonus saw the brightest rainbow I’ve ever seen: the full arc rising out of the lake and descending into the mountains, with a faint second rainbow next to it with the spectrum in reverse direction. Extraordinary!

Spent the last two days answering letters mostly. This afternoon Alec and I trimmed back the north field, to ready it for mowing. Alec got Bruce McGinn to come up with a bulldozer and a load of topsoil to fix the damage in the front field done by NiMo, and to remove stones near the tree line and to smooth out behind Alec’s cabin, for all of which NiMo is paying. I seeded these areas last Friday. We also got Fred Hitchcock’s crew to clean up the mess left at our entrance. Alec is now corduroying the little cut-off made by the loggers behind the chicken house.

Tuesday, June 29, 1993

All caught up with letters. Worked all day on the journal. Laura visited in the afternoon. Chrysanthi went with Chris Perryman to Granville to pick strawberries and returned with 25 pounds. Z. Skorko tuned and repaired the piano yesterday, and today I actually practiced. Naoko and Yasuo are coming this weekend and we’ll have chamber music. Irv Shapiro lent me a fine book on the effect of music on human beings: Music and the Mind by Anthony Storr. I’ll buy a copy for Leander.

Wednesday, June 30, 1993

Mr. and Mrs. Austin visited. They said that Morris sent them a Christmas card showing all ten children and asked to buy their land, offering a price. We have a maniac as a neighbor. Will he gobble us up, too? Will he populate the road with six-acre subdivisions? I’m beginning to see why people feel the impulse to commit murder.

Trimmed the lilac bush. Watered the seeded areas in the field; the new grass is growing nicely. Sent out vetting forms for the newly arrived journal articles. I’m actually quite caught up now. Went with Shapiros to the Meadowmount faculty recital: Brahms’ violin sonata op. 11 no. 4, Mendelssohn’s piano trio op. 66 in C minor. All performed with gusto, of course. The Brahms is the same one that Deanna and Leander did at Bethlehem. Actually, Leander plays more clearly than David Garvey, the Meadowmount pianist, who is older. The violinist superb: Debra Moree. A propos of Leander, Alec remarked that not a single one of the performers had a Ph.D.; all had the masters as their terminal degree.

Thursday, July 1, 1993

I’ve been practicing piano—von Weber—in the morning, while fresh. I suppose I’d better start Kazantzakis today. I’m more eager about mowing the north field.

Friday, July 2, 1993

Yasuo and Naoko Takahashi arrived with a Japanese friend, Noriko, just graduated from Stony Book. Very lively, and insisted on speaking Greek! (She’d been to Greece and fell in love with it.) We had lovely music, especially the Beethoven op. 18, no. 1 quartet, with me playing the cello part on the piano. And it sounded beautiful. Played until 11:00 p.m.

Saturday, July 3, 1993

Invited Irv and Fran and Laura and Michael to hear music. Did Shostakovich, Bach, and the Beethoven op. 18 no. 1, first movement, all credibly, without getting stuck. But apparently I counted out loud so audibly that everyone heard. No matter.

Fixed a place in the barn to place the old Turkish refrigerator when the new Sears one arrives next Friday.

Wrote a long letter to Grant Thompson. John Tallmadge wrote last week the surprising news that Grant is gay and that his marriage is in great difficulty. He’s probably going to lose his job at the Wilderness Foundation. Poor guy. Hope to see him at Thanksgiving when we’re in D.C.

Sunday, July 4, 1993

Started translating the Kazantzakis letters finally, resuming when I’d left off in mid-sentence in London last March. It’s very tedious. I’d rather mow.

Thursday, July 8, 1993

Hanover

Jean’s evaluation went very well. It was humane and constructive. John Diffey makes a tremendous difference. Afterwards: Task Force. I again complained about “reasonable cost” in the mission statement. Lunch and supper with Mother, who is in fine shape.

Friday, July 9, 1993

Sears delivered the new refrigerator. Very exciting. The old one (the Turkish one) is now in the barn as an auxiliary.

Visited Perrymans after supper. Long talk with Heinz about degeneration of moral values in families and the work force in Glens Falls. It’s appalling. Art’s sister Diana looks spiffy on horseback. Then to Vince Tortora’s to see Don Kurka, who is visiting. He’s retired from Tennessee, lives in Florida, and is doing visitorships in various institutes and universities around the world. His landscapes are in great demand. Tom Akstens, who bought Don’s houses, came also. He’s a 1960s product, English lit Ph.D., who never got a job; went into the “music business,” then desired to return to literature, and luckily got a part-time job in Sienna College. His specialty is the theater of Artaud. Also fly-fishing. Nice man. We all gabbed until 11:30 p.m. and returned exhausted. Tried my fax; found that it had been “fried” by the lightning surge that struck the house on Thursday when we were in Hanover.

Saturday, July 10, 1993

To Barton Mines for a tour. The guide was Peter Barton himself, a very handsome, self-assured, articulate “aristocrat” about 40 years old. Perfect social graces. He explained how his great-great(-great) grandfather emigrated from England to Philadelphia. He was a jeweler and occasionally people brought him garnets they’d found in the North Creek area to grind. He married, and his father-in-law manufactured sandpaper and was looking for a better abrasive. Barton, grinding the garnet, experienced how hard it was. He investigated in the North Creek area and ended up by buying 50,000 acres at 10 cents an acre—the whole Gore Mountain. When the mine started, a man would hold a diamond-tipped rod while another hit it with a sledge hammer until they’d make a hole in the rock sufficiently deep for a charge of dynamite. He took us to the huge pit that is now abandoned. It lasted about 100 years. Garnets everywhere on the ground, still. We collected some as bibelots. Then he took us up on the lip of the excavation, where the family has converted its former home to an inn with ski-touring trails. We could see out across the mountains all the way to Killington in Vermont. Finally we went to a reclamation site where, little by little, with difficulty, they’re inducing grass and trees to grow on the tailings: the refuse that the mine deposited for 100 years. Interesting how these environmental niceties are now “motherhood,” accepted by Barton as obviously the correct thing to do.

Returned and started to mow, but soon the knife bar broke, near the ball. Metal fatigue. Thus I have a broken mower and a broken fax machine at the moment. Raked mown hay and moved it into the garden, which now looks very civilized. Grilled steak on the outdoor fire for supper.

Monday, July 12, 1993

To Bud Rodick for a new knife section for the mower—only $65.00. The mechanic who helped me turned out to be Pete Hyde, Bill Hyde’s son, very friendly. Asked about Alec, etc. People have long memories around here. It seems I need to break things on the mower in order to learn its intricacies. The blade was not traveling freely; that’s probably why it broke. It needs 1/64” clearance laterally and 1/32” vertically. I did my best to provide this, and everything seems to work better.

Tuesday, July 13, 1993

Gary, Wendy, Marcus, and Katie McGinn came for picnic supper with another boy, a family friend. Wendy, especially, is very articulate and impassioned about “Christ.” She apparently was a bit of an alcoholic. Gary’s father died at age 52 of drink, and she came from an alcoholic family, too. She was saved from all this by Christ; more specifically, by the bible, where she now finds all wisdom and guidance, e.g. in the Book of Proverbs. They send the children to a fundamentalist school, ditto for the visiting boy. No, he’s educated at home, as were Marcus and Katie until recently. Gary worries (as he should) about the breakdown of family values, and they all try to restore those values with Christ’s help. Why not? Especially when they’re aware of abuses—Baker, for example, and other hypocrites making millions from the faithful.

Wednesday, July 14, 1993

Rosine Gardner came at 8:00 p.m. I retreated upstairs and read the TLS!

Thursday, July 15, 1993

Finished vetting the Bohandy submission on Plath and Anghelaki-Rooke for JMGS in the morning. Then went with Irv and Fran to Saratoga to see Balanchine’s “Jewels.” The costumes are spectacular: first emerald, then ruby, then diamond. The Fauré “Emeralds” very static but elegant. In one of the numbers the dancers never did more than walk. Balanchine was very daring. The Stravinsky “Rubies” was the best because of the score, also the more modern-style dancing, especially by Damian Woetzel. The Tchaikovsky “Diamonds,” with the girls in tutus, was more traditional, with Darci Kistler and Lindsey Fischer, very accomplished. Not the best program we’ve ever seen at Saratoga, but a tribute to Balanchine’s versatility. . . . Went with Irv, Fran, Chrysanthi, and Evelyn Greene. Picnic first, supper at Stan’s afterward.

Friday, July 16, 1993

Tom Wood arrived in mid-afternoon and talked non-stop until bedtime, pleasantly. He’s an eccentric, full of gossip; seems to live in terms of others, the scores of teachers, headmasters, trustees, etc., etc. that he has known. He is now retired finally at the age of 62! But he is active on the Haverford Board and in Haverford’s campaign. Very grateful to Haverford. Very cynical about Quakers. Revealed that Quaker schools used to have quotas against Jews, and that when Friends General Board refused to allow entry of black students, Anna Harvey Jones walked out, a move that made the board reconsider. He continues to be very partial toward Alec, of course, which is nice. We treated him to “stringers” (three parts our wines, one part crème de menthe) afterwards. At 8:30 Fred Hitchcock came with both daughters and wife. Daughter Heather wants to consider Dartmouth and do pre-med and become a pediatrician. Couldn’t get her to say a word all night, perhaps because her parents were present. Poor thing, she probably will never be accepted by Dartmouth.

Saturday, July 17, 1993

Tom left after lunch. We mowed and collected hay, sprucing up for the wedding. Supper at the Narrows with pizza and (of course) hot fudge sundae to celebrate our 38th anniversary. Neither Chrysanthi nor I is very romantic about such things. But it was nice to get Mother’s gift of $3800.

Sunday, July 18, 1993

Finished mowing the field in back of the pond and around the pond, and collected the hay in Alec’s truck in the morning, with a couple of loads donated to Art Perryman’s new horses. Read galley proof for the journal in the afternoon, and trimmed off dead branches of the cherry tree by the fireplace. . . . All caught up on the TLS. Daphne telephoned from Deanna’s house in Maryland. She’s going to spend a few days there; wants to get to know Deanna better. Then to NYC, then to us.

Monday, July 19, 1993

Alec is in Wooster appearing before a Massachusetts certification board to be certified to teach in public schools, after twelve years and two MA’s! Chrysanthi and I creosoted a section of log in his cabin that had been invaded by ants. She and he still think that his alopecia resulted from creosote. I’m doing Galani-Montafis’s part 2 for the journal now, trying to convert her “English.” What a chore!

Tuesday, July 20, 1993

Out with Aser and Evelyn Rothstein for a fancy dinner at Renée’s, the place where Pappou and Yiayia had the Buseck children in 1968 when Peter and Alice were caught in the Russian invasion of Prague. Aser is retired from Children’s Hospital in Toronto but is still active in a biotech company there that is run by his son. He explained with his accustomed lucidity the current project. Many new therapies are actually bodily hormones that can now be synthesized and thus given in large doses as cures. But the body’s regulatory mechanism reduces these doses, bringing the level down to the normal one for that hormone and thus invalidating the cure. What Aser’s company is doing is adding a molecule to the original hormone (a protein) in a way that allows it to function in a creative way in the body yet “fools” the regulatory system. They’ve been successful in the test tube and will now begin experiments with animals. It will be a most important advance if they’re successful. . . . The cystic fibrosis research is also progressing. The gene can now be located in foetuses, which can then be aborted. Evelyn’s grandson, a cellist, was in the Mary Watt workshop at Kinhaven and was thrilled when Leander took over the piano part in their trio (from his Moravian student, who couldn’t manage).

Wednesday, July 21, 1993

More social life. Earlier: finished Montafis (thank God) and also finished clearing the brush away from the little triangle of birch trees next to Alec’s corduroyed patch of road. Then Milly and Jack Adler came with the Shapiros. Jack has metastasized prostate cancer and warned me that PSA 65 is very high and I shouldn’t trust an internist but should see a urologist. He looks very aged. But he’s doing marvelous sculpture in stone and wood and clay, graceful and imaginative. Also, Sharon, after bouts of unemployment plus another failed relationship, just got a three-year contract as art teacher at $35,000 a year. This, plus sculpting, gives Jack a raison d’être now, after his long service helping people as a social worker. Milly vivacious, as always, and very productive as an artist. Our annual ritual of dining together is meaningful to both parties. Chris and Art joined us later, and Art regaled us with “troopers’ memories” and also a description of his relationship with a man in Wevertown who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. But he isn’t sketching or sculpting very much. Horses come first, it seems.

The NiMo crew arrived at 6:00 a.m. and worked steadily until 4:00 p.m. The corridor beneath the telephone poles is now cleared of wood and looks lovely. I’m thinking of sowing it with wildflower seeds.

Thursday, July 22, 1993

Had a modular telephone jack installed downstairs, which means that our “antique” wall telephone, a rotary, can now be replaced by a modern push-button “tone” instrument, fax, whatever. Another move toward modernity. Chrysanthi hung the old phone on the wall as an object d’art.

To Saratoga to meet Alec at the Hall of Springs and then attend another session of the Balanchine celebration.

I learned a new word the other day: shill. I had described Alan Hunt to Tom Wood and his response was: “He’s a shill!” The dictionary says: “an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who begins to buy as a come-on to the crowd.” I mentioned this last night and of course Irv knew it. “Haven’t you ever read Damon Runyon?” he proclaimed.

The ballet was scintillating. We were all so moved. Again Balanchine’s genius is absolutely astonishing: how one person could imagine “Stars and Stripes,” “Agon” (with Stravinsky) and “Viennese Waltzes”!

Dinner at the Hall of Springs previously. Alec in jacket and tie, having returned from his certification exam in Massachusetts (he passed). I reported how pleased I was with the change the NiMo crew had effected beneath the power line. We now have a meadow instead of a wasteland.

Drove directly to Hanover, arriving at 2:00 a.m. Stopped twice by policemen, once for not coming to a full stop at a blinking red light (no ticket), then for going 40 mph in a Woodstock zone of 25 mph, resulting in a ticket and fine of $89.00.

Friday, July 23

Hanover–Holderness

Bought a new fax to replace the one “fried” by lightning. Long lunch with Marty Sherwin and Jack Shepherd. Marty wants to lay down both War/Peace courses next year in order to plan well for the future and come up with something new. I’ll convene the Steering Committee early in the fall and let him present his ideas. Wrote at length to John Baker about all our troubles.

Drove to Holderness, to the Minary Center on Squam Lake. So beautiful! Good session with all present introducing themselves. Then a sumptuous supper. Then the initial session of our Kendal board retreat concentrating chiefly on charitableness, whether the corporation can “tax” residents for charitable purposes or whether all funds must be contributed.

Saturday, July 24, 1993

Minary Center

Started with a half-hour Meeting for Worship. Barbara Gilbert wanted to speak, she told me afterwards, but didn’t. She wanted to repeat her father’s quoting of a Chinese proverb when he finished his fifteen years as head of the YMCA in Ceylon: “If you think of one year, plant rice. If you think of five years, plant a tree. If you think of forever, educate a person.” That’s our real business at Kendal.

Morning session, facilitated by Crosby Deaton, on the twin topics of Quaker values as applied (a) to staff, (b) to residents. The most controversial was my suggestion of peer adjudication in cases of dismissal or discipline, even when we compromised by making the proposed “Grievance Panel” merely advisory to either the Overseers or the administrator. The group could not come to closure on this, although some seemed open to it, including David French (very much) and Margery Walker (moderately).

The afternoon was less controversial, as we enumerated criteria for deciding on charitable activity. At one point the meaning of “charitable” was questioned, and I responded by reminding folks that St. Paul’s “charity” in I Corinthians is a mistranslation for “love.” Love is the free giving of oneself without expectation of recompense. It is “grace.” Regarding the criteria, the one that did divide the group was Brent Edgerton’s suggestion that we should not restrict ourselves to the elderly but should be especially eager to help the education of children. Amen, but some objected.

3:00 to 6:00 was “R & R.” Chrysanthi, John Radebaugh, and I took a canoe down the lake and saw a loon and chick (all fuzzy brown) very close up.

The evening session was a sort of recapitulation. What have we learned? How should this be applied? What should be done first, etc.? Among what we have learned the most memorable was: We’ve learned that all of us, working together, can be more creative than any single group working alone.

Sunday, July 25, 1993

Minary Center

After a huge breakfast, we settled into writing the epistle. Crosby went through all the previous agenda and folks decided whether each item was a recommendation (meaning agreement, a sense of the meeting), a suggestion (meaning lack of agreement), or a reinforcement of an already existing policy or program. I acted as recording clerk, typing away on my Powerbook. Then they recessed for a half hour while I prepared the epistle as best I could, managing most of it. The final exhortation, thank goodness, had been written in advance by Lynmar Brock. The epistle was read and approved, after which we settled immediately into worship. I ministered about Christianity’s monism versus the dualism that separates flesh and spirit, business and religion, and expressed my satisfaction at our proceedings, which had acted monistically on the supposition that the spirit can be enhanced through proper business principles and actions.

Afterwards, people were very gracious about the conclusion of the epistle, and even sang “For he’s a jolly good fellow to me,” led by Lynmar with John Radebaugh on the harmonica. At lunch we did the same for the cooks, and I and others thanked Crosby for a superb job. At 2:00 p.m., sated with fellowship and good feelings, we all departed.

Picked up Mother, raced to West Lebanon to get a new answering machine, departed westward, eating at “Leander’s diner” in Rutland. Home at 10:30 p.m.

Tuesday, July 27, 1993

Alice and Lori arrived and stayed for supper. Alice and Alec practiced the Bartok duet they’ll play.

Wednesday, July 28, 1993

Finished JMGS galleys finally, with several proofs arriving at the last minute via fax. What a relief! Right this minute the caterer is setting up the tent for Lori’s wedding. Daphne arrives tonight, as do the rest of the Busecks. Alec, alas, is preparing to leave immediately after the wedding.

Chrysanthi and I are unhappy about the new à la carte meal plan at Kendal. It should have been brought to the Overseers. I’ve written to Jean to put it on the September agenda.

Various Busecks are here, settled at Son Rise on Schroon Lake. We went over for supper at 7:00 and were finally served at 8:30. But then it was pleasant. Shapiros came, too. The best conversation was between Irv and Tim Alsberg, who’s been in Japan for years and regaled us with an account of his visit to China. Also spoke with Sharon, Lori’s friend from the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone.

Picked up Daphne from the bus before going to Son Rise. She’s been in NYC, taking to Fred Hills, who is very discouraged with the infighting at Simon and Schuster. Daphne found Manhattan attractive and exhilarating. She’s obviously had great trouble adjusting to British culture. She says that they never say what they mean, they’re incapable of making decisions, etc.

Thursday, July 29, 1993

Long talk with Daphne and Alec over a three-hour breakfast. Fax from Dimitri regarding Maria. They’re consulting a Cypriot doctor who works in Jerusalem. Wanted us to help draft a tactful letter to Dr. Pritchard in London. This doctor says that Maria has under 10% chance of survival, but they want to try the treatment he recommends. In the afternoon I jacked up the henhouse and put skids under it and pulled it up to Alec’s cabin. Everything went well until one side banged into a tree and broke apart some of the cross-bracing on the skids. But we fixed that and managed to get it into place finally behind Alec’s house, finishing work at 7:30 p.m. Then had a birthday dinner for Alec: stuffed peppers with yogurt, and the “traditional” wild blueberry pie. Then to Son Rise to the Buseck clan. Long talk with Roy, Amy’s husband, about his French clients. They bought 717 Madison Avenue, where Daphne lived, for $64,000 in 1953—a bank foreclosure. It’s now worth $10,000,000. They keep these investments because of fear that, as aristocrats, they’ll be forced out of France at some point. So all the profits from this and other properties stay deposited in dollar accounts in the U.S. Clive arrived yesterday by private plane and his aged parents arrived today. So did David and Linda Buseck, and others whom I don’t know. . . . Returned at 11:30 and stayed up until 12:30 doing blitz mail and faxes.

Friday, July 30, 1993

Another long breakfast, 7:30 to 10:30, with Daphne. Last night didn’t have to urinate even once, which often happens after a day of very hard work (same happens to Irv). Weather report for the wedding is not encouraging: showers today and tomorrow, and thunderstorms.

Buseck clan arrived for a rehearsal. People swarming all over irked me. Talent show in the evening, with Alec and Alice playing Bartok, Linda clowning.

Saturday, July 30, 1993

The wedding

Thirty-five cars on the north field. Eighty people on the south field seated in front of a “chuppah.” Lori and Peter came from the Guest House, Clive from my office. It was a beautiful service, with a wonderful Jesuit deacon officiating. He emphasized the public nature of marriage and the joining of traditions. He explained the symbolism of the chuppah (household), the rings (circle = perfection, gold = imperishability), the breaking of the glass (the end of everything old in their lives). David Buseck played the flute; that was so simple and so effective. As I told the officiant afterwards, the service was dignified without being at all stuffy. And how nice that the deacon had known Clive since their childhood together in the boy scouts. Afterwards, a sumptuous catered banquet under the tent by our pond, served by waiters in tuxedos. Champagne, a full, beautiful meal; tablecloths, silver—the works! Very different for Terpni. Roy and Amy sat at our table. Nice to talk to them. Long talk afterwards with Henry Stern, former Commissioner of Parks under Mayor Koch. He says that Clinton is a fraud, although he voted for him. They all left at about 6:00 p.m. finally. We went to the Narrows for pizza and hot fudge sundaes, Alec’s “last supper.”

Sunday, August 1, 1993

Alec left in the morning, sadly, driving to Washington to leave his truck there for Leander. Chrysanthi wept, but recovered quickly afterwards. We got her started on a jigsaw puzzle.

Monday, August 2, 1993

Greg finished the mowing. Και του χρόνου! Danny Danforth telephoned about Zachariadis’s rebuttal of Karakasidou on Macedonia. He is opposed to printing it, but Iatrides is in favor and I am in the middle. Busecks all here for supper. My routines have collapsed. Haven’t practiced the piano for a week at least. But I did do some translating of letters today, at least. Greg explained his work to Peter Buseck. At one point in London he closed a deal for one billion dollars in twenty seconds! The minimum that Goldman handles is ten million.

Tuesday, August 3, 1993

Raquette Lake

Our annual canoe trip, beautifully scouted, planned, and executed by Irv. Greg, Daphne, Laura Gouthreau, Susie Buseck, Chrysanthi, and I. We put in at Raquette Lake Village, paddled in the lake and into the river, ate a picnic lunch on top of a huge rock, continued on to the carry, seeing a blue heron in flight just above us, negotiated the carry with Irv’s carriage wheels (the carry is where the Morgans, Durants, etc. built the world’s shortest railroad, to take them across and thence into Blue Mountain Lake), and reached the spot where we had left my car, which was then used to fetch the other two cars at the village. Beautifully arranged. About six miles of paddling. But I didn’t feel tired, just a bit “exposed” to wind and weather. Chrysanthi sat queen-like in the middle but also paddled a bit. Ditto for Fran, who enjoyed her inactivity.

After showers we met the Busecks again and all went to the Narrows, including Henry Stern and his son. Peter and Alice seem much more reconciled to Clive. Peter enthused about Clive’s friends and his skill in electronics.

The tent was removed. We are slowly getting back to normal.

Wednesday, August 4, 1993

Irv gave me a Times Book Review piece by Donald Hall (August 1, 1993, p. 3). Donald is mortally ill, apparently, and in thinking about his impending death he writes: “It is not grief that one feels for oneself but dread of the grief of others. . . . Mostly I feel . . . black sadness that my daily routine must conclude: no more glancing through the Boston Globe early in the morning while drinking black coffee; no more bodily love; no more working at the desk all day—the long engagement with language, which I adore as a sculptor loves wood or clay, as a musician melody and tempo . . .”

I felt that he spoke for me, especially in the words about language. And this morning, translating Kazantzakis’s letter to Prevelakis of 6 November 1956 (400 Γράμματα, σελ. 713, I encountered something similar, but specifically about translating, in this case Homer’s Odyssey: Τι χαρά να δουλεύεις τη γλώσσα μας προσπαθώντας να φτάσεις ν’ αποδώσεις ένα τέτοιο πρότυπο!

This morning I practiced the piano again, the first time in weeks, it seems. Good sign of returning normalcy. At breakfast we gave Daphne and Greg their anniversary present: two paintings by Art Perryman, one of loons, the other of a mother bear and cubs, rustically framed—a reminder of Terpni. They were pleased. Right now they’re repainting our two Adirondack chairs, last painted by Pappous. This afternoon Greg intends to practice his new skill taught by Chrysanthi: bread-making. Tonight we and Yiayia sup with the Shapiros. Then Greg and Chrysanthi will work on the jigsaw puzzle late into the night.

Thursday, August 5, 1993

Took Daphne and Greg to the bus. They’re going to the races in Saratoga and then to SPAC. They return to London tomorrow. In late afternoon drove to Hanover with Yiayia and Chrysanthi. Yiayia’s radio doesn’t work; must attend to that. And her hearing is getting worse. Can’t hear the telephone; must get an amplifier.

Friday, August 6, 1993

Outreach Committee. We go over and over the same material, it seems. Lafayette is still obsessed (“concerned”) with subsidized housing. I’d rather concentrate on Adult Day Care and/or on a coffeehouse for HIV positives, what Grant Thompson has done in Washington.

Saturday, August 7, 1993

Hanover–Tunbridge

Bought a new radio for Yiayia and a telephone amplifier. It’s nice to be able to care for her in these ways, electronically. Cleaned up the office . . . slightly. Then to Tunbridge to Martha De Cesare’s wedding. Saw Martin and Martha Meisel there. The house—Don Stewart’s “folly”—is at the top of a hill: 3.7 miles of steep dirt road. Rain obscured the magnificent view. Martha radiant and gorgeous. Ceremony very minimal: justice of the peace. Poems by Tennyson, Donne, T. S. Eliot. Lori’s was better, last week. Bagpipes droned away. Don S. and two other woodwinds played “incidental music.” Ellen looked worried. A former student of mine who’d done the acting program at A.R.T. said that A.R.T. is breaking up as a repertory group; no one wants to cooperate any more. It’s very evident. He also agreed with my assessment of Stephanie Roth as capable of playing only one role: Stephanie Roth! We were glad to leave before the dinner. Ate wonderful Ziti Luigi at Luigi’s on Route 4 and returned to the farm with relief.

Sunday, August 8, 1993

Terpni

Daphne telephoned from London. She has received her letter of acceptance to LSE. How nice! I wrote to Ambassador Barry about Alec. Also started revising last year’s translations of some Harkianakis poems.

Thom Gunn is a truly spectacular poet, a real superstar. His new book was reviewed superlatively in the Boston Review.

August 19, 1993

To Alec at North Jakarta International School:

Dear Alec,

Did Daphne get through to you? She was having trouble with the telephone earlier today. Apparently all seats are booked for flights your way during Christmastime, and she needs to discuss with you what to do. If you haven’t already spoken, could you try to reach her at home (44 71 584-1654)?

Leander is here and relaxing nicely. Deanna stayed two days, actually slept at night, and generally seemed more flexible about country living. She said in departing that she wished it had been longer.

I seeded the corridor beneath the new power line, using “bank mix” (mostly winter rye, to get something in there quickly) on the section north of our driveway and “conservation mix” (a better mixture, twice as expensive, mostly fescue, which is great for erosion control) on the section south of the driveway. I’ve purchased the wildflower seeds but they cannot be planted if there is danger of frost in the next eight weeks, so that means next spring. Immediately after the planting, it rained for two days, providentially.

Leander and I set the chicken house up on cement blocks and secured the loose siding boards. The floor is pretty well shot, but the rest of it isn’t in bad condition, and the whole is definitely salvageable. I also patched the roof; it will be fine until next season. . . . We also harrowed the bare spots around your cabin and planted conversation mix; ditto for the spot on the new road behind the pole barn. . . . The garden is now under control, with the blueberry section all weeded and mulched. Little by little, we’re closing up, alas.

Very nice evening with Mary and Maureen last night. And Leander and Mom just returned from three hours with the Gouthreaus. Donna was here yesterday, plus an old buddy of Carl Sibler’s whom I knew thirty years ago. Morris went to the Planning Commission last night to beg to be allowed a residence permit. I don’t know what happened. A moving van went up the road the other day, so I presume that the whole family is now in residence.

We’ll be here until Labor Day, as you know.

Love,

Dad

I put the tractor up on blocks, very easily. It’s sad to be closing up already, again. Leander leaves tomorrow. Tonight he and Deanna argued over the telephone. She accused him of abandoning her, it seems, in order to spend three days with us. She’s very selfish, and he seems to be the submissive member of the pair. I predicted to Chrysanthi that the marriage won’t last more than five years. Θα δούμε . ., as Kazantzakis says. But Leander has been more active in pursuing career opportunities in the DC area, with no result, of course. At least he doesn’t seem depressed, as he was earlier in the year.

Telephoned Alec in Jakarta and the first thing he said was “I love my job.” How nice! Daphne and Greg hope to visit him at Christmas.

August 20, 1993

Philadelphia

By plane to Philadelphia and then to Kendal. Long lunch with John Diffey discussing future priorities, Jean (whom he hopes to subject to a management training program to teach her consensual techniques, and what to do with the Epistle that staff in particular are complaining about—e.g., two religions. John doesn’t sympathize. Rather than separate religious and business, as Brent and Debbie want, we should find more ways to combine them. Generally, John and I follow the same drummer, which is wonderful. Then: a long Mission Group meeting of the Task Force, commenting on the draft of the Strategic Plan. It seems that in the future our local board may become the legal board, in which case we’d really need to open it up to non-Quakers to get the necessary expertise.

August 23, 1993

It took me a long time to feel comfortable with Matthew Fox’s The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, which at first seems so touchy-feely. But eventually I found him full of beautiful insights. For example, he defines worship superbly: “The essential role of worship is to link together microcosm and macrocosm once again in the context of thanksgiving or praise for our amazing (and therefore reverential) existence in the universe. Worship is the microcosm (humanity) giving thanks for the macrocosm (the universe and all its creative wonders)” (p. 213). He also appreciates Silence as a way of getting in touch with what there was before words. And he is scathing on the trivialization of worship that occurred in Protestant churches and in Catholic ones after Vatican II, where mystery is removed. I found as well that he articulates the problems John Diffey and I find in Jean Brophy. Ironically, she, a woman, exemplifies the hierarchical paternalism that Fox finds so destructive of cosmic consciousness—i.e., of a sense of the whole, beyond rationality. D. H. Lawrence, of course, said all this earlier, and I may be able to use Fox in my course on religion and literature. Interestingly, Wuthering Heights could be interpreted as a cry of anguish occasioned by the replacement of mystery by Protestant rationalism, etc.

Trouble yesterday with the Jari. Couldn’t remove the oil drain plug. Called Dave Whitty this morning and he told me to use the extension in the socket set because this has the same square shape as the plug. I was using a monkey wrench and stripping the metal off the plug. Long telephone talk yesterday with Alec, who already had lunch with ten Indonesian graduates of Harvard, went to a disco with other teachers, etc. So far he finds the job exhilarating. Also a long talk with James McBride (Brittles), who telephoned to get Leander’s telephone number. His first musical is about to go on tour. His second was produced in Tokyo. He kept assuring me that Leander is really an exceptional musician, both as pianist and composer, and he’s sure that he’ll find his niche once again. Let’s hope.

August 25, 1993

I sent this to Leander today:

Dear Leander,

As you are about to move into your huge, awesome house, I encountered this letter written by Kazantzakis to his translator and friend B. Knös. It speaks for itself. As the Greeks say, «καλορίζικο» (“good rooting”).

Here’s what Kazantzakis had to say in his letter, dated January 8, 1954:

My dear friend,

My wife sends you warm greetings; she is busy all day long with the new house. The carpenters are working, my office is being made ready, in April we hope to move in. It’s a shame that you’re not with us to celebrate. Seeing the little house being constructed, sometimes I think of the words of a Muslim ascetic of the tenth century: “Why don’t you, too, build a house?” he was asked. “Because,” he replied, “an oracle told me that I will live only seven hundred years. So, is it worth the trouble to build a house for such a short period?”

As for me, an oracle told me that I’ll live 83 years; yet I have the naïveté and impudence to build a house!

August 26, 1993

Something in Kazantzakis’s letter to Knös of 9 September 1952 seems to apply directly to me, and I copy it here: Είμαι βέβαιος θα δουλέψατε καλά στο νησάκι της Βαλτικής κι θα ξαναβρήκατε στο σπίτι Σου τόρα τον άγιο ρυθμό της σιωπηλής κι αφιλόκαρδης εργασίας.

August 27, 1993

Jolly three-hour supper at the Copperfield with Mary and Maureen. Laughter! Laughter! Despite our consensus that the world gets continually worse.

I sent the following letter to Burt Pike:

Dear Burt,

I finally got to read “Harry Levin: An Appreciation,” which has been stacked in my “miscellaneous pile” for several months. (Sometimes I feel like a goat; I spend my life eating paper, one pile after the next.) In any case, I appreciated it more than I had expected, not because I was ever close to Harry Levin personally or professionally but because I found in your appreciation of his raison d’être as a critic a very helpful articulation of my own position all these years.

But does one dare to stand up in public and declare oneself akin to Arnold, Saintsbury, Sainte-Beueve, or F. R. Leavis, without appearing comical? Can one talk any more about shoring up our fragments and handing on the intellectual heritage, as Levin does, invoking T. S. Eliot, of course, without being accused of patriarchism or worse? Can one even assert that language refers to the empirical world and is not just a system of self-reflexive signs? In sum, is it still possible to be a humanistic critic?

I hope so, although I also know, and to some degree honor, the opposing arguments. That is why I particularly like what you call Levin’s “skeptical pluralism,” which approaches the task of reading “from a moral base but on the experimental rather than the authoritarian model,” refusing to “embrace one partisan viewpoint to the exclusion of all others.” As I think about my own position over the years, it seems to conform to this skeptical pluralism: always standing on a moral base but never excluding even those who deny that a moral base is possible. Perhaps I’ve read too much Thomas Mann to be able to go through life without being constantly ironic. So I was not surprised when, near the end of the appreciation, you call Levin an “ironic seeker.” That is very nice indeed.

As you can see, your article meant much more to me than I had ever expected. Many thanks!

Sunday, August 29, 1993

Spent almost the entire day vetting the Kendal Employees Handbook, and sending suggestions to Pam Gile and Jean. Let’s see if they follow any.

Some young man from Warrensburg came asking if they could take wood piled in the clearing on Waddell Road, belonging to Alec. Birch. I said Yes. And in return, as a favor, they took down a large pine that had already engulfed the telephone line and would have reached the electric lines next year.

I’ve been pulling up raspberry bushes round the garden fence. Must do a new fence next year.

Stylianos won his case against the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The Synod decided in Stylianos’s favor and condemned the other one. I sent Stylianos a new batch of poems a few weeks ago. Have yet to hear from him.

Leander moved into his new house yesterday. The neighbors already want their children to take violin (not piano) lessons.

August 30, 1993

Letter to Tom Luxon:

Dear Tom,

I finally read your interesting chapter on Bunyan vs. Burrough regarding “other men’s words.” It was in one of many piles that I “consume” little by little. (I sometimes feel like a goat, eating paper all day long—but at least the result in this case will not be little black droppings but this letter: more paper!)

Having examined the Quaker attitude toward “words, the Word, and wordlessness,” I was extremely interested to learn from your chapter that the problem was not confined to Quakers and that it was shared by Bunyan, although his solution was different. I very much admired the way, slowly and deftly, you directed your argument so that a theological discussion led eventually to a literary discovery that allegory was the solution. (Too bad that all these divines, and lots of fundamentalist Christians today, didn’t/don’t consider Scripture, too, to be allegory!) Of course, early Quakers, like Bunyan, although they did include Scripture in the category of inauthentic words unless it was read or heard “in the Spirit” (as you well describe), often used its “other men’s words” when convenient—they had their cake and ate a bit of it, too. But then, and today also, of course, they were/are all too human, and precisely what the Spirit is, and how it manifests itself through words or through silence, remains the big question. Yet in theory, at least, Quakers are clear that, in your language, what matters “is something non-linguistic, even unutterable, a kind of pre-linguistic ‘groan’ neither uttered nor heard . . . [filling] the gap between words and intention, between what one speaks and what is in one’s heart.” (That is so well said!) What happens in practice (and I have experienced this both in others and in myself) is what you describe as Bunyan hearing the Word “breaking in upon him, assaulting him.” What does not happen in liberal Quakerism any more (but did happen in the past, I’m sure) is the experience of Christ as, again in your fine description, the “‘hole’ in Scriptural words which permits one to pass through ‘other men’s words’ to being in the Word itself, in the allegory which has been redefined as reality.” Too bad. That lack leaves a big “gap” in Quakerism, but not a creative, pregnant sort of gap—not a whole, just a hole.

As you see, I’ve found all this very stimulating. Thanks for letting me see it. I hope that the book, by now, is firmly on its way to being published.

Sincerely,

Three ducks were in the pond this morning.

August 31, 1993

This morning four ducks were in the pond, swimming in formation. Leaves are beginning to turn and fall.

Last evening we paid our courtesy call to the Morrises, carrying a loaf of bread and tomatoes. It’s 1½ miles from our house on a miserable road. The house, all cedar on the outside, with a huge garage, a deck facing the (weed-choked) beaver pond, is ¼ finished, it seems. Mrs. Joan Morris greeted us pleasantly and introduced three of the children, the three going to school (despite, it seems, Morris’s declaration to keep them at home because they’d be persecuted by children of Planning Board members). He was there but never appeared. On the way to the property we saw no fewer than three chains that could be secured to block the road at various points. The Segalob property he bought is already posted “No trespassing.” What a fiasco! But the wife and children seem very nice.

Later, Chrysanthi went to folk dancing and Don Greene gave her copies of the psychotic letters Morris wrote to Bill Thomas, the judge, and all Planning Board members after they voted against him owing to sprinklers. He compares himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, opposing unjust laws. Poor devil! His paranoia reminds one of the psychotic student Steve Scher and I had.

Letter from Tziovas. He wants to hold an international symposium in Birmingham in 1995 or 1996 in my honor. On Greek modernism. I’m touched. But the Macedonian mess is getting worse for JMGS. Received yesterday a fifty-page rebuttal of Karakasidou that I really do not want to print.

My memoir of Kimon Friar came out in the first issue of Odyssey Magazine in Athens. I’m glad. Kimon deserves remembrance, and who else will do it?

September 1, 1993

Two deer grazing morning and evening by the pond. Full moon tonight creating a fairyland of design in the illuminated clouds. Chrysanthi very excited by this, and also by To the Lighthouse, which she just finished. I finished another year of Kazantzakis letters: 1951. I’m going backwards. When 1950 is done I’ll have completed the huge loose-leaf list that I brought to the farm for this purpose.

Pulled up raspberry canes by the garden fence. Need new fence next year.

September 2, 1993

Marvelous passage in Kazantzakis’s letter to Prevelakis of 28 February 1950, very appropriate for me. He was thinking of his birthday:

Τι ευτυχία να ’σαι καλά, να ’χεις ήσυχη κι αγαθή τη ψυχή σου και να ’χεις ένα σκοπό που η πραγμάτωσή του να κρέμεται μονάχα από σένα, και κάθε μέρα να κάνεις ένα βήμα ομπρός και ν’ ανηφορίζεις! 65 τώρα χρόνια πάω κι έρχομαι και σεργιανίζω στο σκοτεινό μπουντρούμι, με τα δυο παραθυράκια που το λένε άνθρωπος, και κοιτάζω από τα παραθυράκια τον κόσμο και δεν τον αποχορταίνω. Δεν ξέρω πόσο καιρό θα βαστάξει αυτή η ευτυχία κι η δύναμη κι η γονιμότητα, μα κάνω σα να ’ταν να βαστάξει αιώνια· γιατί ξέρω τι θα πει αιωνιότητα. Είναι ποιότητα, δεν είναι ποσότητα—αυτό ’ναι το μεγάλο, πολύ απλό μυστικό.

Visited Perrymans in the evening. They now have six horses. Art showed how he trains the Arab mare that’s never been ridden. Very tender. He talks to it, kisses it, strokes it, becomes its friend. But all this is an excuse to keep from doing painting and sculpting. I once again tried to encourage him to put art first.

In this town, everyone seems to hate everyone else. I’m glad we don’t live here. You need to be in a clique. We, as seasonal, cross various cliques. When we hear people maligning others, we keep mum, don’t say that we’re friends with these devils.

September 3, 1993

Shapiros for supper with Don and Evelyn Greene. Spent almost the whole time talking about Morris. Don knows the whole story all too well, thinks he’s a first-class skunk, a liar, manipulator, etc., although he may be activated by mental illness, paranoia and the like rather than by totally self-conscious connivance and evil. There’s more of Kafka here probably than of Shakespeare’s Iago.

Saturday, September 4, 1993

Finished all the letters I’d brought to do this summer: 1950 to 1957. Closed up my office, alas.

September 5, 1993

Closing. But spent most of the day building a little cabinet to place next to the sink in the bathroom. Also practiced von Weber a whole hour. I really cannot play it fully up to tempo.

Read Robert Greenleaf’s pamphlet “Old Age, the Ultimate Test of the Spirit.” Excellent for me and for everyone. The test is two-fold: (1) to look back and know that one has served, (2) to continue to serve in old age no matter how limited by health. But in old age he stopped serving in the usual ways. He says: “I came to accept [that] I can best serve by being.” And by meditating: “Somehow the quiet and peace of anyone’s meditation communicates and enriches the culture.” He says that in old age we should learn to transcend the past and not to worry about the future. “There is only now”—“to achieve living in the present moment.” The other major theme is preparation for old age: and not to keep doing what one did before but rather to do things that are appropriate for old age, and to start doing them “while one still has the energy.” Amen.

Sunday, September 19, 1993

Hanover

Very rich Meeting this morning, enkindled by Rhea McKay speaking about thankfulness. Then lunch with Yiayia at Kendal and with Lori and Clive, who spent the weekend with Yiayia. Beginning to enjoy Clive. He’s taken my Minolta fax machine to try to fix it.

These (almost) two weeks in Hanover have been very social: Trix, Chuck, Sheila for supper; lunch with Ned and Dick, etc. Haven’t looked at any Kazantzakis letters. But played von Weber with Dick and Allan last Wednesday and it sounded rather good.

Yesterday in NYC for MGSA Executive to get help with the mess arising from Tasoula Karakasidou’s article on Macedonia. They feel I should print the Zahariadis response but in a much shortened form. I was fortunate afterwards to get a ticket to Twyla Tharp’s dance troupe at the City Center. She’s extraordinary. So vital and creative, and articulate in speech as well as movement (she answered questions from the audience). Marvelous new ballet that we had a preview of (excerpted from Demeter and Persephone, with running commentary by Tharp).

Started reading Kierkegaard again on aesthetic, ethical, religious. It’s so deep and enduring, a much better description of the human psyche than provided by Freud.

September 24, 1993

Poor Panos Rodis poured out his misery to me yesterday. He and Karen are separated; he’s left the amazing house he built with his two hands and she is occupying it with the Russian student who is her lover, the student who threatened to kill a previous girlfriend and was suspended from Dartmouth for a year. And they have two rifles in the house. Pano has the two girls five days a week, living in one room, sleeping in a triple-decker bunk bed. He is teaching four courses. How will he survive? He sleeps five hours maximum. Karen takes the girls on weekends. He thinks she’s severely ill mentally and will crack up in a month. He contemplates divorce, not saving the marriage. Says he got married because Karen was pregnant. The whole thing is horrible. He slowed and gave up his education so that she could have the Dartmouth job, and now he’s out on the street.

Dinner with John and Mary Rassias, second time in a week, and they’re coming to Kendal with us on Sunday. The friendship seems to be healed. At least he’s trying, but is it genuine or because of the testimonial I was asked to write for him for a teaching prize of $25,000?!

Saturday, October 9, 1993

Finished Matthew Fox’s Creative Spirituality with great admiration. Such a bright, articulate voice arising out of (what Fox calls) the moribund “official” church. His “panentheism” is Kazantzakian. His wisdom extends beyond the narrowly theological. An example appropriate for me right now is: “. . . the key to middle-class life is work and education. Indeed, we could define the middle class’s role as (1) educating itself for work; (2) working; and (3) recovering from work” (p. 139).

A propos, last Tuesday, October 5, I discussed with Dean of Faculty James Wright my enrolling in the Flexible Retirement Option (FRO), and I sent in a letter afterwards to initiate the process. My FRO would begin July 1, 1994 and I’d officially retire on June 30, 1997 at age 67. So, after this year, and a full 1994–95, I hope to begin “recovering from work” in earnest.

Since September 24:

September 29. War/Peace Steering Committee meeting, the first with Marty Sherwin, the new director of the Dickey Endowment. Ray Hall will rescue College Course 2 by cross-listing it with his sociology seminar. But we decided to lay down College Course 1 despite pleas from Alan Rozycki. We hope to design a new course with the help of visitors this spring, and a symposium on Peace Studies. Who is going to organize all this? Peter!

September 30. Met a charming and stimulating colleague, Randy Testa, who wrote a book about Amish nonviolence. We have so much in common.

October 2. Supper at Kendal with Mother and the Emlens, Kate’s parents. Then to Bev Web’s concert, with trepidation. But he played marvelously: two Chopin nocturnes and then the huge Fantasia in B-flat. What a treat! But poor Bev is becoming senile, wandering around not knowing where he is, and not remembering what he said a moment ago. Yet he played all this Chopin from memory. Also (with music) Mendelssohn’s Theme and Eight Variations (four-hands) with Franny, who is a terrible pianist but a wonderful human being.

Sunday, October 3. Ministry and Counsel. I’m participating a little more in Meeting now, all this (and more) as part of my “recovery from work.” Also, have been practicing piano almost every morning for ½ hour.

October 6. Dimitris Yiannakos’s little daughter, stricken with rhabdomyosarcoma, was operated on this morning in Thessaloniki, in a kind of desperation move, but successfully. Dimitris telephoned with the happy news: the entire tumor was resected without injury to internal organs. Partly responsible was the opinion of a specialist in Virginia that I arranged for, so I feel that I contributed somewhat. If she now lives it will truly be a miracle.

October 8. Breakfast with Jean planning the next meeting of the Overseers. Carol Weingeist, whom I mentioned, is still a very sore subject. Jean protests that she had nothing to do with Carol’s dismissal, also that she was forbidden to say anything beforehand about her poor performance, etc. True? Regarding outreach, I spoke last week to Alan Rozycki, who would like to make the Farm House a center for Physicians for Social Responsibility and similar groups. He will present his case to the committee next week. The Task Force for a Five-Year Plan met in the afternoon with our document in its final stage (although very badly written). I filled it with red corrections.

Today, Saturday, October 9, I spent at home without leaving the house except to step outside for five minutes to take photos with my new Olympus camera of the two maple trees on Ledyard Lane that are like Moses’s burning bush. Viewed with Chrysanthi a BBC dramatization of To the Lighthouse, so deep and moving. Finished Matthew Fox, as I said at the start of this retrospective entry.

Sunday, October 10, 1993

Another stirring Meeting, sparked by Tom Waring’s agonizing recital of “living in the darkness” owing to Shirley’s son’s suicide and now her leukemia. Others spoke well in a complementary way. I ministered from Matthew Fox regarding the via negativa: that pain and loss are also a way toward God, complementing the creativity of the via positiva. We routinely ask to hold people in the light; perhaps we should also “hold people in the darkness”! Long business meeting afterwards.

Surprise telephone call from Shelagh and Geoffrey Ballard, and they came to our evening party with Tom and Nardi Campion and John and Karen Vournakis. Poor Tom is beginning to be forgetful, but Nardi is all there. What a pleasure to see the Ballards! Twenty-seven years, and both couples felt that we simply resumed the old conversation and relationship as though nothing had intervened. But much has intervened, for Geoff (who reminded me that he is the great nephew of Seebohm Rowntree—I’ll send him my summary of Rowntree’s book)—developed a large company in Vancouver, and has produced a marvelous new process to produce electricity from hydrogen and use it to drive a bus, resulting in zero pollution. We’ll hear more about this tomorrow.

Monday, October 11, 1993

The Ballards came over before breakfast and showed us the video picturing their demonstration bus driving through Vancouver. Also showed us the 2½ minutes they got on CNN. He is moving into Plan 2 now: a lighter bus with longer range. General Motors has been playing very dirty, attempting to sabotage his efforts to interest Los Angeles in his buses. I told him he should write a book about all this, perhaps co-authored, like Chuck Officer’s. I’d try to interest Fred Hills. Must show all this to Ned, also. Geoff will send a copy of the video when they get back home. We both noted that we’re both still married to the same woman. Rare occurrence!

Took them on a tour of Kendal after eating breakfast there.

Then to lunch with Robert Binswanger. He wrote a response to the Review Committee’s report recommending abolition of the Education Department and gave it to me yesterday for comments. It was so very badly written that I sat in front of my Powerbook at various free moments yesterday and redid the entire thing, finishing at 2:00 a.m. this morning. We discussed it at lunch and he’ll use my version, with some slight adjustments. It’s a pleasure to help friends in this way. Strange that such a capable man cannot write.

Karen Rodis blitzed me. She’d noticed that I’d “cut” her on the street the other day and wanted to protest that the blame for the dissolution of the marriage lay with Panos: “If you only knew how he mistreated me!” I blitzed back that it’s difficult for friends not to take sides in these affairs, but that she and I should sit down and talk. Let’s see if she responds.

Leander telephoned gleefully to report that the Steinway he bought from Nigel Coxe ($13,000 plus $650 shipping) is now safely in his basement. Deanna is still not working because the symphony still won’t break the opera’s picket line. But they offered to forgo three days’ wages if the opera orchestra would let them use the Kennedy Center next week and perform.

Tuesday, October 12, 1993

From Abraham Heschel, Quest for God (New York: Crossroads, 1982), p. 44: “Twofold is the meaning of silence. One, the abstinence from speech, the absence of sound. Two, inner silence, the absence of self-concern, stillness. One may articulate words in his voice and yet be inwardly silent. One may abstain from uttering any sound and yet be overbearing.”

October 13, 1993

Pano’s woes again. But he and Karen are talking together at least. Laurence Davies and Nancy are another couple who have separated. Nancy says they won’t ever go back together. It seems mostly the women who desire the separation now at least in these two cases, with the men being the ones who are deserted. I promised Pano to be on the lookout for an honest lawyer.

Nice music: Frank Bridge, von Weber, and Dick’s favorite: Martinu.

October 14, 1993

I brought Alan Rozycki to Kendal Outreach to propose using the Farm House for Physicians for Social Responsibility and such groups—just one room, as an office. We got nowhere. Jean insists that charitableness must be for senior citizens and that, in any case, it’s up to the residents, not us, to decide. It now goes to the Overseers. We’re spinning our wheels re: charitable outreach; have met for two years and have decided nothing.

Friday, October 15, 1993

Lovely breakfast with Eva Gürstner, first violinist of the Lark Quartet, and Leander’s old “flame”—they did a concert tour together in Germany. The Lark concert was stirring. Mozart B-flat vigorously done. Then a moving piece by Alfred Schnittke, a Russian born in 1934 now living in Hamburg, sort of neo-Shostakovichian plus Bartok. So sad and poignant. And such good music to watch as well as to hear. Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” concluded. A treat.

Saturday, October 16, 1993

Bev Web played the same two Chopin nocturnes (in C-sharp and D-flat) that he did last time, forgetting, I suppose. Then the G-minor Ballade and the Valse Brilliant in Ε-flat. All lovely, although he seemed hardly able to stand on his two feet. I go each time fearing it will be the last.

Sunday, October 17, 1993

Another good Meeting. Pot luck with some Dartmouth students. A man came over and said he comes to Meeting primarily to hear me minister. (I was silent today.) With Chrysanthi to see Scorsese’s film of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, beautifully subtle. Spoke this weekend with all three children. The job of middle school principal is open at Sidwell Friends. Too bad that Alec doesn’t have just a few more years of experience. Oliver Rodgers telephoned. We’ll play violin & piano next Friday at Pendle Hill.

October 18, 1993

Kendal Finance Committee. Again it looks like a 5% hike may be needed, alas. No relief in sight, even after the first series of bonds are called.

October 19, 1993

Kendal Overseers. Proposal to admit non-Quakers to the board, maximum of 25%. Margery Walker spoke eloquently against. No sense of the Meeting even after we went into silence. In the silence I ministered, saying we should always decide according to our original vision and not according to expediency. No decision, especially since Mayme and Lafayette and John Radebaugh were absent.

Nice lunch again with Randy-Michael Testa, a true “fellow spirit.”

Yesterday walked around Occum Pond for an hour with Marty Sherwin discussing Peace Studies. We’ll try to bring Michael Klare as a consultant.

October 20, 1993

With Marty again and Dan Siegel discussing the mediation group. Dan will take it on, under the Tucker Foundation. He’s paranoic; that worries me.

October 21, 1993

To Manchester airport to fly, but the plane couldn’t land owing to fog. Night in Day’s Inn. Missed four-hand piano with Dan.

October 22, 1993

Pendle Hill

6:30 a.m. flight to Philadelphia. Books subcommittee at 10:00. We’re breaking even in the Morehouse experiment, which means there’s a chance it will be reapproved in January. Allen Kelly of Morehouse wants it to continue. Lots of good books waiting to be published (incuding Kenneth Boulding’s sonnets written during his terminal illness).

Publications Committee. Four manuscripts. Thank goodness we rejected the one on wicca by Carol MacCormack. Don Sheehan told me of the battered wicca women his wife had treated, and of one who had “betrayed” the movement and had crosses cut into her hands and feet. Also, sexual violation of children, ritual sacrifices (of animals . . . so far). Ugh! Rebecca afterwards told me how relieved she was—that if we had accepted it she would have been ill editing it. We also rejected one on science and religion by Jack Monger. Touchy. But we accepted Carol Murphy’s rather weak diary on “seasoning” plus a defense of total abstinence as the Quaker position on alcohol. This will be useful at Kendal.

Four-hand piano in the evening with Dan. Gossip. John Anderson is leaving (good!) without Sally—they’ve broken up. Bill Taber is leaving (bad). Patty O’Hara is leaving (bad). Paul Jolly’s wife is having an affair with Bob McCoy and asked for separate living accommodations (bad bad). Spring term was distressing, with some women, egged on by Elizabeth Leonard, accusing Chris Ravendal and John Anderson of sexism or even sexual harassment. But Dan is militant. I suggested Chris as the next dean, perhaps pro tem. Played music and talked until midnight, although I arose at 5:00 a.m. this moning. Played the lovely Schubert Fantasia. But the Bach organ fugues and preludes are the most satisfying. I am trying to interest Dan in Leander’s four-hand workshop, but he wants me to go also. . . . Also learned that Donald Swann has cancer and is in hospital, probably dying. There’s a book about him (or by him) called Swann’s Way. His girlfriend, Alison, is now at the Barbour Institute, Birmingham.

October 23, 1993

Pendle Hill

At Meeting for Worship, someone spoke about a Vietnamese refugee, and Peter Crysdale spoke about turbulence. I was moved to speak about gratitude: that we are so favored, so privileged, compared to the Vietnamese, Bosnians, people devastated by earthquakes, civil war, and the like that our great feeling, especially in worship, should be of thankfulness; and, given our good fortune, what a shame if we use our energies to create turbulence and divisiveness instead of placing things in perspective owing to our overwhelming sense of gratitude. Afterwards, Mary Hegelson came up to me and “eldered” (“juniored”) me: I was judgmental, she said (perhaps she also wanted to say patriarchical). People favored by nature, politics, etc. still have torubles and the right to voice their concerns. I was criticizing the PH staff and that was unacceptable! Oh well. . .

On the bright side: squeezed in a little piano & viola yesterday with Oliver and we’ll play again on November 6 at Kendal. Also: a lovely vignette: As we were settling into silence before Business Meeting, Douglas Steere came in and sat down next to a little girl about 8 or 9. Not quite knowing what was going on, he leaned over to talk to her and the little girl instructed Douglas Steere (!) to be silent, placing her finger on her lips and settling into a meditative posture with her lovely eyes closed. Lastly, there was a ceremonial opening of the new Firbank, unrecognizable now with a crafts studio above ground, a new library, etc. Dan spoke beautifully, starting with the fact that the land under Firbank had been granted to the first owner by William Penn in 1682.

October 24, 1993

Hanover

In Meeting I told the anecdot about Douglas and the little girl, since all the ministry this morning was about the gifts that children bring us.

Visited John Rassias, who fell and broke his shoulder, running to catch a plane. He is restless, depressed, can’t eat or sleep because his furious schedule of speaking has been interrupted. But this may be good for him He needs to “recover” from work, as Matthew Fox says.

October 26, 1993

Nice lunch with Alan Gaylord, one of my few friends in the department. I’ve gotten for him, thanks to Grant Thompson, Quaker minutes re: same-sex marriage, for use in his church, which is agonizing over the issue.

Thursday, October 28, 1993

To San Francisco

Routine flight to San Francisco. Worked all the way on my Powerbook, using 2½ batteries. Doing Bakalaki’s JMGS essay, mostly. Lovely hotel: Marina Marriott in Berkeley. Marvelous sunset over the bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. I chaired a session at 4:00 p.m. Went well. On poetry, with Nanos Valaoritis himself in the audience. Nice to see lots of old friends, especially Tom Doulis. Also John Petropulos, and Jim Warren.

Friday, October 29, 1993

Berkeley

The Macedonia session went reasonably well. One person, a local Greek-American doctor, rose and screamed Ανθέλληνες! But Speros Vryonis made a speech about calm and moderation that carried the day. I’m in constant “negotiation” with Tasoula over her response to Zahariadis; she keeps changing her mind and is getting tiresome. I met Zahariadis, who was very civil. Danny Danforth keeps pressuring me and clearly exemplifies all the evils of which he accuses everyone else—namely pursuing scholarship with a political agenda, although his agenda is the liberal one. I feel for this and published Karakasidou, to my deep regret.

Translation luncheon in which I spoke about the dearth of submissions for the Elizabeth Constantinides prize. I’m rooming with Leo Papademetre, who is very pleasant. Lots of gossip about Melbourne (Stathis doesn’t talk to John!) and Sydney (Alf is head of department, but totally withdrawn).

In the evening, to Berkeley campus for keynote speech by Vryonis. Terrible. Whining and self-pitying, complaining about all anti-Greek sentiments: Black Athena, the attack on the Greek Miracle exhibit, etc. Too bad, because he can do so much better. Thence to a restaurant in Oakland, invited by Zeese Papanikolas, to honor his mother upon publication of a novel about Greek-American life. One of the guests was Senator Petris, who drove some of us home. Very affable. They say he’s a consistent liberal and humanitarian, one of the few to oppose the Junta. His house burned in the Oakland fire a few years ago.

Hour-long phone conversation today with Jamie Newton, now a professor of psychology at San Francisco State, and sort of trapped there. I’ll try to get him to Pendle Hill as a visiting instructor or leader of an extension course. He seems to specialize in hypnosis. He wasn’t at all bitter about the treatment he received at Dartmouth when he gave the valedictory against the Vietnam War in 1969.

Saturday, October 30, 1993

Some fine papers, especially on minorities. I’m trying to “capture” them for the journal. For supper we all went—I with Valerie Cairys, nice to see her again—to a huge, lavish Greek-Orthodox church in Oakland to join them in their όχι-day banquet. The Pantokrator very strange: dark, almost negroid, ugly. Also the saints on the iconostasis: dark and ugly. The tholos is covered in copper. Money! Money! Ostentatious display, yet in good taste. 500 people for dinner. Eleni Tsakopoulou ran up to me and embraced me, then led me to her father, who was preoccupied, but he introduced me to Mary McDonald, the Packard heiress who funded the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. She was the principal speaker. Terrible. All the clichés about ancient Greece. Everyone bored stiff. The only good speaker was Senator Petris, who was honored with an award and charmed the audience but got carried away regarding Black Athena, thinking the author black. All the MGSA folks were disgusted, since the banquet had nothing to do with modern Greece or with us. Oh, I forgot to note that last night, before Vryonis, the ambassador spoke, and angered Tasoula, Michael, Danny, etc. by claiming that Greece is the most homogeneous nation in Europe. MGSA has to find a way to exclude ambassadors just as we excluded archbishops.

Sunday, October 31, 1993

Berkeley

Final lunch with Tom Doulis. Afterwards, hour-long conversation (argument?) with the Papandreou government’s under-minister, who worried that we concentrated on the darkness without acknowledging the light. Perhaps. I tried to tell him that the dichotomy is false. Darkness can equal light. That is, when a culture is able to see its faults, that ability is part of its virtue. Thucydides is a perfect example. Was the under-minister convinced? Probably not. Long walk afterwards with Leo around the Marina in a park established by reclaiming a dump. Then Steve Wheeler picked me up, we drove to Oakland, got Susie Buseck, and went to a Thai restaurant for supper. Steve is impressive. He edits an ecological newsletter campaigning not so much for electric cars as for no cars, a different concept of housing that would enable people to shop, etc., without driving. He’s enrolled in Berkeley’s Town Planning School concurrently. A consistent activist for peace and other causes. And it was nice to be with Susie on her own, not under her parents’ shadow. She, too, is heading toward a service career combining law and social work.

Monday, November 1, 1993

San Francisco–Hanover

Met Lafayette and Mayme by accident at San Francisco airport and we traveled home together, with lots of conversation in the waiting room. Warm reunion with Chrysanthi at Lebanon Airport.

Thursday, November 4, 1993

Met with Tom MacFarland at the University Press. He rejected my idea to “revise” Demotic Greek I by adding a few chapters; he wants a full revision. John and I really cannot do this. Sales are decreasing. If they remain below 1000 per year UPNE will not reprint the book and it will die in a year or two. But it will have had a life of almost 25 years, which is remarkable.

Randy Testa spoke on the Amish at the War/Peace seminar/dinner I arranged. So moving! They are like children, not totally innocent, it seems, but restricted in their knowledge and aspirations. It’s extraordinary that their numbers keep increasing, not by conversion but by fertility: they have families of ten children. One of Randy’s formulations remained in my mind: “To be a witness means to live in such a way that would not make sense if God did not exist.” Randy gave me a parable that he has on his door:

❡ Then Jesus took his disciples up the mountain and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the oppressed.”

Then Peter said, “Do we have to write this down?”

And Andrew said, “Are we supposed to know this?”

And Nathanael said, “I don’t have papyrus with me.

And Philip said, “Will we have a test on this?”

And Bartholomew said, “Do we have to turn this in?”

And John said, “The other disciples didn’t have to learn this.”

And Matthew said, “Can I be excused?”

And Judas said, “What does this have to do with the real world?”

Then one of the Pharisees who was present asked to see Jesus’s lesson plan and inquired: “Where is your anticipatory set? Where are your objectives in the cognitive domain?”

And Jesus wept.

Saturday, November 6, 1993

Longwood

Drove to Manchester last night with Jean Brophy. More problems at Kendal with regulatory requirements, insurance, etc. There is no end to it. All-day retreat today at Kendal at Longwood for the five-year planning group. Nice to see Lloyd again, and Crosbie Deaton, and Barbara Parsons. The plan is ambitious, encouraging the Corporation to branch out beyond type-Α CCRCs. . . . At lunch I saw Astrid Dorsey and asked about Coleman. She told me the most extraordinary and distressing news. He is in a psychiatric clinic suffering from depression. He has been disbarred. The reason: last summer it was discovered that for eight years he had been illegally diverting for his own use some money he had been managing for a client. Why? Worries about retirement, Astrid said. I hadn’t known that, earlier, his law partnership had been dissolved, and that one child had died in a skiing accident and another had died somehow. Poor Astrid! Poor Coleman! Such desperation in the midst of relative plenty. . . . The retreat ended at 3:00 and Oliver Rodgers and I retired immediately to his apartment and played viola-piano for two hours: Vivaldi, Bruch, Mendelssohn. How nice!

Sunday, November 7, 1993

Hanover

To the Meeting at 8:30 a.m. to meet with Jim Greenleaf, who is disturbed because of someone’s ministry that he considers illegitimate. Lisa Solbert-Sheldon joined me. We both concluded that the problem is basically Jim’s: he should be more tolerant and flexible. No Meeting is perfect. There will always be disruptive ministry. I confessed my reaction of despair every time Susan Stark rises. . . . After Meeting, Ministry and Counsel retreat until 4:00 p.m., very cozy and friendly. Anne Baird and Rhea McKay are co-clerks now. Then supper at Kendal with Beveridge and Franny Webster, Mother, Harold Greenwald, and Mrs. Bunting, the former president of Radcliffe. What a pleasure to be with such people. I told Bev about Andy Rangell. Spoke to him today. His hands are not better; he can hardly play.

Monday, November 8, 1993

Leo Papademetre arrived, hoping to work on Annotext for both of us. Nice lunch with Steve Scher. We’re planning to go to New York in February to see Britten’s Death in Venice again. . . . Leander has applied for an opening as coach of chamber music at Georgetown. I’ve asked Deb Tanner if she can help. Also Charlie Hamlen.

Tuesday, November 9, 1993

Supper in Norwich: surprise party for Ellen DeCesare’s birthday. The two daughters were there. Martha told me all the dirt about A.R.T., that Brustein is a tyrant, the morale is zero, everyone stabs everyone else in the back. The one institute student who was promoted into the company was Ron Daniel’s homosexual lover, etc., etc. All the good actors leave. The ones who can’t find work elsewhere stay. Alas, alack! No wonder the season was poor last year. Ellen almost didn’t come, but finally Don Stewart convinced her. Tears of surprise. Don was actually pleasant. Martha and Caroline are both charmers.

Wednesday, November 10, 1993

Played Schubert songs with Dick. Leo is having trouble with Annotext because we used the Kadmus Greek font, which is cumbersome. I’m working on Darren Middleton’s article for JMGS on Kazantzakis and relational/process theology. . . . Speros Vryonis resigned from the JMGS editorial board because of Karakasidou’s article. Zahariadis told Tasoula at Berkeley that if he’d heard her second paper he wouldn’t have written the way he did.

Thursday, November 11, 1993

Final meeting of the Kendal at Hanover Five-Year Plan group. I got mad at Jean because she tried to keep me from reporting on changes desired by the Overseers, saying that she had already incorporated all of them. I kept insisting that “at reasonable cost” must be removed from the Mission Statement. This question will go to the Overseers. . . . Fascinating War/Peace Seminar supper at the Inn with the Russian ambassador and various other Russian officials, on the subject of the chance for democracy in Russia. The conclusion seems to be that the Russians will choose stability at any price, not democracy at any price. It was nice to sit at the same table with the ambassador and to chat like old friends. All this was arranged by Marty Sherwin, the new director of the Dickey Endowment. . . . Then to Center Theater with Mother and Chrysanthi and Leo to see a splendid student production of Measure for Measure, one of my favorite plays. What language! “He has a garden circummured with stone.” Paul Gaffney played the Duke with dignity, but students did all the other roles almost “professionally,” except perhaps for the comic ones: Lucio and Elbow, which were OK but not great. . . . Saw Lee Huntington in the audience with one of her charming granddaughters, the one from Haiti, I think. But Rev. Chris Huntington was grumbling that the students’ elocution was poor. Alas, it’s his hearing, which he refuses to admit.

Friday, November 12, 1993

Leo left, having done nothing because of the Kadmos font. Supper with Rassiases and Kritzmans. Larry K. told me that Rabbi Siegel is hated by all the Jewish students because he is so “legalistic.” And I have him directing the mediation program, which he’ll destroy, of course. Larry shares my dim view of the chair of the Fourth Council, whose name I keep blocking. John, his arm still in a sling, is more merry because able to travel. He’s going to Chicago tomorrow in a private, corporate jet.

Saturday, November 13, 1993

We were supposed to go to the Dartmouth Symphony tonight with Ned Perrin and Anne Lindbergh after dining together but Ned telephoned early to say that Anne was in the hospital and would be undergoing surgery on Monday. A while later he stopped at the house to give us the four tickets. Hardly able to speak, he told me that her cancer is everywhere. She’s having a colostomy because the intestines are blocked. But the prognosis is grim. He has hopes for experimental cures at Sloan Kettering. Only five years of marriage and happiness, and she is going to die, most likely. Horrible. Such a sweet, modest, gifted woman. And poor Ned, after two bad marriages, and estranged daughters, finally established a relationship that not only made him happy at last but also brought back the daughters, especially Amy but even Elizabeth to some degree.

Sunday, November 14, 1993

More bad news. Dimitris Yiannakos telephoned Daphne to say that little Maria’s cancer is everywhere and her life is in jeopardy, despite the “miracle” operation performed a few weeks ago.

I ministered in Meeting: the parable given me by Randy Testa, about Jesus as teacher before a “class” of self-servers. After Business Meeting, drove Bob Daubenspeck to Kendal to show him the painting studio. I’m trying to get him to do an ILEAD course there. Bev and Franny asked me to make a videotape of the last copy they have of Bev’s complete Debussy. Supper at the Norwich Inn with the Quaker “birthday” crowd.

Thursday, November 18, 1993

George telephoned, weeping. Little Maria died a few hours ago, her entire body suffused with cancer. Chrysanthi telephoned Dimitris. The funeral is tomorrow.

Outreach Committee: still no sense of how to proceed. The Rozycki proposal won’t work. Maybe we can use Kendal to transport Hanover Senior Center folks once a month but even that seems doubtful. I gave everyone copies of Steve Wheeler’s Urban Ecologist for housing ideas.

Lunch with Mother at the Inn. Then to the Fleet Bank trust Department to discuss our finances. I won’t let them sell more Kimberly-Clark. We’ll buy another tax-exempt bond for $25,000.

Friday, November 19, 1993

Leo is here again. He met with John Rassias, whom he hopes to bring to Australia. He’s a good friend, a very easy companion. Drink with Pano afterwards. He has given up on the marriage. Karen still hasn’t given me a time to meet with her, although she says she wants to.

Saturday, November 20, 1993

Jolly supper at Soong and Rogers Elliott’s, with Chuck and Kathy Braun. Rogers demolished most of my arguments in favor of the Education Department. Chuck, after his strange illness, is functioning again. He just published a paper on “Why Water Is Blue,” and explained to us why. Learned from Rogers that Don McNemar is resigning from Andover. I’ve alerted Dan Seeger. Could we snatch him for Pendle Hill?

Sunday, November 21, 1993

I’m working on “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision” for the Prometheus Society in Washington on December 10th. How nice to be writing again, instead of editing someone else’s writing! Good Meeting this morning. Jean Brophy and Nancy Frost are going to adopt a baby.

Supper party, very successful, with Tom and Nancy Corindia, Marty Favor (new in the English Department), Allison Clarkson and her husband, Oliver Goodenough. He is teaching at Vermont Law School. She is having babies, but is still involved, at a distance, producing shows off-Broadway in New York. A self-assured aristocrat. Told me about her uncle’s great camp, a French chateau erected in Johnsburg, eventually given to the Police Athletic League and then burned, the land returned to “forever wild.” Her place is 500 acres. Very friendly. A brother is in Malaysia; she thinks he would like to meet Alec.

Monday, November 22, 1993

To Kendal to be in a photo showing the president of Granite State Electric giving Jean a rebate check for $118,000. Interesting to meet the three top executives of this utility company. I asked why they pay people to use less electricity and got a very easy answer: they have increased demand and can meet it only (a) by building a new generating plant, (b) by gaining current from users who economize and by using this to meet the excess demand. Method (b) is much cheaper for them than is method (a). Easy! I told them about wastage of electricity at Dartmouth—lights turned on when not needed—and suggested training children in grade schools. They have already developed curricula à propos.

I blitzed the student actress who did Isabella noting my enthusiasm and saying that “defects” in the performance noted in one of the reviews were really defects in Shakespeare’s characterization of Isabel. The actress responded with effusive gratitude. It’s interesting how little gestures can sometimes be bigger than expected.

Tuesday, November 23, 1993

Kendal Overseers. Jean explained the bad news about Mr. Reno and the New Hampshire Department of Insurances. But since Jean has apologized to Mrs. Reno, Reno has now agreed to meet with her. She presents him as an ogre, but David French told me afterwards that Reno is admirable, and very liberal, a Democrat, World Federalist, etc. There are always two sides!

Stopped at Rand Funeral home for the “viewing” of Mrs. Rideout, dead at 89 and looking like a wax doll in the coffin. Exchanged commonplaces with her daughter and son-in-law.

AMTRAK to Washington with Chrysanthi and Mother in two adjoining bedrooms. Very comfortable.

Wednesday, November 24, 1993

North Potomac

Leander met us at Union Station. Showed Mother the Capitol building from the front of the station, did a little shopping, ate downstairs, and took the Metro to Maryland. Saw Leander’s and Deanna’s new house. Very roomy and functional, although certainly not at all interesting architecturally. Leander extremely “domestic,” worrying about raking leaves, planting bulbs, etc. But it’s the worst type of suburbia. Steve Wheeler and folks at “Urban Ecology” would shudder. Nothing is accessible except by car. Leander’s piano, a small Steinway purchased from Nigel Coxe, is lovely, especially in high registers, but the bass is mushy. Ours at home is still the best. I practiced Schubert’s Fantasia in F minor, treble part. Deanna showed pictures of Russia. We went for supper at the Mandarin restaurant they chose for the Rehearsal Dinner, and booked it for roughly 50 people for March 25th. Then visited the two hotels they’d reserved: Ramada, very basic, and Holiday Inn, fancy, atrium, swimming pool, etc. We booked rooms for ourselves, Yiayia, Daphne and Greg, and Leander and Alec. Deanna’s relatives have already booked ten rooms.

Thursday, November 25, 1993, Thanksgiving

North Potomac

Practiced Schubert again, at length. The turkey is in the oven. Leander and Deanna took us to see the church where they’ll be married, and the reception “mansion,” all very nice. The important thing is that they seem very happy together. We had our turkey with all the trimmings. Surprisingly Han Lee, Deanna’s father, telephoned and asked to speak to me. He was pleasant. We exchanged platitudes. He was happy to hear that I like Chinese food. Alec called, then Daphne. Alec is going to have a Thanksgiving meal with some Americans tonight. Daphne just finished entertaining a group with turkey, etc. at home and wants to go to bed. . . . Leander and I tried the Schubert “Fantasie” together. Then we watched a video movie of Mice and Men.

This impressed me from John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, 2nd edition, pp. 262–263:

❡ “The ideal relationship of a human person with God would consist in a vivid awareness of Him, at once joyous and awesome, and a consequent wholehearted worship of the infinite Goodness and Love by obedient service to His purposes within the creaturely realm. To know the creative center of reality as active personal agape would be to accept gladly one’s own status as a creature, utterly insignificant and yet loved and valued in God’s free grace, within a universe that wholly depends upon His activity. Such knowledge of God would make impossible the natural egoism in which we each treat ourselves as the centre of our own world, whilst the awareness of God’s universal care and watchful love would render needless that protective self-concern by which we seek to safeguard our own interests in imagined competition with our neighbors. For if God were known as equally the Father of all men and the Lord of all history, there would be no need to fight against others for a share of His love. Accordingly a human being who lived in a wholly right relationship to God would not be defensive, fearful, or grasping. He would be saved from self-regarding anxieties by the knowledge that his own personal welfare forms part of the all-comprehensive good of God’s Kingdom and of the divine sovereignty. A sufficiently vivid awareness of our Creator and heavenly Father as the ultimate both of love and of power would thus exclude that anxious self-concern which expresses itself in greed, suspicion, cruelty, and the urge to gain power over others.” Amen! (He adds that the only person who surely had a perfectly right relationship with God was Jesus Christ.)

Leander gave me a spectacular lesson on the Schubert Fantasia. I can see why his students value him so highly. How nice it would be if Dan Seeger and I could attend the four-hand workshop in June!

Friday, November 26, 1993

Practiced Schubert well. What a shame that I’m not a better pianist. But I can still get sufficient pleasure from playing.

To Grant Thompson’s for brunch. Sharen, his wife; Ben, just graduated from college and raising funds for Greenpeace; Carrie, a sophomore at Haverford. Grant charming, as always. With the “gay” earring in his left ear (ditto Ben). He’s starting a new job in January as director of an organization that hopes to improve public libraries. The trouble is that he has to raise his own salary plus all other expenses from foundations and businesses. But libraries appeal both to conservatives and liberals, so perhaps he’ll succeed. He’ll commute to NYC, by bus, since the fare is only $20.00, for the first year, after which he hopes to move the office to D.C. But his heart, it seem, is in “gay and Lesbian concerns.” Florida Avenue Meeting has services at 9:00,10:00, and 11:00. The 9:00 a.m. is for those who want to avoid “popcorn” ministry; the 10:00 is especially for gays and Lesbians; the 11:00 for everyone else. Grant goes at 10:00 and says it’s the most vibrant. Recently, an AIDS sufferer in the hospital whom he visited said, “Grant, I need spiritual help,” and Grant was challenged to provide something although Quakerism has no readymade rituals for this. I told him about Charlie Hamlen and will send details. He told me that the board chair of the new libraries initiative is the woman who runs the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts. Small world department. We had another huge meal and talked in a lively way about mutual concerns, including mediation and peace studies, and of course John Tallmadge and Jack Shepherd. . . . Afterwards, Leander drove us past the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Washington Monument, and White House so that Mother could see them again. Tried to go into the main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, but it’s closed for restoration. Leander and I went to the Rotunda of the Capitol, filled with tourists. Old memories revived. . . . Then a comfortable return on AMTRAK, planning our transportation for the March wedding.

Saturday, November 27, 1993

Hanover

Up at 4:45 a.m. to get off the train. Breakfast at the Polkadot. Worked mostly on “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision” for Washington. Supper at Kendal with Mother and Charlie and Mrs. Dudley. Then another Bev Webster concert. Remarkable. All Chopin. He started with the thirty-minute-long great Sonata Opus 35 in B-flat minor, with the funeral march. Then the third Ballade, then two etudes, op. 10 nos. 3 & 4, then the Barcarole and then another etude. All played with ease and ultimate musicianship. What an amazing specialization! As Chrysanthi said afterwards, he’s done nothing else since he was four years old.

Sunday, November 28, 1993

Tom Waring ministered in Meeting about beauty in the midst of decay, and I thought of Bev Webster. . . . Jean told me the other day that she had to write a letter of admonition to Walter Frank regarding his “sexual harassment” of Sherri Buckman. I was stunned. Walter, past president of the New York Stock Exchange, is over 80 and married (Sherri is maybe 40 and married). Apparently this is the third time Jean has spoken to him. After previous admonitions he promised to desist but then renewed after an interim. He writes notes to her saying he loves her; he found out her home telephone and address and bothers her there. She of course is “not interested.” What pained Walter the most this time was that copies of the letter were sent to me and also to John Diffey. By the way, Walter had just donated $25,000 to the Reserve Fund. I wrote him thanking him for the donation and saying that the incidents with Sherri reminded me, primarily, of Jim Strickler’s comment that the major “disease” of older people is loneliness. I hope this does the trick. We developed a nice, bantering friendship, and I hope it won’t be spoiled.

Wednesday, December 1, 1993

Michael Klare came from Amherst to consult with Marty Sherwin, Michael Mastanduno, and me about the future of Peace Studies. Very helpful and cordial. But the crucial hurdle to overcome is to find two faculty members eager to do a Peace Studies course. . . . A student came to the office lamenting the discontinuation of this course and wanting to do a minor in Peace Studies. Alas, I had nothing to offer him.

Friday, December 3, 1993

Pendle Hill

Publications Committee approved the pamphlet I thought impossible and rejected the one I had approved. I jokingly concluded that I have a hypertrophied right brain and an atrophied left brain, at least compared to others on the committee. One submission was by John Yungblut, aged 80+, giving advice to youth. People rejected it, saying it was “authoritarian” and judgmental. So no one has the right to any opinions any longer, it seems. I made a plea against this.

Lovely talk afterward with Rebecca; we are nicely at ease with each other. I fear for the Morehouse renewal that was up in January. Will Denny O’Brien sabotage it? . . . Working on David Mason’s translation of Chouliaras’s poems, which I’m vetting for Princeton University Press. Lots and lots of problems, alas. At 10:00 p.m. played Schubert Fantasia with Dan. He’ll be able to attend Leander’s four-hand workshop. We also did Bach organ music (delicious) and then Schumann’s Bilder aus Osten, with Dan in treble. These we can do at the workshop as well as the Fantasia or in place of it, since it may be too hard. Long talk with Dan afterward. I recommended Chris Ravndal again for dean, but Dan said that he absolutely had to appoint a woman. He also said that Elizabeth Leonard is poisoning the place. He’d like to abolish the entire resident program for a year in order to get rid of her and certain other feminist troublemakers who are authoritarianly against authoritarianism.

Saturday, December 4, 1993

Pendle Hill–Princeton

Fine Meeting. George Peck ministered vigorously on the fallacy of “good wars” and the need for a pacifist rejection of all wars. Oliver Rodgers drove us to Kendal. Played Mendelssohn (better), Bruch, Block, Vivaldi, and a modern whose name I don’t remember. He wants me to prepare the César Franck violin-piano sonata, which he can do on the viola. . . . By train and taxi to Princeton. Mrs. Hurley’s bed and breakfast. Gorgeous house built in the 1870s, full of Victorian antiques. Ms. Hurley is a compulsive talker but vivacious and interesting at age 80. Talks to her cat and they eat supper out of the same dish.

Sunday, December 5, 1993

Princeton

Worked on my lecture in the morning. Lunch at the Faculty Club with Mike and Mary Keeley, John Iatrides, Adi Pollis, Chrysanthi, Dimitri Gondicas, Lily Macrakis. Mike will teach his last class on Tuesday. He says he is going to join “TA” (Teachers Anonymous) as a safeguard should he ever be tempted to teach again. Enough is enough! Amen. We adjourned to the Hellenic Studies offices to form a committee of past MGSA presidents (again!) to worry about finances. The association is being taken over, Mike feels, by “youngsters” hardly out of graduate school, with no sense of the importance of balancing budgets. But I doubt that much will be done about it. . . . Fancy supper at a restaurant with Mike and Mary and Tasoula and Dimitri and his consort and several others. Served by a beautiful oriental girl, a Thai perhaps.

Monday, Dec. 6, 1993

Back to the Friar archives. I’m still in 1954 as Kimon is preparing to undertake the Odyssey translation. Andonis Decavalles joined me, to look at Friar’s references to him—very complimentary. Actually, Friar and Andonis were very close in 1954. Andonis helped Kimon with his Greek; Kimon helped Andonis get a scholarship to Northwestern. Andonis is a good informant about various people mentioned in the letters. . . . Lunch at Prospect with Mike, Don Skemer of the archives, Andonis, Stathis Gourgouris, Judith Herrin. Wine and good cheer. Mike teaches his last class tomorrow. He told me about Salman Rushdie’s five minutes with Clinton, arranged with great effort by PEN, but Clinton had to waffle, saying he respects Muslims, too. Tasoula invited us for supper, but she had a slight auto accident and injured her nose.

Tuesday, December 7, 1993

Princeton

To Sonny Cronk’s for breakfast. Very cordial and deep conversation with her and her mother, Margaret, especially when we got to my description of Kazantzakis’s dipolar theism, for Margaret has been nursing a “pattern” theory (Like D. H. Lawrence’s, I told her) that is very compatible. I extended a feeler for Sonny to return to Pendle Hill but she clearly will not. Says that PH equals anti-intellectualism, fear of academic rigor, and overemphasis on community, all working against what she is trying to accomplish. I gave her Randy Testa’s book on the Amish. She wants me to send her “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision.” At 4:30 I gave my talk on “The Emergence of the Greek Novel Compared to England.” Good group, very attentive, and lots of good questions afterwards, most of which I could answer. Robert Fagles was there and came up afterwards. Very cordial. I finally met Greg Ruf, Tasoula’s husband, a nice young anthropologist, specializing in China. Supper afterwards with students: Dimitris Kargiotis, Ioannis Mentzar (the Japanese-Greek), and also Mary Keeley.

Wednesday, December 8, 1993

Princeton

A quick hour in the computer center revising “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision.” Then 1½ hours with Mentzar on his translation of Karyotakis, which I had vetted earlier. He’s very imaginative, and is working in his 2nd and 3rd languages, Japanese being his first. Lunch with Bob Brown. I suggested that he combine his Χουλιάρας and Εγγονόπουλος submissions with Καρυωτάκης, now being translated by Rachel Hadas, since Houliaras’s poetry derives most clearly from, precisely, Engonopoulos and Karyotakis. Dimitri Gondicas invited me to return to Princeton to teach for a term when I’m free. . . . In Friar archive, confirmation of Dimaras’s antipathy toward Kazantzakis: He refused to say anything about the literary quality of Zorba and The Greek Passion in his article on Greek Literature for the Atlantic Monthly, June 1955. . . . Off to supper with two pairs of Wilsons, Tom and Joan, and John and Woody. John is working on a large series dealing with church and state in various nations; Woody directs teacher training for Princeton students; Tom & Joan are still planning to come to Kendal in 2000. She plays piano. A four-hand partner!

Thursday, December 9, 1993

Princeton–D.C.

To D.C. via AMTRAK. Picked up at Bethesda station and delivered to the Potomac house of George Psacharopoulos, economist at the World Bank. Very hospitable. He did the cooking. Wife a pediatrician. Sweet daughter named Daphne, graduate of McGill, and her boyfriend, Douglas, non-Greek, plus two other couples. I learned a little about the World Bank, also about Razamias who, George confirmed, “doesn’t deliver.” They questioned me at length about Kazantzakis. Nice to be so obviously an “expert.” Douglas and Daphne drove us to Leander’s at 10:30 p.m.

Dimitri Gondicas wants me to come to Princeton to teach in my retirement. I’ll probably return in March to look some more at the Friar archive.

Friday, December 10, 1993

D.C.

By Metro early to the State Department’s foreign service training center. Gave my “Greek Politics through Poetry” lecture. Some good questions. Two of the students are going off soon to Thessaloniki, the woman as consul, the man (a Dartmouth grad) as vice-consul. If we go within three years we can visit them. But poor Jim Warren is losing his job because an ambassador is replacing him, alas. He took me to a Cambodian restaurant in Roselyn, then drove me to the Holocaust Museum. This is excruciating. One feels like weeping from start to finish. But occasionally there are “pleasant” exhibits—for example, the Bishop of Zakynthos, Chrysostomos, when the Germans demanded a list of the Jews on the island, the Bishop wrote his own name in large letters on a piece of paper and gave it to them, saying “Here are the Jews of Zakynthos!” He then alerted the Jews to flee to the mountains, and they were saved. The museum traces before, during, and after the holocaust, showing the rise of Hitler very vividly with Newsreels, his voice, Goebbels’ voice, etc. Especially chilling was the speech in which Hitler proclaimed that the party = the Führer and the Führer = the party. Also vivid through photos was the systematic humiliation of Jews in the early days, before the deportations to be death camps began. There is a moving hall of remembrance at the center of the building. I wrote in the guest book: “Why is it that mankind, alone of the animals, is a mass killer? We are told not to be ‘bestial,’ but it would be more appropriate for the beats to be told not to be ‘human.’” . . . Home to Leander’s on the Metro. Supper, then off to St. George’s Church in Bethesda for the Prometheus Society lecture on “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision.” This went very well. Full house. Numerous questions afterward. I couldn’t get away. Books to autograph. I felt like a celebrity. Perhaps I’ll encourage Darren Middleton in the hope of producing a book containing various contributions on Kazantzakis’s religiosity. . . . Up until 1:00 a.m. talking with Leander and Deanna.

Saturday, December 11, 1993

Potomac

Practiced Schumann’s “Bilder aus Osten.” To Jewish deli to meet Deanna, who’d been rehearsing for an advent service in the Rockville Presbyterian Church. Shopping with Leander to price champagne for the wedding. To the Kennedy Center in the evening for a National Symphony concert conducted by André Previn, whom Deanna says is overly nervous and disagreeable. Yet the concert was spectacularly good and Previn seemed to be ideal in giving cues and truly signaling expression. Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, the theme of which Deanna and Leander want to use for the processional in their wedding; Haydn Symphony no. 102; Deanna played first violin for these two. Then Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a spectacular showpiece for the orchestra. Yet Deanna said that André Previn, the guest conductor, first met them last Tuesday, and two days later they performed the program. That is what professionalism means. Actually, he rehearsed the Haydn most of all. The big romantic pieces can be a bit sloppy, but Haydn and Mozart need to be exact in every respect. Before the concert, I met Maria and her husband, who treated us to drinks. Afterwards, I met Masha and husband, just returned from Minsk on a mission for the World Bank, which is lending the Russians $500 million to help revive their oil-producing capacity, which has fallen to under 50%. They’re voting today for or against the new constitution, which gives almost dictatorial powers to the president. I remember what the ambassador told us last week: that the Russians will choose stability over democracy.

Sunday, December 12, 1993

Potomac–Hanover

Bagels and lox for breakfast. Practiced “Bilder aus Osten.” Then we all went to the Rockville United Presbyterian Church, where Leander and Deanna are going to be married. Chrysanthi started weeping with emotion at the sound of the organ and couldn’t sing the hymns. She was moved in a way she couldn’t explain. Leander nudged me and we both suppressed giggles as the organist improvised jazzy arpeggios as part of a piece supposedly by Haydn. He is a jazz musician named Levy! The Bach chorale was sung by a basso totally, irredeemably, off key. But generally the service was relaxed and unpretentious, with interesting modes of participation by the congregation in prayers and liturgy. The pastor, Mansfield Kaseman (“Casey”) did not give a sermon on this Advent Sunday, which was devoted to the children and included a sort of playlet performance by parishioners. Lots of people knew Deanna and greeted her with pleasure, owing to her participation in the string quartet that’s going to play next Sunday. Church address is 355 Linthieum Street, Rockville, MD 20851, 301 424-6733. After lunch, Leander played the Schumann with me, four-hands; surprisingly, it’s harder, musically, than the Schubert Fantasia. Then he and Deanna ran through the Grieg Sonata in C minor that they’re going to do at Crosslands on Thursday. 300% romantic played with zest. It will warm the blood of the Crosslands audience. . . . To Union Station by Metro. A cup of Kenya coffee downstairs, and then a total surprise: a Black gospel choir singing outside the gates, with an audience including many blacks dancing, singing, and exulting. Such “soul”! If only this could be combined with the good sense and good will (but bad music) we heard this morning at the Presbyterian church. AMTRAK home. I’m working on Ken Boulding’s sonnets, trying to select those for inclusion in our Pendle Hill publication and those to be omitted; also trying to arrange them in a more logical order. All-told they are a remarkable witness, although individual sonnets are sometimes quite wooden.

Tuesday, December 14, 1993

Amherst

To the University of Massachusetts for Greek exams. They paid me $450 this time. Nice outing for Chrysanthi and me twice a year. Elizabeth Mazzocco, deathly ill over the past months, appeared briefly, looking like a cadaver. But she says she’s out of danger.

Wednesday, December 15, 1993

Interviewed Waverly Watson for Haverford. She’s waitressing at Kendal and finds that meaningful because of the sense of community she feels there and because of the experience of loss, when people she’s been serving die. That’s good experience for a 17-year-old. . . . Meghan Dunleavy invited me to tea. She’s back from India where she worked in a storefront or mobile-medical facility tending the poor. She hopes to return as directress of one of its stations. Such a sweet woman, devoted to service, and scarred by the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. But maybe sorrow and hardship are desirable. I read recently that Bayard Rustin was motivated to live a life of pacifism and service because of the indignities he’d undergone as a homosexual. Ditto for Michael Harrington. And I’m reading James Merrill’s “Memoir,” chiefly to see what he says about Kimon and Mina (a lot!), but here, too, the homosexuality seems to have been central, also the sadness of his parents’ divorce. He does seem, however, even at this stage, a shallow, spoiled brat: how different from the personality that wrote the poems. Proust is always right: Vinteuil!

December 16, 1993

Outreach Committee. Still stalled, although maybe we’ll use the Kendal bus to transport others. Maybe! Channy Brokaw talks too much. Lafayette is too retiring. . . . Long talk with Daphne. It’s her birthday. Work at LSE is going well. And she’s taking lessons in Japanese, even learning the characters. She may be able to write a thesis involving Japanese business practice and how they deal with cultural differences when they set up a factory in Europe or America. Good for her! Taking advantage of circumstance. . . . Mardy High came to discuss the Alumni College I’ve agreed to lead. Now I must find two colleagues. I’ll try to give poor Pano a job as discussion leader. . . . Alec was denied certification as principal in Massachusetts and is furious. He asked me to turn to Robert Binswanger for advice what to do next. Robert says: Get Harvard to throw its weight around. Complain to the dean, directly.

Friday, December 17, 1993

Christmas parties have begun. I worked all day on the book reviews for the journal: 12 of them. Eva has done her job well, but still lots of editing is needed. At 5:30, to Marty Sherwin’s party. How did he ever get to know so many people in such a short time! Then to our neighbors, the Walks. Nice to meet others who live on Ledyard, Hovey, Currier, etc. Lots of new people including a young couple, childless, who bought Mrs. Moyer’s house for $1,000,000 and are remodeling it, and live off their investments. He sold a business and retired at age 35. Disgusting! Walk, who now sells real estate, was a colonel in the army in Okinawa.

Saturday, December 18, 1993

Daphne and Greg fly to Indonesia today. More parties. Vivian Kogan’s, at 5:30. Their new house, designed by her husband, Bernard Benn, is the most beautiful, imaginative house I’ve ever seen. Such cleanness, such good use of space! Then to Kendal for supper with Mother and Audrey followed by Bev Web in good form: Schumann, Beethoven’s Appassionata, Chopin’s “Ballad in G minor,” and “La Fille aux cheveux de lin.” Lovely and amazing! I saw Waverly Watson in the dining hall, and Tim told me that she’s the best of the lot. He uses her to train others, and when someone is good they all say “She’s like Waverly”! I’ll write a follow-up letter to Haverford.

Sunday, December 19, 1993

I ministered at Meeting on dipolar theology and process theology, making apologies for daring to use the world “theology.” This stimulated some good follow-up in other ministries. . . . Spoke to Ned, who of course is devastated by Anne Lindbergh’s death: “The worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said. But he’s glad that he didn’t die first, because then she’d be suffering the loss that now is his. Later, saw Amy in the Co-op. She said that Anne’s tumor was so large that she looked pregnant. And it must have ruptured, for she had severe internal bleeding. The case was hopeless, all at once. At least she died quickly, lulled by morphine into relative comfort. 53 years old!

Wednesday, December 22, 1993

Met with Diana Taylor, who’ll join me in Alumni College. She’ll do two versions of Antigone. I’ll do Heart of Darkness. We agreed to ask Laurence Davies to be the third teacher. I telephoned him in England and he said Yes. . . . Another party: at Karen and John Vournakis’s. Her painted photographs of Greece are superb.

Thursday, December 23, 1993

Finished IBM conversion of the Greek for the journal way ahead of schedule. Hopkins wants to switch to Macintosh, but we still haven’t found a suitable Greek font. I’ll have to work out a conversion system all over again. Michael Macrakis and the “Greek Font Society” may help. . . . Leander and Deanna arrived at midnight.

Friday, December 24, 1993

A jolly Christmas Eve dinner with the Nodas (including Kesaya and David—Kesaya transformed with make-up, looking like a Japanese doll; and she has a boyfriend!), Audrey, Leander, Deanna. Lots of laughs and reminiscing. Earlier, lunch with Michael Webster and his wife Leone Buyse and Bev and Franny. Leander sat next to Bev and seemed to be having a good conversation.

Saturday, December 25, 1993

Caught up on letters, finally. Supper with Rassiases.

Sunday, December 26, 1993

Cambridge

Met Dia for lunch. She gave me a good lead re: MG fonts. A.R.T. performance of Henry IV, Part 1 was enchanting, with Bill Camp as a very fine Prince Hall (wonderful control of facial features and body movement), Alvin Epstein a regal yet tormented king, and Jeremy Geidt (of course!) as a jolly, impish Falstaff. Peto was weak but all the rest were fine, as was the gimmick of having the factions dressed in US Civil War uniforms and Eastcheap doubled with contemporary punk plus Los Angeles riots. Henry IV, Part 2 in the evening was inferior, mostly because the play itself is inferior, although the reconciliation scene between Hal and his father was strong, Alvin Epstein doing one of his best interpretations. But Shallow, Silence, Mouldy, Wart, etc. could have been much livelier. The show was stolen, however, by Mistress Quickly, played by a man: Remo Airaldi. What a pleasure to see both plays together! I wish Henry V had followed tomorrow, and Richard II had preceded.

We slept at Cobble Hill, a ca. 1870s home beautifully restored as a Β & Β, with jolly hosts. Late night snack at Dunkin’ Donuts; never has a donut been so good!

Monday, December 27, 1993

But Leander’s bacon and egg sandwich at Dunkin’ Donuts kept him on the toilet all night, alas. Our hosts at Cobble Hill gave us a royal breakfast: quiche (2 kinds) plus special breads. Mother doing well, but eager to get home. So we stopped only briefly to see Tom and Nancy Doulis, visiting their son Yanni, who is a student at Harvard’s architecture school. Dion was there, too; he’s in NYU film school. Also Nancy, whom I hadn’t seen since the early 1970s. Tom is a good friend. One day I hope to see the novel he is writing about Anatolian immigrants. . . . Lunch at Kendal with Yiayia. Saw Walter Frank, who thanked me with some embarrassment for my letter about his philandering, and said that Jean really overdoes such things (I agree). More frozen pipes, but discovered in time before the sprinklers let loose. . . . Worked more on the journal. . . . John Iatrides informed me that Οικονομικός Ταχυδρόμος published the news that JMGS suppressed not one but two scholarly rebuttals of Karakasidou. Some traitor is informing them. Shall we respond? Maybe silence is the best response.

Tuesday, December 28, 1993

Leander is gathering up lots of his belongings, finally, to remove to his house. We’re encouraging him: “Please, take – take – take.” What will we do with all these things, books especially, when we sell this house and move into two rooms at Kendal? . . . Finished James Merrill’s memoir in which he reveals so much about Kimon Friar and himself, including that Kimon was his first lover, while Merrill was a student at Amherst and Kimon a teacher there. I hope to cite Merrill in my piece on Kimon.

Wednesday, December 29, 1993

Naomi telephoned, speaking for Jean, about the proposal to use the Kendal bus to help the Hanover Senior Center. Chrysanthi and I got extremely angry because of what seemed the sabotaging of all of Chrysanthi’s work.

Thursday, December 30, 1993

Cleaned up the disagreement with Jean, more or less. . . . Ned Perrin came for supper. We consoled him. I toasted 1994 as “restorative.” He talked openly and freely about Anne and her family, including C.A.L. (Charles A. Lindbergh). We had a long supper at Jesse’s, filet mignon, and then returned to see Geoff Ballard’s video about the electric bus. Ned hopes to have Daphne visit him again for pancakes. He’s devastated, poor man, but life must go on.

Received a Christmas card from James Morris III, Wevertown, showing all ten children at a wedding of one of them, looking inoffensive, of course. Ugh!

Friday, December 31, 1993

Surprise telephone call from Χρήστος Αλεξίου from Athens simply to wish us χρόνια πολλά. Παύλος has some disease that requires surgery. Christos is working with the European Union to establish an institution for autistics in Greece. He says he is πνιγμένος στη δουλειά και σε δυσκολίες—τα ίδια πάντα. . . . Also received a call from Professor Jeff Rusten, who will help find a suitable Greek font for JMGS. . . . Finished King Lear and re-read the lecture I gave in David Kelsey’s and my class thirty years ago.

1994

Hanover

January 1–June 6

Feb. 6, Stowe, Vermont, Trapp Family Lodge

Feb. 11–13, NYC, Metropolitan Opera

Feb. 27, Cambridge, A.R.T. Cherry Orchard

March 3–4, Pendle Hill

March 24–27, Washington, Leander’s wedding, Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, Rockville, MD

April 21–24, Kendal, Pendle Hill, Haverford, New York

April 30–May 1, Boston, Anthony’s Townhouse, 1085 Beacon Street, Brookline, 617 566-3972

May 5, Amherst

May 15, Terpni

May 18–22, Pendle Hill

May 28–29, Terpni

Terpni

June 7–Sept. 7

June 10–14, Kinhaven

June 22–30, London, 4 Sprimont Place

June 23–25, Oxford, Exeter College

June 26–29, with Daphne and Greg

July 21–24, Hanover, Burlington

Aug. 14–19, Hanover, Alumni College

Hanover

September 8–December 10

Sept. 13–14, Cape May Point, NJ, Pendle Hill retreat

Sept. 15, Pendle Hill

Sept 16, New York City

Sept. 23–24, Pendle Hill

Oct. 8–9, New York

Oct. 19, Washington

Oct. 20, Pendle Hill

Nov. 14–15, New York, Onassis Center

Nov. 23–25, Potomac, MD, Leander’s

Dec. 2–4, Pendle Hill

Dec. 7, Amherst

Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima

December 11–December 26

Los Angeles, San Diego

December 26–December 31

Sunday, January 2, 1994

I ministered in Meeting on David Engstrom’s chagrin, his despair at never being able to cure the hopelessness of his eighth-grade students in Mississippi. Afterwards I was surrounded by Friends with recipes for David, all of which I shall convey to him.

Kenneth Boulding’s sonnets are sometimes wonderful. I particularly like the ones on non-poetic subjects, e.g., “To My Desk Top”:

My desk top is an appalling clutter

Of things unread, unanswered, every one

Reminding me of things I haven’t done,

Of thought unthought and words I didn’t utter.

And all I ever seem to do is putter;

I deal with some things, then what seems a ton

Of mail comes in—I’m tempted then to run,

My mind feels like an overflowing gutter.

I can’t decide whether I need more time

Or do I need a more determined will.

But change in will’s an order hard to fill,

And nothing stops the clock’s relentless chime.

But whether I can find the will—oh well!

That is a story only time can tell.

Tuesday, January 4, 1994

Began my Religion and Literature course with what seems a good group, including two recent arrivals from Russia and one from Czechoslovakia. Yesterday began English 59 with about 40 students: the last time.

Tuesday, January 11, 1994

Overseers’ meeting. Contrary to expectation, we decided not to recommend administration’s 4.5% fee increase. We suggest 4.0%. I never thought we’d actually resist Jean & Co., but we did. Lee Huntington was the one who shifted the sentiment at precisely the right time. Now we’ll see what the Directors do. I faxed John Diffey, Lynmar Brock, and Bill Yost telling them, please, to take our recommendation with the utmost seriousness. Of our group, Dick and Channy Brokaw were opposed (as usual) but everyone else wanted 4.0%.

Dimitris Tziovas wrote that he’ll convene a symposium on July 4th and 5th in Birmingham to honor my contributions to Modern Greek Studies. I hope I don’t have to be dead as a prerequisite for this tribute.

January 13, 1994

Karen Endicott of the Alumni Magazine interviewed me. She’ll do a “profile.” She quizzed me mostly on “Why the novel matters?”

Lunch with Karen Rodis, who finally felt comfortable discussing her family situation with me. She told of being battered by Panos and of originally marrying him because he’d made her pregnant, and of the awful family situation that he’d grown up in that seems to have made him “patriarchal,” etc. They’re still friends, but she’s determined to break the relationship. She discounted the rumor that she’s having an affair with a Russian student, saying “Which one? Three Russians have been living in my house and one of them is gay!” The thought of another relationship made her grimace. What a shame! And what a real, deep story about Greek ethnic family life, to counteract the clichés.

Friday, January 14, 1994

First meeting of the Steering Committee for Kendal’s self-study, leading, we hope, to accreditation.

Sunday, January 16, 1994

To A.R.T. in Cambridge to see Joe Orton’s What the Butler Knew, considered obscene and offensive when it first appeared, but now very acceptable and very funny. A sort of raw, ungenteel Oscar Wilde plus G. B. Shaw (sexual and political satire) plus a delicious parody of the well-made play.

Irene Kacandes is staying at our house, being considered for a job in the German Department. She and we had dinner with Steve Scher and Ulrike. Poor Steve. Ulrike talks non-stop and he listens.

Wednesday, January 19, 1994

Doing better with Martinu’s sonata. We practiced the opening measures of the last movement over and over until we got them right. Very satisfying.

Thursday, January 20, 1994

Dinner at Robert and Penny Binswanger’s. Everyone there connected with Deerfield. A vivacious Dartmouth sophomore, graduate of Deerfield, the first Deerfield girl I’d met. Wide intelligent eyes, perfect conversationalist, lovely laugh. Afterwards, Bins told me that her father had just finished a two-year jail sentence together with his boy Milken, the junk-bond crook! Strange . . .

I wrote a long letter to the Dean for Bins, pleading for the Education Department, which is threatened with abolition.

Friday, January 21, 1994

English Department meeting to select our appointee from among three candidates. I wanted the one who would be useful in Comparative Literature, but she came in second. . . . Supper with our Quaker friends to celebrate Chrysanthi’s birthday a little belatedly.

Saturday, January 22, 1994

I was supposed to go to Pendle Hill today but am home. Rebecca called yesterday and said that everything is ice there and I shouldn’t travel. So I faxed her all my critiques and have gained a day to read and write letters and practice the piano. Corindias called; wanted us to spend the Feb. 4–5 weekend with them at the Trapp Family Lodge. But it would cost $550 and we’re going to New York to the opera the following weekend, so we regretfully said No. Perhaps in the spring when the prices are lower.

Daphne telephoned. Her teacher at LSE told her that her essay was the best in the class and wondered whether she’d consider staying on for a Ph.D. I’m encouraging her. She could do a dissertation based on research done in Japan the next two years.

Spent most of the day re-reading The Sound and the Fury, finishing it in bed late at night. It’s an exhilarating experience. What a grand, huge conception, and yet how simply it all ends in section 4, with Dilsey and the omniscient narration, so calm after all the spasmodic prose of the previous three parts. Dilsey has “the courage to be” and accepts non-being (Benjy and lots more).

Sunday, January 23, 1994

David and Shirley Montgomery, Mayme, and Audrey for breakfast before Meeting. Meeting entirely silent (nice) except for Tom Waring’s ministry. Shirley Waring appeared, very thankful for the Meeting’s support in her illness. I promised Nancy Corindia that we would drive up to the Trapp Lodge on one of their days there to share lunch.

Finished James Merrill’s The (Diblos) Notebook in the afternoon. Its characters Orestes (= Orson) and Dora are clearly Kimon Friar and his wife. Diblos is clearly Poros. Not a very compelling novel (especially after Faulkner), but the use of Kimon interests me. Kimon could become the subject of a fine biography or biographical novel. Written by . . . ?

Off to Kendal to hear a poetry reading by Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. Residents are very angry because apartments are being flooded again by defective sprinklers, and the roof leaks in numerous places, and they fear that they will have to pay. (Yet I think we Overseers saved them a bit of money by reducing the fee increase from 4½ to 4%.) John Radebaugh telephoned asking for ample time on the February agenda to speak about real problems in the health center. Alas, alack, my beloved community is already “fallen”!

January 25, 1994

Met with Marty Sherwin and Gene Lyons. A breakthrough: Gene is willing to coordinate Introduction to Peace Studies in spring term 1995. I’ve got to convince one more faculty member to join him. We said to start with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

January 27, 1994

Visited Sinnott-Armstrong. He didn’t say No. He’s willing to act as coordinator “from time to time,” but not steadily.

Emergency supper with John Diffey at Kendal, and John and Barbara Gilbert. The failure of accreditation by the health inspectors for the second time, plus the structural defects, bursting sprinklers, leaks, etc. have everyone in a tizzy. John has been visiting individuals whose apartments have been soaked. People are wary of paying for the retrofitting, etc.

January 28, 1994

Very nice class in English 53. The “show and tell” was with eager and imaginative students. Yesterday’s Religion and Literature, discussing Faulkner and Kierkegaard, was less successful.

Drink with Pano Rodis, who is reconciled now to divorce but worried about obtaining joint custody of the two girls. He hopes to return to school for a doctorate, but how under these circumstances?

Saturday, January 29, 1994

Supper at Kendal and then a memorial concert for Harold Greenwald, including the Chopin sonata no. 2, op 35 with the somber funeral march. I faxed John Diffey:

Dear John,

Good to see you here, as always. I hope that the trip back was easy and uneventful.

I wanted you to know “the other side of the story,” as follows: On Saturday night, after supper, practically the entire community gathered in the auditorium for a memorial concert played by Beveridge Webster for Harold Greenwald, who died last Monday of bone-marrow cancer. Chris Huntington spoke about him beautifully at the start, and then Beveridge played Schumann, Schubert, Debussy, and finished with Chopin’s Sonata no. 2, which of course has the famous Funeral March at the end. By pre-arrangement, there was no applause at the conclusion. The point should be obvious (as it was to all of us who were present)—namely, that despite all the problems at Kendal at Hanover, the truly important thing is that a group of people are there who do form a community, as though they were all long-time residents of a cohesive village, who do appreciate each other, who do mourn the passing of those among them who have been particularly lovable, and who value these spiritual gifts over and above—or at least equal to—the material surroundings, leaks and all.

Since you left I’ve had a long talk with Jean, who has contacted each of the overseers individually. She resolves to be directly involved, now, in the health care situation, instead of listening to the reports of subordinates. This of course indicates a lessening of trust, which is a shame, but what can we do under the circumstances? I believe that it’s crucially important for the Corporation to be extremely active in our support during the next four weeks. You really should—must—send someone appropriate from your nursing staff to put our house in order (and Jean tells me that this is contemplated).

Sunday, January 30, 1994

Jean and Nancy brought their adopted baby, Lydia, five weeks old, to Meeting. A black child from Dallas. Jean met the mother, who has two others already and wants this one to have the kind of opportunities in life that the mother knows she cannot provide. Sad. Jean asked me how to say “Mother” in Greek, for since the parents are both female they need to teach the child two different ways to say Mother. . . . John Radebaugh is very concerned about the Kendal crisis. He feels that Kendal is too weak to set things right without outside help. Wants an emergency meeting of the Overseers. Nancy Webber Sutton is coming on Wednesday. We’ll hope to meet with her.

Saw Harry Schultz yesterday, looking very old. He told me that his daughter Elizabeth died of AIDS. She’s the one who set herself on fire on the golf course, and married a black man, and whose children had to be raised by Harry and Mary. Now she’s in peace.

February 1, 1994

I sent this to Jean Brophy à propos of the Kendal crisis:

❡ I’ve been thinking about trust. Quite understandably, you are concerned that if you can no longer accept what Debbie tells you uncritically but must henceforth investigate the healthcare situation directly, the price is a deficiency in trust, which is regrettable but, in this crisis situation, necessary.

That’s one way to look at it. Not the only way, however. This first way assumes that human beings ought to be, and can be, perfect in performance of their duties: admirably efficient, honest, creative, and energetic. We all know that this is not always the case; yet we assume the best, hoping that this optimistic assumption will inspire people to do well, and therefore we want to trust. The twofold problem with this approach is (a) that it overestimates human capacity and (b) that it creates and either/or situation of “trust”/“lack of trust.”

Another way to look at this situation is, I think, better. It treats moral questions not in an either/or fashion but, rather, along a sliding scale in which every virtue is a mean between extremes of excess and deficiency. Thus the virtue “bravery” is the mean between “rashness” (excess) and “cowardice” (deficiency). Similarly, trust (when looked at in this way) is the mean between credulity (excess) and mistrust (deficiency).

This way does not assume that human beings can be perfect in performance of their duties or even ought to be. On the contrary, it assumes that although we may try our best (and ought to try our best) we each of us need to be checked and aided by someone else. Note that the United States Constitution, a document that is not generally pessimistic about human nature, nevertheless wisely provides for separation of powers (executive, legislative, judiciary), each power checking and modifying the other, precisely in order to minimize the inevitable deficiencies in each.

In the case closer to hand, what needs to be understood is that if you no longer accept uncritically the reports of someone under you in the hierarchical structure, you have not abandoned trust. Instead, you have moved along a sliding scale away from credulity toward a more balanced attitude between credulity and mistrust. What needs to be understood, furthermore, is that this shift moves the focus of trust away from the individual in order to settle it on the collaborative effort of many individuals, which is precisely where it belongs—for there, realistically, is where our trust and hope ought to be, namely in the faith that optimum performance of duties will happen when individual weakness is minimized through collaboration based on the assumption that individuals are not perfect and therefore need to be scrutinized and aided by others, for the great good of everyone.

In sum, I believe that if you look at trust not in an “either/or” manner, where trust is opposed to lack of trust, but rather in the manner described above, where trust is the mean between credulity and mistrust, the present difficulty at Kendal will be more easily handled.

Saw Eva Gürstner of the Lark Quartet just before they played in Sanborn Library the 4th movement of the 3rd Rasumovsky—my favorite. She inquired about Leander and I had to say that he still had nothing in Washington and no prospects. Then, when I got home, Chrysanthi said “Leander just called. He has a job!” Thanks to Nigel Coxe, Leander was interviewed and auditioned at the Levine Music School, the best in D.C., and today was offered a teaching position there. He’ll start at just one day a week and retain the Moravian job until he gets a better feel for Levine. But the Levine job is expandable. It will put him in touch with D.C. musical life, offer performance possibilities, etc. Terrific! Also, he accompanied a trombonist at Peabody last week, and afterward various faculty members asked the trombonist about his pianist, who was so good. So there’s a likelihood of more opening up there, too. To cap it off, Leander said that he and Deanna had a very satisfying meeting today with the minister who’ll marry them. They really respect him as he does them. How nice! I immediately faxed the good news to Daphne and Alec.

Tea with Arndts and Sheldons. Walter fell and now has his foot in a cast. He is hobbling around and looks very old, but has just finished Heine translations and also a whole collection of women Russian poets. I’ll try to arrange a poetry evening for him and others.

February 4, 1994

Lunch with Gene Lyons, planning the War/Peace symposium. Bill McNeill will come as the main speaker. Gene is delighted that Diana Taylor might help with the Peace Studies course.

Sunday, February 6, 1994

Stowe

Drove to Stowe to the Trapp Family Lodge to lunch with Tom and Nancy Corindia. The lodge is disappointing architecturally, but the place as a whole is nicely unpretentious. We walked in the cold, took a sleigh ride behind two beautiful horses, warmed our insides with hot chocolate, enjoyed lots of good conversation.

February 10, 1994

What a day! 9:00 a.m. accreditation committee at Kendal. Learned that accreditation must be postponed. So we spent 1½ hours deciding that we wouldn’t meet again. Lunch with Alumni College colleagues, planning for the summer. 1:00 p.m., x-hour in English 53 on A Handful of Dust. 2:00 to 4:00, Comparative Literature 70 on Matthew Fox. At the end of the period one of the students sighed, “I’m drained.” 4:00 p.m. CAP. I sat in for Christian Wolff on Bill Summers’ promotion. We agreed with the ad hoc committee to deny promotion because he is so bad with certain students. 5:30, emergency Overseers’ meeting at Kendal because of (a) leaks, etc., (b) health center crisis. John Diffey and Nancy Webber Sutton were up from Philadelphia. We heard the whole story. Residents are up in arms because they feel they’ll have to pay for all the repairs. Diffey will meet with them tomorrow. Home at 8:30 finally. I’d left at 8:00 a.m. Watched a video of Visconti’s Death in Venice. Slow but still evocative for me in parts.

February 11, 1994

Off to NYC

February 12, 1994

NYC, Yale Club

February 13, 1994

Train & car back to New Hampshire

Back home. Found telephone message from Daphne, worried about our Friday travel in the snow. I faxed her:

Dear Daphne,

We just got home and found your message on the machine but didn’t want to telephone for fear of waking you up. The trip home today was uneventful because the predicted storm never came. But our journey to New York on Friday was prolonged and extremely lucky. We went with Steve and Ulli Scher in their car; they wanted to drive all the way. But around Greenfield we hit a vigorous snowstorm. Luckily, they agreed to leave the car in Springfield, where we took AMTRAK. The train arrived in New Haven an hour late, with people standing in the aisles everywhere. At New Haven, after about another hour’s delay, they announced that they didn’t have any engine but expected one to arrive from Washington (!) at some point. We of course had tickets to the Met for 8:00 p.m. and were beginning to despair. Luckily, by going out and asking a conductor on the platform, we were told that there was a Metro North commuter train leaving for New York in about four minutes. So we scrambled over to another platform and caught this train, only to hear over the loudspeaker that delays should be expected. In the event, however, this train made it to Grand Central Station (conveniently for us, across from the Yale Club) pretty much on time: at 6:00 p.m. We left Hanover at 9:00 a.m., so the trip took nine hours. We wolfed a meal at the Yale Club, got a taxi by some miracle, and arrived at the Met with fifteen minutes to spare. The opera, Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice, was gorgeous: it’s the third time I’ve seen it and I’d like to go again tomorrow. It’s a masterpiece.

On Saturday, I corrected papers and then went to a lovely exhibit of Virginia Woolf manuscripts and letters at the New York Public Library while mother and the Schers went to Bloomingdales, etc. We had a leisurely Japanese (of course!) meal, and then went to a delightful comedy called The Sisters Rosensweig, by Wendy Wasserstein, about a Jewish woman from Brooklyn who transplants herself permanently to London and becomes CEO of the Hong Kong-Asiatic Bank there. A bit of fluff, adding up to nothing, but a nice way to pass the time. This morning we were planning to go to the Metropolitan Museum and then have brunch there with one of my former students, but we canceled this because of dire weather reports in order to catch an earlier train back to Springfield.

What about Greg? I heard that he got caught, too, in the storm. Is he home now?

February 16, 1994

Chris Lawson telephoned inviting me to be Quaker in Residence at Woodbrooke for summer term 1995 and to teach a course there. Chrysanthi said Yes unhesitatingly, which surprised me. So we’ll go off to England, Θεού θέλοντος, in March 1995 and stay until July.

February 19, 1994

Veda Crewe and Stuart Joseph, who applied to get married under the care of the Meeting, met with Chrysanthi and me, and Bruce Koloseike and Bob Daubenspeck, for clearness. Veda—fat, articulate, a “survivor”—works in the Lehman Wing of the Met. Stuart, twice divorced, without a job, just finishing college at age 49, seemed somewhat (!) problematic to us, but it’s Veda’s one and only chance (and maybe his last chance), so we said Yes.

February 20, 1994

Went to Rollins Chapel to hear Alex Ogle and others play “our” Martinu trio at breakneck speed. I could never manage it so fast. But what we produce at home basically sounds like Martinu, despite everything.

February 22, 1994

A good Overseers Meeting with John Diffey present. He is still greatly concerned about Jean and showed me a letter to her in which he threatens to fire her if she doesn’t change. He is requiring her to be counseled on a regular basis.

February 24, 1994

Outreach. I spoke again, forcefully, about the legitimacy of taxing the residents for outreach. We are hoping now to help somewhat with meals on wheels in Lyme. Lafayette and John Radebaugh are getting commercial drivers’ licenses to be able to drive the Kendal bus for Chrysanthi’s Hanover Senior Center excursions.

Ned Perrin took us out to supper. Poor man! Since Anne’s death he has been burying his sorrow in work, but not in writing. He says he cannot write . . . yet. So he wants to teach at full level again, every term. I’m hoping that he may come on as a discussion leader in my Alumni College. I offered Testa the same.

February 26, 1994

Listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Death in Venice. The music is beginning to haunt me. It is so beautiful, so sad.

February 27, 1994

Cambridge

To Cambridge. Lunch with Mike Antonakes,, who is flourishing in retirement. Then to A.R.T. for a magnificent Cherry Orchard—pure magic with Claire Bloom as Mrs. Ranevskaya, Jeremy Geidt very fine as Gayev, Alvin Epstein as a teetering Firs, Jack Willis vigorous as Lopakhin, and Reno Airaldi a comic hit as Boris. Everyone was uplifted by Claire Bloom’s presence, it seems, and of course by Ron Daniels’ direction. Even Royal Miller, mediocre in previous plays, did an excellent Pyotr. Claire Bloom, of course, was superb as the improvident aristocrat in decline. Daniels played it with lots of humor, not at all as a dirge. And Lopakhin was done correctly, I think—i.e., not as a complete boor and/or villain, but as the new, vigorous, emerging class destined to replace the effete aristocrats, who are now totally anachronistic.

February 28, 1994

Gerber sent me to Dr. Rous, a urologist. He felt the prostate and concluded that I need to do nothing at this point, especially since the latest PSA is the lowest ever. Amen! But I should have an ultrasound test of the kidneys and make sure that urine is not backing up into them.

March 1, 1994

Graham Wallis’s Presidential Lecture. I didn’t understand the engineering part but was delighted when he read a long poem in rhyming couplets submitted to the Hanford nuclear power plant in England after his inspection of it.

March 2, 1994

A treat. Martha Graham ballet performed here. I found Appalachian Spring (Copland) rather stiff and dated and pretentious in its insistence on being “American.” But “Demeter and Persephone,” choreographed by Twyla Tharp, was scintillating. Of course I’d seen excerpts in New York at the Tharp ballet itself, but now the whole thing, with costumes and delicious music by a klezmer band, was on view. Very moving and joyous. The last ballet, “Maple Leaf Rag,” done by Graham at the end of her career, with costumes by Calvin Klein (!), was slight, but fun.

March 4, 1994

To Pendle Hill. Met Melissa Zeiger and her “consort,” Jonathan Crewe, on the train last night. We’ll be deciding her tenure next week, and it looks bad. At Publications Committee we accepted Dan’s piece on silence, thank goodness. Rebecca is still up tight about Carol MacCormack and asked me to be a go-between. I’m back on the Executive Board; lots to catch up on. Played four-hands with Dan afterwards. He’s dismayed at the new recommendation for Dean but will go along. He wanted Liz Kamphausen, which really would have looked bad, almost incestuous.

Saturday, March 5, 1994

Dan drove me to the Media post office to fed-ex JMGS to Carol, minus authors’ vetting of galleys since Hopkins once again sent the galleys oversees by surface mail. Played Schumann again with Dan after lunch, much improved. This is such a pleasure. Sat in the first class lounge at 30th Street for three hours reading applications to Steve Scher’s NEH seminar. How lucky we all are to be at Dartmouth! These applicants are exiled in Kansas and Mississippi: no libraries, no great cities, no sabbaticals, no research funds, third-rate students. The National Endowment for the Humanities is their solace.

Sunday, March 6, 1994

Ministry and Counsel at 8:30 a.m. I presented our Oversight Committee’s report on Leda and Stuart and was not enthusiastic. The group now wants to see Leda and Stuart here again, before approving their very cumbersome request. I’ve agreed to write up the State of Society report. It’s good to be more active again in Meeting affairs.

Lunch at Kendal. Rose Miller complained about the health center being disorganized, understaffed. Walter Frank exulted in being married 63 years and having entered the Stock Exchange 57 years ago as a clerk (he rose to become president).

Monday, March 7, 1994

Last class of English 53, a panel with students summarizing. I was very pleased. They actually sounded like a BBC program of experts. Then to the Kade Center with Steve Scher and Paul Moravec, the composer, who is off tomorrow to Bellagio.

Tuesday, March 8, 1994

Last Comparative Literature 70 class, not as good as English 53 yesterday, but some of the students did speak well and did seem to indicate that the course had been meaningful to them and “relaxed,” although still demanding. Before this: all morning with the department in tenure deliberations. Thankfully, Don Pease and Pat McKee invited us to supper afterwards to unwind. Chauncey Loomis, Jim and Nancy Heffernan. Lots of drink, fun, and good cheer. Don is just back from Tel Aviv, where people are vibrant, he says.

Wednesday, March 9, 1994

A terrible day. We voted termination for Melissa. It had to be, but the vote was surprisingly negative, 13 against, 4 in favor. We also split surprisingly on Matt Rowlinson, which means that he may be denied by the C.A.P. Ernie Hebert and Tom Luxon passed easily.

Thursday, March 10, 1994

Another terrible day. Started with a two-hour conference at the Inn with Sandy Folzer, the consultant that John Diffey has working with Jean to help change her management style. Had to go through all my complaints about Jean but I also stressed her assets. Then rushed home for a conference call from Pendle Hill and Kendal at Longwood: Dan, Barb Parsons, Rebecca and me regarding Mary Morrison’s request for royalties for her pamphlet, seeing that Kendal ordered 20,000 copies! We refused, rightly. But I offered a compromise that was accepted: an honorarium of $500, to be paid for out of Kendal’s payment to Pendle Hill. Then saw Crewe in the bookstore and asked about Melissa. “She’s in shock,” he replied. He’s furious, convinced that Don Pease & Co. poisoned the meeting. They’ll both be looking for new jobs with meager prospects in this market. Horrible! The sweetest person in the department, Melissa, but she just did not produce. Bright spot: conference with a student writing a D. H. Lawrence pastiche using the Demeter-Persephone myth. I think I really helped her by giving her Sikelianos’s poem “Pan.” Then home to hear from Jean that the Valley News learned that medical examiners censured us, and that they want to write an exposé article. Should we try to pull strings with the editor-in-chief or owner? I thought not. Luckily John Diffey agreed. The examiners are back right now and tomorrow should give a verbal verdict. If they lift the ban, we’re fine, and that could go into the article. If they don’t, we’re cooked!

I hired Jay Bruce to be my presidential scholar next year. Fingers crossed.

Friday, March 11, 1994

Another bad day. Jean called early and asked if I couldn’t come to Kendal at noon for a briefing before the reporter from the Valley News came. A group sat round trying to anticipate his questions and to practice answering. Then the Medicare surveyors called us in for their report. They removed three of the four Α-level deficiencies but retained the most serious one, “Quality of Care,” listing a dozen specific abuses and lacks. Alas! We have one choice: we can appeal. If the appeal is granted, we have thirty days to set things right. Then the reporter came and we had to tell him this and answer other questions. Dr. McCullough valiantly tried to convince him that patients were getting good care; the trouble is mostly in inadequate documentation. The article appears tomorrow and we all have our fingers crossed. I went home at 4:00 p.m. and telephoned all the Overseers.

Saturday, March 12, 1994

Barbara Gilbert asked me to come over. Dr. McCullough, an old friend, had unburdened himself to her and wanted me to know, too. He is saddened by the firing of Martha. He complains that he is never consulted. He recounted how Debbie was abusive toward him. I telephoned him. We agreed that we shouldn’t stir the pot until the Medicare mess is over. But we’ll arrange for him to meet with Diffey. . . . Then supper with the Gilberts and Mother, followed by yet another fine Bev Web concert: Schumann’s Romanze opus 28, Brahms and Schubert intermezzi, Chopin’s Sonata op. 58 in Β minor, Ravel’s Ondine, Fauré’s Nocturne no. 1, and Debussy’s Isle Joyeuse. Bev at this best. Utterly remarkable.

Sunday, March 13, 1994

I had to act as recording clerk at Business Meeting when we considered the draft of the State of Society that I had prepared. Picky-picky. An hour of “picking,” very tedious. The whole meeting went from 11:30 until 2:15. Also, now they don’t like the poster I brought back from London, because it uses the word “Christian” (!) and “he.” Ugh! Then to Kendal to meet with Walter Frank re: governance again. Some are threatening lawsuits but he thinks that this can be averted. . . . Supper at Nardi and Tom Campion’s with Ned Perrin. Nardi recently interviewed Hillary Clinton at the White House and was very impressed.

Monday, March 14, 1994

Started with breakfast with Jean and Barbara Gilbert. Jean is obviously all tied up in knots, emotionally. She is convinced that John Diffey is going to fire her. She is going to start looking for another job. But if she gets fired and doesn’t have a job she’ll lose the baby she recently adopted. Despair. She said that the consultant’s report to her was mostly negative—strange, because my testimony was 50–50. Jean doesn’t want to be where she’s not wanted, she exclaimed. I asked her about Debbie and, finally, was told the truth: she’s no good, and may be “passive aggressive.” Dan and Brent are fine. Pam is so-so, but she tries. Tim after a bad start is fine now. We were sworn to silence. Jean wants time to find another place. . . . Lunch with Steve Scher finalizing his NEH student list and gossiping. Final exam for English 53. Then to a special Kendal Board meeting to hear about the catastrophe. Very useful. Jean outlined strategies, including getting expert help from outside. Then we went into executive session (I had pre-arranged this at breakfast, so that Jean herself volunteered to leave). Much support for her, but not much for Debbie. Desire to speak with Dr. McCullough.

Tuesday, March 15, 1994

Both of my classes were quite successful this term, it seems. Meghan Dunleavy told me that a group of students from English 53 meets regularly in a downtown café to talk about the books. Doug Cameron from Comp. Lit. 70 told me it was the best course he’d had at Dartmouth and that most of the others in the class agreed. Strange. I’d accelerated my retirement because I thought that I’d “lost the touch” and was teaching worse and worse. But now, having decided to retire, I seem to be teaching better. Much more relaxed, obviously. And I keep thinking each time I do a specific book, “This is probably the last time.” But grading papers and exams is still excruciating.

To the hospital for an ultrasound of kidneys, bladder, and prostate. Everything normal, more-or-less. Then to Kendal for an open meeting with residents. Jean, Debbie, and I. They asked what they could do. I said, “Weigh the good with the bad and appreciate the good. Don’t fret. Have faith that we’ll set things right. Don’t denigrate Kendal to outsiders. In sum: keep up your morale.” Barbara and I will go to the next Directors’ meeting in Philadelphia. I spoke with John Diffey and told him of Jean’s discouragement. He then repeated this to her in a way that made her feel I had broken confidence, which I certainly didn’t think I had. Long, difficult talk with Jean. Maybe I convinced her. She may be hearing what she wants to hear, not what is said.

Spoke to Melissa Zeiger, who is despondent because of the tenure decision. She said that Lou told her practically nothing about the reasons. I said how much everyone liked her. “I don’t want to be liked, I want to be admired as a professional person.” Compare my student years ago: “I don’t want to be admired, I want to be liked.”

Wednesday, March 16, 1994

Grading papers all day. My eyes ache. But Dick and Allan came at 7:30 and we played Martinu and Damase for 1½ hours and then chatted over a beer.

Saturday, March 19, 1994

Daphne has been here for two days. Lots of good talk about her course at LSE, which is relevant to the mess at Kendal. She has changed her thesis topic; will do how the media influence public reaction to the Harding skating scandal. She’s excited about Tokyo and has been practicing her Japanese on us. Actually, Greg may move the entire office to Hong Kong after a year. . . . We went to supper with Yiayia at Kendal and then heard Bev play the Waldstein and the Appassionata! Lovely. . . . Back home to finish papers and grades.

Monday, March 21, 1994

One student still delinquent. I told him 9:00 a.m. was the final deadline. No paper at 9:00. I waited until 10:00. Then gave him a D and turned in the grades. At 11:00 the paper appeared, but really only half a paper, and not relevant to the course. So the D stands. A shame: Misha is a Russian, very bright, a good poet so I’m told, but all tied up in knots, paralyzed. In the afternoon John Diffey came to my office with Bob Metz and Barbara Gilbert to plan for tomorrow. John wants to say—in the “public” context of the Overseers’ meeting—to Jean and Debbie that they are really under scrutiny. We agreed. He decided to sleep on it and see if he still feels the same tomorrow.

Tuesday, March 22, 1994

At Kendal from 8:00 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. John decided to proceed, but he forewarned Jean and Debbie. Jean looks terrible: stricken! Our Overseers meeting went from 8:30 until noon but Diffey, Barbara Gilbert, and I left at 11:30 to meet separately with Dr. McCullough (who had been in the meeting previously, and spoke very frankly about his frustrations). We’re trying to avoid being punitive and scapegoating, yet we must really hold Debbie and Jean accountable. John says that every gain achieved when nurses come from Philadelphia is then lost as soon as they leave. They’re actually considering forfeiting the appeal rather than chancing another failure. Tomorrow a consultant arrives. We’ll see. The discouraging thing is that everyone has a different version of events such as the firing of one of the waitresses, and, especially, of Martha. I keep harping on my concern for better personnel procedures, but there is great resistance.

Wednesday, March 23, 1994

Spent most of the day working on Darren Middleton’s prospectus for the book on Kazantzakis and theology that we hope to do together. Badly written, as usual. We are trying to get an Orthodox theologian to collaborate. Stylianos says No. So do two others I have asked.

10:00 p.m., off on AMTRAK to Washington, with Yiayia and Daphne. Nancy Corindia plus four children and an au pair girl are traveling on the same train. . . . I prepared the first class of Greek 13, which meets on Monday the 28th, the day of our return. In effect, no vacation. How different last year was, with our lovely ten days in London between terms.

Thursday, March 24, 1994

Rockville, Maryland

It took us sixteen hours to reach the hotel. Lunch with Corindias in the basement of Union Station. So many people! So many races, colors, sizes, shapes! Found Leander and Alec at the hotel. Alec looking fine. Leander relatively relaxed. Got a rental car. Greg arrived. Mr. Lee and wife arrived. We all drove to Lopa Court. Met Deanna’s sister Janice, very outgoing. She’s like her mother, apparently, whereas Deanna is more like her shy father. Mr. Lee is approachable, more or less; the step-mother seemed more ill at ease. Talked with Mr. Lee about Boeing, the new 777 etc. Janice works for Microsoft in sales. She’s warm, upbeat, plans to move to Taiwan. No one mentioned her failed marriage, of course. Dinner of crab cakes and pork (catered). Then their friends from Silver Spring arrived, by pre-arrangement with Chrysanthi, with a birthday cake and we celebrated Leander’s 38th. Very jolly. To bed at midnight, exhausted.

Friday, March 25, 1994

Slept like a baby straight through, not rising even once to urinate despite multiple glasses of wine last night. Breakfast with Alice Buseck, who said nothing to me, and Lori and Susie, and Paul, who basically said nothing. They departed, and Chrysanthi and I had 1½ hours with Alec alone, listening to his adventures as principal. He is already been approached to take over the headmastershp should the current head leave. He is ambivalent about this, since it would mean loss of contact with the children themselves. Upstairs to work more on Redmont’s essay on Quaker alcoholic moderation (as opposed to abstinence) that I hope to push through the PH Publication Committee. It needs extensive copyediting, alas. Nice talk with Leander, who mentioned Deanna’s cleft palate for the first time, saying that when her mother saw this she determined to give this child, presumably never marriageable, an independent skill. Thus the violin. Lunch at a diner with Lucia, Daphne, Greg, Chrysanthi, Alec, and Leander. Leander revealed that one of Deanna’s uncles in Taiwan, a doctor who owns a hospital, sent them a wedding gift of a check for $12,000. So Leander volunteered to pay for the drinks at the Rehearsal Dinner tonight. I’m paying for the food: $1000: 50 people @ $20 each. Off to the church for rehearsal. Rev. Kaseman has a lovely voice and manner. The music will be beautiful: Sandy Dennis and Nigel Coxe playing Schumann four-hands from Bilder aus Osten; a Kinhaven flute quartet, including Nancy Bidlack, playing Mozart, and the church organist playing Fats Waller for the recessional and Bach for the processional (maybe jazzed up—we’ll see). We placed the certificate Bob Daubenspeck did on the easel set up for it—very lovely. Larry and Robin Wright’s daughter Elizabeth is charming as the flower girl: a darling. James McBride was late (of course), appearing after the rehearsal ended. But Alec as best man and Greg as usher went through their paces nicely. The readings are by Larry Wright (Gibran) and by a gorgeous Minnesota beauty, Deanna’s friend (1st Corinthians). The language is very simple and appropriate. It should be a moving ceremony. Already we were crying.

Nice long talk with Nigel Coxe. He heard Ignat play the Diabelli Variations and Schubert in recital and says that he’s developed into a truly major artist. Also he said that Bev Webster is one of America’s great musicians, as pianist, as teacher, and also as editor: he published an edition of Debussy’s music setting right all the errors in earlier editions.

Back to the hotel and then to the Mandarin Inn for the Rehearsal Dinner. Very sumptuous: eleven courses, with dishes I’d never seen before, including lobster and the pièce de resistance, a huge, whole fish done with magical expertise. I sat between Peter Buseck and Larry Wright. Next to us: ten Chinese relatives of Deanna’s including an uncle who had just flown in from Tokyo and an aunt just arrived from Taiwan. All doctors, industrialists, etc. Plus some assorted cousins, very Americanized. Spoke briefly with Jerry Bidlack, who is retiring from Lehigh next year. Nancy very subdued and distant. Ο well . . . Also met James McBride’s mother: white, the bearer of twelve children. Alec toasted Leander and Deanna movingly, his voice breaking. Janice likewise. Leander made a little speech, thanking various people. All in all, a success. Relaxed and sumptuous, without being ostentatious.

Saturday, March 26, 1994

Long breakfast again, this time with Helene Rassias. John, she, and Mary arrived late last night from Chicago, John looking very tired. Also with Lucia’s nice friend, Diane, from Santa Barbara. Alec appeared in his tuxedo to our cheers. Roy and Amy appeared, and Clarice. Back to the room to get dressed, then to drive to the church by 11:15 for photos. Deanna resplendent in her gown and train, very statuesque. Daphne beautiful, as always. Exhausting photo sessions, Elizabeth Wright, the flower-girl, stealing the show. Just before 1:00 p.m. Charlie Hamlen blew in. Stephanie McBride was late because of the children. Saw her afterwards. She is extraordinarily beautiful and radiant. Yasuo and Naoko arrived just in time. The service was a great success. Rev. Casement’s homily jovial, friendly, personal. He went out of his way to emphasize the Quaker origin and meaning of various silent meditations and of the marriage certificate, displayed on its easel for all to see. The Schumann “Bilder aus Osten” was lovely (although, strangely, I was more moved hearing it at the rehearsal yesterday). Robin Wright’s flute for the Mozart was superb. Leander and Deanna seemed relaxed and able to enjoy each other even “before the altar.” One truly different part of the service was this: after L. & D’s “I will,” Rev. Casement asked the families to stand and to affirm “I will” after he asked if we would support the couple in their wedded life. Then he asked the entire congregation to stand and affirm “We will” after the same question. All this, plus direct remarks in his homily, affirmed the public nature of Leander and Deanna’s union.

Folks signed the certificate, the family first. The Chinese did theirs both in our alphabet and in their characters. Then we all went to the “Mansion” for the reception. Lots of champagne plus lovely hors d’oeuvres in this palatial building. Long talk with Charlie Hamlen, whose AIDS project is going well. Nice to see Mr. and Mrs. Shin again, and Frances Walker, who came all the way from Oberlin and hadn’t seen Leander since 1979. And Todd Engstrom, the bird-expert, who’d visited us on our farm years ago, and Rich Parker from Farm and Wilderness, now an internist in Boston, and Leander’s friend from Oberlin, Edward, and his wife, and . . . and . . . Of course, lovely to visit with Lucia again and her friend Diane, and all our relatives, especially the Buseck children: David most of all. And Clarice, whom I hardly spoke to, Alice and Peter Buseck (ditto), then Helene and John who blew in from Chicago with piles of luggage, and Mary from Hanover. Helene ebullient, as always, John fatigued, Mary “philosophical.” And Amy and Roy (just said hello to them, barely). Most of our time we spent, naturally, with Daphne, Greg, and Alec. Alec hoarse but managing. Visited a bit with the Shantzes; he’s retiring this year, she next year. . . . Finally time to cut the cake. Alec toasted the couple. Leander said how much he and Deanna appreciate their parents. . . . Goodbyes. Oh, Neil Ratliff never showed. He has AIDS. We fear he may have had a relapse. Nor did Jim King show. . . . At the very end, a flurry of activity. It seems that Chrysanthi’s purse was stolen, with Alec’s camera inside. But the catering staff, witnessing the theft and recognizing the culprit as a “regular” at wedding receptions, rushed after him, overpowered him, and called the police. Next we knew, Chrysanthi and Alec departed in a police car to file an affidavit at the station. Leander, Deanna, and I waited an hour, very tired indeed. They returned, purse in hand. . . . Back to the hotel. Rest. Later, a nice couple of hours in the bar with assorted relatives and friends. To bed at midnight. At 12:30 a.m. Leander and Deanna knocked on the door to say goodnight again. They depart tomorrow for a few days in the Carolinas.

Sunday, March 27, 1994

Long breakfast with Alec, Helene, David Buseck, Yiayia, etc. John Rassias had a sharp pain in his flank last night and they took him to the hospital, but nothing seemed to be wrong, and he felt better. Alec, Greg, and I returned my rental car, the tuxedos (but I had worn my own, very proudly, since it dates from the Deerfield Senior Prom in 1948 and still fits), the Lincoln Town Car used to transport the bride yesterday; then to the bar again for a drink and more conversation. Daphne is excited about her thesis on media coverage of Tania Harding’s skating crime; she and Greg are energized about the forthcoming sojourn in Tokyo. They walked us to the Twinbrook Metro station and we said our goodbyes. Daphne and Greg are flying to London this afternoon; Alec returns to Jakarta via Seoul next Thursday. Read the NY Times in the first class lounge in Union Station, bought some silk ties, then Cornelius came, and Nicky in his sweet voice told us about his electric train set. Boarded AMTRAK to find our friend, Mr. Evans, the porter, ready to receive us. It’s nice to be known.

The conclusion after these full, meaningful three days is that we have a cohesive, appreciative, healthy family and so do the Busecks, and so, apparently, does Deanna. Her extended family—truly extended!—seems very cohesive indeed. The service was in good taste, serious, yet not somber—mindful of a divine dimension yet not sanctimonious. By all accounts, Leander has extraordinarily loyal friends. We appreciate all this increasingly as we learn about the disintegration of other families and the general woe characterizing so many domestic situations.

Later, a long talk with Tom Corindia over cognac in the dining car, about the Kendal-Hitchcock relationship. The contract must be renewed in June. Kendal is a financial disaster for Hitchcock; yet, Tom says, the Clinic wants to maintain the relationship.

Monday, March 28, 1994

Hanover

Arrived at 6:00 a.m. Breakfast at the Polka Dot with the Corindias. Home to piles of mail. Then to teach at 12:30. First meeting of Greek 13. Started right off with «Ειρήνη» του Ρίτσου.

Tuesday, March 29, 1994

Comparative Literature Steering Committee to discuss the ACLA report written by Marianne Hirsch and Steve Nicholson among others. Stressed the need for new approaches—the usual: feminist, multi-cultural, etc. I rather liked it; at least it was honest, describing what actually happens. Only Steve Scher was negative—indeed, contemptuous.

Wednesday, March 30, 1994

I’m going to serve on the ad hoc committee for Sally Pinkas’s tenure, with Steve Scher and Christian Wolff. Went today to read her dossier. Superlatives except for some few very negative students. Our English Department tenure cases are so weak by comparison. Listened to cassettes. Her Appassionata is very vigorous, as is her Third Bartok concerto played with the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra under Jimmy Yannatos.

Friday, April 1, 1994

Conference call: Pendle Hill’s Executive Board needed to confirm Janet Shepherd as acting dean after the dean-elect backed out at the last minute. I wasn’t very enthusiastic, but agreed.

Sunday, April 3, 1994

Easter. But you’d never know it at Meeting. Business Meeting dissected my version of the State of Society. I recorded all the opinions on the Powerbook, a long, tedious process of group composition. And they rejected the poster I brought home from London last year because it includes the word “Christian”!

Monday, April 4, 1994

Chrysanthi received a subpoena from the court in Rockville requiring her to appear to testify regarding the theft of her purse and threatening her with arrest for contempt of court if she does not appear. She’s in a tizzy. All the memories of the Gestapo have returned even though this is totally different. We went to John Boswell, who said that witnesses should appear—otherwise the judicial process is subverted—but that they can’t arrest Chrysanthi across state lines, only if she crosses sometime into Maryland. Then I contacted the State’s Attorney in Maryland, who was very understanding. She said: (1) If Chrysanthi does come, the court will cover all expenses, (2) she hopes to do plea bargaining to get a plea of guilty, in which case there will be no trial, (3) if there must be a trial she can postpone it until such time that I can accompany Chrysanthi. Now we’re waiting to see if the plea bargaining will be successful.

I’m arranging with Marty Sherwin for Bill McNeill’s visit. McNeill is a real celebrity and everyone is very excited.

Tuesday, April 5, 1994

Lunch with Graham Wallis about Peace Studies. Like the others, he is willing to lecture, etc., but not to coordinate the entire course. . . . To the art gallery to see Ben Moss’s show before his inaugural lecture this afternoon. Abstract drawings and paintings with quite some power. The lecture was rambling; I left after 90 minutes of it. Turns out he was a pacifist. . . . Strangely, Chrysanthi wanted to see the movie “Schindler’s List,” so we went. But she covered her eyes with her hand most of the time and asked me when it was OK to look. Horrible story. She says it revived all her hatred of the Germans.

Wednesday, April 6, 1994

Leila Kanter of the Pendle Hill board is here with her daughter and husband. The daughter is looking at colleges. I set her up with classes and an overnight in the dorm and spent teatime with them answering questions. The mother is Indian, father NYC Jewish. Daughter is dark Indian type, sweet.

Friday, April 8, 1994

Supper at the Officers’ to see Ann Johnson. She’s now, of course, a mature young woman. Lots of good talk about Noye and Dee, Debra’s failed marriage, and Stella and Jim Clancy (Jim died a year or so ago).

Saturday, April 9, 1994

To Kendal to meet with Mary Keeley and Beasy Brownell (age 90, former chair of Vassar trustees) and Barbara Gilbert re: questions for tomorrow’s forum with the Overseers. Beasy told me not to use the words “dream” or “vision” or “opportunity.” “People don’t want rhetoric or evasion. They want action.” I retyped all the questions on the computer and then typed in the answers. The questions fall into two categories: (1) What is this Board of Overseers? (2) What changes in governance are contemplated?

Having finished my introduction to Kenneth Boulding’s sonnets for Pendle Hill, I’m now reading Edwin Sill Fussell’s The Catholic Side of Henry James for a book review. Next: Doug Gwyn’s manuscript.

Sunday, April 10, 1994

Meeting for Worship, then Meeting for Business. I voiced my misgivings regarding the marriage of Veda Crewe under the care of the Meeting, even though our Oversight Committee had approved it. Friends agreed. Then we went through the State of Society again but, thankfully, with only minor changes. I entered them here and there on the Powerbook and finished. Then they rejected the poster I’d brought back from Euston Road because it includes the word “Christian.”

To Kendal for the forum. Gathering Room full. I distributed questions to all the Overseers and we went through them efficiently, leaving time for comments and questions from the floor. People were generally courteous and rational. But some spoke heatedly, suggesting that we secede from the Kendal Corporation, etc. Afterwards, many came up to speak privately. All in all, the points that concern them seem to be (1) 20% limit for residents on the proposed new board is too restrictive, (2) the new governance isn’t happening quickly enough, (3) for some, the watering down of the Quaker element is distressing—they came because this was a Quaker venture (others, however, say they’ve lost all faith in Quakers).

Monday, April 11, 1994

Letter from Nancy Mitchell describing in gory detail the mistreatment of her mother at Kendal. Alas, alack! Phone call from Walter Frank saying in effect that the Residents Council is ineffective—we’ve got to get the right people on the Overseers, not Mary Keeley. I suppose he means himself and Bob Reno (who was very discourteous to me yesterday). Visit from John Radebaugh, worrying about Debbie, etc. The other morning he telephoned, disguising his voice. Chrysanthi answered and heard, “This is the office of the president of Dartmouth College. We hear that Professor Bien is not performing his duties owing to excessive time spent at Kendal.”

Tuesday, April 12, 1994

Long talk with John Diffey. I think he is ready to commit the Corporation to paying the building expenses. He also seems ready to fire Debbie. Good! Jean has received her report from the consultant and must now submit a plan of correction. I was on the telephone with her for ¾ of an hour. I objected strenuously to “censoring” of the minutes of our last meeting and she agreed to let them go through without the Corporation’s blue pencil. Then she described why she called the police to exclude David Coffee from Kendal, because he returned after being fired, and visited with girlfriends on the nursing staff over the weekend, and on Monday we found a whole set of patients’ records in disorder. Sabotage! And the inspectors are arriving next week.

❡ “[E]thnic homogeneity appears as a characteristic of barbarian communities, not of civilized society.” —W. H. McNeill, “Winds of Change” in Sea-Changes, ed. N. X. Rizopoulos (New York: Council on Foreign Relations 1990), p. 186. Macedonia!

❡ “We have the advantage over other organisms of being capable of a vastly expanded range of mistakes, simply because we interpose words, numbers and other symbols between ourselves and the outer world. This makes human behavior far more changeable than anything genetic mutation and organic evolution can match.” —McNeill, op. cit., p. 201.

April 13, 1994

Lunch with Pano Rodis, who is reconstituting his life after the separation from Karen.

5:00 p.m., special Kendal Overseers’ meeting to hear the consultant, David Jackson, M.D., Ph.D., who specializes in “healing” nursing facilities. He has submitted new systems to us, new ways to check performance. The major problem is lack of leadership. Next: use of temporary nurses. Until these two are cured, we will continue to be in trouble. Supper afterwards with Margery Walker gossiping about Pendle Hill mostly. Then rushed home for music with Dick and Allan: Martinu, Haydn, Bach.

April 14, 1994

I’m on an ac hoc tenure and promotion committee for Sally Pinkas, the pianist, together with Christ Wolff, Steve Scher, Melinda O’Neill, and Jon Alexander. What a pleasure to have a candidate so exceptionally qualified both as a performer and a teacher. It was easy.

April 15, 1994

Lunch with Randy Testa. Nice how easily we talk. Two hours non-stop, deep and meaningful. I’ve asked him to do an ILEAD course on the Amish.

April 16 1994

To Kendal at 8:30 a.m. to have Lou Flaccus “block” Bob McKinley and me as Orlando and Jacques in As You Like It and to work with me on Jacques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech. I’ve managed to memorize it, finally. I’m working now on vocal expression. . . . Supper with Claire and Allan Munck.

April 17, 1994

Supper with Ben and Gene Moss, now back from Australia, where Nikos and Lucia Alonesti entertained them (twice, royally, with overabundant food). Ben’s paintings do not excite me, alas. He’s a non-stop talker, a little tiring.

Monday, April 18, 1994

To Kendal at 5:00 p.m. to meet with what we are now calling the “Junta,” led by disagreeable Bob Reno. Walter Frank, Bob Bergen, Bob Anthony, Mr. Colton, Jim Armstrong, etc., the big and powerful. Barbara Gilbert joined me. Thank goodness John Diffey was there, too, for he bore most of the attack. Reno was merciless re: delays and evasions concerning who pays for building repairs, and the nature of the management fee. The new governance proposals were also attacked: plus ça change plus c’est la même chose, according to them (with some justification). All this was included in a letter addressed to the Corporation. Reno said that he wanted not pretty language but by-laws by next week (!) and he’d write them himself if we were too busy. Armstrong argued for seceding from the Kendal Corporation, being on our own (but afterwards, privately, he came up to me and said this was mostly an extreme tactic). Supper afterwards at home with Diffey, Barbara, John Radebaugh, and Chrysanthi. Relaxed, thank goodness. I’ve drafted a summary of what I want to say to the Directors on Thursday. It’s angry, alas.

April 19, 1994

Kendal Overseers. Debbie has been fired, in effect, though it was presented as a resignation. We heard good news about the building: that Ewing Cole, the architects, accept responsibility for design defects and will pay for setting them right.

Lunch with Timothy Rub and Kathy Hart of the Hood Museum and Gene Lyons regarding a photographic exhibit on refugees for next fall; they’re hoping that Peace Studies can co-sponsor it. But does Peace Studies exist?!

Thursday, April 21, 1994

Longwood

6:30 a.m. flight to Boston, then to Philadelphia. It was snowing when we took off. Kendal at Longwood was dressed in spring flowers, pear and apple blossoms, forsythia, magnolias, all brilliant; tulips, too. Lunch with Oliver Rodgers, who told me (a) that Dan Seeger is alienating everyone at Pendle Hill because he cannot delegate or trust, (b) that Kendal’s troubles must be in part owing to Paul Lewis, whom Oliver described as totally incompetent. Lloyd put him in as the administrator of Crosslands and it was a disaster. Poor Lloyd! He’s autocratic and paranoiac. But Coleman Dorsey is doing better, Astrid told me. Out of the psychological hospital, on drugs that keep him functioning, working with a social work agency. There’s a chance that he’ll be only suspended from legal practice rather than disbarred. I played music with Oliver afterwards. Then Kendal Fund Board met at 4:00, Kendal Corporation Board at 4:30 to 6:00. Supper with Bill Yost, etc., Kendal at Hanover Directors from 7:30 to 9:15. Barbara and I kept pushing for the Corporation to accept responsibility for building defects. John Diffey kept hesitating until the cost is known and where the money is going to come from. Finally we got them to agree on principle to their responsibility and we discovered some money: $250,000 outright, and much more possibly (as a loan from Kendal at Hanover reserves). I delivered my speech; afterwards, John Diffey said he was relieved because it was more charitable than the written version. Good! . . . Back to Pendle Hill by 10:15 p.m. to play four-hands with Dan until midnight. We are trying to choose repertory for Leander’s workshop. Bizet is first choice, then Debussy. We’re getting sick of Schumann. I wanted Poulenc but Dan felt it was too hard.

Friday, April 22, 1994

Pendle Hill

I’ve been vetting Doug Gwyn’s manuscript on covenant vs. charter. Fascinating stuff, but he’s not a good writer: mixed metaphors, jargon, etc. But we’ll publish it. Spoke with Rebecca. She’s touchy and inefficient, as usual. Publication Committee went well. We accepted Yungblut’s revision, thank goodness. Cadbury Committee also went well. One good candidate, so the choice was easy. Supper with Wallace Collett. His wife is moving from Cincinnati to Bryn Mawr as a tenured professor of archeology and he’ll shift homes, too. He told me that he started as a poor farm boy, taught, lost his job in the depression, started a business in catering and food service, eventually bought other businesses nationwide, got on the New York Stock Exchange, became a millionaire. But the business, sold to incompetents, is now bankrupt and his pension is not being paid. Afterwards: dessert and coffee in the Barn to honor Elizabeth Gray Vining, whose book we have just reprinted, and Mary Morrison, whose Pendle Hill pamphlet on aging has been such a success—20,000 copies ordered by Kendal. I got autographed copies from both. We also honored Carol Murphy, who died recently. She left her library to Pendle Hill, which, after choosing what it wanted, left the rest for all of us to plunder at will. I found some Kierkegaard and Tillich. John Anderson gave a good presentation at the evening meeting. He is leaving, so this is his swan song. He is boring in manner but not in spirit. More piano four-hands with Dan afterwards.

Saturday, April 23, 1994

Pendle Hill

Breakfast meeting with Shirley Dodson and Bob Gray of the committee to examine the residential program. Shirley is a live wire. We agreed on central strategies. Later, Denny O’Brien told me that the teachers are already defensive and scared, thinking that I am hopelessly academic. So, says Denny, “be tender.” The morning program for the Board consisted of students extolling Pendle Hill. Vince Buscemi whispered to me afterwards, “If they’d picked other students we would have heard the exact opposite!” John Anderson’s real swan song came next: Academic “rigor” is too often rigor mortis. Pendle Hill wants holistic education, and so on and so forth.

Board meeting after lunch. Robin Harper wants to climb a tree with students to express spirituality! We wisely said No.

Drove to Haverford for the Corporation meeting. Saw Tom Wood, Doug Ross (teacher at Friends Central who came to the farm with his family years ago), Mrs. Harrison (daughter has fatigue syndrome), and Bob Smith, who reminded me that he and I started a Fifth Day Meeting at Columbia in 1957. He is retired as headmaster of Sidwell Friends. (Tom Wood says he wants to see Alec one day as headmaster of one of the Friends schools. Μακάρι!). The chief item was whether future trustees and corporation members need to be members of a Meeting. I spoke about Chrysanthi and Mayme, 100% Quakers who never could take out membership because of cultural ties, and this apparently was just what was needed. Friends approved the motion. Saw Asia Bennett, John Jones, Jonathan Collect, and Doug Bennett, who has left Reid and will be vice president of the consortium of academic societies in New York. Our committee report was reproduced in the agenda; it has produced an advisory board for Quaker concerns, as we had hoped. Also saw Ted Benfey.

Train to New York. 46th Street getting a bit boring now, which is encouraging.

Sunday, April 24, 1994

To the Museum of Modern Art to see the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit. Treat Arnold gave me a pass, so I got in free, without waiting on line. As in all retrospective shows, this one showed Wright’s evolution from stage to stage—i.e., from building homes for the rich to developing techniques for low-income homes; from advocating private homes to building skyscrapers. I also admired his diversity. He designed garages, warehouses, a gas station, plus Unitarian and Greek Orthodox churches. His “taproot” scheme for skyscrapers, with the floors cantilevered off a central pillar, is intriguing, like giant cacti or palm trees. At the end he wanted to build the “Illinois” one mile high. Guided by Emersonian idealism and organicism, he designed homes with solar heating and with earth berms for insulation. But his social vision in retrospect was not of the best, for he advocated suburban sprawl with each family on one acre and dependent on an automobile. This has had disastrous consequences for cities, of course.

Quick visit to the Met afterwards to see the newly installed impressionists. I liked the old installation better, in one large room. Now everything is contained in separate small rooms, a bit claustrophobic. . . . Met Randy Testa at the airport. He was bumped from our flight but was admitted at the last moment. Also met Jim Strickler there. We sat opposite each other and talked steadily for the whole trip—strange, because previously he’s been rather distant. One never knows. He (and lots of others) think of me as solely responsible for Kendal.

Monday, April 25, 1994

Hooray! The Medicare surveyors returned to Kendal today and left after four hours, giving us a perfect score. Not a single deficiency. Jean is overjoyed. So am I, and much relieved. But John Radebaugh called to relate severe problems in medical care.

Tuesday, April 26, 1994

Lunch with Gene Lyons, who is now changing his mind about the Peace Studies course. He says he won’t teach it because I haven’t been able to find a younger colleague to join him.

Wednesday, April 27, 1994

Andy MacDowell is helping me with JMGS and the Constantinides prize. I’m behind in everything. Must set up the residential review now at Pendle Hill. Alec sent me the questions used in Jakarta for the school’s self-study. Supper with Carol and Charles McLane, whom we hadn’t seen for so long. Lots of reminiscences about Jerry and Alec—Jerry’s arrival at Athens College when we had left because Chrysanthi’s mother was dying, for instance, and how John Lincoln rescued him.

Thursday, April 28, 1994

The big day when William Hardy McNeill came, with his wife Elizabeth, at my invitation for War/Peace Studies. His essay on reasons for change (e.g., fall of the Soviet Union) I’d read earlier. It is brilliant (see journal for April 12), stressing demographics (population increase, and move to cities worldwide) as major factors determining war/peace issues in the future. We started with lunch: Gene Lyons, Michael Mastanduno, Walter Sinnett-Armstrong, Bill, Elizabeth, and me. Talked about the course, mostly, although Bill, a great conversationalist, recounted the farcical story of erecting a statue to commemorate the first atomic pile at Chicago. Bill feels we should recruit a new faculty member trained in Peace Studies. But how? Also that we should reduce the course to 3 or 4 faculty at most. Walter feels we should focus everything on one or two major crises, examining these in a multi-disciplinary way. Gene still won’t teach the course without a colleague; nor can the course be approved, I just learned, under the new system unless it has two full-time teachers. . . . They left, and Bill, Elizabeth, and I spent another 1½ hours talking about Modern Greek affairs, mostly about my involvement in the Macedonian mess. . . . Then his talk in 105 Dartmouth, fairly well attended, but almost exclusively by the aged. No students. The talk was pretty much the same as the article, but very well done. Michael Ermarth and Michael Mastanduno, and Marty Sherwin acted as respondents. Then Chrysanthi and Elizabeth supped at Hanover Inn (Chrysanthi having just returned from feeding her 100 homeless in Lebanon) while we went to Marty’s for supper, joined by others from the Steering Committee: Rieser, Berthold, Wallis, Rozycki, Jernstedt, Montgomery. What became increasingly clear, again, was the impasse. No one is willing to take on the course with full responsibility. . . . Chrysanthi and Elizabeth were the luckiest. They escaped hearing their husbands expound the same things for the 100th time.

Friday, April 29, 1994

Supper with Dave and Shirley Montgomery and Ben and Gene Moss. Very jolly. Big discussion of pacifism, since Ben and I are pacifists (or were) and Dave is clearly not. Also, Bill McNeill assumes that humans are naturally warlike; indeed, that without war we wouldn’t have heroism. Both Ben and I had to conclude that pacifism was irrational, a sort of religious madness expressive of some sort of faith in a “kingdom” not of this world. It cannot be defended very well on political grounds—not, that is, the absolute pacifism that refuses to fight a Hitler as well as in an obviously phony war. Dave concluded that 50% of US wars have been “just.”

Saturday, April 30, 1994

Boston

Breakfast at the Inn with Dr. and Mrs. Sinis, Phaedon’s parents. Both born in Greece, living for 25 years in Baltimore. Liberal. They like Ritsos. This surprised me, since Phaedon, the son, seems conservative. . . . Then to Boston to join Filia Macedon, Popy, and Don Johnson, sleeping at a strange rooming house on Beacon Street, with a creepy fat man as concierge. Filia irrepressible, as usual. Determined to show me the town and how much she knows it. Lunch in an Italian restaurant with a Turkish waiter whom Filia treated very badly. But I had a good talk with Don and about how awful Dick Birnie is: something confirmed far and wide. Worked on JMGS article in the room afterwards, until Filia took us all for supper to the top of a new hotel in Cambridge with a revolving restaurant overlooking the whole of Boston and Cambridge. Obscenely expensive, yet full of young people. . . . Then to Hellenic College for Ανάσταση. Filia and Don arguing; very unpleasant. Hard to stand throughout the service, for 1½ hours, but that was fine. Impassioned bilingual service with the English more frequent than the Greek: to accept Christ’s sacrifice for us! Very old priest had the honor of Δεύτε λάβετε φως, a very dignified old man. But who believes? Certainly not the νεολαία. . . . Then to Eva Konstantellou’s apartment for μαγειρίτσα και κοκορέτσι. That girl from UNH was there, the one who wasted my time in Rassias’s Dana program several summers ago, still complaining about everyone else. George Pilitsis, too, with two sweet girls and a boy. Eva very gracious. To bed at 3:00 a.m.

Sunday, May 1, 1994

Boston

Up early to be organized again by Filia: breakfast at Steve’s on Newbury Street, with Takis Metaxas and Stella and baby Δανάη. Takis is obsessed with the baby excessively. Not much to say to him, really, but Filia dominated the conversation, as always. . . . Drove home in driving rain, only to have to go to dinner at Toula’s and Spiro’s. Tsatziki, lamb, pita, champagne, all fine, but all accompanied again with Filia’s high-decibel monologue. Escaped at 7:30 p.m. We resolved to eat only cornflakes for a week.

Tuesday, May 3, 1994

Jean Brophy asked to meet with Barbara Gilbert and me in my office. John Diffey has written to her to say that her job is in great jeopardy. I spoke with John this morning and he assured me that Jean still has a chance for remediation, despite everything. I conveyed this to Jean. She wants to stay, she says. . . . What a mess. It would be better if she left now. I predict that she’ll try, fail, and be asked to leave anyway in a few months. She agreed that revision of personnel policies should be high priority. . . . When I spoke with Diffey again he said he felt he had erred on the side of gentleness all these past months. I sense that he wants her out.

Peace Studies is going down the drain. No one really wants to accept responsibility.

Wednesday, May 4, 1994

Excited visit from Jean Hennessey, who says that the Peace Brigades International seminar I organized for next week should be cancelled because it misrepresents what is happening in Canada between the Inuit Nation and Hydro-Québec. But when I told her that she should come to the seminar and express her view, she refused.

Leander has resigned from Moravian College. Good!

Thursday, May 5, 1994

Amherst

Examined 11 students, including a Turkish Cypriot. Such a nice group! Stavros, the tutor, has done videos of people in Greece explaining how to cook, etc., and this is incorporated in a Hypercard program that is much more “user friendly” than our Annotext.

Sunday, May 8, 1994

Alerted that Kinhaven would be on 60 Minutes, we watched eagerly, even though Audrey Logan, Mother, and Sheila Harvey were over for supper (it is Mother’s Day). Leander anticipated that he’d be seen, since the crews had photographed him last summer. In the event, the segment was 99% about Juilliard’s special program for disadvantaged students and 1% about Kinhaven. It showed the sign, called it “the prestigious summer music school,” and showed ½ second of one of the Juilliard students playing under Jerry’s baton. Oh well. . .

Sheila told me that Kate is in a mental hospital again. She was OK so long as she remained under drug therapy, but now she refuses to take drugs. What a tragedy!

Monday, May 9, 1994

Outreach Committee at 8:00 a.m. Joined by Peter Tailer and Bob Burgess, residents. Lafayette so slow and apathetic, as usual. But we are doing some small services. We hope now to bring Chrysanthi’s senior citizens once a year to Kendal for lunch and a “show” à la Woodbrooke.

Walked around Occum Pond with Marty Sherwin discussing War/Peace Studies. The course has failed; I couldn’t find a second teacher to join with Gene Lyons. But out of the blue Marty announces that he’ll be teaching a course on America’s nuclear armament. So we’ll list that. Also, he wants to develop a minor. Reprieve!

Supper at Kendal and then a delicious concert: Lark Quartet and Bev Web playing Brahms’ Piano Quintet, with Lark doing Shostakovich’s 1st Quartet to begin the program. I followed the Brahms score and when I came to the 2nd repeat in the 1st movement I lost it. What were they playing? Turns out that Bev forgot he’d already repeated, so went back to the beginning for the 3rd time. The cellist, Astrid Schween, caught on immediately, and signaled the others. Michael Webster, turning pages, “smiled under his mustache.” The 1st movement seemed extraordinary long! But what a treat to hear this great piece in these surroundings. I felt good because the whole thing was my idea. Many thanks, of course to Eva Gürstner, the 1st violinist and Leander’s old friend from Kinhaven.

Thursday, May 12, 1994

Hosted Mary Loehr, nonviolent activist, at the University Seminar to talk on the confrontation between the Inuit tribe in Canada and Hydro-Québec. I’m saddened because none of the War/Peace Steering Committee come to these seminars. The enterprise is running out of steam.

Friday, May 13, 1994

Jean asked for another meeting in my office with Barbara Gilbert and me. Jean desperately wants to “overcome”—to keep her job. She tried out her self-evaluation on us. Very frank (up to a point). She’s trying techniques suggested by the consultant. But will she really change, deep down?

Saturday, May 14, 1994

Terpni

To Kendal to rehearse As You Like It. People seemed very pleased with my “All the world’s a stage” speech. It’s been so hard to memorize it, but I did. I also do one short scene with Orlando, when Jacques the cynic ridicules Orlando’s lovesickness. . . . Then to the farm. Started the Jari without trouble this year. Everything looks fine. It’s so beautiful. Saw a large buck on the road driving up. Telephone dead; called the repair department from a pay phone in Wevertown.

Sunday, May 15, 1994

Terpni

Practiced Bizet, which Dan and I will be doing at Kinhaven. We’ve also been assigned Persichetti’s Serenade #8. Serviced and started the John Deere, discovering a much better way to put in the heavy battery, by standing on a step-ladder. Telephone man came, 9:00 a.m. Sunday morning! The line had been struck by lightning. He spliced it: we called Daphne in London. Pruned and fertilized the blueberries. Chrysanthi planted peas. On the way back, discovered that Luigi’s, our favorite restaurant, was destroyed by fire. Poor man! Such a hard worker and then everything destroyed in an instant.

Tuesday, May 17, 1994

All day, practically, at Kendal. John Diffey, Alan Hunt, and Don Kidder began at 7:00 a.m. with the Reno junta. Jim Armstrong told me afterwards that it was cordial and constructive. Walter Frank ditto. Long Overseers’ meeting with good reports on building issues: the Corporation will pay—our visit to the Directors last month helped. Governance much less clear, needs rethinking to insure greater autonomy here while still retaining a link with the Corporation. I announced what looks like a turn-around on personnel policies: a peer review system, now at least placed under discussion by Loraine Deisinger. We started Jean’s self-evaluation but had to discontinue at 11:00 because of Residents Council meeting, which I attended. Same issues; different context. Then lunch with Diffey, Hunt, Kidder, Jean, and Margery Walker. Hunt willing to conceive of a Corporation board without veto power. . . . Next: dress rehearsal for As You Like It. Walter sings beautifully. He was with the Oratorio Society in New York; performed many times in Carnegie Hall. . . . Took Chrysanthi out for supper at Jesse’s.

Wednesday, May 18, 1994

As You Like It a great success. I did my speech without nervousness and without forgetting any lines. Ditto for the scene with Orlando. Mary Keeley was vivacious and humorous as Rosalind, Dolly Adams fine as the skeptical Celia. John Radebaugh forgot most of his lines, as did Ed Tyler, but the others did well, with occasional help from the prompter. Jack Belding was splendid as the wrestler. Lou Flaccus, the director, abridger, etc., is so deaf he can’t seem to keep track of things, yet it all worked, somehow. Full house. The play is so brilliant: comic, serious, full of startling language. What a nice life these people have at Kendal! . . . An hour later, AMTRAK to Philadelphia.

Thursday, May 19, 1994

Pendle Hill

Here, things begin immediately. Picked up at Wallingford, I heard about Sandy Adams’s distress: her relationship failed and she is without a job. Then lunch with Bob McCoy, who wants to maintain a relationship to the Publications Committee but doesn’t want to read manuscripts. Then to staff meeting, 1:30 to 3:00. Thankfully, Shirley Dodson came, too. All in all, it was useful and indeed necessary. Chris Ravndal and Sally Palmer were both forthright about my reputation as someone who is convinced that the teachers do not work. I said I wanted to start fresh, and listen, and learn, despite what I said years ago. Also, people remembered my ministry in which they interpreted me to be saying that no one had a right to complain since we’re so much better off than Bosnians. Mary Hegelson spoke about trust: the review committee needs to be “trustworthy.” Denny O’Brien was very supportive. So was Kay McGinis, recounting that when I taught here I didn’t force my opinion on students. John Anderson stressed the holistic nature of education here. Others stressed that students should be added to the committee. It’s clear, alas, that some (Chris R., for instance) are very angry at Dan, who, they are convinced, fails to understand how hard they work. In any case, I think I successfully showed that I am not an ogre out to “get them”; nor do I wish to “Dartmouthize” Pendle Hill. . . . Music with Dan afterwards. We tried the Persichetti that Leander assigned us. It seems fairly trivial, but amusing, and it is deliciously easy. The Bizet is harder, especially to play it up to tempo. Dan hasn’t practiced much. More tomorrow.

Telephoned Leander. He may have two good opportunities to play chamber music with National Symphony personnel. He says that the Persichetti is really excellent music: he hopes we’ll rise to its demands, and especially the ensemble demands.

Friday, May 20, 1994

Pendle Hill

More people approached me with testimony and also with praise for handling of yesterday’s meeting. Irené is utterly disgusted by teachers; says they’re all incompetent and are panicked about losing their jobs because they’d never get a job elsewhere. Rebecca told me the teachers think I’m doing this because I want to be dean! And so on and so forth. Good Publications Committee meeting. We accepted two out of four. Executive Board, ice cream, then rehearsal of Bizet and Persichetti with Dan, with Debussy as an extra.

Saturday, May 21, 1994

Pendle Hill

At the Executive Board, Dan gave way on the question of appointing two students to the review committee, thank goodness. From 1:00 to 6:00 the committee in its present form (Shirley Dodson, Nancy Van Zant, Bob Gray, and I) interviewed Peter Crysdale, Bill Taber, Paul Jolly, Fran Taber, and John Anderson. The result: like the five blind men’s description of the elephant. Sharp cleavage between administration and teachers/dean. John Anderson denounced Dan as a “hierarch” out for power and control and without vision. Others complained of Dan’s style. All, with some prodding, admitted the teachers’ demoralization, chiefly because of Dan’s campaign against them (as they perceive it). Interestingly, Dan seems to have some of the same defects (or strengths) as does Jean Brophy, although he is much more gifted and experienced. Did we (I?) choose wrongly when we favored him over Asia Bennett? I hope not. . . . Afterwards, supper with the committee and Mary Wood, planning next steps. Then Bizet and Persichetti with Dan, getting better, topped off by Mozart’s 40th.

Sunday, May 22, 1994

Pendle Hill

Meeting at Pendle Hill. Yesterday Peter Crysdale ministered beautifully about the spirit bellying out our sails in periods of calm, and Bill Taber prayed beautifully for acceptance of Christ’s healing gifts. Today a woman sang a song about love’s abiding power. Dan and I then skipped out and drove to Radnor Meeting, where I’d last been, I think, in 1951. Saw George Kramer, pleasantly, and Doug Ross, who ministered lovingly to his daughter, who had just graduated high school. He is giving the commencement address at Friends Central this year. Dorothy Steere ministered, too. She told me that Douglas is sinking fast. And their daughter Helen has cancer, and their son-in-law died. A terrible year. . . . Dan and I went to Roy Rogers (!) for a hamburger and then practiced—more improvement—and I recorded my part for him so he can play against it when he practices. He gave me his essay on teachers’ workload to vet, admitting that I was right about certain inflammatory passages I’d noted yesterday. He drove me to 30th Street and I worked on his essay while waiting. Also, over the weekend, I did final corrections for two articles for JMGS, and read a little of Jackson Bate’s book on literary influence.

May 25, 1994

Clearness Committee for John Radebaugh, who has applied for membership in the Meeting. I told him that he should be examining us, not vice versa.

May 27, 1994

Met with Mardy High and Perry Curtis to talk about the trip to Ireland next spring. I’ll lecture on Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett. He is interested in gardens. We’ll do Ireland and Scotland, ending in Edinburgh. This will be ten days off in the middle of our Woodbrooke term.

May 28, 1994

To the farm. Mowed a bit with the Jari. Removed branches from the large pine we took down last year. Planted some wildflower seeds. Planted tomatoes and string beans. Supper with Shapiros and Perrymans celebrating my birthday, ostensibly. Perryman talking about his six horses mostly, and his time in service. Shapiros just back from Bali and of course full of information and enthusiasms.

May 30, 1994

Last class for Greek 13. I played them rebetika. What a disappointing group except, I suppose, for Coumounduros.

May 30, 1994

Kendal. Outreach first. We’re trying to give a lunch for non-Kendal seniors à la Woodbrooke. Then I spoke to Charlie Dudley’s “Coffee Klatch” on Quakerism. A Mr. Jones then told me he is descended from Gurney and the founder of Earlham, etc. At 2:00 p.m. special Overseers meeting continuing the evaluation of Jean. Afterwards, John Diffey, Barbara Gilbert, and I sat with Jean. She took it well. We’re giving her until October 1. In September we’ll hold interviews and then decide. I doubt she’ll make it. The best would be, probably, if, having learned from this experience and changed and grown, she then were able to start fresh somewhere else. Dinner with Geoffrey Hartman and Comparative Literature colleagues at Montgomery House. He is avuncular. Interestingly, he’s turned off “theory.” It was a long wait.

June 1, 1994

Coffee with Steve Scher and Ulli. They were in London and kindly brought me playbills, etc. for our trip there later this month.

June 3, 1994

Nice lunch with Ned, after a ride in his newest electric car. He is still grieving, he told me, but he is also seeing another woman already, and has succeeded in his aim of making himself busy. He’ll be teaching and living in Boston in the fall.

June 4, 1994

Huge party at the Officers’. Nice to see their children. Talked French with Chucker’s wife’s mother.

June 5, 1994

Supper at Kendal with Yiayia and Bob Burgess and his wife, who apparently has Alzheimers. Bob cares for her tenderly. She has zero memory. He talked about Mary Dyer, an ancestor of his. He surprised me by expressing a very low opinion of Barbara Gilbert, who he says never consults the other Quakers at Kendal. Afterwards Bev Webster and Franny called Yiayia and wanted to come up to say goodbye to us. Bev brought a collection of musical limericks including “dirty” ones on blue pages. Perfect for Leander. I’ll make a xerox.

Finished proofing Ken Boulding’s sonnets. Rebecca did a sloppy job; she is really incompetent. So many good poems. Of the 145, I’d say that 20 are truly excellent, and many others, although not great poetry, are nevertheless interesting. For example “To My Desktop,” which I copied into this journal on January 2, 1994.

June 6, 1994

Lunch with Tom Corindia. Lots of gossip about Kendal and the Clinic. The Clinic loses money at Kendal yet values the collaboration nonetheless. I gave Tom a copy of Kazantzakis’s book on Knossos, for Niki, who is an avid reader, and was named after Nikos Kazantzakis.

June 7, 1994

To Terpni

Listened to a cassette of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It’s brilliant, so sardonic. Practicing for the four-hand workshop. I’ve got the Bizet up to speed (but it’s still shaky). But Dan telephoned to say that he still cannot play it even up to the slow speed at which I started two weeks ago. Working well on my Oxford lecture. I’ve got lots of good material from Jackson Bate’s book on influence, and a little from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I hope to make this talk broad, much wider than the usual review of the relation between Modern Greek and Ancient Greek.

Telephoned Bob Brown at Princeton after learning that he had resigned as literary editor. Actually, he had been fired, more or less, because the new regime requires that he make money and attract famous authors. It’s just like Simon and Schuster. For shame! He’s staying on for two years as editor of the Lockhart series while looking for another job. He says that my advance contract for the Kazantzakis letters is still valid.

Wednesday, June 8, 1994

Moved the large sections of tree trunk of the pine taken down last fall. Mowed a bit. The place looks lovely. Practiced well.

Friday, June 10, 1994

To Kinhaven

To Hanover. Rush rush to collect things in office and home (Alice Buseck showed up), then to Kinhaven just in time for supper. Nice crowd: Kit Van Winkle, 3 or 4 students of Leander’s from D.C., another 3 from Bethlehem, including Brenda. Thankfully Dan Seeger arrived at 11:30 p.m. We’re sleeping on the top floor of the barn, in the infirmary.

Saturday, June 11, 1994

Kinhaven

Practice with Dan in the concert hall from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. He doesn’t know his parts, alas, but will try. Lesson with Leander on Persichetti, 9:30–10:00. Leander explained the structure of the piece: it is pure architecture. Very helpful in many ways. 10:30–12:30 Dan and I practiced more, both Persichetti and Bizet. Slogging. We’ll see. So 3½ hours at the piano on the first morning. We’re probably the worst two pianists here, a humbling experience for Herr Direktor und Herr Professor.

Sunday, June 12, 1994

Kinhaven

Dan doesn’t know any of the pieces and certainly can’t play the Bizet “Merry Go-round,” which we consequently are going to drop. Oh well . . .! We’ll try to do “Playing House” somehow, and of course the Persichetti Serenade no. 8, which he can play, more or less. “To this we propose to add Schumann’s “Trauer” from “Zwölf vierhändige Klavierstücke” op. 85, the piece played by Nigel Coxe and Sandy at Leander’s wedding. I hope I can work this up in two days’ time. Lovely meals and company. Spent at least six hours at the piano today, mostly with Dan as he laboriously learns the notes. Nice outing with him last night for ice cream at Friendly’s in Londonderry. Lots of good talk, and very little about Pendle Hill, which is the whole idea. Leander gave us a very good lesson yesterday. He analyzed the Persichetti masterfully. Sandy gave a very poor lesson today. She had practically nothing to say. I kept urging her, sort of: “Teach us, Sandy!” She caught the error of timing I was making, but offered no insight at all into the music. This evening, guest artist Nigel Coxe played a recital: brilliant technically and musically, partly because of the intimacy. He spoke extensively about the principles governing the programming of Bach–Haydn–Ravel–Lizst, especially Ravel’s conscious use of Haydn and Lizst to structure his own pieces: for example, his “Jeux d’eau” is a direct take-off on Lizst’s “Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’ Este.” The Haydn sonata in A (Hoboken 16, no. 26), rarely played, was extraordinarily interesting and different, showing Haydn’s versatility. Then came Ravel’s “Menuet sur le nom d’ Haydn,” and Ravel’s daunting Sonatine, the last movement of which is especially compelling. He also did Ravel’s “Noctulles” and “Une Barque sur l’ocean” from Miroirs because these were modeled on Lizst’s “Études d’execution transcendants,” two of which concluded the concert. In the midst of all this there was a furious rainstorm whose noise made playing difficult. But the rain let up eventually, and then the lights went out. The piano was moved to the edge near the balcony, and several of us sat in the balcony shining down flashlights on the keyboard, a wonderful place to see Coxe’s technique. Reception afterwards in candlelight, and with Barbara Lloyd’s kerosene lamp.

Monday, June 13, 1994

Kinhaven

Still no power this morning. I washed in the pond. Fourteen trees went down last night over the wires, we heard. But the cooks made coffee on the gas stoves. . . . Better rehearsal afterwards with Dan and then a marvelous lesson from Leander, who is a superb teacher. It looks like we’ll attempt the Schumann, Bizet, and Persichetti. God help us!

In the midst of all this I am reading essays submitted for the Chase Peace Prize, and of course having lots of conversations with fellow pianists, including Leander’s student Brenda, who revealed her life story at dinner last night.

Nigel Coxe gave a brilliant master class in the afternoon. Students, including some of Leander’s, played solo repertoire—Bach, Mozart, Chopin—and in each case Coxe, very gently, first praising certain things well done, arrived at precisely what was lacking in overall conception and interpretation, drawing on his abundant historical knowledge of musical styles, not just on an innate aestheticism. Though lasting three hours, it was fascinating to watch the superlative professional at work.

The rest of the day Dan and I practiced separately or together. I gave up all my individual lessons so we could be instructed together. Leander helped us nicely with a special lesson in the evening.

Tuesday, June 14, 1994

Kinhaven

More practice in the early morning. Dan is still very unpredictable. He can do the pieces by himself but then when he sits down with me he makes serious mistakes. Run-through in the hall at 9:15 a.m. At 10:30, the concert. How nicely everyone played, and how diverse and lovely the repertoire is. Strangely, I wasn’t nervous. None of the frozen fingers and sick stomach of childhood recitals. Actually, we did rather well: a few tentative notes but nothing seriously wrong. And by all accounts we played the Persichetti with great sensitivity (thanks to Leander, of course), for we got a rousing ovation, foot-stomping and all. So, it ended well. Four days with seven to eight hours at the piano. Nice long talk afterwards with Leander about Sandy’s deficiencies, etc. Then drove back to Terpni with Dan, in convoy, listening to Moby Dick and stopping in Warrensburg for a take-out Chinese dinner. Later, after we had eaten, Alec arrived with Eyi and Chrysanthi. Eyi’s smile is infectious. She’s a tiny doll. Apparently I was more effusive to Alec and her than to Chrysanthi, who got angry and ruined everything. Oh well. . .

Wednesday, June 15, 1994

Riparius

Working very long hours, and well, on my talk for Oxford. Also lots of good conversation around the dinner table. Eyi is beginning to join in. Her English is better than last time, but still fairly rudimentary. Lovely to have Dan here today.

Friday, June 17, 1994

Finished the Oxford talk, but it’s too long. A deer cropped grass in front of me this afternoon as I worked. Three hours after supper talking to Alec about Kendal. He hopes we can keep the 100% Quaker board. The Corporation has agreed to try my scheme of peer review for disciplinary action.

Saturday, June 18, 1994

Spent all day shortening my talk, finally down to 25 minutes. Huge thunderstorm last night. Got up at 2:00 a.m. to turn off the pump, unplug fax and computer. But a surge tripped the electric-breaker.

Alec’s school is in real trouble. They’ve budgeted for 245 students whereas several years ago they had 320. But he feels that what they offer is excellent.

Sunday, June 19, 1994

Leander arrived from Kinhaven. Very happy about his workshop and talked steadily for four hours. We played my four-hand repertoire together. Very different from playing with Dan! Finished the Oxford talk.

Monday, June 20, 1994

Alec and Leander took me out to breakfast for Father’s Day. Very sweet. Worked in the morning. Then drove to Hanover. Supper in Sweet Tomatoes talking about Eyi. Chrysanthi confessed (a) that she is dismayed that, after so much effort on her part to escape the third world, Alec may be marrying someone from that world, (b) that she is dismayed because Eyi is “colored.” Well! What I worry about is Eyi’s capacity to have children. She seems to have no pelvis or hips; her figure is like an eight-year-old’s. . . . Mad rush to do everything and get packed.

Tuesday, June 21, 1994

8:00 to 11:30 a.m. at Kendal. I had to leave, although the meeting went to 12:30. The Quaker hegemony is over. But my peer review scheme may get a trial. Alan Hunt’s revised governance guidelines are better than the first draft: more autonomy given to the new Directors, less veto power by the Corporation. Joan Birnbaum is the new president of the Residents Council. No getting round her. She says they don’t want Quaker rule any more. But I think they’ll agree now to suggest six names from which we pick three, instead of merely appointing the resident members of the future board. . . . To the Dickey Center at 11:30 for the Chase Peace Prize Committee. Shelby Grantham wanted to withhold the prize, but Alan Rozycki disagreed, as did I and also Dan Siegel and Margot de l’Etoile. We all agreed, finally, on everybody’s second choice. . . . I’ll be receiving mediation training next October from Dan Siegel. . . . Limo to Logan. We’re doing feast–fast. I resisted filet mignon on the plane. Good, uneventful flight.

Wednesday, June 22, 1994

London

Our familiar Sloan Square. Children on the way to school in the morning. Crumpets with Daphne. Long talk about Eyi and Tokyo and her thesis and experience at LSE. She says she’s in a good psychological mood to leave London now. Greg found a very attractive bedroom flat in Tokyo. But they may move to Hong Kong after a year. Hope to visit them next December before MLA. . . . Daphne asked me to look at her thesis: “Mythmakers, Mythbreakers: The Media and the Social Construction of Sport—Nancy Kerrigan, Tanya Harding, and the 1994 Olympic Figure Shaking Competition.” Alas, it still needs lots of work.

Off to Soho with Chrysanthi—Soho Square, Greek Street, etc.—and then to David Mamet’s new play The Cryptogram, a moving psychological study of the emotional destruction of a child owing to his mother’s marital difficulties. But, beyond this, a study of meaning, how we invent everything, how “truth” is what we think is true. And still further, a study of human depravity in a godless world—what makes us this way? Of course, on the surface, all of Mamet’s very Pinteresque mannerisms with language are present: the repetitions, the talking at cross purposes. Beautifully acted by a fourteen-year-old child actor and by Lindsay Duncan as the mother. . . . Afterwards, nice supper with Daphne and Greg. Photos of their Tokyo apartment. Bit of Wimbledon on TV. . . . Sherri sent the Kendal Overseers’ minutes by fax and I was able to correct them by 11:30 p.m. and to fax them back ; also my suggestions to John Diffey regarding the draft bylaws. A long, interesting day.

Thursday, June 23, 1994

Oxford

Worked on Daphne’s thesis in the morning, copyediting it. Walked to the Victoria Coach Station, not far from Sloan Square. To Oxford by coach. We’re lodged in Exeter College and were lucky to be assigned to one of the refurbished entries. All modern appointments, including indoor toilet . . . and shower! The floors are wobbly and nothing is at a 90° angle, and the door openings are 5’7” (the building dates from the 1600s) but we are very comfortable. To the Taylor Institute at 5:00 for Mike Keeley’s opening address, on nostalgia in Cavafy, Seferis, and Ritsos. Very lovely, with some reminiscences of Trypanis. Saw Nasos Vayenas again, after so many years. Didn’t recognize him; he has aged so much. And Peter Levi has had a stroke and looks so aged. Moving ceremony of awards to students writing the best dissertations, by the Hellenic Foundation. One award went to Karen Van Dyck. Long talk with Dimitris Tziovas about the Bien Symposium scheduled for Birmingham for July 4–5, 1995. It seems it is really going to happen . . . in my honor. He asked who could best speak about my work. Meg Alexiou, I should have thought. Bryer came and said hello. He is hugely fat and gross. But sad. Liz has bad cancer, and his mother and father both died within the last months. . . . Supper at Exeter. Long talk with David Holton. He wants me to lecture at Cambridge next spring. Afterwards to a pub with Mike and Richard Clogg and others. Talk about the Bywater and Sotheby Professorship mostly. We hope that Peter Mackridge will get it but preference will go to a Byzantinist. . . . More work on Daphne’s thesis until past midnight.

Friday, June 24, 1994

Oxford

Breakfast at Exeter. Eggs fried in grease with wonderful bacon and bread fried in grease. All the wrong things. And the obligatory grilled tomato. Sat next to Pieris but we didn’t talk. He’s the one whose dissertation I said should fail when I reviewed it for Sydney. Sat in the back during David Holton’s and Rosemary Bancroft-Marcus’s paper on 17th century Cretan poetry and continued to work on Daphne’s thesis, finishing it so that Chrysanthi could take it back this afternoon. My paper came next; seemed well received. “The Anxiety of Influence in Greek and English Poetry.” Afterwards, Henry Gifford came up to say hello. He is 81 years old and traveled here from Bristol to hear David Ricks and me. How nice! Caught up on children and careers. He has slowed down now. Very little reviewing any more for the TLS. Nice talk too with Peter Levi, who expressed appreciation of my translation of ‘Ή ζωή ἐν τάφῳ, as I did for his translation of the gospels into demotic English. He is working on Milton. He agrees with me that Milton was very Quakerly and radical. . . . Delicious lunch at St. Peter’s. Woman from Cambridge University Press learned Greek from our books. I told her they were going out of print. She thought maybe Cambridge UP would take them over!!! (Unlikely, I suppose.) . . . Walked Chryanthi to the bus station. She’s returning to be with Daphne. Philip Sherrard gave a good paper on Sikelianos in the afternoon. Also David Ricks on Palamas. . . . Walked Henry Gifford most of the way to the rail station. Telephoned Devon Parini. Jay is in Canada, promoting his Steinbeck biography. Devon is pregnant again, due in October. Also, she just finished her second novel. . . . Off to St. Cross’s for supper at 7:15. TLS rep. asked if I’d review Roddy’s new history of Modern Greek literature. With pleasure! . . . Supper at St. Cross. Long talk with Karen Van Dyck about family, careers, music, Vermont. Also with Jackie Mackridge, and, again, Mike Keeley, who is flourishing in his retirement. Mary Keeley, after months in a respirator with, she said, 7% probability of recovery, is resurrected. Cancer gone.

Saturday, June 25, 1994

Oxford

Final day, with quite a few good papers, especially the one by Karen Van Dyck, and some lively discussion, some of it sparked by me. Lunch with Peter Mackridge, the Keeleys, and Harry Davis and Katerina at Brown’s. Nice to talk to Harry, whom we’ve known for so many decades. He tells me that Paul Morby was shunted aside finally and forced out. . . . Final session chaired by me. At the end, by prearrangement, I asked for thanks and applause for Peter Mackridge and said that I hope he’d be served breakfast, lunch, and supper in bed on Sunday. (Afterwards, I was good-naturedly reprimanded by one of the women for this sexist remark.) One of Roddy’s students drove us home. I found the house empty, so went out to a neighborhood restaurant full of loud-mouthed Americans. Read Antigone and the TLS. . . . Afterwards, helped Daphne again with her Introduction.

Sunday, June 26, 1994

London

Westminster Meeting. Some fine ministry, especially regarding discernment of our service to the world: not to take on too much, and what we can honestly do, to do well. Afterwards to the National Gallery, concentrating on the marvelous modern collection that we were so rushed seeing on the last visit, but then paying the usual tribute to Rembrandt and El Greco. The place was full of schoolchildren, some copying paintings in their childish ways, others being instructed brilliantly by Gallery staff, on Rembrandt’s Balthasar’s Feast and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. I saw both these paintings in a much fuller way than I could have if I hadn’t listened over the children’s shoulders. . . . Chrysanthi wanted tea afterwards. We ended up in the wrong place: inefficient, noisy, and overpriced, in the King’s Road. £10 for two teas and two tarts. Oh well . . . And the tea was a cup with a teabag and not even extra hot water. . . . Later, however, we had a fine chicken dinner cooked by Daphne, with good wine and a special dessert. Greg explained, very clearly, why the dollar is doing so poorly: essentially because nations buy so many of our products. He also sold all his stocks the day before they decreased 25% in value. Better to invest in bonds now or indeed in CDs, since interest rates are increasing.

Monday, June 27, 1994

Reading Antigone for Alumni College. In the afternoon went to the Courtauld Galleries in Somerset House. What riches! Cézanne’s Card Players, van Gogh’s self-portrait with bandaged ear, Manet’s gorgeous Bar at the Folies-Bergères, and Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Monet’s Gare St. Lazarre, Gauguin’s Nevermore, and a lovely Modigliani nude. Just one floor of impressionists, but the choices are startling. . . . Met Greg at Spaghetti House in Haymarket. He had been called from Tokyo at 5:00 a.m. and had been in the office since 6:00 a.m. today. Then to Haymarket Theatre to see Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Saw Mike and Mary Keeley by surprise and John Chioles outside. The play is scintillatingly intellectual. Mostly talk, very Shavian. Its subject? Probably Weltanschauung: the difference between 18th-century rationalism and Newtonian physics (all of which was expressed of course in gardens—visions of Arcadia—and then 19th-century compulsive romanticism based on heart not head, and then 20th-century indeterminancy or, better, chaos theory. Whether all this is adequately converted into characterization and action I cannot tell . . . yet. But the play makes interesting use of time shift, going from 18th to 20th century and then fusing the two, which is surely part of the point: the escape from linearity into synchronicity.

Tuesday, June 28, 1994

Stayed at Sprimont Place all day, reading Jebb’s notes to Antigone and finding with pleasant surprise that I can still read some (not all) of the Ancient Greek text. In the evening, to a stupid, yet occasinally amusing play, Dead Funny by Terry Johnson, starring Zoë Wanamaker. Four people are mourning the death of Benny Hill (!). The only really lively scene, for me, was the one in which they repeat Benny’s Chinaman routine, where every word, every sentence, is a double entendre. Otherwise, dreadful waste of time . . . and money.

Wednesday, June 29, 1994

London

Read Antigone again, third time, against Jebb’s notes and with some of the Greek. I don’t quite see my approach yet for the Alumni College lecture, but it will come. . . . Daphne finished her thesis and I gave it one more spot check. . . . To the Barbican in the evening. Met Greg for supper outdoors next to the fountains. Lovely. He went home; we stayed for the Royal Shakespeare Company doing Love’s Labour’s Lost—pure joy of language and slapstick and delicious British humor, malapropisms and all. It was good to end our stay on this high ground instead of in yesterday’s abyss, although I suppose that it’s helpful to see vulgar commercial junk in order to appreciate the power of true art. The Royal Shakespeare Company is doing The Tempest next week, but we’ll miss it. Next spring, however, while at Woodbrooke, we’ll see all the RSC shows, I hope.

Thursday, June 30, 1994

London–Hanover

Routine flight home. Zero jet lag owing to feast-fast. I worked in my office until 11:30 p.m. trying to get ready to continue on to the farm tomorrow. Supper with Yiayia at Kendal. Nice to see so many friends there each time I appear.

Friday, July 1, 1994

Hanover–Terpni

Alec and Eyi showed up, on the way to Boston for a wedding and then to visit Tom Wood in the Poconos. On the way to the farm, Chrysanthi was morose and silent. After much prodding she finally burst out with her dismay at Alec’s relationship with Eyi: return to third world, to a peasant, to a colored person, to someone with meager education and no apparent skills. What could I say? “Thank God my parents are both dead!” Chrysanthi sighed. She’s really suffering. Later, I spoke at length with Leander, who said that he and Deanna spent most of their drive today to Washington talking about Eyi. They share Chysanthi’s dismay. Leander tried to speak frankly to Alec, but Alec was very defensive and touchy. I’m the only one who seems to be taking things more in stride, but I share the others’ fears for what will happen in the long run if they get married.

Interestingly, this morning Eyi asked me in Hanover, “Have I gotten darker?” I wanted to say, “You were dark to begin with,” but kept silent. Apparently she herself is sensitive about her color. Strange. No, not so strange.

July 7, 1994

Finished reading the 24 submissions for the Elizabth Constantindes Translation Prize amid lightning, thunder, and a deluge of rain. Played violin-piano with Alec, including Bach’s Α-minor concerto and the first movement of the Beethoven violin concerto. Planning visit to Tokyo already. Alec spoke today with NiMo about laying cable for him next June.

July 8, 1994

Yasuo is here. Played the Bach double concerto, Holst, Loeillet, Vivaldi, Ibert. Very nice. Eyi is talking more and more, and better and better. Dare I admit that I’m charmed by her? Chrysanthi is still boiling inside.

July 10, 1994

Tom and Nancy Corindia came with their four children: Niki and Emily (the adopted ones) and the twins: Alex and Francis. They brought Mother, too. Lots of fun with the rubber boat in the pond. But when the great moment came to set up their tent, Tom discovered that he’d forgotten the poles. We sat down for meals outdoors, around the picnic table, eleven people in all.

July 12, 1994

To the Hall of Springs for supper with Yiayia, Alec, Eyi, and Chrysanthi. Alec toasted our 39th anniversary. Eyi looked charming in a flowing Indonesian dress. The program included Pastoral Dances: very lovely, especially the duo by Peter Boal and Jenifer Ringer. Then my favorite, Apollo, with Nilas Martins, a blond Danish beauty, as Apollo, looking very much like a Greek god. So moving and exciting owing to Stravinsky’s music and Balanchine’s utter simplicity. Then Fearful Symmetries with minimalist music and choreography by Peter Martins, too long and unvaried. Unrelenting frenzy becomes tiring.

July 13, 1994

To the Shapiros for supper and then Irv’s Indonesian slides and his ninety-minute monologue/lecture. Interesting, sometimes beautiful, but Eyi is right in feeling that too much concentration was on the primitive and ritualist and animistic. Indonesians want to be modern, even Western, as do Greeks, but also to preserve their special culture, but not in this primitive form. The most memorable photos were of the terraced rice fields with their irrigation system, a bit of which I saw outside of Jakarta in 1990.

July 14, 1994

The last three days I’ve devoted to the journal, bringing everything up to date, getting articles out to readers, corresponding with authors, revising the Style Sheet. Finished today. Will turn now to Alumni College lectures, starting wiith Antigone. Reading Bernard Knox first.

July 16, 1994

Up at 6:00 a.m. to burn the brush pile with Alec, Eyi, and Chrysanthi, later with Leander, who arrived last night. After the fire got started we cut down three dead trees that were aesthetically displeasing and burned them as well. Leander in good spirits. His four-hand workshop made a profit of $850 and John Austin already wants him to repeat it several times a year. The Seattle recital, recently cancelled, is now reinstated: Prokofiev, Mozart, Gershwin, and the big Grieg sonata, designed, says Leander, for a non-sophisticated audience. Last night I read Bruno Repp’s scientific study of expression in Schumann’s Träumerei: how 28 pianists differ in their rendition. When all is said and done, what does this prove? Not much.

Worked form 6:30 to 11:30 on the first subsequent clearing. Showered. Napped. Michael Gouthreau came at Alec’s invitation to cut himself some firewood for the winter. . . . The mail delivered Roddy Beaton’s Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, which I’ve been asked to review for the TLS. Finally! (Thanks to Mike Keeley, who was approached first in Oxford, said No, and suggested me. Good friend.)

The Jari broke again, but Dave Whitty had a part and I’ll put it back together tomorrow, in time for Greg.

Daphne and Greg arrived at suppertime in a white convertible rented in Montreal, looking very smart and prosperous, and none the worse for the vicissitudes of moving out of their Sloan Square house. We had a gala and quintessentially American meal of sirloin steak cooked outdoors, and blueberry pie (with berries picked on the farm, of course) to celebrate Alec’s birthday. Daphne presented me with her thesis, very proudly.

July 17, 1994

Leisurely breakfast, with the entire family (only Deanna missing). Congratulations on our 39th anniversary. Fixed the Jari. All gathered round and explained to Yiayia that this gathering is chiefly in honor of her forthcoming 90th birthday (January 17, 1995). She said she has been so happy these days to be here surrounded by family, a feeling she does not get at Kendal despite the proximity of Chrysanthi and me. Alec took Greg and Leander to see the view from his ledges. Leander has been practicing Gershwin and Prokofiev for his recital; I practiced my four-hand repertoire. Daphne and Chrysanthi are planning a lamb dinner tonight. . . . I finished Bernard Knox on Antigone, very helpful, and began Cedric Whitman. So much interpretation hinges on the suspect lines 932–1012. . . . Gala dinner at home with Daphne’s special potatoes and lamb and homemade bread, and champagne, and a fruit salad inside a watermelon rind carved out to be a basket. Yiayia very pleased, of course. Then Leander and I played my four-hand repertoire. I did everything OK except (of course) the Bizet Merry-Go-Round, where one measure stumped me, as expected. But I can do it if I practice more and more. Leander played Schubert and Chopin afterwards, sightreading.

Monday, July 18, 1994

Another two-hour breakfast with everyone present, as we realize that they’ll be disapearing soon. But I booked our tickets to Tokyo for December, and also to DC for Thanksgiving. I’ll try to audit Japanese 1 in the fall. . . . The south field is almost entirely mowed. . . . David Holton invited me to lecture at Cambridge next spring. . . . Leander left, reducing us to seven. Off to the Narrows for pizza, followed by soft ice cream in Chestertown. Beginning to feel the reality of departure, with sadness.

Tuesday, July 19, 1994

Flurry of activity in the morning to get everyone packed. Daphne finishing her job vetting Andria’s translation of German instructions for a steam boiler! Greg helping Chrysanthi with her jigsaw puzzle. Yiayia is in deep conversation with Eyi. Alec is off to North Creek to deliver garbage, bottles for recycling, etc. Chrysanthi is making sandwiches for everyone. . . . I’m staying here on my own for a day; will go to Hanover tomorrow night.

July 21, 1994

Hanover

Saw Daphne off at Hanover Inn. She flew to Dallis to join Greg. Tomorrow they leave for Tokyo. Went immediately to Janet Flanders Travel in Norwich and paid for our two tickets to Tokyo in December. Then haircut, bank, catching up in the office. Jay Bruce, my new helper for the journal, came in with his manuscripts. Supper with Yiayia and Audrey at Sweet Tomatoes. Alec and Eyi returned to the farm after Daphne left. We all had a “last breakfast” at EBA’s.

July 22, 1994

All day at Kendal. Breakfast with the Residents Council. Lynmar spoke briefly. People asked questions, chiefly about the method of choosing council representatives and directors. I defended our position—slate of six from which we choose two—as a compromise. Then to a meeting featuring reports by all department heads, very well done. It was especially good to hear Carol Blanc’s, assuring that beginning August 1st there will be no more temporary nurses. Brava! Proceeded to governance issues, cleaning up the proposed new bylaws, which will be minimum standards for all facilities and can be upgraded by Hanover, Oberlin, Ithaca, Longwood, etc. if needed. I urged elimination of the words “vote” and “elect” in the language. Lunch with Tim Campbell and John Diffey. Afternoon session: auditor’s report, more on governance, more on the shared services fee: we renewed the old arrangement but only until 31 March, promising further negotiation by September. The new board should be in place by September; also, Jim Armstrong and Mary Schaffner have agreed to join from the residents’ community. At the breakfast I said that in effect this is our 10th anniversary: seven years of planning and building plus three of operation. We started as a Quaker-run enterprise but are now, consistent with Quaker principles, becoming all-inclusive and democratic. Interestingly, the Quaker ethos guarantees its own dissolution. Sad, but challenging. . . . Nice supper at Jesse’s afterwards with the Directors and Overseers. Don Kidder will be the Philadelphian joining our new board. They’ve asked me to continue as clerk.

Saturday, July 23, 1994

Burlington

To Burlington for Athos Rassias’s wedding. Helene is engaged to an older man, very nice, with two grown children in their 20s. John is, of course, “skeptical.” But Helene is radiant. Joined Alec and Eyi at the church. Roman Catholic service, OK but with terrible music. Interlude with Alec and Eyi afterward; then long drive to country club on the lake for a gala dinner. Long talk with Buck about John’s future, his fear of aging and retirement. Loud music prevented further conversation, more or less, with the nice young people at our table, including one of my former students. When a Greek dance was played, Chrysanthi ran to the lead, full of κέφι, and I joined. Then we said goodbye to Eyi and Alec, who left for Leander’s before returning to Indonesia. Eyi very grateful to me, said her family doesn’t talk the way ours does. Chrysanthi not depressed. She’s getting used to Alec’s absence, it seems. Overnight in a motel.

Sunday, July 24, 1994

Return to the farm leisurely via Champlain ferry and some sightseeing on the New York State side—down the lake. How nice to return to Terpni!

Tuesday, July 26, 1994

Working on my Antigone lecture. I love to write and think. Practicing Debussy for Dan and me. Jean telephoned to say that Lloyd and Paul Lewis have both resigned. End of an era. When I saw John Diffey last week I said, “You look tired.” He replied that he’d been having several very difficult problems. Probably this was one of them. My guess is that he fired Paul and that Lloyd resigned in protest. We’ll see . . .

Friday, July 29, 1994

To Lake George Opera to see Rossini’s “Lady of the Lake” with the Shapiros and Tom Akstens. Tom’s miserable situation as an adjunct professor at Sienna College makes me realize vividly how fortunate I have been at Dartmouth. Some members of the orchestra were friends of Leander’s either from Kinhaven or Moravian. I talked with Jim Tomba, the percussionist. Seeing so many young musicians, instrumentalists and singers, I recall so vividly the rows of practice rooms at Oberlin Conservatory, with each occupant dreaming of success. But most are in the chorus—if that.

Saturday, July 30, 1994

Finished the Antigone lecture, finally. Spent all day revising it and composing an abstract. Jerry Gardner came for supper (Rosine and the children are in France.) In Rosine’s absence he is very talkative. Lots about Morris, whom Jerry considers sick. Apparently Morris threatened to kill his children and himself this winter; that’s why he was brought out to the mental hospital. But he pays for his full-page ads. Jerry advised him not to print the latest one, and Morris responded with a 13-page letter, by fax, justifying his “persecution.” Another man is suing North Creek for allegedly illegally upgrading Waddell Road. Jerry is doing better financially. But he still needs to wait on table twice a week. He brings home an average of $100 in tips each night.

Afterwards, Leander telephoned, obviously in great distress. He went on at length about how both he and Deanna are almost physically sick, can’t sleep, etc., owing to Alec’s relationship with Eyi. Leander finds Eyi scheming and arrogant, besides being uneducated, untalented, and generally useless! He spoke to Alec briefly—hard to get him alone—and Alec scowled but at least didn’t burst into anger. Now Chrysanthi has written a totally frank letter to Alec about her own feelings, mincing no words. She sealed it. Will she actually send it? We’ll see . . .

Sunday, July 31, 1994

Chrysanthi unsealed the letter this morning. She says she wants to add more. . . . I’m starting to think about my Inaugural Lecture for Alumni College: on interpretation, I suppose. Practicing Debussy on the piano, for Dan. Dan wrote a long response to my Anxiety of Influence lecture. Where does he find the time and energy?! Also sent an even longer self-evaluation of his third year as Executive Secretary that turned out to be much more an evaluation of the teachers than of himself. Meanwhile, the evaluations in questionnaires continue to come in. What a job it will be to arrive at some conclusions! Also, I now have all five sets of votes for the Elizabeth Constantinides prize. No agreement, but I think we can narrow it to four submissions.

Saw a large, unusual bird from my office today, perhaps a mallard, with a red spot on the back of its neck and a kind of aegis or escutcheon on its breast. Also, the other day, a perfect rainbow. I rushed to load film into my camera to photograph it, but by the time I’d done so it was three-quarters gone.

Supper at Hilda Grunblatt’s with Dr. Schalita, 85 years old, who told me her life story. Born in the Ukraine in a shtetl—Jewish village. Studied medicine. Privately tutored in English. Learned German and French in school, so had five languages from early on (those three plus Russian and Yiddish). Oh, also Polish, for they moved to Warsaw. When the Germans invaded Poland the family walked three weeks eastward and reached the Ukrainian village. Then the Germans invaded Russia. She, as a physician, was needed. She had job after job, for instance two years on a collective farm outside of Tashkent, where the peasants used to place frogs on abscesses and where she was venerated as a wonder-working saint because she once revived, with ammonia, a man in a malarial coma. But the Germans killed her husband and entire family in the village. Afterwards she went to Paris and got a fellowship to study public health at Johns Hopkins, where she became interested in psychoanalysis and decided to undergo that training subsequently. . . . Then we drove her home and she showed us the magnificent house—a huge room filled with books. She lives with a “companion,” a twenty-year-old girl called Kasha. She told me that in the 1960s she ordered everything available by Kazantzakis and read the whole lot, one after the other, after seeing the films Zorba the Greek and Celui qui doit mourir. Hilda reminded us that it was Kazantzakis who “introduced” Jacques to me. He had read The Last Temptation and practically fell out of his chair when he saw “Riparius, New York” after my name in the afterward, whereupon he sought me out: the beginning of a long, wonderful friendship. We all toasted his memory; he died in 1989.

August 2, 1994

Spoke with Daphne in Tokyo last night, a very good connection. She sounded most enthusiastic. The apartment is beautiful. Things really aren’t so expensive if you know where to go. The food is superb. Everything is clean and efficient. Her Japanese seems to work (sometimes).

This morning I watched a spider outside the bathroom window. A bumble bee got caught inextricably in the web. As it struggled, the spider fought with it, sparring like a boxer, trying to get in for the kill, which it finally did. Then it carefully adjusted the web, cutting certain strands, fixing others, in order to transport the bee to another spot. Then it attached itself to the bee and sucked, I suppose, until it itself grew huge: a bloated ball. Then it went to sleep. Hours later it began to move again. And now a baby spider appeared as well, very tiny, and keeping its distance at first until the bloated one encouraged it to come closer and seemed to be teaching it how to draw nourishment from the dead bee, whose carcass was now about half the original size. . . . Finished almost half of my opening lecture for Alumni College. A productive day.

August 3, 1994

Supper at the Copperfield with Aser and Evelyn Rothstein: our annual meal with them. As always, Aser explained science to me so lucidly, this time what his son is doing in England in a laboratory in Norwich using molecular biology to improve plants. Instead of cross-breeding as in the past, a process that takes a long time because the new seed must grow through the plant’s entire life cycle before further experimentation takes place, they can now simply take a gene and place it in the seed. Furthermore, this makes cross-breeding possible. Previously, a rose could only be bred with a different type of rose, a tomato with a different type of tomato, etc. Now, anything goes. A gene from, say, an oak tree that provides resistance to frost can be added to a tomato. Human genes can be used, and vice versa. They have already produced tomatoes that do not go bad so quickly, so they can now be allowed to ripen on the vine instead of being picked green. Now the ripe tomatoes will last through the packing, shipping, and display in stores. As always, all this brings on the terrible inferiority complex that we humanists have, spending our lives on material that, compared to molecular biology, seems so frivolous, marginal, and self-indulgent.

We are eating our own tomatoes already, a beautifully ripe and tasty one every day.

August 6, 1994

Finished Eagleton’s brilliant book The Function of Criticism, the first chapter of which I heard as a stimulating lecture in Melbourne in 1983. A propos of what I felt three days ago listening to Aser Rothstein on molecular biology, Eagleton writes (p. 108), “Today, apart from its marginal role in reproducing the dominant social relations through the academies, [criticism] is almost entirely bereft of . . . a raison d’être. It engages at no significant point with any substantive social interest, and as a form of discourse is almost entirely self-validating and self-perpetuating. It is hard to believe that, in a nuclear age, the publication of yet another study of Robert Herrick is justifiable.”

Not unrelated to this is our experience last night viewing La Bohème with the Shapiros at Lake George Opera and discussing afterwards the strange fact that this sentimental work about a situation irrelevant to current reality (since Mimi’s TB would have been cured by antibiotics) draws tears whereas the insufferable reality of a Rwanda or a Bosnia does not.

Saturday, August 13, 1994

To Hanover. Flat tire in Wevertown. Changed it and luckily found a garage open in Warrensburg. Ended up buying four new tires. Good feeling to have tread again. Supper in that nice pasta restaurant near the monastery east of Rutland. Listened to Lord Jim on the way, read beautifully. But the 2nd half is really disappointing, until we reach Gentleman Brown.

Sunday, August 14, 1994

Hanover

Brunch meeting with the Alumni College faculty: Diana Taylor, Laurence Davies (lecturers), Pano Rodis, Joe Medlicott, Randy-Michael Testa, and Don Sheehan (discussion leaders). Planned the last day especially. At 5:00, in 105 Dartmouth, the opening lecture by me on Reinterpretation. I think I wrote this lecture more for myself than for the audience; it’s a sort of review of my career. Eagleton’s book was a great help. Next came a banquet in Hanover Inn with “remarks” by Mardy High and me.

Monday, August 15, 1994

Hanover

I lectured on Sophocles’ Antigone and Diana followed with a lecture on the Argentine “Dirty War” and Gámbaro’s Antigóna Furiosa. Diana is a strong lecturer: rational and also engaged. I’m hopeful that she will do well in Peace Studies. My discussion section went well. What a pleasure to have older students with life experiences to bring! One, for example, had been in Vietnam and told me that our presence there was a large factor in what happened in Indonesia in 1965: the suppression of the communists. Suharto and Co. were encouraged to fight the communists because of their knowledge that U.S. policy and practice supported this. Similarly, if we hadn’t intervened in Greece not only Greece but also Italy would probably have gone red; if not in Vietnam, Indonesia would have remained red, the Philippines have gone over, etc. Domino theory. It’s the first time I heard it make sense. . . . Lunch with Diana afterwards planning strategy for reinstating Peace Studies. I’ve written Elise the good news. . . . Supper with Yiayia at Kendal. She’s looking wonderful.

Received a long fax from Alec, who was responding to Chrysanthi’s letter. He announced that he and Eyi had broken up—actually prior to the letter: at JFK on the way home. That’s better. Also announced that he told North JIS that he is not interested in the headmastership. He wants to stay one or two more years and then to move on. That’s good, too. Chrysanthi and I both appreciated the pain involved in all this (for Eyi as well as Alec, of course). But obviously we’re much relieved. Alec brought Eyi to America to get a sense of how it would be to live here with her, and concluded apparently that it just would not work.

Tuesday, August 16, 1994

Davies lectured on The Tempest for 75 minutes, and what he actually said of substance could have been delivered in 20 minutes. I was very disappointed. He’s entertaining, though, so people were not distressed. Diana concentrated on a vision of the “savage” by imperialist conquerors, especially Columbus in the Caribbean. Fascinating. At night we saw the BBC video of the The Tempest. Quite good, except for a miscast Ariel with a voice much too deep and very bad at singing. In the discussion section, I concluded that the only way the play seems to work without gross problems is as Shakespeare’s valediction to the stage and to art.

Wednesday, August 17, 1994

I lectured on “Heart of Darkness” as an existentialist text. Starting with accounts of how Arthur Dewing treated the story when I arrived at Dartmouth as an instructor. Laurence followed with information on Conrad’s family background and comments on the problems raised by Achebe. Better than yesterday but still not sufficiently controlled. He speaks with only the barest outline, no notes, and therefore mis-times. . . . Met with my student assistant for JMGS, Jay Bruce, who again had nothing to deliver. He promises for Friday. . . . Supper again at Kendal with Yiayia and Beatrice, Fanny’s daughter, so my father’s niece, her daughter and her daughter and son. The daughter is applying to Dartmouth. Sweet, mature girl. As we left, a band was om-pa-pa-ing in the Gathering Room (Willy Black on trombone). Lots of fun. But we went to see Apocalypse Now, which is not fun at all. Chrysanthi left after the opening scene. The film is brilliant in itself, and brilliant as a transposition of “Heart of Darkness” to Vietnam.

Thursday, August 18, 1994

I lectured on “Death in Venice” using my spectacular slide of Dionysus (= Tadzio). Laurence followed with information on Thomas Mann’s life and especially the European political situation just before 1912, and a little on homosexuality. Not bad, and well balanced against mine. The discussion, however, was not good. People seemed unable to come to grips with the story, and circled all around it. At night we saw the Visconti film, yet again! It is haunting: and Mahler’s music simply invades one and remains.

Friday, August 19, 1994

Diana lectured on the film, satisfactorily, not very deeply, however. Then all seven faculty came on stage and we answered questions that had been submitted in advance in writing, after which there were questions from the floor. That went well. After the break, six pre-chosen students came on stage and summed up. Only 2 or 3 did this well, especially a physician who spoke brilliantly. But the exercise was satisfactory. Again, we threw it open to the full audience. And ended—without the usual “tying up” by the director, which I refused to do as contrary to the spirit of the entire College, which emphasized ongoing process, continual reinterpretation, etc. All to the Bema for a barbecue. Nice talk with some of the students, although I got to know very few of them because we didn’t share three meals a day, as on the cruises. Some had been on cruises with me; some had been in class. But I didn’t remember them, alas. I trust it went well. Mardy will get evaluations and we’ll see. . . . Afternoon mostly in Kiewit getting help with my Powerbook (the fax stopped functioning). Met with Jay Bruce again. He delivered about 60%, promised more by post shortly. . . . Drove back to the farm listening to Joy Luck Club, which I found rather tedious. We abandoned it in the middle. How delicious to return to the farm a week after leaving!

Saturday, August 20, 1994

Terpni

The field outside our front door is like a Turkish carpet: all purple and yellow with wildflowers.

Forgot to record last week that I met with Carol Blanc (director of nursing), Jean, and Mayme to discuss the firing of Joyce Hinsley, everyone’s favorite nurse. Carol provided overwhelming documentation showing malpractice: administering medicines not prescribed, failing to administer those prescribed, misrecording doctors’ instructions, etc. We counseled termination and will be prepared for the outcry. Too bad that the Peer Review system is not in place yet. . . . Jean also reported the successful hiring of a new Assistant Administrator. On the other hand, Nancy Mitchell wrote again, detailing horrendous alleged malpractice re: her mother (Alzheimer’s). So, problems continue. Carol Blanc is strong, but also autocratic and cruel, people say (including Jean); morale problems will not disappear.

I’ve started right in this morning (after practicing Schubert a little) with work: reading Roddy Beaton’s Introduction to Modern Greek Literature for the TLS review. . . . Ambassador Friedman called; wants me to lecture again at the State Department’s Foreign Service School.

August 21, 1994

Letter to Tom Wood:

Dear Tom,

I thought you’d be interested to know that Alec broke up with Eyi. He did so at JFK just before they boarded their plane for Indonesia. He had just come from a week with Leander and Deanna in Washington, and Leander had caught him by himself a few times and had very frankly expressed his view, and Deanna’s, that this relationship just wasn’t right. In addition, Chrysanthi wrote a long letter expressing, for the first time, her own dismay. (Fortunately, that letter reached Alec after the breakup, for he himself confided that, if it had come before, his stubbornness might have impelled him to go in the opposite direction.) In any case, this episode (one of a series, as you know all too well) seems to be concluded. In the same letter, by the way, Alec noted that he had been queried again about applying for the headmastership of North Jakarta International School. He replied that he was not interested: he planned to stay only one or two additional years and then “move on.” You can imagine Chrysanthi’s pleasure at both pieces of news! But we sense the pain that Alec has gone through—and Eyi, too—and are relieved that he seems so busy at the moment (he says that he’s working 15-hour days) that perhaps he doesn’t have time to feel the pain. (It will haunt him later, of course.)

His visit with you was very meaningful, as always. I don’t know if you conveyed by silences or looks or whatever your own perplexity regarding the relationship. I expect you did or, even if you didn’t, that some form of “message” got through to accompany the subsequent messages he got from Leander and Chrysanthi. (I, acting on instructions from my good wife, kept silent. Actually, I was the only one who went out of his way to be loving and gracious to Eyi, who after all seemed to me very sweet, frightened, and vulnerable.)

That’s our news—for now! Best wishes to you both.

August 23, 1994

Raquette Lake

An all-day excursion with the Shapiros and their friends the Greenwalds first to the Great Camp Sagamore, which I didn’t find very interesting architecturally, and then on the Raquette Steamboat ride around the lake peeking in at other Great Camps: very pleasant and informative. Most have been preserved, but one, sold to the State, was burned down, as usual. Only the chimney remains.

August 26, 1994

Leander and Deanna are back from Hawaii. Leander enthused about descending to the sea-floor in a glass-sided submarine, flying over volcanoes in a helicopter, and trekking in the rain-forest. A very rich experience. He’s an active tourist, like me, wanting to see . . . see . . . see. . . . Supper with Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald again. Maureen goes into hospital on Tuesday to get an artificial hip joint. We made this the “Last Supper” and talked easily and well from 6:00 to 9:00, non-stop, especially about nursing. Maureen, from her experience as an RN, understands what’s been happening at Kendal. . . . Earlier, I finished a first revision of the “Anxiety of Influence” talk. Peter Mackridge hopes to publish the proceedings of the Oxford Symposium. Previously, I finished the TLS review, which came with much difficulty. I hope it measures up to their standard. 900 words really weren’t enough.

Saturday, August 27, 1994

Tourists again, with the Shapiros. We drove to Newcomb, where Irv had arranged with Ken Helms to take us in his horse-drawn carriage in to the “great camp” Santanoni. The horses were Ben and Jerry! Very lazy, so the 4.7 miles took 1½ hours. Chrysanthi and I got out and walked about 1½ miles. Santanoni is much more interesting architecturally than Sagamore, with rustic doors, and a wonderful complex of porches. Also a lovely stairway done in logs in part. All the structures are built of logs, unlike Sagamore. But the place is a mess, the victim of vandalism and neglect, with leaking roofs, etc. There is some effort to keep the buildings from collapsing, at least. We picnicked on the porch overlooking the lake, then had Ben and Jerry drive us out again. Afterwards, indefatigable Irv took me, the only one who hadn’t been, to the Adirondack Interpretation Center: disappointing except for the stand of cedars we saw and one 120-year-old white pine. Then to Tahawus, where we walked into the premises of the abandoned National Lead Company mine, the old titanium mine. The huge open pit is now ¾ filled with water. The tailings are everywhere, including one huge, ugly, black mountain of them. Old signs eerily say “Visitors’ Parking,” etc. The buildings are hacked away in part and seemingly untouched in part. Deserted. Not a soul where 350 workers labored for so many decades. The railway lines are half-buried in undergrowth. . . . Then via North Hudson to Schroon Lake for De Cesare’s pizza. Home at 6:30. A full day. Chrysanthi said she was happy to see me willing to “waste” a full day like this, and also previously when we went to Sagamore and Raquette Lake. Preparation for retirement, I suppose.

August 31, 1994

Amazing! We entertained Jim and Joan Morris to pie and coffee after supper! He was rational, but quite sickly. Didn’t harp on his “persecution,” etc. We talked about children, schools, the blue heron (which likes their children’s music). He was very curious about the Waddell Road murder. He told us that people had lived back there in the past; there are cellar holes, an old well, etc. Joan, ironically, is working for En Con in Warrensburg. She’s the daughter of a NYC policeman and worked for eleven years in a prison in Dutchess County, in the medical department. She’s glad to associate now more with trees and beaver than people. The children are well liked at school and generally the parents think the North Creek School is just grand. She seems to be Catholic and religious (explains the ten children). She reads a story to her youngest at bedtime and they say prayers together. Neither seems very educated, although he is a sort of amateur architect, having designed this house and constructed ten homes previously. They want us to visit. They’re worried that the children won’t want to settle here or build homes (naturally) although one is talking about building a log cabin. . . . In any case, we broke the ice and found that gossip and innuendo are obviously inadequate to sum up human character.

I am reading Doug Gwyn’s fascinating Marxist study of early Quakerism and am copyediting it for Pendle Hill Publications. What a tempestuous time the 1640s, ’50s, and ’60s were! Those early Quakers were “possessed.” He explains much of it as a reaction to economic changes, emerging capitalism, growth of the bourgeoisie, etc. The central idea is the concept of covenant. They had a covenant with Jesus Christ—the Light, the Life—that superseded all worldly contracts.

September 2, 1994

Don and Evelyn Greene for supper along with the Shapiros. Sheepishly, we admitted to the Greenes that we had been good neighbors to the Morrises. . . . I’m trying to install a workable turnbuckle on the shed door, which has sagged a bit. Closing up is sad, especially in this χαρά Θεού weather. Tomorrow Chrysanthi will collect all the tomatoes (tonight we feared frost and covered them). Same two deer in our entrance. Stars tonight were spectacular: so bright and crisp, especially the entire Milky Way.

September 7, 1994

Terpni

Hard to leave. I’m so productive here, whereas in Hanover I’m fragmented. But Chrysanthi says she’s bored. So we compromised, and will leave two days earlier. . . . The wildflowers I planted near the electric pole are spectacular. I took photos. Must plant more seed next summer. . . . Back in Hanover, stacks of mail. Telephone messages. Office . . .

September 8, 1994

Supper at Kendal with Mother and Dick Jones and his wife, who has Alzheimer’s. Dick talked in a non-stop monologue about his illustrious ancestors: founder of Earlham College, etc., and his wife’s. She’s a Penington. Tedious but interesting. He had also visited an Adirondack great camp in its heyday.

September 10, 1994

Supper again at Kendal, this time with Charlie and Fran Dudley, much better company than the Joneses. Then Bev & Franny’s concert. They played Schumann’s “Bilder aus Osten,” which ought to have been fun for me, but it was totally dead. When Bev played alone, Chopin’s G-minor Ballade and Berceuse, some of the magic came through.

September 11, 1994

All set to go to meeting when Filitsa telephoned in distress. Don Johnson had died yesterday. He chopped wood all morning, then took Popy to climb Mount Cube, got to the top, and had a heart attack on the way down and died with the child, age 11, watching in horror. We drove immediately to Felitsa’s home; she was semi-hysterical, but the child was in perfect control. Discovered that Don had a bad heart, a family history of heart failure, and kept postponing a bypass operation. Macho-suicidal? Felitsa is beside herself with guilt for not pressing him to have the operation, and with self-pity for the loss at home (and work). “Oh, bring him back, Peter! Why can’t he come back?” Takis Metaxas arrived from Wellesley and we drove together to Orford to fetch back Don’s auto. Eerie feeling, stepping into the car he had left fully expecting, of course, to drive home. Finally, Don’s daughters arrived. Filia’s son was expected shortly, and we were able to leave after four hours there. Poor poor Filia! And they had planned to be married in the spring.

I’m preparing for the Pendle Hill Evaluation Meeting next week. I’ve been tabulating the results of the questionnaire. Very tedious. . . . John Hennessey, new on the Kendal Board, has already sent in a critique of the bylaws. That’s all we need!

Supper with Walter and Miriam. He looks wonderful, and is fully alive in mind and even in body. We’re preparing a Festschrift for his 80th, secretly, of course.

September 13, 1994

Cape May Point

Arrived at Cape May for lunch. It’s a bit like von Aschenbach’s Venice, although apparently wholesome—the tourists are Sophists! The famous mansions are “cute” gingerbread houses done up in garish colors, circa 1860s, 70s, 80s, 90s. I totaled percentages in the Pendle Hill questionnaire while eating lunch. Then to Cape May Point and the PH staff reunion. Spent the afternoon on the beach. Tropical heat. Long walk with Rebecca catching up on Doug Gwyn’s book and the Boulding sonnets. Discovered that Gwyn left his parish because, while giving marriage courses to a couple as pastor, he started an affair with the wife! The congregation of course fired him and now the wife is suing the church. Ah! Quakers! Paddled Tom’s homemade kayak/guideboat in the lovely calm sea. Others saw dolphins but I didn’t. After supper, interviewed Janet Shepherd at length for the Evaluation and was saddened to be told that she already has found that she cannot work with Dan. Dan very apprehensive: why were we talking so much? Shared sleeping quarters with Dan but of course said nothing.

Wednesday, September 14, 1994

Cape May Point–Pendle Hill

Up at 5:30 a.m. to go with Nancy Frommelt, Dan, Tom, Sally Palmer, Bill Wood to see the sunrise from Cape May promenade. Fog alas. But a ball of fire rose eventually out of the mist. Nancy and I walked the whole promenade in deep conversation about her work with gifted children in the summer, about natural law, about the Catholics’ reason for opposing abortion. She’s a Franciscan nun and feels that the Vatican is justified but also very inept at public relations, for the deep reasons are not known by the general public. She made it real for me by saying, “Suppose Quakers were asked to renounce the Peace Testimony in deference to a greater good?” You’d feel the way Catholics feel about renouncing their absolute devotion to “life.” . . . We returned for breakfast, Meeting for Worship, and then a “session” organized by Wendilou O’Brien, quite well done, in which each person’s “concern” was rephrased by a group of six. My concern was to breathe true meaning into Quaker phrases that, I fear, have become clichés, especially “the Inner Light.” . . . In the morning I also interviewed Rebecca Mays, who had good ideas about PH’s problems but, thankfully, did not concentrate on Dan. The retreat adjourned after lunch and I gave a lift back to PH to Chuck Fager, the new secretary for the Issues Program. Interesting man, full of ideas, and aware of his reputation as abrasive and controversial. Dan wants him to “cool it” for the present.

Dan and Vince Buscemi, and I went out with the new British Quaker in Residence for supper at a terrific salad restaurant, followed by good coffee and dessert in a bookstore. Then Dan and I played four-hand piano: Debussy, which gave him trouble, but also the Schubert “Fantaisie,” which he actually did rather well, so it was a great pleasure for me, since I can now play the treble part (more or less). We also reviewed “our repertoire”: Persichetti, Bizet, Schumann. Very nice indeed! Afterwards, until about 11:00 p.m., when I couldn’t stay awake any longer (having started the day at 5:30 a.m. after a poor night’s sleep owing to Dan’s snoring), I started proofreading the Boulding sonnets, which Eve Beehler gave me. Alas: typos, omissions, etc.—a mess.

Thursday, September 15, 1994

Pendle Hill

Another long day. Other members of the Evaluation Committee arrived except for Bob Gray: Shirley Dodson, Nancy Van Zant, Justin Duvall (the Benedictine abbot), and Elisabeth Dearborn. We interviewed all morning, broke for a quick lunch, interviewed all afternoon, and finished with a working supper. Alas, what we heard again and again is that people cannot work with Dan. Denny O’Brien is looking for another job. The teachers are alienated. We also had some good ideas re: fundamental change. At the end of the interview we caucused, and members felt that the situation with Dan must be addressed immediately—i.e., before we finish our report. My heart sank. We then had supper with Mary Wood and suggested that he be given professional help (as Jean Brophy was). So we’ll have an executive session of the Board next Friday. This will be devastating for him, for he really does not understand that he is at fault. How will I face him afterward? Will he consider me a traitor? After this meeting I went to play four hands again, but of course said nothing (although I was tempted to forewarn him). . . . Ended the day with more proofreading of the Boulding poems until I couldn’t see straight.

Friday, September 16, 1994

New York City

More Boulding on the train. The sonnets do stand up under repeated perusal. . . . Visit to Japan Tourist Agency and Japan Rail in Rockefeller Center. Long cordial lunch with Grant Thompson at the Yale Club. His new job is fascinating and fulfilling for him. Basically, he is a lobbyist for public libraries. He’s very grateful that I introduced him to Charlie Hamlen, for they have become friends. Of John Tallmadge, he said interestingly that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, and talks too much. Neither was a surprise to me. He has worked out a fine modus vivendi with his wife despite his gayness. She has controlled her alcoholism. The children are understanding. It’s nice that this friendship with Grant is continuing.

Tomorrow—oh my!—I’ve got to finish the Boulding and get it quickly back to Eve Beehler, and also to check and edit all our Pendle Hill testimony and send it to Elisabeth Dearborn, who will remove anything that compromises confidentiality. This then goes to Mary Wood prior to the executive session of the Board on Friday. Ugh! In addition, at some point soon the results of the questionnaire need to go to all committee members. We meet again on December 4th to draft our report.

Thinking again about Pendle Hill, I’m wondering if any sexual restrictions remain any more. Doug Gwyn, a pastor, has an affair with the woman he is counseling! Then I heard that a woman in Swarthmore told Dan that Peter Crysdale “violated me 26 times.” (Could she have been totally passive in all this?) Then Bob in the bookstore becomes the lover of Paul Jolly’s wife and Pendle Hill allows her to remain in residence. When does it stop?

Saturday, September 17, 1994

Hanover

Back into the thick of things. Off AMTRAK at 5:30 a.m. Breakfast in diner. 8:05 a.m. addressed Freshmen on the nature of Comparative Literature. 10:00 a.m. with Diana Taylor, explained the nature of Peace Studies to Freshmen. 2:00 p.m. Kendal meeting with JoAnn Birnbaum, Arthur Nieswander, and some fellow Overseers to hear residents’ view of the proposed bylaws. Dick Brokaw very outspoken and “difficult”; but the rest of us tried to negotiate calmly and discovered that we actually agreed on many points, especially on limiting the Corporation’s veto power. So the meeting ended amicably and we’re ready now for Tuesday’s big event.

Afterwards, somehow finished Boulding and sent it by Fed-Ex to Eve Beehler. Then printed out the Pendle Hill testimony and faxed it to Elisabeth Dearborn, who is going to extract the “Contra-Dan” parts for next Friday.

Sunday, September 18, 1994

To Meeting. Greeted by many in a very friendly way after my long absence. Meeting afterwards with Mary Burrough and Philip Major to help plan Dan Seeger’s universalist seminar in November. One woman very picky and obstructive. . . . Lunch with Mother at Kendal. She’s thriving and in good health, remarkably.

Monday, September 19, 1994

Outreach Committee. Lafayette pokes along . . . so slowly. But Peter Tailer is a live wire! We’re planning a luncheon at Kendal for Hanover senior citizens. We’re all apprehensive about losing tax-exempt status, being declared non-charitable. . . . Lunch with Margaret Smythe, who did the MALS thesis last spring on the French translation of Ulysses. She’s off to Florence to teach English to foreigners. . . . Chrysanthi is still in D.C. with Leander. Leander has set up the new Apple Quadra computer and loves it—it’s so fast.

Tuesday, September 20, 1994

Up at 4:30 a.m. to get Chrysanthi at AMTRAK. The sleeper also brought Barbara Parsons, David Jones, and four others from Kendal at Longwood. Breakfast all together at the Polka Dot. Then Overseers: the new phase, without 100% Quakers. New members are Jim Armstrong and Mary Schaffner from the residents, Jim Ashley (lawyer), John Hennessey, and Bill Hamilton (banker, lawyer) from outside. Astrid Dorsey (here with Coleman) introduced Quakerism, mediocrely. The big issue was the bylaws. We started line by line but then Jim Ashley suggested that a committee could be more efficient. It met after lunch and did come to an agreement that seemed acceptable to John Diffey. Sherri will type it up and distribute it to the committee for a last look. I’ll collate the responses and then send everything to the Corporation Board, which meets on October 6th. With luck we’ll be legal “Directors” next month. . . . At lunch, John, Margery, Barbara, and I met to be updated on Jean’s evaluation. We’re entering the final phase. Questionnaires are going out soon. A decision is expected in early October. We think her chances are good, but a lot depends on the responses from staff and residents. . . . I also spoke to Margery at length about Pendle Hill. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

Bev Webster telephoned to say that Neil Ratliff died of AIDS. I telephoned Leander and wrote to Jim Atkinson. . . . Filitsa has been in touch. She finds that she has no rights whatever. Don’s daughters and ex-wife brought a truck and started emptying out the house last Sunday. Also the office, as though Filitsa didn’t exist. She’s going to try to establish some rights under the common-law marriage statute, but chances are not good. We’ve been asked to write a letter stating that we always thought that they were married.

Wednesday, September 21, 1994

Classes started. I lectured on Ulysses and felt exhausted afterwards. Supper at Kendal with Astrid and Coleman Dorsey. Coleman is looking well, but fatter. I of course said nothing about his recent travail. Astrid told me that he still may be sentenced to jail, but she thinks community service more likely. He’s already doing that. We toured Kendal and he concluded, rightly, that the Health Center is drab and unimaginative. We need a brilliant decorator. . . . Setting up the Mac Classic I got from Leander. Got some of it to work but not all. It’s got a 40 MB hard drive and 4 RAM, a huge increase over the 512 I’d been using.

Thursday, September 22, 1994

Got results of the latest PSA: 5.4, the same as before. Good. It’s stable. First Japanese class. Murder! The teachers refuse to speak English. No questions allowed. Lots of Rassias-type drilling. I could cope with that. But at the end, in the review, when the teacher simply showed the photos without using the language, and the students had memorized the whole sequence, effortlessly, my mind was totally blank. Very humbling. Will I carry on to the end? Doubtful. Five days a week, a minimum of one hour a day in the language lab, plus drill at 7:45 a.m. every day. I’ll try to do the class and the lab. Attendance required (for the students); tests daily. Shows how lax I was in Greek 13 last spring, talking English, allowing absences.

To Kiewit with the Classic. Lovely people! They fixed everything. . . . Lectured on “Telemachus.” The class seems responsible. I assured them that Ulysses is child’s play compared to Japanese!

Elisabeth Dearborn’s “Contra-Dan” arrived via fax, well done (alas). Approvals of bylaws are arriving; no substantive objections so far. . . . Met with Marty Sherwin and Diana Taylor re: War/Peace Studies. We’ll try to get approved as a multi-disciplinary course for the first two years and then hope that the Dickey Center can carry us. Diana reported that Barry Scher told her “the course has a terrible reputation.” Diana seems to be turning it into women’s studies.

Nice encounter with Chauncey Loomis who, like me, is retiring. He is dismayed that romantic poets are not being taught for two years: no standards any more, no agreement on the canon.

Rushed home to eat, to print out the “Contra-Dan” for tomorrow, to write for Filitsa; then Dick and Allan came for this season’s first music: von Weber, terribly rusty. I collapsed on all the difficult sections, not having looked at it for four months. Haydn #1 was better because I’d read it over once.

Off to AMTRAK, where the sleeping car porter greeted me, “Hello, Professor.” Tomorrow, when I have to clerk the Executive Board re: the ubiquitous criticism against Dan, will be very difficult. I’m hoping to get them to assign him a “tutor,” the way we did with Jean. But it’s frightfully expensive.

Friday, September 23, 1994

Pendle Hill

Went over Boulding errors with Rebecca. . . . Long talk with Mary Wood re: strategies for later; another long talk with Ted Brinton, clerk of the Personnel Committee. He’s convinced that personality cannot be changed but that systems can be. Both he and Mary value Dan and want to help him. Ted is dubious about the effectiveness of a consultant. The revelations given to the Evaluation Committee surely aren’t new. Ted and Mary are already aware, owing to exit interviews with the Tabers, etc. . . . Worked on Doug Gwyn’s chapter 8 in spare moments. At the Executive Board we had an executive session in which I explained the complaints. The Board was very supportive of Dan—especially Vince (not Janet Shetter, however). Vince feels that the Board itself failed because it hasn’t given clear signals that it is the boss and that Dan is its spokesman. In any case, the annual review with Dan is scheduled for early October, and all this will be taken into account. Particularly sad is Denny’s alienation (Denny told me that Dan is untrustworthy, a liar, unethical). . . . Afterwards: to Roadside to play: Debussy (which Dan actually practiced), Ravel, Schubert’s “Fantaisie” and Ländler. Only afterwards did he blurt out, “I suppose they pilloried me!” I tried to explain, emphasizing the Board’s support. Dan grew very defensive and self-righteous. He defended his practice of writing memos as a hedge against gossip and innuendo. If he can only be made to see that he, too, may be at fault. Much of what he thinks and does derives from his sad experience with the AFSC when, he says, lack of leadership allowed the enterprise to be “stolen from the Quakers.” To bed at 1:00 a.m.

Saturday, September 24, 1994

Lovely breakfast with Chris and Janet talking about Natural Law. Bernie Haviland ministered beautifully in Meeting using Isaiah 6 as his text: “For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” compared to the unsullied glory of the Lord. The Executive Board considered sexual behavior (rather, misbehavior) at Pendle Hill: harassment, cohabitation and the like. It’s a curse (blessing?) to be born in an interesting, transitional age! Long talk afterward with Janet Shepherd and Mary Wood about Dan. I’m hoping that Janet will play a key role as a peacemaker. Also I hope that Dan and Denny will agree to meet with a mediator. Both said Yes, but Denny is very resentful at the moment. . . . Tried the piano in Waysmeet. It probably needs only a tuning. Good talk with Vince: he calls the teachers the “Gang of Four” and is sure that they are manipulating our committee for their own ends. . . . Finished Gwyn chapter 8 at 30th Street Station. . . . Read in the TLS of Crick’s view (not new, of course) that the “soul” is simply billions of neurons giving signals triggered by chemistry.

October 3, 1994

Selen Ünsel is here, recruiting at Dartmouth for Morgan Bank. Loves NYC. Morgan wants her to conduct their Turkish business, based in London.

October 6, 1994

Breakfast at the Inn with Jean and Bob Shaughnessy, the new #2 administrator for health care. He’s stiff, but by all accounts experienced and competent. I urged him to act as mediator in the estrangement between Carol B. and Betty Barnett. . . . Lunch with Irene Kacandes, who is happy in her new post in the German Department. I’m hoping that she can take over the Modern Greek course eventually.

Saturday, October 8, 1994

NYC

To MGSA Executive Committee to present my biennial report on the journal. I said how relieved I was that the Karakasidou/Macedonia mess was over; it had been so time-consuming and discouraging. But I heard later that MGSA itself is still under attack as “anti-Greek” whereas people like Danforth are accusing the journal of refusing to print their anti-Greek articles. In short, we’re being attacked from both directions. . . . In the early afternoon I delivered Daphne’s new 520 Powerbook and accessories to Vaughan Tebbe, who lives on 91st and 3rd Avenue. Sweet girl, very attractive. She has a new job soliciting ads for a men’s fashion magazine. Then I walked to 96th and 3rd for tea with Selen Ünsel and Geoff Watson, former students. Selen lives across the street from a mosque (but doesn’t attend). Her father chanced to call while I was there; he urges us to return to Istanbul. Geoff is in advertising but finds it meaningless and is going to quit. Good for him! Then back to the Yale Club to meet Karen Van Dyck, Gail Holst Warhaft, Martin McKinsey, and the Elizabeth Constantinides Translation Prize committee, minus Meg Alexiou, who chose not to come. In two hours, over beer and cocktails, we chose Mylonas’s translation of Χαρκιανάκης (!) as the winner, with Stathis Gauntlett and Pavlos Andronikos and Nick Kostis among the runners-up. Then off to “Uncle Nick’s” Greek restaurant on 51st and 9th Avenue for a jolly meal. Mission accomplished, provided Meg agrees.

Sunday, October 9, 1994

Leisurely breakfast at the Yale Club with the Sunday Times; then to the Met to see the lovely Origins of Impressionism exhibit. The real hero and leader seems to have been Manet. What the exhibit showed was the role played in artistic development simply by the determination to do something different, and something closer to real life than the salon paintings of the pre-impressionist era. Philippe de Montebello’s cassette guide was very helpful, as always. . . . Then to lunch with Bob Sullivan, a former Dartmouth student, now an editor at Life Magazine, who interviewed me for the December issue’s story (cover story) “Who Was Jesus?” We talked about Kazantzakis’s vision in The Last Temptation, about Scorsese, about my Pendle Hill lecture on Jesus. Sullivan loves Kazantzakis; he had all the novels in first editions, hardback, and brought them for me to sign. I felt very important. What a pleasure to talk meaningfully like this, effortlessly, for two hours, especially over a sumptuous brunch.

October 12, 1994

Dick asked me to play the Rimsky-Korsakov wind quartet at his house: piano, flute, bassoon, clarinet. I managed the 1st movement fairly well, but not the rest. Then we tried the Beethoven—so rusty, alas.

October 13, 1994

Shapiros are here for a visit. They attended my lecture on “Penelope.” Then we had supper with Yiayia at Kendal and a pleasant, relaxed visit afterwards in her apartment. In the afternoon I visited the new provost to talk about continuation of the University Seminars after I retire. He seemed interested. Will any of these things continue? (The composition center will, of course.) Peace Studies is still vulnerable; the committee doesn’t like Diana Taylor’s proposal, says it isn’t truly interdisciplinary.

October 14, 1994

Played Haydn Sonata #3 quite well with Dick and Allan. Practice makes such a difference! I had never even fingered it during all these years of sight-reading.

October 17, 1994

Kendal lunch with a reporter from Newsday writing us up. Jean is in bed with a bad back, admittedly maybe from tension occasioned by tomorrow’s Board meeting.

October 18, 1994

Kendal Board, 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon. The bylaws still are not settled and people are disgruntled. Trying to get Brent to fund depreciation. Bob Shaughnessy reported well in Jean’s absence. In executive session John Diffey explained the options for Jean. We’d hoped to have all results of the evaluation in hand but they have been delayed. Also, we’ll want Jean present. So, the difficult part is postponed until November. But at least the Board knows that it will need to decide whether she stays or goes.

Wednesday, October 19, 1994

To D.C

Lectured on The Trial. Skipped English Department meeting and flew to Washington via Boston. Leander picked me up at National Airport. He’s in good spirits. Nice reunion with Deanna, proudly displaying new dining room chairs and highboy, very elegant.

Thursday, October 20, 1994

Ambassador Townsend Friedman picked me up at 8:00 a.m. at Leander’s. Bad traffic. Took us 1 hour 20 minutes to get to Arlington, so I started ½ hour late. Friedman an easy conversationalist, so we covered Greece, US politics, etc. I lectured on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης in the first hour, followed by questions and a break. Then on four poets—Seferis, Ritsos, Cavafy, Elytis—in the 2nd hour. Only a few questions because we’d lost the first half hour, but I hope it was useful. They seemed attentive, at least. Friedman drove me from the Foreign Service School to the Ballston Metro, where Peter and Alice now live on the 26th floor, with a view of all of D.C. Tasteless lunch followed by grand tour of NSF, where Peter is spending this year on a special mission investigating just how the government spends its basic research money. He’s right at the top, next to the director and assistant director. Very impressive. Had a good coffee to wash down Alice’s lunch and then returned to the 26th floor of “Alta Vista” to play four-hands with Alice. She’s better than Dan, maybe. But it was nice. Deanna and Leander came for supper, also tasteless. Then we all went to the Kennedy Center for an interesting concert, at least the first half. It started with Samuel Barber’s “Medici’s Dance of Vengeance,” a ballet score from 1956, scintillating, wonderfully orchestral. Then Alicia de Larrocha performed the Ravel Piano Concerto, which again is wonderfully orchestral but in which the piano seems sometimes to have almost a minor part. The second half was Dvořák’s 6th Symphony, which bored us all, including Deanna. 43 minutes, twice as long as the concerto and four times as long as the marvelous Barber. Deanna said the orchestral players were all asleep, too.

Friday, October 21, 1994

Philadelphia

Up at 6:30 a.m. To Bethesda with Leander to his favorite diner for breakfast. Then drove to Pendle Hill. He described the problem with his shoulder, which has no muscle tone around the joint owing to four years’ neglect. He’s doing physical therapy now and some progress seems evident. Reunion with Dan Seeger, who showed Leander Roadside with all its gadgets. They discussed next June’s piano workshop, where Dan will need to be a day late and where Leander will pair him with one of the teachers in my absence. Dan says that things are going better. He had one mediated session with Denny, said Denny still seems grumpy, notes that Denny has never stayed more than two or three years in any one job. So, that’s not going too well, but at least they’re committed to several more mediation sessions.

Publications Committee rejected the Quaker Moderation pamphlet after all my work. Drat! I tried, but almost everyone was against it. . . . Rebecca rushed me to the airport to return to Lebanon. Drove directly to Pierce’s Inn to begin mediation training under Rabbi Daniel Siegel. Chrysanthi, too. Long session tonight on introductory techniques.

Saturday, October 22

Pierce’s Inn

Role-playing began. It’s fun to be with students, mostly girls; they’re so forceful and mature when they’re not intimidated in class. Siegel is good except he talks too much, too too much, and doesn’t seem to realize that all problems with the schedule were his fault. But we had more role-playing and almost brought one (simulated) mediation to a close. More training in December. I think I could actually try a mediation now, although I might not do it very well. A nice axiom: “A successful person is not one who never fails but one for whom failure means feedback.”

Sunday, October 23, 1994

Practiced Haydn’s 1st trio. Did Japanese (also on the plane yesterday). Meeting with Popy, Felitsa’s daughter, who has been with us all week. Felitsa arrived. Lunch together. She seems very beholden to us and I’m glad we can help. Popy was the ideal guest.

Kendal minutes, which I had to rewrite, as usual. Supper with Yiayia at Kendal, followed by Spaulding to hear Elie Wiesel. Very moving speech, chiefly about the prisoners’ early reluctance to remember and then Wiesel’s crusade to make everyone remember, thinking how easily the Holocaust could be forgotten especially after all the survivors are dead.

October 25, 1994

I arranged a lunch so that Irene Kacandes could meet the others who are Greek or concerned with things Greek: Ada Cohen, Kathleen Corrigan, Felia Macedon. . . . Then met with David Henry of Maine, who wants to build a CCRC in Portland, using Lloyd Lewis, who is now on his own and competing (!) with Kendal Development Corporation. Kendal Development made Jean cancel David Henry’s appointment with Naomi! Imagine! But I spoke with him fully and honestly, and he seemed to appreciate this. Sometimes Quakers are really disgusting.

October 26, 1994

Lunch at Kendal with Richard Jones, who is obsessed with his ancestors and others. His people founded Earlham, Evanston, Illinois, etc. His wife is descended from Isaac Penington, etc. He’s inviting a scholar here to talk about Quaker history and wants me to introduce him. . . . Mardy High to the office with suggestions about the Irish tour. I’m now to do an extra lecture on gardens in literature, for example in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

October 29–30, 1994

Spent the weekend correcting C. L. 37 papers, 21 of them. Lori, Clive, and baby at Kendal. Supper together. I’m glad I’m not a “modern” father/husband.

October 31, 1994

A student is processing the Pendle Hill questionnaires, getting all the percentages and making graphs of the results, all on the computer. . . . Daphne and Greg are in New York, he on business and to be an usher in a wedding next Saturday at the St. Regis, very fancy. Daphne’s first impression of New York compared to Tokyo: how cheap (!) and how vibrant. She stars work on the Japan Times as soon as she returns. Morgan Binswanger, Robert’s son, flew to Jakarta today to set up Hillary Clinton’s visit, and he wants to meet Alec.

November 1, 1994

Four-hand piano with Junko Hibya, visiting professor from Keio University, Tokyo. She sight-reads reasonably well but it totally unmusical. We did the Schubert Fantaisie, Persichetti, Bizet, Debussy.

November 2, 1994

Lunch with John Lincoln, who read my lecture on the Antigone and wanted to discuss it prior to beginning an ILEAD course. He thinks that Creon may be the play’s true protagonist.

The worst of tragedies. Allan and Claire Munck went off to Florida on holiday and were joined by their children. Two days later their son, Alex, drowned. Claire discovered the body as she walked unsuspectingly along the beech. He was an epileptic and presumably had a seizure in the water.

November 3, 1994

Lunch with Tom Corindia. Talked about the Kendal bylaws problem and Tom recommended a Harvard Business Review article on “Federalism” (what we want) vs. “decentralization” (what the Corporation wants). I’ll distribute the article to our trustees.

November 4, 1994

Jean came to the office with the results of her second evaluation. Very mixed, at best. We discussed strategies. I suppose she’ll squeak by . . . barely. Sandra Folzer, the coach, is seriously ill with breast cancer, alas.

I visited the Muncks. Both daughters are there. They brought the body back, too. They’re stalwarts, but obviously also deeply distressed. They plan to return to Florida after the memorial service on Sunday. Allan can’t face going back to work just yet.

Sunday, November 6, 1994

Ministry and Counsel, after Meeting, but I left in order to go with Chrysanthi to Alex Munck’s memorial, held in the James’s house on Willy Hill. Non-religious. Rather Quakerlike, since people who knew Alex gave testimony to his qualities. Very weepy. But very genuine. I thought how nice it would be if the rest of us could be recalled so warmly, for good humor, creativity, perseverance.

November 8, 1994

Election Day. The Republicans are going to capture both the House and Senate, it seems. It’s a repudiation of Clinton, alas. Very strange. We can only hope that the Republicans will anger the populace during the next two years so that in 1996 Clinton can be reelected.

Music again: four hands with Junko.

November 9, 1994

I’m teaching The Magic Mountain again after many years and enjoying it very much. Good class this term. . . . Lunch with Steve Scher. He brought me a video of Britten’s Death in Venice. . . . Pano Rodis called. Karen wants primary custody of the girls. He has discovered that she is writing papers for her lover, the Russian student. Pano wonders whether he should try to have her disciplined for this. What a mess! He asked me for the disciplinary regulations.

November 10, 1994

Video on Japan, in Japanese, with subtitles. I actually made out some words: Watashi wa, etc. . . . Supper with Karen Papagapitos, George’s wife. Their son Christian is here again, examining the offerings in drama. Karen turns out to be a very successful author of children’s books. Lively, interesting woman. She clearly took a shine to Chrysanthi.

Saturday, November 12, 1994

Working on the journal. Also need to analyze the Pendle Hill questionnaire results and send everything off to the committee. Also need to work hard on Japanese because I’ll miss two classes next week. . . . Practiced Ravel secondo part, anticipating Dan’s arrival next Thursday.

Allan Kelly of Morehouse called yesterday to complain that Rebecca hasn’t sent any information for the next catalogue, and his deadline is Monday. Rebecca is really slackening. I called her and of course she had no excuse. Also told her that Redmont is understandably very angry because of the rejection of his PH pamphlet essay on Quaker moderation. I need to write to him.

Grant Thompson wrote, sadly, to say that he’s leaving Libraries for the Future on December 31 because their board refused to transfer the office to Washington and he cannot continue to commute. So, once again, he’ll be unemployed. But Charlie Hamlen is flourishing. The Tokyo Quartet is donating the entire Beethoven Quartet series to Classical Action.

Learned that Andy Rangell’s hands still refuse to function, which means that his career as a pianist is obviously ended. Yet he refuses to accept this as a fait accompli and to try to do something else with his life. Another tragedy in the making.

Leander sent the program for Neil Ratliff’s memorial. Dead at 58 from AIDS. What a waste!

November 14, 1994

NYC at NYU

To NYU for Hellenists’ Workshop sponsored by Onassis Foundation and the Ίδρυμα Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού. Very fancy. Opened by Brademas, who quoted me along with Mike Keeley and was very friendly afterwards. Officers of both foundations were present, including Babiniotis and others from Greece. Old friends, too, Anna Farmakidou, for example. Each of us described our program and especially our frustrations and needs. Fancy lunch with one of the foundation officers at each table. I had Ioannou, who was Onassis’s chief lawyer, apparently. He was very moved by the fact that I, a non-Greek, spoke Greek. Lots of sympathy from various quarters when I announced that Demotic Greek I and II are going out of print. Gondicas wants me to revise them at Princeton. Afternoon session devoted to examination of chief needs worldwide. Maskaleris repeated his invitation for me to teach at San Francisco State, probably in the spring of 1997. Then went to the Yale Club with Jeff Rusten of Cornell, the computer expert. He has made a keyboard enabling me to type Kadmos exactly as I’ve been typing my own font, with deadkeys. Bless him! He sat with me for 2½ hours and then went back to his hotel to fix some bugs. Off to Hotel Pierre for fancy reception with hors d’oeuvres. Mike and Mary Keeley were there. She’s well, miraculously. Walked Anna Farmakidou back to her hotel (I stayed at the Yale Club).

November 15, 1994

Final session at NYU, deciding priorities. I suggested a computer data bank for Greek texts. Met Rusten at 8:30 a.m. before the session to finish installation of his “Greek keys.” Lunch at Onassis Center on West 10th Street, not as grand as I’d imagined. Then to Patelson’s, to buy four-hand music for Dan and me.

Wednesday, November 16, 1994

Hanover

Arrived 5:00 a.m. Polka Dot diner breakfast. Office at 6:00 a.m. Japanese class at 9:00 a.m., difficult, having missed two days. Nihongo totemo muzakidii! Lecture on The Magic Mountain.

Thursday, November 17, 1994

Met Dan Seeger at 5:00 a.m. Polka Dot again. Showed him Kendal at 6:00 a.m. He attended my Magic Mountain lecture, on Peeperkorn. Fourhand repertoire. Then dinner party with Corindias and Peter and Gerrie Tailer, new friends from Kendal. More four-hand afterward, including the great Schubert “Fantaisie.” And we discovered Mozart’s Fantasies.

Friday, November 18, 1994

The new Peace Studies course designed by Diana Taylor and Lynda Boose was approved by the multidisciplinary committee after scary delays. Hooray! Maybe I’ll be able to salvage Peace Studies after all before I retire. It goes now to the COI.

Dan attended my lecture again, on the second half of chapter 7 of The Magic Mountain: Hysterica Passio, Séance, etc. Good class.

Then at 5:30 we all went to the Meeting House to begin his class: the Seeger workshop in Quaker universalism. First session was on the meaning of universalism. Nicely done by Dan.

Saturday, November 19, 1994

Dan’s second session was on “Christian” Quakerism, but this got shortchanged because he detoured to consider “Truth” and “Science” at people’s requests. Less audience participation on the Jesus aspect; Dan talked too much, but talked well. Alas, the Christocentric Friends in the group chose to keep silent. Last session, in the afternoon, was on the future of the Society of Friends, a plea for reconciliation, for appreciation of diverse gifts. Dan’s insights are fine, but he should use the Socratic method more. . . . More music, then a nice supper at Kendal with Mother, then more music, then I delivered Dan to the train.

Yesterday, at the dinner party, he gave a full recital of the “Seeger case,” how it started . . . and how it finished. This morning at breakfast he spoke, for the first time to me, about his ex-wife, now very ill.

Sunday, November 20, 1994

After Meeting, Fran Brokaw rose to announce that Peter Bien’s views of Jesus are in Life Magazine, next to Jerry Falwell’s! I’ll buy a copy tomorrow. . . . Interviewed a boy for Haverford. . . . Struggled to finish the résumé of questionnaire questions for Pendle Hill.

Monday, November 21, 1994

Committees for Kendal at Hanover and the Kendal Corporation met over supper. I was clerking. Diffey, Kidder, Don Kramer (lawyer) and Brock from Philadelphia. Bob Metz couldn’t come; his prostate cancer is alive again. We went through the bylaws clauses one by one, the most troublesome being the ones relating to the shared service fee and vetoing by Board members. Twice, at apparent deadlock, Don Kramer came up with new language, quite creatively, and sliced through the Gordian knot. We finished cordially, with apparent agreement.

Tuesday, November 22, 1994

Full Board meeting. All went well until Jim Armstrong reneged on his agreement last night regarding the shared services fee. After ½ hour getting nowhere, Don Kramer again cut through the knot with new language. Result: agreement. The revised bylaws now go back to the Corporation (I adjured Lynmar to try to get approval without further changes) and then to the Pennsylvania Commissioner of Insurance. . . . In executive session, afterwards, we completed Jean’s evaluation. Very mixed results. Clearly some Overseers want her to go. But her virtues are too clear. We agreed that she needs more coaching, and extended the probationary period one year. Probably a pusillanimous compromise. John privately told me that he expects, and hopes, that she’ll want to move on, voluntarily, in a year or two.

I’m struggling now to get the Pendle Hill evaluation materials off to the committee and to copyedit (i.e., rewrite) six articles for the next JMGS. Jeff Rusten has now supplied the Didot font, which will work on Greek Keys the same way as JMGS Kadmos does. Got PH stuff in the mail before leaving for Washington tonight, thanks to James Muiter’s good work in processing the results. But I spent hours and hours analyzing these and trying to make them more “user friendly.”

Wednesday, November 23, 1994

Washington

To Washington via AMTRAK with Yiayia. Nice trip. Brought a wheelchair with us for Yiayia, which helped immensely in Union Station and on the Metro. Long lunch in Au Bon Pain. Metro to Rockville. Met by Deanna. I worked on Leander’s computer, copyediting JMGS frantically. Chrysanthi and Deanna prepared the turkey, pies, etc. Yiayia read Pride and Prejudice with great pleasure. Leander returned at 7:00 from Levine, and we all went to a Chinese restaurant. It’s so easy and pleasant now to be with Deanna.

Thursday, November 24, 1994, Thanksgiving

Some four-hand duets in the morning. Leander thinks Arensky will be good for Dan; we played it over; also Schubert “Fantaisie,” lovely to do against Leander’s sensitive secondo interpretation. And we did the two Mozart Fantasies, which are certainly too hard for Dan. . . . Busecks came for the feast together with Susie, just arrived from Oakland. All the posh wedding presents were on display, very festive. But our extended family doesn’t have clear rituals for saying thanks. Yiayia tried, valiantly. . . . After the Busecks left, Leander expounded to me his hopes to develop the four-hand institute into a real business, away from Kinhaven (and Jerry), located perhaps in the Adirondacks. I gave ideas and contacts, and of course was warned afterwards by Chrysanthi not to interfere in Leander’s life.

Friday, November 25, 1994

Washington

More piano with Leander. Then we all went to Alexandria to the Busecks’ 26th floor apartment for lunch, after which Peter took us through the National Science Foundation. He showed the White House directions that he’s been responding to and also, alas, the full text of the Republicans’ “Contract for America,” which isn’t all bad, actually, but which wants to dismantle AMTRAK, among other things and to increase military spending and decrease Medicare, etc. . . . Good use of the wheelchair again at Union Station.

Sunday, November 27, 1994

Hanover

Chris Clay, my student, cooked us a Japanese curry rice dinner. Guests: Junko Hibya, Lafayette and Mayme. Lots of talk about Japan.

Monday, November 28, 1994

Lunch with Pocloda, the new acquisitions editor at UPNE. He thinks, contrary to what Tom MacFarland said, that maybe they can reprint Demotic Greek, especially if we do some work toward a revision. He wasn’t receptive however either to the Middleton-Bien project or the Birmingham Symposium in my honor. But if Princeton reneges on Kazantzakis letters, he’d be interested in those.

Thomas Hamm, Quaker historian at Earlham, lectured at Kendal on “Rufus Jones and the Transformation of American Quakerism.” I introduced him. A very fine survey of splits (Wilburites, Gurneyites, with descendants of both Wilbur and Gurney in the audience, and descendants of Mary Dyer and Isaac Penington also, and how Jones dreamed of healing the rifts, but failed. He did however transform Eastern Quakerism into a “mystical” and service-oriented religion. Afterwards, a flood of questions.

November 29, 1994

Breakfast with Tom Hamm at the Inn. It’s nice to meet someone who really knows Quaker history. . . . Working frantically on JMGS articles. Hastened to Japanese class; it’s been a humbling adventure. I have so little to show and the students have so much, but they work 20 hours a week and I between 6 and 7.

12:00 to 5:00 with Chrysanthi doing mediation stage 2 with Daniel Siegel and the “adult” trainees, mostly young deans. We did two simulation exercises in the first of which I was the co-mediator (very frightening) and in the second the co-disputant. It’s a very fine technique. I wish I had used some of the tactics at the Kendal meeting recently. . . . An hour meeting with James Breeden afterwards regarding religious pluralism on campus. He has never been able to get his University Seminar really going because there just isn’t much intellectual content when he is involved. . . . Then to Sweet Tomatoes. Met Mrs. Schumann there with Claudia, Petra, and the boys. Helmut died two days ago; his condition was hopeless and the death was a blessing. . . . At the meal Chrysanthi, after warning me to sit down, told the latest: Daphne and Greg are being sent back to London by Goldman Sachs, starting February 1. So the sojourn in Tokyo will be six months instead of two years. Too bad. Daphne won’t do two years of Japanese and she’ll need to quit her job at Japan Times. But it will be nice to have them in London while we’re in Woodbrooke.

November 30, 1994

Last Comparative Literature 37 class. Student mini-lectures, some very interesting. Most worked on Kafka. I did not distribute course evaluations because I don’t expect ever to teach the course again. . . . Filia and Popy for supper. Filia wants to buy Donald’s house and “develop” the land. We warned against this. Alternatively, since she’s being offered $50,000, we advised her to take this sum and unburden herself. Popy, all through the conversation (debate) kept urging her mother not to buy the house but to move into town. Very sensible.

December 1, 1994

Got five of the six JMGS articles in the mail to authors. AMTRAK to Philadelphia.

December 2, 1994

Pendle Hill

AMTRAK an hour and a half late. I arrived at Pendle Hill at 12:40, just in time for lunch meeting. Amazing Publications Committee, unprecedented in that everyone said No to the first manuscript and everyone said Yes to the second. We were finished in an hour. Then Book Committee. We’ll be doing a biography of Douglas Steere next, after Doug Gwyn’s book and the book on women’s journals. . . . Good four-hand piano with Dan after the Executive Board. We tried the Arensky that Leander recommended. Dan likes it.

Saturday, December 3, 1994

Pendle Hill

Long talk with Doug Gwyn, who is writing a new book on pre-Quaker seekers or ranters, comparing them with today’s seeking and ranting. I helped him with literary terminology (which he is using) such as “romanticism.” Meeting for Worship exceptional because Nancy Frommelt used it to reaffirm, publically, her Franciscan vows, including the vow of celibacy. Very moving. I ministered about Milton and Eve: how “freedom” equals subservience to someone clearly superior, precisely Nancy’s condition. . . . After Executive Board I queried Denny about the mediation between him and Dan. Denny says that the whole problem is Dan’s, not his, so obviously there’s a long way to go. Did some C. L. 37 papers, played again with Dan, did some JMGS copyediting, prepared for tomorrow. Supper with David Saunders, the Quaker in residence, and clerk of the Woodbrooke committee. Will see him at Woodbrooke in the spring.

Sunday, December 4, 1994

Another long, good talk with Doug Gwyn over breakfast. At Meeting, David Saunders ministered à propos of Nancy’s vows yesterday, saying that Quakers although less structured and creedal, do have “vows” of a sort, by which he meant the newly revised advices of London Yearly Meeting, which he then read. Very fine. I asked for a copy to take home.

Then, from 10:00 to 4:00 an exhausting meeting of the Resident Program Evaluation Committee (Elisabeth Dearborn, Nancy Van Zant, Bob Gray, Justin Du Vall, Shirley Dodson). We mapped out the format and much of the content of our report, and assigned as “homework” sections to be written by each and sent to me for collation and final editing. With luck we can conclude with a conference call instead of another meeting. We’ll see. . . . Bob Gray drove me to 30th Street and filled in Dan Seeger’s background with AFSC. Wallace Collett had campaigned to have him fired at one point.

Between now and next Sunday I need to: send a résumé of our meeting today to the committee members; grade C. L. 37 papers and exams and turn in final grades; finish copyediting articles for the journal (book reviews can perhaps be done in Tokyo); prepare somewhat my MLA talk on religion and literature. Meanwhile, our roof is being replaced. Oh, also need to review Japanese. Strength! But today, in the 10:00 to 4:00 meeting, I continued to be lucid and energetic while all the others wilted, especially after lunch.

December 6, 1994

Chrysanthi and I are finishing the second phase of our mediation training with Daniel Siegel. It’s going well. I’m hoping to mediate sometime—e.g., at Kendal.

December 11–26, 1994

Trip to Japan

We left Hanover via AMTRAK on Sunday, December 11, 1994, after dining with Yiayia at Kendal. Luckily, it was a feast day in our feast-fast-feast-fast routine. Filia Makedon drove us to the station, where we discovered that the train would be three-quarters of an hour late. Good beginning! The next morning we rose at 6:45 a.m., had breakfast (fasting), and prepared to rush off the train the moment it arrived. It was still about 45 minutes late. But at the end of the East River tunnel, and only a few hundred yards from Penn Station, the engine broke down! So we sat there for a while, and then started moving backwards! Despair. However, by some miracle things righted themselves, the train changed direction, and we made it to the station. Luckily, we caught a bus to 42nd Street and almost immediately a Carey bus to JFK, paying only $4.00 each (senior citizen price).

At Kennedy, where we arrived at 10:30 for the 12:00 noon flight, we found hordes of people, almost all of them oriental, and almost all with mountains of luggage: huge boxes that seemed to contain television sets—or perhaps automobiles! We felt very proud with our one bag each and no checked luggage. Everything went well. The plane left on time, the seats were quite comfortable, the flight attendants kept giving us juice and water, and we were able to break our fast at the second meal, around 2:00 p.m. Japan time (midnight our time). Slept well on the plane. Also copyedited most of the eight book reviews that Eva had sent me for JMGS. We arrived at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 13th.

At Narita we had a long wait on the line for immigration, but passed quickly through customs, where the officer asked “Is that all the luggage you have?” Daphne was waiting outside the barrier. Lovely reunion. I changed money and then we went to exchange our Japan Rail pass vouchers and get tickets for the train into Tokyo Eki. The airport is not exceptional, although it is immaculately clean. But the subway is a marvel of shiny marble and spotlessness. Although there isn’t a morsel of dirt anywhere, a man was carefully sweeping the stairs. On the platform there are marks exactly where the doors open, and people line up one behind the other awaiting the train. All seats are reserved on this one. We enjoyed the ride, which takes about an hour. At Tokyo Eki, Daphne got us a taxi and conversed expertly in Japanese with the driver, who was in necktie but without white gloves. The backs of his seat and ours were covered in white lace. He opens all doors; the passenger does not. The fare is indicated on a meter. No tips are given.

Daphne and Greg’s apartment is in a quiet neighborhood with small dwellings—very posh, of course. They’re on the third floor of a new building that seems well constructed, with an elevator. Huge living room, light streaming in from two directions, ample kitchen with all modern appliances, three bedrooms (all of which will be occupied soon enough), three baths. In one of the bedrooms, Daphne has her computer set up, and Greg has his huge computer connected to Reuters to get all the latest financial information instantaneously. Greg greeted us warmly, and we had a nice meal prepared by Daphne of rich soup and French bread, wine, apples. Then we heard all about the move back to England. They’ll be leaving in mid-January. It’s the first time that a transfer really was not voluntary, says Greg. Apparently the boss of his group in London, John, “wasn’t working out,” so the firm is trying to transfer him to another group and is bringing Greg in as his replacement. Goldman is doing very badly, apparently, with huge losses because of improvident overextension, e.g., in Hong Kong, where an office opened with about 200 highly paid people, costing $200,000,000 a year to run, and not bringing in much in return (although hopes were for huge profits in the future). In any case, there are many people being fired right now, and general gloom in the office. But Greg’s group isn’t doing too badly. When he leaves here, his position will not be replaced. All the people in his group in New York, London, and Tokyo now know each other well enough so that they can function with fewer hands. Greg much enjoyed his trip to Australia, and especially a very special Greek restaurant in Melbourne! We retired at about 11:00 p.m., feeling quite well owing to the marvelous feast-feast-feast-fast regimen. But neither Chrysanthi nor I slept very much that night.

On Wednesday, Dec. 14th we left early in order to arrive at the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Nihombashi in time for the ceremonial daily opening at 10:00 a.m. Every morning the employees all congregate for a meeting with their supervisors. Then some of the girls—all in spiffy uniforms—come to the front door with the floor manager (a man, of course). One of the girls bows, comes out, and makes a beautiful little speech, first in Japanese, then in reasonably good English, about the store’s philosophy, its “corporate image of quality service to its customers,” then bows low again and retires behind the doors. At 10:00 a.m. sharp, she and another girl open the doors and invite the customers in, again with low bows. As we entered, the salespeople all welcomed us sweetly. The elevator girl, again smartly dressed in her uniform and little derby hat, cries a litany as the lift rises to the roof-garden: it’s all theater, really. The roof-garden has a playground for children, and a florist’s with banzai trees for $1000 if one wishes. We went down, floor by floor. There’s a theater, a cultural center, an art gallery, and apparently a restaurant on every floor. The art department is particularly attractive, with marvelous ceramics and metal ware priced from $32,000 to around $1200 for small items. We noticed one couple who apparently were interested in buying something; they were being treated to tea and sweets by salesgirls and manager, complete with bows and more bows. Of course the most fun was the food hall in the basement. Samples everywhere—we practically had our lunch, bit by bit, as we passed through. Bento-o (box lunches) were being prepared, as was sushi, tempura (seafood or vegetables dipped in batter and deep-fried in a vegetable-sesame oil), yakitori (chicken on a skewer, grilled over charcoal), cutlets, etc. . . . Afterwards, we continued on this same avenue to the Ginza. The area is very posh, with office buildings out of which smartly dressed executives keep emerging. At one point I saw one of them enter a limousine to the bows—actually, the obeisance—of the lackey who accompanied him. Another sight, more lovely, is of tiny children all in their blue uniforms and little hats, so tiny that they seem like miniature caricatures of children, emerging from school and descending into the subway without adult accompaniment. Tokyo apparently is totally safe, and everything is extraordinarily organized. We returned via subway to Hiro-o and had our first experience of soba noodles in a tiny shop, just eight seats at a counter. There are infinite varieties, but we had ours “plain,” “kake soba” —just boiled noodles in a delicious soy sauce-based soup, with some onions thrown in. You slurp the noodles using chopsticks and then drink the soup from the bowl. Delicious, nutritious, and cheap. On the way back we looked in on a supermarket designed for foreigners but also obviously patronized by Japanese. Everything and anything is available here, but the difference is the help: here, as everywhere else, abundant help, five people where we would have one. At the checkout counters, girls is smart uniforms, each one backed up by a young man in another snappy uniform of a different color, to place your items in bags. Everyone working energetically and pleasantly: Hai! Hai! Hai! . . . Back home in mid-afternoon, I started working on the JMGS book reviews again, on Daphne’s new PowerBook 520. Ole Smith’s is inflammatory against PASOK, and I had to quench its fire a bit. Others had to be shortened, etc., etc. After supper, Daphne and Greg wanted us to see a Japanese video of a movie about—guess what?—noodles! An entire movie! The opening scene is hilarious: a young man starts slurping his noodles, but next to him is an older man, a sort of Zen master of noodle-eating, who is scandalized. He then instructs the young man. You savor the quality first without tasting. Then you must caress the pork with your chopsticks. Then you taste the tiniest bit of the spice, followed very very slowly with some exploratory noodles. At the proper time, you drink some of the soup. Then you meditate. And so forth. In another scene, some Japanese girls are being instructed on how to eat noodles (i.e., spaghetti) American-style. The crucial thing, says the teacher, is not to make noise. So they try, with disastrous results.

Thursday, December 15th, we were on our own in the morning, as Greg departs every day at 6:30 a.m. for work and Daphne, today, had to leave early for her Japanese lesson. I finished the book reviews, printed them out, and prepared a parcel for Eva Konstantellou, drawing the kanji for United States and the hiragana, laboriously, for “air mail” (kookuubin). Then to Nissekidori by myself—quite an adventure—to find the post office. No luck at first, but I gathered up courage and asked a shop girl, “Kano hen no yuubinkyoku wa, doko desu ka,” and she pointed! The packet of about twenty typewritten pages cost 990 yen! Then came another adventure, to see if we could meet Daphne successfully after her class, at the corner of Roppongidori where the almond shop is: a favorite meeting place in Tokyo, apparently. She was a bit late, so we took in the crowds. I remarked that many Japanese, if you don’t look at their eyes, resemble Greeks, and Chrysanthi agreed. We also noticed how shabbily dressed the crowd was here, compared to the Ginza yesterday. Daphne appeared, having been delayed because, at the Japanese lesson, one of the other students had made her a birthday cake! Hungry, we went to a sushi bar. The chef, in the middle, makes a dozen different kinds of sushi, placing them on dishes that are either yellow, green, blue, or orange, each color costing a different amount: 100 yen, 150, 200, 300. Then there’s a conveyer belt that carries the laden dishes around the bar. You take whatever you want off the belt. When you want seconds, you take another and place that dish over the first one. At the end, you pay according to the pile of dishes and colors at your place. Each person has a dish of shouga (ginger) and a little receptacle with soy sauce. You take some ginger and add it to the sushi, then dip everything in the sauce, and eat. We had mani mono (rice wrapped in seaweed), shrimp, tuna, egg, each more delicious than the other. Chrysanthi struck up a conversation with a talkative Japanese next to her who turned out to work for General Motors. Daphne, who knows the wife of GM’s director in Tokyo, mentioned this to the employee, who responded, “You’ve just spoiled my lunch!” I wondered if GM sells cars in Japan, and he said that there’s a lively market in Cadillacs. Of course! We then took the subway to a station where we changed to a JR (Japan Rail) Soba Line train so that we could use our Rail Passes. Our destination was Ryoogoku, to the new Edo-Tokyo Museum, which is right next to the Sumo Stadium. And, lo! on the platform we saw an actual sumo wrestler: they walk around in wooden clogs and in a flowing robe and have a special hairdo, so cannot be easily mistaken. This was a boy of sixteen, perhaps, and actually not very large—sort of like a Dartmouth football player. Perhaps by the time he’s 25 he’ll weight 300 pounds. The museum is the first interesting building we’ve seen in Tokyo, which in general is remarkably ugly. This is an enormous cantilevered edifice brilliantly white, with an open plaza beneath, somewhat like the plaza in the Albany governmental complex. Beneath, at the ticket booth, are the inevitable girls in uniform, two or more for what in the U.S. would be one. They saved us 500 yen, because they asked if anyone was over sixty-five. You go up a beautiful red escalator to the top where there are models of Edo-castle and the city’s layout when it was first developed by the shoguns. Clearly, this was a feudal society, with an overlord served by vassals in varying degrees. The overlord awarded the highest degree so many bushels of rice, the next degree fewer bushels, etc. In return, they constituted a private army for him. One floor down is the main exhibit hall, huge, with displays about Edo at one end, about Tokyo at the other, and in the middle the Nihonbashi Bridge (actually, “bashi” means bridge), a reconstructed Kabuki theater, and garish floats used in Shinto religious processions. Of particular interest, at least to me, were the scrolls of calligraphic writing. There were two letters, one from the King of Korea to the shogun, the other the shogun’s answer to the King of Korea. The former was rather plain, the latter gorgeously embellished with clouds and abstract designs setting off the calligraphy. One-up-man-ship, evidently. Interestingly, this civilization seemed to employ wood almost exclusively as its building material, which accounts for the numerous fires experienced by the city. Their agricultural implements, at least those displayed, were exclusively of wood, and rather primitive. Even the sluices used for water supply were of wood. In the Tokyo end of the hall, the most memorable part of the exhibit, for me, was the video devoted to the Allied bombing of Tokyo. B-52 bombers coming in flocks over the city, then each dropping 50-odd bombs, all of which caused fire and destruction below, so that most of Tokyo was obliterated. There were also gruesome photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atom bombs. In front of these displays, many Japanese gathered, all in silence, staring. One reason that Tokyo is so ugly, I imagine, is that practically the entire city has been rebuilt since 1945, in a process governed by greed and haste, just like Thessaloniki. There is no sign here (at least that we have seen, so far) of the slow, organic development of a city, the sort of thing that makes London so enchanting. At the end of our tour, exhausted, I bought some ornamental lacquered hashi (chopsticks) and two little prints of ancient scenes. Then we had a delicious coffee ($3.00 each) in the museum restaurant, which again had an abundant supply of waitresses all in smart uniforms. Back on JR; then a long walk home from the station. . . . A fax from Darren Middleton awaited me. Apparently Mercer University Press, Macon, Georgia, is very interested in our proposed anthology of essays on Kazantzakis’s religious thought. I have to fill out extensive forms about my publications, honors, jobs, etc., and fax them back. Greg returned and we all went off to a Thai restaurant, walking again. Suddenly, amidst all the ugliness, a Buddhist temple in a large precinct: lovely, serene, soothing. The meal was fun: curry and the inevitable noodles for Chrysanthi (which she didn’t like) and rice and dumplings.

Friday, December 16th. Daphne’s birthday. But we’ll celebrate in the evening, after Lucia arrives. Daphne went off to work at Japan Times early, leaving maps and instructions for Chrysanthi and me to see if we could go out on our own without getting hopelessly lost. We did very well. Up to Aoyama Dori, where the Kinokuniya International Supermarket is. Actually, we were the only Caucasians there; all the other customers were Japanese. Chrysanthi shopped for tonight’s birthday supper for Daphne: lots of fun trying to find cranberry sauce and dried apricots, neither of which is in my little Japanese dictionary. But we succeeded. Then we walked a bit further on Aoyama Dori, crossing Omotesando, to the Zenkoo-ji Buddhist shrine. These shrines are identified by the swastika, which is disconcerting, given Hitler’s use of same. But, as happened last night, one discovers an oasis of beauty and serenity inside the ugly frenzy of the rest of Tokyo. The gateway houses large statues of four gods, all rather ferocious. The cemetery, like the one last night, is filled with the sticks on which are written the new name given to people after they die. The sanctuary itself, which we could see through its windows, is all gold and splendor, a rococo profusion of ex-votos, as they seemed, or whatever they are. A small Japanese rock-garden was off to one side, and a school with playground in the rear. As we were leaving, we saw several women enter the precinct, approach what looked like a large font in the center, bow with hands clasped in a gesture of prayer, and then do the same in front of the cemetery. On the way back home, we walked through the campus of Aoyama-Gakuin University, obviously an American foundation, presumably Christian, since statues of its American founders are outside what looks like the original building, done in typical American-university style. The library is beautiful, just like ours at home. The campus is landscaped tastefully—another oasis. . . . Home at noon, glad to get out of the biting wind. Spent the afternoon at the computer, preparing my MLA talk for San Diego and then vetting, yet again, one of the articles for JMGS 13, no. 1. At 8:30 p.m. Greg returned with Lucia, who had just arrived from Santa Barbara. Hugs and laughter and, immediately, Christmas carols on the CD player. Then a gala dinner prepared by Chrysanthi: chicken breasts in sour cream, cherry cake, etc., followed by the opening of Daphne’s birthday presents, the most spectacular of which was a pair of opal earrings that Greg purchased in Sydney when he was there last month.

Saturday, December 17. Up early; more work on JMGS. At 10:30 we all left for the Heiwajima Antiques Show, meeting downstairs on the way out Daphne’s & Greg’s neighbor, a Spanish couple—he runs Iberia Airlines here—on their way back to Madrid for the holidays. Very vivacious lady, very sad to see Daphne go. Then subway again and JR again to a rendezvous with Matthew and Patty Goodman. He is the chief of treasury operations at the US Embassy, working very closely with Ambassador Mondale; she is a graduate of the Kennedy School, where she loved Bob Reich’s course, and is half-Greek. They, too, are very sorry to be losing Greg and Daphne. We took the monorail out toward Yokohama, along the Tokyo waterfront, an area that is very modern, having been built on fill that extended the land mass into the harbor. Some interesting buildings, not like the horror of central Tokyo. The Antiques Show was in a huge exhibition hall, and we wandered up and down the stalls for a few hours, finally purchasing a Japanese-style silk robe for me (cost 1000 yen = $10.00), a rather nice print, again for $10.00, and a dish showing Mount Fuji, to give to Daphne (again $10.00). Then the Goodmans and we had a noodle lunch (not very good, actually). They’ll be at Daphne’s party tomorrow. We went next to Hiro-o to the international supermarket where Greg needed to buy champagne for the party tomorrow and Lucia was eager to find an artificial fingernail (!) to replace one of hers that had broken. (She did.) The champagne, turkey, etc. will be delivered before 10:00 p.m.—guaranteed. Afterwards we strolled through a lovely park with a lake filled with ducks and one very strange bird standing on a single leg. Cute mini-children on swings; men fishing; trees trained to go in directions contrary to nature. A lovely serenity. Leaving, we saw a Japanese girl in a miniskirt, confirming what Greg says: that all Japanese women are knock-kneed, owing to the way they have to sit as children. Walking home, talked with Greg about the financial markets. Everyone was expecting China to boom, but that is not happening, or won’t for a long time. Already, certain Chinese companies are defaulting on loans, for example. He told a story of a Chinese investor for a company who had bought securities from Goldman in Hong Kong and had not paid for them. When Goldman’s employee began to pressure him, he said that if the employee went to the Chinese man’s boss, he would kill the Goldman employee! Well, the employee did go to the Chinese man’s boss, and the Chinese man turned out to be the one who was killed. This is the way business is done in China, apparently. But Japan is a different story; it is coming out of its recession and is swimming in money, chiefly because of all the bad investments in the United States and Europe. These were liquidated, and the cash is now sitting in bank accounts at 2% interest. But obviously the owners want to invest these billions more advantageously, and that is where Goldman comes in. Indeed, Goldman is the only American bank dealing in derivatives such as options that has been allowed into Japan. The Japanese banks, says Greg, aren’t sophisticated enough to handle these securities, which are very complicated. I asked him why derivatives have such a bad name, and he replied that it’s because most purchasers don’t understand them and the risks involved. In any case, Goldman is now doing very well in Tokyo. At home, in the room where I am typing this, Greg has a special computer rented from Reuters (and paid for by Goldman, of course). On this, at any moment, he gets full financial news: what various currencies are trading at, what the Dow Jones is at, and/or what a particular stock is doing. In addition, with the flick of a button, he gets graphs of performance over, say, the past six months. Another button gives headlines for all news items of the day, either in English or Japanese. If he is interested, still another button gives the complete news story. This is the “information superhighway” with a vengeance. . . . Later, Daphne and Chrysanthi went off to Narita to pick up Alec, while Lucia, Greg, and I went for supper at a nice Indian restaurant where one man, dressed all in white in chef’s clothes, acted as waiter, cook, and cashier. A lovely curry and so forth, but the price wasn’t so lovely: $76.00 for the three of us. Alec came in on time and arrived in good spirits. So, now we are all here, miraculously, just as planned.

Sunday, December 18th. I had hoped to go to the Tokyo Quaker Meeting in Mita, at the other end of Minato-ku, but Daphne said that if I waited until next Sunday (Christmas), she’d go with me. Around 11:00 a.m. we all left for an outing, heading for the Meiji Jingu (Shrine), but stopping first at the lovely gardens of the Nezu Art Museum, filled with bridges, stone lanterns, statues small and large, carp and huge goldfish in the pond—another oasis in the heart of hectic Tokyo. From here we experienced the full length of Omotesando, a tree-lined avenue that is quite pleasant, and very much of a promenade on a lovely Sunday like this. But the median age in Tokyo seems to be sixteen, judging from these strollers. It is a teenagers’ paradise. Daphne—who seems to know every secret of this city—took us around past the Harajuku station to another street which is truly the teenagers’ paradise: teeming with girls and boys, some with purple hair, rings in their noses and ears, garish costumes, etc. They were lined up twenty deep in McDonald’s. From here, after stopping to make train reservations for tomorrow (all handled efficiently in Japanese by Daphne), we entered the grounds of the, Meiji Jingu. Our first sight (and sound) was a very peculiar one: people on a platform yelling with glee as someone from a crowd of onlookers came up to the platform and pounded something with a huge sledge-hammer. It looked like the carnival attraction in America whereby strong men can pound a ball high enough to ring a bell. But here the pounding just seemed to be into a lot of dough. Later, Daphne discovered that they were pounding cooked rice to make the New Year’s rice cakes, called mochi, whose elasticity represents strength and longevity, and whose whiteness suggests purity. We then passed beneath the first of several impressive gates (tori-i) made of 1500-year-old cypress trees from Taiwan. Approaching the shrine, you are meant first to go to the hand-washing basin, gargle the water there (not drinking from the ladle, but using the ladle to pour water into cupped hands from which you drink—the Japanese are obsessively clean—, and then you are meant to pour some water over your hands. Next, you advance to the enshrined gods (in this case Emperor Meiji and Empress Sho-oken), throw money into the box provided, bow deeply twice, clap your hands twice, and bow deeply once more. We did none of this except drink the water out of ignorance (instead of gargling), but none of the Japanese seemed to do it either. Some tour groups, near the water basin, were blessed (or something) by a girl in a white robe who pronounced some words and then waved a sort of tufted wand over their heads as they bowed. One of the women giggled profusely during the whole ceremony. At the bookstore there was a collection of poems written by the empress, actually quite fine—little 29-syllable verses, of which apparently she wrote tens of thousands and the emperor wrote even more. The Meiji era, 1868-1912, is considered the real beginning of modern Japan. . . . But today’s modern Japan was what we were going to see next, after a delicious (and expensive) lunch in a Chinese restaurant on Omotesando. Along a wide boulevard just next to the Meiji Shrine entrance, and adjacent to the Olympic Stadium, each Sunday young people gather to dance to rock music, and rock bands play full blast, one next to the other, with adoring adolescents and pre-adolescents gyrating and pulsating in front of them. All the music is western, of course. Some of the men were dressed in leather, like motorcycle groupies in America, some were tattooed, all had pomaded hair. The dancing was mostly individual, one at a time, something like a jazz musician doing his solo, while the others watched. But sometimes the entire group would spring into frenetic motion. One group was coordinated: a sort of ballet, very obviously rehearsed, with costumes, gestures, some sort of meaning, I suppose. All the dancers were male—nay, macho. Same for the musicians: male singers, too; no women. All this seemed just the venting of energy and repressed creativity, not the decadent drug-laden phenomenon that a similar activity would be in America. Interestingly, there were no policemen in evidence. No need. . . . Back home, the ladies prepared for the big party. Daphne made delicious cheesecake, baklava, kourambiedhes, and koulourakia. We all dressed in our best, especially Daphne and Greg. At 7:30 promptly, the guests began arriving in droves, a testimony to the sociability of Greg and Daphne in their short stay here. I met so many, I can’t keep them straight, but I do remember some. Matthew and Patty, of course, were nice to see again. Patty wept at the end of the party at the thought that Daphne would be leaving and their lovely friendship made much more difficult. Then there was a lively chap called McGee, I think, a Harvard classmate of Daphne’s and a graduate of St. Paul’s School who is now, at his tender age, manager of Virgin Airlines in Tokyo. I asked if Virgin was doing well when so many other companies were collapsing, and he said “Yes, very well indeed, because we have a vision of our place. Others, like TWA, are either too big or too small, and do not inspire loyalty in their customers.” One flies TWA when there is no better choice, which is exactly right. As for Pan American, he says that the company was destroyed by its top management, which cynically drained it dry for their own financial benefit and then let it wither. Capitalism at its worst. I also had a good talk with Greg’s boss, Hiro, a Japanese. Greg told me afterwards that he is one of the most respected traders in Tokyo, known throughout the industry. Also that when Greg was thinking of leaving Goldman, it was Hiro who convinced management to do everything possible to keep Greg. So, obviously, there is loyalty and respect here in both directions. We talked about Goldman’s troubles, and Hiro said that it is basically a power struggle, with those partners who have lost out being the ones who have been resigning. Then there were two Japanese ladies who are part of the conversation group that Daphne meets with regularly. More difficult to speak to them, especially since one of them kept trying out my Japanese, which didn’t go far, although I managed a few sentences that perhaps were more or less correct (probably less). And a woman who had taught at JIS with Alec and is now here and who told me about a colleague who is applying for my job at Dartmouth—small world. And a lively American woman with a baby, a journalist who has been here for ten years or so. There were others whom I didn’t meet or don’t remember, probably about twenty people in all. A lively party, with Greg very efficiently passing around the champagne and making everyone happy. Quite clearly, there is a separate social life among expats, evidenced here and in the American Club and other such venues. But the nice thing about this gathering was that Japanese came, too. Not only Hiro and the conversation-ladies, but others from Greg’s office, including a rather young lady who apparently is also a crackerjack trader. It’s hard to think of these quite normal people handling so many millions of dollars every day.

On Monday, December 19th, we all rose early, walked to the Hiro-o subway station, and arrived at Tokyo Eki for our trip to Kyoto and Hiroshima via Hikari—i.e., super-express, not to be confused with the super-super-express, or with the Kodama, the express, the three types of the famous shinkansen, or bullet train, run by JR. The engine looks like the front of a Boeing 747, the cars are sleek and beautiful, with vending machines and telephones in the lobbies; separate toilets and washrooms; vendors with coffee and other drinks, bento-o, gifts, etc. circulating, women passing along with sacks to collect refuse, etc. Seats in most of the wagons are reserved, although wagons 1-5 are unreserved. You line upon the platform precisely where the door of your wagon will open. There are five seats in a row (four in the green car—i.e., the first class); lots of leg room, lots of recline, good lighting, an almost silent ride, and fused tracks: no clacky-clackety. The drivers are in pilot-like uniforms and carry attaché cases. The cleaning ladies are also in uniform; they invaded the wagons before we entered. Once the train started, the conductor appeared at the end of the car, bowed, and begged our forgiveness for punching tickets. When the vendor comes and sells you a beer or coffee or whatever, he has an electronic mechanism that records the type of item—similar to what’s used in libraries or in our supermarkets; presumably this enables him to keep track of what is sold, collected, etc. at the end of the day. Fully computerized vendors, in other words. Also remarkable is the silence in the train. Japanese do not scream; women especially have tiny, birdlike voices, at least in public; men, if they talk, do so in near whispers. Announcements come periodically, first in Japanese, then in Oxford English. They assure you that you are on the train to Kyoto, that the smoking cars are such and such, that the dining car is no. 8, etc. Before each station, they announce: We are now approaching Osaka, where we shall make a brief stop. All this is repeated on the electronic screen at the end of the car, first in Japanese, then in perfect English. Also, as one approaches, the screen shows how many kilometers away the station is: 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. We figured that the train goes about 100 miles an hour. There were no delays, no slowdowns, nothing whatsoever irregular. AMTRAK between White River Junction and New York averages 30 miles an hour and is usually late. . . . Quite soon after leaving Tokyo, we saw Mount Fuji on the right, beautifully snow-covered. It is a perfect volcanic cone, sliced off flat at the top. Perhaps it is sacred to the Japanese, but none of the businessmen in our train seemed the slightest bit interested in it, while we gawked. We arrived in Kyoto around 11:00 a.m. It is like arriving in Thessaloniki after Athens, or Melbourne after Sydney: obviously a provincial town, quieter, pleasanter, nicer looking in many ways, with wide avenues, a lovely river, and—as we were soon to discover—temples, castles, and shrines in abundance: it’s a showplace. But our first adventure was getting to the ryokan that Daphne had reserved. We had to go in two taxis, and she gave to one driver the wrong piece of paper, one that contained the address of the bank nearby, rather than of the ryokan itself. So three of us proceeded correctly to the ryokan and worried would we ever see the other three again. Luckily, however, the piece of paper also had the ryokan’s telephone number on it, so we soon heard that they had been left at the bank by the taxi driver. Daphne then rescued them. Our first pleasure was our lodging: The Three Sisters Inn Annex, 89 Irie-cho Okazaki, Sakyo-ku, telephone 075 761-6333, FAX 075 761-6335. You enter through a small Japanese garden, with the typical lanterns and stones and shaped trees. The door is the fusuma, or sliding panel. Immediately inside one removes his or her shoes, being careful not to step on the wooden step just inside the door. Our room was two small chambers on the second floor of what obviously was a very old, remodeled structure. Sliding screens papered on one side (the sho-oji) were inside each window, and a fusama divided the two rooms. In the first was a low table already set with Japanese (i.e., green) tea, with cushions for seats, and a small TV; in the second two western-style chairs. The floors, of course, were covered with tatami (reed mats). Each room had central heat, much appreciated since it was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Futons were laid out for sleeping, each with an electric mattress! The bath was western style, with tub/shower and a regular WC instead of the Japanese style toilet where one has to squat. Inside the bath were slippers meant only for the bathroom; one never wears them in another room, and one never wears one’s other slippers into the bathroom. You immediately feel serene in a room like this, and especially so when we all gathered around the low table for tea. We then went nearby to a raamen-ya, a restaurant specializing in yellow Chinese egg noodles, not to be confused with soba. We had the miso raamen, the style in which the noodles are in a soup made from bean paste. On top were slices of pork (just as in the movie, so we caressed them with the hashi before beginning!) Then began an afternoon of sightseeing. Around the corner from the ryokan is the Heian Shrine, with a huge, garish, orange tori-i. We skipped this and proceeded to the lovely Shoren-in Temple, with huge, gorgeous trees outside, and a lovely garden within the precinct. Of interest are the huge bells in temples. They don’t have clappers, the way our bells do. They are struck from the outside with a log suspended horizontally at the proper height. Just a little way beyond is the enormous gatehouse of the Chion-in Temple, with its pagoda-like double roof. The temple itself is much higher, and is also enormous. The buildings date from the early seventeenth century. Here, for the first time, we encountered a temple that was actually in use. Three people were inside, kneeling and bowing in various directions to the accompaniment of a drum being hit by a priest. We think it was a bridal couple, and perhaps the bride’s father, doing some sort of prenuptial ritual. Afterwards they lit incense-sticks in the courtyard and placed them in a holder, very much like Greek Orthodox Christians lighting candles and placing them in the Orthodox-type holder. The elaborateness of these temple precincts is impossible to describe; so is the beauty, the architectural harmony. From here we climbed up and up to the Kiyomizu Temple, the most famous of the lot, built in 1633. One is struck first by the brilliant orange pagoda in front of the temple complex. The complex itself is constructed on stilts, each stilt being a huge tree, all knit together with brilliant mortise and tenon construction. You descend a long stairway to a sacred flow of water beneath. The ladles provided to pilgrims to drink from this source were inserted in a machine that sterilized them with infrared rays. How typically Japanese! From here we returned through Mauyama Koen (Park), which is meant to be spectacularly lovely at the time of cherry blossoms. . . . For supper, we all went downtown via bus to a department store whose 7th and 8th floors are occupied exclusively by restaurants, one furnishing each kind of Japanese cuisine. We chose Greg’s favorite, the shabushabuya. We were ushered into a private room with a low table, removing our shoes, of course. Fortunately, beneath the table was a depression enabling us to sit comfortably, with knees bent. The waiter lighted a cauldron in the middle, filling it with water, soy sauce, spices, etc. to make a broth. Then he brought plates of raw meat plus vegetables, plus special shabushabu sauce. We cooked our own meal by boiling the meat and vegetables in the broth, which had to be skimmed off periodically into a special dish. I had sake (warm rice-wine); others had beer. At the end, when all this was finished, the waiter brought noodles, which we cooked in the same delicious broth. Back then to the Three Sisters Annex via taxi, and a delicious sleep on the futons.

Tuesday, December 20th. The ryokan serves a Western-style breakfast: lots of coffee, toast, and jam. You eat sitting on a cushion on the floor. Off we went by bus again, this time to Nijo Castle, built 1603–1626 as the shogun’s residence. An enormous complex surrounded by a moat and cyclopean walls. Of interest is the so-called nightingale floor, i.e., floors constructed so that anyone walking on them makes a rather pleasant sort of squeak, the idea being that any intruder would be heard. The rooms are divided by sliding panels, as in our ryokan, and the paintings on these are lavish. The floors are covered with tatami mats. A placard informs one that then, as now, there was no furniture. The shogun and his entourage slept on futons that were brought out at night and stored in closets during the day. For eating, a low table and cushions were brought out. In the great audience room, they have mannequins showing the shogun giving an audience to visiting barons. No furniture: all are seated on the floor. Also, there was no heat. And lighting came at night only from candles, but the sliding panels during the day would be opened onto the garden. As for the garden, the most remarkable feature here, as elsewhere, is the pine trees that have been shaped artificially by an elaborate system of constraints, their branches tied down and forced to grow downward and outward. There is also a typical pond with symbolically placed rocks. . . . We ate in a Chinese restaurant adjacent to Kyoto University: nice to see students and teachers lunching leisurely in this way. . . . From here we went to the lovely Golden Pavilion and pond and gardens, a big tourist attraction. It was built in the fifteenth century as the country hideaway of the shogun, but burned down and has been reconstructed. The “gold” is just that: two full storeys covered in gold leaf. From here we went on to something very different indeed, the ascetic garden in the Ryoanji Temple. It is a Zen garden meant for meditation. It consists simply of raked gravel in which about fifteen rocks are inserted, each rock surrounded by just a bit of grass or moss. The whole is encased in a large wall. It was laid out in 1525, so they say. The meaning is anything you desire. One interpretation is that the rocks symbolize the concrete ephemerality of life in a vast sea of eternity (the gravel). . . . Back to the ryokan; some tea; then out to a little restaurant serving okonomiyaki—an omelet or a sort of thick crepe fried on a griddle in front of us until brown and then coated with grated tuna flakes and a pungent sauce. Delicious, as is everything else in Japan.

Wednesday, December 21st. We needed to leave early to catch the shinkansen to Hiroshima, and the Three Sisters were wonderfully obliging, laying out breakfast for us the night before. The courtesies here are remarkable, at least by those who stand to gain from you financially. (We did notice some rude stares in various places, and in one restaurant we really were given a sign that we were unwelcome.) A pre-ordered taxi came precisely on time, again with the driver in white shirt and tie and white gloves. (If a taxi fleet tried this in New York they would probably attract lots of customers.) At the station, waiting, we watched a school excursion: probably three hundred boys and girls of high school age, all in uniform. They congregated in the grand concourse of the station, lining up in perfectly formed rows, and all squatted while the chief teacher gave them instructions over a megaphone. Perfect little robots: it’s a bit frightening. Hiroshima has a sparkling new train station in a busy square, and wide avenues with trolley cars and attractive buildings—everything built, of course, since the war. We went directly to the Peace Park, constructed on an island that was ground zero at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when “Little Boy” was dropped by the Enola Gay B-29 bomber. The first thing one sees is the A-bomb dome, the shell of a large, domed building that was destroyed by the bomb but whose remains have now been preserved as the symbol of that destruction. It is a stark, terrifying monument, a kind of natural sculpture. Near it are other monuments, for example to Tamiki Hara, a poet who survived the blast but lost his family in it and committed suicide, in 1951. A poem of his is inscribed on the monument: “Engraved in stone long ago, / Lost in the shifting sand, / In the midst of a crumbling world, / The vision of one flower.” Another monument near the dome is “To Those Who Died From the Chuugoku-Shikoku Public Works Office.” Another is to those who died from the “District. Lumber Control Corporation,” another to the “Mobilized Students”—students who had been mobilized to build fire lanes on the island and who were incinerated in the blast. Crossing over onto the island, one sees the Children’s Peace Monument, with a statue of a girl stretching her arms upward and holding a golden crane, conveying hope for a peaceful future. The origin is the story of a junior high school student who died in 1955 of A-bomb disease (leukemia). While in hospital, she folded 1000 paper cranes in the belief that this would bring good luck and save her, which it did not. After her death, her friends campaigned for this monument. Other monuments remind one of the reality of that moment: Monument to the Α-bombed Teachers and Students of National Elementary Schools, Monument to the Employees of the Hiroshima Post Office, A-bomb Monument of the Hiroshima Municipal Girls’ High School, and so forth. We proceeded to the Peace Memorial Museum. You start with two videos, one more excruciating than the other, showing the initial effects, the total devastation, the burns, the maimed and burned people committing suicide by jumping into the river, and then—perhaps worse—the strange symptoms that no one understood, developing afterwards: diarrhea, leukemia, mental deficiency of children exposed to radiation while in the womb, all forms of “A-bomb disease.” The exhibits in the museum trace the history of Hiroshima and of the war, even indicating Japan’s aggressiveness first in Korea and Manchuria and then China. In the video, too, the victims do not seem to blame America; on the contrary, several say, “There would have been no bomb if there hadn’t been a war.” The thinking leading up to the decision to use the bomb is illustrated to some degree, including the fact that Kyoto at one point was considered a possible target because the Americans wanted a city that had not already been destroyed by bombing so that we could more clearly measure the destructive capacity of this single bomb! Imagine! This was one of the “attractions” of Hiroshima. One video exhibit shows the Enola Gay actually dropping the bomb and being shaken by the shock waves after the explosion. The museum also depicts vividly the impossibility of helping those who survived. No medical supplies were available; the hospitals had been destroyed; doctors were powerless. As in the video, there is much here about the delayed effects. Finally, the museum shows the development of the Peace Park and Hiroshima’s sense that it should be the very center of a worldwide peace movement (an impetus that was opposed by the United States during the Korean War). One exhibit reproduces the hundreds of letters written by the mayor of Hiroshima over the years to nations that persist in testing atomic weapons. Others show the visits by the pope, Mother Teresa, the secretary-general of the United Nations. All-in-all, the museum, the videos, the monuments, and the dome serve to engrave in one’s consciousness the enormity of this moment in history. . . . We left the museum somberly, not wishing to talk. This and the Holocaust Museum in Washington are imperatives for everyone, especially for those too young to have their own memories of the Second World War. . . . Walking back to Hiroshima Eki, we bought sandwiches and yakitori for supper on the train. The shinkansen brought us speedily and comfortably back to Tokyo (a coffee purchased from the vendor on the train cost 3000 yen = $3.00, but never mind). From Tokyo Eki we went by subway to Roppongi, which was teeming with activity at 11:00 p.m., and caught a bus along Roppongidori, packed in like sardines with people who had been out on the town. Back home at 11:30 p.m. after a very full, fascinating, and enlightening three days.

Thursday, December 22nd we slept later than usual, had a leisurely breakfast, telephoned Northwest to reconfirm the flight home, and then went out to shop and sight-see in Shibuya, another very busy center, within walking distance of Daphne’s home. In front of the station is the bronze statue of the dog Hachiko, who waited in front of the station for ten years for his master’s return after the master had died. When the dog died, a statue commemorating his loyalty was placed here, and is now a favorite meeting spot. We went to the food hall of the Tokyu Department Store, another gourmet delight with sample dumplings, yakitori, etc. Japanese cuisine is seemingly endless in variety. And everything is almost neurotically clean. In the bakery, you are supplied with tongs. You then pick up the rolls, sandwiches, loaves of bread, etc. that you want—always with the tongs, never touching anything—and place them on a tray that is also provided. You bring the tray to the checkout girl, who greets you as usual with a sweet litany of politeness. She then picks up her own tongs and places each item in a separate plastic container that she seals with scotch tape. All that then goes into beautiful shopping bags, and off you go home, with no fear of contamination. We also saw, on the way, a group of workmen constructing the inside of a house. Although the place was all cement and plasterboard, when they entered to work they nevertheless removed their shoes. . . . Daphne then took us to Bunkamura, the “Culture Village,” a striking building, five years old, all shiny marble, with a lovely atrium, housing a concert hall, art gallery, movie theaters, numerous restaurants and cafés (with waiters in tuxedos, and very fancy prices), an English-language bookstore, and probably much more. As usual, it seems to be combined with a department store! Culture and commerce obviously go together. . . . Daphne went off to work on the night shift at the Japan Times. Chrysanthi cooked chicken stew for supper. Greg returned at 6:30, very tired—he has had to cover for a colleague in New York whose father is in hospital. But tomorrow, the emperor’s birthday, the markets are closed and he has a day off. Around 10:00 p.m., however, he was viewing his Reuters computer screen to see the selling price of pounds sterling. Goldman had sold an option to another bank involving £50,000,000, and it was due to expire in two hours—i.e., at 10:00 a.m. New York time, which would be 12 midnight here. The option would be exercised if the price of sterling against the dollar reached 1.55 or higher. It was now 1.482. Goldman had bought £20,000,000 to have in readiness if the option were exercised; they would then still need to buy another £30,000,000 in order to pay the bank its £50,000,000, and of course if the price went up then they would have to pay more than 1.55 and would sell at 1.55, losing money. Greg said there was no need to wait until midnight; we’d find out what happened in the morning.

Friday, December 23rd. Greg was up at 5:00 a.m., answering a telephone call. Then back to bed and up again at 6:30 a.m. when a slew of faxes arrived. At 7:15, when I awoke, I asked what had happened with the option. “It was fine,” he answered. “The price never reached 1.55, so the option was not exercised.” In other words, Goldman won out on that deal. I then asked about the £20,000,000 that had been purchased in readiness. “Oh, that’s all gone. The option I told you about was just one in about fifteen different deals that came to conclusion yesterday.” . . . I, too, received faxes this morning: again from Mardy High regarding the Irish trip, and again all screwed up, saying that there would be twelve lectures, that we would visit pubs associated with literary figures, etc. I remonstrated, as usual. We’ll see what comes out of that sluggish office next. . . . Today is the emperor’s birthday and thus a public holiday. The public is allowed into the palace grounds on this one day and apparently the emperor stands at a window and the people below shout Banzai! So we went. But we arrived at 11:02, and they had closed the gates at 11:00. After lots of confusion owing to my rudimentary Japanese, we finally discovered that the gates would be opened again at 12:30 p.m. but at another gate, so we went there and waited on line for an hour. Precisely at 12:30 the gates did indeed open again. We advanced in the crowd, were divided into a men’s line and a women’s line, were frisked by policemen, and were admitted to the grounds. But we were then brought to a sort of pavilion with men in very formal attire standing behind a long table. It turned out that this was the Register and that we had stood in line for an hour outside and then for another twenty minutes inside simply to be able to sign the enormous register of those sending the emperor birthday greetings! Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this was the signals of “magnificence” and “empire” and “majesty” that were conveyed by the squads and squads of policemen and policewomen, the extraordinary wealth of the imperial grounds, the hoopla attached to the birthday—even though, of course, the emperor is no longer “divine” and, so far as I know, no longer has any real power. But it is clear that privilege continues here, as in England, and not only for the emperor himself but for his family; his brother occupies a huge estate that we passed on our way to one of the subway stations the other day. As a consolation for our misadventure, we wandered a bit through the extensive palace grounds: a huge expanse in the very middle of Tokyo, the whole surrounded by cyclopean walls and a moat. We’d missed the real fun by two minutes! Tired, we made our way back to Tokyo Eki through a very impressive part of the city—obviously rich and new, with rather nice office buildings—and had a good lunch in the station of (guess what?) noodles, near a group of about twenty well-dressed gentlemen who were shouting and laughing raucously, drinking sake, having the time of their lives. It’s the first time I had seen or heard Japanese being exuberant, noisy, and demonstrative. We’d walked so much by this time, Lucia treated us all to a taxi ride back to Nissekidori. In the evening, Greg treated us to a lavish dinner at the Tokyo American Club, located near Tokyo Tower, which shone resplendent in its many colors, and just behind the Russian Embassy, which seemed like a fortified castle, with high walls, and policemen stationed every 100 feet around the perimeter, so it seemed. The TAC is an ostentatious monstrosity, very posh, with a main building housing restaurants, meeting rooms, and a small library (which contained “my” issue of Life Magazine), and an out-building containing a full-sized bowling alley, squash courts, racket-ball courts, a basketball court, and a gym with workout machines, in which two burly Americans were pumping iron. Ugh! Separating the two buildings is a full-sized outdoor swimming pool. One nice thing about all this was the very obvious presence of Japanese members; indeed, in the dining room more of those present seemed Japanese (or of other foreign nationalities) than American, perhaps because many Americans are away for the Christmas holidays. Greg said that there is a twenty-year waiting period for membership for non-Americans, so eager are people to join. To tell the truth, we all enjoyed being pampered in this way and also—yes, let it be known!—escaping the ever-present Japanese noodles. So, we chose from a menu featuring swordfish, prime ribs, filet mignon, salmon, and other American dishes, preceded by soup and salad, followed by cheese and biscuits, mousse, and petit-fours. I’m glad I didn’t see the bill. But it was a relaxed, lengthy, tasty family meal. . . . Returning home, we turned on the TV and found a Japanese symphony orchestra doing the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th, with full chorus (all Japanese) and soloists (mixed nationality) and a foreign conductor. Very nice indeed. It was followed by Itzhak Perlman and a hornist and pianist doing the Brahms trio. With these lovely sounds we went to sleep.

Saturday, December 24th. This is a fast day in the feast-fast-feast-fast routine. Luckily, yesterday wasn’t. So, breakfast without coffee—a monumental feat for all concerned. It’s Chrysanthi’s birthday, of course. . . . In the afternoon we all took the chikatetsu (subway) to Asakusa, which is the old Tokyo. Here is the oldest temple in the city, the Sensoji. But what a surprise! Stretching from the tori-i to the temple gate is a shopping frenzy, with stalls on each side, decorations galore for the New Year’s season, and thousands of people. As Lucia remarked, “This doesn’t seem very holy.” But all this busyness is its own form of worship, I suppose, and not just of Mammon. In any case the tori-i contains huge, ferocious statues of the gods of thunder and wind, while the gate contains equally ferocious statues of the Deva kings, both looking like weightlifting champions. Just before the temple is a sort of brazier with incense steaming out of it. People crowd around this and wave the incense onto their faces. In the temple itself, people throw coins into a huge receptacle, then clasp their hands, bow their heads, and pray or perhaps recite a mantra. At this moment something was actually happening in the inner sanctum: people were gathered, and three or four priests were hurrying back and forth. The temple is dedicated to the Bodhisattva Kannon, the goddess of mercy; her statue is said to be locked within a shrine behind the altar. To the left is a tall pagoda said to contain relics of the Buddha’s bones. The crowds here and the mixture of commercialism and piety remind one that this is Asia, something easy to forget in many parts of Tokyo. But Alec remarked that a similar scene in Jakarta would be chaotic by comparison, and also much richer in smells! . . . Chrysanthi, Daphne, and I returned home via Nissekidori for some shopping; Alec, Greg, and Lucia got off at Ginza to see that sight. . . . Then a video: Steve Martin in “Roxana,” a clever spoof on Cyrano de Bergerac. After a supper of (yes!) noodles (actually spaghetti carbonara prepared by Daphne) we celebrated Chrysanthi’s birthday. She received beautiful pearl earrings, a diamond necklace, a pair of lacquered chopsticks, and a book on Japanese flower arranging. We finished Christmas Eve properly by viewing yet another video, this time The Miracle on 34th Street, which Lucia had brought with her from California for the occasion. It’s an updated version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with exactly the same message: that it’s nice to be nice, especially around Christmastime.

Sunday, December 25th, Christmas. Greg made us all eggs and sausage for breakfast, enjoyed by all until someone remarked that the Japanese had just discovered how to make sausage from sewage! This was an appropriately high-protein breakfast for our feast day (which was only beginning). Then Chrysanthi, Daphne, Alec, and I walked to Hobson’s to catch a bus cross-town for the Quaker Meeting, while Greg stayed home to make his famous “silk pie” and Lucia went off to Trinity Church in Omotesando. The Meeting is in a sort of precinct that originally was part of a Buddhist temple. There is a very large and attractive Meeting House with kitchen and first-day school, and another building, the Tokyo Quaker Center, that we saw afterwards. The Meeting was remarkable. First, of course, we removed our shoes and put on slippers, which are provided. The attenders were both Japanese and Caucasian. It is an unprogrammed meeting, but one in which hymn singing seems routine, as does reading from Scripture. In any case, a woman rose and asked us to sing hymn no. 100 (hymnbooks are at every seat). This turned out to be “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” in Japanese, of course. It’s a good way to practice one’s hiragana, since one sings syllable by syllable. Then someone else got up and read briefly from Luke, in English. Later, there was an equally brief reading from John, also in English. Ministry, all by Japanese women, was first in Japanese and then in English, with the translation either by someone else or by the same person. One woman spoke movingly of the privations all Japanese had experienced fifty years ago, during and just after the war, when there was practically no food. And she continued by hoping that now, when everything was so plentiful for them, they would remember those in other parts of the world who have no food. Another spoke poetically about walking out in the dark of night recently and hoping that she, too, could see a guiding star, the way the magi had in Bethlehem. At the break of meeting it was announced that the children’s pageant would follow. This explains why children were noticeably absent from the worship: they were preparing for their presentation. This was utterly charming and moving. They seemed about middle-school age, all girls. They entered singing carols. Each had a script from which she read, in lovely English, a little playlet about the baby’s arrival in Bethlehem, no room at the inn, sleeping in the manger, the magi’s visit, the star of Bethlehem. At each part of the story an adult showed a painting to explain where we were. Shopping bags inflated and tied off, with a paper cutout shaped somewhat like a sheep’s head, served for the flock of sheep. When this ended, all the benches were pushed back and a sumptuous table was laid for lunch. People seemed to be very comfortable with one another, and comfortable, too, with the mixture of nationalities. We were approached by two Caucasians, a man who works as a counselor for foreign school children, and thus had lots to talk to Alec about, and his girlfriend, who works at the Sony Corporation. They showed us the Quaker Center, a pre-war house that survived not only the Allied bombing but also the great earthquake in the 1920s. It has a cozy living room, a kitchen, and bedrooms upstairs for guests. . . . In the afternoon, back home, we had champagne and opened presents. Among others, Daphne got beautiful earrings, Chrysanthi a blue kimono (purchased by Daphne at the antiques fair), Greg and Alec linen shirts, I a condiment dish to use for my Indonesian spices, Alec a pair of lacquered chopsticks, I a video of Hawking’s book on time (from Lucia), etc. In the midst of this, Leander and Deanna telephoned from Hanover, where all is well. . . . Folks played monopoly until about 6:30 p.m., when out came the tiropita appetizer (Daphne having secured fillo through connections at the Embassy), turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, salad, good wine in huge wedding-present crystal, and the famous silk pie, scandalously delicious. . . . It was a lovely Christmas, somewhat unreal, perhaps, since on the one hand it seems so normal to be living-in Tokyo (mostly because we are with family in a normal sort of home) while on the other hand obviously it is so completely abnormal and strange; yet very real in its fellowship, especially because of Lucia’s presence to extend our family in such a meaningful way.

Monday, December 26th. We all got up at 6:00 a.m. to see Alec off. He and Greg will take a taxi together to Tokyo Eki. Alec is headed for Hong Kong, where he’ll vacation for three days. We’ll see him again at the farm in mid-July. I’m hoping that he’ll plant some tomatoes, lettuce, etc. so that we can have a garden. Lucia, Chrysanthi, and I went with Daphne to Tokyo Eki later to take the Narita Express.and head for Los Angeles. At the station, we saw a horse-drawn carriage arrive from the palace, very ceremoniously, apparently to pick up some visiting dignitaries. We cheated just a little on our feast-fast routine in order to have one last bowl of noodles at the airport. The trip back was comfortable and uneventful—just ten hours.

Monday, December 26, 1994

Santa Barbara

After a bit of a wait at Los Angeles airport, we were met by a hired driver who had come down from Santa Barbara in Lucia’s sleek black Lincoln. He drove us northward to Santa Barbara along the coast road, with the Pacific truly pacific. What I thought were seals turned out to be surfers in their wetsuits. Lucia was greeted exuberantly by her two Pekinese dogs, who never tire, it seems, of retrieving a tennis ball thrown for them into the garden. What a beautiful house, and how different from our Eastern-style homes! No basement; lemon- and orange-trees outside, eucalyptuses, a wall surrounding everything, as in village homes in Greece. We washed and unpacked for an hour or so, and then got back into the Lincoln to see the sights of Santa Barbara, which is very touristy. Main Street full of boutiques; the old Mission (rebuilt after an earthquake) reminding one that all this land was occupied for thousands of years by Indians before the Spanish came; the wharf with its “valet parking” juxtaposed to simple folk fishing. We ate outdoors at the end of the wharf; even Chrysanthi vowed to eschew noodles! I had (of course!) a hamburger, which seemed exceedingly heavy after the sensible Japanese cuisine. We went to the AMTRAK station to buy tickets for tomorrow. The train there looked so dirty, sad, and old compared to the shinkansen! And when I inquired about first-class seats to San Diego the clerk said that his computer was down and I’d have to call an 800 number. Why he couldn’t call the number himself is still a mystery. This was perhaps our best indication of the difference between Japanese super-efficiency and American medium-efficiency. We bought coach seats and are hoping for the best tomorrow. Chrysanthi napped; I read Kissinger’s sensitive account of Nixon’s final days in the White House before his resignation. Then we all went out again to a lovely restaurant called Acacia for a leisurely supper. It was good to see the fabled town of Santa Barbara where Greg spent his high school years, and to watch Lucia distinguishing between the “Santa Barbarians” and the tourists.

Tuesday, December 27, 1994

San Diego

Actually, AMTRAK left on time and arrived on time in San Diego. The train was mobbed with holiday travelers: people standing in the aisles. Ironically, we each had a Japanese sitting next to us, and when we entered San Diego we saw a big sign: Yakitori. It felt good to be in the know. Part of the way is along the coast, sometimes almost on the beach. The sea on one side and the parched mountains on the other make a memorable passage. But what is really memorable is San Diego itself, beginning with the old Santa Fe railroad station, restored to its original glory. The entire center of the city has been rebuilt, and the architecture is stunning (confirming our opinion about the comparative drabness of Tokyo architecture). We checked in at the Doubletree Hotel in Horton Plaza and went almost immediately to the Hyatt on the waterfront for the MLA/MGSA session, on the diaspora. Irene Kacandes chaired it but had to leave, so I chaired the second half. Speakers were Martin McKinsey, who argued that Cavafy in some of his poems was covertly speaking about his own situation in the Alexandrian diaspora under British rule, Yitzchak Kerem, who spoke about the Jewish diaspora in Greece, which apparently began in the 2nd or 3rd centuries B.C., and Meg’s graduate student at Harvard, George Syrimis. Professor Savvas from San Diego State was a lively discussant in the audience. Afterwards, he told me that he teaches The Last Temptation with great success each year, and also that San Diego is paradise: the best climate, etc., etc. He showed us a Greek restaurant, and the McKinseys, Kerem, and Chrysanthi and I had lots of good talk at supper, enjoying Greek salads and kabobs. Kerem is particularly interesting. He works half-time at Jerusalem and half-time at Thessaloniki, billing himself as “historian and filmmaker of Greek and Sephardic Jewry.”

Wednesday, December 28, 1994

I participated in the MLA session on Pedagogical Issues in Religion and Literature, speaking about my experiences teaching a course on religion and literature last spring, and reading a summary of one of the student papers. I also suggested that no such course should have a final exam, something that rather embarrassed the other speakers, all of whom did have final exams. Among the others, Samuel Smith of Messiah College, Pennsylvania, turned out to be the most interesting. Son of a Mennonite minister, he is now a Universalist Quaker. His students are mostly fundamentalist Christians, and his challenge is to make them see that fictions are not necessarily subversive of “truth.” My students are exactly the opposite: in love with fictions and very suspicious of the Bible. Thus our two presentations complemented one another very nicely. In the audience was Laird Barber. When he came up to say hello, I didn’t recognize him at first—he has grown so fat. But the voice and the attitude are the same, and we were very compatible again, after a hiatus of many years. But the real shock was seeing his wife, Dorothy, when we went to their hotel for dinner that evening. She sat on the divan like a rag doll, her head lowered, her hair gone, making her look like a shrunken, bald male about ninety years old. Apparently she had had lung cancer and surgical removal of the better part of one lung, about six years ago. The hair loss is from chemotherapy. Against all expectation, she still smokes. She had only a half sandwich and a glass of juice for supper; Laird ordered room-service for himself and me. Actually, when Dorothy raised her head; as she did occasionally, she was able to be interesting and even (somewhat) animated, although she spoke in a near whisper that was difficult to hear. Our time together was difficult; it was good to leave.

Thursday, December 29, 1994

I went early to a rather good session on Proust, although feeling somewhat strange because I probably will never teach Proust again. Then Chrysanthi and I went to the famous San Diego zoo, despite Chrysanthi’s increasing illness (sore throat, pains, general lassitude). But she was a trooper and seemed to enjoy this amazing facility: even better than the Sydney zoo. They have species I never knew existed; they have helpful placards about endangered species (some of which they have successfully bred in captivity); they put on a lively trained-seal show; they have birds in huge aviaries that simulate rain-forests, and beasts in large expanses complete with waterfalls. Afterwards, Chrysanthi went to bed, we had a room-service supper, and I went back to the MLA to the session on the Postmodern Bible, which Laird had alerted me to, and at which I met him again. This was most informative: a group have put together an anthology of postmodern criticism of the biblical texts, using psychological, anthropological, sociological, Marxist, etc. approaches. All young theologians, very lively, and very excited about their enterprise. The book will be published by Yale University Press in January; I’ve already ordered a copy. Must tell Darren Middleton about this, in connection with our book on Kazantzakis’s religious vision. Laird and I had a nice opportunity to talk again with Samuel Smith, whom I encouraged to come to Pendle Hill. Then I went to hear Terry Eagleton on Irish modernism. As always, he was impeccably logical and extremely instructive. Interestingly, he held that the Irish renaissance occurred chiefly because the Ascendency (i.e., Protestant descendants of the English conquerors) were losing ground politically and socially; thus they shifted their energies to the arts. At the same time, Ireland, being effectively a third-world country, was not hospitable to truly avant-garde manifestations. Thus the Irish writers (with the exception of Joyce, of course, who first of all was not Ascendancy and secondly left Ireland for good at the start of his career) tended to be very conservatively modernist. . . . On the way out, ran into Jay Parini. We went off to a bar and sat for two hours over some beers, catching up on family and profession. He completely revised his biography of John Steinbeck for the American edition, even though the British edition got very good reviews. The movie on Tolstoy is on hold; no one wants to advance the $20,000,000 needed to produce it. Jay is eager for us to visit his farmhouse north of Middlebury; he bought a ruin and has put $300,000 into modernizing it.

Friday, December 30, 1994

Bob Bell had telephoned yesterday, wanting to see me. We had arranged to go to Sea World together, but this had to be changed owing to Chrysanthi’s illness. So Bob came to the Convention Center and we sat over coffee for an hour. He feels very much better, having produced a book at last (and indeed one that is about to go into paperback). He said that he had just written a new introduction in which, among other things, he thanked me for introducing him to Joyce. (Michael Groden told me the same thing recently.) He’s doing very well indeed at Williams, although Ilona has never felt quite so comfortable there. But they both realize how lucky they are to have tenure, together, in such a small department. . . . Afterwards, Chrysanthi got dressed and we had lunch in the architecturally brilliant shopping mall just behind the hotel, and then went leisurely to the train station. AMTRAK to Los Angeles was again on time (hooray!). Our taxi driver from the station to the airport turned out to be a part-time cantor, graduate of Jewish Theological Seminary in New York—driving a cab, poor guy, to exist. The last day or two I’d been reading Allen Guttmann’s From Ritual to Record: the Nature of Modern Sports in spare moments, and I finished it on the train. Ray Hall lent it to me, knowing my insistence that sport at Dartmouth is a fetish. The book is moderately interesting, most so when discussing the communist attitude toward sports. For example (p. 69): “Capitalist society is essentially achievement-oriented and competitive and sports present to us the purest model of that society—and that is just what is wrong with sports. What society needs is not greater pressure for more achievement, but freedom from the incessant demands for achievement, from the ‘inhumane absurdity . . . of the will to win.’ What society needs is not sports but play.” Guttmann is also interesting on the relation between sports and war, especially on the view that sports “purge” aggressive emotions and therefore make war less likely. On this, Guttmann is unequivocal: “. . . the catharsis theory is invalid. There is some evidence to indicate that the players themselves are less aggressive after the game than before the kickoff, an effect which may result mostly from the enormous amount of energy expended during the actual encounter, but there is a rare consensus among psychologists apropos of the alleged catharsis experienced by the spectators” (131). Also interesting is his view that there is “an inverse relationship between the routinization of daily life in modern society and the relevance of sports like soccer, rugby, hockey, and American football. ‘In the more advanced industrial societies of our time, compared with societies at an earlier stage of development, occasions for strong excitement openly expressed have become rarer.’ Games like football provide Saturnalia-like occasions for the uninhibited expression of emotions which must remain tightly controlled in our ordinary lives. The role of shouting, screaming spectator compensates us for the more restrained roles of parent, employee, and citizen. [A good example: John Punshon, Woodbrooke’s Quaker tutor, swearing like a trooper at a Birmingham soccer match.] And, if the excitement becomes excessive, it spills over into riotous behavior. If this hypothesis is correct, we can explain the function of football in American education. Our high schools and, to an even greater degree, our colleges are agencies of socialization dedicated very largely to the nurture of rational behavior. In football’s collegiate heyday, from the 1880s to the 1950s, American colleges were institutions which emphasized discipline and social control. Students, drawn mostly from the middle class, were supposed to study. It was also expected, since boys will be boys even when they are Amherst Men, that they would exhibit the exuberance associated with adolescence. Collegiate sports, especially football, provided a regular and socially sanctioned occasion for displays of manly courage, outbursts of drunken revelry, and the release of whatever college rules had been suppressed from Monday through Friday. Furthermore, once the student had graduated, the force of nostalgia conspired . . . to give football its special place among the many versions of the emotional ‘time out’” (132–133). Finally, Guttmann questions the clichés about team sports: “There does not seem to be any way to avoid the conclusion that a preference for team sports represents an inclination toward cooperation rather than toward . . . autonomy, but we err greatly if we assume that cooperation is always the enemy of individualism” (158). After finishing Guttmann, I started June Schlueter’s and Enoch Brater’s Approaches to Teaching Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, purchased at the MLA. This is full of good ideas and also of good bibliography. Thankfully, its refrain is that Godot cannot be reduced to any formula, any precise meaning. On the contrary, the teacher’s burden here (as generally in postmodernism and even to some degree in modernism) is to make students comfortable with multiple, ongoing interpretations instead of a definitive reading.

Saturday, December 31, 1994

Our flight home, arriving at Detroit at 6:00 a.m. (3:00 a.m. California time) and at Boston at 9:00 a.m., was routine but hardly comfortable, given seats that barely reclined. But we endured. Fortunately the Mini-Coach ride back to Hanover was without a stop, so in two hours we were home. Thankfully, the weather was fine: clear sky, temperature about 25 degrees (compared to 65 in San Diego). Before entering the house, I encountered a hand-delivered letter from Jean Brophy: She and Dr. McCullough are not speaking to each other, owing to what Dennis sees as an action taken without proper consultation, when Bob Shaughnessy admitted a patient back to the nursing center during the weekend, which isn’t supposed to be done. Fifteen minutes later, Dennis telephoned, and I suggested that I act as mediator in this dispute. He agreed. We’ll see now what Jean says, and Bob. Inside, we found that the upstairs sink didn’t drain, owing presumably to a frozen drain-pipe. I drained the trap, ascertaining that it wasn’t clogged. Then I tried to undo it and could not; indeed, in trying to put it back together I probably stripped the threads. Happy homecoming! But our new roof seems all in place, still visible because there is no snow at all, although the driveway is covered with ice. Chrysanthi went to bed in the sewing room. I shopped, picked up a huge carton of mail at the office, dealt with 248 blitz-mail postings (mostly from the Quaker list and therefore immediately disposable), then found a second immense carton of mail when the postman came later in the afternoon. We opened the gifts left for us by Leander an Deanna: a huge bar of chocolate for me with a painting by Monet on one side (Chrysanthi wants us to gaze at it rather than eat it), a video of British humor, a CD of Samuel Barber, a nice blouse, a lovely vase of flowers. Leander telephoned soon afterward. They had a splendid visit, spending lots of time with Yiayia, seeing Audrey (who is doing well after Harl’s death), visiting with the Nodas (David has a new girlfriend, a Japanese-American raised in Hawaii) and the Corindias. Deanna’s father and stepmother sent us a huge smoked salmon from Seattle. We sent them nothing and must now reciprocate, perhaps with Vermont maple syrup.

1995

Hanover

January 1–April 14

Jan. 7–8, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Jan. 27–28, Pendle Hill

Feb. 11, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Feb. 19, New York

March 3–4, Pendle Hill

March 11–13, Washington

March 15–18, Boston College

London, 7 Roland Gardens

April 15–April 18

Woodbrooke College

April 19–July 9

April 27–30, Gothenburg, Sweden

May 3–4, Cambridge, Selwyn College & chez David & Ann Holton

May 5–6, London, 27 Roland Gardens

May 12–13, Norwich, Nelson Court Guest Suite, University of East Anglia

May 17–18, Glasgow, Hospitality Inn, 36 Cambridge Street G23HN

May 19–20, Oban, Isle of Mull, Alexandra Hotel

May 21–22, Edinburgh, George Hotel Intercontinental, 19George Street

May 23–28, Dublin, Westbury Hotel, Grafton Street 2

June 27, Heathrow, Novotel Hotel 01895 431 431

June 27–July 3, Thessaloniki

June 30, Kalamaria

July 1–3, Aghia Triadha

July 4–7, return to Woodbrooke

July 8, London

July 9, Hanover

Riparius

July 10–September 8

July 18–19, Hanover

August 16–18, Hanover

Hanover

September 9–December 31

Sept 15–16, Pendle Hill

Oct. 1, Terpni

Oct 19–27, Pendle Hill, NYC, Princeton, Washington

Nov. 2–5, Cambridge

Nov. 13–15, New York City

Nov. 21–25, North Potomac (Leander’s)

Nov. 30–Dec. 8, Pendle Hill, Princeton, Kendal

Dec. 12, Amherst

Dec. 12–13, Cambridge

Sunday, January 1, 1995

More disaster from Kendal. Jean telephoned: a sprinkler went off in the attic, flooding six apartments, including Mary Keeley’s! This happened three days after the system was inspected and also, of course, after all the insulation work in the roofs that was meant to guarantee that everything would henceforth be OK. In addition, the appeal board ruled against Kendal. We are not tax-exempt, they declared, because we are not truly charitable, which requires that the charitable activities be available to all segments of the population, broadly. I can hardly argue with them; our so-called charitable activities are infinitesimally minimal. Now we are worse off than before since they also ruled that exemption of the Health Center and Community Center is illegal. Our tax will thus be recalculated, and we expect an increase of about $200,000, wiping out the gains from the retirement of the short-term bonds. Bad! Bad! . . . And Don Kidder wrote to complain about the last set of minutes because they note that Bob Shaughnessy made a pessimistic report (which he did). Don says that we should not include possibly damaging remarks in our minutes, which are public documents. Trouble, too, from Pendle Hill. Rebecca, getting more and more inefficient, forgot that she had promised an author that her manuscript would be reviewed in December. Thus she has not sent the MS with a suggestion that we do our business next week by conference call. Carol McCormack has written me to protest. In any case, the MS is disorganized. Of course, since it is by a woman and about women, Rebecca and others will insist, I’m sure, that organization is a male fetish and shouldn’t apply here. I’ll argue against, in any case. . . . Luckily, many of the journal authors got material back to me, which I must now process. Less success with the Pendle Hill evaluation people: only Nancy sent her homework so far. . . . Daphne telephoned: lovely to hear her voice again. She noted how empty their apartment now feels. We repeated our thanks for a wonderful visit. . . . Spoke with Mother, who is fine and who much enjoyed Leander and Deanna. Also spoke with Audrey, who said that Harl’s last five days were horrendous and that Dennis McCullough was wonderful, as were so many other people at Kendal. . . . Bo-Lennart Eklund has been blitzing me about lecturing in Gothenburg, so I’m already preparing another trip, from Birmingham to Sweden. And Chrysanthi is talking about a visit to Greece with Daphne, probably in June. Tomorrow is the last day of our holiday; teaching starts Wednesday. I feel ready for another vacation.

Tuesday, January 3, 1995

I worked in the office from 9:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. today. In the middle, Kristin Lord appeared. I took her to lunch as the best way of getting rid of her eventually. Prepared materials for tomorrow’s class. Saw students. Printed out Journal articles. Tried unsuccessfully to reach Fotini Tsalicoglou in Athens, for she hasn’t sent back her copyedited article and is holding up the entire issue. Mardy came over with the final version of the Irish trip brochure. Looks delicious. Jean Morcal wants me to submit my MLA paper for a book she’s preparing, and yesterday I deleted it from the computer! Daphne and Greg both wrote, separately, to say how much they enjoyed our visit.

Wednesday, January 4, 1995

Another long, distressing day, although a bright spot was the first meeting of English 57, Conrad-Joyce-Beckett, which went well, except that students are begging to be admitted (I had capped it at 50). The bad news is Kendal. The “Junta,” Reno & Co., have written to the New Hampshire Commissioner of Insurance that our proposed bylaws are illegal, etc. In other words, they’ve sabotaged the entire process, not saying a word about this to the Residents Council, which negotiated the bylaws with us. John Diffey is despondent. We were meant to visit the commissioner on January 16 and now don’t know what to do. . . . On the brighter side, I initiated mediation between Dennis McCullough and Jean and Bob. So at least they’re talking to each other now. But they had only one hour available, so we need to reschedule. Jean is trying to convince me to withdraw, saying that Dennis will try to manipulate one of the Board members. Tomorrow I’ll speak to Jim Armstrong and John Hennessey about this. . . . Viewed the new “Heart of Darkness” video at night. Mediocre. Modeled more on “Apocalypse Now” in some ways than on Conrad. . . . Oh, more bad news: the Classics Department wants to eliminate Modern Greek. End of an era.

Thursday, January 5, 1995

Bad again. This has been a terrible week. In the morning I scrambled to get the journal ready to send on Monday. Finally reached Fotini Tsalicoglou in Athens; she mailed her MS only yesterday. Went to the Comp. Lit. Steering Committee and spent the time reading Kendal budget projections while others discussed student thesis proposals. Then to Kendal. We’re budgeting $750,000 in back taxes! This wipes out all advantages we thought we had, to reduce negative equity by $750,000. Instead, we hope to reduce it by $300,000, the price being a 4.3% increase in monthly fees. Brent came in with 4.00% and we actually raised it—a reversal of previous procedure, when we’ve always argued the staff down, not up. Dick Brokaw wants 4.5%, Lafayette 4.0%, and I suggested the compromise. Spoke to John Hennessey about the mediation and was advised to withdraw, seeing as I exercise a certain power over Jean’s job in my role as clerk of the Board. I told her and she was much relieved. Shaughnessy, also, is convinced that Dennis is the manipulating one. I am very disappointed, because I think we made real progress in the first hour yesterday. . . . Afterwards, Hennessey came, Armstrong stayed, and we talked about Reno & Co. Armstrong was flabbergasted at the letter to the Commissioner of Insurance since it was totally different in tone from what Reno, over the telephone, had told Jim he was planning to do. Walter Frank in effect apologized to Jim for signing it. A second letter from Reno was more conciliatory, saying that he wants the new Board to be seated even though a, b, & c are wrong. We decided (a) to visit the Commissioner as planned, (b) to try to talk directly with Reno beforehand. I reached home at 5:45 p.m., wolfed supper, and went to Ministry and Counsel at the Meeting House. They want me to compile and edit the State of Society again. Big problems with Susan Stark. No one knows what to do. . . . At Ministry and Counsel, Barbara Gilbert said that she was appalled at how cruelly Bob Shaughnessy treated Dennis at the committee this morning, and when I returned home Tom Corindia telephoned to say the same. He said that Dennis was raising legitimate problems of long standing and that Shaughnessy (also Betty Barnett) was almost abusive, and never admitted any deficiency. Tom calls it the worst crisis he’s known at Kendal and threatened that if Dennis resigns or we force him to quit, we’ll never get another doctor from the Hitchcock Clinic. . . . I telephoned John Diffey at home to tell him about the Reno developments and also about the Health Center problems. We both concluded that Jean is failing to create an atmosphere of harmony. (Jean’s clear “solution” is to fire Dennis, who is beloved by the resident community.) John wants to have an executive session on the 17th to talk more about Jean. . . . By now it was 11:00 p.m. and I still hadn’t read over my lecture for tomorrow (on Conrad’s stories).

Friday, January 6, 1995

Hanover–Cambridge

I told Jean about the executive session and she complained, “Unfair! You gave me a year!” Back to Diffey. OK, we’ll modify it. We’ll have her present in the executive session to speak about health care, and will use a committee to report to her in writing about her evaluation. Diffey will confer with Corindia. . . . Scrambled in the office again with the journal and preparing my lecture. Gobbled lunch. . . . But the class is going well. Everyone wants in, and I’m saying No. Also, word is out somehow that this is my last class. Students are begging for independent study with me and I’m trying to escape all this. I spoke a lot today about Hiroshima: its effect on Beckett, etc. . . . We were supposed to go tonight to the big celebration for Walter Arndt—he’s getting a medal from the German government—but decided to drive to Cambridge instead because it’s supposed to snow all night and tomorrow morning. What a relief to be in the car finally, escaping! . . . Arrived at the Quaker Center, went out for spaghetti, and returned to find a square dance, folk dance, and waltzing in progress. So we joined in all three. What fun! Also, nice to see Andy Towl, who said I’m earning an MBA “on the job” at Kendal and Pendle Hill. Also saw an old acquaintance from Pendle Hill and also Tom Ewell, the former NEYM secretary, who dedicated our Meeting House in 1984.

Saturday, January 7, 1995

Cambridge

Went to Au Bon Pain for a croissant and coffee, and brought some back for Chrysanthi but spilled the coffee right in front of the door of the Quaker Center. Set up my Powerbook and worked on the journal. Had to retype the Books Received sent me by Eva. . . . Then to Church Street for lunch with Tom and Nardi Campion, very eager to hear about Japan, and also about my course, for their grandson is in it. Then to the A.R.T. for a splendid production of Agamemnon. Cassandra was electrifying. When she prophesied in a trance she spoke Aeschylus’s Ancient Greek, and this was rendered into English by a “Trojan translator.” Alvin Epstein was excellent as leader of the chorus. Marvelous Clytemnestra. Agamemnon was played by a black actor made to look like Idi Amin of Uganda. Lots of anachronisms in the translation, such as “movie stars,” “fuck you,” and the like—postmodern touches that don’t bother me but bothered Nardi. The A.R.T. newsletter has a fine piece on Godot by Scanlon that I must use in class, for it stresses the play’s relation to the war (cf. what I was saying about Hiroshima to the class) and also its relation to Geulincx, which I of course stress when I teach the Trilogy. Can’t wait to see this Godot. J. Geidt and A. Epstein will play Gogo and Didi. . . . A coffee in Au Bon Pain, more work on the journal, then supper in the German restaurant on the square. Then we went to see the teenage scene: rings in noses and ears, in The Garage. Back to the Quaker Center to read over my lecture on Lord Jim for Monday. . . . The next big job is the Pendle Hill evaluation collection that I really must finish next week.

Sunday, January 8, 1995

Cambridge

Cambridge Meeting. Nice talk and lunch afterward with Andy Towl, who advised me not to use a management consultant for Pendle Hill, saying they do more harm than good. Then back to the A.R.T. to see the remainder of the Oresteia: The Libation Bearers, with Thomas Derrah as Orestes, whose eagerness to kill his mother and Aigisthos, followed by his guilt, self-accusation, and remorse, was very well done. Then the final play, with the chorus of Furies orgiastic at times, with Hermes beating a drum as they writhed and chanted. (Hermes arrived on a motorcycle!) Then Athena arrives and settles Orestes’ fate in a law court, rather than allowing a continuing blood feud. Twelve members of the audience were brought down to be the jury; the result was six for acquittal, six for conviction. The tie was broken by Athena: acquittal. And the Furies then became Eumenides. All in all, yesterday and today: a unique theatrical opportunity.

Monday, January 9, 1995

Hanover

Sent JMGS 13 (1) by Federal Express to Hopkins. This moment is always a great relief. Interviewed a Lebanon high school senior for Haverford.

Wednesday, January 11, 1995

The first of three candidates for the English Department job that in effect is my replacement: Priya Joshi, a native of India with a Greek boyfriend. She studied Greek with Karen Van Dyck. Charming. Elegant. But I doubt the Department will favor her, primarily because I do!

Thursday, January 12, 1995

Second candidate: Julia Burch. She drove me crazy, for she spoke gobbledygook for 35 minutes, potted sociology full of trendy jargon. When I asked her simple questions about literature afterward she couldn’t respond. Dismal. Yet our committee short-listed her over so many others. Interestingly, all three candidates are women, and this one is a pronounced feminist: evidence of Brenda Silver’s chairmanship, I suppose. . . . Nice lunch with Jim Armstrong, however, regarding Kendal problems.

Friday, January 13, 1995

Lectured on the early James Joyce. . . . Then to Kendal to hear Bob Reno’s complaints about our bylaws. I view him as an evil saboteur. John Hennessey is most tolerant. But Bob Anthony, Reno’s closest ally and slated to go to Concord with him to see the Commissioner of Insurance, announced in our meeting that he had changed his mind and would no longer cooperate. Hooray!

Sunday, January 15, 1995

I ministered in Meeting about over-optimism regarding the “beloved community,” citing Pendle Hill, Kendal, and the early church as examples of supposed paradises that were really filled with dissention. Others afterwards testified to Kendal as an oasis of love and support, etc., and then Audrey Logan spoke at some length in a way that was nice but also embarrassing to me, of my long devotion to Kendal and my efforts to make it a loving community. . . . Afterwards, our usual lunch with Audrey, Sidney, Mayme, and Lafayette. . . . Supper with Audrey, the Nodas, and Yiayia, whom we hadn’t seen since before leaving for Japan. She’ll be 90 on Tuesday.

Monday, January 16, 1995

To Concord with Jean, John Hennessey, John Diffey, Don Kramer, Jim Armstrong, and Joan Birnbaum to visit the examiner, Tom Burke, for the NH Commissioner of Insurance. We met for over an hour. Burke clearly is aware of Reno’s complaints and considers them serious. He wonders why we aren’t more independent. He says that his role as a regulatory agent is to protect the residents. He is going to have the Insurance Department’s lawyer investigate. He hopes we can hear in a month. The real problem is legalism. He, quite rightly, assumes the worst and therefore tries to insure that proper statutes are in place to minimize dissention; we assume the best—i.e., that the Corporation will never use its veto power over, for example, amendments we make to the bylaws, or, better, that we and the Corporation will be able to reach amicable agreement obviating use of the veto. We operate on a consensual basis, Quaker-style, he on a legalistic one. And this, of course, is also the way Reno operates. What all this seems to show is that the Quaker style cannot survive in the broader community.

January 17, 1995

Long Overseers meeting, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. We approved the ’96 budget with 4.3% increase in fees and $50,000 appropriated for charity. This will need to be defended to the residents. Long debate about whether it would be advisable to appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court the Tax Appeals ruling denying us charitable status. Debbie Cooper, the lawyer, argued the case very weakly in my opinion, but in the end we decided to go ahead, mostly because an appeal can be withdrawn later on because some other CCRCs may fail to join us. But I don’t see how we can win. . . . At lunch John Diffey, Barbara Gilbert, Margery Walker, and I went over John’s summary of Jean’s evaluation. It’s severer than I had expected, in effect saying that she is going to be fired after a year if she doesn’t shape up in the area of personal relations. We asked for some slight revisions. We’ll need to present it to Jean next month. . . . John Radebaugh resigned owing to medical responsibilities every Tuesday, which means that we’ll need a new representative to the Corporation—good, because John is too flighty and scatterbrained, although wonderful in his very special way. I’ll be sending suggestions to Alan Hunt. We all tried to impress upon John Diffey the love and respect here for the physician, Dennis McCullough, despite the trouble he has been causing the administration. . . . After lunch, we met with Don Monroe, the assessor, Willi Black, chair of the Selectmen, and Jack Nelson and Cliff Vermilya. They gave us the bad news: a tax bill for $680,578.94! They said they didn’t want just to send it in the mail. How thoughtful! Their evaluation is 40 million; ours is 30 million. We’ll talk and perhaps reach a compromise. Also, they in effect promised that if we decided not to go to court again, they’d probably rebate what they might have spent in legal fees. . . . Then to Sanborn to hear the third candidate, a lovely woman with an Indian father and English mother, charming, vivacious, and sophisticated. The department meets tomorrow. I’d be happy with no. 1 or 3, not with no. 2. Supper with the candidate afterwards, plus Brenda, Marty Favor, and Tom Luxon’s wife, Ivy Schweitzer. All very pleasant, but the candidate isn’t prepared to teach Ulysses. . . . John Diffey came over to the house at 8:30 p.m. Helene and Mary were there, making bonbonnières with Chrysanthi for Helene’s wedding. So sorry we’ll miss it. John and I relaxed over brandy.

Speaking of brandy, I’m going to try to “tinker” with Redmont’s Quaker moderation essay and desk-top publish it. John Hennessey gave me articles saying that whisky in moderation, like wine, is good for the heart. . . . Received an invitation to go to Australia from Stylianos, for a cultural conference, but it’s just when we start at Woodbrooke in April and go to Sweden, so I had to decline. . . . A student from 1971 wrote saying he wants to read Ulysses again. How nice! . . . Daphne called from London. They’re having trouble finding an apartment, and the agent is very snobbish and disagreeable. So different from Japan. Also, the man Greg is replacing at Goldman’s is still there and is convinced that Greg undermined him, so the office is very tense. Too bad. But that, too, will pass.

January 18, 1995

English Department meeting to vote on the three candidates. I favored #s 1, 3, 2 in that order, and fervently hoped that #2 could be eliminated. The usual rhetoric and division. But #3 was clearly favored and #2 clearly not, by student reps as well as profs. Then #1 was narrowly voted the back-up, with 10 yeas, 5 nays, and 5 abstentions. Matt Rowlinson suggested that such a vote is invalid. Bill Cook, the chair, ruled him out of order, correctly. My hope now is that #3 will turn us down and we’ll get #1. Afterwards, several colleagues came up to me to say they appreciated my contribution, which was to stress (a) that personality is a factor as well as what appears in a candidate’s dissertation, and (b) that potential for future growth is more important than particular strengths or weaknesses at this moment.

Sunday, January 22, 1995

I ministered again in Meeting, this time to suggest that perhaps vicissitudes ought to be considered normal rather than abnormal, in which case St. Paul is wrong to list faith, hope, and love as the chief virtues. The chief virtue is gratitude, for every moment of “abnormality” we are granted.

Dinner with Allan and Claire Munck. Nice that they are entertaining again, after the death of their son, Alex. Other guests were Dr. Hugh Bower and wife, the ones from whom we “stole” Rosemary Chedburn twenty-odd years ago. He is working in the VA Hospital now. He spoke movingly of the post-traumatic stress syndrome cases he has from the Vietnam War and held that the British managed things better in Malaysia, another unjust war.

Tuesday, January 24, 1995

Conference call for 1¾ hours with the Pendle Hill evaluation committee. Basically, the draft I sent is going to be OK. Members made some very good amendments, however, which I’ll incorporate. Also, Bob Gray did a summary that we’ll all look at and comment upon. Then we’ll have another conference call on February 12, and that should conclude the process.

I’m lecturing on Dubliners and the Portrait this week, and begin Ulysses next Monday. Will this be the last time, ever?

Princeton University Press wrote. There’s a new editor for humanities. Where are my Kazantzakis letters? The contract promised delivery in 1990. I convinced the new editor to extend the contract until June 1997. Will I make it?

Wednesday, January 25, 1995

Music with Dick and Allan. We’re trying to practice the Martinu, starting with the third movement. It went better. . . . Last week Leander’s composition for trombone, trumpet, and piano was performed at Peabody, and he got many nice comments, followed by requests for additional performances, additional pieces, etc. Even a publisher approached him. He asked me about home-publishing and I queried Christian Wolff, who advised against it, saying that it works only when one is already famous.

Daphne telephoned from London. She already has a job—freelancing—to develop a book introducing oriental religions, including Japanese Shinto and Buddhism. She’s delighted about the link with Japan.

Friday, January 27, 1995

Traveled last night on the Montrealer, which is due for discontinuance on April 1st. What a shame! Some forces are trying to save it, perhaps even by privatization, but so far the chances seem very slight. Its discontinuance will change my lifestyle considerably.

Talked the other day with both Alan Hunt and Don Kramer (his replacement as general counsel for the Kendal Corporation) regarding my dismay at Debbie Cooper’s brief for our appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court regarding our charitable status. Kramer on the telephone argued the case much better than she did. But Jean insists on supporting her.

Good four-hand piano with Dan: Arensky, Schubert’s “Fantaisie,” and “our repertoire”: Schubert, Bizet, Persichetti. Also a Mozart sonata. . . . Long lunch with Doug Gwyn about his fine book (I’m almost finished) and his future. . . . At the Executive Committee I gave “dribbles” of the evaluation report, where appropriate, and was helped by certain reactions. I also objected strenuously to the proposed policy on sexual harassment, getting Friends (after a while) to add that the accused “harasser” should also be offered protection. And they want me to write a preamble placing the whole issue in a broader context—e.g., the seven deadly sins (of which lust is the least). . . . Rebecca asked me to vet the blue-lines for my Boulding introduction. I found that the previous mistakes were left uncorrected. What a nuisance! . . . Congenial ice-cream party at Dan’s afterwards. Ken Carroll is having a glaucoma operation next week. . . . More piano afterwards.

Saturday, January 28, 1995

I ministered in Meeting, saying that St. Paul, when listing faith, hope, and love, left out probably the most important spiritual virtue. I then described our recent presence in Osaka and in the cold of Kyoto, and on the Shinkansen whose tracks were ripped apart by the earthquake, and spoke of the cold we experienced and how we knew we would return to the warm ryokan and the soup and noodles and the future with the electric mattress cover. And how miserable the people in Kobe must have been by contrast, in the cold day and night, not to mention their possessions destroyed and loved ones killed. Our fate, I said, hangs by a thread, and it’s a miracle, each day of normalcy and warmth and comfort, that the thread has not been cut, just as it was abruptly cut for the people in Kobe. So, rewriting St. Paul’s passage we should say that the great spiritual virtues are faith, hope, love, and gratitude, and the greatest of these is gratitude.

Three hours in 30th Street Station with my computer, revising the Pendle Hill resident program review.

Sunday, January 29, 1995

I was the rapporteur at a called meeting for the State of Society. In worship, the children stayed with us for 45 minutes, beautifully, and one six year old ministered, saying “We’re human, which means that we’re imperfect.” Lunch after with the Nodas, who leave for Germany tomorrow, Sydney Jarvis, Mary Soderberg, and Audrey. Watched the new version of Godot, act 1, so moving: the tenderness of Gogo and Didi vs. Pozzo’s tyranny over Lucky. Sheila Harvey gave me an article on Godot written by Larry. She’s in love with a man 92 years old. . . . Audrey told us that Beasy Brownell is badmouthing Quakers all over Kendal. Alas, alack. . . . Dinner party at home with Robert and Penny Binswanger, Steve Scher, Ulli Rainer, Dick and Karen Sheldon.

Tuesday, January 31, 1995

Our little group met on the property tax question at Kendal. Very difficult to know what to do, since the appraiser, Don Monroe, uses figures that seem to have no basis in fact. . . . At night, dressed in my purple kimono, I spoke to the Japan Society about my trip, emphasizing Hiroshima.

Tuesday, February 7, 1995

Nice lunch with Ned Perrin, who is already seeing another woman. Supper out with the Lincolns, Armstrongs, and Sheila Harvey with her new 92-year-old boyfriend. She’s in love, like an adolescent. Also Lee Huntington.

Wednesday, February 8, 1995

Jean Brophy’s support group: John Hennessey, Jim Armstrong, Margery Walker, and myself. We were really very supportive. But John Diffey sees the group more as supervisory and we need to work this out.

Thursday, February 9, 1995

To Dan Connelly to update our wills and the P.A. Bien trust. Trying to put our house in order. . . . Just heard that Ole Smith died, almost instantaneously. Felt a pain, went to the hospital, was discovered to have cancer everywhere, and died less than a week later. . . . And Leander went suddenly deaf in the left ear two days ago.

Friday, February 10, 1995

1½ hour conference call at Kendal re: whether or not to appeal the adverse tax decision. Neil Castaldo, whom we asked for a second opinion, says Yes, do appeal, but be prepared to lose. We meet again next week.

Dear Alec,

Leander has asked me to convey to you some rather bad news, alas. Last week, out of the blue, he became deaf in the left ear. And worse, he has in that ear a very annoying ringing. He has been to several specialists, and both agree that the cause was a virus that he reacted to in a traumatic way. The hearing loss is irreversible, and the ringing, too, will not disappear, although with luck it will diminish, and he will find ways to get used to it (one hopes). The hearing is almost totally gone: he can distinguish only the very lowest frequencies. Unfortunately, the ringing is exacerbated by other sounds, for example by the piano, which makes practicing very painful. He will be going shortly to a sort of rehabilitation center that may teach him some tricks to minimize the distress. Under the circumstances he seems to be bearing up rather well. Deanna has been very supportive, of course, as have we and also his colleagues at the Levine School of Music, and lots of friends. So that helps a bit.

Saturday, February 11, 1995

To Cambridge with Sheila Harvey, who told us all about her love affair with the 92-year-old Dr. Tad. . . . Poor Kate Harvey is still a hopeless schizophrenic who refuses treatment. She has just changed her name legally and is no longer Kate Harvey. Sheila also remembered various meetings with Samuel Beckett and told about his arrangement with Suzanne, who first met him when he was lying in a pool of blood after being stabbed on a Paris street. She needed a “failed man,” Sheila said, and Beckett needed a mother.” . . . Lunch with Jim and Sheila Freeman. He’s on sabbatical in Cambridge, doing well after his cancer, hair growing back, reading lots, writing a new book, trying to market a revised and finished one on liberal education. He said I was too young to retire, that I look 50 years old. Μακάρι!

The A.R.T. Waiting for Godot was very intense, perhaps too much so. Here are my afterthoughts, compressed, to the Campions and Sheila, who were with us:

Dear Sheila, Nardi, and Tom,

Having slept on Waiting for Godot and thought about it a little more, I feel that Jeremy Geidt’s Vladimir wasn’t sufficiently tender and Alvin Epstein’s Estragon was too anguished. The Burgess Meredith-Zero Mostel version is quite different in both respects. So is the version Sheila and we viewed last week. I think the play works better if the anguish is centered in Pozzo in Act 2 after he goes blind. The tenderness is necessary to offset Pozzo’s lack of same. All in all, Vladimir and Estragon are meant, I think, to be reconciled to their “existence,” although obviously at times they despair. Yesterday’s performance showed more of the despair and less of the reconciliation. Missing as well was the music hall aspect: Estragon really should be a fat man who is rather stupid and childish, always sleepy, always hungry. Alvin Epstein was too taut. The two ought to do some music hall routines, as they did deliciously in the video we saw last week, but not at the A.R.T. On the other hand, the A.R.T. production, precisely because it was so anguished and relatively untender, perhaps gained in intensity. It was draining. So what are we to conclude? Perhaps that, just as Gogo and Didi will be repeating this same day over and over, with slight differences such as the leaves on the tree, so we, too, are meant to repeat our experience of Waiting for Godot over and over, with differences in interpretation each time. Thus the next “event’ should be a viewing of the Burgess Meredith-Zero Mostel version (which has Alvin Epstein playing Lucky).

At business meeting today, we finished State of Society, we hope. Craig Putnam and Judith Pettingell caused trouble, as always. It’s always the same people, predictably. . . . Then, at 2:00 p.m., I had another conference call with the Pendle Hill Resident Program Review Committee. What a nice crew! The best! We finished! Now I just need to print out the report, photocopy it, and send it to Mary Wood. What a job! None of us, if ever asked again, will ever accept.

Sunday, February 19, 1995

New York City

To NYC last night. Met with John Rassias and Dimitri Gondicas to see if we really want to try to revise Demotic Greek 1 and how. The answer seems to be Yes. Dimitri wants me in residence at Princeton, which would be nice.

Peeked into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on my way to the hotel to meet John. It was packed, standing room only, and the cardinal was preaching—in a New York accent. But alas I couldn’t stay long enough to get even the gist of it. . . . Gave a subway token to a beggar who then grew enthusiastic about my herringbone tweed overcoat and seemed very knowledgeable about such things, poor man. . . . Rediscovered China Peace, now on West 46th Street, much smaller, less attractive in décor, but the food was delicious and the place was full of Chinese. They’ve kept the old beat-up menu covers from the old premises. . . . Sad conversation with my favorite porter on AMTRAK, the one who always calls me Mr. Ben. He’ll lose his job next April 1 unless some miracle gives the Montrealer a reprieve. When we realized that we might not see each other again I wished him well and he said “God bless you.”

Monday, February 20, 1995

Lectured on Finnegans Wake and “Joycemusic” today. The last time . . .? Start Beckett on Wednesday.

Friday, February 24, 1995

Dinner with Ned Perrin and a new girlfriend, Jane: younger, pretty, smart, vivacious, a librarian in Randolph, Vermont. We wish him luck . . . again!

Sunday, February 26, 1995

Mary Wood is enthusiastic about the Pendle Hill evaluation, but I’ve not heard from Dan and am worried.

Turned the radio on and heard César Franck’s Variations Symphonique, which I recognized immediately. One of my favorites when I was a boy. How I used to try to play it on the piano! It still strikes me as particularly joyous.

Am checking galleys for JMGS 13 (1). Wrote a short memorial for Ole Smith, placed just before his article on rebetika music, as follows: “Neohellenists will be saddened by the tragic death of Ole Smith from cancer on 6 February 1995, at the age of 52. Trained in Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek, specializing in the Greek Communist Party, he especially loved Greek popular music, as we see in this article. Undoubtedly he is being sung to his rest in heaven not just by flights of angels but also by his favorite rebetika bands!”

Dinner at Campions with Treat and Molly Arnold. I dropped a hint to Treat that we may want him on the Kendal board, assuring him that Lloyd Lewis is no longer involved. He seemed open to this.

February 27, 1995

Annual medical exam with Dr. Gerber. Everything is fine except that I now have a bilateral hernia. Hemorrhoids getting worse, also prostate, but still nothing to do. He told me that even moderate use of alcohol seems to accelerate loss of short-term memory. Can I go forward with the Redmont pamphlet? . . . Galleys of JMGS 13 (1) sent: two days early. What a relief!

March 1, 1995

We’re going to a Mr. Scheier, financial consultant, to try to simplify, now that retirement is approaching. And tomorrow I speak with Social Security about my Medicare card, which I’ll get in June after turning 65. Something to look forward to.

March 3, 1995

By plane to Pendle Hill. I was saddened at first because no one I encountered even referred to the Evaluation we submitted, but then Chris Ravndal came up with a big smile and said, “It’s great”! And Mary Wood has been very supportive. At Executive Committee each member read a prepared statement reacting to it. Only Vince Buscemi was carping. . . . Four-hand piano with Dan afterwards, until 12:20 a.m.: Arensky, and all our previous repertoire.

March 4, 1995

Pendle Hill

Long breakfast with Doug Gwyn, right through Meeting. He hopes to get the job of Quaker tutor at Woodbrooke. Flew home, needing to urinate desperately for 1½ hours during the flight on a plane with no toilet. Misery. And “my” Montrealer will stop running on April 1.

Sunday, March 5, 1995

Ministry and Counsel. State of Society again, but only minimal changes this time. I ministered on Douglas Steere and Merton. One of the best Meetings we’ve had. No “personal” messages, thankfully, except Chris Dye at the end who spoke of inner emptiness but in a way that related to all of us and also to the general sense of the worship.

Tuesday, March 7, 1995

Eye doctor. New bifocals. He says I have pressure. Must return. . . . Supper at Kendal followed by “Kendal Players” directed by Lou Flaccus doing “A Potpourri of Robert Frost.” I “acted” Warren in “The Death of the Hired Man,” with Mary Keeley as my wife. Not a great poem, really, but I liked the part where Warren describes the hired man’s (Silvis’s) ability to load hay on the rick in such a way that when unloading it he was never trying to lift himself along with the hay, unlike me at the farm. . . . Naomi Hartov has resigned, chiefly because she can’t work with Jean. This may be the last straw.

Wednesday, March 8, 1995

Lunch with Jim Armstrong and John Hennessey regarding Jean. Jim thinks she’ll have to go. John cautions: don’t make Naomi’s resignation seem the cause. We planned strategy for next Tuesday. Then I went to my last class in English literature at Dartmouth: the final panel discussion in English 57. I’m glad that students had the ultimate word. I didn’t want to make any sort of “occasion” out of this. Only, at the end, Jay Bruce, one of the panelists, said publicly, “This will be the last time you teach Ulysses, won’t it?” I nodded, and the class applauded. What really pleases me is the quality of their diaries, which I’m reading now, and their final papers, despite the shock of Beckett.

Thursday, March 9, 1995

War/Peace Steering Committee. Several new members add energy. But Diana Taylor suddenly can’t teach the course. (She’s been asked to chair Comparative Literature.) So we discussed a possible alternative and scheduled another meeting. What a mess! One needs to be exceedingly patient.

Saturday, March 11, 1995

Lunch with Kate Cohen, who finished her book on Jews in Italy during the war and now can’t find a publisher. I said I’d ask Hilda Grunblatt how she published Jacques’ holocaust translations. . . . AMTRAK at 10:30 p.m. to Washington, my last round trip on the Montrealer. Our porter, Tommie, will be transferred to Chicago and seems pleased. I asked the café staff what will happen, and they said that five out of twenty will be retained. The rest lose their jobs. The woman at the White River Junction station will transfer to day service on April 1st when the day train starts. She is furious at this decision, saying all the train people opposed it. She predicts that the day train will be so sparsely used that it will be discontinued, and then we’ll have nothing.

Sunday, March 12, 1995

Washington

Met Leander, Deanna, Chrysanthi at Silver Spring Metro and we went to a lovely restaurant for brunch. Leander is in good spirits considering. His second visit to the tinnitus institute was encouraging. The two doctors spent three entire hours with him. They want him to try a device for the tinnitus that they say has a 90% success rate. It trains the mind to “live with” the ringing. The process takes about 18 months, during the first 6 or 8 of which there is no change. But if change does occur, then it will remain: the device need not be continued after a year and a half. . . . Leander will give up his Bethlehem students, for the commute is now too difficult. But he is doing fine in Washington so far as teaching is concerned. So, all in all, things could be worse. . . . The ladies went shopping for clothes, and we went to get garden supplies for his lawn and for the farm: sprayer, insecticide, tomato trellises, etc. How nice! Then out to a sushi place for supper, after which Leander played for us the contemporary composition by a Bethlehem composer that he will be premiering soon. Very difficult and disjointed. He says he hears the piano out of tune now, even thought it’s perfectly in tune. That’s another adjustment he’ll need to make, over time.

Monday, March 13, 1995

Washington

Reading English 57 papers. I seem always to get more done when traveling than when at home. AMTRAK back home. Really the last time on the Montrealer.

Tuesday, March 14, 1995

Hanover

Kendal Board. I’ve got the committee structure going again. Lee Huntington reported. Treat Arnold will be joining the Board. Afterwards, Jean’s support group met with her and then in executive session. John Diffey, Margery Walker, Jim Armstrong, John Hennessey, and myself. We decided that Jean has to go. Diffey will urge her to seek another job, with December as the deadline for employment here. Nothing will be said to anyone, at least not yet. This is painful for me, since I have worked so closely with her for six years. But she lacks the “people skills” and seems incapable of transforming her personality. With luck she’ll benefit from the coaching she has received and will do better somewhere else, starting fresh, without all the baggage of resentment she cannot get rid of here.

Wednesday, March 15, 1995

Boston

To Boston College. I conducted a class on Zorba for Dia. Then went on the “T” with Chrysanthi to Massachusetts Avenue and Commonwealth to find the Harvard Club. Ate in an excellent half-oriental restaurant. We’re housed in the Haley House, BC’s mansion used for guests. I’m still reading term papers for English 57.

Thursday, March 16, 1995

Telephone interview by the BBC Greek Service, 20 minutes, all in Greek, but I managed. Subjects; reception of Kazantzakis, Modern Greek studies in USA. She wants to interview me more after I arrive in the UK. I lectured on Kazantzakis’s religious vision. Many priests in the audience, but they didn’t seem to be scandalized. Afterwards, the dean of Hellenic College, a priest, came up and said that the Church is quite open to process theology. He was familiar with Hicks’ book, etc. . . . Dinner afterwards, with Meg and others. She told me that Elizabeth Jeffries has been chosen to be the professor at Oxford, out of the blue. Felitsa came, too, and instructed all the classicists on CD-roms, etc.

Friday, March 17, 1995

Boston

Met with Peter Allen and Eva Konstantellou regarding JMGS. Peter reported Executive Committee criticism: too many linguistic articles, too specialized, unreadable; strange policy of dual reviews for certain books, not others. We’ll try to adjust. Peter is very eager to help encouraging authors to submit, vetting MSS, etc. He might be the next logical editor . . . Picked up Chrysanthi and Mother at Symphony Hall, where they heard Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, the “Leningrad,” written during the siege. Stirring, they reported. Off to Cambridge Friends Center, then immediately to the Center for Environmental Studies to hear Michael Macrakis on Greek type. He says the Greeks are their own worst enemies: they want to Latinize the Greek fonts. However, the fact that Didot is used in JMGS is a pleasing development. Maria Herrey was sitting in back of me. Nice to see her again. Next to me was the sister of Αγλαΐα Κάσδαγλη, the “Maria” in our videos done in Birmingham, also Takis Metaxas. . . . Then supper in Porter Square. Then off to Brookline to Filia Macedon’s party in her lovely condo on Beacon Street. Mostly computer scientists, but also a retired provost of SUNY Buffalo, and the Greek vice-consul. Filia surrounds herself with friends, including an Indian optometrist met on an airplane.

Saturday, March 18, 1995

Cambridge

Long talk with Hugh Barbour, who is a bit strange, I must say. Finished grading final exams, working in the Quaker Center. Scores ran from 29 to 95. Then lunch with Tom and Nardi Campion and to A.R.T. with them, Mother, and Chrysanthi to see a stirring performance of Henry V, with imaginative treatment of the French on horseback as a sort of ballet, and a hilarious interlude with the dead Falstaff in his coffin and his belly protruding so much that Mistress Quickly cannot get the lid to close.

Monday, March 20, 1995

“Stewardship” Committee with Barb Parsons. We will suggest a goal of raising $1,000,000 between now and the year 2000. Saw Jean in the committee but no chance to talk to her intimately about our message, in effect, that she’s going to be fired. . . . Met again with Henry Scheier regarding estate planning. . . . Margery and Alan Walker for supper, to discuss Kendal’s transition with Margery. I’ll be away for April, May, and June meetings, back—Θεού θέλοντος—for the July meeting. Debbie Cooper’s argumentation to the Supreme Court of New Hampshire is rather good, although exaggerated at several points.

Tuesday, March 21, 1995

Met again with Dan Connolly re: updating of wills and trusts, and planning to minimize estate taxes. Both he and Scheier are asking us to divest ourselves of the farm, and to rent our cabin in the future from the children.

March 23, 1995

Lunch with Treat Arnold, who has agreed to join the Kendal trustees, and with Patricia Higgins, who is considering it. I told them the whole history. At length!

March 24, 1995

Finance Committee at Kendal to discuss strategy with the Town. Jim Armstrong was finally told outright by Cliff Vermilya that the Town won’t negotiate further because we are appealing to the Supreme Court. The Selectmen consider that we have broken our promise to them to pay taxes.

March 29, 1995

Dear Chris,

Thanks for lending me Harold Bloom’s jeremiad The Western Canon. I read the preface, the “Elegy for the Canon,” “Joyce’s Agon with Shakespeare,” “Beckett . . . Joyce . . . Proust . . . Shakespeare,” and the “Elegiac Conclusion.” I wish I’d had time to read the chapter on Proust, too, and what he has to say about Virginia Woolf. But it doesn’t take much to give one a sense of his main points: that aesthetic criticism is in the doghouse owing to various types of criticism that attempt to link literature with something non-literary, whether that be feminism, Christianity, chaos-theory, queer theory, or whatever. Fine. It’s good to hear a grumpy, conservative voice like this, a voice quite obviously generated from an angry, even paranoiac soul, crying out in the academic wilderness against all the usurpers. But Bloom’s actual discourse on literature—aside from the choice of authors he has included (and therefore, by implication, the choice of authors he has excluded)—does not, in my opinion, further the cause of aesthetic criticism very fruitfully. Aside from anger, the discourse seems governed chiefly by Bloom’s old concern: the anxiety of influence. Thus he spends almost all his time in the Joyce section talking about Joyce’s competition with Shakespeare and giving us a very meager picture of Joyce’s achievement. Sometimes, I admit, he is very provocative, as when he says that the big three of “chaotic” American literature—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner—all derive from Conrad, but Conrad mixed with Henry James in one case, with Melville in another, etc. That is useful. Also, he’s right on when he sees Beckett as deriving from Joyce plus Proust, and then having to find a way to overcome the influence of both. Actually, the chapter on Beckett is quite good (certainly better than the one on Joyce). I was happy to see his emphasis on Murphy, if nothing else. But the real trouble with Bloom is that he is so incorrigibly elitist. He envisages English departments in the future (i.e., the kind of department he would like to belong to) dwindling to the size of Classics departments of the present, and ministering to the select few, whereas the multitudes get their literature through his despised cultural studies, Afro-American studies, and the like. What Bloom entirely suppresses is the fact that many of the current approaches to literature were motivated by an attempt to join the arts once again to politics, religion, morality—i.e., with life in its broadness. Ironically, some of these approaches (e.g., deconstruction) have themselves become elitist, but that should not invalidate the entire phenomenon. All in all, therefore, Bloom’s angry book makes me somewhat angry, too, even though I, like him, defend the canon, as you well know, and teach it unashamedly. Apart from all I’ve said above, I am angered as well by his meandering style and his refusal to document sources. All this derives from a very repugnant arrogance. He sets himself up as an oracle (oracles are allowed to meander) and expects us to bow down like acolytes and be overawed. I am not.

March 30, 1995

Supper at Kendal with Yiayia and Barbara Rice, then four-hand piano with Barbara: my entire repertoire. What a pleasure to play with an expert sight-reader and sensitive musician! . . . In the office, I’ve been spending full time on the journal, catching up on things that ought to have been done long ago, alas. . . . And we’re updating our wills, with new by-pass trusts drawn up expertly by Dan Connelly.

Monday, April 3, 1995

Good meeting with John Rassias planning the revision of Demotic Greek 1. Good to be working with him again. As always, he’s full of ideas.

Tuesday, April 4, 1995

War/Peace Steering Committee again. Lynda Boose has redesigned the course, co-teaching with Alexis Jetter, a journalist involved in Vietnam. Members want a sort of faculty symposium, and I convinced David Montgomery to coordinate the seminar to try to make this happen. He plans to bring socialists from New York. . . . Raced to Lebanon to Dan Connolly’s office to sign the new wills and trusts. All that’s left are the durable powers of attorney for health care. We’ll sign those on Thursday. Facing our mortality in this way is very good.

Wednesday, April 5, 1995

Good meeting with Bruce Pipes and Karen Wetterhahn in the Provost’s office regarding the future of University Seminars after I retire. To my pleasure, Bruce says that he’ll take over, working out of the Provost’s office, ideally with a committee including one person from each of the Medical, Thayer, & Tuck schools, and Arts & Sciences. This sounds good. Next year we can collaborate, and my final year he can go alone. Very encouraging. I wish I were doing as well in War/Peace Studies regarding future leadership.

Thursday, April 6, 1995

Helene Rassias to supper with her fiancé, Bill Miles. How nice to see her so happy. I’m so sorry that we’ll miss the wedding, but Leander, Deanna, and Yiayia will be there to represent us.

Friday, April 7, 1995

Breakfast with Jean Brophy. She told me that she’s actively looking for a job, indeed does not want to stay any longer at Kendal. I said that was best, under the circumstances. If she finds something before December, everything will be fine. She’ll announce this “new opportunity” and no one will know that she was fired. If not . . .? She says she’ll refuse to resign; she needs the money. We’ll monitor this and see what happens. The important thing is to keep mum. Thus she objected to our planned executive session at the April meeting of the Board; this would be a clear signal of trouble. I’ll consult with John Hennessey about this and then call John Diffey.

Lunch with Jack Shepherd, visiting from England. We both lament the persecution of Marty Sherwin and fear for the future of the Dickey Center under Jim Wright as Dean. Too bad. And Jim Breeden has just been fired, too, although in this case maybe there is cause. Jack and Kathy are flourishing in England, although Jack may not choose to stay even if his program is renewed.

Saturday, April 8, 1995

To Meriden for the memorial service for Harlan Logan. Mayme sang a chorale very nicely (considering how badly she sounded last Wednesday when I accompanied her). Governor Peterson gave a lengthy eulogy. Kesaya Noda was charming as she related how frightened she had been, as a child, of this “big man.” Dick Eberhart’s daughter told how Harlan would play basketball with her daughter even in the advanced stage of his Alzheimer’s. I hadn’t realized that he had been a Rhodes Scholar among all the other accomplishments in business, athletics, journalism, and, finally, politics. I sat next to Barbara Barnet, who remembers Alec and who has been close to Don Blackmer recently, but is counseling him not to enter Kendal.

Supper at Kendal as guests of Barbara and John Gilbert, to say bon voyage to us. Then to hear Bev Web play Mozart’s Sonata in A minor, Schumann’s Papillons, and Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, opus 42. Not a program I particularly liked, yet the phenomenon of Bev playing a full recital almost every week continues to be stirring, almost miraculous. One sits there in amazement at all this beauty.

Monday, April 10, 1995

Only four days before departure. So much to do. To Fleet Bank for advice on handling my retirement funds (for a fee). Haircut. Income tax forms from Frank Currier. UN lunch at the Inn with a good speaker from South Africa. Sat next to a Kendal resident who defended the non-refundable entry fee as insuring a greater, non-revocable commitment to Kendal as a community. Last meeting with my student Chris Clay, who’ll be doing a Comp. Lit. honors thesis next year on Joyce and Japanese modernism. Departing, he embraced me. Strange, sweet boy.

Tuesday, April 11, 1995

Rich Brown at Kiewit is trying to help me get an e-mail connection in England. Very complicated. Today, people met to decide finally whether the Ireland trip will go or not; the enrollment has been disappointing. Yes, it will go. That means I have to write a lecture on gardens and literature. . . . Dickey lunch with Jack Shepherd explaining what he does. . . . I’m collecting texts for lectures to be given in England and Sweden. . . . Supper at the Nodas with Treat and Molly, Sydney, Roger and Mary—the “gang.” Sushi. Good cheer. But I forgot to wear my kimono.

Thursday, April 13, 1995

Frantic last-minute activity to prepare Kazantzakis letters to take along for translating, and to photocopy them. I’ve taken 1940–1949. How many will I actually do? Leander telephoned from the Outer Banks. They delivered Alec to the airport yesterday to return to Jakarta. He still sees Eyi. He says that only Indonesian women understand him. He doesn’t date Europeans or Americans. He’s gone native. And after Jakarta he’s thinking of Kuala Lumpur. . . . Leander’s news is good. He’ll be playing a concert with Ignat Solzhenitsyn in October in Washington: the complete four-hand piano music of Beethoven. What a good opportunity! . . . Just before departure, word from Darren Middleton that Mercer University Press has given us a contract. Darren wants the book ready by September. I suppose that I can work on it at the farm in July and August. One out of the way. Three to go.

Friday, April 14, 1995

To England

Mini-coach to Logan. British Air to Heathrow.

Saturday, April 15, 1995

London

Met at Heathrow by Alex, with private car, all arranged through Goldman Sachs. To Roland Gardens, in South Kensington, near the Science Museum. Very nice, large living room, but small kitchen, two smallish bedrooms, one used as Daphne’s study, one with a convertible couch. We’re occupying Daphne and Greg’s bedroom. Lovely welcome. Then off to the Barbican for a matinee of Twelfth Night. Pure joy: Malvolio (Desmond Barrit) especially good, but also Feste, the jester. Emma Fielding fetching as Viola. . . . It seems strange to be with Daphne and Greg in this setting so soon after being with them in Tokyo. . . . I began vetting Meg Alexiou’s new book on Language, Myth, and Metaphor, for Cornell University Press. . . . Dinner in an Italian restaurant.

Sunday, April 16, 1995

London

To Westminster Meeting. Met a New Zealander who is about to do the term at Woodbrooke. Graduate of Dartmouth (here). Career in NZ navy, then teacher of mathematics. Says he’s interested in my Paradise Lost course. . . . In the afternoon, walked with Daphne, Greg, and Chrysanthi to Kensington Gardens via Queensway. Flowers everywhere, resplendent. Roller-skaters, kite-flyers doing all kinds of tricks (I think of the end of Beckett’s Murphy). Round Pond, the Serpentine. Then home for a resplendent Easter dinner of roast lamb. Daphne and Greg are taking a wine-tasting course, and we benefited by drinking some excellent French vintages. They taught me how to sniff the bouquet properly, to swirl the wine in the glass, to taste and inhale through the mouth with the wine on the palate. Rituals.

Monday, April 17, 1995

London

Working on Meg’s book. Walked with Daphne and Chrysanthi to King’s Road, to Marks and Spencer, where they used to live. Bought grape leaves, taramosalata, tzatziki. Lunch with Greg alone. Told him about by-pass trusts, powers of attorney, living wills; he doesn’t even have a will. Promises to see about drawing up one. . . . Off to Chelsea Cinema in King’s Road to see Alan Bennett’s imaginative “The Madness of King George,” beautifully acted. Very poignant, especially when the king reads King Lear aloud and senses the correspondence (ungrateful child, madness). . . . More excellent French wine for dinner.

Tuesday, April 18, 1995

London

I forgot that on Sunday we went to the Serpentine Gallery, just because we were passing it. The “exhibit” was (1) heaps of old clothing that one was invited to take, the point being that most museums invite you not to take; (2) obscene photos of middle-aged men, naked, frontal, proving I suppose how real we are as opposed to the idealization in “other” art; (3) a video of chimpanzees copulating; (4) miscellaneous snapshots and postcards adding up to nothing; (5) swings and stilts that one could play with, proving that museums can be participatory. Such garbage, “the decline of an age,” as Kazantzakis used to say.

Today, after working all day on Meg’s book, except for a trip on Old Brompton Road to buy croissants, I met Chrysanthi, Greg, and Daphne at Leicester Square, dined in style at the lovely (and very inexpensive) Café Flo in St. Martin’s Lane, next to Westminster Meeting: wine, appetizer, steak, veal, sole, dessert, garlic bread, salad, all for £51.00 including tip. Then to see Maggie Smith in Edward Albee’s new play Three Tall Women, a sad exploration first of age and then of aging. In Act 1, Maggie Smith plays a 92-year-old who is cranky, incontinent, forgetful, with osteoporosis, etc., who finally has a stroke. In Act 2 the three women actresses play the same person at age 26, 52, and maybe 80, and how much the 26 year old must learn about her future. The 52 year old says that she’s at the pinnacle of life because she can look both ways, seeing the rise that took place and the decline that will take place. The 80 year old says that her age is the best because she can hope for an end—oblivion. Maggie Smith was spectacular in Act 3 as the 92-year-old, but Act 2 was more interesting. The total effect was of unmitigated sadness despite the touching humor throughout.

Wednesday, April 19, 1995

To Birmingham

Finished Meg’s book in the morning. Then with Daphne to Euston. Nice to see that British Rail is still pleasant and convenient. Trains to B’ham every half hour. 30% discount for senior citizens. Tea and coffee served en route. Taxi to Woodbrooke. Then chaos. They put us in a third-floor room (#42, former servant’s quarters) and we carried up all the luggage. Then they said that was a mistake and we were in #68, Bridge End, over the Quiet Room. So we removed all the luggage and brought it there, only to find that it was being painted. So all the luggage went back to #42. Apologies, etc. Mouse in the room. I plugged in my Style Writer, using an old transformer, and the thing exploded. Obviously, the transformer hadn’t worked. So, no printer. Not a good beginning.

READING

In London:

Margaret Alexiou, Greek Language, Myth and Metaphor after the End of Antiquity.

At Woodbrooke:

Ilva Beretta, The World’s a Garden: Garden Poetry of the English Renaissance.

Gail Finney, The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Derek Clifford, A History of Garden Design

Peter Lawson, The Mechanics of Water

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Bible: Ruth, Jonah, Romans 12

Samuel Beckett, Murphy

The Collected Stories of William Maxwell

Alan Paton: A Biography

Martin Bernal, Black Athena (introduction)

Thursday, April 20, 1995

Woodbrooke

Breakfast, Meeting for Worship, then faculty meetings non-stop from 9:30 a.m. until suppertime. Mostly waste. But a chance to get to know the new staff somewhat. Trying to see if I can purchase another Style Writer here. Finally, I ordered one at a huge cost compared to the Kiewit store.

Friday, April 21, 1995

My printer arrived. Immediately printed the schedule for my Paradise Lost course. Pam Lunn advised me: “In your opening presentation, don’t give information. Try to enthuse the students.” I said I wanted a lectern. “Oh, that’s not our style,” she said. “You don’t want to ‘talk down’ to the students. Just sit around in a circle and be informal.” David Gray is here, to help Anne Thomas with her Swarthmore Lecture, but she, too, has a printer that won’t work. Kathy Gray has a 1½ year old child born out of wedlock. She and her “partner” have no plans to marry. “It’s advantageous to be single taxwise,” David explained.

Chrysanthi and I went by bus to Brum, riding on the top, of course—it’s now “smoke free.” Ate at Pizza Hut (!) and saw O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars at the Alexandra Theatre. Very moving. Surely one of the great anti-war plays, with exquisite parodies of political rhetoric and a real sense of the “human” dimension of political struggle. Yeats’s “Easter 1916” was printed in the program. Nice to meet there, by chance, Brenda, the Woodbrooke secretary, with her Scots husband.

During the day we moved to our new room, #68 in Bridge End. Very small, with the double bed occupying fully half of it and the toilet way down at the other end of the hall. But the view out into the garden is lovely.

Saturday, April 22, 1995

Finally mailed my review of Meg’s book. At least that is done. Played the lovely Steinway piano in the Common Room: Grieg, Bach, Schubert impromptus. Met Olga, here from St. Petersburg, where she teaches English. She plans to do my Paradise Lost course. I set my things in my “traditional” carrel in the Quaker library where I wrote several books in the past. Nice to be back.

Tuesday, April 25, 1995

I was “on duty” from 6:30 to 10:00, which meant making announcements at supper, closing the door for Epilogue, preparing the tea for afterwards, and checking the whole huge place to see that all windows were closed, doors locked, electric machines turned off, etc. They’ve had burglaries and are very “prophylactic.” . . . Am progressing with research for my lecture on gardens. Very interesting stuff.

Wednesday, April 26, 1995

My turn to “sell” my Paradise Lost course. I think I succeeded with one or two doubting or fearful souls. . . . Walked around the pond; it’s lovely. The view from our room is spectacular. . . . Rebecca Mays showed up. She’s a candidate for a teaching job here. I walked her to Bourneville to see the school, and helped identify where her daughter could take music lessons. There are seven candidates for two or possibly three places. She’ll know the results on Friday.

Thursday, April 27, 1995

To Gothenburg, Radisson Hotel

Up early. Bus to New Street. British Rail to Euston. Tube, Piccadilly Line, to Heathrow. Lunch in McDonald’s. Reading another book on gardens; the subject is now becoming more familiar to me. Met at Göteborg airport by Bo-Lennart Eklund, looking a bit fatter and older than last time. A torrent of Greek ensued. He drove us to our swank hotel on what I call the Champs Elysées of Göteborg, right next to the Art Museum and concert hall and state theater. Lovely two-room suite with two baths. An hour later, to the university to lecture on the re-emergence of Greek prose fiction. Small audience. Half the students are in Athens; another is in Paris. But afterwards there were two, at least, who asked numerous questions, including an older archeologist who doubted the “importation from the West” theory of Beaton and myself. Afterwards, to a nice pub-like Swedish restaurant with venison on the menu. I had “3 kinds of herring” as an appetizer. Delicious. Then filet mignon, not so delicious, served with a huge baked potato, which apparently is a staple here. Of course everywhere are these gorgeous Swedish girls with peaches-and-cream complexions: waitresses especially. The student next to me had studied about the Pontos and Bulgaria and was interested in Stavridakis, so I was able to tell him the whole story about the 1919 mission to the Caucasus, and then the role played by Stavridakis in Zorba. Another student thanked me profusely for Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution, which he had just finished. Life’s small pleasures! . . . CNN television in English afterwards in the hotel.

Friday, April 28, 1995

Göteborg

A sumptuous breakfast is included in the room fee: salami, croissants, paté, omelet, bacon, ham, jams, coffee in huge cups. Bo-Lennart picked us up at 10:15 and, with more torrents of Greek, we walked down the Champs Elysées to the pedestrian malls and the huge covered shopping mall, and near the harbor, where the new opera house is, and then back to Västra Hamngaten (meaning South Harbor-Street) to the University. Oh, he also showed us the projected new campus of the university, near our hotel, behind the art museum, very pleasant and open. This time I gave a seminar presentation on anxiety of influence, again with few students but some questions at the end. Is it worth coming so far and getting paid and put in a hotel for three days to lecture to so few? . . . Afterwards we were on our own. Went to the harbor to the new opera house, but it was sold out for tomorrow night. Investigated other possibilities. No concert. But got tickets for Cabaret at the Stats theater. Bo-Lennart picked us up again and we drove to his home nearby for dinner with him and Anita, who has been doing well as an author of children’s books. Their son lives nearby. A daughter works as a writer for TV. She lives with an uneducated man who opened a restaurant in Bangkok, but it failed. They have a child but Bo-Lennart and Anita aren’t very hopeful that the father will remain visible. They talked about the great economic change in Sweden. Boom in the mid-’80s, now bust with their currency having lost about 30% in value and lots of services being curtailed, but not education, Bo-Lennart says. Delicious meal, starting with reindeer meat in a salad as appetizer, then cod in a cream sauce, ice cream, cake, wine, schnapps. (I forgot that when we checked in to the hotel yesterday they immediately gave me a glass of whisky.) Taxi back to the hotel.

Saturday, April 29, 1995

Göteborg

Chrysanthi thought it silly for us to stay an entire extra day, but it turned out quite fine. Another huge breakfast made all the more pleasant by the lovely blonde waitresses. A long walk for shopping in food markets, department stores, sports shops, etc. We bought herring, two kinds, for Daphne. A woman on the street distributing a petition explained that it was an appeal to boycott shops, including food markets, that sell pornography, apparently a huge problem in Sweden where, she said, even children are used for prostitution. Freedom has its price. I left Chrysanthi to shop on her own and returned to the hotel to try to block out my lecture on gardens and literature. I’ve got a wealth of material, including a terrific TLS review all about tulips, which epitomize the imposition of art upon nature. We went out for a coffee and pastry and then at 6:00 p.m. attended Cabaret—a lively, energetic performance with expert mise en scène and a fine jazz band. It took me almost until the end to realize that Fräulein Sally was Sally Bowles or that the whole thing was an adaptation of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, with the cabaret people suddenly confronted by a Nazi denouncing Jews, communists, social democrats. Isherwood’s authorship also explained of course the production’s quite obvious homosexual suggestions. Couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue, but the music and dance were sufficient to make a pleasant experience. . . . Supper at 9:30 in Pizza Hut, filled with young people, as were all the sidewalk cafés. Göteborg is a completely rational city, with streets at right angles, parks, huge squares, the entire center walkable. A complete city offering culture, a lovely central library, theaters, a symphony orchestra, plentiful public transportation (trams), and it has only 500,000 people. No congestion anywhere. No traffic problem. No parking problem that we could see. Saturday night the avenue was quite littered with discarded paper, cigarette butts, etc. But the next morning everything was spotless, for the street and sidewalks had been wetted down and scrubbed. To all appearances, a very lovely place to live, although I sensed that Anita finds it dull.

Sunday, April 30, 1995

Göteborg–London–Birmingham

Smooth flight. Twice as long to go from Heathrow to Woodbrooke as from Sweden to England.

Tuesday, May 2, 1995

Working had on the gardens lecture. Very interesting material. I think of gardens differently now. . . . My first Paradise Lost class. Eight students. It went well. Instead of lecturing, I got them to talk. Did their conceptions of hell, and why Milton doesn’t follow them.

Wednesday, May 3, 1995

To Cambridge

To Cambridge by train. Comfortable except for all the smokers, mostly women as usual. Went directly to David Holton’s college: Selwyn. Lecture on Anxiety of Influence. Large audience, including Iacovos Tsalicoglou’s daughter, who is studying English, and my former student “Cooper” at Dartmouth, who is simply living in Cambridge to be with a girlfriend, and writing, and getting some recognition. Reception afterward. Spoke at length with a woman in the Ίδρυμα Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού here, who liked my lecture and says the foundation’s New York office can probably help with the Middleton book. She’ll be at Norwich next week. Also spoke at length, in Greek, at ease, with a man who wants to study in America. Nice supper afterwards with David and Ann, Harry David and Katerina Krikos-Davis, and Chrysanthi. Krikos-Davis very down on Meg Alexiou, still. Bryer’s wife Liz is dying of cancer.

Thursday, May 4, 1995

Cambridge

Overnight with the Holtons. Accompanied them when they went to vote in the morning. Then Chrysanthi went off alone to walk the town and I spent all morning shortening my Ζωγραφική τέχνη του Ρίτσου from one hour to half an hour. As usual, the resulting text is probably superior. Lunch with David in hall. All fellows get seven free meals per week. They sit at high table, with the understanding that one always sits in the next empty seat, alongside whosever may be there, to enhance fellowship and unity. Within earshot of David and me were a mathematician, engineer, theologian, ancient historian, political scientist. How different this is from Dartmouth, where every attempt at a faculty club has failed! What makes the difference? Is it primarily the subsidy, or a different attitude? In any case, this sort of fellowship would seem impossible at Dartmouth at the moment unless it became high priority in the administration, who set an example here by their presence. (At the Selwyn lunch, the Master was further down the table.) Then, of course, they go to a separate room for coffee, newspapers, and further conversation.

Worked on Gardens in the afternoon and then gave my seminar to David’s graduate students, entirely in Greek, both the presentation and the questions. Good practice for me. . . . Afterwards met Jack Shepherd and went with him and Chrysanthi to a pub downtown. He’s doing beautifully here, and always expresses his gratitude to me for getting him established in Dartmouth, for if that hadn’t happened this wouldn’t have been happening either. Kathy joined us later. She, too, is flourishing, doing more training in mediation. Jack expects that his grant will be renewed until 1999 but they haven’t decided yet whether they should stay. . . . They’ll be visiting us in Woodbrooke in June, to examine it as a possible place for Jack to finish some writing. . . . Back to the Holtons’ for a nightcap and more good talk until midnight.

Friday, May 5, 1995

To London

Met the Holtons’ daughter finally. She’s doing A levels in art history. Train to King’s Cross. Tube to Daphne’s. Went out for lunch nearby. Daphne is doing well on her Eastern Religions book. She asked me to look at part of the Buddhism chapter, which I found charming. I settled in her study with my computer and continued with the gardens lecture. Nice supper at home with Greg. Oh, in the afternoon we took a long walk to Hyde Park and saw the tents, etc. set up for VE day celebrations tomorrow.

Saturday, May 6, 1995

Worked more on Gardens and finished the first draft. Saw the 95-year-old Queen Mother on TV as guest of honor at the VE memorial in Hyde Park with prayers, sermons, Westminster boys choir, veterans with their medals. Very moving. But children know very little. They interviewed one class, and a boy said that Germany had won the war. . . . Off to the Barbican. Lunch outdoors by the fountains; very pleasant on this hot, sunny day. Then a lively production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, pure magic, with Desmond Barrit (Malvolio in the Twelfth Night we saw recently) as a booming Bottom, and Emma Fielding (who was Viola in Twelfth Night) as Hermia. Puck played well but didn’t look the part: too old, hairy, and masculine. I think Puck is better played, actually, by a girl, or a boyish man. But what a pleasure this was! The language is so rich; the imagination; the sensitivity. Theseus’s words about poetry near the end epitomize Shakespeare’s own view of his art. . . . A walk afterwards, a cool drink at home. Then out for spaghetti, and a good night’s sleep.

Sunday, May 7, 1995

London–Birmingham

Stopped at Friends House to experience a bit of Britain Yearly Meeting. Fine Meeting in the large meeting room, preparatory to a vigil around Tavistock Square (which we did not go on). The theme seems to be Quaker initiatives for peace and reconciliation à propos on the weekend when the fiftieth anniversary of VE day is being celebrated. Afterwards we met with various old acquaintances from Woodbrooke and Pendle Hill, and had a good talk with Ben Pink Dandelion, who has just been appointed to the Woodbrooke staff. . . . Returned to find a long letter from Dan Seeger including a copy of the eulogy he delivered at his sister’s wake, extraordinarily sensitive and eloquent.

Monday, May 8, 1995

At Epilogue, St. Francis’s lovely prayer was read. It’s perfect for Pendle Hill. I’ll send it to Dan (he’s just written at length, as I noted above).

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is sadness, joy; where there is darkness, light. Ο Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; not so much to be understood as to understand, not so much to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

Tuesday, May 9, 1995

At breakfast, Anne Thomas told me that both she and Kenneth Boulding, from Liverpool, spoke “broad.” When their intelligence was recognized and they were admitted to grammar school, the school authorities offered “elocution lessons” to rid them of their accents and teach them “upper class” English. Otherwise their careers would have been stymied. But Ken said that at Oxford in his college there were only six boys from grammar school and they were shunned by the public school crowd. It was the loneliest time of his life. He still had the wrong accent, didn’t dress quite right, hadn’t broken the “code.”

Friday, May 12, 1995

To Norwich

Train to Norwich, changing at Peterborough. In the buffet at Peterborough, I met an American colonel returned to Norwich for VE day celebrations. He had been a pilot based there, 18 years old, in the war. Seeing his buddies and feeling the warmth and gratitude of the British was overwhelming for him. He told me how heavily all of East Anglia was bombed by the Germans.

At Norwich, I was met by Lela Banaki, and by Christine Wilson from the Centre for Literary Translation. To the university. Met Amy Mims, who talked about her ongoing translation of Ritsos and about Kimon Friar. Went with Lela and her husband, Stathis, a lawyer, on a tour of Norwich center, which is charming, and for coffee. Then with Amy to see Norwich Cathedral, begun in the 11th century. Evensong in progress: three old ladies. One must imagine another age when these cathedrals were full and were the center of all activity in a community, not just religious activity. I keep imagining that this was the cathedral visited in Hartley’s The Go-Between but I may be confused (as I am more and more). Then a walk through the cathedral’s lovely precincts. . . . Back to the university, and to Lela’s apartment. Others gathering: Dimitris Tziovas and Marianne Spanaki (they’re now married), very eager about the forthcoming July 4–5 conference in my honor. Fatima Eloeva from St. Petersburg, who translated Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός and thanked me profusely for my critical books on Kazantzakis and my translation. Interesting young woman, of Iranian descent in part. We spoke at length. She says that the Russians, despite all their problems, are free, which makes up for economic chaos. Under communism, they were, as it were, in a concentration camp. Then came Alexis Sola from Barcelona, translator of Συμπόσιον into Catalan. Vivacious. Fluent of course in Greek, as is Fatima (who speaks ten languages, including perfect English). He, too, thanked me for my critical books on Kazantzakis. What a pleasure this is becoming! Then Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke together with Rooke himself, whom I had last seen decades ago. At last, maybe at 9:00 p.m., we left by taxi for a Greek restaurant downtown. This συμπόσιον lasted (for me and a few others) until 1:30 a.m. and for the rest until 4:00 a.m. Good talk with Terry Hale, the director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, a lovely energy subsidized by the European Union and the British Arts Council. Translation is booming in the UK: people are being trained, publishers are interested in bringing out translated texts. . . . Much additional conversation with Fatima, who wondered how I’ve been able to continue working on Kazantzakis so long. Embarrassing. Some day I hope to graduate. As more and more wine was consumed, Lela’s husband, Stathis, started singing raucously, joined by Sola and sometimes by Fatima. Κέφι. We were joined by two technicians with the National Theatre’s touring company’s production of Joe Orton’s play that we saw at the A.R.T. in Cambridge. Nice group. To bed at 2:00 a.m., overfed and full of κουβέντα.

Saturday, May 13, 1995

Norwich

Long breakfast with Patroclos Stavrou (who, last night, protested how he had resisted for two years Eleni’s desire to adopt him as her son). I spoke to him about the Middleton book; he says that we should be able to get $500 from Eleni without difficulty. Eleni Cubitt of the Ίδρυμα Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού says that the president, Sakellaridou, reacted favorably to the proposal. . . . The symposium started with Patroclos Stavrou’s prolonged summary of everything we already know (he also played a greeting from Eleni, now aged 92). My “Reminiscences of a Translator” went very well; Terry Hale wants to publish it. In the afternoon, Roddy Beaton gave a good paper on the Greek vs. the English Οδύσεια. He also said, in passing, that Kazantzakis studies are undergoing a renewal in Greece, stimulated in large part by my Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit. Amazing. On the other hand, the reissue of The Last Temptation, etc., by Faber does not even have my name as translator on the title page. Oh well . . . As I said in my paper, we will be “spiritually” rewarded. . . . Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke gave a brilliant paper on Kazantzakis’s Odyssey versus Friar’s, saying that Kazantzakis’s is the journey of the mind whereas Friar’s, because of the nature of English, its paucity of adjectives, etc., is the journey of the body. . . . I stated how happy I was that Friar’s contribution is being recognized and I told the audience about the Friar archive and what I discovered there. Then I spoke about Scorsese’s film and Fatima spoke about the relation between Greek and Russian in translating The Last Temptation. She wants me to come to St. Petersburg to lecture (in English or Greek) to her students. She sweetly asked to kiss me (French style, on both cheeks) as we parted. I was most appreciative of Terry’s effort to arrange such a meaningful conference. As I told him, Kazantzakis had occupied so much of our lives—all of us—and it was very satisfying to be able to reflect a little on that “service.” . . . Christine Wilson drove me to the station. She had just seen Joe Losey’s film of The Go-Between and she confirmed that this was indeed the “correct” cathedral. Also that Marion and Leo had had tea in a place still in existence and that the hall at which the film had been shot is nearby. . . . Nice reunion with Chrysanthi at Woodbrooke. I returned first, she came later, having just seen Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Birmingham Rep, with Daphne and Greg. We exchanged full accounts of our doings: she, Daphne, and Greg went to “Cadbury World” among other things and returned loaded with chocolates.

Sunday, May 14, 1995

Breakfast with Daphne and Greg. Chrysanthi says that Daphne has been depressed, alas: problems of self-worth, which is strange since, unlike many people she is employed in a way that allows her to be creative. They go off to Los Angeles and Pasadena next, for Greg’s father’s birthday. Then we’ll see them in Greece. . . . What I need to do, now, is to concentrate on the journal, for on Wednesday we leave for Glasgow.

Wednesday, May 17, 1995

To Hospitality Inn, 36 Cambridge Street, Glasgow

B’ham to Glasgow by comfortable train. Four hours. Long walk afterwards to George Square, where the statues are equally divided between poets and soldiers. One of the girls in the reception has a brogue so thick I can’t understand a word.

Thursday, May 18, 1995

Glasgow

The group arrived this morning. Perry Curtis from Brown, David Mitchell from the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, and his wife Kate. The only Dartmouth people are Bob Miller ’44 and Diane Carney, and Jean Vitalis, Billy Vitalis’s mother, and Josephine Buchanan, Billy’s grandmother. All the rest are from Brown University. In the morning we went to Glasgow Botanical Gardens, whose chief greenhouse is the so-called Kibble Palace, with orchids, ferns, etc. Taken around by the director. I liked the Spanish moss, like a woman’s long hair, and the room with all other kinds of mosses. In the afternoon, Chrysanthi and I went to the Transportation Museum: cars, busses, railroad locomotives and private cars, stage coaches, but, best of all, a huge room devoted to shipbuilding: the Clydeside Room. Models of all the ships built there, including the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth 1, which we sailed upon, and Queen Elizabeth 2 and Empress of India (sunk by torpedo). So sad that Clydeside is now largely inoperative; only two active shipyards remain, creating oil rigs for the North Sea. Then across to the Art Gallery and Museum, with its splendid Great Hall. There’s a nice Turner (“Modern Italy”) and a Corot (“Mme de . . .), and a Ribera “St. Peter Repentant,” and a gorgeous Filippino Lippi “Madonna and Child.” Also interesting was the Scottish Room with history, maps, artifacts. James Watt, whose improvement of the steam engine made the industrial revolution possible, lived here. Glasgow prospered chiefly because of trade with America, especially in Virginia tobacco. Dumbarton, just outside of Glasgow, means fortress (Dum) of the Britons. . . . At 5:30 p.m. David Mitchell lectured well on Scottish gardens, dressed in a kilt. Very proud of Scotland as a site for gardens that thrive because of huge rainfall and of climate made temperate by the Gulf Stream. Orientation dinner with all present introducing themselves.

Friday, May 19, 1995

Glasgow–Oban, the Alexandria Hotel 0631-62381

A good first day. Started with the Younger Botanical Gardens. Most spectacular is the avenue of sequoia trees planted in 1872. Gorgeous. The gardens feature rhododendrons and Douglas firs and larches. Very extensive. “Nature,” not “art.” Younger was a baron obsessed with gardening. The property is now run by the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens. Then a delicious salmon lunch at Creggans Inn on Loch Fyne, run by Lord McLane, whose son was there. Then to Crarae Gardens, with Sir Ilay Campbell, younger son of the Duke of Argyll, whose grandmother, Lady Grace Campbell, started the garden. Interestingly, he speaks with an Oxford accent, not a Scots accent. Upper class. David was rather scornful of him as an amateur, but a devoted one. And he’s “very important” on the Foresty Council, National Trust, etc. . . . Lastly, and best of all, to Arduaine Gardens, developed by the Wright Brothers and given to the National Trust in 1992. David was literally ecstatic about these, and justifiably so. On a headland jutting out, southern species are viable because of an effective windbreak of trees, which also prevents the spray from reaching them. So, suddenly, inside a forest, one steps into this paradise of color and shape. . . . On to Oban, where I lectured on “Literature and Gardens” successfully, I believe. David said the lecture was useful to him, giving a new perspective on matters about which he is totally knowledgeable. . . . Comfortable supper and coffee in the hotel.

Saturday, May 20, 1995

Isle of Mull–Oban

To the Isle of Mull by ferry. Gorgeous day: clear, warm, brilliant son. The harbor of Oban is Greek-like. We started with Duart Castle, seat of the chief of Clan Maclean. It was a ruin, but was restored in this century. A very uncomfortable home. But the logical site for the chief’s fiftieth anniversary, when Macleans came from all over. We’re wondering if Charles McLane is a Maclean. Interesting to me was the fact that Cromwell’s forces attacked here, but the Macleans had already left and the Cromwellian ships were sunk in a storm. We were lucky to see Great Britain’s highest mountain, snow-covered, on this clear day: Ben Nevis. Then to Torosay, a “baronial” castle—i.e., built by nouveau riche plutocrats. Not very interesting except for some fine bindings in the library, including a complete Conrad. But the formal gardens are nice, with statuary, even, from Padua no less, a good illustration of my lecture last night. And the formal garden is nicely balanced by a “natural” one. . . . Afterwards to a weaver who demonstrated the machine on which he makes tartan cloth. Very interesting. Finally, back to the ferry slip via a “steam railway” that turned out to be a sort of toy, yet capable of drawing 100 people in Lilliputian wagons: extremely uncomfortable and expensive. But the ferry ride back was lovely. Later, around 7:30 p.m., leaving the hotel, which faces the water, I saw a living Manet painting in front of my eyes: the exact colors of his seaside pictures of Brittany, the sea exactly the same turbulence. . . . Down the quay to a nice restaurant with people from our group. Smoked salmon and whisky. At 10:30 p.m. when we finished, it was still light outside. . . . Wedding in progress at the hotel. Whisky smell. Bride six feet tall. Scottish dancing. Kilts. Jollity.

Sunday, May 21, 1995

Oban–Edinburgh, George Hotel

Very long bus ride from Oban to Crathes Castle near Aberdeen. Again, the house isn’t very interesting, but the gardens are spectacular. The yews in topiary were planted in 1702. They are gigantic, like entire cottages or walls enclosing formal gardens. The gardens are in four parts, each emphasizing a different color. In the house, one point of interest is the inscriptions on the ceiling rafters, as in Montaigne’s tower. One struck me as quintessentially Scottish: “the slothful hand maketh poor but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.” . . . Another long bus ride to Edinburgh. Lecture by Perry Curtis in the bus, on how the kilt and tartan are both rather bogus, the kilt invented actually by an English Quaker who devised it to enable his Scottish workers (cutting trees for charcoal for the Quaker’s ironworks in England) could work with less encumbrance. . . . On the bus, I prepared my Yeats lecture for tomorrow, renewing my sense of his mastery, and vetted Patrinos’s essay for JMGS, sloppy, inconsistent, unprofessional, as usual. I’ll need to spend countless hours editing it. . . . George Hotel, very posh. . . . Supper in an Italian restaurant with a loud obnoxious German talking non-stop at the next table; very annoying. Walked the entire length of Princess Street, one of the great streets, with the castle up above like the Athenian acropolis. So much Greek revival architecture in this Georgian city. Memories of Mrs. Macpherson in 1955 when I was courting Chrysanthi, living in the YMCA. We both went to the Firth of Forth Bridge, I seem to remember. Chrysanthi remembers buying, on Princess Street, her first piece of clothing with her own money. Forty years ago!

Monday, May 22, 1995

Edinburgh

To Manderston House, near Duns, south of Edinburgh, near the English border. Duns, we were told, was the birthplace of Duns Scotus. Also, because his views were ridiculed, we have the word “dunce.” The house, built early this century in imitation of a Georgian Adam mansion, is lovely, of course, and opulent, including a silver-plated banister. We were guided by the occupant, Lady Palmer, a tall aristocrat, very “simple,” a great friend of Diana’s who had had Charles and Diana at Manderston for several weeks in an effort to keep the marriage together. For me, the interest was that Palmer is the same Palmer as Huntley and Palmer Biscuits: they were Quakers originally. Her husband is now Lord Palmer of Reading (where the biscuit factory is), but Lady Palmer didn’t seem even to know that the ancestors were Quakers. In any case, the firm is now owned by Nabisco. The gardens are lovely, with rhododendrons in bloom, a formal garden in front and an informal one in the rear. But David Mitchell finds them nothing special. Still, they are one more example of great expense and skill in creating a private retreat from evil. . . . At 4:00, went with David to his own venue, the Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh, which are magnificent. Extraordinary rock gardens covering four or five acres, each quadrant concentrating on plants from a distinct part of the world; entire section devoted to China at three or four levels of altitude; sequoias (but smaller than those at Younger because of less rainfall); rhododendrons of course, azaleas in full bloom, everything so spaciously laid out. Then to the greenhouses for wine and hors d’oeuvres and a tour, glass in hand. So much better than Longwood Gardens or even Kew Gardens because of the space allowed and the helpful labeling. Huge lilies, two meters across; orchids; huge palms; cacti; ferns. David very proud, of course, and justifiably so. . . . Dinner in the magnificent Adam Hall of the George Hotel with Ned and Phyllis Sunderland and Sydney Williams. Phyllis was married earlier to a Serb and we were able to talk about Byzantium. Ned is about to publish a book on church history.

Tuesday, May 23, 1995

To Dublin, Westbury Hotel

Up early to mail queries to Patrinos. Again, sloppy sloppy sloppy. This issue of JMGS is going to be a bit haphazard because I don’t have access to my usual databases. But I’m editing it here as best I can. Forgot to say that yesterday morning I lectured on Yeats after breakfast. A good lecture, if I must say so. But I’m not aware that the people are very much interested (some are). David said afterwards that he found the poems almost impenetrable, despite my efforts. And he has tried Ulysses repeatedly but has never gotten beyond the first two chapters. Of course! All these people need teachers! . . . Flew to Dublin. . . . Westbury Hotel is just off Grafton Street, which was very lively at 3:00 p.m. Bewley’s Café was full. We went off with the group for a tour of Trinity College, with a perpetual student named Joseph as guide. He rattled off information about architects, dates, etc., but everything punctuated with anticlimaxes, puns, and denigrations in one-liners that seemed straight out of Oscar Wilde. We were guffawing. Then a drink in the buttery, followed by dinner in Commons, with the Fellows at High Table and our group eating with the students. At 6:40 sharp the beadle locks the doors, all stand with a great scraping of chairs, and a student mounts the rostrum to say grace in Latin. At the end: repeat performance. All rise, grace in Latin, and the Fellows march out—to coffee or port.

Wednesday, May 24, 1995

Dublin & environs

A long, fine day. I lectured at 8:00 a.m. on Joyce. Then from 9:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. we were traveling. First stop: Joyce’s tower. Nude men bathing in the 40-Foot, but women are now allowed, too. Then to the lovely formal gardens at Powerscourt at Enniskerry, County Wicklow. The house burned and is a shell, alas, but the gardens are intact, a miniature Versailles, the last formal garden of such extent laid out in Europe, David told us. Only the Japanese garden seemed a little precious and wrong. There is a grotto, knots of flowers, parterres, a fake medieval tower: the works. David went on about the unbelievable expense and labor involved—150 men with wheelbarrows moving huge amounts of earth to make the various levels, flat expanses, gradations, etc. that we see today. Legend records that the garden’s designer, an alcoholic, was wheeled around each day in a wheelbarrow as he devoured a bottle of sherry and directed the workmen. . . . Then to the old Abbey of St. Kevin at Glendalough, County Wicklow. In the sixth century this was a great center with students from all over Europe. Now there isn’t much left: some eleventh- or twelfth-century buildings, one remarkable one called Kevin’s Kitchen, with a stone roof. . . . The surprise and delight for me was our next visit, to Avondale House, the home of Charles Stewart Parnell. Perry gave a long account of Parnell’s career and importance, and I reminded folks about “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” and the Christmas dinner scene in the Portrait. The house is “modest” but lovely, with lots of memorabilia: pictures of Kitty O’Shea, love letters, a sketch of Parliament at the time showing Parnell, Davitt, and others (and listing a Sir Sydney Waterlow, baronet). I was very moved by this experience, including a video they showed of Parnell’s career. The amazing thing about him is that apparently he was a very poor public speaker, also that he went totally against the interests of his own social class. Perry says he was hounded at the end by fundamentalist Protestants in Britain as much as by Catholics in Ireland over his adultery. . . . We ended this unusual day at Mount Usher, where the azaleas were in their glory. Another superb private garden built around a river. Exotic plus native species, semiformal vs. informal. A gorgeous achievement of green and color and smells and marvelous trees. . . . I also finished editing Efthimiou: sloppy sloppy.

Thursday, May 25, 1995

Dublin

To Trinity to see the Book of Kells again in the Long Library, whose books are rapidly disintegrating. Then to Dublin Castle, which I’d never seen before. Above the gate is the Statue of Justice with her scales, facing inward with her back to the Irish population (!). Interesting to discover that one of the viceroys was Earl Gray, who is immortalized in Earl Gray tea. Lunch in Bewley’s: crowded, noisy, and expensive, alas. Then I went to the General Post Office, which has plaques commemorating the rising, plus a statue of Cuchulain, which we read about in Murphy. Dublin in general is unpleasant: chocked with traffic. It’s entirely different in feel from Edinburgh. . . . Perry lectured well on Irish history, covering, as he jokingly remarked, six hundred years per minute and ending with the Easter rising: Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916.” . . . Supper with Jean Vitalis and Josephine Buchanan, then with them to the Gate Theatre in Parnell Square to see Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. Very appropriate for us, since the theatre is Georgian as is the play, and since the setting is a country house, just what we’ve been visiting. The squire and his wife are “provincial” (she’s never been to London) and much is made of their simplicity in contrast to urban sophistication. The director was Jonathan Miller—brilliantly done. Lots of good laughs throughout. Theatre full, every seat; very responsive audience. How nice to see a nation’s classic theatre filling a theatre on a Thursday night! One reason may be the price, only £13.

Friday, May 26, 1995

Dublin

Perry lectured on the political situation in Northern Ireland, giving the background, which seems to be chiefly that of economic inequality and exploitation. Then we went to Phoenix Park to the former vice regal lodge, now the home of Ireland’s presidents. Here we were very gracefully received by Mary Robinson, the president, and her husband. In her residence there is a portrait of Douglas Hyde by John Yeats, W. B.’s father, the one who is buried in Chestertown. I hadn’t realized that Douglas Hyde was a former president—also Healy, the subject of Joyce’s Et tu Healy, I believe. . . . On the way to Castletown House in Celbridge, County Kildare, we learned that the prefix Fitz- means “illegitimate son of”! Castletown was built ca. 1722 for William Conolly, a nouveau riche who became Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. It is now under repair and is without its original furniture. I found it very vulgar, a blatant statement: “Look how rich I am!” . . . On to Russborough House, bought by Alfred Beit, the nephew of a South African diamond millionaire, to house his art collection, which I found mediocre except for six Murillos depicting the entire story of the Prodigal Son. . . . Supper in a mediocre Greek restaurant with Sidney Williams. Worked on my Beckett lecture. David Mitchell gave his final lecture, on exotic and native plants of Ireland.

Saturday, May 27, 1995

Dublin

I lectured in the morning on Beckett’s Murphy, and seemed to get through to some people. Then we went to the new Irish Writers’ Museum in Parnell Square. Very nice indeed. I particularly liked John B. Yeats’s portraits of Lady Gregory, AE, and the young William Butler Yeats. There’s a fine portrait of Goldsmith, too, by Joshua Reynolds. A special exhibit showed photographs of Irish places mentioned in Beckett’s work. And the holograph of “Crazy Jane Meets the Bishop” (sic) is there, written on Coole Park letterhead. . . . Then off to Malahide Castle and gardens, occupied for eight hundred years by the Talbot family, the first one having come over with William the Conqueror in 1066. A lassie with a wonderful brogue took us round the gardens. I remember the Colletia armata Rosea, reputed to be the thorn bush used for our Lord’s crown of thorns, as the gardener put it. A lethal plant, with spines instead of leaves. The house has a medieval banqueting hall and paneled room, the other rooms being Georgian. . . . Lunch again in Bewley’s, unpleasant, full of smoke and noise. Spent the afternoon working on JMGS. Grand farewell supper at Newman House, on the far side of St. Stephen’s Green. On the way there I discovered a nice bust of Joyce on that side of the Green. Newman House used to be University College, where Joyce studied in the physics theatre, the same room in which we feasted. Gerard Manley Hopkins actually died in one of the rooms downstairs, now (not then) the ladies’ loo. Lovely dinner in the grand style: salmon hors d’oeuvres, duck, white and red wine, a marvelous sweet, champagne; speeches by Terry, David, and me plus toasts by students.

Sunday, May 28, 1995

Dublin–Birmingham

Chrysanthi greeted me with Happy Birthday and a nice new necktie. Bumpy flight to B’ham. Cards from Daphne and Leander. News that Jean Brophy has resigned and will be leaving in June. Also that Jim Armstrong has done very well in negotiations with the town over tax matters. Plus a long letter from Margery Walker bringing me up to date on everything. Reentry to Woodbrooke somewhat negative. Too much mail, too much indifference on part of students to Paradise Lost. Anne said they mostly slept through the video. But Alan Graham loved Book 6. . . . Long call from Daphne about our nephew Nikos Sphairopoulos, who spent four days with Daphne (uninvited) and turns out to be a boor, very spoiled, very nasty toward his wife. A jerk.

Wednesday, May 31, 1995

Woodbrooke

I gave my talk on Gardens and Literature, and afterwards Anne Thomas quite rightly said that I shouldn’t cite Isaiah in connection with the golden age, since he was looking forward, not backward. Golden Age is a Greek concept, not Hebrew. Quite right, except that Milton fuses the two by having overtones of Isaiah in his Golden Age paradise. Anne also warned me against Bacon, who apparently is now considered a villain by ecologists, as one who recommended raping the earth.

Thursday, June 1, 1995

I ministered in Meeting on our pond, how it liberated the water table. Similarly, the power and goodness of God are hidden and useless until we dig down into them and liberate them to be both beautiful and useful.

Eleni Cubitt telephoned to say that Philip Sherrard just died of cancer. She and Alix MacSweeney wanted me to write an obituary for The Independent, but I said No—not enough information on hand here.

Kristin Lord blitzed me (and this was sent here by the department secretary) obligingly to say that on the Quaker on-line network Gerry Yokstra-Murakami, in Osaka, quoted my “Words . . .” pamphlet at length. Amazing! One never knows.

To Stratford by coach with a Woodbrooke group to see Romeo and Juliet directed by Adrian Noble. Not bad, not good. The Friar was well played. Romeo (as Chrysanthi kept saying) was “too short.” Also too frenetic perhaps. But Mercutio was spectacular.

Friday, June 2, 1995

Telephoned John Rassias congratulations for Helene’s wedding tomorrow. Too bad we can’t be there, but Leander, Deanna, and Mother will represent us. . . . Jack and Kathy Shepherd arrived from Cambridge to spend the weekend. I took Epilogue, reading from Ken Boulding’s sonnets. Jack is in trouble because his boss, Gwen Prins, is being hounded out of the university, and justifiably. Jack says that she’s a liar, has misused funds, etc. But if Prins goes, Jack’s program may also have to go. Thus he and Kathy have no idea where they’ll be next year. The weekend here was a chance to escape all this temporarily.

Saturday, June 3, 1995

I was told that my Epilogue last night sent Clare Chamberlain fleeing from the room in tears because she has cancer, like Kenneth, and couldn’t take the reminder. And Anne Thomas, it turns out, has cancer of the spine, but not so threatening as Clare’s, apparently. I of course, was innocent, as they realized. . . . Went to “Cadbury World” with the Shepherds: a Disneyland sort of exposition of where the cocoa beans grow and how chocolate is made—complete with samples. Jack at meals enjoyed meeting our Ethiopian resident, Gobana Besaye, and it turned out that Kathy had met Zablon Malenge in Kenya already. . . . In the evening we had supper in the B’ham Rep restaurant and saw a good performance of The Importance of Being Ernest—pure froth. So the Shepherds had chocolate and nonsense all day long.

Sunday, June 4, 1995

To Bournville Meeting with the Shepherds. Bill Fraser saw me and rushed over. Thirty years! Afterwards we spoke at length; also with Nancy a bit. They’re in a retirement community for teachers in Bournville.

Monday, June 5, 1995

Piano duets with Sylvia, a retired piano teacher. Not a great sight reader, but better than the students I’ve played with so far. . . . In Bible class, Anne Thomas showed clips from four different Jesus movies, including Scorsese’s Last Temptation (the raising of Lazarus, killing of Lazarus by Paul, cleansing of the temple). Despite myself, I found these scenes quite convincing. Later, she screened the entire film. I gave an introduction and then led a discussion afterwards. The audience, all women, found the film interesting but unmoving. “Too macho,” one of them concluded.

Tuesday, June 6, 1995

Chrysanthi has been trying to arrange a meeting with our nephew, Nikos Sphairopoulos, and his wife Leanna. They are here for observation at hospitals. Nikos has behaved despicably. First with Daphne in London, now with us: showing no inclination to meet and basically saying No. We’ll keep trying. Strange. How to explain this? . . . Staff meeting about Woodbrooke’s new building, etc. Also about our complaints as Friends in Residence. Some good will come out of it. . . . PL class, Book VIII. I’m encouraging the class to do something silly for Log Night. Today they met at 6:00 a.m. to read the text together.

Long conference call with the Kendal Board, led by John Hennessey. He convinced Jim Armstrong to serve as interim administrator and we all approved, enthusiastically, choosing him over John Diffey. We’ll give him a salary of $100,000 a year, plus a company car, fax machine, cellular phone. I telephoned him afterwards in Maine. He said, “I, like you, Peter, was raised to lead a life of service.” Amen. He’s giving up his summer in Maine. Would I give up the Adirondacks? He said that Jean’s exit was just as we planned, smooth and civilized. He also reported that the Supreme Court has accepted our appeal. Neil Castaldo will now actively seek “friends of the court.” Also, it seems that Carol Blanc has gone—at last. . . . Bob Shaughnessy has declared himself a candidate for the administrative post. I’ll oppose him vigorously, and Hennessey says he will too.

Martha and Leonard Dart have given me their manuscript on Marjorie Sykes—an anthology of her writings—for an opinion on how to organize it. And Chris Lawson has given me George Smith’s essay on Quaker education to vet. Again, I spend my time fixing other people’s work (the last two weeks have been solidly spent on JMGS) instead of doing my own work.

Thursday, June 8, 1995

Duets for an hour with Sylvia. Schumann mostly. Then a session with Darts about the Sykes manuscript. Then Susanna Kelber asked me to write a Miltonic pastiche for the Log: a Woodbrooke staff meeting à la Book II. I’ll try. Then a morning catching up on old correspondence. I have piles. Then Efthimiou’s twenty faxed pages arrived with corrections and changes for her essay, and I spent the result of the afternoon entering them. Yesterday I spent hours at the university checking her bibliography. But finally got on line with the help of Graham Smith, a grungy fellow in a leather jacket, unshaven and apparently unwashed, but jovial and helpful. . . . Then to town with Chrysanthi to buy final rail tickets and go to the theater: an adaptation of Wuthering Heights at the Alexandra. They tried hard, and the script was cleverly done, but the book is so much better. I don’t think that Heathcliff can be satisfactorily played by anyone. He’s too “mythic” (in the book) and wasn’t at all on the stage.

Friday, June 9, 1995

I’m going through a large pile of unanswered letters, some going back to last December—from people like John Tallmadge, Tom Doulis, Outi Maula, Elise Boulding. . . . In the afternoon, the Friends in Residence meet with the Awards Committee of the Council. We had submitted reports earlier, and Chrysanthi, Anne, and I were all critical of our reception and the ignorance we had of what was expected of us. All this was discussed amicably, with promises of reform. I complained also that no one had asked to make use of me above and beyond my teaching of Paradise Lost. Indeed, none of the staff had even invited us to sit down and visit socially and informally. I attributed most of these problems to defective leadership on the part of John Sheldon, a born non-leader. But the real fireworks came after supper when we met with the full Council. In considering our report, no one seemed even to notice my second paragraph, where I say that I was told the students won’t buy books and I shouldn’t try to do anything very demanding at all, etc., and that they could read Paradise Lost in books borrowed from the library. This Council seemed sleepy and inert. But then Pam Lunn got up and said the paragraph was a misrepresentation of what she had told me, that Woodbrooke can’t buy books and then have them on hand if fewer students take the course, that students can’t afford books, and the like. The clerk, after an interminable time writing his minute, concluded that my paragraph was the result of a misunderstanding. I objected strenuously to this. The clerk then took another long time and oh, finally someone rose and said that perhaps the minute should reflect my view that the courses needed more rigor, but that was not the “sense of the meeting,” so the clerk wrote that my paragraph was the result of “mutual misunderstanding.” At this point I didn’t want to pursue it further, for this item had taken up the entire agenda so far, so I kept quiet. But I conclude that the clerk was incompetent, making no effort whatsoever to bridge the gap between us. And the Council, with the exception of one who spoke and a few others who told me afterwards that they agreed with me, was simply eager to avoid any trouble. A disgraceful performance. Pam, who is an authoritarian feminist, is no doubt furious. I’ll try to see Sheldon soon and see what to do next.

Saturday, June 10, 1995

Long, good talk with John Reader, a Council member whom we had known when he and Mary were Friends in Residence at Pendle Hill. He felt that what happened last night was healthy. His account of what is happening in Quaker schools in Britain, however, was frightening. They are directionless, he says, losing pupils, no longer serving a distinct purpose. Part of the problem seems what I call the “fetish of community.” As at Pendle Hill, their expectations are so impossibly high that only anguish results. . . . For supper, Dimitri and Marianna Tziovas came, and we talked steadily from 6:00 p.m. until 11:30. She is very lively, surprisingly. It was a good visit.

Sunday, June 11, 1995

Feeling rather disgusted with Quakers, I did not go to Meeting. Met with John Sheldon after lunch to say that he should mediate between Pam and me. He agreed, telephoned her, and she agreed. We’ll meet next Thursday. . . . Then to New Street to meet Nikos and Leanna Sphairopoulos—finally. Actually, they were both very pleasant. Leanna is young and sweet, studying dentistry. He is specializing now in orthopedic surgery for children. We had a lovely meal at a Chinese restaurant and conversed effortlessly for three hours in Greek. I haven’t heard their English yet; Leanna says she understands more than she can speak. When we made inquiries at New Street regarding tickets for them, Nikos asked me to do the honors, so probably neither of them is at ease linguistically.

Monday, June 12, 1995

I posted JMGS 13 (2) to Carol. As always, an immense relief. But I still need clarifications from two authors.

Tuesday, June 13, 1995

Attended Janey O’Shea’s class on the effect of the Richmond Declaration (1887) and Manchester Conference (1895) on launching the Society of Friends into the twentieth century, effecting a “transmutation” from an obsession with traditional doctrine to (a) openness to new doctrine, e.g., the Higher Criticism, and (b) an emphasis on experience and service—in sum, liberal Quakerism. She presented all of this very well.

Thursday, June 15, 1995

The sequel to Janey’s class was a guest lecture by professor Kennedy of Arkansas (he used to play basketball with Bill Clinton) on the Society of Friends from the Manchester Conference through World War I, with emphasis on revitalization of the Peace Testimony by people like Wilfred Littleboy, whom I remember so well. I chaperoned Kennedy and brought him together with Alessandro Falcetta, a student here who is writing an M.A. thesis on Rendel Harris. They both agreed that Harris, although a top scholar, was extremely deficient as a person: arrogant, authoritarian. . . . Met with John Sheldon and Pam Lunn. This went very well. She was pleasant and he was very fair. Both agreed that a system to obtain books, when needed, would be good, and Pam will try to work something out with the Westhill Bookstore. I said how sorry I was that everything had been so escalated last Friday, and we parted friends! . . . Off to Bryer and Liz. Liz, thankfully, was having one of her “good days”—smiling, glad that her hair is coming back after chemotherapy, very open about her expected death, sorrowful mostly only about having to leave her teaching job. Two of the three daughters were there. One, a horticulturalist, I told about our trip and will give her my Gardens and Literature lecture. The other works in drama in London. The third is in video, also in London. Bryer ridiculously eccentric, dressed like a Turkish pasha. Told me that George Savides just died. Said he hated going to Sherrard’s funeral, with the body there in an open casket. Immediately, he showed me a book and asked, “Do you know anything about this awful Quaker?” It was Rendel Harris! His letters to his wife from Armenia while he was distributing aid after the Turkish genocide. Bryer sees him as totally insensitive to Armenian culture and Orthodoxy, arrogant, assuming that the Armenians should learn to do everything in a British manner. I told him about Kennedy’s and Alessandro’s similar opinion. Then Bryer in his haphazard way started to “interview” me; he’s meant to review my relation with Birmingham on July 4th. This was totally unsystematic and wayward. To make matters worse, another guest arrived, a Professor Murphy, with two young boys. “Chaos” was Bryer’s apposite comment. End of interview. Apparently Rendel Harris convinced two spinster ladies to learn Modern Greek so they could go to the monastery at Sinai to look at manuscripts, and the ladies afterwards endowed MG studies at Cambridge. All this adds up, somehow, to a connection between Woodbrooke and Modern Greek. I think (fear) that this is what Bryer is going to say on July 4th.

Friday, June 16, 1995

Lunch with Muriel Poulter at her retirement community, Queen Mother Court, where Bill and Nancy Fraser also live. Very tiny rooms, no facilities to speak of, but of course a lovely garden that puts ours at Kendal to shame. Muriel no longer reviews Pendle Hill pamphlets; I’ll see what happened. . . . Off to B’ham Art Gallery to see Epstein’s Lucifer again and Ford Madox Brown’s wonderful couple emigrating to Australia, also a special show on Gainsborough’s Harvest Cart paintings, showing the influence of Dutch landscapists. Then to the library to find depictions of Satan, Sin, and Death for Olga, who is doing a paper on Sin and Death for the Paradise Lost class. Helped by a very knowledgeable librarian, I found many and xeroxed them all for Olga.

Saturday, June 17, 1995

Daphne is probably going to do another book, this time on Native Americans. I sent her the addresses of all our Native American Studies faculty. Alec faxed thanks for the Adirondack furniture book I bought for him last summer at the Blue Mountain Museum and reported that “John Deere is purring” and that Carson Bunker is ready to start digging the trench for the electric cable to Alec’s cabin. I wish we were there. . . . Worked today on my book review of Alan Paton: A Biography, without reading very much of the book (!). Ditto a few days ago for the collected stories of William Maxwell. That finishes the backlog of work I brought with me. Of course, I haven’t spent any time at all on the Kazantzakis letters (as usual). . . . Arranged for $2500 to be sent to Mercer University Press as one-half subsidy for the Kazantzakis and religion book. UPNE acknowledged finally that they will give an advance contract for the revised Demotic Greek 1. But my Life in the Tomb will be allowed to go out of print. They have ten copies left. I said I’ll buy them. . . . Brought back the Diabelli Variations from the B’ham library and tried. I can play about three of them. The rest are too hard to sight-read up to tempo. . . . Paul and Dympna Morby came for supper and we had a lovely reunion. She is very active, journeying to Romania four times a year to help teach English; she works with Roman Catholics there. I thanked Paul for his gift of a book on gardening years ago, and gave him a copy of my Literature of Gardens lecture. He, all excited, said we must come to see his garden. So we are invited for lunch tomorrow.

Sunday, June 18, 1995

The Morbys live now just above Fox Hill Close. His garden is magnificent, a miniature version of the marvels we saw in Scotland, and all created by him within the last ten years, after they moved from Harborne. A walled garden designed to give pleasure all year round, with emphasis not on flowers but on shapes, green, shade, shadow. Dympna served us a feast, the best salmon we’ve ever had, plus Paul’s best vintage Italian wines, first white, then red, strawberries, then cheese and biscuits, and Paul’s cappuccino. Then he proudly showed a video of himself at a celebration in Italy making a long speech in fluent Italian about the greatness of the Italian tenor Martinelli, who was being honored, largely because of Paul’s efforts. . . . We left, stuffed and (I) maybe a little drunk. Walked to the duck pond, where the boat club people were having races, and mama and papa duck were swimming with five ducklings lined up in perfect formation between them. . . . An hour’s rest, then off to supper at Tziovas’s. Very different: hard to sustain conversation at first, miserable little house with rooms like cells, awful cooking, no traditions of graciousness or hospitality. But things warmed up gradually. Marianne does have some personality although Dimitris has very little, besides being a good, gentle, honest person—which is enough, after all. Some amusing anecdotes about Bryer. Talk of τα Μακεδονικά. They are sensible about such things.

Tuesday, June 20, 1995

I have a bad cold. Yesterday I probably had temperature. The first sickness since we left. Chrysanthi departed at noon for London; tomorrow she flies to Greece with Daphne. Spoke to Leander and Alec at Terpni last night. It’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit there. Leander’s four-hand workshop was a splendid success, he feels, although it just broke even financially. Folks already want to sign up for next year. Dan Seeger came late and left early, but was there for Nigel’s recital and other goodies, and had lessons on Arensky. Leander said that Helene’s wedding ceremony was “horrible.” Unimaginative, soulless, Karen Sheldon “dead.” He greatly appreciated his own and also Daphne’s, which worked, he feels, because in effect I told Karen what to say. But the reception was lively, with John making a speech and occupying the center of attention (of course). . . . Alec is excited about electricity. NiMo has been consulted. He already has a telephone number. The pathway is selected, and Alec is clearing branches and trees so that Carson Bunker can get through with his backhoe to dig.

Tony and Jean Brown were in to lunch. Tony, now retired, and spending most of his time working with silver, is afflicted with tinnitus in both ears. We talked about this and about Leander. Tony says that when he is concentrating on silver bracelets he almost forgets the sound but that otherwise—e.g., in Quaker Meeting—it’s horrible. And he said he could barely hear me talking to him, given the background noise of Woodbrooke lunchtime. . . . Played Telemann and Vivaldi with Keith, a moderately accomplished recorder player. . . . Taught P. L. Book X. Good class but a bit sleepy. Boris said it was good that Adam and Eve made up, for otherwise the epic would have been several books longer. . . . I was on duty as usual (Tuesdays). Timothy did Epilogue: King’s College choir singing Thomas Tallis. Over cocoa we had a long talk about the rituality of musical services. Silent Meeting. Then George Smith caught me for another of his monologues. To bed at 11:30 after reading a bit more of Anne Thomas’s Swarthmore lecture on creation stories as guides for the journey.

Wednesday, June 21, 1995

After staff meeting, lunch with Marian McNaughton and Val Ferguson. It came out, finally, what the trouble is here, at least according to them. It’s the continuation of Chris Lawson as leader (not to mention Christina as librarian). They said that Chris had simply been here too long and had nowhere to go. I asked why the Society of Friends didn’t find another position for him, “moving him sideways.” They said it had been tried. What a shame! All of us need to learn to divert. Bill Fraser, when I asked him why he didn’t stay on another eight years as warden, said, “It wouldn’t have been good for Woodbrooke.” Amen.

Thursday, June 22, 1995

The first truly gathered Meeting I have experienced here. Alan Graham gave thanks for “little things”: the sun rising, letters from friends. George Smith spoke about having to unlearn being harder than having to learn. I ministered on having to unlearn, perhaps, the belief in a God who is perfect, mentioning process theology (Anne invokes it in her Swarthmore Lecture) and the exercise in Anne’s class on Monday in which we arraigned Adam and Eve but concluded that they were innocent and God was guilty—i.e., very imperfect. Val Ferguson then ministered about the beauty of loving relations (e.g., letters from friends), mirroring a loving God despite everything.

Alessandro Falcetta said he wanted to meet Bryer re: Rendel Harris. I brought him with me to the university in the afternoon for such a meeting. This apparently proved fruitful; he’ll be going to Crosbie Road tomorrow. . . . I gave my “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision” paper to the Brum seminar, last of the academic year, to a packed house. Some good questions afterwards, but nothing really engaged with the problem, except that a British convert to Orthodoxy held, quite legitimately, that Kazantzakis’s views are closer to Orthodox religiosity than to Augustinian. Of course! An elderly gentleman whom I later met held forth at length about the problems with Darwinism and I had to divert him in order to allow others to speak. At the reception I was told that he, aged now 86, was a confidant of T. S. Eliot’s and Charles Williams’s. He started again at length about his own poetry, which Eliot had advised him not to publish. I asked him about C. S. Lewis, and he replied with scorn that he was a charlatan. But he greatly admired L. C. Knights. Rhoads Murphy, the instructor of Ottoman Studies, was there and we talked about Columbia. He knows Austerlitz, who he says now has very bad cancer and is still married to the Finnish wife (who summered in Riparius years ago). Also met some engaging students, and the young Catalan who had been at Norwich, too. Beautiful spread in the university guest center with its splendid garden.

Friday, June 23, 1995

Peter Ricketts saw my name on the Art’s Faculty bulletin Board and telephoned, inviting me to supper tomorrow. Long, exhausting talk with Janet Shepherd about Pendle Hill. She’s very negative, still, about Dan, saying that he’s completely isolated now, invisible, and still micro-managing. She thinks he should be fired. . . . Woodbrooke has filled up with people on a short course for unemployed Quakers. They look very scruffy, poor things. One at lunch, covered with tattoos, was largely inarticulate. He sat next to his mother, who’d gone to school at Ackworth and had read Paradise Lost intact and assured me, “I still have the book.” (Take note, Pam Gile.). . . In the evening, went to the new B’ham Symphony Hall with Michael Wetton, Julia Hick, and Elizabeth Scherrer to hear Brendel’s final concert in the Beethoven Sonata series—the last three sonatas. The final one, in particular, is monumental. He played all three with his expected clarity, vigor, and delicacy. Huge fortes, tiny pianissimos, all alive owing to this hall’s splendid acoustics. Saw Rhoads Murphy there with his wife Monica. They gave us all a lift home afterwards and I gave them a tour of Woodbrooke.

Saturday, June 24, 1995

Meeting was filled with the unemployed. Janet Shepherd ministered about God as “mender” and I followed her with hopes that he/she/it/they would do lots of mending of the unemployed, who should persevere in the faith that disaster can be opportunity. . . . Spent the morning writing letters to JMGS submitters regarding the fate of their articles. . . . Long leisurely supper with Peter and Monika Ricketts. In the car he told me that he’d been the victim of clinical depression for 2½ years and had to stop work completely. But the condition disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared and he is now fine: retired at age 61 but more active than ever in various scholarly pursuits with medieval French and also in public service. He mentioned Steve Nichols as a 100% rotter and charlatan who publishes always collaboratively so that he can hide behind the others when the gross mistakes of the publications are revealed. We both are amazed that a man with such defects of character and scholarly integrity can have attained such heights in the profession. When I saw that he was a candidate for MLA president this year, I despaired. But he wasn’t voted. He’ll keep trying, of course.

Sunday, June 25, 1995

More letters to JMGS authors, mostly rejections. And I started packing for the return tip. Good! Chrysanthi and I have both had enough this term. How I long for the farm!

Tuesday, June 27, 1995

A spate of letters and more JMGS reviews occupied me most of the morning, but I also helped Olga with her report, making xeroxed enlargements of Sin and Death engravings. And Julia says she wants to do a brief project on freedom in Milton. Goodbyes to the Whiteheads and to Keith, who will be gone before I return, but I’ll see the Whiteheads at Pendle Hill. Last night Alessandro spoke for an hour on Rendel Harris, followed by discussion and comments, mostly from me. He did quite well, although his Italian accent made comprehension difficult at times. Harris among other things seems to have preceded Bernal’s Black Athena in assuming that Africans, especially Egyptians, had a much more developed civilization than we imagine, and passed on much to the Greeks. But of course this was heresy, and he was ignored. . . . Final PL class went well. We finished! The class had gathered at 6:00 a.m. to read Book XII together, with much laughter, waking Val Ferguson. Olga and Julia told me that it was the best class this term—indeed, the only worthwhile one, since the others were so fragmented because of the modules. But I don’t expect any recognition or thanks from the likes of a Pam Lunn or a John Sheldon. . . . Ran from class to the bus to New Street. Train to London suffocating, but I worked on Jeter’s essay for the Middleton volume—very poor. What can I do? Tried to get tickets for the play on Furtwängler that Harold Pinter directed, but it doesn’t open until next week and the theater was locked. Went to Raymond Review instead, lavishly unimaginative, boring. Then tube to Heathrow, long wait for courtesy bus to Novotel Hotel. Slept at midnight, very tired.

Wednesday, June 28

London–Thessaloniki

Up at 5:15 to catch the 6:00 a.m. courtesy bus to Heathrow. Long tedious flight to Thessaloniki, stopping at Turin. Good view of the Alps however. Jagged knife-edges; I imagined crash-landing there. Talked with the man in the next seat, who turned out to be a “Macedonian” from Adelaide on his way to Skopje. He was ignorant of Greek feelings. I told him to speak only English in Greece. Actually, at passport check in the airport I noticed that he was being held up while the officer checked his computer file. Don’t know what happened next. George, Vouli, and Chrysanthi were waiting. Vouli went off; I’ll see her on Thursday. George pleasant and talkative. We congratulated each other on not looking older and not having gained weight. (His hair is grayer, though.) Greg made a good impression on everyone. George and he spoke broken French a bit. Daphne’s Greek, by all accounts, was excellent. She’s a good linguist, obviously. George left us at Lola’s and Kostas’s in Aghia Triadha. We’ll go to him tomorrow. We are housed in Nikos’s study, very uncomfortably. Nikos locked his bedroom. Chrysanthi very “turned off” by the relatives: all they want to know, she says, is how much Greg earns, how much Leander earns, how was Leander able to buy a home. George says that Tilda is overprotective regarding the surviving twin; a mosquito bite is a major catastrophe. It’s always “Μη! Μη!” The cousins haven’t even met Nikos’s wife, Leanna. Obviously this is not a happy, united family. Probably because of Kostas. He is a bit difficult. Themis and Miranda Altas came in the evening (after I had gone for a delicious swim in the rather choppy gulf: warm, very salty, practically deserted). In the conversation, Kostas related how he used to work with the Germans and how nice some of them were (no doubt true). Themis said the same: they had German and Italian soldiers, 17 years old, quartered in their home. They treated his mother as their mama, and wept when they left. But maybe Kostas’s wartime activities rankle George. I did better with Themis when we went to the παραλία for pizza and beer and he was sitting next to me. Even asked him about Slavo-Macedonians around Florina. He said that all these people are Greek, felt themselves Greek, until the Bulgarians exploited them for their own divisive purposes. He also said, interestingly, that his own mother and grandmother, although “pure” Greeks, were bilingual and even trilingual (Greek, Macedonian, Serbian), the grandmother coming form Monastir. Lola added, of course, that Gligorov is really Grigoriou, an ex-Greek communist. All the while, Chrysanthi kept kicking me under the table, to change the subject. . . . Themis is fully retired; they spend lots of time in Michaniona. Theodora has died. Marianna gave up the law and teaches law-related subjects in the lyceum. . . . Slept thanks to ear-plugs in our very noisy room with trucks passing continually outside. But first walked the length of the village. The main part is quite unchanged. The παραλία is improved because cars are no longer permitted. Lovely oleanders (πικνοδάφνη) in bloom everywhere. But the far end is much overbuilt with ugly apartment blocs. Saw the house of Kyria Marianthi and Kyrios Alekos, where we spent two summers and I was famous as “the man who was always writing.”

Thursday, June 29, 1995

Αγία Τριάδα–Καλαμαριά

Good conversation with Lola and Chrysanthi over a prolonged breakfast, greatly facilitated by Kostas’s absence—he goes into town very early each day. Even touched some interesting subjects: superstition, religious fanaticism, AIDS, besides the usual junk. . . . Another lovely swim. I haven’t been in the ocean, I think, since Waikiki Beach (which is better than this) in 1983. George came for us and we transferred to Καλαμαριά. Still haven’t gotten to Odysseas. He telephoned when I was out. Chrysanthi doesn’t want to call back from this phone because Kostas will get angry because of the expense (she says). That’s why she never telephoned me at Woodbrooke. . . . The Kalamaria apartment is still beautiful, with vistas on all sides and a large empty area in back that cannot be built upon. But then there is Efthymoula! After three hours of her I felt like screaming. The problem is that her normal conversation is screaming, and that everything needs to be discussed and contradicted interminably. In addition, it is beastly hot. I wish I were back in Birmingham. I had a nice long talk however with Aglaïa Lypourli on the phone. They are leaving town tomorrow and we won’t be able to see them. . . . Finally got out of the house at 9:15. Taxi to the American Farm School. Morose taxi driver refused to talk. Huge festival at the School with expensive tickets for dinner and dance. We were given complimentary tickets by Vouli—we and Βουλευταί, as we were told. Saw Κυρά Κούλα, Vouli’s housemate. Vouli introduced Chrysanthi to a young woman, and then told her afterwards that this was the grown-up version of one of the babies that Chrysanthi and the students had raised at the Quaker girls’ school. The woman knows nothing of this; indeed, she does not know that she was an adopted child. At our table were the Willises: David and Christine (Lansdale). Very nice to see them again. David explained that the School abandoned its African program owing to its sense that development had failed in Africa. With the fall of communism, the School’s efforts shifted to Albania and Bulgaria. Bruce is actually engaged in developing the Albanian part. Albania, today, Christina explained, is just where Greece was when Bruce arrived at the Farm School in 1947. (I told her my impression of Indonesia, just like Thessaloniki in 1955.) David favors Farm School tactics. Small is beautiful. Train young farmers and send them back to their villages with better knowledge, as opposed to huge projects funded by The World Bank. Also at the table was David Schuler, USA’s vice consul in Thessaloniki, a Dartmouth graduate (’87) and present when I lectured at the State Department. He told me that Ambassador Friedman died recently of a heart attack. Schuler had a tour of duty in Osaka and found a Japanese wife, a lovely woman with whom we had lots to say. He is doing well here; made a “human rights” report for the State Department confirming the existence of people who consider themselves Macedonians! He knew about Karakasidou’s troubles and wants to see her. I’ll call her tomorrow. His boss, Mimi Hughes, the consul, also was in my State Department class. She was there but we couldn’t find her. Also at the table was a pleasant Irish woman who had read Kazantzakis and Joyce and had lots to say about both. So it was an extremely pleasant evening, during part of which we sat under a light rain: so cool. What worried me was Vouli, who seemed depressed. She is retiring in August; says she can’t stand grading and correcting student essays any longer (!). But she has nothing to do in place of the School, except to care for her mother, who is failing. She was bitter about certain developments in the School: the encroachment of bureaucracy, mostly; also Draper’s tolerance regarding Macedonia (Vouli is a fanatic nationalist on this issue, alas). We got home finally at 2:15 a.m.

Friday, June 30, 1995

Slept late. Showered. Appeared for breakfast to Efthymoula’s scream: Είσαι ξυπόλυτος, θέλεις παντόφλες; Όχι, λέει η Χρυσάνθη, θέλει νάναι ξυπόλυτος. Telephoned Dimitris Gounelas. They’re leaving for Athens tomorrow, but he’ll pass by on his way home this morning. Δημήτρης Ντούτης is away for three weeks. Chrysanthi and I, eager to escape, walked down to the park opposite the house, by the sea. Very pleasant. Had a lemonade (Fanta—i.e., coca-cola), sat, watched children playing hide and go seek. Chrysanthi told me how appreciated Daphne is by her authors and employer; she’s an effective editor. A propos, I finished a first look at Constantelos’s article for the Middleton volume yesterday. Like Jeter’s, it needs massive rewriting. . . . Gounelas came for ten minutes and stayed an hour. He was most encouraging regarding conditions at the university, thanks in large part to EU money and also to competition from places like McGrew’s college at Anatolia. Ruth is fine; she’s teaching in the Department of English; her eyes are stabilized. He confirmed Tziovas’s remarks at Norwich that there is increased interest in Kazantzakis and that his books are now being taught more regularly. Dimitri says that five or six colleagues have asked to read my Politics of the Spirit. Most interestingly, he revealed that the department has several apartments in town that it keeps for visitors. I could come in a year or two for a semester, perhaps teach a course on Kazantzakis, and complete the scholia for the Letters. The department would cover travel, etc. Chrysanthi and I both agreed that we could contemplate a sojourn in Greece provided (a) we were not living with relatives, (b) we did not come in the summer heat. . . . At 3:00 p.m., for lunch, came Andreas and his fiancée, Demetra. Both are lawyers. He hopes to specialize in labor law, she in international business law. She is plain in appearance but has an outgoing personality, is articulate, obviously very smart, and seems kind. Best of all, she is soft-spoken! Our conversation was fine until Efthymoula began her shrieks, always at length. I asked Andreas if he still was interested in the theater. Only to go as audience, he replied. There is an experimental theater here as well as the Κρατικό. Stavros dreams of starting a sort of theatrical school in the far future, and Andreas is already representing his interests for the Odeon. Andreas seems “cured.” George explained to Chrysanthi yesterday that starting in high school he had been a rebel, a very extreme leftist under the first PASOK regime, etc. But like many products of the 1960s he has entered the mainstream although still manifesting his earlier beliefs by doing labor law. . . . As I sit here on the rear balcony at 6:00 p.m. writing this, I suddenly notice that Olympus is visible in front of me! . . . Talked with Daphne on the telephone. She and Greg like Marmara. They hope to go on a boat around the tip of Άγιον Όρος tomorrow. We did that once on a cruise ship, I remember. How beautiful! . . . At 10:00 p.m. Bill McGrew fetched us and we went to a ψαροταβέρνα in Aretsou. Strangely, from start to finish, Bill spoke Greek, as did we, of course. Along the way he mentioned that every time he returns to America he feels more foreign; conversely he feels increasingly Greek, appreciating especially the fact that in Greece one is never alone. On the other hand, the family, such a cohesive force (not always!) means that larger groupings lack power and cohesion. Also, he lamented that cheating—on income tax, on university exams, etc.—is a “way of life” and that most EU money is diverted into private pockets. Nevertheless, things are much better now than when the first PASOK government almost destroyed Anatolia College. His four-year college is not accredited by the Ministry, of course, but it continues to attract students and is beginning to play a role in Greek life willy-nilly. It is barely legal because of certain interpretations of the constitutional prohibition and another law permitting ελεύθερα ιδρύματα. As usual, too much food was ordered, and Bill insisted on paying despite our protestations. Chrysanthi afterward felt that all this was very artificial, not understanding why he is so hospitable always. . . . Returning to George, we looked down on a neighbor, a Sarakatsanos, celebrating the παραμονή of his son’s wedding. . . . I forgot to mention that Bill was very negative about Karakasidou (a graduate of Anatolia College), as well as about American officials like Schuler vis-à-vis the Macedonian question. “They should ingratiate themselves with Greek officials instead of creating enemies, which means that when the time comes for these Americans to be useful for us they cannot be because the Greeks do not trust them.”

Saturday, July 1, 1995

Thessaloniki

A long, interesting day. We went into the city in the morning by taxi. Fortunately, it’s Saturday and many people are away for the weekend. No traffic. Visited Vouli at 10:00 a.m. She was in better spirits today. She showed me some of the materials used for teaching Greek literature. A section from Zorba is one of the included, authorized, texts. Cute story about the inspector επί χούντας who overlooked the fact that she was teaching Homer’s Odyssey in the Kazantzakis-Kakridis translation, although the law then required Homer to be taught in the original. Another story about Stylianos and George Papandreou, Minister of Education and Religion, who confided to Stylianos that he is an American, really, not a Greek. He graduated from Amherst College. . . . At 12:00 noon we left Vouli for our appointment with Mimi Hughes, the American Consul General, in her gorgeous apartment on the third floor of the consular building on Οδός Νίκης, στην παραλία. She told us that this building had been one of the several along the waterfront owned by Salonika Jews, all of whom were killed in the holocaust. The building is in very bad repair and indeed is unsafe. They’d like to leave it, but fear that this will precipitate the discontinuation of the consulate altogether, since the Republican Congress is cutting the State Department’s budget drastically. Mimi is a Barnard graduate. She was in the class when I lectured at the State Department for Jim Warren, whom she admired; she said that the course degenerated under Friedman, who really had no qualifications. She told us that she is Jewish and thus feels affinities with the Greek character: the screaming, the constant debating, the focus on the family. But she is very opposed to the politics against FYROM (τα Σκόπια), wishing that the Greeks could be like the Jews, to extend the hand of reconciliation to the enemy, and do business with them. She greatly fears the instability in Bosnia and is afraid that FYROM may not even exist in five years because of pressures from the Kosovo Albanians, etc. Our soldiers there help stabilization, and of course make the Greeks accuse us, as always, of anti-Greek sentiments. She asked me if I knew of Karakasidou’s “wonderful article.” I explained that I had published it. I must send her a subscription to JMGS. She is trailed everywhere she goes by two policemen who of course report her every movement. Once she saw some representative of the Turkish minority in Thrace and the next day the newspapers screamed in huge headlines that she advocated removing the Patriarchate from Istanbul! Total fabrication, of course. But that’s the way things work here. I told her about Bruce Lansdale’s graph of foreigners’ reactions to Greece. She experienced that initial euphoria but is now falling into the expected disgust. She also noted that by State Department calculations Greece is a number 4 on the scale of danger, with number 1 being the least and number 5 the most dangerous. But she also struck me as fully professional, determined to do her job well, including reports on human rights. She has a large budget to administer, and feels that responsibility acutely. When I explained my own projects and the possibility of returning here to do the scholia for the Kazantzakis letters, she said she’d like to host a dinner party in my honor so that I could meet key people. How nice! She’ll be here until July 1997. . . . Next we went to our 2:00 p.m. lunch with Odysseas, Eleni, Toula, Stavros, and their four-year-old daughter, a sweet child, Athiná, much better behaved than Dimitrios’s Evi. Η γιαγιά, who is dying, was in the back room but no one suggested that we see her. They have completed a beautiful home in Μεγάλο Χωριό in central Greece, in the mountains, Eleni’s birth village, but are afraid to go there with Yiayia because she might die on the way. Conversation was dominated by Stavros, with a litany of difficulties, constant money problems, but at the same time grandiose schemes for future projects and buildings, including a Kinhaven-type summer music camp for which they already bought land in Kassandra. I fear that poor Stavros is not a very good manager, yet somehow they survive. Indeed, they have 600 students enrolled in their two Odea. Poor Toula looks exhausted. I asked her, Κουράζεσαι; and she nodded sadly “Yes.” All the better students want her as their piano teacher, so she is overloaded, plus having the lovely child, Αθηνά. Fortunately the family is supportive and cohesive. Αθηνά very obviously has a beautiful relationship with her grandfather, Odysseas, and grandmother, not duplicated, it would seem, in the Evi-George/Efthymoula relationship. The grandparents do lots of babysitting, and this gives them pleasure and diversion from the care of Yiayia. They are saints regarding the latter. No complaints. Eleni even sleeps with Yiayia every night to care for her when she wakes. Yiayia is moribund, doesn’t recognize anyone, needs total care, and suffers from the heat. The mystery, for us at least, is Takis, who obviously has no desire to see us, didn’t show when invited to meet Daphne and Greg, and probably wasn’t even expected today. . . . After a delicious meal of pilaf, fruit, coffee, we went in Stavros’s car, the expensive Audi he bought in 1987 and now looks very old, to see the house they’re building in Ambelokipoi, far far away, at the opposite end of the city, toward Πέλλα. Nice, narrow, quiet street with somewhat of a village flavor. The οικόπεδο was bought by Stavros’s parents long ago. It’s narrow, so they have built a huge house four stories high, designed by Takis. Now, as usual, the construction has been abandoned in the middle because Stavros ran out of money. One good thing is that he doesn’t borrow, operates on a cash basis. They hope to renew construction and finish within a year. It will be very grand, and will have an apartment for his parents. But the location is unfortunate, even though there is a new ring road that brings Stavros to the city quite quickly. . . . We returned to George’s. Tasoula Karakasidou telephoned and I told her about the good feelings of both Mimi Hughes and David Schuler in the Consulate. She says she’d like to visit David. Fortunately she is now working without harassment, at home in Kalamariá, writing her book. She expects to take up her post at CUNY Queens College in the fall unless the financial crisis eliminates it. Again, I realize how fortunate I have been at Dartmouth. Greg Ruf, her husband, has a job at Stony Book, where they’ll live. . . . The clarino band arrived downstairs and led the groom and family in a parade to the nearby church—very unusual. George and Efthymoula went to the service. We begged them to go to the reception afterwards (we were invited but demurred after such a full day and no siesta—probably a mistake—for then they decided not to go either). “I may never see you again,” said George. “Even if you come, I may die in the meantime.” True, but I urged us all not to be μοιρολάτρες. Then he wanted to take us for pizza in Panorama but Chrysanthi said we were tired and couldn’t we go somewhere closer. So we went part way into town to a pizza place on the main road with the television set blaring, people all around us blowing cigarette smoke in our faces, and deafening scooters accelerating just beyond on the street. Φρίκη! I became depressed and stopped talking (one could hardly be heard over the din). Μίλα, Chrysanthi kept urging me, and I suppose I did a little at the end. But this outing was a distinct failure. Fortunately we returned home for fruit afterwards on their spectacular balcony, with a storybook sunset behind us and a new moon just appearing. That went better. But sleep was difficult with dogs barking at 4:00 a.m., not to mention the ever-present heat and the need to keep doors closed to prevent ρεύματα!

Sunday, July 2, 1995

Αγία Τριάδα

Leisurely breakfast on George’s balcony, starting with the ceremonial γλυκό. Church service in the background, with the priests and ψάλτες chanting with microphones, outdoors—very nice. George brought us to Lola’s. Kostas had a friend on the front porch who turned out, most unlikely, to be an Englishman from Reddich, Birmingham. He’d been 25 years in the British merchant marine, most of it working for Shell on tankers. He had also worked on the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth for Cunard. Had good sense to switch to a strong company, exercised stock options, and now in retirement has a nice income, a Greek wife, a flat in Thessaloniki, a summer flat in Aghia Triadha next to Kostas, a flat in London, and his home in Reddich. Six months in Greece, six month in England. Nice story. George found him “pleasant” and so did we. Delicious swim afterwards, with the beach quite full on this hot Sunday, buses from town disgorging people (mostly teenagers) continually. Kostas cooked mashed potatoes, bifteki, and goats’ livers in onions: delicious. Siesta. Then to παραλία with Chrysanthi for frappé (ο φραπές ή το φραπέ), long sweet conversation, then another swim, the beach relatively deserted at this late hour (6:30–7:00 p.m.). Sun lower; delicious cool air, finally. I was admirably patient, even Chrysanthi admitted, sitting in the café with a man listening to a blaring portable radio next to us, and six others smoking like chimneys behind us. One needs equanimity. Apparently Greg behaved beautifully under even more difficult conditions, since he couldn’t understand the conversation around him. He learned two Greek words, πάρε and φάγε. Everyone complimented us on Daphne’s splendid Greek. . . . Will we ever come back? Probably, as I said before, if it’s not in the summer and we have our own living space. So, we’re going to redeposit our drachmas in the bank here and let them accumulate interest for next time. But right now I am eager to leave. I told Chrysanthi that what made this stay tolerable was the chance to meet several very interesting people. “Not all people are interesting,” she responded, and we need to learn to be calm with them. Agreed. But it’s difficult. In any case, if all goes well we’ll be back at Woodbrooke tomorrow night.

Monday, July 3, 1995

Αγία Τρίάδα

Later last night, back to Apostolos’s café with Lola and Kostas for τοστ και λουκουμάδες και λεμονάδα, the last now produced by Coca-Cola Co. I’m warming up to Kostas and (I think) vice versa. Lola is hopelessly anti-Turkish; they can’t do anything right, all hate Greece, etc. She, and most Greeks, are also pro-Serb in the war there. “We’re the only friends the Serbs have.” I told her that the general view elsewhere is that the Serbs are the aggressors and villains. The village of Aghia Triadha has collected clothing, food, etc. to send to Serbia, and has an arrangement whereby Serbian casualties come here, to Sun Beach, for rest and recuperation. Lola described seven young men, all with amputated legs, walking on crutches, who were watching the pan-European basketball match the other day in a café and applauding gleefully, instead of lamenting that they could never play basketball or soccer again themselves. I said that they’re probably delighted that (a) they’re alive, (b) their disability will guarantee that they are never mobilized again into the army. Everything is relative. Another sad sight, part of the volta taking place in front of us, was a father, gray-haired, wheeling his spastic son, aged 30+, in a wheelchair. We all concluded that we should cross ourselves repeatedly and give thanks that we have healthy, normal children (not to mention that they are employed productively in jobs that interest and fulfill them). . . . This morning I am sitting on the balcony in the shade. It’s still reasonably cool, with a slight breeze. Chrysanthi, Lola, and Kostas have all gone into Thessaloniki by taxi, Chrysanthi in order to put all our unused drachmas back into the bank and, I hope, to buy some μέλι Ημεττού (όχι εμετού!). I need to think about my “Concluding Remarks” for the Birmingham conference that starts tomorrow. Too bad I didn’t bring the Powerbook. . . . Finished my “Concluding Remarks.” Dimitris telephoned to transfer a message from John Rassias that Chrysanthi will be teaching in ALPS after all. Too bad. . . . After a quiet morning of work, my last swim. I’m beginning to like this place. . . . Taxi to the airport at 2:00 p.m. Daphne and Greg already there. Also George, Vouli, Lola. We all kidded Greg: πάρε, φάγε, βόλτα, ζέστα. He and Daphne had a marvelous time in Marmara. Took a boat round Mt. Athos, too. Swam in pellucid sea. Ate. Slept. But both said that five days were enough. Greg added that the markets were quiet during his stay in Greece, so it was a good time for him to be away. Good flight to Turino, at least, but there we were stalled for 45 minutes by radar failure in Milan. I feared we’d never get home for the Symposium tomorrow. But we did fly off eventually, thank goodness. I’d arranged for Alix to meet us at the airport. He sped us to Euston and we made the 7:45 by four minutes. Nice to be back in Woodbrooke and in cool weather. And how nice that Daphne has come, too. She, by the way, is now doing a third book, on Native Americans, and is establishing a reputation as a very good editor.

Tuesday, July 4, 1995

Birmingham

Breakfast with Daphne and Chrysanthi. Fax from Karen Van Dyck congratulating me. Another from Jim Armstrong saying that the Town has refunded over $400,000 overpayment to Kendal. Another from Carol Hamblen about all the graphs in this issue of JMGS. People at Woodbrooke welcomed us warmly (students—not staff), all thinking we had been stranded by Greek shipping and airline strikes. Meeting for Worship. I ministered on the amputees we heard about in Aghia Triadha. . . . To the university. Peter Ricketts there. Also Paul Morby, Stathis Gauntlett, Yannis Vasilikakos, Alf Vincent, Peter Mackridge, Roddy Beaton, Vasos Vayenas, Vangelis Calotychos, Yannis Karavidas, Mihalis Chryssanthopoulos, Meg Alexiou. John Halden opened the Sumposium. Dimitris Tziovas then spoke at length about my work on Cavafy, Kazantzakis, and Ritsos, language teaching, MGSA, having clearly done his research well. Very kind! Then came Bryer, who was amusing but irresponsible, going all over the place about me as Quaker (and originally a New York Jew), and castigating Rendel Harris, connecting him (i.e. Quakerism) with the house occupied at Cambridge by Kazantzakis. It was embarrassing, but well meant. Then Meg Alexiou spoke on the “performance” aspect of Greek παραμύθια. This was followed by an actual performance of a paramythi by the autistic people of Oakfields House, including Dimitris Alexiou. So moving! They actually functioned as a group, these people who are so unaware of others. . . . Afterwards, I spoke to the woman who achieved this miracle. She appreciates the high intelligence of the autistics, does not consider them sick or her activity as therapy. Much of what we saw was improvised; they are very adaptable in this. Apparently they can function as a group when doing so “metaphorically” in terms of drama or song. I thought back to the Rudolf Steiner school for Down Syndrome people in Brummen, Holland, where I worked in 1952, and how well the staff succeeded in bringing the best out of the handicapped by using music and drama. . . . Spoke to Dimitris afterward, and he began the usual litany about busses. . . . From here we went to the regular program in this Symposium dedicated to me. I chaired the first session: two papers, one on defining modernism (too theoretical), the other on modernism and Hellenism (not about Modern Greek, really). Fairly good discussion afterwards. . . . Then lunch, thankfully. Sat next to Peter Mackridge. Talked about Sherrard and Savidιs and where I should deposit the Kazantzakis letters. Peter says: Gennadion. Not ΕΛΙΑ. . . . First afternoon session quite interesting: Elizabeth Sakellaridou dared to say that some of Kazantzakis’s plays have theoretical quality. Vangelis Calotychos then spoke on Galanaki and a Turkish author. After tea, Vayenas on Hellenocentrism as a way of determining who should not be considered γενεά του ’30. Stathis Gauntlett very amusing and clever on the «monocotyledons» of Greek modernism, starting by speaking of Peter Bien’s polycotyledons! Martha Klironomos not so good on Orthodoxy and secular ideas. Lively discussion regarding Vayenas’s terminology and methodology. . . . 6:00 p.m., Yannis Karavidas interviewed me for half an hour for the BBC. The program will be aired here, mostly for Cypriots, and in Cyprus and Australia. Yannis is enduring BBC stringency, but still has a job. . . . Eleni Cubitt told me that John Major won a vote of confidence for the Tories, 218 votes, with only 89 for Redwood. . . . Final session today from 6:30 to 8:30. Mihalis Chryssanthropoulos on self-reflexive short stories, Maria Kakavoulia on interior monologue, Helen Yannakakis on Pentzikis. . . . I’ve had more than enough for today. Banquet finally at the University Conference Park. Long talk with Eleni Cubitt. I suggested that Cavafy’s «Αλεξανδρινοί βασιλείς» would be a perfect commentary on the recent marriage of Prince Pavlos in which τα στέφανα were στέμματα. She will arrange to have it published in a periodical. . . . Home at 11:00 p.m., exhausted.

Wednesday, July 5, 1995

Birmingham

Up early to add a new section, on modernism, to my “Concluding Remarks” for the conference today. At breakfast, Olga tried to reschedule her Paradise Lost presentation and got into trouble with Pam Lunn. Chrysanthi fears that my mini-epic will offend. Anne Thomas thinks not. . . . The conference today had some very good papers, especially Petros Martinidis’s on the architecture of Thessaloniki, if you can call it architecture, governed by greed and speed; and Christopher Robinson’s fascinating paper on Kostas Tachtsis’s Το τρίτο στεφάνι as a “transvestite text,” using a gay French author, Tremblay, as his entrée. Interestingly, he claims that the active homosexual partner in Greece is considered “normal”; only the passive one as considered homosexual—i.e., dominance, even in a homosexual relationship, is acceptably masculine. In a long conversation with him at lunch I told him about Fotini Tsalicoglou’s JMGS article on AIDS and he added that Greeks believe you can get AIDS only if you’re the passive partner—i.e., that the virus travels only in one direction. Another good paper was presented by David Connolly, who has lived in Athens for sixteen years and is active as a translator of Elytis and others. . . . At teatime I went to the Barber Institute to visit Alison Smith, Donald Swann’s “partner,” whom I had met at Pendle Hill. Surprisingly, she remembered me well. She is deliciously young and fresh and vivacious; Donald was 70 when he died. We sat for an hour over tea and had so much to talk about. She would like to put together materials by and relating to Donald for a Pendle Hill pamphlet. I encouraged her. She’d also like to have a performance of Donald’s Greek songs, and I gave her Eleni Cubitt’s name. Interestingly, she roomed at Woodbrooke last year and hated it, agreeing with me that the staff is so cold and distant, although she did appreciate John Sheldon’s shyness. Donald also set Emily Dickinson poems on death and dying. I told her about the Kenneth Boulding sonnets. And all about my study under Alfred Swan. Alison is in touch with Jane in Haverford. She hopes that I’ll telephone her next time we’re in London. She’s about to leave the Barber Institute, to begin a teaching job in the “university” run by Sotheby’s, training dealers, museum curators, etc. . . . The conference’s final session, 6:15 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., started with Tziovas’s paper on “Mapping Out Greek Literary Modernism” and ended with my “Concluding Remarks.” In these I started with distinctions among pre-modernism, modernism, and postmodernism; proceeded to ways in which my experiences at Birmingham led, I hope, to a general effect on the discipline—specifically, the journals BMGS and JMGS, and the Demotic Greek books, videos, etc.; concluded with the thought that we not only study modernism but are modernists in our critical approaches, that modernism’s relativity and non-definitiveness are exhilarating. Very nice letter yesterday from Mario Vitti offering congratulations. And today a long letter from Christos Alexiou full of the kindest testimonies of friendship and gratitude, and bringing me up to date on the establishment of an Ίδρυμα in Greece for autistics. I’ve been very remiss in not writing him.

Friday, July 7, 1995

Woodbrooke

Typed out my “Concluding Remarks” at the Bien Symposium and sent them to Christos Alexiou, along with a nice letter, to Eleni Cubitt, and to Dimitris Tziovas, in his case along with my ratings for the various speakers at the symposium and also my vetting of Tziovas’s draft introduction to the short stories of Hatzis, well done, as always. Took Chrysanthi to New Street with half our luggage and telephoned Daphne from there to give our time of arrival. Back at Woodbrooke and wanting to make another phone call, I discovered to my consternation that letters Ε to Q in addresses were missing. Rushed back on the bus to New Street. The guard didn’t want to let me though, since I wasn’t traveling, but I convinced her and, lo and behold! The missing pages were still in the phone booth. The gods looked down smilingly on me today. . . . Practiced duets (Arensky, Schumann) with Lynda and Etsuko for Log Night. Supper: a huge feast. We all circled the buffet table for our moment of silence and it seemed all too likely that we were worshiping the food. Today was a “fast” day in our feast-fast regimen, but I cheated a little when it came to prawns and curry stew, but resisted coffee. Log Night was very jolly. Silly songs and games. A playlet by my class on their 6:00 a.m. reading session for Paradise Lost. I performed my “Great Consult,” a fragment of the Woodbrookiad written, it seems, by Rendel Harris. It apparently pleased some—Claire, for instance, and John Sheldon, but I fear that Pam Lunn was not amused. Also did the Arensky duets (opening adagio and closing fugue) with Lynda, satisfactorily, without jitters, but they never called on Etsuko and me for the Schumann. Fond goodbyes to favorite people: Anne Thomas, Michael Wetton, Martha and Leonard Dart, Crispen, the Ethiopian (who hugged me, unexpectedly), the nice Indian, and Eva, the delicious nineteen-year-old Dutch girl, who gave me a lovely kiss (also unexpected), and Alessandro Falcetta, with a Mediterranean embrace, and the two secretaries, Brenda and Rosemary, and Val Ferguson, who hopes to come to Pendle Hill in 1998. I had no desire to say farewell to the staff (except Claire and Linda) and the feeling was mutual, I’m sure. Anne Thomas told me today that they’re all Lesbians and had been distant toward her because she’s heterosexual (and of working class background). . . . Forgot to say that yesterday they had a ceremony to thank all the Quakers in Residence and gave each of us a little gift. Chrysanthi made a speech saying how lovely Woodbrooke is, etc. I said nothing. . . . Also forgot to add that my Paradise Lost class had an extra session yesterday to hear projects by Julia and Olga. Poor Julia was petrified and almost inarticulate on liberty in Milton, and we all were relieved when she finished; she was shaking visibly. But Olga was splendid on the allegory of Sin and Death, examining all its nuances, including what Milton took from Spenser, then commenting on the various illustrations I found for her, and finally wondering why in some languages Sin is grammatically feminine, death masculine, while in other languages this is reversed. It was a pleasure to hear her. Pam Lunn, her “staff link,” arrived late and left early, without commenting, the Lesbian bitch! . . . So, the overall experience at Woodbrooke this time was mixed at best: wonderful, fascinating students, a quite satisfactory teaching experience for me, but clash with some of the staff and general sadness to see Woodbrooke so apparently rudderless, desperately experimenting with three-week modules that ruin the eleven-week courses. I’ve been debating whether to write a comprehensive letter to someone (Sheldon, or David Saunders, a trustee). I did say it all to Chris Lawson yesterday and he seemed to be listening, and concluded sadly that probably he has been at Woodbrooke too long, but he is only 57 and cannot get a pension unless he continues to age 60.

Saturday, July 8, 1995

To London

Lots of luggage. Train to Euston in the morning. In the afternoon, Daphne took us to Hampstead, where she and Greg hope to move. Charming, like Cambridge (Massachusetts) but too far away. We walked on the heath and along the streets and in the town, finally collapsing into chairs at Häagan-Dazs, where I consumed two coffee milk shakes! (The heat was terrible.) We then went for a coffee in Covent Garden, which was swarming with tourists, entertainers, etc. The café boasted that it was here that Boswell first met Dr. Johnson. Then to Chez Flo next to Westminster Quaker Meeting for a nice French dinner. Greg met us there, having come from tennis. Walked again through Covent Garden to the Aldwych to see Tom Stoppard’s latest, Indian Ink. I found it slow, not very theatrical, but Daphne said she liked it better than Arcadia. Although the focus is ostensibly on a British poetess who goes out to India in 1930 and dies there, the true subject, I think, is political: the travesty of empire, with arrogant mediocrities ruling a nation that was civilized a thousand years before England. Also, I think it is an updating of Forster’s A Passage to India, which is clearly invoked. The most sardonic touch is the “Club,” which doesn’t allow Indians to enter and in which the British dance 1920s flappers’ steps. There is also satire against pedantry: an American professor who is editing the poetess’s letters and is pedantic about the scholia. I saw a little of myself! . . . Home by tube, and saw the startling penultimate game in the Wimbledon female final: 5-all in the last set, with 18 deuces before Steffi Graf finally broke Arantxa Sánchez Vicario’s serve and then took the final game at love.

Sunday, July 9, 1995

London–Hanover

Slept well despite the heat and despite a party next door that went to 4:00 a.m. Kept half-dreaming about all my complaints against Woodbrooke. Probably I should write a letter and unburden myself. . . . Taxi to Heathrow, very convenient, and porter to check-in, saving all the trouble. It’s nice to have money. Had customs stamp the VAT refunds. There was an obnoxious American at the desk who was angry because he couldn’t post a pre-paid envelope to Ireland. He kept insisting that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. . . . Routine flight. Chrysanthi said she felt relieved to be in Boston, in America. I had no such feeling, indeed somewhat the opposite. Knowing that I’ll now have to resume multiple responsibilities that had been so deliciously absent the last three months. . . . I keep rewriting and revising in my mind the letter I think I need to write to John Sheldon outlining my negative feelings about Woodbrooke, alas. Piles of mail at home and office, of course. We went to Kendal for supper. Mother looking remarkably well, in a nice summer dress. Big hugs from Gerry and Peter Tailer. Dinner with Bev Webster and Franny and the other pianist. Franny confided, “He hasn’t had a drop of liquor for four and a half years!” A miracle. Obviously because he is happy and appreciated. Concerts scheduled all four Saturdays in July. I told him about Leander’s deafness, also talked about Andy Rangell. Bev concludes it is psychological. . . . Barbara Gilbert came over, delighted to see us. Afterwards, Chrysanthi went to her “office”—she has to begin the Rassias ALPS language program tomorrow morning. Nice to be in our own bed again.

Monday, July 10, 1995

Hanover–Riparius

Left my “zapped” Stylewriter at Kiewit hoping that they can repair it. Bought two dozen bagels for the farm (first things first). Replaced the Cross pencil that Chrysanthi ruined in the laundry at Woodbrooke: $47.00. Then to Kendal for a meeting with Jim Armstrong and Margery Walker to set the agenda. Jim has revised the bylaws and I smell trouble. He wants a clause about Roberts Rules! Afterwards, Lee Huntington telephoned to voice her dismay. Jim also wants the full Board to meet only quarterly and a strong executive committee to function in the intervals. Lafayette called to voice his dismay at this. But there are nice things, too, especially the rapprochement with the Town. Willy Black even led singing at Kendal’s fourth anniversary celebration. Margery regretted Jean Brophy’s outburst at the meeting: “You fired me!” but we all concluded that generally we handled her dismissal well. . . . Lunch afterward at Kendal with Margery and Alan Walker and Mother. . . . Gathered mail from office and house and drove to the farm, arriving around 11:00 p.m. Alec had gone to bed. How lovely to be here! The moon is bright and the place looked beautiful.

Tuesday, July 11, 1995

Terpni

Alec is all excited about his project to bring electric and telephone to his cabin. The trench is dug and lined with sand already. We laid electric and phone cable from the transformer to the house—that is Alec’s responsibility—and began covering them with six inches of sand. Carson Bunker arrived with another load of sand. Sand is heavy. We shovel from the pile to the wheelbarrow, dump the wheelbarrow and then rake or hoe the sand evenly over the cables. I treated myself to a nap in the afternoon. For supper we went to the Narrows and sat for two hours talking. Alec has had his first real difficulties at school. He opposed the chairman of the trustees re: the two-year policy for teachers, and was more or less reprimanded by Michael and Larry, the school’s founders. On the other hand, the accreditation went well; they were certified for three years, and Alec got a $10,000 increase in salary for next year.

Wednesday, July 12, 1995

Terribly hot. 95 degrees. More shoveling of sand into the upper trench, plus, ironically, shoveling of sand out of the lower trench to get rid of some piles that will impede NiMo when they come. Delicious swim. The pond is now at a perfect temperature, warm enough to enter with ease but cool enough to be refreshing. . . . I’m struggling with the mail. It’s strewn all over the living room floor and I’ve filled a thirty-gallon trash can so far with the junk. We cooked delicious steak outdoors, with mashed potatoes, salad, and beer.

Thursday, July 13, 1995

More shoveling. More heat. Another swim. Mail getting slowly sorted. Bills getting paid. Drove with Alec to Lake George diner for supper, after which he continued to Hanover. He told me about more troubles at school. The business manager had ordered trees cut down and Alec, arriving on a Saturday morning and seeing this happening, put a stop to it, leading to a huge argument afterwards. He is quite sure that Michael and Larry will ask him to leave after next year. Good! From what he says, he’ll be looking for jobs here as well as abroad, unless, he says, “my personal life changes”—i.e., a woman enters the picture.

I forgot to enter here the conversation I had with Greg in London. He said that an attractive promotion may be possible for him if he stays in London, and he is tempted, provided that Daphne agrees. Also, they are thinking of starting a family and feel that it would be advantageous to have the baby in England rather than New York—better care during and after. So, although the original plan was to return in August 1996, that may change.

Friday, July 14, 1995

Impossibly hot. I’m suffering from it. I read Bill Clinton’s speech at Dartmouth’s commencement. He has a gift for humor and for depth. I was very touched. . . . Made myself a good supper of lamb chops on the grill.

But I spent the morning writing my letter to John Sheldon. Eight pages. Very frank, even blunt. I’m sending a copy to David Saunders, for Council is ultimately responsible for the spiritual health of the institution, and another copy to David Gray. Let’s see what sort of responses I get, if any. Here it is:

Box 32

Riparius, NY 12862, USA

14 July 1995

John Sheldon, Principal

Woodbrooke College

1046 Bristol Road

Birmingham Β29 6LJ, England

Dear John Sheldon,

I have debated for a long time whether to write this letter but feel that I must, since its contents have been haunting me and I want to exorcise them and have done. I write not in anger but in sadness for the state of Woodbrooke as I perceive it. Probably what I say will make you angry, but I hope that it makes you sad instead. Please remember that, despite everything, I value Woodbrooke immensely and am sure that it will prosper in the future. I also value all that you and the other staff are doing to provide a suitable program for your students, and I know that many students—if not most—were extremely satisfied last term. Also please remember that Chrysanthi and I have been coming to Woodbrooke at quite regular intervals since 1955 and have seen it function under many wardens and many teachers in the past—so we have some basis for comparison. Unfortunately, our experience last term was distressing in many ways that I shall explain below. I shall be sending copies of this letter to David Saunders, for I feel that Council is ultimately responsible for the spiritual health of the institution, and to David Gray, for I came to Woodbrooke this time and the last time (1985) in order to replace David, and primarily at his initiative.

There is so much to say. I shall probably make something of a mess, but I’ll try to place things in logical categories. Where appropriate, I shall make recommendations for better procedures in the future. With luck some of these recommendations will strike you as justified and will be implemented.

Information sent prior to arrival. As you know, Chris Lawson neglected to send Chrysanthi and me information about the duties of Friends in Residence. You pointed out to me that these duties were described in one paragraph of Pam Lunn’s letter to me sent in January, a letter also about my teaching. Fine. The problem is that by the time mid-April arrived I had completely forgotten about this letter. Woodbrooke also sent out a very fine packet of information about travel, what clothing to bring, etc., shortly before the start of term. Recommendation: In the future, send to all FIRs just before arrival, in the packet with travel information, a reminder of their duties. In this way, that information will be fresh.

Rooming. We were assigned Room 68 in Bridge End. We gloried each morning in the view from its two windows out onto the marvelous Woodbrooke garden. However, the room is essentially designed for 1 person, not 2. The second bed barely fit, and—most interestingly—there was only one study table and lamp. This is a statement by Woodbrooke that study is not important. Two people are placed in a room with rudimentary study facilities for only one of them. That is not good. Recommendation: When two people are assigned to a room, make sure that the room contains two desks and study lamps.

I happen to suffer, as do many older men, from an enlarged prostate (fortunately benign so far), which means that I need to rise three to five times each night to urinate. No forms were sent prior to arrival asking if I had any physical disabilities that might affect the location of my room. In the event, room 68 is the furthest away from the loo. In 1985 I was in New Wing, in a room directly across from the loo, and that made these nocturnal journeys much easier. When I mentioned, on the first day, that we had been in New Wing previously (in a room with two study tables, by the way), I was curtly told “We have changed all that.” No one inquired, either before arrival or upon arrival, if perhaps I had any special needs. (I realize that all this was complicated by the installation of a telephone—but if inquiry had been made early on, the location of the telephone could possibly have been adjusted.) Recommendation: Send to all students, FIRs, etc., well in advance, a form asking for details of physical disabilities that might affect rooming assignments.

Money. Our agreement with Chris was that neither Chrysanthi nor I would receive honoraria. Fine. We felt that a full term’s room and board, plus all the amenities of Woodbrooke, were more than ample compensation. When we learned, however, that other FIRs (at least some) did receive honoraria, we wondered what sort of policy this was. I spoke to Chris and he agreed that I should receive an honorarium, but that Chrysanthi should not (still strange). So, I finally did receive £294.53—£450 less £155.47 (!) for telephone installation—for my eleven weeks’ teaching. Recommendation: Determine honoraria for FIRs consistent with budgetary constraints, and then pay these honoraria uniformly, not selectively. Regarding the telephone, first of all it was an extraordinarily useful amenity for me throughout the term and really did make a difference. So I am grateful that the installation could be handled so well by Howard. One might question, however, not only the sizable charge for installation (at least compared to a comparable service in America, which costs $45 or about £28 as opposed to £155) but also the policy of charging me for what has become a permanent addition to the Woodbrooke building and, presumably, an attractive amenity for future FIRs or others who might wish a telephone and could occupy that room. Perhaps a 50-50 split of the cost between Woodbrooke and me might have been more appropriate.

Library. The Woodbrooke library is one of the coziest I have ever experienced, and it has quite an interesting and broad collection of books. In the past I wrote two of my own books in it and fully researched a third. I always worked at one of the desks by the window in the Quaker Library, establishing this as my own little study space where I could leave materials. (This was even more important this time since our room, as noted above, had a study table for only one of its occupants.) In the past, Christina Lawson always used to tell me how pleased she was to see me spending so many hours there, as perhaps an example for others. However, to my amazement this time, when I began to set up my desk, she said that I would be in her way when she needed to shelve books behind me. I went ahead nevertheless. She repeated her demurral. I assured her that if she needed to shelve books I would gladly remove myself at that time. During the course of the 11-week term, only once did such shelving occur. So, my first day at Woodbrooke gave me a distressing message: “Please don’t use my library on a regular basis in a fashion that facilitates your study needs, for you’ll be in my way.” (On the other hand, once Christina understood that I really would remove myself without hesitation whenever the need arose, she accepted my presence graciously, and we had fine relations during the term, including lots of business in which I wrote US dollar checks for her to publishers in America and was reimbursed in sterling.)

Books. We had quite enough conversation and debate about the policy of not having students purchase books, except if the books can be ordered from Friends House. I don’t need to repeat here my dismay at this policy and the extremely poor signal that it sends out regarding Woodbrooke’s seriousness as a centre for study. It is a shame that this issue had to be debated at such length at Council. It might have been better had you anticipated the difficulty and conferred with both Pam and me prior to Council. But that is easy to say in hindsight. Let me merely repeat what we said when the three of us met: Recommendation: that an arrangement be established with Westhill Book Store whereby students may, in the future, purchase books that teachers feel are needed for a course.

Sociability and friendliness. Now we come to the truly distressing part. Both Chrysanthi and I delighted in the student body this term, made close friends, and were continually stimulated and supported by students. We cannot say the same for the staff. Chrysanthi felt alienated half way through the term and was eager to leave. It is indicative that I went to Val Ferguson, not to anyone on the staff, to ask her to try to encourage Chrysanthi, which of course she did. Chrysanthi made a beautiful little speech at the farewell ceremony for FIRs, but that was mostly an expression of her good, loving nature, an attempt to erase the very real problems she felt during the term.

Not only Chrysanthi and I but also some others—students and FIRs—found the staff distant, cold, indifferent, and basically discourteous. I will give some instances:

—I asked you on three separate occasions to play four-hand piano duets with me. You never responded, not even to say that you wished you could but were too busy. After the third time, I felt it humiliating to ask yet again. With what pleasure I remember the duets that Maurice Creasey and I played (including at epilogue). With you there was nothing comparable.

—You never spoke to either Chrysanthi or me during the term, not once (except perhaps for a “Good Morning” in the corridor). When, in the 10th week you did speak to Chrysanthi she reported to me: “Good God, John Sheldon actually spoke to me!” You and I did speak, of course, after the confrontation in Council, but that was a separate, “official” situation initiated by me (which you handled very well).

—Pam Lunn never once spoke to me during term until I wrote the paragraph to Council about the policy of “No books.” One might have thought that the Director of Studies might be interested in the course I was offering, have asked at some point if I needed anything, or how things were going, or if any of the students was having difficulty, etc. Nothing. Zero communication (except—as always—“officially” in one meeting in which we all were there and spoke about specific students). I’m talking about courtesy and sociability, not about official meetings! One of my students, Olga, did a splendid special project on the allegory of Sin and Death in Milton. Pam was Olga’s staff link, so naturally Olga invited her to the presentation in the final week. Pam arrived late, left early, and said nothing. It was disgraceful. If she is angry at me, there is no reason why she should behave with such discourtesy to her link student. Olga deeply resented it.

—Neither you nor anyone else ever invited Chrysanthi, me, or Anne Thomas to coffee, much less tea or supper. (Oh, yes, Anne was invited once for coffee—by Leonora Wilson, i.e., not by a regular member of the residential program!). With what pleasure we remember eating Pakistani food with our hands with John Punshon and his wife after visiting their home, or John’s antics at the football match to which he took my son, or the lovely weekend we spent in Wales at David Robson’s home, or the many times in the past we took tea with the Lawsons and their children in their home, or the repeated hospitality of Muriel Poulter, or the visits to Tony Brown and his wife to see Tony’s silversmithing, or the pleasure of having David Gray’s daughter Kathy with us for many weeks one summer in America. This means that you and the other staff related to us exclusively as “business,” in your official time “on duty” (and actually did not relate even then, as I noted above). Would it be such a burden to have a FIR to coffee, to try perhaps to get to know him or her as a human being?

—The two working-class students, George Smith and Brian Perry, were treated miserably. George used to tell me that when he passed certain staff members in the hall they would look right through him as though he did not exist. Brian, I remember, once told me, “I said hello to——, and she cut me dead.” Both George and Brian were “difficult” in some ways, I know, but both were also fascinating human beings (especially Brian, who worked as a manual laborer all his life and then put himself through the Open University and came out with a head full of miscellaneous knowledge). They left Woodbrooke with extremely negative feelings.

—Alison Smith, whom I have known for several years owing to her partnership with the late Donald Swann, and whom I saw at the University towards the end of term, told me that she left Woodbrooke in disgust because of the distance and coldness of staff. And Alison is the most vivacious, pleasant, and easygoing of human beings.

—I thought that Linda, the gardener, might be interested in my lecture on “The Literature of Gardens” and asked her if she’d like a copy. She said Yes and I gave her one. Never did she say a word to me subsequently about it—that she had read it, or regretfully had no time to read it, or whatever. Instead, silence. (On the other hand, I did have some human-human communication in other ways with Linda, although it took many weeks before she opened up a bit. She even confided that she had once spent some time as an agricultural laborer on the island of Crete.)

—John Wyatt, in dinner-table conversation, told me at one point that only one student was registered for autumn term. Later, the number was increased by 100% through the registration of Andrea Useem, a Dartmouth student whom I diverted from Pendle Hill to Woodbrooke, thinking that she would receive better training here for her ultimate purpose, which is to serve in some way in Africa. John handled her application very well, going out of his way to make arrangements for her to study Swahili, etc. But never once did he say to me, “How nice of you to have directed her to us. Thanks.” Thank yous do not take much energy, but they are very rare at Woodbrooke.

I mentioned some of these complaints to Chris Lawson in his “official”—always official!—debriefing of me the day before term ended. He replied that staff are impossibly busy. This term John Wyatt was away for a month; you had recruiting to do; you had Yearly Meeting; you had the building plans; some people were planning next year’s courses; others were negotiating with Selly Oak Colleges, etc., etc. No excuse! It doesn’t take a great deal of time or energy to be courteous to those in residence during term. I was very busy, too, by the way. Maybe busier than some of your staff, since I taught the Paradise Lost course, which involved rereading the text and also about three hours of preparation for each class; edited and sent off to the printer’s an issue of The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, researched and wrote the lecture on gardens and literature, lectured twice in Sweden, twice in Norwich, twice in Cambridge, four times on the 10-day Dartmouth tour of Ireland and Scotland, once at Woodbrooke (on gardens), and twice at the University of Birmingham—all of which required revision, shortening, adaptation to different audiences, etc.; and translated a batch of Kazantzakis letters. But when Chris Lawson asked me to read his son Peter’s full-length radio script I did so with pleasure, returning it with oral commentary regarding its strengths and weaknesses. Chris also asked me to read George Smith’s essay on Quaker education, which I returned with two pages of detailed commentary and suggestions for revision. Chris also gave me Martha Dart’s typescript on Marjorie Sykes’ writings for vetting, and I then met with Leonard, Martha, and Chris in order to suggest a complete reordering of the material, which was then done and which, according to Martha, improved the book considerably. In addition, Chris asked me to chaperone Professor Kennedy for two days, which I did with pleasure, introducing him along the way to Alessandro Falcetta, since Kennedy is also interested in Rendel Harris. I was never too busy for these extra duties (and pleasures). Also, I played 4-hand duets on many occasions with two students, accompanied Keith, the module student who played recorder, and traveled to Birmingham Central Library to get some Telemann for us to do together. When Brian Perry needed a poem by John Clare that he couldn’t find in the Woodbrooke or Central House libraries, I again traveled to the Birmingham Central Library and spent an hour finding it for him, since the quote he had given me was garbled. Regarding Olga’s project on Sin & Death, I spent two hours to no avail at the University of Birmingham library trying to find illustrations and then, on the next day, traveled again downtown to the Birmingham Central Library, where I was successful in returning with about 20 splendid illustrations for her. And I brought Alessandro to the University to meet Professor Anthony Bryer, who is obsessed with Rendel Harris. After this interview, Prof. Bryer invited Alessandro to his home (imagine!), showed him a shelf-full of books relating to Harris, and put him in touch with a don at Oxford and another at Cambridge who could help him. I also wrote a mock epic for Log Night, as you know. I did all these extra tasks with pleasure; I was never too busy. But your staff were too busy to say thank you, to invite a person for a cup of coffee, to inquire about progress in a course, and you couldn’t spare half an hour to play 4-hand duets! (I must add that there were two exceptions to all this: Stuart Morton actually took time to communicate with me “unofficially” on several occasions, and so did Clare.)

Recommendation: Train your staff to be more courteous and humane.

Meeting for Worship. I and many others found Meeting for Worship dead for most of the term. It did get better towards the end, thankfully. Again, I blame the staff. No one on staff displayed a gift for ministry, or even ministered at all except very infrequently. The only person who possessed this gift and more than once uplifted our spirits was Val. I realize full well that ministry at Meeting is not everything, that silence is at the center. When I say that Meeting was dead I mean the silence, too. This obviously is not something that can be remedied by “planning.” It reflects what I perceive as the general lack of spiritual vitality at Woodbrooke. Recommendation: Try simple courtesy first. Maybe true love will then come more easily, and spread its power into Meeting for Worship.

Modules. This comment is not personal, since my Paradise Lost course was not affected by the modules. Only one module student entered my course—Keith, who had read the poem at the University of Toronto under expert guidance and therefore was able to slip into the course without difficulty. But I faithfully attended Anne Thomas’s course on the Bible. Anne is a gifted teacher, very well prepared, a hard worker, articulate, enthusiastic. But her course did not go well, and the reason was the modules. Since, following instructions, she planned the curriculum so that each three-week period would have its own integrity, the power and continuity of the eleven-week course was lost. I spoke to her about this; she is the first to agree. What a shame! Recommendation: If possible, allow eleven-week courses to continue without adjustment for the eleven-week students. Plan module courses as separate entities.

Farewell. I shall relate here my very last interaction with staff, just prior to departing for America on Saturday morning, July 8th, because I think it typifies the problem I have tried to describe above in no. 6. On Friday I asked Helen whether I should deposit my master key in the box by the door before leaving and she said that I should give it directly to her instead, adding, “I’ll be on duty Saturday morning.” On Saturday I therefore left it for her and she said, very kindly, “Thank you.” She performed her duty perfectly. But her duty did not call for her to add, “Have a safe trip” or “Goodbye” or “I hope you had a good stay here” or “I hope we shall see you again someday.” Perhaps she did not wish to say these things to me. But civilized society has developed certain courtesies that make life more tolerable; we say things “typically” without necessarily meaning them from our heart. Helen’s duty produced the “Thank you” for the key but nothing more. She related to me perfectly as “business.” Perhaps she felt that goodbyes had been said at the little ceremony—again “business”—held for all the FIRs a day or so earlier. Yes, they had been said “officially,” and well said. But “unofficially” there was nothing. So I went out the door with a businesslike “Thank you” for my key but without any connection whatsoever between one human being and another—and this from the tutor for community! No wonder that Alison Smith left Woodbrooke in disgust and that Chrysanthi, I, George Smith, Brian Perry, and others found the staff distant, cold, indifferent, and basically discourteous. One does not get the feeling at Woodbrooke that each and every one of us is cherished for that of God in him or her. Rather, one gets the feeling that we are there for eleven weeks, need to be serviced in various “official” ways, and will be replaced in short order by another group. So, “Thank you” for the key—full stop!

Conclusion. I worry that Woodbrooke, at a time when so much energy is being spent on issues of future construction, is functioning very poorly in what truly matters: the spiritual and intellectual parts of the overall program. There is much Quakerly talk about community and love. But community and love are precisely what are defective.

As I said at the start, this letter will probably make you angry. It is outspoken and direct. I repeat, however, that I hope it makes you sad, not angry, and that it was written out of sadness not anger. I am sad to see a primary centre of Quakerism in such trouble. But I also repeat my general Quaker optimism that things will get better. If my analysis has helped to specify the nature of some of the problems, and if my recommendations help in the amelioration, I will be very pleased and will feel that my distressing term at Woodbrooke was not so bad after all.

Sincerely,

Peter Bien

cc: David Saunders, David Gray

Saturday, July 15, 1995

Woke at 6:00 a.m. because the electricity failed and then a huge storm followed. A deep hum, almost like an earthquake. Furious gusts of wind. The house shaking (just a bit). Bangs downstairs. Sheets of rain spray over my bed, as though I were on the deck of a ship. I feared the ash tree would come crashing down onto the roof, just above me. At 7:00 Joan Morris telephoned. She said it was a tornado. Fifty trees down in their place, she thought. The road is blocked. Trees on top of their car. But they have lots of food. She got through to NiMo and reported the outage. I can’t see any significant damage on our place. Just branches down, not whole trees. Lucky. Alec telephoned at 8:30 from Hanover and said the storm is just starting there. It’s now 9:00 a.m.; no electricity yet. But a vehicle just passed on the road, going toward the Morrises’, so presumably my part of Waddell Road is clear. . . . Later: I drove out to get the mail. Was barely able to get around and under various trees across Waddell Road. Other trees along the highway hung up on the electric wires. At the P.O. Brenda told me that a family had been killed at the Lake Luzerne campsite when a tree fell on their trailer and crushed them. Then the man who lives in Lou Curth’s place on River Road said he watched huge pine trees being lifted out of the ground roots and all and toppled, or other trees being stripped of branches and bark in a circular motion by the cyclone. He, like Morris, has uprooted trees strewn everywhere, but no damage to his home or family. Later I took Alec’s Stihl and cleared Waddell Road to the highway, and also his path to his cabin, which had a poplar and an alder across it. Chrysanthi called. Luckily the storm bypassed Hanover. . . . All the Morris children visited (or 7 out of 10) to report that they’d cleared their portion and were able to get round the trees leaning against electric wires. At 6:00 p.m. still no current, which makes the outage twelve hours so far. Weather a bit better: 85 instead of 95. Luckily we have the pond, so I was able to get clean and cool. Probably I should buy an electric generator for such emergencies. I hope our food doesn’t spoil. I have not opened the freezer; perhaps that’s OK. But the fridge is very warm inside. . . . These days I’ve felt a considerable lassitude. Is it the heat? Age? Need for a holiday? I think it’s mostly the heat. . . . The mail keeps arriving. Fortunately all the stock reports are encouraging—large gains everywhere in this surging market. But what happens next?

Monday, July 17, 1995

To Hanover

Two days after the storm and still no electricity. And last night there was another lightning storm with heavy rain (but no wind) and the restored transformer in Wevertown was hit by lightning. No power yet in Riparius, on River Road, etc. The company claims that they had 200,000 customers without current and that 90% are now with current. We obviously are the remaining 10%. Last night we cooked all the chicken and hamburger that had defrosted in the freezer and made a mess trying to dispose of the “frozen” yoghurt, which was a gluey syrup that spilled all over the floor. We also cooked potatoes and corn in the open fire, drank wine, and were well fed. On Sunday we went to the Chester Diner but they had run out of food. Then to Warrensburg, which didn’t seem affected. We ate in the Chinese restaurant and were even able to get some bottled water at the Grand Union. We’ve been using the kerosene lantern at night. I’m tempted to resurrect the old two-burner kerosene stove we used at first. It’s still in the barn, but perhaps filled with mice nests. Why didn’t I buy a portable generator all these years?

Spent most of yesterday reading all the material that had accumulated from Kendal, much of it encouraging, and I wrote out a little “ministry” about the rationale for Quaker silence, which I hope to use tomorrow. Also got my office cleaned up, trimming dead branches off the oak and yellow birch and tarring the wounds. Black flies ferocious. But then came a delicious swim.

In Hanover, supper with John Diffey, Jim Armstrong, Andy Burgess, and Ed Flaccus discussing how best to foster Kendal’s Quaker character. We agreed that the crucial factor will be who is chosen as the next Executive Director. Andy and Ed will try to draw up a list of areas in which Kendal should be different because it is Quaker. Afterwards to the Hanover Inn for a drink with John Diffey. He confided that he would like to become Executive Director of Kendal at Hanover but it is too early in his career and he still has goals to reach where he is. We discovered that Jean Brophy, when instructing new staff about Quakerism, had Chris Huntington, the Catholic priest, do it, and Chris told them that Quakers call people by their first names! What a travesty! Spoke with Betty Barnett, the new Director of Nursing, who said what a joy it is to work under Jim Armstrong (instead of Jean). John and I agreed that we had gotten rid of Jean very “smoothly.” She didn’t threaten a lawsuit and she didn’t even get, or request, severance pay.

Tuesday, July 18, 1995

Hanover

Trustees’ meeting. Chief problem was Jim Armstrong’s desire to include Robert’s Rules of Order in the bylaws. I spoke vigorously against this, as did others, but it was Harry Bird who saved the day by saying that when the Rules are used no one ever understands them. So we won on this issue, preserving the Quaker style of business procedure. The other contention was over Jim’s wording of the duties of an executive committee, strongly opposed by Lafayette. We agreed to rethink this one. I’ll give him alternative wordings and we’ll see what happens. . . . Afterwards, Search Committee: John Hennessey, John Diffey, Margery Walker, Loraine Deisinger. Lee Huntington and Joan McKinley absent. Among the applicants are Richard Bewley and John Clancy. I said that Richard is extremely likeable, etc. but not as bright as I would have hoped. Loraine agreed. John Clancy always made a good impression but we wonder why he doesn’t seem able to hold a job. So far there are fifty-odd applications of which at least fifteen seem qualified on paper. . . . To the dentist. Red Logan died of cancer, poor man. . . . To the office. Bill Cook passed me. I said a warm hello and he muttered “Hello” and kept on walking. Such are the greetings one receives from one’s chairman after a three-month absence. But Pat McKee and Jim Heffernan were very different. . . . Chrysanthi’s students put on a play tonight and then Chrysanthi went with them (the two seminarians) to C & A’s for pizza and beer, offered free by the restaurant. John Rassias telephoned to say how superb Chrysanthi had been these past ten days. Hardly surprising! . . . Called Alec. . . . Still no electricity.

Wednesday, July 19, 1995

To Riparius

Drove back, listening to Daniel Defoe’s History of the Plague in London. Fascinating. Arrived to find the electricity restored. Alec says it came on at 12:30 p.m. That makes our outage 106 hours. All refrigerated food spoiled, of course. But we escaped very well, luckily. . . . Alec has finished the 6-inch layer of sand in the entire trench. Backbreaking work.

Thursday, July 20, 1995

More shoveling, this time to place a layer of dirt, without rocks, above the sand in Alec’s trench, to cushion the rocks that will enter when Carson Bunker fills the trench with his bulldozer. Hard work. I am out of shape, flabby, a bit fat. The pond is a delicious sequel. . . . Perrymans came after supper. I was distressed, as in previous years, by their lack of curiosity. Not a single inquiry regarding our travels or our children or our careers. Instead, endless recital of the accomplishments of their son Arthur, son-in-law Mike, etc. I had to struggle not to fall asleep. Also, the class differences are interesting. They are perfectly content to have Arthur go to Adirondack Community College.

Friday, July 21, 1995

Supper with Fran and Irv Shapiro. What a difference! They wanted to hear all about Japan, about Woodbrooke, about the garden tour, to see our photos, etc. Irv showed his latest paintings, very striking in color (but really deficient in drafting technique, reflecting lack of training). He is self-propelled (as Muriel Poulter says I am) whereas Art Perryman is not; again, he did very little all year, except add to his house and buy more land. Very severe blow-down behind Irv’s house. It’s amazing that we escaped.

Saturday, July 22, 1995

Serendipity. Don Kurka telephoned: Did I want to go to the ballet with him and Marian Morse? Of course. So off we went to the matinee on the final day. Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 (Balanchine), quite traditional, with beautiful alternation of solo dances and corps de ballet to reflect solos and tuttis in the music. Kyra Nichols very engaging; Philip Neal huge and athletic. Then “Ash”—music by Michael Torke, modified minimalist with relentless driving energy, choreographed by Peter Martins, danced by his son Nilas and Wendy Whelan, with lovely costumes: postmodern yet aesthetic. Then a short Balcony Scene from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, a love-dance choreographed by Sean Lavery. Finally: Firebird, 50th anniversary of the 1945 revival, using Marc Chagall’s 1945 scenery and costumes. Three Chagall paintings as big as the whole stage, in spectacular reds and blues. What a pleasure! Also nice to share with Don Kurka our revulsion against deconstruction. He admits that he is having a blockage: doesn’t know what to paint any more. Is discouraged by the postmodern denigration of illusion, the basis of art’s enduring power. . . . A swim. Then to North Creek motel restaurant to celebrate Alec’s birthday. I gave him an electronic device meant to scare away mice (his roof is infested) plus an anthropological study of Java under the old kings and the Dutch. Tortoras arrived by chance. Their daughter, now an M.D. in Alaska, had, I believe, a brief affair with Alec years ago. . . . I faxed to Daphne the blurb I wrote for Doug Gwyn’s book.

Sunday, July 23, 1995

Daphne faxed back very good suggestions for revising the blurb: more “punch,” shorter sentences, a “teaser” to hook the reader. The professional at work! . . . Today she and Greg will walk in Camden Town a bit to see if they favor that house (at £450 a week) instead of the one in St. John’s Wood at £700 a week. Let’s hope so. The third choice is Hampstead, too far away. . . . I revised the blurb and Daphne liked it. She and Greg walked in Camden Town and decided against that house because it fronts the back of a supermarket. . . . To Meadowmount with Irv and Fran and also David Frost, who was with Jane O’Connell. David lost his wife last November. She was blind and had one leg amputated and needed dialysis three times a week, and then had a stroke, so the death was a blessing, in a way. He is still rewriting and ghostwriting biological articles, now especially ones from Japan: he has done 500 so far. Jane is teaching, mostly composition, at Paul Smith’s. Meadowmount program was disappointing: all technique in the first half: a brilliant young violinist, age 18, doing the Sibelius Concerto, such terrible music, at least when heard with piano reduction of the orchestral part. But it showed off all possibilities of violinistic technique. Then a twenty-year-old Korean girl played Ysaye’s Sonata, again pure show, nothing else, followed by a medley from Carmen, which at least had some familiar melodies. The second half was Brahms’s 3rd piano trio, with the piano overpowering the strings and the whole thing jerky and unmusical. But it’s still nice to see the concentration and skill (at least technical) of young people.

Tuesday, July 25, 1995

12:50 p.m. Alec has electricity! Everything is happening at once today. Carson Bunker is filling the trench with his bulldozer; the phone company hooked up the line at the pole, but it still needs to be hooked up at the house; the electric company connected ingoing and outgoing wires at the transformer, hooked up to the pole, installed the meter. With beating hearts we watched Alec plug in a lamp. And it lighted! First use: my present of the electric device to scare away mice.

Wednesday, July 26, 1995

Alec was so lucky that all the workmen came yesterday, for today it rained most of the day, hard, and work was impossible. I was in my “office” in the lightning and thunder, reading galley proofs for JMGS 13 (2), a huge job, for this issue is extensive. Also wrote thank-yous to Meg and Bryer and Tziovas. And I keep thinking about Woodbrooke. By now my letter will have reached John Sheldon, David Saunders, and David Gray. Will I get responses?

Friday, July 28, 1995

Chinese dinner with Shapiros and then a splendid production of Rigoletto at the Lake George opera with a very convincing Rigoletto, the tragic figure condemned to make people laugh. But the real hero is Verdi. This was his first truly great opera, and it’s easy to see why. . . . Leander’s friend and colleague Jim Tombe was again the percussionist. I enjoyed talking with him in the interval.

Saturday, July 29, 1995

Spent all day writing letters to JMGS contributors, bringing the file up to date. Very hot again, but a delicious swim helps. . . . Read Baudelaire’s great prose poem in TLS: ❡ Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu’il guérirait à côté de la fenêtre. Il me semble que je serais bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute san cesse avec mon âme. [déménagement = moving one’s furniture, house-moving, poêle = stove]

Monday, July 31, 1995

On Saturday while I was flossing, a gold ‘on-lay’ flew out of my mouth, one of those superb jobs done by the Madison Avenue dentist fifty years ago and admired ever since by all dentists who have looked into my mouth. This morning it was re-glued by a Dr. Berman in Warrensburg who turns out to be a great reader of English literature who studied Joyce and T. S. Eliot at Johns Hopkins but prefers George Eliot. We had a pleasant dental session sharing our literary enthusiasms. . . . Last night, Tom Akstens was here for supper. How nice to discuss Antigone and compare our reactions to Rigoletto. He is still miserably exploited at Sienna College but at least has a job, and keeps writing book reviews and articles, including pieces for Adirondack Life on fly-casting, for which he is a professional instructor, and combining this with English literature. . . . Worked some more on Redmont’s essay advocating “temperance” (i.e., moderation, not abstinence) among Quakers, regarding wine especially. I’m shortening it and making it more coherent and also more tolerant of the opposing view, with the hope of resubmitting it to the Pendle Hill Publications Committee and finally getting it passed. Since I solicited this at the start, I feel a continuing responsibility. . . . Alec flies tonight at midnight to Seoul and then Jakarta. All signs are that this will be his last year at North JIS.

I keep worrying about the letter I sent to Woodbrooke, and I’m annoyed, and somewhat surprised, that I have not received an answer from any of the three people to whom it was sent.

Tuesday, August 1, 1995

Dan Seeger arrived and we immediately went for a delicious swim. Then to Olmsteadville to supper with Mary and Maureen. Lots of good conversation as always. I tried to give Maureen the “other side” of the Enola Gay controversy. She, having been in the service, of course assumed that the bomb had saved countless American lives and was therefore entirely justified. Afterwards, Dan and I began playing over our “repertoire”: Persichetti, Arensky, Schumann, Bizet, Debussy. Also did Bach’s Little Preludes and Fugues on the harmonium, with Dan playing the pedal part. We’ll save the Schubert Fantasia for tomorrow.

Wednesday, August 2, 1995

I showed Dan my letter to Woodbrooke. I wonder what he really thinks: perhaps that I am a prima donna, or a crank. He told me about Rebecca Mays’s affair with Chuck Fager and Chuck’s difficulty in extricating himself from her cloying grip. And David Frederick, the fund-raiser, was sexually harassing his secretary. Dan wishes that Denny would leave, so he could select his own management team. Also, he vowed to me that in his last two years he is going to try to reestablish a hierarchical authority so that the present situation, in which mediocrity hires mediocrity, will cease. We played duets again in morning and afternoon. For supper we cooked a delicious sirloin on the fire outside. Chrysanthi left at 7:30 to go folk dancing. When she returned at 9:30 Dan and I were still at table, having talked continuously in the interval and never getting round to desert. Nice! Then we played the Schubert Fantasia, and not badly either, except for the final page.

Thursday, August 3, 1995

Dan left after breakfast, headed to Bath, Maine, to visit Liz Kamphausen and her parents. I returned to my office to work on the Middleton volume. The essays require massive copyediting, and it is slow going. Among other things, I completely rewrote the first three pages of Middleton’s introduction, in order to remove the gush and the illogicalities. Let’s hope he doesn’t resent this.

Friday, August 4, 1995

In the afternoon, to Glens Falls to buy a refrigerator for Alec. It took four hours, but at least we ended with a purchase. . . . Drove up to René’s restaurant to see the storm damage. Four large white pines along the road, each one snapped in two about thirty feet up, with the jagged stump remaining. Extraordinary. . . . Supper (last night) with Evelyn and Asa Rothstein, and Shapiros. Their daughter was there; her son was thrilled at Kinhaven when Leander sat in for Brenda in his chamber piece. Asa, although retired, still goes to international conferences, mostly to be honored by his former students and co-workers. . . . Leander arrived after supper, after three days at Cavendish practicing with Ignat. The Grosse Fugue is “impossible,” he tells me; their hands get in each other’s way. He wants to practice these intertwining parts with me. He is full of admiration for Ignat’s intellect, how he analyzes every detail of the music, but not so enthusiastic about his politics, which are ultra-conservative. His career is spectacular: he plays the Brahms piano concerto with the Philadelphia orchestra next month in both Philadelphia and New York, then makes his Carnegie Hall debut. How nice! Leander said that Alexander Solzhenitsyn removed seven hundred cartons of books to Russia, but that hundreds more still remain in Cavendish, which the family hopes will someday become a Solzhenitsyn museum. . . . Leander had a good time with Alec in Washington. He tells us that Alec is now in love with his Indonesian secretary, Emma. That is very complicated. Leander and Deanna arranged a supper with a friend of Alec’s, a former teacher at JIS now living in Washington. It was cordial. But Leander concludes that a deeper relationship is out of the question, because Alec requires a woman who has no “agenda” of her own except serving and following Alec. Alas!

Saturday, August 5, 1995

Worked all day on the journal and Middleton. Leander left early for Ithaca, to attend his friend Todd’s (the ornithologist) wedding, dressed in a $450 designer suit that he proudly bought for $89.00. . . . We went to Gary and Wendy McGinn’s for supper and then to a concert at the Word of Life Inn, together with Marcus’s and Katie’s piano teacher, a woman who has a music-ED degree from Syracuse University and loves English literature. What an experience! This is another world, another culture. The facility is posh: saunas, swimming pool, restaurant, auditorium, beautiful lounges, tennis courts. People come from far and near to stay in the hotel rooms or cottages at $90.00 a day and be with others of the “saved.” Almost immediately we met Jack Woertzen, the founder. He had a strange looking man in tow and announced to us that this individual had just found Jesus. Hallelujah! Also that Mr. So-and-so, a distinguished man, had found the Lord yesterday. Amen! The concert was a solo “recital” by the founder’s son, Don (or Dan) Woertzen, on a huge Steinway concert grand with a microphone stuck into its soundboard. He started with an adaptation of the Ode to Joy theme from Beethoven’s 9th: hideous; piano with percussion accompaniment. Then he told jokes in a patter—a sacred Victor Borge without the latter’s true wit. Then he expanded on his training, given the Lord’s gift of musicality (!). Obviously he’d had classical training from a teacher who, he enthused, played all 48 Bach preludes and fugues by heart as well as all the Beethoven piano sonatas. But his own playing (essentially by ear) was mechanical. Bang bang! No musicality whatever to sweeten that extraordinary technique and self-assurance. Then he read bloopers from church bulletins—e.g., “Today’s sermon: the meaning of Hell. Come early to hear our choir practice.” Or: “Ceremony today in both the north and south transepts. Babies will be baptized at both ends.” And so forth. Then he played the organ processional (on the piano) that he had written for one of his children’s weddings, very organistic actually, better than the soupy tin-pan-alley piano stuff. Then he played songs he had written, no words, just the music (but the audience knew the words). Then we all sang “He is exalted . . . as head over all,” repeatedly, rising for the last verse. Then he did a sort of skit, getting a non-musician to take a lesson by repeating a note three times, to which Woertzen provided a full accompaniment. Finally, he announced that before his last number (thank God!) he would testify, whereupon he told us his life story: how successful he had been, with home, car, monthly salary, etc., and how at age 40 he realized that none of this meant anything because our lives here mean nothing—the only meaning is after death. Thus in our lives here we must be united with Jesus, who guarantees us “passage” to beatitude—who saves us. (This confirms my own sense that it’s very hard to be a Christian if one does not believe in the afterlife.) Oh, I forgot that earlier he had read a poem of praise, a eulogy, for his father. The father concluded the evening by leading us in prayer. But the prayer consisted of information about all the important people who were coming this next week, including the director’s children, etc. What does all this mean? Primarily, I think, “family values.” (Therefore homophobia, horror at abortion.) It’s a sort of repetition of the primitive church: a refuge in a time of decadence.

Speaking of decadence, Dan Seeger is convinced that we’ll become a third-world nation and that the rich will get richer, the poor poorer, that the working class will be marginalized because labor will be done in Indonesia, etc., where it is cheap.

Sunday, August 6, 1995

Finally found George Syrimis in Cyprus. I’ve never received his galley proofs. Now he tells me that he sent them to Woodbrooke. . . . I’m glad I wrote to John Chioles saying that I should be replaced as editor after one more year—i.e., after I complete my second three-year term.

Wednesday, August 9, 1995

Leander is working hard on the Grosse Fugue for his Washington four-hand concert with Ignat Solzhenitsyn. It’s devilishly difficult, mainly because the two players get in each other’s way so frequently. Thus Leander has asked me to play the primo (Ignat’s part) in those places, and we repeat and repeat until he develops strategies (sotto, sopra, quick release of a note, etc.) to avoid a clash. It’s great fun. Incredibly complex music written by Beethoven late in life. . . . We have also read over all the other pieces on the program: Marches, a sonata, two schools of variations. What a pleasure to play with Leander as my partner, and what a contrast with Dan.

Wednesday, August 16, 1995

Finished mowing the south field. That’s it for this summer. Και του χρόνου! Off to Hanover. Supper in Lake George diner with Leander, who then returned. Arriving at 12 Ledyard Lane we encountered two skunks on the front lawn. Luckily we didn’t startle them and they wandered off.

Thursday, August 17, 1995

Hanover

Stewardship meeting, 8:00 a.m. We’re gearing up for fundraising, hoping to get $200,000 a year to reach $1,000,000 by 2000 for assistance for monthly and entrance fees. Wayne Broehl and Treat Arnold have joined the committee. I’m going to rewrite the Mission Statement as a Case Statement for the committee. . . . Long meeting afterwards with Jim Armstrong and John Hennessey. The search for the CEO now has seven shortlisted but Bob Shaughnessy is one of these, so the effective number is really six. Richard Bewley and John Clancy are still in the running. Interviews occur next week, after which only two or three will be shortlisted and will come to Kendal for visits. . . . We worried about the tax appeal to the Supreme Court. Bob Reno feels (a) that we’ll lose, (b) that the IRS will then attack us. He advises working with legislators for more favorable laws. Neil Castaldo has not produced amici curiae so far, which is worrisome. But John H. still hopes we’ll proceed. Jim and I are on the fence. We’ll let Debbie Cooper produce our brief and submit it, however. . . . To the dentist afterwards. Red Logan died. I now have Dr. Neal. She says this tooth will need a crown. Cost: $650, and we now have no dental insurance. . . . Had Middleton disks all converted to Mac Word 5.1 so I can now work with them. . . . Got Mother and returned to the farm, thank goodness. Hanover seems so suburban. Dogs bark all night. You can’t find a parking place. But it’s still marvelously convenient and beautiful.

Friday, August 18, 1995

Leander picked Deanna up at Albany airport last night, stayed over in a motel, and arrived this noon. Deanna looking very fresh and attractive. . . . I ordered Haydn sonatas, which Leander says are best if I want to start learning a solo piece. . . . Spent the morning doing another draft of the Redmont essay on Quaker temperance. Now it goes to him for approval. I’ll try to submit it to Pendle Hill’s Publication Committee again if Rebecca allows. Also two days ago wrote a review of the new biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry, who paints Greene as a malicious hypocrite, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, deceptive, a complete sham morally, an ogre. I spoke of Proust on Vinteuil: the separation of the art and the life.

Tuesday, August 22, 1995

Leander, Deanna, and Yiayia left yesterday after a pleasant visit. Yiayia in fine shape, body and spirit, enjoyed the sun, read Thomas Hardy, painted with Chrysanthi (although she says she can’t paint any more, prefers playing the violin), and slept soundly in our living room. Deanna one afternoon practiced Brahms’ violin concerto and Bach unaccompanied suites in the barn, with the sound wafting across the field to me in my office: very nice. Leander practiced well: Grosse Fugue, other Beethoven four-hand pieces for the October concert with Ignat, plus lots of Czerny and Clementi. And we did all of my four-hand repertoire together plus the new Dello Joio and Stravinsky’s five easy pieces, with Leander able to play the hard part, of course. Perfect Stravinsky. And we did a marvelous Ravel “Beauty and the Beast.” He suggested Haydn sonatas if I want to start learning solo repertoire, which I do. . . . Last night listened again to Leander’s “Prelude and Caper for Brass Trio and Piano,” this time with the score, which makes a huge difference. It’s sophisticated and playful and, I would think, very difficult to play well. He’s a capable composer. I wish he’d do more. Also listened again, with score, to the Grosse Fugue played by the Budapest String Quartet. Such a forbidding piece. I didn’t like it at first; it seems to have no soul, to be a hypertrophy of intellect. But I’m getting to like it better as I listen again. The instruments are almost indistinguishable (except the cello) for they keep crossing each other in register (which explains why Leander and Ignat are always in each other’s way). . . . Working well and extensively on the Middleton book. Mailed Jeter two days ago and Bak yesterday and am ready to mail Dombrowski today. In quality they are A, B, C+, alas, with Dombrowski’s now in forth draft, still very disjointed. But he probably can’t do any better. . . . Artemis Leontis sent the sweetest letter in response to my declaration to John Iatrides that I should step down as journal editor after my sixth year (1996). Artemis begs me not to, and says nice things about the journal. Eva Konstantellou telephoned for the same reason. It’s nice to be “stroked” like this occasionally. I certainly don’t get any strokings from Chrysanthi. . . . Our new mower, a Troy-Bilt, is working well. It took me an entire day to assemble it. Leander cleared out the patch beneath the old carriage shed and now we can look through the remaining trees and see the north field unobstructed. Last night a deer was there, staring back at us. . . . Daphne and Greg have completed their move to Christchurch Street, off King’s Road in Chelsea. Sloane Square tube again. Daphne says she loves the street, which is “villagey.” The neighbors are friendly and talkative, and the Royal Hospital Gardens are adjacent, a sort of private park for them, not to mention the river and Embankment a block away. She laments that we’re not coming at Christmas. But I’ve already booked our tickets for March. . . . Yesterday saw a tiny spider, no bigger than the head of a pin, paralyze and kill a large ant, ⅜” long at least, and drag it away. . . . Healthwise, my left foot is hurting again and I’m using the protective shield that Dr. Helms made for me. And last week I had pain in my right hip joint for two days. Arthritis? Urination problem a bit worse, too. Otherwise, fine. Lots of energy. Sleep well. Work well.

Friday, August 25, 1995

Finished editing Jerry Gill’s essay on Kazantzakis and Kierkegaard: very moving. But I had to add lots of facts—e.g., Kazantzakis’s use of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic-ethical-religious material in his Odyssey. . . . Redmond replied. He likes my revision of the Quaker moderation essay. Now let’s see if we can get it past the PH Publications Committee on the third try.

Saturday, August 26, 1995

Al and Mary Zalon are at the Shapiros. We had supper all together and then all came here and we played Telemann, Bach, and Mozart, not too well, of course, and had Chrysanthi’s apple strudel for dessert. Laura and Michael Gouthreau came, too. All very pleasant. . . . Leander and Deanna left early this morning and telephoned from Potomac eight hours later. Leander cleared the area in what used to be the carriage shed; it now looks very nice. We can see out to the north field.

Sunday, August 27, 1995

An interesting day. 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., worked some more on Gill’s essay. 10:00 a.m. to noon, played more Bach, Mozart and Loeillet with Al, much better. The second movement of Mozart’s flute concerto is lovely. We did the other concerto in toto also. 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., took out a rock in the north field; seeded the entire area dug up for Alec’s electricity; harrowed it all with the tractor. Shower. 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. went to Art Perryman’s cabin, on the way out stopping to watch a heron sitting on our road very placidly and looking back at us. Art’s annual barbecue. Long talk with Jim Smith about possibility for a North Creek library. Met Wayne Schoonmaker, the pastor of their church. He trained in Philadelphia Baptist Bible College. Couldn’t really get a conversation going with him, but it was good to meet. Perrymans’ daughter Arlene there with husband Michael and infant daughter. Also John Armstrong, whom I mistook for Richard Stewart, which he did not appreciate. Walking back to Art’s cabin, saw the devastation from the storm. Terrible. 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. walked down to Alec’s beaver pond to see if he had any storm damage. None. What a lovely property he has. Then a good cup of coffee fleshly brewed; then a nap on the couch. Then e-mail session; Gill’s revised text sent off to Darren; letters sent to Flinders University officials, lamenting decision to eliminate one position in Modern Greek. Poor Leo; he’s being besieged.

Friday, September 1, 1995

Leslie English arrived for the weekend with a “serious boyfriend” named Ira. He works for IBM and makes beer and mead (!) as a hobby. Nice man. Very considerate guests. They pitched a tent in the pole barn. We went to Tom Akstens for a luscious supper. A woman friend was there; she’s a music impresario, knew about Charlie, etc. Tom has a TV disk and can see 300 channels—in Baker’s Mills!

Sunday, September 3, 1995

Finished copyediting Middleton’s on Whitehead yesterday. Now I have only Kamperidis’s, and to write my own. Today I spent six hours at the computer making a composite list of references for the book. What tedium, but it has to be done. Changed clothes afterwards and finished putting the tractor up for the winter. . . . Alec wrote that he’s going to Beijing for a conference, then to Singapore for another. He’s in his element. . . . Kendal interviews are finished. The committee meets next week to select the short list. Sherrie told me she wishes they could have Jim Armstrong for ten years. What a relief to have Jean out of there. . . . Mother felt dizzy yesterday and was taken to the nursing area. Our friend Ann Wentworth telephoned, said it was probably a mild stroke but that she is fine now; heart perfect; just tired. How nice she’s in Kendal for both her sake and ours.

This poem was in the TLS, 11 August, p. 10, very fine: “A Postmodern Hymn to Obscurity”:

In the beginning was the light

and the light was life

and the light was with life

and by light were all things made

and the light shone in darkness

and the darkness knew it

and lectured on it

and light died before the uncreating word.

So darkness lectured on darkness to darkness

and the darkness saw that it was good.

—Alasdair Gray

Supper again with Mary and Maureen, who are always good company. I showed Maureen a letter from John Tallmadge, whom she knew as Dean when she was doing her Ph.D. at the Union Institute.

Tuesday, September 5, 1995

The final week, alas. Supper with Perrymans, followed by tour of the new rooms in their house, their son very taciturn, as always. . . . I’m working now on my own essay for the Middleton volume.

Thursday, September 7, 1995

Final supper with the Shapiros. Mrs. Morris, having ignored us all summer, invited us tonight and we said No.

Friday, September 8, 1995

To Hanover

Final rituals: draining water, dismantling my office, and the rest. Back to Hanover. Felitsa is in the house still.

Saturday, September 9, 1995

To Kendal, and supper with Mother, who is tired after her “episode” (probably a minor stroke) but otherwise OK. She had very good treatment and is so happy to be at Kendal.

Today started at 10:00 a.m. at John Hennessey’s house. He brought me up to speed re: the Kendal search committee. They have two lead candidates and two back-ups (one of whom is Richard Bewley). Mother will be taking Jack Coleman’s ILEAD course on Thomas Hardy. I’ll give her my Hardy lecture from the Book of the Month Club cruise.

Monday, September 11, 1995

Long meeting with Jim Armstrong at Kendal followed by John Hennessey. We planned the visits of the two candidates.

Tuesday, September 12, 1995

Holly Parker came. She’ll be doing an English Honors with me on Joyce and Kazantzakis, classicism and romanticism. Saw Elaine Gaylor after many years. Also Brock Brower. Met with Dave Montgomery and Gene Lyons to plan War/Peace University Seminars series on socialistic critique of capitalism, Dave’s “thing.”

Thursday, September 14, 1995

Doctor Brannen tells me that I have cataracts in both eyes, but very minimal so far. Also, the pressure is up again, and my eyesight degenerated considerably in only six months. I need a new prescription. None of this is encouraging, obviously. . . . I did the “reception” for Peace Studies. More students this year than ever before. . . . Conference call on our appeal to the Supreme Court. Neil Castaldo has been unable to secure amici curiae and we are therefore discouraged, although I found Debbie Cooper’s brief quite cogent. John Hennessey, who was #1 pro is now #1 con, feeling that the gesture should be made by a group of hospitals, with more clout. And Bob Reno, the old pro at NH law, tells us that we will lose. We agreed to wait until early October, when the Town’s brief will be available, before deciding.

Friday, September 15, 1995

Pendle Hill

To Philadelphia via US Air alas, the Montrealer having been discontinued. Pendle Hill so lively and friendly and vital compared to Woodbrooke. The first face I saw was George Smith’s, visiting from England, together with the two Friends in Residence who had been at Woodbrooke, too. Played Dello Joio and Ravel with Dan after ice cream. He is still embattled, feeling that he is hampered from leading. And à propos at supper Chris Ravndal went on at length about consensual vs. hierarchical governance. So, nothing has changed. Also, there are only 20 students. And last year, with 30 students, still produced a deficit. The new dean, Margaret Frazier, is aware of all the problems. We had a long talk about my sense that the modular system at Woodbrooke won’t work. She has a better version of it, copied from Earlham School of Religion.

Monday, September 18, 1995

The annual lobster dinner at Kendal. Very jolly. Ate with Mother, and John and Barbara Gilbert. Then Chrysanthi and I went to the Harvard-Radcliffe Club to hear Dr. Plume, clinic head, on problems of medical distribution, taking John Diffey along. Plume had been a cub scout in Nardi Campion’s troop.

Tuesday, September 19, 1995

Kendal Board. Candidates start coming tomorrow. John Hennessey is very angry because Treat Arnold was accepted into membership last April and hasn’t appeared once. . . . Supper at Sweet Tomatoes with Chuck and Trix Officer. The “penultimate supper,” as he called it, for he goes into hospital on Thursday for by-pass surgery. Mortality is only 1%, so his chances are splendid . . . yet he’s frightened. (We learned all about such things as mortality rates from Dr. Plume last night.)

Wednesday, September 20, 1995

Terry Lowd, our first candidate, is here. Dan, he, and I toured the facility at 4:00 p.m. First time I’d been in the boiler room. Terry is affable, picked up people’s names easily, but generally is not very “alive,” strangely. I’m surprised that the Search Committee valued him so highly. Long supper at the Inn afterwards.

Thursday, September 21, 1995

Terry Lowd all day at Kendal. We met with him again at 4:30 p.m. He desperately wants the job (he’s now unemployed), but Cara told me that he is very low on the staff’s list; he seems to be something of a male chauvinist, and one informant told us that he is a womanizer. But he lacks electricity. . . . Stewardship meeting in the morning. Wayne Broehl is with us now. Very eager about fund-raising.

Sunday, September 24, 1995

I gave a class on William Penn at Meeting, swatting it up last week, mostly on the plane to and from Pendle Hill. He seems much more remarkable than I’d ever realized. . . . Felitsa and Sheldons for supper. I toasted καλορίζικο for Felitsa’s new house. She slept there for the first time last night.

Monday, September 25, 1995

Lunch with Ned Perrin. He’s still grieving for Anne. Taking an anti-depressant that causes impotence. But teaching in Environmental Science and hoping to write two books, one “An Almost Perfect Marriage,” another on the new electric car he hopes to drive all the way to Colorado. His writings about Anne’s death have advertised him as an eligible bachelor; he was approached by a Mrs. Roosevelt, former chief of protocol in the Bush White House, to have lunch in Washington.

The second candidate arrived, Stephen Fleming, head of Friends Homes West, Greensboro, aged 31. What a difference! He knows the business inside-out, is full of electricity and life. But can we get him? He worries about the cultural change living in the North. He kept insisting on calling me Dr. Bien.

Tuesday, September 26, 1995

More with Fleming. Everyone loves him. John H. and Margery Walker will visit Greensboro next week and try to convince him not to pull out. . . . I finally reached Kamperidis in Istanbul, thanks to Selen Ünsal’s help with phone numbers. His is the only essay still not ready. He mailed it, he says, last week.

Wednesday, September 27, 1995

Music started. Played Kuhlau trio, very nice, and Haydn and Martinu. Kamperidis’s essay arrived. I finished “God’s Struggler”!

Thursday, September 28, 1995

Mailed “God’s Struggler” to Mercer University Press and to Darren Middleton. Celebrated by eating a hamburger with John Lincoln and Marianne Best at the Inn during a meeting re: ILEAD. . . . Attended James Breeden’s farewell ceremony. Very warm testimonials. He was shafted by the provost, it seems. I’m now on the Search Committee for his successor. . . . Dinner at the Indian restaurant with Chrysanthi and Felitsa so Chrysanthi wouldn’t have to cook after cooking for 110 homeless people in Lebanon. Then Felitsa took us for strudel and espresso. Very fancy. Then laughed with Benny Hill.

Saturday, September 30, 1995

Trying to catch up. Making more tapes for Demotic Greek. Filling out recommendations for students. Catching up on journal correspondence. Hoping to clear away some of the piles of papers still on our bedroom floor. Went to Poverty Lane orchard to get apples and see some autumn color.

Sunday, October 1, 1995

Terpni

Magnificent color around Killington: whole mountainsides of red. Farm beautiful. Grass I planted on Alec’s trench is growing, although spotty in places. I pruned the fruit trees. We picnicked on the porch. Alvin Millington drove up, hunting partridge and grouse. Says he surveys the property every so often. Walked the logging path to the swamp to see if there was any storm damage. Minimal, although the path needs clearing again. Nap. Nice supper in Whitehall: Italian.

Monday, October 2, 1995

Met with Bruce Pipes. He and the provost’s office will take over the university seminars, but he wants me to remain as a partner for the foreseeable future. . . . Wrote a long letter to Δημήτρης Γουνελάς exploring further his invitation for me to teach in Thessaloniki next autumn. Will I get paid? Housing? . . . Long telephone talk with Lloyd Lewis. Asked about Richard Bewley as possible administrator for Kendal. Lloyd says “Beware” because Richard’s marriage is strained and he’s not predictable. Was offered another job; accepted and then withdrew because his wife refused to move. I also asked Lloyd about the anti-Quaker movement in the Board. Should we abdicate, in effect? Lloyd says No, hang in there. If the Quakers go, Kendal will be just like all the other places, lacking distinctiveness. I must caucus the Quaker element.

Wednesday, October 4, 1995

Kendal trustees met in extraordinary session, with John Diffey and Don Kidder connected by telephone, and we decided to make an offer to Stephen Fleming. Now he and his wife will visit again on Saturday and Sunday to see if new England “culture” is compatible enough. We are preparing a good show. I got Nancy Corindia to chaperone them on Saturday afternoon, for example. We’re hoping. If he says No, we’ve got no one and will need to start all over again.

Thursday, October 5, 1995

Daphne called. She’s pregnant. Chrysanthi is already planning to go in June when the baby comes. Well, we may be grandparents yet.

Friday, October 6, 1995

Crisis. Steve Fleming says that he won’t come for under $100,000. We offered $82,500. Jim Armstrong, John Hennessey, Margery Walker, and I met for two hours. Margery was totally positive, says $100,000 is appropriate. Jim is now totally negative, saying that Steve is mercenary. But John and I won him round to allow tomorrow’s visit to take place. . . . Good music: Kuhlau, Handel, Kaltenborn.

Sunday, October 8, 1995

Steve and Anne Fleming are here. We had a cordial breakfast, toured Lebanon a bit, went to the Methodist church service (which Steve found exactly the same as North Carolina services) and then to the airport, where his plane was cancelled at the last minute and we had to spend an extra $650 to get them home. He says he’ll let us know in 48 hours. . . . Supper at Kendal with Mother and Morton and Toby Bien, who are quite nice. She’s loud and brassy but a schoolteacher of English who is probably very effective in the classroom. Morton is still totally estranged from his brother Howard, who seems to exist just this side of the law.

Tuesday, October 10, 1995

John Hennessey telephoned. Steve Fleming’s verdict is No. The reason, he says, is his wife’s uneasiness with leaving her roots in North Carolina. So, we’re back to the beginning. We meet tomorrow.

Wednesday, October 11, 1995

Jim Armstrong is very distressed, not sure he wants to serve beyond December 1st, yet we’ll never find an Executive Director before then. I talked with Margery and John Diffey. All agree that we must respect Jim’s wishes and let him step down if he must. We’ll meet again next week when John is here.

Friday, October 13, 1995

Lovely surprise. Knock on my office door and in walks Leon Black and his wife Debra. I told him how often Chrysanthi and I thought of him, wondered how he was doing, followed his downs and ups in the papers, etc. He is flourishing, owner of a company that buys up other companies, effects mergers, improves management, etc., and then reaps the profits when the faltering company succeeds. He is obviously extremely wealthy: just endowed a Shakespeare chair at Dartmouth. He’s indulging his love of art by being an art collector, seriously, with agents, etc. Latest specialty: Chinese bronzes. Previously, Mondrian. He lends paintings to museums, works closely with the Museum of Modern Art and will probably be a trustee there next year. They have four children, each in a different private school in New York.

Saturday, October 14, 1995

Breakfast at Hanover Inn with Leon and Debra. His mother has remarried; his sister is divorced. He and Debra repeatedly urged us to use their apartment on 78th and Park as headquarters when we’re in NYC. They have a separate floor for guests with a private entrance, kitchen, etc. I said I’d love to see his paintings, of course.

Nice letter from Andrea Useem, 2½ days after arriving at Woodbrooke. She is excited by all the Africans there (as I had predicted). I wrote back, asking her to give regards to Stuart Morton and really no one else. I’m still haunted by my estrangement from the staff there. There isn’t a day when it doesn’t come to mind, alas.

Daphne telephoned. She’s beginning to have peculiar appetites; craved broccoli yesterday. Chrysanthi explained that this happens in normal pregnancies.

I spent half the day clearing a pile of papers left on our bedroom floor from the British trip and earlier. Still one more huge pile to go.

An Italian proverb says: Traduttore traditore (translator traitor). Too bad I didn’t know this earlier for my translation article for the Arndt festschrift.

Stewardship met the other day. We want Walter Frank to head the Kendal Fund Drive. But the poor man just lost his son to cancer of the throat and is frequently in New York reorganizing the business. But, gallantly, he said he would consider it.

Monday, October 16, 1995

Incredible! John Hennessey telephoned early. Fleming has changed his mind. He said that Anne was weeping all week, convinced they’d made the wrong decision. They went to church yesterday, prayer, etc. So they’re coming. (Luckily for them, we had no 2nd choice candidate to fill the job in the interim.) The question now is salary. Steve says he should get $115,000. John Hennessey, Jim Armstrong, John Diffey, and I met for hours, with Margery Walker connected by telephone. We agreed on $105,000 plus a one-time gift of $5000 to ease the move. Steve accepted.

Tuesday, October 17, 1995

Board meeting. John H. explained the salary at great length. After an hour, they approved. I went out and telephoned Steve. He’ll tell his staff this afternoon. We called in our management staff, told them, and I wrote a letter to all residents saying that they’d agreed to leave a lifetime in North Carolina to come to our frozen north, and I hoped that the warmth of welcome would compensate for the temperature. Steve told me on the phone that the change had occurred in large part because he found in trying to write to me to justify the earlier No decision that he just couldn’t do it, couldn’t send the letter. Tomorrow I’ll send them a catalogue for thermal underwear, an L. L. Bean catalogue, a copy of my letter to residents, something about Quaker boards, news of our retreat planned for January 15 (Steve will begin work on January 8), a list of houses available from McLaughry realty, business card of Sally Rutter, realtor, a list of Dartmouth rentals. We also agreed, at the Board meeting, to pull out from the Supreme Court appeal, reluctantly. Chose Lake Morey Inn for the retreat, after visiting it yesterday with John Hennessey so that, in the car, we could talk about Steve’s salary before meeting with the others.

Wednesday, October 18, 1995

A reply by John Sheldon to my letter sent in July. Totally self-defensive, but at least he doesn’t call me an egotist filled with spiritual pride. But he conveniently doesn’t remember my repeated requests to play four-hand duets, and dismisses all my other criticisms in one way or another. At the end, however, he expresses friendship and hopes that Chrysanthi and I will return to Woodbrooke soon. That’s good. I’ll write back, briefly, putting an end, as he wishes, to this controversy, which it makes no sense at all to prolong. . . . Also received a long letter the other day from Anne Thomas, reaffirming her alienation from Woodbrooke. Won’t see her tomorrow at Pendle Hill, alas, for she’s been rotated off the board. . . . An hour-long telephone interview by Holly Lebowitz, a Cornell student working on Scorsese’s film of The Last Temptation. I’m an external advisor for her thesis. . . . This morning, first meeting of the Search Committee for the new Tucker dean. Lee Pelton is the chair. The provost, Lee Bollinger, surprised everyone by saying that he didn’t care whether the new dean reported directly to him or to the president. The sentiment around the table so far seems to favor the service aspect of Tucker rather than a dean’s “prophetic” role. I agree, thinking of my early work camp experience and the years when Tucker, with my cooperation, was sending students to international work camps.

Thursday, October 19, 1995

To Philadelphia

Took AMTRAK Vermonter, the new day train replacing the Montrealer, to Philadelphia: 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Our car insufferably hot. Electricity failed in the café car. The train goes on Central Vermont tracks to Palmer, Mass., then switches to Conrail to Springfield, going backwards with many delays. It’s like Yugoslavia in the 1950s. But we arrived in time to meet new board members at Dan’s home, including an interesting black Jamaican, Noel Palmer, from Westbury, NY meeting, and Margaret Hope Bacon. Afterwards, Dan and I played Dello Joio, Ravel, Debussy, Arensky, Bizet, Persichotti—our repertoire, old and new. Not bad, actually, but I need to work much more on the Dello Joio.

Friday, October 20

Pendle Hill

Everyone delighted to see Chrysanthi, of course. I had a long breakfast with Doug Gwyn, discussing possible reviewers for his new book. Then orientation of new board members re: the Publications Committee. Then long meeting with Rebecca, planning agenda, etc. We rejected all three submissions, which pleased me. Afterwards, Yuki Brinton asked about my Tokyo trip and I recounted it as best I could. I’ll send her my typed diary. Then another session with Rebecca going over submissions to the book subcommittee. We rejected most without reading them. We hope to do a new biography of Douglas Steere and a reprint of one of his books. After supper we had a book signing for Doug’s book with me introducing it by reading my blurb on the back cover. Then David Fredericks jokingly (I hope) said, “I hope the book isn’t as dense as Peter Bien’s blurb.” Then three women gave a dramatic reading from our next book, the Quaker women’s nineteenth-century diaries. Then back to Dan’s for another go at our repertoire. He told me that Pendle Hill’s property tax exemption is being challenged by the Wallingford School Board, and I was able to recite to him the long history of Kendal’s similar problem. It turns out that now I’m a sort of expert in such matters. . . . The Meeting today was very powerful. Dan told me afterwards that he had feared after the departure of Peter Crysdale and Bill Tabor that ministry would suffer. But it hasn’t. Today a friend from Kansas raised on a farm spoke well about the importance of manual labor for one’s spiritual development.

Saturday, October 21, 1995

Pendle Hill–New York

The program this morning was the Resident Program Review. I introduced it together with Shirley Dodson and Bob Gray. I said that there had never been a review, and Dorothy Steere corrected me, but I replied, correctly, that it can no longer be found. Then everyone broke into small groups to determine which of our recommendations they favored, which they found ill advised, etc. I’m not sure that very much came out of this, except strong support for courses of a different length. . . . At the Executive Council the main item was the challenge to our tax status. I repeated much of what I’d said to both Dan and Denny yesterday. . . . Back to 30th Street with Chrysanthi. Yale Club at 4:30. Daphne and Greg in their hotel (Four Seasons, 57th Street) at 5:30. Both looking radiant despite their flight. The hotel a last-minute change because of a mix-up and congestion in NYC hotels because of the 50th anniversary of the UN with over a hundred heads of state in the city, police everywhere, motorcades of huge limousines, and the like. Daphne and Greg just yesterday in London had seen her fetus via ultrasound. Everything normal. It’s an inch long! The beating heart was very visible. Daphne is doing well, although her appetite is strange and sometimes she feels tired. Chrysanthi brought her a “pregnancy book” recommended by Nancy Corindia. The baby is due in the first week of June. . . . We ate a real NYC supper in Wolf’s Delicatessen on 57th. Greg had pastrami, I had chicken liver, and everyone had pickles and cheesecake. Then to the NY State Theater to see Puccini’s Turandot for the first time. Steady music, no real arias except two very famous ones, one by Liù and one by the tenor lead. Daphne in the interval enlightened us all by explaining that the emperor and Turandot are Confucians, and require that everything be done according to elaborate ritual, while the skeptics Ping, Pang, and Pong (!) are Taoists, who resist artificial rituals and feel an affinity with nature. All this Daphne learned from the book on oriental religion that she is editing. I told her that I wish she had written the program notes. We were in the 4th tier in $17.00 seats and surrounded by young people, New York’s opera fans of a tender age. How nice! Daphne and Greg were very tired by this time, understandably. It was 4:00 a.m. by their body clocks.

Sunday, October 22, 1995

Daphne and Greg came to the Yale Club for a two-hour, leisurely breakfast. I expanded on my latest thinking, or perplexity, about how to pass the farm on to the children in a way that minimizes taxes and fuss. Just read a book advocating conservation easements and saying that to pass on land via a will is the worst possible way. I’ll investigate a limited partnership further. Greg then returned to the hotel’s health club to work out, Daphne and Chrysanthi went shopping for maternity clothes, and I went off very excitedly to the Metropolitan Museum to see the Rembrandt and Goya exhibits. The theme of both was authenticity. In Rembrandt’s case, which paintings, formerly attributed to him and often signed, were actually done by his students. The exhibit included engravings, etchings, and drawings. These, perhaps even more than the paintings, show the sheer virtuosity of this master, especially the etchings. One of them interested me in particular because of my paper several years ago on the sexuality of Jesus. The etching “Christ Crucified Between Two Thieves” (The Three Crosses), 1653, 2nd state of 5, Met. Catalogue #94A, clearly shows both Christ and one of the thieves with erections. Goya’s work is of course totally different. Here, too, etchings were impressive, especially the “Disasters of War” sequence done between 1810 and 1823. How effective this would be in War/Peace Studies, juxtaposed to paintings, like David’s, that idealize war and warriors. Plate 69, called “Nada. Ello lo dice” (Nothing. That’s what he says) shows a skeleton, victim of the famine following the Napoleonic invasions, and the audio lecture suggested that it is often interpreted as Goya’s rejection of the possibility of an afterlife. Useful for Kazantzakis. . . . Forgot to say that Greg last week went to Paris on the train three hours from Waterloo to Gare de Nord. Breakfast on the train, 20 minutes in the tunnel. He had a long lunch with clients and returned in the afternoon. Remarkable. . . . Met Daphne and Chrysanthi at the Yale Club at 3:00. Goodbye to Daphne until Thursday. Then to Penn Station. Goodbye to Chrysanthi until the 28th. Marion Fuson at Pendle Hill told me, “You’re at your best when Chrysanthi is with you. You’re complete.” Amen. . . . To Princeton. They have put me in the Nassau Inn. Very posh. Just had a full roast beef dinner in the Tap Room, where I’m writing these notes. Tomorrow: start work with Dimitri Gondicas & Co. on the revision of Demotic Greek 1.

Monday, October 23, 1995

Princeton, Nassau Inn

Worked with Dimitri, Andromache Karanika, and Kostas Kanakis from 9:30 to 11:30 and again from 4:00 to 5:00. We attacked the agenda I’d prepared earlier, deciding on monotonic vs. polytonic, the sequence of parts in each chapter, how to treat Maria, what aspects of Greek “reality” to include, etc. Tomorrow we’ll start actual composition: chapter 1. Dimitri took me to lunch to discuss MGSA and JMGS. The large bibliography project that was commissioned under my presidency has collapsed entirely under Peter Allen’s care. Embarrassing. Dimitri hopes that I’ll stay on as editor of the journal for another three years. I said I would. Regarding Hopkins’ demand for $4000 more in subsidies, I said that Dimitri, John Iatrides, and I should go to Baltimore and meet with Marie Hansen and others when I return to Princeton. Direct meetings are better that letters back and forth. . . . Mike Keeley said hello in the morning. He’s off to Australia this morning for a PEN meeting.

Tuesday, October 24, 1995

Princeton

We did the red-blue-black of the scenario of chapter 1, keeping the basic text more or less. Lunch with David Ricks, Dimitri, Stathis Gourgouris. David gave a talk on Kalvos in the afternoon and then about twenty of us went for a banquet at a Chinese restaurant. Nice talk with Bob Fagles, who remembers Jim Armstrong well and says that he could have been a distinguished Homerist if he hadn’t gone into administration. Fagles, amazingly, didn’t start learning Greek until after completing an English major at Yale. Also had a chance to talk to Alexander Nehemas, who invited me to be a visiting professor at Princeton sometime in the future. How nice! . . . Worked late on the Demotic Greek revision, typing it into the computer, and found a way to print my file at Kinkos at 10:00 p.m.

Thursday, October 26, 1995

Princeton–Washington, Hotel DuPont Plaza

Yesterday: good working sessions again. We’re still on chapter 1 but it will go faster once we establish the basic template. It’s good to have Kanakis, the linguist. Worked again this morning. Then bus to Trenton. I was the only white person. The driver conversed continually with various passengers using his microphone. Another culture! A churchman boarded and collected money for a mother whose son had been killed by a car (so he said). A Puerto Rican boarded later and the driver greeted him with “¿Como estas?” In Trenton, fast-food restaurant in the station, repulsive, slobbering bag lady treated kindly by the black girl behind the counter. . . . Daphne was in the first coach of the 1:57, as previously arranged. She’d had a productive time in New York, even with the “difficult author” who has been so tardy in submitting her chapter for Daphne’s book on eastern religions. But especially regarding photos for the book on Native Americans. And she says that she likes New York City and feels at home there, although growing increasingly fond of London. She’s in good spirits and good health, with no ill effects from the pregnancy so far. We went to the DuPont Plaza Hotel and were joined by Irv and Fran Shapiro for supper. They reported that Ignat’s and Leander’s concert last night was a great success even though Tom Wood did not applaud (Pat Wood did, enthusiastically). Daphne and I went via Metro to Grosvenor Station, then to Strathmore Hall, seeing Ignat first, with warm gloves on his hands, then Leander, also with gloves. Ignat assigned Daphne the job of recording the concert, and seated both of us in the front row, next to Leander’s deaf student, Ben. Oh, upon entering, the first person I saw was Mary, Leander’s student who was at the workshop last year. Then Sylvia, then Dick Sheldon. Ben and I conversed via lip reading and writing. He’s applying to college, wants to include Dartmouth. He says he can hear the music when he has his hearing aids in place, but Leander doubts this. He feels the vibrations, mostly. Two men said something about the Broadwood piano: that it lacks expressive qualities but makes up for that in clarity of definition. Ignat and Leander played with perfect coordination and balance of tone. Very loud, very soft (the piano, after all, is called “forte-piano.” Ignat’s technique is powerful, very clearly defined. The music of the first half was done chronologically starting with Beethoven aged 21. Not great, but always interesting, and a treat because never heard. But the Grosse Fugue, which occupied the second half, was of a different order: magnificent, frightening. Leander introduced it well, saying that Beethoven thought it expressed his anguish at being deaf, at being close to death, but also his ability to be serene notwithstanding. The music in this form, four-hand piano, is fascinating to hear and especially to watch, with all four hands everywhere crisscrossed, one under the other, etc. (as I had experienced when Leander and I did parts at the farm this summer). An extraordinarily moving, meaningful performance. I only wish I could have heard the whole thing repeated. . . . Afterwards Daphne, Ignat, Leander, and Susan (Ignat’s girlfriend, a medical student at U of P) went out for supper. Leander and Ignat felt that the audience was very unresponsive, clapping perfunctorily, tepidly. Perhaps. I asked Ignat about his parents. Are they happy in Moscow? Yes, personally, privately, but the situation in Russia in general is chaotic. Ignat full of fun, just like old times. Loves baseball, fast cars, women. What a nice, jovial visit we had! Leander delivered me at 11:30 p.m. to the Metro to catch a train back before the Metro closed, and I missed the last train by 30 seconds, but was able to get a cab, shared with a reporter from Houston who queried the black driver about Mayor Marion Barry, who the driver defended as truly caring for DC’s residents. (He was easily reelected after emerging from jail!)

Friday, October 27, 1995

Washington-Hanover

By train, hours and hours, from Washington to Springfield, then bus to White River Junction: 12:15 to 10:30, 10+ hours. Before leaving I finished my report on one of the new batch of Pendle Hill pamphlet submissions, a very badly written essay on a good topic: George Fox’s mysticism. I’m also reading more on William Penn, a full biography.

Sunday, October 29, 1995

Ministry and Counsel retreat at the Meeting House, 12:30 to 5:00 p.m. Shirley Waring expects to die in the next two weeks; she has refused further treatment for her cancer. She spoke movingly in Meeting a few weeks ago about this decision and her peacefulness in facing death. At M & C we discussed “eldering” and our role in forming committees to help people in need.

Wednesday, November 1, 1995

I’m working many hours editing Patricia Fann-Bouteneff’s JMGS article on Pontic theater to have it ready to give to Stratos Constantinidis tomorrow in Cambridge. As usual, so many things are wrong: inaccurate translation of Greek texts, even. . . . Dana Burch is after me again re: investment of my TIAA/CREF funds. Must plan ahead to minimize estate taxes. It’s complicated to have too much money. . . . Tucker search committee met again. Last time we favored the “service” aspect of Tucker; now we heard that the Board of Visitors favors the “prophetic” aspect—that the dean must speak truth to power, sit on the highest councils, have easy access to the president. Jan Tarjan reported on budgets. Jokingly, it seems that we are looking for the Messiah. . . . Sarah Le Sure, my presidential scholar for JMGS, announced that she is leaving school for medical (psychological) reasons. Ugh! She vows to continue helping me from home, but we’ll see. The college plans to discontinue her e-mail privileges and I urged the dean not to. . . . We had music last Monday instead of tonight, and played Kuhlau and Bach quite well, also watched Yoyo Ma on TV on a program on how to practice difficult music. Best advice: always hear every note in your mind before you play it.

Thursday, November 2, 1995

To Cambridge

Chrysanthi and I are staying in the posh Charles Hotel. Actually, the room is small and nothing special. Marvelous keynote lectures at the MGSA symposium by Nicos Mouzelis on theory of modernization—rather, theories—and how they apply or fail to apply to Greece. Interestingly, he said that the apophatic way of Orthodoxy is compatible with postmodernism, which tends to undo the differentiations introduced by modernization. Also that Greece has failed in modernization because its democratic procedures developed before industrialization, leading to an elephantiasis of government that now sabotages modernization. . . . Nice to see old friends again: Elizabeth Jeffries from Sydney, Dimiroulis whom I last saw in Adelaide, Anna from Melbourne, Mavrikos whom I knew only via e-mails to Edinburgh and Panorama, Samatas from Crete, whom I published. Also a young man named Chryssostomos who wants to put our ed-articles on the internet. Also Maria Herrey (thank goodness I remembered her name), Karen Van Dyck, Addie Pollis (who was astounded to learn that she had rejected a paper by Mouzikis for JMGS), Greg Nagy. After the reception, went for supper with Stratos Constantinidis to discuss, at length, the forthcoming special issue on Greek theater. I’ll get him to include my latest on Kazantzakis’s Χριστός in his bibliography.

Friday, November 3, 1995

Charles Hotel

Lovely breakfast with Chrysanthi in the hotel, reading the New York Times leisurely. The stock market hit an all-time high yesterday. . . . Lots of stimulation and business at the MGSA symposium, plus a session which I chaired, with Diana Haas speaking on Cavafy’s letters. Sarah Kafatos in the audience. Discussion with Eva Konstantellou and Peter Allen re: book reviews in the next issue of JMGS, and with Prof. Kazamias re: a response to the education articles, which he finds very poor if not scandalous. Also talked to Dimitris Dimiroulis regarding financial assistance when I go to Greece, and to Gregory Jusdanis about the symposium planned for Columbus in March. . . . Jim Warren wants the next symposium, in 1997, to celebrate the Truman Doctrine (1947), its 50th anniversary. . . . At 5:30, to the celebration honoring Elise Boulding as World Citizen: very posh. Ray Hall and Gene Lyons there. Elise very happy to see us. She was introduced beautifully by the head of Peace Studies at George Mason University, and then spoke about the next hundred years. She almost broke down when saying at the start that she wished Kenneth could have been present. . . . Back to MGSA: a session on the humanities consisting of a dialogue between Meg Alexiou and Karen Van Dyck, very flabby and boring. Chrysanthi kept nudging me, to keep me from sleeping. . . . Back to the hotel. Started editing, on the computer, Sakellaridou’s article.

Saturday, November 4, 1995

Cambridge

Called Jean Brophy last night. She was out. Left a message that she did not answer. Another nice breakfast, reading the NY Times again very leisurely. More copyediting of Sakellaridou. To MGSA: business lunch with the Publications Committee: Dia, Brian Joseph, John Iatrides. We’re trying to salvage the bibliography, perhaps by publishing it piecemeal in the journal. This might “save” this project, which I helped negotiate in Washington. We got $35,000 from the Greek government and we have produced nothing. If we publish discrete bibliographies over several years in the journal, at least we’ll have something, although not the impressive book that was contemplated. . . . Long talk with Gregory Jusdanis after lunch. Heard Richard Clogg’s paper on “privatization” of Hellenic Studies—i.e., proliferation of chairs endowed by governments. Very amusing, and also sad. Long discussion with Jim Warren about why the KKE lost Greece. He says it was Zahariadis’s decision to favor a united Macedonia. This lost KKE most of its moderates and reduced them to recruiting Slavo-Macedonians as soldiers. . . . I invited Danny Danforth and Sarah Kafatos to supper with Chrysanthi and me, and we sat for three relaxed hours discussing mutual concerns. Chrysanthi spent most of the day in Filene’s basement hunting for bargains, and had lunch in Durgin Park with Nancy Iatrides.

Sunday, November 5, 1995

MGSA business meeting. I suggested the Truman Doctrine as the subject for 1997 (proposed by Jim Warren) since it will be the 50th anniversary. Sad to leave the Charles Hotel, which had become like home. Back in Hanover, met Yasuo and Naoko Takahashi and had supper with them, Nodas, and Mother at Kendal. Naoko will be taking her Ph.D. generals in linguistics in January.

Monday, November 6, 1995

A full day. Tucker search in the morning: interviewing the entire staff, secretaries, etc., all of whom seem to view Tucker as very special. Suddenly I realized that Jack Shepherd would be the perfect dean. Lunch with Jim Freedman talking about his illness (so far so good), Kendal, and Sheba’s illness: she’s in a mental hospital being treated for depression but she’s making good progress. I told Jim about my father at Mt. Sinai. Jim goes twice a week to Boston, has supper with her, and returns. What an awful two years he has had, but at least he finished his book on liberal education. . . . Then went to the Inn to meet Howard Zinn, who was with John Lamperti. Then to Dickey Center to meet Gene Lyons and Leonard Rieser. Then to 13 Carpenter, where I was so relieved to find a full house: every seat taken, even some students present. Zinn spoke with passion and humor about class in American society and our failure to be honest about class inequities. He rambled a bit, but redeemed this by virtue of his concern for justice and economic fairness. Nice to see this really radical thinker. Reminded me a lot of A. J. Muste. Fine University Seminar afterwards at the Inn, with lots of questions, answers, and discussion over dinner.

Tuesday, November 7, 1995

I spoke on William Penn, an expanded version of the talk I gave at the Meeting in September. This time it was at Kendal’s coffee klatch, organized by Charlie Dudley. Large audience. Some questions afterwards. . . . Lunch with Jay Bruce, my born-again Christian student, who is so nice. Trying to interest him in Quakerism. Home to interview a boy applying to Haverford.

Thursday, November 9, 1995

Nice supper with Michael Gaylor and Elaine Shamos. Michael, a psychoanalyst who used to head Dartmouth’s counseling office, quit to go into private practice (and to earn more money). One of his “patients,” he tells me, was Chris Chen, who was so obstreperous and whom I tried to support when he fled Heffernan’s class. Gaylor says that Chen has finally found himself and will most likely some day be a distinguished architect. Apparently Chen’s problem was immense pressure from an imperious father.

Friday, November 10, 1995

A student videotaped me on Olympia and the Olympic games. I read Kazantzakis’s wonderful analysis of the pediments at Olympia, in Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο. . . . Holly Parker, my thesis student, presented her first piece of writing. Quite good. She has remarkable “instincts.”

Saturday, November 11, 1995

Met over lunch with John Rassias to get his reaction to our revision of DG1 done at Princeton. He was very helpful. He says he’ll meet with me and Chrysanthi on Saturdays to write micrologues, etc.

Sunday, November 12, 1995

Shirley Waring is in the hospital, choosing to die rather than continue medication. I ministered à propos, citing Arafat’s comment on TV when asked if he feared assassination, considering what happened to Yitzhak Rabin. He said, “I believe in God and thus I know that each one of us has his destiny. Thus I don’t worry.” I said that he teaches us in this way that death is not a catastrophe, a negation of everything meaningful, but rather part of the nature of being, just like life. Shirley’s case helps us realize this. Facing death, she matured, grew, became a teacher for all of us. . . . Chrysanthi did drills for chapter 1 of the revised DG1. I’ve been supplementing them and typing them in the computer. . . . Felitsa telephoned: “Let’s all go out to Sweet Tomatoes!” This meant Filitsa and her new boyfriend, Otmar Foelsche. We are happy for her, that she has overcome her loneliness. So we all went out to Sweet Tomatoes, together with Yiayia, and had lots of good stories and laughter.

Monday, November 13, 1995

Interesting time at Kendal hearing a presentation of the actuarial report. First time I’ve been exposed to what actuaries do—very complex and useful. The presenter helped us very much to understand better the consequences of our fee structure. In his life expectancy table I was a bit disappointed to find that I have only 17 more years. Mother at 92 has 5. . . . Afterwards, Jim Armstrong, John Hennessey, and I worried about Steve Fleming’s contract, which Debbie Cooper got all wrong because she didn’t follow my letter to her. . . . Flew to LaGuardia at night.

Tuesday, November 14, 1995

New York City

To NYC for a gathering sponsored again by the Onassis Foundation and with the presence of the newly reconstituted Ίδρυμα Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού. Papademetriou, the Onassis president, was fairly imperious although he tried to be democratic. We sat for 3½ hours in the morning and two more hours in the afternoon, listening to him explain what the foundation intended to do, and he not really listening to our suggestions, although he kept protesting that he welcomed them. Lunch at table with the former ambassador to Greece, who was quite interesting about November 17 excesses of the State Department, lack of need for the consulate in Salonika (it was saved owing to the Macedonian problem). Brademas spoke about the arts, and I commiserated with him afterwards regarding Gingrich & Co. “The coming of the barbarians!” he commented. Had a chance to talk a bit with Sifakis, Mitsis, Jeff Rusten re: fonts, with Ioannis Kazazis re: my visit to Thessaloniki, with Dia and especially Gondicas re: strategy for grant applications for our revised DG1. We did this afterward in a Greenwich Village coffee shop, with a Greek bookseller joining in. Afterwards, to the Plaza Hotel for a reception, very fancy, obscene. String trio with no one listening. Full meal, in effect, buffet style. Met Fotini Tsalicoglou, Constantine Tsoucalas’s “partner” and the author of the essay on AIDS that I published. Talked to Neni Gourgouris about the wisdom of having two children rather than just one. . . . Severe storm. Will I be able to fly tomorrow? Trains are so much better.

Wednesday, November 15, 1995

NYC-Hanover

The storm abated. Actually, the flight was amazingly fast because of tailwinds. Thankfully, no emergencies waiting for me at home, and not even much mail or e-mail.

Thursday, November 16, 1995

Hooray! I introduced Steve and Anne Fleming to the assembled residents at Kendal, saying that we were at a natural point of transition, with all sorts of problems behind us, and now the expectation of accreditation next year. Jim Armstrong spoke briefly, and then Steve spoke, making a good impression. Afterwards, he and Anne stood for an hour on a receiving line, patiently, while everyone shook hands. What a pleasure! I shudder to think of our situation if he had said No. . . . After supper, I served as a judge for Binswanger’s students’ presentation on the educational problems of San Antonio. They described the mess there quite graphically and recommended solutions, which the judges had to rate for their feasibility. Bins does wonders with his students.

Friday, November 17, 1995

Met with Steve Fleming to brief him on problems—e.g., the services agreement. Then with Dana Burch, who is advising me on better ways to invest. Then with Holly Parker, who is progressing nicely on her thesis. Then out to supper, guests of Jean and Bill Vitalis. She was with us in Scotland and Ireland. He is a director of the Ledyard Bank. Very pleasant.

Monday, November 20, 1995

Tucker search again, this time with students, who gave eloquent testimony regarding the importance of Tucker in their lives. I keep thinking that Jack Shepherd would make a perfect dean. . . . Chris Clay came in to talk about The Waste Land; I used my graduate school notes. Then to a meeting of the Kendal Finance Committee. We hope to refinance the long-term bonds. Afterwards, Jim and Carol Armstrong invited Chrysanthi and me, John Diffey, and Mr. and Mrs. Shaughnessy to dinner at the Panda House. Nice to socialize in a relaxed way with Bob S. and to meet his wife, a Hanover native.

Tuesday, November 21, 1995

To Washington

Kendal board at 8:30 a.m. We agreed to meet bimonthly in 1996. Treat Arnold absent again, and people commented. After lunch, I picked up Yiayia and Chrysanthi and drove to Manchester. Luckily, everything was on time. We arrived at National Airport at 6:30 p.m. Thanks to the wheelchair ordered for Mother, got out to a taxi quickly, and arrived at Kennedy Center at 6:55. Interesting concert: Ned Rorem, two pieces by Virgil Thompson, Debussy’s “La Mer” (so modern). The clinker was the Saint Saens violin concerto, which is 5th rate. Rorem full of meta-jazz, saxophone solos, etc. Thompson interesting and lively. The hall only half full. Deanna drove us home and Leander arrived later from Levine. Lovely reunion. We feel very much at home there. Yiayia weathered all this beautifully.

Wednesday, November 22, 1995

Fun! We went to the Men’s Warehouse and I bought a suit, blazer, trousers, hat, and gloves. Everything amazingly cheap. Then lunch in a Jewish deli: chopped chicken liver. Yum! Chrysanthi and Deanna busied themselves with pies and preparing the turkey. I did JMGS editing and had a good lesson from Leander on Dello Joio. He showed me how to do octaves with the wrist. Then to a Chinese restaurant, the same one where we had the rehearsal dinner for the wedding. Sad to learn that it’s closing on Sunday. The owner explained that his rent had been raised from $10,000 per month to $22,000. Leander rented a video, a comedy, and we relaxed afterwards.

Thursday, November 23, 1995

Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. Lovely. Alec telephoned, just back from Beijing. . . . Another humorous video.

Friday, November 24, 1995

The chair of the search committee of College Park Friends Schools called, hoping that they could interview Alec. He seems to be an attractive candidate, but I fear that his heart is in Indonesia (he’s been offered a new contract to stay at North JIS). Deanna went to town to play a Pop’s concert: show-tunes, sold out. She’s unhappy about infighting in the orchestra and lost another audition for principal second, but is doing a lot of chamber music in DC, including a quartet of David Diamond’s at the Holocaust Museum recently where she played first violin. . . . Yet another video with Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie.” Lovely spoof.

Saturday, November 25, 1995

DC to NH

Deanna drove us to National. Good flight, on time. Supper at Kendal with Audrey. Then heard Bev Web do another spectacular program: Appassionata, Debussy Reflets dans l’eau, Ravel Jeux d’eau, Liszt Le Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, Chopin Berceuse, and Scherzo no. 2. He is getting better and better; plays now with power he lacked earlier. Barbara Rice says in the beginning he didn’t want to be at Kendal and was taking out his anger on the piano. That’s all in the past. Hearing him continues to be an experience of sheer miracle.

Sunday, November 26, 1995

Susan Stark ministered again at Meeting, disconnected but not so lengthy as usual. She gives me the jitters. Nice lunch afterwards with our “gang”: Nodas, Audrey, Sydney.

Monday, November 27, 1995

Another Meeting of the Tucker search committee, this time with area clergy including Father John from Aquinas House, who spoke very well, indeed eloquently.

Tuesday, November 28, 1995

Sally Rutter telephoned to announce that Steve and Anne Fleming had secured a house. A rental near the Ray School, with a six-month lease. Perfect.

Went to Sweet Tomatoes and met Trix and Chuck Officer there by accident. Sat together. Chuck played tennis the other day for the first time after his by-pass surgery. He is a “resurrected” man.

November 30, 1995

Long ride on AMTRAK with Chrysanthi to Philadelphia. Worked on the computer, JMGS editing. Played Dello Joio with Dan in the evening.

Friday, December 1, 1995

Pendle Hill

A full day. Peter Crysdale is back on a visit. He ministered in Meeting very well, as always, saying that a “yearning for God” is more important than a “belief” in God. . . . Publications Committee rejected my revision of Redmont’s essay on moderation. Actually, the reasons were very convincing, I have to admit, especially Mary Ellen Chijioki’s. Now: what to do next? . . . Leander showed up at lunchtime on his way to Bethlehem for concerts, but I had the Book Committee meeting and couldn’t join him and Chrysanthi. Ignat, who was in an automobile accident a few days ago, will be OK, but has many broken bones, including a finger and an arm. Pendle Hill board again not very active re: budget shortfalls. Denny dominates. Dan seethes. But we played Dello Joio and Ravel again after ice cream. It’s sounding better. Good visit with Doug Gwyn at supper.

Saturday, December 2, 1995

Pendle Hill

Board in the morning. After lunch worked on Kamperidis’s review of Lorenzatos’s Μελέτες. Then to Dan’s for practice, after which he, Chrysanthi, and I all drove to Society Hill to go to the movies—Carrington, about Lytton Strachey, Carrington, Mark Gertler, very open about their “abnormal” sexuality, ménage à trois, etc. Dan finds Bloomsbury very decadent, self-absorbed. Hard to disagree. This includes Strachey’s conscientious objection. Afterwards, we took Dan out to supper in an Italian restaurant and had long talks about the film, then about his niece, who is being sued by her own father, and inevitably about the teachers at Pendle Hill, who do next to nothing, but prevent Dan from governing effectively. He is partially right, of course, but his paranoia and anger contribute to his ineffectiveness, alas.

Sunday, December 3, 1995

To Princeton

At breakfast, one of the teachers, Nancy Frommelt, the Franciscan nun, said she wished I was living at Pendle Hill. I said that right now I almost felt I was. But Dan told us last night that the teachers resist his bringing in visiting teachers, even David Gray. . . . Good long talk again with Doug Gwyn after Meeting. He will be applying to be a pastor at a Friends Church in Maine. I thought of him for dean of the Tucker Foundation, but he is nowhere as strong a candidate as, say, Jack Shepherd. . . . Yesterday Peter Crysdale was here, and ministered beautifully in Meeting, as I think I noted already. . . . Long pleasant lunch with Nancy Frommelt and Sally Palmer and Mary Wood (who’s about to move into Kendal). Then more practice with Dan, who drove us to 30th Street.

Monday, December 4, 1995

Princeton

We’re housed very comfortably at Palmer House, a mansion donated to Princeton. Worked again with Dimitri, Kostas, and Andromache, still on chapter 1, verifying what Chrysanthi and I did in the interim. Supper at a restaurant with some other visitors, plus Mike and Mary, Stathis, Neni, Dimitri, Kostas, Andromache.

Tuesday, December 5, 1995

Princeton

We’re moving ahead to the scenarios of chapters 2 and 3, not writing them in Greek but specifying what should be in them, and which grammar. Lunch with John and Woody Wilson. John is now Dean of Graduate Studies. They’re mildly interested in Kendal (they have a summer home in southern New Hampshire). I hope to give them a tour this summer. Supper with Joan and Tom Wilson (who are definitely coming to Kendal in 2000). Tom is retiring on December 31 after 35 years in practice here. Retiring cold! No more contact with medicine, so he says. I hope that we can put him on our health committee at Kendal.

Wednesday, December 6

Princeton

We have blocked out chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Sandra Cronk picked us up for lunch with her and her mother. Her School of the Spirit is prospering, and will be located at Pendle Hill next year. I told her about our disappointments at Woodbrooke and about my hope to write something about Quakerism and process philosophy. In the afternoon, Glen Bowersock gave a lecture on the 25 poems that Cavafy never finished, emphasizing the union of sexuality and history. Well done. He was very friendly; wants to take me to lunch next time. Also met Bob Hollander. Ditto. And Peter Brown briefly. Mike Keeley gave me a volume of his Cavafy translations graciously inscribed: “Faithful companion on the great Cavafian voyage, so many years en route.” Supper afterwards at Prospect. Sat next to Mrs. Fagles, who is very involved in music management, and we talked easily. Also learned more about Stathis Gourgouris’s background. All concerned here feel that Hellenic Studies is supportive and friendly. How nice! Ditto for Comparative Literature here. I compare with English at Dartmouth. Hellenic Studies makes Mike feel part of them although he’s emeritus. Will I get the same treatment at Dartmouth? Doubtful.

Thursday, December 7, 1995

Kendal at Longwood

Good ideas for future chapters of DG1 as a result of discussion this morning. Then taxi to Trenton. Chrysanthi took the train back home; I went south to Wilmington and then via taxi to Kendal at Longwood for Personnel and Pension Committee clerked by Lynmar Brock. Alan Hunt absent (thankfully). Atmosphere conciliatory. Every suggestion I made for less authoritarian and hierarchical language was accepted without objection. Good discussion of pros and cons of merit pay, with Loraine Deisinger (who made a very good presentation) favoring new systems to link pay to performance. Interesting people there. A hotshot banker from Ithaca; a prominent engineer from Oberlin; a local trustee who thanked me for “Tempted by Happiness”; Dave Hewitt the actuary. (This morning, in Palmer House at breakfast the other guest said “Are you Peter Bien?” He’d been my student in the late 1960s; said I still looked the same. And that my course was one of the very few outside his major, Classics, that he valued and remembers. Nice!) . . . The Kendal meeting went from 2:00 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. with only a break for supper served on the same table. But, interestingly, there was no sense of fatigue or languor. Good clerking, good agenda, real issues. . . . But I couldn’t get to Longwood Gardens.

Friday, December 8, 1995

Wilmington–White River Junction

The train is full. I’m surrounded by chattering women. Horrors. But the computer is a solace; helps concentration. I’m trying to compose a mock epic fragment on “James of the Strong Arms” for January 5th. . . . Finished the day with Felitsa’s housewarming party. . . . Met a doctor from North Carolina (recognized the accent) and talked to him and his wife about Steve and Anne Fleming. They’re already in touch.

Saturday, December 9, 1995

Deanna is pregnant. Thus, Θεού θέλοντος, we’ll have two grandchildren, one in June, another in August. . . . We’re meant to see The Tempest at A.R.T. today but there’s a bad snowstorm and we can’t go.

Sunday, December 10, 1995

I read Boulding sonnets on death at Business Meeting. People appreciated the humor.

Tuesday, December 12, 1995

Amherst–Cambridge

To Amherst to examine students again. One was a Turk, a very elegant young woman. Chrysanthi complains that I use outmoded language, which of course I do. Stavros, seeing the αλφαβητάριο I use, said he had the same one in kindergarten. . . . Drove to Cambridge. Nice supper in the Charles Hotel (which no longer frightens us). Then A.R.T. for The Tempest. Imagination. Compelling, with a very fine Prospero: Paul Freeman, from R.S.C. Ariel is always the most difficult. I think he should be played by a girl or boy, not by a hunk like Benjamin Evett. Derrah was fine as Trinculo, Epstein as the garrulous but honest Gonzalo. My appreciation and understanding of the play was much enhanced by the Alumni College we did two summers ago.

December 14, 1995

Kendal meeting to plan the retreat. Jim Armstrong said that he ruled out Quakerism during the discussion of values! Ugh! But he wants to talk about it privately.

December 15, 1995

Hanover

Chris Clay brought his statement for graduate school admissions. He is a straight A student but can’t write, poor chap. . . . Lunch with Diana Taylor, seeking her help in Peace Studies. She feels that Leo Spitzer might be willing to assume leadership, and will ask him, gently. . . . Deanna is depressed (her pregnancy), wants to go home to Daddy and cancel the London trip. Poor Leander. But Chrysanthi gave her a huge pep talk that seems to have helped. . . . I received word from Greece that the University of Thessaloniki will house us for two months in a room, and Chrysanthi said she’ll refuse to go; she can’t live in one room for two months. What next? . . . Right now we’re both in bed most of the day with cough and cold. Very bad.

Saturday, December 16, 1995

I’d given Bev Web the Dello Joio four-hand pieces. Mother called to say that he and Fanny played them tonight, and received the most applause she can remember. . . . I’m revising Constantinidis’s Prologue to the theater volume, cursing him: he’s omitted all documentation. . . . Spending most of the day in bed, however.

Monday, December 18, 1995

Alec telephoned. He leaves for London tomorrow. In January he’ll interview at Sandy Spring Friends School and Friends Community School. Of course he already has an offer to stay on at North JIS. Deanna feels better. She and Leander fly to London tonight. . . . Ignat is in Cavendish, able to drive and also to practice already. Lucky boy. . . . Both Chrysanthi and I are sick, with sore throats, low-grade temperature, fatigue. Lots of naps and reading.

December 21, 1995

We were well enough to go to the Heffernans’ cocktail party. Their children are charming: Andrew, an aspiring actor; Virginia, finishing a Ph.D. in literature at Harvard. Campions there, Lincolns, Brock Brower, Rutters. I’m trying to bring Bob Fagles here from Princeton to read from his new Odyssey translation. . . . Leo Spitzer won’t lead Peace Studies, but Lynda Boose said she would, and Leo, Marianne Hirsch, and Diana Taylor vowed to act as supporters. Progress! We’ll all need to meet now with Gene Lyons to regularize the course. If I can leave Dartmouth with Peace Studies still alive, I’ll feel satisfied.

December 24, 1995

Reports from London are not good. Deanna is depressed and neurotic. Stays awake all night, sleeps half the day, refuses to go out, wanted to change her tickets and come back earlier. But Leander, all patience, has convinced her to stay apparently. When Daphne talked about their trip to Paris, Deanna started to cry. Daphne cancelled the tickets. Is all this owing to the pregnancy, or is it more deeply entrenched in her personality? Trouble ahead.

December 25, 1995

Brought Mother here for a nice breakfast and exchange of gifts. Daphne bought me a lovely valise for traveling, after seeing me so encumbered when we went to D.C. together. She’s so thoughtful. Then at 5:00 p.m. we had Claire and Allan Munck plus Gerry and Peter Tailer for a lovely warm friendly supper. John and Mary Rassias came at 9:00 for dessert. They, too have no children, nor do the Muncks or Tailers this year.

Wednesday, December 27, 1995

Lots of music. Played duets with Barbara Rice at Kendal for 1½ hours. Then Dick came and we did modern flute/piano music, but ended with Bach. . . . I’ve recorded my parts for the Dello Joio and have sent them to Dan. Also for the Debussy.

Thursday, December 28, 1995

Supper with Suzanne and Thomas Laaspere. He told me, for the first time, that his real name isn’t Laaspere. His family was forced to take this very Estonian name to replace their Germanic one at a time of intense nationalism. Two out of their three children are divorced. We’re doing better, so far.

Friday, December 29, 1995

Working on the journal every day, it seems. I haven’t done any Kazantzakis letters this term. But we did make some progress on the revision of Demotic Greek 1. Had lunch with John Rassias on this yesterday. He is incensed because Kostas Kanakis replaced subject-possessive-object with nominative-genitive-accusative, and wants Kanakis fired. I’m hoping that Gondicas’s diplomatic skills will prevail. . . . Finally received Kazamias’s “commentary” on the education articles: 17 pages. Very critical, of course. I toned down the text, working on it from 8:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. Then sent it via e-mail to Psacharopoulos, who will reply. Μεγάλος μπελάς. (But not as bad as Macedonia.) . . . Nice evening with the Corindias. Went to their house at 5:30 and interacted nicely with the four children, who are excited about their train set, jigsaw puzzles, and other Christmas gifts. And Nicky played the piano, as did Emily. What a household! Four balls of energy, two dogs, and a cat. Then the adults escaped to Mrs. Ou’s for a leisurely Chinese dinner.

December 31, 1995

Genevieve Williamson’s annual New Year’s Eve party. Nice to see Louis Cornell again. He’s still hoping to establish a music center for ensemble work.

1996

Hanover

January 1–March 9

Pendle Hill, Jan. 18–21, 1996

Cambridge, Feb. 24

NYC, Feb. 25

Princeton, Feb. 26–29, Palmer House

Pendle Hill, March 1–2

Potomac, MD–Washington, DC, March 3–4

London

March 10–18

Oxford, March 15–16

Hanover

March 19–May 20

Groton, VT, March 26

Columbus, OH, March 29–31

NYC, April 14

Princeton, April 15–18

Pendle Hill, April 19–20

Pendle Hill, May 16–18

Boston, May 19–20

Athens

May 21–23

Hanover

May 24–31

Riparius

June 1–2

Hanover

June 3–July 16

Hitchcock Hospital, June 7–8

Riparius

July 17–29

Glasgow

July 31–August 1

London

August 1–5

Riparius

August 6–Sept. 9

Hanover, Aug. 10

Potomac, MD, Aug. 21–22

NYC, Aug. 23–24

Hanover

September 9–October 6

Pendle Hill, Sept. 20–21

NYC Sept. 21–22

Princeton, Sept. 23–26

Greensboro, NC, October 6–9

Hanover

October 9–17

London, 32 Christchurch St.

October 18–25, 32

Thessaloniki

Oct. 25–Dec. 3, Μέγα Αλεξάνδρου 29

Athens, Nov. 19–21, Ξενοδοχείο Αγ.

Γεώργιος Λυκαβηττού

Iraklio, Nov. 21–23, chez Stelios & Ava

Orphanoudakis, Κλεομένους 2,

τηλ. (01) 72.90.711

London, Hotel Novotel,

December 3–4

Heathrow 01895-431431

Hanover

December 4–31

Philadelphia, Dec. 5–7

Amherst, Dec. 11

Cambridge, Dec. 15

Riparius, Dec. 29

January 1, 1996

Festive lunch at Kendal with Mother and the Tailers. Lobster.

January 3, 1996

Dr. Forst Brown advised Chrysanthi to let him operate on her hand; otherwise the thumb will eventually become limp and unusuable, he says. . . . Dinner with Dick Williamson and Georganna. Lots of talk about her training as a psychoanalyst. Lots of music afterwards. But I could hardly play the Fauré I used to do reasonably well years ago. . . . Afternoon meeting again with Dana Burch, financial adviser. He wants me to draw as much money as possible out of TIAA/CREF and let him manage it. Some good ideas, but I’m growing increasingly wary.

Thursday, January 4, 1996

Working still on the journal. I had hoped to start on the letters again, but no luck. Meeting on Peace Studies with Gene Lyons, Mary Jean Green, Barry Scher. Very discouraging. Lynda Boose’s course can continue only two years. After that we have to pay our own way. And Gene doesn’t want to commit until the new director of Dickey is chosen. . . . Filitsa and Popy and Otmar for supper. Filitsa talks non-stop, which I find wearisome, although basically we both enjoy her. Popy is returning to Texas to her father. Filitsa and Otmar are planning their marriage. How nice for both!

Friday, January 5, 1996

Kendal Finance Committee. We’re going to be able to raise fees only 3% it seems. Jim Armstrong, Walter Frank, and I managed to kill a plan to close the Cadbury Dining Room for lunch. Terrible! In the afternoon, we celebrate Jim’s interim directorship. With Jim and Carol on stage, we presented “Act I—Board, Act II—Staff, Act III—Residents. In Act I John Hennessey gave Jim a pair of ear-muffs to wear when he drives his tractor. I read my “newly discovered epic” and gave him two books on Homer. Lee Huntington presented the bowl that we bought at Simon Pearce and had engraved with Jim’s and Carol’s initials. In Act II, lots of well-wishing from staff, ending in a poem in rhymed couplets by Cara. The most spectacular gift: a compressor for inflating tractor tires. (I’m jealous.) Plus a John Deere hat and model. Then the residents did three songs from “My Fair Lady” with new lyrics about Jim, Carol, and Kendal, sung by Edie Gieg and Walter Frank. Lots of hats, and an honorary degree to Carol: Ph.T. (“pushed hubbie through”). The atmosphere was one of joy and emotion. (Sherry Buckman shed tears when Jim praised her work.) I think the entire community was celebrating itself: it’s a collection of caring, talented, sophisticated human beings. My epic seemed to be appreciated. It even drew laughs in the right places.

ARMSTRONGIAD

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many wiles,

James of the strong arms, lured into exile from seagirt Maine

by a hennessey Olympian, to do battle with monsters:

the one-eyed tax assessor in Hanover of the elms,

lotus eaters lounging in their long wood, drugged

by shared service fees, while Carol of the white arms,

his circumspect consort, withered in seagirt Maine,

faithful in her abandonment while beset by suitors

wooing surreptitiously by FAX and e-mail, for they knew

that the Olympians of the Board had vowed to prolong the

strongarm’s exile month after weary month.

But the man of many wiles, forewarned by Zeus

who thunders on high that Sirens were near, took a great wheel

of wax and with the sharp bronze cut a little piece off

and rubbed it together in his heavy hands, and soon the wax

grew softer, and he stopped the ears of his staff but then

commanded the Buckman to bind him hand and foot

to his throne. Then the Sirens approached and directed

their sweet song toward him. “Listen to my singing,

honored James,” warbled Walter of the Franks. “Hear

the honey-sweet voice that issues from our lips, for

we know everything about shared service fees, and

Antonius of clan Robert knows everything that happens

over all the generous earth regarding not-for-profit corporations.”

So they sang in sweet utterance. James’s heart desired

to listen, and all would have been lost if the Buckman had not

fastened him with yet more lashings and if his stalwart

mates with the wax in their ears—Sir Daniel of the House

of Ebbin, and noble Brent of Edgertown—had not persevered

in their self-denying silence.

But when Dawn

showed again with rosy fingers, James of the strong arms

went down to Hanover of the elms to vie with tax assessors

and eclectic anthropi. Their leader rose up as straight and tall

as a Cliff, and next to him stood Black Willy. But it was

Lord Donald of the Moonrows, a man like murderous Ares himself,

who seemed most formidable of all the Hanoverians in build and beauty.

“Come, friends,” he said. “Let us ask the stranger to compete

with me in assessing—his ridiculous thirty million against

my forty-two—for in his build he is no mean man,

for lower legs and thighs he has, and both arms’re strong above them,

and the neck is massive. He may be younger than he looks,

for the crush of cares has used him badly, for I say there is no other

thing worse than administering Kendal for breaking a man,

even though he be a strong one.”

So they asked him. And resourceful

James of the many wiles spoke in turn and answered them:

“Why do you urge me on in mockery? Cares are more in my mind

than assessments, for I long to return to Maine and to Carol

of the white arms and to my letter press and all the sweetness

of irresponsibility.”

Whereupon the tax assessor answered him to

his face and spoke to him roughly: “Stranger, I see that you

are one who grasps for profits. You do not resemble an athlete.”

“Now you have stirred up anger deep in the breast within me

by this disorderly speaking,” answered James of the strong arms.

“Know, then, that build and beauty are not everything.

There is a certain kind of man, less noted for beauty, but the gods

put comeliness in his words, and they who look upon him

are filled with joy, and he speaks to them without faltering.

In your case, the appearance is like the immortals yet the mind

is worthless.”

He spoke, then grasped a discus bigger and thicker

and heavier than ever seen, and addressed the Cliff and Black Willy:

“O esteemed anthropi, let my throw determine the assessment.”

His comeliness of speech won their assent. He spun and let fly

from his ponderous hand. The stone hummed in the air to

thirty-five, which pleased the eclectic anthropi, who invited him

straightway to their hot tub and a feast of roast moose au jus, while

Donald of the Moonrows slunk away in humiliation.

[Here the manuscript breaks off, so we shall never know how James of the strong arms fared with the lotus eaters drugged by shared service fees in their long wood. Fortunately, however, we do have one more fragment, a curious one, perhaps not quite authentic, but in any case clearly the very end of this overly long epic, since James is now back in Maine and about to be reunited with his long-suffering wife.]

When James of the many wiles had slain the suitors

by disconnecting FAX and e-mail, Carol of the white arms

heard her lady in waiting announce: “He is here; he is in the house.”

But circumspect Carol said to her in answer,

“This is not true. You know and I know that the Olympians of the Board

have vowed to prolong his exile month after weary month.”

Then the companion said to her in answer:

“My child, what sort of word has escaped your teeth’s barrier?

There is another proof: that scar on his foot.”

So circumspect Carol wondered, for she had also had

a dream that seemed now to be coming true.

Meanwhile, unexpected gods appeared from South of Olympus,

Carol’s own patron deities, the Carolinians, and they threw

a beautiful mantle and a tunic about him as he came out of the bath,

but left the scar carefully exposed, and Anne of the Carolinians

made him taller to behold and thicker, and on his head

she arranged curling locks that hung down like hyacinthine petals.

Then he sat opposite his wife, who glimpsed the scar on his foot

and relented. And as when the land appears welcome

to men who are swimming after Poseidon has smashed

their strong-built ship on the open water, and gladly they set foot

on shore, escaping the evil, so welcome was her husband.

Then the gods held back Dawn of the rosy fingers so that

circumspect Carol of the white arms could relate her dream:

“Dear husband of the strong arms, I saw you in my dream

as a frog on a lily pad. Then a fairy appeared of the hennessey

type and with a swish of his wand transformed you into a prince

for nine long and weary months. But then in my dream

the fairy returned. With another swish of the wand

he transformed you—not back into a frog, but into the goodliest

form of all: a RESIDENT!”

And so the two talked into the night.

She, shining among women, told of all she had endured,

and wily James of the strong arms told of all

the cares and joys he had inflicted on others.

Nor did any sleep fall upon her eyes

until he had told her everything.

(December 8, 1995, on AMTRAK train 56, Wilmington to White River Junction.)

Lunch earlier today with Andrea Useem, newly back from Woodbrooke, where basically she had a very good experience. Yet she, too, felt that the worship was dead. She’ll be going to Kenya shortly to work with a group of journalists. I’ll try to bring her into contact with Jesse Grunblatt. . . . Supper afterwards at Sheila’s with Lincolns, Lee Huntington, and the Joyces. I forewarned Lee that I want to resign the clerkship of the Kendal board as of April 1st, a Quakerly thing to do, since administrative control and responsibility should rotate. . . . Then to Filitsa’s for dessert and coffee. Otmar’s son was there, a freshman at UNH and a veritable Ganymede.

Saturday, January 6, 1996

Long talk with Alec, who is in Maryland. He is not drawn to either school. Friends Community School is too small, too all-demanding, and the salary too meager. Sandy Spring wants him to raise money chiefly; he’d be separated from students. So it’s doubtful that he’d accept either offer (if an offer is made). So, back he goes to Indonesia, as expected. . . . Long talk also with Daphne. She says that she’s been “moody” in her pregnancy but her “mood” is one of joy and elation. How lovely! She will be going to Hong Kong and Malaysia shortly, following Greg, a final extravaganza before the baby comes.

January 9, 1996

Interesting colloquium on Christian Wolff’s music, discussed by the musicians who will be performing it tonight. They appreciate the improvisational element, making them co-composers to a degree instead of slaves to a score. Several, although Americans, now live permanently in Europe. They expanded on the cultural differences that add up to much greater public and private support for the arts. . . . The Wolff concert in the evening was quite excruciating. The pieces are so long, so repetitive, going nowhere, filled with portentous silences. The best was an extravaganza for percussion because the performer was such fun to watch as she “danced” her motions. Bev Web walked out at the intermission. . . . Paul Moravac, who is probably a better composer than Wolff (and who is much admired by Leonard Slatkin) has been terminated at Dartmouth. He told me today that it was owing to Jon Appleton, whom he called a psychopath.

Wednesday, January 10, 1996

Margery Walker, John Hennessey, Jim Armstrong, and I met to hear John’s and Jim’s complaints about Quaker practices on the Kendal board. Hennessey objects to my saying “Now Friends.” We’re neither Friends nor even necessarily friends, he says. He wants a chair rather than a clerk because a Quaker clerk really doesn’t want to lead whereas a good chair does. And of course they both want voting and a cessation of the silences before and after meetings. The “encounter” was cordial. I think that each side listened to the other. We’ll continue, of course, at the retreat on Monday.

Sunday, January 14, 1996

In Meeting, I ministered on the Quakers vs. non-Quakers on the Kendal board, saying that we feel sometimes like Friends in Pennsylvania or Rhode Island before they abdicated, or even like Saint Francis when displaced by Brother Elias, the quintessential organization man, and usurper of the order (who nevertheless may have saved it). Afterwards, Joan Ashley came up, saying that I had angered her, for she assumed that I was calling Jim Ashley a usurper. . . . I also spoke about the Frenches’ grandson, in a coma in the hospital as a result of complications following brain surgery. Last Friday, David French came to the house to ask about funeral arrangements should those be necessary. Yesterday he asked us to share supper with Tossa and him and the boy’s parents, Jim French and Tak, his Thai wife. We spent a few hours with them, some in the intensive care pediatric unit. What a sad place! Another parent, a Bible church pastor, came to visit his sixteen-year-old daughter who was in danger of having both hands amputated. She’d been taking drugs, passed out, and spent the night outdoors in the extreme cold last week, freezing both hands totally. He was very open about this. And the Frenches seem open to the possible loss of their grandson and are grateful for the good care he is receiving. But if he ever comes out of the coma they don’t know how much brainpower will be left. The father is the French who works in Indonesia but has never met Alec. His Thai wife, not like Eyi, is educated: a lawyer. So sad, all of this.

Monday, January 15, 1996

Lake Morey Inn

Our Kendal Board retreat at Lake Morey Inn, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. It went well, with everyone present and participating. We were all very pleased with Steve Fleming, who is “presidential” (at age 31) and articulate, and who knows this business inside-out. The case-histories all elicited good discussion and insight. The queries re: the board expressed our shortcomings. John Hennessey advocated an enhanced Nominating Committee that would also monitor board performance. . . . I’m determined to step down as clerk (Quaker clerks really should not want to lead) and hope that Margery will succeed me. . . . Quaker-non-Quaker dialogue, elicited by one of the case histories, was again cordial. Both sides agreed that voting, if done well, and sense of the meeting, if done well, are very similar. It’s when either is done badly that the difficulty begins.

Tuesday, January 16

Kendal Board. Hennessey was openly critical of Lee Huntington’s leadership of the Nominating Committee, especially regarding orientation. I asked him afterwards to be tender toward her. But I fear that the damage has been done. Executive Committee met with John Diffey in hope of truly ending the impasse over the shared services fee. The ball is in John’s court now.

Wednesday, January 17, 1996

As I expected, Lee sent me a letter of resignation. I wrote back as best I could. Really, John Hennessey is sometimes cruel. . . . Full day at the office, with Holly, Chris, Jay. Then to dinner at the Hanover Inn with Audrey and Chrysanthi and Mother to celebrate Mother’s 91st birthday. Then upstairs to the Wheelock Room to the Harvard-Radcliffe Club to hear Jim Freedman talk about liberal education in America. He spoke very well, balancing its achievements against its very real problems. Sheba was there, looking terrible—actually looking like the mental patient she is. I think that Yiayia was really pleased to be part of this nice occasion.

Thursday, January 18, 1996

AMTRAK

Off to Philadelphia. On the train I typed up the minutes for the retreat, wrote a reply to Joan Ashley, and tried to start my obligations for the grammar in Demotic Greek 1. . . . I’m eager to play Dello Joio and Ravel with Dan tonight. I’m finally beginning to learn my part: very very slow, but not hopeless. . . . The other day Dimitris Gounelas sent details about housing in Thessaloniki, not so bad (although not so good, either). Chrysanthi agreed to go.

Played Dello Joio, Debussy, and Ravel with Dan. He still hasn’t learned the notes for the Dello Joio. But interpretation is going better. However, I too am still having trouble with the notes, despite all my practicing.

Friday, January 19, 1996

Pendle Hill

Met with Rebecca in the morning. She failed to do the financial report requested by the Board. We went over some figures and she will try to patch something together at the last moment. Exhausting Publications Committee meeting: four manuscripts (we accepted three—a record) plus consideration of our report, plus other business. Mary Ellen Chijioke is clearly the strongest and best member now. We agreed to move forward with two reprints of books. . . . Executive Board included consideration of our Resident Program Review. Our advice is not being buried under the carpet, but no concrete action has been decided upon so far even though the budget shortfall is worse than ever. . . . Rebecca presented well, including financial figures (!) displayed on a huge sheet of paper very professionally. Amazing! All done between my final conference with her at 5:50 p.m. and her late entrance to the committee at 7:30. No supper. . . . She stayed until 11:30 at Dan’s ice cream party, so we played only for half an hour, both quite tired.

Saturday, January 20, 1996

Pendle Hill

Executive Board went into executive session and Vince pleaded with us to affirm Dan as the CEO, as opposed to the team approach. No action. But people listened. . . . PH’s tax exemption is now being appealed by the school board, after the appraisal board decided in our favor. Trouble ahead. . . . Met a lovely couple from Hobart, Australia, the Farrells. She is Bill Oats’s daughter and he, Oats’s son-in-law, is the headmaster of the Friends school there. . . . After lunch I went to Brinton House to join the extension course on Quaker governance. The leader, Laura, is a 1983 Dartmouth graduate. Nice to see Oliver Rodgers there, plus people on the Sandy Spring board who’d been involved with Alec, and interesting Friends working with AIDS suffers, plus others on the board of Abbington Friends School, and a former teacher at Friends Central, and people from 15th Street Meeting in New York. Made me feel that if we moved to Kendal at Longwood I would be able, probably, to fit into a wide-ranging Quaker network filled with good people. There was also a nice AFSC staff person with a very Arab name, and a black woman, fat, eating continually. They had ample handouts for board procedure, and especially for nominating committees and the like, just what I need. Also a literature table filled with relevant pamphlets that I can order for the Kendal board. I spoke to Laura about traveling to Hanover. She’s ready and eager. I’m beginning to feel that solving the Quaker-non-Quaker problem should be my next (and probably last) challenge as clerk. . . . To Dan’s at 10:00 p.m. We played until 11:30, including Persichetti (still OK) and the great Schubert Fantasia (very scruffy) and the Schumann Träumerei (OK). Then talked and ate ice cream until 12:30 a.m. Dan is still obsessed with the teachers’ laziness, in his view. I urged him, again, to expedite two-week (or one-week) modules, citing what we did in Alumni College at Dartmouth in 1993. And I also concurred with his view that the teaching staff should be reduced from 4 to 3 if the budget situation continues dire next year. He would ask Nancy Frommelt to leave first, and Liz Kamphausen (of course) last, because she’s the only one who does a full day’s work. The problem is that all these teachers, if released, will have a very hard time finding other employment, says Dan. But one needs to be cruel at such times. I told him of my suggestion in the executive session that we go periodically into modified executive session with Dan present and Denny and Margaret absent, so Dan can openly express himself. He still has a low opinion of Denny, even professionally. He resents the fact that he wasn’t able to recruit his own top associates. Even Margaret, he says, was not chosen by him but by the Search Committee overruling him. And he regrets that our Residents Review Committee’s report stresses the importance of search committees (although he likes the rest of the report). It will be fascinating to see where PH is a year from now. How can it balance its budget without downsizing? Ironically, it’s Vince who is pressing this and therefore trying to help Dan. Yet Dan feels that Vince is a pest, abrasive, etc. (not true, I’d say).

January 22, 1996

Steve Fleming called to say that our first case of Peer Review will take place this week, most likely. It involves a housekeeper who, it seems, was having an affair with the husband of her supervisor, and accuses the supervisor of firing her out of revenge. The supervisor lists numerous “crimes”: insubordination toward residents, and the like. We’re all apprehensive to see how the Peer Review works.

January 25, 1996

The Peer Review took place. The committee met for two hours with the “accused,” then deliberated without her for less than 30 minutes and reaffirmed her termination. Steve is much relieved. . . . I’ve been rehearsing Lou Flaccus’s latest “production”: a reading of selected scenes from the Odyssey. I play Polyphemos. Poor Lou is “out of it,” deaf as a doornail, and with most peculiar ideas about the Odyssey that all of us have to refuse to follow. . . . Jim Sheridan, who plays Odysseus, is writing a book on Kendal’s history. I’ve put together an archive for him going from the start (1985) to 1991, with more to come. As I went through this myself, I was amazed at how much I did during those years. Luckily I kept copies of most of my important speeches, etc., so there is a good record.

January 26, 1996

Good music last night: Kuhlau and Martinu. . . . Gondicas and Andromache Karanika wrote scenarios for chapters 2 and 3 of Demotic Greek 1, true to their promises. Chrysanthi and I are modifying them slightly in the case of no. 2 and more massively for no. 3, and I’m working on the grammar. Perhaps we’ll actually complete this project. Gondicas had good talks in Greece with two cartoonists who will furnish sketches. . . . Nice dinner at a Chinese restaurant with our Quaker “gang”: Nodas, Audrey, Arnolds, Soderbergs, Sydney Jarvis.

Saturday, January 27, 1996

I acted as a coach for Daniel Siegel’s latest mediation workshop. All the techniques came back vividly, and I did a successful simulated mediation in a case of sexual harassment. . . . We have Ava Orphanoudakis here for the weekend, because she was grieving at the loss of her grandmother and her dog (poisoned) in Crete. We had a good supper with Yiayia and then heard Bev Web do another extraordinary concert: all Chopin—Sonata opus 58 in B minor (huge), 3 preludes, 3 études including the one I studied in Boston when I was at Harvard, 2 nocturnes, and then the huge Scherzo no. 2 in B flat minor. He gets better and better. What a treat to be in the presence of genius time and time again. . . . Yesterday, met with Lynda Boose, Diana Taylor, and Marianne Hirsch to try to revive Peace Studies. They seem eager. And a meeting previously with the dean, Mary Jean Green, was quite encouraging.

February 3, 1996

I played the Cyclops Polyphemos in Lou Flaccus’s production of “Scenes from the Odyssey” at Kendal. Miscast, of course, since I hardly have the voice or the build for this barbarous giant. But I growled and groaned a bit. The whole affair, with excerpts from Cyclops, Sirens, Nausicaa, Circe, and the Phaiacians, was very nice indeed.

February 8, 1996

Chrysanthi went into hospital for arthroplasty performed by Dr. Forst Brown, on the left thumb. Her thumb bones now are all out of line because of stretched tendons and lack of cartilage. He sliced a bit of good tendon out of the arm and reconnected the misplaced bone to bring it into line. He also relieved her carpel tunnel problem, a pinched nerve causing pain. He said the operation, lasting two hours, went well. But Chrysanthi is very groggy and a bit nauseous from the intravenous. . . . Visited the Frenches’ grandson again. Still in a coma, although he has half-opened his eyes and seems occasionally to hear speech. Jim French is back at work in the Philippines. The mother, poor thing, is in the hospital all day long, week after week. . . . Visited with Alice and Peter Buseck, who are here for a few days. His lab was the first to discover in nature a third allotrope of carbon just discovered.

February 9, 1996

Chrysanthi still very low this morning. But she’ll feel better after the I.V. is discontinued. And yes, at 4:00 p.m. she was transformed. Smiling, walking a bit, feeling hungry. They’re keeping her an extra day in hospital. . . . Lee Huntington left frozen soup, as did Audrey. Greg and Daphne sent flowers.

Saturday, February 10, 1996

To Felitsa’s in the morning to act as witness for her marriage to Otmar Foelsche, a civil ceremony performed by Paul Young. Chrysanthi much missed, of course. Jolly lunch afterwards at the Norwich Inn. Brought Chrysanthi home afterwards, her hand in a bulky bandage and her whole arm in a sling to keep the hand above the heart. She’s taking a drug for pain.

February 13, 1996

Barbara Gerstner in the Provost’s office is going to take over the University Seminars. Good choice, since she’s familiar with them and believes in them. And Lynda Boose will lead War/Peace Studies. Her Vietnam course has 60 students enrolled and 30 on the waiting list. . . . Friends are delivering frozen soups and whole meals to help Chrysanthi. Tomorrow the Muncks will come for supper before music and we’ll have Chinese take-out. I’m washing the dishes now, of course.

Tuesday, February 20, 1996

Voted for Clinton in the primary. Took Chrysanthi to Frost Brown again. She’s much better, taking Tylenol instead of the drug. Brown said everything is fine. The big bandage came off and was replaced by a cast, much lighter, which allows the four fingers to protrude and even the first joint of the thumb. Fingers are no longer numb, a good sign. . . . Supper at Mrs. Ou’s with John and Dolly Radebaugh, Chrysanthi, and Yiayia. Then to the Hop for a student production of a play about the plight of grape pickers poisoned by pesticides. The Radebaughs worked three years with César Chávez as he attempted to unionize the workers. They got $20 a week subsistence pay. Saints! The play brought back distressing memories to them, especially of the airplanes spraying lethal chemicals. The actors were all in Diana Taylor’s Spanish class.

Wednesday, February 21, 1996

Department meeting. We voted tenure for Melissa Zeiger, finally. I hope that this will be my last meeting of this sort. They are horrible.

Thursday, February 22, 1996

Took Chris Clay and Holly Parker to lunch at the Inn. Saw Ann Forbes there; she’s here for a lecture. I feel so warmly toward her, perhaps I even embarrassed her. Chris has just been accepted to Yale graduate school to do Japanese with a full scholarship for five years plus membership in an academic honor society. He’s very happy. Holly wrote a splendid thesis for me on Kazantzakis and Joyce, romantic and classical, but both giving ultimate allegiance to silence. She’s hoping either to teach at Andover or to be hired by Simon and Schuster. . . . Iason Demos, doing an independent study with me on Kazantzakis, wrote another very fine paper in Greek, totally lucid.

Saturday, February 24, 1996

Cambridge

To Cambridge for A.R.T. Lunch at Henrietta’s Table in the Charles Hotel with Tom and Nardi Campion and their grandson Peter, whom I had in class last year. He’s discouraged by the anti-intellectuality of Dartmouth, poor lad. We saw a stirring performance of Tartuffe. Alvin Epstein acted better than I’ve ever seen him before. Tom Derrah as a convincing Orgon. Ms. Gilsig charming as Mariane. Lots of delicious anachronizing including quite obvious connections between Tartuffe and religious hypocrites today. A treat.

Sunday, February 25, 1996

To NYC

Flew to LaGuardia. Luggage at Yale Club. Bus to Metropolitan Museum for the Pergamon exhibit. Sections of the Telephos Frieze. I see now why art historians used to dismiss the Hellenistic period as inferior. These sculptures lack the magic of the Parthenon frieze. Perhaps because in some cases they’re unfinished. That was the most interesting part: to see an arm, for example, that was still too thick and that clearly hadn’t received its final smoothing by the artist. Most interesting of all was the model of the Great Altar at Pergamon, with good placards explaining everything there, not to mention the story of Telephos, Herakles’s son. Afterwards: to the Seasonal Pleasures of Japanese Art, much more moving actually. It is so delicate and spiritual. The Greek art is all of “this world.” I took the brochure for Chris Clay, for it speaks of timelessness, something that he is wrestling with in his thesis. Then to the Guggenheim for the exhibit on Abstractionism, which was really the highlight of the day for me (although I should note that on my way out of the Met I paid my respects to Rembrandt’s self-portrait). “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline.” Of course the building itself is probably the most extraordinary part of any exhibit at the Guggenheim. All in all, I think I understood abstraction in the arts better than ever before owing to the placards and exhibits here. Clear statements by the artists themselves are very helpful. For example: “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them” (Jackson Pollock). A central tenet of expressionism is to create equivalents for feelings rather than copying them or outside reality (which can best be done by photography). Or: “Abstract art is like music. Let it wash over you without worrying about meaning.” “Breaking down form” (Agnes Martin). Interesting how “spiritual” some of abstractionism is. “The idea is to express nothingness, the immaterial; thus liberating the spirit.” (I remember the Zen garden in Kyoto.) An artist I’d never known but now like very much is Ellsworth Kelly. His “Dark Blue Curve” is wonderfully soothing, immaterial, spiritual. His “Broadway,” a large red square inside a slightly larger white square, but slightly skewed, is fascinating. “In my work,” he wrote, “it is impossible to separate the edges from the mass and color.” Another interesting artist on display is Robert Ryman, a practitioner of monochrome painting. Canvas after canvas, all white, the accomplishment being his range of expression although operating within such strict limits. He wrote, “The white just happened because it’s a paint and it doesn’t interfere.”

Monday, February 26, 1996

Princeton

Working again with Gondicas and Andromache. Kostas isn’t going to stay with us, it seems. We went over chapter 2 meticulously, fixing my Greek and simplifying my grammar, mostly.

Tuesday, February 27, 1996

Richard Martin, a classicist interested in Modern Greek, met with us yesterday afternoon. He had vetted Lesson 1 and had some good suggestions for a few additional drills. He promised to look at future chapters. . . . This morning I tried to print out some pages in the Classics computer lab, where Mache gave me access, but without success. Incompatibility of their system 7 and my system 8, it seems. . . . Lunch at Prospect with Bob Hollander, now chair of Comparative Literature here. He has Princeton alumni who did Dante with him return at reunion times to do a canto together, and suggested I try to do the same with alums who did Joyce’s Ulysses with me. Nice idea. . . . Nicos Mouzelis appeared at Joseph Henry House. Said he likes it here because Princeton students work (whereas neither students nor teachers at LSE work, he says). He also surprised me by saying that his Greek is rusty; he can’t spell, is not sure of idioms, etc., and has someone help him with his articles for To Βήμα. . . . Nice supper with Elizabeth Prodromou. Poor thing, she’s one of the many scholars who subsist on one-year jobs, post-doc fellowships, and the like, and never know where they’ll be the following September. She has a friend, Alex Kyrou, who studies post-World War II relief efforts, and was fascinated to hear about the Quakers in Macedonia and the Quaker Girls’ School.

Wednesday, February 28, 1996

Princeton

Lunch with Mary Murrell, the new literature editor at Princeton University Press. Very pleasant; young; encouraging. She seems flexible about the date of delivery for the Kazantzakis letters. “Everyone is late!” she assured me. Her version of change at PUP is much more encouraging (naturally) than Bob Brown’s. Lippincott is strengthening the scientific and economic sections, because those books make money and can subsidize humanities books, which don’t. She was curious about the Karakasidou mess, and I tried to explain the historical background making Greeks so over-sensitive. She reported that Danforth’s book on Macedonia is selling well and, so far, has not provoked any hysteria. Then, somehow, we got onto the subject of CCRCs, Kendal, etc.

Supper with Glen Bowersock at the Institute for Advanced Study. Very grand. Huge place for over 200 scholars, of whom only 20 (including Glen) are permanent. Tremendously stimulating, he says. The meal: white and red wine of choice, Scotch beforehand, salmon soufflés, steak au poivre, crêpes suzettes. We talked for three hours, easily, about common friends (Trypanis, Savidis, Vryonis, Meg), about translation (of Cavafy, of Kazantzakis), about the gospels as “novels” (he calls them “proto-novels”, but his Sather lectures, just published, argue that the gospels stimulated the emergence of the Greek novel in the late first century A.D. and early second century. He didn’t know my article about the role of Forster and Auden in Cavafy’s career; I’ll send it. He was very interested in my work on L. P. Hartley, and on how I got involved in Kazantzakis. He expressed his great admiration for Christian Wolff and also for Holly, who apparently was a brilliant student at Harvard. All in all a very easygoing, friendly evening that I hadn’t expected, since Glen is, by reputation, so “formidable.”

Thursday, February 29, 1996

To Pendle Hill

A morning session with Kostas Kanakis. Clarification on terminology. Dimitri, Mache, and I planned out grammar and story-line for lessons 5, 6, 7, and a bit of 8. In the afternoon, worked on the scenario for lesson 4. Then to Pendle Hill. It took four hours via bus to Trenton, and SEPTA. Visited with Dan. He had actually practiced. Dello Joio and Debussy are sounding much better. Only the Ravel is still very ragged. At 10:00 p.m. a Buddhist monk arrived, dressed in the yellow robe. An American. Tan (= Tuan = Lord) Jeff! He can sleep only in an environment where no women are present and cannot receive food from women. He retired straightway, and Dan and I talked over a cup of tea.

Friday, March 1, 1996

Pendle Hill

Another PH breakfast. Sat with Vince Buscemi and a student who turned out to be a Dominican sister. She described her life and the work of the nuns: teaching, nursing, helping AIDS sufferers. But there are no newcomers. None. She realizes that drastic changes need to be made or the order will die out. . . . Meeting for Worship. Margaret Fraser ministered about Woodbrooke’s financial plight (Council meets there tomorrow) and PH’s own. Dan ministered about his conviction that PH, despite everything, has a vital something to offer. Shaking hands afterward, I was greeting by Jack Hunter. We talked quickly, for he was late for a meeting of the Friends Council on Education. He is now teaching, not deaning, at Westtown, and very happy. Children are all doing fine. He and Ruth, after he retires in a few years, will move back to their house in Woodstock and will rejoin Hanover Meeting. He had a heart attack a year ago but is doing well, watching his diet, exercising, reducing weight after angioplasty. What a nice, and unexpected reunion! I told him, of course, of Alec’s “affair” with Sandy Spring School. . . . Then came a message that Rebecca was home ill and wouldn’t be able to come to the Book Committee meeting. So I had to telephone her and get briefed, and find manuscripts in her mailbox and faxes on her desk in order to run the meeting. But it went well. . . . Afterwards, lunch with Doug Gwyn, joined by Chuck Fager, Doug still has no prospects for next year, but Woodbrooke offered him a friend-in-residence position for spring term 1997. . . . At 2:30 I went down to the barn to watch Tan Jeff’s meditation class, the students having come over from Swarthmore, some sitting in lotus position. One breathes, and concentrates on various areas of the body in order to dissipate tensions there. Tan Jeff, an Oberlin graduate, looked very peaceful as he meditated, very Buddha-like.

Saturday, March 2, 1996

Pendle Hill–Washington

The board approved reduction of staff by two positions and the unlucky people were named. Though sad, this is in my opinion a very healthy move, and I said so. They are being given a very generous and humane “separation package.” Afterwards, we met at Roadside with Dan alone (not Denny or Margaret), as Vince and I had wished. This worked perfectly, for Dan poured out all his frustration at being inhibited from leadership. We agreed to have such sessions regularly, thereby affirming his position as “boss.” . . . Max Carter invited me to Guilford next autumn as “distinguished Quaker visitor.” Strange! Afterwards, Dan and I relaxed with music. What a tonic! He drove me to 30th Street. AMTRAK to Union Station. Met Leander at Grosvenor station of the Metro. Nice supper at a Japanese restaurant, but I failed to see that they had soba! Leander’s career is flourishing. He is now the pianist in a trio that is under management, and he’ll be performing with a singer at a gala put on by the Levine School. The negative is Deanna’s continued dismay at the orchestra under Slatkin. She would like to audition for Boston again, but for Leander to move again, just when things are going so well and have to start all over again from zero is too cruel. So they’ll stay put at least for now, especially with the baby coming. Leander is still very negative about Jerry Bidlack and wishes that he could shift his piano workshop somewhere else. But where? He has thought of Pendle Hill, but PH has no pianos. When Deanna got home (at about 11:30 p.m.) they showed me a sonogram of the baby, 3 mm long. A dark blur inside a gray blur. Stayed up until 1:00 a.m., talking.

Sunday, March 3, 1996

Potomac, MD

Bagels and lox for breakfast. Leander gave me a very good lesson on the Dello Joio. Too bad Dan couldn’t have been here, too. Then to Kennedy Center to see the RSC (on tour) do A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the same production (the “umbrella” production) we saw last spring at the Barbican, with the wonderful Desmond Barritt as Bottom and Alex Jennings, who has a delicious voice, as Theseus and Oberon. As in London, so here, the performance was pure froth, an exercise in human imagination. Only Puck, the hardest character to realize, was unconvincing. Hippolyta/Titania was played by the same actress, Lindsay Duncan, whom we saw in Cryptogram, though one would never know it, she was so different in the two plays—the mark of a good actor. . . . Then we went to a splendid Vietnamese restaurant in Rockville, my first experience with this delicious cuisine and very handsome people. (We were killing them not too long ago.) More lesson when we returned: very helpful with the Debussy and the Ravel.

Monday, March 4, 1996

Washington

To the State Department’s Foreign Service School. I lectured on “Learning about Greek Politics through Poetry.” The school was closed for five weeks owing to the government shutdown. Everyone there is headed for Athens, no one for Thessaloniki. . . . Flew home, making my first use of the US Air club in both National Airport and Logan. . . . Chrysanthi very loving and excited upon my return. Her hand is much better. Supper at Kendal with Yiayia, to say goodbye before we leave for London. She’s fine, but says she’s always wanting to sleep. Soon the permanent sleep will come to relieve her. . . . Piles of mail. Galleys to JMGS but no galleys yet from Mercer University Press.

Tuesday, March 5, 1996

Hanover

Delivered our income tax materials to Frank Currier. That’s a relief. Authorized Corey Smith to sell Con State Bank and buy Motorola and Tennessee Bank. Lectured at the Engineering School on Science and Poetry; only four students this time, but several were quite lively for a change. Saw Jay Bevan re: JMGS, Mary Beth Duncan re: a testimonial to the Quaker UN office, Holly Parker, who needs a letter to Fred Hills at Simon and Schuster, and then Iason Demos for an hour’s tutorial on Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται and Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός. He’s a good reader, very perceptive, and I enjoy conversing with him for a full hour each time in Greek. But what an exhausting day, especially because this is a fast day in our feast-fast regimen. . . . Finished copyediting Zachariadis’s article and typed a clean copy of our work at Princeton to send to Dimitri.

Wednesday, March 6, 1996

Feast day, thankfully. Scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast. Lunch with Steve Fleming at Kendal. He wants to turn a studio apartment into a guest apartment. Says no one wants this apartment; everyone wants at least one bedroom. Rushed back to Sanborn to confer with Jim Heffernan on Holly’s thesis. He wanted A minus but agreed to award an A with honors, thankfully. Back to Kendal for joint meeting of the Executive Committee and the Nominating Committee. Lots of questions. Should we increase the Board to 15 to make 3 residents legal? Or reduce the residents to 2? Should Lafayette or Mary Schaffner, or both, go off? We’re hoping to attract a senior administrator at Dartmouth, and maybe Cliff Vermilye. . . . Then Executive Committee. The wine problem is on the agenda, alas. John Hennessey kept quizzing me about our Quaker position. I said that it’s a part of the testimony of simplicity. That didn’t convince him in the slightest. Actually, it’s hard to be rational about such things. We’re also increasingly aware that John Diffey is getting squeezed in Philadelphia, between the need to be solvent and the need to satisfy people like us, who don’t want to pay $500,000 a year. The meeting lasted until 7:20 p.m. I got home just as Dick and Allan were arriving for music. Wolfed some supper and then played Dello Joio and Haydn. Dick noted that we used to “scream” when he suggested Dello Joio and even Martinu. No longer. We now greet these gifted composers as a challenge.

Thursday, March 7, 1996

Scrambled to read Demos’s last paper and enter his grade (A), to pack, go through piles of office mail, eat our “fast” lunch (broth and lettuce) and get to the MiniCoach by 1:00 p.m. It’s snowing, of course. . . . Thankfully, I joined the US Air club two months ago. Used it in D.C. and Logan last weekend, Now used the B.A. club—they have reciprocity—and were very comfortable as we waited from 4:30 until 11:30 to see if the flight would leave. I worked on the computer, finishing my report on Dombrowski’s book, and then correcting JMGS galleys. Chrysanthi read a novel. The flight was cancelled. This snow brought Boston’s total this winter to a record. BA bussed us to the Holiday Inn in Brockport. Got to sleep at 1:30 a.m.

Friday, March 8, 1996

Boston

Awake at 9:30. Full breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes. We decided to break our fast. Telephoned Daphne. Comfortable morning. Chrysanthi poolside reading the paper, and using the exercise machines. I back to the computer, vetting JMGS and trying to answer John Hennessey’s objection to my view of Quaker leadership. BA pays for all this and even gave me a telephone card to make free calls. But at 11:30 a.m. it was still snowing. . . . Again at Logan from 3:00 p.m. At 10:30 p.m. we still hadn’t gone. But it has stopped snowing. The problem now is the congestion at the airport. They don’t have a gate for the plane, so far. I wrote a long letter to John Hennessey (at the hotel) responding to the Pendle Hill pamphlet on Quaker leadership. At the airport, a long letter to Christos Alexiou, in Greek, a letter to Rebecca Mays pointing out more proofreading lapses (!), and then I worked for six hours, rather well, on Gounaris’s article on Macedonian historiography. Thank goodness for the BA lounge and the computer. Otherwise this delay would have been exceedingly dismal. We finally boarded at 12:30 a.m. and took off at 1:30 a.m. All told, a 34-hour delay.

Saturday, March 9, 1996

London, 32 Christchurch Street

Arrived at 12:30 British time. No lines or congestion at this hour. We were out of immigration and customs in five minutes. Trusty Alex, waiting, drove us to Christchurch Street with lots of conversation, especially about the Irish problem. Daphne not looking as big as I had expected. Their house is small, obviously redesigned from what was probably originally a 2-up 2-down. Very cosy, with a small walled garden out back and an outdoor terrace on the second floor. We washed and then went off to the Tate Gallery to see the Cézanne exhibit, Daphne thoughtfully having secured tickets. It was a marvelous retrospective, showing aspects of Cezanne’s art that are rarely exhibited. Usually one sees the famous landscapes, of Mont-Sainte-Victoire for example, the still lifes, and the Card Players. But there is so much more that is entirely different, for example the superb Lac d’Anney, permanently in the Courtauld Gallery, which a critic has called a painting of stupefying beauty. When you step back, the water glistens and you want to jump in. I also liked his very late The Garden at Les Lauves (Phillips Collection, Washington, DC): a mass of blotches suggesting the color and even the shape of a garden. And the portraits are remarkable: of his artist friends, of peasants, of his wife.

Sunday, March 10, 1996

Leisurely lunch at a nearby restaurant. I was daring: had steak and kidney pie. Lovely except for all the smokers. Then walked in gardens of the Royal Hospital, and the adjacent park, which is beautiful, and just right for Daphne with the forthcoming baby. The so-called Hospital is actually a residence for pensioners who were in the army. They dress in distinctive uniforms and are very talkative, it seems. Buds everywhere. Crocuses and snowdrops in bloom, and even a daffodil or two. On the Chelsea Embankment is an unusual statue of a boy and a dolphin, with the boy miraculously flying through the air as though weightless. In the park we watched bungee divers across the river. They dive off a huge crane and have an elastic attached to their ankles. They fall, then bounce up again, then fall, then bounce up. What a way to get thrills on a Sunday afternoon! . . . Daphne’s two books done with Duncan Baird, one on the Old and New Testaments, the other on Asian religions, are spectacularly beautiful. Printed in China. . . . I spent time copyediting Zahariadis again and Gounaris for tomorrow’s meeting with Mazower.

Monday, March 11, 1996

Finished Gounaris and Zahariadis and printed them. Met Mark Mazower at Covent Garden tube station and went to a splendid Turkish restaurant called Sofra. He is well established at the University of Sussex. Like me, he does research in Greek but teaches something else: European history. He’ll write a short introduction for the Macedonia issue of JMGS and says he’d be happy to join the editorial board if asked. He was very interested in my account of the Quaker girls’ school, since he’s doing something sponsored in part by Amnesty International regarding succor for children, especially orphans, in Greece after the world war and civil war. I suggested that he interview Vouli or Chrysanthi. . . . Quickly back to Chelsea (discovered that the Clintons named their daughter Chelsea because they were walking here when they discovered that Hillary was pregnant); then to King’s College for a seminar on Leo III (was he or wasn’t he an iconclast?) by David Haldon. Nice to witness such a truly professional performance in both the paper proper and the questions. He answered me brilliantly when I asked if he thought Orthodox today who do obeisance to icons worship the archetype behind the visage, or are they heretics believing in more than one God, in effect? He said that our God is economics but how many people understand its essence. Similarly, how many in medieval times understood the theory of icons? Nice to see Rowena Loverance, who gave me a big kiss on the lips (!) and Roddy Beaton, and Judith Herrin (more kisses, but on the cheeks, French—or Greek—style). Arranged for lunches. . . . To Piccadilly to see Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie again. Good performance, not brilliant. But the play is very sound, with its interesting mix of realism and a kind of transcendentalism, plus its suggestion that the only solution to the excruciating boredom of the characters is war! . . . No supper; a Cadbury chocolate bar sufficed.

Tuesday, March 12, 1996

Working now on Roudometof’s JMGS article. . . . Bought Cadbury’s chocolate as a gift for Steve and Anne Fleming. Also bought an adapter to use in Greece with my British Style-Writer (thinking ahead). . . . In the evening, met Greg at a Spanish restaurant opposite the Young Vic theatre. Lovely meal of hors d’oeuvres, chicken livers, mussels, paella. Then to the New Vic to see a brilliant translation/adaptation by Martin Crimp of Molière’s Misanthrope, splendidly acted by Ken Scott as Alceste and the American Elizabeth McGovern as Jennifer. Done in rhymned couplets with outrageous, scintillating rhymes and brilliant reference to twentieth-century affairs while hinting all the same at the seventeenth-century venue in Louis XIV’s court. The Young Vic is a theatre in the round, very intimate, and very cheap. A stimulating funny-sad intellectual-emotional treat.

Wednesday, March 13, 1996

Met Rowena Loverance at the British Museum and had a long lunch nearby at the Konaki Greek restaurant. She’s doing well in the education department of the B.M., although she lost out on a promotion she’d hoped to obtain because the position became redundant. But the Education Department is going to expand into space surrounding the Reading Room, and will offer electronic devices, CD Roms, on various subjects. She made the first of these, on Byzantine art. I’m hoping that she can advise us on our DG1 CD Rom when the time comes. We talked about Woodbrooke. She has just joined the Council and hopes to join the committee, and was interested in my experience. I told her everything, and also a little about Anne Thomas, but withheld Anne’s distress at all the Lesbians there for fear that Rowena might be one, too. Woodbrooke’s condition is desperate. They are reducing staff. Chris and Christine Lawson will take early retirement this June. Claire will leave and not be replaced in hosuekeeping. Stuart Morton will no longer teach and will concentrate on fundraising. The administrative team will be only 2 instead of 4: John Sheldon and Helen Rowlands, with Helen in charge of the academic program (!). Rowena expressed her distress at the appointment of John Sheldon as principal over Janet Scott, a qualified academic who was thought to be “too academic.” The “PC” position is that what matters is bonding, not intellectual challenge. The Yearly Meeting seems to want this. Woodbrooke is complying, but the irony is that it has not become attractive therefore to YM members. At Council, Rowena and Val Ferguson (they’re good friends of long standing) tried to favor the more seriously academic option on one issue, but were unsuccessful. Rowena quite sensibly says that Woodbcrooke’s troubles are really the YM’s troubles in concentrated form—real lack of direction. The only thing uniting Friends, she says, is silence, not pregnant worshipful silence, but vacant silence. Any talk of God is frowned upon. (She may speak to our condition. I really must pursue this and write a PH pamphlet on the subject.)

Rushed by taxi in heavy traffic to the Haymarket Theatre to meet Chrysanthi for a matinee of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. How different from last night, and from The Glass Menagerie. But similar in the supurb acting. I never knew that Wilde could write serious (while also funny) theatre, very like Shaw. It is about integrity in government and, more deeply, similar to Molière’s Misanthrope, about the defects, the inhumanity, of an uncompromising position. So the moral is, I suppose, that we all have some sort of skeleton in the closet, and that love should not be restricted to those who are pure but should be granted to those who are impure and imperfect. Of course the play is old fashioned in its treatment of women: the wife’s highest duty is to foster the husband’s career. Chrysanthi found that distressing, of course. . . . Nice dinner at home with Daphne and Greg. This morning, the furniture that Daphne bought in Hong Kong arrived. A lovely desk, a chest for blankets, and a low, round Chinese piece used for wedding cakes. All very decorative.

Thursday, March 14, 1996

A busy day. I was out from 7:45 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. Went first to the BBC at Bush House. Breakfast with Yannis Karavidas, still very fat, who then interviewed me in the studio upstairs on JMGS, Kazantzakis letters, Kazantzakis and religion, and Demotic Greek 1. Will be broadcast to Greece tonight and here in the UK on Sunday. Then to Foyle’s to look for music for Dick, Allan, and me; found two modern pieces. They also had Ned Rorem’s trio, but it was £20 and I resisted. Then to the Penn Club just to pass ¾ of an hour reading JMGS galleys. It’s very shabby still, but maybe the people are nice. Then to King’s to meet Roddy Beaton. Splendid lunch across the street in Aldwych. He has revised two older books and made some progress on the biography of Seferis. He’s teaching The Last Temptation in English for the first time and likes my translation. Then rushed by taxi to the Barbican to meet Chrysanthi to see the Abbey Theatre production of Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. Eight men, all enlisted to fight in WWI, all Ulster Protestants. The play, brilliant technically, managed to use this to give insight into the hatred today between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. But primarily it is a brilliant examination of the psychology of warfare, especially in a situation in which the soldiers know they are going to die for nothing, a cause that is meaningless to them, and the only thing that keeps them going is camaraderie (just like Vietnam). If I were still going to teach my Comp. Lit. course again I’d love to use this play. Of course the most remarkable thing is that McGuinness, the author, is an Eire Catholic. . . . Chrysanthi went back to Chelsea and I to Soho to meet Judith Herrin for coffee and pastry. She is happy to be back in London with her husband, of course, but misses Princeton and feels very pressed here by administrative duties at the Centre for Hellenic Studies, Gordon Square. She’s half-time at King’s. Not much time to write. But one is lucky these days to have a job at all. We hope to visit more, and en famille, if I return to London. These old Birmingham acquaintanceships are gratifyingly deep, it seems. Bought apple tarts for all of us in Sloan Square on the way home. Delicious, leisurely supper, followed by Greg’s favorite relaxation, watching tennis on TV. Finally, began to look over my lecture for tomorrow, shortening it. . . . Learned that Greg’s income last year was just under $500,000. Obscene.

Friday, March 15, 1996

Oxford

To Oxford from Paddington. At the plenary session of the Greek Weekend Philip Carrabot played a tape of George Papandreou harranguing the crowds and I swear he sounded just like Harry Kleen. Philip also played a tape of Papadopoulos making his famous surgery and plaster cast speech. Very eerie. Dimitris Tziovas spoke about trends in the ’60s in literature. Long talk with Dimitris afterwards about the publication of the papers on modernism delivered last July in my honor. Bryer’s one on me will not be included, thank God. It’s all being published in Greg Nagy’s series in Boston. Elizabeth Jeffries was in the plenary session; she’s been here only one month. In the next session I gave my Kazantzakis and Religion lecture to a large audience, and there actually were some questions. . . . At supper, sat with Dimitris Gounelas. He clarified the situation at Salonika next year. I’ll actually be collaborating in a course jointly taught by the two of us. He’ll do Pentzikis probably and we can both concentrate on philosophical and theological approaches. Won’t start until the end of November. I could stay four weeks; no need for more. He’ll continue with the course after I leave. No lectures, no texts, just discussion. I should specify the curriculum ahead of time, however, for we may need to photocopy texts. There will probably be eight students. I think I’ll do the religious approach, starting with Κωμωδία, including Ασκητική and perhaps Zorba (Saint Zorba!). The class will meet for either two hours or three hours, once a week. Easy!

Saturday, March 16, 1996

Oxford–London

Chrysanthi took the 9:15 back to London. I went to Blackwell’s Music Shop and bought some more trios for Dick, Allan, and me. Then to 47 Wellington Square again. A good session on Πεντζίκης and Τσίρκας led by D. Gounelas. Good to get some sense of what he’ll be doing in the class next fall. We spent 1½ hours analyzing just a few pages of text, mostly Pentzikis, whom he sees as θρησκευόμενος. Interestingly, Thessaloniki becomes a major symbol, like Joyce’s Dublin. Next, Roddy Beaton led a class on modern versions of the Odyssey theme: Ιθάκη, Ο γυρισμός του ξενιτεμένου, Η απόγνωση της Πηνελόπης. I had never paid attention to the date of the Seferis poem, 1938, when S. returned to a Greece ruled by Metaxas and WWII was looming. Nor had I noticed the date of Ritsos’s Penelope, 1968, I think, written on Lesvos. So Odysseus, the bully, is in a way the colonels, politically. After this, we all went to lunch again at St. Cross College. Marianna Spanaki says she’ll use our revised DG1 next year in class if we wish. . . . Back to 32 Christchurch Street by 4:00. Greg watching Rugby on TV, the girls out shopping, looking for baby furniture. Doug Gwyn telephoned. He’s visiting his British girlfriend. . . . Thinking again of Oxford, it was lovely to see the students performing, especially in Roddy’s class, which was done in the Socratic method. . . . Birthday dinner for Greg: lamb and trimmings. . . . Finished copyediting Roudometof on Macedonia.

Sunday, March 17, 1996

London

Jack and Kathy Shepherd came up from Cambridge. All six of us had lunch in an Italian restaurant, sitting next to the famous captain of the British rugby team, whom we saw on TV yesterday. Jack and Kathy are happy because the Pew Foundation has renewed their grant, so they are fine for another 3½ years. I’ll try to send Mary Beth Dunham to Jack as an intern next year. We walked afterwards in the Royal Hospital gardens and I brought Jack up to date on mediation at Dartmouth and Peace Studies, and explained what’s happening on the Kendal Board. He sees it as a play for power by John Hennessey and Jim Armstrong. It’s not just, or primarily, dissatisfaction with procedures. . . . They left around 3:30, and an hour later I went to Covent Garden to meet Doug Gwyn, who is here to visit Caroline Jones. It was fun to meet her because she trained as an actress. She explained the rigorous training: 12 hours a day for two years. Now she’s doing Quaker theatre as a form of conflict resolution and will be spending five weeks in Belfast in the summer working with Protestant and Catholic children. But first she’ll return to Pendle Hill. Doug still has no sense of how he’ll support himself after PH ends in May. I’m hoping that PH will keep him in some capacity for a year so that he can finish his book on the Seekers. . . . Final supper with Daphne and Greg. Chrysanthi will be back in June, and I’ll hope to stop on my way to Glasgow later in the summer. And again on our way to Greece in October.

Tuesday, March 19, 1996

Hanover

Back to piles of mail and also to Kendal Board meeting at 8:30 a.m. A very distressing meeting, with Quaker members on one side and non-Quakers, especially Jim Armstrong, on the other. The issue was whether our line item for charitableness should be a “reserve” fund. Jim reported that the Finance Committee was opposed (although they really weren’t very united). Margery made an eloquent speech in favor. I said that the matter was so basic that we should discuss it but not make a decision. Jim wouldn’t hear of that: the committee had made a recommendation. I spoke of the “tyranny of committees.” Jim said he felt a vote was in order. I said I felt that silence was in order. Finally, so that we could do something, we decided to approve the recommendation only for this fiscal year, implying that this was not a definitive decision on policy. Jim kept insisting that we cannot tax the residents—he being a resident, of course, and having a clear conflict of interest. But the real controversy was much more basic: between a Quaker (theocratic) vision of governance according to certain principles even if residents disagree and a secular, democratic system governed by rationality and efficiency. Jim could not abide having the decision postponed. . . . I felt that all the coherence established over 4½ years had been smashed. . . . Steve Fleming, more “realistic,” counseled that things cannot be the same now that the Board is no longer 100% Quaker, and that both sides must learn to adjust. Of course! But still, it hurts.

Sunday, March 24, 1996

Chrysanthi took Yiayia out for a drive, and she had another seizure: intense dizziness, loss of color, cold sweat, and then vomiting. But she felt better afterwards. Very scary.

Monday, March 25, 1996

Long talk with Steve about the board situation, and later with Laura Melly, Margery, and also Don Kidder. Jim Armstrong has offered an olive branch to Margery, apparently. She an Alan invited us to Groton tomorrow.

Tuesday, March 26, 1996

Groton, Vermont

The Walkers’ dream-house on Groton Lake, designed by Alan. Lovely. Long lunch discussing what to do. Helped by John Diffey on the telephone. Apparently everyone knows that Kendal at Hanover’s board is divided, owing to my participation in Laura Melly’s workshop, and my ministry in Hanover Meeting, and my talk with Lloyd Lewis. John says all this could inhibit “sales”! I’m too naïve, as Chrysanthi keeps telling me. Margery suggested some revisions of our “Position Paper” (as did L. Melly) to make it speak more easily to non-Quakers. An interesting article in The Economist makes me see John Hennessey and Jim Armstrong as representing “Enlightenment Values” (logic, efficiency, science) and we Quakers medieval ones.

Friday, March 29, 1996

To Columbus, Ohio

Spoke with Dr. Gerber. My PSA has gone up again; it’s now over 7. So he wants me now to have a biopsy. The prostate will either be benign or have a low-grade cancer or a high-grade cancer. If high-grade, then the prostate must come out. If low-grade, we’ll need to talk. In any case, Gerber is sanguine. It’s early, and should be curable. Amen.

Flew to Columbus, Ohio. Very unpleasant. Next to a woman who didn’t stop talking for an hour. Taxi driver in Columbus an Ethiopian. Couldn’t understand me when I said I was going to “Victorian Bed and Breakfast.” Couldn’t find the street. Finally we asked someone and arrived. A Victorian mansion, occupied by an eccentric English lady. Seven dogs in her living room. Her husband drove me to the “annex,” another Victorian mansion filled with beautiful antiques. The husband said, “My wife arranges things. I would do it differently.” One other symposiast was there, a Peter Murphy from Melbourne. We had lots to talk about. . . . Supper take-out from Kentucky Friend Chicken. . . . I’m reading galleys for the Middleton book—slow. . . . Dimitri and Mache finally sent the scenario for Lesson 4 of Demotic Greek 1, quite nice, with the mother a physician and the father washing the dishes. . . . Last Wednesday I taught the first class of Greek 13, doing three Cavafy poems. What joy! It occurred to me, especially after last Tuesday, “Why am I squandering my life as a trustee of Kendal? What I do best and enjoy most is teaching literature. And this is my last class at Dartmouth.” . . . E-mail from Leander, who is very excited about the trio that he has been asked to join. It will have a good series in D.C. Little by little he is reaching the “big time.” He and Deanna played last night at Crosslands. He spoke to Clayton Farraday, who predicted that Alec will never return to the US except in the summers. What a shame that he didn’t take the headmastership of Sandy Spring Friends School.

Saturday, March 30, 1996

Columbus, Ohio

Breakfast with Tom Gallant, the historian from Florida. He turns out to be a New Hampshire native, half French and half Native American. Nice man. Vassilis and Artemis and Gregory arrived while I was still in my bathrobe and seemed extraordinarily surprised to see Peter Bien without a necktie. The symposium was held on the third floor, a large room filled, as is the rest of the house, with bibelots. I gave a talk on “Why Kazantzakis’s books are out of print.” Nice group; interesting papers. One symposiast is the book review editor of Το Βήμα, Mitropoulos. After a long day, we all went off to a splendid restaurant and had a four-hour meal. I sat next to Stratos and had a good chance to know him better. He is alone in the world—parents dead, only sibling killed in an auto accident in Greece, no extended family in Greece. He stays in hotels when he goes. But he is married to an American from Iowa who has a family there. Sad. Gregory’s wife came; she has Quaker connections and taught in a Friends school. She has just published a novel with Faber and Faber. Long talk earlier with Gail Holst-Warhaft.

Sunday, March 31, 1996

The symposium continued until noon. One of the participants thanked me privately for “defusing” things. To the airport with Gail; lots of talk. But I did some more galleys on the plane. Directly from Lebanon airport to Kit and Keith Van Winkle’s for supper with Mr. and Mrs. Shin and Alex Ogle, the flutist. They’d just done a concert: flute and piano. Mr. Shin told me his life story, more or less. He is now counseling Japanese, Korean, and Chinese students in prep schools in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Ogle is a Harvard drop-out. Started flute seriously only after leaving Harvard. Kit is excited about her new piano. She’s already sent in her tuition for Leander’s workshop. . . . Leander and Deanna arrived quite late.

April 1, 1996

We had a jolly joint birthday party for Leander and Helene Rassias, both 40 years old, with her husband, Bill Miles, just turned 50. John and Mary came later and Leander promised John that he would practice his arpeggios!

Tuesday, April 2, 1996

To Kendal with Leander and Deanna for supper with Yiayia. I left early to go to Dick’s to play the Mozart and Beethoven Quintets with his group. Willy Black on bassoon. When I told Leander with dismay that I wouldn’t be able to play my part decently, he said, “Don’t worry, the others won’t either,” and he was right. After the others left, Dick and I continued with Satie and Fauré.

Wednesday, April 3, 1996

A birthday party for Edward Bradley, turned 60. He had a heart attack a few weeks ago, but seems to be doing better—on strict diet. Douglas Marshall and wife were there, from St. Paul’s School. . . . Took Barbara Will out for lunch. She turns out to be a violinist—attended Greenwood. Nice to get to know one of my younger colleagues at last. . . . Department meeting. Peter Saccio wants to move the Composition Center out to get more office space. I spoke against. Motion tabled until next week. I think that it will fail.

Thursday, April 4, 1996

Leander and Deanna off to the White Mountains for a little private holiday in a resort. Kendal meetings on accreditation, then Executive Committee. Margery and I had revised our “Position Paper” with advice from Laura Melly and using some of Warren Witte’s language, to make it less defensive. Jim Armstrong and John Hennessey are still opposed to opening the question at the next board meeting. Steve Agrees. They want to do it at a retreat, or in committee, over time. Jim clearly knows that he acted badly at the last meeting. Too aggressive. We’re making progress, but always on their terms, not ours. . . . Tom and Nardy Campion for supper. They want to go to Greece on an Elder Hostel and sought advice.

Friday, April 5, 1996

Leander and Deanna are back after two days of gourmet meals and a view of Mount Washington from their bedroom window. Leander gave me a very good lesson on the Ravel and also on the Debussy. Supper at Kendal.

Saturday, April 6, 1996

Tom and Nancy Corindia here for supper with Leander and Deanna, plus Yiayia. Chrysanthi made Easter lamb.

Sunday, April 7, 1996

I’m back on the trustees of Hanover Meeting. We met this morning. Good Meeting afterwards. Again, Chris Dye ministered well. Leander and Deanna left at noon; had a terrible trip because of snow, sleet, and miserable traffic around New York City.

Wednesday, April 10, 1996

Leander called yesterday, very enthusiastic about the workbench I bought him for his birthday. . . . Department meeting defeated the motion to send the Composition Center elsewhere. Hooray!

Thursday, April 11, 1996

To the clinic for prostate biopsy by Dr. Rous. In two weeks I’ll get a report. Cancer or no cancer. I’m very relaxed about the whole thing, but the nurse said that my blood pressure was up before the procedure. Bumped into Peter French and his wife in the hospital. Their boy is the same: motionless but with open eyes and able to “track” the motion of someone’s hand. Poor people! Peter quit his job in Indonesia and will be looking here. . . . Chrysanthi and I went out to Sweet Tomatoes to “celebrate” my biopsy.

Friday, April 12, 1996

Working steadily to try to prepare for Princeton. Made some progress on the grammar for chapter 5.

Sunday, April 14, 1996

New York–Princeton

Nice visit to the Museum of Modern Art, after many years. Special Brancusi show, strategically placed just after some monumental Rodin sculptures. Brancusi revolted against Rodin’s dominance and style, opting for the petite and abstract. His “expressions” of fish, roosters, birds in space, etc., are so clean and simple. . . . Also nice to see a large piece by David Smith called “Australia,” and of course Monet’s water lilies, and the model of the Lever House, which is, like Brancusi’s sculptures, so “clean” and simple.

Read a Cornell student’s thesis. I’ve been advising her. Holly Lebowitz’s “Archetypal Man, Archetypal God: A Jungian Analysis of The Last Temptation of Christ”—the film, not the book. Very detailed on Scorsese’s effects and intentions, but the Jungian part often seems stretched. . . . Before leaving this morning, I wrote a short reply to John Wyatt at Woodbrooke, consoling him (he was fired). Long talk with Anne Thomas last night. She reports that John Sheldon is still bad-mouthing me.

Monday, April 15, 1996

Princeton

Right to work again with Dimitri Gondicas and (later) with Andromache Karanika. They go over my grammar and rewrite large parts of it. . . . I’d booked lunch with Bob Brown at Princeton University Press, and once again he didn’t show up. (Later he telephoned to say he’d had a crisis with taxes: today is the last day.) Saw Mary Mullen again; she asked about the Letters, of course.

Tuesday, April 16, 1996

Princeton

I’m extraordinarily comfortable in lovely room 36 at Palmer House, with windows across two entire walls. Lunch today with Dimitri, catching up on appointments: e.g., Calotychos got the job at NYU over Sifakis’s objections. Long, pleasant supper with Amy Mims, who is translating more of Ritsos. Although American, she has no family or roots here and says she belongs in Greece.

Wednesday, April 17, 1996

Princeton

Good lunch with Nicos Mouzelis, a natural intellectual who turned out to be very interested, as a sociologist, in Quakerism. I’m sending him Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years. And, he agreed to come on the Editorial Board of JMGS, as has Mark Mazower, two strong additions. . . . We were meant to have a talk today by Kostas Kazazis, to whom I had sent our chapters 1 to 4 for vetting, but his back collapsed and the visit was canceled. . . . I went off to supper by myself at 6:45 when we finished, feeling guilty later that I hadn’t asked Mache. Will do so next time.

Thursday, April 18, 1996

Princeton–Pendle Hill

Lunch with Bob Fagles, who’ll be coming to Dartmouth at my invitation next October to read from his new translation of the Odyssey. A charming man, devoted pedagogue. If we were all like him, how good our universities would be! . . . Met Claire Myones on Nassau Street as I was waiting for the bus; talked about Dimitris’s growing exhaustion. He needs to learn to say No and relax. . . . Bus 606 to Trenton instantaneously places one in a different world: a black world, lower class. Ditto for Trenton rail station and SEPTA train to Philadelphia (as opposed to AMTRAK).

At Pendle Hill, thrust again instantaneously into a different world. To begin: meeting with Dan, Rebecca, Chuck Fager, Barbara Parsons, and Margaret Fraser regarding Rebecca’s concerns about Chuck’s publications (complicated by the fact that they had a brief affair and now Chuck won’t communicate with her except via writing). We ironed out the troubles, one by one. Then I and Barb Parsons left. I went to Dan’s to practice Ravel; the others remained to see if the exclusively non-verbal communication between Rebecca and Chuck can be ended. (Rebecca wants to have supper with me in May, outside of Pendle Hill, presumably to talk about all this.) Finally Dan came, fed up with Rebecca, and thankfully we got to Ravel, Debussy, and Dello Joio. Our hands get in each other’s way, and we’re trying to fix that. We’ve switched parts in the Ravel, at Leander’s suggestion, and I’m still struggling to play the notes of the second part. I can learn things, but it takes so very long.

Friday, April 19, 1996

Pendle Hill

A busy day. Early morning, attempt to finish my homework: reading two pamphlet submissions and reporting on a book submission and reading applications for the Cadbury Fellowship. Agenda setting with Kathleen Flanagan (subbing for Rebecca,, who’s at QUIP in Greensboro). Publication Committee at 12:30. Accepted the pamphlet I wanted, and rejected the one I didn’t want. Good! Books at 3:00. Liz Kamphausen very opposed to Kashatus’s book on Quaker education, seemingly because he uses sexist language (she says). Doug Gwyn is very positive. Emily Conlon opposed because it has long footnotes. Jeannette Reid in favor. Deadlock. We turned to five other manuscripts that need to be vetted. Finally, in the last five minutes, thanks to Doug, we managed to approve, and Liz agreed to “stand aside.” Good Quaker process. . . . Ran to the library for Cadbury Fellowship Committee. Most applicants easily eliminated. Two left, one favored by Anne Thomas and one who is currently here. Kenneth Carroll, who of course dominates (because he gave the money) favors the one here, but Anne’s favorite will probably come anyway, in another capacity. Everyone seems positive about our choice. . . . Dessert and coffee with Sally Palmer and Bob and Pat Lyon. Bob very aged. General Board meeting: a shout—“Peter!” It was Lloyd Lewis. We sat together and whispered to each other as much as possible. How nice to see him again. As he said, he’s a “failure at retirement”—i.e., working harder than ever. . . . The presentation was by a Quaker who was a TV anchor for news, speaking about integrity, how on several occasions her integrity got her fired. . . . Thankfully, finished this long day with four-hand piano with Dan, our “repertoire” again: getting better. Plus Mozart’s 40th, the first movement went very well, the third and fourth less well. (Skipped the adagio.) . . . Stayed up until 12:30 finishing minutes for Publications and Books and printing them on the Stylewriter that I’ve carried with me owing to Princeton needs. Started reading TLS review of a new book by Conor Cruise O’Brien on the contemporary distrust of enlightenment values, but fell deliciously asleep.

Saturday, April 20, 1996

Pendle Hill–Hanover

Pendle Hill students are apprehensive regarding the rumor that the residential program will be “abandoned.” First board session: Denny and Margaret spoke well about plans for change. Then we broke into small groups. General Board members apprehensive about a supposed challenge to “community.” One said that the last thing she would want at Pendle Hill is a service project, since she does that all the time and comes to Pendle Hill for contemplation. People resented not being consulted in advance, and being part of a rush to act. Etc., etc. We aired most of this in the Executive Board meeting that followed. Nevertheless, we’ll probably be asked to make fundamental changes at the May meeting. . . . After lunch, I finished a report on a book submission, very engaging, on the proper use of money.

Monday, April 22, 1996

Worked all day again on Demotic Greek 1. Slow. Supper at Mrs. Ou’s with Steve and Anne Fleming. Off duty, he’s more childish than on duty. Also very eager about money, it seems. Complained about John Diffey’s salary and the excessive salaries of corporate heads. But he makes $105,000 a year at age 31. (However, Greg Tebbe makes $500,000!)

Tuesday, April 23, 1996

Spoke with Dr. Rous regarding the prostate biopsy. I have cancer. He says it’s “slow”—no rush to do anything. I’ll go in to talk to him at length next week. And Chrysanthi has the flu and 102 temperature. But spring is here. The lilacs are filled with buds.

Thursday, April 25, 1996

Just received Adrian Wright’s biography of L. P. Hartley, by post from Blackwell’s. He has made good use of Hartley’s letters to me, including the one where Hartley said “You and I are of the elite.” Pictures and descriptions of Avondale, of servants, etc. bring back vivid memories. He even records that I was invited to Avondale. There is also much of course about Fletton Tower, which was sold last year after Hartley’s sister’s death. Good to see that everyone else, not just I, sensed Hartley’s decline as a writer. The later books were even rejected by Hamish Hamilton. Poor Hartley died a hopeless alcoholic.

May 10, 1996

Lots of anguish about the operation. Rous scheduled me for June 14: radical prostatectomy. Jim Freedman wants me to go to his doctor at Mass General. Various people warned against Rous, including Athos Rassias, now an anesthesiologist, and a doctor contacted by Tom Corindia, and, most rigorously, Diana Taylor’s husband, an internist. All extolled Dr. Heaney. So I switched. Heaney gave me a good exam and seems more flexible. I’m now scheduled for June 7th. Have taken a leave of absence from the Kendal board, a big relief. Canceled Leander’s four-hand workshop, alas. Canceled Chrysanthi’s trip to London. Canceled all boards, meeting in Ithaca, etc. Still hope to sit on Middleton’s Ph.D. oral in Glasgow on August 1st but that, too, is doubtful. And the farm? Many people have been nice. John Rassias telephones almost daily. John Iatrides wrote a heartfelt letter. Still haven’t told Mother. That’s the hardest. . . . but I’m going to Athens, still, to give the Kimon Friar lecture on May 22nd.

May 16, 1996

To Pendle Hill. Good practice with Dan: Debussy, Ravel, Dello Joio, and Mozart’s 40th for good measure. I won’t be able to join him at the workshop; the operation is that same day, but Leander will partner him. He has practiced and is doing much better. After a few tries we were able to do all the pieces reasonably well without faltering. . . . Talked late into the night, mostly about his retirement plans (or lack of plans) after he leaves PH in four years. Oh, Liz came and we played our program for her as audience and then had a cream tea.

May 17, 1996

A full day at Pendle Hill. Breakfast with Ben Pink Dandelion, here from Woodbrooke for the Issues program. He says that the three redundancies (John Wyatt, Claire Chamberlain, Stuart Morton) have been good, giving the new management team a sense of solidarity and mission. But where and how they’ll get students remains a problem. . . . At Meeting, I ministered toward the end about death, mentioning my own life-threatening disease and developing a belief in death as fulfillment in the natural world, since the promise of an afterlife is no longer meaningful. Many people apparently heard this message, as they told me later. It was a difficult one to give. . . . Book Committee afterward. Rebecca tried to sabotage our decision to accept Kashatus’s on education, but Doug and I persisted, and we compromised, maintaining the promise provided he can obtain $3000 in subsidy. . . . Publications Committee went quickly for a change: two rejections and one return for substantial revision. . . . Then Rebecca and I went to hear Paul Anderson, an evangelical Friends pastor and professor of New Testament at George Fox College in Oregon. Very sweet, engaging man, apparently quite tolerant of liberals. His views make sense: on sexuality, “Just say No,” celibacy until marriage, much better than AIDS or teenage pregnancy. But the basic premise is unacceptable to me—namely, that the Bible says so-and-so and the Bible is the inspired word of God. Some of the PH students spoke, mostly about their own Lesbianism, and why should this be thought sinful. Actually, one spoke so beautifully, so clearly from the heart, that her words, to me, seemed the Word of God much more than St. Paul regarding the horrors of homosexuality. . . . Then out to Media Inn with Rebecca for an intimate supper. I had assumed that her purpose was personal, but she spent 9/10 of the time talking about staff-board relations, the threat of change, the resentment of decisions being handed down from on high. Only at the very end did she want me to know (which I’d already known but of course did not say) that she had been “going out” with Chuck Fager, that this relationship had soured, and that its past history obviously colored her current difficulties with his publishing program. Fine! . . . Executive Board grappled with yet another deficit budget. Vince and I seemed more worried about it than the other trustees. Plans are clearly under way to terminate one of the core teachers, evidently Nancy Frommelt, but all this is secret so far. They want to wait until the students leave. There will be big trouble if this is done—a different kind of trouble if it’s not done. Afterwards, Dan and I talked about all this at length, after some more good practice. Nice to see Oliver Rodgers at the meeting.

May 18, 1996

Executive Board in the morning followed by lunch with Dan in which he expanded, again, on his difficulty in working with Denny (although the relationship in some ways is better than it had been). Anne Moore was nice to me. . . . Then off to Temple University for the “Kazantzakis Festival.” Greeted at the door by a woman who said, “You don’t recognize me?” I didn’t. She turned out to be the Greek neighbor in Sunnyside in 1956 who was so close to Chrysanthi and who once came to the farm when I was building the kitchen wing and installing the light in the ceiling. Reunion after more than 3 years. Morton Levitt was there to introduce me. Kostas Myrsiadis gave an initial presentation on the reception of Kazantzakis’s Odyssey. I gave my “Kazantzakis’s Long Apprenticeship to Christian Themes” as a kind of rehearsal for Athens next week. Most of it was OK, but some (about monism and dualism) still a bit dense. Supper afterwards with Kyriakos and his wife in a hotel on City Line Avenue and then tea in their home in Bryn Mawr. He is a sociologist, ferociously intelligent, very intellectually curious. He has long been an adviser of Kenneth Boulding. I’ll send him the sonnets. He thinks that Nicos Mouzelis, although gifted, is plowing over old fields, writing about theories that are already passé. They have a lovely sweet child about 6 years old. What a gift! They want to meet Chrysanthi. . . . Back to Roadside. More practice on repertoire, followed by a Bach toccata and fugue, root beer floats, and more talk until midnight. How nice to have this easy relationship with Dan!

Sunday, May 19, 1996

Protein-rich breakfast at Philadelphia airport (this is my Feast Day in the feast-fast regimen). Flew to Boston to join Lee Pelton and others interviewing candidates for the Tucker deanship. Interesting experience. We had all kinds, from an ex-cook who had started the Collis Café, to an ex-college president. Many ordained ministers who had chosen not to have parishes. After each candidate, the committee caucused. At first I thought that it would always be the two women in the group against the men, but the results were sometimes more diverse. More tomorrow. . . . Joe O’Connell drove me to Harvard Square. He is an oncologist in the Medical School but now in charge of service projects and ethical education. Supper with Meg Alexiou. I told her about my cancer, of course, and she told me about her resolve to quit Harvard in no more than three years, to be able to return to England and be with Michael Hendys in Kent and closer to Dimitri. Good fellowship.

Monday, May 20, 1996

Interviewing again from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. We narrowed the field to six out of twelve. I convinced them to bring the head of the Ethical Culture Society to Hanover next week to interview also. I was the only one who knew of the Ethical Culture Society’s importance. Memories of Algernon Black, and my father’s involvement there, and square dancing there on Friday nights! At the end, I drew Lee Pelton aside and told him about my cancer. He was very moved. It is fascinating to see the different way, and degree, that different people respond to my news. . . . Then to Logan Airport. Soup (this is “fast” day). Flight to London.

Tuesday, May 21, 1996

London–Athens

Telephoned Daphne from Gatwick. No baby yet. Arrived at Athens at 3:00 p.m., Greek time. Met at airport by Mather Gennett and Panayotis, the driver. On the way, I asked about the Kaisariani Monastery. Is it really within walking distance of the new university (as we say it is in Demotic Greek 1)? It is. We passed by it. Then to Deree. Fifteen minutes with President Bailey, who has been there for twenty years and has added buildings, students, programs. Gennett talks obsessively about rare books, prices, collecting. They installed me in the VIP apartment, a palace, huge and beautiful, overlooking half of Athens. At 7:00, a drink with the dean, Bob Boughner, a roly-poly classicist who seems to have arrived here by accident and one of whose major qualifications was that he is not a Greek-American. Then Panagotis reappeared with a van to take Boughner, me, Gennett, and wife to Mets for supper, and to meet Christos Alexiou and Eri. All this worked perfectly. Christos and I, old friends as always, both marveling at how the passage of time seems to evaporate, so that we take up exactly where we had left off so many years before. And my feast-fast worked amazingly well. I felt perfectly normal, and only began to feel tired around 11:00 p.m., Greek time (= 4:00 p.m. USA time). Evi is strange; she talks so slowly. But I’m happy for Christos that he has her, and of course their daughter, Aspasia Maria. . . . Long telephone call with Dia Philippides earlier in the day. We’ll see each other tomorrow.

Wednesday, May 22, 1996

Athens

By taxi downtown. Long circuitous trip. American Express Bank. Discussed converting our account to Greek Treasury Notes or bonds, to avoid charges and tax. But I didn’t want to make the decision in a rush. Met Christos at 11:00 a.m. at Govostis’s bookshop on Asklepiou. Most of the old university is all torn up for a Metro station. Met Γκοβόστης himself. Then walked to Monastiraki, to Christos’s office for the Greek Autistic Society. For the first time I’d learned all that he has accomplished in three years. Remarkable. Now he hopes to get money from AHEPA. With luck in five years they’ll have six homes for autistic people and a center for administration and research in Halandri. His secretary is a sweet woman who is the parent of one autistic child and one normal one. . . . Then a horrible taxi ride, 45 minutes, to Kolonaki. Streets blocked off, traffic diverted, bumper to bumper. But the cab was air-conditioned. Reached Dia’s at 1:40. Wim Bakker was there, also Dia’s mother, and the old Greek servant who had been with the family for thirty years. Full lunch, very pleasant, with good fellowship. It’s still a bit hard to see Wim in this situation, after knowing him married in Holland to his first wife, with their children. But this happens all the time nowadays. . . . Then quickly to Christos’s to see the child. And I explained PSA to him and urged him to have exams, because he has some symptoms: gets up four or five times at night to urinate. . . . Taxi back to my palace in Aghia Paraskevi; arrived at 5:30 p.m. Wash. Nap. Little work on the computer, typing in Demotic Greek changes and editing Iatrides’s book review of Sfikas. Then Boughner walked me to Deree. Introductions: new people, old friends, e-mail acquaintances. Don Nielsen. Byron Raizis. John Zervos (Athens Center). Mike and Mary Keeley. John Chiolis. And of course, inevitably, Patroklos Stavrou. Also Iacovos Tsalicoglou, whom I didn’t recognize at first, to my embarrassment. He brought me his sister’s new novel. Nice introduction by the college’s vice president and dean. My lecture went well, very well, from all accounts. Nielsen told me afterwards that it came from the heart as well as the mind since, I suppose, the subject in part was a theory of death—death as the Paraclete, the Comforter. I opened it to questions afterward, and there were good ones, but then Stavrou stood up and started to declaim at great length about the re-publication of Kazantzakis’s works. Luckily I diverted to other questioners. Afterwards, a full supper for fifty people. Bed at 12:30 a.m.

Thursday, May 23, 1996

Athens–New York–Boston–Hanover

Worked on the computer a bit in the morning. Another driver delivered me to the airport. Worked some more on the computer, typing in changes for DG1. Departure delayed an hour because of busy skies owing to a soccer match in Italy yesterday. Long—too long—flight to New York: 10½ hours owing to headwinds. But they showed Sense and Sensibility, and that was a treat. The language and the faces are so beautiful. . . . I spent time editing the Residential Life Section of the Kendal self-study, abysmally written, alas, and needing a great many changes. . . . Spoke Greek continually all these days, except when at Deree, without difficulty. Indeed, I was pleased that various officials, at the bank and airport, answered me in Greek now instead of in English, as they always used to do.

May 28, 1996

Christina Sloane Tebbe born, 7.1 lbs., today in London, on my birthday. Also, luncheon by Comparative Literature with some nice words and a present: a new translation of Dante’s “Inferno.” Chris Wolff comforting about my illness. Supper at Kendal with Yiayia, Audrey, and Ray Hall.

June 1, 1996

Terpni

Lovely day at the farm. Started the John Deere, Jari, Troy-Bilt. Supper with Shapiros.

June 2, 1996

Terpni

Cleaned up around the office, hoping to work there this summer. Saw Perrymans at the new ice cream place next to Riverside Station. . . . Nice letter from Ignat on my return, wishing me well. And telephone call from Ned. . . . Many phone calls these days to Daphne, who was pampered in the clinic, taught how to hold, bathe, clean, and nurse the baby. She and Greg are back home now. Vaughan will be coming soon to help. A friend brought them lasagna for supper. We still have not heard Christina Sloane’s voice.

Thursday, June 6, 1996

A day spent at home preparing for tomorrow. Horrible stuff to drink to produce diarrhea to clean out the entire system. No solid foods. Yesterday, good lunch with Ned, and then music with Dick and Allan. So, normalcy up to the last minute, more or less. As I told Ned, I have not been depressed, and I’ve slept every night normally. Occasionally, to be sure, my mind was obsessed with the fear that the cancer has spread to the lymphatic system. But only occasionally. It’s interesting how people have reacted. Darrel Mansell, for instance, has been remarkably solicitous, contrary to expectation. Even Peter Saccio has been nice. On the other hand, John Diffey, whom I’d have expected to call or visit, was totally absent. No word. But generally people have been most kind, and first and foremost John Rassias, who has telephoned me every day for two weeks to say “All is light! Everything will be golden!”

Friday, June 7, 1996

Hitchcock Hospital

At the Admitting Office at 6:00 a.m. Into the OR by 7:30. As they wheeled me in they gave me a sedative, and the next I knew someone was telling me “It’s all finished.” Remarkable. Dr. Heaney said that everything went extremely well. No bleeding. None of the blood I had donated was even used. The lymph nodes seemed OK; there were no hard spots. But we won’t know for certain until the news comes back from the pathology lab in about a week. Heaney will call me. So I’m still not off the hook. Generally, however, everything looks good. And they even repaired the bilateral hernia. Chrysanthi was here most of the day, most relieved. They walked me from bed to chair but I was dizzy and my legs felt like rubber. When I got into the chair I vomited profusely, and then felt better. Tried reading TLS but couldn’t. Slept fitfully, not because of pain—there was none—but because I really wasn’t tired.

Saturday, June 8, 1996

Hitchcock Hospital

Much improved. Walked with no difficulty. Ate a full breakfast. Still no pain by late morning even though the epidural was discontinued. Chrysanthi telephoned lots of people last night—Dick, Allan, Bins, Sheila, Lucia, and more this morning. Alec called form Jakarta and started crying when he heard the good news. Leander called from Kinhaven. Daphne reached me at the hospital.

Sunday, June 9, 1996

Return

Dr. Cozzolino removed the drain this morning and told me I could go home. The nurse gave me a bag of tricks and full instructions about medications, the catheter, etc. So at 11:00 a.m. I was home. Ate, napped, used the computer, checked e-mail, telephoned Margery Walker and Tom Corindia. The Nodas came while I was napping. Afterwards Alice called form Kinhaven, and Steve Fleming, then Jim Freedman at the end of his long day conducting Dartmouth’s graduation (how nice that it didn’t rain). And Mother came for supper. I still have not moved my bowels; that is a worry. Maybe tomorrow. Lots of rumbling in the stomach, for sure. Am taking pain medication for the incision. Reading TLSs, nothing more serious at the moment. Bernard Redmont called (not knowing I was sick) about his pamphlet on “Quaker Moderation.” I must produce that in camera-ready form this summer and have done.

Monday, June 10, 1996

Everything worse today. Digestive system not working. Incessant rumbling in stomach and intestines dancing inside me, with severe cramps. Called Dr. Cozzolino. He told me to take milk of magnesia. Soon afterwards I passed gas for the first time, a good sign. Diarrhea, amber colored, showing that the awful bowel prep from Thursday was still inside me. Visiting nurse came, very nice. Says my incision is doing very well indeed. Lungs, pulse, blood pressure all fine. Another problem is passage of blood and other liquid around the catheter through the penis, with considerable discomfort. Cozzolino said this is caused by bladder spasms and is “normal.” Lots of flowers and telephone calls. People really do care, it seems. 4:00 to 6:00 p.m., participated in Tucker Search Committee meeting via speaker phone.

Tuesday, June 11, 1996

Stomach rumbles continued but without pain. But Tuesday night, three times, I passed large squirts of urine from outside the catheter. Worried, telephoned Cozzolino, who again said this is OK, so long as the catheter itself isn’t blocked, which it isn’t.

Wednesday, June 12, 1996

Visiting nurse again. Said that the squirts of urine are a good sign—the bladder is actively opposing the catheter, wants it out, i.e., is strong and responsive, which bodes well for continence later, as opposed to a passive bladder that doesn’t react. So, you never know. Still no solid bowel movement. But she told me to discontinue the codeine, which is constipating, and to hope for something normal by tomorrow. Otherwise, I’m feeling quite well. Dick Williamson came and we talked for an hour.

Thursday, June 13, 1996

Last night: first solid stool. This morning two more. Digestive system seems to be working again. E-mail from David Jaspers in Glasgow. I told him that in all likelihood I’ll be able to be there for the viva on August 1st. . . . Nice appreciative note from Holly Parker.

Friday, June 14, 1969

Long visit from John Rassias, another from Dick Williamson yesterday. Today Allan Munck telephoned, and also the nice Greek-American psychiatrist who was operated on by Rous. Went out this morning for the first time, with the leg bag, to the hospital to have clips removed. Saw Dr. Heaney briefly. Catheter removal scheduled for June 25—Tuesday week. But no report yet from pathology. . . . Went to my room (331) to say thanks again to the nurses. Steve there. Left a note for Mac. In the Atrium, saw Edward Bradley and Sheila Harvey. Edward looking very thin, doing rehabilitation exercises after heart surgery. Sheila showed off her wedding ring.

Filia Macedon gave us a cassette of old-time καντάδες, wonderful to hear Chrysanthi singing along and dancing. We even danced a little, sedately. Songs like Τα πράσινα μάτια. . . . Called Eleanor Fletcher to say I’d most likely be going to Glasgow but to book me as an invalid requiring a wheelchair, in order to have help with luggage.

6:30 p.m. Hooray! Dr. Heaney telephoned with good news. The pathologists’ report shows that the cancer was wholly confined to the prostate. Maybe I have cheated fate. I now need to measure PSA periodically. Heaney says that if I go five years with PSA at zero, the likelihood of a recurrence is minuscule. If anything happens, it’s likely to happen within five years, but that, too, he feels, is not probable. Hooray!

Friday, June 21, 1996

I’m sending the following letter out to all the good people who have wished me well.

Ὑγίεια καὶ νοῦς ἐσθλὰ τῷ βίῳ δύο.

(“Health and intellect are life’s two blessings.”)

—Menander

Yes, health and intellect are life’s two blessings. But when one becomes ill with cancer one realizes that love and friendship ought to be added. For me, it was (almost!) worth getting sick in order to experience the inflowing of concern, care, and good wishes from so many quarters. First the hospital room and then our home received vase after vase of flowers; hot soup appeared on the doorstep; the telephone rang off the hook. John Rassias called every day for two weeks prior to the operation, finding me even in Philadelphia and Boston, to say only one thing: “All is light. Light! Light!” Jim Freedman shared his own anguish at the onset of cancer and his relief at its control, in many conversations. Dick Williamson and Allan Munck came round to the hospital and home. But the true hero in all this was Chrysanthi, who canceled plans to be in London for the entire month of June with our daughter Daphne and our first grandchild, Christina Sloane Tebbe, born on May 28 (my birthday!) in order to care for me, who, according to our children’s predictions, was bound to be an “impossible patient” (really, I wasn’t so bad). In any case a thousand thanks to you and all the others who were kind enough to inquire, telephone, send flowers or cards, visit, or pray.

I can now report (1) that the operation itself went very well, not requiring transfusions of the blood I had previous donated for myself, and sparing one set of the nerves that govern sexual potency (in addition, as a special bonus, the surgeon repaired a bilateral hernia), (2) that the pathologist’s report, received after a week of anxious waiting, confirmed that no metastasis had occurred to adjoining lymph nodes or other tissues, and furthermore that the cancer was wholly confined within the prostate gland itself, inside the capsule. Very good news indeed! Of course, there is always a chance of a recurrence; I will need to monitor the situation on a regular basis. But I have been told that if no recurrence occurs in the first four or five years, the likelihood after that is virtually zero.

A thousand thanks to medical science in the abstract for advancing so quickly—if all this had happened even eight or nine years ago, I would probably not have been diagnosed early enough for a cure. And then a thousand thanks to medical science in particular: to Dr. Paul Gerber, my primary physician, for tracking my condition and acting with alacrity; to the anesthesiologists who were so humanely professional; to Dr. John Heaney, a surgeon esteemed by his colleagues for both technical skill and human warmth (a native of Dublin and graduate of Trinity College—in my first interview with him I brought along a photo of me and a Dartmouth Alumni College group being greeted by Mary Robinson, the president of Ireland, in order to establish my credentials!); to the two urological residents, Dr. Samuel Hakim, who performed most of the operation, and Dr. David Cozzolino, who seemed on duty day and night (when did he sleep?) and was always prompt to reassure me regarding various forms of post-surgical distress; to Laura Stempkowski, the nurse practitioner, who gave expert instructions for exercises to help overcome incontinence; and to the splendid nurses on Floor 3, especially Steve and Mac. How fortunate we are to have the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in our back yard!

The procedure I underwent is called radical prostatectomy—good Greek, as many of my colleagues will know, for “slicing out of the [entire] prostate.” One must wonder what imaginative or whimsical anatomist named this little beast the “prostate,” meaning in Greek “one who stands in front” (ο προστάτης) or, by extension, a “protector.” Yes, it does stand in front of the bladder and, yes, it does protect the sperm, I suppose, for the prostate secretes a milky, alkaline fluid into the urethra at the time of emission of semen, thereby enhancing the sperm’s journey to the egg, since semen is acidic and sperm needs a relatively alkaline medium in which to be optimally mobile. But when our little friend does his job of protection for thirty years or so and reaches middle age, he tends to grow fat, and then one of God’s mistakes (remember: “God” for Kazantzakis, and me, equals evolution) is revealed, for the fat little protector squeezes the poor urethra, which unfortunately runs right through his middle. And then the otherwise miraculous machine that is our body finds itself retaining urine—the first telltale symptom of what one hopes is merely “benign prostatic hyperplasia” (BPH).

It is churlish, I realize, to criticize “God” for such a mistake, since it seems that in His original “plan” we were meant to be sexually active from about age 15 to age 45 perhaps, and to die soon afterwards—in which case very few men suffered from prostate disease. However, in the revised plan imposed by technology and medical science the little gland not only reaches middle age and beyond, not only grows fat in an innocent way that merely makes you go to the toilet five to seven times a night, but also becomes a prime site for carcinoma (καρκίνωμα, already meaning “a malignant tumor” in Hippocrates; Latinized as cancer; both from the Indo-European root kar- meaning “hard”). And that’s what happened to me.

Many of my male friends, apprehensive about their own condition, have asked about the details; thus I am emboldened to recite some of them here. How does one determine when BPH turns into prostatic carcinoma? First, your physician performs a digital rectal examination, attempting to feel abnormalities in the prostate. Since only one side can be felt, this is half-effective at best, but it can pick up hardness, asymmetry, or—heaven forbid—a lump that has pushed through the prostatic capsule (skin). Secondly, you have your blood tested every four or six months for prostatic specific antigen (PSA), a protein produced by prostatic cells. A score of 4 or below is meant to be normal. A higher score may or may not indicate cancer, but a continuous rise (which happened to me) is clearly a danger sign. My scores went like this:

May 1992:

6.5

September 1992:

5.6

January 1993:

5.5

May 1993:

5.7

February 1994:

5.4

March 1995:

5.8

September 1995:

6.2

March 1996:

7.6

My primary-care physician, Dr. Paul Gerber, feeling nothing suspicious in the digital exam (a finding confirmed by a urologist to whom I was sent just in case), interpreted the first seven of these scores to mean that the condition was still benign. This finding was accompanied by gallows’ humor: “In any case, you’re much more likely to die of many other causes before prostate cancer gets you.” Dr. Gerber, although clearly a believer in “watchful waiting” rather than overreacting, nevertheless reacted speedily when the March 1996 reading showed 7.6, a significant jump over the previous reading, and the culmination of a steady rise for the past year. I was sent immediately for transrectal ultrasonography, which visualized some cancerous spots in the gland and directed Dr. Stephen Rous where to pinch little bits of tissue for analysis under a microscope. This procedure, called “biopsy,” confirmed that the prostate was cancerous in one of its lobes, but apparently clear in the other.

The biopsy took place on April 12. On April 23 I went to Dr. Rous’s office. “You have cancer,” he pronounced without any circumlocution. Things could be worse, of course: it was only in one lobe (apparently), and the Gleason score was 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 (a Gleason score of 2 to 4 indicates a low-grade cancer, 5 to 7 and intermediate-grade cancer, 8 to 10 a high-grade aggressive cancer most likely to be untreatable and deadly). Since an intermediate-grade cancer can go either way, behaving like a low-grade one or, eventually, a high-grade one, obviously the best bet was to think about proper treatment.

For me at least (and also for my physicians), this eliminated the option of “watchful waiting,” which I considered a stupid gamble—if not sheer suicide. The remaining choice—between radiation and surgery—also became clear, owing to my general good health, relatively long life expectancy (given my parents’ history), and reasonably young age (66). But this last sentence makes a long, quite agonizing story deceptively short, and simple.

When you go to a doctor and he says, “You have cancer,” your life turns upside-down even if the cancer is only intermediate grade and even if it is potentially curable, as prostate cancer is. The disease is still cancer. The next two or three weeks after April 23 were hideous, although I neither went into depression nor became incapable of working. (I even traveled to Greece for two days to lecture, with ghoulish appropriateness, on Kazantzakis’s postmodern conversion of the “Comforter” (ο Παράκλητος) from the Holy Spirit to Death.) Suddenly, however, I was confronted with the very real possibility that a planned retirement likely to give fifteen fruitful years, a period in which four books (at a minimum) would be brought to completion, might never happen. “If the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes, it is incurable,” the urologist informed me, “but we can probably keep you alive for up to ten years.” Thank you very much! So the specter became not only one of relatively imminent death but also another of prolonged therapy usurping one’s time and energy. I began to feel like Kafka’s Herr K., whose “trial” displaces all other interests. Would the cancer be confined to the prostate or metastasized to the lymph or other tissues? Was it not at that very moment pushing its way through the capsule (although I was assured that intermediate-grade cancers are likely to be slow)? John Milton’s lazar house of maladies shown to Adam as a foretaste of what his Fall will cause, previously to me just a perfect quotation for doctors’ offices, now became frighteningly real:

Immediately a place

Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark,

A Lazar house it seemed, wherein were laid

Numbers of all diseased, all maladies

Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms

Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,

Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,

Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs,

Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy

And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,

Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,

Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.

Dire was the tossing, deep the groans. Despair

Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch;

And over them triumphant Death his dart

Shook, but delayed to strike, though oft invoked

With vows, as their chief good, and final hope.

(Paradise Lost XI.477–93)

When I passed children playing in the schoolyard near our home, or adults walking animatedly up and down Main Street, I wondered what right they had to be so healthy. Health, previously assumed—consciously or unconsciously taken for granted—became the obsessive desideratum, surpassing even intellect.

But one’s life also turns upside-down in certain ways that are positive. You acknowledge that dying, especially at age 66 or thereabouts following a marvelously full and rewarding life, is hardly a cosmic catastrophe. Indeed, you feel relieved that those four books hanging over you may not need to be completed after all. How nice to be delivered from responsibility in this way (since no one will accuse you of laziness)! Furthermore, you acknowledge that your service on boards of trustees, committees, and the like, although meaningful, is hardly definitive for your own being, and that you are anything but indispensable for the groups concerned. We all do our bit, to be sure, but someone else can always do just as well if not better. What a positive pleasure to say to a group, “Give me a leave of absence, please” or “Allow me to resign under the circumstances”! One is able to “shirk” without being accused of shirking—which is almost fun. What all this adds up to, perhaps, is the enhancement of what one is rather than what one does (although the latter surely conditions the former). Put another way, it adds up to the knowledge that relationships (especially with family and close friends) are more important than accomplishments. Is it worth becoming seriously ill to gain such knowledge? I said earlier that it was almost worth getting sick to experience the inflowing of concern, care, and good wishes from so many quarters. No one would wish illness upon himself in order to reap such benefits. But when illness does come, it is important to realize that benefits may come as well. Jim Freedman says that his cancer made him a better man. I hope that when all this is over I will be able to say the same.

Is it admissible to believe, as Kazantzakis does, that one has “cheated fate” in a case like this? I fear the arrogance of such a belief, for we all know that Charon will wrestle with us again and again, on this threshing floor or that one, until he wins. Nevertheless, and even at the price of arrogance, I feel right now like James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (6.995–96, 1003–05) when he ascends from Hades. Like Odysseus—like me—he has been allowed to visit the underworld and then to return. This is what he thinks: “Back to the world again. Enough of this place. . . . Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. . . . They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.”

Once again, thank you for your concern. May all of us be blessed throughout our lives with health, intellect, friendship, and love.

Sincerely,

Peter Bien

Sunday, June 23, 1996

I strapped on the leg bag this morning and went to Meeting. The hour seemed very long indeed and I was uncomfortable but managed to last to the end. The discomfort comes from congestion of some sort in the testicles because the lymphatic drainage system was removed in the operation. Difficult to sit. This is supposed to get better.

For the first time since the operation sixteen days ago I felt like reading something serious instead of just TLS, The Economist, etc. So I started Ian Barbour’s Religion in an Age of Science, on process theology, useful for Middleton’s viva and also, I’m hoping, for my talk at Kendal on July 16, for Barbour says that the definition of the Kingdom is “Community” (pp. 219, 221).

Tuesday, June 25, 1996

The catheter came out today and I’m wearing my first diaper since infancy. Let’s see what happens. Actually, the catheter had almost become part of my body, like a natural appendage. But I’ll learn not to miss it.

Wednesday, June 26, 1996

The first night went very well. No “accidents.” I think that, contrary to all expectation, I am already entirely continent.

Thursday, June 27, 1996

No, I’m not. Lots of dripping, mostly at night and later in the day.

Friday, June 28, 1996

Jim Warren, after receiving my letter, wrote me a poem, a parody of Athanasios Diakos:

Για, δες καιρό που διάλεξε

ο Πετρομπέης να νικήσει

που παλεβήσει με το Χάροντα

και τον πλακώσει στο αλώνι.

Saturday, June 29, 1996

More responses to my letter. A touching encomium from Dave Montgomery. And best of all, this lovely, thoughtful reply from Leander:

June 26, 1996

Dear Dad,

Thanks for your exhaustive and moving letter, much more than a letter actually. Informative, spiritual, “necessary” reading for all who are close to you. I know that people will appreciate receiving it.

You write that James Freedman feels the confrontation with cancer left him a better man, and that you hope to experience the same. I can’t imagine that you won’t. On a much smaller scale, and obviously minus the threat of termination, I had similar findings following loss of hearing and permanent tinnitus. It made me more sensitive to others, their respective plights and crosses to bear, as well as gave me a much enlightened perspective on my own existence, my own “whole picture,” if you like. Previously large concerns or problems seemed dwarfish in the aftermath; certain fears and difficulties, both personal and professional, were allayed; I felt a comparative calm and sense of control. Most importantly, perhaps, I discovered who my true friends were. I have a profound belief that your ordeal will leave you changed, and emotionally healthier, wealthier and wiser.

It seems your trial has given you much to reflect upon, most remarkably a wake-up call as to the comparative value of life’s riches. The meaningful closing of your letter indicated to me that you have been struck by a simple revelation: that friendship and the demonstrative interaction with and support of a loving network of individuals outweigh the benefits of workaholicism, and that productivity can be put into perspective, whereby it is not a solitary signature of success, but functions more beneficially in partnership with, and is only equal to, accomplishments as a friend, father, husband, and human being.

I hope things continue to go smoothly. Take it easy.

Love,

Leander

Wednesday. July 3, 1996

Laura called from urology to tell me that my PSA, tested on June 25, was 0.3. Very good indeed for so soon after the operation. . . . Incontinence is present, but better than expected. Sometimes I go most of the day with just one diaper. As predicted, best times (driest times) are in bed at night (although I’m still waking frequently to urinate) or sitting. Worst times are after rising from a seat, or sneezing, or blowing my nose.

Tuesday, July 16, 1996

The big event at Kendal. In the morning I transferred the clerkship (now called the chairpersonship) to Margery Walker after serving for seven years. In my valedictory I recited Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech, to describe basically why Kendal exists, and reminisced about key events from the start (Lloyd Lewis and I talking at Pendle Hill in the autumn of 1984) to the groundbreaking ceremony. Margery then said some very nice things about my service. At the meeting’s end, I read a testimonial for Lafayette Noda, who is leaving the board after ten years, and Margery read one for Lee Huntington. Then both Lee and Lafayette spoke, and both stressed the need to maintain Quaker values and practices. Amen! It was lovely to welcome as new members to the board Gordon Browne, Cliff Vermilye, and Lynda Fowler. Then, a splendiferous outdoor barbecue under a tent, complete with balloons and an om-pa-pa band, to celebrate Kendal’s fifth anniversary. I sat with Mother and Alec, who came to Hanover last night. Steve spoke, and John Diffey, and then I was the keynote speaker at the end. I started by saying that for some of us this was not the 5th anniversary but the 11th and then turned to the “religious” genesis of Kendal at Hanover: how it was conceived as a religious service in conformity to the Quaker view of the “nature of being” (God) not as monarchical but as relational, characterized by participation and interaction, so that the “kingdom” (misnamed) is really a community. I quoted Jim Strickler’s maxim, “the major disease of older people is loneliness” and said that the purpose of Kendal was to mitigate that through community. Afterwards, Margery again spoke about my service in flattering terms, indeed embarrassing ones, and Steve presented me with a fancy bronze plaque commemorating that service. All very nice! What a contrast to my Kinhaven service, which ended with silence and Jerry Bidlack’s enmity (understandable, I suppose, since I campaigned to get him to relinquish leadership and retire). Jean Brophy was present; we had a pleasant few words and a hug. She is thriving in her job, she says—was just promoted. Good to hear.

Afterwards, Alec and I went in his truck to Kiewit to pick up the $1600 worth of fancy computer equipment that Dartmouth is giving its professors. I’ll now have 500 megabytes of external memory instead of 20, 16 RAM instead of 8, a CD-Rom slot, ability to access the worldwide web, very fast response, a color monitor. The idea was to enable Dartmouth professors to keep up with Dartmouth students! . . . A nap (still useful in my recovery period) and then off in our Buick and Alec’s truck to the farm.

Wednesday, July 17, 1996

Terpni

Our 41st anniversary. I gave Chrysanthi a folding umbrella, traveling alarm, and clothing organizer, in anticipation of lots of traveling to see multiple grandchildren. She and Alec walked me out to the north field to show me my present: two cherry trees that Chrysanthi bought earlier this summer and Alec had planted. How nice! We look forward to cherry pies. . . . Alec has finished all the mowing and raking. What a worker! We tried to plan his addition for a bathroom; he has begun to cut new logs for it. He now has electricity and a telephone. . . . At 5:00, left to Hall of Springs, Saratoga, for a sumptuous buffet. Then to ballet, opening with “Swan Lake,” which was extraordinarily moving, especially the pas de deux by Wendy Whelen and Nilas Martins at the end of Part I, to a violin solo, one of Balanchine’s great achievements. Next, “Calcium Light Night,” with music by Charles Ives, was a total contrast, with the choreography by Peter Martins, being a sort of parody of what we’d just seen, but clever and athletic, not ugly. Only two dancers, both superb: Edward Liang and Cara Copeland. Charles Wuorinen’s “Reliquary,” conducted by the composer, I found rather boring. But the final ballet, Tchaikovsky’s “Suite No. 3,” again by Balanchine, was sumptuous and varied, with Damian Woetzel giving a bravura performance in Part 4. A lovely evening, celebrating our 41st anniversary.

Monday, July 22, 1996

Hanover

To Hitchcock Clinic for a routine check-up with Dr. Heaney. All is well. He verified that the two hernias are repaired. Incontinence is minimal and should improve in three to four months as scar tissue dissolves and tissues gain their normal flexibility. Leakage occurs when I rise from a seated position simply because of gravity. I’m managing now on one pad a day, no more diapers, and need no protection at all while sleeping, although I wake in order to urinate two to five times nightly. This, too, should improve; indeed one night I woke only once. . . . Chrysanthi and I had a lovely supper, outdoors in Lake George on the way back; felt like Greece. . . . Alec left the farm today at midday, headed for Leander’s. He left a lovely note saying how much he loves this place. No wonder! Next year he hopes to start an addition to his cabin to provide for a bathroom and perhaps kitchen and an extra bedroom. . . . He refurbished our ladder to the sleeping loft, removing (at long last) the random boards I’d nailed to two log-ends in 1951 and replacing them with thin logs glued with dowels to the two log-ends. What a difference! We can now go up and down with bare feet easily, and the appearance is suitably rustic: just right for an Adirondack cabin.

Tuesday, July 23, 1996

Terpni

Spent most of the day catching up with mail and finishing the galley proofs for JMGS 14/2, which I’ll mail tomorrow to Hopkins. For once, everyone—all authors, Peter Allen, Sarah LaSure, and Eva Konstantellou—responded in time. Also started experimenting with some of the four-hand repertoire Leander has suggested for Dan and me: Brahms waltzes, Mozart D-major sonata (not, alas the F-major, which is exquisite but beyond us), a Beethoven march in C major. He also recommends von Weber but I had to send for the music from Patelson’s. . . . Wrapped the lower trunks of the two new cherry trees, to help them get through the winter. . . . The John Deere is “asleep.” Alec did this before he left, to save me the exertion. (But Dr. Heaney said that I could lift anything I wanted, thus foiling Chrysanthi’s attempts to “protect” me from all such exertions); indeed, he said: “Live your normal life” and I really am feeling normal now, in the 7th week after surgery, except for incontinence and impotence. Orgasms are still possible, but without any emission, for there is no more semen. . . . In late afternoon, my students Jay Bruce and Chris Clay arrived. I gave them the full tour, including the logging road and the path to Alec’s wetlands. And we had a leisurely supper. Very pleasant. Jay will be going to Oxford in September to study theology, and Chris to Yale to continue in Japanese studies.

Wednesday, July 24, 1996

Went to Staples in Queensbury to buy a new fax machine to replace my ailing one. Very high-tech, with built-in answering machine. . . . In the afternoon unfortunately heard that my mother fell yesterday in the Gathering Room. Today an X-ray revealed that she had fractured her hip. She’s in the emergency room at Hitchcock. So we drove back to Hanover. Saw Mother after the operation. She was alert.

Thursday, July 25, 1996

Spoke to her surgeon, Dr. Murphy, who showed me the before and after X-rays. He placed three large screws in the bone. Mother will need twelve weeks of recuperation, with minimal weight on the broken hip. Sad. I hope she won’t need to forgo the Odyssey course.

Friday, July 26, 1996

Fax from Athens informing me that I’ve been awarded an Onassis Foundation grant. Round trip airfare for Chrysanthi and me; one month in a hotel, with breakfast; and about $1500 in cash. Hooray! Now I can truly say that I never go to Greece unless someone else pays for it. . . . Driving to visit Mother in the evening, I noticed a warning light on the dashboard. We stopped at the Co-op service station. The alternator had died. So now we have no car. No chance of having it fixed until Monday. So we’re “tourists” in Hanover.

Saturday, July 27, 1996

Mother transferred to Kendal’s health center. We called a taxi to visit her, waiting for it while sitting in the lovely chairs on the porch of the Hanover Inn, the first time either of us had done that in our 35 years in Hanover. Mother looking terrible. Said she’d had a nightmare. Didn’t know where she was; very distressed. Turned on the Olympics on TV to let her focus on something else. Chrysanthi stayed with her while I went to hear Bev Web play: Beethoven’s Pathétique and Opus 31 no. 3 (which I used to play), Schumann’s Papillons (not my favorite), and then the extraordinary Chopin Fantasie Opus 49 in F minor, which he played brilliantly. Andrey Logan, who has been a saint since Mother’s fall, drove us home.

Sunday, July 28, 1996

Called Dimitris Gounelas to confirm dates for arrival and departure in Greece. He said they all may be on strike.

Monday, July 29, 1996

Car fixed; new alternator. So we drove back to the farm. Watered the new cherry trees. Went through piles of mail. Finished (sort of) chapter 4 of Demotic Greek 1, to send chapters 1 to 4 to Dimitri and Andromache tomorrow.

Wednesday, July 31, 1996

London–Glasgow

Arrived Heathrow 6:30 a.m. Alex there to drive Chrysanthi to Christchurch Street. I continued to Glasgow. Met by David Jasper at the airport. Young Englishman, very genial and talkative. He took me to the university. Met Professor Newlands, the theologian who will be co-examiner tomorrow. Lunch together. Very genial. We both agreed that Middleton’s thesis, though weak, should pass with “minor revisions.” Then David drove me to his home, about 15 miles south of Glasgow. Nap. Tea. Lots of talk, about theology, literature, theology and literature, children, Darren. Then drove to see the upper Clyde. Very picturesque and rural. Then splendid Indian restaurant in the village of Hamilton. Then home to Scotch whiskey and more talk next to the fire, with a Beethoven quartet playing in the background. David extraordinarily friendly and hospitable. Thankfully I experienced zero jet lag. Went to bed at midnight, not even tired. But did overdo my “pad” and ended with wet pants after supper. Oh well. . .

Thursday, August 1, 1969

Glasgow–London

To the university. Met Darren, finally, and his lively wife. Coffee. Met the professor of English who will host the Dartmouth foreign study group. At 10:00 a.m. the Middleton viva, with me as eternal examiner, Newlands as co-examiner, John Riches as chairman (non-participating), and David sitting on the side, also non-participating. Riches turns out to have been Paul Anderson’s supervisor (Anderson: the evangelical Quaker who defended the anti-homosexual position at Pendle Hill). Small world. I spent about 35 minutes detailing some problems with the thesis, including a misunderstanding of the Apollonian category in Nietzsche, which he confused with the category of the Socratic, but also tried to indicate the great successes of the dissertation. Newlands did the same. After an hour, Darren left. We reaffirmed our previous opinion that he should pass but should do the revisions suggested (more or less). He returned. Congratulations all around! Then Darren and wife and I went out for a ceremonial lunch, discussing their future (he’ll finish at Rhodes next June, she’s beginning at Princeton Seminary this September). Thank goodness, I stayed dry through all this. Taxi to airport. Returned to London.

Friday, August 2, 1996

London

A full, interesting day. First to the National Gallery to see the Degas exhibit, concentrating on his final years when he went beyond impressionism and indeed became a sort of link between impressionism and post-impressionism. Most striking are the soothing pastel colors in portraits, depictions of dancers and female nudes, plus the audacity to paint nudes in awkward positions. A video showed his technique of using tracing paper so that he could re-do a particular composition many times. Most enjoyable, as being in the proximity of genius always is. . . . I should mention of course that last night and this morning I saw our first grandchild, Christina Sloane Tebbe. The house is transformed, filled everywhere with baby paraphernalia. Christina is a placid baby, now nine weeks old, with big eyes and an expressive face. Holding her, I was amazed at her warmth. Daphne is a very caring, loving mother and Greg dutifully plays his role. . . . After Degas, walked down the Strand to King’s and met Roddy Beaton and Mark Mazower for lunch. We went again to the Sofra Turkish restaurant. Very nice. Roddy is writing a biography of Seferis and recently returned from Ismir and environs, trying to get some sense of Seferis’s birthplace. Mark is very ambitious, writing a history of welfare governments of Europe, and what happened. A huge subject. He told me about a woman in London who went out in the 1950s to Salonika and took pictures of the girls’ school. I’ll try to contact her. . . . Then to the Penn Club for a rest and more reading of Sallie McFague, also of newspaper accounts of the unrest in Indonesia. . . . Then to the Barbican to see Julius Caesar in a strong production with a wonderfully imperious Caesar (Christopher Benjamin), a scheming Cassius (Julian Glover), and of course a complicated Brutus (John Nettles), all beautifully directed by Peter Hall. An extraordinary treat, as one expects from the RSC. And eerily relevant to what’s happening now in Indonesia, but I hope not fully relevant—i.e., not the full consequences of civil war. The two great speeches, the funeral orations of Brutus and then of Mark Antony, were beautifully done.

Saturday, August 3, 1996

London

A girl from Croatia who wants to study sign language in America came to me for advice. She’s been helping Daphne and other Americans but the British won’t renew her visa after November. I’ll try to send her relevant information after I return. . . . Long walk with Christina in the pram, Daphne, Greg, and Chrysanthi down King’s Road, teeming with young people on this beautiful Saturday morning. . . . Reading McFague’s The Body of God, still. It gives a good overview of postmodern thinking. Also started work, on Daphne’s computer, copyediting Anastasopoulou’s article for the next JMGS—tedious. . . . Went with Greg and Daphne to a matinee of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. Very funny, beautifully acted, but of course totally un-memorable. What a contrast with yesterday’s Julius Caesar.

Sunday, August 4, 1996

London

A lazy morning. After lunch, walked with Christina in the Royal Hospital Gardens. Then to Portland Place to visit Nancy Crawshaw, a professional photographer who had gone out to Greece in 1946–47 in the midst of the civil war and had photographed, among other things, the Quaker school. I’m quite sure that Chrysanthi, looking quite fat, is in one of the photos. Some were published in the Times Educational Supplement, which I can get, some in Quaker brochures, which I hope I can get. Crawshaw would like to leave the photos to Quakers but hasn’t found anyone so far who is interested. I said I’d make inquiries at Friends House, starting with Stuart Morton. Perhaps Ben Pink Dandelion can help, too. . . . On the way home, looked at the Sloane Club, which is affiliated with the Yale Club in New York. Very modest facilities compared to the Yale Club, but they assuredly do a very nice tea. . . . Salmon dinner cooked by Chrysanthi, and then Christina’s bath. Daphne got me marmalade and digestive biscuits as a going-away present.

Monday, August 5, 1996

London–Riparius

Driven to Healthrow by Alex’s wife, very talkative. At Philadelphia, I put Chrysanthi on SEPTA to go to 30th Street Station and then to Washington via AMTRAK. I flew back to Albany and drove home, stopping at the Montcalm for a good dinner. To bed at 10:30 p.m. our time, equals 3:30 a.m. London time. At 12:30 midnight the telephone rang, and Leander announced the birth of a daughter, Sophia May Bien, by Caesarian. Spoke briefly to Deanna, who seemed in good spirits, and to Chrysanthi. Deanna’s waters had broken yesterday, but the doctors couldn’t induce her contractions; thus the need for the Caesarian. But she seems fine and the baby looks normal and healthy. So we now have two granddaughters born about nine weeks apart.

Thursday, August 8, 1996

Dick Williamson telephoned with the shocking news that Georganna died, of ovarian cancer. All the symptoms she’s been having for two years, diagnosed as stomach spasms, apparently were related to this other, deadly disease. And suddenly she is dead. I helped him arrange for a memorial at the Quaker Meeting House on Monday. He said he didn’t want the Norwich Congregational Church because the minister would say something about God. But the Quakers are OK, apparently. Poor Dick! What a blow!

Allison Clarkson invited me to dinner with her family. Her uncle and aunt were there: Dr. and Mrs. Hudnut, whose son went to Dartmouth. Also her parents, Clarkson (English) and wife, and assorted aunts. They’re all very rich and accomplished. Mostly Episcopalian, although Hudnut comes from a line of Methodist ministers. She and Oliver Goodenough, her husband, bought an old farmhouse barn across the road from the Windhover Lake and compound. The table we ate off (in the refurbished barn) came from Fox Lair, the great camp that was given to the State and burned. Oliver, a lawyer, specializes in property transfer to children, so I hope to consult with him regarding Terpni. . . . I’m enjoying cooking, and actually was disappointed I’d been invited out, although I enjoyed the company.

Friday, August 9, 1996

Leander called. He wants me to see the baby, who cries and cries. Chrysanthi wants a holiday in NYC after she leaves. So I’ll go down on the 21st or 22nd and we’ll return to NYC on the 23rd and see the Picasso exhibit at MoMA and then the Homer exhibit at the Met.

Friday, August 16, 1996

Although I’ve enjoyed preparing dinners I’ve hardly had a chance. Sunday August 11 to Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald for dinner. Tuesday to Tom Akstens, Wednesday to Perrymans, Thursday to Rothsteins (with Shapiros), and next Sunday with Jerry and Simon Gardner to share pizza in Schroon Lake. Art Perryman advised me not to rush into logging with Gregory May, who showed me an impressive stand of oak in the woods in back of my office. But I’ll wait until Alec is here next summer. Also, Chris, ever practical, suggested I wait until retirement, for tax advantages and also perhaps the lowering of the capital gains tax. The oaks are gorgeous. Straight and tall. . . . Aser Rothstein is still involved in amazing science, which he explains so well. He and a colleague have found a way to “humanize” plastic and animal prostheses by coating them with a human protein that gives the elasticity they lack. That’s only one of two schemes he is working on now in his “retirement.” . . . Tom Akstens will be married in January to a graphic designer who will hope to survive professionally in Bakers Mills. He has turned vegetarian. We supped on mushrooms and squash.

But last Monday, unexpectedly, I had to go to Hanover for the memorial service held at the Quaker Meeting House, thanks to my intervention, for Georganna, Dick Williamson’s “partner.” She died of ovarian cancer last week. For two years she had thought she had stomach spasms and was being “treated” with diet, whereas all along it was this deadly cancer. Again, how fortunate I have been, by contrast. The service was genuine and real. Nothing artificial. Dick broke down and wept; so did her children. But people from the psychoanalytic institute in Boston spoke well about her expertise and compassion, and Bill Pence was eloquent about her gifts as a graphic designer. So, what a tragedy! Just as she was about to finish her psychoanalytic training! And just as Dick was beginning his retirement. Sad! At least they’d had fifteen years together, whereas Ned and Anne had had only five.

Sunday, August 18, 1996

Pizza supper at DeCesare’s with Jerry Gardner, like me a temporary bachelor. He’d just finished his exams at Adirondack Community College for undergraduate science courses to enable him to study to be a physician’s assistant (he sold the North Creek newspaper to Sue Goodspeed and is much relieved). We both agreed that living alone, especially when temporary, is not at all distressing. Indeed, it’s rather nice to be able to make decisions without consulting anyone else.

Tuesday, August 20, 1996

Drove to Hanover last night. Stopped for a hamburger at The Loft on routes 9 and 189, and the owner recognized me immediately. How we used to love going there because of the smile of his wife, but she left him long ago. He perseveres, cooking hamburgers and onion rings. . . . Lunch today at Kendal with the three new trustees: Gordon Browne, Cliff Vermilye, and Lynda Fowler, head of Rockefeller Center, on the concluding afternoon of their orientation. John Hennessey explained the new Governance Committee. Then Cara took us through the kitchen, first time for me as well as them. They do 700 meals a day in an extremely cramped space. . . . Then I visited with Mother, who is in good spirits. Her X-ray is on the 27th. If the pins have worked, she should be able to return to her apartment. . . . Then back to Kendal for Quaker orientation. I spoke and then Gordon Browne did, movingly, about silence, no voting, and pacifism. Cliff afterwards said it was the best orientation he had experienced after serving on many boards. Thanks to Steve for setting it up. Margery and I with Gordon hope to give Quaker orientation to residents, nurses, and other staff this year. I questioned Gordon about his arrangements for his farm, regarding transfer to the children. They have created a not-for-profit corporation, just like Warder Cadbury’s at Camp Backlog in Indian Lake, and Gordon says it works extremely well. . . . Then to Rassias to meet Ava and Stelios Orphanoudakis and their daughters, visiting from Crete and looking at colleges. Stelios’s career is fascinating. He is once a week in Athens for a high-level committee, is director of the Research Institute in Iraklio, is professor at the university, and is deeply involved in the E.U. He’ll set me up with privileges on Forth net so that I can have e-mail in Greece. And one of his colleagues may be able to help Christos.

Wednesday, August 21, 1996

To Washington

To Albany in the afternoon to fly to Washington to see Sophia. Leander is exhilarated at his new adventure of fatherhood, despite the baby’s reluctance, so far, to sleep at night, and its vociferous crying. He was in the OR during the Caesarian, and the baby, “wrenched untimely from the womb,” was placed immediately in his arms. Fathers, these days, obviously need to be much braver than we were, forty-odd years ago. The Caesarian of course saves the mother the pains of labor, so it isn’t all bad. Also, the baby is saved the constriction of the birth canal and the obstetrician’s forceps. . . . Nice reunion with Chrysanthi when we reached the house. Sophia has a lovely round face but lacks the big round eyes of Christina. We can’t quite tell so far whether she’ll have “oriental eyes” or not. In any case, she has no hare lip, which is a blessing. Deanna is very subdued and undemonstrative, perhaps owing to Chrysanthi’s outgoing behavior, singing and talking to the baby, walking with it. Leander will most likely be the more demonstrative of the two parents. Deanna is nursing, yet the baby seems to need more nourishment, and they’ve supplemented the nursing with formula, just like Daphne. The miracle, and perplexity, of birth, once again, is all too evident. These creatures emerge able to suck, digest, evacuate, sneeze, belch, yawn, grasp, and scream, but that’s all. Their digestive system is operative, their sympathetic nervous system (heartbeat, breathing) is operative, yet they are so totally helpless otherwise. And then the brain develops, the bones develop, the muscles grow strong, and they can become a Beethoven! . . . Chrysanthi fed us; Deanna never cooks, it seems. We watched some TV, and retired in the basement to be out of ear-contact with Sophia upstairs.

Thursday, August 22, 1996

Potomac

A leisurely day. I’ve been vetting the now-completed accreditation self-study for Kendal. Still much to change. Leander and I read over the Brahms four-hand waltzes, opus 39, and selected which to work up with Dan; also chose a von Weber march and a Schubert march to combine with the Beethoven march in C major (which may be too hard for us). Leander’s concert schedule for spring 1997 is awesome, including Kennedy Center, Little Carnegie, Corcoran Gallery, Strathmore Hall, with flute, violin, tenor, and viola. We took a long drive and he asked about wills, life insurance, pension, college fund for Sophia, also worries about gall bladder and prostate owing to family history. I’ll call TIAA/CREF to see if he can join. He grilled hamburgers on the new patio in their very attractive back yard—again Deanna contributed nothing—and we feasted. They bathed the baby; she hates water, it seems, screamed the whole time. Again, Chrysanthi and I slept in the basement in order to have some peace.

Friday, August 23, 1996

To NYC

Metro to Union Station. Croissants at Au Bon Pain. AMTRAK to New York. Traffic, noise, oppressive heat. Yale Club a haven. I napped while Chrysanthi shopped at Daffy’s, hunting for bargains. Walked to MoMA, stopping at Barnes and Noble to buy some “cloth books” and “board books” for Christina. At MoMA, the marvelous exhibition “Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation.” Chrysanthi doesn’t like him because of his cruelty, she says—having read Ariadne Stassinopoulos’s biography—toward all the women in his life. But these women were true Egerias, stimulating him to do “portraits” that represented more his own feelings, positive or negative, than the appearance or feelings of the subject. Well-known paintings—e.g., the woman who is “exploded” and whose mouth is like a vice plus saw—now fall into the evolution of his love-life: this image being his revenge on a woman no longer in favor. Indeed, the mouth is interpreted as a destructive vagina ready to bite and saw. Quite remarkable is his diversity of styles. He could paint realistically and abstractly, cubistically and surrealistically, all in the same period. . . . Returned to the Yale Club for a mediocre meal, but in pleasant surroundings, on the 22nd floor. Then to see “Master Class,” based on Maria Callas’s master classes at Juilliard. A bravura performance by Patti LuPone as Callas, winning a standing ovation. The play mesmerizing at every moment: how Callas, totally egotistical, yet totally devoted to her art, annihilated the poor students while at the same time truly diagnosing their failings and truly suggesting ways to improve. This brilliant play by Terrence McNally has everything: drama, psychological depth, festival, grand music, intellectual truth. Callas ended with an encomium on art itself, without which we would all be poor. Amen!

Saturday, August 24, 1996

New York–Terpni

Breakfast with the New York Times at the Yale Club, always a treat. (Shirred eggs.) Bus to the Met, half price for senior citizens. The Winslow Homer show is so different from the Picasso, but complementary. Homer painted nature and other people; Picasso painted himself disguised as other people. Homer was a brilliant watercolorist, self-taught, apparently. Lots of Adirondack paintings; he was headquartered near us in Minerva. A mid-19th century painting includes a hay rake exactly like the ones we still buy from Braley Noxon. Another scene shows the typical log cabin and clearing before the tree stumps have been removed: they stand like a rash on the landscape. His anger at unethical hunters is evident, how they’d drive deer into the lakes and slaughter them, how they’d take only the rack and the hide, for money. Also lovely scenes of one-room schoolhouses, boys playing “snap the whip” in recess. Also sensitivity to the new role of women as teachers and factory hands, leaving the farms for the mills. And the fierce depiction of angry seas on the Maine coast. And the sculptures of British fishwives, especially the one walking with her redheaded baby into a gale. We were there until almost noon, but then quickly went through the Toulouse Lautrec exhibit, very minor compared to either Picasso or Homer (but his career lasted only ten years). Finely, early Greek art, nicely reinstalled on the first floor: the Cycladic harp-players and “modern” women are so memorable. . . . AMTRAK up the beautiful Hudson to Albany. Scenes from the tracks show why painters formed the Hudson River School to record these beauties. . . . Taxi to the airport to retrieve our car. Supper in the Montcalm, just like old times. And home to the serenity of Terpni, the polar opposite of Times Square.

Sunday, August 25, 1996

Warder Cadbury had invited us to Meeting for Worship at Camp Back Log, but it was too much of a trip, seeing we’d not even unpacked, so we didn’t go. Finished CCRC accreditation vetting and wrote ten letters, catching up, including a long one to Christos about Stelios’s colleague who might help the autistic society. And a reply to George Goodwin, who wrote kindly after attending the Kinhaven Board’s celebration for John Austin, saying that people had been asking for me. . . . Shapiros for supper, very jolly.

Monday, August 26, 1996

Supper along Schroon Lake with Wendy and Gary McGinn and their children Marcus and Katie. Always very pleasant. The children are maturing nicely. Marcus is no longer surly: quite a transformation. But poor Gary is trapped in his job at Murphy’s. He’d love to leave and have something more creative and challenging but there are so few opportunities here, and he is almost 50 years old. He applied to be caretaker of a camp in Speculator and was short-listed but not chosen. Katie played a hymn well enough on the piano and Wendy sang, on key but with a strident voice. I told them all about the Greek civil war, Truman Doctrine, Odysseas in Russia. They seemed very interested but perhaps suspected me of communist or at least leftist/liberal tendencies. . . . Spent the day reading Rhea Galanaki’s novel The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha about a Cretan boy who was led away to Constantinople, who converted to Islam and became Egypt’s Minister of War and leader of the Egyptian army dispatched to quell the Cretan rising of 1866–68. Fascinating subject, but not told very compellingly.

Thursday, August 29, 1996

Nice visit with Al and Mary Zalon at the Shapiros over a sumptuous lunch of lox and capers and goat cheese. They have a deer hound, about four feet high, almost as big as a young deer, that runs almost as fast as a deer in an ungainly gait and is almost human in its playfulness. Very friendly (Al and Mary, not to mention the dog), repeatedly invited us to their home in Mt. Vernon. Next year if they come for a longer stay we’ll play flute and piano again, as has been our habit. . . . Working on lesson 6 of Demotic Greek 1. I invented a word for computer science: κομπιουτερολογία, but Felitsa tells me it is, strangely, επιστήμη της πληροφορικής. Chrysanthi is doing the drills. Lots and lots of work, proceeding very slowly. . . . Also put the Troy-Bilt mower “to sleep” for the winter.

Saturday, August 31, 1996

To Brant Lake Camp for the 80th anniversary celebration. Wine and hors d’oeuvres on the waterfront (much expanded), a grand banquet in the dining hall, ending, of course, with baked Alaska, and then entertainment in the Clubhouse, with Bob Gersten singing Raus mit Kraus à la Arthur Freund. Lots of pictures, including one of me as a junior counselor in 1946, age 16, with curly hair. Met Bobby Bronsteen and his wife, Chuck Dorf (who was managing editor of the Brant Lake Mirror when I was editor), Vince Starace, aged 88, and looking like a character in a Pirandello play, Peter Schweitzer, Bob Reich’s aunt (!), and of course Bob and Libby Gersten, Karen (Gerstenzang) Meltzer, Richard Gersten and wife. The camp is flourishing, full up with 320 children each paying $6000. Lots of dramatics still, and a good pianist, but no more extended trips for fear of liability. Karen, who is trip counselor, says she still consults my files with meticulous accounts of the trips I organized at age 17–18. Amazing! I don’t remember making files. At the dinner, everyone came to the mike and said a few words of thanks or reminiscence. I’m glad that Chrysanthi had a taste of this phase of my life. It was raucous in the dining room. And we all sang a Brant Lake song at the end of the Clubhouse entertainment. A nostalgia trip.

Sunday, September 1, 1996

Peter Schweitzer came for a late breakfast, driving his immense Mercedes limousine. Very vivacious and friendly. Was sorry I sold the Schweitzer stock but glad I’ve kept most of the Kimberly Clark. Told me that his rabbi, whom I saw last night at BLC, gets paid $125,000 a year plus benefits. That’s Scarsdale. . . . A shingle fell off the cabin roof, strangely, and I went up on the extension ladder and replaced it, right at the very top. Glad I can still do such things. . . . After supper, nice three-hour visit with Art and Chris Perryman, talking about not-for-profit corporations, limited partnerships, etc., for transfer of land, about logging, and about religion. His more-or-less fundamentalist faith is hard for me to take, but at its basis is really just a sense of awe and wonder and gratitude for the miracle of the created universe, and that is fine. He told stories, too, of some of his actions as a State trooper, as for example when he once arrested the supervisor of the Town of Thurman for harassing a woman. And the daughter of their fundamentalist minister is with child out of wedlock. I said that Jesus would have been compassionate, and Art agreed. Interestingly, we also talked at length about Paradise Lost, Milton’s emphasis on the felix culpa and the necessity of choosing. Art, à propos, is against home schooling and even parochial schooling, because the children are too protected: Milton’s “cloistered virtue.”

September 3, 1996

Lake Placid

A nice outing to Lake Placid to confer with a lawyer, Timothy Smith, about a better arrangement for our farm. He suggests a partnership rather than a not-for-profit corporation. He was joined by a young lawyer who just passed the bar, Amy Smith, who turned out to be from North Creek, a neighbor of the Grunblatts. We’ll await Smith’s proposal in writing.

September 4, 1996

Dr. Heaney wants me to volunteer to take part in an experiment in drug therapy for prostate cancer, two years long, involving the need for bone scans and perhaps some side effects (unless I get the placebo, which goes to 50% of the volunteers). I’m not very inclined, so far. . . . Bill Hans, a forester, came at my invitation. He is going to do a full survey of our timber. . . . Supper at Shapiros with David Frost and his new woman, Joan, who turns out to have been a classmate of mine in 7th and 8th grades at P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights. She remembered the name Peter Bien instantly. She said that all the Jackson Heights students thought we’d all arrived from Europe. (It was only Sunnyside!) . . . Working morning and afternoon on Demotic Greek revision, trying to catch up to have chapters 1 through 8 ready for Dimitri and Mache when I go to Princeton on September 23. In the evening, vetting Tziovas’s volume from the modernism conference in my honor. Alas, many red marks. . . . Leander told us that Sophia slept six hours last night and five the night before. Wonderful! But she cries most of the day.

Sunday, September 8, 1996

Breakfast at the Copperfield with Maureen and Mary as a farewell. And had a nice evening with the Perrymans two days ago. Closing very easy this year, since we never opened the guesthouse and Alec did the John Deere.

Monday, September 9, 1996

Terpni–Hanover

An appraiser came. I shut off water last night. Nice to wash at the well and use the outhouse, as in olden times. The new appraisal is needed for the gifting we want to complete to the children. Left at 11:00 a.m. and drove to Hanover, sadly. Chrysanthi immediately went to the Senior Center for a meeting. She’s now more involved than I am.

Thursday, September 12, 1996

Returning to Hanover is like returning to a huge city. So much to do. Many people to see. The farm simplifies life deliciously. Today I saw Frank Currier about tax implications of the gifting.

Friday, September 13, 1996

Allan Munck had an acute gall bladder attack plus operation, much simpler than mine. No incision; everything done through three tiny holes, via television. Visited him. He’s doing well. Lunch with Dana Burch, who is combining Wall Street and Union Theological Seminary, as he had hoped. He seems to consider me a sort of guru. . . . Dick Williamson came for supper, and we played Mozart. He seems much more cheerful than the last time we visited.

Monday, September 16, 1996

A “Kendal day.” Interviewed by John Hennessey and Mary Schaffner in the morning regarding our opinion on the future of the Stewardship Committee. I’m still in favor of taxing residents for charity but we need to do it with their knowledge and approval, not covertly. Then lunch with Mother in the café. She is walking much better now, and much faster. Then a grand supper at the Hanover Inn for all trustees and spouses. Sat with Gordon Browne, who regaled me with stories about Quaker crooks.

Tuesday, September 17, 1996

Kendal board, my first without being clerk. Margery Walker chaired very well. How relaxing to be “on the sidelines”! John Diffey finally inquired about my health and I decided not to consider him a “false friend” any longer. . . . Eye exam: pressure better—i.e., less threat of glaucoma. . . . Supper at Sweet Tomatoes with John and Mary Lincoln.

Wednesday, September 18, 1996

Back to Kendal to talk to residents about the accreditation self-study, now completed. My job was to explain my role as editor. I did this with humor, judging from audience reaction, as opposed to the weighty seriousness of the other speakers. Even Beasie Brownell, long a critic of Quaker leadership, came up afterwards to say a good word.

Thursday, September 19, 1996

Nice lunch with Randy Testa, who is sure that the Education Department will now be left alone. Robert Binswanger has resigned as chair, and his nemesis, Andrew Garrod, is the new chair. We’ll see what happens. . . . US Air to Philadelphia. Good piano session with Dan, who did practice the 1st four Brahms waltzes but not much else. He likes them and also the three marches. Afterwards, he took me to a fabulous ice cream place for a stupendous milkshake. Fun!

Saturday, September 20, 1996

Pendle Hill–New York City

The board of course discussed Nancy Frommelt’s dismissal. But it has to be. She greeted me yesterday with a big smile but I’m told that she is very sad. I ministered in Meeting about the miracle of childbirth and the human organism, which almost convinces one that a Maker planned it all; yet scientists tell us it was all trial and error. What to believe? It doesn’t matter. Perhaps the “plan” was for trial and error. What matters is simply awe and appreciation for our presence on earth and the miracle of life. This sparked other ministries, including a very fine statement of thanks to the Lord Jesus for all this. A gathered meeting. How nice! . . . After trustees and an executive session with Dan, I drove to New York with Vince Buscemi. Easy conversation for 2½ hours, making the time pass. He fears he is going to have prostate cancer. . . . Met Gail and Karen at the Yale Club; we had an easy time giving the translation prize to David Connelly. Then to Greek Print reception. Saw Peter Papas of the Ίδρυμα Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού, which he says is functioning again. But the Onassis Foundation and NYU have divorced. The academic program will now be on its own in the university, which is better. . . . Then to a nice Greek restaurant with Gail, Karen, and also Laurie Hart, who teaches at Haverford. They told me about MGSA Executive Committee’s reluctance to continue Peter Allen as JMGS associate editor. I hope he doesn’t conclude that I betrayed him. I didn’t. I had no idea that this would happen.

Sunday, September 22, 1996

New York City

Leisurely breakfast at the Yale Club with the New York Times. Then to Greek Print. Mike Keeley and I shared the podium with Karen Van Dyck, talking about translation. I got lots of laughs for my όρτσα story. . . . Worked on DG1 in the Yale Club library. Supper in “China Peace,” which is getting worse. Then drove to Princeton. I’m housed handsomely in the Nassau Inn this time. Palmer House is full.

Monday, September 23, 1996

Princeton

Dimitri deconstructs my grammar, but we maintain good humor and the collaboration remains viable. Mache is the one mostly responsible for the scenarios in first draft. She set me up with a computer printer in the Classics Department, thanks to Richard Martin’s agreement. (I brought my Style Writer but it arrived broken from the trip in the valise.) . . . Supper with Betsy Middleton, Darren’s wife, studying now at Princeton Seminary: theology and social work. Sweet girl.

Tuesday, September 24, 1996

Princeton

Worked 9:30–11:30 a.m., 2:30–4:30 p.m. as usual. Lunch at Prospect with Dimitri and Nehamas, who renewed his invitation for me to come to Princeton for a semester in 1999–2000. Good! Met Mrs. Goheen and conveyed greetings from Jim Armstrong.

Wednesday, September 25, 1996

Princeton

Hellenic Studies dinner. Met Roudometof and Kyrou, etc. Evi, Dimitri’s “partner,” told me that she had breast cancer and now has another tumor. Lots of good talk with Mike Keeley. We both confessed that in retirement we have more money than before, and hardly know what to do with it. He hopes to give a nice donation to the American Farm School.

Thursday, September 26, 1996

Princeton–Hanover

We worked on the revision for chapter 7. Did 5 and 6 previously. Mache wrote the scenario for chapter 9. There will be 12 chapters plus an epilogue. Thus the end is coming in sight. But every time we look at older material we add, change, subtract. . . . Drove to Philadelphia airport. . . . Allan and Dick came for supper and music.

Friday, September 27, 1996

Nice visit from Leslie English, who yearns to return someday to Greece but is tied to her job as journal editor.

Saturday, September 28, 1996

Bob Bell came from Williamstown and we had a long lunch together. His daughter’s operation for curvature of the spine has been postponed but the condition is still very worrisome. He exults in good teaching and feels he doesn’t need to produce more scholarship. His book on Joyce’s humor proved that he can do it. So he runs a program helping new faculty at Williams acquire better teaching skills. Would that we had something comparable at Dartmouth! . . . We talked also about our childhood, growing up as the sons of physicians.

Monday, September 30, 1996

Long breakfast at Lou’s with Scott Brown, the new dean of the Tucker Foundation. He wanted my sense of priorities established by the committee. Luckily I had my committee notes, which I was able to give him. What a challenge he faces! And what a peach of a job! Interestingly, on the same day, I received a warm, flattering letter from Jan Tarjan about my illness, with no mention of her failure to be appointed dean. I responded with my “prostate letter” and kind words about the wonderful service she gives to students. . . . Met Jim Freedman on the street. He’s still getting very encouraging reports from his lab tests and is approaching the two-year mark after the operation. He said that my letter is “circulating.” He kept it and gives copies to other people as needed; so does Jim Wright.

Tuesday, October 1, 1996

To urology for my three-month checkup. PSA is again 0.01. “Welcome, my healthy friend!” was Dr. Heaney’s greetings. My next exam is in six months. After that one year. . . . Took Chrysanthi to the Hanover Inn to catch a limo to Logan to fly, business class, thanks to the Onassis Foundation, to London.

Wednesday, October 2, 1996

To Kendal for celebratory breakfast for everyone who worked on the accreditation self-study. As editor, I received a “certificate” on which practically every word was (deliberately) misspelled. How nice! Plus an elaborately wrapped pencil one inch long.

The new appraisal for the farm arrived, surprisingly giving the sale value as only $65,000. Alec’s cabin is excluded. The acreage is put at $300 per acre only. Fine! All the better for gifting. . . . Lunch with Daphne Psacharopoulos, daughter of George. She’s just arrived at Tuck School. Tells me that Tuck students do gratis consulting; could be used at Kendal. . . . Met with Iason Demos, back from his term at Thessaloniki and wanting to do a comparative literature thesis on different approaches to modernism in Greece and England, using Theotokas’s Ελεύθερο πνεύμα. An article in the Birmingham symposium papers that I’m currently editing is very helpful. . . . Bob and Lynne Fagles arrived. At Jim Tatum’s “Mediterranean Studies” university seminar he read from his translator’s “Afterword” to the new Odyssey plus some good passages from both the Iliad and the Odyssey. He appreciated the diversity of faculty present, including music professors, medievalists, etc. . . . I left before supper, to play music with Dick and Allan: von Weber, Kuhlau, Max Reger, Fauré.

Thursday, October 3, 1996

I introduced Fagles to a packed 105 Dartmouth audience, including Mother: her first outing. Thankfully, Dartmouth Hall now has a ramp and an elevator. I read Pope, Butler, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Cook, and Fagles on VI 125, where Odysseus, the “first gentleman of Europe,” covers himself before appearing before Nausicaa. Lots of fun! Fagles is the only one who calls a spade a spade: “Private parts.” He read brilliantly: the proem, Cyclops, slaying of suitors, reconciliation with Penelope. It was a treat. Afterwards, reception in the Faculty Lounge: a good chance for David Millstone to talk with Bob. Then at 7:00 we gathered at the Norwich Inn: Armstrongs, Fagles, Lincolns, Campions, Bill Scott and me, for a lovely three-hour dinner with easy, good conversation and excellent food. Everyone left totally relaxed.

Friday, October 4, 1996

Picked up my absentee ballot for the November election. Took the Fagles to Kendal and gave them the tour. Then to Comparative Literature lunch with faculty and students; he spoke well about translation. Then goodbye. A successful visit. . . . Supper at Muncks with Dick.

Saturday, October 5, 1996

Supper with Audrey and Mother at Kendal. For the first time (that I knew), Bev Web faltered. He started the Valse Brilliante opus 42 (which I used to play), quite obviously had trouble remembering it, faked, repeated, and then gave up. Franny prompted in a stage whisper, “Play the Berceuse,” and he did, perfectly. The rest was the 3rd Ballade, 2 nocturnes, and Scherzos 1 and 2. Let’s hope that he can keep playing and that he dies suddenly, without a period in which he can no longer play.

Sunday, October 6, 1996

Flew to Greensboro, NC to Guilford College, where I was J. M. Ward Distinguished Quaker Visitor (!). Max Carter in charge. My first lecture was in New Garden Friends Meeting, a large complex designed by Mather Lippincott. I did my “Words, Wordlessness, and the Word” lecture, the same given when I was Quaker visitor at Haverford. How nice to have another chance! There were good questions and then a period of worship.

Monday, October 7, 1996

Greensboro, NC

Breakfast at 7:00 a.m. with Don and Britte McNemar. Don is the new president of Guilford. How nice to visit with them again and think back to good times at Dartmouth. His formal inauguration is this Friday, and he has invited Leonard Rieser to be the speaker. Leonard hired him at Dartmouth and elevated him to the associate deanship. Then Don accompanied me to “The Hut,” Max’s headquarters, for morning worship, a 15-minute Quaker Meeting held each morning with several students in attendance. Then to Max’s class, “Jesus at 2000.” They had just read The Last Temptation and some had seen the movie. One student was assigned to report on the final three chapters and did so very poorly and minimally. I tried to explain the “ladder of love” there, how Jesus goes from aesthetic to ethical and then finally to eschatological. Apparently there are some evangelical Quakers in the group who, of course, are scandalized by Kazantzakis, but they didn’t speak. They keep journals that Max reads each week, and voice their dismay there. Max’s program is exemplary, and obviously very meaningful for the 40-odd students in it. Too bad that Haverford cannot have something similar, but money is needed, and Max has an endowment. . . . Free after lunch, I worked in the library, reading Jusdanis’s publications for a promotion review. . . . Then a formal dinner in my honor at the McNemars, with one of the Quaker Studies students, now dressed in a tuxedo, acting as caterer. Mel Kaiser was there, Judy and Cyril Harvey, a man who graduated Dartmouth and brought the Aegis to show me my photo in 1966, another who said he’d taken my Joyce and Kazantzakis course in 1968. I had to “say a few words,” as did Don and also Britte. . . . Then back to New Garden Meeting for my second lecture, on Kazantzakis’s religious development, how he needed to develop “metaChristianity” consistent with evolutionary theory and Bergsonian vitalism. Again, good questions afterward. I think it went well. . . . Back at the Guest House, watched a TV program on Dole and Clinton, very interesting: their differences and similarities, and something on the role of Dole’s Methodism vs. Clinton’s Baptist allegiance. Last Sunday, of course, I watched their debate. More dignified than in previous elections. Dole was quite good, but his meanness was also evident. He provoked Clinton repeatedly, and Clinton never hit back, but controlled his temper perfectly; indeed, became sweeter each time this happened.

Tuesday, October 8, 1996

Worship at The Hut, breakfast with Max and students. Lunch ditto. Then to Friends Homes to meet the director, Wilson Sheldon, Steve Fleming’s mentor. I tried to be apologetic about “stealing” Steve from him, but he already feels that Steve needed to extend himself in a different environment. Friends Homes is very unattractive physically but also much cheaper than Kendal. But then we drove to the clone, Friends Homes West, where Steve was director. This is exceedingly attractive, not only the buildings but the grounds, and I see how unimaginative the landscape gardening at Kendal is. Friends Homes West has beautiful enclosed gardens; that’s what we need. . . . Fourth discussion with Quaker students at the Hut; quick supper; 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. radio interview conducted by two very nice students, one of whom is also going to write an article for the newspaper. . . . Then my last lecture, billed as “Jesus and Sexuality” but really about the figurative vs. the literal. Again, how nice to have a second opportunity to deliver something done previously only once, at Pendle Hill. Large audience, many of the same people who’d been at the previous lecture—a good sign. Good questions afterwards.

Wednesday, October 9, 1996

Greensboro

Worship and breakfast. Then Max’s class again: a good interchange with one of the evangelical students regarding “God’s word” in the bible, truth vs. myth, what precisely I believe (I told her), whether this could be called Christian, etc. Fun! . . . Lunch with faculty. Airport. Home. A lovely visit, well planned and executed by Max Carter.

Thursday, October 10, 1996

Hanover

No rest. Kendal personnel committee. I’m the new clerk. New members are Cliff Vermilye and Gordon Browne, both with extensive experience in personnel matters. Continuing members are Patricia Higgins and Mary Schaffner. Steve Fleming attends, and Laura Hooley is the staff person in charge. We’re moving toward merit pay of some sort. Steve and Laura will come back with a definite plan. . . . Afterwards, Gordon said that he has identified two Quakers who could be excellent trustees. One is the warden of Woolman Hill. Added to my suggestions—Jack Coleman, Leonard Cadwallader—that makes four. Gordon spoke very highly of Cadwallader, whom he had actually hired as business manager of the Farm and Wilderness camps.

Friday, October 11, 1996

Alice and Peter Buseck are here to celebrate Alice’s 60th birthday. We supped at Kendal with Yiayia, Clive, Lori, and little Rachel, who’s a beauty.

Saturday, October 12, 1996

Susie Buseck arrived, also David and Linda, and we supped this night at the Panda House and then all went to the Busecks’ bed and breakfast place in Etna for birthday cake and coffee. Susie and David are lovely people.

Sunday, October 13, 1996

Final Buseck day. Supper at Kendal buffet, everyone plus Lori’s two Peace Corps friends from South Royalton, an interesting couple: he’s trying to make a go as a vegetable gardener.

Wednesday, October 16, 1996

Xeroxing Kazantzakis letters, those with illegible words and those I still haven’t translated. . . . Allan and Dick came for our last music session until December. Did Beethoven, a modern composer named Ward, Martinu. . . . Then watched Clinton–Dole debate. The same old rhetoric, repetition, formulae. But reality does break through occasionally.

Thursday, October 17, 1996

To London

Frantic xeroxing in the morning, and typing of DG1 plans to mail to Dimitri and anxious waiting for the minicoach, due at 12:30, finally arrived at 1:20. During the trip to Boston I copyedited Michael Macrakis’s “Introduction to the Proceedings of the Symposium on Greek Type Faces.” At Logan, huge line waiting to check in at BA economy class, but I went directly to Business Class. No wait. Then to the BA lounge where we’d spent two days in March. Finished Macrakis, mailed it. Resumed work on DG1 revisions on the computer. Fast, good flight. Business class a dream: large seat, reclining, foot rest, better food, great service: “May I hang up your suit-jacket, sir?” And a steward who looked familiar and greeted me, “Nice to see you again, Mr. Bien.” How can we ever fly tourist class again after this?

Friday, October 18, 1996

Christchurch Street

Christina is beautiful, with very distinctive features. She took to me very easily. (Sophia, in new photos, looks very Chinese.) Daphne is a relaxed, demonstrative mother, like Chrysanthi. Greg described his new job; he’ll interact now with the wider Goldman Sachs interests as they affect his group. Said that the last four people in this job all moved upward, two with partnerships. This now seems to be his aspiration. Chrysanthi and I had a lovely reunion, exchanging news. I went off to buy ballet tickets at the Royal Opera House. Walked around Covent Garden a bit watching street magicians, then went to the Giacometti exhibit at the Royal Academy, and understood for the first time the power of his elongated, squashed sculptures, where human heads seem to emerge out of molten lava. A great talent, but nowhere as inventive or diverse as, say, Picasso. . . . Pleasant supper afterwards at home. Watched Christina being bathed; she is so placid, loves the water. She holds her head up now, eats from a spoon, drinks water from a specially designed cup, sometimes holds her milk bottle, “talks” in the morning upon waking, cries very seldom.

Saturday, October 19, 1996

To the Barbican to see As You Like It, directed by Steven Pimlott. Pure magic from the opening moment to the end. Jacques’ “7 ages” speech was rendered better than I’ve ever heard it before, by John Woodvine, and Touchstone, the fool, was mercurial as played by David Tennant. But of course the major role was Rosalind, done effectively by Niamh Cusack, although Rachel Joyce’s Celia was everywhere as good. (Interesting how many of the performers have Irish names.) Phebe, the peasant, was perfect. All in all, a huge “poem” about love in all its guises, including of course the homosexual, between Orlando (not one of the strongest performances, played by Liam Cunningham) and Rosalind disguised as Ganymede (!). . . . O to be in London long enough to see the rest of the repertoire: Macbeth. . . . Chrysanthi and I resolved to come periodically for a week. We’ll stay at the Penn Club, now that Daphne and Greg will be returning to New York. . . . Afterwards, Daphne and Greg returned to relieve their babysitter, and Chrysanthi and I, at her request, walked a bit through Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, and Covent Garden, to get a renewed feel of the city. Musicians in Covent Garden playing Buxtehude’s Chaconne, singers doing Porgy and Bess. Tried to find the Turkish restaurant, without success. Ended up very well, however, in Le Palais du Jardin in Long Acre, for a fine supper. Chrysanthi surprised me by saying she’s truly looking forward to the sojourn in Greece, her vacation, after the onslaught of two babies plus Lucia Tebbe over Christmas, then teaching. I said I have no desire any longer to teach, although I do like to lecture the way I did at Guilford or in New York at the Greece in Print event.

Sunday, October 20, 1996

Met Jim Warren and his wife, Marge, at Victoria & Albert Museum and went out for lunch. She “knew me” because she had learned Greek from our book and tapes at Barnard under Dorothy Gregory. Jim is separated now from the State Department but is preparing a book of source documents for the civil war period. He told me that the determining event in the civil was Zachariadis’s declaration that if the communists won they would separate off Greek Macedonia and create an autonomous Macedonia. The Greek national army, thitherto dispirited, suddenly gained morale. Desertions from the rebels increased; the tide turned. So, it was morale just as much, or more, than firepower and materiel that really made the difference. What drove Zachariadis to such a mistake? Jim said that his total mentality from early training was “international” rather than Greek. His thoughts were for the future of international communism and that’s what lost him the war. . . . Walked home in time to wish Greg bon voyage as he left for New York City to look for an apartment among other things.

Monday, October 21, 1996

Worked on lesson 6 of DG1 in the morning. Then went to the Hayward Gallery on South Bank (near Waterloo) to see the Mapplethorpe photos. His technique and imagination are marvelous, and I suppose that on balance it’s art rather than pornography, but the subject matter is very raw: huge erections, behinds, anal penetration, and the like. But also some haunting portraits and photos of orchids and lilies. Interesting to see young women viewing all this with equanimity, no titters or snickers. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS (of course) and left this legacy of gay liberation. . . . Then to Foyle’s to buy chamber music and books needed for the Salonica course. . . . Then tea in Leicester Square watching the tourists. Then National Gallery to see Rubens’s landscapes, not my style, but his powers of observation were remarkable. Then walked to King’s to hear Michael Jeffreys’ talk on Solomos as “process” rather than “product,” with a computer program showing four different edited versions of a single poem. The point is to stop believing in the virtue of a “definitive text” and to appreciate the multiplicity of versions. Nice reunion with him, Judith Herrin, Roddy Beaton, David Ricks and some others who knew me but whose names I don’t know. Afterwards, supper in the Sofra with Roddy and Michael, who brought me up to date on Stylianos (he and the department have been reconciled, excluding Alf Vincent) and on the situation in Melbourne—which is being attacked in part because no one, except Stathis to a minimal degree, publishes. . . . Jim Warren came, too. He spoke very highly of Mimi Hughes, the Consul General in Thessaloniki, and asked me to try to help the consul, David Schuler, whose morale is low; he’s at the stage where everything the Greeks do is annoying.

Tuesday, October 22, 1996

Lunched with Stuart Morton at Friends House. He commutes daily from Birmingham. He is in charge of all service programs in Africa and Asia. We talked about Woodbrooke, of course, and Outi. He was guarded, but he indicated that the decisions regarding redundancy came down from high with no discussion and no recourse. John Wyatt is still unemployed. Clare Chamberlain went to live with one of her children. Stuart spoke to one of the librarians on my behalf regarding Nancy Crawshaw’s photos of the Salonika Quaker school, which I’d like to see deposited at Friends House rather than Princeton. Then I spoke to the librarian personally although he isn’t in charge of photos. He was most encouraging. I wrote to Nancy Crawshaw à propos. . . . In the evening went to Covent Garden with Chrysanthi to the Royal Ballet, an all-Ravel program, starting with “La Valse,” which I love so much. Choreography by Frederick Ashton, so different from Balanchine, and thus refreshing. Next was a gorgeous pas de deux by Darcy Bussell and Adam Cooper to Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infant défunte”: pure serenity. Then a humorous “La fin de jour” with the dancers in Edwardian bathing suits. Finally Ashton’s “Daphnis and Chloë,” which I’d never seen. Chloë, danced by Sarah Wildor, was so supple. A full-scale “story ballet,” totally effective.

Wednesday, October 23, 1996

Almost finished with DG lesson 6, which I’ll send to Dimitri tomorrow along with lesson 5. I’ve been writing drill after drill. . . . In the afternoon, matinee of Uncle Vanya with Daphne and Chrysanthi. New translation, much more active, indeed violent, than productions I’d seen previously. Derek Jacobi a mercurial Vanya. Imogen Stubb fetching as the professor’s young wife. Frances Barber superb as Sonya, the old maid, and Trever Eve fine as the doctor. Directed by Bill Bryden. We were in the fifth row and could appreciate the facial expressions, the tears on Jacobi’s face. Actors and characters seemed to merge. And what a remarkable play, so well paced, with intensity and slackness perfectly balanced. . . . Supper afterwards in the Sofra: fine Turkish food. . . . Today Christina impressed us all by sitting up and keeping her balance at least for thirty seconds.

Thursday, October 24, 1996

I’m apprehensive about the move to Greece tomorrow, but trust that our customary adaptability will not fail us. . . . Worked on Demotic Greek all day. Then to the National Theatre to meet Rowena Loverance and see Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Quick supper at the National. Rowena will be coming to see the Byzantine exhibit at the Met in New York next March. I quizzed her about Woodbrooke but she didn’t seem to know much, or wouldn’t say. The Oedipus plays used a new translation by Ranjit Bolt employing rhymed couplets, which struck me as wrong, especially as some used feminine rhymes and were almost ludicrous. But on balance the productions were very rich—hardly surprising since Peter Hall was the director and Alan Howard played Oedipus in both. All actors had masks fitting over the entire head like a huge helmet, but the diction was very clear. In the Tyrannos the choruses were spoken, which I found disappointing; but in the Colonus they were sung or half-sung: much better. Scenery, lighting, costumes—marvelous. Tyrannos was heavy, too long, and I did not find my emotions being “purged,” as Aristotle says. What came through was Oedipus’s obsession with knowing—knowing evil (like Adam and Eve). Knowledge turned him into a sinner with a huge price to pay, again like Adam and Eve. The most memorable aspect of this evening was the brilliant idea of placing the Colonus together with the Tyrannos (perhaps the Antigone could be added, too). I had never seen the Colonus. It is so beautiful and tender, peaceful, like the calm ending of Paradise Lost. The historical aspect is interesting. Done in 406 at a very bad time for Athens, it affirms Athens’s continued importance, culturally if not politically. What a treat! What a nice way to end our stay in London!

Friday, October 25, 1996

London–Thessaloniki

Alex picked us up at 5:45 a.m. Warm goodbye to Daphne and Christina, and also to Alex, but with hopes to see him again. BA flight to Thessaloniki via Stuttgart. Very few passengers. We were the only ones in Business Class after Stuttgart. The pilot came out. Long talk. He went directly from A-levels to BA training school, he told me. Invited me into the cockpit. From there, looking out the pilot’s window, the plane didn’t seem to be moving at all. He showed me the screen with a line showing the way to their destination: they navigate by that, staying on the line. (What happens if the computers malfunction? Don’t ask!) Dimitri Gounelas met us, drove us to the university apartments, presented us a potted plant. Our apartment (the only one with a private bath) had been given elsewhere—mix-up! Dimitri was chagrined. But we’re in a large third-floor room with view of the sea. Bathroom in the hall, shared by others. Kitchen ditto. We’re promised “our” room on Monday. Immediately to the university. Showed me the office of Γεώργιος Κεχαγιόγλου, which I’ll occupy. Excellent! Meal. Then straight to the Βαφοπούλειο for a symposium on Salonica prose writers, Peter Mackridge speaking as we entered. Afterwards, huge hug from him and kisses, Greek style. Panayiotis Moullas spoke very well, insisting that we should read texts and not concentrate on an author’s lovelife! Various authors spoke, very eloquently. So, just a few hours after arrival, we were thrust into Salonica’s intellectual life. Pleased to find that I understood just about everything, without strain. Spoke to Kehayioglou afterwards, and Aglaïa Lipourli came up with a big hug. And Moullas thanked me for the favorable review I wrote of one of his books a long time ago: good memory.

Saturday, October 26, 1996

Breakfast with Peter Mackridge at the Metropolitan Hotel. I’m hoping that he’ll come to America for the MGSA Princeton symposium in 1999. He says that he has very few students at Oxford, but Elizabeth Jeffreys has even fewer. Most go to King’s or Birmingham. We looked at hotels. The Queen Olga is cheap but the room is too small, and Vouli says it’s used by couples who want one-night sex. The place is full of naval officers, here for the October 28th parade. Very nice for the girls! We took a long promenade on the beautiful seafront, directly in front of our room. I’m working on chapter 7 of DG1, typing in the changes we made in Princeton and writing new drills. . . . Friday night, went to Odysseas and Eleni at Kolokotroni 11. Their Yiayia is permanently bedridden and needs constant care, but they managed to bring her to the village this summer, traveling by taxi at great expense. This morning we walked down Σαρανταπόρου to see the old house there, miraculously still standing, occupied by Boy Scouts. Chrysanthi didn’t seem particularly moved. Fortunately, neither of us lives in the past. And we peeked into the Aghia Triadha church where we were married. Again, very little emotion. We live in the present. . . . To George and Efthymoula for lunch. Joined by Andreas and his nice wife, Dimitra, and their baby, George. Both are lawyers without much work, but they say that each year things do improve. George and I had a long conversation, chiefly about our children and the good relation between Deanna and Chrysanthi, her mother-in-law, and our friendship with Lucia. George of course hasn’t been so lucky. And he told me that his prostate cancer returned after twenty years’ remission. He has elected not to treat it. I didn’t want to press. Efthymoula was as repulsive as ever. She assured us that something was true: something about Aristotle Onassis, because “all the periodicals said it”! . . . We discovered a McDonald’s nearby, for an evening snack.

Sunday, October 27, 1996

Breakfast in “Evan’s Delicious”: coffee and tyropita. Worked on lesson 7. Scared silly when I blew all the fuses by stupidly using a surge protector rated only for 110 watts. But the computer was unharmed and I was able to restore the current because actually the system is modern enough not to use fuses. Walked to Vouli’s. Her mother is quite spry. Talked about Stylianos. He seems to think I’m angry at him. Must write. Vouli said he withdrew from the competition for archbishop of America because he disagreed with the Patriarch’s decision to split off South America and the Caribbean. Who knows? Vouli wants us to go on a two-day excursion to Pelion, but we really don’t want to. . . . Finished Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” I see why Dimitri has assigned it to go with Kazantzakis’s Κωμωδία, since it shows the agony of a man who becomes notably ill and is convinced that there is no afterlife and also that he never committed anything that deserved punishment. In short, his suffering is meaningless, absurd. The interesting difference between Kazantzakis and Tolstoy in this regard is that Kazantzakis grappled with the theme at the very start of his career, Tolstoy near the end. . . . French fries, a chocolate milkshake and chicken burger at McDonald’s, watching children play.

Monday, October 28, 1996

Όχι day

Huge parade. Odysseas, Vouli, her mother, George and Efthymoula joined us to watch from the balcony. The first part very moving. Red Cross ladies came first, then various locals dressed in village costumes, then Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, gymnasium and lyceum students, university students—i.e., civilians. Then the military: tanks galore, missile carriers, planes zooming overhead, helicopters floating by, infantry, including women, the navy in their beautiful uniforms, the officers with swords, the air corps, the mountain corps with skis. . . . George mentioned yesterday that he had been twice imprisoned during the war, once by the Germans, who stood him against a wall in a mock execution (which he of course did not know was mock). How did he feel viewing all this? And Odysseas, the ex-communist αντάρτης? Best not ask. . . . In the midst of it all, we were given the keys to our room on the first floor, the one with the private bath. Much smaller, with no view, and with dogs and pigeons directly beyond the balcony. Oh well . . . We moved. . . . Then to Kostas and Lola for lunch. Their street is now only for pedestrians; very nice. I find Kostas hard to understand, but got enough to take part in the conversation. Lola has been rejuvenated by becoming a grandmother. As she said, all one needs, really, is not to think primarily of oneself. They worried about me—always writing. I explained the fact that work, for me, is pleasure, mostly. How fortunate! . . . Back home to finish lesson 7 while Chrysanthi went back to George’s at Kalamariá for coffee.

Tuesday, October 29, 1996

Our first “business day.” To American Express Bank. Typical scene: one employee screaming at another. We need to realize that these rages are not so drastic as they seem. (?) Then bought bus cards: 12 tickets available apparently only in one location, which we discovered without too much trouble. Then to the university. Kehayioglou very accommodating. Showed me the secrets of fax and telephone. The secretary is Γεωργία Χρίση. Tried e-mail but it doesn’t work. Dimitri Gounelas and Ruth took us back home to Panorama. Very village-like. He knows everyone. Fun buying bread, fish, etc. They have a spectacular house with fields in back and a view of Χορτιάτη. Tastefully done, with Greek handicrafts. Dimitri cooked the fish. Ruth’s eyesight is so-so. Very little central vision left, only peripheral. Every so often the bleeding resumes in the retina and she loses more. But she’s still functioning. Their nine-year-old boy, Francis, came in from school. Speaks English with a lovely New Zealand accent. Then Αγγέλικα, fifteen years old, came in. She’s a flutist and has gone to summer music camp. They all seemed to be interested in my description of Kinhaven. Ruth said that Angelica rarely sits with adults but she did this time.

Wednesday, October 30, 1996

Working on my Nikiforos Fokas chapter in Politics of the Spirit, volume 2. I like it, will use it for the course here. Bought Λυμπεράκη Τα ψάθινα καπέλα for Chrysanthi. In the evening, went to the university to hear Linda Pratt (University of Nebraska) lecture on how and why postmodernism makes us see modernism differently. She concentrated on American poets: Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens. Interesting, but I objected in the discussion to her emphasis on the link between modernism and fascism, saying that one really needs to include Joyce and Woolf in the picture. Also, in saying that postmodernism leaves us with nothing (except a healthy deconstruction), she never mentioned Beckett, another regrettable omission. Afterwards, Vouli took us to a nice coffee bar off Πλατεία Ναυαρίνο for κρεατόπιτα and cappuccino.

Thursday, October 31, 1996

Peter Allen faxed me, very upset by the vote of the MGSA Executive to terminate him as associate editor of JMGS, and rightfully so. At least he’s clear that I am innocent in this regrettable affair. In the afternoon Chrysanthi and I went to the τεχνλογικό πάρκο behind the American Farm School, the FORTHNET office, to try to get my e-mail to work. Frenetic young man there talking on two telephones at once while typing on a computer at the same time. We stayed two hours while he came and went; he gave me software and told me to go to a Macintosh place in town. In the evening, back to Βαφοπούλειο for another symposium, this time on Εμείς κι οι άλλοι, a good subject. Marianna Tziova was one of the speakers; she flashed me a huge smile when I entered (late) in the middle of an interesting talk by Τζίνα Πολίτη. Μιχάλης Χρυσανθόπουλος presided. Nice to encounter old familiar faces. Ο Παναγιώτης Μουλλάς, in the question period, once again complained—γκρίνιασε, είπε ο ίδιος—that the whole discussion was off base. Γκρινιάζει πολύ εύγλωττα. Afterwards, supper with Vouli and Chrysanthi in Καμένη Γωνιά, with talk about the degeneration of the Greek language, according to Vouli. Then, with Chrysanthi, an ice cream and a good cup of coffee. Ah, life’s small pleasures! . . . Before this, I went to the Macintosh place. Chris, another frenetic, again talking on two telephones at once, screaming at people, etc. I left the computer.

Friday, November 1, 1996

Back to the Macintosh place. They said I don’t have enough memory. I deleted lots of programs. They’ll try again. . . . Trying to reserve a hotel for John and Mary Rassias. Makedonia Palace full because of two medical seminars and a film festival. Got a room in the Electra Palace.

Saturday, November 2, 1996

Finished my Nikiforos Fokas essay. Back to the Βαφοπούλειο for the last day of the conference on Εμείς και οι άλλοι. Ο Κεχαγιόγλου delivered an eloquent paper on Greek expressionists but was challenged by Gina Politi on a proper definition of expressionism. Intellectual life here is very intense . . . and articulate. The auditorium was full, every seat taken. Spoke to Kokolis, who lost his wife recently. Dimitris told me that our first class will be on Tuesday, at last. Farinou read from Bakhtin on the centrality (!) of marginality, and jokingly concluded that η Θεσσαλονίκη, αν και η πολιτιστική πρωτεύουσα της Ευρώπης, είναι στο περιθώριο. . . . Lunch with Chrysanthi in Goodies, a club sandwich and a “chicky” (chicken) sandwich. . . . In the evening, walked all the way to Vouli’s for supper with George and Charlotte Draper and Vouli’s friend who is the academic director at Anatolia College. Will try to arrange for John Rassias to do a workshop there in the future; they’d like that. Talked about Nancy Crawshaw (Charlotte would like the photos to come here), Mr. and Mrs. House, Demotic Greek 1, from which Charlotte studied, their new two-year-old junior college. Κυρά Κούλα είπε, «Πάχυνες, Πήτερ». Walked all the way back again on the παραλία and had a final milkshake at McDonald’s.

Sunday, November 3, 1996

Catching up on mail from home. Watched a church service on TV. I find it antipathetic. Out at 11:00 a.m. for a coffee with Chrysanthi and κουλούρια, which we ate on a bench in the sunlight on the παραλία. Approached by two Jehovah’s Witnesses who asked, Did we know why the world has problems? No. Well, here’s the answer—and they gave us The Watchtower in Greek. The answer, interestingly, is that religion has failed. Catholics kill Catholics, Protestants kill Protestants, whereas Christ was a pacifist. Hooray for them!

Forgot to note last Friday that we went to the theater: Πειραματική Σκηνή της Τέχνης at the Θεάτρο Αμαλία, for Chekhov’s Οι τρείς αδελφές (Three Sisters). Acted with vigor, pathos, humor, not as good as London (of course), but very professional. However, it was all action, with very little of Chekhov’s pauses, silences, languor. The central character is the doctor (cf. Chekhov himself) who, no matter what happens, concludes that it doesn’t make any difference. Complete cynicism vis-à-vis life’s joys and tragedies.

This noon we ate with Odysseas and Eleni. Chrysanthi encouraged them to speak about Tashkent and the war and their participation in the Αντίσταση, which they did, willingly, at great length. Regarding Russia today, Odysseas’s conclusion is Καλά να πάθουν. Under Communism everyone was fed and housed and had a job. Now, greed and chaos. Gorbachev is the arch villain in his eyes. His account went into detail about how well he and the other Greek refugees were treated.

Monday, November 4, 1996

Went to a lecture on postmodernism and teaching, Derrida, etc. Pretty old hat: how a text has many meanings. But delivered with passion. Afterwards, κρεατόπιτα with Vouli and Chrysanthi at Vouli’s favorite place off the Πλατεία Ναυαρίνο. Long talk with Κοκόλης, who lost his wife to cancer but is grateful that he loves his profession and is energized by students. How fortunate we are! Toula paid us a visit. She says that things are hard at the Odeon because the general economy is so weak. Parents don’t have money for music lessons, or enroll their children and then don’t pay. . . . George had an emergency: total blockage of urine. A doctor came to the house and inserted a catheter and relieved him. He assumes that his prostate, which was removed a long time ago, has grown back. Is that possible?

Tuesday, November 5, 1996

My first class. Eleven students: ten girls and one boy. Dimitris and I did nothing but organize—who is assigned, what, when. Everything in Greek, of course, but I didn’t have any trouble. . . . Message from Ann Wainwright at Kendal that Mother had another small stroke but healed quickly and perfectly. No emergency. . . . To Αριστοτέλους to a nice ουζερί with Zizis and Ritsa. She had a by-pass several months ago and looks very old but says she’s fine in body but not in psychology. He is retired, and full of Freemasonry (Τεκτονισμός), which seems to be very liberal here. I tried to explain Quakerism to them, with difficulty.

Wednesday, November 6, 1996

Spoke to Ann Wainwright. Mother is fine. Spoke to Mother. She’s a bit confused, asked if I were calling from England. But then seemed perfectly fine. I fear that she may never return to the apartment, however. Ann says that Mother would accept this calmly. I only hope that she remains well in body and mind through Christmas, when all the children and grandchildren will be in Hanover. . . . Clinton reelected, but the Republicans retained both houses of Congress, alas. Yet New Hampshire elected a democratic governor and senator: amazing! . . . To the new Byzantine Museum, a nice building but still empty, for a lecture on Mount Athos, with slides of some of the treasures that will be shown in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition. . . . Then to the Βαφοπούλειο for a very fine lecture by Μίμης Λυπουρλής on an ancient text called «Ομήρου και Ησιόδου αγών». He read the ancient Greek, then a translation of each section, and spoke eloquently about our need to know texts above and beyond the standard ones. In this one, the poetic “contest” between Hesiod and Homer was won by Hesiod because the king decreed that poetry about food and farming is more important and wholesome than poetry about war, even if it’s inferior as verse. How nice! . . . This morning, I walked to the Αλεξάνδρειο Οδείο and played through my entire four-hand repertoire with Toula. She’s not a perfect sight-reader but with one run-through she can play everything well enough. What a pleasure for me! She said that she doesn’t give four-hand pieces to the students because she has no way of obtaining the scores. I must send her some basic pieces: Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bizet.

Thursday, November 7, 1996

Working on my Μακρά μαθητεία lecture: very slow, but it’s good άσκηση for my Greek. Went to a symposium on women poets to hear Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, but they had changed the program. Another poetess read, and I understood essentially nothing. Then I met Katerina by accident outside. She says that Mrs. Kazantzakis is like a mummy, and she doesn’t want to visit her again.

Friday, November 8, 1996

My first “office hours” (ώρες συνεργασίες) at the university. Both students came who are slated to report on Tuesday, one on Κωμωδία, the other on Νικηφόρος Φωκάς. We had an hour and a half’s really good tutorial covering the texts, life, their reactions, their pleasure at first exposure to philosophy. What a pleasure! I felt that I was offering something at last. After all, the university is housing us, giving me a splendid office, a fax, a xerox, telephone, and so far I’ve worked a total of only 3½ hours. And Έφη Τσιούτσιου at the Onassis Foundation, when I told her I’d booked the Achilleus Hotel (cost 11600) said, Κύριε καθηγητά, να πάτε σε καλύτερo ξενοδοχείο! The Foundation will pay everything. I said we were simple people without fancy needs but that I’d ask Chrysanthi, που κάνει κουμάντο. And of course Chrysanthi said, “Let’s go to the fancy hotel.” . . . Long conversation with Leander by telephone. They’re fine. Sophia sleeps through the night, has a huge appetite, is gaining weight. Thursday is Leander’s shift; Deanna has morning rehearsal and evening concert. They’re looking for a nanny. So far none of the applicants speaks a word of English. Leander gloated over the new car they bought: a four-wheel-drive Subaru. He wants to go to the farm with Alec and me over Christmas. . . . Μακρά μαθητεία even slower now because I’m adding material on Νικηφόρος Φωκάς, panentheism, etc. . . . Chrysanthi and I had a nice lunch in the Πλατεία Ναυαρίνο and walked all the way home. At night, went out for τοστ in a place with a blond woman in high boots and (I’m sure) no brassiere, sitting alone, smoking and drinking, a prostitute maybe, while four very virile men in their 40s sat opposite, mustachioed Greek types. When another joined them, his neighbor kissed him and stroked his hair. Strange. Afterwards we walked again on the παραλία, which is a blessing for us. . . . Finished Camus’ The Outsider (L’Étranger) in bed. It, Ivan Ilych, and Kazantzakis’s Κωμωδία fit together beautifully.

Saturday, November 9, 1996

Working on Η μακρά μαθητεία του Καζαντζάκη σε χριστιανικά θέματα. Very slow. Toula, Stavros, and Αθηνούλα came at 9:00 and took us to a ψαροταβέρνα in Καλαμαριά. Octopus, squid, μπακαλιάρος, all very nice. Long discussion with Stavros about materialism vs. idealism. He declares himself άθεος, materialist, Marxist. I tried to explain that spirit equals energy, and that human affairs, contrary to the Marxist view, are often determined by “spiritual” rather than purely economic factors. The child is very sweet.

Sunday, November 10, 1996

To George’s for lunch. Tilda there with daughter, and Dimitris. Tilda very cordial, smiling, eager to converse. Nice change from our previous impressions. George worried he may have cancer; he’ll go for a urological exam on Tuesday. Efthymoula didn’t scream and pontificate as much as usual. . . . In the evening, Dimitris and Ruth picked us up and we all went to Mimis and Aglaïa Lypourlis. Their living room is filled to bursting with bibelots and bric-a-brac, as before. Very lively conversation, especially with Mimis, about George Thompson, ancient Greek pronunciation, our children, the joys of retirement.

Monday, November 11, 1996

John and Mary Rassias arrived and installed themselves at the Makedonia Palace in a room facing the παραλία and sea. I had office hours from 4 to 6. The two students assigned to Zorba came; they didn’t have much to say, but we talked for an hour and I think I gave them some direction. Then to the hotel. Walked with John and Mary. John puffing. Back to university to hear Moullas lecture on Βιζυηνός, very logically: a good introduction, stressing that he wasn’t ηθογράφος and avoided the romantic nostalgia for the village that was current in the nineteenth century. That’s why he is so σύγχρονος. Afterwards to Ναυαρίνο for supper. John wanted σκορδαλιά. No luck.

Tuesday, November 12, 1996

With John and Mary to Μονή Βλατάδων. A Syrian priest very kindly opened the church for us. They have students from twenty different countries, mostly from the Soviet bloc and the Arab world. They all do a full year of Greek at the university before beginning the theological course. Lunch with the Rassiases in the upper town. Siesta. Work. Then supper at—finally—a good restaurant in our neighborhood: οι Λύκοι, where John got his σκορδαλιά and we all had omelets.

Wednesday, November 13, 1996

To the Farm School. Caught the end of the πανηγύρι for St. Chrystostomos, with boys dancing, then girls dancing, all in costumes, the boys very martial, the girls very feminine. Beautiful. How nice to see a line dance in which everyone is coordinated, in time, melting individuality into the whole. Then, by prearrangement, Joann Ryding, head of public relations, introduced us to the English teachers. Chrysanthi ran into two graduates of the girls’ school who remembered her as energetic, with the big γαλάζια μάτια. We’re trying to plan a workshop at the school for the Rassias method of language teaching. After a tour of the farm—one huge pig, a pregnant cow, John Deere tractors—lunch with the head of English at the new college, plus dean of the college. Afterwards, John put us all in a semicircle and did a demonstration class in Chinese! Stop, start, turn. Tzing! Fun. . . . I also found Christine Willis, who said that Pinewood needs help in language teaching—would we go to see Peter Baiter, the headmaster? So we did this next. He is interested in cooperating in order to improve instruction in both Greek and English (in Greek they use our book). Christine said she thinks he’ll be stepping down. I thought of Alec as the next headmaster. . . . In the evening, George, Lola, Efthymoula, and Odysseas all came to us to visit, and I brought over the Rassiases to meet them. George began speaking French very apologetically. I had briefed John and Mary on some of the very complicated family history.

Thursday, November 14, 1996

Chrysanthi took John and Mary to the Archeological Museum; I worked on Kioukias’s article for JMGS, which, as usual, needs Englishing. Lunch all together in Navarino Square. John had skordalia and vakalaro (cod), which his mother used to make. To my office for telephoning and faxing. Steve Fleming faxed me that the self-evaluation for Kendal was one of the best that the commission had ever seen. The accreditation team gave us an A+. I faxed him back with hearty congratulations. . . . In the evening, went to the Θεάτρο Αμαλία for a production of Catherine Anne’s Tita-Lou, translated from the French. Just two actresses plus a voice-over. The Lou of Λυδία Φωτοπούλου was stunning and brilliant, with all emotions, the whole spectrum. And how amazingly clear and clipped her Greek is! The Tita of Έφη Σταμούλη was adequate (she played Masha in the Chekhov, also adequately). The play is about two very close sisters who leave Britain for the first time to go to Palermo tracing their late father’s life; there they live through togetherness and estrangement, sickness and health, sisterly love and the desire for a man’s love. The play ends with the voice-over declaring: Υπάρχει . . . η θλίψη των αντρών. . . . Μια θλίψη που δεν αγγίζει τις γυναίκες. Μια θλίψη . . . που αναδύεται από μια πολύ μακρινή αδυναμία. . . . Την αρνημένη αδυναμία. Τη βλέπω παντού αυτή τη θλίψη. . . . Βλέπω στους άντρες . . . μια θλίψη που δεν αγγίζει τις γυναίκες. . . . Afterwards, a final tea and dessert with the Rassiases in “Wolves,” back to their hotel, and adieu for a week until we meet again in Crete. John will be going all over Turkey to do four workshops. He hopes to return to Thessaloniki to do the workshop here with us if I get invited in 1997 to one of the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of Kazantzakis’s death. We’ll see . . .

Friday, November 15, 1996

Still working on Kioukias’s JMGS submission. . . . Office hours today were very busy. The two students doing Zorba didn’t come, alas, but I was besieged by students wanting to study in America, including one who aspires to do a Ph.D. in Modern Greek. I told her about Harvard, Ohio State, Princeton, and NYU. Another was from Anatolia; she came with her mother. She wants to go to Dartmouth, is a fanatic rock climber. She wants me to interview her. Another is here on a Fulbright from America. . . . Walked in the evening all the way to Aristotelous to meet Ξενοφών Κοκόλης at Tottis’s. Two and a half hours of good talk and food. He is a leftist, very devoted to teaching and publishing (gave me all his recent books); says he’s been reading Bien for years, never goes to department meetings, has recovered from loss of his wife to cancer eight months ago. He was unable to work for three to four months afterwards. Very negative about Greek education, based on memorization and non-participation. Then the graduates go out into the high schools and do the same: φαύλος κύκλος. After decades of service he is earning now only 400,000 a month, which means about $20,000 a year. But of course he insisted on paying for our meal! . . . Walked all the way back again with Chrysanthi, she dressed only in a suit jacket and pullover. It’s about 60 degrees here. Just heard from Dartmouth that it’s 10 degrees Fahrenheit there.

Saturday, November 16, 1996

Finished Huis Clos. L’Étranger is perplexing; Huis Clos is all too straightforward. As Garcin declares at the very end: “Pas besoin de gril: l’enfer, c’est les Autres.” Yes, it certainly could be. Interesting that Sartre chose as the only man in the play a pacifist who was shot because he was a conscientious objector. . . . Supper at the home of Λίνα Στέφα in her swanky apartment at Μεγ. Αλεξάνδρου 13. Guests: Vouli, Bill McGrew, and I. N. Kazazis, professor of classics and head of the Τμήμα της Φιλολογίας: the man who OK’d our residence here, and whom I’d met at NYU in his capacity as board member of the Ίδρυμα Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού. Talked with Bill about a Rassias workshop; he’s agreeable. Kazazis is very interesting and excited regarding the Κέντρο Ελληνικής Γλώσσας, which now has all the fiches from the Georgacas dictionary and expects to produce a definitive Greek-English dictionary σιγά-σιγά. Home at 1:30 a.m.

Sunday, November 17, 1996

Today is the anniversary of the Πολυτεχνείο and trouble is expected from anarchists, especially around the American embassy in Athens and the consulate here. Up at 7:00 a.m. John Rassias telephoned from Athens; insomniac again. I did the contents page and survival Greek, telephoning for DG to mail to Gondicas, who has supplied nothing all this time. We took Odysseas and Eleni out to the Λύκους and successfully managed to pay. Very cordial. In the evening, George and Efthymoula came and we went to a pizza place in a new shopping mall in Kalamaria, very nice, and again I managed to pay. Also, we managed to explain to them the origin and meaning of our Thanksgiving holiday. Efthymoula was more supportable, conversing instead of dictating, although when we got into the car to return home and I started to buckle my seat belt, she screamed from the back seat “Don’t use it!” but then corrected herself: “Oh, οι Αμερικανοί το χρησιμοποιούν.” Greeks never, even though it’s a criminal offense to be without the belt.

Monday, November 18, 1996

A tiring day. Thrice to the university. In the morning because Γεωργία Φαρίνου wanted to talk. She has made no progress on her study of Kazantzakis as autobiographer. The usual complaints: teaching, administration (she’s chair of the τομέας this year). Too bad, because her work could be valuable. I called Doutis, to try to ease her way to a Fulbright. . . . Took the wrong bus at lunchtime and ended up walking to the Λύκους to meet Chrysanthi. All sweaty. Then back to the university for ώρες συνεργασίες, but no one came. Then to the Εταιρεία Μακεδονικών Σπουδών for a lecture that Vouli wanted us to hear, on archeology in Turkestan. Very poor. 90% travelogue, 10% archeology. But interesting regarding the sense that people have there that they are descendants of Alexander the Great. . . . To Vouli’s with Chrysanthi and Lina Skoufa for a light supper. Then walked all the way home.

Thursday, November 19, 1996

Athens

Class at 10:00 on Zorba. The two girls did very well. I’d worried because they didn’t come to office hours yesterday, but what we had done last Friday obviously was sufficient. They organized well, touching the work from aesthetic, political, ethical, and philosophical perspectives. Good discussion afterwards. But, poor things, they have no hope of being appointed to teaching positions enabling them to use their training. . . . Flew to Athens. Taxi to Hotel St. George Lycavettos, where the Onassis Foundation has placed us. Fifth floor room with breathtaking view of the entire city, Acropolis in the center, sea and Salamis in the background. . . . We immediately walked to Σύνταγμα. McDonald’s and Steer’s have replaced the Greek cafés there. Great barriers everywhere for subway construction. Noise. Traffic. But some lovely pedestrian oases near Kolonaki Square. Went down Panepistimiou to Omonoia. “Our” loukoumades shop is still there: miraculous. But the Hotel Omonoia, where I was locked in on 21 April 1967, seems to be defunct. To Πλατεία Βικτωρίας to see Christos and Eri. Dinner. Lots of plans for an issue of Θέματα λογοτεχνίας dedicated to Ritsos, perhaps together with an MGSA symposium, in 1999, the 30th anniversary of our first symposium, 1969, and the 90th anniversary of Ritsos’s birth. Christos’s work for autistic children is progressing. He has some chance of help from AHEPA. But the description by Έρη of life in the Department of Modern Greek at the University of Athens was harrowing. Mediocre senior professors block the appointment of anyone with more than mediocre talents. Professors still read from their books, which students are forced to buy. Everything is based on memorization rather than discussion. A sad story. Things are much better at Thessaloniki, it seems. Finally, we all pored over the illegible words in the Kazantzakis letters, and Christos and Eri deciphered most of them, although not all. They also helped here and there, identifying an expression as a quote from Ερωτόκριτος, for example. Back to the hotel very late, very tired.

Wednesday, November 20, 1996

Athens

A Russian Neohellenist, Viktor Sokolink, had telephoned me yesterday, and we met for breakfast. He is also an Onassis Foundation fellow. Christos showed me last night that Sokolink has an article on Ritsos in Θέματα λογοτεχνίας. His chief interest has been on the use of myth in Ritsos, especially in Τέταρτη Διάσταση, and he had benefitted evidently from my work on Φιλοκτήτης. Very cordial, extended conversation. I’ll send him offprints when we return. . . . We went to the great αρχοντικό of the Onassis Foundation to meet Έφη Τσιούτσιου in the flesh. A very fleshy lady, with broad smile (Chrysanthi says that no one smiles in Greece). She took us on a tour: Onassis’s Monte Carlo office reestablished exactly as it was; his books (many in English), art works (mostly Greek), Maria Callas’s piano, portraits of Onassis, his son Alexander (who died in a plane crash), his daughter Christina (who probably committed suicide), Jackie Onassis, Maria Callas, first wife, etc. Ostentatious wealth everywhere. I recognized one of the trustees (he’d been in NYU) and he told me that he’d just returned from NYC where the Foundation donated $1,500,000 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a Greek library. The endowment is over four billion. That means about 800 million income at 5%. . . . Walked through Πλάκα. Beautiful nineteenth-century villas. Suddenly I hear “Peter!” It’s Άθαν Αθανασόπουλος, director of the Εταιρεία Ελληνικής Γλώσσας, located just under the Acropolis. So, we had another tour. They’re producing a computerized data base of all Greek texts from the 5th century A.D. (when the Ancient Greek θησαυρός stopped) to today. All the Byzantine fathers, medieval writers, folksongs, etc. I asked him about Kazazis’s similar institute in Thessaloniki and he was very negative. Yet another case of duplication of effort instead of collaboration. . . . On to the Acropolis. Teaming with Greek schoolchildren. Most of the external scaffolding of the Parthenon is gone, although some scaffolding does remain in the interior. One cannot walk on the building or even quite up to it, as in the old days; yet one can now, once again, see the corrections for optical deception (οφθαλμιτική απάτη). Lots of familiar objects in the museum: the man carrying a sheep; reconstruction of the pediments; the real Caryatids (except for the one in the British Museum). . . . To the Grande Bretagne for a wash and a short rest. Then to Café Dola, now called Café Φίλων, Skoufa and Lykavitou, to meet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. Her στέκι. She had an ouzo, I a φραππέ. Talked about Patroklos Stavrou, whom she hates. He and Ανεμογιάννης are not on speaking terms. Πάντα τα ίδεα! Stavrou wants to make another Kazantzakis Museum in Athens. Katerina hopes that the Museum in Βαρβάροι can be shifted to Iraklio so that more people can go to it. She’ll try to organize a celebration for the 40th anniversary of Kazantzakis’s death, in 1997, in Aegina, and wants me to come. Then we did our “job,” looking at illegible words, the ones that had stumped Christos and Eri. Katerina solved a few additional mysteries, but 5 or 6 still remain. . . . Nice lunch in the hotel: μουσακάς, hot and fresh. Siesta. Then to Ιπποκράτους to see a rollicking production of Goldoni, based on confusion because of two brothers who are identical twins, although one is smart, the other βλάκας, both played by the same very talented actor. Finally, of course, the mystery is solved, and everyone gets married and lives happily ever after.

Thursday, November 21, 1996

Athens–Iraklio

Long breakfast again with Viktor Sokolink, including his wife this time, who doesn’t speak Greek; she has a little English (he has none). So we spoke Greek and he translated into Russian. They want us to come to Moscow; we want them to come to America, perhaps to Princeton if we have the Ritsos symposium. . . . Welcomed at Iraklio airport, now called “Nikos Kazantzakis” airport, by John and Ava holding a sign: “Peter and Chris.” Drove to Ava’s new house, lovely, next to a huge olive grove and about 1/8 mile from Stelios’s office at the Institute of Computer Science. Ψηλορείτης in the distance, banana tree, olives, apricots, peaches, grapes in the garden. Beautiful yellow Labrador dog called Chloe. Daughters enjoy watching television for hours, slumped on the couch. Alas! Went to the Institute, walking with John, to meet Stelios and the “famous Maria Vita,” his secretary, who turned out to be a sexy siren with dyed blonde hair and tight pants. Stelios took us on a tour of the entire Institute, of which Computer Science is just one part. Saw their robot, trained to detect and thus avoid obstacles owing to “senses” provided by sonar and infra-red. Saw the laser labs. Talked to director of the lab experimenting with modes of communication for the handicapped, and told him about Kendal, with hope that we might be a laboratory for them at some point. But their cooperation, understandably, is with EU countries first. Stelios explained how likely they are to get 85% funding from the EU, which means that they really have to meet European standards, are continually inspected, do many projects in collaboration with similar institutes in the other EU countries. Wonderful! Europe may be slow to achieve monetary union, but it is already “united” in other ways, such as these. Very impressive projects, people, and building. . . . Back to their home for a leisurely supper of fish soup.

Friday, November 22, 1996

Iraklio

To the Institute to collect my travel reimbursement from Maria “V.” Then Ava drove us all to Μυρτιά to see the Kazantzakis Museum, opened especially for us thanks to a telephone call I made earlier to Τιτίκα Σακλαμπάνη. I was very moved: the collection is so rich, especially in the early works that I’ll be talking about tonight. And, of course, in its record of theatrical productions. But probably the museum would be visited more frequently if it were in town. Yet the curator said that they had 1000 people in October—busloads of Germans, etc. . . . At 7:00 p.m. I gave my lecture at the Institute: Η μακρά μαθητεία του Καζαντζάκη σε χριστιανικά θέματα. Stelios introduced me very kindly, recounting how supportive the Bien and Rassias families had been when he arrived at Dartmouth, then introduced John, saying that John would now display the results of his teaching method: the Greek he had mastered in four days! So John spoke, in very nice Greek, about my translation of St. Francis that he had so appreciated, about our collaboration on Demotic Greek 1, etc. It was very moving. The talk went well. I relaxed quite quickly, which meant that the Greek flowed better. In the question period I didn’t have any difficulty at all understanding or answering. Afterwards, people came up: Vouli’s niece, George Kallinis, whose article on Λεμονοδάσος I’ll be publishing, the chair of the Φιλοσοφική Σχολή at Rethymo, and one of the professors there in Modern Greek, hoping I’d come there next time. Indeed, I think that we’ve already arranged for November 1–2 next year, when they’ll hold a celebration for the 40th anniversary of Kazantzakis’s death. We can coordinate this with a Rassias workshop in Iraklio and a previous Kazantzakis symposium on Aegina, plus a Rassias workshop in Thessaloniki, with luck. Another man said that he’d been present, age 17, at Kazantzakis’s funeral. Another said that he’d had the same questioning about the μεταθανάτια ζωή. There was a nice American woman married to a Greek scientist, a nice Greek who’d grown up like Kazantzakis very religious, and wanted to convert all the neighbors. (And previously, Stelios had helped me find the right Greek expressions for “fusion reaction” and “process theology.”) Then a group of a dozen or so went to a taverna in Iraklio for supper, with lots of easy, pleasant conversation. . . . Returning late to Stelios’s home, we nevertheless watched his video about the robot, then said goodbye to John and Mary, who will be leaving at 6:15 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Saturday, November 23

Iraklio–Thessaloniki

Leisurely breakfast outdoors on the terrace with Psiloritis in the background. Pancakes with maple syrup. Then to town. Stelios and I to Demosthenes Stefanidis, behind the museum. His father’s brother was Χαρίλαος Στεφανίδης, Kazantzakis’s boyhood friend. Lots of stories about the eccentric Harilaos, whose pharmacy was a sort of salon for the writers and artists of the time, so much so that it went bankrupt as a pharmacy. The present Stefanidis took over Harilaos’s papers, all thrown into trunks, and discovered letters from Kazantzakis, among others. The whole archive is now in neat notebooks labeled from the 1740s to the present. His Kazantzakis notebook is rich, starting with a long letter from 1902. He promised to send me xeroxes. A whole series was published in the periodical Δέντρο, which he lent me to make my own xeroxes and return to him. So . . . more letters! He, like me, wonders where to deposit his archive. Stelios may be able to arrange for a computerized index produced at the Institute. . . . We found Chrysanthi and Ava at a café teeming with νεολαία, very lovely on this fresh, sunny, warm Saturday morning. Then to a seaside restaurant (people were swimming) for fish eaten whole (head, bones, and all), to the airport, and fond goodbyes. A good visit! . . . Entering our room at Μεγάλου Αλεξάνδρου 29 felt like returning home. Then to τους Λύκους for an omelet and across the street to Steer’s for a decent cup of coffee.

Sunday, November 24, 1996

All day: family. Odysseas and Eleni fetched us at 10:30 a.m. Off by taxi to Goodies, where son Τάκης was holding a birthday party for his daughter. Thirty children, at least, upstairs in Goodies’ special room, with slides, seesaws, etc., and two women directing the kids in games, dancing and the like. Afterwards, each received a special carton with a hamburger, fries, and soda. Yum! Energy. Thirty kids jumping and screaming, while their parents sat outside poisoning the air with cigarette smoke. Takis smiling, taking photos, again not spending much time with us, but I learned at least that he’s working on a sewage system and other infrastructure in Halkidiki. Toula came briefly and we arranged to play duets again on Wednesday. We extricated ourselves finally around 12 noon despite Odysseas’s protests. At 2:00, to Dimitris and Tilda for lunch. Their daughter, at first silent, gradually opened up and then wouldn’t stop talking, about her toy doggie who urinated on the carpet και έκανε κακά, etc. Nice that she finally feels at ease with us. Tilda and Dimitri very easygoing. She expressed her profound gratitude to Daphne for the hospitality in London when their child was dying of cancer. Dimitri told me that she is only half-Jewish (father, not mother) and always wanted to escape the ghetto. She converted to Orthodoxy before the marriage and wears a cross prominently around her neck. . . . Siesta. Then to George and Efthymoula, joined by Dimitris and Tilda and the daughter. George’s prostate grew back, so he was told. He has PSA of 2.0. I advised going to a second urologist for another opinion. This one advises another operation, which George refuses to have. Civilized conversation with Efthymoula. Yes, it is possible. The daughter again very talkative and friendly. George said it had never happened before. . . . Telephoned Daphne. They leave London on Wednesday, for good.

Monday, November 25, 1996

Wind and rain all night. 50 degrees this morning when I went out to buy bread. The bread seller very philosophical: να μη παραπονιούμαστε, είχαμε τόσο ωραίο καιρό. . . . In the office from 4:00 to 7:30. Interviewed two Anatolia College students who want to come to Dartmouth, and then met with the pair who are doing Christ Recrucified tomorrow. How alert and smart they are! . . . Then Ritsa and Zisis took us out again, to a ψαροταβέρνα in Depot. When I tried to pay, Zisis of course refused, saying, Μη νοιάζεσαι για υλικά πράγματα. Nice.

Tuesday, November 26, 1996

Walked to work. Another very good, lively class, with excellent reports and good discussion afterwards. Long talk with Dimitris afterwards. He has vetted my lecture, which he says is σαφές και δυνατό. Walked to Aristotelous to meet Δημήτρης Ντούτης for lunch with three other Fulbrighters. (Chrysanthi went off to the American Farm School to make fifty apple pies for Thanksgiving.) One Fulbrighter is a water engineer, working on anti-pollution. Says that the Thermaic Gulf will be clean next year when the new treatment plant is opened. Now only 40% of sewage is treated. Next year 100% will be treated. The remaining problem is pollution from agriculture. Fertilizers enter the water table and reach the sea eventually. That’s much harder to control, obviously. He cited the Hudson River as a shining example of anti-pollution success, and I was happy to report that I spend summers in Riparius. . . . Worked some more on the lecture, incorporating Gounelas’s corrections and smoothing out some of the sentences. Then returned to Pelagidis’s article for JMGS. Thank goodness no one invited us out tonight. We went to Steer’s and had a club sandwich. A new resident here is a heavy smoker and the whole place is polluted. But we’ll be leaving in six days.

Wednesday, November 27, 1996

A busy day. Went to the Odeon at 12:30 and played through my four-hand repertoire with Toula. Did all four pieces of the Della Joio, not just the first and last. Then at 5:00 to ERT3 opposite the Γαλλικό Ινστιτούτο, to be interviewed on TV on Kazantzakis by the well-known journalist Βολονάκης, who was well prepared and somewhat provocative. It will be screened tomorrow; thus I was astute enough to speak about the lecture I gave “last night.” . . . Walked to the university in pouring rain; drenched. Lectured in the σπουδαστήριο. Full. Lots of students. Afterwards few questions but Μουλλάς asked about Nietzsche and Tolstoy, Dimitri about Buddhism, Elsie about the word θρησκοληψία. The audience seemed attentive while I was speaking, at least. Then out for the obligatory dinner with Φαρίνου, τους Λυπουρλίδες, Κυρία Χασιώτης, Δημ. Φραντζή and others I didn’t know. Home at 1:00 a.m.

Thursday, November 28, 1996

Worked all day on a review of Karen Van Dyck’s work for her tenure decision at Columbia. I tried my best, but I doubt that she’ll get it, poor thing. . . . To the Farm School with Vouli for Η Μέρα των Ευχαριστιών, Thanksgiving. Turkey dinner for 250 people. Saw Mimi Hughes, the consul general. Sat with David Schuler, the consul, a Dartmouth grad, and his Japanese wife, whom we had met in 1990. Christine Willis is interested in Alec for Pinewood. We’ll talk further. The students sang hymns (I thought I was back in Deerfield) and did square dancing and Greek dancing.

Friday, November 29, 1996

Long talk with Xenophon Kokolis in the office. He’s writing an article on the poems of Αναγνωστάκης that refer to Christ. Very moving poems, which he read aloud to me, all of them copied out in his own hand. He does this in order to internalize texts he admires. Anagnostakis is a communist, of course, yet the poems are sensitive exploitations of Christian materials. I am hoping that the essay will be published by JMGS. . . . Afterwards, full offfice hours again. And I collected 114000 drachmas for my talk on Wednesday. Amazing! In the evening, Farinou and her husband Stavros picked us up. Then they picked up Moullas, and we went to a restaurant in Depot run by a former studnet of Stavros’s (in pharmacology). Superb food. Good talk. Moullas invited me to the Βιζυηνός congress in March. How can I write something on Vizyinos?

Saturday, November 30, 1996

Rain. Bought τσουρέκι for breakfast. Started to pack. Finished copyediting Pelagidis on the economy—the first time I understood some basic concepts concerning deficits, supply-side economics, etc. Then started to catch up on correspondence. Doorbell rang. It was Odysseas, unshaven and distraught. Stavros had a severe heart attack last night and is in intensive care! He may die. Poor Toula. She’ll lose husband, father, and business associate all at once. . . . Chrysanthi was at Lola’s saying goodbye. Then we went to George and Efthymoula for Andreas’s name day. Δήμητρα very nice: simple, smart, down to earth. Their baby never cries. Andreas has written a play and has translated a story by E. A. Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher,” to be published. We said our goodbyes. . . . Back home, Christine Willis called to learn more about Alec. Pinewood will be advertising for an assistant headmaster. . . . Dimitri and Ruth picked us up and we all went to Elizabeth (Elsie) Sakellaridou for yet another δείπνο. (The poem by Sikelianos that Kokolis examined is Δείπνος—Last Supper—and the same title is used by Anagnostakis.)

Sunday, December 1, 1996

Amazingly, a day without a δείπνο. Chrysanthi went to church with Lola in the morning. To the Wolves for lunch. Long siesta. Reading Ασκητική. At night, τοστ, καφέ and a long walk on the παραλία. Heard that farmers plan to block the road to the airport as a sort of strike. Will we be able to depart on Tuesday? Big worry. . . . Kazantzakis in Ασκητική (σελ. 88) has this good advice for scholars: Πολέμα στο κρανίο, σκότωσε τις ιδέες, δημιούργα καινούριες. Ο Θεός κρύβεται μέσα σε κάθε ιδέα όπως μέσα σε σάρκα. Σύντριψε την ιδέα, λευτέρωσέ τον! Δώσε του μιαν άλλη ιδέα, πιο απλόχωρη, να κατοικήσει.

Monday, December 2, 1996

The farmers are striking, blocking major roads with their tractors. Apparently it will be difficult or impossible to get to the airport tomorrow. At first we decided to leave early in the morning for our 4:00 p.m. flight. I went to the university, held my ώρες συνεργασίες, told the student I’d have to miss her presentation, left thank you notes to Kehayioglou for the office, to Dimitri and to Γεωργία Χρήση, the secretary. But when I went back home Vouli called a taxi driver she knows: the man who in the summer runs the hotel in Μαρμαρά where Daphne and Greg stayed. He said he knows the back roads and we shouldn’t worry. So I changed plans about tomorrow’s class. George and Charlotte Draper took us out, with Vouli. Charlotte said that they’d be retiring in three years and that Alec should think about applying for the headmastership. Also that of Pinewood if and when Peter Baiter leaves. But she doesn’t think he should apply for the assistant headmastership of Pinewood. Interesting. Draper had no previous connection with agriculture; apparently that is not required.

READING IN THESSALONIKI

Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”

Albert Camus, The Outsider (L’Étranger)

Satre, Huis Clos

Kazantzakis, Κωμωδία, τραγωδία μονόπρακτη

Kazantzakis, Ασκητική

Tuesday, December 3, 1996

Thessaloniki–London.

To class. Reports on Ασκητική and Toda-Raba. Farewells. I think that the term went well. Too bad I cannot stay to continue with Pentzikis. Dimitris drove me home. The taxi was already there, all loaded. We left at 12:30—both cars. By-passed the road block and approached the airport from the other direction. Lucky because they say that tomorrow that route will be blockaded also. But we arrived easily. . . . Comfortable flight, again business class. Worked on the computer: Doumanis’s and Pappas’s article on Castellorizo. Novotel near Heathrow. Lovely shower. Watched a soccer game on TV. Chrysanthi and I both agree that the entire Greek experience now seems like a dream, a pleasant one. . . . In class, I defended my view that Kazantzakis’s Σιγή is not nihilistic, but is an apophatic expression of the ultimate inadequacy of all talk.

Wednesday, December 4, 1996

London–Boston–Hanover

Again, the luxury of business class. BA hostesses all smiles and service, compared to scowling Olympic ones. Boston amazingly warm, 60 degrees, no different from Salonica. Minibus home with three annoying Germans talking the whole time. Their language gives me the creeps. Our house immaculate: Felitsa took care to have Zdenka come in and vacuum. Out to Panda for supper. Chinese food again! Unpacked everything, but left all papers and books on the floor, where they will doubtlessly stay for weeks.

Thursday, December 5, 1996

Philadelphia

Off on AMTRAK to Philadelphia, custom class, very comfortable. Began work on Ollier’s article on Valaoritis. Awful! Incomprehensible English, incoherent paragraphs, elementary mistakes everywhere. Can I salvage it? Arrived in time to play four-hands with Dan. He practiced the marches (more or less) but still fumbles terribly in the Brahms. Too bad. His problem now is that staff meeting doesn’t want him to clerk, nor does it want rotating clerks each time. It wants to have a steady clerk that it chooses. Dan of course sees this as a threat to his leadership. . . . More of the same.

Friday, December 6, 1996

Pendle Hill

Publications Committee. I read the three submissions on the train yesterday and supported all three. The committee rejected two of the three. Afterwards, Book Committee. We’ve got our plate full this year. For the next publication we had hoped to have the authorized biography of Douglas Steere, but the writer has a bloc and can’t seem to finish it. Nice breakfast with David and Margaret Gray. He called Stuart Morton a saint, and is glad, as I am, that he is now in Friends House. David had counseled him to leave Woodbrooke long ago. He said Claire Chamberlain is much better off now, relieved to be “redundant.” The one problem is John Wyatt, still unemployed and probably unemployable.

Saturday, December 7, 1996

Philadelphia–Hanover

Train to Springfield, OK. Then bus in a snowstorm. Trees and electric wires down across the road. Driver had to back up, turn around, use alternative routes. Arrived finally at the White River Junction bus station at midnight. Closed. I called a taxi but had to wait in the cold for ¾ hour. A policeman said he’d help if he saw one. Finally one came, but along the way the policeman stopped the driver and asked, “Did you pick up that old man at the bus station?” I felt like Zorba when they called him παππούλης. But the driver kindly offered, “You don’t look old.” Chrysanthi was waiting up, worried and sick, of course.

Sunday, December 8, 1996

Daphne and Christina arrived Friday night, also in the snowstorm. Their plane circled Logan for two hours before landing, and she missed the 5:15 minibus, caught the 8:15, and arrived at 11:00 p.m. But the baby slept the whole way. Christina is beautiful, blond, sits up, sleeps all night, smiles just a bit, puts her “dummy” (pacifier) in her mouth the right way. She came to me without fear. We all went to Kendal for lunch. Christina in a high chair and admired by everyone. Mother very chipper and walking quite normally. . . . Working still on Ollier, slow going. . . . Called John Iatrides re: the Peter Allen mess. I’ll write to the Executive Committee asking that he be reinstated and suggesting that the committee might like to designate a second associate editor (presumably a woman). John surmises that Chioles and Keeley determined to get rid of Allen out of fear that he would end up as editor owing to my illness last spring.

Wednesday, December 11, 1996

Amherst

To Amherst to examine Demotic Greek students again. Stavros has videos that we’ll see in January and perhaps can use for the new DG book. Afterwards, Christmas shopping in the Deerfield candle company, a festival complete with (mechanical) German oom-pa-pa bands. . . . Daphne went off to New York to start setting up their apartment, leaving Christina with us.

Thursday, December 12, 1996

Dimitri Gondicas has sent sample drawings for our book done by an Athenian artist. I don’t like them. Need to show them to John when he returns from Turkey. . . . Finished Ollier, thank God!

Saturday, December 14, 1996

Cambridge

Daphne returned yesterday. Thus Chrysanthi and I were able to go to Cambridge to see Six Characters in Search of an Author at the A.R.T. What a brilliant, stimulating play! The “characters” are “real” because “eternal” whereas the players are unreal because subject to contingency. Very Platonic. Brustein’s adaptation is very funny, with lots of topical in-jokes. Totally successful intellectual theater. Geidt excellent as the “senior actor.” At the very end, I had a terrific nose-bleed, and ended up stretched out on a bench with people giving us tissues and advising me to pinch the bridge of the nose, which worked, eventually. . . . For lunch, we indulged in the delightful fare of Henrietta’s Table in the Charles Hotel: shrimp, oysters, paté, eggs Benedict. . . . Once home, John called. Back from Turkey. The Patriarch received them warmly, remembering Veronica, who had tended a previous patriarch when Bartholomew was his assistant. . . . Pirandello’s introduction to Six Characters is a perfect gloss on Kazantzakis’s Κωμωδία—Τραγωδία: “life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have in us . . . the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality . . . that from time to time reveals itself to be vain and illusory. Whoever understands the game can no longer fool himself, but if you cannot fool yourself you can no longer derive any enjoyment or pleasure from life.”

Friday, December 20, 1996

Greg arrived from NYC. We were all interested to see if Christina would remember him, for he’d been away from her for two weeks. She warmed up to him quickly. . . . Alec arrived from Indonesia, looking fine. He revealed that he has a new girlfriend, an Indonesian, of course, but at least she’s not employed by the school.

Sunday, December 22, 1996

Alec and I went to Meeting at Kendal, combined with Hanover Monthly Meeting. Very moving ministry by residents concerning their gratitude to us. I ministered saying the gratitude was equal from us to them, for their faith in us and also for their values that have made a loving community possible. Alec also ministered, recalling the Meeting’s effect on him as a child, especially Henry Williams and Elizabeth Ballard. . . . Afterwards, we all had lunch with Yiayia, including Christina.

Monday, December 23, 1996

Bought a new car: a Buick Century, one step up from the Skylark. Very unexciting stylistically, but “solid,” and proper for a respectable bourgeois.

Tuesday, December 24, 1996

Lucia Tebbe arrived from Santa Barbara. Leander, Deanna, and Sophia arrived from Maryland. Sophia is so small compared to Christina, very inert, or so it seems. She looks Eurasian already. Daphne and Greg cooked a nice supper for us.

Wednesday, December 25, 1996

A long, pleasant day. Bacon and eggs for breakfast. Opening of presents—many! Visit by the Rassiases, including Veronica, who has an extraordinary personality. Discussion with Alec, Leander, and Daphne regarding a “Terpni Partnership.” Daphne is willing to be the treasurer, paying the bills. Expenses relevant to an individual’s house will be borne by that individual; expenses relevant to the general upkeep will be charged to the Partnership. I hope to establish a fund to cover taxes and insurance. . . . Turkey dinner. Interval to laugh over Steve Martin’s film “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” then Christmas pudding, apple pie, champagne, and decaf coffee. Very nice indeed.

Saturday, December 28, 1996

To Audrey Logan’s for pizza lunch with the Nodas, including Kesaya and David and David’s Japanese-American “partner,” who works for the Time-Warner foundation, judging grant proposals. Supper with Yiayia; then Bev Web’s concert, all Chopin. Nocturnes and études beautiful, fantasy and scherzo full of memory lapses, ditto for the Grand Waltz Brillante, although he got further with it this time than last time. He is 88 and failing, but the old magic is still there on occasion. I hope that he’ll drop dead one day, perhaps while playing (indeed we all feared that he would fall every time he rose so unsteadily from the piano bench). If he is forced to stop playing and is still alive, I think he will die from despair.

Sunday, December 29, 1996

Terpni

Up at 6:00 a.m. Off to the farm with Alec and Leander in Leander’s new Subaru. Breakfast at the Woodstock Inn. Arriving at 11:00 a.m. we looked for a possible site for Leander and Deanna’s house on the upper fields, and found two possibilities. Then a contractor, Roger Anderson, came, to plan with Alec for Alec’s cellar hole, septic tank, and dry well. Alec was pleased. He’ll do it as soon as the frost is out of the ground, and everything will be ready when Alec arrives in June. Art Perryman drove up. Then we returned to his house to look at brochures for log kits, which he had in abundance. Back in Hanover, Chrysanthi objected to both sites we described, saying that the house should be at the edge of our north field. But that may be too swampy. We’ll look again next summer. In any case, they may not have enough money to build. . . . A few days ago I sent off final instructions to Tim Smith in Lake Placid regarding the Partnership, and spoke to Frank Currier about tax consequences. The children agree. And Daphne will be the secretary-treasurer paying bills and keeping records. . . . Invitation from Moullas to speak at the Vizyinos conference in Thrace in March. I’d like to do this, but what can I say about Vizyinos? Perhaps a comparison with Thomas Hardy—two fin de siècle pessimists.

1997

Hanover

January 1–June 12

Cambridge, Jan. 2–3, 1997, Friends Center

Princeton, Jan. 12–16, Palmer House

Pendle Hill, Jan. 23–25

Thessaloniki, Feb. 21–25, Hotel Macedonia Palace

Cambridge, March 1–2, Friends Center

Princeton, March 3–6, Palmer House

Pendle Hill, March 6–10

NYC, March 22–25, Yale Club

Boston, April 8–9, Holiday Inn, Brookline

Wilmington, April 13–14, Hotel DuPont

Philadelphia–Princeton, April 17–24, Pendle Hill

Boston, April 29, Hellenic College

Amherst, May 9

Washington, State Department, May 14–15

Pendle Hill, May 16–17

NYC, May 18, Daphne

Princeton, May 19–22

Cambridge, A.R.T., May 24

Riparius, May 25–26

Kinhaven, June 6–10

Riparius

June 13–September 5

Hanover, June 20

Hanover, July 14 & 15, Kendal Board

Hanover July 18 & 19, Kendal Personnel Committee

Hanover

September 6–October 17

Philadelphia, Sept. 10, Kendal Corporation

Philadelphia, Sept 19–21, Pendle Hill; then New York City

Boston, Oct. 4, then NYC

NYC, Oct. 5

Princeton, Oct. 6–9

Potomac, Maryland, Oct. 9

Washington, Oct. 10, State Department

Europe

October 18–November 6

Oct. 18, Ramada Inn, Logan Airport, Peter to London, Penn Club, Chrysanthi to Thessaloniki

Oct. 19, The Excelsior, Heathrow 01817596511

Oct. 19–25, London, Penn Club, 21 Bedford Place, WC1B 55501716364718

Oct. 22, Oxford, chez Peter & Jackie Mackridge

Oct. 23, Birmingham

Oct. 26–31, Thessaloniki, Hotel Metropolitan, Vas. Olgas 65, 031 824221

Nov. 1–2, Hania, Hotel Omalos, 0821 95215

Nov. 2–4, Iraklio, Oikia Orfanoudaki

Nov. 5, Athens, Hotel London, Glyfada

Hanover

November 7–December 31

January 1, 1997

Yiayia played Scot Joplin rags (!) at Kendal at a lovely festivity, a little orchestra, plus lots of refreshments. We all went and of course Christina (mostly) and Sophia were the main attractions. Both infants seemed enthralled.

January 2, 1997

Drove Alec to Cambridge very comfortably in our new Buick. Greeted at Quaker Center by Anna Jones’s daughter. Fine dinner at Giannino’s; then to A.R.T. to see Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, well acted by Will LeBow as Ekdal, and of course Jeremy Geidt as his father. The bitter satire against “integrity” is all too obvious, as is the symbolism of the wild duck, explained ad nauseam in the program notes and also in the text itself. But what a brave play for its time: a slashing of all pieties. Its mode: sardonic.

January 3, 1997

To Logan with Alec. Breakfast. Fond goodbyes. He flew off to Tokyo, Singapore, Jakarta. At 9:00 I had an hour-long conference call with Margery Walker, John Hennessey, and Jim Armstrong re: Steve Fleming’s 1997 salary. We decided on $110,000 and better life insurance plus a bonus of $7500. Not bad, but he deserves our support, and we need to keep him here for a while. He is already being approached by other CCRCs.

Sunday, January 5, 1997

Heard yesterday that John Lincoln is in intensive care following an operation for “torn aorta.” Very serious. He might have died. Long talk with Mary. So far so good, she says. . . . Greg, Daphne, and Christina left in early morning in their new Toyota station wagon. We’ll miss them, and especially Christina, who’s a charmer. With luck we’ll be able to visit them now and then in New York. It was so good to have Daphne and Christina here for a full month, and Greg for about ten days.

Friday, January 10, 1997

Dinner with John and Mary. John has elevated PSA and is slated for a biopsy later this month. He’s joining the club. . . . Greg got three tickets last week and took three days of aggravation to register their car. What a beginning! And he finds the colleagues at Goldman all crassly money-mad. They have vowed to leave Manhattan for the suburbs. . . . I was strong enough to say No to Panayotis Moullas’s invitation to come to Greece in March for the Vizyinos conference. I would have needed to set everything else aside between now and then to prepare something and this just wasn’t a good idea, for time must be spent on Demotic Greek 1 (!) and on the Kazantzakis letters. But we all still hope to return to Greece next November, I for the Kazantzakis conference in Χανιά, John and Chrysanthi for language workshops in Thessaloniki and Iraklio.

Saturday, January 11, 1997

Saw the film of Twelfth Night. The stage is so much better. It lets one imagine. Cinema does the imagining for one.

Our Christmas greetings, sent out last month:

In 1996 the Bien family added two lovely young ladies: Christina Sloane Tebbe, born in London on May 28, and Sophia May Bien, born in Maryland on August 5.

We had the pleasure of having them with us over the holidays together with their parents—Daphne and Greg, Leander and Deanna—plus Alec, here briefly from Indonesia, plus Lucia Tebbe, here from Santa Barbara, plus great-grandmother Harriet Bien, whose 92nd birthday is approaching. What a miracle a child is: so utterly helpless, yet so unexpectedly expressive even at a few months of age, able to convey feelings of joy, curiosity, repulsion, shyness, hunger, pain, fatigue, and boredom. We enjoy the child’s curiosity most of all: how those big eyes grow even bigger, shifting from right to left to follow a new toy or a new adult face! And the little steps forward that are really so momentous: the ability to control the head, the ability to sit up without losing balance, manipulating the pacifier so that the right end goes into the mouth, the first smile, the first giggle, the first experiments with standing straight with locked knees. Of course. more is to come: teeth, a word or two, thought.

How amazing to think that these almost helpless bodies can mature into a concert pianist or a champion tennis player!

What a year this has been: The two grandchildren, our first, were balanced negatively by much too much illness. Chrysanthi needed an operation to correct painful arthritis in her hand; Harriet fell and broke her hip, requiring surgery and a 12-week recuperation (happily at Kendal); and Peter was diagnosed with prostate cancer in March, subjected to prostatectomy in June, and then to three weeks with a catheter, but seems to have come out of it all with very good prospects for the future. Enough!

Peter has retired from teaching at Dartmouth after 36 years in order to complete various writing projects. God’s Struggler: Religion in the Writings of Nikos Kazantzakis (edited with Darren Middleton) was published in May. A thorough revision of Demotic Greek 1 is in progress, in collaboration with Dimitris Gondicas and Andromache Karanika at Princeton plus Chrysanthi Bien and John Rassias at Dartmouth. The projected “Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis” is about 2/3 done. And volume 2 of Kazantzakis: Politics the Spirit is more or less finished in first draft, awaiting polishing and elaboration. A future project may be “Process Theology and Quakerism.” The freedom of retirement made possible a stimulating six weeks in Thessaloniki in the autumn, teaching a graduate seminar in the university there.

Chrysanthi, besides being an extraordinary grandmother, continues as head of the Hanover Senior Center and as Senior Lecturer in Dartmouth’s Department of Classics. She vows never to retire!

We wish you and yours a peaceful, healthy, and productive 1997.

Thursday, January 16, 1997

At Princeton since Monday. We’ve got the scenarios now for the whole book. Went over drills, etc. of chapter 8. John and I don’t like the illustrations Dimitri found. We’ll try Rix Jennings again. . . . Train to NYC. Time to go up to 81st and West End to visit Daphne, and Christina, in the new apartment. Christina gave me a big smile. Nice street; the apartment is pleasant but hardly worth the $4000 per month they’re paying. Daphne is feeling more at home, gradually. Greg was shocked by the gross avidity of his colleagues at Goldman; in England that yearning is more “muted.” . . . Long train & bus ride back. The bus driver let me sit in the warm bus until Chrysanthi arrived. Very kind.

Friday, January 17, 1997

To Kendal to meet with Warren Witte, who will be the facilitator at our retreat in March devoted to Quaker values. Gordon Browne noted, pessimistically, that many organizations founded by Friends have been taken over by non-Quakers. That might happen here. Witte is very impressive.

Sunday, January 19, 1997

Monty Brower came to visit. He graduated in 1981. Luce Fellow on a Hong Kong newspaper for two years, then on a California newspaper for one year, and on People Magazine for seven years. Almost went to divinity school. Now is an M.D. doing a residency in psychiatry. Married, and a convert to Roman Catholicism.

Monday, January 20, 1997

Working on the journal, Demotic Greek 1 revision, and an article on Kazantzakis translations. Bought 50 boxes to use to pack up the books in my office. Queasy feeling. Every book was a part of my life—now going into storage. . . . Nice lunch with Robert Binswanger and Joe Medlicott. Bins is now persona non grata in the Education Department owing to Andrew Garrod’s animosity.

Tuesday, January 21, 1997

Kendal Board. How nice not to be clerk! We raised the monthly fee only by 2.5% and the entry fees by 0%. I visited Dartmouth’s Personnel Office to learn more about retirement benefits. I printed up new business cards and letterheads saying emeritus! It’s a new adventure. . . . Emily Cope Harrison visited. She was my student at Harvard in 1983. Now she’s applying to Dartmouth Medical School.

Wednesday, January 22, 1997

Advice from John Rassias about our book—to put Survival Greek at the end, for example. Lunch with Ned. He’s interested in Kendal, mildly. . . . Took Redmont’s Quaker moderation text to Jeanne Childs for formatting, finally. Folks at Kendal will be debating abstinence vs. moderation next week. . . . Dick for supper. He wants me to read a book called “Caring.” We disagreed about Conrad’s Secret Agent; he kept insisting that Verloc feels himself a hero whereas I think the point is just the opposite.

Thursday, January 23, 1997

To Pendle Hill

All day on AMTRAK. Worked on book reviews for the journal. Piano with Dan when I arrived. He still hasn’t learned the notes for the Brahms.

Friday, January 24, 1997

Pendle Hill

Solid committee meeting 10:30 to 5:00! Rebecca getting increasingly sloppy. Actually forgot pamphlet #5 this year. #6 six weeks late. But the biography of Douglas Steere has arrived. We rejected all three pamphlets at Publications Committee but accepted the Steere book after each of us read a chapter. It’s “adequate,” barely. . . . After ice cream, more piano. We played a lovely Haydn symphony.

Saturday, January 25, 1997

The Board had lunch with Dan. More about his inability to govern because of Denny and Margaret, who think that they’re equal to him. This gets tiresome. Afterwards, finished the Haydn symphony. Thot, Dan’s foster son, telephoned. His apartment was burglarized, all his wife’s jewelry stolen. . . . In Meeting today, fine ministry, especially about theodicy: the problem of evil. Why does God permit such evil? “Why don’t you do something, Lord?” complains a believer. And God answers, “I did do something: I created you!”

Sunday, January 26, 1997

I reported the theodicy ministry in Meeting today. Then we went for our customary lunch with the Nodas, Sydney, Mary. Cherry pie.

Monday, January 27, 1997

John Lincoln on the telephone. Let’s go to Sweet Tomatoes tonight. So we did: his first supper out after his terrible episode of a torn aorta. He was on display. So many people came over to say a kind word.

Tuesday, January 28, 1997

I was supposed to go to David Millstone’s class in Norwich primary school to be a storyteller for Odysseus in the Iliad. Prepared at the last minute. Rather apprehensive. But it snowed enough last night and this morning to have school canceled, so I never went. Much relief!

Wednesday, January 29, 1997

Cello-piano with Allan: Mendelssohn, Beethoven. He wants to do the Schumann next time. . . . Last night Dr. Judy Tyson came for supper. Old friend from the 1960s. She’s a lapsed Quaker by her own admission, but now very contented as an obstetrician/gynecologist. . . . Sent off my essay for the book on Greek translation. . . . John Rassias may have prostate cancer. We had him and Mary for dinner to cheer him up. This fear, he now tells me, accounted for his fatigue in Thessaloniki in November.

Friday, January 31, 1997

Leonard and Rosemary Rieser to supper at Kendal with Mother, followed by a tour. He seemed interested.

Sunday, February 2, 1997

I did a class in Quaker testimonies at the Meeting House. Quite a large audience. I used Fox and Barclay. Tim and Phoebe McCosker for supper. They’re going to Greece to see potters. Suddenly they became affable and friendly, after years of “looking the other way.”

Monday, February 3, 1997

Chrysanthi had “the ladies” for supper and I went alone to Panda House. But in came Tom and Nardi Campion and we sat together, very pleasantly.

Tuesday, February 4, 1997

Lunch with Rabbi Daniel Siegel, who has resigned. I worried about mediation, which he directs (and which I brought to Dartmouth). He assured me that it will continue.

Thursday, February 6, 1997

Chrysanthi went to New York on the train to visit Daphne. Yasuo Takahashi came here. We ate at the Indian restaurant and then played Schubert sonatinas, violin and piano, very nicely plus some Japanese music he brought. He’s a good sight-reader. What a pleasure! He is having a difficult time. Wants to leave the Olympus Company and somehow stay in the United States, ideally as a scientist concerned with care of the aging. That’s why he’s here, to visit Kendal tomorrow.

Friday, February 7, 1997

Yasuo went off to Kendal with me for breakfast and spent the day. I went to the Norwich school to be a storyteller in David Millstone’s class on the Odyssey. I did Odysseus as we see him in the Iliad. Beautiful children with big eyes, listening attentively. They know the story, all the characters. Wonderful! . . . Supper at Kendal with Yasuo and Mother. Home. More violin-piano.

Saturday, February 8, 1997

Campions invited me to lunch and to watch with them the video about Andrew Carnegie and the awful Henry Clay Frick. How can I ever enjoy the Frick Museum again? Campions said I cheered them up.

Sunday, February 9, 1997

Business Meeting on the State of Society, with me as recorder, as in past years. It gets easier and easier. Lunch afterwards, as usual, with Nodas, Sydney, Mary Soderberg, Audrey at De & Ro’s, where they know I always order cherry pie.

Monday, February 10, 1997

Kate Cohen here for a reading from her new book. We had lunch. She’s going to marry Adam finally, after 8 years. She’s still young and radiant. Wants me to come to the wedding. . . . The reading was lovely, with pastries and coffee. Very cozy.

Tuesday, February 11, 1997

Went to David Millstone’s class again to hear Willem Lange finish the story: homecoming, slaughter of the suitors. But he omitted the bed! Too bad.

Thursday, February 13, 1997

Good meeting with representative from TIAA/CREF re: retirement options. I transferred $50,000 from CREF into TIAA. Should have more than enough without touching the remainder in CREF, which is about $900,000. . . . Tom and Joan Wilson arrived for their Kendal admissions interviews and we had supper there with Mother and Robert and Penny Binswanger—the three classmates from Deerfield 1948. Afterwards I asked Tom why they chose Kendal at Hanover over other CCRCs they had looked at, and he answered, “You!” “Well,” I said, “I chose Haverford because of you.” So, 45 years later my compliment is being returned. They will, I’m sure, nudge us to activate our own admission process. It will be a bit strange if we enter while Mother is still alive. Two generations at Kendal.

Friday, February 14, 1997

John and Mary again for dinner. His prostate biopsy was negative and he is much relieved. We planned a bit of holiday together next October before the Salonica workshops.

Thursday, February 20, 1997

The Classics Department honored Chrysanthi and me by inviting Meg Alexiou to lecture, all coordinated by Jim Tatum. Jerry Rutter said nice words about both of us. And Meg, before starting her lecture, did the same, referring to our shared experiences of pleasure and pain. Then she gave a truly excellent, even magisterial, lecture on Greek prose: ancient, medieval, and modern. What a pleasure, especially compared to Bill Scott’s very mediocre lecture yesterday afternoon on “the Gospel of Odysseus”—i.e., the moral teaching of the Odyssey, a splendid topic not very well covered, alas. But he did better at breakfast this morning, speaking to about 80 students, the Presidential Scholars, more informally about the Odyssey, myth, and the Greek gods. The best point was the following: the Greek gods are like a mafia family living in the next apartment from yours on Park Avenue. You’re glad they’re there, because they offer a certain protection. On the other hand, you suspect the most disreputable goings-on in their apartment. But you’re always nice to them when you meet in the elevator. . . . Returning to Meg and our own celebration, the lecture was followed by a reception in Reed Hall and then a very nice supper in the Norwich Inn with Tatum, the Wolffs, Irene Kacandes, Kathleen Corrigan, Meg, and us. . . . Meg is on the retirement track at Harvard, going to be half-time now and planning to leave in three years. She’s selling her house and looking forward to living with Michael in Kent by the Channel, in the house once occupied by Wellington. We both felt how lovely and appropriate was this gesture of hers, especially remembering that I delivered the eulogy for her in Birmingham when she was about to leave there to go to Harvard. In any case, it’s nice to feel appreciated once in a while.

Friday, February 21, 1997

Boston–Frankfort

To Boston via air, then US Air to Frankfort. I was in economy class surrounded by 25 teenagers going to Germany for a week. Miraculously, the attendant came down and said I should transfer to Business Class because of my priority gold status with US Air. How nice! So, I was pampered (there were only five in Business Class) and even slept a bit.

Saturday, February 22, 1997

Frankfort–Thessaloniki

Arrived in Thessaloniki at 1:00 p.m. Met by travel agent for the Υπουργείο. Taxi to the Macedonia Palace Hotel in our old neighborhood. I never dreamed I’d be in this extraordinarily expensive hotel, and now everything is paid for. Upon entering, I saw—what a coincidence!—Dimitris Yiannakos, there with two business colleagues. «Η Θεσσαλονίκη είναι σαν χωριό», είπε. Just in time for the first επίσιμο φαητό, with the υπουργός, ο κ. Βενιζέλος, as host. He spoke briefly and well. Nice to see old friends: Stathis Gauntlet, Anna from Melbourne, John Burke, Dimitris Tziovas, Mario Vitti, Bertrand Bouvier (whom I didn’t recognize at first), Dimadis, others from Sydney and Adelaide who remembered me but I did not remember them. . . . At 5:30-ish the 2nd session began (I missed the first in the morning), mostly individuals voicing their problems and complaints. Αργυρίου, president of the European Association, was quite impressive. Also Dimadis, who invited me to lecture in Berlin. . . . They all were taken to a restaurant but I went instead to Odysseas and Eleni to deliver the face cream for Eleni and a pile of xeroxed four-hand piano music for Toula. Telephoned Lola, Toula—we’ll meet tomorrow—and George. Very good meeting with Odysseas and Eleni; they both came downstairs; Yiayia had gone to sleep. We had μπουγάτσα.

Sunday, February 23, 1997

Thessaloniki

More of the same, except that Maronitis came and added a strong voice. But he said that they don’t like American Neohellenists here because they (the Americans) scorn Greek scholarship. Obviously he was generalizing from Lambropoulos, which is hardly fair.

For lunch I took Toula and Stavros to “The Wolves” and treated them. “Our” waiter wasn’t there, but the παιδί was, and I left a large tip. Stavros is recovered from his heart attack, but Toula and he are both frightened: another one could come at any time and perhaps be fatal. And their other problems continue, mostly economic. Poor Toula seemed very depressed. What a shame! Such good, creative people ought to be liberated to enjoy life. They of course asked much about Leander and dream of seeing him again. But when?

George called, and then actually came at 8:00 but didn’t find me (I was in the telephone booth calling him). When I spoke to him afterwards and offered to hop on the bus and come there, he said No, and καληνύχτα. Strange. He told me yesterday that he still has severe medical problems and probably is depressed. So I went with the group for dinner at Το Μύλο, an old industrial area that now has clubs and restaurants. Huge amounts of good food, as always. Sat with Mario Vitti and Jerry Augustinos, and Papacosma.

Monday, February 24, 1997

Thessaloniki

Wind-up of the symposium. Our group met over breakfast to plan our presentation: Neni Panourgia, Vangelis Calotychos, Victor Papacosma, Karen Van Dyke, Jerry Augustinos, and I. In the event, it was decided that Argyriou, head of MGSA-Europe, would speak for all of us. At the lunch, I sat again with Mario Vitti, who said he’d heard that I’d become a Morman!! I tried to explain that Quakers and Mormons were not the same thing. Bertrand Bouvier said he’s coming to New York next week to see the Byzantine exhibit, and I offered him hospitality at the Yale Club, in fond memory of the hospitality he gave me in Geneva in 1987 when he rescued us from that awful hotel. . . . Afterwards, I went to the university to meet with our class. Dimitri brought champagne. All the girls came except one, and the one boy didn’t come. Lots of laughter, kisses, good exchange both serious and frivolous for two hours. Περί μενα να σας ξαναδώ μόνο στη μην-υπάρχουσα μεταθανάτια ζωή, τους είπα, αλλά να με! . . . Afterwards, Dimitri drove me to his lovely home in Panorama, first picking up his son at Anatolia College’s new library, which is stunning. Big smile and hug from Ruth when I arrived. Τσίπουρο και φέτα, και κουβέντα. Alas, big problems in the department, the Μουλλάς faction against the Κεχαγιόγλου faction, and Ruth’s eyes had a further setback and their daughter went through a period of anorexia. . . . I’m hoping that Dimitri will write an essay on Kazantzakis for the special issue of JMGS I’d like to publish. Also hoping he may do something on Ritsos and be invited for the 1999 MGSA symposium at Princeton. . . . Arrived back at the hotel at 10:30 p.m. to find a message from George. He’d come again at 8:30 and of course had not found me. Oh well . . . No appointment.

Tuesday, February 25, 1997

Thessaloniki–Munich–Philadelphia–Lebanon

Off at 6:30 a.m. by pre-paid taxi with Jerry Augustinos. Good conversation with him the whole way to Munich (two hours) and waiting for his flight to Atlanta. . . . Back on tourist class for the flight to Philadelphia. I’m very spoiled. But next to me was a nice German man, a bookseller headed to California to spend two weeks in a Zen-Buddhist center. We talked about Lawrence Durrell, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Henry Miller, Kazantzakis. But I also worked well with my trusty laptop on this nine-hour flight. Arrived at Philadelphia in time for the 4:30 to Lebanon but it was full, so I sat in the US Air lounge copyediting Vlahoutsikou’s essay on mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. Supper in the Marriott; very nice. But I was understandably tired. By the time I got the 9:30 p.m. flight to Lebanon it was the equivalent of 4:30 a.m. Greek time, and I awoke this morning at 6:00 a.m.

Wednesday, February 26, 1997

Hanover

To Kendal at 10:00 a.m. for Residents Council meeting. I didn’t realize that at this session the results of the wine ballot would be announced. Actually 2½ times as many people said they preferred no wine as those who said they preferred wine. But about 70 were on the fence, saying they didn’t care and wouldn’t mind a six-month trial. Jack Morehead, current president, ran the meeting rather autocratically, insisting that none of this came from the council and that the council had no position on the issue (even though some members tried to get him to open discussion regarding a position). All he opened was whether or not the ballot results should be forwarded to the trustees. Here the council voted strongly in favor, so it will be in our laps at the May meeting. I fear the worst. Already I’ve gotten a half dozen impassioned letters bemoaning the divisiveness caused. . . . At 5:15, to the War/Peace seminar/dinner for a very fine presentation on El Salvador. . . . Then music with Dick and Allan, although I was feeling quite groggy from jet lag. Afterwards, Dick poured out his chagrin at the psychoanalytical school’s decision to award Georganna a posthumous degree, very much against his wishes. He is debating whether to go or not. . . . A nightcap of a new Benny Hill video got me guffawing.

Thursday, February 27, 1997

The President of Hellenic College, Rev. Alciviadis Calivas, drove to Hanover with George Pilitsis to consult with John Rassias and me regarding the poor results for Greek instruction at Hellenic and especially at Holy Cross Seminary. They’re producing priests who don’t understand the Greek that they mouth. We agreed to go to Hellenic in May to facilitate a “retreat” with the faculty. What is really needed, of course, is an evaluation visit, but the president feels that that will be too threatening. . . . Supper with them, then work in my Baker Library study, trying to get my new computer to work properly. Then Benny Hill.

Friday, February 28, 1997

Advisory/Executive Committee at Kendal. Lunch at 12:30, and we didn’t end until 4:00. Main business: preparing the March 18 retreat on Quakerism. Had Warren Witte on the speakerphone. John Hennessey has prepared a splendid paper summarizing Quaker values as he understands them, taking a great amount from my attempts earlier to do the same. . . . Discussion also of the refinancing. I’ll be going to the “closing” dinner in New York City on Monday since I’ll be close by, in Princeton. Walter Frank is going to take Steve and Brent through the Stock Exchange on Tuesday, for he’ll be closing it to celebrate his 60th anniversary of entering the exchange, but I can’t go. . . . Did income tax materials and delivered them to Frank Currier. Drove to Lee Huntington’s in Norwich. She has scores of Bill Huntington’s books on war/peace issues and thought I’d know how to dispose of them. I didn’t. . . . Supper with Mother at Kendal. Our Croatian friend, Zdenka Tot, has begun to work there as a waitress.

Saturday, March 1, 1997

Cambridge

To Cambridge by bus. Saw Büchner’s Woyzeck at the A.R.T. with Thomas Derrah superb in the title role and Will LeBow diabolical as the sadistic doctor. An amazing play written by this 22-year-old genius after he did Danton’s Death (which Jim Clancy produced as his début at Dartmouth). Episodic and highly poetic, but also “guttural,” done most imaginatively via stage business, music, song, stark contrasts. Yet it all hangs together in a postmodern sort of way. To the Charles Hotel afterwards for tea. Saw Mrs. Emlen there and also Georganna’s daughter, just about to go upstairs for the psychoanalytic graduation where Georganna will be receiving the posthumous degree. I learned that Dick decided after all not to come. . . . Finally read Holly Parker’s essay on Kazantzakis’s Odysseas and Joyce’s Bloom, which I think is now good enough to publish in the special Kazantzakis issue of JMGS I hope to put together in 1998. Several people I spoke to in Thessaloniki expect to contribute as well. . . . To Meg’s house for supper with her, Dia Philippides, and Wim Bakker, and Dia’s mother, in her 90s. Meg had been drinking; could smell the whisky on her breath. But she was nevertheless in control, and everything went well. Lovely dinner: roast lamb with all the trimmings. Wim and Dia in good form. Dia’s mother a remarkable, aristocratic woman but now frail, with severe hearing loss. “Don’t get old,” she kept telling us. Meg has sold her house. Starting next year she’ll be only half time, and in three years she’ll finish. . . . I spoke to Wim about the Dutch in Indonesia. “Money, money, and only money,” was his verdict.

Sunday, March 2, 1997

Cambridge

Cambridge Meeting, every seat taken. Someone ministered about music, wishing that Friends had music. And I ministered afterwards about our experience of the power of music in the Moravian Church: how their music equals our silence and visa versa. Nice to see Paul Mangelsdorf, Andy Towl, Warren, Kesaya, and several people who came up afterwards, including a young woman who said she had gone to Meeting while she was a Dartmouth student and now was a steady attender. . . . Brunch in the Charles Hotel, hardly in keeping with Quaker simplicity, I fear. Then to the A.R.T. again to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a multimedia parody of the Grand Guignol starring Alvin Epstein as a very suave Dr. Caligari. Lots of “stagecraft,” and some interesting (and uninteresting) music. But overall disappointing because the script was so pedestrian. If only it had been in rhymed iambic pentameters as good as those in Love’s Labour’s Lost! . . . Filitsa and Otmar were in the theater, so Chrysanthi got a lift home with them instead of taking the bus. I caught an earlier plane to Philadelphia and drove to Princeton in an Avis car: a Buick Century. Arrived 9:00 p.m. in the lovely room 36 of Palmer House.

Wednesday, March 5, 1997

Princeton

Heard Nancy Ševčenko give a seminar on a single illustration in a Byzantine manuscript, showing the donor with a halo, just as big as the Παναγιά, contrariwise to the Byzantine convention of the donor being represented (unless an emperor) as infinitely small compared to the donee (Christ or Virgin). A mystery, but no evidence to explain it. . . . Work with Dimitri and Mache is going well. We’re correcting the grammar for Lesson 10, which I’m doing piece by piece, and have now begun to go over Lesson 1 again, finding many changes still necessary. The designer came, but with problems—couldn’t print from my fonts. But we found the “printer font” in my extensions folder, so he should be able to print now.

Thursday, March 6, 1997

Princeton–Pendle Hill

Nice long lunch with Mache, who is a sensible girl. Her mother’s family comes from Καλαμπάκα, below the Meteora monasteries, with which, she said, they never had any contact. . . . Drove to Pendle Hill. Good practice with Dan; he had learned numbers 1 to 6 of the Brahms waltzes much better than before. Talked over tea until 11:30 p.m., about Pendle Hill’s obsession with the “nature of community.” We both feel that it’s best discovered when one isn’t trying.

Friday, March 7, 1997

Pendle Hill

Spent the whole day in front of my computer, entering the changes in Lesson 1. Eye strain. Then Executive Committee. We laid down the Issues Program for lack of funds (but Dan is hoping to see Chuck Fager leave). We hope to revive it in some fashion eventually.

Saturday, March 8, 1997

Pendle Hill–New York City–Pendle Hill

Was planning to practice with Dan and then go to a movie and have supper together, but his mother fell ill and he had to leave for Medford Leas. So I took the train to New York to visit Daphne, Greg, and Christina, who has begun to crawl. She also turns off light switches. Daphne and Greg have decided to stay in Manhattan and are looking at condominiums there rather than houses in the suburbs. Very wise. . . . Played a bit with Dan on my return. I think that we should attempt more of the Brahms waltzes and maybe forget the three marches.

Sunday, March 9, 1997

Went to Middletown Meeting, where Shirley Dodson worships. Old Meeting House with a century-old cemetery. Facing bench. Mr. Stratton from the Kendal board greeted me with a smile; he’d been very distant at Kendal meetings. . . . Worked on Demotic Greek 1 for a few hours, then drove to Kendal at Longwood to play Mendelssohn, Fauré, and Bruch with Oliver Rodgers, followed by supper there. Immediately saw Mary Morrison, Janet Shepherd, Yuki Brinton, Bob and Mary Metz.

Monday, March 10, 1997

Pendle Hill

Full-day board retreat at Brinton House. Morning spent on the mission statement. I drafted one attempt. Small groups came up with two others. Now Shirley and I are meant to collate them and emerge with something satisfactory. Afternoon spent on five-year plan and priorities. I stressed: (a) a theology for the 21st century, (b) a Quaker ministry to capitalism. . . . Long wait at the airport. Home finally at 11:30 p.m.

Wednesday, March 12, 1997

Hanover

PSA test. Here’s hoping! Supper with Dick Williamson, then flute and piano. Then he stayed until 10:30. Since Georganna died his whole personality has changed, for the better. He is now open and conversational.

Thursday, March 13, 1997

Finally! Completed Redmont’s essay on Quaker moderation. Fifty copies made at my expense. I’ll now advertise in Friends Journal.

Friday, March 14, 1997

Met Dana Burch. He gave me a xerox of George Soros’s article on capitalism: brilliant, attacking its major premise that individual self-interest is somehow best for the collective good. Soros demolishes this view. He stresses that all assertions of truth, including this one, are dangerous, the only “infallible” truth being that we are all fallible! The article encourages me to believe that we truly can have a Quaker testimony on capitalism. Must send a copy to Dan Seeger, and to Greg. . . . Daphne telephoned, very excited, to say that the British government has granted Christina citizenship. She’ll be able to work in any of the EU countries. . . . Chrysanthi is babysitting in Potomac while Deanna is touring with the National Symphony. She’s doing well, but Sophia won’t let herself be changed by Chrysanthi so far.

Saturday, March 15, 1997

Retreat at Hanover Meeting. I stayed for the morning session, which was well done. We were asked to write down what events or people in our lives enhanced our spirituality. I thought of the farm first, because it shows me that I am a minor part of a huge continuum into which I must fit . . . temporarily. I thought of Douglas Steere and Dave Ritchie and Donald Harrington as persons. And of books, especially Ulysses, Paradise Lost, Zorba, and Beckett. To the question “Where are you going spiritually?” I answered: toward aging and death, accepting freely what necessity demands; toward dematerialization and divestment; toward leaving a memory behind of good cheer; toward serenity (one hopes); toward eternity, which calls us home unto itself.

Sunday, March 16, 1997

Ministered in Meeting about Soros’s article. Lunch at Dee and Ro’s with “the gang”: Nodas, Audrey, Sydney, Soderbergs. Cherry pie. . . . Supper with Mother at Kendal with Lucile Smith: very lively. All recognize that Beveridge Webster is weakening. . . . Mary Fitzgerald telephoned from North Creek. Long conversation about the new library there, our grandchildren, Alec’s new girlfriend.

Thursday, March 20, 1997

To Kendal with Ned Perrin. Gave him the tour. He’s going to put in his $1000. How nice if he decides to come! . . . Booked for two lectures in October in England, at King’s and at Brum. Working on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης for Brum.

Friday, March 21, 1997

To Gerber for my annual exam. Blood pressure better than ever. 6 to 10 pounds overweight. PSA zero!! Lafayette and Mayme had me to supper with Kate Read and her husband. A Japanese banquet.

Sunday, March 23, 1997

Yale Club

To NYC by train yesterday, comfortably in custom class, working well with the computer on Demotic Greek and Kapetan Mihalis. To Daphne and Greg’s for supper: Chinese takeout. I walked all the way from the Yale Club. Christina already asleep. Her parents hadn’t slept for three nights with the child teething. They’re trying to secure a co-op apartment nearby, but three other families have put in competitive bids. . . . To the Met this morning to see the Byzantine exhibit, which I found extraordinarily moving because it seemed to show an entire society dedicated to the gentleness of Christ. (But surely the truth was more complicated and diverse.) Marvelous mosaics, enamels, gold work, coins, glass, plates—i.e., both the sacred and the secular civilizations. In addition, on this day there was a festival for children conducted by the museum’s education department: demonstration of Greek dances, instruction in mosaic, with the children given tesserae and glue; practice in Byzantine chant, and two youngsters crowned as emperor and empress; an icon painter at work; a wood carver at work. And then when I left I found Fifth Avenue roped off for the Greek Independence Day parade, for later. . . . Walked to Carnegie Hall for the National Symphony concert conducted by Slatkin. Deanna very much in evidence in the second violin section. All-American program: Ives’ “Unanswered Question” and “Central Park in the Dark.” Not much fun to listen to, yet noteworthy for having been composed in 1908 in a postmodern style, with different bands coexisting in cacophony. Next: Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade” with Shlomo Mintz as violin soloist. Mediocre uninteresting music performed without much aplomb. I noticed that Deanna didn’t applaud Mintz at the end. Saw Daphne and Greg in the intermission; they were in the balcony—Greg’s first visit to Carnegie Hall. The second half was why we all came (full house, almost): Corigliano’s First Symphony, dedicated to friends who had died from AIDS. It begins with all the strings “wailing” and lamenting: union A on open strings. This and other effects brought tears to one’s eyes. Huge fortissimos followed by sudden pianissimos. The orchestra splendid; much expanded percussion section; harp, two pianos (one offstage). A particularly moving effect was the offstage piano playing Albéniz’s “Tango,” a favorite of the pianist friend who died. I was at full attention from start to finish (plus at full nose bleed), and much appreciative of Slatkin’s bravery in programming this sort of concert. At the end Corigliano himself came out for bows amid many bravos. . . . Afterwards, backstage to find Deanna, but she had already escaped, and I found her, Leander, and Sophia down the street in the Meridien Hotel. Deanna very apprehensive that the baby would not remember her after her two-week absence. . . . Then found Chrysanthi at the Yale Club, after her two weeks’ babysitting in Potomac. We had a splendid dinner at Café Un-Deux-Trois (44th Street) and then visited Daphne and Greg. A full day.

Monday, March 24, 1997

To Daphne’s for lunch with Leander, Deanna, Sophia. Then James McBride came with his daughter Azure and son Jordan, ages 4 and 3. He’s finally making money. Income of $21,000 last year, and he even has a cleaning lady! The book on his mother is on the bestseller list, and he has a $25,000 advance to ghostwrite the autobiography of a famous jazz musician. . . . I forgot to mention, à propos of artistic success, that Leander played at Kennedy Center on Saturday night, Schubert lieder, and was very pleased despite the singer’s decision to change the entire program three days before the concert. An earlier recital with a flutist at Strathmore Hall was much less satisfying, since the flutist couldn’t count. His next is at Crosslands with Deanna: Kreutzer Sonata. How I wish I could go! . . . Walked with Leander, Daphne, and families to West 72 to see the apartment house where Bernstein used to live, Leander enjoying his old haunts when he was at Manhattan School and used to come down for “the best hamburger” in New York and a papaya milkshake and a 50-cent hot dog. Supper at the Yale Club with Chrysanthi, then to visit Leander at the hotel; he came down and we went for dessert and coffee nearby and he showed us an amazing 24-hour Korean food mart with gourmet dishes all for take-out.

Tuesday, March 25, 1997

Leander’s 41st birthday, and their anniversary is tomorrow. Chrysanthi and I walked up Madison Avenue and went to the fascinating Sony education exhibit in the Telephone Building on 56th: robots, demos of ultrasound, endoscopy, the evolution of communication technology. Filled with children, who have many advantages living in NYC. Back to Yale Club for a leisurely lunch with Daphne, who says that she never eats a decent meal any more. She’s hoping that they’ll manage to secure an apartment in the next week or so. I’m embarrassed to ask how much it costs. They’re paying $4000 a month rent now. . . . Goodbyes until Friday, when they’ll all drive to Hanover. Lucky seat in AMTRAK again, with a wall plug for the computer. All the comforts of home.

April 1, 1997

The Hale-Bopp comet was beautiful again tonight: a huge light in the sky, with its tail extending backwards and out.

April 2, 1997

Saw Dr. Heaney. Everything fine except, of course, potency. They showed me videos of three “remedies”: a vacuum pump, a suppository inserted into the urethra, and injections into the side of the penis. Repugnant, all of them. Spoke later with Bob McGrath on the street, who says there’s now a potency pill, not yet approved. But he’s managed to get some, and assures me that they work. I’m skeptical. The saints went through all sorts of deprivations in order to escape libido. Perhaps I should consider this situation as escape, too. . . . Good meeting with John Rassias planning our April 29 retreat at Hellenic College.

April 3, 1997

To Quechee with Chrysanthi to buy a present at Simon Pearce’s for Kathy Harp, the English Department secretary who is leaving after ten years. We treated ourselves to a lovely lunch overlooking the waterfall. . . . In the evening, War/Peace Seminar given by a Palestinian Dartmouth alumnus now working for a peace organization. He painted the Israelis as horrible barbarians using torture, intimidation, etc. against the Palestinians. Strange how the media obscure this side of the story.

April 4, 1997

Met with Lynda Boose, Dave Montgomery, and John Lamperti to discuss the future of War/Peace Studies. Lynda, quite rightly, wants to reform the committee, adding younger members and activists. John has been very energetic as seminar chair this year, and Lynda’s course in Vietnam has been a great success. So . . . we seem to be surviving. . . . Supper at Audrey’s with Jim Atkinson and his new wife. He is still working on Machiavelli, and I’m still working on Kazantzakis!

April 6, 1997

Dinner at Kendal with Mother and Polly Bunting-Smith, former president of Radcliffe. She’s all excited about a “posh party” next week for “Nate” Pusey’s 90th birthday. I interested her in Ken Boulding’s sonnets and will send her a copy.

April 7, 1997

Christian Wolff telephoned, very distressed that his son Tico was only wait-listed at Haverford, and hoping that I would write a letter. I interviewed him, and wrote to Haverford’s director of admissions that they were shooting themselves in the foot to prevent a family like the Wolffs becoming part of the Haverford community. We’ll see what happens.

April 8, 1997

Holiday Inn, Brookline

Chrysanthi wants to reinstate herself as a Greek citizen and get a Greek passport, only so that Alec can also get one. He’s been told in Jakarta that whoever has a Greek mother is a Greek. So we telephoned the consulate in Boston and were told that they would issue one and we should come. So we drove to Boston the previous day, installed ourselves pleasantly in the Holiday Inn in Brookline, had a delicious meal in a Thai restaurant, and went to see West Side Story, which Chrysanthi says we saw on Broadway in the late 1950s. A good show, good cast, marvelous Jerome Robbins choreography, the song in Act 2 addressed to the policeman and justifying the gang’s behavior because of parental deprivation is scintillating; the whole thing skirts Romeo and Juliet interestingly, without mimicking it.

April 9, 1997

Boston

We arrived at the consulate at its opening hour, 9:00 a.m., but of course it wasn’t open. Greek time! The secretaries showed up at 9:15. We filled out the application in a waiting room filled with incessantly chattering Greeks, φαφλουτάδες, as Chrysanthi said. One woman came in exclaiming Μπούρσι! (“It’s cold” in Turkish.) To make a 2½ hour story short, in the end they refused to issue the passport, saying that we needed a Greek ταυτότητα or equivalent obtainable in Thessaloniki. I’ll write to our lawyer relatives, Andreas and Dimitra Giannakos, to see what to do next. Alec’s desire is to be able to work without question in EU countries, and also to function better in places (e.g., China) where an American passport is a detriment.

April 11, 1997

Hanover

Nicole Laundy at Kiewit got my new computer to work, finally, and showed me how to access and print the pictures that Rix Jennings is sending electronically. Wonderful! And Chrysanthi and I saw the worldwide web page for the North Jakarta International School, with a nice picture of Alec.

April 12, 1997

Packed up more books in the office. This is now becoming somewhat demoralizing, added to Don Sheehan’s abuses of my hospitality—he’s got his wife in there, dog, and son, besides himself. I packed up favorite reference materials: OED, foreign language dictionaries, Oxford Companion to English Literature, Dictionary of Slang, etc. Will I now stop functioning as a scholar? Must find a way to shelve some of these books again. . . . Supper at Kendal with Mother and Joan Williams, the Unitarian minister. She turns out to be a great fan of Kazantzakis, was telling me all about Saviors of God and Report to Greco before Chrysanthi let out the secret of my involvement. . . . Saw Wayne Broehl on the way out. He has been in his Kendal apartment for three weeks and is very pleased. . . . Then to Rassiases to hear about John’s meeting in New York with Archbishop Spyridon regarding the commission. It went well. John said, “No clergy on the commission, please,” and the Archbishop replied, “Good idea!” Amazing. Also, John told him of the Church’s opposition to ας τις σαχλαμάρες in our first edition, and Spyridon laughed and said how ridiculous this was. So, we’re into a new era, it seems. He knew already about our scheduled appearance at Hellenic College on April 29. Obviously we need to be a success there. His dream is for Greek Americans to know something about Greek culture, besides the language. Amen! What’s ticklish for us, obviously, is our authorship of Demotic Greek 1 and Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος—ideal, we think, for the program. But we can’t “sell” our books in our capacity as consultants/commission members.

Sunday, April 13, 1997

Wilmington

To Wilmington. Hotel DuPont, the best hotel I’ve ever experienced. Supper with Tom Clark, doing well after by-pass and stroke. Delivered my “Deree” lecture on Kazantzakis. Mary Hoxie Jones came, and Don Pease’s father, and Yuki Brinton. Lots of good questions.

Tuesday, April 15, 1997

Fleet Bank Trust Department with Mother and Chrysanthi to meet the new fund manager. The trust is over $1 million. Lunch with Tom Corindia at the Inn. He is elated because the hospital was given good grades by the government investigator whereas other hospitals have been fined millions. To an auditing firm to see Marie McGee, with Bruce Koloseike, our Meeting’s treasurer, I as president of the trustees. We want the Meeting audited for the first time.

Wednesday, April 16, 1997

Kendal Board via conference call. The news: Steve has resigned in order to accept the C.O.O. position at Presbyterian Homes in North Carolina. Of course he had to say Yes, bringing him back to Greensboro as head of a multi-facility organization. But so soon! We had hoped to keep him for five years. Now he’ll leave on July 15, one and a half years after starting here. . . . In the afternoon, met with John Hennessey and Margery Walker. Margery has already selected a new search committee. . . . Said warm goodbye to Ann Wainwright, who is moving south to be with a child. Kendal will miss her.

Thursday, April 17, 1997

To Pendle Hill

With Chrysanthi via AMTRAK to Philadelphia. Arrived at Pendle Hill at 8:30 p.m. Went to Dan’s to practice. We’re doing only the Brahms now. It’s getting better.

Friday, April 18, 1997

Pendle Hill

Meetings from 9:15 a.m. until 5:45 p.m. with hardly a break. First Cadbury Scholarship: awarded to my first choice. Ken Carroll more pliable than previously. Then Pubs: accepted two manuscripts but rejected one by George Peck (as Rebecca confided to me before the meeting). Then Books. After supper, celebration with the full board for Kashatus’s book on Penn’s view of education, with the author dressed as Penn and doing an impersonation; very impressive. . . . Then more piano with Dan.

Saturday, April 19, 1997

Pendle Hill

Larry Ingle is here. We talked at length. He would be a good one for the board. Dorothy Steere ministered at Meeting about waiting, and then a gathered meeting followed. I was thinking about the Greek word περιμένω, which means both “to wait” and “to expect.” In the board meeting, I introduced the new mission statement along with Shirley Dodson. We then broke into small groups that were very useful. I fear we’ll need to tinker some more with the mission statement. Nice meeting with Lloyd Lewis over supper. He is developing a community in Tucson, Arizona, that is linked to the university. We lamented together the loss of Quaker identity at Kendal at Hanover.

Sunday, April 20, 1997

Pendle Hill

Off to the Barnes Collection in the morning with a group of Pendle Hillers. What a smorgasbord! El Grecos next to Cézannes, Tintorettos, etc. Wonderful Cézannes, Matisses, Renoirs. . . . Then to Longwood Gardens. Tulips, orchids, an organ concert (bad music). . . . Later, drove to Princeton.

Monday, April 21, 1997

Princeton

Worked with Dimitri, Mache, and Chrysanthi on lessons 8, 9, and 10. Lunch with Mache, who is getting married in August. Supper with John C. Baker in Hightstown, at the Meadow Lakes retirement community. He is 101, in good shape mentally and physically, although I thought his legs were going to cave in at one moment. Still obsessed with Jean Monnet, his quintessential hero. Reading widely—e.g., the new biography of Lincoln. I’d been apprehensive, but actually the encounter was pleasant. We talked from 5:30 until 8:00, had a tour, ate supper. All very “natural.”

Tuesday, April 22, 1997

Supper at Mike and Mary Keeley’s, with Dimitri and Evi. Mike wants me to explore reprinting some of my books. Gave good advice regarding the Rassias consortium—e.g., don’t ask Brademas! Evi is interesting. From a wealthy Greek industrialist family in Egypt; knew the Cavafys, etc.; educated in Switzerland. She’s a psychoanalyst who maintains practices in Athens, New York, and Princeton.

Wednesday, April 23, 1997

Met with Alivizatos, who wants a special issue of JMGS on constitutional law. . . . Talk in the afternoon by Vassilis Lambropoulos. Excellent. As I told him afterward, he was “at his best.” He was very complimentary regarding my work, as was Stathis Gourgouris, who has done wonderful translations of songs by Yannis Patilis. Nice to see Bob Fagles and Lynn. Relaxed dinner afterwards. They’ve established a very cozy atmosphere.

Sunday, April 27, 1997

Lunch with Mother, very genial. I convened the annual meeting of the Incorporated Trustees of the Meeting. Dick Brokaw wants to give us $10,000 in memory of Channy. . . . Spring weather. I put on the screen doors; put the snow scraper away for the year. . . . To Rassiases for dinner. Greek Easter. Lamb.

Tuesday, April 29, 1997

Boston

To Hellenic College in Brookline with John Rassias, by car. Planned our strategy on the way down and also caught up on the Demotic Greek 1 revision. Greeted by the president, Father Calivas, and by Eva, George, and Father John Chryssavgis, who has come from Australia and is close to Stylianos. Also the dean who heard me lecture last year at Boston College. In the morning, John did his usual talk and demonstration, teaching them “forward,” “back,” “turn” in Chinese. Lots of laughs and fun. After lunch, he showed the video of Chinese learning the same words in Greek. Then I facilitated a “retreat” on prerequisites for effective teaching. They broke into groups of four, then came back into plenary session and each group reported. Then I MC’d a general discussion. All went well. . . . John then improvised with more demonstrations (unplanned) almost ruining the rest of our plans. But I salvaged an abbreviated form of “Should Greek be preserved?” The dean was eloquent about the Church’s very serious dilemma in this regard. . . . All in all, people seemed pleased. We had a full dinner, and then left. And they paid us twice what I had asked, $500 each instead of $250! Back at 9:30 p.m., very tired.

Wednesday, April 30, 1997

Arranged for my retirement insurance. Supper with Dick at Mrs. Ou’s. Music: Bach, Mozart.

Thursday, May 1, 1997

I lectured to ILEAD at Kendal on late treatments of the Odyssey theme, especially Joyce’s and Kazantzakis’s. Full house. I emphasized Joyce, of course, but spoke about the centripetal and centrifugal Odysseus, the classical and romantic mentalities. And read Cavafy’s Ιθάκη. Afterwards, formal dinner at the Norwich Inn, hosted by John Lincoln, who is brave in trying to act normal despite the speech impediment caused by two strokes (he introduced me at Kendal, and gave a toast at the dinner). Others: Campions, Armstrongs, Mother, Chris Lincoln and wife (whom he met at the American Farm School, so I suppose I am responsible for their marriage, since I sent him there). . . . Had lunch earlier at Kendal with Mother and Alice, visiting here for a day. . . . Very happy about British election results. Watched BBC until 2:00 a.m.

Friday, May 2, 1997

Did my annual class at Thayer School, reading poetry about technology. Really, the anti-technology poets are unfair; they ought to sing the marvels of science and technology, not just the ugliness. . . . Supper at Hanover Inn with Ned. The Campions had urged me to contact him because he is back in depression, so much so that he dropped his class in mid-stream, just couldn’t continue. But he was in a good mood tonight: talkative and lively. . . . Returned to find a message from Caroline De Cesare that she can’t find Ellen. . . . I contacted state police.

Saturday, May 3, 1997

Ellen is still missing, it seems. I drove to Tunbridge and found the house locked, all the curtains drawn. Went to neighbors, hillbillies, one very drunk at 2:00 p.m., and abusive, but others were more civil. They didn’t even know who Ellen and Don were. . . . Returned to find a message from Caroline that she had finally reached Ellen. The trouble had been only the telephone. Hit by lightning. It seemed to ring when you called but didn’t sound in the house. Thus she concluded that Ellen wasn’t home to answer. Everything’s OK. . . . At 10:30 p.m., picked Chrysanthi up from White River. She’d been at Daphne’s since last Thursday. Christina is now walking (if she holds on to a chair). Daphne signed the papers for the apartment on 84th Street. Now they still need to get a mortgage and be accepted by the co-op committee.

Sunday, May 4, 1997

Elise at Meeting spoke movingly of her new life without Kenneth, and of slowing down at age 77.

Monday, May 5, 1997

Supper with Beth Landsman at Kendal and Barbara Rice, to try to set up a Webster fund for continuing concerts at Kendal. I’m to draft the letter of purpose. The point is to get Bev to play less frequently and to shift his energies to welcoming and coaching others. He is failing as a pianist, alas. Very tricky business, but we’re hoping it will work.

May 9, 1997

Amherst

Spent the day with Chrysanthi examining students of Greek language, as usual, and saw the CD-Rom prepared by Stavros Siokos. Possibly we’ll use it as part of our instructional package. Afterwards, visited George and Ellen Goodwin. George’s first words as I entered: “Well, you failed and I failed in one thing, to get rid of Jerry Bidlack!” Yes. Their children, interestingly, are not doing “well” by the world’s standards: Will is a carpenter (but a good one, so what’s wrong with that?); three are unmarried. Strange. Such terrific parents. . . . Then to Atkins’ Farms for a luscious cherry pie.

Tuesday, May 13, 1997

Scott Brown and others discussing the future of mediation at Dartmouth. The main problem seems to be the paucity of actual cases to mediate. Afterwards, stopped to see Jan Tarjan, who unburdened herself to me: that Scott thinks everything she’s doing is wrong. Low morale. He insists that Tucker is a failure (she says) because it doesn’t reach “hard core” students. I was dismayed, since I was so involved in bringing Scott and since I’ve always felt so close to Jan. What a shame! I’ll try to speak to Peter Gilbert à propos (Scott’s supervisor). . . . Town Meeting. We voted against a zoning variance that would allow another CCRC in Hanover.

Wednesday, May 14, 1997

To Washington

Flew to National Airport. Leander met me and we had a leisurely supper together. He’s full of his daughter, his fatherhood. How nice! Warm greeting from Deanna. She has a very bad relationship with her own father and stepmother, so it’s doubly important that Chrysanthi and I fill those roles for her or try to.

Thursday, May 15, 1997

Washington

Lectured for Jim Miller at the State Department. Went well. One of the group will be going to Thessaloniki in September to replace David Schuler, and another, who was absent today, to replace Mimi Hughes. Miller wants me back next year, he says. Went with him on the State Department bus to the Metro to get to the National Gallery, but arrived at 5:00 p.m. just as it was closing. Main impression of Washington, coming from New Hampshire: how many people there are! Supper at home. Deanna made shrimp risotto, her specialty. First time I’ve ever experienced Deanna cooking. Sophia crawled (forwards): a milestone. Then we all went to Starbuck’s for coffee and to an ice cream parlor for a sundae. Fun. Talked to Leander about his hearing. He actually does hear in the left ear, but not high tones. And the tinnitus is only minimally annoying, he says. So, could be worse. . . . I had a good lesson afterwards on the Brahms waltzes.

Friday, May 16, 1997

Pendle Hill

To Pendle Hill via Metroliner and Avis car. At Publications Committee the essay on George Fox’s concept of light, one that I felt so drawn to owing to my own interest in the subject, was trashed by Larry Ingle as partisan (Bensonite) and full of errors, etc. We debated at length and finally decided to try to get it back in revised form with some of the partisanship muted and the errors removed. If we publish it, then I could write a companion piece tracing the meaning of light before Fox. Don Sheehan, à propos, gave me Grosseteste’s treatise on light to read, and this refers to passages in St. Basil, etc. It’s a broad subject. Grosseteste makes it clear that light equals a unified principle of creativity before the creation of sun and moon, the physical manifestations of light, and is therefore easily equated (as in Fox) with the eternal Christ before the historical Christ. I might bring in the material I use in my lecture on Beckett’s Unnamable: the pre-reflexive cogito, as an analogy. . . . Practiced with Dan after the ritual ice cream following the Board meeting. He still doesn’t know the notes. But he promises (still) that he’ll learn them.

Sunday, May 18, 1997

New York City

Drove to Princeton. Left my valise at Mrs. Hurley’s. New Jersey Transit to New York. Christina now rises effortlessly to upright position without holding onto anything, and walks. Also pushes her cart with great glee. Also says “Boom” (more or less) when she falls down. Daphne, Greg, Christina, and I walked across Central Park to 84th and Lexington to see the building where they bought a co-op. Very nice street. Then back to a street fair on Columbus Avenue. Daphne is in touch again with Duncan Baird publishers and may begin part-time work for them. This is fine.

I’m reading Jay Parini’s new novel, Benjamin’s Passage, about Walter Benjamin’s flight from the Nazis across the Pyrenees to Spain and his death there. Quite gripping. I don’t want it to end. The only problem is the book’s failure to convince me that Benjamin ever wrote anything especially worthwhile.

Wednesday, May 21, 1997

Princeton

Working well with Dimitri and Mache. We’re revising lessons 2, 3, 4, and 5, which will need to be sent out to various schools in August. And I spent many hours going through the large collection of Mitropoulos cartoons and xeroxing those that we might use.

Thursday, May 22, 1997

Princeton–Hanover

Mache took me to lunch with a Cypriot who admires my work and loves Kazantzakis, whom he says is very much read in Cyprus because of his revolutionary ardor. . . . Home at 7:30 p.m. Out to Jesse’s with Chrysanthi for a leisurely supper catching up on our several adventures.

Saturday, May 24, 1997

Cambridge

Splendid performance at the A.R.T. of Shaw’s Man and Superman, with appropriate music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Stirring. Jeremy Geidt at this best as Mendoza and the Devil. Kristin Flanders as a fiery Ann/Ana. Jack Willis perfectly cast as Hector Malone, Sr. Shaw’s mixture of the comic and the serious was most effective. But what really is memorable is the play’s abiding relevance to contemporary problems even now, almost a century after its composition. How nice to be exposed to good theater.

Sunday, May 25, 1997

To the farm. The house is in good shape, but full of dead flies, as usual. Alec’s is full of shavings caused by ants in the ceiling; otherwise clean. I assembled our new Mantis tiller and used it in the garden. It dealt heroically with our tangle of roots, and needed to be untangled itself repeatedly. But in the end it did its job admirably. . . . Supper with Fran and Irv. Lots of description of their trip to South Africa and Victoria Falls.

Monday, May 26, 1997

I tried to start the John Deere but couldn’t. Obviously the battery was at fault. It wouldn’t take the charge. . . . Hummingbird in the barn. Red fox last night at the Shapiros’. . . . Home. Call from BBC saying that the Church in Greece is trying to have all of Kazantzakis’s texts removed from schools because of his “atheism.” Could I comment? But it was too late. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

Tuesday, May 27, 1997

Supper with the Rassiases. I helped John with the letter he wrote explaining the commission. He asked me to invite John Iatrides to serve. I called John, who said he’d be provocative because of his Protestantism. But he’ll speak to Van Coufoudakis.

Wednesday, May 28, 1997

Elliotts, Laasperes, and Yiayia, and Claire Munck for supper for my birthday. Chrysanthi gave me a hummingbird feeder. Sent off final decisions for my pension.

Thursday, May 29, 1997

Department dinner for Chauncey Loomis and me: completing the circle, as he said. Ned Perrin spoke about me, reading testimonials (from my department file) by Bob Horton, Douglas Steere, and Bill Tindall. People were gracious, more than expected. I gave a talk that seemed to be well received, as follows:

FISH DINNER TALK, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

May 29, 1997

Subjects:

1. Accidental factors in a career.

2. Growth.

3. Gratitude.

4. Does any of it matter?

ACCIDENTAL FACTORS

Initial hiring

Arthur Jensen, Marjorie Nicholson

eat with fork and spoon

John Finch’s telephone call for “Dr. Bien”

Father - Doctor - visited Thursday – chauffeur

Chrysanthi: “He doesn’t live here. But his chauffeur brings him every Thursday.”

Kazantzakis

At Columbia, 1956: Greek Passion given by a friend while I was reading Aldous Huxley, etc.

In Greece, 1957: a shelf of untranslated novels, etc. The Last Temptation.

In England, 1958: George Hill, K’s publisher, instructed by Mrs. Kaz. to reject translations not made directly from Greek. Whereupon, I submitted a chapter of The Last Temptation—precisely at the right time.

[Digression: “getting stuck in Kazantzakis”]

Kendal

The accident of serving on a Philadelphia board of trustees with Lloyd Lewis, CEO of the Kendal Corporation. He wanted to clone Kendal in New England. I wanted a retirement home for my parents. The result: Kendal at Hanover.

GROWTH

George Bernard Shaw in “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” in Man and Superman: “A fool’s brain digests . . . art into pedantry. Hence university education.”

Our job: to avoid becoming pedants. How: by growing, refusing to get stuck in a given approach.

My training at Columbia: New criticism—Brooks & Warren.

So: textual analysis, supposedly as a contemporary would have understood the text. For Milton: Basil Willey’s The Seventeenth-Century Background.

That’s fine: but nothing is fine if it becomes a fetish.

Growth (or at least variety) came, sometimes because of some happy accidents:

Team-teaching English 59 with Brenda Silver (too bad that team-teaching is now so limited). Feminist perspective. Ideological criticism.

Invitation by Chauncey to lecture on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury at a time when, owing to Kazantzakis, I was interested in Kierkegaard. Religion and lit.: Most recent book, in collaboration with a theologian.

Humanities 1-2 and English 17 (survey course): the importance of intertextuality both within a culture and across cultures.

Comparative Literature: Joyce-Proust-Mann-Kafka. Modernism in Europe in relation to WWI.

The need to fit the whole of Ulysses into a course: reduction of survey course to three authors, with a new approach: the examination of an author’s total career rather than just a single work.

And, last but not at all least:

Composition—especially English 2-3 and the Composition Center, using techniques usually confined to the instruction of foreign languages.

Why might this potpourri of involvements and approaches help to keep one from becoming a pedant? The dictionary defines a pedant as “One who exhibits one’s learning or scholarship ostentatiously.”

By changing,

by growing,

by experimenting,

by climbing out sometimes precariously on thin branches—by, in effect, being a bit of an amateur (a “lover” as well as a non-professional),

one avoids becoming totally fixed in a given approach, and therefore is less likely to have the self-assurance that can lead so easily to pedantry.

This leads to my third subject:

GRATITUDE

I’m grateful to a department that allowed—and I hope will continue to allow—eccentric careers like mine, like Chauncey’s, like Ned’s.

In my case, it meant honoring translation in the tenure decision, something that is rarely done.

It meant accepting a colleague whose research and other scholarly activity (societies, periodicals, symposia) came to be almost exclusively in Greek literature and culture, although sometimes with a comparative approach that involved British literature.

It meant lending me out, without excessive grumbling, to teach each and every year in Comparative Literature, and often enough in Classics.

I’m also grateful to a department that has always refused to separate composition off from literary study.

To me—and I hope to many of you—composition (although always a chore in part) has been a great challenge, and actually a sort of (masochistic) pleasure. If nothing else, the need to teach composition probably engenders humility in us and therefore fights against the arrogance that leads to pedantry.

And I’m grateful to a department that has maintained a mentoring system that at times—perhaps often—is truly what it is meant to be, and not just a system of policing or evaluating for promotion or tenure. In my case, since Harry Schultz was my mentor, the system worked perfectly.

Finally:

DOES ANY OF IT REALLY MATTER?

It’s well and good to talk about a career, and growth, and gratitude. But when all is said and done, does what we do make any difference? We place ourselves ostentatiously in a position to be judged by students, by colleagues, by reviewers. Why? Certainly not for the money! Is it for the praise that sometimes comes? Is it for gratification?

I hope not. Praise and gratification are far too fickle. And the more we crave them the less likely are they to arrive.

My own view is that the academic profession needs to be self-justifying—in other words, not deemed worthwhile because of any by-product, effect, or success, certainly not by any measurable, quantifiable by-product, effect, or success. Yes, I do sometimes feel (or hope) that what I do and you do “is not just a random event among billions of other random . . . events that will pass away without a trace, but that it is an integral component or link . . . in a great and mysterious order of Being, an order in which everything has a place.”[1] But perhaps that non-quantifiable, transcendental hope, too, should be resisted. On the other hand, because it’s hard to persevere in a totally meaningless void, I subscribe to the “philosophy of ‘as-if,’” which says that although I may fear that nothing we do really matters, I act as if it did matter. A propos, here’s a short poem by a Greek poet, Yannis Patilis[2]:

Why should I write these poems?

Why not walk to the newspaper stand,

Or gaze at the flowerpots on the window,

Or drink some water?

Why not leave my self

In this chair,

Forgotten

And unjudged?

No, I do not choose to be unjudged. I act as if some of it, at least, does matter. I choose—and I hope that each one of us will choose—to be self-judged.

[1]Vaclav Havel, “The Future of Hope.” Religion & Values in Public Life (Harvard Divinity School), vol. 5, no. 2/3 (Winter/Spring 1997), p. 2.

[2]Translated by Stathis Gourgouris, in Quarterly Review of Literature 36 (1997): 25.

Saturday, May 31, 1997

Supper with Yiayia and Audrey. Yiayia is increasingly confused; everyone has noticed. Also she’s lonely. Betty Conrad asked if she could help. Chrysanthi thinks to ask Ellen Baber to visit periodically. . . . Afterwards, Bev Web played: All four Chopin Ballades! Shaky and tentative in the G-minor (the one I’d played) but then better and better. And he concluded with two études including Opus 10, no. 5, the “Black Key Étude.” What a pleasure to have him play so well. . . . For the Webster Performance Fund we collected $17,000 overnight. I telephoned Bea Tauss in New York to see how to get through to his former pupils at Juilliard.

Saturday, June 1, 1997

Meeting at Kendal. I ministered on the nature of silence: the “Word” before words. Then to Sheldons for brunch. And I asked them to listen to my Brahms waltzes. . . . Then to the office, which now is almost completely empty. (And Study 702 in Baker ridiculously full.) Peter Saccio stopped by and was very friendly, contrary to his stance for the past twenty years or so.

June 6, 1997

To Kinhaven

Dr. Dresser, the endodentist, tells me that I need root canal work on tooth 31. We’ve scheduled it for August. Kit Van Winkle picked me up at the dentist’s and we drove together to Kinhaven, talking all the way. Nice to see people from the first workshop: Bruno Repp, Sue Mullen, and of course Sandy Dennis and Nigel Coxe. Also Mrs. Shin. But Dan Seeger telephoned earlier to say that he cannot come because his mother had another stroke this morning. Too bad, after all our practicing and planning. But, on the other hand, perhaps this is better, since I’ll have Leander as my secondo.

Saturday, June 7, 1997

Kinhaven

Mrs. Shin did a master class, very instructive. And I had coaching from her this morning. Showed me how to lift my wrist, caress the notes, get forte from the arm rather than the fingers. But she refused to allow Nigel to witness her class. Insecurity. She seems perfectly lively and content despite her husband’s recent death. Told me that Northfield–Mt. Herman is still a mess. They accept anyone who can pay (so she says).

Sunday, June 8, 1997

Kinhaven

Coaching from Nigel today. He worked mostly on phrasing, portamentos, getting a different tone quality by flattening the fingers. After supper he played a spectacular concert: fantasias by Haydn, Brahms, Beethoven (Moonlight Sonata). He has absolute control. Played 3rd movement of the Moonlight with Dionysiac frenzy (under perfect—shall we say “Apollonian”?—control).

Monday, June 9, 1997

Kinhaven

Coaching today from Leander. He stresses the harm in over-expressive playing of Brahms. All my ritards, rubati, etc. are gone (unless marked by Brahms himself in the score). Even before this lesson, I could sense the harm done by Kit Van Winkle to her Beethoven sonata in yesterday’s master class with Nigel, a brilliant display of diagnostic ability, pep, and sensibility. Interesting how he often makes his point about Schubert or Beethoven or Brahms by hearing the piano music as though it were string music. “You need vibrato here!”

Tuesday, June 10, 1997

Kinhaven

The big day. Leander and I had a run-through in the hall directly after breakfast. Not good. I made errors in places I’d always gotten right before. Then he suggested one more run-through in the barn, this time strictly at half speed. And lo! The performance went well. No mistakes (although Leander told me afterwards that I started the first waltz before he was properly seated on the bench). I didn’t have any debilitating nervousness; no ice cold hands, although clearly I was “stressed” in some way, perhaps beneficially. In any case, various people came up afterwards (including Nigel) to say how beautifully I’d played the Brahms. Surely Leander’s secondo was part of the success.

Drove back home with Kit to learn from Chrysanthi that Yiayia had had another small stroke two days ago and Chrysanthi had wisely refrained from telephoning. What happened was this: She went out of her apartment dressed only in her bra. Someone saw her, brought her to the clinic. There she was incoherent. They put her to bed. And an hour later she was fine, with full memory of all that had happened, and no impairment. Our question now is whether she should stay in the health center at least until we return in September. We all had supper together (including Leander).

Wednesday, June 11, 1997

Hanover

At breakfast they sat Mother at the same table with two of the zombies that need to be fed. She has resolved now to return to her apartment. Can’t blame her. We’ve had conferences with Donna, the social worker, and the charge nurse, who’ll be on the lookout if something else happens. . . . Alec arrived in time to sup at Kendal with Yiayia and us. Then he helped us with his truck to remove the last two items from my office: computer table and four-drawer file cabinet. That’s it. Finito. Empty.

Thursday, June 12, 1997

Lunch with Steve Scher, just returned from Austria. He’s doing the introduction to Sally Pinkas’s recital of Schubert songs in July. I hope to attend. . . . John Hennessey personally delivered the Kendal search committee’s dossier on the two applicants whom they’ve chosen to be finalists. Miraculously, both are Quakers: Len Cadwallader (whom I recommended) and Warren Witte (whom I had recommended earlier to facilitate our retreat). I was extraordinarily pleased. Either would be splendid. But how to choose between them?

Friday, June 13, 1997

To Terpni

To the farm, finally. The past two summers we didn’t arrive until late July, in 1996 because of my prostate operation, in 1995 because we were at Woodbrooke. How nice to be “on time” in 1997. We unloaded, ate lunch, and got back into the car to drive to Hudson Falls to get a new battery for the John Deere, plus plants, plus $100 worth of food. Unloaded, got back in the car, drove to North Creek to eat in Smith’s Restaurant. Huge turkey dinner, most of which we brought home for tomorrow, together with a blueberry pie.

Saturday, June 14, 1997

Gorgeous weather. Alec arrived early from Hanover. Worked all day: mowing, opening shutters, vacuuming, pruning the lilac, watering the tomatoes. Very tired after supper. But Art Perryman visited unexpectedly and we enjoyed his company for a few hours. His son Arthur graduates on June 28 and will go to Adirondack Community College, saving $$$. Art did practically no painting this year. But they bought yet another piece of land, adjacent to Antler Lake.

Sunday, June 15, 1997

Again, worked outdoors all day. Roger Anderson, Alec’s contractor, came with “Alex,” who runs the backhoe. Plans for septic tank, etc. We also discovered strategies for Alec’s addition, whether to begin the first log directly on the cellar floor or on the lip left in the foundation to be covered with a facing of fieldstone to hide the cinder blocks. I voted for the former. Alec’s new cellar has a poured concrete slab for its floor—the first cellar floor on our property that isn’t dirt. We’re coming up in the world! . . . Shapiros for supper. Very jolly. Irv told no fewer than three separate jokes about violists. They guffawed at the Mitropoulos cartoons I’ve used for Lessons 1 through 4 of the new Demotic Greek 1. . . . John Rassias telephoned from Logan Airport, on his way to Estonia (!) to say that the new DG should be copyrighted jointly by him and me, to protect our use of formatting ideas from his French book. . . . Hour and a half conference call with the Kendal board to decide to bring Witte and Cadwallader to Kendal for visits. Some members feared that neither candidate had run organizations of sufficient scale. I emphasized the “spiritual” qualities we need at Kendal. We decided to bring them.

Monday, June 16, 1997

Another conference call, this time with the Executive/Advisory Committee of Kendal, to decide how to handle the interim between Steve’s departure on July 15 and the arrival of our new CEO, probably not until September or October. After going around in circles, we decided on Brent Edgerton. This will be difficult for Bob Shaugnessy, who is nominally #2. But the staff all seem to like and respect Brent whereas their feelings are different with regard to Bob.

Friday, June 20, 1997

Hanover

Back to Hanover to interview Len Cadwallader at breakfast at the Hanover Inn, together with John Hennessey, Patricia Higgins, Treat Arnold. Nothing spectacular, but OK. How can one tell, really? Probably best by the record, which of course is good.

Monday, June 23, 1997

Riparius

Piano tuner, Z. Skorko, is here: a starved intellectual. Polish immigrant criticizing American anti-intellectualism (“no poetry”) but admitting that when he visits Poland everyone considers him a foreigner. Caught in a no-man’s land between two worlds. He is convinced that English is a language suitable only for business. I told him about Shakespeare, and Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s English, he insists, was vivified by Polish. (French, more likely.) But the piano is in fine shape. I’m struggling to master the three waltzes in Brahms’s opus 39 that I omitted at Kinhaven, especially the one in seven sharps. C# major, very difficult for me, but I’m getting it slowly. Of course it has to be played molto vivace.

Alec’s cabin is rising. He has most of the walls up. As before, he seems incapable of planning the whole thing, but goes one step at a time. Septic and dry well are now installed. Arthur Perryman is helping him, and he had Bill, a fellow teacher in Jakarta, here for a day—a good worker. . . . As for me, I’m struggling with bad English for the next issue of JMGS, but am also attempting to till the garden, which is a maze of spaghetti-like roots that get tangled in my new Mantis tiller. However, one treatment, laboriously, ought to suffice for the future—i.e., next time will be easier. I also broke the Troy Bilt mower because I had failed to adjust and lubricate the knives.

Wednesday, June 25, 1997

Irving telephoned saying a good violinist was playing at Meadowmount and did we want to go. So we went. What a treat! The violinist was James Ehner, a 22-year-old Canadian master. Such tone! Such sensitivity! Such technique! But equally remarkable was the pianist: Eduard Laurel, a Manhattan School grad. We sat in the first row and could see everything clearly. They played Schubert’s Fantasy in C, Bartok’s Sonata no. 2, Sarasate’s Spanish Dance (electrifying), Kreisler pieces (schmaltz), and Wieniawski’s Variations on an Original Theme. Then, as an encore, the violinist sat down at the piano and played a four-hand piece with professional speed and dexterity. What a phenomenon!

Daphne called. Christina is saying “Pip,” “dove,” “boom” when she falls, and “dada.” How does an infant become an Ehner or a Laurel?

Monday, June 30, 1997

Terpni

The Kendal Board met with me and some others connected by telephone. They chose Leonard Cadwallader, director of the Farm and Wilderness Camps, as the next Executive Director of Kendal. Since I nominated him originally, I am very pleased. The runner-up was Warren Witte, also good but clearly a second choice after Len. So, we’ll continue with Quaker leadership.

Leander is here, looking at log home kits for his future home here, which we’ll build in our north field. . . . Alec’s cabin addition has its four walls completed. He is ready now to do the tie beams and then the roof rafters.

Thursday, July 3, 1997

A large deer, a buck with small antlers, about ten feet from me in my office. Very calm. He looked at me, listening with his huge ears, and I looked at him. He stomped his foot the way a horse does, and raised his white tail. Finally he moved off a bit to the center of the field and then turned to look at me again as I stood very stationary next to my table. . . . Visit from Al Zalan and Mary yesterday. We played Bach on flute and organ. Very nice.

Saturday, July 12, 1997

Alec and Monica disappeared for three hours to climb up to the ledge on Alec’s land, and at supper afterwards announced that they are engaged. Obviously Alec had prepared this event, because he had already purchased a ring (thanks to Daphne, who kept mum all the while). It’s a good match. We are pleased. But Chrysanthi says she won’t go to Jakarta for the wedding.

July 15, 1997

Hanover

To Hanover last night. Heard Steve Scher talk about Schubert’s lieder setting Goethe poems, very instructive, and actually better than the concert that followed. . . . Today, Kendal board approved the Webster Performance Fund, approved a 50% refundable entry fee (designed so that people won’t choose it!), and said goodbye to Steve. In the ceremony afterwards, I read the following sonnet I’d composed for him:

A SONNET FOR MY FRIEND MR. STEPHEN P. FLEMING ON HIS DEPARTURE FROM KENDAL

(with apologies to John Milton)

Steve, whose tenure here was far too short

With only one New Hampshire chill endured,

No time for Anne and Brooke to be inured,

No ease to savor friends or home just bought,

Your eighteen months as Kendal’s leader

ought to serve as just an interim abjured,

instructing Carolinans to be cured

Of ice, snow, frost, and horrors of that sort.

But how ripe with meaning that short time was,

What guidance given, genial friendships made!

Accreditation came, our apogee,

As one-and-thirty climbed to thirty-three. Yet

now, alas, your presence starts to fade.

Presbyterians’ gain is Quakers’ loss.

July 16, 1997

Terpni

To SPAC. Dinner in the Hall of Springs with Yiayia, Alec, and Monica. Then scintillating ballet: “Apollo” (my favorite) with a golden-haired Dane looking very much like Apollo; a Hindemith/Balanchine ballet that I didn’t like very much; then a spectacular pas de deux (Tchaikovsky/Balanchine) danced by Damian Woetzel, who was cheered afterward by all the teenage girls who are his students; finally Jerome Robbins’s clever “The Concert,” a spoof on ballet, with everything done (deliberately) wrong.

Thursday, July 17, 1997

Sent volume 15 #2 of JMGS to Hopkins. What a relief! . . . Our 50th Deerfield reunion will be next June and I was asked to write a one-page biography for the Yearbook.

STATEMENT BY PETER BIEN FOR THE 50TH REUNION YEARBOOK

Although I spent only my senior year at Deerfield, that year made a significant difference in my life. The major reason was Richard Warren Hatch, my English teacher. I came from a medical family that expected me to pursue a scientific career. All my orientation had been in that direction until I arrived at Deerfield and was awakened by Dick Hatch to the magic of words and literature. That I went on to concentrate in American History and Literature at Harvard, in English (and music) at Haverford, and then to do a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia indicates what happened. This was followed by a very happy 36 years at Dartmouth College teaching mainly Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Beckett, and other stars of high Modernism (plus a little Milton, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Homer, Mann, Proust, Kafka, and Kazantzakis).

The other area in which I was awakened during that year at Deerfield may seem strange to most of my classmates. It was religion. My strenuously anticlerical family considered religion mere superstition, if not worse. At Deerfield I learned otherwise. After a bit of experimentation, I settled on Quakerism as the most appropriate home for my own blend of liberalism and mysticism—a choice that led quite directly to my marriage to Chrysanthi Yiannakou, a native of Greece, who had been working in a school established there by British Quakers after the war.

Deerfield’s greatest deficiency for me was in music. In 1947–48 it offered no way for a student to continue piano lessons or to expand musical knowledge. Sometimes an enforced break of this sort leads one to abandon an instrument for good, but in my case it did not. I have delighted in weekly chamber music sessions for the past 40 years. And now, in retirement, I am actually practicing! In addition, I’m pleased to have raised one son who is a professional pianist and another who is a music educator.

Deerfield’s monosexual student body in those days was also a deficiency. However, despite initial awkwardness with the opposite sex, I am blessed with a stable, enriching marriage of 42 years that led to three lovely children. Our pianist-son has a good career as a performer, composer, and teacher; our music educator is now the assistant headmaster of an international school in Indonesia; our daughter has worked as an editor for Simon & Schuster in New York and Duncan Baird in London. All are married; thankfully none is divorced. My marriage also led to Modern Greek literature and language as the major foci of my scholarship. I began as a translator (mostly of Nikos Kazantzakis, including his controversial The Last Temptation of Christ), went on to write literary criticism in this field and to co-author a language textbook, and have served for many years as editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.

A very important part of our life as a family has been the 120-acre abandoned Adirondack farm that I purchased in 1950 for $10 an acre. I built a log cabin using balsam poles from our forest for the walls and fieldstone for the foundation and chimney; a son has recently built his own log cabin 700 feet away in the same manner. Most of my books were written in an Adirondack-style lean-to under a huge yellow birch tree. The farm, which we call “Terpni” (Greek for “pleasant,” and also the name of my wife’s native village), has been a tonic for all of us, putting us in touch with nature—sky, stars, snakes, deer, vegetable crops, the forest, the ledges, lightning, thunder, frogs, turtles, fireflies—and teaching us to live with self-reliance and simplicity. For this, and for so much else (e.g., surviving cancer) in these 50 years since Deerfield, I am profoundly grateful.

Saturday, July 19, 1997

Daphne, Greg, and Christina arrived from New York. So we are now seven. Yiayia and Chrysanthi are sleeping at the Alp Horn Motel at Loon Lake; I’m in the Guest House, Alec and Monica in Alec’s cabin, and Daphne, Greg, and Christina in our cabin. We all fit around the kitchen table, somehow, and have jolly good meals, mostly watching Christina (who eats and eats) at breakfast and lunch (we have supper at 8:00 p.m., after she is asleep). Christina is indomitably active, investigating everything, moving constantly (when she is not eating). She loves the swing I hung from the large cherry tree in front of the barn. She also loves a large ball we inflated (left over from one of our children’s infancy).

Sunday, July 20, 1997

A beautiful day. Greg helped Alec split wood for the fireplace; then mounted the John Deere and mowed ¾ of our large south field, while I did the “embroidery” with the Troy-Bilt mower. Last night we had thick juicy hamburgers for supper and tonight a lovely steak, cooked outdoors to perfection (by me). Red meat: what a treat! Daphne is eager to move into the Co-op they bought on East 84th Street, after renovations (they were accepted recently by the co-op committee: two men, both Harvard grads). They are happy for Alec, as are we.

Monday, July 21, 1997

Alec and Monica left, after breakfast, driving Yiayia back to Hanover. Tearful goodbye with Chrysanthi. “You’re so far away,” she sobbed. “At least I’m not alone now,” Alec sobbed back. They plan to marry there, probably in April, and then to have a reception here next summer. Yiayia did well. She moves with more difficulty now and is severely limited by her deafness in participating in conversations, but still enjoys a good book. She was chuckling at The Catcher in the Rye. Daphne’s family left after lunch. We remained, exhausted. I took Chrysanthi for supper at the Copperfield, to relax.

Tuesday, July 22, 1997

Trying to get back to a normal routine again before Leander and family arrive in early August. Practiced Mozart this morning. Assigned Chrysanthi sentences to write for DG1. Started preparing my “Melissa” lecture for Χανιά in November. Finished sending out all JMGS submissions to reviewers. . . . To the ballet again: Slavonic Dances, surprisingly traditional for a 1997 ballet, and lovely. Then a surprise: “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” plus Bizet’s “Jeux d’Enfants,” including the “Berceuse” that I did four-hand with Dan. Damian Woetzel again, this time as a love-sick tin soldier with jerky, stiff movements. Charming. “Allegro Brilliante” was lifeless, although by Balanchine. But the final dance to four Brandenburg concertos, choreographed brilliantly by Jerome Robbins, again in classical style, was exceptional in its congruence with the music.

Sunday, July 27, 1997

Very excited to have already received two replies from the Bev Web students I wrote concerning our Performance Fund. Both will contribute and both are interested in coming to Kendal to perform. One is William Black, who taught Leander at Oberlin briefly. . . . Last night to Lake George Opera to hear Verdi’s Otello for the first time. What exceptional music! Iago was fine but both Otello and Desdemona were weak, straining, Otello overacting. I’d like to see it again with first-rate principals. . . . This morning, drove to Indian Lake, invited by Warder Cadbury to Meeting for Worship at Camp Backlog. Tom Brown was there, also David Borton, and 30 other family members including the sixth generation following Tom Brown’s grandfather, who bought the place in 1910. Meeting in “The Focus,” a tent faced by the backlog and fire. Messages mostly about Camp Backlog, rather disappointing. Soup and bread for lunch. Everyone very cordial of course. Judy Cadbury gave us a loquacious tour. And I had a long tête-à-tête with Warder about retirement, Adirondacks, etc. We were taken there in the boat, but we walked out through state land on the 1¼ mile trail. Very hot. Stopped in Speculator on the way home for ice cream and a malted to cool off.

Saturday, August 2, 1997

Finished translating my twenty-minute talk on “Melissa” into Greek. Chrysanthi checked each day’s work—took me all week. How nice to have good dictionaries finally: the Oxford Learner’s and Kriaras’s. In the afternoon went to Tom Akstens’s reception for his marriage to Susanne, a graphic designer. Hordes of people at his place in Bakers Mills—very strange. Among them a former student of mine who told me that my class convinced him to major in English. He is now a full professor at Siena, a colleague of Tom’s. Tom and Susanne live of course in Don Kurka’s former house. Don arrived, too. I don’t understand how he can bear to visit the place. We had him to supper a few days ago. He is retired but is still actively painting, and he spent a memorable two months in an artists’ retreat in Montana run by, and populated almost exclusively by, Lesbians (with mustaches and hair on their legs). . . . Started reading John Banville’s The Untouchable, a novel about a British spy who is exposed. Scintillating opening.

Sunday, August 3, 1997

Working on Demotic Greek 1 again, filling in missing parts. It’s endless. . . . Mowed Alec’s land through to the other side of the power line. Full of raspberries in perfect ripeness. . . . Alec and Monica have returned to Jakarta after a week with Leander & Co. that went well.

Monday, August 4, 1997

Evelyn and Don Green for supper. Nice to know that Don worries about all the “improvement” in North Creek, but he says that the supervisor and business community see only the lowering of taxes and don’t look further. (Doubtful, however, if taxes will be lowered.) Don is also convinced that Eliot Monter is laundering dirty money via the Copperfield. That’s what Art Perryman thinks, too.

Wednesday, August 6, 1997

To Glens Falls to the opera. Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream done very well indeed. Britten’s music is so brilliant, although not immediately ingratiating. Our 2nd trip to Glens Falls in a few days, since the car battery went dead last week and we had to go to a dealership to have it replaced under warranty. Afterwards, shopping in the amazing supermarket the Price Chopper (I bought double Gloucester cheese) and supper at the Montcalm including their famous seafood bisque. Like old times.

Thursday, August 7, 1997

This morning a young deer raced full speed along the forest’s edge just outside my office, then turned around and raced back again, hoofs pounding on the grass. Beautiful sight. . . . Mowed the east field to look nice for Leander & Co. and broke the mower. But Bud Rodick had the parts, amazingly. . . . Took down the dying cherry tree in front of the old barn. . . . Finished all I could do at present for Demotic Greek 1, ready to mail lessons 1–8 to Liappos, Spanaki, Pilitsis, and U-Mass. . . . Eva called. Everyone at Hellenic College is shocked. She’s looking for another job. Among those fired was the progressive dean who spoke so well when John and I were there. The archbishop seems to be an autocrat. Clash of two cultures: American democratic vs. Byzantine autocratic, alas.

Monday, August 18, 1997

Hanover

Root canal operation; went well. No pain afterwards. I even had lunch (soup) two hours later, with Michael Mastanduno, new head of the Dickey Center, regarding War/Peace Studies. He is (correctly) worried that Lynda Boose will put all her friends on the Steering Committee and no one else.

Tuesday, August 19, 1997

Hanover

Prolonged, interesting meeting of the Kendal Personnel Committee, which I clerk. We’re going to introduce a system of merit pay, and also an “earned time” system combining sick leave, vacation, personal days. . . . Returned to the farm and then dinner at Morse’s with Don Kurka plus his elusive wife and charming daughter (who imports Italian vases) and her two lovely children ages 3 and 7—good ages, for they talk.

Wednesday, August 10, 1997

Terpni

Leander, Deanna, and Sophia left. All is set for Leander’s house to be built this fall and winter by Pinky O’Dell, in the north field. . . . In the afternoon I seeded around Alec’s cabin and then harrowed, and got the harrow stuck behind the house and spent two hours squeezing it between the house and a tree. And the harrow is now broken. But a big rain is expected tomorrow, so the seeds will probably germinate. I also built a huge bookcase a few days ago in the room connecting the living room and kitchen, with thoughts of bringing here some of our Hanover books. In fact we’ve already brought a long shelf of art books. Also, I brought filing boxes and have now separated all our music here into categories and placed the boxes in the new bookcase. . . . The volume from the Birmingham symposium in my honor arrived, a festschrift for Peter Bien: very nice. . . . Dia and Wim vetted my Melissa Greek. Lots of changes. And they suggest a plot summary at the start. . . . Thinking also of closing up. Only two weeks left.

August 30, 1997

Chrysanthi painted the kitchen floor yellow, and today I finished the three-day job of painting the porch blue. And then I began a new table, a larger one, for the kitchen, given our increased extended family. It’s fun to be doing carpentry again. . . . I may take piano lessons; Leander says I should. Called Sally Pinkas, who recommended the #2 person at Dartmouth, Gregory Haynes. . . . Finished the review of Banville’s The Untouchable, reading every word of it: such a good book. Started the new biography of Lawrence Durrell immediately, also for review. Very poor, so far. Alix MacSweeney called from London; she wants me to review Gourgouris’s Green Nation for TLS. How nice! And Mary Murrell at Princeton University Press agreed to a new date for the Kazantzakis letters: June 1999. Μακάρι! . . . Gregory Maniatis called from Odyssey Magazine. They’ll run my Kazantzakis piece next issue. He wants me to do an overview of Modern Greek studies in America. We’ll see. . . . I want to write a “ballad” for Lafayette and Mayme’s 80th wedding celebration, using the Russian for “yes” (da) so that I can play with No and Da.

Saturday, September 13, 1997

Supper with Mother and Audrey. Mother will be giving up her apartment next week and moving permanently to Barclay 30, where she feels much more comfortable, sleeps well, and has more contact with people. . . . First intercourse, fifteen months and one week after my operation. They told me that potency sometimes comes back in a year and a half. Well, this is only a year and a quarter, but it’s still about ½ potency. . . . Am enjoying my 7th floor study in the library, a good place to work. Bought a cellular telephone so that I can have some communication from the study and elsewhere outside of home now that I lost my office telephone.

September 15, 1997

Dinner with Lynmar Brock, new chair of the Kendal Corporation. We were all frank about residents’ dim view of the Corporation and need for better PR.

September 16, 1997

Kendal Board. I presented the new recommendations from the Personnel Committee for Earned Time and Merit Pay. The Board accepted both, but suggested that “merit” be called “performance.” Later, we finalized Yiayia’s transfer to Barclay (Assisted Living). We’ll have 30 days to vacate apartment 301. Mother seems at peace with the decision; indeed, she initiated it.

Sunday, September 21, 1997

New York

Flew to Philadelphia on Friday. Book Committee. Board. Music with Dan. He wants us to perform the Brahms, etc. at Log Night, winter term. Maybe he’ll practice. Saturday p.m. to New York. Supper with Daphne, Greg, and Christina, whose vocabulary grows and grows. Daphne is preoccupied with the new home. So it goes. Yiayia vacates, the grandchildren occupy. . . . Today, met for lunch at Dock’s (where Rob Sullivan interviewed me for Life Magazine) with Robert Roberson of Harwood Academic Press, who wants to reprint some of my translations and essays. Μακάρι. All this thanks to Mike Keeley. . . . Then to NYU for Greece in Print. Heard Olga Broumas recite a moving poem about disinterring her father’s bones. Great surprise: Burt Pike was there, looking well, although he, too, had a radical prostatectomy. Also spoke with Stathis Gourgouris, whose book Dream Nation I am now reading for a TLS review. First chapter almost impenetrable. He told me that he wrote it for a specialized audience—obviously not one to which I belong.

September 22, 1997

Hanover

Chrysanthi spent all weekend helping Yiayia to move, and we both spent today packing books, china, etc. So many belongings, even in that small apartment. . . . The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine has an article about me by Rob Sullivan (of Life Magazine) remembering that I graded his paper in my Kazantzakis and Joyce class a “C.” Dimitri Mitropoulos wants me to write book reviews for Το Βήμα. Supper with Yiayia. Afterwards, I tried the organ. I’ll need to practice to play hymns at the service I conduct next month. What a thrill!

September 27, 1997

I gave a speech at Kendal inaugurating the Webster Performance Series.

October 4, 1997

Boston

Written for Mayme and Lafayette’s 50th and recited at the Parker House in Boston:

A BALLAD

for the

50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF MAYME AND LAFAYETTE NODA

October 4, 1997

by Peter Bien

(Note: The word for “Yes” in Russian is “Da.”)

There lives a wife in Meriden

And a goodly wife is she.

She has two lighthearted children

As pleasant as can be.

As cranky as can be – NO.

As pleasant as can be – DA.

There lives a spouse in Meriden

And a goodly spouse is he

Who every winter in his truck

Brings us a Christmas tree.

Brings us six tons of blueberries – NO.

Brings us a Christmas tree – DA.

There lived a lad in Meriden

And a goodly lad is he

Who went off to the great city

To lend dollars for a fee.

To lend dollars for love – NO.

To lend dollars for a fee – DA.

There lived a lass in Meriden

And a goodly lass is she.

Writer, shrink, theologian, dean,

Most supportive she can be.

Most standoffish she can be – NO.

Most supportive she can be – DA.

Mayme, Lafayette, Kesaya,

David they are called,

And evermore in our hearts

Shall they be held.

Shall they be forgotten – NO.

Shall they be held – DA.

This wife and spouse in Meriden

No war tax do they pay.

To withhold a percent for peace

Is a far better way.

Is a most seditious way – NO.

Is a far better way – DA.

Nisei welfare do they espouse

With all their heart and soul

Remembering the wartime camps

With their inhuman toll.

With their justified detention – NO.

With their inhuman toll – DA.

Their service and allegiance

Give they to the Quakers

With broad contempt and ample scorn

For all religious fakers.

For all peaceloving souls – NO.

For all religious fakers – DA.

So let us praise their fifty years

Of married life together,

And wish them and their children

Much more sunny weather.

Much more storm and thunder – NO.

Much more sunny weather – DA.

“Terpni,” Riparius, New York

September 2–5, 1997

Kesaya and David orchestrated an elaborate tribute for their parents: 150 people from Europe, California, Hanover, etc., including primary school chums, relatives, professional colleagues. Huge lunch on the top floor of the Palmer House. David read a beautiful toast. Then various people spoke, sang, or recited. Mine drew many laughs and vociferous No’s and Da’s. There was lots of kidding about Mayme’s vociferousness and Lafayette’s habitual silence. . . . Earlier, I saw the young Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts: a feast. At age 12 Picasso was accomplished and at age 16 he was producing paintings that looked like old masters. The exhibit showed him breaking from “academic art” under the influence of fauves, impressionism (slightly) in his blue period and his pink period, up to age 25, after which he entered his cubist period. Lots of visual jokes. Lots of bawdiness and self-deprecation. It’s hard to see here the monster that Chrysanthi saw after reading a biography.

Sunday, October 5, 1997

NYC–Princeton

Drove to NYC last evening. While Deanna is on tour in Europe, Chrysanthi is in Maryland, babysitting; she was very worried I’d fall asleep at the wheel. I didn’t, although I’d risen at 5:30 a.m. yesterday. This morning to the Met to see the exhibit of the extraordinary collection amassed by Degas. High points for me were the El Greco “Saint Ildefonso,” the provocative “Gypsy with Cigarette” by Manet, and the Bellelli Family by Degas himself. I bought a print of Degas dancers for Daphne’s new apartment. Then to Daphne’s. Lunch there. Christina full of pep, and glad to see Pappou. Her vocabulary is expanding daily—no, momentarily. She now says “elevator,” for instance. We walked across the park to the new apartment on East 84th Street. It’s being painted now. It’s an unpretentious building, none of the awful glitz of their West End Avenue rental. They’ll be very “homey” when they get it finished, with, I hope, lots of paintings and books including the Costigan and Schweitzer that Yiayia couldn’t hang when she moved to the Assisted Living room. . . . Then to the swings in Central Park: Christina is insatiable. And she climbed some shallow steps, up and then down, first time she’d done that. . . . We parted at 72nd Street. On Fifth Avenue the Polish parade: music, costumes, fun. But no fun driving to Princeton. It took me 1 hour 50 minutes to get to New Jersey. Tried the Lincoln Tunnel first; stayed in line ¾ of an hour and gave up. Went to the Holland Tunnel; stayed in line another hour. By the time I reached the NJ turnpike, imperious need to urinate. When I finally got to a rest-stop, couldn’t control and had an “accident.” Still! Listened to Samuel Pepys’ diary on tape through all this waiting, thank goodness. How vivid is his account of the restoration of the king in 1660. Interesting that he was professionally associated with Sir William Penn, and he mentions “the Penn boy”!

Mike Keeley telephoned before I left Hanover. Wants to suggest me as an American Farm School trustee. I’d like that very much, if it happens.

John Rassias met me last Friday. He still objects to my grammatical and etymological notes in the revised DG1. We compromised. They’ll stay but be shifted to the end of the chapter if Dimitri Gondicas agrees.

Monday, October 6, 1997

Princeton

A full day. Work on lesson 5 with Dimitri and Mache. Long lunch with Dimitri discussing how to get more funding for the book—from Coufoudakis. Hopeless in Greece because Babiniotis is everywhere and on every board, and our book competes with his. Nice hour with Mache in the afternoon. She is radiant, now newly married, and about to start her Ph.D. dissertation on “Female Voices in Homer.” Also spent an hour with a young Austrian scholar now living in Berlin, a feminist, very engaging. I’m hoping that she’ll submit to the journal. Then a two-hour supper with non-stop conversation in Greek with Mario and Alexandra Vitti. How nice! When Mario and I met last May in Thessaloniki after 30 years we said we’d need to do better next time. But who could know that a second meeting would come only months later. He advised me to publish my catalogue of Kazantzakis letters before the actual letters, and to speak to Philippides about it when I’m in Crete. He has the lowest opinion of Patroklos Stavrou. Their grandson has leukemia but seems to be in remission at least for now. Sad. Mario’s archives are here in Princeton. Hundreds of letters from Elytis, unpublished poems, etc., etc. Mario says: “Never give archives. If you do, the recipient won’t value them. Sell them for the highest possible price. Then they’ll be cared for.” Dimitri tells me that the English lady’s photographs are all here now: huge boxes filled with them. Eventually we’ll find the ones of the Quaker school, with luck.

Tuesday, October 7, 1997

Princeton

Mario’s archive includes six letters from Kazantzakis. I ordered them photocopied. He also has valuable materials form Elytis, including Elytis’s self-criticism of early poems. . . . Long meeting with a Greek lady working in Limerick, Ireland, specializing in Turkish studies. She wants a copy of my Christopher lecture since it will deal with Ireland. . . . Supper in a Chinese restaurant with the Vittis, Mike, and Mary, Nehamas, Dimitri and Evi, and the two visitors, the one from Limerick and the Austrian living in Berlin. . . . We finished lesson 5, third revision.

Wednesday, October 8, 1997

Princeton

Mache brought her mother to meet us. Newly arrived from Volos. Very young looking. Dimitri told me that Mache’s parents are “simple”: father a policeman, mother a seamstress. They sacrificed everything to advance their daughter’s career, and it worked. . . . Started lesson 6. Long talk with Mario in the afternoon. Then supper with Mike, Mario, and Alexandra in an Italian restaurant, with Mike and me sharing the bill. Mario full of anecdotes about Elytis, etc. . . . Mike wants me to join the American Farm School board of trustees.

Thursday, October 9, 1997

North Potomac, Maryland

Train to Washington. Chrysanthi is doing well with Sophia, who at least sleeps all night. Leander fine. Excited about his house: cellar finished, electric line in, septic to be done on Monday. At 6:30 Steve (from the Workshop) came with a flutist and did a run-through of a concert they’ll be giving: Copland, Schumann, Prokofiev. Of course I knew the Copland and Prokofiev, having played them (hacked at them) with Dick. Nice to hear them played up to tempo and with all the notes.

Friday, October 10, 1997

Washington–homeward

To the State Department. Did my talk again for Jim Miller’s class. It went OK, I think. Train back to Philadelphia. Then by car through lots of traffic, as far as Meriden, Connecticut. Stayed in a motel.

Saturday, October 11, 1997

Marvelous color on Interstate 91 returning home. Finished listening to Pepys’ diary, which “saved” me on this trip. “Up and to Whitehall . . .” How lovely he is switching into Spanish/French when he records anything sexual. And how sad that he abandoned the diary owing to oncoming blindness. . . . Supper with Yiayia, who is in splendid form and enjoying her new quarters.

Sunday, October 12, 1997

I led the non-denominational service at Kendal, preaching on “Why God Is Silent” and playing the organ for the hymns. But I left out part of the service, including one hymn and the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe just as well, since it says “Hallowed be thy name” and the gist of my sermon was that God cannot have a name. He is the “Unnamable.” Nice lunch afterward with Joan Williams, who runs the services, and Mother. Bev Webster and Franny telephoned later in great distress because they had forgotten to come.

Monday, October 13, 1997

I am increasingly frantic, trying to prepare for the trip. Now Alexis Kalokairinos in Iraklio wants me to give a public lecture there in Greek. Lots of additional preparation I had not bargained for.

Wednesday, October 15, 1997

David Buseck is here. Lunch with him and Mother at Kendal. He is a nice young man, a very active scientist working in computer technology. . . . Supper with Dick at the Indian restaurant. Then music with Dick and Allan. Very good tonight. We did a Bach sonata and all three Handel trios, but I played badly. Amazing how lack of practice depletes one. Then a long talk about entering Kendal, with Allan, and trying to convince Dick that it isn’t lunacy. Dick is very opinionated on the subject. . . . Picked up Chrysanthi from the AMTRAK bus.

October 16, 1997

Adrian Murry, the student who has been formatting our DG1, failed to show up for my appointment with him. Irresponsible. But Adrienne Wilson, the very pretty girl who is my Presidential Scholar on the journal, is always on time, and does good work, but not always as much as I’d hoped.

October 17, 1997

To Boston

Nelson Kasfir had me to lunch to relate the long sad story of his partner’s mother at Kendal. He says they’re thinking of taking Kendal to court. I offered mediation. . . . By plane to Logan. Chrysanthi threatened beforehand that she would vomit on the flight, but of course she found it very comfortable in actual fact. Overnight in Ramada Inn paid for by E-Z travel, which so messed up our travel arrangements. Delicious supper there.

October 18, 1997

Boston–London

Up and to British Air at 5:45 a.m. (cf. Pepys). Flight overbooked, but being early we got our seats. Very comfortable trip. Good movie. I worked on the computer, typing in passages from Gourgouris’s book. . . . Overnight at The Excelsior at Heathrow, again at E-Z travel’s expense. Luxury hotel.

Sunday, October 19, 1997

London

A long, pleasant day. Up at 5:30 a.m., back to Heathrow. Saw Chrysanthi off on a flight to Thessaloniki. To Euston. Bought tickets for Oxford and Birmingham. To the Penn Club. Breakfast. A friendly place. Sat at table with a man called Ira Nadel who teaches Joyce in America. We talked and talked until 11:00 a.m. How nice! Then to the Royal Academy exhibit of contemporary British art: “Sensation.” Interesting, disturbing, ostentatiously ugly. There was an installation of flies in a huge bra showing them reproducing and then being zapped electronically—life and death. Another statue of executed men horribly castrated. More interesting was the public: lots of young girls taking it all in placidly. Then to the National Gallery to see the Rembrandt on loan, “the Blinding of Samson,” gruesomely detailed, an early Rembrandt in the style of Rubens. Then to Odeon Haymarket to see the film “Wilde,” very moving: how Wilde—married with two children—was sort of sucked into homosexuality by various young men, especially the neurotic Lord Alfred Douglas. The downfall very pathetic. Lots of explicit gory sex, not enough on his plays and witticisms, although some of it comes through. . . . Then back to the National Gallery to see the wonderful Van Goghs and Cézannes, especially, and more Rembrandt, especially the “Woman Bathing in a Stream,” 1654. . . . Then across Hungerford Bridge to Queens Elizabeth Hall to see the Moscow State Opera Company’s production of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” (text by Pushkin), marvelously sung and played by virtuoso performers: soprano, contralto, tenor, baritone. Sat next to a man who had sold me his extra ticket; we enjoyed sharing our enthusiasm. Back to Bloomsbury by tube. To Garfunkels for a pudding. To bed at 11:30 p.m.

Monday, October 20, 1997

Penn Club breakfast. Sat with “Steve,” who teaches Elizabethan literature in Kentucky, and a British young lady who lives in the Penn Club and is researching a book on TB but hasn’t read The Magic Mountain. Again, lively conversation with very friendly people. The atmosphere here is like that at Pendle Hill. And talked about “Wilde” with two others who had seen it. . . . Lunch in Knightsbridge with Robert Robertson at a fancy Chinese restaurant: Mrs. Chow’s. He wants to do my translations of “The Moonlight Sonata” and “Philoctetes” with a recording plus essays and maybe Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Let’s hope. Later, he came to hear me lecture on Νικηφόρος Φωκάς at King’s. Went well, I think. I felt in good form. Alix MacSweeney was there, too. I told her about my feelings re: Gourgouris’s book. She advises writing a short review, about 700 words. My Dartmouth student Iason Demos was there. We’ll have supper on Friday. Roddy and I had a leisurely supper afterwards in the Waldorf Café in Aldwych. He’s just as far behind in his Seferis biography as I am in my Kazantzakis letters.

Tuesday, October 21, 1997

Another nice breakfast with Steve May (Georgetown College, Kentucky), who turned out to have a son who graduated from Haverford and another from Oberlin, and Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), who saw Stoppard’s The Invention of Love last night. It’s a perfect play for academics—like Travesties. Full of Greek and Latin allusions. Indeed, there’s an Ancient Greek couplet in it that he asked me to translate, and I couldn’t, except for odd words. . . . Read over my Καπετάν Μιχάλης lecture and reading notes on the novel. Then to lunch with Rowena Loverance and Alix MacSweeney at “The Old Amalfi” restaurant in Southampton Row. I’d bought the new Greek grammar by Mackridge, Holton, and Warburton and recommended Kostas Kazazis to Alix to review it. Also bought the Stoppard play. Alix was able to translate the couplet quite well. Rowena, who continues on Woodbrooke Council, tells me an outside commission will be reporting on what should be done. She confessed that John Sheldon and Helen Rowlands were the wrong appointments (hooray!). They think that Helen will become clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting, which is a way to get rid of her. But no way of getting rid of John yet. What a shame! Afterwards Rowena took me back to the B.M. and showed a sample of the interactive computer program that will be installed in the round Reading Room: what Steve May was cursing at breakfast. Rowena is one of the chief architects. It will display beautifully everything in the Museum, most of which cannot be seen because it’s in storage, or can be seen only imperfectly: front, not back. Each object is accompanied by full data, explanation, cross references to other materials, and bibliography of relevant books (which will be available in the Reading Room). Very user-friendly. They’ll work on it for three more years. Opening of the new room will be in 2000 or 2001. The only catch is that so far they have no money for staff for the room once it opens. . . . To King’s for Roddy’s class on Καπετάν Μιχάλης, mostly second year undergraduates. A good group, with some fine questions and discussion after my talk. . . . Walked across the bridge to Olivier Theatre for Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People starring the magnificent Ian McKellen as Dr Tomas Stockmann. What a strong, totally contemporary play—about truth and integrity vs. the expediency of those in power. Of particular interest to me is the play’s relevance to Kazantzakis, for he treats the same theme exactly in Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται and in some of the plays. If only he had had Ibsen’s theatrical skill to make this theme stirring on the stage!

Wednesday, October 22, 1997

Oxford

Lunch at Magdalen with Oliver Taplan, who is on the Onassis committee for judging the new drama prizes and also now sets up the new translation series of Greek plays for Oxford University Press. Euripides Herakles is assigned to Tom Sleigh (poet) and Christian Wolff (scholar). How nice! . . . Then to New College to meet Jay Bruce, who is doing well in his second B.A., this one in theology, but faces financial problems next year. I hope to help him re: a Reynolds. . . . To Blackwell’s Music Shop for new trios. . . . Then to Peter Mackridge in 47 Wellington Square, and my lecture on Καπετάν Μιχάλης. Small audience. But Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys were there, as was the recent British ambassador to Greece, a pleasant man with whom I spoke at some length afterwards. Supper with Peter and the Jeffreys. Lots of talk about Stathis Gauntlett, Leo Papademetre, Alf Vincent, Paul Tuffin, Anna Hatzinikolaou, John Burke, the general crisis in Melbourne and Adelaide especially. Michael will retire in about three years and return to England. They’re hoping that daughter Catherine, now a law student in Sydney, will agree to return also. Michael is still very negative about Stylianos for bearing grudges so long. Told me that John Chryssavgis had broken with Stylianos before coming to Hellenic College. . . . Back to Peter and Jackie’s home: cognac, talk, sleep.

Thursday, October 23, 1997

Birmingham

By rail to B’ham. To the University. Saw Dimitris Tziovas. Bryer’s on a cruise. John Holden said hello but won’t be at my lecture; it’s his birthday. . . . Bus to Woodbrooke. Easy, warm reunion with Alessandro Falcetta. I’m hoping that he’ll come to Haverford/Pendle Hill to complete his work on Rendel Harris. Lunch with Alessandro and Ben Pink Dandelion, who was forthright about the Woodbrooke situation. They have some good ideas for the future, but need time to overcome the general perception outside that they’re a basket case. John Sheldon came over, very friendly. Asked me for coffee afterwards. Also saw the gardener, and Wilson, the short-course coordinator, who was friendly. Met Mary-Jo Clogg, Richard’s wife. I’d been at their home 25 or 30 years ago. She’s the new librarian. Telephoned Richard, who promised to send in his JMGS report—finally. At coffee, David Saunders, who tried to be civil and friendly but obviously wasn’t. But the Bursar said a nice Hello, remembering me. Also Brenda, the secretary. Then another hour with Alessandro. Back to the university. My talk had a larger audience than yesterday’s, including Rhoads Murphy, the Ottomanist, and Katerina Davis, and of course Marianna Spanaki, who told me afterwards that she very much likes the grammar in DG1. Hooray! Tziovas, earlier, had promised a surprise. When Χρήστος Αλεξίου walked in, I realized what it was. How nice! Afterwards, quite a good discussion. . . . Then to a Chinese restaurant, but without Christos, who went to see Dimitri. He’s trying to find a way to place Pavlos in a British institution. At supper I heard the shocking news that Victor S. had died of a heart attack in his 50s. What a shame! Katerina asserted that Seferis’s Έξι νύχτες στην Ακρόπολη is a roman-à-clef about Kazantzakis-Sikelianos (composite) and Panaït Istrati. Nice to see Harry Davis, although as always all he seems capable of saying is that university life (and students) gets worse each year. Earlier I’d spoken as well to Peter Ricketts on the telephone. He’s doing well, very active, lecturing internationally. But I was distressed to hear that Paul Morby hadn’t come to my lecture because he is too severely ill. . . . Late train back to London, arriving at midnight.

Friday, October 24, 1997

Lunch with Jack and Kathy Shepherd. He’ll be returning to Dartmouth to lead the Kenya program for Environmental Studies and to teach, probably, in the summer. But they’re thinking of maintaining their primary domicile in England, which means that Jack won’t be as useful in Peace Studies as I had thought, unless we can convince him to spend an additional term in Hanover. . . . Finished typing out key passages from Gourgouris’s Dream Nation to use in my TLS review and also, I expect, in the Christopher lecture. Mailed this and other accumulations back to Dartmouth. . . . To the Strand to meet Judith Herrin for tea. She’s just back from Istanbul. Very cordial, friendly hour together. I told her all about the mess at Hellenic College when she inquired about Archbishop Spyridon. She has experienced the Archbishop of Alexandria, who she says is young and simple and eager to have the Church “reach out.” But converts tend to “reach in,” and are very conservative. . . . Then met Iason Demos, my student at Dartmouth, now studying at King’s. Walked across the bridge to the Old Vic to get my ticket, then had supper. It turns out that his father is a semi-professional photographer in Athens, connected with a photo archive that can supply photos on any and all subjects. This may be just what we need for the revised DG1. . . . To the Old Vic for Waiting for Godot with Ben Kingsley as Gogo and Alan Howard as Didi. A very fine Godot. Interestingly, these two leads were played neither as clowns nor even as tramps. And Gogo had none of the Zero Mostel flavor but on the contrary was caustic, mean, incisive—perfectly suited to Ben Kingsley’s craggy face. Pozzo (Denis Quilley) and Lucky (Greg Hicks) also fine. It’s such a sad-sad play. Yet also a play about endurance. The refrain of the Trilogy, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” is repeated frequently, explicitly & implicitly. Alan Howard gave a bravura performance complete with Irish accent. And he’s going to be Lear tomorrow afternoon!

Saturday, October 25, 1997

So sorry I’ll be leaving tomorrow. This week has been so rich. Final breakfast with our “daily seminar”: Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia) and Steve May (Georgetown College, Kentucky) and Jack and Kathleen Shepherd. . . . Midmorning met with Mark Mazower, who is separated from his wife, alas, and living at a different address, which explains why he never responded to JMGS articles sent for vetting. Apparently the estranged wife won’t forward the mail. . . . Telephoned Chrysanthi chez Vouli; she advised me to bring a coat, since it’s so cold in Greece. So I went to Marks & Spenser and got a nice raincoat that would have been useful the last few days, since it’s so cold here, too. . . . To the Old Vic to see Alan Howard in King Lear. Amazing that he, transformed, played this old king after doing Didi yesterday. And yesterday’s Pozzo was Gloucester, and yesterday’s Lucky was Edmund, very villainous. Yet the play was not entirely satisfactory. I’m not sure why. Somehow the poetry didn’t come through. I’m spoiled by Devlin’s marvelous Lear that I saw at the Brattle Theater while I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the recording that keeps it current. Alan Howard has a wonderful voice, capable of modulation, but he was much less vehement than Devlin. But Edmund, also Edgar, were both convincing, as were the three daughters. The scenery was nil: nothing, just a stool here and there, and stocks for Kent. Actually, the play accelerated nicely toward the end, when everyone was dying. And the storm was very well done. . . . Then two hours walking around Leicester Square, mobbed on this Saturday night, and eating just sparingly because I’m so overstuffed that food sickens me. Then to see Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. Interesting how disappointing and uninteresting it was to see a set with elaborate scenery, and civilized people sitting on couches and slaying each other with “civilized” dialogue. I’m spoiled by Godot, Lear, even An Enemy of the People, all of which are “experimental theater” compared to this well-made play. But Maggie Smith was of course hilarious as the alcoholic sister and the other actors were fine. It’s typical Albee, I suppose, showing the deadness of a “respectable” family full of the spiritual dead.

Sunday, October 26, 1997

To Greece

Up at 4:45 a.m. to catch the Air Bus at Russell Square, very convenient. In the plane, the steward asked me to change seats to free up my seat for a baby, and he gave me five bottles of champagne as recompense. Chrysanthi and Vouli at the airport. Warm reunion. We installed ourselves at the Metropolitan Hotel in a very nice room. Chrysanthi was relieved and delighted to have a “place of my own” after boarding with Lola for the past week. Odysseas came and visited for a while. Then George picked us up and we went to Andreas and Demetra’s apartment in Kalamaria to say Χρόνια πολλά (St. Demetrios’s name day). Andreas still strange but at least civil. Cute baby. An interesting friend who “works in petroleum” explained to me what happened to Esso-Pappas (bought out by the government) and what is being done about pollution in the Thermaïc Gulf. Andreas had gone with Chrysanthi to try to get the required document for her passport. Now they need her naturalization papers. He is confident that he’ll have success once we send a copy. George wants us to pay him. I offered but Andreas refused. George and I talked about our prostates. He is taking a medicine and seems to be better. He bought a new car and is very proud to show off its electronic marvels.

Monday, October 27, 1997

Walked all the way, on the παραλία, to the λημάνι to confirm Olympic tickets. Saw nice gentrification of some streets in the old warehouse district, streets that had remained from the old Salonica, with two-story buildings and cobblestones, now boutiques, fancy cafés, etc. Visited two fine bookstores on Αριστοτέλους searching for Θεατρικό έργο του Ν. Καζαντζάκη by Παπαχατζάκης because it has an extended section on Μέλισσα, and found it miraculously. Also found a cassette version of Ritsos reading, to help in finding where to obtain permission for Robert Robertson’s venture. Then to the Byzantine Museum, but found an immense line there and gave up. The guard advised coming at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow. Walked to “The Wolves” and had a nice lunch. Το παιδί is still there, but now with γένια. . . . Siesta. Then George and Dimitris picked us up and we went to see Dimitris’s glass balustrade in the new theater for the Κρατικό Θέατρο Βορείας Ελλάδος, built next to the abandoned Catholic monastery at the other end of the city, next to the Παύλος Μελάς military camp (where George was imprisoned). A magnificent building designed by a Japanese architect and financed chiefly by EU funds. Dimitris supervised the selection and purchase of the glass, which of course has to be totally safe and strong, and is. Otherwise he goes to prison, he says. Σιγά-σιγά the city is recovering from what I call the “rape” (βιασμός) that ruined it in the 1960s–1970s. Even the little park constructed in front of our last year’s apartment is now finished and quite nice, complete with a display of contemporary sculpture. Back to Dimitris’s apartment for Χρόνια πολλά, cognac, sweets, coffee. Tilda pleasant, the child absorbed as always with her Barbie dolls.

Tuesday, October 28, 1997, Όχι day

To the Byzantine Museum for the Άγιον Όρος exhibit: very full and beautiful. Daily life (including a wine barrel as big as a small room), topography, manuscripts from the tenth century onward, Byzantine music, silver bindings for the Τυπικόν, frescoes, icons galore, ψηφιδωτά, all with church singing low in the background. Some of the painting is gorgeous. A real treat. . . . Back to the hotel. I’m working on my Iraklio lecture, trying to shorten it. The translation by Αγγελάκη-Rooke of my Columbia pamphlet is superb, so I don’t need to “fix” that, merely to reduce it to 50% or less! . . . Lunch at Odysseas’s and Eleni’s with Toula, Stavros, and Anthoula. Toula looking young and fresh; last May she was very stressed out and showed it. A summer’s holiday in Χαλκιδική helped her immensely. They bought twenty stremmata (about 4½ acres) in Halkidiki and hope to start a Greek Kinhaven, if they can get the EU interested enough to underwrite it. They questioned me (again) about Kinhaven and I explained as best I could about its finances, philosophy, etc. I doubt they’ll ever succeed. Stavros isn’t experienced enough or sufficiently self-directed; also he continues to smoke, thus surely will have health problems again (last year he had a heart attack). . . . Supper with Dimitri and Ruth Gounelas at their home in Panorama. The great fire of this past summer came close but never really threatened them. Both children were there: Frankiskos, who continues at Athens College and will probably study computer science later on, and Angelica, whom they sent to a “liberal” boarding school in England, near Wells, where she seems happy enough. (This is a week’s break in mid-term.) She is doing a two-year A-level course in English, French, and Italian, with hope of entering a British university. The fee, even for EU citizens, is £18,000 a year, but she got financial aid. . . . Dimitri exceedingly warm and friendly (as always). He promises me an article on Kazantzakis for JMGS, on Χριστός και Βούδας (the two plays). Ruth is organizing a big conference of the European Society of English Studies. Another friend came also, a Cypriot scholar who’d been at the B’ham symposium in my honor and had delivered a paper, but of course (!) I didn’t remember her. She said that she’d watched me at the conference as I sat at the back of the hall and she observed that I dozed off now and then. Yes. We spoke about Maronitis, whom everyone dislikes. (“If you have Maronitis as a friend you don’t need an enemy!”) and also about Κριαράς, who still comes to the department at age 93 and is still directing the huge Byzantine dictionary project, which has reached the letter π. Dimitri says that Kriaras memorizes ten lines of poetry daily as an exercise to keep his mind in shape and his memory intact. What a good idea! But I, at 67, far from 93, find it almost impossible to memorize either verse or music. Maybe I should set myself five bars of music a day and see what happens. Probably I’ll improve. . . . Back to the hotel at 1:00 a.m.

Wednesday, October 29, 1997

Finally shortened my Iraklio lecture to about 45 minutes and rehearsed it. Then to LYRA recording company on Τσιμισκή, where luckily I got full information about where to apply for copyright permission for the Ritsos recording. Then to Vouli’s for a long, huge lunch with—how nice!—Bruce and Tad Lansdale, and Mrs. Stefa, plus of course Vouli’s mother and Κυρά Κούλα. Tad looking wonderful, Bruce beginning to look like an old gaffer but still with a young, strong voice, and lots of projects. They’re off in a few days to Nepal. He always reminds me of our first meeting, when Charles Lindsay was so appalled at Chrysanthi’s “American.” Talked a little about the search to replace Draper. Bruce stressed a candidate’s perception of the “spirit” of the School, and the “nature” of Greeks—naturally. Said that when he announced his forthcoming retirement, Greeks on the board assumed that one of his children (or, rather, sons) would succeed. Such is the νοοτροπία. Actually, one son was remotely interested, but only for five to ten years, not for the expected forty, like his father. So he didn’t apply. All our conversation around the dinner table was in Greek of course, but we lapsed into English when just the four of us were alone in their car on the way back to the hotel. We have repeated invitations to Metamorphosis. They told us of one of their sons who sort of “dropped out,” although educated, worked as an orderly for four or five years in a nursing home, but now, fifteen years later, has “found himself.” Also spoke of Christina, who converted to Orthodoxy and had to be baptized by full immersion (wearing a bathing suit and a smock). I said nothing about being approached to serve on the board. . . . Then, after a short siesta, to Lola’s and Kostas’s to pay respects. Couldn’t stay long enough to eat the cheese pita that was baking, because we had concert tickets, so we walked to the Αίθουσα Τελετής του παν/μίου for one of the events connected with the Πολιτιστική Προτεύουσα, a concert by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Excellent. The best was “Four Sea Interludes” from Peter Grimes by Britten: brilliant, exciting music splendidly performed under the baton of Alexander Lazarev. Then a concerto for percussion and orchestra by James MacMillan, performed with gusto by a female soloist, Evelyn Glennie, who ran from marimba to xylophone to drums to chimes to gong. A circus. Forgot the music, absorbed in this circus. Then Silelius’s 5th Symphony, not so much fun as the first two pieces. And a rousing encore of a Scottish dance. Walked back to the hotel, stopping at Goody’s for a “clap sandwich” (club) and French fries.

Thursday, October 30, 1997

American Farm School

Decided to leave the hotel today instead of tomorrow and go to the American Farm School, where John and Mary Rassias are already installed. Emotional goodbye to Odysseas and Eleni—tears and entreaties to stay for lunch. But we said No. Lunch at The Wolves. Vouli drove us to Cincinnati Hall, a very comfortable guesthouse. Nice reunion with John and Mary, catching up on all sorts of news, including John’s breakfast at Blair House with Vice President Gore (whom he says is a wooden dummy) and Patriarch Bartholomew. Archbishop Spyridon showed some anxiety owing to John’s failure so far to start the Commission, a good sign: he really wants it to happen. . . . Drinks at Charlotte and George Drapers’, with Vouli. Then to a tavern in Θέρμη and a jolly meal with lots of talk, I mostly with Charlotte about the Princeton archive with its photos of the Quaker School, and about their plans after they leave the Farm School a year and a half from now.

Friday, October 31, 1997

Farm School–Athens–Χανιά.

Huge breakfast in Cincinnati Hall with an English lady here from Bahrain applying for a job here with the EU. John, Mary, and Chrysanthi off to Θεσ/νίκη to bank and museums. I worked on Μέλισσα in our comfortable room, gazing out at the sea. Of course what used to be a view unobstructed by a single building now has the περιφεριακό (ring road), factories, car stores, apartment houses, etc., but the sea is still visible above all this. . . . Chrysanthi and the Rassiases are off to town. I was driven to the airport with George and Charlotte Draper. Zetta Farinou was there. Old times! In Athens, I found Dimitris Tziovas and Marianna Spanaki at the airport. All together to Χανιά, bus into town, long walk through the modern business section—which is very attractive, as is the airport—to the Ομαλός hotel (which I’ve been calling the Ανόμαλος). Then out to a tavern for a long supper and much talk. Στράτος Κωνσταντινίδης also; then to a ζαχαροπλαστείο for coffee. To bed at 1:00 a.m.

Saturday, November 1, 1997

Χανιά

I’m beginning to think about the Christopher lecture, which will be conceived and written by some miracle. This morning I thought of beginning with Milocz’s remark to me about both capitalism and socialism being a way to “cheat” death and fate. But what cuts across both political extremes is nationalism, the strongest replacement of religion—the “idea” in defense of which one is expected to be willing to die. What made nationalism possible (see Benedict Anderson on this) and what also undermines religion, is “history”—i.e. the view of the evolution of events, of progress, replacing the “steady state” of the pre-historical view. All this could serve, perhaps, as an introduction to “Inventing Greece” (and Ireland, and America). Examples could be Koraïs, Θάνος Βλέκας, Παπαρρηγόπουλος, Καζαντζάκης, Σεφέρης, the development of a “myth”: ελληνικότητα. No matter if the myth is altered, for any myth is the sum of all its varieties. What the myth does is to provide a meta-temporal rationale for life and death, a meaning for our otherwise futile and meaningless existence. Today this is provided most strongly by nationalism.

Off at 10:00 a.m. for the beginning of our Kazantzakis symposium. Rain, cold. The view from my hotel window is the central bus station. And this is supposed to be Crete’s most picturesque town! The symposium: in the Δημαρχείο, a handsome building. Display of Kazantzakis holdings in the Δημοτική Βιβλιοθήκη Χανιών: first editions of the plays, newspaper clippings, the new editions in brown covers issued by Patroklos Stavrou, some of my books. Very impressive. The symposium is quite mixed. Ο Φάνης Κακριδής spoke very well about the παιδικό μυθιστόρημα. A woman was original and helpful regarding Kazantzakis’s early aestheticism in Όφις και Κρίνο, etc. A schoolteacher was extremely good on Kazantzakis’s dreams, showing us manuscript versions of dreams that Kazantzakis wrote down as such and then used in his novels. At the start, the 86-year-old bishop of Χανιά spoke well, assuring us that the Church had never excommunicated Kazantzakis. And Emmanuel Kriaras, in a paper read in his absence, remembered hearing Kazantzakis and Istrati at the Alhambra in 1928. I think that my paper on “Melissa” went well; at least the audience seemed attentive. I stumbled on a few words (as always) but basically managed to make my Greek κατανοητά, I hope. We were dined at a restaurant for lunch, and again at a tavern for supper. Too much food! Throughout, an elderly couple have taken me in tow. I have no idea who they are, but they’ve been very attentive. And Αλέξης Καλοκαιρινός showed up—head of the museum in Iraklio—and gave me the poster and invitation for my Monday night lecture.

Sunday, November 2, 1997

Χανιά–Ηράκλειο

Walked to the harbor. Rain, wind, wild sea, but still very picturesque: the old Venetian buildings, and even a mosque preserved (minus the minaret). The symposium resumed with some good papers, particularly Tziovas’s on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης. I chaired the final session, and didn’t feel embarrassed doing it in Greek. Afterwards, I skipped the final lunch (at Θερισό) in order to catch a lift with the Kalokairinos family (wife, son, daughter), with a stop for a brizola on the way. Good κουβέντα. He has already invited me back in August 1998 to talk about Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης in relation to the ξεσηκωμούς—they’ll be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the rising of 1898. He delivered me directly to Stelios’s door. Nice reunion. Stelios just back from Australia; photos of Stylianos looking quite relaxed. Then to the airport, a little apprehensive because the heads of state of all the Balkan countries arrived today for a conference and police are everywhere. But everything was normal. Then Chrysanthi, John, Mary, Stelios, and Natalie and Joseph Ventura went to a παραδοσιακό Κρητικό εστιατόριο for more food. John and Chrysanthi feel that the workshop at the Farm School was a great success. They’ve been invited back for next year already. Too bad that George Draper had to miss it. . . . Afterwards κουβέντα και τσάι chez Stelios, and bed.

Monday, November 3, 1997

Ηράκλειο

All of us to the Medical School (very handsome building) for the start of the workshop. Mary and I walked back (Stelios is off to Athens for a day for a committee). Returned for lunch and to help with one of the groups practicing the “method.” I did this from 2:15 until 5:00, very engaged with these teachers, mostly female, who were trying to master John’s techniques. Lots of laughs; good attitude. Walked back to Stelios’s. Alexis Kalokairinos picked me up. Drove downtown to the Επιμελιτήριο (Chamber of Commerce) building, for the lecture. Fine hall, 300 people, full. Tziovas and Marianna came, as did Roddy Beaton, Titika Sachlambani, Stephanidis couple that gave me letters last year. Nice. Very warm welcome. The talk went well. I had rehearsed it earlier, and didn’t stumble over Greek words. John Rassias sat in the front row and recorded. It was quite short (40 minutes plus or minus), which allowed lots of time for questions. Luckily I understood them (mostly) and was able to answer adequately, I think, in Greek. “Was Kazantzakis an atheist?” “What can you say about his treatment of women?” “You spoke of his defects. What are they, precisely?” . . . Afterwards, scores of people came up to say thanks and shake hands. And a young man said that he was reluctant to ask a question from the floor owing to his age. He wanted an explanation of Kazantzakis’s doctrine of “freedom.” . . . Afterwards, all to a tavern for traditional Cretan food. And “home” at 10:30 p.m., ridiculously early for Greece. Very tired.

Tuesday, November 4, 1997

Ηράκλειο

Up at 7:00. John needs two hours to wake up. Clear sky. Sun. Warmth, first time since we arrived. Fed the cat. Ψηλορείτης visible in the distance. Natalie took John and Chrysanthi to the Medical School for the workshop. Alexis came at 9:30 for me. Downtown to the Ιστορικό Μουσείο, which is now twice as big as I remember it: the old Kalokairinos mansion plus annex. Alexis gave me an exhaustive tour of the newest exhibit: the history of Iraklio under Arabs, Venetians, Turks. Plus a huge model of the town in 1669 with a slide show and splendid lighting that highlight specific buildings, portions of the battlements, etc. Then he drove me to the Physics building of the university to visit Mr. Trahanas, director of the University Press. He seems interested in publishing a translation of my Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, which I summarized for him. He also wants to do an anthology of articles on Kazantzakis with suggestions from me regarding specific titles. . . . Then to the Medical School. Lunch with John and the workshop group. Then I was pressed again into service, again to monitor practice sessions for substitution drills. At 8:30, to a restaurant for the final dinner with some of the students. Long conversation with one of them about Kazantzakis and other literary subjects. Very pleasant. Hugs and kisses at the end and wishes for all of us to return. Also very nice comments about my lecture. . . . Home. More talk with Stelios, John, and Mary until 1:00 a.m.

Wednesday, November 5, 1997

Iraklio–Athena, London Hotel, Glyfada

Telephoned Nikos Alivizatos to confirm our lunch today. Stelios drove me to the airport. Police everywhere. The Turkish prime minister was about to leave in his private Lear jet. Red carpet. Limousines, TV, etc. A very helpful taxi driver from the Athens airport told us to go to a cheaper hotel (which was cheap but . . . rudimentary), waited, drove us into town. Work on Metro everywhere. Went first to LYRA office to ask about Ritsos άδεια. I have to send a letter to the company’s director. Then to Alivisatos’s office. He looked very distressed. Told me that at a department meeting that morning one of his colleagues suddenly dropped dead. Turns out that Alivisatos is related to Theotokas. He showed me pictures of his grandfather, a lawyer in Istanbul, and (I think) uncle of Theotokas. He gave me a volume by Theotokas. His wife came. He took us to a very fancy restaurant on Ακαδημίας. Good, easy conversation about the status of conscientious objectors now in Greece, and my experience in America, and the case that he took to the International Court in Straßburg to try to get Greece to act more justly toward religious minorities, especially Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refuse to salute the flag and thus feel that their children should be excused from compulsory attendance at patriotic parades. He won a Pyrrhic victory because the Straßburg court ruled that Greek courts must accept such cases (they had previously refused), but when the case went to the Greek court the ruling was that parades have no military content (!) and thus children cannot be excused. As for the new law on COs, it was passed in the Βουλή but still needs directives to be applied. So he is not sure what will happen. In any case, things are moving in the right direction. Interestingly, those who opposed the CO law in the Βουλή argued that Greece is not part of Europe (!) and that Greek exceptionalism, its Oriental roots, direct that it operate differently from the West. We talked also about the forthcoming JMGS issue for which Alivisatos will be the sub-editor. It seems that it will happen. . . . Then to the Grande Bretagne for a little rest. Telephoned Christos. Walked to his office in Οδός Αθηνάς. He went on at length about his attempts to place Παύλος in England and how hopeless the situation continues to be in Greece. A mother of an autistic child committed suicide, another attempted the same. He keeps trying. We took the subway (Piraeus to Kifissia) to Victoria Square. Έρη very friendly. Ασπασία-Μαρία a diminutive adult; speaks beautifully. They bought the apartment upstairs on the sixth floor and will henceforth have twice as much space. And Christos will finally have an office at home. He telephoned Έρη Ρίτσου for me about an άδεια for the Sonata-Philoctetes volume. I spoke to Eri, who said that she remembered me and seemed very pleased by the project. She controls translation rights but will need to ask her lawyer and Κέδρος about rights to print the Greek text. Fine. Heard more about the χάλια at the Τμήμα Φιλολογίας. Greek clientelism seems to operate in the university just as elsewhere. Classes are now 200 to 400, all lectures, with many students absent. Teachers of course do not know their students. . . . Christos wants to print my lecture on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης, having it translated first. That’s good, since I’ll need a translation, probably, for next August in Ηράκλειο.

Thursday, November 6, 1997

Athens–London–Boston

Up at 4:45 a.m. Taxi to East Terminal. Moment of panic when I couldn’t find my passport. But I found it. . . . BA flight delayed because a plane ran off the runway at Heathrow. And yesterday in Greece there was an earthquake. And Alivizatos’s colleague dropped dead. So . . . And, as I jokingly tell people, I need to “invent Greece” between now and November 14. Βοήθεια! Home at 11:00 p.m. our time = 6:00 a.m. Greek time.

Thursday, November 13, 1997

Cambridge

Finished “Inventing Greece” yesterday and read it aloud this morning: 51 minutes. I had to skimp on the last phase, modernism, barely mentioning the Seferis poem I had hoped to elucidate. Also, I couldn’t do anything but mention Θάνος Βλέκας. . . . Talked to Daphne, who is happily in the new apartment. Christina calls me Pouppa instead of Pappou. Drove to Cambridge, listening to Katherine Graham’s fascinating autobiography. We reached the presidency of JFK. Watergate and Fritz Beebe are still to come. . . . Luxurious suite in the Charles Hotel, paid for by Harvard. Nice dinner with five or six graduate students.

Friday, November 14, 1997

Cambridge

Worked during the morning in our luxurious suite writing a TLS review of Gourgouris’s Dream Nation, whose language is so repulsive. How to say this and still be kind is the problem. Lunch with Caroline Higbe, a Harvard faculty member who is a candidate for a job in classics at Dartmouth. Tea with Meg, who is looking forward to returning to England but who worries that they’ll not be able to afford placing Pavlos in a home there at £50,000 a year. Terrible weather: snow, sleet, wind, cold. Will anyone come to my lecture? But Boylston Hall was adequately full. My former student Peter Wilson came. How nice! And Eri, Christos’s wife, was there of course, and Jenny Mastoraki, and Lily and Michael Macrakis and Dennis Siotis and Greg Nagy, and Takis and Stella Metaxas. I think it went well. People didn’t get angry, in any case, when I said that I know the Church exists in Greece but I wonder whether Christianity can exist when the spiritual power is subordinated to the secular. In the question period I elaborated on the CO situation in the USA and elsewhere, where spiritual “truth” overrides the state’s demands (although of course by permission of the state). Reception afterwards in Barber Hall, the refashioned Freshman Union. Long talk there with Eva Constantellou, who says the situation at Hellenic College is worse and worse. Then, hungry, a roast beef sandwich at Au Bon Pain. And home to our suite, where Chrysanthi says she’d like to spend a full month.

Saturday, November 15, 1997

Cambridge

The Symposium was excellent, chiefly because scholarly presentations alternated with poets reading. Eri spoke well in splendid English. Mastoraki mesmerized the audience. Meg asked Manolis Savidis and me to sum up at the end. I stressed the excellent collaboration of scholars and authors. Then a festive dinner in a noisy restaurant. Sat opposite Greg Nagy and had a chance to converse pleasantly. They’ll be looking soon for a successor to Meg.

Sunday, November 16, 1997

To Hanover

One final huge breakfast at the hotel, then home listening to the rest of Katherine Graham’s story, involving Fritz Beebe, Watergate, her husband’s suicide. What tenacity she had! . . . At home: Greg, Daphne, and Christina, who arrived last night. Christina is 300% energy: climbing, investigating, talking talking talking. And such big smiles. When we swing her or do anything nice she says, repeatedly, “more, please.”

Tuesday, November 18, 1997

Kendal Board. John Diffey convinced the Kendal Fund to award $5000 to our Webster Fund. Hooray! We concentrated on growth. How much, how far, would the Corporation go? I had lunch with Andy Rangell and Bev and Franny. Andy is playing again, although he still hasn’t regained full power and endurance in his hands. He is also trying to write and illustrate children’s books, and showed me a prototype. . . . Fleet Bank called. Mother hasn’t paid her Visa bill for four months. Then I discovered that she also hadn’t paid Kendal bills, phone bills, Medigap insurance, etc. Nor had she deposited checks. In sum, she had stopped functioning financially. Visa had an $80 penalty. Medigap insurance had been canceled, phone was about to be discontinued. I had to scramble to put everything back in order and I’ll henceforth need to take charge. Alice is here, too, and helped find Mother’s checkbook. But when she offered to help from Arizona I said No because her own efficiency in such matters is so very bad. . . . On top of this I said I’d be the Quaker Meeting’s next treasurer. Bruce Koloseike walked me through some of the procedure and I’m now regretting this decision. So much! So complicated!

Sunday, November 23, 1997

Greg came again on Friday. Today they all left for New York, where their kitchen is being rebuilt. They’ll need to eat out for a month. They took Mother’s Costigan and the beautiful Schweitzer watercolor and the Sikeliotis dancers and one of Mother’s best oils. How nice! . . . I’m trying to learn the 3rd movement of the Mozart F major four-hand sonata. Very very difficult.

November 27, 1997, Thanksgiving

Last night Dick came for supper with his new girlfriend, Susan Monahan, who looks about 50 years old and is married but estranged (and still living in the same house with husband) and mother of several grown children including a disturbed apparently non-functional boy. Chrysanthi described her as “frightened.” She hardly talked, except when spoken to. Poor Dick! . . . Another sad case is Ellen DeCesare Baber, who has finally left Don Stewart to set up her own domicile in a condo bought with profits on the stock market. Chrysanthi says that every time she visits Ellen or talks on the telephone with her, she weeps, especially because her two girls seem so unsupportive and selfish at this difficult time. Ellen lost her job, lost her relationship—in effect has lost her children. What’s left? Chrysanthi fears she might kill herself. . . . But we had a jolly Thanksgiving dinner at the Nodas, together with Yiayia (who forgot her hearing aid and glasses and told the man next to her at table that her husband died six months ago). Nodas’ Japanese friends were there: a gentleman with whom they went to primary school in Livingston, his daughter (Kyo, whom I knew from the Pendle Hill board) and her three children. Plus Kesaya. The old gentleman turns out to have played the same role for Medford Leas as I played for Kendal at Hanover. Medford Leas is extremely viable, with millions in the bank, a huge waiting list, etc.

Saturday, November 29, 1997

To NYC

Overnight at the Harvard Club, all crimson carpet and walnut paneling, but I like my own Yale Club better (it was full today). To the Guggenheim to see the Rauschenberg retrospective. A feast of ugliness and, I suppose, cleverness, justified (in the accompanying brochure) by R’s reconnection of art with real life in reaction against abstract impressionism. Yes, real life is there: bathtubs and cardboard shipping cartons, and the like. Also, he smashes old-fashioned sentimentality, for instance by covering over David’s backside (he’s on horseback) with generous smudges. . . . Then to Daphne’s new apartment, 125 East 84th, still very much unfurnished; everything in boxes; the kitchen under construction. But Christina remembered Pouppa sweetly. Graham Tebbe was there, looking well (but again unemployed), and Greg’s stepmother Karyn, who seemed much more real this time (compared to her part in the wedding). We went by taxi to 9th Avenue and “Little 12th Street,” in the meat-packing district: lofts, wide cobbled streets, very close to Jane Street (Greenwich Village), to a restaurant now very fashionable. Joined by Vaughan, looking very much like Lucia, with the same mannerisms and facial expressions. We’ve concluded that Christina looks just like Graham. Also joined by Vaughan’s boyfriend Nick, who works in Hollywood selling low-budget independent films to foreign distributors, chiefly in South America. Apparently they’re going to get married, although he hasn’t proposed yet. V. has quit her job at “Time Out” and will move to Los Angeles to be with him. Also there was Philip, Karyn’s son and his recent bride, who assistant-teaches English as a MA student in Arlington. They’re doing Dickens’ Great Expectations: how unimaginative! But also The Merchant of Venice. She seems nice. Philip, who majored in jazz drumming at New England Conservatory, is now working in computers! . . . Afterwards to 46th but I’m not affected any more; probably better that way.

Sunday, November 30, 1997

New York City–Princeton

Meager breakfast in the Harvard Club, which charged me $168 for overnight. A rip-off. Then to Daphne’s and with Greg, Christina, Graham, and Vaughan to a Greek-run coffee shop on Third Avenue for breakfast. The owner was delighted by my and Daphne’s Greek, of course. More chance to talk to Graham, since last night was so noisy. But he is not a great conversationalist, like his son. . . . I said my goodbyes and went off to MoMA to see the impressive Schiele exhibit. I’d remembered some of his work from my visit to Vienna, but this retrospective of his remarkable thirteen-year career (he died at age 28 from Asiatic flu) showed a tormented soul, very much like Kafka, emblematic of pre- and post-WWI modernism. Raw sexuality, celebration of ugliness, yet all subjected to exquisite constraints of design. Another exhibit, of Castiglioni’s utilitarian design (silverware, lamps, furniture) was also nice, but of course without the real power of the Schiele. Also made a quick trip through the permanent collection, so very familiar to me: those lovely Cézannes, Picassos, Matisses, and more contemporary stuff: rocks or automobile tires, and the like. . . . Bus to Princeton. I’m in the apartment in Palmer Square this time. Too hot, but very convenient. Went to the WaWa store near the Dinkey to stock up for breakfasts. Working on the Mihalis article on the computer. Spoke to Chrysanthi. She says I should be stern with Mache for neglecting the micrologues. Also with John Rassias for neglecting his contributions. Again, I’m doing the book almost single-handedly. . . . Before leaving Hanover I was able to send Christos about half of my Kapetan Mihalis article with all the documentation added, and also all the quotes changed back to the original Greek, a slow, laborious chore. Also finished copyediting Chryssavgis’s on Sherrard. Started reading Middleton’s newest piece on Kazantzakis and process theology—a pleasure.

Monday, December 1, 1997

Princeton

Mache very embarrassed that she had failed to do any of the micrologues. So she had two ready and promised two more for tomorrow. . . . Lunch with Dimitri catching up on “who’s in, who’s out.” Supper with (Mache’s) Seraphim Sepheriadis, a young political scientist, graduate of Anatolia College who then got a B.A. at Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. at Columbia. He laments the state of scholarly life in Greece, saying that there is no cooperation.

Tuesday, December 2, 1997

Lunch with Mache. Supper at the new Thai restaurant where I accidentally met Bob Hollander, wife and son, and joined them for a pleasant visit and meal. He recalled teaching with Jeff Hart at Columbia, and noted how gifted Dinesh D’Souza was as a student. . . . I’m struggling to keep up with the typing and the extensive revisions we’re making. Finished Lesson 6 yesterday; now working on Lesson 7.

Friday, December 5, 1997

Pendle Hill

Played Brahms last night with Dan. He’s doing much better. We’re even getting the variation in seven sharps. Also did Della Joio and Debussy. That will be our program during Festival Week in March. . . . Today at Publication Committee Emma Lapsansky spoke about “hallowing our diminishments.” I thought of Marjorie Hope Bacon’s schizophrenia, manias, and paranoias in the CPS mental hospital she describes so well in her book, and of Meg’s autistic boys, and of the Alzheimers patients—John Corindia and others at Kendal—and of the Down Syndrome people in Holland when I was there for the Quaker International Voluntary Service.

Saturday, December 6, 1997

Pendle Hill

I ministered in Meeting on hallowing our diminishments, citing King Lear’s “pure unaccommodated man—poor forked animal—off off with your lendings,” also E. M. Forster’s passage in which the Christians cannot accept wasps in heaven. Are we made in God’s image because we are whole and intelligent (ο Λόγος) or are we diminished creatures also made in God’s image? Perhaps one sometimes should worship a diminished God. . . . Nice visit with Doug Gwyn, who has published a collection of his essays and is still working on the book about the Seekers. . . . Chuck Fager wants me to participate, perhaps co-edit, a Festschrift for Dan. I almost spilled the beans when talking with Dan, but not quite. But we probably can’t have PH publish it, because Chuck cannot work with Rebecca. (Rebecca of course wants to try to work with him!) . . . Returning to Hanover, I learned that Franny Webster had a stroke but Bev played tonight despite this, all Chopin, beautifully. And Audrey fell and broke her hip. We must hallow our diminishments.

Saturday, December 20, 1997

Cambridge

Splendid performance of The Bacchae at A.R.T., with an especially good treatment of the chorus. Michael Keane was just right as an effeminate Dionysus, and Ben Evett as Pentheus; the two messengers especially fine. It occurred to me afterwards that already in ancient Greece there was pressure against “Europe”—i.e., enlightenment, individuality, etc., and for “Asia”—i.e., communality (via dance), instinct, παραφροσύνη. Cf. Kazantzakis’s Zorba, which of course incorporates Dionysus (via Nietzsche). I was emboldened to send in a précis to the European Modern Greek Society symposium committee for the Berlin symposium next year on Greece between East and West. Euripides–Dragoumis–Lorenzatos–Kazantzakis.

Tuesday, December 23, 1997

Finished “Kazantzakis and Film,” my talk for the Toronto MLA, using diary entries from 1964 (shooting of Zorba outside Χανιά), 1989 interview with Paul Schrader, and my New York Times Op-ed piece. Fun to dip back into old diaries that, I must admit, are quite fascinating.

Wednesday, December 24, 1997

I said “Happy Birthday!” to Chrysanthi and she replied, “I doubt that I’ll have many more.” I assured her that she’d live to 96. We’ll see. . . . Leander, Deanna, and Sophia arrived. Sophia is so diametrically different from Christina: silent, frightened, stand-offish, but not all the time.

Thursday, December 25, 1997, Christmas

Nice turkey dinner with Yiayia and others after distributing presents. Leander gave me Knowlson’s biography of Beckett. Very thoughtful. I gave him The Cambridge Companion to Schubert. Also very thoughtful. John and Mary, Helene and Bill came over later. John is interested in my use of journals (commonplace books) in class. I had to leave at 7:00 to go to Kendal to introduce the third of our Webster Performance concerts. Michael Webster, clarinet, and his wife Leone Buyse (rhymes with “spicy), flute, piccolo, alto flute. A beautiful program beautifully played. Her flute is heavenly, as is his clarinet (if a clarinet can be heavenly). They took turns accompanying each other on the piano, and spoke helpfully about each piece before performing it—the perfect technique for Kendal. The program mixed modern with traditional: a contemporary “canon” followed by Bach’s “Siciliana.” Chopin’s only piece for flute, “Variations on a Theme by Rossini,” was scintillating. They ended with Fauré, Debussy, and Lutoslawski—very fine. Afterwards, conversation about the future of Bev and Franny: perhaps two rooms in Assisted Living with an upright piano and their cat. Bev kept telling me how often he thinks of me and talks about me. How nice to have made this friend! . . . And Michael and Leone say they’ll perform again on December 25, 1998.

Friday, December 26, 1997

Riparius

Up early. To the farm with Leander. Breakfast in the Woodstock Inn, very grand. We arrived at 11:30 and Pinky O’Dell and his son Adam were waiting for us in Leander’s new house, complete on the outside except for the screening on the porch, and quite advanced on the inside: all sheetrock in, room dividers, doors, electric, basic plumbing. Leander had many details to decide—for example, whether to have a “peninsula” or an “island” in the kitchen, to have the yellow pine flooring V-grooved or straight at the ends of the boards, pine paneling on the drywall in the bathroom. Pinky says that he can do everything that Alec wants on his cabin, and he cautioned us to keep this work hush-hush because the cabin is totally contrary to code! He also says he can move our guesthouse to firmer ground and place it on proper piers (unlike mine, which the frost has headed all out of line). So, we had a very useful time, and a pleasant one. Warm weather, sunshine, not much snow. Leander’s camp warm as toast with just one baseboard operating. . . . Afterwards, to Murphy’s for extra keys, more decisions about kitchen cabinets, and a consultation with John Armstrong. Then a very late lunch at “The Chicken,” a ridiculously huge (and good) hamburger. On the way home, Leander said that Deanna refuses to do any more recitals; the one in January at Kendal at Longwood will be her last. She has also dropped all chamber music. She just saws away in the orchestra, practicing in rehearsals. All this because (a) of the baby, (b) she “peaked” so young, and now has no incentive or drive to improve or diversify. Nor does she seem to feel the need to share her gift with others. What a shame! So gifted and yet so uncreative! Leander thinks that things may change when their child (or children) goes/go to school, but the likelihood is that they will not, alas.

December 27, 1997

Hanover–Philadelphia

To Yiayia’s storage bin. Leander and Deanna are very happy to take a Thomas Hart Benton lithograph (what a treasure) but quite uninterested in the couch. Maybe they’ll take the bookcase and some chairs, later. . . . Dick Williamson visited. Afterwards, both Leander and Deanna remarked, “He looked so sad.” They are perceptive. Georganna’s untimely death has devastated him. . . . I edited Roddy Beaton’s “Commentary” on Jusdanis’s et al.’s “Whither the Neohellenic?” (which Roddy writes as “W(h)ither . . .). This has infuriated Jusdanis, who’ll be writing a commentary on the commentary. I’m feeling more and more inclined to relieve myself of the journal, rather than continuing to have people angry with me, as Ricks and Jusdanis have been recently. . . . Off to Manchester Airport for a (delayed) flight to Philadelphia. There it’s snowing. Made the Toronto flight because it, too, was delayed. Then we sat on the runway for an hour waiting to be de-iced. Luckily I was next to an interesting young woman who was a trained Montessori teacher, so we had a good conversation, and I spent time also editing Roudometov’s piece for JMGS. Arrived at the Toronto Hilton at midnight, very tired.

Sunday, December 28, 1997

Toronto

Yesterday, in the airport customs, the officer asked me what I was planning to do in Canada. “Go to the MLA.” “Are you giving a talk?” “Yes.” “Are you getting paid for the talk?” Ha ha ha! I assured him of the contrary. Went to Quaker Meeting today, walking a long way along University Avenue in this beautiful city. To my surprise, I was greeted by Keith Maddock, who had entered my Paradise Lost module at Woodbrooke part way through. Very nice to find old acquaintances unexpectedly. In addition he gave me a sensitive account of the “jury trial” of Eve that my students had presented at the end of the term, showing his appreciation of the girl with nose rings. I inquired about Terry Gardner, who must have worked with Friends in the Vietnam period, but no one knew of him. Then I telephoned the Terry Gardner listed in the phone book, but he said that he was the wrong one, and that the guy who teaches at the University of Toronto has an unlisted number. Too bad. On my way back, I stopped at the museum to see an exhibit on whales, full of parents with children. Fascinating. Very interactive. . . . Then to our Greek seminar on film. Nice to see old friends including Gonda and Vangelis and of course Stratos and Martin McKenzie and wife. I gave my paper on the three Kazantzakis films. Not much reaction. No questions except Martin’s on Panaït Istrati. Disappointing. Some of the other papers were quite interesting, especially the one on Greek soap-operas. Afterwards, we all went to a restaurant on George Street for a leisurely supper. I returned through the huge Eaton shopping mall, and then walked toward the lake to see Union Station. The whole city center is new or refurbished: wide avenues, glitter, a sense of cleanliness, although a few miserable-looking homeless are on the streets.

Monday, December 29, 1997

Toronto

To the Royal York Hotel to see Michael Groden’s computer project on Ulysses, and who was in the room but my Penn Club chum, Ira Nadel—a very nice encounter. Groden’s project is spectacular; he hopes to involve some of us as consultants. I was pleased owing to the fact that he first read Ulysses under me at Dartmouth, and also because he emphasized Bob Bell’s study on Joyce’s humor, Bob having also first read Ulysses under me at Dartmouth. . . . Then to a good session on Beckett and Proust, chaired by James Knowlson, whose book Leander gave me for Christmas. He is a cancer survivor; we share that. We dined together at Sheila Harvey’s some years ago. Good papers on Beckett’s Proust essay, on A + C in Molloy (elucidated by the Proust essay) and on Beckett’s and Proust’s treatment of photographs. A speaker recalled Marcel’s chagrin as he sees (what is like a photo of) his aged grandmother, who while still alive seems as though dead. I’m beginning to feel that way about my own mother, who seems to me now more and more like a living corpse as she ages. . . . Martin and Karen McKinsey then took me to lunch in an Irish pub with leisurely conversation about Greek and Irish literature. He hopes to apply to the fellowship program at Princeton. He gave me a booklet of his own poems, all based on Greek themes. . . . Back to the Royal York to hear Josna Rege, my replacement at Dartmouth, talk on black British writers. She is articulate and lucid. . . . Dinner at a Thai restaurant with Dick Dellamora, who has strong memories of our farm, children, house. He’s “out” as a gay person, and has written a will leaving his estate to Dartmouth for use by Gay and Lesbian Studies. Of course he has no children. At 10:30 another man joined us by prearrangement apparently, and when I returned to the hotel at 11:00 they went off together. Hmm. . .

Tuesday, December 30, 1997

Breakfast meeting at the Royal York with Phyllis Franklin, MLA president, and about 30 other teachers all of whom, like me, had received teaching awards. The subject: What can the MLA do to enhance teaching? I suggested working with graduate schools that produce Ph.D.s, to incorporate some teacher training in their programs. . . . It’s snowing lightly. I returned to the Hilton underground, via the P.A.T.H. What a livable city! Worked more on Roudometov’s essay; had a chopped liver sandwich in a Montreal deli. Then to the second session of our Greek/MLA seminar, with Gonda Van Steen giving a good paper and Stratos another, and a lovely young lady showing clips from a Greek film, a very anti-Junta adaptation of Lysistrata. Fun. Taxi to the airport with Gonda and Stratos. Lots of talk with Gonda while waiting for our planes. She’s doing well at Tuscon. Canadian bacon for supper, very different from what one gets here. Home at midnight to find a hysterical Chrysanthi, who had forgotten that I’d be so late and was frantically trying to find what had happened, calling police, various airlines, the Rassiases, the Hilton in Toronto. She calmed down, eventually. I should have telephoned, obviously.

Wednesday, December 31, 1997

Hanover

Chrysanthi fully calm. Leander, Deanna, and Sophia left, their car full of Sophia’s paraphernalia. My Sony tape-deck has been returned and fixed. . . . The sewer backed up again. Called a man to “roto” it out again. Reality! Yesterday started Jim Sheridan’s history of Kendal at Hanover, which he asked me to check for errors, omissions, etc. There are some, of course. But all in all it’s a valuable, readable record. And I’m grateful to him for stressing the Quaker component. Must finish it today. Must get ready for the move to Pendle Hill. Must prepare in advance for April’s course in Ulysses for ILEAD. Must read Tom Doulis’s translation of Thanos Vlekas. Must finish this issue of the Journal. Too much! . . . Annual party at Genevieve’s. Nice talk with Leonard, who has left the employ of the Solzhenitsyns and will also quit the bookstore, to go to Nepal.

1998

Hanover

January 1–7

Jan. 3, 1998, Cambridge

Pendle Hill

January 8–March 20

Jan. 15–16, Princeton

Jan. 17–18, NYC, chez Daphne

Feb. 9–10, Princeton

Feb. 28–March 1, Millersville, Lancaster

March 2–3, Princeton

March 5, Bethesda, Leander’s concert, Motel 6, Laurel, MD

March 12, NYC, Archdiocese

March 15–17, Hanover

March 18, New York, Harvard Club

Traveling

March 21–22

London-Paris-Singapore-Jakarta

Indonesia

March 23–30

March 23–30, Omni Batavia Hotel

Hanover

March 31–June 16

April 3–6, Providence Marriott, Providence, RI

April 16–18, Pendle Hill

April 19–22, Princeton, Palmer House

April 28, Amherst

May 2, Cambridge

May 8, NYC

May 11, Göteborg, Sweden, Quality Panorama Hotel 0317677000

May 12–13, Stockholm, Hotel Tegnérlunden 08 349780

May 14–17, Pendle Hill, NYC

May 18, Boston, Hellenic College

May 19–20, Princeton

May 23, Cambridge, A.R.T.

May 25–27, Princeton

May 29–30, Riparius

June 6–7, Riparius

June 12, Deerfield

June 13–16, Kinhaven

Riparius

June 17–September 10

June 23–24, NYC, Saratoga

June 27, Hanover

July 6–7, Hanover

August 10, Hanover

Hanover

September 11–October 15

Sept. 18–20, Pendle Hill

Sept. 24–26, NYC

Oct. 2–3, Boston

Oct. 4–7, Princeton, Pendle Hill

Oct. 8, Chicago, University Club

Oct. 9, Pendle Hill

Europe

October 16–November 1

Oct. 16, Athens, Hotel Arethousa 322 9431

Oct. 17–22, American Farm School, Drama, Kavala, Serres

Oct. 22–25, Thessaloniki, Hotel Metropolitan

Oct. 26, Athens, Hotel Phoinix, Glifada

Oct. 27–Nov. 2, London, The Penn Club

Hanover

November 2–December 31

Nov. 13–14, Cambridge

Nov. 16–19, Princeton

Nov. 20–27, N. Potomac

Dec. 3–6, Pendle Hill

Dec. 7–9, Princeton

Dec. 23–28, NYC

Thursday, January 1, 1998

Annual New Year’s breakfast at the Nodas’, with their neighbors, including the pretty girl who does all the publicity at the Co-op, and Quaker friends.

January 3, 1998

To Cambridge. Lunch with Filitsa and Otmar in the Charles Hotel. Then Peter Pan & Wendy at the A.R.T. Terrible. Total waste of time: five hours’ driving.

January 7, 1998

Met with Sara Zuniga, whom I think I’ll hire as my presidential scholar for next year. What a relief! She’s a Spanish beauty.

January 8, 1998

To Philadelphia

Drove in heavy rain to Pendle Hill, Eight hours on Interstate 91. Convoys of electric company trucks heading north to help with people who were hit by the ice storms. Millions are without electricity. But Hanover was spared.

January 9, 1998

Pendle Hill

Getting settled in our “luxurious” apartment, Firbank 26: living room, our own toilet (!), efficiency kitchen, hall, and two bedrooms, the second of which I’m transforming into an office. And I rented an electronic keyboard in Hanover; that’s going in the office, too. All the comforts of home! Shopping at Radio Shack in Springfield Mall to buy telephone, answering machine, good coffee. Our phone was installed and I’ve set up the fax. . . . Welcoming tea at Dan’s. He gave a short talk and read Cavafy’s “The City,” a “grim” poem. Why? . . . Heard that John Rassias is in the hospital. Teaching a class, he had sudden difficulty in breathing and was rushed to the emergency room. No diagnosis yet. He’s on oxygen and IVs. Telephoned him. He could hardly speak. . . . Met with Rebecca regarding the proposal for a publication endowment to be inserted in the preliminary prospectus for the capital campaign.

Sunday, January 11, 1998

Pendle Hill

Went with Dan to Burlington Meeting, about a 30-minute drive into farm country. Old Meeting House with wonderful paneling, including panels that open and close to shut off the Meeting space from a larger space. Met Ted Brinton there. A strong meeting with “flavor.” Afterwards, we all went to an Italian restaurant, and then Dan and I practiced our Brahms, Debussy, and Dello Joio. He still doesn’t know the notes.

Monday, January 12, 1998

Rebecca and I finished the draft of our proposal: part for books, part for pamphlets. . . . Meeting regarding consultants; we identified ourselves to the new students. More shopping. It’s nice to have our car here. Practiced again with Dan. . . . I’ve been doing “post pots” after dinner but am now assigned for the rest of the term to post pots after breakfast. So I bought rubber gloves, since I work with the disinfectant. Our team is Dan, Liz, and I. . . . Went to Swarthmore to get a library card and use their bibliographic databank for JMGS needs. The computer was down.

Tuesday, January 13, 1998

An hour and a half with Jennifer Elam, the Cadbury Scholar doing a project on mystical experiences and mental illness. She has numerous testimonies from people who (a) had direct experience of God, (b) were committed to mental hospital for psychosis. I’m trying to help her organize all this in order to write it up in what some day should be a very good book. . . . During supper, to the “Men’s Group,” trays in the Reading Room. Very meaningful. One, Mel, is going into hospital on Thursday for a serious operation. We talked about making a will. Another has a son in prison. A third is at odds with his parents. A fourth, Dan Cook, is gay and has AIDS. And at Christmas his father gave him a stone earring for his pierced left ear. Amazing. Another is a family physician: David, 4th generation MD, broken marriage, decided to stop practicing and is trying to see what to do next. Another, Greg, going blind, is in love with Margaret Fraser and in a great dilemma since she is being attracted by another school to take a much better-paying job, but in a location where he does not want to go. And she said she’ll turn down the job for his sake, which of course he doesn’t want, either. I commented, perhaps cruelly, that the Roman Catholic tradition of celibacy for those in religious vocation (which Margaret clearly is) perhaps makes sense. Most of these men now see Pendle Hill as their most comfortable “home.” That speaks well for PH but of course is sad for them, since they’ll need to leave sooner or later.

Wednesday, January 14, 1998

Lots of Quakers and other people here with FWCC and AFSC. Saw David Atwood, who taught at Woodbrooke when we were there, and Van Ferguson. Nice. Yesterday I ministered in Meeting. Someone from this group ministered about religious vocation, the call, and following it. I then spoke about St. John Climacus and the wonderful icon of the ladder, showing that those who follow the call need to renew their vow repeatedly; otherwise they fall off the ladder at the next step as they “ascend.” . . . Over lunch, I met with those who would like to have some help with writing. To my dismay there were eight! I’ll meet with them individually and then occasionally call the full group together. . . . At 5:00 met Dan and drove together (with Chrysanthi, of course) to Kennett Square. Supper in a Chinese restaurant talking to Dan about theology. Then to Kendal at Longwood for Leander and Deanna’s concert, with me as page turner. A lovely program: a late Schumann sonata, then a 90-second Ravel interlude for piano solo, then a late Mozart sonata. Turning pages was a bit nerve-wracking, but I managed. Ferociously difficult piano parts, which Leander played deliciously. In the Ravel, which he did from memory, he had a memory blank after the first two notes but then started again (no one noticed) and went through to the end beautifully. He really hasn’t memorized anything for fifteen years, since he always plays ensemble. And Deanna played beautifully, too, although from my position as page turner I had to concentrate on the piano part. Ignat came and we had a nice reunion. He inquired sincerely about my cancer and said how much my “prostate letter” meant to him. Also nice to see Mary Hoxie Jones, Mary Morrison, Janet Shepherd, Dorothy and Oliver Rodgers, Mary and Bob Metz, Clayton Farraday, Yuki Brinton, and Rebecca and Anna Mays, who came to hear Leander. They’ll repeat the concert at the Presbyterian church where they were married, and at another venue in D.C., but Deanna doesn’t want any more recitals at a distance. . . . Dropped Dan off and drove the 60 miles to Princeton, to Palmer House.

Thursday, January 15, 1998

Princeton

Dimitri accomplished wonders this Christmas in Athens. John Demos will furnish photos from his archive for free. Maniatis (Odyssey Magazine) will help with formatting and printing. Mitropoulos the cartoonist will draw special cartoons for us. . . . We finished Lesson 8’s revision and started Lesson 9. Chrysanthi left after lunch to go to Daphne in New York.

Saturday, January 17, 1998

NYC

Train to New York yesterday. Christina is sick: diarrhea and vomiting all Thursday night, less vomiting today but still some diarrhea. Daphne and Greg up all night Thursday and then Greg had to go to work downtown and directly to London last night for an important presentation today. To top things off, this morning Christina somehow got her finger stuck between the side railing of the crib and the headboard. I had to break the railing to release her. Bleeding, a cut, screams. . . . Escaped to go to the Village to meet Burt Pike for lunch. His huge apartment on Charlton Street is lovely. Daphne’s is still totally unready: packing cases, minimal furniture—like camping out. No kitchen. Eating on paper plates from take-out food brought in three times a day. Some day it will be like Burt’s, I hope. We went to Caffé Dante on MacDougal Street for a light lunch. He is still very active in teaching and administration and writing. Told me to my surprise that Thomas Mann, like Kazantzakis, had been neglected by scholarship for a period and is now regaining interest. I mentioned my ages-old essay on the séance scene in Der Zauberberg, perhaps all that’s been said by someone else. . . . Met Chrysanthi and Daphne at Minetta Lane Theater, off 6th Avenue near Bleeker, to see “Gross Indecency: the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.” Very imaginatively presented with Edward Hibbert as a superb Wilde. Everything taken from the existing documents, including De Profundis. The only deficiency was the portrayal of Bosie, nothing of his tantrums and self-centeredness so evident in the film “Wilde” that I saw in London. But this treatment added the important dimension of what was implicitly on trial besides sodomy—namely, aestheticism—totally lacking in the film, which overdid the purely sexual element. This show also presented interesting biographical elements in An Ideal Husband, which was playing in London when the trials began (until it was closed down after Wilde was indicted). The show ended, brilliantly, with the whole cast reciting, choral-like, Wilde’s poem “The House of Judgment.” . . . Afterwards, Daphne and Chrysanthi went back to relieve the babysitter. I toured the Village a little. It’s its own very special world. Then went to the Yale Club library to try to find Wilde’s poem. They have the books but they’re all in the librarian’s office, locked over the weekend. Drank a Manhattan and felt tipsy afterwards. All these days I’ve been scouring the New York Times for its articles on Indonesia and especially Suharto, who seems, with his family, a case of almost pathological greed. To think that the machinations of a single family could topple the economy of such a huge nation! But obviously there were other factors. We worry much about Alec’s wedding, scheduled only a few days after the next election. All predictions are for violence against the Chinese-Indonesian minority—i.e., Monica and family. And Alec wonders how many students will show up for school on Monday, since part of the ex-pat community seems to be pulling out.

Sunday, January 18

New York–Pendle Hill

Went to Meeting at Earl’s Hall, Columbia. About 30 people, 3 blacks, all ages, including many in their late 20s or 30s. Good ministry. After Meeting they have a custom called “Afterward” when Friends who want to speak about issues or perhaps were “almost” about to minister, can stand and talk. Good, but time-consuming. When newcomers’ time came, I stood and said that I was probably a co-founder of the Meeting. I told how three of us around 1956ff. formed the first Meeting at Columbia. Fifth day at lunchtime. One was Robert Lawrence Smith, who later became the headmaster of Sidwell Friends School. The third was in the registrar’s office, I think. After Meeting, their archivist caught me and begged for any more information I could provide. I remember that an engineering professor, Victor Paschis, now deceased, took the leadership afterwards and shifted the Meeting to first day. The woman introduced herself as Chris Dye’s cousin and said that he spoke often to her about me, very warmly. How nice! . . . Cab back to 84th. Greg had just arrived from London. Christina still subdued, but clearly on the mend. This morning Daphne insisted on my dismantling the offending crib, which she placed in the garbage. Yesterday she bought a new crib. Nice to have money. We felt best to leave immediately. Had delicious bagel and lox on Lexington. Subway to Port Authority Terminal, where I’m now writing this as we await the bus to Princeton.

Thursday, January 22, 1998

Pendle Hill

In Meeting this morning, one of the students, Jerry, rose with sobs and blurted out something like this: “I try to bring God to Meeting and God doesn’t come. Meeting is nothing if we don’t bring God. Pendle Hill is nothing if we don’t bring God. O God, why don’t you come? God, help me!” And sat down with audible sobs. Later someone else read a psalm that speaks of God’s presence. I kept thinking of the view that God is the one who needs help from us. If we don’t reach out to others, God is diminished. If we don’t overcome egotism and inertia, God is diminished.

Yesterday, found Wilde’s “The House of Judgment” at Swarthmore. It is so strong. I’ll read it in Epilogue on Monday.

Chrysanthi asked yesterday, “Why are we here?” It occurred to me that it’s a good preview of life at Kendal. Certainly we’re entirely comfortable in our two-bedroom apartment—a good sign.

John Rassias is out of hospital now, but still weak. Let’s hope he will regain sufficient strength to start the Archbishop’s Commission in March, as scheduled. . . . Nancy Corindia is back in the hospital, debilitated by depression. Poor Tom! . . . Went to Lloyd Lee Wilson’s short course on Gospel Order: the Thursday night “demonstration” for the full community. No preparation at all. But the students spoke, hesitatingly, after a while. Mostly about gratitude, bonding, feeling good about Pendle Hill as a whole, and about Wilson. (Afterwards, Janeal told me that all this was totally contrary to what had happened in the course, where they’d been very “turned off” by Wilson.)

Friday, January 23, 1998

In Meeting, Wilson ministered, saying that we’re meant to be a leaven in society and that the leaven, as in the bread, needs to be “consumed.” This moved me to minister using Oscar Wilde’s prose poem that I’d read yesterday, “The Master.” A man is weeping and someone questions him. “I reached love, I cured a blind man, I raised a man from the dead, I was compassionate to the prostitute, I cleansed the temple . . .” “Why, then, are you weeping?” “They didn’t crucify me!” . . . Later, I heard that this had preoccupied the short course people in their final meeting. I wonder if they connected it with what Wilson said about the leaven. . . . Book Committee. Doug Gwyn and I, thank goodness, once again prevailed over Liz Kamphausen, this time to get a Yes for Paul Lacey’s book on education. We also accepted Margaret Hope Bacon’s on her experiences serving in a mental hospital where her husband was assigned as a CO. Beautifully written. . . . In the Board in the evening, Dan surprised me by telling everyone that I was naturally gregarious. Rebecca and I presented the review for publications. Afterwards, Henry Freeman, the consultant for fund raising, said how moved he was by my “passionate” attachment to Pendle Hill publications. . . . A new board member, Gay Berger, is clerk of the Kendal at Hudson board, so we had lots to exchange. After ice cream, music with Dan. We are gradually improving the Dello Joio.

Saturday, January 24, 1998

In the board’s executive session I raised the question of Dan’s retirement two and a half years from now. We should begin looking, discretely, for a successor. . . . More practice with him after lunch. What a lovely tonic music is after a full day of meetings. . . . For supper, a Greek meal at Margaret Fraser’s, cooked by Chrysanthi, complete with ouzo & retsina, avrolemono, pilaf, stifado, loukoumadhes. A man played guitar and sang folksongs. Then the Pendle Hill cook, who is from Costa Rica (and says that Amos’s Rara Avis is well known) sang impassioned songs beautifully. Very jolly. Nice to talk to Greg, Margaret’s boyfriend, who is going blind and seems very serene nonetheless.

Sunday, January 25, 1998

Pots with Liz. Discovered that she’s a Bryn Mawr grad. To Kendal for Meeting. 100+ people. Very good ministry, sparked by Jack Shepherd on the 139th Psalm. Mary Hoxie Jones said it was her father’s birthday; he would have been 135. She told anecdotes, including one about his visit to the Gestapo in 1938 to try to help the Jews. They received him courteously, then left the room and kept the AFSC delegation waiting in silence. They returned after a time and said that they’d do what was requested (of course they did nothing). Lunch with her and Bob and Mary Metz afterwards. Then to Oliver and Dorothy Rodgers’ to play music. Oliver is still busy on his project to discover the mathematical secrets of good violin tone, but his viola playing has deteriorated, alas. Still, we had nice Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Telemann.

Tuesday, January 27, 1998

Working with Jennifer Elam on her writing. She’s the Cadbury Scholar, studying the relation between mystical religious experience and mental illness. Also with Charlie Randall, who has written some fine poems, and Marti Matthews, ditto. Last night I read Wilde’s “The House of Judgment” at Epilogue (very few present) and today used it in ministry, emphasizing our need to be able to imagine the kingdom. This seems to have spoken to the condition of some, judging from comments afterwards. . . . More rehearsing with Dan. Then watched Clinton’s State of the Union address on TV. He was dignified and well received despite all the accusations of adultery.

Thursday, January 29, 1998

Liz’s tea on The Last Temptation was so crowded that we had to move to the library. Good discussion on the first assignment (pp. 1–65). All the right questions were asked. I had to restrain myself, not to explain everything at the start. My own re-reading has been pleasurable. I like the “thrust” I gave the English. But I’m also picking out a few typos and infelicities. The book jacket says: “200,000 copies sold.” Oh, if only I had royalties!

Friday, January 30, 1998

A lovely supper in a Thai restaurant with Liz, Dan, and Chrysanthi. . . . Danny Danforth has submitted a “commentary” on Lambropoulos’s attack on ethnography, and I solicited a reply from Lambropoulos. This issue of JMGS should be lively.

Saturday, January 31, 1998

Daphne, Greg, and Christina arrived, the baby healthy and effusive now, with a big smile and a sense of humor. They slept in Brinton 21, and we had the whole of Brinton House to ourselves after the baby slept. Discussed application to nursery school. Daphne has already discovered that various schools seem to attract rich ladies in diamonds. At 4:00 Dan gave us a marvelous and unexpected “cream tea”: scones, clotted cream, jam, and really good Earl Grey in his parents’ silver tea-service. Reminiscent of the cream tea we had with Daphne and Greg in Chelsea two years ago. Dan recounted his contact with George Soros, who’d been helped by British Friends and gave money to AFSC for a time. Dan told me that Gregory looks like Gregory Peck. And what a beautiful baby and mother. Wow! What a family!

Sunday, February 1, 1998

Went with Daphne, Greg, and Christina to Longwood Gardens—lovely, as always. They left, before PH lunch, after buying sandwiches, coffee, and French fries at Springfield Mall. In the afternoon, Chrysanthi and I went to the Brandywine Museum to see the exhibit of N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth, all illustrators, which is very different from true artists. Very disappointing, but the river is lovely. And so were landscapes of the Brandywine valley by other American artists, mostly nineteenth century. . . . Music with Dan after supper.

Tuesday, February 3, 1998

Long lunch with Kathryn Damiano, who had read my pamphlet on silence and wanted to talk to me about it. She is here to do “spiritual nurturing” and believes that silence—unbusyness—is a central part. She also helps people, especially older folks, cope with diminishment. We could perhaps bring her to Kendal.

Wednesday, February 4, 1998

I’ve been given a consultee, Laura Sherwin, who is here to direct the two youth programs in the summer. But she is just out of college (Earlham), inexperienced, and is frightened, indeed almost in panic. Also, she doesn’t get paid, although she gets room and board. I fear for the program. She also feels uncomfortable being in community. In sum, everything is wrong. How can I help her?

Thursday, February 5, 1998

Talked to Denny O’Brien and Anne Butterheim about Laura. They’re going to start her full-time stint now (with salary) and reduce her to half-time later. She’s overjoyed. . . . Went to staff meeting. They discussed Dan’s proposal for an extra hard look at tenure considerations in the fifth year. I told them how brevity of tenure was connected in the past with low salaries that made people leave of their own accord. But then they could get jobs elsewhere; now it’s much harder. . . . At 5:00, Liz’s meeting re: The Last Temptation. Another good discussion, much aided by Dan and also by Chris Ravndal’s knowledge of the Bible. I explained the change from Son of the Carpenter to Son of Man. . . . After supper, to town (South Street) with Caroline Jones, Christopher Miller, and Annie Milman. We were supposed to go to a café that was to hold a poetry reading. It was closed. So we went to another café, had dessert and coffee, and listened to Caroline’s and Chris’s poems anyway. Very nice.

Friday, February 6, 1998

To town again for inoculations for Indonesia. Caught 45 minutes in traffic standstill owing to an accident, but arrived only one minute late. Very helpful nurse in Travel Medicine department of U. of P. hospital. We got hepatitis A, polio, and tetanus/diphtheria. . . . Then to Temple University for luncheon for Van Coufoudakis. But his plane was delayed, so we ate without him. Nice to see some old friends again. Van came eventually and gave a splendid talk on Cyprus, answering many questions afterwards. He told me he has horrendous problems at home (he’s Dean of Faculty) because of his Provost. . . . Home quickly; a coffee in the Mall. Supper at Tom Jeniks’s table, his 50th birthday: pot roast and cheesecake.

Saturday, February 7, 1998

To town yet again. To the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They have five Cézannes and some Manets. Also lots of Duchamps including the “Nude Descending Staircase,” and some Brancusi, including his lovely “Fish.” But Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam,” supposedly inspired by the Iliad, was revolting. . . . Put Chrysanthi on AMTRAK to go to Washington to babysit for Sophia for a week while Deanna is on tour with the orchestra. . . . Long tutorial again with Jennifer Elam, helping her set up chapters for her book. Ditto with Marti Matthews yesterday. And met Harvey Gilman, here (with his male “spouse”) to lead a course on Outreach. I spoke in Meeting yesterday about Cupitt and about Tillich’s Courage to Be, saying that now we need the courage to be without a supernatural personal God. Gilman rose afterwards and invoked Erich Fromm’s book The Courage to Be Imperfect saying that we imperfect creatures do need a friendly palpable God and cannot be always satisfied with Tillich’s God behind God. . . . Tonight, at Margaret’s party (Greg’s birthday), I had a chance to talk further with Harvey and also with Lisa Sutton, who seems very moved by The Last Temptation.

Sunday, February 8, 1998

To Swarthmore Meeting. They sing hymns before silent worship, not to my liking. The Meeting was poor: too much “ministry,” none of it religious, all of it moral. Nice however to see Paul Mangelsdorf and Mary Ellen Chijioki afterwards. Yet in the coffee hour not a single person came up to me to say Hello. That’s a failing of many Meetings, although I hope we do better in Hanover. . . . Drove to Princeton in the afternoon; nicely installed in Palmer House Room 36. Finished Don Cupitt’s After God: The Future of Religion, a wonderfully stimulating book, and one that greatly encourages us to believe that process theology and (liberal) Quakerism are right for today’s post-Darwinian world. He advocates the “philosophy of as-if.” God does not exist (except as a human construct) but we can still act as if he (she) existed, ordering our lives as though in response to “eternal” considerations. There is lots of Nietzsche behind all this and lots of Kierkegaard (the how rather than the what); they are our modern gurus. He also sees—provocatively—God and Mammon changing places, with God inspiring people to be divisive and violent and hateful, while Mammon, incarnated in international corporations, inspires people to cooperate across ethnic and linguistic and religious barriers! Mammon “wants peace and stability, progress and universal prosperity. By contrast, God (especially in the Middle East) appears to have become a Moloch who demands ignorance, poverty, and war” (p. 122). . . . However, “To believe in God is to live as if under the eye of God, and to assess oneself and one’s world as from the standpoint of eternity” (p. 83). Amen.

Sunday, February 15, 1998

To Lia Bien Friedman’s daughter’s and son-in-law’s home in Bryn Mawr, where about fourteen were gathered, all cousins of sorts—Lia’s other daughter and husband and children, and her son and wife and children. Lia is Eddie Bien’s widow. We were reminded that Eddie died in Jakarta. Very jolly, extroverted lot. Older children in Germantown Friends School. Both husbands are physicians. Jonathan, the Bien son, is a banker, now unemployed (he worked for the Japanese bank that collapsed). They put on a sumptuous brunch: bagels and lox, etc. . . . Afterwards, went to Haverford College library—how lovely!—to get copies of the Kierkegaard anthology for my course.

Monday, February 16, 1998

Went with Liz’s class to the Quaker Collection in Swarthmore to see the original manuscript of Woolman’s Journal and travel diary. Very moving. Beautiful handwriting. Mary Ellen showed clear evidence of his change of style in the revision. Then we saw some scattered pages of George Fox’s very bad handwriting, almost indecipherable. They think he was dyslectic. . . . Met an interesting man, Ray Tretheway, from Sacramento. He knows Tsakopoulos. His mission, and work, is to convince cities to plant trees: the urban forest. He was evangelical in his conviction about the importance of this work. Another person, a pitch-black lady, is teaching a course on Islam this week. She’s jolly, with a beautiful smile. . . . At men’s group tonight we discussed sexuality. I confided what had happened after my operation. David talked about celibacy vs. promiscuity after a divorce. Mark recounted his affaire here—how satisfying it was. Tom grew hot about Pendle Hill’s “hypocrisy” in sexual matters and said that he thinks that Dan Seeger is a closeted gay and therefore so up tight about cohabitation. Mel told about his recent attraction to one of the ladies here. All very confidential. David asked me afterwards how I’ll argue when the trustees meet on Friday to develop a cohabitation policy. I said I’d probably be on the far left, certainly compared to Dan and probably also to Shirley. We’ll see . . .

Saturday, February 21, 1998

NYC

To Daphne’s after washing pots with Dan following breakfast. Daphne announced that she’s pregnant again. Due in September. I went to the Yale Club library, finished this week’s assignment in The Last Temptation. What a good novel! I really like my English! Then I began the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury, now very easy for me, and scintillating. I was so absorbed that I forgot the time and had to race back to Daphne’s in a cab. To a French restaurant on 79th Street. Prix fixe dinner for $25 (cheap in New York). Very festive and special. Then to Lincoln Center to see O’Neill’s Ah Wilderness, a splendid play about a rebellious teenager (O’Neill) reading Oscar Wilde, Ibsen, Nietzsche, in an up-tight upper middle class household in Connecticut ca. 1906. The ending is a bit disappointing (love conquers all difficulties), but all the rest is stirring drama. Very well acted and superbly directed. A treat.

Sunday, February 22, 1998

Bagels and lox for breakfast. Then with Christina to the zoo. She talks so fluently, repeating every word one says, even “elephant.” And she understands everything. . . . The 84th Street apartment is still not ready, but it’s getting close. Daphne hopes to have her kitchen by next Wednesday. After lunch, a quick tour of the Met with Chrysanthi: costumes (Gianni Verache) and impressionists, especially gorgeous Manets. Train back to Pendle Hill, Chrysanthi staying with Daphne until Wednesday. Two hours’ practice with Dan. Continuing with the Benjy section of Faulkner.

Thursday, February 26, 1998

Chrysanthi cooked a Greek meal for the whole Pendle Hill community. I went out and bought tarama and dolmadhes for everyone, all most appreciated, and baklava. Then I introduced Zorba and we showed the film, followed by discussion. People seemed to like the film, although inevitably some of the women found it sexist.

Friday, February 27, 1998

My consultee Laura Sherman is a “sad sack.” So agonized, so self-destructive. What a shame to see this in a 23-year-old. I feel helpless. She needs a magician, or maybe a trained psychoanalyst. . . . At lunch, accidentally met a professor at Ohio University, where John Baker’s $1.3 million is apparently being squandered. This professor confirmed what I’d heard, alas.

Saturday, February 28, 1998

Drove to Gap, Intercourse, and Paradise on the way to Millersville to sup with Jack Monger. Intercourse very touristy. Tawdry stuff, although we liked the shoe-fly-pie and the fudge. Saw lots of Amish in buggies, children walking wearing their distinctive hats. Dinner with Jack, Marie, his new “partner” it seems, after Carol McCormack’s death last year, and another couple (nice husband, φαφλατού wife) was lovely. Jack sculpts in wood very imaginatively. Showed us his “gallery,” indoors and out.

Sunday, March 1, 1998

Walk around Jack’s garden, very British. Then to Lancaster Meeting. 9:00 a.m. book discussion on Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son, told by Jesus in first person. People read it out loud, by turn, and sometimes commented. Meeting for Worship began with a woman in a wheelchair (stroke victim) emoting in self-pity for twenty minutes, breaking repeatedly into tears and then recovering. But the remaining ministry was sane and fine. A large Meeting with lots of children, not afraid to talk about Jesus. . . . I gave the forum, my subject being Kierkegaard’s aesthetic–ethical–religious. I called it “How to Be Happy.” The emotive woman, who really needs to learn how to be happy, kept calling out “Hear! Hear!” Afterwards, numerous questions. Jack said that it sounded like poetry and gave us three small sculptures. . . . Drove to Princeton, stopping at a railroad museum on the way. At 8:00 met with two sweet post-docs, both women, both historians, over a beer in the Nassau Inn, where we’re staying in an overheated room.

Monday, March 2, 1998

Princeton

Finished revising Lesson 11 with Dimitri and Mache. Then drove to Hightstown to Meadow Lakes to visit John C. Baker, age 102. He actually seemed stronger and healthier than when we last saw him at 101. Straight, lean, with perfect long- and short-term memory, good appetite. A bit hard of hearing and of sight, and very garrulous. But his long lucubrations always made sense (if you waited long enough). We stayed from 5:00 until 8:00, including supper. He greatly appreciates Dartmouth’s Peace Studies program and also the materials I sent him recently. He will give us another $25,000, hoping we’ll match it. (I was expecting more. Too bad!) Nice (and very long) stories about Andy Towl, President Lowell of Harvard, etc.

Thursday, March 5, 1998

Bethesda, Maryland

Drove to Bethesda with Dan Seeger and Chrysanthi to hear Leander and Ignat’s all-Schubert concert at Strathmore Hall. Nice to see Randy Testa there, also Leander’s student Steve, who turned pages. At 8:00 p.m. Leander and Ignat still had not arrived. They came at 8:10. It turned out that Leander had been on the toilet for an hour with diarrhea. But the concert went well, despite some page-turning confusion and Leander’s forgetting one repeat. Long Schubert fantasias (not the great F minor one, however), with every repeat taken. The final group, six marches, was the best. But by this time the piano had gone out of tune. (Fortepiano, rebuilt Schubert-era instrument.) They played with energy, excellent ensemble, and great attention to dynamics. But Schubert is really not equal to Beethoven. . . . Afterwards, to Fridays on Rockville Pike for Ignat to have supper and us to have snacks. Dan and Ignat squaring off about contemporary music. Ignat hasn’t done any CDs because the industry is in crisis, he says: decreasing sales, emphasis on the old war-horses, which he doesn’t want to do. (He wants to do the Diabelli Variations or the Goldberg Variations, bless him!) . . . Chrysanthi went home with Leander; Dan and I drove to our motel in Laurel, Maryland. To bed at 1:30 a.m.

Friday, March 6, 1998

Breakfast at McDonald’s, very tasty. Drove back to Pendle Hill in two hours with good conversation about Tuot, Dan’s foster son, a Cambodian Buddhist, and his Cambodian Christian wife, and their jobs, and mother, and adjustment to the United States. . . . Consultation with Laura Sherwin at 1:30; she’s still agonized with self-doubt. Spoke to Daphne. She has lost the baby! It just stopped growing at seven weeks. A blessing, says the doctor, since obviously there was a genetic defect. Daphne will have a D & C tomorrow. Given this development, she decided that she could, after all, go to Indonesia, but now she finds that the flights are all booked. She’s on the waiting list. . . . Book Committee at 3:30. Board after supper. Then the usual ice cream, only Dan invited everyone to listen to us play #6 of the Brahms, the most difficult one, and we both made a horrible mess of it. . . . Letter from Andreas Yiannakos, who finally unearthed Chrysanthi’s birth certificate and baptismal certificate from Terpni, birth listed of course as 10 May 1927 instead of 24 December 1933 because the Germans had to make her six years older in order to keep her in prison “legally.” But the name is given as Γιαννακούδη instead of Γιαννακού. So that’s the end of our long attempt to reestablish her as a Greek national, since Andreas says that we’d need to go to court in Serres to change the name back, at great expense, etc. This is surely something that Chrysanthi does not want to do, or to be reminded of.

Sunday, March 8, 1998

Leander, Deanna, and Sophia drove up from North Potomac, bringing Chrysanthi back. Sophia is so inert, especially compared to Christina. Very little life in her, very little vocabulary. Strange, since Leander is so demonstrative. Leander looked at the piano in Waysmeet and recommended buying a new one instead of trying to rehabilitate this one. Then he gave Dan and me a two-hour lesson, concentrating on the Brahms and Debussy. He’s a splendid teacher. Details! Details!

My course in Faulkner and Kierkegaard started at supper. Good group, including a Presbyterian minister, Tim Gardner, who is a hospital chaplain in D.C. and is from an old Southern family. Bobbi Kelly is in the course, too. Peter Folger, my student at Harvard in 1983, is in, as is David Harris, Dartmouth Quaker student, now a pathologist in the South. I started with my mini-lecture “How to Be Happy,” summarizing the Kierkegaarding aesthetic, ethical, and religious modes. Then we discussed Benjy.

Thursday, March 12, 1998

NYC

The course is going well. We finished Dilsey yesterday, spending the whole class on her and not getting to the Kierkegaardian religious mode. Chrysanthi and I rose at 6:00 a.m. and were in New York by 9:00. Breakfast at the Yale Club with John Rassias and “Dino,” the postmaster of Norwich and a member of John’s Commission. Chrysanthi to Daphne’s. Good briefing by John of concerns regarding the Commission. Dino very nice; went through Greek school himself and learned nothing. . . . Then to Daphne’s. Christina in fine mood. Their kitchen is finished, long and narrow but well designed, functional. The little office is also finished. . . . To the Archdiocese on 79th Street at 12:30. They told us that the Archbishop would be late because he had been in D.C. at the White House having breakfast with President Clinton. I chatted pleasantly with Vasos Papagapitos over glasses of champagne and hors d’oeuvres of shrimp—very grand. Then Spyridon entered. We all stood up. He’s very young, tall statuesque in his robes, not fat (yet). Doesn’t smile much; seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. He spoke well about the Commission’s charge, also about Clinton’s very professional handling of the morning’s agenda, which was to issue a proclamation supporting March 25th. Said that Iakovos had done nothing to support education and thus he hopes to change previous policy. Said he’d heard about me from people at Hellenic College, probably Fr. Chryssavgis. Said he aims to “turn Hellenic College around.” We then had a nice lunch served by waiters in tuxedos. Following this, Spyridon disappeared (lunch was preceded by the Lord’s prayer in English) and a grace in Greek, and followed of course, monastery style, by the Archbishop rising and offering another prayer. We continued with a business meeting of the Commission, with John explaining how it would work. The Archdiocese’s Director of Education expanded on the setup: how many schools, teachers, students, the textbooks used (mostly Loïsos), the training of teachers, in Thessaloniki, he says. . . . Left at 3:30 with Dimitri Gondicas. Taxi to Penn Station. Met Chrysanthi there. Got back to Pendle Hill just in time for the evening session of my course, open to the entire community. Margaret Frasier came, and Liz Kamphausen, and several students. Afterwards, one of them came up and said I was a “master teacher”! Bobbi Kelly said the course was a perfect combination on “content” and “affect”—since this session and tomorrow’s are devoted to how the students’ personal lives interact with either Faulkner’s material or Kierkegaard’s, or both.

Friday, March 13, 1998

Final session of the course. They asked to continue over lunch. I think it was a success. Great fatigue afterwards. I guess I was sustained by adrenalin. But after supper I had to introduce the Scorsese film of The Last Temptation, screened at Davis House. I actually liked it. It didn’t seem too long (it’s 2¾ hours). I must revise my derogatory remarks. Good question period afterwards.

Saturday, March 14, 1998

Haircut. Dr. Gerber said he preferred Dow Jones to Paula Jones! Out for supper with Evelyn Siegel’s brother, Nick Schefer, and his wife Anne, a Freudian psychologist. Beautiful home next to a stream. I told Anne about Laura Sherwin and she felt sure that she could be helped by therapy; gave me a brochure that I’ll pass on to Laura. Lots in common. She majored in music at Bryn Mawr. We both had Goodale. I told her about Swann, whom she did not have. It was good to unwind with Scotch and wine and a good dinner, after my course. . . . Earlier today Dan and I played a run-through for Liz and Chrysanthi. It went fairly well.

Sunday, March 15, 1998

To Hanover

Last real practice with Dan. It’s going better and better. Lovely talk on the telephone with Selen Ünsal, who’ll tell her parents in Istanbul about Alec and Monica’s visit. Also, she knows trustees and the president of Robert College, which interests Alec, I think. Dan drove in his car, I in mine, to 30th Street, where I parked. Then Dan delivered me to the airport, a lifesaver. I’m bringing a huge valise home to ease our congestion in the car when we return on March 31 (God willing). . . . There was a squirrel in our house last week. Mary Rassias called; thought an earthquake had hit it. Lamps overturned, all bibelots scattered, and it ate through the quilted window shade in the bedroom. Mary left doors and windows open, and it apparently exited after about three days’ captivity. With luck a cleaning lady set things right by yesterday.

Monday, March 16, 1998

Hanover

The house is fine, except for the quilted shade by my desk—eaten through. And one Ritsos stone carving seems to be missing. But entering it after such a long absence, I felt that we are so much better off in three rooms, as at Pendle Hill. The accumulated junk in the house—no, not junk, of course, but yet it all is so unnecessary. Depresses me. Huge box of mail awaiting, plus another huge box at the office. To Mother. Found her sitting outside of the dining room, next to Richard Eberhart, holding hands. Afterwards, she told me, “He has a crush on me.” “Do you like that?” I asked. “No.” “Does he annoy you?” “No, he doesn’t annoy me.” Ate lunch with Mother (Richard always sits by himself). Hard to make conversation, but we did exchange maybe twenty sentences. She’s still quite corpus mentis, remembers people, etc. Afterwards, I gathered together her IRS documents (in the pile of unopened mail) and took everything to Frank Currier along with my tax documents and also, for the first time, those of the Terpni Partnership. Its income, about $2000, was nicely balanced by its expenses, about $2300, so there will be no tax to pay.

Tuesday, March 17, 1998

Hanover

To Lyme Inn for Kendal Board retreat. Going in, I felt that my time on the Board should end, that I’m losing interest. But the presentations in the morning and discussion in the afternoon were so interesting, I wonder if I shouldn’t stay on. A dilemma. John Diffey presented a new “Shared Services” fee plan, very poorly written, and totally unsatisfactory to us. He had egg all over his face, since he wasn’t even very familiar with the document (written, it seems, by Bill Yost). So, we got nowhere on this issue. But we did have some good ideas regarding possible charitable outreach by Kendal. . . . Flew to New York late. Overnight in the Yale Club. The “retreat” was disappointing because only half of it (the morning) was really a retreat; the rest was business.

Wednesday, March 18, 1998

NYC

Lunch at the Harvard Club with “T” Jewett, who in effect was interviewing me, I suppose, for a position on the American Farm School Board of Trustees. It was a cordial encounter and the result was positive; she said she’d put me up for a vote at the May meeting. The October meeting will be in Greece. I told her I was interested in, and somewhat experienced in, board functioning. She intimated that they have difficulty: old timers who run the show. We’ll see . . .

Thursday, March 19, 1998

Pendle Hill

A busy day. At 11:30 I read my “How to Be Happy” paper to a large audience—the three Kierkegaardian modes. People seemed very interested and appreciative. Then at 3:30 Dan and I performed! Brahms, Debussy, Dello Joio, and Schumann’s “Träumerei” as an encore. I was very nervous, shaking more in the foot than the hand (at least). Played some of the waltzes well enough, but lost my place in the one with the triplets and had to “invent.” But all in all it was “acceptable” (for amateurs), I suppose. The piece in seven sharps brought gasps and Bravi. . . . At 7:30 a lovely “Meeting for Learning” with everyone in a large circle in the candlelit barn, worship-sharing mode. I felt very privileged to be part of this community.

Friday, March 20, 1998

Packing. Saying goodbyes. Washing pots with Dan. A good Meeting for Worship. At night, “Log Night,” including a skit about my yellow gloves, which were transmogrified into a huge bow-tie. Laughter all around.

Saturday, March 21, 1998

Philadelphia–New York–London

Dan drove us to the airport. Bad start. Plane delayed. Confusion. All other flights booked. Then they wanted to send us to JFK by limousine, with little chance of arriving in time. Finally the plane arrived. We got to JFK too late for the 7:50 Air France flight. Air France couldn’t rebook us until Wednesday. Luckily, I called American Airlines, responsible for the delay, and they booked us free of charge to Paris via London. Then there was the question of our suitcase, booked to go on Air France. The Air France office was due to close at 9:00. No bag. Then luckily they advanced the closing to 9:30. At about 9:15 they found our suitcase. More vicissitudes to get to the American terminal. Still more exchanging our Air France ticket for an AA ticket. But we flew successfully to Heathrow.

Monday, March 23, 1998

Jakarta, Indonesia

Sunday: Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle. How nice to find our valise again. Then Air France to Jakarta via Singapore, 16 hours. Singapore airport is so beautiful, with indoor gardens. Alec and Monica and Leander met us at the Jakarta airport, new since I was here in 1990, and quite beautiful. Also a new road. We drove to the Omni Batavia Hotel, built by the Dutch, newly restored and quite resplendent. An arrow on the ceiling of our room points toward Mecca, so Muslims will be able to orient themselves correctly when they pray. Monica radiant and beautiful. Alec evidently very excited about the forthcoming events. Yesterday he and Leander spent a day at the beach, a five-hour trip across the island, to the south coast: the Indian Ocean, over scary roads, through villages with scores of men just squatting by the roadside, idle and unemployed, with that oriental inertia and placidity that one sees (or at least used to see) also in Greece. A lovely dinner at the hotel, and amazingly cheap: about $25 for all five of us, including drinks, soup, hors d’oeuvres, entrée, dessert, coffee. And an orchestra came over and played at our table: popular songs requested by Monica and Alec. We spoke about Rev. Haskin and the sort of marriage counseling they’d received. I asked Monica if she and her parents had spoken frankly about the likelihood that she will leave Indonesia. They had. Like Chrysanthi’s parents, they will be happy if their daughter is happy. How nice! . . . We unpacked, showered (it’s between 90 and 95 here), watched CNN on television, and slept at 11:00 p.m. without feeling any appreciable jet lag, thanks to “feast–fast.”

Tuesday, March 24, 1998

Jakarta

Sumptuous breakfast at the hotel. Then Alec’s driver, Rico, picked us up. Long ride on the ring road to NJIS. Meeting with Michael Doughty, headmaster, and Larry Balli, the school’s founder, plus lots of other teachers, secretaries, etc. “Alec’s mother and father!” or, more properly, “Mr. Bien’s mother and father.” Students in their uniforms: blue shirts and khaki pants. All races, colors, shapes, sizes. Visited various classes. They seem to use the progressive method mostly, with students working in teams and teachers circulating. Only once did we see the traditional method, with the teacher “lecturing” in ESC class about the definite article, and it seemed sterile and fruitless. Alec appears to know each and every student by name, and many parents. One parent came to the office and presented him with two gold wedding rings. . . . Michael and Larry took us out to lunch at a nearby mall, very fancy, with the business manager and the chair of the board. Explained their fear that in June they may lose 200 students, which will mean breaking teachers’ contracts. Already they are not replacing teachers who decide to leave. However, Larry especially says he believes in this country. It has every resource, immense wealth, potentiality. He just bought a car at a ridiculously low price and is building a house similarly. They hope to build a new school on adjacent land, a school for Indonesians, especially those who are returning from abroad. Of course the government has to change its present policy. The prohibition against Indonesians attending the foreign international schools derives, apparently, from the government’s fear that 80% of the places will be taken by the Chinese-Indonesian minority. Larry says they’d have to impose quotas and give scholarships to lower this enrollment to about 50% (the Chinese are only 5% of the population). In any case, if the school gets built, Larry says that Alec would be the ideal headmaster. So, obviously, some plans are already being developed to bring Alec and Monica back. . . . After lunch, we circulated to various schoolrooms participating in the science Olympics—projects in which teams of students competed, for example to build the tallest tower with toothpicks and jellybeans (teaching them triangulation and not to eat the jellybeans). Best of all, we went to a class learning gamelan and were invited to participate. So, for ¾ of an hour we banged the proper chimes on one for the gamelan instruments, guided by a native instructor. Whereas our music (and life) has a beginning, middle, and end, the gamelan music seems to go nowhere, perhaps round and round, repeating and repeating and repeating, until (in a way) exhausted. It was fascinating to do this with the instructor showing what to strike, and how many repetitions. . . . School ended at 3:00, and eventually Alec took us to his apartment nearby, a new complex with tennis courts, a pool, fitness center, air conditioning—very nice. Leander was there, working on his composition. He’d had diarrhea and vomiting last night, owing to mussels eaten at the hotel. But now seemed better. At 6:00 we left for downtown, a long ride with crazy traffic—cars and trucks of all sizes, motorcycles darting in and out. No traffic lights, no lanes. But we managed. Finally arrived at the World Trade Center, very new, posh, and Western. Monica came with her mother, young and chic, but doesn’t speak English. Up to 18th floor to the fancy Athletic Club, all paneling and ostentatious wealth, with a view of the whole city. We were guests of an Indian family with two boys in the school, a 3rd grader and a 6th grader. The father is in the export business, exporting to Africa. He had been in Kobe, Japan, for 15 years; left a few months before the earthquake. They like Jakarta very much and idolize Alec, whom they say sets the entire tone of the school, filling it with love. After drinks, we all drove to the Hotel Sahid Jaya, where I’d eaten on my 1990 trip, again to the 18th floor, to the Shah Jahan Indian restaurant. Gorgeous décor, waiters in traditional dress, etc. Our host ordered a huge dinner of traditional appetizers, then chicken and lamb curry, drinks made with yoghurt, etc., and ending with a chocolate cake with writing in confectionary: “Well came [sic] to Professor and Mrs. Bien”! Hugs and kisses all around, multiple thank yous. Back to the hotel at 10:30, stuffed and very tired.

Wednesday, March 25, 1998

Jakarta

Slept quite normally last night, whereas the night before we were both awake at 1:00 a.m. and restless from then until 7:00. Last night just like home; jet lag is over. . . . Rico the faithful driver picked us up. First stop: maritime museum, very dilapidated, in a huge warehouse-type building constructed I think by the Dutch. Models of boats, photos of the old Batavia. Actual canoes, maps, stuffed fish. Pictures of the slave or quasi-slave labor employed by the Dutch: the clove trade and nutmeg trade (these were the “Spice Islands”). Various reminders of the Dutch East India Company, here from the 1600s until 1945. They had a monopoly on tea until around 1815; all British tea had to be purchased at their auctions in London. What have they left here? Canals, and bitterness. . . . Then Rico drove us out along the quay where dozens of small ships were moored, all loaded with sawn lumber. In each case, scores of men, like coolies, were unloading the boards two at a time carried on their shoulder, with padding beneath, over boards serving as precarious gangplanks, and placing them in trucks. And this in the 95-degree heat and sunlight of mid-morning. Poor souls! No fork-lift trucks here. . . . Then downtown to the National Museum, a Greek-style building very poorly maintained, but filled with Buddhas, Shivas, rich textile, pottery, etc. Most interesting are the models of village-style houses, ungainly monstrous birdlike things on stilts. The museum was filled with schoolchildren in uniform, a group of which tried out their English on us and then insisted that we pose with them for a photo. Beautiful, smiling faces. The artifacts are primitive; none of the glory of the old Greek art or the delicacy of the Japanese. . . . Back to the hotel. Chrysanthi went off shopping with “Mary” for the school. I spent the afternoon in the hotel, after a sumptuous lunch. I’m reading galley proofs for JMGS 16/1. And yesterday an e-mail from a contributor reached me here (!), sent by Ann Fenton in the English Department. . . . Alec came and we went downtown again to a sumptuous hotel for the March 25th reception hosted by the Greek ambassador. On the receiving line, parents of a student in NJIS, very familiar. Lots of good food. Another world. People of all nations, very sophisticated, in the midst of squalor. Met the Consul General, who’s been in Indonesia since 1940. I asked why. He told me, “When Mussolini invaded, I decided it was a good time to leave.” So he avoided the το έπος της Αλβανίας, την Κατοχή, civil war, and Junta, but was interned here for two years by the Japanese, a horrible experience, he told us. . . . Then to Café Batavia for supper with Monica, very fancy. Western-type restaurant two blocks from the hotel. Walked back, crossing the fetid canal, reeking of sewage. A world of contrasts. Oh, in the Café Batavia, a birthday cake for Leander. But he has diarrhea, so wasn’t too interested.

Thursday, March 26, 1998

Leander is now at the hotel. Leisurely breakfast. He told us that Mary Watt asked him to lead the chamber workshop. Temptation, if it weren’t for his old nemesis, Jerry Bidlack. He hopes that Ignat will join the faculty of the piano workshop. . . . With Alec, across the city to a village-like neighborhood and, unbelievably, a store specializing in pearls. Chrysanthi bought a string of cultured pearls for herself and another for Daphne. Total price, with the clasps, about $40! . . . Lunch at the Hilton Hotel on the way back. Another gorgeous spot, full of palm trees, like Hawaii. But back at the hotel, after calling Air France to confirm our return flights, I discovered that I was missing the tickets for AF006, Paris to New York. They must have been taken by mistake in New York or Paris. Desperation. Telephone to Air France office. Faxes to them of the tickets in our possession plus the itinerary issued by the travel agent. The lady will tel-ex NYC and try to get authorization to reissue the tickets. What a mess! I must be losing my hold. I’m ordinarily so careful about such things. . . . Also, we discovered that Alec had the wrong information abut the Busecks’ arrival yesterday. Rico waited for them in the airport for four hours. And we cancelled one trip today to the tea plantations, not knowing when they’d come. Now we learned that there is no plane from Seoul on Wednesday. They were meant to arrive today, all along. So, another driver is there waiting for them. And we went off to NJIS to see the school’s talent show. “Not much talent,” as Leander remarked later. 90% of the participants were girls, dancing—mostly rock and roll—but one little girl, the daughter of an Australian teacher, did ballet. Some comedy skits, very poor violin playing, mediocre piano, etc. And one tiny tot, in kindergarten, I think, belted out a song from a Broadway musical. Cute children. Most embarrassing was the staff person who sang a song about Jesus. She’s a born-again fanatic and insensitive to the multi-religious nature of the school. Alec says that her contract was not renewed. When reprimanded for proselytizing in school, she told Alec, “Who should I listen to, you or God?” Afterwards, Larry Belli introduced me to an Indonesian gentleman married to a Spaniard, whose three boys opened the program with a rock band. Poor parents, if they practice at home! The man is in the Assembly and is one of the negotiators with the IMF. I suggested to Larry and to next year’s principal designate that they ask the Indonesian staff, also, to perform, applying Quaker principles of equality. . . . Afterwards, we gathered Alec’s belongings from his apartment, including the wedding certificate, and all returned to the hotel, where we found the Busecks, newly arrived from Korea. Long supper, and bed, with continued worry about my lost tickets. (Earlier, I’d asked the Hanover travel agency to fax its copies of the missing tickets.)

Friday, March 27, 1998

Good news from Air France. They’d agreed to restore my ticket for a $75 penalty per person. Rico drove everyone first to the Air France office, where Alec and I met “Ya-ya,” the woman who had helped me, and secured, thankfully, the missing coupons. Then to the church where we’ll rehearse later, and across the way to a huge department store whose fourth floor is devoted exclusively to Indonesian handicrafts: batik, leather, wicker, woodcarvings, silver work. I bought a wood carving of Hindu gods, a little jewelry box for Chrysanthi in silver filigree, and a batik tie for myself to wear tonight. Ridiculously cheap prices. The tie, for example, cost about $6.00. A quick meal in the food hall in the basement, like Union Station, with fast food stalls of all kinds, bursting with people. Then back to the church. Rev. Haskin is a lively 70-year-old. Met Monica’s father, wiry, very Chinese-looking; brother Edwin, who is art director for an advertising firm; sister Fiona, in 9th grade, and an uncle. It’s frustrating not being able to talk to Monica’s parents, but Edwin has very good English. Also present was “Bob,” leader of the brass band that will perform. Leander tried out his Ravel, his own piece, “Pastiche,” and is very unhappy about the lousy un-tuned piano. Haskin put us through an hour and a half’s exhaustive rehearsal, with pelting rain outside. Let’s hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow. Finally, back to the hotel driven by Rico in one of the NJIS vans. Along the way, Monica told us that workers in the Eveready Battery factory here earn just over $1.00 a day. . . . Exhausted, probably from nerves mostly, napped. Then dressed for the rehearsal dinner. About 30–40 people in a private dining room in the hotel. Chinese food, elegantly served. Our group: Chrysanthi, me, Alec, Leander, Alice and Peter Buseck. Their group: grandmother, Mrs. Dewi, 7 siblings with spouses and some with children, Fiona, Edwin, father and mother, some of father’s relatives, an aunt from Melbourne, someone from Borneo, Alec’s friend, an American who is now principal of the Pakistan School in Jakarta, Dr. Haskin and wife. I sat between Haskin and Monica’s uncle Lukas Widjajanto, who deals in laboratory instruments and chemicals and has traveled to the US. On Haskin’s other side, another uncle, Goenedi Hadiwidjaja, a stock broker, very interested in the fact that Greg works for Goldman Sachs. Haskin delivered a long grace in Indonesian. Leander made a good speech, translated by Haskin. I, jokingly, remarked at one point that the translation seemed twice as long as the original. He spoke of the high-rise office blocs and hotel in Jakarta as representing know-how and sophistication, whereas the poorer sections represent stability, endurance, acceptance, and he praised Monica for embodying both virtues. Afterwards he told me that he had planned nothing; it was all improvised on the spot. I felt relieved that, although having made speeches and lectures all my working life, I didn’t need to do so any more. Uncle Lukas also spoke at some length, translated by Alec. Haskin told me his “history”: how he and his wife came here in 1962, I believe, after finishing a D.D. and being ordained into the Presbyterian ministry. Ever since he has enjoyed being “a big fish in a small pond.” Now they’re thinking of retiring back to America. I told them about the CCRC concept and promised to send full information after I return to Hanover. Monica was beautiful in a fancy silk gown and scarf. All in all, a relaxed, pleasant occasion, with enough interchange despite the linguistic barriers. But in the room afterwards Chrysanthi was obviously in a bad mood and I finally got her to voice her disturbance: “All those Chinese!” Yes, it would be nice if, as with Greg’s mother and family, we could have better connections with in-laws in Leander’s case, and now in Alec’s. But the important thing, obviously is not that at all, but the long-term compatibility and happiness of the couple. . . . At 11:00 p.m. we men went to the bar for a beer, and then wearily to bed.

Saturday, March 28, 1998, Alec’s wedding

At breakfast, Monica’s father sat with us for a bit, and we learned, with Alec as translator, that the family has been in Indonesia for 14 generations. Yet they’re still considered an alien minority, and there has been no intermarriage. Alec reminded us that the cleavage is more Christian–Moslem than Chinese–Indonesian. Some of the family are thinking of emigrating, but the father is conservatively attached to Pentalongon and determined to stay, regardless. Alec said that they have no insurance. If their drug store is burned down or looted, they’ll be ruined. Already there was an attempt at arson, but the father was present and able to control the fire in time. Now, out of fear, they no longer sleep in the same building as the store, leaving the business all the more vulnerable to harm. . . . This was a long, exhausting, meaningful day. After lunch we all paraded to Monica’s room, where she was with her parents and family. Alec knocked ceremoniously three times and the door opened, accepting the groom. There was Monica, resplendent in her wedding dress, train, and veil. Then the large wedding party was transported, again by NJIS vans, driven by Rico and another, to the church. In the vestibule, the civil ceremony took place. Alec and Monica sitting at a table, with Leander on one side and Edwin on the other, facing a woman judge. She orated at length, had them sign various papers, had us sign them, too, and after half an hour or so pronounced them man and wife by civil law. By this time, the church had begun to fill up. I helped arrange the certificate on its table; we had to paste it down with masking tape to overcome its curl. Right on time, at 4:00 p.m., the service began, with us parading down the aisle and sitting in the first row. A full brass ensemble then played a rousing wedding march for Monica on her father’s arm. The service was excellent, about one and a half hour long, partly because everything had to be said in two languages. A student choir from the Christian university sang beautiful anthems. Leander played Ravel, and then a “Pastiche” specifically composed for the wedding. There was a Quaker silence, admirably introduced by Rev. Haskin. I ministered on the meeting of east and west, doing vs. being, music that goes somewhere vs. music (e.g. gamelan) that seems to struggle to no nowhere, creating a steady-state. It’s silly, I concluded, to think that Monica will display the Eastern qualities, Alec the Western. Each of us combines east and west, just as we combine male and female, in varying proportions. Yet this is a meeting of east and west. Let’s hope that Alec and Monica, each of whom, when alone, is incomplete (as all of us are) will combine to form a completeness of east and west. . . . One of the most moving moments in the ceremony was the “Honoring of Parents.” Alec and Monica first embraced her father and mother, then Chrysanthi and me, with plentiful tears flowing. At the end of the ceremony, with the brass sounding the wedding march again, all the principals had to stand in a receiving line at the back of the church, shaking the hand of everyone who exited (after signing the Quaker certificate). Along came Marianna Kotopo, our old acquaintance from Woodbrooke. And of course many NJIS teachers whom we knew, and that Indian who had hosted us, and Michael Doughty and Larry Belli, and Alec’s old roommate, Andy, from 1990, with his Indonesian wife. Rev. Haskin, afterward, told me that this was the best wedding he’d conducted in his entire thirty-odd years in Jakarta. Why? I wonder. Maybe because of the music, and/or his respect for Alec. . . . Rico drove us back to the hotel. A quick wash, and then to the ballroom. Hordes of people, about 500, I believe. More photos–photos–photos. Alec, Monica, Chrysanthi, I, and Monica’s parents on the dais for the opening toast. Then cutting the cake. Then a toast by Leander. Then food. The people rushed to the tables. Alec had invited all the NJIS staff: drivers, cafeteria workers and the like among others. I got engaged in so many conversations, when I finally got a place all the food was gone: only a little rice left. But I had a beer. More singing from the college choir, very secular now. At around 10:00 o’clock everyone had left. A great festivity, filled with gentle, graceful people. Too bad that Daphne couldn’t have come. . . . Finally, very tired, back to the room: to pack for tomorrow, and sleep.

Sunday, March 29, 1998

Singapore

Up at 5:45 a.m. Everyone down for early breakfast. Rico drove us all again to the airport: Leander, Alec, Monica, her parents, two uncles. Hugs, goodbyes. Will we ever see them again? Unlikely. But Edwin, Monica’s brother, says he’ll come in July . . . Routine flight to Singapore. Taxi to Raffles Hotel, the famous place that hosted Conrad, Kipling, etc. We decided to walk a bit. But the heat and sun were oppressive, so we took refuge in a huge air-conditioned mall. Singapore is antiseptically clean. We saw a street cleaner removing two little twigs from the gutter with a pair of calipers. But there is a certain sterility in all this modern perfection. At 3:00 we returned to Raffles, drenched in sweat. Jasmyn Chelich was waiting for us. She’s a great talker, about her psychological counseling, about Singapore’s history and politics, about joint acquaintances from Woodbrooke. At 4:00 we went to the famous Raffles tearoom for high tea, and were joined by Jennifer Lien, a Dartmouth grad who is now a journalist in Singapore. Wonderful spread of savories and sweets, all elegantly served. Jennifer is flourishing—just received an award for “best younger journalist of the year.” Her specialty is electronics, especially computing. Afterwards, Jasmyn took us to the Anglican cathedral where her father had been head deacon. A service was just finishing. Nice to see the cathedral so full and lively. She introduced us to her friends the bishop and archbishop in their regalia. All Chinese, of course. Then she left us and Jennifer took us in the modern, immaculate subway to Orchard Road, the chief shopping street. Spectacularly beautiful because lined with native trees. Teeming rain began, but Jennifer knew a place to get a taxi without going outdoors. Long queue, but finally we were returned to the airport. Leander took a shower; I was led thoroughly through this airport that caters to one’s every need. Boarded Air France 257 at 10:00 p.m., very very tired.

Monday, March 30, 1998

Paris–New York–Philadelphia

Routine flights. Enough time in Charles de Gaulle Airport to have a good croissant and real French coffee and to buy Chrysanthi some face cream. Also leisurely switch at JFK to American Eagle. What a difference from the trip from Philadelphia. Went to visit Dan after supper. Hospitable as always, he offered tea, and cheese and crackers. Long description of our adventures. He also gave me the video from our performance. Nice to see others at Pendle Hill, too. Everyone very welcoming.

Tuesday, March 31, 1998

Pendle Hill–Hanover

Slept well. Amazingly, no jet lag. Drove home in eight hours, delivering the electronic piano upon arrival. Supper in Murphy’s, full of students, very noisy. Piles of mail again. Met Erica Thrall in Sanborn. I’m still “Professor Bien” to one or two students. Not for long, though.

Wednesday, April 1, 1998

Lunch with John. He’s planning the Commission’s first meeting in Boston at the end of May. . . . My proposal for a Berlin conference next October was accepted. Should I go? Not clear. But it’s a chance to see Berlin, I suppose. . . . Supper with Mother, who looked well, was at her best mentally: well aware of the wedding. Lots of people greeted us merrily at Kendal.

Thursday, April 2, 1998

I started my ILEAD class on Ulysses. Class overbooked. Includes Tom and Nardi Campion, Leonard Kent, Dr. Barrett, Mrs. Broehl. We did introduction and Telemachus, right on schedule. I had to explain laboriously what Joyce means by asserting that we are all usurped, existentially.

Friday, April 3, 1998

To Providence, Marriott Hotel

Drove to Providence for the “Consortium of Language Teaching and Learning” conference. Again in a hotel! This is rather pleasant. Peter Patrikis, head of the Consortium, is very effective as a discussion leader. He’s a Harvard Ph.D. in comparative literature who couldn’t get a teaching job and luckily found this. People from Columbia, Brown, Chicago, Cornell, Queens, Princeton, and Dartmouth. Each described what we do. Then a lavish dinner. Good to have a chance to talk more with Dimitri Gondicas.

Saturday, April 4, 1998

Providence

Another full day of discussion about resources for teaching Greek. I stressed the need for a web site. Another lavish dinner. Kazazis and I talked at length. This ultra-humorous man is (as is often the case) a very sad man. Disastrous first marriage. Two daughters, one of whom refuses to speak to him. He considers himself a failure. Sad.

Sunday, April 5, 1998

Providence–Hanover

Easy drive home. We’re worried about an obvious leak in the drain pipe from the upstairs toilet.

Monday, April 6, 1998

My annual physical with Dr. Gerber. Very healthy, except for cholesterol. He wants me to consider taking pills that may cause hepatitis. . . . Plumbers here to fix the pipe, which needs to be replaced. Luckily, it’s accessible from outside on the back porch. . . . Trying to get permission from Kedros for Ricks’s essay on Sachtouris. He got angry at me (again) and I felt (again) that I ought really to give up the journal. Enough is enough. And Dan Seeger called, urging me to complete the sexuality queries, needed for the Pendle Hill personnel committee Friday week. And Lewis Owens needs a recommendation. And Dia needs an update for her census. And Dartmouth wants me to write to a Cypriot student who has been accepted. And the Arsenault family telephoned from Johnsburg: Cara is accepted to Dartmouth and can’t decide between it and Middlebury. They’re coming next week. I need to arrange classes for her, etc. And Susan Kogan pulled out from the May 9 Webster concert, the bitch! And I’ve secured a performance of a ragtime band at Kendal in June, thanks to the Hop. And . . . and . . . Telephoned Christos in Athens: Where is the translation of my Καπετάν Μιχάλης essay? He said it was mailed επείγων, but so far it has not come.

Wednesday, April 8, 1998

Resumed music with Dick and Allan. Mozart, Bach, Bridges, Haydn. Last night John came and we wrote the Commission questionnaire and one Μια ματιά for the Greek book.

Thursday, April 9, 1998

Second ILEAD class. We did Nestor and Proteus. A long time, again, talking about usurpation.

Saturday, April 11, 1998

Daphne, Greg, and Christina are here. Greg flies off to Hong Kong tomorrow. We went to Helene Rassias’s pre-baptism party for her son Matthew, age two months and so tiny. What a miracle that she was able to bring this child to term, thanks to in-vitro fertilization.

Sunday, April 12, 1998

Western–Eastern. Very strong meeting for worship. One ministry spoke of Christ’s despair at Eli Eli lama sabachthani. I ministered, saying that this constitutes a necessary precursor to the reaffirmation that came with Τετέλεσται. Sophistry, perhaps. But how “authentic” it is that the Gospel includes the cry of despair, and in Aramaic? Sarah Putnam, our clerk, was so moved by the Meeting that she could barely speak afterwards when she needed to make announcements. She extended a warm welcome to me (Chrysanthi stayed at home, cooking lamb for our Easter dinner). The Muncks came for dinner and Dick Williamson and his lady friend from New Jersey, Susan (who is strange), and of course the Tebbes, including Christina, who behaved well.

Monday, April 13, 1998

John Hennessey and Margery Walker took me to lunch to discuss whether or not I’d continue on the Kendal board. I decided to end my service, after about fifteen years. So my last meeting will be in June. If I’m elected to the American Farm School board I’ll want to do that with vigor, but not be overloaded. And I believe in Quaker rotation of responsibility. . . . The Arsenault family is here from Johnsburg. Cara has been accepted in Dartmouth and Middlebury and is trying to decide. Gene, the father, is the banker, a native, son of the electrician who died so tragically in his burning truck. Never went to college. The wife is an import, more sophisticated. Gene surprised me by saying how grateful he is for the “flatlanders” who have settled in North Creek and that they never would have had all the present development without these newcomers. We had the family to dinner. I’ve set up various meetings, classes, etc., for Cara.

Tuesday, April 14, 1998

An American Farm School trustee telephoned. Barbara Barnes (ex Putney School head) recommended Alec to them for headmaster. So we faxed Alec to send his résumé. The trustee is going to arrange an interview with George Draper and a Greek trustee when Alec is in Thessaloniki on April 20th. What a pleasure it would be if he got this job! . . . Worked with John for several hours improving the questionnaire that the Commission will send out to teachers, students, and parents. . . . To Kendal to have supper with Beveridge, Franny, Michael Webster, and Mother. Bev looks terrible. His left eye is inflamed. Franny’s stroke has destroyed her memory. Michael has cleaned out their apartment. They’re both in the health center. So sad.

Wednesday, April 15, 1998

Met with Lynda Boose and Leonard Rieser to try to understand how to deal with Michael Mastanduno, head of the Dickey Center, regarding the War/Peace endowment. Leonard suggested that I ask John Baker to write a letter stating his expectation that the endowment be used for courses, for curricular development, precisely what Mastanduno refuses to do. Nice to see Leonard again. He says that we all must have supper together.

April 16, 1998

To Pendle Hill

Taught ILEAD (Calypso, Lotus Eaters, Hades) and rushed to Manchester Airport. At Pendle Hill, immediately to Dan’s to play Schubert, Mozart, and Samuel Barber. I felt truly “at home,” entering Pendle Hill again. Nice to see so many familiar faces and be greeted so warmly by various people.

Friday, April 17, 1998

Pendle Hill

I’m writing this in the Springfield Mall, eating ice cream at the end of a long, busy day. Good talk with David at breakfast. He said that the offering on gossip has been interpreted by several women as anti-feminist. Alas, alack! . . . Cadbury Scholarship Committee at 10:30. We chose Patricia Loring, an easy choice over the two others. . . . Publication Committee 12:00 to 3:00. We chose one of the three: Lucy Medner’s on Quakers and death, reworked the third time. In some free time I wrote a letter to Daniel Carson vetting his new play, which is still pretty weak (poor fellow), but I couldn’t say that, and tried to encourage him. Supper with Glen Hinson, author of the Steere biography, and Nancy Strong. Book signing afterward. Then we all drove to the Quadrangle to honor Dorothy Steere and Douglas’s memory. Dan spoke, then I reminisced about Douglas’s tough grading of my Kierkegaard paper, his cell groups, the breakfast that Alec attended, Alec’s help in taking them to the Quadrangle, and Dorothy making all the decisions. Then I read from “On Listening to Another” as an example of Douglas’s best style, which combined anecdote with abstraction. Hinson spoke at length about writing the biography. Mary Hoxie Jones reminisced. And Dorothy spoke well about their life together. All this was then completed by a song, a round, with words honoring Dorothy. A very moving exercise.

Sunday, April 19, 1998

Princeton

More piano with Dan last night. “Our” Schubert and Barber, which is meant to go very fast, alas, and then some more Schubert, sight-reading. Long leisurely supper last night with Caroline Jones and Doug Gwyn, in the middle of which Jan Greene presented me with yellow rubber gloves, to replace those “purloined” last term in order to be converted into a bowtie. . . . This morning in Meeting I ministered again, beginning with Larry Ingle’s projected book on Nixon as Quaker, then recounting the extraordinary egotism of Lyndon Johnson when I was at the White House, and contrasting this self-importance with the atmosphere of Quaker Meeting, where we hope to “be moved” rather than to move, and to sense our infinitesimal role as pawns in the great chess game played by God. This was then taken up by Marti Matthews, who spoke of the humility of Pope John XXIII, and by Chris Ravndal, who spoke of the less hierarchical and egotistical role of teachers in the Pendle Hill style “meeting for learning.” A good, centered Meeting. . . . Then drove Larry Ingle to the airport and continued on to Princeton. I’m in Room 40 at Palmer House, way in the back, with toilet in the hall, but I view the huge, very green lawn out the window. To Joseph Henry House for Greek Easter: lamb and goat on the spit, wine, potatoes, taramosalata, etc. The Fagles were there, and Mike and Mary, and Tasoula Karakasidou, and 50 to 75 others. Spoke at length with Mike about Alec’s candidacy for the American Farm School directorship. Apparently this search is still wide open, since the two top candidates they produced in phase one of the search are not acceptable to everyone. Alec’s interview with George Draper should be tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Monday, April 20, 1998

Dimitri and I went over lessons 11 and 12 yet again. Δεν έχει τελειωμό! Mike Keeley is very solicitous regarding Alec; wants to be kept up to date so that he can report accurately to the AFS board when it meets in May.

Wednesday, April 22, 1998

David Ricks and Mike Keeley read various translations of Cavafy poems, with commentary. Very effectively. But I wish they’d read mine of “31 B.C. in Alexandria.”

Thursday, April 23, 1998

Hanover

Alec reports that he is not interested in the AFS headmastership because it will involve him in fundraising and dealing with trustees, not in day-to-day contact with students or with involvement in curriculum—the aspects that he fancies. So that’s the end of that. . . . I gave the inaugural lecture for the Dartmouth Hellenic Society, repeating my “Inventing Greece.” Debate afterwards about the virtues or evils of nationalism. Not a word, strangely, about what I said regarding the Church.

Friday, April 24, 1998

Howard Wriggins, former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, and his wife Sally took me out to supper in order to talk about enhancing the Quaker influence and consciousness at Kendal. I said that Admissions is the key. We hope next to speak to Leonard Cadwallader.

Sunday, April 26, 1998

Chrysanthi and I took Zdenka Tot out to dinner. She now owns a car, and is about to get her Green Card. Sends money every month to her family in Croatia—cash.

Wednesday, April 29, 1998

Michael Groden came to Dartmouth to demonstrate his “Hypertext” Ulysses, a marvelous concoction via computer, enabling each and every person now to access photos, to hear songs, to listen to Ulysses as read by Irish voices, etc. Many came from my ILEAD class.

Thursday, April 30, 1998

Groden attended my ILEAD class. I did “Joyce Music” plus Flanders and Swann. The students had much trouble with Ulysses being both linear and cyclic. How can Bloom be different at the end of the day (asking Molly to get him breakfast) yet at the same time be “everyman” who is going to be born again into another Typical Day on the morrow? I explained that complication is what Joyce hopes we will accept.

Saturday, May 2, 1998

To Cambridge, driving Ellen Baber there to see her daughter. Chrysanthi and I went to Robert Brustein’s play Nobody Dies on Friday, about Lee Strasberg, his family (dysfunctional), and Marilyn Monroe. Really about the curse of celebrity. Alvin Epstein played Strasberg; I’ve never seen Epstein act better. The role was perfect for him and he for the role. And what a good, “well-made” play, showing me how poor Daniel Carson’s latest effort is. The gift of the play was that Strasberg, although a selfish ogre, is never presented as a cardboard devil; one sees the “human” side, and inevitably sympathizes to a degree, despite everything. Good theater: what a pleasure! . . . Supper in the Riverside Grill in Enfield, the first time in 25 years, and it’s still the same.

Sunday, May 3, 1998

In Meeting I ministered about the contradiction of linearity and cyclicality in Joyce, combining it with Isaiah Berlin’s differentiation between relativism and pluralism. Quakers are accused of being relativistic, believing in everything and therefore in nothing “absolute.” But why can’t many absolutes coexist plurally and in contradiction? My hope is that we are pluralists rather than relativists. . . . Finance Committee afterwards. I’m to be the new treasurer, starting now.

May 5, 1998

Hanover

An interesting day. Breakfast at the Hanover Inn with Jennifer Lien, who was so nice to us in Singapore. She’s doing a series of articles on chip manufacturers in Silicon Valley, but is beginning to feel somewhat trapped by her eight-year commitment to the Singapore newspaper. She has five years to go. . . . Lunch with Elizabeth Mazzocco, Stavros, Chrysanthi, and John, after which they demonstrated their laserdisc for Modern Greek. Surprisingly, John liked it, as did we. We’re hoping to be able to incorporate it in our new Demotic Greek package as a supplement. . . . Then worked on my lecture in Greek on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης for Sweden. Also on an essay by someone else on Joyce’s use of Modern Greek; I was asked to check the Greek. Then sat for an hour in Kiewit while Randy Spydell tried, so far unsuccessfully, to make the Scusi work on my computer. He promises to get it working tomorrow. On the way home, a long talk on the street with Peter Cosgrove and a shorter one with Rogers Elliott, and then a free ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s. They do this once a year, and had issued over 2000 cones already today.

Friday, May 8, 1998

NYC

American Farm School board meeting at their offices, Broadway and 26th Street. Finally met Patty Chamberlin, who was so patient with me when we had such trouble with tickets last October. Since I won’t be voted a board member until tomorrow, I simply sat in as a guest at the committee meetings. George and Charlotte Draper expressed pleasure at meeting Alec and Monica. The capital campaign chairwoman, Mimi Lowry, is a dynamo; she supervised a successful campaign netting almost $7 million. But the school strikes me as very vulnerable. If they didn’t get an almost $2 million subsidy from the E.U. they’d be in a mess. The dean of the new college, Vangelis Vergos, reported on successful placement of its students as interns, because they know English, computers, etc. better than Greeks graduating from the state universities. There was talk of adding a fishery component. Much complaint about George Draper’s budget, which obscured important information. (Mike told me at Princeton that Bruce Lansdale was almost incapable of fiscal management, although very capable of raising money.) All in all, the trustees seem capable. They range from a rather young AFS graduate to a very elderly head of finance who appears to be a retired CEO of some large corporation. Also John C., a British agriculturalist married to a Greek. The chair ran a good meeting: Mr. Thomas, from Cincinnati. We joked about everyone except him being east of the Hudson. I assured him that I was one and a half miles west, at Riparius. All in all, a friendly lot, apparently pleased to have me join them. Mike Keeley wasn’t there because he and the search committee were interviewing candidates for the headmastership. Saw him afterwards at the cocktail party at the Harvard Club, which Chrysanthi attended with me. I said I’d probably be most interested in the college and also perhaps in editing the centennial books that are proposed. I’m not sure that I’m very excited about this new service—less so than my Quaker services and Kendal. (A propos, Dan Seeger called yesterday to see if I might be willing to serve as clerk of the Pendle Hill executive committee if I’m asked. Well, I suppose so.) The AFS’s next meeting will be at the School, in October, for three days.

Spent an hour or so with Christina; she is a dynamo. Never walks, always runs. And for the first time she said, “Mommy, pee,” sat on the toilet, dribbled a bit, and flushed the toilet. After the cocktails, returned to 84th Street for supper. Greg, supposed to go to Carolina to play golf, called from Newark to report cancellation of his flight, so he joined us, too, for supper. The apartment is beginning to look “civilized” now. The dining room set and the living room furniture arrive next week. I’m waiting for paintings on the walls . . . and a piano.

Saturday, May 9, 1998

Up at 5:45 a.m. but really since 2:00 a.m. because of the infuriating siren of a car whose burglary device somehow got turned on. I flew back to Manchester while Chrysanthi took the train back. Went to Brenda and Everett Marder’s in Quechee for lunch. Brenda will need a good translator for Stewards of the Soil, and perhaps I can help her through my contacts: Christos Alexiou and/or people in Θεσ/νίκη. She also needs to find a way to republish this and, together, the second volume, which will take the story from 1950 to the centenary (2004). I suggested publication by advance subscription. Everett hopes to retire from his law practice in about two years and then set himself up as a legal consultant in Greece while Brenda is in residence at the Farm School. . . . Just time to collect mail in Hanover. Off to Kendal for the “gala concert” celebrating Beveridge Webster’s 90th birthday. Nice dinner beforehand with the three pianists who came: his former students Andy Rangell, Monica Jakúc, and Bill Black, and the committee (Barbara Rice, Sally Pinkas, Fred and Connie Landmann, Sandy Sanderson), and Wendy Ardizzone, Bev’s daughter, and her husband. Michael Webster couldn’t come but he wrote a nice paragraph that I was able to quote in my opening remarks, in which I said that I hoped we could bring the Fund up to $50,000, and concluded by saying that the music tonight would establish both a link with the past, because the three pianists had studied with Bev at Juilliard, and a link with the future: our Bev. Webster Performance Fund’s enhancement. Each pianist spoke about memories of Bev, very warmly. Andy played Haydn and Albéniz, not very well, alas. Monica did three Debussy preludes from Book 2, including the spectacular Feux d’artifice, all “fireworks.” Bill did Chopin’s 4th Ballade very competently. But, strangely, none had the magic of Bev Webster and the je ne sais quoi. Afterwards, birthday cake and punch. Many nice comments. And a large birthday card with the program printed on it and beneath the signatures of all present, more than a hundred. It was really very nice. I feel that he has added such a spiritual dimension. There isn’t enough that we can do in recognition. And he’s still a punster. Andy remembered two examples: (1) “One memory loss is a lapse. Two memory losses are a relapse. Three are a collapse.” And, when Franny was given a scholarship at Oberlin because she played half a dozen instruments and also sang, Bev called it a “band-aid.”

Andy spent the night with us. His hands are better, almost. He’d like to do a full program in Hanover, perhaps as a benefit for AFSC. He showed us his latest children’s book, with charming illustrations and a very cute text about a boy who has extraordinary powers of hearing. And he is thinking of another about a creative spider who spins all sorts of beautiful forms into its webs but never catches any flies in them: the creative, impoverished artist.

Sunday, May 10, 1998

Hanover–Philadelphia

Nice to see David French at Meeting after a long absence. . . . Worse news from Indonesia with more and more riots, also violence against Chinese-Indonesian shop-owners. I sent an e-mail to Alec but he hasn’t responded yet.

Monday, May 11, 1998

Göteborg, Quality Panorama Hotel, 031767 70 70, www.panorama.se

Arrived at Göteborg via Philadelphia and Paris. Bo-Lennart’s wife, Anita, poor thing, had a stroke and wasn’t able to appear. She continues to be unstable: dizzy, etc. This has slowed down her writing career, which was very successful (books for children and young people). I lectured on “Reminiscences of a Translator from Modern Greek” to his students, undergrads and grads, about 20 people. Not much discussion afterwards but it wasn’t entirely dead either. Afterwards, supper with Bo-Lennart, one older student, a Cypriot-Greek, and two younger ones, all women, a Swede and a Greek-Swede, charming people. Conversation exclusively in Greek. Walked back to the hotel. What a civilized city: every sidewalk has two lanes, one for pedestrians, the other for bicycles, clearly marked. The main streets have trams. No congestion, no pollution, no traffic jams. Trees and parks everywhere.

Tuesday, May 12, 1998

Göteborg–Stockholm

The hotel breakfast puts ours to shame. Ten different kinds of bread. Cold cereals galore, with apricots, raisins, and yogurt. Eggs, bacon, sausages. Fine marmalades, Liver pate, salami, ham. Juices, different kinds of coffee. The hotel is full. Sat with two Germans attending a business conference on chemicals. Asked about the euro, etc. The older man worries about lack of border controls allowing all kinds of undesirables to enter Germany, where they steal, etc. The younger one had faith that such problems would be solved, and realized that the old national separations no longer make sense economically. . . . Flew to Stockholm. They don’t even assign seats in the plane; there are always enough, it seems. A land of myriad lakes below, and forests, and very few people. Even Stockholm, which does have an occasional line of cars waiting for a red light to change, is uncongested. My hotel room looks out on a park and right now I’m watching four beautiful blonde girls about 14 years old practicing gymnastics. After Eva Hedin left me here I walked to the Strindberg Museum, which is housed in the flat he was occupying when he died, and retains the original furniture. There are some splendid portraits of him, too, looking very fierce and “artsy.” Walked further downtown, to various shopping streets, one of which, in front of the Concert Hall, has a splendid large statue of a gun whose barrel is twisted pretzel-like, obviously making it inoperative as a gun. And in the mouth of the barrel are flowers. . . . The lecture was much more fun here than in Göteborg because there were many good questions afterwards about Kazantzakis’s theatrical career in general, although none about Nikiforos Fokas in particular, because of course they hadn’t read it. A nice man in the front row is a theater person and doing an essay on Kazantzakis’s drama, so he knew Capodistrias, Buddha, Melissa, etc., also Sodom and Gomorrah, which he says is heavily influenced by Η θυσία του Αβραάμ. Nice dinner afterwards in a Greek restaurant with Eva Hedin, this man (a Swede), Eva Bronman, another Swede, and a lively Greek lady from Cephalonia.

Wednesday, May 13, 1989

Stockholm

A long, interesting day. Eva, Eva, and Mimi came at 10:00 a.m. after I’d had breakfast, again with Germans opposed to the euro and with a nice Austrian from Vienna less opposed. We went off to the new Museum of Modern Art, at my suggestion. Such a lovely building, on an island, in the majestic harbor of this city. A small collection, quite representative of abstract impressionism, the latest installations, plus an odd Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian. Each room has a sort of square window that frames the outdoors, converting it, too, into a work of art. Several rooms exhibit Swedish artists, mostly derivative: cubists, impressionists, etc. It was lovely to see groups of Swedish school children. One was gathered round a half-abstract, half-realistic statue of a nude woman. When the guide brought the children around to her back, one of the boys, about seven years old, shouted “rummpa”: rump! . . . Afterwards we walked to the National Museum to have lunch in the Atrium restaurant. Fried fish, vegetables, potatoes, wine. Lovely. And of course good conversation throughout. Then in the car again to the king’s deer park, set aside as a recreational area, where we had coffee and strudel in the sunshine, surrounded by tulips. . . . All this was lovely, to see this beautiful city on such a perfectly sunny day, with everyone out, enjoying the first earnest of summer. But then we got hopelessly caught in traffic—which I thought didn’t exist in under-populated Sweden. Got to the hotel at 5:00. Left again at 5:30, this time in a taxi and again got stuck in traffic, in part because someone had shot someone else, and a street was filled with police. (I thought that crime didn’t exist in Sweden.) Reached the university at 6:05—not bad. Then couldn’t find the lecture room. Then almost got stuck in the elevator. But was able to start my lecture on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης at 6:09. My Greek felt awkward to me, alas. At the end, Anna, a lecturer who does Greek here, said rather vehemently that in effect my interpretation is entirely wrong: a rationalizing interpretation imposed on a work dedicated to surpassing rationalism. She sees Mihalis as a paradigmatic Dionysian figure, a κουζουλός, just what Crete needs. I know that Mihalis actually says this in the book. But that doesn’t mean that we are convinced. We went back and forth, I being somewhat limited by my Greek, but finally I suggested that the whole fun of literary criticism is to have multiple, even conflicting, interpretations. Afterwards, she came up with a big smile and hugged me. . . . Jan drove us home—the man interested in Kazantzakis’s theater, this time mercifully without traffic. I dined alone in a Chinese restaurant and went to bed early, since Eva is coming to meet me tomorrow at 6:00 a.m.

Thursday, May 14, 1998

Stockholm–Philadelphia

Eva showed at 5:50 a.m. We had a leisurely breakfast at the airport. She seemed genuinely pleased about my visit, including the nice day of sightseeing yesterday. Routine flights: Stockholm–Amsterdam, Amsterdam–Philadelphia. At Pendle Hill, supper with Rebecca and with Marcia Prager, a rabbi who is teaching a joint course with Rebecca on the Hebrew and Christian Bible. Big hug from Mrs. Barnes. Happy to learn that Suzi Morrison was hired by Friends Central School to teach English, indeed hired by every school to which she applied, but she chose Friends Central. Off to Roadside for a committee meeting on cohabitation policy: Mary Ward, Dan, Shirley Dodson, and me, Ted Brinton absent. Generally they agreed with my approach using queries instead of rules. But the queries were modified somewhat, placed in a different order, and pruned. I’ll type up a clean copy tomorrow for presentation to the board.

Friday, May 15, 1998

Pendle Hill

The Times this morning reported total chaos in Jakarta, with mobs burning, looting, and killing, especially in the Chinese enclave in North Jakarta, precisely where Alec is, but also downtown where the big hotels are—i.e., where Monica works. But the international companies have shut their doors and are trying to evacuate their personnel. Yet the road to the airport is impassible because mobs stop and destroy vehicles on it. Alec’s school must obviously be shut, since students cannot be transported across the city. The violence is aimed (a) at ethnic Chinese, which means Monica’s parents, of course, and the Suharto family holdings. I haven’t been able to come in touch with Alec yet because I don’t’ have my e-mail capacity here. Will try to get through by telephone. The State Department has advised all Americans to leave. But Alec is no longer alone; he is married to a Chinese-Indonesian, and Monica will obviously be worried about her family. How dramatic that all this is happening only two weeks after our happy time there for the wedding!

Saturday, May 16, 1998

NYC

To New York by AMTRAK after Pendle Hill board in the morning. Stayed overnight in Daphne’s apartment (they’re in London). To the Princeton Club for a long, leisurely supper with my Bronx High School of Science comrades: Arthur Kaledin, Freddy Mann (and young wife), and Philip Oppenheim. Gene Girden couldn’t come. Norman Mack chose not to. Alan Schleifstein has changed his name and couldn’t be located. All these people look young, vigorous, and prosperous. But Arthur is lame, walks with crutches but gets around very well. He’s a retired MIT professor of history, yet still teaching some courses, and working on a book on Tocqueville. Fred is a retired advertising executive who seems to have made lots of money; they had the Pfizer account. Seems to have been married more than once—older children but now a young wife. Poor Arthur was divorced by his wife after 42 years of marriage and now lives alone in Cambridge. Buzz Oppenheim is a retired schoolteacher. We were all very compatible, talking about the present as well as the past. But it’s interesting how vivid some of the past memories are. Arthur, for example, remembered “Adolph and Harriet,” and the fact that my father drove us every day to Queens Plaza subway station. Also lots of memories about tennis where I, as happened at Brant Lake Camp, seem to have left behind a conviction of excellence (!). I told them that the best thing I ever did was to leave Bronx Science because at Deerfield I was encouraged to devote myself to literature (by Mr. Hatch, especially), something that never happened at Bronx Science. And I told Arthur that equally good for me was the change from Harvard to Haverford, because this led me to Quakerism, and Quakerism to Chrysanthi, and Chrysanthi to Greek literature. Arthur said he agrees that Harvard in our day “had no soul.” He hopes that Chrysanthi and I will visit him in Cambridge.

Monday, May 18, 1998

Boston

More news from Alec and Monica. They now have tickets to leave tomorrow, arriving in D.C. on Wednesday. Let’s hope. I asked if Monica was reconciled to leaving. Alec said she was sad, because she had planned originally to have a week at home with her family, but that her parents supported her early departure under the changed circumstances of all the violence and political chaos of last week. Good! Let’s hope, however, that she doesn’t become homesick once she’s here. Chinking a log cabin, going to the ballet, etc. will all seem rather frivolous compared to the momentous events in Indonesia, not to mention the danger to her family.

I drove to Hellenic College in the afternoon for the first hearing of the Rassias Commission. Fellow Commissioners were John, Peter Patrikis, Sol Gittleman (provost of Tufts), Demosthenes (the Norwich postmaster), and a Greek professor from MIT: Nikos. Good audience. Lots of teachers, some parents, the priest in charge of education in the Boston area. Various people spoke at length, and with passion, about the massive problems they face, chiefly lack of support by parents, who use the Greek schools chiefly for cheap babysitting; indifference on the part of the students (and even on the part of seminarians in Holy Cross), grossly inadequate pay, lack of benefits, inadequate teaching materials, inadequate or non-existent teacher-training, etc., etc. A huge lament. They seem to have faith that the Commission will do some good, stressing that actual results are what are needed, not just a fancy report (of course!). What surprised me was the total lack of resentment or anger toward us. I had assumed that we would be threatening and that teachers would proclaims their expertise. Quite the opposite. They viewed us with gratitude and hope, after proclaiming their failures.

Tuesday, May 19, 1998

Princeton

Slept last night in the airport hotel. Got up at 4:50 a.m. to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight to Philadelphia. Arrived at Joseph Henry House, ready to work, at 9:35, only five minutes late. A productive morning, correcting lesson 5. Lunch with Gonda Van Steen, who is visiting. She’s doing well in her new job at Tucson. Felt very sleepy during our afternoon work session, but stayed awake. Then napped from 6:00 to 8:00, and had a hamburger at the Nassau Inn bar. Trying to hear the latest news about Indonesia. A huge demonstration is scheduled for tomorrow.

Wednesday, May 20, 1998

The demonstration was called off, for fear of bloodshed. What’s next is anybody’s guess. . . . Worked well with Dimitri and Mache, entering all the corrections through lesson 9.

Thursday, May 21, 1998

Miracle: at 11:00 p.m. last night—that would be May 21 in Jakarta—I heard that Suharto had stepped down voluntarily and that Habibie, the vice-president, became president. So, a nonviolent revolution, or at least the beginning of one, since Habibie is a Suharto crony and not trusted. But this is a tremendous change. The students are jubilant. . . . Good class on Ithaca and Penelope with my ILEAD students. But Molly does puzzle them. Why doesn’t she have children, they ask. . . . After supper, Bruce Koloseike came to instruct me in the use of “Quicken” for the Meeting’s treasury. It’s an amazing piece of software.

Friday, May 22, 1998

Breakfast meeting at Dirt Cowboy with Sally Pinkas, Connie and Fred Landmann, Lisa Mayer, Barbara (the pianist), Sam Samuelson, and Sue?, planning next season’s Webster concerts. I’ll try to book Nigel Coxe. Bev Web is probably finished, has terrible incontinence. Barbara says he always stinks. What a shame! . . . Can I possibly learn the Dvořák pieces and Barber in time for Leander’s workshop? A real challenge. . . . Rick Taylor, General Maxwell Taylor’s son, whom I haven’t seen since 1948, telephoned to see if I was going to the Deerfield reunion. How nice of him! I remember my visit to his family when his father was commandant at West Point—quite an adventure for a seventeen-year-old.

Saturday, May 23, 1998

Cambridge

To the A.R.T. for Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, freely updated of course. It was pure pleasure, starting with a chorus of nurses in full uniforms (but with miniskirts) doing a sensual dance, Argon farting throughout, lots of fun about enemas, extravagant songs about health imitating Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, etc., and outrageously inflated rhetoric pronounced by the undesirable suitor, Thomas Diafoirus. Even “Viagra” made it into the script, as well as the ultimate curse: may he roast in an HMO!

Thursday, May 26, 1998

Princeton

Working with Dimitri, looking at other MG texts to get ideas for ours. Yesterday, coffee with Mike Keeley, who astonished me by telling how the Farm School lost $25,000 trying to arrange for the Hyatt Corporation to buy Farm School land and build a hotel . . . and casino! The deal fell through; venture capital lost. . . . Tonight to Hightstown to sup with John Baker. He has a new scheme. Will give us $50,000 if we name the War/Peace Endowment the Jean Monnet Fund. A good idea, actually, since Dartmouth gave Monnet an honorary degree in 1961 and since the W/P money is in the Dickey Endowment for International Understanding, precisely right for Monnet. Also, other money might come our way after this change. So now I need to talk to Mastanduno, Boose, Jim Wright, Jim Freedman, etc. in order to get back to Baker. Involved also is our common friend Andy Towl, who is in touch with the Monnet professor in the Harvard Law School. Of course, it was Towl who brought Elise Boulding, Leonard Rieser, and me to John and Elizabeth Baker. Baker kept saying how good we’d been to him (we thought he’d been good to us). Dartmouth apparently was the first institution to make the Bakers feel that their peace efforts might work.

Thursday, May 28, 1998

My last ILEAD class. A very fine concluding discussion. One student even said that the role of Homer’s Athena is played by language—a brilliant insight. All in all, the students seem satisfied and grateful. They asked when I’d be teaching another ILEAD class and I said I hoped I’d be strong enough to say No. . . . Dick came for supper, bringing a bottle of wine for my birthday, which is also Christina’s. We played Mozart afterwards.

Friday, May 29, 1998

Riparius

Up early. Breakfast at the Woodstock Inn. Arrived at the farm around 11:00 a.m. to see Leander’s completed house, really very nice, and of course Alec and Monica. Pinky is putting in Alec’s bathroom, and will be doing the kitchen next week. We started planting the garden after lunch, using the Mantis tiller I bought last year. Around 3:00 p.m. a storm, heavy rain, and loss of electricity. We were supposed to eat at Shapiros’ but they couldn’t cook, so we all went to the new Italian restaurant in North Creek and had ravioli and spaghetti, huge portions, most of which we took home, hoping our current would be restored. It wasn’t.

Saturday, May 30, 1998

Still no current. I set up my office, got the tractor running, repaired the flush mechanism on the toilet. Nice interlude in the morning. We all went down to Riparius for a coffee at the Caboose. Alec and Monica recounted some of their adventures in Greece, and the train ride from Thessaloniki to Istanbul. . . . Off to the Narrows with the Shapiros for pizza. Still no current when we returned at 9:30. But NiMo promises restoration tomorrow. We did fine all day, filling the toilet from the old well when needed and cooking hamburgers on the fire outside.

Sunday, May 31, 1998

The electric came on at 3:30 a.m. after a 36-hour outage. Well, not so bad as the 104-hour outage after the hurricane a few years ago.

Monday, June 1, 1998

Hanover

Nice supper at Sweet Tomatoes with Leonard and Rosemarie Rieser. He is still advancing and retarding the Atomic Clock at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in Chicago: alas it was retarded recently owing to India’s and Pakistan’s atomic tests. I’m hoping that he and Michael Mastanduno will visit John Baker sometime in Hightstown; perhaps there will be something in Baker’s will for War/Peace Studies. I’ve written him that Dartmouth is willing and happy to change the endowment’s name to honor Jean Monnet. We’re waiting for Baker himself to specify the exact title.

June 4, 1998

Saw Kate Porter (now Kate Porter Burke) at a meeting at the Tucker Foundation to discuss criteria for a new chaplain. She and Alec used to play clarinet-violin sonatas. She’s now chief student dean, a very sweet lady. I’m hoping that she and Alec will visit when Alec and Monica come next week.

June 7, 1998

Riparius

We decided spontaneously yesterday to have another weekend at the farm. Good weather. Leander and Deanna arrived with Sophia, to enjoy their new house. Sophia already points to it and says “Thofia howz.” Leander gave me a good lesson on the Bizet and Barber.

Friday, June 12, 1998

Deerfield

To Deerfield for my 50th reunion. Housed in Rosenwald Dorm. Rosie was there, repeating the story of how he promised the dorm on the condition that it be occupied only by girls (Deerfield was still all boys). The trustees voted co-education the next year. Saw Laird Barber in the dorm and had a long chat in his room. His wife is desperately ill, a housebound invalid, alas. Probably if she died it would be a blessing for all concerned. At the reception and dinner tonight I saw Bob and Penny Binswanger of course (Bob organized the reunion). He wants to speak to Alec and help him in his job search. Sat at dinner between Bob Johnston and his wife. I hadn’t seen him since 1951, probably. He’s a lawyer, chief counsel for Squib for years but left because of disagreement with a new management team. Now in private practice near Princeton. Most recently helped preserve 400 acres of forest that the Institute of Advanced Study wanted to sell and environmentalists wanted to save. Wants me to call him when I’m in Princeton, to have supper. Said he had contact with no one from Deerfield and sent his own children to public school on principle. The others I’d hoped to see didn’t show: Tom Wilson, Howie Burnett, Steve Baran, although Steve Baran sent greetings via Charlie Drinkle. The saddest part was the reading of the necrology: Dick Aldrich, Eric Verrill (class president), Tom Moore, and about 20 others. It’s good to be alive! Some of our masters were there, too: Mr. Walbridge, master of Manning House, where I lived; Mr. Suitor, Mr. Bohrer. Amazing! The new headmaster, Eric Widmer, spoke, preceded by his very lively Indian (East Indian) wife, who apparently teaches literature at Brown and now also part-time at Dartmouth. Chrysanthi didn’t like her because she spoke mostly about herself, although very engagingly. The headmaster discussed what is different and what is the same. He bravely noted Mr. Boyden’s deficiencies: no interest in the arts, for example (they now flourish at Deerfield).

Saturday, June 13, 1998

Kinhaven

Breakfast at Deerfield with some alums. Then we drove to Kinhaven. I’m in Leander’s four-hand piano workshop again. My partner is Alice Buseck (Dan couldn’t come). We’re doing Bizet (from the Children’s Suite), Barber “Pas de deux” from “Souvenirs,” and Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance no. 3. Chrysanthi will stay until tomorrow. Ditto for Deanna and Sophia. Alice and I had a splendid lesson with Leander, all on the Barber. What was just a collection of notes now has a chance to become real music. After supper, Leander and Ignat played Schubert beautifully (and how much more attractively on Miss Mann’s modern Steinway than on the Broadwood at Strathmore Hall). Ignat and Mrs. Shin played Schumann’s “Pictures from the East” poorly (Mrs. Shin’s fault, not Ignat’s, of course). Monica and Alec arrived in time to hear it. Afterwards, cheese and wine and good talk. (Leander and Ignat lay awake talking until 4:00 a.m.) Ignat’s fiancée, Caroline, is here, a 4th year medical student at the University of Vermont, and very pretty. A Catholic, she plans to convert to Orthodoxy.

Sunday, June 14, 1998

I had a very good lesson on the Dvořák from Ignat, a sensitive, brilliant teacher. Our three pieces are sounding better, although technically I still cannot play the final four bars of the Dvořák at breakneck speed. In the afternoon master class, Mrs. Shin’s was boring, Ignat’s scintillating, on Haydn’s Variations in F, played by Kit Van Winkle. Alice and I practiced separately and alone after supper and then talked in the living room about Ireland, which she and Peter hope to visit this summer. I told her not to miss Bewley’s Café.

Monday, June 15, 1998

Bits of sunshine this morning. It has rained steadily since Friday. At breakfast Mrs. Shin told how when she first got Ignat as a student, aged 8 or 9, he couldn’t play a C-major scale. Two years later he was playing the 2nd Beethoven piano concerto. Alice and I had our coaching this morning from Mrs. Shin. Very useful both technically and interpretatively. But I still cannot play the last three bars of the Dvořák most of the time up to speed. Fine master class. Bruno played Fauré and was coached well by Mrs. Shin; Steve played Beethoven’s magnificent Opus 90, such a deep, tragic work, and was coached brilliantly (as expected) by Ignat. In the middle, I had to wait for a phone call from Greece. A reporter from Τα Νέα wants to interview me. We’ve set an appointment for Wednesday. Good talk with Kit at supper. She’ll speak for Leander at the Kinhaven Board meetings. Also informative talk with Bill Rhodes, a retired A.I.D. official. He considers that the international formula for a crisis like Indonesia’s does make sense.

Tuesday, June 16, 1998

A full, pleasant day. Rose at 6:30 a.m. in order to practice, yet again on the last 5 bars of the Dvořák. Run-through with Alice at 8:30; still doesn’t sound right. We resolved to do the ending at 108 instead of 132. Practiced some more. We were first on the program. Barber went very well. Bizet was certainly satisfactory. And even the Dvořák went well, although I got confused very briefly owing to the syncopations that Ignat stressed. But the ending was perfect. Introducing the piece I warned the audience that the Dvořák might be transmogrified into the ending of Mozart’s “Musical Joke.” But, happily, that did not happen. . . . Stayed only 20 minutes longer; heard a nice rendition of Ravel’s “Beauty and the Beast.” Then drove to Hanover to be in time for the Kendal Board, my last meeting. A full agenda, very interesting, with plans for new construction, and splitting the Cadbury Fund into three separate funds, and resolution, finally, of the financial arrangement between us and the Kendal Corporation. At the end of the meeting Margery read a beautiful citation about my contribution over the years, since this was my last meeting after 14 years’ service. I spoke briefly about past and future. Re: the past, how Jim Strickler alerted me to Doris Ferguson’s fervent desire to keep her land out of Dartmouth College’s clutches. Re: the future, that the crucial area is admissions, to attract a quality of residents to match those who have come so far.

Then we all went down to the area just outside the Gathering Room for a “tea” with residents. Here, again, Margery spoke about my contribution, and then I was presented with a gift, a large box. I unwrapped it. It seemed very light. Soon it became clear that there was nothing in it, nothing, that is, except a photo of a beautiful chair on order for me, with the Kendal logo imprinted on the back. . . . Various people came up to say nice things. Then I went to see Yiayia. She had just started supper, so I joined her and the lady who always sits at her table. Strange: why is it that people at this stage never talk to each other? It can’t be hearing, because both heard me when I tried to make some conversation. . . . Then to my study in Baker Library to collect JMGS and other materials to take to the farm. Back to 12 Ledyard for more materials. Alice was there, beaming. Said that Leander and the others had declared that our playing this morning was the best of the whole lot. Especially the Barber. But also the Bizet and Dvořák. Alice ecstatic. On this happy note I drove to the farm, arriving at 11:30 p.m. to find Leander, Alec, and Chrysanthi waiting. Leander repeated this judgment, very warmly. To bed at 12:45 a.m.

Wednesday, June 17, 1998

Riparius

Getting settled. Worked on Beaton’s JMGS article. Rain most of the day. The 7th day of uninterrupted rain. The small cellar in Leander’s house is flooded and he is very worried. Alec has put one window in his addition and is chinking it. Also did nice paneling in the bathroom. . . . We all had a leisurely supper, talking about the Indonesian mess.

June 20, 1998

Nice long supper at the new Copperfield bistro with Mary and Maureen, followed by continued conversation at their house. Politics, philosophy, religion, North Creek gossip. Maureen accessed Indonesian news on the internet, which we printed out for Alec and Monica.

June 21, 1998

Shapiros for supper. More talk about Indonesia with Monica. Her family has no cultural connection at all with China. They’ve been in Indonesia for 14 generations.

June 22, 1998

A hot, muggy day. I worked eight long hours getting Middleton’s essay ready for JMGS. After supper we all opted for the Caboose for ice cream, watching the swollen Hudson River run past. Back home, Alec and I tried Mozart’s violin-piano sonata no. 15, which we decided to practice. The slow movement is ethereally beautiful. I’m doing better and better on the piano. Of course the four-day workshop helped immensely. I really should take lessons regularly.

Tuesday, June 23, 1998

NYC

Up at 5:45 a.m. Drove to AMTRAK Albany-Rensselaer station. Easy 2½ hour ride along the Hudson. Started reading Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, which I’m reviewing for World Literature Today (already a month overdue). Entering Penn Station and the New York subway after a morning among 1,000,000 trees is an experience. Exhilarating in a way. . . . Lunch at the Yale Club with John Rassias, who had just returned from a meeting with His Eminence. The Commission is very meaningful for John and he kept insisting that he needed my involvement at every step, which of course he has already received. We feasted on lamb chops to fortify ourselves for tonight. . . . Then went to the Strand Bookstore on Broadway at 12th and bought a 1988 Encyclopedia Britannica for Alec’s house, at $350. . . . Then to Daffy’s for a new shirt and tie for tonight. Then to the Yale Club barber. . . . Our hearing began at 6:00 p.m. at the Archdiocese’s center on East 74th. Everyone was there except Vasos. I reached him in his office. He was about to come when he received news that his cruise ship’s generators had failed at Karpathos and he was frantically flying people out to remedy the situation. So we’ll miss him. The hearing went well; about 50–60 people, many teachers, one school principal, some parents, some priests. One of the priests came up and asked me to autograph my “Introduction to Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Ritsos,” which he’d just bought in Greece. The principal of the Astoria school was a bit obstreperous and unreasonable, insisting on talking Greek (although two of the Commissioners cannot understand it) and complaining about our questionnaire. But the others were passionate in constructive ways, very committed to Ελληνικότητα and very worried about the situation. One confided to me privately that she couldn’t say in public the full story about the deleterious role of the Church. But another stated that the priest of her congregation insisted that school prizes go only to those children who were regular in church attendance, not to those who did best in their lessons. We were urged to visit a school, and also to have another hearing in New York, preferably in Astoria or Flushing. John was asked to demonstrate his method, so we had a lesson in Chinese, with a six-year-old boy stealing the show. . . . Hot soup with John and another Commissioner at 11:00 p.m. and to bed.

Wednesday, June 24, 1998

Saratoga

I forgot to note that last Monday Mrs. Morris appeared at our house around 4:00 p.m. very distressed. Her car had caught fire just beyond our entrance. We walked back to it together. The left rear wheel was askew. The moment she started the engine and put the car in gear red flames darted out from between the spokes. She turned off the engine and they promptly stopped. Clearly a problem for “Car Talk.” She waited in the car until one of her children drove up the road and took her home. . . . Up again at 5:45 a.m. 7:15 a.m. train, full this time, back to Albany. Then drove to Saratoga State Park to meet Irv, Fran, Chrysanthi, Alec, and Monica for a picnic lunch followed by a performance of La Traviata. Violette and Alfredo very mediocre, but not bad enough to ruin the miraculous music. And Il Padre was excellent. What an extraordinary composition! The melodies haunt me day and night.

Saturday, June 27, 1998

Hanover

To Hanover last night with Chrysanthi. Delicious meal: shrimp scampi with cream sauce on the pasta, in Lake George. Spent today scurrying about, cleaning our room in anticipation of the Shepherds’ arrival. Meeting with Sara Zuniga, my current Presidential Scholar, who actually does quite well. To Radio Shack and phone mart to replace the cordless phone zapped by lightning yesterday. Drove back late at night, listening deliciously to Joan Sutherland in La Traviata.

Sunday, June 28, 1998

Working in the garden. The tilling with the Mantis is much easier this year, but still laborious. Alec and Monica are progressing on the floor of their addition. But the water in Alec’s shallow well is fetid, really stinks, from all the rain we’ve had. . . . In the office, I’m copyediting reviews now for JMGS 16/2; some are so full of gibberish that they’re incomprehensible.

Tuesday, June 30, 1998

Alec and Monica left for Hanover. I accompanied them to Lake George, where we had another delicious Italian meal. Returned listening to more of La Traviata. The farm is incomparably beautiful now, so green from all the rain, the fields peppered with wildflowers (I haven’t mowed yet). Alec’s Britannica arrived and I’ve been reading various articles in bed. Glad to see my books cited in the article on Modern Greek literature.

Friday, July 3, 1998

Since I finished preparing the journal yesterday, I spent today doing farm work, although I had to write some letters for the Pendle Hill Publications Committee after breakfast. Spent the morning spraying ant poison in my office, the Guest House (very badly infested), and Alec’s cabin. At first the sprayer didn’t develop any pressure, but I discovered the reason and fixed it. After lunch, continued weeding and tilling the garden, and finished the forward part (the blueberries remain). It looks very “manicured.” Then mowed with the tractor around half of the lower field and the entire field east of the pond, and raked around the pond. Monica made a fine supper: meatloaf, spinach topped with cheese, mashed potatoes. After supper, practiced Mozart. Alec came down about 10:00 p.m., after putting yet another coat of polyurethane on his new floor, and we played Mozart number 15. . . . Yesterday afternoon I took care of all of Leander’s screens, placing the hardware where needed, drilling holes for the screws, etc. Some skill required. I was very gauche the first few times, but improved in quality and time rapidly.

Saturday, July 4, 1998

Yasuo and Naoko are here. We played Shostakovich, and the Beethoven piano quartet, and hacked away at the Schumann piano quartet, which is stirring.

Sunday, July 5, 1998

Spent the morning writing letters for the journal. Yasuo, Naoko and Monica went to church in Riparius. Daphne and family went to the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake. After lunch I finished mowing the east field and everyone—Yasuo, Naoko, Greg, Monica, and Alec—raked hay, and Alec brought it to the garden. I raked after finishing mowing the “beach.” The field looks lovely, as does the garden. We then played music: St. George, and the Beethoven violin concerto. Then a splendid supper: hamburgers, franks, and corn cooked on the fire outside; home-fried potatoes made by me, salad, coffee, apples. Christina was cranky and finally had to be taken “home” (to Leander’s house), to our general relief. After dark, Alec and I dealt with the large wasps’ nest under Leander’s porch. In mowing, I spared the splendid wildflowers on top of the drywell.

Monday, July 6, 1998

To Hanover to get Chrysanthi to prepare the house for Jack and Kathy Shepherd. Met with Sara Zuniga, my current Presidential Scholar, who seems competent in some ways. Lunch with Mother, who actually conversed more than usual. Dick Eberhart asked me to write my name on his menu, then asked me how many years I’d been at Dartmouth. Bev and Franny Webster sat at the next table and smiled graciously when I said hello, but I’m not sure they know who I am. Bev said he once had a shirt just like mine, with bold stripes. We’re still hoping to bring Mother to the farm on the 25th. . . . ALPS dinner in Alumni Hall. I met Chrysanthi’s five students, one of whom is a French girl from Paris, another, Danae, a charming Greek-American. John told me that he is having the Commission questionnaires processed professionally by a statistician.

Tuesday, July 7, 1998

Drove back to Riparius with Chrysanthi, listening to Il Trovatore.

Saturday, July 11, 1998

Daphne, Greg, and Christina have been at the farm all week. Leander arrived yesterday, saying that all his cares melted away as soon as he entered his new house. On Thursday, Greg and Daphne departed for the Sagamore, leaving Christina in the capable hands of Chrysanthi and Monica. The baby behaved well, hardly missing its parents. Today we all drove to the Sagamore to return her to them and have lunch. The Sagamore is very lush and posh, a mixture of nineteenth-century elegance and modern efficiency. Beautiful grounds, flowers, lawns, everything manicured, filled with rich people. The lunch was nothing special, but pleasantly outdoors overlooking the lake. Daphne and family then headed back to NYC. We stopped at Silver Bay on the return, to show Leander, Alec, and Monica the very interesting assembly hall, ca. 1900. Then stopped at Brant Lake Camp to show them my boyhood venue, including a picture of me aged 11 (1941). . . . Back at “Terpni,” I finally finished my work on the garden, spreading pine needles around the blueberry plants and then mulching with newly cut hay. Also swept out the Guest House, which was filled with “sawdust” created by infestations of ants, and sprayed poison around it and around Alec’s (again). Leander, too, has ants, apparently. Next project is to widen by two slats the table I built last year. I’m relaxing, now, since I sent in JMGS 16/2 yesterday.

Sunday, July 12, 1998

Practiced Starer’s duet for ¾ hours, playing against the 2nd part, which I had recorded on cassette. Then spent the rest of the morning (a) searching the internet for London theaters in October when we’ll be there, (b) widening the kitchen table by two boards, fairly successfully, but with some errors. In the afternoon, napped deliciously for 1½ hours, then raked the field in back of the barn and put the hay in the garden; then picked all the remaining apples on our tree (which ripened extraordinarily early this year); then helped Leander with his job of applying preservative over the cedar siding, then mowed around Chrysanthi’s garden with the Jari; then sprayed ant poison around Leander’s cabin; then cleaned the sprayer that he’d been using; then showered, tired and hungry. Γιουβαρλάκια and καρπούζι for supper.

Tuesday, July 14, 1998

David and Leone Mirza arrived. They’d last been here in 1965. David had a stroke but is functioning well, teaching economics at Loyola in Chicago. Leona is a math educator. She may be able to help our Commission when we visit Chicago. They told me about the remarkable language villages for teenagers at Concordia College, something that might be good for students studying Greek. Nice to see old friends. As happens so often, the passage of years evaporated immediately.

Wednesday, July 15, 1998

On Monday, while Leander was still here, we celebrated Alec’s birthday, which isn’t until July 29, when they’ll be gone. Indeed, Alec won’t experience a 29th at all, because he’ll be crossing the international dateline and will go directly from the 28th to the 30th. I gave him, and Monica, and their house, the beautifully bound set of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1988) that I bought at the Strand Book Store last month. A very special gift, all agreed. Then Leander and I played through my four-hand repertoire for them: Barber, Bizet, Dvořák, even Starer.

Tonight, Wednesday, we celebrated our 43rd anniversary (which isn’t until the 17th) by, as usual, dining in the Hall of Springs and going to the ballet. Met Donna Trautwein there and Shandra; nice reunion. The program was lovely. “Concerti Armonici” choreographed by Peter Martins: pure serenity. Then (the reason I’d picked that night) “Prodigal Son,” choreographed by Balanchine, music by Prokofiev, scenery by Rouault: the original Diaghilev production premiered in 1929. Damian Woetzel was spectacular as the Prodigal, and Helène Alexopoulos equally so as the Siren. Balanchine was 24 when he conceived this amazing work, so extraordinarily expressive from the first moment to the last. Finally, Stravinski’s “Symphony in Three Movements,” again Balanchine. Wonderful music, but the choreography was nowhere as striking as that for “Prodigal Son” or even Martins’ in the first ballet.

In the morning, I had to make an abstract in Greek for my Καπετάν Μιχάλης lecture, which Alexis Kalokairinos wants to have read by someone else at the symposium in Iraklio in August celebrating the centenary of Crete’s liberation in 1898. Now I need to reduce the Greek version, currently a full fifty-minute lecture, to twenty minutes. . . . All afternoon I worked on the bench that will serve on one side of the table for the kitchen. Alec sawed the half log to make it less bulky. I spent hours sandpapering it (with our machine), and then filling all the holes with plastic wood. The difficult part will be the legs.

Friday, July 17, 1998

Finished sanding my bench and prepared the legs, draw-shaving rough 2 × 4s and then sanding them clean. Perrymans here for dessert. Arthur laconic re: ineffective English class at Adirondack Community College. Art cynical about the Riparius-North Creek train venture (as I am, too). Waste of taxpayers’ money owing to vested interest in business community, etc. . . . Reading a fine book about Quakers and the law, recommending mediation. I hope that we’ll publish it.

Saturday, July 18, 1998

Mowed the lower fields again, to prepare for the big event next Saturday. Katia, Alec’s Russian friend, came with her husband, mother, and two lovely children, ages 6 and 9. They live in Wynwood now; I hope to show her Pendle Hill sometime. . . . Inserted legs in the bench. The first one is skewed but the others are fairly straight. . . . After supper, to the Caboose in Riverside for hot fudge sundaes.

Monday, July 20, 1998

Everything’s happening at once. Pinky and Adam O’Dell came to dig the new footings for the Guest House, which they’ll move onto higher ground. The tent is arriving tomorrow. Busecks are in North River and want us to visit. . . . I started reading Mike Keeley’s new book, Inventing Greece, about Durrell, Miller, Seferis, Katsimbalis, and—inevitably—Keeley. Very nice so far. . . . Finished vetting four book manuscripts for Pendle Hill publications. Sadly, Doug Gwyn’s newest, on the Seekers, needs lots of reworking. . . . Ordered a wheelchair for Yiayia’s visit. Re-did tar on the ash tree next to the cabin, again infected with ants. Mowed Alec’s path across the road with the Troy-Bilt, which I fixed yesterday. Chrysanthi put a fourth and final coat of polyurethane on the bench I built, and I moved it into the kitchen. Alec and Monica sat on it for supper. It’s quite handsome. At 8:30 p.m., exhausted, we drove to North River to visit the Busecks. Pinky arrives tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. to continue. Oh, I forgot to note that last night there was a serious thunderstorm, and we were up half the night.

Tuaesday, July 21, 1998

Again, everything at once. Pinky and Adam arrived at 7:00 a.m. to finish Alec’s countertop and vanity, then to finish the four footings for the Guest House. A huge truck came with three men to erect the tent for Saturday, a festive white affair that looks very grand next to the pond. The telephone man came to try to fix the static that prevents one from accessing my e-mail. He found a short, replaced a cable, but the static persists, probably a defect in the computer itself, alas. Then another truck came bringing top soil (cost $100) to cover Leander’s dry-well. Alec spread it a bit using Pinky’s Bobcat. As for me, I got almost to the end of Keeley’s lovely book, then changed into working clothes. First I put my toolbox together again after Chrysanthi’s thorough cleaning. Then I mowed around the rest of the pond with the Troy Bilt, at one point losing my balance and falling into the pond, my left side under water, my right dry. Afterwards, I just continued, with one boot slurping water. Shirt and dungarees dried remarkably fast on this very hot day. Afterwards, finished off with the scythe and then the John Deere, and raked a pile. By this time it was 7:30 p.m. Enough. Shower, supper, reading TLS for relaxation.

Wednesday, July 22, 1998

Big thunderstorm again last night at 3:30 a.m., so both Chrysanthi and I were up disconnecting plugs and turning off the pump and water heater. Probably the last strike is what injured the internal modem in my computer. Wrote my report for Princeton University Press on Mike Keeley’s book, and started straightway typing in the revisions for Demotic Greek 1: still on lesson 1. In the afternoon, Alec and I attempted to remove a huge stone in the driveway, unsuccessfully. I broke the logging chain twice, and Alec, even with Pinky’s Bobcat, couldn’t lift the monster out of its hole. We were giving up when, unexpectedly, along came Pinky and proceeded, of course, to dislodge it successfully; then did a few other stones (smaller), then stayed and talked for an hour. He has ΙΧΘΥΣ on his machine, and I explained the meaning to him. In the course of this, Leander, Deanna, and Sophia arrived. Alec invited all of us to his newly civilized living room for a drink—champagne. His house is truly lovely. I’m encouraging him not to cut the bottom log in the window that became a door. Late supper, turkey, and then all to bed at 10:30, exhausted. Oh, Daphne called. She went to the gynecologist yesterday; has new pregnancy, now about eleven weeks; is doing just fine. The doctor heard the fetus’s heart. . . . She’s going to lend me her modem to solve, I hope, my e-mail problem.

Thursday, July 23, 1998

Working in my office this morning I heard a snort and saw a doe not too far away looking at me and snorting repeatedly, wagging her tail; further away, two fawns, that ran off. But the mother remained probably for five or ten minutes, just staring and snorting, although she loped a bit further away at one point in her beautiful jumping gait. Then I returned to lesson 2 of Demotic Greek 1, typing in John’s good ideas for classroom activity.

Off to Glens Falls at lunchtime to pick up a wheelchair for Mother (it’s raining, so it’s a good time to go). Got stronger poison for carpenter ants, and a new long-handled shovel to replace the one whose handle we cracked under the stone yesterday. Worked on the muddy spot on the entrance road, packing it down with the tractor. Then everyone descended upon us at once: Rhoda and a friend, Alici Friedman, whose son lives in Jakarta (she was there two weeks ago), Lori, daughter, and Clive, Paul, David and Linda, Susie (Peter and Alice stayed away with the other baby, who has conjunctivitis). Picnic supper outdoors. Then a nice time in our living room with Alec and Monica recounting how they met and showing the two beautiful albums of wedding photos.

Friday, July 24, 1998

Things are beginning to happen. James and Stephanie McBride arrived with their two children, in James’s luxurious Mercury sedan. Nice visit. Sweet children. Steph is working toward a B.A. in English, concentrating on drama (she is an ex-actress). Brittles is still working on his biography of a certain jazz great whose name is Quincy Jones. The success of Color of Water is great, but also dangerous, for it siphons him off into unproductive (but lucrative) publicity stunts. He now charges $10,000 for a lecture, mostly in an effort to reduce the number. I want him to come to Pendle Hill, which he says he’ll do for free. He totally disagrees with Paul Manglesdorf’s assertion that “the whole African-American community is trying to escape from a continuing expectation of servitude” and that therefore “there is a terrible mismatch between the cultural expectations of the Society of Friends . . . and the cultural expectations of most African-Americans.” James says that the distance between blacks and Friends is mostly a matter of (1) class, (2) ignorance regarding Friends’ existence, (3) general decline of blacks’ interest in religion. I hope that we can have him at Pendle Hill to discuss all this. What’s really needed at PH for diversity is blacks on staff and on the board, first, more importantly than black students.

Saturday, July 25, 1998

The big day. People began arriving around 10:30. We had about 120 all-in-all, on a glorious day: sunny, breezy, cool. So nice to see Charlie Hamlen, Tom Wood, Allan and Claire Munck, the Corindias, the Nodas, and, late, of course, John and Mary Rassias and Helene and Bill and Matthew, even Athos and family. Also Jack and Kathleen Shepherd. From here: Perrymans, Fitzgeralds, O’Dells, Akstens, Lorna Bunker and daughter and family, McGinns. Also Yasuo and Naoko, Milly Adler, Shapiros, and Walter and Joyce from Jakarta, and a dozen or so of Alec’s classmates at Haverford, and two Friends Central teachers. Alec made a lovely introductory speech when everyone was seated under the tent, saying how lucky it was that I had planned all this in 1950! (I should record also that “Big Yiayia” was here, driven by Audrey, and of course Brittles, and all the Busecks, even Paul.) The food was gourmet from start to finish (except for the coffee). Also Amy and Roy Bernstein came. And Rhoda and her friend, and Rosine Gardner. The children loved the pond and the boat and various balls, and the badminton. Very pleasant indeed. Afterwards, Alec took his Haverford chums up to his cabin for beer, and I took the Rassiases and others on “the tour.” Everyone had left by about 5:30, I think. But we still had Brittles and family back after supper for more good communion. Monica of course was radiant and relaxed through it all. She is very gifted in those ways.

Sunday, July 26, 1998

Brittles and Naoko and Yasuo again in the morning. Then David and Linda came, and I put David to work mowing the south field, which he did for three hours, very helpfully. A crew came and removed the tent. It’s now as though nothing had ever happened, except that both paddles for the boat got broken (I’ve ordered new ones from L.L. Bean already). Brittles and I joke that we must go to the movies when he next visits. Did I mention that Daphne and Greg and Christina came on Saturday; they left this morning. Christina and Sophia really noticed each other this time. Sophia even tried to push Christina on the swing. (The swing broke, so did the hammock, but all is fixed again.) Daphne brought me her modem, so I am back on e-mail now: a great relief.

Monday, July 27, 1998

Leander sprained his ankle yesterday playing badminton with Alec, but is fine today. Yiayia and Chrysanthi spent their second night in the Alp Horn motel, sleeping better. Pinky and Adam came at 7:00 a.m. to show us how to drain Alec’s water. David and Linda came for breakfast and then left for Hanover, driving Yiayia back. Alec and Monica are packed, but Alec insisted on going to the dump. So we all had lunch together. They finally left in mid-afternoon. I felt very emotional about Monica: we all love her. Afterwards, Chrysanthi and I relaxed by driving to Lake George and having a good Italian meal.

Tuesday, July 28, 1998

Started the trench from shed to Guest House for the electric line. I started it with the plow, which actually worked. Then used the Mantis tiller, finally the pickaxe. Worried when the John Deere’s lights and gas gauge stopped working. But discovered later that I had accidentally turned the ignition key off, although the motor kept running. So, no problem. For supper, we all had yet another meal from the leftovers from Saturday’s lunch. . . . Alec telephoned from Newark Airport. They leave at midnight. The flight from D.C. was bumpy and Monica got sick. Bad start. But they’re both in good spirits. . . . Chrysanthi went to Curtis Lumber today and ordered kitchen cabinets. I’d been planning to install them ever since we built the kitchen, 40+ years ago. . . . Have started to fill out the forms for entrance to Kendal.

Wednesday, August 5, 1998

Went swimming for the first time. But combined it with work, pulling out water plants that are encroaching in the pond. . . . Finished the trench to the Guest House; laid #10 wire in it, in a plastic pipe. . . . Supper with Don Kurka at Garnet Lake. He’s doing photography now and showed us his portfolio. Wonderful. Such technique, and also human or natural interest. I’d love him to have an exhibit at Dartmouth.

Thursday, August 6, 1998

John sent me two paragraphs he has written on elementary education for Life Magazine (Rob Sullivan, of course). So poorly written. I converted them, I trust, into something publishable. They’re “vintage Rassias,” viz.: “What we need are manias. Who will touch students,” etc.

Spent all day yesterday in Glens Falls, to xerox Demotic Greek 1 and send a copy to Dimitri Gondicas in Athens. Went to the new, enlarged “Price Chopper,” an extraordinary store, and bought luscious bread and bagels and (even) cherry pie. . . . Supper with Maureen and Mary Fitzgerald, who alas are going to be moving to Queensbury.

Friday, August 7, 1998

More clearing of the pond. More work on the Glossary of grammatical terms, which is turning out to be a major project. Supper with Evelyn and Aser Rothstein. He is always interesting. Brought us up to date on research and progress on cystic fibrosis since the gene was discovered in his lab. Children can now live much longer, although still not cured. Prevention occurs chiefly through the aborting of fetuses who have been identified as having the defective gene.

Saturday, August 8, 1998

Bad news. My Powerbook 145 died. Won’t boot up; blank screen. And I had just ordered a new battery this morning. What to do next? The Morses gave us tickets to the Adirondack Ensemble concert in Wevertown. Not bad. Saint-Saëns trio, mediocre music, but it showed off the pianist, Dan Weiser, who, I learned, will be teaching at Dartmouth now. I hope to recruit him for Kendal. Saw Allison Clarkson and her father. Also Cara Arsenault, who wouldn’t say, really, why she chose Middlebury over Dartmouth.

Sunday, August 9, 1998

Spent all day putting in the electric in the Guest House, a much bigger job (as always) than anticipated. I’m using #10 wire throughout, overkill perhaps but useful if we ever want to run an electric heater there, for example. Chrysanthi and I cleaned it out considerably. It will develop into an attractive space. . . . Then off to Meadowmount with Irv and Fran. The Meadowmount Trio, all faculty, played Robert Ward and Chausson—nothing special. Chausson about on a par with Saint-Saëns. But then they were joined by a wonderful violinist and violist to do the Schumann Piano Quintet, which was scintillating, especially the miraculous scherzo, molto—but molto—vivace. What a treat! Topped off by ice cream at the Shapiros’ afterwards.

Monday, August 10, 1998

To Hanover to try to deal with the computer crisis. They told me the prospects of repairing the 145 are minimal. Might cost $400; the whole machine is worth only $125. So, I took the plunge and bought the new G3, top of the line, cost $2900. But since I never paid a penny for any of my previous computers, all being given by Dartmouth, I shouldn’t complain. . . . Lunch with Mother, who seems quite well. Back by 5:00. Swim. Supper with Irv and Fran and Mike and Laura Gouthreau, very pleasant. To bed at 10:30 exhausted, since we’d awakened at 5:30 a.m. this morning. . . . Oh, yesterday we had a stray dog all day, a puppy, very friendly and domesticated, but whining, wanting to come in the house. We drove it to the Riparius campground and deposited it there, where there are lots of homes and lots of children; perhaps someone will take it in.

Wednesday, August 12, 1998

Spent most of yesterday trying to get my new computer to receive e-mail, unsuccessfully despite long conversations with Kiewit, Apple, and Global Visage. Something’s missing. But this morning, following a Kiewit suggestion, I tried Global Village scripts at random, and one of them worked. So, I’m back in touch with Alec, etc., but still cannot print anything because I forgot to bring Microsoft Word with me on Monday, stupidly. . . . Continuing to do the electric in the Guest House, a very slow process, very difficult with #10 wire. . . . Leander and family returned in the wee hours last night. Their experience in Seattle was very positive. We’re glad, for they now have a better relationship with Deanna’s father. Leander even toured Janice’s factory, where the bottled water is processed, all by robots. . . . I am also reading galley proofs for JMGS 16/2, the special issue on Kazantzakis: a real pleasure.

Friday, August 14, 1998

My $3000 G3 Powerbook stopped working last night. It freezes after booting. This morning I spent 1½ hours on the telephone with an Apple technician as she walked me through the procedure to fix it, having to do with extensions. Now, let’s see how long it keeps working. . . . Finished the electric wiring in the Guest House, but haven’t tested it yet. Swam. Deanna has a guest, Linda, a vivacious 40-year-old, veteran of 20 years in the National Symphony. She told me that Rostropovich was a “letch.”

Sunday, August 16, 1998

The new computer stopped functioning again this morning and I felt good because I was able to set it right by myself. It worked the whole rest of the day. I finished reading JMGS galleys and then returned to the grammatical glossary in Greek and English for DG1. . . . Leander and I played through Starer four-hands and recorded it for Dan. Then I played my secondo part for him, too, and recorded it. Also finished pulling the plants that had invaded the pond, a big job that took over a week.

Tuesday, August 18, 1998

Pinky arrived at 7:00 a.m. with Adam. A huge truck with a boom came at 8:30 and by 11:00 the Guest House was moved. Of course the truck broke one of the footings, a part of the eaves and drip edge ripped off, but basically the house seemed unhurt. Then came the electric. It didn’t work. Pinky suspected my wiring, but that was fine. Eventually we located the problem in the underground cable. Despair. But Pinky’s bright idea saved the day. He linked the white of the underground cable to the black of the source, and it worked. Brilliant. The black must have been injured somewhere and shorted out, but the white was fine, and everything is now in order. I don’t like the new position of the house in relation to everything else, but I’ll get used to it. . . . Also, the computer broke again last night. But the Apple technician solved the problem very quickly this morning and I worked for four hours, still on the glossary of technical terms, then cleaned up around the Guest House, then tried to repair the moldboard on the mower. Spaghetti for dinner. Afterward, the Perrymans came. Art related Carson Bunker’s questioning of faith after losing two daughters to MS. Theodicy, of course. What kind of God would permit this?

Friday, August 21, 1998

We’re all suffering from colds caught from Sophia. Couldn’t work yesterday, outdoors, that is. But finished assembling the grammar that I’m sending to Peter Mackridge for vetting. Marianna Spanaki says that the grammar is the best part of the book. . . . Leander’s pupil and friend Steve arrived today with his “partner,” Terry. Lovely people that I’ve gotten to know at the four-hand workshops. They’re in the computer business and told me that what I’ve experienced with the new G3 is common with all computers of all makes. Generally, quality control at the factory is so poor that adjustments need to be made afterward. Also they said that the people who answer the telephone at Apple and try to help me are trainees and often don’t know much. Yesterday I was three hours on the phone with one of them, who failed to fix my new problem—failure to print. But afterwards, almost accidentally, I solved it myself by installing a new system. . . . Despite our colds, and fortified with aspirin and Sudafed, Chrysanthi and I took off at 5:30 today for Saratoga, with Don Kurka. Supper in “Dr. Moriority’s,” then a lovely evening: the Miami Ballet, directed by Edw. Villella, whom we remember of course from the NYC Ballet. Nothing profound, but lots of raw energy, youthful exuberance, occasional beauty. Lots of fun. A sparse audience, but very enthusiastic. These dancers are like super-trained race horses: sleek, powerful, overspecialized.

Thursday, August 27, 1998

An interesting day. In the morning I finished the talk I’ll give in New York on Kazantzakis’s travel writings. After lunch I worked for four hours to mount the kitchen cabinets that arrived this morning, and finished successfully. Then mowed for an hour, completing the south field, which means all the mowing for this season. Και του χρόνου!

Friday, August 28, 1998

Pinky is going to put a water heater in the Guest House, so next year we can have electricity, hot and cold running water there. Wow! The remaining problem is the toilet. . . . Leander and I marked the north and west borders with the blue paint I bought. The north, that is, until we got into the swamp and there was nothing to mark. On the way back we apparently had gone too far and were on Antler Lake territory, and suddenly we saw a huge tent with a little vehicle in front of it—the “domicile” of the minister from Speculator whom Gary McGinn told us about; he comes there to escape. In the middle of the woods, truly. It’s good that we did this marking, for there were stretches on both borders with very little sign of any previous marking. However, we always managed to find a trace of fence eventually and to fill in the gaps. Exhausting work climbing up ledges, through slash, over fallen trees, and then slogging through the swamp with water up to our calves and boots totally waterlogged. But had a delicious dinner of our own zucchini stuffed, and a Sam Adams beer. Afterwards, I felt strangely dizzy and decided to go to bed early, but not before writing a few letters. . . . The stock market lost about 500 points yesterday and today; it’s now at 8000 (Dow Jones), down from a high of about 9000. About a 5% loss, I believe. Actually, this might be beneficial. The long-term gain was too unreal.

Sunday, August 30, 1998

Leander, Deanna, and Sophia left today. Too bad. It was a lovely month of August having them. We made a festive breakfast. Chrysanthi did French toast. I did bacon and my “famous” home-fried potatoes. . . . Thinking back over this summer’s projects, as I remember them:

In the office: finishing JMGS 16/1; entering all changes in DG1; creating a grammatical lexicon for DG1; starting the Greek lexicon for DG1; writing my talk on Kazantzakis as travel writer; struggling with new G3 computer.

On the farm: widening the kitchen table; bench for kitchen table; trench for electric to Guest House; wiring of Guest House; removal of old piers behind the Guest House; removal of a huge rock in the entrance; installation of kitchen cabinets; remarking of boundary lines; removal of all growth in the pond; better, and complete, tilling of the garden; seeding around Leander’s and Alec’s; routine mowing, of course; 120 people for lunch for Alec on July 25th.

Spent the day seeding around Leander’s, Alec’s, and the Guest House, raking Leander’s in the hot sun, and using the disk harrow, repaired by Bud Rodick. Helped Leander drain his water. After they left, Chrysanthi and I finished marking the border: the south side, the easy one. Then we treated ourselves to a nice supper at the Sicilian Spaghetti House in Lake George that we find so uniformly good. And we strolled like tourists up and down the Lake George Main Street—quite a sight. At home, telephone message from Dick Williamson. His leg is better, but now he’s developed a condition that keeps him from urinating. He has to introduce a catheter each time he wants to void. Ugh! And Susan, his hoped-for girlfriend, is trying to put her life together without Dick. Sad. How blessed we are to have (a) a stable marriage, (b) normal, productive children who still like to see us (and vice versa). None of this can be taken for granted. . . . Barbara Gilbert telephoned to say that Mary Metz died. I wrote to Bob. We’ll have more and more of this, obviously. And then one day it will be Chrysanthi or Peter.

Tuesday, September 1, 1998

Supper at Shapiros with David Frost and his “partner,” Joan, who was my classmate, incredibly, in P.S. 69, 7th and 8th grades. She related how our troupe arriving in 7th grade from Sunnyside was considered a phenomenon by the other students, who’d been together, mostly, since kindergarten. We were thought to be direct from Europe! (Among other misconceptions.) We both enjoyed recalling the amazingly good education we received at P.S. 69, via the project method. I of course still have the project books I completed then. They are remarkable for that age and level. Poor David, who was flourishing as a re-writer of Japanese articles on biology, is now critically unemployed, since the Japanese have run out of money. But he is keeping busy reading for the blind, etc. Fran and Irv are off to France soon, to visit the Normandy beach where he landed in the war.

Thursday, September 3, 1998

Another dinner, this time at Rosine Gardner’s, now the home of a divorcée, alas. Her other guests were Dan Weiser, the pianist of the Adirondack Ensemble, and Ovidiu Marinescu, the cellist. Lots of cozy musical talk. They’d all been to Apple Hill, for example, and of course knew about Bev Webster and so forth. Dan will be teaching this year at Dartmouth. Rosine made us a splendid quiche Lorraine.

Saturday, September 5, 1998

Chrysanthi and I marked Alec’s south line, as far as the beaver pond. Tough going, but we managed to follow the line. Pinky came and installed what’s needed for hot and cold running water in the Guest House next summer. And of course it now has electricity. A transformation. After supper, went to the Adirondack Ensemble concert, chiefly because Dan Weiser and Lisa Spilde played four of the Dvořák Slavonic dances. They of course got the notes, and up to tempo, but I found the interpretations unexciting and uninspired, especially the A major one that Alice and I played (if I may say so) more musically. Then the full trio did Paul Schoenfield’s “Café Music for Piano Trio,” a brilliant piece very exciting to hear. But for the second half another group came and played jazz, which bored me silly. Afterwards we went home with Tom Akstens and Susanne Murtha for a nice visit in which Tom regaled us with anecdotes about his terrible boss at Empire College, Saratoga, who sells her desk copies to students. They pledge to help Alec and Monica in the winter if necessary.

Sunday, September 6, 1998

Finished lesson 9 for the Greek-English glossary. Tough, tedious work requiring ultimate concentration. Three lessons left. I should be able to finish Monday–Tuesday–Wednesday. We leave on Thursday. In the afternoon, Chrysanthi and I marked Alec’s northern line, again as far (actually almost as far) as the beaver pond. Very tough going because of all the slash from logging, but we found old markers and actually some fence, too. Walked back along the power line. What a wilderness all this is: hundreds of acres without human habitation (whereas 100 years ago it had been cleared and farmed).

Tuesday, September 8, 1998

Trimmed branches off the trees between the garden and the south field. Great improvement aesthetically and also practically, for mowing. But balancing with a chain saw on a ladder is dangerous, and really not a good idea. I might buy one of the extended chain saws they now make for limbing.

Wednesday, September 9, 1998

Chrysanthi ran out of leftovers, so we had supper at “The Rooster.” Very nice. All set to leave tomorrow except for the water.

Thursday, September 10, 1998

To Hanover

Turned the water off; locked up. And off we went, alas. Breakfast at McDonald’s. Piles of mail at home, as always. Dick Williamson called; treated him to supper, the first night. He seemed very low, almost in clinical depression.

Friday, September 11, 1998

Brought Mother home for supper. She was quite alert at the start but then lapsed into her accustomed silence.

Tuesday, September 15, 1998

I did a mediation workshop for student supervisors at Thayer Hall; got them in groups of 3—two antagonists, one mediator. It was fun and maybe did some good. . . . Trying to get Veysel at Kiewit to shift the columns on my Greek-English lexicon so that it becomes an English-Greek lexicon. But, as always, it cannot be done straightway. I need to enter tabs in each entry. So I began this tedious job. . . . Dick had me come to play with his group: the Mozart and Beethoven piano quartets. I did most of it all right until we came to the last movement of the Beethoven, which I started at a decent tempo, which was a big mistake.

Wednesday, September 16, 1998

Dick and Allan came for music and supper. Bach and Mozart, very nice. We also did a good Max Reger piece.

Friday, September 18, 1998

Pendle Hill

Publications Committee with Rebecca, etc. Coming to PH is always so pleasant. Mary Barnes said how much she misses us; so did Richard. Yuki, beautiful Yuki, changed her hair and doesn’t look beautiful any more. Suzie Morrison is teaching King Lear at Friends Central. I’ll send her a tape of the Brattle Theater production. But the nicest treat was at supper. A man with a Scottish accent came up to me, “Aren’t you Peter Bien?” “Yes.” “I’m Roland Ellis, and here is June!” They were the wardens at Woodbrooke when we were then in 1985. Lovely reunion. We spoke for 1½ hours at supper, and I was late for the board meeting, as usual. He of course was very eager to hear my assessment of Woodbrooke as a result of our 1995 stay. And he remembered Leander and Outi and Marianna Katopi, and Jasmyn Chelish. . . . Dan and I went over the Starer, Schubert, and Barber after ice cream. Dan very tentative. Trouble with timing, but after an hour we were beginning to get the hang of it.

Saturday, September 19, 1998

More visits with Roland and June. Also Larry Ingle, here for the Board. His new book project is “Richard Nixon—Quaker”! In the afternoon Dan and I practiced again and I worked on the English-Greek lexicon.

Sunday, September 20, 1998

Board retreat, mostly on our strategy and timing regarding the search for Dan’s successor. He gave his accustomed speech about the virtues of hierarchy and the defects of Denny O’Brien. At the end, Paul Mangelsdorf came up to me and asked if I would be willing to be a candidate! “I’m too old,” I protested. “I’m 68, will be 70 when the term begins.” “But you look ten years younger,” he said. How nice! But I certainly, at this stage in life, do not want to be Executive Director of Pendle Hill, nor do I think I could do the job very well. . . . At 4:00 p.m. Dan and I practiced again. Then off to the airport and home. Every time I go to PH I feel that it is my home; it seems strange to leave.

Thursday, September 24, 1998

NYC

Supper with Daphne and Greg and Christina, still awake at 9:00 p.m. when I arrived. Her first words to me: “Play piano.” Good! She sings very well, right on pitch. Tebbe apartment still not “finished.” No paintings on the wall. I find their taste very bad: repulsive drapes, an ugly couch. Oh well. Chacun à son gout.

Friday, September 25, 1998

A full, exhilarating day. Breakfast with Daphne and Christina. Then to Homeric Tours, 59th Street, to pay the balance on our tickets to Greece. Very quiet. Not the chaos I expected. Made some itinerary changes to get an extra day in Athens on the way back and to leave London on Sunday rather than Monday, so that Chrysanthi can be home for her Senior Citizens meeting. . . . Then to Columbia. Entered Butler Library nostalgically to view the main reading room again—unchanged—and then the English and Comparative Literature reading room, which wasn’t there any more: transformed into offices, alas. A librarian downstairs told me that all the specific reading rooms had been removed 20 years ago but that they were now going to be replaced. . . . Then to Hamilton Hall. Gayle Holst was there, and Martin McKinsey arrived around an hour late, having taken the wrong subway. We chose this year’s winner of the Elizabeth Constantinides Translation Prize, a woman who translated a play by Ziogas. Unfortunately we couldn’t give it to Tom Doulis for his Θάνος Βλέκας because the translation has too many problems. Meg Alexiou placed Doulis first and the Ziogas play last, but she wasn’t present to argue her case. Nice lunch with Martin afterwards; he’s finishing his Ph.D. and going on the job market this year, poor fellow. . . . Then to the Yale Club to meet John and other Commissioners. Vasos Papagapitos treated us to a limousine to go to Flushing, but it held only four passengers, so John and I, unable to find a taxi in the rain, took the #7 IRT train, past 47th Street, Sunnyside (!), to Main Street Flushing and then a cab. Good meeting, once again with lots of teachers, parents, and some newspapermen present. Phyllis Franklin will be especially useful when we Commissioners convene to make our report. The one new element this time was a long plea for use of the internet. Limousine back, very quickly. In bed by 11:00 p.m. It’s nice to be involved and appreciated, emotions I felt strongly today.

Saturday, September 26, 1998

And today, too. Breakfast with Greg, who explained what hedge funds are (one has just turned bottoms up, throwing Wall Street into a dither). Christina running around with no diaper or panties, apparently beginning to be toilet trained. . . . By subway to NYU. The moment I entered the building (no, even outside in the street) people began to come up: “Oh, Professor Bien” etc., etc. Old acquaintances, like Dorothy Gregory, and new ones. I delivered my lecture on “Nikos Kazantzakis as Travel Writer” and it seemed to go very well indeed. Good questions afterwards. But I couldn’t stay for the rest of my panel (I’ll hear them next week in Boston). By taxi over the Williamsburg Bridge to LaGuardia Airport. Driving down Delancey Street, passed Allen Street, where my father grew up. It looked very nice: wide, with some green in the middle. But then I remembered that in his day there was an el there. . . . To Kendal for supper with the Bev Web Performance Committee and Nigel Coxe, our recitalist tonight. His concert was extraordinary. First, Mozart’s Fantasia K 397, which of course I played. He did it very slow and soft, an interesting interpretation. Then Beethoven’s Sonata opus 28, which I also played, especially the Andante. But the high point was Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor: as exciting as the Diabelli, and played with tremendous verve. Then Chopin’s Nocturne op. 27 no. 1 (played often by Bev Web), Mendelssohn’s scintillating Rondo Capriccioso, and Liszt’s Valse-impromptu as an encore. Afterwards, one of the residents came up to me and said, about the recital, “I think I was in heaven.” “You were,” I replied, “and so was I.” Afterwards, I gave Nigel a tour of the place and had a chance to talk. He stressed what a good composer Leander is, what a shame that he is not composing. Yet, his diversions—a viable family (and now the farm)—are also very important, especially for Nigel, who of course is unmarried and I think beginning to fear a lonely old age. He was appalled at the sight of Webster, who came to the recital in a wheelchair.

Sunday, September 27, 1998

I ministered in Meeting about Nigel’s recital. Why does this send us to “heaven” and what does that mean? Surely aesthetic pleasure is finite and fleeting whereas heaven is meant to be infinite and permanent. But the genius of a Beethoven (and a Coxe) puts us somehow in the realm of angels—accomplishment beyond the human norm. Most importantly, the inexhaustible creativity of Beethoven’s variations (there were only 32 but we know that there could have been 64, 128, etc.) simulates for us the inexhaustible creativity of the Nature of Being, otherwise known as God.

Monday, September 28, 1998

John came and we did more of the Μια ματιά exercises for the book. He has also done his introduction finally. Last night: a nice long dinner with Ned Perrin and his new girlfriend, Susan A., a professor in the religion department. Very good for Ned—a bright, sympathetic woman, mature yet youthful. He seems in very good spirits. I asked him what his current project is (meaning writing, of course) and he answered, “Mending stone walls.”

Tuesday, September 29, 1998

Long supper with Dick Williamson and then music: Prokofiev, Mozart, Vaughan Williams, followed by some real conversation, which isn’t easy with Dick. . . . Earlier, inauguration of the Peace Study Fellows program at the Dickey Center. A fine initiative. People were very gracious toward me, calling me the founder.

Wednesday, September 30, 1998

Telephoned Leonard Rieser, who has pancreatic cancer metastasized to the liver, and was given two to six more months to live (two months are up). His speech is very slurred but he obviously wanted to talk, and kept me on the telephone for twenty minutes. I told him my thought about his situation, that length of life is of minimal importance compared to quality of life, and that his life had been of such high quality that all of us will be hard pressed to equal it. He agreed. He is very open about his condition; seems to be at peace spiritually. . . . Read an extraordinary book for Pendle Hill Publications: Lawrence Miller’s “Witness for Humanity: the Biography of Clarence E. Pickett.” Speaking of a life of value! Extraordinary. And the whole account makes me see Quakerism in general in one of its best periods. Strange that I sleep so often in Waysmeet at Pendle Hill, Pickett’s home. His ghost will hover there more meaningfully now.

Thursday, October 1, 1998

Alivizatos’s group of essays arrived for the constitutional law issue of JMGS. Good! . . . Long lunch with Steve Scher. We might go with them to the opera near Cooperstown next summer. . . . John came in the afternoon and we did one more lesson in the Μια ματιά review series. Then in a flurry to get to White River Junction and meet Tom and Joan Wilson for supper, I was sure I’d deleted everything we did over the past two hours. Delightful supper with the Wilsons, who’ll be entering Kendal in 2000 or 2001, just like us, presumably. Tom had a radical prostatectomy and is doing fine. Joan is eager to meet up with musicians here and will be bringing an electronic keyboard. . . . Returning home, I discovered to my relief that I hadn’t lost our work after all, but had saved it on a floppy instead of the hard disk/finder. But also discovered that we had skipped lesson 5 inadvertently, so I did that one myself.

Friday, October 2, 1998

Cambridge

Supper at Giannino’s with Meg Alexiou, who insisted on paying. We speculated on who will succeed her. Her favorite is Tziovas and her least favorite is Lambropoulos. I also wondered if Christos, now that Pavlos’s future is settled (he’ll go to England to live in the Haunch Lane house, which Christos has donated to the autistic society), will continue his campaign in Greece for autistic halfway houses. Surely he will not decide to relax now. Neither he nor I knows how. . . . Big disappointment earlier at Harvard Coop, where I went to buy another green book-bag and was told that they’re not manufactured any longer. So, this has joined Caroid tooth powder as a staple of mine that I have lost. . . . To A.R.T. with Meg afterwards to see a play called “How I Learned to Drive” by Paula Vogel, very well acted by Debra Winger (the others being acceptable). I found it rather boring most of the way, although it began to hang together toward the end, and probably needs to be seen more than once, for, like modernist and postmodernist art, it doesn’t go straight forward from beginning to middle to end, but backwards and sideways. So, the first viewing is disconcerting. The author is a feminist and Lesbian, and the play seems to be a study of the harm that men can do to women. But the man in question, “Uncle Peck,” a 40+ year old who is irresistibly enamored of his 11- and then 17- and then 18-year-old niece, is too pathetic, really. The cards are all stacked against him, which hurts the play considerably. And his wife and mother-in-law are simply a chorus for the author’s anti-masculinism. So, not a very satisfactory play; yet it’s always nice to see good acting, which we did very well indeed since we were in the first row. Afterwards I missed my hat, so we walked back to Giannino’s. It wasn’t there. Then to Winthrop Entry K, where Meg is living (exactly where I lived in 1983), then back to A.R.T., where they had my hat waiting for me.

Saturday, October 3, 1998

Brookline

Up early. Drove to Hellenic College, of course getting lost once or twice. Beautiful day. I’m sitting now on a bench on the lawn of this place, the former Weld estate, looking out over downtown Boston. My job today is to M-C the Greece in Print panel on travel writing, with Mike Antonakes, Lily Bita, and Vangelis Calotychos. Bita recited an amazing story of her “passage to India” to find Indians full of enthusiasm for Greece and things Greek. Mike Antonakes spoke well about Kazantzakis and Buddhism. Then we went out together for a cordial lunch. He is still teaching occasionally, and planning to stay in their house in Lynn. He surprised me by saying that there is no real community in Lynn; he is mostly alone. Strange. Hanover is much better. . . . Back to Hanover. Martin McKinsey sent forms for me to write, immediately: a testimonial for a Fulbright grant. So, here we go again.

Sunday, October 4, 1998

To Princeton

By AMTRAK, slowly, to NYC and then by NJ Transit to Princeton Junction, using my computer to do more of the English-Greek lexicon, and reading the full dossier of the American Farm School trustees’ meeting. Met at the station by Mike Keeley; to his home for supper with Mary and Dimitri Gondicas and Evie. Had a little time to speak about AFS with Mike. He feels that the new college must go to four years, indeed will save the rest of the school, whose program, he feels, is now passé since Greece must cease being primarily an agricultural nation. I find this strange, for Greece will still need farmers, although fewer. Mike feels that agricultural training is now as good if not better in Greek schools, and that the AFS no longer offers anything really special. We’ll see. Furthermore, the farm, now surrounded by the city, should be sold or developed, especially now that the School has the Zannas farm in the countryside. . . . Our other time at dinner was spent mostly discussing MGSA. Dimitri and Mike are very worried. The Executive Committee is mediocre, they feel; the new constitution is ineffective; there is a vacuum of leadership. Another real problem is who will succeed me as editor of JMGS. We thought of Mark Mazower, John Iatrides, and Danny Danforth. . . . Mike is still suffering, mostly from his medications. Lacks energy. Has inadequate blood supply to the heart despite the stent in one artery. But he is delighted that his new book on Miller, Durrell, and Katsimbalis/Seferis is about to appear, including six pages on Karyotakis, responding to my complaint that Karyotakis had been overlooked. . . . Dimitri drove me to the apartment assigned me only to find that Claire Myones had forgotten to leave the key. So I spent the night at the Nassau Inn.

Monday, October 5, 1998

Princeton

Good work with Mache on John’s Μια ματιά, correcting and adding. Later, good work with Dimitri concerning Kazazis’s remaining suggestions and those of Gonda Van Steen. More tomorrow.

Wednesday, October 7, 1998

Princeton–Pendle Hill

Finished vetting John’s Μια ματιά and selections for proverbs and expressions. Drove to Pendle Hill in the late afternoon, arriving in time for supper. Liz says that my guidelines for cohabitation were not received very favorably by staff, but Dan demurred, saying that they want to keep the queries relating to the impact of cohabitation on the Pendle Hill community but to eliminate the queries that relate chiefly or entirely to the couples themselves—what they call the “marriage counseling” queries. So be it. . . . Played Starer and Schubert and Barber with Dan. Not too bad. Dan expanded to me at great length about his former wife, Betty Jean, from whom he’s not divorced (strangely) and who is now seriously ill with cancer. He fears that his own resources will be attached so that she can go on Medicaid. A sad story of an alcoholic, self-destructive woman, according to his account: an aspiring actress who, after finally being given a leading role, decided she would quit the theater. Plus more of the same. When I hear such stories I of course am reminded of how blessed my own situation is. I am like Clarence Pickett who, near the end of his life, complained (after a fashion) that he’d never had occasion to suffer.

Thursday, October 8, 1998

Chicago

Met at O’Hare by David and Leone Mirza, who then took me out to lunch, very graciously, and delivered me to the University Club on East Monroe Street. David was very lucid and informative on hedge funds, the volatility of the stock market; Leone was very helpful regarding bilingual education—she’s an Armenian-American and therefore appreciates the problems of the Greek-American community. University Club is palatial. My room reminds me of the accommodations at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington. And Chicago is lovely. So rich, so clean. I walked in the loop area, entered the Sears Tower to see the huge, fascinating Calder mobile in the lobby: sun, moon, stars, and a helix revolving, all hugely big, in keeping with the hugely big building. Then to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral where we had another Commission hearing, with John, Nick, John’s employee in Chicago; Leone came too but sat in the back. A slightly different flavor here from Boston and New York. More emphasis on the need for centralization by the Archdiocese. Very articulate principals, and also a woman high up in the Chicago Public Schools’ central office (the CPS is headed by Vallas, a Greek-American, who is now nationally celebrated for his accomplishments in upgrading the system). To bed at 11:00 p.m., Chicago time.

Friday, October 9, 1998

Chicago–Philadelphia

Up at 4:30 a.m. (ugh). Back to Pendle Hill via 6:20 a.m. plane from O’Hare. Our Books Committee lasted from 12 noon until 4:45 p.m. Approved the Pickett biography, thank goodness. Also Margaret Hope Bacon’s “primer” on Quakerism. Rejected Emma Lapsanski’s interviews of people who remembered the 1955 unification of Hicksites and Orthodox. And, surprisingly, everybody except one rejected the anthology of essays on Woolman. Liz Kamphausen is the sticky one; she doesn’t like anything. . . . Had only an hour to play Starer and Barber with Dan. Then Rebecca joined us and we had a nice supper outside, talking mostly about Anna Mays’s desire to go to Greece. Also, I read and vetted Dan’s very fine essay on community. No fatigue at all, despite only four hours of sleep last night. My plane home was delayed. Finally reached Lebanon at midnight, still wide awake. Lovely reunion with Chrysanthi.

Sunday, October 11, 1998

Business meeting. Some people want to have two separate Meetings for Worship because of crowding. Happily, many were opposed. I came away with a pile of checks for depositing and bills to pay, now that I’m treasurer. Also, the Independent in London wants me to write an obituary for Lily Zografou. And Filia Macedon telephoned at 10:00 p.m. needing a testimonial by tomorrow. I spent many hours writing up the minutes for the Chicago Commission meeting. Luckily, that’s finished.

Monday, October 12, 1998

Lunch with Tom Corindia. When I hear stories such as his I realize how fortunate we are. He has diabetes and isn’t able to manage it successfully despite the injections he needs to give himself several times a day. His wife, Nancy, suffers from depression and has been in and out of the mental hospital. Now she’s on even keel, with drugs. But until when? And their eldest, Nikos, has “attention disorder.” Cannot concentrate. Cannot finish his homework. This, too, is now considered a disease, so he goes to a psychiatrist for treatment with drugs. What a mess! On top of that, the Hitchcock Clinic alliance is almost bankrupt because of bad mergers with local clinics. . . . Went to Jim Heffernan’s inaugural lecture as the 2nd Beebe professor, following me. On rhetoric. Amusing but not deep. His 98-year-old mother was in the audience, looking about 70.

Tuesday, October 13, 1998

Took my presidential scholar, Sara Zoniga, to lunch. She’s a dear, and is growing enthusiastic now about her work for JMGS. She actually finished two manuscripts and I gave her four more. She wants to travel to Greece, perhaps Santorini. . . . Working on Xenophon Kokolis’s essay on Anagnostakis, which needs massive copyediting. I wanted to finish in time to bring it to him in Salonika, but I won’t make it. . . . Nice talk with Darrel Mansell in Sanborn. He, too, has problems. Fearful of retirement because he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Poor guy! And his Italian wife wants to return to Italy, which he dreads for himself. I told him that usually I am more eager to go to Greece than Chrysanthi is.

Thursday, October 15, 1998

To London

Routine flight on Virgin Atlantic to London.

Friday, October 16, 1998

London–Athens, Hotel Arethousa

A very full day. Routine flight, again via Virgin Atlantic, to Athens. Settled in Hotel Arethousa, Οδός Μητροπόλεως. Not bad; very cheap—δp 24000 = $85.00. Walked around central Athens taking photos for Demotic Greek 1, mostly of Greek signs. Chrysanthi bought little dresses for Sophia and Christina. Then to Christos Alexiou’s office, Αθανάς 2, which at first we couldn’t find. With him to his apartment, Πλατεία Βικτορίας, pleasant reunion with Έρη and their daughter, Ασπασία-Μαρία, now ten years old, in fifth grade; acts like a little adult. Does she ever play? She’s in the famous Αρσάκειο, Greece’s first public school after the revolution. Christos brought me up to date on the offer by Crete University Press to translate and publish my Politics of the Spirit. Apparently it’s going to happen. And the translator we approached, Ασπασία Λαμπρινίδου, has agreed to undertake the project. Christos telephoned her, and she said that she could come right over. So at 10:00 p.m. she arrived. A young woman, devoted to literature, who does translation on the side. Not very talkative, however. We all sat until 12:45 a.m. (!) talking with enthusiasm about literature. How nice! And Christos actually laughed, a rare occurrence. Christos wants to publish Ritsos’s letters to me. I hope I can find them. . . . So we slept at 1:15 a.m., which of course was 6:15 a.m. Hanover time, just about the time to get up. But thanks to my feast-fast regimen, I had no jet lag.

Saturday, October 17, 1998

Athens–Thessaloniki

Slept well. To the airport by 9:30, only to find that our plane is delayed an hour; doesn’t leave until 1:15. Telephoned Vouli, who’ll pick us up. Took more photos, against mostly of signs. . . . A nice quote from Proust’s La Fugitive, included in a TLS review (October 9, 1998, p. 11): “L’homme est l’être qui ne peut sortir de soi, qui ne connaît les autres qu’en soi, et, en disant le contraire, ment.” . . . Vouli, Lola, George, and Odysseas were waiting at the airport. Hugs and kisses. Then to seaside restaurant with Vouli and Lola for μύδια, οκταπόδι, etc.—a plunge into Greece. To the Farm School. Cocktails and dinner at the Drapers’ house. Christine Lansdale came; I thought she was Tad! Started meeting other trustees, also David and Patty Buck. David is the headmaster elect, currently head of the Prague International School. He’s interested in Alec for a principalship there next year. They are eager to learn Greek and want our books and tapes. Good beginning.

Sunday, October 18, 1998

Kavala

AFS excursion to Eastern Macedonia. How amazingly developed everything seems: good roads, electricity everywhere, tractors, fertile irrigated fields. . . . To Amphipolis, but the museum was closed because it’s election day. (Earlier, the guide took us to her polling place in Neapolis. Her school, formerly τῆς Νεαπόλεως, is now της Νεαπόλης. Beautiful view. Then through Drama, and lunch there on the Nissaki island in the middle, with ducks swimming next to us. . . . Then to Philippi, to see (again) the stream in which St. Paul presumably baptized and the Baptistry of St. Lydia (the first European Christian), with beautiful mosaics in the dome, not the Pantocrator but St. John baptizing Christ. Then the impressive remains of the basilica at Philippi and the theater. . . . Then to Kavala. Hotel Philoxenia, high above the city. Cocktails. Then to the harbor for dinner.

October 19, 1998

Kavala–Thessaloniki

A long fascinating day. Began for me with a leisurely breakfast sitting next to trustee Eve Labouisse, whose husband was ambassador to Greece under Kennedy, just after Ellis Briggs, and whose mother was Eve Curie! An old woman still full of vitality, and speaking enough Greek still. . . . Interesting walking tour in Kavala to the home of Mehmet Ali, who became the Pasha of Egypt—a fascinating Turkish-style house. Coffee in the Foundation he established, now a restaurant for educational purposes, in the Imaret. . . . Then to the village of Nikisiani, way up the mountain, to a new κέντρο nestled between peaks, for a lunch of goat, lamb, σουτζουκάκια, halvah, and a breathtaking view. . . . Then to the extraordinary cave Alistrati, newly opened thanks to EU money. A fairyland of stalactites and stalagmites looking, to me, like Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed living room in Great Expectations. The pedestrian walkway took us for a full kilometer through this magic of diverse forms, like pillars, like coral, like jellyfish, like the legs of sheep. . . . Finally through Serres (not very impressive, although I made Chrysanthi laugh because I pointed out all the stores where one could buy men’s underwear—I forgot mine home) to the village of Chrissórata because 150 families from the village live in Worcester, Massachusetts, the home of one of our trustees. Grand welcome. Flowery speech by the village president, proud demonstration of the guesthouse paid for by remittances from Worcester, where the visiting Worcesterites can sleep; ceremonial coffee; loukoumia distributed to everyone. I sat with the new president-elect. He’d been a gastarbeiter in Germany for 19 years. Another man had been in Germany for 35 years and now enjoyed an ample German pension. The children are in law school, etc. The fields are fertile and are irrigated from the nearby lake. Again, the miracle of development. In Chrysanthi’s childhood not far from here it was malaria and tuberculosis for everyone. . . . Back to AFS by 11:00 p.m., very tired.

As planned, this trip has enabled trustees to exchange conversation informally, and I feel I’ve gotten to know some of them—not all. They’re quite a group. Two widows of ambassadors, one high official in the World Bank. And it was veyr nice, as I said earlier, to get to know David and Patty Buck. Turns out that her father’s family were Quakers, named Hoag (I thought of Becky Hoag Shankland) and that she grew up in Greenwich, NY. David’s family had a summer home on Friends Lake. Small world! I’ve heard a little about the school: for example that the college doesn’t have many applicants, that Engish is taught very badly in the lyceum, which explains why so few lyceum graduates can be accepted into the college. Vouli feels that there’s one very bad person, the one on charge of EU relations, and one very good man: the vice-principal, Tasos. I hope to speak in private to Tasos soon.

Tuesday, October 20, 1998

AFS

A full day at AFS, from 7:45 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. The student assembly is every weekday at 7:45. All students are present. This time each trustee was introduced. But first a student read from the New Testament in Greek, then in English, followed by a hymn sung by all (including Chrysanthi, who knew all the words) and everyone crossing himself or herself. Students actually looked quite reverential. Then the boy who had read the passage gave a presentation about his village, the ancestral village in Thrace, the exchange of populations, and the new village in Χαλκιδική. Very nicely done, with illustrations projected by an overhead projector. Afterwards, George Draper spoke in beautiful Greek about trustees, the day’s arrangements, etc. . . . The rest of the morning was devoted to a tour of adminsitrative offices: library, information center, EU coordination center, girls dormitory rooms with six beds, each with a teddy bear (or two or three); Turkish toilets across the hall. They put three Western toilets in as well, but the students prefer the Turkish style. . . . Big lunch, then two hours in the library with the director talking about his problems, chiefly owing to the school’s desire to be accredited. The library needs extensive upgrading, but they don’t know whether to buy books or CD-Roms. Big problems. . . . Afterwards, Finance Committee. More big problems, dipping into endowment because of cash flow problems, expectation to be saved by the Ministry of Agriculture and/or the EU. . . . A recess; finished reading over my Καπετάν Μιχάλης lecture, which needs lots of practice. . . . Then to dinner at Mr. and Mrs. Levis’s apartment. US trustees, Greek trustees, and friends of the Levis, including Mr. Voutaris, the wine-maker, and his wife. He explained to me that οἶνος, wine, vin, and wein are cognates. Yesterday I learned that κρασί arose because they diluted the wine, or mixed it, with water. Thus κρασί (cf. κράμα = mixture). Supper; delicious meal, very European. The apartment is filled with paintings, including a very nice Sikeliotis of a nude girl and man. Levis is not Jewish. His father or grandfather was adopted by a Salonika Jewish family. In 1912 Venizelos appointed him mayor of the newly liberated Thessaloniki provided he change his name to a Greek one. He refused, and Venizelos relented and appointed him anyway.

Wednesday, October 21, 1998

American Farm School

In the morning, another moving assembly. Then a fascinating tour of the practical side of AFS: the winery (donated in part by ο Γιάννης Βουτάρης), with excellent dry red wine, and the girls pasting on the labels by hand; the hothouses, huge expanses; the machine shop, with power tools from Germany probably dating from the Occupation; the milk production unit, with explanation of how carefully the cows’ teats are protected from infection after milking, and lots about artificial insemination to enhance genetically those features that create greater production of milk; finally the poultry houses, with old methods in one, modern methods in a second, and absolutely contemporary ones in a third. In the last two, everything is automatic: feed distribution, egg collection, waste removal. In the last (in which each hen spends her life in a cage), special feeds (e.g. oregano) given (a) to decrease the smell and, more importantly (b) to decrease the cholesterol and increase a nutrient that is good for human hearts. These eggs are twice as expensive, for obvious reasons. They have probably 20% less cholesterol. . . . This was followed by a staff/student mixer. I sat next to a recent graduate of the two-year college, now a new staff person, who was born and raised in Nigrita. But then Tasos, the vice-principal, came and spent a long time expanding on what Vouli had told me, about the Σατανάς, Micheliidis, head of EU relations and lifelong learning. Tasos says that because he brings in money he is impossibly arrogant and wants the tail (money) to wag the dog (AFS), destroying the school’s spirit of cooperation, unity, and service. Kpίμα! I spoke to George Draper about this afterwards, in confidence, and he said he was aware of the problem and had almost fired Micheliidis but had ended by promoting him. It’s almost impossible to fire anyone, and in this case he would demand $75,000 minimum severance pay and “hush money,” not to bad-mouth the school. We’ll see. In any case, George wants to settle this somehow before David Buck arrives. . . . Lunch with a young teacher of mathematics, a Cretan, who adores Kazantzakis. . . . In the afternoon, by van to the Zannas Farm, about an hour away. About 500 stremmata, nice flat land, next to the Axiós Ribver, thus ready for irrigation. But the buildings are in ruinous condition. A rig was drilling a well. Plans exist for restoring the buildings. David Acker hopes that the farm will become a well-known demonstration project for “ecological and organic farming.” . . . We also had a Greek Summer meeting. They’ve run out of meaningful projects, it seems. I spoke about the Quaker work camp experience and suggested that they combine American and Greek youth into teams working with Albanian refugees, helping them to build homes (cf. Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity), or otherwise to settle better. This would be a big change from the usual attitude condemning “those awful people who do nothing but steal,” etc. . . . Then Chrysanthi and I went to one of the “clubs” functioning on Wednesday afternoons, to the one organized by the Cretan mathematician, whose hobby is traditional folk music. He played λαούτο and mandolin; others had guitars, bouzoukia, and drums. Lots of singing, too. And Manita, a trustee, added her voice and guitar very pleasingly. What a nice, varied life is possible at this school! . . . At 8:00 p.m. we all left for another splendid dinner, this time at the Panorama apartment (with paintings galore, and a view of the entire city) of Stavros and Loretta Constantinidis. Met the new American Consul-General, Stephenson; very nice; the one who was absent when I spoke to the group at the Foreign Service training school last year. He wants to arrange a lecture for me if we return. Also met several wealthy women who form a group that helps AFS students on the weekends, bringing them to cultural events in town if they can’t go home to their villages.

Thursday, October 21, 1998

Another very full day. Σύναξη at 7:45 a.m. Three students spoke about their visit to America sponsored by AFS and 4-H. But they really didn’t say much. No analysis; no meditation on the meaning (or lack of meaning) of their visit; just bare facts—we did this, then that. . . . From 9:00 to 1:00, formal meeting of the Corporation first, and then, quickly, the Board. Very well led by chairman Thomas and George Draper. Lots of committee business reported efficiently and approved without discussion, but lots of discussion about the Zannas Farm, Greek Summer, and, of course, finances. Nothing, strangely, about accreditation or expanding the college to four years. We meet again in NYC on February 19–20 and then (surprise) in Greece on May 20–21 followed by an excursion to Corfu. The decision to meet in Greece in May is because the Drapers will be leaving and an appropriate celebration will be organized. . . . After lunch, Vouli drove us to the Metropolitan Hotel, where I began by complaining about the price, which they lowered from 39,000 to 35,000. More shortening and tightening of the lecture, which I read aloud to Chrysanthi: 48 minutes. Then bus to the university with a bougatsa and Nes on the way. Dimitri already had the 115,000 drachmas I get paid. About $400. Perounias showed up, a linguist I’d last seen in Berkeley probably in the 1970s. Not a single teacher from the τμήμα. Oh well. . . . But my Cretan mathematician friends from AFS came, together with the school’s φιλόλογος (Vouli’s replacement), plus Vouli and Lena Stefa and a Ph.D. student I’d met in Oxford. No one from Chrysanthi’s family. But the room was filled with students, including some standing in the aisles. How nice! That’s the way it should be. The lecture went well. I had no trouble articulating the Greek. Questions afterwards were also easy to answer in Greek, although I had to be helped with the word στοιχειό (ghost—Kazantzakis’s father). Afterwards, about a half dozen people came up to ask private questions, including a German (speaking Greek) who is writing a thesis on Kazantzakis’s Οδύσεια. . . . Afterwards to Διαγώνιος with Vouli and Lena Stefa for γύρος και σουτζουκάκια. Walked back to the Metropolitan on the παραλία, part way with Lena, who is trying to read Ulysses. I’ll send her the chart and my notes.

Friday, October 23, 1998

Long breakfast at the hotel with Victor Roudometof, who is now teaching at Anatolia College. It turns out that he can be a considerable help for the Archbishop’s Commission (a) because of a relevant article he has just written, (b) because of his access to relevant statistics compiled by the Greek Ministry for the Διασπορά, (c) because he can usefully vet our draft report. So, I’d like to include him in our work as a consultant. . . . Mailed two heavy packets of papers and books (Stylianos’s two latest) home, and sat in the Information Center of the British Council (the library was transferred to one of the “free” colleges now here) to write at length in this journal. . . . then to the university to meet Dimitri, who took us home for lunch. Their daughter, Angelica, is just back from school in Somerset, speaking English with a perfect British accent; their son, Frankiskos, is doing well at Anatolia College. Ruth is completing an interesting book approaching literary texts, including Beckett, via psychology—e.g., Molloy’s complicated relationship with his mother. Dimitri wants to bring me here again for another collaboration at the university. We’ll see . . . At 7:00, to Odysseas’s and Eleni’s. Lola was there, too. Supper, of course. Most of the time we had to listen to Odysseas and Lola screaming at each other (in a friendly manner) over politics—the recent elections—, also over Andreas Papandreou’s Mimi vs. Clinton’s Monica. Fortunately George and Efthymoula arrived later and asked for details about Alec’s marriage in Jakarta and the celebration in Riparius, with George always asking, in each case, how much it cost and who paid. Then Stavros and Toula arrived to pick up their child, Ανθούλα, now about ten years old and very pretty. Stavros told me the latest tragedy. He’d purchased a large tract of land in Halkidiki, all forest, with 100-year-old pine trees, hoping to establish there a summer music camp. And last summer the entire forest burned. Nothing left except ashes. As for their house in Neapolis, at the other edge of Salonika, it’s 80% finished, but how can they live there, it’s so far away from the Odeon. They’d thought to put his parents in it, but his father died last year. Their family life is a continuous saga of bad plans, wasted money, and awful luck. Yet the Odeon continues with 200+ students, somehow. We’ll see them again tomorrow night. Odysseas walked us back to the hotel, vociferating in a machine-gun-speed monologue without respite. When we entered the hotel both Chrysanthi and I sighed: “Ah, quiet at last!”

Saturday, October 24, 1998

Walked all the way down to the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, housed in the beautiful nineteenth-century mansion of the Greek consul in the then Ottoman Salonika. Excellent photos, slide show, placards. Lots about Παύλος Μελάς, of course, and also something about Ίων Δραγούμης. It’s hard to imagine the frenetic excitement when the Greek army entered the city in 1912, of course on October 26, the name day of Saint Demetrius. . . . Also stopped at City University, across the street from the museum; it now has the books that used to be in the British Council library. Walking slowly to Lola’s, I sat on a bench near Πιάτσα Ναυαρίνου and was approached by one of the students who attended my lecture on Thursday. “What is your view of God?” he asked straight off. How nice! I said that God is just shorthand for . . . το ων, η ουσία, το σύμπαν, and that whatever we say about “him” automatically lessens “him”; therefore Quakers sit in silence. He is from Mykonos. Said that his λύκειο teacher gave them Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός to read. Όλοι οι καθηγητές ήταν φιλελεύθεροι. . . . Lunch with Κώστας και Λόλα. Too much meat, as always, but easy conversation. . . . Toula and Stavros were supposed to pick us up and they telephoned to say they were too busy. So we walked to Αμαλίας and got theater tickets for tonight. On the way back, stopped at the so-called Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο, which is actually an art gallery. But most interesting of all is the building itself. We were told that in the nineteenth century and early twentieth it was used as a joint church-mosque-synagogue by Orthodox, Moslems, and Jews who developed joint services. Imagine! That’s the sort of thing we never hear; yet it exists, and existed, at least to some small degree. And the building itself is beautiful, with a huge dome, Saint Sophia style. . . . Then a quick supper in our favorite restaurant: Οι Λύκοι (The Wolves). Disappointing. All different waiters and chef. But the old chef came in later. . . . Then to η Πειραματική Σκηνή, Oδός Αμαλίας, with Vouli, to see George Tabori’s «Το κουράγιο της μητέρας μου», a largely autobiographical account of his Jewish mother’s capture by Germans in Budapest and her dispatch in a cattle train to Auschwitz, but how she was saved by a German officer along the way, and returned safe to Budapest. The technique was very undramatic: narration by her son, played beautifully by Χρήστος Αρναμάλλης. But the mother was Έφη Σταμούλη, the mediocre actress who is the wife of the director and is thus given all the leading roles in this troupe’s productions. Oh well . . . All the supporting players were better, so the net result was quite moving. And Chrysanthi and Vouli both liked it.

Sunday, October 25, 1998

Chrysanthi went to Vouli’s to see if they can buy tickets for the Prague Symphony tonight at the Μονή Λαζαριστών, where Dimitri did the glass railings. I am this moment watching in television the very special service at the Αγία Μονή Ξενοφώντος Αγίου Όρους, celebrating its 1000th anniversary. The Patriarch is there; he was just given some golden medals. So is the Archbishop of Greece. And Stephanopoulos, the Greek president, and all the ministers of state, including the Minister of Culture, Ευάγγελος Βενιζέλος, whom I met. The abbot just delivered a colorful speech in church katharevousa; now Stephanopoulos is speaking in demotic, about the invaluable tradition preserved in such monasteries, and the hope that the Turkish government will learn to value to Patriarchate in Istanbul. . . . Now Patriarch Bartholomew is speaking, in a clear, deep voice, again in church katharevousa. He is saying nice things about the Christian κήρυγμα—e.g., it hopes for ελευθερία από των παθεών. Η εκκλησία δεν πολεμά· σώζει. He spoke against rabid nationalism as well as individualism. . . . To George’s and Efthymoula’s for lunch. Dimitri and Tilda and child came. George has recurrence of prostate, with PSA of 2. He is interested in hearing about any new therapy that is developed in the US that I hear about. Dimitri is about to develop a web site for his business, and has just purchased a “notebook” computer. And soon will have e-mail. They’d all like to come to America but cannot afford it. So they buy lottery tickets and hope. . . . Zetta Farinou telephoned earlier and came to see us at 6:00 p.m. We sat for 1½ hours in a café near Διαγώνιο and talked about literary affairs, the μεταρρύθμιση, etc. She’s discouraged regarding the quality of students studying philology now. They learn facts by heart, not much more. . . . Then with Vouli to Μονή Λαζαριστών to hear the Prague Symphony do pieces by Smetana, Wieniawski, Wexman, and Dvořák, the 2nd and 3rd with a fine Greek violin soloist, Χρήστος Γαλιλαίας. But all the music was mediocre. Still, it’s nice to hear a fine orchestra. . . . Joann Ryding was there, from the Farm School.

October 26, 1998

Athens, Hotel Phoinix

Vouli drove us to the Salonika airport. Breakfast there at exorbitant prices ($4.00 for a cup of coffee). Taxi to Hotel Phoinix in Glyfada, near the airport. Then immediately taxi to Αγία Παρασκευή, a 45-minute ride. Greeted by Mr. and Mrs. Demos and Iason. Demos was a teacher; applied for headmastership of Pinewood but lost the job to George Draper. Little by little went into the photography business, chiefly as a representative in Greece of foreign photographers. They had prepared some slides for us, and we chose about twenty of them as appropriate. These need to be scanned into the computer and then returned for negotiation regarding price, which Demos says he’ll keep as low as possible. Also, someone here could take photos in Athens by pre-order. They also showed us magnificent photos by Manos, who lives in Boston. To use these we’ll need to negotiate directly with the photographer. All in all, a useful visit. They then took us out to lunch, after finding most restaurants closed on Monday, but finally one open in Halandri. Very grateful for my care of Iason at Dartmouth. Iason is working for them in the interim before he begins his military service of 18 months. We finally got a taxi back to Glyfada (another ¾ hour ride), telephoned Christos to say we were too tired to go downtown, telephoned General Macedon to send greetings from Filitsa (but it’s doubtful that he understood), walked along the seashore, visited a Luna Park, returned to the hotel, and thankfully went to bed at 8:30 p.m. (Last night, 5½ hours of sleep only.) In Glyfada we saw a hotel that’s been converted into a sort of CCRC. How nice!

Tuesday, October 27, 1998

Athens–London

Routine flight to Heathrow. Tube to Russell Square. We have a double room on the third floor of the Penn Club with bath “en suite,” very fancy. Went out immediately to find Lloyds Bank and Boots (for baby supplies for Daphne). It’s quite a shock to encounter the darkness and rain of London after so much Greek sunshine. Stopped to find Rowena Loverance in her office but she was gone. Then back to Piccadilly by foot. Spaghetti dinner in a restaurant I remembered in Haymarket. Then to Comedy Theatre for its double bill, Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” and Schaffer’s “Black Comedy,” acted by the same cast, more or less. Both plays brilliant, funny, marvelously acted. Why is it that British actors are so much better than American ones, in body movement, voice quality, everything? The theatre was filled with teenagers; that’s how a theatrical tradition continues. In “Hound,” two critics watching a who-done-it are confused with the characters themselves. The pompous language of their criticism is delicious, a parody of how we scholars and critics pontificate. The Schaffer play brilliantly reverses lighting. When the fictional lights are on, the stage is black (!). When a fictional fuse blows and the plot is plunged into darkness, the stage lights go on full force. When the “dark” room is lit by a match or cigarette lighter, the stage lights dim to half-force. All this, combined as it is with slapstick: actors groping in the “darkness,” bumping against things (and each other) in hilarious ways, is delicious. So we concluded a very pleasant first day in London at 11:00 p.m., British time, 1:00 a.m. Greek (and our body) time.

Wednesday, October 28, 1998

The Penn Club

Tried to talk to two Germans at breakfast without much success. Chrysanthi took off by herself to go to Marks and Spencer in Oxford Street to buy turtlenecks. I found another Lloyds Bank and got more £, which don’t last long here. Then to Euston to get a rail schedule for Gatwick. Then to Friends House Library. Nice conversation with the people there regarding our Pendle Hill publications, the three books we recently approved and they’ll be receiving. Asked for news about Woodbrooke. The man lamented the lack of academic rigor there, as do I. . . . Jay Bruce, the born-again Christian Dartmouth student who took several of my classes and also assisted me with JMGS, wanted to see me. He’s now at Oxford, finishing another B.A., this one in theology. We had a nice lunch together; he has a good memory—asked about Leander’s tinnitus, Alec’s situation in Indonesia, the farm (which he had visited). He is hoping to teach next year in an independent school for a few years and then to return for a Ph.D. and possible ordination. His B.A. thesis is on “The Theology of Pleasure.” Interesting! His tutor predicts that he’ll get a First. I said I’d try to help him re: Quaker schools or international schools. . . . Walked all the way to the Old Vic, getting lost a bit. Saw an amazingly effective production of Amadeus directed by Peter Hall, with a splendid Salieri played by David Suchet, and an equally splendid Mozart (Michael Sheen). Again, the magic of live theater! Then rushed via tube to Senate House, Malet Street, to hear Frank Kermode lecture on Cleanth Brooks. Met a nice man on the tube going to the same place, a Mr. Bushey, an American forty years in London, a lawyer working for the U.N. The lecture was very reminiscent for me re: new criticism vs. historicism (Douglas Bush), vs. theory vs. New Historicism. Nice talk afterwards with a young Canadian who just finished his doctorate here in American Studies, which are now offered in twenty or thirty British universities. Hors d’oeuvres afterwards at the reception, plus lots of wine, all deliciously gratis.

Thursday, October 29, 1998

To the new British Library. Contrary to the press releases, Chrysanthi and I found it very pleasing both inside and out—more than pleasing: grand in the best sense, μεγαλοπρεπής. I even secured my reader’s ticket, good for five years. Will I ever do research in London again? Perhaps on “light” for a Pendle Hill pamphlet. . . . Back to the Penn Club to meet Lewis Owens, the Cambridge Ph.D. candidate in theology who has been working so well on Kazantzakis. He sees Kazantzakis’s “blasphemous” ideas as straight from Boehme and the Buddhists. And he has discovered, in the Iraklion museum, which houses Kazantzakis’s library, 50 relevant books with underlining and often an indication that they were purchased in Vienna or Berlin when Kazantzakis was developing his ideas for Ασκητική. Lewis gave me the dissertation as it now stands, about half finished. But he doesn’t know Modern Greek, alas. Also, he has run out of money and will need to leave Cambridge for nine months in order to work and save for next year. I’ll try to help him, and already have written numerous testimonials to granting agencies, none of which gave him anything. . . . To the Gielgud Theatre for Michael Frayn’s amusing “Alarms & Excursions,” a series of five or six short plays, extremely funny, extremely biting toward modern urban life with its plethora of machines and gadgets. A bit like a Greek επιθεώρηση, without the music, song, and dance. Once again, actors playing multiple roles convincingly, so one is actually surprised that the actor or actress is the same person. . . . By tube to the Barbican. Rush hour. Thousands of people rushing up, rushing down. We’re glad we don’t live here. But where else can one find such exquisite theater? . . . Good lamb (better than in Greece) in the Barbican Terrace Café, where we shared many meals with Daphne and Greg in the past. The RSC performance of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal struck us as labored: trying too hard, with the effect being chiefly of people trying too hard. But the second part went better, and of course has delicious scenes, especially the “usury” with Charles Surface, the dissolute son, and Sir Oliver Surface (impersonating the moneylender’s accomplice, played excellently by Tim Wylton). But the Jewish moneylender, Moses, is embarrassing to put on stage nowadays, but of course was real then, I suppose. He recommends interest of 50% if Charles isn’t really too bad off, and of 100% if he is desperate for money. The moral of the play is of course all too clear; there’s very little subtlety here. . . . On the way out, a pleasant voice cried, “Hello, Professor Bien!” It was a Byzantinist from King’s and her husband and son (who complained that the play lacked scenery). She told me about the graduate seminar at King’s tomorrow. . . . Home via tube, very tired. Gave one ticket, which strangely had not been gobbled by the machine, to someone who was begging for a way home. (London has its share, it seems, of the destitute.)

Friday, October 30, 1998

Nice conversation at breakfast—finally!—with an American academic, John Shawcross, then with a British woman form Lancashire who has macular degeneration of the retina and expects to go blind. She is down to meet with a support group. Thinking of my father’s unwillingness to prepare himself for blindness, I asked her if she were learning Braille. She said No, just like him, alas. . . . By tube to Piccadilly, to the Royal Academy for a very unusual exhibit: Picasso’s work in ceramics. At age 65+ he developed this interest in the south of France (e.g., Antibes), where he found some very skilled ceramic craftsmen who could execute his designs. And what a variety of designs! Plates, pots, jugs, statue-like columns, all executed with superb skill. Much inspiration from ancient Greek forms, too . . . An interlude in Fortnum & Mason’s, not buying anything, but enjoying some free samples of delicacies. . . . To the National Gallery, which in the past I’ve often done in a hurry. This time we went leisurely, first through the eighteenth-century wing, then in the older wing to see El Grecos, Rembrandts, Vermeers, and my favorite Michelangelo painting, the one that is only half finished. There are also wonderful Cézannes, Van Goghs, Monets. . . . To King’s College. Roddy Beaton welcomed us with a lovely smile. To the graduate seminar, a paper on Cavafy’s abandonment of the πολιτικός στίχος (δεκαπεντασύλλαβος), with some parallels with Ezra Pound. David Ricks in charge. The student said that Maronitis declares that Achilles and Patroclos were lovers (he was reading Cavafy’s “Τα άλογα του Αχιλλέα.” I wondered. Achilles seems extremely heterosexual in the Iliad. Also, I wondered if Pound was right in claiming that iambic pentameter needs to be “heaved” away in English in order to approach the speech rhythms of the people. Iambic is the natural speech rhythm of English. Nice to see such a large group of M.A. and Ph.D. candidates at King’s. But I was disappointed at Iason’s thesis, which I read on the plane from Athens, and David told me that Iason received a mere pass. Too bad. Afterwards—surprise—Judith Herrin appeared, just back from Vienna (?) and about to leave for Athens. We shared a few moments together with her and Roddy. . . . Then to the Haymarket for Tom Stoppard’s “Invention of Love.” I’d read it last year and found it tedious. I found—we found—the production equally tedious. It reminded me of Kazantzakis’s plays, all declamation, no action. Of course it had its moments, especially at the start when Housman has died and finds himself approached by Charon to be rowed across the Styx, and is told “You’ll find a three-headed dog at the other side. Just ignore him and he’ll ignore you.” The subtext is homosexuality, quite suppressed in the play, just as it was in A. E. Housman’s life. But the hints are obvious enough for those in the know, especially the material relating to Oscar Wilde’s trial (I’d finished reading “Gross Indecency” a few days ago and was very aware of all this—for example, the cue words “posing as . . .” Everyone is in the play: Jowett, Pater, Frank Harris, Jebb. The jibes against pedantry are poisonous. So it’s intellectually stimulating, but is not theater. John Shawcross, a retired professor from Kentucky who became my breakfast partner at the Penn Club, called Stoppard a “charlatan.” Too strong perhaps, but I’m amazed that this very poor play has received so much praise and sells out night after night to capacity audiences.

Saturday, October 31, 1998

A splendid final day in London. Pleasant breakfast again with Professor Shawcross. Walk in the rain—rain all day, sometimes hard—to Courtauld Gallery, which reopened only yesterday after a closing for refurbishment. A treasure house of impressionists and also of Rubens, especially his “Wrath of Achilles” and “The Death of Achilles,” two studies done as designs for tapestry. Another surprise: Cranach’s famous “Adam and Eve.” Still another, a small room filled with canvases by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, with a striking self-portrait by Fry. Bell and Grant strike me as mediocre, however. But the glories on the third floor are the impressionists: Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies Bergère,” which the museum placard rightly calls “magisterial.” I particularly loved Cézanne’s “Le Lac d’Annecy,” with its gleaming blues. . . . Then across Westminster Bridge to meet Peter and Jackie Mackridge at the National. Leisurely lunch there with them, joking about our “profiles”—more fiction than fact—in Τα Νέα recently. (But I forgot to mention another surprise at the Courtauld, a special exhibit on drawings, with all the modes on display—graphite, chalk, carbon, quill pen—for the spectators to try out, and then each masterwork identified with its particular mode made clear. There were drawings by Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rubens, Constable, Canaletto. Beautiful.) . . . Then a magnificent production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Olivier, all 3¾ hours of it. Shakespeare’s skill is such that although both Antony and Cleopatra are dissolute, unheroic, weak, they (especially Cleopatra) nevertheless capture our sympathy sufficiently so that their deaths, especially Cleopatra’s, are moving. Antony comes close, however, to failing this heroic stature, especially when he insists on fighting by sea at Actium against everyone’s advice, and then cowardly follows Cleopatra’s ship when she abandons the battle. And when Enobarbus leaves him to go to Octavian’s side, this is almost confirmation of his (Antony’s) degeneracy. On the other hand, he is the remnant of a great leader, one ruined by an excess of passion. He is a “strumpet’s fool,” like Bill Clinton. . . . After this feast, it seemed wrong to want more, or to be able to stomach more. But we had a 2½ hour interval, ate crêpes leisurely off St. Martin’s Lane and then saw an equally magnificent show: Racine’s Britannicus, very connected with Antony and Cleopatra, of course, because it continues Roman history, Junie at the end throwing her arms in desperation around the feet of the cult statue of Augustus (i.e., Octavius Caesar), as the only representation of virtue. The depiction of Nero’s pathology, and especially of the evil counselor, Narcissus, is brilliant. An unrelentingly intense play, from the first moment to the last, with Toby Stephens as Nero and Diana Rigg as his powerful mother, Agrippina. In the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra, Alan Rickman played a powerful Antony and Helen Mirren, a famous screen actress, a captivating Cleopatra. . . . A wonderfully stimulating day; we felt very fulfilled as we walked back, still in the rain, to the Penn Club for our last night’s sleep.

Monday, November 9, 1998

Hanover

John Hennessey and Len Cadwallader delivered my Kendal Chair, with a brass plate attached recognizing me as founder, leader, and esteemed colleague 1986–1998. Very nice of them. . . . Daphne and Christina are here. Greg had to return yesterday. I’ve been playing nursery rhymes for Christina.

November 12, 1998

Big trouble in Jakarta again. Students killed. Alec telephoned and sent an e-mail. Mrs. Haskin sent an e-mail. They’re all OK, but Alec had to close the school today. He and Monica are packing and getting ready to ship everything, including some furniture, in a container. We’re glad they’re leaving, but of course Monica will have big worries about her family. They’re meant to return here in early January.

November 13, 1998

Cambridge

To Cambridge to hear Dimitri Tziovas’s Christopher lecture, a very fine one about developments in Modern Greek pedagogy, from the “continuity hypothesis” to the “polarity hypothesis” (e.g., Hellene vs. Romios). He recommends focusing now on hybridity. Good! Nice dinner afterwards at the Harvard Faculty Club. Had a chance to visit with Meg and Michael, Nea Herzfeld, Dia Philippides’s cousin, a wealthy woman who raises money for the Cambridge Greek Orthodox Church School, which is very successful, she says. Why? Money!

Sunday, November 15, 1998

Quaker Finance Committee meeting in the morning. Then I performed, with Peter Saccio, Jim Heffernan, Lawrence Davies, and others, in Gross Indecency, the moving play about the three trials of Oscar Wilde. I was the Judge in Act I, and Gill and Lockwood, the prosecutors, in Act II. I had wanted to play the professor, lampooning him, but the director didn’t like my interpretation and gave the part to Davies, who did it very well indeed. Good audience, including Ned, Steve, Brock Brower, Alison Clarkson, the Campions. Very few students. The audience was attentive; no yawns. I’m hoping that Jim will organize Act III of Man and Superman for next year.

Tuesday, November 17, 1998

Princeton

Up at 4:45 a.m. yesterday for the 6:00 a.m. flight to Philadelphia. Arrived at Princeton at 9:30 and began to work immediately with Mache, correcting the Επανάληψη sections for lessons 10, 11, and 12 that John and I did recently. Not bad. Most of the Greek is OK. Long lunch yesterday with Dimitri bringing each other up to date. Lunch with Mike Keeley today in Prospect. He’s on strict non-meat diet because of his heart trouble, but otherwise doing well. He just gave a gift of $25,000 to the American Farm School. He has no children and lots of money, so is thinking of his favorite charities. He continues to feel that my role on the AFS board should be to help the College become viable. Μακάρι. Supper with Mache and a nice Greek from Thessaloniki, Νίκος Πάνου, just graduated from the Aristotelian University and hoping to do a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at either Harvard or Princeton. He is a native of Mytilene and says that he used to swim by the Fykiotrypa rock described so lovingly by Myrivilis.

Thursday, November 19, 1998

Princeton–Washington

Dimitri and I, and sometimes Mache, have been going over Peter Mackridge’s grammatical corrections very carefully. They’re most helpful, indeed lifesavers. Lunch with Mache. She’s going to have a baby in March. How will she ever continue her studies? . . . Drove back to Philadelphia and met Chrysanthi on the Vermonter AMTRAK, which took us to Washington, to Leander’s.

Friday, November 20, 1998

To Ballston on the Metro. Spoke to Jim Miller’s State Department class on “Inventing Greece.” Lots of questions during the talk instead of after it, basically on the difference between ethnicity and nationalism as a motivating force. Maybe the poetry would have been better. But at least I was able to elaborate on Koraïs and katharévousa, which they hadn’t heard about at all, as yet. . . . Afterwards, to the National Gallery. An interesting show on Edo art and culture, meaningful of course because of our visit years ago to the Edo Tokyo Museum in Tokyo. There was a special ceremony today, with about thirty Japanese singing and then doing an acrobatic show in which three of them, successively, climbed a huge ladder held vertical by the others and then at the top turned upside down, hung on with no hands, etc. . . . Also shown was some of Jock Whitney’s collection, paintings I’d seen in the American Embassy in Regents Park when Chrysanthi and I were invited there in 1958 as Fulbrighters by Whitney, then our ambassador. But for me the best part was the rooms in the West Building devoted to El Greco and Rembrandt. “Christ Cleaning the Temple” (like the one in the Frick), a powerful St. Jerome, nude, and the famous “Laocoön” and “St. Martin and the Beggar” by El Greco. Wonderful. Of the Rembrandts, I particularly liked “A Polish Nobleman,” the 1659 self-portrait (but still not as good as the one in the Frick), and the wonderful Apostle Paul. A real treat. . . . Then to Union Station for a good cup of coffee and some sorbet, and back to Rockville on the Red Line, reading a helpful primer on the E.U. that I got at the Foreign Service School this morning. . . . Read stories to Sophia. Watched television news and discussion regarding the impeachment hearings that took place yesterday. As Leander said, “It’s theater!” But where is the Shakespeare or Ibsen to make it truly theater? . . . Learned tonight that Deanna is pregnant gain. Due in early June.

Saturday, November 21, 1998

Washington

To Kennedy Center with Deanna in the evening. First time I’ve seen the rebuilt concert hall, very nice, with seats now in back of the stage, and vastly improved acoustics. James DePriest conducting, a black man with polio, heavy steel braces on his legs, just like FDR. He hobbles up to the podium, manages to ascend somehow, seats himself on a swivel chair, hands his crutch to a violist, who lays it on the floor, and is ready to begin. Very moving. Brahms’s exquisite “Variations on a Theme by Haydn,” a bit energy-less, maybe too slow, but still exquisite. Then the great cellist János Starker playing first Haydn’s Concerto in D, then Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme.” I like the Haydn more. In both, of course, Starker’s extraordinary technique was evident: a real show, but also musical. But the “hit” of the evening was Lutoslawski’s “Concerto for Orchestra,” for a huge orchestra including two harps, piano, celeste, xylophone, drums of all sorts. Exciting, percussive, but also contrapuntal music that showed off the orchestra—the lovely flutist, for example. We were in the circle, looking down on everyone, and thus easily able, visually, to follow the orchestration: English horn, timpani, tuba, trombones, a long solo by violas, etc. We had entered via the stage door with Deanna, and were able to look out onto the stage from the wings, mingling with the orchestra players in tails waiting to go on. . . . During the day, I entered on computer the changes we’d done in Princeton owing to Peter Mackridge’s very fine vetting of my grammar.

Sunday, November 22, 1998

Out for lunch to a diner: pancakes and ham. Then to a nearby park, playing hide and seek with Sophia and walking in the brisk air. In the evening, Grant Thompson and his wife Sharon picked us up and we went out with him for supper in Bethesda. Lovely visit 6:30 to 9:30 with easy flow of conversation. Happily, Grant is doing well again, after being fired as head of the Library project in NYC. He is now a consultant helping CEOs of giant corporations to be more effective, for which he charges $2400 a day! ($300 an hour!) But he has terrible chronic prostatitis, forcing him to urinate once an hour. No cure in sight. Sharon is doing better also. She’s holding down a job in real estate, and she refused wine at dinner (she’s an ex- (I hope) alcoholic. Daughter Carrie, only two years out of Haverford, is working as a paralegal in the White House. Son Ben is a bicycle delivery boy in San Francisco, married to a woman with rings through all the secret places on her anatomy. Grant embarrassed me when he asked what I’ve been reading and I had to answer, “Only books submitted to Pendle Hill Publications or sent me by World Literature Today for review. He reads copiously, goes regularly to ballet, opera, and theater (he’s seen Gross Indecency twice). Good life. And D.C. is getting better, he assured us. I was pleased to learn that David Kendall, President Clinton’s lawyer so much in the news these days, is a Quaker member of Florida Avenue Meeting.

Monday, November 23, 1998

Finished reading Pendle Hill pamphlet submissions for December and typing my review. One is by Kenneth Boulding, a possible reprint, but much too flowery for my taste. The one on Quakerism and science is excellent. . . . Raked leaves with Leander and Sophia, who disappeared in the large piles into which she jumped with glee.

Thursday, November 24, 1998

Washington

Treated myself to the Phillips Gallery. What a treasure! I’d last been there with Richard Dellamora during an MLA, probably 15 or 20 years ago. The special exhibit of impressionist paintings of winter was disappointing except for the Monet canvass of ice breaking upon the Seine, and four of the twenty-five amazing wheatstack paintings he did, each one slightly different. But the permanent collection is exquisite, starting with the two depictions of Repentant St. Paul, one by El Greco, ca. 1605, the other by Goya, ca. 1820, the first bright, full of color, showing a magnificent figure in pain, the Goya dark, colorless, showing an ugly insignificant-looking man, also in pain. As a painting, the El Greco is immediately more striking, indeed one of the most stunning El Grecos I’ve seen; but the Goya is truer. Both of course carry the keys to the kingdom. Other delights: four dual-color canvasses by Rothko, each with a slightly different combination of colors. Very soothing. A lovely Van Gogh, “The Road Menders” (1889) with monumental trees in a village square. And the pride of the museum: Renoir’s huge “The Luncheon of the Boating Party,” as large and striking as the great Manet bargirl at the Courtauld in London, and happier. I also particularly liked Delacroix’s “Paganini,” conveying the diabolical streak of the violinist; two Cézannes: “Woman in Blue” with its lovely shades of blue, and of course yet one more “Mt. Sainte-Victoire” (1887). There’s a nice Picasso, “Bullfight” (1934) and a splendid Eakins portrait of a Miss Van Buren (ca. 1891). Plus Hopper’s “Winter,” O’Keeffe’s “Dove,” Marsden Hartley’s “Wood Lot, Maine Woods” (1920). And more, of course. . . . A sandwich in Starbuck’s Dupont Circle, where I discovered that my hotel is no more, alas. . . . Home. Then to a first-class fish restaurant with Chrysanthi, Deanna, and Leander (the babysitter keeping Sophia): oysters Rockefeller. Memories of New Orleans. Then to a wholesale shopping extravaganza. Bought garlic.

Wednesday, November 25, 1998

Finished writing a book report yesterday for World Literature Today. This morning sight-read Schubert impromptus, practiced Barber, and then had a nice lesson from Leander on Barber, mostly, the Schubert march, and Starer. . . . To town, Chinatown, to lunch with Dennis Carroll, who is excited about yet another novel he’s writing (he rises at 4:00 a.m. in order to work before going to his job at the General Accounting Office (GAO), where he’ll be able to retire in seven years at age 55 with full benefits. And of course he brought along a 250-page manuscript for me to read. How nice if he could get published finally! I hadn’t realized that the sleazy character in the play he wrote about academia was based on Leon Black. Stupid of me. Afterwards, he took me to the GAO, whose endless corridors seem directly out of Kafka: hundreds of individual cubicles, spacious enough, each with a single individual and a huge, expensive computer, and everyone seemed to be working. The GAO, Dennis explained, is an arm of Congress and is meant to investigate the Executive Branch. Speaking of the Executive Branch, I recommended that Dennis go see “Gross Indecency,” which is playing now in D.C., and write a similar play about Clinton–Starr–Lewinsky & Co. But he is too engrossed at the moment in his novel. He introduced me to a nice colleague who is also a writer on the side, and then telephoned his father, Admiral Carroll, who was at Dartmouth two days ago, speaking for our Peace Studies program. He said that all went well but that everyone was wondering where I was. Ironically, Admiral Carroll was the one who knew, since I’d written him to say ironically that I’d be in D.C. He couldn’t see me this afternoon because he was just about to be interviewed on CNN, twice. So Dennis and I left together. He took me through an amazing building, the Pension Building, built after the Civil War to serve the army pension system. A huge central atrium supported by Corinthian columns. Lovely. . . . Then I went off to the Space Museum on the Mall, always a favorite. The Wright plane, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, and next to it the plane that recently went clear round the earth without refueling. Wright’s flight at Kitty Hawk lasted less than one minute and traversed all of about 200 feet, yet it solved many of the problems that were to make later development possible. Space capsules, missiles, a piece of metal from the moon, demonstration of the principles of flight: lift, thrust, drag. I had only ¾ of an hour, alas. Had to get back to Rockville by 4:00 p.m., since Leander was meeting Susie Buseck there, too, at that time. She’s here with friends for the holidays and came to have supper with us tonight. We delivered her later to her friend, and roommate, who is visiting her parents in Silver Spring. Leander suspects that they are Lesbians.

Thursday, November 26, 1998

D.C.

Thanksgiving. Steve and Perry came: interesting, considerate companions, as always. Lots of admiration for Leander’s new G3 Powerbook computer, which he just set up last night. I’ve borrowed the installations disk for his Microsoft Word 98, since it can draw boxes and produce colors, all of which will be good for our Demotic Greek revision. Turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Chrysanthi made spinach, Steve brought sweet potatoes and cranberries and homemade ginger ice cream and a good French wine (which the two of us finished). Apple, pumpkin, and pecan pie afterwards followed by liqueurs in the living room. Very civilized. After they left we watched a movie on television featuring an eight-year-old boy, which fascinated Sophia. Early to bed, in order to rise at 5:30 a.m. tomorrow and take the Metro to Union Station in time for AMTRAK back to Hanover. All in all, a pleasant, varied week, mixture of work and play, and of course heaven for Sophia, for she had Yiayia’s full attention from morn till night.

Friday, November 27, 1998

AMTRAK

Eleven hours on AMTRAK from D.C. to White River Junction. Very relaxing. Very good for work on the computer. But when we got home we received messages that Mother had had congestive heart failure again, had to be placed on oxygen, was hallucinating, couldn’t breathe, swollen feet and legs. We rushed over. She was in skilled nursing, but much better, totally stabilized. Invited us to lunch tomorrow!

Saturday, November 28, 1998

Mother quite silent at lunch. Didn’t eat anything. We brought her back to bed. It seems clear that she should be transferred to skilled nursing permanently.

Sunday, November 29, 1998

A good Meeting. I ministered about Admiral Carroll. Lunch with Nodas, Soderbergs, Audrey. Dinner party with Elliotts, Dick Williamson, and Laasperes. Nice to have old friends.

Monday, November 30, 1998

Our interview at Kendal for admission to the Ready List. Hélène went over the contract, then spoke about Quaker values; Louise Mertel discussed insurance. Then lunch with two residents. The full ritual, although for us it was a bit redundant. Hélène says it will be 2½ years before an apartment is ready, but Chrysanthi wants to wait five years. We’ll probably compromise at 4+. . . . To UPNE afterwards to see Mike Burton about formatting our book. He’s had success so far with the disk I gave him.

Tuesday, December 1, 1998

To see John Rassias, who had a cataract and glaucoma operation yesterday. He seems fine. Wants to go to the American Farm School again for a second workshop.

Wednesday, December 2, 1998

Jim Sharpe, the broker who has taken over from Hank Elitzer at Paine Webber, visited. He’s a former football coach and looks it. Adopted two Chinese girls; was intrigued that I had two Chinese daughters-in-law. . . . Then back to Kendal to complete our admissions process: nurse practitioner, then back to Hélène. Good session with the social worker, Donna LaFleur, who was intrigued that neither of us in our written declarations had remembered any real sadness. She elicited some good articulation from me, I hope, regarding philosophy of life—and death. . . . They decided to move Mother to Vining 70, skilled nursing. All the furniture will go, too, except the bed, so she’ll be in a very similar environment but with much more attentive care. Actually she’s much better; the swelling has subsided, appetite has returned. But the nurse practitioner said that she’s probably not going to live more than a few months more. . . . Nice music with Dick and Allan. Four Handel sonatas and Vivaldi. . . . And John Radebaugh then brought me a packet of materials on F.U.N.D. to take to Pendle Hill tomorrow.

Thursday, December 3, 1998

To Pendle Hill

To Fleet Bank for the semiannual review of the A. F. Bien Trust and Mother’s custody account. Both doing very well indeed. I alerted them to the possibility of Mother’s death soon, and they recommended lots of gifting. . . . To Ledyard Bank to open a F.U.N.D. account. Now at $1300. . . . Then to lunch with Sara Zuniga, my presidential scholar helping with JMGS. She delighted me by finishing all the manuscripts I’d given her and then expressing how much she’d learned, and giving me a present (and a hug). I should have given her a present, but I’ve given her three or four fancy lunches at the Inn. . . . To Pendle Hill by air and Avis. Supper with Roland Ellis, who is very friendly. Also Larry Ingle. Then music with Dan: Starer, Barber, Schubert. Dan was expressive about his great difficulty: his ex-wife (whom he never divorced) is dying of cancer and he fears that she’ll run out of money and he’ll be responsible. He visits her in New York City weekly.

Friday, December 4, 1998

Pendle Hill

After Meeting, I told everyone about F.U.N.D. and placed the flyer in people’s mailboxes. Many expressions of support. . . . Publications Committee without Rebecca, who’s in Zimbabwe. Mary Barnes substituted, very nicely. They rejected a piece on science and religion that I thought splendid. Too bad. Accepted one on prison visitation by Keith Maddock, my friend in Toronto Meeting. . . . Supper with Caroline Jones and Doug Gwyn. I’ve agreed to edit his new book on the Seekers. . . . Executive Board: they finally accepted my cohabitation regulations, after revisions by staff. Let’s see now if this new approach—queries rather than rules—works.

Saturday, December 5, 1998

Pendle Hill

After the Board lunch, I sat as consultant with the Search Committee for Dan’s replacement. No names yet, but ideas about where to advertise. Also, we changed the name of the job from Executive Secretary to Director. Good! Also, we determined that the candidate does not have to be a member of the Religious Society of Friends. Good!

Sunday, December 6, 1998

Pendle Hill

Mike Keeley called. Wants to use one of my paragraphs as a blurb for his new book. With pleasure. Told me that Gourgouris was denied tenure by the Comparative Literature department. Hellenic Studies was not involved at all. He is despondent and angry. . . . To Middletown Meeting with Doug Gwyn. Afterwards, I spoke about F.U.N.D. The clerk turned out to be the person at Crosslands who has been arranging Leander’s concert on this coming Thursday. On our way back, Doug was very open about his relation with Caroline, his feeling that he was denied the pastorship in Indiana because he is “living in sin” with her. To Dan’s at 5:00; more practice. Then a good Thai meal in a restaurant in Lansdowne; then more practice and a Bach Toccata for “recreation,” as well as our old Brahms waltzes, some of which (but not all) were still in our fingers.

Monday, December 7, 1998

Princeton

Worked with Dimitri and Mache. Dimitri wants color pictures in the book whereas UPNE wants black and white. Supper with Dan Seeger, Richard Barnes, and Mary Wood, who drove up from Pendle Hill to solicit me for the campaign. I agreed to transfer $5000 of appreciated American Express stock this year, and to give another $5000 over the next four years. Then we ate a nice dinner; I had filet mignon. . . . Chrysanthi said that Mother, sadly, has been a bit abusive with her, saying sharply, “Don’t treat me like an invalid!” She obviously senses her diminishment and has to strike out senselessly at the person least deserving. Too bad.

Tuesday, December 8, 1998

Mache and I selected poems for each lesson in the book, a good addition. Lunch with Mache and with a professor in Cyprus who’s interested in the role of religion in shaping both Greek and Turkish civilization. She hopes to submit something to the journal. Fun to have the entire discussion in Greek. More work on poems after lunch; then Dimitri and I went to hear Prof. John Gager lecture fascinatingly on Saint Paul as allegedly anti-Jewish. A brilliant lecture claiming that Paul honored Judaism always. His supposedly anti-Jewish remarks were actually directed against gentiles who had begun to frequent synagogues in the diaspora—e.g., “It is evident that no man is justified before God by the law” (Gal. 3:11). Also Ga. 3:10, 6.15, Rom. 3:20, 9:31, 11:28. He balanced this with many pro-Israel passages, which might seem inconsistent but are not if we can accept that the supposedly anti-Jewish passages do not concern Jews. For example, Rom. 3:31: “Do we overthrow the law through faith? By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law.” Saw John and Woody Wilson in the audience. They asked straightway about Kendal and I brought them up to date. They still have done nothing. . . . Watched the fascinating impeachment hearings. One of the witnesses today was Professor Sam Beer, whose marvelous course Social Sciences 2 I took fifty (!) years ago. He still looked vigorous and spoke well. Humorously, however, I thought that the lecturer today on St. Paul would be appropriate for the impeachment hearings, which are also saying that the president (like St. Paul) said one thing but actually meant something else.

Thursday, December 15, 1998

Leonard Rieser died, aged about 76. What a shame! He made my life at Dartmouth a pleasure. He was the ideal administrator because always so humane.

Monday, December 21, 1998

Lunch with Michael Webster and Leone Buyse. I asked Michael what happened to his father’s career. Was it the alcoholism? “No, not initially,” he answered. “Father was very difficult. He didn’t know how to be graceful with managers; he demanded his own repertoire, wouldn’t play Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto a thousand times. So they wrote him off. And when he started teaching at Juilliard he found that very fulfilling. He knew 70 piano concertos by heart. Toward the end he began drinking so much that sometimes it showed in his teaching, and Juilliard had to ease him out. Sometimes he was picked up drunk in the gutter. And he had periods of great anger and abusiveness, including recently at Kendal, until he was put on an ‘anti-psychotic’ drug, which calmed him down.” Michael says that Bev was performing demanding programs in recital at age 12 in Pittsburgh, also that he was an abused child, whatever that means. In any case, they seem extremely grateful to me for easing the Websters’ way into Kendal. It has been a salvation for them.

Tuesday, December 22, 1998

Ned Perrin and his new friend Susan Ackerman for dinner with the Schers. Ned seemed depressed. I must try to get him alone when I return in January. He published a very moving memoir about his marriage to Anne Lindbergh (five years only) in Modern Maturity. . . . Big computer troubles recently. The Greek-English lexicon froze and I had to re-do an entire month’s work on a back-up that luckily was not corrupted. I’m enjoying the new formatting capabilities available in Word 98, which I got from Leander. I can now make squares with different kinds of borders around paradigms or poems, and also shade them various degrees of gray. A big improvement. But slow work, as is the introduction of the poems and songs we selected recently at Princeton. I’ve finished nine lessons so far. Three to go. I’ll take them to New York tomorrow and maybe work on the train.

Thursday, December 24, 1998

Yale Club, NYC

Amazing Jackson Pollack exhibit at MoMA. I never appreciated his late “splatter paintings” until now, seeing the evolution that led to them, the differences among them, and how they reflect his tortured psychotic soul. . . . Lunch at Daphne’s. Greg and I went to the pastrami take-out place on Lexington and ordered pastrami on rye and chopped chicken liver on rye. A real New York City treat. . . . Christina very excited by our presence, especially Chrysanthi’s. This morning, Chrysanthi’s birthday, I gave her the new Merck medical guide, which she seemed to appreciate. She is obsessed, almost, with medical details. . . . Over coffee in the Yale Club, read a TLS review on Heidegger. Not very sympathetic, and yet the following attracted me, at least: “Being and Time teaches us that ‘Authenticity is intensity, nothing else.’ The great fact of our existence, the one that we spend most of our time ignoring or trying to overcome, is its finitude. We will one day have to die, and thus the flow of time is, for each of us, ‘a series of little departures, lots of little deaths.’ An authentic existence is one that recognizes that ‘the meaning of being is time’ and ‘resists the tendency to escape, to evade.’ Authenticity is thus ‘the negative of negation’ [Das Nichts [which] selbst nichtet].” Ray Monk, TLS, Nov. 1998, p. 30, reviewing Rüdiger Satranski’s Martin Heidegger (Harvard UP).

Friday, December 25, 1998, Christmas

Opening presents at Daphne’s. Daphne got me a Flanders & Swann video, very thoughtful. Then a delicious roast beef dinner that even Chrysanthi liked. A pleasant Christmas without any religious dimension whatever. We walked 40 blocks from 44th to 84th along Lexington, admiring the stunning architecture of new buildings.

Saturday, December 26, 1998

Daphne came for breakfast, a leisurely visit. I’m still hoping that they’ll get Christina a British passport. Chrysanthi and Daphne went shopping. I went to the Guggenheim to see the splendid show bringing together treasures from the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Guggenheim here, all the way from Cézanne to yesterday. Beautiful Kandinskys and Mirós, but also everyone else in modern art since the Fauves. Minimalism leaves me cold. But, interestingly, Jackson Pollack now seemed conservative (!) to me, after I saw the latest, supremely ugly, manifestations of art. . . . Then met Greg to see together Zoë Wanamaker in Electra. A splendid performance, adapted by the Irish playwright Frank McGuiness and directed by David Leveaux. Claire Bloom as Clytemnestra. Everything that a Greek play should be. Even the histrionics. Even a mask, just at the start and finish. But no sung chorus; indeed no choral chorus, just one speaker, with two other women in dumbshow. But wonderful modulation from intensity to expectation to silence. The moment when Orestes (thought dead) reveals himself to Electra was totally powerful. Zoë Wanamaker received cheers and a standing ovation, deservedly. . . . To the Yale Club with Greg for a beer and a cordial visit. Then to their apartment for another supper of leftover beef. . . . I’ve been working on Kokolis’s essay on Anagnostakis, a huge job of copyediting, alas.

Sunday, December 27, 1998

New York City

To the Met with Chrysanthi. An interesting special exhibit on Netherlands painting from Van Eyck to Breugel. Exclusively Christian subjects (which became tiresome) until Breugel liberated art to deal with the life of peasants—humanized it. However, in the Christian subjects one sees, increasingly, experiments in perspective, wonderful landscapes stretching out behind, and the conflation of the historic subjects with contemporary costume, architecture, and landscape. So, in a way, the humanization was prepared before it actually happened. . . . We then visited our favorite, the El Grecos and Rembrandts, before walking to Daphne’s. . . . There I was called into service to repair door knobs, affix a door stop, etc. Tried to rewire a lamp yesterday, only to cause a short circuit. Then, miraculously, Daphne brought out all the paintings that had not been hung for a year, and we all experimented with proper locations, even agreeing on some. She has my parents’ Costigan, plus a lovely Schweitzer, the Sikeliotis dancers, and others that they bought. . . . I went off by myself to the Alvin Ailey ballet at the City Center: a memorable experience. One of the four ballets was recent and very contemporary—spasmodic, ostentatiously anti-beautiful, with percussive music: Polish Pieces (1995), music by Górecki, choreography by Hans van Mauen: an ensemble piece, quite attractive. Then “The Time Before the Time After (After the Time Before)” (1970), choreographed by Lar Lubovitch to Stravinsky’s lovely “Concerto for String Orchestra,” a pas de deux, very sensual, exquisitely danced. The spasmodic one, hard to take, but again exquisitely danced, was “Lettres d’Amour” (1998), choreographed by Redha, music by 8 or 9 different composers—overly long, without apparent shape except for a sort of rondo recurrence of certain steps. But then came “Revelations” (1960), choreographed by Ailey, to music of Negro spirituals. The audience went wild. This is what the aficionados had been waiting for (audience full of blacks). And justly. Such moving music, such expressive, creative dancing of the ten different spirituals, the audience clapping and shouting with glee and bursting into bravos at the end. How lucky I was to go, and to have this on the matinee program. . . . Then back to Daphne’s where we actually hung various paintings, plus Yiayia’s antique mirror, and moved a bookcase, making the apartment look more “ready,” finally. Then a lovely chicken and orzo supper, cooked by Chrysanthi.

Monday, December 28, 1998

NYC–Hanover

Our morning ritual at the Yale Club of leisurely breakfast reading the NY Times. This time lots of conversation with Carlos, the headwaiter, who regaled us with his favorite jokes—e.g., “In Cuba, people discuss where they’ll bury Castro when he dies. In Napoleon’s grave? OK. In Lenin’s grave? OK. In Jesus’ grave? No no! He came back after three days!” Or: “An American Jew complained to his rabbi, ‘My son became a Christian.’ The rabbi replied, ‘Well, so did mine, but let’s pray and ask God what to do.’ So they question God, who replied, “Don’t ask me what to do. My son became a Christian, too!’” Or: “A famous professor gave the same lecture repeatedly. Once, he asked his chauffeur, who had heard it often, to pretend he was the professor. They’d exchange places. So the chauffeur gave the lecture and no one knew the difference, until the question period, when a question stumped the chauffeur. But he rose to the occasion, saying ‘That’s so simple, I’ll ask my chauffeur to answer it.’”. . .

Chrysanthi accompanied me to Penn Station, worried that I couldn’t manage all the heavy luggage. Then she went back to Daphne’s until Thursday (Greg leaves tomorrow for Vaughan’s wedding in Los Angeles), and I returned via AMTRAK to Hanover.

1998 HOLIDAY GREETINGS FROM PETER AND CHRYSANTHI BIEN

This year our lives were filled with the beautiful creatures in the photos above. The little ones grew up, started to talk, sing, and dance, and spent many pleasant hours with their Γιαγιά and Παππού. Alec and Monica were married in March in a memorable ceremony in Jakarta, Indonesia, attended by us and Leander, and also by Aunt Alice and Uncle Peter Buseck. The church service was followed by a grand reception and dinner for 500 people. Then in July, at Terpni, we had 120 good souls for lunch so that all of Alec’s friends and ours could meet the bride. In the interim, Alec and Monica were evacuated from Jakarta following the riots in May—not a happy time. They are back in Jakarta now, experiencing renewed violence. But Monica’s family are all fine, and Alec’s school has been functioning through thick and thin, although with only 190 students compared to the 360 before the troubles began. Happily, the couple will be returning in January to the Adirondacks, which will be a novel experience for Monica, who has never seen snow. Alec will then begin looking for a new position.

Good news, also, from Greg and Daphne. Greg received an important promotion from Goldman Sachs; he is now high up on the managerial ladder. And Daphne is expecting in February. As for Leander and Deanna, their biggest change in 1998 was occupancy of the lovely cabin they had built at Terpni last winter. They spent most of August there, very busily transforming it into a cozy second home. So we now have three dwellings on the farm, all miraculously furnished with electricity and modern plumbing (not to mention e-mail, fax, and internet: Monica, for example was able to read the Jakarta newspaper in Bahasa Indonesia each day during the unrest last summer). Alec’s cabin now has two rooms, two lofts, a modern kitchen, and even a bathtub! In ours, kitchen cabinets were installed after 40 years’ procrastination. (We need to keep up with our children.) Even the little Guest House was upgraded: moved out of its swamp to a dry location, furnished with electricity, indeed with hot and cold running water. We find all this quite amusing, given the farm’s history of seven years without electricity, eighteen without a telephone, and forty with a privy and no plumbing. But Peter’s office is still in the south field in an Adirondack lean-to under his huge yellow birch. (But it’s furnished now with a brand new GE3 Macintosh Powerbook whose batteries last seven hours.)

Chrysanthi continues as chairperson of the Hanover Senior Center, as coordinator for the Quaker Meeting’s service in feeding 120 homeless people once a month, and as the only one in our family still actively teaching at Dartmouth. She has begun to write very moving memoirs of her childhood experiences in Terpni, Macedonia, and in the last two years she has clearly become the world’s most desirable babysitter! Harriet is going to be 94 years old. She was able to travel to the farm for Alec’s celebration last July, and she continues to receive superb care at Kendal at Hanover. Peter is busier than ever in his so-called retirement: lecturing in Sweden, Greece, and at the State Department, teaching Faulkner and Kierkegaard at Pendle Hill and Joyce’s Ulysses for ILEAD in Hanover, editing the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, revising the textbook Demotic Greek 1 with colleagues in Princeton, serving on the Greek Orthodox Archbishop’s Commission to investigate the teaching of Greek in Church schools, continuing on the Board at Pendle Hill and as clerk of the Publications Committee there, serving as Hanover Monthly Meeting’s treasurer and also as treasurer of F.U.N.D. (Fund the United Nations’ Deficit), an effort by local Quakers and others to embarrass our legislators into paying the full amount of the United States’ dues to the UN, and serving as a new trustee of the American Farm School in Thessaloniki, Greece. (This enabled both Peter and Chrysanthi to have a very meaningful time there in October, visiting family and touring villages in Eastern Macedonia, where Chrysanthi had recruited girls for the Quaker school decades ago.) Peter also attended his 50th reunion at Deerfield Academy in June, a lovely chance to renew various friendships, and then spent several days of intensive practice at Leander’s four-hand piano workshop at Kinhaven, teaming up with sister Alice to perform Barber, Dvořák, and Bizet, which they both managed miraculously to do without total or even partial collapse. Happily, weekly chamber music with Dick Williamson and Allan Munck (flute and ’cello) has continued quite regularly.

We are thinking of the future. Chrysanthi and Peter went through the admissions interviews (six hours of them) at Kendal at Hanover. We expect to move into two rooms there sometime before 2004. The major problem will be what to do with all the books.

With greetings, best wishes, and hopes that 1999 will be health, happy, and productive for you and yours.

Peter and Chrysanthi Bien

1999

Hanover

January 1–June 7

Jan. 8–10, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Jan. 19–21, Princeton

Jan. 22–24, Pendle Hill

Jan. 27, Terpni, Day’s Inn, Lake George

Feb. 1, 3, 4, 5, N. Haverhill, Jury duty

Feb. 16–18, Princeton

Feb. 19–20, NYC, AFS trustees

Feb. 27–28, Cambridge

March 2–4, Princeton

March 5–7, Pendle Hill

March 8–9, San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn, 545 Point Lobos Ave, 94121, 416 752-8000

March 10, Sacramento

March 12–13, NYC, Yale Club

March 23–25, Princeton

March 26–29, Los Angeles

April 2–4, Terpni

April 8–9, New York, Don Giovanni

April 13–15, Princeton

April 15–18, Pendle Hill

May 3–4, New York

May 5–6, Princeton

May 7, Amherst

May 13, NYC

May 14–15, Pendle Hill

May 16, Cambridge, A.R.T.

May 25–26, Princeton

May 27, NYC, Archdiocese

May 28–31 Terpni

Terpni

June 7–September 12

June 8–10, Princeton

June 11–15, Kinhaven

June 20–23, Princeton

Hanover

September 13–December 31

Sept. 17–19, Pendle Hill

Oct. 6–10, Princeton

Oct. 14–17, Pendle Hill

Oct. 21–22, NYC

Nov. 3–7, NYC, Princeton

Nov. 13–14, Pendle Hill

Nov. 21, Cambridge

Nov. 23–26, N. Potomac, Courtyard Marriott, 2500 Research Blvd., Rockville, 301 670-6700, 800 321-2211

Dec. 4–8, Pendle Hill, Princeton

Dec. 9, Amherst, Sheraton Airport Hotel

Dec. 11–12, Pendle Hill

Tuesday, January 5, 1999

Leander underwent a colonoscopy owing to pains in his lower abdomen, scrotum, etc. There was some sort of growth, and the doctor took a biopsy. So we’re all waiting now for the pathologist’s report.

Thursday, January 7, 1999

Ceremony in Ledyard Bank this morning, with speeches by John Radebaugh and the leader of the Bahá’ís, TV coverage, and presentation of the proceeds of F.U.N.D., of which I am the treasurer, $1800 so far, to the sixteen-year-old Helen Drysdale, who will drive to New York City today with Scot and Patricia and will present the money to the UN Treasurer, Susanne Bishopric, tomorrow morning. We hope that Congressmen will take notice. The whole idea is to make a gesture that says, in effect, that the US ought to pay its UN dues.

Friday, January 8, 1999

Cambridge

Mailed clean typescript of complete Demotic Greek 1 (441 pages)—well, almost complete—today to Peter Patrikis, from whom we hope to get more money, and to Peter Mackridge, whom we’ll pay $500 to give everything a careful professional look. I’ll be so happy when this burden is behind me. The past few weeks I’ve been frightened that my computer files will be corrupted (again), and have taken extra precautions regarding multiple backups. . . . Also posted to Dan audiotapes of me playing secondo in the Barber Waltz, Pas de Deux, and Galop, and primo in the Schubert march, sloppy, with errors, but at least I was able to get through all the pieces in time. Very hard in places, technically, but I improve a little each morning. Speaking of music, very nice Telemann, Handel, and Bach last Wednesday with Dick and Allan. . . . Drove to Cambridge in the afternoon, trying to keep ahead of the snowstorm, which we did most of the way, but not all of it. Route 128 was a nightmare: bumper to bumper all the way. But listened to the entire B Minor Mass on the way down. What a blessing! . . . Delicious supper in the Charles Hotel: lobster pot pie. Then to A.R.T. to see Phèdre. Good, but not in verse, and generally a bit slow, especially compared to the machine-gun rapidity of the Britannicus we saw in London. The absence of verse was a big mistake; it changes the entire character of the play, making it stand or fall by criteria of psychological realism whereas in the French original, or even in a good verse translation, the language becomes a major factor, if not the major factor. The play of course is of particular interest right now because of the impeachment and trial of Clinton, which started yesterday. The subject is the same: self-destructive adulterous love. But Racine (and of course Euripides, his prototype) put this in a broader context—a family curse, the enmity of the gods—and this lifts the interest up and beyond that of purely psychological abnormality.

January 9, 1999

Cambridge

Leisurely breakfast in Au Bon Pain: croissant, coffee, and NY Times. Then worked on Stephanos Stavros’s article on the EU court. At 1:00 p.m. heard the A.R.T.’s lecture on The Merchant of Venice, very interesting. Shylock was originally conceived in the comic mode in commedia dell’ arte, and only later was conceived as tragic. This production will restore some of the comic approach. How carefully everything is researched: the exact meaning(s) of every verb in the text, the past production history, the particular forte of each actor. . . . Worked on Stavros in the afternoon again. Supper at Giannino’s, very leisurely. Then a magnificent A.R.T. production of The Merchant of Venice directed by Andrei Serban. Will LeBow was a perfect Shylark, Kristy Flanders an engaging Portia. The courtroom scene is the highlight, in which Portia (disguised as a brilliant justice) pleads so eloquently for mercy as opposed to law (again one thinks of the House vs. Clinton, of course), but then in the end uses the law itself to undo Shylark’s bond. Shylark, like Antonio in Measure for Measure, remains ultimately inscrutable. He certainly never seems a villain despite his bloodthirsty need for vengeance; yet he hardly is a hero more sinned against than sinning. Thus we have a problem play, tempting us to “solve” its perplexities by artificially narrowing its possibilities.

January 10, 1999

Alec and Monica arrived in New York. Monica’s passport was stamped immediately as OK for her green card. They’re off to Leander’s now, and some rest. How nice to have them here, finally.

Monday, January 18, 1999

Philadelphia–Princeton

Long AMTRAK trip. Lost power outside of NYC and waited two hours for restoration. But I worked well on my computer, using the battery. Spent most of the trip copyediting the Pendle Hill Vietnam book supposedly (but not) copyedited by Chuck Fager. Arrived at 30th Street too late to get my rental car, so taxied to the airport’s AVIS location with a woman in a similar predicament. Drove to Princeton, arriving at midnight.

Tuesday, January 19, 1999

Princeton

Very good session with a professor of German, Jamie Rankin, who explained that the Rassias drill method is now considered passé and ineffective. The “in” thing is “realia.” Students should never utter anything they don’t understand as part of their experience, etc. We’re trying to add such elements to the Rassias-type drills we already have in abundance. . . . In the evening, listened to Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speech. What a circus this: his impeachment trial at 1:00 p.m. and his State of the Union at 8:00 p.m. But very effective nonetheless. He seems determined to go on.

Saturday, January 23, 1999

Pendle Hill

Arrived on Thursday. Good piano practice with Dan, who again did not practice, this time because he was three weeks with his former wife, Betty Jean, as she died horribly from multiple cancers. This morning I ministered at some length in Meeting about Clinton and theater, Don Giovanni, Paradise Lost, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Phèdre—everything relates. The question in the current proceedings is: Where is God? . . . Supper last night with Doug Gwyn, whose next book, on Seekers, is ready for my editorial hand. Yesterday, Publications meeting, a marathon, 12:00 noon to 4:15, six manuscripts discussed. But we did it! Today: Board and then Search Committee, followed, beautifully relaxing, by more piano with Dan, followed by supper together at the Media Inn. I got him to talk about his post-PH plans: he has two projects involving a sort of symposium he hopes to organize. More music afterwards, including sight-reading of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Tuesday, January 26, 1999

Good meeting with Peter Patrikis regarding the Demotic Greek revision. He offered another $3000 to $4000 support. Also met with Robert Binswanger, who was in town for a day. He continues to want to help and advise Alec. I urged him to convince Penny to have them register for Kendal at Hanover. Robert says he thinks he is immortal.

Wednesday, January 27, 1999

Riparius

Up at 6:45 a.m. Breakfast with Leander at the Woodstock Inn. Arrived at the farm at 11:00. The snow is crusted over, sheer ice, very hard to walk. But Alec’s path is plowed. He and Monica are cozy in their lovely cabin, with a fire in the stove. And Monica is pregnant, due in September. She’s very happy. Said that her mother needed three years to get pregnant, and Monica obviously did not inherit that tendency. Leander turned the heat on in his cabin and is also comfortable. I arranged the five boxes of Yiayia’s books I brought, including two in Hebrew that belonged to Pincus Bien, my paternal grandfather, and some of my father’s medical books, plus the art books that I gave them year after year as Christmas presents. Then we drove to Lake George for supper together. Snowing badly, so I registered in Day’s Inn, mostly to keep Chrysanthi from worrying. Then we had a leisurely supper, very pleasant, at the Chinese buffet, followed by a visit to Price Chopper to show that marvel to Monica. Chrysanthi telephoned at 10:00 p.m. to say that Daphne gave birth to a boy: Andrew Tebbe. 8 pounds. No hair. Big feet. Fat. She’s well and so is the baby. Amen.

Thursday, January 28, 1999

Hanover

Chrysanthi sick. Dizzy, unbalanced. I took her to the hospital. They couldn’t find anything wrong. Told her to drink lots of water. For supper I went to Canaan to Ann Forbes’s to talk to about a dozen people about Quaker clerking, business process, clearness committees, etc. They’re interested in relation to the housing commune they’re setting up. Very good questions and discussion. I was delighted to be able to offer this sort of witness.

February 1, 1999

North Haverhill

I’m sitting in the jury room of Grafton Superior Court, on jury duty, waiting to see if I’ll be called. Just saw a long video explaining the jury system, the trial system, and exhorting us to be fair and unprejudiced. Amen.

Today, Leander, Deanna, and Sophia are leaving. Leander attended Ignat’s wedding yesterday. Deanna couldn’t go because she has the flu. A beautiful wedding followed by only about 25 people at dinner in Grafton, Vermont. Mrs. Solzhenitsyn asked Leander to send especial greetings to Chrysanthi and me. Alexander did not come.

There is an opening now for a principal at Moses Brown School. Alec says he is interested. Monica has morning sickness, vomiting. She’s going to NYC tomorrow to be with Daphne and the new baby, Andrew Gregory Tebbe.

Last Saturday we went to the memorial service for Leonard Rieser in Rollins Chapel. String quartet and clarinet played Mozart’s clarinet quintet. The rest was all testimonies by, among others, Thaddeus Seymour and Greg Prince, both of whom it was nice to see again after many years; Joan Baez’s father; Jim Wright (very dull); Jill Conway (very alive); Leonard, Jr.; Tim, who broke down weeping and couldn’t talk; Jim Cox (semi-articulate in his usual manner, but amusing); Bill Cook (read Robert Frost); and Leonard’s older and younger brothers. Lots of laughter about Leonard always being late to meetings and also about his shoveling his donkey’s manure each evening after dealing with the “shit” at Dartmouth all day long. But lots of serious admiration for his intelligence, humanity, devotion to family, and general wisdom. All in all, an appropriate tribute.

Back to the jury. This morning, amazingly, I was chosen by lottery for 3 out of the 4 juries selected. No one else had this “honor” (catastrophe?). However, owing to this, the judge’s clerk excused me from further selection next week for civil cases, which means that I can go to L.A. for the Archbishop’s Commission, then to Princeton, and then to the AFS board.

Wednesday, February 3, 1999

North Haverhill

All day in court. A fourteen-year-old girl, very attractive and mature, testified that her fifty-year-old uncle molested her sexually over an eight-month period, gave her alcohol, and showed her pornography on the internet. First he just asked her to undress and then he masturbated while gazing at her. Then he began touching her breasts and inserting his fingers in her vagina. Finally he had intercourse with her. Then they had an argument. Three days later she went to the police (she had told no one up to this point, and may have been enjoying the whole affaire). Her uncle, on the stand, denied everything. His attorney claimed that the child was “troubled” and was taking revenge after the argument. A nurse certified that the girl was no longer a virgin. A “sexologist” explained the “grooming” of victims that is common, and the sort of escalation exhibited in this case. The uncle’s wife and the girl’s mother (sisters) also testified.

Thursday, February 4, 1999

North Haverill

The trial resumed. Final arguments. Then we began our deliberations around noon and by 4:30 still had not reached unanimity, although most, if not all, of us considered the man to be lying, not the girl. But had the State proved this beyond a reasonable doubt—that was the question. We agreed first about the masturbation and voyeurism, reasoning that a thirteen-year-old wouldn’t be able to make this up if she hadn’t experienced it. Also, when asked if he was circumcised she said he was, which he was, so this was a sort of evidence. But regarding the sexual intercourse (with a condom) we felt that she could have invented this from her own experience with boyfriends. Also that she could have accessed porno on the internet, without his help. So, deadlock. That night I did some “research.” I called up “Buttman” on the internet: the pornographic code that he apparently knew. Gross. But for the real stuff one needs to have a password, which you get by dialing a 900 number and paying a fee with a credit card. I reasoned that the thirteen-year-old was unlikely to have been able to do all this, and that her uncle presumably had indeed shown her the obscenities she described (women performing oral sex on dogs!).

Friday, February 5, 1999

North Haverhill

Back in court from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30. I convinced the others regarding the pornography charge, and gradually we agreed as well on the intercourse one. So only the alcohol remained, with a single juror, Jim Poage, formerly of Kiewit, holding out. But eventually even he became convinced that there was enough testimony on this as well. So we marched back into the court and the foreman (thankfully not me) pronounced guilty nine times. The defense attorney asked for the jurors to be polled, so each of us pronounced guilty on each of the nine counts. No emotion from the defendant. But the girl was crying on her mother’s shoulder. We learned afterwards that the defendant was escorted immediately to jail. He’ll be sentenced in a month or so, and can get up to twenty years. The judge told us that this type of case, sexual molestation of children, is now the most common that they do, chiefly because the perpetrators insist on denying guilt rather than in admitting it in exchange for a lighter sentence. . . . Interesting people on the jury. A motorcycle type with long hair tied in pigtail and, he said, a pistol always carried. (But a nice guy, actually.) An insurance adjustor, formerly a military officer. A performer and student of Western folksongs. An employee in the local John Deere tractor store. A girl raised on a farm and now working in a store. The director of admissions of Keene State College. Poage, the former head of Kiewit (who was fired, and now works for Dartmouth Medical School). . . . My second jury won’t convene because the case was settled out of court. They’ll let me know about the third one on Monday.

Wednesday, February 10, 1999

John Rassias and I planned the Archbishop’s report. Met with the Dartmouth statistician who had tabulated our questionnaire’s results, which sometimes are at variance with the oral testimony we received. How to deal with the discrepancies remains a problem.

February 11, 1999

Met with Len Cadwallader at Kendal to complain about the Admissions Director’s neglect in responding to us. No letter for over two months. She wrote rapidly last week after my letter of complaint.

February 12, 1999

Conference call with the new committee at Pendle Hill charged with evaluating the short courses there. Should they continue or be laid down? We meet again in March. . . . Nice supper with Allan and Claire Munck, feeling sorry for me because Chrysanthi has been away all week in New York with Daphne and the new baby.

Saturday, February 13, 1999

Supper at Kendal with the Webster Performance Committee plus Mother, who was pleased to be included. Then we all went to Sally Pinkas’s lovely recital: Beethoven opus 111, Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales,” and a big Lizst extravaganza, all played with feeling and elegance. Afterwards, Sally joined the committee to plan for next season. We’ve collected over $41,000 so far. The goal is $50,000. In introducing Sally, I urged the audience to contribute—again!

Sunday, February 14, 1999

Business Meeting. I reported that we had received a $25,000 bequest from the Georgia Rese estate. . . . Picked Chrysanthi up at AMTRAK; nice supper afterwards.

Wednesday, February 17, 1999

Princeton

I came here on Monday night. Yesterday, had a long nice supper with Martin McKinsey, who is here for a month. Today, surprise, Judith Herrin appeared. We went together to an extraordinary “Gala Reading” to celebrate sixty years of creative writing at Princeton: Mike Keeley, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates (very funny as Marilyn Monroe), C.K. Williams, a splendid poet, and others. Then to supper with Judith, a nice reunion. I asked her if anything is wrong with Rowena Loverance. “No,” she said, “it’s just that she never answers letters or even e-mail.” So it’s not just me.

Thursday, February 18, 1999

To NYC. To Daphne’s to see the new baby: Andrew Gregory Tebbe. Very tiny still, with closed eyes, sleeping peacefully. A nanny arrived, and we were able to have supper with Greg. Daphne finally seems to have found a reliable nighttime nurse and daytime nanny. So she’s quite relaxed. I put together the lamp I rewired. It works.

Friday, February 19, 1999

Leisurely breakfast with John Rassias at the Yale Club. Then to the Farm School board: committee day. I’m on the Education Committee. The major problem is whether, and how, to extend the two-year college to a three- or four-year college awarding a BS degree. This seems the way to go. In the evening, cocktails at the Footes’ on East 66th. He is head of the Cathedral School, and he urged me to have Alec telephone him since he knows about openings everywhere. Leisurely supper afterwards with Joann Ryding, David Acker, and John Cleave.

Saturday, February 20, 1999

Full AFS board, mostly going over material covered yesterday, but with new information on the sale of parcels of land. Afterwards I went to the Guggenheim to see the new exhibit “Picasso and the War Years” and “Jim Dine.” The Picasso somewhat disappointing, except perhaps for the many “weeping woman” studies. Guernica not included, but reproduced photographically. Jim Dine’s work left me totally unappreciative. Yet he is celebrated as an innovator. Strange. . . . More typing of DG1 at the Yale Club, fixing lesson 5 now. Then to Lincoln Center for a grand evening of ballet, especially the final one: “The Four Seasons,” choreographed by Jerome Robbins, full of humor and athleticism and beauty. The shining girls of winter, the pale green costumes of spring, the languidness of summer (danced by Hélène Alexopoulos), and then the spectacular autumn with Damian Woetzel at his best, and Wendy Whelan. And of course the Verdi music, always engaging. This was preceded by Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater complete with soprano and counter-tenor, choreographed by Peter Martins. Very quiet, contemplative, danced by Peter Boal, Darci Kistler, Jock Soto, and others. This was its premiere. The first dance was Respighi’s “Ancient Airs and Dances,” choreographed by Richard Tanner, very baroque, black costumes, stately, danced by Jock Soto, Damian Woetzel, Nilas Martins, Wendy Whelan. A gorgeous show in the majesty of the New York State Theater, which had a display of scores of photos of dancers from the past: Maria Tallchief, Jacques D’Amboise, with Balanchine coaching.

Sunday, February 21, 1999

NYC–Hanover

Another breakfast with John Rassias, who is doing a workshop here at Baruch College, including several unemployed actors whom he trains to teach English as a second language, AMTRAK back home.

Thursday, February 25, 1999

Ned Perrin took us to supper at a restaurant in Fairlee. He has broken with Susan. His daughter Amy is separated from her husband, who insists on custody of their child. His daughter Elizabeth collects men for two-year periods and then discards them. Another dysfunctional family, alas.

Friday, February 26, 1999

Dick came at 5:00 and we did the Fauré sonata and then a Bach violin-harpsichord sonata that he is learning on the flute. The Fauré is of course impossible for me, but I think I did the Bach reasonably well. Then Allan and Claire came and we all had a lovely spaghetti supper after which Allan, Dick, and I did Bach, Bridges, and Damase.

Saturday, February 27, 1999

Cambridge

Dia Philippides and Wim Bakker took us to supper at Giannino’s, very graciously. Dia wants me to edit a festschrift for Meg Alexiou when she retires in December 2000. Perhaps Greg Nagy and I could do it together. Wim and I both feel that retirement is an altruistic act, opening places for younger scholars. . . . Then to A.R.T. to see a rather good production of The Master Builder. Ibsen is so amazing in the way he begins with realism but introduces ritual and mystery along the way. Here, Hilde, although played realistically, is equally a kind of spirit, and/or a projection of the Master Builder’s own psyche and his diseased psyche.

Sunday, February 28, 1999

Cambridge

Overnight at Friends Center. I’m reading a rather good Greek novel for a World Literature Today review: Εφιάλτες και όνειρα by Ελένη Βοΐσκου, about life in Athens during the Junta period, covering different social strata, age groups, etc. . . . Quaker Meeting at 10:30. Too many people. Too much vocal ministry, all disparate, 80% by women. Saw Andy Towl afterwards, and Warren, and Anna Jones’s daughter Emily. Brunch at the Charles Hotel, a feast, but we were shocked when the bill came: $32 each + tax and tip, and vowed never to go again. . . . Back to A.R.T. to see a new play, indeed a premiere, Don De Lillo’s Valparaiso, which turned out to be terrible, the worst play I’ve ever seen: pretentious, boring, untheatrical. What a waste!

Tuesday, March 2, 1999

Princeton

Arrived at 11:00 p.m. last night. Dimitri and I spent the morning going over Peter Mackridge’s corrections of our textbook. Then a fancy lunch at Prospect with the Cypriot poet Κυριάκος Χαραλαμπίδης, who is here to work with his translator, Martin McKinsey. Also present: Mike Keeley and Stathis Gourgouris, who was pleasant despite his failure to receive tenure. Haralambidis very approachable and simple and humble. Sees no solution to Cyprus’s problem except increasing integration of Cyprus and the EU. Afterwards I spoke at length with Mike about the American Farm School, especially about the problem of extending the College to four years, an idea that he greatly supports. Glad to hear that he’ll be coming back on the Board next year. Supper at Meadow Lakes with John Baker, who asked me to come again. He’s still spry at 102, his mind entirely clear; bad sight and hearing, and sore back, but otherwise still relatively fine, living independently in his apartment. He half-indicated that he’d like to give more money to us, perhaps as a bequest in his will.

Wednesday, March 3, 1999

Princeton

Continued doing the Mackridge corrections. Then heard Judith Herrin talk about three Byzantine empresses. Very large audience and good discussion afterwards. Reception and supper following. Then to the Nassau Inn for a beer and two hours of conversation with Stephanos Pezmazoglou, mostly about our experiences as journal editors. He wants me to write an account of my tenure as editor. Good idea, but when can I find the time? . . . Finished Εφιάλτες και Όνειρα but wasn’t able to start writing the review. . . . Spoke to John. It seems that we’ll be going to Los Angeles after all, on March 26th or 27th.

March 4, 1999

Princeton–Pendle Hill

Nice visit with Mark Mazower, who’ll need to decide next year whether he stays in Princeton or returns to his post in Sussex. Princeton, he says, is clearly a superior university; it offers him much more time for research, but he prefers to live in England (London) where, he says, it’s so much easier to have a rich social life. May we all be troubled by problems no worse than these! . . . Drove to Pendle Hill and had supper by accident with a professor of theology at Moravian who was about to start an extension course. He used Zorba to teach existentialism, so we had lots to talk about. And he promised to remember me to the Schantzes, Leander’s chairman/woman, when he was there. . . . Piano afterwards with Dan, who actually practiced the Starer and some of the Barber Serenade.

Friday, March 5, 1999

Pendle Hill

Meetings all day. Short-course review committee (looks like we’ll recommend continuation), then publications, the board.

Saturday, March 6, 1999

Pendle Hill

Board, board lunch, search committee, then piano with Dan and a nice leisurely supper in the Thai restaurant with Dan and Larry Ingle, who’s progressing on his book on Nixon as Quaker (!). More practice afterwards, including “recreational” playing of a Haydn symphony.

Sunday, March 7, 1999

To San Francisco

Routine flight to San Francisco. I worked well for most of the six hours, reading galley proof for JMGS. Will I miss the journal when I lay it down at the end of the year? Yes, in many ways. But not if I dive right back into the Kazantzakis letters and volume 2 of Politics of the Spirit, my own work instead of the work of others. . . . Martha Klironomos was supposed to meet me at the airport. Didn’t find her. Managed in my AVIS rental car to get to S.F. and find the hotel, which is right at the northeast corner, fronting the sea. She showed up later, very remiss, and took me to supper at the famous Cliff House nearby, opposite “seal rocks.” Very pleasant. And very different décor from the East. And the serving people are so often Mexican or Hawaiian or . . . Telephoned Chrysanthi. They’d just had a huge snowstorm. Telephoned Alec. Two feet of snow yesterday, but he got to town today. He was very pleased with his visit to Friends Select, contrary to expectation. So if they offer him the principalship he may accept. Durham is clearly still very interested. He expects to hear from Troy soon. And he might go to interview in the Bahamas.

Monday, March 8, 1999

San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn

I’m sitting in my room in front of a huge window overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Boats go back and forth, waves crash. It’s raining, alas, but still . . . different. Thanasis telephoned. We’ll meet tomorrow. Martha came and we turned into tourists: Lincoln Park and Legion of Honor Museum (closed), with good views of the coast and the Presidio. Then downtown through Japantown, Russiatown, Chinatown, Italytown, etc. to Coit Tower, Rivera murals, and a spectacular view on top of the whole city, with the Golden Gate and Oakland bridges. Then lunch in a café with a friendly Greek waitress. Then the department. Roland Moore appeared. How nice! He showed me the MGSA website that he created which, among other things, enables one to access Το Βήμα in Greek . . . I lectured to about 40 people on Kazantzakis’s travel writings. Afterwards a full hour of questions, one of the liveliest groups I can imagine. Then coffee and cake. Met again a Thessaloniki girl whom I had helped while there; she is now in the US on a three-year scholarship. Then all the way across town again (thanks to the Avis car) to the Italian center for a lovely supper (to which I treated Martha) at “the oldest Italian restaurant in the US, Ristoranto Fior d’Italia, with a waiter who looked like Groucho Marx and unexpectedly gave us coffee and dessert on the house. Very grand. Full of happy people enjoying themselves. . . . An extremely satisfying day. I’m glad that I still have something to offer people, or so it seems.

Thursday, March 9, 1999

Awoke to sunshine and blue skies. Walked to Lou’s, a breakfast place along the seaside road, and sat at a table facing the breakers, with a full, gorgeous rainbow over the ocean, and large birds soaring above or hanging in the air for prolonged periods without moving their wings. Worked on galley proofs in the hotel, looking out at the ocean, until Thanasis Markaleris arrived. Hugs and kisses. We talked non-stop from 12:00 noon until 5:30 p.m. He drove me across the Golden Gate Bridge to a lookout point where one can see this lovely city in its full glory, and took some photos as remembrances. Then into the countryside of Marin County, up winding roads to another spectacular lookout point. Then down into a moist valley, shaded and foggy, to the Muir Forest, 500 acres of preserved first-growth redwoods—trees 500 to 1000 years old, arrow-straight, trunks 15 feet wide, towering majestically into the sky. It was my first view of these trees in their natural growth (we’d seen redwoods transplanted in two rows in a Scottish garden). What a treat! . . . This city is so exceptional. Clean, well-ordered, rational. And surrounded by sea, bay, countryside, forests, all very Mediterranean in feel. . . . Thanasis brought me to San Franciso State. Coffee in the student union. The students are “first-timers” mostly: the first in their families to go to college. And of all races. Certainly 50% oriental. At the Kazantzakis Chair offices I was interviewed for television. A pleasant Greek-American assisted by a taciturn (but pleasant in a different way) Irish-American technician. I then lectured on “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision” to about 50 to 60 people, again a mixture: students, adults. Afterwards, lots of questions and discussion, like last night. Very satisfying. . . . By the time Marsha and I found a restaurant still open (Chinese) it was 11:00 p.m. Full of Chinese youngsters, the name in Chinese characters spread over the walls. Dirty. But we survived. To sleep at 12:30 a.m.

Wednesday, March 10, 1999

Sacramento

Drove out to Sacramento to visit the Vryonis Center. Speros, as expected, treated me to an hour-long monologue of extreme paranoia, chronicling the sins of Brademas (coward), Papadimitriou (autocrat), Lambropoulos (schemer), Karakasidou (incompetent), Gourgouris (average intelligence and arrogance), Van Dyck (mediocre), and so forth. Thus he now runs his own show, funded in large part by Angelos Tsakopoulos. He denies that he is an extreme nationalist, yet he expanded on the machinations of the Turkish government vis-à-vis the scholarly community. Afterwards, thankfully, he showed me the quite interesting library, which has Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Armenian, Persian, etc. materials. He referred to his son’s suicide—schizophrenic—and to his own humble upbringing and the discrimination he experienced in Tennessee because he was Greek. It was a relief to have some time with Christos Ioannidis, who is happier, it seems, and more stable. He agrees that instruction in Greek language/culture in the Church just doesn’t work. No money for teachers, so the schools recruit anyone who is willing to be exploited. Then, around 1:30, we all went for a large lunch and more pleasant conversation, even bantering. Speros encouraged me to take some of the Center’s publications. I drove back, again without getting lost, and through the S.F. civic center on Van Ness: concert hall, town hall, library, etc., very handsome. Martha came to the hotel around 8:00 and we had another nice supper in a “rocking” youth-culture bar and restaurant right on the seaside, again with Rivera murals, and we exchanged stories about Speros. To her, he had commented that Cavafy was a degenerate and thus shouldn’t be taught or studied.

Friday, March 12, 1999

New York

At 9:00 a.m. I was at the Diller-Quayle School, East 95th, to see Christina’s rhythms class. And what a treat! John, the major leader, is clearly an actor with trained voice and body, very much for musical comedy. Mia, his assistant, a cute Japanese young woman, also has a trained voice, and the pianist, so imaginative and effortless, doing everything by ear, integrated immediately with the improvisations of John. So, what I witnessed was ¾ hour of pure theater as John had the children build towers with blocks and then knock them down (accompanied by downward arpeggios on the piano), use the blocks to tap in rhythm, jump in time, move around in time, run and stop according to the music, sing together (e.g. ABC and Barney), play triangles, sing the 8 notes of the scale, and do-re-mi, etc. And there was even time for a snack. About ten children were present, all with a parent, mostly mothers but an occasional father, who participated in all the routines. And then they went to a café nearby for muffins or cupcakes, and gradually all become friends. As I said, it was a great treat to be present. They even sang a song welcoming Υιαγιά and Παππού. . . . Afterwards, to the Met to see the Dacci exhibit, which didn’t move me, really (what a difference when viewing the El Grecos just outside the exhibit’s exit), and then the really remarkable exhibit of Picasso’s ceramics, which I’d seen already in London but was well worth a second viewing. . . . Then back to the Yale Club. Finished the JMGS galleys. . . . This morning, how nice to be greeted warmly by Carlos the head waiter’s “Hello, Professor! Haven’t seen you for a long time.” At 7:30 p.m., Daphne and Chrysanthi came for supper at the club. Oh, I also bought more ties at Daffy’s, one reduced from $70.00 to $3.00.

Saturday, March 13, 1999

Breakfast with Daphne, Chrysanthi, Christina, and Andrew. Bagels and lox. Then back to the Yale Cub to work on editing Pendle Hill’s vision statement, which needs complete rearrangement and retyping.

Monday, March 15, 1999

Hanover

Campions, knowing that Chrysanthi was away, kindly invited me for supper, with Ned. Then I rushed home to be interviewed by telephone by someone in Sydney, Australia, preparing a radio program on Ασκητική. Spent the day finishing JMGS 17/1 galley proofs.

Tuesday, March 16, 1999

Unpleasant telephone altercation with Alexander Kyrou, who is angry because I printed Gallant’s criticism of Kyrou and because I didn’t let Kyrou know until this morning, when it’s really too late for him to reply. But we ended more cordially. Times like these make me delighted that I’ll be freed of the Journal by the end of this year, after 25 years.

Wednesday, March 17, 1999

Quaker Finance Committee meeting. Bruce will help me soon to make my first budget. Right now I’m trying to get an accurate sense of the Meeting’s assets. . . . Finished the Pendle Hill vision revision. Sent JMGS galleys. Now back to Demotic Greek. . . . Alec hasn’t decided about Durham yet. He is hoping to hear in time from Friends Select in Philadelphia.

Thursday, March 18, 1999

Spent most of the day trying to get a sense of Quaker assets. And the other day I had to spend an entire morning answering questions the IRS sent regarding F.U.N.D.’s application for tax-exempt status. All this is OK, I suppose, but I really should be working on the Kazantzakis letters and on volume 2 of Politics of the Spirit. . . . Dick came for supper and we played his pieces; then Allan came for our usual trio music but had a bout of diarrhea and left after Della Joio and one Haydn. Dick brought ½ of a baguette (!) as his contribution for supper.

Friday, March 19, 1999

Alec accepted a principalship at Friends Select School, Philadelphia, turning down Durham Academy, which also offered him a principalship. How nice to have him and Monica nearby in Philadelphia, and in a Quaker school! . . . Nardi wrote that after I left them last Monday, Tom remarked, “Well, Peter Bien’s mental health is certainly in good shape.” Yes, it is. Amen.

Wednesday, March 24, 1999

Princeton

Dimitri now finds that 600 words are missing from our revision and must be added . . . somehow. We developed some strategies. . . . Very pleasant poetry reading in the afternoon by the Cypriot poet Kyriakos Haralambidis, accompanied by excellent, effective translations by Martin McKinsey. The two have been working together at Princeton this entire month. Kyriakos said that Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot poets do know each other’s work and are mutually appreciative. . . . At the dinner afterwards, I told Alexander Nehamas that my times at Princeton make me feel that I’m still partaking in the academic life, something that is really not happening at Dartmouth any longer. . . . Nice chat with John Wilson. He’s been reappointed Dean of Graduate Studies for another five years, after which he plans to retire (perhaps) to Kendal at Hanover. . . . Dan Seeger, Richard Barnes, and I were meant to visit John Baker, but he canceled, owing to severe back pains. We’ll try again in April. He wants us to try to bring Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren together to be more effective politically in their shared peace testimonies.

Friday, March 26, 1999

Philadelphia–Los Angeles

Good, very good, practice with Dan last night, especially on the waltz. We did the first page and a half about 20 times until we really began to get the feel of it. Today, met Jan Hoffman by accident at breakfast. She’s the former clerk of NEYM. She was at Woodbrooke in 1993 when John Sheldon was appointed and said she felt his presentation to Council was very poor. . . . We’re gathering names for a possible successor to Dan. I telephoned several people, the most helpful of whom was Gordon Browne. . . . Doug Gwyn is still without a job for next year. Ditto for Martin McKinsey. Doug can stay at Pendle Hill, but there he has essentially no income. . . . Long, tedious flight to Los Angeles, so different from San Francisco: flat, spread out incredibly. To the Marriott Hotel in the center, top floor, with a view of freeways and office buildings. Then a lovely supper in the hotel with John Rassias, Bill Scott, and Constance Tagopoulos, planning for tomorrow and also for our report. Connie told us something we’d not been aware of before: that many Greeks want to escape Greekness because they feel that Greece rejected them, whether economically or politically, or both.

Saturday, March 27, 1999

Los Angeles

To Saint Sophia Community Center for the Commission hearing. Most vocal were the priest, Father Ioannis Bakas, and the school director, Mrs. Doumas. The priest is very young, energetic, smart, articulate in both English and Greek, ambitious—a doer. Lots of other good testimony from parents. Afterwards, Father John showed us the St. Sophia Cathedral, a garish monstrosity in my opinion, a Hollywood version of Byzantine glory. And we learned that it had been financed by Spyros Skouras, the movie mogul, and his brothers. Apparently the Skouras family sat in the front pew, the upholstered one, and had a switch that could dim or enhance the lighting. When Skouras disagreed with the sermon, or was bored, he would lower the lights (!), and vice versa. Then we saw the $700,000 “parking lot” just constructed, like a Disney theme park, with space for ρητά (at a price). Father John hopes to reclaim the entire neighborhood, obviously quite slummy, by making it into the Byzantine-Latino Quarter in cooperation with the neighboring Roman Catholic church, peopled by Latinos and served by a very Irish pastor (whom we met in the tavern across the street (3 lamb chops and the trimmings for $5.99). . . . Back to the hotel. Lunch. Then all four of us retreated to my room and began to revise my “Digest of Commission Hearings.” Break for supper, then another session until 10:00 p.m. (= 1:00 a.m. New England time).

Sunday, March 28, 1999

Los Angeles–Philadelphia

Breakfast in the hotel with John and Demetrios Liappas, who unfortunately was unable to attend the hearing yesterday. He told us that almost all the assistants he’d hired to teach our book with the Rassias method found this activity “demeaning,” alas. But he’s a believer. He helped us with some good ideas for the Commission. Then John and I worked intensely until breaking for lunch. Short walk; then visited the L.A. Public Library, a beautiful building filled with people. As always, one is overwhelmed by the wealth and productivity of America. More work then, until we completed this phase of the revision at about 6:00 p.m. I went to the airport. Watched the exciting national championship of women’s basketball—Purdue defeated Duke. Returned to Philadelphia first class, thanks to a frequent flyer upgrade. John and I plan to work more this week and to send a completed draft to all Commissioners on Friday.

April 3, 1999

Terpni

Spending Easter weekend at the farm with Alec and Monica. Things are so different there now. Alec is living in his cabin, keeping warm thanks to the wood stove (he needs to add wood at 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., however). We stayed in Leander’s house, heated by electricity, indeed so hot that I had to turn the heat off and open the window. We tramped back and forth through the remaining snow from one house to the other; it’s already mud season, so all vehicles remain at the entrance. Waddell Road is quite passable, although rutted. We breakfasted each morning with Alec and Monica and lunched together and took them out Saturday night to the Inn at Gore for a very nice supper. I started the tractor, the earliest ever. We’ll go back in late April or early May and plant some garden, since Alec will be able to tend it in case of frost. For now, however, he and Monica are going to leave on Monday for a two-week trip to Philadelphia to begin looking for a place to live; then via Williamsburg, Savannah, and Charleston to Tom Wood in Florida and the Shapiros. Alec made a very fine door for the bathroom; now he’s working on window trim. Still lots to do in his house, but it has served very well this winter.

Thursday, April 8, 1999

NYC

To NYC via AMTRAK. Met Daphne for supper. She’d just come from jury duty and looked distressed. Then to the New York State Theater for Don Giovanni. Greg met us. At intermission Daphne was suffering so acutely from a migraine that they left. Chrysanthi and I returned for the second half. Singing OK but not superlative. Audience very lukewarm. Yet here was Mozart at his incredible best, his glory. The dinner scene at the end is incomparable. At least Chrysanthi seemed to appreciate it fully. So it wasn’t a fiasco, despite the departure mid-way of Daphne and Greg. We both agreed that in the future we should plan no more “occasions,” for children. Let them do that for us if they wish. Good night’s sleep at the Yale Club. Work in the library on Pendle Hill pamphlet submissions. Relaxing trip home. A nice outing, at least for the two of us. Chrysanthi amazed me by saying she wants to go to the Virgin Islands—she who always in the past said No to every suggestion I made for travel, but then of course came along and was pleased. . . . We both read Andreas Giannakos’s little theatrical piece—very “sick”: pessimistic, anti-civilization. He needs the simplistic moralizing of Don Giovanni.

Thursday, April 13, 1999

Princeton

Nice lunch with Mike Keeley. We need to be watchful regarding travel to Greece in May. If the Kosovo war continues, Americans in Greece may be very unwelcome. Mike will be returning to the American Farm School board, I’m glad to learn. I told him about Bill McGrew’s valedictory report to the Anatolia board, which I think should be obligatory reading for AFS trustees. He suggests that George Draper be encouraged to write a similar valedictory. . . . Drove to Hightstown in the evening. Dan Seeger, Richard Barnes, and I met with John Baker, who was in bathrobe and pajamas. He’s confined to his room now, at age 103, with severe back pain caused by disintegrating vertebrae that pinch nerves. But he seemed fine for the ¾ hour we stayed. Dan explained Pendle Hill’s hope to start a forum program and how intrigued we are with Baker’s suggestion that Quakers try to bring the three historic peace churches together—Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites—to be more of a concentrated force politically. This would be perfect for our forum, but of course we need money. Baker said that he’d like to give us some. He also wanted to know the level of the Jean Monnet Fund at Dartmouth—it’s now at $350,000. I brought him our proposal for a War/Peace minor, very impressive, and a video of one of the speakers who came on the War/Peace Fellows program. Let’s hope he’ll be convinced to leave something in his will. . . . Afterwards, Dan, Richard, and I had a big dinner in the Hightstown diner. . . . I returned to Princeton and did more typing for our Demotic Greek 1 revision, all the new words we’re adding. . . . On the way to Princeton from Philadelphia yesterday, I returned to center city Philadelphia to see “The Versailles,” where Alec has rented an apartment. What a location! Locust Street in the middle of everything, two blocks from Rittenhosue Square and Curtis, two blocks in the other direction from the Academy of Music and Broad Street. Every type of restaurant is nearby including a “trendy” café filled with young people. WaWa supermarket a block away, lots of parking, subway adjacent. And Alec can walk to work at Friends Select in fifteen minutes. The building is ca. 1920, very well maintained, with a man in the lobby at all hours. Very nice indeed.

Wednesday, April 14, 1999

Princeton

Good work again with Dimitri. Also, Mache came; she’s fine after giving birth a month ago. . . . Met John Wilson at the fountain of the Woodrow Wilson School. Walked to his house. Wine with him and Woody. Their four grandsons all look like Tom Wilson—four towheads. Then drove to the graduate college, a huge Gothic memorial to a Dean West who fostered it around 1915, against the wishes of Woodrow Wilson. A mimicry of Oxford grandeur. We ate in “hall,” with students. Unlike Trinity, Dublin; no grace in Latin.

Thursday, April 15, 1999

To Pendle Hill

Princeton: work in the morning. Saw Dimitri Mitropoulos, the journalist, briefly. He is the son of the marvelous cartoonist. Then to Pendle Hill: good practice with Dan; we’re playing the waltz better now. Rapid supper in Wendy’s. In the afternoon, Cadbury Fellowship Committee. We chose Orion Smith for next year; she’ll do an anthology of Nailer’s writings, with apparatus, introduction, etc. Margaret Bacon lectured on Friends’ treatment of blacks in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. Not at all encouraging. Meetings made blacks sit in the back on segregated benches. In the discussion afterward, I spoke about my impression of Haverford when I arrived in 1950. It seemed like the antebellum south: all the students and professors (except one: Ira Reid) white; all the servants, janitors, gardeners: black and servile. Helen Horn, Douglas and Dorothy Steere’s daughter, confirmed this memory. . . . Felt very tired, probably because of the tensions inevitably involved now in the Demotic Greek 1 book, with the publisher asking for a manuscript by May 1st. We hope to give half (lessons 1–6) by May 15. Also, I worry about producing the Hanover Monthly Meeting budget on time. Then comes the next journal, by early July, not to mention finishing the Archbishop’s Commission document by May 13th, probably. And I’ve just been booked to lecture in New York—“Death in Venice” on May 13th, too. Too much!

Friday, April 16, 1999

Pendle Hill

A long full day. Started at 9:30, after Meeting, with Book Committee, discussing Wilmer Cooper’s revised volume on Conservative Friends, which we agreed to publish. Then to Short Course Review Committee. Renamed “Week-long Courses,” we’ll run them for another three years. That’s very good indeed. Then Publications Committee. Reported the mess owing to our rejection of the pamphlet about US troops in Okinawa. Rebecca said one reason was its one-sidedness. Surely not all Americans were rapists, etc. Now the author is accusing Pendle Hill of “racism”! Long long discussion of Lisa Sutton’s rewritten essay on potting and spirituality. Friends found it too self-focused. We hope she’ll rewrite it yet again, concentrating more on the pots and less on herself. She’ll be devastated. But at least we accepted Jennifer Elam’s despite its bad writing, asking that it be shortened by 25%. . . . I rested a bit. Then had supper with Doug Gwyn and Caroline Jones. I’ve got to edit Doug’s book on Seekers this summer. They’ll be staying on at Pendle Hill next year. After supper, we introduced the Vietnam book and Larry’s book on education to the General Board. Escaped to the Barnes’ to tell them what to see in Greece. Then to Dan’s. We’re really doing much better on the Barber waltz, the Starer, even the Schubert. Only the Barber Galop is really not ready yet. This may be too much for us this year. Dan wants me to come during Festival Week to perform.

Saturday, April 17, 1999

Pendle Hill

Wallace Collett invited me home to tea in Bryn Mawr to meet his wife, Stella Miller, who is an archeologist dealing with Greece. Very pleasant. We of course have shared many experiences. I showed them the Mitropoulos cartoons in our revised DG1; much appreciated. They showed me their mansion, a huge house exquisitely furnished. She has an office that is any scholar’s dream: floor to ceiling bookshelves in a huge room, state of the art computers. She married well, for Wallace is a millionaire, of course. He’s 84 now and still active and vigorous. She must be around 60, if that. . . . Returned to supper meeting at PH of the Search Committee for Dan’s successor. We were asked for three questions to be used in interviews. I submitted: (1) The PH mission states that we are witnessing to the Truth. Can we speak any longer of the Truth with a capital T? (2) How can we reconcile the difference between conservative and liberal Friends over the subject of homosexuality? (3) Do Quakers have a position on the world’s economic order, namely capitalism? . . . More practice with Dan after the business meeting. We’re doing better. Even played the Schubert march at a faster tempo.

Sunday, April 18, 1999

Pendle Hill

Nice talk at breakfast with Sally Palmer about Lisa Sutton’s essay. It’s so strange that Friends are now “frightened” by discussion of Jesus. Then a long practice with Dan, again quite encouraging, followed by lunch “out” and more practice until he had to leave to visit his parents at Medford Leas and I had to go to the airport. At Meeting this morning, good ministry about the need to retain hope and optimism despite everything we see and hear. Directly to Kendal from Lebanon Airport, with Chrysanthi, in order to introduce there the movie Zorba the Greek.

Wednesday, April 28, 1999

Richard Barnes telephoned excitedly from Pendle Hill. John Baker gave them $100,000 as a result of our visit. And Baker phoned me earlier to say how much I’d meant to him over the years. Imagine! It’s just the opposite: how much he meant to me. He feels he’s dying now, at 103 he may be right. Will I see him again? I’ll try on May 5th when I’m in Princeton, but I fear it’s doubtful. . . . John came again. We’ve spent many hours together this week polishing the Commission report. Now we’ll meet with Phyllis Franklin and others in New York on Monday.

Saturday, May 1, 1999

I’m feeling very conflicted about going to Greece on May 18 because of the war in Kosovo. The Greeks are 90% in favor of the Serbs and against NATO and us. John Iatrides wisely advised me: “If you’re going to do important business for the school, then go. If you’re going to celebrate, don’t go. This is no time for celebration.” And we’re going to celebrate George Draper’s retirement, David Buck’s accession. Normally, the board would be in New York. And John Rassias quite rightly says that at a time of graduation, celebration, etc. the board won’t do much business anyway. I’ve been trying to convince Tom Thomas to cancel the trip, but so far he hasn’t. Hope to speak to Mike Keeley about all this on Thursday. I think that I should take the sum I would have spent on the trip and contribute it to Kosovo relief.

Sunday, May 2, 1999

Presented my first Hanover Monthly Meeting budget to the Finance Committee. I did it on Excel, which I didn’t know how to work very well. (Subsequently, I bought a manual.) The question, as always, is how to balance income with expenditure. It will work, eventually. Lunch afterwards with the “gang”—Nodas, Audrey, Sydney, Mary, Chrysanthi. Then drove to Manchester with John Rassias and flew to New York.

Monday, May 3, 1999

New York City, Yale Club

All day at MLA, 10 Astor Place, revising our Commission report. Phyllis Franklin very helpful as a super editor, fixing and rationalizing. Dimitri Gondicas full of good ideas. Jim Alatos, too. Many changes, all of which I entered on the computer. We worked intensively from 9:00 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. with a short break for a lunch of overcooked hamburgers. Then dinner at the Yale Club with Constance Tagopoulos and John. . . . I’m asking all concerned what they think about my going to Greece. Long talk with John last night over supper at Docks. “Don’t go.” But he also says, “Don’t go to Kendal. Ugh, to be surrounded by so many people!” I hope he is wrong. About Greece, Effie Cochran agrees, “Don’t go.” So does Dimitri. Supper with Tom?, professor of Russian at Queens, Peter?, chair of the Italian Department, and Sophia?, who does media research, at Maltemi on First and 41st. Very pleasant and lively. To bed at midnight, but not before John and I worked a bit more on his “editorial comments” in the Commission report.

Tuesday, May 4, 1999

New York

Back to MLA at 10 Astor Place. Joined by Connie and by Vasos Papagapitos. Warm regards to Chrysanthi, Daphne, Alec, Leander. He was helpful regarding the schisms in the Orthodox Church, and confirmed the accuracy of our strictures about the schools. Worked from 9:00 until 1:30. Back to the Yale Club with Constance for a late lunch. Then I went off to the Whitney for the “American Century” exhibit, part one, 1900–1950. Video introduction by my former student, Maxwell Anderson, now director of the Whitney. Fascinating, and very nostalgic: Wizard of Ox, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, lots of Bentons (including diorama of the entire mural at Missouri’s State Capitol, including the inset, the study for which we own). . . . Then to Daphne’s. Lucia is there, and we had a nice reunion. Andrew slept placidly despite an ear infection. Christina was absorbed in Sesame Street. Greg returned from work elated because the Goldman Sachs stock, floated today, rose from 53 to 70. We all went out to a French restaurant for dinner. Daphne expatiated on her jury trial, a case in which a woman who had received plastic surgery was suing her doctor for malpractice. She lost. It was a good experience for Daphne, all told. . . . Back to Princeton. Worked there until midnight.

Wednesday, May 5, 1999

Princeton

Dimitri had some more good ideas for John regarding his visit with the Archbishop. We found John at the Yale Club luckily and faxed the pages. Continued working on introducing new words to lesson 11. Cambanis came through with the Πολιτιστικά for 1–6. Mache has done nothing, however. Very frustrating. But she arrived later with baby in carriage and apologized. Actually, she’d done her job, given it to her husband to mail, and he neglected his part. Spent an hour with a Princeton junior, a Mennonite, who will be doing a thesis next year in history on the different effect of Greek ideals on elocution/rhetoric on Quakers and non-Quakers in the period just preceding the American Revolution. He senses that the Friends viewed rhetorical training as contrary to plain speech, and that this attitude may have hastened their loss of power. I was able to relate him to the Swarthmore and Haverford collections, to Mary Ellen Chijioki and Emma Lapsanski, and I told him about Larry Ingle. I also mentioned Paradise Lost, in which Milton makes the devil an accomplished rhetorician. . . . Went to a Chinese restaurant for supper and found Gail Holst there with her husband, Warhaft, and their two adopted Asian children. I joined them and reminisced about Melbourne. . . . John telephoned late to report that his interview with Archbishop Spyridon went well. Spyridon’s answer was always the same: “John, you should appoint an independent commission to oversee the implementation of your recommendations.” Έγινε! Our official presentation is now scheduled for May 27th.

Thursday, May 6, 1999

Princeton

Dimitri is again overly meticulous, revising the revision. . . . Long expensive (and very good) lunch at Lahere’s with Mike Keeley. Bruce Lansdale, whom he saw last night, thinks I should go, that staying home is like putting one’s head in the sand. But Mike can see my position, especially since this is an ad hoc trip, not one of the Board’s regular sorties to Greece. I still haven’t decided, but I tentatively booked accommodation for another trip to Princeton on the assumption that I will not go. . . . Spoke yesterday on the telephone to John Baker. He is still hurting, and having bowel problems. Not a good idea for me to come now, but he still hopes to see me in the future. Amen.

May 10, 1999

To Tom Thomas, Chair of the American Farm School Board:

Dear Tom,

Thanks very much for your thoughtful letter in which you say that part of the reason the School has been held in high esteem in Greece is that the Board has “never wavered in its message or mission even when Greece has been in turmoil. We have always stayed the course and operated the School without missing a beat.” I appreciate that thought from you. A similar thought was relayed to me from Bruce Lansdale via Mike Keeley last week.

However, I have decided—after much internal (and external) debate—to cancel my tickets and not come. I have taken the $1000 I would have spent on the trip and have sent it to the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees to be used for relief of Kosovars.

I very much appreciate your view that this is precisely the time when one should be present, and applaud you and other trustees for making the trip as planned. But my situation is somewhat different, chiefly because of Chrysanthi. She was a refugee herself (from the German bombing of Thessaloniki), and her family suffered horribly in the German occupation and the subsequent civil war; therefore her visceral reaction to the events so close to Greece (with their inevitable repercussions in Greece—my brother-in-law says that they can actually hear the bombing!) is acute, and her reaction to my absence in Greece even more acute. There is really no sense in doing something right in service to the School at the cost of doing something extremely wrong at home.

I hope and trust that you and the others will understand this very special situation in my case and will rest assured that I will remain an active, energetic trustee in the future.

May 13, 1999

New York City

Flew in this morning. Returned Olympic Airways ticket. (And they waived the refund fee “for me,” the employee said. Nice.) Saw the new Greek exhibit at the Met; very airy and spread out, so one doesn’t get claustrophobic. Also a good exhibit on the tragic destruction of Assisi owing to an earthquake last year and what is being done by way of restoration. Then went to 10 E. 39th, where I bought shoes ten or more years ago, and got another pair of these superb shoes. Cost: $255! Then was picked up at the Yale Club in a limousine and driven to the World Trade Center. Met by Jeffrey Murphy, Dartmouth ’76, my host. Entrance clearance required because of a bombing scare some years ago. Up to the 40th floor, offices of Thacher Profitt & Wood, 150 years old, with 170 lawyers, a “mid-size firm,” says Jeffrey. His office looks out over the Hudson, beautifully. His neighbor’s office looks out over the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, etc., even more beautifully. I lectured to 15–20 lawyers on Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.” An attentive audience, some questions afterwards, and much discussion in the very fancy reception that followed, with superb hors d’oeuvres offered by lackeys, plus wine. Another Dartmouth student, very friendly. Also several of the other lawyers. How young they all seem! Then by limousine again to a fine Italian restaurant with Jeff and one other colleague. Fine discussion about literature and education, and (inevitably) about politics. Jeffrey wants to bring humanities into the workplace. How nice! He says that the firm’s partners are very supportive. By limo back to the Yale Club at 11:30 p.m.

May 14, 1999

NYC–Pendle Hill

To the Diller-Quayle School at 9:00 to observe the class again. Same leader, assistant, and extremely talented pianist. Christina sleeping at first but woke up gradually. They learn coordination, mostly. Afterwards, we went for the ritual muffins. Met a friend of Daphne’s. Nice to see all these mothers of about the same age knowing each other. Then a long walk in the park with Daphne and Christina. Lucia’s visit last week was a disaster because Christina continues to reject all her advances and Lucia reacted “like a three-year-old,” says Daphne. Strange. . . . To Pendle Hill by AMTRAK and SEPTA. No Publications meeting. But our “Week-long Course Review Committee” met over supper. We had ideas for the future that I am meant to write up in draft form for the others. Then the board. I said, provocatively, that the board was “held hostage” by the Resident Program, afraid to make changes. But Dan and others said appropriately that we, as hostages, can open the door and walk out. I was reminded of Kafka’s parable in The Trial. . . . Ice cream afterward. And then Dan and I still had enough energy to practice the Barber Waltz quite systematically, going from slow to medium to fast, and keeping lots of control.

Saturday, May 15, 1999

Pendle Hill

The board decided not to approve Vince Buscemi’s request for $5500 plus a half-time staff person for the U.S. Ethnic and Racial Concerns Committee. We’ve got to investigate this whole problem more, speak to consultants, etc. One possible consultant is James McBride. Gay Berger is the new clerk, a relief after too many years of Mary Wood. . . . In the board lunch afterwards, we spoke more about the Resident Program. No attention to politics, no service program, no scholarship by teachers. Dan showed us the 1942 brochure. What a difference! . . . Afterwards, two and a half hours of good practice with Dan, very encouraging. What we really need now is lessons, which of course we’ll get at Kinhaven. He drove me to the airport and we had a Chinese supper together in the food court and then espresso in the US Airways club plus a long conversation about “Death in Venice” and The Magic Mountain and Ulysses. Dan hopes to visit us at the farm in late July after attending New York Yearly Meeting at Silver Bay. How nice! . . . Dan revealed that Liz Kamphausen is now in a Lesbian relationship with Orion Smith. Teacher with student. Not good. . . . Nice reunion with Chrysanthi. We went out to Starbucks at 10:30 p.m. for coffee and pastry and “catch-up.”

Sunday, May 16, 1999

Cambridge

After Meeting for Worship, when newcomers introduced themselves, lo and behold a man stood up and said, “I’m Dirk Spruyt”! I couldn’t believe it. We co-directed weekend work camps in Rochester in 1953–54. Have I seen him since? If so, I have no memory of it. We had a pleasant reunion. He’s retired from the Public Health Service and is now obsessed with sustainability. I suggested that he lead a week-long course at Pendle Hill. Also saw Andy Towl and talked about John Baker, and thanked Andy for his part, I’m sure, in the $100,000 given to Pendle Hill. Lunch at the Meeting with Andy, Dirk, and a man who kept insisting that Quakerism needs to pay more homage to the intellect. Amen. . . . Then to the A.R.T. to see Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan” about life (if you can call it that) in the Aran Islands, with memories of Synge, of course. Very well acted except for Jeremy Geidt, who just played himself. Home via Vermont Transit bus; met Larry Davies at the bus station. He and Heffernan are planning another play-reading next year, but clearly I haven’t been asked. Oh well . . .

Monday, May 17, 1999

Hanover

Started my next review for the TLS, and visited Phyllis Deutsch at UPNE to explain my trouble with Gondicas. She’ll “threaten” him and we’ll see if this works. . . . Looked up my journal entries for May 1969 for Brock Brower this Friday. What an extensive journalist I was then! Will I ever have time to type out the entire series of entries, the record of a (mostly intellectual) life? A propos, I learned today that John Petropulos died last week while he was at his desk marking student papers. Ugh!

May 24, 1999

To NYC and Princeton

I may have found an illustrator for DG1—Duane Bibby—thanks to Dick Williamson. Let’s hope that Dimitri doesn’t object. . . . Waiting at Manchester Airport for a delayed flight to LaGuardia (bad weather in New York), I read this nice passage in the TLS for May 21, by David Constantine: “Translation . . . is, like teaching, an intrinsically humane activity. I don’t mean that its practitioners are always themselves, in whatever else they do, humane, but that the activity itself, ideally conceived, is humane, and, in practicing it as well as they can, translators are doing something that Rilke might have added to his list of things to show to the Angel, as proof that humanity matters after all. . . .”

May 25, 1999

Mike Keeley’s book on Miller and Katsimbalis and Durrell was reviewed superlatively in the Times. He’s delighted, as are all his friends. His only complaint, to me, was “They keep calling me ‘Professor.’ I don’t want to be ‘Professor” any longer. I want to be ‘writer’!” . . . More proofing and insertion of new words and ideas on formatting with Mache and Dimitri. He wants to postpone the delivery of lessons 1–6 to UPNE but I refused. Mache came up with some very good new ideas.

May 27, 1999

To NYC

On New Jersey Transit to Manhattan with Dimitri. Quick visit to Daphne, about to leave for the Hamptons. Christina very grumpy, wouldn’t even say Hello. She has a cold and has been that way for three days. . . . Then to the Archdiocese for the big event, the presentation of the Commission’s report. Lots of journalists, TV cameras, photographers. Very grand. Spyridon made a fine speech, first in Greek, then in English, saying in effect that the Greek language is necessary for faith and culture. John spoke well about our report and then answered questions. The only time he probably didn’t rise to the occasion was when someone questioned the appropriateness of the word “diaspora,” saying, quite reasonably, that second, third, fourth, etc. generation Greek-Americans really do not think of themselves as a diaspora. Photos afterwards, distribution of the printed version, very nicely done; then dinner on the sixth floor, with very good wine (not Greek). Sat next to Vasos Papagapitos, happily. And opposite the Archbishop. Then he signed copies of the book for each of the Commissioners and gave us signed photographs. Then a lackey came and started to shine his shoes! Afterwards, John, Connie, Sofronos, and I unwound a bit over a cool drink. John is already thinking of the implementation committee.

May 28, 1999

To Terpni

Two-hour breakfast at the Hanover Inn with John, planning the implementation committee for the Archdiocese. Obviously this θητεία isn’t going to end for a while. . . . To Riparius, late. What a relief! And how nice to see Alec and Monica there. Monica is showing her pregnancy now. Alec mowed, cleaned our cabin a bit. I turned on the water, opened some shutters, and we were instantaneously at home. Birthday greetings from the children, and even a phone message from Sophia, like a little bird.

Saturday, May 29, 1999

Terpni

Planted the garden. It’s easier and easier now, with the Mantis tiller. Didn’t get jammed even once. Also set up my office. Fertilized the cherry trees. Sprayed ants already sharing the house with us. Supper pleasantly with the Shapiros and Gouthrous.

Tuesday, June 1, 1999

Hanover

Stayed May 30 and 31 at the farm, deliciously. Working of course on the Demotic Greek 1 revision. Crisis: the Greek-English vocabulary file is corrupted. But I think that I saved it back in Hanover, using an older version. Supper with Mother. Very difficult to converse, but Chrysanthi tried valiantly. Bev Webster looking worse and worse. Franny, too. Like a zombie. Terrible. I found the new Kendal Keynotes (Spring 1999) there with the front page devoted to me, quite nicely:

. . . TO CONVEY THE VISION OF KENDAL’S BEGINNINGS

AT THE BOARD MEETING held on June 16, 1998, the directors honored Peter Bien for his leadership of Kendal at Hanover over the past twelve years. Peter’s term on the board had ended and it was appropriate to use the occasion to fête the man who had done more than anyone else to make Kendal at Hanover a reality.

More than Peter’s leadership was honored that day. It was Peter’s strong commitment to values and vision that steered the youthful organization through the growing pains of its first years. There were crises of construction, Medicare surveys, taxation and governance issues—to name but a few of the problems that tested Kendal’s earliest years and would have caused someone with less tenacity and commitment to become discouraged.

Once Kendal filled, Peter turned his attention to strengthening the board, crafting innovative personnel policies, and supporting the effort (from his position as board chair) to have Kendal become the first continuing care retirement community in northern New England to be accredited.

Upon the recitation of the Minute of Appreciation at the board meeting, Peter was asked if he would like to say a few words. After regaling us with stories of the early days, Peter asked the board to remember that “the existence of Kendal is really a miracle.” He went on with the following words:

“This splendid Word made Flesh is what needs our incessant care and vigilance now. If it is to become ever more healthy, beautiful, civilized, and temperamentally serene, it will do so only because of the quality of the people who continue to come here as residents and staff. So, our greatest challenge in the future, I believe, is to convey to prospective residents and employees the vision of Kendal’s beginnings.”

Thank you, Peter, for giving us the gift of your farsighted vision. We are all most grateful. —Len Cadwallader

Monday, June 7, 1999

To UPNE with John to present half of our book, lessons 1–6. Phyllis Deutsch, Mary?, Mike Burton, and the president all in attendance. They’ll start copyediting and formatting. Our job now is to supply the remainder. Still much to do, especially regarding illustrations. And Mike sent a message later that one of my disks is unreadable. I made another. I’ve had great problems with computer corruption—files freezing or Greek suddenly becoming (garbled) “English” or English (garbled) “Greek.” I’ve rescued the frozen files by going to earlier versions and also by splitting them in two. Shorter files seem to work better. So, fingers crossed for the UPNE typesetting! But it was a relief to submit this much, even if it’s only half. . . . Lunch with Tom Corindia last week, for help with the Meeting’s budget. He is going to send a new way to do the summary. But afterwards I found a way to reconcile the account totals and the fund balance totals. . . . Lunch last Friday with Ned. He’s better now, he said, than at any time after Anne’s death. . . . And saw Chauncey Loomis in the English Department a few days ago, by coincidence. Still grumpy, very involved in town affairs in Lenox, where he’s a grandee, of course. . . . We’re watching the elections in Indonesia. No result yet, but Megawati’s coalition seems favored to win, and Golkar (Habibie) to lose. So far, everything peaceful and orderly. Mrs. Haskin sent an e-mail bulletin, very upbeat and optimistic.

Tuesday, June 8, 1999

To Princeton

To the farm late last night, then up at 6:30 this morning to drive to Albany Airport and fly to Newark in order to get to Princeton by lunchtime. One new problem: We want our book to be called “It’s Greek to Me,” and John discovered another book called “It’s All Greek to Me.” Alas!

Saturday, June 12, 1999

Kinhaven

Back from Princeton late on Thursday the 10th. Leander at the farm, playing a Bach toccata on the piano. Chrysanthi unpleasant because she feared she would be left without a car when I go to Princeton on the 20th, since Alec and Monica leave on the 21st. I had to change my tickets, to go from Hanover instead of Riparius. On Friday, Monica fixed my Excel difficulty on the Meeting budget. She knows Excel perfectly—used it in her job at Eveready Battery. Made plans with Alec to repair the garden fence, to try to keep rabbits out. . . . Off to Kinhaven. Heard the Firebird Suite on the radio on the way. Scintillating. Alice is at the workshop this year, also other old-timers: Bruno, Kit, Sue, etc. Lovely to see Nigel Coxe again, and Ignat and Caroline. Dan arrived this morning in time for our coaching by Nigel. Lots of help with the Barber Waltz especially. Later, I had a superb lesson from Ignat, again mostly on the Waltz, which he sees as a parody, like Ravel’s “La Valse.” And he taught me four different exercises to do for octaves, a technique developed by Liszt, and passed down via Goldowski, etc. Then, a special surprise, Nigel offered to give a concert, previously unscheduled. He played Beethoven’s Sonata no. 28, magnificently. Then Beethoven’s 32 Variations on an Original Theme, which I had heard him do at Kendal. (He’ll be happy to play again at Kendal, he says.) He has extraordinary control. No one plays Beethoven so meaningfully, except Richard Goode. Then Chopin Nocturnes, Impromptu, and the 3rd Ballade, not so effective as the Beethoven, but still a bravura performance. And earlier he’d done a master class with students playing Mozart’s Sonata in C and Prokofiev’s “Visions Fugitives” (Steve Klein, a major accomplishment). I played the Galop with Ignat. Fun. . . . Worked a bit on lesson 8 of the text, and to bed exhausted.

Tuesday, June 15, 1999

Kinhaven

Dan and I were first on the program. I completely flubbed the first two bars of the Starer, but no one seemed to notice. The rest went well enough. Dan played his very best throughout, so we did a credible job even on the Pas de Deux. And the Waltz went well, too, indeed the parodistic way we ended it was a great hit. Lots of good music followed, but the high point was the great Schubert Fantasia in F minor played movingly by Alma and Bruno. It was nice to have Alec and Monica and Chrysanthi in the audience. They came last night and thus heard the faculty four-hand recital in which Leander played first with Nigel, then with Ignat (the Schubert “Marche characteristique” at breakneck speed and clean as a whistle, with Ignat in the treble) and then with Mrs. Shin. Exhausting for him (on four hours sleep), but he managed. After lunch, Alec and Monica drove off to Portland, Maine, to visit their Jakarta friend Andy, and Chrysanthi and I drove back to Terpni.

Wednesday, June 16, 1999

Right to work on the Greek book. More computer failure. Steve at Kinhaven says I need more memory. Must have this done immediately. Also started to work on Aspasia Lambrinidou’s needs for her translation of Politics of the Spirit: various Kazantzakis texts for which she had no access to the original Greek. Slow work. I found about half. The rest need a visit to Hanover.

Saturday, June 19, 1999

To the Mountainside Christian Church in Schroon Lake to witness Marcus McGinn’s highschool graduation. It’s all Bible and Jesus. Very cozy, but I interpreted it as a triumph of brainwashing. They have an entire life-system, all based on a lie—that every word is directly from God. But of course the details make sense: to be kind, to love God rather than money. Gary McGinn pointed out his Speculator pastor, Rev. Hart, who has the tent adjacent to our southern border. We hope to meet him sometime. . . . Pizza at the Narrows afterward. The owner, my friend, gave us two coffees on the house.

Sunday, June 20, 1999

To Hanover–Philadelphi–Princeton

To Hanover early to present the Meeting’s budget. It went well, with not too much carping. Major discussion concerned my designation of $0 for AFSC-Philadelphia. That was changed, of course, to $50 (!) pending investigation about the spiritual condition of AFSC-Philadelphia, which according to Dan Seeger is pathetic. Too bad. . . . Then I tried to find more texts for Aspasia. Took one hour to find the first one, the Sipriot interview, misquoted (of course) by Mrs. Kazantzakis in her biography. Finally flew to Philadelphia and proceeded by Avis car to Princeton.

Wednesday, June 30, 1999

Sent lessons 1–6 of “Eureka! It’s Greek!” to UPNE. What a relief!

Thursday, July 1, 1999

Len Cadwallader telephoned to say that Bev Webster died yesterday. A blessing. His life-style was so very poor. How pathetic when once I wheeled him back to his room from the dining room and had to lift him out of the wheelchair into bed, his legs totally nonfunctional. What a gift knowing him these past nine years! And hearing him!

Monday, July 5, 1999

Yasuo and Naoko have been here since Saturday, their eleventh year visiting us on the July 4th weekend. Alec is not here (he’s at Leander’s in case the baby comes) but in some ways it was better because we had so much good music to play (piano-violin-viola) including two exquisite Mozarts. We had five separate sessions over the weekend, besides lots of talk, pizza at the Narrows, etc. Naoko is devastated because she cannot get pregnant, it seems. Yasuo is exploring a change of career, to go into gerontological research and therapy. . . . I’m also working as fast as I can on the journal—my last. Hour after hour! I want to publish a valediction at the start of the issue.

Saturday, July 10, 1999

Worked fifteen hours yesterday on the journal and another three this morning in order to get it to the post office on time. And off it went, huge, my last, after 24 years. I included the following “valediction”:

Folklore asserts that BMGS / JMGS was founded by Mike Keeley and Anthony Bryer in a Birmingham bar, or else by Peter Bien and Anthony Bryer in a Birmingham bar. The stable elements seem to be Bryer and the Birmingham bar. In any case, twenty-five years have passed since then. Bryer, who preferred to remain as business manager, induced the formidable Donald Nicol of King’s College London to edit BMGS (affectionately nicknamed “bum-gas”) with me as his associate editor. This Anglo-American modernist-Byzantinist collaboration continued from 1975 to 1983, published by Blackwell’s. By that time, folks at MGSA felt that our discipline had advanced sufficiently for us to manage a journal on our own. Thus Lily Macrakis and I journeyed to Blackwell’s in Oxford with a proposal; they were not amused. Then Bryer and I journeyed to Baltimore to lure Johns Hopkins into some sort of interest; that went better—indeed, for seventeen years Hopkins has provided us with a succession of totally professional editors. And the mariage de convenance between England and America ended amicably, with BMGS continuing on its own in Birmingham and with a newly invented JMGS edited by Bill McNeill taking flight in Maryland. We changed then to two issues a year and added book reviews. Later, with the great help of Jeffrey Rusten of Cornell and the valiant cooperation of Hopkins’ compositors, I was able to computerize the typesetting of Greek, ending the previous nightmare in which every γ had come out as a χ every ν as a υ, and all the breathings were facing in the wrong direction (for we then used polytonic). Next, Michael Macrakis and The Greek Font Society stepped into the act, lamenting our ugly font and making us a present of the elegant Didot, which is now employed.

For me, these twenty-five years have been quite an adventure. To work with Bill McNeill and then with his energetic successor, Ernestine Friedl, was a valuable apprenticeship. When I assumed the editorship in 1990, I then had the pleasure of collaborating first with Michael Herzfeld and then with Peter Allen as associate editors, both of whom are possessed of an excellent eye for detail and a clear mind for judgment. Thankfully, the book reviews were always handled separately, initially by Mary Layoun and then by Eva Konstantellou, who despite family obligations and massive troubles at work has always been a dedicated, imaginative colleague. In addition, of course, JMGS has had a distinguished group of experts on its editorial board ready to read submissions and recommend or dissuade (we have published only about 38% of the 440 submissions received since December 1985). Many many thanks, therefore, to Margaret Alexiou, Richard Clogg, Loring Danforth, John Iatrides, Kostas Kazazis, Edmund Keeley, Mark Mazower, Nicos Mouzelis, Alexander Nehamas, Dimitris Tziovas, and Speros Vryonis. Lastly, I must mention the succession of Dartmouth students whom I have trained in copyediting, proofreading, and bibliographical research, young people who in some cases have gone into the field professionally. In particular, I remember with gratitude Kate Cohen, Jay Bruce, Erica Thrall, and Sara Zuniga.

Thinking back over my nine years as editor and fifteen before that as associate editor, I consider the most notable areas of growth to have been (1) the computerization of Greek, already mentioned, (2) the greatly increased diversity of scholarly fields represented, instead of just literature and history, which dominated at the start, and (3) perhaps most important, the large number of submissions now coming from Greece itself. Yes, these years have been an adventure—stimulating, educative, and mostly pleasurable despite the curses hurled at me occasionally by rejected authors. The real purpose of JMGS has been not just to make scholarship available in print but also to act as a kind of school for peers, offering constructive advice for improvement and always operating according to the dictates of scholarly rigor. Consequently, perhaps the journal’s most important activity is not what is seen on its pages but everything that occurs invisibly before publication. With hope and trust that this will continue, I happily turn over the editorship now to my successor, Professor Susan Sutton, wishing for her the patience, fortitude, and sleeplessness that she will need for her own forthcoming adventure.

Thursday, July 15, 1999

Drove Chrysanthi to the AMTRAK station in Rensselaer, arriving at 8:20 a.m. She went to Washington to help with Nicholas, born on July 11th via natural childbirth rather than Caesarian. 8½ lbs. I drove to Saratoga, bought ballet tickets for matinee and evening, shopped at Price Chopper (cherry pie), visited the National Museum of Dance (disappointing, but I neglected to go next door to see if any instruction was taking place). Then I saw a deliciously exuberant program: pure joy and fun plus athleticism. Robbins’ “interplay,” Balanchine’s “Tarantella,” Peter Martins’ “Barber Violin Concerto” (both music and dance extraordinary), and finally Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes,” to march music by Sousa. Then a nap on the grass. supper in the Hall of Springs with Don Kurka and two friends of his, the Skinners, he a retired sculptor, she an elementary school teacher, followed by an all-Balanchine/Stravinsky program, so entirely different from the matinee: “Apollo,” perfectly done by Nikolaj Hübbe, “Orpheus,” which I’d never seen before, very imaginative in its evocation of Hades, and “Agon.” What a splendid treat! Back at the farm at midnight, with a star-filled sky overhead.

Saturday, July 17, 1999

Chrysanthi telephoned to say “Happy Anniversary.” We’ll celebrate next Friday when she returns. It’s our 44th. . . . Terribly hot again. I’m working indoors so I can use a fan. Still typing new material and revisions into lessons 7–12. It’s endless. Worked outdoors a bit. Put up the bat house. Assembled the composter some more. Put oakum in slits in sheathing where bees have invaded our kitchen wall. . . . Took a delicious swim, my first this year. Pond very low, very warm. . . . Hummingbirds are back. Saw three at once feeding on our porch, although they seem usually to want to chase each other away and hog the sugar-water for themselves. . . . Christina telephoned. Do we have horses? Daphne says she’s horse-crazy. I telephoned a stable in Lake Luzerne and we discovered that they do pony rides for children.

Tuesday, July 20, 1999

To SPAC again, alone, to see the all-Stravinsky program, highlighted by “Firebird” with the Chagall sets and choreography by Balanchine and Robbins in collaboration. Stunning, of course, especially the wild scene in the middle with the monsters. Very good for children (and adults). The final ballet, “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” again displays Balanchine’s genius to interpret the music so expressively, and always in a new way, without falling into clichés.

Wednesday, July 21, 1999

Managed to finish part 1 of lesson 7 and to print it without further corruption of the file. Spent a second afternoon on the new outlet in the kitchen. Finished it, plugged in the Microwave. No juice! What did I do wrong? I think it’s because I used the black and red of the three-wire conduit instead of the black and white (stupidly). Will correct this tomorrow and see what happens. . . . Don Kurka came for supper. I fed him one of Chrysanthi’s delicacies: τουρλού.

Friday, July 23, 1999

Picked Chrysanthi up at AMTRAK, Rensselaer. Supper in Saratoga, then ballet: “Serenade”: very early Balanchine to Tchaikovsky’s lovely music, mostly ensemble, especially the girls, all in white, the Balanchine genius already in evidence, especially when compared to Peter Martins’ setting of Wynton Marsalis’s mediocre music—unimaginative choreography for the most part, although some of it was daring, I suppose, especially in the way the men maltreat the girls. But the “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” was brilliant again, both as music and dance. Home later, very tired, but filled.

Monday, August 9, 1999

A full, interesting day. Vetted Lewis Owens’s chapter 1 in the morning, briefly (I’m doing it by installments), read over a Mozart violin-piano sonata, telephoned Corey Smith to sell and buy stocks, blitzed Elenor Marsh regarding a performance at Kendal by one of Hopkins Center’s residency groups, blitzed Artemis Leontis regarding how bad the article on Whitman and Elytis is and how right she was to recommend rejection, spent most of the morning completing my vetting of galley proofs for JMGS 17/2 (my very last issue!!). After lunch, read TLS a little, then assembled the easel that Daphne shipped here for Christina (that took an hour), finished the swings that Alec and I have built for the children, lengthening the chain so the seat is lower; then with Alec, using the Stihl trimmer, removed protruding branches on the south field, up to my office, a big, tiring job, then collected them all and took them to the brush pile, using Alec’s trailer; then mowed around Leander’s house in preparation for his arrival in a few days. Showered. Then Asa and Evelyn Rothstein came for dinner. Asa in very good mood. I had him explain at length the ongoing research that is attempting to create stents with the protein “elasticin” in order to render the stents more acceptable by the body. They’re at the stage now where they hope to begin experiments with animals. All laboratory tests are positive—encouraging. At dinner he regaled us also with tales of his “secret” research on radiation to be expected from the atom bomb then under construction at Los Alamos and his almost farcical time conducting experiments with live soldiers in the desert prior to our invasion of North Africa, to determine how humans react in a temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit. A very stimulating time. But then, after they left, I had Monica and Alec help me display on the computer the first illustration done by Duane Bibby for our revised textbook: the Pavlakis family. Quite nice, but Chrysanthi says that the faces should be longer, not so round, and I say that Mrs. Pavlakis’s nose shouldn’t be quite so bulbous. But the style is fine. Also received a blitz from Tom Doulis, to whom I’d mentioned Alec’s new job. Tom enthused that he and Nancy had met at Friends Select, where she was teaching and he came to teach English for two years. Small world. We’ll both be at the Nassau Inn in November for the MGSA symposium. How nice that his translation of Θάνος Βλέκας was accepted for publication by a university press.

Wednesday, August 11, 1999

To Saratoga for a lovely supper with Donna Trautwein and Ed Welsh and Donna’s father, aged 90, Leo Cohen, very lucid and talkative. Then to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra, Peter Serkin spectacular in Brahms’s 1st piano concerto and the orchestra equally spectacular in Dvořák’s New World Symphony, Dutuit conducting.

Friday, August 13, 1999

Leander, Deanna, Sophia, and Nicholas arrived last night after a surprisingly quick and peaceful drive. Nicholas, five weeks old, very placid; Sophia full of pep. . . . Broke the Ford mower yesterday: all the rivets sheared off the knife-bar. Took it to Bud Ruddick this morning for repair. He’s into tractor restoration now. People collect old tractors. Too bad I lost my 1935 Allis Chalmers. . . . A surprise this afternoon was the arrival of James McBride with his two children, but not Stephanie. They’re having marriage problems, alas, but he thinks they’ll survive as a married couple. He finished his ghost-written “autobiography” of Quincy Jones, but Jones doesn’t like the non-laudatory passages and won’t pay James his fee. A mess. But his musical will get a workshop performance at the Kennedy Center and a chance to be seen again by the “big wigs” who could bring it to Broadway. James is willing to come to Pendle Hill to lecture, as a favor to me, he says. His normal fee is $10,000 (although he’ll accept $5,000). Pendle Hill will pay him $200. . . . Eleven people for supper tonight. Stew. It went well. . . . Peter Allen did his usual very conscientious job of vetting and I entered his changes this morning. Waiting now for more authors and for Sara Zuniga. My last galleys!

Monday, August 16, 1999

Peter Schweitzer telephoned to say that his sister, Joan Bewley-Bull, died at age 76. Poor benighted soul: fabulously rich but everything else wrong. She refused to go to doctors, never had a pap test, and of course died of breast cancer. Peter thinks that the ex-husband, James Bewley-Bull, is in a sanitarium, a hopeless alcoholic. In any case, there is no contact. . . . We are having quite a time with everyone here. Christina and Sophia enjoy each other most of the time, but also compete and fight at times. Tonight, as we were celebrating Sophia’s birthday with cake and champagne, she came in screaming, saying that Christina had pushed her, and Leander lost his temper, called Christina a bully and accused Daphne of refusing to discipline her. When Chrysanthi defended Daphne Leander left the table in a huff, slamming the door—and ruined our party, of course, although the rest of us stayed for a while calmly and cordially. Sometimes the adults are more childlike than the children. But the kids are somewhat barbaric. We made a swing-set with two swings, but they want only the single swing, and continually compete for occupancy. Chrysanthi says it’s “natural.” . . . By and large, it’s nice to have them all here. Daphne’s Andrew is very placid, and Deanna’s Nicholas, five months old, is like a little mouse. I’m comfortable in the guesthouse, now with electricity and running water. Chrysanthi, since Greg left, is sleeping in the main house to keep Daphne company. . . . Spent time clearing trees in back of Leander’s; he has opened it up very nicely. And yesterday we had a good time at the Warren County Fair, with the girls taking ride after ride and the parents indulging in franks and fries. . . . On the book, I’ve started entering the paradigm numbers in the Greek-English vocabulary: very slow and tedious. John says the Press is now going to delay the book. Duane Bibby’s drawings need further fixing: Nikos is too young, so is Maria, etc.

Tuesday, August 17, 1999

All fine with Leander. His good quality is that he forgets and forgives easily, after exploding. The girls went off for pony rides. In the afternoon. Rhoda came with her brood, two sons with their wives and families—five more children, making nine kids and 10 adults for pot luck supper. One son, Martin, a lawyer, is assistant to the attorney general of New Hampshire, based in Concord. He is currently working on the new regulations for school taxes. A very astute, articulate man. The other son, Paul, I think, also a lawyer, is in the Department of Justice in Washington. His wife, Carol, also a lawyer, is in private practice in McLean, Virginia. Is Martin’s wife, Ann, a lawyer, too? Maybe. The children, five in all, range from about 15 to about 8 or 9. Paul’s are all blonde, as is Carol. Mike, the oldest, is a swimmer and violinist. Wants to be the best in everything; refused to swim in our pond because afraid of the frogs (!), but they took him to the YMCA in Glens Falls to do laps. Sweet, demure children, all of them. And of course both boys married non-Jews. So did we all.

Sunday, August 22, 1999

Greg arrived again yesterday and promptly finished mowing the south field. That’s it for this year. Και του χρόνου! Today Daphne and family left, which means that Chrysanthi and I return to our house after a week very comfortably in the Guest House, now furnished with electricity and running water. The visit was a good one. Daphne is already talking about next summer. Rain finally.

Monday, August 23, 1999

After the rain, I burned the brush pile. A nice mist hung low over the field at 6:00 a.m. One match was all that was needed. Most of it was consumed in fifteen minutes. But then I added three loads of brush from Leander’s. Chrysanthi came out with the watering can (!) to protect the grass.

Tuesday, August 24, 1999

Finally, thank God, finished entering the paradigms in the Greek-English lexicon. Took me ten days, such boring work. But it’s done. I’m still trying to get decent drawings from Duane Bibby. Discouraging. And Alix MacSweeney sent me the copyedited version of my TLS review, a travesty, done by an illiterate. I’ve told her that it cannot be published in that form. How could the TLS descend so far? . . . In the afternoon, walked the south logging path with my chain saw, clearing the various trees that have fallen across it. On the left-hand fork, alas, several large trees lie across the path, from the blow-down two years ago, I think.

Wednesday, August 25, 1999

Last night prepared four more testimonials for Lewis Owens; he never stops. Sent off IRS payments for us and Mother, also NH taxes. Returned TLS review to Alix with a long distressful letter. This morning wrote a review of Mike Keeley’s Inventing Paradise for World Literature Today, without having to read the book a second time. Quick work, and fun. Now, before JMGS page proofs arrive, and before Aspasia sends me more chapters of the Greek translation of Politics of the Spirit, I must turn to Doug Gwyn’s latest, Seekers Found, which I foolishly agreed to copyedit. Let’s hope its English is better than what I had to deal with in The Covenant Crucified.

Sunday, August 29, 1999

Leonard Cadwallader telephoned to tell me the shocking news that he is resigning as director of Kendal. Why? He cannot get along with the board, which presumably means chiefly John Hennessey. I asked him if essentially we could call this a conflict between Quaker culture and non-Quaker culture. He said Yes. So, the troubles that I had to begin to deal with, chiefly with Hennessey and Jim Armstrong, have led to this. Apparently Hennessey has stacked the board with “corporate” types so that the few Quaker voices—Margery Walker, Treat Arnold, Gordon Browne—are drowned out. But Len and Mary Ann hope to remain in Hanover, at least. What a surprise! What a disappointment! I asked if in his view the people coming in as residents in the last year or so have impressed him as “quality” and he assured me that they are wonderful. So that, at least, is encouraging.

This morning, Leander, seeking a bit of hose I have in the basement to our bathroom, stepped on the ladder before securing it. The ladder slid out from under him and he fell down into the basement on his back, striking his head against the concrete wall. But luckily, thankfully, he didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion, although he did seem to pass out briefly. A narrow escape. What a horror story it would have been if he’d ended up in the hospital, with them slated to return to Maryland tomorrow. But later in the day he seemed fine. After supper we took Sophia to Stewart’s for ice cream (and indulged ourselves).

Monday, August 30, 1999

Long talk with Margery Walker about Len. It turned out that, basically, he was fired. Just like Jean, but for the opposite reason. She was a splendid manager and hopeless at personal relations. He is good at personal relations but apparently hopeless as a manager. Margery says he didn’t understand the budget, failed to follow through on promised projects, failed to establish meaningful relationships with the hospital, college, and town. He had a bad review after the first year, was counseled subsequently, and it didn’t work. Again, just like Jean. Well, too too bad. John Hennessey already has a search committee formed, of course, dynamo that he is. He, Jim Armstrong, and Margery are all serving their final year. Margery says that the board is strong, with good new members. Μακάρι! . . . I suggested to Chrysanthi that we think about selling the house and moving into temporary rental quarters, in order to be prepared for the move to Kendal. She says that Felitsa wants to buy the house.

Sunday, September 5, 1999

Very sociable. We visited a Greek family (imagine!) that purchased the cabins halfway between Wevertown and Johnsburg, where the musicians used to live. They hope to run a business. The son is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the New School, and knows Adi Polis. Small world. Then we called on Deana and Matt, our neighbors, and saw their converted barn, very cozy. He gets up at 3:00 a.m. every day to get to work on time. He’s the caretaker of a very fancy golf course. All this was preceded by pizza at the Narrows. “Will I see you next year?” I asked the owner. “Not if we sell the place,” she replied with a sigh. They’ve been trying to sell it for years. No takers.

Monday, September 6, 1999

Finished Doug Gwyn’s Seekers Found, 532 pages, all requiring heavy editing. But it’s an amazing education in Quakerism. Then I immediately began to revise my etymology paragraphs, guided by the Princeton professor who vetted them. Later: flushed and changed the coolant in the John Deere, my baby!

Wednesday, September 8, 1999

Finished rewriting all twelve etymological sections of our textbook, incorporating suggestions made by a Princeton classicist, and adding new material here and there. . . . Also finished putting the tractor to sleep for the winter.

Friday, September 17, 1999

Apprehensive regarding 6:00 a.m. flight owing to Hurricane Floyd (we had an amazing fifteen inches of rain yesterday and last night), but the weather improved and the flight took off 45 minutes late. Sunny skies in Philadelphia. I went to 1530 Locust Street and visited with Monica, who is huge and waiting. . . . Beautiful apartment, tastefully decorated with Indonesian artifacts. So different from Daphne, whose apartment was cluttered with packing cases for months and whose pictures didn’t get hung until I did it. Then we walked to Alec’s school, ten minutes away. A fine facility, with auditorium, gym, pool, wrestling room, weight room, art room, music room, etc. Alec already knows many names; he introduced us to everyone he encountered. He’s feeling much more positive now. Out to a Korean self-service restaurant with an amazing collection of dishes, oriental and occidental. Upstairs in the dining room, encountered Shirley Dodson, about to do a fund-raising presentation at Friends House, which is across the street. Afterwards, Monica and I walked to Arch and Broad to see the Maxfield Parrish exhibit at the Philadelphia Academy. He was a superbly gifted artist, full of whimsy, especially when he illustrated books of nursery rhymes. Of course many paintings evoke New Hampshire owing to his residence in Plainfield-Cornish. Monica was eager to see everything. We walked back to 1530 and I continued to Pendle Hill. . . . Search Committee. We now have nine applications, including Mary Ellen Chijioki’s. Board. Ice cream. Then practice with Dan, who obviously prepared the Satie, so it was fun. I played terribly. Must study my part much more.

Saturday, September 18, 1999

All-day board retreat at Providence Meeting, founded in 1684. Clarence Pickett is buried in the graveyard. We unexpectedly concentrated on my concern: to expand and deepen the curricular offerings and to employ outside teachers. I drafted a minute at the end that we hope will be approved in October. . . . Long talk with Larry Ingle about Doug’s book. He agrees with me. So I met with Doug and Caroline over supper and urged him to eliminate the final two chapters, on Abraham and Hellenism, or perhaps to relegate them to appendices. . . . To Dan’s again for longer practice, followed by some of our old repertoire: Debussy’s “En Bateau” and Schumann’s “Träuer,” which we did well, the Dello Joio, which we did very badly, then Bach preludes and fugues for fun. How lovely!

Sunday, September 19, 1999

To Swarthmore Meeting. Lawn mower howling outside for most of it. Afterwards, nice to see Lee Bennett after so many years, and Mary Ellen Chijioki, and especially Asia Bennett, whom I asked to contribute to the Seeger festschrift. Then to Philadelphia to lunch with Alec, Monica, and Dan in Penang, a Malasian restaurant. Very noisy and ethnic, filled with Asians. How nice to have Alec and Monica now in Philadelphia!

Saturday, September 25, 1999

Kesaya and David gave a surprise 80th birthday party for Mayme at the Shaker Inn, with dinner for 70. After supper, as we did as at Lafayette’s 80th, people getting up to recite poems, sing songs, or just tell anecdotes. Here is my contribution:

A SONNET FOR MAYME NODA ON HER EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY

Eighty years are long but not too long if

filled with care, love and some variation—

city, farm, domestic peace, and a tiff

with nuclear power and wartime preparation.

Nor too long if sweetened by the piping

of recorder consorts after pruning

humongous hours with minimum whining,

or by friends regaled with sushi in the evening.

Mayme’s eighty had all of these and more,

plus detention camp and decades galore

with industrious, compliant Lafayette.

But taught by Quakerism to abhor

vi-o-lence, bellicosity to deplore,

she never was a militant suffragette.

I’ve been reading books by Hartshorne, Cobb, Griffin, etc., thinking perhaps to write something on Quakerism and process theology for the Seeger festschrift.

Sunday, September 26, 1999

To Strafford to hear Admiral Gene Carroll—finally—speak on American militarism. A superb lecture. The basic point was that no imperial power in the history of civilization was ever able to maintain itself by virtue of military power, and we will fail also because alas our main strategy to maintain our hegemony is a military one. Very discouraging in the details, too. But he remains optimistic; that is his virtue. We spoke about Dennis, still unpublished. His father has advised him, as I have, to condense and tighten, but he does not listen. Sloan Coffin was there; he recently had a stroke and now walks and talks with some difficulty, alas. And Ned Coffin, his brother, was there, too; he’d been in one of my ILEAD classes. Went out with Chrysanthi and Chris Dye, whom I’m hoping to interest in serving as a Kendal trustee. . . . Still no call from Monica. The baby is now one day overdue.

Monday, September 27, 1999

Alec telephoned this morning. Their son, Theodore, was born last night about 2:00 a.m. 8 pounds 15 oz. Huge. Monica is exhausted but well.

Wednesday, October 6, 1999

To Philadelphia and Princeton

Visited Alec, Monica, Chrysanthi, and Theodore (!), now ten days old. He’s cute, with an interesting mouth. Alec looks very happy and comfortable as a father.

Friday, October 8, 1999

Princeton

Dimitri and I worked long hours yesterday and today and we have finished only lesson 1. We thought we’d do the whole book. But instead of just responding to Kate Cohen’s copyediting, we’re rewriting large sections—again! (And sometimes with cause.) Now Dimitri wants to delay publication for an entire year. But the drawings he got from Greece are superb, much better than the first two submissions that I got here, except for the price: she wants over $3000! Saw Bob Fagles on the street. He’s thinking of retiring next year, at age 68. I encouraged him.

Tuesday, October 12, 1999

Long meeting at UPNE. They refuse to accept all the changes we made in lessons 1 & 2. They also remind us that all illustrations are to be in black and white. Phyllis will write a strong letter to Dimitri. I telephoned Mike. He’ll talk to Dimitri, if Dimitri wishes, telling him that enough is enough. Will he comply, or withdraw, or sabotage? Thankfully, had a nice long supper with Robert Binswanger, a chance to unload emotionally.

Wednesday, October 13, 1999

Lunch with Steve Scher; another chance to unload. And supper with Dick, followed by Mozart, Beethoven, Joplin, C.P.E. Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi. Nice! Also had a good long talk with Frank Currier about money—how to minimize taxes. Lots of good ideas. Then visited John Boswell, who is packing all his files in boxes and is about to retire.

Thursday, October 14, 1999

Spoke with Jack Hunter, trying to interest him to serve on the Kendal board. Then met with the Webster Performance Committee and Sally, planning concerts for this season. Actually, all slots are already filled, and the fund has grown to $58,000.

Friday, October 15, 1999

Pendle Hill

Piano last night with Dan. The Satie is going a bit better, but I still haven’t mastered my part. Dan took the plunge and invested in the house at Lumberton Leas. We both wonder how our piano relationship can continue after he leaves Pendle Hill. . . . Books Committee, Publications Committee, nice talk with Yuki, who still has the most exquisite face I’ve ever seen. Then to Philadelphia. Supper with Monica and Theo, who is already bigger than last week. Alec still at school. Kids were there for a slumber party. He got back at 8:15 p.m. He already has a small string program going, about twelve players, but he can rehearse them for only ten minutes, twice a week. Yet they already sound quite good, he says. He has a low opinion of the productivity of his dean, the woman with the ring in her nose, although they get along, more or less. So, it’s a mixed picture, but basically positive. Tomorrow he goes to a reunion of his Haverford buddies, who feast on crabs once a year.

October 21, 1999

To NYC

Flew to LaGuardia. Met a Quaker acquaintance accidentally at LaGuardia food court, the ex-president of the Haverford Corporation, Collett, very friendly, on his way to Ohio to help direct FAHE. Then to the Yale Club. Bought another pair of expensive shoes, $285, perhaps my last, plus three shirts and two ties at Daffy’s. Then: limousine to 2 World Trade Center. Nice to be recognized by various lawyers at Thatcher Proffit Wood. I spoke this time on “The Dead”—a good lecture, I think. Questions followed, not many but enough. More nice talk in the reception and then a very fine dinner in a hugely expensive Italian restaurant in the East 20s ($32.00 for an entrée). With Jeff Murphy and two others from the firm, one a young lawyer and the other a painter who works there as a secretary to make ends meet. Lots of good talk about literature, art, and religion. How pleasant to be back in this sort of discourse and fellowship again; I now realize how little of it I have enjoyed since retirement. Yet I said No to an invitation to do another Alumni College trip in Greece in May. Maybe that was a mistake. But I didn’t want to lose, in effect, a whole month.

October 22, 1999

NYC–Lebanon

Breakfast at the Yale Club with Graham Tebbe and Greg. Very cordial and pleasant. Greg made me understand better that a move to the suburbs might be right for them, especially if his commute is no more than an hour each way. We talked also about money and the inadvisability of giving grandchildren too much too soon. In any case, if they have a trust fund they shouldn’t be told about it.

November 3, 1999

To NYC by train. AFS cocktail party. Long talk with David Buck, who says he feels that he and Alec will be working together one day.

November 4, 1999

Yale Club

American Farm School board this morning. Education Committee very disappointing: long speech by the Greek trustee, no real engagement with the issues. I then rushed to Princeton for the MGSA 30th anniversary symposium. I spoke in the session on the bibliography edited by Stratos Constantinidis, finally come to fruition after thirteen years. I gave the early history: how the Greek Embassy conceived of the project because the Turks had produced a bibliography; how I traveled to Washington to collect the first payment and to discuss details with the Library of Congress. Earlier: nice long lunch with Tom Doulis, followed by a nice long supper after the session. His translation of Θάνος Βλέκας is being published by Northwestern University Press, miraculously. We had a cordial reunion; it’s been a long friendship. . . . Then rushed back to NYC.

November 5, 1999

NYC

AFS full board all morning. I tried to get them to pass a resolution that they’d cease relying on EU funds for the operating budget after 2006. They refused, but most of the sentiment went in this direction. . . . After lunch, went to part 2 of “The American Experience” at the Whitney. Awful. Nothing to lift the spirit. Such a disappointment after the very stimulating part 1. Then walked all the way to Woolman Rink in Central Park, where Christina was getting an ice-skating lesson. Mostly tumbling at this stage. When she and Daphne joined Chrysanthi and me, Christina ran to me and gave a big hug. Consequences of the farm. Then Daphne couldn’t find a cab to take herself, Christina, and Andrew home, a typical NYC saga. But this weekend is the marathon and New York is full up. So we all got on the crosstown bus. . . . Chrysanthi and I got dressed in tuxedo and long dress and then went to the Colony Club for the AFS banquet honoring the Drapers and the Bucks. Tad and Bruce were there, also Brenda and Everett Marder. Also Mac Godley, whose wife Betty had described his multiple infirmities to us at Wednesday’s cocktail party. George and Charlotte were presented with portraits. David tore up his prepared remarks and spoke extemporaneously, and well. I sat next to Annie Levis at dinner. She’s a lively conversationalist.

Saturday, November 6, 1999

Princeton

To Princeton by bus. I had hoped to find three Greek passages in the library for Anastasia. Found Dragoumis’s Σαμοθράκη easily enough, but the others were in Νεοελληνικά Γράμματα and Καινούρια Εποχή, both shelved as “rare books” and unavailable on Saturdays. . . . Lunch at the renovated Palmer House, more beautiful than ever, to discuss the MGSA endowment. Our committee consists of past presidents. Herzfeld was missing (he’s in Europe), but the others were there, except of course for John Petropulos, who died: Nikiforos Diamandouros, Mike Keeley, Lily Macrakis, John Chioles, Van Coufoudakis. Also John Iatrides, ex officio. We set guidlines for use of the endowment, which has grown to around $300,000 from the original $30,000 that I deposited with Corey Smith 25 years ago. They worry about the Executive Committee’s friction between young and old. They hinted that it would be good if I could serve again as president if Van is not reelected. I hope he is. . . . I then chaired a session with Karen Van Dyck and Helen Kolias speaking on diaspora issues. I ended it by remarking that the Rassias Commission had been critized for using the word “diaspora,” since many (or most?) Greek-Americans do not consider themselves a diaspora. . . . Then another banquet. 200 people. I was up front, brtween Ernie Friedl and Electra Petropulos, John’s widow. His daughter was there, too; she knew Alec at Haverford (she was at Bryn Mawr). Nikiforos eulogized John very well indeed. Then each of us, past presidents and past editors of the journal, was honored. Very pleasant, to be sure!

Sunday, November 7, 1999

Taxi to Trenton AMTRAK station. It took us 13 hours to get home because the Vermonter’s engine caught fire near Baltimore. We took another train to New York. I asked permission to wait in the first class lounge and this was granted. So we read the New York Times in comfortable surroundings. Home finally at 9:30 p.m.

Monday, November 8, 1999

Learned today that Mac Godley, whom we had greeted as he circulated in his tuxedo at the Colony Club before the dinner, died yesterday at home. He was reading the paper, got up, and died. And Petropulos died at his desk while grading student essays.

Monday, November 8, 1999

Dick for supper and music. We did a sonata written by John Koch, very fine. Then Mozart.

Tuesday, November 9, 1999

To Kendal to hear Lisa Mayer and a violinist and cellist do Beethoven’s 3rd trio and the Mendelssohn trio. Excruciating. The music was dead. I kept squirming but couldn’t leave. Afterwards, saw Wendy, Bev Web’s daughter, in the hall. She’s here because Franny is probably dying. Wendy says she was with Bev when he died and was playing Mozart for him. So he died listening to Mozart.

Wednesday, November 10, 1999

Meeting for Grieving for Dick Brokaw, who was killed with his new wife in the Egyptian airlines crash last week. Very deep and gathered. I ministered, saying that we are probably designed by nature not to live much more than 50 years and that everything beyond should be considered a gift. Also that what matters is the quality of one’s life, not the quantity. And that “immortality” is probably best provided by the fact that one is remembered, as the ancient Greeks well knew.

Thursday, November 11, 1999

Lively supper with Robert Binswanger. Alas, Penny has breast cancer and will have a mastectomy next Wednesday. He is taking a leave of absence for a month.

Friday, November 12, 1999

Lunch with Tom Corindia at the hospital to discuss the auditor’s report on Meeting finances. The auditor wants us to depreciate the building and furnishings. Tom disagrees. Then to Felitsa’s and Otmar’s for supper. Again very lively with lots of laughter.

Saturday, November 13, 1999

Philadelphia

Up at 5:00 a.m. to catch the 6:00 a.m. flight to Philadelphia. Walked Alec, Monica, and Theo to the hotel in Rittenhouse Square where Alec had a strategic planning conference all day; we met teachers, principals, and a student from the school, all very attentive to Theo. Then breakfast with Monica. Ordered scrapple so that she could experience it. She’s very active; goes to a breast feeding support group at the hospital, for instance. Goes most days to Friends Select to have lunch with Alec. Family are fine in Indonesia, thankfully. . . . To Pendle Hill. Search Committee 1:30 to 5:00. We reduced the 30 candidates to 8. Len Cadwallader received 9 out of 10 votes, the highest of the lot. Good, so far. But Gay Berger says we should choose a woman. Lots of other strong candidates, for example Mary Ellen Chijioki. . . . I drove back to Philadelphia. Supper with Alec & Co. and Dan Seeger. Monica made a lovely Indonesian dish complete with hot sauce—really hot. Dan took photos. Everyone very jolly. Alec seems quite fulfilled now by his job. He is even beginning to appreciate the dean, the one with the ring through her nose, who conducted a dance for the students last night very well. Then we all went to 18th Street for coffee and ice cream. . . . To Wallingford. Dan and I went through our repertoire: Satie and Bizet’s “Le Bal.” I still have trouble with the Satie. Must really learn it by heart, I fear, and that is something I don’t seem able to do.

Sunday, November 14, 1999

Quechee

To Quechee to see Brenda and Everett Marder and to give Brenda the photos of the Quaker girls’ school. Lots of good talk about the School, and also about Everett’s future. He confesses that he is fully tied to his job; that’s his whole life (except for children). If he retires, there’s a void. Worrisome. He is thinking of becoming an arbitrator in labor disputes or finding something in Greece. Brenda’s book will try to place the Farm School in the broader political context, which may make it very controversial. Already, where she wrote “bandit war” her Greek translator used εμφύλιο instead of συμμοριτοπόλεμο.

Sunday, November 21, 1999

Cambridge

To Cambridge. Lunch with Andrea Useem, back from Africa and now doing a Master’s degree at Harvard Divinity School. Interestingly, she realized that it was “too easy” to remain an ex-pat (she’d been four years in Africa) and that she’d better come home to see what might be the right step for the future. She’s charming, and very gifted as a writer. . . . Then to Widener (my key still works) to look up some Greek texts for Aspasia. Found the one in Καινούρια Εποχή about Rosa Luxemburg, but Widener didn’t have the one by Λαμπίδη in Νεοελληνικά Γράμματα. . . . Then to Dorchester to meet Darren and Betsy Middleton and Lewis Owens, all here for the American Academy of Religion meetings. Lovely reunion. Darren is pleased with his job in Fort Worth. Betsy finished her Master’s in Divinity at Princeton and hopes to find a Ph.D. program in Texas. Lewis is confident that he’ll submit his dissertation on schedule in January. It should reach me in February. And the viva is on March 24. I brought him Kazantzakis’s handwritten reading notes on Frobenius. In the car, we listened to School for Scandal and laughed heartily.

November 23, 1999

To Washington

Up at 4:45 a.m. Drove to Springfield, AMTRAK to Washington, reading Pendle Hill pamphlet submissions. Metro to Avis. Avis to Bamboo Buffet to meet Leander, Deanna, Sophia, and Nicholas by pre-arrangement. Huge Chinese dinner, very pleasant. Then to Courtyard Marriott hotel. Leander accepted Kinhaven’s proposal to run a second workshop, this time for duos (piano-violin, piano-cello) with 16 students, beginning in 2001. Good. Deanna’s back at work. Everyone is mad at Slatkin, who fired a half dozen of the older players. The orchestra will tour Vermont in April. I suggested that Leander and Deanna play at Kendal then. But Deanna says that she hasn’t practiced for a year, cannot play solo now. So she goes every day to Kennedy Center and of course plays the notes.

November 24, 1999

Washington

To Davis House, R Street and 18th, near Dupont Circle, to interview Frank Massey, executive secretary of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, with Pat Hunt and Andrea Wasi. He was OK, could do the job certainly, but all three of us felt somehow unexcited. Afterwards, long cordial lunch with Pat, talking about AFSC, where she worked for so many years. She confirmed its problem. It became a victim of its own affirmative action. . . . Then to the Phillips Gallery, which had a big show detailing the collecting efforts of Phillips himself, and of course showing his treasures. My favorite was John Sloan’s “Six O’Clock, Winter,” showing the Third Avenue El. (He died in Hanover in 1951.) But equally memorable among the Americans are Edward Hopper’s “Sunday,” showing a lonely man on a stoop, and Stuart Davis’s “Corner Café.” Of course, there are also the spectacular “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (Renoir) and the two “Repentant St. Peter” (Goya, El Greco, so very different). In addition I loved Rouault’s “Circus Trio” and Picasso’s “Woman in Green Hat.” All in all, a treat. . . . Then Metro to Rockville and via my Avis car to Leander’s. Alec, Monica, and Theo had just arrived. Alec expatiated on defects of the Friends Select board: two factions with opposite educational philosophies, so endless wrangling and inability to reach decisions. Board and school controlled by two Meetings instead of being independent. That’s already 75% of the trouble. I reminded Alec of Lloyd Lewis’s advice to me when we were conceptualizing Kendal at Hanover: “Don’t affiliate with a Meeting!” But Alec sees the adventure of being in a situation where so much needs to be fixed but where the school, despite its annual deficits, and despite teachers who are 100% individualists without a sense of corporate purpose, is nevertheless getting better rather than worse.

November 25, 1999, Thanksgiving

North Potomac, Maryland

Everyone came to the hotel for breakfast. The two infants at the head and foot of a long table, the six adults and Sophia around it. Returned to 9 Lopa Court. Leander gave me a long, good lesson on the Satie, also on the Bizet, showing how to practice the octave jumps in the latter. Returned to the hotel to vet Aspasia’s Greek of my chapter 8—very slow work. Then Daphne, Greg, Christina, and Andrew arrived. All to 9 Lopa Court for Thanksgiving dinner. We even gathered round the table with clasped hands and gave thanks for health and food. The girls were excited to see each other. The three infant boys competed for our attention. Lots of photos. Then back to the hotel for babies and mothers, and we four men went to a James Bond movie, all chases and murders and sex and torture and espionage, but beautifully acted. Even Judi Dench was in it. Such skill and expense for such drivel and rot.

Saturday, November 27, 1999

Gay Berger arrived and the two of us interviewed Len Cadwallader for the Pendle Hill directorship. I see him as the perfect candidate. His referees—Margery Walker, John Hennessey (who helped me understand more what went wrong at Kendal) and Nash Barsom—are all extremely positive. Let’s hope.

Sunday, November 28, 1999

Marders and Lincolns for supper. Very jolly. John brought me a large-print, beautifully framed drawing of Icarus about to fly, thinking it was Daedalus—all this as thanks for my Ulysses course in ILEAD, which he took.

Monday, November 29, 1999

Don Blackmer for supper. We talked about Richard Warren Hatch, whom Don had gotten to know at M.I.T. I found four or five Hatch letters, plus a long one from me to him, bringing back that important time in my life—1960 ff. Don will come to Kendal, but without his wife. He gave me an excellent article on woodlot management.

Tuesday, November 30, 1999

To Northampton to interview David Foster for the Pendle Hill job, with Anne Moore. I was not impressed. Walked around Deerfield on the way back. Nice to see it with all the students there.

Wednesday, December 1, 1999

Nicole Laundy at Kiewit has helped me by developing a program to alphabetize Greek words. I spent two hours with her worrying about its operation and some bugs, but now it seems to work. Faculty lunch; sat next to Dirk Van der Walle, who leaves for Indonesia tomorrow. Also saw Syd Lea after decades. Dick for supper. We played another John Koch sonata, very mediocre. Then, with Allan: Haydn, Bridges, and Martinu, surprisingly well.

Thursday, December 2, 1999

To Pendle Hill

Up at 4:45 a.m. Interviewed Mary Ellen Chijioki at Pat Hunt’s house. She’s a person of depth and knowledge. Alec called. He’s very sick. Sore throat, etc., so he won’t come for supper with James McBride tonight. Just as well, because James didn’t show up for supper either. So Dan, Andrea, Orion and I ate our special meal in the Reading Room and tried to figure what we’d do if he never appeared. 7:00 p.m., no James. But at 7:15, with me standing at the PH entrance, he drove in. He’d been caught in traffic. We stuffed him with brownies instead of supper. He signed dozens of books. Finally we started. I introduced him. He read from Color of Water, spoke about his mother, and the strange life his family led, evoking peals of laughter from the large audience: a sort of Shakespearian laughter, an escape valve for pathos. Then he switched (as we had arranged) to why African-Americans don’t seem interested in Quakerism. And he was blunt. Why should we come to you? Are you so great? Have you ever come to us? He also spoke about the pain of being black. Most of his boyhood friends are either dead or in jail. And he voiced some very lovely compliments about Leander and our whole family. All in all, it was a resounding success. He was totally genuine. Critical, but not angry or paranoiac.

Friday, December 3, 1999

Pendle Hill

Breakfast with Vince Buscemi, who has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, Gleason score 6, just like mine. He wanted to discuss the radical prostatectomy—its aftereffects. . . . Worship. Then to Pat Hunt’s again, with Judy Harvey and Gay Berger, to interview Daniel Smith-Christopher, a professor of Old Testament at Loyola Marymount. Very ebullient, indeed so much so as to be a bit frightening. He turned Gay off totally and she sort of vetoed him for further consideration. . . . Publications Committee. We didn’t accept Kenneth Boulding’s reprint; suggested that it be photocopied from the original edition. . . . Then Search Committee. We reduced the 8 finalists to 4, just the ones I wanted, including Len Cadwallader and Mary Ellen Chijioki. . . . Executive Board after supper. Long discussion about the minute I wrote at the retreat. It was misunderstood or not understood. We should have written a narrative and have briefed Margaret. Ice cream at Dan’s. Then practice. I still can’t get all the notes securely in the Satie, even when we go slowly. Discouraging.

Saturday, December 4, 1999

Pendle Hill

Long discussion in Executive Board about whether students should have a computer furnished for e-mail. We finally said Yes. . . . At the board lunch I suggested laying down the Resident Program for two years, using as a pretext Liz’s resignation (if it comes, for she’ll probably want to join her Lesbian partner Orion, who is going off to Toronto to head the Canadian Service Committee). Of course this was too radical for everyone. But the board does wish to bring teachers in from universities, to strengthen the intellectual content. . . . Then the wedding of Doug Gwyn and Caroline Jones. I spoke about the union of poetry and prose, and the hope that this complementarity could keep all idioms accurate. (Subtext: Hornby dictionary.) Lovely to see them united after much hesitation. Doug is short-listed for Ben Pink Dandelion’s job at Woodbrooke. . . . At Meeting this morning I ministered on the amazing sunrise seen from my flight yesterday. And God said, “Let there be light,” and it was good. Good? No, not just good. A daily miracle that we don’t deserve! Then Paul Mangelsdorf ministered on the sun’s centrality to all life owing to photosynthesis. . . . Met Farah Mendelsohn again. Long talk with Larry Ingle. . . . To Dan’s for more practice. Then a nice supper together. Then playing over our old repertoire, which is now rather extensive: Barber, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Della Joio, Persichetti, Debussy, Starer. Some were discouraging, but some went rather well.

Sunday, December 5, 1999

Pendle Hill–Princeton

Breakfast with George Lacey and Peter Jarman, very stimulating. Long meeting with Margaret Fraser in an attempt to clarify our mysterious minute on bringing courses on politics, economics, etc. into the term-length course curriculum. . . . Then to Locust Street. Alec feeling much better. I used his printer to produce a copy of the Cadwallader interview and reference reports that I’d typed from my handwritten texts. Theo is bigger now. Monica is looking very radiant. We bought sandwiches at a French bakery and ate our lunch in Rittenhosue Square, watching the world go by (including the art teacher at Friends Select). Alec is inviting a new teacher to replace one who resigned and broke his contract. . . . Drove to Princeton. No key at Nassau Inn, but then Claire rushed in, very flustered because her father is undergoing surgery tomorrow and she has to have root canal work done. But at last I was able to get into my apartment. Watched Greek television (!) after supper.

Wednesday, December 8, 1999

Princeton

Lunch with Anthony Hirst, an interesting man who was years in the building trades in London before deciding to return to university (King’s London) to do an MA in Byzantine Greek and then a Ph.D. in Modern Greek. He is interested in the appropriation of religious language by poets not necessarily people of faith. Very pleasant and stimulating. . . . Dimitri and I worked well over the three-day period, but we’re still no further than the end of lesson 3. Mache has devised new exercises but is careless re: introduction of new words, which is a pain for me. Oh, when will we finish this damned book?!

Friday, December 10, 1999

To Philadelphia

At the airport for a 6:50 a.m. flight. The pilot came out and told the ticket agent that tomorrow’s 6:00 a.m. flight would be delayed 2½ hours. I panicked because Len and Mary Ann Cadwallader were booked on that flight and the delay could make him miss his interview. The pilot said he’d delay the flight 10 minutes if they would get to the airport. I telephoned. Nobody home. So, helped by the ticket agent, I detailed alternative flights from Manchester, hoping for the best, whereupon in they walked! They had independently changed their flight, so we all flew down together.

Saturday, December 11, 1999

Pendle Hill

Mary Ann charmed everyone, and I think that Len did too, especially in the afternoon session with the staff, when he seemed more relaxed. The committee clearly sees him still as a viable candidate. . . . Rushed to the Armenian sweet shop to get desserts for tonight. They were closed, but still there. They opened for me, annoyed, and said “Quick!” So I got 6 kataifis, that’s all. Heard part of the mad scene and the last scene from Lucia on my way back sung by magnificent Met Opera voices. . . . Dan cooked a splendid stew, served at Roadside with lots of wine, for Alec, Monica, Theo, Claudia, Gay, and me. A lovely dinner and fellowship. Then we played Satie (getting better), Bizet (still very rough) and the Schubert Fantasie (ugh!).

Sunday, December 12, 1999

Pendle Hill

Second interview with Mary Ellen Chijioki. Her husband, Mark, was also present. He’s a Nigerian intellectual, very charming. She was articulate and full of ideas, but the committee found her a bit overbearing. Good! That means Len is now competing in a field of three rather than four. Fingers crossed. . . . Supper at a Chinese restaurant on Broad Street with Alec, Monica, and Theo, who was restless and unhappy. Met Len and Mary Ann at the airport. Len was very happy with his time with Margaret and Denny; they were together until 5:45 instead of the scheduled 4:15. Good! Good! I talked earlier with Barb Parsons about Len from the point of view of the Corporation. She said they all lamented because “Another Quaker bit the dust!” . . . Our flight was canceled because of “maintenance.” We were placed on a later flight. This was cancelled too, for the same reason. So I’m now in the Sheraton Hotel near the airport to spend the night at US Airways’s expense. Luckily I have no appointments tomorrow. Len does, but there’s no solution except patience.

Friday, December 17, 1999

Yesterday I misplaced chapter 8 of the Greek translation of Politics of the Spirit. I was frantic, since its loss meant a month’s work gone for nothing. But today, looking for George Draper’s address in the AFS file, I found chapter 8 there (!). Hallelujah!

December 20, 1999

Hanover

Daphne, Christina, and Andrew are here. Andrew is trying so hard to walk but cannot quite make it . . . yet. I played Jingle Bells for Christina (joined by Chrysanthi and Daphne) to dance to. “Faster! Faster!” she demanded, and became a whirling Dervish. Then “Slower! Slower!” I did it lugubriously, in minor key. . . . Went to Kendal to hear Michael Webster’s and Leone Buyse’s concert. They plan to continue every Christmas despite his parents’ deaths. Wonderfully clear clarinet and flute tone, and she also used the alto flute, which is throaty and mysterious.

December 29, 1999

Tebbes left this morning after a very nice stay. Highlight was Andrew’s discovery that he can walk. In the last four or five days he has advanced from a very hesitant step or two followed by collapse, to 15–20 steps this morning, including a turn or two, with his arms raised high to aid balance, and a look of triumph in his eyes. How jealous the chimpanzees must have been when they saw early homo sapiens rise up in this way to two-legged locomotion. A miracle! . . . Leander’s family and Alec’s left yesterday. We had a fine week with everyone here—no accidents and no crises. Our dinner at Kendal with Yiayia went splendidly, with all babies on best behavior. And Theo in Meeting on Sunday slept peacefully from start to finish and was then introduced with eyes open.

December 30, 1999

John Heaney sent me an e-mail. PSA zero. Happy New Year! Yes, that’s the very best New Year’s gift.

December 31, 1999

I’m working on Dan’s festschrift. Vetted Chuck Fager’s article on NEYM as the originator of liberalism. Now I’m going over the Supreme Court’s Seeger decision, which Chuck got off the web and I got from Baker Library. . . . And I finally finished chapter 8 of Aspasia’s translation of Politics of the Spirit and sent it off to her. Still have chapters 2, 5, and 6, plus notes. Slow work, but it’s nice to read my book again. I’m amazed that I even could have written it.

2000

Hanover

January 1–June 13

Jan. 1–2, Cambridge

Jan. 7–8, Pendle Hill

Jan. 19–22, Princeton, Pendle Hill

Feb. 4–6, NYC for MGSA

Feb. 7–9 Princeton

Feb. 10–12, NYC for Thatcher lecture

Feb. 19–21, Cambridge, Holiday Inn Express, 617-577-7600

Feb. 24–March 5, NYC, Princeton, Philadelphia

March 20–29, London, the Penn Club

March 24, Cambridge (England), Fellows Guest Suite, Queens College

April 4–7, Princeton

April 13–16, Pendle Hill

April 17, Terpni

April 26, Cambridge, Howard Johnson Hotel

April 27–30, London, Penn Club

May 2, Amherst

May 8–10, Princeton

May 12, Terpni

May 14–21, Cambridge, Pendle Hill, Medford Leas, Princeton, Washington, Cosmos Club

May 26–28, Terpni

June 9–13, Kinhaven

Terpni

June 14–September 9

July 6–8, New York City–Amagansett, Long Island

July 15–16, Hanover

July 22–25, Hanover

Hanover

September 9–October 5

Sept. 10–19, Cape May, Lumberton, Princeton, Philadelphia, Pendle Hill, N. Potomac, Washington

Sept. 29–Oct. 1, New York, Princeton

Greece

October 6–November 6

Oct. 6, Zurich–Athens–Thessaloniki

Oct. 9–Oct. 8, Athens, Hotel Phoenix

Oct. 9–13, American Farm School

Oct. 14–15, Athens, Hotel Andromache, 22 Timoleontos Vassou

Oct. 16–Nov. 5, 29 Megalou Alexandrou, Thessaloniki

Nov. 5, Athens, Hotel Phoenix

Nov. 6, Athens–Zurich–Boston–Hanover

Hanover

November 7–December 31

Nov. 12–15, Princeton, Philadelphia

Nov. 21–29, Sydney, Australia, Country Comfort, Sydney Central, George St. at Quay

Dec. 1–2, Pendle Hill, Lumberton, Pendle Hill

Dec. 6–8, Princeton

Dec. 23–28, Boston, NYC, Princeton

January 1, 2000

To Cambridge to A.R.T. The Idiots Karamazov, a very irreverent post-modern takeoff on Dostoevsky and Constance Garnett. Energetic and amusing in places but mediocre. It needed to be written by Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard, and wasn’t.

January 2, 2000

A.R.T. again. Chekhov’s Ivanov. Magnificent. So well acted, and specially directed by a Russian using the Stanislavsky method. The magic is that a play about boredom doesn’t end up boring the audience. On the contrary. It’s a brilliant depiction of clinical depression.

January 3, 2000

Finished reading the Seeger case. Fascinating. I thought back to the Harvard course I took on constitutional law. This decision was more philosophy than law.

January 7, 2000

To Philadelphia

Plane delayed two hours because of ice on roads preventing pilots from arriving on time. But I got to Dan’s by 10:00 p.m. and we played Satie and Bizet until 11:15.

January 8, 2000

Pendle Hill

Interviewed Steve Baumgartner, a former CEO of Donnelly Corporation with a $600,000 salary who has opted out of business at the age of 50+ and wants to contribute to Quakerism. Superbly articulate, experienced, cosmopolitan. I fear him as a real challenge to Len Cadwallader’s candidacy. . . . Long talk with Rebecca afterwards, preparing for Publications Committee’s presentation to the Executive Board on the 21st. Then to Dan. Great improvement on Satie especially and also Bizet. I’m finally learning my part, but more work is needed. I am an exceedingly slow learner on the piano, alas. Supper with Dan. Long good conversation about religion and science. I told him about process theology and insisted that the Truth served by religion includes what science tells us about the nature of the universe, even if it leads to the conclusion that the soul does not exist. Afterwards, we played Husa, with no pleasure at all, then turned to the great Mozart sonata and finally to the 40th Symphony.

January 9, 2000

Interviewed Norman James. I wasn’t very impressed, but Mary Wood will be his advocate. Lunch with Doug and Caroline. Doug, thankfully, has prepared an essay for the Seeger festschrift. He is off to Woodbrooke on Tuesday to compete for a teaching position there. Good luck to him! . . . Supper with Alec and family. Baby up every three hours last night. Monica is exhausted. And Alec had a difficult week at school: a teacher was upset because of his suggestions for curriculum reform: wept, left, slammed the door. (But he made up with her, somewhat, later.) A parent was equally upset over being told that her son is a problem child. Further outburst of weeping, another door slammed. So many of the children are from divorced homes or are being raised by single mothers. Alec says that there’s no unified vision in the school, no joy among the teachers. And the board is divided into two contending camps. Alas! Alack!

Tuesday, January 18, 2000

Princeton

Started lesson 4 with Dimitri, and finished it in one day. Silvio Levi’s comments are very helpful. Lunch with Dimitri and Mike Keeley. They want me to be president of MGSA and Dimitri plans to nominate me. Then they’re arrange for someone to nominate Dimitri as treasurer, Gonda Van Steen as secretary, and Jerry Augustinos as vice-president. Well, we’ll see. Supper with Dimitri, too. Now he wants me to teach a course for one semester next year, perhaps Religion and Literature, using some Greek materials and some non-Greek. The class could meet once a week for three hours, and I’d be housed in Palmer House and could commute. Will I have the strength to say “No”?

Wednesday, January 19, 2000

Princeton

Working on lesson 5. Lunch with Serena Joyce, who runs the Farm School office in New York. She came down to see the Nancy Crawshaw archive. She has a brother names James Joyce! She was eager to learn more about Greek political history (and Irish, too; she didn’t know who Parnell was). Fun.

Thursday, January 20, 2000

Princeton–Philadelphia

We didn’t finish lesson 6, mostly because of the extensive rewriting prompted by Silvio Levi. Snow all day, but travel to Philadelphia was almost normal. Played Satie, Bizet, and Husa with Dan. He places Len Cadwallader last on the list because of his emphasis on community. Dan fears he’ll undo Dan’s “progress” vis-à-vis false ideas of community.

Friday, January 21, 2000

Pendle Hill

Doug Gwyn was offered the job of Quaker Studies tutor at Woodbrooke and accepted. I’m delighted for him and Caroline. Book Committee: Liz Kamphausen negative about everything as usual, and without written comments or even notes. Very unprofessional. But the rest of us overbalanced her, and we accepted Ratliff’s collection on pastoral counseling. Margaret Hope Bacon asked me to have lunch with her to complain about Rebecca’s procrastination. Then, Search Committee, ably clerked by Anne Moore. Denny and Margaret’s choice (by written statement): Baumgartner and Cadwallader. Staff pretty much the same. After much discussion my recommendation that we eliminate Chijioki and James was accepted. Bill Newman spoke strongly in favor of Baumgartner. Gay Berger spoke against, but then switched. I of course spoke in favor of Cadwallader. Chris favored him, too, as did Fuson. But it became clearer and clearer that Steve Baumgartner was going to win. Friends favored excitement and risk and vision over “comfort” (Len). So, I lost, I suppose. But I realized from the start that Steve was the more adventurous choice. So be it. . . . This long day continued with the Search Committee dining together. Then, at the Executive Board, we of course reported the results (Dan was delighted) and then Rebecca and I had to present the annual review of Publications Committee activities. I pleaded for her to be given a part-time secretary. (The Japanese whose pamphlet on Okinawa we rejected is still bothering everyone and still wants to meet with me!) Spoke to Bob Gray afterwards about Medford Leas, which is looking for a new director. Perhaps Leonard can apply, if he hasn’t already. . . . Satie and Bizet again with Dan; getting better, and we’re using the metronome. Then Schumann for our “recreational” music. . . . Nice talk at supper yesterday with Cyril Harvey, about Olympia and Delphi.

Saturday, January 22, 2000

Philadelphia–Hanover

Long board lunch, with Dan haranguing us again about Denny’s and Margaret’s failure to be “team players.” Mickey Edgerton bravely accused him of distortion. Many changes in organization might be made, but now Steve Baumgartner must have a say.

Tuesday, January 25, 2000

Snyder telephoned. The $1000 had “made his day.”

Sunday, January 30, 2000

I telephoned Cadwallader last night because we received word that Baumgartner is now officially the new director. Also, I told him about the search for a new dean of the Tucker Foundation. I’ll try to get him to meet Robert Binswanger and Jan Tarjan. . . . Adult education with Jack Hunter after Meeting. On prayer. A difficult subject, especially if one doesn’t believe in a personal God. Jack will be going to FAHE in June. I wanted to go with Alec, but he can’t.

Wednesday, February 2, 2000

Long, good lunch with Jack Shepherd. I’m hoping that he’ll teach a course at Pendle Hill on development issues.

Thursday, February 3, 2000

To Dan Connolly yet again. We’ve finished phase 2, the trusts for children and grandchildren.

Friday, February 4, 2000

To NYC

To the Yale Club. Three-hour delay owing to weather. But in time to get to the ballet. And what a revelation the first ballet was, indeed one of the most memorable I’ve ever seen: “Goldberg Variations,” played of course on the piano, expertly. Choreography by Jerome Robbins. Brilliant interpretations of the musical mood, again and again. Exhausting. Lasted ninety minutes, but worth it. The other two, “Tarantella” and “Western Symphony,” both Balanchine, were routine by comparison: light, fun, pure froth after the “ordeal” of the Goldberg.

Saturday, February 5, 2000

My first meeting as a newly elected member, again, of the MGSA Executive Committee. I was elected president, for three years. Gondicas vice-president, Gonda Van Steen secretary, Jerry Augustinos treasurer. Tony Molho is on the board; very helpful. So is Zachariadis; a bit of a pain, I fear. We started planning the next symposium. The trick now is to convince someone to head the program committee.

Sunday, February 6, 2000

To 15th Street Meeting, 9:30 a.m. service, sparsely attended, but good. . . . Worked on chapter 2 of Politics of the Spirit, checking the translation from Anastasia. Then to Daphne’s. Christina active as usual, dressing us all up in costumes, including me. Then to Metropolitan Museum. I saw the Walker Evans photographs as best I could, owing to crowds. Poignant images of poor whites in Alabama, like Adirondackers. Also to Gulbenkian exhibit: his private collection from Lisbon; disappointing, but I liked Manet’s “Boy Blowing Bubbles.” . . . To Princeton by bus. Lovely room again in Palmer House.

Tuesday, February 8, 2000

Princeton

Lunch yesterday with Anthony Hirst, who is doing interesting work on the computer. Finished lesson 6 with Dimitri. Great problems again with corrupted computer files. Today at breakfast I met a British Ottomanist, Michael Hayward, here as a visiting professor. Lots of frothy talk about Bryer, Kings, Oxford, etc. . . . Dimitri now wants me to do a Freshman Seminar here next year. Why not on Joyce’s Ulysses? . . . Got draft MGSA minutes already from Gonda Van Steen. Am I crazy to take on this new responsibility? But I suppose it proves that I’m still “alive.”

Wednesday, February 9, 2000

Princeton

Finished most of lesson 7 with Dimitri, but also cleaned up a lot of Mache’s new drills. Not bad. Don Skemer showed me the Kazantzakis manuscript they’re thinking of buying. The owner wants $60,000; they’d like to offer $25,000 or $30,000. It’s remarkable. The entire Οδύσεια on onionskin paper in Kazantzakis’s hand, with extensive additions, deletions, changes—e.g., two drafts. What a demon Kazantzakis was! Simply to have written all this out (several times) is almost unthinkable. . . . My TLS review appeared, finally. . . . At 5:00 p.m., Dimitri and I changed rooms and discussed MGSA business for two hours: committee structure, etc. Lots to do when I get home.

Thursday, February 10, 2000

NYC

By bus to New York. Continued typing in new changes to the Greek text. Then to Bowling Green via subway to visit Goldman Sachs. But at lunch, at the Yale Club, I walked out forgetting my attaché case. Suddenly remembered as I was in Grand Central; ran back in a panic, and found it. Untouched. Scary. Hadn’t been in the financial district for years. The Customs House is splendid, as is Federal Hall with the statue of George Washington, not to mention the Stock Exchange. Paine Webber has its own huge building at 85 Broad Street. Greg showed me the trading floor—hundreds of young people in front of multiple computer screens, one of which is Greg’s. He has Christina, Andrew, and Daphne on the screen, too. Actually, he was most distressed today because of a personnel problem in London. A young “superstar” (age 28), moved there from the Tokyo office, wants to get rid of the old employee (age 33), who he says is “over the hill.” Greg must decide. But the “old” one, although perhaps no longer the best trader, has been a loyal and good member of the team. Greg cannot just discard him. So his problem is to convince the young one to be patient and also compassionate. There will be multiple telephone calls tonight, so he won’t join us for dinner after my lecture. But he did come to Thatcher Proffitt Wood with me, talking also about his increasing desire to leave Goldman Sachs entirely. But the huge bonus in GS stock he received last year is like a noose around his neck, since it doesn’t become vested at all until three years, and then only in part. The full sum is his to keep only after five years. Should he stay, and agonize? Or leave, and lose the money? In addition, he and Daphne are disgusted with the ridiculous competition for school places in the Upper East Side. For kindergarten, Christina will need to take an exam (!) and the parents will need to be interviewed. Imagine! And at a dinner for Christina’s pre-school class they were revolted by the kind of parents they met, all ostentatious and of course filthy rich. Greg says he might like to become an independent financial advisor. Also, to stay in the northeast; no desire whatever to return to California. All this affects, of course, whether they decide to abandon their apartment and move to the suburbs. . . . The lecture at Thatcher went well: on The Last Temptation. The “class” or audience was the largest so far, including many regulars. Good questions and spirit. There even was a former TPW employee who had been at my first lecture who came for this one although he now works for IBM in San Jose, California (obviously, he’s doing other things as well in NYC). Eight people for a lovely supper afterwards. And Jeff Murphy wants me to come again, perhaps to do Mrs Dalloway.

February 11, 2000

NYC

Nice long lunch at the Yale Club with Burt Pike. At first I didn’t recognize him, he looked so old. But, as soon as we started talking, of course the familiar Burt was revealed. He is about to retire, finally, discouraged by the cutbacks and underfunding of the City University; they’ll need to reduce everything by 40%. (I thought of David Lodge at Birmingham under Thatcher.) Like me, he has lots of money now, but unlike me he has no family. None. So he plans to make a substantial bequest to Haverford. How nice! It’s nice to have this one colleague still familiar, from Haverford. . . . Went afterwards to Patelson’s to buy more music for our flute–cello–piano trio. . . . Then to Daphne’s. Greg came, much relieved, since a series of telephone calls seems to have set right the wrongs of yesterday; the superstar will now be patient. . . . To Lincoln Center for the ballet again. And what a pleasure! “Ballo della Regina” (Verdi/Balanchine) wasn’t much, although danced by Damian Woetzel. But then came “The Cage” (Stravinsky/Robbins), with a marvelous set suggesting a spider’s web. Wendy Whelan danced “The novice” superbly, all sinewy and spasmodic. The “story” is the bug-like destruction of the male by the female; the corps seemed like a colony of ferocious ants on the rampage. All this to Stravinsky’s orgiastic music. Finally “La Valse” (Ravel/Balanchine), one of my favorites. The orchestration is superb. I hadn’t realized that Balanchine places one girl dressed in white amidst everyone dressed in black. She is eventually courted by “Death,” who gives her black to wear over the white and then kills her. Ravel said of his piece that it involved “Dancing on the edge of a volcano.” Precisely.

February 12, 2000

NYC–Hanover

Charlie Wood was having breakfast at the Yale Club, horribly obese, about to lead a Dartmouth alumni weekend on Shakespeare, with Peter Saccio. I did some more typing on Mache’s additions, and flew home.

February 13, 2000

Hanover

Judy and Cyril Harvey here, looking at Kendal. I gave them a Dartmouth tour, and then we all went to Sally Pinkas’s duet concert with her husband. Among other things they played the Barber Souvenirs, complete, of course, and up to tempo. But, frankly, I think that my own rendition of the “Pas de deux” with Alice was more musical.

February 14, 2000

Took Len Cadwallader to lunch with Bob Binswanger to learn more about Tucker and the deanship. But alas the result was that he was frightened away, especially by our sense that the dean should be a moral voice crying in Dartmouth’s wilderness. . . . Glad to hear, though, that Kesaya Noda got the job as the president’s letter-writer.

February 17, 2000

To Dan Connolly again. We’ve now finished phase 2, the children’s and grandchildren’s trusts. What remains is to decide what to do with CREF and eventually to fund these trusts.

Friday, February 18, 2000

To Cambridge, Holiday Inn Express

Snowstorm predicted tomorrow, so we left for Cambridge this morning, after I sent Susan Sutton, again, everything she needs to type Greek Didot. She procrastinated, I fear. Will the May journal appear on time? Doubtful. We’re domiciled in a hotel at the east end of Cambridge, the Quaker guestroom being unavailable. The hotel is filled with high school debaters from all over the country, contestants in a debate fair to begin tomorrow at Harvard. It’s delicious to hear them discussing their topics so knowledgeably. I’m using this time to go through Anastasia’s translation of my chapter 5, which, if I may say so, I find very interesting reading.

Saturday, February 19, 2000

Cambridge

Joe Orton’s “Loot” at the A.R.T., splendidly acted by Alvin Epstein, Jeremy Geidt, etc. And hardly as scandalous as the notices made it seem. Very Wildean actually: epigrammatic style, destructive criticism of dead mores. I’m thinking of Andreas Giannakos’s “autobiographical novel,” also so negative, but lacking Orton’s structure, humor, and brevity. . . . We also watched some of the debate contest, on the subject of whether juvenile offenders ought to be tried in adult courts just like adults. Good arguments on both sides, but not much elocution. The man who talked about Joe Orton before the performance, an actor, had of course much more training in speech and was a pleasure to hear. Poor Orton, murdered in his 30s by his lover. What a waste!

Sunday, February 20, 2000

Cambridge

Finished chapter 5. Started a long letter to Andreas, in Greek, about his writing, difficult to compose because I’m so unimpressed by his piece and don’t want to discourage him. Saw Charles L. Mee’s extraordinary play “Fall Circle” at the A.R.T., about East Germany just as the Berlin Wall came down, with reference to Berliner Ensemble, Heiner Müller, Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle,” etc. Marvelous theater: profound, tragic, comic, full of energy and eloquence.

Thursday, February 24, 2000

Yale Club

To the American Farm School’s cocktail party at Phil Foote’s, East 66th Street. President Clinton dining on East 65th Street, scores of police everywhere, traffic redirected, a canopy extending from the restaurant door out into the middle of the street. Reminded me of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the University of Bristol, when they built a separate toilet for her. Foote asked immediately about Alec, as did David Buck. Foote and Alec will try to meet in Baltimore next week. People very friendly, including Tommy Thomas, who took me aside to talk about continuing the two-year college rather than expanding to four years. . . . Walked back to the Yale Club along Park Avenue, being shunted first to one side then to the other because of the president’s itinerary.

Friday, February 25, 2000

Good meetings. I felt much more connected this time. I’ll be able to help (a) with Brenda’s book—in fact they sort of put me in charge to bring down the cost, coalesce the two volumes into a single binding, find copyeditors, (b) help with better teaching of Greek to Greek Summer students, (c) help with better teaching of English at AFS. . . . Grand Central a carnival. Wonderful four-part singing by a group of African-Americans. Oysters Rockefeller in the bowels. Then to Lincoln Center to the ballet. 2 out of 3. “Scènes de Ballet” (Stravinsky/Wheeldon): wonderful music and choreography. Ditto for “Opus 19, The Dreamer” (Prokofiev/Robbins), danced spectacularly by Damian Woetzel and Wendy Whelan. But “Liebeslieder Walzer” (Brahms/Balanchine) was tedious, strangely. In “Scènes de Ballet” there were about fifty children from the School of American Ballet performing beautifully up to their capacity.

Saturday, February 26, 2000

Full board of AFS, again very satisfying, probably because I’m feeling my way better in this crowd and seem to have something to offer. For example, in discussion about computerizing the new library, I told them about Stelios Orphanoudakis, who surely could be helpful as a consultant. . . . Supper with Daphne and Greg at Rado’s on East 84th near 2nd. Very relaxed. They went off to a movie and I returned to plough along in the Politics of the Spirit translation.

Sunday, February 27, 2000

NYC–Princeton

Breakfast with Daphne. Andrew smiling at the door. Christina playing games, hiding behind it. Eventually we had an extended game of catch. It’s amazing how Daphne copes all day long, but she seems to be surviving, even smiling. . . . Then to Morningside Meeting. I’d hoped to see Vince Buscemi there but he and Ernie didn’t come. But Jerry? was there, my acquaintance from Pendle Hill two years ago, the gay man who’d thrown over his job in computing and was pretty disoriented. How nice to find him now a pillar of the Meeting and a full-time student at Union Theological Seminary. He ministered on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, explaining the subtleties of the Hebrew text. After Meeting I once again told them all that I think I am a co-founder of the Meeting owing to the Fifth Day Meeting that Smith and I started at Columbia in 1956 and was then taken over by Victor Paschis and changed to a First Day Meeting. Friendly people, obviously very liberal. . . . Walked all the way from 116th down Broadway to 65th to the ballet again. In next to last row in the 4th tier, but could see fine, especially with opera glasses. And what a treat again! “I’m Old Fashioned” starts with a movie clip of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Then comes a series of variations on this by Jerome Robbins, until the final scene in which fifteen couples onstage duplicate exactly the Astaire steps, with Astaire and Hayworth again shown on the screen. It was spectacular. Then “Scènes de Ballet” again, with all the children, and Stravinsky’s haunting music. Finally, for the last number of the winter season, “Stars and Stripes” (of course) with Wendy Whelan and Damian Woetzel outdoing themselves, and the boys of the “Third Regiment” being especially scintillating. Pure joy! And a woman next to me was in ecstasy because she teaches ballet and one of her students, sixteen years old, was in “Scènes de Ballet.” Also during intermission one of the corps explained about the point shoes (which are used only once and then discarded) and answered questions—e.g., how do the men lift the women so effortlessly (it’s because (a) the women don’t weigh much more than 100 lbs., (b) the women spring upward just before the man lifts, so he isn’t lifting “dead weight”).

Tuesday, February 29, 2000

Princeton

My usual lunch with Dimitri going over MGSA business; then to visit Hank Dobin, the dean in charge of Frosh seminars. He thinks that Ulysses will be too challenging for the freshmen. A shame. I’d love to do it again. Can it be done incomplete? I need to elect either a writing-type seminar (12 students) or a regular one (15 students). Here we go again! Do I really want this? But it’s nice to be at Princeton. At 5:00 one of Dimitri’s students, Karen Emmerich, a blond beauty, came to meet me because she plans to be a grad student at the University of Thessaloniki next year, when I’ll be there. Her CV is remarkable. She was “hooked” by going to Germanacos’s program when she was in high school. Then Mache drove me to her home in Englishtown, about 45 minutes away, for a nice supper with Demo, her husband, who works in an engineering think-tank doing mostly military research, and baby Andrew, age eleven months and clinging to mother. Mache is remarkable, caring for baby (which she still nurses), commuting, helping us with the book, pursuing her Ph.D., caring for a husband. Demo and I had a vigorous conversation for 2½ hours on various subjects ranging from prostate cancer to the Kosovo war.

Wednesday, March 1, 2000

Lunch with a professor of philosophy here, Bas Van Fraassen, who did a Freshman Seminar entirely on Light. We shared bibliography and ideas connected with my desire to write about Quakers’ standard phrase, “Hold him in the light,” and the Inner Light. He gave me his bibliography and syllabus, some of which may be useful. But when will I ever find time to write on Light? Right now I’ve got the Greek book—huge amount of typing; a book review already late for World Literature Today; the translation of Politics of the Spirit that I have to check for Aspasia—so slow; and Owens’s dissertation that I have to read for Cambridge later this month. Too much!

Friday, March 3, 2000

Pendle Hill

I ministered in Meeting about Truth, using Tillich’s God Beyond God; thus always the Truth Beyond Truth. A difficult theology, but good for Quakers because it keeps us always seeking. . . . Steve Baumgartner asked to meet with me and we had a 1¼ hour tête-à-tête in the library: very cordial and friendly. He said that I was signaled out by staff as being behind the call for “rigor.” I tried to explain, telling the whole story of the Resident Program Review Committee, whose report he hasn’t seen, and must see. He asked what advice I could give him and I said, “Keep talking to everyone. Be visible. Don’t disappear all day in your office.” . . . Good music with Dan after supper.

Saturday, March 4, 2000

Pendle Hill

Board, ground-breaking for the Conlon Conference Room, off of Brinton House, with Conlons present and very pleased, of course. Good talks by Dan, Richard, Shirley. . . . Then more piano. Dan wants us to perform in May. We’ll try to revise the Starer, Debussy, and even the Schubert March, plus doing Satie and maybe the Bizet. . . . To Alec’s for supper. Baby up every night; they’re both suffering from lack of sleep, but don’t look it. Then we all went to Friends Select for the middle school play: C. S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe,” expertly done by these remarkable seventh-grade children. Lovely to see Alec in his work context. He’s obviously very well liked, and surrounded by interesting, nice people. The auditorium was packed with parents, teachers, and fellow students.

Sunday, March 5, 2000

Pendle Hill

Ugh! Meeting Takashi Mizuno, with Rebecca, Emma, Bobbi Kelly, Claudia, and a woman from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He very emotional. Broke down in sobs and weeping, about how injured he was by Rebecca’s letter. When I tried to defend Rebecca, saying that it was basic Quakerism not to demonize either group in a conflict situation, he cut me off saying he couldn’t listen to me any more. But we got beyond this impasse, slowly. Emma was very good, and so was Rebecca, Claudia less so. I think I regained his trust when I said that although I’m sure I’m not a racist, I’m also sure that I can lapse into offensive remarks or behavior. Eventually I tried to suggest that although his object was to make us grow, because we were the offenders and he the offended, probably he could grow, too, as a result of all this misery. He sort of admitted that he had heard, sort of . . . What a sad case: a paranoic nourished by the white man’s guilt of those who have stood behind him. . . . Thankfully I then went to Dan’s and played for two hours, supped, and played again, “recreationally,” Mozart’s G-minor Symphony and Haydn’s exquisite symphony.

March 9, 2000

Barb Parsons telephoned with the sad news that Lloyd Lewis died, aged 72, of leukemia. What a shame! Just as he was beginning to enjoy his retirement; indeed he was traveling in Italy when stricken. We were buddies through all the early days of Kendal.

March 16, 2000

From: Peter A. Bien

To: lingle@bellsouth.net

Subject: Bacon review, etc.

Dear Larry,

Thanks for sending the Bacon review, which is very upbeat indeed, except for the paragraph about PH’s editor. I don’t know what dates were involved, and the reviewer doesn’t give details. Oh well . . . Dan feels strongly that Rebecca should not continue any longer, but he also seems to know that Quakers are unable to fire anyone. And in many respects she does very well indeed. But then there are the lapses. Margaret Bacon complained bitterly to me about Rebecca’s inaccessibility, and Larry Miller was furious for the same reason. Pendle Hill is filled with people who, in effect, have no place else to go.

The meeting with Takashi Mizuno was excruciating. He came with a high-level support, Arlene Kelly, clerk of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and now of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. We were represented, thank goodness, by Emma Lapsanski, who spoke eloquently, and by Rebecca, who also did a splendid job. Bobbi Kelly was there but totally silent throughout. And Claudia Wair was predictably paranoiac, but calm. As for Takashi, he let us know how severely we had injured him, then broke down in a paroxysm of sobbing. When 1 said that it was a basic Quaker belief and principle always to assume that there is something good in every group, and that we don’t like to demonize one side in a conflict (using as an example the Germans who were so horrible in Greece during Chrysanthi’s girlhood but among whom there clearly were some, at least, who hated what their own army was doing), Takashi replied, “I can’t talk with you.” When I said later that I have two daughters-in-law who are people of color, he replied, “They all say that.” However, Emma and Rebecca saved the day, sort of, and Takashi calmed down a bit. I think I got through to him when, toward the end, I said that really I am not a racist but I know and admit that, even so, I am capable of remarks or attitudes that perhaps escape me and that I’ll later regret, and that could be considered racist. In short, no one is pure. He liked that. Then I suggested, at the very end, that we had all learned and grown from this difficult meeting together, and that the “we” should include him as well. He frowned, but uttered a few words that seemed to indicate that maybe he heard. So, after two very unpleasant hours, we parted in a friendly way (sort of). My hope, and Rebecca’s, is that this will be the end. But it won’t be, for he now has a program for “encouraging” the Publications Committee to publish materials by non-white authors.

Dan told me that Takashi’s behavior is similar to lots of analogues he saw in the AFSC—basically an ego-trip hiding behind accusations of discrimination, and bringing to its support a whole league of guilt-ridden Quaker types. Amen!

We’re off to England on Monday to see Othello, Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens (my first time), and Antony and Cleopatra, plus Rosenkavalier, the ballet, Copenhagen, and Maggie Smith! I hope to forget Takashi in the process.

Sincerely,

Tuesday, March 21, 2000

London, Penn Club

Easy, routine flight yesterday, especially pleasant because we both went Business Class owing to frequent flyer mileage. And what a splendid first day we had today, first of all because of the weather: brilliant sunshine, daffodils everywhere, some tulips, pansies in Russell Square, fruit trees in bloom. We went to the British Museum and with luck happened upon a group being conducted by a splendid guide from the museum. She dwelt on the Rosetta Stone, and Chrysanthi and I were able to make out the Greek pretty well. Then she added so much to the Elgin Marbles, explaining Athena’s birth and why the figures on the pediment display, with their bodies, since the heads are missing, such surprise. She enthused that the Parthenon was completed in fifteen years. I thought also of Hagia Sophia, and of the Empire State Building, which was finished in an amazing eighteen months. Miracles, all. The Museum has redone its Hellenic collections and has placed placards everywhere now to help orient the viewer. The grace and perfection of Ancient Greek and Hellenistic sculpture astounds repeatedly, every time one views these artifacts. How satisfying, especially compared to the deliberate ugliness of certain contemporary art. . . . Then to the Barbican for an astounding production of Othello, with Ray Fearon in the title role and Richard McCabe as a slimy Iago. Superbly directed by Michael Attenborough. Of course the major compliments need, as always, to go to Shakespeare. “How,” Chrysanthi asked, “would he know about the depths of evil we see in Iago?” Good question. But he reflects so much experience, and such divine experience, in all the plays that the only answer, I suppose, is an evasive one: genius. In any case, this production held one spellbound from start to finish. No wonder it is sold out night after night. I was pleased to see so many children in the audience. This theatrical experience was so perfect, probably all the rest will be anticlimaxes.

Wednesday, March 22, 2000

Penn Club

To Friends House. Asked for Stuart Morton, but he’s in Sri Lanka for two weeks on Friends Service Council business. Spoke with Josef Keith in the library about Nancy Crawshaw’s photos; gave him the ones I have and promised him more information once I return to Princeton. Also Norman Gilbertson’s address. The library already has Brenda Marder’s first volume, plus minutes of Friends Service Council during the period of the Quaker School’s existence, plus Margaret Backhouse’s letters. Actually, Brenda might do well to spend a week here. . . . Chrysanthi had violent diarrhea but then felt OK, thankfully. . . . To Piccadilly for Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett’s comedy, starring Maggie Smith as the homeless eccentric who enters Alan Bennett’s life for fifteen years. Mediocre compared to Shakespeare, of course, but surely it’s unfair to make this comparison. On its own merits, it was a clever way of expressing many social issues: homelessness, senility, the ineffectiveness of social workers, feminism, the emptiness (outwardly) of an artist’s life, sons caring (or not caring) for aged mothers, etc. Bennett splits himself into two look-alike characters, using this technique to allow his “thoughts” to be aired as one speaks to the other. Maggie Smith of course stole the show; indeed there wouldn’t have been much of a show without her. . . . Then to the Olivier. Nice supper there, followed by Trevor Nunn’s Merchant of Venice. Derbhle Crotty was unbelievably good as Portia, a wonderful comedienne, and then a severe justice in the Ducal courtroom. And Henry Goodman played Shylock perfectly, with just the right proportion of malice balanced by righteous indignation and self-pity. All was done in a sort of 1920s Berlin or Vienna ambiance, with nightclubs, torch singers, and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Lots of fun in the romance aspects—e.g., with “lost” rings at the end—and lots of very serious discussion of mercy vs. justice, Christian vs. Jew. Shylock is, in the end, ambivalent, justified yet at the same time impossibly intransigent. I’m sure that the play should allow this ambivalence to remain, rather than tilting the balance one way or the other.

Thursday, March 23, 2000

Worked on Aspasia’s translation in the morning. Then to Duchess Theatre, off Aldwych, to see “Copenhagen.” We sat on the stage, very close, obviously, to the three actors: Bohr, his wife, and Heisenberg. Fascinating encounter: Heisenberg returns to his mentor in 1941, after Denmark was occupied by the Germans. The reason is not entirely clear, or at least Bohr isn’t clear. Is Heisenberg helping the Nazis or hindering them? Does he want to find out from Bohr what the Americans are doing (i.e., are they able to make an atomic bomb)? Along the way, lots of the science is explained: uranium 235 vs. 238, plutonium, what the critical mass is. Heisenberg miscalculated the needed critical mass, making German success seem impossible. Did he do this out of ignorance or design? He claims that he keeps his post, cooperating with the Nazis, in order to prevent it going to someone else who might achieve success in making the bomb. Bohr isn’t sure he believes this. As for Bohr, he went to Los Alamos and developed the triggering mechanism for the Nagasaki bomb. So, says Heisenberg, you killed 100,000 people. Lots of talk also about Bohr’s complementarity principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, those two great advances; and of course about quanta vs. waves. Aesthetically, it’s remarkable that this totally intellectual play, with no real “action,” nevertheless was theatrical, with a shape, a development, emotional climaxes. . . . Supper nearby in the Sofra restaurant, Turkish, where Mark Mazower once took me. Then to Covent Garden to the newly rebuilt Royal Opera House, to see Der Rosenkavalier. We were way at the top, still £50 each, but with a perfect view. Richard Strauss’s music is gorgeous, miraculous. The story, at first frivolous and petty, becomes better, as one would expect from a text by von Hofmannsthal. The singing was splendid, especially Baron Ochs (Franz Hawlata), Octavian (Susan Graham, an American who studied at the Manhattan School of Music), and Marie Therese (Renée Fleming); the entire production rich and lavish in terms of scenery, costumes, fine acting. But obviously the music—its variety, congruence with the text, orchestral color (lots of brass)—was paramount.

Friday, March 24, 2000

Cambridge

Train from King’s Cross to Cambridge. Installed in Fellows’ Guest Room at Queen’s. Then to King’s to meet Rev. Dr. George Pattison, the dean, and the person in charge of all the services at King’s College Chapel. Young, very friendly. We agreed on strategy for Lewis Owens’s viva, and how he would be required to do all the typographical corrections (manually, with white-out or new text pasted over the old). George’s expertise is chiefly on Kierkegaard. He knew of Douglas Steere as the first translator of Purity of Heart. He wants to see my essay on Faulkner and Kierkegaard. Lewis arrived at 11:00, somewhat frightened, with sweaty palms. But we were civil and gentle, and actually had a good conversation for 1¾ hour. We started with the typos; then I raised my queries; then Pattison his—for example, best omit the discussion of Heidegger if this gets developed as a book (which I hope it will). I felt that he should expand his criticisms of Kazantzakis; he mentions only “excessive individuation” at the very end, without any discussion. Also, can Kazantzakis truly be helpful to professing Christians, or is he best called a meta-Christian? We weren’t allowed to say “You pass,” but we indicated his success indirectly by saying that all he needed do was clean up the typos. Then Chrysanthi returned and we had a lunch of sandwiches and fruit in King’s Senior Common Room with George alone. . . . Walked to Selwyn at 3:00. Nice reunion with David Holton. No news yet about his application to be promoted to a Readership, his third try. But he’s better situated now at home, in a village eleven miles away, with a cohesive village life, which they missed in Cambridge. At 4:00 his graduate students came, and others, including Μάχης, whose article on Greek labor I’d published in JMGS after meeting him in Princeton. I read my “Inventing Greece”; it went well, with lively discussion afterwards for an hour on questions of nationalism. A very articulate, thoughtful group. . . . Then to St. John’s College for a splendiferous dinner hosted by Lewis. Present were Lewis’s “partner,” Monica, a beautiful woman of Spanish extraction, his parents, very young, a fellow student who also got his doctorate recently, George Pattison, Douglas Hedley (the supervisor who should have warned Lewis about the technical errors), Chrysanthi, me (at head of table), and, best of all, Nicholas Hammond. An elegant meal beautifully served, and topped off by cognac and truffles. Hedley engaged me in a long conversation about Rufus Jones and Coleridge, the mystical inheritance. At table during this long meal (7:00 to 11:00 p.m.) the most interesting was of course Nicholas Hammond, aged over 90 but still very sharp, though deaf in one ear. He’d been one of the British classics dons sent out to Greece in the war. He learned Greek well enough and grew a ferocious looking black mustache well enough to “pass” as a shepherd when he traveled into German-occupied Salonika. He knew Aris and Siantos and all the others. Told me that the ELAS leaders were basically out for personal power, alas. At one point he helped negotiate an agreement between ELAS and EDDA to cooperate instead of fighting each other, but it was vetoed by EAM headquarters (Zachariadis, probably). He was part of the group that planned and executed the destruction of the Gorgopotamos rail viaduct, thus interrupting German supplies going down through Greece to Rommel in Africa. Earlier, when Hitler invaded, and before he was smuggled back into Greece to work with the resistance (if I got the story correct), he was evacuated to Crete, narrowly escaping death as German planes strafed the caïque he was in, escaping only because the German plane hit an air pocket and was thrown a bit off course. Then he was evacuated to Egypt. He said at the 50th anniversary celebrations in Crete that the most moving testimony was by a Maori who had been in Greece with the New Zealanders. Lots of other stories of derring-do, hair-raising escapes, etc. Then, back at Cambridge after the war, he was assigned to look after Kazantzakis in 1946 when Kazantzakis was sent to Cambridge. Kazantzakis’s English was very poor, but Hammond could of course converse with him in δημοτική. Kazantzakis wanted to see Sheppard, the principal of King’s, the eccentric don. “Who are your intelligentsia?” Kazantzakis asked him. “We don’t have intelligentsia at Cambridge,” Sheppard replied; “they’re at Oxford. We have only intelligent people.” Kazantzakis asked who were people of the spirit. “I am,” replied Sheppard, then named some others. “Trevelyan?” asked Kazantzakis. “No, not Trevelyan,” came the reply.

Saturday, March 25, 2000

London

Lewis and his father picked us up at Queen’s after we had a “full English breakfast” with a score of dermatologists there for a convention, one of whom turned out to be a Cypriot with whom we talked in Greek. Poor man had lost his home and περιουσία in the north. . . . Back in London, worried about the US Airways strike. As of last night it looked probable, with consequent cancellation of our Gatwick-Philadelphia flight. But I reached them by telephone this morning and was told that although an agreement had not been reached, both sides did agree to keep talking, at least until May. So we seem safe. . . . To Sadler’s Wells, where I had never been before, to see the Northern Dance Company in “Carmen.” A little like West Side Story, but I was not moved by any of it, as I was in New York recently, for example. Graceful and acrobatic, with Bizet’s music sometimes pure and sometimes transmogrified into rock and roll. . . . To Moorgate and the Barbican for Timon of Athens, which I’ve never read and had never seen. Richard McCabe, the splendid Iago, played the Touchstone-like cynic Apemantus. Michael Pennington played Timon. My favorite was John Woodvine, who played the steward—what a beautiful voice he has. The first half was very effectively staged with wonderful jazz music played by an off-stage band, and a fanciful Turkish bath scene, plus dancing girls played by boys. The moral is all too clear, and quickly clear. Timon is generous to a fault, and naïve. He thinks he has friends, but he has only flatterers and sycophants. When he exhausts his resources and is hounded by creditors, he asks the former “friends” to help him financially, and all find excuses. All this is convincing. But the second half is not; probably this is the part that Shakespeare never finished and was pieced together by others. Timon is discovered destitute, in a cave, although with a horde of gold, still. His wits have turned. It’s very much like Act III of King Lear, but lacking the preparation for this desperate state. Here it happens instantaneously. The loyal steward is just like Kent in Lear, Apemantus somewhat like Lear’s fool. But none of this is developed sufficiently to work. Furthermore, the subplot with Alcibiades—who is banished unjustly by the Senate, serves to aid Athens’ enemies (as happened in “real life” if one can believe Thucydides), and who then returns to neatly punish those who deserve it (although we’re never shown how the choice is made)—is much too rudimentary. What is fascinating is this: Could Timon, especially the second half, be typical of Shakespeare’s first drafts, which were then rounded and filled by his own genius and also by the actors’ reactions and experiences—something that never happened in this case, at least not by actors’ reactions.

Sunday, March 26, 2000

London

Interesting breakfast conversation with a Spanish woman who teaches British literature in Spain. She likes Barry Unsworth. They do Dubliners and Portrait but cannot do Ulysses except in translation. . . . Walked to Westminster Meeting. A man from Korea ministered, using an interpreter, saying that he had discovered the Truth and that if anyone wanted enlightenment, they should ask him (in Korean presumably). I was moved to minister about the truth that is always beyond Truth, like Tillich’s god beyond God, and that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle should remind us that in “knowing” the truth we also alter it in the very process of cognition. After Meeting, in the “announcements” period, the Korean got up again and restated at excruciating length that he was Enlightened. But a man from Toronto Meeting also begged to differ with me, saying that Heisenberg’s principle applied only to the material world, and that surely God could know us without uncertainty, and that we, in such knowledge, are changed. Afterwards, we talked, and he insisted that being a Seeker isn’t good enough. We eventually do become Finders, and surely George Fox passed beyond seeking. Perhaps so, but I still like Heisenberg, Tillich, and seeking. . . . To the National Gallery: a special exhibition called “Seeing Salvation: the Image of Christ,” where in the very first room I found what could be on the cover of the pamphlet I hope to write some day on the subject of Light. This is William Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World,” based on John’s gospel, showing Christ with a lantern knocking on a door. Luckily they had a reproduction of it in the shop, so I’ll bring it home. In the final room was Dali’s famous crucifix and also Sutherland’s cartoon for the large tapestry at Coventry Cathedral. . . . In Trafalgar Square, I did look up this time to see the one-armed adulterer atop his pillar. An acquaintance at the Penn Club says that in the Greenwich Maritime Museum they show his tunic with the bullet hole, and how small he must have been. . . . Then to the Royal Academy for a very special interesting exhibit, “1900: At the Crossroads,” composed entirely of paintings and sculptures done around 1900. There are early Picassos, Matisses, even a Kandinsky, all done in the realistic mode of their beginnings. There was Cézanne’s “Man with Crossed Arms.” Picasso’s “The Absinthe Drinker,” influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, is moving. And there’s another early Picasso, “The Death of Casagemas,” that looks extraordinarily like a modernist’s El Greco. The same colors, the same division into layers, as in El Greco’s “The Burial of Count Orgaz.”

Monday, March 27, 2000

London

Continued working on Aspasia’s translation. Also walked down Charing Cross Road to Blackwell’s for children’s books and Benny Hill and then across the street to Foyle’s for some music for flute, cello, and piano. Found some. Difficult because the cello parts need to be in treble or bass clef since Allan doesn’t read the viola clef. The “boss” of Foyle’s (I presume) came up to speak to the clerks—very suave, in a suit that looks like it cost £500. Reminded me of Walter’s suit in Kendal. . . . To King’s College at 5:00-ish. Heard their student symphony practicing Shostakovich for a concert tonight. The heard Renée Hirschon give a very interesting paper on name-day celebration in Greece versus birthday celebration, stating that the former, as a ritual, derives from religious precepts and is totally collective whereas the latter is secular and individualistic, celebrating an individual’s temporal existence whereas the name-day celebrates that individual’s connection with something eternal, as manifested in the saint whose day it is. Afterwards, I said that name-day occasions in my experience have often been sterile, with people paying respects to others they really do not like, whereas the one birthday party we attended, at Goody’s, was very communal indeed. She answered well, holding that the birthday, because based on invitations, was exclusionary, whereas the name-day, where people just go, without being invited, is not. Afterwards, Renée, Roddy, Judith Herrin, Chrysanthi, and Roddy’s wife all went for a delicious meal at Sofra, the Turkish restaurant. And Judith walked us home to Russell Square. Alix MacSweeney was at the talk, and wants to meet tomorrow.

Tuesday, March 28, 2000

London

Back to King’s, where I lectured to Roddy’s class on my talk (given originally at Deree-Pierce) on the works and thoughts about Christ that preceded Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός: Comedy, Fasga, Σπασμένες ψυχές, Νικηφόρος Φωκάς, Χριστός, a bit of Οδύσεια, terza rima Χριστός. It went well, I think, with about 45 minutes of good questions and discussion afterwards. David Ricks said interestingly that meta-Christian and post-Christian can mean quite different things. I had thought the terms were interchangeable. He sees meta- as continuing traditional Christianity but with changes whereas post- signifies a replacement with something essentially different. Maybe. Afterwards, a woman gave me her CV, hoping that I could find her a job in America! . . . By tube to Tower Hill and then further along the river to the Times Building to meet Alix MacSweeney. She showed us around the large room where the TLS is produced each week, remarkably the week of publication, not well in advance, as I had supposed. Indeed today, Tuesday, was “press day”! A man was doing last-minute adjustments on the page layout. Then it goes to the printer. They receive it back tomorrow, after which it is posted and placed in shops (still on Wednesday). The date of the issue is the following day, Thursday, in this case 30 March. Alix introduced us to the edtor, very pleasant. I mentioned that I’d been a subscriber since 1957 most likely. “Yes,” he replied, “most people end their subscription at death.” “Well, we can look forward to that.” Alix told me that TLS has 30,000 subscribers. It’s owned, as is the entire Times, by Rupert Murdoch. It needs to be self-sufficient, and turn a profit on its own: it isn’t carried by the other papers. So they’re always looking for more subscribers, especially in the USA. I thought that if I were an ancient Egyptian and were to be buried with familiar, desired objects to take with me to the “other world,” I migiht do worse that to have some issues of the TLS. . . . To the Barbican for Antony and Cleopatra with Alan Bates and Frances De La Tour. We’d heard how good she is, and of course remember Bates as the Boss in Zorba. But the production was disappointing. I preferred the one we saw at the Olivier last year, which got bad notices. De La Tour made Cheopatra seem charmless, a spoiled egomaniac with childish demands. Nor is she attractive physically. Bates is now fat. His Antony was OK, with all the paradoxes of the characterization, and he did, I suppose, make us feel for him toward the end, despite his stupidity, gerontic voluptuousness, and obstinacy beforehand. Shakespeare’s “trick” is of course to have Antony send along Enobarbus’s treasure even after E. has switched sides: evidence of the “noble Antony” whom we really have not seen otherwise. And Octavius, who really is noble, or at least will be as Augustus, seemed just a querulous autocrat. Correctly, the audience was luke-warm, a huge contrast to the truly excited audiences at Othello and The Merchant of Venice. Oh well, two out of three isn’t bad, and even the first half of Timon was splendid. Add to that the exquisite Der Rosenkavalier and the intellectually compelling Copenhagen and perhaps the merits of Lady in the Van, and we did well enough. But how I wish I could see Martinu’s The Greek Passion here at the end of April!

April 8, 2000

Back from another three days at Princeton, when we finished lessons 10 and 11. Only one more to go. Practiced twice with Dan, but he’s still not ready for a concert at Pendle Hill in May. On returning, glad to hear that Dick Williamson’s prostate operation (TURP) went well. He told Dr. Heaney, who has now operated on prostates for everyone in our trio, that we will call ourselves henceforth the Heaney Trio—better, the Heaney Urological Trio.

April 11, 2000

Stylianos published a lovely poem in his monthly bulletin.

ΕΠΙΣΗΜΕΣ ΟΥΤΟΠΙΕΣ

Ο χρόνος, άκου που σου λέω, δεν κυλά μήτε καν κινείται

για τον απλούστατο λόγο ότι δεν υπάρχει.

Τ’αστέρια όμως που περιστρέφονται ακαταπαύστως

ως την οριστική τους θανή

εκπέμπουν φως ή δανείζονται φως ρυθμίζοντες τις εποχές

κι ανοιγοκλείνοντες τα βλέφερα σε μέρα και νύχτα.

The idea, clear from his article, is that “time” is a human construct, an invention.

Financial planning continues. I visited Dan Connolly again; we’re setting up the accounts for three trusts for children and three for grandchildren. I received my first obligatory distribution for my CREF account, and we rolled over $1,000,000 from CREF to PaineWebber, to be invested in American funds. Let’s hope . . .

Saturday, April 15, 2000

Pendle Hill

We arrived Thursday night and supped with Alec and family, very pleasantly. Friday started for me with Cadbury Committee. Only two applications. Then Publications at noon, but Rebecca neglected to send the manuscripts until I reminder her a few days ago, and I got mine only this morning. We rejected both. I described the Takashi meeting to the group. Afterwards, Rebecca and I had an 1½ hour talk. I was hoping that she’d say she wanted to resign. She is going to apply again to Westtown, but of course they won’t hire her. She says that she cannot attend to details because she is so discouraged by the lack of a “unified vision” at Pendle Hill and in Quakerism. Poor Rebecca! She might have to wait 100 years. I also forewarned her about the Seeger volume done by Chuck Fager and me, and of course she was miffed that we hadn’t included her in the enterprise (if we had, as Chuck mentioned later, we probably would never have produced the book in time). . . . Business Meeting was occupied mostly by memorial minutes, for Lloyd Lewis, Elizabeth Gray Vining, Sonny Cronk, and others. Very sad, except for Vining, who died at age 97. . . . Chrysanthi slept early, having been sleep-deprived by virtue of three nights with Theo. I put corrections for lesson 11 into the computer. . . . Today started with Nominating Committee, 1½ hour instead of the expected ½ hour. I’m going to have to be recorder for Executive Committee since Paul Mangelsdorf is rotating off. Ugh! A quick breakfast in the huge, beautiful tent erected in front of Firbank; then worship, marred, only at the start, by a “speech” against hate literature. . . . Lunch in the tent. Nice to see old friends: Coleman Dorsey, John Cary, Margery Walker especially. Then the afternoon celebration, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. the first speech, by a 92-year-old man who had been in the Pendle Hill class of 1930 (year one) was amazing. He was eloquent and youthful. But then Janet Shepherd went on forever. Max Carter was better. And Paul Rasor, the new forum-director, was interesting in giving us his very varied background. Richard Barnes spoke about the campaign. I was pleased that he expanded on John C. Baker’s $100,000 gift received owing to Andy Towl and me. Finally, Gay Berger began the celebration of Dan’s ten years. After her talk she invited Chuck and me onto the platform. Chuck spoke well about his indebtedness to Dan, first for the Seeger decision, which enabled Chuck to be granted CO status instead of going to jail, secondly for hiring him to do the original forum program despite his dubious reputation for extreme positions. Then he spoke of the festschrift idea, saying that he figured, since a festschrift is an “academic” concept, that he needed the help of a “certified academic,” namely Peter Bien. Then came my turn. I began by stating that I’d never been called “certified” before, and that this was usually for incarceration in the loony bin. Then I described the contents of the volume: the reminiscences by allies in the AFSC years, the scholarly articles (including my own on process theology, saying that I’d given it to Dan but he never read it, which drew a huge laugh from the audience), and Dan’s essays, and finally the Supreme Court decision itself. Dan was of course totally surprised, as we had hoped, and very moved and gratified. I presented him his copy, inscribed by Chuck and me. He then delivered his valediction, speaking well about the need for all of us to realize that the basic laws of life ordain that younger hands need to take over. . . . Lastly, Gay introduced the director-to-be, Steve Baumgartner, who spoke briefly, mainly to express his gratitude for being chosen to lead what quite obviously is a very extraordinary institution. . . . It was long but nice. Folks seemed very pleased by the festschrift; many offered their hands to shake as we exited. . . . Then to Philadelphia again and a nice Italian restaurant with Alec and family. Theo slept through most of it. Alec expatiated to me about his effort to introduce uniformity in the curricula of each of the sections of a given grade, something not yet done at Friends Select. The school’s most basic dilemma is that the Head, and ½ the board, want it to be academically rigorous and able to compete with Friends Central in this regard, whereas the other half of the board and most of the older staff want it to be diverse, educating non-university-type students as well as future scholars. Alec is caught in the middle. He recognizes the need for more rigor and uniformity in the curriculum, yet he would like the school to become even more diverse than it already is, via the recruitment of international students (resisted now by many teachers because they don’t want non-speakers of English). As for Monica, she’s a full-time mother, but meeting other mothers in the park, and beginning to decide on a particular Presbyterian church that she favors. They both love Philadelphia, which is not surprising.

Sunday, April 16, 2000

AMTRAK

I read two of Brenda Marder’s chapters. No spark. And so many grammatical mistakes and infelicities. One is quite bad, a survey of women’s predicament, potted sociology. The other, on the Quaker school, based in considerable part on interviews with Chrysanthi and Vouli, is better, but still rather pedestrian. Oh my, oh my! What are we going to do?

April 17, 2000

Terpni

To the farm with Chrysanthi to turn the water on so that Leander and family will have water when they come on Friday. But discovered a broken (frozen?) pipe under the kitchen. Leander’s hydrant will be fine but we’ll need to repair our pipe before we can have water in the house. Strange. Why did this happen? Is it because I was unable to undo that little cap on the “appendix” last summer?

Tuesday, April 18, 2000

“Quaker 8s” at the Spottswoods’ in Norwich with the Cadwalladers, Anne Baird, Billi Jo Johnstone and partner. We talked about people who greatly influenced our spiritual development. I cited Douglas Steere and Dave Ritchie as the yin and yang of my early Quaker experience. Chrysanthi spoke movingly of her father: how calm he was despite provocation during the German occupation.

Wednesday, April 19, 2000

Took Kesaya Noda to lunch at the Inn. She is now an official “letter writer/corrector” for President Wright, in a lovely office in Parkhurst. She seems pleased. She even ate a huge portion of the Inn’s buffet instead of her home-prepared rice.

Sunday, April 23, 2000, Easter

Daphne, Greg, Christina, and Andrew came on Friday. They’re still looking for a house in the suburbs. Greg is thinking of leaving Goldman Sachs in two or three years. The children are a 200% occupation, but Daphne is very patient. . . . At Meeting today I ministered on Resurrection: What can it possibly mean for liberal Quakers? I mentioned D. H. Lawrence’s “scandalous” interpretation in “the Man Who Died,” Yeats’s conflation with Dionysus in his play, and the general yin-yang of life: sleep-wake, winter-spring, grandparents-grandchildren, senescence-vitality, the fact that a universal principle seems to be that vitality comes from a previous death. This was picked up nicely by subsequent ministry.

Monday, April 24, 2000

Leander, at the farm, was present when Ray Smith, plumber, fixed our pipe and also a defective valve in Leander’s system. So, all is now well again. Leander’s family were treated to the sight of 4 or 5 young deer “dancing” in the south field.

Tuesday, April 25, 2000

Leander, Sophia, and Nicholas arrived. Deanna is in Manchester, Vermont, playing with the National Symphony at the start of its week-long Vermont residency. Sophia was extremely withdrawn and shy to begin with, but then warmed up, eventually coming willingly to my arms for a goodnight kiss, and proclaimed, “I love you!”

Thursday, April 27, 2000

To England

Last night in Cambridge at Howard Johnson’s. Up early to get the 9:00 a.m. plane, tourist class, but two empty seats adjoining so it wasn’t too bad. Am reading Brenda’s volume 1 of Farm School history, interesting, and well researched, but the writing is terrible: faulty punctuation and idioms, sexist language, anachronisms, grammar. It will really need to be copyedited. At Heathrow, took the new express to Paddington to save time, but then lost an hour in the metro trying to get to Russell Square. But made it just past 10:00 p.m., to find a note from Gay Berger inviting me to supper on Saturday, which of course won’t be possible. . . . Found two excellent reviews, indeed superlative ones, of Martinu’s The Greek Passion plus one negative one. Of course much of the information is wrong. They speak of Turkish refugees (!) and of Kazantzakis as a communist. Alas, alack!

Friday, April 28, 2000

London

Worked on Aspasia’s footnotes in the morning. Then to Friends House. Long, pleasant lunch with Stuart Morton, who remembers Leander very vividly and seemed like an old friend. He’s not too happy with his work at Friends House (he directs projects in Sri Lanka and India) and expects to quit in a year or two, and move back to Birmingham. Wilhelmina is unemployed there. He movingly described her experience with racist remarks and attitude among Quakers. I told him at length about the Takashi affair. . . . Then to the library. Josef Keith was absent, having just gone home owing to an emergency there. So I met with the head librarian, Malcolm Thomas, to deliver my photos of the Quaker School, Norman Gilbertson’s address, and a catalogue of Nancy Crawshaw holdings at Princeton. In the midst of this the fire alarm rang and we all had to evacuate the building to the street opposite. Standing there, suddenly a load of excrement fell from above, splattering the shoes of one of the girls. “Endsleigh Gardens aren’t what they used to be,” said Thomas. Luckily we were able to finish indoors. . . . Walked then to the British Library to see the special exhibit “1000 Years of English Literature.” What a treasure: first editions, manuscripts, sound recordings of Plath reading “Ariel,” Conan Doyle speaking about Sherlock Holmes, news on the day that Lady Chatterley’s Lover went on sale, Auden reading “The More Loving One”—“Looking up at the stars / I know quite well / that as far as they care / I can go to hell.” Splendid! Philip Larkin reading “Wedding Wind,” Eliot reading “The Burial of the Dead” from “The Waste Land,” ending with “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” And Virginia Woolf’s manuscript of Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s workbook for Ulysses, with different colored crayons crossing out motifs already inserted. As if all this wasn’t enough, the permanent exhibit now has Woolf’s BBC talk on the magic of words: the first time I’d ever heard her voice. Also Yeats and Joyce reading. But the biggest surprise for me were the Beatles—how good they are, especially the song “Michelle,” which is brilliant. And there is Nelson’s last letter to Emma Hamilton, two days before the Battle of Trafalgar, where he was killed, and his strategy for that battle, written out on four pages. . . . Nice talk afterwards over tea with a student of organic farming and sustainability, doing an MA in Wales and very opposed to the World Bank, IMF-type development. . . . To Covent Garden to pick up my ticket. . . . To Piccadilly. Ate in an Indonesian restaurant: Daging Melati (strips of spicy beef, very nice). Then indulged myself in Raymond Review Bar, quite tasteful. Home in the rain. A surprisingly rich day, and zero jet lag.

Saturday, April 29, 2000

Long discussion at breakfast with a young man here for a conference on nonviolence. He’d done the Peace Studies M.A. at Bradford. We had much in common, although he is not a Quaker. A believer in the true possibility of cooperation and peaceful coexistence for all human beings. . . . Pre-performance talk at the Royal Opera, 6:00 p.m. The speaker quoted a letter from Martinu: “I hate America.” He was himself a refugee since 1938; never returned to Czechoslovakia after the war. Loved the theater. The Greek Passion is not an opera; it is musical theater. He composed fifteen operas; left France for the USA in 1941. In 1945 he taught at Tanglewood. After the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 he couldn’t return; he was considered a reactionary in Czechoslovakia and a communist in the US! The Greek Passion is his last major work. Begun in 1954. He had read Zorba. Kazantzakis discouraged Martinu from doing Zorba because the dialogue was all-important. He offered Martinu instead his newly translated Christ Recrucified. So Martinu knew the book in English from the start. Two themes: the heritage of Christian virtues and our obligation to humanity. He called Act IV a requiem; the chorus is paramount. Martinu sent the opera to Covent Garden. Sir Arthur Bliss had the score sent to three referees who said No. Discouraged, Martinu revised considerably: thicker orchestration less chorus, more conventional plotting, also more old fashioned. The revised version was performed in Zurich in 1961, in Wales in 1981. Tonight we’ll hear the first version for the first time. Four musical themes recur: (1) theme of the cross, (2) Kyrie eleeison, the compassion theme, (3) selfless love, associated with Katerina, (4) marriage and folk music. . . . Finally, the great moment. I’m seated in A13 in the stalls circle, on the level of the stage, about 20–30 feet away, with a good view of the conductor and orchestra. While the audience is still being seated, the Agha is on stage, looking very Turkish—dissolute, drinking raki (already!), while Manolios sleeps on a mattress stage-left. The curtain is down. Immediately the conductor takes his bow and raises his baton, the curtain rises to reveal the extraordinary set—like a child’s jungle-gym, with numerous platforms at various levels. Beautiful. Quickly, the notables are introduced, all dressed in suits and neckties (although fingering worry-beads) whereas Manolios, Yannakos, etc., are in old dirty clothes, unshaven. Katerina, Lenio, and the other women are in black. Grigoris is in typical priest’s “uniform.” The notables proceed to assign villagers to perform in the Passion Play. The best is when Judas is selected. “Never, never” sings Panayotaros, but the priest reasons with him, “Without Judas, the resurrection cannot take place.” All this is splendid. We also see Lenio, who expects Manolios to marry her and is very much in a hurry whereas he is not. And of course Katerina is secretly attracted to Manolios. About halfway through the first act (of this production, and acts 1 & 2 of the original), the refugees arrive, bedraggled. I was disappointed in Fotis, who somehow lacked the stature, visually, that he is meant to have. But he sang beautifully, although all in all I don’t think that Martinu did justice to him. One of the refugees dies, and Grigoris screams “Cholera!” as a way of excluding them. Already, however, Manolios and the “disciples” wish to help the refugees. Food is brought, etc. A fine scene involves Ladas, the miser, and Yiannakos, when Ladas employs him to get the refugees to relinquish their jewelry, etc., in exchange for food. (Later, Yannakos, in another good scene, finds that he cannot cheat them in this way, confesses to Fotis, and is forgiven.) The second act (= Acts III and IV of the original) somehow lacked the dramatic force of the first one. Manolios finds that he cannot marry, Lenio all but seduces Nikolios and they are wed in a colorful scene complete with on-stage band, clarinet, but sounding more Czech than Greek. Manolios and Katerina pledge to be brother-sister rather than lovers in another good scene, chiefly because for Katerina the orchestra is repeatedly silenced and replaced with a folksy accordion. Manolios’s “offense” in the eyes of Grigoris is somewhat short-circuited, but a tremendous moment comes when Judas clasps him close and kisses him brutally. The mob, incited by Grigoris, kills Manolios, but Martinu skips the fact that it’s in church and that Grigoris gives the final OK (in the novel) and crosses himself. Too bad. The opera ends with the despair of the refugees, and Fotis’s fortitude. They’ll pick up again (although in an earlier scene they had sketched out the gates of their future village) and walk into the future . . . quietly.

The audience, full house, was ecstatic. Repeated curtain calls, one man in the stalls standing and shouting “Bravo, Maestro!” for the conductor. A triumph. Kazantzakis must be smiling. He had to wait such a long time and experience so much misunderstanding and opposition. Yet here he is, via Martinu, enchanting this audience and greatly moving them. I was thinking during the performance, “Once upon a time, Christianity suffused people’s lives (for better or worse) as it does the lives of these characters. Especially Manolios, “playing” Christ, realizes increasingly what a responsibility, burden, and opportunity is his. And the disciples “catch” his sanctity, imperfectly at first, because they’re all-too-human, but eventually in a definitive way.

During the interval, sipping coffee in the Amphitheatre lounge, we listened to Peter Mackridge, on Lewis’s portable radio, talking about the novel and about Kazantzakis, a very “orthodox” approach, rightly stressing Bergson, dematerialization (seen in Manolios as opposed to fat Patriarcheas), and transubstantiation of flesh into spirit.

Back to the Penn Club with Lewis and Monica (going to King’s Cross). A Häagen-Dazs ice cream walking through Russell Square, then telephoned Chrysanthi the good news about the opera, and to bed.

Sunday, April 30, 2000

London–Boston–Hanover

Breakfast at the Penn Club, very lively, with Gay and Horst Berger. They’d gone to the Dome yesterday. Awful, Horst concluded: ugly, noisy. And he should know, since he is famous for building huge dome-like structures worldwide. Gay told me that Dan was always exasperated by Paul Mangelsdorf’s minutes because they were typically late and far too detailed. I, as the new recorder, will try to do better. She also noted some mistakes already made by Steve Baumgartner, acting perhaps in the way he had as CEO of a large corporation. But small mistakes, and ones that he was able to cover over. So far so good. . . . Taxi to Paddington. Heathrow Express. Nice talk on the airplane with an African expert who flew in from Nairobi last night. He expanded on the scourge of AIDS there; 30% of young girls are infected. One spends time going to funeral after funeral.

May 4, 2000

Hanover

Gay Berger is here, overnight, for Kendal all-communities’ meetings. Tonight there was a dinner, held at the hospital, and Chrysanthi and I were invited. Nice of John Hennessey. Nice to see John Diffey again, and Lynmar Brock and Claudia, and to meet some of the new figures, like Earl Harrison, former head of Sidwell Friends, and Mr. Rogers, former president of Guilford, and some new people on the Hanover board, e.g. Hebble. Lynmar spoke at length, not well (as usual). John Hennessey was more controlled and cogent, and said nice things about me.

May 5, 2000

Received e-mail from Shirley Dodson that Laura Sherwin died. She was my consultee at Pendle Hill, the totally neurotic figure. I assumed it was suicide but it wasn’t. Perforated stomach at age 25.

May 8, 2000

Princeton

Did half of lesson 12 with Dimitri, severely revising one of the grammar sections. At lunch, Anthony Hirst gave a brilliant talk on the appropriation of Christian language by Palamas, Sikelianos, and Elytis, all of whom are neo-pagans and actually quite blasphemous. But they never got into the trouble that Kazantzakis did, perhaps because neither State nor Church worried about the evil effect of poetry. . . . Supper at Mike and Mary Keeley’s, where I went to discuss Brenda Marder’s book, which I should recommend to the board next week. Very pleasant. Mike is off to Greece, then to Moscow for PEN, then to London for Seferis celebrations. PEN is in a pickle. They combined with Amazon.com to select a short story for a prize and then a display on Amazon’s internet. But the story is about fellatio in a Muslim context, and Amazon is afraid to display it.

Wednesday, May 10, 2000

Princeton

A full day: 7:00 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. on Thursday morning. Finished lesson 12. Lunch with Dimitri in Prospect: lots of “business” concerning MGSA especially. In the late afternoon, to Dan’s for practice (he decided not to do the mini-concert at Pendle Hill on the 15th). We did Satie, Bizet, Debussy. Then to the airport. Chaos. Most flights canceled owing to thunder storms. Mine delayed two hours but at least it flew. I arrived at Manchester at 1:00 a.m. No luggage. Filled out a form, and returned to Motel 8 to sleep.

Thursday, May 11, 2000

Worked on computer at the motel. Returned to Manchester Airport at 11:00, the first flight in from Philadelphia. Still no luggage. Returned to Hanover. Prepared “Oxen of the Sun” for Heffernan’s course, which I taught at 4:00 p.m. (he’s in Sweden at a conference). Twelve students doing an entire term on Ulysses. What a pleasure! I realized, for the first time, I think, since I retired, that I really do miss teaching. So probably the course at Princeton next spring will be pleasurable. . . . Dick and Allan came at 7:30 and we had good music for two hours. Did Vivaldi’s “Seasons,” all four. . . . Phone form Manchester. They found my luggage. They told us to go to sleep; it would be delivered in the middle of the night.

Friday, May 12, 2000

Terpni

Awoke to find my valise in the mud room. Amen! Off early to Woodstock Inn for breakfast (our little ritual) and then to the farm. Everything fine. Broken pipe repaired. We planted potatoes, string beans, parsley, and fertilized all the fruit trees, plus the little evergreens we planted in Leander’s field that look so deprived. Chrysanthi vacuumed. Back to Woodstock for supper at the Inn with two very young, pretty waitresses.

Saturday, May 13, 2000

I delivered the fiscal year 2001 Hanover Meeting budget to the clerk’s slot, since we’ll be gone tomorrow. Luckily I was able to prepare 95% of the budget last week while traveling. It was easy, compared to last year (the first try). Actually got fund balances and total of accounts to match exactly. . . . When to Jimmy for a haircut but he was closed, so went to Hilde’s salon for the first time and was barbered (much better than by Jimmy) by Matilda, a beautiful, talkative blond whose parents, she told me, are both doctors at Hitchcock. She hails from Kansas City. . . . Kendal for supper with Lisa Mayer, the Sandersons, and another couple, all on the Beveridge Webster Performance Fund Committee. Wendy Ardizzone and husband were at dinner, too. Then came our great benefit concert, on Bev’s 92nd birthday, given by Veronica Yochum, the teacher at New England Conservatory who has sent us most of the students who have played in the series (four of the five students were present). I introduced her and also encouraged everyone in the hall to give $100, just as so many impoverished musicians, his former students, had done when we inaugurated the fund. I started with appropriate quotes about music, especially Sir Thomas Browne’s about music evoking divinity, and then enlarged on how we had been blessed by the presence of Bev (and Franny), to whom Veronica was presenting this offering. She played a splendid recital complete with introductions to each piece: a Mozart sonata (late), Chopin nocturne, barcarole, and best of all a spectacular performance of a Bach English Suite. She commented on how Mozart had discovered Bach toward the end of his career and been influenced, and that even Chopin wrote polyphonically to some degree, inspired by Bach. Thanking her at the end, I said that we can now believe in the immortality of the soul since Mozart, Chopin, Bach, and the Websters had been with us in the hall. In the interval, Wendy spoke tearfully about her parents’ death (within four months of each other) and how she had played Mozart for Bev in his last moments of awareness. All in all, it was a beautiful evening. My mother came, too, in her wheelchair, and lasted through to the end. Though she chided Veronica for talking so much; she just wanted her to play.

Sunday, May 14, 2000

Cambridge–Philadelphia

Up at 5:30 a.m. to get a Vermont Transit bus at 7:00 to Boston. On this long trip I read over my poems for Monday’s lecture and finished Valtinos for WLT review. Lunch in the Square at Au Bon Pain, then to the A.R.T. for a superb production of A Winter’s Tale, fully as good as anything we’d seen in London, directed by a Macedonian. Costumes very Turkish (especially for Bohemia): βράκες, αργιλέ, belly dancing. Jeremy Geidt was in his best form as the shepherd who raises Perdita, who was played by a radiant beauty, Sarah Howe. Thomas Derrah was of course a perfect clown, Autolycus, joined by Remo Airaldi as a perfect son to the Shepherd. The production somehow managed to unite the Sicilia (tragic) portion with the Bohemia (romantic comedy) portion, so much so that the final scene of Hermione’s restoration was extremely moving.

Monday, May 15, 2000

Pendle Hill

Routine flight last night. Met at the airport by a limousine sent by Pendle Hill. Breakfast with students in Rebecca’s journal-writing short course. Then SEPTA to Suburban Station, and a short walk to Locust and 15th to visit Monica (her 29th birthday is tomorrow) and Theo, who has one tooth and is crawling, but still somewhat cranky. Met Alec at Friends Select for lunch. Michael has resigned the headmastership at NJIS and the position has been offered to Alec, but he says that he isn’t interested. Nor is Monica. They may have another child and want to spend at least six years in this country before returning, perhaps, to Indonesia. But he thinks he’ll leave Friends Select after next year; he just doesn’t feel comfortable there. . . . Back at Pendle Hill, met with Rebecca concerning the Van der Merwe book and his antagonism to AFSC. I strongly urge publication, perhaps with a preface by someone from those AFSC days. . . . Supper with Chuck Fager, who urges us to begin granting royalties and advances to Pendle Hill authors. Not much chance, I told him. . . . At 7:30 I delivered my Poetry and Science talk, really a poetry reading. Good audience, including of course many friends.

Tuesday, May 16, 2000

Pendle Hill–Medford–Princeton

Shirley Dodson drove me to Medford Leas after we left Chrysanthi at Wallingford Station to go to Washington. Lots of good talk along the way, including more on Van der Merwe. My poetry talk was OK, I think. Lyle Tatum’s wife came up afterwards and said it was the best in the whole series. Tatum commented on Van der Merwe’s egotism, very obvious in his writing itself. Good questions and comments after the talk. Shirley and I then took off, after talking pleasantly with a man who had spent twenty-five years at Monteverde in Costa Rica and of course knows Katy Van Dusen, her husband and family. . . . We got box lunches from Medford Leas and ate them while driving to Princeton. Arrived around 2:00 p.m. and at 2:30 I was again at 58 Prospect Street. Dimitri and I went over Mache’s latest additions to lesson 12 and then began a review—again—of lesson 1, concentrating on formatting. Will this ever end?! . . . Back in Palmer House I worked on my WLT review of Valtinos’s Deep Blue Almost Black, which I found rather disappointing, but can I say that in the review?

Thursday, May 18, 2000

Princeton–Washington

Dimitri had to leave at 11:00 a.m. because poor Evie has bad news medically, probably ovarian cancer, and he had to bring her for treatment. I’m hoping that he, and perhaps Mache, can come to Terpni in June. . . . Train to Washington Cosmos Club, very grand. Met with Tommy Thomas and David Buck about “the book.” We made some basic decisions: two books instead of four; revise volume 1; use a printer not a publisher; do some in hard-cover. . . . To Kennedy Center, where Chrysanthi joined me for a lovely concert conducted by Gerald Schwarz: Tchaikovsky’s suite no. 4 (not very memorable), Shostakovich’s cello concerto no. 2 played with panache by Lynn Harrell, a devastatingly morose piece of music making me think of Shostakovich suffering under the Stalin regime, but fascinating musically. Then Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” so nice to see and not just hear, because the orchestration is so varied and exciting.

Friday, May 19, 2000

Washington, Cosmos Club

Spoke to Alec, who might come to visit Leander tomorrow. David Buck asked after him yesterday and so did Phil Foote today. Breakfast with David and Patti and Tom, very sumptuous. I recommended Bill McGrew and Μίμης Λυπουρλής as possible new trustees. They told me that McGrew was probably forced out of Anatolia and bitter, and his departure not even celebrated after 20+ years as director. Sad. . . . Board committees. Long discussion about “the book.” They decided on one volume instead of two, with volume 1 copyedited but not cleansed of anachronisms (this will please Brenda). Published by the Farm School. Some copies in hardback. Arthur Dukakis donated $20,000 to the project, and there are other donations, so the money is in hand. Discussion also about “precision farming,” which analyzes the soil square meter by square meter. . . . I left at 2:00 p.m. and took the Metro out to Rockville. Met by Deanna and Sophia. They worry about Sophia because she is so morose and cranky, but she and I did well together. We built a locomotive with blocks; she showed me her room, etc. . . . Back to the Cosmos Club (such a handsome building; good to see Gilbert White’s photo on the wall as one of the most distinguished members). Then two blocks down Mass. Ave. to the Greek Embassy for dinner hosted by Ambassador and Mrs. Philou. I was seated at his table next to Eve Labouisse, daughter of Mme Curie, 96 years old (I’m told), and remarkably alert and sensible. Philou very charming and genuine; no airs. Glen Grant’s widow on my other side. Philou spoke well toward the end, followed by Tommy Thomas and David Buck and Sperry Lea. Then I got up and told about the Turkish Bibliography that inspired the Greek government to give $35,000 to MGSA to produce a Modern Greek Bibliography, which I now have the pleasure to present to the Ambassador. It took 17 years, but it’s done! He was suitably impressed and grateful. After dinner we talked at some length. He knew of my work, and asked for a recommendation of a computer expert in Greece, so I’ll send him Stelios’s address.

Saturday, May 20, 2000

Washington

Breakfast with John Borovilas, who lives on Staten Island, has three small children, leaves home at 6:00 a.m. arrives home at 8:00 p.m., and is fed up with this lifestyle. Cf. Greg and Daphne. . . . The long meeting of the full board included some good discussion: of TEE vs. Λύκειο, two-year college vs. four-year, “the book,” etc. Tommy and David are very positive about the retreat I suggested for October on the entire educational situation. . . . Chrysanthi returned to Leander’s earlier (their house construction is finished: a kitchen twice the size, a guestroom and bath in the cellar). I went quickly to the Philips Gallery, next door. At 5:00 Chrysanthi returned with Alec and Monica and Theo, driven by Leander. Alec and family were able to accompany us to the reception at a club on Mass. Ave. and 18th Street, and they had a reunion with David and Patti. Too bad that Phil Foote wasn’t there. He wants to see Alec, will be recruiting a middle school principal for 2001–2002. I had invited Jim and Penelope Alatis and also Jim and Marge Warren. Both came. Alatis, thank goodness, seems ready to host the 2001 MGSA Symposium. 99% sure, at least. We both went to Ambassador Philou and told him, and he promised to assist. Had a nice long talk with Mike’s brother, Ambassador Keeley, who is now retired from the diplomatic service and is active as a publisher of his own writings. Regarding Brenda’s book, he strongly recommended self-publication (actually he uses Thomson-Shore, Pendle Hill’s printer) and also hardback for a certain percentage of copies. Also met Mimi Hughes again, the former Consul General in Thessaloniki, about to be posted to Mexico City. David Schuler, the former Consul (and a Dartmouth graduate) resigned from the diplomatic in order to take a job in Japan (his wife is Japanese). Afterward, Jim Warren and Marge invited us home, so we drove to their 1830 house on Capitol Hill, a doll’s house filled with treasures such as original Lear watercolors. I hope that he’ll help Alatis re: MGSA. And maybe introduce me when I come in September for Ann Lea to speak on “Odysseus Across the Centuries.” (I met her briefly yesterday at the Greek Embassy; she flew off to Greece today for a conference on the Elgin Marbles.) It’s interesting and fun to be involved with so many capable individuals, for instance Mimi and Charles Lowry, with whom I had lunch yesterday; he was in Honolulu on Dec. 7, 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed; his father was an officer in the Navy. He wonders whether Roosevelt, presumably knowing that the bombing would take place, deliberately hushed up the information so that the incident would propel us finally into the war. And Sperry Lea is interesting. His father (or grandfather) was a Quaker. And all of Jim Warren’s ancestors were Quakers, and he and his sister still use thee to each other, although no one in the extended family is a practicing Friend.

Sunday, May 21, 2000

Washington–Hanover

Up at 5:50 a.m. Vermonter at 7:30. Chrysanthi got off at NYC to spend three days with Daphne. I continued home, loaded with things to do: typing the Greek book, vetting the Politics of the Spirit translation first and foremost.

Thursday, May 25, 2000

Evelyn Greene here, with lots of conversation for hours before, during, and after supper. She encourages me to contribute to the Black Hole rather than the library.

Friday, May 26, 2000

Terpni

To the farm. Planted tomatoes and more string beans. Lots of weeds because we didn’t use hay mulch last year.

Sunday, May 28, 2000

Terpni

My birthday. Chrysanthi said “Let’s not count any more birthdays. Christina said, “Happy birthday, Pappou.” Then, when I tried to start a conversation, she replied, “I’m busy playing.” . . . Last night, lovely dinner with Irv and Fran. Irv showed his photos from Normandy, 1945–46. Beautiful. But they’re feeling older. Fran cannot drive now. They’re thinking of selling their property. I asked Daphne if she might be interested. . . . Deana Baker and Matt pulled in for a short visit. He has bought a new John Deere, also made mostly in Japan. . . . Did lots more weeding, started the tractor, mowed in front of Leander’s house, prepared my office, fixed the big shutter on the picture window. . . . Then to Quechee for supper with Everett and Brenda Marder. Everett, for the first time, explained his army career—what “a nice Jewish boy was doing in the Army.” He had fantastic training and advantages, all kinds of education subsidized by the army, and then of course he served in Greece in tumultuous times, including the fall of the Junta. I reported to Brenda the discussion at the board meeting. She seems OK except regarding publisher vs. printer. She very much wants the former. But who?

Monday, May 29, 2000

Big problems with our “Greek Today.” Dimitri has been sidetracked by Evie’s illness. She has severe cancer. So, he has done nothing since I was there. And Phyllis Deutsch, our editor at UPNE, says she’ll be leaving in the autumn. If we don’t deliver the MS this summer we won’t have an editor there. . . . But at least I’m finishing my vetting for the Greek translation of Politics of the Spirit. Will send the footnotes off to Aspasia tomorrow.

Saturday, June 10, 2000

Kinhaven

Back at Kinhaven for Leander’s four-hand workshop. Waited anxiously for Dan to arrive by lunchtime, as he had promised. No Dan. But he arrived at 1:25, five minutes before our coaching with Leander. We did half of Satie’s “Trois morceau en forme de poire,” with much improvement. Our other piece, Bizet’s “Le Bal” from Jeux d’Enfants, we never got to. Later, Nigel told me that Satie had gone to dinner at Debussy’s and Debussy had told him, “You need to have more form in your compositions.” So Satie went home and wrote his “Three pieces in the shape of a pear”! And of course they aren’t even three pieces, but . . . Nice to see Ignat again, and Caroline, who is studying for her medical license exam next Thursday and looked pale and worried. In the afternoon Ignat gave a master class for Kit Van Winkle (Bach’s Partita in D), Barbara Sherman (Beethoven’s Opus 31 no. 2), and Linda Lienhard (Beethoven’s Opus 110). A brilliant class, showing that everything depends on details. . . . Dan and I made some progress in additional practice after supper. At the 9:00 o’clock party I spoke with Robin Williams, who works in no. 2 Trade Center and wants to come to my Mrs Dalloway lecture. At supper, earlier, I spoke with Molly Bidlack, now grown up, going into her sophomore year at NYU, and surprisingly “civilized.” I remember the horrendous child, smiling at Benjy’s funeral, for example.

Sunday, June 11, 2000

Kinhaven

Another very good coaching, this time from Nigel, who really understands Satie’s music and helped us to do it “right,” with no dynamics except those specified in the score, and less contrast between piano and forte despite the ff and fff. And he explained things like “Comme un bête,” which means not “brutally,” but “like an unthinking simpleton.” At lunch, caught sight of Nancy Bidlack in the kitchen and said hello. She reacted with what Leander terms her “forced smile”—they can never seem to forget my campaign to have Jerry retire. . . . In the afternoon, another master class, this time by Nigel, again brilliant (and also entertaining). Bruno Repp played Griffes’s “Roman Sketches,” opus 7, very French impressionistic. Susan Nisbett did Chopin’s Nocturne in F. And Steve Kline did Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.” Nigel was wonderfully animated, gesticulating, singing, conducting as though for an orchestra, and of course demonstrating. And what a difference when either Ignat or Nigel sits down and plays portions, no matter how well the student did beforehand! . . . In slack spaces I am putting in Kate Cohen’s corrections to the Greek-English lexicon on the computer. One file corrupted completely but I was able to restore it from the backup. So far so good. . . . But I tried scanning for the first time before leaving for Kinhaven on Friday and so far haven’t succeeded. Dimitri and Mache promise to work so that we can submit in July. We’ll see . . .

Monday, June 12, 2000

Kinhaven

Fine coaching from Nigel on the Satie and also a little on Bizet. The secret for Satie is no dynamics except what is indicated. Also crisp staccatos. The Bizet, he explained, is really a “Can-can.” We should play it as though for the Folies Bergère. Dan and I spent many hours practicing together, and separately, to try to apply what we were taught. In the evening, a splendid faculty recital. Nigel played Schubert’s Sonata in A (D 764) with absolute control and the ability, like Horowitz, to go from p to pp to ppp. He also trilled effortlessly with his 4th and 5th fingers. And did the final octaves with both hands at breakneck speed, a technical challenge that, so Leander told me, forces most pianists to neglect this sonata. Then Leander and Ignat played the Sonata in B-flat (D 617) for four hands, superbly. Afterwards, Nigel remarked to me that they are a perfectly matched duo team, and the best he has heard. The rest was less memorable. Nigel and Chonghgo did Fauré’s “Dolly” and then Chonghgo and Ignat played Mendelssohn’s “Andante and Variations,” opus 83a, technically brilliant but without the musical quality of the Schubert.

Tuesday, June 13, 2000

Kinhaven

Recital day! Dan and I practiced at 7:30 a.m. before breakfast. Everything still very vulnerable. I made new mistakes. But thankfully the actual performance went well. I think we did the Satie musically, in the style taught us so well by Nigel. And even the Bizet went off without serious problems. The other teams were mostly excellent, especially Kit and Sue doing the Liebeslieder Waltzer and Charlotte Armstrong and Robin Williams doing Schubert’s “Eight Variations in A-flat” (D 813). So, another year’s workshop came to a successful end.

Thursday, June 15, 2000

Terpni

Arrived yesterday afternoon. Nice to have the house open and ready, more or less. Today an orgy of shopping in Glens Falls to five different furniture stores to buy a new sofa-bed, which finally we did. Also some wooden cabinets for Chrysanthi to keep silverware so the mice cannot parade over them. Supper in a Chinese restaurant where we saw the woman who runs the Narrows. Sadly they won’t operate it this year, so no new trips for pizza overlooking Schroon Lake.

Saturday, June 17, 2000

Shapiros for dinner last night. I played the Satie, feeling very much in control. They’re looking for a CCRC but the prices are frightening. . . . I’ve been re-reading Mrs Dalloway. Exhilarating but also a bit tedious, alas. Also reading Bobby Gersten’s short history of Brant Lake Camp, full of reminiscences concerning people whom I remember vividly—e.g., Marv Kahn, the great pianist when I was a camper, and Joe Demmy. . . . Went to Rosine’s for the party celebrating Ellie’s graduation from high school. Her brother thinks he might like to teach English literature. Saw Bill Thomas there and talked again about my donation, not for the Black Hole but maybe to provide the New York Times and/or TLS in the library, or something for the school. Nice to see Laura and Mike (she’s retiring in November). Rosine and I will do four-hand piano in August; she has learned the secondo to the great Schubert F-minor Fantasie. Finally met David Greene, also Hornbeck, who builds the boats and wanted to know how I start my brush fires so well. . . . Then to Perrymans after supper. Art said he wanted to show me something. So we loaded into the truck and drove up a sort of mule track, up and up, behind Antler Lake, where he is building a ten-foot square log structure or lodge with a superb view of the whole green countryside. Notched logs, perfectly, of course. A hideaway; another hideaway. On our way back we saw a black bear and three cubs crossing the road. Also all the new homes around Antler Lake, some quite grand.

Sunday, June 18, 2000

Am trying out Karel Husa’s “Acht böhmische duette” for next year’s four-hand workshop. I think that Dan can do them.

Friday, June 30, 2000

To Glens Falls, Staples, to xerox 450 pages of Greek Today and post them to Dimitri. Four more lessons to do; I’ll post those on Monday. I’ve been sitting at the computer morning, afternoon, and night putting in all the final corrections. How good it will be to be finished with this. I do take an hour or so off each afternoon to weed in the garden—nice, mindless activity with an immediately visible result.

Monday, July 3, 2000

Again to Staples for xeroxing. Posted the remainder to Dimitri. An orgy of shopping at Price Chopper. Then a long, pleasant supper at Applebee’s with Mary and Maureen Fitzgerald, followed by another hour or so at their house, with continuous good talk.

Tuesday, July 4, 2000

Gary and Wendy McGinn arrived unexpectedly on their “bike,” a huge Suzuki motorcycle they just bought. I hope they don’t kill themselves. But it’s very sexy, to be sure. Afterwards, Don Kurka and the Morses came for supper. And yesterday we had a visit from Mylene, Daphne’s Filipino babysitter, who is vacationing on Loon Lake. Very social, all of a sudden. Don Kurka brought the New Yorker article on prostate cancer, not much new, except that sometimes if they cut the nerves to the penis they can graft on another nerve taken from the foot. But it still seems right that I had the radical prostatectomy instead of radiation or “watchful waiting.” The death from metastasized prostate cancer is excruciating and certain. . . . Am trying to learn Virgil Thomson’s “Synthetic Walzes.” Nowhere as interesting as Satie, alas.

Wednesday, July 5, 2000

Alec telephoned this morning from Pekalongan, with Theo’s squeals in the background. All’s well there, he says. Fiona was accepted to the same university that Monica attended, and goes off to start tomorrow.

July 5, 2000

POND SUMMERS

When early July’s

Arrival quieted the spring’s black flies

We spent green afternoons

Stretched on the moss

Beside dark Eagle Pond, and heard across

Its silences the calling of the loons.

The days swam by,

Lazy with slow content and the hawk’s cry.

We lost ambition’s rage,

Forgot it all,

Forgot Jane Kenyon, forgot Donald Hall,

And sleepily half-glanced at a bright page.

Day after day

We crossed the flaking railroad tracks and lay

In the slant August sun

To nap and read

Beneath an oak, by the pond’s pickerelweed.

Then acorns fell: These days were almost done.

—Donald Hall

Thursday, July 6, 2000

NYC

To AMTRAK in Rensselaer, then to Penn Station. What a shocking contrast to emerge there and then take the subway, after departing our sylvan paradise! Yale Club buffet very relaxing. Then to Patelson’s for four-hand music. Then Jeff’s limousine to the World Trade Center. Lectured on Mrs Dalloway. Not many lawyers this time but lots of other people, including Jeff’s oldest client, and his two uncles and a whole book club from Long Island. I think it went well. Oh, Robin Williams was there from Kinhaven. Afterwards, she, Chrysanthi, Jeff, and I had supper in a fancy restaurant on Central Park South that actually wasn’t particularly good, especially considering the prices. To bed at 12:30 a.m.

Friday, July 7, 2000

To Amagansett

Lovely breakfast on the 22nd floor. Then to Met Museum to see the “Painters in Paris” exhibit. Fabulous Picassos, my favorites being “The Blind Man’s Meal,” done in 1903 when he was 21 years old, and “Women in White” (1923). But I also liked Derain’s fanciful portrait of Lucien Gilbert (1906), Juan Gris’s “Violin and Playing Cards” (1913), Utrillo’s “Dorémy” (1935), and the Giacometti sculpture of “Three Men Walking” (1949). . . . Then to Penn Station and the Long Island Railroad to Amagansett. Noisy, crowded, but I was able to read (Yatromanolakis). Daphne’s rented house is a mansion—huge, with heated outdoor pool, tennis court, billiard table in the cellar, and whirlpool tubs, five television sets, etc., etc. Disgusting, really, but also very quiet and pleasant. Christina and I went swimming in the pool. She is being taught at a day-camp. Andrew now walks and runs with assurance, and makes noises that aren’t articulated words quite yet. Both children very friendly, which is a relief. Greg came on the 6:19 train; we barbecued steak for supper on the house’s super gas grill outdoors. All this luxury is shocking, but easy to get used to. Of course, people seeing our 300 acres and 3 houses at Terpni must think that we, too, are living in luxury, which we are, but it’s different because so much of the construction was homemade.

At the lecture last night, someone asked me why people keep diaries (referring to Virginia Woolf). In my own case it’s certainly not with any thought that these diary entries will be published or even read in holograph by anyone. It’s simply that, without this record, experience evaporates almost instantaneously into the ether and is lost. With this record, experience is nailed down, solidified, retained. Is that an adequate reason? Yes!

Saturday, July 8, 2000

Another swim in their delicious pool. Then to Amagansett riding academy to watch Christina’s lesson on a pony. The children groom the horse first, then saddle and bridle it, then walk, finally try to trot just a little. In another rink, an expert woman was doing dressage. Remarkable. The whole stable is quite obviously a playground for the rich: youngish mothers with their invariably blond children, and most of the riders (of all ages) women and girls. . . . Finished Yatromanolakis’s remarkable first novel, which I’ll review for World Literature Today; watched the Wimbledon women’s finals, very exciting, with a black American woman defeating a white one, both over six feet tall. . . . Andrew mouthed something like “Pappou” once or twice. Christina is in love with my comb, which she borrows morn and night to do her hair.

Thursday, July 13, 2000

To SPAC. Buffet at Hall of Springs, very disappointing, as it has been for several years. Then to a pre-performance talk in the Little Theater, which was a delight. The dancer Stephen Hanne moderated. The three speakers were O’Brien, who joined the company in its very first year and is now retired, Sean Lavery, the assistant to Peter Martins, and Hélène Alexopoulos. They reminisced about “Mr. B.” (Balanchine), “Jerry” (James Robbins) and Lincoln Kirstein, about first arriving in Saratoga in 1966, and in being told “This is a horse town, not a dance town”; about rain storms when the orchestra pit became flooded and members had to flee, with the conductor playing the rest of the ballet on a piano on stage, reading from the orchestra score (!); about lights failing in thunder storms, about a ballerina getting stung by a bee in the midst of a performance, about “Jerry’s” sense of inferiority compared to the incomparable genius Balanchine. Lots of laughs. Afterwards, I spoke personally to Alexopoulos, asking her how her parents reacted to her interest in ballet. “They supported me as a child because they never dreamed that I would make a career.” She is married with two 6½-year-old children, twins, and she worries because they’re not learning Greek (she speaks Greek herself). I’ll try to send her a copy of Greek Today when it’s ready.

Started another barrel-full of compost yesterday. The first batch was very successful, ready in three weeks. And the garden is now entirely civilized. We laid black paper along some of the edges, and mulched the blueberries. But in bending down to pick up the roll of black paper I heard a “crack” in my back and could hardly stand straight. Terrible time sleeping that night. It’s considerably better since, but still troublesome. Am I getting old?

The ballet tonight was lovely, as always. “Symphony in Three Movements” (Stravinsky/Balanchine), starting with the gorgeous line-up of girls, all in white, in two rows; “Mercurial Maneuvers” (Shostakovich/Wheeldon) with the marvelous Edward Liang, and Jenifer Ringer and Jock Soto, showing how lovely and satisfying a modern work can be (it premiered last April in New York); and finally the exciting “West Side Story Suite” (Bernstein/Robbins), with Damian Woetzel as one of the leads, dressed in T-shirt and blue jeans.

Tuesday, July 18, 2000

Long talk on the phone with Sue Halpern-McKibben concerning my intended donation of $10,000 to the Johnsburg Library Foundation, of which she is a trustee. She has a child at Farm and Wilderness, so we had lots to share. She told me that I was the first person to donate to the library in the start-up phase, and that I would be the first person to donate to the Foundation except for one of its trustees. The problem is to try to decide how the income from the endowment should be used. . . . Evelyn Rothstein invited us to supper, kindly. Aser as always was very articulate about his scientific progress. Actually not too much progress since last year because they had to find how to make significant quantities of elasticin, in order to begin testing with animals. They finally did manage, and the testing will now begin. Meanwhile they’ve discovered possible new uses for elasticin, for example in cosmetic surgery.

Wednesday, July 19, 2000

Fed Ex brought Dimitri’s latest—and final, I hope and pray—revision. Now: retyping again, pasting, xeroxing. And he telephoned from Athens with still more ideas that he had thought of on the plane. . . . To Saratoga with Don Kurka. Nice supper in Lillian’s Restaurant. Easy, continuous conversation about painting, literature, politics, old age. We saw “Concerto Barocco” (Bach/Balanchine), which leaves one with the feeling that nothing can possibly be wrong in the world, that evil does not exist: it is so perfect, chaste, pure. Next: Slonimsky’s “Earbox,” Very different (John Adams/Peter Martins). Not to my taste, really, but colorful and energetic. The second new ballet, “Appalachia Waltz” (choreography by Mahdaviani) was better, a very imaginative extension of square dance motifs, and engaging music played by cello, violin, and bass fiddle on stage. Last came “Symphony in C” (Bizet/Balanchine), the girls in tutus, very traditional and lovely.

Thursday, July 20, 2000

Russell Puschak came from the Johnsburg Library to go through the four cartons of books I had made ready, to see which might be kept for the collection and which should go for the book sale. He discovered Mr. Boyden’s prize book, given to me for having the highest average at Deerfield in my class. I almost lost that one. Separating from the rest is hard; they’ve all been meaningful to me, and in some cases to my father (biographies of Morris Cohen, Mr. Justice Holmes, William James, Santayana). But they really must go. . . . I decided, talking to Russell and after speaking to Sue Halpern, to ask that my $10,000 gift be used to inaugurate a periodical fund, perhaps to start with the daily New York Times.

Friday, July 21, 2000

More ballet. “Mozartiana” (Tschaikovsky/Balanchine), gorgeous, with children, Kyra Nichols, and of course Woetzel. A Balanchine style that I’ve never seen before. “In the Night” (Chopin/Robbins) suffers by comparison with Balanchine. Very romantic and even sexy but lacks the Balanchine spark. Finally “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet”: Brahms’s juicy music orchestrated with full color by Schoenberg and beautifully danced—another of Balanchine’s triumphs. Saw Mel and Herb Goertz there. He very friendly, she withdrawn. I think that she must be a mental case; she looked sick. At Lillian’s Restaurant, before, the young waitress, when I said I was going to the ballet, admitted that she had never been, although she lives in Saratoga. I thought of her during the performance: what a miracle she is missing, right in her back yard.

Sunday, July 23, 2000

Hanover

Driving over last night I listened to Garrison Keillor telling jokes. One was: “What happens when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian? You get someone who knocks on the door and doesn’t know what to say.” I used this as a text for ministry this morning, changing Unitarian to Quaker, of course, and going on to venture that if we say anything we’ve got to learn to base our faith on truth, namely the naturalistic basis of everything, including what used to be called soul or spirit. I was thinking of course of the genome project and my conversation with Aser the other night. It was a good, centered Meeting, with others taking up the theme appropriately, especially Hugh and Rhea, she telling about a scary time when she was lost in the woods and he, later, stressing that a compass always gets you through. . . . At Business Meeting we did the budget, with Friends deciding to spend more and more. Let’s hope they contribute. . . . In the evening I attended ALPS supper, then skits night, full of fun and lots of fluent Italian, French, Japanese, even Greek. The Greek skit was based on my story about the girls in Thessaloniki who asked how to get to the train station and the Greeks arguing amongst themselves regarding the best way and forgetting the girls, whom I put in a taxi, telling the driver to take them to the station.

Monday, July 24, 2000

Nice lunch with Robert Binswanger. Penny is 85% cured of her cancer, and continues for life with a medication. He has been elected president of the Hampton College Board, a white man presiding over a black college. He’ll return to Dartmouth winter and spring to teach in Rockefeller.

Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Hanover–Riparius

Supper with Mother. She’s stable, the same, much diminished in “cognitive facility.” But she has a good appetite and can still walk . . . slowly.

Wednesday, July 26, 2000

Working on what I hope is the final revision of Greek Today. I visited Phyllis Deutsch on Monday and had a good preliminary talk. Promised her the full MS by next week. And Aspasia blitzed me from Athens. She has finished the translation and will deliver it tomorrow to the University of Crete Press. Good. Two projects nearing some resolution.

Saturday, July 29, 1999

A nice poem by a friend (TLS June 30, 2000, p. 28):

THE DEPARTURE

At first a boiling from within. The heart

pounds and the groin thumps

with an all but irresistible

pull drawing me to you or her to him.

Later a cooling curls the corners up.

One finds a peaceful perch from which (as in

a nineteenth-century novel or a story

by Katherine Mansfield, matrons at a dance

sit on little gilded chairs against

one wall and watch their daughters waltz) to view

the widening gap between the self

and all it recently so fiercely wanted.

The focus on the tricky glancing mirror

can’t be sustained in this new stolid land

whose reigning deity, till yesterday

beautiful, young, trembling with urgency,

myopic now, thick-bodied, stoical,

struggles to his feet and walks away

toward a dark stream in a shady grove

without a backward look.

—Rachel Hadas

To Friends Lake Inn at 8:00 p.m. for a surprise 70th birthday party for Don Kurka, hosted (and paid for) by his daughter Mara. Son Karel up from Florida, old friends from Long Island, plus the local friends: Tortoras, Morses, and some new ones we met. And what a good meal! Then we all gathered in a function room for birthday cake and coffee and good cheer. I hadn’t realized that a place as sophisticated as Friends Lake Inn was in our vicinity.

Monday, July 31, 2000

A day to remember: I finished Greek Today! (At least for now.) To Staples to xerox it. Tomorrow I’ll post it to Phyllis Deutsch at the Press.

Thursday, August 1, 2000

I worked hard doing nothing—wrote letters, played the piano, read a little Whittier, arranged more books in the Guest House. In the afternoon we went to the Shapiros to see Milly Adler, who was in great form talking about Jack Adler and Sharon. . . . Later, Leander and Sophia arrived. Sophia so mute, but with a beautiful smile, and of course eats nothing. Nice dinner with Alec, Monica, Theo, Leander, Sophia. . . . I wrote to Meg, whose sister Liz is dying of pancreatic cancer. Also, Adam Lindsay wrote that his brother Angus died of a brain tumor. We remember them as beautiful children at the Quaker School in Thessaloniki.

Friday, August 4, 2000

An interesting day. The forester Ross Morgan walked Alec, Leander, and me through the woods in the morning for three hours and filled us with knowledge and information. Among other things he showed me how beneficial my thinning had turned out, over the years. He’ll return next week. Leander wants to cooperate, as do I. Alec hesitates because he fears that cooperating with RCPA will label him as a “green” and he wants to be free of labels here. We’ll see . . . Then in the afternoon Alec and I did another half of the south field, trimming branches that interfere with mowing. I used the long Stihl, much better this year than last. One needs technique in this, too. . . . Then Rosine came and we played for 1½ hours, Schubert’s F-minor “Fantasie” (wow!), Arensky, Bizet. She’s very good. As Leander keeps saying, it’s a shame that I am “stuck” with Dan. But friendship is also important. . . . After supper, Leander played the Husa with me. Too difficult for Dan, we concluded, except perhaps for two of the items. . . . At the office, I’m working now on Kazantzakis and Hitler, for the Australian JMGS.

Tuesday, August 8, 2000

Did as much as I could on Kazantzakis and Hitler; need access now to my study in Hanover for all the missing quotes. So I started copy-editing Brenda Marder’s Stewards of the Land, which she had scanned. Monica solved the problem with the scanning that had prevented me from extending the margins. It was a question of frames, which need to be removed. . . . Alec and I have been trimming back all overhanging branches in the south field, a big job. Finished yesterday and today gathered up all the piles and brought them to the central pile for eventual burning. At 3:30 Rosine came, so I descended the tractor and played Schubert and Mozart in my dungarees and work boots. Then back onto the tractor to finish the job. Only here can one have this delicious variety. Deanna and Nicholas are here, adding to the complexity of supper in a nice way. Deanna and Monica have pledged to provide dessert each evening. Daphne telephoned to remind me that I never paid rent this year (!), so I’m mailing $750 to Paine Webber tomorrow.

Thursday, August 17, 2000

Put the tractor up on blocks this afternoon, with Alec’s help. Serviced the Jari and the Troy Bilt. Yesterday finished mowing the south field. Και του χρόνου! We felled a very nice balsam that Leander felt too close to his house, barked it, and placed it in the pole barn for possible future use. . . . Today worked on MGSA business, preparing the agenda for September’s meeting. Yesterday finished another chapter of Stewards of the Land. I’ve done front matter, chapters, 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, and the epilogue. Good research, terrible writing, but it’s easy to fix. . . . Now must start preparing for my Cosmos Club lecture on Odysseus across the centuries. The boys went to Hanover on Tuesday and brought back a new book from Baker that discusses the Ajax and the Philoctetes à propos. . . . But I also have all the Translation Prize submissions to read, and Constantinidis’s dissertation on Greek theater. Too much, as usual. . . . Lovely visit on Monday from Joan and Tom Wilson. Learned more about her background. She spent her girlhood in Sofia, where her father was headmaster of a near-eastern college; also in Beirut later. They hope to be in Kendal before we get there. . . . Also nice visit from Art and Chris, with Art telling us at great length about his boyhood and his early career as a trooper. And Hilda Grunblatt came a few days ago, also to see our family and tell about hers. She still hasn’t edited Jacques’ memoirs but hopes to do so at some point. Life here with the five grandchildren and their parents is very noisy. But more pleasant than unpleasant, although there are moments of the latter. Supper is not peaceful. Two days ago we escaped to Schroon Lake pizza with the McGinns; that was better. But Christina and Sophia play well together. Andrew is delightful, and Nicholas and Theo always sources of a laugh. But when Andrew cries all morning and Christina throws a tantrum, poor Daphne is ready to scream and so are we. Chrysanthi of course keeps everyone sane. . . . Daphne and Greg are seriously interested in buying the Shapiros’ house on McCarthy Road. We’ll see . . . I’m writing this lying in bed in the Guest House, where Chrysanthi and I have migrated since Daphne’s arrival. Filled now with my books, it is extraordinarily pleasant.

Saturday, August 19, 2000

Terpni

Dan Seeger arrived yesterday afternoon, fresh from Canadian Yearly Meeting and his move to Lumberton Leas. This morning Leander and I played the Thomson Synthetic Waltzes for him and he liked them well enough. We also did three of the Husa pieces. So Leander says, learn all of these and we’ll see what is best next June. . . . Then we all went to Irv and Fran’s, which Daphne and Greg are thinking of buying. And so they did, for about $300,000. We walked through the woods. Disappointing, because clearly lumbered recently (which Irv knew nothing about); lots of pine but not much else. In need of thinning rather than cutting at present. . . . Dan and I had lunch at the Caboose overlooking the Hudson, and the train arrived, full of tourists. In the afternoon we played our Satie, still OK, and Bizet (not so OK). Then guests began to arrive. The children had planned a 70th birthday/50th Terpni anniversary party for me. Fran and Irv, Mike and Laura, Art, Chris, and Arthur, Dan, Don Kurka. They made a feast: shrimp cocktail, prime ribs, corn, birthday cake (made by Christina and Sophia). Christina, the perfect little hostess, offered drinks. Don Kurka videotaped everyone on his superb digital camera and interviewed all the children regarding me, I fear. He’ll send us the tape next week. Chrysanthi in her interview said all the important things: that she is so glad she had three children who like each other and get along, and five grandchildren who seem also to be friends. I stressed the role of the farm in the children’s lives. All in all it was a lovely gesture on the children’s part, although I don’t feel 70.

August 30, 2000

Finished my “Odysseus Across the Centuries” lecture after reducing its length by about 30%. Sent Brenda’s sample chapters off to Mercer University Press. Started reading submissions for the Elizabeth Constantindes Translation Prize. . . . Leander gave me a 1½ hour lesson on Thomson’s “Synthetic Waltzes,” with lots of helpful comments pertaining to Dan’s part. I’m liking the piece more and more. . . . In the afternoon, Ross Morgan came, and Leander and I went with him to survey Shapiro’s forest. Marie McCarthy drove up, thinking we were intruders, but we explained everything. We discovered some boundary lines, quite close to the house, and also considerable logging obviously directed by a forester, so presumably not on Irv’s property. When we get the tax maps next week we should understand better precisely where the boundaries are. But on Irv’s land there is lots of pine. Ross thought they could harvest $50,000 worth straightway. . . . Yesterday did lots of chipping. The new machine is a great addition.

August 31, 2000

Leander and I drove to Newcomb to meet the contractor Dan Turcott, who brought us to some homes he had renovated in an exclusive private development around a lake. The lots go for $48,000 each, 100-foot frontage, about one-half acre each. I knew Daphne would be happy. Beautiful work, including staircases. Maybe he can build one for us. . . . Did more trimming with the Stihl pole trimmer. . . . After supper, ice cream at the Caboose, getting to be a sort of ritual for us now.

Sunday, September 3, 2000

To Albany for Shandra Trautwein’s wedding, performed by her minister, a very nice Christian service, tender and inoffensive. Brent was there, of course, to give her away, dressed in a tuxedo. I didn’t recognize him; it’s been 20 years, but as soon as we identified each other the old friendship resumed. Had time to speak also with Bob and Kelly Nestle and their daughter. And an interesting young man from India who will be entering an arranged marriage soon. Niki Trautwein, now a jazz saxophonist, supplied the music with his combo, and very well indeed. He told me he loves Kazantzakis.

Tuesday, September 5, 2000

To Don Kurka’s on Garnet Lake for supper preceded by a long walk along the lake. While he cooked, Chrysanthi and I viewed the video he took at our celebration on August 19. Lovely. Besides pictures of Christina and the other grandchildren, he sequestered each of the three children plus Dan Seeger and interviewed them regarding their feelings toward me and the experience of growing up at Terpni. Of course they spoke movingly; indeed, I was embarrassed hearing their remarks. Interestingly, among other things, they all said that from me they learned how to work. Don also interviewed me, and Chrysanthi. I appreciated the fact that for 50 years we could spend our summers without television, radio, or newspapers. And how meaningful Terpni has been not just for me personally but for the entire family. Chrysanthi of course gave thanks for health, bodily and spiritually.

Wednesday, September 6, 2000

To Queensbury to sup with Mary and Maureen, followed by a long coffee at their home. Very pleasant, as always. Maureen wants to read Mann’s Magic Mountain after listening to my description of it.

Thursday, September 7, 2000

Put my office away for the winter. And I’d finished extensive pruning of the plum and cherry trees and the apple tree a week or so ago. Now pruned the blueberries. Affixed shutters, etc. It’s sad to close the place, but part of our accustomed yin-yang existence.

Saturday, September 9, 2000

To Hanover

Drained the water, including the pipe that I couldn’t do last year and that presumably caused the frozen pipe. Breakfast at McDonald’s. In Hanover, picked up Quaker treasurer’s mail, Sanborn mail, xeroxed Joyce’s chart for Washington, sent everything by Fed Ex. . . . To Kendal for supper with Mother, who looked fine but was very closed within herself, as always. We showed pictures of family from the summer.

Sunday, September 10, 2000

To Cape May Point

Flew to Philadelphia. Exiting the plane onto the tarmac was like going outdoors in Indonesia: into an oven. . . . Drove to Cape May Point. First session of the Pendle Hill staff retreat was very lively owing to two fine facilitators, a white male married to a black female. The subject was diversity. But the main benefit I think was the relaxed atmosphere in which the full staff and some trustees could listen to each other and appreciate the generic seeking involved. . . . I walked down to the beach afterwards on this moonlit night. Calm sea, gentle breakers, skimmers (birds) pecking away to bring out tiny creatures just below the surface of the sand. Old houses ca. 1875 everywhere; a peaceful setting.

Monday, September 11, 2000

Another session with the facilitators. Then a free afternoon, but Steve Baumgartner wanted to meet with me, so we spent a half hour together and then Gay Berger wanted to be briefed on Rebecca’s failure to communicate, apparently, with Van der Merwe in South Africa (Rebecca told me that her computer was down for three weeks, but surely she could have used someone else’s). After supper, skits and songs, including one that Rebecca cooked up for me and herself and two others: a simulated Publications Committee meeting in which the committee differed diametrically on a manuscript and we resolved the difference by consulting an oracle: a fish that sings. My part was to condemn the submissions’ fancy language by using even fancier language myself in support of plain talk! This got some good laughs from the audience. A jolly time. There was even a song by Doug Gwyn, recorded from a previous year. And of course Sandra (now no longer living with Sue Morrison) sang a fervent song in Spanish.

Tuesday, September 12, 2000

Cape May–Atlantic City–Lumberton–Princeton

Steve Baumgartner initiated us into his strategic planning process. I was assigned to the “Stewardship of the Faith” discussion group and made a speech about faith based on truth, including scientific truth, and perhaps the realization that everything is materialistic, so that the older concepts of spirit and soul are no longer valid. . . . After lunch I drove to Dan Seeger’s, stopping at Atlantic City out of curiosity. I went into Caesar’s and Bally’s: hundreds if not thousands of slot machines with addicts engrossed. In Caesar’s also blackjack and roulette. An amazing sight. The boardwalk was crowded. Huge hotels to house the gamblers. I was glad to leave. . . . Dan’s new house in Lumberton is lovely—large rooms, light-filled, nicely designed. He of course has devised ingenious ways to house his computer, TV, etc. We played Thomson’s “Synthetic Waltzes” and Husa, not badly for the first try. He gave me a tour of the area, including the infamous airport that threatens to extend its runway. And he cooked a dinner for the two of us: a roast, couscous, vegetables. And a splendid pastry (boughten) for dessert. We’re planning subsequent meetings already. . . . Got to Princeton at 10:45 p.m. Couldn’t get into Palmer House because the phone to the Security Office was broken. Walked there. Finally got in by 11:30 p.m.

Wednesday, September 13, 2000

Princeton

Good session with Dimitri, who did a careful vetting of Appendix C & D. Over lunch we discussed the MGSA agenda, committee structure, symposium arrangements, etc., then returned for more work on Greek Today. Saw Theano’s cover but didn’t like it. Dimitri is going to pay $5000 of my rent in spring term, in exchange for which I’ll deposit $5000 in the Greek Fund at Dartmouth and pay Θεανώ. Afterwards, we started designing mandates for MGSA committees. . . . Then to Mike Keeley’s to talk about the Farm School. He says that David Buck’s reliance on Barry Fieckman is deeply resented by the Greeks. Mike also wonders who’ll be the next board chair. Mimi wants it but is a dictator. Drackus wants it but doesn’t seem too smart. Best would be John Cleave. Mike even suggested me. Horrors! Then he, Mary, Dimitri, and I went to a nice pizza place, packed with very un-college-like Princeton inhabitants, for a leisurely supper.

Thursday, September 14, 2000

Princeton

Continued with Dimitri writing mandates. Met Don Skemer accidentally in Firestone and sat with him for an hour while he had lunch. He had returned recently from Greece—Meteora, etc. He is not concerned if we extend the ten-year prohibition period for MGSA archives. . . . Got Valtinos’s Στοιχεία για τη δεκαετία του ’60 so that I can see the Greek while I review the English for WLT. . . . To lunch at the Annex with Mache (pregnant again) and Φιλοθέη Κολίτση, whom I’d known both in Thessaloniki and Cambridge. She’s now a fellow at Princeton for the year, a very sweet young lady. . . . A bit more with Dimitri, then drove to Philadelphia for supper with Alec, Monica, and a rather restless Theo. Alec has had a good beginning at school despite a leaking roof (which actually helps bind people together). Monica is infinitely patient with Theo, as always. . . . Overnight at Pendle Hill.

Friday, September 15, 2000

Pendle Hill

After Meeting, Richard Barnes interviewed me for Steve Baumgartner’s Strategic Plan. Two hours, very pleasant, because the questions drew out many good memories about my religious life in general and my association with Pendle Hill in particular. I stressed the need for a Quaker theology consistent with “Truth” as it is now understood. And the need for Quaker-based communities. . . . Then a long long lunch with Rebecca about publications policy, especially her desire to integrate Paul Rasor’s forum publications into the overall publications program. Steve wants to increase publications and also to hire a professional to supplement (replace?) Rebecca. . . . Then a haircut. Then ice cream in the mall. . . . The board meeting was my first as recording secretary, so I sat behind my computer. Easy agenda. The best will come tomorrow.

Saturday, September 16, 2000

Today’s board was extraordinary. Steve has created a very new atmosphere of forthrightness, clear speaking, honesty. He led us through difficult questions: What we really think Pendle Hill’s mission is? Who do we really serve? What do we really think about the resident program, the week-long courses, the extension program? What inhibits change? Most of the time was spent on the resident program, the consensus being that it doesn’t work and must be either abolished or radically changed. Good. I mentioned the case of Fircroft College in Birmingham, whose governors closed it for several years, firing all personnel, while they redesigned it. Steve is determined to do something. He agreed with me that, to some extent, we have been “held hostage” by the core teachers and that a new diversity of subject matter and personnel is needed. But Bill Newman is convinced that there are no longer enough people who can come for 10, 20, or 30 weeks, and pay. We hope he’s wrong—that by redesigning the program we can make it work.

AMTRAK to Washington. Supper leisurely in Union Station. Then to Kennedy Center to meet Deanna and attend a most wonderful concert by the National Symphony, devoted entirely to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as orchestrated by Mahler. In the first part, Leonard Slatkin explained, with numerous musical examples played by the orchestra, exactly what Mahler did and why he did it: added more instruments, rewrote parts for horns, trombones, and flute, all of which were limited in Beethoven’s day compared to Mahler’s (e.g. horns could not play a chromatic scale), made adjustments so that melodic voices could be better heard, etc. In each case, Beethoven’s original was played first, then Mahler’s revision, the difference always obvious. Then, after an interval, the orchestra did the entire 9th. It was stirring and of course especially the final movement with soloists and chorus. At the end, the audience exploded and rose as one body to its feet to give a prolonged standing ovation, something I’ve never experienced before. . . . Sorry I’ll miss the Balanchine ballets tomorrow, but they’re sold out. Drove home with Deanna, who is now teaching a student, a sixteen-year-old Romanian boy who is being subsidized by the National Symphony’s endowment for this purpose. How nice!

Sunday, September 17, 2000

North Potomac

Lovely, excited greeting by Sophia: Pappou! But Nicholas seems not to have remembered me, which is OK, given his tender age. Deanna outdid herself for breakfast: bacon and French toast. Leander gave me another fine lesson on the Synthetic Waltzes, on his beautifully rebuilt piano.

Monday, September 18, 2000

Washington

We delivered Sophia to her play-school at 9:00 a.m. She went in without objection or hesitation, contrary to last year’s behavior. Metro to Dupont Circle. Left my luggage at the Cosmos Club; took the Georgetown University shuttle to the campus. Conferred at length with Jim Alatis’s assistant, Ai-Hui Tam, a lovely Singaporian. Then met with Jim, toured the various auditoriums and restaurants that we may use for our MGSA symposium next year. After lunch at the Faculty Club, met with sales agent at the convention center, which has everything we need but is very expensive. I then taxied to a local hotel to see about rooms there and a possible banquet. Back to the Cosmos Club. Supper with Ann and Sperry Lea, Jim and Marge Warren. Greg Nagy arrived in time, from Cambridge, where he commutes to teach once a week, to introduce me very exaggeratedly saying that I was responsible for the addition of Modern Greek to Harvard (!). Very friendly indeed. Amazing to see Lelia Washburn again. Jim and Penny Alatis came as did Senator and Mrs. Sarbanes and Ambassador Philou, so this was really quite a grand affair. My lecture, “Odysseus Across the Centuries,” apparently went well. Ann said it was the best they’d ever had. Lots of questions afterward, most of which I could answer, more or less. Then I was able to sit with Greg for a few moments. Asked about Meg’s book, why the long delay. He said it was mostly Meg’s fault: her alcoholism and “that dreadful man,” Michael, who has removed her from the academic world. But the book will probably be published soon. He surprised me by remembering my suggestion that we collaborate on a festschrift for Meg. We’ll talk further after the conference on ritual in the spring. I asked him as well about the 2nd person used with Eumaeus in Book XII of the Odyssey. Kelly Nestle had asked me at Shandra’s wedding. He said it’s a locution used for oracles and gods, and shows that Eumaeus is much more than a simple swineherd.

Tuesday, September 19, 2000

AMTRAK

Long trip by train from Union Station to White River Junction—11 hours. Did more copyediting of Brenda’s deficient prose and some corrections in Greek Today. And read some more in Valtinos’s novel, which continues to be fascinating.

Saturday, September 23, 2000

Chrysanthi went to New York on Thursday to babysit this weekend while Greg and Daphne go to Petra Schumann’s wedding in San Jose, California. I had a good evening of music with Dick—some new pieces that he discovered, and Prokofiev’s sonata, lovely but hard. There’s a Beethoven that I hope we’ll do with Allan next week, also. . . . Out of the blue, I’ve been invited to Australia to give the keynote address at the MGSAAZ conference there, November 23–26. I think that Stylianos is chiefly responsible, although the invitation came from Vrasidas Karalis, head of department. I’ll go, and will miss Thanksgiving at Leander’s.

Monday, September 25, 2000

Visited UPNE. They’re very negative, refusing to take the revisions I’d prepared. Said all revisions must be done after copyediting, by hand. Ugh!

Tuesday, September 26, 2000

Had lipid profile done yesterday. My cholesterol is up again to 225. Not bad, but not good. Gerber wants me to resume the Lipitor drug, which I’ll do after we return from Greece. Chrysanthi returned on AMTRAK at 6:30 and we went directly to John and Mary’s for supper. John in good form, exulting in the new office he created by adding a room. He expects to continue forever, it seems.

Wednesday, September 27, 2000

Jim Sharpe and John Bodnar from Paine Webber are trying to help us avoid death taxes. They suggest a “CRUD” trust, enabling a large sum to go to charity, thus decreasing the estate and producing a sizable tax deduction plus annual income of, say, 8% of the principal, for life. Added to that could be a Bien Public Foundation, enabling the children to continue to give to charity after our deaths, and life insurance, which would pay to the children the equivalent of what we removed from the estate, but without tax consequences for them (although we’d need to pay high annual premiums). Let’s wait to see who is elected on November 7, Gore or Bush, since that will affect the disposition of the estate tax.

September 28, 2000

Meetings all day today. First, Webster Performance Series Committee over breakfast. Sally Pinkas charming and vivacious, as always. Lisa Mayer has already booked the entire year, so we’re fine. I contributed two programs, one by the thirteen-year-old child prodigy I heard in the hospital last year, another by Mrs. Shin. Next, lunch at the Dickey Center with the new War/Peace Fellows, a lovely group of about 15 students, including Alexios Monopoulos. Each one recited briefly what brought him or her to want to be a Fellow. What a fine group! For the first time, I feel saddened that I’ve lost contacts with young people, but perhaps I’ll have some in the future. Alexios wants me to advise him in setting up a War/Peace Studies minor. Afterwards, Ron Edsforth expressed his delight at the turnout and thanked me profusely for having invited him to take over the introductory course. He’s now coordinating the entire program. We’re very fortunate, for his heart and soul are dedicated to this endeavor. . . . Finally a private meeting with Tom Corindia at the Meeting House to prepare for the finance committee plus trustees’ meeting on Monday to clarify how we’re going to finance the reconstruction. Tom prepared excellent tables showing the consequences of various strategies over a ten-year period.

Friday, September 29, 2000

To New York

Lovely flight to LaGuardia, including the circling of Manhattan on this beautifully clear day. We flew down the Hudson, then over the Statue of Liberty, and back along the East River, affording the best view of this unbelievable city that I’ve ever experienced. . . . Three hours with Daphne, Greg, and the children, including supper (Vietnamese take-out). I brought them English cheese—double Gloucester and Wensleydale. Christina and Andrew all smiles, laughter, and unquenchable vitality. But Andrew still doesn’t really talk, although he understands much. Daphne is discouraged by all the fuss necessary for Christina to be accepted to kindergarten next year, including interviews with the child plus both parents (requiring Greg to miss work). Among other places,, they’re looking at Friends Seminary. But they still hope to move to New Jersey if they can find a house in Rumson or vicinity.

I read over my “Kazantzakis’s Attitude Toward Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s,” prepared for JMGAAZ, but also part of my volume 2 of Politics of the Spirit. Over the last two weeks I had laboriously entered the extensive quotes. Now it reads very well indeed. I was very pleased by the writing.

Saturday, September 30, 2000

Princeton

Comfortably housed in Palmer House again for our MGSA Executive Board meeting today and tomorrow. Today’s meeting went well; we made progress especially on the symposium and its venue. Then there was a nice reception, still in Palmer House, after which John and Nancy Iatrides, Victor Papacosma, Jerry Augustinos, and Mike and Mary Keeley, and I went to the Nassau Inn for a leisurely supper, where I was able to bring Mike up to date on our deliberations.

Sunday, October 1, 2000

Princeton–New York City

A very useful morning meeting where we went over the entire committee structure holistically, making many changes. Also began to think of an updating of Stratos Constantindis’s bibliography. Then I drove to Manhattan with John and Nancy, who left me at the Columbia University subway, 116th and Broadway.

Wednesday, October 4, 2000

Took Alexios Monopoulos to lunch. He’s a sophomore who wants to minor in Peace Studies in addition to completing a geography-modified major by the end of his junior year so that he can be a Senior Fellow in his final year. Wow! And he has already done a research project in Greece, all on his laptop, which he foolishly packed in checked luggage, whereupon it was stolen. But how nice to see a student like this at Dartmouth!

Thursday, October 5, 2000

Dickey reception for faculty. Professor Joseph is returning. I worked with his wife Jennifer for years on English 1–2 and Intensive Academic Support. It will be nice to see her again. How good that through the Dickey Center I still have this connection with Dartmouth! And I saw Rosemary Rieser on Tuesday at the Laasperes’ for dinner: memories of Leonard, John C. Baker, Elise Boulding and all we did together to get Peace Studies started and to keep it going.

Saturday, October 7, 2000

Zürich-Athens

Long layover in Zürich, where we enjoyed the food and especially the French-style coffee. Arrived late in Athens and alas one of our two checked valises didn’t arrive, happily Chrysanthi’s, with clothing only, and not mine, which has all the books I need for teaching. With luck the valise will arrive . . . sometime.

Sunday, October 8, 2000

Hotel Fenixs (Phoenix)

Η Θεανώ had a family emergency. I’ll see her next Saturday. But Aspasia came, with Christos. We went to the πλατεία to a tavern and had a nice leisurely lunch. I learned that Aspasia είναι φιλόλογος και διδάσκει σε ένα γυμνάσιο στις Ελευσίνες, που πρέπει κάθε μέρα να πηγαίνει με τ’ αυτοκίνητό της μια ώρα, ή δύο αν έχει κίνηση. Πρέπει να γράψω έναν σύντομο πρόλογο για την ελληνική έκδοση του βιβλίου μου. Της είπα και να περιμένει κάποτε έναν 2ον τόμο. Από το Χρήστο μάθαμε με λεπτομέρειες την πρόοδο για την υπόθεση των αυτιστικών. Θα κτιστούν τώρα δύο-τρία σπίτια, το ένα στα Γιάννινα, το άλλο στον Βόλο, με πιθανότητα ότι και άλλα θα κτιστούν. Και ο Χρήστος είναι τώρα διάσημος στον κόσμο ετούτο. Π.χ. είναι ο μόνος από την Ελλάδα που πήρε πρόσκληση να πάει σε ένα διεθνές συμπόσιο στο Washington, και μεθαύριο θα πάει για άλλα συμπόσια στη Γαλλία. Είχε βγάλει και 5-6 βιβλιοράκια για τους αυτιστικούς. Και συνεχίζει να εκδίνει το περιοδικό Θέματα λογοτεχνίας που λέει η Τζίνα Πολίτη ότι είναι το κορυφαίο λογοτεχνικό περιοδικό. Είναι και 70 χρονώ, οπώς είμαι κι εγώ. Μάθαμε επίσης για την μεγάλη περιπέτειά του να μεταφέρει τον Παύλο στην Αγγλία. Έπρεπε σιγά-σιγά να ετοιμάσει το γιο για την αλλαγή, με φωτογραφίες από το ίδρυμα που θα πήγαινε, νότια από το Birmingham, ακόμα με ένα βίντεο δείχνοντας τους κάτοικους, το περιβάλλον, κτλ. Πάντως, όταν ήρθε πια η μέρα αναχώρησης ο Παύλος δεχόταν στην αρχή αλλά στο τραίνο από το Βόλο ξαφνικά αντιστάθηκε βιαίως, σκληρίζοντας τόσα δυνατά που όλος ο κόσμος έφυγε από το βαγόνι. Ύστερα κάλμαρε πάλι, ώστε κατάφερε ο Χρήστος να τον φέρει στην Αγγλία, οπού τώρα είναι σχετικά ευχαριστημένος. . . . Ύστερα μας πήγε η Ασπασία στο Σύνταγμα, για να δοκιμάσουμε το καινούργιο Μετρό. Οι αποβάθρες (platforms) είναι πανόμορφες, όλα μάρμαρα, και στολισμένες με τα ευρήματα των ανασκαφών. Πήγαμε στο σπίτι του Χρήστου για να δούμε την Έρη και την Ασπασία-Μαρία, που μεγάλωσε πολύ και μπήκε τώρα στην πρώτη γυμνασίου, στο Αρσάκιον. Μιλάει πολύ αθηναϊκά. Η Έρη μου είπε ότι ο Ροϊλός, που διδάσκει τώρα στο Harvard, ήταν δικός της φοιτητής. Ο Χρήστος μου έδωσε μια καινούργια μετάφραση των άρθων του George Thomson και μου διάβασε δύο σελίδες από το άρθρο του πάνω στην «Τέταρτη διάσταση» του Ρίτσου, που μοιάζει, όπως φαίνεται, με τη Σιγή του Καζαντζάκη και νομίζω και του Beckett. Θα ήταν ωραίο να συνεργαστούμε, γράφοντας ένα πιο πλήρες άρθρο πάνω σ’ αυτό το θέμα. Ίσως θα εκδόσει τη διάλεξη που ετοιμάζω τώρα για το Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο πάνω στην Οδύσεια του Καζαντζάκη.

Ξέχασα να γράψω ότι στην πτήση από τη Zürich ο διπλανός μας ήταν ένας καθηγητής καλσσικών σπουδών στην Κύπρο. Μιλήσαμε ωραία για δυο ώρες, στ’ ελληνικά εννοείται. Και όταν φτάσαμε στην Αθήνα είχαμε άλλη περιπέτεια αφού μία από τις δύο αποσκευές δεν ήρθε. Ευτυχώς αυτή που ήρξε ήταν η δική μου, με τα βιβλία μου. Της Χρυσάνθης είχε μονάχα ρούχα, αλλά και φάρμακα και δώρα. Συμπληρώσαμε ένα χαρτί, και φτάσαμε στο ξενοδοχείο στις 2:00 το πρωί. Και την Κυριακή δεν ήρξε. Φεύγοντας από του Χρήστου, πήγαμε ξανά στο ανατολικό αεροδρόμιο και μιλήσαμε με τον κατάλληλο άνθρωπο, ένας πολύ καλός τύπος που φροντίζει αν και δεν περιμένει να μας ξαναδεί.

Monday, October 9, 2000

Αθήνα—Θεσσαλονίκη

Στο ρεσεπσιόν μάθαμε ότι η βαλίτσα η χαμένη είχε φτάσει. Ωραία. Μάθαμε επίσης ότι η Ολυμπιακή Αεροπορία θά ’χει απεργία, αλλά ευτυχώς όχι σήμερα. Θά ’ρχισε αύριο. Επίσης προβλέποναι καταιγίδες στα βόρεια μέρη. Θα φτάσουμε στη Θεσσαλονίκη σήμερα; Στο αεροδρόμιο ακούσαμε ότι η πτήση μας θα έχει καθυστέρηση λόγω καθυστερημένη άφιξη του αεροσκάφου. Έτσι περιμέναμε. Στην Ελλάδα πρέπει νά ’χεις υπομονή και γαλήνη. Πετάξαμε επιτέλους και προσγηωθήκαμε μέσα στη βροχή και μαύρα σύνεφα, αλλά εν τάξει. Μας περίμεναν και ο Γιώργος και ο Οδυσσέας και η Βούλη. Η Βούλη μας πήρε στη Σχολή, στο Cincinnati Hall. Το βράδι όλοι οι σύμβουλοι πήγαν για φαγητό στο σπίτι του Γιάννη Βεζύρογλου στο Πανόραμα, πολυτελέστατο. Είδα εκεί και τον Καθηγητή Κολιόπουλο, τον ιστορικό, και τη γυναίκα του, που διεύθυνε την αμερικανική βιβλιοθήκη.

Tuesday, October 10, 2000

American Farm School

Κάθε μέρα πηγαίνω στη σύναξη (assembly) των παιδιών στις 7:45 π.μ. Αρχίζει με ένα χωρίο του Ευαγγελίου στο πρωτότυπο, ύστερα στ’ αγγλικά. Μετά έχουν έναν ύμνο και μια προσευχή. Ύστερα, ένας μαθητής μιλάει πάνω σ’ ένα θέμα—π.χ. το χωριό του, τη τατουάζ (tattooing), τα καράβια, τον μακεδονικικόν αγώνα. Τελευταία, ο διευθυντής σχολείου ο Σωκράτης Αδαμίδης μιλάει για το πρόγραμμα της ημέρας. . . . Σήμερα εμείς οι σύμβουλοι αρχίσαμε το workshop μας, ακούγοντας μια καλή παρουσίαση από το αμερικανικό πρόξενο, τον John Koenig, πάνω στην τριτοβάθμια εκπαίδευση στην Ελλάδα. Τεράστια προβλήματα. Και αβεβαιότητα για το μέλλον. Έπειτα είδαμε τον καινούργιο ξενώνα του κολλεγίου, την προωρινή βιβλιοθήκη και το χώρο στον δεύτερο όροφο του Princeton Hall που ετοιμάζεται για την καινούργια βιβλιοθήκη.

Wednesday, October 11, 2000

Τη πρωί ακούσαμε μια κυρία που είναι Consultant for EU Affairs of the National Employment Service να μιλήσει για το εκπαιδευτικό σύστημα και τη δυνατότητα ή μη-δυνατότητα των αποφοίτων να βρουν θέση. Στο τέλος είπε ότι δυχτυχώς το σύστημα ετοιμάζει τους μαθητές και φοιτητές για συγκεκριμμένες θέσεις αλλά οι συνθήκες αλλάζουν και εξελίσσονται τόσα γρήγορα που σε λίγα χρόνια αυτά που έμαθαν δεν ισχύουν πια. Έτσι έπρεπε να μάθουν «πώς να μάθουν». Ύστερα την πλησίασα εγώ και της είπα, «Στην ψυχή σας είστε αμερικανίδα». . . . Ύστερα υπήρξε άλλη σύναξη όπου ο Σωκράτης Αδαμίδης σύστησε εμάς, τους συμβούλους, με λίγα λόγια να προσπαθήσουμε να εξηγήσουμε τη σημασία του όρου “trustee.” Φάγαμε το μεσημερινό με το προσωπικό. Ο δάσκαλος της θεολογίας, που ήρθε προ τριών χρονών στη διάλεξή μου, κάθισε πλάι. Το απόγευμα με τον Αδαμίδη πήγαμε σ’ ένα χωριό με δύο μαθητές να δούμε την οικογένειά τους. Ήταν εκεί ο παππούς, η μαμά, που προσέφερε γλυκιά και καφέδες, ο θέιος, και ο πατέρας. Ο δε πατέρας μίλησε με πάθος εναντίον της γεωργίας. Δεν μπορεί, λέει, να τα βγάλει πέρα. Η ελπίδα του είναι να πουλήσει τα χωράφια για βίλες! Δεν είχαν βροχή και ξεράθηκαν τα προϊόντα. Απ’ την άλλη μεριά, προσέξαμε ότι έχει τεράστια τρακτέρ και combine. Μου είπε ότι όλες οι μηχανές είναι πληρομένες δεν χρωστάει τίποτε. Επίσης δύο εργάτες έβαλαν πλακάκια στο εξώτοιχο του σπιτιού—δηλ. δεν ήταν παμφτωχός. Ύστερα ο Αδαμίδης μας εξήγησε ότι είχε κερδήσει αρκετά λεφτά αυτός ο γεωργός σε δύο δεκαετίες και υπέφερε μόνο τα τελευταία χρόνια. Το χωριό πριν από τριάντα χρόνια ήταν πολύ φτωχό και δεν είχε νερό. Το πηγάδι ήταν ενάμισο χιλιόμετρο μακριά και έπρεπε να κουβαλήσουν όλα το νερό τους από εκεί. Ο πληθυσμός είναι μεικτός. Πολλοί ήρθαν από τη Μικρασία στα ’22· άλλοι είναι Βλάχοι, κτλ. Λέει ότι όλοι τώρα ενώθηκαν, είναι όλοι Έλληνες! . . . Το βράδι πήγαμε όλοι στο μέγαρο του Σταύρου Κωνσταντινίδη, παμπλούσιο με πελώριο πισίνα, ζωγραφιές παντού, κτλ. Μας έδειξαν το καινούργιο βίντιο της σχολής που ήταν η ευθύνη της Randy—παραπολύ επαγγελματικό, μα χωρίς συνοχή, όλο κομμάτι-κομμάτι, αλλά όμορφο. Είχαμε δει ένα άλλο βίντιο που το έκαναν οι άνθρωποι της Marshall Plan το 1950, όχι πολύ επαγγελματικό αλλά δείχνει χίλιες φορές καλύτερα ακριβώς τι κάνουν και τι μαθαίνουν τα παιδιά.

Thursday, October 12, 2000

Στη σύναξη ένας μαθητής μίλησε για το τατουάζ. Τότε ο David Willis μας εξήγησε τι πρόκειται να κάνει με τα τρία κιλά σκουλήκια που έφερε από την Αμερική τα οποία θα βοηθήσουν να κάνουν compost από τα manure του κτήματος. Συνεδρίασε η επιτροπή της δευτεροβάθμιας εκπαίδευσης με πρόεδρο τον Γιάννη Βεζύρογλου—με εμένα, τον John Cleave, τον John Crunkilton και τον David Acker. Αποφασίσαμε να μην πανικοβληθούμε λόγω της απουσίας φοιτητών στο Κολλέγιο, αλλά να συστήσουμε έναν καλύτερον τρόπο ώστε να βρεθούν φοιτητές και στην Ελλάδα και στα Βαλκανικές χώρες. Οι ξένοι χρειάζονται υποτροφίες. Χθες σε μια συνεδρίαση εγώ είπα ότι θα δώσω $5500 αμέσως, που φτάνει για έναν χρόνο. Το απόγευμα, στη συνεδρίαση του Development Committee, μίλησα για το «βιβλίο» της Marder, πως το έστειλα στο Mercer University Press, πως άρχισα να το copyedit, κτλ. Ευτυχώς έχουμε $9000 για το βιβλίο. Το βράδι φάγαμε barbecue μπροστά στο Princeton Hall και κοιτάξαμε τους χορούς των παιδιών, παραπολύ ωραία. Και χορέψαμε και εμείς το καλαματιανό και στο τέλος-τέλος το «τρίβω το πιπέρι»!

Friday, October 13, 2000

Συνεδρίαση όλων των συμβόλων. Μίλησα πάλι για το βιβλίο, και όταν ο Παύλος Κοντέλης είπε πως χάνει η Σχολή το «πνεύμα» που είχε, είπα ότι πάντα ακούμε τέτοια παράπονα, και ίσως δικαιολογημένα, όταν ιδρύματα αλλάζουν, και δε μπορούνε να ξαναγυρίσουν στις συνθήκες μιας περασμένης εποχής. Στη 1:00 η ώρα όλος ο κόσμος αναχώρισε για το Κτήμα Ζάννα. Και τι μεγάλη διαφορά είδαμε εκεί από τα ερείπια που είχαμε δει πριν από δύο χρόνια. . . . Το βράδι ήρθε ο Δημήτης Γουνελάς και μας πήρε στο διαμέρισμά μας, 29 Μεγ. Αλεξάνδρου, πάλι στον 3ον όροφο, ακριβώς εκεί που είμασταν στα 1998.

Saturday, October 14, 2000

Athens, Hotel Andromeda, 641-5000

Πετάξαμε όλοι με Aegean Air. Μας μετέφεραν με πουλμάν στο Ξενοδοχείο Ανδρόμεδα, δίπλα στο σπίτι του αμερικανού πρέσβη και κοντά στη Πρεσβία. Από εκεί, στο Μουσείο Μπενάκη, που τώρα είναι τετραπλάσιο. Ένας ξεναγός μας οδήγησε χρονολογικά από την προιστορική εποχή μέχρι σήμερα, σε 60 λεπτά! Έχουν φωτογραφίες μεγάλων ποιητών του εικοστού αιώνα: τους Παλαμά, Καβάφη, Σικελιανό, Σεφέρη, Ελύτη, και Ρίτσο. Ο Γιάννης Βεζύρογλου μου είπε, όταν έδειξα τη χαρά μου και την έκπληξη ότι και ο Ρίτσος συμπερλαμβάνεται, ότι λάθος κάνουν, επειδή ο Ρίτσος δεν ήταν υπέροχος ποιητής! Φάγαμε στο εστιατόριο του μουσείου, στον ύπαιθρο. Τότε πήγαμε με τη Χρυσάνθη στο Χίλτον όπου ήρθε και η Θεανώ Πετρίδου να μας δείξει τις ζωγραφιές της για το Greek Today, προπαντός το καινούργιο εξώφυλλο, διορθωμένο από το προηγούμενο, που δε μου πολυάρεσε. Και αυτή η δεύτερη εκδοχή πάλι δεν είναι ό,τι χρειάζεται. Θα προσπαθήσει ξανά να μικραίνει τα γράμματα και να μεγαλώσει το σκίτσο του Μητρόπουλου. Χαριτομένη κοπέλα. . . . Στις 8:00 η ώρα όλοι οι σύμβουλοι πήγαν στο “residence” του πρέσβη, του Nicholas Burns. Παραπολύ προσιτός άνθρωπος, νέος, όλο χαμόγελο. Είδα στη βιβλιοθήκη του τη δική μου μετάφραση της «Ζωή ἐν τάφῳ». Του την έδειξε και μου είπε πως τη διάβασε με πολύ ενδιαφέρον. Είδα και μια ανθολογία του Πλάτωνα με επιμέλεια του Raphael Demos και του εξήγησα ότι ο Demos ήταν ο καθηγητής μου στο Harvard για τον Πλάτωνα και τον Αριστοτέλη. Αυτό το βιβλίο ανήκει στη Κυρία Burns· το χρησιμοποίησε στο πανεπιστήμιό της. Στο φαγητό ο Burns· μίλησε ωραία για την Κυρία Labouisse και τον άντρα της, και αυτή, που είναι 96 χρονώ, σηκώθηκε και μίλησε ωραία. Εγώ ήμουν πλάι στη Shelly Crunkilton, που φαίνεται να ξέρει για εκδοτικά πράγματα και θέλει να μας βοηθήσει σχετικά με το βιβλίο της Brenda.

Sunday, October 15, 2000

Athens–Thessaloniki

Περίπατο στη γειτονιά με τη Χρυσάνθη. Ωραία γειτονιά, με πάρκο, συντριβάνι, σχολεία, και το νεο Μέγαρο Μουσικής κοντα. Τότε πήγαμε όλοι στο σπίτι του Παύλου Κοντέλη κοντά στο στάδιο. Με καταπλητική θέα στη βεράντα: η Ακρόπολις και ο Παρθενώνας απέναντι, ο Φιλοπάππας στο βάθος. Γάγαμε εκεί. Ήρθαν και ο Bruce και η Tad. Ο Bruce μας διήγησε μερικές ιστορίες του Hodja. Μίλησα πολύ με τη Tad. Ο Bruce γέρασε πολύ αλλά στέκεται ακόμα, πάει στη Bosnia και στην Αλβανία, διανέμει εκεί το καινούργιο του βιβλίο. Όταν έφυγαν οι περισσότεροι, μείναμε εμείς που επρόκειτο να επιστρέψουμε στη Θεσ/νίκη, δηλ. Ο Γιάννης Βεζύρογλου, ο Σταύρος Κωνσταντινίδης, η Άννη Λέβη. Και συνέχισε η κουβέντα για τη Σχολή με τον Παύλο Κοντέλη για δύο ώρες. Ανησυχούν πολύ. Ξαναρχίσαμε την ίδια κουβέντα και στο αεροδρόμιο, που έπρεπε να περιμένουμε δύο ώρες. Φτάσαμε επιτέλους με τη Χρυσάνθη στο διαμέρισμά μας, τακτοποιηθήκαμε, βγήκαμε για καφέ, και κοιμηθήκαμε παρ’ όλο το θόρυβο από τη λεωφόρο δίπλα και τα σκυλιά.

Monday, October 16

Thessaloniki

Άρχισα αμέσως. Η ώρα 9:00 το πρωί στο Παν/μιο. Έλαβα το κλειδί του γραφείου μου, εκείνου που το είχε ο Δημήτρης (τώρα έχει πιο μεγάλο). Συνάντηση με τον Παναγιώτη Μουλλά και τη κυρία Χρύση, τη γραμματέα. Πήρα και τα χρήματα για τη διάλεξή μου (που θα γίνει την 1η Νοεμβρίου). Το βράδι πήγαμε περίπατο στην παραλία με τον Οδυσσέα και την Ελένη. Μιλήσαμε για τον Αντρέα (του Γιώργου), ο οποίος δεν έχει δουλειά σαν δικηγόρος και φαίνεται να παθαίνει ξανά από νευρική ασθένια. Τους περιέγραψα το κείμενο που μου είχε στείλει, όλο για το θάνατο και την αυτοκτονία, και στο σημείωμα προς εμένα τόνισε πως το κείμενο είναι «αυτοβιογραφικό». Η παρέα του είναι αναρχιστές. Ο Οδυσσέας είπε, πολύ σωστά, πως φταίει ο Γιώργος επειδή το ζόρισε το παιδί να παρατήσει μια καρριέρα στο θέατρο ως ηθοποιός για να σπουδάσει τα νομικά. Κρίμα.

Tuesday, October 17, 2000

Πάλι στη Σχολή. Η γραμματέας με βοήθησε να γράψω στη Τράπεζα American Express, που το κατάστημα στη Θεσ/νίκη έκλεισε, να πάρω τα χρήματά μας από την Αθήνα. Τότε ο Τάσος, που ξέρει για υπολογιστές, έβαλε software στο κομπιούτερ μου ώστε να πάρω ημέιλ εδώ. Τότε ο David Willis με δάνεισε το κινητό του τηλέφωνο. Έφαγα ένα σάντουϊτς με τον Everett και τη Brenda στο ωραίο σπίτι που τους έδωσαν. Ο Everett θέλει παραπολύ να διοριστεί ως διευθυντής του Fulbright στην Αθήνα αλλά ξέρει ότι και ο Bill McGrew ζητάει να διοριστεί και αυτός. Τελευταία πήγα στο γραφείο της Randy Warner και κάθισα εκεί τρεις ώρες με τη Randy και τη Brenda συζητώντας το «βιβλίο». Το βράδι, πάλι στην παραλία με τον Οδυσσέα και την Ελένη. Για πρώτη φορά, ο Οδυσσέας μιλούσε για τους Γερμανούς και για το εμφύλιο. Άρχισε στη νομική σχολή, λέει, και έγινε εργάτης. Θυμόταν ότι ήταν πρώτος στο στίβο, πριν έρθουν οι εισβολείς. Έτρεξε, νίκησε, και αμέσως λιποθύμισε από την κούραση. Όταν έβαλαν οι Γερμανοί τους γονείς και τη Χρυσάνθη στη φυλακή, ο λόγος ήταν αυτός, είπε.

Wednesday, October 18, 2000

Πήγα στο παν/μιο για office hours: 10:00 με 1:00, κάθε Τετάρτη. Και ήρθε ένας φοιτητής έμεινε δύο ώρες. Ο Frank Bretschneider, ένας Γερμανός που τον είχα γνωρίσει και στα 1998 και που προσπαθεί να γράψει μια διατριβή πάνω στις ομηρικές επιρροές στην καζαντζακική Οδύσεια. Δύσκολο! Θα μπορέσω να τον βοηθήσω, και άρχισα κιόλας. . . . Προσπάθησα να συνδέσω το ημέιλ αλλά η γραμμή πάντοτε ήταν απασχολημένη. Πήρα εισιτήρια για μια συναυλία μεθαύριο. Πήγα στο πρακτορείο για το κινητό, που δεν δουλεύει καλά. Έφτασα αρκετά κουρασμένος στο Makedonia Palace, που ήρθε και η Χρυσάνθη, και πήγαμε για pizza.

Thursday, October 19, 2000

Θα μιλήσω στο Anatolia College πάνω στο Odysseus Across the Centuries στις 30 Οκτωβρίου. Πρέπει να ετοιμάσω την ελληνική μου διάλεξη στο πανεπιστήμιο, 1η Νοεμβρίου, πάνω στην Οδύσεια του Καζαντζάκη. Θα χρησιμοποιήσω ως βάση το κεφάλαιο 8 του Politics of the Spirit, μεταφρασμένο από την Ασπασία, αλλά το κείμενο θέλει αρκετή δουλειά για να γίνει κατάλληλο για μια διάλεξη. Ο Bob Chatel, που διδάσκει “humanities” στο American College of Thessaloniki (= Anatolia) ήρθε και φάγαμε μαζί στους «Λύκους». Ωραία να κουβεντιάσουμε για τον Όμηρο, τα δράματα του Σοφοκλέους, τις μεθόδους διδασκαλίων, τις διάφορες μεταφράσεις τις Ιλιάδας, τα διάφορα λεξικά, και παρόμοια. . . . Το βράδι περπατήσαμε με τη Χρυσάνθη στην όμορφη παραλία ως την πλατεία Αριστοτέλους, και φάγαμε μπουγάτσα κρέμα. . . . Δουλεύω τώρα λιγάκι: διάβασα για να προετοιμαστώ για το αυριανό μάθημα—τι θα πει «άβυσος» και «σιγή» και προχώρησα στη διάλεξη πάνω στην Οδύσεια.

Friday, October 20, 2000

Το πρώτο μάθημα σήμερα με το Δημήτρη. Περιμέναμε 7–8 φοιτητές· ήρθαν 17. Τους μίλησα εγώ για το μεταφυσικό σύστημα του Bergson. Τους μίλησε ο Δημήτρης για το Kant, Marcuse, Σεφέρη και Ελύτη, που όλοι τους προσπαθούν να εκφράσουν το αίσθημα του συνόλου, δηλ. όταν χάρη στην τέχνη ή στη θρησκεία υπερβαίνεις την καθημερινή κομματισμένη πραγματικότητα και αρχίζεις να καταλαβαίνεις την ενωμένη ουσία. Ευτυχώς έχουμε στην τάξη μερικούς που σπούδασαν φιλοσοφία, αν και η πλειοψηφία σπούδασαν λογοτεχνία. . . . Ύστερα βρήκα τη Ζέτα Φαρίνου, που καθόταν με μια κοπέλα που ήταν στην τάξη μας πριν από 3 χρόνια. Ωραία συνάντηση. Τότε ο Δημήτρης και εγώ πήγαμε σ’ ένα εστιατόριο στην Οδόν Εγνατίας και σε λίγο ήρθε και η Ruth, και περάσαμε ωραία. Τότε γύρισα στο γραφείο και κατάφερα να συνδέσω το ημέιλ: πολλά γράμματα σχετικά με το MGSA. . . . Το βράδι περπατήσαμε με τη Χρυσάνθη στην οδό 25ης Μαρτίου, στο καινούργιο Μέγαρο Μουσικής, ν’ ακούσουμε τον διάσημο πιανίστα τον Σβουρό, που έπαιξε και ένα πανόμορφο κονσέρτο του Mozart και το α΄ κονσέρτο του Tchaikovsky. Κατόρθωμα. Όταν ακούς και τα δυο μαζί, καταλαβαίνεις πόσο υπερβαίνει ο Mozart. Το έργο του Tchaikovsky, που όταν ήμουν παιδί και άκουε το Artur Rubinstein να το παίξει το αγάπησα πολύ, τώρα μου φάνηκε πολύ στομφώδες.

Saturday, October 21, 2000

Ο Δημήτρης Γιαννακός μας επισκέφτηκε το πρωί με τη κόρη του, την Έβη, που είχε μεγαλώσει πολύ. Θα τελειώσει του χρόνου το δημοτικό και ψάχνουν για ένα καλό γυμνάσιο. . . . Φάγαμε στους Λύκους και περπατήσαμε στην παραλία, στης Βούλης. Ήταν εκεί η κυρά Κούλα που μιλούσε ακατάπαυστα ώσπου να γυρίσει η Βούλη. Με τη Βούλη μιλήσαμε για το σχολείο των Κουακέρων που δυστυχώς δεν θα μείνει στη συνείδηση του κόσμου γιατί του λείπει μια ιστορική αφήγηση. Κρίμα που οι Jones δεν ανέλαβαν τέτοια δουλειά. Της πληροφόρησα για το αρχείο που βρίσκεται στο Friends House στο Λονδινο. Μιλήσαμε και για το Στυλιανό, που δεν ήθελε λέει να ’ρθεί στην Αμερική και για το Σπυρίδωνα, που λέει ότι είναι ομοφυλόφιλο. Γυρίσαμε στο σπίτι πάλι με τα πόδια, στην παραλία. Απόλαυση. . . . Το βράδι πήγαμε στο Θέατρο Αμαλία, να δούμε «Μετά την πρόβα» του Ingmar Bergman με τρεις ηθοποιούς που όλοι ήταν έξοχοι. Το έργο ήταν πολύ συναρπαστικό, σχετικά με την προσπάθεια του Bergman του ίδιου να καταλάβει τις ανάγκες των ηθοποιών του και να ξεχωρίσει την επαγγελματική επαφή από την προσωπική και μάλιστα ερωτική.

Sunday, October 22, 2000

Τελείωσα και ένα ακόμα κεφάλαιο του Stewards. Πήγαμε στη Σχολή με το Δημήτρη Γιαννακό και μπόρεσα να το φέρω το κεφάλαιο στη Brenda. Γυρίσαμε το σχολείο με τους Μάρντερ, τον Δημήτρη και την κόρη του, την Έβη, που είδε για πρώτη φορά μιαν αγελάδα, ένα γκουρούνι, κότες κάνοντας αυγά, κτλ. Επίσης το μπρόκολο για την πρώτη φορά. Ύστερα πήραμε την Τίλντα από το σπίτι τους και φάγαμε όλοι κοντά στο λιμάνι σ’ ένα παλαιό μέρος της πόλης που στο παρελθόν ήταν γεμάτο πορνεία και τώρα γέμισε με εστιατόρια, ξενοδοχειά, και ταβέρνες. . . . Ο Έβερετ λαχταράει να εγκατασταθεί πάλι στην Ελλάδα. Ενδιαφέρεται για τη θέση του διευθυντή του Fulbright. Γι’ αυτό έγραψα ένα συστατικό γράμμα στην κυρία που είναι επικεφαλής της επιτροπής.

Monday, October 23, 2000

Πήγα στην Εγνατία Τράπεζα, όπου έχουμε τώρα το λογαριασμό μας. Είχαν έλθει τα χρήματα από την Τράπεζα American Express στην Αθήνα: 741473 δραχμές. Μου είπε η κυρία Μαμεδάκη στο Customer Service ότι ως μόνιμος κάτοικος της ΗΠΑ δεν αναγκαζόμαστε να πληρώνουμε το φόρο των 15 τοις εκατόν του τόκου. Πρέπει να της στείλω ένα πιστοποιητικό από την αστυνομία στο Hanover που επιβεβαιώνει ότι μένουμε στην Αμερική. . . . Ύστερα πέρασα από το κατάστημα του Bosch για να μάθω πώς να μάθω πόσες μονάδες έχω ακόμα στη διάθεσή μου στο κινητό τηλέφωνο. . . . Γύρισα στο διαμέρισμα. Ήταν εκεί ο Γιώργος. Καθήσαμε με τη Χρυσάνθη για μιαν ώρα ενώ αυτός, με πολύ πάθος, μας διηγήθηκε τα βασανά του λόγω της ψυχολογικής κατάστασης του Ανδρέα. Ο γάμος κλονίζεται, δεν έχει πελάτες στο δικηγορικό του γραφείο, πηγαίνει κάθε μέρα στο γραφείο και βάζει κασέτες με μουσική. Η παρέα του είναι οι αναρχικοί της πόλης, καπνίζει σαν καμινάδα, κτλ. Έμμεση αυτοκτονία, είπε ο Γιώργος. Του είπα εγώ ότι μπορεί να μετατραπεί σε άμεση. Και του εξήγησα τις εντυπώσεις μου πάνω στο κείμενο που μου το είχε στείλει ο Αντρέας για την κριτική μου. Πάντως, ο Γιώργος ήταν έξω φρενών και πολύ απελπισμένος. . . . Ύστερα από τη συνάντηση ετούτη, πήγαμε στης Λόλας. Μεγάλη διαφορά. Ο Κώστας και η Λόλα έχουν ένα εξαρετικά ομαλό παιδί, το Νίκο, που είναι γιατρός με σπουδαίες ευθύνες στο νοσοκομείο. Η γυναίκα του είναι οδοντογιατρίνα. Δουλεύουν κανονικά, κερδίζουν το ψωμί τους, και παραπάνω. Ο Κώστας ενδιαφέρεται στα πολιτικά, στα οικονομικά, ακόμα στη λογοτεχνία: μιλούσε για μια γνώμη πως τα ποιήματα του Σεφέρη είναι μέτρια και πως ο Σεφέρης συνεργάστηκε και με τη χούντα και με το Μεταξά! Μεγάλη διαφορά να είμαστε σ’ ένα χαρούμενο σπίτι. . . . Το βράδι μας πήραν η Βούλη και η Λένα Στέφα σ’ ενα ωραίο κέντρο στην πάνω πόλη, στο δάσος Σεΐκ Σου (που θα πει χίλια δέντρα). Η Στεφα θα πάει κι αυτή στην Αυστραλία, προσκαλισμένη από το Στυλιανό. Έτσι είπαμε «Καλή αντάμωση». Μίλησε και για το Bill McGrew, που, καθώς ξέρω, ζητάει δουλειά (Fulbright, π.χ.) κι αυτός στην Ελλάδα.

Tuesday, October 24, 2000

Προχώσησα λιγάκι στη διάλεξή μου πάνω στη καζαντζακική Οδύσεια. Ανταμώσαμε τον Μίμη και την Αγλαΐδα Λυπουρλή στην Πλατεία Ναβαρίνο και φάγαμε ωραίο ψάρι και ήπιαμε ωραίο τσίπουρο. Μου έδωσε ο Μίμης το βιβλίο με τη σειρά διαλέξεων που έβραλε στο Βαφοπούλειο. Μου είπε πόσο σκληρά δούλεψαν όλοι στο Ίδρυμα Τριανταφυλίδη πάνω το καινούργιο λεξικό. . . . Το βράδι πήγαμε στο Κολοκοτρώνη 11 και φάγαμε με τον Οδυσσέα και την Ελένη. Ο Οδυσσέας μου διηγήθηκε πόσο πίνουν οι Ρώσσοι. Vodka για πρωινό! Και η παραγωγή τους ελάχιστη. Τι φταίει; Το σύστημα που τους εγγυόταν φαγητό, διαμέρισμα, ασφάλια, εκπαίδευση, γιατρούς, κτλ. Γιατί τότε να βγάζουν ιδρώτα;. . . Στο σπίτι διόρθωσα τα πρακτικά που έγραψε ο Γιάννης Βεζύρογλου για την επιτροπή μας. Στο γραφείο, με ημέιλ, διαπραγματεύτηκα με τον Alf Vincent για τις διαλέξεις που θα κάνω στο Σύδνεϋ.

Wednesday, October 25, 2000

Κάθησα τρεις ώρες στο γραφείο. Ήρθαν οι τρεις κοπέλες που θα παρουσιάσουν την Ασκητική την Παρασκευή φαίνεται ότι είναι προετοιμασμένες. Η μια θα μιλήσει για το Kant, η άλλες για το Bergson και το Nietzsche. Τέλεια! Βρήκα και έναν κουρέα, πολύ φλύαρο είπα ότι θα γυρίσω ύστερα από τρία χρόνια. Τηλεφώνησα στη Gonda να της πω ότι τα πρακτικά που έγραψε για τη συνεδρίαση της Διοικητικής Επιτροπής της MGSA μπορούν να τυπωθούν στο Δελτίο μας. Πιο σπουδαία: τελείωσα την πρώτη γραφή της διάλεξής μου πάνω στην Οδύσεια του Καζαντζάκη. . . . Ύστερα ήρθαν η Ρίτσα και ο Ζήσης και μας πήγαν να φάμε σ’ ένα μικρό ταβερνάκι κοντά στο Ντεπό. Μιλούσαν για το γιο τους που πέθανε τόσο τραγικά και ο Ζήσης μίλησε πολύ για το τεκτονισμό (Freemasonry) που, φαίνεται, είναι η σωτηρία του γιατί εκεί βρίσκει και παρέα και πολιτιστική διέγερση. Πρέπει, λέει, να πιστεύεις στο Θεό και στη μετεμψύχωση για να γίνεις μέλος.

Thursday, October 26, 2000

Αργεία σήμερα: η γιορτή του Αγ. Δημητρίου. Ολόκληρη η πόλις κλειστή. Περπατήσαμε στην παραλία ως τη Πλατεία Αριστοτέλους και πήραμε το λεοφορείο στη Καλαμαριά για να φάμε το μεσημερινό φαΐ στου Γιώργου. Ήταν εκεί και ο Αντρέας, η Δήμητρα, και ο γιος τους το Γιωργάκι. Το παιδί, τεσσάρων χρονώ, έχει ένα εξαιρετικά πλούσια λεξιλόγιο είναι και ζωηρό, εξωστρεφές, όλο χαμόγελο και γέλιο. Ο δε Αντρέας μοιάζει με φυλακισμένο, πεινασμένο, με μακριά μαλλία ενός κοριτσιού. Όμως ρωτώντας για τις ουρανοξύστες της Νέας Υόρκης, αν είχα ανέβει καμιά φορά στην άκρη, του διηγήθηκα για το Empire State Building και επιπλέον για το World Trade Center όπου έκανα τις διαλέξεις μου για δικηγόρους. Τότε, δε ξέρω πώς, μετεκόμισε η κουβέντα στον εμφύλιο πόλεμο της Ισπανίας και μου είπε επανειλημένα ότι ενδιαφέρεται για τους αναρκικούς που πολέμισαν τον Φράγκο. Οταν καθίσαμε να φάμε, αυτός έφαγε τέσσερις μερίδες τουλάχιστο, σαν να μην είχε φάει για μια βδομάδα. Ύστερα, πριν τελειώσαμε, μας αποχαιρέτησε και έφυγε. Δε φαινόταν ψυχολογικά άρρωστος αλλά απ’ την άλλη μεριά η συμπεριφορά του δεν ήταν ομαλή. Η γυναίκα του, η Δήμητρα, ήταν πολύ φιλική· μιλήσαμε εύκολα πάνω σε διάφορα θέματα αλλά δεν ανοίξαμε ούτε το θέμα της συμπεριφοράς του, ούτε της δουλειάς που φαίνεται δε πάει καλά. . . . Το βράδι πήγαμε στης Βούλης. Είχε γυρίσει στο σπίτι η κα. Στέλλα από την κλινική. Ήταν εκεί και η Φω-φώ, η αδερή της Κύρας Κούλας, να φροντίσει τη Στέλλα ώσπου να συνέλθει εντελώς από την εγχείρησή της. Βγήκαμε και φάγαμε γύρο στην Πλατεία Ναβαρίνο, ύστερα καφέδες και γλυκό σε κομψό ζαχαροπλατείο.

Friday, October 27, 2000

Έγινε το μάθημα πάνω στην Ασκητική. Η μέρα ήταν αργεία και στο πανεπιστήμιο. Ερημιά. Αλλά ήρθαν 50 τοις εκατόν των φοιτητών, και οι τρεις κοπέλες που είχαν ετοιμάσει παρουσιάσεις. Μίλησαν αρκετά ωραία, όμως και οι τρεις διάβασαν μακριά χωρία, που δεν είναι καλό. Ευτυχώς υπήρξε συζήτηση αρκετή. Βρήκαμε και άλλους τρεις να ετοιμάσουν παρουσιάσεις για τον Ζορμπά. Με ημέιλ ο Βασίλης Λαμπρόπουλος μου έστειλε ένα μεγάλο άρθρο στην Καθημερινή πάνω στη Joice Loch, πολύ ενδιαφέρον. . . . Το βράδι περπατήσαμε ξανά στην Πλατεία Αριστοτέλους. Είδα στη θάλασσα ένα πελώριο πουλί, πελεκάνο μάλλον. Σ’ ένα ουζερί εκεί ανταμώσαμε τον Ξεναφώντα Κοκόλη και περάσαμε τρεις ώρες πολύ ωραία μιλώντας για τη λογοτεχνία προπαντός. Υποσχέθηκε αυτός να με βοηθήσει στην επιλογή των εκατό ποιημάτων για το Fakazis. Ξέρει πολύ καλά τα άπαντα του Αναγνωστάκη, π.χ. Μας είπε ότι η Ζωή Καρέλλη έζησε πολλά χρόνια στην Αμερικανική Γεωργική Σχολή όπου ο άντρας της δούλευε. Ο καημένος ο Ξενοφών έχασε τη γυναίκα του εδώ και πέντε-έξι χρόνια και παραμένει μόνος. Η κόρη τους ζει στην Αγγλία, που σπουδάζει για ντοκτορά. Ήταν ο μόνος καθηγητής που δεν ενδιαφέρθηκε καθόλου για προαγωγή. Τώρα όμως άλλαξε, λόγω της οικονομικής του κατάστασης, αφού σε έξι χρόνια θα γίνει υποχρεωτικά συνταξιούχος.

Saturday, October 28, 2000

Η ημέρα της Όχι. Αργεία πάλι. Παρέλαση στην Οδό Μεγάλου Αλεξάνδρου την είδαμε μια χαρά από το μπαλκόνι μας. Ήρθαν και ο Οδυσσέας, η Ελένη, και ο Γιώργος. Στην αρχή, μαθητές σε διάφορες παραδοσιακές στολές—παραπολύ όμορφοι. Ύστερα όμως, τανκς και παρόμοια μηχανήματα με όπλα, στρατιωτικά αεροπλάνα από πάνω, φαντάροι, ναύτες, ναυτίνες, κτλ. Φρίκη. Όταν υπάρχουν τόσα όμορφα παιδιά, γιατί πολεμούν τα κράτη; Φυσικά θα απαντήσουν πολλοί ότι πολεμούν ακριβώς για να ασφαλίσουν την ασφάλεια τέτοιων παιδιών. Ίσως. Αλλά η σπατάλη πόρων και ενέργιας είναι φρικτή, σε όλα τα κράτη, όχι μονάχα εδώ. . . . Πήγαμε ύστερα να φάγουμε το μεσημερινό στου Δημήτρη Γιαννακού. Η Τίλντα χαριτωμένη, η Εύη γελαστή. Μας έδειξε η κόρη τα βιβλία που χρησιμεύουν για αγγλικά, πολύ ωραία. Της χάρισα το Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, του οποίου την πρώτη ή δέυτερη έκδοση είχα χαρίσει πριν από 20 χρόνια στον πατέρα της. Ίσως μια μέρα θα σπουδάσει η Εύη στην Αγγλία ή στην Αμερική. . . . Το βράδι ξαναπήγαμε στο θέατρο να δούμε μια κωμωδία του Κεχαΐδη και Χαβιαρά, «Με δύναμη από την Κηφισιά». Είναι από τέτοια έργα που περνάς την ώρα σου ευχάριστα και την άλλη μέρα ξεχνάς πως το είδες. Με μια λέξη: σαχλαμάρες. Αλλά οι τέσσαρις ηθοποιοί έπαιξαν πολύ ωράια, με κέφι. Για μένα επίσης ήταν μια γλωσσική άσκηση αφού μιλούσαν παραπολύ γρήγορα, μα και καθαρά. Μπορούσα να καταλάβω, νομίζω, γύρω από τις 75 τοις εκατόν. Ύστερα, φάγαμε γύρο και μπύρα με τον Οδυσσέα και την Ελένη. . . . Νωρίτερα η Χρυσάνθη διάβασε προσεκτικά τη διάλεξή μου και αρχίσαμε να καταγράφουμε τις αλλαγές: να διορθώνουμε τυπογραφικά ή γραμματικά λάθη, να απλοποιούμε τη γλωσσα.

Sunday, October 29, 2000

Γυρίσαμε στο Θέατρο Αμαλία, να δούμε «Οδύσσεια»: σκηνές από το ομηρικό έπος με σκηνοθετική επιμέλεια της Έφης Σταμούλη. Το πρωτότυπο ήταν στα γαλλικά από το Colin Harris. Ήταν και για παιδιά (που γέμισαν το ακροατήριο) και για ενήλικους. Γεμάτη φαντασία και ενέργεια. Και χρησιμοποιήθηκε πολύ απλά σκηνικά έτσι μπορεί να παιχτεί και στα σχολεία. Κρίμα που δεν έχουμε το αντίστοιχο στα αγγλικά και στη τηλεόρασή μας. . . . Ύστερα φάγαμε με τον Οδυσσέα και την Ελένη. Τους ρώτησα αν η συμμετοχή γυναικών στην Αντίσταση ήταν η κύρια αιτία της κατοπινής απελευθέρωσης των γυναικών, όπως ισχυρίζεται η Brenda. Συμφώνησαν με τη Βούλη ότι οι γυναίκες στην Αντίσταση ήταν λίγες. Άρχισαν να κάνουν «αντρικές» δουλειές νωρίτερα, στον πόλεμο εναντίον των Ιταλών. Γενικά η αιτία ήταν ο δεύτερος παγκόσμιος πόλεμος, λένε, και όχι η συγκεκριμένη προσαρμογή της γυναίκες στην Αντίσταση. . . . Το βραδι περπατήσαμε στην πόλη και καθίσαμε σαν Θεσσαλονικείς σ’ ένα τραπέζι στο πεζοδρόμιο και φάγαμε τυρόπιτες. Τελευταία, διάβασα σιγα-σιγά τη διάλεξή μου για να την ακούσει η Χρυσάνθη, και κάναμε διάφορες απλοποιήσεις.

Monday, October 30, 2000

Όλο το πρωί δούλευα ξανά στη διάλεξη. Το συντόμεψα. Προσπάθησα να το κάνω πιο σαφής, αφαίρεσα μερικές επαναλήψεις. . . . Φάγαμε στους Λύκους, ξαπλώσαμε, πήγαμε στο A.C.T. (The American College of Thessaloniki—i.e. Anatolia College) στο “New Building” που βρίσκεται δίπλα στο παλαιό campus, δώρο του αμερικανικού λαού. Δίπλα θα χτιστεί μια state-of-the-art βιβλιοθήκη. Μίλησα αργότερα με τη διευθύντρια της βιβλιοθήκης, που φαίνεται να ενδιαφερθεί για τα βιβλία που μπορούσα να τους χαρίσω, στους τομείς της αγγλικής και της ελληνικής φιλολογίας. Θα γραφόμαστε. Μίλησα σ’ ενα μεγάλο ακροατήριο για “Odysseus across the centuries,” στ’ αγγλικά. Ύστερα, μια νεαρή κυρία με πλησίασε, αμερικανίδα, και είπε ότι ήταν φοιτήτρια μου στο Dartmouth στη συγκρτική φιλολογία γύρω στα 1976. “Your course changed my life!” είπε. Τι καλοσύνη! Και τότε, σχετικά με τη διάλεξη, “You haven’t changed.” Μακάρι. Γνώρισα πολλούς καθηγητές στο Κολλέγιο. Λένε πως θέλουν ν’ αρχίσουν μια “minor” στις νεοελληνικές σπουδές ή, καλύτερα, στη νεοελληνική λογοτεχνία. Πήγαμε μαζί τους σ’ ένα εστιατόριο στις Βασιλίσσης Όλγας σ’ ένα από τα παλιά μέγαρα, πολύ κομψό και παραπολύ ακριβό, με πιάτα flambé, κτλ. Μα το δικό μου μοσχάρι ήταν σκληρό, σαν δέρμα. Περπατήσαμε στο σπίτι με το Bob Chatel και τη γυναίκα του, μια ιρλανδέσα που διδάσκει αγγλικά. Όλοι αυτοί οι ξένοι expatriates εδώ έχουν μια καλή, ευχάριστη ζωή. Ήρθε στη διάλεξη ο Γιάννης Βεζύρογλου και ο David και η Patti Buck. Ο Γιάννης μας κάλεσε για αύριο. Το “social life” μας πλημμυρίζει.

Tuesday, October 31, 2000

Δούλεψα στη διάλεξή μου. Έκανα πρόβα, την συντόμεψα πάλι. Το βράδι πήγαμε στο ωραίο σπίτι του Γιάννη Βεζύρογλου και της Νόρας, στο Πανόραμα. Προσκαλισμένοι επίσης ήταν ο Γιάννης Κολιόπουλος και η γυναίκα του. ΄Ετσι περάσαμε πολύ ωραία, συζητώντας ζητήματα της Σχολής, της A.C.T., του πανεπιστημίου, της γεωργίας. Και φάγαμε το νοστιμότατο φαγητό που είχαμε ως τώρα στην Ελλάδα. Άφησα με το Γιάννη τη μετάφραση του Προλόγου μου στο βιβλίο της Brenda, το πρώτο μέρος.

Wednesday, November 1, 2000

Τηλεφώνησε ο Γιάννης: Τα ελληνικά δεν είναι καθόλου καλά. Κρίμα. Κάποιος πρέπει να τα ξανακοιτάξει. Θα γράψω σχετικά στη Randy. Είχα office hours στο πανεπιστήμιο. Ήρθαν οι τρεις που θα μιλήσουν για το Ζορμπά, με πολύ λίγη προετοιμασία. Η μια, η Στέλλα, θα έρθει και αύριο. Το βράδι έδωσα τη διάλεξή μου πάνω στις προσεγγίσεις προς την Οδύσεια του Καζαντζάκη. Το σπουδαστήριο ήταν γεμάτο, standing room only. Ήρθαν ο Μίμης και η Αγλαΐα, ο Ξενοφών, η Ζέτα, ο Σωκράτης από τη Σχολή μαζί με μια κοπέλα που διδάσκει φιλολογία εκεί, και ο Γιώργος, η Ευθυμούλα, η Λόλα, η Βούλη, η Λίνα Στέφα. Το διάβασα το κείμενο εύκολα, χωρίς δισταγμούς, χάρη στις πρόβες. Ελάχιστα ρωτήματα στο τέλος, δυστυχώς. Έπειτα, πήγαμε με το Δημήτρη στο Πανόραμα, ήρθε και η Ruth, και φάγαμε.

Thursday, November 2, 2000

Ήρθε η Στέλλα και την έδωσα δεδομένα για τον Σταυριδάκη για την παρουσίασή της. Το βράδι πήγαμε με τη Βούλη και τη Λίνα σ’ ένα πολυτελέστατο εστιατόριο στα «Λαδάδικα», γεμάτο κόσμο, όπως πάντα. Οι Έλληνες δίνουν πρωτερότητα, καθώς φαίνεται, στην παρέα τους. Ένα στενόμακρο τραπέζι γεμάτο άντρες, άλλο γεμάτο γυναίκες. Πανάκριβο, αλλά ο κόσμος έχει χρήματα.

Friday, November 3, 2000

Το τελευταίο μου μάθημα. Χωρίς το Δημήτρη, που αναγνάστηκε να πάει στην Αθήνα για ένα συνέδριο πάνω στον Τσίρκα. Πήγε καλά αν και ένας φοιτητής δεν μας προσέφερε πολλά. Στο τέλος, μέγαλη έκπληξη, είπανε να πάμε όλοι να φάμε για να γνωριστούμε καλύτερα. Αλλά ήταν προπαντός ένα πάρτι για μένα. Καθήσαμε στην Πλατεία Ναβαρόνα ως τις 5:00, και η συζήτηση ήταν ζωηρή—για το μέλλον τους, για τους ξένους που βρίσκονται παντού τώρα στην Ελλάδα, για την ταυτότητα που πρέπει ή δεν πρέπει να συμπεριλάβει και τη θρησκεία καθενός. Γύρισα στις 5:00 στο γραφείο. Κοίταξα το ημέιλ μου για την τελευταία φορά, τηλεφώνησα στο Swiss Air να επιβεβαιώσω την κράτησή μας, και στο Ξενοδοχείο Φοίνιξ, μάζεψα τα πράγματά μου, κλείδωσα, και άφησα το κλειδή για το Δημήτρη. Πάει και αυτή η εμπειρία. . . . Το βράδι πήγαμε στο Μέγαρο Μουσικής όπου ανταμώσαμε το Γιώργο και την Ευθυμούλα. Ακούσαμε την Κρατική Ορχήστρα Θεσσαλονίκης, που είναι μέτρια: Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture (δε μούκανε εντύπωση), Bruch Violin Concerto: πολύ όμορφο και ο σολίστας υπέροχος (Έλληνας που σπούδασε στο Oberlin). Τελευταία, Stravinsky Firebird, που δεν είχε τη φλόγα που πρέπει, αλλά πάντως ήταν συγκινητικό. Δυστυχώς, αυτή την ωραία βραδιά τη χάλασε ύστερα η Ευθυμούλα στο πίτσα που πήγαμε, αγού επέμεινε να αλάξουμε τραπέζι να μην υποφέρει, λέει, από τον καπνό. Η φωνή της με νεύριασε φοβερά. Αλλά μπορούσα να μιλήσω λιγάκι με το Γιώργο για τον προστάτη του (που ξαναφύτρωσε) και για το Δημήτρη, που λέει ο Γιώργος οφείλεται τώρα να μπει μέσα σε μια μεγάλη επιχείρηση αντί να παραμένει ανεξάρτητος. Η δε Ευθυμούλα, φαίνεται, είπε της Χρυσάνθης όλα τα μυστικά της οικογένειας—πως το πρόβλημα είναι και ο Δημήτρης, όχι μονάχα ο Αντρέας. Του έδωσαν τα πάντα και ποτέ δεν τους προσκαλεί, ποτέ δεν τους προσφέρει κάτι. Τους τηλεφωνεί μονάχα όταν χρειάζεται babysitting για την Εύη. Τους έκανε ένα παραπολύ μικρό σπίτι στη Φούρκα, και τους το πούλησε μολονότι αυτοί τον είχαν δώσει ολόκληρο το οικόπεδο. Και τα λοιπά. Τραγωδία μεγάλη. Σκέφτηκα ξανά αν έπρεπε εμείς να δίνουμε επανειλημμένα στα δικά μας παιδιά. Ίσως καλύτερο θάταν να κάνουμε ένα Ίδρυμα Bien που θα δίνει στις φιλανθρωπιστικές υποθέσεις.

Saturday, November 4, 2000

Thessaloniki

Πήγαμε το πρωί στο ωραιότατο διαμέρισμα της Λίνας για brunch με τη Βούλη. Πάλι μεγάλη συζήτηση ως τη 1:00 για τη Σχολή, τον Καζαντζάκη, τη θρησκεία, τα κύρια προσόντα του Θεού (βούληση; ορθολογισμός;). Η Λίνα μούδωσε μερικά ποιήματα του Στυλιανού που είχε μεταφράσει, να κάνω έλεγχο. Θα βλεπόμαστε σύντομα στο Σίδνεϋ. . . . Το βράδι ήρθαν η Τούλα και ο Σταύρος μ’ ένα σωρό δώρα για τα δικά μας εγγονάκια. Είχε έρθει νωρίτερα ο Οδυσσέας να μας αποχαιρετήσει με γέλιο και δάκρυα. Ο μεν Γιώργος είναι τόσο κλειστός, ο δε Οδυσσέας τόσο ανοιχτός. Όσο για την Τούλα και το Σταύρο, ακόμα θέλουν να ιδρύσουν μιαν κατασκήνωση καλοκαιρινή (Music Camp) με δάνειο ή/και ενίσχυση από το Ε.Ε. Μακάρι! Είπα στην Τούλα ν’ ρθεί μόνη της ένα καλοκαίρι να δει το Kinhaven. Πήγαμε στους Λύκους να φάμε. Πολλή συζήτηση για το παιδί τους, Ανθούλα, που είναι δέκα χρονώ και ετοιμάζεται να πάει στο γυμνάσιο. Ενδιαφέρονται για το Κολλέγιο Ανατόλια. Ο Σταύρος πιέζει το παιδί, που είναι πανέξυπνη, μαθαίνει μεμιάς χωρίς κόπο και γι’ αυτό δεν ξέρει να κάθεται και να συγκεντρωθεί. «Κάνω κακό;» μου ρώτησε. «Μπορεί,» απάντησα, αν και βέβαια δεν πρέπει να πας στην άλλη άκρη και νάσαι αδιάφορος. Να την πιέζεις, αλλά με την αγάπη. Προπαντός οπόταν σου έρχεται η αγανάχτηση, σκέψου αυτό.» Ύστερα πήγε να φέρει το κορίτσι, που ήταν σ’ ένα πάρτι στο σπίτι μιας φιλενάδας. Πανόμορφη κοπελίτσα με αριστοκρατικό μακρουλό πρόσωπο. Είναι προχωρημένη, είπαν, στα αγγλικά, αλλά δεν ήταν πρόθυμη να μιλάει. . . . Λέγοντας ότι θα πάω στη τουαλέττα, πήγα και πλήρωσα. Όταν ο Σταύρος αργότερα πήγε κι αυτός να πληρώσει και του είπανε ότι δεν χρειάζεται, θύμωσε. «Τι έκανες, θείο! Στην Ελλάδα εμείς πληρώνουμε.» Και έβαλε δύο δεκα-χιλιάρικα στο τραπέζι (ο λογαριασμός ήταν μόνο 14000). Δεν μπορούσα να αντισταθώ. Μακάρι να ’ρθεί η Τούλα σε μας μια μέρα για ν’ είμαστε κι εμείς φιλόξενοι.

Sunday, November 5, 2000

To Athens

Περιμένοντας στο αεροδρόμιο της Θεσσαλονίκης, διαβάσαμε τον όρκο του Μεγάλου Αλεξάνδρου. Είπε ότι δεν ξεχωρίζει τις φυλές. Δε ξεχωρίζει τον Έλληνα από το βάρβαρο. Ένας καλός άνθρωπος, από οποιανδήποτε φυλή, είναι Έλληνας. Ένας κακός Έλληνας είναι χειρότερος απ’ ένα βάρβαρο. Και αν διαφωνήσετε, να μη πολεμήσετε, αλλά να βρείτε μια λύση ειρηνικά. . . . Κρίμα που στη συζήτηση για το αλβανό παιδί που δεν του έδωσαν τη σημαία στις 28 Οκτωβρίου μολονότι που ήταν πρώτος στην τάξη, κανείς δεν θυμήθηκε τον όρκο εκείνο. . . . Μας περίμενε στο Ξενοδοχείο Φοίνιξ ο Don Nielsen. Ευθύς πήγαμε στο παλιό του αυτοκίνητο ρωσσικής κατασκευής προς το Σούνιο. Κάναμε όμως μια στάση στο δρόμο για να μας δείξει ο Ντον ένα ωραίο λιμνάκι με θερμό νερό που κολυμπούσαν ακόμα οι άνθρωποι. Στο Σούνιο φάγαμε ψάρια φρέσκα βλέποντας το ναό. Τότε ανεβήκαμε στο ναό και στο γύρω-γύρω τέμενο. Τι ωραίο! Θάλασσα, νησιά, μνήμη των αρχαίων. Όλο μιλούσαμε για την Ελλάδα, για τη ζωή του εδώ (ζει τώρα εννιά χρόνια στην Αθήνα), για τη βοήθεια που προσφέρει σε διάφορες ομάδες προσφύγων, μαζί με τους Γιατρούς Χωρίς Σύνορα. Είναι φορβερός επικριτής της Ελλάδας, αλλά συνάμα την αγαπάει. Για εκείνον, οι περισσότεροι πολιτικοί είναι “thugs” (ληστές) που ενδιαφέρονται πρωτ’ απ’ όλα για τα συμφέροντά τους και που βάζουν τους συγγενείς τους σε επίσημες θέσεις. Η κατάσταση του Κολλέγιου Αθηνών, π.χ., είναι τρομερή, χάρη στον Αντρέα Παπανδρέου, που έβαλε στη δικό του διοίκηση αγγράμματους που μισούν την εκπαίδευση (κατά τον Ντον). Όταν γυρίσαμε αργά στο ξενοδοχείο, καθίσαμε άλλη μια ώρα και μας περίγραψε την επιθυμία του να δημιουργήσει εδώ μια National Trail από τα Γιάννενα μέχρι τη Μάνη. Θα χτιστεί από νέους εθελοντές που θα μπούνε σε κατασκηνώσεις “Outward Bound” που θα μάθουν Leadership. Είπα ότι ίσως θα ενδιαφερθεί η Γεωργική Σχολή, που πρέπει τώρα να βρει καινούργιες διευθύνσεις και ν’ αρχίσει πρωτοποριακά προγράμματα. Αν μου στείλει μιαν πρόταση (proposal) θα προσπαθήσω να τον φέρω σ’ επαφή με το David Buck.

Monday, November 6, 2000

Athens–Zürich–Boston–Hanover.

Ξυπήσαμε πρωί-πρωί στις 4:45 π.μ. Χιλιάδες κόσμο στο αεροδρόμιο των Αθηνών. Μας έβαλαν στο Business Class στην πτήση προς τη Ζυρίχη, δε ξέρω γιατί. Φτάσαμε στο σπίτι στις 5:00 μ.μ., ύστερα από 20 ώρες χωρίς ύπνο.

Tuesday, November 7, 2000

Hanover

Voted for Gore. Wrote an abstract for my “Inventing Greece” lecture, which I rather liked. Went to the clinic and had wax—large lumps—irrigated from both ears. Supper with Mother at Kendal. She’s much reduced in body and mind, but at least still recognizes us.

Thursday, November 9, 2000

Dickey Center lunch with two administrators who were at Kent State when the students were shot and killed by the National Guard. A horrible story of inadequate leadership, especially by the Ohio governor. I kept pointing out contrasts with what happened at Dartmouth in 1969. Much better. At least we had trained officials in the State Police. Kent State had the National Guard, untrained in part. Still nobody knows whether they were commanded to fire or just panicked. I recall so vividly my reaction, in Birmingham, when I first heard of this tragedy.

Friday, November 10, 2000

Nice long lunch with Dick Sheldon talking about Russia and our children and Odysseas’s tale about alcoholism in Tashkent. Then we went together to St. Thomas’s for the memorial service for Tom Campion, who died last week at age 84. Full house: bagpiper playing Amazing Grace, lovely hymns, a fine homily, and lots of reminisces by children and grandchildren; laughter, stories of Tom’s fanatical love of fishing; then prayer that Tom used to recite at dinner, by Robert Louis Stevenson: “O Lord, give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage, gaiety, and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.” (Engraved on Stevenson’s statue in St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.) Afterwards, at the reception in Top of the Hop, Nardi said she would like to continue going to the A.R.T. with us. Saw Peter Campion, my former student, who recited a fine poem at the service and says he’s still looking regularly at Joyce’s Ulysses. Also saw Sheba Freedman. Asked her about Jim, to whom I’d written last week and who returned my note but not saying anything about his own health. It’s very bad. The lymphoma returned and he has tumors in the brain and on the spine. He’s undergoing chemotherapy again, and the brain tumor is shrinking but not the spinal one. He’s very glum at the moment, Sheba says. No wonder.

Saturday, November 11, 2000

Russell Puschak from the Johnsburg Library came. We looked through all my books, in the bedroom, living room, television room, basement, and he selected scores and scores to take for the library. Good unburdening.

Sunday, November 12, 2000

Philadelphia–Lumberton–Princeton

To Dan Seeger’s at Lumberton. Played the Synthetic Waltzes and the Husa pieces. Dan hasn’t practiced, as usual, but we improved a little after listening to a CD of the waltzes. Also played the 1st and 2nd Brandenburg Concertos for fun. Dan was politically successful in getting two democrats elected to the town council: dems who oppose the airport extension.

Monday, November 13, 2000

Princeton

Working on Brenda’s chapter 3 from the first book. Very slow and tedious. Dimitri and I went over MGSA business, chiefly concerned with the forthcoming Georgetown Symposium. I’m not eager to continue with all this responsibility. And the “book” continues. Many changes in the rear matter, the lexica. Here we go again! Will it never end? Mache is seven and a half months pregnant, but the baby has an abdominal cyst that is worrisome. . . . In the afternoon: to Mike’s to meet with Yannis Fakazis and Peter Constantine and Mike about the 100 best poems project. We were successful in modifying Fakazis’s ideas. We’ll stress the translations rather than the 100 “best” poems. He wants the whole thing ready by next October for the Frankfort Book Fair. Peter Constantine (a friend of Burt Pike’s) is a very impressive man. We all went out for dinner afterwards. Mike and Mary were in Australia about six weeks ago. Mike showed me a medal given him by Stylianos. Perhaps he’s planning something similar for me. We’ll see . . . An idea for the Meg Alexiou symposium in April: I could “perform” Ritsos’s Moonlight Sonata (in English) as an example of ritual, and then perhaps speak about it a bit, and also about my own experience of ritual in Quaker Meeting. . . . Working all afternoon with Dimitri and seeing how much still needs to be done in the lexica, I feel very tired.

Wednesday, November 15, 2000

Philadelphia

Supper with Alec, Monica, and Theo, who now walks and runs, and was in a very good mood. Alec seems more at peace with his job and likely to stay there next year, which is good.

Saturday, November 18, 2000

Two hours with Dan Connelly trying to figure out what to do with all our money. We think now that we’ll delay the charitable gifts or just make a designation regarding the obligatory withdrawal from the IRA, probably listing ⅓ with Chrysanthi and ⅔ with the children. Later, Tom Akstens’s student Steve Meirs arrived. He wants me to guide him: he translates Spanish poetry without knowing Spanish. But does it well. I showed him my translation of Stylianos’s “Hector to Andromache,” to convey that a translation really can be quite free. But I’m hoping that he’ll try rhyme when the originals are rhymed.

Sunday, November 19, 2000

Nice to be back in Meeting after such a long absence. Lafayette ministered at length; indeed, I’ve never heard him say so many words all at once—about a woman who had been raped, and the supposed offender sent to jail for eleven years, until proved by DNA to be innocent. Kesaya ministered about her brother David’s wedding in Hawaii, how the minister asked bride and groom to forgive each other their lapses and faults, and how strange and difficult this was. . . . Afterwards, Finance Committee met to worry about Craig Putnam’s latest estimate for the renovation: $350,000. . . . Coming home, I received an e-mail from Australia saying that Stylianos hoped I could extend my stay to December 1, when he’ll be celebrating his name-day with a big dinner. Of course I cannot. Chrysanthi said that we should give him a gift. So I spent the afternoon composing the following sonnet:

A BILINGUAL SONNET FOR ARCHBISHOP STYLIANOS ON HIS NAME-DAY

Στυλιανέ, thy name itself’s a prop

στύλος, στύλωμα—a mainstay, pillar

where Simeon legislated on top

to pilgrims arriving from near and far.

And how much better than “Your Eminence,”

since height for thee conveys a fatherly

concern both strict and loving, assurance

of στοργή ruled by faith, hope, and charity.

Therefore let the στύλ- in Stylianós

ring out in thy name-day’s celebration;

for pillars, props, and columns keep the roof

from caving in, sustain our Lord Χριστός

the Pantokratoras’s elevation,

and provide each pilgrim with living proof.

Monday, November 20, 2000

Quaker 8s at our house. Poor Billie-Joe Johnston has metathesized breast cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. Don, her husband (partner?), was here, too, and spoke very movingly of their new situation. Also present were Many Ann Cadwallader and Judith Pettingill. The topic we chose was Thanksgiving. What are we thankful for? Answers: living in the Upper Valley, speaking English, belonging to a vibrant Quaker Meeting, living in a country without religious discrimination, having children who are productive independent citizens. It was a lovely gathering.

Tuesday, November 21, 2000

To Los Angeles

Chrysanthi went off in AMTRAK to Washington to spend Thanksgiving with Leander and everyone else. I took Vermont Transit to Manchester Airport, then flew to Pittsburgh, and again to Los Angeles, where I boarded a Quantas flight for Sydney. Los Angeles is amazing from the air, stretching out flat, all lighted up, as far as the eye can see, except where delimited by the Pacific Ocean. And the LAX airport is equally amazing. Everyone seemed under 25 years old. All announcements in Spanish; everyone you ask for directions speaks English with a heavy accent. Mexicans everywhere in broad sombreros. I was spoiled on US Air, being in first class. Now: 14+ hours in Quantas, tourist class. . . . Started reading John Banville’s latest novel, Eclipse, for WLT review. Lovely language, especially the similes and metaphors, but so far (just 20 pages) the plot and characterization haven’t gripped me. How good Conrad was with his openings! I sat next to a nice Australian girl with a Greek-Australian boyfriend, so we had something to talk about.

Thursday, November 23, 2000

Sydney

Went from Tuesday to Thursday because of the international date line. Met at the airport by Vrasidas Karalis and another Greek-Australian. Nice hotel in city center. Telephoned Alf Vincent and will meet him tomorrow. Telephoned Stylianos but he wasn’t there. Lunch in Malaysian restaurant. Long conversation with the owner about Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where he had lived. He decries Australian intolerance and, like me, wishes that we could move beyond nationalism. “I don’t feel I’m ‘Australian,’ he concluded. “More importantly, I’m human!” . . . In the evening, the conference inauguration took place in the Great Hall of the university. Very grand. Short speeches by the vice-chancellor of the university, the dean of the Faculty of Arts, Vrasidas Karalis, and then a major address by Gough Whitlam, a remarkable 84-year-old former prime minister obviously very knowledgeable about Greece. He ranged from Thucydides to the Elgin Marbles, easily, amusingly. Later, people told me that he had been deposed by Her Majesty’s Governor-General, a dramatic moment that people still remember although it occurred thirty years ago. Afterwards, a group went out for supper. Among them, Spiro, who identified himself as a graduate of the American Farm School who was saved from expulsion by Phil Foote. I’ll write to Phil. Small world. To bed at midnight, still feeling quite alert. Once again, the feast-fast regimen negated jet lag.

Friday, November 24, 2000

I gave my keynote address, “Inventing Greece,” just before lunch. It seemed to be well received by this group of thinking people despite what I say about the Church and about nationalism. In general the papers are very good, much better, I must say, than those at our own MGSA symposium a year ago at Princeton. . . . In the evening I went to the Opera House and got a standing room ticket to the sold-out performance of the Australian ballet. Waiting, I struck up a conversation with an Australian lady who invited me to share a coffee. We enjoyed a lively conversation for ¾ hour. The first ballet, “Belle Figure,” had very distinctive and imaginative choreography by Jirí Kylián. The second, to lovely music by Schubert, was neoclassical and beautiful. The third (for which I was able to sit) was horrible owing to Philip Glass’s orgiastic, repetitive music, which I detest. Twyla Tharp’s choreography, better than the music, at least, still seemed to emphasize the ugly rather than the beautiful. But it certainly did not lack energy.

Saturday, November 25, 2000

Finally reached Stylianos on the telephone after many tries. He is in Melbourne, returning on Monday. He asked about Daphne και το καπέλο μου, of course. Wants to tell me his problems. . . . The highlight at the conference today was Michael Jeffreys’ paper on Greek bibliography, really his swan song, because he has retired and will be leaving Australia for good in a fortnight, to join Elizabeth in Oxford. He began and ended with kind references to my “Inventing Greece” of yesterday. . . . Good discussion in the afternoon after Helen Nikas’s paper on Kazantzakis’s women in Zorba. . . . In the evening the banquet, at the Hellenic Club, to honor Michael upon his retirement. I should mention that Alf Vincent came to my paper yesterday, as did Lena Stefa. Alf is persona non grata apparently at the department. A long story! . . . Learned how bad things are in Melbourne. Pavlos Andronikos has been forced into early retirement, in his late 40s, because Greek is no longer going to be offered at Monash. . . . In the evening we all went to the Hellenic Club, Elisabeth Street, for our banquet and a farewell dinner for Michael Jeffreys. I was seated next to Professor Crittenden (?) of the philosophy department, and a former dean. So of course I asked him about György Markús. They are good friends. He and his wife are doing well, despite the tragic injury that reduced one of their sons to an invalid. Crittenden will send my regards. There were speeches, including one by me in which I compared this retirement to Bill Smith’s where, in answer to the question, “And what does he leave behind?” we heard “A parking place!” For Michael, the answer is, “A scholarly community that really did not exist ten years ago.” And I told how he had called everyone together in 1990 to found MGSAANZ, which now produces symposia, a journal, etc. I also said, very honestly, that the level of this symposium is far above our own MGSA’s last year in Princeton. How nice to have, accidentally, been able to eulogize a colleague in this way! I remember the similar occasion, of course, when I eulogized Meg Alexiou in Birmingham.

Sunday, November 26, 2000

To Quaker Meeting in Devenshire Street, a convenient walk from the hotel. About 25 people only, fully silent, but meaningful. Afterwards, I spoke with a man who had been to Hanover to meet Rosenstock-Hussey. The Meeting subscribes to our Pendle Hill pamphlets, I was pleased to see. . . . Then back to Sancta Sophia College for the last session of the symposium. A man from Greek radio intercepted me there and I did an interview in Greek, about 15 minutes, that will be broadcast tomorrow, on my Odyssey lecture, on “Inventing Greece,” on not believing in history. . . . I caught the last of Mihalis Pieris’s talk. He is the one whose Sydney dissertation on Cavafy I felt was not worthy of acceptance, many years ago. At the session’s end, Michael Jeffreys and I were asked to sum up. I went first because Michael also wanted the use the occasion to say Goodbye to Australia after twenty-five years, which he did gracefully.

Monday, November 27, 2000

To Circular Quay. Ferry to the zoo. Kangaroos, gorillas, seals, pandas (of course), otters, a huge Kodiak bear. I didn’t see everything; the heat was oppressive. I remembered how impressed we were with this zoo when we first saw it, because there are no cages. . . . In the afternoon, Stylianos sent a car. Lovely reunion at the Archdiocese. Lena Stefa was there, too, and Vrasidas. Hugs and kisses. Jokes about το καπέλο μου. Showed photos of Daphne and the children. Immediately Stylianos telephoned Vouli and we all said hello. Too bad Chrysanthi wasn’t here, too. Then leisurely to St. Spyridon’s for my lecture on “Odysseus Across the Centuries.” The famous Greek chorus was rehearsing in the church, the one that performed so beautifully at the Olympics. I spoke in the hall downstairs to a full house, after a too-flattering introduction by Vrasidas. I included Stylianos’s poem “Hector to Andromache” and this lengthened the lecture. I went over an hour, alas, and people began to leave before I finished. But I hope it was OK. Afterward Stylianos spoke beautifully, ending by honoring me with the medal of St. Andrew, the same that he had given Mike Keeley. Then all to a seaside restaurant for a huge fish dinner and good conversation. Stylianos is now 65. No thoughts of retiring, but if and when he does retire he will stay in Australia. Much praise by him and also Vrasidas for Australian social policy, multiculturalism, health care, etc. We spoke about the Church in America. Spyridon, Stylianos said, was “sick.” Stylianos is so glad he did not go. Γλίτωσε.

Tuesday, November 28, 2000

Again to the Archdiocese. Then Stylianos, Lena, Stylianos’s deacon, and I went to the Sydney aquarium, a marvel displaying huge sharks and turtles and crocodiles, and the tiny fish of the coral reef, and everything in between. Here, as at the zoo, one feels the unity of all creation, of which we are only one very recent portion. Frogs, for instance, have been around for 150,000,000 years. Stylianos was very philosophical about all this, and also very aware of poems written on this subject and collateral ones. Fond farewells at the university, where I was delivered to meet with the Modern Greek department to talk further about the need for a comparative dimension to Greek studies and also to answer questions about possible exchange programs for their students in America. This was followed by a nice lunch with good fellowship and more fond farewells. . . . In the evening, Alfred Vincent came. We had a long coffee in the hotel, then went off by bus to Newtown, to the Στέκι, a small tavern filled to choking capacity with about 150 people squeezed in together. After an hour we were all served drinks and μεζεδάκια. Then Alfred introduced me very grandly and I spoke on The Last Temptation. In the question period people seemed to want to make Kazantzakis a Christian. I had to justify my view that, at best, he is a “post-Christian.” Nice to see Alf, who is so vilified as “Satan” by Vrasidas and Stylianos, in his element here, surrounded by friends. This group convenes regularly for “philosophy nights”: a meal, a talk, questions, and then music. In this case, just as the music was beginning, I begged a ride home (it was already 11:00 p.m.) from Andonis Costopoulos. In talking with him I learned, alas, that “Vrasidas is very difficult,” after naïvely remarking that it seemed to me that members of the department all liked each other and got along. Not so, apparently. In any case, this was my first lecture in a tavern. Very nice, actually.

Wednesday, November 29, 2000

Sydney–Los Angeles

Vrasidas accompanied me to the airport. We hope to keep in touch. Among other things, he is interested in Quakerism in connection with Kaïris. Routine flight to Los Angeles and then from L.A. to Philadelphia, it still being Wednesday because of the international date line. Telephoned Chrysanthi upon arrival; she’d just returned from New York on the train. They’d had a fine Thanksgiving.

Thursday, November 30, 2000

Pendle Hill

I ministered on the fish in the Sydney aquarium—how they coexist in peace because presumably they’re all given enough to eat, even the sharks, so don’t eat each other; also my feelings of “relationship” to all of creation, and of humility: the frogs have been around for 150,000,000 years. . . . Drove to Lumberton. Dan cooked a full lunch. We played Thomson and Husa, he not having practiced much, as usual. But the Synthetic Waltzes are going better. We also did our old Satie, not bad, and finished with Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, #40. Fun!

Friday, December 1, 2000

Pendle Hill

Breakfast with Larry Ingle and Bill Tabor. Bill is teaching a course on Quaker language, including “light.” Larry is still stymied on his Nixon as Quaker biography. . . . Forgot to say that I supped with Alec, Monica, and Theo last night, all sick with colds and sore throats. Alec is worried because the high school principal is leaving and the elementary school principal might leave. Yesterday he had a successful conference with the fifth grade teacher who neglects writing. Apparently this individual understood the need to change and didn’t get angry. So, a victory for Alec, so far. . . . I sent a fax to Stylianos again, thanking him for his φιλία, φιλοξενία, και το σταυρό του Αγίου Ανδρέα, και το δώρο της Δάφνης. . . . Book Committee at 10:00 a.m. Doug Gwyn’s on Seekers is published. Charlotte Fardelman’s is in the pipeline, as is Ratliff’s on counseling. We’re still undecided about the book on Woolman; it’s going out to Bill Spengemann for review. And we’re going to reprint the anthology of Quaker seventeenth-century women writers. Quite a lot. . . . Publications at noon. An easy Yes to a good essay on journal writing composed, we learned later, by Mary Morrison and Barbara Parsons. And an easy No to a garbled essay on “the spirit.” The Executive Board meeting concentrated on Steve Baumgartner’s strategic plan.

Saturday, Decemvber 2, 2000

Pendle Hill–Hanover

A whole morning on the strategic plan, ending with our approval for the process to continue. Steve is bringing very ambitious, imaginative leadership, and working with the staff so they don’t feel that all this is being imposed from on high. . . . Finished another of Brenda’s chapters, and continued typing in corrections to the front matter of Greek Today. Will it ever end? Nice to get to know Wilmer Stratton, a fine new board member, retired chemistry professor from Earlham.

Saturday, December 9, 2000

John Rassias called early today to say that John Walsh had died. I went to the service at St. Denis’s. Age 61, from a blood clot probably resulting from an operation on his ankle! Tragic. Such a nice man! The service was all about Jesus Christ, not about John. No eulogy. Just the assurance that he is in heaven, thanks to Christ’s sacrifice. Terrible! Such lies, and yet the Eucharist still has a strange power.

Tuesday, December 12, 2000

Quaker 8s again. Don spoke of his dilemma as a physician working in a nursing home with a repulsive nursing director. Should he resign or persevere? This led to interesting speculations and comments by all concerned, including Chrysanthi, who spoke of the man who smelled and had to be excluded from the Hanover Senior Center. There is always the black sheep (Manolios in Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται) that needs to be excluded. But I said how glad I am that the Meeting does not exclude Billy, the Down Syndrome man who speaks, sometimes at length, in a way that no one can understand. And I recalled also when people wanted to elder Elizabeth Ballard but I argued vigorously against this.

Saturday, December 23, 2000

To Boston

To Boston to the A.R.T. performance of “Three Farces and a Funeral,” adapted from Chekhov by Robert Brustein. The farces are bittersweet: funny but also terribly sad because of bad tempers, greed, and general self-destructive irrationality. The best was the first, “The Proposal,” splendidly acted by Jeremiah Kissel and especially Mirjana Jokavic. In between the three farces were scenes drawn from Chekhov’s correspondence with the actress Olga Knipper, who eventually became his wife. The final scene shows her present at Chekhov’s death from TB. Lots of energy, imagination, creativity. . . . A few days ago I finished copyediting Brenda’s Stewards, part 1, all 12 chapters. She is an incredibly bad writer; thus practically every sentence needed to be “fixed.” But the story she tells, and the research she presents, is admirable and fascinating. What stalwarts those early leaders were: Father House, Charlie House, Theo Litsas especially. . . . Arrived at the Yale Club at 12:30 a.m., owing to a breakdown of AMTRAK, the “new” service.

Sunday, December 24, 2000

Worked on Greek Today in the morning, mostly transferring the Ημερολόγιο in each chapter to its new position just after the Πρόσθετο λεξιλόγιο and before the first grammar. But I took some time out to explore the ever-increasing wonders of Grand Central Station, and bought some Stilton and Shropshire cheese for Daphne. Then to the Metropolitan Museum. Saw three special exhibits, plus my favorite El Grecos and Rembrandts. The first exhibit was “The Year 1”: art from the Mediterranean basin all the way to China and Southeast Asia. The Roman artifacts, of course copying Greek ones for the most part, were the highlight for me. The second exhibit was “New York City ca. 1825–65”: how by 1865 it already was a great financial and also cultural center with gifted painters and architects especially (the exhibit did nothing with literature). Lastly, “Gold of the Scythians,” with excerpts from Herodotus on the walls. The gold stags with enormous antlers were the main attraction. . . . Then to Daphne’s. Roy, Amy, and Laura Bernstein came for tea. Laura works in the fashion industry. Her older sister, Jill, who’s in Puerto Rico at the moment, teaches pre-school at Temple Emanu-El. Roy said that all the parents are in duplex and triplex apartments on Fifth Avenue, with summer homes in the Hamptons! Alec, Monica, and Theo arrived fresh from Minneapolis, where they attended the wedding of Monica’s Indonesian friend. Then Leander, Deanna, Sophia, and Nicholas arrived. We celebrated Chrysanthi’s birthday with lots of presents, a song and a cake. All the children were well behaved; some actually could talk to each other a bit; yet I couldn’t sequester the adults in order to ask their opinion of a charitable foundation. Maybe tomorrow.

Monday, December 25, 2000, Christmas

NYC

Breakfast and opening of presents at Daphne’s. Sensibly, each adult member now gets only one gift, the giver chosen by lottery at Thanksgiving. The grandchildren were relatively placid. Andrew was mesmerized by Disney’s Tarzan movie. Leander, Greg, Sophia, and Christina went to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes and the rest of that extravaganza, which appealed it seems more to the adults than to the children. Leander was most impressed by the quality of the orchestra and especially of the two organists. Daphne then fed us all a beautiful turkey dinner with all the trimmings. A totally secular Christmas except for Monica and Alec, who disappeared for a few hours to go to church. I managed in the interstices of child care to talk to all three children about my scheme to set up a sort of charitable foundation that they would manage at some point and perhaps that their own children would manage eventually. Happily, all three seemed very eager to do this and approved the idea heartily.

Tuesday, December 26, 2000

NYC–Princeton

Bought a new raincoat at Daffy’s for $59.00, reduced from $205.00. Worked on our Greek-English lexicon; one of the files is totally corrupted. I hope that I can restore it from the zip disk when I get home. Alec, Monica, and Theo came for breakfast, which went well. Chrysanthi went back to Daphne’s with them. I lunched at the Oyster Bar on oysters Rockefeller. Then I was picked up by Yannis Fakazis. Drove to Princeton with Peter Constantine also, to Mike Keeley’s to take the next step in our book of 100 poems. At first I thought Mike was going to sabotage the project; he was so negative about everything and how much work he had to do and how much he had to pay a research assistant, etc., a side of him I hadn’t seen before. But gradually he warmed to the project and we made progress. He wants me to write the introduction. We decided on about 75% of the poets and poems. Sat for 3½ hours, then went and had steak for supper. Fakazis drove me back to the Yale Club, arriving at 10:30 p.m. Peter Constantine is a mellow, nice person, very easygoing, without Mike’s prima donna side. Fakazis is a dynamo, very eager and apparently very well organized. The book will probably happen and probably be nice. He also intends to bring Life in the Tomb back into print.

December 31, 2000

Hanover

Daphne and family are here—very lively. We had a jolly New Year’s Eve gathering at the Rassiases’, at 6:00 p.m. because of the kids. The rituals continue: snails smothered in garlic followed by lamb and the βασιλόπιτα with quarters hidden for the children. . . . I’ve had to copyedit the proofs for my “Odysseus Across the Centuries” lecture, very badly set in type by the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage. Also, I’ve corrected and revised two of Lena Stefa’s translations of Stylianos’s poems; more to go. And I’ve found more poems for the Fakazis project: by Decavalles, Zoë Karelli, Nikiforos Vrettakos, Palamas. Also spent considerable time preparing the agenda for MGSA’s February meeting. And I finally emptied the valise we’d brought back from Thessaloniki last November 6th!

2001

Hanover

January 1–January 29

Jan. 6, Cambridge for A.R.T.

Jan. 15–18, Princeton

Jan. 25–27, Lumberton, Philadelphia, Pendle Hill

Princeton, 324 So. Stanworth Drive

February 1–May 20

Feb. 2–4, Washington, Holiday Inn Georgetown

Feb. 11, Huntington, Long Island

Feb. 19, Lumberton, Dan Seeger

Feb. 23–25, NYC, Yale Club, AFS trustees

March 2–3, Philadelphia, Pendle Hill

March 3–4, Hanover

March 10–11, Boston, Cambridge for A.R.T.

March 20–21, Washington

March 21–22, NYC

March 23, Philadelphia

April 1, Philadelphia

April 5, New York, Carnegie Hall

April 5–8, Hanover

April 11, New York, Onassis poetry reading

April 19–22, Pendle Hill, Philadelphia

April 27–28, Cambridge

April 30–May 1, New York

May 5, Princeton

May 16–18, New York, American Farm School

Hanover

May 20–June 16

May 23–25, Philadelphia, Princeton

May 26, Cambridge for A.R.T.

May 27–28, Terpni

May 31–June 2, Washington, Capitol Hilton Hotel

June 8–12, Kinhaven

Terpni

June 17–September 9

June 28–29, Hanover (Chrysanthi to ALPS)

July 14–15, Woodstock–Weston–Hanover

August 28–29, Waccabuc, NY (Daphne)

Sept. 7–8, Skeneateles, NY

Hanover

September 10–December 31

Sept. 13–15, Pendle Hill, Philadelphia

Sept. 21–23, Princeton

Sept. 27–28, New York, Pendle Hill Oct. 5, Riparius

Oct. 18–21, Philadelphia, Lumberton, Pendle Hill, South Salem

Oct. 24–28, Washington, Georgetown Inn

Oct. 29–Nov. 1, Stanford, CA, Garden Court Hotel, Palo Alto, 650 322-2194

Nov. 2, San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn, 415 752-8000

Nov. 3–8, Vancouver, Hotel Vancouver, 604 684-3131

Nov. 9, Seattle

Nov. 15–17, NYC for Farm School

Nov. 29–Dec. 2, Philadelphia, Pendle Hill, Princeton

Dec. 13–14, Cambridge

Dec. 24–25, Philadelphia (Alec’s) Radisson Warwick Hotel

Dec. 26–28, South Salem (Daphne)

January 4, 2001

John and Mary Lincoln invited us to lunch at Simon Pearce’s together with Nardi Campion. A jolly time. John’s stroke leaves him with impaired speech, but we could understand him almost always. Nardi is coping, after Tom’s death, answering thousands of letters that have arrived.

January 7, 2001

To: Bob Fagles

Subject: Antigone

Dear Bob,

I saw your lovely Antigone at the A.R.T. in Cambridge yesterday. What a good show! More accurately: how utterly exhausting (emotionally) for the audience! Have you seen it, or will you?

Assuming that you have or will, I won’t go into detail. But—first of all—the language was 100% comprehensible yet at the same time sufficiently hieratic, elevated, in a word “poetic,” especially of course in the choruses, which are always the hardest to stage and which they did valiantly, even at first with masks and buskins, and later with dance and some percussive music.

Of course what strikes one is how utterly contemporary the play is. That was helped, I suppose, by the mixture of costume: the principals in dress of olden times but the male chorus outfitted as rather up-to-date soldiers. Creon seemed too much like Milošević.

The weakest part was Tiresias. Poor Alvin Epstein (who always plays himself no matter who the character) just did not have enough magical authority to effect the 100% reversal in Creon convincingly.

I liked the excesses of Antigone, who is played as a sort of Weatherman (the daughter of one of our dear friends here, a Quaker, was the well-to-do girl whose townhouse in New York blew up when she and other Weathermen were making bombs in the cellar—so all this is more than academic for me). And Haemon, too, was acted most effectively. Creon perhaps less so. In the 1950s I saw the play in Thessaloniki, with Irini Papa as Antigone and Manos Katrakis as Creon, staged on the basketball court of the local YMCA, and I still remember Creon’s stare or glare as a kind of knife passing right through every member of the audience. Nothing like that, alas, at the A.R.T. yesterday, although we were in the 4th row.

But, as I said earlier, the play was exhausting for the audience in the best sense, meaning that from start to finish we were rapt out of ourselves and living the anguish of the characters on stage. It’s good to be back to normal again . . . purged.

Sincerely,

Peter

January 25, 2001

What’s happened since January 7th? On the 9th we went to Cadwalladers’ for Quaker 8s. Each person was told to bring a quotation. I brought the ending of Molly’s soliloquy, and it was chosen. We went into worship sharing mode, each person commenting. Most spoke about flowers and the marvel of creation. But others spoke about saying Yes instead of No. I thought of Cavafy’s poem, of course. . . . On January 10th I posted two boxes of books on American and British literature to a student in Belgrade, daughter of a scientist whom we had met in Thessaloniki. She has no access to books; what they have are 40 years old. So I gleaned some beauties from my office boxes in the cellar. . . . Lunch on the 11th with Irene Kacandes, who turns out to be offering this moment a “Homer Across the Centuries” course at Dartmouth. She includes “Omeros,” which I don’t, plus Krista Wolf’s “Cassandra.” . . . On the 14th, Business Meeting re: the renovation, now priced at $325,000. I spoke against, but the major effect of my sentiments was to energize those in support to voice their enthusiasm. So it seems that it will go ahead. . . . We also had a nice dinner party: Tom Laaspere was in unusual good spirits, smiling, talking about his war experience, and not asking to go home early (which he usually does). We had the Sheldons, too, and Jack and Ruth Hunter. Very jolly and cordial. . . . We are truly reaching the end of the book now. I finished vetting the Greek-English lexicon and also all the chapters. Of course Dimitri still wants to add expressions and a poem or two. All the art work is in from Θεανώ in Athens. Dimitri even obtained a permission letter from Mitropoulos. Amazing! But he still has not written his short preface, which has been promised since last July. I visited the apartment assigned to us; it’s no palace, but OK for a short stay. Also got an ID card, parking permit, e-mail access, locker in the Greek σπουδαστήριο in Firestone Library. Visited Butler College, where I’ll be teaching. The master told me that he wanted me as a fellow, but I have been “snatched away” by Forbes College. So I walked over to Forbes. There, the Director of Studies turned out to be my former student, John Hodgson, whom fortunately I remembered (he visited at Dartmouth, became a professor of English because of me, he said, sent a daughter to Dartmouth). Very friendly. We had lunch “in hall.” I get five free dinners a week. Thursday lunches the fellows congregate. He may even have an office for me. Very nice. Also, Mache told me that the chair of the Classics Department is another former student of mine who told her that his best course at Dartmouth was mine. Gratifying! . . . On Wednesday, January 17 Hellenic Studies had a βασιλόπιτα party, with about 20 people present. Afterwards, Dimitri, the Keeleys, David Connolly, and I went out for a splendid dinner. And I got back to Palmer House in time to see another video in the jazz series that has been running for two weeks. Fascinating and informative, not only about the music but also about black America—the total discrimination and segregation that blacks faced until quite recently. Among other things, I learned that the expression “Hey, man” was cultivated by blacks because the southern whites so often called them “Boy” no matter what their age. . . . Returning home on Thursday January 18th I learned to my dismay that Jim Alatis mismanaged the arrangements at Georgetown for our MGSA Symposium in October. The dates he chose now turn out to be parents’ weekend, and we cannot use any of the facilities! . . . Visited Phyllis Deutsch at UPNE and asked her to blitz Dimitris saying that the book cannot be delayed again. I actually brought the manuscript back with me, but I still have lots of typing to do and then need to print out a new copy. . . . On Saturday, January 20 went to Kendal. Supper with Lisa Mayer and others on the Webster Committee; then introduced Mrs. Shin, stressing her expertise as a teacher. She gave a really unsatisfactory concert, playing virtuoso pieces that made her strain. No magic, except perhaps in the two Brahms intermezzi she did, the only pieces that did not require huge technique. . . . After Meeting on the 21st, Jack Hunter conducted Bible study. We spent two hours on ten verses in Mark: Jesus’ temptation and the start of his ministry and the “recruitment” of Zebedee’s sons. Chrysanthi recited the passage for everyone in Greek. . . . On January 23: vetted the printed version of my “Odysseus Across the Centuries” talk, which the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage is printing. So poorly set; all the poetry wrong. I’ll need to see the next set of proofs. To the Fleet Bank to meet with J. T. Underwood and Cindy Neily regarding my father’s trust and mother’s custody account, which together are now worth two million. And Fleet has done wonderfully: a 3% profit since last time despite the falling stock market. We made some changes and took out some money for gifting. J. T. is a reader; he is into Shaw right now, reading Man and Superman. I’m going to send him my recording of the Arts of Death speech and I encouraged him to go see The Doctor’s Dilemma at the A.R.T. . . . Lunch with Steve Scher, just back from Berlin and excited about going to Sydney in July. I told him about our stopovers in Hawaii and then Tahiti when we went in 1983. Then to the dentist. Then at 4:00 to a special lecture-demonstration by Yoyo Ma about his “Silk Road Project”—namely, discovery of the marvels of Asiatic music. He played a Mongolian sort of cello but also played his own cello, so beautifully, and spoke well. He repeatedly expressed gratitude for his liberal arts education at Harvard as opposed to a conservatory education. At 6:00 we had guests at another successful dinner party, this time with Robert Binswanger, Jim and Carol Armstrong, Margery and Alan Walker, and Chris Dye, a very lively, compatible crowd plus a super dinner: spanakopita, lamb, meringues for dessert. I gave Jim my Odysseus talk; he seemed pleased. He’s an ex-classicist who still loves things Greek. . . . Today, to Philadelphia and then to Dan’s at Lumberton. He had just returned from twelve days in Florida and hadn’t practiced at all. So Thompson and Husa were very rough. But they improved as we went over them again and again. It would be so nice if he learned the notes. But we had lots of good talk about “the airport” (of course), Pendle Hill, Daphne’s new home in Riparius, and George W. Bush as usurper.

February 1, 2001

To Princeton, 324 So. Stanworth Drive

Drove to Princeton in our Buick, Chrysanthi having decided at the last minute to come, so I canceled the reservation for a rental car. First use of the E-Z pass, which worked. I love technology! Our quarters are actually quite nice: large (2 bedrooms), lots of closet space, a full kitchen, laundry machines next door, a lawn in back, parking in front, etc., and lots of light.

Friday, February 2, 2001

Washington

To Washington by train. Met Deanna at Kennedy Center and heard a fine concert, seated this time in back of the orchestra in the first row, in full view of the audience. The high spot was Radu Lupu playing Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto. Our view of him was “intimate.” He is extraordinarily relaxed, or seems so, looking away from the instrument, communicating very obviously with the conductor (Alan Gilbert), and of course playing with exquisite control and feeling. What a contrast to Mrs. Shin the other night! Equally enticing was the 2nd half, devoted to Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dance, which is a show-off piece for a huge orchestra including harp, piano, saxophone, gongs, xylophone, marimba, etc., etc. We were right over the percussionist, who had to race back and forth among his various instruments. Fun to watch and hear.

Saturday, February 3, 2001

MGSA Executive Board at Georgetown University. Everyone present. Tom Gallant has made much progress on the symposium program, but the venue remains unsettled. We all returned to the Holiday Inn for supper with the marketing director there, who showed us the facilities (mediocre) after serving us a mediocre supper (gratis). Jim Alatis and his wife Penelope will try to have us meet at Georgetown after all. We hope that his capable assistant, Ai-Hui Tan, will arrange everything, including the banquet. Afterwards, some of us continued pleasantly over cocktails in the bar.

Sunday, February 4, 2001

Began with the Fund-Raising Committee meeting over breakfast and then spent the rest of the morning in plenary sessions discussing the reports of our various committees. All in all, a productive two-day meeting. Afterwards, I met Deanna, Leander, Sophia, Nicholas, and Chrysanthi in Union Station, where we all indulged in the food court. But in the afternoon I was able to spend some time in the National Gallery, a special exhibition devoted to Alfred Stieglitz and all the painters he aided, especially Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley (nice picture with Maine subjects), Georgia O’Keefe of course, and John Marin, among others. Some beautiful work, all showing the importance of a gallery, in this case Stieglitz’s.

Monday, February 5, 2001

324 S. Stanworth Drive, Princeton

Leon Black telephoned. His son Josh was not accepted for Bill Miles’s summer program in France. He wants me to intervene. I spoke to Bill, who accepted Josh for next year. Leon very friendly; invited us to supper when we’re in New York.

Tuesday, February 6, 2001

We’re getting settled little by little in Princeton. Such a nice town! Fine tour of Firestone Library today, together with one of the Hellenic fellows, Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum. Also lots of help at the computer center setting me up for e-mail using a local server. Then met with Dimitri to go over MGSA business resulting from our meetings. And at 7:30 in Butler College, my first class. Eleven students. Went well. The three hours didn’t drag. We discussed Odysseus’s character as seen in the Iliad. Students are articulate and not shy.

Wednesday, February 7, 2001

Alexander Nehamas took several of the fellows and me to lunch at Prospect. Very grand. Good way to begin to get to know people. Then visits to various offices to get better settled. After supper, went to hear Bob Hollander and his wife (both colleagues at Columbia grad school) recite from their new translation of Dante’s Inferno. Not great.

Thursday, February 8, 2001

My first Fellows’ Lunch at Forbes, where I’m entitled to 10 meals a week. Nice to meet colleagues and to share with John Hodgkin, my true host at Forbes.

Friday, February 9, 2001

Chrysanthi has a bad cold, or the flu, coughing, aches, maybe temperature. I went to hear Liana Sakelliou’s paper on Seferis’s “Thrush.” OK, but more an appreciation than an analysis. A few of us had supper at the Annex and then went to Richardson—Liana and David Connolly—to hear the Brentano String Quartet. They did a quartet by Charles Wuorinen that was excruciating, and 25 minutes long. Stravinsky’s “3 Pieces” are often as dissonant and wild, but redeemed by melodic interludes and also brevity. Probably 4 minutes of Wuorinen might have been interesting.

Sunday, February 11, 2001

To Huntington, Long Island

Bus to New York. Limousine picked us up at the Yale Club and took us to Jeff and Teresa Murphy’s in Huntington. Very hospitable. Sweet children. Sister, brother-in-law, grandfather (stockbroker who knew and admired Walter Frank). Fancy lunch. Then to Sophia Center, a huge seminary that used to have hundreds of seminarians studying for the priesthood and now has 25, mostly foreign, and mostly second-rate, as Father Smith informed me later. I lectured on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and “The Trial” to a good audience including several of Jeff’s lawyer colleagues whom it was nice to see again. Lots and lots of questions. Afterwards a fine Italian meal with Jeff, Teresa, and Father Smith, whom I hope to entice to Pendle Hill. Limousine back to the city.

Tuesday, February 17, 2001

My Roland electronic keyboard arrived. I’ll get used to it, I suppose. The second class again went well. One student dropped, so now I have ten. Very comfortable. We did Ajax and Philoctetes.

Wednesday, February 14, 2001

Lunch with Mike Keeley, Yannis Fakazis, Peter Constantine and David Connolly to talk more about our translation project. Fakazis still wants a full introduction. We hope that Anghelaki-Rooke can write it, or Constance Tagopoulos. . . . My first office hours, at Butler. Two students came and we had a useful time together.

Friday, February 16, 2001

I lectured on Ritsos’s “Painterly Technique” for the Hellenic Program. Michael the archeologist called my approach “alchemical,” but Angelos liked it.

Saturday, February 17, 2001

Dimitri and I are working every day, going through the English-Greek lexicon word by word. Slow but important. Long lunch with David Connolly, who hopes to have more professional engagement with institutions, journals, etc. in America. He is a sweet guy and was terribly mistreated, it seems, buy the Ionian University. He has taken out Greek citizenship; now he must do his military service, but only three months’ worth.

Sunday, February 18, 2001

Angelos, Dimitri, Chrysanthi, and I went to the Keeleys’ for supper and lots of good conversation.

Monday, February 19, 2001

Dumbarton Leas

We drove to Dan’s for practice (not bad—he had learned his part much better) followed by his home-cooked supper. Very nice. I forgot to say that yesterday Alec and family and Daphne and family visited. We all had brunch in Butler College. Christina admired all the “castles” on the Princeton campus. She’s been accepted to Marymount School, where she’ll go, also to Friends Seminary and Hewitt. What a relief! . . . Watched some of Joe Losey’s “Don Giovanni” with great pleasure.

Tuesday, February 20, 2001

Lunch at Forbes with Joan and Tom Wilson, just back from the Amazon and Machu Picchu. They’re moving to Kendal at Hanover in ten days. Worked with Dimitri again; we’re getting closer. My third class. Students’ papers were due and they made presentations, sharing their work with the rest of the class.

Wednesday, February 21, 2001

Talk by David Connolly on principles for translation in general and translation of Engonopoulos in particular. He speaks well and has lots to say, but his usual principle is the opposite of Mike’s and mine. We try to adopt the text to English; David adapts English to the text. Fine dinner afterwards, about 30 people. And I finished xeroxing the first installment of Greek Today for UPNE: front matter, Before We Begin, Lessons 1 & 2, Before We End, Appendices A, B, C, D, E.

Thursday, February 22, 2001

Yale Club

Sent the material to UPNE via Fed Ex. I hope to send everything else by the end of next week. . . . Walked to the Dinky. Train to New York. Visited Ambassador Tsilas at the Onassis Center at 3:00. Very friendly and welcoming. But he referred to the “problem” with MGSA, namely Karakasidou. We agreed that that was past history and should now be forgotten, so that we may cooperate. I invited Onassis to mount an exhibit at Georgetown in October. We also talked about the poetry reading scheduled for April 11 and a possible bench reading for Life in the Tomb sometime. Then I was shown around the current exhibit, which includes good canvases by Tsarouchis and Ghikas, but nothing by Sikeliotis. . . . Next went to the Foundation for Hellenic Culture on 57th Street to see Katy Myrivilis again after so many years. She’s fine, except of course she laments the loss of Lambis at age 59 from lung cancer (he was a heavy smoker). She’s happy to have my Life in the Tomb published again by Fakazis, and sees no impediment. I also invited the Foundation to collaborate with MGSA in October. She’ll think about that. . . . Back to the Yale Club in the snow. Then Chrysanthi and I walked to Sheila Baird’s on East 37th between Park and Lexington. The ground floor and basement of a brownstone: beautiful plaster work, high ceilings, garden out back. All the AFS trustees were there, for socializing and fellowship. Everyone asked me about the Dartmouth murders, which now seem to have been motivated by neo-Nazi propaganda, that the holocaust didn’t exist, etc. We left at 7:00 in order to get to Leon and Debra Black’s for dinner. They live in baronial splendor at Park and 72nd in a duplex apartment that is filled with Leon’s art collection: original Turners, Picassos, Monets, Manets, Rembrandts, Michelangelos, Seurats, Van Goghs, Cézannes, Brancusis, Modiglianis, and a Degas, Delacroix, Corot, Hals, Pollock, Matisse, plus Chinese bronzes from 3000+ B.C. to A.D. 100. Like the Frick Collection. And he is now on the boards of the Met and MoMA. So his wealth has a purpose: feeding his “addiction” to collect art in a discriminating way. Debra, too, is active in community good works. And the four children are lovely: Ben, Josh, Alex, and Victoria. Two of the boys have been reading the Odyssey in Bob Fagles’ translation, so we had a lively discussion about their teachers’ interpretations and misinterpretations. I thought to myself: How nice if our grandchildren turn out like this when they’re 6, 11, 13, and 17 years old! The meal began with candles, yarmulkes and Alex reciting the proper prayer in Hebrew (although he confessed that he didn’t know what it meant). Leon took us around the collection, elucidating everything, and especially the various Chinese dynasties. He also remembered Leander, Alec, and Daphne and hopes to meet Daphne when we all gather again for another meal. How nice!

Friday, February 23, 2001

AFS committees. Post-secondary chaired by John Cleave in Yannis Vezyroglou’s absence. Then Student Life chaired by Jenny Fenton. They’ve decided to have English-speaking interns, after being pestered by Annie Levis and me for two years. David Buck says that he is interested in Don Nielsen’s proposal for a sort of Outward Bound program, but must talk to staff about it. In the plenary session we were instructed meaningfully by a fund-raising consultant whose handouts I hope to use also for MGSA. . . . Afterwards I went to Patelson’s to buy the Diabelli Variations and assorted Chopin and some four-hand music, then to Carnegie Hall to pick up our tickets for Alfred Brendel in April, then to Steinway Hall to ask about pianos for Kinhaven. A new Boston goes for about $26,000 but a new Steinway is $55,000. They give 20% discount to institutions. And the wreck now at Pendle Hill will have a certain trade-in value. . . . At the Yale Club, Maxwell Anderson, Dartmouth graduate, spoke about the Whitney, which he now directs. He kindly brought me up to date about his father, whose writing on Joyce was so important. Oh, I forgot to write that Leon also collects first editions. He has a copy of Ulysses, the “blue book” printed in France, and also something with Joyce’s scribbled additions and corrections.

Saturday, February 24, 2001

Full AFS board, 9:00 to 1:00. Ambassador Niles spoke well about future EU funds, which surely are going to go to Poland, Hungary, etc., rather than to Greece. George David, head of Coca-Cola in Greece, spoke well about the economic and political situation. Some of us are beginning to think that both the School and the College need to change their name so that the name does not seem to restrict their mission solely to agriculture. . . . Chrysanthi and I then went up to Daphne’s. Greg is leaving for Hong Kong tonight. Chrysanthi is going to stay for a week. I returned by bus, alone, to Princeton.

Monday, February 26, 2001

Nice supper with Tom and Joan Wilson, who have sold their house and will be moving to Kendal at Hanover next Sunday.

Tuesday, February 27, 2001

My third class. We read poetry: Du Bellay, Seferis, Cavafy, Ritsos, Auden. Hard to be sure if anything is really meaningful to these students, but who knows? I need to be optimistic.

Wednesday, February 28, 2001

Gonda Van Steen is here for a week. I brought her to Forbes and introduced her to John Hodgson and Allison Cook in the hope that they’ll invite her to be a Fellow next year. Had office hours in Butler from 4:30 until 8:00 (!), going over student papers. Supper at the Annex, where Tom and Joan were celebrating their departure with friends.

Thursday, March 1, 2001

Princeton–Pendle Hill

Met with Mike Keeley in the morning to go over the Fakazis project, about which Mike continues to be very negative. We’re both going to read over some additional translations to see which we want in, which out. . . . Worked again with Dimitri. He still keeps adding to the book, incorrigibly. But I think we’ll finish by the end of March.

Friday, March 2, 2001

Pendle Hill

All day in meetings. Book Committee re: the Woolman volume. Pubs Committee accepted a beautiful essay on hospice care. Evening: Board and Staff together in the Barn to listen to staff (and students) summarize findings re: Pendle Hill history in various areas: curriculum, community, service, etc. Very well done.

Saturday, March 3, 2001

Pendle Hill–Hanover

More reportage in the Barn in the morning re: Steve Baumgartner’s strategic planning, followed by questions and discussion re: affirmative action, the possibility of giving a certificate for completed study, etc. I suggested—perhaps!—an MA program in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, modeled on what Ben Pink Dandelion has done at Woodbrooke with the University of Birmingham. Over lunch and until 2:30, the Board sequestered, hearing Steve’s summary of new developments (in thought, not yet in action). He pledges himself to have PH racially diverse by 2015. I doubt it. . . . I then flew to Hanover, ahead of a snowstorm, in order to find the Joyce notes that I stupidly neglected to bring in February. Found them in the bottommost carton, buried beneath five others. Chrysanthi is sick again, alas—sore throat, cough, like before.

Sunday, March 4, 2001

Luckily, landed in Philadelphia again before the snow, which began in earnest as I was driving back to Princeton. So much to do! AFS, Fakazis, PH, my course, Greek Today, and the upcoming lectures in New York and Washington. A man in Melbourne wrote beautifully on Kazantzakis and existentialism, inspired by my Pendle Hill pamphlet. I hope the Pubs Committee will accept this one.

Friday, March 9, 2001

Worked with Mike Keeley again, choosing poems for the Fakazis book, followed by lunch and then Mache Karanika’s talk at Hellenic Studies on women’s laments in Byzantine times and thereafter. I mentioned the professional mourners at Chrysanthi’s mother’s funeral, and also the vibrant singing of girls going off to the vintage in Αγία Τριάδα.

Saturday, March 10, 2001

Cambridge

Joyful reunion with Chrysanthi in South Station. We missed each other exceedingly. To the A.R.T. to see Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, not his best, to be sure, yet remarkable for its time and brave criticism of the medical profession and also of “moral correctness” as opposed to the amorality of a creative artist. Star of the show was Will Le Bow as Sir Ralph Bonington. The lead, Sir Colenso, played by John Feltch, was adequate only, no real depth in the portrayal. Alvin Epstein was at his best as the aged Dr. Blenkinsop.

Sunday, March 11, 2001

An extraordinary experience: seeing Brecht’s Mother Courage at the A.R.T. with Karen MacDonald brilliant in the leading role and (my favorite) Mirjana Jakovic equally brilliant as Kattrin, the mute daughter. The director was brought from Budapest—János Szász. Extraordinary power and imagination, a total condemnation of war and an examination of war’s mercantile aspect: it provides a living for certain people (typified by Mother Courage). Brecht’s total theater is startling when compared to Shaw’s traditional dramaturgy. In Brecht there is song, movement, solo action, choral action: everything. But all controlled, emotionally as well as intellectually.

Tuesday, March 13, 2001

Class: Joyce’s “Proteus” through “Lestrygonians.” Even my best student, Scott, is dismayed and disheartened by what he calls Joyce’s “showing off.” How to get beyond this is the problem, especially on a first reading.

Wednesday, March 14, 2001

Dan came and we rehearsed the Virgil Thompson and the Husa. He’s still having much trouble, especially with the timing of the Husa. It’s discouraging for me, but I remain patient.

Saturday, March 17, 2001

An important day. Carol Sheehan came; she’s going to copyedit our book for UPNE. Dimitri and I sat with her for three hours, and she took the manuscript with her—most of it (I still need to do the two lexica at the end, and of course Dimitri still hasn’t written his preface). But essentially the monster has been delivered. . . . Last night I had supper with the Sheehans, Don and Carol, at their son Rowan’s apartment. He is finishing a degree in musical composition. He sings beautifully, as do they all. For grace, they faced the icons (they’re all converts to Russian Orthodoxy, and Don is a sub-deacon), sang the Lord’s Prayer in four-part harmony, acapella, effortlessly. Then served a very fine dinner. Don and Carol’s home in Sharon, Vermont, is without electricity and built by their own hands. (Correction: they recently installed some solar panels, so they have electric light and can run a computer, if the sun is out). Rowan has a terrible stutter, but he keeps on stammering until the word finally comes.

Sunday, March 18, 2001

More material from Dimitri. When will he stop?! But I finished the Greek-English lexicon and delivered it to Carol. Then treated myself to a video of Horowitz palying Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. Lovely!

Tuesday, March 20, 2001

To Washington

Overnight at Leander’s. His rebuilt piano sings. I sight-read Beethoven variations; then we played Virgil Thompson together and Husa, which Leander particularly likes. He says that Dan and I should do Der Abend as well as Kleines Scherzo, which probably Dan won’t master.

Wednesday, March 21, 2001

Washington

A very fine meeting for two and a half hours with Jim Alatis and Ai-Hui Tan over lunch at the Georgetown faculty club. I gave Ai-Hui $2000 to cover her good work. We talked about rooms, finances, food, hotels, publicity. Very cordial. Ai-Hui will come to Princeton at the end of the month to meet with Dimitri and go over the materials that were used for the last symposium. . . . Then by train to NYC, working for three hours straight on the English-Greek lexicon, which is slow going. Bad weather in New York: high winds, heavy rain. And a scaffold collapsed in front of the Yale Club. All the streets are roped off. So I had oysters Rockefeller in the station. Afterwards, a policeman wisely suggested that I telephone the Club. I was advised that they have a service entrance on 44th between Madison and Vanderbilt. So I got in, finally, very wet and a bit tired. . . . Andreas Yiannakos published a short essay (vanity press) dedicated to his father. I’m trying to read it, but the Greek is very difficult. He’s a philosopher, an abstract thinker.

Thursday, March 22, 2001

Worked well on Appendix H in the morning. Then a long, pleasant lunch at the Yale Club with Serena Joyce: lots of talk about the Farm School, and her brother James Joyce (!). I hope that she’ll attend our MGSA symposium in October. . . . Then to East 95th Street to be interviewed by a member of the firm supervising Kinhaven’s proposed capital campaign. I was frank about the need for transition plans to a post-Bidlack and post-Bethlehem school. And I doubted that raising $1.6 million to build a new concert hall was feasible. Urged by Leander two days ago not to say anything negative about the Bidlacks (since vengeance is taken on him) I indicated that I thought the School was well administered now, which indeed it is, since it fills up each summer, has a good faculty, and ends in the black. I said I could probably contribute $5000 but not more, especially considering the current bear market. . . . In the evening, to Merkin Hall to hear Izzy (Gardner) Ganz. While waiting, I sat unknowingly next to Abbie, her husband, and in back of Debbie Gardner. Their conversation soon made it apparent who they were and we had a joyful reunion. Debbie says she remembers the tractor at Terpni. Abbie is an 80-year-old punster who has every possible physical defect but still seems vibrant. Izzy performed a “happening,” I suppose—directed by daughter Debbie and composed by Christopher Vassiliades, who, I later discovered when we met (a) loves Kazantzakis and my translations, (b) was Leander’s classmate in Robert Goldsand’s studio at the Manhattan School of Music. So we had lots to talk about. The “happening” or (perhaps) opera, entitled “Eve,” was an ongoing lament about everything. (But Vassiliades assured me that he has also written an uproariously funny comic piece.) Izzy went through the motions of injecting herself repeatedly with crack, of rolling in agony on the floor, etc., but singing most of the time in her deep, strong mezzo-soprano voice. At one point she accompanied herself on an electronic piano; throughout the rest she was “accompanied” by computer tape going swish-swish. I found it pretensious and very unbeautiful, but I guess I’m a square. Apparently it was composed for Izzy. The second half was devoted to the music of a black basist called Brian Smith. First voice and piano, then a trio with clarinet, bass (played by the composer) and marimba, finally a string quartet. Unpleasant music, always too long, but with interesting moments, and a merimba part that was fun to watch played with gusto. The audience in Merkin, at least tonight, is very different from an audience at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. Lots of blacks, lots of Jews, lots of mulattos. The artsy crowd. Afterwards we all went to a restaurant—Vassiliades and his crowd, Izzy and hers, Debbie and her collaborator in TV production work. Lots of extroverts. Dirty jokes, guffaws, good cheer. I felt somewhat out of place, but not entirely.

Friday, March 23, 2001

To Philadelphia

By train to Philadelphia, AMTRAK Metroliners now have a quiet car—no cell phones allowed. What a pleasure! To Pendle Hill to meet some of the QUIP people. Anthony Manousos was there; nice to see him after so many years. Also Susan Corson-Finnerty, the editor of Friends Journal, who told me that they have just received the issue containing my article “How to Be Happy.” At last! Over lunch, the man from Barclay Press explained how with a $28,000 machine they can now produce books on demand (but binding and covers need to be done elsewhere), enabling them to do print runs of 200. We’ve got to advance, too, to this digital technology. . . . Drove to Chestnut Street to go to Jacobs Music Company, the official Steinway dealer. To my great surprise, I learned from Valerie, the institutional head, that Pendle Hill can get a new Steinway M (5 foot 7 inches) for just about the same price as Zenier would charge to rebuild our existing O (six foot one inch): $24,500. This is because Pendle Hill gets a 20% institutional discount, plus $6500 trade-in for the decrepit Steinway in Waysmeet. We talked also about a Boston (for around $11,000) and a Yamaha (for about $16,000). She played all three. The Steinway really is better sounding. I’ve offered Steve Baumgarner $10,000 for the new Steinway if he can come up with the balance. . . . Met Chrysanthi in 30th Street Station; she had returned from the weeks’ babysitting for Leander, with lots of stories of how horrible Sophia is. Too bad.

Sunday, March 25, 2001

Went to Princeton Friends Meeting for the first time. A very old (18th century) Meeting House, very quaint. But the vocal ministry was pathetic. People very friendly afterwards, however. . . . Listened to Richter’s CD of the Diabelli Variations. Actually, I don’t like everything he does. Am eagerly awaiting our trip to Carnegie Hall in April to hear Brendel’s playing. I’m trying to learn the easier ones; it’s slow going. . . . In the late afternoon, I finished typing Appendix H, the English-Greek dictionary. That ate up a week of my life, but at least it’s done.

Monday, March 26, 2001

Hooray! Mercer University Press is going to accept Brenda Marder’s book! What a relief!

Thursday, March 29, 2001

Nice visit by Margaret Fraser from Pendle Hill. We went to the Princeton Art Museum. There’s a lovely Burne-Jones stained glass window of Saint Cecilia, among other treasures. Then to a lecture by Hermione Lea on suicide and death in literature and biography, culminating in the case of Virginia Woolf, whose biography she has just written (I heard her read from it two days ago). A fine scholar and lecturer. Then supper, excellent, at Forbes.

Saturday, March 31, 2001

Chrysanthi is sick again: infected ear. Very glum. We went to the doctor yesterday and then again today. . . . Met with Ai-Hui Tan and John Iatrides and Dimitri to make further arrangements for the MGSA symposium. Greg Nagy has indicated that he’d like to cooperate, as has the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage. . . . Nice visit with John and Woody Wilson over dinner at an Indian restaurant. John will finish eight years as dean of graduate studies next year and then retire two years beyond that. They’ve made no plans for the long-term.

Sunday, April 1, 2001

Philadelphia

Visited with Alec, Monica, and Theo. They were very excited to see us. Huge brunch in a hotel. Walked to see the new concert hall under construction, the lovely hotel with a lobby imitating the Roman Pantheon, and the old Wanamaker’s store, now Lord and Taylor’s, with its huge central hall and immense organ.

Monday, April 2, 2001

Randy Warner has finished copyediting part 1 of Brenda’s book. I sent her my files electronically to produce a clean copy. We’re moving forward nicely on this. And I finished the first draft of my talk on ritual and Ritsos’s Moonlight Sonata for Harvard at the end of April, referring to Quakerism, mowing, Anastenarides as my own brushes with ritual. My “How to Be Happy” just appeared in Friends Journal. Let’s see if anyone reads it. (Margaret Fraser did and liked it.)

Thursday, April 5, 2001

NYC

To NYC by bus. Supper at Daphne’s. Christina raced across the hall to embrace me. What a pleasure! Andrew is a bundle of laughter and energy, but he doesn’t talk. He had a second speech therapy yesterday. We’re all assuming that this will pass, but what if it doesn’t? Then to Carnegie Hall to hear Alfred Brendel, looking very old, but still totally vigorous at the keyboard. He did Haydn’s Sonata in G minor, lovely, then the great D minor Mozart Fantasy that I used to play, but he did it so freely, so romantically that I’m sure Leander and other pedagogues would object. But Brendel obviously can do as he pleases. Then the equally great Mozart Sonata in A minor, K. 310, very bravura. The 2nd half, however, was the real reason we came: Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Whew! Tempi! I couldn’t come close, even in the easy variations, and the hard ones were like whirlwinds. Such a variety of moods and styles: arias, fugues, parodies. Brendel did everything very dramatically, bringing out the contrasts. Program notes said that this was the last major work that Beethoven wrote for the keyboard, and of course he was totally deaf. It’s impossible to fathom. I had the score, and followed it carefully. A great joy. The man next to us was McNeill, from the McNeill-Lehrer hour on television. Carnegie was sold out, and gave Brendel a loud standing ovation at the end.

April 8, 2001

Hanover

Flew to Hanover last night to get certain materials from my study, to check bibliographic details for Aspasia, and to attend Business Meeting this morning, summoned by Hugh MacArthur since the chief agenda item was consideration, once more, of the renovation project. I presented the latest treasurer’s figures, showing that we had already spent more for architectural fees than had been collected for the Building Fund and also that annual fund contributions are only 80% of budget, although only three weeks remain in the fiscal year. Nevertheless, almost everyone was eager to proceed with the $325,000 project. Even those who had demurred in the past—Audrey Logan, Treat Arnold, I, Lafayette Noda—spoke up voicing our willingness to stand aside. So a minute was drafted giving the go-ahead to Jack Hunter and others on the fund-raising committee to try to raise $100,000 at least. . . . I was booked for a 3:10 flight back to Philadelphia. In the event, I needed 25 hours to get to Princeton. Everything was canceled owing to fog in Philadelphia. So I spent another night at home in Hanover, got up at 4:45 to catch the 6:00 a.m. flight, which was also canceled, finally flew out to New York, waited several hours there, was booked onto a 12:15 flight to Philadelphia, which was delayed an hour. Arrived home at 3:00 p.m. But luckily I had the Spyridon biography with me, so made lots of progress reading.

Tuesday, April 10, 2001

Very good class tonight, the last on Ulysses. We covered Eumaeus, Ithaca, and Penelope. Scott Nancarrow brought his high school English teacher to observe. He, at least, seems to have discovered the marvel of Ulysses and some of the others have also, although people like Miss Whitney prefer The Great Gatsby.

Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Dan came again to practice. He still doesn’t know his notes and needs to count out loud “one-and-two-and,” although he says he can play everything perfectly when he is alone, but at half speed, of course. Very discouraging. We went to lunch again at Forbes with Paul Bou-habib, who is interested in the Seeger case. . . . At 4:00 p.m. we went off to Manhattan in a stretch limousine with Mike and Mary Keeley and Bob and Lynne Fagles. Lots of fun going but then we got stuck in traffic, worried, and arrived at the Onassis center with only seconds to spare. The hall was full. Warm greetings from Ambassador Loukas Tsilas. Serena came; also Burt Pike. Bob read beautifully from Odyssey XXIV, the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. Mike read Cavafy’s “Trojans” and “Ithaca,” Seferis’s “King of Asine,” Ritsos’s “Nausicaä” (which I didn’t know), and “Penelope’s Despair.” I did Ritsos’s “Moonlight Sonata” accompanied by the cassette of Casadesus playing Beethoven. Peter Constantine read short poems by Kondós and others, not very memorable, and the poet Χατσόπουλος, flown in from Athens, spoke at length, boringly, about the nature of translation, all abstractions, no examples, but then read two lovely poems of his own in Greek (one called “Nemesis”) which were followed by David Connolly’s very flatfooted translations. Oh, Constantine also read a superb poem by Constance Tagopoulos, who was present and recited it in Greek—on Apollo, the Sun. Saw various old friends afterwards: Rachel Hadas for example. Then went with Constance, her partner Peter, Peter Constantine, Chrysanthi, and Burt to Lindy’s for cheesecake. People seemed very moved by the “Moonlight Sonata,” not surprisingly.

Friday, April 20, 2001

Pendle Hill

General Board at Pendle Hill, but I was mostly interested in the piano. I got Denny and Steve Jackson and Shirley Dodson to agree on a spot for it in the foyer of the barn. I got Richard Barnes to write a purchase order and Denny to agree to sign it. Leander contacted Ignat, who owns and loves the Yamaha piano and who confirmed that this was the way to go. Leander agreed, and warned against the Boston, which falls to pieces after about a year whereas the Yamaha has very fine durability.

Saturday, April 21, 2001

Pendle Hill

Finally caught Steve and got him to agree. I’ll pay half ($8500) and he will raise the other half. I ministered in Meeting about the nature of ritual, emphasizing the need to have faith that it will somehow change the outside world. After lunch drove to Philadelphia, picked up Alec and we all went to Jacobs Music. I played the Yamaha C3 (6 foot 1 inch) and loved it; it’s bright, with a mellow base and a brilliant treble. I actually like it more than the Steinway B (5 foot 7 inches), which was much more subdued. I tried a few of the Diabelli variations on each, a good test because they’re so expressive. Bought the Yamaha plus a vinyl cover that I paid for myself. Easy! And cheap: $17,000, owing to the institutional discount plus the $6500 that they give us for the junk Steinway in Waysmeet. Done! It will be delivered next week. . . . Nice supper in a quiet restaurant, with Alec and Chrysanthi. Then to the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Academy: a spectacular concert—Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 in D minor K.466 played gorgeously by Angela Hewitt, then Mahler’s Symphony no. 1, performed exquisitely by this superb orchestra conducted by a young Russian, Yakov Kreizberg. The Mahler is of course nice to see as well as hear, because it exploits all the resources of a huge orchestra: two sets of timpani, harp, augmented brasses, etc. The ideas are so original, the emotions so well controlled. It’s hugely long, yet never tiresome, especially when one can see as well as hear.

Sunday, April 22, 2001

Little Yuki, the Japanese doll, is delighted that she’ll be able to play the new piano. Margaret Fraser is overjoyed. (And Dan wants to concertize on it, as does Leander.) . . . A new development is Steve’s decision to place Rebecca on probation if she doesn’t voluntarily leave by next Wednesday. She’s behind in two pamphlets and Steve just cannot let this continue. Richard, too, is fed up. I had long talks with Rebecca, trying to convince her that catastrophes can sometimes turn into opportunities, and in any case the religious approach to vicissitude is to convert it into something positive. I think she should leave, but she’ll probably hang on for now. . . . Back in Princeton, went to a lecture on the photos of Athens taken by Félix Bonfils in the 19th century, and then to Firestone to see the exhibition. No cars, of course, no πολυκατοικίες, sparse population, a sort of large village with the Acropolis towering in the center.

Monday, April 23, 2001

Long relaxed lunch with Mihαïl Chrysanthopoulos, with lots and lots to talk about. What a pleasure!

Tuesday, April 24, 2001

Serena Joyce here. She found a beautiful write-up by Nancy Crawshaw, photos and text, of the Quaker school in Salonika published in 1951 in the Times Educational Supplement. We’re having reproductions made. I treated her to lunch in Prospect. Then we all went to David Rudenstein’s lecture on the Elgin Marbles. He’s a lawyer and is interested in the legality of the firman from the sultan that allegedly allowed Elgin to remove the sculptures. Rudenstein’s conclusion, so far, is that there is no evidence whatsoever for any such document and that the so-called translation presented to the parliamentary Special Committee in 1816 was fraudulent, a doctored translation of a document in Italian that probably was Elgin’s application to the sultan. Fascinating. . . . We went to Forbes for supper, then Chrysanthi and I to Butler for my class, the first of two sessions in which the students presented, orally, their term papers. Ben Holstin however brought his clarinet and instructed the class on rondo form, using the Mozart clarinet concerto, all this being relevant to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, of course. Rachel Timinsky did a bang-up job, as always, with class participation, a monopoly game with Odysseus progressing toward Ithaca every time someone answered a question correctly. Even the weakest student, Sloan Fisher, did OK. One more week of this, and then a party on May 8.

Wednesday, April 25, 2001

To Dan’s at Lumberton. The Thompson is going quite well, but Dan still needs to count one-and-two-and, etc. in the Husa.

Thursday, April 26, 2001

Long lunch and talk with Gonda Van Steen. I took her to Forbes, where I hope she’ll be made a Fellow next year. . . . Then drove to Pendle Hill. Piano still not delivered.

Friday, April 27, 2001

Cambridge

Nicely housed at the Inn at Harvard. To Boylston Hall for “Ritual in Greece: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” marking the retirement of Margaret Alexiou. Lots of old friends. Dia and Wim, Thanos Veremis, Greg Nagy, Ruth Macrides, Vangelis Calotychos and his wife, Anna Stavracopoulou, Michael and Nea Herzfeld, Charles Stewart, Laurie Hart, even Jan Ziolkowski. The first session was devoted to classics: Nagy on repletion in Homer, Yatromanolakis on Sappho, and Pat Easterling, who had been Meg’s teacher at Cambridge, very interestingly on “new” and “forever” (= “incorruptibility” and “wastage” in Ritsos’s language) in Greek drama. The second session was devoted to Byzantium. Ioli Kalavrezou was interesting on dance and Macrides on petitions. They had a “master of petitions” and I thought that Nikiforos Diamandouros should be called that now; he is PASOK’s ombudsman, ο Συνήγορος του Πολίτη. Wim Bakker spoke on Ο θρήνος του Θεοτόκου and presented some exquisite poetry, especially the stanza in which the virgin entreats the cross to bend down so that she can kiss the dead Jesus. This was followed by a grand dinner in the Faculty Club, complete with toasts for Meg added to various testimonies voiced by speakers earlier.

Saturday, April 28, 2001

Cambridge

The morning was devoted to Modern Greece. Dia spoke on the Cretan renaissance, Calotychos on the Balkans, Anna nicely on Karaghiozis, Panagiotis Roïlos on Elytis as modernist, and I on a ritualistic approach to Ritsos’s “Moonlight Sonata” followed by an abbreviated performance with the Beethoven music. It went well. In the afternoon, devoted to anthropology, Herzfeld spoke on “the ritualization of taxonomy” (!), Stewart on dream, and Laurie Hart, incomprehensibly, on architecture. Also, three papers on Welsh and Irish materials, honoring that side of Meg and her father. Also, deliciously, Andrea Useem came to meet me in the coffee break, by pre-arrangement. She married last Saturday and has converted to Islam, as has her husband. After finishing her M-Div at the Harvard School of Theology she hopes to return to journalism, as she should, because she is so very very good at it, and will now specialize in theological issues. She was radiant, and looked lovely in her Muslim head-cover. . . . I should add that this morning we had a long, leisurely breakfast at the hotel with Meg, reminiscing about the past and thinking of the future, especially Meg’s appearance as keynote speaker at the MGSA symposium in October. The saddest news is that Pavlos has had three epileptic seizures, something not uncommon, says Meg, in autistics as they grow older.

Sunday, April 29, 2001

Princeton

Went again to Princeton Friends Meeting. A truly gathered meeting this time, with good ministry about ecology. . . . Met my student Sam Choi at Forbes for an hour to help him with his term paper. I worry about Scott Nancarrow, who did so brilliantly at the start of the course and now seems paralyzed. He repeatedly says he is coming to office hours and then does not show up. . . . At 9:00 p.m., to Alchemist & Barrester’s in Witherspoon Street to gather with others from Hellenic Studies to bid farewell to Angelos Delivorrias, who returns tomorrow to Athens. He’s the director of the Benaki Museum, a big shot there, but here in Princeton a very friendly, warm, modest individual with strong, sensible opinions. We hope to see each other again.

Monday, April 30, 2001

Anna telephoned from the Onassis Foundation in New York. She wants to send me around the country lecturing for two weeks in October. One possibility is Vancouver, where we could see Jeff Ballard and family. And Onassis will pay transportation and hotel for Chrysanthi, too. . . . At 1:00 p.m. we went to the video conferencing room to examine Amherst students, via video hookup. Quite remarkable. We see them; they see us. Texts and pictures and handwriting come through well enough. A new experience. . . . Then bus to New York (Chrysanthi says she’s beginning to like this varied life made possible by residence in Princeton). Quick supper with Daphne. Christina visited Marymount and met her teacher. Andrew is saying a few more words, but still very indistinctly. . . . We walked up Lexington to the 92nd Street “Y” for the “Tribute to Isaac Babel,” with special VIP seats thanks to Babel’s translator, Peter Constantine. The hall was filled, every seat. First Babel’s daughter spoke, then Peter read a deliciously funny Babel screenplay about a Jewish production featuring a maid with pointed breasts and eyes congealed in lasciviousness. Cynthia Ozick read from her excellent introduction to the forthcoming book. Paul Auster read the lovely story “Guy de Maupassant.” The poorest was Grace Paley, reading “Gedali.” But then Elie Wiesel spoke inspiringly about the trial and execution of Babel in 1941, and how his silence condemned him in Stalin’s eyes more than his utterances. The evening concluded with Nathalie Babel’s overlong account of her mother’s death. At the reception afterwards it was nice to congratulate Peter Constantine for this important book, and also to see Burt again.

Tuesday, May 1, 2001

To Butler College for a special dinner with a speaker who had been a CIA spy for 36 years in various locals, including Greece, which he said was a great posting for him because Athens was so very full of intrigue. For once we heard the real truth about spies, traitors, counter-intelligence, derring-do. He bugged foreign embassies, forestalled terrorist attacks, discovered American CIA agents who were double agents, spying for Russia, etc. Chilling. But real. . . . Afterwards, my final class, with five students making presentations. Scott Nancarrow, with whom I had an emergency tutorial in the afternoon, did very well. All the others were totally satisfactory, except Sam Choi, who doesn’t have an oral gift, alas. Next Tuesday, our party.

Thursday, May 3, 2001

Delivered Chrysanthi to Trenton to take AMTRAK home so that she can vote in Town Meeting next week for the new Senior Center. Dan came to practice. Thompson going fairly well, Husa still not good. Lunch in Forbes again with Paul Bou-habib, whose dissertation is on John Locke and is therefore interested in conscientious objection and other limitations of state power, all of which Locke opposes. . . . Good session with Dimitri, finishing the revision of the English-Greek lexicon. . . . In the evening, went to hear a lecture by James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, on “Poverty in a World of Plenty.” Excellent speaker, apparently devoted to alleviating poverty despite what his critics say. Horrendous statistics. Millions if not billions exist on $1 or $2 a day, still. Why are the dissidents so angry at the World Bank?

Friday, May 4, 2001

Pendle Hill

Sat with Steve Bamgartner talking about Rebecca. She has elected the probation period. Steve thinks (and hopes) that she will fail and expects to know by June. She is sure she’ll succeed, of course. Everyone is delighted with the piano. I played Mozart and Beethoven on it. The treble is very bright, the bass OK but a bit grumpy. Good touch. And it fits well in the Barn. . . . Dan arrived in the afternoon; he is attending the Forum program. We played Thompson and Husa. Again: Thompson OK, Husa pretty tentative.

Saturday, May 5, 2001

Princeton

Carol Sheehan came again and showed Dimitri and me her copyediting strategies for front matter and Lesson 1. Very helpful. Dimitri still wants to change the arrangement at the start of each lesson, saving the cartoon for later. I disagree. We met again at 5:00 p.m. and worked out a good compromise that suits us both. . . . Watched Chaplin’s “A King in New York,” a bitter satire, and funny, on American boorishness, commercialism, and red-baiting.

Sunday, May 6, 2001

Went to the Westminster Choir School to hear Rowan Sheehan’s presentation with a full evening of his compositions, mostly liturgical, for various combinations: two sopranos and cello, chorus, baritone and piano, organ, tenor and chorus. I didn’t find the music very exciting—meager rhythmic interest, no counterpoint. But it was soothing. The real interest was the performance. Gorgeous. What voices!

Tuesday, May 8, 2001

Our class party in the basement café at Butler College, catered by “Oliver”: Greek μεζεδάκια σπανακόπιτα, μουσακάς, μπακλαβάς. Then I showed the Joseph Strick film of Ulysses. The net effect of all this: hard to say. They’re very reticent, very different from the Greek students I had in Thessaloniki.

Wednesday, May 9, 2001

Saw a student by accident and she said how good the food was. . . . To Dan’s for final practice before we meet at Kinhaven. It’s going better.

Thursday, May 10, 2001

I examined four students in the University of New Orleans taking elementary Greek. The best was a 70-year-old man who actually spoke Greek after only twelve weeks of instruction. All this was done by telephone, of course, unlike the Amherst exams I did last week by videoconferencing.

Friday, May 11, 2001

A symposium on nationalism moderated by Mark Mazower, who speaks as impressively as he writes.

Saturday, May 12, 2001

They came for my Roland electronic keyboard, which has given me much pleasure since February. Then to Philadelphia Street Fair on Walnut Street: music, dance, food. We had a nice Italian meal in a restaurant with Alec and family.

Monday, May 14, 2001

Nikos Christides arranged a little farewell dinner for me and Chrysanthi, inviting Sophia and Roxane. Very pleasant.

Tuesday, May 15, 2001

All the students turned in their term papers on time, except Scott Nancarrow, who had pneumonia last week and was in the hospital. I’ll expect his on Saturday. Supper at the Keeleys’ with Bruce and Tad Lansdale, and Bob and Lynn Fagles. Bruce had a brain operation that cured the trembling in one hand. He’ll have a second operation for the other hand in November. But he seems very old, still.

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

To NYC to hear Patroclos Stavrou lecture on Kazantzakis at the Onassis Center—a very disorganized non-scholarly lecture with lots of quotes in Greek and English, of course all lauditory. He was very pleased to see me, it seemed. Afterwards met Loukas Skipitaris in the reception—the actor who did the tapes for Ιπτάμενος Θάλαμος. We might use him again for Greek Today. Supper at the Yale Club with Chrysanthi and Constance Tagopoulos with lots of good talk about Joyce’s Ulysses and other books in Odysseus Across the Centuries, a course that she, too, is teaching.

Thursday, May 17, 2001

Prepared for AFS tomorrow and started reading Anita Brookner’s The Bay of Angels, which I’ll review for World Literature Today. Also finished reading and grading all the term papers, which ranged from one C+ to several A’s, one A-minus, and several B-pluses. . . . Then to the Met. Lovely exhibit of Vermeer and the Delft school. His early “Christ in the House of Mary and Martha” (1655) is lovely, with Martha bustling about and Mary just sitting. There was the original of “Young Woman Studying at a Virginal” (1670), the reproduction of which we have in our bedroom. “The Glass of Wine” is also lovely. The colors of these originals are so bright and fresh. There’s also an exhibit of Byzantine jewelry and artifacts; not very impressive. The highlight was the Blake exhibit, on loan from Tate Modern. What a genius! I particularly admired “God Judging Adam” (1795), and of course “Newton” (1805) and the huge “Angel of the Revelation” (1803). I bought the catalogue, to enjoy at leisure. . . . Then to Daphne’s to see Christina and Andrew. Christina made me into her horse and tired me out. What energy! And I played peek-a-boo with Andrew, who is speaking a bit more now, but of course in a way that only Mother understands. Greg and Daphne came to the Yale Club for supper.

Friday, May 18, 2001

New York City

Committees: Post-Secondary with Yannis Vezyroglou, Secondary with Pandelis Panteliades, Student Life with Annie Levis. Then a plenary session with the Clinton administration’s chief State Department official for the Balkans, who gave us a fascinating “inside” picture of Milošević and the Bosnians and Montenegrins. Interestingly, although many have argued that the wars in the Balkans result from age-old ethnic and religious differences, his view is that most of the trouble results from a very small number of powerful, unscrupulous leaders out for power and money. They manipulate everyone else for their own advantage. He emphasized how incapable Miloševic was of listening to advisers except those who agreed with him. . . . At 6:00 we walked to Sutton Place South to go to Eve Labouisse’s reception in a delightful apartment overlooking the East River. Ambassador Tsilas came at my invitation as did Anna Stavracopoulou and Amalia from the Onassis Foundation, whom Alex Drapos introduced as from the Niarchos (!) Foundation. Afterwards the Keeleys and John Cleave and Gail Grant went to Meltemi Restaurant, which I mistakenly thought was Molyvos, which sent Alex and Ami to 7th Avenue. But they joined us finally and we had a good Greek meal with lots of talk and laughter.

Saturday, May 19, 2001

NYC–Princeton

A long trustees’ meeting in the morning, 8:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. The English-speaking interns are all hired, and David wants them to have Rassias training this summer. I convinced the Board to have a workshop on Greek education—TEE, TEI, Λύκεια, AEI. . . . Then back to Princeton by train.

Sunday, May 20, 2001

Hanover

Graded students; delivered grades. Easy drive back to Hanover, six hours, no traffic. I marvel at my “Easy-Pass” at toll stations.

Tuesday, May 22, 2001

Quaker 8s at Cadwalladers’. Billie Jo’s cancer is still responding to treatment, she says, although she has lost almost all of her hair.

Wednesday, May 23, 2001

Long lunch with John Rassias about Spyridon. (John is going to NYC to speak at an event celebrating the new biography.) . . . Flew to Philadelphia. Alec and Monica were out, so I had supper on Walnut Street in the same Italian restaurant we’d gone to previously. Then found them home and had a nice visit, except that I caught Theo’s cold.

May 25, 2001

Princeton

Intensive work yesterday and today with Dimitri and Mache shortening the book. We’ll put everything removed into a Workbook. Finished typing the corrected English-Greek lexicon. . . . Finally left 34 South Stanworth Drive.

May 26, 2001

Cambridge

To the A.R.T. for an imaginative, if zany, production of Richard II directed by Robert Woodruff, who’ll be replacing Brustein as head of A.R.T. next year. Lots of homosexual suggestion (more than suggestion) that didn’t add much, really. Richard played marvelously by Tommy Derrah (who’ll be Iago next year), and Bolinbroke equally well by Bill Camp. But the true marvel, of course, is Shakespeare’s language, plotting, and psychological insight. The incompetent, decadent Richard becomes a sort of artist. And Bolinbroke, the usurper, is a mixture of crass ambition plus an overpowering sense of sin that nevertheless does not overcome the ambition.

May 27, 2001

Riparius

To the farm. We planted the garden. Removed a huge pine branch fallen directly across our entrance. Leander’s cellar is dry, luckily. . . . Supper with Shapiros, who will be leaving in August for a new home in Queensbury. We celebrated my birthday with a lovely dinner.

May 28, 2001

Riparius

Started the tractor. Hooray! We drove home early and went to hear Joan Wilson perform Loeillet and other “old music” at Kendal: viola da gamba plus two recorders. Peter Tailer encourages us to apply for one bedroom and den, which will be easily available.

May 29, 2001

Dimitri Gondicas, Executive Director,

Program in Hellenic Studies

58 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, NJ 08544

Dear Dimitri,

Thank you for your kind letter of May 24th. You ask about my class, my association with Forbes College, my research in the library, and my impression of the Program in Hellenic Studies.

My freshman seminar “Odysseus across the Centuries” was blessed with eight very capable students and only one who merely limped along. I’m glad to report that Agatha Gilmore, who had lots of Latin in high school and who wrote an “A” final paper on the voyages of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Bloom to the underworld, wants to start Ancient Greek next year. Rachael Timinsky, another “A” student in the course, is already studying Ancient Greek and hopes very much to go to Greece in her junior year. Scott Nancarrow, who started spectacularly but slackened a bit toward the end (owing mostly to a bout of pneumonia) is another who might do more with Greek subjects in the future.

It is difficult for the teacher of a course to have an accurate sense of its success; one must ask the students. They filled out course evaluations but I have not seen them; I think they went to Peggy Reilly. But I’d like to quote you what Jen Brea, another of the “A” students, wrote to me afterwards:

I’ve always considered myself an “English” person. In school it was always my favorite class, always the environment that I found the most stimulating and the most exciting. That changed when I moved to New York the middle of my junior year.

My academic experience there was very disappointing, and I started hating the idea of English class, which was just horrible considering how valuable it had always been to me, how much reading and writing about literature was a part of my life.

I’m telling you this because the experience of this seminar has brought me back to the way I used to feel about English. That I started being excited about the intellectual exploration again, I cannot thank you enough. I really enjoyed this class. I feel like it did what any good class should do—helped me to learn, to grow, to challenge my assumptions. Anyway, I wanted to thank you because I don’t think that we, as a class, thanked you properly when I know that I speak for everyone when I say this seminar was a challenging and rewarding experience.

And thank you for introducing me to Joyce!

In any case, it was stimulating for me to be with such a good class. They even recovered from the seemingly mortal blow delivered them by Joyce at the start, ending with some appreciation of the wonders of Ulysses. A good sign was that Nancarrow brought his high school English teacher to one of the sessions and Brea brought her mother!

My time here was greatly enhanced by my fellowship at Forbes College. John Hodgson, my former student at Dartmouth, Alison Cook, and Andrea La Paugh couldn’t have been nicer. I also enjoyed getting to know Paul Bou-habib, a graduate student, and Eduardo Cadava. Forbes provided me with an office, many meals, a place to bring friends and family, a venue for several very interesting lectures, and also—perhaps most important—the opportunity to see four of my students (all Forbes residents) informally outside of class. I am very pleased that, somewhat owing to my efforts, Gonda Van Steen will be a fellow at Forbes next year. I should add that although I was not officially a fellow of Butler College, where my seminar took place each week, I felt like one there as well, since the Master, Edward Champlin, allowed me use of his office for meetings with students, Betty Stein kept inviting me to meals and lectures, and Judy Fallon was always helpful. The course’s end-of-term party took place in the Butler College café, with a Greek supper catered by Olives, and a showing of the excellent film of Ulysses by Joseph Strick.

Firestone Library, including the Hellenic Studies spoudasterio, was of course an important resource during my four months in residence, although I am sorry to report that I was unable to pursue work on either the Kazantzakis letters or the second volume of Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit. However, I used library resources for my course and also for a paper on Ritsos and ritual that I gave during the term at Harvard and another paper that I am about to give momentarily at the State Department. On three different occasions I made use of the rare book collections, and I also collaborated with the director of the American Farm School’s New York office on further investigation of the Nancy Crawshaw archive.

The Program in Hellenic Studies was a source of constant stimulation owing to the excellent people who came and went during spring term. I was especially pleased to be able to meet privately with Mark Mazower, Mihalis Chrysanthopoulos, and David Connelly, as well as to share fellowship with various post-docs and other visitors. Additional highlights were the lectures by David Rudenstein and Helen Philon, and of course the Bonfils exhibit.

Chrysanthi and I felt totally comfortable owing to our housing at 324 South Stanworth Drive, which put us within walking distance of Nassau Street and the university. Thank you, Dimitri, for the Stanley J. Seeger fellowship-in-kind toward rent. This covered the months of March, April, and May at $1400 each (February being missed owing to a bureaucratic mistake), totaling $4200 if I am not mistaken. My out-of-pocket expenses for Greek Today, so far, add up to $3959.85, with more to come, so it looks like an equivalence has been achieved.

Especial thanks, Dimitri, go to you for making all this possible and for the jokes and meals, as well as the concentrated work, that we shared over the past four months. Hellenic Studies is a seaworthy ship with an energetic, imaginative captain at the helm.

Congratulations, and best wishes for the future.

May 31, 2001

North Potomac, Maryland

Nice visit with Leander and family. Niko seems to have taken an especial liking to me. I read him about eight books; he couldn’t get enough. . . . Earlier, War/Peace luncheon with the new fellows. I was the featured speaker on “The History of War/Peace at Dartmouth.” Nice to think again about Elise, Leonard, Jack, Al Rozycki, and of course Elizabeth and John Baker.

June 1, 2001

Washington

I spoke at the State Department for one and a half hours on Cavafy’s Alexandrian cycle. The group included two spouses of future consular officials in Greece. One woman was lively and asked lots of questions; the others not so much. Jim Miller drove me to the Capitol Hilton. From there I went to visit the two hotels Ai-Hui booked for MGSA, Georgetown Inn and Lathem. Very useful. Discovered more flexibility in the arrangements, with increased possibility for room sharing. Supper at the Hilton for tomorrow’s fifteen speakers. I sat next to Ambassador Monteagle Stearns; good to meet him for the first time. And very nice to see Bill McNeill again. He told me that Elizabeth has Alzheimer’s, alas. And they’ve made no arrangements for institutionalization. How fortunate we are that we’re connected with Kendal through our Quaker life-style!

June 2, 2001

Washington

I was the first speaker in today’s symposium, “US Relations with Greece in the Twentieth Century,” sponsored by Gene Rossides’s American Hellenic Institute, a Washington lobby, mostly. My topic: “What Non-Greeks Can Learn from Modern Greek Literature.” I started with an audiotape of “Homer Thrace” in Never On Sunday saying he’d come to Greece to learn the Truth. Lots of people came up afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed the talk. All the other talks were political: Psomiades movingly on the Asia Minor Catastrophe and American aid; Coufoudakis on Greek-Americans and US-Greek relations; Iatrides on the Truman Doctrine; Papacosma on Greece and NATO. Then a ceremonial lunch honoring McNeill, who spoke amusingly about his adventures in civil war Greece as a 27-year-old, including in Salonika occupied by ELAS. I couldn’t stay for the afternoon session to hear Jim Miller on PASOK, Stearns on the future of US-Greek relations, and Rossides on the US Executive Branch and relations with Greece. Too bad, but I had to catch the last plane back to Lebanon.

Sunday, June 3, 2001

Very good Meeting. Someone raised the basic question of evil. Theodicy. I ministered on the felix culpa—evil as an opportunity, challenging us to choose correctly. Nice to see Jack and Kathleen Shepherd afterwards. In the afternoon, went to vet John Rassias’s speech for the Spyridon event in New York. We both learned that Pilitsis is now the archdiocese’s head of education. Thus we have a friend on the inside.

Wednesday, June 6, 2001

Leander is here. We went to White River Junction together to buy a telescope for the farm. It is computerized. You tell it “Venus” and it is supposed to find Venus for you! Apparently one can see seven planets, galaxies, etc. With luck, that will interest the grandchildren (and maybe the grandparents, too). . . . John Rassias asked me to vet his application paper for the MLA coordinating committee and also his speech at Spyridon’s affair next week. He always has lots to say but generally says it rather badly. Let’s see now what happens. He very much wants to be elected to the MLA position. But his heart attack is now an everyday reality. To go to NYC, for instance, he hired a limousine rather than brave the rigors of plane, train, and taxi. . . . Good music with Dick and Allan. We did the Debussy sonata. And Dick and I tried Harold Boatrite’s flute-piano sonata, which is very nice. . . . Yesterday: good long lunch at the Inn with Steve Scher, who is off to Australia soon. Alice arrived later.

Thursday, June 7, 2001

Alice and I played through her pieces and mine for the Kinhaven workshop. She is doing a beautiful C-major Mozart four-hand sonata and two Brahms Hungarian dances. . . . Yesterday Leander visited Yiayia and actually got her to laugh. He has a way with her that all the rest of us lack. . . . I had my general physical exam by a young woman doctor, Hong, Gerber having canceled twice. Everything fine, she says. . . . Went to Orford, invited by Chris Dye, to join a reading group composed of lawyers, all men, doing “A Painful Case” in Dubliners. Three of the five very well read, perceptive. One had Jesuit schooling. I remembered enough, aided by my annotated text. In any case, we had a true “class” from 4:30 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. Fun!

Friday, June 8, 2001

Kinhaven

Sent Lesson 3, revised, off to Carol, reduced from 51 to 33 pages. Then to Kinhaven with Alice. Dan and I are in the trailer again (another trailer). Practiced on the concert hall piano (Miss Mann’s), which is lovely. Dan is much improved. We actually did the Husa up to speed.

Sunday, June 10, 2001

Kinhaven

Superb lesson on the Husa from Mrs. Shin followed by a helpful lesson for my solo Mozart Rondo, stressing phrasing. As always, it’s the details that make the difference.

Monday, June 11, 2001

Kinhaven

We heard that Caroline Solzhenitsyn gave birth to a boy, Dmitri. How nice! Everyone here signed a card for Ignat and her. Nigel gave Dan and me a fine lesson on the Thompson, complete with anecdotes about Thompson himself. For example: “Nigel, how long should this fermata last?” “Well, Virgil always said that a fermata equals twice the value of the note or rest over which it stands.” Yesterday’s master class, by Nigel, was superb. Charlotte Armstrong, Leander’s student, played the Debussy Toccata exceptionally well. Bruno played Glazunov for thirty minutes! Alma Rhodes played Brahms, but not very well. At supper tonight, Steve introduced me to a friend who comes monthly from Massachusetts to have a lesson with Leander. The faculty concert was thrilling. Nigel and Leander did a Beethoven march. Then Nigel played Beethoven’s Opus 27 no. 7 sonata—fantasia—with extraordinary vigor and precision. I don’t think that anyone plays Beethoven better. Then Leander and his Levine School colleague Nancy played Reger: froth and easily forgettable. Mrs. Shin and Nigel then teamed up for a Mozart sonata, which seemed somewhat formulaic to me. The program ended with Mendelssohn, played by Mrs. Shin and Leander. Scintillating. I’ve never heard Mrs. Shin play better. And Leander was amazing, both as a technical virtuoso and as a very sensitive interpreter. After the performance they said they’d like to play it again, and did. Later, we all gathered for wine and sweets. And Dan and I went over our pieces for the last time, slowly, with the metronome. It will be a miracle if we get through them tomorrow.

Tuesday, June 12, 2001

Kinhaven–Hanover

Dan and I played quite well. Both the Husa and the Thompson were greeted with squeals of pleasure in the audience. Dan didn’t make a single timing error, just some garbled notes, nothing serious. I forgot some dynamics and had trouble finding the middle pedal, but otherwise maintained control. Alice and Bob Cummings played their Mozart exquisitely—musically the highlight of the program. . . . Leander told me that the cook had been told by Nancy Bidlack, “I hate Peter Bien. He tried to get us fixed.” Well, I did, I must admit. . . . Returning home, I began immediately getting chapters ready to send to Carol, and also rushed to Fed Ex to get lesson 3 to Dimitri before he leaves for Greece.

Thursday, June 14, 2001

Nice visit from Henry Hart, here for his 25th reunion. He is doing well at William and Mary. How nice that he has a normal career, unlike John Tallmadge and so many others who never achieved tenure. Also saw another former student to whom I was close, Rand Jones, the one who knew James Merrill. . . . Working hard on Greek Today in an effort to prepare all the shortened lessons for Carol.

Saturday, June 16, 2001

Done! Sent lesson 12 to Carol this morning. Now I have only the Workbook to prepare for her. . . . Mary Rassias had appendicitis and was operated on yesterday but today is already home and walking around. We visited. Nice to see Veronica and her children, all dressed Amish style. She is transformed, salt of the earth, producing goats-milk yoghurt and cheese, eggs, and chicken meat, and she says they’re even making money. . . . John discovered that the celebration for Spyridon on the 11th was held on the very day that the archdiocese was celebrating Bartholomew’s name day, and he is furious at the deception, for this was never told him beforehand. . . . Nice supper yesterday with Tom and Joan Wilson, who are flourishing at Kendal but are off soon to Midway Island (!) to do . . . of course . . . scuba diving.

Sunday, June 17, 2001

To Riparius

Business Meeting considered my budget for 2002. All’s well, more or less. People like to spend more and more, but they also contribute (some of them).

June 28, 2001

To Hanover

To Hanover to deliver Chrysanthi for the ALPS program in Greek. I moved my two filing cabinets from Baker 702, which I was forced to vacate owing to construction in Baker, to my new office, 312 Gerry, until Baker is ready again (about 1½ years) and we move back. Everything else is in boxes in the cellar of 12 Ledyard Lane.

Thursday, July 5, 2001

Riparius

In the morning today Alec and I finished the grand staircase we’ve constructed to reach our sleeping loft and make Chrysanthi happy. (It will be a huge surprise for her when she returns after ALPS.) It took us 2½ days. We got 10-inch by 12-foot rough stringers from Brown’s Lumber in Pottersville. Then we sliced a log in two for the treads, securing each with two long lag screws at each end, having been careful first to level each one in two directions. The result is totally steady, and very appropriately rustic. It even looks OK aesthetically, despite my fears. The log ladder is now serving in the barn. . . . Innovations this summer are (a) a video machine upstairs that we determine to keep secret from all the children—I’ve watched Balanchine ballets so far, lying in bed before sleeping—, (b) two oil-filled electric radiators that do wonders on a cold day or evening.

Saturday, July 7, 2001

My first batch of compost is ready; it took only two weeks. I’ll start a new batch tomorrow. All three plum trees have fruit, the first time that ever happened. We had formed tomatoes even in June and a small ripe one today. Amazing. Lots of fun with Theo, who talks continually in both English and Indonesian, and is a comedian. And Monica is a splendid cook; she has made supper every night (except on Thursday when we all went to the Narrows, happily flourishing under new management, to celebrate the completion of the stairs) now that Chrysanthi is in Hanover. Alec and I cleaned up fallen branches around the swings next to the Guest House, using my Stihl extension saw. After supper we played Handel violin sonatas plus “cruise music.” Leander sent me the Percy Granger piece. I hope to learn both parts and record them for Dan. I already did that for the Diabelli sonatina that Steve recommended at Kinhaven, but it is too “stupid” for my taste. I’ve been copyediting Brenda’s part 2: fascinating material but very badly written. Semi-illiterate. Also copyedited Serena Joyce’s AFS minutes and was dismayed to see that the trustees’ meeting in Greece is scheduled for June 4–7, which conflicts with Leander’s four-hand workshop.

Sunday, July 8, 2001

Went to work early, preparing another batch of compost: 12 portions of shredded green hay and 3 portions of wood shavings and old hay. Then showered, met Don Kurka in North Creek, and went to the Adirondack Museum to hear Bob McGrath lecture brilliantly on the role of Adirondack painting in helping to create the Park. He mentioned “muscular Christianity,” the view of a minister who advocated camping in the Adirondacks as a spiritual pursuit. I told Bob afterward that I must be a “muscular Christian” at Terpni. Warder Cadbury was there, too. He says that Tom Brown is depressed because throughout his life, but no longer, he made a difference or helped someone every day. But why can’t we deserve to rest on our laurels in old age? Why be depressed? . . . Off to Shapiros’ for sandwiches and the trip to Meadowmount. This is quite a Sunday! Rosine Gardner came, too. Jerry finished his P.A. course but at the last moment one of the teachers disqualified him. He is planning litigation. Poor Jerry—a failure in all pursuits, including marriage. The concert was typical: a 17-year-old girl playing Paganini with gusto, a 16-year-old emoting expertly over the Dvořák cello concerto (great performance of lousy music), but then the Harding trio—three sisters, blond-haired red-blooded Americans aged 19, 19, and 16—did the Brahms Trio no. 1, with its ferociously difficult piano part played with ease and power.

Saturday, July 14, 2001

A varied day. Started by writing a book review for WLT of Anita Brookner’s The Bay of Angels, until about 10:30 a.m. Then changed into work clothes, went down to the pond, and chipped a huge pile of brush. Then changed again and drove with Chrysanthi to Lincoln Inn, Woodstock, for the celebration of Andrea Useem’s marriage. Huge gathering under a tent with full dinner served. Then “testimonies,” mostly by Andrea’s numerous relatives, and her parents. I spoke about her gift as a writer, as evidenced first at Dartmouth (essay prize in War/Peace Studies) and then in African journalism. Her husband, Justin, stood up after his parents spoke lovingly, and said that they weren’t his biological parents; he had been adopted. And his biological parents were actually present. He’d met them for the first time about a month ago, and met his biological brother for the first time yesterday. Both he and Andrea are converts to Islam, their speech peppered with “if God wills,” and she looking lovely with her head scarf. He hopes go to Oman in the Gulf to teach English as a second language. It was a lovely, joyous time. Nice to see Nelson Kasfir there, too. He introduced Andrea to Kenya, which led to her journalistic career and also to her interest in Islam. . . . Then we drove to Weston to the Kinhaven anniversary celebration, with plans to meet George Goodwin and his wife at the staff concert. He has just turned 80 but looks and sounds 20 years younger. Very pleasant reunion of two past presidents of the Board. Also saw John Austin, another past president, and Jonathan Richman, the retiring president. Jerry Bidlack was very pleasant. Even Nancy managed to say “How are you?” or something like that. Staff concert mediocre, except for Shostakovich’s piano quartet. All the staff now are unknown to me except for Caroline Wahl, the Fresh hornist, who is still blowing strong. Jerry led the staff orchestra in “Appalachian Spring,” which I found boring and overrated. Irene Mendelsohn came over to say hello. How nice! Also Anna Mays, Rebecca’s daughter. And Michael Webster, whom Chrysanthi dislikes so much, saying he’s hopelessly egotistic. But he alerted me to Husa and now suggested a piece by Corigliano. . . . Arrived at Hanover at midnight.

July 16, 2001

My Harvard 50th occurs next year and there’s going to be a new book published. Here’s what I sent in, answering their questions:

“Of all your professional accomplishments or volunteer activities, which did you find most personally rewarding?” Somehow encouraging a student to continue a love of literature in later life despite quite different vocational pursuits.

“Given the chance, what would you do differently?” Practice the piano 2 to 3 hours a day.

“How would you like to be remembered?” As someone more concerned for others than for self.

“Remarks. What you’d like to say about yourself, your family, and your current interests.” My main feelings continue to be gratitude and surprise: gratitude for a life that has been blessed in so many ways, surprise that (so far) no disaster has occurred to mar those blessings. I was not killed or maimed in a war; I married well; I engendered three fine children all of whom are happily married, comfortable, and productive; I spent thirty-six years teaching literature at Dartmouth, sensing most of the time that this was more like recreation than work; I found a supportive, energizing religion in Quakerism and (thanks to my wife) a stimulating scholarly endeavor in Modern Greek literature; I had the good fortune to purchase 120 acres in the Adirondacks while a sophomore at Harvard, and this has remained a summer paradise for the entire extended family; I was trained sufficiently in piano to be able to enjoy chamber music with friends; I’ve found ways to serve—helping to found the Kendal at Hanover retirement community, being a trustee for the American Farm School in Greece, Pendle Hill near Philadelphia, and the Kinhaven Music School in Vermont, chairing the Modern Greek Studies Association and editing its journal; I was fortunate to discover Nikos Kazantzakis’s novels in the late 1950s and to translate three of them; I’ve written and published in other ways that have been meaningful to me and, I hope, to others. ‘Retirement’ seems to be a joke. Academics are fortunate in having intellectual pursuits not dependent on employment. Yes, there is more freedom and more time (to practice the piano, for example). But scholarly and trusteeship endeavors continue. Responsibilities continue. I do not feel ‘superfluous,’ at least not yet. And my wife and I are expecting to enter the Kendal at Hanover retirement community to finish out with fellowship, stimulation, and security this adventure that so far has been cause for such gratitude and surprise.

An interesting day. After writing the above, I began typing volume 2 of Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit. After a twenty-year (or more) delay, the writing seems very distant. In the afternoon, serviced the Troy-Bilt mower; mowed in back of the garden, very dense hay this year; switched beds: from our sleeping loft to the Guest House and vice versa, the beds in the Guest House being Adolph and Harriet’s, which we put there last week although they really didn’t fit in the old iron bedsteads. Now the fit is better. Then helped Alec unload his purchase of shiplap to finish off his new bedroom over the kitchen. Showered. Supper as usual with Alec and family, Theo in fine form. Then music with Alec: Dvořák’s sonata, and Saint George’s that we played at Woodbrooke. Went reasonably well. Oh, I should have stated above that I practiced Granger for an hour after breakfast, struggling over eight measures with difficult timing. In the evening, after music, fascinating articles on cosmology in the TLS. A full, varied day. And Morton Bien sent a letter with his sister’s genealogical discoveries: the actual ship on which my father and his family arrived at Ellis Island, apparently in 1907, he aged 5.

July 18, 2001

We all went to a 2:00 p.m. rehearsal at SPAC. The dancers, out of costume, of course; a piano instead of the orchestra; the conductor on stage in a chair with the score in front of him; a ballet master seated center-stage and clapping hands whenever he or she wanted something repeated. They started with Balanchine’s marvelous “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” with Yvonne Bouree the highlight in my mind, dancing with Nilas Martins. Then they did spring and autumn from “The Four Seasons” (Verdi/Robbins). Delicious music. Then “Dances at a Gathering” (Chopin/Robbins), where we were able to see even the great Damian Woetzel in rehearsal, and Helène Alexopoulos. A lovely experience, especially to see the true rehearsal aspects, when a sequence was repeated maybe five or six times (for example when Martins couldn’t set Bouree down gracefully after lifting her (it was perfect in actual performance later). . . . Buffet in the Hall of Springs, then, with Don Kurka (Alec, Monica, and Theo having returned home), followed by the performance: Stravinsky and Verdi, plus a new ballet, “Soirée” (Rota/Tanner), very traditional in both music and choreography. OK but not as splendid as either of the others. Balanchine, clearly, was a Shakespeare in our midst, a supreme genius able to do multiple works all unique and different.

July 19, 2001

Alec put a second window in the new bedroom. I made great progress in clearing the south field of fallen branches and trees, in order to mow. And my second batch of compost is ready. We mowed the area in the foundation of the old barn and hope to build a sandbox there. . . . Am learning my part for the Percy Granger, slowly (as usual). Bought a new biography of Joice Loch.

July 24, 2001

Another lovely evening at the ballet and dinner with Asa and Evelyn Rothstein. He has progressed in his research project. They’ve coated catheters with their new substance and have had remarkable success in tests with rabbits. The uncoated catheters caused blood clots, the coated ones did not. Also, they’re learning how to produce their “elasticine” in large enough quantitites to be able to do more extensive testing. . . . Actually, the first two ballets—“Allegro Brillante” (Tchaikovsky/Balanchine) and “Romeo and Juliet” (Prokofiev/Lavery) were routine, and the orchestra sounded dull, perhaps because the great heat and humidity affected the instruments. But the final one, “The Concert” (Chopin/Robbins) was sheer delight. It’s a parody on bad concertgoing and bad ballet dancing, brilliantly realized by Jerome Robbins and excruciatingly funny, which is of course rare in ballet.

July 26, 2001

Amazingly, I was able to secure a part for my Ford mower, a long rod that causes the blade to lift. Drove all the way to Granville for it. . . . Ai-Hui Tan has finally arranged for the MGSA banquet, at the Sea Catch restaurant. . . . I’m reading Paul Rabor’s essay on Pendle Hill pedagogy, well done, but not too different from the older vision by Howard Brinton and, subsequently, Parker Palmer. The stress, of course, is on the “Meeting for Learning” as opposed to the hierarchical teacher-pupil relationship. And he’s very good on the recent fetish regarding “spirituality,” which he says has become “commodified”—it’s like a new dress or a fancy car: an acquirement available in our capitalist society.

July 28, 2001

Another interesting visit with the Rothsteins. Supper at their house. Aser and I got on the subject of genetically engineered seeds, which interests me because of the Farm School, of course. As usual, he was splendidly knowledgeable and articulate. The US favors them, Europe prohibits them. He explained why. He is 100% in favor. The worst that has been feared so far is that modified corn can cause allergies although there is no proof. And a further modification makes the possibility of causing protein to disintegrate before the corn is ready to eat. A huge plus is the fact that seeds that resist certain bugs will mean less or no use of pesticides. Also, increased yields owing to genetic modification will mean less use of chemical fertilizer, all this being an economic benefit for the farmer plus an ecological benefit for everybody.

July 30, 2001

Fixed the mower for the second time, luckily discovering a huge spring lying in the field as I started to mow with the imperfectly fixed mower. . . . Don Kurka for supper. Then we went to North Creek to hear Warder Cadbury lecture on Tait, the Adirondacks painter (really: “illustrator”). Third-rate painter and second-rate lecturer. But it was nice to see Warder and also Allison Clarkson and her mother, who talked to me about the social register (!) while Allison talked about sending her eleven-year-old son to Groton. Met some other people. There’s now a whole intellectual and artistic life in North Creek, with classes, lectures, library.

August 1, 2001

Ross Morgan, the forester, came for supper. Very affable and knowledgeable. He’s going to make us a master-plan for harvesting and thinning.

August 10, 2001

To Lake Pleasant to spend a morning and afternoon with Tom and Joan Wilson. Canoeing, pleasant lunch, viewing of his slides of Midway Island and snorkeling.

August 16, 2001

To Saratoga and the races with Tom Akstens and Suzanne Murtha, plus Don Kurka and his friend Amy. We actually won about half the bets, including one for which I would have collected $5.30 on $2.00 if I hadn’t lost the ticket. The horses are beautiful and unbelievably fast. The whole atmosphere is very festive. Dinner afterwards in an Indian restaurant in Saratoga. A pleasant outing.

August 17, 2001

Finished book shelving in the Guest House. I plan to move a large part of my library here. It’s a secure feeling to have this resource, which I already put to good use for my “On Retirement” essay, which I also finished today. It’s mostly about mortality as superior to immortality! Luckily I was able to use some good material by Michael Platt, sent me by Jeffrey Murphy. . . . Leander finished the fair copy of his sonata for flute and piano and gave me a copy, but it’s very hard and I can’t get a very good sense of it. However, I’ve begun to feel comfortable with the secondo of the Granger; made a recording of my part and sent it to Dan. . . . Daphne and Greg closed on their house in South Salem, New York, so they’ll now have three residences: East 84th Street, South Salem (for weekends) and McCarthy Road, Riparius. Lots of money. . . . We have ripe plums on two of our three plum trees.

August 25, 2001

Finished re-reading and vetting my very long chapter (monograph) on Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis. I liked it. What energy and research went into that manuscript! I could never do it now. Next is: To translate Connie Tagopoulos’s poems for the Fakazis anthology.

Sunday, August 26, 2001

To Camp Backlog in Indian Lake for Quaker Meeting with Warder and Judy Cadbury, David Borton, and about twenty other Friends from Adirondack Meetings, mostly from Saranac Lake. Pleasant, interesting people. Meeting under canvas on a tent platform, facing the water, with a fire going in front of the backlog. Afterwards, a huge lunch under another canvas. We came in by boat but walked out, 2½ miles through “forever wild” forest. Very pleasant. . . . Bought steak on the way back for the last supper with Leander, Deanna, Sophia, and Nicholas, who leave tomorrow, topped off by ice cream at Stewart’s. Sophia improved greatly during her stay here, ending like a normal, happy child whereas she began as a neurotic disaster.

Thursday, August 30, 2001

Leander and family left on Monday, and on Wednesday we drove down to Waccabuc, New York (South Salem) to see Daphne and family in their new house. It’s a mansion of course, a tastefully restored home and barn with huge rooms downstairs, lots of bedrooms upstairs, some usable space in the cellar. Plus perfect stone walls around the 2½ acres, lots of trees and gardens, etc. Daphne is of course in charge of establishing a new household to be used weekends and vacations. We visited the town, the lovely park, the impressive library. The area is of course very posh, but not as Gatsby-like as the Hamptons. Greg can get to Grand Central in one hour from Katonah. Not bad.

Impressively, on this same day Greg and Daphne purchased the Shapiros’ home in Riparius, the lawyer doing the closing. We’ll see now how they’ll divide their time between Waccabuc and Riparius.

Friday, August 31, 2001

I finished translating Connie Tagopoulos’s 4th poem. Her work is stunning. I’m delighted to be translating poetry again.

Saturday, September 1, 2001

Another reunion at Brant Lake Camp, celebrating its 85th year. Folks I was close to were absent this time, but various people came up to say hello. And Peter Schweitzer was there, so we sat together at the banquet. The highlight for me was seeing Vince Starace, 93 years old and still playing tennis. Everyone spoke at the banquet, mostly in praise of Bob Gersten and Karen Meltzer. Tiresome. Then we were all shown a video—delicious regarding the camp’s activities but then cloying when it switched to more praise of Bob and Karen.

Sunday, September 2, 2001

Nice five-hour supper at Don Kurka’s on Garnet Lake. Poor man, he’s contemplating divorce after 45 years of marriage. But he needs to escape a relationship that is now purely business and no sentiment except bitterness and recrimination. His children are supporting him, luckily.

Monday, September 3, 2001

Pinky O’Dell came and started to tear the cedar siding off the back of Leander’s cabin, preparatory to adding the shed. Then the Grangers came, grandfather, father, and son, to fell the large pine that is too close to the house. They cut the roots (or shredded them) with the backhoe, then leaned the bucket against the tree and pushed it over. A fifty-year-old massive pine.

Tuesday, September 4, 2001

Bill and Beverly McCarthy, owners of the McCarthy property, invited us for cocktails at their summer house on Friends Lake. I treated them to lots of history about Charles and Bernard McCarthy, how I got my farm, etc. They hope that the McCarthy property, 150 acres, will stay intact and not be subdivided. The proceeds from the sale are going to go to the Class of 1953’s 50th reunion gift to Dartmouth. How nice! . . . I revised Connie’s poems and sent them off to Fakazis together with four new Harkianakis translations.

Friday, September 7, 2001

Drove with Chrysanthi to Skaneateles. Housed beautifully in a converted farmhouse in the latest style, with the barn full of show-horses. Lovely people from the Dartmouth Club of Central New York took us to a very fine restaurant. Easy, jovial conversation. Beforehand we explored the main street of this extraordinary town, which looks like Switzerland: so rich, manicured, and sophisticated.

Saturday, September 8, 2001

Skaneateles

I spoke on “On Retirement” to the Dartmouth Club, avoiding the clichés and approaching it through an examination of whether immortality is preferable to mortality (No!). It seemed to hold their attention. A gerontologist said that he wants me to deliver it at the Syracuse University Medical School, whose doctors need to be enlightened about such issues.

Sunday, September 9, 2001

To Hanover

Drained the pipes, packed, returned to Hanover. A fine summer: very productive on the farm (staircase, lots of pruning and trimming, books in the Guest House) and regarding grandchildren, who got to know each other and us.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

The World Trade Center’s twin towers were destroyed by a terrorist attack. Daphne agonized concerning Greg, but he got through to her by cell phone around 10:30 a.m.. He was unharmed, but kept in the Goldman building until noon and then had to walk all the way home to 84th Street. I’m agonized regarding Jeff Murphy.

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Telephoned Murphy at home. What a relief to hear his voice on the telephone. As soon as the plane struck Building no. 1, he and all his colleagues left Building no. 2 despite assurances from the management that all was well. If they had stayed, as many did, they of course would all have been killed when the building collapsed. Horrible!

Thursday, September 13, 2001

Philadelphia

To Philadelphia via train since all the airports are still closed. Visited Alec in his new apartment. Theo very excited to see Pappou. Raced from room to room showing all his toys. Monica is immense with the forthcoming baby.

Friday, September 14, 2001

I ministered in Meeting. The Dalai Lama opposes violence even against the Chinese oppressors of his nation. We cannot expect our leaders to take this Buddhist position, nor can we even expect them to follow Christian precepts. What kind of nation are we, really? I’d say: a Roman nation, convinced that power is glory. The Romans crushed the “terrorists” who attacked them. They were able to do this for several centuries, until they disintegrated from within. So . . . ? . . . Met with Steve regarding the future of book publishing at Pendle Hill. He’ll remove Rebecca from this responsibility. Hopes to hire someone else and to commission books mostly. So we’ll see what happens. The first in the new series might be an updated Brinton 300 Years with removal of sexist language and toning down of the bias against evangelicals. . . . Then spoke with Rebecca, who as usual complained about “lack of candor,” saying that she had never been told that she would be relieved of the books. . . . Drove to Princeton to meet Mike, Karen, and Peter Constantine at lunch at Prospect. We agreed that we cannot meet Fakazis’s schedule. We’ll try to read and evaluate all the poems by December 1st. . . . Then to 58 Prospect Avenue to see Dimitri, who showed me Theano’s design for lesson 3 of our book. Beautiful! We hope that the Press will agree. . . . Back to Pendle Hill. They delayed the Board so that everyone could meet in the barn for worship à propos of the September 11 events. Very moving. Short Board meeting afterwards, mostly about money.

Saturday, September 15, 2001

Executive session after the regular Board meeting, with Steve and not Denny or Margaret. Steve surprised us by saying that he’d like to replace Margaret (not Denny). Big trouble ahead. Also, he admitted that his “honeymoon” is over. I warned him against the trajectory that so often happens: increased isolation, paranoia, autocracy. He is aware of this, of course. We’ll see if he can avoid it.

Sunday, September 16, 2001

More people in Meeting today than ever before. I ministered again about America as a latter-day Roman Empire.

Tuesday, September 18, 2001

Quaker 8s at the Cadwalladers’. We had a delicious discussion of an Emily Dickinson poem. I was most taken by the line in which she says the tune is better than the words in a song or hymn.

Friday, September 21, 2001

NYC

Vanderbilt Avenue, from 42nd to 44th is blocked off by police “for security.” Happily, they allowed pedestrians. I walked to Times Square. Large demonstration, mostly young people, with placards and chanting: “Justice, not war! Justice, not war!”

Saturday, September 22, 2001

To Princeton

Port Authority Bus Terminal also cordoned off in part “for security.” But to Princeton. Met with Stratos Constantinidis at the Nassau Inn regarding his grandiose plans for volumes 2 (and 3) of the annotated bibliography. He irritates everyone, but not me (so far). At 11:00 Dimitri came and also John Iatrides. We excused ourselves and went into conference about MGSA’s multiple problems. Who can replace Susan Sutton as Journal editor? Should we cancel the symposium, given what happened on September 11th? And so forth. Then to Palmer House for MGSA Executive Board meeting. No quorum: only John, Dimitri, Stratos, Katy Fleming, and myself. But we went through the long agenda nevertheless, as best we could. At 6:00 p.m., reception. I met Sikelianos’s great-granddaughter, a sweet young thing, poet in her own right, but only in English. Then Jen Brea came, my student last spring. She wants to do the undergraduate program in the Woodrow Wilson School and somehow to serve humanity instead of going to Wall Street. Brava! After all this, leisurely Chinese dinner with Stratos.

Sunday, September 23, 2001

Princeton

Full agenda again, mostly about the constitution and other administrative problems. We finished miraculously at 12:30, exhausted, Katy with a migraine. Drove to Manhattan with John Iatrides, pleasantly, lots and lots to talk about. He related how during the Junta period he was at a reception at the Officers’ Club in Thessaloniki when in walked Papadopoulos, surrounded by goons. Everyone began to applaud. But John kept his hands behind his back, whereupon one of the goons approached him menacingly. He then applauded, for which he now of course hates himself. But these moments of cowardice (or “accommodation”) keep one alive. The opposite story is the one I’m reading: the biography of Joice Loch and Sydney. What heroes and saints! What grit (and luck)!

Thursday, September 27, 2001

NYC

Met with Fakazis, Van Dyck, Keeley, and Constantine over lunch at the Yale Club, to discuss scheduling and other details of the anthology project. Mike and I will try to agree on the poems to stay and the poems to be cut; Karen and Peter C. will do the same, all this by December 1st. Then the two groups will try to agree, so we can give Fakazis a finished MS by March 1st. . . . To the Met. Exhibit of Breughel’s drawing and etchings, not my taste. Then with Daphne to Marymount School. Very posh quarters, all walnut paneling. Lots of life inside. The older girls all look like Renoir’s models. Met Christina’s two kindergarten teachers—two more Renoir models. Christina was in baking class, an after-school activity. Very tired. She hardly said hello to me, which is unlike her. Then we took her to a birthday party held in a manicure shop. Each of the five-year-olds received a professional manicure. This is New York! . . . At 7:30 I met Greg and Daphne at a nice restaurant on 2nd Avenue and 84th. Greg is fine. His group at Goldman’s are making more money than ever, he says. And he can travel to work without impediment. But afterwards they took me to the Fire Station on 85th, which lost nine men. Flowers outside, photos on the wall. Horrendous.

Friday, September 28, 2001

Pendle Hill

By train to Philadelphia, using my new Bose earmuffs to deaden the cell phone talk. Not bad. At Pubs we chose a very fine essay describing the peace vigils in Philadelphia, and also, to my surprise, Lewis Owens’s on Kazantzakis’s “existential vitalism,” which the committee actually loved.

Saturday, September 29, 2001

Finished vetting all the anthology poems and typed out the results for Mike. Good to be finished with that chore. Marders came for dinner. We talked about Bill McGrew and Bruce Lansdale and of course Randy and “the book.” Brenda promises to meet her deadline this summer. John Rassias and Veronica popped in around 9:00 p.m. delivering ten of Veronica’s chickens. Ten whole chickens. Free range, of course.

Sunday, September 30, 2001

In Meeting I ministered by reading Sikelianos’s marvelous poem “Agraphon,” very appropriate for these days. . . . Later, finished preparing “Inventing Greece” for publication by the University of Sydney people. I also wrote this:

There is at least one head of state, the Dalai Lama, who refuses to respond to violence with violence—he will not support Tibetan guerrilla fighters in their struggle against the Chinese invaders of Tibet. We cannot expect American leaders to practice Buddhist precepts in the same way. Can we expect them, however, to practice Christian precepts? The preachers at the service at the Washington Cathedral on Friday, September 14 were eloquent in calls for restraint. “Let us not become the evil we deplore,” one of them declared, while others reminded the president that Christianity is based on love, not hate. But are we a Christian nation? I doubt it. What are we, then? I think we are a Roman nation. The founding fathers certainly had the ancient Romans in mind and there is a famous statue of George Washington dressed in a toga. They may have been thinking of the Roman Republic, but what we think of is the Roman imperial superpower that occupied a position in the world quite similar to our own today. Among other things, the Romans created the so-called Pax Romana, which was maintained for 200 years by virtue of a supreme military strength that crushed (and crucified) any opposition. We have maintained a so-called Pax Americana for perhaps 50 years, which once again has been maintained by virtue of supreme military strength ready to overwhelm all “barbarian” (i.e., “rogue”) incursions, even two at once! Our grandeur is based on power. How many times does one not hear the proud exclamation, “We are the most powerful nation on earth”? Not “the most moral,” “the most compassionate,” “the most forgiving,” “the most generous,” but “the most powerful.” To see ourselves as latter-day Romans is instructive, since we know that the Roman Empire eventually degenerated from within. Power works for a certain period—perhaps 200 years, perhaps 50—but apparently also self-destructs. That is why it is so important now, in considering what to do about the terrorist attacks, that we remember the forces that—ultimately—are more powerful than power.

—Peter Bien, Hanover, New Hampshire Monthly Meeting

Saturday, October 20, 2001

At Pendle Hill, I ministered again by reading “Agraphon.” Afterwards, Larry Ingle ministered by quoting Emerson: “When it gets dark enough, we can see the stars”—a perfect epigraph for the poem. . . . Last night visited Alec after Monica and he returned from hospital. She’d had contractions and thought the baby was coming, but it was a false alarm. Theo raced out to greet me and led me by hand to his pile of books. I read two; then he consented to go to bed. Alec’s broken heel is keeping him on crutches, but he moves around with lots of agility. . . . Thursday, drove to Lumberton and played Thompson and Husa and even a little Corigliano with Dan. Fine supper out in the airport restaurant, which of course Dan should not patronize since he is so opposed to the local airport. Then Schumann. Very nice. . . . A long Publications meeting, four hours. One of the submissions is by Larry Ingle (although members don’t know this), accusing Quakers of being irredeemably middle class. We recommended that he revise it slightly by acknowledging his own similar status. You should begin, I told him afterwards, with “I drive a Volvo and have three advanced degrees.” . . . AMTRAK to New York this afternoon and then commuter train to Katonah. Daphne picked me up, very gaily. Graham and Karen were at the South Salem house for the weekend, and we had a roast beef dinner celebrating his birthday. Andrew and Christina were in (relative) good form. Daphne asked me to install a ceiling fixture in their dining room but I couldn’t wire it properly because the ceiling uses 3 wires, only to a male switch, and I didn’t have my “book” to remind me how to do this sort of arrangement. Too bad.

Thursday, October 25, 2001

Georgetown

By AMTRAK yesterday to D.C., 11½ hours, well spent by me in going over all the queries in Carol Sheehan’s copyedited Greece Today. She did a good job. I posted the MS back to her this morning from Georgetown. Last night at Leander’s. He just had his flute-piano sonata printed by computer, but filled with errors that need correction. He’s discouraged because Mrs. Shin now doesn’t want to perform it at Dartmouth. Maybe he’ll get Nigel Coxe. But all four youngsters to whom he gave master classes last month won prizes in an all-Eastern competition, two firsts, one second and one third. . . . To Georgetown University at 3:30 p.m. for the first panel of our MGSA 2001 Symposium. Supper with Jim Warren, as lively as always. Then the official opening ceremony in the lovely Gaston Hall. Welcome by Georgetown’s Provost, then by Jim Alatis, then by me, with details of our award of the Translation Prize last year to Karen Emmerich, then Tom Gallant about the 2001 Dissertation Prize, and changes in the program occasioned by the decision of so many—mostly in Europe but also in the US—not to come. We started the evening with a few moments of silence in memory of those killed on September 11th. And we finished with Van Coufoudakis, Ambassador Monteagle Stearns, and Ted Couloumbis on Greek-American relations, with lots on Cyprus, of course. What remains with me from this presentation is the phrase “American exceptionalism,” which perhaps is no longer possible after September 11th—perhaps. I spoke about the error of Greek exceptionalism in my “Inventing Greece” talk, but I must admit that I never thought of American exceptionalism, which may be the most pronounced of all.

Friday, October 26, 2001

Georgetown

Long breakfast with Van Coufoudakis, who will be leaving Indiana to become president of a private university in Cyprus. We talked a lot about privatization, thinking of the American Farm School. He feels that EU pressure will be the crucial factor. Also spoke to Ted Couloumbis about this, with sureness that privatization will happen, deviously, without change in the constitution. . . . I chaired a session in the afternoon: two papers on linguistics, one on what happens with Greek immigrants in Montreal, the other about situations in which someone answers for someone else. The third paper was on marketing antiquities in Greece, done by a marketing person and very interesting. Fairly good discussion afterwards. We also heard the anthropologists’ session, with Peter Allen giving an amusing paper on how the “peasants’ in his village of examination were sure he was a spy, and Michael Herzfeld elaborating brilliantly as the discussant and chair. At 7:00 we re-gathered in the ICC Galeria for the Ambassador’s reception. Mike Keeley introduced Rhea Galanaki and Thanasis Valtinos. Galanaki read, poorly, from her latest, followed by translation read by Helen Kolias—a fine translation but read in a monotone. Valtinos was much better. His prose has ζουμί, as I told him. It’s full of whimsy. And his translator had a better voice and a more varied intonation. Then I introduced Ambassador Philon, telling about Odysseus in Iliad 1 & 2 as the man of action—reliable, efficient—and the man of words, and how I wished that Philon had run for the presidency of the USA, after we all suffered through the Bush-Gore debates. He started, “Keep on talking, Peter! I like it!” Then Tom Gallant introduced Constantine Tsoucalas, who had earlier brought me greetings from Iakovos Tsalicoglou plus an Olympic 2004 beautiful paperweight as a gift. He spoke about the ideal of making the 2004 Olympics a reinforcement of internationalism and peace, and of the hope to have hundreds of young volunteers from the US, Canada, and Australia. . . . A propos, the staircase down to the ICC auditorium has an epigraph by Teilhard de Chardin: “The age of nations is past. It remains for us now, if we do not wish to perish, to set aside the ancient prejudices and build the earth.”

Saturday, October 27, 2001

Georgetown

In the afternoon, listened to three young scholars discussing the Greek civil war “from the bottom up” (i.e., on the village level), not from the top down. Good material. But in the question period I said that I found their presentations very horrifying because they treated the actions of people in warfare, including all the killings and executions, as not much different from, say, playing the violin—i.e., as something that perfectly normal human beings do. So I asked them, “Do you conclude from your researches that warfare is something that humans have always done and will always do? Or do you sense, at all, that this behavior is sub-human, a descent to insanity?” They of course justified their academic investigation. But people came up to me afterwards thanking me for this concern. . . . This session was followed by a colloquium featuring Ted Couloumbis, Thanos Veremis, and Constantine Tsoucalas talking about conflict in the Balkans. Couloumbis is really impressive: soul as well as brains. . . . Afterwards, Touscalas suggested that we devote our next symposium to the Olympics, in which case we could get lots of money, he says, from the Olympic Committee and also probably from the Costopoulos Foundation. I thought that perhaps we could use a museum as a venue. Must ask Leon Black and Max Anderson what they think. . . . We all then trooped to the Sea Catch restaurant for the banquet, a fine meal nicely served. Deborah Tannen spoke very well about Lilika Nakou’s conversational language compared to the same material reworked for novelistic purposes. The original conversations were always more vivid. Then, in response to a question, she spoke, delightfully, about her famous men’s speech vs. women’s. Men never ask for directions (that’s me!). Men don’t confide in each other; women do. This starts in childhood. Women talk, men act. Michael Macovsky, her husband, was there. I hadn’t seen him since he was fired from Dartmouth, mostly by Don Pease and Patricia. He had good memories of Lawrence Davies and me and Suzanne Brown. Luckily, he saved his career (by a hair’s breadth). He is now chair of the English Department at Fordham! And so the MGSA 2001 Symposium ended: with smiles and good cheer. Valerie Caires came up, very happy that we could see each other again. And she’s in love, she told me, and introduced her beau. How nice! . . . Walked back on M Street. Jumping. Νεολαία. Jazz.

Sunday, October 28, 2001

DC–San Francisco

Breakfast with John Iatrides. Mike Keeley came over to announce that mail has been suspended in Princeton. Anthrax discovered. Who’s next? He also told me that he’d grown up here in Georgetown and that all those million dollar houses were derelict shacks occupied mostly by blacks. Then the whole area was gentrified. The blacks are gone, the whites are here now. Iatrides worries about who can succeed me as MGSA president. Maybe Jerry Augustinos? Tom Gallant would be fine, but we’d really like him to take over the journal. We’ll have lots on our plate to discuss when we meet in February.

The only dark spot in this weekend was a bad argument I had with Leander on the telephone on Friday. He was stressed out because of upcoming concerts for which he hasn’t had time to practice, and exploded. But later that evening he called again and apologized. And the next day we had a very cordial conversation. So all is well.

Monday, October 29, 2001

Stanford, Palo Alto

Good flight yesterday, first class, thanks to the Onassis Foundation, with a lovely supper and a good movie. This morning drove to Stanford; found Richard Martin, admired Stanford’s beauty, especially the main quad, where he is. Went to our hotel in Palo Alto, gorgeous, the nicest design I can remember. Back to Stanford for my first lecture, “Inventing Greece.” Very small audience, maybe 10 in all, but a good audience, interested, some fine questions afterwards, and a correction: I shouldn’t speak of the brevity of Periclean democracy, which lasted almost 200 years (not all under Pericles, obviously). Met Eva Prionas, whose class I’ll address on Wednesday, and a nice linguist fresh from Oxford, Ela Widdows, who asked for a xerox of my bibliography. Also a gent who brought greetings from Speros Vryonis. I read the Teilhard quote at the very end of my lecture.

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Santa Clara, Santa Cruz

A free day. After a haircut, we drove to Santa Clara, to the center of Silicon Valley, to see the Intel Museum. Fascinating. What miracles those engineers produced! Every facet of life is now different because of Intel’s famous chips. (Last night, discovered a new Apple sales store in Palo Alto; the girls there claimed that Apple actually made a profit last quarter. Fun to see all the iMacs, G3s, G4s, etc. so nicely displayed.) By a huge coincidence, as we were leaving the Intel gift shop we spied David Buseck, visiting Intel on business, as it turned out. We’ll have lunch with him and Linda on Thursday. Then we drove over the mountains on twisting back roads past wineries to Santa Cruz, a seaside resort, rather tacky. Then along Route 1 bordering the Pacific with its crashing breakers, until we headed back over the mountains again on a road passing through redwood groves, especially in San Mateo Memorial Park: gorgeous straight trunks like candles.

Wednesday, October 31, 2001

To Stanford via the “Marguerite” shuttle. Went to the Hoover Tower. The exhibit shows Hoover as quite extraordinary. Graduate of Stanford’s first class, in mining engineering. An international entrepreneur in mining and a millionaire at a young age, after which he devoted himself to helping others instead of himself. Was this the result of his Quaker origins? Perhaps. Maybe even most likely, although in his memoirs, which I perused in the Hoover library, he didn’t seem very attached to Quakerism. In any case he was apparently a dynamo in organization and management, and ran relief programs, first in Belgium after WWI, then elsewhere, with panache. He was at Versailles with President Wilson (Hoover was Secretary of Commerce under several presidents) and foresaw the disastrous future effects of the retaliatory provisions against Germany but couldn’t get them changed. As president, he was ruined, of course, by the crash of 1929, by his refusal to spend huge amounts of federal funds to help restore the economy. So, with 10,000,000 unemployed, he was voted out of office in 1932. I found his memoirs very well written, very lucid. He is one more example, like Clarence Pickett, of a Midwestern (Iowa) boy born into a very humble Quaker milieu, a very strict one, who emerged into sophistication and power but also good works. . . . Then met Eva Prionas and the linguistic graduate student Ela Widdows for lunch at the new engineering building financed by David Packard, Sr. Then to Eva’s class. Six very bright students, five girls and one boy, including one who was half-Greek, half Punjabi, who had pursued a career as an actress for five or six years in London and given up, another who is related to General Van Fleet. I did my State Department talk: Greek politics as seen through poetry, as a palimpsest. Do we Americans feel immersed, maybe trapped, in history the way the Greeks do? I of course argue that we do not. But perhaps we’ll feel this more and more in the future. . . . Nice supper afterwards in a good Greek restaurant, with all the students, Eva, and Richard Martin, who gave us a lovely present: a book detailing all the trees on the Stanford campus. (I’d asked him yesterday about certain trees and he didn’t know.) The campus is an amazing arboretum with exotic species from all over the world. It was laid out in part by Frederick Law Olmstead, who did Central Park. The book told us that redwoods require 400–500 years to mature.

Thursday, November 1, 2001

Cupertino

Drove to Cupertino to have lunch with David and Linda Buseck. David works in a company that makes the huge machines that firms like Intel use to manufacture their “wafers” with chips on them. He is in customer relations. Linda, besides performing as a clown, teaches “leisure” at San Jose State—i.e., how to program and devise appropriate activities at schools, hospitals, prisons, retirement communities. And she consults and lectures freelance in this field, and especially helps à propos in their reform temple. Lovely people. We then drove to the Apple Computer Campus in Cupertino, a huge complex looking very prosperous. No museum, just a store. I bought an Apple cap. . . . My final lecture at Stanford, “Odysseus Across the Centuries,” went especially well with a full house—audience mostly staff and adult students. We then went for a sumptuous supper at a restaurant with Richard, Eva, Eva’s daughter, the linguistics professor and his wife, he a Finn, so we had lots to talk about owing to Leander’s adventures with Outi and the sauna.

Friday, November 2, 2001

San Francisco

Freeway 280 to San Francisco to the Seal Rock Inn near the Cliff House. Dense fog over the ocean, but Chrysanthi and I walked down to the Cliff house, to the small museum there, and could see the breakers below. Thanassis Maskaleris met us at noon and acted as host and tour guide. Across the Golden Gate Bridge despite warnings concerning a terrorist attack on one of the SF bridges; lunch by the seaside; then to the tranquility of Muir Woods, where we heard a ranger explain the biological and chemical secrets of this ecosystem where even tiny slugs are necessary for the wellbeing of the giant trees. A lovely interlude. Then at 5:00 p.m. Susie Buseck arrived and we walked down to the Cliff house for tea. She’s working as a combined social worker/lawyer, consistent with her training. She deals with children whose parents voluntarily request that the children be placed in foster homes, in today’s case because the mother has AIDS and knows that she will soon die. A good serviceable job. . . . By car then to San Francisco State University, which I found in the dark, miraculously. Lectured on “Tempted by Happiness” in the building’s central auditorium, to a large crowd including even high school students. Very good questions afterward, including a statement by Thanassis challenging my claim that Kazantzakis as early as 1950–51 was seeking “detachment.” Thanassis sees him as more “Cretan,” always ready to “overcome.” Then Martha Klironomos took us to a fish restaurant, very noisy, a young crowd, but tasty. To bed at 1:00 a.m.

Saturday, November 3, 2001

To Vancouver

Up at 6:00 a.m. Drove to the airport without getting lost (!). Security made me remove my shoes and put them separately through the machine. . . . Picked up at the lovely—spectacular!—airport by Geoffrey and Shelagh Ballard. Drove off in their huge Mercedes limousine for a tour of parts of the city, especially the extensive park. Then across the bridge to their sumptuous new home in North Vancouver, with a view of harbor and center city. Geoff astounded me by relating how he was driven out of his own company by the current CEO, a Pakistani Muslim, who lied to the board, saying that Geoff was sabotaging his efforts to run the company correctly. Eventually the opposition controlled more than 50% of the stock, and Geoff was voted out. He now has no relationship whatsoever with Ballard Power Systems. But he has founded a new company—Hydrogen—and has convinced General Motors to cooperate. The idea is that fuel cells do not just make electricity using hydrogen and producing water as the residue; they can also use water to produce hydrogen. So Geoff’s idea is that you’ll fill your fuel cell car with water; it will convert the water to hydrogen, and then you’ll be ready to travel. Simple! But he has also had four years of severe illness needing a stent in his aorta, two artificial knees, and maybe a liver transplant. It’s a miracle that he is alive. And he is somewhat hard of hearing as well, poor man. On the other side, he is famous, rich, and celebrated, with seven honorary degrees. And he lectures all over the world on transportation subjects. His son Curtis, whom we had last seen as a ten-year-old, called with his wife and two boys. He remembered Leander and Alec. We went to a lovely hotel for supper, where the owner is of course very familiar to the Ballards, who use his facilities for both pleasure and business. Before and afterwards, much good talk, some of it “theological.”

Sunday, November 4, 2001

Vancouver

Went to the Anglican Church with Geoff and Shelagh. Jolly, energetic, young rector who accompanies hymns on the guitar. Lovely moment for the children: “Do you know what a saint is?” “Are you a saint?” “Ah, hello Saint Sam!” But of course the service is mostly prescribed, with set readings and hymns. OK, but not for me. When they recited the Nicene Creed I kept silent. And they’re afraid of silence. In the prayers, the woman conducting them said that anyone in the congregation could voice a prayer in the silences between the prayers she voiced, but of course there were no utterances. . . . Back home for lunch. Attempt to find the other two sons, Edward and Mark, but they were not at home. Then some more sightseeing, including the new art gallery that one of the sons’ wives runs in an interesting building in the sort of Soho of Vancouver, including a huge market. . . . Finally we were deposited at the Hotel Vancouver, where we had a leisurely supper, alone, and retired early.

Monday, November 5, 2001

Vancouver

Discovered Vancouver’s central library, in a beautiful building not far from our hotel. Started re-reading Dan Dombrowski’s Kazantzakis and God. Excellent. I really should write a Pendle Hill pamphlet about God as no longer the Aristotelian unmoved mover or, more precisely, as bipolar: being and becoming. Lunch in a food court we discovered across the street. Picked up by André Gerolymatos and his assistant, Maria. To downtown campus of Simon Fraser University. I gave my “Odysseus Across the Centuries” lecture to a full house, standing room only. Ballards came, too, and I had to kid Geoff about Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which he knows by heart and adores. Reception afterward; met nice people including Cypriot consul to Vancouver and Maria’s (non-Greek) fiancé. Then back to the hotel with Geoff and Shelagh for a leisurely supper. Geoff taught us about red wines, which need to be aerated before consumption—i.e., shaken or poured from bottle to decanter. I asked him how long he thinks it will take the internal combustion engine to be replaced. Forty years is his guess. The real culprits re: pollution are the “class-6” trucks, those that operate within cities. They account for a huge amount of the problem. If they were replaced with fuel cell trucks we wouldn’t have to worry so much about cars or heavier trucks (which operate from city to city, not within the city).

Tuesday, November 6, 2001

Vancouver

We were driven out to Simon Fraser University’s main campus, on the mountain in Burnaby. Beautiful architecture; a whole city, it seems, self-contained. André began to explain their internet system, which seems very sophisticated. Perhaps we can use it for Greece Today. More on this tomorrow. Geoff and Shelagh arrived in time for my seminar, but first we attended a class in elementary Greek, with good responses from the students but no Rassias tricks in the teaching. My seminar was on The Last Temptation. Small audience but some good questions afterward, chiefly from Geoff, who asked whether, if I had translated the book after understanding it in the ways I indicated, the translation would have been better. Tough question. I responded that probably the translation would have been worse. It was better to have approached the book naïvely. . . . Afterwards, Geoff, Shelagh, Chrysanthi, and I went to a lovely pub-like restaurant and continued with lots of good talk about faith and the afterlife. . . . They returned home; we went to the library, where I finished Dombrowski’s Kazantzakis and God, the second half nowhere as interesting for me as the first half. Then dessert buffet at the hotel.

Wednesday, November 7, 2001

Vancouver

Maria’s fiancé, who works in the computers sector, drove us to the Simon Fraser campus, to the Diamond Center, high on the mountain, with spectacular views of water below and jagged mountains in the distance, like the Alps. Then to a demonstration of their computer program for distance learning, with Ambassador Tsilas, a Greek journalist, and Chouláras, the press officer in Ottawa and of course an old friend. The program reminds me a little of our Annotext, but it isn’t as fully developed yet: no sound, no graphics. But some of the ideas are OK for presentation of the grammar and drilling it. Overall, however, I had expected more and was disappointed. . . . Then back to the Diamond Center for an intimate lunch with SF’s president, Stevenson, who turned out to be a youngish man, very affable, totally non-pompous. Born in South Africa, a historian. We talked about September 11, of course, and Modern Greek at Simon Fraser and about Simon Fraser himself, an 18th-century explorer active in this region. Afterwards, saw more of the stunning architecture of this campus, by the young Canadian architect Erickson. . . . Back at the hotel, walked down to the water with Chrysanthi, admiring building after building, plus fountains, pedestrian precincts, and the like. A very “civilized” city. . . . Then another dinner, hosted by the Dean of Arts in a fancy restaurant. I sat next to Tsilas and had a good conversation. He revealed that the impediment for Onassis vis-à-vis MGSA is Alexander Nehamas, who angered Papadimitriou, so that Princeton and MGSA are now blacklisted. I assured Tsilas that Nehamas is hardly active at all in MGSA. He would like to produce a rapprochement; wants me to meet with Papadimitriou in Athens. We’ll see. He also asked me, strangely, if I am afraid of death. I said No and that I could send him my essay “On Retirement,” which deals directly with this question. He felt bereft when he left the foreign service at age 62 or 63. I told him that I never felt that way, strangely, after I left the active professoriate. Geoff and Shelagh were there, too. Geoff said that he has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it. Also, they’d like to come to visit us and especially to see Leander again. So we’ll try to get them to the farm this August. Apparently our times here together have been very stimulating for them as well as for us. I learned a little more last night about his standing here. He has a pin in his lapel. Someone asked what it signifies and he answered. Then Colin Jones, our Simon Fraser host in lieu of the president, said that it is the equivalent, in Canada, of a knighthood in England.

Thursday, November 8, 2001

Vancouver

The phone rang at 7:15 a.m. It was Alec happily announcing the birth of our new granddaughter (!), Elena Madeline Bien, 9.2 lbs., born around 6:30 a.m. Philadelphia time. Monica is fine and so is the baby. Chrysanthi will arrive there on Saturday morning, precisely when Monica and Elena will be returning from the hospital. The timing is perfect. . . . We went to Simon Fraser by taxi for my last lecture, “Inventing Greece.” I started with an apology, saying that it was written long before September 11th and now seems not to apply at all to fundamentalist Muslims, whose allegiance seems to be to the religion rather than to any specific Muslim nation. On the other hand, I hoped that my “metaphysical” interpretation of nationalism might appear suitable as well as an explanation of the Muslim fanatics’ mentality. Again, there was a small audience in the seminar room, but some good questions at the end. Then, delightfully, we departed with the Ballards for a long lunch near the campus. Geoff discussed his Quaker background, his mother having been a sort of foster child of Seebohm Rowntree’s. But he was raised in an upper middleclass family, sent away to a public school at a tender age, never loved by his father—the whole upper class catastrophe. He said that Shelagh prevented him, happily, from acting the same way toward his own sons. . . . To the Pan Pacific Hotel for the final dinner, 60–70 people, hosted by the Onassis Foundation. Lots of speeches, by deans, André, Colin Jones, and introductions including a very complimentary one for Geoff Ballard, and then for me. I spoke “personally,” about learning Greek in bed, studying with Raphael Demos, L. H. Post, Kitto, being able to say in Ancient Greek “the general led the army into the plain,” then learning Modern Greek from schoolbooks (Η Νίνα παίζει με το τόπι της), translating The Last Temptation because of Mrs. Kazantzakis’s moratorium on translations not directly from the Greek; then a little about founding of MGSA and development of the field, with hopes, finally, that Simon Fraser’s MG program will prosper. Tsilas spoke afterwards about the Onassis Foundation’s programs and hopes. Fond farewells, presents from SF, ride back to the hotel with the Ballards. Geoff very excited because he received a hint, earlier, that vice-president Cheney, because we don’t want to rely now on Arab oil, is going to say something about hydrogen. And General Motor’s CEO booked a telephone call for this morning. Let’s hope. Emotional parting with Geoff and Shelagh, and expectation of another reunion this summer, at the farm.

Friday, November 9, 2001

Vancouver–Seattle

To Seattle via AMTRAK bus, about 3½ hours. Dan Dombrowski, author of Kazantzakis and God, met us at the station. We had lunch at a harborside restaurant, then went to a salmon hatchery, saw the salmon fighting their way upstream to the holding tanks, where their bellies are split open and the eggs are placed where they’ll hatch. The fingerlings are then placed in the ocean. Remarkably, these same fish return two years later to the exact same stream to spawn. Then to a huge waterfall emptying into a gorge. Fun to talk with Dombrowski because of his work with process theology, which he says is marginal but usually acceptable, at least in Protestant circles. I’d still like to do a Pendle Hill pamphlet on Quakerism and process theology, overcoming the theistic (Aristotelian) view of deity and in favor of the panentheistic one. Dan drove us to the home of Deanna’s father and stepmother, Han and Rachel Lee. Surprisingly, he was easy to talk to, although he doesn’t establish eye contact. She, too, except that her English is minimal. Their friends, they said, are Taiwanese, not Chinese. Han believes that Taiwan will be restored to China eventually. Even now, Taiwanese businesses are moving to China because labor is so much cheaper there. We also talked easily about Boeing (whose factory we later saw), Ballard fuel cells, Chinese characters (kanji means “Chinese word”) and grandchildren. They took us to a Chinese buffet restaurant, mediocre, but near the airport, and then to the airport. Very convenient, obviously, and nice to keep our acquaintance alive.

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Visited Steve Scher, back from hospital after his heart episode, arrhythmic, and doing well. He made me his “famous” cappuccino, using a “sparkling new machine.” Then Dick came and we went to the Indian restaurant. Who do I see there but Ned Perrin and Nardy Campion and a youngish lady sitting next to Ned. It was only after some initial conversation that he volunteered, “We are married.” Dick said afterwards that Ned looked ill, maybe with Alzheimer’s, and I agree that he was strange. Is this his 4th marriage? The woman looked about 40; he is over 75, I imagine. . . . Dick and I played Prokofiev’s marvelous sonata, then tried Bach’s concerto in A and 1⅓ of Bach’s violin sonatas.

Thursday, November 15, 2001

NYC, Yale Club

Went to the World Trade disaster site. Still smells. Men scrubbing soot off the nearby sidewalk. Skeleton of the building’s façade. Number 5 WTC reduced to its exposed 2 × 4s, a skeleton. Police everywhere and barricades. Public gallery at New York Stock Exchange, closed since September 11. . . . Tried to find a copy of Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis at the Strand Book Store. It’s out of print in both the US and Great Britain. No luck. . . . Supper with Daphne and Greg. Christina not very friendly. Andrew beautiful but still talks in a way that is largely incomprehensible (except by Daphne).

Friday, November 16, 2001

NYC

Post-secondary committee with Yannis Vezyroglou. Student life committee with Annie Levis. The three interns are functioning beautifully and the students are speaking more English. But the College is still greatly under-enrolled. Six Lyceum students did enroll, but these were the six who failed the state exams to enter university. After lunch, a plenary session: a think tank to throw out ideas for strategic planning. I started the session by reading Ritsos’s “Peace,” appropriate for September 11th and much appreciated. I also gave my update regarding Brenda’s book. Lots of good ideas were thrown out. I thought of Jack Shepherd’s Cambridge program as a perfect template for AFS in relation to Albanians, Bulgarians, etc. From 6:00 to 8:00, party at Phil Foote’s. The Greek Consul will host us next time, he pledged. Met Phil’s son, who graduated from Tuck School. Afterwards, I invited a group to sup at the Yale Club, which is always so deliciously placid: Mike and Mary Keeley, Alex Drapos, John Cleave, George Legakis and wife. Very pleasant and relaxed. Toward the end, Alex asked for ideas for the 2004 celebration. I felt that students should be involved, perhaps doing a play or pageant based on AFS history.

Saturday, November 17, 2001

NYC

A very full board meeting in the morning. Mike started it by reading Sikelianos’s “Agraphon” at my suggestion—haunting and appropriate for September 11th, written during the 1942 πείνα. During lunch, I spoke to Arthur Dukakis about possibly having MGSA 2003 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and maybe also at the Malliotis Center. He is chair of the Malliotis board and a friend of the Greek curator at the museum. This might be more possible than the Met in New York. I spoke to three different people there over the weekend, and was not encouraged. Tried repeatedly to get Leon Black on the telephone (he’s a trustee), without success. Dukakis told me that Michael Macrakis just died. So, Lily won’t be much help. . . . Afterwards to the Giacometti show at MoMA. Not my taste, really, except for the gorgeous “walking woman,” done before he developed the style for which he is best known. She is thin, elongated, but smooth, not composed of thousands of slabs of clay. Then to the New York State Opera to see The Magic Flute, sung in English. For me, its magic was only intermittent, perhaps because of the overall production, although the voices were all first-rate. As always, the miracle of Mozart’s music is the highlight.

Thursday, November 27, 2001

Philadelphia–Lumberton

Drove to Dan’s to practice for tomorrow night. Then to Alec’s to see Elena, now three weeks old: a tiny bundle, sleeping peacefully. Alec is very negative about Friends Select, but will probably stay next year, his 4th.

Friday, November 28, 2001

Pendle Hill

Books Committee with Steve present. He wants to change the whole procedure so that we’ll commission books and pre-sell them. But he is going to allow the re-issue of Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years with updating by Margaret Hope Bacon. Then he hopes for an entire book on the last fifty years, followed by a totally rewritten history of the 350 years. But who can do any of this as well as Howard Brinton? . . . Pubs Committee said Yes to two of the four submissions: a record. Suzy Morrison came, pregnant with twins. Since she’d been in a Lesbian relationship with Sandra, this came as a bit of a surprise. . . . Dan arrived at 6:00 and we practiced on the new Yamaha while everyone else was having supper. Lovely sound. After the Board, we performed the two Husa pieces (with lots of mistakes by Dan) and the Thompson, which as usual was a crowd-pleaser.

Saturday, November 29, 2001

After the morning Board meeting and executive session over lunch, I drove to Princeton and met with Dimitri for three hours mostly discussing MGSA problems, especially concerning the recent symposium. He is worried that young people aren’t coming. Is MGSA in decline? Then to Forbes College to have supper with my former student Nancarrow, and also Jen Brea and one other. Very pleasant. Nancarrow is doing humanities in the Columbia University type great books course and loving it.

Tuesday, December 4, 2001

Mother moved to Vining 630, in the new construction, a double room but occupied by her as a single. Very nice. I fixed the frame of a fine picture of my father, aged maybe 40, smoking his pipe and looking very distinguished.

Friday, December 7, 2001

Fancy English Department dinner at Home Hill. Chrysanthi and I went to see if we still felt some connection with the department. And actually we did. People were very cordial and welcoming. . . . Earlier, saw Dr. Heaney, the fifth year after my operation. All looks well. I don’t need to return now unless the PSA goes up. He explained with excitement that he now does the “radical” laparoscopically.

Thursday, December 13, 2001

Cambridge

To Harvard to hear Babiniotis’s Christopher lecture, on Demotic and the EU. The main challenge, he stressed, is multilingualism. What’s needed in Europe is linguistic polymorphism as opposed to the linguistic hegemony of English. Interestingly, he said that teachers of Greek in Greece itself misuse the communicative method, using it empirically with the outmoded Triantafyllidis grammar. . . . Afterwards to the A.R.T. to see Pirandello’s fascinating Enrico IV, about reality vs. fantasy, madness vs. sanity, the historical vs. the contemporary. Bravura performance by David Kelly as Enrico. Lots of razzmatazz, as is usual at the A.R.T., but it was appropriate this time. Rich costumes; a whole world of delicious fantasy.

December 21, 2001

I saw Dr. Gerber last Monday about cholesterol. He had had me take a new blood test that indicates hardening of the arteries and also a vascular ultrasound. Today he told me that both tests came back very favorably, showing no hardening. Thus I don’t need to take Lipitor, the cholesterol-reducing drug. Excellent.

December 24, 2001

To Philadelphia

E-mail from Stelios saying that he’d just been given as a present my book Καζαντζάκης: η πολιτική του πνεύματος. So, it’s published, finally. . . . AMTRAK to Philadelphia. We were the only people in the Business Class car the entire trip. Overnight in Warwick Hotel, 13th and Locust. Surprise upon entrance: Leander and family already there (we expected them tomorrow). Shared their supper. Then to Alec’s. They gave Chrysanthi a splendid present: an easel for painting. Plus cheesecake with 5 candles and “Happy Birthday.” I gave her this morning a beautiful cookbook for “healthy” meals that she seemed to like and says she can’t wait to use. . . . On the train, did draft agenda for MGSA board meeting in February and started revising my “Christ Recrucified” chapter for volume 2 of Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit. I’m doing all these chapters with Greek quotations as well as English translations to ease the process should volume 2 be translated into Greek. The chapter isn’t bad, but very long. How good that I did all this (the entire second volume) 25 years ago. I could never do it now if I started from scratch. . . . Walked to the new concert hall, just completed. It was closed but we could gaze through the glass to see the magnificent lobby inside, all under a vaulted roof that looks like the sky itself. . . . Met afterwards with Leander a bit. They are in effect held hostage by their children, who control their lives from the moment they wake until, finally, they sleep.

December 25, 2001, Christmas

Philadelphia

Daphne and family arrived at 11:00. We all gathered at Alec’s to distribute presents. The best, I think, was a set of a dozen dinosaurs for Andrew, who has a “thing” about dinosaurs and knows all their scientific names: brontosaurus, tyrannosaurus, etc. We had a light lunch, lots of talk, then returned to the hotel for a few hours so that Theo could have his nap. We gathered in Daphne’s two rooms. I played hide and seek with Christina and Sophia. Lots more talk, pleasant. Then back to Alec’s for a splendid turkey dinner prepared by Monica, followed by her special chocolate cream pie. Alec showed a Mr. Bean video that had us all in stitches. Back to the hotel, where luckily we found Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn on the TV in “African Queen” followed by the Royal Ballet’s “Nutcracker.” A very relaxing day, which also included a few hours’ work on my “Christ Recrucified” chapter. The problem with this second volume, I fear, is that it will be too long. Will I have the discipline to cut?

December 26, 2001

Philadelphia–South Salem

Alec and I walked to the Kimmel Center, which is remarkable: two separate buildings under a single glass dome with sunshine flooding in. The large hall is beautiful, shaped like a cello. One of the resident orchestras is Ignat’s. . . . Then drove with Leander to South Salem. He is such a bad driver, ignoring signs, switching lanes suddenly without directional signals. I’m amazed that he has not been already in a serious accident. Heavy traffic, wrong turns, but we arrived finally, enjoying the peacefulness of this lovely house. Greg had to return to New York by train after supper. Leander and I walked through Katonah, a typical upscale community with outrageous prices in its boutiques.

December 27, 2001

South Salem

Played with the children—tag, etc. Drove to Ridgefield, shopped in the fancy D’Agostino’s. . . . Listened to a remarkable CD of Callas arias, also to Pavarotti singing “New York, New York.” Finished melding my typed “Christ Recrucified” chapter with the longer version of the political section. Read two TLS’s. Long talk with Daphne in the evening about Andrew’s speech difficulty. He pronounces all the vowels correctly but not many of the consonants. Daphne is encouraged however by his progress over the last six months.

2002

Hanover

January 1–June 12

Jan. 5, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Jan. 24–Feb. 2, Philadelphia, PH

Feb. 8–11, Princeton (MGSA), New York

Feb. 14–15, NYC

Feb. 23, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Feb. 24, Huntington, Ulysses lecture

Feb. 27, Harvard, Saint Francis lecture, The Inn at Harvard, 617 491-2222

Feb. 28–March 3, NY, Princeton, Fakazis project, AFS

March 9, Cambridge, A.R.T.

March 12–17, Athens, Hotel Electra

April 5–8, Pendle Hill, “Light” course

April 8–9, NYC, Onassis Foundation, Queens College

April 18–20, Pendle Hill

May 2, Amherst

May 16–18, Pendle Hill

May 19, Cambridge

May 28–30, Athens, Hotel Arethousa, 10 322 9431

May 31–June 2, Thessaloniki, Hotel Metropolitan, 310 824 221

June 3–10, American Farm School and Ouranoupolis

Riparius

June 12–September 7

June 14–16, NYC, Huntington, L.I.

June 29–30, Hanover

July 9–10, Hanover

July 30, Hanover to empty out storage locker

Hanover

September 8–December 31

Sept. 12–13, New York

Sept. 19–22, Pendle Hill

Oct. 4–6, New York, Princeton

Oct. 17–20, Pendle Hill, Washington

Oct. 25–26, Boston, AFS

Nov. 2, Northampton

Nov. 26–28, Potomac, MD, Courtyard Marriott, 800 321-2211, 2500 Research Blvd., Rockville

Dec. 3, Amherst

Dec. 5–8, Philadelphia, Pendle Hill

Dec. 12–21, London, Canterbury, Deal, London

Dec. 24–26, Daphne’s: 68 Benedict Rd., South Salem

Dec. 30, Riparius

Friday, January 4, 2002

I read with surprise and dismay in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin that John Harvey died. Surprise because he had disappeared all these years, with nothing in the various Harvard alumni books; yet now there was a short account of his career, which was spent mostly in Korea, as it turned out. I thought to contact Peter Fleming, who had been across the hall from John and me in Lowell House. Peter telephoned and we had a long, cordial conversation, the first since 1949 or 1950. Actually, Peter had written the obituary. He and John’s college friend Laszlo Berger had visited John in hospital in Boston and again in Washington, DC, as he was dying (of lung cancer probably, the result of his chain smoking). Peter’s regret was that he hadn’t contacted me as well. Too bad. John was important for three years in my life. I wish I could have said a proper “goodbye” to him.

Saturday, January 5, 2002

Cambridge

Lunch with Panagiotis Roïlos, who wants me to lecture at Harvard in February on Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis. He’ll be doing an entire semester on Kazantzakis, and also will have a Kazantzakis film festival. He even has a print of Celui qui doit mourir. Then to the A.R.T. for a splendid performance of Othello, so vivid that we all felt the agony of the characters as though they were in real life, not in a play. Tom Derrah was a fine Iago, John Thompson an epileptic Othello and Karen MacDonald a splendid Emilia. Only Mirjan Jokovic’s Desdemona left me not entirely enthralled. I realized that Cherry Jones will play the lead in Lysistrata in the spring: that should be a true treat. . . . Bought a CD of Rosenkavalier in Cambridge and listened to half of it in bed, following the libretto. It’s a work of genius.

January 24, 2002

To Philadelphia

Yesterday Hélène Rothermund called from Kendal and offered us an apartment, number 171 in Lucretia Mott, two bedrooms. We went to see it this morning before I flew to Philadelphia. It’s fine, a typical “F” apartment but with a screened-in porch, facing west. The only defect: two pine trees outside the windows blocking some of the light, but she says they can be trimmed. We’re inclined to say Yes and will then avoid the 5% increase in entrance fee effective on April 1st. Chrysanthi told Daphne, who said it was a shame; we should wait for the two bedroom and den, but Hélène said that would be five years. Chrysanthi is eager to go, and I am willing. It has to happen, so why not now, before we have any debilitating illness. . . . Chrysanthi has already been talking to a real estate agent, who says she can sell our house in one day for $350,000.

Before rushing to Kendal: conference call with Mike Keeley, Karen Van Dyck, and Peter Constantine regarding the Fakazis anthology. We agreed on most points and will meet on February 10 to choose the poems that remain “in.” Nice group to work with.

Gondicas delayed two months or more in returning the copyedited MS of Greek Today. We’ll lose another academic year. Theano still can’t use my disks for typesetting. I’ve gotten Stelios Orphanoudakis to investigate. And Felitsa Makedon gave me someone here who might be able to help. . . . Off to Philadelphia and then to Dan’s. We played the Granger and the Townsend as well as possible. Dan ignores all phrasing and dynamics. But we did the old Husa better than ever. Lovely supper in a restaurant Dan has newly discovered. The town board wants him to run in their next election. He’s hesitating. If he does run, he’ll end up mayor for sure. . . . To Pendle Hill. Played the new Yamaha piano from 11:00 p.m. until midnight: Beethoven.

Saturday, January 26, 2002

Philadelphia

Long board meeting until 2:30 because of executive session, first with Steve, then without him, regarding the evaluation of his performance after his first year. I asked him if he had to go through a similar ordeal when he was CEO of the Donnelly Corporation and he said Yes, but not with such nice people. Among other things, he told us that he is determined to get Margaret Fraser to leave; he feels that she is incapable of performing the dean’s duties because she is basically a “pastoral” person and says she agrees. This will be painful. I wish he’d be as decisive about Rebecca. . . . Drove to Philadelphia and had a nice supper with Alec and family. Then Alec and I went two blocks to the Academy for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 145th Anniversary concert, to be held every year still in the Academy even though the orchestra has moved to the Kimmel Center. A light program showing off the orchestra, and with Heidi Murphy, soprano, and Joshua Bell, violinist, as soloists. I found Murphy’s singing especially moving. What a miracle to have such an instrument in one’s throat! . . . Afterwards, back to Alec’s for dessert and conversation, mostly about why Quakers aren’t uniformly pro-life in the abortion question. Hard to answer, since liberal Quakers are pro-choice, which would seem to be contrary to the peace testimony, justifying the violent destruction of life.

Sunday, January 27, 2002

Philadelphia–Pendle Hill

Drove to Philadelphia again and went to the zoo with Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena. A fascinating place. America’s first zoo, with many rare, endangered species. Theo is especially attracted to the gorillas. Then to Chinatown for lunch in an Indonesian restaurant, a very authentic one according to Monica. On the way back, I bought four new shirts at Macy’s for the ridiculous price of $7.00 or $13.00 (pure silk), since I’d forgotten to pack my shirts. . . . Tried to prepare a little for my course, starting with Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Chrysanthi telephoned that Sally Rutter thinks we can get $400,000 for the house. But $28,000 will go as the agent’s commission. . . . First meeting of my course. Only five students, one of whom is Margaret Fraser. Another is an interesting young black man who wants to be a writer, presently teaching “language arts” in Middle School in a Quaker school in the south. Another is a Dartmouth dropout who also wants to write. And two older women. We started on A Handful of Dust. Luckily (for me), none of the students had a clue regarding the hidden religious theme.

Wednesday, January 30, 2002

Pendle Hill

Chrysanthi arrived last night via train and we visited Alec and Monica a bit. Today I met with Steve regarding Rebecca. We’re both convinced that she has to go. (He’s also firing Margaret Fraser.) Rebecca has reverted to her previous practice of not answering messages and has also become a sloppy editor. The recent pamphlet on Kazantzakis is filled with errors that she didn’t correct on the MS and additional ones perpetrated by the typesetter that she didn’t correct because she never even read the typeset copy. Maybe she can stay on as a part-time teacher, that’s all. . . . To Route 3 to pick up 80 Greek desserts for tomorrow. Course going well.

Thursday, January 31, 2002

Chrysanthi cooked a Greek supper for everyone, much appreciated. After supper, lecture by Mary Lord, who’s working for AFSC, on the response to September 11th. She said that the World Council of Churches wants help from historic peace churches regarding nonviolent techniques. I told her about John C. Baker’s $100,000 gift to facilitate cooperation among the three historic peace churches.

Friday, February 1, 2002

Finished the course by playing Martinu’s opera yesterday and today. It’s magnificent. If only it is produced again, somewhere. Dan here for lunch. He’s decided not to run for the Lumberton council. Margaret stayed a bit after lunch and told me that Steve is requiring her to leave. Nice that she was willing to share. She has no idea what’s next. I reminded her of Kazantzakis’s “eschatological hope.” Perhaps this tragedy can become a blessing. . . . The course was nice and went well. But I still feel that I don’t need this any more. I should steel myself to concentrate on writing. Now I’ve lost an entire week. . . . To Philadelphia. Luckily, tonight James McBride was signing his new novel at Border’s at Walnut and 18th. We went with Alec and family to the Italian restaurant opposite Border’s, then saw James and Stephanie and Azure and Jordan, and met James’s mother for the first time. He signed a book for me, his novel on the black regiment in World War II. But we couldn’t stay for his talk because Alec had gotten us tickets to the Tokyo Quartet at the Kimmel Center. The Perelman Recital Theater, where they played, is disappointing. Chrysanthi said the seat color is the color of vomit. But the quartet played Mozart, Brahms, and Hayashi beautifully, with perfect precision and grace.

February 8, 2002

Princeton

Nice supper with Tom and Nancy Doulis, who are at Princeton for two months. Before that, Hellenic Studies seminar with Michael Llewellyn-Smith, former British ambassador to Greece, speaking very knowledgeably on Venizelos’s role in the Asia Minor disaster. Then I rushed to Firestone Library to see if I could access Ο Νουμάς (1909) on the CD they have, and I did, finding what I needed (a quote from Σπασμένες ψυχές) in ten minutes. But the Νέα Εστία I needed was in storage. Yet interlibrary loan said they’d xerox some pages for me and mail them. Amazing!. . . In Prospect House after dinner, saw the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Stunning. Such ideals, such beautiful, youthful faces. But the Utah Indian show was sentimentalized.

Saturday, February 9, 2002

Princeton

A miracle! I convinced the MGSA Executive Board that the Olympics might be a good topic for our 2003 symposium. Tom Gallant, newly appointed to a chair at York University in Toronto, volunteered to be local arrangements chair if we go to Toronto, and promised ample financial support from his community. Looks good. Also the Minister of Culture was in New York last week and promised support if we do something on the Olympics. Thus my plans for the Metropolitan Museum of Art will go away, but we’ll be fine in Toronto, where there is also a fine museum. . . . I discovered that Llewellyn-Smith is working on the Olympics as an expression of statehood, and another person here is studying them anthropologically. I’m also hoping to get Don Nielsen to come.

Sunday, February 10, 2002

More MGSA in the morning; then Mike Keeley and I went by train to New York and met with Karen Van Dyck and Peter Constantine in Mike’s apartment on 9th Street, to compare ratings on the poems meant for the Fakazis anthology. We got as far as Ritsos. I’ll need to go back next week. . . . Bought some κεφαλοτύρι και μανούρι cheese to take home, plus delicious double Gloucester.

Thursday, February 14, 2002

New York City

Went to Dimitri Tziovas’s Onassis Foundation seminar at Columbia, on collectivity vs. individualism in Greek culture. Good crowd including Adi Pollis, Sifakis, Gourgouris, Neni, Syrimis (teaches at Yale), Kate Fleming. Excellent discussion. I urged him to be more comparative, to avoid what Gourgouris calls ομφαλοσκοπία. Marianna was there too. I sent regards via them to Bryer, Katerina, and Harry in Brum. . . . Had supper with Daphne and Greg beforehand. They’re going to Riparius tomorrow. Gary McGinn has agreed to be caretaker for the house.

Friday, February 15, 2002

To Columbia again. Nice to sit in Butler Library after so many years. Worked from 11:00 until 3:00 with Karen, Mike, and Peter on the anthology. Peter hopes to bring out a complete short stories of Papadiamandis to match his Babel volume. We’re making progress. They agreed to keep four of the Χαρκιανάκης poems. . . . E-mail from the Metropolitan Museum saying they’re willing to host our symposium. But we may go to Toronto.

Saturday, February 16, 2002

Bought 30 cartons from Staples. Discarded all the audiotapes I recorded 40 years ago in New York. One’s past life ends up in the trash. Started to paste furniture decals in the diagram of our new home: Kendal 171. We’ll be fine: downsized sensibly. But there are still lots of books. I’m very calm about the move, so far. What I’ll miss most is walking to the office and walking home for lunch. But maybe a bicycle will suffice except during snowstorms.

Saturday, February 23, 2002

Cambridge

Lunch with Tasoula Karakasidou. But first, while I was waiting for her in the Charles Hotel, in walked Lynn and Bob Fagles with their daughter. Nice reunion, comparing impressions of retirement. Then a lovely reunion, too, with Tasoula, who is now interested in “medical archeology”—e.g., why Cretans have such an increased incidence of cancer, presumably owing to use of fertilizers and pesticides. I thought this might be of interest to the American Farm School, and good reason for supporting organic farming. . . . Then to the A.R.T. for Adam Rapp’s “Stone Cold Dead Serious,” beautifully acted, about a dysfunctional family that somehow improves owing to tragic developments. The first half, Chrysanthi said, is “sick”—so vulgar and obscene. But the second act is moving and humane. . . . Chrysanthi went home by bus; I continued to NYC via US Air Shuttle.

Sunday, February 24, 2002

Huntington, Long Island

Limo to Huntington driven by a Yugoslav from Montenegro. We talked for an hour about my experiences in Yugoslavia, and his of course. He is so happy to be here. . . . Lunch with Jeff, Teresa, and children. Then to the Sophia Center. Nice to see Father Smith again. Good crowd, including a woman who teaches Joyce at Adelphi College. I lectured for two hours with a short break, got as far as the end of Proteus. Nice reception afterwards with cordial conversations. People seemed very appreciative. And I enjoyed lecturing again on Ulysses. . . . Then supper with Jeff, Rev. Smith, and a colleague of Jeff’s. Smith very liberal in politics. Greatly disturbed by American bombardment of Afghanistan, etc. Jeff strangely very conservative on all issues. I told him about Robert Frost’s “I was conservative as a youth as a way of assuring I’d be liberal when I got older.” Jeff went in the opposite direction, alas.

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Cambridge

To Harvard. Dia visited at 5:00, followed by Roïlos. Then to the Barker Center where I lectured on Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis as a post-Christian using soul-force to create his own fate. Good questions afterwards, followed by dinner at the Faculty Club with Roïlos and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, who wants to see my essay on Μέλισσα.

Thursday, February 28, 2002

My first experience of the Acela train, the new AMTRAK express, from Boston to New York in three hours. Beautiful cars and good speed. . . . To Columbia. Worked from 2:00 to 6:00 with Mike, Karen, and Peter; we’re getting near the end but not quite. I have to go to Princeton on Sunday.

Saturday, March 2, 2002

I read Harkianakis’s “The Twentieth Century” to start the AFS Board meeting today, then reported on the Marder history: contract signed, copyediting progressing, illustrations being gathered. We expect to deliver the MS to Mercer UP in September. . . . They changed the dates of the 2003 meeting in June, so I’ll be able to attend Leander’s workshop then. . . . Last night, reception at the Greek Consulate on 79th Street, very grand and cordial. Tonight, Paul Taylor ballet at City Center. I’m reading more of Calotychos’s materials for the tenure decision. How to support him? So much of it is journalism rather than scholarship. . . . To the City Center to see Paul Taylor’s ballet troupe. Three ballets, each so different: “Arden Court” with music by William Boyce, classical, traditional, yet with the Paul Taylor flavor. Then one I hated: music by György Ligeti: postmodern, mostly computerized, it seemed; ugly; the dance movements spasmodic, disagreeable. But then “Black Tuesday,” delicious, humorous, although set to songs about the Depression, ending with “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.” Joyous. And of course in all three, even the second, the marvel of trained bodies. At the final curtain call, Taylor himself appeared, looking about 40 years old although he is 71.

Sunday, March 3, 2002

Princeton

To Mike’s to continue work on the Fakazis anthology. . . . Yesterday Chrysanthi called: the furnace smoked, set off a smoke alarm. Boisvert’s Pete came, fixed it, he thought, left, and soon it started all over again. Finally they discovered that the culprit was the chimney, which Pete cleaned. And all this while Daphne was in Hanover helping to sort things out: what goes to South Salem, what to Riparius. Daphne likes our new apartment; that’s very encouraging.

Thursday, March 7, 2002

Paid Kendal $274,964 entry fee and $2944.10 for the first monthly fee (pro-rated). Supped with Wilsons there and then spoke in the Gathering Room on the origins of Kendal. Mother was in the front row in her wheelchair. Afterwards she actually spoke three or four connected sentences to me, just like old times, and said that she had heard every word.

Friday, March 8, 2002

War/Peace Studies lunch, full of students; good discussion of the current “war.” Is it the precursor to World War III or more like the imperialistic skirmishes of the nineteenth century? I suggested the Moslem resurgence from the 8th to the 15th centuries: maybe the same will happen. . . . After supper went to see Judy Dench in “Iris,” about Iris Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s. Superb, and infinitely sad.

Saturday, March 9, 2002

Cambridge

Lunch with Dia and Wim in the Harvest Restaurant. Then a spirited performance at the A.R.T. of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade.” I must see a video of the Peter Brook production to compare. I remember seeing it on Broadway. This production has Corday kill de Sade as well as Marat. Stephanie Roth-Haberle was superb as Corday, Will LeBow as Marat. Total theater, very Brechtian of course.

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

Athens, Hotel Electra

Uneventful flights to Athens, via Amsterdam. Nice seat-mates to talk to, and delicious upgrading to business class on the transatlantic flight, which tempted me to cheat on feast-fasting in order to eat the delicious supper offered by US Airways. Arrived in Athens to find a band playing loud music in Syntagma. After supper, walked to Panepistimiou, meeting Victor Papacosma on the way, to indulge in loukoumadhes: shop filled to bursting with talkative middle-aged women. Strange to pay for everything in euros, 2.20 for loukoumadhes instead of 800 drachmas.

Thursday, March 14, 2002

Athens

Our group met at 8:30 a.m. in the hotel and were bussed out to Glyfada to a National Bank building (built with EE money). Lengthy introductions, more coffee, and finally our subgroup, Ανθρωπιστικές σπουδές (= Humanities), started looking at dossiers. I had six in all. For each we had to grade zero to ten for a series of criteria. Then a separate dossier came for ΕΤΠΑ (Ευρωπαϊκό Ταμείο Περιφερειακής Ανάπτυξης), another source of funding, and again we had about ten categories to grade: very difficult. In each case, we had the relevant grades of two earlier readers; very helpful. I finished one dossier by lunchtime but after lunch managed to do the remaining five (we stayed until 8:00 p.m.). I’m sure I did them poorly, especially in the area of funding, which I had very little sense of. The dossiers were from the Ionian University (for a program in translation), from Athens (for translation, Greek as a second language, use of computers in classics), and from Thessaloniki (Greek as a second language, computers and classics). I gave good grades to all except the one from Athens, with Babiniotis as chief, which was asking for extra money to do what a department should do in its normal operation. Also, the two theses submitted as evidence of past accomplishment had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of the proposal. But the other five were worthy (I hope), although the Ionian people, who seemed very expert in translation, appeared very different from what David Connelly told me about them when we were in Princeton. If only we could reconvene in three years to learn which of the funded programs really did something. All in all, about 60% of the applicants will be funded. Lots and lots of EU money. . . . At 9:00 p.m. we all gathered at the Ταβέρνα του Ψαρρά in Plaka for a too-large meal and of course lots of conversation. I listened to and spoke Greek exclusively all day without too much fatigue. Among the colleagues here, beside Victor Papacosma, is Αργυρίου, head of the European MGSA, a soft-spoken gentle man; a nice French professor who has lots of Ancient Greek and struggles with Modern Greek; a Greek woman teaching in France; a super-confident lawyer who tries cases here in Athens; Greek professors teaching in California and at Brown, several from Cyprus, including one who teaches Plato and Aristotle and was delighted to hear that I had studied at Harvard with Raphael Demos.

Friday, March 15, 2002

Athens

Another twelve-hour day working. I had to write up a defense of my decisions in each of the six cases, in Greek of course. Then our group listened to each person’s conclusions and the coordinator (from the Ministry, very capable) asked for any discussion. I think mine were the most controversial, largely because in several cases I liked the general idea of the proposal but wasn’t strict enough regarding the particulars of the application, especially in the area of funding. But we finally finished about 8:00 p.m. and then had to sign each and every page of each and every set of grades. Very tedious. Supper at this center. Nice conversation. Taxi back to the hotel. Sleep! . . . But when I returned to the hotel I saw my message light blinking. It was a message from Chrysanthi saying that we had received an offer of $350,000 for the house and should we say Yes. I called; she wasn’t home, so I left a message: Yes, say Yes. $350,000 minus Sally Rutter’s 7% commission = $325,500, minus other costs of about $1500 = $324,000, minus Kendal’s entry fee of $276,000 = a surplus of about $48,000, which fully covers a year’s monthly fees and moving expenses. So, it’s OK. And if we receive the money before around May 1st I’ll avoid paying interest on $225,000 borrowed from Paine Webber on margin.

Saturday, March 16, 2002

Athens

Walked down Ερμού, now only for pedestrians, to find the nearest branch of Egnatia Bank, on Αθηνάς, but of course it’s closed on Saturday. Then by subway to Μέγαρον Μουσικής and one block to Μιχαλοπούλου to visit Θεανώ Πετρίδου in her studio at #93. She showed me what happens when she boots up my Greek: βλέπω becomes βλήπω, etc. All the letters are in the wrong place on the keyboard. Stelios’s man in Crete is going to try a conversion; that’s our only hope. But all the English is fine, so that can be copied and pasted even if the Greek needs to be retyped (lessons 1–6 are already retyped). In any case, Θεανώ is in touch with Panagopoulos, Orphanoudakis, even Jeff Rustin, and of course with the Press. Our next job is to get the copyedited MS to her. She hopes to finish by July. . . . In spare moments I’m going through my dossier on Light, marking passages in red. Lots to do, still, to be ready for the course in April. Plus moving, of course. . . . Martin McKinsey came to the hotel and we walked through Plaka to the new pedestrian precinct at the base of the Acropolis, then across the shoulder of the hill back to Plaka, which is lovely, filled with restored mansions, new museums, etc. And fewer cars. Martin is here on a Fulbright to translate, annotate, and introduce Cavafy’s prose writings for a book. And he has a real, tenure-track position next September at UNH. How nice! . . . By metro to Πλατεία Βικτορίας to see Christos and Eri. Christos gave me a long résumé of the situation re: autistics in Greece. Actually, much has improved. The Greek government is sponsoring three homes for autistics, out of the six proposed. More may be added later. Also, there are schemes to train the personnel involved. He has already translated into Greek and published about ten books dealing with autism. The negative side is that his own board of directors is sabotaging him and his efforts, trying to oust him from the presidency. Powerful individuals want everything done solely for their own autistic children and resent Christos’s interest in the whole of the country. I thought of Jeff Ballard’s ouster from the company he founded, the non-Quaker takeover of Kendal, ousting us Quakers. But when Christos in disgust said that he would not run again for the presidency, a leading supporter, a corporation in France, said that they’d withdraw their pledge if Christos wasn’t president. So, he’s still the boss. But who knows? In any case he has no clear successor (διάδοχος). . . . I told Eri about my service reading submissions and she commented that the one done by her department was done in a mad frenzy because they’d been informed of the competition only two weeks in advance. Typical!

Sunday, March 17, 2002

Athens

Nice breakfast with Argyriou and Papacosma. . . . Then walked to the Acropolis. I’ve been many times, but I was just as amazed as always by the perfection of the Parthenon and its sculptures. The power of this art is so evident. And much has been restored on the north side. . . . Subway to Εθνική Αμύνη, where Don Nielsen picked me up on his Vespa scooter, without a helmet. He has a comfortable apartment at 40 Κωστή Παλαμά in Νέα Ψυχικό and lives with his huge, aged cat and lots of books. We ate in the local taverna. He knows everyone in the neighborhood and pays the tavern owner by monthly bills. Coffee in front of a wood fire in his apartment. Good discussion on the Olympics (he’ll help in many ways our MGSA symposium), on environmental protection (he’s interested in Alexios Monopolis’s project and will introduce him to Costas Carras), on Theano’s problem (he thinks Dimitris Daskopoulos can help), and on the American Farm School (he agrees that Dimitri’s father would be an ideal trustee, especially since he knows everyone in the government in Thessaloniki). . . . Back on the scooter to the Metro. Stopped to view, again, the archeological finds displayed in the Syntagma station. . . . Then to Christos and Eri again. Lovely to be with old friends. Christos wants me to send him photocopies of Ritsos’s letters to me, especially the one where Ritsos outlines what I should write about him. This can be published along with other materials in Θέματα Λογοτεχνίας. We talked a lot about Daphne’s Andrew. Could he possibly be autistic? But the chief symptoms outlined by Christos don’t seem to be evident in Andrew, thankfully. We laughed about the occasion when Christos brought me to visit Ritsos on the day of my arrival, after two sleepless nights, and we ended up going to a special performance of “D” with Katrakis that lasted until midnight, and then to a taverna as Katrakis’s guests, until 3:00 a.m. or more. And Christos had other memories of Birmingham and even of New York that I’d forgotten. We’ll hope to see each other again at the end of May, with Chrysanthi.

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

Sold the house for the full asking price of $395,000. This will pay the Kendal entrance fee plus two full years of monthly payments. . . . Space Committee in the evening. They still have not reduced the total renovation price to the Meeting’s stated maximum of $375,000.

Saturday-Sunday, March 23–24, 2002

Leander and Alec here. Very helpful with the moving. We brought loads to storage in Lebanon, to my office in Gerry, and of course to Kendal 171. So much better to work together!

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Moving day to Kendal. Hanover Transfer people wonderfully efficient and pleasant. One load went off to Daphne in South Salem; everything but the books to Kendal 171. Easy. We’re both very comfortable here already. I don’t miss 12 Ledyard Lane.

Sunday, March 31, 2002 (Easter)

Easter dinner at Kendal with Tom and Joan Wilson. Living here is like being in a fancy hotel. And going out on our balcony in the cool morning is like going out on the deck of a cruise ship. . . . All the paintings are now up, thanks to a maintenance woman who worked most of Friday. Some boxes are still unpacked, but mostly we are settled. I’ve been continuing to prepare for the Pendle Hill “Light” course. I wrote to Steve Baumgartner urging him to fire Rebecca after discovering that she never paid Bill Spengemann for his vetting of the Woolman manuscript.

April 7, 2002

Pendle Hill

My “Quaker Light” course ended at lunch today. It went well, with 12 varied and interesting students including a Jungian and a copyeditor who had actually done my Politics of the Spirit book for Princeton (Charles Ault). Also Betty McCord, age 93 and totally “with it.” And a nice woman from Hanover Meeting, Anna, a nurse at Hitchcock. We went all the way from Genesis to Einstein, tracing the tradition of light that reached Fox and Barclay, then what they did with it, and then the science of light: wave or particle, material or immaterial. To me, finally, “Quaker Light” is the energy of creativity in the nature of being. It invades us, is “inward” (not “inner”), aligns us with metaphysical forces, is “panentheistic,” is whole and yet subdivided without being fragmented. . . . Will I ever write all of this up to be a Pendle Hill pamphlet? Meanwhile, Rebecca gave me the committee’s comments on my “On Retirement.” Most people didn’t like the Gulliver section at all; many liked the later sections. But they want it to be more directly Quaker, and more personal. I hope to do an acceptable revision.

April 8, 2002

NYC

Visited Marymount and spoke to the Admissions Director and the head of the Lower School, saying how pleased we all are with Christina’s education there. They both were very aware of her, and Andrew, and Daphne and Greg. Lovely people. Then to Daphne’s. She’s pregnant, but wants to have tests, afraid that as a 35-year-old the baby may be defective, in which case they’ll abort it. A double-decker bed was delivered. Christina will sleep on top, very proudly. . . . Then to the Onassis Center for the Cycladic exhibit. I had hoped to see the Minister of Culture, Venizelos, but he didn’t come. Met his deputy briefly but couldn’t talk to her in the press of people. Saw Sifakis, Mache Karanika, Babiniotis, Rachel Hadas, and my former student Sean Hemingway, now a curator of Greek and Roman at the Met. Also Varvitsiotis and Harry Psomiades, whose institute at Queens College has been saved.

Tuesday, April 9, 2002

Flushing

Out to Main Street, Flushing on the #7 train, past 46th Street. I had hoped to get off on the way back to see 3902 47th Street, but met Yannis Fakazis at the Stassinakis lecture and got a lift back in his car. Visited with Constance Tagopoulos in her office at Queens College, then met some Comp. Lit. people discussing course cancelations owing to lack of funds; then to Stassinakis’s lecture. He had my book in Greek and was very jolly and friendly. His talk was entirely elementary, a general introduction (in Greek), well done for that level, but not at all analytical. At lunch afterwards he was very negative about Patroclos Stavrou, saying his only interest is money. Anemoyannis has withdrawn from active interest in the museum he founded; professors at Rethymno are resisting the idea of a Kazantzakis chair. Etc., etc.

Wednesday, April 10, 2002

Hanover

Spent hours at 12 Ledyard, clearing out my remaining belongings. I have no feelings of regret leaving the house—none. Strange. . . . Finished Don Cupitt’s Emptiness & Brightness, recommended by Darren Middleton. I think I can use it as part of my “Light” essay. Basically he says that metaphysics is bunk; there’s no eternal verity, and that religion must be based on love of, and gratitude for, the contingent world in which we have our existence. Bravo!

April 12, 2002

Splendid piano recital at Kendal by Frederick Moyer, a master. Did interesting pieces, by Arensky, Donal Fox, and Myra Hess’s arrangement of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

April 14, 2002

Yesterday, another fine piano recital by one of Veronica Jochum von Moltke’s students, Chinese of course, and female. Tonight the movie “Amadeus,” as fresh as ever, with Mozart’s glorious music. . . . Meeting for Business, slated to approve the renovation project, couldn’t because we still don’t have a firm price from the contractors. But I was directed to send in the application to the Friends Meeting House Fund for a mortgage loan. I’ve also arranged with Tom Burton at Mascoma Bank for a line of credit up to $250,000.

April 17, 2002

Chrysanthi and the other Kendal folk dancers put on a one-hour demonstration before an appreciative audience. Nice to see the 70- & 80-year-olds doing the polka! . . . Today I bought a new bicycle, with twenty-four gears. Compared to my old Rudge with its three gears, this one is like a Mercedes replacing a Honda Civic. I go from Hanover to Kendal in 12 minutes. And the bike can be placed in a rack on the Advance Transit bus if needed.

April 18, 2002

Philadelphia

To Dan’s. Much improvement in the Townsend, also the Granger. For “recreational music” we did Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes, sort of.

April 20, 2002

Pendle Hill

Long talk with Rebecca after Pubs. She doesn’t seem to realize that Steve has determined to remove her from pamphlets as well as from books although he tells me he has communicated his decision to her repeatedly. And of course she has realized that I wrote a letter against her. I explained the whole mess with Spengemann. In the Executive session of the Board, Steve confirmed his decision to remove her, although he says that she is the very best person on staff insofar as articulating Pendle Hill’s strategic goals is concerned. Richard Barnes gave me lurid details of her defects, including one time when she hadn’t read her e-mail or heard her voice mail messages for a protracted period and the overload broke the system. He also said that we lost so many donations because of her neglect that it would have been far cheaper to have paid her to stay home for several years. Sad. . . . Last night the activists presented their stories to the General Board, prefaced by their leader, O’Reilley, one of my favorites. They went off today to D.C. to join the anti-war protests and we all “held them in the light.” In Meeting, someone ministered about the correlation between brokenness and wholeness, after which I was moved to minister on darkness as the precondition for light. . . . Saturday p.m., picked up Alec and family and we all went to the Barnum and Bailey circus followed by dinner in the Indonesian restaurant. After the circus I asked Theo, “Did you like it?” and he answered, resolutely, “No!” Nor did we, really. It was all glitz and noise, although of course with some amazing bareback rides, acrobats, dancing elephants, etc. But the clown was a protracted bore. . . . I’m reading Brenda’s revised chapters for part 2. They still need editing. . . . Rebecca will read my revised “On Retirement” in a week if it’s to be included in next month’s mailing for Pubs. What first? . . . Chrysanthi reported that the man came to clean out 12 Ledyard on Friday and did a fine job. So, that’s the end of our relation with the house, except for the closing on April 30. I feel no regrets—none.

April 30, 2002

Closing on 12 Ledyard Lane. The new owner is Jolin Kish. We received a check for $363,691.09. The selling price was $395,000. We paid $28,000 for the house originally. The $363,691 covers Kendal’s entry fee and almost two years of residency. Excellent!

Saturday, May 18, 2002

Philadelphia

Last Thursday Dan came to Pendle Hill and we played for two hours on the beautiful Yamaha. Much better, especially the Granger. On Friday, Pubs accepted my “On Retiring” although Helen Horn voted No. But others were very positive. Book Committee was presented with Steve’s new concept of commissioning rather than using unsolicited manuscripts. I’m a bit dubious, but we’ll see what happens. . . . Today, after a long Executive Board meeting, I drove to Bryn Mawr and visited with Stella Miller-Collett to discuss our joint cruise next May. She is enthusiastic and will give splendid lectures using slides. Wallace gave me his latest book, detailing his fight against McCarthyism. He is 87 and becoming forgetful but otherwise seems well. . . . Then to Alec’s for supper and a long visit. They’re about to move to 18th Street and larger quarters.

Sunday, May 19, 2002

Cambridge

Flew to Boston. Chrysanthi came by bus. We met at South Station and went for lunch to Alice and Peter Buseck’s on Linnaean Street. Very pleasant. Then to the A.R.T. for a bravura performance of Lysistrata starring Cherry Jones in an adaptation by Robert Brustein. Funny, serious, beautiful, fanciful. Perfect theater. . . . Then to Andover to visit Lori and Clive and their three little girls, all very sweet. Peter and Alice were there, too. We ought to have gone sooner, but at least we finally got to visit them. We’d like Lori and children to come to the farm this summer.

May 21, 2002

Riparius

Planted tomatoes, protected by Reemay and wall-of-water. Turned on the water. Couldn’t start the tractor because I hadn’t charged the battery, the charger being invisible somewhere in our Lebanon storage bin. We came last night and slept over, even watching a Benny Hill video. Delicious Italian dinner at our favorite restaurant in Lake George.

Sunday, May 26, 2002

I introduced Sally Pinkas, who played a brilliant concert featuring Rachmaninoff’s Etudes-Tableaux and the amazing A major sonata by Schubert, written three months before he died at the age of 31. I thought I was hearing Bev Webster again: the same power, assurance, and unerring musicality.

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Athens, Hotel Arethousa

Arriving, we fulfilled our ritual and went for loukoumadhes on Panepistimiou. Then to Christos’s and Eri’s for supper complete with birthday cake. Christos very expansive, again, on the saboteurs on his governing board who accuse him of failing to produce a home in Athens for their autistic children, and of just enjoying travel as he goes off to Paris, Madrid, Washington (and perhaps soon Melbourne) to meet with international committees on autism. They also accuse him of placing his own children in England. But if he placed them here, somehow, he would be equally accused of feathering his own nest. In sum, his situation is impossible. But if he resigns he is convinced that the entire autistic society, and movement, will collapse. . . . Eri told me that her department’s application to the Ministry and EU was approved. (This is the one, I think, that I said should not be approved, although maybe I’m confused.)

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Athens

A very full day. To Εγνατία Τράπεζα. My drachmas have been converted to 1700+ euros. I withdrew 400 without trouble. That’s very pleasant. Then to Germanos shop where a young man taught me how to use my new Sim-card cell phone. Later, I called Alec—a beautiful connection—and he called me back. Amazing! Then Chrysanthi bought Greek-style skirts for Christina and Sophia, and Greek t-shirts for Andrew, Theo, and Nikos. All this in Monastiraki. Then we discovered accidentally a Γωνία του Βιβλίου, including a shop selling books for the University Presses of Crete. Mine was there and the clerk told me it sells well. But she offered me only 10% author’s discount on the price of 12 euros. I should go to the Presses’ office on Μάνης 5. So there we went and got 40% discount. Bought five copies to give to Christos, Ritsa, Gounelas, Vouli, and?. Then to Μεταίχμιο publishers to talk about the Greek translation of “Stewards of the Land.” Spoke with the co-owner, Vasso Papageorgiou. Randy found them: a new house, 8 years old, specializing in schoolbooks for φροντιστήρια and on translations. Vasso gave me various samples to show to the trustees. If we need a translation, they can supply one. Also, they’ll of course do copyediting. She wants to produce a kind of coffee table album with lots of photos. . . . Lunch then in Δαφνή restaurant; the one on Φιλελλήνων is closed. Nap. Then to Θεανώ. All smiles. She’ll finish half the book by June and send lessons 1–6 to Mike Burton for his approval. She showed us lessons 3 and 4. Beautiful, although we suggested some space-saving in the transformation drills. She hopes to finish by October. Her contacts with Burton are going well. When she sends an e-mail he answers quickly. At first she was (understandably) dismayed at Carol Sheehan’s copious copyediting with its scores of codes, but now she says she’s assimilated all this and it’s OK. Good visit. Then to Acropolis. Again, first view of the Parthenon is so inspiring, as though that building is alive and wants to talk to you about dignity and rationality. . . . Walked back through Plaka. . . . Then to Ritsa’s, walking along Λεοφόρος Αλεξάνδρου for the Victoria Μετρό. Mika Provota was there, the young girl with a Princeton Ph.D. whom Ritsa hoped I could help. Very eager. A lover of Joyce as well as Kazantzakis, Cavafy, and especially Homer. She’ll be living in New York soon (moving from London) and hopes to find some work. I’ll send her addresses and names to contact. . . . Ritsa looks older (she’s 80) but her voice is exactly the same. Christos and Eri came. Christos expounded loudly on the general degeneracy of modern life, compared to his childhood in poverty, when ideals were present and clear. I don’t think the rest of us agreed with his utter pessimism. I gave Ritsa my book; ditto for Christos. Ritsa gave me an album of photos of resistance women στην εξορία στην Μακρόνησος and elsewhere during the Occupation. “See if you can find me,” she challenged us. Nice dinner, complete with another birthday cake and seven candles, which I blew out, it seemed, until one of the “extinguished” ones burst anew into flame. Surely an omen! Mika’s father came to get her, and kindly drove us back to the hotel at 2:00 a.m.

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Thessaloniki

Traveled by Aegean Airlines for the first time. Very nice. In the evening, George and Efthymoula came and we all went to our στέκι, τους Λύκους. George tried to convince me (a) that not a single Jew was in the World Trade Center on September 11 because they all knew in advance what was going to happen, (b) that Bush and the government also knew and purposefully did nothing to stop the attacks because they knew how beneficial they would be politically. “Why do you believe those lies?” I asked. “Οι εφημερίδες γράφουν έτσι.” “Το πιστεύεις το καθετί που γράφει η εφημερίδα;” Maybe I convinced him, at least about (a), if not (b). Otherwise we had a nice visit, covering the prostate (of course) and also Kendal, which Chrysanthi and I tried to explain at some length.

Friday, May 31, 2002

We’re both sick, with bad colds, maybe flu. But made the rounds today, first to Odysseas and Eleni, then to Vouli, finally lunch with Lola and Kostas. Then a very long siesta. Then by taxi to George’s, for a supper of hot soup and tea. He has a thermometer. Took my temperature. Just about normal, a good sign. He also has a blood pressure machine. Both Chrysanthi and I are OK. Nice visit with Odysseas. We’ll return tomorrow for lunch. He is 82; George is 84. Odysseas has arhythmia of the heart, and other infirmities, but looks fine. Toula is still overworked, all day long. Stavros still smokes (as does Andreas). Again, we tried to explain Kendal. . . . At Vouli’s, Κυρά Κούλα voiced her desperation: nothing to live for, no interests, no sense of an attractive future. She feels trapped. Alas. Probably Vouli would love her to leave, but where can she go? Vouli’s mother, Κυρά Στέλλα, is still compos mentis, but cannot walk without a walker, and tires quickly. Vouli is still vivacious and alive. I gave her a copy of my Πολιτική του πνεύματος. She has been visited by Irish Browning (!) but not the φιλενάδα, Paula; they’ve broken off. . . . Lola and Kostas are the same, very welcoming. Kostas cooking as usual and very interested in the world soccer finals playing in Japan. Nikos came for two minutes and invited us tomorrow but we won’t go because of our illness lest we transmit something to their child. . . . In the evening, I also gave George a copy of my book. Don’t know if he’ll read it; he might. I of course gave Vouli a copy; she may look at it.

Saturday, June 1, 2002

Yesterday, I forgot to say, I went to Germanos (down the avenue from the hotel) to see why my cell phone stopped working. The answer: I’d used up all the credit on the Sim card, mostly by calling Alec in Philadelphia. So they added another 18 euros. Each call, even if local, is expensive—about 1 euro, or 90¢. I now know that if I dial 1501 I’ll be told how much credit remains. . . . Then went to Egnatia Bank and withdrew more euros for our total bill. The exemption I hoped to get for the 15% tax on interest is not available because our account is in euros; it would be available if my account were in dollars only. . . . This morning we slept late, until 8:30, trying to shake off these sicknesses. Chrysanthi then went to Vouli and I walked all the way to the Λευκός Πύργος to see the book exhibit, only to find it closed. It opens at 6:00 p.m. tonight. We returned then. Amazing! Over 100 publishers with beautiful material. Among them the University Presses of Crete, with my book right out front. Also Kedros, where I discovered that my book on Ritsos is still in print. We also saw the excellent, beautiful methods for Greek as a second language, which of course will be competition for Greek Today. And lots of impressive programs on CD-Rom, especially an entire encyclopedia beautifully programmed. I even found the Δημητράκου Λεξικόν but they don’t sell individual volumes (I seem to have lost my volume 1). Ευτυχώς, ορκίσαμε να μην αγοράσουμε ποτέ ένα καινούργιο βιβλίο, αλλιώς θα αγόραζα πολλά.

Sunday, June 2, 2002

Nice walk on the παραλία this morning. Then with Odysseas and Eleni to George’s for lunch, with Efthymoula’s fine cooking, and lots of ouzo. Eleni indicated that Hillary Clinton is Jewish (!). Really! I tried to explain many things—e.g., why the death penalty is applied in Texas but not in New Hampshire. Good discussion, very lively. We went at 1:00 p.m. and returned at 5:30. Rested, then met Vouli and had tea in the café on the 5th floor of the Macedonia Palace hotel, very fancy and nice.

Monday, June 3, 2002

To AFS

To the post office to mail excess papers and books. Then to Φράγων 13 στην αγορά to see Dimitris Yiannakos in his office, where all his glass projects are on display. We talked about the kind of anti-Semitism I’d experienced. He wasn’t surprised. Andreas, who has his law office next door, peeked in toward the end but we just exchanged greetings, didn’t talk. Vouli picked us up at the hotel and took us for lunch at the restaurant of the Ιστιοναυτικός Όμιλος nearby, then to the Farm School, where we are housed in Joann Ryding’s basement apartment, very comfortably. All trustees to dinner at Μαϊμή Τάβερνα, Αρετσού, by the sea. Met Gail and Ruth Schoppert. He’ll be a new trustee but is here now for board development. He enthused about Alec. It seems that Gail was head of the accreditation committee for North Jakarta international School when Alec was in charge of preparing for the assessment. Gail said that the school would never have been accredited if it hadn’t been for Alec. He has a very low opinion of the two owners.

Tuesday, June 4, 2002

AFS

Workshop in which each farm and school manager gave an overview of his operation. Very useful not only for the information conveyed but also for our better sense of personalities—e.g., the new farm manager, and Tassos, the new dormitory manager, in charge of the three interns, who were also introduced. I told the interns how Annie and I had pestered the board for three years before the program was begun. It’s been a huge success. . . . Dimitris and Tilda and Evie took us to Thermi for παγωτό. A nice meeting. Evie is about to start gymnasium.

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

Workshop continued. Gail Schoppert in the morning with exercises in better board functioning, based largely on the clash between Yannis Vezyroglou and David Buck over the school’s alleged failure to consult the committee (i.e. Vezyroglou) before instituting (in brochures) the revised curriculum (that the committee had actually recommended). This was disguised in the example, of course, but was all too obvious to those of us on the committee. Generally the sense emerged that this board is not working well. Among other things, Gail advised a committee to evaluate board performance, something I had suggested last year but was rejected. In the afternoon, John Cleave walked us through the strategic planning conclusions in an effort to see what comes next. Supper in the palatial home of Stavros Constantinidis.

Thursday, June 6, 2002

Committee day. With Annie and others for student life, where we worried mostly about the monitors in the dormitory and the enforced study hall, which doesn’t seem to work. Then Post-Secondary with Vezyroglou, who usurped 9/10 of the time over the clash with David (who actually apologized repeatedly) and who said he is going to resign as chair. Good. He’s well meaning and a true friend of the school, but meetings turn out to be monologues. . . . We had an “International Lunch” cooked and served by students at the College: Albanian, Polish, Nigerian, Macedonian (FYROM), and Greek. I was introduced to two young ladies, one Albanian, the other Macedonian, who apparently are being supported by the $5000 I gave for financial aid. They were beautiful and graciously thankful. We sat together afterwards and had a good exchange (in English, of course). The Albanian will be in the US for two months this summer, in Alabama, and wants to continue for a higher degree. The Macedonian isn’t sure at this point of her future. Both have one more year at Perrotis. I’ll send another 6300 euros, which is the cost of a full year for one of them. . . . Dimitris Gounelas picked us up and took us to the American College at Thessaloniki (ACT), to the president’s office—Dick Jackson, who had invited me when I met him at Constantinidis’s. The purpose was to see the new library and to meet the new head librarian, Karen Bohrer. The library is colossal and beautiful, much more attractive, alas, than Dartmouth’s new Berry by the famous Venturi. I spoke to Bohrer about donating books. They have lots of space. Of course, I’ll need to make a catalogue. . . . Then to Dimitri’s home. Frankiskos is now six feet tall and bass-voiced. He was studying for his religion exam tomorrow, and showed us the book, all about Greek Orthodoxy. “Does the book say anything about other faiths?” I asked. “Yes, they’re heresies.” Ruth seems fine; her sight is much impaired, but stable at least for now. Dimitri wants me to offer a public lecture and a one-time graduate seminar next May, for which they have a κονδύλι. I’ll need to send him the dates between the end of the Greek university and the beginning of AFS meetings in 2003. . . . Returned for the barbecue at Princeton Hall and the famous “pepper dance” and lots of other dancing. Chrysanthi was in her element.

Friday, June 7, 2002

Ouranoupolis

Board meeting, at which I summarized the status of parts 1 and 2 of the centenary history and showed samples of Μεταίχμιο albums. The rest of the meeting was somewhat contentious and inefficient. Susie Alexander spoke passionately against reinstating Mimi Lowrey on the board, because she is so divisive, but nevertheless she was elected. So was Dimitri Gondicas. And Gail Schoppert. Vezyroglou announced his resignation as committee chair; so did Sperry Lea. So, the situation is not good. And we have an annual deficit of over $1,000,000! . . . By bus then to Ouranoupolis, the long way, via Σταυρός, where we’d come on an excursion once with Chrysanthi’s father, long ago, and via Στάγειρα, birthplace of Aristotle, newly excavated. Ouranoupolis is a Greek Lake George now, with wall-to-wall tavernas. But Mrs. Loch’s tower still stands proudly by the sea. We took a caïque across to the island of Ammouliani, where we are housed in the Agionissi Resort (03770 51-102), very lovely and peaceful. This is turning out to be a pleasant holiday despite my lingering flu.

Saturday, June 8, 2002

Back to Ouranoupolis and then on a boat for a tour of Athonite monasteries. Windy day with some swells on the sea. Eventually Chrysanthi felt seasick (the only one), threw up, and seemed to lose all strength. They shortened the trip. We all went to the Ξενία hotel for lunch. She lay down for several hours and finally rose, smiling. I brought her into the dining room where everyone was and we all sang triumphantly Η Χρυσάνθη αναστήθηκε εκ νεκρών. Long talk with Christina Willis about the Pinewood School, which might be appropriate for Alec. Peter Baiter, the head for seventeen years, is finally going to leave. Also long talk with David Buck about Kendal. He is interested. So is Christina for Bruce and Tad, but they need a CCRC in California, on the sea. Given what happened today to Chrysanthi, probably she should not accompany me on the Greek cruise next May.

Sunday, June 9, 2002

We were allowed a special tour of the Πύργος, normally closed. I saw the “famous” αποχωρητήριο that I remember so well from my overnight there as Joice Loch’s guest, and the bedroom where I slept. The tower is being restored by the archeological service and will eventually be a Joice Loch museum. Right now about thirty rugs are there, rolled up in burlap bags strewn over the floor. Our host unrolled a dozen for us—one startling masterpiece after another. Obviously we all worry about their preservation. It’s not clear, really, who owns them. Κυρία Φανή, Mrs. Loch’s companion, now 80 years old, had much to say, and quite clear memories. This was a memorable visit. Ouranoupolis is full of restaurants, hotels, etc. People we asked said they like the new reality; they work hard for six months or so—the tourist season—and rest for the remainder . . . We were then all driven to Metamorphosis to visit Bruce and Tad at home, a lovely cottage on the sea on land bought for a song in the late 1950s. I wrote in their guest book, in Greek, “Seeing you here and remembering all you offered to children and adults in Greece, I truly believe that even a single candle can conquer the darkness,” echoing a motto that Bruce has prominently displayed on his wall. But Bruce still shakes markedly when lifting, say, a tea tray, and looks ten years older than his 77 years. . . . Home to the Farm School at 7:30 p.m. owing to heavy traffic. Pano and Joann, the epitome of hospitality, offered us coffee and more fresh cherries just cut from their trees.

Monday, June 10, 2002

Thessaloniki–Zurich–Boston–Hanover

Up at 3:45 a.m. Joann drove us good naturedly to the airport. Comfortable flight to Zürich, where I helped an Albanian worker, resident in Greece, on his way to Sweden to visit a sister. Chrysanthi bought duty-free face cream, of course. . . . I’m vetting Brenda’s part 1. Just read her account, in chapter 6, of the burning and then rebuilding of James Hall, which we of course rededicated a few days ago (it was blown up by the Germans when they left). Too bad I hadn’t been aware of this passage; it would have been so appropriate the other day. In chapter 7, about Charlie, there’s an appreciation of the School’s Quaker connections, including Charlie’s conscientious objection, influenced by Rufus Jones . . . After twenty-one hours, finally got to the Dartmouth Coach terminal on Etna Road, where we had left our car, to find the car battery dead. Called AAA; they jump-started the car but then in doing the paper work informed me that my AAA membership had expired. I’d never received the renewal forms. So, I paid the driver. Two hours later: back home. The apartment really did feel like home.

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Kendal

Lectured to the Professors’ Colloquium at 9:30 a.m. on “Retiring to Kendal (and Beyond).” My flu was so bad I could hardly get through a page without blowing my nose, but managed. John Hennessey was there, and Lorin Riggs, and Wayne Broehl, and a few others. . . . To the clinic in the afternoon. I don’t have pneumonia, don’t have temperature. It’s probably in my sinuses. I was given Sudafed, to alleviate the symptoms.

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

To Riparius

Arrived at the farm at noon. Leander was there; his workshop finished yesterday. He is very pleased with the quality of playing and also the extra day. He wishes that I could get rid of Dan as my partner and play with Alice. But how? He’s scheduled for lots of recitals this year.

Thursday, June 13, 2002

Put the charger on the tractor battery but it hasn’t worked so far. Piles of mail and e-mail to go through. Brenda’s chapters 9–12 in part 1 still waiting to be vetted. In the evening I patched together a Ulysses lecture for Saturday, using bits and pieces of my regular lecture on the book.

Friday, June 14, 2002

To NYC

Drove to Albany-Rensselaer AMTRAK. Penn Station always a shock: so many people! So many nationalities! I had hoped to see Vasos Papagapitos at Travel Dynamics, but he couldn’t be there so late. We went to Daphne’s. Both children very affectionate and lively. “You’re It” (to me) was Christina’s decision for a game of tag. Andrew proudly showed drawings. Daphne is due on October 15. Next Thursday they’ll all be at Riparius. They went off to South Salem. Chrysanthi and I had a nice buffet dinner at the Yale Club. Worked on Brenda’s chapter and reviewed my lecture.

Saturday, June 15, 2002

Huntington

Paul Moran, the artist who works three days a week doing graphic design at Thatcher, joined us for the ride, via limousine, out to Huntington. Same driver as last time, a Yugoslav. Met Jeff Murphy at a country club (his wife just had a hysterectomy and didn’t want anyone visiting). Father Smith joined us. Champagne celebrating his forthcoming transfer to Cornell University as chaplain. He is 70 but looks 55. How nice! He told me that he celebrated the marriage of David Moro and Jackie McCarthy, our North Creek acquaintance. Small world. I lectured on Ulysses chapters 4–18 (!) at the Sophia, a full two hours, complete with Bach fugue and Mr. Bloom’s fart. And tomorrow is Bloom’s day. Small audience but attentive and appreciative, with some useful questions afterwards. Apparently my lecturing style was appreciated. It’s encouraging to be able still to do it. Reception afterwards offering opportunity to talk to some of those in the audience. Then a nice dinner with Jeff, Chrysanthi, Paul. Paul is gay. Spoke about his first lover, who died of AIDS. He is with his second for ten years. He is HIV negative, amazingly. I asked if they’d thought of adopting a baby. They had, probably in India. A lively, talented man; wants me to visit his studio. Our driver brought us back, first depositing Paul in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to visit a friend. Chrysanthi and I, very tired—to bed.

Sunday, June 16, 2002

NYC–Riparius

To the Met to see the marvelous Eakins exhibit. What a technical master he was, and what a visionary! His portraits exhibit souls, not just faces. His one-and-only self-portrait, done late, shows him angry and bitter. (He’d been excluded from societies and galleries because of his frank use of the nude, especially the male.) We also took a quick look at the large exhibit of tapestries, huge allegorical scenes done mostly in Brussels. . . . Train to Albany. Drove home, stopping to shop at Price Chopper.

Sunday, June 23, 2002

Visited Shapiros in their new home in Queensbury—lovely inside, filled with Irv’s paintings, but the location is unpleasant, and to buy anything they need a car, not a good arrangement for 80+-year-olds. Irv thoughtfully bought a catalogue of the British Museum’s Joyce exhibit. . . . After lunching together in the Chestertown ice-cream parlor (huge milk shakes), we said goodbye to Daphne, Greg, Christina, and Andrew, who’d been here since Thursday. The children are like two cyclones: “Swing me, Pappou” (or, as Andrew says, “Ding me, Pappou—higher”). “You’re It, Pappou” (in tag). “Watch me, Pappou.” I tried to teach Christina to play a four-note tune on the piano. She’s a very slow learner (on the piano). Thursday and Friday they all slept in Leander’s house, but Saturday in their own new home, the Shapiros’ house on McCarthy Road. Previously, I helped them put shades in the children’s bedroom, move furniture around, remove a tree that fell onto the beach by the pond, etc. Slowly it’s become a “home.” . . . Gary McGinn made us a lovely arbor out of cedar, which I placed over the well-pipe. We planted honeysuckle, which should cover it in flowers in about two years. Worked many hours in the garden removing weed–weeds–weeds. But our plantings are doing well. . . . Lovely siesta each afternoon, which seems to have helped me get rid of the flu I caught in Greece. It’s gone now, finally.

June 29, 2002

To Hanover

Drove Chrysanthi to Hanover to start her ALPS Greek course, this time with two students from Hellenic College/Holy Cross. She’ll sleep in a dorm room, having no transportation to get back and forth to Kendal.

July 1, 2002

Nice supper with Don Kurka at the Tortoras’ home, where he is staying. He wants to read Ulysses, so I brought him Joyce’s chart and my notes and answered a slew of questions. Lots of fun. He’s now divorced, trying to sell his house in Florida, and considering where to settle, probably back at his university in Tennessee. Children are supportive. His daughter, separated from her Merrill Lynch husband, is in divorce proceedings. She says she needs to spend $100,000 a month (!) and thus needs a million-plus alimony. . . . Earlier today I was lucky to be seated on our porch while “our” chipmunk was digging a new hole. And what an engineer he is! He digs with front paws and then clears the dirt under his body and out the back. After a stint of this, he backs up to shovel the same dirt further away from the entrance, to be out of the way. Then, most remarkably, he turns around and uses his snout as a shovel, pushing the loose dirt still further away from the entrance. What a marvel of instinctive behavior!

I’ve been reading Howard Wriggins’s remarkable memoir of his AFSC service as a young man, aged 22–26, during and just after World War II, in Lisbon, Algiers, Italy, Paris, and then slightly later in Gaza, feeding and clothing desperate refugees. What a tribute to the AFSC of those days, and of course to him. So many difficulties, so many crucial decisions to be made, so much tact needed to work with local officials. Of course the saddest part of the story is that the same phenomenon continues: the Palestinians are still in tents fifty years later. Howard started as a C.O. assigned to AFSC, but seeing the misery caused by the Nazis and feeling increasingly that only military force would be effective, he could no longer consider himself a pacifist. He asked me if I thought he would be misunderstood by his fellow Quakers. I see no problem. He is sensitive to both sides of the issue. He also asked me to “correct” the English, so I ended copyediting the entire 200 pages. It would be nice if Pendle Hill could publish this, but with Steve Baumgartner’s revision of the policy this may not be possible.

Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena arrived safely in Jakarta after an “uneventful” flight and a pleasant time in Seoul’s new airport, which has all the amenities of the Singapore airport.

July 4, 2002

Don Kurka came to Terpni for supper—the stew that Chrysanthi had prepared for me. Again, lots of good talk, including his history as a draftee in Korea.

July 5, 2002

All afternoon in North Creek at the new community center with Ross Morgan and some of the other forest owners in his “Smartwood” certification program. It’s moving forward slowly. He’s done the plan for our 300 acres but I haven’t seen it yet. We meet again on August 6. One of the people, a woman, is named Tannen. I asked her if she were related to Deborah, and it turns out that she’s Deborah’s sister. So we had lots to talk about.

July 6, 2002

A surprise telephone call from Nick Trautwein, who later came to visit with his girlfriend, charming Amy. He has clear memories of Terpni even though he was only six or seven years old when he used to come. Now a jazz saxophonist, he recently did a week’s gig in Athens. . . . On the farm, I’ve finally gotten rid of the weeds in the garden, a large job this year. And I finished mowing the north field. Will do the east field tomorrow. Mower behaving well so far, probably because I keep checking the bolts holding down the sickle bar. . . . Shelagh Ballard telephoned. She and Geoff will visit on July 18–20. And Leander called to say that Brittles and family will be visiting in August. Nice!

July 10, 2002

To Hanover yesterday. Returned Howard Wriggins’s manuscript, a detailed account of his time working for AFSC in refugee relief, a remarkable service. Supper last night with Chrysanthi, John, Mary, and the Greek students at ACTS, including one from Holy Cross and one from Hellenic College, sent as promised by the president. Both are converts to Orthodoxy. . . . At breakfast this morning, I was surprised to see Jim and Carol Armstrong, in from Maine for a Finance Committee meeting yesterday. “Why does Kendal have a deficit?” I asked. “Because people aren’t dying fast enough. The actuarial studies were wrong. We aren’t collecting enough new entry fees.” . . . Drove to Saratoga with Chrysanthi. Lovely ballet: “Raymonda Variations” with happy music by Glazunov. Then John Cage’s interesting “Haiku” with brilliant choreography by Albert Evans. I liked the music, too. Mostly percussion, played by five experts on stage. Counting! Finally an old favorite, the Bernstein/Robbins “Fancy Free” with Damian Woetzel. A lovely evening.

July 12, 2002

To Queensbury to photocopy Greek Today, in part, for Mata Dova, who’ll be using it at Hellenic College this August. I’ve been proofreading lessons 1–6, just received from Theano. What a mess! Mistake after mistake, made by her typist but also presumably by her, sometimes consciously, changing our text in ways I cannot accept. So, back to the “monster,” many hours alas to be spent with red pencil. . . . Supper at Applebee’s with Maureen and Mary. Maureen lively, as always; Mary preoccupied with bad health.

July 14, 2002

Finished mowing around the pond yesterday. Also Alec’s path across the power line. The farm looks extraordinarily beautiful. . . . Shapiros came for an early supper and then we drove to Meadowmount. Beautiful concert, well balanced: Brahms’s violin sonata no. 3, Martinu’s violin sonata no. 1, played energetically by a young Czech, and the Dvořák Dumky Trio done with gusto and humor.

Saturday, July 20, 2002

Geoff and Shelagh Ballard arrived Thursday night and what a nice visit we had until they left this morning! And this morning we talked at length with Alec, who returned from Indonesia last night after a good stay and a good trip back. With the Ballards we had continuous, easy, stimulating talk, from start to finish. Thursday evening we all drove to Saratoga, feasted at the Hall of Springs, celebrating our 47th anniversary, and then saw a fine program: the Stravinsky/Balanchine “Agon,” then a new ballet called “Morphoses” by Christopher Wheeldon, with excellent music by Ligeti, and finally the Fred Astaire piece by Jerome Robbins, with Astaire and Rita Hayworth excitingly on the screen and the corps de ballet imitating them. On Friday, after leisurely breakfasts, we went to the Adirondack Museum, where a special treat was a demonstration of chair caning (actually, with paper rush, not actual cane) that interested Geoff, because he does this as a hobby. And saw Ellie Gardner and Rosine there, since they’re on the staff this summer. Back home, fascinating elaboration by Geoff of his dream: to eliminate the internal combustion engine. His new company, General Hydrogen, is enthusiastically backed by General Motors and some foreign giant corporations, and has developed ways for fuel-cell vehicles to be supplied with hydrogen by stopping at places like McDonald’s and Walmart. I asked what will happen to gasoline stations. “They’ll have forty years to gradually disappear,” Geoff replied. He predicts that the Ballard company will also fail because they want to manufacture fuel cells whereas General Motors can do it more cheaply and better. The major argument for the elimination of internal combustion is the disease produced by pollution. Studies are now beginning to show, claims Geoff, that the lives of children growing up in a high pollution city like Los Angeles will be severely curtailed, and that the incidence of asthma is significantly increased. He is off today to New York to speak on all this tomorrow morning. Then off to China to do the same there. Et cetera. What a beautiful vision, and one that is eminently practical. Yet it will take thirty years at least for the changes to take place, and he won’t be here to see them, nor will I. In any case we had a stimulating time with these good friends. I even interested him in Don Cupitt’s book for their reading group at their Anglican church, since their priest keeps telling them that the worst status is that of certainty about religious truth.

July 25, 2002

Another marvelous evening at the ballet, with Chrysanthi and Don Kurka. The incomparable “Prodigal Son,” danced by Damian Woetzel. Then two short Stravinsky/Balanchine ballets, totally different; then the lively “Tarantella,” and finally “Vienna Waltzes,” ending with the Rosenkavalier waltz. Beautiful.

July 29, 2002

Alec’s birthday dinner at Daphne’s (Shapiros’ old home) with the meal cooked by Monica. Children in best of form, even making chocolate cupcakes for me, the “chocolate boy.” . . . Yesterday a little party at our neighbors’, Irwin Morris and his young wife, who’ll be teaching 4th grade in Johnsburg school next fall. Morris clan there, very friendly. But the “lake,” at least there, is dry, just mud. Jim Morris assured me, however, that the beaver have not left.

July 30, 2002

To Hanover

To Hanover with Alec and Leander. Visited Yiayia, who was in good form, laughing, and insisting that we have lunch with her, which we did in the Wistar dining room. She walks there energetically, leaning on her walker. She finished all her ice cream but not much of her entrée. Leander, especially, was very lively with her. We then rented a seventeen-foot U-haul truck and emptied out our locker, completely. Drove back, supping at the Midway Diner in Rutland. A good day.

July 31, 2002

Emptied the truck into the pole barn. Why do we own so much? So many Greek books (they’ll be shelved at Daphne’s), so many English-language books (they’ll be added to those in the Guest House).

Sunday, August 4, 2002

Lovely visit from James McBride, Azure and Jordan, on their way to Montreal for a holiday. Stephanie and the baby will join them there, traveling by air. She wants to migrate to Canada to escape the U.S. value system. I was frank with Brittles regarding what I thought were construction problems in “Miracle at St. Anna.” Happily, he’s already planning a second novel, about a female saxophone player, and wants to improve. I’m going to send him Ford Madox Ford’s account of his and Conrad’s novelistic technique. Saturday night, Leander, Alec, Daphne, Greg, and I went to a grade-C movie in Glens Falls, thinking of Brittles: “Goldmember,” a movie easily forgotten. . . . I finished arranging all my literary books alphabetically in the Guest House, about 1500 volumes. But why? Also harrowed and seeded the driveway and the trench for Leander’s water. Let’s see now if anything germinates. . . . Working with Steve Baumgartner and Jack Coleman to get Pendle Hill to publish Steve Cary’s memoir. Steve died a few days ago. And, alas, I heard from Nardi Campion that Ned Perrin’s Parkinson’s is bad and he doesn’t have long to live. Telephoned him; cordial conversation. I asked how I could help and he said that since he’s no longer able to drive he’d like to be chauffeured occasionally. I’ll hope to do this in September when we return. How sad that he’s being taken off in such an untimely manner.

Tuesday, August 6, 2002

Another meeting with Ross Morgan devoted mostly to the idea of a forestry cooperative. Alec and Leander present; very negative about RCPA. They don’t want to be labeled as “greens” although they like Ross and his forestry plan for us. . . . Said goodbye to Russell, who’s leaving the North Creek library for a year to go to school.

Sunday, August 18, 2002

Alec and family left yesterday, the last to go. Quiet. Off to Saratoga with Don Kurka, Tom Akstens, and Susanne Murtha to a polo match. Whitney cup. Very fancy. The horses are amazingly beautiful and vital. Then to an Indian restaurant followed by coffee in the Adelphi Hotel. A nice change.

Monday, August 19, 2002

Leander is back with furniture and a keyboard. His concert for the flute convention went well. . . . I’m progressing slowly with the bibliography of Greek books, all of which are now alphabetized on Daphne’s floor. . . . Perrymans here for dessert and three hours’ conversation. He is very down on all the “flatlanders” who now control the town.

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Perrymans took us to the great “shed” built by Morrell. They just bought it. Beautiful views. Reminds me of the Greek temple in Arcadia. But Art sees it all as Christian: God’s work, etc., with himself as steward. I asked him last night what could explain the mentality of the two boys who murdered the Zantops. “No God in their life,” he answered. Could be right. A bankrupt secularism that offers violence as salvation.

Friday, August 23, 2002

Nice walk through the Pack Forest to see the “Grandmother Tree.” Large white pines, a feeling similar to Muir Woods. Must take the children next summer.

Sunday, August 25, 2002

Finished cataloguing and shelving the Greek books, which now occupy Daphne’s north parlor. A huge job; took all week. But nice to restore acquaintance with so many old friends.

Thursday, September 26, 2002

Lunch at the Dickey Center with Svetlana Broz, Tito’s granddaughter, a remarkable medical doctor from Yugoslavia who now is a full-time peace worker. She collected testimonies by the hundreds of individuals in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Kosovo who were helped by others of the supposedly “enemy” ethnicity—Serbs helping Croats, Muslims helping Christians—and has published these in a book now translated into English. I bought a copy and will lend it to Zdenka, who idealized Svetlana Broz (alas, I didn’t alert her to the occasion). Broz’s plea was for all of us never to believe what we read in the newspaper. The media, in her experience, enhance hatred and divisiveness.

I haven’t written in this journal for a month, it seems—since August 25th. We returned to Hanover on September 7, felt fine entering our apartment as opposed to 12 Ledyard Lane. That part of our life is over.

—I contacted Jack Coleman about publishing Steve Cary’s memoirs at Pendle Hill.

—Spoke to Ned Perrin, who alas is very sick with Parkinson’s and not expected to live long.

—Went to New York only to visit with Peter Mackridge, who is lecturing for the Onassis Foundation. We had a lovely supper together at the Yale Club on September 11, four hours of easy talk. Then I lunched with him and others at the Columbia Faculty Club on September 12 and attended his fine talk on Solomos.

—Bought a new Buick Century 2003 model on September 16, for $18,500.

—Swam five laps in the Kendal pool after which Tom Wilson certified me as able to swim.

—Lunched with Kesaya Noda to talk about her desire to pursue an MFA program.

—Managed to get my G3 computer to use an Epson printer, thanks to help from Susan Bibeau.

—Played Schubert Ländler, set for four hands by Brahms, with Dan at his house on September 19

—Met with Steve Baumgartner at Pendle Hill on September 20 about Rebecca’s departure from publications next March. He wants to use free-lance editors as an interim solution and then hire a replacement for the 2003–2004 year.

—Had two nice suppers with Alec and Monica and children on September 20 and 21. Alec feels better about Friends Select. Rose, the head of school, wrote a very complimentary letter showing her appreciation of all he has done, the first indication he’d had.

—Socialized at Kendal with Broehls, Deweys, Sandersons.

—Lunched with Robert Binswanger, who is here—again—for another year of teaching and deaning.

—Spoke with people at the Fleet Bank about continuing with them after my mother dies.

—Moved on September 27 from Gerry 312 to Baker’s 5th level (the old 8th level) as a temporary location before going to the old 10th level, now the 7th.

September 28, 2002

Quick trip to Riparius on this beautiful day. Fixed the wooden case in our car trunk so that it can fit into the new Buick. Catalogued more books, the ones on philosophy in our cabin. Napped beautifully on the grass in the afternoon.

September 29, 2002

I’ve been revising my Fakazis introduction to meet some of Mike Keeley’s objections. Received a very nice letter from Admiral Gene Carroll thanking me for my continuing support of Dennis.

September 30, 2002

Chrysanthi went off to NYC to be with Daphne in the days before her birth of our 7th grandchild, which we already know will be a boy.

October 3, 2002

The decoration committee vetoed my proposal to place five Sikeliotis paintings in the hall. Only two per resident, I was told, “and you already have too many.” So I re-arranged things in the apartment and hung them in our bedroom. Much better.

Friday, October 4, 2002

NYC

Nice lunch at the Yale Club with Serena Joyce, who has a new job with the City, connected with September 11th. She’s fine. But she confided to me that she never got along with David Buck, a bad sign. . . . At 4:00, went to a hotel on Lexington to meet Bill Breichner, head of journals at Johns Hopkins, and John Iatrides, to discuss the future of JMGS at Hopkins. Breichner was very supportive. Our future there is secure; the commission will most likely increase but only according to the inflation index. People are “hitting” the electronic version in the thousands. But regular subscriptions are below 400 and he would like us to spend about $5000 on a promotional campaign. A fine meeting, which I’ll report to the MGSA Executive Board tomorrow. . . . Quick visit to Daphne and family, including Chrysanthi. The children go wild when I arrive and need to be raced after, swung round, etc. I was soon sweating. . . . By bus to Princeton.

Saturday, October 5, 2002

Princeton, Nassau Inn

Spent all morning with Dimitri going over the errors in Greek Today. He has already helped Theano correct some of them and will sit with her again at the end of October. We expect to get lessons 7–12 and front matter soon. I’m hoping that Otmar Foelsche can fix the computer problem before Theano does the rear matter, to avoid retyping. We need to start thinking about the Workbook, which will be on a CD only, not printed.

The MGSA board met all afternoon, dealing mostly with nominations for the upcoming elections. Then a reception and dinner. I had a good conversation with the woman who has been hired in Stathis’s old position, a former student of Peter Mackridge’s.

Sunday, October 6, 2002

Princeton–New York City

The Board spent most of its time today discussing the 2003 symposium in Toronto. Tom Gallant has been marvelous so far in preparing the hotel, banquet, etc. Too early to know about the program. The committee is chaired by Addie Polis, which worries many people. Drove back to Manhattan with John Iatrides, Nancy, and Addie. US Air to Lebanon. Home around 9:00 p.m., finally.

Tuesday, October 8, 2002

Surprise! Breakfast at the Hanover Inn with Bobby Gersten and Libby. Then I showed them Kendal, Orozco murals, Sanborn, and the Hop. They live half the year now in Brant Lake and the other half in Florida, near Miami. Sharon has become the managing director of the Alvin Ailey Ballet Company. Big stuff! I’m hoping that they’ll visit us at Terpni this summer. Lib has a good memory; she recalled my father’s good suggestions to her re: nursing her baby. Took them also to see Harriet, who just stared blankly.

Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Good talk with Roberta Moore about the alumni cruise this May. Then with Barbara Gerstner about getting Geoff Ballard here as a Montgomery Fellow. Lunch with Ron Edsforth and Doug Haynes regarding future policy for War/Peace Studies, which seems to be flourishing right now, happily. . . . Dick came for supper and then we played lots of Bach, and the Prokofiev sonata.

Thursday, October 10, 2002

Terpni

To the farm, with Dick. Catalogued more books, but still didn’t finish. Dick pruned the fruit trees, a bit. It’s wonderfully relaxing to be here.

Friday, October 11, 2002

Piano four-hands with Kitty Gibson; she’s mediocre, alas, but still it’s nice to have someone. I’ve suggested that we both prepare Debussy’s Petite Suite a bit for the next time. . . . Dick came again for supper, bringing the Shostakovich sonata, which we’ll try to play a bit, at least the first movement, which is slow.

Saturday, October 12, 2002

Daphne went to the hospital; the baby was induced; we now have a seventh grandchild.

Went to Gaylords’ celebration for fifty years of marriage. Then supper with the Webster committee at Kendal, preceding a Webster concert.

Daphne’s baby was born this afternoon, very easily and quickly. And they named him Peter Graham Tebbe.

October 17, 2002

Philadelphia

To Dan’s to practice the Schubert-Brahms Ländler, the Townsend folk songs, and the Granger. Not bad. But the best was a Haydn symphony that we played very well. Then to Alec’s. He’d just returned from a trustees’ meeting. Theo stayed up “for Pappou,” who of course was immediately pressed into service to read a long—long!—book about pigs. Alec surprised me by speaking very positively about Friends Select, more so than ever before. Excellent new teachers, a new administrator for development, beginning of a $5,000,000 campaign, and even Rose, he said, does some things very well. He had applied to the Town School in New York for the headmastership but wasn’t even short-listed. Just as well. Perhaps he’ll stay on at Friends Central.

October 18, 2002

Philadelphia–Washington

Good Pubs meeting. I announced that Rebecca will be finished in March (she was absent today). Very fine pamphlet by Mary Morrison describing her near-fatal illness at age 91 and how she was so eager to die. . . . Then via AMTRAK to Washington to Capitol Hilton Hotel for the American Hellenic Institute’s symposium on “The Future of Hellenism in the United States.” I arrived in time for the dinner and sat next to Ambassador Patrick Theros, who had served in various Arab and Muslim countries and explained much to me about different Islamic sects. Fascinating. Charlie Moskos gave the keynote address, stressing the vulnerability of Hellenism in the US owing to mixed marriages (over 80%).

October 19, 2002

Washington, Capital Hilton Hotel, 16th and K

I gave my talk, “Greek Language School Programs: Is There a Need for Change,” essentially digesting the Commission report. It was well received and I was flooded with questions, the first of which was “Where did you learn Greek?” I answered, of course, “στο κρεβάτι” to much laughter. Lots of other presentations, mostly equally pessimistic. At lunch I sat next to Gene Rossides, the moving force in this Society. Very informative. I learned that his son went to Dartmouth and studied mostly with Charles McLane. In the afternoon, long tête-à-tête with Vassilis Lambropoulos regarding MGSA affairs. Afterwards drinks with Rossides, his son and wife, Pappadakis (president of Drexel) and, best of all Harry Mark Petrakis and his wife, both extremely friendly, as though I was the celebrity they were meeting instead of vice versa. He had given a rousing speech earlier, full of humor, especially about how he learned Greek με το ξύλο!. . . Afterwards to the Kennedy Center; met Deanna; splendid and unusual concert enhanced by my seat in back of the orchestra with full view of Slatkin and the extraordinary harpist and other musicians (except bass drum and timpani unfortunately hidden from view). The program: Saariaho’s “Nymphaea Reflection for Strings.” As preview, Slatkin explained: No melody, harmony, rhythm. What’s left? Sound! And the sound was like computerized music. Interesting but too long. Then Rautarvaara Clarinet Concerto played by Richard Stoltzman, world premiere. I learned later that Leander had studied with Rautavaara in Helsinki. A more traditional piece with extraordinary gymnastics for the soloist. After the intermission, another surprise: Tchaikovsky’s 2nd Symphony, never heard, and extraordinary fun. Showing off the orchestra. Boom, bang, whoosh. We were all doubled over in appreciative laughter at the end. . . . Drove with Deanna to Lopa Court. Up until 12:30 a.m. with Leander and Deanna. They’re in the midst, now, of the sniper problem, with schools locked, etc.

October 20, 2002

Washington–Hanover

Leander cooked a big breakfast: eggs, bacon, hash browns, muffins. Then he gave me a very long and good lesson on the Schubert Ländler. To the airport with Niki, who likes to watch planes. Home by 5:30 in time for normal supper at Kendal.

October 21, 2002

Jack Coleman called to say that he easily raised the $15,000 required for the Steve Cary book, most of it donated by John Whitehead, of course, and Norval Reece. How nice! And: Greg was promoted to Partner in Goldman Sachs. There are 300 partners. The firm employs 25,000 people. How nice, too!

October 25, 2002

Boston

AFS board met in the Harvard Club on Commonwealth Avenue. Dimitri Gondicas was there, his first meeting. I delivered the Workbook for Greek Today; he’s going to Greece tomorrow and will deliver it to Θεανώ. Also delivered to him Otmar’s attempt to make our disk compatible for her in Greece. In the break, went to the Poetry Room in Lamont Library to find poems for tomorrow: Anagnostakis’s “Days of Thessaloniki 1949” and Ritsos’s wonderful “Stones.” Nice to be in Lamont, which I experienced in its inaugural year, 1949. . . . Then to Beacon Street, for a reception at the Greek consulate. Then by bus to the Maliotis Center for a dinner hosted by Arthur Dukakis. Some nice new board members. One is the boss of United Fruit and of course knows all about Eli Black.

October 26, 2002

Boston

I read my poems at the meeting’s start and announced with pleasure that Brenda’s book is finished—and delivered to Mercer University Press. I held up the CD, delivered to me from Randy by hand by Joann, that contains all 500 pages. The board, dismayed at the School’s deficit, gave David Buck a hard time. With luck he’ll cut expenses even more than he has already done.

November 2, 2002

To Northampton to a forestry conference with Ross Morgan, one of the speakers, and Peter Bauer leading a workshop. Very interesting, especially on growing ginseng. Ross already does this.

November 7, 2002

My first physical exam at Kendal. Dr. Watson, friend of the Rutters. Says I’m totally healthy, shouldn’t even worry any longer about cholesterol.

November 8, 2002

Visited Ned Perrin, who has Parkinson’s disease. He lost so much weight, but eats ice cream with impunity every night. I think that his spirit is serene regarding the prospects, which are discouraging. The worst moment was when he said he’d probably have to sell the house. What a shame that he is not in Kendal. He’s happy to be publishing a piece in the Valley News tomorrow on hybrid cars. Said he’d like to come to supper. I’ll try to arrange to have Nardi Campion too.

November 10, 2002

Riparius

Day at the farm. 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I catalogued the Quaker books and the poetry and prose anthologies. Met Daphne’s neighbors. Saw the Riparius bridge in its new position 40 feet upstream.

November 11, 2002

To President Wright’s house for the ΠΒΚ induction ceremony. They’ve put me on the nominating committee. Alan Gaylord is the chapter’s president; he led the ceremony rather pompously, dressed in his academic gown. . . . Afterwards, to Peace Studies to view the gruesome film “No Man’s Land” about the Serbian-Bosnian war. Horrible.

November 13, 2002

Joan Wilson’s viola da gamba trio in the Gathering Room. Each player had treble, alto, and bass gambas and played them all. No vibrato. Contrapuntal music. But boring to my ear.

November 14, 2002

To White River Junction to see the performance there of “Proof,” about a mathematician’s dysfunctional family. Vigorous acting but somehow just below a truly professional level. Everyone was enchanted; I wasn’t.

November 15, 2002

Ned Perrin, Sarah, and Nardi Campion came for supper. Ned slow but still alert. We were so slow in getting to the dining room, getting soup and salad, that when we were ready to go to the buffet table we saw that it had been removed. I convinced the chef to bring pans of food back just for us. Losing Ned seems very unjust and wrong.

November 17, 2002

After Meeting, I presented my material on “Light” to the adult study group, a large crowd that seemed very interested. One asked how Jesus could be both God and Son of God. I said, read the opening of John’s Gospel: The Word was with God (προς το Θεό) and was God. I stressed that our ability to accept contradiction and illogicality is probably the sine qua non of an acceptable religious approach.

November 19, 2002

Howard Wriggins, at my invitation, spoke at a War/Peace luncheon about caring for refugees in Lisbon in 1942–1943. I asked the students, “Who has seen the film ‘Casablanca’?” Only one, and he did not register that Ingrid Bergman and her husband were desperately eager to get to Lisbon. . . . At 4:30 a fascinating presentation by John O’Reilly, a montage-ist, friend of Don Kurka’s. He showed 50–60 slides of his work, very beautiful (all dark, reminding me of Käthe Kollwitz), very brusque and even scandalous with blatant genitalia (he repeated often that he’s gay). In the question period one of the Studio Arts teachers, presumably a born-again Christian, accused O’Reilly of blasphemy owing to some risqué montages including Jesus.

November 20, 2002

I had a long breakfast with O’Reilly at the Inn. He and Don were roommates at college and have been in touch ever since. He fancies Cavafy; I brought him some of my translations and an essay. He has worked at odd jobs to feed himself all these years, but recently has come into vogue. . . . I invited Tom Wilson to join me at the Wednesday faculty lunch. We sat next to Filitsa, who emoted about her need for a city.

November 21, 2002

My first meeting as a member of Kendal’s Events Committee. The chair, Jeanne Reeves, is overpowering and domineering but she’ll step down soon, thankfully. Joan Snell turns out to be a bit of a pill. But Tom Wilson’s on it and some other good folk. My first project is to bring Dan Weiser’s trio. Cost $500. The committee will give $200.

November 22, 2002

Four-hand piano again with Kitty Gibson. We’re doing Debussy’s “Petite Suite.” She’s over the hill, alas. But I enjoy the fresh sight-reading. We also did Clementi today.

November 23, 2002

Lunch with an eager freshman who graduated Friends Academy in Long Island and is attending our Meeting.

November 24, 2002

“Light” again after Meeting, concentrating on the scientific view, which turns out to be amazingly compatible with the religious view.

November 25, 2002

Went to UPNE, now in Lebanon, to pick up Theano’s setting of lessons 7–12. These will now need to be proofread. Stopped at the Meeting House to see the progress. Outside work seems finished but the inside is still entirely rough. The Meeting room is significantly larger. The house proper is now a single wide-open space. The old useless porch is a fine enclosed room, our new library. But it’s all going to cost $500,000.

I haven’t recorded here all the interesting people we’ve been meeting at Kendal, most recently the Deweys, the Baldwins, the Pietsches—a great enrichment. My talk on the origins of Kendal was transcribed and published this week in “Kendalites.” Lots of favorable comments from residents. It seems that I am clearly now “the founder” in everyone’s mind.

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

To Washington

Drove to Springfield, then AMTRAK to Washington. The train was full, every seat taken, but we were very comfortable in Business Class. Wrote my book review of Heaven’s Edge and began to correct lesson 7 of Greek Today. . . . Leander, Sophia, and Nicholas were waiting for us at the Rockville Metro station, Sophia very excited. At 9 Lopa Court, I of course was pressed immediately into service reading stories to Nicholas.

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Courtyard Marriott, Rockville

The Greek Consul telephoned. Could I come to town to visit with her and the ambassador? So I went in, ate at my favorite café, the Midi, off Dupont Circle, and spent 2½ hours with them, trying to figure out what can be done about the problems exposed in the Rassias Commission report. I suggested (a) exploring the possibility of charter schools, (b) seeing if Modern Greek couldn’t be taught in, say, the Bethesda public school, where there are lots of Greek-Americans, (c) convening a conference of leading university figures (Lambropoulos, Gondicas, Van Dyck, Roïlos, Gallant, Bien, etc.) to examine how the university programs could begin to affect what happens in primary and secondary schools. We’ll see. The next move is theirs. Oh, I also hoped that they could arrange a meeting between Rassias and Archbishop Demetrios. . . . Returned to 9 Lopa Court. Alec and family had arrived. Elena is now standing but not quite walking. She’s beautiful. We had a Chinese dinner at home (take-out). Leander is distraught because he just discovered that some criminal has been charging multiple purchases on a credit card bearing Leander’s name. . . . Overnight at the Courtyard Marriott since Alec is now occupying the guest room at Leander’s.

November 28, 2002, Thanksgiving

Leander gave me a good lesson on the Schubert Ländler. With Alec’s family we had a lovely turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Leander put on a good show despite his chagrin over the identity theft. Lots of reading to Theo and Niko.

Friday, November 29, 2002

We had both families to the hotel for breakfast, successfully. Even Christina actually ate something. Then to Rockville, the Metro, AMTRAK, Springfield, and home. A long day.

December 3, 2002

Amherst

To U-Mass for Greek exams. One student was extraordinary: a girl of Polish origin who had lived in Athens for a year at age 8, then had forgotten all her Greek, and now seems to have remembered it.

December 4, 2002

Holly Dustin, a former student, asked to have lunch. She is the fund-raiser for Vermont Public Radio. I’ll try to get her team to speak at Kendal. She fondly remembered a dinner for students at 12 Ledyard Lane, but I’m not sure she remembers anything from my course.

Thursday, December 5, 2002

Big snowstorm in Philadelphia. I canceled flights and went by train. Arriving at 6:00 p.m., I telephoned Chrysanthi, who then informed me that Gay Berger and Steve Baumgartner had been trying all day to reach me and that all the Pendle Hill meetings had been canceled. Nice supper with Alec and family, at home. Huge long book about pigs (as always) read to Theo.

Friday, December 6, 2002

Pendle Hill

Steve, Bob McCoy, and I met about books: Cary, Gwyn, etc. The Cary needs an editor. Doug Gwyn will be returning to PH for three years to write his new history of twentieth century Quakerism. All this extra time enabled me substantially to revise my talk for Canterbury: a political approach to The Last Temptation. Also, on the train yesterday, I copyedited several more lessons of Greek Today as set by Theano, filled with mistakes. . . . Very strong Meeting for Worship this morning. Also good talk with Mary, who runs AFSC’s peace program. She’s devastating regarding the hypocrisy and deception involved in Bush’s Iraq policy, and candid about AFSC’s troubles, although she says that McNish is a good manager. . . . Back to Philly for dinner again with Alec and family, this time in a Persian restaurant, very tasty. Then more pigs read to Theo.

Saturday, December 7, 2002

Pendle Hill

Another strong Meeting for Worship. More revision of my lecture. Lunch with a surprise visitor, Nancy Frommelt, who wants very much to see my chapter on Saint Francis. Dan Seeger came at 5:00. We played Schubert and Townsend. He still hasn’t learned his Townsend parts and I doubt that he ever will; they’re too hard. Then we went to Darlington Fine Arts Center, meeting Alec there, to hear Leander’s concert. He played Brahms’ 2nd Piano Quartet, an amazing piece, complex, meaty, emotional, with a very fine violinist, cellist and violist, all of whom will join Leander tomorrow in coaching amateurs (including Oliver Rodgers). The cellist played Bach’s 2nd unaccompanied cello suite: deep. The violinist & violist played a Mozart duo. A lovely, long program. Then Dan, Alec, Leander, and I went for food and drink. Very jolly.

Monday, December 9, 2002

Suddenly I was very sick with a stomach bug, on a day with three meetings. At 9:30, the Professors’ Colloquium. I had to sneak out, exit to the snow and vomit violently. Rested. Then Music Meeting over lunch. I had only a few sips of soup, and had to leave again with diarrhea. In bed. Then Finance Committee at 7:00 p.m. Two long hours that I managed somehow, about Meeting House renovations, now priced at $450,000.

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Amazingly better. Had lunch at the Inn with Jack Shepherd, who is teaching full time now at Dartmouth. We’re wondering about the search for a new director of the Dickey Center. Half the committee wants a big-time diplomat; the other half wants a big-time academic. I’d like Ron Edsforth, who is neither.

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Sent off revised lessons 7–12 to Dimitri yesterday and Theano today. Will this book ever materialize? And without errors? Supper party with Wilsons, Snells, McCullochs. Then music with Dick (Khachaturian, 3rd movement) and Allan: two Bach sonatas, then Poulenc.

Thursday, December 12, 2002

Afraid of snow (which actually did not come) went by bus to Manchester instead of by car. A long day. I’m re-reading Cupitt’s Emptiness & Brightness with great appreciation. It’s thrilling.

Friday, December 13, 2002

Canterbury, Chaucer Hotel

5:15 p.m. We’re sitting in the Sanctuary of Canterbury Cathedral waiting for Evensong to begin. How lovely! Of course, the cathedral is essentially empty; we’re two of perhaps a dozen “faithful.” But the miracle of its construction is still powerful. . . . Yesterday traveled easily, no snowstorm, and very luxuriously in Envoy Class across the ocean. Lewis Owens arranged for a driver to bring us to Canterbury. We toured the High Street, activated my UK orange Sim card, had lunch in Marks and Spencer’s café, and generally felt immediately and easily at home. Saw Lewis’s cousin, Gareth Owens, and Lewis, who says that Don Cupitt will be present tomorrow. Wow! He’s my guru of the moment. The second read of his book is even better than the first. . . . Evensong, especially in juxtaposition to Cupitt, confirmed for me the deadness and futility of this faith. Beautiful singing, beautiful reading of Scripture, but all dead, relating to nothing real. The only moment that spoke to me came near the end, when the priest prayed for Anglicans in difficulty in Nigeria. That, at least, was real. Of course, the entire “performance” does soothe one, does cover vicissitude with a kind of peacefulness, but maybe a good cappuccino would do the same. One can only try to imagine the cathedral in the 15th century, filled with thousands of active believers. But they, too, were dedicated to nonsense. . . . All the symposiasts met in the bar of the Chaucer Hotel and stood talking for two hours before going out for pizza and wine. How marvelously pleasant to see all these old friends again. Only Dan Dombrowski was missing, but he showed up with his wife at the hotel at 11:30 p.m., having been diverted from Heathrow because of fog. And Don Cupitt himself was among us, in person! I told him he was my guru. He seemed a bit distant and I couldn’t warm up to him—not yet. Also, he seems old and a bit tired. But it was delightful to talk at length again with Vrasidas, mostly about Stylianos, who, Vras says, should resign but never will. And Howard Dossor: unaware of the mess that Rebecca Mays made of his pamphlet. And Betsy Middleton, who will be doing a Ph.D. dissertation at Duke on born-again Christian women: how they react, as women, to fundamentalist doctrine. Fascinating. I told her about Bruce Lansdale’s findings regarding ποιος κάνει κομάντο. And beautiful Monica, Lewis Owens’s partner, as charming as ever. And Gareth Owens, his cousin, who has a splendid career in Iraklio teaching Erasmus foreign students. And of course Darren, and Lewis himself. Vrasidas wants me to contribute to a book on Stylianos’s poetry. Lewis wants an essay on revaluation of The Last Temptation. If I could get Cupitt to Pendle Hill. . .! We even slept OK, despite jet lag.

Sunday, December 15, 2002

Walmer–Dover–London

Sitting in the train, at Dover, waiting to go to London. It’s 5:30 p.m. and we’ve been with Meg and Michael since 10:50 a.m. Driven there by Lewis and Monica. What a nice visit! Meg very excited; we were her first American visitors. Michael a perfectionist; the old Tory (reminds me of Evelyn Waugh) cooked venison with all the trimmings. We drank gin and tonic, champagne, the best red wine and then vintage dessert wine: very fancy. Meg took us on a long walk despite the rain, to the strand to see the Channel, then to Walmer Castle with its association with Wellington and also the Queen Mam who died recently. Michael’s mother, 90+ years, joined us for lunch. All very jolly. Meg totally relaxed. Her second book is out, finally. Her first book has been translated into Greek and is now out; her next project is to complete a biography of her father. She was truly pleased by our visit, and so were we. It was an unusual chance: our being so close because of the Canterbury conference. . . . The conference yesterday was splendid. My paper was the first: “Is The Last Temptation a Political or a Religious Novel?” It went well, I think, largely because of the revisions I made at Pendle Hill last week. Then Lewis spoke on “Kazantzakis and Trotsky: Philosophers of a Transitional Age.” Then Darren on “Kazantzakis among the Postmoderns: Some Reflections.” In this paper he treated Kazantzakis in relation, in part, to Don Cupitt, who was in the audience and who had participated in an earlier discussion very usefully. Dombrowski followed with “Kazantzakis’s Process Theism and Negative Theology.” After lunch, Vrasidas spoke on Kimon Friar’s translation of Kazantzakis’s Odyssey. Next came Howard Dossor on “The Ascent of the Self in the Philosophy of Kazantzakis.” Finally, Gareth Owens, with slides and music, on Kazantzakis and the Palace of Knossos (entertaining, not scholarly). At the end, Lewis cited me for forty years’ work on Kazantzakis and gave a present: a crystal globe, very nice. After a respite at the hotel, we were all taken to a very fine Italian restaurant, where I had snails, delicious veal, a lemon brulée, plus of course lots of wine. All in all, a fulfilling day with good friends and their charming wives. (Lewis finally proposed to Monica after 11 years!) . . . This morning, a long leisurely breakfast with Darren and Betsy before Lewis and Monica drove us to Walmer.

Monday, December 16

London, the Penn Club

We started by going to the British Museum to see the new courtyard and refurbished Reading Room. The Reading Room is of course spectacular, shining, with the original catalogue displayed (I’m in it!), reference books all around the lowest tier, and computers that enable one to access the Museum’s holdings with full explanations. Lovely. The space is a little like that of the new concert hall in Philadelphia, covered with a glass dome under which sits a restaurant. While Chrysanthi explored the computer I went, of course, to the Parthenon Marbles, which are always a miracle. A video demonstrates how the horsemen are in ranks six deep. . . . We spent the afternoon collecting future theater tickets, then booking the train to Gatwick at Victoria Station, where we were introduced to “Panini,” like Greek τοστ. After a rest, to Macbeth, a riveting production although the lead himself was not brilliant, but wholly adequate. The two rows ahead of us were filled with schoolgirls who obviously had studied the play and now had the privilege of seeing a super-professional production. Although I cannot remember any previous production that I saw, the play itself—the poetry—was extremely familiar. I must have read it repeatedly in school, for I certainly never did while at Dartmouth. In any case, our first day, and especially our first theater, during this stay in London, was marvelous.

Tuesday, December 17, 2002

London

Went to Friends House Library and found Josef Keith again. Delivered more photos of the Girls’ School from the Nancy Crawshaw archive at Princeton, plus some text. I’ll return tomorrow to look at Sydney Loch’s account of 45–46. . . . We went to the new Tate Modern, across the bridge from Blackfriars. Imaginative conversion of an immense old power station. The building is monumental and interesting, the art disgusting, banal, trivial, shocking, and occasionally brilliant. There are some miscellaneous Picassos, Matisses, and one nice Dufy. What I liked best were Giacometti’s statue called “Spoon Woman” in which her abdomen looks like a spoon, and Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Still Life 2002.” This was a DVD video, starting with a Vermeer-like dish of fruit. But then, in the course of 3½ minutes, the fruit begins gradually to show signs of rot, then more rot, until the entire plate is a mess of putrescence attacked by bugs. In sum the normal three-dimensions of art have now become four dimensions, with time added. A perfect postmodern work of art. . . . We then went directly next door to the new Globe Theatre, and took the tour. The instigator was the American actor Sam Wanamaker. The theatre feels very uncomfortable. You get baked in the sun in most seats or drenched in rain if you stand in the pit as a groundling (umbrellas are not allowed). Only the very rear bench in each level has any support for the back. But it’s true to Shakespeare’s original. . . . Walked then across the Millennium foot-bridge to Saint Paul’s: very disappointing, partially (but not entirely) owing to restorations in progress. The crypt is interesting: tombs of both Wellington (who now interests us because of Meg’s flat) and Nelson. Memorials or graves of other notables. But nowhere as moving as a Gothic cathedral like Canterbury. . . . A little nap at the Penn Club, a pasta dinner, and then “My Fair Lady,” the musical by Lerner and Lowe. Shaw’s brilliance is not sacrificed. The songs are lovely. The acting was energetic and convincing. A good show but also an educational one, except for the sentimentalized ending in which Eliza returns to the despicable Professor Higgins.

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Penn Club

Breakfast was fun for the first time because of affable, talkative table-mates including a lady whose first language was Welsh and whose children are completely bilingual. I spent the morning in Friends House library reading letters to and from Sydney Loch and sometimes Joice Loch. This should be very useful for my lecture. Nothing is startling new, but all the details are given here, and the day-by-day development of policies and activities. But I hadn’t known that Hastings House was rented by Friends Service Council as the local Quaker Center. Or that Theo Litsas had joined the Society of Friends. . . . We then went to the matinee of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, done beautifully. I found it totally contemporary since the “profession” is used chiefly as a metaphor for every kind of mercantile hypocrisy. The mother, in particular, was played with huge passion. Where are the Shaws of today to treat mercantile hypocrisy so well? . . . Supper at Sofra restaurant. We met the manager, whose name is Greek and who, he told us, is from a mixed marriage: Greek father, Turkish mother. So, such do exist. Then to Covent Garden for La Traviata in very expensive orchestra seats (£140 each, the only ones I could get). The music is a miracle, especially the Father’s sung by Paolo Gavanelli. Inva Mula’s Violetta was fine—such a demanding role. Only the tenor (Alfredo) was weak not so much in voice as in stage presence.

Thursday, December 19, 2002

Penn Club

A very interesting time in the Science Museum seeing pioneering steam engines and attending a “lecture” for children on how bridges are really held up. One could spend a week in this venue; we had only 1½ hours available. . . . Back to Friends House for more Loch letters, until it closed at 5:00. . . . Then walked to the National to see A Laughing Matter by April de Angeles, playing alternately with She Stoops to Conquer. Brilliantly acted. The characters are, deliciously, Dr. Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Boswell, Garrick, and various eighteenth-century actors. A play perfectly designed for professors of English. Each scene is introduced by Johnson quoting definitions from his dictionary. The plot (if there is one) centers on Garrick’s unwise decision to produce an inoffensive play by a clergyman instead of Goldsmith’s “questionable” one. In the event, his audience is bored and starts throwing potatoes. So Garrick saves the day by switching to King Lear (with a happy ending). A delicious farce. Theatre at its absolute best. And tomorrow we see She Stoops to Conquer with the same actors.

Friday, December 20, 2002

Penn Club

Another long breakfast with easy conversation with the man who’ll be running the club during the holidays as a hostel for youths working with the homeless. . . . Then Alix MacSweeney visited at 10:00 a.m. and stayed for an hour, talking about my work, Meg’s, the TLS (with a new editor). She’s fine, and her position remains secure at the TLS despite many cutbacks. The new editor, Stoddard, was trained as a classicist, which helps. . . . To Friends House for lunch with Stuart Morton, who left a note of regret and didn’t show. Chrysanthi joined me in the library looking through the Greek files relating mostly to the start-up, in 1945–6, and the ending, in 1966, of the Girls’ School. All in all, my researches will be invaluable for the AFS lecture in May, giving it the authenticity deriving from archival research. . . . Off to Pizza Paradise restaurant in Catherine Street to meet Peter and Jackie Mackridge. (Nice telephone call from Roddy Beaton, who has just finished his book on Seferis; it will be published by Yale University Press in the autumn.) She Stoops to Conquer at the National with Peter and Jackie. The first half rather slow, and not helped, especially for Chrysanthi, by the Litchfield accent of Tony Lumpkin. But this set up the delightful second half in which Kate clearly “stoops to conquer.” Of the two plays, we enjoyed the modern one more, but of course the modern one would not have been possible without the eighteenth-century one. So, it was good to see both. . . . Thinking of all we saw, Chrysanthi feels that probably Mrs. Warren’s Profession will be the most memorable. Agreed. But also Macbeth. And La Traviata for its beauty. . . . A very nice, different, diverse holiday.

Saturday, December 21, 2002

Traveling

8:30 a.m., tube to Victoria. Rail to Gatwick. Plane to Philadelphia (business class), Alec waiting at the airport. To his apartment (Chrysanthi’s first time) for a few hours. Back to the airport. Plane to Manchester. Wait. Vermont Transit to Hanover Inn, arriving at 12:15 a.m. (5:15 a.m. London time). Big Yellow cab to Kendal. Bed at 12:45 a.m.

December 25, 2002, Christmas

South Salem

Drove to Daphne’s yesterday: four hours. Saw Peter for the first time, 2½ months old, kicking, smiling sometimes, eye-motion. Christina and Andrew in best form. Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena arrived around noon. A restful day together: games, stories, birthday celebration for Chrysanthi, who cooked pita for supper. Today Monica made French toast and bacon for everyone for breakfast. Christina is becoming adept with her be-bop toy; Andrew is enjoying his castle, Theo his tow-truck. Eventually Leander, Deanna, Sophia, and Nikos arrived, all the presents were distributed (I received chocolate, of course) and we all sat down to a splendid dinner of prime ribs and then cherry pie from Atkinson’s, courtesy of us. Then the snow began, a huge storm that deposited about 14 inches.

Thursday, December 26, 2002

Car buried in snow. We barely managed to get out of Daphne’s still unplowed driveway, but the rest of the trip was easy, although slow. Alec and family left early for Riparius and are now cozily in their cabin. Leander and family left later, arriving at their bungalow (opened, plowed, and heated by Pinky) around 9:00 p.m. We hope to visit them this Saturday if the weather is OK.

December 30, 2002

Riparius

Alec and Leander and families settled into their homes a few days ago and we drove over today. Lots of snow, but beautiful weather. Both families are comfortable. I built a fire in our kitchen and was able to do some more cataloging on the computer. We shared lunch with everyone and then drove home, supping at Sweet Tomatoes in Rutland. Obviously both homes are winter-worthy, provided that plowing is done. If anyone spent the winter there, we’d keep the tractor going and put a blade on the front, which should do the trick. Also would purchase a generator in case of electric outages. . . . But this is just fantasy.

December 31, 2002

New Year’s Eve again with all the Rassiases gorging on snails. Veronica’s children are remarkable, as is Helene’s little Matthew, who at age 5 acts like a 12-year-old. John is sickly, tired, and somewhat depressed. But he will never think of retiring. Helene told me, “If Father retires, he’ll die.”

2003

Hanover

January 1–June 18

Jan. 18, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Jan. 23–26, Princeton, Pendle Hill, Philadelphia

Jan. 30–31, New York

Feb. 15, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Feb. 20–March 2, New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, New York

March 6–9, Pendle Hill

March 15, Cambridge, A.R.T.

March 20–24, Thessaloniki, Electra Palace Hotel, 2310 232-221, Fax 235-947

April 10–13, Pendle Hill

April 18–20, South Salem, Daphne’s

April 28–May 26, Athens, cruise, Thessaloniki

May 31, Cambridge

June 5–10, Kinhaven, Weston, Vermont

Riparius

June 1–September 5

June 19–22, Pendle Hill

July 12–13, Kinhaven

July 18–19, Hanover, Saratoga

Aug. 10–12, Hanover

Aug. 25–26, Cooperstown, Glimmerglass Opera, Arcadia B&B, Cherry Valley, 607 264-9001

Hanover

September 6–December 31

Sept. 6, Brookline: Hellenic College

Sept. 14, Riparius

Sept. 18–20, Philadelphia, Pendle Hill

Sept. 27, Riparius

Oct. 4–5, Richmond, Virginia

Oct. 10–12, Pendle Hill, teaching course on Light

Oct. 14–15, Pendle Hill

Oct. 16–19, Toronto, Sutton Place Hotel, 418 924-9221

Oct. 24–26, New York, AFS board

Nov. 12–15, New York, Pendle Hill, Princeton

Nov. 25–28, N. Potomac, Courtyard Marriott, 800 321-2211

Dec. 2–3, Pendle Hill

Dec. 4–5, Athens, Hotel Achilleas, Lekkam 20 323.3197

Dec. 6–7, Iraklio

Dec. 23–26, Daphne’s, South Salem, Hayloft Motel, 914 763-5410

Dec. 29, Riparius

January 1, 2003

Dick Williamson had us to supper along with Chuck Braun and wife. Chuck wants me to “perform” again in his Freshman seminar in March.

January 3, 2003

Joan Wilson got me to help her build an 8-foot-high snowman. We tramped out into the field in front of Mott, knee-deep in snow, only to find that the snow is so powdery that it cannot be packed to form anything.

January 7, 2003

Nancy-Rose Logan had me come to her home after supper to talk about “Light” to the 7 or 8 Dartmouth students who’ve been interested in Quakerism. And, wow! they’re bright and articulate and hard to please.

January 13, 2003

At the Professors’ Colloquium this morning, Dick Nolte, former US Ambassador to Egypt, spoke about the excesses of Israel’s policies and the powerful Jewish lobby in the US that insures that we continue our support. Barbara Taylor, a Jewish resident, in the discussion called him an anti-Semite and a promulgator of dissention, and wept. So Fred Berthold and others are trying to decide what to do to heal this a bit, perhaps to invite Susan Heschel, who teaches Jewish Studies at Dartmouth and is opposed to Israel’s policies and the Jewish lobby. . . . At noon, lunch with Mary Robinson. I reminded her when Perry Curtis, I, and others, had tea with her in Phoenix Park while she was president of Ireland, also of my memory of the portrait of Douglas Hyde by John Butler Yeats, who is buried in Chestertown. She spoke energetically about her new venture: to help globalization become ethical.

January 15, 2003

Joan Snell has enlisted me to play eight-hand piano, which we did today on the two pianos in the Gathering Room. Joan, I, Co Emlen, and Barbara Rice: Schubert’s Marche Militaire, Liszt’s Hungarian Dance. Nice. . . . Lunch with Ann Armbrecht, my student who went to Nepal and visited the Dalai Lama, now sadly divorced but still sparkling.

Saturday, January 18, 2003

Cambridge

Lunch with George Pilitsis in Cambridge followed by the A.R.T. production of Euripides’ “The Children of Heracles,” directed by Peter Sellers. (Chrysanthi is in New York helping Daphne while Greg is away.) A play all about refugees preceded by a forum on the subject and followed by Sellers himself explaining his goals. Very powerful, and once again a confirmation of the genius of ancient Greece and the stagnation of humanity. Nothing basic has changed in 2400 years. . . . Went for supper at the Charles Hotel at the bar and got into conversation with my neighbor, who said after a bit, “I think I know you. Aren’t you Professor Peter Bien?” She turned out to be “Maria,” who TA’d in Chrysanthi’s Greek 11. Nice long conversation abut Dartmouth, the play, Greek, etc.

Sunday, January 19, 2003

After Meeting, Alan Walker’s soprano arrived and we rehearsed the Walker songs, with Mayme Noda doing the harder obligato parts. Very unsure. Wrong entrances, wrong notes. . . . Only one more full rehearsal before the day of performance. Ugh! . . . Lots of e-mails from Rebecca Mays, who has been definitely fired, finally, begging for another five days to clear out her office. I telephoned Steve. Bob McCoy is trying to pick up the pieces.

Thursday, January 23, 2003

Princeton–Philadelphia

A good day with Dimitri. More changes in lessons 7–12 that he asked me to approve. Discussion of strategies for the CD-Rom. Viewing of internet lessons done in Greece by a government institute; we hope to convince them to enter our drills in their excellent format in exchange for which we’ll recommend their site to our readers. Regarding MGSA, we both hope that we can convince Tom Gallant to replace me as president. Alas, he’s the one and only viable candidate besides Dimitri himself, who is too overloaded to add this to his responsibilities. Among other things we had a sumptuous lunch in the Faculty Club. . . . Then to Philadelphia for turkey dinner with Alec, Monica, and children. Alec arrived finally at 6:00 p.m., having been working until then at school. Elena is walking everywhere. Practiced Alan Walker songs at Pendle Hill late at night.

Friday, January 24, 2003

Pendle Hill

At worship, I ministered about Don Cupitt. Folks approached afterwards: “That’s what I believe. How can I find his books?” . . . Doug Gwyn is here. We breakfasted together. He will be writing the history of American Quakerism 1950–2000 over a two-year period. I quizzed him about Woodbrooke. It’s OK, but just OK. He, like Daphne, found communicating with the British somewhat difficult. Later, in utmost confidentiality, Steve told me that certain staff people object to Doug’s return because of an alleged sexual assault during his previous sojourn. (He was removed from his pastorate in California, years ago, owing to a sexual assault.) So we’ll need to see now what happens. For this (unstated) reason we deleted his project from the Books Committee meeting. Everything is behind schedule because of Rebecca’s non-functioning. We hope to catch up with the Woolman book, to place an errata slip in the Brinton reprint. The November pamphlet will be mailed next week. Other pamphlets will be two months behind until spring. Mary Stratton, Wilmer’s wife, has joined the committee. Afterwards I took Rebecca out to lunch so that we could talk without disturbance. She is acting well under the circumstances, doesn’t seem to be bitter or vindictive, but she feels that her summary dismissal was unjust and wants a “hearing.” She wrote accordingly to the Board, which later denied the hearing, but is still struggling with a proper minute. After Rebecca, I conferred at length with Bob McCoy about timing of pamphlets, what to do with the 40 pamphlet submissions now piled on Rebecca’s floor, and the date of our special meeting in February. Then: Executive Board, which went from 3:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. Most of it concerned Rebecca and what to do. Wilmer chastised Steve for acting out of anger, which Steve admitted and promised not to repeat. We tried a minute simply affirming support of Steve, but I and another trustee objected, so this was not passed, especially because members had not yet read the numerous letters from staff and students supporting Rebecca. We also discussed the proposed governance change, deciding that we are not ready to present it in April. Wilmer was testy about this, as was Tom Corl, complaining about all the work he’d done and the paucity of help or discussion. Sad. As solace I shared ice cream with Mac Given and then practiced Walker songs again. Also, had a nice reunion with Caroline Jones during our short supper break.

Saturday, January 25, 2003

Pendle Hill–Philadelphia

Board from 9:45 until 5:00 p.m. More Rebecca. But—better—a wonderful presentation by Elizabeth Ellis on the “Chester Project.” A sort of renewal of the work camp idea. Splendid. More on the continuing deficit. More on the dean search. Steve does not want Paul Rasor; he insists it must be a woman. Regarding Rebecca, we tried numerous wordings for a minute and could not agree. I recorded all ideas, which will be e-mailed to everyone. I’ll try to draft a minute from these, but not until we see if Rebecca is willing to sign the separation contract now in her hands, as opposed to pursuing litigation. A mess. Everyone agrees that she needs to leave publications (she too agrees). The two questions are: Why should she not continue on as a teacher? Was Steve’s angry, summary dismissal just? Steve’s argument re: teaching is that she repeatedly lied regarding the status of the pamphlets and books; also that if she is allowed to teach this year (as he is now doing, actually), she’ll wheedle her way into continuing next year. I feel that complete separation will be best both for Pendle Hill and for her. But we need to do it with kindness if possible, not anger. . . . To Philadelphia at 5:00 p.m. Picked up Alec and family and went to Marina and Kevin Brownlee’s home on 22nd Street for supper. A lovely reunion after about 15 years. Hugs and kisses. The lovely daughter is very adult physically and mentally although just in 8th grade. The son, younger, is the opposite: non-communicative. Daughter wants to learn Greek. I’ll send her information about ALPS and also the Farm School trip to Greece. Marina wants to see Greek Today when it’s ready. A lovely dinner and reunion.

Sunday, January 26, 2003

Hanover

Flew home just in time to rehearse again with Alan Walker. I’m still making mistakes in certain parts, but I’m able now to watch the words more and adjust if I’m not with them exactly.

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Performance. Betsy, the soprano, came at 9:00 a.m. and we had another run-through, also with Mayme. Not bad. From 10:00 to 11:00 I practiced some more in our apartment, then returned to the Gathering Room wearing woolen gloves, as Ignat does before playing. Large crowd. All went well. I wasn’t nervous, and I didn’t make any mistakes, although I surely didn’t play all the notes. Betsy entered a measure early at one point, but I adjusted. Lots of smiles and congratulations afterwards. Rachel, Alan’s daughter, was there, and Kesaya, and Carol Armstrong. Then a nice lunch in the Walkers’ apartment. Alan now wants a repeat performance in Plainfield, Vermont. I’m glad to be finished, at least for now, with these un-pianistic Walker pieces. . . . In the afternoon, drafted a board minute for Rebecca’s dismissal, drawing on attempts by Tom Brown, Carl, Given, and others and being very frank about Steve’s error although supporting him in the end. We’ll see if the others accept it. . . . Then supper in the café with Dick and the Wilsons, all voicing dismay over Bush’s State of the Union speech last night (except for his advocacy of fuel cell cars). Music with Dick and Allan: Bridges, Vivaldi, Dello Joio, all much better than Walker.

Thursday, January 30, 2003

NYC

Up at 5:00 a.m. Drove to Springfield. Train to New York. Lunch with Jeff Murphy in a restaurant on 44th. They’ll be moving back downtown in August. He says that he’d like more lectures next year. He paid, saying that the firm “did very well this year”! Then to Columbia to see Karen Van Dyck and Peter Constantine about our next activities with the anthology. Mike Keeley didn’t arrive because he has prostate cancer and today went for his first radiation session. Afterward, Karen took me to dinner at the Columbia Faculty Club, a treat for her, she revealed (away from the children for once) as well as for me. We hope to see each other next in Thessaloniki.

Tuesday, February 10, 2003

We had Quaker 8s at Billie-Jo Johnstone’s house, all sitting around her bed. She is terminally ill with metastasized cancer and is near death. She spoke only in single words and occasionally a short sentence, although at the end when I thanked her for “putting up with us” she graciously said it was a pleasure for her. The quotation chosen as usual at random was from Don Cupitt, “When we give up the idea that our chief religious task is to discover some very important Truth, then we’ll be ready to see that our chief religious task is to love this world and this life and to make the most of them that we possibly can.” Beautiful, but hardly appropriate for someone dying at age 40. Her partner, Dr. Don Lacey, was upbeat and courageous. And a woman from hospice, there to help, joined in our spoken meditations, beautifully, in a heavy Spanish accent.

February 15, 2003

Cambridge

A nice reunion with Eva Konstantellou over lunch at the Harvest Restaurant. She trains teachers in “Reading Recovery,” a method of helping first-graders who do poorly in learning to read. She’s so happy that she escaped Hellenic College. . . . Chrysanthi and I then saw Marivaux’s “La dispute” at the A.R.T., my introduction to Marivaux. I missed the rhymed verse that I presume is in the French original (later I found that the French original is in prose!) but otherwise fully enjoyed the humor and spectacle of this ironic look at human sexuality.

February 20, 2003

New York

Katy Myrivili telephoned, angry because she thought I was altering the Ζωή ἐν τάφῳ translation and using the British edition. Now I have to deal with both her and Fakazis. And I’m spending countless hours going over his scanning. . . . To Daphne’s. Christina very temperamental, Andrew not, always smiling. Peter holds his head up and is beginning to look like Greg. Daphne and I went by subway to the Harvey Theater of BAM to see Twelfth Night in the Donmar Warehouse production. Lovely. The language, of course; the acting; the songs; the humor (Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew). Simon Beale’s Malvolio especially fine. Also Emily Watson’s Viola/Cesario. But the true hero is always Shakespeare himself.

February 21, 2003

New York City

Met Don Kurka, as planned, at the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum at 9:30. His colleague and friend, Sam Yates, also an artist, was there, and eager to talk to me because his material grandmother was a Quaker and one of the founders, he said, of Guilford College. The Da Vinci exhibit is gorgeous. I bought one reproduction, of the Virgin’s head, perhaps to put in the hall next to all the other women we have there. We then went to a special exhibit of brilliant photographs especially of New York, and finally to another special exhibit of African-American painters, again splendid: such talent, such pathos! This was followed by a leisurely lunch at the Met. . . . I then visited Katy Myrivili at the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, to show her precisely the kinds of changes I’m making in Life in the Tomb, and calm her down. She was fine, all smiles. But Fakazis is strange. He told her, for example, that he had returned to me my copy of the novel—my one and only copy of the American edition—which he has not.

February 22, 2003

Princeton, Nassau Inn

Good. I’m no longer president of MGSA. Tom Gallant was elected, owing to a bit of “king-making” by Dimitri and me. I contacted Tom earlier to see if he would accept, and he answered Yes. So, we nominated him; there was no opposition. Gonda is now vice-president. But John Iatrides announced suddenly that he would be resigning as Executive Director at the end of 2003, a blow to the new president. Also learned during the meeting was that Kostas Kazazis had died at age 68, suddenly. He’d been studying Jespersen the morning of his death. The big question remains: Should we all travel to Greece on March 20 if the US invades Iraq? . . . Mike Keeley showed up briefly. He’s undergoing radiation therapy for prostate cancer and beginning to have side effects: diarrhea, fatigue. And Mary has breast cancer and is also being radiated. He is very low, alas. . . . Kathy Vanderpool of the American School in Athens is now on our MGSA board and will be very valuable—e.g., regarding investments. Nice to meet her. And Mache Karanika is with us now, as are Karen Emmerich and Neni Panourgia. Tom led a very good meeting, followed by dinner and the drinks at the Inn. Oh, Peter Allen is with us again, vigorously.

Monday, February 24, 2003

Pendle Hill

Couldn’t fly home last night owing to ice and sleet. So I’m in Pendle Hill for a few extra days. At Meeting today, Steve announced that Rebecca signed the termination agreement. Thus our board minute will now be posted. Let’s see what happens. Tom Jenik asked to speak with me and said that morale is very low because of Steve. Everyone is afraid that if they’re “obstructionist” they’ll be fired. Can’t talk to him openly. He just isn’t right for this community, says Tom. I responded that the board is fully aware of his acting out of anger sometimes and has told him that this is entirely unacceptable. Can he cure it? . . . Steve told me that Doug Gwyn’s marriage is faltering because of the revelation that he sexually “abused” a woman at Pendle Hill some years ago, this on top of the similar incident in California that cost him his job as pastor. Steve thinks the marriage will survive, maybe. All this will affect Doug’s plan to be three years at Pendle Hill to write the history of American Quakerism 1950–2000. . . . I’m continuing with my copyediting of Life in the Tomb, and liking what I read.

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Pendle Hill

Monday-night lecture last night on Quakers and Afro-Americans, debunking the myth and showing with lots of evidence that most Quakers were racially prejudiced, just like everyone else, that they were not heroes of the Underground Railroad, etc. In the question period I asked about work camps. Did they do any good? The answer was that they falsified the situation, making the white participants think that all blacks were poor, whereas many middleclass blacks existed. . . . Today, spent an hour with Bob McCoy, who is developing the Cary book into something much better by adding Steve’s speeches and pamphlets plus lots of photos of AFSC relief workers in Europe. He is also making progress on the mess left by Rebecca concerning pamphlets. We’ll need copyeditors, one of whom I hope will be Daphne. . . . Our board minute was posted yesterday. So far, everyone who has read it has been satisfied, they tell me.

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Pendle Hill

Pubs meeting. It’s clear that we really need an in-house editor to replace Rebecca, as opposed to the pick-up outside editors favored by Steve. I told him this when we met afterwards regarding the dean seach. I favor opening it to non-Quakers; Mickey Edgerton wants only members. We’ll decide in the Executive Committee next week. . . . To Dan’s for music. He seems to have practiced a bit. He took me to his Friendly’s, where of course everyone knows him. He is working 40 hours a week there, as host, manager, and computer expert. He recited to me at length the difficulties at Medford Leas, which is planning an expansion acutely opposed by most residents. . . . Late, back at Pendle Hill, I practiced Granger’s Spoon River piece that I need to perform at Kendal in April.

Thursday, February 27, 2003

NYC

To Brooklyn for interviews—two—on Greek radio. One on Life in the Tomb, the other on the Archbishop’s commission, half-hour each, in English. Very fine host, who had done his homework and asked all the right questions. The lovely homes still on Schermerhorn Street reminded me of Monroe Street, where Mother grew up but that now, I’m told, is a slum. . . . To Daphne’s for supper. Alec was there, too, since he’s been in NYC for a professional meeting. Bob McCoy asked Daphne if she’d edit one of our PH pamphlets but she said No—wait six months and then maybe.

Friday, February 28, 2003

NYC

American Farm School board. Committee day. I’m on the Secondary and Post-Secondary Education commitees. We’re recommending an increase in room and board fees to help heal the $1,500,000 deficit. David Buck seems to have done very little to improve the situation since our last meeting, but he hopes that we’ll be operating with a balanced budget in six years owing to land sales, capital campaign, and some economies in operation. We discussed elimination of the Lyceum but David said that wouldn’t save any money. . . . Met Burt Pike for dinner at the Yale Club. Nice reunion of two post-prostatectomy survivors. He’s just translated Goethe’s Werther. We went to the NYC Ballet, a brilliant, delicious evening: “Concerto Barocco” (Bach/Balanchine), so pure and stately. I thought: If human beings can do this, how can the same species kill each other in wars? Then the spectacular “Tarantella” (Gottschalk/Balanchine), which is such fun. Next, Wheeldon’s “Carousel” to music by Richard Rodgers, showing this young choreographer to have the Balanchine mastery. Everything was precisely right for the music. Then “Hallelujah Junction” (John Adams/Peter Martins): music played by two pianos, very percussive and syncopated. Nice. A large cast in beautiful costumes. Finally “I’m Old Fashioned” (Morton Gould/Jerome Robbins), the one that starts with the movie of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Always delciious to see again. A splendid evening.

Saturday, March 1, 2003

NYC

More AFS. We had to agree to let David Buck draw down another $1.2 million from endowment to avoid closing the School. Horrible. “T” says that John Cleave’s leadership of the Strategic Planning Committee is grossly deficient; thus nothing has been done. . . . At the end, I recited the anti-war passage from Life in the Tomb, the same one I did on Thursday for the radio interview. . . . Dinner of oysters Rockefeller. Then downtown to see G. B. Shaw’s Heartbreak House at the Pearl Theater, St. Mark’s Place and 1st Avenue in the East Village, a very lively neighborhood. Well acted, although not quite up to British standards. Shaw’s humor is delicious, and also his awareness of aged dementia (Capt. Shotover). Social counsel regarding snobbery and upper-class mating immorality, put into perspective only at the very end as the war intervenes with bombardment. Of course, we are precisely equivalent now to these Edwardian Englishmen living in a bubble until World War I broke it.

Sunday, March 2, 2003

Home by train owing to prediction of snow, again, in New Hampshire and fear that my flight would be canceled.

Wednesday, March 5, 2003

I served on the committee to select the Lewin Fellow in the Tucker Foundation. Three fine candidates all wanting to do a service project for their first year after graduating. Took Jan Tarjan to lunch. . . . In the evening MC’d the celebration at Kendal of Philip Booth’s poetry, initiated by me and organized by Cleopatra Mathis. Six poets came to read and to speak about Phil and his work. The Gathering Room was full.

March 6–9, 2003

Pendle Hill

Worked in the Free library on Thursday before supping with Alec and one of his teachers, a young woman doing third grade, half Greek, very sweet. On Friday, Books Committee worrying about the errors in the Brinton re-issue, and about Gwyn. Steve divulged to everyone the accusation of sexual impropriety, which Sally and Chris seem determined not to forgive. And Larry Ingle wants a sample chapter from Doug. I impressed on Steve the need for an in-house editor to replace Rebecca at least part-time. He said OK. After Pubs, met with Rebecca, who wants our board minute revised to be “fairer.” Later, Gay refused to put that on the agenda. At executive session, lurid terrible stories about Steve. . . . Supper on Saturday with Alec and family again, this time in the Italian market area, a totally different feel from downtown Philadelphia.

March 10, 2003

War/Peace Steering Committee. A bomb: Ron Edsforth announced his resignation as coordinator.

March 13, 2003

Friendly 8s at our apartment meditating on Milton’s sonnet on Fairfax, which is so applicable to current events.

March 14, 2003

Met with Daryl Press and Kathy Allen to plan W/P speakers for next year, concentrating on terrorism, refugees, torture. . . . Cocktails and dinner with Osgoods and others. Then off with Tom Wilson to the White Church to introduce the film of The Last Temptation.

Saturday, March 15, 2003

At 8:00 a.m. rehearsed Granger’s Spoon River with Co Emlen in the Gathering Room. I’m still missing notes, but at least I can fake it fairly well. Then drove to Cambridge. Lively lunch at Harvest with Panayiotis Roïlos and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, who very much likes my essay on “Melissa.” Then to the A.R.T. to see Rinde Eckert’s “Highway Ulysses,” which I found extraordinarily poor. Pretentious, and really not related in any meaningful way to the Odyssey despite the intentions. The after-play talk was better than the play. Eckert has interesting ideas about the Odyssey, but they didn’t find a suitable vehicle in this play. . . . Nice supper at home afterwards: omelet and apple salad and wine and good coffee.

March 20–23, 2003

Thessaloniki, Electra Palace Hotel

To Thessaloniki, despite Chrysanthi’s worries because of the Iraq war, arriving Friday around 3:00 p.m. in the middle of a huge anti-war demonstration on Tsimiski that prevented my taxi from reaching Aristotelous. So I walked from XAN in back of the police lined up on the sidewalk, the marchers in the gutter, chanting. Long visit with Vouli after I registered in the hotel. Κυρά Στέλλα still alive and fairly active (she went out to church, aided by a companion). Vouli understandably worried about the future and her own life after her mother dies. If only Greece had something like Kendal, she said. I hope she’ll read my Quakers and AFS lecture before I give it. . . . Our Ministry of Culture conference began on Friday at 9:00 p.m. with a supper at the new Mediterranean Hotel. Very mediocre food, but nice company, lots of old friends, and some new ones, like Panayiotis Pappas from Simon Fraser. On Saturday we had a full day of presentations, starting with Mrs. Souloyianni, who organized all this for the Ministry, and including an overly long speech by the minister, Venizelos, whom Vouli calls ο χοντρός. In the interval between the last presentation and another 9:00 p.m. supper (at Barrister this time, again mediocre), I visited for 2½ hours with Dimitri Gounelas, very pleasantly, at the hotel and then walking back toward the university. I decided not to call any of Chrysanthi’s family, since if I contacted one and not the others there would be misunderstandings. At the start of Saturday’s session I was unexpectedly asked to say a few words, in Greek of course (no English at all in this conference), and pleased people judging from the applause, when I noted that not all Americans support President Bush’s war in Iraq. . . . On Sunday, we began again at 9:30 and went until 6:30. I chaired one session, trying valiantly to keep one of the questioners at the end from orating at length, and then I delivered my own paper on Η δραστηριότητα της Εταιρείας των Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών της Βορείος Αμερικής, adding Gonda’s request to mention that eight of the twelve executive committee members are women. . . . Especially exciting in this fine conference was the chance to hear and meet Νεοελληνιστές from Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslovakia, Ukraine, Latvia, not to mention Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, England. Many knew me or my work. Several are waiting—still waiting—for Greek Today. Kazazis attended, as did (nice surprise) Mme Tsistsiou from the Onassis Foundation: my friend. At supper at Barrister on Saturday I sat with two younger people from the Ministry of Culture and gained greater insight into their activities and frustrations. The woman, thirteen years beyond her M.A., is still living with her mother. On Sunday, exhausted from the full day of presentations and discussion, I walked back instead of taking the group’s bus, had a quick τoστ for supper, and went to sleep early. . . . Up at 4:30 a.m. on Monday. Taxi to the airport, arranged by the Ministry. Flew to Amsterdam on the same plane as Gonda, Tziovas, the man from Portugal (José), and Panayiotis?. I spent two hours together with Gonda in the US Air lounge wondering how we are going to replace Iatrides as executive secretary of MGSA. She’s hoping it can be done somehow at Princeton but we both know that Gondicas is already totally overloaded.

April 2, 2003

Performed Percy Granger’s “Spoon River” with Co Emlen, two-piano four-hands, at a Kendal impromptu. Covered up mistakes satisfactorily, and got back in sync with her when she turned two pages by mistake. Faking is all.

Voltaire: “How infinitesimal is the importance of anything I do, but how infinitely important it is that I should do it.” Yes! . . . Finally finished vetting the Life in the Tomb text and sent it to Fakazis. Next; the Quaker-AFS lecture for May 14.

April 4, 2003

Starting to write my lecture: Η επίδραση των Κουακέρων στην Αμερικανική Γεωργική Σχολή. . . . Introduced Dan Weiser and the Classicopia trio at Kendal; they played a marvelous concert of Borodin, Rachmaninoff, and Rimsky-Korsakov.

April 8, 2003

Went with Lynda Boose to see Barry Scherr, now provost, to try to get his help in regularizing Ron Edgforth’s appointment so he’ll continue coordinating War/Peace Studies. Last weekend he ran a marvelous symposium on refugee problems, starring Romeo Dallaire, who headed the UN’s force supposedly meant to prevent genocide in Rwanda. . . . Later, Jim Sharpe of UBS took us to lunch and explained better our accounts and future possibilities there. We’re moving all other accounts (Prudential, Sims, Janney) to Fleet in a trust account—expensive but convenient.

April 22, 2003

Led Jack Shepherd’s class on “Heart of Darkness,” followed by lunch with three of the students. Very nice. . . . Learned that Harry Schultz, my first mentor at Dartmouth, died last Friday. Not too nice. But he was “ready.”

April 30, 2003

Athens, Athens Plaza Hotel, 210 335.2400

I’m reading Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey with great pleasure. Just reading. No pencil; no notes. I should try it on our grandchildren. Right now I’m on Book 13 in the hotel, with a gorgeous view of the Acropolis. Very fine supper last night with Christos, Eri, and Aspasia-Maria. For once the conversation did not concentrate on Christos’s ταλαιπωρίες. If I can get D. Gounelas to review my Πολιτικά του πνεύματος, Christos will publish the review. No review has appeared. Strange. . . . My hotel is luxurious. A suite, with complimentary bottle of wine and bowl of fruit. This morning I went to Germanos to get a case for my Greek cell phone, then to the bank for euros. No problem. Monastiraki is transformed with a beautiful new Metro station. . . . At noon to Theano’s. She gave me the back matter to proof-read for the first time, plus the front matter and lessons 1–6, which have been corrected and should now be OK (except for the polytonic poems, for which she needs a different font). I hope to complete my part by May 13 when, with Dimitri, we’ll go over lessons 7–12. She and her colleagues have been given all the design work connected with the new Acropolis Museum: brochures, signs, placards. . . . Lunch in the Delphi Restaurant, still OK, but the nice place with the garden on Philhellene is gone, although it will be replaced soon by another with the same garden, by the same owner, whom I met. Our Travel Dynamics group convened for a reception at 7:30 p.m. Nice to see Stella Miller and Wallace Collett. . . . At the cruise reception, I met the one and only Dartmouth couple, an interesting man with a Hong Kong wife. He was a PAA and TWA jet pilot for decades. . . . Don Nielsen came with his girlfriend. We walked beneath the Acropolis on the beautiful pedestrian boulevard, then drove to Pangrati to a jazz club to hear the famous oud-player Haig Yazdjian. We met him before they started at 11:00 p.m. and he signed my copy of his latest CD. I also spoke at length with the bass guitar player—a Greek, who joined with him—about jazz vs. classical. The music was lovely, more like classical counterpoint than jazz. The club was packed, everyone listening carefully, no one talking. People of all ages. What a nice life in this city that seems to be getting better and better largely because of preparations for the 2004 Olympics. They drove me back to the hotel. To bed at 1:00 a.m.

May 1, 2003

Up at 6:30 a.m. We had to leave early because today, May Day, the center of Athens will be paralyzed by May Day demonstrations. Long bus ride to Lavrian with stops at Sounion, Stella, the Greek guide, talking continuously and annoying everyone. Boarded the ship after lunch. Lifeboat drill conducted by one of the German officers. I felt so glad that Chrysanthi wasn’t present because he looked and sounded just like an SS officer. Chrysanthi would have had nightmares. . . . I lectured at 5;15 on Homeric epic and the restoration of order. Lots of questions. But the tour guide told me afterward that I couldn’t be heard in the back row because I didn’t speak directly into the microphone. . . . Nice supper after a cocktail. Some pleasant people here. Sailed at 8:00 p.m. for Chios. German officers, Ukrainian waiters.

May 2, 2003

Chios

Stella lectured on the excavations at Troy, all nine layers. We were driven by bus way up to the mountain-top to visit Νέα Μονή: an ossuary filled with the skulls and thigh-bones of those murdered in the monastery by the Turks in 1821. The church, in bad repair, yet with many intact frescoes and mosaics. What’s sad is that the monastery is now deserted: one monk and one nun. . . . Then to the south of the island, mastic country, to the village of Πυργή, unusual because of the geometric designs painted on the façades of all buildings. Chios was the ancestral island of Κοραής and also of Θεοτόκας, but I saw nothing except street-names connected with them. There is a Koraïs Museum but of course it was closed since we arrived in mid-afternoon.

May 3, 2003

Delos. Good tour led by Stella first to private homes and the theater, then to the sanctuary, temple for Apollo, the lions, the Dionysos sanctuary with the phalli, finally the museum. There I saw for the first time a Herm and remembered what Alcibiades did. Back to the ship. Then to Syros: a revelation. Pure geometry: a cubist painting. What lovely architecture! What wealth! The town hall, the church, the Επιμελητήριο (chamber of commerce). And lovely alleys filled with restaurants. Surely one of Greece’s most impressive places, obviously because it was the chief port in the nineteenth century. I remember that in Kazantzakis’s Καπετάν Μιχάλης ο Κοσμάς έρχεται πρώτα στη Σύρο. . . . Good lecture in the evening by John Reich on the origins of the Greek and Latin civilizations.

May 4, 2003

Arrived at Nafplion. Bus to Mycenae. Beautiful day again. Shaft graves, beehive tomb, palace, lion gate. Extraordinary, but I told folks that it’s even better on a blustery day with dark clouds. John Reich explained that the beehive tomb is constructed by corbelling, not by the principle of the arch, whose thrust is outward. The corbelling thrust is downward. Then to Tiryns, which is disappointing after Mycenae. Wallace Collett, age 88, climbed all the way up to the palace floor and felt dizzy on the way down but is OK. He’s amazing. In the afternoon, I continued proofreading the back matter of Greek Today, finishing appendix B (the paradigms). Walked a little in Nafplion; lovely, and much improved owing, as always, to the EU. Nice supper and a previous cocktail with the good people here.

May 5, 2003

At sea all day. Lecture by Stella on Mycenae and by John on Sicily.

May 6, 2003

Malta

Spectacular harbor, but the tour was disappointing: megalithic stones like Stonehenge but much smaller, about 3500 B.C., then the cathedral, baroque (excessive) but with Caravaggio’s Beheading of John the Baptist. Filled with tourists. It’s a “free port”—no tariffs, which accounts, in part at least, for its prosperity. But compared to Greece it is ugly and uninteresting.

May 7, 2003

Sicily

To Erice in the morning on the extreme west end of Sicily. An ancient walled city, now a tourist attraction. Lots of history but not very meaningful for our purposes. The afternoon was better, after a lunch in a hotel filled with school groups touring. To Segesta, with a splendid Greek theater and a fifth-century Doric temple especially interesting because it was never finished and thus one can see some of the building techniques such as knobs on the ends of large square blocks of stone, used to help move them; these knobs would be smoothed out later. Also, the main floor was not at its final height. More would be added after fluting of the columns. Fascinating. . . . Good lecture by John Reich on Pompeii, which we’ll visit tomorrow. At supper with John and Erica, and Wallace Collett and Stella, impassioned discussion of atheism vs. Quakerism. “What do you believe?” John asked me. “I believe in the Nature of Being” was my best answer. Difficult.

May 8, 2003

Naples

Spectacular entrance into Naples harbor with Vesusvius on the right. John said it’s due to explode soon. . . . Morning at Pompeii with a good guide. House of the Faun especially beautiful. Forum. Red light district with mosaics of various “positions” on the brothel walls. Ingenious streets with raised rocks to allow pedestrians to cross without wetting their feet in rainy weather and carriages to pass between the stones. So, I finally made it to Pompeii, after having been deposited at the locked gate when we traveled to Greece on the Cristoforo Colombo and arrived on Easter Sunday. . . . Afternoon at the Archeological Museum where finally I saw the famous Alexander mosaic. Huge. Alexander vs. Darius. Fairly well preserved. It was a floor mosaic, a masterpiece, in the House of the Faun. Now it is displayed vertically, on a wall. Lots of other items from Pompeii including bodies, skeletons, jewelry. One gorgeous vase, blue with white work overlaid. . . . Jolly dinner again with Stella and Wallace, John and Berit. . . . More proofreading; I’m now in Appendix F, the English-Greek lexicon.

May 9, 2003

Lipari

An especially nice morning on Lipari, one of the Aeolian Islands. We could see Stromboli, the reputed Cyclops, in the distance. Lipari is famous for pumice (I bought a piece) and for obsidian: black volcanic rock that is very hard and can be shaped into a knife, razor, etc. Lovely flowers. But the best part was the museum, one of the most attractive I’ve ever seen, because of the nature of the displays. Splendid Greek vases, hordes of jars rescued from sunken ships, burial urns, a collection of models for Greek tragic and comic theater masks. . . . In the afternoon I gave my lecture on Homer as Geometrician, preceded by reading the Scylla and Charybdis section of Odyssey 12 and then playing Ods Bodkin’s splendid recording of the passage, all this because at the very end of the lecture we passed (calmly!) through the straits of Messina, with Sicily on one side and the boot of Italy on the other, about two miles apart.

Saturday, May 10, 2003

The tour this morning was to Taormina, where I’ve been twice before. So I stayed on board in order to make more progress on the Greek Today proofreading. Panel discussion in the afternoon, organized by me. It was OK, not great, but still useful.

Sunday, May 11, 2003

Town of Corfu, which is lush, all green, very Italianate. Interesting pediment of Medusa in the museum. Lovely monastery high on a hill. Turquoise waters. Very like Bermuda. Spectacular barbecue for supper on board.

Monday, May 12, 2003

Ιθάκη

A bus tour of Ithaca, which is very lovely, and has very little tourist trade. Way up to a mountain village on switchback roads (good that Chrysanthi didn’t have to experience that frightening ride). . . . I gave my last lecture in the afternoon, Odysseus Across the Centuries, and offered to send anyone my reading notes for Thucydides when I get home. . . . Captain’s cocktail party followed by supper ending in baked Alaska. Sat with a gentleman whose sister was married to A. J. Ayer, the British positivist.

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Athens–Thessaloniki

Worked on Greek Today in the hotel. Then to Θεανώ, with Dimitri. We’ve got a “road map” for the rest of the book, including CD Workbook. Much left to be done. Theano hopes to finish by September. Then Dimitri and I went to a café (filled with sexy young women playing tavli and smoking) to talk about the Farm School. He is totally against expansion of the College to four years. A better plan would be to develop a plan whereby our College grads could go to Anatolia College. . . . Flew to Thessaloniki. Randy Warner met me at the airport. Lots of talk about Mercer UP, etc. I have a nice room in Cincinnati Hall, even my own toilet. Supper and long conversation with David and Patty Buck, joined at first by Christina Willis. David repeated his desire to quit in two years. I told him about Alec’s “No” after being selected by the school in Cambridge. “Careful!” said David. “If one does that more than once, everyone assumes that something is wrong.”

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

School assembly at 7:45. Very moving. Χριστός ανέστη. A girl spoke; then Socrates and Tasos. Lots of friendly greetings. Vouli came and went over my lecture, making many suggestions for improved wording. Visited the library; we’ll talk tomorrow about the books they’d like. Then to Socrates, who’ll be retiring at the end of the summer. He says that he really hasn’t faced that yet; he is still too involved with the day-by-day operation of the school. Then to English class, each student using a computer donated by Mrs. Godley. Each wrote an e-mail letter to a pen-pal in the US and also did grammar drills, quite imaginative ones. Excellent spelling, and they’re only first year T.E.E. Then to an agronomy class that was a review of the term’s work, preparing for exams. What are the three breeds of pigs? How are cows artificially inseminated? What is genetic manipulation? The students answered most of the questions quite adequately. . . . Lunch with three students whom I quizzed on various topics—e.g., Is it OK if the president doesn’t speak Greek? Yes, they all said. Siesta. Rehearsed my lecture. Did some more proofing of Appendix G of Greek Today. The lecture went very well apparently. Enthusiastic applause. Full house in the top floor of James Hall, including lots of students. Enough questions afterward, fielded by Dimitris Gounelas, who introduced me. Takis Litsas spoke well about the continuing power of Quaker witness. I asked him afterward if his father was or was not a Quaker. He was everything, the son replied, when the need arose, and always sincerely. Supper afterward in an ουζερή, with Barry, Dimitri, Vouli, and Vicki, the head librarian. To bed at 12:30 a.m. rather tired.

Thursday, May 15, 2003

Up at 6:45 in time for today’s assembly, which involved an hour-long presentation by the astronomy club, aided by computer projections, of the nature of the planets of our solar system. Very fine. Then I spoke at length with Christina about the School’s lack now of any real program and also with David, who seems alas alienated from the School and looks forward to retirement in the summer of 2004. He gave me a list of ideas he has shared with Mr. Zannas, confidentially. Then to Vicki, who handed me a list of the several hundred books she would like me to send. Then to Randy, showing her lessons 1–6 of Greek Today. . . . Tasos Apostolides, who will succeed Socrates as Head of School, spoke beautifully before the astronomy presentation this morning, emphasizing how wrong it is for the inhabitants of Planet Earth to war against each other. It’s very exciting to see this School in operation, and in some ways to be a part of it. . . . Met the two young women I supported financially in Perrotis College: Iva Milenkovic, from Macedonia, and Albana Fejzo, from Albania. Iva doesn’t know what she’ll do next; she’d like to work on a cruise boat. (I said I’d give her Travel Dynamics’ address.) Albana wants to continue for a Bachelor of Business Administration and eventually for a Master’s. She can’t go to Holland because the tuition is 10,000 euros a year and her parents, both teachers, earn very small salaries. She could go to A.C.T. (Anatolia College), paying the room and board, if she got a fellowship covering the $7,000 tuition. Otherwise no. I’ll speak to Anatolia; maybe I can help. . . . In the evening, the TEE-Λύκειo graduation in the gymnasium. So moving! The graduates beautifully dressed. Each got an AFS pin. The prizes (one of which was handed to the winner by me) included a heifer, which was led into the hall rather reluctantly. Special attention to Socrates Adamides, who is retiring. He was made an honorary graduate, and gave a fine speech. Sat between David Buck (who tried a little Greek in his speech) and Annie Levis, with Vouli in the row behind. What a nice atmosphere!

Friday, May 16, 2003

Spoke to Dick Jackson and Evangelos Vergos about supporting Albana Fejzo. Jackson will speak to his admissions team and call me back. Vergos says she’s absolutely tops both in scholarship and character. He told me that his aunt trained as a midwife under the Quaker program established by Sydney and Joice Loch, and showed me the stethoscope and blood-pressure instruments she was given. Then I went to a management class taught by Rotsios. The students prepare extensive prospectuses for “new business,” sort of like the reports I get from stockbrokers, very professional and advanced. I spoke to him about Alexios Monopolis and the Prespa Peace Park. Surprisingly, he knew about it and had even taken the class there already. . . . To town: lunch with Odysseas and Eleni. They’re very worried about Toula, who works too hard, and Stavros, who, they say, is killing himself by smoking. His health problems sap his energy, shifting more burdens to her. They’ve moved to the large house they built on the other side of town, which means a long commute in addition. Very nice visit, two full hours of constant talk, plus a delicious meal. Then to Kostas and Lola for another hour, very pleasant and relaxed. Lola looks much older; Kostas is gray but otherwise spry, and still cooking cake and baklava. I treated myself to a γύρο. Also visited the new municipal library, whose collection seems very meager, alas, although they do have a few of my books.

Saturday, May 17, 2003

Lola telephoned, having forgotten completely that we visited yesterday, to arrange when we could see each other, and why doesn’t Chrysanthi come, etc. Something serious, I fear: probably Alzheimer’s. . . . Working on my Kazantzakis lecture, shortening it and making it more coherent. . . . George picked me up. His prostate is there again, causing all the usual symptoms. Obviously it was not all removed when he had the supposed “radical” operation. We drove to his house, where Andreas was waiting, alone, without wife or child. He’s a mess: difficult to talk to, in a sort of depression I’d say, although we managed a few stabs, each of which terminated after a sentence or two. Thankfully, Dimitri, Tilda, and Evie then arrived, all very friendly and normal. They want me to speak English to Evie tomorrow on our excursion. Tilda said that my lecture Wednesday was συναρπαστικό, and I couldn’t think of the English translation—maybe “compelling.” Immediately after the dinner. Andreas left, saying he needed to return home for his cigarette. Ugh! Chrysanthi telephoned. She’s back in Hanover, has registered and inspected the car, done laundry, etc. Everything was fine with her visits to the three families, although she finds Sophia a bit of a problem, especially compared to Christina. . . . I finished shortening my Kazantzakis lecture and read through it aloud a few times.

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Worked on the front matter of Greek Today. Lots wrong. Dimitri, Tilda, and Evie came with two friends, Avram and Christina. I showed them James Hall, where Farm School reunions were in progress. David worried because tomorrow there’s a general strike and trustees won’t be able to arrive. We went off in two cars to Χορτιάτη, now a large village, and beyond on a dirt road for a walk in the country. Mountains, the lake of Λαγκαδάς in the distance, oaks, chestnut trees, nightingales. Very rural, yet so close to the city. Then the usual large meal (very unappetizing) in the town. Then to Panorama to another place for cappuccinos; this restaurant specializes in chocolate. Home at 5:30, very tired. Siesta. Then Toula came, not with Stavros but with a friend, Theano, another pianist, graduate of Anatolia and of the Sophia, Bulgaria conservatory. Toula seems fine, not at all downtrodden as Odysseas thinks. She is exploring religious philosophy and is interested in Quaker philosophy and in Kazantzakis’s religious position. I’ll send her the text of my Farm School lecture and perhaps my Καζαντζάκης, η πολιτική του πνεύματος. She of course wishes to know all about Leander especially. From what she said, she still loves her music and her job; she is still κεφάτη.

Monday, May 19, 2003

Interesting College class with Sachis Gertsis on plant nutrients with two Nigerian students and one Greek. Lunch with Randy Warner checking the status of Brenda’s book. All the illustrations have been submitted. Looks good. . . . To Thessaloniki for my lecture on Kazantzakis’s attraction to Fascism and Nazism. Small audience, only about 25 people, because of the general strike today (university closed) but Xenophon Kokolis came, and Michael Chrysanthopoulos, and Dimitris Gounelas of course, and Vouli and students. I think it went well; They seem to have found it interesting and informative. Afterward, nice supper with Dimitris, Michael, and a recent graduate who teaches Greek to foreign students and says she’s looking for a better book. I of course made propaganda for Greek Today.

Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Workshop on the college. Very informative also on lifelong learning. Then another on the TEE and Lyceum. Also useful. On returning to Cincinnati Hall, after a coffee with Patti Buck and the Thomases, I found a letter from UPNE, the director, complaining angrily about our refusal to return corrected proofs to them and also about Theano’s bill for $4000 for the Workbook. They demand everything by July 1. I sent an e-mail saying that August 1 would be possible. . . . To Vezyroglou for supper. Chance to talk at some length with Bill McGrew and with Dick Jackson (who says that Albana is accepted—the scholarship committee will meet Thursday and he’ll call me), Stavros Constantinidis, who grew impassioned about not selling land, John Koliopoulos, Vezyroglou, and even John Cleave, who drew me aside wanting to learn what I thought about the various issues confronting us. He said that the resident trustees want David Buck to go. They expect him to save $1,000,000 and of course he cannot. No word from Gounelas yet about my payment for the lecture. I’m feeling homesick, am eager to return.

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Tour of the farm—eggs, milk, maintenance shop—and the site for the new dormitory. Borovilas complains that the Lyceum grads don’t get into university. True. But they go to TEI: technical colleges. I thought of the debate in Quaker schools: high academic success vs. the true mission. . . . College put on its international lunch. Beautiful. I spoke again with Albana. She’s going for another interview tomorrow, for scholarship support. . . . Gounelas delivered €410 for my lecture. UPNE replied that August 1 is OK for our deadline. I phoned Theano. She can do it, she says.

Thursday, May 22, 2003

Post-secondary meeting chaired by me, with Bill McGrew present and also Vangelis Vergos, Annie Levis, David Acker, Yannis Vezyroglou. Main item: expansion of the College to 3 or 4 years to offer a B.Sc. degree. McGrew’s report listed advantages, disadvantages, reasons for waiting. We concluded that the investigation should continue and indeed should involve an outside consultant to join McGrew. . . . Rushed off to Thermi to deposit the €410 I earned for my lecture. Fine, but the bank’s computers were down. Early afternoon, Dick Jackson telephoned to say they had accepted my proposal regarding Albana. I pay $5000, they pay $2000 and she has a full tuition scholarship. Hooray! . . . Secondary Committee with Betty Godley, Annie Levis, and me. We concentrated entirely on better instruction of English. Back to Thermi; computers up. Then plenary session called by resident trustees, very disagreeable. Paul Condellis recommended that David Buck not be renewed after his first term if he doesn’t balance the budget. Dimitri Constantinou wants him to fire staff. Dimitri Zannas spoke of the “good old days” that are no more. Everyone says the spirit is gone, the staff are bureaucrats instead of a family, etc. Very difficult for David. . . . Afterwards, happily, I brought the good news to Albana. Hugs and smiles and more hugs. Vergos, too, is very pleased. Also Joann. Big dinner with staff. I ate with the Pougouras couple (Mary Chism), Tasos couple, Pelagia couple, the last two spouses both university professors. Good people. I spoke to Pelagia about her role in the ηγεσία but then realized that she hasn’t been officially confirmed. And Condellis is opposed to Tasos’s leadership. Then, the obligatory grinding pepper dance with much laughter. Finally, I sat with the three interns and learned lots of secrets about TEE and Lyceum, especially TEE: that the students don’t study, that many have been sent by parents who want to get rid of their unruly children. Lyceum students are much better.

Friday, May 23, 2003

Full board. I read Harkianakis’s “Expropriation of Building Sites.” Shocking! More abuse of poor David Buck; demands that he cut the deficit. Schemes for exploiting our land without selling it. John Cleave’s view that eventually we’ll abandon both TEE and Lyceum and have only a university, and no farm. I of course gave the post-secondary report and also read the secondary although Annie is chair. We started at 9:00 and ended at 2:30, exhausted. Lunch finally. Telephoned Chrysanthi; all’s well at home. Then we all got in a bus and were driven to the second πόδι of Halkidiki, to Porfi Hotel at Nikita, Sithonia. I brought along the remaining pages of Greek Today to try to finish before leaving Greece. I’m in the middle of lesson 4.

Saturday, May 24, 2003

Nikita

To Annie Levis’s summer house in Gerakini. Beautiful, but surrounded now by tacky condos, etc. Everyone there: Lansdales, Tasos and wife, Pelagia and husband. I learned that Paul Condellis had abused Annie after yesterday’s meeting, telling her to shut up. (She had read minutes that contradicted what he was claiming.) She cried, and said she was resigning from the board. Of course everyone assured her, as I did today as well, that it was Condellis who should leave the board. She said she’d stay. Long walk on the beach with Magda, a very interesting young woman recently married to a Serb. I told her about Svetlana Broz and will send info about her book. . . . After a rest, to the village of Parthenonas, mostly abandoned and dilapidated, but with several restored or newly built mansions. We went to that of Magda Kosma, widow of a fur merchant, high up on the mountain with a spectacular view of the gulf and Kassandra opposite. But it’s the last place I’d want to live: so inaccessible. Long talk with Gail’s wife about Kendal, which they hope to enter. . . . Back at the hotel, to the bar for coffee and to see a dance troupe, very fine, but I was saddened to see Greek dance prostituting itself now to entertain German tourists.

Sunday, May 25, 2003

Metamorphosis

Sunshine finally, after three days of rain. Finished lesson 6 of the book; Joann will mail everything to Theano tomorrow. . . . To Metamorphosis to Bruce and Tad’s lovely home. Tad very interested in CCRCs but they can’t take the actual step to decide. On the trip home in the bus, David Buck kept quizzing me about Kendal. With luck the Bucks and Gail and Ruth will visit Kendal in August and I’ll give them a tour.

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

My 73rd birthday. Spent at the farm. We planted the garden, turned on the water, started the tractor, cleaned house. Everything fine. Lovely reunion with Chrysanthi when I returned two days ago. Sometimes it’s good to be apart. We stayed up until 2:30 a.m. reciting our various adventures.

Saturday, May 31, 2003

Cambridge

Shakespeare’s “Pericles” at the A.R.T. Not a very coherent play yet with a wonderfully poignant final scene as Marina is reunited with her father. Of course the A.R.T. pulled out all the stops, especially in the brothel scene at Mytilene. All in all, evil and despair is conquered mostly by magic and all ends well. A “romance” as they say. . . . Joan Williams wants to start a presentation of “What I Believe” at Kendal. I think I’d say, “I believe in rationality, the nature of the ordered universe.” Do I also believe in evolution to produce consciousness (à la Bergson) so that we may appreciate and understand universal rationality? Perhaps.

Friday, June 6, 2003

Kinhaven

Our Schubert Ländler are going well. Dan knows his part. But Townsend, which we hope to do next year, is still problematic. The faculty four-hand recital started with Nigel and Chonghyo playing the great Schubert Fantasia extraordinarily well. Beautiful pianissimos and stark contrast with the fortes. Leander then did four Ländler with Betsy—melodic and sweet. Then Leander and Ignat did the 55-minute long Sonata in C, to my mind nowhere as great as the Fantasia, but a marathon accomplishment for the performers. Afterwards I learned that they had rehearsed only twice, for three hours on Wednesday and six hours yesterday. Tomorrow Dan and I have our first lesson. In practice I’ve been learning also the piano part to the Beethoven Trio No. 2, which is gorgeous. . . . In spare time, I found a Kazantzakis quote in Zorba for Bruce Lansdale’s book being translated into Greek and started proofreading the galleys for Life in the Tomb, which still has errors.

Saturday, June 7, 2003

Very good, long lesson from Mrs. Shin pointing out numerous ways for me to improve my part and fewer for Dan. The main problem is touch; I have to produce full tones without hitting the keys. Excellent master class by Ignat, whose perceptions are brilliant. And of course when he plays a chord or phrase it is so different from the same played by a student. . . . I think that today is the 8th anniversary of my radical prostatectomy, and all is well.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Dan and I performed our eleven Schubert Ländler satisfactorily. A splendid concert except for the boring Schubert march with all its repeats. . . . At Kendal, heard John Kerry. He’s the most impressive of the Democratic candidates we’ve seen so far.

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

To Riparius

Leander is here, very pleased with his workshop. We played the Townsend, all four pieces. He’s clear that Dan cannot cope with the secondo. I’ll need to ask him to let me play with Alice. He can prepare a solo piece for the new impromptu format.

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Bought a sit-down rotary mower at the new store in Wevertown: $2000. We’ll begin to look like a golf course now. I hope to start by doing Alec’s field and surprising him.

June 20, 2003

Pendle Hill

Dean search committee; we’re just starting. Steve insists that we have at least one African-American (presumably female) on the shortlist. . . . Long talk with Bob McCoy after lunch. Pubs is going well. Steve has authorized Bob to hire a part-time freelance editor. I caught a half hour of a presentation to our college interns about transgender, by a man who considers himself a woman. He was very interesting, showing the scientific basis for gender confusion. At 4:00 reached Dan’s. Told him about Leander’s view regarding Townsend. Dan surprisingly acquiesced: “OK, you’ll do it then with Alice. I’ll prepare a solo.” Exactly what I’d wanted. But we’re inaugurating a good project that will maintain our relationship. We’re going to revive all the pieces we played over the years. Dan will record each and put them all on a CD. We’ll start with the Virgil Thomson waltzes.

June 21, 2003

Long talk with Mac Given about the trustee retreat I missed and generally about Steve’s problems. I told him I was devastated when Steve hinted he might resign after the Rebecca mess. But no, he’s still on board, thankfully. . . . To Alec’s in the afternoon, and to the Kimmel Center for a festival (summer solstice) chiefly for children. Nothing very interesting except perhaps some jazz played by middle school kids.

June 24, 2003

Terpni

Chrysanthi is doing ALPS again in Hanover. She told me that she has only three students. Those promised from Hellenic College never came.

June 25, 2003

Terpni

Last Sunday, after returning from Pendle Hill, I went with Chrysanthi to visit Don Blackmer and Joan Dexter in Tunbridge. He looks so well; she is aged. She abandoned him to go and live in Zürich and become a Jungian analyst. I think they maintain separate domiciles but obviously visit occasionally. She, like me, was very stressed and unhappy at Harvard/Radcliffe in 1948–52, but for different reasons. Don of course was not. When I told him my view that Harvard did not have a soul (whatever that means) he cited wonderful people like David Tyack and Neil Hastings, full of soul. . . . We spoke also about Dick Hatch, whom Don came to know after Hatch went to MIT. Don saw him as a sort of surrogate father, and probably he was that to me as well. I was shocked to hear that after Hatch’s wife died (following a long, distressing illness), Hatch committed suicide by walking into the sea (they lived on Cape Cod). Don assured me that he had told me this previously; I had suppressed it, obviously. . . . In Hanover I found the packet of letters I had received from Hatch, but alas I don’t have copies of those I wrote to him. He saved me from science, opening up the beauties of literature.

June 26, 2003

A varied day. Finished proofreading Life in the Tomb (still full of errors; Fakazis’s people are so sloppy), mailed it. After lunch I dealt with a dead groundhog I’d trapped; he was eating our garden. He was entangled in the garden fence, which I had to cut to extricate him. I buried him in his own hole. . . . Then mowed with the new White mower, which makes this place look like a golf course. Then weeded the garden around the rhubarb. Tomorrow I’ll put fresh black paper down. Then scythed tall grass at the margin of the pond, completing preparation of the “beach” area (most of which I did with Leander’s rotary mower yesterday). Then took a delicious swim. Water remarkably warm for so early (but the temperature has been 90 degrees for three days). Chinese dinner. Read the TLS. Studied the White manual. Prepared checks from Meeting to NEYM, the Quarter, and other Quaker charities. Answered e-mail. Oh, in the morning I practiced, trying to relearn the Chopin étude I did as a sophomore at Harvard when I took lessons in Boston. So far I doubt I can get it up to speed, but let’s be patient.

Paul Condellis has resigned in disgust and anger from the Farm School board. Sheila Baird wrote that the board is totally ineffectual; T. Jewett thinks the same. Sheila says, “Let the Greeks take over entirely.” No! John Cleave failed us by not producing a strategic plan. Alex Drapos is a weak chair, reacting too late always. And probably David Buck is also to blame, since over three years he has produced no appreciable savings and thus forces us to destroy our endowment. So, the board is disintegrating just when we are planning the “triumphant” celebrations for the centennial.

June 27, 2003

Audrey Logan telephoned with the shocking news that Mary Soderberg died yesterday from a sudden, massive stroke. She suffered from high blood pressure, but seemed perfectly well the day before, indeed had just been with her daughter-in-law, who gave birth. Then she had a huge headache at night and by morning was brain dead. So her death is a blessing, in a way. However, “ask not for whom the bell tolls.” Poor Roger, only a year after his retirement.

June 28, 2003

My first effort to pack the books meant to go to the American Farm School. Tedious, but I’m pleased they’ll have this home and that so many other books will go to Bissell Library at Anatolia. Having one’s books in a library is, I suppose, a viable form of “immortality.”

Alec and family arrived. I mowed his field with the new White rotary mower. Took them all out to the Inn on Gore Mountain for supper. Elena has a sizable vocabulary of single words meaning (in her dialect) things like sleep, poop, yes, no, eat, Pappou, dad, mom. Her smile is infectious.

George telephoned to say “Lola is all right.” What does that mean?

June 29, 2003

To: dbuck@afs.edu.gr

Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2003, 3:31 PM

Subject: COURAGE!

Dear David,

Just a word to confirm to you that there are those of us “out there” who are thinking of you at this time, which must be extremely difficult for you and frustrating. What remains in my mind is your insistence at the Board’s May meeting that remedial actions—especially reduction of staff—be done “humanely.”

You’ll remember, perhaps, that when Dimitris Constantinou kept insisting on such reductions, I remonstrated that the procedure he was recommending (demanding?) could not possibly be humane.

At the time of a previous crisis, if I’m not mistaken, everyone on staff, from top to bottom, voluntarily took a salary cut of, say, 10%. Would that be possible now? Such a move would presumably help to mollify certain trustees.

My own sense—and I say this in frankness and confidentiality—is that a large part of the problem is John Cleave’s failure to produce a strategic plan. The committee had two years, and the results are nil.

I hope that all the rest of us will actively resist Sheila Baird’s advice to turn the School entirely over to the resident trustees. On the contrary, what’s needed now is to solidify the Board once more behind the quite daring collaboration of two cultures that has worked largely with success in the past.

At the end of each difficult day, keep thinking of beautiful Vermont! I can say that with especial authenticity right now since I am typing this in the midst of 300 acres of beautiful forest in the Adirondacks.

With warm regards to you and Patti.

Monday, June 30, 2003

Alec and family came on Saturday. I took them out for supper at the Inn on Gore Mountain. Spent most of yesterday at Daphne’s collecting the books requested by the Farm School and Anatolia College, all the best ones, of course. I hate to lose them but keep realizing that they’re better off in a library.

July 13, 2003

Kinhaven

To Kinhaven yesterday to the dinner for former trustees. Lovely to see Bill Polk again, and John Austin, Ike Patch, Carolyn Wahl, also Mary Watt, Peter Schultz, and Michael Webster, guest conductor this week, and Leone. I arranged for them to concertize again at Kendal. Saturday’s staff concert had two premieres of pieces commissioned by Kinhaven, one by Allen Shawn, another by Tison Street, the last deliciously formal and tonal. Then there was a jazzy original composition by a faculty member and finally Brahms’ opus 34 piano quintet, with Kate Boyd awesome on piano. A treat! Today, the student concert was inspiring—such talent and sensitivity not only in expected things—Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Haydn—but in Milhaud and then some zany percussion pieces including an improvisation and a piece for four bass fiddles. Jerry Bidlack’s madrigal group was exemplary. And finally Michael Webster conducted the full orchestra in two allegro movements from Brahms’ 2nd Symphony, played with precision and verve, with especially good cellos and French horn. Another treat. Home by 8:00 p.m. to supper of stew with everyone in good spirits, and a splendid rainbow outside.

July 15, 2003

To the circus in the afternoon with Alec and family. Elephants, acrobats, jugglers, camels, trained dogs, an amazing hula hoop artiste. I think we enjoyed it more than Theo did. . . . Then to ballet with Don and Maria, meeting at the Hall of Springs a former colleague of Don’s, an art historian, very pleasant. Donizetti’s “Variations” (Balanchine) danced with bravura by Miranda Weese and Damian Woetzel; “Guide to Strange Places,” music by John Adams, choreography by Peter Martins: loud, dissonant, gruff, not to my taste. Finally “Glass Pieces” with Philip Glass’s awful music but deliciously humorous choreography by Jerome Robbins. At dinner, Maria asked about Quakerism: “Please explain it.” I tried.

July 16, 2003

Mailed 449 items, mostly books, to Bissell Library, Anatolia College; 13 cartons, postage $358.20. The Guest House is now back to normal.

July 17, 2003

Our 48th anniversary. Alec and Monica had us to a delicious dinner with Laura and Mike Gouthreau also. Laura brought me a bar of especially delicious Belgian dark chocolate.

July 19, 2003

Hanover

In Hanover for the memorial service for Mary Soderberg, who died suddenly last week at age 68, from an aneurism. So sad! Kendal’s Gathering Room was packed. The service was Quaker style, with excellent ministry evoking her gentleness and serenity. But poor Roger, recently retired, has been robbed of his retirement, really. . . . Nice to see Bruce Koloseike there, back from Shanghai, where he has already been four years. We drove directly to Saratoga. Gala night (not for us, but we could ogle all these celebrants in their tuxedos and evening gowns). Balanchine’s “Walpurgis Nacht” was charming, but the best of the evening was Wheeldon’s “Liturgy” danced by Wendy Whelan and Jack Soto: totally new, different, yet still consistent with ballet traditions. “Thou Swell,” with lively music by Richard Rodgers, was no match choreographically (by Peter Martins), but very pleasant.

July 21, 2003

A sociable day. To Elizabethtown on Route 9, which is now totally neglected above Schroon Lake—looks the way Route 8 used to look between Bakers Mills and Speculator. Lunch with Maureen and Mary Fitzgerald, who now live in Plattsburg. Their minimal situation made us triply appreciative of Kendal. They’re in a retirement institution that provides no health service, bad meals, no intellectual stimulation. But at least there are no stairs to climb. Maureen especially misses stimulating conversation (some of which we had over our two-hour lunch). . . . After supper, Art and Chris Perryman came. Their daughter, poor thing, has multiple sclerosis. Horrible! We avoided Christianity and horrible liberalism, to spend pleasant hours together talking about Arthur (who has a girlfriend), Greece, Adirondacks. How flexible one must be to go from the liberal Democrats Mary and Maureen at lunch to the reactionary Republicans Art and Chris (mostly Art) after supper. But the visits were equally pleasant because we’ve learned which topics are OK and which are verboten.

July 23, 2003

To Saratoga: dinner, then talk by Wheeldon, the excellent choreographer. He’s 30 years old, English. Spoke exclusively about “Carnival of the Animals,” which we saw tonight and found rather disappointing, certainly without the true genius of his “Liturgy,” which we saw last week. But Balanchine’s “Chaconne” (Gluck) and “Symphony in Three Movements” (Stravinsky) were both stunning, and so totally different. Clearly, Wheeldon wants to escape Balanchine; he spoke more enthusiastically about Jerome Robbins. He wants to bring children and new audiences to ballet, which is admirable, but “Carnival of the Animals” is a sort of cheap way to do it.

July 24, 2003

Theano Petridou e-mailed me. She has FINISHED Greek Today and has sent it to Mike Burton at UPNE. She and Dimitri worked on a daily basis for the last three weeks. What a relief! Finally!

July 28, 2003

Forestry meeting with the new forester, Charlie Butler, and some of the old participants and some new ones. Fred Vetter was there. I said to him, “You won’t remember me, because the last time I saw you I was seventeen years old.” He said he remembered. He seemed so tall then. Maybe I was short. And he seemed so much older than me—maybe five years. Another man, a former publisher now producing 300 cords of firewood a year in Keene Valley, was very friendly. Also a widow who owns 2200 acres in Speculator, a former high school English teacher. . . . Afterwards we all went to a restaurant in Olmsteadville to honor Ross Morgan, who showed up with his wife and was wearing a jacket and necktie. Amazing. When speeches began, I told about his metaphor of the “hare’s breath” [sic]. He said he knew that was coming. We all chipped in to give him a Hornbeck canoe as a present.

July 29, 2003

Alec’s birthday. Two couples, the wives teaching at Friends Select, were here as well as Leander and Sophia. Very festive: hamburgers and franks on the outdoor fire, then a birthday cake and wild blueberry pie. We gave him a small sander as a perfect present.

August 1, 2003

All afternoon with the new forester, Charlie Butler. Walking through the woods hearing which trees to keep, which to discard. He is young and somewhat “academic,” nowhere as mellowed as Ross. Chrysanthi doubts that he’ll last.

August 6, 2003

To Meadowmount with Leander’s family and Lori and Amy. Deanna was a student here, ages 14 and 15. The first summer, studying with Galamian, she was required to do nothing but scales and études to correct her bowing arm. The second summer she was allowed a few pieces. Tonight’s concert was lovely: Ravel’s “Tzigane,” a tour de force for the violin (I thought of Balanchine’s ballet throughout). Then Stravinsky’s “Concerto in D major” for violin. Then, so lovely, the Fauré violin sonata with a superb staff pianist from Russia. We needed to leave at intermission (already 9:00 p.m.) and thus missed the Ravel string quartet. A splendid evening, preceded by a picnic in Lewis.

Alec, with Earl’s advice and Clive’s help, finally fitted the new muffler and exhaust system onto the Jeep, which is now purring along, although it still has problems. . . . I pruned around the old agricultural machinery in back of the barn, and also took down the asymmetrical apple tree at the edge of the old shed, to leave all the trees now in a straight row. Difficult to get the stump out but managed at last. . . . Also finished typing a new chapter concerning Kazantzakis’s cultural and political involvements in Athens 1945–46. I think I’d like to use this for my talk in Iraklio in December, so I’ll need to translate it into Greek.

August 8, 2003

A bad day. At supper, Leander exploded against Christina and Daphne, Daphne fled with children in tears, Leander continued to fulminate, Chrysanthi started crying. Horrible. All because Christina went second on my tractor ride although Lori’s Amy was supposed to go second. But there was more from the past, obviously. With luck some repair was done late tonight at Daphne’s. We’ll see.

August 9, 2003

OK. All healed. Leander went to Daphne’s last night and apologized. He has a terrible temper on occasion. My analysis is that Christina is so demonstrably better adjusted than Sophia, he is obsessed with Christina’s faults. But Sophia seems to be improving . . . somewhat.

August 18, 2003

Wilsons here for lunch on the porch. As Joan was eating, suddenly three dead black ants fell out of the sky, it seemed, onto her plate. Looking up to where the playroom wall begins, we saw a whole army of carpenter ants, or rather two armies, for many pairs seemed locked in battle. Of these, one was all black and one black with a red middle: two tribes, it seemed, at war. We moved to the picnic table. Leander produced carpenter ant spray: we sprayed, and all succumbed, at least for now. More were found in the bathroom, parading from one end to the other. More spray; more corpses on the floor.

August 19, 2003

In one day, working for about twelve hours, I built a second large bookcase in the anteroom joining cabin and kitchen. Nine shelves 4½ feet long.

August 20, 2003

Chrysanthi polyurethaned the bookcase in the morning and in the afternoon we began transferring all the Greek books stored at Daphne’s (she and Greg have put the property on the market for sale, alas). Finished in early evening: 750 items, still all in alphabetical order, alpha to omega. The room looks very nice indeed, now with at least 1000 books in its two large cases.

August 25, 2003

Arcadia Bed & Breakfast, Cherry Valley

To Glimmerglass opera to see Robert Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik together with Don Kurka, the composer’s younger brother. Kurka died in 1957 at age 35, of leukemia, just after finishing the opera. It’s an anti-war piece tongue-in-cheek, sardonic, and also very funny sometimes. Very well performed. . . . Supper afterwards with Don and Maria, the Morses, and the Millers. The lead singer and one other were at the same restaurant, so we were able to chat a bit. He expects it to be done by the City Opera in the 2004–05 season. . . . Cooperstown is filled with grown men and boys in baseball uniforms, stores selling bats, photos of Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio.

August 26, 2003

In the morning we went to the Farmers’ Museum and learned how flax becomes linen, and where the phrase “towhead” comes from. Lots of other very interesting exhibits and demonstrations. Then across the street to the art museum, which includes Native American art, one canvas by Hicks, a few by Cole, but most of the others are mediocre. . . . Lunch with the baseball crowd again. Then “Don Giovanni,” superb, such an amazing work of genius, beautifully sung, but at the ending there was no statue. Giovanni slit his wrists, committed suicide instead of being cast down to hell by a righteous universe. In other words, the parable was humanized, its metaphysical dimensions erased. This may be OK for twenty-first century audiences, but I doubt that it is OK for Mozart. But 9/10 of the performance was totally convincing and moving. . . . Returning home at 8:30 p.m. we were greeted by Leander and Nikos, who related all their many activities during our absence.

August 30, 2003

To North Creek’s Tannery Pond Community Center to hear Dan Weiser in concert. He is such a good pianist. Best piece was Smetana’s Piano Trio in G, opus 15, amazing, tragic, intense music. And all of this in North Creek!

August 31, 2003

Lovely dinner with Don Kurka and Maria at the Tortoras’ house. They hope to come to Hanover to see the Orozco murals and want us to visit them in Tennessee in March or April. It’s wonderful that Don’s life has taken such a turn for the better thanks to Maria, who is smart and sweet. . . . Alec is here, closing up his cabin and worrying about the flying squirrels that are nesting in his roof. The Jeep is now going to winter in our pole barn. He hopes to plow snow with it when he comes at Christmastime. . . . We’re all sad that Daphne is going to sell the Shapiros’ house, but what can we do? . . . I’m translating my essay on Kazantzakis in Athens 1944–46 for the symposium in Crete in December. Fun.

September 4, 2003

All day pruning the apple tree, which I neglected last year. Did the three prune trees yesterday. Chrysanthi said I gave the apple a “crew cut.”

September 5, 2003

Mark Carpenter came to photograph and measure all the buildings, to rectify deficiencies in the insurance. . . . A few days ago we were supposed to visit Donna and Ed Welsh on their new land off South Johnsburg Road. We went, but the road was so bad we turned back and never found them. Next year we’ll try in their van, which clears the rocks. . . . To Hanover, where there was a phone message from Eva Konstantellou that George Pilitsis died from a brain tumor. Funeral tomorrow.

September 6, 2003

So I got up at 6:15 a.m. and drove to Boston for the funeral, even though I should have been at the grand opening ceremony of the new Hanover Community Center, where Chrysanthi made a speech. Beautiful ceremony at Hellenic College, with Archbishop Demetrios officiating. Lily Macrakis gave a brief eulogy, the archbishop a long one. All agreed that George had rare qualities of sweetness. He was without malice. So, as the service wished repeatedly, he is now comfortably with the saints in heaven, his sins forgiven! . . . Saw Vangelis Calotychos, Patricia, and their twins, plus Eva and her daughter, now in college, and the president and dean of Hellenic/Holy Cross. Everyone very friendly and cordial. Poor George leaves a widow and three children. And, as the president told me, the Greek language program is now in a shambles there.

September 14, 2003

Terpni

To the farm, and how nice to be there, if only for six hours. We civilized the blueberry bushes, laying down mulch. And I brought more art books, Quaker books, and Greek books for the Main House shelves. Long talk with Earl, who stopped by. Happily, the bear that bothered Kelly and him is gone. Supper at our favorite restaurant in Lake George, but Anna, from Poland, my waitress friend, was working two shops away, in a Polish restaurant. We stopped to see her afterwards and to wish her well. She returns shortly to her final year in university in Gdansk, and hopes to visit Australia next summer.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

AMTRAK to Philadelphia. I took my first Lipitor pill, urged by Brenda Jordan after liver test proved OK.

Thursday, September 18, 2003

To Friends Select’s 9:30 assembly addressed by a graduate who is a documentary film maker. His excerpts were from a film on anarchists in West Philadelphia, very “liberal” I suppose, just like the school’s image. Alec gave me “A Friends Select School History” from which I learned why the term “Select” is used. The original school was open to everyone. With increasing secularization in the nineteenth century the board decided to create “select” schools that would enroll Quaker children only and perpetuate Quaker values. Of course the school is once again totally diverse, as it should be. . . . On the train yesterday I read a book on Epictetus the Stoic philosopher, and found some choice quotes. I like the Stoic view that God/Zeus = nature, and that nature is rational. Thus we, “imitating God,” fulfilling our own natures, should also strive to be rational. Amen! When I speak at Kendal on “What I Believe” I think I’ll start with “I believe in Reason.” Some of the quotes will be appropriate for Quaker 8s. . . . After 1½ hours in the Philadelphia Free Library, I went back to Friends Select and then with Alec to pick up Theo at his school and have lunch together. . . . I’ve finally found time, here in Philadelphia, to continue Harry Mark Petrakis’s novelistic treatment of the Greek Revolution in 1821. It’s very vivid, and very willing to show the atrocities of the Greeks as well as those of the Turks. He sent it to me with a plea for me to read and respond, then to donate it to Dartmouth’s library, which I shall do next week. . . . At 3:30, telephoned Dan to say I wouldn’t be coming, owing to the hurricane. Strong winds already and rain, but I got back to Pendle Hill easily. Lovely supper with Gay Berger and the two new Friends in residence, Ruth from England (former clerk of Woodbrooke Council) and Inge from Holland. Talk of Bill Fraser, etc. . . . Then played the beautiful Yamaha for 1½ hours, trying to learn Beethoven’s 1st cello-piano sonata to do with Allan on Wednesday. Very difficult, especially the 2nd movement.

A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).

70. Socrates used to say that an unexamined life is not worth living. [Apology 38a]

163. Our own natures are parts of the nature of the universe. Therefore, living in agreement with nature is the goal of life, that is, in accordance with . . . the right reason pervading everything . . . [Chrysippus, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, VII.87-8]

20-21. The Stoics . . . take all phenomena and living beings to be the / observable effects of a cosmic order, constituted and implemented by a principle they call Zeus, God, reason, cause, mind, and fate. . . . Everything that happens is ultimately an expression of this single principle, which by acting on ‘matter’ extends itself throughout the universe and makes it one gigantic organism.

145-6. First, and most important, is the characteristically Stoic identification between God and rational perfection. There is no gap between an ideally wise Stoic and God because the human paragon, by virtue of being perfectly rational, is obedient to God and in conformity with the divine will and law. We have already noticed how Epictetus talks about ‘the God within’. . . . As cosmic rationality, God also exists outside every individual’s mind because he is the structuring principle of the entire universe. . . . If we apply our minds properly to the study of our own and the world’s nature, we are literally in touch with God. Physical nature, not a sacred text or revelation or inspired prophecy, is the Stoic’s guide to the divine.

110. What is a human being? A rational, mortal creature.

From what, then, are we distinguished by rationality? From wild beasts.

And from what else? From sheep and the like.

Take care, then, never to act like wild beasts. . . . Take care, too, not to act like a sheep.

When do we act like sheep?

Whenever we act for the sake of the stomach or the genitals, whenever we act in a random, dirty, or unconsidered way. . . . Whenever we act competitively, injuriously, angrily, and aggressively, to what level have we sunk? To wild beasts . . . (Epictetus, Discourses (Diatribai), 2.9.1-7)

137. Whenever you see someone holding political power, set against it the fact that you yourself have no need of power. Whenever you see someone wealthy, observe what you have instead of that. . . . If you have the absence of the need to have wealth, realize that you have something greater and much more valuable.

252. Why are we angry? Because we set such store on the things they steal from us. If you stop setting store on your clothes, you won’t be angry with the thief. Stop setting store on your wife’s beauty, and you won’t be angry with the adulterer.

188. We don’t need God, as distinct from ourselves, to tell us what to do; but we are able to tell ourselves what to do only because of the way our nature has been constructed. . . . Hence for Epictetus, the goal of ‘following God’ is equivalent to ‘living in accordance with nature’ (Discourses, 1.26.1), which was the standard Stoic definition of the good life.

272. How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself. . . ? . . . Whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates. [Manual / Encheiridion (51)]

Friday, September 19, 2003

Pendle Hill

After Meeting I spoke with a man who works in local prisons. He says that the prisoners are all anti-Bush and opposed to the Iraq war. At Meeting I asked for prayers for all of us in New Hampshire who need to discern who will be best able to defeat Bush, when we vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in January. . . . The hurricane has passed. A huge tree is down across Rope Ferry Road. Pendle Hill has no telephone service. Otherwise, just small branches down everywhere.

October 11, 2003

Pendle Hill

One of the students in my course on Light is Fay Lawton, Peter Gardner’s sister. I’m amazed. She is now a widow, living at the Quadrangle. And I’m going to see Terry Gardner next week. Gay Berger took the course also, as did Laura Melly.

October 13, 2003

This was my talk today at our “What I Believe” session:

To start, I must say that the title should be “What I believe now.” Beliefs can change from decade to decade, maybe even from year to year. So, I’m not sure that what I’m going to say now would have been the same ten years ago or will be the same ten years in the future, if I’m still around to have an opinion.

What I believe in now is . . . rationality. That may sound strange for someone who, like myself, is aware of modern philosophical thinking—or, more accurately, postmodern philosophical thinking—with its emphasis on the vagueness and imprecision of everything, on the omnipresence of mutability, the multiple meanings of language, the total absence of any Aristotelian “unmoved mover,” any “final point of stability in the swirl of existence.”[1]

But I have been influenced recently by Stoicism, especially by the thought of Epictetus, who lived from about 50 to 130 A.D. first in Rome, then in northern Greece. Like other Stoics, he stressed that our own nature is part of the nature of the circumambient universe. That is certainly something I believe, and also a belief that is fashionable nowadays, especially among environmentalists. But Epictetus and the earlier Stoics believed that nature is governed by reason; they took “all phenomena and living beings to be the observable effects of a cosmic order.”[2] Again, this seems contrary to postmodern thinking; yet as I observe and contemplate the regularity of sunrise/sunset, the circling of planets around stars, the predictable cycle of living creatures’ birth, growth, maturation, and senescence, the intricate interdependence of animate and inanimate creation, I really do sense rationality at work around me and inside me. Of course unpredictability, chance, and inexplicability are also present, but right now I like to see them as defects of a system, not as that system’s essence.

The Stoics go one step further, asserting that the observable cosmic order is “constituted and implemented by a principle they call Zeus”—in other words, God.[3] That is more difficult for me, since I certainly do not believe that the universe was planned in advance by some supreme being. But if God is just shorthand for “the nature of things”—the predictable regularity characterizing cosmic order—then I have no problem. Indeed, I can subscribe to the Quaker assurance that something of God resides in each person: something of the rational universe in me, since I am part of the orderly cosmic whole.

But belief is frivolous if it does not manifest itself in action. Epictetus is especially attractive because he emphasizes moral behavior. His ultimate guru, Socrates, declared that an unexamined life is not worth living, which means that we are called to understand the ultimate structure and meaning of reality and, in addition, to collaborate with that structure, behaving morally. Moral behavior requires, first of all, that we differentiate between that which is subject to our control and that which is beyond our control. Furthermore, moral behavior requires that we act in conformity with a reasonable table of values. We are taught, for example, that the seven deadly sins may be divided into those that are carnal and those that are spiritual, with the spiritual being much more serious than the carnal. If one overcomes gluttony, avarice, or lust (all carnal) and in so doing succumbs to anger, envy, or pride, one is not collaborating with a rationally structured universe but, rather, is sabotaging a table of values that orders sins rationally according to their severity. Epictetus says this memorably: Why are we angry, he asks, when something is stolen from us. “Because we set such store on the things they steal from us. If you stop setting store on your clothes, you won’t be angry with the thief. . . . Whenever you see someone wealthy, observe what you have instead of that. . . . [I]f you have the absence of the need to have wealth, realize that you have something greater and much more valuable.”[4]

Clearly, Stoicism teaches us how to attain tranquility. Let me conclude with what Epictetus says concerning the relation between Socrates and ourselves: “Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”[5] That is perfect advice for someone like myself who believes that the prerequisite of tranquility is a rational universe that challenges us to understand its ultimate structure and to collaborate, as best we can, with that structure. So I end as I began: What I believe in (at least now), despite all the contrary evidence, is rationality.

NOTES

[1]F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 181. Cited in Darren J. N. Middleton, “Kazantzakis among the Post-moderns: Some Reflections.”

[2]A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 20-21.

[3]Long, p. 21.

[4]Long, p. 252, p. 137.

[5]Long, p. 272, citing Epictetus’s Encheiridion 51.

October 15, 2003

Back at Pendle Hill. Played four-hand piano last night with one of the staff: Haydn symphony, Mozart sonata, Townsend. Today, Dean Search meeting. We have narrowed to 8 or 9 whom we’ll interview. Among these are Paul Rasor, Laura Melly. In the afternoon, went to Philadelphia with Chrysanthi and Bartholomew Miheso, a Kenyan Quaker pastor who’ll be at Pendle Hill for the year. Showed him Kimmel Hall, the Academy, Union League, Town Hall with Penn’s statue, 30th Street Station, Four Seasons Hotel. Then to Friends Select, where Alec gave him a tour and listened to his method of Quaker liturgy in Kenya, very much like a Methodist service. He asked me about tithing and repentance. Monica came and we all trooped to Pietro’s for an Italian supper. Cappuccino in the Springfield Mall, then early to bed, with plans to get up at 4:15 a.m. tomorrow in order to get to the airport in time (which for Chrysanthi means two hours early!) for the flight to Toronto.

October 16, 2003

Toronto, Sutton Place Hotel

To the hotel via bus and subway. Then Aser Rothstein picked us up and took us to his and Ev’s luxurious apartment by the lake, overlooking islands, filled with art from China, Japan, India. Lovely lunch with them, but sorry to hear that they may sell their Adirondack house. . . . In the first session of the MGSA symposium, we heard Eri Stavropoulou speaking on depictions of Americans in nineteenth-century Greek literature. . . . Then Terry Gardner met us at the hotel and we walked to the rare book library of the University of Toronto for the opening of an exhibit of rare books. A lovely room, indeed spectacular. Some speakers followed: a scholar praising the collection, the librarian who did the catalogue, etc. Wine, hors d’oeuvres, and catching up with Terry, who has three daughters and six grandchildren. . . . Then by taxi downtown to inauguration ceremonies: a lovely tribute to John Iatrides, who in turn praised all past MGSA presidents and editors of the journal; then a splendid talk by Michael Llewellyn-Smith on the 1896 Olympics in Athens, and much more generally on the Olympic idea and reality.

October 17, 2003

Toronto

Good sessions, especially on the Junta, and especially by Ted Couloumbis, who stressed that Greeks should finally admit their own culpability for the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. In the audience was Brady Kiesling, the man in the US Embassy in Athens who resigned over the Iraq war. He’ll be coming to Dartmouth in November. He said he learned Greek from our book. Very good keynote talk by Nikos Alivizatos on what, if anything, Greece can contribute to the EU. His answer was that Greece, more than any other EU country, has been growing and changing according in part to EU directives, for example in the treatment of minorities. It can therefore teach others in the community that a nation can comply and conform without losing its own identity and integrity. . . . Long talk at the reception with Peter Allen, who says that some of the Greek AFS trustees, e.g. Yannis Vezyroglou, are thinking of a merger of AFS with Anatolia College. If this happened, perhaps Anatolia could take over our Lyceum, relieving us of that function. . . . Long talk also with Elina Tsalikoglou, daughter of Iakovos and Ersi. She’s at Oxford working under Peter Mackridge on nineteenth-century satires based on Lucian. At lunch, went with Chrysanthi to the Royal Ontario Museum, which turned out to have dinosaurs, etc. and not to interest us. Had a sandwich there and walked back to the hotel through the lovely University of Toronto campus, stopping at one of the libraries.

October 18, 2003

Liz Kamphausen joined us for breakfast. She spoke openly about the rupture with Smith, simply announced by the latter. There is no further communication between them. Liz is trying to find her way, perhaps via a degree in counseling and a future private practice combined with teaching in a Quaker day school (I mentioned Friends Select, of course). She’ll be getting Canadian citizenship but actually hopes to return to the USA. Naturally I told her all the gossip about Pendle Hill: Rebecca, Steve, Deborah, what happened with the Doug Gwyn book proposal, etc. Liz would like to continue on the Books Subcommittee and also to serve on the PH board at some point. Lovely to see this old friend. . . . Listened to Elina Tsalikoglou’s presentation. She is poised, speaks perfect (British) English, can ad lib at the podium. . . . Then I performed with Mike Keeley and Peter Allen in a session discussing Mike’s book “Inventing Paradise.” . . . Yesterday also saw Mike Antonakes and caught up with his news and family doings. They have six grandchildren. . . . To the Ontario Museum for the banquet. Sat at the same table with Brady Kiesling, who was informative on US government snafus regarding Iraq and so-called weapons of mass destruction. The speaker was the Greek ambassador to Canada, who told about his adventures as ambassador to Armenia, including some amusing airplane rides.

October 19, 2003

Toronto

Breakfast with Dimitris Tziovas, who would like me to lecture in Birmingham preferably in late February or early March. Also Margaret Kenna, who is still so excited about her research concerning political refugees on Anaphli. . . . Then MGSA Executive Committee. Chief problem: replacing John Iatrides as Executive Director. No solution so far. No action on my proposal to shift the endowment to TIAA-CREF.

October 22, 2003

Met with Mike Burton et al. at UPNE. He says that Theano’s work is unprofessional because of low-resolution scanning making captions fuzzy. Also that she didn’t follow copyediting specs. Etc., etc. They proposed doing a “pilot edition” with all the defects rather than trying to correct them. And the Workbook, which no one ordered done except Gondicas, is “over-produced.” They haven’t paid her fee. I’ll need to check everything again, and they implore me not to involve Dimitri at all. How? Tasos has done the sample CD; it’s in the mail. UPNE will not pay for it, so we authors will need to raise 6200 euros. Also, the Press will not pay us royalties until 5000 copies are sold. Price for the text: $45.00. For the Workbook: $15.00. They haven’t priced the CD yet. But the bottom line is that yes, they’ll have a book ready for academic year 04–05.

I’ll be teaching a seminar at Columbia from January through early May, the one I did on Kazantzakis at Harvard in 1983, to students who know Greek. How nice!

October 23, 2003

New York

Supper at the famous “21” with Jeff Murphy. “21” filled to capacity. Very fancy. Waiters in tuxedos, etc. Very pricey. Each entrée $42.00. A la carte $12 more for appetizers, more for coffee, etc. God knows how much our drinks and wine cost. Jeff has been using the restaurant for twenty years, mostly for clients. He said that tonight was his best-ever dinner here (meaning the conversation). He confided that he’d fallen in love with one of the younger lawyers but (luckily) his feelings were not reciprocated. Thus it’s finished, and his marriage is intact. Teresa was never told. He inquired about prep schools for his son, who isn’t doing well in a local Catholic school. His conservative politics continue; he supports Bush and Wolfowitz in eliminating Saddam Hussein, thinks the UN is ridiculous, laughs at the Democratic presidential hopefuls. He despairs about the Catholic Church, beset by several scandals in the Long Island diocese where he is, resulting in significant drop in contributions to the parishes. . . . He marvels at his law office, overlooking the bay, Statue of Liberty, as before, but the other window overlooking ground zero (the former Trade Center), which is eerie—a huge hole. . . . Actually, my meal (veal schnitzel) wasn’t all that special, but the company was lovely. . . . Then, back at the Yale Club, I discovered that John Rassias was there, and spent an hour with him talking about his trip to France, and then about the vicissitudes of Greek Today.

October 24, 2003

New York

Post-Secondary Committee with Crunkilton, Mike Keeley, and David Acker. The usual; no feeling that Perrotis should expand to three or four years. Need to wait for elections to see if Nea Demokratia is elected and if they’ll recognize private universities. Plenary session concerning the proposal for Resident Trustees to meet regularly with David. Fear of divisiveness, although their spokesman, Kostas Kravvas, denied this. Annie whispered that she had been αντιπολίτευση in all this. Some of us worried and objected, so Alex asked Thomas, Kostas, Annie, and myself to draft a response, which we did later. This was read in another plenary session and approved. Annie and I, the only “Secondary” members present, drafted our report for tomorrow. Gondicas, the chair, is absent again. . . . Annie agreed to travel with me to see Kendal at Longwood next March. . . . Afterwards, a much needed Bloody Mary at the Yale Club. Then to Daphne’s. Peter is walking (sort of), Christina is playing some one-handed tunes on the piano, and likes her lessons. Andrew is doing well at St. David’s, including speech-wise. Greg’s office may move across the river; he’ll travel by ferry. . . . Then to AVRA restaurant on East 48th for dinner with trustees. Nice to talk with an employee who grew up in Astoria and went to Bryant High School, as did Bill Tsacalis’s wife.

October 25, 2003

New York

The response to the Greek trustees that Tom, David, Kosta, and I drafted yesterday got deconstructed completely at today’s full board meeting, chiefly because Mike Keeley felt that any re-affirmation of the unity of the board would be misinterpreted by Resident Trustees as an expression of distrust. In the discussion, which became rather heated, I wished that he had been in a Quaker context and I could have called for silence. In the vote, I abstained. Most of the meeting worried about the strategic plan, or lack thereof. We are going to devote all of the March meeting to brainstorming. There was no executive session, no talk of shortening David’s term. Alex was kept as chair. . . . So it goes. . . . Afterwards, I went down to Prince Street in the Village, swarming with people, and up to the 10th floor in a building to Sam Israel’s gallery to see the exhibit devoted to the Clintons. Many funny, evocative cartoons, paintings, photos, including a painting with Bill as Tarzan and Hillary as Jane. . . . Then to Carnegie to the new hall dug out beneath Carnegie to hear a recital of John Cage’s piano pieces on a “prepared piano,” complete with subway rumble (expected) and voice-over from someone in the hall upstairs (unexpected). The music pretentious and mostly (not always) boring. But a sort of experience, I suppose. The audience (about ⅓ full) applauded vociferously at the end. . . . Then to Patelson’s for some more four-hand music: Mendelssohn, Beethoven’s 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th symphonies. . . . Super at the Oyster Bar (of course). . . . Then to the Mint Theatre, like Sam Israel’s gallery tucked away on an upper story of a building, to see Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land, translated as “Far and Wide.” Boring at first, just talk, no humor (until Act 3), no acting except sitting down, standing up, crossing legs, uncrossing legs. But it got better and by the end was recognizable as a study of dysfunctional human beings—upper middle class all with divorces, affairs, boredom, liaisons, gossip, no one really happy. . . . The Thomases were there. Nice. We compared our degree of boredom.

October 26, 2003

New York

Breakfast again with John Rassias, looking very tired. His workshop ends at midday today. On Friday Mr. Stephens from the cruise was also having breakfast; nice to see him again. . . . To the Met to see the El Greco exhibit. I’ve never been so moved and astonished by paintings. Truly, as the commentators state, El Greco liberates the soul of his bodies, the essential character of his portraits. And what colors! What movement and passion! A great experience. I purchased a poster of his “View of Toledo” for our Kendal corridor wall. And how special to see two icons indisputably done by Θεοτοκόπουλος while he was still in Crete. The elongated figures, the non-representationality, the lack of depth-perspective of later paintings all started here in the icon style. Of course when he went to Venice he deliberately assimilated Western style, including perspective, but gradually returned somewhat to Byzantine elements. Of great interest were the indications of how influenced Picasso, even Manet, were by El Greco.

November 12, 2003

New York

Supper at the Yale Club with Constance Tagopoulos. Then we went to the Foundation for Hellenic Culture for a program MC’d by Karen Van Dyck presenting three Greek writers and their translators: Zyranna Zateli translated beautifully by Peter Constantine, Yorgos Skambardonis translated by Karen Emmerich, and Petros Tatsopoulos with a translation read by Karen (but not by her). All prose, too long, a bit tedious. Poetry is much better for such presentations, as we discovered at the MGSA symposium at Georgetown in 2001. Nice to see Peter, Karen Van Dyck, Karen Emmerich, and others including Katie Myrivili. I urged them all to go to the El Greco exhibit. The Greeks enthused about New York. One of them said he doesn’t feel Greek, and indeed all the works were not “Greek” in any clear fashion. People nowadays, at least in Europe and North America, are so similar. I’ve always felt that differences in class are greater than differences in ethnicity.

November 13, 2003

New York

A very full day. No. 7 train to Flushing, but I got out at 46th Street and walked down 47th past what used to be my father’s office (now a private dwelling) to the stores on Skillman Avenue—still a grocery of sorts, still a drug store, but now a store with Turkish provisions, a Romanian restaurant, a Greek pizza place (on 48th the barbershop is still in the same place). Homes and the gardens are unchanged but look rather shabby and untended. The Nursery School is still there in the same place. Our home, 3902 47th Street, is outwardly unchanged and seems cared for. The private garden in back of each house seems to me now much smaller than I remember it. The trees in the communal garden and along the street, sycamores, are of course much larger. I returned via 48th Street, where the Davidoffs’ house on the corner seems unchanged. Faces along the street: Chinese, Latino, and . . . who knows? Then back on the no. 7 to Flushing; bus to Queens College; some xeroxing in the library, on the way to which one views the Manhattan skyscrapers with clarity. People here watched in amazed horror as the twin towers were struck and collapsed on 9–11. . . . Then to Constance’s office. Introduced to Classics Department chair and other faculty, all of whom came to my lecture on a Nietzschean interpretation of Zorba the Greek. The room was full—lots of students. The dean, the department chair. Very nice. It went well. Good questions afterwards. Then lunch in the Faculty Club. And Constance drove me all the way back to the Yale Club. Twenty minutes later I was on Fifth and 51st in the studios of Greek Satellite Television for an interview. The interviewer, Nancy, grew up in the village next to Terpni and Nigrita. We ranged all over the lot, half in Greek, half in English. It was pre-recorded, not live, so the times when I blew my nose will be edited out. They broadcast across the entire USA, also to Australia and Canada. . . . Then no. 7 train again to Queensboro Plaza, change to W to Astoria, 30th Avenue, and walk to the Archdiocesan Community Center nearby for my second lecture: Kazantzakis in Athens 1944–46 engaged in the active life. In the audience: Skipitaris, the actor, who told me that Apostolidis’s 6200 euro fee is no bargain, but not grossly overpriced. Lots of interesting people in the audience and lots of good questions afterwards. Luckily regarding the Δεκεμβριανά I was able to tell them, thanks to what John Iatrides said in Toronto, that all this history needs now to be rewritten because of the recent availability of various archival sources. . . . To the “Kendro Byzantium” with Constance, on 31st Street, all the waiters and waitresses speaking Greek, ditto for the customers. We ordered Greek τοστ but it was just a grilled cheese sandwich à la America. Back at the Yale Club at 11:30 p.m., watched André Agassi’s tennis match a bit.

November 14, 2003

Philadelpia–Princeton

Up at 6:45. ACELA to Philadelphia. Avis car to Providence Meeting house to interview Deborah Haines for the dean’s job and to tell Steve Baumgartner about “Religions for Peace,” which I learned about thanks to Jerry Davidoff. Denni is on the board, as is Tsakopoulos and his daughter Eleni. But not a single Quaker. Steve said he knows about the group, has actually met Denni, and is in touch with her successor as head of the Unitarians. . . . Deborah Haines is a viable candidate. I especially liked the fact that she has a Ph.D. (in history) and has produced some research. But she also apparently is a good organizer. We’ll see. Laura Melly surprisingly did not interview well, Steve said. Spann, “his” candidate, did very well. She’s an African-American female, so has a great advantage. Jack and Ruth Hunter worked with her at Oakwood and praise her. . . . Long talk at Pendle Hill lunch with Bob McCoy, who expects to get $100,000 for the Cary book. But no recruitment yet of Rebecca’s successor owing to some roadblocks placed by Barb Parsons. I’ll speak to her. Also saw Bartholomew, who, I fear, expects me to help subsidize his children’s college education in the USA! . . . Drove to Princeton and went to Firestone immediately, hoping to find the old volumes of Nea Estia I need to complete some documentation in a chapter of my volume 2. But all the Nea Estias are in storage and take three days to be delivered. So, no luck. I’ll try Harvard. Then met Brady Kiesling at the Nassau Inn and sat for 1½ hours with him over a beer, talking about Dartmouth, the Dickey Center, Peace Studies, his forthcoming lecture at Dartmouth, and then especially the American Farm School. I explained its problems and the need for a new president. I wondered if he is persona non grata with the State Department and the diplomats in Greece but he said he is a great friend of the new Consul in Thessaloniki and with most in the embassy, although Ambassador Miller is mad at him. In any case, what we need is a good manager, and that is precisely what he does not want to do. So we talked about trusteeship. This would interest him. However, since we don’t get reimbursed for service, airfare, etc., he couldn’t manage now. Perhaps in the future when he has a source of income. He already has good ideas for the school, for example to develop a training program for Albanians and Pomaks to care for the elderly in farm villages. I told him about my Kendal “insanity”; he seemed interested especially since Greeks tend now to have only one child and since the demographics indicate an aging population. Perhaps some day he’ll join us. He assures me that he won’t forget his Greek.

November 25, 2003

North Potomac

To Washington via AMTRAK. Leander and children met us at the Metro station, Rockville. To a fancy diner for supper. Long good talk with Leander afterwards.

November 26, 2003

Alec and family arrived. To Vietnamese restaurant for lunch of Po (noodle soup). . . . Visited oldest oak tree, huge and symmetrical. Practiced Chopin and Townsend. Leander played Townsend with me and was very helpful. Visited Sophia’s and Nikos’s school, which is rich and impressive, filled with computers.

November 27, 2003, Thanksgiving

Everyone to our hotel for breakfast. Even Elena cherishes scrambled eggs and bacon. Macy Parade on the TV. The other night Sophia and Niko jumped and jumped on their two beds, screaming with delight, until the neighbor emerged to complain. . . . Turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Afterwards Leander gave me good pointers on how to practice the Chopin etude but warned against performing it at Kinhaven: too difficult. We’ll see. . . . Drove to a sort of park/boardwalk/lake—to walk off the meal. . . . Alec noted that he had applied for a job in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but wasn’t shortlisted. Obviously he seems ready to go back overseas if an opportunity arises. He’s in touch with John Magagna à propos.

November 28, 2003

Everyone to the hotel again for breakfast. Then Chrysanthi and I to Rockville Metro, Union Station, AMTRAK to Springfield; car home. On the train I listened to Madame Butterfly and shortened my Kapodistrias lecture for April.

December 1, 2003

Hanover–Amherst

Examined two students at U-Mass, Amherst. One truly remarkable, a linguist already in five languages. . . . On e-mail, a message from Dick Jackson, president of Anatolia, to say that Anatolia alums have spoken to him of the need for a sort of Kendal institution there. Thus, the way might open for my crazy dream to be realized via a collaboration between the Farm School and Anatolia. Very encouraging.

December 2, 2003

Philadelphia, Lumberton

To Dan’s. Practiced Thomson again but did not record it. Needs lots of work. Started Satie, which became familiar, gradually. His group got “trounced” in the elections. The Republicans are back in control of Lumberton.

December 3, 2003

Pendle Hill

Dean Search meeting. We left two finalists: Spann and the Jacobsens. Eliminated Paul Rasor and Laura Melly but want to keep them as interim possibilities if one of the others doesn’t materialize. . . . Read and vetted Darren Middleton’s good chapter on the theology of The Last Temptation. Long talk with Gay Berger over lunch. Kendal on Hudson now has its steel framework. . . . Flew to Frankfort.

December 4, 2003

Frankfort–Athens

On the flight to Athens I sat next to a young Greek woman doing a Ph.D. in papyrology in Germany. She asked about Margaret Alexiou and was interested in learning about George Thomson. I queried her about care of the elderly and explained the CCRC idea. She was most encouraging, saying that many families are at their wits’ end over care of the aging. The children cannot, or do not want to, have the aged in their home. Typically, the children hire caregivers, usually Filipinos, to “solve” the problem, obviously without solving it. . . . Arrived at 7:00 p.m., checked in at Hotel Achilleas, much improved from its old state, and met Theano in the lobby of the Athens Plaza Hotel. She finished correcting Workbook 1–6; we’ll check everything tomorrow. Walked along Οδός Νίκης to Don Nielsen’s favorite restaurant, where he was waiting. Then had a relaxed two-hour meal, more conversation than food. Theano, too, encouraged me in the CCRC idea, saying that the old ways no longer work in Greece. Don, thanks to my intervention, will be traveling to the Farm School next week to talk about biotourism and ecotourism. Good luck! I brought him $80 worth of painkilling pills to quiet the throbs in his thigh. I also brought two more Kazantzakis quotes, much appreciated, for his fortune cookie project. Zero jet lag, really. Slept at 11:45 p.m.

December 5, 2003

Athens, Hotel Achilleas

Took €200 out of my bank account. Then to Panepistimiou 11, the Αθηναϊκή Λέσχη, a fancy 8-story club, for meeting with the group trying to create a bibliography of Greek journal articles, chaired by Kathy Vanderpool. Nice to meet the directors of the American School, Gennadion Library, National Library, National Documentation Center, Μακεδονικών Σπουδών, etc. We got through the agenda quite well. MGSA will be one of the collaborators. Then lunch in the rooftop restaurant, with all the bigwigs of the Onassis Foundation, including Papademetriou, at the next table. . . . Metro to Μέγαρον Μουσικής and from there to Μιχαλακοπούλου 93 to visit Theano. We went over every page of Workbook 1–6, checking each and every required correction. Good we did this, because several had not been corrected satisfactorily. Theano will mail everything to me on Tuesday. . . . In times of waiting at airports, I’m revising my Kazantzakis and Renan essay for Darren Middleton, adjusting it to conform to the required house style of the publisher.

December 6, 2003

Iraklio, Hotel Galaxy

Last night, on arriving around 9:00 p.m., I was told to go to a meeting of the group, already assembled. Introductions, all around. Lovely to see Alf Vincent again. Then we were all taken out for a late supper. Bed at 12:30 a.m. This morning, nice breakfast with Benjamin Hendricks, a Belgian resident in South Africa, with a Greek wife. Talked about Mandela and the miracle of their bloodless revolution. Then we were all loaded into a bus and driven to Μυρτιά (Βαρβάροι) for the symposium, held in an auditorium next to the Kazantzakis Museum. Each one of the nine speakers spoke about Kazantzakis in his or her nation: Lucille Brando for Brazil, Jelena Novaković for Yugoslavia, with amazingly good Greek, Alf Vincent for Australia, Ahmed Etman for Egypt, Hendricks, Jan-Henri Swahn for Sweden, Zurab Vacheishvili for Georgia, Li Chenggui for China. Fascinating. This went on until around 4:00 p.m., preceded by 8 or 9 introductory greetings from the mayor, βουλευτής, etc. Then a big meal with χωριανούς. Back at the hotel, I was picked up by Stelios and Ava and taken to their lovely home. Stelios is now president of this, president of that, a founder of Forth. Ava is doing beautiful paintings and will soon have a huge children-friendly installation in the new Natural History Museum. Daughter Eleni was there, looking very pretty. She graduated UVM in Art History, spent a year in Florence, and now thinks she wants to get an MBA. Of course at 11:00 p.m. she left for a night on the town. Coq au vin for supper, cooked by έναν Γιώργο who seems to have some relationship there. Stelios makes his own wine from his vineyards. Quite a lovely life.

December 7, 2003

Iraklio–Varvari

Back to the village. Tour of the Museum. The inevitable video produced by Patroclos Stavrou, better than the one I saw many years ago. New books, including collections of letters. Then each of us spoke again: Brando on Kazantzakis’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses, Novaković on Zorba, I on Ένα όνειρο που έγινε εφιάλτης: ο Καζαντζακης αφήνει το γράψιμο ύστερα απ’ την Απελευθέρωση και μπλέκεται στην πρακτική ζωή της Αθήνας, 1944–46 (Stelios and Ava came to hear this), Alf on the Kalomiris and Martinu operas, Etman on how the Arabs preserved Greek texts, Henricks on Κωνσταντίνος Παλαιολόγος, Swahn on Börje Knös and the Nobel Prize, Vacheishvili on Christian monasticism in Ο Χρίστος ξανασταυρώνεται, and Li on Πώς αποκάλυψα και μελέτησα τον Ζορμπά. This last was the most moving, for Mr. Li, a jolly soul, related how he had been sent by the Mao government to Albania to learn Greek, how in the Cultural Revolution he was luckier than most because instead of being sent to the fields he was sent to a harbor to deal with Greek shipping, and how a Greek ship brought some books, all of which were meant to be seized and burned by the authorities because evidently tainted by capitalism, and how he convinced a soldier to allow him to retain Zorba, and how, reading it, he was struck by the hero’s free mind, his rejection of authority, of all the horrors then prevalent in China. He resolved to translate the book and did, after many years’ work. But Patroclos Stavrou refused him permission to publish! Somehow, publication now seems possible. At the end, he presented the Chinese manuscript of the translation to the Museum. . . . Then we were all presented with gifts: heavy books (!), a medallion with Kazantzakis’s head engraved, two bottles of wine and one of oil, raki, thyme. More speeches, especially by the mayor, and by Alf suggesting that we hold a symposium every two years at the Museum. Also appreciation of how marvelously Kazantzakis’s worldwide influence was indicated by the presence of these nine non-Greek individuals from five continents, all speaking Greek. Then, of course, another meal. . . . One of the audience, a woman of about 30 who approached me yesterday to express her appreciation of my books (as did many others) became a good friend. When she asked me yesterday when my volume 2 would be ready and I then asked her to wish me good health, she burst into tears and confessed that she has a health problem. She has a chapter in one of the books I now have, and hopes to receive a critique from me. . . . Back in Iraklio at the hotel, Stassinakis actually paid my total travel and hotel expenses in cash, and Vacheishvili invited me to come to Tiflis to lecture there (in Greek). I spoke to him, and also to Jalena Novaković, about possibly requesting some of my books; they’re both in need. I’ll send them catalogues. . . . Stelios and Ava picked me up at the hotel again, hoping to go to a nice place for some μεζεδάκια, but everything was closed on Sunday, so we had a very bad pizza at the airport, accompanied by good conversation. They foresee real difficulties with a Kendal in Greece. The rich will employee multiple caregivers and won’t want to leave their homes; the others will not be able to afford a Kendal. The most likely residents might be foreigners who want to retire to Greece, but then Thessaloniki is not the best location—too cold and not directly on the water. . . . In Athens I went across the street to the Sofitel Hotel, very expensive (€245) and fancy. I was upgraded to the Executive Suite, even fancier. Slept from 11:30 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning, in order to catch a 5:55 a.m. Lufthansa flight to Frankfort.

December 23–26, 2003

South Salem, Hayloft Motel, 914 763-5410

At Daphne’s for Christmas. Celebrated Chrysanthi’s birthday on December 24. I gave her a portfolio volume on “I Love Lucy.” Most others gave her jam—very appropriate. Leander was supposed to arrive on the 24th but Deanna was in bed throwing up, so they never left Maryland. Greg has basically had no serious buyer for the Riparius property, one huge defect being the 2nd parcel of forest for which there is no access. He thinks now to donate it to the Nature Conservancy and get a tax writeoff. . . . Alec is fed up with Rose at Friends Select and is actively looking for another job. Too bad, because they’ll miss Philadelphia.

December 29, 2003

Riparius

I drove over to see Alec and Leander at Terpni. The new bridge is finished in Riparius. The old one was blown up and then its pieces retrieved from the river. Both families are cozy in their well-heated cabins. Alec is now determined to leave Friends Select mostly because of inability to respect or work with Rose, the head of school. He is looking domestically, but also in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur. We haven’t heard anything more about a possible opening at the Pinewood School in Thessaloniki.

December 31, 2003

Snails with the Rassiases, as always. Vasilopita with two quarters for Athos’s two children.

2004

Hanover

January 1–May 28

Jan. 6–9, Pendle Hill, Princeton, Philadelphia, Lumberton

Jan. 17, Cambridge

Jan. 20–25, NYC, Philadelphia

Jan. 28–31, NYC, Princeton

Feb. 5–6, NYC

Feb. 12–15, NYC, Princeton

Feb. 19–21, NYC

Feb. 26–27, Pendle Hill, NYC

March 4–6, NYC

March 10–12, NYC

March 25–26, NYC

April 1–2, NYC

April 8–9, NYC

April 14–15, NYC

April 16–19, Philadelphia

April 20–21, Athens, Hotel Akropolis House, Kodrou 6, 210 32.22.344

April 23–25, Rethymno, Σπίτι της Ευρώπης, 2831 051-957

April 29–30, NYC

May 5–7, NYC

May 8–9, Riparius

May 13, Washington

May 14–16, Pendle Hill

May 22–23, Boston, Beacon Hill Friends House

Riparius

May 29–September 7

May 31–June 1, Pendle Hill

June 10–15, Kinhaven, Weston, Vermont

June 16, Albany, Philadelphia, Frankfort

June 17–24, American Farm School, Thessaloniki

June 25, Athens, Hotel Andromeda, 22 Timoleontos Vassou, 210 641–5000

June 26, Albany, Hotel Albany Marriott, 518 458-8444

July 1–6, Hanover

July 3, Cambridge

Hanover

September 8–December 31

Sept. 30–Oct. 1, New York

Oct. 2–3, Princeton

Oct. 14–16, Pendle Hill

Oct. 17, Boston

Oct. 28–30, New York

Oct. 31, Kendal at Longwood

Nov. 5, New York

Nov. 10, New York

Nov. 23–25, Potomac, Maryland

Nov. 26, New York

Dec. 3–5, Pendle Hill

Dec. 24, Riparius

Dec. 28, Andover

Dec. 30–31, South Salem, West Lane Inn, 22 West Lane, Ridgefield, CT 06877, 203 438-7323

January 1, 2004

Supper at Dick’s with Roger Soderberg and the Brauns. Very nostalgic about old times at Dartmouth. . . . I’ve been learning and practicing a Scarlatti sonata to play on the harpsichord later this month. But the harpsichord is so limited. No dynamics are possible, no pedal. Leander gave me a lesson last Monday on his digital keyboard at the farm, emphasizing articulation (staccato, legato, portamento).

January 6, 2004

Pendle Hill

Last night, immediately after arrival, I went to play piano, found someone playing and suggested duets. She’s Tricia, from Perth, Australia, and a very good sight-reader. We did Schubert Ländler, the Virgil Thompson waltz, and some of the Satie. Then came epilogue conducted by her husband, Roger, reading a poem by Rilke, followed by worship sharing as we do in our Quaker 8s. . . . This morning at breakfast I sat by accident with the Jacobsens, here to be interviewed for the dean’s job. He’s a Dartmouth grad and she was a dean at Dartmouth. The interview went very well. I’ll be happy to see them here. But on Thursday we’ll interview the other candidate: Spann. . . . Steve has hired Joey Rodger to head the Peace Network. She starts in August. . . . On the train yesterday, despite very rough tracks between WRJ and Springfield, I finished the first draft of my translation into Greek of my lecture on Kapodistrias. Now it needs to be corrected and shortened. Also read Κωμωδία (brilliant) and early essays—Η αρρώστεια του αιώνος, Η επιστήμη εχρεωκόπησε;—and began Ξημερώνει. Kazantzakis was extraordinarily precocious. All of these were done in his twenties.

January 7, 2004

Princeton

Worked all day with Dimitri. Numerous changes in lessons 7–12. Will I be able to enter them? Lunch at Prospect talking about strategies for MGSA: maybe Drexel for the next symposium, or a smaller affair. I’d like it to have a definite theme, perhaps Greece and the EU. Saw Mike at the βασιλόπητα party. Almost $1,000,000 was embezzled from the Farm School. He is meeting with the Finance Committee on Friday. Alex Drapos is paralyzed, more or less, and should resign. Phil Foote is willing to chair the board but not until October. . . . Returned at 9:27; epilogue at 9:30. Then did four-hand duets with Tricia: Schubert and Virgil Thomson (which she has learned beautifully), then Satie, which I still cannot play accurately.

January 8, 2004

Pendle Hill

Interview with Spann; very engaging. She was at Oberlin Conservatory when Leander was there, and taught at Friends Select. We’ll have a difficult time choosing tomorrow. Off to visit Alec and family for supper. Read lengthy books to Theo and of course Elena wanted her turn—her favorite books, about zebras. When Alec returned we telephoned John Magagna, whom I had last seen in Jakarta in 1990. He might help in the AFS search for a new head. He has already placed a head in Greece, in the Athens community school. Alec will be going to his job fair in Boston in February; he is determined to leave Friends Select, alas. We also telephoned two long-term staff at Friends Select to ask about Spann, and both responded very positively. . . . Back to Pendle Hill at around 10:30 p.m. Played piano until 11:30: Scarlatti and Satie. Read some of Stylianos’s theology in bed until 12:15 a.m.

January 9, 2004

Pendle Hill–Lumberton

Long meeting of the Search Committee. Mickey all for the Jacobsens; Steve all for Niyonu Spann. Carol, Steve, and I are less doctrinaire, although I favored Niyonu throughout but repeated that I’d be satisfied with the Jacobsens. Steve argued strongly for the presence of an Afro-American not only in her own right but also because of others she would presumably attract. We ended favoring her provided a dinner with her partner went well. . . . Off with relief to Dan’s. We still haven’t brought the Satie up to the level where it can be recorded, but it’s getting better. Nice supper in . . . Friendly’s (of course). Our “recreational” sight-reading was Beethoven’s quartet opus 132. Amazing! One needs to play these marvels, not just to hear them, in order to appreciate the complexity.

January 11, 2004

Kendal

Our harpsichord concert. Large audience. I did my Scarlatti sonata. Nervous, but no disasters. People seemed to like it. I saw Sandy Sanderson clapping vigorously.

January 12, 2004

John Hennessey presented an interesting case at our professors’ colloquium: Vermont Law School’s policy of prohibiting government recruiters because of the army’s position regarding gay soldiers. Should this be upheld or not? The policy prohibits Vermont Law School from receiving federal funds. Those attending, although divided, voted to keep the policy. I said that the school was better off without government funds and the compromises they inevitably entail.

January 13, 2004

Saw Dr. Allen again. It’s OK to continue with Lipitor.

January 14, 2004

Long lunch with Ron Edsforth, who feels he is being made redundant at Dartmouth. Mastanduno has appointed Al Stam to teach Ron’s course next year, without consulting the War/Peace Steering Committee. Students are rallying for Ron, as are certain faculty. . . . Music with Allan again, back from New Zealand. We were very rusty on the Debussy.

January 15, 2004

Lunch with Anthony Bramauto, a student who says his life was changed by Ron’s course and who will write a long piece on War/Peace Studies for a student newspaper. I filled him in with some of the history: Bakers, Elise, Leonard. . . . Supper with Felitsa Makedon and Otmar Foelsche, at Kendal. She is fat and egocentric.

January 17, 2004

Cambridge

Lunch with Dia and Wim, very pleasant. Then to A.R.T. for a fine production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Martha Clarke, with Tom Derrah very funny as Bottom. Angelo flew all over the stage on cables. But Puck, instead of being an angelic youth, looked like a bum who had just slept on the Bowery. Strange.

January 18, 2004

My turn to do the monthly Interfaith Gathering at Kendal, on the Greek Orthodox Church. I used recordings of the liturgy in English (done by Stylianos’s group in Australia) and the Gospel and Χριστός ανέση in Greek. Spoke about the filioque and also about icons, showing some icon-like portraits by El Greco. People seemed pleased; one commented that what I did was “churchly,” which of course was my purpose.

January 19, 2004

Another meeting of the Pendle Hill Dean Search Committee, with me on the telephone. Chris and Mickey now definitely for Jacobsens owing to bad vibes from the dinner with Niyonu and partner. Carol leaning that way. Steve still utterly opposed, and arguing eloquently for “affirmative action.” After about 1½ hours of discussion we veered again to Niyonu. I’m not even sure how that happened. Now Steve needs to discuss salary, etc. to see if she’ll accept.

January 20, 2004

To NYC

Off to NYC on AMTRAK. Met Burt Pike at the Pearl Theatre, St. Mark’s Place, and saw a superb production of Aeschylus’s Persians directed by Shepard Sobel. They did the chorus especially well—with masks, and a general feeling of “an added dimension.” Of course the most amazing part is Aeschylus’s willingness, after the great Greek victory at Salamis, to write about the defeated rather than the victors. Xerxes is portrayed as an inexperienced, arrogant youth filled with hubris, yet even he is seen with compassion. . . . Where is our dramatist to write “The Iraqiad”? . . . Afterwards, a leisurely supper with Burt at Mitali on 6th Street, a fine Indian restaurant. He has embarked on a somewhat new career as a translator. Nice to see someone my own age who is equally active, and also a survivor of prostate cancer.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

NYC

Worked in the Yale Club library on my translation of Ο πρωτομάστορας, which I hope to finish in time for the Columbia class. Then with Chrysanthi to Columbia. Met with Jerrie Visco, the department administrator. Her office a total mess, piled high with miscellaneous papers. But she has her wits about her and was able to locate what was needed to get me paid the miserable $800 I’ll be earning for this course (less deductions, of course). I received a key to an office with three desks and three occupants. I’ll have ½ of one of the desks. Also an ID card. And the secretary is going to prepare xeroxes for tomorrow. Then to Butler Library to visit two pleasant librarians regarding my reserve book shelf. Then back to Hamilton Hall to see Karen Van Dyck, who showed us a photo of her Leander, aged 3. She told me the sad news that Vangelis Calotychos has been refused his appeal at NYU. . . . Back to the Yale Club for supper in the new grill on the 3rd floor. Then to the library to hear a liberal journalist decry all the misrepresentations by the conservative media. Interesting for such anti-Bush sentiments to attract a large, appreciative audience at the Yale Club. . . . Then to Lincoln Center for the NYC ballet, part of the festival celebrating 100 years since Balanchine’s birth. They did “Chopiniana” choreographed by Fokine because this and other Fokine ballets convinced Balanchine, while still in Russia, to do ballets without a story. Next came Harlequinade, in two acts, first performed in 1965, very rich, with colorful costumes, children’s choruses, and exquisite dancing by Yvonne Borree, and a huge cast. Balanchine at his most extravagant.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

NYC

More translation of Ο πρωτομάστορας. Then to Columbia for the first meeting of my class. About 14 students, more than expected: 2 men, all the rest girls, including Karen Emmerich. I had everyone introduce him/herself and say why they were interested in the course, whether they read Greek, etc. I described my own very long apprenticeship to Kazantzakis. Then we did a bench reading of Comedy. We’ll see how many return next week. Spoke to my office-mate and emptied the three drawers that will be mine in half a desk. . . . To Lincoln Center for a very special evening of ballet. “Apollo” done magnificently by Hübbe, Yvonne Borree again, Somogyi, and Rutherford. Surely the purest, most delicate of the Stravinsky/Balanchine collaborations. So moving! Done first in Paris for Diaghilev in 1928, premiered here in 1951. Next: “Serenade” (Tchaikovsky), Balanchine’s first ballet after his arrival in New York, premiered in 1935, choreographed originally for his students at the School of American Ballet. Mostly formations of girls in long dresses. Finally, “Prodigal Son” with Peter Boal and with Darci Kistler as the Siren. Magnificent. Prokofiev music, of course. Totally different exhibition of Balanchine’s genius. And tonight they celebrated his 100th birthday by giving everyone in the theater a drink of vodka and a piece of birthday cake. On stage, Peter Martins drank a toast to Mr. B., while the entire company assembled in front of a huge photo of Mr. B. dancing. And dozens of balloons descended from the balcony. Lovely!

Friday, January 23, 2004

Pendle Hill

Early train to Philadelphia. Books Committee with McCoy, Densmore, Stratton. We are developing a strategy to go forward with a new history to supplement Tom Hamm’s. Then Pubs Committee with Tricia and Roger Walmsley plus a student and one of the young activists—no regular members. We accepted the essay on eldering and rejected the one purportedly on Bosnia. Then Bob and I interviewed two candidates for the part-time editor’s job, Donna McDaniel and Cassie somebody. We chose Donna. . . . After supper: trustees. Executive session at the end, without Steve. Agonized discussion of his misuse of the Search Committee, browbeating Mickey regarding the necessity to hire Niyonu instead of the Jacobsens, etc. He and we should have considered the committee advisory, allowing him to disregard its recommendation, but he needed the committee to acquiesce to his choice. We finished at 11:00 p.m.

Saturday, January 24, 2004

More board. I’m the recorder, an exhausting job, but at least it seems to be appreciated. Earlier, very good Meeting for Worship, with John Calder ministering beautifully about the children in Camden whose lives are so dismal and no Jesus to come to heal them. And a visitor was the Nobel laureate for peace from Belfast, who had addressed the forum on Thursday. She was given the lovely going-away song with everyone gathered in a circle. And she came into the board meeting and shook all our hands. We finished at nearly 3:00. I drove to Dan’s. We’re getting better on the Satie. Also did Thomson, and Beethoven’s next to last quartet as “recreational” music after supper at Friendly’s—the whole piece. Dan will be leaving on February 16 for a year in San Francisco heading the AFSC office there—a mess, he says. And his airport situation in Lumberton is also a mess, threatening to decrease the value of his home. But at least for a year he’ll have extra income from AFSC. So, no more piano enjoyment until he returns in the winter of 2005.

January 27, 2004

I voted for Kerry, Chrysanthi for Dean. Kerry won; Dean came in second. Nice Quaker 8s at Anne Baird’s with everyone present: Biens, Cadwalladers, Foestels, Pettingill, and Dr. Don. The quotation was on valuing this life.

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Played eight-hand piano with Joan Wilson, Co Emlen, Barbara Rice: Bach’s 3rd Brandenburg, Smetana, and some junk.

Thursday, January 29, 2004

NYC

To Columbia. Very good class. I worried beforehand, but there was no need. Then to ballet, an extraordinary “Swan Lake” choreographed chiefly by Peter Martins. Daniel Ulbricht spectacular as the jester, Jennie Somogyi as Odette/Odile. A feast of bravura dancing.

Friday, January 30, 2004

To Karen’s office in the morning for the first meeting regarding her search for (a) an assistant professor, (b) a one-year replacement while she is on leave next year. Calotychos has applied, and Gourgouris, and even Karanika, not to mention Martha Klironomos and others. I have to read dossiers next week. . . . Received a strong letter from Richard Abel at UPNE saying “No more changes” and that I had submitted 1600 since August, when the “completed” manuscript was delivered. Let’s see what happens with Dimitri tomorrow.

February 6, 2004

To St. David’s School at 9:30 a.m. to read a pirate story to Andrew’s class. He introduced me to the class as “My Pappou. He likes chocolate.” . . . Good class again yesterday. Better than Princeton because the students are older and have much more experience. . . . Read job dossiers for Karen. I hope that she will offer the job to Calotychos, whose appeal has failed at NYU.

February 9, 2004

Supper with Ned Perrin and Sarah and Nardi Campion. Ned has put his home up for sale. Very sad. This winter the pipes froze and at one point they had no heating oil. He wants to come to Kendal, without Sarah. Three- to five-year wait for an apartment. I spoke to Hélène and Karen: the best chance is assisted living, maybe in less than a year. . . . Learned that Thomas Laaspere cannot stand, is in hospital, and Suzanne has cancer and will be undergoing chemotherapy. What a shame that all these people aren’t in Kendal. We are so privileged.

February 10, 2004

Met with four members of the War/Peace Steering Committee to prepare our meeting with Mastanduno. We want the Steering Committee’s primacy to be recognized and Ron Edsforth to be restored the core course. . . . Lunch with Irene Kacandes. The Modern Greek course is no longer one of the prerequisites for Greek foreign study. She nevertheless hopes to teach it well, and with rigor, attracting students not necessarily going on the foreign study trip. . . . Brenda Marder, just back from Greece, had a wonderful experience talking about her book at various venues. But David and Patti Buck are despondent, and the Greek trustees are antagonistic. In any case, both the English and Greek editions of the book are here, on time, and well done. . . . Alec went to the Magagna job fair and apparently has secured a new job in the Bangkok Patana School in Thailand, a British international school. He and family will fly there shortly to complete the arrangements. So . . .

February 12, 2004

Class on Ασκητική. And the Greek group meeting beforehand is going to translate Καποδίστριας collectively. To ballet afterwards: Balanchine’s “Jewels,” part 2, to Stravinsky’s music, was scintillating. Parts 1 and 3 less so, but 3, “Diamonds,” has interesting formations by the entire troupe. Miranda Weese and Nikolaj Hübbe were grand in part 2, “Rubies.”

Friday, February 13, 2004

An interesting day. To Columbia early. Interviewed by a reporter for the National Herald, half-Greek, who told me that his grandfather was an αντάρτης in the Civil War. Then with Karen and Debbie to choose a short-list for the two jobs, which we did, including Calotychos. . . . Then to Wall Street for a long, warm lunch with Selen Ünsel at an expensive restaurant. She’s flourishing and is now a mother. Her parents come frequently; we’ll try to see each other soon. Talked about the need for a Kendal-type facility in Greece and also in Turkey. . . . Then to TIAACREF for a long discussion about transferring MGSA’s endowment there with an officer who dreams of going to Greece. Supper at the Yale Club. Then to 51st Street for a lecture by Kitroeff on the Olympics. Saw Mrs. Myrivili shortly before her departure. . . . Bus to Princeton. Arrived 10:10 p.m.

February 19, 2004

Emerging into NYC at Penn Station is always “different” after the cold whiteness of New Hampshire. Today there was a full Dixieland jazz band blasting away in the station, with a marvelous black pianist, a Chinese marimba-player, and a colossal trumpeter. . . . I had another good class, this time on Toda-Raba, which most of the students rightfully considered rather defective. The two hours go amazingly quickly. Then to Lincoln Center to meet Chrysanthi (here at Daphne’s for a few days) and to see King Lear starring Christopher Plummer, directed by Jonathan Miller. The best Lear in my experience since Devlin’s at Harvard in 1949. All the American actors spoke their lines with British expertise.

February 26, 2004

NYC

“Sleeping Beauty” at the ballet, beautifully danced by Ashley Bouder as Princess Aurora and Damian Woetzel as Prince Désiré, with Merrill Ashley, a surprise, as the wicked fairy Carabosse. Woetzel is amazingly suave. A treat! . . . Yesterday, Book Committee at Pendle Hill, with very little agreement about sponsoring a new history of twentieth-century Quakerism to balance Tom Hamm’s discouraging one.

March 4, 2004

Good class on Zorba. Then Rentzou’s talk on Greek surrealism, very professional. Supper with Karen, Rentzou, and Karen’s huband, but rushed off to meet Darren Middleton at his hotel. He was in for the Jesus Seminar. His book on The Last Temptation is progressing. He’ll be Crete in April.

March 5, 2004

Farm School committees and then plenary session for three hours discussing whether David should stay through June or leave immediately. This in executive session, of course. We favored June, thankfully. He assured me that he’ll do his job scrupulously to the end. . . . Trustee dinner at Thalassa Restaurant on Franklin Street to honor Brenda for the book. Her children were present. I spoke first about publishing vicissitudes, Shawcraw’s photos, Randy’s work. Brenda spoke very well. Toasts, applause.

March 6, 2004

Full board, with Greek trustees via telephone. They want David gone tomorrow, but we opted for June. Bedjian, a new Greek trustees, present in New York, argued strongly for the crisis needing immediate solution, good manager, etc. I tried to mollify him. He could be a candidate for the presidency, but his behavior today is a good indication for us to beware. I don’t think he ever listened to anyone else. . . . Home at 10:00 p.m. to learn that Barbara Rice, age 88, is about to be married to Bill Wilson, aged 93. And our Anthology was here, well done, indeed a handsome book.

March 8, 2004

Last week, and today, I’ve been putting in final corrections for Greek Today, working at the Press (they won’t let the MS leave the premises for fear it will get into Dimitri’s hands). Some of Theano’s errors will remain, alas. . . . The CD arrived from Tasos Apostolidis, and is fine. The Press is now excited as publication becomes a reality. . . . Practiced a Loeillet sonata with Joan Wilson and Madith Hamilton, I playing the harpsichord. Also tried my two Goldberg variations on the harpsichord, with meager success.

March 10, 2004

NYC

Went to New York on Wednesday this week in order to hear Vangelis Calotychos’s presentation, which was excellent. Followed by a long dinner.

March 11, 2004

After class, Koutrianou’s presentation, which put me to sleep. Then to the Met, late of course, to hear “L’Italiano in Algeri” (Rossini). I finished out the first act in the theater, watching on TV, second act in the hall. An opera full of fluff and nonsense, a jeu d’esprit, performed with lots of verve and humor.

March 12, 2004

Met Karen and Debbie Steiner at Columbia to choose the winner, and of course it was Calotychos, which pleased me greatly.

March 13, 2004

Fancy supper with Allan and Claire Munck at the Quechee Club, my payment for reciting poetry there. Very pleasant, especially because on the house.

March 15, 2004

Trying to get Ned Perrin into Kendal. Sarah is desperate and cannot cope. He put the house on the market, sadly. No luck here. But something may open up in Whittier (Alzheimers’ unit) in a few months.

March 16, 2004

Margery Walker is leading the effort to hold some sessions on Quakerism. I’ll lead off on the subject of silence, to be followed by Gordon Browne on everything else. . . . In the evening Hanover Monthly Meeting Finance Committee reviewed my draft budget for FY 05. The level for contributions is up a few thousand, alas. But we can give $20,000 toward the mortgage, saving lots of interest over the next 14 years.

March 17, 2004

Played Bach adagios with Joan Wilson. They really don’t sound very good on the recorder. Dick’s flute is better. Oboe would be even better. . . . To Care Meeting for Mother. I reported Dr. McKinley’s feeling that Mother is depressed and angry. They didn’t think so, but they’ll have a geriatric psychologist look at her. Sometimes she looks like a corpse, staring expressionless.

March 19, 2004

Otmar has found a young Japanese woman, Yukari Itsuki, to do the website for Greek Today. We met today, and I’ll see her again on Monday. She wants to start work immediately. . . . Karen Lester, the admissions assistant, is leaving Kendal after 13 years’ service. I said a sad farewell to her. She’s been the salvation of the admissions office.

March 20, 2004

Cambridge

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the A.R.T., vigorously acted by Will Le Bow as Goldberg, Remo A. as McCann, Karen MacDonald as Meg, and Tom Derrah as Stanley. The discussion afterwards confirmed what everyone felt: that one is not meant to understand what is happening and why. Indeterminacy rules.

March 21, 2004

Very good Meeting today with heartfelt ministry. Then I rushed back to Kendal to attend J. C. Colton’s interfaith service, this time on his personal view of Catholicism. It seems that there are very few Catholics here, maybe fewer than two dozen. Strange. . . . Alec and family are now in Bangkok to see the school where he’ll be working next year. Daphne is on vacation with family in Jamaica, Bahamas. Leander declared that he and Deanna will play a recital at Kendal on April 2, 2005.

I ministered last week about the Hubble Telescope out in space. It has delivered a photo of one small patch of sky that is seen to contain 10,000 galaxies, each with millions of stars and numerous suns and planetary systems, just like our Milky Way. And all this is so far away that the light recorded by the telescope took fifteen billion years to arrive, traveling at 186,000 miles per second. Thus what is seen is not too far from the “big bang” that created it all. This discovery should confirm to all of us our utter insignificance in the cosmic scheme. It makes human greed, power-hunger, and violence all the more nonsensical. Instead, we should marvel every morning at the mere fact that we exist in a world that can be both beautiful and comfortable (at least for some of us).

March 23, 2004

Went to Woodstock to have lunch with Pano Rodis, the old friend whom I haven’t seen for several years. He is remarried, with a third child by the second wife. The girls are amazingly 16 and 14 now; I remember them as toddlers. He is no longer connected with the Education Department or indeed with Dartmouth. He trained as a clinical psychologist specializing in childhood and adolescence, and has a thriving practice. . . . The same night, John and Mary Rassias came for supper, which Chrysanthi cooked, so we ate in the apartment. John brought a video dedicated to the former archbishop, Spyridon, which I found disgustingly egotistic with its shouts of άξιος, άξιος. He’s trying to develop a foundation that will aid Greek education, but his views are excessively chauvinistic; he sounds almost like the “Citizen” in Joyce’s Cyclops episode—every element in secular and sacred civilization derived from Greece! . . . Listened to several more recordings of the Goldberg Variations, including Glen Gould’s. Anything goes, it seems. Tempi vary exceedingly from artist to artist, as does articulation (use of staccato, legato, etc.). I perform my two variations at the run-through on Saturday, then at the concert on Sunday. . . . Visited Lee Huntington in Hanover Terrace Nursing Home, where my father died. Horrible place. What a difference at Kendal! She, poor thing, broke ribs in a fall. She won’t be able to live in her house in the future, so, just like Ned Perrin, she’s stuck. We are so lucky to be in Kendal. . . . Visited my mother. She was in bed, but awake with eyes wide open. No response. She seemed just like a corpse. . . . Alec sent an e-mail from Bangkok. They like the school very much. Their home will be right next door, within walking distance. He was about to go to visit the US ambassador, arranged by Ken Yalowitz at my request.

March 25, 2004

NYC

Fakazis and Peter Constantine met me at the Yale Club and drove to Astoria to the Cosmos FM studios for an interview on the new Anthology, with Karen and Mike on the telephone. I read “31 B.C. in Alexandria” in Greek and English. Then to Columbia for the class on Christ Recrucified. The Greek novelist in the class said it wasn’t his cup of tea. . . . To the Met for Madame Butterfly. So moving. A real tear-jerker. Beautifully sung by a Chinese soprano, Liping Zhang, as Cio-Cio San, making her Met debut. Thunderous, prolonged applause at the end.

March 26, 2004

NYC

To 22nd Street and 9th Avenue to visit Izzy Ganz in an apartment she has kept in New York. Long breakfast together. She knows and has performed with Joseph Kubera, doing Cage. She’ll urge him to respond to me regarding Kendal. Also, she could come in May 2005 with a pianist to do a show of Gershwin and other musical comedy songs, re-arranged. That would be marvelous. She’s a successful survivor of breast cancer as I am of prostate cancer. How nice! She’s performing on Sunday across from the street where she grew up. . . . Then lunch with Michael Groden, in NYC for six weeks to teach a course on Ulysses at the YMHA. He says they’d like to invite me again to the Dartmouth Club of Toronto. His Joyce archive has been stymied by Steven Joyce, who considers Michael an “enemy.” I told him about Patroclos Stavrou, à propos. Michael is going to receive an honorary degree in Dublin on Bloom’s Day.

March 28, 2004

I performed Goldberg Variations #s 19 & 22, preceded by some remarks about the Urtext, which has no tempi, no dynamics, no phrasing marked, no articulation. Thus full interpretation is left to the performer. And the various recordings I’ve heard are totally different in tempo, etc.

March 29, 2004

Two hour War/Peace meeting still stewing about what happened to Ron Edsforth. Ross Virginia came up with a good idea toward the end, and he and I will try to draft a statement. Our hope is that the College can somehow offer Ron another course, or a section of Social Science 1, as opposed to trying to restore him to our core course.

April 1, 2004

NYC

Surprising class, because everyone liked Fratricides. Registered students described ideas for term papers. One wants to write a series of poems. . . . To the Met for Rigoletto, beautifully sung by Olga Makarina as Gilda. Sad, but fortunately not a tear-jerker like Madame Butterfly last week.

April 2, 2004

NYC

Long lunch at the Yale Club with Constance Tagopoulos. John Rassias hoped that I’d convince her to join with him in the Spyridon effort, but she views this as futile and hopes that John himself will abandon Spyridon. Later, I conveyed this view to John, who vows not to change. I told him that I could no longer support him and withdrew from the committee. Apparently the Patriarch has announced that he will defrock Spyridon if he persists in these efforts.

April 5, 2004

With Otmar Foelsche, sent our proposal to Peter Patrikis for funding of the website. Yukari Itsuki has begun work already. . . . Back at Kendal, I spoke on the nature of silence at the first of a series of meetings to acquaint people with Quakerism.

April 8, 2004

NYC

After class, met Jeff Murphy at Four Seasons, another frightfully expensive restaurant. Poor man, he earned $1,000,000 last year, but is lonely and bored at work. And he commutes four hours a day. I’m trying to interest him in Kendal.

April 10, 2004

Piano practice all day today and also last night, with Alice, perfecting our four Townsend pieces for the Kinhaven workshop. We made considerable progress. The pieces are brilliant. Also, for two hours, attended the celebration honoring Richard Eberhart on his 100th birthday: children, grandchildren, neighbors, friends. I read three poems at the start, and then ended the event by reading “The goal of intellectual man / Striving to do what he can / To bring down out of uncreated light / Illumination to our night . . .” How nice that we celebrated the arts in this way, as we did in NYC for Balanchine’s 100th a few months ago!

April 14, 2004

NYC

To Martha Graham ballet at the City Center, filled with memories of our many nights ca. 1956–60 watching Balanchine’s ballet. Graham style is so different. Long skirts, jerky movements, political innuendoes, preponderance of women. Tonight’s program: “Satyric Festival Song,” short, for a single dancer. Then “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which is whimsical. Then “Cave of the Heart,” which begins and ends with dancing to silence, à la Cage, I suppose. Good music by Samuel Barber. Finally “Chronicle”: anti-war, all women in black. Interesting, but everything lacked the Balanchine magic.

April 15, 2004

NYC

The class was very moved by The Last Temptation. Again, good discussion. The two hours go so quickly, so easily.

April 16, 2004

Pendle Hill

Again, Pubs did not select any of the pamphlets submitted. And we have no more waiting to be judged. No submissions—strangely. Is this just a quirk, or is there a reason? We are mystified. Some good additions to the committee, especially Jim Rosen, the man who voluntarily is putting all the out-of-print pamphlets on the web.

April 17, 2004

Pendle Hill

The first meeting of the new Communications Committee, clerked well by Kenneth Sutton (he managed to keep me quiet). Bob McCoy stunned me by declaring that in the new governance system the Pubs Committee is only advisory to him; he can act as he pleases. Tom Corl came in and confided that this is true. I was close to announcing my resignation, convinced that this is a sabotage (wished by Steve B., of course) of Quaker process. Afterwards, however, Bob pledged that little would change. Obviously he won’t veto or override the committee unless something awful happens. I informed everyone of the lack of new submissions for pamphlets and of all future prospects for books. . . . In the short trustees’ meeting, Steve announced that Denny O’Brien had overlooked some $200,000 that will swell the deficit. Denny tended his resignation, which Steve refused to accept. I pleased everyone when I compared this to the Farm School’s embezzlement of almost $1,000,000. . . . Yesterday in Meeting I ministered on the 10,000 galaxies discovered by the Hubble telescope and the extraordinary meaning this should have for all of us.

April 18, 2004

Pendle Hill, Crosslands

Practiced Townsend a bit. Much work still needed. Drove to Crosslands with Tony Manousos, who was scheduled to interview Yuki in connection with his book on the Brintons. I spoke to the Crossland Quakers on the Hubble telescope and Epictetus and Kierkegaard’s three stages, an approach to a philosophy of living and dying. Lots of questions afterwards. Margaret Hope Bacon was my host, and I even got an (unexpected) honorarium of $100. . . . Then to Philadelphia for supper with Alec and family. Lots of books read to the children. Talk mostly about the forthcoming job in Bangkok, storage of belongings at Daphne’s and the farm, and Alec’s final chore to have a will drafted. I urged him to get some life insurance as well . . . Chrysanthi telephoned, very worried, as expected, by my flight tomorrow.

April 19, 2004

Pendle Hill—flight to Frankfort

Unexpected meeting with Rebecca Mays at Pendle Hill and long talk after lunch. She’s still trying to return to Pendle Hill in some capacity, and so far has failed to land another job. She explained that the change I experienced in the Communications Committee was precisely what caused the break between her and Steve, he insisting that the Pubs Committee be merely advisory and she refusing to accept that owing to her continued faith in Quaker corporate process. She has good ideas for putting some oomph back into the pamphlet undertaking. But will Steve allow her to return? Doubtful. They have an appointment on Wednesday.

April 20, 2004

To Athens, Hotel Akropolis House, Kodrou 6, 210 32.22.344

Even on the bus from the airport my cell phone rang: Ritsa. We’ll meet tomorrow. Then on the subway it rang again: Christos. We’ll meet at the hotel in half an hour. So, hardly settled as I was in this old-fashioned hotel that costs only 50 euros a night (with breakfast), Christos arrived and we had a good chance to talk. But then Don Nielsen arrived with his girlfriend Lia. He took me to a tiny restaurant run by a Frenchman. Communal tables (like those in the Deerfield Inn). Excellent non-Greek food. Lots of good talk. Among other things I discovered that Don has a long acquaintance with Manny Stefanakis, the newly elected president of the American Farm School, plus a relationship with his wife. He says we did very well. He also works with Ambassador Miller’s wife and hopes, through her, to get invited to the AFS dinner at the embassy on June 25. I hope he’ll help me with my Kendal scheme. Lia, although at first saying Greeks don’t do it that way, came round quickly to agreeing.

April 21, 2004

Athens

A very full day. To the Ίδρυμα Ουράνη, only to discover, of course, that they don’t write checks (why didn’t they tell me this before?) but rather send money by cable. They need the name of the bank, tracking number, etc. I telephoned UPNE later, got the information, and will return to Ouranis tomorrow. To the Benaki Museum to say hello to Angelos Delivorrias, the director, friend from Princeton. He wasn’t there. I left a long note and then proceeded to photograph many of the portraits in the museum, although I fear that the reflected flash will ruin many of the photos. . . . To Monastiraki. Deposited 750 euros in the bank, added μονάδες to my cell phone, visited Christos in his office. He has a computer there, so luckily I was able to check e-mail. Filitsa asked me to write a reference for Popi, her daughter, which I did in Christos’s office and then mailed. Δολμαδάκια with Christos in a fine old-fashioned restaurant on Stadiou. At 5:00 Ritsa came. We talked for 1½ hours very freely and easily, then walked a bit in the Plaka to show me where the children’s museum is. After 8:00 Iakovos Tsalicoglou came with Ersi. We went to a tavern in the Plaka called Platania, which used to be the haunt of Katsimbalis, Seferis, and many other literary lights; their names are displayed in the upstairs room, and there’s a nice photo of Katsimbalis and Seferis and Leigh Fermor. Don Nielsen came, too, plus several other Dartmouth grads: an interesting man, class of ’52 but much older since he skipped many years; Stephanakis (?), who invited me once to Minneapolis, where, he remembered, I read Ritsos’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Plus another whom I remembered slightly. A very fine evening, until midnight.

April 22, 2004

Athens–Iraklio

Breakfast at the hotel with a nice American couple I met yesterday. Then back to the Ouranis Foundation with all the numbers they need to wire the money. Lots of talk with the two women there, Καραθάνου and one other. . . . Then to Θεανώ, who gave me various materials for realia. She no longer has the commission to do the new Acropolis Museum; the award was made illegally, she admitted. She’s waiting anxiously to see the finished Greek Today. Stopped at the Μέγαρο Μουσικής to get a brochure that might be useful for realia. (I’ve been photographing everything of interest I see.) Then to Patroclos Stavrou way way up on Harilaou Trikoupi. He talked non-stop for 1¾ hours about the Cyprus mess, how good he was to Eleni Kazantzaki, how horribly both Anemoyannis and Stassinakis have behaved toward him, cursing him, accusing him of nefarious motives, etc., about the Selected Letters (I explained and tried to justify the delay), about Mrs. Kazantzakis’s letter of permission that no longer has validity, he claimed. But he insisted that he would issue his own permission. I said I hoped to complete Politics of the Spirit, volume 2 in three years. Then come the letters. Finally he had photos taken of him and me, with and without his assistant in the shop. The rooms he showed me next to the shop are chaotic. Piles and piles of Kazantzakis’s publications and manuscripts lying on the floor. Huge boxes from Geneva still unopened. He said that he hopes to undo the Varvari Museum, claiming that Anemoyannis has the best materials in his house and never gave them to the museum. What a mess! Finally in the street as I was departing he said he hoped I would say some words of appreciation regarding him when I speak tomorrow at the symposium. Θα δούμε . . . In Iraklio, Ava met me at the airport (how nice) and drove me home. Stelios very open about his cancer, which seems very serious: a large tumor pressing on the liver. But it has responded well, so far, to chemotherapy. It started, apparently, in his knee, which was operated on some years ago. But obviously something remained, and traveled. He’s in good spirits, working normally, and optimistic. But . . .! Local bus to Rethymno, arriving after 11:00 p.m. We’re housed in To Σπίτι της Ευρώπης, owned by the university. Luckily, I was placed in a ground floor room to which the deafening music of the bar next door did not penetrate. To Σπίτι is opposite the entrance to the μικρό λιμάνι, the Venetian harbor. The sea is out front. Lovely.

April 23, 2004

Rethymno

I spent most of the morning, after a leisurely interval talking with a colleague from Moscow and his wife, searching for the post office, which allowed me to walk through a good part of the city center, swarming with tourists, very picturesque. Mailed various presents given me, including a beautiful album of photographs from one of the Dartmouth grads. The symposium, very much part of the πολιτιστική Ολυμπιάδα, began at 7:00 p.m. in the Οδείον Ρεθύμνου, actually a Venetian building with beautiful vaulted ceilings, which became a mosque and is now a cultural center. After tons of “greetings,” one of which was by the eloquent mayor of Varvari, whom I remembered, of course, and who greeted me effusively later, Stylianos Alexiou opened the proceedings, noting at first that Galatea Alexiou was his aunt and that of course he had met Kazantzakis. He is somewhat infirm (maybe had a stroke) but still fully lucid. I followed with my talk on Kazantzakis’s play Καποδίστριας. He and I, as keynote speakers, were given 30 minutes instead of 20. Then the whole gang went next door to the museum, which had an exhibit on the Kazantzakis-Prevelakis friendship, with lots of photos, manuscripts, etc.

April 24, 2004

Rethymno

By bus to the new university campus at Γάλλος. A full day of talks, with lunch in the faculty cafeteria and a siesta in the hotel. In the evening a full meal in a village, very festive, followed by four young musicians, including a vivacious priest, singing traditional Cretan songs: lyra, guitar, drum. Beautiful young waitress. I sat between Roddy Beaton and a professor from Ghent who discovered that Kazantzakis plagiarized his Ph.D. dissertation on Nietzsche from French sources. Across the table, a gentleman from Χανιά whom I met when we had the symposium there and who wrote the προσωπογραφία του Καπετάν Μιχάλη that I have. Excellent talk earlier by Αγγέλα Καστρινάκη on the anti-nationalism of Zorba, very much like my “mellowed nationalism,” which I’ll send her. We had a comfortable talk at dinner. She’s very feminist, of course. Home at 12:30 a.m. but thankfully the café music, which apparently continued until 5:00 a.m., didn’t penetrate my room.

April 25, 2004

Rethymno–Iraklio–Athens

More talks in the morning, including by Έρη Σταυροπούλου, Π. Ροϊλός, and Δημηρούλης, who was especially good. Then Δημήτρης Γουνελάς and I went by taxi to the bus station and by bus to Iraklio, but I, having been in touch with Stelios and Ava, got off a bit before the town and was promptly met. Again to their home, with a friend from Paris. Time to check e-mail. (An Athenian newspaper wants to interview me; it will have to be by telephone on Tuesday.) My spiel again (earlier to Gounelas, now to the Parisian friend) about Kendal; apparently there are no CCRCs in France. They all see the need. Sweet Ava drove me to the airport, and we parted, wishing that Stelios’s cancer will subside and not return. Μακάρι! . . . Stelios got me a discount at the Sofitel, 198 euros instead of 245. Very comfortable and obviously much better than going all the way to town and returning at 5:00 a.m. . . . In the airport, and everywhere, I took photos for the website with the digital camera lent me by Otmar—several hundred. Many, I fear, will be unacceptable because I used flash when I shouldn’t have. . . . Throughout the symposium, speaker after speaker referred to my writings on Kazantzakis, usually to agree, sometimes mildly to disagree. I seem to be considered by all (including Patroclos Stavrou) to be the leading Kazantzakis scholar. Lots of people said they are eagerly awaiting volume 2 of Politics of the Spirit. Will I ever finish it? Judging by the pace achieved this year, it will take a quarter-century and I’ll be 105 years old. I told Stavrou three years. Then the Selected Letters. Unlikely.

April 26, 2004

Athens–Munich–Philadelphia–Manchester–Hanover

What a trip! I started in Athens airport at 6:30 a.m. Arrived in Hanover at 12:00 midnight. Total: 24½ hours.

April 29, 2004

A disappointing class, because two of the three students meant to report conked out, leaving only Joanna, who did well. This leaves six for next week—too many. But afterwards I was happy to go to a talk before the ballet, by Hanna, a new soloist, who described his training (he came to NYC at age 12), his thrill at being elevated to soloist status, etc. This was held in the “Rose Building” next to Juilliard. Nice to see the rehearsal rooms for ballet, to meet two young aspirants, and to see scores of other young folks pursuing ballet and other arts. The program began with “Walpurgisnacht,” which had nothing to do with the title but was all serenity and grace. Then came “Liebeslieder Waltzer,” the only Balanchine ballet that ever bored me. The dancers were too fully dressed to be attractive, and Brahms’s interesting four-hand piano music was spoiled by the four singers who drowned it out. But the final ballet, “Symphony in C,” was delicious, both soloists and corps performing the accustomed Balanchine miracles.

April 30, 2004

AMTRAK delayed three hours. My return took nine hours. Dan and Penny Southard (from the Alumni cruise last May) visited and joined us for supper at Kendal followed by a tour.

May 3, 2004.

A long two-hour lunch with Steve Scher, who looks very old and is walking with a cane and has balance problems. Next week he is going to have surgery: an artificial hip. But he is still excited about opera, music, and literature.

May 5, 2004

A long day. Up at 5:30 a.m. Drove to Amherst for Greek exams: one rather poor student, another brilliant, hoping to do a Ph.D. in linguistics, already learning Chinese and Swedish besides Greek—an easy “A.” . . . Then to NYC. Yale Club supper. Then ballet at 7:30. Another Balanchine gala, complete with vodka toast. The idea was to present all the elements of his talent. Thus Placido Domingo sang, Wynton Marsalis played Gershwin on the trumpet, players from the Philharmonic performed as did singers from the NYC opera. Very interesting were numerous film clips in which Balanchine spoke, or Balanchine and Stravinsky kidded around. And of course there were dances: “Harlequinade” done by children of the School of American Ballet, “Dance Concertante” done by my favorites, Yvonne Boree and Peter Boal, “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet,” the gypsy rondo done spectacularly (of course) by Damian Woetzel and Wendy Whelan, an excerpt (thankfully) from “Liebeslieder Waltzes,” which I again found boring, the 2nd movement of “Concerto Barocco” danced beautifully by Maria Kowroski, “The Man I Love” with Nilas Martins, and then the Rosenkavalier finale from “Vienna Waltzes,” spectacular with the stage filled with beautiful women in long silk dresses, all white, waltzing merrily. A treat!

May 6, 2004

New York City

To Daphne’s. Heard more about the imbroglio concerning their Riparius house. With luck they can buy out the purchaser, who threatens to sue them. What a shame! In any case, Daphne advises us to remove anything we desire this weekend, including the canoe. . . . To Patelson’s to buy Schubert sonatas. I listed to Dino Lupu playing two of them yesterday and want to try. . . . To Columbia for lunch with Karen Van Dyck. Next year the Columbia program will have Mazower, Calotychos, Gourgouris. Splendid! She asked if my students now know more about how to approach a work of literature. She needs to ask them. We never did anything in class expanding critical techniques, but of course I gave them many examples of my own writing, which perhaps can serve as models. . . . Class had 4 of the 6 meant to present their papers today, which meant that we did get through with everything by 6:00 p.m. The presentations were really quite fine, and included a series of poems by a nice man, an actor, who is a bibliophile and brought for my signature first editions of the Kazantzakis novels, my Politics of the Spirit, and even my L. P. Hartley. . . . To the ballet again. First a talk about Balanchine’s extraordinary authority among the dancers; then about individual works. These works, all by Austrian composers, show the huge diversity of Balanchine’s styles: Mozart’s Divertimento no. 5 with the girls in tutus, traditional; then Episodes, music by Webern, dancers in leotards and tights, very abstract; the finale, based on Bach, being the best, both musically and as danced by Kowroski and Askagard. Finally, and amazingly, the complete Vienna Waltzes, all five; as always, a bravura performance.

May 7, 2004

New York City–Hanover

Up early to get to Andrew’s school, St. David’s, at 8:15 a.m., walking along Park Avenue, watching all the little rich kids being brought to school, in order to read a story to the class, this time about a mosquito. The children remembered that last time I read a pirate story. Andrew introduced me again as “chocolate man.” Then some more strolling on Madison Avenue before arriving at Marymount at 9:30 a.m. for grandparents’ day. Auditorium filled. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade girls, all in identical uniforms, marched to the stage and then sang beautifully, with excellent enunciation, so that every word could be understood, many fun songs and many about conserving water, which is the school’s project at the moment. The conductor is a young girl obviously well trained. Some choice remarks after a “peace song” about how appropriate that is today. The head of school, Sister Fagan, spoke nicely about family values and the importance of the extended family. Then to Christina’s 2nd grade classroom to see her writing—little stories she composed—, some drawings, etc. Next, she led us to the science room to see what they’d been doing regarding worms and larvae and moths. A lovely experience. . . . Brunch at the Yale Club, AMTRAK, late as usual, back to Springfield. We had planned to drive to the farm but it was too late, so we headed back to Hanover. I was fine, but just two miles from home, ascending West Wheelock Street, I fell asleep and swerved to the right, hitting the curb and slashing the tire. A policeman pulled up and called AAA. So, finally the spare was affixed and we got home at midnight. Fortunately I didn’t hit anyone else! Also, it didn’t happen somewhere on Interstate 91, where we would have been out of touch, since in addition my cell phone’s battery was exhausted. So, all’s well.

May 8–9, 2004

Riparius

Arrived at 1:00 p.m. Greg and Alec already at work at Daphne’s emptying things and making trips to the dump. We transferred much to Terpni: aluminum canoe, tools, a large crowbar, tiller, etc. I started the White mower, tilled the garden for potatoes and string beans, started the John Deere, nailed our “Stop” sign back on to its tree, fertilized all the fruit trees, propped up a garden fence-post.

May 10, 2004

Spoke to the Professors’ Colloquium at Kendal on the Fall of Constantinople. Learned that Patrikis’s consortium denied our application for $4000 for the website. What to do now? Tested 3 New Orleans students via telephone.

May 13, 2004

Washington

To DC by plane, leaving at 6:15 a.m. Taxi to Georgetown University, now very familiar. Luckily, Jim Alatis was in his office, together with Ai-Hui Tan—so nice to see her again. He was the perfect host, introducing me to Κυρία Ρασιά, the teacher sent by the Greek government, who prepared students to read poems at our presentation. Then a comfortable lunch with him in the Faculty Club in the Leavey Center. I kept accessing my e-mail to see if Ioanna M. had sent her essay. Nothing. Nor has it arrived by post to Hanover. Found an empty classroom and worked several hours entering financial data in my Assets file. Then soup and apple pie in the Faculty Club. At 6:30 p.m. we gathered in the ICS auditorium. Constance Tagopoulos, Peter Constantine, and Yannis Fakazis arrived, sweating after a six-hour car ride with no air conditioning, Constance walking with difficulty, using a cane. At 7:00, no audience. They arrive at “Greek time,” a half hour late. So we began. Jim introduced Constance, Constance introduced the two Peters. The students read in both Greek and English, not too badly. Then Peter and I responded to questions. I was able to read “31 BC in Alexandria” and to summarize my article on rhymed translation. But I never had a chance to do “The Moonlight Sonata” although I was fully prepared. Luckily, my former student at Harvard, Peter Forbes, came. We finished at 9:05. I called Deanna’s cell phone as pre-arranged, and Peter drove me in 10 minutes to the Kennedy Center. Good coordination. Sophia and Nikos of course stayed up. Hugs and kisses. Both played their piano pieces, very well. Both have perfect pitch. Then Nikos read aloud an entire Dr. Seuss book, “Green Eggs and Ham.” He’s a precocious reader. Lots of talk afterwards with Leander and Deanna about the Tebbe mess at the farm, and about Deanna’s forthcoming sabbatical. Last look at the computer to see if Ioanna had sent her essay. No. My grades are due tomorrow. To sleep at midnight.

May 14, 2004

Washington–Philadelphia

Up at 6:10 a.m. Leander drove me to the Rockville Metro station, AMTRAK to Philadelphia. AVIS to Pendle Hill. Nice to see John Punshon again. Steve startled me by noting that he hopes to replace Bob McCoy (but also to help him find another job) with Paul Rasor in charge of pamphlets, and perhaps to upgrade Donna. A manuscript edited by Donna still had lots of technical errors. Discouraging. Books are suspended for at least three years unless a Cary-type windfall occurs. In our board meeting and afterwards in the trustees’ retreat, Will Stratton got hot under the collar, threatening to quit the board, etc., mostly because Tom Corl accused him of disrespect toward Steve. Steve spoke at length about the Peace Network and, as usual, requested our full support. After he left we discussed at length this method of his, to present something that he alone has concocted, without consulting us (like the scheme to replace McCoy with Paul Rasor), and then to solicit unswerving support or “ownership.” I called it a red herring. Why “own” something that we have not helped to generate?

May 16, 2004

Pendle Hill–Hanover

On the last day of the retreat we said nice things to Gay Berger about her clerkship, which is now taken by Tom. I called it “rational.” In the silent worship preceding our final session, I ministered using the French push-pull coffee pot as a metaphor. We put in the coffee (subject matter), then pour in boiling water (discussion, divergent viewpoints); all this churns around a bit; then we depress the piston, pushing the coffee grounds into quietness and stability (silent worship), and it’s only then, after the cohesiveness of worship, that the coffee is ready to pour. . . . Stupidly, returning the Avis car, I left the keys, but together with them also all my own car keys. Will I ever get them back? . . . Twice I spoke to Wendelee O’Brien about Denny’s mistake. We decided to restore the self-imposed salary drop of $10,000. She was so appreciative of the restoration but also of the openness, the chance to talk frankly about his chagrin.

May 17, 2004

Dan Connolly, our lawyer, came for a review of wills and trusts. Everything seems in order. And we probably won’t be exposed to estate tax since the threshold is rising and our worth is falling.

May 18, 2004

Joe Mehling, the College Photographer, did some lovely portraits of me, prompted by Joan Williams’s wish to do a sculptured bust working from photos. . . . To the Fleet Trust Department for a review of our finances, down to about $3,000,000, but more than enough to keep us comfortably at Kendal.

May 19, 2004

Met with Yukari, who is doing our website (no money from Patrikis, but Otmar has pledged $1500). She’ll make a “gallery” from the photos I took in Athens and Rethymno.

May 21, 2004

Dickey Center lunch with a journalist back from six months in Iraq. He said that the New York Times never pressured him not to publish something.

May 22, 2004

Cambridge

To the A.R.T. for Oedipus, with Mike and Elaine Antonakes. John Campion, a splendid actor, played the lead. Stephanie Roth-Haberl was a beautiful, although perhaps overly frantic, Jacosta. Tom Derrah led the chorus, which recited in Greek (!) accompanied by supertitles, a brilliant ploy that allowed the chorus to sing and at the same time to be understood. All voices were enhanced electronically, which I found annoying and unnecessary. . . . Nice dinner afterwards on Mass Ave. with the Antonakides, who are busy and productive in retirement. Overnight at the Beacon Hill Friends House, a Bulfinch structure built in 1803, once very grand, now a mixture of grandeur and shabbiness. Lovely library, where I worked on the photos for our website.

May 23, 2004

Breakfast at a hotel to avoid the filthy kitchen at Beacon Friends. Then to Park Street Church (where I’d last been in 1949, with John Harvey, to hear Billy Graham). We witnessed a children’s cantata on Nicodemus, followed by a rousing sermon preaching the need to be born again. Congregation repeatedly applauded the children. Disgusting. A performance rather than a liturgy. . . . Then Friends Meeting, a very lively young group. Kenneth Sutton was there, plus some Dartmouth grads. Ministry about gay marriage (of course). . . . To the Malliotis Center for another presentation of our Anthology, with Peter Constantine. So nice to see there the Metaxases, Dia, Eva, Lily, even Alex Drapos bringing Manny Stefanakis, the new president of the American Farm School, to meet me. I was able to read “The Moonlight Sonata” this time, plus Sikelianos’s “Agraphon.”

May 24, 2004

Chinese supper with the Nodas, Arnolds, Hunters, and Sydney Jarvis to celebrate her 80th birthday and my 74th. Also Roger Soderberg. . . . Earlier, met with Yukari Itsaki to do more on the Greek Today website, a new adventure for me. I’ve made “screen shots” (i.e. graphics) of pages with Greek text on the computer. These she can place directly into the site.

May 25, 2004.

Supper with the Mitchells, always interesting. Then to the Bairds’ beautiful house in Lyme for Quaker 8s with the Feustels, Cadwalladers, and Judith Pettingell. Don Stacey absent, alas. They picked one of the slips I had placed in the basket. Epictetus. We had lots of fun with Stoicism and rationality

May 26, 2004

To UPNE to go over errors again in the Greek Today proofs. We’re finishing . . . slowly. Tonight, music with Dick alone, Allan busy. Did the Prokofiev sonata and some more modern music.

May 27, 2004

Supper with the Nicholsons. She had asked me to recruit eight officiants for the Sunday interfaith services at Kendal next year. I was able to give her the list.

May 28, 2004

Happy Birthday from Chrysanthi and a present of two new shirts. Retirement luncheon at the Hanover Inn for David Montgomery with several of his former Ph.D. students eulogizing him fondly. Ag Pytte was at my table, and Roger Soderberg and Bill Doyle. David spoke well in response. The whole thing was very dignified. . . . In the evening I put on my tuxedo to go to Sanborn for the retirement dinner for Alan Gaylord and Jim Heffernan, which was less dignified because the testimonials were so exaggerated and because neither retiree responded very meaningfully, Heffernan doing a parody of Wordsworth. But it was nice to interact with former colleagues like Lou Renza and Peter Cosgrove (the Irishman).

May 29, 2004

Terpni

To the farm. Planted tomatoes, covered with Reemay against frost. Mowed. Set up my office.

June 1, 2004

Pendle Hill

Pubs meeting. Miraculously, we said Yes to two of the three submissions. Fewer and fewer manuscripts are arriving, perhaps because we no longer have Rebecca to cultivate authors. Played the Yamaha here last night. Today went to Janeal’s exhibit resulting from her seven days in prison for civil disobedience. What degradation!

June 2, 2004

Another full day. To Otmar early concerning the website. Then Dickey lunch to select new War/Peace Fellows—a good panel of applicants, making me proud of Dartmouth. And, big surprise, Al Stam announced he’ll be teaching his regular government department course, which means that Ron Edsforth will do the Introduction to Peace Studies after all—a final resolution for a problem that has plagued us all year. . . . Music with Dick and Allan at night. But news that Classicopia advertised that their June 4 concert at Kendal will be selling tickets at the door for $10 each. Against Kendal policy. Huntley Allison demanded that the concert be canceled, joined in this, alas, by Gordon Browne, president of the Residents Council. All my work organizing this, for nothing. Small-minded, legalistic people.

June 3, 2004

Marcia Colligan, Classicopia’s manager, asked for a hearing. So she, Huntley, Gordon, Nancy Prosser, and I gathered. Marcia apologized, said it was just an error, and that it has been corrected (today’s newspaper withdrew the $10 notice and Kendal performance). Nancy and I pleaded to let the concert occur. I spoke about the difference between act and intention. Here the intention was pure. Gordon’s reaction: “Don’t get intellectual.” They wouldn’t budge. A rule’s a rule. So I returned the $500 check to Kendal. (Nancy and I agreed to pay $125 each out of our pockets, and later I gave them another $250.) I contacted three lawyers subsequently, all of whom said that we had broken a contract and that if Classicopia sued us we’d lose the case. Oh well . . . My first disagreeable experience at Kendal.

Saturday, June 5, 2004

I performed at Kendal: “Odysseus Across the Centuries.” Full audience. Amazing that Kendal people come out even for poetry.

Sunday, June 6, 2004

Good Meeting this morning. Then pleasant lunch with the Nodas, and Kesaya and Chris Dye, who seem to be living together now. Very nice! In the afternoon I went to the Classicopia concert that we had canceled. This time at the Roth Center: a program of Jewish composers: Block, Milhaud, Kreisler, etc. Lots of verve and fun.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Terpni–Kinhaven

Moved to Terpni on June 7th. Refrigerator doesn’t work. Sears man came. Faulty compressor. More $$ to fix than to buy a new one. So today we went to Sears in Queensbury and ordered a replacement. Met Irv Shapiro at the Buick place where we went for an oil change. Arrived at Kinhaven in time for a delicious supper prepared by Sue. Lots of old friends have returned. Alice is here, having had a two-hour lesson with Douglas Townsend in New York. He gave her a cassette with one piece played in his arrangement for orchestra.

Friday, June 11, 2004

Lots of practice with Alice and alone. We’re still quite unsteady on the Townsend. Lovely faculty four-hand recital with Leander doing some very interesting modern pieces by Robert Russell, playing with Nancy Breth, and then Mendelssohn’s spectacular Andante and Allegro Brilliant, opus 92, playing with Chonghyo Shin. Mrs. Shin wants to play at Kendal in September. I’ll try to arrange it.

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Very good coaching by Leander on the first Townsend piece: a world of difference just by observing details. In the afternoon, Nigel Coxe played a solo recital masterfully: Haydn sonata in C, Beethoven sonata, opus 26, and Liszt: Sonetto 104 del Petrarca, Waldesrauschen, Soirées de Vienne #6. He has total control: such marvelous pianos and pianissimos. The Haydn especially was exquisite; also the Liszt Soirées, based on Schubert, perfect for a Balanchine ballet. I asked Nigel if he’d repeat the program at Kendal and he said Yes. . . . Then at 7:15 we did our solo recital. I was first with Goldberg variations #s 22 and 19. I made new mistakes in places that never troubled me before, but kept going each time and did not make errors when I did the repeats. Lots of people afterwards said they appreciated the interpretations. Alice played very musically: Six Preludes by Paul Bowles. Steve Kline was ambitious: some Scriabin preludes. A new man, Victor Dyni, attacked the Brahms Capriccio in G and the Liszt Sonetto 104 del Petrarco like an intelligent gorilla. What a travesty, especially compared to Nigel’s Liszt earlier. Bruno Repp played well, as always. Alma Rhodes did the famous Schumann “Aufschwung”; Charlotte Armstrong did a lovely Chopin nocturne, etc.

Sunday, June 13, 2004

Chrysanthi and I went to the Priory. No service because the brothers are on retreat. I bought a bookmark with a portrait of Dorothy Day on it. The monks are dedicated to peace. All war, the Pope has said, is a defeat for mankind. . . . I had a lesson with Chunghyo that didn’t amount to much: basically a question of raising and lowering the wrist to get smoother sequence of notes. We enlisted Robin Williams to turn pages for us, a big help. Alice is still getting mixed up in some sections, and I’m still “cheating “here and there. . . . Nigel did a fine master class with Susan Alexander playing a Chopin nocturne and Margie Patterson the Chopin Ballade in F minor, which is extraordinary. In the evening, at wine and cheese, I had a long talk with Nigel about Kendal. Alas, he cannot come, even though he put in his $1000 and has been in touch repeatedly. The problem is Massachusetts, which has its own pension and health system (both inadequate) for State employees, which means that he doesn’t have either Social Security or Medicare. Horrible! He sees no solution at the moment. Again, I realize how blessed we are to be in Kendal and able to afford it.

Monday, June 14, 2004

Practiced with Alice on the concert hall piano (Miss Mann’s) at 6:00 a.m. and had a run-through with Robin turning pages. Lesson with Nigel at 9:00 a.m., very helpful. He wants us to make this lovely music less ponderous. After supper, splendid solo recital by Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a demanding program: Brahms’ variations on a theme by Schumann, Webern’s Variations, Beethoven’s sonata opus. 7, plus a lovely Mozart rondo as an encore. Played with superlative technique wedded to sympathy and lovely musicianship. Nice to visit with him a bit at the reception.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Our day! Lots of good four-hand music, especially “Dolly” (Marty Starr and Judy Risch), Mendelssohn’s “Andante and Variations” (spectacular: Addie Edelson and Alan Robinson), Smetana’s “Moldau” (Margie Patterson and Robin Williams), Reger Waltzes (Michi Tashjian and Steve Kline, perfect for a Balanchine ballet), Bizet “Jeux d’enfants” (Alma Rhodes and Bruno Repp, including those I’ve tried to play), and of course Townsend’s “Four Fantasies on American Folksongs” (Peter Bien and Alice Buseck). Of course I made mistakes, some in places never troublesome before, but we covered them fairly well. The piece was very well received. . . . Back to Terpni. Leander arrived at 6:30 and we went to the Copperfield Inn for a nice dinner. Saw Jerry Gardner’s lovely daughter there. Talked about poor Nigel’s situation.

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Albany–Philadelphia

To Albany after fetching a new wheelbarrow tire. Garage people most impressed that I’d had the old tire 52 years. Also got 60 Lipitor pills from the North Creek pharmacy. All set to go. Routine flights Albany-Philadelphia (met Charlotte Armstrong in the Albany airport’s McDonald’s). But Philadelphia stormy. Sat in the plane for three hours until the weather cleared. Happily in business class.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Frankfort–Thessaloniki

Missed our connecting flight, of course. Booked for a 6:30 p.m. flight. Spent five hours in the United Air Club, very comfortably. Met at Thessaloniki airport (which is doubling in size) by George Koualizides. Our quarters in Cincinnati Hall are fine: a corner room with cross ventilation and a balcony on which I am now sitting. Gail Schoppert and Ruth are here. Also saw Patti Buck and told her how beautiful Vermont is now, to cheer her up. Our total trip took 28 hours door to door.

Friday, June 18, 2004

Vouli came for breakfast. Lots of talk about Farm School people and activities. David Buck came to greet us. Talked more about a possible Kendal here. He sees no problem with the incompatibility with Farm School mission, or indeed with the presumed lower income than from, say, a supermarket. Must convince Stavros Constantinidis. To town with Vouli and Chrysanthi to the κομμοτήριο and I to the bank and to Germanos for 36 more μονάδες for my κινητό τηλέφωνο. Saw Κυρά Στέλλα, now 96 years old and unable to walk. But quite sound in mind. She is looked after by a live-in woman from Romania. . . . Then to Kostas to pay our respects. He broke down repeatedly in sobs and tears recounting how Lola died. Nikos is very attentive, telephoning every midday and visiting every evening. And the eight-year-old Constantinos comes to watch soccer with his Παππού. But Kostas’s life now must be very lonely and perhaps desperate. What a shame that the rest of the family never warmed up to him. Back to Vouli’s for lunch in a restaurant; tasteless. Taxi to AFS and siesta. I wanted to check my e-mail, but the library is closed until Monday. The whole place seems deserted. . . . David and Patti came again. Christine Willis came to say hello and to repeat that Pinewood would be looking for a head for 2005–06. Peter Baiter is leaving finally. There may be an interim head for one year. More interchange with Gail and Ruth Schoppert. . . . Finally Anthoula (Toula) arrived, after getting lost and going to the wrong “farm school.” She seems very strong, not at all devastated by Stavros’s death. They moved the Odeon further down the same street, also shifted their residence to the large house built in what seemed to me the edge of the city. This, plus Stavros’s sudden death, kept her on her toes. She still dreams of a summer music camp at the property in Χαλκιδική. She wants to come to America in July, to see Kinhaven in action. Μακάρι ! Έτσι, αντί να δούμε μια ταλαιπωρημένη, κουρασμένη, απελπισμένη γυναίκα, είδαμε κάποια που γεμάτη ήταν κέφι και σχέδια για το μέλλον. Ωραίο! To bed at 12:30 a.m.

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Checked e-mail at David’s beautiful house, full of relics from Kuala Lumpur, Prague, and Greece. Called Dick Jackson. I’ll visit him on Monday, regarding Kendal and also Albana, whom I propose to support next year. Then I joined the staff at their “environmental cleanup.” With a plastic bag and a surgical glove I went around the buildings picking up odd pieces of paper, candy wrappers, beer bottle tops, lots of cigarette butts, bird feathers, etc. Met Tasos Apostolidis, who was busy painting at the main gate. Lots of thanks for the CD, which he said was a pleasant experience for all concerned. Also saw Randy Warner and thanked her for all her efforts concerning the Marder history. Long talk as well with Thanos Kassapidis about the interns. He said they were very helpful but found difficulty applying the Rassias techniques in the classroom. Also, the one who spoke Greek, as soon as the students learned this, elicited Greek from them instead of English (as I had predicted). . . . Chrysanthi had gone off meanwhile with George and Odysseas to Lola’s grave, where they placed flowers, picked weeds, and listened to a priest intoning prayers. Then George and Chrysanthi returned and George and we had a lively extended conversation on our Cincinnati Hall porch. Then to his apartment, where Dimitris and Tilda had already arrived. Efthymoula served a splendid meal, as always. Lots of talk about education, politics, etc. Efthymoula related at length her episode being mauled by a huge wave while swimming last August. George still has prostate problems but takes medication and endures the side effects. Otherwise, both seemed relatively well, although Efthymoula seems somewhat depressed. Όταν της είπε η Χρυσάνθη, «Πες μας τα νεά σου», απήντησε, «Δεν έχω νέα. Ζω . . . » . . . Back at the school, we met Peter Schoppert and his Singaporian-Chinese wife. He heads Singapore University Press; she heads the Singapore historical museum. Both are around 40 years old. A Dartmouth grad, he studied Greek with Chrysanthi, then got a Fulbright to Singapore, where he met his future wife . . . and the rest, as they say, is history. . . . Ruth and Dimitris Gounelas came to get us around 8:00 p.m. His and Ruth’s home in Panorama is more beautiful than ever, overlooking Χορτιάτης. Ruth’s eyes are stable, but becoming very gradually worse with age. But she can still function well. Dimitris is no more comfortable in his department than before, but, like Ruth, able to function well enough. The brightest students go into medicine and engineering, others into philology. But maybe 30% are truly interested. One in 30 finds a job in public education; the rest make do somehow in φροντιστήρια, ιδιοτική εκπαίδευση, etc. The ND minister of education opposes ιδιοτικοποίηση των πανεπιστημίων, contrary to the party’s pre-election platform. Their son Frankiskos was there, very tall now, and about to go off to do computer studies at Imperial College, London, although his parents wish he’d stay in Greece. We passed along our general wisdom: “Never give advice.” Ruth thinks that my Kendal idea won’t work in Greece because everyone will assume it’s a γεροκομείο. Lots of education needed. Actually, we saw that the university’s Department of Music now has a building on the road to Θέρμη precisely near my ideal site for a Kendal; and other university programs are building there, including a theater. And there’s a technology museum, too. In short, next door to the hypothetical future Kendal will be a cultural center. . . . Back late; to bed at 1:00 a.m.

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Chrysanthi said that this is the first day she ever remembers doing nothing. Not quite. We had no plans and went nowhere. But I took 65 photos for the website, talked a lot to Gail Schoppert, read the newspaper (which has a beautiful section devoted to the Farm School), and got materials in order for the board meetings. We walked around the campus in the morning. Chrysanthi was delighted to discover a mulberry tree (μουριά). I ate a huge black mulberry and some small white ones. Very juicy. . . . With Gail and Ruth to an ouzeri in Thermi for supper. Chrysanthi said this was the first day in our married life that she observed me doing nothing. But I did take 65 photos.

Monday, June 21, 2004

David Acker lectured at 10:30 about new possibilities in agriculture, very effectively, with power point. Vouli then drove us to town. I took another 60 or so photos, mostly in the αγορά, of fish, fruit, and meat, with the labels. Then to Odysseas’s and Eleni’s for lunch on their porch (Kolokotroni 11). Lots of talk about Stavros and Toula. . . . Then taxi to Anatolia College to meet with Dick Jackson about Kendal. Anatolia won’t invest, but it will aid in various ways. He called Dr. Barich; we arranged to meet tomorrow. He also called Albana, who turned out to be in Athens but expects to see us in Thessaloniki before we leave. Jackson spoke of pending legislation in the EU that would legalize British-affiliated colleges here, but might mean the end of American colleges unless they “become British.” Therefore our Perrotis College should not change to a three- or four-year degree granting institution, but should remain a two-year institution, since these are not affected. . . . Out to a taverna by the sea with trustees and others, including beautiful Amber Kumera. Ducks and ducklings below.

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Intensive sessions of the board, organized by Gail Schoppert. I was in charge of the break-out group on computers, library, Greek summer, and secondary schools. We came up with a dozen or so goals that we conveyed and discussed in the plenary session that followed. Then Annie Levis drove me to town (Λευκός Πύργος, «Ζύθας») to meet Dr. Barich, president of AHEPA. He has plans to build a medical facility plus an Alzheimer’s unit on land just donated in the town of Λάκωμα, 4000 στέμματα. Two of his colleagues attended also, one a banker, the other a businessman who drove me back to the Farm School. They seem very interested. The plan is for me to speak now to John Diffey to see what the Kendal Corporation can and cannot offer. . . . Yesterday evening Stylianos telephoned from Athens. He’s coming to Thessaloniki but not until after we leave. He is very pleased with the Anthology and was glad to meet Peter Constantine in Sydney. I said that I hope to translate the three new poems that Peter brought back for me.

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

More on the strategic plan in the morning, led by Gail and by John Crunkilton. They distributed 20 little self-adhesive dots to each of us, and we placed as many as we wished on yesterday’s goals we wished to prioritize. A good trick! Lunch was provided by the College’s international students, from Kosovo, FYROM, Albania, etc. I had hoped to meet the Albanian, Elona Kaxhaj., whom I am sponsoring, but she wasn’t there. At 6:30 we left in a car provided by AFS (with driver) to go to Lakoma. Interstate-type highway most of the way. The village is a mix of traditional agriculture plus new industrial development. The surroundings are still mostly χοράφια, αμπέλια, etc. I was told, however, that it is becoming a suburb of Thessaloniki—i.e., people live there and commute each day to the city to work. Nothing much to offer: a café, church . . . But Kendal would attract more, probably. We clocked the return to School at 18 minutes & 25 kilometers. To the city center should be about 35 km. . . . At 4:30 I met with Thanos Kassapidis and the four interns. They complained about under-utilization in English-language instruction but approved the Rassias training, especially the games, more so than the finger-snapping technique. . . . At 5:15 Everett Marder drove us to the swanky Hyatt Hotel to meet with Brenda and the two women from the New York office: Sandra Vassos and Amber Kumera, about their plans (or lack of plans) to promote Brenda’s centenary history. They haven’t done much so far, but they had ideas about giving a copy to everyone at the Waldorf banquet. At 6:30 our ad hoc committee to revise the mission statement met around a table near the Hyatt’s pool. Manita, Mike, Kostas Kravas, Waring Partridge, and myself. Waring had already prepared a text and generally was assertive about each phrase. Kostas was mostly silent. Afterwards, as we drove to Stavros Constantinidis’s home for supper, we in a taxi, Costa and Manita in Costas’s car. Costas complained that he was intimidated by Waring and that the revised mission statement lacked “magic.” By this he meant that it emphasized the School’s work in agricultural instruction rather than emphasizing its values: integrity, internationalism, community rather than individualism, etc. Well said! . . . At the dinner party I had a long talk with Frank Bedjian about financing a Kendal-type CCRC, also with Chris Minoutis. Both think that banks will lend provided they have collateral. Dick Jackson was there; I told him all about the meeting with Barich.

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Secondary School meeting with Tasos and Pelagia largely conveying their needs and replying to questions we asked last July. I took notes and typed up everything later on the library computer (with difficulty: loss of saved document when the electricity cut off—they do this to prevent students from wasting memory with games). At 12:30 our mission committee met to revise in Costas’s spirit, adding “magic”! Then at 1:00 I ran to Cincinnati to meet Albana, the Albanian Perrotis graduate whom I’m supporting at Anatolia’s A.C.T. Hugs and kisses. Thousands of thanks. She is radiant, happy, industrious. She’s been caring for her brother, hospitalized in Athena. When I had to meet briefly with Tasos and Pelagia over lunch, she spoke to Chrysanthi, assuring her that I am a καλός άνθρωπος. She now speaks Greek fluently. After three more terms at A.C.T. she hopes to come to the USA for a master’s degree. I suggested that she go to Δημήτρης Ντούτης for help regarding US university programs. At 2:30, post-secondary committee, with Vergos giving a boring presentation during which I napped a bit. . . . At 6:30 p.m. a journalist preparing an article for Odyssey Magazine interviewed me about the School’s trustees. . . . Then a fancy outdoor supper in the olive grove. Then commencement at 9:00 (supposedly): an extravaganza dreamed up by Tasos. The usual speeches by “dignitaries”: one, looking at Bruce (who is very frail), said, Βλέπω τον Μπρους, που προσέφερε στην Ελλάδα περισσότερο από όλους τους πρέσβεις της Αμερικής. But, thankfully, these speeches were interrupted by προβολές: video scenes of students (mostly on the farm, very little in the classroom) in four series—fall, winter, spring, and summer—accompanied by classical music (Bach, etc.). Very nice. Then there was a “presidential pageant” with Father House and wife (Vouli!) on the balcony, then Charlie and Anne, then Bruce and Tad (for real), George and Charlotte Draper (for real), David and Patti Buck, and finally Van Stefanakis and Manolis, each group accompanied by a recital of chief accomplishments. (Manolis complained to me later that he was called Dr., which he isn’t, whereas Van, who is a Ph.D., was not.) Tasos Apostolidis spoke very well about the phenomenon of a 100-year history. Students received their diplomas “on video” (!), two at a time, to speed things up. The major talk was given by Hélène Glykatzi-Ahrweiler, now rector of the University of Europe. I slept through most of it because it had no relation to the AFS centenary, was about the evils of technology, whereas of course the school is attempting to make proper, constructive use of technology. Finally, prizes were given first by Vangelis Vergos for the College, then by Pelagia Vousa for the Eniaio Lykeio and the Techniko Epangelmatiko Ekpaideftirio (TEE). The calf produced a good laugh, as usual. One student received a full scholarship to Marymount College in the USA. Finally, the assembled students sang the Ethnikos Ymnos, horribly off key. Midnight. A lovely event, all-in-all.

Friday, June 25, 2004

Full meeting of the board. Alex allowed me to say something about my Kendal project. I explained the AHEPA possibility but hoped that the AFS possibility remained. I was told to bring in a business plan, indicating especially how much money would accrue to the School each year. My Secondary School report was vigorously criticized by Gail and others because it was mainly a wish list for the budget, something inappropriate for trustees. I tried to emphasize the hope to recruit minority students but didn’t receive much support. In sum, this didn’t go well at all. Even Annie, privately later, said she regretted my including Tasos’s and Pelagia’s dismay because only one resident trustee attended the Μέρα Μαϊού. We also had a debate about recruiting students from the entire extent of Greece instead of chiefly from Macedonia. John Cleave maintained that this was not a proper subject for trustees. I felt that it is a policy issue and thus very proper. In the middle of the morning I was called out because Tasos and Pelagia, very agitated, needed to show me what they called a “libel” just printed up by the three interns, who intended to distribute copies to all trustees. David vowed to prevent this. They said they received no support from Tasos and Pelagia, nor from the English language teachers, nor on the Yearbook project. Tasos told me that one of them had offered narcotics to students and had had sexual relations with one of the girls, as attested by her diary. Should he be sent home at once? That’s in David Buck’s hands. David isn’t convinced. . . . This is how we ended the week at the School. . . . At 3:00 we were bussed to the airport and flown to Athens, to the Andromeda Hotel. An hour for a shower and shave. Then to Ambassador and Mrs. Miller’s residence for a ceremonial dinner. Nice to find Don Nielsen there (he knows Mrs. Miller). Both Millers seemed very young, not at all pompous, very approachable. After dinner and the requisite (short) speech, Miller invited everyone to watch the great soccer game between Greece and France. (As we were walking home from the residence, huge shouts in the street confirmed that Greece had scored a goal, and indeed they won 1 to 0.) I brought Don up to date on the Kendal project. He says he might be able to help because he knows people who specialize in obtaining EU grants. I introduced him to Manolis, too. And Manolis and I, sitting next to each other at supper, had a chance to talk at length. He wants a copy of my AFS Quaker lecture and Greek Today (he needs to improve his reading and writing abilities and to extend his vocabulary). He said that he likes to operate “outside the box,” which in this case might mean ending the secondary schools and replacing them with a program attracting students from other secondary schools to visit, and work at, AFS for short periods, something like the Mountain School in Vermont, which I described to him.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Athens–Munich–Philadelphia–Albany

To bed last night at 11:30 (stayed up to watch Greece win the soccer game). Up this morning at 5:15. Taxi to airport. Routine flight to Monaco. Then to Philadelphia and Albany. Overnight in the Albany Marriott Hotel.

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Terpni

How nice to be here again! The new refrigerator came yesterday. Today Alec and family arrived in a huge U-haul truck pulling their car behind. We unloaded everything into his cabin and onto the porch, floor to ceiling. Hard work. They scarcely have room to walk in the house. Tried to get a mattress upstairs to the new bedroom but couldn’t. He’ll remove the banister tomorrow and try again.

Thursday, July 1, 2004

To Hanover

To Hanover with Chrysanthi so she can start her ALPS Greek course tomorrow. Brought my new 110 photos to Otmar to remove from the digital camera.

Saturday, July 3, 2004

To Cambridge

Brilliant production of Molière’s The Miser at the A.R.T. I want now to read L’Avare in French. Will it be quite so raunchy?

Tuesday, July 6, 2004

I organized the photos in categories for the website and brought them again to Otmar. He’ll send them to Yukari in Japan. Last night some of Chrysanthi’s students—a nice family about to go to Greece, friends of Manita’s—treated us to supper at the Inn. They can now say Θέλω νερό! . . . We drove to Saratoga and attended the ballet’s opening night, the high spot being of course “Apollo” with Hubbe and Darci Kistler, Bouder, Weese. Brilliant, both music and dance. Stravinsky/Robbins “Circus Polka” came first, danced entirely by children (all girls) in three waves of decreasing height. Then “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” with Soto, Borree, and finally “Cortège Hongrois.” Stephen Hanna, whom I’d heard speak in New York, was brilliant. So was Jennifer Ringer.

Saturday, July 10, 2004

Supper with Tom Akstens and Susanne Murtha, and Don Kurka and Maria (newly married). Susanne has a beautiful new studio for yoga classes, with a cork floor, all built expertly by Pinky O’Dell. Chrysanthi starts yoga with her on Monday. . . . Earlier, Direct TV installed a satellite dish, so we now have television in order to watch the Athens Olympics. A few days ago Radio Shack failed to get a signal; trees in the way. But Direct TV’s satellites are higher, so it works. The technology is amazing.

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Shapiros came for supper. Fran is 90+ and amazing. They still go canoeing.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

We celebrated our 49th anniversary a little early by going to the ballet and then eating steaks at a restaurant in Queensbury. Program: Hindemith/Balanchine “Four Temperaments.” Difficult, abstract, but a breakthrough for 1940. Then Wheeldon’s new “Shambards,” especially nice in its last movement, with lively fiddle and square dance motifs in James MacMillan’s score. Finally, the most fun: “Four Seasons” (Verdi/Robbins) with spectacular dancing especially by the men. Pure joy. . . . The other day, visited Donna and Ed in their new property in Johnsburg. They have built a picture-book outhouse. Nothing else, so far. They sleep in a camper. I’m glad that I pioneered when I was in my 20s rather than 60s or 70s.

Friday, July 16, 2004

Amazing! We unloaded a huge pile of junk at the dump, gathered laboriously from the top of the small barn. Included was all my childhood photographic equipment, including the Omega enlarger, my flood lights, etc. for the puppet show for TB relief when I was probably eight years old, the long fire hose given us by Elmer Pitkin when we had a pump by the pond, bits of roofing, bits of asbestos siding, old lamps, etc., etc., and four metal cots. Good riddance to bad rubbish! Lots of room upstairs now. We plan to clear the downstairs so that a vehicle can be stored there this winter. . . . This evening, to the circus in town. Elena was dancing to the rhythmic music. Amazing woman with hula hoops, twenty at a time. . . . Our anthology got a full-page review (along with Maskaleris’s) in the latest TLS: positive but really not very perceptive.

July 21, 2004

Two speckled fauns visited me in my office this morning, each about a meter long only, staring at me, without fear, from a distance of ten feet. They disappeared eventually into the forest. Mother was still in the field, apparently not very interested. . . . I finished “Spain.” Working now on “Report to Greco.” Was invited yesterday to a lecture at the Donnell Library in NYC on Scorsese’s film. . . . Alec had some friends, Barbara and Doug (his senior principal at Friends Select). They, Monica, and I climbed the ledges on Alec’s land, up over boulder and boulder to a place finally with a view. I was fairly exhausted, with beating heart (which calmed after a rest), but I made it—not bad for a 74-year-old. Afterwards, Monica’s curry and fritters, and then hot fudge sundaes at Stewart’s.

July 22, 2004

Took Alec and family to ballet matinee, very good program for children (and adults): “Interplay” (Morton Gould/Robbins), “Fancy Free” (Bernstein/Robbins), and “Stars and Stripes” (Sousa/Balanchine). Delicious and joyous. Afterwards, supper in our favorite Sicilian Spaghetti House. Anna’s friend, also from Poland, is there again waitressing. Anna is working in Ireland and still hopes to go to Australia. . . . I finished my chapter on “Prometheus,” also on “Spain,” and am progressing on “Report to Greco,” which I rather like. . . . UPNE sent a sample CD for Greek Today for me to check, but it was blank. No sound.

July 25, 2004

Finished mowing the south field. Quite early this year. Got a sapling (balsam) to use as a railing for the staircase in the cabin. Daphne arrived with family. Andrew’s first words: “Can I have a ride on the tractor?” Steak on outdoor fire for supper, then marshmallows for everyone. . . . We’re enjoying our television. Tomorrow the Democratic convention begins.

August 5, 2004

Nice visit from Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Caroline, Dmitri, and Anna. They came on Sophia’s birthday, and we all ate chocolate cake together. Ignat loves the Schubert Andante I’m trying to learn. Maybe I can have a lesson on it from him in Kinhaven next June. Caroline finished her internship; she’ll start a residency in psychiatry at U. of P. But they may move to Cavendish, in which case she’d transfer to Hitchcock. Ignat told me that his father had an office less elaborate than mine! He nailed a board between two birch trees and used that as his desk in good weather. . . . I’ve been weeding the pond; today was the fifth afternoon, a big job but never done before, so really our pond is behaving very well.

August 13, 2004

Olympics began and we saw the opening ceremony on our satellite television: amazing. The ceremony was boring—an attempt to project the greatness of Ancient Greece but done through multimedia magic, which obviously interested the producers more, it seems, than the subject matter. But the parade of nations, 202 of them, was impressive. And Greece is receiving wonderful attention.

August 14, 2004

We rose at 5:45 in order to say goodbye to Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena as they drove off to JFK in order to fly tonight to Hong Kong and then Bangkok. Theo promised to bring me a large Thai umbrella next summer, preferably made from chocolate! They reached the airport in a record five hours.

August 15, 2004

Alec telephoned and e-mailed from Bangkok. They had a restful, pleasant trip, the children preoccupied with personal television screens and games.

August 16, 2004

I finished weeding the pond, an extensive job that took more than a week. Now it looks beautiful, and large. Let’s see what grows back, and doesn’t, next summer.

August 17, 2004

Tarred the seams in my office roof, which has been leaking. . . . Working now on the Zorba chapter; entering the Greek and the documentation is the tedious part. I like the text. . . . Contacted the (new) humanities editor at Princeton University Press, and will meet her in NYC in November. She seems to be honoring our contract. . . . Lori, Clive, and three daughters were here last week, very pleasantly. They’re placid children, unlike Leander’s Sophia. Clive rebuilt Daphne’s screen door, beautifully (they lodged in Daphne’s house). Then Daphne, Greg, and children came for the weekend, supposedly to walk the forest with Steve Warne, but Greg was sick and it was canceled. They’ve decided to keep the house. How nice! . . . The other day I received the Greek Today Workbook and CDs. They look fine, except on the captions for one of the cartoons we somehow lost three iotas, so it reads Μα σήμερα δεν έχε νέφος. Ενα από χθες. Ugh! I’m going to try to add an errata section to the website. There will be more errors, I’m sure. . . . Chrysanthi is taking some very good art (painting—watercolor) classes in town and is pleased. We have only Leander’s family with us now, but their children are loud and selfish. Deanna does nothing to help. Chrysanthi and I are keeping calm.

August 25, 2004

The RCPA forestry group met at John Sullivan’s log cabin off Loon Lake. He has a nice rustic banister from which I got good ideas for our own. And he filled cracks in his tabletop with epoxy glue mixed with “wood powder.” Biggest surprise was to find my Deerfield classmate Bill Knox there. I remember him so well, including the visit to his home in Manhattan. He’s the one who simply dropped his clothes on the floor when he changed or undressed and a servant picked them up. He had a nervous breakdown at Princeton, finished at Colgate and apparently has had a good career teaching. We saw Sullivan’s saw mill, solar kiln, transept. All very instructive and pleasant.

August 26, 2004

Drove to Elizabethtown to lunch with Mary and Maureen. Mary is aged and walks now only with two canes. Maureen seems fine. Both are mentally alert and very liberal politically. Poor things, they’re surrounded by Republicans where they live.

August 28, 2004

To Queensbury to visit the Shapiros, who took us for a splendid dinner in the Heidelberg Restaurant on Quaker Road. Irv’s paintings adorn all the walls. The full basement is now a studio and archive. They’re very comfortable, with everything they need close by. But what happens when debility arrives? Fran is 90, Irv over 85. Apparently Al and Mary Zalon are interested in Kendal on Hudson. . . . Earlier today Martha Klironomos telephoned about my visiting professorship at San Francisco State. But Chrysanthi pleaded that this four-month visit mustn’t happen, reacting emotionally and strongly against it, saying how could I desert her (she won’t come) and what if one of us died during that period, etc. She was so distraught I telephoned Martha on the spot and told her to forget the entire arrangement. So, no teaching in San Francisco.

August 29, 2004

We were shocked a week ago to read in the North Creek paper that Warder Cadbury had died. We saw him in Stewart’s just a few weeks ago and were hoping for a visit. Today we went to the memorial service, held at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, where he was involved for decades. The service was half Quaker, half programmed, and very nice, with many fine messages about his virtues, a video of part of a lecture on naming the Adirondack peaks, and some music. Emphasis was on his service as an amateur historian of Adirondack lore, and a collector of relevant items. He was greatly appreciated, clearly. In the Quaker silence, I was one of the many who spoke. I said that he “smiled under his mustache,” especially when he had such fun showing me the outhouse at Backlog that they call the Oval Office. There was other testimony about this sort of whimsy. We drove back in a furious storm: lightning, thunder, drenching rain, and found ourselves with no electricity at home, thus missing the final, closing ceremony of the Athens Olympics on our satellite television. . . . Earlier today we telephoned Alec and spoke at length with him and Monica. They seem very happy so far. Theo is so eager to attend school that he wants to go to bed right after supper so he won’t be late getting up. Alec has begun his tasks at school and is learning the ropes. He’s very comfortable so far with the administrative team.

September 3, 2004

Finished installing a banister for our rustic stairway up to the sleeping loft. The main post I made a bit fancy with the router. The banister is a balsam pole very assiduously sanded. Chrysanthi will paint it with polyurethane tomorrow.

September 18, 2004

Pendle Hill

A somewhat contentious trustees’ meeting. Kenneth Sutton angry at Steve and Joe Rogers angry at everybody. I congratulated Steve on his patience, which he appreciated. He had two small strokes over the summer, but now seemed fine. Niyonu is beginning to interact nicely. Elizabeth Ellis gave a stirring report on the Chester project and showed us poetry (good poetry!) written by some of the ex-convicts she nurtures. Joey Roger spoke well about the Peace Network. But Steve, very emotional, confessed that he failed last year, his first failure in a long career, since we have a 1½ million deficit. Next time we’ll need to choose whether to abandon some programs or take the risk of leaving things alone a bit longer.

September 19, 2004

Fred Berthold gave me his new book on theodicy. Today in Meeting Mary Ellen read queries that seemed so naïve and benign that David Montgomery objected to them vigorously, and I stood and ministered about theodicy and process theology, which seems a better solution than the free will defense.

September 20, 2004

Mother died tonight, peacefully. This is what I wrote for the Kendal Times:

HARRIET BIEN

January 17, 1905 – September 20, 2004

Harriet Bien died peacefully on September 20th, four months short of her 100th birthday. She grew up in a lovely brownstone on Monroe Street in Brooklyn, getting around town in her parents’ horse and buggy. After graduating from Adelphi College, where she prepared for a teaching career, she married a young pediatrician who opened a practice in Sunnyside, Queens County, in 1927. They resided there until the 1960s and then moved to Madison Avenue in Manhattan, where they spent 15 happy years enjoying concerts, theater, and a circle of friends not to mention Christmas visits from children and the first crop of grandchildren. She served as a guide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as an award-winning volunteer in New York Hospital. In the 1980s she came to Hanover with her husband, becoming after his death a founding resident of Kendal, where she was blessed with many active years: painting, playing the violin, giving detailed reports in numerous ILEAD classes, attending theater locally and in Boston, and maintaining a lovely apartment in Dyer. As aging began to diminish her energy, she voluntarily moved to Assisted Living in Barclay, where she and Richard Eberhart formed an inseparable duo at mealtimes. Skilled Nursing in Vining came next. As always, Kendal’s care was expert and compassionate. Her mind eventually wandered, but she was always comfortable in body. Indeed, on her final day she walked to supper, ate well, returned to watch television, and then quietly expired in her chair. She is survived by Peter Bien of Kendal and Alice Buseck of Tempe, Arizona, as well as by seven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial concert in the Gathering Room on April 2nd.

September 26, 2004

Alice came and stayed with us for three days, which was very helpful. I had to go to the funeral home to arrange the cremation, to the bank (with Alice) to learn about distribution of the trust and custody account; we needed to clean out Mother’s room. Furniture went to storage, clothing to Listen, odds and ends to the Attic, some items to us or the farm, some to Alice. Lots of family pictures and other memorabilia; some of Mother’s writings, paintings, a lovely picture of her in her wedding dress. Many people here wrote kind letters. I did an obituary for the Kendal Times (see above) which got printed as well in the Valley News, so the whole town seemed to know. . . . Alice and I also found a few moments to try our new Warlock duet, which is fun.

September 30, 2004

New York

I spoke at the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, first on the Foundation’s activities, then on the Farm School, as an introduction to Brenda Marder’s talk on the European context ca. 1904–1948. Then I introduced Manny Stefanakis, who was there with his wife, as was Phil Foote. A good event.

October 1, 2004

New York

To Astoria with Yannis Fakazis for another radio interview, on Life in the Tomb, with Vangelis Calotychos also. Forty-five minutes in Greek, then thirty minutes in English. They want me again, for Kazantzakis. . . . Spent the afternoon in the 42nd Street library, which amazingly has back issues of Nea Estia plus other sources I need for proper documentation. I gazed for minutes at the marvelous painting of blind Milton dictating to his daughters. Then to Daphne’s. Met her and Christina on 84th Street, returning from Christina’s swimming. Latest news: Christina says they are going to get a dog. Who will care for it? Greg sees himself walking the critter at 11:00 p.m. Peter full of Pappou and Ah (a tractor). Andrew busy with a train set. Greg, Daphne, and I went out for a leisurely dinner on 84th Street and Madison. Then to Princeton via bus, arriving at 11:30 p.m.

October 2, 2004

Princeton

Breakfast in the Nassau Inn with Tom Gallant. Full of new ideas for MGSA including symposia every three years instead of two plus collaboration with MGSAs of Australia and Europe. Mrs. Souloyianni wants us to interact more with the non-academic Greek-American community. For our Chicago symposium I suggested bringing Trahanatzis. . . . Lots of talk with Mike Keeley at the reception. I’m going to help honor him in NYC in November. He’s still suffering from the radiation treatment of his prostate cancer. Nice to see Mache again, and Dimitri, and Karen Emmerich.

October 3, 2004

Rode back to NYC with Peter Allen, who dropped me in Washington Heights. Long subway ride to Grand Central. Flew to Burlington. Home at 9:30 p.m. to a warm greeting by Chrysanthi.

October 6, 2004

Today Chrysanthi and I went to the cemetery to watch Mother’s urn being buried in the family plot, where there is room, we were assured, for both of us as well. . . . Music with Dick in the evening. Someone wrote to me asking for memories of the Baden Street work camp in Rochester. I checked my 1953–54 diaries. Nothing. All about girlfriends and intellectual pursuits. . . . The other day Andrew telephoned. “Is Yiayia in heaven?” “Yes, I think so,” I answered. Then: “Will she come down from heaven and become a new baby?” “Yes! Yes!” How remarkable from a five-year-old, who somehow understands the mystery of reincarnation.

October 15, 2004

Pendle Hill

Ministered at Pendle Hill Meeting about Andrew and Yiayia. This was much appreciated according to people’s comments afterwards. I thought we’d be making the crucial and difficult decision about Pendle Hill’s future, but now it’s postponed until December 4th. . . . Played four-hand piano with John Smith, who is an excellent sight-reader: Schubert, Husa, Debussy, Ravel, Townsend, Warlock, who committed suicide, Smith told me. Met the Australian who came, finally, to be Cadbury Fellow. He knows Tourek Meeting, the Doricks, etc.

October 16, 2004

Julien O’Reilley spoke about her work with youth. She’s charming. I hope that her appearance in Hanover next weekend will go well. . . . Steve, in today’s trustees’ meeting, bared his soul, recounting a near-death experience, and his delight at being at Pendle Hill instead of the corporate world of jets and limousines. He wants to stay another six years, making ten in total, leaving when he’s 60. Amen! But if we continue with the same deficits we can last only 20 more years.

October 21, 2004

Black tie dinner at Kendal followed by social dancing. I wore my tux (from the Deerfield prom). It fits! Danced to 1950 tunes. They picked a queen and king by lottery and I was king, complete with cardboard crown. Nice!

October 23, 2004

A 1964 grad, Pat Heir, who did English 2–3 with me, took me to lunch with his daughter, who is applying to Dartmouth. Amazing that he remembered the course. More amazing that he knew and greatly admired Paul Davidoff (Pat is a town planner). Paul was a superstar in the profession, apparently. I was sent his daughter’s essays, which I filled with red ink, just as Pat remembers his being filled.

October 24, 2004

Julien came last night. We had supper at Kendal with five Quakers. She spoke very well at Meeting and then I gave her a tour of Dartmouth. So nice to see a person of this age (about 26) so devoted to Quakerism.

October 28, 2004

New York

Farm School centennial banquet, black tie, at the Waldorf-Astoria. A huge crowd, very good meal, net profit about $150,000. But the band played so loudly that one could hardly talk to one’s neighbor. I sat between Mary Keeley and Tad Lansdale, and managed to converse with both somehow. Tad agrees that a CCRC is badly needed in Greece. She worries about Λάκωμα as a location: no university, no beach. True . . . but . . . She and Bruce have no plans to move, except to go in with Christine if necessary. Ditto for Mary and Mike. Mary is relieved to know that a Quaker service provides people who’ll give care in the home. . . . Nice talk with Vergos beforehand and with Chris Minoutis. Also with Sperry Lea. . . . The materials sent by our new president, Manny Stefanakis, in advance of the meeting are superior to what David used to send. . . . Did speak at some length with David. He has a year’s severance pay, is sitting tight at present, fixing their house in Vermont. He might look later at the School for International Studies, or Antioch, in Brattleboro. . . . Chrysanthi and I danced a bit at the Waldorf. She said she enjoyed the whole affair, which was dedicated to Aliki Perroti.

October 29, 2004

New York

Waiters at the Yale Club breakfast, knowing my sympathies, hoped that Kerry would win, in a landslide yet! Chrysanthi went off to 91st Street, Daphne’s new apartment, to help. I went to the AFS offices for a long day of committee meetings: the mission statement (with Mike K. and Manita), post-secondary with Vergos, Mike, Dimitri, and Crunkilton, secondary with Annie, Dimitri, and Gail Grant. Phil Foote asked me to serve another three years. I said I hoped I’d find my particular niche as a trustee. Previously, it was to get Marder’s book published and well written. . . . Walked home, admiring the Empire State Building. . . . To the City Center with Chrysanthi to see the American Ballet Theater, so different from the NYC Ballet. Two Mozart/Kylián ballets, both very humorous. Then a long one by Berio/Forsythe, interesting but static. Finally, spectacular choreography to Philip Glass’s repetitive music, by Kirk Peterson: ritualistic, bombastic.

October 30, 2004

Exhausting board meeting from 9:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Phil Foote will be the new chair; that’s good. We are leaning toward recommending expansion of the College to three years, with an affiliation with a British or other EU university. Taxi with Seth Frank up Madison to Daphne’s new apartment on 91st Street, very spacious, 5 bathrooms. But not looking its best right now because they’ve just begun unloading. Yesterday, found Theotokas’s Πνευματική Πορεία in the 42nd Street Library and xeroxed the pages I need. . . . Tonight to Greenwich Village to the Cornelia Street Café to hear something arranged by Gail Holst: Theodorakis’s songs.

October 31, 2004

Kendal at Longwood

Annie Levis and I took AMTRAK to Wilmington, where John Diffey met us. On the trip down, Annie told me the worst things about Manolis Stefanakis, that he is arrogant, egotistic, insensitive, and is using funds for his own benefit, etc., and worse. Ditto for Minoutis. Apostolidis and Voutsa are demoralized, convinced that Manolis is not interested in education. Αλίμονο! The only solution, at least at first, is for Phil Foote, the new chair, to be apprised of this and take action. What a shame! Everyone wishes that David Buck were still there. At Kendal, John gave us the expected tour. Of course, Longwood is so unattractive compared to Hanover. We saw health center rooms, severely frail people being fed, and an apartment (very small). Lunch with two residents who are native Greeks. The husband feels that we’ll have difficulty in convincing Greeks to sell real estate, and also that retired Greeks won’t want to be on committees, actively involved, since they lack the Protestant work ethic. But they agreed that a Kendal is truly needed in Greece. On the return journey, Annie and I discussed strategy. She feels that location in Lakoma would be a mistake. We should try to convince AFS to use its land. This means convincing Stratos Constantinidis first and foremost. Annie, however, will speak first to Takis Litsas, who knows all about land—we need to be sure that residences are permitted on the School land; then to Stratos, who is a trustee of Anatolia as well as AFS. The principal cohort is likely to be Anatolia grads; thus Dick Jackson will be crucial. Diffey says that a project needs to be 70% pre-sold before money for construction can be raised. In operation, a facility should be 95% full. At 90% one needs to worry; 85% is the real bottom. Kendal communities range from 66 apartments to about 290. We should expect the entire process to take 10 years. . . . To 91st Street afterwards for supper with Daphne and family (cooked by Chrysanthi). Peter talks continuously and is very advanced. The apartment is still unsettled, except for the kitchen.

November 5, 2004

New York

To NYC for Mike Keeley’s award. Black tie event at the Hilton. Nice to see Constance there and Nehamas and Chiolis, Varvitsiotis, Fakazis, Gondicas, and of course Mike and Mary, Simonides, and the girl who conducted our Myrivilis interview at the radio station, dressed in a slinky gown revealing all curves, and more. I was seated at table #1 with Cathy Vanderpool, the Keeleys, the Greek consul. I had John Brademas to my right and Senator Sarbanes to my left, with his wife to his left. Nice chance to speak to both of these luminaries. Mrs. Sarbanes was outspoken about Republican hypocrisy: all their so-called “values,” are masks for greed and the craze for power. Cathy, in her eulogy of Mike, quoted Pericles and at table agreed with me that we should all be reading Thucydides, especially the Sicilian expedition, to truly understand our invasion of Iraq. Sarbanes was very interested in my account of Odysseas’s 30-odd years in Tashkent, and especially regarding what happened after he and his family repatriated to Greece. Brademas, typically, reminded me of his importance. I was first on the program, speaking briefly about Mike as the rare academic whose creativity was not drained away by his professorial service. I then read three of his translations, all from Sikelianos: “On Acrocorinth,” “Caïques,” and (of course) “Agraphon,” stating how difficult Sikelianos is to translate and how these English texts may actually be better than the original Greek ones. Mike himself read Απολείπειν ο Θεός Αντώνιον in English, then Greek, followed by two nice excerpts from “Inventing Paradise.” Later, he read Elytis and Seferis lyrics that had been set to music and these were then sung very well by an old friend of his and a Greek band. Lastly, after filet mignon, a dance troupe, beautifully dressed in national costumes, performed. The consul wants to organize something else with me in the future. Mike was in his element, a gracious honoree.

John Radebaugh sent me his memoir about pediatric practice. Fascinating but very badly written. I’m trying to clean it up for him. At least it’s only one-fifth of Marder’s 500 badly written pages.

November 7, 2004

Hanover

A nice, unusual Sunday. Meeting, mostly lamenting the election. I ministered by reciting the story in Sikelianos’s “Agraphon,” very appropriate for this situation. Then to John and Mary Lincoln, who took us out to a fancy restaurant in Orford for a pleasant brunch with lots of good talk despite poor John’s speech impediment owing to his stroke. Then to Ken Yalowitz’s open house. Shepherds there and new people to meet, and more good food. Then home to practice Scarlatti a little. Then Jeff Murphy and son Kieran arrived and took us out for supper at the Norwich Inn. Again lots of good conversation even though Jeff voted for Bush. Then back to Kendal to give them a tour.

November 8, 2004

Telephoned Alec in Bangkok to say hello to Elena on her 3rd birthday. All is well there, but it’s very hot—over 100 degrees. Visit of Monica’s parents went well.

November 10, 2004

New York

Drove to Burlington. Beautiful scenery, like Switzerland. Mountain peaks covered already with snow. In Yale Club by 12:30. Roast beef buffet lunch. Walked to Donnell Library on 53rd for my lecture on Kazantzakis’s films as part of the library’s Hellenic Festival. Introduced by Elizabeth McMahon, a vivacious redhead, all gush. Lecture went well, with enough questions and good ones afterwards. People will have a chance to see Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek next week and the week after. Celui qui doit mourir will be screened next spring, with luck. Elizabeth videotaped the lecture and promises to send me a copy. . . . Arrived back at the Yale Club by 4:30 in time to meet Hannah Winarsky, the new humanities editor at Princeton University Press, very young and pleasant. She seems fully committed to publishing both my volume 2 and the Selected Letters. Hooray! We discussed technical details over drinks, then lamented George Bush’s re-election (his portrait hung above us, alas). She grew up in Princeton, where her father was in the Institute of Advanced Studies. Very nice to have a face-to-face meeting with someone who is going to be playing a large role in my life over the next few years. I projected volume 2 for early 2005 and the Letters for early 2006. Θα δούμε . . . Miraculously, I made the 7:10 return flight at LaGuardia, just. So, this time it was Hanover–New York–Hanover all in the same day.

November 16, 2004

Breakfast with Andy Lewin, former student, who has endowed the Lewin Fellowships at the Tucker Foundation. He surprised me by saying I was responsible because of the piece I published in the Alumni Magazine about Ann Armbrecht and Elise Boulding, stressing how important service should be in everyone’s life. One never knows.

November 20, 2004

Ned Perrin died today. Sarah brought him home a few days ago; he had fallen and broken his thigh bone. So he died in the house he loved (too much). Peter Saccio and Nardi Campion went the day before and read the Episcopal service for the dying. Sarah slept the last night in bed with him. His ashes will be scattered on the property.

November 24, 2004

I took a nice bicycle ride with Leander, Nicholas, and Sophia throughout the neighborhood with houses houses houses, no center, no stores, but attractive tree-lined streets and an occasional park. Leander and I went out for lunch at an Indian restaurant, not very good, followed by a delicious Starbucks coffee. . . . I continued fixing John Radebaugh’s autobiographical memoir, interesting but poorly written, 125 pages long. I’ve spent many hours for this interesting friend.

November 25, 2004

Thanksgiving turkey, etc., etc. Alec telephoned from a beach on the Gulf of Siam (!), using his cell phone. Amazing. Leander helped me with my Scarlatti piece. Yesterday for supper they had a neighbor who works in the World Bank and is very pessimistic about George Bush’s huge deficit.

November 26, 2004

New York City

Train to New York. To Daphne’s new apartment, still mostly unsettled. Another turkey dinner, very pleasantly. We delivered some of Harriet’s paintings to Leander yesterday and Chrysanthi’s latest, of the farm pond, to Daphne today.

November 27, 2004

7:00 a.m. train. Home at 1:15. At 2:00 run-through of the harpsichord recital. My Scarlatti went fairly well.

November 28, 2004

Harpsichord recital. I got through the Scarlatti without too many mistakes, although piano-trained fingers tend to hit more than one key on the harpsichord. People find this a relaxing three quarters of an hour in mid-afternoon. . . . Supper with Lili Paxson, who has just arrived, and Rose Miller.

December 2, 2004

Pendle Hill

Unexpectedly, I reached Pendle Hill just before the Forum at Swarthmore. John Smith invited me to go with him and others, so I did. And it was remarkable: devoted to Chester. Speakers included the black mayor of Chester, a remarkable man, formerly a policeman, with a twelfth-grade education only; a black professor at Swarthmore, like the mayor born and raised in Chester; Brother Robb Carter, a black youth-worker in Philadelphia; and our own Elizabeth Ellis. Carter arrived late because he was just involved with two youths, one of whom pulled a gun, but luckily no one was hurt. He was weeping at the hopelessness of these lives and the system that almost guarantees failure, but concluded, “We must keep trying.” The mayor, too, told of the hopelessness of blacks in Chester, but also of some success stories, including one where he had taken a boy into his own home to live and thus escape a dysfunctional family. I thought of James McBride’s mother, raising 12 children successfully. In the question period I asked if they had anything like the citizens’ council that Chrysanthi served on in Hanover for youthful first offenders. They do not, and seemed interested.

December 3, 2004

Pendle Hill and Philadelphia

Pamphlets committee. We accepted the essay on Pierre Cérésole, after much debate. Also one other. Remarkable. Donna McDaniel’s copyediting of the Henry Cadbury essay was still unsatisfactory. I seem to have to correct all her “final” texts. . . . Played four-hand with John Smith for an hour: Satie, Starer, etc. Then, in tuxedo, drove to the Hyatt Regency in Philadelphia for Haverford’s celebration of its successful $200,000,000 capital campaign. Very fancy: lamb chops and caviar with drinks, then huge dinner, obscenely wasteful. Tritton said “Thank you” in 45 languages, representing the linguistic diversity of Haverford (his Greek was 50% correct). Emma Lapsansky spoke well about her fears that Haverford would not be diverse, after Temple, but her delight at teaching there. I was able to say hello to Steve Cary’s wife, who immediately thanked me for naming the Cary Room at Kendal. All this seemed very unlike Haverford, very unQuakerly: too posh and profligate.

December 4, 2004

Pendle Hill

Long board meeting in the new all-day format. Huge deficit again. We’re giving the Peace Network two years to raise their own money, or quit.

December 24, 2004

Terpni

A quick trip to the farm just to get some books for my courses in January and to leave some goodies for Leander, who’ll be arriving in two days. How lovely it is! Chrysanthi just as enthusiastic as I. The lake frozen. Snow, just one inch, on the ground. Deer tracks. Peace.

December 25, 2004

Christmas dinner at Dick’s. Our trio played Reger’s Weihnachten badly. I played Christmas carols for singing. Very festive. Lots of telephone calls from Greece, including one from Vouli to say how horrible Stefanakis and his wife are (I relayed all this to Phil Foote), and a brief call from Alec, who is in Indonesia. . . . At 11:00 p.m., Ulli telephoned to convey the shocking news that Steve Scher died last night in his sleep, aged 68, from a heart attack. At least he was unaware. They had champagne and a nice dinner, watched television, and he went to bed fine. At 4:00 a.m. he was essentially dead. I had lunch with him recently, and he was planning to do one more foreign study to Berlin, then to enjoy full retirement, out of which he is now cheated. But at least he didn’t suffer at all.

December 28, 2004

To Andover Inn for a memorial to Mother, organized by Alice. Her entire family was there: Peter, David and Lynda, Susan and her partner Ellen (very nice), Paul and financée Dana, and a cousin. None of ours. Some music, a poem, then free testimony. I spoke about bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning, and about the years going to the New York Philharmonic children’s concerts followed by Schrafft’s ice cream soda. And the trouble of getting father and mother to leave 74th Street to come to Hanover. Chrysanthi spoke about mother as her best friend when she first came to America, her good nature, humor, cooking lessons. Paul Buseck and David both spoke well. Peter read a doggerel poem. Alice added memories. Then a handsome lunch, after which we all went to Lori and Clive’s house. Alice and I tried out Warlock—at half speed, of course. Alice assembled a loose-leaf book with memorable photos of mother and dad, Monroe Street, all the brothers and sisters and grandchildren. Amy Bernstein sent me mother’s marriage certificate. A day of warm memories. . . . But all this time Chrysanthi was terribly worried about Alec since he’s in Indonesia and we’ve heard nothing from him since the terrible earthquake and tsunami that happened on Sunday, two days ago. We did find out that Java was not affected. But Chrysanthi now thinks that Alec has been abducted by a Muslim terrorist! Lots of people have called: George, Vouli, Barbara Doyle, Dick Williamson, Dimitris Giannakos, someone from Friends Select, Jerry McLane. . . . I sent a telegram to Monica’s parents. No answer. Fiona’s e-mail is no longer valid. No phone numbers . . .

December 29, 2004

Finally Alec telephoned. He’s in the mountains enjoying himself with family, Fiona, Edwin. I chastised him for making Chrysanthi frantic for three days, not sending us a complete itinerary. But we know that he and the family are fine.

December 30, 2004

West Lane Inn, Ridgefield, Connecticut

To Daphne’s in South Salem. Peter Tebbe is a dynamo, incessantly wriggling and talking in his unintelligible manner (but Daphne understands). Greg is increasingly involved in Brazil, where Goldman Sachs wants to establish itself to capitalize on that emerging economy.

December 31, 2004

South Salem, Ridgefield

New Year’s Eve dinner at Daphne’s with Leander and family. Alec telephoned. Four families in his school were killed last week by the tsunami. We’re all contributing to Doctors Without Borders to help with relief. . . . The children were excited by presents. I gave Chrysanthi Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and biographies of Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin. Alec gave me a Thai umbrella (small), promising a big one when they return in June. I gave Greg a book about globalization. . . . Worked on, and finished, evaluating about 120 abstracts submitted for our MGSA 2005 symposium, most of them entirely acceptable in my view. We’ll see now what the other committee members say. . . . We walked down Ridgefield’s main street with its enormous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses, and all had a hot dog from the (apparently) famous vendor.

2005

Hanover

January–June 14

Jan. 1–2, South Salem

Jan. 8, Cambridge: A.R.T.

Jan. 27–28, Pendle Hill

Feb. 1–2, Providence

Feb. 8–9, Providence

Feb. 11–13, New York, wedding

Feb. 14–15, Providence

Feb. 19, Cambridge: A.R.T.

Feb. 22–27, Providence, New York: AFS, MGSA

March 1–12, London, Birmingham, Cambridge, Penn Club

March 15–16, Providence

March 22–23, Providence

March 26, Cambridge: A.R.T.

March 31–Apr. 1, Buffalo

Apr. 5, Providence

Apr. 12, Providence

Apr. 14, Philadelphia, Pendle Hill

Apr. 19, Providence

Apr. 22, Riparius

Apr. 26, Providence

May 2, Amherst

May 3, Providence

May 10, Providence

May 15–16, Riparius

May 18–19, New York

May 20–22, Pendle Hill, New York

May 27–28, Riparius

June 7–8, Boston, Beacon Hill Friends House, 617 227-9118

June 9–14, Kinhaven

Riparius

June 15–September 5

June 16–18, Riparius

June 18–19, Pendle Hill

June 19, overnight at the Shapiros’

July 3, Camp Backlog, Indian Lake

July 8–10, Hanover

July 11, Randolph, NH

July 30–Aug. 1, New York City

Aug. 6, Cooperstown

Hanover

September 6–December 31

Sept. 15–19, Oracle, Arizona, Cherry Valley Ranch, 520 896-9639, via Phoenix & Tempe: then Tucson, 800 731-6760, Marriott University Park, 520 792-4100, Four Points Sheraton Boston Logan, 781 284–7200

Sept. 25, Amherst: concert

Sept. 27–Oct. 1, Athens, Hotel Eridanas, Peiraios 78

Oct. 2, Manchester, NH, Highlander Hotel, 603 625-6426, 265 Buckingham Way

Oct. 11–20, San Francisco

Oct. 21–22, New York

Oct. 22–23, Pendle Hill

Nov. 3–6, Chicago, MGSA, Palmer House Hilton, 312 726-7500

Nov. 9–10, Washington

Nov. 12–13, Dover, Vermont, David & Patti Buck

Nov. 22–26, Washington, to Leander for Thanksgiving

Nov. 29–30, Boston

Dec. 6, Amherst

Dec. 10, Cambridge

Dec. 11, New York City

Dec. 12–26, Bangkok, Thailand

Dec. 27–28, South Salem

January 1, 2005

South Salem

We all went ice-skating in the afternoon in an indoor rink, using rented skates. Daphne is of course an expert, given all the lessons she had as a girl. Christina did well; Sophia is a beginner. I started rather tentatively, staying near the railing. Ankles bent. But gradually this stopped and I became more adventurous until—a fall on my backside. So, back to the rail, more slowly. But considering that I haven’t been on skates for probably 30 years, not bad. Leander fell and hurt his shoulder again. He has a torn ligament. He also told me in confidence later that he might have a benign tumor in his bad ear. He goes back to the doctor on Monday. He may need to have it removed surgically. Scary. . . . I finished a pile of TLSs, and all the MGSA abstracts.

January 8, 2005

Cambridge

To Cambridge early, to avoid snow. Read more of chapters 1 & 2 of Joyce’s “Portrait,” which is so extraordinary, in the main reading room of Widener, now restored to its original grandeur. What a difference between this and our totally uninspiring new Berry Library at Dartmouth! The show at A.R.T. was different: 1¾ hours of a single actress, also the author: Pamela Gien in “The Syringa Tree,” about growing up in South Africa when Apartheid was in force, and specifically about the lovely relationship between the six-year-old white “Miss Elizabeth” and her black nanny. Gien is brilliant, playing five or six different roles with different voice timbres and different accents: very exuberant and moving. In the discussion afterwards she came out an answered questions, most of which came from fellow South Africans in the audience expressing their own grief and remorse over what had happened in their country before Mandela’s miracle of unification.

January 9, 2005

Robert Binswanger and wife took us out to lunch at the Canoe Club. He had worked four months for Kerry in Ohio. “The Republicans simply outdid us in getting out the vote,” he confessed. The Binswangers still hope to enter Kendal and are waiting for an apartment.

January 10, 2005

My first I LEAD class. I’m doing Joyce’s Ulysses: 8 weeks, meeting each Monday in the Card Room at Kendal. A few former students, from previous ILEADS taught by me, are in the class, which is nice. Why did I do this? Mostly owing to Avery Post’s prompting. . . . We had Ulli for supper. Poor Steve Scher died on Christmas Eve of a massive heart attack. She is “coping.”

January 16, 2005

Our monthly Kendal interfaith service was led today by Don Sheehan and Carol, doing an Acathist service written by a Soviet dissident priest in jail, praising all the beauties of the world despite his desperate situation. Very moving. Don came at my invitation and seemed to be appreciated. Maybe again next year?

January 22, 2005

Service in Rollins for Ned Perrin. A Thetford neighbor was the best speaker. A good picture of his humor and his devotion to electric cars. Good to speak to Reeve Lindbergh. And Ginia Allison had been sort of a girlfriend when Ned was very young. Amy was there with husband and child. But no Elizabeth. A sad time.

January 27, 2005

Dinner with Margaret Fraser in Ardmore, where she now owns a house. One daughter is living there, working in Starbucks. Margaret is flourishing as the director of FWCC. We had a delicious Thai meal.

January 28, 2005

Pamphlets committee did not accept John Radebaugh’s submission but asked to see it again after some suggested revisions are made. Fingers crossed! I’ve spent many hours fixing his English and trying to highlight the Quaker element.

January 30, 2005

I conducted the adult education class after Meeting, on the subject of Light (of course).

February 1, 2005

Providence

My first class at Brown. 40 students. I have a nice office, an ID card, a salary check already. Charlie Auger in Comparative Literature has been very helpful. Also Carol Wilson, the secretary. Elsa Amanatidou took me out for supper afterwards along with Dimitris Livanos, who teaches history. We’ll set up a time for me to give a public lecture later.

February 5, 2005

Memorial in Rollins for Steve Scher. Several students spoke beautifully. Info about his life in Hungary. Some music (obviously). Poor man, cheated of his retirement.

February 8, 2005

Providence

Prof. Kurt Raaflaub, a distinguished classicist, took me out to supper after class. Very approachable, pleasant. Nice to talk about Homer.

Friday–Saturday, February 11–12, 2005

New York

With Chrysanthi for Laura Bernstein’s wedding. To the ballet on Friday: “Apollo,” my favorite, beautifully danced. Then three we’d never seen: “Chichester Psalms” with full chorus and boy soprano, music by Leonard Bernstein; “Andantino” (Tchaikovsky/Robbins); and “Shambards” (MacMillan/Wheeldon). On Saturday morning we went to Daphne’s. Andrew enlisted me at once to put together his latest “bionic man,” hard but we did it. Then I played electric hockey with him for a while, finally escaping to go to the Reubens show at the Met: his drawings in preparation for paintings. Such energy and talent! And today the “Gates” by Christo opened in Central Park, saffron cloth everywhere, also on some schools, etc. in a spirit of camaraderie. . . . The wedding at the Essex House was moving, especially Jill’s speech to her (younger) sister and best friend. Fancy. Black tie. Greg and Daphne were there, so we spent some time with them during the hors d’oeuvres period (1½ hours). But at dinner the band was so loud no one could speak to anyone else. At 10:30, with the main course still not served, we left, as did Daphne and Greg. Did manage to speak with Amy a bit despite the noise. They’ll be coming to our 50th on August 13th.

February 19, 2005

Cambridge

A strange A.R.T. production featuring a French-Canadian mime and actor. Benny Hill is a better mime. But some of this was interesting. Fortunately, Chrysanthi thought it was wonderful.

February 21, 2005

Showed the Ulysses film in ILEAD class. Barbara Taylor said to me afterwards, “You are changing our lives.”

February 22, 2005

New York

Ballet again. Pure joy. “The Bleu Necklace” and “Makin’ Whoopee,” both choreographed by Susan Stooman, music by Irving Berlin in the first, Walter Donaldson in the second. Both with amusing story lines, spectacular dancing, especially by Damian Woetzel in “The Bleu Necklace.” Children, a dancing dog, comic turns, parodistic sentimentality. A perfect way to forget all one’s cares in the real world.

February 24, 2005

New York

Long talk with Annie Levis, staying in a nearby hotel, again about the arrogance of Stefanakis and his wife, too. Then to AFS office for executive committee meeting in which I and others spoke directly to Stefanakis. I said that I couldn’t possibly give him a vote of confidence. He acted well, saying that honesty is valuable. But the meeting was tense. Afterwards, mission statement meeting chaired by me. I’d made adjustments suggested by John Cleave, and the result seemed to work. . . . Then to Daphne’s briefly and the children. Greg absent. But his negotiations with the Brazilian bank have led to success; on April 1st the bank and Goldman will officially join. . . . Then to E. 79th for a reception by Greece’s ambassador to the UN, a pleasant short, fat man who assured me that the UN is healthy.

February 25, 2005

New York

Post-secondary Committee chaired by John Crunkilton, ably. We’re headed toward a three-year B.A. program at Perrotis. But not yet. First there has got to be some affiliation with an EU university, preferably a UK one. . . . Then Secondary Committee, chaired by me. Again, we hoped that the School would recruit from immigrant communities, which it seems loath to do. . . . Spoke to Stefanakis, shook hands, and said “Let’s be friends, that’s best.” He agreed. After the meeting, which he attended, he smilingly said, “Now I wasn’t arrogant, was I?” Evangelia was there, too, disturbed because so little is done for learning-disabled children. . . . A little rest at the Yale Club (where I continue to work on my Saint Francis chapter. Then to the reception at Phil Foote’s. Then with Mike Keeley to the Orthodox Cathedral on 74th; met Peter Constantine there, also one of my students from the Columbia class, also Vasos Papagapitos. Hugs & kisses. Met the Dean, Stefanopoulos. With Constance Tagopoulos chairing, as in Washington, we read from our A Century of Greek Poetry (after signing dozens of copies) and answered questions. I did “The Moonlight Sonata,” of course. And some Harkianakis and Tagopoulos. Large audience, very responsive. Then Fakazis took all of us out for dinner at a Greek restaurant on 2nd and 71st. Fine food, but music so loud conversation impossible.

February 26, 2005

Full board including executive session about Stefanakis’s failings. Greek trustees connected by speaker phone. Stefanakis’s report to us was very professional. Everyone likes what he is doing but wishes he wouldn’t alienate so many fine people. (Cf. Jean Brophy.) He has a one-year contract. There’ll be a review before August and then a decision whether to keep him or not. Afterwards, Evangelia took me aside at length and poured out her misery—how students have severe difficulties that no one treats, so they come to her, and the staff resents her “interference.” A mess. . . . Then to Columbia to MGSA executive, most of which I had missed. They wanted me to chair the nominating committee and I said No. My term ends in October, finally. Nice to see Mache and Karen, who’s about to take her orals and, like me, says the Ph.D. at Columbia is such a pleasure: all one is supposed to do is read and read. How nice! . . . Supper at Un Deux Trois.

February 28, 2005

Hanover

My last ILEAD class. Joyce’s “Penelope” with expected complaints from some of the women students, but not all. One student brought in Joyce’s reading of Anna Livia Plurabelle, which was a good way to end. Also, some stayed to see the newer Ulysses film, called “Bloom”—OK except that Molly is portrayed as much too young. Students seemed happy. I’ll see their evaluations at some future time.

March 1, 2005

Manchester–Philadelphia

Worry that we’d never fly, owing to snow. But it stopped and we got to Philadelphia easily. Long wait spent in the US Airways club (thankfully) working on Saint Francis still. Then only one more chapter to go: Report to Greco. Plus four short appendices. Routine flight, business class. Slept even.

March 2, 2005

Penn Club, London

So cold here. Rain mixed with snow. But we had a lovely day, very full and different. To Euston to buy train tickets for the week. Then to Charing Cross, commuter train to Greenwich, very crowded at 5:00 p.m. Found the pub that contains the theatre, but no one there until 7:15. Supper next door in Sofitel Hotel served by a 19-year-old Lithuanian beauty, here with her boyfriend, she told us. Expensive; we should have stayed in the pub for an £8 hamburger! At 7:30 the “theatre” opened. Tiny, maybe 50 seats. We were in the first row, two feet away from the actors. A moving, splendid performance of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” so well made and powerful about class differences, decadent aristocracy à la Faulkner. Vibrant peasant class. Superb acting by all three characters. I discovered that I was seated next to the director, a woman who looked about 25 years old. She said that playing in such an intricate fashion on top of the audience is wonderful training for actors, forcing them to use all of their skills, which is what happened. A wonderful opening to our stay. And these young actors are really better than any we see at the A.R.T. Afterwards, trying to get back to London, our train was delayed, then another delayed. We waited about ¾ of an hour in frigid winds on the platform (station closed). Finally made it back to London Bridge; changed; to Charing Cross; the tube to Goodge Street. And a fine night’s sleep. No jet lag thanks to the miraculous feast-fast formula.

Thursday, March 3, 2005

Birmingham

Our first Penn Club breakfast: eggs and bacon, toast and jam, stewed prunes. Worked on Saint Francis a bit. Then to the British Museum, beautifully filled with school children. Saw the Rosetta stone (again) and of course the Parthenon Marbles, each of which now has a helpful explanatory placard. One of the pediments depicted the contest of Athena and Poseidon for Athens, Poseidon creating a spring, Athena an olive tree, which won her the verdict, of course. What a miracle these sculptures are! Also looked into the Reading Room, which arouses much nostalgia in me since I spent enough time studying there. . . . Then to Euston and Birmingham. More nostalgia. We walked through the new Bull Ring, completely rebuilt and very fancy. Central streets now are fully pedestrian. But we found the 61–62–63 buses in the same place for Bristol Road. The upper deck is smoke-free now; before it was a fog. University looks the same: Barber Institute, tower, library, Arts building. Tziovas on the 4th floor, near Ruth Macrides and the American who does Ottoman studies. Everyone very friendly and welcoming, especially Bryer, who showed up with the first volume of BMGS (Bumgas!) with his, Nicol’s, and my signatures on the contents page. “We invented this in Staff House,” he reminded me. “And we divided MGS and JMGS peacefully, in good Quaker fashion,” I reminded him. My lecture, in the usual room, went well, I think. Harry came with his wife (Katerina), too. Old friends. And Marianna. But in the question period I couldn’t remember the name of the British ambassador who in effect invited Kazantzakis to England. Afterward we all drove into town to eat in a very good Chinese restaurant. Hong Kong style, very different. 9:30 train back to Euston. . . . Interestingly, we did not go to Woodbrooke. The pain of 1995 is still operating.

Friday, March 4, 2005

Finished vetting Saint Francis and started Report to Greco, my final chapter. Outside: snow. Late morning, to an internet café to check e-mail, some of which was urgent. Then to Tate Modern to see the Turner–Whistler–Monet show for which we had to buy tickets and wait, but we spent some time in the regular collection seeing other gorgeous Turners and also Constables. What was clear from the exhibit was that nineteenth-century London was severely polluted owing to industrialization. But this produced smogs and brilliant sunsets that the artists (except for Whistler) rather liked. This seems to be the source of Turner’s fogs. In the show, I particularly liked “Sun Setting Over a Lake” (ca. 1840), just color, no definite shapes, and “Junction of the Severn and the Wye” (ca. 1845). In the regular collection the most astonishing masterpiece we viewed was Blake’s “God Creating Adam,” God seated in a chariot of fire. . . . We walked along Millbank past Parliament and the Abbey, up Whitehall (where guards were changing)—stately official London—to St. Martin’s Lane. Ate spaghetti, strolled in Leicester Square, then saw Macbeth. RSC production beautifully acted and directed, and so modern, for the theme of overweening ambition is applicable everywhere.

Saturday, March 5, 2005

Finished vetting Report to Greco chapter. Only the three short appendices are left. Went to the National Theatre and, hooray, were able to get tickets (returns) for Dream Play for Tuesday. Leisurely lunch in the restaurant there, hearing the jazz concert below. Then walked along the embankment with St. Paul’s rising on the opposite bank, to Tate Modern to see the Strindberg exhibit. Good to learn something about this talented man: playwright, painter, and photographer. Of course, he outraged bourgeois elements and was embittered, went through three marriages, had nervous breakdowns, recovered, painted foreboding canvases, all black, but Turneresque, with fog, no clear outlines. Truly foreboding. We’ll see two of his plays this time: Miss Julie (middle period) and Dream Play (late). Apparently there’s an interesting movie of Miss Julie. When the play opened in London in the 1960s the lead was Maggie Smith. . . . Across Bankside Bridge to Bankside Station, then to London Bridge for the train to Catford Bridge. Like yesterday, full. Catford is a depressing suburb largely populated, it seems, by blacks. The theatre, like the one in Greenwich, combined with a bar, opened only at 7:00. Full house for a very lively performance of Twelfth Night. Very intimate; we were in the second row. Wonderful to see the facial expression of these talented, well-trained actresses and actors. The comic scenes—Toby, Malvolio, the Fool—hilarious. The sentimental ones . . . sentimental. The boy-girl confusion delicious. . . . Easy trip home, not like the long, cold wait at Greenwich.

Sunday, March 6, 2005

Another big breakfast. Then to Friends House Meeting at 11:00. Completely silent. Spoke afterwards to an Englishman who lives in Thailand, two hours south of Bangkok. “Why do you live there?” I asked. He answered, “It’s cheap. My lodging costs £30 per month. Wonderful food.” “Do you speak Thai?” “No, of course not. Everyone wants to speak English.” Introducing ourselves, I said that we had come here from New Hampshire to escape the cold. (It’s been about 3 or 4 degrees Centigrade here every day, with snow, sleet, and hail.) Everyone laughed heartily. . . . Returned to the Penn Club and vetted three of the four appendices. Then tube to Knightsbridge, near Harrod’s, and walked along Kensington Gardens to the Albert Memorial, now shining in gold, and to Royal Albert Hall opposite to see Carmen. The Albert Hall itself is extraordinary (as is the Russell Hotel, built in 1900, that we peeked into this morning, all marble, walnut paneling). Carmen in the round was so vigorous, so passionate, so thumpingly rhythmic, with a beautiful tenor and soprano, and an excellent Carmen (alto). Three hours of perfect staging. Sung in English, although we could understand perhaps only 10% of the sung words, but the plot was clear enough in any case. Chrysanthi was enthralled. . . . Back to Russell Square. Hamburger in a pub, very good, except for the smokers, all women, at surrounding tables. . . . In Russell Square Station a gust of wind blew off my beret, which landed on the tracks. There it stayed, of course.

Monday, March 7, 2005

To “Turks” exhibit at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. Not much of note, really, except probably the carpets. Too much related to the sultan (all from Topkapi), very little to the common people. Beautiful ceramics, but copied from China. Conclusion: the Greeks were better! . . . A stop in the National Gallery to see its only two El Grecos, and a whole gallery of marvelous Rembrandts. . . . At 4:00 p.m. met Anna Rosenberg at the Maugham Library, Chancery Lane, now part of King’s. She bore a letter from Don Nielsen. Her father is Nielsen’s best friend, apparently. She interviewed me for half an hour in Greek for the local Greek radio station. Then Roddy came, and David Ricks, and Alix MacSweeney and Rowena Loverance (!) and Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, and lots of others, to hear my talk on Kazantzakis’s “action” ca. 1944–46. Good questions afterwards both as part of the event and then privately during the reception. Then Roddy, David, Chrysanthi, I, and Judith Herrin had a leisurely supper with lots of good talk about Meg, George Thompson, MG Studies, Peter Mackridge, etc. A nice evening. Judith walked us “home” to the Penn Club.

Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Started with my now obligatory fifteen minutes at the internet café. Then walked to the National Gallery to see the extraordinary Caravaggio exhibit. Amazing realism for his time. Amazing attention to common people. Amazing latitude of interpretation—for example his “John the Baptist” is portrayed as a languid, sexy, mostly naked adolescent boy, probably Caravaggio’s homosexual lover. He was a maniac, murderer, brawler, but extraordinarily gifted, as all these paintings show. The exhibit brought together a pair of depictions of Christ as Emmaus, one with Christ shown as almost a boy, the other as the usual bearded mature man. The first light, the second dark, somber, probably reflecting Caravaggio’s own circumstances. . . . We then spent an hour or so in the permanent galleries, especially enjoying various docents explaining canvasses to school children. . . . Then to the National Theatre to see Strindberg’s Dream Play. As in Joyce’s Circe episode, perhaps modeled on this play, the main character has delusions of grandeur (he is knighted) and (many more) delusions of abasement: his wife has numerous lovers, he is accused by various women, and so forth. A phantasmagoria evoking in a convincing manner the craziness of the dream state.

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

Started correcting Brown papers. The first an “A,” well written and imaginative. The second thoughtful but illiterate: C+. I’ll give her the drills I did for the Composition Center, now happily on line. . . . Walked to the Royal Academy and spent two hours with Alix MacSweeney, no longer at the TLS, married, painting. Her interest in Greek things continues, of course. . . . Then walked back, to the British Museum to spend an hour with Rowena Loverance in her splendid office in the East Wing overlooking the entrance court. She is off to Bombay on Friday to join a Swan’s cruise going to Petra and St. Catherine’s. She’s been involved in preparing the BM’s e-learning programs used worldwide. We talked a lot about Woodbrooke, for she was on Council during the bad days there. She agreed with me regarding the ineffective Council, the improper leadership, etc. We also talked about Kendal (Rowena is a Quaker); she has visited the Quaker CCRC in York, done by the Rowntree Trust and very attractive. She now lives with her 86-year-old mother, whose mind is failing. Difficult. But at least she has a stimulating job in her area of expertise. . . . Then walked to the National Theatre, stopping for a sort of supper at a café filled with smoking women. The play was Lorca’s last, “The House of Bernarda Alba,” about a tyrannical mother of five unmarried daughters who messes things up so seriously that one of the daughters hangs herself. Lots of bitter social commentary about class and especially about bourgeois propriety. But in my view, at least, the play lacked any technical interest. It is simply a well-made play: characterization, action, emotion aplenty, but nothing experimental. Saw Anna Rosenberg afterwards on the way out, the student who interviewed me, doing a thesis on Lorca’s influence on Greek poets (not dramatists), and she agreed.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Cambridge

Met Lewis Owens, who now works in a sixth form cram college for rich kids who failed their Α-levels. He does placement: getting them into university afterwards. He took me round to his principal, dean, etc. All very cordial. Then to the Cambridge University “union” room, very fancy, where the famous debates are held, for my poetry reading. I introduced Cavafy, doing Η πόλις & Απολείπειν ο Θεός Αντώνιον (in English, of course), then “The Moonlight Sonata,” “Agraphon,” and Stylianos’s “The Twentieth Century.” Attentive audience for 1½ hours. Some good questions. Monica came in and we adjourned for lunch. They’re still not married—together for 14 years—but recently bought a house, a step forward. She teaches computer technique for the university, a good job. . . . Then walked past King’s College and Queen’s to Selwyn. Lovely to be in Cambridge again. An hour with David Holton in his suite. He’s engaged now in a large project: a proper grammar of Medieval Greek, a five-year project with several collaborators. He still uses my early book on the language question. How nice! We went to the Classics Faculty for my talk, again on Kazantzakis in 1944–46. About 30 people, some students, some adults. Afterwards one of the students said that I, unlike most lecturers, seemed actually to care about my subject. Good! To Selwyn bar for a beer and more talk. Students came in for “uncorking” before dinner in Hall. They bring their own bottle of wine, pay £1.50 to have it uncorked, and carry it into supper. How civilized! Then with ten others, including Anne Holton, to Grantchester and the Rupert Brooke restaurant. Nice supper with good conversation. Then David drove us past the Grantchester Church, but we couldn’t see if the clock was still at 10 past 3, and the old Vicarage, and the pool where Byron bathed. Overnight very comfortably at Selwyn.

Friday, March 11, 2005

Cambridge–London

Breakfast in Hall. Joined by an economic historian who also spoke last night and who visited Greece in 1955, also by a man doing a Ph.D. in theology and preparing for the Anglican priesthood. Lots of good talk about ordination of women, Bishop Gene Robinson, etc. He said he knows of no biblical argument against ordination of women in the Anglican Church, as bishops, but would vote against it now (not in the future, he hopes) simply because it would split the church all the more. . . . Back to London. Stopped at the British Library with its spectacular statue of Newton (à la Blake) in the courtyard, to see the exhibit of treasures. . . . Lunch with Stuart Morton in the Friends House restaurant. He is involved in peacemaking in northern India, trying to bring opposing factions together under Quaker auspices. Marjorie Sykes’ work in the past gives them credibility. But his family situation is not great. Wife Willemina, from Zimbabwe, has experienced color-prejudice. But life in Zimbabwe is far worse than life in Birmingham. He seemed very happy to see us and to renew an old acquaintanceship. We heard about Chris Lawson, Tony Brown, David Gray, David Abbott, and others from our past at Woodbrooke. . . . To Islington, Almeida Theatre, to see Hedda Gabler, so well acted that the actors and actresses seemed truly to be the personages portrayed. What a horror Hedda is! What a destructive personality! At least in the end she destroys herself as well, not still another innocent victim. Such a powerful play! This visit we seemed to have specialized in horrible women: Miss Julie, the mother in Lorca, Hedda, Lady Macbeth.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Hanover

Home at 10:30 a.m. Immediately to Quaker business meeting because the budget was on the agenda. Later, back home, a distressing telephone call from John Rassias to report that Stelios Orphanoudakis is dying from his cancer. Later I spoke with Ava. Stelios is 56 years old, at the height of his career. But the cancer metastasized everywhere and he’s a goner. He was being treated in Cyprus; they flew him back in an ambulance plane so that he could die at home. Now he’s on heavy doses of morphine. She put the phone next to him and he said, groggily, “Hello, Peter”—that’s all. Ava seems strong. What a shame! Such a good, useful person!

Friday, March 18, 2005

Stelios died in his sleep.

March 26, 2005

Cambridge

Fine production of Marlowe’s “Dido, Queen of Carthage” at the A.R.T. Strange how everything seems to relate to my course at Brown. Aeneas’s long, impassioned speech about the Fall of Troy is so moving. And of course Aeneas does not make the mistake of Antony with Cleopatra; he leaves Dido and fulfills his “manly” obligations to rule, and to found Rome. Dido in her final agony, deserted, broke into Virgil’s Latin, very movingly.

March 27, 2005, Easter

Very good Meeting today. Dave Montgomery started it all off by saying that he couldn’t believe in the resurrection and that those who do are horribly conservative politically. I told the story of Stylianos’s whisper to me that they tell the common people about the afterlife because they need it. I said that to be remembered for something done well, something created, something given, is really enough of an “afterlife.” Kesaya spoke beautifully as did Chris Dye and others. Afterwards, when the clerk asked for joys and sorrows, I told the sad story of Stelios’s death. . . . Later we telephoned Crete and spoke at length with Eleni and Ava. Their home is now so empty. The Forth website has a beautiful obituary that I’ll give to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine and Thayer School also. . . . Easter lunch at Kendal with the Wilsons, Sapirs, Nicholsons.

March 31, 2005

Buffalo, NY

In Buffalo for a lecture on “Inventing Greece.” My host, Jean Botsoglou, kindly arranged to take me to see the Joyce collection at the University of Buffalo library. And what a treasure it is! One of the curators brought out just a sampling—he said it was perhaps a fraction of 1% of the full holdings. What happened was that when Joyce needed to leave Paris precipitously to escape the Nazis, he and Nora left everything in the apartment as is. The apartment was looked after during the war by friends. After the war (with Joyce dead, of course), Nora decided to sell off the manuscripts, galley-proofs, etc., etc. These things were listed for auction and Buffalo was the only bidder! They got the whole lot for $10,000! (Recently, several items were purchased by the National Library in Dublin for many millions of euros.)

He showed us:

• An early printing of Finnegans Wake with typographical errors noted, many just commas inserted or deleted.

• Corrected galley proofs for FW, with numerous changes and additions in the margins.

• Holograph MS of Joyce’s essay on the Portrait, in a very fair hand, with very few changes. Probably a fair copy.

• Notebook with ideas for FW, using Joyce’s system of different colored crayons to indicate which ideas had been used, or needed to be used again.

• Sylvia Beach’s copy of the first printing of Ulysses, with a dedicatory poem by Joyce inside, and the cover the pale blue and the white of the Greek flag. Apparently Joyce had insisted on this, despite the printer’s difficulties in producing the blue. A handsome volume, obviously printed as a sort of luxury edition. This copy bound in leather by Beach. People were meant to bind, themselves, the paperback book, converting it to hard cover.

• Joyce’s early version of the Ulysses chart, in Italian, with not much filled in regarding the Nostos, which Joyce hadn’t begun to write yet.

• A notebook with ideas for “Stephen Hero.”

• Holograph MS of the Proteus episode, looking quite similar to the final printed text, and beginning of course with “Ineluctable modality . . .”

The curator was of course very familiar with Michael Groden and also with his difficulty (and Buffalo’s) owing to Stephen Joyce. He was impressed when I said that Groden had been introduced to Ulysses in my class at Dartmouth.

All in all, a rare, unexpected pleasure!

My talk, “Inventing Greece,” was loudly opposed by one of the audience, who fulminated against Jews (!) and said that I should be describing how wonderful Greece is. But most in the audience disagreed with him and were embarrassed. Very lively question period. Afterwards, folks came up carrying ancient copies of Demotic Greek 1. Also, many purchased Life in the Tomb and the poetry anthology, all of which I had to sign. A good experience.

April 1, 2005

Hanover

Leander and family here, but Daphne couldn’t come because all the children are sick. We went swimming (not me) in the pool. Sophia is now expert. Nicholas is still frightened, but trying.

April 2, 2005

Alice now here with Lori and the three girls. More swimming. Alice and I practiced the Warlock, which is coming along nicely, though I still need to learn all the notes. Run-through of harpsichord concert went fairly well. Eleven people at supper in the Kendal dining room. Leander and Deanna’s concert was lovely. Mozart’s sonata K. 526, amazing (Mozart’s Kreutzer, as Leander calls it), then Prokofiev’s Five Melodies; then Leander played Schumann’s Träumerei in memory of mother, followed by some moments of silence; finally Brahms’ sonata op. 90. Leander was so moved by playing the Schumann he could hardly concentrate on the Brahms, he told us later, but it didn’t show, of course. . . . Afterward, lots of gracious people expressing their pleasure. Kingsley said it’s the best concert he’s ever heard at Kendal. Muncks came and Dick and Suzanne and Hunters and Shepherds and Bill Niles with Matthew. A good, appropriate tribute to Harriet Bien.

April 3, 2005

I played the Aria and two variations from Bach’s Goldberg Variations at today’s harpsichord recital. Not bad. Also accompanied Joan Wilson in Loeillet. That went very well.

April 4, 2005

Participated in choosing a student to receive $12,000 Lewin money to do a service project next year. My favorite was chosen by a 4 to 3 vote.

April 6, 2005

Driver’s test and eye test. Passed. OK for five years.

April 7, 2005

My physical with Dr. Chris Allen. All’s well. Cholesterol at 169. Prostate antigen zero. Liver function OK. He recommends colonoscopy in 2006.

April 8, 2005

Christian and Holly Wolff joined us for supper. He’s interested in Kendal, probably more than she is. They’ve invited us to their farm.

April 9, 2005

Appropriate memorial service for Bart Cadbury, who died a few days ago. (I saw them bringing him out in a body bag when I went down to the garage.)

April 10, 2005

Kathy Shepherd and I did a mediation simulation in First Day School with kids about 10 years old, and wow! are they sophisticated, especially Frank Miles’s grandchild.

April 11, 2005

Fred Berthold spoke at our professors’ colloquium on theodicy: the problem of evil. Too much attention to St. Augustine. But he agrees with process theology. . . . Met Gail and Ruth Schoppert at Peking-Tokyo. Gail is so discouraged by Stefanakis that, like me, he’s not going to the May board meeting in Greece. Stefanakis is clearly telling lies about Mimi Cobb, who sent all of us an anguished account of her tribulations.

April 12, 2005

Providence

I showed the Ulysses film in class and really watched it this time, very emotionally.

April 14, 2005

Philadelphia

A lovely five hours with Peter Mackridge, who came down from Princeton and met me at the Art Museum. We spent the next 2+ hours in the extraordinary Dali exhibit there. Such talent! As always, in this type of retrospective exhibit, one could see his growth, from representational subjects to a bit of cubism, a bit of Picasso-like exaggeration, and then, slowly, to his forte: surrealism, in which madness is always represented not with fog but with meticulous detail; finally back to semi-representationality spurred by the Spanish Civil War and then World War II. One of the Civil War paintings is fully as moving as Picasso’s famous Guernica. We both liked in particular his view of a woman, seen from behind, leaning on a windowsill and looking out to the vista of the Mediterranean beyond. . . . Afterwards, supper at Pietro’s, where we used to go with Alec and family. Also, I showed him the Kimmel Center.

April 15, 2005

Pendle Hill

Pendle Hill’s fruit trees in full bloom, magnificent. I was moved to minister in Meeting: “Arriving here last night from frozen New Hampshire, where our lakes are still covered with ice, and seeing the magic of Pendle Hill’s grounds this morning, I remember a story about St. Francis. Francis left his hermitage one morning and stood before a tree, still bare. “Speak to me of God,” he said to the tree. And the tree blossomed. . . . At pamphlets committee I failed to convince the others to say Yes to John Radebaugh’s rewritten memoir. So, lots of effort with no result. But we happily approved Janeal Ravndal’s account of her seven days in prison. Earlier, we heard that Bill Tabor had died. . . . We had a special trustees’ meeting about finance, with Steve again requesting our full support and discernment re: whether to keep trying the “vision” (Chester, Peace program), or to return to the “traditional” (resident program, short courses, pubs). We favored the former. . . . At 4:00 some of us were taken to Chester, to a meeting in a church with about fifteen Afro-American teenagers all of whom are on parole. Two leaders led them (and us) through various exercises and games meant to emphasize sharing. Fun. Pendle Hill is paying for all this, which is splendid. The kids get an evening meal also, which apparently is more than they often get at home. . . . The evening meeting enabled various students to describe their projects. As always, the spirit here is infectious. After 10:00 p.m. I played piano until midnight: Warlock and Schubert.

April 16, 2005

Pendle Hill

Cadbury Committee over breakfast. We chose a scientist for a change, which is nice. Then Communications Committee with Gay as acting chair. Mike Heller very useful, also Anthony Manousos. Staff person Shirley Dodson, of course. I keep reminding them that we ought to start publishing books again at some point. Trustees met briefly over lunch. We told Steve that we want to give the “vision” a bit more time. Then Communications again, airport, hotel.

April 17, 2005

Pendle Hill

Edwin Butenhof’s Interfaith Gathering consisted of a sermon mostly against pacifism. But we all stay friends, and had a cordial lunch afterwards.

April 18, 2005

I posted Kazantzakis’s Politics of the Spirit, volume 2, to Princeton University Press!!!

April 19–20, 2005

Providence

Chrysanthi came along this time. Good class; students spoke about plans for their final paper and selected a favorite poem from the packet I gave. A candidate for the post next year, Marinos Pourgouris, attended also and contributed usefully. Afterwards, a nice dinner with Elsa, Marinos, and Livanos. . . . I gave NH-VT brochures to the Bonanza bus driver who told me she wants to tour our region on her holiday.

April 22, 2005

Riparius

To the farm. Sunshine. Planted peas, beets, carrots. Placed batteries in the John Deere and the White. Rescued Mann’s “Death in Venice” for Chrysanthi to read. No leaves yet, but beautiful nevertheless. . . . Home by 6:30 in order for me to go to Norwich Inn for a “stag party” honoring Chris Dye, who’ll be married next Saturday. His lawyer friends, Lafayette, Bob Daubenspeck, David Rakyta. Lots of good talk, especially with the lawyers, one of whom, a reformed alcoholic, recounted his experiences. He is now recovering also from evangelical religion! . . . I received $60,000 from Mother’s custody account. Gave $11,000 each today to Leander and Alec.

April 25, 2005

Dear Gay [Berger],

Yesterday, in Meeting, Leonard Cadwallader ministered so beautifully about his dedication to community, and in a way that evidenced his spiritual connection so vividly, that suddenly, and really for the first time, I felt that we had made a real mistake in choosing Steve Baumgartner to direct Pendle Hill.

The essential difference between Steve and the rest of us is that he has no Quaker qualities—nothing that evidences itself in either the spoken or (more importantly) unspoken manner so apparent yesterday in Leonard.

I hadn’t thought this before, but I do now: Maybe the prime reason that I’m eager to sever all connection with Pendle Hill since I’m rotating off the board (in other words, resigning also from the pamphlets working group) is my lack of pleasure in working with Steve. I supported him, of course, in recruiting Niyonu, and feel good about that. And I think the Chester program is marvelous (I’m not at all sure about the Peace initiative). But he doesn’t light a spark in me the way Dan Seeger did or Margery Walker before him, both so effortlessly Quakerly in their personalities.

Oh well . . . just some thoughts . . .

Back now (appropriately!) to my essay on Light.

April 26, 2005

Providence

Another good class, this time on Kazantzakis’s Odyssey. Afterwards, to Susan and Peter Allen’s for supper with them and daughter Eveline and her friend Mara from Romania. Family style, around the table, very nice. I made a pitch with Peter for a Kendal in Greece since he’s on the Anatolia College board of trustees.

April 28, 2005

Ken Yalowitz spoke well at Kendal about why the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. He was there, in Moscow on the very day. We had supper with him and Judy beforehand, together with Howard and Sally Wriggins, Dick and Karen Sheldon, and Charles McLane, for obvious reasons, given their careers. I introduced Ken, speaking about the Dickey Center.

April 29, 2005

Supper with about fifty people at Hanover Inn on the eve of Kesaya Noda’s wedding to Chris Dye. Afterwards, Chris asked each and every person to stand and describe his or her relationship to the bride and/or groom. Fascinating. Chris’s sister from Dublin with her Irish (lady) partner. Das and wife from Tokyo. Another Dartmouth grad who said he’d taken Comparative Literature from me in 1968. Lot’s of Kishis from California. When my turn came I mentioned my vetting of Kesaya’s book on Livingston and my good word for her when President Wright was looking for an assistant.

April 30, 2005

Eight-hand piano in the morning: Smetana and Bach, with Joan Snell, Joan Wilson, and Co Emlen. Afterwards Joan Wilson and I tried the Warlock, which she sightreads beautifully. . . . At 1:00 p.m., off to the Dartmouth skiway (named for the McLanes and designed by Treat Arnold’s partner) for the wedding, Quaker style. Two hundred twenty-five people. I started the worship by describing the nature of silence to the group, most of whom were not Quakers. In ministry, I said, rise out of the silence and sink back into it. Think of all of us as covered by a large blanket or tarpaulin. When you rise you stretch that cover, give it a sort of bump, but do not break through it. Then, when you sit, it returns to its original shape, as though undisturbed. The Meeting went well. Chris and Kesaya said their vows faultlessly. There was much ministry, including Lafayette speaking at length about Kesaya’s girlhood. Then everyone signed the certificate, and two hundred twenty-five people were fed a catered dinner, followed by songs, a fiddler, etc. Home at 9:00 p.m.

May 3, 2005

Next to last class, devoted to students’ presentations of their final papers. So many were imaginative, ambitious, and successful. I can’t remember having such a talented class. Let’s see now if these papers read as well as they sounded orally.

May 5, 2005

Since I’m going off the Pendle Hill board and Publications Committee, I thought it would be interesting to make a résumé of my Pendle Hill service. Here’s what I found:

PETER BIEN’S INVOLVEMENT WITH PENDLE HILL

Administrative

Member of the General Board 1977–1992, 1994–2005, Secretary, 1979; Assistant Presiding Clerk, 1980–1981; Presiding Clerk, 1982–84.

Member of the Executive Board, 1982–1992, 1994–2005. Recorder, 2002–2005.

Publications Committee, 1977–2005; Clerk 1984–2005.

Cadbury Scholarship Committee, 1987-2005; clerk 2004–2005.

Clerk, Search Committee for Executive Secretary, 1990–1991.

Clerk, Outside Review Committee for the Resident Program, May 1994–February 1995.

Search Committee for Executive Secretary, 2000.

Search Committee for Dean, 2003.

Negotiated arrangement with Morehouse for distribution of PH books.

In residence

Visiting Teacher, Fall term, 1990.

Quaker in Residence, Winter term, 1998.

Publications

Tempted by Happiness: Kazantzakis’ Post-Christian Christ, Pendle Hill Pamphlets, 1984.

Words, Wordlessness, and The Word: Silence Reconsidered from a Literary Point of View. Pendle Hill Pamphlets, 1992.

“Publisher’s Preface.” In Guide to Quaker Practice by Howard H. Brinton, pp. 5-7. Pendle Hill Pamphlets, 1993.

“Introduction.” In Sonnets from Later Life. 1981–1993 by Kenneth Boulding, 1995.

On Retiring to Kendal (and Beyond): A Literary Excursion. Pendle Hill Pamphlets, 2003.

[maybe forthcoming] Quaker Light. Pendle Hill Pamphlets, 2006 (?).

also: co-edited Festschrift for Dan Seeger.

Teaching

Weekend course in “The Uncertain Christ,” May 8–10, 1981. Co-leader with Mary Morrison.

Term-long course on The Last Temptation. January-March 1998.

Weeklong course on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Kierkegaard’s aesthetic, ethical, and religious modes. March 8–13, 1998.

Weeklong course on Christianity and Fiction (Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Kazantzakis’s Christ Recrucified). January 27–February 1, 2002.

Weekend course on “Light.” April 5–7, 2002.

Weekend course on “Light.” Oct. 10–12, 2003.

[forthcoming] Weekend course on Zorba the Greek. Feb. 3–5, 2006.

Lectures

“The Deep Structure of The Last Temptation of Christ.” May 10, 1981.

“Artistic Transformations of Jesus.” May 18, 1992.

Introduction to the film Zorba the Greek. Feb. 27, 1998.

“Poets’ Perceptions of Science & Technology.” May 15, 2000.

Recent Donations

Capital campaign

$10,000

December 2000

1,000

April 2001

1,000

April 2001 for Yamaha grand piano

8,500

April 2002

1,500

November 2002

1,500

August 2003, 18 books @ $5.00

90

May 2004

5,000

October 2004

1,000

April 2005, for Chester program

1,000

April 2005

5,000

$35,590

May 10, 2005

Providence

My last class. Students presented their final papers, some exceedingly good. One did paintings of the Odyssey & Ulysses, using power point to project them. Lots that I had never seen. Another did Virginia Woolf’s reactions to Ulysses, again using material new to me and important. Class went until 7:10. At 7:30, friends picked me up for a farewell dinner at Milona’s house: Elsa, Dimitris, Milona, her husband and daughter, and Ott from admissions (who’d known Alec when she was at Bryn Mawr), and a grad student. Leisurely dinner with lots and lots of talk. To bed at 12:30 a.m.

May 14, 2005

Izzy Ganz here with her young pianist, Charles Tauber; we picked them up in Rutland last night; the train arrived at 12:10 a.m. (!), an hour late. Bed at 2:00 a.m. Supper today with Lisa and Connie. Then the concert: musical comedy songs by Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Tom Lehrer, Bernstein. Audience sing-along for “Those were the days.” Izzy vivacious and very professional. Charlie a superb pianist. Yet, really, Mozart or Brahms are better. How clear it is that these songs are ephemeral, whereas the great classics are not. And Izzy’s voice, although technically accomplished, lacks magic. She’s not a Lotte Lehmann. . . . Their friends the Duphtys joined us for drinks afterwards and then took both musicians home, in Strafford.

May 15, 2005

Gordon Browne conducted the ecumenical service, speaking about his visit to Hiroshima, movingly. I hope that he can expand this into a Pendle Hill pamphlet and that the result will be better than Radebaugh’s. We met Izzy and Charles in Woodstock and returned them to AMTRAK in Rutland, then continued on to the farm. Supper in our favorite restaurant in Lake George. The owner recognized me at once, told me that Anne, the waitress from Poland, will be back in 2007. Her friend from Romania was working again and very friendly. She’s married to an American now, and lives in Glens Falls.

May 16, 2005

Riparius

Planted 40 seedling evergreens given us by Lafayette. Tilled the garden and put in the 2nd planting. Fixed the grape vine better and added additional posts. Read and marked one more Brown final paper (I’ve done all of them now, but one still has not been submitted). Got the tractor off its blocks but couldn’t start it. Starter goes click-click-click, that’s all. I’m charging the battery overnight to see if anything better happens tomorrow. We’re both hungry and tired after so much physical activity.

May 19, 2005

New York

Flew down last afternoon and had a full roast beef dinner at the Yale Club: salad, wine, dessert, coffee, for free because May is my birthday month. Amazing. This morning: to the Roosevelt Hotel to be interviewed by a Hollywood company, on film, regarding Scorsese’s Last Temptation. Started with the make-up expert who greased and powdered my face, improved my eyebrows, etc. Then answered questions for an hour, on Kazantzakis, the film, myself, Schrader. Should be lively. . . . Back home in time to dine with the Webster committee, including Sally Pinkas, who was very lively. She hopes to furnish us a marvelous Bulgarian violinist next season.

May 20, 2005

A huge lunch at the Inn honoring John Rassias for his contributions to Dartmouth alumni. John spoke in his usual exuberant manner, not saying much. But a standing ovation followed. Former student Mosenthal told me he remembered Comparative Literature 47 with great pleasure, as have other students. That was probably my best course: Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Proust. We had also sent him to Birmingham to work with Paul Morby, very meaningful in his life. . . . Flew in the late afternoon to Philadelphia. . . . Managed an hour in my office this morning, adding more good quotes from Gregory Palamas on light, all of which insist that it is not “created.”

May 21, 2005

Pendle Hill, then to NYC

Long trustees meeting with Niyonu reporting on her initiatives to get the Resident Program in better shape, and other projected changes—e.g., making Tom and Charlie redundant, not replacing Denny, promoting Carol Sciaira, etc. But chiefly, should we keep destroying the endowment (another $2,000,000 between now and 2008) or go back to the “traditional” Pendle Hill, in which case Steve said at first that he would resign (although maybe Mickey convinced him otherwise), or hope that Joey can raise funds by next year to keep Chester, Youth, and Peace going. We expect to decide on June 19, God help us.

May 22, 2005

NYC

Met Howard Dossor at the Yale Club. He’s in New York, from Melbourne. He gave me a play he has written but cannot produce because Stavrou never answers his letters. I didn’t know that he was an ordained Congregational minister who left the ministry in disgust and then became a teacher. We talked energetically about Kazantzakis and the film, etc. for 2½ hours. I then rushed to Columbus Circle to hear a recital of new music benefiting Classical Action. Nice to see Charlie Hamlen again after a long time. One of the first selections was a setting of Molly Bloom’s last words, for mezzo-soprano. Very nice. Splendid singer. New music very accessible.

May 23, 2005

Jay Parini is here. Old friends! So easy, as though no time intervened. He read poetry in the Gathering Room most effectively, and was applauded for his anti-Bush verse. Introducing him I said how nice that he is here as a poet, which is how I first knew him, before all the novels, biographies, and critical writings. His book on Tolstoy is still perhaps going to become a movie, starring Anthony Hopkins.

May 24, 2005

Mats Lemberger brought eight Green Key Dartmouth students and they dined with 30+ of us in the Steere Room: emeriti professors and alumni. Each person stood up and told his or her story briefly. So many of the alums had been in World War II. One of the students is of Turkish parents. A very moving experience, to see how all of us are connected with Dartmouth.

May 25, 2005

Visited Christian and Holly Woolf and youngest son on their farm in Vermont. Inherited from her parents. Three houses, two big barns, sheep, horses. They grow all their own hay. Mostly Holly’s work. Christian is often in Europe, very active as a composer. Chrysanthi took a shine to Holly.

May 26, 2005

A team from Woodbury College, including their president, came to do a presentation on mediation at Kendal. I invited Michael Levengood, Kendal’s acting executive director, to sup with them. The simulated mediation was so-so, the mediator one of their students. She forgot some of the elementary techniques, alas. Very small audience: embarrassing, partly because our advertisement had said meditation instead of mediation! In my introduction, I told about Bob Reich’s remark to me: “Litigation never changes anyone’s heart; mediation has the chance to do this.”

May 27, 2005

Farm. Started the tractor this time, after cleaning battery terminals well with steel wool. But I broke the Ford mower almost instantly. The brackets holding the pitman rod sheered off, instead of the pitman rod breaking. Bud Ruddick, amazingly, says he has a replacement part. Next time. Fertilized the garden. The trees we planted are still there. Saw Donna and Ed, whose cabin is now erected. Met the padrona of Sicilian Pizza in Warrensburg, when we were both buying flowers. She calls me “Professor.”

May 28, 2005

Back to Hanover in time for supper at the Muncks’. Chrysanthi gave me a cap as a birthday present. Tedious conversation over dinner, except with one of the guests who is in the Vermont legislature. Kendal socializing is better—supper until 7:00, then home.

May 29, 2005

John and Mary Rassias for supper in the apartment. Chrysanthi will be teaching ALPS in July and maybe a three-day intensive course August 1 to 3. John invited me to do the three-day refresher in French, gratis.

June 1, 2005

Met the new War/Peace Fellows at the Dickey Center. Some contemplate peace-advocacy after graduation. Tom Corl will host them at the Red Cross next May if we wish. . . . Dick and Allan for music: our last Wednesday until next September.

June 2, 2005

Long lunch with Jack Shepherd. He’ll be going to Africa in the fall. We’re planning another lunch in early September before he leaves.

June 3, 2005

Events Committee. We’re planning for Bishop Robinson’s talk in early September. Ginia Allison chaired her last meeting. . . . Warm pot-luck at the Meeting House to say goodbye to Christine Linares and Ellis. Too bad none of us knows the Pendle Hill farewell song.

June 4, 2005

Supper at the Marders’. Lots of gossip about the Farm School. Everett wants to be a trustee. I submitted his credentials to T. Jewett. The news is that Stefanakis is still antipathetic, as is his wife. They removed their son from Pinewood School and brought him back to Boston. Rumor has it that Stefanakis wants to leave. But the board, of course, will turn coward and do nothing, I predict.

June 5, 2005

Three-hour lunch at EBA’s, after Meeting, with Nodas, Sydney, Hunters—our “gang.” Sydney told about Bill’s death at age 47, from emphysema. He was a heavy smoker and drinker. Had only ⅓ of his lung functioning. Lafayette is 90.

June 6, 2005

Finance Committee. They’re following my suggestion that we pay the $38,200 needed to retire the entire mortgage. Business Meeting will decide on the 12th.

June 7, 2005

Boston

Drove to Boston. Parked under the Common. Got settled in Beacon Hill Friends House. To Cambridge. Supper in the Charles Hotel, very ample. Then a marvelous performance at A.R.T. of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, a masterpiece. O’Neill was influenced at first by Strindberg, then by Sophocles and Aeschylus. The Greek element very evident in this production, which by lowering the lights effected something like choral interludes. And of course Abbie’s infanticide recalls Medea’s. Raymond Barry a very persuasive father: Ephriam Cabot. Mickey Solis a fine Eben. The theme of rocks so meaningful to us from our own experiences in the Adirondacks. Also the theme, indeed obsession, of possessing what one has created by oneself, in this case the Cabots’ farm, threatened to be stolen from them by Abbie. Wonderful acting, indeed just as good as British.

June 8, 2005

Boston–Manchester

To South Station after breakfast in Palmer House hotel. Chrysanthi to Washington via AMTRAK. I then drove to Manchester airport to wait for Alice’s arrival at 7:30 from Phoenix. But her plane was grounded at Chicago owing to bad weather. At 8:30 I drove home. She arrived, finally at 11:00 p.m. and stayed overnight in a hotel.

June 9, 2005

Kinhaven

To Kinhaven with Alice. We started practicing our piece: Peter Warlock’s “Capriol Suite.” And I’m trying to get my Schubert andante ready for performance on Saturday. Wonderful solo recital by David Abbot: Beethoven Opus 31 #1, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Bach as an encore. Very powerful, controlled playing. Afterwards, as I was taking to him, he remembered Daphne, a student here 20 years ago when he was a teacher. He lives in Switzerland and has a good job, but is recently divorced from his Swiss wife, and misses America. I told him about Cheever’s story about the woman living in Europe who suddenly discovers why she is not content: she cannot get a BLT. . . . Nice to see Ignat again, and Nigel, and Mrs. Shin, and Nancy, and Bruno.

June 10, 2005

Kinhaven

Very hot. I bought a fan at the Vermont Country Store. Lots of practice with Alice on the Warlock, and alone on the Schubert. The highlight of the faculty four-hand recital was Leander and Ignat doing the Schubert Fantasia in F minor, magnificently. Wonderfully moving, with great pianissimos. I kidded Ignat afterward, because I remember him saying when he and Leander did an all-Schubert program in Washington that he’d never include the Fantasia. He explained that it is overdone, to the exclusion of several other Schubert compositions of equal quality.

June 11, 2005

Four-hand coaching from Leander, very helpful especially regarding my technical difficulties. In the evening, the solo recital. I was first and did the Schubert quite well, I think, with only one little technical glitch that I think I covered over fairly well. Mrs. Shin, Nigel, Leander, and Nancy all told me afterwards that it was very well played. And why don’t I take lessons?! Alice did two Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, the first exquisitely, but the second, technically more demanding, didn’t work so well. . . . Nice talk with Charlotte Armstrong yesterday. She’s reading the Iliad and Ovid. I’ll send her my notes. Also long talks with Bill Rhoads about his work at the Fairbanks company in St. Johnsbury and his reading to the blind. . . . The heat continues. I’ve spent the day barefoot and in shorts. The fan helps.

June 12, 2005

Up early to have 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. on the concert hall piano, with Alice. Then a private lesson with Mrs. Shin on the Schubert, which was excellent. As always, it’s the details that count, and she showed me details throughout. Lots more practicing of the Warlock with Alice, with moderate improvement, lots of problems remaining. Master class conducted brilliantly (as always) by Ignat, for Steve Kline, who was impressive in playing a demanding sonata by Scriabin, then for Mrs. Lawson, who did Beethoven. Ignat’s diagnostic ability is extraordinary, as are his powers of articulation. Among other things, he told us that all Schirmer editions of Beethoven, etc. are garbage, but the Schnabel Beethoven is OK because Schnabel’s suggestions are good and are always labeled as his, not Beethoven’s. . . . After supper, Alice and I tried the Warlock some more and then began sight-reading some possibilities for next year, specifically Rachmaninoff and Moszkowski (Spanish Dance). We also tried to revive some of last year’s Townsend.

June 13, 2005

Very good coaching in the morning from Nancy. What a difference it makes! She said everyone is talking about my Schubert. Mrs. Shin keeps saying, “You’re so musical.” And: “Why don’t you take lessons?” “My last lesson,” I keep repeating, was when I was 22 or 23 years old. 53 years ago.” . . . Lots of practice today with Alice, incorporating what Nancy suggested about tempi, accents, dynamics. Given a miracle, it will be OK tomorrow. . . . Quick trip to Weston to use the free computer terminal offered by the Country Store. In the evening, a stirring recital by Nigel: Beethoven Opus 10 #2 and Opus 31 #2 (Tempest) separated by Six Little Piano Pieces, Opus 19, by Schönberg, very nice. And the Beethoven was noble. Then a very jazzy piece by his colleague at U-Mass, followed by Liszt’s “Les Jeux d’Eaux à la Villa d’Este” and a gorgeous Liszt “Liebestraum” as the encore. So delicately played. . . . Before the concert, Leander addressed everyone about the Kinhaven spirit: non-competitive, non-judgmental. He told me afterwards that there had been an unfortunate incident. . . . Nice conversation again with Charlotte Armstrong over wine and cheese.

June 14, 2005

Kinhaven

Alice and I performed the Capriol credibly, although one final chord came in two parts instead of simultaneously together. We did a run-through at 6:45 a.m. that helped, probably. Lots of other really musical duet pieces, and some not so musical. Fun to hear people play selections that I did in the past: the Barber, Dvořák, Poulenc, for example. . . . Fond goodbyes, “see you next year.” Home with Alice, who took a 5:00 p.m. bus to get to Lori’s. Piles of mail, e-mail, phone messages, as always.

June 15, 2005

Hanover

Spent the afternoon, supper, and part of the evening with John Tall-madge and his two daughters, Rosalind and Elizabeth. Ros is looking at colleges. I gave her a good tour, stressing art history and studio art, her interests. John is 58 years old and now once again unemployed, although he sees this as an opportunity for diversification. His wife, Pam, has a steady income, health insurance for the family, etc. A lovely reunion. He kept repeating that I was his “Nestor” at Dartmouth, exemplifying a life style as well as scholarly attributes. . . . After supper we picked up Chrysanthi from AMTRAK. In the apartment I played my Schubert and the Capriol and John tried a Chopin Nocturne, which he murdered. But it’s good to try.

June 16, 2005

Hanover–Riparius

Breakfast with John and daughters. Then we drove to Riparius, which is very wet. Road washed out in places but still passable. Impossible to mow. We tended the garden a bit, opened shutters, organized. Wonderful to be here.

June 17, 2005

A miracle. The phone company installed Ethernet service for my computer, which now accesses internet and e-mail speedily, with no dial-up to a modem. Marvelous. But the television doesn’t work, perhaps because of all the rain. . . . I mowed a little, in between showers. We went to North Creek to shop. Saw Mrs. Schaffer, who reported that Don, aged 68, has heart disease. Treated ourselves to pie from the NC bakery. Lots of mail. I played the piano, which actually sounds and works better than some of the Kinhaven grand pianos. . . . Doug Gwyn responded helpfully to my Quaker Light essay, but worried that I use only the Greek approach with John’s gospel and say nothing about Hebrew influences. I’ll try to fix this. Paul Lacey also responded favorably. I’ll quote some passages from his own lecture on light.

June 18, 2005

To Philadelphia

Lunch at the Shapiros’, where Chrysanthi will stay during my absence. Fran, aged 91, had both knees replaced and is doing quite well, although still experiencing pain. Irv is painting more and more, better and better. . . . AMTRAK from Albany to Philadelphia, then SEPTA because the Avis place closes early on Saturday. A long trip, but I worked on Quaker Light, and the Pendle Hill materials (dire!), etc. I do not look forward to tomorrow’s board meeting, although I hope to see Dan Seeger, who’s there for AFSC. . . . Speaking of boards, Vouli telephoned to speak again of how horrible things are at the Farm School. Then the NYC fundraiser resigned, sending us all a long letter detailing how Stefanakis made his job impossible. I am repeating to Phil Foote that we must save the School from another year with this disastrous leader. If we don’t, the School’s pain will be our fault as much as Stefanakis’s. But Phil, so far, is not willing to take this step. Among other things, Stefanakis apparently masterminded a contract that would extract about $200,000 from us if we fire him. . . . Arrived late at Pendle Hill, walking from Wallingford SEPTA station. Immediately met our friend from Australia, the Cadbury Fellow, who has actually written something on Quakers and Catholics. Then played the beautiful Yamaha piano: Beethoven and Debussy. Slept in the “Museum” room in Chace of one of the staff, who occupies a suite. Saw Schyler Cunningham, who said he’d meet me at breakfast to talk about the Chester program.

June 19, 2005

Schyler never showed up for breakfast. Met a woman who lives in Cobb Hill, the commune established by Donella Meadows. We talked about Ann Armbrecht, who left the community. . . . After Meeting for Worship, saw Paul Lacey and thanked him for his lecture on Light; saw Dan Seeger and arranged for lunch; saw Don McNemar, now living in Boston, teaching, and serving on the AFSC board. And others. . . . Then the time of truth: the board. We met from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. with an hour off for lunch. Steve recommended the “severe” option: cutting Peace, Chester, Youth program, reducing the staff by 10 to 2, basically acknowledging his (and our) failure in achieving the Vision. Everyone lamenting, only Gay and Pat seemed willing to take the risk of drawing another two to three millions out of our $9,000,000 endowment. I was convinced that to do this would be truly bad management, and reluctantly concurred with the motion to curtail the Vision. Steve thinks he can now reduce the 2006 deficit to $250,000. We’ll see. . . . Nice quick lunch, at Wendy’s of course, with Don Seeger, who apparently really will leave San Francisco in a month (maybe). We caught up on children, his foster son and family, and San Francisco, which he loves. He’s already been asked to lead the Democratic Party in Lumberton, and said No. . . . Read Dodd on the 4th Gospel. Not much. I need his earlier book. AMTRAK to Albany. Late. Got to Shapiros at midnight. Overnight there, then breakfast on the 20th. Fran at age 91 is doing beautifully after two knees replaced.

June 27, 2005

Got Dodd’s “The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel” from Dartmouth. Exactly what I needed. Incorporated information, thanks to him, on Philo, the Corpus Hermeticum, Wisdom literature, and more on Stoicism and Neoplatonism. Finished this draft today, working most of the day in intense heat and humidity. But in the afternoon Bud Ruddick’s man came and fixed the Ford mower, miraculously finding a used part. The other day I started Alec’s Pathfinder and also the Jeep, removing both from the barn because I wanted to stand on the roof of the Jeep to try to reach the branches that are obstructing our satellite television. But they were still too high. So I contracted with a tree company to come and trim those plus other branches that are too close to various roofs. Just around the house I’ve mowed first with the Troy-Bilt, then with the White, trimming with the line trimmer, and everything looks splendid. Fields have very high and thick hay owing to all the rain in past weeks. Garden doing well so far. Ants in office beam but my spray seems to be killing them since my table each morning is covered with shriveled corpses. . . . Long Pendle Hill conference call yesterday. The board decided to restore the Youth programs and a modified Chester program. Deficit will be $500,000. Strangely, I was one of the most conservative, warning against future bankruptcy. Gay Berger admitted that I convinced her. The other side was represented chiefly by Ted Brinton, who felt we should maintain the Vision and all go out and raise money for it. So we compromised. . . . The Farm School is in a real mess. Apparently the TEE and Lyceum teachers have called for Stefanakis’s immediate dismissal. Today we all received an unsigned letter detailing Stefanakis’s accomplishments (Minoutis probably). John Cleave and Waring Partridge have reacted strongly against Phil Foote’s evaluation that calls for dismissal. Tomorrow the board will indulge in a conference call that promises to be tempestuous, but interesting.

June 28, 2005

Surprisingly, Zannas reported that even the Greek trustees, with two exceptions, say that Stefanakis must go, not because he is so terrible but chiefly because things have gone downhill so far already that no remedy is possible. Just about everyone on the phone agreed. So he’ll get notice shortly, and then we’ll see if we can get rid of him for less than $300,000. . . . Bud Rodick’s man came again and fixed the Ford mower for $500. But it works. I finished the north field.

July 1, 2005

Proofs of my Renan article for Darren’s book arrived. Filled with typographical errors and faulty copyediting. It has taken me two days to set them right. . . . Mowed Alec’s field, which now looks lovely. . . . Chrysanthi and I have been watching an interesting video on Alexander the Great showing Kabul, Samarkand, the Indus, etc., the localities he traversed, and making him out a war criminal, sadist, egomaniac, as well as a sort of driven genius.

Sunday, July 3, 2005

Camp Backlog

Judy Cadbury invited us to come and be present for the interment of Warder’s ashes. Joel met us with the boat. The first person I greeted when we arrived was Tom Brown, now 93 years old and sound in mind and body. He ministered well, in a firm voice, at Meeting for Worship in front of the backlog, about 25 people present. Judy ministered too, about Warder. Then we all went to a young balsam prepared for the interment and Joel and Judy poured ashes into holes around it. We all sang a hymn before and another after, two of Warder’s favorites. Judy spoke again about him and their marriage. She’s Canadian, was not a Quaker, and said, humorously, that she helped prevent hemophilia owing to all the intermarriage of the Cadbury, Brown, and Borton families. Chrysanthi and I then spent probably ¾ hour with her at her tent, listening to her incessant monologue about Warder’s depression, their marital troubles, his electric and shock therapy, his lying on the couch all day long, and the difficulties with Joel, who also is subject to depression, as was Henry Cadbury, she said. So it’s in the genes also. Henry was a deficient father, too busy being a great, famous man. Warder suffered. He tried to do better, and he and Joel had a close relationship, although Joel seems very troubled, 40 years old and not yet finished with his Ph.D. Finally the bell rang for lunch: turkey and all the trimmings. Tom Brown elaborated on Plato and Aristotle as dinner conversation and said that death is necessary and actually sweetens life. I told him about my “On Retiring to Kendal (and Beyond),” which says the same; I’ll send him a copy. After lunch Joel returned us in the boat, with Judy, too. She walked us to our parked car and then kept us for an hour with another interminable monologue. No wonder Warder had depression! Driving home we both felt enervated by her, but, poor thing, she means well. She’s just very lonely. Said she couldn’t bear to enter the Indian Lake house for a year after his death.

July 4, 2005

Chrysanthi’s Hoover vacuum doesn’t suck. I spent the whole afternoon taking it completely apart to check for blockages and found none. Miraculously put it back together properly. One belt is broken. We’ll replace it and see what happens. . . . Watching Britten’s “Death in Venice” video, which is inferior to the staged production I saw. . . . Chrysanthi said I was like Henry Cadbury, always busy and working, not spending enough time with the children. Perhaps. But we did lots together here at the farm. . . . Leander is such an attentive father that he doesn’t fulfill himself as a composer. That’s the other side of the story.

July 7, 2005

Yesterday and today watched Peter Sellers’ video of Don Giovanni. He’s made Giovanni and Leporello Hispanic slum-dwellers. At the final banquet they eat big macs and when Giovanni praises vino he drinks a McDonald’s milkshake. But beautifully sung. On the 5th we saw Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at SPAC, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the NYC ballet at SPAC, beginning with “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1966. Not as imaginative as other Balanchine ballets, except maybe for the donkey. . . . Finished Renan proofs for Darren’s books.

July 9, 2005

To Hanover yesterday so that Chrysanthi could start the ALPS program in Greek. Stayed away from supper yesterday in order to avoid watching John do his customary antics. Went today. Nice group of students, including one who will be an intern at Anatolia starting in August. . . . Finished vetting my proofs for David Holden. Practiced. Tried my Goldberg on the harpsichord. . . . Eagerly awaiting news about Stefanakis’s reaction to our devastatingly negative evaluation.

July 10, 2005

Alec and family arrived safely at JFK from Bangkok. He’s going to South Salem as first stop and then, if not too tired, to the farm. . . . At Meeting today, long talk with Mats Lemberger, whom I’m trying to interest in becoming a Farm School intern for 2006–07.

July 11, 2005

Randolph, NH

Long drive from Hanover to Randolph. Very beautiful, especially near Randolph itself, which sits directly in back of Mount Adams. Welcomed by Avery and Peg Post, then Jim and Harriet Baldwin, the Hortons, and others. I lectured on “Death in Venice.” Afterwards, a man came up and said he’d been on the second floor of Α-entry, Lowell House, when I was on the fifth floor. Amazing. But neither of us for the moment could remember the name: Lowell. Another man said he’d run the Open University Seminar at Dartmouth, which was sabotaged, he said, by the humanists. Afterwards, leisurely lunch at the Baldwins’, with about a dozen of the group. They want me back next year, but it’s a very long way from Riparius, as I discovered on the return trip—four hours, over the Port Henry Bridge. But I returned early enough to greet Alec and Monica.

July 15, 2005

Alec and I have been re-shingling the small roof over the connecting room. We finished today and rewarded ourselves with dinner at Hall of Springs and ballet: “Octet” (Mendelssohn/Martins), “Agon” (Stravinsky/Balanchine), and “Union Jack” (Balanchine), none of which I’d seen before. “Agon” is of course very pure and cerebral. “Union Jack” is the opposite: a wonderful show: costumes, scenery, 70 dancers on stage, humor, acrobatics, pure fun. Martins’ “Octet” very satisfying, too.

July 16, 2005

Long visit by Don and Maria Kurka, here for only five days because Maria has to return to Tennessee for a green card interview and to care for her ailing father. Don has sold some of his land. But they hope to return for a longer period next summer. . . . Telephoned Chrysanthi to wish her happy anniversary (tomorrow). She said she’d completely forgotten. It’s only the 50th!

July 17, 2005

Drove to Kinhaven for lunch catered to present and former trustees. Nice to see Bill Polk again, and Jonathan Richmond and John Austin. Then a marvelous concert, starting with the orchestra doing a Shostakovich symphony. Caroline is still there, and Peter Schultz and Mary Watt, and Jerry is walking with a cane, suffering from arthritis, but he conducted beautiful madrigals. A treat, as always.

July 21, 2005

Alec is placing cedar shingles on the playroom wall, finally, after 30+ years. I’m making a window frame so that we can have a glass window for that room. 45-degree corners secured by dowels, rabbited with the router. Pretty bad result, I fear, but usable. . . . Today Dan Fones, wife, and son arrived and spent all morning trimming the ash behind our cabin (to facilitate television and to remove branches overhanging the roof), the cherry next to the barn, then several pines overhanging the Guest House. Finally they took down two large dead trees in the rock pile in Leander’s field. Then everything was fed into a chipper; thus we now have a large pile of chips. And television!

July 22, 2005

Hearing that Alvin Millington was dying, at age 81, with a brain tumor, all of us went over the Millington district to pay our final respects. He reacted minimally but perhaps was aware. Mrs. Millington has Alzheimer’s and was all smiles. The youngest daughter was feeding her father a little and looking very pretty. We stopped to see Dale, whose new, young wife, Monica, is a vivacious beauty. Then David arrived. I wanted to see him because he is child number 2, after Roy, and the one I knew best in the 1950s. I remember him climbing the greased pole at the Warrensburg fair. But now he is immensely fat and he told me that he has an incurable lung disease the result of driving a cement truck. He can’t work, and has no resources except social security. Poor man! Alvin, who fathered ten children and was nothing much in life, now obviously achieved his true role as paterfamilias, with the whole clan gathered round (except Billy, the youngest, who’s a hopeless alcoholic). Very touching.

July 23, 2005

Alvin died last night. . . . I’m very sick, with some sort of flu and a temperature of 101. Alec drove me with Chrysanthi to the Warrensburg Health Center and I had a good examination, being instructed not to try to get better by shingling roofs, mowing, raking, and constructing window frames.

July 29, 2005

Leander arrived with Sophia and Nicholas in time for Alec’s 47th birthday supper, topped off with a large blueberry pie made by Chrysanthi from our own blueberries. We finished the playroom wall. I made the window frame and screen-frame. Alec did the shingles, caulking, etc. I still need to make a shutter. It looks very nice indeed, after decades with tar paper. Also finished mowing around the pond with the John Deere, Troy-Bilt, Leander’s rotary, and the scythe.

July 31, 2005

To NYC

Drove to the AMTRAK station in Rensselaer but couldn’t go the usual route because the bridge collapsed. I got shunted into Empire Plaza where luckily a parking attendant told me, more or less, an alternative route. Luckily I had time to spare. In NYC went straightway to MoMA for the first time since its renovation. Lovely to see a Debra and Leon Black gallery on the 5th floor, filled with delicious Picassos, Giacomettis, Matisses, Mirós. The special exhibit on the 6th floor graced the close friendship and partnership of Cézanne and Pissarro for about twenty years as Cézanne, especially, was developing his distinctive style. . . . To Izzy Ganz’s apartment on 22nd and 9th for supper with her and Abbie at a very good Chinese restaurant on 9th and 24th. Abbie is a character. He even wrote a fake “personal” in one of the papers advertising for a female sexual partner, and got 35 replies. He is a student of Stalinism and had heard of Victor Serge. He’s 84; Izzy must be 60+. Their daughter, Gaby, the truck driver, just got divorced in order to pursue a Lesbian relationship and raise her daughter with two mothers, so to speak.

August 1, 2005

NYC

Hooray! We voted overwhelmingly to end Stefanakis’s presidency by September 1, either by termination or, we hope, his willingness to resign. Only two voted no: Kravvas and Drapos. It’s all hush-hush now until our lawyer and his lawyer negotiate. This may cost us up to $300,000, but keeping him would be far worse.

August 5, 2005

Finished the new roof on the shed. Galvanized. Done very quickly. . . . Brittles (James McBride), Stephanie, and their youngest visited for four hours. He’s hoping to write a novel on the Civil War from the viewpoint of blacks. I told him about the Penn School, John Woolman (whom he had never heard of), Hal Weaver’s proposed anthology of writings by black Quakers, and Donna McDaniel’s critique of Quaker actions concerning blacks. . . . Telephoned Bridgit McCarthy Sullivan, Marie McCarthy’s granddaughter. She hopes to write a biography of Marie, and earn enough money to buy Daphne’s house.

August 6, 2005

Cooperstown

We saw a splendid production of Britten’s opera Death in Venice, very moving, marvelous music, a gang of young boys dancing and prancing as Tadzio’s playmates and satyrs, a resplendent “Lady of the Pearls,” a fine baritone doing the fop at Pola, the gondolier, the hotel manager, the barber, and the ha-ha singer. I hadn’t remembered that Britten actually has Apollo and Dionysus on stage debating who will win von Aschenbach’s soul. It was such a moving show, and perfectly consistent with Thomas Mann’s hope that an emotion can have the precision of thought and thought the power of an emotion. . . . Supper at the Sicilian Pizza restaurant, waited on by Kate, the Polish girl who is friendly with Anna, whom I got to know there several years ago. The owner always greets me as “Hello, Professor.”

August 7, 2005

Finished mowing the south field. Και του χρόνου! Leander has been mowing the “beach” and path to the pond with the White and his rotary. Never looked so nice. . . . Pendle Hill conference call regarding the interim director. The interviewing committee recommended a dual directorship: Niyonu and Barbara. Ted Brinton said this never works. I strongly recommended John Calder and was joined by many others, including Gay. Tom Corl in effect threatened to resign if we didn’t appoint Niyonu, thus saving $80,000 (Calder’s salary). No decision possible. Another conference call is scheduled for Wednesday.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Again no decision possible. New possibility: Dan Seeger. Hal Weaver was obstinate and obnoxious, insisting on Niyonu. Oliver Rogers favored her too, but politely. All the rest of us were for John Calder. But we agreed to interview Dan on Saturday and have another conference call on Sunday.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Paul Buseck came with his fiancée, Dana. He’ll be teaching in a two-year Native American junior college in Arizona. She works in a food bank in Tucson that provides free food to the poor. Nice people!

Friday, August 12, 2005

E-mail today from Hanne Winarsky: Princeton University Press has accepted my volume 2. I’ll need now to remove all the Greek and do the other corrections. I told her that I could probably deliver a manuscript by Thanksgiving. Wonderful!

Daphne and family came yesterday, too. And immediately Andrew of course asked for a tractor ride. As did Christina, but this time could she do it by herself, without me? I showed her how to press the clutch pedal, and off she went, solo.

Today David and Linda arrived, and Lucia, and eventually Alice, Peter, Susan, Ellen (her partner), Lori, Clive, and their three girls. A circus. We somehow fed them all: hamburgers on the fire. And of course everyone needed a new tractor ride, including, this time, even Peter. . . . Anniversary greetings from Dan Seeger, Annie Levis, Deanna’s father, Dia Philippides. . . . I’m almost finished with the translation into Greek of my talk on Ritsos’s “Moonlight Sonata.”

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Our big day. Everyone here: Peter and Susan Schweitzer, Amos, Linda, Martha, Amos’s son Pablo, Rhoda and Marin + wife and children, all the Busecks, Linda’s three sons and some family, Amy and Roy. Lots of children. All at Terpni until about 3:30. Then to the Garnet Hill Lodge. The children ate and then played. We all gathered on the porch for supper. Alec read a poem. Leander presented us with a beautiful stained glass depiction of the farm. I spoke about Harriet. Amy spoke about Clarice.

August 20, 2005

I started removing the Greek from the version going to Princeton UP. The fascism chapter lost 28%, travel books chapter 22%. Very encouraging. If the average is 20% then the resulting length should be OK.

August 23, 2005

Leander and family left. The children were very sad to go. We’re looking forward to next summer. I promised to set up the telescope first thing. . . . Pruned the lilac bush severely and surrounded it with black paper covered with chips. . . . Chrysanthi and I went to Queensbury and bought ourselves a new bed, a “double,” like the one in Hanover, to replace our two singles, which are going to a North Creek church group that distributes things to the poor.

September 5, 2005

To Hanover

To Hanover on Labor Day, early, in order to hear Bishop Robinson tomorrow. Putting Terpni “to sleep” is sad, as though the house and property were dying. But with luck there will be a resurrection next spring.

September 6, 2005

Supper with Bishop Gene Robinson followed by his talk. He is young, totally un-pompous; drove himself up from Concord, dressed in the bishop’s purple shirt, nothing fancy. At supper I asked him about evolution vs. “intelligent design.” He replied: Evolution, as science describes it, is miraculous; surely God is pleased.” He is totally against fundamentalist Christians. His talk was splendid, very personal, very broad. He spoke about his own childhood in poverty, about his status as a gay male, which, he said, helps him to understand the feelings of all marginalized folk. At his inauguration he had to wear a bulletproof vest. He has received numerous death threats. Said he was ready to die because afterwards he’d be in the bosom of the Lord. In the question period I asked why the mainline churches were not a strong public voice in this country, a counterbalance to the evangelical. He agreed that they were not and could only hope that somehow that would change.

September 11, 2005

At Meeting, I ministered about Bishop Robinson (as did Barbara Gilbert), saying that he exemplified the truly Christian position of involvement with things of the world yet without needing such involvement (I didn’t mention Kierkegaard but obviously was thinking of him). . . . Today and all last week, watched the US Open tennis matches. Agassi, age 35, lost today in the finals, after winning spectacular five-set matches in the semi and quarter finals. All these players are so skilled; they’re almost like ballet dancers.

September 13, 2005

I had a colonoscopy at the hospital. Three years ago there were two polyps, both pre-cancerous but benign. They were removed. This time there was only one, very small. I’m now on a five-year cycle instead of a three-year one.

Friday, September 16, 2005

Phoenix–Oracle

Flew yesterday from Boston to Phoenix, rental car to Alice’s, arriving at 10:30 p.m. their time, 1:30 a.m. our time. Morning breakfast there with everyone: Lori, Clive and the three girls, David & Lynda, Susan & Ellen, Peter & Alice. Played a bit of Warlock on Alice’s seven-foot Steinway. Then we all drove in a caravan of three cars to Oracle, near Tucson. Susie driving with us. Lots of desert. Cacti of various sorts. New developments near Mesa, hundreds of homes, trailer parks, etc. We’re told they’re mostly for retirees. More going up near Oracle. What will they do all day? Play bridge? Golf? Watch television? Get drunk? The C.O.D. ranch, where the wedding will take place, is a sort of retreat center that houses about thirty people. Altitude 4500 feet. Marvelous mountains in the distance, some like moon-surface, some all granite weathered smooth. Peter took us to Cherry Valley Ranch, our B&B. A gorgeous mansion owned by a former mining engineer (copper mines) whose daughter now runs the B&B. Beautiful room for us. Cool. Large fan, reminding us of Tahiti. Siesta. Then back to C.O.D. for buffet supper. Met interesting people, including one who plays duets with Alice. They have a “piano club”; six or seven people prepare a piece each month, either solo or duet, and meet in one of the homes, where they perform for each other. Very easy-going and non-competitive. Good idea for Kendal. After supper, we worried if Leander would ever arrive and find the place, but he did. In the “barn” we were treated to a power point presentation of Dana’s full life: photos of babyhood to the present, and then ditto for Paul. Next, skits, songs, memories by Peace Corps colleagues.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Oracle

Lovely sleep. Woke to find our door locked from the inside. I crawled out a window and opened the door from the outside. Sumptuous breakfast. Conversation with the other guest here, who turned out to be the daughter of the novelist Hervey Allen (Anthony Adverse) and a Quaker in Tempe Meeting. I’m working on Politics of the Spirit, volume 2, removing the Greek, and am up to Kapetan Mihalis right now. . . . All the women came here to have a premarital party for Dana with poems, wishes, etc. and then dancing led by a belly-dancer, on the patio. Leander arrived. We all went to the State Park opposite and were taken through the Kannally Ranch House. Fascinating and beautiful, a glimpse into the life here eight years ago, with ranching and mining and lots of money and dinner parties and trips to Europe. Drove along the road toward Lemmon Mountain to see more views of the stark landscape. Then back to C.O.D. for the wedding, timed to start after the full harvest moon rose “obediently” in the clear sky. A Jewish wedding under the chuppah, with a female rabbi officiating rather effusively. Very long. Paul (unbelievably) in a tux. Innovations: the rings were sent around to everyone for individual wishes (I wished them healthy and happy children); herbs were sent around for us to smell (there was no smell by the time they reached me); loaves of bread were sent round for each of us to break off a piece. No music. Breaking of the glass at the end. Mazel tov. Guests were asked to sign a “rolling pin” that will hang in their kitchen. Afterwards, a meal with more health food grown by local growers. We sat at the “family” table, of course. Then various folks extended wishes to the bride and groom. Then the wedding cake and dancing. We left around 9:30 and returned to our sumptuous Cherry Valley Ranch and a lovely sleep. Leander was with us throughout. We’ll see him again next Sunday, in Amherst.

September 18, 2005

Tucson, Marriott University Park Hotel

Chrysanthi has the flu. Running nose, aches, maybe temperature. We drove to Tucson, awed by the sharp bare mountains. She slept all afternoon in the hotel. I worked on Politics of the Spirit and talked with Martha Klironomos about my lectures in San Francisco. At 7:00 p.m. Gonda Van Steen called for us and we went out for supper at a Mexican-style restaurant. Terrible food (for us) but everyone else raved. Our host, Mary Voyatsis, turned out to have a son at Groton whose roommate last year was Alison Clarkson’s son. Small world.

September 19, 2005

Tucson–Boston

I lectured to about 50 people on The Fall of Constantinople. Very emotional. But most of the questions were about the Turks, and of course I couldn’t answer. They needed Speros Vryonis.

September 25, 2005

Amherst

We drove to Amherst to hear Nigel Coxe and the flutist Susan Rotholz perform Leander’s “Blackbird Variations,” beautifully done (and twice: they repeated it as an encore). Nigel loves the piece. The flutist was with Leander and Alec at Kinhaven and spoke warmly of the experience. Nigel also played the Moonlight Sonata, excitingly. . . . At supper in Sweet Tomatoes we saw Father John, the priest who works in the hospital. He joined us and we spoke animatedly about the Jesuits, Sheila Harvey, Gene Robinson, Larry Harvey. He studied Latin and Greek (ancient more than koine) and loved the classics.

September 27, 2005

Athens, Hotel Eridanos

Routine flight: Manchester, Charlotte, Frankfort, Athens. There’s a train now from the airport. Eridanos Hotel very grand and comfortable, a boutique type. Everything paid by the Ministry. At 7:30 I met Dia and Wim at “To Kouti” opposite the entrance to the Thiseion. Wim looking very old and tired. Trouble hearing. Dia lively although having crises with her 100-year-old mother. They’re driving tomorrow to Yannena for a conference. Very nice to sup my first night with friends. Zero jet lag thanks to feast-fast. Afterwards: internet café near Monastiraki, up five flights of stairs. Two euros for twenty minutes.

September 28, 2005

Athens

Opening of the Ritsos symposium in the Benaki’s new building at Peiraios 138, a long walk. Warm greeting from Angelos Delivorrias, the director; we were together at Princeton. Warm greeting of course from Christos Alexiou. It’s lovely that we never feel any time has elapsed between visits; it’s as though I were here yesterday. Nice to see Jenny Mastoraki again after many years. She very much likes our Anthology. . . . In the afternoon break I visited Kastaniotis, father and son, to see if they might be interested in publishing my volume 2 in translation. They said I should definitely try first to have the University Presses of Crete do the 2nd volume since they did volume 1. If this doesn’t work, come back to Kastaniotis. Or perhaps they could collaborate somehow with Crete. . . . Very nice also to see Mario Vitti, who chaired the evening session. I brought along the photo of him, Chrysanthi, me, and Raïzis taken at Princeton in 1969. . . . Also had loukoumades in the Aegean on Panepistimiou. While there, my kinito rang. It was Chrysanthi. “How are you?” “Fine. I’m eating loukoumades!”

September 29, 2005

Spending lots of time with Christos. Pavlos is being moved to a new home in Liverpool and Christos is in constant touch with him and Meg. Aspasia-Maria is in the final year of the Lykeio and is preparing for university exams. She wants to do theater. Roddy spoke today on modernism, very nicely. Christos advised me to telephone Sifakis in Thessaloniki regarding the University Presses of Crete. Sifakis says he’ll support the book. I need to write now to Trachanas, the director. Sifakis advises me to try to retain copyright so that Crete won’t have to pay Princeton a large fee for translation rights. (Not likely.) Christos’s paper on Τέταρτη Διάσταση very fine, and very close to my own feelings about the Σονάτα του σεληνόφωτος. . . . In the afternoon I visited Patroklos Stavrou for two hours. Very friendly. Showed me the αποθήκη where the entire oeuvre of Kazantzakis in new editions is stored (but he doesn’t seem very good at selling). He’s working now on a new printing of Οδύσεια, re-set. Willing and eager to help me with information regarding the selected letters. Advises me to deposit my archive at the University of Crete, Rethymo (never at Varvari). David Ricks says: investigate the Vikelaia Library in Iraklio also; they have Seferis’s archive. Stavrou described Eleni’s last days; she died peacefully, still somewhat aware mentally. Age about 101. His biggest problem is: What happens when he dies? There is no successor to manage Kazantzakis Publications. . . . I skipped the evening session and instead met Don Nielsen and Lia. Supper in a Cretan restaurant (not very good, actually). Don explained at length his two projects: the Athens Free School and another. He still wants Kazantzakis quotes from me for fortune cookies. He also explained the idea he has for the Farm School, very exciting and profitable. I’ll keep reminding McGrew

Friday, September 30, 2005

I gave my paper in the morning session: To τελετουργικό στη Σονάτα του σεληνόφωτος. I had practiced it a few times and I think it went well enough. Christos chaired the session. Rita Papatheophilou showed up; she’s 83 and walks with a cane but still has her nice smile. So did Peter Mackridge and Jackie, here on an Onassis grant, splendidly housed in St. George Lycavettos. And, amazingly, so did Aglaïa Lipourli. Mimis is OK, although still worried about prostate (as is Christos). A good actress read poems to guitar accompaniment at the end of the day. Then dinner in a nearby tavern, Christos and I sitting with Ksenija and Ivan Gadjanski, from Belgrade.

Saturday, October 1, 2005

Athens

I chaired a session with David Ricks on translating Ρωμιοσύνη, Ivan Gadjanski on Ritsos in Serbia, and Amy Mims on Ritsos and Joyce’s Ulysses, very interesting. The last event was a round table with big names: Kazakos, Douka, Kontos, Patrikios, all of whom knew Ritsos and most of whom seem to be KKE. Lively, argumentative. But Eri Ritsou calmed the waters at the end by virtue of her warm thanks to the Benaki and all the speakers. At lunch, Christos and I sat with Patrikios, who very much likes our Anthology. Talk, also, of torture under the junta and before that under Metaxas. I said in the session I chaired that both Ritsos and Joyce suffered: υπέφεραν, είδαν βρώμα, αλλά στο τέλος-τέλος φώναξαν «Ναι».

October 5, 2005

To Montpelier for lunch at Woodbury College hosted by Larry Mandel, president. I’m hoping that we can involve Kendal with them somehow, perhaps by instituting an ombudsman who’ll do the course in mediation. Toured the Vermont State House afterwards, for the first time.

October 6, 2005

A good lecture by Monteagle Stearns followed by supper at the Inn with him and his wife Tony, the Rutters, Marders, Yalowitzes.

October 7, 2005

Lunch at the Marders, again with Stearns, who was very friendly. I gave them my translation of “The Moonlight Sonata.” In the evening, good concert by a quartet playing a wonderful Debussy quartet, experimental, offbeat.

October 8, 2005

To Cambridge in heavy rain. Bought a Harvard cup to replace the one strangely missing at the farm. To the A.R.T. to see “Carmen” accompanied by two pianos. Well done, but after an hour or so the alarm sounded, the show stopped, and everyone had to vacate the building. We waited 15 minutes and decided to return home because of the heavy rain. Later I discovered that all this was caused by a light bulb exploding and that the show resumed and finished. So we drove five hours to see one hour of “Carmen.”

October 11, 2005

To San Francisco

Flew first class from Philadelphia. Some trouble securing keys for 265 Buckingham Way but eventually succeeded with Martha Klironomos’s help. Beautiful quarters: a small apartment with everything. Three blocks from a good mall. Fifteen minutes from the university. Mexican dinner with Martha.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

A full day. Managed to get a wireless connection on the computer. Exciting. Amazing. Sat in on Martha’s Greek language class, using Greek Today. Excellent students, well prepared. She teaches with lots of κέφι. Then from 6:00 to 9:00 I led her class in discussion of Zorba. I lectured, followed by enough questions and informal discussion. Then dinner in a restaurant where the waiter turned out to be half Greek. But everyone else in this neighborhood seems to be either oriental or Mexican. . . . Beautiful surroundings, marvelous weather, the magic of San Francisco. And the university is huge. 30,000 students, impressive buildings, a large “Quad” (green) in the center, fine bookstore and student center. And Martha has thirty students in elementary modern Greek!

Thursday, October 13, 2005

I finished a draft of the Heroism lecture for Washington. Also vetted another Pendle Hill pamphlet, fixing all the things overlooked as usual by Donna McDaniel. Worked in SFSU library, found Kenneth Clark’s “The Nude,” which has good comments on Donatello’s “David” for my lecture. Met Martha and we supped in a fine restaurant before my lecture on “Inventing Greece.” Good audience: lots of questions, no vituperation or anger (as in Buffalo). Zeese Papanikolas came (we’ll see him again on Saturday), and the cultural attaché in the consulate, who knows Terpni-Nigrita, and Roland Moore, the MGSA computer guru.

Friday, October 14, 2005

A three-hour lunch in the Cliff House with John B. Vlahos, who has come to all my lectures and has been working with Richard Martin at Stanford on Homer. He believes that Penelope recognizes Odysseus earlier than is generally thought, and expounded his evidence. Lots of good talk about this and lots more. . . . Read more Magic Mountain. . . . Supper with Martha, this time in a Turkish restaurant run by a Palestinian, very good indeed.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

An unexpectedly full day with Roland Moore, visiting his home in Oakland. Nice garden, fruit trees, grapes, flowers. Then meeting Zeese Papanikolas for lunch in another Turkish restaurant in Oakland, then to Zeese’s home. Meeting his wife Ruth, daughter, son; supper there; then to a cello and piano recital in Berkeley with them. Then home on BART with Martha. Zeese’s garden: bougainvillea, running water, lemons, oranges. They’re thinking of moving to a CCRC. Lots of talk about Kendal. He is writing a book on talented folk who considered themselves failures: Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway. . . . Ruth is a psychoanalyst with a practice. Roland studies alcoholism among Navahos, etc. . . . Nice to have experienced MUNI and BART.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

To San Francisco Friends Meeting on 9th Street. Two folks ministered on silence, and I was moved to minister on God is silent. Lots of people asked to be remembered to Dan Seeger, whose office was upstairs. . . . Then to Eleni Tsacopoulou, walking for an hour on this very hot day, uphill. She’s on the ninth floor with windows overlooking San Francisco in three directions: Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay, Alcatraz, a bit of the Oakland Bridge. Beautiful. Her husband publishes a political newsletter. They have two small boys both going to a school run by Chinese, with four hours a day of instruction in Mandarin. Greek maid. Eleni builds huge developments, 700 houses at a time, including “segregated” housing for the elderly. I told her about Kendal, of course. They’ll be going to Beijing in 2008 for the Olympics there. I hope they’ll meet the Chinese Greek-speaker whom I met in Iraklio. Would they perhaps be interested in building a CCRC in Greece?

Monday, October 17, 2005

A little sightseeing downtown. Saw a cable car depart. Embarcadero, Ferry House, promenade, Oakland Bridge. Beautiful. Then had supper on Folson and 3rd with Susan Buseck. She, a lawyer, was very interested in copyright issues affecting translations. She told me that she and Ellen want to adopt a baby, perhaps from China, but have hardly begun the process yet. She just returned from Tempe where the family gathered for Peter’s 70th birthday. She realizes that her father is frightened at aging and really has no plans for the future.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

More research at the library for my Washington, DC, talk. Then to Martha, who recorded me as part of a sort of oral history project. Then met Stavros, who teaches the third and fourth semesters from our book. He’s now doing lesson 8. We projected the website on a screen and introduced the students to its benefits. But the videos didn’t work. Stavros alas is not a good teacher: no zest. So the class sort of limped along. One of the students afterwards, a mature adult, thanked me for the book especially compared to what he was exposed to in the Greek Church. . . . Also arranged via telephone for Nigel Coxe’s recital at Kendal.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

My last day. Worked on the D.C. talk some more. Continued to read in The Magic Mountain, which is so long! Then to Martha for more oral history followed by my three-hour class on The Last Temptation, half on the novel, half on the movie. Then a final supper with Martha and fond farewells. She’s been a wonderful host.

Friday, October 21, 2005

New York City

Breakfast with Annie Levis in the Grand Hyatt Hotel. This was useful, since we really did just about everything needed for the Secondary Committee’s meeting later today. Post-Secondary came first, with Bill McGrew present. We quite obviously did not authorize extension of Perrotis to three years, but we encouraged further feasibility studies leading possibly to a decision in June. The Secondary Committee was greatly helped by Costas Kravvas, who knows all about the regulations governing removal of livestock. Everything, except three categories, must go by 2009. The three categories can be, for example, one cow, twelve chickens, six rabbits (more or less). Our minutes stressed the continuing importance of the practical program despite the removal of livestock. . . . What a difference with Bill McGrew as president instead of that disaster, Stefanakis! Everyone was relaxed, hopeful. I’ve been renewed as a trustee for another three years. Nice to see Dimitri Gondicas, who wants me to come back to Princeton sometime. He’s worried about the lack of advertising for Greek Today, and some teachers saying it’s too difficult . . . Cocktails at Phil Foote’s. Then to Daphne’s. All children very talkative and friendly. Christina is proudly knitting a scarf for Chrysanthi’s birthday. The new Steinway grand looks truly grand. Andrew is doing well in school. Peter is already more “mature.” I of course brought a packet of chocolates for everyone.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

NYC–Philadelphia

AFS full board in the Cosmopolitan Club on East 66th, which is only for women. Most of the discussion concerned money with some real possibilities for steady income. Nothing is left for a Kendal except a plot of seven acres which I fear is too small. . . . Arrived at Pendle Hill just in time for supper. During the meal, Wil, chair of the General Board, stood up and made a very nice speech about my multifarious services over many years. Then, in the barn, before the final meeting, Barb playfully “crowned” me as valued trustee emeritus. Everyone was very pleasant and friendly. Tony Manousos has a scheme to help us resume publication of books. Shirley says that, yes, my Light essay will be accepted in revised form. Let’s hope. . . . At 11:00 p.m., after everyone left, I played the Yamaha for ¾ hour. It’s a beautiful instrument.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Philadelphia–Manchester–Hanover

Spoke to Chrysanthi. She says she has missed me. I’ve missed her. Time to go home. And I’m glad I’m finished with Pendle Hill after so many years.

October 25, 2005

Quaker 8s at the Feustals. They chose a quote by Don Cupitt about brightness. Hard but evocative. I spoke about the Light that preceded sun, moon, and stars.

October 26, 2005

Lunch with Robert Binswanger. He’ll return to Dartmouth in 2006–07 to teach a course but still has no encouragement from Helène at Kendal regarding an available apartment. I inquired on his behalf and also had no encouragement. She says there will be a two-year wait.

October 27, 2005

War/Peace committee choosing the next group of student fellows. Al Stam is doing much better as director. A new faculty member, teaching Spanish and interested in the civil war, invited me to coffee. I told him about Jacques Grunblatt in the International Brigade and about the Spanish refugee who gave me carpentry lessons when I was a child.

October 28, 2005

Phi Beta Kappa meeting with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Kate Soule. We have to recommend faculty members for honorary membership plus one alumnus from the reunion class. A candidate was Ambassador Briggs, Ellis Briggs’s son, but we chose someone else. This is my last year on the committee, thankfully.

October 30, 2005

I amused folks at Meeting by ministering about my new discovery, Johnny Cash. His sad song when he could hardly sing: “Nobody.” The importance of community. . . . At 3:30, early music concert at Kendal. I did three Goldberg variations, numbers 6 and 30 went well. At number 2 I began to be nervous, but managed. Joan Snell sang off-key again. . . . I’ll try Scarlatti for next time.

October 31, 2005

Julien O’Reilly from Pendle Hill. Dinner with the Wrigginses and Gordon Browne and Pat Ballou. Julien charmed everyone. We had a nice time in the apartment afterwards. She runs a monthly cabaret in Philadelphia. I gave her $5000 for the Pendle Hill youth program.

November 1, 2005

Dinner with Becky Smith, the new Kendal director. She’s trained in music, choral conducting, and comes from Maine and a family of Baptist ministers. She seems lively and gregarious. We’ve had five directors in fourteen years. Four were asked to leave. Let’s hope that she’ll do better.

November 3, 2005

Chicago

At MGSA symposium, the 19th. Nice to see old friends: Tom Doulis, Stratos Constantinidis, Olga Broumas, Mache Karanika, Dimitris Tziovas, Vasillis Lambropoulos, Victor Papacosma, Tom Gallant, Elsa Amanatidou from Brown, Marinos Pourgouris, now happily at Brown, the graduate student I met in London working on Lorca and Greek poetry. Broumas read original poems and Elytis translations in her keynote speech, very nicely.

Friday, November 4, 2005

I eulogized George Pilitsis in the session I chaired, which went well. Short visit to the art museum, huge, with a lovely collection of impressionists and some good El Grecos. Lots of time at meals with Tom Doulis, who is happily active in retirement, as am I.

Saturday, November 5, 2005

I eulogized Evro Layton at 8:00 a.m. at the librarians’ session but then went to hear the papers on the Olympics, including one by Roland Moore on volunteering. Long lunch today with Tom Doulis. Yesterday’s supper was with Dick Jackson, talking mostly about a possible CCRC in Greece. He now says that the Farm School land is not good since that area will be too noisy and busy, with a huge mall, super-highways, etc. Thus I should try to keep in touch with Dr. Barich regarding the project in Lakoma. If Barich comes to the USA, try to have him meet John Diffey. Also perhaps speak to AHEPA people here. Last night, also, we all went to a Greek movie, very episodic and non-linear, on the plight of migrants: women forced into prostitution, etc. Pretentious and overly long. . . . MGSA business meeting, followed by a martini with Tom Doulis very pleasantly.

November 7, 2005

Hanover

Howard Mitchell gathered us together to plan our meeting with Becky Smith next week—who goes first, second, etc. The whole point is to develop better ways of treating staff. We’ll stress peer review and suggest an ombudsman. . . . In the afternoon, Dickey Center lecture in Filene, full house, standing room only, on intelligence and terrorism, with Judge Silverman, co-chair of the presidential committee on intelligence reform, and John McG., deputy director of Intelligence. Very lively. They claimed that everyone truly believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. They weren’t so sure, they admitted, about some connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. A Dartmouth professor, Le Bow, was much more liberal, calling the intelligence community “criminal.” Afterwards, a long, lively supper at the Inn, about fifteen of us with lots of questions. I asked if we should allow torture if we capture an al-Qaeda leader. Le Bow agrees that arrogance is rampant and suggests the reading of Thucydides, as do I.

November 8, 2005

I voted against the multi-million bond issue for playing fields. In the afternoon, I led an ILEAD class session on retirement, speaking first about CCRCs and then about our attitude toward death, using my pamphlet. Joan Wilson, responsible for my invitation, said it went well. . . . At supper we joined Joan and her guests, a jazz pianist who had just married an Indonesian woman. They met on the internet. She’s very aware of New Hampshire temperatures, since 80 degrees Fahrenheit for her is cold. At the concert, he played old jazz and big band tunes with zero musicality, banging and banging. We left before the end.

November 9, 2005

To Washington

Arrived early at the Carnegie Institution and discovered that the Center for Defense Information is housed in the same building. So I visited them and was taken around very graciously and then introduced to the woman who recruits interns. We talked of course about Admiral Gene Carroll. I’m hoping to convince Al Stam to bring our Peace Studies Fellows to the CDI on their Washington trip next May, also to get some of the Fellows to apply to be CDI interns. . . . Lectured on “Pagan and Christian Heroism Reconciled” to about 35–49 people. James Alatis introduced me very kindly. His wife, Penelope, came, as did Alma Rhodes and her husband and also Judith Tomero from Kinhaven. Some good questions afterwards. Lots of time to talk to Sperry Lea about the Farm School. Anna Lea seemed pleased with the lecture. Lelia Washburn was there too, among old friends. And Leander, who drove me home afterwards.

November 10, 2005

Washington

Leisurely morning at 9 Lopa Court. I’m reading Walter Arndt’s translation of Faust, Part One. In some ways, it’s very Kazantzakian. We picked the children up at noon (half-day school today) and went all together for lunch and to the airport. Leander has canceled his trip to Bangkok.

November 12 & 13, 2005

Dover

To East Dover, Vermont, to visit David and Patti Buck, together with Gail and Ruth Schoppert. They’re in an eighteenth-century house with a spectacular view to the East and someone else’s cows across the way. We talked talked talked, about the Farm School of course but also about Alec’s career, David’s prospects (nothing yet), Patti’s reluctance to be a headmaster’s wife again. I brought Benny Hill and Johnny Cash for entertainment. The most extraordinary moment was the dog’s. It suddenly began to howl in a soprano voice and then went into an epileptic fit for two minutes followed by exhaustion and then return to normalcy. Apparently this happens about once a month. . . . On Sunday we left early in order to get to Hitchcock hospital in time for flu shots.

November 15, 2005

I spoke to the Professors’ Colloquium at Kendal with John Hennessey, about challenges to the humanities in tertiary education, and stressed the good work done in international baccalaureate programs, which David and Gail told me about the other day.

November 17, 2005

Finished shortening and fixing volume 2. I’ll print it tomorrow. I cut about 15%.

November 18, 2005

Nigel Coxe came to play a concert at Kendal, at my invitation. Supper with his friends Jerry and Muriel King and (of course) Lisa and Connie. Introducing him, I said how skilled he was in master classes. He played beautifully: Haydn, Beethoven (Moonlight Sonata), Schoenberg, a Chopin nocturne, Liszt, then Mendelssohn’s Capriccio, with appropriate remarks before each. Many in the audience told him afterward, and me, that it was the best piano playing they’d heard at Kendal. Yet Nigel himself felt the audience not responsive enough to warrant an encore. Too bad. He’s getting forgetful (not of music), doesn’t drive at night, has gout and other illnesses, is very worried about his future and aging. Becky Smith, our new executive director, attended (at my urging). I’ll speak to her again about some way to get Nigel into Kendal, perhaps by reducing the entry fee.

November 19, 2005

Eight-hand piano: Mozart operatic overtures, with Stan Udy, Joan Snell, Co Emlen. In the evening we went to Hanover to see the Johnny Cash movie “Walk the Line.” Not bad, yet never showed his great social conscience, only his drug addiction. But the actress who played June Carter Cash is electrifying.

November 20, 2005

Joan Wilson did the ecumenical service, reading a sermon preached by her father, short and sweet. For lunch afterwards we joined the Nodas, Sydney, Roger Soderberg, and the Arnolds at a catered meal arranged by Audrey Logan.

November 23, 2005

Washington

Last night to Leander’s via AMTRAK. Today I went to town to lunch with Daniel Carson. Arriving early, I visited Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was shot, and the house across the street where he died the next morning. A ranger in the theater explained everything, minute by minute. I hadn’t realized that it was a conspiracy to kill not only Lincoln but also the vice-president, secretary of war, etc. However, only Lincoln was hit. Booth, a Shakespearian actor, saw himself as a Brutus dispatching a Caesar (tyrant). A full museum in the theater basement offers photos, cartoons, the assassin’s small pistol, bits of Lincoln’s clothing. Very moving. . . . Daniel and I lunched for two hours in the Chop House on 7th Street. He’s been in the GAO for thirty years. Will retire soon. His latest novel is about the sexual temptation of a Protestant pastor. I read a chapter a few days ago. Not bad, but alas not really distinctive in any way, especially linguistically. Poor Daniel. He’ll probably remain unpublished. His wife tells him that his writing is an addiction, like smoking. We talked about his classmate John Smith, whom Daniel considers almost a criminal, money-mad, unscrupulous. I told him all I know about John, his art collection, his benefactions, the reasons for his father’s suicide. . . . Afterwards, again for two hours, a nice visit with Jim Warren, sitting in his small study at the back of his garden. He has prostate cancer and was told by one doctor that at 78 he is too old for the “radical.” I urged him to visit Johns Hopkins, which he had already arranged to do, for another opinion. He remembers the piece I wrote about my own “radical.” Lots of talk about the Farm School, Bill McGrew (an old friend of Jim’s), etc. He had a grandfather who was a weighty Friend. I’ll send him my talk on Quakers and the Farm School. . . . At Leander’s afterwards, practiced Scarlatti in his new studio and received some good pointers especially on trills. Then we all watched “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” with much laughter.

November 24, 2005, Thanksgiving

Alec telephoned from Bangkok, Daphne from New York. More Scarlatti. Also, I listened to my favorite Johnny Cash songs again and began to arrange them in some meaningful sequence for a possible Kendal program. Over-ate pleasantly: turkey and all the trimmings. Then a cold walk at the lake. Afterwards we watched Steve Martin again in the very fine “Father of the Bride,” a satire drawn from common experience. Earlier, thanks to Nicholas’s urging, the men went on a bike ride to his school and back.

November 25, 2005

To Hanover

Leander, Sophia, and Nicholas rode in with us on the Metro so that, getting off at Dupont Circle, Nicholas could ride up and down the extraordinarily long escalator to the street. Chrysanthi and I had the usual leisurely trip on AMTRAK back to Springfield, Mass, and then home by car.

November 29, 2005

Boston

To Jordan Hall to hear Veronica Jochum do her Mozart program with a narrator reading from the letters and giving elements of the career. Veronica began with Opus 1, written when Mozart was five years old. She also played the great Opus 309 sonata. A delicious event, much appreciated by the large audience. I got various ideas for my own turn as her narrator here at Kendal in March.

December 10, 2005

Cambridge

All this week: preparing for my class at Patana on Goethe’s Faust, Part One (only, thank God). A colleague in the German Department, Ellis Schookman, helped me considerably with handouts and good advice; he had just finished a Comparative Literature course on the Faust theme. Also helped by Ulli Rainer, who says she knows the German text by heart. Walter Arndt’s translation is monumental, a remarkable achievement. It took me about three readings, plus lots of dipping into commentaries, to begin to feel comfortable with this work. Poor students! . . . Today we met Eva Constantellou in Cambridge, lunched grandly at “Harvest” and saw a very imaginative, well-acted performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters directed by a Polish director, Krystian Lupa. The play, of course, is splendidly philosophical at the same time that it is so emotional. Poor Masha! Poor brother, who reminded me of Bill Rawson in North Creek, who dreamed of getting a Ph.D. in history and of teaching in a college but ended up clerking in his father’s hardware store and is now Town Clerk (just as Chekhov’s unfulfilled “brother” is on the County Council).

December 11, 2005

To NYC

Long AMTRAK trip to New York but I worked some more on Faust, read tourist brochures on Thailand and, most importantly, prepared three chapters of volume 2 for Crete University Press by removing the English translations following Greek quotations and making other necessary adjustments.

December 12–13, 2005

To Bangkok

Thai Airlines non-stop, seventeen hours, JFK to Bangkok. Happily, no lines at JFK either for boarding pass or security. And the plane wasn’t full, so I had an empty seat next to me. First meal about 12:30, vegetable and salad. Then I slept as much as I could in what was Thai night, until the next meal, around 6:30 p.m., which is Thai 6:30 a.m. So I had meat, breaking the fast. In the remaining ten hours I worked a lot on the computer, read the Economist and TLS, and snoozed a little more sleep. Alec and children at the airport. Long ride in this ugly city to Patana School. Their apartment, five minutes from work, is fully adequate: three bedrooms, three toilets, living room, kitchen, balcony. I felt fine thanks to feast-fast anti-jetlag regimen. But didn’t sleep well.

Wednesday, December 14

Bangkok

A full and busy day, my first in Bangkok. Up at 5:45 a.m. after a night mostly lying awake. Breakfast on cereal and croissant. To school, which is a five-minute walk, literally next door. At 7:50 to David McGrath’s (pronounced McGraw) drama class, which I conducted on Goethe’s Faust, emphasizing the fact of translation, the entire Faust story, starting in Germany, going to England in Marlowe’s Faust, then to Germany again with Schiller and Goethe, Schubert’s “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,” etc. Gounod, etc. Finally Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, linking the theme to Nazism. Spent time on Faust’s rewriting of Ἐν ἀρχή ἦν ὁ λόγος: word → deed, and stressed Goethe’s view that we learn moral choice through action. Linked his play to Genesis and Job (few students had ever read anything in the Old Testament). Spoke about the felix culpa. Stressed ambiguity. Is Faust guilty/evil? Yes and no. What about Gretchen? How and why can she be “saved” at the play’s end? Some of the students (as usual) responsive, others not. But generally, I think, a good class. . . . In Alec’s office, then, I met with a grade 11 student already thinking of university in the US in film studies. She’s Thai, her father’s a film director here, and she’s already done editing. I explained our liberal art’s system in the first two years, the fact of “distributives,” and encouraged her to apply to NYU, which was news to her. . . . Then Monica took me on a tour of the primary school, a separate complex, beautifully functional, and also architecturally lovely, as is everything here (bougainvillea, pond with goldfish, swimming pools, playgrounds, greenery everywhere). Monica knows everyone (no surprise). Saw Theo’s class and Elena’s, met their teachers. Then went for lunch at the primary school cafeteria, joined by scores of children and their teachers. Wide choice of meals, including delicious Thai curries, sandwiches, soba noodles. Children so well behaved, neat. Posters saying “We always say please and thank you.” “We always eat everything on our plate.” “We always clean up afterwards.” . . . Back to the apartment. Two-hour nap. Computer work. Then to school again for outdoor festival for Christmas: singing, instrumental music, a gifted teacher accompanying expertly on a keyboard. Very joyous. Then an indoor concert in the auditorium. Audience singing Christmas carols. School choirs of different ages doing Christmas-oriented selections. Alec’s string orchestra performing the last movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (Alec told me afterward that some of the children couldn’t even read music, others had to play everything on open strings; he did maximal arranging). The acting head wished everyone at the end a happy and peaceful 2006. I thanked him afterwards, also spoke at some length with the faculty pianist, a Swede who is leaving school in July to return to a new adventure, as yet unknown, in Sweden. . . . Ham and potatoes offered by parents. . . . Back home. Then to the supermarket with Alec to buy raisin bran (!) and more milk. A market just like ours, all signs in Thai and English.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Bangkok

Attended Steven Brooks’s class in Intellectual Baccalaureate: theory of knowledge, concentrating on language. Can we think without language, for example. Students working in groups preparing answers to set questions. I didn’t have much to add and the time was short, but it was good to see teacher and students performing so well. Then I helped Alec set up for his strings class, after seeing the fifty-meter Olympic swimming pool and squash courts. His students gathered. He showed me the state-of-the-art computer projection that allows music to be written and projected beautifully. Monica came and we went to the primary school with all classes gathered for a lunch provided by parents. Children—again—very organized and competent in selecting and loading their plates. Spoke with the Senior Teacher of this level; met more of Monica’s numerous acquaintances. Then back to Alec. I accompanied the group’s selections on the electronic keyboard—little pieces from a violin method book. Alec counted, got them started, set the tempo. Everyone very cordial. Then to lunch with two students interested in studying in the USA, one in fashion design, the other in musical composition. The real surprise was the presence there, also, of a Patana graduate who is now a sophomore at Dartmouth, a native Thai. I promised him a lunch in the Hanover Inn in January. He took English 2-3, voluntarily, last year. . . . Siesta. More Kazantzakis on the computer. Played with Theo and Elena a bit. It’s easy to conclude about this place: Why would anyone ever want to leave?! . . . At 5:00 p.m. two Thai friends came to Alec’s apartment for dinner: mother and daughter, both teaching Thai to natives and Thai to foreigners in the school. The mother did most of the talking, about teaching techniques, lack of adequate textbooks, etc. I told her about Greek Today. I asked especially about Buddhism. Her husband is very active in a temple. She proposed to take us to a temple complex next week, but nothing she said gave me any indication of Buddhist “spirituality.” I must ask the Thai Dartmouth student when we meet in Hanover. He did some service as a monk.

Friday, December 16, 2005

Bangkok

To school for 8:00 a.m. all-school assembly—all 2000 students arranged perfectly in rows or sitting on the floor of the basketball court, on colored rugs. On the stage a chimney for Santa. Music: jazz band, Christmas carols, the acting head in charge. But will Santa find us? Smoke from the chimney. “Ho ho ho!” from somewhere. We’d better sing another song, loudly, so he can find his way. Children very excited. Finally he appears in full costume, and with an Irish accent (a parent). He will go to primary school classrooms to distribute gifts afterwards. A joyous occasion. A good mixture of impromptu fun (all well-planned, of course) and complete order. . . . Afterwards, Monica showed me still more of this immense physical plant. The school’s own post office; the central office, where the director of “services” said that they have 300 service employees, and about 200 faculty. Cost averages about $20,000. There is no endowment. Everything comes from students’ fees. Later, from the registrar, I got the complete schedule. Obviously, this is for the rich, or for foreign employees whose companies pay tuition as a fringe benefit. Met some more Americans. All in all, they are about 8 of the 200 total. This man is working here in the regional office of the Center for Disease Control. . . . Another full lunch provided by parents in the primary school area. Nice conversation with an Indian woman who is a piano teacher. Then at 1:00 p.m. the Awards Assembly in the auditorium. This was very formal, with the Thai national anthem first, everyone standing while the dignitaries paraded in and sat on the stage (including Alec in black suit and academic gown). Awards for math, progress, service, debating, model UN, sports, etc., punctuated by choral singing and twice by Alec’s string ensemble, which performed well. Lots of applause for those honored. Nice words about the acting headmaster, who will return to his position as deputy head in January. (He movingly asked for silence at the 8:00 a.m. assembly for those killed last December by the tsunami.) As Alec and I discussed later, it’s interesting that although prizes are given for excellence and individuals and groups are ranked first, second, third, generally the spirit is one of cooperation rather than competitiveness. We wondered about Quaker schools, which frown on all forms of competition. . . . At 5:00-ish went upstairs to Belgian friends. He works on rural electrification, now in Vietnam, but wife and four children are here, she teaching French in the Patana school and the kids are students there. His work is sponsored by the European Commission, interestingly. Some colleagues of Alec’s were there also, delighted to learn that I am a Macintosh user, as they are. A group of Filipino Roman Catholic girls and boys was the hit of the evening, brought in to sing Christmas songs accompanied by guitars. . . . We left in order to drive all the way downtown on the expressway in a taxi to attend the Bangkok 2005 jazz festival. A huge outdoor affair sponsored by Heineken beer. The “acid rock” music was certainly not my taste, but it was fun to be among so many Thais, mostly young, and to sit eating popcorn.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Bangkok

We telephoned Daphne (it was still December 16th in the USA) to wish her happy birthday. Drove this morning outside of Bangkok to “The Ancient City,” gateway to Thailand’s cultural heritage: 320 acres shaped just like Thailand containing 116 buildings plus Buddhas and statues representative of each region, mostly in teak. One building housed probably fifty statues, life-sized, of Buddhistic worshippers in prayer position. Another had an obese laughing Buddha. Elsewhere was an immense retching Buddha. I bought some hammered leatherwork similar to what is done for Karaghiozis puppets. We ate in a pavilion, sitting cross-legged (or trying to) on the ground. . . . At 5:00 p.m. some friends came, a couple, both American, both physicians, both employed here by the Center for Disease Control: Dr. and Mrs. Michael O’Reilley. He studied Latin and Greek at St. Mark’s School and loves the Odyssey, about which we talked at length. I’ll send him my reading notes for the Iliad, which so far he does not appreciate. Their daughter and Theo played joyously; she was in his class at Patana school. Nice people, very lively and simple, and about to go on a holiday to their father-in-law’s in New Hampshire.

Sunday, December 18

River cruise to a 200-year-old temple complex. The river is very different in Bangkok: fancy hotels, villas, numerous temple complexes. At the temple we knelt and saw Buddhist devotees doing obeisance just like Greek Orthodox, but before Buddha as opposed to icons, offering a candle or flower, or affixing gold leaf to the small Buddha in front of the central, large one. All Buddhas are in gold (color, at least). Yellow-robed monks in evidence. Outside, in a hall, monks seemed to be preparing a ceremony, perhaps a funeral. Everywhere an atmosphere of peace, quiet, everything in order as Buddha stares down at you so contentedly. Otherwise the site is very touristy, but we saw a skilled potter making jars on the wheel, about thirty seconds for each rather beautiful small jar. On the way back a bad meal. But upon return we all went to the Oriental Hotel, which is super-deluxe. Another world. Social dancing in the lounge. Beautiful waitress in Thai dress serving tea. Unbelievably, a ceremony by Bangkok Jews (300 strong) attended by the princess. We then went to a large central park, filled with joggers, bicyclers, people doing t’ai chi, etc., to listen to the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra’s outdoor concert: pops—Offenbach, William Tell Overture, music to “Star Wars,” and the like. Folks with food baskets, wine, champagne, enjoying a respite. But we left in the middle to go to another complex, touristy, with stores and restaurants of all types, and had an Italian dinner. On the way to the car, Alec saw one of his colleagues at Patana, there with his in-laws. Aside, this man told me how much Alec is appreciated there—“a breath of fresh air”—, the third person to do so since my arrival. . . . I forgot to mention a beautiful sleeping Buddha we saw on the river cruise, eyes barely opened, reposing very peacefully.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Bangkok

We took the Sky Train from the terminal at On Nut to Chit Lom Station, adjacent to a gigantic department store, very upscale, with a fabulous food court on the top floor. Separate places for Thai, Indian, Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Japanese food, also coffee, also desserts. You order by pointing to a model plate; they prepare it in front of your eyes, and run your charge card through a machine. At the end, leaving, you pay the total on the card. I had Vietnamese noodles in soup with fish balls, very nice, then café latte and cherry crumble (!) heated and placed on melted syrup. Cafeteria style, but lovely young people in uniform to carry your tray, clear dishes, etc. Total luxury. We then re-boarded the Sky Train for one station, Siam, to go to the new aquarium, Siam Ocean World, in the Paragon Mall, which had a movie theater with five titles, etc. A wonderful aquarium, complete with divers feeding the sharks. Home. Nap. Then Mr. Thornhill, the acting headmaster, came to visit and stayed an hour. We talked abut competitiveness, the Quaker view versus (perhaps) what happens at Patana. He said that my reaction—my feeling that the “awards” do not really create a hostile atmosphere—is very clearly planned. Awards for effort, for improvement, for group activity, all cut across the individual ethos that otherwise could dominate. He says that he will stay in Bangkok after leaving the school in July and will seek another job. I mentioned Gail Schoppert’s difficulties in returning “home” after a professional life abroad. Thornhill has been here for sixteen years. He says he understands about 60% of the Thai he hears, which is advanced. He went yesterday to a woman who deals in Tarot cards. Tomorrow he heads off to Burma with a friend, to the beach, then to Rangoon. Such is life for ex-pats. . . . Long talk with Alec about the children’s future: will they feel baseless? Doubtful. Video of Elena’s ballet class, singing assembly, Theo’s soccer instruction. Elena donned her necklace and bracelet. She’s all woman! I read a fine book to Theo, about a dragon who loves his voice.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Bangkok

Forgot to note, yesterday, that we started the day by going to Sukhomvit Soi 93 to the Jim Thompson outlet store and bought a lovely silk blouse for Chrysanthi for 1200 baht (about $30). Today we took Monica to the dentist’s downtown, near the Nana Sky Train stop. A beautiful hospital that, in a way, makes Mary Hitchcock look provincial. Like a hotel inside plus a mall. Starbucks, Au Bon Pain, McDonald’s, a huge indoor car park, a sort of hotel for patients and families to stay overnight, the nurses in starched all-white uniforms, smiles everywhere. . . . From there we went nearby to the Jim Thompson house, where in the store the same blouse I bought yesterday for 1200 baht was now 2400. The house is beautiful, all in teak, with works of art everywhere, gardens, etc. Thompson settled here after World War II and developed the Thai silk industry, very profitably. We ate in the house’s restaurant, outdoors in front of a pond. . . . In the evening, went to a traditional puppet show. Three people, young men for the male puppets, young girls for the female, dressed in black, are perfectly coordinated, dance as they manipulate the puppets with sticks attached to head, arms, etc. The play was a version of an Indian epic, rather silly, but with lots of fun: ogres getting hit over the head, a magical finger that turns into a weapon, etc. Afterwards, the two head puppets were taken by their operators through the audience, the woman embracing and kissing women in the audience, the male shaking his fist at us. Very fine (and very oriental) music throughout, the text mostly sung, really, on a CD, not spoken by the operators. . . . Afterwards we checked out the very active night life in this area: huge open market (I bought a silk tie with elephants for $2.00), a rock band, hundreds of people, mostly young, eating at outdoor tables surrounded by a sort of food court. Fireworks in the distance. . . . I should have mentioned the car wash we had on the way home this afternoon: two employees washing everything with soap before the machine, then drying everything with towels afterwards, all for $2.00.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Bangkok

This was our most interesting and memorable day, thanks to the teacher of Thai in Patana School, who arranged everything. We met her in the north part of the city and were joined by a Thai couple and the wife’s sister, two of the three speaking good English. Together we drove about 60 kilometers further north to the world headquarters of the Dhammakaya International Meditation Center, whose motto is “World Peace Through Inner Peace.” There we were joined by our accompanying couple’s son, a full-time monk, about 30 years old, a university graduate who renounced the world. Very pleasant, but no English. That was provided by the guest-master, who brought us in to a hall to meditate, then loaded us all into a vehicle to see the entire complex. They sometimes host 300,000 people at a time, to meditate together and achieve inner peace. 1200 monks live there. Shortly before 11:00 a.m. our accompanying monk left us to prepare for lunch. We were then brought to the monks’ dining hall, a huge shed with open sides and numerous “tables” on which monks crawled on their knees, then sat and then were offered food by us (the food having been provided; and a hearty meal it was). Seeing 1000 monks doing this was extraordinary. Before, however, there was extended chanting, with all guests in meditation position and a row of monks sitting immobile as they sang. The goal of the foundation is to facilitate a higher level of consciousness, uplifting the quality of the human mind. They hope that this will transform the culture of war and violence to a culture of peace and nonviolence. There are branches worldwide, including seven in the USA. . . . We then went to a nearby university for a snack in the refectory. This university uses English as the language of instruction and caters to foreigners. Then we visited the Bang Pa-In Palace, the king’s summer palace, with a beautiful throne room all in gold, marvelous trees and bushes shaped like elephants, rabbits, deer. Finally to a floating restaurant for a late lunch. . . . Returning, we went to an impressive mall, just like anything in the US, with everything available and crowded with shoppers. Then supper in a Japanese restaurant in the mall. Total price for three adults and two children: $17.00.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Bangkok

Alec and I took the Sky Train and then a river boat to the Sleeping Buddha compound and then to the Grand Palace. The Sleeping Buddha is immense, holding his head with an extended arm. Jewels everywhere. The compound is resplendent in jewels, marvelous trees, golden buildings, an interesting standing Buddha. The Palace, across the street, is huge. The “Emerald Buddha” was too small and distant to see well, except later in the regalia museum where a replica is displayed. The throne room is “magnificent” of course. But all this is really overblown. The regalia museum is a bit like Topkapi in Istanbul: golden swords, jewels, etc., but also some good photos of the current royal family. . . . Home for tea. Then back into town to the theater: “Siam Niramit, presented in a magnificent modern theater seating 2000 and equipped with every possibility for rapid scene changes, a channel of water on the stage, human figures flying through space, realistic lightning and hell-fire, etc. The show: a sort of ballet plus illustrated Thai history, although one would hardly know that without the program explaining each scene. A cast of thousands! Loud, interesting music. Special effects. Actors coming into the audience. Wow! We spoke afterwards with the executive producer, who said it was an effort to counteract the large transvestite and other pornographic shows that Thai directors seem to favor. This one had two elephants on stage plus goats and chickens, aside from lots of attractive young humans, but the audience was meager.

Friday, December 23, 2005

Bangkok

Back to the hospital by 8:45 a.m. for Monica’s additional dental appointment. We stayed in the pediatric area, complete with an interior playground for kids plus a children’s video, and at one point a visit by Santa distributing presents to everyone. Then horrendous traffic to reach the Vimanmek Mansion, a former king’s residence built of teak. Lots of wealth, lots of china, etc. from England (the king studied in Oxford) photos of Queen Victoria, a gorgeous grand piano. Wealth galore, also good taste. Back to a mall for a large meal (it’s my “feast” day) in Sizzle, a western-style restaurant: steak, baked potato, salad bar. . . . In the evening, next door to a restaurant very much like a Greek κέντρο, outdoors, filled with large and small parties of diners, all Thai. Very good food. And along comes an elephant with a boy on its back selling packets of food to diners who want to feed the beast. Many did. Later, a blind singer with recorded music, guided by a friend or relative—a sweet tenor voice. Alec and family come here often and are well known. The waitresses love the children, very obviously. We finished with ice cream for everyone.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Bangkok

My fasting day for jet lag. Unbuttered toast, fruit. In the morning, to King Rama IX Park. Huge and beautiful. The children brought their bicycles. We walked extensively. Flowers everywhere, including a Chinese garden, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, English. Impressive central building housing a large auditorium. On the exterior, displays of the king’s hobbies: playing saxophone, building rowboats, with photos and artifacts. Snack in the park’s restaurant, which offers full American breakfasts: pancakes, bacon and eggs. I had fruit only. In the late afternoon we took the Sky Train into town to meet Monica’s aunt, uncle, and children, who are here on a tour from Indonesia that will take the group afterwards to Hong Kong and then China. We met them in another huge department store, near the National Stadium, packed with people, as usual mostly young. Then to a large restaurant with young servers in their snappy uniforms. A large meal (I eating vegetables but cheating with two fried shrimp). The two cousins, ages 13 and 16, didn’t talk much, although both are in English-language schools and the eldest will be going to Monash University in Melbourne. The father’s English is good, so we could converse a bit. He told us that Bangkok’s extraordinary development is fairly recent, within the last ten years. Nothing comparable in Indonesia owing chiefly to instability and corruption in government. Returning home, we telephoned Chrysanthi in South Salem and wished her happy birthday.

December 25, 2005, Christmas

Bangkok

Lots of fun opening presents in the morning. Our view-master is a great hit for both children. I received another Thai elephant necktie, this one brown (the one I bought is blue). At noon we went into town again, easy, no traffic on Sunday, to a superb European-style restaurant called Crêpes et Cie. The owner, born in Greece, is fluent in English and French. Waiters are dressed French-style. Mediterranean cuisine. I had Moroccan lamb, the tenderest, tastiest lamb I’ve ever eaten. Alec had tzatziki and mousakas. A lovely final meal on my feast day.

December 26, 2005

Lucky! I was in a row of four seats, all empty, on the return flight, so I stretched out at full length and slept. Met at JFK by Greg’s limousine driver, who drove me to the new house in South Salem. Large and comfortable. Leander there, too. I showed Bangkok photos on my computer. Christina rather distant, not Andrew, and Peter talks continually and is frenetic. Alec manages his children better than Daphne and Greg do, I fear. Chrysanthi is fine and very loving. We’ll return to Hanover on the 28th by train from Stamford.

December 31, 2005

Snails at the Rassiases’, with Buck and others. Mary now has heart disease and seems very old.

2006

Hanover

January 1–June 1

Feb. 2–5, New York, Pendle Hill

Feb. 11, Cambridge: A.R.T.

March 2–4, New York, Farm School trustees

April 1–2, Rochester, NY

April 27–30, Ithaca, NY, Riparius

May 4–5, New York City

May 19–20, Riparius

May 27, Cambridge

Riparius

June 2–September 10

June 8–13, Kinhaven

June 13–21, Albany, Frankfort, Thessaloniki, Munich, Philadelphia, Albany, Albany Marriott, 189 Wolf Road, 518 458-8444

July 2–5, Hanover; Randolph, NH, guests of Avery & Peg Post

Sept. 6–8, Hanover for Council agenda

Sept. 10, Hanover for Kendal’s 15-year celebration

Hanover

September 11–December 31

Sept. 22, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Sept. 24–Oct. 2, Los Angeles, Marina dal Rey Marriott, 310 301-3000

Sept. 30, San Diego

Oct. 18, Riparius

Oct. 26–28, NYC, Farm School trustees

Nov. 13–18, Colorado Springs, Room at the Inn, 719 442-1896

Nov. 22–25, Maryland, Leander’s

Dec. 5, Amherst

Dec. 9, Cambridge

Dec. 22–26, Daphne’s: 92 Bouton Rd, South Salem

Dec. 18, Riparius

Dec. 31, Cambridge

January 1, 2006

Nice New Year’s dinner with Weezie and Bill. And I finished preparing my volume 2 for the Greek publisher, doing a lot in Bangkok and on the flights there and back.

January 11, 2006

Started ILEAD class on “Death in Venice” and The Magic Mountain. Also spoke to a reading group on The Sound and the Fury. Yesterday started working again on the Selected Letters of Kazantzakis.

January 21, 2006

Cambridge

All the past week I reworked my essay on Mann’s séance, first written in 1984, sent to Burt Pike, Werner Hoffmeister, Walter Arndt, and Steve Scher, then abandoned. Now I’ve incorporated most of their suggestions. Will try to publish it, belatedly. . . . Today to Cambridge. Saw Sartre’s No Exit nicely acted by Will LeBow, Remo Airaldi, Karen MacDonald, and Paul Plum. So strong. Hell is other people.

February 2, 2006

New York

Farewell dinner at the Yale Club for Constance Tagopoulos, with Burt Pike. Very pleasant. Her son has MS, requiring her presence in Athens. But she’ll help me in the 2007 Kazantzakis conference here.

February 3, 2006

NYC–Pendle Hill

Visited Ambassador Tsilas to see if Onassis will sponsor the Kazantzakis conference. He’s in favor but must get permission from Athens. Also very interested in Kendal-type for himself and agrees that CCRCs are needed in Greece. One of my students from Columbia works here at Onassis. They want me to go around again to several universities. . . . Train to Philadelphia. I bought 65 pieces of baklava for tomorrow’s dessert. Started my Zorba course. A pleasure to have John Cary as one of the students and also Jack and Ruth Hunter.

February 4, 2006

Pendle Hill

Showed the Zorba film to everyone in the evening, followed nicely by Jack Hunter’s “Epilogue” in silence.

February 11, 2006

Cambridge

Interesting but defective Romeo and Juliet at the A.R.T. Hard to understand because the “stage” was in the middle of the theater and the actors often had their backs to us. Yet, still moving, especially because the private affair was conditioned by a public affair. Shakespeare’s message, as always, is very clear.

February 13, 2006

My old computer (OS 7.2) died and I bought a new Mac laptop (os 10.4.4.), very fast, of course. . . . Jim Sheridan asked me to write another piece on the beginnings of Kendal. I went back to my 1991–1992 diaries, which are extensive. And it’s all there, especially the huge problem with Jean Brophy, the firing, alas, of Carol, the faulty sprinklers flooding apartments, the leaking roofs pouring water into the place, the ceilings that had to be replaced because of faulty sound insulation. How can I print this and still be discreet, especially retarding Jean? Oh yes, also the Town tax imbroglio.

February 14, 2006

I did my “Celebration of Johnny Cash” in the Gathering Room. Earlier today, in the clinic for blood-taking, the technician told me that Cash’s daughter had complained about the movie, just as I do, saying it is so negative, omitting the positive side. I had a full house for the presentation, including Kesaya and Chris, Lafayette and Mayme, and Mats Lemberger and a friend from Dartmouth. Ralph Mayer’s machines produced marvelous fidelity. I had to struggle to hold back tears on stage, but managed, with much nose blowing. And Johnny Cash sang out, full and strong.

February 15, 2006

Last I LEAD class. Finished The Magic Mountain, playing the music that Hans listens to, thanks to a disk lent by Bruce Duncan.

February 19, 2006

Very busy. I’m continuing with the Kazantzakis letters. Just finished 1943; doing 1944. Lots of words remain indecipherable. But now Chel Avery has sent me all the comments on my “Light” essay, with suggestions for shortening, eliminating footnotes, etc. A big job. On top of this, Jim Sheridan asked me to write again for Kendalights about the early days of Kendal. I looked at my 1991–1992 diary entries, which are quite full. But of course I can’t print much of what I found, especially all the negatives about Jean Brophy. With care and discreet erasing, however, it’s going to work.

March 2, 2006

New York

Cocktails at Sheila Baird’s. Walked there with Annie Levis; heard all the Farm School gossip. Then to Broadway to see the Johnny Cash show “Ring of Fire.” Delicious. Just song after song, some I didn’t know, many favorites that I did know. Sung by many male and female voices recruited from Nashville. Wonderful band; scenic effects; a little acting to support themes. But mostly just the songs. A treat.

Friday, March 3, 2006

Post-Secondary Committee gave the go-ahead for expansion of Perrotis to three years. I wonder if Vergos will be an adequate director. Good meeting later re: Secondary and also re: Strategic Planning with Gail Schoppert. At 5:00 met Michael Groden for 1¼ hour at the Yale Club. He’s still stymied by Stephen Joyce but will probably do his critical thesaurus now without quoting the text, just referring to it. I hope that Bob Bell will speak to him about reading Ulysses for the very first time in my class. . . . Then briefly to Daphne’s. She had won a lottery at St. David’s providing a catered dinner for ten. It was tonight. She didn’t lift a finger. Waiters distributed drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The table was beautifully set with our Limoges china. I met some of the guests: Dartmouth alums, colleagues from Goldman Sachs, a mother from St. David’s, etc. . . . Then to Marymount College on East 71st for another cocktail party hosted by its president, now an AFS trustee.

Saturday, March 4, 2006

Full board. Happily, we voted to purchase 75 acres far enough outside the city to accommodate our cows. A woman willed $4,000,000 to the school. And Betty Godley left $1,000,000. Nice to see Dimitri Gondicas and Mike, of course. . . . Over the weekend, I read the first of the two books on Buddhism lent me by Taveephol Chardtumrong. I draw the line at reincarnation, I’m afraid. But some other passages are worth quoting:

❡ (p. 9) There are two foremost lights in the world: the light of the sun and that of the moon. . . . They, however, . . . cannot illuminate the inner world or the human mind.

❡ (p. 43) . . . The meditator realizes that everything in this world is transient, subject to suffering and uncontrollable because it is non-self. Thus, the mind abandons the desire to acquire, the desire to have, and the desire to be.

❡ (p. 89) Nibbana is the goal of Buddhism. . . . Nibbana is not nothingness. That Nibbana is total cessation does not mean it is nothing. But it means complete extinction of suffering . . .

❡ (pp. 122–123) Life begins and ends with cries and moans. . . . Babies cry with closed fists—a symbolic indication that they are born to hold and cling. But when we close our eyes to take leave of the world, we spread our palms as if to remind those left behind as witnesses that we cannot take anything with us.

March 5, 2006

Today I was told that I was elected president of Kendal’s Residents Council for 2006–2007. At least it ends after one year.

March 21, 2006

Very nice celebration at Kendal for Lafayette Noda’s 90th birthday. About 60 people for dinner in the Steere Room. Toasts (with sparkling apple juice), testimonials, a chronology, photos from babyhood onward. I made everyone laugh by saying (after Mayme told of being stopped by police while driving), “Next time you’re stopped for speeding, Lafayette, and the officer asks you for an explanation, just say ‘I’m 90 years old and I don’t have much time.’” . . . Busy recently preparing “The Mystery of Quaker Light” for Pendle Hill publication with a new editor, Chel Avery. Progressing on the Kazantzakis letters. Preparing a lecture for Rochester. Going to the Armstrongs’ for supper tomorrow because they’d missed my Johnny Cash celebration and wanted a “private showing.” Wilsons will come, too. Pat Porter gave a beautiful recital this afternoon on Kendal’s organ, which I brought here, negotiating with its owner, Carleton Chapman, and the Kendal architects, who needed to modify Gathering Room design in order to fit in 50 loudspeakers.

March 23, 2006

Chrysanthi played Jackie Kennedy and I played Thoreau in Joan Williams’s “Who Am I?” Chrysanthi read beautifully, ending with lines from Cavafy’s “Ithaca.” At the very end, as the audience was leaving, Steve Crary collapsed and died, aged 93, a nice way to go. Tomorrow Bill Summers will lecture on Mozart. On Saturday comes Veronica Jochum’s and my Mozart program.

March 25, 2006

Our three-day Mozart festival. Last night Bill Summers lectured well on Mozart’s theaters, with clips and music. Tonight Veronica Jochum and I presented “Mozart: a Journey.” I read from the Mozart letters and eye-witness accounts of the wunderkind. Veronica played music appropriate for the year and circumstances, and showed slides. We rehearsed yesterday for three hours and this morning for two. Trouble with the power point slides in rehearsal but perfect in performance. And Veronica played masterfully. I had to read sometimes in German, French, and Italian. Lisa helped my German. Full house. It went very well, and was videotaped.

March 26, 2006

Completed our Mozart festival tonight with the film “Amadeus,” which is so strong, mostly because of the music.

April 1, 2006

Rochester

Spoke on “The Last Temptation as Post-Christian” to the Hellenic Society. The nicest surprise was that the lady who hosted me in Buffalo drove all the way to hear this. How nice! A retired Catholic priest was a fine member of the anticipatory dinner and then the audience. A Platonist. And he didn’t object to what I said about Saint Augustine.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Mayme Noda died Friday night. Kesaya called me earlier on Friday saying that it was hopeless. Lafayette called early Saturday to say that she had “expired” and to thank Chrysanthi and me for our friendship. At Meeting this morning, David hugged me and wept profusely. Later Kesaya the same. Lafayette very stoic. I played piano for hymns, replacing Mayme, and folks sang her favorite hymns. I ministered in Meeting about Mayme’s diversity: wife, mother, cook, farmer, musician, and citizen, Quaker activist. I should have included “speaker”—almost monologist. Others ministered movingly. Kesaya visited later in the afternoon trying to plan the memorial service here at Kendal. . . . This morning we also heard our Kendal service with Alan Horton officiating, speaking on “reason” (Darwin) vs. “faith (creationism) very expertly. Lively lunch afterwards. Then at 3:30 early music concert. I played Scarlatti’s Sonata in D major, terribly. Nerves. But I got through to the end without breaking down totally. Frozen fingers.

April 24, 2006

Andrea Useem was meant to arrive today to speak at Dartmouth at 4:00, at Kendal at 7:15, and tomorrow at a War/Peace lunch, all painstakingly arranged by Fred Berthold and me. But all flights were canceled at Dulles owing to fog. She couldn’t get another booking, everything full, and we canceled everything. She was going to speak about her conversion to Islam and the role of women in the American Muslim community. We’ll try to re-book her for next autumn.

April 27, 2006

Ithaca, Hampton Inn

Drove to Ithaca with Walter Reeves, 6½ hours, but easy because we talked interestingly most of the way. He, of course, is the current president of the Residents Council whom I will replace for 2006–2007. 3:00 p.m. meeting at Kendal at Ithaca of Resident Council members from all eleven communities. Lots of good ideas. Nice reunion with John Diffey, but I had to say that not much has been done about a Kendal in Greece. Supper in Kendal at Ithaca’s dining room with some of its residents. Hanover is nicer, and has better food.

April 28, 2006

Plenary sessions in the morning, first mostly about baby boomers and their effect on CCRCs in the future. Lovely reunion with Gay Berger; we lunched together. She says that Pendle Hill is not doing well. Huge deficit. Weak interim director. Niyonu alienating people. Hal Weaver a disruptive influence on the board. Alas! But Dan Seeger is in charge of plans to refurbish Friends Center on 15th Street. Second session on IT and other improvements for health care. After lunch, small groups on strategic planning. Then dinner in Cornell Ornithology Lab, sitting next to Gay Berger. Opposite, a man who taught Greek and Latin at Oberlin. Lots to talk about.

April 29, 2006

Ithaca–Riparius

Our Hanover group met to discuss how we would act back home. We’ll summarize these lessons to the residents and each of us will submit a reaction to Becky. At the end they brought out the entire kitchen staff that had fed 200 guests so well. Applause. I heard that Ithaca has an ombudsman. Interestingly, when I asked Lorraine Deisinger about it she said it didn’t work; no one used it (she also said that peer tutoring never worked because the aggrieved party didn’t want peers to know everything). So I went to Dan, the executive director of Ithaca and of course got the opposite news: the ombudsman (actually they have two) works very well indeed. Consultation is often. There’s a dedicated telephone and e-mail. The individuals are appointed by the board upon recommendation by the council. Alternatively, two council members can serve. The ombudsman can often help solve a problem, or can refer it to the proper person. But personnel firings are out of bounds for the ombudsman. What I learned from this is what I already knew: don’t trust Lorraine Deisinger. . . . Drove to the farm. Chinese supper. Everything fine in our house, but Alec had three large trees blown down in back, with top branches landing on his woodshed roof. Minimum damage, probably.

April 30, 2006

Riparius

Put books away. Picked up a huge number of fallen branches—to the pile. Got the tractor ready. The new system of jacking didn’t work because the cement blocks sank so far into the ground that the wheels were no longer elevated. Next year must put a plank under them to spread the weight. Tractor wouldn’t start; no battery power. Strange, because it’s fully charged, and I cleaned the terminals with steel wool. I used jumper cables from the car, and it started. Let it run 90 minutes. We’ll see what happens when I try again on the next visit. No time to fertilize fruit trees or till the garden. Next time. The ash next to the house seems to have ants again and needs re-tarring.

May 2,2006

Nina McCall now reports that Jay Pierson, Kendal board chair, thinks that I shouldn’t serve as council president because I’ll be away too much. I explained to her the willingness of Betsy Sanderson, vice-president elect, to serve during this period. I also spoke with Pierson, who seemed to soften his objection. We’ll see what happens.

May 11, 2006

New York

Christina’s play in the Marymount School: Li’l Abner. She played Moonbeam McSwine. She sang one song and said a few lines. Marrying Sam was excellent; real stage presence. The lead roles were grade 5. Christina is grade 4. Singing, dancing, dialogue, scenery. Costumes. A real show. Nice young woman playing the piano very expertly. Afterwards I asked her where she trained: Cincinnati and Mannes. Also spoke to Nancy Prosser’s granddaughter, who does music in the upper school. Concepcion Alvar, head of school, came over to say hello. She seems to know Christina. . . . A few hours afterward with Greg, Daphne, and other children in their apartment: Daphne explained more about the contemplated move to Santa Barbara. “I don’t want to raise my children in New York.” That’s partly the reason. Everything here has to be planned. The kids cannot just go outside and play. So they return home and watch television. But Andrew paints, makes ceramics, and collects baseball cards. Peter asked me if my tractor was green.

May 5, 2006

New York

To the Guggenheim Museum for the David Smith show. He’s the one who lived and worked on a farm in Bolton Landing. Remarkable sculptures and paintings. How I wish I could stand one in the fields at Terpni. Asking one of the guards if the Smith farm was open as a museum, I discovered that she is a graduate of North Creek High School, lives in Johnsburg, and studied with Paul Little. Small world. Also saw exquisite Kandinskys and Cézannes. Then to Marymount for Christina’s grandparents’ day. Grades IV and V again, this time singing Irving Berlin songs plus Chattanooga Chou Chou and a Joplin rag. Part singing; syncopation. Excellent. Concepcion Alvar, head of school, spoke well afterwards, saying that the school supports the arts. She was the one person seated on the floor during the singing. Then Christina took us to her desk and to a monopoly-like game fashioned by the students consistent with their study of the Westward movement: covered wagons, buffalo, etc. Also saw a paragraph she wrote very excellently. Then by subway to Grand Central and the Yale Club, where Daphne met us with Andrew and we all had a sumptuous lunch. Walked with them four or five blocks up Madison Avenue in 80-degree sunlight. They’re off later to South Salem. Daphne worries about our Biedemeier dining room table, meant to go to Alec, but how? It would be a shame to lose it. . . . To Penn Station and home.

May 11, 2006

Lunch with David Wykes, who wanted my advice about retiring. Dinner with Ethan Foster and Constance Littlefield, CPA; then long session about Quaker budget, which we’re going to simplify.

May 12, 2006

Those who went to Ithaca met to plan our presentation to everyone. I’ll speak about all the other Residents Councils and the advantages of being part of a system. I hope to speak at the 15-year celebration in September, maybe repeating some of my remarks at the 5-year celebration in 1996. . . . Then to the English Department’s “Fish Dinner” to honor Bill Cook upon his retirement. I spoke about our visit to Mina Shaughnessy at CCNY, our reading of anti-war poetry as a sort of Amos and Andy team in the Core Course for Peace Studies.

May 13, 2006

Rehearsed Titus and the Mozart sonata in the morning. Then the first meeting of my council officers: Betsy Sanderson, Pat Burnham, Kingsley Ervin. We chose Joan Wilson to be our fifth member. In the afternoon, performed the sonata with Joan (four hands) and Titus with Joan, Joan Snell and Bill Clendenning (eight-hands), not too badly, in the Cary Room, for health center people.

May 14, 2006

To a fancy house in Etna to celebrate Walter Arndt’s 90th birthday. He is still full of good humor. Nice to see Prue again and David. Then a fancy supper with Allan and Claire Munck.

May 19–20, 2006

Terpni

Despite gentle rain and black flies, I tilled the entire garden and we planted lettuce, scallions, potatoes, peas, string beans, cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes (covered with Reemay against possible frost). Turned the water on without any problems. Mowed with the White. Fertilized the three plum trees (all full of blossoms), two cherries, and the apple tree. Picked up lots of fallen branches around my office. The big problem is a large pine that fell directly into the pond. I managed to saw off the bottom six feet of the trunk with my small Stihl, which doesn’t cut straight. Tried to pull the tree out of the pond with the John Deere, but couldn’t get traction because the ground is so wet. Will try again in June. Supper at Sicilian Pizza in Lake George, greeted by our friend the owner.

May 24, 2006

The eleven of us who went to Ithaca lined up on stage in the Gathering Room, each pair with one of the new microphones just purchased for $9000, to tell the community what happened at Ithaca. My assignment was, in five minutes, to describe our feeling that it’s better to be part of a multi-site system like the Kendal Corporation than to be a stand-alone single-site CCRC. I also said something about the advisability of an ombudsman and also of a Kendal at Home. The day before, I attended the health committee chaired by Harriet Baldwin, and the task force considering changes in council chaired by Tedd Osgood. . . . Supper with Dick, then played Poulenc and Bach violin-piano sonata, and the marvelous Prokofiev sonata, which is very hard for me.

May 25, 2006

Practicing the Alberti bass on the Mozart D-major sonata which we’ll be doing at Kinhaven. Very hard. Trying to learn Mozart’s “Little Gig” to do on the harpsichord next fall. It’s a marvelous fugue, really, with the subject upside down in the second part. . . . Council’s budget committee in the morning; Weezie Pietsche’s “Kendal Stories” in the evening. I described how we got the organ from Carlton Chapman.

May 27, 2006

Cambridge

A marvelous show at the A.R.T.: Marivaux’s The Island of Slaves with a bravura performance by Fiona Gallagher as Cléanthis. The idea is transformation: masters becoming slaves, slaves masters. To extend this, Robert Woodruth, the director, introduced five “islanders”—transvestites all, dancers, singers, etc.—from Boston and, of course, Province-town. They were very funny, interacting with the audience. But the play’s moral, that the aggrieved slaves needed to overcome vindictiveness, was beautifully done, and solidified at the end when they all began to sing Mozart, from Così fan tutte. . . . We had additional fun listening to Car Talk on the way in, Prairie Home Companion on the way back, plus Greek songs including our favorite about the divorcee who needs to tell her ex-husband that the cat has just had kittens. Supper at Sweet Tomatoes.

May 28, 2006, my birthday

Good Meeting. I ministered about Marivaux combined with Stuart Lord’s message last Sunday about lifestyle. Pong came, at my invitation, and told everyone that in his service as a monk at age 12 the idea is that every good deed helps one’s parents. Brunch at EBA’s, free because of their birthday policy. Then at 4:30 the marriage of Phidias and Alice Dantos’s beautiful daughter Maria to a Greek boy from Athens in a full Greek wedding with three priests, stefana, χορός του Ησαΐα, Christos Anesti 3 times. All in Rollins Chapel, with un-Greek organ before and after. Then reception and dinner and dancing at Hanover Inn for 300 people. We were with the Marders mostly. Spoke to the groom’s parents, just arrived from Athens. They don’t speak English. At the dinner, American band (too loud, of course) until 10:00 p.m. Then, happily, a fine Greek band from Boston with bouzouki. And everyone danced, led by Phidias and Chrysanthi at first. Syrtos, tsamikos, etc. I couldn’t believe that this was happening in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Sunday, June 4, 2006

Terpni

Rain-rain-rain since we arrived on Friday. Supper in the Route 28 diner, enough to take home for a second dinner. Saw six large wild turkeys out front and three large deer near my office who just watched me as I advanced slowly, but eventually turned and ran. Tomatoes survived but lettuce and peas seem to have been washed away. Chrysanthi will plant more lettuce tomorrow. And I’m going to dig up the rhubarb plant and fill its hole with cow manure, then replant it, with hope for revitalization. We went to the Black Hole this afternoon to see Mill Brook at its fullest cascading over the rocks with immense force. Despite the weather I’ve done some mowing with both the Whιte and the John Deere. I also set up my office and began work this morning, still translating 1923 letters using the new laptop, whose battery is very long-lived. Also am using the larger of the two “lazy susans” I built for jobs like translating that require three or four books at hand; the smaller and better one has been very well used in my study 705 in Baker Library. The Shapiros came for supper last night. Fran, aged 93, looks 70 and acts 70. She’s better than ever, with a new knee. I played them the Mozart D major sonata that I’ll be doing with Alice at Kinhaven, using the CD, which of course goes faster than we’ll dare. Irv’s WWII photos from France are on exhibit in Glens Falls. We’ll go on Thursday on the way to Kinhaven. Demetrios Liappas telephoned from Los Angeles about my week there as Onassis visitor at the end of September. Three lectures, dinners, receptions. . . . I’ve written to Stamatis Philippides about booking a hotel in Rethymno for 18 March, 2007 until the end of May. Must work now on the Kazantzakis symposium I’ll be running at NYU in March 2007. What first? And much to prepare for the Farm School trustees not to mention Kendal’s Residents Council. And early in July Kazantzakis volume 2 arrives and I’ll need to do the index.

Tuesday, June 6, 2006

To revitalize our rhubarb, I dug under it and we deposited compressed cow manure underneath. That should help. Leander arrived last night and regaled us with the accomplishments of Nicholas and Sophia. Today he mowed around his house; he doesn’t want me to do it with the John Deere because I don’t rake the cut grass. Chrysanthi and I put more black paper, heavy gauge, on the borders of the garden. This seems to work as a weed-preventer, whereas the old system, hay mulch, doesn’t.

June 7, 2006

Today on my way to the office one of the wild turkeys was right in my path, followed by two very tiny chicks. Instead of running away, she came toward me, honking and obviously encouraging me to turn around and disappear. I didn’t. Eventually she flew onto an overhanging branch. I didn’t know that these large, heavy birds could fly, but they obviously can, at least short distances. . . . All packed now for 5½ days at Kinhaven followed immediately by the trip to Greece. Rain again today and predicted until Sunday. Too bad.

June 9, 2006

Kinhaven

Alice and I have already spent many hours doing our Mozart. No lesson yet; we begin tomorrow morning with Leander. It sounds good (although I still can’t do the Alberti bass at sufficient speed) but we need help with trills and other nuances. Also did some sight-reading of Gershwin, Mendelssohn, and more Mozart. Some familiar people here: Mrs. Patterson, who turns out to be related to Jerry King; Bruno Repp of course, who gave me one of his “scientific studies” of how four-hand pianists relate to the timing of each other (imagine!); Robin Williams, Charlotte, and Leander’s other regulars but not Alma and Bill this year. David Abbott joined the staff. He told me he left Kinhaven because of Jerry Bidlack’s mediocrity and praised me for being practically the only one who tried to remedy it by having him step down as conductor (of course he didn’t, until recently owing to age and arthritis). The place looks very bad; even the once-lovely living room in Main House is a mess. Chrysanthi and I are in the Da Capo trailer. Lights don’t work; no heat; dehumidifier overflowed and flooded the carpet; ants in the bathroom. But we’re managing. Chrysanthi sits and reads in Hale House, which is clean and heated. I brought a computer and have kept abreast of e-mail. Stamatis Philippidis just booked us a suite at the Jo-An Palace in Rethymno and wants me to produce an 80-page booklet on Kazantzakis to be ready by October! That means working the whole month of August, after I finish the index to volume 2. The Kazantzakis letters will be delayed once again, alas.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Kinhaven

Excellent lesson with Leander exclusively on the first movement, which will now be played slower, enabling me to get the Alberti bass better. He had me do lots of exercises to get things in unison. In the evening, faculty four-hand recital with a lovely Beethoven, a Cherubini not so lovely, and a great Mozart—with Leander, Nigel, Mrs. Shin, Nancy, and David Abbott (that was Friday night). On Saturday, the solo recital by lots of fellow students. But I didn’t play this year and neither did Alice. Most interesting was part of Ives’ Concord Sonata.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Kinhaven

Still cloudy and cold, the 5th or 6th straight day. Very good lesson with Nancy this morning, exclusively on the 2nd movement, which she got us playing a bit faster than we had, and thinking in three rather than in six. Alice and I had a half hour warm-up on the concert hall piano at 7:00 a.m. Then another lesson with Leander.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Kinhaven–Philadelphia

Alice and I were first on the recital program and I think we did the Mozart musically. I wasn’t nervous, but I made one slip and Alice made one—nothing serious. We benefited greatly from all the coaching: Mrs. Shin yesterday on mostly the 2nd movement, Leander on Sunday afternoon on the 3rd movement. Everyone laughed when I announced that the sixteen-year-old Mozart wrote this to play with his sister. Last night we heard a splendid solo recital by Nigel: Mozart Fantasy played better than ever, Bartok Microcosmos, 4 Schubert impromptus done beautifully, the same Mendelssohn Rondo Capriccio that Charlotte played the other day, again perfectly done. He is such a consummate musician. After Alice and I performed, Chrysanthi and I left immediately to drive to Albany, park the car at the Marriott, and catch our flight to Philadelphia. On the US Airways flight to Frankfort I was upgraded to business class, strangely, and actually slept a few hours.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Frankfort–Thessaloniki

By virtue of my business class seat, US Airways treated us to a room for the day in the Sheraton Airport hotel. What luxury! We slept another two hours, showered, sat and read, had a very expensive mid-afternoon meal. Then flew via Aegean to Thessaloniki. I’ve started to re-read The Sound and the Fury. The Benjy section is really quite clear if you look for the guiding signs that Faulkner includes. So far what’s all too clear is Benjy’s helplessness yet deep understanding, Dilsey’s solicitude, the mother’s self-accusations, Jason’s meanness, Caddie’s tenderness: “She smelled like trees”! . . . Met by Pelagia Voutsa and her husband at the airport, now greatly expanded. First conversation: how good it is to be rid of Stefanakis. Agreed. She was very pleased with the three interns this year and looks forward to the new three next year. We’re housed in the brand new Niarchos dorm in a nice room with air conditioning.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Slept finally after two hours lying awake. Saw Thanos and talked about interns, then Phil, John Cleave, David and Gail at breakfast. Everyone very friendly. Secondary Committee with Annie, Tasos, Bill and Phil sitting in. We will report on the new division of T.E.E. into the Technical Lykeio and the Technical School. Then Post-Secondary ably chaired by John Crunkilton. We voted unanimously to recommend expansion to three years. Bill McGrew’s conclusion: “What the hell! Let’s do it!” We worry about Vergos as president of a much higher operation. He’ll need to be replaced. . . . Dedication of the lovely πλατεία outside Princeton Hall, with an interminable religious blessing, short speeches, and then lovely dancing by students. Dimitri Gondicas and I sat for a time to catch up. Princeton is flourishing, but he worries very much about MGSA, including the journal. A long lunch (two hours) with the three interns, two girls and a boy, very happy in their assignment. They assured me that Pelagia always offered support. Also, they were regularly assigned the 4th hour in the week of English language instruction—conversation, which they handled through games. . . . I typed up the Secondary minutes for tomorrow and checked e-mail. Don Nielsen, to satisfy Lia’s conservatively Christian family, is going to be baptized Greek Orthodox and assume the name Damian. He noted how intolerant his instructors have been, insisting as they do that Orthodoxy is the only valid faith. . . . Long walk around the grounds with Chrysanthi, who went out for lunch with George and Efthymoula. When George was alone with her for a moment he asked if she was happily married, then said “Look what I have!” Poor man! . . . College graduation with a lovely valedictory speech by a student from Macedonia (FYROM), stressing how marvelous it was to be with Bosnians, Kosovans, Greeks, etc., and to feel the predominance of human brotherhood over nationalistic differences. The 29 graduates were from all the Balkan countries, from peoples that had been killing each other for centuries. Now they were one family in Perrotis College. How nice! And of course Albana was present, both in various videos shown at the graduation and in person, looking very pretty and beautifully dressed. But her situation is not good. Her poor twenty-two-year-old brother is seriously injured after an automobile accident and now cannot work. She has a bad job in a video store. The solution, she thinks, is to go back to A.C.T. for the MBA degree, one year if she goes full-time, two years if she goes part-time. She’s accepted, but has no money and is waiting to see if they’ll award financial aid and how much. I guess I’d better continue to subsidize her. I’ll write to Dick Jackson and offer to pay half.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Full board. We passed the College proposal for a three-year program offering the B.S. degree—very risky, but probably less risky than continuing with the two-year College, whose numbers of students have remained about the same, without growth, for ten years. The finances look much better. Some bequests have come in, and we’ll begin to receive regular income from leased land. Saw David Willis at lunch. They’re fine, but Bruce Lansdale is very frail; can hardly walk, although he manages to get to the water, David says, holding on to a rope. Sad. If they only had a Kendal here! . . . In the evening, to Stratos and Loretta Constantinides’ house for supper. Mansion in Panorama, great wealth. Lots of time talking to Tasos and especially to his wife, a Ph.D. in mathematics teaching at the university. Marder very resentful of Charlotte Armstrong, who doesn’t appreciate him, he feels. Had a chance to praise and appreciate Stratos’s art collection, which includes two stunning portraits by Tsarouchis. . . . Before this we were driven out about thirty km. toward Polygyros to the land that the School may purchase: 160 stremmata in one piece, to which we hope to add another 150+ to make a bit over 300 total. Beautiful wheat fields in a totally rural area, but it took us 45 minutes to arrive. If we buy the land and eventually decide not to use it for our livestock (200+ cows and bulls, hens, turkeys), we can presumably sell the land again. Cost now, about €750,000.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Farm tour led by the Thomases. Large Case tractor sold advantageously to the school by Paul Condellis. I sat in the cab (air-conditioned, with CD player), then next to the driver at first, others snapping photos. Thomases explained the use of every building: abandoned piggery, slaughterhouse for 20,000 turkeys, milk production unit, egg production, tractor maintenance. We finished by meeting the farm staff directors and tasting tsiporo and Omega 3 eggs and receiving a few stalks of wheat. It’s very inspiring, all-told. . . . Then driven by lovely Dora to Annie Levis’s summer house on the second finger of Halkidiki. Ate with her husband mostly: Aris, our gracious host. Bruce there, hardly able to walk. Brenda Marder drew me aside to complain about the physical appearance of the School and to emphasize the College’s role as a place where Balkan nationalities could intermingle peacefully. Amen. . . . Waiting now to hear back from Dr. Barich regarding a meeting on Monday or Tuesday. . . . To town to visit Odysseas and Eleni. Very emotional reunion. The best news is that Toula now has a “partner,” Γεώργоς, whom they like very much. He is a divorcee with prior children who are with the former wife. He is very handy and helpful in many ways, but Toula still has many problems (chiefly payments on huge loans taken out by Stavros) and she smokes. We didn’t see her; however, Takis and Brini came, he looking very handsome without a mustache. She teaches in the Τεχνικό Λύκειο στο Πολύγυρο, a long commute. He is in charge of public works for the city. Η κατάσταση, λέει, είναι χάλια. But he always says that, like Vouli. We stayed until 11:30 and were happy to get back to Niarchos Dorm, our temporary “home.”

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Delicious Greek honey for breakfast. No electricity all morning. Went to Cincinnati Hall, where it was cooler, and read more of The Sound and the Fury, part 2, Quentin’s, which I am discovering is even more difficult than Benjy’s part 1. Also read Bruce Lansdale’s beautiful poem “Metamorphosis” about his life in Greece, generally, and at the School in particular, a perfect expression of the School’s idealism. He includes touching tributes to Litsas and to “the lady in the tower,” Joice Loch. . . . George picked us up around 1:00 p.m. He’s very opposed to the legislation to permit private universities, which has got all the university students and faculty out on strike at the moment. He says the rich will go to the private universities and the rest to the public, and that’s what the present conservative government wants. I explained about financial aid. We went to a fine restaurant in Kalamariá and were joined by Andreas and wife and son (Γεωργάκης) and later by Dimitris and Tilda, and of course Efthymoula was there. Good chance to talk with Andreas, who was eager to hear about Alec and Leander. He says he is no longer interested at all in the theater, indeed doesn’t even like to go as a spectator. Too bad! The child is extroverted and clearly very smart. He told jokes, little stories, etc. with κέφι. I asked Dimitris about Albana’s hope to do better with an MBA and he agreed; it’s the only way, he asserted. I also asked him if a CCRC in Lakoma would be too far away and he thought not, provided the institution had its own bus, which of course it will, not to mention private cars owned by the residents. . . . Arranged with Dr. Barich for Tuesday night at 6:30, here. Called Takis Litsas to come. Called Bill McGrew. Trying to reach Annie. Called David Willis but no way to see them on Tuesday. They’re coming to the USA next summer. Will try to get them to the farm. Daughter wants to go to university in the USA perhaps. Spoke at length with Ruth and Dimitris Gounelas. I’ll see him tomorrow. . . . To Cincinnati Hall to meet Tasos and his wife Dora. We went to the κέντρο “Miami” with Bill McGrew, Vouli, Phil Foote, and the woman who was in Sydney with me many years ago, Lina Stefa. Our table was next to the water. A huge fish (συναγρίδα), octopus, salad, ouzo, wine. Lots of good conversation. Phil and Bill asked me about Everett Marder. Why is he so pushy? Difficult to answer. Ditto re: Brenda. Lots of talk about the university strike, of course.

Monday, June 19, 2006

To the city by taxi. Aegean Air office on Οδός Νίκης, by the port. Then Germanos, which couldn’t replace my battery—the κινητό is too old. Then to Τράπεζα Εγνατίας to take out €525; then to Τράπεζα της Ελλάδος to deposit it to the Hotel Jo-An, which Stamatis now says is “worn out,” but we’ll give it a try. Then to Λουκουμίδης for coffee and a briki. Then to Vouli’s. She has a Georgian woman living with her now and helping, a very attractive young lady who explained that she crossed the border into Greece secretly, was caught and sent back to neighboring Bulgaria, paid for a false passport, crossed again, secretly, was not caught, got a job illegally, eventually was allowed to apply for legal status as a resident, which she now enjoys. Her son is back in Tbilisi with the grandmother. Poor soul! . . . I went to the Kamára to meet Dimitris Gounelas. Vouli told me a good joke à propos: Δεν μπορεί να περάσει κάτω από την Καμάρα. It means that a man’s wife is so unfaithful that his horns of cuckoldry grow so large that they prevent him from passing beneath the Kamára. Dimitri had never heard it, but laughed vigorously. We talked and ate from 2:00 until 4:30, then walked through the university, now on strike with students guarding every entrance to prohibit anyone from entering. Problem: the proposed legislation for privatization. I suggested depositing my Kazantzakis archive here; apparently they now have a responsible archival department. Dimitris will inquire. Also, he wants to propose me for a doctorate. Unlikely, I think. After that, I met with Vladimir Bošković, again at the Kamára, and we sat for an hour. He has a translation of my Introduction to Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Ritsos, already done, in Serbian, to be published in maybe 200 or 300 copies and also on the internet. I asked for no money in effect: 5% of sales after 1000 copies, which means zero. Pleasant man who said that students in Belgrade still have a great shortage of books. I’ll send Greek ones if someone responds to my catalogue. . . . Back to Vouli’s, then to AFS, and to dinner with Pelagia Voutsa and her husband, Γεώργоς, a professor at the university. Bill McGrew and Phil Foote again plus Vouli. Delicious home-cooked food on the veranda of their large, luxurious house. We overlooked the bay. Pelagia loves to talk. Tasos stopped by to say a final farewell and promise to come visit us in Rethymno, with Vouli. Μακάρι.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Long talk with Joann and Randy about Albana. Both stress that one really should have work experience before going to an MBA program, also that she’d be better off eventually going to a program other than the one at A.C.T. I’ll see her at 4:00 p.m. today. Read in the newspaper that Θάνος Βερέμης, chair of the committee recommending changes in the universities, has received death threats. The questions are obviously very serious. . . . Out to lunch again with George and Efthymoula. She didn’t scream too much. A relief. Afterwards, George gave Chrysanthi €500 and asked her to buy herself something very nice. She bought a jacket for €20. . . . At 4:00 p.m. I met Albana in Cincinnati Hall and we talked energetically for 1½ hours. She’ll contact guidance and placement people at Anatolia with the hope of landing a better job. If she returns for the MBA two-year part-time program, with luck she’ll work in a meaningful job during that time. Meanwhile, at Joann’s suggestion, I’ll contact Costas Kravvas to see if he could possibly employ her in his translation business; she knows four languages: Albanian, English, Greek, and Italian. I told her that if she gets married at some point I’d like to be at the wedding. “You’ll be my κουμπάρος!” she replied. At 6:00 p.m. Dick Jackson came and I pressed him to award her half tuition if I paid the other half. He did not promise, but hopes that this might be possible. Annie came at 6:15 as promised, and Alfred Barich and three cohorts at around 6:30. Takis Litsas also came, at my invitation, as did Bill McGrew and the Marders. Dr. Barich brought us up to date. They hope to acquire another 2500 stremmata (about 600 acres) in a village 8 kilometers from Lakoma, one with hot springs and other attractions. On the two properties (neither of which they actually own yet) he hopes to build: hospital, Kendal, villas, shopping center, golf course . . . and more! I think he expects that the Kendal Corporation will do much more than John Diffey has in mind. I tried to alert him to the realistic situation. He wants 600 apartments. I told him that we have 250 and the largest Kendal has 290. Why? Because the major desire is for community. And how will he fill so many? Diffey says a project should be 70% pre-sold before construction. “Oh,” he answered, “there’s no problem, because we’ll put others—younger people—in those empty apartments until older people sign up for Kendal.” Of course a major problem is the medical insurance one. Also, if Americans sign up, will they get residence permits? Maybe the most unrealistic part is Dr. Barich’s expectation that his Kendal could be low-cost. After they left, Takis Litsas expressed his total scorn. “Pie in the sky!” One of the AHEPA cohorts also, who remained silent for the 1½ hours we convened, drew me aside afterwards and explained that he, as a banker, was very skeptical. I promised to bring John Diffey and Dr. Barich in touch: let them work out what happens next, if anything. Diffey will be in Europe next June and perhaps could come to Greece. Barich travels two or three times to the US every year but current plans won’t bring him anywhere near New York or New England. Θα δούμε . . . Lastly, to Θέρμη for yet another full meal, with Bill McGrew and the Marders. Brenda talked too much, very negatively. Bill expressed the huge difficulties of trying to do things right while needing to conform to Ministry of Education regulations. We all worry about leadership in the new college. How can Vergos be shifted aside?

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Thessaloniki–Albany

Up at 6:15 a.m. Pelagia and George drove us to the airport. Good flight on Aegean to Munich. Rest in the Lufthansa Business Lounge. US Airways to Philadelphia. I’m still reading Faulkner’s Quentin chapter (#2), very difficult, more so than Benjy’s chapter.

June 26, 2006

Riparius

The Shapiros came with Al Zalan, fresh from Apple Hill. Lots of good talk, a nice lunch, and then some flute and piano: Handel, Bach, and Lili Boulanger, which he particularly liked.

June 27, 2006

Bob Bell here. He interviewed me for a piece he is writing on me for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. I’m embarrassed. He has collected memories from Michael Groden and Jeff Murphy, among others. . . . I wrote a short introduction, in Greek, for the Serbian translation of my introductions to Cavafy, Kazantzakis, and Ritsos. Now I need to write another introduction for the reissue of my volume 1 of Kazantzakis, Politics of the Spirit in paperback. . . . Rain, rain, everything soft and soggy. The road still passable—just.

July 3, 2006

Randolph, NH

I lectured to the Randolph Colloquium on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury using the Kierkegaardian analysis. Large audience, lots of questions, lunch afterwards at Hirsch Cross’s mansion with the mountains in front: Adams, Jefferson, Madison. The Posts, Crosses, and us. He’s very lively at age 92 and will be teaching an ILEAD course in the fall on globalization. The house is immense, wrap-around porch, wrap-around garden tended by a full-time gardener, all started by his grandfather, then his father, in different locations in Randolph. Drove to the Posts’ much more modest abode, but another full, winterized house with two or three guestrooms. Full of books on theology, philosophy, literature. Welcome nap in the afternoon. . . . Yesterday slept late after driving from the farm, supping at Sweet Tomatoes in Rutland. I spent the afternoon mowing the east field in hot sunlight. The transfer from that to the elegance of our Kendal apartment was striking. We lead such a rich and varied life. Today it’s more and more. . . . Supper at the Posts’ with Jim and Harriet Baldwin and Allan and Joan Horton. Very pleasant, out on the porch with the looming mountains in the background. After they left, more conversation with Avery and Peg until 11:00 p.m. Lovely people.

July 4, 2006

Randolph–Hanover

We detoured to Bretton Woods to see Mt. Washington in the distance and especially to wander through the Mt. Washington Hotel, built in 1902 and filled with families and young children. Reminded me of the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Venetian Lido, as in “Death in Venice.” To Kendal. Dinner with Weezie and Bill and the Griffens. Again, very friendly, pleasant company. Bill gave me his new book. I promised him “The Mystery of Quaker Light.”

July 5, 2006

Hanover–Riparius

My first agenda meeting with the executive committee. 2½ hours. Pat Burnham is especially diligent and helpful as secretary, and so is Betsy Sanderson as vice president. Kingsley reminded me that the first meeting, next Wednesday, will set the tone for my administration as president, so I’d better prepare. Howard Mitchell and Bob Stambaugh came to brief us on the buddy system proposal. Lots on the agenda. . . . Some shopping, dinner at the Sicilian restaurant in Lake George, waitress from Chestertown just graduated Hobart studying Islam. Back to the farm early enough to go through the pile of third-class mail retrieved at Kendal; it included my new pamphlet on Quaker Light with a very nice blue cover including the word Λόγος correctly printed.

July 6, 2006

Started letters again. Lots of tree removal on Alec’s field. Fixed garden gate with a turnbuckle and cable, very fancy. . . . Dick wants to perform Trimble again and has found a suitable soprano. . . . Viewed the end of Scorsese’s “Age of Innocence,” very sensitively done: a total exposé of a false society. . . . I’m now booked to go to Colorado College for a week in November.

July 10, 2006

Dan Fones here with wife and daughter (not son, who apparently is a troublemaker and school dropout). They cleared the mess behind Alec’s house, chipping everything except the largest trunks. Two oak trees needed to be cut, alas. Then, with great difficulty, Dan pulled the large pine out of the pond. Finally, various other blow-downs. And a bit of thinning just south of the garden, to admit more sunlight. Lots accomplished in four hours. Cost $600.

July 12, 2006

Hanover

A full day. 9:00 a.m. orientation of new Council members by Ella Erway. 10:30–12:30, Council, I presiding. It went reasonably well, I think, although I must try to end at noon in the future. Jim Sheridan is the most outspoken councilor, but helpfully. I managed an opening and closing silence, plus decision by consensus, not voting. We discussed political behavior, smoking, and each councilor introduced himself or herself. . . . Drove back to the farm and directly to North Creek for a forestry meeting with the new RCPA forester, Dan Gilmore. Alec was already there. Gilmore is smart and articulate. He promises to do more than his predecessor. We’ll invite him to supper. . . . Alec and family are here now, the children lively as always. Alec is doing well at Patana and is serving on the Strategic Planning Committee with the new head of school.

July 14, 2006

Barber of Seville at the Seagle Colony. We went because the female lead was sung by Jennifer Lien, the Dartmouth student who graduated JIS and hosted us in Singapore. A sweet voice. No orchestra—two pianos expertly played. Took Theo and Elena, who lasted through the first act. Theo appreciated the humor.

July 15, 2006

Ballet matinee again with the children. Lawn seats. All new, different ballets we hadn’t seen before, but nothing special musically.

July 19, 2006

Dan Gilmore, the new RCPA forester, here for supper. We walked Alec’s land for two hours. Harvest possible. We’re talking about a thinning operation on the Terpni property. He can mark the trees.

July 20, 2006

Burned the very large brush pile and kept adding more brush all day; very satisfying. . . . Alec drove his Jeep to Dale Millington’s with me in the Pathfinder behind him flashing blinking lights. Visited Mrs. Millington; she’s 76 and looks 96. Alzheimer’s; no teeth; sits all day and watches television. Alone.

July 22, 2006

Wonderful ballet with Chrysanthi, our anniversary treat. “Russian Season” with interesting choreography by the new head of the Bolshoi. Then extraordinary Stravinsky/Robbins “The Cage,” where the girls, dressed as alluring insects, destroy two men. A lovely Tchaikovsky/Robbins “Andantino,” so different from Robbins’s “The Cage” because so traditional. Then Prokofiev/Lavey “Romeo and Juliet” to that extraordinary music. And finally, “Firebird”! . . . A whole group from Kendal was there; nice to say hello. We then supped in the Montcalm: lobster bisque with sherry, as we remembered it. . . . But opening a letter from Leander afterwards we learned that both hands and wrists and forearms are in great pain, diagnosed as De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, curable apparently, but how long? He had a big chance to play in North Carolina in November, but will probably need to cancel. Right now he’s been told to avoid all activity with his hands. He’s chagrined because on Wednesday he’ll be here at the farm wanting to do so many projects and won’t be able to do any. We telephoned and told him not to worry, certainly, about the farm. He will probably want to see a rheumatoid specialist in Hanover, to discover if there’s more to this than the tenosynovitis.

July 25, 2006

Visit by Gail and Ruth Schoppert plus Patti Buck and dog Essa (David is already in Windhoek, Africa). Lots of talk about the Farm School, Stefanakis, Alex Drapos, George Draper, and far-away places: Bali, Malaysia, Bangkok. Gail will be visiting Bangkok in November and will see Alec and family. At the same time, Tom Wood arrived with his driver, Dan, a college student 6'6” tall and very good with Theo and Elena. Tom slept in Leander’s house, Dan in the Guest House, the Schopperts and Patti and Essa in Daphne’s. Quite an arrangement.

July 26, 2006

Gail made pancakes for us all. Poor Tom Wood is mostly blind from macular degeneration. Can’t drive or read. But obviously still travels, although only with help. Everyone departed around 11:00 a.m. with warm expressions of gratitude. . . . I made a list of author’s alterations for Princeton University Press, then mowed more of the south field, and then James McBride arrived. He stayed for supper. Will return most likely on August 4th with family. He is finishing a novel about a slave and slave-master. He spoke about his own tendonitis and the expert treatment he had received in St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital in New York. Leander should go there, it seems. I found more on the internet. . . . Dick sent the score for Trimble, which I’ll now need to learn again.

July 28, 2006

Don Gilmore, the new RCPA forester, took Alec, Leander, me, and Theo and Nicholas to John Sullivan’s to see an exemplary logging operation. Sullivan is 4th generation on the property, first farmed by his great-grandfather in the 1870s, who arrived from Ireland. We sat first in his cabin, all cedar logs, then toured the woods, mostly in heavy rain. The two youngsters behaved well, no complaints. We were all soaked through at the end, but didn’t seem to mind.

July 31, 2006

I drove to the Seagle Colony to fetch Jennifer Lien, who came for supper. She told me that she took singing lessons at Dartmouth, performed in various ways, etc. Then did her required eight years with the Singapore newspaper. And now is trying to make a career as a soprano. She was lovely the other night as the lead in The Barber of Seville. . . . I’m doing the index to volume 2. Meticulous, boring work, but necessary. The “corrected” Greek came back, still filled with errors. And Stamatis Philippidis in Crete is giving me a hard time regarding my book for the students there. He wants me to revise and update previous writings.

August 3, 2006

Finished mowing the south field, early this year. Trimmed the low branches around one of the rock piles and thus started a new brush pile; we burned the large one last week. . . . Rosine Gardner Leloir came and we played four-hand piano: Mozart, Weber, Beethoven. Dick sent me Trimble, which I’m trying to learn again. Very difficult. Helped Alec load gravel from a pile on the road, to make his muddy road more passable. . . . James McBride returned, this time with Stephanie and Asher (daughter), now a teenager, very pretty, about to start 9th grade, and his young son, on their way to parents’ day in Canada where their other son is in a camp. He wants Leander to go to the therapeutic center in New York for musicians. I doubt that Leander will. The daughter is obviously acting like a “difficult” teen. Talk about Ms Walker, Leander’s teacher in Oberlin. She has written an autobiography in which she mentions Leander, saying that he liked to play too fast but eventually learned to play musically, and remembering going to my father when her son was always crying. . . . I’m to be one of the three speakers on September 7 at Kendal’s 15th anniversary, the others being the board chair and John Diffey. I think I’ll do John Donne’s “Ask not for whom the bell tolls”—but yes, we also do ask for whom the bell tolls. Time: 3 minutes maximum. Pins will be given to all staff who have been with us for 15 years; 15-year residents will also be recognized. Sadly, the other day, Becky Smith telephoned to discuss dismissal of a 15-year nurse’s assistant who apparently falsely accused another of being on drugs and then repeatedly denied doing this. I suggested mediation, without success.

August 6, 2006

To Bolton Landing, Sembrich Museum, to hear Diana Fanning’s piano recital. I invited her to Kendal in March but will be in Greece when she comes. A very long Schumann but some wonderful Debussy and Janáček. The Museum is on a promontory surrounded by Lake George. Very fancy. Returned via the Hague and Brant Lake, where the general store just burned and is a pile of rubble. Lots of memories. . . . Rosine was here a few days ago, as noted, and will come again. I wonder if Alice will do Kinhaven again.

August 11, 2006

Dan Gilmore took Alec, Leander, Greg, and me to Newcomb to the SUNY Environmental Center where the forester walked us through part of the twenty acres they had just logged with huge machines that grab the tree, detach it, and saw it into required lengths, the operator sitting in a cab, air-conditioned or heated, with music playing. No chain saws, no skidders. No injury to other trees. Dan says that even we can do it this way. A buck approached, six pointer, very tame and just stared at us and ate, not frightened. The forester told how they’d removed 1000 deer to a nearby forest, all with electronic devices pinned to them, and they all died because deer need familiar bedding grounds in winter. Afterwards we hiked a bit to a lovely pond and had a sumptuous lunch at Marsha’s in North Creek.

August 13, 2006

Daphne’s family left today. Peter is remarkable. A talker. Christina is developing breasts already. She drove the tractor readily. Andrew is expert at catching with a baseball glove and throwing. He knows the batting averages of all major league stars. . . . I’m trimming trees around the pond, to keep fewer leaves from falling into the water. Much help from Alec. Leander offered but I urged him not to compromise his hands, now incapable of playing because of tendonitis, but getting better. He has a big concert with Ignat in November. Will he be able? . . . Took everyone for supper at Sicilian Pizza in Lake George at the season’s height. . . . I’m reading over all lectures for Crete, updating them for the Kastaniotis booklet.

August 21, 2006

Tom and Joan Wilson here for lunch, with spanakopita, of course. Nice to have Tom now on the Kendal board and Joan with me on council. We felt free to gossip. . . . Afterward, Leander took us all on a short hike near Severance, to a secluded pond on state land, very peaceful, with large hemlocks and pines straddling rocks.

August 22, 2006

Yesterday I finished the revision of “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision” and today the revision of “Tempted by Happiness,” prepared for the translator in Rethymno. . . . Scott King at Red Dragonfly Press wants to republish all my Ritsos articles and translations.

August 25, 2006

Dear Leander, Alec, & Daphne,

Mother and I spent three hours this morning with four people from Niagara Mohawk and all of our Morris and Millington neighbors, including Derek and his wife Courtney, who will be Alec’s direct neighbors when they build their house.—very nice people, with three children ages one to four.

Niagara Mohawk is going to construct another high-power line about 10 feet west of the existing line, on new poles (single poles, not double ones). It will be about 30,000 volts, if I remember correctly—the existing one is 115,000 volts! To the west of the new line they’ll need at least 10 feet clear and they will also need to remove any “danger trees” up to about 20 feet from the line. This means that trees will be cut on Alec’s property (and on the properties of our neighbors). They promise either to chip the slash or to pulverize it with their powerful mower. The logs will be left, and can be used by the owners for firewood or whatever. I told Earl that he should feel free to collect any useful logs from Alec’s property. The woodcutters will not be removing any wood for sale. Everything will be left. Unfortunately, some very nice, large trees will need to be cut. The idea is to minimize the possibility of a tree or branch landing on the wires owing to wind or an ice storm.

A NiMo forester will supervise the entire project, which starts in two days. All the Morris & Millington boys will also be watching carefully, and will keep an eye on Alec’s land as well as their own.

There is no payment whatever for any of this. NiMo owns a 100-foot swath and in the deeds apparently has the right to eliminate “danger trees” beyond their actual property.

That’s the story! It was nice being with all our neighbors, who seem a good lot.

Love,
Dad

August 30, 2006

I creosoted the north-office table, saving it probably although there’s some rot. Also put more chips around the fruit trees. And finished typing the Kapetan Mihalis chapter for Crete. I did the Zorba one a few days ago. All the others have been sent.

September 1, 2006

Finished Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. He is an enthusiastic Darwinian. Interestingly, in many ways his view coincides with the neo-Darwinism of Bergson and thus with Kazantzakis. For example, evolution is via material until it reaches human consciousness, which then takes over in some respects. Page 207 ff. on “the idea of God” is relevant. Also pp. 210–211: “I have emphasized that we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, / however, makes them behave rather as if they were purposeful . . . The idea of purpose is only a metaphor, but we have already seen what a fruitful metaphor it is.” He ends (p. 215) by hoping that although our genes are selfish, we may in some cases practice altruism.

September 7, 2006

Hanover

Agenda meeting yesterday with Betsy, Pat, and Kingsley, a splendid group. . . . Today, Kendal’s 15-year anniversary. Splendid lunch under a huge tent, for 400 people. We sat with Audrey Logan, Frank Miles, and Dick Nolte, who is doing much better after his devastating stroke. In the program, Becky introduced first John Diffey, then Jay (board chair), then me. I spoke about John Donne’s “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, because it tolls for me. But we also do ask, since we value individuals here. The perfect sight is to see both the mask (life) and the abominable face behind it (death); indeed, awareness of Nada enhances the vigor of our participation in life.” . . . Last night we all saw Edie Gieg’s video of the 15 years, with good shots of construction, deceased founders (including Harriet Bien), my talk about cutting the ribbon, plus activities, e.g., Alan Walker’s songs with me at the piano, and of course Mozart: A Journey. And Chrysanthi and Weezie in the latest Follies, dancing gracefully with their walkers. . . . At the luncheon, after the speeches, Becky, Brent, and other managers introduced staff who had been here fifteen years—e.g., Sherry Buckman—and read the names of the 85 (!) founders still alive.

Sept. 9, 2006

Riparius

Back for Arthur Perryman’s wedding on the top of the mountain Art bought, the one with the Morrells’ shed. Beautiful weather all day until late afternoon when it poured rain. Nice to see Mr. Smith again, who works on a construction job at Donnemora Prison, a five-story hospital. And Paul Little, retired biology teacher in North Creek. Spoke with him about evolution vs. creationism. He is religious and believes, up to a point, in creationism but certainly not that God did it all in six days. Long talk with Hans, Art’s former brother-in-law, now remarried and in a new job but still living in Wevertown. And of course nice to see Ann and Eileen and Michael and Ann’s husband again. Good service, very Jesus oriented but at least the minister did not read St. Paul’s comments urging women to be subservient. Afterwards we drove around the Antler Lake properties with vivid memories of Carl and Ora Sibler when they owned the entire property. Then to Bedford, south of Wells, to Arthur’s home by the Sacandaga River, for lots and lots of food. The fiancée’s father is a commercial fisherman. She, Megan Cash, is a senior at college, working now at Adirondack Community College. Art Perry-man did not look well. I think that he disapproves of the bride’s father. He spoke forcefully about the odds against success, 50% divorce, and of course hoped that these two would “make it.” . . . Back home, Chrysanthi and I fertilized all the fruit trees, plus Leander’s balsam, with stakes. And again I fixed the lock on the front door so that it would catch. . . . The Greek in the bibliography for volume 2 came back again, with new errors introduced by this incompetent typesetter, so intent now on fixing each χ that he typed as κ—for example making Πέτρος Χάρης into Πέτρος Κάρης. So I spent another two or three hours going over everything once again. . . . Am reading Brenda Marder’s novel, “The Greek Dream,” about diplomatic derring-do in Greece and Bulgaria. It’s not bad, really.

September 13, 2006

Council today went well. Thanks to Jim Sheridan’s eloquent presentation against smoking, Council agreed to a complete ban everywhere, including apartments, although current residents are grandfathered to the status quo.

September 22, 2006

Heard today from Roddy Beaton that he is planning a fancy “book launch” for me in the Great Hall at King’s for October 2007. And heard from Dimitri Gounelas that the faculty at the University of Thessaloniki has approved me for an honorary degree. My oh my!

September 27, 2006

Los Angeles

Demetrios Liappas drove me to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication to hear Brady Kiesling and two other diplomats who, like him, resigned over the forthcoming invasion of Iraq speak about anti-Americanism. What good fortune to be in LA just when he did this! I’d read most of his book by this time. It’s amazing what a full life he had during his twenty years at the State Department. The other speaker, a woman, was even more impressive. She is now a peace activist, arrested for protesting at Congress, the White House, etc. They’re all convinced that the current administration’s policies are totally counter-productive. Brady spoke well, as always, and signed my book graciously. I hope to see him when we’re in Greece next spring. . . . In the evening, I did the first of my presentations at Loyola Mary-mount: a poetry reading—Cavafy, Ritsos, Seferis, Elytis, Anagnostakis, Karyotakis, Harkianakis, featuring of course “The Moonlight Sonata.” All this went very well indeed; the audience was fully attentive throughout. Lots of interesting people, including a man in whose arms Eva Palmer Sikelianou died at Delphi in the midst of a performance, another man who does Greek theater here, and, afterwards at Jerry’s delicatessen eating the best pastrami sandwich imaginable, a lady who raises money for Loyola Marymount and knows all the Greek millionaires in the vicinity, most of whom give nothing.

September 28, 2006

Demetrios drove me down to center city to see the new concert hall and theater and opera complex. Lovely. Then Little Tokyo, Chinatown, the old center city. As in Philadelphia, redeveloped offices have been accompanied by apartment houses, which makes all the difference. Lunch on chopped chicken liver in a deli, very decadent. In the evening I gave my “Kazantzakis’s Religious Vision” talk. Over 100 people. Very good questions after. Father John, dean of the Cathedral, was there with his class in Orthodox theology. He’s the one that showed John Rassias and me around the cathedral when we were here for the archbishop’s commission. I expected that he would ask a question or make a comment but he didn’t. Hamburgers with Demetrios and Katherine afterwards.

September 29, 2006

Demetrios took me on another tour, this time to Venice, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, and finally to Loyola Marymount University. Lunch in a fish restaurant in Venice, the best swordfish I’ve ever eaten. I left my MasterCard there, discovered when I rented a car later, but they kept it and we retrieved it. Phew! Walked to Venice beach and watched people surfing. I’m glad I don’t live in this city. Everything is too far from everything else. Car necessary at all times. Traffic. But beautiful beaches. Sunshine. Also fog. In the evening, supper with Demetrios, Katherine, and the teacher of Greek language here, Christina, and her husband, who turned out to be very interesting because he’s an agriculturalist raising tomatoes commercially. We talked about the Farm School. He says that agriculture in Greece will be essentially dead in 10 or 20 years except for huge, mechanized farms. No hope for the Farm School to continue as it is, except perhaps if it specializes in some niche market. What’s really needed in Greece is marketing, not production. I hope that he will visit the School when he’s next in Greece.

September 30, 2006

San Diego

Long drive to San Diego on the ugly freeways. But no traffic, thankfully. Met Steve Stephanou, son of Papastephanou. He gave me an offprint from Nea Estia about his father and Kazantzakis and showed me that in some photos of Kazantzakis as a schoolboy the boy next to him is Papastephanou. Everyone very gracious and pleasant. Full lunch in USC Faculty Club, then something about the $3,000,000 they’ve raised for three academic chairs: in ancient Greek history, Byzantine history, and modern Greek history. I predicted great difficulty in filling them, especially the modern Greek one, and also warned about universities (e.g., Harvard) accepting money for chairs and then not filling the position. Lecture went well, with people asking good questions and coming up afterwards, as usual, to say that they’d never realized that Kazantzakis’s novels are really the filling out of a full philosophical system. And why should they? Actually, Kazantzakis would probably have been a better artist if he hadn’t done this. . . . Long drive home. I went off the Freeway several times to try to see more of the ocean and of villages. Back by 7:30 p.m.

October 1, 2006

Taxi to Westwood to attend Quaker Meeting, only to find no Meeting there any longer. I was stupidly using information photocopied probably ten years ago. So I ended up with a $60 taxi fare and nothing else. Returned to Venice Beach. More surfers but no “entertainment.” Sumptuous Sunday buffet in the hotel. Read the New York Times. Finally Demetrios came at 4:45 for my final performance, “Inventing Greece,” preceded by dinner at the university. This went well. Most importantly, I met a former president of AHEPA, who seemed interested when I told him about building a Kendal in Greece. Signed lots of copies of our Anthology and also of Life in the Tomb. Surprise: Mache Karanika showed up; she’s now teaching at the University of California, Irvine.

October 3, 2006

Hanover

Dan Connolly here. We updated our powers of attorney. We should be OK regarding estate taxes because we’re “too poor” with only $4 million in assets!

October 4, 2006

Played Satie with Stan Udy, a very good sight reader.

October 8, 2006

Julien O’Reilly here for Pendle Hill. Although I feel quite distant now from PH, I gave her $500 for the Youth Program, which I have always enjoyed supporting.

October 9, 2006

Lunch with “Pong,” the Thai student who graduated from Patana. He reassured me that life now goes on in Bangkok, despite the coup d’état, as though nothing had happened.

October 10, 2006

Eight-hand piano at 8:15 a.m.; Farm School conference call at 9:00 a.m.; Professors’ Colloquium at 10:00 a.m. A busy morning.

October 11, 2006

Council, spent almost entirely on smoking again. I managed to emerge with a minute to go now to board and administration. It was a circus but at least people talked. At one point I suggested voting instead of sense of the meeting; the result was 8 to 7. “You see what happens when you vote!” I declared, which pleased the Quakers in the audience. . . . Afterwards, leisurely lunch at the Inn with Tom Corindia. He’ll retire in June, very early. The two adopted children and especially the girl are still causing Nancy and him great pain. We are so fortunate by comparison. . . . Tom Norton, clarinetist, came for the first instrumental rehearsal of Trimble. Not bad. Next, the soprano.

October 12, 2006

After four years, Hélène finally asked me to speak about Quakerism to the waiting list people, and gave me seven minutes. People seemed especially to like my description of “subtraction.”

October 14, 2006

Nice lunch with Mary and John Lincoln at Isabel’s in East Thetford, before they drive off to Florida. John is walking with a cane and struggling to enunciate clearly. I actually understood almost everything he said.

October 15, 2006

Tom Wilson officiated beautifully at our first Interfaith Gathering, recalling three persons who had changed his life. . . . Yesterday, in the Cary Room, Joan Snell, Bill Clendenning, Stan Udy, and I played the eight-hand version of Beethoven’s joyous Septet Opus 20. But Bill told everyone that Beethoven wished he had burned it.

October 17, 2006

Quaker 8s here, a very good session based on George Herbert’s marvelous poem “Love,” one of my favorites.

October 18, 2006

E-mail to the children:

We spent a pleasant and productive day at the farm yesterday, luckily without rain. Don Fones + wife and daughter worked from 7:30 a.m. until about 3:30 p.m. and did the following:

—cut Leander’s trees as indicated. Trunks are sawn into 4-foot lengths (mostly) and left in place but will be easily moved next summer.

—cut all branches overhanging the guest house

—cut ⅓ of the cherry tree just in back of the small barn, and overhanging the roof of the barn. The log is on the ground still, left there because it is the best possible firewood. We can cut it up this summer.

—trimmed all branches overhanging the pond, clear around. These are small and have been left on the ground because the ground was still too wet for him to bring his truck down or the chipper. We can easily bring them to the pile.

—trimmed various trees hitting electric or telephone wires

I think that’s it. I paid Dan $1000 from the Terpni Partnership fund. His regular full-day price is $1200; he gave us a discount!

And, by the way, just before we arrived, Earl Millington apparently accosted Dan, wondering why he was felling trees on our property. Dan explained. And we waved to Earl as we arrived.

I pruned the apple tree with Chrysanthi’s help.

The new electric line is up, wires and all, at least in our sector, but they’re still cutting trees at the edge of the woods to give a sufficient open space to the left of the wires. Directly where our crossing was they now have a large parking lot paved in gravel. At least we won’t need to mow there any more, for a long time.

Leander’s house looks fine. Even your flowers in the half barrel are still alive, despite some cold mornings.

Alec’s house is fine, although we found some very clean shavings from the ceiling in the middle of your living room—your friendly ants at work.

Daphne’s house is also fine. Water is turned off, I’m glad to report.

On the way back to Hanover, we had supper in the Farmer’s Diner in Quechee because—imagine!—Chrysanthi won a raffle giving us $25.00 worth of free food there. Our bill came to $25.05, so I paid 5 cents plus tip. They specialize in produce from local farmers, especially organic ones.

October 26, 2006

To NYC

What a day! 8:30 a.m. with “Group of 6” in Becky’s office encouraging her to adopt non-hierarchical management styles. I printed up my essay on Quaker management. Bill Pietsch has joined us (Dan Dandon died) and is encouraging us to have an ombudsman. Becky doesn’t want to move fast on any of this. She in effect usurped the meeting by talking non-stop for an hour, everyone else silent (except me). Pam Mayer brave because her husband, David, died two days ago. . . . Then drove fast to Springfield, arrived on time in NYC and walked immediately to 26th Street stopping momentarily to buy a nice fedora in the garment district. 4:30 p.m.: Secondary School Committee with Annie, Gail, Bill McGrew. We prioritized some of the School’s needs, emphasizing recruitment (as always). Then, still with our valise, to Metsovo Restaurant on West 90th for trustees’ dinner, mediocre and over-priced as usual. But I sat next to Bill and was able to tell him about Eleni and Angelos Tsakopoulos. He hopes now to visit Eleni in San Francisco. Phil Foote has agreed to add Dimitri Gondicas to the Secondary Committee, at my request. Gail is going off. Dimitri agreed, happily.

October 27, 2006

Post-Secondary Committee. Lots of problems at Perrotis but we keep hoping. Then to Daphne’s. Christina always starts by having me squeeze her hand. Andrew is speaking very well now. Peter ebullient as usual. I had Daphne sign the new power of attorney forms. . . . Then to Phil Foote’s cocktail party. Long talk with Mike Keeley.

October 28, 2006

Full Farm School board. The financials look very promising owing to income from land. But no progress on the Kendal project. Relaxing trip home on AMTRAK. Very good Chinese supper in Greenfield.

November 4, 2006

Andrea Useem arrived with her ten-month-old son Moses, after calling me from Dulles airport to say that her plane was delayed. Last spring we had to cancel her talk because all flights were canceled. Better luck this time. We went to the Tafts’ at 5:00; their grand-daughter had done a thesis on Islam. Supper with Fred Berthold, Dick and Jeanne Nolte, Kevin Reinhart (her Dartmouth instructor in Islam). Ron Greene, her thesis adviser came also, with Mary Jean. I introduced her to a large crowd. She in effect told her personal story of religious awakening, dissatisfaction with the empty rituals of the Episcopal Church of her upbringing, meeting Muslims in Kenya, Egypt, Zimbabwe, and finally converting as a sort of leap of faith above and beyond rationality. (Yes, she had read Kierkegaard!) Then, interestingly, about marriage: the anguish of a failed love affair in Kenya with another Dartmouth student; then, in Cambridge, the more-or-less arranged marriage to Justin, whom she hardly knew. A better way, she affirmed. Finally, a little about progressive Islam, which hardly exists. She no longer wears the head scarf. She would like to worship in the same section of the mosque as the men do, and so forth. It was all very genuine and honest, and much appreciated, I believe. The real question is: Will it last? Will the marriage last? Will her allegiance last? She is very intelligent and thus is bound to keep on asking questions.

November 12, 2006

Harpsichord concert. I played Mozart’s “Little Gig.” Less fright than in previous performances, but again I made some mistakes and therefore was too frightened to do the repeat at a faster temp, as I had planned. But it was OK—just. Dinner afterwards with Phil and Pat Porter and a guest of theirs, a professor of English who had gone from school to school setting up humanities programs.

November 13, 2006

Colorado College

Flying in, one sees flat brown land, like wasteland, desert, yet sprinkled with houses, and then to the west, rising suddenly, the Rocky Mountains, with Pike’s Peak the highest, 14,110 feet. The town has 500,000, including 30,000 soldiers plus the Air Force Academy. Colorado College has 1900 students. Owen Cramer met me at the airport. Later, dinner at his house with his wife Becky and English teacher Lisa Hughes, who is studying Modern Greek from Greek Today. Very pleasant, knowledgeable people.

November 14, 2006

Huge breakfast at the Inn. Then coffee with Owen and the English teachers whose poetry class I was about to lead. I did the four versions of “31 B.C. in Alexandria” and Harkianakis’s “A Lemon Tree,” talking about whether or not to use rhyme when translating rhymed poetry, and citing Walter Arndt. Students read the translations nicely and asked good questions. Pleasant to be in a class again, especially since I don’t need to give grades. In the afternoon I practiced well for several hours in the Music Building on a lovely Steinway grand. Trimble, Warlock. Alan Walker’s songs, and the Messiah organ part, all for Kendal performance in December. Supper then with David Mason (English, a poet who lived in Greece, knows Katerina Angelaki-Rooke), and Marcia Dobson (Classics). Then my poetry reading: “MG poets and ancient Greek themes.” Good audience, most of the students from this morning’s class, plus others.

November 15, 2006

Large breakfast. Another guest is a Burmese political refugee from the military regime there, here to lecture on that situation. We talked for half an hour at breakfast. He thinks of Spain under Franco and hopes that when the Burmese leader dies there will be a restoration of democracy. The innkeeper told about this house, originally a single family dwelling—the owner ran a gold mine. Lots of tourism here; lots of military, which helps everyone commercially. Still lots of mining in Colorado, including gold. Vail, where Daphne goes, is “high end” in his words. Of course! Spoke with Chrysanthi, now at Daphne’s. She had a good trip yesterday by bus and train. Friday morning she goes to Andrew’s grandparents’ day at St. David’s School. . . . Two students particularly liked Ritsos’s poem “Stones” and are going to use it in their class. . . . Practiced in the morning. Then gave my talk on the γλωσσικό ζήτημα at noon with lunch (γύρος) again, some students but mostly teachers. Informal; good discussion. Then more practice. E-mail: they want me now to come to Germany in July to give a paper on Kazantzakis and Germany. I thought to speak on his letters from Berlin. . . . Supper with Owen Cramer, very pleasantly. We are compatible and always have lots to talk about. He took me then to a lecture by Carl Rubino, professor of classics at Hamilton College, on “Reflections on Science, Ethics, and Humanities.” Very interesting and well delivered. He started with Plato and the conception that the truest essence of life is stable, ordered, unchanging. Achilles seeks this and can find it only in death. (I’d add Jesus.) We all have this passion for order and fear disruptions to it. But the conception is a fundamental mistake. Read Aristotle, Goethe, Einstein. Motion governs all, motion, not stability, even though some of Newton’s regularities are true. But they aren’t the whole story. We speak of following God’s will. But God’s will must be multiple; thus we always need to choose—that constitutes our ethical freedom. Which one of God’s wills is right for us this time?

November 16, 2006

Owen took me to the Garden of the Gods, an amazing group of enormous sandstone megaliths with Pike’s Peak in the distance. They were originally the sand beach of the inland sea here hundreds of millions of years ago. The plain now at 6000 feet descended, leaving these mounds thrusting their jagged shapes above. He says that there are photos on the Colorado College website. Then more practice. I’m learning the Alan Walker pieces very slowly, alas. Then my Kazantzakis and demotic talk, again over lunch, to a small group, now mostly teachers. Then a phone call from Becky and Betsy, our usual fortnightly meeting. Then more practice. Then at 5:00 David Mason picked me up to have supper with the poet Dianna Thiel (pronounced Teal), whose husband is Greek and who knows Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. She read beautifully: poems full of humor, pathos, serenity, wisdom, and all totally comprehensible. Lots of students in the audience, almost all female. In a dormitory complex with a full café serving pizza, coffee, etc. Again evidence of the great wealth of this college. I’d like to see Thiel read at Dartmouth, maybe at Kendal also.

November 22, 2006

Washington

A real treat this morning. Drove to Kennedy Center with Deanna in the morning and was allowed to view the rehearsal, the only one in the hall. They did Rhapsody in Blue with a brilliant pianist, Kevin Cole, a specialist in Gershwin. Very jazzy and scintillating. Such marvelous music, played with verve and gusto. The conductor stopped the orchestra mostly to refine difficult entrances at the end of various pianistic cadenzas. Next they did Gershwin songs with a harmonica soloist who gyrated his pelvis a bit like Elvis Presley. I left. Taxi to 7th Street NW to the District Chop House to meet Daniel Carson for lunch. He is now retired but he says it’s a mixed blessing because he had a girlfriend (Platonic so far) at work who is a stimulating conversationalist, which his wife is not. So he now makes excuses to get to town (to the library, supposedly) in order to see this woman, who of course is married, unhappily. What happens next, if anything, is the question. He is writing yet another novel and says, as usual, that this is the very best. I’ve been urging him to publish with a vanity press as a start. But he resists this. He wants me to send him my Kazantzakis volume 2; says he read volume 1. And Leander told me he gave my “On Retiring to Kendal” pamphlet (imagine!) to one of his students, who greatly appreciated it. What a surprise! . . . I practiced the Alan Walker songs, thank goodness, on Leander’s very bright Steinway in the new studio. Take-out Chinese for supper and then we all watched a DVD of Nannie McFee, a take-off Mary Poppins starring Emma Thompson as the magical nanny, so imaginatively done, and with marvelous child actors.

November 23, 2006, Thanksgiving

More practice. The trick, really, is to memorize, which I do very slowly and very badly. Daphne, Greg, and the three children arrived around noontime. We had our turkey feast at 4:00 p.m. Delicious, with all eleven of us around the enlarged dining room table. Afterwards to Daphne’s hotel where the children all went swimming in the indoor pool. Greg is still determined to leave Goldman Sachs after he receives his 2006 bonus—very soon. They seem to want to offer him a new job coordinating expansion in the developing nations of Eastern Europe, and probably based in London. But he’ll most likely say No, because such a job would require constant travel. Also, he’s thinking now of abandoning finance entirely to do “something else.” But what? He’d like to gain some involvement with the Nature Conservancy, for example. They are pretty sure about moving to Santa Barbara but will keep the South Salem house for the summers. They’re already investigating schools for the children. . . . We returned to 9 Lopa Court and enjoyed, once again, “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.” Then talked until 12:30 a.m. after the children went to bed.

November 24, 2006

Some more early-morning practice. Leander likes two of the three Walker songs but wishes that Alan had known more about proper notation. All of us took the Metro to Washington and we said loving goodbyes as the others got off at Metro Center to spend a few hours on the mall as sightseers. On our AMTRAK trip back I continued translating from Greek to English my “Αντίθεση και Σύνθεση στον «Φιλοκτήτης» του Ρίτσου.”

November 25, 2006

Performed three Alan Walker songs with Susan Cancio-Bello, soprano, in the Gathering Room to start the memorial service for Alan, whose heart gave out last week. Afterwards, Quaker-style, all the children spoke, including Douglas, whom I had last seen in 1972 in Kingsmead Close. I wasn’t nervous playing, and all went well. At one point Susan skipped a measure, but I easily caught up with her and no one knew the difference. The extensive practice in Colorado helped immensely.

November 26, 2006

Supper at kendal with “Pong” and another Thai student, Vorapat, a senior, whose uncle was the former Thai ambassador to the US and is now foreign minister in the caretaker government. This lad also went to prep school in the US. “Pong” will take maple syrup and some T-shirts to Alec when he returns for the Christmas holiday.

December 2, 2006

Eight-hand rehearsal of Beethoven at 8:15 followed by Joan and me rehearsing Warlock. Then at 10:00 Susan, Tom, and Dick arrived to rehearse Trimble, which went very well.

Sunday, December 3, 2006

The big day! Susan arrived at 2:00 with her electronic keyboard. Everyone else at 2:30, and we rehearsed a little. Concert at 3:00. Large audience. Trimble first. We got through to the end without stopping but often were out of time with each other, especially Dick, who cannot count. At one point Susan hesitated, waiting for a chord that didn’t come. But none of this was apparent to the audience. As with the Walker songs, I was not nervous. Warlock went well. The two Joans played a jazzy Pavane by Morton Gould for two pianos. We eneded with Beethoven’s Septet Opus 20 for piano eight hands, played very well. Done!

December 4, 2006

Jason Lewallen, an MA student in Comparative Literature, wants me to help him with Joyce’s Portrait. We had a pleasant lunch and I started him off with relevant bibliography. No one is teaching Joyce!

December 6, 2006

Did the New Orleans oral exams this time via video conferencing, which worked very well from them to us but not so well from us to them—my voice and image “crackled” occasionally. Otmar says it’s because they use PC instead of Mac. This sort of thing can be done anywhere in the world.

December 7, 2006

Attended Hugh Taft’s Financial Advisory Committee. They decided to recommend to the board, via the council, that fee increases be limited to the average increase in expenses over a five-year period. But at the board’s finance committee in the afternoon this was rejected. So we’ll have no presentation of it in council, alas.

December 18, 2006

My Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit arrived today, looking very nice indeed. . . . At Kendal Board I was disheartened by the corporation’s marketing chief, who spoke of fancier apartments, fancier amenities, etc., etc., totally materialistic, and not a word about our original hope and dream for a caring community and for simplicity. I voiced my concern, emotionally, and of course everyone asserted that they really did believe in all this.

December 25, 2006

Christmas at Daphne’s in South Salem. Multiple gifts for the children; A few for the adults. I gave Greg a book on the history of the Nature Conservancy since it seems now, since he has retired from Goldman Sachs, that he’d like to become involved in environmental work. I received, of course, chocolates. Greg feels greatly relieved. No more tight stomach owing to trades of millions of dollars. He’ll stay on at Goldman until May as a sort of consultant. Then, who knows . . .? Daphne is thinking of course of health insurance, schools for the children if they move to Santa Barbara, etc. I played ping pong with Christina, who is quite good. Also with Andrew and Chrysanthi. I can still play, it seems. Lots of good food, of course, including the traditional roast beef dinner on Christmas day. Alec telephoned from Peckalongan, where everyone gathered for Edwin’s wedding yesterday. . . . I wrote most of my future lecture on Kazantzakis in Berlin, working from the 1922 and 1923 letters. But the latter are translated only through August, so I’ve got to do the rest now. . . . Another frighful letter from Patrokos Stavrou, who calls me a Brutus and demands I return all the notebooks that Mrs. Kazantzakis allowed me to photocopy in Geneva. I wrote him a conciliatory letter. . . . I signed a contract with Club Quarters, a hotel used by NYU, for our March 3rd event, promising speakers that they’d be reimbursed 50% of the cost. This will derive from my pocket unless Mrs. Myrivilis comes through with support from the Foundation for Hellenic Culture. . . . Volume 1 of Kazantzakis, Politics of the Spirit arrived in the new paperback edition, looking very nice. Kastaniotis’s volume with my eight Rethymno lecturs is almost ready. And a publisher is bringing out all my writings on Ritsos. How nice!

Δρ Πάτροκλος Σταύρου

Εκδόσεις Καζαντζάκη Χαριλάου Τρικούπη 116 114 72

Αθήνα

Αγαπητέ Πάτροκλε,

Συγγνώμη που άργησα να γράψω. Ταξίδευα επί τριών βδομάδων και ήταν δύσκολο να φροντίσω για την αλληλογραφία μου επειδή ήμουν μακρία από το σπίτι.

Τί να σου πω; Πρώτ› απ› όλα, και πιο σπουδαίο: Παρ› όλο που λες για μένα, συνεχίζω εγώ να σε εκτιμώ και να σε ευχαριστώ για την εκτενή προσφορά σου σε καθετί που συσχετίζεται με τα γραψίματα και τη σταδιοδρομία του Καζαντζάκη.

Όσο για μένα, η γυναίκα μου επιμένει πως είμαι παραπολύ αφελής και ίσως έχει δίκαιο. Έτσι, όταν μου ήρθε η πρόταση να οργανώσω κάτι στην Αμερική στα 2007 για να γιορταστούν τα πενήντα χρόνια μετά το θάνατο του Καζαντζάκη, ούτε καν σκέφτηκα «Πάω με τον αντίπαλο του κυρίου Σταύρου και γι› αυτό τον πληγώνω» ή «Έπρπεπε να υποστηρίξω τον κύριο Σταύρο και νά τους πω Όχι»· μονάχα σκέφτηκα «Τι ωραίο να πάω με τον Καζαντζάκη !» και «Ποιοί επιστήμονες να προσκαλέσω να τον τιμήσουν αποτελεσματικά;» Αν ήταν σφάλμα αυτό, να με συμπαθάς !

Το συνέδριο μας θα είναι υπό την αιγίδα του Πανεπιστημίου της Νέας Υόρκης και (ελπίζω) του Ιδρύματος του Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού (θα αποφασίσει σε δεκαπέντε μέρες). Το πανεπιστήμιο μάς δίνει την αίθουσα, μερικούς καφέδες, το μεσημερινό και το δείπνο τζάμπα· άλλο κονδύλι δεν έχουμε (εκτός αν αποφασίσει να δώσει κάτι το Ίδρυμα Ελληνικού Πολιτισμού). Δε δίνουν δραχμή οι λεγόμενοι Φίλοι του Καζαντζάκη. Ας προσθέσω ότι εγώ ποτέ μου δεν έδωσα δραχμή σ› αυτούς και τώρα τελευταία όταν με ζήτησαν να γίνω μέλος της εκτελεστικής τους επιτροπής, αρνήθηκα.

Οι δυσκολίες που είχες και έχεις—η κλοπή, η δίκη—είναι φρικτές, θλιβερές. Αλλά εγώ, ως επισήμονας, όχι πολιτικός ή νομικός, αισθάνομαι κάπως μακριά από αυτές. Το ενδιαφέρο μου και (ελπίζω) η αρμοδιότητά μου βρίσκονται μονάχα σε κείμενα. Γι› αυτό συνεχίζω στα λίγα χρόνια που μου παραμένουν (πλησιάζω τα 77 χρονώ) να προσπαθήσω να συνεισφέρω κατιτί στην καλύτερη κατανόηση των έργων του Καζαντζάκη. Επειδή ο κύριος σκοπός της δικής σου ζωής είναι ο ίδιος, είναι κρίμα να τα βάλουμε. Πάντως, καθώς δήλωσα νωρίτερα, συνεχίζω να σε εκτιμήσω και να σε δω ως φίλος και συνάδελφος.

Στο πρώτο σου γράμμα δεν μίλησες για την επιστροφή των φωτοτυπιών που έλαβα από την κυρία Καζαντζάκη. Πρόκειται για διάφορα τετράδια. Θα σου τα στείλω ευχαρίστως. Επειδή θα χρειαστούν ένα πολύ μεγάλο δέμα, θα πρέπει πρώτα να ρωτήσω στο ταχυδρομίο πώς να πάνε πιο ασφαλισμένα.

Τα καλά νέα είναι ότι το βιβλίο μου Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, volume 2 τυπώθηκε και θα εκδοθεί το Φλεβάρη. Μόλις πάρω αντίτυπα, θα σου στείλω ένα. Και ο πρώτος τόμος του ίδιου βιβλίου θα ξαναβγεί χαρτόδετος.

Σου εύχομαι να είναι το δικό σου 2007 ειρηνικό, υγιές και καρποφόρο ! Και να πάψουν τα βάσανα.

December 28, 2006

Riparius

Arrived at 10:30 a.m. Dan Gilmore already there. He, Leander, even Nicholas went to a patch of forest on the logging road going to the balsam stand and marked trees for stand improvement. Nice to be with Dan as he did this, since he explained his reasoning in each case. We want to enhance this tree, but this other one is competing with its crown, so let’s mark this other one for girdling or felling. A break for lunch. Then returned and did some more, perhaps an acre all told. After Dan left we exchanged Christmas presents and all went to Queensbury to share supper. A lovely day. Back to Kendal around 9:30 p.m. Yesterday I convinced Becky and Brent to allow Barbara Taylor to sublet to a second tenant without paying the $800 surplus. Good. Now I’m trying to help Mary Lou Burgess to stay here, following Bob’s death. All this comes because of my presidency of the Residents’ Council.

December 31, 2006

To Lori’s in Andover to visit Alice and Peter. Alice likes the Satie “La Belle Excentrique” that we are preparing for Kinhaven. They’ll be traveling to South Africa in the summer to see Clive’s half-brother. . . . Then we continued on to Cambridge to the A.R.T. to see its production of The Importance of Being Earnest, done entirely by two male actors playing all the roles most amusingly. Then to the Rassiases’ for snails, lamb, champagne. Long, good talk with Bill Miles, and with John.

2007

Hanover

January 1–March 14

Feb. 3, Cambridge

Feb. 22–24, New York, Club Quarters

Feb. 25, Cambridge

March 1, Yale

March 2–3, New York

Greece

March 15–May 31

March 14–15, to Athens, Hotel Achilleas, 210 523-3197

March 17, to Rethymno, Hotel Jo-Ann Palace, 2831 024 241

March 29, to Thessaloniki, Farm School

April 13–15, Athens, Hotel Achilleas

May 2, Iraklio all day

May 4–5, Athens, Hotel President, Kifisias, 43 210 698.9000

May 11, Χανιά

May 13, Φαιστός, Βόρι

May 16, Thessaloniki

May 18, Iraklio, Hotel Astoria

May 23, Iraklio, Hotel Atrion, 2810 246000

May 30, Athens, Hotel Sofitel

June 1, Frankfort–Boston–Hanover

Riparius

June 5–September 10

June 7–12, Weston, Vermont, Kinhaven

July 28–29, Würzburg, Hotel Franziskaner

July 30, Albany Marriott, 189 Wolf Road, 518 458-8444

Hanover

September 11–December 31

Sept. 23, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Oct. 18–19, New Haven, Yale, MGSA

Oct. 21–26, London, Penn Club; Canterbury; Walmer

Oct. 27–31, Farm School

Nov. 1–3, Athens, Farm School apartment

Nov. 4–7, Farm School

Nov. 20–23, Maryland, Leander’s

Dec. 3, Atlanta, Georgia

Dec. 7–9, Pendle Hill; Lumberton Leas

Dec. 10, Amherst

Dec. 22, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Dec. 23–26, South Salem, Daphne’s

Dec. 28, Riparius

January 1, 2007

Kendal lunch with Weezie and Bill Pietsch and others.

January 6, 2007

Beautiful “medieval fest” at Colby-Sawyer organized by Susan, with Pat Porter directing the choir. Madrigals, acrobatics, costumes, and a delicious dinner.

January 11, 2007

Barbara Gilbert and I met with Jay Pierson, board chairman, about the Mary Lou Burgess case. We, and many others, are hoping that Kendal can bend its rules a little to allow her to stay. Also spoke to John Diffey about this, to Brent, Becky, Jack Hunter.

January 15, 2007

Visited Jeff Horrell, Dartmouth’s head librarian, to enlist his aid in securing my study, since I’ve been warned that I might need to vacate. This would be a disaster for me. He seemed to understand.

January 18, 2007

Memorial for Henry Terrie at Sanborn. Nice to see some of my former colleagues. I said nothing. Others spoke at length (of course).

January 21, 2007

Ralph Mayer gave his Interfaith Gathering, all music that gave him a “high” in the past. All this at my urging. The music was nice, but as a service this was not very appropriate.

January 22, 2007

Kendal board. I presented the Council’s and Residents’ Finance Committee’s recommendation for a 3.5% increase. Gordon McCouch, naturally, spoke against. The board voted for 4%. Regarding smoking, they approved Council’s slightly revised program, but one of the trustees accused me, and Council, of being “mean spirited” in not allowing future residents to smoke. Steve Marian saved the day by noting that the hospital is about to adopt a similarly restrictive policy.

January 27, 2007

Margie Patterson’s piano recital, again my responsibility. It was terrible: Schumann’s “Carnival” excruciatingly long and dead. Ravel’s “Valses Sentimental” a bit better. Bach’s Toccata full of memory lapses, no spirit. At least it’s over. Never again. Jerry McLane on accordion in the afternoon at least had spirit and accuracy.

January 28, 2007

To the Pastoral Care group at Meeting to ask for $5000 for Mary Lou Burgess. Patricia Higgins and Craig Putnam offered objections. I couldn’t believe this. If our own Quakers are so non-charitable, what can we expect from others?

February 2, 2007

“Pong” and a Thai student at Deerfield came for supper here. These upper-class Thais are so suave, in the best sense. Too bad that Alec can’t learn the Thai language. Alec and family will visit us in Greece in April.

February 3, 2007

Racine’s Britannicus at the A.R.T. Extraordinary acting in a classic play about the arrogance of empire, directed against George W. Bush. A wonderful adventure for the audience.

February 8, 2007

Feeling depressed because I’d done something I thought was helpful and good for Mary Lou Burgess and it backfired. She’s disturbed because some Quaker telephoned her asking how much money she had. But then this nice letter arrived out of the blue:

Subject: Greetings from a former student

Dear Professor Bien,

My name is Scott Nancarrow, and I was a student of yours in your seminar “Odysseus Through the Centuries” during the spring of 2001 at Princeton University. I’m writing because recently I’ve been reminded of several of the books we read and I’ve had several fond recollections of the seminar. When I took the class, I was a freshman and had very little stability in my life; I had moved far away from home for the first time, was sick for nearly the entire semester with mono and then a cold that was eventually diagnosed as pneumonia. So, at the time, I don’t think I was fully able to appreciate how wonderful the literature was and how well the discussions illuminated the reading. However, now that I’ve been out of academia for nearly three years, I often find myself thinking about Ulysses, the Odyssey, a beautiful poem you gave us called “The Lemon Tree,” and the selections from Kazantzakis we read.

I’m not writing to ask for a recommendation or some kind of favor. I just wanted to express my grossly belated gratitude for the wonderful seminar you taught. It was one of the highlights of my college experience and I feel very fortunate that I had a chance to see a glimmer of beautiful literature. Thank you very much for being an excellent professor and for unflaggingly conveying your passionate enthusiasm for the material to a seminar full of freshmen who didn’t give you nearly as much positive feedback as we should have.

I hope you’re doing well and that your work has been rewarding. I also hope that in your work you still have time to teach undergrads. Thank you again!

Sincerely,

Scott Nancarrow

Saturday, February 10, 2007

A nice day in Boston. We drove in, lunched pleasantly at the Parker House, and then saw the powerful play Doubt starring Cherry Jones. Really about a legalistic mind versus a compassionate mind. But at the very end the legalistic mind, for the first time, has “doubts.” And the curtain falls. . . . Prairie Home Companion on the way home, always amusing. Nice Chinese dinner. And return to Kendal in time for a marvelous violin & piano recital by two Japanese students: Brahms, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz (piano solo), and lots of virtuosity. But the violinist was so musical. A great pleasure.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

I ministered on legalism vs. compassion, speaking about the play Doubt but thinking of course about the situation at Kendal with Mary Lou Burgess. The Business Meeting agreed to send a good letter to the Kendal board but not to pledge money to help Mary Lou. I called the argumentation “sophistic” when speaking afterwards to Jack Hunter, who is on the committee that will make a final recommendation.

February 14, 2007

A long, intense Council meeting chiefly because of Hugh Taft’s persuasive rebuttal of Jay Piersoll’s reasons for the 4% increase. Gordon McCouch of course got very disturbed at what we were doing, and said so. I concluded by declaring that all this forthrightness had been “healthy.”

February 16, 2007

I impersonated Albert Schweitzer in another of Joan Williams’s “Who Am I?” evenings, playing part of a Bach fugue, first, on the organ. Afterwards, Pat Porter, our trained organist, complimented me for holding all the sustained notes, which pianists usually don’t do, since they can rely on the sustaining pedal.

February 17, 2007

Practiced Satie with Stan Udy. It’s very whacky. Alice and I will need to do it with lots of exaggeration. In the afternoon, Daphne, Greg, Christina, Andrew, and Peter, arrived like a cyclone blowing through our house, especially Peter. Christina has orthodontia permitting her to eat only mushy foods (like ice cream!) and liquids. They all went out in the snow, got soaked, and we put their clothes in the dryer before supper.

February 18, 2007

To Meeting to play piano for the hymn-singers, then back to Kendal for Stan Udy’s Interfaith Gathering, a lecture on sin! He quoted from Psalm 118: 8–9. This spoke to me, feeling as I do so pessimistic about the outcome of the Mary Lou Burgess case: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in princes.”

Here’s the letter I sent yesterday to the chairman of the Kendal board;

Dear Jay,

This letter concerns the case of Mary Lou Burgess. Although I don’t like to do this, I’m going to say, in this case, that I’m writing not only as a single resident of Kendal at Hanover but also as the current president of the Residents’ Council, and as chair of the Board of Overseers from 1989 to 1995, when the Board of Directors was in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and chair of the Board of Directors from 1995 to 1996. I was also very involved in the conceptualization of Kendal, in bringing the concept through the regulatory processes in State and Town, in specifying architectural needs, etc., etc.

I say all this, regretfully, simply to indicate the depth of my feeling that the Mary Lou Burgess situation is a perfect test case of whether or not the “values and standards” for Kendal that I helped write and establish at the start will be upheld. Among other things, we pride ourselves in claiming that no resident will ever be forced to leave Kendal owing to financial stringency. This proud statement is repeated in “New Beginnings,” the excellent DVD just distributed by the Kendal Corporation. I know that perhaps Mary Lou will not be considered a “resident” since she never paid the entrance fee. But note that Values and Standards, page 15, after repeating the claim that no resident will be forced to leave, states: “New residents who cannot afford the full fees may be admitted with assistance as well.” Furthermore, Values and Standards, page 4, under “Financial Design,” states that we aim “to make our communities affordable to the largest possible number of people.”

There is no question here of the value of this individual. She is loved and respected by a large group of her fellow residents, in part owing to the excellent care she provided when she worked here professionally as a caregiver. The question is whether strict financial criteria will win over broad humanitarian criteria. If they do, and she is therefore forced to leave, everything we claim about our values and standards, our charitableness, our “need to feel a sense of community” (Values and Standards, page 6) will be a mockery and the Board of Directors will rightfully be accused of valuing business considerations over all others. Let me add that, paradoxically, the perhaps “non-business” decision to welcome Mary Lou into full residency is likely to enhance the business side of our operation, because it will send a strong message out to the wider community of people considering application to Kendal that we really are what we say we are in the Kendal Corporation’s Mission Statement (Values and Standards, page 3)—namely, an organization meant “to lead a system of communities . . . for older persons, in accordance with the principles of the Religious Society of Friends.”

I repeat: This is a test case of whether we pay mere lip-service to such principles and to all the fine language in our various publications. Since you are the current chair of the Board of Directors, I am hoping that you will exercise leadership in assuring that Kendal’s professed mission, professed values, and professed standards are real.

February 19, 2007

I spoke on Quakerism at Kendal, joined by Margery Walker and Jim Sheridan. But Howard Mitchell brought up the subject of Mary Lou and Jim ruled him out of order. This soured the proceedings. At the end, Hélène complained to me bitterly because I had denied that peer review was in use (which of course it is not). Too bad.

February 22, 2007

NYC, Club Quarters

Met at 5:00 in the Yale Club with Scott Nancarrow, the student I’d had at Princeton. He was eager to do a Ph.D. in philosophy but got frightened after his favorite philosophy professor at Princeton was denied tenure. . . . Then to Sheila Baird’s for Farm School cocktails. Planned tomorrow’s meeting a bit with Annie, then back to the Yale Club for supper with Michael Groden, who knows a lot about copyright and might be able to help me if I have trouble publishing the Kazantzakis letters because of Stavrou. Canada, for example, limits copyright to 50 years, whereas in the USA it is 70 years.

February 27 2007

Secondary and Post-Secondary committees. I totally forgot that I’m also now on the Finance Committee, and missed it. At Post-Secondary we voted to ratify the agreement with the University of Wales Institute. George Koualizides took the Farm School to court for unfair dismissal and has won the case. Annie told me in confidence that David Lans-dale and Joann Ryding are leading candidates to replace Bill McGrew as president. Dinner at Kellari on 44th Street. John Borovidas sat his daughter Christina, a high school junior, down next to me because she is interested in Dartmouth. So I answered her questions and gave what advice I could about admissions.

February 24, 2007

Full board. The latest land arrangements might include some space for a Kendal. I’ve just about given up on Dr. Barich and AHEPA. Dimitri Gondicas, who’s on the land committee, said he’d be supportive.

February 26, 2007

Margo Johnson, head of the Gifts and Bequests Committee, called me to her apartment because she says my collection for Mary Lou Burgess should have gone through the committee and gotten its permission. So now, ex post facto. I’ve applied. We have collected over $16,000. . . . Yesterday, at A.R.T., a moving adaptation of Oliver Twist, very imaginatively directed and superbly acted. . . . Later: now over $21,000 for Mary Lou.

March 1, 2007

New Haven

Lectured at Yale, for George Syrimis, on Kazantzakis’s religious vision in The Last Temptation. Interesting conversation with a professor teaching Ottoman history about Muslim thinkers who are very much like Kazantzakis. I wish someone had written about this—not me. I told him, Θέλω να γλιτώσω από τον Καζαντζάκη. Nice dinner afterwards at a hotel in New Haven.

March 2, 2007

New York

Came down on AMTRAK. TO the Guggenheim Museum to see the very unusual exhibit on Spanish painters from El Greco to Picasso, arranged not chronologically but thematically and especially showing how influenced Picasso was by his Spanish predecessors. El Greco’s “Vision of St. John” is among the masterpieces included. . . . Then to Daphne’s. Andrew’s birthday party is this evening. . . . In the evening, to Astoria, invited by the Pan-Cretan Society to their club for a full dinner, and a very good one, too. Nice to see old friends: Darren, John Anton, Andrea and her husband, Vassilis, Constance, and to meet new ones: Kyriaki Petrakou, and Αθηνά Βουγιούκα.

March 3, 2007

The big event. 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., 9 hours, but it went well and wasn’t a bit tiring. Perfect venue supplied by Katy Fleming and her assistant Niki. Good presentations, all cut down to the 15-minute limit, all except John Anton’s. Simonides recited portions of Kapodistrias in Greek with much passion. And we ended with Linda Orphanos and a marvelous guitarist doing five Theodorakis songs (I think). Then a leisurely dinner in a hotel on the Square, subway ride back uptown with Darren, and a very welcome bed. Everyone seemed pleased. We had questions after each paper and kept to the timing. Much helped by Nikos Metallinos, whom I asked to chair the second half. Audience always awake and attentive. Jeff Murphy showed up. Also Burt Pike. Jeff wants to quit the law and get an MA in English literature. I told him about Greg resigning from Goldman.

March 13, 2007

Yesterday the board, in executive session, agreed to allow Mary Lou Burgess to remain. Thank goodness! The $22,000 I collected will help make her entry fee possible. So, even though I was told that what I did was illegal, because one cannot solicit at Kendal without prior permission, I’m glad I did it since it helped the fortunate outcome. I gave $5000, some others gave $5000, $4000, $2000, lots of $500, and one $10.00.

March 14, 2007

Thanks to Betsy Sanderson’s willingness to take charge, I skipped Council today so that we could get the 11:00 a.m. bus to Logan Airport. Routine flight to Frankfort.

March 15, 2007

Athens

Routine flight to Athens. Met by Nikos Mathioudakis, sent by George Stassinakis. By car to Εθνική Άμηνα, then Metro owing to traffic. Nikos helped with the large valise all the way to Hotel Achilleas (Λέκκα 21). Simple but OK. Out for a walk to get a tyropita, amazingly we saw Constance Tagopoulos on Ερμού. Hugs and kisses. Lots of gossip about all the strikes and demonstrations (we saw nothing all day long, luckily, but traffic was largely diverted from the city center, also because Putin is here to sign an agreement for a pipe line). A nice nap. Then Nikos met us again and walked us to the Γαλικό Ινστιτούτο on Σινά. Nice to see Katerina Anghelaki there, and Christos, and the two from the New York event: Petrakou and Vouyoukaki. Katerina very low, misses her husband terribly—he died 1½ years ago. “I’m an old lady!” Stavrou refuses, or at least hesitates, to publish Kazantzakis’s letters to her father. I fear for my letters. How can I get permission? Dimitris Gounelas tells me that the University of Thessaloniki is ready to award me the honorary degree in October or November; we’ll need to fix the date. Stassinakis there of course. I sat on the stage with ten others and was next to last to speak, around 9:30 p.m. Miraculously I stayed awake throughout. One of the speakers was the nice woman who invited me to Rio. Apparently this is for real. Another from Moscow, one from Italy, another from Germany, all speaking Greek. I gave mine on translating into English, ending with the epic of όρτσα and producing many laughs. Last came Gounelas, who was very complimentary about my translation of The Last Temptation. Actually, I like the passage he read. Afterwards, everyone wanted to say hello, to exchange business cards, etc. Most important was a woman called Yolanda Hatzi, niece of Elli Lambridi, who has the Lambridi archive, including letters from Kazantzakis. We’ll meet tomorrow, luckily. At 11:30 p.m. walked to the hotel with Christos, who related at length his difficulties with, and now estrangement from, Margaret occasioned by his desire to move Pavlos to Birmingham, which she opposes. Terrible mess. They are no longer on speaking terms. To sleep at 12:30 a.m. No jet lag at all, thanks to feast-fast.

March 16, 2007

Athens

Yolanda Hatzi came at 10:00 a.m. She is going to publish Kazantzakis’s letters to Elli Lambridi, in Greek of course, but will let me include some in the Selected Letters. She’ll prepare photocopies and we’ll meet again when we return to Athens in April. At 11:00 Christos came and we talked steadily for two hours about all sorts of topics and luckily not primarily his vicissitudes with Margaret and the children. He described steady and slow progress being made regarding care for autistics owing mostly to EU policies and a little to UN policies. He has become emeritus director of the Autistic Society and thus is spending more time as a φιλόλογος, editing Θέματα Λογοτεχνίας. Wants to do a special issue on Ritsos, to include Ritsos’s letters to me. But where are they? . . . At 1:00 p.m. Iakovos Tsalicoglou came and we went to the restaurant on Mitropoleos called Ο Τζίτζικας και ο Μέρμηγκας, where his lovely daughter Elina was waiting for us. She’s a new mother with a 1½ year old son and Iakovos is a new and apparently excellent παππούς. Christos accompanied us for the first half hour. Elina is collaborating with Karen Van Dyck, Peter Constantine, and Mike Keeley on a new anthology of Greek poetry from ancient times to the present. Iakovos has retired from LaVerne University and hopes to write a manual instructing young Greek scholars on the mechanics and ethics of research. Back to the hotel at 3:30 for a short siesta. At 5:00 Agatha came with a photographer and assistant. We went to the Παλαιά Βουλή, Οδός Κολοκοτρώνη, where they posed me for probably 50 shots; then to the Grand Britannica (saw Lucas Tsilas right away), where we sat and had coffee and she interviewed me for Kathimerini’s magazine while the photographer took numerous other photos. She also gave me the name of a friend in Rethymno who runs a very good restaurant there. We’ll see what she does with the interview. Luckily she’ll send it to me for approval. . . . At 8:00, to Monastiraki to meet Don Nielsen and Lia. They took us to a square with a very special restaurant with a beautiful view of the Acropolis from the upstairs dining room. A lovely meal that he allowed me to pay for (€80) since he has no money now. He explained his Kafkaesque problems. He cannot get a residence permit because he cannot show adequate earnings in Greece ($ from USA don’t count) and he cannot earn enough in Greece because he doesn’t have a residence permit, which permits employment. Of course, όλα γίνονται στην Ελλάδα με τα μέσα, and someone offered to fix things for him for a fee (bribe) of €10,000, which of course Don doesn’t have. Also, every time he completes multiple required forms then the law changes and those forms are no longer valid and he needs to start with new ones. More Kafka. Also, he cannot get married until he has the permit. He thinks a miracle may happen in a few months . . . maybe. Φρίκη! But we had a nice meal and much good conversation about more pleasant things. And in walked Jason Demos (Dartmouth grad whose father supplied some photos for Greek Today). “Hello, Professor Bien!” Thankfully, I remembered him. . . . Afterwards, internet café in Syntagma.

March 17, 2007

Leaving the hotel, I checked regarding our reservation for April 13 (OK) and Alec’s (no record). I’ll try to reach Alec later today. Metro to the airport, half price for seniors, €3 each. At Kazantzakis Airport, Iraklio, we were greeted by Severios, Stelios’s fellow Dartmouth student and close friend, who had come with his wife Marianthi from Cyprus. She is very nice, born in South Africa of Greek parents, raised speaking Africaans. Ava was waiting for us outside. Warm reunion. Then fish dinner in a seaside restaurant. Then drive to Rethymno. Our double room in Jo-Ann Palace is very dark. We changed it for a lighter single room. Siesta. Then Stelios’s friend Pandelis drove us to a village high in the mountains where Stelios used to play as a child with relatives there. Supper with about 12 people including an interesting professor who had studied and taught in the US. Very traditional style peasant house, of course done up beautifully. Lots of talk about Stelios and his virtues.

March 18, 2007

Drove with Severios and Ava to Stelios’s grave, again in a village quite high, where Stelios used to play as a child. On the way, stopped at his aunt’s, 80 years old and a bit infirm. Four generations in the house. Daughter preparing the κόλλυβα. Παππούς lively, drove with us in his pick-up truck bringing a large bag of his own oranges. At the grave, about 40 people, including Ava’s daughter Eleni, who looks very much like her father. He got her a job at the Institute. Beautiful, statuesque young woman. The priest chanted appropriately, swinging the incense censor. Some tears, not many. Eleni spread more incense afterwards. Lovely photo of Stelios at the head of the tomb, with his gray beard. A physician friend and his American wife took charge of us, sort of, and spoke of the small lump Stelios showed him in his leg. The whole crew then drove to a seaside taverna for raki (of course) and more raki, and a full meal. No speeches, just a warm welcome by Ava. Talked with Stelios’s successor at the Institute and his wife. Voluble professor (history of science) from last night. . . . At Jo-Ann, we changed our room yet again; this one is a bit longer and has a kitchenette. Walked in the neighborhood. Γύρος for supper; Chrysanthi feasted on spaghetti. . . . Discovered to my surprise and pleasure that Jo-Ann has wireless for the computer.

March 19, 2007

Went to the university in the morning, in Γάλλος, high on a hill overlooking the blue Mediterranean. Attended to details of payment, etc. with Roula Kritaki, who had helped me so often and well via e-mail. Then to the library, where we were shown the Prevelakis Collection, all the 400 letters from Kazantzakis and all other correspondence, kept in manila envelopes in locked cupboards (thankfully—I told the librarian about the Επιστολές προς τη Γαλάτεια, which were “borrowed” (stolen?) from the Ιστορικό Μουσείο. I’ll be able to view the letters I need on microfilm, to discover what Kazantzakis wrote in the passages that Prevelakis censored. Returned by bus. €30 more in my kinito. Mousakas for lunch. Amazingly the Jo-Ann has wireless internet, so I get my e-mail here with no trouble at all. The manager reduced our tariff from €420 to €400 per month because we’re in one room, not two. But she’ll need to add for breakfasts. . . . Practiced my lecture yet again. Stamatis came and we walked to the Περιηγητική Λέσχη. About 125 students plus a few dozen adults, including Alexis, whom we met at Stelios’s memorial. Stamatis ran a class on Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης first, distributing a handout with a list of characters and recounting the plot, etc. Very sterile. The rector introduced my part, mentioning the donor. I spoke for 50 minutes and I think it went well. The audience seemed attentive throughout. Afterwards, mercifully, there were quite a few questions including the inevitable one about Kazantzakis and women. Someone asked me to explain Bergson’s philosophy at length. I talked about the gushing fountain. Now all this needs to be repeated in Iraklio on Wednesday.

March 20, 2007

Walked to the sea and ate in the harbor. A man with bad eyesight asked me to dial a number for him on his kinito, which I did successfully. Afterwards, in the restaurant, he paid for my wine. Looked for an electric piano keyboard, so far without success. Started cataloging the specific Prevelakis letters that I need to check, a tedious job, and checking will be even more tedious.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Iraklio

What a day! A graduate student, Stavros, drove us with Stamatis, to Iraklio. We took pajamas, etc., planning to stay over in order to go to the bank tomorrow. Three quarters of the way there I discovered that, unbelievably, I had left my attaché case in the room, and the lecture inside it! What to do? Find someone to bring it from the hotel, immediately? Several attempts failed. Then Stamatis had a brilliant idea. His daughter, at home, could send the electronic copy to our e-mail and we’d access it in Iraklio. She did this, following detailed instructions. Stavros and I found an internet café. Try as he might, he couldn’t access his e-mail. So we telephoned the daughter again; she sent it to my e-mail, which I accessed immediately via http://basement.dartmouth.edu/blitz. So we started printing. At page 7 (of 12) the printer ran out of ink. Consternation again. But the attendant said that we could continue in blue rather than black. This worked. So, at 8:20 p.m. I had the lecture in hand, for the 8:30 scheduled event. But Greek events never start on time. Thus I was able to shorten it a bit, although Gareth Owens came to say hello as did Κυρία Λυδάκη from the Cretan University Press. The Rector took some time, too, with introductory remarks. Actually, it went better than last Monday since by now I was so familiar with the text. And there were good questions afterwards. As Stavros said, we brought the “thriller” to a happy ending. Afterwards, the Rector and his wife took us out to a very fancy restaurant for a super delicious supper of swordfish. His wife very lively. Will run for parliament as a PASOK candidate. She posed me, half joking, many basic questions about Kazantzakis and life. She’s related somehow to Kazantzakis’s mother’s family. Trusty Stavros drove us home. To bed at 3:00 a.m.

March 23, 2007

To the university to discover the words that Prevelakis censored. With the help of Ελένη Κωβαίου we made some progress, but the photocopies the university made (on film) are sometimes so bad that the words cannot be read. Thus Eleni will produce several originals for me next week. . . . For coffee to Stamatis’s. Wife Katerina is very nice and the 14-year-old daughter Φωτεινή is the one who saved us on Wednesday by sending the lecture via computer. She played “Für Elise” and Kabalefsky for us on the piano—not bad. She’s preparing to compete in a contest in Athens next month. Stamatis has the text of my book from Kastaniotis, and has already discovered errors. I now have it to check. But I also need to practice, and shorten, the Odyssey lecture for Monday. Lots to do.

March 24, 2007

Alexis Politis and his charming wife Angela Kastrinaki had us home for a supper of snails, raki, etc. She has written on Zorba, he mostly on folksongs, but he is in charge of the impressive computer thesaurus of Modern Greek materials. Very pleasant people.

March 25, 2007

Watched the Independence Day parade in the morning: nurses, coast guard, soldiers, and lots of schoolchildren, many rather fat. Patriotic rhetoric, of course. Nice to see some children in national costume. . . . Telephoned Leander to wish him happy birthday and happy anniversary. In the evening, to Andreas’s and Jane’s amazing home of the top of a mountain in the village of Αγίου Πνεύματος. Crazy, but 360-degree views of sea, mountains, sky. He wanted to know how to translate Kazantzakis’s Τέντωσέ με, Κύριε. I said “Bend me” instead of “Stretch me.” Later, on the internet, I learned that the official translation is “Draw me.” Two graduate students joined us. And of course, food food food, his own olive oil, his own raki.

March 26, 2007

To university ΕΛΚΕ to get my first check (€14000). Then one of the officials there took us downtown to complete the paperwork for insurance and taxes, all done rather quickly and easily. Tried to xerox for tomorrow’s lecture in Iraklio but all machines were being used by students (all girls) copying entire books and defying copyright. Back to town on the bus. Lunch. Siesta. Then to university with Stamatis for my Odyssey lecture. Stamatis first for two hours, non-stop talking, without preparation. I tried to be less “official” (pompous), joking with students, looking at them, ad libbing during the lecture, etc. Enough questions afterwards.

March 27, 2007

To Iraklio

Drove to Iraklio with Stamatis listening (sort of) to a Haydn quartet. Huge difficulty parking in Iraklio but by sheer luck and after many wrong turns Stamatis found a parking garage near our venue, Αίθουσα Ανδρόγεω, Πλατεία Λιονταριών. He held forth again for 1½ hours; we walked in the square, then sat in the anteroom. Gareth Owens came, and some others including a newspaper reporter for an interview. Beautiful Bechstein piano on stage. Lots of photos by newspaper people. Lecture went well enough although bad lighting made it difficult to read. Best part was when I suggested that the truest example of the “aesthetic man” is the γυναικάς and, in the second row of the audience, a young man pointed to his friend in the next seat, who smiled smugly. “Ah!” he sighed, «βρήκαμε έναν». Much laughter. Ava came. Afterwards, she, some friends of hers, Gareth, Chrysanthi, and I went to a favorite taverna for supper. Got back to her home at 1:00 a.m. Nice to see lovely daughter Eleni there, and the two very “human” dogs and the two rather sleepy cats. Ava had a catalogue of an art exhibit by Sarah Kafatos, who now, Ava told us, lives in London with Fotis.

March 28, 2007

To Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις to collect my translation from Ειρήνη Λυδάκη, all 700 pages of it. I have to go through it now and respond to the translator’s queries. Irene says they’ll take care of typos and the index. Appendices and bibliography still to come. . . . Then to Knossos to meet Gareth and follow his guided tour through the palace given to his 27 Erasmus students from five or six different nationalities. He was very lively, as one might expect. I didn’t know that the Thira explosion has been dated to an exact year: 1628 B.C. if I remember correctly. Ava picked us up and we went for a rather good lunch at a restaurant favored by Eleni: special omelet with potatoes, fried mushrooms, etc. Then to the new Natural History Museum to see (a) the Yale University exhibit about the animals and insects and birds of Connecticut, beautifully done as multiple installations, and (b) Ava’s imaginative exhibit meant for children, very interactive, about turtles, owls, snakes, trees, fish, and everything else, all done in very fine installations with computerized control and involvement. This was two years’ work for her, producing an impressive result. . . . Chrysanthi to hair dresser. I managed a one-hour siesta from 5:00 to 6:00. Then we picked up Chrysanthi downtown and drove to a village where there is a very fancy convention center. There we heard Professor Grammatakis give a long and very fine lecture on To Σύμπαν: big bang, expanding universe, dates of inception, etc. Predictions for the future (next multiple billions of years). I understood about 90%. Very encouraging. Then downstairs to a fine art exhibit including a collage by Ava and a fiery fantasy by Christine, whom we met, an American, resident for decades here. She said she came at first because of Kazantzakis. . . . Very nice all these days to be with Ava. We talked freely about Stelios and the possibilities for Ava’s future—maybe an MFA in Vermont. Hope to see her in America. She goes to Guilford each spring and summer.

March 29, 2007

To Thessaloniki

Vouli met us at the airport and we drove to the Farm School and were installed in the top floor apartment of Hastings House. Huge, because intended for all six of us when Alec comes. Lunch in Princeton Hall with Mats, Tom, and the third intern. Tom’s report about teaching of English not very encouraging. Mary Chism missed multiple classes. No real energy or initiative. Mats is going to run the Marathon on Sunday, starting in Pella and finishing at the Statue of Megas Alexandros. Saw Chris Minoutis, who worries about deficits. Saw Randy. Long talk with the librarian. Bill McGrew asked me to attend the management team meeting but I told him that the nicest thing about emeritus status is the ability not to go to meetings. In my case I had to meet David Wisner at 2:45 to be taken to Anatolia College, very fast on the new roads, to lecture on “Inventing Greece.” Bissell library first. Albana came. Hugs and kisses; her big smile. I donated the book of the Rethymno conference to the librarian and showed David and her the new data bank created by Alexis Politis. The lecture went well. Bill McGrew came and asked good questions. And it was nice to see Peter Baiter again after many years. He learned his Greek from our book. . . . With Bill to a taverna and two hours of conversation about how corrupt Greece is and what he hopes I’ll do with the strategic plan. . . . Amazingly, the school brought me a computer that connects to the internet. So I’m all set with e-mail “at home.” . . . To town on the 66 bus from Thermi to Charilao and the number 10 bus down Egnatias. To Egnatias Bank to deposit my check for €14000 and make application for a card to use in cash machines. Then to Vouli’s. Back at School, Stylianos telephoned from Australia. Very lively. If I go at the end of June he says he is likely to be there. . . . Started correcting my volume 2 and telephoned the translator. Alas I don’t have the book here or even the computerized text. At 8:30, downstairs for the big party that Bill organized in our honor. Everyone! Randy and her artist husband. Mary Chism and her husband. Vergos, Vezyroglou, who said we have probably found land for the cows, except that it is expensive. Stavros. Joann. Pelagia and George. Tasos and Dora, and many others. Lots of food, wine, tsipouro.

March 31, 2007

Worked in the morning. George came and took us to a nice restaurant with Efthymoula, Andreas, Dimitris, Tilda, and Evi. I talked at length with Andreas, who seems still very leftist and cynical. He thought a school like Patana that mixes students of 50 nationalities is very bad, a consequence of the awful globalization foisted on the world by the rich. Afterwards we went to Valdari to see a splendid atrium skylight created by Dimitris, a beautiful eleven-story office building. Then, after intense arguments among the family, to the harbor for coffee, a café we didn’t know existed. Right on the water. . . . Short rest. Then to Odysseas and Eleni. Toula’s daughter came for 30 seconds and left. But then Takis, Brini, and Eleni came and stayed. Both girls are in the last year of the lyceum and are preparing for the Πανελλήνιες εξατάσεις. Both have declared architecture as their desired field. Eleni, a real charmer, a woman already. Easy to talk to. . . . I forgot to note that at Bill’s party yesterday I also met the Perrotis student I’m not supporting, an Albanian, Haxhire Myrteza, called Xhini (pronounced “Jiri”). I also met Nurjhan Manjunosova, from Kyrgyzstan, who is finishing and hopes to go to Brandeis (she’s Muslim), which has offered her a 50% tuition scholarship. But where is the rest of the money going to come from?

April 1, 2007

George and Pelagia Vourtsa drove us to Annie and Aris Levis’s country home in Halkidiki. Tasos and Dora came. Tasos sat with me for an hour with a very complete chart explaining precisely every detail in the old programs in the secondary School and in the new ones. Very useful. The Farm School actually designed part of this for the ministry. But the ministry has been preoccupied with the problems in the universities and has done nothing to advertise the new programs. Annie, Pelagia, and I had our first discussion about the strategic plan, which Bill wants substantially revised and made much more adventurous. They are not very supportive, alas. We’ll meet again tomorrow morning. . . . Lovely lunch. Lots of talk. And George telephoned to say that Obama had withdrawn from the presidential race. April fools! Long walk afterward along the beach and through the huge hotel grounds next to Annie’s house. Drove back via Polygyros, on the old road.

April 2, 2007

Worked well for two hours with Pelagia and Annie on revising the strategic plan for the Secondary School, mostly using the extensive revisions prepared by Bill McGrew, but adding a bit here and there, also subtracting. Pelagia will type it all tomorrow and give it to me to check. . . . Albana came to join us for lunch. Her impasse here leads her to hope now to settle in the US. There’s a lottery that gives green cards to 50,000 individuals each year from third world countries. She has applied. I encouraged her to come if possible. We talked about Kendal (she is very attached to grandparents) and showed her the Kendal Corporation CD, which she found very moving (as did I) and “amazing.” “We desperately need something like this in Albania!” Μακάρι να χτιστεί στην Ελλάδα! . . . I discovered that chapters 5, 6, and 7 are missing in the translation I’m vetting.

April 3, 2007

Irene Lydaki restored chapters 5, 6, and 7, and sent as well the four appendices and the bibliography, totaling now 611 pages that I need to vet. I’m up to page 100 more or less. Slow work, and doubly difficult because I don’t have the English text. . . . Nikos and Liana came with their two children, Christina aged 2½ and Kostaki, ten years old. Christina a little charmer who recites the capital cities of 20+ countries. I took them to see cows, and newborn calves at this marvelous school. . . . To Thermi for a very bad and expensive lunch, by bus. At 8:00 to church, full to bursting. A young man offered me his seat, thankfully. Ψάλτες singing in full voice, the priest very logical and dignified. Sermon about μετάνοια. I understood some of the Bible—John on Jesus and Lazarus—but none of the chanting, which was the most important, of course. Nice to see men as well as women in church, and some younger people, too. Everyone, on entering, lights a candle, crosses himself or herself, and kisses the icon of Christ. One man did a sort of half-obeisance repeatedly, bending and touching the floor.

April 4, 2007

I corrected Pelagia’s typescript of the Strategic Plan, mostly minor corrections but a few substantive ones. Chrysanthi is helping ladies prepare the epitaphios with flowers. Chris Minoutis took us out for lunch to a very nice fish restaurant by the sea. Conversation for 2½ hours about his adjustment to Greece (he is a Farm School graduate who went to university in California and stayed 15 years and speaks only English to his ten-year-old son). Also about a future Kendal, which he says is desperately needed here. And about Stefanakis and the wife (the real problem, according to Chris). Then, overstuffed with food, we went to a dinner party hosted very beautifully by Pelagia and George Voutsas, with Bill McGrew, Tasos and Dora Apostolides, Annie Levis, and us. Conversation from 8:30 until 12:15 a.m. non-stop, all in Greek, of course. Tasos told me that all Greek publishers are corrupt, including Kastaniotis, but maybe not the University Presses of Crete. He wants to do Kazantzakis in comic book form. At the end of the evening I read everyone the following delicious passage by George Orwell that I had copied out from the translation of my volume 2: Αν κοιτάξεις μέσα στο μυαλό σου, τι νομίζεις ότι είσαι, ο Δον Κιχώτης ή ο Σάντσα Πάντσα; Σχεδόν σίγουρα, είσαι και οι δύο. Το ένα μέρος του εαυτού σου θέλει να γίνεις ήρωας ή άγιος, αλλά το άλλο είναι ένα χοντρό ανθρωπάκι, που βλέπει καθαρά τα πλεονεκτήματα του να μείνει ζωντανό με ολόκαιρο το τομάρι. Είναι ο ανεπίσημος εαυτός σου, η φωνή της κοιλιάς, που θέλει τη σιγουριά, το μαλακό κρεβάτι, την τεμπελιά . . . Whereupon Bill ended the evening deliciously by declaring, Αχ! To μαλακό κρεβάτι, αυτό θέλω τώρα!

April 5, 2007

Chrysanthi went shopping with Dora in a marvelous mall nearby, “better than America.” Then George came and brought us to his lovely apartment for a fine lunch spoiled only by Efthymoula’s loud voice. Discussion of the 6th grade history text that “smooths” what happened to the Greeks of Smyrna in 1922 and is being contested by the archbishop, the right wing, and strangely also by the KKK. . . . Then to Dick Jackson at beautiful Anatolia: new theater, new playing fields with a track just like Hanover high school’s. I played the Kendal video for Dick. He’ll arrange for me to speak to Mr. Bissell, chair of their board, when we’re all here again in May. My hope is that Anatolia will become a sponsor, even if no money or land is forthcoming. He fears that Pinewood may close. Told me that Dragoumis was interviewed for AFS presidency but rejected because not American. Candidates now seem to be Joann Ryding and David Lansdale. He’s sorry that Bill doesn’t support Brady Kiesling. . . . Then to church for the service of the twelve gospels, 3½ hours (I stayed 1¼), until the 11th. Beautiful soul-wrenching psalmody for the crucifixion. I could again understand maybe 50% of the gospel readings, none of the psalmody. Too bad I don’t have the little book used by many others to follows the words.

April 6, 2007

One and a quarter hours with Bill McGrew discussing the Strategic Plan, which he still finds inadequate, plus Kendal, Brady Kiesling, Jini . . . A Kendal here would be very difficult because Greece is generally weak in private institutions, everything relating either to the State or the family. His goal is to make the Farm School better than the State schools; otherwise why should it exist? . . . To Odysseas and Eleni for lunch on the terrace. Eleni said interestingly that during the Πείνα of 41–42 είχαμε να τρώμε in their village. Lots of ouzo. Then we walked to Nikos’s apartment, very far, about where the Μέγαρο Μουσικής is. The park along the παραλία is now very lovely, and more work is being done on a long stretch toward the end, after the Yachting Club. I was able to talk quite a lot to the eleven-year-old Constantinos, about the different account of the Μικρασιατική Καταστροφή in his father’s sixth grade history and in the one being used today. Nikos drove us back to the Farm School in time for the Επιτάφιος περιφορά, with Chris Minoutis in front holding the large cross. Very beautiful Επιτάφιος with candles on the roof guiding us through the night.

April 7, 2007

Bill McGrew kindly drove us to the airport to fetch Alec and family, who arrived right on time at 11:20 a.m. and seemed wide awake despite a ten-hour plane ride from Bangkok last night. Hugs and kisses all around. Chrysanthi cooked a lunch for all of us. Then visits: George came with Andreas and his wife but not their son. Nikos came and took us downtown. Returned luckily in time for the Ανάσταση service at the School. All candles extinguished. Δεύτε, λάβετε φως. Candles lighted. Then everyone left the church and gathered outside. At midnight Χριστός ανέστη εκ νεκρών . . . and the church bell ringing happily. Everyone kissed: Χρόνια πολλά! Home with lighted candles. Cracked the eggs, Chrysanthi winning every time until the very end. Sleep at 1:00 a.m.

April 8, 2007, Easter

Yesterday, Alec and I went to the airport to rent a car from Avis. Couldn’t because they require international driver’s licenses. But Hertz said OK and offered a much better rate. The clerk was a young woman from Χανιά, Crete, impressed that I’m professing at Rethymno. Today we started at 9:30 a.m., heading for Takis’s house at the FYROM border. Got lost, headed toward Turkey but called him on the κινητό and were told to turn around, go back, head for Edessa and then Ευζώνας. Takis met us at the border station and guided us to his house in Ειδομένη. About 40 family members present, mostly on Brini’s side, but Takis’s two daughters were there: Eleni, whom I’d met, and Evi, age 15, looking about 18, about to enter the Lyceum in September. Toula absent, alas. Lots of interesting people, including a man who’d been taken to Poland in the παιδομάζωμα and stayed there 30 years; he told me that he’s not a believer in all this Easter nonsense. Also a university student at Athens, in economics, very opposed to nationalism and pleased when I told him I agreed. Also an older man full of κέφι (he ate the goat’s head) who danced alone or in groups with energy. We ate and ate, μεζές first, τσίπουρο, finally the goat, very tasty; then lots of dancing—Takis first and foremost and the daughters and Chrysanthi, and even I a few times. . . . We walked in the village itself, talked to a farmer going on his tractor to his fields; he grows wheat and corn (for the animals). Saw a large, old John Deere tractor and were scared away by a huge watchdog. Houses in FYROM (Skopje) visible in the distance, as well as snow-covered mountains. . . . Alec drove us back. I was very sleepy. Then we returned the car to our “girlfriend” at the Hertz desk in the airport; she gave us a big discount. Then went by cab to Vouli’s. She took us all to Πλατεία Ναυαρίνου for γύρος, σουτζουκάκια, etc.

April 9, 2007

Monica helped me negotiate the «tables» format on Word and I typed in those parts of the Strategic Plan that Bill McGrew wanted added, and sent the newly revised plan off to Pelagia and Bill. But Bill still wants changes. George and Efthymoula came; more of her screaming voice. Then Dimitris Gounelas drove us all to his lovely home in Panorama with views of mountains and the new nunnery, new clinic for the aged. Ruth is well, her eyes stabilized. Delicious lunch followed by long walk to the cemetery. Saw boxes where bones are placed after five years. When Dimitris dug up his father, the body was not yet decomposed. Horrible. Ruth told me about David Lansdale; his career has been with the aged, he has a degree in geriatric care. If he becomes the Farm School’s next president he might be my best ally for a Greek CCRC. If . . . Elena tumbled down ¼ of a flight of stairs but miraculously did not injure herself. Dimitri told me that at the degree-awarding ceremony I should deliver a scholarly paper of about 20 minutes. Maybe I’ll do my paper on Ritsos, with handouts. And don’t bring my Columbia gown. I’ll be given a Thessaloniki gown. A lovely visit, as always. . . . Home. Then to town. Τοστ. Then to Odysseas and Eleni. Odysseas very emotinal in his reunion with Alec and Alec in seeing again the apartment where he lived as a very young child.

April 10, 2007

To Bill’s for further talks about the Strategic Plan. He is wary about the call for an experimental (petting) farm. I typed corrections to what I hope will be the final version. At 12:30 we all left with Bill for Hαlkidiki: Casandra, Sani Beach, not too far from Μάλτεπε (Καλλιθέα). Big resort, but beyond it a deserted, beautiful beach with a Byzantine tower at one end and debris containing shards of ancient pottery, some of which we collected. Pellucid water, beautifully turquoise. Then lunch by the seaside in the next village, Bill allowing me to pay. Home at 6:00 p.m., tired. Takis came and drove off with Alec and Monica while we kept the children, well occupied with computer games. I continued my vetting. I’m now up to page 184.

April 11, 2007

To Τράπεζα Εγνατίας to withdraw money from my €14000 salary and to collect my ATM card. The person who helped me turned out to be an American long resident in Greece, graduate of Pinewood School. I left with €1000. Spent the rest of the day on the Kazantzakis translation. I’m now around page 200. Irene Lydaki wants me to wait until I finish, then compare with the changes stipulated by her copyeditor.

April 12, 2007

Last day at the School. Long talk with Joann about a Greek Kendal. She recognizes the necessity. Printed the latest Strategic Plan for Bill and Tasos. Alec and family visited Kostas, who again wept, thinking of Lola’s death. I went to the School’s managers’ meeting from 1:00 p.m. to 3:45 p.m., chaired by Bill, very professional, with reports by Tasos, Vergos, Petsas (buildings), Joann, Chris. Interesting discussion on how to name the ΕΠΑΛ and ΕΠΑΣ in English: “vocational,” “technical,” “lyceum,” “high school”? Afterwards, Chris took Chrysanthi and me for lunch at Carrefour. Long talk again about a Greek Kendal. . . . At home afterwards, George, Efthymoula, Andreas, Georgaki, Dimitra, Takis, all talking at once. Georgaki played “football” with Elena. At 8:30 p.m. Tasos and Dora picked us up and we all went, also with Bill, to “Miami” in Krieni. Delicious and very compatible, and managed not to overeat. We were marvelously cared for by the School, and in exchange I pledged another €5000 to help a Perrotis student in the 2007–08 academic year.

April 13, 2007

To Athens

Chris drove us to the airport in the Perrotis bus, very comfortably. Installed comfortably in the Achilleas Hotel. Very good lunch in Δελφοί in Οδός Νίκης. Watched the strange changing of the guard in front of the parliament, where we encounted Tom Coppert and parents. Dropped into the Grande Bretagne to show it to Monica. Walked down Ermou and visited the eleventh-century church halfway down, a well-preserved example of Byzantine architecture and design. Walked through the Plaka. Exhausted, back to the hotel for a bit, then to Panepistimiou for loukoumades. Kids to bed.; Chrysanthi and I to Apollonos 21, Central Hotel, to meet Alf Vincent, who took us to the Plaka—Adrianou, teeming with people. Sat for French coffee and ice cream. Alf described his extraordinary project of the moment (and the last ten years), a critical edition of a memoir, never published, by a Greek who observed the siege of Kastro (Iraklio) by the Ottomans and its fall, then fled to Venice and in his old age wrote 200-odd pages about life in Crete in the seventeenth century: food, commerce, politics, sports, etc., under the Venetians. Alf has done a translation and full annotations for a bilingual edition now in press. We spoke also about the Stavrou-Stassinakis problem, the forthcoming Kazantzakis sessions in Sydney and Adelaide, and about one of his student’s dissertation on Darwinism that I’ll soon be evaluating. He hopes that I’ll encourage republication of the JMGS Australia issue on Kazantzakis that was so extraordinarily filled with errors. Walked home past the Παιδικό Μουσείο and the hotel nearby where I once stayed.

April 14, 2007

Athens

To the Acropolis with 10,000 other tourists. Lots of scaffolding. Saw the new museum down below, huge, being built. Hard to appreciate the Parthenon with such crowds. Chrysanthi couldn’t go through the Propylaea owing to acrophobia and waited for us down below. Then to the Children’s Museum, where I left everyone so that I could go to Syntagma to meet Manolis Aretoulakis and collect his two translations of my lectures: “Berlin,” and “Why Read Kazantzakis.” We spent 2½ hours together talking easily about his work (he teaches English literature) and mine. Glad to hear that he approves of private universities for Greece. . . . Siesta. Then to Christos and Eri’s, where we saw Dimitris for the first time in probably twenty years. He is much the same, but improved in that he says I when he means I, whereas he used to use He for I. He spoke somewhat connectedly about his grandmother’s death and remembered his aunt’s death. Every West Midlands bus driver knows him and never charges him for rides. Even Christos, once identified as Dimitris’s father, got a free ride recently. He’ll be visiting Meg and Michael after he returns, soon, to England. Here he visited Christos’s sister in Volos. The star of the evening was Aspasia Maria, studying English literature at the university but theater, her first love, separately in a private school. She recited—rather, performed—the story of the butterfly and the cockroach for the children with professional grace. Let’s hope that she can find her way as an actress. Right now they’re doing Medea at the school. But she seems to be in favor of students closing the university again. I asked why. “It’s to show the Ministry that the system cannot work unless they rescind the new law.” Eri filled me in a bit about the November 1–2–3 conference. I’m to be the keynote speaker on November 1, for 45 minutes. I suggested a lecture on Kazantzakis’s letters and she thought that would be fine. In Greek, of course. Christos expanded to Alec his past history, explaining what I had not known: that he almost had the contract to publish Kazantzakis’s Άπαντα until Eleni reneged because she wanted all the money and thus decided to publish everything herself. But of course the civil war destroyed Christos’s publishing capability in any case. . . . A full meal. Lots of photos by Dimitris. Fond farewells. A welcome coffee on Omonia.

April 15, 2007

Athens

To the archaic agora first. Marvelous to see the Theseion early in the morning with no one else there. It was even better than the Parthenon yesterday because of the crowds there and all the scaffolding. And the agora museum in the reconstructed Stoa is probably the best in Greece. I remembered the child’s potty. Also of interest: water-clock for timing orators’ speeches to six minutes; system of ostracism; system of choosing jurors; jar with four huge octopuses painted on it; cooking utensils. . . . To Kerameikos for renewed experience of the grave carvings, with emotional farewells extended to the departed. The Metro again to Victoria for the Archeological Museum. Chrysanthi remembered the marvelous bronze jockey on his racing horse, and of course Zeus (or Poseidon) ready to toss the thunderbolt (or trident). Final meal in Monastiraki. Alec and family accompanied us to Syntagma to wave goodbye. The best part of all these days together was the two children’s complete compatibility with both Chrysanthi and me, something that needs to be renewed, and certainly was there the last ten days. . . . We treated ourselves to a taxi ride from Iraklio airport direct to Jo-Ann Hotel in Rethymo, well worth the €60 fee. Souvlaki for supper amazingly only €3.00 after the huge expenses in Athens.

April 17, 2007

A lucky event. Walking toward the harbor we wanted a better look at the mosque being repaired, and suddenly heard someone playing classical music on a piano inside. We entered and discovered that it’s the Rethymno Odeon and that the secretary knew my name because Philippidis had considered this place for our lectures if the university were still closed. So, I was invited to practice piano in the hall, on a huge new concert grand, a Siena, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Wonderful! . . . Yesterday, lectured for the first time with Roddy and had a nice supper afterwards with him and Fran. . . . This was in the Economist: Arnold Toynbee said that civilizations proceed from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage. (Where are we?)

April 18, 2007

To Iraklio

By bus to Iraklio with Roddy, Fran, and Stamatis. I lectured again, on the political interpretation of Zorba, Roddy again on Odyssey and Palamas and Zorba and Myrivilis. A nice surprise was to find Tsoucalas in the audience; he’d come to Iraklio for a cataract operation performed by the famous Rector, who took us all out again for dinner afterwards. He is a great friend of Stylianos’s and wants to award him an honorary degree, but other professors object. Back via taxi paid for by the Rector. To bed at 2:30 a.m.

April 21, 2007

To Angela Politis’s birthday party (10:00 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.). From there an immense surprise: Aglaïa Kasdagli, who played Maria in the video that John and I made in the 1970s in Birmingham, her face quite unchanged but her legs very infirm, so that she can hardly walk. Lots of reminiscing about those days. Must try to send her a CD with the videos, which she has probably never seen.

April 22, 2007

Two-piano and four-hand recital at the Odeon: Clementi, Infanti, Shostakovich, Debussy, Grieg. The Grieg was very lively (Four Norwegian Dances, opus 35).

April 23, 2007

Lectured today in the Περιγητική Λέσχη. Smaller audience, but Alexis Politis came and also Ava’s friend where we had dinner on the two-year memorial. Afterwards to a really good restaurant with Roddy and Fran. The place is filing up: tourists. Our hotel is booked solid. The beach has umbrellas, etc.; reminds me of the Lido in “Death in Venice.” Roddy is staying at a very fancy hotel: Porto Rethymnon, on the promenade. I’m doing better with the Satie, beginning to learn it. Skipped ahead to the appendices in the Bibliography in my translated book. In the text, now up to chapter 21. 200 pages to go. Mail came from the Kendal Corporation. They want to revise Values & Standards. I’ve found it repetitious, somewhat bloated, and needing considerable correction.

April 29, 2007

A very nice presentation at the Odeon by Rethymno school children dedicated to Kazantzakis: readings from various novels, special readings concerning music and dance in his works, and then—imagine!—quotes from the Odyssey set for chorus and orchestra, all students. Too long, but full of enthusiasm. The hall full. Parents, presumably. Obviously the teachers who drill these students seem to have no interest in our lectures. But they did announce our series very quickly when no one was listening.

May 1, 2007, holiday

Agatha, who interviewed me in Athens, arrived with her new husband George on the first anniversary of their marriage. She wanted to show us the fabulous restaurant ΑΒΛΙ, owned and run by her college friend Katerina and designed by her architect husband Costas Iliapoulis. Beautiful place, carved out of the Venetian walls. Costas appeared. He was just elected αντιδήμαρχος (vice-mayor) of Rethymno. He wants me to meet the mayor on Thursday and to discuss the possibility of my introducing a Kazantzakis program by children sponsored by the municipality at the end of May. Then we all followed him to his fabulous home about 11 km. east of Rethymno. He keeps horses (also rabbits, chicks, goats). He leapt up on the Cretan horse (a breed that doesn’t trot), bareback, riding expertly, but the Arabian, very young and not ready yet to support such weight, went out through the gate that had been left open when we entered. So Costas pursued on the older horse, found the beautiful black Arabian and led it back. Lots of good talk meanwhile with his wife Katerina, very lively, and his sister who is also an architect in his firm, specializing in restoration of historic buildings. Eventually we all went out to eat “lunch” at 5:00 p.m. Costas got me drinking the raki the proper way, all down at once. Nice to meet George, who is in marketing and turns out to be a schoolboy friend of Christos Galinopoulos, who spoke at NYU on March 3rd.

May 2, 2007

Iraklio

Early bus to Iraklio, where I deposited my second check (€4000) in the Egnatia Bank. Then taxi to Forth to see Irene and go over her queries, not many. Then an hour or more with the director, Stephanos Trachanas. Very lively. Lots of good talk about Kazantzakis, including my hopes for the Selected Letters. Lunch; then the Historical Museum where Alexis Kalokairinos’s secretary welcomed me effusively and assigned a lovely curator to take us through. She did this very energetically and was going strong when closing time (5:00 p.m.) arrived. They have two early El Grecos. . . . To the Lions Square, our favorite place for coffee and a bit of a nap, much needed.

May 4, 2007

Athens, Hotel President

Taxi to Χανιά airport: €50 + €5 tip. To Hotel President near Ambilokipi. Nap. Then sat in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne and worked on shortening my lecture. To Στοά του Βιβλίου at 7:30 p.m. for one event, sponsored by the Cretan Society. Full house. 200 people at least. Nice to see Iakavos, Don, Manolis, George, and Agatha, Christos, Kyriaki and Athina Vouyιouka, maybe Amy Mims (who left a book). I spoke for my required 15 minutes on Γιατί να διαβάζουμε τον Καζαντζάκη στον 21η αιώνα. Stamatis took 45 minutes to do his 15. Unorganized, unprepared, as usual. Good discussion afterwards. Dallas was there; he spoke at length. People gave me books and said nice words, although no one really spoke about or questioned Kazantzakis’s religious vision, the subject of my talk. Big, endless supper afterwards with lots of laughter, jokes, good fellowship. Christos wants my text for Θέματα Λογοτεχνίας. Agatha told me that I’ll be speaking at the event organized by the mayor later this month.

May 5, 2007

Hectic breakfast with the hotel full of Spanish, German, Chinese, etc. visitors. I worked again on shortening a lecture, something required by Stamatis, who himself speaks for 45 minutes when he’s been allotted 15. Oh well . . .

May 6, 2007

Received the official letter from the University of Thessaloniki about my honorary doctorate on November 7th. And wrote to Vras that I cannot come to Australia in July. Chrysanthi much relieved. 95 pages to go in the translation.

May 7, 2007

After our lectures at the university, we were driven home by a man who turned out to be a retired school inspector who had a talent for μαντινάδες. He regaled us in the car on the way home with various examples. He and our friend Andreas and a few others meet fortnightly in the Jo-An to discuss philosophy, literature, etc.

May 11, 2007

We were driven to Χανιά, Roddy, Stamatis, I, and Chrysanthi, and the three of us lectured on Zorba σε φιλολόγους (high school teachers). Nice to see the man who produced the “proceedings” of our Congress here, in the same room, ten years ago. Beautiful meal afterwards by the sea. . . . In the evening, a graduate student interviewed Roddy and me at length for a new project, a “blog” on the internet concerned with Modern Greek literature.

May 12, 2007

7:45 p.m., finished my vetting, all 611 pages, of the translation of volume 2. What next?

May 13, 2007

Φαιστός

Bus to Αγία Γαλίνη, marvelous scenery. Met there by Gareth Owens, who showed us the lovely harbor with statues of Daedalus and Icarus, with Psiloritis in the background. He drove us to Φαιστός, where we met some British guests of his. Toured the site with his expert commentary. He showed us where the Phaistos dish was found. Gareth is working on Linear A still and has theories, but of course not a full decipherment. He then drove us to his wife’s village, Vori. Lovely lunch: παϊδάκια (lamb chops) plus, just for me, Shepherd’s Pie made by his wife. Then to their home for coffee, ice cream, and a tour of the garden. Finally, about 6:00 p.m., tired (it was quite hot all day), found a taxi back to Rethymno. A nice excursion.

May 14, 2007

Managed to reduce my Last Temptation lecture to about 35 minutes. Practiced piano, happily. Γύρος for lunch. Then Jason Lewallen’s MA thesis arrived, so I had to spend all afternoon vetting it before going off to lecture downtown at 8:00 p.m.

May 16, 2007

Iraklio–Thessaloniki

Lectured on The Last Temptation in the Androgeo. Good questions. Gave last pages of the Kazantzakis translation to Irene. Then to Thessaloniki. Big party at McGrew’s. New trustee Joel Polk very nice; in financial markets in NYC, like Greg. Another new one, Barbara Heming. And a new Greek trustee: Hatzigiannakis. Nice to be back in the upstairs apartment of Hastings House.

May 17, 2007

Farm School

Committee day. I started with finance, my first time. We have an endowment of $40,000,000+, 80% in equities, 20% in bonds, which Sheila and others defended. Then Post-Secondary Committee, thinking about the new three-year program and hoping for the best. Then my Secondary Committee with the agenda devoted exclusively to the relation between schools and animals if the animals need to be moved to a remote site. Thankfully Tasos, who I thought would say that the practical program would collapse if the animals moved, did not. Instead, he reported that the Ministry allows “excursions” once a month to a remote site. Hurray! I wrote up the minutes with all the possible eventualities. Then I spent an hour in one of the College classes answering questions or explaining how the practical program came from Father House’s experience of the Penn School’s program for freed slaves. These students seem uninterested in farm animals; they want business, management, etc. They’re from Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, FYROM. I said that friendship and fellowship develop best owing to a shared work experience. Then to the Farm Committee’s endless debate about whether to purchase 700 stremmata for possible transfer of the cows. Pendelis very opposed. David Acker in favor. Finally they compromised. We’d look for cheaper land in the Kilkis area, and if this fails, we’ll buy the 700 stremmata. . . . To the Stavros Constantinidises’ for supper. Amazing: Dartmouth’s ex-dean Carroll Brewster was there among the Anatolia trustees. Nice reunion. I spoke at length to Anatolia’s vice-chair about a Greek Kendal. He’d actually visited Crosslands. Bissell hadn’t come. The president of Anatolia’s alumni association gave me a book by Lorin Riggs’ mother that he’d published very handsomely, to bring to Lorin.

May 18, 2007

Farm School–Iraklio, Hotel Astoria

Four trees planted in memory of those who’d died, starting with Alex Drapos. Father Kyriakos officiating. A brief eulogy by a friend, then moments of silence for each. At the end, Father Kyriakos summarized beautifully, praising our silence. Then a very long board meeting from 9:00 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. Big problem is the question of land purchase. First vote: a tie. More arguments. Second vote, the yeas won, just. I voted Nay. Dimitris Zannas, when we were discussing all the arrangements for leasing land, said he feared we’d become a business whereas we should be offering something constructive to society. I then spoke at length about the possibility of doing this through a Greek Kendal placed on the 70 acres of plot C2, which still remains open for use. Afterwards, Phil asked me to submit a written proposal, and Annie suggested I do so as a letter to Zannas. Will do. Spoke to Kravvas about Albana. He can hire her as a “farm worker” no matter what she actually does, and this gives her a permit for a year, which can be renewed. . . . George Koualizides drove me to the airport. He’s very much in touch with folks at the School despite being fired, and is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Crete on the subject of the Open University. Nice to see him flourishing, without bitterness. . . . To Iraklio. Met Zetta at the airport, going like us to Iraklio for the symposium. Arriving at the Astoria Hotel, we went to the reception for symposiasts and who was there but Patroklos Stavrou. Chrysanthi approached him and he hugged her. I approached him. Smiles, hugs, kisses. Πήτερ, ήμουν τόσο άγριος προς εσένα επειδή σε αγάπησα τόσο πολύ. Έτσι, είπα, όλα περασμένα. Ναι ! So that’s nice. He said he had received the large packet I’d sent with the τετράδια and my book but had never opened it. I hope he now opens it and finds the book. My other book, Οκτώ διαλέξεις, was distributed earlier to everyone and I received my first copy. Quite an evening.

May 21, 2007

Stassinakis telephoned to say that Agatha is a traitor and please have nothing to do with her. Then the Αντιδήμαρχος telephoned: come to the Δημαρχία today. So we went at 4:00 p.m. The scheduled program is canceled. We were in the Mayor’s office. Outside, angry voices, shouting, worse and worse. The Mayor raced in, furious, saw us, left. Eventually the outburst stopped; police escorted someone outside. The Mayor wanted to say hello. Amazingly calm. Invited us to dinner tomorrow. And the other vice-mayor, Costas, invited us to his name-day at AVLI tonight. . . . To Gallos. My final lecture. Full house, every seat taken, standing room only. Roddy came next, then a good talk on male bonding in Kazantzakis; finally Stamatis on Kazantzakis and Dostoevsky. Lots of questions and discussion. . . . At 10:15 p.m. we showed up at AVLI, warm greetings by all three “assistant mayors for civilization”! Mezedakia, raki, etc. with interesting folks. One was a neighbor of the Orphanoudakis family and another a cousin. And they all know Stylianos. Small world. The Mayor came a bit later. Warm hello. . . . I’m preparing for a visit tomorrow to the Kazantzakis Museum at Varvari. Leventis saw me the other day at the symposium and we arranged the visit.

May 22, 2007

To Andreas and Jane Drakonakis’s with Roddy and Fran. He is a proud gardener, she a proud cook and painter, but very isolated high on the mountain above Atsipopoulo. Lots of good talk. Back at 5:00 p.m. Nap. Then the Αντιδήμαρχος Πεπή Μπιρλιράκη-Μαμαλάκη fetched us, picked up the Mayor, Γιωργής Μαρινάκης, and we went off to a tavern where we were joined by Alexis Politis. The Mayor gave us lovely presents as a remembrance of Rethymno. Apparently all this started with the famous Agatha, now Stassinakis’s enemy. The Mayor lively, simple, very approachable and friendly. The whole group wants to make Rethymno better and better, with pedestrian streets, the longest promenade in Greece (12 km.), etc. Lots of food, of course. Home at 12:30 a.m.

May 23, 2007

Iraklio, Atrion Hotel, Chronaki 9, Herakleion 712 02, 2810 246 000, info@atrion.gr, www.atrion.gr

Up early to get the 8:45 a.m. bus to Iraklio. Taxi to Μυρτιά past marvelous vineyards owned by Boutaris. Barbara Tsaka and Andonis Leventis helped me at the Museum, deciphered some illegible words, and introduced me to their website that lists all the letters in their possession. Eventually these will be scanned and thus available on line. Not yet. But they can photocopy any that I need. Also they’re thinking of doing a meeting in 2008 on the Scorsese film, which has never been shown in Crete, and rarely in Greece although it’s available in video form. Andonis drove us back to the Atrion Hotel, in back of the Historical Museum. Nice lunch there. Siesta. . . . Final lecture before a smaller audience. Lots of questions. Fond farewell to Irene. At the end I introduced Alf Vincent, a third non-Greek scholar, to the audience and he spoke briefly. Then a poem dedicated to Kazantzakis was read, and we all went out to a tavern, including Roddy and Fran for lots of food and talk until 12:30 a.m.

May 24, 2007

Iraklio–Rethymno

Tried to buy some of Tasos Apostolidis’s comic books but the store had none. Then asked a policeman how to get to Kazantzakis’s grave and he said “We’ll take you.” So we rode there in the patrol car. The tomb doesn’t seem to have his name, but it does have Δεν φοβούμαι τίποτα, δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, είμαι λεύτερος. Back to Rethymno by bus, which included a furious argument between the driver and a woman regarding a ban on standees. Alf was in the same bus, headed for a day at the university.

May 26, 2007

Finished Maria Zarimis’s very interesting dissertation on Darwinism and Greek literature, especially Xenopoulos, which I’m vetting for The University of New South Wales. If I’d known all this some years ago, I would have written very differently about Kazantzakis because he now seems to have been doing pretty much what everyone else was doing. . . . Supper with Roddy and Fran at Λεμονόκηπος. Later, I discovered that Greg Nagy was eating there at the same time, at the other end of the garden, with a group of symposiasts. We never saw each other, but communicated afterwards by e-mail.

May 27, 2007

Roddy, Fran, Chrysanthi, and I treated Stamatis, Katerina, and Photini to lunch at Lemonokepos, very pleasantly. Long and repeated “Thank yous” all around, in both directions.

May 28, 2007

My birthday. Warm e-mail from Daphne, telephone call from Alec, nothing from Leander as usual. In the evening, Chrysanthi treated me to a “tost” and a chocolate sweet. At 11:00 a.m. we met Jane and Andreas in Atsipropoulo and they drove us toward Sitia and then to marvelous gorges and volcanic mountains and a secluded beach on the south coast, a tourist town and non-tourist villages, and to a village tavern owned by a man with a marvelous white beard. Exquisite scenery everywhere, cultivated patches interspersed between βράχους. A huge flock of sheep with swollen utters, wanting to be milked. Goats high on the mountainside, stripping it bare of all trees and shrubs. When we retuned, I gave Andreas a copy of my volume 1; he’ll read it, I think, and we won’t have its weight in our luggage on the way home. . . . Tonight, walked to the harbor. The huge ferryboat for Piraeus just arrived. Cars and trucks pouring out of it. Others waiting to go in. The one experience that we of course denied ourselves was the trip to Crete by sea. . . . I’m trying now to fix the translation of my “Kazantzakis in Berlin.” The translator did my English but did not incorporate any of the Greek quotations, which I now need to do.

May 30, 2007

Χανιά–Αθήνα

Taxi to Χανιά. Sofitel Airport Hotel. Then to Metro to meet Lia and Don. Italian restaurant. Don expanded on his multiple schemes that might involve the Farm School, where actually he’d like a job. I was discouraging about the job, but he’ll send his proposal on to Bill with a covering letter from me. Lia’s work involves translations of business materials from multiple languages. No word about their forthcoming (?) marriage. Don still doesn’t have a residence permit. A bit of an adventure on the way back to the airport, since we missed the last train. But we lucked into a taxi for the long ride.

May 31, 2007

To Τράπεζα Εγνατίας, deposited €1000. With my Greek Visa card I can withdraw a maximum of €2000 a day. I should get $1.30 for every €1.00. Constance picked us up at the Grande Bretagne and drove us down Λεωφόρος Συγγρού to Βούλα, to Athina Vouyιouka’s splendid private home there surrounded by a garden with fruit trees and flowers. Η Κυριακή Πετράκου joined us, and a Scottish lady who has been thirty years in Greece, plus a gentleman in publishing. Lots of talk, lots of gossip about Stavrou. Athina is going to a conference in Beijing with Stassinakis. Kyriaki will be with me at the University of Athens in November. There from 12:30 until 5:00. Then back to Syntagma and the Metro to the airport. Spent some time viewing the interesting Venizelos exhibit there. Tennis: French open, on TV.

June 1, 2007

Athens–Frankfort–Boston–Hanover

Up at 3:45 a.m. First flight at 6:00 a.m. Everything normal except Dartmouth Coach, which was 30 minutes late owing to traffic, so we missed our taxi at Hanover Inn and waited half an hour. Home at 7:15 p.m., 23½ hours later. Then Chinese restaurant.

June 3, 2007

Meeting. I played hymns. Nice lunch at EBA’s with Jack and Ruth Hunter and their son Edward, now unemployed and unmarried. Sad. Lots and lots of mail to go through.

June 4, 2007

Exchanged 1000 euros for $1,250. Better rate in Greece: 1.31. But it’s still nice to have the gain. Minimal jet lag, indeed zero. Leander here for lunch.

June 5, 2007

Farm

Eight-hand piano with Bill Clendenning, Stan Udy, Joan Wilson: Schubert Trout. Then to the farm. Leander still here. Huge infestation of ants in his electrical box. Wind storm caused lots of damage, including a heavy branch fallen into the garden destroying the south fence. Happily nothing in the pond this year. We had enough garden left to plant tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, lettuce. No damage to buildings, although a white birch branch is resting on Alec’s porch roof and a heavy limb is resting on the Guest house roof, just resting.

June 6, 2007

Executive Committee meeting in our apartment to plan the June 13 Council meeting and Association meeting. Mel on Monday, also, with Becky and Betsy. All’s well. They are delighted that Tedd Osgood’s New Era Task Group will now be disbanded. I promised not to talk about cows. They worked diligently in my absence, especially Betsy Sanderson and Pat Burnham. . . . Then drove to Boston, parked under the Common, got key to Beacon Friends House, Τ to Cambridge, pot roast dinner in Charles Hotel, then a superbly acted performance of Pinter’s No Man’s Land at the A.R.T., although Chrysanthi kept falling asleep. Vintage Pinter, abourt aging, the confusion of reality with fantasy, the futility of existence.

June 7, 2007

Drove back to Hanover in time to meet Laird Barber for lunch. He has a cousin in Norwich whom he visits. Luckily, he’s healthy and able to travel, most recently to Portugal. Ditto for us, so far. Then drove to Kinhaven, where Alice and I will play Satie. Our first try was rather encouraging. Nice to see old friends, especially Charlotte. But Bruno is missing. Ignat is here with Carolin and the two children, all looking very handsome. Housed again in the Infirmary, somewhat refurbished although without hangers or even a mirror. Managed to reach Chrysanthi on telephone (not cell, which doesn’t work here). She’s off tomorrow to New York to see Daphne. Alice and Susie last week visited Sunnyside (3902 and the office), Atlantic Beach, Little Red. In all our former houses, the current occupants remembered Doctor Bien. My room in 3902 is unchanged as is most of the rest of the house, but the courtyards have been invaded in some cases and all the front doors are no longer green.

June 11, 2007

Kinhaven

Splendid lesson from Nigel, who really knows a lot about Satie, whom he explained chiefly as an anti-Wagnerian. And a splendid solo recital by him: Bach, Mozart, Bartok, Mendelssohn, all played masterfully. Long, nice talk with Ignat after lunch (Dmitri’s birthday cake) on Russian and world politics. Paul Buseck and Lori arrived for supper and overnight.

June 12, 2007

Kinhaven–Hanover

Our Satie was OK, I suppose, although I left out some notes (especially at that difficult page-turn), but people liked Satie’s zest. Trip home included my obligatory chocolate milk shake. Chrysanthi returned from her visit with Daphne and family, the last time in New York, since they’re moving to Santa Barbara in August. Andrew successfully caught a fly ball in his baseball game. Hooray. Better than I ever did.

June 13, 2007

Kendal–Terpni

My final Council meeting and Annual Meeting. Full house. I summarized the Council’s accomplishments; will repeat this for the Board on the 18th. Car in garage for new brakes, available at 5:00 p.m. We headed straight for Riparius but got only as far as Woodstock, when everything went dead in the middle of Route 4. No battery. Called AAA by a miracle (very bad cell-phone service). Waited one hour 20 minutes for the tow truck to arrive, meanwhile trying to reach Leander to cancel our supper appointment in Lake George. A helpful, talkative man kept us company, advised me to call police to help push the car out of Route 4, which happened. When the tower arrived he said, “Let’s look under the hood.” He immediatly found the wire connecting the alternator to the battery, which the garage technician had forgotten to reconnect. So, after starting with jumper cable, we were fine, and continued to the farm, arriving at 12:30 a.m.

June 14, 2007

Tractor battery doesn’t work. Started tractor with jumper cables, hoping to charge the battery. Leander has done yeoman service mowing not only around his house but around ours. Wonderful! We all went out to our favorite Sicilian Pizzeria in Lake George and feasted on escargot and shrimp scampi. The owner’s daughter is studying literature, doing an M.A. at Boston College. Her mother’s worried that she’ll never get a job.

June 15, 2007

Long talk with Earl Millington. He says that Gary is very lax regarding Daphne’s house. Leander hopes to employ Earl as caretaker for all of us. . . . Shapiros visited. They’re selling their Florida property. Fran is still canoeing at age 93.

June 18, 2007

Back to Hanover for my final meeting with the Kendal board. This is the report I gave:

REPORT TO BOARD, 6/18/07

Peter Bien

Since the board last met, on March 12, the Residents’ Council has met six times. I presided only at the last meeting, in June, owing to my ten-week residence in Crete. Betsy Sanderson, the council’s vice-president, presided splendidly in my absence.

I will give the highlights of each meeting.

March 14. Our fund appeal for the council’s activities came in at $29,322, exceeding the 2006 result by $2000. We were pleased to award a college scholarship to Ivana Kovacikova (known to all as “Aka”); she will receive from the council $1500 per year for four years and $2500 per year for four years from the administration. She is expected to return each summer to work in the dining room. Our previous recipient, Ashley Parker, will be helping in admissions this summer. We hope that the 2007-08 council will increase the council’s award from $1500 to $2500 per year.

April 4. This was a special meeting convened to receive the report of the New Era Task Group (Hoke Brissenden, Dick Cherin, Barbara Gilbert, Mary Jenkins, Rose Miller, Tedd Osgood [chair], Walter Reeves, Betsy Sylvester, and Bill Tate), with the understanding that no action would be taken at this time. Council was supplemented by five special guests—Gordon McCouch, Ella Erway, Becky Smith, John Hennessey, and John McCall—each of whom commented on the report. Council agreed by consensus to receive the report.

The NETG’s original charge was to improve the council’s interface with residents, directors, and administration in order to evolve a more participatory and cooperative relationship. Its major recommendations were:

Council should hold closed sessions as well as open ones. The chairpersons of the Residents’ Health Committee, the Financial Advisory Committee, and the Facilities Liaison Committee should be members of council. The secretary as well as the treasurer should be appointed for a two-year term. The president and vice-president, although continuing with one-year terms, should be eligible for re-election for a second year.

The outgoing president should be appointed to the next nominating committee. The nominating committee should serve year-round. The executive director should be able to call special meetings of council to address a limited agenda. Council members should be invited to attend directors’ meetings. Council should be more involved in selecting those residents who will serve as directors or as members of administrative committees.

April 11. Discussion of the NETG report continued. Council agreed that more experienced residents should be nominated to serve on council and that better orientation is needed for new residents concerning the council’s role. Council expects that the nominating committee will know best whom to select. It was clear that yet another meeting on the report was needed.

April 26. At this final meeting, each speaker was limited to a maximum of two minutes, with Kingsley Ervin keeping strict time. The final sense was that there will be no need to change council’s bylaws; however, the 2007–08 council may wish to revise council’s guidelines.

May 9. The nominating committee revealed that it had received suggestions from eighty-eight residents concerning appropriate persons for the next council’s members and officers. Council agreed that the nominating committee should work year-round, concerning itself with committee chairs and members. The NETG report was received with thanks with the expectation that the committee’s hard-working members will now be relieved of their duties.

June 13. Council’s budget stands at a healthy $68,397. At the Annual Meeting that followed council’s brief session, the names of residents who arrived since June 2006 were read aloud, and all were welcomed once again. Harte Crow summarized the board’s major concerns for the near future. The bylaws were changed so that the Health Services Committee will henceforth be named the Residents’ Health Committee. The president summarized council’s major activities since last July as follows:

After much discussion, and some dissention, we formulated a radical non-smoking policy for Kendal. This was approved by the board and is now being implemented by the administration.

Responding to the initiative of the Facilities Liaison Committee, we sent to the board the hope that board and administration will find ways to limit CO_2 emissions and will enhance Kendal’s “greenness” in additional areas. Board accepted this proposal and agreed to set up a relevant committee in due course.

We approved the Financial Advisory Committee’s proposal concerning a method for determining annual fee increases as well as its suggested increase for fiscal year 2008. This was brought to the board, which responded with thanks but could not accept the proposals. Nevertheless, the extensive dialogue between residents and board that took place over this issue may make future cooperation more possible.

We instituted a new Welcoming Committee that will be more effective in orientating newly arrived residents.

We heard reports from most of our major committees.

We have in hand annual reports from twenty-two standing committees and task groups.

We utilized “sense of the meeting” most of the time as the preferred way to make decisions, therefore avoiding the possibility of “we win,” “you lose” that may happen when voting is utilized.

We began and ended each meeting with silence as a way of expressing the collectivity that, one hopes, transcends our members’ multifarious individuality.

The Annual Meeting ended with council’s new president, Ginia Allison, introducing herself and hoping for an active, constructive council in 2007–08.

June 22, 2007

Saw a ewe and the smallest possible faun on the road. And, mowing near the pond, saw a partridge with about six tiny chicks. Tomorrow Chrysanthi begins a nine-day teaching stint for ALPS in Hanover.

June 30, 2007

Drove to Riparius to get mail and saw various people outside a house “reconstructed by Greeks.” So I stopped to say hello and yes they are very much Greeks: Stelios and Anastasia. The invited me to return at 3:00 p.m. for lamb roasted on the spit. I did, and of course the lamb wouldn’t be finished until 5:00. But in the meantime there was lots of talk with them and their friends, Arabs, grandparents born in Jordan, son born here married to a lovely girl born in Jordan. Very pleasant people. They’re Christians: Catholics practicing the Greek orthodox liturgy. Stelios is a contractor, but former owner of Symposion restaurant on 113th Street. He has poured $350,000 into this house, which he now regrets; wants to sell it but of course the price is very high. . . . I bought a Stihl gas-powered trimmer, which is very powerful and will help especially around the pond. Yesterday I got Alec’s Pathfinder off its blocks and started it without trouble. Also cleaned lots of branches near the pond and mowed there. Lots more to clear. Am reading Harry Mark Petrakis’s Shepherds of Shadows for which I agreed to write a foreword. It’s quite interesting: a novelistic treatment of the Greek revolution.

July 6, 2007

Still cleaning up all the blow-down in the fields. Pile after pile. . . . Serious rain as we traveled to Saratoga to see Peter Martins’ new production of “Romeo and Juliet.” And went to hear him talk beforehand about simplifying the scenery, finding a Juliet who looked 14 years old (he did), removing repetitions from Prokofiev’s score. A large undertaking, lacking the magic of Balanchine, but a very fine balcony scene, amazing sword play, and very moving at the end.

July 7, 2007

Elena telephoned from JFK, where Alec and family arrived at 6:30 a.m. We have their house aired, their fridge well stocked, the Pathfinder outside and waiting for use. . . . Finished Shepherds of Shadows. How now to devise the foreword?

July 14, 2007

Finished all the necessary cleanup from the blow-down, a huge job, helped of course by Dan Fones and crew, who spent a full day here. We still want to grind down existing stumps. Visited Fones this evening, to deliver for their daughter, who is expecting, Peter Tebbe’s crib, no longer needed. He and his wife and some friends were drunk on beer, or “happy” rather. Wife very talkative, proud of a little table she made from the burl on our cherry tree. Son, the one who was in jail last year, quiet but civil. I kidded him about becoming an uncle. He smiled (rare). Kelly, the man who worked on the crew, was there with his brother, who proudly showed me his uncut hair down past shoulder length, a ten years’ growth. . . . Finished a draft of the Foreword for Petrakis’s novel, stressing the truthfulness of his account of the Greek revolution: patriotic rather than nationalistic, to use Orwell’s terminology. . . . I’ve been rotating Alec’s photos that need rotation, hoping perhaps to prepare an illustrated talk on Greece for Kendal.

July 17, 2007

Worked very hard with Alec today, our 52nd wedding anniversary. We rented a stump grinding machine. I chain-sawed the stumps as low as they could go. Alec then ground the remains. We finished his plot, did three on our plot, two next to the garden, the large spruce destroyed by ants, then started Leander’s and did maybe ¼ when the machine broke and had to be returned. The sawing was very strenuous because always horizontal.

July 20, 2007

Yesterday and today, Alec and I marked the entire Terpni Partnership property with fresh blue paint. Many fences are still visible. But of course we couldn’t mark the southwest corner, which is in the middle of the swamp.

July 21, 2007

Marvelous ballet matinee with Alec and family. “Circus Polka” (Stravinsky/Robbins), which is all children, one stream followed by several others each of younger ones. Delicious. Then “Jeu de cartes” (Stravinsky’s marvelous music with so-so choreography by Peter Martins). But then Balanchine’s 1940 masterpiece “The Four Temperaments” (Hindemith), which shows his extraordinary imagination. Not a single cliché. Finally “Aurora’s Wedding” (Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty music, choreographed by Martins copying Petipa), as a marvelous demonstration of what ballet used to be like in Russia, with cat, puss in boots, little red riding hood and the wolf, marvelous court jesters, and pageantry galore. Afterwards we gorged ourselves at the Chinese buffet.

July 22, 2007

Surprise: an e-mail from Ole Amundsen saying that on Friday, listening to public radio, he heard Cornell West say that his number one summer reading is Peter Bien’s volume 2 on Kazantzakis. Imagine! . . . Big problem with my Quicken file of Quaker finances which showed a deficit where there is none. Luckily I had a correct backup and was able to fix everything. . . . Finished mowing the south field, which means everything. Και του χρόνου! But how many more years?

July 24, 2007

Marked Alec’s southern border. Very strenuous, climbing up ledges with Alec and Leander (who arrived yesterday). Then we went more or less northwest through difficult terrain (downhill this time) and arrived at the beaver pond. Two lodges and double dam very visible. Also numerous trees felled by these amazing creatures, one tree totally debarked. Spaghetti dinner as a reward followed by ice cream at Stewart’s.

July 25, 2007

Burned the pile, to which Alec added five or six loads of brush from his field. . . . I’ve shortened Ο Καζαντζάκης θρησκομανής for Athens on November 1st. . . . Troy-Bilt sickle bar mower needed a new set of knives, which I was able to order. The existing ones are half broken and all very dull and nicked.

July 26, 2007

Daphne and family arrived for supper—steak on the wood fire outdoors. Christina’s first words to me: “I’m taller than Monica!” Peter’s: “Where’s the tractor?” Greg explained his probable involvement in the future: in a new company that will encourage businesses to lower their CO_2 emissions thanks to certain benefits provided by the company. He’d do the financial part, thanks to his experience and his many contacts in the financial world. The other partners are in London, Hong Kong, China. He’d travel, but intermittently. . . . Alec and I managed to cut several high branches with the rope-chain-saw. Amazing. These had impeded Chrysanthi’s best view from her favorite chair on the porch. . . . I finished shortening Ο Καζαντζάκης στο Βερολίνο for the University of Thessaloniki on November 5th. I can say a lot more in English in 20 minutes than I can say in Greek, apparently.

July 28, 2007

Würzburg

Flew yesterday from Albany via Philadelphia, business class. Then train from Frankfort to Würzburg; stupidly sat in a smoking permitted apartment, empty, but later occupied by two women, maybe Hungarians (train’s terminal: Budapest) who struck me as Lesbians and who smoked continually, when they weren’t eating cold sausages for breakfast. Würzburg is green. Flowers, trees, gardens, parks. A small city apparently 90% rebuilt after being bombed by the British in 1944. Hotel, then to Die Residenz, very ornate, for the conference. Nice to see Darren, Roddy, Fran, Tziovas. Met Niki Stavrou, Patroclos Stavrou’s daughter (!). She teaches with Constance at Indianapolis University in Athens. Very friendly. Told me that they just lost a court case against Stassinakis for supposed libel. He wants Eleni exhumed to prove that Stavrou killed her. Good papers, generally with simultaneous translation of the German ones into English. Lunch downtown pleasantly. More papers. Then a sumptuous Greek dinner. Most of the restaurants here seem to be Greek.

July 29, 2007

Würzburg

Sunday. Church bells. Deserted streets. Eleni Kouvaiou (Rethymno library) said she’d read a simultaneous translation of my paper into Greek, so I prepared the Greek text for her in the early morning, laboriously crossing out all the deleted material from the original lengthy essay. . . . Beautiful formal gardens in back of the Residence and viewed from the ornate “Saal” where we are speaking. Yesterday we also all went to the Town Hall where the mayor greeted us with champagne and a long talk about Würzburg in German, of course, which naturally I didn’t understand. But I feel that if I lived in Germany and studied a bit I would manage the language fairly rapidly. Lots already seems familiar, at least to read, less to speak. . . . This morning’s session was excellent. Dimitri Tziovas spoke about “Being—Becoming,” the possibility of reading Kazantzakis’s novels as “closed” (Being) versus the possibility of reading them as “open” (Becoming). Interestingly, the sort of discussion initiated by Darren Middleton for Kazantzakis’s theology is now being applied to considerations of Kazantzakis’s literary style. I came next with my paper on Kazantzakis in Berlin with Eleni rendering the translation into Greek. Then Niki Stavrou spoke very well indeed on existentialism in Kazantzakis, again picking up from Middleton on Whitehead, etc. Afterwards there was extensive discussion of all three papers. The major question, for me, as expected, regarded Kazantzakis’s communism. . . . Around 1:30 p.m. we all walked to the river to board an excursion boat that went up-river (the Main) very slowly so we could see some villages, lots more greenery, vineyards, striking churches, then entered a lock, exited, reversed direction, and returned. I sat mostly with Darren, Niki, and her friend who is a tenured administrator at Indianapolis (in Athens, of course), and a friend of Constance’s. Niki is adjunct only. Lots of beer and food. . . . I walked back to the hotel, again in the rain, then walked back to the river and across to a large church for an organ and choral concert of Mendelssohn’s sacred music and some secular rounds, all done a capella, and nicely sung. But alas Mendelssohn is not Bach. . . . Met fellow symposiasts and spent another few hours in a nice restaurant where I spoke chiefly with Zdravka Mihaylova, a Bulgarian scholar and government official, very sympathetic, and a Greek man who turned out to be from Rethymno, actually Atsipopoulo, where Andreas and Jane live, and a very nice retired German theologian and protestant minister who wants to enhance German theological discussion of process theology and who told me that he always accompanied C.O. applicants when they went to the tribunal. Back to the hotel at midnight, to find Darren, Niki, and Niki’s friend still talking and drinking good Würzburg wine.

July 30, 2007

Würzburg–Albany

To bed last night at 12:30. Up this morning at 6:00 a.m. 6:56 train to Frankfort. The trains are on time, clean, fast, with lots of amenities. . . . I’m reading Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man en route. He almost makes one believe in Christianity! Some of this may be useful for Kazantzakis as θρησκομανής.

August 2, 2007

We marked Alec’s north border, after crossing below the second beaver dam. Wonderful view of one of the beaver lodges, right against the shore. Hard climb in 90–95 degree humid heat. Theo and Nicholas were with us, doing fine. Hard to know where State land begins (eastern border), but we did find a stake. . . . Troy-Bilt mower broke: metal fatigue. Hope to have it welded by Bud Roddick. . . . I started thinning trees that Dan Gilmore marked. . . . Nigel Coxe here; lots of good talk about his past acquaintances, e.g. Larry Adler the harmonica player, who could do even Rhapsody in Blue. . . . Leander very worried about hordes of hunters on our land. We conferred with Art Perryman, who suggests a gate and says that Waddell Road is famous among locals for baiting and jacking deer. I keep resisting posting. In Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man, p. 218, there is a good expression of my reason: “The maximum of freedom and the minimum of tyranny is achieved when God is recognized as the absolute owner, and man merely as a steward and a user.”

Sunday, August 5, 2007

A very social day. Started by going down to Matt and Deana’s, with Alec. Matt restored a broken part for the jeep clutch. Long talk with Deana. They’re married now. He had cancer of the esophagus and almost died, both from the cancer and the chemotherapy. But he’s in remission and working at a new job in South Glens Falls. Then, back at Terpni, Derek Millington pulled in on his four-wheeler, with two children. He’s the grandson of Daisy and Earl Allen, and will be our full-time neighbor when he builds his house in a year or two. He works as an automobile mechanic at Della Honda on Quaker Road. Nice to have someone close with such skills. He recommended a deep cycle battery for the John Deere; it might survive the winter. Then Alec’s family and we drove to Lake Pleasant to visit Gary and Wendy McGinn, who are now installed in a large religious site that is being refurbished to serve as a refuge for churchgoers undergoing divorces, missionaries in furlough, etc. Huge lodge with bedrooms, pond, fields. Former horse barn. Gary is 59 and expects to retire from Murphy’s in three years. No pension, no health insurance then. . . . Back home to get a bottle of champagne given us by Greg, then to Tom Akstens and Suzanne Murtha’s for a good meal followed by dessert around the fire outside. Tom is negative re: Don Kurka, whose son intends to build on part of Don’s land while Tom buys another part in order to prohibit anything being built on it. A mess, alas. Home at 10:45 nicely lubricated with champagne and a cordial.

August 6, 2007

James McBride arrived, alone. His Italian novel is very likely to be made into a movie using his own screenplay. “The boys” went out, and then Leander and he slept at Daphne’s or, rather, stayed up all night talking. He entertained the children with stories, jokes, grimaces. . . . Earl Millington has apparently fixed my Troy-Bilt mower, which needed lots of welding.

August 7, 2007

Finished my lecture, “Καζαντζάκης ο θρησκομανής” for November 1st in Athens. Went to town to be treated to lunch by Peter Bauer and Bob Harrison of RCPA, who obviously wanted to enlist my financial support. I promised $1000 a year for five years, expecting to still be alive at age 82. I hope that Peter could somehow meet Len Cadwallader and learn about Vital Communities. . . . Stassinakis wants me to lecture again in Crete, but how? . . . The students of a lyceum in Iraklio have sent two pages of interview questions that I need to answer.

August 31, 2007

Two men came with a jeep fitted with a post-hold auger, cement, etc. and installed our new gate—Leander’s great (!) addition that Chrysanthi and I never wanted. So, presumably trucks will no longer invade the property during hunting season. But I expect retaliation in the form of vandalism or worse. We’ll see.

September 5, 2007

Nice 1½ mile hike with Evelyn and Don Greene to a secluded pond on State land near Garnet Lake. I asked Don about the gate and posting. He doesn’t post. Several times when he did post signs they were all torn down and obscene messages were left for him. . . . Late this afternoon we saw a small black bear run across our entire east field to the far side of the pond. . . . I’ve sent my three lectures in Greek off to Vouli to vet the Greek. And the talk in English for the book launch is also ready. So I did do something this summer, although nothing alas on the Kazantzakis letters.

September 23, 2007

Had lunch at “Harvest” in Cambridge with Nurjhan Mamajunusova, the young woman from Kyrgyzstan who finished #1 at Perrotis last June and is now doing an MA at Brandeis, partly with my $5000 support. Poor creature, she went to Greece chiefly to avoid being trapped in an arranged marriage. Her liberal father understood but her mother refused to speak to her for five days. (Things are better now.) Then we went to an extraordinary production at the A.R.T., Nurjhan’s first time ever in a theater: an updating of Don Giovanni combined with Molière’s “Don Juan,” complete with lots of Mozart’s glorious music beautifully sung. A moving aesthetic experience.

October 4, 2007

Lunch with “Pong,” who graciously brought me a present: a Jim Thompson Thai necktie, of course with elephants. This summer he spent another month as a monk, accruing “merit” for his parents. He wants a career in high finance. Interesting that in his Buddhist context this and the monkish service can coexist without difficulty.

October 5, 2007

Lecture by Orhan Pamuk in Rollins Chapel. He is so genuine; nothing pompous or fake or pre-programmed. Profound, brilliant, funny. He read from “Other Colors,” a delicious vignette of a child not wanting to go to school. And he compared his work as a writer to a child’s utter absorption in a favorite game.

October 13, 2007

I organized a dinner in the Penn-Morley room, with wine (!), for the new Pendle Hill president, Laurie Perman, and local Quakers: William and Sally Wriggins, Gordon Browne (who has Alzheimer’s), Pat Ballou, Rose Miller, Chrysanthi, and myself. Relaxed, with real conversation. I wish her well, telling her Dan Seeger’s classic remark about his work at Friendly’s Restaurant: “It’s easier to manage ex-convicts than to manage Quakers!”

October 4, 2007

Long lunch at EBA’s with Laurie and Jack and Ruth Hunter, with more chance to interact meaningfully with Laurie. Useful since I’m about to return to the Pendle Hill board. Yesterday, before her arrival, I performed two movements of the Trout Quintet for 8-hand piano in the Cary Room with Joan Wilson, Bill Clendenning, and Stan Udy, the Dartmouth sociologist. Of course I muffed a few passages but at least didn’t get lost.

October 18, 2007

Yale, Omni Hotel

I spoke at the MGSA symposium, the 20th, on “Kazantzakis in Berlin 1922–23.” Nice to see old friends and colleagues: Eva Constantellou, now doing JMGS book reviews; Dia Philippides, Marinos Pourgouris from Brown, doing well there, and Elsa Amanatidou; Brian Joseph, John Iatrides, Dimitri Gondicas, Peter and Susan Allen, Gunnar de Boel (Göteborg), Dimitri Papanikolaou (Oxford, we met at Iraklio & Rethymno), Constanza Güthenke (Princeton), Constantine Tsoukalas, last seen in Iraklio after his cataract operation by the Rector; Karen Emmerich, now teaching at Barnard; Vangelis Calotychos, George Syrimis; Mache Karanika, now at UC Irvine; Tom Gallant, now at UC San Diego; Gregory Jusdanis, and lots of time with Everett and Brenda Marder and Martha Klironomos. We couldn’t stay beyond lunch on the second day, too bad because the program is extremely rich: lots of new, young scholars. MGSA very alive. . . . Last Wednesday, lobster supper at Kendal with Avery and Marge Post and Weezie and Bill Pietsche. Lots of shared experiences and concerns. Avery regaled us with his stories of meeting the Pope and the Patriarch. I told the lovely story of Patriarch Bartholomew and Veronica Rassias. . . . Have spent the last two weeks vetting the March 3 submissions for possible publication in JMGS. John Anton’s is almost gibberish. Constance Tagopoulos’s has all the documentation confused. Dan Dombrowski’s is perfect. Others are so-so, but needing lots of correction. I’ve been thrown back to the nine years of editing JMGS when I did this regularly. . . . At the Inn the other day, lunching with Tom Corindia, a man came up to me: “Professor Bien! You taught me Freshman English in 1982–3.” He was a Native American, freshly off the reservation in 1982 and now is here to give a public lecture. Apparently I’m still recognizable after 25 years.

October 21, 2007

Penn Club, London

A wonderful first day in London. Good flight last night, happily business class. Gatwick train, sitting across from lovely English children—girls, so typically “mature” in their conversation. Fine room at the Penn Club, which seems to have been painted and has new carpets. Lunch in Russell Square. Then by tube to Earl’s Court to the Finborough Theatre, tiny, maximum 50 seats, for a superb performance of “Little Madam,” an evocation of Maggie Thatcher as a child, wonderfully acted especially by Catherine Skinner in the leading role. The author, James Graham, is 25 years old. Clever use of the child Margaret’s fantasies as a group of phantoms who appear and disappear and then turn into real people like Edward Heath. Thatcher of course becomes increasingly rigid, doctrinaire, and self-righteous. One couldn’t help thinking of George Bush, but also perhaps of Hillary Clinton, despite many differences. Wet sat in the second row and could appreciate the mastery of facial expression as well as voice production of these extraordinary actors. . . . Then to Leicester Square for a spaghetti dinner and back to the Penn Club for coffee and some time for reading the latest TLS.

October 22, 2007

London

To the National Gallery, rooms we’d not seen before, all Christian subjects, reminding one, I suppose, of the utter centrality of this religion for European peoples of older times. Only two El Grecos. Wonderful Rembrandt self-portraits. . . . Bought one-week “oyster cards” for the tube: unlimited journeys. Descended 175 steps at Russell Square station owing to crowded elevator. To King’s at 6:00 p.m. for the book launch. A woman interviewed me for radio. The Great Hall full, every seat taken, mostly by Cretan Association members. Lovely to see Dimitri Tziovas, Peter Mackridge, David Holton, Lewis Owens plus wife (a pianist) and baby, Alix MacSweeney, Rowena Loverance, and of course Roddy and Fran Beaton. I spoke first: “Getting Unstuck from Kazantzakis,” after Roddy’s introduction and something from the Cretans’ president. Then Lewis, then Peter Mackridge, and finally Dimitri. All very complimentary, of course. Afterwards, people came up with books for me to sign. Long talk with Alix and with Rowena, who also came with the speakers to supper at Sofra afterwards. All in all, a moving occasion. Walked back to the Penn Club at 11:00 p.m. with Roddy, Fran, and Dimitri.

October 23, 2007

Dimitri Tziovas spent the night here, so we had a long breakfast together talking about Brum, Meg, Roddy’s estrangement from her because she wrote a negative review of his book on Modern Greek literature, Bryer (sick with arthritis), the future of MG studies in England. . . . Sent a birthday card off to Elena with six $1.00 bills. . . . Another long talk, this time with Joseph Keith, the librarian at Friends House who appreciates everything I gave him about the Quaker school in Greece. He reminded me that Friends House has meeting spaces that can be rented out to outside groups like the American Farm School. . . . Saw an interesting play in the Royal National Theatre: “Rafta Rafta,” about Indian immigrants to England and father-son troubles. Beautifully acted and produced, as always. . . . Then to LSE to hear Kostas Simitis’s lecture on the health of democracy, or lack thereof. A bit abstract, but better in the question period. He is very rational and also very learned. In citing failed attempts at a true third party in Greece, he went all the way back to Σβώλος in 1945–46.

October 24, 2007

Canterbury–Walmer

To the British Library. My reader’s ticket expired in 2003. I renewed it to 2010. But will I ever use it? We met Judith Herrin at the library at 12:30 and had a leisurely lunch together until 2:15. Previously, went through the Treasure Room again. 2008 is a Miltonic anniversary. Listened to the Beatles. Judith is just back from New York, where she went to celebrate her 65th birthday. Her latest book was reviewed, miraculously, in The Economist. (Roddy told me that my volume 2 will be reviewed in TLS by Dan Dombrowski.) Judith and I have many memories, going back to her student days at Birmingham. We learned why Meg and Roddy had a falling out (not healed); she wrote a negative review of his history of MG literature. She walked us back to Euston. We went on the tube (using my marvelous oyster cards) to Victoria and entrained to Canterbury. Roddy met us. We walked in town a bit, in the precincts of the marvelous cathedral, a miracle. Then to Fran and their new residence, a little outside town, lovely, with a long high wall filled with books. And Fran’s mother’s collection of fine china. Then all four to Meg and Michael’s in Wellesley House, Walmer. They now have not only Flat 1 but also the upstairs flat, where we ate and slept, after sherry downstairs. Michael gruff and sweet together—a “character.” Meg very glad to see us (and vice versa). A long leisurely supper lasting until 11:30 p.m.: smoked salmon, lamb, fruit and ice cream, and lots of wine. Meg open about her mother’s death. I played her mother’s eighteenth-century spinet, recently tuned: my Scarlatti sonata, and an Irish song that Meg sang (it was done at her wedding).

October 25, 2007

Walmer–Charing Cross

Slept well upstairs in Wellington House. Coffee with real cream. Meg gave me her latest, Απόκοπος, with her translation, which I’ve begun to read with interest. She expanded on the quarrel with Christos over moving or not moving Pavlos, who is doing well, she says, in Lancashire. He may have bipolar disorder as well as autism—rash shifts of mood. She told of her horrible time in 2005: breast cancer, double mastectomy. Then a viral disease contracted in hospital, then her mother’s decline and death, afterwards concern about her father’s books and archive, since the parental house would need to be sold. Efforts to place George Thomson’s Greek books at the University of Thessaloniki, which I warned her against. No scholarly or intellectual project at the moment because of all these previous concerns; she has given up the hope to write her father’s biography. Someone else can do it better; she’s too close and hesitant to reveal, for example, her mother’s naïveté regarding political factors. . . . Taxi at 9:50—showed us the ancient church in which Meg and Michael were married (because, Meg noted, of her severe illnesses and fear of possible death). Train to Charing Cross. Lunch. The matinee of “Shadowlands,” about C. S. Lewis, a wonderful drama beautifully played: how can a loving God permit pain and death? Lots of fun at first with Mrs. Gresham’s American accent (played by a British actress) but soon her cancer turns everything to sorrow. Lewis’s faith is severely tested. He believes that the future is all; this life is a vale of tears, but his experience shows him the inadequacy of this. . . . A very good Italian dinner. Then a very sterile play even though by Schnitzler and adapted by Stoppard, “Undiscovered Country,” about rich Viennese involved in adultery. Well, we’ve done very well so far: three good out of four.

October 26, 2007

Finally some talkative people at breakfast, an American professor who knows David Roberts and an English meteorologist active in East Africa before retirement. . . . To internet café, where I needed 1½ hours to deal with all sorts of e-mails, including notification from Eirini Lydaki that the Greek translation of my volume 2 has been released. . . . Then to the British Museum. Got some sense of the amazing Chinese terracottas simply by leafing through the catalogue. We viewed the Greek exhibit much more thoroughly than in the past, going all the way chronologically from the Mycenaeans to Alexander the Great, concentrating as always on the Elgin Marbles. But the frieze from Bassae is also extraordinary, although not so monumental. Also paid some attention to the sculptures taken from the temple of Νίκη, which I’d not viewed before. . . . To the Coliseum for Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea,” strangely unlike Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, of course, but with wonderfully expressive music and singing, the orchestra mostly just continuo with harpsichord, but occasionally filled out with strings, even brass, harp, and, at the end, organ. Fanciful costumes; gods and angels on cables flying across the stage. Seneca’s death scene very morning (and ethical). Nero a stinker (played by a female soprano, strangely), but nevertheless redeemed because he values love over everything else (including morality). Poppea slinks and poses, insuring her elevation; yet she, too, ends as an emissary of love and is therefore exonerated from all else. A fitting conclusion to our week in London.

October 27, 2007

Up at 5:30 a.m. to get to Heathrow on the Piccadilly Line, still using our marvelous oyster cards. To Thessaloniki via Frankfort. Met at the airport by Tasos and Vouli. Installed in Cincinnati Hall, recently refurbished. Then supper at Tasos’s, with Dora, Vouli, and Joann. Learned that a new hospital now exists near the Cosmos Mall, apparently the best in Thessaloniki, which has attracted various physicians from abroad. This sounds like it would be perfect for a Kendal-at-Thessaloniki. But Stavros Constantinidis wants to build a hotel on the “C” property, the one that’s large enough for a Kendal. Tasos advises me to deal with one of many companies here that have architects, lawyers, etc., all ready to plan such a facility. But how to pay them is the rub. Tasos showed us a good film about El Greco using text by Kazantzakis. And my volume 2 in Greek has already arrived, so I saw it tonight for the first time. Didn’t say anything to Joann about the presidency, from which she has apparently withdrawn her candidacy. Better when we’re alone.

October 28, 2007

Worked on Καζαντζάκης ο θρησκομανής, fixing it, shortening, revising, and speaking it out loud. Lunch with two students at Perrotis from Kyrgyzstan, a man and a woman, very sweet, able to converse in English. One more girl will come in April. They lack computers, which makes life difficult when the library is closed. The girl’s dormitory room is a quadruple, with toilet, etc. outside in the hall. She says she doesn’t mind. . . . George came. He has had another prostate operation but says he’s now fine. Efthymoula not so fine, either in spirit or body. Spoke to Joann via telephone about the presidency. She vows continued service to the School but family reasons (always!) dictated withdrawal of her name for the presidency. Too bad. I’ll talk to her son tomorrow about Dartmouth. . . . To Odysseas and Eleni in the evening. He’s always very emotional when seeing Chrysanthi. She has serious arthritis in one leg and cannot negotiate stairs very well. Their summer holiday was very short because of a flare-up. . . . Met the professional archivist, Nancy Birk, who is here for three months putting the School’s archives in order. I’d like to do something about lack of computers for Perrotis students unless they come with their own.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Assembly. Prayers. Announcements by Tasos. He introduced Chrysanthi and me but I wasn’t called on to speak. Then we shared a cup of coffee with him and Thanos Kasapidis. Then walked along Σαρανταπόρου to see if number 11—Chrysanthi’s home, where I spent half a year—is still there. It is, the only remainder on the street, and looking very well maintained. Walked on την παραλιακή Οδός Βενιζέλου and bought plane tickets to Athens and back. Then went to the publisher of Tasos’s Olympic games comic book and bought a copy to give to Andrew Tebbe. Home via the #10 bus to Χαριλάου and then the #62 (Thermi) bus to the School’s fence entrance. Saw the dig for the new subway, along Egnatias. Bus hugely crowded with people all crushed together. . . . Went to Joann’s to talk to her son Alexander about Dartmouth and other colleges. He has a very strong CV from Anatolia’s IB program and has applied early decision to Yale. Nice boy, studying Turkish, perfectly bilingual in English and Greek. Then to Salonika, fetched by Vouli in her favorite taxi. Went to movie “El Greco,” very well done, moving and exciting. Nice to see scenes of Venetian Crete after having lived there. And Cretan dancing and music, not to mention El Greco’s paintings. Whether his terrible vicissitudes with the Inquisition are totally historical I do not know. Or his relationship with two devoted women. Must read further.

October 30, 2007

Dimitri Gounelas came at 8:00 a.m. to get addresses for invitations to the doctorate ceremony. I listed some trustees and our relatives and those we know locally. Let’s see if anyone comes. Spent most of the day in class, morning in the School, afternoon in Perrotis College. Did Mary Chism’s English first. Again, she uses computer exercises, which the students do well enough. Then to a sort of composition class: how to organize an essay, very abstract, without much student participation. Then the same materials in another class composed of students with learning difficulties: slower, smaller class; again, too much talking by the teacher, not much by the students. . . . Then to history, half of which was occupied by me, the teacher having asked me to talk about trustees, my career, my translations, etc. I told them the όρτσα story, among others. . . . Went to Perrotis and talked with the new head, Don Schofield. Asked about Vergos. It was hard for him to be demoted, but Don is sure that he will do well in his new position as head of LLL. . . . In the afternoon, I met the Kyrgyzstan student who gave me a present, a local hat, very high-rise, made of sheepskin and worn in both summer and winter. Went then to a College class in English grammar for first year students, beautifully taught by a young Polish woman married to a Greek whom she met when she was a student at Perrotis. Πολύ κέφι. The students responded very well to the exercises, all of which concerned various forms of the future. . . . Chrysanthi and I took a taxi to Cosmos, the new, huge mall. I was not impressed. Lots of fancy stores but not much else. . . . Then for supper again to Tasos and Dora, who had invited the famous educator Tsolakis, also another professor of mathematics (Dora’s colleague). Very nice to meet Tσolakis, who brought me a letter by Kazantzakis to Kriaras, still alive at age 102, and in good health, mind and body. He says he’ll talk to people about publishing the Kazantzakis Selected Letters in Greek after I finish, and wants to publish my lectures in his periodical. Very nice! He is universally respected, so Dimitris tells me. One of the books used by students in the class I observed earlier was by him. He sees himself as continuing the contribution of Delmouzos. . . . Tasos read my Θρησκομανής lecture and corrected various typos and solecisms, thankfully.

October 31, 2007

Θεσ/νίκη–Αθήνα

Halloween. At student σύναξη there were wonderful costumes: a cardinal, a superman, a rabbit, and many more. One of the students we met yesterday spoke well about trick and treat. The rest of the morning, until 11:00, I struggled with the e-banking for Marfinegnatia, which I still cannot make work. Then we flew to Athens. Installed in the Farm School’s apartment at 8 Μαυρικίου in Εξάρκεια, which Don Nielsen tells me is the neighborhood for anarchists. Lovely supper in a nearby taverna with Don and Lia, who happily announced that they’ve been married, or sort of, since his lack of residence permit prohibits marriage. But they went to an island and had there a civil wedding whose certificate still hasn’t arrived, but they’re hoping it will. I delivered the usual pharmaceuticals to Don plus this time an ingenious device to enable him to put on his socks without bending over, which he can no longer do. His Free School project has some new hopes. We talked a lot about depositing archives, since Lia just finished a large translation job for ELIA.

November 1, 2007

Easy to go to the center via bus via Ιπποκράτους. Went to Marfinegnatia Trapeza on Panepistimiou to get them to show me, finally, how to work the e-banking. And they did. Let’s see now if I can do it on my own. . . . To Goulandris Cycladic Museum for a very fine exhibit about El Greco, his painter-son, his chief apprentice, and others (his workshop) who produced canvases meant to be El Grecos but lacking his “spirituality.” Yes, we saw the difference when an original was hung next to an imitation. . . . Then to the Benaki Museum for a good photographic exhibit, most interesting to me because of photos of railway bridges blown up by the Germans as they left Greece in 1944. A nice lunch in a restaurant I knew on Nikis near Plaka, the Delphi now being, sadly, closed for good. On the way back we crossed paths with the schools and university demonstrating again (!) against the government’s proposed legislation to allow private universities and therefore to change article 16 of the Constitution. The ironic thing is that they argue for “free education” whereas their so-called “free” education is so deficient that all families need to spend huge amounts on φροντιστήρια. . . . “Home,” rested, washed, changed into black suit. To the university. Nice to see old friends: Christos, Eri, even Ritsa Papatheofilou, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Kyriaki Petrakou, Athina Vouyiouka, Constance Tagopoulos, whose son is worse and worse. She’s very unhappy in Athens and misses New York. Patroklos Stavrou was supposed to be on the program to give greetings, followed by Petrakou representing Stassinakis (!!). Fortunately, he (Stavrou) is in Washington today at the Library of Congress, where I sent Middleton to replace me. The Rosenberg girl came as well. Lots of official welcomes from deans and provosts. Then I spoke: Καζαντζάκης ο θρησκομανής. Chrysanthi said that I did well, the best Greek she can remember. No question period because they needed to show a very long film afterwards, new, on Kazantzakis’s life, quite accurate, with interesting visuals, including photos of Elli Lambridi. Afterwards, on the way out, we learned that they had feared that the student demonstrators today would try to occupy the building, and they locked the door. But, happily, the students did not appear. Afterwards Christos, Eri, Constance, Chrysanthi, and I went—of course—for loukoumades at our favorite στέκι στο Πανεπιστημίου, near Omonia. To bed by midnight.

Friday, November 2, 2007

To Panepistimiou. Saw Christos again and autographed his copy of my volume 2 in Greek. But then had to leave to get to Οδός Λυσία in Plaka, the Ioniko Kentro, to hear talks on Kazantzakis, including Dia’s. Luckily, I found a young, pleasant, cooperative taxi driver who brought us there, too far to walk especially in this heat. The Ιωνικό Κέντρο is a beautiful neoclassic building totally restored, with large spaces for lectures. Today, people from Finland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and the USA described the extent and nature of translations of Kazantzakis into their language. Bo-Lennart Eklund was the Swede, but didn’t show, and his paper was read. From the Finnish representation, I learned how to pronounce Börge Knös. It is not Knes, but Knös with German ö. And Bér-ye. Speaking about translations in UK and Ireland was David Connelly. We had a very pleasant reunion and he surprised me by announcing that he’ll be present on Wednesday for my doctorate; he teaches now in Thessaloniki although he still lives in Athens. Dia’s presentation for USA and Canada was from her “Census” and was all graphs and percentages. . . . We then walked the short distance to Χαιρέφωντος to visit Brady Kiesling and his partner. Saw his lovely flat, with view of the back of the Acropolis, five minutes walk from Acropolis Metro. He described his investigations of November 17, how most of what he originally thought he knew is false, how the confessions of the perpetrators were very “cooked” in a way that saved certain guilty individuals. He has three chapters ready and has sent them to his agent in New York with the hope of finding a publisher. Of course the avid readership will be here in Greece once the book is translated. His first book, on diplomacy, has just been issued in translation. We then walked to his favorite restaurant, which turned out to be the same one on Nikis that we ate in yesterday. Eventually his partner joined us, a Brazilian lady who works (without a permit) as a “therapist” in clients’ homes. Very pleasant and lively. We talked about Don Nielsen’s situation. Brady says that there are lots of young lawyers who can fix this sort of thing for a reasonable price. . . . We finished at 3:30. More lectures didn’t begin until 5:00. So we went to the Grande Bretagne and ordered a cappuccino and frappé (which cost €16!) and sat comfortably on the hotel’s couches. Very good talks this afternoon, especially the one on the failure of Greek academics to teach Kazantzakis by Γιώργος Κεχαγιόγλου. At 8:00 p.m. came the Round Table. Lovely to hear Katerina describe her childhood awareness of Kazantzakis, and then Rhea Galanaki, who at age 10 in Iraklio marched in Kazantzakis’s funeral procession. Generally, she and others confessed that they earlier had dismissed Kazantzakis as not for them, but are now changing their minds. One of them even declared Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο the finest book in Modern Greek prose. . . . At 9:00 p.m. Dia and Wim came to fetch us by pre-arrangement. They took us to a very lively restaurant just off Panepistimiou near Omonia. Saw Professor Walter Puchner and his wife there. I had μήδια in a cheese sauce, very pungent. It turns out that Wim received an honorary doctorate from Thessaloniki; he warned me to remove my suit jacket because the doctoral robe is so hot. Home at midnight.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Back to the conference, beginning at 10:00 a.m. Very good papers, including one by a young professor, Εύη Πετροπούλου, on Kazantzakis in Germany. She’ll be speaking in Thessaloniki also on Monday. Petrakou fine on Μέλισσα. Κεχαγιόγλου also fine. Went to late lunch with Constance and Αθηνά Βουγιούκα, to the same restaurant on Nikis. Αθηνά very negative about PASOK although she’s a leftist, indeed a communist. Fond farewells. We returned to the apartment, the met Christos and Eri at Ακαδαμίας 48 (γωνία Σίνα), which turned out to be the university staff house: very fancy rooms for conferences, talk, coffee, etc. plus a restaurant with beautiful service, fine menu, and very low prices. A sort of Athenian Yale Club (except for the prices). Christos very excited about the horrors committed by the USA. The abject poverty he saw in Washington, etc. Eri worried about Aspasia-Maria’s typically young-girl behavior, going out at 11:00 p.m. and returning at 3:00 a.m. But she’s very good about calling her mother at whatever hour to establish where she is. We spent three hours of non-stop conversation, over spaghetti and ice cream and espresso. To bed at midnight. At lunch, Aliki and Constance gave us lessons in the latest Modern Greek slang: μπάχαλο = χάλια· μανούλι = ωραίο νέο κορίτσι· πρώτη κάλπσα = πλούσιος show-off. Christos said, interestingly, that he used to spend time with Markos Avyeris and Galatea and that she was pleasant—i.e., that the nervous tantrums, fainting spells, etc. that Kazantzakis refers to in 1923 when she was still married to him were really his fault, that he demanded much from her (and from Prevelakis) but gave nothing to either. Obviously, like many geniuses, he was totally self-centered and ambitious, despite all the fine language about serving the Πνοή.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Back to Thessaloniki. Catching up on e-mail. At 9:00 p.m. Don Schofield met us and we went with him to a good restaurant in Thermi, where we were joined by his partner, of Greek parents who were in Romania because of the civil war. Don recounted his own protracted troubles with Greek authorities over residence and job permits. He recommended a specific lawyer for Don Nielsen. He became a Greek citizen, which helped. He gave me a print-out of his latest translations of a Greek poet who had a stroke and now cannot write. Schofield himself is now an admired poet. He awakes at 5:00 a.m., writes from 5:30 until 9:00 a.m., then pursues his duties as head of Perrotis College.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Assembly with Nancy Birk, who wants me to recommend her for the board of trustees. A student spoke at length, mumbling, about the EU. Father Kyriakos warned students that the Καινή Διαθήκη is a contract by which they will be judged. . . . Then to a class on the EU, specifically on regulations governing the welfare of workers. One of these regulations involves the possibility of mediation. I’ll bring this to Kendal. . . . To the new library on Εθνικής Αμύνης for yet another Kazantzakis symposium. Saw Aglaïa Lypourli. . . . Albana telephoned and we arranged to meet at the Καμάρα for lunch. She related her tale of woe: no job. She’ll finish her MBA course work in June, then write a thesis, and graduate in October, after which, unless some miracle happens, she’ll be forced to leave Greece. She despairs of returning to Albania, which she says is totally corrupt. Her mother, a teacher, earns €200 a month, her father €220 a month. I suggested Costas Kravvas, but she was not treated well by his secretary and in any case his work location would require a 1½ hour commute each way. I suggested America, but she feels responsible to stay near her parents, her brother being still a semi-invalid in Italy. I’ll talk to Dick Jackson about some work-study employment for her at Anatolia. . . . Back to AFS on #10 and #66 buses, then taxi back to town. The closing session of the symposium very fine: Gounelas brilliant on Plato and μονιμότητα, Κεχαγιόγλου repeating his interesting lecture given in Athens, Εύα Πετρόπουλου fine on Kazantzakis and German literature (but she didn’t know about Report to Greco being based on Goethe’s autobiography). I spoke on Kazantzakis in Berlin 1922–23. It went well; I actually got the audience to laugh. Lots of questions afterward that fortunately I understood. Lovely to see in the audience Tasos, Dora, Joann, the mathematician and wife whom we met last week at Tasos’s, Aglaïa, and scores of students—full house. Annie Levis also; she told me that Phil Foote has been replaced by Charlotte Armstrong as board chair: a disappointment. We all went afterwards to the Pan-Cretan Λέσχη for a meal, speeches, photos, and Cretan music with lyra and voice and guitar. 50,000 Cretans live in Thessaloniki.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Assembly. Father Kyriakos spoke beautifully about time: every day is lost, so make it worthwhile, without regrets. Two French girls, exchange students for a short period, voiced their thanks and their invitation to the Greek students to come to France. Very sweet. Of course their common language is English. . . . Met the two Kyrgyzstan students in the library and tried to arrange with Thanos to have them come to the Doctorate ceremony tomorrow. Also had our photos taken, I wearing the tall hat, to send to Nurjhan. Tasos told me that Tsolakis reported that his committee approved the publication of the Kazantzakis Selected Letters in Greek based on my work in English. . . . We watched a group of students, maybe thirty, rehearsing dances for Thanksgiving, done to American country music and taught by the young woman who also does secretarial work, Zina Pantazi, and is the daughter of Pantazis, who used to make the trustees dance. Wonderful exuberance and precision. . . . George came, brought us to Kalamaria, picked up Efthymoula, and we ate a full meal, enduring Efthymoula’s objection to the restaurant, the food, etc. Then to a zacharoplateio for dessert and coffee. Stuffed! Back to Cincinnati Hall at 5:00 p.m. . . . At 8:30 Tasos came, with Dora and Annie Levis.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

My big day. Started with breakfast, really brunch, at Lena Stefa’s spectacular apartment overlooking the harbor. Vouli there and another former teacher at Anatolia. Then met Dimitri in his office; nice to see the department secretary again, who very much remembered me. With some difficulty, but not too much, we collected the €1200 payment owed me. Then to the beautiful new library building and the “special collections” accompanied by three librarians. It’s very real, with archives already in hand (Delmouzos, Triantafyllidis, etc.) and apparent ability to take care. I’ll tell Meg. And they have a few Kazantzakis letters that they promise to send me. Lunch with Dimitri despite the large brunch not too far behind. A nap back at Cincinnati. Change into black suit and shirt with French cuffs. Dimitri and Ruth fetched us at 5:45. To the original University of Thessaloniki building, with its huge Great Hall. Lots of friends came: Aglaïa and Mimis Lipourlis, Albana (big hug and kiss afterward), Tasos and Dora, Pelaghia and George, Don Schofield, Gertzis and a few other teachers, Randy, Joann, David Connolly, Zeta (in robes, representing the department), George, Efthymoula, Odysseas, Andreas and son Γεωργάκι, Tilda and Dimitri, Nikos, Toula, Takis. I gave Toula Leander’s phone numbers. Two students from my class with Dimitri some years ago, Vouli, Lena, her friend from brunch, Professor Sifakis, who inspired the central library at Rethymno, the wonderful man, Tsolakis, who is arranging for the Letters to be done in Greek, Frairis from Monday’s conference, and lots of others I didn’t know, plus the Kyrgyzstan student from Perrotis, and a whole gang of students currently studying at the university. Of course Dimitri and Ruth, the vice-provost, dean, head of classics. The vice-provost gave some of my background; then Dimitri spoke at length about my books, translations, textbooks, etc. Then I stood up. The official dedication was read, I was “dressed” in robe and hat. Applause. Then I gave my talk, Καζαντζάκης ο επιστολογράφος, which apparently went well. I had no difficulty, it seems, with the Greek. Afterwards, a long line of people offering congratulations, a buffet upstairs, and home with Tasos and Dora.

November 9, 2007

Up at 3:40 a.m. Taxi at 4:15 a.m. Alitalia to Milan. US Airways, envoy class, to Philadelphia. Home after 26 hours.

November 21, 2007

Leander’s

Went to see the new art’s center at Strathmore. Beautiful hall, all in birch and maple. Then to a supermarket catering to Hispanics and orientals. We were the only Caucasians there. Very funny video later, of a health-food freak serving “tofu turkey” for Thanksgiving. Leander took us all to a good Greek restaurant in Bethesda and I had ιμάμ μπαϊλντί. . . . Vetting Constance Tagopoulos’s essay again from the beginning because she revised it. Ugh! Agreed to pay for a computer for the Kyrgyzstan student at Perrotis, about €60.

November 22, 2007, Thanksgiving

Nice turkey dinner, as always, topped by Greg’s superb wine (Cohn’s). Daphne telephoned, as did Monica and Alec. Afterwards, we all laughed heartily at the Disney animated film “Ratatouille.” . . . I worked on vetting Tagopoulos’s revised essay (still very confusing) and on writing up my adventures at the Farm School, in order to distribute to trustees.

December 1, 2007

Brenda Marder asked for a translation of the doctorate proclamation for an article she’s writing on me. So here it is. It sounds just like the exaggerated rhetoric of the Hellenistic proclamation regarding Octavian and Antony in Cavafy’s poems. Plus ça change . . .!

VOTE

of the Department of Philology

of the School of Philosophy

of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki

for you

Peter Bien

Professor Emeritus of Dartmouth College, USA

The teachers of the section Medieval and Modern Greek Studies

and its chairwoman Georgia Farinou-Malamatari

said that

you have fulfilled fifty years of fertile intellectual work

and have dedicated a large portion of it to the study of the

demotic language and of outstanding authors of modem Greek

literature, especially the work of Nikos Kazantzakis, scrutinizing

archives, translating his novels, analyzing the religious and

philosophical basis, and composing the first complete

two-volume biography.

The Department of Philology of the School of Philosophy,

wishing to honor you, the sensitive translator, the skillful

anthologizer, the tireless student who approached modem

Greek literature critically, historically, and comparatively,

and the energetic ambassador of Greek literature who with

modesty and results contributed in various ways to its

promulgation, especially to the English-speaking world,

has decided unanimously to award you

the honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy

and to grant you all the accompanying privileges.

In Thessaloniki,

the seventh day of November, two thousand seven.

December 3, 2007

Atlanta

I spoke on “Kazantzakis’s Religious Mania” at a beautiful museum at Emory University, sponsored by the Greek Consulate and the local Greek (maybe Cretan) community. Good audience; lots of questions and comments. A priest, Father Panayotis, spoke interestingly about Orthodox wisdom that goes against the Augustinian-Platonic-Aristotelian insistence on God’s immutability. Consul Lambros Kakissis was an exemplary host, as was Maria Doiranlis, who studied art history at Columbia and knew Sean Hemingway. Wonderful Greek restaurant afterwards.

December 4, 2007

Atlanta

Consul Kakissis drove me around the city. Then brunch with Father Panayiotis. Then more sightseeing, the highlight of which was the tomb of Martin Luther King, next to the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he preached. He was killed so young, only 39 or so. Atlanta unimpressive; no public squares or great parks, just nondescript streets, but with interesting architecture. . . . Read Dan Schofield’s translation of Nikos Fokas along the way, very fine, maybe better than the Greek.

December 9, 2007

Pendle Hill

On the way down on the train on December 7th I thought, “Why am I doing this again?” However, being at Pendle Hill has changed my mind. What a stimulating place! Strong Meetings for Worship, lovely conversations at meals, lots of friendly people glad to have me back. Fascinating account from Denis, from Rwanda, about how and why the genocide took place. Mary Ann, a Unitarian pastor, showed me a very useful magazine article on Darwinism, process theology, etc. Another told me of a relevant book on the same subject. Friend in Residence, Jennifer, described how Woodbrooke has renewed itself very successfully. Pendle Hill still has a $500,000 annual deficit. Should we change or abolish the resident program? It’s possible, for 2008–09 but not necessarily the best idea. Laurie Perman is a strong director, and also personable. I congratulated her for not sitting on the facing bench during Meeting for Worship; she appreciated this. During prayer requests at Meeting I asked for prayers for us who will vote on January 8 in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. . . . Drove to Dan Seeger’s in Lumberton. He’s very busy in various Quaker activities, but not writing much. Alan and Bev Gaylord came for tea; they are neighbors. Louise Frankenbury teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as does, maybe, her husband Dick Corum. Alan has privileges at Princeton as an alumnus. Lots of exchange information about children.

December 20, 2007

Played piano for the Kendal read-through of the Messiah, part 1, plus Hallelujah chorus, Becky conducting. I got lost a few times but generally did well enough. Switched to organ for Hallelujah.

December 22, 2007

A marvelous tour de force at the A.R.T.: “No Child,” written and acted by Nilaja Sun in a one-woman bravura performance that brought the entire audience to its feet in a standing ovation. The subject: the rigors of teaching in a slum school in the Bronx, especially under “No Child Left Behind” legislation. She, the teacher, decides to entice the obstreperous students into performing a play. “You’re thespians,” she tells them. “What, Lesbians?” is all they can reply. But in the end, they do perform, more or less, and probably fail their Regents exams.

December 24, 2007

South Salem

Here at Daphne’s and Greg’s substantial home, which they will now occupy perhaps two months a year. Strangely, I’m reading Cathy Wilkerson’s (Audrey Logan’s daughter’s) book Flying Close to the Sun, all about her rebellion from the middle-class values and wealth of her parents and class, and her involvement in radical anti-Vietnam War movements like SDS and eventually Weathermen, ending in the explosion of homemade bombs destroying the Wilkerson home in Greenwich Village and killing three of her companions there. To read this in the ostentatious wealth of South Salem is indeed strangely disconcerting. Chrysanthi and I walked in the neighborhood this afternoon, viewing one oversized mansion after another. . . . Christina is psychologically very maladjusted, it now seems—always angry and non-communicative. It’s interesting that Sophia, earlier a mess, is now apparently quite OK whereas Christina, earlier OK, is now a mess. What a shame! Last night at supper she sat with her head down on the table, repeatedly commanded by Greg to “sit properly.” It’s painful to watch. . . . Greg is involving himself in various environmental initiatives but always as a consultant or board member, not “buying in.” He also is thinking of running a training institute for young tennis players. . . . Vetted Dennis Carroll’s “Prologue” to a book of vituperation against America’s obsession with victory. Strong but, as always with Dennis, too long. . . . Did I mention here the lovely review of my volume 2 by Don Dombrowski, full-page, calling the work “magisterial”?

2008

Hanover

January 1–June 9

Jan. 12–14, Tempe, Arizona, Busecks

Jan. 14–25, Santa Barbara, California, Daphne’s

Jan. 26, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Jan. 31, Manchester airport, Highlander, 603 625-6426

Feb. 1–5, Pendle Hill

Feb. 5–6, Leander’s; Washington, Cosmos Club

Feb. 18–22, Pendle Hill

Feb. 23, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Feb. 23–25, Hartford

March 5–8, New York

April 16–17, Washington

April 18–21, Pendle Hill

May 16–17, Riparius

May 24, Cambridge

Riparius

June 10–September 10

June 27–28, Andover, Wyndham Hotel, 123 Old River Road, Andover, 800 219-4606

Hanover

September 11–December 31

Oct. 7–12, Thessaloniki, Farm School, Hotel Ambassador, 2392021200

Oct. 13–23, Iraklio, Hotel Atrion, Rm. 314, 9 Χρονάκη, 2810 246000, atrion@her.forthnet.gr

Oct. 24–26, Rethymno, To Σπίτι της Ευρώπης

Oct. 27, American Farm School, Thessaloniki

Nov. 15–17, Chicago

Nov. 25–28, Washington (Leander’s)

Dec. 12, Amherst

Dec. 13–14, Cambridge, Sheraton Commander Hotel, 617 457-4800

Dec. 23–25, South Salem (Daphne’s)

Dec. 26, Riparius (Leander’s)

January 12, 2008

To Tempe, Arizona

Arrived late: midnight our time, 10:00 p.m. their time. Paul is with Peter and Alice for the weekend. Alice in good spirits. No hair owing to chemotherapy. Her cancer, she told us, is incurable, because spread throughout the body, but in about 90% of cases it goes into remission after treatment. She’s been very bad on certain days and fine on other days. Once, she fell on the way to the toilet during the night and was too weak to get up. So, we’ll see what will happen with her lymphoma in the next four or five months, when the chemo treatment is meant to end. . . . Read Dennis Carroll’s extended essay about Americans’ obsession with victory. It’s brilliant, the best thing he has written. I’m going to send him a lengthy commentary. He writes movingly about his father, Admiral Carroll, and scathingly about Leon Black.

January 13, 2008

Tempe

Played Dello Joio with Alice, who finds the piano difficult because of her illness. But she likes the piece. Paul is here through lunch. Lots of good talk about his teaching on the Indian reservation. In the afternoon, went to the Phoenix Botanical Gardens with Peter and Alice. Marvelous cactuses of all kinds beautifully displayed. The miracle of adoption to a dry, hot environment. I then took everyone out to dinner at a good Italian restaurant. Alice today had her very best day, as though nothing was wrong.

January 14, 2008

Tempe–Santa Barbara

To a bird sanctuary with Peter and Alice. Large egrets and blue herons. Xeriscape vegetation. Very open and quiet. In the afternoon, Peter took us to Arizona State University, his office, etc. 60,000 students, a whole city in itself. Alice in good form today, too. She has her fourth chemo soon. Total is meant to be eight. Previous treatments caused great trauma, including hysteria. But her white blood cell count is now much lower—a good sign. . . . Flew to Santa Barbara. Daphne and Greg live in a former estate built in 1916, called Villa Rosa to remember a manor house near Lake Como. Truly baronial. Huge rooms, too many. A wine cellar at 58 degrees Fahrenheit, a guesthouse where we are housed, immense patio, swimming pool, two Jacuzzis, one outdoors, one indoors, majestic oak trees, fountains, statuary, etc., etc. Three hugely expensive automobiles, a cleaning lady, a gardener, someone washing the cars.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Montecito

Drove to Peter’s school, run by the Episcopal Church. Young mothers all in jeans, blond hair. Then to the beach: surfers, gorgeous beach-front homes, oak trees, eucalyptuses, bougainvilleas. To the village stores. Orchids for sale. A ride part way up the mountainside. Then further up to Christina’s school. . . . Trying to respond to Dennis Carroll. Also to put Katy Fleming’s corrections into my vetted March 3 papers, before sending them to Peter Allen for JMGS.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

We drove over the mountains to Los Olivos to visit the Firestone Vineyard. First, wine tasting, 5 or 6 varieties, each explained by an employee. I particularly liked the 2004 Syrah Estate. Then a full tour of the facility: vineyard, process of squashing the grapes, process of fermentation, oaken barrels for maturation. Then to Beckmen Vineyards, much smaller, for another round of tasting. Then lunch in a village looking like a movie set for a John Wayne western. On the way back, drove along the beautiful Santa Barbara waterfront and harbor and the famous wharf. Palm trees, green grass, volleyball courts, tennis, lots of bicycling. . . . I’m reading over my February 6 lecture on Οδύσεια.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

To the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to “Reef,” a demonstration of sea life on the Santa Barbara reef. We were special guests of the director, who had us handle sea urchins, starfish, a baby octopus, and see small sharks, shark eggs, and other fascinating creatures. Picked up Christina, who had “slept” overnight at a school friend’s and was, happily, not as solemnly offensive as usual. Maybe lack of sleep helps her. Peter had a tantrum screaming at Daphne “I hate you” and hitting her. Andrew, as always, the angel of the troop. Christina is a terrible mess; we haven’t exchanged three consecutive words all week. She answers in monosyllabic sentences: “Yes,” “No,” “Nothing,” and the like. Disappears as soon as she returns home or dinner is over. Interestingly, Leander’s Sophia, who started as a problem, now seems fine. The reverse is true for Christina, alas.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Drove Greg’s BMW to central Santa Barbara to attend Quaker Meeting: small, entirely silent, very friendly. Older people but also young couples with children, and a man next to me reading a Pendle Hill pamphlet by George Peck. . . . In the afternoon we all went to the painting and handicraft exhibit on the grass along the seafront. Most interesting, at the start of the Stearns Wharf, was an “installation” by Veterans for Peace: 3000+ grave-markers for those killed in Iraq, plus an indication of the number of Americans wounded and the number of Iraqis killed and wounded. . . . Last night on TV, a moving special on the life of Martin Luther King, whose birthday is celebrated tomorrow. Christina has a friend with her and is much less morose now, at least with the friend. . . . Watching lots of very exciting tennis: the Australian Open. Out for supper at a Mexican restaurant.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Working on the JMGS issue doing our March 3rd symposium, integrating Katy Fleming’s vettings into my own. . . . Off to Sea World on the Wharf, very good for children (and adults), amazing to see an octapus up close, and jellyfish propelling themselves. . . . Watched Andrew’s tennis clinic, a dozen nine-year-olds actually hitting the ball and racing around the court. Lucky children! . . . Supper in a fancy hotel with Oran Young and his wife Gail. I wanted them to meet Greg because Oran is head of the Bren School at UCSB, doing graduate degrees in environmental science, and his wife is an environmental lawyer. Lastly, watched the Democratic debate: Obama, Hillary, and Edwards. Hillary and Obama punching each other disgracefully. Edwards speaking more to the issues.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Finally saw the other side of Santa Barbara. Went with Daphne to Storyteller, where she hopes to volunteer. It’s a school for deprived children aged eighteen months through five years, mostly Hispanics from non-functional families and/or harmed in the womb by mother’s drug-taking. They stay from morning until 5:00 p.m., for free. Biog grant from the owners of Kinkos. All the teachers are bilingual in Spanish. All signs are in both English and Spanish. We got a full tour by the director and a member fo the Advisory Board. I’ll send them a contribution. I was told that the population of Santa Barbara is mostly of the very rich and trhe very poor, with those in between needing to live 20 miles away and commute to work. . . . Nice lunch in Montecito afterwards, with the very rich. . . . 4:00 p.m. tea with the immediate neighbors, who invited us as well as the children. The husband is a good amateur photographer. The redwoods he planted about 30 years ago are now huge. Oprah Winfrey’s property adjoins theirs and is somewhat visible.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Heavy rain. Cold. Working on “Science and Faith” for my Kendal Inter-faith Gathering in March. Also finished vetting, again, Galanopoulos’s impossible essay. . . . Dinner at a good Italian restaurant; Then to a huge theater on State Street to hear Pinchas Zukerman play the Bruch violin concerto and conduct Beethoven’s 5th, both magnificently. Huge theater full and appreciative.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Visited Andrew’s school, where the lunchtables, etc. are outdoors (although today it is raining). Children all in recess outdoors. When the bell rang, they all reentered classrooms instantaneously. Huge computer lab, with the newest Apple computers. Full library. Lucky kids! . . . Lucia came at 11:30, to take Chrysanthi out to lunch. She has markedly aged since we last saw her. Greg and I met Brock Brower in town for a long talkative lunch. Brock seems to know everyone, including several people that he hopes to introduce to Greg. He told, at length, about huge difficulties regarding 200,000 acres of forest. He’s just finished a novel set in Norwich and involving the Norwich Inn (renamed) and Sally. . . . Greg’s former boss at Goldman in London is now living in Santa Barbara. He came to say hello. Amazingly, they’ve been to North Creek and know David Moro and Jackie. . . . Warm goodbyes to Peter and Andrew and Daphne. Christina says that she’ll be up at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow and will drive with us and Greg to the airport. We’ll see. . . . Just about finished my sermon on Science and Religion for Kendal in March.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Cambridge

Overnight at Friends Center. Marvelous production of Frayn’s «Copenhagen» at the A.R.T. with Will LeBow as Bohr. So moving and at the same tiome so intellectual—just what I like. Better than the original production we saw in England in 1998. And useful, a bit, for my Science and Religion sermon.

February 1, 2008

Pendle Hill

At one gathering in the evening I told the other trustees about my Science and Religion ideas. Lindelee thinks it really does apply to Quakerism. I should write to John Punshon and ask, and then perhaps enlarge the current text to become a Pendle Hill pamphlet.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Meetings all day and evening. Very pleasant, cooperative board now. Hal Weaver is gone, thankfully, and Laurie as director is much more genuine than Steve Baumgartner, who bludgeoned us into supporting all his crazy ideas. I’ll serve on the Education Committee. We should add literature and social justice (activism) as regular courses, like Woodbrooke. I spoke with a man here for a year completing a five-volume (!) history of poetry and autobiography. Who will read it is the question. Practiced on my Yamaha, which continues to be lovely.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

We finished with lunch. Mike Heller, Gaye from Haverford, and I will try to get college students to intern at Pendle Hill. . . . Drove out to Longwood Gardens, beautiful as always. Special emphasis now on orchids. . . . Pendle Hill library has an interlinear Greek-English New Testament. I photocopied the Gospel of John to begin studying it, and found that the Greek is almost modern and quite comprehensible most of the time. . . . It’s very nice to be here again; one’s life is stretched. Rebecca Mays will be teaching here in the summer. I telephoned her and found her daughter Anna, who was very ebullient, but so far I haven’t found Rebecca at home. . . . Tried Dello Joio with Sara, a cook here, but she couldn’t sight-read well enough to do much. Played solo for an hour afterwards on the lovely Yamaha.

Monday, February 4, 2008

Attended Marcella Martin’s class on prayer, very intense and informative. We practiced mantras tied to breathing. I did Δόξα σοι ο Θεός, which coordinated well. She taught about icons and light, so I was able to contribute a little. By lunchtime I was very hungry. This must be “active learning.” . . . Went to potluck supper at Chester Meeting to meet the group walking from Boston to Washington in the cause of peace. Leader: an American woman who is a Buddhist nun—hair shaven off, yellow robe. Another American. The rest Japanese. They sang a mantra for us that they use while walking, complete with drums. Showed a CD film about leukemia in Iraqi children caused by our explosives using “depleted uranium,” which also injures the American soldiers who handle these materials, not knowing. I suggested letters to the Times, ideally written by Nobel laureates, whom we might be able to find with the help of Cambridge Meeting. The problem is that depleted uranium is hush-hush. One of the Chester group sang protest songs with guitar, quite well. Another world: men with long hair and pigtails. . . . At the supper, Janet Shepherd was present. Nice to catch up with her regarding Pendle Hill.

February 5, 2008

Leander’s

To D.C. by train. Leander picked us up at Rockville and we went to the community center where Nicholas was having his weekly lesson in basketball. The teacher is a former professional and he thinks the world of Nicholas, who really is remarkable, learning to dribble all different ways (sometimes with two balls at once), to do lay-ups and reverse lay-ups, to shoot from the three-point line (he can get the ball all the way and often makes a clean basket). Also: running sideways. Then we met Deanna and Sophia and had a feast in Legal Sea Foods. Watched TV to see the results of the super-Tuesday elections, but it was too early for California.

February 6, 2008

Cosmos Club and Georgetown

My talk on Kazantzakis’s Odyssey apparently went very well, judging from lots of comments afterwards. Nice to see Jim and Penelope Alatis there, and especially Deb Tannen, who wants to meet for supper with Chrysanthi and Michael Macovsky when we’re next in town. Dennis Carroll came but rushed off afterwards to visit his mother, who’s in hospital and very ill. Jim and Marge Warren came, Jim looking considerably older; he’s 80. My co-hosts couldn’t have been nicer. And there was a woman who wants to organize a remembrance of Kimon Friar. I promised to cooperate. Afterwards, supper at McLean, Virginia. I had ιμάμ μπαϊλντί. Lots of talk with my co-host, young and attractive. Back to the Cosmos Club at 12:30 a.m.

February 7, 2008

Jim Warren came at 10:30 and we talked non-stop until 12:30 about the Marshall Plan, Nick Burns, Brady Kiesling, the Iraq catastrophe, State Department teaching of Greek, Psacopoulos, cherry blossoms, dogwood. He promised to show us spectacular dogwood if we come in the spring. . . . Checking out, I passed Hank Paulson, who was with a group going in for lunch. But by the time I turned around with intent to speak to him, he had disappeared into the dining room. Too bad. I would have opened with, “I’m Peter Bien, Professor of English, Dartmouth College, and father-in-law of Gregory Tebbe.” It would have been interesting to hear his reaction.

February 8, 2008

“I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.” —Freeman Dyson, reviewing John Polkinghorne’s The God of Hope and the End of the World (The New York Review of Books, vol. 49, no. 5, March 28, 2002, page 6).

February 12, 2008

An extraordinary concert by Sally Pinkas and Evan Hirsch, two pianos and percussion for Bartok’s sonata. But the highlight for me was the Brahms “Variations on a Theme by Haydn,” which can be all fire and brimstone at one moment and then immediately peaches and cream at the next. They also did Milhaud’s “Le creation du monde,” very jazzy owing to Milhaud’s experiences in Harlem

February 21, 2008

Pendle Hill

Just finished a four-day course taught by Chris Ravndal on the Gospel of John. Very well done both because of his good spirit and a diverse, stimulating group of students. And how nice for me to be simply a student, without the worries and apprehensions of the teacher! Part of the pleasure came from reading a lot of the text in the κοινή Greek and discovering that I really can do this. John’s Gospel, at least, is easy. The Greek is almost modern. 90% of the words are the same. The differences in grammar—datives, for example—don’t bother me because of my acquaintance with katharévousa not to mention the study I did of κοινή at Selly Oak Colleges and my rudimentary study of ancient Greek with L. A. Post at Haverford and then Prof. Kitto at Bristol. What I discovered in this course was that even I, a Quaker universalist, liberal, and skeptic, can find Biblical study engrossing. And I appreciated the literary skill of the author(s) of John. What stood out for me was the repeated contrast between a physical manifestation and the creative spirit behind it. This begins in the Prologue with the difficult term ο λόγος. Yes, it is the “Word,” but more importantly the creative power that produces words. Jesus, each time he performed a miracle, gave a sign (σημείο), showing that the spirit behind the material accomplishment was what mattered. Very Quakerly: compare our replacement of the physical, material aspects of the sacraments with the spiritual meaning behind them. We had lots of fun with Pilate’s “What is truth”! Students included Ann, who raises llamas; Barbara, thirty years a Methodist pastor but recently dismissed by her bishop; another Barbara: a Unitarian pastor; a black lady, Sharon Knox, with a huge laugh, who spoke of her slave great-grandmother; an ex-Roman Catholic now drawn to Buddhism; Lauri’s husband; a man from MissourA; the current Friend in Residence, Marian Fuson, remarkably agile in mind at age 87; and some Pendle Hill staff and students. . . . I treated everyone to baklava tonight. For lunch today, Maria Χναράκη, who teaches at Drexel, came and we talked in Greek about Kazantzakis’s theater. She’s interested in Kalomoiris’s Πρωτομάστορας especially.

February 23, 2008

Cambridge

An interesting modern-dress production of Julius Caesar at the A.R.T., complete with a jazz trio doing the musical interludes. I missed Shakespeare’s transcendent language.

February 24, 2008

Hartford

Went to Hartford Quaker Meeting in the morning. Some good ministry about the spirit behind words. I thought of course of John’s Λόγος. A man remembered my name from Haverford. Then to the Mark Twain house, very grand. He made lots of money by marrying well, and then of course from royalties, until he lost it all in a bad investment. He regained it and paid off his debts thanks to a worldwide lecture tour. . . . Then to the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, much more modest. We must read Uncle Tom’s Cabin again to see how it stands up. In 1852 it was a worldwide sensation and very responsible for the attitudes that made civil war essential. Then to Park to Park Street Playhouse in West Hartford to see Gail Schoppert in a play about a millionaire who recognizes no right or wrong, only “I can, I must.” Well acted, compelling performance. David and Patti Buck came also, and we dined together and then saw them at the Schopperts’ house afterwards. They think I should continue to press for a Kendal in Greece. Perhaps I could interest Charlotte Armstrong. Others were there from various international schools in Beirut, etc.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

New York City

Rode down with a Kendal group by bus all the way. Looked for 8-hand music at Patelson’s. Nothing. Attended Paul Taylor ballet at the City Center. Delicious, especially his “classic” Aureole” (Handel) followed by the hilarious spoof “Troilus & Cressida (reduced) to Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours, full of sequences about dancers who supposedly cannot dance. “Counterswarm” to electronic music by Ligeti was harder to take but the final number, “Arden Court” (Wm. Boyce) was pleasantly traditional. Marvelous dancers, many of whom performed in two or even three of the evening’s ballets. I bought a CD-ROM so that Chrysanthi could see something of what she missed.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Began by translating, for the Secondary Committee, the new rules for technical education, sent me by Bill McGrew in Greek. Yesterday, on the bus, worked on Maria Zarimi’s failed proposal for a fellowship in Australia to turn her “Darwin and Literature” thesis into a book. As in her thesis, which I vetted in Crete, her English here was so bad that it’s no wonder the committee said No. . . . The only member of the Secondary Committee present was Manita. But lots of visitors attended. I wrote up the minutes afterwards, then went to Strategic Planning and fell asleep during most of it. Walked back with John Crunkilton, stopped at the Empire State Building to see the lobby, with its plaque indicating Al Smith as president, and then visited the 42nd Street Library: special exhibit on Kerouac showing his scroll of On the Road, and a small exhibit celebrating John Milton’s 400th with some first editions. This city is very stimulating! Then to cocktails at Sheila Baird’s. Long talk with Gail about expatriation, thinking of course of Alec. Joann Ryding, while speaking to me, sank to the ground—fainted. We took her into the bedroom and seated her, whereupon another attack ensued—lack of breathing. Then better but very pale. Called 911. Ambulance came in 10 minutes. Examination showed her heart OK but variable blood pressure, and she went off to hospital with Bill McGrew in attendance. Bill Tsoucalis invited me to accompany him and his wife and Jud to a Japanese restaurant where we had a leisurely supper with much good conversation about academia, Democratic politics, faculty salaries, and the like.

Friday, March 7, 2008

We met on Exchange Place, next to Wall Street, in the conference room of a foundation. I attended Finance Committee for the first time and listened to the presentation by two officers of the Bristol Company that manages our investments. They do it on the long-term basis, avoiding big swings because of market fluctuation. Not a very good speaker, but the financial results are OK. Then Higher Education Committee. Everyone is committed to keeping Perrotis largely a residential campus, which will mean building a new dormitory or some equivalent. Charlotte told me, regarding a Kendal on Farm School land, that I’d have to produce a feasibility study. But how? I also attended the Farm Committee to hear the latest about our cows and poultry and the land, which is still not purchased although we should be able to close the deal soon. Then back to the Yale Club for a break. Then back to Exchange Place. Bus to DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn to Vince’s favorite restaurant. Lots of wine and good cheer, toasts to Phil Foote, the retiring chairman. I told the story of the man I met in Sydney who was expelled from the School by Bruce for leading a student revolt and who told me that Mr. Foote was the only one who defended him and argued against expulsion. I sat between Daisy Pappou and Barbara Heming, convincing Barbara that a CCRC is not such a bad thing. Back to the Yale Club via the same bus, at 11:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Down to Wall Street early. I walked to Bowling Green. The lovely Customs House is en face and the water is visible. Old Dutch New Amsterdam plus huge skyscrapers. AFS full board from 9:00 to 1:00 without a break. Charlotte Armstrong now in the chair. I of course gave my Secondary Committee report and answered questions as best I could. No major changes noted except perhaps to cancel the June meeting (good!). We’ll meet next in Greece in October. . . . Got to Beaumont Theater to be informed that South Pacific lasts until 5:00. (Our group thought 4:00.) But I’ve got TLS’s to read and Brittles’ new novel. Bought manouri cheese in Grand Central market; they’re carrying it again after several years when they had only kasseri. . . . Met the Dartmouth group at the Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center. Bus to Kendal on Hudson, where Gay Berger was waiting for me. She proudly showed me her apartment on the third floor, with full view of the Hudson River at its widest, with the Tappan Zee Bridge visible on the left. Lovely. But the apartment seemed cramped and small. Ours at Kendal is much better. Nice to see Horst again. We then ate in their “café” downstairs. Nothing special. Met a Greek-American lady who lives there and serves on Pendle Hill’s general board. Gay says she’s appalled that Rebecca Mays will be teaching again at Pendle Hill. I told her about Rebecca’s “inability” to return my telephone call. Par for the course. Back home at 1:30 a.m. and we had to advance the clocks for daylight savings, which made it 2:30 a.m.

March 12, 2008

Long lunch with Mats (Matthew Lemberger), who is trying to plan his life. Law school? Comparative literature? Another B.A. at Oxford? I’m putting him in touch with Bob Donin about law and Dan Dombrowski about studying philosophy and especially Spinoza and Leibnitz. Also contacted Oliver Goodenough about Vermont Law School, but he didn’t answer.

March 14, 2008

Don Connolly did our taxes, since poor Frank Currier has cancer of the esophagus. Lots to pay this year, over $20,000, but gross income was well over $200,000.

March 16, 2008

I spoke at today’s Interfaith Gathering on Science and Religion, highlighting Don Cupitt. Lots of people asked for written copies afterwards.

March 27, 2008

Chrysanthi had a freak accident but luckily is OK. Trying to put gas in the car she suddenly was showered by gasoline, which got in her eyes, hair, and saturated her coat. People in the service station called an ambulance and she was well treated in the “poison center” of the emergency room with the eyes flushed out, etc. Luckily she reached me by telephone and I fetched the car, still parked at the station, and brought her home. We were supposed to go to the Kendal dinner-dance that evening. No way. She rested. The entire apartment smelled of gasoline from her clothes. The lucky thing of course is that no one was in the vicinity with a cigarette.

March 28, 2008

Took Chrysanthi to an ophthalmologist at the hospital. He pronounced the eyes unharmed. Later we heard that Charlie Boren, a Kendal resident, had been killed this morning in a car crash occasioned by black ice on the road. I saw him yesterday looking happy and vibrant. This bad luck highlights Chrysanthi’s good luck, of course. . . . Bob Fagles died of prostate cancer, age 74. . . . I discovered the actual contract awarded me by Princeton University Press for the Kazantzakis letters, plus all the relevant correspondence, including Mrs. Kazantzakis’s permission statement. Will send this now to Hanne Winarsky at the Press with hopes that we can bypass Patroclos Stavrou.

March 29, 2008

Read the remarkable following passage by Walter Benjamin, from the Prologue to his “The Origin of German Tragic Drama” (in TLS 21 March 2008, p. 14): “In empirical perception, in which words have become fragmented, they possess in addition to their more or less hidden, symbolic aspect an obvious profane meaning. It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given in self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication. Since philosophy may not presume to speak in the tones of revelation, this can only be achieved by recalling in memory the primordial form of perception. . . . Ultimately, this is not the attitude of Plato, but the attitude of Adam, the father of the human race and the father of philosophy. . . . Ideas displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, must be renewed in philosophical contemplation.”

April 9, 2008

Finished translating (first draft, of course) all letters from 1902 to 1957. The last was four pages of scrawl to Stavridakis. I enlarged it to double size and worked with Chrysanthi to try to decipher lots of illegible words. What remains now are the new letters to Elli Lambridi, to Papastephanou, and to Martinu. Of course the major problem remains Patroclos Stavrou. Is he going to be friendly and supportive or, as usual, paranoiac? I’ve approached Hanne Winarsky at Princeton about the contract I received twenty years ago.

April 17, 2008

Washington

To Leander’s yesterday via AMTRAK. Today met Dennis Carroll for lunch after walking a bit in beautiful downtown DC, now filled with tulips and blossoming trees. Dennis is adjusting to retirement. Still unpublished. I suggested a book based on his work in the General Accounting Office (GAO) but he felt he was never high enough to know what really was going on. Afterwards to the Phillips Collection’s special exhibit of more recent acquisitions, including a Benton, the museum’s first. They also have a Raphael Soyer and a beautiful large Dufy, all painters that my father bought. Nice supper with Leander, Deanna, Nicholas, and Chrysanthi (Sophia is away on a school trip) in a restaurant with very authentic Adirondack décor. Leander corrected my trills in the Bach fugette. I started to practice the Alan Walker songs again plus our next 8-hand piece, the Thief of Baghdad overture, very simplistic, especially compared to the amazing first movement of the Trout Quintet, which we did in the Health Center last Saturday, without too many gaffes. Last Monday War and Peace Studies held its first University Seminar in a new series arranged by me, with Ken Yalowitz presenting very interestingly on how he helped prevent the Russians from invading Georgia during their war in Chechnya. Old friends attended, like Graham Wallis. . . . Read Bowen’s book on boards of trustees, sent to all AFS trustees by Mike Keeley. Lots of good and necessary ideas.

April 18, 2008

Pendle Hill

Arrived just in time for the Education Committee. Nice to see Vince Buscemi again. Teachers have lots of plans to revitalize the Resident Program. I warned that possibly nothing will be done, as happened frequently in the past, or that too much will be attempted, as happened with Steve Baumgartner. . . . Jack Hunter has been elevated to Executive Board, which is nice.

April 19, 2008

At Meeting afterwards, when the Steve Cary Lecture was announced, I got up and explained how we produced the book, with Jack Coleman’s intervention, the financial help, and the decision to include photos and Steve’s essays. In the evening, just before George Lakey’s Cary lecture, with the family present, and also one of the donors, I was asked to repeat this story. Lakey spoke with lots of energy about nonviolent ways to counteract terrorism. . . . Lots of talk at meals with Alec’s friend Max Carter. And I drove to Route 3 to buy baklava for tomorrow, and indulged myself at Macy’s: new shorts for the farm. Also finished reading Lewin fellowship applications and made a selection of four for the shortlist to interview.

April 20, 2008

Difficult session on finance, although I sweetened everyone with baklava. Once again we will exceed the budgeted deficit and approach $500,000. Several of us argued that this is unacceptable and that Lauri will need to reduce the size of the staff. She seemed to agree, reluctantly. . . . Lots of talk with Tony Manousos, who hopes to write a biography of Howard and Anna Brinton. And had a nice talk with John Cary, who looks amazingly young. All signs are that Haverford is trying to be more Quakerly, although, or perhaps because, all the top leadership is now Jewish.

April 21, 2008

Telephoned Tom Wilson to ask how the Binswanger Interfaith Gathering went yesterday. He said it was fine, although the audience was smaller than usual. All the regulars came, however. Robert B. apparently has visual problems and had to read from large-type print. He and Penny are seeing Lisa Tuesday about an apartment. . . . Met Chrysanthi in the Business Class wagon from Washington to return together to Springfield and Hanover.

April 24, 2008

A visit from Andreas and Jane Drakonakis, our Rethymno friends. I showed them Dartmouth, had supper together at Kendal, listened to Hannah Putnam on owls and hawks (with live examples) in the Gathering room, did the Kendal tour. Lots of good talk.

April 25, 2008

Long breakfast with Andreas and Jane with more good talk with Andreas who, like many physicians, has a vivid interest in philosophy and literature. In the evening, to Newport for the Επιτάφιος service, bringing Andrew Klein and Despoina. Very moving service nicely amalgamating Greek and English.

April 26, 2008

Practiced my two Goldberg variations on the harpsichord and then rehearsed Dello Joio with Joan Wilson. Saw Robert Binswanger yesterday. He’s measuring all dimensions of the apartment offered them in Brinton, which he first thought to reject but is now reconsidering. . . . In the afternoon, “Daughter of the Regiment” in a Met broadcast in Loew Theater. It was my first opera, with my uncle Bill Schweitzer in top hat. Lily Pons starred. We went backstage afterwards to congratulate her.

April 27, 2008

At our Early Music Concert, I played Goldberg Variations 19 and 10. Nervous, but not too much.; Sop, no really serious mistakes. Then to the Rassiases for Easter lamb dinner with Athos and family and Helene and family. Athos, I learned, is now a Hanover Selectman.

May 16, 2008

Terpni

To the farm. Turned on the water and found it all gushing out of a broken pipe in the “basement” under the bathroom. Called various plumbers. Then, luckily, Earl Millington drove in one his new four-wheeler (baby will come by Caesarian on June 4) and said he could fix it. So we raced down to Murphy’s before 5:00 p.m. closing and secured the new part, a 90-degree corner plus a drain (much needed apparently). Earl did a beautiful job with propane torch, flux, and solder. . . . Good to see no large trees down, although a branch crashed again into the garden fence. Started the tractor easily but couldn’t start the White: weak battery and I don’t have a 6-volt charger (actually this was a mistake; the battery is 12-volt). The office looks good. Alec’s house is fine, also Leander’s. Earl says that the gate really helped.

May 18, 2008

Mary MacCracken’s Interfaith Gathering, the last of this season. Next season is all full. . . . Then Rachel Walker came with the soprano, Betsy Brigham, and we went through all the Walker songs, making lots of mistakes despite all my practice. We’ll perform next Sunday, but probably not all of them.

May 23, 2008

Stanton Burton’s trio performed in our Webster series. Piano–oboe–bassoon. He had included Ligeti on the program but changed his mind. I had prepared some introductory remarks about Ligeti, about the piece for 100 metronomes, for examples. So Stanton said, yes, say them, and I’ll give just a few samples on the piano with some explanation. Then they played Beethoven, Previn, and Poulenc, with me turning Stanton’s pages and therefore really appreciating the skill and artistry of a very talented pianist.

May 24, 2008

To the Museum of Fine Art in Boston for its splendid El Greco exhibit, with stunning paintings: a Saint Jerome, an Annunciation, Laocoön, and a marvelous portrait of a Spanish poet. Then to the A.R.T. for “Cardenia,” a sort of Shakespearian spoof, very alive and clever, good entertainment but nothing more.

May 25, 2008

Rachel Walker and Betsy Brigham here all day to record the Walker songs, with Ralph Mayer the engineer. We did all the Noda songs in the morning and all the R. L. Stevenson ones in the afternoon plus one by Getty Gilson. Ralph had me play very softly, but the piano sounded just right on the played-back recordings. We’ll do the remaining songs sometime this summer. It was fun to play the lovely Yamaha C-3 in the Gathering Room.

Sent this to Lauri Perman after trustees approved the budget with a $350,000 deficit necessitating job cuts:

Dear Lauri,

I felt, and I believe that all the trustees felt, that your plan for amelioration is both sensible and do-able, although of course painful—also that it is entirely consistent with trustees’ wishes. So, brava!

I’ve been reading about a new book called “Out of Eden” whose opening sentence is “Evil makes us Human”! The author continues: “No life ever realizes its full potential; no state policies or actions are a full realization of a state’s sovereignty; no work of art is adequate to the artist’s full aesthetic vision. . . . The problem of evil has to do with the problem of a finite will that seeks to realize an infinite meaning.”

Obviously, this applies to Pendle Hill. We all have a vision of PH that I suppose may be called “infinite.” But the nature of human life legislates that the infinite cannot be achieved. Yes, evil makes us human. In dealing with this, the author continues, Christianity teaches us to use love and self-sacrifice. Your salary reduction is a beautiful indication of self-sacrifice, as will be, I hope and trust, the salary reductions of several others. The love in your approach to those who must relinquish their jobs will be another “human” response to the inevitability of non-infinity. Maybe it’s all summed up in the story of Adam and Eve. When Eve ruins everything, Adam, although at first angry and self-righteous, comes to realize his own involvement in non-infinity (i.e., in not being God), and this unites these two. As they are expelled from Paradise, they go “hand in hand” to live like true human beings in a world in which evil makes them human. Let’s think of Pendle Hill now as “Paradise lost,” which really means “humanity gained.”

June 5, 2008

All set to go to Kinhaven to play Dello Joio with Alice but she got sick again (herniated disk) and had to cancel, so I stayed home. Discovered this extraordinary poem by accident:

THE TOWER (excerpts)

William Butler Yeats

WHAT shall I do with this absurdity—

ο heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were

Bound neither to Cause nor to State.

I leave both faith and pride

To young upstanding men

Climbing the mountain-side,

That under bursting dawn

They may drop a fly;

Being of that metal made

Till it was broken by

This sedentary trade.

Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird’s sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades.

June 28, 2008

Andover

To the Wyndham Hotel, where we met Alec and family. They arrive from Bangkok yesterday and came here to attend Rachel Bolton’s Bat Mitzvah, as did we. This was in a large restaurant installed in a former mill building in Lawrence. A long, disparate ceremony very ineffective although there were some nice moments. Rachel’s talk was incomprehensible because of bad diction; most of the other talks were incomprehensible because of bad (or no) microphone. But Clive spoke beautifully and audibly, the only one to do so. Alice broke down in tears and couldn’t continue. Lots of Hebrew: Baruch Adonai ad infinitum (and ad nauseam). But nice to see all the Buseck children and the Ecksteins (he is McCain’s personal physician). Alice alas has a recurrence, or continuation, of the lymphatic cancer contrary to previous news that she was in total remission. She is much diminished, but still brave and cheerful. They to to a cancer center in Tucson next week for a second opinion. Fun to be with Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena. Many children considerably taller.

June 29, 2008

We all drove back to the farm. Alec got his water operating perfectly but couldn’t start the Jeep. I did more mowing in the south field. Supper together marred by Theo screaming at Elena and Elena in tears. But this was smoothed over fairly well.

July 9, 2008

Finished mowing. Και του χρόνου! But at age 78, how many more years will this be possible? Ten? Unlikely. Five? Perhaps. . . . Ballet last night, all Jerome Robbins. Afternoon of a Faun delicious. Also Glass Pieces, although I don’t like the music. The rest, nothing memorable. . . . Alec, with Pinky O’Dell’s help, is building a pole barn, 16´ × 24´. Nice to see this happening. There’ll be a 2nd floor for storage, much needed. The ground floor will house Jeep and Pathfinder.

July 12, 2008

Ballet matinee with Alec and family. Prodigal Son performed better than I ever remember, with an exciting lead, Daniel Ulbricht, and a seductive Siren.

July 15, 2008

Pinky O’Dell and Adam were here for four hours to put up the trusses on Alec’s new pole barn. I helped, nailing the floor for the second storey. Marvelous workers, all jokes and good humor, and of course skill.

July 16, 2008

Lovely evening at ballet preceded by supper in Saratoga with Don and Maria Kurka and Jane? from North River. Maria is running an on-line course in art history, sitting at her computer. Sixty students. She says that there is lots of individual contact, always of course via computer. Ballet was varied: “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” (Balanchine). Lovely and stirring, except I prefer the piano quartet as originally written and not as orchestrated by Schoenberg. Then “Interplay” (Gould/Robbins). Then “River of Light” with interesting music by Charles Wuorinen (4 marimbas or xylophones, etc.), choreography by Peter Martins, the best of his that we’ve seen. Finally a new ballet, “Concerto DSCH,” by Celexei Ratmansky with music by Shostakovich, excellent, very different. A treat, as usual. . . . I have a strange rash that itches. Shingles, maybe?

July 24, 2008

Beautiful ballet again: Balanchine/Stravinsky “Divertimento for Le Baiser de la fée.” Robbins/Prokofiev “Violin Concerto.” Bernstein/Robbins “West Side Story Suite,” that stirring parody of Romeo and Juliet

July 25, 2008

Alec’s barn is advancing. The roll-up door works, thanks to Pinky. Alec and Monica work until 7:30 p.m. The siding is on, the roof, pebbles around the edges. Luckily, the Jeep just fits; it’s the highest vehicle.

July 31, 2008

Daphne and family arrived finally. Christina smiling and in good spirits. We played a vigorous game of ping pong that she won in overtime 24–22. They’re about to sell the McCarthy Road house to the neighbor. No regrets. We’ll salvage various goodies. Alec has already moved the harmonium to his cabin. . . . Frank Currier died, poor man: cancer of the esophagus. Alice Buseck’s lymphatic cancer has returned. Bad news for her. Miraculously, we’re still healthy. . . . Kazantzakis letters a pain. Those around 1926–1932 are filled with mistaken translations and missing words. Did I do these myself? Sometimes I wonder. Much reparation will be needed. But things get better in later years. . . . Greg explained his multiple connections with environmental activities: fisheries, forests. CO_2. He also hopes to revitalize Santa Barbara’s municipal tennis facility. Tells me that his former Wall Street colleagues are all in a funk. He’s so glad to have escaped this culture of greed.

August 3, 2008

Some of the Kazantzakis letters are really remarkable. Here’s a good definition of liberal theology: “The highest good, I believe, is heroically to contemplate this fruitful, wonderful life and to agree with it. No optimism, no pessimism, no lip biting, just understanding and bearing it.” (Letter to Leah Dunkelblum, November 1932.)

August 23, 2008

Finished second draft of the letters. Βρήκα τον μπελά μου, αλλά αξίζει ο κόπος. Πολύ δουλειά όμως παραμένουν σχόλια, λέξεις που δεν διαβάζονται. Good that I received the Onassis grant, enabling me to spend the entire month of March in Greece.

September 20, 2008

Cambridge

To the A.R.T. for Anna Deavere Smith’s moving one-woman show on “Grace”: about AIDS, holocausts, deficient medical care, and other assorted horrors, beautifully acted. . . . I’m vetting Dennis’s new play on Lawrence vs. Russell, a fascinating project in which he is trying to outdo “Copenhagen.” . . . Working now again on the Prevelakis letters, asking help from Ελένη Κωβαίου for problematic words. . . . Bicycling every day into town, which is refreshing. . . . Played Dello Joio four-hands in the Cary Room with Joan Wilson. Working now on Haydn eight-hands for November performance there. . . . Jim Sharpe left UBS and we’re joining him now in Merrill Lynch, transferring everything and hoping for the best.

September 26, 2008

Heard Bartok’s 2nd string quartet played at the Hop. Such passion, power, anger, frustration! And so much better than the Schumann that followed it, in which the passion struck me as “manufactured,” fake.

September 28, 2008

Saw James McBride’s novel “Miracle at St. Anne’s” in Spike Lee’s film version. So much killing! Horrible. Very good acting, but too long, exhausting. Best scene: where all three armies—American, Nazi, Italian—are praying to the same Jesus. . . . I wrote a short piece on Kazantzakis’s “Darwinian Ethics” for the Melbourne periodical “Etchings.”

September 29, 2008

Senator Mitchell lectured brilliantly at Dartmouth and then about twenty of us had supper with him at the Inn and could ask more questions. I asked whether, if the Israeli-Palestinian problem is ever solved, terrorism will decrease. His answer was an emphatic “No.” He explained that Al-Qaeda was founded in Egypt owing to different problems and is not a reaction only, or even primarily, to the Israeli situation, despite what we hear.

October 5, 2008

The head of Fulbright-Greece asked me to write an account of my three grants. I started by reading my 1987 journal of the time in Greece when we were collecting Kazantzakis letters. Extraordinary how vigorous we were, how many people we met, how many dinner parties we were invited to, how much we collected! In addition, Alec came, and Daphne. I’ll need now to look also at the journal pages for the English Fulbright (1958, I think) and the Australian one (1983). Also, I was a very vigorous journalist then, not so now. . . . Lovely dance performance at the Hop: Armitage troupe. Excellent choreography, dancing, and music: Ligeti, Bartok. In the discussion afterward I asked Armitage if Balanchine is passé. “No, indeed,” she replied. “we are all in debt to him.” . . . I’ve resolved to read the Aeneid. It’s about time. I tried many years ago and was bored. Let’s try again. My Fulbright journal reminds me how bored I was by Kazantzakis’s Odyssey, which I was reading in Greece in 1987.

October 7, 2008

Long but uneventful trip, including and eight-hour wait in Frankfort. Farm School placed us in the basement of the home of Θάνος Κασαπίδης, which Chrysanthi found depressing, so we transferred to the Ambassador Hotel in Πλαγιάρι, where others were staying. Buffet in Hastings House. Nice to see Bill McGrew again and fellow trustees.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

American Farm School

Café meeting very interesting regarding the so-called “model farm,” with a computerized presentation by David Acker illustrating various land possibilities. We still haven’t purchased anything, but expectations exist. During the part on LLL, I spoke about Vergos, whom I had talked to earlier: how hurt he was when he was removed from the Perrotis deanship. But LLL is very important, and he has adjusted, realizing, he says, that his devotion and obligations are to the School as a whole rather than to a single entity such as Perrotis. . . . Met the interns, two of whom, of course, are from Dartmouth. We’ll share a meal later. Secondary Committee at noon; managed the entire agenda somehow: (1) $600,000 to extend and renovate Massachusetts Hall with new classrooms; (2) fact that the model farm will be of no educational value to the schools—what they need, if we lose the campus animals and birds, is a small “demonstration farm,” a Noah’s arc of three cows, three pigs, three hens; (3) whether the Strategic Plan is being implemented (it is, we learned), including worry about Tasos Apostolidis’s retirement in three or four years; (4) thanks to Moskalaïdes for the new wing of the boys’ dormitory; (5) thanks to Tasos and staff for excellent recruitment results: 253 students; (6) worry about campus security—narcotics, etc.; (7) student life enhanced by the three new interns. . . . I lunched with Andrew Klein and three students, two of whom spoke English with some fluency (probably because they live in Thessaloniki and had better schooling than village kids). Andrew has a scheme to encourage recycling via a kind of game. Joined later by a student who had been to NYC for a meeting and whose English was much improved there. Andrew says that the instruction here is entirely adequate, but many students show no interest. . . . In the afternoon, I wrote up the minutes and went to Tasos’s office with the items on Massachusetts Hall and the model farm to Pelaghia, who translated my English easily into Greek for Tasos, making good changes and additions. . . . During all this, further news of stock market crashes in the US and around the world. Sheila Baird and others advise: sit tight, don’t panic, don’t sell unless you’re desperate for cash (which I am not). . . . Big dinner party in the Hastings House ground floor suite (where the king and queen stayed). This was for Aliki Perroti and her large group of friends. We expect her to announce tomorrow support for the new College dormitory. Moschahlaïdis was surrounded at table by two attractive ladies, and seemed very lively.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Higher Education Committee met with David Acker chairing in John’s absence. Need for action required by the new legislation legalizing private tertiary education groups. Hopes for new dormitory if Mrs. Perroti gives the money. Big “Perroti Day” ceremony starting with church service. Father Kyriakos, I learned, has cancer; his voice is much weakened. Vouli was present, also Lena Stefa. Lots of talk about Stylianos. Then we gathered outside of Perrotis College. Talks by Bill McGrew, Don Schofield, then a good student in English, then another student in Greek, then Aliki herself, who pledged funding for the new dormitory (!), then Thanos Veremis. Met the Kyrgyzstan student from last year (the boy; the girl left before taking final exams last year) plus two new ones and his cousin and a friend. Limited English but I think we communicated some of the time. I pledged to get two more computers for them. We lunched together pleasantly, outdoors. . . . Evening party at Stavros Constantinidis’s house, an annual ritual. Sat with Tasos, Dora, and others. Lots of talk with Dora especially about defects of the university (she’s a professor of mathematics), and the advantages (maybe) of private universities.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Full board meeting, interrupted at 10:30 for a celebration honoring Moschahlaïdes for the new boys’ dorm, followed by tour and reception. I’d been worrying about Albana because I had no word from her. But during this event my cell phone rang and it was her, just back from Albania seeing her sick mother. We’ll meet her early tomorrow and will be the only people at the graduation ceremony for her, as though we were her parents, since her own parents cannot come from Albania. Very sad, but how good it is that we, at least, will be there. . . . The board resumed. Again we have a deficit. Talk about limiting capital expenses. But when in my report I asked for $600,000 to enable us to expand Massachusetts Hall, the board agreed. Phew! Regarding my subsequent item about the Model Farm’s irrelevance to the Secondary School, however, there was no real discussion. Too bad. Charlotte Armstrong, the new chairman, was weak; no leadership, no indication of any vision. Her major goal, it seemed, was to finish the full agenda on time. Very discouraging. I had a sinking feeling about the board, although nowhere as bad as under Manny, when things were so evil. But we’re lacking now in shared vision, and certainly in leadership. Afterwards, talking with John Cleave, I discovered that he felt the same. And we went back to what happened to poor David Buck, who was crucified by a cabal in the board, unjustly. Another problem was the great secrecy about the presidential search. Are there any candidates? We’re not sure. Did the consultant help? Not much. We’ve spent $200,000 on this with no result. I and others (Frank, for example) stressed that the board should not be presented (as we were with Manny) with a single candidate, to accept or reject, but with at least two candidates. No promises, since they may have only one to present. And it seems that all the candidates so far are Greek, which is problematic unless they were education in the USA. . . . I lunched with the three interns, who explained their involvements. Webb is coaching both the girls’ and the boys’ soccer teams. All are helping with English. . . . The board went to Souli’s ouzeri for late supper, in 40 Εκκλησίες, near our apartment in 1987. Mediocre food, accompanied by two fine instrumentalists (both with a guitar) and singers, both male, whereupon Souli herself began to sing at the top of her voice in a microphone, deafeningly, and shaking her behind and breasts in the intervals before the next verse. Κέφι. She said σ’ αγαπώ to poor George Legakis, who is far gone with Alzheimer’s and depressed, and he smiled and actually sang along with some of the words. That was nice. Best of all, the farm director, Thanasis Giamoustaris, sat next to me before Souli’s deafening songs began, and explained at length, answering my questions, why a model farm would be good to have. He stressed the College’s potential involvement rather than the schools’ (although the College has not used the Zannas farm) and felt sure that the schools will be able to have their demonstration farm. He also stressed how important the model farm will be to numerous groups of adults who visit (quite apart from LLL). To bed at 1:30 a.m.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

An important day. We left the hotel and settled in Cincinnati Hall, thankfully. Talked a bit with Bill McGrew about what I learned from Thanasis last night. Bill says that Thanasis is not capable of very deep understanding of the total situation. Bill must in any case continue with efforts to purchase the land, since this is what the board directed, and the land can always be sold again. Bill also supports only two trustees’ meetings a year, saying that each meeting is a huge burden on him and the staff, too much. I fear this because then an executive committee gains strength and can actually usurp the board’s power. As always, there are arguments on both sides. . . . Long walk to see μοσχάρια και αγελάδες. In the evening, taxi to Anatolia College to meet Albana Fejzo. At the gate, Dick Jackson drove up with his daughter, who’d been at the stables horseback riding, lovely girl, originally from Finland, presumably an adopted daughter. Albana came looking lovely in a black dress from the MBA graduation ceremony. Tea with Dick and lots of conversation about horrible McCain and Sarah Palen. The graduation was in the new auditorium. They sat us in the front row. Greetings by Panos Kanellis, Anatolia’s vice-president (who was a candidate for the Farm School presidency and was told on the eve of an interview that he was no longer a candidate!). Address by Yanis Katoulidis, poet/journalist who runs an advertising agency. He spoke well about being humanistic in business. Then Nikos Kourkoumelis, MBA director, citing special awards, announced that Albana was chosen for the MBA award for outstanding service and he asked me to come to the stage and present it, which of course I did with pleasure and then said a few appropriate words to the audience. Dick Jackson afterwards told everyone that Albana had been supported by Info-Quest (where she’ll start work on Monday) and by Professor Bien. Nice reception afterwards, everyone very friendly. Then we took Albana back to Cincinnati Hall and sat for an hour or so, hearing about her warm feelings for Perrotis College (as opposed to ACT). The essential difference is the College’s residential nature, precisely what I emphasized in the citation I wrote for Mrs. Perrotis. Albana’s commute each day to Info-Quest (whose building’s glass was all done by Dimitris Yannakos) will take her, happily, through the Farm School and Perrotis. Let’s hope that they pay her decently (she’s been embarrassed to ask, so far) and utilize her skills. How good it was that the graduation was coordinated with our presence here!

Sunday, October 12, 2008

To Καλαμαριά for lunch at a restaurant with George and everyone. But George came first, alone, to Cincinnati Hall and gave Chrysanthi €500 that he asked me to turn into dollar checks, one for Evi, who is starting university, the other for Georgaki, who is starting gymnasium. Silly not to give euros, but apparently the dollar still has some glamour here. At the restaurant, Andreas and Georgaki were there first and I was able to speak well with the boy, who is amazingly mature for a 12+ year old, much more than either Christina or Sophia, whose conversational answers consist of one word only. Then came Andreas’s wife with Efthymoula, and finally Dimitris, Tilda, and Evi. Unexpectedly I had a good exchange with Efthymoula about her teachers at university: Kakridis, Politis, Papanoutsos, Kriaras, all the big names. And she and George are old friends of Tsolakis’s. Back to school to fight with the antiquated computers here. Discovered that the priest has cancer, bad, lost lots of weight, his voice is weakened, lost one lung via an operation, has refused chemotherapy. Κρίμα! More talk with Tom Thomas about the remote farm and cows. Very difficult decision. Also about candidates, or lack thereof, for the presidency. Then to Tasos’s and Dora’s to see Tsolakis—and eat, of course. I was able to show him the four or five letters to Galatea in 1922 that I have already annotated, giving him an idea of my style and the sorts of annotations required. He seemed pleased. His Greek version will be published under the imprint of the Aristotle University. Τους είπα ότι θέλω να γλιτώσω από τον Καζαντζάκη και ίσως να ξαναπάω στα ποιήματα του Στυλιανού Χαρκιανάκη. Tsolakis has a lecture series on Mondays and wants me to give one in March, probably on the letters. He needs to know by Christmas.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Thessaloniki–Iraklio

Up early in order to go to Assembly. Four students, all girls, spoke about the Macedonian struggle, the subject also of an interminable church service at Αγία Σοφία that we saw yesterday on television. It’s the 100th anniversary—1908–2008—of the end. Photos of Pavlos Melas, etc. Tasos spoke with passion against the students who set fires in the dorms and asked them to confess to him, in confidence, stressing the importance of fellowship in the school. Then he asked me to speak and I told the 250 gathered students, in Greek of course, what trustees do, especially choose the president. . . . Then to the airport. Chrysanthi will go to stay now in town with Vouli. Forgot to note that after the assembly we audited a mathematics class. Fine teacher, difficult equations that these first-year students seemed able to do well enough. Lots of give and take in the class, which was encouraging. . . . In Iraklio, the Hotel Atrion is fine, except that I haven’t been able to make the wireless internet connection (promised) work. They’ll send someone to help tomorrow. Walked to Πλατεία Λιονταριών. The fountain is finished, but the Βικελαία Βιβλιοθήκη is still covered in canvas, under renovation for two years or more. Apparently some of it is functioning in Πλατεία Αγίου Ματθαίου, which is a bit far. Luckily I took a look at the exhibit (old books) in the Βασιλική Αγίου Μάρκου and discovered that this Friday there will be a symposium on Βικέλας (who died 100 years ago) with speakers including Alexis Politis, Angeliki Kastrinaki, and Dimitris Tziovas. So I’ll go and say hello to them all. . . . Very bad γύρος again; perhaps they’ve eliminated fat, for health, and with that goes the taste.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Still no luck with the wireless in the room, but it works nicely in the lobby. They’ll keep trying later. Went to the Historical Museum. Mrs. Daskalakis expected me, brought out the full collection of letters to Galatea immediately. She’ll do xeroxing for me, too. And suggests that I include some in the book as illustrations. I’m improving the translation here and there. Discovered an entire paragraph in the printed version that isn’t in the manuscript. Manuscripts help sometimes with dates because the post office stamp is sometimes visible and even (quasi)legible. . . . To Marfinegnatia Bank. I still have 3600 deposited. Stocks rose markedly yesterday and are rising again today, so far, owing to government action worldwide. Mrs. Daskalakis helped remarkably with the illegible words and other queries—for example φιλώ τη δεξιά σας, a common expression for φιλώ το δεξιά σας χέρι, but using the ancient Greek, feminine, χειρ, which is understood. She found some other words also, in a full dictionary of the idioms and dialect of Eastern Crete. . . . I discovered a foreign language bookshop on Χάνδακας and bought something on Heracles for Christina (in English, of course). Ate in a big taverna near the Historical Museum. I went in at 8:00 p.m. Place just about empty. Ενωρίς ακόμα, μπορώ να πάρω κάτι να φάω; Παναγία μου! he answered, and showed me the full menu. I ordered παϊδάκια and red wine. He brought an entire bottle. At the end of the (very good) meal I said I thought I was getting a glass, not a bottle. Ωραία, είπε. Θα το κάνουμε ποτήρι. And then he brought me ρακί (to aid digestion) and ρεβανί and παγωτό, on the house.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Finished going through the Galatea manuscripts, all of which are being photocopied for me so that I can check in detail. Also went through all the Diamantaras ones, which involved illegible words all of which, with Georgia Katsalaki’s help, I deciphered. But most help came from the actual letters as opposed to the photocopies. Alexis Kalokairinos was at the Museum today and we had a long and friendly talk, using the ενικός. He wants me to give my Kazantzakis archive to the Museum, which already has Kazantzakis’s office, library, and many letters, etc. They really don’t seem to have a good set-up for archives judging from what I’ve experienced—very limited workspace. But things seem well organized, each (original) letter in a separate cellophane envelope, all in chronological order. It does make sense, I suppose, to have Kazantzakis materials in his birthplace. And I have more faith in the Historical Museum in the long run than in the Kazantzakis Museum in Myrtia. . . . Spoke with Gareth Owens. We’ll meet over the weekend. Ate supper in a Vietnamese restaurant. Saw the splendid exhibit on Kazantzakis’s travels in the Historical Museum, beautifully and richly done.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Finished up at the Historical Museum. Supper with Gareth. I explained all the possible placements for my archives—Dartmouth, Princeton, ΕΛΙΑ, Thessaloniki, Rethymno, Historical Museum, Kazantzakis Museum, each of which has some pluses and just as many minuses. He felt that the archive should be in Greece, not the USA, which of course makes sense. And he finally recommended Thessaloniki (a) because of my association there (teaching, honorary degree), (b) because they seem to have a professional archive department, which certainly the Historical Museum does not although perhaps the Kazantzakis Museum does, but its location is a demerit. Also, if I gave the archive to either of the museums here, the other would feel cheated. With luck I can speak to the librarians at Thessaloniki on October 27, if they are not closed for the October 28 holiday.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Went to the permanent Kazantzakis exhibit at the Historical Museum, which has been expanded usefully. Lots of electronic material added. Next to it is all the horror of the German occupation. . . . Worked on pronouncing my lecture for Rethymno. Spoke to Leventis and Tsaka of the Kazantzakis Museum; they advised me not to come now; it’s chaos, with workmen everywhere. It hopes to open on March 1. Tsaka says that they don’t have any letters to Eleni; Stavrou has them. And he of course doesn’t answer my letters. . . . Ben Petre, whom I met yesterday at the Historical Museum (he does all their translations into English, and very well indeed), sent me his excellent article on the mistranslations of Καπετάν Μιχάλης because not done from the Greek and/or because of changes/deletions imposed by the German publisher. . . . Saw Alexis Politis and Angela Kastrinaki, who came for the two-day symposium on Vikelas. Sadly, Tziovas isn’t going to show. Politis lectured interestingly on the actual novel Λουκής Λάρας and the text (non-fictional) on which it as based. At one point he said, Αφήστε τα μεγάλα προβλήματα και απασχολουθήτε με τα μικρά. Well said!

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Breakfast with Alexis Politis and another speaker today, Βασίλης Σαμπατακάκης, who teaches at Lund in Sweden and knows Bo-Lennart and Anita Eklund. He’s a great talker. We talked about Mt. Athos, the film of Zorba, etc. . . . Returned to the Βασιλικό of St. Mark’s to hear Angela, who spoke well on Vikelas’s atheism: Ήταν Χριστιανός που δεν πίστευε στο Θεό. He projected this in his short stories, meant for intellectuals, but not in Λουκής Λάρας, meant for τον κοσμάκη. I told her afterwards about (a) John Milton, liberal in his Latin treatise but conservative in Paradise Lost, (b) Stylianos’s comment to me about teaching the “common people” about the afterlife, (c) that Kazantzakis, like Vikelas, learned very much from Renan. Indeed, Vikelas seems a precursor of Kazantzakis. Another speaker was Cristiano Luciani, from Rome, who told me he sees Mario Vitti regularly and that Mario is fine. . . . Γεμιστά for lunch in the nice restaurant I found overlooking the Koules Fortress. In the evening, Gareth and Kallia took me to a very high-class restaurant on Evans Street, just beyond the section of the Venetian walls where the municipality will construct a permanent Kazantzakis exhibit sponsored by the Ministry of Education. Saw the Owens’s boys also; they’re bilingual, of course, and interested in soccer and basketball. Sounds familiar.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Read and timed my Rethymo talk, after much oral practice. 21 minutes. Walked all the way to the Archeological Museum, which is still basically closed except for two rooms with marvelous treasures going chronologically from about 3000 B.C. to the first century A.D. (Roman period). Among those on display, the Phaistos Disk, which dates from the new palace period, 1600–1400 B.C. I didn’t remember that it has two sides. Does my replica?

Monday, October 20, 2008

I forgot to add that on Saturday at the Vikela conference I met Stylianos Alexiou. He told me that Lefteris, his father, destroyed all of Kazantzakis’s letters to him when their friendship ended. Stylianos wrote about this (I believe) and says he’ll send me an offprint. . . . I wrote Nancy Birk and Darren Middleton asking for advice on the placement of my archive. Also to Dimitri Gounelas and Roddy Beaton (who suggest the Gennadion).

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Found the temporary Βικελαία Βιβλιοθήκη στη Πλατεία Μαθαίου and spoke to the director, Dimitris Savvas. Oh my, does he want my archive! Ready to receive it tomorrow! Will pay for shipping. To soothe the two museums here, he will make microfiche copies for them. But Roddy says the Seferis materials were not even catalogued when he looked in the 1990s. . . . A stranger at Aghiou Markou the other day gave me several books, a lovely portfolio, and a special Vikelas stamps worth about fifteen euros. Why? Because “You are Peter Bien.” Well, I used the stamps today to send a package of books, etc. back home; they covered most of the total cost of €16,70. . . . Asked about Avis rental car for March and was told it’s cheaper to book it in the US. Found that the parking lot in back of Atrion could take my car for €12 a day. Not bad. Spoke to Eleni Orphanoudaki on telephone. Ava will be here in March. . . . Another disappointing γύρος for lunch. No one makes it any longer in the old, much better, way. I asked the waiter, who responded, Καλά, όλα τα πράματα χειροτερεύουν.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

General strike yesterday, but it didn’t affect me. Finished going over the Levi letters using the manuscripts. Am in the middle of the Diamantaras ones. I’m correcting mistakes all the time, some very embarrassing. This morning I became a tourist, went to see the Venetian fortress, the Koules. What an amazing building, showing the genius and energy of those people. Four-square: all stone, all with huge arches giving large rooms beneath. I can’t imagine how the Ottomans ever took this fortress and was told that the siege ended because they sank Venetian and French warships in the harbor. The Venetian aesthetic is of course displayed in the Lion Fountain, constructed under Morosini in the 1600s. . . . I put on jacket and tie (for the first time) to go to the interview at the Historical Museum. Lots of photos in the library, some together with Georgia Katsalaki, and a long interview about my work and why I got interested in Modern Greek literature. They promised to send me the text and photos. Θα δουμε . . . as Kazantzakis liked to say. At the same time there was a presentation by two brothers, Germans, of the diary, paintings, and photographs that their father had made while serving as a German soldier in Crete in 1943–44. At least something good came out of the occupation. He was a professional artist who luckily returned briefly to Germany before they left Crete; thus most of his drawings, etc., were preserved. Afterwards he was taken prisoner in Yugoslavia and spent several years in prison. Other drawings that he had with him then were lost. But those given to the Historical Museum are a great treasure. The brother who spoke, in German followed by translation, was near tears. Very moving, the whole business. There will be an appropriate exhibition, but not before 2010. Also will be included in the permanent exhibit being prepared on World War II. . . . Fond goodbyes to Georgia Katsalaki, who helped me today with αρχίζω να πλαντώ, which she found in Kriaras’s dictionary. The verb is πλατάζω or πλαντώ. I translated it, “I was ready to burst.” . . . Started to write my lecture for Chicago, using materials on religion and science already on the computer, plus appropriate passages from the letters ca. 1923 to Galatea and Papastefanou. About to leave Iraklio, I’ve actually found it a rather nice city, small enough so that one can walk everywhere, full of trees and squares and parks, and with a relaxed life-style, the κέντρα full every evening, young people playing σκάκι. The one thing missing is a παραλία along the sea-front. And of course it’s impossible to park, unless one uses a motorcycle or Vespa.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

To Rethymno

By bus to Rethymno. Kriti Beach Hotel, far from the old town and generally antipathetic. I found the responsible young lady at the Ινστιτούτο Μεσογειακών Σπουδών and she transferred me to the university’s Σπίτι της Ευρώπης on the waterfront near the Φρούριο, where I’d stayed my first time in Rethymno. But this time luckily I was given a room at the back, away from the noise of nightlife. Opening ceremonies included greeting by the mayor, who was joined by the vice-mayor, Pepi, now (I think) married to him. She beamed with delight when she saw me; he turned to shake hands. Nice. I had hoped to see and hear Moullas, but his wife died recently and he didn’t come. Angela Kastrinaki read his very good paper about the theatrical contests. Earlier, around 2:00 p.m., I had lunch in “our” restaurant, but the familiar waitress was no longer there. Still OK, and very non-touristy.

Friday, October 24, 2008

The Σπίτι της Ευρώπης is an old Turkish house redone: interesting architecture with a large courtyard, hanging balconies, etc. Walked to Εστία, where all the lectures now are. Mine was second in the morning and, I think, went well. Many questions afterward and many compliments: “You taught me things I never knew.” Then I presided over the second session. Five speakers, but I stayed awake and didn’t even yawn. Μεζεδάκια. Then a journalist and photographer drove me back to the Σπίτι and conducted a long interview that will be part of a documentary on Kazantzakis in which his enthusiasts answer questions in their own language; thus all of my part was in English. I doubt that Patroclos Stavrou will be pleased with everything I said, but both the journalists and I agreed that “we don’t want hagiography.” In the talks today there was a deliciously funny one about a Karaghiozis play in which beautiful Eleni is pursued by a Turk and by an Englishman, both of whom use Karaghiozis as a go-between. Stamatis Philippidis appeared and gave a good paper but then left because, he told me, he can’t sit for a long time owing to pain; he takes cortisone. I was reassured that Foteini is still playing the piano. And I visited the Odeon and had a nice conversation with the secretary there, who remembered me and thanked me for sending the CD of Alice and me playing our duet. Then had λουκουμάδες in “our” usual place. . . . Tedd Osgood e-mailed to remind me that I’m speaking to the Professors’ Colloquium on November 3rd. More to prepare.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Leander sent an e-mail that a truck crashed into our farm gate, destroying it. But luckily no damage to buildings. Well, it lasted one year. . . . Went to Fortezza this morning; disappointing compared to Iraklio. Built in late 1500s. Turks occupied Rethymno in 1616. Couldn’t see any of the underground structure. Just the battlements on top, and what was the mosque built by the conquerors (with minaret chopped down). Visited Jo-An. Nice reunion with the director, but the kitchen and dining room girls weren’t there. Andreas and Jane Drakonakis picked me up there and we drove off, with another friend, a lovely Cretan man full of memorized poetry, μαντινάδες, and Ancient Greek quotations, to a village, Argyroupolis, with abundant flowing water, near Andreas’s mother’s village, about half an hour from Rethymno. Ate next to rushing water with snow-white geese washing themselves. Dramatic mountains in the background, the impressive wildness of the Cretan landscape, all volcanic. This was a great treat. . . . But there was more. Eleni Kovaiou picked me up at 8:00 and treated me to a fish dinner and three hours of steady conversation. She wants me, of course, to donate my archive to Rethymno. Suggests I speak to Alexis Politis about finding money to pay for the staff to put each and every detail on the computer, and also suggests that I give the archive bit by bit, waiting until this is actually done before submitting more. She apparently has Kazantzakis letters (all in manuscript) that I don’t have, and will send them. She needs my list of needs. She has written very interestingly about Kazantzakis’s obsessive identification with Nietzsche. I said I’d try to get it published in JMGS if someone (Ben Petre for example) could translate it into English. Must contact Peter Allen about this. . . . Chrysanthi telephoned. She’s back in Cincinnati Hall, ready, very ready, to go home. So am I, although I’m totally comfortable in Greece and speaking Greek. I keep telling everyone that I need to go home to vote—for Obama, of course.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Heard Eri Stavopoulou’s talk and another rather good one on Kalomoiris’s opera of Πρωτομάστορας. Then Andonis and Jane picked me up again for another lunch, this time in town, with pleasant conversation, and delivered me to the bus terminal. Met some others from the symposium there; coffee together in Iraklio airport. Fast flight to Thessaloniki. Lovely reunion with Chrysanthi, who told me how worried she is about Vouli, who seems to have the beginnings of dementia. We’ll write to Stylianos à propos.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Luckily, the Thessaloniki University library was open until 1:00 p.m. although this is St. Demetrios’s name day, with parades, etc. Dimitri Gounelas met me and we were shown by the archival people exactly what they would do if I sent my archive here: everything, piece by piece, on the internet so that anyone, sitting at home, can read manuscripts, see photos—whatever. And, unlike Rethymno, I won’t need to raise money. Storage on climate- and humidity-controlled shelves, with lots of empty space. It’s a fully professional operation. I said, of course, that I’m not going to decide now and in any case that the transfer won’t take place for several years. But I could begin further negotiations at any time, and to have everything here would obviously help Tsolakis in the Greek publication of the letters. Long, good talk with Dimitri afterwards in Starbucks. Then to Vouli’s, where Chrysanthi was waiting. Vouli seemed OK to me, not demented, but Chrysanthi says that she repeats herself very badly. . . . We learned that “Julian” by Kazantzakis is playing at the Βασιλικό Θέατρο and got tickets. Then to George and Efthymoula’s for stifado and a chance to talk with George while Efthymoula was in the kitchen (otherwise impossible). . . . Siesta. Back to town for the play. First to Odysseas and Eleni briefly, to say goodbye. The play didn’t start until 9:35 p.m. because they waited for Papoulios, President of the Democracy, to appear, surrounded by photographers. Audience clapped and rose, briefly, but really without much enthusiasm. We left after the first act. The play was heightened emotions without stop. Well acted and produced but, as usual with Kazantzakis, “overdone.” Also rather bad acoustics in the theater. Hard to hear sometimes and to understand. I didn’t think much of this play when I wrote my chapter on it. Must read that chapter again and perhaps also the play.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Travel

Home! Business class from Munich to Philadelphia. What a pleasure! Seats become beds, just about. Finished the Aeneid. Book 6, the underworld, is the best. 7 to 12 are rather disappointing, and Aeneas at the end is a murderer rather than a forgiver. Also read the full program for Julian; very helpful. Also some of Clint Gardner’s book on liberal theology. Everything fine until we learned that all flights from Philadelphia to Boston were canceled owing to weather. One flight still going to Manchester, but no seats. Standby. But then, miraculously, we were given two seats. Called Tom Wilson, who was planning to pick us up from the Boston bus at 11:45. We’ll miss the last Manchester bus, will stay overnight in a hotel. “No. I’ll come and get you at the Manchester Airport,” which he did. Thus we arrived home at 9:30 p.m. instead of midnight. First experience with Kendal’s locked doors and the magic wand that opens them.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Hanover

Mail. Phone messages. Meeting about Kendal’s doctor. Supper for Chrysanthi and dancers honoring the caller’s last evening after seventeen years. Dick came and we played Prokofiev’s sonata very badly. Muncks now at Kendal two days. Allan exhausted from emptying boxes, couldn’t play. Flu shots.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Practiced Haydn for 8 hands. Eleni Kovaiou sent some more manuscripts. Started planning Monday’s talk to the professors here.

November 4, 2008

Election day. Audrey Logan died at about 10:00 a.m., peacefully. Kesaya and a daughter were with her. Audrey, of course, had voted by absentee ballot for Obama. Kesaya told her, although rather prematurely, that he had won, and she then closed her eyes and expired.

November 15, 2008

To Chicago

I’ve learned how to do Power Point, partly, and am loading photos onto it for our Greek night at the Meeting on the 21st. We’ll also play some Greek songs, especially our favorite one about the cat that had kittens. . . . I’m now annotating the letters to Galatea, using of course annotations done by Elli Alexiou for the most part. . . . Played three movements of Haydn’s 88th Symphony, 8-hands, last Saturday in the Health Center. We’re now rehearsing the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and will also try the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody. . . . Asked Art Perryman’s opinion about what to do regarding our sabotaged gate at the farm. “Rebuild it! Don’t let those bums get away with anything.” Leander and Alec agree. . . . Terrible fire at Montecito, destroying hundreds of homes. Daphne and family evacuated. Their home has escaped, but not by much. Other mansions are just chimneys and rubble. . . . In Chicago, Van Economou picked me up at O’Hare and drove me to his home for supper with lots of family and guests. Chief among the latter was the daughter of Marinatos, the archeologist who excavated Acrotiri on Santorini. She teaches Ancient Greek here. The site is closed. The roof caved in, doing damage to the site, and has never been repaired. She’s very bitter, of course, and generally cynical about things in Greece. And here, too, since the African-American dean at her college wants to eliminate the Classics Department and replace it with Afro-American Studies. We had lots to talk about. Others, from Thessaloniki, knew about the Farm School (milk, turkeys). A very nice evening. Their son, a high-school senior, has mastered Modern Greek owing to a good Greek school here and good teaching. He is applying to the University of Chicago and wants to go into archeology. Good luck! . . . I’ve followed the Montecito fire on the internet. It seems to be fairly well contained, although fires have burst out in other California towns nearby. With luck Daphne and family will be returning home tomorrow.

November 16, 2008

Chicago

Chrysanthi on the telephone told me that Audrey Logan’s memorial service was beautiful. Lots and lots of testimony, Quaker-style, especially from all her adopted children (Japanese, etc.) and from lots of Kendal people. Too bad I had to miss it owing to this Chicago trip. . . . Van Economou picked me up again to take me to the 57th Street Quaker Meeting, near the University of Chicago. Along the way we tried to see Obama’s house in the Kenwood section but the street was blocked off by police cars. Big beautiful houses in an area that was once grand, then degenerated, and is now reclaimed. The 57th Street Meeting is small, in a private home, about 30 people. I was told afterwards that it had been reduced to about 6 people some years ago owing to Friends moving out to suburbs and establishing new Meetings, e.g. at Evanston. A woman “off the street” rose and spoke at inordinate length about St. Paul and (somehow) cats. After a silence she was about to rise again, saying “I have another inkling,” but fortunately a Friend came over to her explaining that we speak only once and she sat down. No other ministry. Afterwards, during Joys and Sorrows, I expressed joy for Daphne’s house being spared. Since she’s next to Oprah Winfrey, every time the news confirmed that Oprah’s house was intact, I felt relieved. Pot luck lunch afterwards, where I spoke with a man who said he had served as a surgical technician in the Navy, so we exchanged surgical technician stories. Then Van retried me (he’d been at the Greek cathedral where, as he says, he goes “to be seen,” not out of much religious conviction. More sightseeing, through the University of Chicago’s beautiful campus, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robee House, the Midway museums, the park where Obama gave his acceptance speech (Van was there with 20,000 others). Back to the very busy hotel, all sorts of bridal showers, etc., plus of course my talk, which seems to have gone very well. Lots and lots of questions, and congratulations. Nice to meet various people, one teaching Greek using our Greek Today, another using our anthology of twentieth-century poetry, another whose daughter had studied with Chrysanthi, another who knows the Damianos family, another who wants to use our Ιπτάμενος Θάλαμος. A very upscale group of highly educated well-to-do Greeks and Greek-Americans. Dinner afterwards with Economou, Tsakos and one other in, of course, a fancy Greek restaurant. Lots of good talk and fellowship. And I received a check for $400. Very nice.

November 18, 2008

I’ve revived the War/Peace University Seminar. We met tonight to hear Tom Powers warn that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and will ruin Obama if he pursues it. Alas! A very good turnout, lots of questions, wine and good food. In sum: a success.

November 21, 2008

Presented a talk on Greece at the Meeting with slides and Power Point, plus Chrysanthi’s loukoumadhes. Power Point didn’t work at first, but thank goodness Scot Drysdale appeared and made a necessary adjustment on the computer, in the “Display” area, and then everything was fine. People were amused when, displaying my Phaistos Disk, I said I won it because I was an Olympian in 2004.

November 26, 2008

Leander’s

I was a tourist all day in Washington. First to the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, first draft of the Constitution, with penciled changes, the definitive Constitution, bill of Rights, and later documents relating to the civil war, women’s suffrage, etc., all displayed in the beautiful rotunda of the building. Luckily, few tourists. This and other buildings all seem to combine Greek and Roman architectural influences, using Greek columns but generally a Roman vaulted ceiling. Then to the West Building of the National Gallery. I was able to follow a docent who spoke interestingly about selected paintings: a Giotto, a da Vinci, a Vermeer, a van Dyck, a Cézanne, and others. Then I visited the fine El Greco paintings, including Laocoön, and Rembrandt. . . . Long walk then to the World War II memorial, past the Washington Memorial on the Mall. Good excerpts from speeches by Roosevelt, Truman, MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower. Two sections: Atlantic and Pacific. Lots of fountains. . . . Then another long walk to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which I found architecturally disappointing. Actually there is no architecture at all, just the famous long wall with names of the dead inscribed thereon. . . . Then to the Lincoln Memorial with the marvelous Daniel Chester French statue of the seated Lincoln, based on the seated Zeus from the temple at Olympia, and the Second Inaugural on one wall the Gettysburg Address on the other. Very moving. Then to the Korean War Memorial, a series of statues of soldiers armed and advancing, and a good statement to the effect that we fought to aid a people we never knew. Then another very long walk to the F.D.R. memorial covering many acres, all outdoors, beginning with “Prologue”: statue of him in a wheelchair and an inscription of Eleanor’s thoughts about the disease really making him the man he truly was. Then a separate section for each of the four terms, showing unemployment and depression, the public works, then Pearl Harbor, then his sudden and untimely death in 1945. A wonderful tribute. In the shop, I saw part of a video on his career and bought it. Interestingly, he, like Obama now, campaigned in 1932 using the slogan “Change!” . . . Back for Chinese food dinner and a funny movie, after hearing Sophia, and then Nicholas playing the clarinet, producing very attractive sounds.

November 27, 2008, Thanksgiving

Leander and I sight-read some Godowsky four-hand pieces, sounding very Polish. He thinks that Alice and I should play a four-hand arrangement of Britten’s “Playful Pizzicato.” Lovely thanksgiving dinner, turkey and all the trimmings. Both Sophia and Nicholas wrote out a page of what they are thankful for, and Leander did the same at table orally. Mostly family. Afterwards saw the sequel to yesterday’s film. And then went into town to the Verizon Center for a basketball game, Wizards vs. Magics. Our seats were at the very top of this huge stadium and Chrysanthi said “No. No.” owing to acrophobia. Luckily there were many empty seats and we managed to exchange our tickets for seats down below and of course much closer. Wizards lost, not even close. Every time they shot a basket it missed whereas the other team’s shots generally went in. So, minimum of the excitement produced by a close game. But lots else: dancing girls, T-shirts dropping down in parachutes, a kissing game as the video focused on various couples, sometimes on people who didn’t even know each other. And noise! And dancing in the aisles. And a child’s team playing during the half, very expertly.

November 28, 2008

On the train back to Springfield I worked more on my Vancouver talk about BMGS and JMGS. Home at 10:00 p.m.

December 9, 2008

I played the organ part (without pedals, of course) for the Hallelujah Chorus of Kendal’s Messiah read-through, without nervousness, and reasonably accurately including simulated trumpets. Fun!

December 13, 2008

A lovely day with Nurjhan and her husband Chad. He was in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan and that’s how they first met. Lunch at Au Bon Pain, A.R.T. theater, a circus show, very ingenious, then to the family hosting Nurzhan, the Cohens, with two talkative children and a super-smart dog capable of tricks. Superb lamb dinner cooked by Dr. Neil Cohen. Tomorrow Nurzhan moves to Washington to be with Chad, who works there for an NGO helping developing nations to establish small businesses. She’s finished her course work at Brandeis and now needs to write her MA thesis on Women’s Rights. I told her that she looks younger every year. . . . Chrysanthi and I spent the night very comfortably in the Sheraton Commander hotel.

December 14, 2008

Would have gone to Cambridge Meeting, celebrating today Andy Towl’s 98th birthday, but needed to return to Hanover because we’d planned lunch at Kendal with Ruth and Jack Hunter. Bob Daubenspeck joined us.

December 15, 2008

Lunch with Alan Rozycki, who has agreed to become co-coordinator with me of the War/Peace University Seminar. How nice! Like us, he has a very international family, one child married to an Indian (Asian), another to a Finn. We had lots to talk about. Saw Ron Edsforth, who just finished a history course like the one he used to teach for War/Peace before Ken Yalowitz “fired” him. And he is now enjoying a three-year contract instead of the one-year contracts he’d had in the past.

December 19, 2008

Telephone from Greece saying that the Εταιρεία Συγγραφέων wants to make me an honorary member. I suspect that Christos has something to do with this!

December 25, 2008, Christmas

Santa Barbara

Opened presents this morning. Daphne gave me a new fax machine for the farm to replace my antique. Spent time here starting an index of persons and topics treated so far in my annotations to the Kazantzakis letters, a huge, long list even though I’ve only done 1902–06, 1922–24. I’m reading an anthology of sayings by Epicureans and Stoics. Here’s a good one by Lucretius (Bk. III, 931): “Why groan and weep at death? For if the life that is past and gone has been pleasant to you, and all its blessings, as though heaped in a vessel full of holes, have not run through and perished unenjoyed, why do you not retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace, you fool, a rest that knows no care?” Why not, indeed! Today Harold Pinter died at age 78—my age. Conor Cruise O’Brien died last week. I remember his dinner parties so well. But he was 91 and still working on a new book. My hope, of course, is that I’ll be able to finish the Kazantzakis letters and see them published by 2010, with luck—age 80. . . . More from Epictetus, Handbook 41: “It is the mark of a want of natural talent to spend much time on things relating to the body, as in exercising a great deal, in eating and drinking a great deal, and often emptying one’s bowels and copulating. These should be done in passing; and you should turn all your attention to the care of your mind.”

Epictetus Fragments 8: “If a man endeavors . . . to persuade himself to accept of his own free will what cannot be avoided, he will live a measured and harmonious life.”

Marcus Aurelius Meditations, book XII.1: “Begin . . . to live with Nature. You will then be a man worthy of the Universe that gave you birth and will cease to be a stranger in your own country, surprised by what is coming to pass every day, as at something you did not look to see.” XII.23: “By the changes of her parts the whole world continues ever young and in her prime. . . . Therefore for each individual the cessation of his life is no evil, for it is . . . neither of his own choosing nor without relation to the common good.”

2009

Hanover

January 1–June 7

Jan. 17, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Jan. 23–25, Pendle Hill

Feb. 24–28, New York, Farm School trustees

March 1–5, Athens, Hotel Achilleas

March 5–9, Thessaloniki, Farm School, Cincinnati Hall

March 10, Athens

March 11–21, Iraklio, Hotel Atrion

March 22–28, Athens, Arethusa Hotel, 210 32.28.43

March 28, Athens Airport, Sofitel Hotel

April 17–20, Pendle Hill

May 1–2, New York City

May 8–9, Riparius

May 16, Cambridge

Riparius

June 8–September 9

Hanover

September 10–December 31

Oct. 4, Riparius

Oct. 15, Phoenix & Tempe

Oct. 16–17, Vancouver

Oct. 18–21, Princeton, Palmer House

Oct. 22–24, New York City, Yale Club

Oct. 3, Cambridge, Widener Library

Nov. 24–27, Leander’s

Dec. 3–5, Brookline and Cambridge

Dec. 23–26, South Salem, Daphne’s

January 17, 2009

To the A.R.T. for a very interesting production of The Seagull, making the play entirely easy to understand. Chekhov, complaining bitterly about the drivel in the theater, was like Kazantzakis in 1906, but what were the forces, besides mere talent, that enabled Chekhov to develop so well as a dramatist whereas Kazantzakis’s career was aborted, more or less?

January 20, 2009

Spent the entire day at home watching the Obama inauguration on TV. Everyone, even the Fox News people, seemed enchanted. But the stock market went down another 300 points.

January 28, 2009

Philadelphia

After the Pendle Hill meetings, I met Dan Seeger for lunch, together with Jack Hunter. Dan, surprisingly, is moving. Medford Leas says he doesn’t have enough money to enter, so he’s going to Folkways, next to George School, entering in April. His huge problem of course is downsizing. How to deal with the amazing collection of documents in his basement? He hasn’t touched the piano since going to San Francisco (where he’ll soon be returning for another month). As lively as ever. Very involved in Quaker affairs, including the “greening” of Friends House in Philadelphia. . . . Yesterday, squeezed between Pendle Hill board and meetings, I gave two talks at the Greek church in Media with one, in Greek, about writing Greek Today, and what we found on the Spyridon Commission, the other on the work of Myrsiades, especially the Ritsos translation. He and Linda were there, to be honored for a very productive career.

February 14, 2009

Played eight-hand piano: first movement of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, which we rehearsed for probably six weeks, and didn’t make any serious mistakes. The others were Joan Wilson, Bill Clendenning, Pat Porter. We’ll do Haydn’s Military Symphony in April.

February 15, 2009

Played two Goldberg variations as prelude and postlude for Stan Udy’s Interfaith Gathering, not perfectly, but I was able to cover over the mistakes pretty well.

February 21, 2009

Cambridge

Lunch in Au Bon Pain with Dia and Wim. Her mother died at age 103. Was librarian at the American School in Athens for decades. Dia suggested two good restaurants for me in Athens. Then to the A.R.T. for a splendid production of Beckett’s Endgame with Will LeBow and Tom Derrah in the lead roles. Such a depressing view of life and death, mostly death (written soon after Beckett’s experiences in WWII), yet sweetened with some macabre humor, which leads us to accept everything after all—well, almost everything or, well, half-accept.

February 24, 2009

New York

Saw D. H. Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd at the Mint Theater. Such a strong play about a dissolving marriage. Husband in the coal mine, wife better education; the typical DHL situation. And very Kazantzakian in a way, since “Should she go away with a true lover (and a better educated one) or follow her ‘duty’ and continue to suffer?” The dates are similar; Lawrence finished this one by 1910; Kazantzakis’s Ξημερώνει was 1906. Lawrence’s play apparently relates to the short story “Odor of Chrysanthemums,” which I must re-read. Apparently Martin Meisel gave a lecture on the play at the theater, from his book How Plays Are Made, which I must now read when I get back to Dartmouth. Dennis Carroll is so anti-DHL in his play on Lawrence and Russell, but I feel now, as I did when teaching, DHL’s great talent and power. . . . Supper at the Oyster Bar, oysters Rockefeller for nostalgia’s sake, but I really didn’t like them that much.

February 25, 2009

9:00 to 11:00 a.m. with the president-elect of the Farm School, Dimitris Kyriakou, together with a dozen other trustees. He’s impressive, very smart, a linguist, lots of good experiences on the EU Commission, a good listener, a lucid answerer of questions. We were all impressed (except, I heard, Brenda Marder—oh, well). Lunch at the Yale Club with Michael Groden, who found a copy of my “Linguistic Revolution” in the Strand Book Store in perfect condition and asked me to autograph it. He hopes to return to his Joyce Thesaurus project after copyright expires in 2012 and Stephen Joyce can no longer refuse permission. He is hoping to publish three books, one a memoir of living with Joyce (I should do an essay about living with Kazantzakis). . . . Two and a half hours with trustees, being taught how to approach prospective donors for large gifts. I slept through some of it, happily. Supper at the Yale Club with Tom and Joan Thomas, served by my friend, the woman from? (where). She honored my happy birthday card and gave us a bottle of Coen burgundy (!) for free. Then to Lincoln Center for wonderful ballet: Swan Lake (Balanchine’s abridgment with a gorgeous Sara Mearns dancing like an angel; then the Bizet-Balanchine “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” music “Children’s Games” that I played four-hand piano. Very funny, very childish (for adults). The Prokofiev-Lavery “Romeo & Juliet” with lovely Janie Taylor. Finally “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” (Balanchine/Richard Rodgers), from the Broadway show, not as good as the Bernstein show, but lots of tap dancing and some humor. A scintillating evening, together with the Thomases.

February 26, 2009

E-mail from Dimitri Gondicas, who is smoothing the way for me to leave my archive to Princeton, not only the Kazantzakis letters but other aspects of my work and career. I’ll see him this afternoon. Down to Charleton Street for lunch with Burt Pike, meeting first at his apartment and then going to a nearby restaurant for my lunch of salad (fast day in anti-jet-lag regimen). Like me, he continues to be productive, having just published a new translation of Rilke, which he gave me, and working on two additional books besides serving on P.E.N.’s translation committee. He misses Constance Tagopoulos and asked me to send warm regards (which I did by e-mail promptly). He sees Peter Constantine often. Peter is “the same,” scraping by financially despite his linguistic genius. . . . Returned to the Yale Club to meet Dimitri Gondicas, who gave me some good contacts in Athens and invited me to spend a week or so at Princeton (subsidized) to finish my annotations; they have up to date encyclopedias, prosopographic resources, etc. Also, of course, to deposit my archive there. He has spoken to Don Skemer and they’ll take my photocopied letters with the proviso that they may not allow the photocopies to be photocopied. OK. They already have Mario Vitti’s archive, and Keeley’s, and some Seferis, and half of Friar’s. They’ll even want any Kazantzakis novels, etc. with my penciled annotations in the margins. I have lots of them! . . . By bus to 79th Street to the Greek Consulate to hear a good lecture by David Acker on the future of worldwide agriculture and how the Farm School can participate, followed by a reception. Nice to see Ruth Schoppert, also a man who’s a member of the huge club near North Creek—we talked about forestry. Sheila Baird said that the Bank of America is firing 40,000 employees. (Nothing in the newspaper about that so far.) We’ll see if Jim Sharpe and Michael at the Hanover office survive, not to mention my investments. . . . Harry Mark Petrakis has written a good story, “The Grandmother,” based on what I told him about the German soldier in Crete in WWII who painted portraits of Cretan peasants.

Friday, February 27, 2009

My big day for committees. Higher Education and Secondary Education. Before that, Land, which happily delayed once again the purchase of a remote farm, requesting further study and information. So, the fate of the cows remains, as we said, a “moo point.” Higher Ed routine. Secondary not quite routine, since we needed to thank Pelaghia for her service; she’s retiring. We also praised Tasos for being placed again on an important committee to advise the Ministry. My idea that we shouldn’t always be hoping to recruit “better” students did not fly at all, and won’t appear in the minutes. But my desire to have Tasos’s declaration in the minutes did pass. I mean his declaration that cows 65 km. distant will serve no educational purpose for the secondary schools. . . . At 7:30, fancy dinner at the Harvard Club honoring Bill McGrew. Cost: $120. But it was very fine. Big surprise: all his children were there, a son, several daughters, and one fiancé. I had a chance to talk to the daughters, one of whom teaches in a Rudolph Steiner school in Manhattan, the other who is an architect in Washington, DC. Several good speeches honoring Bill and then Bill responded well. One of the testimonies was by Brenda Marder, revealing how she, Everett, and Bill were all studying together at the University of Cincinnati.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Full board. It started with tributes to Bruce Lansdale, first by Bill, then by Mike Keeley (their boyhood together, and an appropriate Seferis poem, from Μυθιστόρημα), then by me: first with Hodja’s story about Ποιος κάνει κομμάντο, then a portion of Bruce’s poem “Why I Love Greece.” Main problem in the meeting was of course finances: excessive drawdowns on the endowment, lack of the expected income from land leases. But we voted in the new president, Dimitris Kyriakou, and heard very professional financial reports from the new financial officer, Yannis?. I left a bit early to catch the bus to Newark Airport for my flight. Waiting, I read lots and lots of pages by Dennis Carroll and prepared some reaction. One of his pieces is very movingly about his remarkable father, Admiral Eugene Carroll, whom of course I remember well.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Athens, Hotel Achilleas

Routine flights, Newark–Frankfort via Lufthansa, business class. Good food. I slept a little. Then Lufthansa from Frankfort to Athens. Train from the airport not running. Took the bus to Syntagma. Amazingly little traffic, probably because of the holiday weekend and tomorrow (Καθαρά Δευτέρα, the beginning of Lent). Hotel Achilleas the same as always, minimal but clean and quiet. Don Nielsen telephoned. He’s in bed with a virus infection that Lia caught as well. So our dinner is canceled. He’s been promised his residence permit. I supped on λουκουμάδες στο Αιγαίον στην Οδό Πανεπιστημίου, followed by a cappuccino. Up until midnight without apparent jet lag.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Athens

An exhausting day. Started by going, as arranged, to the Onassis Foundation on Αισχύνου, in a lovely neighborhood near Plaka and the Acropolis. Frédérique Χατζηαντωνίου was there despite the holiday, a French woman resident for decades in Greece, very pleasant. She gave me my check for €4500 and deducted the 800+ for my share of the business class flight. Onassis provides some office space for its fellows, near Ευαγγελισμός. I must investigate. She also gave me an extensive booklet giving details of the foundation’s activities and its board, all sons of former officers. Their projects are diverse. Might they build a Kendal in Greece? Should I ask? . . . The exhausting part came next. I walked from the Panepistimiou Metro to Εκδόσεις Καζαντζάκη, 116 Χαρίλαου Τρικούπη. Patroklos Stavrou kept me there for four hours, from 11:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., without lunch. He talked non-stop mostly about himself, his virtues, his accomplishments, the evil ones who do not appreciate him (like Vassilis Vassilikos). He has no manuscripts! Thanks that someone (!) is hiding them until they come out of copyright in nineteen years. Regarding my archive, he favors Kalokairinos’s Historical Museum. Then, to prove how wrong Vassilikos and the other detractors are, who claim that he has destroyed Kazantzakis through inactivity, he took me (again) to the αποθήκη behind the office, filled with piles of unsold books that he has reprinted. The problem, obviously, is not production (each new edition is with an attractive binding and an introduction by him) but sales. He prints 5000 and sells 250. He insisted on giving me titles I desired: the new Prevelakis 400 Letters, Σπασμένες ψυχές, the two children’s novels (nicely illustrated), etc., etc., and then the best of the lot, the new Οδύσεια reproducing exactly the original 1938 edition—a treasure. I carried all these, somehow, back to the hotel. Must mail them home. Then made up for lack of lunch at 5:00 p.m. with McDonald’s French fries and milkshake (most everything else closed today because of Καθαρά Δευτέρα). Then Metro to Christos and Eri, another three hours, but very pleasant. Christos recovering, slowly, from his broken hip. Walks carefully with a cane and without if on level ground. Works at home. He’s continuing with Θέματα Λογοτεχνίας and indeed plans a double issue on Ritsos (born 1909, 100 years ago) and wants me to contribute and to find suitable others. Will not continue with the autistic society, which requires too much travel abroad, and domestically. Is in good relationship now with Meg, who’ll be coming with Dimitris for Easter and staying in the apartment. Says she feels her life is now in Greece mostly: her English connections are now mostly gone. Eri expatiated on how unbelievably bad many of the private universities are, really immoral imitations. She criticizes Veremis’s legislation as hopelessly naïve. Also expatiated on the impossible bureaucracy here that stymies everything. Happily, I was able to correct her English on a short précis she needs to submit. They’ll come to dinner at the Gennadion after my lecture.

Thursday, March 3

Athens

Beautiful weather. 65 degrees, clear sky. I deposited my €4500 and investigated regarding envelopes to post Stavrou’s books. Prepared for my class at College Year in Athens on Kazantzakis’s Darwinian ethics, a good paper that I suppose I gave somewhere in America (can’t remember where). Could have used it for the lecture I’ll be giving next week, which is perhaps too dense and long. . . . News on e-mail about the Keeley Prize in MLA. Do I qualify? Not sure. . . . The school sent a car to pick me up and bring me to the new location: two fine buildings in Πλατεία Σταδίου, right next to the Stadium built for the revival of the ancient Olympics in 1896. Phylactopoulos, the owner and head, greeted me with a huge smile and hug. I remember his father. We ate in the cafeteria with students, all American college students, ⅔ girls, ⅓ boys. I was surprised to find all 180 students seated for my lecture, and lots of faculty: full house, obviously a sort of important event. I think the lecture went well. It was clear, and fairly short, always a virtue. Two brave students asked good questions. Afterwards a group of teachers gathered round with more questions and discussion, and finally the same two students, one with a lovely smile, who wanted to ask more. All very pleasant, topped off by a surprise honorarium of €100. Afternoon coffee in a shop with wi-fi. Then at 8:00 p.m. met Iacovos Tsalicoglou at the hotel. Walked to Μητροπόλεος to the same restaurant at which we ate several years ago: Ants & Crickets. Joined by his wife and the lovely daughter who is an Oxford grad and has been translating English poetry into Greek; she’s included in the new anthology being prepared by Keeley, Peter Constantine, etc. Then, a surprise: David Connolly joined us. He’d written that he’ll miss my lecture because he’s going to England, but here he was, newly appointed to be a full professor of translation studies at Thessaloniki and with a State prize. But he lives still in Athens and spends usually three days a week in Thessaloniki. Lots of reminiscing about Dartmouth. Iakovos remembers his delight hearing me say, in 1963, that I learned Greek in bed. His son, rejected by Dartmouth, graduated from Connecticut College and is prospering. One daughter is divorced (after two months) with a child, but coping. A lovely evening to finish a much more relaxing day than the one with Stavrou’s four-hour monologue.

Wednesday, March 8, 2009

Athens

Spent two full hours and about €138 unburdening myself of the Οδύσεια (which cost €48 to mail) and the other 10 or 11 books by Kazantzakis. Had to buy bubble envelopes, stout paper, and packing tape. At the post office when I told the clerk that the huge packet was Kazantzakis’s Οδύσεια she replied with a huge smile, “Kazantzakis is my favorite.” Then to the Benaki Museum to look at Sikelianos manuscripts only to discover that the Sikelianos archive is now in Kifissia. A librarian helped me by telephong Kifissia (which can’t be reached now by subway because anarchists burned the entire train yesterday morning in the Kifissia station, first, however, telling the passengers to leave). The curator there looked up my dates and reported that none of the letters I wanted is in the archive. So I was saved a trip. Then telephoned the Palamas Archive (Ασκληπιός 3). They’ll investigate. If my desired dates are there, I’ll need to make an application that goes to the board of governors. Probably nothing will come of this either. So the only positive result from today’s efforts is that I learned the year of Elli Lambridi’s death, from the recent encyclopedia in the Benaki Museum’s library. . . . Lunch in Kentrikos Restaurant, Stadiou, where Christos once took me. Then met Constance Tagopoulos at 8:00 p.m., again in Ants and Crickets, Ο Τζίτζικας κι ο Μέρμηγκας. Fortunately she continues to have contact with Queens College and directs a summer school each year. I say “fortunately” because her situation with the American college here, Northeastern, is terrible. She’s an adjunct teaching one or two courses that she cannot choose. Very poor students. No benefits. The full catastrophe. On top of this, she has her 40+-year-old son with muscular dystrophy, unable to hold a job, requiring nursing care and therapy as his condition continually worsens. But she is brave and does the best she can. What a shame! In New York she was appreciated and stimulated. Here, neither.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Athens–Thessaloniki

Went to investigate one of the places provided by Onassis for its awardees. Not much: a room with computers and xeroxes. No help for me in the library downstairs, which is devoted to science. . . . Routine flight to Thessaloniki. At the Farm School, Cincinnati Hall well prepared for me, same room as before. Fridge full. Met Andrew Klein and Amanda in the library. They’re doing fine. Also saw the Kyrgyzstani student from two years ago, who is also doing fine. The two from this year not so well. Both are in the Foundation Program (remedial mostly for English). One of them graduated from Lower Foundation to Higher; the other did not and is continuing in Lower. So it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to enroll in Perrotis next year.

Friday, March 6, 2009

American Farm School

Very full day, starting with the Assembly. I spoke to the student body, announcing the new president. They applauded when I noted that he is Greek. Then coffee with Tasos. He knows who will replace Pelaghia—a mathematician that’s been second in command under her. Also knows who will replace himself when he leaves after two more years. In sum, unlike some people (e.g., Tsolakis), Tasos has prepared successors. He repeated that he cannot stand τεμπελιά. He admires McGrew because Bill works so hard, and well. Then I went to three classes. The one on Roman history was about Actium, Cleopatra, Alexander, Octavian. I reminded the teacher about the relevant Cavafy poems, which I hope to find for her. Told the students afterwards that nationalism is a curse (they were taught that ancient Greeks were devoted to theater and art, whereas ancient Romans were barbarians who copied the Greeks). I reminded them of Alexander’s remarkable saying about Greeks vs. barbarians recorded in the Thessaloniki Airport. Next: chemistry taught by Pelaghia. Of course I understood nothing. She’s very strict, but apparently (Tasos told me) a mother, especially to the female students, and he is sorry that her replacement will be a man. Lastly: animal husbandry, all about cows and pigs, keeping them healthy, inserting sperm to fertilize the cows, proper nutrition, the various breeds of sheep, etc. The teacher asked me to speak and I told them about the trustees’ concern: what to do with the cows. They had no idea that all livestock must go. All her students are EPAL. Also saw Pelaghia discipline a student who has been threatening girls, sending him out of the dormitory to live at home (his parents work for the School, live on campus) with threat of expulsion if he doesn’t change. The three classes were fine, especially because all three involved the students. No monologue from the teachers, contrary to what I had experienced in previous years. . . . Telephoned Vouli and went in a taxi to Tsimiski 87. She already had guests: a woman who had graduated from the School, which she adored, and her husband, a farmer in rice and corn, she a compulsive talker in a hugely loud voice, he silent (until she left the room, whereupon he became garrulous). Peasant type, very friendly. Later came one more guest, Loukia’s daughter, Vouli’s godchild, and we all ate together in the apartment, reminding me of dinners there in the old days—e.g., with McGrew. I showed Vouli computer photos of our farm. Vouli looks considerably older, but is still mentally OK. . . . Back to School in the late afternoon; short nap. David Willis fetched me at 7:30. Long drive to his village home, over badly rutted dirt road—no, not village home, because it’s in the middle of a large olive grove, not at all in the village. A beautiful home designed by David and Christine, with views of the far-away city and of Mount Olympus. The house was full of six University of Virginia students on a week-long educational excursion with Christine concerning pottery. Lovely young people, including an Indonesian-Chinese from Sumatra. Lots of talk about the Farm School, Bruce, Quaker girls’ school, civil war, Kazantzakis. The Lonsdales so far seem to approve the Αμυδαλιά quote. Tad is in California, diagnosed with breast cancer, but the latest news is that it may be a false diagnosis. They’ll know more in a few days. The School priest has severe cancer but is under treatment in Ohio by a new “wonder drug” and is determined to survive. Christine’s daughter is about to start the IB program at Anatolia. They asked about their son Bruce. Should he be enrolled in the Farm School’s EPAL and then perhaps do the last two years at Anatolia for the IB? I suggested questioning Mats. The oldest daughter is now at Haverford on full scholarship and very happy there. David agrees with me that we should not buy the remote farm for the cows, or even just buy the land, because he fears a prolonged recession or even depression that will lower the land’s value if we decide to sell it later. . . . Our own situation is precarious. Tony at Bank of America telephoned Chrysanthi to say that he’d been let go and indeed the entire Hanover office is closed. We’re supposed to deal with someone in Manchester. I’ll look into transferring everything to the Ledyard National Bank.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

American Farm School

Mount Olympus brilliantly clear across the gulf, snow-capped. Washed clothes; practiced Britten. Rehearsing my lecture. Then to town, stopping in the public library, which has internet capabilities. Met Albana at the Καμάρα at 2:00 p.m. Hugs and kisses. She appreciates the fact that she has a job even if the take-home pay is only €700 a month (miserable) and the duties secretarial mostly. After a year’s stay (already six months) she can look for something else, but given conditions today that will be difficult. . . . In the evening, supper at Tasos’s on Dora’s (Theodora’s) name-day, with George and Pelaghia Voutsas, and Vouli, and the presumptive successor to Tasos, Yalomas, who seems a bit shy and certainly doesn’t have Tasos’s “presence.” George reminded me that some years ago he told me that I would be the best president of the Farm School. Είπα: Αμάν, γέρασα! We talked lots about Macintoshes, which he favors and owns, and of course about Κυριακού, and about the remote farm, which they all agree with me is a mistake. And of course χαιρετισμούς στη Χρυσάνθη. . . . While in town I experienced “The Web,” a huge internet café with probably 100 machines patronized by boys and young men all playing video games in which someone is shooting someone else.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

The only unpleasant day, because of Efthymoula. But in the morning I practiced Britten and adjusted the lecture still some more. George fetched me and, happily, sat and talked before we returned. He’s a Hillary Clinton fan, like Chrysanthi. But as soon as we picked up Efthymoula and drove off to the ουζερί, ugh! She screams; she accuses; she directs—like the British Madame Hortense, only it isn’t funny. Poor George. He has a back-seat driver of the worst sort in the front seat. But we had a nice swordfish dinner (fasting! no meat) and a bit of peace as he drove me back without her.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Assembly, then class supposedly on the European Union and the Marshall Plan, which turned out to be a monologue on communism vs. capitalism. Knowledgeable teacher but minimal interaction with the students, and no discipline regarding the lesson plan. The next was much better: a Λύκειο class on Thucydides. Very nice, with lots of interaction. I told them my view that everyone should read Thucydides to discover how little human beings have progressed since then. We’re just as bad as they were. . . . Then to the College: class by Mr. Girtsios on agricultural machinery, 28 students from Greece, the Balkans, Kenya, in English of course, with good use of power point. Gertsios complained to me afterwards that he cannot do research owing to the teaching load—six classes a year with a threat to go to eight. . . . Nice visit with Don, who of course wanted to know all the gossip about Kyriakou. . . . On my way to lunch at Princeton Hall, a man waylaid me to help him translate a prospectus for a machine he has invented to help clean the plastic sheets that are used in greenhouses. That took an hour, and I didn’t know the terminology in either Greek or English. . . . More piano practice. . . . Tasos and Dora drove me to town. Beautiful lecture hall in the Archeological Museum. Full house, about 300 people, standing room only. Annie came, and Vouli. A teacher at university, doing Kazantzakis’s Ταξιδεύοντας, brought her class. The widow of Ανδρόνικος introduced herself. Head of the museum gave a short introduction, then Tsolakis a long one, quoting Kazantzakian passages (Ανέστακας and Η αμυγδαλιά άνθισε) and saying flattering things about me, promising to make me an honorary member of Φιλόλογος next time I come (with Chrysanthi). I felt fully at ease reading my Greek and didn’t stumble very many times. Afterwards, lots of people came up to give congratulations. Then with Tsolakis, Vouli, Tasos, Dora we walked to Διαγώνιο, a well-known restaurant specializing in γύρος και σουτζουκάκια—nothing special, but a pleasant, quiet place. We walked Vouli home and then back to Tasos’s parking garage across from the Museum. Back to Cincinnati at 12:30 a.m. Tsolakes says that many people asked him for a copy of the lecture to be able to digest better its thought. He’ll publish it in Φιλόλογος.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Thessaloniki–Athens

Up at 5:45 a.m., a bit tired. Nice to be back at Achilleas, where I seem to be a “regular.” Good luck: went to Ίδρυμα Κωστή Παλαμά when the director, Professor Kasinis, happened to be there and the secretary produced two manuscripts for me plus the periodical in which Kasinis published them plus a third for which there is no available manuscript because the letter was sent not to Palamas but to Ο Νούμας. Kasinis very cheerful and friendly. Knows Stavrou, Eri Stavropoulou, Christos, etc. Then to Gennadeion. Very impressive buildings. The director, Mrs. Georgopoulou, very pleasant. Large auditorium practically full. Lovely to see many of my friends: Ritsa, Christos, Eri, Kyriaki, Athena Vouyouca and her Norwegian friend. Among those who came up afterwards was the widow of Andronikos the archeologist, and a vice-president of the Ouranis Foundation, and Frédérique was there, too, of course, and various souls who claimed they had met me, say in Buffalo (!) at some point, and even a Dartmouth grad. A few questions afterwards. Athina asked about Kierkegaard, and I was able to answer that with ease. But a gentleman in the back complained that Kazantzakis really could never have downgraded Plato because he actually translated some dialogues. This was more difficult and I probably sounded a bit wishy-washy. Mrs. Georgopoulou saved the day by inviting everyone to the reception just outside the auditorium. Afterwards, in her palatial quarters she gave supper to us: Eri and Christos, myself, Constance, and some fellows of the Classical School. Her husband came later; he teaches economics at one of the private colleges. We talked politics, American and Greek. Home at 12:30 a.m. So the two lectures are now over.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Iraklio, Hotel Atrion

A fruitless morning. Went to see the new Acropolis Museum, but it’s totally closed, can’t even get near it. The outside is very different, and attractive. Then went to Kastaniotis’s store and office at Zalongou 11, with the idea for a new book, a collection of my various essays. But I was told to telephone and make an appointment. . . . So, to the airport. Ava met me accompanied by a biologist who is giving a lecture on Darwin tomorrow. Later, Ava and I met for supper, a very nice meal of non-Greek food. And lots of good talk. She’s going to Athens tomorrow but will be back next Wednesday and we’ll share another meal.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Μυρτιά.

Taxi to Venizelos Hospital, where Barbara Tsaka met me and we drove to Myrtia, stopping by a τυρόπιτα for lunch. The Museum is really a mess. Leventis there in his coveralls working; she, happily, spending most of the day finding manuscripts for me. A very fruitful day: examined all they had for Kakridis, Anghelakis, Knös, Eleni Samiou—only the last producing no results (as expected). More tomorrow. She drove me back. At 7:00 p.m. to Ανδρόγεω, where I lectured in 2007, for the Darwin talk, the first of a series of four, the second next Thursday. Excellent! A biological-cum-philosophical defense of Darwinism done extremely well.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Myrtia

Another very fruitful day, especially regarding Stavridakis manuscripts, even the one that I worked so hard to decipher, and now found clearly written out by George Anemoyannis. Home again with Barbara, her baby son screaming and kicking in the back seat and she remarkably calm.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Iraklio

No Museum on the weekend. I spent most of the day in front of the computer, doing all the chores I had saved up from the two past days at the Museum. Good progress. At 8:30 p.m. Ben Petre came and we drove out of the city to a fine restaurant high up, with a view of the entire city below. Very good food, and even better conversation until midnight. He works as a free-lance translator, Greek to English, and as a corrector of scholars’ English. Greek wife, 2 children. He’s been here about 15 years. Regaled me with splendid information about the (mis)translation of the Kazantzakis novels by those who did not know Greek.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Continued to work in the hotel. Barbara Tsaka picked me up at 5:30 and we went together to the village of Χερσόνησο, maybe 20 km to the east of Iraklio, for an Αφιέρωμα στο Καζαντζάκη, held in the hall of the village church, with the priest seated in the chair of honor. After greetings, a chorus of women sang beautifully. Then I was asked to say something. I spoke about the Επίλεκτα Γράμματα and said that Kazantzakis had a μανία για την ελληνική γλώσσα. Then the Museum’s video was shown, the one written by Stavrou, but narrated well by an actor. Barbara asked me to note the errors, which I did; nothing serious. Then two ladies read interminably from Ταξιδεύοντας. Finally Αντώνης Σανουδάκης spoke very well on Διδακτικές παροιμίες και σατυρικά ποιήματα στον Καπετάν Μιχάλη—very interesting, showing what a careful writer Kazantzakis was. I told him afterwards that now I understand better why the novels written in French are so dead, because Kazantzakis couldn’t make use of the demotic wealth of his own language. Then the priest rose and with a φωνάρα declared that he agreed with Κύριο Πήτερ regarding Kazantzakis’s mania, etc., and stressed Kazantzakis’s true religiosity. Then he insisted that I accompany him to his home to taste his own wine that’s been 50 years in the barrel. I talked with the παπαδιά. Both she and he were born in this village. The wine, actually, was nothing special. He brought two large bottles-full for me to take back to America (I gave them to Barbara) and also picked a branch of laurel (δάφνη) for me. Home at 10:30 p.m.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Worked Monday and Tuesday at the Museum, always with very good results. Yesterday Andonis printed up all the manuscripts I’d indicated, so I now have a huge pile of work to do, completing uncompleted letters. Tsaka and Leventis couldn’t have been nicer and more cooperative, and all this in the midst of their ongoing renovations and their need to be ready for a symposium at the end of June. . . . This morning, conversing with the ladies who clean my room, I asked if they were perhaps Romanians because I detected something strange in their Greek. “No, no!” they protested. “We speak Cretan dialect.” I was most embarrassed. They say oshi for όχι and τsi for της. . . . Kazantzakis’s epigraph in the small Dante he always carried: servus diabolicus Dei. . . . Out for suppr with Gareth and Kallia. He hopes to get a subvention from the Onassis Foundation to give him more time to work on the Phaistos Disk. I joked with Kallia because the water is now running in the Lions’ Fountain (when last here she explained why it was not running). She’ll take me tomorrow to meet Stefanidis’s progeny.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Nice long breakfast with an American young lady whom I saw yesterday reading the Iliad at breakfast and spoke to her about how nice this was. Today we sat together and had much to say to each other about Greece, Australia, New York. She’s going off to Santorini tomorrow. I told her about Akrotiri, which of course is closed, alas. . . . Met Kallia at 10:00 a.m. and we went together to meet Γεώργος Στεφανίδης, son of Demosthenes, who was Harilaos’s nephew. The Stefanidis archive remains with the family. They don’t want to give it to an institution που θα το βάλει σε δουλάπα. I agreed. . . . In the evening, the second lecture on Darwin, only it wasn’t on Darwin. The speaker, minimally prepared, but all too fluent, lectured us on the virtues of Karl Marx. As for Darwin, he agreed that the human being is a βιολογικό oν. Thanks a lot! He argued, strangely, that human violence and other defects are not biological (perhaps that’s Marx’s view) and can be cured (by socialism, of course). I learned nothing about Darwin, alas.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Beautiful sunny day. Called Kastaniotis and made a rendezvous for next Friday, but I doubt they’ll want to accept my proposal of a book collecting my lectures and occasional printed articles. I listed them today from the Vita; there are many. . . . Visited the Historical Museum, newly re-opened, and saw Georgia, and Alexis, and the others I know in the library, all very friendly. Georgia believes that Stravou is lying about the manuscripts of letters to Eleni. . . . Off to Ανδρόγεω again for an evening on Dimakis. But in the afternoon I must record that I had a truly American donut and a superb coffee made in a push-pot. To Ανδρόγεω again for the λογοτεχνική εσπερίδα για Μνηά Δημάκη. Nice to see Stamatis Philippidis again and to hear him give by far the best of the presentations: a “new criticism” analysis of two poems, very fine. He takes cortisone to fight pain but manages, obviously, to work in his retirement, although some days he cannot. Foteini is still playing the piano, I was glad to hear. Right now, Beethoven’s Sonata no. 1. My new friend Αντώνης Σανουδάκης, who greeted me with kisses, also spoke. And he edited a collection of Dimakis’s poems, which I purchased. The first speaker was the poet Χριστόφορος Λιοντάκης, who said that we are honored to have the presence of Peter Bien, the translator and best commentator on Kazantzakis, etc., whose books unfortunately are not being handled satisfactorily by the κληρονόμος (Stavrou), etc. Then a good speaker recited some poems. Then students of the local λύκειο recited and then sang poems to a guitar accompaniment, very nicely indeed. It was fine also to see Κώστας Μουτζούρης, whom I remembered from Χανιά. And of course good to learn more about Δημάκης, some of whose letters from Kazantzakis I’ll be publishing. . . . At 9:00 p.m. Ava came and we went to a fine restaurant with a lady who teaches English privately in Iraklio and a couple, the wife an English teacher in the university who cooperated when John Rassias and I were here, and her husband, a retired professor of physics. Big topic of conversation: the fact that early today the office of Citibank on 25 Αυγούστου had been blown up by anarchists and completely destroyed. . . . Saw Βαρβάρα Τσάκα at the Dimakis event, and finally asked if I could address her in the singular as Βαρβάρα. Of course!

Saturday, March 21, 2009

At the Dimakis event, a newspaper reporter asked me to write some reminiscences of Pandelis Prevelakis, also born 100 years ago. So I did that this morning, telling how he always knew the words that even Mrs. Kazantzakis didn’t know, because typically he was the one who gave those words to Kazantzakis. . . . Ava came again and we ate fish in a seaside restaurant very pleasantly. Then I walked to the Θεατρικός Σταθμός and saw an honest-to-God Καραγκιόζης play, live and real. But it was quite poor. He couldn’t modulate his voice sufficiently to make each character sound different, and the play, what there was of it, was incoherent, without an outcome. But there was a bit of fun, naturally, and he involved the children in the audience very nicely. . . . Then to Αγίου Μάρκου for the Ritsos evening—three hours, no seats, but Ben Petre saw me and put me in the first row with the dignitaries. Very bad lecture, completely inappropriate for the occasion, because totally professorial in the worst sense, by Maronitis. No one was listening. But then lots of goodies: an adult chorus singing Theodorakis’s settings of Ritsos, Eri Ritsou reading part of “The Moonlight Sonata” beautifully (I said hello; she said she’s no longer corresponding with the Marders but respects them; also said that she’s oppressed and worried). Maronitis smiled and said hello also. The best part was the 5th Gymnasium students singing, reciting, dancing, all connected with Ritsos, and some recordings of Ritsos himself reciting, plus a short video of his life. All in all, a lovely tribute not only to Ritsos but also to what is happening at least some of the time in Greek schools.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Athens, Hotel Arethusa

Traveled with Ava and her friend Mr. Stefanidis (no relation), a computer scientist who is in Stelios’s job at the Institute. They treated me to a taxi ride to Syntagma and also told me that a woman in the Ministry of Economics wanted to meet me. She apparently governs the Ministry’s aid to the Kazantzakis Museum. The Arethusa Hotel is “minimal” but the price is only €55. I’m getting used to it.

Monday, March 23, 2009

To the Benaki library. Worked well with their up-do-date Greek Larousse encyclopedia, solving may aporias. Found an internet café and ate at the Kendrikon restaurant again.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Alas, the Benaki is closed always on Tuesdays and will be tomorrow also: 25 March. But I worked in the hotel preparing my queries. Saw Don Nielsen for two hours in Starbucks (smoke-free). He’s in a bad way. Lia is depressed, hasn’t spoken to him for three days. He’s been fined €2000 for some irregularity owing to marriage away on an island and doesn’t have the money, which may delay the residence permit. But he also has a new scheme with the Archbishop of Cyprus (Chrysostomos) that should produce some income and also perhaps a considerable charitable sum for the American Farm School. Is it, however, just another of his many schemes? . . . Ate in a Chinese restaurant. Never again owing to the high cost. But I’ve discovered that Everest makes really good τοστ for €2,60. . . . Chrysanthi reports that the Binswangers are at Kendal looking at two apartments. More news tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Chrysanthi tells me that the Binswangers have chosen an apartment. Hooray! Today I watched the parade, all military. And the larger the tank, the more the people clapped and yelled παληκάρια. Horrible. And all those machines of destruction are supplied, I believe, by the USA. Interesting to see women in all the services. . . . Finished reviewing all the Stavridakis letters and in reading Anemoyannis’s entire collection, just to get a better understanding (which I did) of the issues raised. But I need to be extremely careful. In one of the letters I translated Τραπεζόντα (Trebezon) as “bank” (τράπεζα)!! . . . Met Constance at 3:00 for “lunch.” Poor thing, she’s stuck in this horrible college as an adjunct. Her elements of salvation are the programs she still directs for Queens College.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Worked six steady hours in the library of the Benaki Museum, fearful that I wouldn’t be able to check all the people I needed to in my fixed time, today and tomorrow. But actually I got through quite a bit more than half and thus should be fine tomorrow. I also found a twelve-page letter from Sikelianos sent to Kazantzakis (I think) before he answered in one of the letters I’ll print. Sikelianos, judging from this, was far more prolix than Kazantzakis. Very hungry, I had dinner at the usual place, rested a bit, and then met Βασιλική Κολυβά at 6:15 together with—surprise—Anna Rosenberg, whom (thankfully) I’d remembered from London. Apparently they are related. Kolyva is in charge of a program stimulating effective use of the computer, and will be going to Myrtia this Tuesday to give a prize to the Kazantzakis Museum for its excellent scanning, etc., all of which benefited me. But it’s just an honor, no money involved. Anna works in Comparative Literature with Spanish and English and has the usual adjunct jobs in several places. She volunteered to help me translate Spanish if need be. . . . Chrysanthi thinks that the Binswangers have chosen an apartment, finally. She told Joan Wilson (recently back from Egypt) that I’ll be at eight-hand piano on Tuesday and Allan Munck that we’ll be having music on Wednesday. Also need to refurbish the Bach Goldbergs for the early music recital later in April, on the harpsichord, and to learn the two pieces for Kinhaven, since Alice says that she is still planning to come although she has begun a new treatment regime for her cancer. Leander reports that he has sleep apnea, but that it’s treatable by a machine that increases the oxygen he breathes while sleeping. . . . I’m ready to go home. It’s been a rather long but very full and profitable time in Greece: Athens–Thessaloniki–Athens again–Iraklio–Myrtia–Athens.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Happily, I finished researching all my queries in the Benaki library by about 1:45 p.m. Walked to Goody’s for a salad (fast day today). Then to Kastaniotis’s to talk about a new book. We decided that it would be better to collect my writings on Ritsos, rather than those on Kazantzakis, since this is the Έτος Ρίτσος. I’ll need to send all information quickly next week. Saw father and son Kastaniotis again. Father said that the USA caused the financial problem and I agreed. But he also said that his firm, and generally book publishing, is doing better than ever. People in distress apparently like to read more. His sales are increasing. . . . Looked at my e-mail in the coffee shop that includes wi-fi. Learned that Chauncey Loomis died. Born in the same year as I was. “Cancer.”

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Sofitel

I chose to spend my last morning in Athens by finding the museum where Ava has her painting. That was difficult. I walked to Monastiraki to get the Metro to Thiseion, only to be told that Thiseion was now closed but only “minutes away.” The five minutes turned out to be thirty through a section of Athens I’d never seen: second-hand furniture stores and the like. From the closed station to the museum, another thirty minutes, but I found it finally thanks to asking people. It’s To Πολιτιστικό Κέντρο Δήμου Αθηναίων, very nice, with the art exhibit upstairs and downstairs a Karaghiozis exhibit complete with a current player explaining everything to a group of children. The art upstairs was environmental, about trees. Ava’s was the only one that was just pretty: four seasons of a sort of abstract forest in different shades. Lovely. The others were not pretty, but often interesting. Examples: a unrolled roll of toilet paper all covered with words—title, Ο λόγος ανακυκλωμένος. A valensa with a sheep rising out of its own wool. Insides of a clock shaped like a spider. A butterfly made out of machinery, showing I suppose that the real butterfly is also a machine. Downstairs the Karaghiozis exhibit had some posters, one entitled Καραγκιόζης υπουργός την Κυριακή. In front of him various protestors with signs as follows: σύνταξη στα 35, έξω οι κλέφτες, εσένα θέλουμε, προστασία στο περιβάλον. Reminded me of Mr. Bloom in Circe: Mayor of Dublin for a day. . . . Traveled to the airport, Sofitel Hotel, and began entering into the proper letters the data I collected at the Benaki library. Also on television some really fine bouzouki playing, αμανέδες και ρεμπέτικα, making me sorry to leave Greece (but glad as well). Also, bought Athens News for the first time and realized, thanks to it, how very much does go on in Athens culturally.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Travel

Up at 4:45 a.m. to catch the flight to Munich. Then a seven-hour wait for the Boston flight spent in the business class lounge where I was able to enter almost all the remaining data from the Benaki, to check e-mail (e.g. from the head of the Athens branch of the British Council whom I never had time to meet), and eat. On the flight, sat next to a man from Vienna who now teaches math at Harvard and was reading the Bhagavad Gita. Lots of interesting talk about Harvard, Larry Summers (whom he supported), etc. Watched tennis on TV, both Nadal and Federer eliminated in semi-finals. Murray the champ.

April 7, 2009

Hanover

What a day! 8:15 a.m., eight-hand piano rehearsing Haydn for Saturday’s performance. 10:00 a.m., Professors’ Colloquium, with me introducing the speaker. 1:00 p.m., my annual physical exam with Dr. Dacey. 3:30 p.m., conference at the Ledyard Bank with J. T. Underwood and Larry Draper and Stephanie Hart about transferring our accounts from the Bank of America. 6:30 p.m., John and Mary Rassias for supper in the apartment. 9:30 p.m. as John and Mary were leaving, he begins to bleed from the mouth (recent dental work) in the hallway. Quick return to the apartment. Bleeding continues. We call the Kendal nurse. She asks if he takes a blood thinner. Yes. That’s the problem. I drive him to the Emergency Room. 10:30 p.m., he’s in Emergency under care. We return home.

April 11, 2009

Christos telephoned to say that I’d been elected Επίτιμος Μέλος της Εταιρείας Ελληνων Συγγραφέων (or something like that). He’s a member and so is Meg. Meg will be coming to them for Πάσχα, which means that he and Meg are on better terms now.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Philadelphia

To the Art Museum to see the Cézanne show. His paintings are very spiritual, ethereal. Next to most of them they placed paintings by other artists—Picasso, Matisse, Braque, etc.—influenced by the Cézanne painting in question. All acknowledged Cézanne as their ultimate guru and the inventor of modern art. Nice to see again especially his still lifes with the table and floor all out of proportion. And the three card players accompanied by an art photograph of three biddies playing cards, their faces rapt in concentration. I purchased a small reproduction of the three card players to take home as a memento. . . . Then to Pendle Hill in time for supper. General Board meetings and trustees Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, centering on the report of the Visiting Committee, which turned out to be to eliminate the General Board and continue with only a single board: the trustees. Good idea. Miraculously everyone agreed, and it was approved. Details to be worked out: change of by-laws, committee structure, etc. I spoke about my negative view of Haverford’s Corporation, a comparable board, which was essentially just a show; also of my time as clerk of the General Board struggling to make the meetings more than a show. Nice to see Vince Buscemi and other old friends. Also John Cary, who came for the Cary lecture given by Paul Lacey on the need for confidentiality. While speaking to John afterwards, my left leg suddenly fell asleep and I tumbled to the floor, luckily not hitting anything. This has never happened before. Strange. No damage done. I’m also noticing certain mental slippage. . . . Jennie Keith, a new trustee, is a pianist at about my level. Good sight-reader. On both Saturday and Sunday nights we played duets: Persichetti, Britten, Copland. The Copland is beautiful. She’s eager to do more in July if I come. Trustee sessions were also devoted to financial problems: ten years of deficits. I called for zero deficit in two years. Not much support, alas. Perhaps undoable without great injury to Pendle Hill, so they say. But a greater injury would be to go bankrupt and close down entirely, like Antioch College. . . . With so many hours of meetings, I felt unable to concentrate toward the end.

April 23, 2009

In a TLS review of a volume of Beckett’s letters, they quoted from the amazing letter to Alex Kaun that I used to cite in my lectures, probably in connection with Molloy. How nice to see it again, especially so soon after seeing all those Cézanne paintings in Philadelphia: “It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused. . . . Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as, for example, the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? An answer is requested.”

April 26, 2009

Played a Goldberg Variation on the harpsichord at an Early Music concert in the Gathering Room. Huge audience because the concert was dedicated to Gerry Tayler, who died last week. It went well. I’m getting less nervous.

May 1, 2009

Yale Club

To New York via the new Dartmouth Coach service. Left at 6:00 a.m. and arrived at 11:00 a.m. They have wi-fi. I read Tony Manousos’s first half of the book on Howard and Anna Brinton, keeping track of errors, typos, etc. Brinton had a truly interesting life because of Orthodox vs. Hicksite divisions, the liberal tendency in Earlham College vs. mid-Western evangelicalism. . . . Went to Patelson’s for the last time; it’s going out of business, alas. Not much left, but I found a Debussy Petite Suite for Music Minus 1, and something for Dick and me, something else for Allan and me. Stopped at the Onassis Center to see the exhibit on ancient Greek women. Left greetings for Tsilas, who wasn’t there. Ballet in the evening: Mozart-Balanchine “Divertimento no. 15,” which we’ve never seen. A scintillating masterpiece of choreographic originality and versatility, and of course beautifully danced. What a pleasure! Then a surprise: “After the Rain,” choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to music by Avro Pärt, an Estonian. Again: original, inventive, moving, and beautifully danced by Wendy Whelan. Finally “Firebird,” which of course is a spectacle, with its Chagall sets and costumes, and a seductive firebird danced by Maria Kowroski, whose hands were continually expressive.

May 2, 2009

New York

In the morning we went on a tour of Harkness House, 1 East 75th, a Fifth Avenue mansion now occupied by the Commonwealth Foundation set up by Harkness. Interesting man who was very philanthropic, but indulged himself with this sumptuous building. I thought that the Commonwealth Foundation, which concentrates on health, might be interested in a CCRC in Greece, but was told that they only operate domestically. . . . We then went to a ballet matinee, again splendid: Bach/Balanchine “Concerto Barocco” with Wendy Whelan again and Albert Evans. Very pure. Then Tchaikovsky “Pas de deux,” athletic extravagance. Then what I was waiting for: Ravel/Balanchine “La Valse” (but mostly “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales”). The music of “La Valse” is haunting, the choreography so-so. Finally: Stravinsky “Symphony in Three Movements,” which we’ve seen in the past. . . . Another supper at the Yale Club (last night, free entry because it’s my birthday month). Then back to Lincoln Center for “Coppélia,” exquisitely danced by Megan Fairchild. Hadn’t expected to like this as much as I did. Spectacular dancing—varied, expressive, virtuosic. A treat.

May 3, 2009

New York-Hanover

Went to 15th Street Meeting. Morningside Meeting, where Vince and Ernie go, was too far because we had to catch the bus at 2:00 p.m. Four mentions of Jesus during the ministry, very different from Hanover. But generally a good Quaker feeling. Home with Dartmouth Coach, 5½ hours from Yale Club to the Hanover Inn.

May 5, 2009

David Watts, director of Human Resources, briefed me on the article coming tomorrow on Jacques, the French dishwasher who writes symphonies. He feels that he has been denied rehiring unjustly. Watts says simply that there were better people. . . . In the evening, Stan Myers, Tom Wilson’s brother-in-law, asked my explanation of problems between Kendal at Hanover and the Kendal Corporation regarding payment of the annual fee. I found lots of appropriate archival material—letters from John Diffey and John Hennessey, etc.

May 6, 2009

Only one student doing Greek at U-Mass, this time, so they asked me to do the exam on Skype instead of driving all the way. It worked well enough.

May 7, 2009

Talked by telephone with Peter Mackridge, who’s at Princeton for a month. Can’t go to see him, alas, and probably will never return to London. (I haven’t renewed my Penn Club membership.) He helped Katerina Anghelaki with Kazantzakis letters to her father, which Stavrou is meant to publish—but when? . . . After supper, Ralph Mayer did an interesting musical program on Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” including a two-piano version of “Petrushka.”

May 8–9, 2009

Riparius

To the farm. Good shape. No blow-down. Home clean. Started John Deere and White easily.

May 14, 2009

Joan Wilson came to play the Britten duet with me, preparing for Kinhaven. But several hours later I received e-mail from Alice that she is back in the hospital with relapsed lymphatic cancer and will most likely need to cancel Kinhaven—again. At least her relapse was detected before she traveled east. She needs now to resume chemotherapy treatment. Doesn’t look good. I told Leander that neither of us will be coming. Poor Alice had wanted so much to be able this year, unlike last year, to do the Kinhaven workshop. Almost made it . . . but not enough.

May 16, 2009

Cambridge

A.R.T. did Mamet’s “Romance,” a brilliant satire attacking the judicial system, racial/religious prejudice, homophobia. Wonderfully acted. Marvelously funny, while at the same time serious.

May 17, 2009

After Meeting I gave my talk on “Quaker Light.” Large audience. Good questions.

June 9, 2009

Terpni

Jeff Murphy sent me this testimonial he had apparently sent to Bob Bell:

Professor Bien was the hardest teacher I had at Dartmouth. In his seminal “Modern Novel 1” course, students began by reading “Portrait of the Artist,” then Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Mann’s “Death in Venice” and “The Magic Mountain,” Proust’s “Remembrance . . .,” and Kazantzakis’s “The Greek Passion.” And that is just the beginning, as his lectures—and these books themselves—inspired/forced the student to bone up on those vast pieces of Western (and non-Westem) civilization that had somehow theretofore escaped our educations (from Hermes Trismegistus to Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy” to the structure of a fugue to the nature of montage to György Lukács to the Bible and Homer to transubstantiation to epiphany . . .), many of which were not even mentioned in any other College courses. One had the sense of being immersed in culture. But “inspired” is the key word: it was joyous torture. Moreover, the “torture” continued for life, as he answered every letter and e-mail that I have sent to him in the 30 years since my graduation.

His own life is itself an inspiration, including his “retirement,” which is more productive than my “active years”: indeed, I still get tired hearing of his schedule. And yet he has time for former students trying to reignite the spark of inspiration from our memory of him. I am a lawyer, and there was a time when I had several associates who were interested in serious books. So, some 20-plus years after I left Hanover, I proposed to Bien that we would read, say, “Mrs. Dalloway” and he would come to my firm (then in The World Trade Center) and give a one-hour lecture and answer questions, and we would buy dinner and pay a (far too modest) honorarium. He did this four times, on four different books!

Over my 35 years of collegiate, graduate school, and professional life, I have almost never encountered anyone who was able to balance genius/achievement and humanity as does Professor Bien. I only hope that my children encounter such a teacher.

June 13, 2009

Driving to the post office on Waddell Road, I saw a doe with the tiniest fawn I’ve ever seen—no more than two feet tall, if that—but it was fully capable of running along with its mother. . . . Finished annotations this morning for the 1928 letters. Fewer than 30 more years to go.

June 27, 2009

Alec and family arrived in new York this morning from Bangkok and drove to Leander’s for a few days. . . . Mowing this afternoon on the strip on the west side of the pond with the Troy-Bilt, I slipped on the grass and the mower went into the pond, fully submerged. Chrysanthi thought it was very funny. We got it out with a rope and back to the barn with the tractor. But will it ever run again?

July 10, 2009

Alec and I removed the old fencing around the garden and installed new fencing, fixing all the cedar posts, most of which needed to be held in place by metal posts. Two days’ work, morning and afternoon, very tiring. But it’s done, and much needed.

July 12, 2009

Long e-mail from Dimtri Kyriakou indicating that Charlotte Armstrong and Jud Shaver have told him that he is no longer going to be the Farm School president. Astonishing. No word to the board. I telephoned Mike Keeley in Athens. He said that Kyriakou required that he not be a resident of Greece, be paid in Spain or Austria, not pay Greek taxes, not be subject to military service, etc. They (rightly) refused. So, we now have no president.

July 13, 2009

Very nice visit from Gail and Ruth Schoppert and David and Patti Buck (and their epileptic dog). Lots of talk about Kyriakou (Gail knows nothing). Lots of camaraderie with Alec because all three are involved in international education. Happy hour with ouzo, of course. Dinner with spanakopita and Turkish coffee. Lots of good talk until 10:00 p.m.

July 14, 2009

Our guests treated us to breakfast at Marsha’s, 8:25 a.m. until 10:30. Such easy and compatible visitors! Gail, having lived and worked abroad for his entire career, felt ill at ease when back in America. He agrees that Alec, because of his annual six weeks here, and his home, may not suffer the same consequences when, finally, he does return. Alec has turned down offers of promotion that required reduction of his six weeks here. Good! So far . . . Bought a new lock for the repaired gate. Let’s hope. I wonder if it might be best to close the gate but leave it unlocked.

July 15, 2009

A rare sunny day, no rain. Worked on letters until 3:30 but then mowed (Leander’s, then the south field) until 6:30. Supper at Alec’s: salmon. Chrysanthi and Theo then played chess. He’s learning. I played hymns on the harmonium they brought from Irv and Fran’s.

July 18, 2009

For our 54th anniversary (yesterday) we went to the ballet matinee of “Coppélia.” How nice to see it again, this time starring the extraordinary Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia (in NYC we saw Megan Fairchild). Such fun, such sheer pleasure! Nothing serious, an event magnificently artistic, and just a display of what the dance can do. Before, there was a demonstration workshop with tiny children: first position, plié, and the like, very well taught by one of the principal male dancers. Afterward we went to Lake George and feasted in the Sicilian Pizza, Alec treating; then strolled through Lake George Village, the children insisting on experiencing Frankenstein’s Chamber of Horrors. Next: ice cream at Stewart’s (of course). A very nice outing.

April 29, 2009

Alec’s 51st birthday. Leander came yesterday, Daphne today. We all had supper together, very pleasantly. And, miracle of miracle, this afternoon I finished the annotations, feeling very emotional as I approached Kazantzakis’s last letters shortly before he died. What remains now are the queries—annotations where I need information.

August 2, 2009

Finished mowing the south field. Και του χρόνου! . . . Lovely visit the last three days from Daphne and family. Christine much changed for the better. Charming and beautiful.

August 22, 2009

Finished putting up the tractor; still difficult. In the evening, went with Donna and Ed to the Hall of Springs for a lovely leisurely dinner and then the Philadelphia Orchestra. Huge videos inside as well as outside, showing close-ups of instruments soloing at each moment, a great enhancement, especially with the “Bolero,” which concluded the program spectacularly. Russian pianist Kirill Gerstein, a marvelous soloist in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini.” “Peer Gynt Suite” boring, but de Falla’s dances from the “Three Cornered Hat” a good show-off piece for this splendid orchestra.

September 5, 2009

A varied day. Pruned the apple tree in the morning. Then Tom and Joan Wilson came for lunch, returning from Lake Pleasant to Hanover. Tyropites and dholmadhakia. Then supper of delicious spaghetti and scallops with homemade bread with olive oil and garlic. Then to North Creek for a concert, very fine, by a group of Russian a cappella singers, all very professional. First half: Orthodox Church music. Second half: folksongs. Then a little tennis on TV (US Open) and finally, of course, “I Love Lucy,” which has been entertaining us for a month.

September 7, 2009

Fran telephoned to say that Irv Shapiro died last night. We knew it was imminent; he was under hospice care. Apparently he thought of us as “inmates” because of our residence at Kendal. But what a shame for Fran, especially, that he denied them residence in a CCRC. I hope that she will now move to one. . . . Dismantled my office today. Sad. Mowed down Chrysanthi’s flower garden. Sad. But I’m already booked for eight-hand piano at Kendal next Tuesday, which is nice.

September 10, 2009

Riparius

Jeremy Caggiano, the RCPA forester, visited and we walked extensively through Alec’s land and the Partnership. I learned a lot. On Alec’s there are numerous burls on black cherry trees. There’s a man in North River who buys burls from certified forests (like ours) and makes bowls out of them. We’ll ask if he is interested. Lots of good trees. Lots and lots of water in the beaver dam, more than ever. Then we walked up Waddell Road to see the white pine stand about halfway up to the north border. Very nice, commended Caggiano, but the regeneration is not pine but balsam. If you do nothing, you’ll have a balsam forest there in 40 years instead of a pine forest. Remedy: thinning, to allow more light to reach the ground so that pine can seed themselves, as they do in an open field. Walking up the north logging path, he felt that my thinning there (many years ago) made a difference since that area had mostly valuable trees and no birch or poplar. We examined beech trees, some healthy and some very sick with the beech bark disease that leaves the trees all pimply. If you cut down a sick tree, it regenerates through root suckers and you end up with 5 or 6 new sick trees. Thus when you cut the tree you need to poison the cambium (the living circumference). This goes down to the roots and prevents the unwanted regeneration. Finally, along the southern logging path we found many beautiful oaks and ashes, some with 5- or 6-foot logs in them, but not quite ready yet for harvest. He will return using aerial photography to get a better sense of the entire property. We agreed to do about two acres of thinning a year, which he will mark. It’s senseless to harvest now because the price of wood is so depressed, except for veneer. An idea is to ask Irwin or Jim Morris, who have outdoor furnaces that burn soft woods as well as hardwoods if they’d like to remove some of the trees I girdle. Another idea is to contact someone who deals in firewood, again to remove certain trees that I girdle but do not fell. Let’s hope that we’ll be healthy and vigorous next summer to do some thinning as planned. And let’s hope also that with the locked gate we won’t have disturbances by David Millington or others of his sort. I’m worried. We’ll contact trooper Swan, who says he’ll keep a look-out.

October 4, 2009

Riparius

Drove to the farm. Beautiful color in Vermont. The purpose was to get all my materials for Milton and Paradise Lost, since I’ll be giving a talk on PL for the Professors’ Colloquium in November. Everything is exactly as we left it, including the locked gate. Very peaceful. A lovely outing.

October 18, 2009

It seems that I’ll need to have cataract surgery on both eyes, says Dr. Brannon. Dr. Desey recommends a second opinion, which I’ll get in December from Dr. Miller at Hitchcock. So far I don’t have any diminishment of vision.

October 12, 2009

Playing Schumann’s Ε-flat major piano quartet, first movement. So beautiful, but difficult. And with Joan Wilson I’m rehearsing the Britten “Playful Pizzicato” and the Donizetti.

October 15, 2009

Tempe

Routine flights to Philadelphia and Phoenix. Alice met me, driving a pick-up truck. She’s feeling OK right now after what she hopes will be the final chemo treatment, but realizes that she has a chronic illness that will never be cured. She’s playing piano again. We tried Britten and Donizetti, also some Bizet and Dello Joio, all very satisfying but also needing much practice. I tried Goldberg no. 1 for her and it went fairly well.

October 16, 2009

Vancouver

Arrived last night after 11:00 p.m. Took the new sky train into town. To bed at 1:00 a.m. here, which means 4:00 a.m. New Hampshire time (I rose at 5:15 a.m.). Cell phone dead, but had it fixed. Distressing e-mails from Greece. Yannis Vezyroglou has now resigned from the board. Like Pantelis, he wants Joann to be interim president, then a new search to find an American president. Also another e-mail, from Kyriakou detailing all the money he can find for the school, etc., and why don’t we install him as president after all. . . . At the symposium, so nice to see old friends: Tom Doulis, (who has had several minor strokes, but is finishing an old book and planning a new one, and whose son married in France and soon after divorced), Dia Philippides, Andromache Karanika (doing well on a sabbatical in Harvard’s center in DC), Martin McKinsey, who has gained tenure at UNH despite opposition by the dean and the department chair, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Victor Papacosma (we talked about Meg Alexiou, who happily is doing research and writing again, on Πτωχοπρόδρομος), also Martha from San Francisco State, Peter Allen, who encourages the Farm School to try Anatolia’s no. 2 candidate (who was no. 1 for Peter), Karen Emmerich, Dimitri Tziovas, the nice young man from Brown that I helped: Marinos Pourgouris. . . . Then met Shelagh Ballard and went together to a good Italian restaurant, where we talked with animation from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. about Geoff (it was his birthday today), about the new house she’ll be moving to in a few days, about her three boys and their spouses and children, about the sad fate of Geoff’s last business, which never attracted sufficient capital and was sold—the business concerned with the distribution of hydrogen; then about our three children and spouses and their children; and of her loneliness after Geoff’s death; and of the problems in the Anglican faith (she still goes to the St. Francis church here); she wants a copy of my Quakerism and Darwin essay when it’s published. A lovely reunion. . . . On the way back to the hotel, I met Martin McKinsey on the street. He wanted a beer and I accompanied him, drinking only water. He has tenure at UNH, happily, although he’s not fully happy there, and is getting divorced. Reminisces about my course at Harvard, which he attended. Questions about Scott King, who’s meant to publish my Ritsos writings. A long day.

October 17, 2009

Vancouver

A very good opening session, with Emmanuela Kantzia speaking on Βιζυηνός and then Dimitri Tziovas speaking excellently on Ritsos’s “Philoctetes,” deemphasizing the political aspect and emphasizing the individual/psychological one. It was fun for me to revisit material on which I had worked so long ago. In the question period I related Ritsos’s reaction to my Penguin prologue: “I’m not a political poet. I’m a poet!” Saw Michael Herzfeld, who is still spending time in Thailand. Nice reunion with Elsa Amanatidou, who has gained tenure at Brown and treated me so well when I was there. Also nice to see Gonda Van Steen again; she has moved to Gainesville, Florida, from Tucson, and is happier there. A man named Christopher Brown introduced himself. He’s teaching Greek language at Ohio State, using our Greek Today, and he had been to Dartmouth to do a Rassias program. Good to hear that our book is being used. And he has lots of students every year. . . . Fascinating session hosted by André Gerolymatos demonstrating “the Odysseas Greek Language Tutor” for teaching elementary Greek on line, even in China with grammar, etc. in Chinese. At Simon Fraser they have increased student enrolment in Modern Greek threefold. I thought of the backward, old fashioned teaching of English to Greeks at the Farm School. What a difference! I also thought of our somewhat amateurish website for Greek Today. They would like to look at it, and borrow. . . . Marinos Pourgouris spoke well on the student revolt in Athens last year. Devin E. Naar of Stanford University gave a brilliant paper on “A Chief Rabbi of Greece? Defining ‘Hellenic Judaism’ between the World Wars,” using Ladino newspapers as sources. The difficulties in choosing a leader remind me of the current difficulties of the American Farm School.

October 19, 2009

Princeton

Nice to be in Palmer House again. Young man at breakfast teaching computer science in Singapore, just arrived with jet lag. I instructed him in feast-fast for his return. Breakfast at the Nassau Inn with Dimitri, who has orchestrated my three days in his usual excellent manner. Great worries about the Farm School board, which is riven by enmities, resignations, etc. Got my key to the Modern Greek Reading Room in Firestone, level A and settled in, but couldn’t find the Larousse Encyclopedia that was so helpful in the Benaki library. Later I learned that Dimitri has ordered it but that it hasn’t been shipped yet. Good meeting with Don Skemer about my archive. He’s fully willing to accept it but warned me that Princeton does not permit photocopying unless all permissions are received. Also, he cannot use my 3 × 5 card file and wants all that information transferred to computer, where it will be easily accessible. Lots of work for me (or somebody) but understandable. What this would be, Dimitri hopes, is a Bien archive containing Kazantzakis, not just a Kazantzakis archive. I’d need to send my Ritsos letters and the letters from Kimon Friar and anything else I have. I was very pleased, obviously. . . . Hard to work in the library because Dimitri has scheduled me so heavily, but I found some useful Who’s Whos and literary encyclopedias and was helped by the MG cataloguer, Jeff. Lunch in Scheide Caldwell House. This happens every Monday. All of Dimitri’s “harem” are present—the various lucky Fellows supported by Princeton’s ample funds. Met briefly with Nicholas Panou, a post-doctoral Fellow and then, very happily at 3:00 p.m. with Marina Brownlee. Kisses and hugs. She is Professor of Spanish here; Kevin teaches medieval French at the University of Pennsylvania and they still live in center city, Philadelphia, where I visited with them when Alec was still at Friends Select. She is involved in some comparative projects involving Spanish and Greek. Lots of good memories of Dartmouth, Chrysanthi, etc. And Marina came to my talk later today. Perhaps she can help me with Spanish queries for the Kazantzakis letters. . . . At 6:00 I returned to Scheide Caldwell House for my lecture on “Kazantzakis in Berlin 1922–23.” Full house, no seats. Dimitri gave an exhaustive and embarrassing introduction. I delivered satisfactorily, I suspect, because afterwards there was a barrage of questions and comments, including one from a young scholar who concluded that Kazantzakis was “a faker.” Alexander Nehamas told me afterward that the lecture was successful because it was so easy for everyone to understand my personal involvement with the material. Touché! Afterwards, as always, full supper. I joke with everyone here: You’re always eating. Mike and Mary came even though, as he always repeats, he doesn’t like Kazantzakis, not even Zorba, any longer. Lovely to see Carol Oberto, who remembers Chrysanthi’s vivacity so well. So endeth the first day.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Princeton

In the morning, met with Constanza Güthenke, who of course I remember from previous meetings. She couldn’t attend last night and of course was interested in the German element. Happily she’s now a tenured associate professor in Classics and Hellenic studies, very friendly and cordial. Time for some more work in the library, then lunch at Prospect (faculty club) with Dimitri and Mike and Mary Keeley. Conversation mostly about the Farm School. Mike strongly supports Panos Kanellis (so does Annie, but Tasos is strongly opposed). I learned from Mike, for the first time, that Kanellis had been no. 2 when the search committee recommended Kyriakou as no. 1. That’s encouraging. I’m squeezed between Manita, who expects me to vote No, and Mike and Annie, who of course will vote Yes. Nice to see Mary looking well and participating in a lively manner despite all her illnesses. . . . Then back to Firestone and the Rare Books section to have Kalliopi Balatsouka go through all Kazantzakis’s letters to Kimon Friar (1951–57). I indicated those that I’m printing. She noted dates of all the rest. At home I’ll see which of the remaining ones I have in the archive and she’ll send me any that I lack. Apparently the Friar archive (which she is civilizing) includes my letters to him and even copies of his to me. He was very systematic, for example copying out the Kazantzakis letters, fortunately, because the originals suffered water damage in Chicago and are partially unreadable. . . . I skipped the lecture on Greek health care in order to complete the agenda for AFS Secondary Committee, which meets on Friday. Tasos has been trying to reach me via telephone, unsuccessfully so far.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Tasos did reach me early in the morning. Surprisingly, he said that he is not worried about fewer hours teaching English, which Bill McGrew views as a major problem. Regarding the president, he is surprised that he disagrees with Annie, since mostly they agree on everything. But he has a low opinion of Kanellis and says that everyone in Thessaloniki does as well. And Kanellis is going round saying that he’s the next president of AFS. I don’t know what to do. He said that Vouli is sinking fast. Can’t walk. Uses a wheelchair. Frail. No faith in the man who promises to reissue my Selected Letters. Είναι στα καλά του; είπα. Όχι! . . . Two items arrived from special collections: Prevelakis’s To δέντρο (with autographed presentation to Mario Vitti), which totally solved one of my queries, and Katsimbalis’s bibliography of Seferis, who provided step 1 toward solving another query. But when three volumes of Nea Estia also arrived from storage, they turned out to be the wrong ones. . . . Met with David Jenkins, new librarian for classics, Hellenic studies, and linguistics. He learned Greek from Demotic Greek 1 and Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος. I encouraged him to buy Greek Today for himself and the Κοραής dictionary for the library. . . . Then in the early afternoon, saw Efthymia Rentzou, whom I knew as a graduate student and is now assistant professor of French and Italian, and a mother. Final meeting was with Alexander Nehamas in his office in the Department of Philosophy, 1879 Hall. Talked about my lecture, Nietzsche, Kimon Friar, and how Peter Mackridge refuses to be in the same room with Vassilis Lambropoulos. He also asked about Meg and Roddy, who were enemies, but I told him about the dinner we all had at Meg’s home with Roddy and Fran and Meg and Michael. All these enmities are sad. . . . Across from his office: the music building, which of course I remembered. So I asked if I could use a practice room and was given a key without any difficulty. Returned there after supper (in a new restaurant called “Zorba’s Brother”) and went systematically through the 1st Goldberg variation, which I had luckily brought along the music for). I’m scheduled to perform it on harpsichord this Sunday. Very helpful practice.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Princeton–New York City

Another good practice session in the Music Department. Then the Dinky and New Jersey Transit to Penn Station. Lectured for Jeff Murphy at his new law firm: Sonnenschein et al. in the McGraw Hill Building on 6th Avenue and 48th. Lovely to see his son there, a new graduate looking for a job in New York, so far unsuccessfully, but he had an interview today and is hoping. Jeff explained that his previous firm, Thatcher, is dissolved. Its largest clients were Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, both of course non-existent. Thatcher simply had no business, no income, and was put down. One hundred of its lawyers and support staff transferred to Sonnenschein. My audience was about 20. No questions afterwards except one that I couldn’t answer: “What made the ancient Greeks so remarkable?” But friendly talk with individuals. One roomed in the same big house with Leander at Oberlin. Another read the Iliad in college. Another is currently listening to Joyce’s Ulysses on tape as he drives to and from work each day. Then to the Greek restaurant Kellari on 44th near the Harvard Club, with Jeff’s closest colleague and his uncle and wife of the uncle’s deceased brother. Good food and talk. I also had a full buffet lunch at the Yale Club in midday, for free because I still used a birthday card.

Friday, October 23, 2009

New York City

To the Guggenheim for Kandinsky retrospective. I’d seen the one they did 25 years ago. This was equally impressive although the commentary by “experts” on the cassette distributed was rather fatuous. . . . To AFS office for College Committee and then Secondary. Nice that Pantelis came this time. Nothing really difficult, but we resolved that the outlying farm not be bought. Even Bill McGrew is of this opinion now. Kellari Restaurant on E. 20th is OK but nothing special. I sat next to Joel Post and opposite Link Jewett, who gave me a position paper he wrote against decreasing CO_2. Also spoke to a guest who has been helping to find someone for learning deficiencies.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Full board. Not as bad as predicted. People were courteous and civilized, unlike sessions several years ago. I was furious because Charlotte did not put the Secondary Committee on the agenda. Just an oversight, she declared. Also, last February’s Secondary minutes were not reproduced in the minutes as I had written them. (Gail’s fault, he later confessed.) Lots of speeches against Kanellis, especially from Pantelis. Others felt that the fractured board should be healed first. But the vote was 14 to 7 in favor. I voted Yea, encouraged by Dimitri and Mike and Annie, although with hesitations especially because Tasos telephoned me a few days ago to express his strong opposition. But at least we have somebody now. . . . Subway with Marders to Brooklyn Heights, where they’d left their luggage at Cindy’s house. Drove home with them in driving rain.

October 29, 2009

Finished preparing a talk on Milton and Paradise Lost for the Professors’ Colloquium on Monday. Half from old material, half new. It’s fun to write a lecture again. And Milton is truly amazing.

October 20, 2009

Greatly helped today by Miguel Valladares, a reference librarian who happens to be Spanish and who carefully researched one of my queries, and solved two more, all concerned with Spain. . . . Lovely concert tonight by the Ling Quartet, finishing with the 3rd Rasumovsky—the extraordinary fugal 4th movement that I loved so much when I was studying music at Haverford.

November 16, 2009

Really finished the Selected Letters. Printed everything downstairs in Academic Computing. Made a copy for myself at Gnomon. Notified Hanne Winarsky at Princeton University Press. She asked for names of possible readers. I gave her Beaton, Mackridge, Philippides, Gounelas. What remains is another trip to Widener Library to check the Papyrus-Larousse Greek Encyclopedia for additional dates of birth and death. I’ll do that on December 3, when we go for the talk at the Maliotis Center on Quakers and the Farm School. Then everything goes to Princeton, hard copy plus disk.

November 21, 2009

To Dartmouth Symphony to hear Bonnie Thron do the Shostakovich cello concerto. During the interval three men came up to me and announced that they’d had me for a Frosh seminar in 1971. They remembered the books, etc. Amazing. All three had children now at Dartmouth and playing in the orchestra. . . . Finished reading Ian Barbour’s “Religion and Science,” the perfect primer for my forthcoming essay.

November 23, 2009

Working now on “Quakerism and Darwin.” Interesting. For the first time I’ve investigated some of the actual writings of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, using them to stress how advanced thought was interpreted as heresy long before Darwin. It’s good to be writing something original again instead of translating Kazantzakis’s letters or annotating them. A propos, Lia Mehan finally found an address and even an e-mail for Linos Benakis. I’ve written him about the mysterious “Loukia” in the letter to Elli Lambridi. Let’s see if he answers.

November 24, 2009

To Washington

Surprise. Met Rhoda at Springfield AMTRAK station and talked steadily all the way down to New Haven. . . . Deana didn’t get home until midnight because she was playing at the White House for Obama’s State dinner for the prime minister of India, which included the entire National Symphony. They did Bernstein’s “Candide” and the like, but didn’t see the guests or dinner, which was in a separate tent. They did, however, see Obama, who came to thank the orchestra.

November 25, 2009

Washington

I went in via Metro and was picked up at Dupont Circle by Mache Karanika, who drove me to the Harvard DC complex, a group of buildings on land donated by Mellon: residences for the Fellows, offices for each, a full library, and a lovely lounge. She’s doing well there but not, alas, at her home university, UC Irvine, where the senior people in the department seem to be against her. She needs to find a publisher for her expanded dissertation, then to produce a second book to have a real chance for tenure. But at least she has a job, which is very rare now for classicists. Then to Dennis’s favorite chop house to lunch with Nurzhan and Chad. She has no job and has received only one invitation for an interview. He works for an NGO that helps charitable types and other businesses in developing countries get going. They may move to Trinidad in six months to concentrate on this work in the Caribbean area. I told her about difficulties at the Farm School with respect to animals, the presidency, etc. Very pleasant visit. . . . Then met Leander, kids, and Chrysanthi at the National Geographic Museum to see the exhibit of Chinese terracotta figures dug up recently, all meant to accompany and protect the first Chinese emperor in his afterlife. He apparently was a horrible tyrant, and much admired by Mao! Then to the mall to see the World War II memorial, large and grandiose, of course, with some good statements carved into the rock, including “We came to liberate and not to conquer.” . . . Dinner in a spaghetti place, very fine. Movie: “Tootsie.”

November 26, 2009, Thanksgiving

Practiced Haydn, Scarlatti, and Donizetti. Played the Donizetti duet with Leander, who says it can be effective only if played truly Presto, as indicated. My part is easy enough. Good turkey dinner with all the fixings. Children dressed nicely. Greg’s Coen wine! Nicholas played saxophone jazz with Leander, very well indeed, and Sophia played guitar, her new choice. Nicholas is no longer enthusiastic about basketball. Leander thinks he pushed him too much. He’s a natural on the saxophone, it seems. Good tone, good rhythm. Watched “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” still with great pleasure and laughter—a brilliant film. I worked a little copyediting Manousos’s book on Howard and Anna Brinton, read TLS, entered Linos Benakis’s info on Loukia in the 1924 letters. Drank B&B as a nightcap.

December 1, 2009

Cambridge

Working in Widener again. This time with the Papyros-Larousse Encyclopedia, and I did find one solution to a query. Then to Hellenic College using our directional aid, a huge help. Lovely to see the Drapers after many years, and the Bucks, after many months, and Charlotte Armstrong, who apologized about the mix-up with the Secondary Committee minutes, and a woman who hopes to publish the Macrakis festschrift at Hellenic, and William Howard Taft IV, Judy Richardson’s “partner,” it seems. Draper spoke well, as did a recent graduate who is now at Mt. Holyoke, and I gave a very short version of my paper on Quakers and the Farm School. Lots of good food, of course, and good feelings.

December 4, 2009

Cambridge

Back to Widener. Found one more solution to a query, this time from the International Who’s Who. Then to Roilos’s Medieval and Early Modern Greek Symposium. Jan Ziolkowsky was the introducer. Lovely to see him again after 25 years. He says that I haven’t changed. Also lovely to see the Jeffreys; the last time was in Sydney; and Roddy, who says he’ll be happy to vet the Selected Letters, and Dia, and Wim. Good talks but not really in my field. Spent 1½ hours with Dia and Wim in the evening in their apartment.

December 5, 2009

Leisurely morning. Then to a splendid discussion at the A.R.T. with Prof. Graber of Harvard and Diane Paulus, the new A.R.T. director and current director of the Public Theater in New York City, about how to do Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, and why the A.R.T. is having its current Shakespeare festival. In the question period I asked which plays they’d favor if they were teaching in high school or middle school. One answered King Lear—oh, the students need to play the role of Cordelia! Then at 2:00 p.m. the marvelous adaptation of A Winter’s Tale, transformed into an opera with an all-black cast and a jazzy orchestra. Moving, funny, energizing.

December 6, 2009

In the mail, my new book on Ritsos, needing proof-reading.

December 7, 2009

Vouli died this morning after ten days in hospital. Joann sent me the news via e-mail and Chrysanthi then telephoned and spoke to Katerina in the apartment, which is full of people. Funeral tomorrow. I first met her in 1955, 54 years ago. I sent a fax to Stylianos: Χάσαμε τη Βούλη σήμερα το πρωί. Πόσα φαητά είχαμε η Χρυσάνθη κι εγώ γύρω στο τραπέζι της, πόσους φίλους γνωρίσαμε στο διαμέρισμά της! Φαντάζομαι πως και σένα, εκεί πρώτα ανταμώσαμε, στη Τσιμισκή 87. Χάσαμε μια φιλία που βάσταξε μισο αιώνα. Κρίμα.

December 12, 2009

Good poetry is magical, for example these verses in Thomas Hardy’s “Afterwards” that I read today in the TLS:

When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say:

‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

The trick, of course, is the juxtaposition of highly poetic diction with the ordinary speech of the last line.

December 16, 2009

Horrible! Kingsley Ervin, whom I chatted with two days ago about piano playing and Adirondacks and his singing at St. Thomas’s, today is dead. Sudden and unexpected. . . . But Daphne celebrated her birthday (43rd) beautifully, with Greg cooking all the meals, taking all three children to and from school, etc. So, pluses and minuses. Also, tonight I played Haydn and Debussy and Frank Bridge with Allan and Dick, and Mozart before that with Dick. At least the Mozart was well done. . . . Amazingly, I’m in touch with Ian Barbour. He read my new essay on Quakerism, Darwin, and Process theology and seemed to approve except for my use of Don Cupitt, whom Barbour considers promoting “a purely naturalist view, though a rich naturalism that makes extensive use of symbolism.” He worries about a clash between Cupitt’s emphasis on transience and Hartshorne’s dipolar view. I need to rethink my essay a bit and will try to make some adjustments tomorrow. . . . Very nice supper yesterday with Jim and Carol Armstrong. He is 90 and beginning to feel old, but still drives his tractor, although Carol worries about his balance when getting on it and especially off. I think of my own jumps when I descend the John Deere. How will I manage if I survive to age 90? . . . Am proof-reading my new book on Ritsos, which reprints all my old essays and translations. The translations are printed with the original Greek side by side. The Greek, of course, is horribly done; everything is wrong.

December 21, 2009

Good talk with Fred Berthold about process theology, which he favors and hopes to write a book on. He told me Tillich’s definition of God: that which is worthy of our ultimate concern.

December 30, 2009

I’ve been haunted the last few days by thoughts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was imprisoned by the Nazis owing to his anti-Nazi activities, culminating in a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. In prison he had access to books and wrote a remarkable series of letters that were eventually published. But after about two years being held without trial, he was subjected to a summary, false trial, condemned to death, and executed cruelly the next morning by hanging, with wire around his neck, not even a rope. Apparently he went to his death calmly, praying fervently. What a horror! He was, I think, 41 years old. . . . Lunched with Andrea Useem and her husband, Justin. She’s now employed by the Washington Post’s Leadership blog, mostly editing other people’s submissions. She said that she got tired of concentrating on Islam. I asked about liberal Islam. Yes, it exists, she and Justin replied, but not in open discussion. Liberals keep quiet, or whisper to like-minded Moslem friends. Nothing further. Moreover, the mosque does not provide fellowship. You rush over five times a day, often in the midst of work, pray, rush out. They haven’t gotten to know a circle of compatible Moslems through the mosque. Happily, Quakerism is very different.

December 31, 2009

Received this today via e-mail. Govostis publishes Christos Alexiou’s periodical Θέματα Λογοτεχνίας. The author illustrated must be Dostoevsky, who definitely is not laughing.

2010

Hanover

January 1–June 12

Jan. 23–24, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Feb. 18–28, Santa Barbara, California, Daphne’s

April 17, Lawrence, Massachusetts

May 6–7, NYC, Yale Club, ballet

May 20, Riparius

May 22, Cambridge, A.R.T.

May 30, Riparius

Riparius

June 13–September 11

June 19–20, Hanover

July 2–5, Sedona, Arizona

July 15–16, New York City

September 3–6, Berkeley, California

Hanover

September 12–December 31

Sept. 18, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Oct. 2–4, New York City

Nov. 4–6, New York City

Nov. 12–13, Pendle Hill

Nov. 17–18, Boston, Marriott Copley Place

Nov. 24–26, Leander’s

Dec. 23–26, South Salem, Daphne’s

Dec. 29–30, Riparius

January 8, 2010

Went to Freya Von Moltke’s funeral at the Norwich Congregational Church. Veronica played a Mozart adagio. Grandchildren and the surviving son spoke about the Countess’s modesty, humor, etc., and about the estate, now restored as a reconciliation center. Full house; very moving, especially when the coffin was moved out by the family at the end, for burial. . . . Then to Meriden for lunch with Kesaya and Chris, Lafayette, the Hunters, and Sydney Jarvis. Kesaya then took the ladies into the main house in order to distribute to them elements of Mayme’s wardrobe, so Chrysanthi returned with various pieces, in a snowstorm, driving at 25 mph. Kesaya couldn’t feel comfortable with the new Dartmouth president, Jim Kim, and is leaving on April 1st, but with nine months’ continuing salary plus 93% of her medical insurance bill for life. . . . I’m translating various poems from Stylianos’s latest collection, Παίδων και εφήβων. Difficult, but I’m able to do some of them, at least. . . . Very nice letter from John Tallmadge, who marvels that we’ve known each other for 45 years.

January 18, 2010

Princeton University Press says that my Selected Letters is far too long. I’ve got to reduce it. I’ll probably remove the incomplete letters to Eleni Kazantzakis where the manuscripts are missing. Too bad. Started the re-reading. The positive aspect is that I’m catching various errors, adding some annotations, etc.

January 23–24, 2010

An interesting weekend in Cambridge. Saturday lunch with Peter Wilson, the student who lived near us. He writes novels and has a child adopted from China. Then to the A.R.T. at 3:00 p.m. for part one of “Gat2,” a show comprising a full reading of The Great Gatsby plus dramatic action, very well done but seven hours long. One hour for supper, in the theater. Then another three hours, 7:30 to 10:30. The major point seems to be: money is a curse. Slept at the Quaker Center. Nice to see Andy Towl, now 99 years old and very sprightly, also several people from Pendie Hill: Alec Kern and a former student.

January 25, 2010

Joann sent the beautiful CD about Vouli’s life, filled with photos of her at all ages, plus this memorial in The Sower:

ΒΟΥΛΗ ΠΡΟΥΣΑΛΗ (1924-2009)

Η Βούλη Προύσαλη, κρητικής καταγωγής, γεννήθηκε στη θεσσαλονίκη καI σπούδασε στη Φιλοσοφική Σχολή του Α.Π.θ. Προσλήφθηκε ως φιλόλογος στην Σχολή το 1967, στην τότε Οικοκυρική Σχολή θηλέων, και από το 1978 δίδαξε στα σχολεία του Δευτεροβάθμιου προγράμματος, ως τη συνταξιοδότηση της το 1995· Η Βούλη, άτομο ιδιαίτερα «δοτικό» ήταν αφιερωμένη σε ό,τι αγαπούσε: τον σύζυγό της, που δυστυχώς έφυγε πολύ νωρίς, την μητέρα της, τους συγγενείς, τους φίλους της. . . Γαλουχημένη με το πνεύμα «Lansdale» αφιερώθηκε στο έργο της Σχολής, πιστεύοντας στην αποστολή της και την υπηρέτησε πιστά και από ποικίλες θέσεις. Λάτρεψε, φρόντισε και βοήθησε με κάθε τρόπο μαθητές και συναδέλφους. Την Βούλη δεν θα τη θυμόμαστε μόνο για την πολύχρονη και πολυσχιδή εκπαιδευτική της προσφορά ή για τα πολλά φανερά καλά που έκανε. Θα τη θυμόμαστε κυρίως για τα πιο πολλά κρυφά καλά που έκανε! . . .

Friday, February 19, 2010

Santa Barbara

Arrived last night after a routine non-stop flight from Boston to Los Angeles, where Greg and Daphne met us. Luckily I have Ethernet communication to the web in their guest house and was able to deal with 70-odd e-mails including important ones: four letters protesting the breakup of the King’s College Modern Greek department, sad and unexpected, for lack of enough students. I’ve been able to continue reviewing the Kazantzakis letters, finding very few to remove, but correcting various mistakes along the way. Have also been able to practice, using Daphne’s Steinway, doing the Bach F-minor prelude, Book 2, that I hope to do on the harpsichord in May at Kendal. I’m also learning my 8-hand part for the overture to Don Giovanni. Most of our time here has been spent watching the boys’ athletics. First Andrew’s basketball game at the YMCA. He’s not very good and was allowed to play only 8 minutes. These are 5th graders. Some are quite remarkable and fun to see, as was the entire phenomenon of the Y’s activities—lots of teams, volunteer coaches.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Today it was Peter’s basketball game, also at the Y. First graders, lacking the skills of the fifth graders, but still full of energy and speed. Peter is better coordinated than Andrew and more competitive. Interestingly, Daphne seems to know lots of people and lots know Greg from his early days in this town. We next went to Peter’s tennis lesson at the adjacent club, full of very expert players. And a marvelous machine that throws out tennis balls exactly where the instructor wants them, and can even produce topspin. In the afternoon, Andrew’s tennis lesson. He hits quite well, looks like he could develop into a fairly good player. He is not meant for rough competitive team sports. Greg went to coach the high school team. One of his best is accepted to Dartmouth for next year. Tonight Greg and Daphne went to a dinner party involving wines contributed by growers, all proceeds to charity. And Christina went off to Los Angeles to play in a volleyball tournament. Some life! The privileged few.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Walked in the woods. Met a woman on a horse that she coaxed to step sideways to let us pass. Then to movies, to see the film of a series of books read avidly by Andrew, a way of bringing Greek myth into modernity. Very fanciful, with the Lotos Casino in Las Vegas, for example, being the Lotus Eaters. Saw the chief shopping center of Santa Barbara, which is architecturally beautiful and very appealing, of course. Jazz band outside of Borders. Shop selling eight different flavors of frozen yogurt. And so forth. In the evening, we went to the theater: “Souvenir” by Stephen Temperley, about a singer who is tone deaf. Two characters, the singer and her accompanist, the latter played expertly by Edwin Cahill, a graduate of New England Conservatory of Music and Manhattan School—pianist, singer, actor. Very funny as she sings everything hopelessly off-key, but becomes a cult and performs in Carnegie Hall.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Daphne took us to see the remarkable Santa Barbara Law Court building, constructed in 1925 after the previous building was destroyed by an earthquake. Modeled on Mediterranean originals, it is quite amazing for its beauty, grandeur, imagination, and style, surely like no other law court building anywhere, and full of murals, calligraphy, gardens. Even the jail, adjoining, is beautiful. . . . In the afternoon, I spent considerable time practicing my Bach, which is advancing. Read a story to Peter before he slept, about a crocodile and a hen who discuss that they are brother and sister because, despite their differences, they both lay eggs.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Daphne took us for a long walk along the Montecito beach, where a very wealthy man built a huge mansion, created bike paths, and purchased the Biltmore Hotel. His fortune came from toys for children. Nice to see the beautiful Biltmore, built in 1926, like the Courthouse, after the earthquake. Lots of tile-work and luxury. Then more luxury next to the Biltmore in the club where the Tebbes are members. Huge swimming pool, longer than Olympic length, gym, ping pong, sauna, decks for sunbathing, a nice outdoor lunch (with electric heaters overhead) that we indulged, a fancier restaurant, etc., and of course the sound of breakers and the view of the adjacent Pacific Ocean. Met a friend of Greg’s, a Dartmouth grad of ’93 named Matthews who now is a visitor for the Rockefeller Center. Spoke with him about Michael Gazanniga, who is now at UCSB. Also about President McLaughlin, business ethos versus academic ethos, two cultures. The luxury and wealth here are of course extraordinary. . . . After supper we went to a meeting at Christina’s school meant to encourage parents to have their children stay there for the 9th grade instead of transferring to 9th in a high school. The school is typically progressive. I asked the teachers if they knew the origins—i.e., previous schools of this nature. They really did not. I think of the Wyneken School near Weimar described by Kazantzakis. When they spoke of their student council, I asked if they ever thought of peer review, and the headmaster answered, “That is our desired goal.” Christina’s history teacher graduated from Dartmouth. He spoke very highly of her, saying that she’s scholarly and friendly. One of the fathers came up to thank all the Tebbes for Christina’s good friendship with his own daughter, who is having difficulties. Yet at home she is horrible. Refuses to talk, eats and excuses herself immediately to disappear. She casts a pall over the entire household. Yet apparently at school she is an entirely different person. She will need to decide now whether to stay another year in this fine progressive school or to start 9th grade in Santa Barbara High School. Before that she’ll go on one of the school’s usual trips, climbing Mt. Whitney, and will continue playing volleyball to see if her team qualifies for higher competition. Of the children, Peter is the most outgoing. Andrew is sweet but silent compared to Peter (but not to Christina). And Andrew, not good at team sports like basketball, is quite good at tennis, as we observed the other day. . . . Shirley Dodson says that she wants to print my “Quakerism, Darwin, and Process Theology” in the Pendle Hill pamphlet series. Good. But she suggests revisions, all of which I find entirely reasonable. She says that I am too categorically negative about Quakers; they don’t always subscribe, as I claim, to complete Platonism. I just found in a Kazantzakis letter a statement that “eternity” must be considered qualitative, not quantitative. I’ll use that. Also, she wants me to be more personal, so I think I’ll talk about my marvelous Plato and Aristotle course at Harvard. This is a revision that I’m happy to do. I’ll be able, as well, to use some of the material in the essay I wrote for the Seeger festschrift, about which I had completely forgotten.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Raining, but we kept our appointment at Lotus Land and went around for two hours under umbrellas, guided by a docent. An extraordinary garden, very diverse, with plants from everywhere in the world. I thought continually of Darwin—the profusion of species, each specialized. Walking through this wonderland, one truly senses the extraordinary natural world of which we are one small part.

Thursday February 25, 2010

A nice visit with Professor Apostolos Athanassakis of UCSB, chairman of the Department of Classics there. He remembers being in our house in Hanover, something I do not remember. We share many acquaintances: Meg Alexiou, Kimon Friar, Bill Scott, George Thomson, Andonis Decavalles, Greg Nagy. He is now editing The Charioteer and wants me to contribute. I queried him about perhaps lecturing if and when we return here—for example a reading of poems by Modern Greek authors treating ancient Greek materials. He took me to yet another beautiful seaside restaurant near the university. I had mussels and clams. We had two martinis, plus pasta. He is well known there, introduced me to several men at the bar, one of whom said proudly that his father attended Dartmouth. . . . Also spent considerable time today practicing my Bach prelude and even the fugue a bit. Christina’s report card arrived. A or A+ in everything plus excellent for attitude, deportment. Strange, because at home she’s a horror.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Nice visit from Lucia, looking much older but still very lively. We talked about CCRCs. She has found nothing attractive here. . . . My Bach prelude is beginning to sound like real music. And I’m progressing a little on the fugue. With Lucia we ate lunch in the next town; breakfasts all day.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

To Peter’s basketball game again. Very exciting; they lost by 2 points. Peter got one basket. Lovely to see these first graders exercising as a team. Greg in 8th grade coached the 3rd grader who is now the grown-up coach of Peter’s team. Small world. Drove through Westmont College, advertised as for “students of faith.” Presumably girls there are not drugged, as they are at Dartmouth.

March 9, 2010

Hooray! Hanne at Princeton said I could send the Kazantzakis Letters in their “shortened” state, still about 800 pages worth. . . . And I finished revising “Quakerism, Darwin, and Process-Relational Theology,” greatly helped by Shirley Dodson’s critique.

March 12, 2010

I booked tickets to Greece for June 21–28 shortly before we have to fly to Arizona on July 2nd, and put the tickets on hold for 24 hours, not paying. At supper, it suddenly occurred to me, and I said to Chrysanthi, “You know, we really don’t have to go to Greece.” She burst into total joy, saying “Wonderful. Let’s stay home.” “But you won’t see your family.” “No matter. Let’s stay home.” So I canceled the tickets.

March 15, 2010

Posted Kazantzakis Letters (reduced) to Princeton. Chrysanthi asked me later, “Well, what will you do now?” The answer was easy:

1.More work on the letters after Princeton gets back to me, not to mention the index.

2.Prepare the deleted letters for the website of Ekdoseis Kazantzaki. Niki Stavrou is thrilled at the prospect.

3.See my Ritsos book through to publication.

4.Translate more of Harkianakis’s poems.

5.See Quakerism and Darwin through to publication. That, too, in revised form, has been returned to Pendle Hill.

6.Write an introduction to the JMGS special issue on Kazantzakis; revise papers given in the NYU symposium, and adjust my own short paper given there.

7.Learn the F-minor Well Tempered (Book 2) fugue. I’m doing well on the prelude.

Peter Schweitzer telephoned to say that his wife, Susan, died last night after a long, debilitating illness. Death was for her—and him—a release.

March 16, 2010

Chrysanthi had the first of her cataract operations. Dr. Miller, who spent time in Greece first as a teenager in Greek Summer and then as a counselor for that program, greeted us with Καλή μέρα, and noted that he would operate on the αριστερό eye. Everything went well. She now has a bandage over the eye. He’ll remove it tomorrow morning and then she should have the pleasant surprise of greatly improved sight.

March 22, 2010

Met Norvell Reese and his wife at Corinne Johnson’s. He’s the one who subsidized the publication of the Steve Cary book. A jolly man, very rich it seems, and very involved since his youth in Quaker activities. Ditto for his wife. . . . Urged by them, we are going to sign up at Pendle Hill to attend the anniversary celebrations in November and hear Parker Palmer give the Steve Cary lecture.

March 31, 2010

Kendal is producing a book consisting of accounts by residents of their experiences in World War II. I asked Chrysanthi to contribute and she agreed, writing the first half of what follows and then discovering a previous bit of writing that we added as the second half, fixing things a bit to make the chronology work (it isn’t fully accurate). The next day, after I had submitted her text, she had misgivings about the second part, feeling that it was far too personal. Thus I resubmitted this time only the first part. But then, the following day, she became very agitated about that submission as well, complained of stomach cramps, etc. So we withdrew everything. But I add the script here:

THE GERMAN OCCUPATION OF THESSALONIKI, GREECE—APRIL 1941 TO OCTOBER 1944
Chrysanthi Bien

I was eight years old in April 1941 when German parachutists invaded my home town, Thessaloniki, Greece. At 7:00 a.m. a Greek officer came, knocked at our door, and told us to leave town immediately. We did not know for how long. My mother took six pillow cases, one for each member of the family, and filled them with things that we might need. My parents, my two brothers, my sister, and I each took one of these. We started walking. Many people joined us. We didn’t know where we were going—just out of the city. Very often we had to lie down owing to bombs that filled the air and made a horrible noise. The sky was full of beautiful yellow, orange, and green parachutes—especially orange. I remember how beautiful it was but also how horrible. We kept walking and walking, falling down each time a bomb sounded. I don’t remember how far we walked, but it was a long way. Finally we arrived at a village. We did not know anybody, but my father somehow found some flour to buy and we children went out in the fields to collect dandelions, which my mother made into a sort of puree. I remember how delicious it was. (We were exceedingly hungry!)

We stayed in this village for two or three months, after which they told us to go back home, again walking. On the road home, we saw many people tearing the parachutes in order to use the material for clothing or to sell it. When we returned home, the streets were full of tanks and our house and neighborhood were occupied by Germans. My father, an elementary school principal, managed to find us a place to stay with some of his students, until we found our own home. Our lives were not pleasant: no food, no playing outside in the street, as we used to do. Also, the advice we received every morning, very strongly, was not to trust anybody, not even friends, neighbors, or even relatives. The German “soup committee” gave us some “flour”—the chaff of the wheat. I remember that every Tuesday and Saturday I went with other children to the soldiers’ dormitory because the soldiers threw old pieces of bread to us, which we ran to collect. Many times older children took this bread out of my hands and I returned with nothing. People were dying in the streets. The community oven cooked some of the chaff-bread but we had to stand in line to get it. Very often beggars who were nearly dead grabbed the bread from our hands. The little bread we did secure was hidden by my mother beneath her bed. We received one piece a day so that it would last longer. Life became worse and worse.

Some Greeks sold themselves to the Germans. These collaborators made our lives still worse. Suddenly we saw them all loaded down with guns, walking with Germans and spying in various neighborhoods. Odysseas, my younger brother, was in the second year of law school. One day the university students decided to demonstrate against the Germans. They demanded food, homes, and jobs. The demonstration was horrible, and very unsuccessful. The next night at 2:00 a.m. our home was filled with Germans and collaborators. Two Germans pulled off my blankets. Putting a gun against my face, they demanded that I tell them were my brother was. At the same time, other Germans began hitting my father, whom they confused with my brother. After that unforgettable night, our family life changed forever. We lost my brother, not knowing if he were alive or dead. Our family life was never the same. The Germans used to come two or three times a week, at any hour, to ask questions about my brother. Whenever they came, the collaborators helped themselves to whatever food was in our home and took it away. My parents never complained about losing their belongings; they tried to be nice to the collaborators in the hope that the collaborators would be nice to them. But that student demonstration started a new era of suspicion. The Germans and collaborators, working together, used every means to spread fear everywhere. People were no longer the same; no one smiled; everyone was afraid to talk with others. The Germans started to arrest people or whole families because of a brother’s action in a demonstration. They came very often and demanded that we confess our knowledge of where our brother was. The prisons were full of completely innocent people because of a brother, sister, or neighbor. My family had this same history.

Three years later, my brother Odysseas was in the mountains with a communist unit of the resistance forces. The Germans, although clearly losing the war and soon to leave Thessaloniki, continued to persecute families of those in the resistance. At that time I was one of the children recruited to help gather up newborn babies abandoned on doorsteps by their Greek mothers because fathered by German soldiers (the mothers having received ample food and clothing as thanks for their “services”). One day at 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon I was informed that the Third Police Precinct required me to appear immediately. I was in the suburbs, six kilometers from city-center. I put on my coat at once and ran all the way. . . . Out of breath, I had a sudden idea to go quickly to ask my parents what was happening. I climbed the stairs and what did I see: a haunted house, empty, all the doors open, cold. Hateful. My blood froze. I dashed quickly into every room, called out and called out again, but the entire apartment, devoid of everything that resembled a family’s home, smelled of informers’ boots, Gestapo, collaborators. When I looked in one of the bedrooms, what did I see: my sister stretched out, half dead, gazing at the ceiling with tearful frozen eyes. She didn’t say anything to me. I grew frightened. Sweat and shivers froze my bones, my knees gave way, my entire being wept for everything I was seeing and undergoing at that moment. I didn’t have any idea what was happening; I was acting mechanically, quickly. I ran to our neighbor, who told me that the collaborators had come and taken the whole family but had left my sister because at that moment she had suffered a nervous breakdown. The neighbor didn’t know anything else, or any details. Besides, I didn’t have time to wait; I needed to go as quickly as possible to appear at the police station. I went. I knocked on the door, proceeded inside, and greeted the officer politely with a smile (that’s what we were taught: always greet them with a smile). Like a god from top to bottom, he looked at me severely, without saying anything. He called another policeman who led me to a large cell whose chain-tied doors he had to open with two huge keys. He shoved me in and departed. The space was filled with women standing, some kneeling. As soon as I entered I heard “Poor thing! A young girl!” (I was eleven years old.) I stood where I’d taken the first step without uttering a sound, bereft of words and feelings, and unable to sense what was happening around me. A new world was in front of me. Suddenly I felt myself a part of this new world of mine: two tiny holes with iron-barred windows, weeping women of all types whom I had never seen until then. They told their stories and exchanged information, introducing themselves in the hope of someday finding each other again in the world outside. There in the midst of the sad and aggrieved female voices I made out the voice of my mother. Disappointed and humiliated, I pushed my way left and right and came near her. She saw, hugged me, and I heard “Κορίτσι μου!” (My daughter!”) among her maternal sobs. That’s all. The poison blocked my throat and I didn’t say anything. What could we say? Our situation said it all. My mother stood there like a pillar, always unbending, always beautiful, patient, tender, active, brave, unselfish. Now, however, this goddess of mine had descended to being imprisoned; she became in my sight like all the other women. That tormented me exceedingly: that this higher, precious, rare woman who was my mother, my ideal individual, my adored person whom I believed unconquerable—that she had descended in that cell to be handled as they pleased by the police and was unable to show her pride and integrity. That thought broke the wings of my existence. Many times I did not even want to see my mother when I laid my head on her breast and slept. We didn’t speak at all. Although I wondered what she was thinking, what could we say with a bitter mouth in that suspicious atmosphere? All this, and more, tormented me, without a word to utter.

After forty bitter and tormenting days, the chains were heard. We all curled up, petrified, and fixed our eyes on the door. A policeman shouted my name fiercely and commandingly. I got up in a flash and, jumping over the seated women and pushing aside the standing ones, I obeyed his commands. “Follow me!” When I emerged outside I saw the American Farm School’s Quaker director, who had heard of my plight because of my work collecting orphaned newborns. It was October 1944. The Germans were leaving Thessaloniki and he had just arrived from Cairo. He hugged me with tears in his eyes and patted me. While I was still in his embrace I heard him saying to the Greek police officer, “I’ll be responsible for everything. I promise you that Chrysanthi will be under our protection and supervision and she will remain at our school without outside contacts.” He placed me in his car and we left. At night when they put me to sleep with blankets, a hot-water bottle, and a cup of chamomile with honey and lemon, when they all had left and I was alone, it was only then that I came to myself and began to cry. I had forgotten to say goodbye to my mother, my goddess, she who had given me so much, had sung me so many songs, had lain awake so many nights and had deprived herself for my sake. For a moment I did not know where I was, who I was. I had lost my mother, father, two brothers, and sister. I was alone.

But there may be something positive emerging from this distressing history, since Chrysanthi now says that she wants to write a long memoir starting with her time at Woodbrooke in 1955 and continuing with her life in the United States at farm and in city. Μακάρι! She also summarized her life: lovely early childhood, then horror from 1941 to early 1950s, the joy from 1955 onward!

April 4, 2010, Easter

Επιτάφιος service in Newport on Friday. Brought Evelyn Spiegel and Carrie Rosenblum, the Dartmouth student who’ll be going to the Farm School in September as one of the new interns. I started tutoring her in Greek last week. Today: Kendal Easter lunch with Spiegels, Pyttes, and Suzanne Laaspere. Tonight we’re having Rassias, Marders, Spiegels, and Penny Binswanger for τσουρέκι and cracking eggs.

April 17, 2010

Lawrence, Massachusetts

To Lawrence, Massachusetts for Amy Bolton’s Bat Mitzvah, which means “daughter of the commandments.” Amy, a tall, beautiful lass of 13, was very poised and secure. The best talk, as at Rachel’s a few years ago, was by Clive. The text of the ceremony, to me, is revolting because unbelievable gibberish from the Torah (Leviticus, etc.) with a few good moments calling for peace (Shalom). The rabbi was very lively. Amy is fostering various charities through all this, so it’s not all in vain. Lovely to see Alice there, looking quite well. She says that her white blood cell count is normal after the last chemo treatment; however, she has platelets, something in the blood that promotes clotting, giving her black and blue marks on the skin. Obviously she is still very ill and the disease is incurable, but perhaps this treatment can control its development. All the children were there, including Paul and Dana with their new baby. David’s business is thriving (it’s health care). So is Clive’s. Susan and Ellen have decided to get married, on September 5th. It can’t be legal in California but they don’t care. Ellen proposed and Susan accepted. Chrysanthi says that she’s willing to go. Leander came with Sophia. Sophia, also 13, seemed so tiny and shrunken by comparison with the Bolton girls, all three. Leander will run the Kinhaven duet workshop this summer despite significantly reduced enrolment and vows that this will be the final year.

May 6, 2010

New York City

Since we canceled our June trip to Greece, I suggested that we spend two days in NYC and go to the ballet. Today we traveled by Dartmouth Coach, arriving at 11:30 a.m. Went to MoMA in the afternoon to see the exhibit of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, big spreads he did for Life Magazine on war scenes, Soviet Russia, Indonesia, 1948 China, American vulgarity. Also old favorites, especially the Picassos. Supper at the Yale Club, no cost because it’s my birthday month. The ballet was all Balanchine: “Concerto Barocco,” where the two lead dancers follow the two solo violins and the corps does the tuttis; “Duo Concertant” (Stravinsky); “Four Temperaments” (Hindemith), and “Symphony in Three Movements” (Stravinsky). As always: moving, beautiful performances, especially the “Concerto Barocco,” one of Balanchine’s early ballets (1941).

May 7, 2010

Tonight’s ballets were all Robbins. “2 and 3 Part Inventions,” just piano, lovely to hear; “Opus 19/The Dreamer” (Prokofiev), using his lovely first violin concerto; “I’m Old Fashioned” (the Fred Astaire ballet). The music of the first two splendid; Morton Gould’s arrangement of Jerome Kern in the Astaire ballet boring and unimaginative (I’m a snob, surely). But Fred Astaire is always wonderful to watch. Interestingly, of the dancers on stage I always watch the girls not the boys, but with Astaire I watch him and not his partner (Rita Hayworth this time). . . . Earlier today we went to the Met to see the Picasso retrospective, an extraordinary opportunity. His very early work, representational, shows his large talent. Ditto for the Blue Period. Everything was there: the entire career step by step. Then, the show called “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity,” starting with the era of Henry James’s Washington Square, continuing up to today. The styles of the 1920s and 1930s I well remember from my mother, including her wedding dress.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

We returned via Dartmouth Coach to Hanover, arriving at 1:30 p.m. I practiced, took a brief nap, and at 3:30 played the 8-hand version of Haydn’s Military Symphony, first movement, at our monthly recital. Actually we played it better than ever before at rehearsals. No mistakes.

May 14, 2010

Alec reported that the Patana School closed today owing to the hostilities downtown, the first day lost by the school despite all the disturbances recently and previously. Also, a sort of civil war seems to be in progress in central Bangkok.

May 28, 2010

Chrysanthi invited six guests for supper in the apartment to celebrate my 80th birthday: Muncks, Pietsches, Wilsons. Claire brought a very chocolaty chocolate cake. Menu all Greek: τυρόπιτα, κρεατόπιτα, δολμαδάδια, χωριάτικη σαλάτα. Very pleasant.

May 29, 2010

Went to the Dartmouth Symphony and Handel Society’s performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection.” The first movement in my opinion is psychopathic. But the rest isn’t; it’s even beautiful at times besides being extraordinarily loud. (We were in the second row.) What a joy to see our Dartmouth students performing so professionally.

June 6, 2010

I played the prelude and postlude at the memorial service for Bob Stanton. Bach’s fugue in Α-flat from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered, and then a Chopin Nocturne. Not perfect, but not bad. And I seem to have conquered the jitters. . . . People here are upset by all the construction and feel that the original sense of community has been lost. Various groups are trying to enlist me to sign a petition or to help plan a remedy. Chrysanthi keeps lecturing me to stay outside and apart from all this. I’m pulled both ways. But we’re about to depart for Riparius, which perhaps is the answer, at least until September.

June 12, 2010

I played the Bach fugue again in the Cary Room this time plus 8-hand piano: Overture to Don Giovanni. Frequent performance has reduced my nervousness remarkably. No more frozen hands.

June 13, 2010

To Riparius. Entering our farm, we were observed by a doe in the east field, very attentive so long as the car alone was in her vision but off she went as soon as we emerged from it.

June 15, 2010

Lovely, warm e-mail from Έρη Ρίτσου responding to my message to her after I noticed in my journal from decades ago a few sentences about her together with us in Christos’s home in Birmingham, and how she was studying American literature but still had not read Faulkner.

June 16, 2010

Tractor battery dead, surprising because I charged it so carefully in Hanover. Earl Millington came down and discovered that it was simply the positive cable not secured tightly enough to the terminal.

June 17, 2010

When it went dead again I knew what to do this time; I fixed it correctly, and everything was fine. But I couldn’t start the Troy-Bilt, the one that took a swim last year. It will go back to Dale’s tomorrow. . . . Everything else is now working well including TV, and high-speed internet after some difficulty solved by a nice technician from the telephone company. I’m working on my revised lecture for Jeff Murphy on A Passage to India. Last night we watched Howard’s End, thanks to Netflix. Before that, more “I Love Lucy.”

June 20, 2010

Back to the farm. More mowing, this time at Alec’s. Our Troy-Bilt doesn’t work. Water from its “swim” last year had remained in the motor and rusted out some parts. It’s now, thanks to Earl, at Huggins’ place in Warrensburg to see if he can fix it. . . . I’m trying to learn the prelude to the Α-minor fugue in Book 2.

June 24, 2010

From The Economist, June 19, 2010. Very important for Kazantzakis’s Bergsonism:

In one way, post-genomic biology—biology 2.0, if you like—has finally killed the idea of vitalism, the persistent belief that to explain how living things work, something more is needed than just an understanding of their physics and chemistry. True, no biologist has really believed in vitalism for more than a century. Nevertheless, the promise of genomics, that the parts list of a cell and, by extension, of a living organism, is finite and cataloguable, leaves no room for ghosts in the machine.

Viewed another way, though, biology 2.0 is actually neovitalistic. No one thinks that a computer is anything more than the sum of its continually changing physical states, yet those states can be abstracted into concepts and processed by a branch of learning that has come to be known as information science, independently of the shifting pattern of electrical charges inside the computer’s processor.

So it is with the new biology. The chemicals in a cell are the hardware. The information encoded in the DNA is the preloaded software. The interactions between the cellular chemicals are like the constantly changing states of processing and memory chips. Though understanding the genome has proved more complicated than expected, no discovery made so far suggests anything other than that all the information needed to make a cell is squirreled away in the DNA. Yet the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

Whether the new biology is viewed as rigorously mechanistic or neo-vitalistic, what has become apparent over the past decade is that the process by which the genome regulates itself, both directly by one gene telling another what to do and indirectly by manipulating the other molecules in a cell, is vastly more complicated and sophisticated than anybody expected.

June 25, 2010

I remember the pleasure I felt listening to Peter Constantine talk on Isaac Babel, whom he had just translated, and receiving his book. Today in the TLS I read that the translations are full, truly full, of horrible errors on every page. I’m thus glad that I’m having Peter Mackridge check my Kazantzakis letters. In the same TLS I encountered the following poem by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Alissa Valles:

ON TRANSLATING POETRY

Like a clumsy bumblebee

he alights on a flower

bending the fragile stem

he elbows his way

through rows of petals

like pages of a dictionary

he wants in

where fragrance and sweetness are

and though he has a cold

and can’t taste anything

he pushes on

until he bumps his head

against the yellow pistil

and that’s as far as he gets

it’s too hard

to push through the calyx

into the root

so the bee emerges swaggering

loudly humming

I was in there

and those

who don’t take his word for it

can take a look at his nose

yellow with pollen.

Very good for my work on Χαρκιανάκης!

June 29, 2010

Weeded the garden, which now looks fine. Tilled it again with the Mantis, which I succeeded in getting to run again by adjusting the carburetor. . . . Am watching Wimbeldon with pleasure.

July 1, 2010

Chrysanthi and I are raking up lots of hay in the east field. I did half the “beach” using Leander’s mower, finishing with the scythe. Happily, the Troy-Bilt was not seriously in trouble. Mr. Higgins in Warrensburg has fixed it for only $30.00. . . . A good poem, read today in April 2’s TLS:

LAST REQUEST

(After reading the TLS, February 12, 2010)

Samuel Johnson, pitiable and great,

feared death because his soul might never die

being damned by God to eternal pain.

Hume stopped fearing death, seeing his soul to be

a bundle of sensations death would untie,

thus preventing Dante’s infernal state.

One poet knew the bed where he would lie

at a window in sight of sea and sky,

screens behind which a patient daemon would,

‘rather like music,’ thump the floor, cry thrice,

‘Come, Jeffers.’ Let me too without distress

obey that call into fertile nothingness.

—Alasdair Gray

July 3, 2010

Sedona, Arizona

Traveled yesterday, leaving the farm at 8:15 a.m. and arriving at our destination at 8:45 p.m. Arizona time = 11:45 p.m. Eastern time. Good, uneventful flights. Avis car at Phoenix, and I didn’t get lost. Found Alec and Peter Buseck waiting for us at the entrance to Briar Patch Inn, to show us a direct way to our cabin, named “Owl.” Only Peter gave us someone else’s key by mistake, so at 12:30 a.m. we were awakened by knocking on the door; another couple had our key, we had theirs, so we exchanged amicably. Saw Alice last night and Clive, Monica, Theo, Elena. Alice in good spirits but relaxing in an armchair. . . . Breakfast this morning outdoors with a racing stream below, red-rocked canyon wall in the distance, and guitarist and violinist playing music. Joined by Paul and his four-month-old baby, chubby and serene, and David and Alice. All the “young folks” went on a hike in the canyon. We drove to Sedona on 89A, which offers spectacular views of the red-rock formations, all eerie shapes. Back to the cabin. I’m reading A Passage to India in the edition that I carefully annotated with marginal notes when I taught the novel. It’s a great pleasure to return to it now, with probably greater appreciation than I had many years ago. I’ll be lecturing on it for Jeff Murphy’s lawyers in New York on July 15. Also the last few days I have been watching Wimbledon avidly but am missing the ladies’ finals today and will miss the gentlemen’s tomorrow. . . . At 5:00 p.m. we all gathered in the “Big House” for the celebration. Peter brought out a vintage bottle of port he had purchased in 1970 from University College, Oxford, and very fine it was indeed. Susie showed numerous photos on power point, some donated earlier by us—for example, a scene at Peter and Alice’s wedding at Hone and Irene’s, photos of his father and mother, a photo of all of us when we went to the Grand Canyon on my parents’ anniversary, etc. Statements by Paul, Ellen, David, some limericks composed by Lori, etc., and a catered supper ending with a large very chocolaty chocolate cake. Professions of enduring love by Peter and Alice. Alice very tired at one point and took a respite, but returned in good form. She begins chemo again on Wednesday, hoping for the best.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Sedona–Grand Canyon

I accompanied Alec and family to the Grand Canyon, a two-hour drive from Sedona. Amazing scenery along the way: canyons, mesa, 7000-foot altitudes, 13000-foot volcanoes. Entering, I received a lifetime pass to all National Parks. Grand Canyon is very commercialized but obviously the canyon by itself is still pristine—huge and unthinkable. We went down one of the trails perhaps ¼ mile and then happily turned back—it was scary. Reached Sedona about 4:15 p.m. A much needed shower and change of clothes. Then everyone announced they were going to Slide Rock. We arrived after 6:00 p.m. and the official entrance was closed, but we were able to reach the site “surreptitiously.” It reminded me of the Black Hole. A healthy stream flowing over smooth rocks that one can slide over, ending in a deeper pool. Elena and Theo broke the ice and were followed by Alison and Amy, also Paul, David, Ellen and, with lots of screeches, Dana. A good finale to the weekend’s festivities. Another dinner, nice words, and goodbyes.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Phoenix–Albany

Up at 5:30 a.m. Easy drive to Phoenix. No traffic because today is also a holiday. Discovered in the US Airways Club that Nadal defeated Berdych in straight sets.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

From A Passage to India, chapter 31: “If I live impeccably now, it is only because I am well on in the forties—a period of revision. In the eighties I shall revise again. And before the nineties come I shall be revised!” (The speaker is of course Fielding.)

Friday, July 10, 2010

Fancy dinner at the Copperfield Inn with Don and Maria Kurka and two of their Garnet Lake friends, followed by a dreadful concert at Tannery Pond. A chamber orchestra. It started with the Star Spangled Banner, everyone rising. Later they played the theme songs of Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard, asking in each case for those who had served to stand and be applauded. Following this: God Bless America plus army marches. Too bad Art Perryman wasn’t present; he would have approved. He told Chrysanthi that Obama was trying to make the USA a Muslim nation.

July 14, 2010

Saratoga

Our annual feast at Hall of Springs followed by ballet, celebrating our 55th anniversary a few days in advance plus Alec’s birthday further in advance. Wonderful to see Balanchine’s genius on display, as always. Family continued home. I drove south to the Marriott Albany to spend the night.

July 15, 2010

New York

Early flight to La Guardia. Lunch at the Yale Club. Nice to see my favorite waitress, Angela. Limousine picked me up at 4:30, drove clear across town on 44th to the Hudson. Hell’s Kitchen is now replete with fancy apartment buildings and restaurants. We drove down past the old piers where we departed for Europe, now removed or converted into entertainment centers. A narrow park along the entire stretch with bicycle paths. To the World Financial Center. Cafés, open-air, along the river. Marinas. Beautiful. The tall atrium of #2 WFC with indoor palm trees. Met downstairs by old friends who had attended my previous lectures, then upstairs by Jeff’s classy, sexy “assistant,” then Jeff and others I’d remembered, including Paul, the artist. And an Indian gentleman, a painter named Natvar Bhavsar, who had been brought along, since the subject was Forster’s A Passage to India. Good crowd. Good questions afterwards. Couldn’t answer some of them, since I’m really so distant now from all this—e.g., Why are the three sections connected with climate: e.g., heat, rain? The Indian said that Forster’s picture of India under the Raj is inaccurate. I should read William Dalrymple’s White Mughals to see why. Reception following the lecture. Long talk with the founding director of the firm. Then the Indian took us all to “the best Indian restaurant in New York” (of course), on Hudson Street, the owner his friend. He ordered for us, including lamb chops. Nothing extraordinary, but fine service and atmosphere. About ten people around the table. Finished at about 11:00 p.m.

July 16, 2010

New York City

Yale Club air conditioning failed during the night. Breakfast outdoors on the roof. Amazingly, I found White Mughals in the Yale Club library and read about 100 pages on and off, lots in the airport waiting for my flight, delayed two hours. At 9:30 a.m. went to the King Tut exhibit in the former New York Times building on West 44th between 7th and 8th. Beautifully displayed and captioned artifacts from the Cairo Museum relating to Tutankhamun himself (who reigned from age 9 to 18, when he died) and other Pharaohs. I brought the catalogue back for Chrysanthi and also to show to the Wilsons in September. Back at “Terpni” at 11:00 p.m., I learned that our pump had failed. No water! Returned with a pound of manouri cheese.

July 17, 2010

Luckily, Pinky O’Dell was able to come in the morning to replace the broken pump. What an immense job it was to haul out first Leander’s pump, which is only half-way down, then ours, hundreds of feet down, then to replace it with the new McDonald pump, and to reinsert both and all the wiring. The lever for the drain rusted off and needs to be fixed. Pinky will do that separately, later. The new water is full of sand but will clear up in a few days, we’re told. The old pump was installed in 1990, so it lasted exactly 20 years, about right, says Pinky. The major trouble is that we don’t use it continually since we’re gone for 8½ months each year. If the new one lasts 20 years, I’ll be 100 when it breaks. Total charge $785, which the Terpni Partnership account will pay.

July 28, 2010

Damn! Pendle Hill rejected my Quakerism and Darwin (revised) for the second time, definitively now. I’ve asked Darren Middleton if he knows of another possible venue. . . . Dan Fones and crew are here, ridding a large pine of branches interfering with our TV reception, felling the dying pine in back of Leander’s cabin, trimming branches to allow more sunlight in the garden. Cost this time: $1200 for a full day’s work. Right now Dan, with crampons, has climbed high up in the TV tree, with a small chain saw lopping off branch after branch.

July 29, 2010

Alec’s birthday. I bought him a 4-inch vice, very fancy, for a hypothetical workbench to be built (next year, it seems) in his barn. We started our thinning operation on the #2 plot, the one for beech trees, I using an axe because my Stihl is at Dave Whitty’s getting a new piston. Somehow—how?—I prepared a can of 50:1 gas:oil for the saws and forgot to add the oil. Thus we ran both my saw and Alec’s plus the Mantis on gas only, no oil. But Alec’s is working still and so is the Mantis. We finished plot #3 (hemlocks) last week.

August 3, 2010

The three children gave me a Happy Birthday party and both of us a Happy Anniversary at Friends Lake Inn, with a truly exceptional meal:

BIEN FAMILY CELEBRATION

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Au d’oeuvres: mussels, fine cheeses, paté de foie gras

Wine Selections

Pinot Grigio, Santi, 2008

Pinot Noir, MacMurray Ranch, 2007

First Course

Mixed Greens

sun-dried cranberries, pecan & pistachio praline, crumbled bleu cheese with balsamic vinaigrette

Entrees

(please choose)

Grilled NY Strip Steak and Blackened Sea Scallops red bliss oregano mash and gritted corn off the cob

Oven Roasted Statler Chicken Breast filled with Madeira marinated lump crab with herb mash, tomato bruschetta and béchamel sauce

Sesame Encrusted Yellow Tin Tuna blood orange soy beurre blanc, saffron risotto and steamed broccoli

Hickory Rubbed Pork Chop whole grain mustard apple demi glace, German bacon potato salad and tri-colored carrots

Dessert

(please choose)

Port, Cranberry and Almond Brownie served with dark chocolate ice cream

Key Lime Tart with broiled meringue

Innkeepers, John and Trudy Phillips Executive Chef, Matthew Bolton Sous Chef, Scott Dewar

plus a special menu for the children, ending with Brownie à la mode. . . . Lots of appropriate toasts. Then outside to take our 2010 family photo. Then back to our private dining room. I read most of the following remarks from my journals concerning Riparius:

July 10, 1952, S.S. Waterman, mid-Atlantic

I had been at Riparius and immediately returned . . . taking Peter [Gardner] with me to the farm. The few days with him were delightful. We finished the sheathing on the overhang, then put the roofing paper over it. Next we completed the outside nailing for chinking, and Peter helped me with most of the oakum. Two nights after having worked steadily from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. we went horseback riding, once as far as the Black Hole, with Clare Carman. Before Peter came I had put on most of the roofing paper, filled in the two gables with boards from the barn, and laid the two floors. After he left I completed the chinking, including the outside cementing, all but a few logs directly under the overhang, where rain cannot enter; put in all the windows, planeing them to size and securing each with a sash lock; made and hung two doors, only temporary ones, however; creosoted the outside up to the level of the windowsills. It was a grand month at Riparius. I worked very well, largely, I think, because of the relaxation and companionship in taking meals with the Carmans instead of preparing them myself, as I did the summer before. I enjoyed their conversation, simple as it was, much more than that of the Gerstanzangs, where Arthur Levitt and Karen invited me one evening for a steak dinner. The desolate, meaningless, parasitic life of those people with their constant round of tennis, swimming, golf, or boredom stands in sharp contrast to the constructive activity and deep human contact I knew over at Riparius. Even a slight incident binds people and destroys all the sophisticated superficiality that characterizes so many people. Alvin Millington cut his leg with an axe and the blood gushed out so fast that he had to apply a tourniquet (lucky thing he thought to do it). I drove him down to Carmans’, where he had left his car, and offered to drive him to Chestertown, but he thought he could make it by himself. As I expected, he began getting faint down the hill, and stopped at home so that his wife could accompany him. An hour or so later he was back at Carmans’, and his childish smile when I happened to drive by was something to warm the coldest heart. “Ten stitches,” he said, with pride; and he looked like a great honor had been given him instead of a near-great misfortune. He thanked me profusely, although all I did was drive him half a mile (at the end of which he had presence of mind enough to apologize for the pool of blood on the floor of my truck).

What real part the farm will play in my life yet remains to be seen. At any rate I shall have a home, for you cannot call Sunnyside or New York City a “home” and really mean anything.

Tuesday, October 21, 1952, Riparius.

Warmed by a pot-bellied tin stove, illumined by a kerosene mantle lamp, and enjoying the fruits of much labor, here in my cabin. . . . Now I am at Riparius and feasting on the fall colors, the ever-bright stars at night, the bend of trees to the wind. Since Saturday I have been laying the finish floor downstairs of five-inch Canadian spruce. Only five rows left. I have also filled up a few more holes around windows, etc., in an effort to get the place reasonably ready for winter living. But the fireplace will have to wait now, for it is too cold for cement work.

Thursday, October 23, 1952, Riparius.

Yesterday I finally finished the floor, and what a difference it makes. Now I really feel protected in this house and even confident that it will see me through a hard Adirondack winter.

December 20, 1952, Sunnyside.

So far, my house has cost as follows, exclusive of tools and things stolen:

cement for foundation

$ 15.00

floor joists 18/2" × 6" × 16' @ .080

23.00

corner posts 4/2" × 6" × 12'; 4/2" × 4" × 12

6.50

windows and sash

108.00

door & window frames 150 r,f. 2" × 6"

12.00

plate 2/2" × 4" × 20'

2.00

spruce flooring, tongue & grooved @ 140

57.00

shiplap flooring

35.00

rafters 36/2" × 6" × 16'

46.00

sheathing

45.00

asphalt roofing paper

24.00

oakum

15.00

cement & lime for chinking

10.00

nails

15.00

creosote

5.00

$418.50

September 1, 1953, Rochester.

I had a glorious two-week vacation at Riparius, made complete in every way by good weather, lots of work accomplished, and much socializing, the latter not ordinarily a part of my Riparius stays. . . . I built a good deal of my fireplace and did, I think, a good job. On the outside I built up the footing, then laid the hearth of firebrick, which I put on so unevenly that it looks like a genuine 17th century antique hearth, and thus is very becoming. On the inside I got as far as the arch, which I didn’t complete for lack of the proper-sized arch support.

A Haverford freshman, John Hawkins, was Sibler’s chargé d’affaires and we soon became friends, since he is mostly interested in music, is an organist, and a friend of Peter Gardner’s. He helped me lay rock one afternoon. Then I went over to George Davis’s place and bought the beautiful pump organ there for $20. That evening and one other, John and I played it far into the night. . . . Went horseback riding . . . up past Dr. Barnard’s, where we enjoyed her magnificent panoramic view, and then through the woods to Mr. Kennedy and one of his mistresses.

October 30, 1954, Riparius.

Warming my feet in front of a truly blazing fire in my fireplace, the first fire of its career. And a foot-warming one it is, too, cackling away, spurting, blistering; now and then throwing out a dangerous spark onto the carpet, making me wish that I had not forgotten the fire-screen that still lies useless in fireplace-less 3902. One log is already shriveled red from the heat; the others are encased by semi-circular leaping flames. Now the wood begins to settle a bit, dangerously. I see ashes on my clean white firebrick. Soon the hearth will be black with use.

But all is not well. I found that my cabin had been broken into, or so it appeared. The lock and lock-fixture on the back door had been sheared off. I saw immediately that someone had removed the stovepipe that projected through the south attic window. I went upstairs with trepidation, expecting everything else to be taken, but nothing was. I told Carmans and they immediately said that the culprits were four hunters living across the road, for they had needed stovepipe.

Tomorrow I hope to pour a concrete slab for my chimney cap and to complete the struts that will hold it up. Also I must hang the new front door and figure a way to make the back one more secure. After this I want to make window coverings from the old barn-wood.

November 2, 1954, Riparius.

Sherman, Ken, Fred, and Hal found a bee tree yesterday. Sherman braved the bees’ wrath and stole the cone, escaping with only one sting. Clare placed the cone in a large pan and heated it until the honey separated down from the wax. She then strained the liquor until it became clear: a delicious finished product. I told them that I had a bee tree on my place, too, so today we all went back to the edge of the swamp to look at it. It turned out to be the same one they had found. The top had fallen off and lay open on the ground, exposing both honey and bees. The latter droned industriously over part of the cone, eating the honey that they had manufactured and stored over the past years. Actually, most of the honey was already consumed. Sherman said that if we had found the tree a year or two ago we would have captured two or three hundred pounds of honey. As it was we only got a few jars full.

June 2, 1958, Riparius.

Freddie killed eight porcupines in my barn this winter. Also a bobcat which, as he says, “was sitting upon a rock just like a house cat. I had my twenty-two, and I shot him right in the neck. He just rolled off the rock, kicked a couple of times, and . . . that was all!”

There’s a blazing full moon to the east tonight, and a very insistent whippoorwill outside.

September 12, 1959, Riparius.

I accidentally chipped off Roy Millington’s front tooth—his “best apple-eating tooth”—while we were sawing wood. Took him to Dr. White in Chestertown, who put on a cap and hopes that the tooth can be saved.

Saw Nick Millington again. He lost his arm in the sawmill, now has a hook, and a twitch in the left shoulder where the straps are. He gets $145 a month from the government, so is fine that way.

I saw Alvin Millington yesterday, too. He’s a virile looking chap, much younger than I’d thought, with a prizefighter’s nose and a scant beard. His project now is making his own bullets and loading used shells with them. He has elaborate molds & precision machinery for this, and says he saves about 80% of the cost of new bullets.

I like the Millingtons’ children: Roy, David, Jimmy, Dale, Earl, Catherine, and a few others. Roy takes charge of everything. Jimmy is the black sheep. David is the best looking. Chrysanthi says they’re all barbarians and are corrupting Leander.

July 28, 1960, Riparius.

We cleaned the organ and saw a baby mouse crouching inside. Chrysanthi quickly went and brought the cat, who pounced. A little squeak and then silence, the cat walking methodically away with a ploff of fur between her teeth. But then Alec screamed mightily. He—poor thing—could see nothing but injustice and tragedy in this planned and well-executed murder.

July 2, 1961, Riparius.

I lost a lamb the morning after we bought him, because I went to get the two lambs from their shed, by myself, and while I was holding one the other slipped out between a crack resulting from a loose board (the house having been patched together hastily the night before). The other lamb struggled furiously to escape as well but I held on to his foot. I could hear, actually feel, his heart thumping and making the entire body quiver. It was a sudden, furious effort. I thought surely he would drop dead from a heart attack. The successful escapee stood off about 20 feet from the house, glaring at me, and then both lambs began bleating plaintively at each other. I called Chrysanthi, and we (very stupidly) tried to head off the lamb, forcing him back toward the barns. But he kept retreating in the opposite direction, and before long went into the woods. A few days later we learned that the lamb had been seen in town, near the post office, on the following morning.

The remaining lamb must have a charmed life, however, ferocious, unpleasant beast that he is, always glaring at me hatefully with his head lowered, as though glancing over the rims of bifocal glasses. I say so because last Sunday, as we were driving home from our swim and picnic at Minerva Beach, we saw the blackest, cruelest-looking clouds I had ever seen, and rushed back home, beating the storm by just a half a minute. I had tied the lamb to the shed and had left the door open, and the rain came down so furiously, and with lightning and a hurricane wind, that I didn’t have time to go out to him or, rather, I was about to go to him when I saw his entire shed rise up in the air, fall again, and the next time rise and continue rising, sailing through the air like a kite and landing upside down about sixty feet from its original position. I waited until the storm passed and then ran to the field, expecting to see the poor lamb strangled. But there he was, wet but healthy, next to the shed, the rope around his neck. We set the building upright and gave him an extra dish of grain—the filthy beast! The same wind also toppled over the outhouse, ripping off its peaked roof. I had to spend the next day salvaging the roofing and making a new, shed-type, roof.

Our first month here is already gone! I finished the first draft of Saint Francis and have started the revision. No time for other reading, however. My projects so far: enlarging the garden, building the sheep shed, peeling 110 cedar posts, putting the windows in the kitchen, and building a set of shelves, using glue and dowel-pins, my first venture in this type of construction. Also, fixing up the chicken house and putting a fence around it. Of our five chickens, only one lays, and she only every other day. Also, we got two kittens from Mr. Tubbs, and one disappeared the other night, probably scared by some animal that came to eat the cat’s food. The other kitten, which has two “club feet,” couldn’t run far enough to get lost. Here is an example of where a defect aided in the battle for survival. Of all our animals, only the rabbits have suffered nothing very spectacular, although their house was also overturned in last week’s storm.

August 5, 2010

We finished all three of the areas designated for thinning, Alec doing probably three-quarters of the work and I one-quarter. . . . Celebrated Sophia’s birthday pleasantly. Her white pine, which seemed to be dying, suddenly came alive.

August 6, 2010

Lunch at Marsha’s. Then retrieved my Stihl from Whitty, with a new piston. Cost $100. Left Alec’s, which also suffered from my gaffe of not putting oil in the gasoline can marked 50:1. . . . Final supper with Alec and family. Then to Stewart’s.

August 11, 2010

Harvard Magazine had an article on drop-outs and requested others to send in their memories. So I sent this:

Although I left Harvard after only two years (1948-1950), I am not technically a “drop-out” because what I did was transfer to Haverford College, where I received my B.A. in 1952. Nevertheless, my story may be of some interest to true drop-outs.

The major problem for me was the size of classes and the remoteness from professors. I experienced marvelous lecture courses, especially from Raphael Demos and Samuel Beer, but was always in a huge hall and terrified at approaching the professor. An equal problem was the disappointing nature of the sections. Most of the graduate students who conducted my sections were not interested in teaching us, or even in the course material, but rather in having us do research for their ongoing doctoral dissertations. (There was one splendid exception, however.) The difference between Harvard and Haverford is well illustrated by the case of Professor Hocking. He had retired from Harvard just before I arrived; otherwise I surely would have taken his famous philosophy course on the meeting of East and West, sitting with 300 others in a large hall. When I matriculated at Haverford as a junior, I discovered that he was there as a visiting professor and would be offering this same course. Naturally, I enrolled. The class consisted of twenty students. Professor Hocking read and graded all the essays (Haverford did not have any graduate students). In one of my essays, I ventured to disagree with him. He graded it “A” and invited me to supper. This resulted in a friendship that continued via correspondence until he died.

In addition, I felt that Harvard’s justified pride in intellectual accomplishment left it morally deficient. There was very little sense that we were extraordinarily privileged and therefore owed something to the rest of the world. The exact opposite was true at Haverford, which sent me out as a work-camper on weekends to the slums of Philadelphia and which tended to produce graduates interested in teaching, social work, the ministry, etc., instead of business or banking.

If I had remained at Harvard for my junior and senior years, presumably some of these difficulties would have disappeared or been reduced. However, Haverford—largely because of its intimacy—changed my life in a way that I doubt could have happened at Harvard.

To Chestertown to hear the Johnny Cash Band. Spoiled because none of the words could be understood—owing to distortion in microphones, Leander said. Still fun to hear “Jackson” and other favorites. Pizza afterwards in the Chestertown place now under new management and much better.

August 12, 2010

Typing in my office, I had two fauns ten feet away, not bothered at all by me as they sniffed at the grass; then the doe, their mother, also very close and undisturbed by me. I’m now typing volume 2 of my Journal: 1950, summer at Brant Lake, visit to MacLeish, transfer to Haverford, Hocking’s course. . . . Waiting for Peter Mackridge’s final set of corrections of the Kazantzakis letters.

August 13, 2010

Leander and I felled a tree in back of his cabin, landing it expertly exactly where we intended it to go. My repaired Stihl chain saw works beautifully. (I had accidentally filled it with gasoline minus oil, which ruined the piston.) Dave Whitty’s son (also Dave Whitty) did the expert repair.

August 14, 2010

Attended a woodsman’s education session at John Sullivan’s farm (John very friendly, assured me that Protect the Adirondacks, although without resources, is at least honest, not corrupt). Saw Steve Warne there, our very first forester, now working for Donna and Ed. A good demonstrator from Cornell gave basic lessons in (a) identifying which trees to eliminate in a thinning exercise, (b) safety with a chain saw, (c) how to fell a tree. I was familiar with much of this, but certainly not all, especially cutting technique. On a large trunk, after making the V, he doesn’t cut from the back toward the V, but inserts the saw point-first through the trunk one inch in back of the V, to create the hinge. Then he uses wedges, or he saws from this cut backwards, away from the V until the tree begins to sway, at which time he “escapes” at least 15 feet away at a 45-degree angle, not behind the tree.

August 15, 2010

Peter Mackridge completed his vetting of the Kazantzakis letters. I couldn’t have found a more competent person to do this job, because of his trained eye, his knowledge of Greek, including idioms, his wide knowledge of Greek history and culture (resulting in valuable help with the annotations). He has saved me from extreme embarrassment. My errors in number and nature are beginning to convince me that at age 80 my mind is no longer what it used to be. I append here part of his final e-mail:

“Reading and checking through your translations has been an educative and often moving experience for me. In particular, I found the hairs standing up on my back with emotion as I read the very last letters that he wrote before disappearing off the face of the earth somewhere between China and Alaska (a fitting way to go, in a sense).

“I would like to be able to write a review article about your book for BMGS when it is published, με το καλό. It would be a pity not to give myself the opportunity to record my judgements and impressions, and as an editor I can waive the normal convention that books should not be reviewed by people who are acknowledged by the author as having contributed something to it. Unfortunately, because of the pressure of time, I had to do the checking job very quickly, and I didn’t have time to make any notes that might help me in such an article, so I will have to look again, at greater leisure, at the text in the published version of your book.

“I send you many congratulations on your great work. It is an άθλος worthy of Kazantzakis himself, and I’m delighted and privileged to have been given an opportunity to have contributed to it.

“With all good wishes to you and Chrysanthi. Peter”

August 20, 2010

Lunch at the Copperfield Inn with the new president of Protect the Adirondacks, Peter C. (?), and the chief fund-raiser. Peter is very impressive: newly retired after many jobs entirely relevant to his new position. Told me that RCPA and the precursor of Protect were both near bankruptcy. Consolidation seemed to help, but the finances are still very meager. I gave $1000 this year. Obviously they want more. . . . Then went to Greg’s barbershop in Minerva, run by a transplant from New Jersey with a pronounced New York City accent. He gave me an excellent haircut for $8.00 and then asked if I wanted him to do my eyebrows! No! He enlarged on all the excellent communal activities in Minerva. I hope to visit him again next summer.

August 21, 2010

Finished draft no. 4 (!) of Quakers and Darwin in order to shorten it to about 4000 words (from 8000), to comply with the usual word count of articles in the QUIP journal, which is willing to take a look. . . . Worked hard afterwards, completing the covering of the entire blueberry patch with woodchips, probably twenty wheelbarrow loads. Previously I spread a lot of pine needles over the area. Next: pruning. Also raised a ladder against the cabin’s south wall in order to get high enough to trim some of the ash branches that are too near to the roof. If the deadly ash borer kills this majestic tree, we’ll be very sad.

August 22, 2010

I’ve been called a “workaholic” perhaps with some justification. Today, typing my journal entry from Haverford, March 2, 1951, where I have extensive entries from Carlyle, I found this, which apparently appealed to me 59 years ago: “The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was happiness enough to get his work done. . . . The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man; how much more the done Work.”

August 23, 2010

Rained heavily all day yesterday. We had a comforting fire going, and I spent time practicing my Bach prelude (C-minor, Book 2 of the Well Tempered Clavier) and also typing more of my journal. I finished volume one (39,000 words) and am now about one-third through volume two (16,600 words so far). Judging from the extraordinarily lengthy excerpts I copied in from books that I was reading, I wonder if I had time to do anything else at college. Right now I’m at the time in life when I declared my C.O. position to the draft board during the Korean War period (1951) but am still at Haverford: my junior year. Among lots of personal notes I record a girlfriend’s remark when I told her that she was saved from listening to things I had written, “Oh, you write, too!” I don’t mean the journal, but poetry and fiction. Today, in the TLS in a review of a book about women who attached themselves to writers, the reviewer quotes Henry Miller’s advice to Anaïs Nin, who had been writing a voluminous diary, “. . . the hours that go into the journal are an evasion . . . You see I am aiming seriously at the destruction of this diary. It is only good if you recognize it for what it is worth; otherwise it is dangerous, poisonous, inclined to make one lazy, facile, self-centered.” Does this apply to me and my diary, the whole of which, from 1948 to today, probably adds up to 1,000,000 words? Plus how many hundreds of thousands of words in translation. But original poetry or fiction? Nothing.

August 28, 2010

Tom and Joan Wilson were here for lunch on the way to Lake Pleasant, Joan bringing a jar full of her delicious chocolate-chip cookies. Their son-in-law, who works for CARE, is now in Afghanistan, which is dangerous and worrisome. I’ll join Joan and Stan Udy and Dr. Clendenning in eight-hand piano on September 14th, doing Schubert’s Trout Quintet. . . . We had the Smiths for dinner, Jane and Rob, our Antler Lake neighbors. He taught French in schools on Long Island. She graduated from Hunter College. Interesting, cultivated, liberal people.

August 29, 2010

Finished lifting the tractor up off the ground, easier this year, with no mishaps. Always an “accomplishment.” Dinner at the Wells House in Pottersville with Donna and Ed with lots of talk about Adirondack things (Ed is building an outhouse) and of course America’s dismal political situation.

August 30, 2010

Kendal asked me to fill out a personal form giving info and preferences for after death: where buried, undertaker’s name, location of safe deposit box, etc., and also an Obituary. This is what I submitted:

Peter Bien was born on May 28,1930 in Queens County, New York, the son of a pediatrician who had opened his practice there in 1927 and a mother who served as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was educated in three exceptional public schools, P.S. 150 in Sunnyside (primary), P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights (middle), the Bronx High School of Science for three years and then Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where for the first time he found his true direction: literature (not science). His boyhood in New York City was extremely rich; it included attendance with his mother for many years at the full series of the New York Philharmonic’s children’s concerts at Carnegie Hall, regular viewing of the Museum of Modern Art’s exceptional movies, weekly square dancing at the Ethical Culture School, lots of tennis (lessons, tournaments, membership in the Bronx High School team and the Deerfield team), horseback riding with his father, introduction to the Metropolitan Opera thanks to his uncle Bill, Toscanini’s concerts with the NBC Symphony thanks to uncle Mike, who worked for NBC, second row seats at Lewisohn Stadium with his father whenever Artur Rubinstein played Tchaikovsky, bicycle rides to LaGuardia airport to watch the PanAm clippers land on water, family outings to the Trans Lux Theater on Madison Avenue, meals in Schrafft’s, the Russian Tea Room, the Automat, summers at Atlantic Beach, one block from the ocean, then from age eleven to twenty at Brant Lake Camp in the Adirondacks, first as camper, then as counselor. Deerfield made a large difference chiefly because of Richard Warren Hatch, his teacher of English literature, who became a friend and correspondent for many years after graduation. Education continued at Harvard, where he concentrated in American History and Literature and lived (sophomore year) in Lowell House. Harvard was extraordinarily stimulating, yet disappointing in the undergraduate’s inability to have meaningful direct contact with his professors, plus what young Bien felt was an “absence of soul.” Thus he transferred for his final two years to a small institution where intimacy was easy and “soul” was plentiful—Haverford College—majoring first in English but then finally in music, chiefly owing to Professor Alfred Swan, an inspiring teacher of composition. After a three-year interval, Bien’s education continued in the Graduate Faculties of Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, majoring in modern British fiction, minoring in Italian renaissance literature, and choosing John Milton (over Shakespeare and Chaucer) as his required major author. Both his M.A. thesis and his doctoral dissertation were on the British novelist L. P. Hartley, with whom he enjoyed a frequent correspondence. This led to the first of his three Fulbright grants, to spend a year near Hartley as a graduate student at the University of Bristol, in order to visit the novelist, who lived nearby in Bath, and to complete the dissertation, which was subsequently published in England by Chatto & Windus.

The three-year interval before graduate studies consisted first of half a year in the Netherlands, where he was sent by the American Friends Service Committee to an international work camp at a home for sufferers from Down Syndrome, then of two years’ national “alternative service” as a conscientious objector during the Korean War, working as a surgical technician in Rochester, New York’s General Hospital. During this time, he studied piano at the Eastman School of Music and became a formal member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), to which he had been introduced at Haverford, largely by Professor Douglas Steere, and for which he had been prepared by regular attendance with his father at The Community Church in New York where he greatly admired the liberal, anti-militarist pastor, John Haynes Holmes. Upon completing his required service, he traveled to Birmingham, England, in order to spend the first half of 1955 at Woodbrooke College, a Quaker adult-education center. There he met his future wife, Chrysanthi Yiannakou, who had been sent there from Greece by the headmaster of the Quaker school outside of Thessaloniki where she had been teaching baby-care to village girls. After the Woodbrooke term ended, Bien traveled to Greece by third class rail, sitting up for three days and two nights on the Orient Express (all-in-all he, eventually with family, made 27 trips on the Orient Express from Western Europe to Greece). He cycled into Thessaloniki on his British bicycle. He and Chrysanthi were married there in July in the Greek Orthodox Church. They moved to New York at the end of the year. Bien began his studies at Columbia in January 1956 and their first child, Leander was born at the end of March.

The summers at Brant Lake Camp had led six years earlier to Bien’s purchase of an abandoned uphill Adirondack farm of 120 acres for $1200 ($10 per acre). By 1956 he had already constructed a 16 × 20 foot cabin from logs he cut on the property, at a total cost of $418.50. Chrysanthi now joined in the necessary addition of a kitchen, plus completing the chinking of the logs, clearing land, etc. Fifty-four years later (2010) the farm consisted of 300 acres with three separate dwellings, three barns, a guest house, and Bien’s wonderful office: a three-sided Adirondack lean-to facing south. All this, except one of the dwellings and one of the barns, was constructed “by hand” by Chrysanthi, Peter, and especially Alec, their second son, born in 1958, who built his own log cabin. “Terpni,” as the farm is called, repeating the name of Chrysanthi’s birth-village in Macedonia (the Ancient Greek word means “pleasant”) brought together Bien’s three children (the third being daughter Daphne), their spouses, and seven grandchildren each summer for extended stays amidst beauty and peace.

At Columbia, Bien, quite by accident, read a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated as The Greek Passion. Most of his professional work for the next fifty years involved translations of this author’s work and scholarly writing about it. He co-founded a Quaker Meeting at Columbia and began teaching there after completing his M.A., first as instructor of English to Hungarian refugees (which led later to an interest in writing textbooks for the instruction of Greek), then as instructor of English literary classics to adults in Columbia’s “extension division.” He obtained his Ph.D. in 1961 and that same year began teaching at Dartmouth College as an instructor.

At Dartmouth, serving actively for thirty-six years, he was honored as the first Ted and Helen Geisel (Dr. Seuss) Third Century Professor in the Humanities (1974–79) and then as the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing (1989–97). He chaired the Program in Comparative Literature on three separate occasions, co-founded War and Peace Studies, founded and directed for twenty-five years the University Seminars program and the Resource Center for Composition, was elected twice to the president’s advisory committee (CAP, which gives final approval or disapproval for tenure appointments), and served six times as lecturer on Alumni College seminar-cruises in the Mediterranean. His teaching concentrated on British modernism (Joyce especially, Woolf, Lawrence, Conrad) and comparative modernism (Joyce, Mann, Proust, Kafka, Beckett), plus lots of Paradise Lost. In addition, he offered five courses in the adult-education Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth (ILEAD), of which he was an Honorary Founder. His research, after the first book on L. P. Hartley, was devoted almost exclusively to Modern Greek literature: primarily to Kazantzakis (criticism, plus translation of three novels and an annotated edition of the Selected Letters), Myrivilis, Cavafy, Ritsos, and Harkianakis, accounting for 19 books of criticism or translation, plus 3 textbooks on Modern Greek language in collaboration with John Rassias and others (full titles, etc. in Who’s Who in America). His academic honors include Fulbright grants to England, Australia, and Greece, the E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching (Danforth Foundation), a conference and Festschrift in his honor by the University of Birmingham, England, the Gold Cross of Apostle Andrew awarded by the Archbishopric of Australia, honorary doctorate from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, honorary membership in the Hellenic Author’s Society. While still at Dartmouth, he served terms as visiting professor at Harvard University, Melbourne University (Australia), Woodbrooke College (England), the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece, 3 times), Pendle Hill (twice); after retirement from Dartmouth (1997) at Princeton University, Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Crete (Greece), with shorter stays for lectures at Loyola Marymount University, Colorado College, Stanford University, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). He also lectured in Sweden, England, The Netherlands, Germany, Australia (Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne), Thailand, repeatedly in Athens, Iraklio, Hania, Rethymno, and Thessaloniki (Greece), and in Virginia for the Department of State.

A founding member of the Modern Greek Studies Association, he served as its president from 2000 to 2002. Other administrative experience included presidency of the Kinhaven Music School’s Board of Trustees; presiding clerk (Quaker-talk for “president”) of the Pendle Hill General Board, and clerk of its publication committee; clerk (twice) of the Hanover Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends; trustee of the American Farm School (Greece), chairing its Secondary Education Committee; president of the Kendal at Hanover Residents’ Council, 2006-07; chairman of Kendal at Hanover’s Board of Overseers, 1989–95; chairman of Kendal at Hanover’s Board of Directors, 1995–96. He was generally credited with being the founder of Kendal at Hanover, although obviously a dozen or so other Quakers on the founding committee also contributed in important ways.

His life was blessed by a beautiful marriage, three children who are responsible citizens and caring parents, a fine academic situation at Dartmouth College, idyllic summers at “Terpni,” the continuing fellowship and inspiration of various Quaker meetings, and a final home in another meaningful community, Kendal at Hanover.

September 3, 2010

To Berkeley

Flew to San Francisco. Rental car on freeways. Managed to find the Berkeley City Club, a Moorish medieval monument with beautiful public rooms but an uninspiring bedroom. A half hour later Ronald Moore and Thanassis Maskaleris were waiting for me at Reception. Roland took us to a new restaurant on Oxford Street named “Gather,” where Martha Klironomos joined us. The menu was as though in a foreign language, everything organic/health food, but delicious. 10:00 p.m. Berkeley time was of course 1:00 a.m. Hanover time, but I was wide awake with this splendid company, sharing many interests and experiences.

September 4, 2010

Berkeley

Lovely breakfast at the Club. At noon Michael Heyman came. We had dined with him and his wife in 1983 in his Chancellor’s mansion, and then treated him and his wife (now deceased) to dinner at Dartmouth when he was serving as a trustee. I remember opposing him when McLaughlin wanted to bring ROTC back. He is exactly my age, born on May 30, 1930, but has emphysema and partial deafness. Was a heavy smoker. He arrived with an oxygen tank and a device in his nose. Sat a bit to catch his breath. Then drove to the Berkeley Marina to a lovely restaurant by the water. He is now remarried. He told me that he lost his eldest son, but I don’t know how. We had a lovely reunion, as though no hiatus had existed, talking easily from noon until almost 3:00 p.m. . . . Then I braved the freeway again and highway to Ellen Lerner’s parents (mother and step-father) in Mertinez, California. I got lost but called on my cell phone and was directed. All of Alice’s children, spouses, and grandchildren were there, of course. Alice herself was feeling very well. Blood count normal. “Remission,” she confided. But more chemo starts next week. Ellen has four brothers. One spoke to me at length because his son, a high school senior, had just returned from Dartmouth, where he attended debating practice for high school teams. He wants now to apply to Dartmouth. I gave him the usual advice. The food was, again, all health/organic. Not my taste. Lots of talk with various relatives. Susie and Ellen appeared, of course. I hoped they like rice, since my gift was a rice cooker.

September 5, 2010

Berkeley

Sunday. I walked, far, to Berkeley Friends Meeting on Vine Street. Anna Brinton attended this Meeting. Afterwards I was introduced to her grandson and we talked about Pendle Hill and Tony Manousos’s forthcoming biography. Then I was able to visit the University of Berkeley’s Doe Library. Huge reading room. Lots of my books in the catalogue. The campus is beautiful, chiefly owing to its many redwood trees. It is very large compared to Dartmouth. Lots of single people and families strolling on this lovely Sunday. . . . Back on the freeway to Moraga, site of the wedding, which I found without mishap. Susie in a white wedding dress, Ellen in white trousers! First, signing of the marriage document; then everything else was via Jewish tradition. Susie and Ellen signed plus only one friend (apparently Ellen’s real father was present and she didn’t want him to sign—thus no relatives at all). The wedding was outdoors. Lovely, very moving singing by the female cantor. The officiant, also female, was “half a rabbi,” I was told, but did well. The whole was very emotional. One thinks, always, of one’s own relationship. . . . Nice to see Daphne and Greg, who came just for the wedding. Afterwards, another organic/health food dinner (alas) plus “events” organized by Linda: bad poetry, bad singing, but all in good spirit. When Daphne and Greg left, I followed them in order to get back to the freeway (in the opposite direction from them), which I did successfully.

September 6, 2010

Not so successful today on the way to Rental Car Return. I made a stupid wrong turn off the freeway but somehow retraced my route and found the Avis facility, luckily. Uneventful flight home (first class, like the flight out). Back to Kendal at 9:00 p.m., where Chrysanthi had a steak dinner waiting. Finally nothing organic or healthy! I’m glad she didn’t need to suffer my adventures on the freeways. She of course was eager to hear all about the wedding, and about Alice’s health, and especially about how Susie and Ellen were dressed. All in all, this Lesbian wedding was exactly like a heterosexual wedding in its feel and its ceremony.

September 7, 2010

Riparius

Back to the farm for a final week and for closing. Earl has made two lovely paths for his four-wheeler. Leander flagged them with surveyor’s tape. We walked both with pleasure.

September 10, 2010

Riparius

Yesterday and today I spent lots of time bringing wood chips to the garden and spreading them there. I’ve done the entire section with blueberries, and the section with flowers, and one strip on the side. All this despite a back that sometimes ached. . . . Fertilized the fruit trees with spikes but did not prune the trees. Let’s see if this makes any difference next year. However, I carefully pruned the blueberries.

September 11, 2010

Trying to close the water, I found that I could not open the drain owing to Pinky’s new system. I didn’t even know which of the two visible pumps was mine and which was Leander’s. Lots of trying to no avail. Kept calling Pinky but he was gone all day. He called back after 7:00 p.m. and promised to come at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow. So we had a leisurely extra day at the farm with beautiful weather.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Pinky came, showed me which pump was which (the lower one is mine) and where to hook the end of the long lever. I urged him to come next summer and restore the lever the way it was before he changed the pump: permanently attached. We got back to Kendal at 4:00 p.m. and immediately entered this very different lifestyle.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Finished the extra chores with the Kazantzakis letters, including finding a few Greek manuscripts that Peter Mackridge never received. As soon as he looks at these, the whole book will go back to Princeton University Press, thankfully.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Only one more poem to go in the Χαρκιανάκης volume. I’m hoping that he will have someone in Sydney check my English for mistakes and then perhaps find a means for bilingual (or monolingual) publication in Australia. . . . A very pleasant visit from Laird Barber in the afternoon. He’d come to visit his cousin, who lives in Norwich. I invited Tom Wood and Robert Binswanger to join us for tea at 4:00 p.m. Tom brought the 1948 Pocumtuck (Yearbook) and we had great fun looking at the photos and credits. Chrysanthi remarked my curls. I looked very “official” in my tuxedo as a member of the debating team, with Bobby Johnston the chairman. Binswanger surprisingly was not involved as a manager in just about everything, as he became in later life. Tom was a soccer player and the only graduate going to Haverford. We’re all of us reasonably healthy and active whereas many of our Deerfield classmates are now dead. . . . Dinner with Mel and Evelyn Spiegel with so much easy conversation that we almost forgot our theater tickets for “Death of a Salesman” at the Hop at 8:00 p.m. The group that performed was based in the Weston, Vermont theater, all of them professionals. Despite this, the production simply did not work. The lead overacted continually. Too much screaming. Also I think that the play is overrated. Of course it makes its point about false mercantile values and father-son enmity, but it lacks the brilliance of a Shakespeare or even of a Shaw. If nothing else, it is never relieved by humor or song, techniques used by Shakespeare to keep tragedy from becoming maudlin.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

New York City

To New York by train. Nice lamb chop dinner at the Yale Club, Chrysanthi and I sharing one serving (5 chops). Then to see Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, starring Cherry Jones. And what a difference! Jones never overplayed, although the part could easily inspire screaming or the like in a lesser artist. The daughter, not so good but adequate, the various men also . . . adequate. But the play was lifted as a whole by Cherry Jones’s great talent. I remember her from the marvelous Twelfth Night she did at the A.R.T. and then Doubt, which we traveled to Boston to see. Shaw’s message, no longer shocking, as it was in 1905, is still needed, although the feminine “solution” of celibacy and independence is no longer embraced by so many intelligent women.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

NYC

A very busy, varied day. Started by taking the M4 bus to Morningside Heights. Gazed at our old residence on 121st Street, still the same, but the building next to it has come down and been replaced by a Columbia building, as have the brownstones across the street that used to be occupied by Puerto Ricans; they are now a high-rise Columbia dormitory. And the sandbox on Morningside Drive has been planted—no more fun for small children. Then to Morningside Quaker Meeting, which now meets on the 12th floor of the Riverside Church tower. Lovely to see Vince Buscemi there, as I had expected, and his wife, Ernie. Vince and I spoke at some length after Meeting about Pendle Hill. He is still on the Racial Justice Committee, that’s all, and hopes to resign from that fairly soon. He said that the finances were saved last year by a bequest. He agreed that our choice of Steve Baumgartner as Executive Secretary was a large mistake. Morningside Meeting is smallish. No children. Lots of strange—and strangely attractive—people. Introducing myself, I told about founding the Meeting around 1958 with the worship group I started at Columbia, which eventually was attended by Victor Paschis, who developed the Meeting much further. Robert L. Smith (eventually headmaster of Sidwell Friends School) used to meet on fifth day with me at Columbia. The Morningside Clerk wants me to send her a full account in writing, to put on their website. Μακάρι! . . . Viewed the beautiful Riverside Church nave, and the Hudson to the west. Walked along Broadway from 120th to 72nd, viewing “farmers’ markets” along the way: food, singing, handicrafts. Lunched on a frankfurter outdoors across from Lincoln Center. Then attended the New York City Ballet’s matinee, a stellar program. “Chaconne” (Balanchine/Gluck), very delicate, danced by Wendy Whelan. Then a complete change with two short Stravinsky/Balanchine ballets, “Momumentum pro Gesualdo” and “Movements for Piano and Orchestra,” abstract, pure. Then another total change with “Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux,” sheer athleticism, jumps, the girl diving into the boy’s arms, the crowd cheering. Finally, Peter Martin’s “The Magic Flute” to music by Ricardo Drigo, a lovely tale about a girl whose parents want her to marry an old wealthy man hardly able to stand while she of course has a serious boyfriend her own age. Lots of humor, color, costumes, scenery, a good ballet for Theo and Elena next summer at Saratoga if they do it there. The Tschaikovsky spectacular was danced with bravura by Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia. All in all, one of the best ballet programs we have seen, partly because everything was the first time for us. . . . But the day continued. Lacking time, we went into a sort of pub for a sandwich. This turned out to be a place where unemployed actors and actresses serve as waiters and also perform, very loudly, and well. The place was full of enthusiastic young people, and everyone was asked to donate something to the actors in addition to the bill for food (which was high: $33 for two toasted cheese sandwiches!). At 7:00 p.m. we attended a musical: Mama Mia, very loud, but in good taste. Same story (sort of) as Mrs. Warren’s Profession: a girl who doesn’t know who her father is, a mother who is proud to be single and independent. But this was of course sentimentalized, since she finds her original husband (seducer) and marries him at the end. Not bad. Good singing. A good band. Setting supposedly a Greek island, with men playing tavli. . . . A long, full day, thanks to the wonders of New York City.

Monday, October 4, 2010

New York City

To MoMA at 9:30 a.m. to enter before the mobs, thanks to my membership, to see the very interesting Matisse exhibit devoted to just about only five years of his career, 1913 to 1917, when he was struggliing to find his own way instead of copying the cubism of Picasso and others. I bought the catalogue (as usual) and also a small poster to give to Leander because the subject is “The Piano Lesson.” . . . For Evelyn Spiegel, got info and menus from three Greek restaurants, for their trip to New York later this month. Bought manouri at the Grand Central market and went to Penn Station for the trip home. . . . Heard that Howard Mitchell’s wife, at Kendal, had a devastating stroke and is terminal. Does not recognize him now. Very sad.

October 9, 2010

Kendal

Saw the Met Opera telecast of Das Reingold. I found it horrifying, so dark, voices so low, orchestra so overblown, all about power, and I concluded that now I know why the Germans were attracted to Nazism.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Drove to Lake Morey—beautiful autumn color—to see sixty-five students receive mediation training. I explained to them about our effort many years ago, the opposition from deans, the encouragement received from Robert Reich (a court of law never changed anyone’s heart). They were told the differences among negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and litigation. The instructor, a lawyer, termed litigation “war,” the object being to defeat an enemy. . . . Returned in order to see the Met’s new production of Boris Gudunov, for the first time. Ugly, sadistic, no joy.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Early Music concert. I performed the C minor prelude and fugue from the Well Tempered Book 2, with errors owing to nervousness, but I think I covered them satisfactorily. Supper with Robert and Penny Binswanger and their son Tim, who had spent a term teaching English at Athens College in 1977. Folks there thought at first he was a CIA spy. Lunch after Meeting with Jack and Ruth Hunter and Sydney Jarvis, first time since last spring. But no Lafayette, who is now permanently in Kendal

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Lafayette is now installed in Barclay. Saw him and Kesaya last night at supper. He goes to exercise, takes long walks, eats in the café. The apartment, maintained empty for twenty years, is now relinquished. . . . Heard the president of Friends School Ramallah yesterday. Very impressive woman who relates how horribly the Palestinians are treated by the Jews. She is one of the very few remaining Palestinian Quakers. I sent the school $500. . . . Today, finished typing volume two of my elephantine journal. Another 100+ pages single-spaced. Does this tedious job make sense? Yet reading over the material I am thrust back into parts of my life that largely I have forgotten. Right now it’s the period just before beginning C.O. service in Rochester.

October 29, 2010

I had written to Jud Shaver, chair of the Trustees Committee, who asked if I’d be willing to serve another term on the Farm School board, that I wondered what real service I could offer. I’d certainly done a service in the past, fixing Brenda Marder’s history so it could be grammatical, and I’d also helped in securing interns. But what now? And I was discouraged by Gail Schoppert’s failure to include the Secondary Committee minutes and subsequently by Charlotte Armstrong’s omission of the Secondary Committee on the list of those reporting. But I said I’d be willing to serve one more term. He apparently sent all this to Annie, who—lovely Annie!—sent me the following e-mail and warmed my heart: «Dear Peter, Τι είναι αυτά που έγραψες στον Jud? Αμφιβάλλω αν υπάρχουν, όχι πολλοί αλλά έστω μερικοί, που να αγαπούν, να καταλαβαίνουν, να ξέρουν τη Σχολή και τις ανάγκες της περισσότερο από σένα. Οι περισσότεροι είναι περαστικοί, γράφουν στο CV τους ότι είναι και μέλος του Board της AFS και που τους είδες ύστερα από λίγο. Είναι τιμή για την Σχολή να σε έχει στο Board της. Κατάλαβέ το. Μη ξανακάνεις τέτοιες σκέψεις σε παρακαλώ! Άννη»

A quick trip to the farm today to get some more books on Paradise Lost for my ILEAD course and to return laundry, bring the hula hoop I bought for Elena, etc. Everything just as we left it, but the pond full up from the great amount of rain we’ve had. Earl discovered our gate opened and called to say hello. He killed a bear in our woods, a 125-pound male, and says there’s a large one still there. He’s eating the meat and will have the head stuffed by Roy to hang proudly on his wall. Lunch at Marsha’s, chocolate milkshake at Stewart’s, our familiar rituals. I put graphite in the gate lock to ease entry of the key. . . . Finished introduction to the Saint Francis section in Thanassis Maskaleris’s forthcoming anthology of ecological passages from Kazantzakis. . . . Wrote a blurb for Harry Mark Petrakis’s latest. . . . Waiting on line to be seated at Green Tomatoes restaurant, a woman came up to me and said, “I’m Noel Perrin’s daughter!” What a nice surprise! This was the younger of the two. She was accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter and by a man named Carlos, her “fiancé.” First marriage obviously did not last. She lives in Florida but is visiting her mother, Nancy, here. I asked if she was working. No. No jobs owing to the bad economy. She noted how important we were to Ned, and I answered her that he was my very best friend in the department. We had lovely memories of pancakes (she smiled) and of removing stones from the fields, and petting Ned’s cows, and . . . and . . . I seem to be easily recognized by people who have not seen me for decades.

November 4, 2010

Yale Club

Got up at 5:30 a.m. to drive to Burlington for a 9:30 a.m. plane, only to discover that the flight was canceled. Got a seat on the next US Airways flight scheduled for 1:00 p.m. Plane arrived at 2:00 p.m., and I finally got to La Guardia at 4:00. My meeting was at 3:30. So I missed it, but luckily it was the College Committee, not the Secondary one that I chair, which is tomorrow. On bus 60 to Manhattan, the driver stepped out and returned 15 minutes later. I should have traveled by AMTRAK, but I am sort of held hostage by US Airways, always hoping to fly enough in order to renew my Preferred status the following year. But had a very pleasant dinner with Burt Pike at the Yale Club. Three solid hours of conversation. He’s healthy and busy, as I am. We’re both very fortunate. He, like Dennis Carroll, felt that I shouldn’t retype all the passages in my journals but should gather together entries on a given subject. The farm, for example. He’s very opposed to Xlibris, saying that the books they advertise in the New York Review of Books are beneath contempt.

November 5, 2010

NYC

It’s lovely to work in the Yale Club library, typing volume three of my journal, which is now 1953 in Rochester. Lots of memories of life there and also of various trips to Riparius. It’s amazing how many people I interrelated with and were forgotten until revivified by the re-reading of these journal entries. A particular example worth remembering concerned the death and wake of Charlie McCarthy, Bernard’s father. . . . At noon, Maya Nathan appeared and joined me for lunch. She’s a Dartmouth graduate who is applying to be an interne at the Farm School next year. Two hours with her. She’s rather academic, not very sportive. I’m not sure how effective she’d be, although she has experience working with academic low-achievers. She’ll see Ev Marder tomorrow. Let’s see what he thinks. . . . Walked to 26th and Broadway, fun because Broadway now has a corridor reserved for pedestrians. The hat store where I bought my fedora is now closed, alas. In time for my Secondary Committee. Nice to see fellow trustees. Jud Shaver assured me I’d been renewed for another term. Gail Schoppert gave me thumbs up. He now has a goatee; I hardly recognized him at first. A new trustee, Christos Folias, was outspoken and very friendly; we shared stories about the Svarnas School, which he attended and in which I taught English in 1955 for dr. 30/hour (= $1.00). T. Jewett asked to join the committee, as did Folias. Very easy to talk to and work with Panos Kanellis, the new president. I asked if Father Kyriakos, the priest who died, will be replaced. The answer seems to be No. No need any longer. Too bad. The memorial classroom for Vouli is ready. They’ve ordered a commemorative plaque. I said I would pay for it. . . . Back to the Yale Club. A Manhattan and spicy chicken wings in the main lounge; then worked on the report for tomorrow until I walked to the Century Club, 7 West 45th, for board supper. Very intimate; many didn’t come owing to Greek Summer festivities elsewhere, which I chose to miss. Lots of talk with Joann Ryding. The club, very exclusive, etc., is really inferior to the Yale Club in its amenities, just as is the Harvard Club also.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

NYC

Buffet breakfast at the Yale Club. Then to board meeting from 9:00 to 1:00. Chairman Charlotte Armstrong seems mostly confused. Secretary gets mixed up. Interminable discussion without adequate “clerking,” as Quakers say. But I read my report with verve and obtained easy approval for the beginning of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, plus (in principle) of elementary school depending on Panos’s feasibility study. Finances look a bit better owing to the rising market. And we voted, finally, to buy a farm, already equipped for cattle, for the cows.

November 12, 2010

Pendle Hill

To Pendle Hill for the 80th anniversary celebration and Parker Palmer’s Cary lecture. The grounds are beautiful, with leaves still on the oak trees and the tall Japanese maples. We drove immediately north to Newtown to visit Dan Seeger. Newton Garver was with him also. Dan’s quarters in Pennswood Village are very tiny. He sleeps on a Murphy bed in a room that doubles as an office. Bookcases neatly arranged, of course, but the huge archives he had in the basement of Lumberton Leas are gone. He has just finished as interim director of AFSC, working in the newly greened Quaker headquarters that he was in charge of greening (they have a Platinum LEED—Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design—award for it). Now he’s on multiple Quaker committees, but has given up playing the piano, even though his keyboard is still evident, only now as furniture. Healthy and vibrant, worried about gaining weight, exercising extensively in the ample exercise room. We had good conversation, especially about his reasons for abandoning Medford Leas, and then went through the hallways for a fine dinner complete with Dan’s wine. He and Newton discussed Kant. Then we got to politics. . . . Back at Pendle Hill, lovely reunion with Shirley Dodson, and Laurie Perman. Shirley assured me that I am not the only “accomplished” author who has been rejected by the pamphlets committee. Laurie hopes to start book publication again with Doug Gwyn’s new history of Pendle Hill and then Tony Manousos’s biography of Howard and Anna Brinton, but probably via electronic publication. Too bad I missed Doug, who is here all year but was gone to England just this weekend.

November 13, 2010

Morning session on John Woolman led by an energetic professor, very knowledgeable, but who talked too much. However, he did call upon folks in the class, including me. I suggested that Woolman, like Fox, was a genius. How else explain the quality of his writing, let alone of his morals. Margery Walker, sitting in front of me, suggested that the cadences of his prose came from the King James Bible. Greeted Parker Palmer at breakfast. He was very gracious, obviously remembering me, for we had many good interchanges during his decade at Pendle Hill. . . . After lunch, Chrysanthi and I rushed to Macy’s in Springfield Mall, our favorite. I bought two suit jackets at ridiculously low prices; she bought a cashmere sweater that I’ll present to her as a gift at Christmastime along with a collection of paint brushes we ordered on line a few days ago. . . . The main event came next: Parker Palmer’s Steve Cary lecture. It was splendid. First came introductions, including Dan Seeger explaining who Steve Cary was, then one of Parker’s trainees explaining his “spiritual enterprise,” and finally Laurie speaking about Pendle Hill’s unexpected beginnings in 1930, directly after the stock market crash. (I told her later about the Empire State Building and Al Smith.) Parker spoke at length about his eleven years at Pendle hill; he came aged 35, and how much it taught him about community: where the teachers worked in the kitchen and garden and the workers studied. As Director of Studies he took the exact same salary as the cook. He explained how gradually he came to appreciate silent meeting after first rejecting it and wanting his more familiar sermon and hymns. He found that silent meeting was a fine way of discovering a “safe space” for the inner spirit, the essence no longer distracted by “accidentals.” I told him afterward of Leonard Slatkin’s introduction to a piece of avant-garde music: “No melody, no harmony, no rhythm, no counterpoint. What’s left, then? Sound.” And sound it was, fascinating because the old expectations had been removed. The same happened with him and silent meeting. Quakerism’s chief discovery was subtraction. . . . Lots of talk afterwards. Reunion with old Pendle Hill friends and colleagues, among whom was Rebecca Mays, whom at first I didn’t recognize (she’s fatter now). Very cordial about “our” production of books at Pendle Hill, which she hopes won’t be forgotten. Her daughter has given up the bass fiddle and is living with a man in Italy. . . . Supper in the Reading Room, 18 people, by invitation. I sat next to Steve Cary’s widow and daughter. They were pleased to hear that the Cary Room at our Kendal will house a recital tomorrow. After dessert we had a chance to ask Parker questions. I asked how we should react at Kendal when certain people become angry at the mention of Quaker values. He replied helpfully. Ask the person to express his or her values and how they developed. Let the objector feel that he or she is being heard. Often, the reply will show that the person’s values are totally compatible with Quaker values. The important thing is to get beyond branding and to arrive at the essence: at sound not at melody, rhythm, or harmony. . . . Parker told a good Quaker joke. A Quaker farmer’s mule refused to work. The farmer says to the mule, “Thee knows that I won’t kick thee, beat thee with a lash, or hit thee. But thee doesn’t know that I’m going to sell thee to the rich Episcopalian next door who’s offered me twice your worth!” Yes, Quakers came to do good and did well.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Up at 5:00 a.m. Flew back to Manchester. Beautiful weather. Practiced Schubert. To the Hop at 12:45 for Met Opera’s “Don Pasquale,” a delicious comic romp. 3:30 p.m. to Cary Room to practice 8-hand first movement of Schubert’s Trout Quintet. 4:30, Cary recital. We played last, well enough. I told everyone who Steve Cary was and how pleased his wife and daughter were to know that his room at Kendal would be filled with music. . . . Then Walter and Miriam Arndt showed up (they were supposed to come next Sunday). So we accommodated to their presence and shared a long supper with them. Walter is 97. His complaint about Harvest Hill, where they moved: No one to talk to. Such a shame. But apparently Jim Tatum visits occasionally and they converse together in Latin. Miriam is afraid to drive in the dark; thus I managed to get her yellow VW bug back to Lebanon, with Chrysanthi following successfully in our car. A long day.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Boston

Lunch in the Hanover Inn with the “old group” as usual on Wednesdays. President Kim was there. I told him how much we valued these lunches and he assured me that they would continue. . . . Dartmouth Coach to South Station. In the “T” I was told that seniors could receive a large discount if they had the proper card. So I obtained the card, finding the office by a miracle. Thus, each ride now costs $0.60 instead of $2.00. Back Bay Station on the Orange Line, then through a huge mall to the Marriott Hotel. Met the organizer of this meeting, Vasiliki Tsigas-Fotinis, the coordinator for the Standards for Modern Greek Language Learning Project. With her were Nancy Biska, who remembered interviewing me for Greek television, Vassiliki Rapti from Harvard, and Aristotle Michopoulos, head of Modern Greek at Hellenic College, who in the past was accused by Eva and others of stultifying the teaching there. The purpose of all this is to submit standards to ACTFL to be included in their next publication of national standards. I found ACTFL’s materials excellent and want to send them to the Farm School to help with the teaching of English there. The four of us met for three hours over supper in a restaurant and exchanged lots of good ideas. I encouraged the teaching of Κοινή (New Testament) to be included in our thoughts. Nancy told me that in contacts with Dimitrios, the current archbishop, she learned that he refused to read the report that John Rassias and I wrote for his disgraced predecessor, Spyridon. . . . Afterwards, I wandered through the Prudential Center, which is next door. What a lovely city this is! The Marriott in late afternoon was swarming with young people drinking and enjoying themselves, very much as in an English pub.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

To the Sheraton Hotel for today’s meetings. We accomplished a lot in the morning and even more when after lunch we were joined by Elpida Bairaktaris, who teaches Modern Greek in a charter school in Delaware and had lots to show us about lesson plans, objectives, etc. She’s from Thessaloniki and is well aware of the Farm School. In mid-afternoon the two Vassilikis went off to the ACTFL committee hoping to get its permission for us to submit standards for MG. I took the 4:30 bus home. Chrysanthi and I had a delicious calf’s liver dinner in the apartment and later watched Ken Burns’s fine documentary on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Washington

To Leander’s yesterday via AMTRAK, a 12-hour journey, but comfortable. Today I visited FCNL’s “green” building by pre-arrangement, and was given a tour by Jim Cason. It’s on 2nd Street, across from the Hart Senate Office Building, a short walk from Union Station. Originally it was two or three town houses, but not in the horrible slum where I served in an AFSC work camp in the 1950s. Jim told me that most of that burned down in the riots of 1968. The Quakers received a Platinum LEED award for greening this facility, where 27 people work each day. He showed me: flooring made from bamboo instead of oak or maple since bamboo matures in three years; a carpet made from reprocessed bottle caps (!) and laid down in separate squares so that one or two can be easily replaced owing to stains, etc.; a full geo-thermal system supplying both heat and air conditioning; plantings on the flat roof, designed to absorb most of the water from rainfalls and thus to help prevent the overflowing of DC’s public drains; a sun-conduit facing south and beaming sunshine to the floor below via transparent flooring; wallboard made from reprocessed waste material; metal chairs and tables designed for easy recycling; staircases with natural sunlight, designed to be pleasant and therefore to encourage people to use them instead of the elevator; a shower for people who arrive via bicycle on hot days; a scheme to encourage use of bicycles by means of contributions to charity. All this cost many millions but he says that the payback period on extra greening costs is only about six years. Very nice to see all this. Probably the Quaker Center in Philadelphia, whose greening was supervised by Dan Seeger, is equally impressive. I wrote at once to Win Hunter suggesting that he add Jim Cason to his lecture series, after Bill McKibben. Cason can come, will use power point illustrations, and will stress “What we did wrong.” . . . I spent the rest of the day usefully and enjoyably as a sightseer. First to the Supreme Court, which has a museum in the basement with portraits of past judges—e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Cardozo, and a lot on the design and construction of the building, heavily influenced by Greek architecture (but the Greek sculptors of human—or divine—figures were so much better). Then to the Library of Congress, the adjacent building. Nice to see the grand rotunda again in the Jefferson Building. I checked the electronic catalogue to see which of my books are included and found pretty much all of them, including translations into Greek. There was a special exhibit of Jefferson’s amazing library, all arranged in his categories: a treasure. . . . Detoured to Metro Center subway station to get a half-priced senior Metro card. Then to the National Portrait Gallery for a special exhibit of Norman Rockwell’s vignettes for the Saturday Evening Post covers—humorous or sad pictures of American life, plus portraits of civil war leaders, Walt Whitman, revolutionary leaders, and a whole section on Katherine Graham and the Pentagon Papers controversy. So much to see, including the impressive building itself. . . . Out to an Italian restaurant with everyone. Then falling asleep while watching the film “Robot.”

December 7, 2010

Another colonoscopy. But this time the doctor told me that I needn’t have any subsequent ones in the future, even though two small polyps were removed. Her decision relates, I expect, to my age, 80½, and to the fact that these polyps grow very slowly. In other words, I’m bound to die from something else before colon cancer gets me.

December 8, 2010

Very nice two-hour lunch at the Hanover Inn with Jack Shepherd with lots and lots to talk about in multiple areas: writing, family life, England, Dartmouth, Quakerism, mediation. He wants now to have these lunches more frequently.

December 10, 2010

Diversity Committee meeting. Weezie is very excited by my discovery that Pennswood Village (where Dan Seeger now lives) has an ongoing program to support entry fees to the tune of $100,000 a year. Margery Walker is similarly delighted. We’ll keep trying. . . . This meeting was followed by a summing up of our Values initiative in a joint meeting with the staff. I had occasion to pester them again about mediation, but I doubt that anything will happen.

December 11, 2010

Saw Verdi’s Don Carlo in the Met’s film series. Marvelous lead soprano, Marina Poplavskaya, and terrible evocations of the horrors of the Inquisition. . . . Afterwards, however, a beautiful Webster recital by Dan Weiser and Philip Liston-Kraft doing four-hand music, including Schubert’s masterpiece, the Fantasia in F minor, which I introduced. He wrote it in 1827 several months before his death at age 31. They balanced its sad grandeur with the delicious Brahms Hungarian Dances and with Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Sunday, December 12, 2010

A busy day. At 8:30 a.m. I gave a talk on Isaiah’s 4th Servant Song and its prediction of Jesus. Large audience. Lots of good questions and discussion. I stressed how useful this was for the early Christians in their attempt to convince other Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah. . . . Then Quaker Meeting, at Kendal this week. Then Business Meeting emphasizing our attempts to bolster and save the Kendal Worship Group. . . . Then Pat Porter conducting her New London group of Renaissance Singers, including our friend Susan, who sang the Walker songs with me several years ago. Then a nice dinner with Bill Pietsch and Martha Wiencke. Then practicing my part in the eight-hand Schubert Unfinished Symphony. . . . On the sad side, Penny Binswanger suffered a broken back when Robert went off the road owing to black ice ten days ago. She’s on a respirator and is kept artificially in a coma until she responds better. Will she survive? If yes, will she ever walk again? Also, Alice Buseck seems to feel that there is no longer any therapy for her lymphoma.

December 18, 2010

Matthew Rassias-Miles received chrismation at the Newport Greek Orthodox Church in a moving ceremony yet one that reaffirmed the total orthodoxy of the Church, including its renunciation of all heterodoxy. At the dinner afterwards, David Markwood, Veronica’s husband, told me that he is reading my translation of Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis for the third time, the book is so meaningful for him. I actually did some Greek dancing with Chrysanthi in the lead. How nice! . . . Twenty people registered for my ILEAD course on Paradise Lost, including many from Kendal. A full house! Will I do this reasonably well? So far I’m not very enthusiastic. . . . Alec and family arrived in NYC from Bangkok this morning and will be at the farm tomorrow. Luckily, it’s not too cold, only about 15 degrees.

December 24, 2010

New York City

Drove to South Salem yesterday. Lovely to see Alec and family there plus of course Daphne and family. Today I went with Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena to the City via commuter train from Katonah. And what a busy, interesting day we had. Grand Central market for manouri and caerphilly. Then a day-card for Alec for bus and subway (used Chrysanthi’s card for Monica), Oyster Bar, Grand Central main hall, then the Yale Club library and lounge, 42nd Street library reading room and painting of Milton reading to his daughters, Bryant Park’s ice skating; walked down Broadway looking for a deli; found one advertising Greek dishes only to discover it’s now owned and run exclusively by Koreans, but had a pastrami sandwich nevertheless. Macy’s outside and in. Wanted to ascend Empire State Building but the line was too long. Bus to 83rd Street. Metropolitan Museum to see the Egyptian section because Elena is studying Egypt in class, then armor for Theo. Walked down Fifth Avenue a bit. I pointed out 20 East 74th Street to the children. To Rockefeller Center’s magnificent Christmas tree. Mobs of people there, including two ladies from Indonesia whom Monica knew! Pointed out where Daphne used to work at Simon and Schuster. Times Square all lighted up. Broadway now a pedestrian precinct. Back to the Yale Club for a quiet supper served by my friend Angela, total cost $127 for everyone whereas I’d been charged $135 for my single supper at the Century Club when the Farm School trustees ate there (complained to Charlotte Armstrong to no avail). Harlem Line commuter train back to Katonah. Ten miles to Daphne’s house. What a day!

December 25, 2010

South Salem

Christmas with Daphne’s family and Alec’s very pleasantly. Christina hopes to go to the Thacher School and is studying for the PSAT exam. I looked at the study-book and couldn’t do any of the math problems. Leander and family were meant to be present but canceled because Sophia had received C, D, and Ε on her report card for the first term at high school and Deanna was too upset to travel and socialize. But we expect to see them at the farm on the 28th.

December 29, 2010

North Creek

Leander and Alec and families are both on the farm, keeping warm. Very little snow, grass visible. Waddell Road totally clear, sanded. Frost heaves very severe, leaving gaps in the earth. We met them all in North Creek at the ski bowl, where the children were tubing down the hill with glee. Very cold. But there’s a new building there with a café where we had hot chocolate while waiting. Then to Pete’s Ah for pizza, which we ate in Leander’s cabin, with beer and apple pie. Very pleasant. Slept in the center of North Creek at Alpine Lodge, with its fake-rustic décor.

December 30, 2010

Breakfast with everyone at Marsha’s. The waitress quit school in grade 12; was failing all her subjects and is now making sometimes $100 a day. North Creek full of skiers. Drove to Riparius. In the post office Roy Millington greeted me, “Hi, Pete, when are you going to live here full time?” I answered that I’d dreamed of doing that 60 years ago but alas will never do it now. We delivered some books to our cabin and replenished the mice poison. Everything looks fine. Children went horseback riding. Alec, Leander, and I tramped over parts of the 36 acres that Deana Wood wants to sell just south of our south field. Discovered that the Antler Lake stream is in a rather deep gorge as it traverses the corridor they created. Someone presumably could build near our southern border, but this seems unlikely. And Deana is asking well over $1000 an acre, which is prohibitive. Chrysanthi spent some time in the North Creek library. I returned to our motel and made a compendium of journal entries on Riek Kleefstra, which Dennis Carroll has encouraged me to do and to send to him. It’s a bit embarrassing, of course. . . . Supper with everyone at Trappers. Leander and Nicholas went to a jazz concert at Tannery. We returned with Alec and family to their cozy cabin, where Theo and Elena stretched out comfortably downstairs, reading. But each also played a piece on the harmonium, Theo especially well.

December 31, 2010

Our usual escargot party at the Rassiases. Good to talk with Bill Miles. Mary very sleepy all the time. Matthew hugged and kissed me because I gave him a chrismation present: Ritsos’s poetry, bilingual.

2011

Hanover

January 1–June 11

Jan. 29, Cambridge

Jan. 30, West Hartford

Feb. 23–25, Tempe, Arizona

March 2–5, New York City

March 15, Boston

March 16–25, Santa Barbara

April 7–9, Madison, Wisconsin

April 16–17, Tempe, Arizona

May 8, Riparius

May 4–5, New York City

Riparius

June 12–September 10

Hanover

September 11–December 31

Sept. 12–13, New York

Sept. 17, Cambridge

Oct. 12–14, New York

Oct. 23, Riparius

Nov. 1, Riparius

Nov. 10–12, New York City, Farm School trustees

Nov. 22–25, North Potomac, Leander’s

Nov. 30–Dec. 2, Washington, Embassy Circle Guest House, 2224 R Street NW, 20008, 877 232-7744

Dec. 23–26, South Salem, NY, Daphne’s

January 1, 2011

Celebratory lunch with Weezie and Bill Pietsch, Rose Miller, and Avery Post. Avery told lots about his career: many parishes, then administrative position in local context, finally national directorship of the United Church of Christ. . . . Supper with Ruth Stanton: chopped chicken liver, just for me, she claims. . . . These last few days I’ve read the entire book about the Cadbury, Fry, and Rowntree chocolate companies, their accomplishments, fights with Nestlé and Mars, and Hershey, and then, so sadly, the takeover of Cadbury by the American cheese company, Kraft. End of an era. I thought of our Kendal. Will it go the same way? As the author said, all the old values, so remarkable, were replaced by a single remaining value: money.

January 4, 2011

I’m now typing 1955 in my journal, including the lovely time at Woodbrooke, Edinburgh, London, eventually Greece, with Chrysanthi after we first met. It’s quite a revelation.

January 16, 2011

Played two Goldberg Variations, numbers 18 and 10, at this morning’s Interfaith Gathering, when Brent Edgerton spoke very well on fate vs. destiny. Happily, I didn’t get nervous and didn’t make mistakes. Performing fairly often helps considerably. . . . Am now vetting the copyeditor’s changes on my Selected Letters, over 2000 pages. But it’s going fast enough. Mostly questions of hyphenation, capitalization, and the like, but in addition he has caught some embarrassing typos.

January 29, 2011

A very good show about Buckminster Fuller at the A.R.T., acted by Thomas Derrah alone for two hours. And Bucky did talk, nonstop. An intellectual treat, unabashedly “metaphysical.”

January 30, 2011

To West Hartford to the lunch celebrating Gail and Ruth Schoppert’s 50th wedding anniversary. We had hoped to see David and Patti Buck there, but they’re in Florida. Did see the Johnsons again and had easy conversation since he was a book publisher and knew David Godine and Ray Nash.

February 6, 2011

My sister Alice has given up trying to treat her lymphatic cancer, has called in Hospice, and is dying. Doctors giver her perhaps four months. Today, practicing piano (Haydn’s Military Symphony for eight-hand piano performance next Sunday) I suddenly felt that losing the wonderful pleasure of playing piano must be for her one of the saddest aspects of losing . . . everything. Piano, especially chamber music, was always central for her. It’s good that we were able to be a duet team at Kinhaven for several years.

February 20, 2011

Miriam Arndt called to say that Walter died last Tuesday. End of an era. Such a remarkable man.

February 21, 2011

I introduced Jim Strickler, who spoke at Kendal about the splendid program of Dartmouth Medical School to help concerning childbirth and mothers’ health in Kosovo, saying first that we Kendal residents wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him, but most likely would be across the river, paying Vermont income taxes! And then I recited his dictum: “The most serious disease of older people is . . . loneliness.”

February 22, 2011

I introduced professor Bill Wohlforth at our War and Peace Studies dinner-seminar. Of course the Hanover Inn’s projector for his illustrations on Power Point wouldn’t work, as usual, but he did splendidly without them. His thesis was that the world today has fewer wars than ever before in history. Hard to believe, but he argued well. Good to see Tom Powers as one of the audience this time, brought by Alan Rozycki.

February 23, 2011

To Tempe

Flew to Phoenix in order to see Alice in time, for she’s dying from lymphatic cancer and is now under Hospice care at home. Paul and Susie are visiting now. Paul showed all his photos of Hazel, of course, now one year old. Alice was sleeping, so we didn’t greet her today.

February 24, 2011

Tempe

We greeted Alice in the morning. She smiled broadly but she has failed considerably since Leander saw her about ten days ago. Now she cannot get in and out of bed, cannot walk, and talks only in half sentences, sparsely. Susie suspects that the cancer has gone to the brain. But she was very aware of who we were. She’s free of pain owing to morphine, but is always tired, and stays alert with eyes open only briefly before lapsing back into sleep. The Hospice nurse comes regularly, as does an assistant nurse to help with washing, etc. Peter is a devoted caregiver and very happy that her last days will be at home, where he can sleep next to her, hold her hand, etc. Even while she sleeps, one or more of the family tend to sit in the room and be there when she rouses. A sad story, but actually not so sad now that the inevitable is clear and she is not in pain. Interestingly, Peter received additional morphine and the paperwork advised strongly that he shred all the labels lest someone sifting through his trash discover the presence of morphine in the house and burglarize the dwelling to secure this drug for illicit use. . . . I spent enough time typing more of volume 5 of my journal. And I bought everyone a takeout Indian meal—everyone, that is, except Alice, who drinks but has stopped eating except for a sliver of cheese perhaps every 12 hours. We all rejoiced that she was so remarkably well, despite the cancer, for her 50th wedding anniversary celebration and for Susie’s wedding. When I tell people, especially at Kendal, that she’s dying at age 74, the uniform reaction is “So young!”

March 2, 2011

New York City

Flew from Manchester to La Guardia for the Farm School trustees’ meetings. Went to 47th Street with my extracted tooth and its gold crown and was given $60 for the gold. Amazing! Then to MoMA for the special exhibit of Picasso’s “constructions” using bits of newspaper, cardboard, scrap metal, etc. to fashion rather beautiful “paintings,” many representing guitars (sort of). Then to Columbia for a seminar given by Heath Cabot on how Greece treats displaced people applying for asylum—very badly. Fifteen thousand applications have resulted in about 80 approvals. Nice to talk with Vangelis Calotychos, whose edited book on Anagnostakis, which I vetted for Fairleigh Dickinson, has been accepted for publication. He hopes that Princeton will accept another. I’ve told him to apply to Hanne Winarsky. Neni was there, too, and I thanked her for the various e-mails she sends on Modern Greek subjects. I felt very much at home on the sixth floor of Hamilton Hall. . . . Then to West 110th Street to Sharon Vaino’s dinner for Farm School trustees. T. Jewett, who has joined my committee, won’t be able to attend tomorrow owing to a conflict. Long talk with Jud Shaver about retirement communities. He is 61 and beginning to think about such things. I prompted him to visit Kendal on Hudson. Sat with Seth, the young man who’d been in the office previously, an unemployed (mostly) actor and would-be director of musical comedies. He picks up odd jobs to make ends meet.

March 3, 2011

A full, interesting day. Did some typing of volume 5 of my journal in the lovely Yale Club library. Then walked to Madison and 36th to the Morgan library and museum. What a treasure! This plutocrat collected books mostly and manuscripts. I saw his Guttenberg Bible, Shakespeare Quarto, original manuscripts by Mozart, Liszt, Schumann, Schubert, and his thousands of volumes of English and French literature in fine bindings. Nice to watch groups of schoolchildren being instructed there. Then to the Chinese restaurant on 39th and 6th recommended by Mrs. Gow’s son as the best in New York. I had spring shrimp with garlic sauce, very tasty, and amazingly inexpensive. We had our meeting of the Primary, Secondary, and Student Life Committee at 3:00 p.m. T. Jewett couldn’t come. Costas Carass, a new member, was useful, Panos full of information and good values, ditto for Bill Tsacalis and Tommy Thomas. Manita was present but didn’t speak. We’re full of excitement regarding the forthcoming pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and primary school, which should affect Secondary and even Perrotis in helpful ways. And the whole project has invigorated Tasos Apostolidis, who now is no longer longing to retire. . . . Back to the Yale Club. Met Michael Groden for dinner there and for the Mint Theater’s production of Arnold Bennett’s 1909 play “What the Public Wants” about crooked, exploitative journalism, very appropriate for today, a century later. Well acted, always interesting.

March 4, 2011

Went to an exhibit that included a movie showing Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79 hour by hour. Lots of smothered bodies. Good displays of how Pompeii’s citizens had lived before the catastrophe. . . . Wrote up the minutes of our Secondary Committee’s meeting yesterday. Perrotis meeting today. Panos tired; too many meetings. Afterwards, Dimitri Gondicas and I went out for coffee for an hour or so. He made a good suggestion for the cover of my Selected Letters, to have the image of Kazantzakis depicted against the background of a holograph letter. Also to include some photos of letters in the book. Of course he wants to revise Greek Today, and asked me to inquire at UPNE if they’re willing—perhaps to do an on-line 2nd edition. . . . Instead of going to the ultra-expensive trustees’ dinner, I went to the Paul Taylor ballet at the City Center. The first offering, “Speaking in Tongues,” I found repulsive and much too long. Ugly, spasmodic repetitions. I couldn’t wait for it to end. Of course it did contain bravura dancing. But the second piece, “Esplanade,” to Bach’s double violin concerto, one of Taylor’s earliest, was totally delicious, sort of 50% modern dance and 50% ballet, marvelously congruent with the music. This time I wished it hadn’t ended so soon.

March 5, 2011

NYC

Full board. Pretty routine. We still have a yearly deficit, but less. They expect each trustee to give a minimum of $3000 a year. . . . I’m stuck in La Guardia Airport at 7:00 p.m. because the plane has some problems. Chrysanthi just telephoned to say that Alice died two hours ago. I’m not surprised. She was failing rapidly when we saw her, and I doubted that she’d last until our projected visit on March 14th. She had stopped eating, to hasten the process. Apparently all the children were present. It’s very good that we went when we did in February to see her when she still could recognize us and be aware that we had come. But at age 74, which everyone now says is “so young,” it’s a shame that she couldn’t have had another few years.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Bob Daubenspeck came for lunch and gave us his latest little poem:

CONVERSATION

Will there be silence?

Or will there be conversation

when I am called and join the Holy Spirit?

It will depend, dear one,

on how many words of Love

you have learned and carried out.

March 15, 2011

To Boston via Dartmouth Coach. Checked in at Hilton Logan Airport. Silver Line to South Station. Got a senior “T” card for Chrysanthi. Red Line to Cambridge. An hour reading about Prometheus in Widener Library. Supper in a Thai restaurant. Then to the Oberon on Arrow Street for the A.R.T.’s “rock opera” production of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Waiting on line outside with others, all of whom were very young. Those over 21 received a red tape across the wrist, certifying them capable of ordering alcoholic beverages. Finally admitted. Our seats were at Table 2 on bar stools, very uncomfortable. Everyone given earplugs! We applied ours. But most of the music was quite bearable, even nice. I watched the remarkable bassist a lot, and the gyrating guitarist. Prometheus was a man in his twenties, shirtless, in blue jeans, writhing in his chains, acting, speaking, and singing well enough. Io was an African-American girl, Hermes a domineering braggart. Some of Aeschylus actually survived all this and could be heard. But despite all the castigation of tyrants (Zeus), the performance had no emotional power for me, although afterward they made a speech about Amnesty International, its relevance to Libyan dictatorship, etc. A large problem was the fact that in the songs the words could barely be understood. One question, when all is done, is why Greek drama needs to be subjected to all this extraneous business, although it did attract a full house mostly of people hovering on either side of age 21.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Santa Barbara

Daphne left us for an hour and a half at the Mission while she did her weekly service at the Middle School, helping with snacks. The Mission is interesting, giving the history of the region: first Indians, then Spain, then Mexico, then the United States: 1848 treaty with Mexico, 1849 gold discovered, 1850 California becomes a state. The Missions were created of course to convert the Indians to Christianity. Instead, the Indians caught the white man’s diseases and died in droves. I was impressed by how crude all the architecture and artifacts were compared, say, to those of Ancient Greece. After lunch we went with Peter to his tennis lesson, not next door but in a gated community (with a real gate and guard at the entrance) surrounding a golf course and tennis courts. Luxury galore. Sumptuous private homes. Tennis pros on tap. Disgusting. . . . David Buseck sent me the music we’re meant to play at Alice’s memorial. A bit difficult. I’ll need to practice. I queried Alec, who is coming, if he’d like to do Fauré’s “Après un rêve.” Andrew had a lesson on bass guitar. The teacher arrived in a Mercedes. But all menial workers are Mexicans driving pick-up trucks and buying sandwiches in Montecito for lunch instead of bringing lunches from home.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Lots of piano practice this morning: Fauré’s “Après un rêve” and the flute sonata David sent me to play at Alice’s memorial. Nice lunch in an Italian restaurant nearby with Chrysanthi and Daphne. Greg is away with his tennis team for a match. Watched Andrew play basketball (his team won, 25 to 0) in a lovely YMCA filled with people on exercise machines. Joined Facebook, tutored a little by Christina. Watched the “husband-wife” pair of ducks who are sojourning here, it seems.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

We gave away our tickets to the Met broadcast of Lucia di Lammermoor in Hanover because of the trip here, but happily discovered that it played as well today in Santa Barbara. What a pleasure! Natalie Dessay played Lucia memorably, Ludovic Tézier the villain, Enrico, Joseph Calleja the lover, Edgardo. Beautiful music, expert singing and acting. The sextet was especially memorable, and of course the mad scene. . . . Folks who asked to be my friends on Facebook included the nice student I had at Princeton, Nancarrow, who is now gainfully employed in Chicago. But Doug Gwyn wrote to say that after this summer (he is now at Pendle Hill, writing its history), he sees no source so far of gainful employment.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Daphne digitalized the video that Don Kurka made when I celebrated my 70th birthday and the farm’s 50th birthday. We saw the whole thing, of which I had very little memory except for the huge faux pas when Don said to Dan Seeger, “I’ve heard that you don’t play the piano very well.” (Ugh!) Lovely images are recorded, and even better are the testimonies of Alec and Leander about me and their relationship with me and especially about the major role played by the farm (a) in that relationship and (b) in their own sense of values. . . . Afterwards, played monopoly with a very energetic Peter and Andrew.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

My Ritsos book has been corrected (let’s hope) by the publisher. I’ll need to go through it again, of course. But not, I hope and trust, with the agony of the first time, when the Greek was 80% wrong. . . . I’ve had an interesting and cordial e-mail exchange with the new editor of JMGS, Maria Koundoura, because she graduated from the University of Melbourne and also has roots in Thessaloniki. . . . The Kazantzakis Letters will be returned to me, paginated, in mid-May, to check again and write the index. Publication probably in December. . . . This morning we walked through the extraordinarily beautiful shopping center of Santa Barbara on State Street: flowers, colors, opulence everywhere. Then to the excellent museum to see a special exhibit of an artist who says he was influenced by Kazantzakis. In the afternoon, to Santa Barbara High School to watch Greg’s boys’ tennis team play another high school. I was amazed at the skill and strength of these young players aged 14 to 17. They serve beautifully, have powerful overheads, and smash their forehands and backhands. Well, it’s California. Greg was pleased because his team won most of the matches. We picked up Peter and Andrew from school. What a difference! Peter lively and vivacious, Andrew half asleep, uninterested in everything, devoid of vitality. Christina left yesterday morning for a five-day camping and kayaking trip organized by her school. I find her personality extremely negative; she actually frightens me. But apparently she’s entirely different when not at home. At least I hope so. Of all our seven grandchildren, Alec’s and Monica’s have the best personalities.

March 28, 2011

Membership Committee tonight at the Meeting with the results of the letters we sent out six months ago to “junior members” and non-resident adult members. Among the “junior,” Daphne asked to be released from membership. Among the adult non-residents, Leander asked to be released from membership. So we’ve lost them both, it seems, definitively, to Quakerism. Only Alec (maybe) remains with some allegiance. A shame! Their lives, and the lives of their families, are impoverished thereby. I failed in this respect (and others) as a parent.

April 4, 2011

An interesting day. At 8:30 a.m. Joan Wilson came to play four-hand piano with me. We practiced the Brandenburg: our two parts of the eight-hand version we’re doing with Stan Udy and Bill Clendenning. Then I went to Chalmers to introduce Homer Jernigan, the speaker at this month’s Professors’ Colloquium, which Tedd Osgood and I coordinate. Homer gave a splendid presentation on innovative methods of teaching theology, reminding me of the dismal teaching of New Testament Greek that I endured at the Selly Oak Colleges. Then to my study in Baker Library, working some more on my essay on Thomas Mann’s séance chapter. Then Chrysanthi picked me up and at Kendal we supped with Evelyn and Mel Spiegel and Suzanne Laaspere and Dick and Audrey Cherin, very pleasantly. Then Chrysanthi and I drove back into Hanover to attend a splendid production at Hopkins Center—the SITI Theater from New York doing their very interesting version of Macbeth, beautifully acted, as though in rehearsal. This was followed by a question and answer period between actors and audience. At home, I accessed Daphne’s photos, sent to my Facebook account, of their week in Hawaii, all sunshine and surfing. All this in one day.

April 6, 2011

Accidentally I discovered that Stephanie Boone, who used to work for me in peer tutoring, is still working in the totally revised system, which continues in an enhanced fashion. She’d like to have me interviewed regarding how all this started.

April 7, 2011

Madison, Wisconsin, Concourse Hotel, 800 356-8293

A long trip here. Delays at Chicago, but at 7:00 p.m. I met Vassiliki Tsigas-Fotinis, Eva Prionis (from Stanford), Nancy Biska, Elpida Bairaktaris, and Louiza Kondilis, and we all went out for a delicious supper at the hotel: Thai hors d’oeuvres, swordfish, full glass of wine, and lots of good talk.

April 8, 2011

Madison, Wisconsin

But the real fun was today, especially at breakfast. I sat at a table with teachers of Arabic, of African languages, a Palestinian named Mohammed who teaches Arabic, an American who’d spent two years in Indonesia and whose children went to Jakarta International School (JIS) while Alec was teaching there, and an Indonesian-Chinese Christian lady teaching Indonesian in California. Wonderful! Then our group met for many hours with June Phillips, who gave an excellent presentation on the ACTFL standards, giving us lots of ideas how to improve our application. And it turned out that Louiza is a good friend of Tom and Nancy Doulis in Portland. Small world. We kept going until 5:30 p.m., assigning each of us jobs to do before we meet again in New York in October. Then we reconvened for supper together at 7:00 p.m. . . . On e-mail, I received Simone Dinnerstein’s program for April 30. . . . At supper tonight, Nancy told us terrible things about the New York archdiocese, that everything is controlled by their financial officer, even the archbishop and the patriarch, with evidence of homosexual relationships, corruption on a grand scale. Horrible! . . . Interesting that all the waiters we’ve encountered, plus personnel at the hotel, are Americans, not Mexicans or Hispanics from Puerto Rico or South America, or other ethnics. Such is the Midwest, it seems—very different. . . . Chrysanthi told me on the telephone that Congress at the last minute reached an agreement on the budget, so that the government won’t shut down tomorrow. What a circus this Congress is!

April 9, 2011

Madison

Vassiliki and I went in the morning to visit and tour Monona Terrace, the large complex designed by Frank Lloyd Wright very late in his career, at the time of the Guggenheim Museum. And it is lovely: full of circles, and a marvelous stairway with a skylight above. Rooftop gardens. Even the parking areas are aesthetic.

April 16, 2011

Tempe, Arizona

We traveled early this morning to Phoenix, met Daphne at the airport and Alec at the Four Star Hotel. How nice! Then to Friendship Village for the memorial to Alice. This is the retirement community where Peter Buseck’s mother spent her last years. Big auditorium with a Petrov piano, made in Czechoslovakia. David and I rehearsed the Handel Adagio and Allegro quite nicely. Then Alec and I rehearsed the Fauré “Après un rêve,” agreeing on rubato elements. In the event, I played the Handel allegro badly, starting well, then having trouble, but ending well, so it was OK, not a disaster. But Alec and I played the Fauré beautifully. It is such an emotionally powerful piece, and was much appreciated. Before things started, it was especially nice to greet and talk to Ellen, although Susie was rather cold and distant. She and others of course were lamenting for their mother. Peter Buseck’s position was especially difficult. Paul Ekstein, Peter’s cousin, offered the welcome. Then David and I played our Handel. Then came a series of reflections by, in order, Clive, Paul, Lori; then our Fauré; then reflections by a woman whom Alice had helped with English; then Daphne, then Leander’s letter read by Daphne, then Carrie Bitterbaum’s letter read by Susie, then a Scriabin prelude played by Walter Cosand, a piano professor, then lots of open reflections unprogrammed, e.g. by Amy Bernstein and Roy, and lots more. Finally, Paul Ekstein closed the proceedings two hours after they had begun. The tributes to Alice’s vivacity, love of family, love of music, love of travel, were various and warm. I spoke about our many collaborations at the Kinhaven four-hand workshop, benefiting from Leander’s coaching. Too bad that almost nothing was said about Little Red Schoolhouse. Carrie Bitterbaum’s letter was especially warm; I hadn’t realized that Alice and she had been best of friends. Paul was humorous about his failures as a French horn player. Ellen spoke beautifully, as did Clive, describing the difficult family situation with his own parents as compared to the excellent one thanks to Alice and Peter. All in all, it was an informative, uplifting testimony to a life that alas ended too soon. . . . Afterward, back at the hotel, we had a few hours with both Daphne and Alec before she left for her flight back to Santa Barbara. Then Alec, Chrysanthi and I had a leisurely delicious steak dinner in a nearby restaurant. He described Elena’s brightness; she is now mastering Chinese! His work as head of arts continues to appeal to him; he manages the drama department, studio art, and music, with an ample budget. How nice!

April 20, 2011

An article in today’s Daily Dartmouth quoted Chrysanthi, who was interviewed yesterday:

Chrysanthi Bien, chair of the Hanover Senior Citizen Advisory Committee, also said she appreciates the wide variety of opportunities available to her in Hanover. Bien co-wrote a Greek language workbook with French and Italian professor John Rassias that was published by the College in 2004.

“I take advantage of everything here,” Bien said. “I’ve been living in Hanover since 1961 and it’s been fantastic. I know many of us love the fact that here you can see the opera for $20 compared to spending $200 in New York or Boston to see the same show.”

The Hanover Senior Center is also a popular resource for retirees, according to Bien, who organizes events for the center.

April 21, 2011

Went to “Be Fit” to receive physiotherapy for my pains in left hip when getting out of bed and, less so, in right arm when raised high. Also trigger finger in the left hand, but this seems to be getting better. The pain hasn’t happened in a long while. I’ve started a series of exercises.

May 3, 2011

New York City

To NYC by Dartmouth Coach, arriving at 11:30 a.m. Yale Club lunch served by Angela, my friend. Then we went to Macy’s at Herald Square, the huge store that was built around 1840, I think. Bought a new Atlantic valise to replace my old red standby whose extendable handle no longer works. And Chrysanthi insisted on buying me a new suit jacket, summer weight (silk & wool) for my birthday (paid for of course on my Macy’s card). We rested, dressed somewhat fancy, and walked to the Union League Club on East 37th, very special—Abraham Lincoln was a member—for a cocktail reception first, all this for the Farm School. Nice to see old friends and to meet new folks connected in some way with the School. I felt worse and worse about skipping the meetings in June because trustees really should not be absentees, but Chrysanthi refuses to go to Greece. Then we all went upstairs to another huge room for dinner (filet mignon) and a talk by the actress Olympia Dukakis, first cousin of the late Arthur Dukakis, a former trustee, and also of Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate. She was lively as she recounted her Greek roots and her admiration for Arthur, but she didn’t reveal any secrets of her professional life in what she called “the entertainment industry.” I talked a bit with Joann Ryding, who says that Tsimiski is filled with failed, empty, stores. We both worried about Albana, who seems at the end of her tether, in an economy with nothing fresh to offer.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

New York City

A long, stimulating day. I took Chrysanthi at 10:30 a.m. to see the Morgan Museum, which had so impressed me the last time I was in the City. This time, after touring the office and library, I went upstairs to see the exhibit of personal journals, wonderfully varied and informative, especially those of Thoreau, Scott, Virginia Woolf (in print, not manuscript), Charlotte Brontë, Hawthorne. Good to be reminded that I’m not the only obsessive journal-keeper. . . . Walking uptown afterwards, we passed leisurely through part of the garment district devoted chiefly, it seems, to beads. Also wholesale dresses, female ornaments, and the like. A hot pastrami sandwich à la NYC and then an immense treat: the musical comedy “Billy Elliot,” enchanting from start to finish, largely owing to the immensely talented eleven-year-old playing Billy and also to an even younger boy (it seemed) playing the mischievous Michael. Music, décor, choreography, stagecraft—everything enchanting. A full three hours of delight. I’m ready to see it again. . . . Back to the Yale Club for a lamb chop supper served by Angela, plus wine and coffee, all free of charge because it’s my birthday month. So $500 for the Farm School filet last night and $0 for the lamb chops tonight. . . . Finally, to Lincoln Center for ballet, as though one hadn’t experienced enough ballet already in “Billy Elliot.” An all-Balanchine program: “Episodes” (Webern), very abstract and modernistic, with the beautiful Ricercata from Bach’s Musical Offering added on. “Tombeau de Couperin” (Ravel), formalistic, with two quadrilles. Finally “Symphony in Three Movements” (Stravinsky), beginning with the spectacular row of ballerinas stretching, angled, across the entire stage. A contrast of whites and blacks, frenzy and serenity.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

New York–Hanover

To MoMA where, luckily, I’m still a member, so we went straight in instead of waiting forever on line with the hordes of people buying admission. Went again to Picasso’s guitars, which Chrysanthi hadn’t seen. Some are lovely artistic paintings, others mere sketches or jokes, it seems. Perhaps most impressive is simply his productivity. Upstairs, on the 6th floor, we were held in suspense by a film showing a red bug trying to get up a steep hill and repeatedly failing. Then another film, remarkably intimate, of a small but intensely powerful tornado, remarkably filmed. We raced through an exhibit of German expressionism because of the need to get back to the Yale Club for our return bus. Too bad, because Chrysanthi’s portrait is of course by a German expressionist we knew in Morningside Heights. A quick trip to Grand Central Market to buy manouri and stilton. Then the five-hour ride back to Hanover, during which I read some of the boring Ph.D. thesis I’m vetting on the novelistic treatment of Asia Minor refugees.

May 7, 2011

Memorial service here today for Sandy Stettenheim, Quaker style. I instructed the non-Quakers at the start about silence.

Sherri Buckman will retire after 19 years. I wrote this poem for her:

A SONNET ON MY EVENING’S SHERRI

My evening’s quaff of flavorful Sherrí,

unfailingly smooth, sweet and ever good,

even with a dollop of Levengood,

Fleming-lad, Cadwallader, and Brophy,

or Armstrong, Edgerton, Woolrich, or Smith,

not to mention our council presidénts

splendidly galore. But now I am miffed:

no more nineteen-year-old daily essénce:

that routine quaff of Harvey’s Bristol Cream,

which aided Sherri’s vigor organizational

to upgrade each day’s chaotic mess

to its identifiable proper nest,

making Kendal’s life operational,

powered by brain and a bit, too, of dream.

May 15, 2011

Played “Après le rêve” with Madith Hamilton, cello, as the prelude for Fred Berthold’s Interfaith Gathering, and the largo from Chopin’s Cello Sonata as the postlude, managing both well enough. Lively lunch afterwards with the Bertholds. I learned the Chopin in one week, which is encouraging.

June 22, 2011

Riparius

Here since June 12. Leander returned after Kinhaven, did lots and lots of mowing but also broke the White by encountering a thick stick hidden by tall grass. It’s being repaired. I’ve been preoccupied for ten days creating the index for the Kazantzakis Letters, covering roughly 40 pages a day. Near the end today. And on page 825 I found the following regarding translation of The Last Temptation into French. Kazantzakis writes to Prevelakis, “Your Greek and also mine is sufficiently craggy for those who do not know demotic. Thus I confess that I would not entrust the Temptation to Mr. L. at a distance”—“at a distance” meaning without help from him. Well, what do you know! Who was there to help me? . . . My Ritsos book arrived from Scott King. Beautiful cover and design. But still a few typos in the Greek, only four this time. Both this and the Kazantzakis Letters are reaching the point of publication. . . . I should mention the five or six sessions of physiotherapy I had in Hanover for my thigh and also my right shoulder, with remarkable improvement especially for the thigh. I’m continuing the exercises here at the farm, more or less.

June 23, 2011

Finished the index to all 851 pages of text.

July 4, 2011

Finished an extensive weeding of the garden, by hand mostly. Ready now to start in the office with my journal. I’m doing 1966 at present. . . . Lots of mowing. And Alec, Monica, and the two children raked the entire east field and pond field and brought the good hay to Art Perryman, whose three horses were most appreciative.

July 5, 2011

Splendid evening at the ballet. “Fearful Symmetries” to John Adams’s minimalist music; dynamic choreography by Peter Martins, total energy without stop. Then “I’m Old Fashioned,” which we’ve seen so many times and this time seemed uninteresting because Fred Astaire is better, really, than these dancers. But “Stars and Stripes,” which we’d never seen, was spectacular, demonstrating Balanchine’s genius once again. . . . Yet they ruined the Hall of Springs dinner by abandoning the buffet. The ordered entrée was enough for four people—disgusting. I complained to the maître d’, who said she agreed.

July 14, 2011

What a pleasure to see both “Apollo” and “Agon” on the same program at SPAC. “Apollo” remains my absolutely favorite, the masterpiece of the 24-year-old Balanchine. “Agon,” with Stravinsky’s 12-tone difficult music, is interesting but not soothing, as “Apollo” is. Also on this program: Balanchine’s sensational pas de deux “Tarantella,” pure fun, and a fine exploration of Ligeti’s piano music by Christopher Wheeldon, premiered in 2001. All this was topped of by (a) a full moon in clear skies, (b) a Stewart’s chocolate milk shake in Lake George on the way home, with Chrysanthi ordering the same for herself and cherishing it, after resisting for 30 years.

July 17, 2011

Daphne, Greg, Andrew, and Peter arrived (Christina is at a volleyball camp). Very nice celebration of our anniversary. Cookout with steak, corn, potatoes, marshmallows, fruit. Andrew grew three inches since last summer and his voice is changing. He asked to drive the tractor; he can now reach the pedals. Daphne is a new member of the board of trustees of the Santa Barbara Middle School, where Christina just graduated and Andrew is about to begin. Greg is chairman of the Santa Barbara High School Foundation, which hopes to raise $5,000,000 this year.

July 20, 2011

Alec now has four “new” tires on his Jeep, actually old truck tires given him by Earl—whitewalls no less—and a uniform set. He also now has a generator that works, so the battery charges. And suddenly the horn works. I treated him to the generator as his birthday present. The gas pedal is now controlled by a bungee cord since its spring disappeared. Perhaps next year he’ll fix the brakes. . . . I just finished 1967 in typing my journal. 1967 was an amazing year. Coup in Greece. A week on Mount Athos. Harbison Award and visit to the White House. Woodbrooke.

July 23, 2011

Finished typing Journal VIII, which brings me to the middle of 1971. This one included the Colonels’ coup in Greece and life at Woodbrooke, ending with our tour of Quakerism’s classic sites.

July 28, 2011

Finished mowing the south field—i.e., everything. Have I ever done it so soon, before the end of July? . . . The pond has algae, the first time. I’ve ordered bacterial treatment, and the children are scooping the pads out with a device I constructed with two badminton rackets wired together and covered with window screen.

August 17, 2011

Tom and Joan Wilson brought us the algaecide I ordered, forbidden in New York State, OK in New Hampshire, so I had it sent to Kendal. Last Sunday we applied it in the pond and today, lo and behold!—the algae are all gone. I also applied something that introduces millions of bacteria that dissolve the sludge, thereby reducing the nutrients needed for algae. So far so good. This double treatment seems to be working beautifully. I also had the water tested and got a good result: it’s fine for recreational use.

August 20, 2011

Wilsons for lunch, on their way home from their week at Lake Pleasant. Tom remembers coming here in 1950. We had lots of blueberries for dessert, and our own tomatoes and lettuce on the sandwiches, plus σπανακόπιτα. In the morning, typing my journal for 1977, I found a long entry describing in detail the time John Rassias and I spent in Birmingham with Christos Alexiou and Paul Morby, making the videotapes for Demotic Greek 1. After the Wilsons left, Leander and I went into the woods to the area where we did the thinning of beech last year, and salvaged a large amount of this beech for firewood. . . . Spaghetti dinner. Then of course to Stewart’s for ice cream. . . . Two days ago we had dinner with Fran Shapiro at “The Glen,” where she now lives. She is 97 years old, perfectly sound in mind, just a little slow on her feet, but able to walk well enough, and with a good appetite. But she misses Irv terribly and shed a few tears when speaking about him. . . . My Ritsos book arrived, looking very beautiful. I asked Scott King if he might be interested in my Harkianakis translations and he told me to send them.

August 24, 2011

A new book by Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs, starts with his recipes for personal dignity. The TLS reviewer (August 19 & 26, p. 29) summarizes as follows: “You should recognize, as a matter of self-respect, that your life is objectively important. And second you should assume the responsibility to make something of it: to pursue a good life by all means but in any case to live well, true to your situation and the values you find appropriate.”

August 25, 2011

John Tallmadge was here for 24 hours, arriving for lunch yesterday and leaving after lunch today. I think we talked—or mostly he talked—pretty steadily during all those hours except at night when we were asleep. He, now approaching retirement age, was very interested in my “philosophy” of retirement and how, in actuality, I had applied that philosophy, or if I had. I told him, of course, that I, so far, have been very lucky insofar as health is concerned. That is always the Number 1 consideration. Also, qua humanist and not scientist, I could pursue my profession after retirement, needing just a computer and time, not a laboratory, grants, etc. He told me that he was impressed, even as an undergraduate, with what he perceived as my ability to stay far away from academic politics and factionalism, and we discussed this at length—the truth of his perception and also to some degree the untruth. But I was not the sole subject of conversation. It was good to hear his own story, and values, and application of those values. He is admirable in, owing to good values, overcoming the disappointment of (a) failing to get tenure at Carleton, (b) being dismissed from his job at Union. His belief, gained from actual experience, is that catastrophe can be turned into opportunity, and that is what happened regarding both of the above catastrophes. He is now acting as a consultant, helping people in academia who are struggling. He showed us his techniques in this regard. They are admirable. (Chrysanthi was very interested in all this.) How nice to see this totally civilized man! . . . And of course he loved Greece. We saw photos galore, especially of Arcadia and Bassae, now enclosed in a tent. Yesterday I showed him our forest thinnings and the lovely hemlock stand. And this morning I took him down to see our super-industrious beavers. More talk along both these paths. A lovely visit. . . . In the afternoon I struggled with the White, servicing it for the winter, but couldn’t unscrew the oil filter.

August 26, 2011

Managed this morning to unscrew the oil filter, after I loosened the cowling sufficiently to expose it better. But in replacing it with a new filter I failed to notice that the rubber ring of the old one hadn’t come out with the filter, and I tightened (I thought) the new one with two rings in place. As a result, when I started the motor, oil shot out. Luckily I didn’t destroy the motor, but it was close. When I finally secured the filter properly and started the motor again, huge billows of smoke were emitted, from the spilt oil that was everywhere. Finally everything became normal again. The White is now “ready for 2012” in the barn, neatly covered.

August 27, 2011

We’re supposed to endure part of a hurricane this evening and tomorrow. A few days ago we felt, very slightly, the earthquake centered in Virginia.

August 28, 2011

Yes, we did have the hurricane, but not the worst of it. Twelve steady hours of driving rain. Then fierce gusts of wind, very scary. And no electricity, of course. We lost five or six trees between the Guest House and the south field. Luckily, no real damage and just popples toppled over, roots and all, and also a balsam with the roots. Lots of cleanup tomorrow. The big ash next to our cabin lost large branches but nothing hit our roof. . . . I was able, despite all this, to finish putting the John Deere away for the winter, doing much better with the jacking and elevating than last year, for instance. Of the machines to fix for winter I have remaining only the Troy-Bilt mower and the Stihl saw. Then I hope to do lots of pruning of blueberries and all the plum trees and the apple tree. . . . My ILEAD course has six registered students. Too bad. I was hoping for zero.

September 4, 2011

I read Peter Mackridge’s informative article about Kay Cicellis, whom unfortunately I never got to know, although I think I met her once at a reception. I appreciated what she once wrote in a letter: “I know how easy it is to distort, unwillingly, the meaning and the flavor of a literary text. I have learnt to fear translators!” Amen.

September 12, 2011

New York City

I lectured for Jeff Murphy and his colleagues again, this time on The Magic Mountain. There were fewer attending than in the past, but most had finished the novel and I had good questions afterwards. Jeff said this was my 9th lecture to his group. Lovely to see familiar faces. Leisurely dinner afterwards with good discussion.

September 13, 2011

New York City

I fulfilled a long ambition by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. The tower was completed in 1875; the bridge opened in, I think, 1883. Remarkable engineering triumph. Afterwards à propos in the Transportation Museum in Grand Central, I understood more about the similar engineering triumph of the first railroad tunnel under the Hudson River, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad. . . . On the bus to NYC I vetted Maria Kurka’s essay on modern Colombian painters: their ambiguity—very philosophical and complex. On the way back, I read and annotated Dennis Carroll’s latest, on the metaphysical deficiencies of contemporary life, relevant for The Magic Mountain.

September 17, 2011

Cambridge

Saw Porgy and Bess done with great gusto at the A.R.T. Gershwin’s music is of course the essence of it, but story and characterization also come through with emotional power.

September 24, 2011

I think of this journal as a commonplace book. Today in the TLS for September 9, p. 23, I was interested to read that Erasmus’s manual “On Copia” (on what is rhetorically pleasing) “instructs the reader in the usefulness of keeping a commonplace book, in which to record useful phrases, good ideas, and striking witticisms, which can be recycled in later writing, as needed.” Of course the review continues, “we all have access to Wikipedia, the cyberspace version of the commonplace book.” Well, I have both: Wikipedia, which I use on almost a daily basis, and my own, which I continue to read and type. I’m now up to the year 1982.

October 7, 2011

A review (in TLS, Sept. 30, 2011, page 5) of “Alfred Kazin’s Journals” by Zachary Leader attracted me for obvious reasons—for example, the fact that Kazin’s full journals add up to 7000 pages. This book publishes about one-sixth of the total. Kazin called his journal “a disorderly pile of shavings.” He saw its task as being “to use our suffering and to use it so well that we can use it up.” My journals are obviously—thankfully—different. . . . I was attracted to the following section on other people’s journals:

The journal-keepers Kazin measures himself against are Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, André Gide, Edmund Wilson, and John Cheever. His own journals constitute an “open, suffering, deeply clamorous personal record.” Wilson’s journals, in contrast, are “simulations of objectivity,” his voice “caged,” “disciplined,” making little distinction between “the degradations inflicted upon the old stone house in Talcottville” and “his daughter Helen flying through the windscreen in a terrible motor accident.” Kazin was a champion of emotional openness, like many writers of his age. Saul Bellow, five days his junior, has the protagonist of his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), complain that “to keep a journal nowadays is considered a kind of self-indulgence, a weakness, and in poor taste.” Dangling Man is written in journal form, by a protagonist openly defiant of current codes: “If you have difficulties, grapple with them silently, goes one of their commandments. To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine.” This was Kazin’s attitude as well, yet he admired the “obdurate elegance” and “persistence” of Wilson’s more impersonal journals.

John Cheever’s journals could not be more different from Wilson’s, but their emotional nakedness and extremity (“God knows what Susan C. [Cheever’s daughter] or Gottlieb [the New Yorker editor] or whoever left out”) elicit a comparable admiration: for the “terrible strength” required of their author, an iron determination that recalls “the Kafka story about the terrible machine, ‘The Penal Colony.’” At his own moments of extremity and self-exposure, Kazin sometimes feels ashamed of journal-writing: “What a disease, what sentimentality, what rhetoric! What excuse for not living! Above all, what self-centeredness!” Mostly, though, he finds writing in journal form, in any form, a joy: “Evening—writing—the bliss of writing. How lucky I am to be able to write, to be able to write this quickly. To be able to tune in whenever and wherever.” In writing, Kazin feels, “you have paid back something of your debt to the Creation, to look at things more sharply, attentively, and above all more lovingly, with the senses and coordinates aroused by the act of writing.”

The construction company in Brant Lake Eric and Eric is re-roofing our small barn, with metal over the shingles I put on in 1982. This is the first time we have hired some outside people to do any of our roofs. Leander and Alec wanted very much to do it next summer, but I thought best to keep them off of roofs despite the expense: $2371.

October 10, 2011

In today’s class, on Ritsos, I read, among many others, his poem “the Last Summer,” written on Samos two years before he died. It of course speaks to me, strangely: “Farewell colors of evening . . . Time to pack our three suitcases: books, papers, shirts . . . Don’t forget the pink dress you looked so nice in, even if you won’t be wearing it this winter. Meanwhile in the few days left I’ll revise the lines I wrote in July and August, though I can’t help thinking that I’ve added nothing, have in fact subtracted far too much, because what glimmers through those lines is a lurking suspicion that this summer, with its cicadas, its trees, its ocean, its boat whistles blowing in glorious sunsets, its caïques bobbing under moonlit balconies, its feigned compassion—will be my last.” —Karlóvasi, September 3, 1988.

October 12, 2011

New York City

Went to MoMA to see the large retrospective on Willem de Kooning. It seems that he spent five decades deliberately producing ugliness, which I suppose is a commentary on the times. Contrariwise, I am re-reading Life in the Tomb, which I will teach (somehow) on Monday. This, although about the ugliness of the first world war, is beautiful in its allegiance to the human imagination. I cannot imagine how I ever had the endurance to translate it.

Saturday, October 15

I’m still in New York. My flight was canceled yesterday; everything else was booked solid. Luckily, the Yale Club (which really feels like home) could take me another night. Yesterday was interesting. I apparently left my Parker pen at NYU. In addition, I lost my penknife at Burlington because I’d forgotten to leave it home; it was confiscated by security at the airport. I’m getting careless and forgetful. Also a bit confused. Yesterday morning when Vasiliki Tsigas joined me for a breakfast meeting, I thought she was Vasiliki Rafti, and at NYU I couldn’t figure out who Eva Constantellou was until I saw her name tag. But everything else was OK. Our breakfast meeting with the ACTFL people was pleasant and productive. It seems that I should go to Denver for the next meeting. Then at NYU I saw lots of old friends (recognizing most, I’m glad to say). Andonis Decavalles’s widow was there, and gave me a lovely photo taken in 1973 at the MGSA symposium at Columbia showing Andonis, Chrysanthi, Christos Alexiou, and me (looking very young at age 43). Mike Keeley was there, looking old and tired. Mary has lost her near-term memory and is undergoing chemotherapy. They’re still in the house despite everything. But they did go to Greece for three months. Heard Dia give a good paper on her Census, with Wim in the audience. We pledged to visit again in Cambridge when we go to the A.R.T. Nice to see Elsa Amanatidou from Brown, and Martin McKinsey, now at UNH, and Vangelis Calotychos, and Karen Emmerich, currently in Cyprus, and Dimitri Gondicas, and Πετράκι, the son, now 16 years old, of Stathis Gourgouris and Neni Panourgia (Eva’s “baby” is about to get married), and George Syrimis, and Gonda von Steen, and Victor Papacosma, now retired in Maine, and Katherine Fleming, now vice-chancellor at NYU, and Vasilis Lambropoulos’s wife, etc. In Dia’s session on bibliography and libraries, the Yale librarian spoke at length of all the services rendered by Evro Layton—good to remember her in this way. The Modern Greek specialist at the Library of Congress, Harold Leich, turned out to be a Dartmouth graduate. He told me that he studied Modern Greek with Michael Choukas. Obviously that affected his life. The session I chaired, “New Readings on Seferis,” had just two speakers since three had canceled. But this was much better since we could therefore have leisurely discussion after each of the papers, both of which dealt with Seferis’s treatment of Homer. Thanks to my ILEAD course, I was able to point out the quote from Karyotakis in Μυθιστόρημα, which the speaker had overlooked. We had a good discussion of Greek writers’ use of the ancients and its pros and cons. Also saw Peter Allen and Tom Gallant.

October 22, 2011

Ruth Lappin, chair of the Kendal Finance Committee, asked me to come with details of how we handled, or failed to handle, problems with the building’s defects when I was chair of the board. I looked over whatever documentation I still had in my files, a lot, and came up with considerable information and memories. Right now I can hardly imagine how involved I was in those years when, somehow, I was also still teaching.

October 23, 2011

Riparius

Finally made it to the farm, traveling on Route 4, now restored after the August 28 hurricane, but showing evidence still of vast damage on both sides of the road. The new metal roof on the barn, done by Eric & Eric, contractors, looks lovely. Strangely, they left a large tarpulin, a ladder, lots of boards, and some roofing paper. Also, I found the cable for the lightning rod detached from the grounding rod because now too short. A mystery, until reliable Earl appeared and pointed out that they had to wrap the cable around a bit, owing to the metal roof, forcing them to detach it from the clamp securing it to the grounding rod. I’ll try to repair this with additional aluminum cable. Earl also told how one of the workmen, whom he knows, said that placing metal roofing over shingles was simply bad technique, so they removed the shingles even though we had secured a reduced price from Eric & Eric by asking them to leave the old shingles under the new metal. So, we seem to have received a sort of bargain. Lovely supper in Sweet Tomatoes, Rutland, on the way home.

October 24, 2011

My six-week ILEAD course ended today with a class on Zorba. I did two weeks on Cavafy, one on Seferis, Elytis, Sikelianos, Karyotakis, one on Ritsos, one on Life in the Tomb, and the last one on Zorba. Some of the students seemed very involved and responsive. Among them was Evelyn Spiegel, a Greek-American, Frederica Graham, who grew up in Greece while her father was serving there under the Marshall Plan, and Everett Marder, so I had some who could read the Greek out loud (sort of). At least all, except one, stayed through all six weeks. . . . I’m very angry at Charlotte Armstrong, who abolished my Farm School committee without consulting me. She wrote me that the committee’s reports where “written by the Administration” (!) instead of representing the trustees’ independent appraisal of school affairs. Some truth in that yes, but not entirely. We’ll see what happens in New York on November 11, when the new Education Committee replacing mine and the Post-Secondary meets.

October 30, 2011

A lovely Sunday, fine Quaker Meeting, with only Peter Stettenheim ministering. Lunch at EBAs with Jack and Ruth Hunter and Sydney Jarvis. Then the Metropolitan Opera’s high definition broadcast of a marvelous Don Giovanni. Interesting supper with Kendal friends. Then practiced Barsantis, which I’ll be playing with Joan Wilson and Madith Hamilton at the early music concert on November 6, plus the #2 Goldberg variation, which I’ll be playing by myself. . . . Typing the journal is progressing. I’m in volume 12, approaching the end of 1985, on typed page 955.

November 1, 2011

To Riparius again, because I felt compelled to fix the disconnected lightning rod cable, having secured the necessary materials thanks to the internet. I did this without difficulty. Then I also managed to replace the defective special socket despite the rigors of dealing with #12 wire. Chrysanthi and I shared a pizza in Rutland on the way back. Saw Earl before we left. His camera photographed a splendid buck that he’ll be waiting to shoot tonight. Venison for the winter plus spectacular horns! . . . Gifted $100,000, $25,000 each, to Theo, Elena, Sophia, and Nicholas.

November 9, 2011

Played Bach with Dick on flute and Pat Porter accurately sight-reading the voice parts. Lovely. Next week we’ll have Allan Munck again on cello, back from Florida, and perhaps Phil Porter singing bass voice parts.

November 10, 2011

New York City

Went to the new Islamic show at th Met. Huge, diverse collection. For me (and most people, probably), the most spectacular artifacts were the carpets, plentiful and beautifully displayed. One about thirty feet long, others almost as long. Since I’ve seen girls in Ouranoupolis making rugs laboriously knot by knot, I can imagine the labor that these Islamic rugs represent. Otherwise the art doesn’t “send” me, probably because there are so few depictions of human beings, or even of animals. What seems to dominate is caligraphy, design, geometric exactitude. . . . Traveling here, I began to read David Bellos’s Is That a Fist in Your Ear, about translation. Some of it will be useful for my talk on translation to the Professors’ Colloquium. I also found, by total surprise, probably an accurate translation of a phrase in Tasos Apostolidis’s report on the Farm School’s Resident Trustees. He stresses ερευνητικές εργασίες. The best I could come up with was “academic skills.” In Bellos I found “empirical investigation,” which seems to be what the cryptic Greek actually says. Dimitri Gondicas told me later that it probably means “research projects.” . . . Cocktail party for Farm School trustees. Nice to see Tommy Thomas and especially Sheila Baird, the hostess at her splendid residence on East 37th Street. I asked Joann about Albana. Her hope now is to get aid doing another degree this time in the U.S. As Joann said with some severity, “What she really should do is get married, even if it’s not meant to last.” Mariage de convenance! . . . I raced to the City Center to see the American Ballet Theatre, and what a pleasure that was, except for the first number, “Duets,” with percussive music by John Cage realized it seemed by jack hammer and sticks. But the rest was exquisite: a trio on stage playing the andante from Schubert’s Trio no. 1, three dancers languidly interpreting the gorgeous music. Sheer beauty of both sight and sound. Title: “The Garden of Villandry.” Next came a humorous Twyla Tharp “Known by Heart (Junk) Duet,” followed by “Private Light,” the best part of which was the exceptional guitar playing of popular music. Lastly, “Company B,” choreographed by Paul Taylor, set to renditions of popular songs by the Andrews Sisters, the words being very important. Great fun, with lovely dancing. A long evening, yet I was sorry when it ended.

November 11, 2011

New York City

I walked to MoMA to see the Rivera fresco show, luckily with my member’s pass at 9:30, avoiding the crowds that came later. Of especial interest was Rivera’s troubles with Rockefeller Center, which asked him to remove the depiction of Lenin and, when he refused, removed and destroyed his entire fresco. I compare this, of course, with our Orozco murals at Dartmouth, equally communist, yet kept, never destroyed or even “fixed.” I was also extremely interested in the fact that Rivera, like Kazantzakis, was invited to Moscow for the 1927 tenth anniversary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution, although he was a VIP, standing very near Stalin on the reviewing stand. A few years later, however, he was expelled from the Mexican Party because of his support of Trotsky over Stalin. The frescos displayed are of course splendid. . . . Education Committee at 3:30. I emphasized the need for the board to vote tomorrow to establish an elementary school (grades 1 to 6). I compared this visionary plan to the decision to build the Empire State Building a few months after the 1929 crash and quoted Bruce Lansdale regarding “vision” from my 1987 diary. . . . Dimitri and I sat for an hour over tea afterwards, talking mostly about what he hopes will be the “Peter Bien Archive” at Princeton. Besides the Kazantzakis letters, 3 × 5 cards (which apparently won’t be accepted unless they’re digitalized), notebooks, etc., he wants all books sent me as presentation copies, all letters from Ritsos, Harkianakis, etc., all texts—e.g., Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός with my penciled notes as I was translating. He’ll also see which of the books I collected might be needed by Princeton. He suggests that I drive there on a Sunday, stay over, attend the Monday lunch he always holds, remain for someone’s presentation on Tuesday, and depart on Wednesday. He’ll suggest dates. . . . Then to Περγάλι restaurant on West 20th Street for the usual very expensive supper with trustees. I enjoyed meeting the new trustee, Sophia, and her husband, who played tennis at Harvard, but just after Greg Tebbe. He remembered my coach, Jack Barnaby. Also another new trustee, Morgan, whose father was close to the Lansdales.

November 12, 2011

Full board. There was considerable discussion about the proposed elementary school, worry about raising the venture capital needed to fix the building, worry that in the present crisis not many parents would have enough money for private schooling. Pantelis spoke beautifully, saying that in Greece parents will work fifteen-hour days and go without food in order to educate their children in the best possible way. Tsakalis also spoke beautifully about the formation of character in the proposed school. And it passed. Phew!

November 23, 2011

Washington

Arrived at Leander’s yesterday evening and watched the Republican debate on TV. Depressing. Sophia is doing much better in school, happily. Today I went to Washington, first to the Corcoran Gallery. I was intrigued by a sculpture by Mary Early, made of narrow pieces of wood glued together and coated with beeswax. I thought that I could do something like this at the farm. Found an image of it on the internet. Then to District Chop House for a long lunch with Dennis Carroll, whose parody of the Gospel of Matthew I read on the train yesterday. Much too long; no playing with the King James language. Repetitious; onesided (anti-Christian). A shame, because the general idea is a good one. Today he seemed to agree with my criticisms and suggestions, and plans to rewrite.

November 24, 2011, Thanksgiving

Practiced Schubert’s Trout and Goldberg no. 25. Nice walk around the lake. Turkey and trimmings. Skype with Alec, Monica, and the children. Alec and the Patana school have not been flooded, thankfully. The Buddhist center I visited is under two feet of water, Alec said; so is the university where we stopped for lunch. . . . Watched an amazing Woody Allen film after our feast and then, by accident, an hour-long Thanksgiving special on Lady Gaga, whom I assumed would be provocative and in bad taste but turned out to be just the opposite. Truly good voice, natural musician, excellent pianist, sensitive, helpful in the community, with warm memories of the Catholic girls’ school she attended on 68th Street in Manhattan, and of her grandfather, etc. She can do all styles: jazz, pop, folk, country. Now she has established a foundation to help children and to set up her father as owner of a restaurant, his lifelong dream. She’s an Italian-Amerian New Yorker. One of only twenty accepted to NYU Theater School at age seventeen. She is now twenty-five and a superstar.

December 2, 2011

Washington

Arrived yesterday and had a leisurely supper with Leander in an Indian restaurant. Today, I drove in to the Kennedy Center with Deanna and watched the National Symphony’s rehearsal from 10:00 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. with Eschenbach conducting. What a pleasure this was! Shostakovich’s first symphony, written when he was 19 years old, shows off the orchestra in spectacular fashion and is beautiful. Then the violinist Midori played Britten’s violin concerto, which of course showed off her as a brilliant soloist. Fun to see everyone including Midori in normal street clothes, looking very ordinary. Had a long talk afterwards with “Bill,” the head usher, who had kept my valise safely during the rehearsal. He is a former teacher who now works at the Kennedy Center three days a week and thus hears all the concerts. . . . Metro to Dupont Circle. Then to the Embassy Circle Guest House on R Street, just in back of the Greek Embassy. Very nice, small, simple B&B. Then went to the nearby Phillips Collection to see their special show on Degas’s ballet paintings and sculptures, which left me pretty much unimpressed. But it’s always nice to see the marvelous Renoir and also many good Cézannes. . . . To the Greek Embassy at 6:00 p.m. People approached saying, “Do you remember me?” I didn’t. But no matter; we talked about Georgetown, etc. Zoë Koumadou, my host, had lost the handouts I mailed to her. Luckily I had copies, so she had them reproduced just in time. I think that my lecture on Odysseas Elytis, who refused to become pessimistic, went well. One of its virtues was length, only 40 minutes. Afterwards two other people read some of Elytis’s poetry in Greek and English, and a twenty-minute pretentious video illustrated a few of his sayings with boring images. The best part was the question period. I was asked where I learned my Greek and I answered (of course) “in bed.” Talking to people on the line for μεζεδάκια, two amazing things happened: (1) A man told me that as a child he had known Δημήτριος Γιαννακός στη Νιγρίτα, (2) a woman, sent here by the Ministry to teach at Georgetown, turns out to have run a small business precisely in Κολοκοτρώνη 11. We were both amazed at the coincidence. I told her about our apartment and about ο Κύριος Μάνεσης upstairs who threw boiling water down on noise-makers during siesta time. . . . Zoë took me out for dinner afterwards and we found much to talk about. For example, two people she knows (they were at the lecture) specialize in Hippocrates and know Λυπουρλής. In Cos, Hippocrates’s herb garden has been re-created. I thought of this for the Farm School and hope to learn more. She wants me to be on the advisory committee for a project she’s fostering to spread awareness of Greek literary culture. And so forth . . .

December 4, 2011

Kazantzakis in a 1957 interview: Όταν δουλεύει κανείς πνευματικά δεν αρρωσταίνει, δεν γερνάει —αυτό είναι το μυστικό: να μην παρατήσει κανείς τη δουλειά του, γιατί τότε αλίμονο. (Ταχυδρόμος, 2 Μαρτίου 1957.)

December 16, 2011

Long two-hour lunch with Ulli Rainer, Steve Scher’s widow. Good to reminisce about Steve after so many years.

December 21, 2011

Finally received my “implant” tooth, solid gold. But it’s a molar, way in the back, so cannot be seen or showed off. The process has taken a year and a half.

December 22, 2011

The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis arrived today, a very fat book, the result of twenty years of work (off and on). How nice that it’s DONE!

December 24, 2011

South Salem, New York

At Daphne’s for Christmas. I asked Christina what she’s doing in her English class. “We read books,” she answered. “Which books?” She couldn’t remember a single one. “Macbeth,” Daphne called across the room. “Oh, yes, Macbeth.” Sad.

2012

Hanover

January 1–June 2

Jan. 13–14, Lake George, Queensbury Hotel, 518 792-1121

Jan. 27–29, New York City, Yale Club

March 8–10, Wilmington, Delaware, Hotel Du Pont, 302 594-3100, 800 441-9019

April 19, Riparius

May 8, Concord, New Hampshire

May 11, Riparius

May 12, Cambridge

May 27–30, Riparius

Terpni

June 3–September 7

June 18–26, Greece, Thessaloniki & Komotini

July 13, Hanover

July 15, Weston, Vermont, Kinhaven

August 30, New York City, to lecture

Hanover

September 8–December 31

Sept. 19–20, New York City, ballet with Constance Tagopoulos

Sept. 22, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Oct. 7, Riparius

Oct. 12–18, Greece: Athens & Iraklio

Oct. 24–27, New York City, Farm School trustees

Nov. 15–16, Philadelphia, Marriott Downtown Hotel, 1201 Market St.

Nov. 17–22, Potomac, Maryland, Leander’s, & Washington

January 5, 2012

Mendelssohn’s two string trios and cello sonata at the Hop, played expertly. Yet I found the trios strangely “empty.” They seemed exercises in fancy technique (especially when played as fast as they were by this group) without much musical interest. As someone else said perceptively afterwards (Ruth Lappin), the pieces were “busy.” Only the scherzos were better, because they had some fun in them.

January 12, 2012

Hooray! Scott King is going to publish my translations of Harkianakis’s Παίδων και εφήβων. And the Kazantzakis Letters are published very handsomely by Princeton.

January 14, 2012

Lake George

Drove last night in bad weather, wind and snow, to the Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls, old but rather nice. Today, beautiful weather, spent at a Cornell Cooperative Extension program for forest owners. Lovely to see Ed and Donna there. Donna rushed over and hugged. Also Steve Warne and Bob Manning and the coordinator of Protect. Good presentations especially on taxation (480A), keeping the property in the family, conservation easements. Of course everything, especially the easements, are complicated, but certainly possible. 480A doesn’t seem right for us. I took lots of notes that I’ll hope to share with the boys. . . . This was held in the Great Escape Lodge, filled with very good Adirondack-type furniture, and a large water-playground filled with children and adults. . . . Last night we had supper in the Montcalm, the first time in probably twenty years. They still have “fisherman’s bisque.”

January 21, 2012

From TLS review of Frederic Raphael’s talk on Josephus (TLS, Dec. 23 & 30, 2011, p. 19): “Josephus was the first Jew to offer an overview of the world’s history and evolution which was not Judaeocentric. In his wake, Yahweh would be deconstructed through the centuries, by a series of Jewish intellectuals, some religious, many not. A suite of competitive analyses generated schemes of redemption, in this world if not in the next. Visions of universal truth, culminating in Marxism, divinized History itself, which became a godless theodicy in which logic or ‘the dialectic’ held inexorable, impersonal sway. Dialectical materialism was only one of the ways of depersonalizing the God that had failed, and finding a governing principle less capricious, and more morally consequential, than Tyche. The desire for an overarching logic that applies to everything is often said to be the legacy of Greek ‘science’; But the appetite for universal rules, and the belief that they can be divined by human intelligence is an aspect of Judaism that Josephus and his epigoni never abandoned.” . . . À propos of this sort of discussion, I began today—on the Dartmouth Coach bus to Boston in a snowstorm, to see As You Like It at the A.R.T.—to read a book summarizing the evolution of Don Cupitt’s philosophy, which of course interests me exceedingly. . . . Scott King, who did my Ritsos book, has agreed to publish my translations of Stylianos’s Παίδων και εφήβων bilingually. And I received the entire Greek text via internet form Kastaniotis, so we won’t have to type the Greek and will avoid the terrible mess that arose from Scott’s typing of Ritsos’s Greek.

January 27, 2012

New York City

Came down this morning on Dartmouth Coach. Nice to be welcomed by name by various people at the Yale Club. Took my tan shoes to be repaired at the store in the Club building and was told that the shoemaker in West Lebanon did slipshod work, gluing new soles instead of stitching them. So now the repair was done expertly. . . . Then to Lincoln Center to see a rehearsal of Christopher Wheeldon’s new ballet “DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse.” Nice to see a young vivacious woman, Clotilde Otranto, conducting. The music, by Michael Nyman, was minimalist but not as annoying as Philip Glass’s. The dancing—i.e., the choreography—was different, original, appropriate for the score. The dancers, as always, were splendid: Ashley Bouder, Maria Kowroski, Tyler Peck. They were in full costume. The stops were mainly for the music, not the dance, although at the end Wheeldon guided various couples in the execution he desired. . . . Yesterday a virus in my MacBook destroyed everything I’d done all afternoon, on the translation lecture I’m preparing for the Professors’ Colloquium in March. I have a backup in the office, which should be all right. . . . At 6:45 p.m. in the Rose Building on West 65th we attended a “Dancer Chat.” The dancer was Faye Arthurs, a perfect Balanchine type, leggy (her own description of herself), probably weighing 100 pounds at most, small-breasted, charming. She spoke intelligently about her career, and answered questions. I asked how ballets are learned. She said that older dancers teach but mostly now the new dancers study videos. The School has a huge collection of videos of the repertoire. Sometimes, however, an older choreography is lost. An example this season is the “revival” of “Seven Deadly Sins”; it isn’t a revival at all because Balanchine’s work is now lost and the ballet has been re-choreographed by someone else. She said that most of the company know about 75 ballets. As soon as they hear the music, they’re ready to go. Amazing! We then went to the evening performance. “Ocean’s Kingdom” with music by Paul McCartney (the famous Beatle) and choreography by Peter Martins, added up to nothing. Martins, alas, is always boring and unimaginative despite lots of razzmatazz. And the music, pleasant, again added up to nothing that one could want to hear again. A flop. But then we heard Ravel. What a difference! First “Tombeau de Couperin,” by Balanchine: sedate, pure, serene. Then Jerome Robbins’s “In G Major” (the Ravel piano concerto), with an exquisite pas de deux by Sterling Hyltin and Adrian Danchig-Waring. The whole ballet delicious.

January 28, 2012

New York City

Another very busy, stimulating day. First to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit on West 44th, beautifully done. There is so much about Old Testament times that is known by scholars but not by laymen like myself. Much of it was well displayed in this show. The whole story of the accidental discovery of the Scrolls, their cleaning and preservation and interpretation, was well told in a movie narrated by some of the principal experts involved. Fragments of the Scrolls were displayed, each with explanatory materials. This source of Scripture and, more generally, Israeli actuality, was made very clear via artifacts and placards and an audio guide. There was much made of the Ten Commandments. Do we follow them? “Thou shalt not murder!” Hardly. . . . Stopped in Barnes and Noble café for a coffee. Nice to see an African-American man reading a story to his wide-eyed son. Then to one of the best ballet programs. A marvelous “Firebird” to begin. The music is so moving in all senses, that of motion and of emotion. Then the Bizet/Balanchine “Steadfast Tin Soldier,” which of course we’ve seen (as we have the “Firebird”) frequently but it was totally fresh again, and beautifully danced by Megan Fairchild and Daniel Ulbricht. Then the Tchaikovsky “Pas de deux” that shows off the two dancers, especially the male this time: Gonzalo Garcia. Finally the Gershwin/Balanchine “Who Cares?” a festival of color and motion. Some paragraphs in the program notes may be appropriate for our Kendal all-Gershwin Webster recital in May. . . . Back to the Yale Club for a delicious lamb chop supper. Then walked to City Center’s Pearl Theater on West 55th to see G. B. Shaw’s The Philanderer in the intimacy of this small theater with the audience on three sides of the stage. Well acted, funny, and equally “socially relevant.” Interesting to see that the women’s movement was alive in 1893, thanks very much to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The play’s hero is an Ibsenite refusing to follow the usual norms of masculine behavior and hoping that his many female friends will be equally unwomanly. The scenery is dominated by a portrait of Ibsen. But at one point a character scoffs “Pshaw,” pointing at it and giving away GBS’s Ibsenite proclivities. Lots of fun. Intimate, stimulating theater. We walked back to the Yale Club in lovely New York weather. . . . Between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ballet I forgot to note that we spent an hour or so at MoMA, showing Chrysanthi the Mexican mural exhibit, visiting the Leon and Debra Black room to see if he donated any of the paintings in it (he did not), and enjoying the Picassos especially.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

NYC–Hanover

Chrysanthi suggested we spend the morning in the Metropolitan Museum. We arrived at opening, 9:30 a.m. No crowds. Went first to the refurbished American wing. I was especially interested in the Hudson River School, paintings of Adirondack subjects, also by Winslow Homer. Lovely silver, furniture, as well. Then to our old-time favorites: Rembrandts, Vermeers, El Grecos, and the Impressionists.

February 10, 2012

A lovely visit from Daniyal Mueenuddin and his Norwegian wife Cecilia. Yesterday he read selections to Dartmouth students who filled Sanborn library, after an hour of questions and answers in the Wren Room. All this was shared with a young poet named Yang. Daniyal was very relaxed and impressive. Then we all had dinner at the Canoe Club in Hanover. One of my former students is now teaching creative writing here; he remembered my course on Conrad, Joyce, and Beckett. Today we had a leisurely breakfast together with Kendal’s famous sweet roles, then a tour of Kendal. Nice to meet Jim Armstrong in Whittier, where he’d been reading to the Alzheimer patients. At supper, with Pakistani delicacies supplied by Rehan, I took Cecilia over to meet Agnar. They started speaking Norwegian to each other, and Ag actually spoke more than I’ve ever heard him do—he’s so limited by Parkinson’s—but apparently not so limited when conversing with an enticing young Norwegian beauty like Cecilia. Daniyal spoke well to a full house afterwards about his own ancestry, father, mother, taking over the father’s farm, fighting corruption, discovering so much to write about, such as seven generations of his family—in prose, whereas he’d been a very mediocre poet previously. He also read a short section of the autobiographical piece that will be in The New Yorker in April, and then answered questions about his work and also about the situation in Pakistan. An obvious success. We said sad goodbyes, since they’ll be leaving at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow to go to Killington to ski, and we expressed hopes that they’ll return. Yes, said Daniyal, on my next book tour. Let’s hope. I felt so friendly and at ease with them both.

February 13, 2012

Saw Götterdämmerung for the first time in the Met’s HD transmission at Hopkins Center. The music is wonderful but, as Mark Twain famously said, “Wagner would be better without the singing,” by which he meant, I venture, that the plot and characters are repulsive. When I saw Das Reingold last October my major conclusion was that Wagner was a proto-Nazi.

February 25, 2012

Lunch with Carrie Rosenblum, the Dartmouth grad whom I sent to the Farm School as an intern in 2010–11 and who did so very well in that role that she has now been hired to lead Greek Summer 2012. I wonder if Christina will go. Carrie told me, alas, that the teaching of English at the Farm School is very poor, the students are bored and uninterested. This was not a surprise, sadly. But she had very good experiences on the sports field and also when invited to students’ homes. . . . Quite a day today. On the way to meet Carrie I heard the Dartmouth Symphony rehearsing Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto with a student pianist, a remarkable virtuoso, then rehearsing Milhaud’s 4th symphony, which struck me as precociously modern and interesting; thus on the spot I bought tickets for tonight. We already have tickets for the matinee of Dartmouth Players in Hair Spray, a Broadway musical, all song and dance done vivaciously. Went with Mel and Evelyn Spiegel and then continued with them to have roast beef dinner at the new “boutique” hotel in Hanover—very good indeed. So: lunch out, theater, dinner out, symphony, all in one day. And tomorrow we have the Met HD’s production of Verdi’s opera Ernani. I also finished my revision of the translations of Harkianakis’s Παίδων και εβήβων and vetted the computerized book with facing Greek and English pages.

March 8, 2012

Wilmington, Hotel du Pont

I’m here for a few days to work again with Vasiliki Tsigas-Fotinis and her team on getting Modern Greek language teaching accepted by ACTFL. Others who came were Nancy Biska, journalist, who acts as paymaster, Ari Michopoulos from Hellenic College, Eva Prionas from Stanford. We were the guests of Elpida Bairaktaris, who heads up MG teaching at the Odyssey Charter School here in Wilmington. How nice to be back in the magnificent Hotel du Pont! I telephoned Chrysanthi after checking in to my room, a beautifully furnished suite, and confessed, “I wouldn’t mind living here.” The group met for supper in the palatial dining room, where we sat for three hours at least. Then I detoured to the Hotel du Pont Theater, huge and jammed, to see most of the performance there of La Cage aux Folles, a Broadway musical in which most of the female parts are played by men and the subject is how normal homosexuality can be. A little like a Greek επιθεώρηση, disjointed, stressing song, dance, and a bit of sex. First half very mediocre, second half better. At first I thought the corps de ballet were women; they weren’t.

March 9, 2012

We spent the day at the Odyssey Charter School, a truly remarkable place. Founded, and still managed, by Greeks, it features immersion in Modern Greek language and culture for all students, from kindergarten through 8th grade. Only about 5% of the students are “heritage”—i.e., Greek-Americans. We met the corps of teachers of MG. They do math classes in Greek as well as language classes. They’re sent here by the Greek Ministry of Education, paid by the Ministry, given airfare by the Ministry, and pension accumulation. They stay three years and can be renewed for two more. Then . . .?! No jobs at home, most likely. Guided by the ACTFL Standards, they developed very fine agendas for teaching at various levels. Our job all day long was to revise our own list of standards, especially now that ACTFL has changed all the rubrics. In this we were guided once again, as previously in Madison, by June Phillips, who was in charge of developing the standards for ACTFL in the first place. At 6:30 the school’s founder took us out to a restaurant for supper, together with some of the administrators, all very dedicated people who kept stressing that the school’s social goal is to create a true community of caring individuals.

March 10, 2012

More revision of our standards, working now in the hotel. Travel by taxi to Philadelphia International Airport together with June Phillips. We’ll meet again in Philadelphia in November at the ACTFL convention, when we expect that our efforts will be rewarded with acceptance. . . . On e-mail yesterday was a letter from Niki Stavrou complaining that Dimitri Gounelas was part of the move to discredit her father. Thus she hesitates to approve his editorship of the Selected Letters, with publication by Aristotle University. She wondered if I’d be willing to mediate. If I convinced him to allow Niki to publish the book, perhaps she’d agree to authorize his editorship. I replied that I have training in mediation and will be happy to try. Μπελάς!

March 23, 2012

Phil Porter lent me his three-disk recording of the St. Matthew Passion plus his full score, and I listed to it last night, enraptured, especially with the choruses, more specifically the double choruses, usually in exquisite counterpoint. The genius of Bach is incomprehensible. But so is that of Beethoven, as made more evident in a documentary we saw a few nights ago: how he pulled away from Mozart and Haydn at first slowly and then precipitously. . . . When I talked about translating at the Professors’ Colloquium a few weeks ago I mentioned the English word “sough” meaning the sound of wind passing through trees. I pronounced it “suf.” Phil Porter said he’d heard it as “sow” rhyming with “cow.” Later I found that one dictionary gave suf as preferred, sow as secondary, while another dictionary gave the reverse. Today I composed the following poem for Phil:

THE BALLAD OF BUFFWUFF

(for Phil Porter)

One source wants sough like stuff,

another insists it sound like sow. [the female pig]

If only I knew just precisely how

I ought to say it when I tug my pluff,

—or should I call this pluff somehow plough?

My despond is in a most-gruff sluff.

(Yet must not every sluff be shouted slough?)

Ο Phil, teach me, without rebuff, to disallow

every skulking –ow; help me to off-slough

each buffwuff that indubitably is a bowwow.

March 31, 2012

Supper with Robert and Penny Binswanger. He wanted to tell us that he has cancer of a rare kind: breast cancer. He has already had an operation to remove the tumor and is now awaiting the pathology report of adjoining areas to see if it spread. A difficult time.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

A splendid day in Boston with Pat and Phil Porter. Left Kendal at 7:30 a.m., listened to Ignat’s marvelous playing of the Goldberg Variations on the drive. Arrived at the Fine Arts Museum precisely at 10:00 a.m. when it opens. It is huge now; I haven’t been for several decades. We took quick looks at impressionists (not much) and Greek and Roman (lots), two El Grecos, then joined the 11:00 a.m. tour of the new American wing, all four floors of it, with an excellent young guide. Concentrated on Paul Revere, Copley, colonial furniture, Jackson Pollack, Bostonians’ need to appear European. Just a smidgen, but all very interesting. Then a quick lunch in the cafeteria, and walked to Symphony Hall, a bit early, so Chrysanthi and I went across the street to the huge Mother Church of the Christian Scientists. Empty, but there were receptionists present to help orient visitors. I remarked that the architecture resembled that of Greek Orthodox churches and she said that the inspiration was Byzantine, especially St. Sophia in Istanbul. But unlike Orthodox churches, this one is without ornament; it’s plain, almost Quakerly, except of course for the huge, very visible organ pipes. The organist is the son of Paul Ashley, one of our Kendal neighbors. . . . Back to Symphony Hall for the 2:00 p.m. introductory lecture on the St. Matthew Passion. We learned that Bach was the 3rd choice for the coveted position in Leipzig. No. 1 was Telemann, who refused, using the honor to have his salary increased where he already was. No. 2 also refused. The church documents state that they were reduced to employing “mediocrity”—namely, no. 3, J. S. Bach! The performance, from 3:00 to 6:00, was grand: a perfectly trained double chorus supplemented by two student choruses plus excellent soloists. The audience—full house—was rapt as was I, as I followed everything thanks to a piano score with English translation. Then we all had a simple supper and drove home listening to more Bach, Dinnerstein’s latest CD.

April 4, 2012

Finished typing volume 20 of my journal, which brings me to the middle of 1994.

April 7, 2012

Lovely reunion with Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who came with his son Dmitri, now aged 10. Very pleasant, ebullient. Lots of fond memories. Asked about Leander, Alec, Daphne. We about his mother, who lives in Moscow and is concerned with the ongoing reputation of Alexander, who completed his massive history of the Russian Revolution in seven volumes. The family now lives in Cavendish, with Ignat keeping an apartment in New York and traveling frequently to Russia. He played Schubert and Prokofiev masterfully—miraculously—to a very appreciative audience. I introduced him by saying that his career is given fully in the program but I should add that he is a very good teacher and a wonderful conductor of master classes with a gift for diagnosis of precisely what’s needed in a student’s playing to effect improvement. Then:

“I’d like to say a brief word about Schubert, if I may. We’ve had the pleasure of hearing Schubert songs this season; tonight we’ll hear the first of his two piano sonatas in A minor. And two weeks from tonight we’ll hear Sally Pinkas playing the sonata in D major. With luck, perhaps I can convince our Classicopia duo pianists to do the extraordinary Fantasia in F-minor sometime next year, perhaps in memory of Beveridge Webster, who played it so often with his wife Franny.

“I always think of Schubert in this Kendal context, where middle age begins at 70, because poor Schubert died at age 31, from syphilis, which in those days was a death sentence. He contracted it in 1823 and survived for six years, dying in November 1828. In March 1824, aged 27, he was in despair, writing in a letter, “I find myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, . . . whose most brilliant hopes have perished . . .” What is amazing, however, is the productivity of those remaining six years. The sonata you’ll hear in a moment is from 1823, the one Sally will play on April 21 is from 1825. And in his final year there are three more—marvelous ones—the last written the month before he died.

“So, in hearing Ignat Solzhenitsyn play the sonata in A minor, let us appreciate the extraordinary creativity of a man severely ill who died at 31 years of age. As the epitaph on his grave states: ‘The art of music has entombed here a rich treasure but even fairer hopes’”

April 10, 2012

Pleasant dinner for the tenth anniversary of the Lewin grants. Nice to see Andy and his second son, who’s now at Dartmouth. Sat next to one of the War/Peace Fellows. I hope to influence him to ask to visit the Center for Defense Information in 2013. . . . Then to the Hop for the Takács Quartet, which did the amazing Beethoven opus 131, which is so extraordinarily contrapuntal.

April 11, 2012

Met with Ji Hyae Lee ’13, the student who has been so dedicated to reinstituting mediation at Dartmouth and has finally succeeded. Training begins this Sunday, with thirty students. She was very appreciative of my assistance, presenting me with a bouquet of beautiful flowers plus a huge kiss. I’ll visit the session this Sunday. . . . And in the mail today came the very welcome announcement that Chrysanthi has won the 2012 Joseph D. Vaughan Award presented annually by the New Hampshire State Committee on Aging and EngAGING to an individual in each county who has shown outstanding leadership or achievement as a volunteer on behalf of older citizens in New Hampshire. She’ll be honored at a special ceremony in Concord on May 8th. All this happened owing to Kesaya Noda’s nomination, aided by information supplied by me, and various interviews—e.g. with Willi Black, Shirley Montgomery, Evelyn Spiegel, Gail in the Senior Center. How nice!

April 15, 2012

Pleasant, busy weekend. Greek Easter. Friday to Newport church with Chrysanthi and Frederica Graham, student in my ILEAD class on Greek poetry and a fellow Quaker. We sang all traditional hymns: Η ζωή εν τάφω, Άξιον εστί. Beautiful, moving service expressing the sadness of Christ’s suffering. Saturday listened enraptured to the Met Opera’s HD film of La Traviata, so emotional, mostly owing to the music, quite aside from the pathos of the plot. Today, Sunday, a gathered Meeting with my committee, Adult Education, preceding and Fred Berthold’s talk on “Why Christian Anti-Semitism” afterwards. I introduced him with pleasure. He is 90 and is going strong. His chief point was that the synoptic gospels are very different from what follows in John and especially in Acts and the Epistles, since in the synoptics there is no “theology” of Christ as son of God saving us from Adam’s sin. The later doctrines were anathema to Jews, who thus were considered heathen or heretical by Christians. . . . Then to the mediation training arranged by Ji Hyae with teachers from Champlain College, about thirty students all very attentive as they were taught how to ask questions that are not judgmental. How nice that this effort is being revived so well! . . . Then to Rassias’s for Easter lunch, lamb and trimmings following cracking eggs. Veronica there with David and all six children. They want to visit us in the Adirondacks this summer. . . . In typing this journal, I’m now in 1995. Recently finished the long account of our trip to Japan. I sent a copy to Kesaya and another to Alec, who has just returned from a trip to Japan with his family, retracing our steps: Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, but with Naoko and Yasuo Takahashi, not Daphne Tebbe.

April 28, 2012

Wonderful Webster performance tonight by the two Classicopia pianists, Dan Weiser and Philip Liston-Kraft. I had pestered Dan for a year to do Ravel’s “La Valse” and we were treated to that amazing piece. In introducing them I said that, for me, the waltz was like a beautiful young girl who wished to dance in sunlight and did occasionally, but somehow was restrained in a dark cellar from which she sometimes emerged but then was forced back in, in which case we heard bits and pieces of this glorious waltz, distorted and disfigured. Dan added later that Ravel composed the piece after the first world war and it has been often interpreted as his statement about the end of the beauty represented by pre-war Vienna. In any case, the piece also presents the generic human condition whereby we do possess beautiful and beneficial emotions and capabilities, yet these are all too often constrained and distorted by outright evil or by our own laziness or indifference, so that at best only bits and pieces, distorted, are evident, until sometimes our full capacity for goodness is temporarily released.

April 29, 2012

After Meeting, Jack Shepherd and I went together to visit the second session of the renewed mediation training at Dartmouth. But when we talked there with the student leader, Ji Hyae Lee, we found her discouraged because the trainer had done no simulation exercises, alas. Some were promised for this afternoon’s final session, that’s all. Strange, because the trainer had brought six graduate students along supposedly to supervise multiple simulations. Jack, Ji, and I spoke about ways to remedy this next autumn. Perhaps we were amiss in not conferring at length with the trainer before the sessions began.

May 8, 2012

An important day for Chrysanthi. She won the Vaughan Award, thanks to nomination by Kesaya Noda. This is issued by the New Hampshire State Committee on Aging each year “in recognition of one’s outstanding leadership and meritorious achievement on behalf of New Hampshire’s older citizens.” An award goes to one person in each of New Hampshire’s ten counties. Chrysanthi received it for Grafton County. So today we traveled to Concord, together with Evelyn Spiegel and Suzanne Laaspere, for the ceremony. Helene Rassias showed up as well. The certificate is signed by Governor Lynch, who presented the award in person, and by Nicholas Toumbas, Commissioner of the State’s Department of Health and Human Services, who congratulated Chrysanthi in Greek! All this happened in the governor’s reception room of the State house. Lynch made a short, appropriate speech and then a lady read Kesaya’s letter of nomination, the governor presented the award, official and unofficial photos were taken (one of which, with Chrysanthi looking very happy between the smiling governor and Toumbas, appeared on the first page, Section B, of the Manchester Union Leader on the next day). I append here the nomination letter:

CHRYSANTHI BIEN VAUGHN AWARD NOMINATION

March 2012

Chrysanthi Bien has devoted herself to the service of elders in the Hanover area for so long that no one I spoke with could date the beginning of her involvement. Through an examination of town records, we’ve discovered that Chrysanthi joined the steering committee of the Hanover Senior Center in 1988—twenty-four years ago. She’s continuously chaired the group for the past twenty-one years. Since 1986, she has also led the committee running the 55-Plus Art Show at the Howe Library.

When Chrysanthi first began, the Senior Center offered only a few informal activities. Today its schedule is rich with exercise and craft classes, lunches, health clinics, and social activities. Chrysanthi played a role in the overall growth of the center’s offerings, but she has also directly involved herself in nurturing several programs. Once a month, various Upper Valley churches take turns sending members to make lunch for the center’s seniors. Chrysanthi coordinates the program, making many phone calls to ensure that there are enough volunteers and that plans are in place. Over the years, she has helped maintain the continuity of craft offerings by leading activities herself. Each December, for example, she gets greens from the Noda family’s Christmas tree farm for wreath making. As a painter, she also encourages the work of others, promoting senior center participation in Howe Library’s art show and guiding the hours of labor necessary for the show’s success. She has initiated and supported the development of connections between young people and seniors at the center and is instrumental in the advisory committee’s volunteering monthly to prepare a meal for guests at the Upper Valley Hostel.

Chrysanthi will be stepping down from her position at the Senior Center this year. I join many others in believing that she is most worthy of receiving the Vaughn Award, not only in recognition of the many hours she has devoted to seniors this year, but because of her vision and her unbroken, long-term commitment.

Chrysanthi grew up in Greece, in a village where the lives of elders, families, and young children were interwoven within a single community. Her background has surely formed her values. Everyone who speaks of her mentions her efforts to connect the Center and its seniors with individuals and organizations in the wider community. She works hard to break down the barriers that tend to divide the generations in our culture, and, through her efforts, gives seniors the fullest respect and honor, as should always be their due.

On the same day, in the evening at the Hanover Town Meeting, Chrysanthi was cited for her various forms of long-term service and was awarded with a beautiful glass bowl crafted by Simon Pearce.

May 9, 2012

Arnie Alpert, who heads the AFSC office in Concord, notified me that a beautiful photo of Chrysanthi receiving the award from the governor was on the first page of Section Β of the Manchester Union Leader. Most places in Hanover don’t carry it (it’s right wing) but I found a copy in the gas station. Now we have several copies to show off.

May 11, 2012

A lovely day at the farm. I started the White easily, also the tiller, and tilled the entire garden. Chrysanthi planted three tomatoes, covering them with Reemay against possible frost, and also some string beans and potatoes.

May 12, 2012

To Cambridge for an A.R.T. production dedicated to the life and songs of Woody Guthrie done by four multi-talented actors/singers. He was deliciously left-wing, which this audience seemed definitely to appreciate. I particularly liked the country music flavor, reminding me of Johnny Cash. Chrysanthi remembered singing Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” in Greece, with Greek words, of course, and said she’d like to learn it on the mandolin this summer.

May 19, 2012

Another treat: Handel Society doing the Brahms Requiem, which I followed with the full score. Beautiful. And it was preceded by Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw,” so moving as the Warsaw ghetto Jews began to sing the Shema Israel as they are led to the gas chamber. We marveled afterwards at how fortunate we are to be able to hear such totally professional performances 12 minutes from our apartment.

May 26, 2012, to Rachel Hadas

Dear Rachel,

I was so moved by your “Freelance” in the TLS about showering your husband in the Schervier Nursing Home—mostly because Chrysanthi and I (who are healthy, thankfully) live in a retirement community where, inevitably, we know too many couples with one member descending—or descended—into Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s and the other member trying his or her best to cope. Fortunately, we have our own Health Center; thus the deprived person is still in the same building, and is well supported by angelic nurses, with the healthy member remaining in an apartment but visiting for meals, activities, and (who knows?) perhaps even showers. But to know these couples while both are hardy and then to see one decline so rapidly in mind and body is devastating. All the more reason, naturally, to marvel at our own good health. I turn 82 this Monday and am still comfortably riding my bicycle, gardening, teaching a bit, translating, publishing books. And Chrysanthi just received an award from the Governor of New Hampshire for her decades of volunteer service to the town’s older residents, besides which she plays a mean game of ping pong!

Our best wishes to you.

May 28, 2012

Terpni

A pleasant birthday. Chrysanthi gave me a chocolate bar, a jar of chutney, and a painting of a large field with me in the middle on a tractor, mowing. Leander gave me a bottle of sherry. We had a full, pleasant supper at Basil and Wicks.

May 29, 2012

A technician from Direct TV upgraded us to HD, with a new dish, oval this time, not round, using satellites higher in the sky so we should be able to receive the local stations. But I couldn’t find the remote for the new TV; thus he hooked us up with the old one again. Several hours later, of course, I found the remote and was able to get the new TV to work for the French Open tennis (Williams defeated in the first round). What a difference in reception! Trouble getting the DVD machine to work but I managed and we actually saw some “I Love Lucy.” The same day the technician for the telephone company got my high-speed internet to work after fixing a defect in Wevertown that kept me from receiving a full signal.

May 30, 2012

Best news of all, and a huge surprise: the Riparius Post Office will continue as it is for two years and will also continue beyond that period, but with reduced hours of operation, although access to our P.O. boxes will continue at more hours than those of the actual office with a postmaster giving service. Hooray! I discontinued the box I had secured last summer in Wevertown.

June 8, 2012

Amazing! Everything is working. Another technician from Direct TV fixed the remote so that the picture appears now each time I press “On.” And it’s remarkably clear and crisp. I’ve been watching the French Open tennis matches, with pleasure. My computer now has a wireless modem and wireless mouse. The new laptop is much faster than the four-year-old one which, however, is still needed for printing. The tractor now works thanks to a new battery and also to my recall of Earl’s advice that the positive cable must be secured very tightly, and cleaned beforehand with steel wool. I’ve done the entrance up to the cabin and have started Leander’s field. And I finished the first chapter of Mathioudakis’s dissertation. The Greek is easy for me, thankfully. I wish the quality were better. Let’s hope he really begins to contribute something in subsequent chapters. So far, nothing much. . . . One first great load went to the dump. That’s always a relief, a pleasant “evacuation.” I read my own chapter on Kazantzakis’s Οδύσεια in volume 1 of Politics of the Spirit and liked it. (Preparation for dealing with Mathioudakis’s thesis, even though it’s on the epic’s words rather than its ideas.)

June 9, 2012

George telephoned to announce tearfully that Efthymoula has died. Bad cancer. Luckily she went very quickly. I wrote him as follows: Έχομε τόσες αναμνήσεις, με τη Χρυσάνθη, από ευχάριστα δείπνα και ενδιαφέρουσες συνομιλίες στο φιλόξενο σπίτι σας, καθώς και εκδρομές στην άνω πόλη ή ακόμα στην Τερπνή ! Η Ευθυμούλα πάντα ήταν η τέλεια οικοδέσποινα, Θα μας λείπει προφανώς όταν, κάποτε στο μέλλον, θα σε ξαναδούμε. Με αγάπη.

June 11, 2012

Everything is working finally: the tractor with a new battery, the Troy-Bilt, which started with the first pull after I squeezed the right-hand handlebar to establish an electrical connection. I’ve spent lots of afternoons in the garden, weeding, tilling, fertilizing. It’s beginning to look civilized, and everything is growing nicely. Of course I’ve also done some mowing both with the White and the John Deere, plus the Troy-Bilt, but not as much as in previous yeas at this stage. Interestingly, there are no bugs: no black flies, no mosquitoes. A chipmunk seemed to be raising her family in the fireplace, but now we don’t hear them any longer. Haven’t seen Earl and we wonder apprehensively because he told us earlier that he’d been in hospital with severe symptoms. We telephone and there is no answer. Chrysanthi is cooking marvelous suppers night after night, very involved all of a sudden in this art, besides struggling as always with puzzles.

June 14, 2012

Long, nice visit to Donna and Ed, first by the pond, then in their cabin. They’re building a real house near the pond. Ed expanded to me on the defects of Donna’s daughter’s good-for-nothing husband, who cannot hold a job or perhaps doesn’t care to.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

To Kendal

Left the farm on a beautiful morning, Chrysanthi wondering why I would leave this paradise in order to expose myself to the discomforts of a trip to Greece. But at least I now have business class for all flights, and also again in October. Of course we also recognized, as always, that Kendal, too, is totally “home.”

Monday & Tuesday, June 18–19

Boston–Philadelphia–Athens–Thessaloniki

Dartmouth Coach 7:00 a.m. to Logan Airport. Easy flight to Philadelphia. Then business class non-stop to Athens, arriving on Tuesday morning. My feast-fast-feast-fast routine, plus lots of (sort of) sleep on the flight has worked well. I felt wide awake all day Tuesday. Athens airport just like always, no sign of any “crisis” in Greece. Waiting for the Olympic Airlines flight to Thessaloniki, I encountered T. Jewett in a wheelchair, which she didn’t really need, although she has a bad back. Olympic men took charge, treating her like a queen, and me, too. I couldn’t even roll my valise; they did that. We were kept from going on the bus with everyone else to the plane. A large truck-like vehicle came for us. It had a way of lifting the wheelchair with T. in it, to its door. We entered to find a space with some seats and a way of securing the chair. At the plane, all this was elevated until on a level with the plane’s entrance, and in we went. My valise was raised by this good man to the storage space above. A smiling hostess ministered to our every need. At Thessaloniki, the same tricks, in reverse, with similar solicitude until we were both inside our Farm School staff person’s car. This was Sissy Bamba, who works at the desk in the library. I settled in to my room at Cincinnati Hall but soon went by taxi to the Καμάρα, where I had arranged to meet the woman to whom Georges Stassinakis gave the money for my October travel expenses. We repaired to a café to have a frappé. She handed me €1550, exactly what I had requested. Since I had only about €15 previously, the guard at the Farm School gate lent me €50 just in case. Earlier, in Athens, I tried to use my Greek visa card at an ATM machine, only to be told that the card was now invalid. Back to Cincinnati Hall. At 8:00 p.m. we all left in the Perrotis van, with Vangelis Vergos driving, for a nice tavern in Αρετσού, by the sea, and were regaled with Greek μεζεδάκια, finishing with ice cream. Here endeth the first day.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Up early. Went to the assembly, first enjoying a warm reunion with Tasos. He invited me to speak to the students and I did my usual thing: what trustees are, what we do, how we try to maintain the original ideal of combining the best in Greek and American cultures. These students are only those who will be graduating and who are now taking four days of exams. Also the two interns, one of whom is from Dartmouth, Maya, whom I did not recommend very warmly but who apparently has served well by helping with college counseling: eighteen students have been accepted by American universities, all with large financial aid. I of course had asked Tasos earlier to show me the new Vouli Prousali classroom, which he did. There is an appropriate plaque, including a quote by Kazantzakis. He immediately arranged for someone to come with a camera, so after the assembly I posed with him, Κατερίνα Διάφα και Σωτήρης Γιαλαμάς next to the plaque. The photographer also photographed the room itself, so Chrysanthi can get some idea of it. What followed was the board’s “information day,” exhausting but very instructive. We started with the new educational dairy where the students learn to make cheese, yogurt, ice cream; we saw the laboratories and tasted sample cheeses. It’s very high tech. Stratos Constantinidis emphasized to all of us that the Farm School’s future lies in high-level scientific expertise. Then to the library to see a film produced by a student who received an award, followed by a nice video on Μέρα Μαΐου and then info about the eight students who’ll be attending US universities, each of whom spoke to us briefly in English, well enough, followed by the dozen or so of younger students who will be spending a summer period in America, more going on this type of internship than ever before. Next came information on a new enterprise, the snail farm, near the winery. The snails reproduce on one half, eating sunflowers, it seems, and they “grow fat” on the other half. Then: escargot! Next came the new campus store, where I succumbed to the great temptation to bring home τραχανάς for Chrysanthi and παξιμάδι. We then congregated outside the new dining hall, where I was greeted unsuspectedly by a very attractive young lady who turned out, of course, to be Ελένη Γιαννακού. We exchanged telephone numbers after many smiles and good feelings. Next to the dining hall. After lunch we toured the old KEGE building, now remodeled for the pre-K, where Eleni is a volunteer, and for next year’s kindergarten. We were enchanted by a dozen or so pre-K children who sang for us in both Greek and, very well, in English. They use computers already, plant, cultivate and harvest salad plants, as their introduction to “green” reality. It was a delicious moment for us trustees. Again to the library for a presentation on architectural plans for the future primary school—namely, a renovation and expansion of the old location of laboratories. Joann followed this with the financial realities of the primary school and opportunities to contribute in ways that would affix one’s name to part of the project, for example on a classroom ($30,000). I mentioned to Joann that I would like to consider doing this and she kindly replied that the School really should have some place with my name and Chrysanthi’s attached to it. Finally, at about 3:00 p.m., Panos presented his new vision for a Center for Entrepreneurship in Agriculture. I checked e-mail, took a short nap in my air-conditioned room. Supper was at Panos’s. Dora Apostolidou came up and we talked at great length about Vouli, retirement (she’s coming close), the Greek universities. I also met Panos’s wife for the first time. She’s important at Anatolia. I reminded her about Albana and also Nurjhan. A very long, full day.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Assembly again. Then an attempt to get wi-fi to work in Cincinnati (unsuccessful). Then Primary, Secondary, and Student Life Committee with Tasos and others giving inputs on the pre-K, the future kindergarten and primary school, additional opportunites for the secondary students (they can now have lessons even in Chinese), and details about various exchange programs. No action items or votes needed. It was fun to hear about the robot being built, to be trained to collect garbage. I suggested that he be baptized by full immersion, wearing a bathing suit. . . . In the afternoon, Higher Education Committee with John Cleave chairing pro tem (John Cruncilton just had a prostatectomy) and I acting as secretary pro tem. Nice to see Don Schofield beforehand and to catch up. He’ll be publishing a book of poems shortly. I told him about my translation of Harkianakis. He’ll retire in two years and will continue to live in Greece, perhaps on Ithaki. In the committee session, Vergos spoke on Adult Education, which is now increasingly important because of the urbanites who have lost their jobs and are returning to the land. Don then detailed his area: study abroad programs. Rotsios spoke about finances (they increased revenue without raising fees, and they decreased expenses, partly by reducing financial aid, alas, from 52% to 30%. Interestingly, most of the students enrolled from the AFS secondary program failed after a year and had to leave (mostly owing to deficiency in English). Finally, Φίλιππος Παπαδόπουλος elaborated on future hopes, including making Perrotis an “elite private college” (his words, not mine). But he also revealed that the Greek students, now 64% of the total compared to 38% three years ago, are the worst. They’ve failed the Panhellenic exam for university entrance and have lost their self-esteem. So they get special attention for a year and still, in most cases, need to leave. Κρίμα! Rotsios told me that they teach five courses a year and still manage some research. The total student enrollment is 127. . . . At 6:00 p.m., thanks to Eleni’s initiative, I was greeted at Cincinnati by Μπρίνη, Τάκης and Ελένη. They live in Καλαμαριά, quite close. In the back seat were Odysseas, now 90 years old (George is 92) and walking with a cane, and his wife Eleni, who seemed in much better health than her husband. Talk talk talk about Alec, Monica, Theo, Elena, our time with them in the village during Easter vacation 2007, Takis’s job (going well), his salary (reduced 50%), Brini’s job (secure), her salary (reduced 40%). He said that contrary to what one might expect owing to Greece’s crisis, his municipal projects are continuing, still funded by the EU and the town. Only a very few have been eliminated. Odysseas and Eleni, miraculously, are going to Eleni’s village this Sunday, driven by Takis. Somehow they still manage. . . . Then another vivacious young lady joined us: Ανθούλα, η κόρη της Τούλας, about to graduate from a five-year course as an engineer, and not expecting to find a job. She’ll help instead in Toula’s Odeon, the way Odysseas used to help, in the office. But she also plays piano, violin, accordion. A pleasure to see these two younger women. Lots of good food: fish, shrimp. Takis drove me back at 10:30 p.m. because I still needed to type the minutes for both the Secondary and Higher Ed committees.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Assembly again. This time I offered to read from the Gospels, in English. I chose Luke 6 about the speck in your brother’s eye and the log in yours. The student read the Greek with zero expression, just to get through it as fast as possible. I tried to read the English translation “theatrically.” It’s a marvelous passage. . . . Introducing myself at the full board meeting at 9:00 a.m. (everyone was asked to do this), I mentioned the passage but comforted the trustees by saying that of course it did not apply to them! The meeting went from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Tedious. Wrangling over minutiae. I stressed the need for literature and the arts as well as science and technology, but I don’t think Kanellis, a chemist, understood. He said I shouldn’t worry because English is taught. What I was hoping the students would get was Greek poetry and prose. The acronym for his scientific emphasis is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). I said that I hoped the stem would have a flower. . . . Tried afterwards repeatedly to reach George by telephone, and finally succeeded. He seemed very disturbed, spoke of the terrible shock of Efthymoula’s death. I suggested a rendezvous tonight but he didn’t seem able to consider it or anything else. Maybe tomorrow, although I’ve arranged to meet Lena Arampatsidou and her husband at the Καμάρα at 1:00 p.m. for lunch.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

I finally reached George last night. He kept talking about το μεγάλο σοκ owing to Efthymoula’s death. He wasn’t free. I gave him my telephone but he never called back. Today I went to the Βυζαντινό Μουσείο and actually found a beautiful and appropriate icon on a postcard they sell, for a possible illustration on the cover of my Harkianakis book. It’s called Παναγία Δεξιοκρατούσα because she has her right arm around the baby Christ, not the usual left arm (leaving the right arm free for crossing oneself). . . . Walked to the Καμάρα in the great heat, about 43 degrees Centigrade (= 110 degrees Fahrenheit). Lena Arampatsidou came with her husband, a nice young man who is a tax collector (!). She, it turns out, is going to assist Dimitris Gounelas in editing the Kazantzakis letters in Greek. So it was very good that we met because I was able to give her lots of needed information about the project. They took me to a very good restaurant just across the street, also very quiet with few customers (owing to the crisis). Her salary has been reduced 35%, his the same. But she says that the university is working well. She hopes I’ll support her in going to Princeton for some study-time and in getting a Fulbright (she failed on her first try). I explained about Patroclos Stavrou vs. Stassinakis, etc., and the reconciliation that took place between Niki Stavrou and Stassinakis. We had a very long lunch, with lots of protein for me on my feast day. Then they drove me back and I gave them a tour of the Farm School. I promised a full party with champagne when the Greek letters are published. . . . My taxi driver this morning waxed philosophical about Greek rationality as we watched thousands of cars bumper to bumper at 11:30 a.m. trying to get to the beaches in Halkidiki: Οι Έλληνες εφεύρισκαν την ορθολόγισμα, αλλά έφυγε από την Ελλάδα. Τώρα έχουμε την συγκίνηση!

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Το Κομοτηνή

All day with Nikos Mathioudakis, a tall Cretan. He came to Cincinnati Hall at 9:30 a.m. I gave him a tour of the Farm School and we took off to Ξάνθη, where his professor and her husband were waiting for us for lunch. We traveled on the Εγνατία Οδός, which is remarkable, exactly like our interstate highways. This one goes from Ηγουμενίτσα all the way east to the Turkish boarder, through beautiful country: fields being irrigated with spraying fountains, forests, mountains, lakes, trees. Ξάνθη is beautiful, with a river running through the middle. The professor, Πηνελόπη Καμπάκη, is loud and brassy, but very friendly. Her husband, a professor of mathematics, went to school with Tasos Apostolidis, and he telephoned Dora while we were eating. He is also a poet with many published volumes, all of which he, of course, gave me. Penelope has two grown daughters who are professional singers. I heard their CD, truly beautiful. After the typical long lunch (on my fast day, so I concentrated on salads), Nikos took me to a fine hotel. Siesta. He came again at 7:30 and we walked through the city, including the section where Muslims live. There’s a mosque, of course, and also stores with Turkish foods and supplies.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Nikos’s big day. I practiced my talk, also typed a little journal. A friend got me at 10:30 a.m. The university is on a campus out of town. Some of it has been built, but not all. The building we entered was like a shed, but air conditioned and OK for power point. We five examiners sat on one side, guests on the other, including Nikos’s parents, the father very typically Cretan. Nikos spoke for thirty minutes summarizing the thesis with the help of power point, followed by a short video showing Odysseas’s trip down to the tip of Africa and onto an ice floe. The examiners asked questions and he replied. I kidded him about ελεύθερο μάνταμα, also on prohibiting me να γλιτώσω από τον Καζαντζάκη. Lots of hugs and kisses afterwards when he returned to hear our verdict of Άριστα. Then about 30 people feasting in town. Good food, and fortunately on my feast day. I was fortunate in sitting between the two young female linguists who had served with me on the jury and were easy conversationalists. And Nikos’s father, in true Cretan style, gave us jigger after jigger of raki. Finally Nikos drove me, again on the amazing Εγνατία Οδός, to the Alexandroupolis airport. Overnight in the Sofitel after a quarter pounder at the Athens airport’s McDonald’s.

July 5, 2012

Riparius

Alec was mowing with the Troy-Bilt when the steel rod with the knives broke in two. But I was able to order a replacement part. Also the belt on the White kept slipping off the pulleys. We went to Steve, who fixes things like this, and he sent us to NAPA for a new belt, which seems to work. But he told me that Bud Roddick has retired and closed his shop. A great shame. . . . I’m typing the journal every day, now in volume 26, covering the summer of 1998. The farm never looked nicer, mostly because Alec and the two kids have done so much mowing and raking. And Monica is picking wild blueberries. We already have tomatoes on the plants. Tonight for supper we enjoyed the τραχανάς I brought back from the Farm School store. What a treat! Watching Wimbledon tennis, too. Tomorrow: semi-finals between Federer and Djoković.

July 10, 2012

It’s starting. Close friends. Mary Rassias died today, peacefully. Heart failure. Who’ll be next?

July 12, 2012

Ballet. Stunning “Firebird” with Ashley Bouder, one of my favorites.

Viewed “our” seat: Section 18, row C, #1:

July 13, 2012

Drove from the farm to Norwich to visit John Rassias, following Mary’s death. He seemed fully in control but Athos was deeply, visibly affected. The problem was a blood clot that invaded Mary’s heart, unexpectedly following her reasonably good recovery from her recent operation. Alec and family will go tomorrow and we’ll send flowers from us and all three children.

July 15, 2012

Kinhaven

To Kinhaven with Alec and family for the School’s sixtieth anniversary celebration. It was very nice to see old friends: Jerry Bidlack, of course, who conducted madrigals and also the Vivaldi “Gloria” with a combined Kinhaven and alumni chorus; Jim Quinn, still in DC and a subscriber to the National Symphony, and his daughter; Lelah Dushkin, living in Kansas but hoping to move to a retirement community in Massachusetts—her brother died, but Nadia is alive and well; Sandy Dennis, who now co-directs the Junior Session and continues to teach piano in NYC; Peter Schultz; Carolyn Wahl, whose horn and other brass students were very active in today’s concert; Irene Mendelson, happy to be back on the Kinhaven board—she said she prefers the West Side to the East Side, jokingly, and I remembered many meetings on the West Side, more on the East Side, but some in Brooklyn; Elizabrth Gombosi, still on the board. I was sorry that John Austin didn’t come, nor did Bill Polk. Alec was invited by Jerry to return to the Bidlacks’ after the concert to see Nancy, which he did. She’s totally incapacitated by Lou Gehrig’s disease and, he says, is very angry. But, I remarked, she was very angry when she was healthy. It was wonderful to see Jerry actively conducting despite his own health problems. The concert was typical: a little Mozart and Schumann and Bruch, three Morley madrigals, but also lots of unknown composers played by a brass trio, or a snare drum quartet! The full orchestra, at the end, did a piece by Hindemith that I didn’t much like, but it showed off various orchestral sections: brass, woodwinds, percussion, strings. All in all, as always, it is a joyous thing to see these talented students playing so well under the guidance of Kinhaven’s fine staff. So after sixty years, the School is flourishing both artistically and even financially, with new faculty housing, new student cabins, the dining hall enlarged via a covered porch. Still, the barn needs a new roof and Main House needs just about everything. I was saddened to learn that the concert grand piano, which I secured for Kinhaven from Frances Mann, is now disliked by many (but not all). During the concert, I sat beneath one of the ceiling fans that I also donated to the School, relieved by its gentle breeze on this rather hot day.

July 17, 2012

The bar holding the knives on the Troy-Bilt snapped in two while Alec was mowing. But I was able to order a replacement that came today. I inserted it, and now the Troy-Bilt works better than ever, despite this mishap and despite drowning in the pond a few years ago. Alec was also able to get our chipper to work again. I’m hoping that Irv’s tiller can be resurrected, too.

July 18, 2012

Today something really terrible happened. Diana Cox wrote to Bill Cook, c/o Jim Tatum, that despite being invited to Kendal and despite clearing all the required committees, now he cannot be admitted because beds are no longer available. Bill is heartbroken, Jim is furious, I feel betrayed by Kendal, not to mention that this really is also a breach of contract. And Diana now says that the case is closed; we will no longer consider Bill’s entry. I suspect that Diana was “instructed” by Becky Smith, damn her. But I’m not sure. Diana in the past was always eager to have Bill, or so she seemed; thus the reversal is strange. Poor Bill believed he would finally find intelligent people to talk to and be stimulated by. No more. Alas! I’d worked on this for four or five years; it has come to nothing.

July 21, 2012

Finished mowing the south field. Και του χρόνου!

July 25, 2012

To the circus in Lake George, much better than the North Creek circus, which didn’t come this year. Marvelous acrobats, all Chinese. Thankfully there was a net for them in case of misses, which happened. Scary. But the clowns were pathetic. They need the likes of a Benny Hill.

July 25, 2012

Drove Chrysanthi to Glens Falls Hospital for an ultrasound on her foreleg that always seems numb. The doctor reported everything normal. . . . After supper we had a musical evening. Elena played violin with Leander accompanying (much better than I had accompanied her last week, of course). She scratches away more or less with no sign of musicality. She’s better on the piano, playing a rag. Then Theo played his clarinet pieces again with Leander accompanying. He does show musicality. Lots. Then Nicholas on his alto saxophone with Leander playing marvelously despite having to transpose at sight from Ε-flat. Nicholas is now able to improvise after the “head” of the jazz piece is finished. He plays well, very well, but this music leaves me cold. Fortunately Leander, Alec and Deanna then did some Bach followed by a very fine Vivaldi, Alec sight-reading marvelously well. What a pleasure to hear this near-professional music in our log cabin! Finally Sophia surprised everyone by declaring that she would sing, provided that her parents retreated into the kitchen. She did, pumping out chords on the piano very badly. Afterwards she was willing to do the Star Spangled Banner with Leander on piano, better, but no oomph. . . . Alec and some of the children put a new coat of blue paint on the side and rear of the barn, which now looks very fresh, with its new blue roof as well.

July 29, 2012

Very nice 54th birthday party for Alec. I gave him a super penknife with screwdriver, scissors, bottle opener, etc., plus an industrial vacuum to replace the one that was destroyed by mice. Monica cooked chicken kabobs on the fire and her marvelous Indonesian noodles. Leander provided a special sort of beer. Theo built and lit the fire all by himself for the first time, successfully. Lots of fun afterwards opening presents, and then everyone climbed upstairs to watch the Olympics on our new first-class television.

August 2, 2012

An interesting evening with Tom Akstens and Susanne Murtha. Dinner at Basil and Wick’s, always good. Catching up, mostly on their lives. They’ve bought a second home, in Rhode Island. Susanne says, “Don’t tell anyone.” They go on weekends, just for a change, so far. Tom’s jobs continue at Sienna College and the New York State internet university, both of which exploit him increasingly. But he manages, somehow, always as an adjunct, alas. We then drove to the Seagle Colony in Schroon Lake and witnessed a sort of professional production of Don Giovanni, music provided by duo pianos. Not bad, but the Statue scene was emasculated without the orchestra and with a weak Commendatore. Octavio, the tenor, was the best voice; this made Octavio a little more believable. All the singers are young, beginning their careers; all have professional training. So, all in all, it was worth going.

August 3, 2012

Today, thankfully, we ended the difficult problem I’ve had each year opening and closing the water owing to Pinky’s system of the long lever meant somehow to find a small lever and open or close the drain. No more. I called Wolfe’s well drilling, and Gary, who remembered doing our well, sent his crew—Kyle Dunkley and another Gary Wolfe (his nephew). They replaced the tiny lever with a new device that opens and closes the drain automatically owing to fall in pressure or restoration of pressure. So, in the future I no longer will need to open the well cover and try to make Pinky’s long lever somehow work. A great relief. All this happened owing to Chrysanthi’s pestering, although I kept saying that I’d learn to use Pinky’s lever better. She was right, of course. . . . Very lovely dinner tonight with Don Kurka and Maria, here for only three days. She’s doing well, curating a show, teaching. He continues to paint “for himself” although he “accidentally” sold a painting. I’ll send her the Kazantzakis letters when they’re in Tennessee this autumn. She also would like my Ritsos book. All the children and grandchildren came over after dinner, plus Leander’s friend Breck from Kinhaven, for a pleasant hour.

August 4, 2012

Breck, who used to work for the TomTom Company until he was laid off, gave me a needed lesson on my TomTom. Then we drove to Armstrong Road to meet Don and Maria again, who took us to meet a Greek-American surgeon and his artist wife who live in the house on Coulter Road that used to belong to Bob and Marian Morse, where we first met Don Kurka. Stratos Kantounis, born in America of parents from Ikaria, was very friendly and pleasant and wants to see us again. . . . I finished a book review of Tom Doulis’s book on the Junta years, The Iron Storm, very difficult to write because he published it privately with no copyediting; it is filled with embarrassing typos. But I hope I did it justice.

August 6, 2012

Doulis, alas, wrote to say that I failed to do justice to his book because I emphasized the proof-reading defects in my second paragraph. I thought I had encouraged readers of the review to read the book. Not clear whether I should answer him or not.

August 7, 2012

Nikos Mathioudakis, whose viva I participated in at the University of Thrace, arrived here by bus from New York. We had long discussions about his projected involvement in publishing the Kazantzakis letters in Greek. But first, Niki Stavrou has assigned him the task of placing my so-called “Discarded Letters” on the internet. We also talked about his following my suggestion to see what Kimon Friar did, if anything, with the 5000+ neologisms in Kazantzakis’s Οδύσεια. For this he’ll need a post-doc fellowship, ideally at Princeton. Lastly, we talked at length about the celebrations that Niki is planning in London on February 18, 2013. Nikos will be there, and I’ll be the chief speaker, my subject still not determined although I thought perhaps something like “How does one stay interested in Kazantzakis for fifty years?” We went over a list of possible others to speak at this event. I gave him the usual tour of Terpni, and Alec and I took him down to see the marvels created by beavers. Then an Adirondack cook-out shared by him with all of us, a total of ten around the picnic table.

August 8, 2012

Jim Heffernan wants me to teach another ILEAD course winter term. I said No, but maybe spring term on Joyce’s Ulysses. . . . Drove Nikos to catch his return bus in Glens Falls and then shopped in Lowe’s for a new kind of mouse poison in solid blocks instead of pellets. Lunch in the Greek-American diner on Glen Street. Overheard the nice waitress telling the next table about dolmades, pronouncing the “d” like an English “d,” and gave her a lesson how to pronounce it like the “th” in “this.” She was a good student. . . . Chrysanthi and Theo re-did the cement on the front of the well and I rewrote “1950 ΤΕΡΠΝΗ.” . . . I’m re-reading Paradise Lost with great pleasure. Just finished Book 9, the Fall.

August 10, 2012

Alec and family left and we both felt truly sad. Theo and Elena are now such clear, interesting personalities that we engaged with so easily and pleasantly for these past six weeks. And Monica continues to be so helpful and cooperative. I collaborated in many projects with Alec, as always. They hope to come for Christmas 2013, but of course next summer first.

August 13, 2012

Dan Seeger arrived and we immediately began endless talking about so many things we shared in previous years. Then, after supper, we tried some of our old four-hand duets: Percy Granger, Schumann, Schubert’s March, even the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. Both of us were surprised and pleased at how familiar all this still was. Also Debussy.

August 14, 2012

Showed Dan Alec’s house and our forest, including the lovely hemlock stand. He needed to work on his computer, the daily torrent of e-mails, etc. He told me that Pennswood Village, his CCRC, is only 80+ occupied. Several other CCRCs in the Philadelphia area have failed. Very worrisome. We plan to meet for supper in Philadelphia on November 15, with Leander coming up from Maryland for the occasion. Played more four-hand duets in the afternoon and again after supper: our old repertory—Brahms’ waltzes, Husa, Dello Joio, Satie, and of course Mozart’s 40th. We were both pleased, indeed amazed, at our ability still to play these things, although the Samuel Barber was beyond us, except for his slow waltz.

August 15, 2012

Before leaving, Dan showed Chrysanthi his i-pad and i-phone and Kindle. Very tempting. . . . Working on my Paradise Lost lecture for August 30. Entirely new; nothing recycled from previous lectures.

August 17, 2012

Reading at breakfast an article by E. O. Wilson in the Harvard Magazine (May-June 2012), I came across the following which seems to be written precisely for us here at the farm: “Studies have shown that given freedom to choose the setting of their homes or offices, people across cultures gravitate toward an environment that combines three features. . . . They want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and closes, and they want to be close to a body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean. Even if all these elements are purely aesthetic and not functional, home buyers will pay any affordable price to have such a view. People . . . gravitate toward savanna forest (parkland) and transitional forest, looking out safely over a distance toward reliable sources of food and water. . . . All mobile animal species are guided by instincts that lead them to habitats in which they have a maximum chance for survival and reproduction. It should come as no surprise that during the relatively short span since the beginning of the Neolithic, humanity still feels a residue of that ancient need.”

August 18, 2012

A new Pendle Hill pamphlet by William Shetter called “Some Thoughts on Becoming Eighty-Five” reminded me of Elizabeth Gray Vining’s “On Being Seventy.” I especially like his “Truly, there are few things more disheartening than an old sourpuss.” . . . Lovely visit for lunch by Tom and Joan Wilson returning from lake Pleasant. Joan brought her marvelous chocolate chip cookies and Chrysanthi served spanakopita. They’re off to the South Pacific in November to see the full eclipse of the sun. Chrysanthi seems willing to go to California next spring, but by rail only, which the Wilsons say is a splendid adventure. . . . I finished my Paradise Lost lecture. Must time it tomorrow.

August 24, 2012

Received the following cri de coeur from Constance Tagopoulos. I had written her about a lovely poem of hers called “Apollo” that she had recited with me, Keeley, and Fagles at the Onassis Center in 2001 or 2000.

Dear Peter,

What a beautiful message and memories! Thank you, it soothes my heart, especially on such a brutal day like today, when IRS rather than sending me some tax money back, asked me to pay them 3,000 euros! This is a new tax they just invented by canceling all kinds of tax exemptions, even medical! Greek citizens are up in arms, they all have to pay money back. Mine is exorbitant especially after they reduced my modest income by 45%. To make sure we pay, they entered the amount we owe on the DEH [Δημόσια Επιχείρηση Ηλεκτρισμού] bill and if we delay they will disconnect our electricity supply! Democracy at gunpoint!

Thank vou. mv friend! Your words, soothing like poetry, brought life back in me at this brutal moment. I miss poetry as I miss my friends; it is poetry that keeps that spark alive in our memory, like Odysseus when he buries himself under the branches and falls asleep, symbolically dies. Homer, poetry, will rekindle the spark with words, love for life, the sun, the sea, Ithaca . . . no matter how many times he buries that spark . . . he will be born again and again. . . . There is no poetry in this country to keep the spark alive any more, no tenderness, admiration, generosity, even the sun is hostile. . . . Our language has dried up, is all codes, slogans. . . . I tried to write a few times, cruel voices came out, or too cerebral. On the other hand there is this persistent cry: This is real life! Now, at the end of your life you are at last in contact with reality, suffering, danger, responsibility! Nobody helps—everybody pretends, now you are a complete person!—Nobody loves?—They envy, and betray you, unless you rise way above them, then they slavishly worship you!—No, thanks! I want to write poems crying all the time! Like then!—Oh, God, what a bore! I had friends then who knew the heart and emotion. They vanquished time and distance because they understood poetry—life.

August 30, 2012

Drove to AMTRAK Rensselaer station. Easy ride to NYC, reading Dennis Carroll’s diatribe against the Koran, in which he actually quotes me on why I felt I couldn’t read any more of that very strange document. We were able to walk to Jeff Murphy’s office this year because they’re now in the McGraw-Hill Building—four floors!—on 6th Avenue and 48th. Nice to see old friends, the “regulars” at my lectures. Apparently this is my tenth year doing this. But the total number of attendees seems to be decreasing. Jeff said he couldn’t get beyond Book 1 of Paradise Lost because of all the annotations. One of the others said he read all 12 books with pleasure in three days, by ignoring the annotations. Good! Questions afterwards from Jeff’s uncle (who, I was told, shows the beginnings of Alzheimer’s) and a few others. But afterward, while we were all drinking wine, about ten of them gathered round me discussing my emphasis on monism and my pleasure in the “defeat” by Milton of the dualist position. Some contended that we do indeed have souls that are immaterial, citing Mozart, Beethoven, Milton. I of course granted the miracle of genius but hoped that even this has a monistic—i.e., materialist—explanation. Then downstairs in the same building to a superior restaurant. Lots of good conversation and good food. Home to the Yale Club at 11:30 p.m. to watch a bit of Mitt Romney’s disgusting speech accepting the Republican nomination.

August 31, 2012

Luckily, I discovered by accident on the internet the existence of a Tenement Museum on Delancey Street and secured tickets for a tour they offer of a tenement building on Orchard Street. So about twelve of us were guided through by an excellent docent. We actually fully occupied the three hundred square feet of an apartment—kitchen, tiny bedroom, salon. No electric, no toilet, no heat, no water at first although municipal laws eventually forced landlords to add these improvements. Each tenement had twenty such apartments, each housing an entire family, sometimes four or five children plus parents plus a grandparent. Horrible! We heard about a family whose husband deserted them when he lost his job; he went out west and was never heard from again. The wife and mother had to cope, which she did by sewing in the apartment—barely. Some help was given by FDR when he was governor of New York, but not enough, obviously. The back of the building, where we were taken to see the privies serving these twenty families faced Allen Street, where my father’s family first lived after they emigrated in, I think, 1905. Allen Street is now wide, with a park-like median. But the docent told me that this was added by Mayor La Guardia because Allen Street was “famous” for drugs and brothels, and he wanted to clean it up. Also, the 2nd Avenue El ran just outside the apartment windows. I wish I knew how long the Bien household remained in this horror, but who can we ask any longer? I wanted to have lunch afterward in a real Jewish delicatessen and was told to go to Katz’s on Houston Street. So we walked the necessary five or six blocks in the 95 degree heat, only to find a line around the corner waiting to enter. No luck. . . . Home on AMTRAK and a nice dinner in our old haunt on Route 9, the Montcalm, where their specialty, seafood bisque with sherry, is still very tasty.

September 16, 2012

I’ve not written anything here about the Bill Cook saga, which has now ended, alas, so badly. A stroke many years ago left him paralyzed, speechless, mentally impaired. He recovered somewhat but is still paralyzed on one side, able now to talk but perhaps has Alzheimer’s. Sad. I recommended that he be placed in Hanover Terrace and that happened. I visited him frequently there, bringing κουραμπιέδες. Horrible place, filled with zombies, no one for him to talk to, and not very good therapy. Jim Tatum, who looks after Bill’s affairs, moved him to Genesee, which is better but still provides no one, really, to talk to, none of the intellectual stimulation we get here at Kendal. So, starting several years ago, I suggested that he move to Kendal. But Kendal, at that point, could not admit him because he would need to go into Skilled Nursing, into which we were not permitted by law to admit anyone from outside; he was too incapacitated to go into Assisted Living, where we could admit people from outside. This was confirmed by one nurse who went and examined him. However, Diana Cox, head nurse, told me that they were trying to change the law in a way that would allow admission into Skilled Nursing. This process dragged on for two or three years. I kept Jim and Bill informed. Finally it happened. Then the problem was “census”—how many skilled rooms were empty. So Bill was kept waiting at least another six months or so. Finally, last spring, Diana invited him to apply; census was low. He visited, was delighted, went through the usual process of financial discussion with Brent, and was ready to move. Then, suddenly, last August, Diana wrote to say that he could not come, the census didn’t allow it. He was furious, as was Jim. Diana offered to visit in person to explain. They responded that they didn’t want to see her. Their deposit was returned. I asked Diana if he could be invited again when the census permitted. She said No. Thus it ended, with Jim and Bill very angry. The other day, Diana asked to see me, together with David Urso, to explain. Tight-lipped, she said, “I am fully responsible,” denying that Becky Smith had influenced her. When I said that in effect she had broken a contract with Bill and could be sued, she agreed. She was motivated, she said, by fear of having to send a resident to a nursing home if our Health Center was full, and then being accused of giving a room to a non-resident. We couldn’t go further. The case was closed. No chance of Bill coming later (not that he would want to, now). So, all these efforts and hopes over several years ended negatively, despicably, in the worst action ever taken by Kendal to my knowledge.

September 19, 2012

NYC

Dartmouth Coach to the Yale Club to meet Constance Tagopoulos for supper and ballet. In the afternoon, Chrysanthi and I went to MoMA and saw an interesting special exhibit about artifacts made for children, especially after World War II, for example a toy wheelbarrow, the sort of thing I could have made at the farm but didn’t. I did, of course, construct a large doll’s house for Daphne, with living room, kitchen, bedrooms, and a roof covered with genuine asphalt shingles. I don’t remember her spending much time with it, however. Maybe a wheelbarrow would have been better. Then the wonderful 4th floor, where both Chrysanthi and I especially liked a Cézanne landscape with stones and pine trees, but only half realistic. . . . Constance appeared at 5:00 p.m. together with a friend and colleague from Queens College, Nicholas Alexiou. We discussed the problem of getting copies of the Letters to Athens for my autographic session at the Estia bookshop. Nikos says that the Greek Tourist Service will send some copies, gratis, so I left one with him via Constance (who’ll carry one in her valise) and will post others on Friday. Let’s hope. He said that the whole situation at CUNY is bad owing to budget cuts. But they still receive their salaries every month, unlike what happens in Greece. Constance is of course utterly pessimistic (but she has always been that way about Greece, even before the crisis). At dinner we talked about the “round table” scheduled for October 15th. Stamatis Philippides is contentious, threatening not to come. He wants to recommend a complete Άπαντα for Kazantzakis, like the one done for Palamas. Εν τάξει, but who will do it, and where’s the money? (Niki, of course.) Then to the ballet. Delicious. Three Stravinsky/Balanchine early masterpieces: “Apollo,” “Orpheus,” “Agon.” “Apollo” was danced by Chase Finlay, a blond beauty who looks like a god. The music is of course marvelous, as was the entire realization, making one ever more certain that of all ballets this is Number 1. “Orpheus” less so. Interesting, and moving, of course, but lacking the utter magic of “Apollo.” But “Agon” is surely a masterpiece, culminating in the splendid pas de deux danced by Wendy Whelan and Amar Ramasar, who received loud shouts of Bravo from the crowd. As always, a splendid evening: emotional and intellectual.

September 20, 2012

NYC

Beautiful day again. Clear blue skies, 70 degrees. Leisurely breakfast of eggs benedict. We returned to MoMA and, as Chrysanthi said, we “exhausted it.” This time we “did” the 3rd floor, which is all abstract expressionism, Dada, and the like. But also the lovely sculpture garden, and an enclave with Turkish carpets. Very satisfying. Then a shared BLT, a long bus-ride home, a Chinese dinner, and a look at the new Black Family Arts building, where Leon lists as donors not only himself and Debra but their four children.

September 21, 2012

Sent two copies of the Letters to Nikos Alexiou, hoping that his scheme of getting them to Greece will work. . . . Yesterday, in the bus, I finished typing volume 30 of my journal (2002–2003); today I printed it and started volume 31 (2003–2004), which begins on typed page 2204. . . . Read Dennis Carroll’s parody of the Gospel of Matthew, some of which (not all) is quite clever and bitingly anti-religious. Sent him my critique. . . . Received the first review so far of the Selected Letters, by David Holton in the Anglo-Hellenic Review. Very fair and complimentary. . . . I’ve been reading E. A. Milne’s Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God, attracted by the title. Actually it’s 99% cosmology and 1% theology. And I don’t understand 99% of it. But I did find today a few sentences that are totally comprehensible and well worth quoting: “At the epoch of creation we can make no proposition as to what the state of affairs was. God, in the divine act of creation, is covered with a mantle of invisibility; we cannot even in imagination assist at the birth of the universe” (p. 96). “We cannot, at present, say exactly what we mean by quoting a figure for the age of the universe. . . . / Estimates of the age of minerals in the earth’s crust, for example give their age as from three to five thousand million years, whereas the direct interpretation of the red-shift in nebula spectra gives only some two thousand million years. . . . What is significant is that a ‘time-constant’ of the order of a few thousand million years seems to be thrown up by the study of the universe, and that the only reasonable interpretation of this is that it measures the age of the universe for us here now, reckoned from the transcendental event which was creation” (pp. 96–97).

September 22, 2012

Cambridge

To the A.R.T. for a spirited performance of a new play by David Adjmi called Marie Antoinette, a very free treatment of her personality and career with Brooke Bloom giving a bravura performance in the leading role. At the end, one is perplexed whether to despise Marie for her snobbery, excesses, decadence, or to commiserate with her owing to her sad end, captured by the revolutionaries, tried, convicted of “treason,” and executed. The play had minor connections with contemporary events—e.g., the Occupy Wall Street movement. But it really did not make one feel the revolutionaries’ cause. We got famous statements, for example Marie’s remark when told that the peasants were starving and had no bread to eat: “Let them eat brioche,” she cruelly commented. The production skillfully combined period costumes and décor with a totally contemporary mode of speech. Well done!

September 27, 2012

Had lunch with Carrie Rosenblum, whom I sent as an intern to the Farm School several years ago. She was a great success there and returned last summer to direct the School’s “Greek Summer” program. Now she’s got a two-year job with Dartmouth Admissions, just what Mats Lemberger did many years ago. At lunch, she warned me that she would convey bad news from the School. She proceeded to say that everyone—staff and students—dislikes Panos Kanellis, viewing him as autocratic, cold, not interested in them, hard to feel close to. What a surprise! The trustees all seem to feel that he is a great success. Also, Tasos Apostolidis, who begged me not to vote for Kanellis, is apparently working very well with him. One never knows, and trustees seem always to be the last ones to know. Carrie related that people at the School are instructed that they are not allowed to speak to trustees. So they all kept begging her to “speak to Peter Bien,” and that is what she is doing. Sad. About the new food service: the food is terrible. Panos chose friends (of course). I told him to try Sodexo, and he said No. People fear that Panos wants gradually to make AFS like Anatolia, eliminating the cows, etc. and emphasizing academic scholarship, perhaps stopping to enroll boarding students from the villages. Of course we already hear from Constantinidis and others that Perrotis should become a center of biological research and innovation. Carrie told me that Perrotis students complain that the teaching is extremely poor. Well, I don’t know what to make of all this, except to keep vigilant in case these directions begin to become more apparent in the board. She kept invoking the name of Bruce Lansdale—in other words, belief in the School’s original objectives.

October 4, 2012

Heard a talk by Zainab Salbi, coming away with the conviction that I had just witnessed a saint, or genius, or both. I was reminded of Mairead Corrigan, the woman we heard in Selly Oak who co-led the struggle for reconciliation in Northern Ireland and received the Nobel Peace Prize. Salbi, after escaping from Iraq via an arranged marriage to an American Muslim, has spent her life working for women’s rights and equality worldwide. She spoke movingly of women exchanged for cows in Sudan, and wisely declared that one needs utter curiosity even concerning the heart of darkness—only then can there be a bridge for peace. Also what the Dalai Lama told her: If you don’t respect those you serve, then do not serve.

October 5, 2012

I was invited by the Dickey Center to share breakfast with Zainab and a small group of students and faculty. Wonderful to see her more intimately. I brought her my translation of Ritsos’s “Peace,” which, as I told her, seems almost to have been written by her. She smiled beautifully. Responding to questions, she described how the money poured largely by us into Iraq served chiefly to create corruption because there was, and is, no civil society in Iraq ready to use it, no NGOs. Thus it went to incompetents and to corrupt officials. In response to my question about the role of Islam in discriminating against women, she said that Islam is going through its dark age and perhaps just beginning to emerge. It is wonderfully beautiful (e.g. as described to her by her mother when she—Zainab—was a child) but also terribly corrupt and horrible. And of course she noted that all three of the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are paternalistic.

October 7, 2012

Riparius

I’ve longed to return to the farm and I found an excuse: to get books on Ulysses, which I’ll be teaching for ILEAD in the spring. So we left today early and spent a delicious five hours on the farm, walking a bit to see the fall color and planting garlic cloves in the garden, mulching them against winter cold and expecting to harvest them next summer. Then our usual spaghetti (Chrysanthi) and veal (Peter) dinner at Three Tomatoes, Rutland.

October 10, 2012

Discovered in the Greek newspapers today that a general strike is being considered for October 18, the day I’m meant to board a plane at 6:30 a.m. Will the airport be closed?

Saturday, October 13, 2012

US Airways flight two hours late to Frankfort. I had only an hour and a quarter to catch the Lufthansa flight in another terminal + security + passport stamping, but I did make it. Trouble with a steward who said my valise was too heavy (owing to two copies of the Selected Letters), but I managed to lift it. Settled in the Achilleas Hotel on Lekka, very familiar, of course. Someone told me that Lekka is now the center of Athens’ drug traffic and the like; it does look rather “potted” at night. Bought Christos and Eri some beautiful dried figs and went to Πλατεία Βικτωρίας. What a nice, deep friendship. We both remarked, simultaneously, that each time we visit together it’s as though no time had intervened. We simply resume the previous conversation that lapsed perhaps five or more years ago. This time Christos had a guest, Γιώργος Μιχαηλίδης, who, he says, is Greece’s most important contemporary novelist. Michaelidis of course gave me a book to take home. And Christos gave me a study he completed on Ritsos’s “Orpheus,” which I had written about many decades ago, and Eri gave me something of hers. Aspasia-Maria, now an assistant director at the Εθνικό Θέατρο (!), was still at work there, so I didn’t see her. She is 24 years old. Christos has some difficulty walking, and uses a cane, but is able to circulate. He wants to dedicate an issue of Θέματα Λογοτεχνίας to me. The first thing he needs is my full CV, which I will send when I return home. While I was there, Meg telephoned from England (they have good relations now). She said an extraordinary event had just happened—an epiphany. Years ago one night when she was preparing supper and Michael was fixing a bird feeder, he went to the next room to hang it outside a window and simply died suddenly. Since then, Meg said, no birds ever used the feeder until this very day, when she was amazed to see a crowd of goldfinches there. She also said that she’s been awarded a visiting term at the University of Edinburgh and thus will be teaching again. I told her about the planned events on February 18 in London, and my hope that she can come. Over dinner, Christos filled in the latest about Dimitris, who is still in the halfway house near the university, and Pavlos, who is in a house in Blackpool with excellent wardens. He brought out a painting of this 45-year-old handsome, masculine man who is so severely handicapped with autism. Christos and Eri insisted that I take a taxi to the hotel rather than the Metro because I would be carrying my black attaché case, a great temptation apparently for robbers. Things have changed.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Iacovos Tsalicoglou came to the hotel at 10:00 a.m., bought a copy of the Selected Letters (€63) and sat for two hours talking a lot about his life. The private university here in Athens where he used to teach economics simply went out of business and he was never able to find another job, not even with College Year in Athens. So he became an “independent scholar.” He has produced a short book on scholarly techniques and problems, in English. And he queried me on publication possibilities. Without encouraging him, I said that I could approach Princeton University Press on his behalf and also UPNE. He should consider electronic publishing and also a vanity press. He’ll send me a copy. It’s lovely that this old Dartmouth friendship continues. Then at 12:00 noon another Dartmouth friend, Don Nielsen, arrived with his wife Lia. I had brought them some lip balm and hydrogen peroxide that they had requested. We walked through Plaka, first past restaurants mobbed with tourists, eventually to a quiet, almost deserted one under the Acropolis. Long, very warm talk with Lia about her new job, teaching English to gymnasium students in a φροντιστήριο, which is far superior to her old one. And she actually gets paid—not much, but at least regularly. She lamented that none of the teachers she had for English literature demonstrated any real love or passion for their profession. Don is walking now without pain owing to two artificial hips. And he can put on his socks and tie his shoelaces. He remembered with great gratitude the machine I brought for him from America to do this; happily it is no longer needed. As always, he has a spectacular scheme, perhaps not just one but two, both of which can help the Farm School, he declares, and not cost the School any money! In addition, he knows of a better design of hothouses, totally “green.” He’ll give me documentation on both of these, so I can say something at the AFS trustees’ meeting next week. . . . At 6:00 p.m. I arrived at the Ξενοδοχείο Αθηναΐς near Mavili Square. The whole gang was there: Constance, Stassinakis, Gounelas, Stamatis, plus six others on the local board of the Friends of Kazantzakis. Constance guided me in plans for tomorrow’s presentation. Stassinakis talked a blue streak, as usual. I had nice reunions with various people I’d been with on previous visits, and we finished, as always, with a dinner in the hotel, at Stassinakis’s expense. Back to Lekka by taxi, with Constance. I walk around Athens now only with a plastic sack, not my attaché case, fearing that the case will be tempting to someone to steal.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Stassinakis came early with a driver and we went to the Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, Σόλωνος 60. The manager, very κεφάτος and friendly, gave us a table, offered coffee. Downstairs I noted that they don’t stock my Πολιτική του πνεύματος in the Literary Criticism section, although they said that they had done so in the past and needed to order more copies. Very few original works of Kazantzakis’s either. Oh well . . . Θανάσης Παπαθανασόπουλος came at 11:00, the first visitor. He kept emphasizing that he failed to be inducted into the Academy by one vote. Fond memories of our visit to his apartment probably in 1995. Others came, too, including Don Nielsen, and the inevitable privately published poets who autographed copies of their latest to give to me. But, amazingly, I sold every book we had brought, seven in all. I kept one so I’d have something to show in Iraklio. One man bought two copies, gave me €150 and refused change. He identified himself as a surgeon, so presumably doesn’t need change. Νίκη Σταύρου spent two hours with us, bringing two members of the team that runs Εκδόσεις Καζαντζάκη. At one point she asked me if I’d do a fresh translation of Zorba. “It’s under copyright,” I reminded her. She knows all that, naturally. She says that she gets along well with the manager of Simon and Schuster in New York and thinks that he’ll agree to have the novel re-translated. I said I’d be interested. Πώς λοιπόν να γλιτώσω απ’ τον Καζαντζάκη; She wondered also about a new translation of Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης and I said I wasn’t at all interested in doing that. But to create a really good, accurate English version of Zorba would be nice. And I might even convince S & S to give me some of the royalties. . . . My pocket full of the cash from all these sales, I went to lunch with Dimitri Gounelas in the restaurant on Βουλής that Christos once took me to. Very few customers, which seems now to be the rule in the Greek crisis. Dimitri asked about the sort of contract he should expect. I said I’ll send him my Princeton contracts as models. . . . Some delicious rest. Then by taxi to the Γεννάδειος Βιβλιοθήκη with an Albanian driver who had no idea where it was. But I remembered enough from my last lecture there: above Ευαγγελισμός in Kolonaki. Good audience including Christos, Don, Iacovos, Κυριακή Πετράκου, Diana Haas, who works on the Cavafy archive and whom I remembered from my talk at NYU on Η ζωή εν τάφω, plus of course Stassinakis and his entire committee, an important priest in the first row representing a more important priest, a member of parliament (Νέα Δημοκρατία), and various other notables. I had no trouble reading my talk. I did it precisely in the 30 minutes I was allotted. Gounelas spoke well about Kazantzakis’s relation to Mussolini and Hitler, drawing a lot from my chapter. Stamatis Philippidis also spoke strongly, but I’m embarrassed to say that I fell asleep during his talk and awoke, or was awakened, by the applause at the end. I suppose that people saw me nod off, but no one said anything. Lots of very kind people afterwards. Lots of photos. A TV interview in the hallway. But finally we escaped—Niki, Gounelas, Philippidis, Nikos Mathioudakis, and I—to a very fancy restaurant in Kolonaki (my shrimp entrée cost €22, plus of course more for wine, coffee, pourboire). At the restaurant, waiting for us, was Niki’s husband, Spiros, a loud, pleasant man who runs the business end of Εκδόσεις Καζαντζάκη. He said that they break even barely and complains that his profits are taxed extremely heavily. Niki is up all night, he says, answering hundreds of e-mails from all over the world. I predict that when the Selected Letters appears in Greek, she’ll be even busier.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Met Stassinakis at the airport and we flew together to Iraklio. Nice to be in the Atrion Hotel again, unchanged since my last visit. Welcome siesta. Then to the Lions Square and the Androgeo, where I lectured so many times in 2007. Hugs and kisses from Barbara Tsaka, big smiles from Leventis, greetings from a lady who introduced herself as a good friend of Ava’s (Ava left three days ago). I was surprised that Katsalaki didn’t come; nor did Gareth Owens. Someone conveyed Stylianos Alexiou’s regrets; he is over 90 and unable to circulate. Ben Petre gave me some new work of his. The Mayor spoke well at first. Stassinakis then explained the activities of the Friends. Early in my talk I exhibited the one remaining copy of the book and announced my desire to donate it to the Vikelaia Library, whose director was sitting in the first row. I lengthened the talk by including a few more passages from the letters. I felt very confident in delivering it, just as though it were in English. No questions or preaching afterward. A relief. Then we went to supper with Ava’s friend and her husband, a very interesting physician who gave a long explanation of Stassinakis’s sleep apnea, and the chair of the Friends in Iraklio. Back in the hotel at the amazingly early hour, for Greece, of 11:00 p.m., I caught some of the Obama-Romney debate on the TV and the conclusion of many that Obama did well this time, overcoming the Democratic despair that followed the first debate, in which he did not do well.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Went out to buy τραχανάς and Loumidis coffee. Finally discovered through the internet that airline controllers would go on strike tomorrow starting at 10:00 a.m., which means that my 6:30 a.m. flight will be OK, as Lufthansa assured me when I telephoned. Big relief. Just about everything will stop tomorrow: Metro, taxis, trolleys, ships. . . . Nice to spend the night again in the Sofitel, where they know me from previous times. I didn’t have to fill out the usual form; all the information was in their computer.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Athens–Hanover

All went well. Up at 4:15 a.m. Lufthansa at 6:30 a.m. to Munich, long before the airport closed at 10:00 a.m. US Airways business class thankfully for the nine-hour flight to Philadelphia. Wonderfully comfortable. I worked on the computer most of the time. Kept to veggies and fruit at first but then switched to high proteins—meat! By a mistake, I thought yesterday was my fast day; it was supposed to be the feast day. But actually this was better. I fasted all of yesterday and about half of today, switching to high protein diet just about 6:00 a.m. American time (12 noon German time). In Philadelphia I had to go to the agricultural inspectors because I had declared the figs I bought for Chrysanthi. But they passed them. Full flight to Boston, but only an hour. Comfortable Dartmouth Coach to Hanover, and hugs and kisses from Chrysanthi when I got off the bus. 25+ hours, but relaxing.

Friday, October 19, 2012

No jet lag at all. Slept normally. Chrysanthi enjoyed her gifts of figs (delicious!), τραχανάς, and a large Loumidis coffee. Lots of unpacking to do, testimonials to send for Tom Akstens, and agenda to prepare for the AFS Secondary/Student Life Committee next Friday. Learned that Jerry King died while I was away, one of the best people here; he leaves Muriel, whose rheumatoid arthritis handicaps her so severely. Lots of practicing of Gershwin and Schumann for Sunday.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

An amazing 70 degrees. Trees brilliant orange-red outside our window. I bicycled to the Co-op to buy grapes and Macintosh apples. Started thinking about my Rollins Chapel sermon on November 4, on the mind and God. Norman Porter, the very able man on the facilities staff here, taught me how to activate the new system for projecting power point. Bob Christie tried his slides and everything seems OK for tomorrow morning. . . . Annie Levis sent an e-mail to say that she won’t be coming to the AFS trustees next week because Aris, her husband, has cirrhosis of the liver, which is incurable except by liver transplant. Sad. I sent my condolences, naturally. Also to Marjorie King.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

I played the prelude and postlude for Bob Christie’s Interfaith Gathering. The Gershwin Prelude #2 went well enough, although there were two mistakes that probably weren’t noticed. But the postlude, Schumann’s Träumerei, was perfect—not a single mistake. Hooray!

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

NYC

To New York by train. Went immediately to the Frick Museum to see old favorites after many years’ absence. What a pleasure! Vermeer’s “Officer and Girl” with light streaming in through the window on the girl’s face. El Greco’s “St. Jerome” dressed in his cardinal’s robe with his hands on the opened pages of the Vulgate Bible, the Latin translation, which he has completed. Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert.” I thought he was receiving the stigmata but perhaps he’s just in ecstasy, meditating. And a painting I don’t remember from previous visits: Ingres’ “Countess of Haussonville” (1845), in her blue dress with her finger pressed to her chin, very different and memorable. Then of course Constable’s “Salisbury Cathedral,” where one can see the over-sized steeple leaning a bit out of the vertical, as so well evoked in Golding’s The Spire. Then my especial favorite, the Rembrandt Self-Portrait from 1658, cheeks, nose, mouth lighted, but a dark shadow over the eyes. Turner’s “Dieppe Harbor” (1826), so crowded with boats and activity, another that I don’t remember from past visits. But of course I very much remembered Whistler’s “Conte Robert de Montesquieu-Fezensac” (1892), most of course because Proust modeled Charlus on him. Finally El Greco’s very small canvas of the “Purification of the Temple,” crowded with figures and with a very active Christ in the middle. The museum building is unchanged. Sorry the music room was closed; I remember concerts there, especially Glenn Gould when I was probably ten years old. . . . To the Union League Club on East 37th for the Farm School’s gala. Met Manita Scocimara’s daughter and Swiss son-in-law, parents of Alexi, the girl who came to Dartmouth somewhat because of me, left, returned, left again, and is now finishing her degree in England. They assured me that daughter is now fine. And there are no hard feelings about Dartmouth. The father whispered in my ear that Greece is being kept temporarily in the Euro by the Swiss banks and that she’ll be dumped at an opportune moment, and will revert to the drachma. I sat next to a talkative, interesting woman, married to a Greek, whose knowledge of the Farm School comes exclusively from Greek Summer—Nancy Mantzikos, involved with the Delfinia Group, which arranges luxury tours to Greece. I assured her that this does not give an accurate picture of the School’s nature and doings. She needs to visit, obviously. Also sat next to fellow trustee Bob Uek and got to know him a little better. He’s all in finance, audits, and such things. . . . Nice e-mail from Nurzhan, who is now in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City no less, where Chad has an NGO job. She has taken out US citizenship, which simplifies her travels. Too bad that our Monica didn’t do this during the five-year period when Alec was at Friends Select. Now she cannot because they live in America only five or six weeks a year. I wrote to Albana as well but have not received an answer, which worries me. She was meant to be in Crete but didn’t show up for my lecture in Iraklio last week.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

NYC

To MoMA to see Munch’s “The Scream,” which Leon Black purchased for $119,900,000 and has lent to the Museum (anonymously) for a few months. I must say that it is very interesting, indeed memorable. Munch was apparently something of a psycho and he wanted viewers truly to understand and experience what a psychologically disturbed person feels, what makes him or her scream. The painting succeeds in doing this. I certainly would not like to have it in my bedroom to view first thing upon awakening. Apparently Munch meant the scream not to be from the specific figure but rather to be the generic scream of nature. Poor anguished person! . . . College Committee. Perrotis rated #1 of private colleges in Greece, above Deree-Pierce. I warned everyone about the “reality” of these classifications as opposed to the “perception” created. Panos thinks we would do better affiliating with an American university as opposed to the Cardiff institute. We would need then to make Perrotis a four-year college. The vast majority of students are now Greek, who were described to us repeatedly as the worst students because typically they enroll in Perrotis because they fail entrance to Greek public universities. Only 20% of students are now from the Balkans, etc. This is a major change. I spoke very positively about Vergos when we discussed extension work, saying how mature and strong he was after the humiliation of being removed as Perrotis’s director. . . . Afterwards, cocktails at Joel Post’s on East 77th. Nice talk with his wife. They have a six-year-old son in a fancy private school. I reminisced about St. David’s and Marymount, both of which she knew about. Earlier, long talk with Seth Frank, who wanted to know how Mike Keeley is doing. I told him the sad news about Mary’s death.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Prepared for Agriculture and Secondary, working in the Yale Club library. Attended the Farm meeting and gave my report about the Nielsen scheme to deal with cow manure and other waste. People seemed interested. In the Secondary Committee I was asked to introduce the possible problem of sexual harassment of our young students. Does the School have a policy about this and a procedure? I asked Panos to report at the next meeting of the trustees. . . . Nice long supper at the Yale Club with Burt Pike, who, like me, is active, alert, and productive. I didn’t realize that he had supervised Constance Tagopoulos’s dissertation at CUNY. . . . Then to the theater to see Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People for the first time, very well acted by Boyd Gaines as Stockmann and Richard Thomas as his brother, the Mayor. It is so terribly bitter, about how honesty is defeated by expediency and how democracy is perverted by an illiterate populace and a scheming self-serving bureaucracy.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Full board. Charlotte as autocratic as ever. Announced that we’d skip the March meeting. I objected, saying that such a decision should be discussed by the full board and then voted one way or the other. Others concurred. So, in the event, the board voted to restore the March meeting. The question of leadership also arose. Why didn’t a committee on trustees recommend a slate of officers instead of us simply re-appointing the incumbents, including Charlotte, of course, as president. Well, the committee went out and came back in ten minutes recommending, the cowards, that the existing officers be continued. So we’re stuck with Charlotte again. . . . One good idea, from John Crunkilton: we should look for trustees who are connected with early childhood education. I’ll think about those I know from the ACTFL group. But they won’t have thousands of dollars to contribute.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Chrysanthi and I both went to Meeting at Kendal, which now attracts about twenty people. Very good ministry, especially from Rose Miller. Then to the opera, Otello, but I needed to leave early to get back to perform in the Early Music program: Goldberg Variation 18. I made mistakes but apparently people didn’t notice; several said how well I played! Then a lovely, lively supper with Audrey Cherin and Bill Tait. What fun to be in Kendal!

November 7, 2012

We’re all delighted because Obama won a strong victory. Amazingly, New Hampshire elected a Democratic governor and sent Ann McLane Kuster to Congress. Even Warren County, New York, elected a Democratic Congressman.

November 13, 2012

I’ve been reading E. A. Milne’s Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God, most of which I cannot understand because he’s a mathematical physicist. But occasionally he speaks non-technically, as for instance on p. 133: “. . . laws of nature are not special ad hoc creations, thrown in by the Creator to keep the world running, as fuel is fed into a machine, not even as catalysts, facilitating the ‘reaction’ of evolutionary process; but they are part of the inevitable accompaniment of the actual content of the universe . . . It seems to me that this state of affairs makes the physical universe a more perfect construction, more worthy of our wonder . . . than if we regarded the universe as an amorphous structure on which certain independent ‘laws of nature’ were set to work.”

November 15, 2012

Philadelphia

Very nice dinner in Philadelphia with Chrysanthi, Leander, and Dan Seeger. Dan very talkative, especially about his disappointment with Obama (although he voted for him, even though he considered voting for Romney in order to make everything so totally bad four years from now that perhaps some acceptable candidate would emerge). Leander reported a fine visit to Moravian College with Sophia, who is attracted to its program in developmental psychology. She is finally doing well in math and chemistry, thanks to a good tutor. Nicholas gets “A” in everything without doing any work. He’s silent and morose most of the time. Although Leander spent excessive time with both children reading to them and they to him, neither now reads, except on the internet, of course. Dan says he’d be willing to speak to Hanover Friends Meeting on the Pope’s encyclical on world peace, which is being remembered now and celebrated.

November 16, 2012

Philadelphia, Marriott Downtown, 1201 Market Street

Went to explore the Reading Terminal Market, across the street from the hotel. Many of the stalls are staffed by Amish women, all very prim, dressed in their long skirts, hair covered. I bought a jar of Amish jam. . . . The three sessions for Modern Greek were mostly stimulating and occasionally truly excellent. How nice to be with scholars again, each one adding something new and interesting for me. Also how nice to see old friends and acquaintances—from Stanford, Harvard, Drexel, the Odyssey School in Wilmington—and to meet new people, especially Ουρανία from Athens, who spoke so very well on enclitics, when to use them and when not to. For once I was simply a listener, although I participated in the various discussions. . . . Quick lunch in the Reading Terminal Market, served by an Amish man who seemed mostly interested in the cash box. Slight break after the last afternoon session; then walked to Locust just beyond Broad Street, across from the Academy, to the Estia Greek restaurant (215 735-7700), where Vassiliki had reserved a private dining room for about 20 people, some from the convention, some from the community, including a woman who used to teach Modern Greek at the Bronx High School of Science. This was very lively, although the food was nothing special.

November 17, 2012

Philadelphia–Washington

To the new Barnes Museum in the morning. The building itself is exceptional, inside and out (gardens, trees, and pools outside). The paintings, arranged exactly as they were in the original museum in Merion, are of course extraordinary. Indeed, the richness is so great that I found myself concentrating only on a single painter, Cézanne, represented by dozens of gorgeous masterpieces, with the very large “Card Players” in the main gallery. Landscapes, portraits (e.g., of his favorite postman), still-lifes. All of them educe a power and subtlety lacking, I’d say, in the numerous Renoirs also on display. One genuine El Greco, several “from the school of El Greco.” Philadelphia festive on this sunny day, preparing for a Marathon race tomorrow. Peeked into the Free Library on the walk back but didn’t have time to go upstairs to revisit the main reading room. Parkway, where I walked, is surely one of the world’s marvels of city planning. . . . Back at the hotel, however, I was dragged into the embarrassing dispute between the two “directors” of our project, the two Evas, who are academics from Stanford and Harvard, and poor Vassiliki, named “coordinator” and accused in a loud dispute over a table in the restaurant of exceeding her responsibilities, claiming that our standards are finished when they are not, inviting people to an exorbitant $70 supper last night (neither of the Evas attended), etc. Loud voices, self-justification on both sides. I counseled them to forget the past, letting bygones be bygones, and to be more careful about the future, with Vassiliki coordinating more democratically. A sad, contentious way to end an otherwise pleasant time in Philadelphia. . . . Train to Union Station, Washington. Metro to Foggy Bottom, shuttle to Kennedy Center. Met Deanna and Chrysanthi. Supper in the café on the top floor. Then a marvelous concert. First the Tchaikovsky violin concerto played by a splendid virtuoso, Sergey Khachatryan, who from the very first phrase displayed an exceptional musicality, especially in his ability to achieve pianissimos. We gave him a standing ovation, with pleasure. Then Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony, opus 43, the one that Stalin disliked and had to be withheld until after Stalin’s death. A full hour long. Huge orchestra: 7 French horns, 2 tubas, 2 harps, multiple percussion players. Deanna sitting alone on stage (her partner was ill), very visible. Splendid conductor, Vasily Petrenko, whom Deanna said she and the other players liked and admired. He required four rehearsals to get the orchestra to stay together in this difficult music with changes in time signature frequent, ultra-sudden shifts from ff to pp, etc. The sadness—despair—was evident, as though the music were somehow declaring “Save us from Stalin!” Another standing ovation at the end.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Washington

Leander drove us all to Arlington, Virginia to a restaurant on the Potomac for Sunday brunch: eggs benedict on Maryland crab-cakes, not very good, alas, but the atmosphere was pleasant. Then, next door, the Torpedo Factory, now a haven for artists, with 300+ studios where people work and display their wares, which I found uninteresting for the most part and extremely over-priced. But they also run a school for amateurs, which is good. We walked through the historical section of Alexandria, with its million dollar homes. Then to the mall in Washington. Walked to the back of the White House and took photos of ourselves with the building in the background. Only when we returned to Lopa Court and I surveyed the news on the internet did I realize that an hour or two later Bill McKibben would be leading his followers around the White House property to encourage Obama not to allow the tar sands pipeline. Too bad we missed this. No wonder there were policemen on the street already when we were there. . . . I read Dennis Carroll’s revision of his parody of Paul’s letter to the Romans and sent him an e-mail with my comments in time for our meeting tomorrow.

Monday, November 19, 2012

A full day in town, although I practiced my Goldberg fugue a bit before leaving and also some of the Milhaud. To the National Gallery first. So nice to see El Greco’s large “Laocoön,” his very bright “Madonna and Child,” his “Saint Idelfonso,” who looks very “academic,” sitting at a desk and writing, and a version, not the best one, of “Christ Cleansing the Temple.” Also a Rembrandt self-portrait when he was 53 years old (1659) but lacking the magic of the self-portraits in the Frick and the Met. I was pleased as well to see the famous “Venus and Adonis” by Titian, Venus resisting Adonis’s advances just, I think, to maintain good form, not really to send him packing. Another nice Rembrandt, his “Lucretia” about to plunge a knife into her breast, poor thing. . . . Walked up 7th Street to the District Chop House for a 2½ hour lunch with Dennis Carroll. He encouraged me to use Xlibris for my journal and gave me pointers: use 11-point type with justified right margins; order soft-bound copies, which they do well, not hard-bound ones, which they do poorly; perhaps have them do a volume 1 of the journal before I finish everything. As for him, he hopes to complete his revised New Testament, first the Pauline epistles. I hoped he would do justice to Hebrews, chapter 11 on faith, and of course play nicely with Apocalypse. I think he is reconciled to never being published except by Xlibris, with whom he apparently has more volumes than anyone else on their list. . . . Then Metro to Dupont Circle and a bit of a walk to 1000 Connecticut Avenue, the shirt store that advertised pure cotton shirts for $39—Charles Tyrwhitt from Jermyn Street, London. They measured me: neck now 16 inches, alas, sleeve 32. I ended up buying three shirts which Chrysanthi can give me for Christmas!

. . . I’m sitting now, writing this, in the Martin Luther King public library on G Street and 10th, NW, very comfortably for 1½ hours until I meet everyone at a Chinese restaurant nearby before going to see the Wizards (who so far have lost every single game) at the Verizon Center. . . . I’m reading in the TLS about the new volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters and am about half way through John D. Barrow’s The Book of Universes, about to begin the section entitled “Chaotic Universes” (p. 161). . . . To Chinatown, nearby, and a Mongolian restaurant to meet everyone else at 5:30. There’s a buffet of raw meat, lo mein, vegetables, etc. You choose what you want, place it in a bowl, add garlic to taste, then tell the chef if you want it hot or mild; he adds the appropriate sauces, then cooks everything on a very hot griddle and returns it to you in your bowl. Waitress brings rice and tea. You eat and then, if you wish, go back for more, repeating the process. I had beef the first time, lamb the second. I didn’t find either particularly tasty. . . . Then to the immense Verizon Center to see the Wizards play Indiana. The Wizards lost again but at one moment were only a single point behind. Indiana was clearly the better team. Wizards seem always to miss the basket, even on most foul shots. Lots of noise. An organ. Chorus girls. People hawking beer. A Child’s game during half-time plus amazing acrobats jumping high up, turning summersaults in mid-air, and placing a basketball in the hoop on the way down. Chrysanthi very engaged, cheering the Wizards when they scored, moaning when they missed a point. Fun. Nightcap of Β & Β.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Very nice to return to the Phillips Collection. I’d forgotten that they have a truly magnificent El Greco, “Repentant St. Peter,” ca. 1600. Peter is strong, muscular, with full gray beard and plenty of hair, in perfect physical shape despite his despair. Next to this painting is the same subject by Goya, ca. 1822, with Peter old, sickly, fat, bald. An interesting pair. Of course I remembered the large Renoir “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1881). How could one forget that? But it was stimulating to find other paintings that I’d never noticed in previous visits or had forgotten: Rouault’s “Afterglow Galilee,” with its sunset colors and thick paint; Manet’s “Spanish Ballet” (1862), very unlike most Manets; van Gogh’s “Road Menders” (1889), with its eerie row of greenish trees; Cézanne’s “Garden of Les Lauves,” totally abstract, almost like a Kandinsky, and painted in 1906, the year he died—interesting to compare this with the Cézanne self-portrait of 1880 when he was 41 years old: totally representational. Then of course there is the Rothko room with a large typical Rothko, solid colors, on each wall, supposed to enhance meditation. Lost on me. Lastly, some wickedly abstract monstrosities by Dove, whose celebrity eludes me. . . . . After this, it was stimulating to be introduced to a true creative genius in the East Building of the National Gallery: Roy Lichtenstein. If one knew only his sort of comic book illustrations done with dots, one would not think much of him. But this larger retrospective exhibition showed his inventiveness and individuality evidenced in numerous transformations of style and content. The East Wing also has some treasures on (I think) permanent exhibition. I was attracted by Kandinsky’s “Improvisation 31” (1913), Brancusi’s two separate “Bird in Space” statues (1925, 1927), gleaming and smooth, Georgia O’Keefe’s “Line and Curve” (1927), several disturbing paintings by Mad Beckmann, especially his large “Argonauts” (1950), and the immediately recognizable Giacometti elongated nudes. . . . I should have mentioned that Leander took me for lunch at a deli that he knew; we had very good pastrami and chopped chicken liver. Crowded, but we got a table. I of course ordered the chopped chicken liver, he ordered pastrami. Nice. So now I don’t have to try Katz’s again in the Lower East Side, where we couldn’t get in because the line went around the block. One chopped chicken liver sandwich per year (or, better, per decade) is truly enough. . . . After supper, Leander and I went to the new Spielberg movie, “Lincoln,” in the theater complex at the lake where the Sodexo headquarters are. The star is Day-Lewis, whose father I remember meeting at Chatto and Windus’s in 1958. A brilliantly intellectual film concentrating on Lincoln’s obsessive desire to have the House pass the Thirteenth Amendment, freeing slaves, despite all the opposition even in his own party (Republicans) and of course in the opposition Democrats. The polarized House, as shown, seemed exactly like our contemporary polarized House (maybe that was Spielberg’s point). Votes had to be “bought” in various ways. A two-thirds majority was achieved, barely, with two votes to spare. Soon afterward, Lincoln was assassinated by Booth, who thought of himself as a Brutus necessarily killing a “tyrant.”

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Drove in with Deanna. Spent the morning in George Washington University’s library, reading Barrow’s The Book of Universes, some of which I actually understand, since it is not mathematical. Had lunch in the Starbuck’s next door, finishing the second half of yesterday’s chopped chicken liver sandwich, plus a latte. Then Metro to L’Enfant Plaza, which is very grand, with interesting architecture, and walked to the Space Museum. Luckily I was able to attach myself to an excellent tour led by a former fighter pilot. Most interesting to me was the large exhibit devoted to the Wright Brothers and containing the actual plane that they flew for twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk plus the experimental gliders that preceded this flight. Although sort of Rube Goldberg from a modern standpoint, their device was carefully planned and built after much preliminary experimentation—the true beginning of air transportation. Leander told us later that he and family have visited Kitty Hawk, where there is a large museum dedicated to the Wright Brothers and their achievement. Also interesting to me in the Space Museum was the material on Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow, including his actual plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. I asked the guide how Lindbergh stayed awake and he said, among other things, that he flew close to the ocean’s surface with open windows so that spray landed on his face. Lots on planetary exploration, manless planes (drones), how planes land and take off from aircraft carriers, Copernicus and Galileo, the comparative sizes and distances of all the planets of our solar system, the fact that the large distance ones like Jupiter and Saturn are not solid but are gaseous, and more and more, for example on comets: where they originate, how often they return, why they are called comets (from the Greek κομήτης, of course, “having long hair”—the tails). . . . I then went to the National Portrait Gallery, near Gallery Place Metro. I’d been there before but this time, seeing a Benton painting on one of the posters outside, I inquired whether they had other Bentons. And they do indeed: two real beauties, the best Bentons I’ve ever seen. On the third floor is a large “Self-Portrait with Rita” (his wife) painted on Martha’s Vineyard where they were vacationing in 1923. Benton paints himself bare-chested with muscles like a body-builder’s, whereas Rita is not glamorized at all. Then on the 2nd floor there is a huge canvas, really a mural, called “Achelous and Hercules” (1947). It’s 22 feet long. A muscular Hercules wearing blue jeans is about to break off one of the horns of Achelous, the river-god now a bull as the river floods. One broken horn becomes “cornucopia,” the full harvest owing to the irrigation the river provides. All this relates to Benton’s home state, Missouri. His murals in the State Capitol, finished in 1936, contain the panel for which we own a study.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Thanksgiving feast. Leander gave a long “blessing,” offering thanks for health and good spirits, and especially for his dear wife (with a bit of broken voice here). Nicholas dressed with blazer and necktie, Sophia in her #1 blue jeans. Walked around the pond afterwards and then watched a remarkable film, “Babe,” so sensitive about a piglet who trains as a sheep-dog, and thus is not served up as pork.

Friday, November 23, 2012

On the long train ride home I typed more of volume 32 of my journal despite the rough tracks, and read TLS, including the following about Spinoza, which amazed me because my views are just like his in many ways. Here’s why, according to Daniel Schwartz’s book, reviewed by Steven Nadler: “In his metaphysical and moral masterpiece, the Ethics, Spinoza identifies God with ‘Nature’, defends the life of reason over ‘bondage’ to religious passions, and denies that there is any kind of personal immortality. In his ‘scandalous’ Theological-Political Treatise, he argues that miracles are impossible, that prophecy is a product not of knowledge but of the imagination, that the bible is not the inerrant word of God but merely a compilation of human writings passed down through the generations (and thus a ‘corrupted and mutilated document’), that organized religions are in fact just organized superstition, and that religious authorities have no right to exercise control over the state or over the freedom of people to think and say what they want. The work was vehemently attacked by church and civil authorities immediately after its publication in 1670.”

Sunday, November 25, 2012

I ministered about Spinoza in Meeting. David Montgomery ministered afterwards, saying he fails to understand why so many people react with such passion against these liberal values. (I told him afterwards about Rebecca Mays’s diagnosis to me during the Last Temptation controversy, that it’s basically a subconscious fear people harbor concerning mortality.) Judith Pettingell told me afterwards, “Wow! Those Spinoza values are exactly mine, too.” Phebe McCosker leaned over to tell about the efforts to convert Jews in Amsterdam to Quakerism in the 1600s when a man who ground lenses for a living (i.e., Spinoza) acted as translator. Somebody else recommended a relevant novel by Isaac Singer. But of course two women ministered later in Meeting about the centrality of emotion in knowing God, since rationality is necessarily deficient in this regard. Yes, God is love as well as mind. . . . Finished typing volume 32 of my journal, on typed page 2351. Volume 33 begins on June 22, 2006. I’m getting close. Only volumes 33, 34, and 35 to go, and I’ll be up to date. As Dennis Carroll suggests, it might be a good idea to print a first volume with Xlibris even before finishing the full typing.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

We had supper last night with Pete Kelsey, retired Episcopal priest. He said that his major effort in his various parishes was to convince people in the congregation that God loved them. I kept thinking of this in Meeting this morning and wondering how, say, a child dying of leukemia at age 9 could be convinced that God loved her. It’s the old problem of theodicy, of course. I kept striving for some solution. John Milton’s felix culpa, that God allows sin and suffering because some future good will come of it, didn’t satisfy me. I felt stuck until someone in Meeting ministered about being loved even though he didn’t deserve to be loved. Suddenly that seemed to work for me. The important thing is not just that God loves you but rather that God loves you—or that “you are loved” somehow by the universe—even though you don’t deserve to be. What this means, perhaps, is that there is always the possibility of redemption of some sort, the possibility only, not the assurance. Coincidentally, the opera we viewed this afternoon, Mozart’s last, La Clemenza di Tito, showed just this and seems, remarkably, to be Mozart’s final message in his difficult final year—namely that clemency is possible, and indeed redeems sin and suffering.

December 13, 2012

I appreciated encountering this in the journal for 2007 that I was typing yesterday: “I keep resisting posting at the farm. In Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man, p. 218, there is a good expression of my reason: “The maximum of freedom and the minimum of tyranny is achieved when God is recognized as the absolute owner and man as a steward and user.” Of course the word “steward” evokes the American Farm School, which Father House described as “Stewards of the Land,” Φροντιστές της γης.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Played the variation movement of Schubert’s Trout Quintet, transcribed for eight-hand piano, with Joan Wilson, Stan Udy, and Bill Clendenning for the Health Center audience. Full House. No nervousness and no mistakes. Lots of practice obviously helped.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

A full, interesting day. Started at the Meeting House at 8:30 a.m. with a meeting of the Adult Education Committee: Dulany Bennett, Jack Hunter, Hope Rennie, Frederika Graham. They want me to do two programs: the Meeting’s pacifist activity during the Vietnam War, ideally together with Peter Stettenheim, and the Meeting’s beginnings, purchase of the Rope Ferry Road property, decision to sell it, purchase of the Lebanon Street property. I also arranged for Doug Gwyn to come here from Pendle Hill in May to tell about some aspect of Quaker history. . . . Home at 10:10 a.m. Short time to practice. Then to the Gathering Room to do the music for DeWitt Mallary’s interfaith Gathering. I did Beethoven’s andante (in part) from the Appassionata as prologue, Goldberg Variation 30 as postlude, and three hymns. Again without nervousness or any serious mistakes. And I learned the Goldberg in just one week. Very encouraging. . . . Then we rushed to the new Black Family Arts Center (Leon Black’s gift) to see the Met’s HD movie of Aida, all four hours, with a very good lead: Liudmyla Monastyrska. Home in the first snow of this winter.

December 19, 2012

Arnie Alpert wrote that he spoke with the new Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. Rob Hirschfeld, who said he remembered me from going to Quaker Meeting when he was a student at Dartmouth. I looked up my records and found that I also had him in class. He was Dartmouth class of ’83. Interestingly I noted that he wrote the best final exam in the class and also a “heartfelt” paper explaining how affected he was by reading Ulysses and how it changed his life. Hope to meet him.

December 20, 2012

Andrew’s school sent all of us a very fine poem by Wendell Berry just before the Winter Solstice:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grass of the world, and am free.

December 24, 2012

Chrysanthi’s birthday, age 79 probably. We exchanged presents, just the two of us since this is the first year we didn’t all gather at Daphne’s South Salem house. They didn’t come, and they’re thinking of putting it up for sale. Greg sent me a Santa Barbara High School tennis cap, very nice. Leander sent chocolates and ripe pears and flavoring for coffee. But the best present was the Nook I bought for Chrysanthi; she broke into tears because, she said, she so much wanted something like this. Of course getting it to work was another matter. But so far I’ve managed to purchase Sudoku for it plus the book about Lincoln on which the recent film was based. . . . We visited Weezie, who is celebrating the 30th year of her ordination as an Episcopal priest.

December 25, 2012, Christmas

Snowing outside. A big surprise via an e-mail this morning from Leander. Last night they went to a pre-Christmas service at a Presbyterian church in Bethesda with a fine chorus. Sophia joined in the singing with vigor apparently, and says she wants to join the church. I responded to Leander with one word: “Wow!” This would be good for her and maybe for the family, if the minister is reasonably liberal. . . . This morning I finished typing volume 33 of this journal and began the present volume, 34, at typed page 2475. What to do with all this remains a problem. Probably Xlibris.

December 28, 2012

Reached 2011 tonight in my typing of the journal. Getting close. . . . Finally did a bit of cleanup in my Kendal “office”—the piles under the table that has the typewriter (now never used) and fax machine. A large amount was discarded, but I also discovered valuable things form the past, for example my talk on “Pagan and Christian Heroism” that I illustrated with two statues by Donatello. Also memories from the Kazantzakis Symposium I organized at NYU in 2007. . . . Iacovos Tsalicoglou sent me a manuscript he wrote that he thinks I can place with a publisher. Impossible, I fear.

December 29, 2012

The Kazantzakis Museum sent this postcard that Kazantzakis wrote to someone, probably from Antibes. It’s refreshing since so much else for Christmas is totally secular.

Χριστούγενα.

Ο Θεός να δόσει το παιδί που γενήθηκε σήμερα στη Βηθλεέμ να ξαναφέρει στη σημερινή αμαρτωλήν ανθρωπότητα την αρετή, την αφέλεια και την εβγένεια του «Υἱοῦ τοῦ Ἀνθρώπου».

Ν. Καζαντζάκης

2013

Hanover

January 1–June 28

Jan. 5, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Feb. 14–15, Boston, Charlotte, London Gatwick, Penn Club

Feb. 15–20 London

Feb. 21, Gatwick, Charlotte, Boston, Hanover

Feb. 24, Cambridge, A.R.T.

March 7–9, NYC, AFS trustees

May 1–3, NYC, ballet

May 17, Terpni

May 25–27, Terpni

June 1, Lawrence, Massachusetts

June 2–3, Terpni

June 17–24, Thessaloniki

Terpni

June 29–September 14

July 8, Hanover, Dr. Ficini

Hanover

Sept. 14–December 31

Sept. 21, Medford to Sally Pinkas’s, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Oct. 19, Terpni

Oct. 23, Durham, NH, UNH

Oct. 24–27, NYC, AFS trustees

Nov. 24–29, Leander’s

Dec. 24–26, Terpni

January 1, 2013

Nice lunch today with Muncks and Lappins; nice dinner last night (lobster). But this is the first New Year’s that we didn’t celebrate New Year’s Eve at the Rassias’s with snails (because of Mary’s death), didn’t go to South Salem for Christmas (because the Tebbes did not travel East this year), and in effect spent the holidays without children. One reason was our fine, extended stay with Leander for Thanksgiving; another was probably Christina’s grown-up lifestyle that precluded traveling for her. But Alec telephoned from Indonesia and Leander sent a nice e-mail. So it goes . . .

I’m hoping to free myself of the responsibility for the Interfaith Gatherings, which I’ve coordinated for seven years. I asked Bill Benson and he thinks that he can do it.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Cambridge

A TLS review of a new biography of Lyndon Johnson quotes one book as concluding, “Lyndon Johnson believed in nothing but his ambition. Everything he did was for his ambition.” This of course reminded me of the time I was in the White House listening to Johnson’s dismal recital to us of his own achievements, a display of naked egotism that made all of us cringe.

To Cambridge to the A.R.T. for a remarkable show called “Pippin,” revival of a 1972 Broadway musical about a young man trying to find meaning in his life and discovering that power and militarism are not the way (the original version played during the Vietnam War). This revival was done by a team of remarkable Canadian circus acrobats and a full orchestra. What a pleasure to see these twenty or so talented people, all trained in ballet, who could sing, dance, act, and perform miracles with their bodies.

Yesterday I vetted Nikos Mathioudakis’s proposal for a postgraduate time at Princeton, very badly written, alas. I sent him massive suggestions for changes. Today, I found his revision when we got back from Cambridge and supper at Three Tomatoes at 9:00 p.m. and looked at it again. Happily, it is just about ready to go, but he forgot to attach his name to it! I e-mailed it back. It’s due in Princeton on Monday.

January 6, 2013

Finished typing volume 35 on page 2584! Amazing. As George Bush infamously said regarding the Iraq war, “Mission accomplished.”

February 5, 2013

Spoke with the new director of the Dickey Center, Daniel Benjamin, about reviving the War/Peace University Seminar but no longer at the Hanover Inn, which has become too expensive. He wants to delay until he has a better sense of all of the Dickey Center’s programs. So, we’ll see . . .

February 6, 2013

Dan Benjamin delivered his first public lecture—on his subject of expertise: terrorism and counter-terrorism. I was pleased to hear him conclude that the country that emerged best of all, following terrorist threats, is Indonesia, and I wrote him afterwards about Alec’s adventures in 1998 during the coup and following it.

February 8, 2013

Niki Stavrou received a letter from Simon and Schuster indicating that they might look with favor on a re-translation of Zorba the Greek. Here’s hoping!

A sad visit tonight with Kesaya and Chris in Whittier. Lafayette has stopped eating and drinking, is heavily dosed with morphine owing to pain and obviously will die very soon. Kesaya realizes that this is now the best answer for her father. We spoke already about a memorial service here at Kendal. She hopes of course that David can arrive in time from New York despite the severe snowstorm now in progress. We all have so many uplifting memoires of Lafayette, not to mention Mayme. I thought of the party in Boston and my poem with No-Da as the refrain (Da of course meaning Yes in Russian).

February 12, 2013

Letter from Simon and Schuster indicating some interest in allowing a new translation of Zorba.

Marvelous four-hand duet recital by Sally Pinkas and her husband, Evan Hirsch. She invited me last night to a “salon” at Dartmouth where they played some of the four-hand pieces: Schubert’s Rondo and Shapero’s interesting piece. But today in Spaulding these were much better. And added to them were some two-piano pieces, South-American tangos and a marvelous sonata by Poulenc, whom I had erroneously thought wrote only light, playful pieces like the four-hand sonata I used to play at Woodbrooke long ago with Maurice Creasy. Tonight’s recital was brilliantly varied and showed off the real possibility of the two-piano literature.

February 13, 2013

Sally came for lunch at Kendal. Thankfully Chrysanthi, who has been homebound for a week with flu, felt well enough to partake. Sally of course wanted to tell us in detail how she fared so beautifully in Bangkok and at the Patana school thanks to Alec and family, and ultimately thanks to me for putting her in contact with Alec. Of course she marveled at the children, especially their dishwashing!

February 14–15, 2013

Boston, Charlotte, London, Penn Club

What a day! Routine flight, Envoy class, to Gatwick. No jet lag thanks to feast-fast and enough sleep. As promised, Nikos Mathioudakis met me at the airport with a car and driver. Penn Club always the same. In the guest book I noted that I had first resided there in 1955. Changed $400 in a bank at a good rate: 1.6047. Went to the British Museum. Reading Room closed, so couldn’t revive memories of when I used to work there. But there was a special exhibit upstairs of drawings of Greece by British travelers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Athenian Acropolis with sheep grazing outside. No buildup. Antiquities incorporated into the Turkish houses. Seeing the Elgin Marbles always sends a chill down my spine, especially the procession of horsemen. I’m glad they’re here, “saved” by Lord Elgin. It was lovely to see hordes of schoolchildren gazing at these sculptures and crowding around the Rosetta Stone. . . . I went to the Holbrooke Underground Station and put money on my Oyster Card, enough for a week, I was told. . . . Walked all the way to the Royal Academy, hoping to see the Manet exhibit, but there was a huge crowd on line for tickets. I was advised to come back at 9:00 p.m. (they’re open to 11:00 tonight). Passed time in the National Gallery; always a pleasure to see old favorites: the two unfinished Michelangelos, El Greco’s powerful large Christ driving the traders from the Temple (ca. 1600), Titian’s striking Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23), with Bacchus’s cape flowing out behind him as he leaps down from his chariot, which is drawn by two leopards. Then, of course, Rembrandt’s “Belshazzar’s Feast” (1636–38) with the fateful writing on the wall, and his two self-portraits, one at age 63, the other at age 34 when he was wealthy and successful and looking it, while at 63 (the last year of his life) he seems to be weighed down by life’s difficulties, something seen equally in his portraits of other old men. Finally, I always admire his “Woman Bathing in a Stream” (1654). . . . Supper of bad food in Chinatown, which is garish and immense. Then to an interesting play, The Audience, starring Helen Mirren. She played Queen Elizabeth II having her obligatory weekly audience for an hour with each and every prime minister, twelve in her experience, starting with Churchill. Twelve different actors, eleven men and one woman (for Maggie Thatcher), played the PMs and looked remarkably like each of them. The audience—sold-out house—was enchanted because of course they knew all about the troubles and scandals of each. Mirren played the queen with understatement except when she got angry at the despised Maggie Thatcher. She was tender with Harold Wilson when he confessed his Alzheimer’s and announced his decision to resign, whereupon she asked him to invite her and the Duke of Edinburgh to dinner at 10 Downing Street, the first such visit since Churchill’s time. Great audience; cheering at the end. Fine theater! But it was too late to go back to the Royal Academy Manet exhibit. I did, however, go in to see the other exhibit, “Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape.” By means of many prints and some full-color paintings, this showed how British painters began by imitating the French and Dutch landscape masters and then developed their own styles and mastery. Turner’s amazing abstractionism is not evident in his landscapes, as it is in his seascapes. My favorite, therefore, remained Constable, evidenced here by his disciple David Lucas’s “The Rainbow, Salisbury Cathedral” (of course) and his own “A Boat Passing a Lock.” After a while I could tell the difference between the master’s genuine work and an imitation by one of his school.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

London

At breakfast, talked with a friendly American diplomat working in our mission in Brussels and here on vacation because he says that Brussels is boring and also that it is always raining there. (Here: clear skies and sunshine!) He predicts that Greece will pull through slowly, but not yet. It probably should not have been accepted by the EU in 1981. We now know that it offered inaccurate financial data in its application. I explained the importance for Greece of choosing “Europe” as its chief partner rather than cow-towing to the Eastern bloc, especially given what happened in the Greek civil war. And I explained to him that in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, a Greek about to travel West to France, etc. would say Θα πάω στην Ευρώπη.

Alix MacSweeney came to visit around 10:00 a.m. She explained, poor thing, that she lost her husband last year. He was a longtime sufferer from diabetes and was dispatched by an attack of flu when he was applying for a job (besides painting) that he could not have handled physically, if it had been funded. He was a fairly successful painter, with works in the Tait here and in MoMA in New York. I must get his accurate name and see if I can look at the canvases in MoMA. Alix, herself a painter, is not practicing her art at the moment, since she’s preoccupied with preparing for her deceased husband’s probate, etc. Too bad. She has no further influence in the TLS but is not surprised at its failure so far to review my Selected Letters volume. The new Classics editor favors Ancient Greece and not Modern Greece, all too apparently. I told her of my failure to get into the Manet exhibit (which she had seen and found somewhat disappointing), whereupon she revealed that she is a member of the Royal Academy (RA) and can bring me in as her guest without a ticket. So we went there and, as she said, I entered immediately without cost or waiting in line. She, having seen the exhibit, departed. I found it much better than she had, although I also agreed with her assessment of many of the portraits as being clearly the work of someone interested primarily in the high (excessive?) fee. I found the show better than she did, although I agree that many of the portraits fail to evoke the subject’s spirit. But Manet has always been one of my favorites, and it was exciting to see his preferred black color predominating in so many canvases, one next to the other in five or six large galleries. Also interesting was to learn that he trained by copying previous masters, especially Goya, Velázquez, and Frans Hals. And I made a note of the saying by Baudelaire, an admirer of Manet, that music is the highest form of art owing to its non-mimetic quality. Of the paintings, aside from the famous “Music in the Tuileries Gardens” (1862), I especially liked the following: “George Moore in the Artist’s Garden.” Moore was of course admired by Joyce. And here he is, very young, looking ready for lively conversation, sitting in the sunshine, dressed shabbily as for an outing. “Portrait of Théodore Duret,” the look of a dandy. I thought of Whistler’s large portrait of the French aristocrat who was the model for Proust’s character Baron Charlus. Here, too, we see a man totally satisfied with himself—that is his “spirit” shining through. “Portrait of Berthe Morisot,” one of many. Her eyes are completely alive. Among the “status” portraits, the one of Antonin Proust (no relation to Marcel) shows a person 100% pleased with himself as a dandy. A nice touch is the one glove on and one glove off. Then of course there is the reduced version of “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” which looks somewhat frazzled compared to the large version, yet nevertheless conveys Manet’s willingness to shock the stuffed shirts.

The rest of the day was not so successful because both plays I saw were inferior (one in its execution, the other in its script) to The Audience last night. The first, Macbeth, was overacted. The lead had a Scottish accent, which was nice. But before his first soliloquy he pretended to vomit into a modern toilet, completely wrong for everything else. Lady Macbeth was young and somewhat glamorous, which seemed incongruous to me. Lots of thunder and lightning, and Macbeth’s severed head displayed in all its blood after MacDuff kills him. Etc., etc. Too much effort, strangely negating rather than abetting. I walked then on familiar ground down the Strand and across the river to the National Theatre. Good meal in the buffet there: chicken stroganoff. People always so helpful and kind. Pianist playing rags with admiral zest and power. But the play in the Olivier, the huge main theatre, had lots of empty seats and was, for me, a failure. It was called The Captain of Köpenick and was about a sad sack who kept screaming most of the time and was funny and interesting only when he donned an officer’s uniform found in a shop and commanded a group of soldiers deliciously. Of course the whole was a strong protest against militarism. But, as with Macbeth, the excessive theatrical efforts really had a negative effect instead of the opposite. These consisted, here, of revolving stages, half-stages that descended and were replaced by others; brass bands marching around the stage, and other theatrical marvels, all of which, for me, were totally un-marvelous and just interfered with what might have been successful if had been done simply, and without screaming. I walked back to the Penn Club.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Couldn’t attend Meeting because I had to leave at 12:00 noon to go to Watting to meet with Rowena Loverance. That was a bit of an adventure: tube, then an overground line to Shadwell. Then confusion. Everyone visible either in shops or on the street was Muslim (from Bangladesh, I learned later). One actually found Rowena’s street on a smart phone, but confusion remained until I found an English worker who showed me exactly how to find Rowena’s street. And there she was, outside, waiting for me at 1:00 p.m., just as previously arranged. She was “let go” with ten others from the British Museum about seven or eight years ago, and moved here with her elderly mother, who occupied the ground floor while Rowena was upstairs. Her mother died a few years ago and Rowena now has a roomy, attractive flat looking out at the large Shadwell Basin. We had so much to talk about! She remembered all the children’s names, and I went through the basics for Leander, Alec, and Daphne. She expanded on what had happened at the British Museum, basically a decision to make an entirely different use of the Reading Room from the one she had contributed to fashion—namely, multiple computers displaying the BM’s each and every object with full explanations. All that has been removed and is available now to anyone at home, on line. The Reading Room will become an exhibition space. She continues to work as a Byzantinist, her interest at present being in Byzantine sculpture. There isn’t much, and a great deal is simply “decorative,” but there are significant finds of objects that need cataloging with full explanations, which she is preparing for a new book. I suggested I’d see if Kathleen Corrigan could invite her to Dartmouth. We had a lovely lunch together. Then some neighbors called, a young couple, the man English, the wife Indian teaching English literature in a sixth-form school. He had fun talking about Joyce’s Portrait, etc. All this lasted until about 5:00 p.m. Rowena then walked me to see the river, which is extraordinarily wide here in Wapping, and to the train station. Tube to Green Park from which, with some difficulty and telephone calls, I reached the Park Lane Hotel to meet Niki Stavrou, Nikos Mathioudakis, and others for supper. Fun to see old friends and acquaintances, and to be introduced to many new people. Thanasis Maskaleris was there, just arrived from California, very jet-lagged and sleepy. Roddy Beaton arrived. He’d been at the other symposium, which I’d missed in order to go to the Manet exhibit. Nice to see Θανάσης Αγάθος again, after many years, and my friend Athina Vouyouka, representing Stassinakis and the Friends. We were served a fine dinner in the hotel, with a chance to meet the other symposiasts. One of them turned out to be a cousin of Eleni Tsacopoulos, so we had lots to talk about. I learned that Eleni is thriving as the US ambassador to Hungary; she wants to give all her business responsibilities to her brother and sisters, in order to continue with a career in politics. I told the cousin, Nektaria Klapaki, the curious story of the telephone call I had received from John Anton asking me to recommend Eleni for admission to Dartmouth although she was a poor student (B minus) but had a father worth millions. And Dartmouth accepted her! Home by taxi.

Monday, February 18, 2013

The big day. I was picked up by Niki’s special bus at the Penn Club. Mine was the first session. Of course everything began late, but no matter since Greek events never begin on time. I was preceded by Beaton, Mathioudakis, Lewis Owens, and Papanikolaou. My “Report to Nikos” (Αναφορά στο Νίκο) apparently was a great hit. I was the only speaker who, if nothing else, made people laugh (the όρτσα story). Lots of applause and people coming up afterwards asking for a copy. The next session, for which I served as moderator, had talks by Aphrodite Athanasopoulou from Cyprus, Gerasimos Zoras, son of Professor Zoras, Agathos Charalambakis, and Klapaki. We finished the second morning session at 2:45 p.m. No time for discussion, alas. After a quick lunch the presentations were no longer scholarly. Vouyouka explained what the Friends do. Varvara Tsaka, using power point, indicated the Museum’s new initiative, basically to put all resources on line. She told me privately that she still is not getting paid, also that Leventis has left and probably cannot be replaced. Then came four very excellent string players, a quartet, playing Theodorakis’s music for a Zorba ballet. Not my taste at all until, toward the end, came the famous dance used in the film. After this, an English actor in a screaming monologue of Zorbatic sayings, accompanied by a pleasant Japanese man on an oriental sort of guitar and then on a bass fiddle. Much too long and too loud. The Zorba movie came next but luckily most of the speakers were allowed to return to the hotel via taxi. We were then loaded into different taxis and taken a long distance to Lemonia, a famous Greek restaurant near Regents Park. Mobbed, every seat taken. But of course Niki had reserved a private dining room upstairs. I sat next to her at the long table and learned that Simon and Schuster have agreed on a new translation of Zorba. Apparently I’m going to be paid by Niki, who also promises to send me a definitive Greek text. No talk yet about the level or means of compensation. As usual, much too much food. Mezedakia galore and then, after we were fully stuffed, the main meal: παϊδάκια. I inquired about reimbursement for my expenses and she sent me to a gentlemen at the far end of the table. Although I had sent her all the figures, he knew nothing. So I had to find various numbers again, luckily on my printed itinerary. But then, stupidly, I converted dollars to pounds by using the number I’d learned to do the opposite: to convert pounds to dollars, which I’d been doing since arrival for meals, taxis, etc. As a result, the total came to £2050, which he promptly gave me in cash. When I got back to the Penn Club, I realized my mistake, figured everything correctly and discovered that I’d been overpaid £1000! I immediately explained this to Niki via e-mail, and slept after an extremely long, full, and fulfilling, day.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Another full, varied, interesting day. Started by going to Friends House owing to the mission that Randy Warner had asked me to fulfill: to speak to Helen Drewery about the decision to stop paying the Farm School about £4000 a year from the Simmons Trust. I had e-mailed Drewery. No response. Six months ago I had written her and sent my lecture on Quaker influence upon the Farm School. No response. Now I telephoned her private number and received a recorded message that she was out sick. But another call to the receptionist confirmed that she was in the building. So I went, only to be told that she was in a managers’ meeting all morning but that I could talk to her assistant. So down came a young woman called Clare Wood who told me she’d been in this job only two months. We spoke for a half hour (all she could spare). She took notes. I explained about the Quaker element in the School’s history and then about reconciliation happening among Balkan students in Perrotis College, and finally about the new ecological initiatives in the pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and primary school, followed by how we are helping the unemployed city folks who are returning to the land. She promised to speak to Drewery. And, miracle of miracles, I received a one-sentence e-mail later from Drewery herself saying that she was sorry that she couldn’t see me herself today and that tomorrow she would not be in the office at all. I don’t expect anything positive to happen. But at least I fulfilled Randy’s commission.

Walked then to King’s College and met with Polina Tambakaki over lunch in a Thai restaurant nearby. She has a class in Kazantzakis at King’s but with only one student. Sad. She hopes to have more next year. She wants me to look at some writing she’ll send. Nice young scholar, and lucky to have a position at King’s. At 1:50 exactly, as arranged, Lewis Owens met me at King’s entrance and escorted me upstairs to a room where a television crew was documenting an interview with Niki. The subject was chiefly The Last Temptation, upon which Lewis hopes to make a documentary. Niki answered various questions expertly, showing an intimate knowledge of the novel. In the interval after her turn, she said she had received my e-mail about the financial mistake, apologized for not giving her colleague my numbers in advance, and I happily returned her £1000 in cash. Then my turn came to be interviewed, Lewis asking the questions: how I first became interested in Kazantzakis (I told the story about my fellow student vomiting), how and why the book was opposed, then how the Scorsese film was challenged (my story of going to the screening in New York and having to pass through a gauntlet with Catholics on one side and right-wing Protestants on the other), whether I liked the film (hated it at first because of its total lack of Kazantzakis’s language, and I related what Schrader told me about Scorsese’s anger at the first draft: “No poetry!”). When I finished, Roddy entered and spoke very well about why he likes the novel and enjoys teaching it, emphasizing the final four chapters. Niki left, forgetting the £1000, which were left on a table, but Lewis ran after her successfully with the money. Then he, I, and a friend who was part of the film-making team had a coffee and pleasant, easy conversation until about 5:00 p.m., when Lewis and I went by taxi to Islington to meet his wife Tania, from the Ukraine, a pianist, and a man who turned out to have been her piano teacher and also one of the two performers on a disc Lewis gave me of the two-piano version of Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony, the one we heard the National Symphony do, and the one that Stalin disliked. Lewis explained that owing to Stalin’s displeasure the orchestral parts and the score had been destroyed, so that all that remained was the two-piano version that Shostakovich had prepared. I told them about the impressive power of two-piano performance I had experienced recently thanks to Sally Pinkas and Evan Hirsch. I also told them, very emotionally, about Beveridge Webster; they had never heard of him. Then we all went across the street to the Almeida Theatre, very small, to see an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw beautifully acted. The Governess was of course the lead, in a challenging role, but perhaps the star was the child who played the small girl. Lots of scares and shocks when the two specters appeared suddenly. Not great theater but a pleasant way to spend an evening. One feature I had never seen before was the use of subtitles (overhead) although the language was of course English. This was to enable deaf people to enjoy the play, and indeed there were four deaf people in front of us, conversing via sign language in the interval. I must now read Henry James’s famous story again. Lewis was obviously very gracious today, renewing a friendship. He was open in speaking about Monica, the woman he abandoned after living with her for fifteen years. It just didn’t work out, and luckily he found Tania, married her, and fathered two children. He also of course left the academic life (he says he was miserably treated at Canterbury) and is now president of a successful company advising secondary school students about entrance to British universities.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

My last full day in London. Fulfilled a longtime wish by going to the Natural History Museum to do homage, I suppose, to the statue of Charles Darwin overlooking the Main Hall. This I did, with pleasure. The museum is amazing. Filled today with children (it was a school holiday of some sort) and organized to appeal to children. I saw only a small part, of course: insects (fascinating), whales (including a full-scale model, and explanation of how they mate and sing), birds, prehistoric mammals. What a treasure house! Then by taxi to Leicester Square, lunch of pasta and soup (my “fast” day), an hour again in the National Gallery enjoying as always especially the Cézannes and Manets. Then to a play about Oscar Wilde and his tragedy. First act: just before the police come for him. Bosie encourages him to catch the train to Dover and escape to France. Wilde refuses. Lots of Wildean repartee and brilliant wit. Bosie self-centered and hysterical. He’s convinced that the controversy is really between himself and his father, whom he despises and hates. Wilde refuses to leave. Second act: Wilde in Naples after his two years in Reading gaol. Bosie there in bed, naked, with a naked Italian. Wilde despondent. No money. No audience. His career ruined. And Bosie protests that he really isn’t just a lover of men, he is bi-sexual. He wants to abandon Wilde—although his family will help Wilde if Wilde gives permission. He does. And Bosie departs. The ultimate betrayal. Beautifully done, with superb acting, as always. Good vegetarian supper in an Indian restaurant. E-mail message from Simon and Schuster leading to a date for me to visit them on March 8th.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Taxi to Victoria at 6:30 a.m. Gatwick Express. First class lounge. Expedited scrutiny of baggage, but they discovered the two jars of British jam I’d bought for Chrysanthi and confiscated them. I should have known better. Broke my fast in flight around 6:30 a.m., New Hampshire time, with Envoy class steak dinner.

So much to do, alas, when I return: Lewin applicants, ILEAD course, Webster organization, eight-hand practice and performance, Farm School trustees’ meeting in March, continuing with vetting my Journal, whereas now the single important concern and activity should be the re-translation of Zorba.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

To Cambridge by bus owing to snow. Met Tom Akstens and Suzanne Murtha there. They had driven up from their new house in Rhode Island and treated us to lunch in a Japanese soba restaurant on JFK. They plan to sell the Bakers Mills home in about three years and to re-locate permanently. And Suzanne is exploring a career change. Tom will continue at Sienna, commuting, but will leave Empire. Saw Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie at the A.R.T. starring Cherry Jones, whom I so admire, as the mother. Such a sad play. Very well acted also by the woman who played the crippled daughter, Celia Keenan-Bolger.

February 25, 2013

Thanks to Pete Kelsey, I spent an hour today, very pleasantly, with the new Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, Rob Hirschfeld, who took a class from me when he was an undergraduate here, and also did some Greek with Chrysanthi, and went sometimes to Quaker Meeting. My notes record that his final paper showed his “heartfelt” feeling of being greatly influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses.

March 2, 2013

Spent five hours viewing the Met HD projection of Parsifal. The first act, which took almost two hours, was so slow, so boring, but the rest was not. The music is magnificent but the whole conception, being Wagner, I found repulsive. The Christianity centers on overcoming one’s sinfulness. Not my cup of tea.

March 6, 2013

Hoke Brissenden died suddenly. He had obviously been very weak the last few weeks, walking always with oxygen and so exhausted the other day that he had to stop in the middle of the corridor and lean against the wall. And his wife, Annella, seems to have Alzheimer’s. How can she exist on her own now?

Went to the Bentley Theater to see Rachel Decker-Sadowski act in Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. And who was sitting next to us but her mother, father, and boyfriend, and directly in front of us her tennis coach! Nice to meet all these people and to see her on stage. She’s got the theater bug; will be spending the summer in London at one of the acting schools and going to three plays a week!

March 7, 2013

New York City

Spent an hour and a half with Michael Groden at the Yale Club. He is writing a memoir of his long association with Joyce and it begins, he told me, with my class at Dartmouth. He is free now of the restrictions imposed by Stephen Joyce because all the works are out of copyright, but he doesn’t have the energy or desire to fashion the Joyce thesaurus. Too bad. . . . Then walked to 21 and ate there with Jeff Murphy talking about Catholicism and Obama, and the difficulties of lawyers and his three children. Then to Lincoln Center with him to see the Paul Taylor dance company’s show. Very different from the NYC ballet. No dance shoes; barefoot mostly. No tutus. Lots of running, jumping, spectacular sliding. The men in trousers, the women in skirts. But spectacular athleticism and also the ability to convey peacefulness and contemplation. We saw “Gossamer Gallants” (Smetana/Taylor), “Eventide” (Vaughan Williams/Taylor), and the spectacular “Esplanade” (Bach/Taylor). Paul Taylor himself took a curtain call at the end.

March 8, 2013

Visited Suzanne Donahue at Simon and Schuster in the same building where I visited Michael Korda many times in the 1960s. And Suzanne asked “How is Daphne?” for she had been with S&S when Daphne worked with Fred Hills and remembered both of them well. She is very happy we’ll be doing a new Zorba. I’m to deliver the manuscript on May 1, 2014. And she’ll allow a subtitle (“The Saint’s Life of Zorba”) even on the cover. She also wants a Foreword regarding the reasons for a new translation. On e-books they pay authors 25% of their net proceeds (which are typically 30% less than the list price). But I’ll be paid by Niki, not S&S. . . . Then went to MoMA to ask about Peter de Francia’s two drawings. They’re in storage in Queens. I was given the name of the person to write to in order to set up an appointment to see them. . . . Then to buy cheeses at the Grand Central market. . . . Then to 26th and Broadway for the end of the Farm Committee followed by the Perrotis Committee and finally the Primary/Secondary Committee. My idea to minute our support of the primary school despite the letters from Stavros and Seth against continuing with it was rejected because members thought it would be better to be silent about the whole business and that the two objectors would not press the matter. We hope that Charlotte won’t raise it tomorrow. I was asked to speak to her. We also discussed the harassment policy, which many, including myself, found too long, too detailed, almost unreadable. I read the first paragraph of the Pendle Hill statement as an example of something much more humanistic, brief, and reader-friendly. I also wish that mediation training were prescribed and that appeals could be done by peer review. Faint hope, alas. I asked about Tasos’s retirement. Apparently he’ll stay on, part-time, but relieved of full responsibility. He is interested in the new school for youngsters, I was glad to hear. . . . Dimitri Gondicas and I sat for our routine post-meeting tea. He is discouraged by the paucity of applications to Princeton from Americans doing Modern Greek. Also said that Mathioudakis didn’t have a chance (a) because he submitted in Greek and only a little in deficient English, (b) his program was mechanical, numerological, too much counting. To my half-jocular suggestion that Perrotis contain a course in nature poetry and not just courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) he suggested that such poetry could be introduced surreptitiously via the English-language program. Good idea. I was pleased to learn that he’ll attend the meetings in Greece in June. He of course reminded me about my archive, which Princeton is waiting for.

Then to the Morgan Museum for a concert organized by Charlie Hamlen, who is now organizing the St. Luke’s orchestra and chamber groups. He was there. We had a lovely reunion after many years. He is prospering. He went back to IMG after leaving Classical Action, but didn’t want to stay there and fell into the St. Luke’s job, happily. He was so pleased to see Leander at Nancy Bidlack’s memorial. Also pleased that he could help me with our Webster concerts at Kendal. This program, unbelievably, contained two pieces that I play with Dick and Allan: Ravel’s Sonatine for flute, cello, and harp, and Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp. They played the Ravel very slowly. It struck me as a juvenile piece, and indeed it was written when Ravel was young: 28 years old. The Debussy was, by contrast, a very late composition, written in 1915 (he died in 1918). Nice to hear these done with the harp, but I must say that Dick, Allan, and I, despite all the mistakes we perpetrate, do make both pieces sound more or less as they are meant to sound. Also performed was a brilliant fantasy for harp and violin by Saint-Saëns, who apparently was a splendid pianist who used to say to audiences, “Which of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas do you want me to play,” and then could do any one of them from memory. The most exciting piece was the world premiere of a quintet by Sean Shepherd, 34 years old—brilliant tonal but dissident writing for oboe, clarinet, violin, harp, and double bass, with a second movement labeled “insistent, nasal, snarling, relentless.” This was totally stimulating. Nice to see the composer, who took a bow and applauded the players. A fond goodbye to Charlie, embracing.

March 9, 2013

Full board. Instructed by my committee, I asked Charlotte not to suggest a third-party investigation of our charter to see if the primary school was legitimate under it. She said that she didn’t intend to, and she didn’t. Joel Post noted that we had depleted our endowment by more than $20,000,000 to cover deficits in the last six or seven years. But things look better now.

March 21, 2013

Chinua Achebe died today, aged 82. I remember having supper with him a long time ago at Dartmouth with some students also. One of the students asked him, “Is it still possible to witness primitive customs in the Nigerian villages?” Achebe’s answer was classic: “Try Scarsdale”!

April 3, 2013

Attended the Emerson Quartet’s recital at Hopkins Center. I have never experienced such utter perfection in execution. Total precision and also sensitivity.

April 5, 2013

Our balcony was completely rebuilt and then re-enclosed with thermal glass instead of plastic, the whole now also about eight inches larger. It’s a veritable extra room. And today Chrysanthi’s new swivel chair arrived. She sits queen-like there, reading a printed book or, more often, her e-book on the new Nook.

Nikos Mathioudakis, in Athens, has been splendidly helpful to me in discovering the meaning of the many words in Zorba that are not in any dictionary—what he calls νεολογικά αθησαύριστα. Of course Kazantzakis is sometimes just playful, as for example when he makes Zorba speak to Mme. Hortense about her “admirals” (ναύαρχοι) changing the word to νάβρακοι (sea-underpants)!

April 10, 2013

I am re-reading Ulysses and am already doing “Ithaca.” Yesterday I found two extraordinary passages that must be recorded here: (1) “He [Stephen] affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.” (2) “What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged . . .? The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” This mimics the last verses of Dante’s Inferno, when Virgil and Dante emerge from hell.

I finished my first chapter of the new Zorba translation—chapter 11. (I always start in the middle.) Today I tried to make Mme. Hortense’s English sound like English with a French accent. Tricky.

April 15, 2013

Finished re-reading Ulysses, a wonderful experience.

April 21, 2013

Finished John D. Barrow’s remarkable “The Book of Universes,” of which I understood maybe 20% at most. His conclusion (p. 295): “We are asked to accept that our universe is a member of a never-ending multiverse of actual universes displaying different properties. Our universe may be special in ways that are essential for our own existence, and that of any other form of intelligent life. Today our universe exhibits a second burst of accelerated expansion that began less than 5 billion years ago. Copernicus taught us that our planet is not the centre of the universe. Now we may have to accept that even our universe may not be at the center of the Universe.” I especially liked his section labeled “Chaotic Universes.” Some quotes: “. . . why not try to prove that order will always result from chaos?” (p. 261). “This is an appealing idea: It has major philosophical implications. If true, it would mean that we don’t need to know how the universe began (or even if it began) in order to understand its present structure” (p. 262). “Sadly, by 1980, . . . the appealing idea . . . that physical processes in the very early history of the universe would always ensure the expansion because isotropic and homogeneous did not fly. There were just too many persistent types of irregularity . . .” (p. 168).

I learned today, via an e-mail from Niki Stavrou, that the bookstore in Athens where I autographed the Kazantzakis letters last October, Estia, has closed, gone out of business owing to the general economic crisis in Greece. How very very sad!

April 22, 2013

My final class, the sixth, in my Ulysses course for ILEAD. Some very appreciative students, some others who left halfway through. I’m happy now to be able to concentrate exclusively on the re-translation of Zorba.

May 1, 2013

New York City

A very long, varied, stimulating day. Up at 5:00 a.m. Dartmouth Coach to the Yale Club. Full buffet lunch. Then walked to 42nd between 9th and 10th to a small theater on the 4th floor to see what turned out to be an extremely well written play excellently acted called The Call about a young white couple that can’t seem to have a baby and decide to adopt a black baby from Africa. But the “baby” offered is said to be 2½ and looks at least 4 years old. The wife, brilliantly acted by Kerry Butler, is despondent. She wanted the full experience, the first word, the first tooth, not a four-year-old. She decides to cancel. But finally she accepts to go through with it. Very emotional, sensitive, and real. And so well written by Tanya Barfield and directed by Leigh Silverman. A pleasure! . . . Chinese dinner in the food court of Grand Central, actually very tasty. But then a huge adventure getting to Lincoln Center. As usual we started with the Shuttle expecting to go easily from Times Square to Lincoln Center on #1. But there was a stalled train on the uptown tracks, huge crowds, and we were unable to get into a train. So we exited and I said “Let’s walk along Broadway and get the bus that goes to Lincoln Center.” We walked quite some distance, no buses at all, and then I discovered that we were going downtown and had reached 36th Street! Horrors. Tried to get a taxi. No luck. But we did find a “rickshaw driver” and got in—a young foreign man doing the best he could on his bicycle, weaving in and out of traffic, assuring us that he had never had an accident. Would we arrive in time for the first ballet? Doubtful. But we did arrive at 7:28 for the 7:30 performance. His fee was $60, $1 per street (30 blocks) per passenger. Luckily I had three $20 bills, which cleaned out my wallet. And we arrived in time for a wonderful program. This whole week they have dedicated to American composers. So there was much too much Morton Gould, who is mediocre, but also, thankfully, some Bernstein on Friday. Tonight started with Gershwin, all the familiar songs, some played Gershwin-style on the piano. The ballet, called “Who Cares?’ is by Mr. Balanchine, as they always used to call him. The highlight of the evening was “Ivesiana,” also by Mr. B, to amazing music by Charles Ives. The best was the first, “Central Park in the Dark,” with the corps in dark brown costumes slinking around the stage, almost invisible, an effect that only Balanchine could have produced, owing to his versatility. My only complaint was that I wished I could see the entire piece over again, to digest it better. Next came the show-off pas de deux “Tarantella,” which is pure fun. Finally, more fun: “Stars and Stripes.”

May 2, 2013

Walked to MoMA and entered at 9:30, before the crowds, owing to my membership. Saw the fascinating Claes Oldenburg special show. He lived in the East Village and Lower East Side and collected objects that he converted into objets d’art: a lipstick, cash register, frying pan with a fried egg, hamburger, clothespins, etc., reminding us that many of the objects we use have aesthetic qualities, for example the device I have both at Kendal and at the farm to moisten and seal postal envelopes, made by him into a sculpture. The ugly and ordinary things in our daily lives can be lifted into art, as proved by this exhibit. At 11:00, by pre-arrangement, we went to the museum’s offices two doors further east on 53rd Street and were taken by a young official to the print and drawing department, where two drawings by Alix MacSweeney’s late husband, Peter de Francia, who died in January 2012, had been brought for us from storage in Long Island City. Both are large. One, framed, is political, with a military figure dominating; the other, charcoal on paper, illustrates one of Césare’s stories, showing figures in a boat, one reading, another fishing with the line attached to his ankle. Wonderful work. I asked if they’d ever be exhibited and was told probably not. However, if Alix arranges an exhibit in England and wants them, the museum will be happy to loan them. Our guide was a young woman with an accent. I asked about her training. She’d studied art history in her native Argentina, then secured an internship at MoMA and was hired after three months. Lucky! . . . Back to the Yale Club to lunch with Jennifer Karsten, the new head of Pendle Hill. Young, energetic, happy to be in this position. She wants me to give a course, or at least a lecture, on Kazantzakis. I told her Yes but not until I finish translating Zorba. However, I’d like to do Quakerism and Darwin earlier, if they’d be interested in that. Apparently John Myers will decide. Then we raced back to Lincoln Center to attend a rehearsal of the NYC ballet. Not at all interesting. Lots of waiting with nothing happening. No real instruction taking place. Back to the Yale Club for a free dinner because my birthday is in May, then to our second night of the ballet’s American festival. “Thou Swell” choreographed by Peter Martins to music by Richard Rodgers, with two singers whose words could rarely be deciphered. Mediocre. But Wheeldon’s “Carousel,” again to Richard Rodgers’s music, was much better, especially at the start when the dancers are in a large circle that draws inward. The best of the evening was of course Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” again to Richard Rodgers’s music. Balanchine’s magic saved this evening.

Friday, May 3, 2013

To the Frick Museum at 10:00 a.m. to see old favorites but also a fine special exhibit of drawings. St. Jerome is so powerful. Rembrandt in his self-portrait is so self-satisfied. We walked both there and back on this beautiful day with flowers in bloom and everyone enjoying the outdoors. Lunch with Charlie Hamlen, so friendly and gracious. He told the sad story of his home in Jaffrey burning down with all his belongings when he was away with his wife (yes!) in Paris. Everything they owned was lost. But he is prospering now, and very happy in his current job managing the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. . . . At 2:30 we were in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral on 74th and 1st Avenue for a long service: the Depositioning from the Cross. At the height of this the priest detaches the Christ-puppet from his cross, wraps the body in a shroud, and will later place it, tonight, in the tomb for the Επιτάφιος service. But he pretends that the body is on a cloth held from his shoulders by another priest and paraded through the church, with the faithful prostrated in obeisance on their knees. Very moving, with incense wafted before him. I was a bit exhausted after these two hours, most of it standing. Thus for once we didn’t walk but took the 72nd Street crosstown bus to Broadway and supped early in a good restaurant across from Lincoln Center. Then to the Rose Building for a “Dancer Chat.” This was with Olivia Boisson, a new member of the corps, very petite, born in Queens County and educated in ballet school in Forest Hills, then in Harlem, and then in the School of American Ballet, from which she was selected for an apprenticeship with the NYC ballet, followed six months later by this exciting job. She explained a typical day: practice from 10:30 to noon, then from 1:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. Then perform! Mondays they are free. Then to our final evening of ballet, again all by American composers. I was dismayed that the first ballet was again by Morton Gould, who is so mediocre. But the choreography by Robbins for this “Interplay” is excellent. What a difference, and pleasure, to hear Leonard Bernstein’s exciting “Fancy Free” next. The three sailors in the bar, choreographed by Robbins, are a pure joy. The last number was one of our favorites, “I’m Old Fashioned,” that starts with the movie of Fred Astaire and Rita Heyworth dancing. The end, when the whole ballet corps repeats Astaire’s steps, is scintillating. So endeth our three-day ballet festival.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Dartmouth Coach home. At 8:00 p.m. Doug Gwyn arrived from Philadelphia. Lovely reunion after too many years. It’s so good that he seems now to have a steady, continuing position at Pendle Hill.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

What a day! Breakfast with Doug and Chrysanthi in the café. Then to Meeting. After Meeting, Doug gave a sort of class on the Beatitudes and their relation to early Quaker writing by Fox and Penington mostly. It was a brilliant class, with a good group of about twenty-five of us. Doug was able to draw out splendid participation by the “students” as well as to present his own points succinctly and clearly. We were all very pleased. Then quickly back to Kendal at about 1:45 p.m. to greet Natasha Peremsky, today’s Webster pianist. She was there, practicing Chopin and Mussorgsky. A twenty-five-year-old “sweetheart,” friendly, simple, no evidence of her genius or extraordinary success. At 3:00 she gave a beautiful program. Chopin’s 4th Ballade, Beethoven’s Tempest sonata, “Pictures at an Exposition,” and, to calm us down, as she said, at the end, Chopin’s “Berceuse.” I could tell from the first two bars of the Ballade that she was extraordinary. Thank goodness our Yamaha piano rose to the demands she placed on it: huge fortes, tiny pianissimos, and everything in between. Beethoven’s sonata was truly given a tempest. And of course the Mussorgsky has dynamics in excess in all directions. Everyone felt that she was the best pianist we had ever heard here, maybe even better than Dinnerstein. Wonderful! And all thanks to Charlie Hamlen, her good friend and mine, for putting me in touch with her. . . . But the day’s events continued. It was Orthodox Easter Sunday, and we all went, Doug and Natasha, too, to John Rassias’s for the traditional lamb supper and cracking of eggs (Chrysanthi won). Lovely to see Veronica especially, and 5 of the 6 children. They hope to visit us this summer.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Doug and Natasha up and ready at 6:00 a.m. I drove them to town and they caught the 6:30 a.m. bus to New York. Amazingly, everything went so very well yesterday. . . . In the afternoon: Dr. Miller. We decided to wait until I complete Zorba to do the cataracts. I also have a lower eyelid problem that forces tears out of the eye instead of allowing them to drain internally as they should. This needs surgery but must wait until the cataracts are finished.

May 7, 2013

I spoke at the annual Remembrance Ceremony for those who died in the past twelve months, about forty people this time. I did more or less what I did three or four years ago, via literature and philosophy: Swift, Andrew Marvell, Kazantzakis, Lucretius, Harkianakis.

May 9, 2013

A fine computer person at Dartmouth finally repaired the website that we did for Greek Today, making the Morby videos work perfectly once again.

May 10, 2013

Performed eight-hand piano in the Cary Room: second and third movements of Mozart’s 40th. No nervousness and no mistakes. But the middle F stuck each time on the upright piano. I contacted Dale Howe and hope that he will fix it before we perform again next Wednesday.

May 14, 2013

Meeting trustees. I’m president again, by rotation. It seems that we can conclude the negotiations regarding the donation of one-twelfth of the expanse rich in natural gas by selling our rights to the others who received the eleven-twelfths, and we might get almost $70,000 for this.

May 15, 2013

Eight-hand piano again in the Cary Room, this time a Rossini overture—terrible music, but the audience loved it.

May 16, 2013

George Pattison is here. He and I vetted Lewis Owens’s dissertation and did the viva together at Cambridge. Lovely reunion. He spoke well on Kierkegaard, saying that his mode of writing, jumping from subject to subject somewhat confusedly, is “post-Christian.” I’ve been calling Joyce’s writing “postmodern.” Maybe I should also say “post-Christian.” What a difference between Joyce and, for example, John Milton!

May 17, 2013

A quick one-day trip to the farm. Started the White, fixing a leaking oil filter. Did some planting. A lovely feeling of peace, as always.

May 19, 2013

Alan Horton officiated at the Interfaith Gathering. He is such a deep, thoughtful man, totally atheistic yet at the same time totally “religious” in his metaphysical concern for one’s status in the circumambient universe.

May 20, 2013

Met with Ella Erway, Avery Post, and others. We are scheming to enhance the Elizabeth Fry Fund in order to recruit to Kendal people of limited economic means.

May 21, 2013

Joan Snell helped me with my version of Mme Hortense’s French accent in my Zorba translation. Big improvement.

May 25, 2013

Farm

Cold, rainy day. I started the water easily. No difficulty; indeed, the new system makes the process so much easier. No uncovering of the well any longer; no groping for that tiny lever. Internet works perfectly. TV works perfectly. Our new downstairs telephone works perfectly. But the bottom of the toilet tank leaks. That never happened before. I lowered the tractor off its struts and prepared it but was afraid to see if it will start, until tomorrow. Chrysanthi made delicious spaghetti with chicken and garlic for supper.

May 26, 2013

The tractor started immediately. No problem. I lubricated it and the mower and mowed. But I couldn’t start the tiller and thus prepared the soil for Chrysanthi’s planting by using a shovel. Added peat moss and fermented cow manure. Began to read Merrill Brockways’s autobiography. Not very interesting so far. I’m waiting until he gets to his relationship with Balanchine. He mentions being at “a boys’ camp” while he was a Columbia College student beginning in 1946. Thus I must have been 16 when I played duets with him at Brant Lake Camp. . . . We’re enjoying “I Love Lucy” again, before sleeping.

May 27, 2013

Couldn’t start the tiller until I realized that maybe it needed a new spark plug. This did the trick. I tilled the entire garden, which as usual was full of weeds. We ate supper in the new restaurant on Route 28, practically the only people there: two hamburgers, pie and coffee, all for $21.00. Earl visited at sat forever. Stephen will be entering kindergarten in the fall. We learned a lot about gun culture here in the Adirondacks, both encouraging and discouraging. Roy and Dale, who both have served prison terms and therefore are not allowed to possess guns, both do possess them. Dale served because he raped Monica when she was under-aged. Eventually, of course, they married. But Braley Noxon’s new gun shop needed to be placed a least 1000 feet away from the school!

June 1, 2013

Lawrence, Massachusetts

To Allison Bolton’s bat mitzvah. The ceremony leaves me cold, as it also does Chrysanthi and Leander. But nice to see family, especially Ellen Lerner, Paul, Hazel at age three a bouncing redhead, Peter Buseck still mourning Alice but with a lady who lost her husband recently, David planning to go to India on business via Bangkok and will visit Alec, Susan about to move back to the Bay area with Ellen although neither has a job yet. Paul and Dana sell all the vegetables they produce, and she’ll have a second child in October. The eldest Bolton daughter is off to Pitzer College in California in September. She told me that everyone smokes pot there. Clive can afford the full cost. Allison, although profoundly deaf since birth, reads lips expertly and apparently hears very well with hearing aids. She of course read the Torah and did all the other required parts of this very forced ceremony.

June 3, 2013

Learned lots today from Earl. We heard a repeated call that I thought was a bird but that he identified as a faun calling its mother; apparently they’d become separated. Also, 89 and 91 gas do not have the ethanol problem that 87 gas does. We should use 89 at least in all our machines, plus blue Stabil just to be doubly sure. He brought some dog food hoping that this will attract our woodchucks into the have-a-heart trap. We’ve experienced no luck, so far, with ham, lettuce, carrots. Leander did lots of mowing both at his cabin and ours. I mowed Alec’s and cleaned up around my office. The huge rock in Waddell Road was removed thanks to Earl’s perseverance. It’s on the side of the road now, as large as a small automobile. We clocked the distance from our house up Waddell Road to the northern border because Chrysanthi walks it: five-tenths of a mile, thus a full mile there and back. . . . Finished the day with milkshakes at Stewart’s for Leander and me.

June 7, 2013

Sent the following letter:

Αγαπητοί Πάνο, Άννη, Τάσο, Joann,

Φαίνεται πως η τρίχρονη θητεία μου στην Εφορία της Σχολής θα λήξει τον Οκτώβριο. Μου ρώτησαν αν θέλω να συνεχίσω να υπηρετώ. Συζητήσαμε με τη Χρυσάνθη και νομίσαμε και οι δύο ότι ήρθε πια ο καιρός να πάρω σύνταξη από την Εφορία. Είναι απαραίτητο να έχετε στην Εφορία πιο νέα μέλη που θα μπορούν να υπηρετούν για 6 ή 9 ή 12 χρόνια. Εγώ θα τελειώσω 15 χρόνια ως έφορος και 7 χρόνια ως πρόεδρος στην Δευτερεύουσα Επιτροπή. Φτάνουν! Έφτασα πρόσφατα στην ηλικία των 83 χρονών. Αν υπηρετούσα ακόμα και 3 χρόνια, θα έφτανα στην ηλικία των 86! Δεν πάει.

Ήρθα πρώτη φορά στη Σχολή το 1955 όταν ήμουν 25 χρονώ. Έμεινα με τους μαθητές στο υπνωτήριό τους, και έπιασα φιλία με τον Bruce Lansdale που βάσταξε πολλές δεκαετίες. Η ευκαιρία να υπηρετήσω τη Σχολή ως έφορος ήταν για μένα μία από τις ακμές της ζωής μου και θέλω να ευχαριστήσω εσάς ειδικώς για όλα που κάνετε για τη Σχολή και επίσης για όλα που κάνετε για εμάς τους εφόρους, που προσπαθούμε να συνεισφέρουμε κάτιτι.

June 8, 2013

I went to the Dartmouth Baccalaureate service to hear Bishop Gene Robinson, who was exceptionally good. His text was Luke 3:10–11: “And the multitudes asked him what then shall we do? And he answered them: He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none, and he who has food, let him do likewise.” This is followed, continued Robinson, by Jesus’ temptation for forty days in the wilderness. He is supposedly temped by the devil, but really he is debating with himself regarding his table of values. First temptation: Do more tricks. Turn a stone into bread. Jesus refuses. Second temptation: All power. Jesus refuses. Third temptation: Jump off a tower and angels will save you. Jesus refuses. Robinson then said to the students: You are intelligent and greatly favored. What will you say in your “inaugural lecture”? Will you say no to similar temptations, especially to the offer of power, which is certain to corrupt you? I hope that, following Jesus, you will devote your lives to helping those in need, those who are marginalized. . . . It was brilliantly done, so simple, so brief, so utterly comprehensible.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Thessaloniki

Arrived 2:30-ish. Sissy Baba drove us, very pleasantly. Panos Kanellis gave us a private tour of the new Primary School, unfinished but at least we could see the large dimensions of the various rooms. Only eight students registered so far, but he hopes that the second year will be a big improvement owing to the entrance of large numbers from our own kindergarten. . . . So nice to see so many old friends at the supper. I sat with Vergos. Stavros Constantinidis explained that his letter against the Primary School and his resignation from the board were both caused by complicated tax regulations that make it difficult for him to serve openly on two boards. So he’ll serve “non-openly.” Everyone was very happy to see Chrysanthi. From some hints dropped along the trip, I’m suspecting now that the real reason for her reluctance to travel to Greece the last three or four years is chiefly Vouli’s death. Tasos will show us Vouli’s memorial classroom tomorrow. I’m feeling somewhat emotional about my decision to leave the board, which may mean that this will be my very last trip to the Farm School and perhaps to Greece. I have served as a trustee for fifteen years.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Information day at the Farm School. Students going to America spoke, as did two who went last year. The one at Skidmore told me he performed in a play there, in English of course: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. What role did he play? The Wall! Lovely to see kindergarten and pre-kindergarten children singing to us in English and watering their crops, digging with tiny shovels and filling tiny wheelbarrows. Eleni Giannakou was very much there, working. . . . In the afternoon, to George’s. He was hysterical, screaming, weeping, changing subjects, fulminating against his two children, Dimitris and Andreas, and especially against their wives. He gave them everything and they give nothing in return except scorn and further demands, he says. Both are virtually unemployed and without work or income in the crisis. George apparently is devastated by the loss of Efthymoula, which is strange because throughout his married life he always indicated that he had married the wrong person and was trapped in misery. We finally extricated ourselves and returned. Tonight was the annual “Dance Under the Stars: 450 people paying 40 euros each. We paid our 80 euros and sat at a table with Bill McGrew and Lena Stefa and others. Lots of champagne, good steak dinner, western style, music featuring French songs, dancing until 2:00 a.m. We quit at midnight. Bill is almost finished with his history of Anatolia College. He asked about the Marders who, he says, don’t answer his e-mails, and about Mike Keeley. I told him the sad news about the former and the rather good news about the latter. Lena left her spectacular waterfront apartment (relatives occupy it) and downsized closer to city center. We reminisced about being together in Australia with Stylianos. . . . A man who was involved with AHEPA and Dr. Barich when I was trying to establish a Kendal here brought me, miraculously, a printed copy of an e-mail I had sent to Barich and others in 2004 about John Diffey’s willingness to help. I felt certainly zero sense of the Greek economic crisis tonight as I sipped my second full glass of champagne.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Long tête-à-tête with Pandelis after breakfast about the harassment policy and other issues philosophical and ethical including my decision to leave the board, partially at least owing to my allegiance to stenosis, “narrowing,” in old age. I cited Kazantzakis, who claimed that he wanted to die with no remaining flesh on his body, just bare bones. Then came the Primary/Secondary Committee, with lots of presentations about pre-k, kindergarten, secondary schools. Then we came to harassment, and the place exploded. John Cleave wants a one- or two-page document with a single policy for the entire institution, instead of separate sections for each of the three main divisions (Primary, Secondary, College). Others agreed. Pano said that he couldn’t have staff revise it and suggested that we do it. I said that I’d coordinate things to arrive at a drafting committee. We’d circulate the result and committee members would suggest changes. But the final revised document, ideally of two pages at most, would be beyond further discussion. Let’s hope! College Committee followed. I spoke about the need for time if they expect faculty to do research. They have no sabbaticals, plus a heavy teaching load: eight classes. I also questioned the current policy of enrolling up to 80% of Greek students and only 20% of foreigners, mentioning the role of reconciliation played by the students from Balkan nations in the past. Not much support, except from Don Schofield. Oh well . . . Foreigners need financial support, up to 14,000 euros a year.

Chrysanthi returned to George this morning. Ellenitsa, our friend from the Deaf School, joined them and drove them to the cemetery to view Efthymoula’s grave. In the afternoon we both went to the Byzantine Museum where I luckily just caught the director to give her my Harkianakis book with the lovely cover of the icon from the museum, the Παναγία Δεξιοκρατούσα. We walked down Tsimiski noting the many closed businesses. Also, coming in by taxi, twice at red lights there was a man with a cup or outstretched hand, begging for coins. And the taxi driver on our return expatiated on the χάλια of Greece and wondered if we expected a third world war precipitated by Syria. . . . Then Takis came. Last night at the Dance Under the Stars we arranged this with Eleni and spoke with her at length about her very positive feelings about her job and the School, thankfully. We went to a fish taverna, the one next to “Miami”—Takis, Brini, Elena, Odysseas, Eleni. The restaurant was full despite Greece’s economic crisis. Long easy talk with Eleni; long easy talk with Brini. Odysseas quite silent but did exchange a bit with Chrysanthi. Eleni wonderfully active and graceful. Easy conversationalist in English as well as Greek. Back at midnight.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Full board. Annie says she’s “angry” because I’m leaving the board. Lots of kind words from various fellow trustees. Gondicas suddenly appeared (from Athens). Told me that Mike Keeley is doddering, beginning to decline noticeably from age. Charlotte, thankfully, said she will step down as chair in October. Good! Once again she seemed to forget (!) the Primary/Secondary Committee, but I finally gave my report, the last one. At the very end Manita spoke about the relation of agriculture with values. I followed this with Kazantzakis’s poem that is really on the exact same subject: “I went to the acacia and said ‘Speak to me of God.’ And the acacia blossomed.” I’m feeling now that my decision to leave the board after fifteen years is the right one. I’m calling it στένωσις when I try to explain in Greek: a narrowing that I believe, philosophically, is what we should be doing voluntarily as we grow older.

In the evening we went to see Christina and David Willis in their lovely home, garden, and orchard about twenty kilometers east of the School. Tad was there; she lives with them. Son Bruce was there. He just finished his freshman year at Haverford. Their daughter graduated recently from Haverford and then married a Haverford classmate! Bruce is charming, effortlessly bilingual. He did IB at Anatolia College. At Haverford he is one of the “Quaker Bouncers,” a team of students who inspect parties and deal with drunkards or near-drunkards. Good idea for Dartmouth. Tad smiles and is coherent, but mostly silent, and moves with difficulty. David told us that she is just a bit senile. I’m reading her autobiography now; it’s fascinating, really a biography of the Farm School. David gave us his lecture, with power point, on the School’s beliefs and practices, gleaned from Brenda Marder’s history. He has surrounded the house with olive trees, grapes, fruit trees, and a large garden. Christina teaches ceramics at the School and does beautiful work of her own. I related my Haverford story to Bruce especially, how I took Hocking’s course there, how I majored in music by taking courses in four different institutions. Lovely vegetarian supper (our “fast” day), freshly picked from their garden.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

To town to visit Odysseas and Eleni. What a difference from poor, hysterical George! Wonderful Takis drove us. Big surprise: Toula was there, looking good, smiling. Hugs and kisses. Food food food, of course, all on the balcony. Toula naturally asked about Leander. I told her the whole story as best I could. Eleni expatiated on her military service and her mother’s incarceration in prison which, she said, wasn’t so bad: they got fed and housed, developed things to do, etc. I thought of Charlie Chaplin’s famous moment in a movie when he is released from prison and begs the warden to let him stay. Odysseas told details about their home in Μεγάλο Χωριό. It’s on the central square, flanked by the village museum, church, taverna. Eleni was born there; the house was destroyed by the Germans but then rebuilt. Why don’t we come? Will we ever come? I had to be honest: no, never. We have our own paradise in the Adirondacks. Tearful good-byes. Then to George’s again. Happily, Ellenitsa was there. She’s the retired head of the School for the Deaf, and it was a pleasure to see her again after so many years. Lots of memories of Αγία Τριάδα together, for example of myself as the man “who was always writing.” George was hysterical part of the time regarding Efthymoula and his unfaithful sons, but I tried to divert him via other subjects and various jokes, and actually got him laughing. A woman from Russia (the Caucasus) was there cooking, which makes things easier. More food of course. But finally we escaped, Ellenitsa driving us back to Cincinnati Hall. I should add that Dimitri telephoned, saying he’ll send a photo of Marios Karasavas from 1955. But he won’t come to see us. Everything is χάλια, no work.

Delicious siesta. Then Nikos Sphairopoulos came with his gracious wife, a periodontist, and two children: Constantinos, in his final year of the lyceum, and beautiful Christina, who is going into the 4th year of elementary school. Such civilized, serene people! I joked with Constantine about coming to America for university. He isn’t sure yet regarding what he wants to study. The girl played piano; she studies with Toula and performed last Wednesday in the Odeon’s recital. Both husband and wife have good jobs and actually get paid, although less than before. They brought ice cream for everyone. Daughter wanted to see our cows afterwards, and I showed everyone the kindergarten garden and “lake.” . . . Then we went to dinner with Tasos and Dora, who remembered that I like chicken livers! They gave me a lovely gift, a paperweight from the Benaki Museum, a replica of an ancient Greek coin with Athena’s favorite, the owl, on one side. Katerina Diafa was there with her husband. She’s the new head of the schools, replacing Tasos. We wish her well. Three and a half hours of steady and interesting conversation over a delicious dinner in the garden with a full moon overhead. They were all very interested in my adventure of translating Zorba and how I discovered Kazantzakis (the story of my Columbia classmate’s vomiting over Christ Recrucified). To bed at 1:45 a.m.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Takis and Brini came and drove us to the village of Χορτιάτης, where we viewed with horror the memorial to all those slaughtered by the Germans on September 2, 1944 (!), just before the Germans left Greece—the barbarians! Entire families with tiny children included. Then a look at the new rose garden on the Thessaloniki promenade, which is now adorned also with rows of trees and a bicycle path with guide lights. Back to their apartment for a perfect “fast” meal. They’ve been so good to us.

Monday, June 24, 2013

What a mess! Only last night when I printed our boarding passes did I realize that the travel agent, Judith Flanders, made a terrible mistake with Chrysanthi’s return trip, booking her from Thessaloniki to Frankfort instead of from Thessaloniki to Munich together with me and then of course on a totally different flight that would have gotten her to Boston tomorrow morning instead of tonight. Didn’t sleep much last night worrying about this. Tried to call Lufthansa offices but they were closed. This morning Aegean at the airport refused to change Chrysanthi’s ticket from Frankfort to Munich because it was a Lufthansa ticket. I had to purchase a new ticket for €210. Luckily there were seats. Then, in Munich, where luckily we had lots of time, the Lufthansa service center took 1½ hours to process a new ticket and charged me €350 because of change fee plus increased fare owing to lateness of booking. Again, luckily, there were seats on the flight. Chrysanthi vowed never to fly again! All this because of Janet Flanders’ sloppiness and also my own neglect in noticing any problem until it was all too obvious on the boarding passes printed last night. But after receiving our new tickets we relaxed and had a nice lunch of meat, breaking our fast at wake-up time in Hanover and enjoying two free hot chocolates given by gracious Lufthansa.

July 5, 2013

Terpni

To Don and Maria Kurka’s for supper. They’re renting the Morses’ old (palatial) house on Coulter Road. Maria’s sister was there, too. She is a pediatrician specializing in kidney disease. Her house burned down in Knoxville a month ago with total loss but no human casualties, since no one was at home at the time. Don did an impressive painting, a version of “The Scream” with two onlookers betraying lack of awareness in different ways. Maria produced a show in Colombia complete with an impressive bilingual catalogue, and will be doing another one in the National Museum there. Lovely to see them, as always.

July 7 2013

From a TLS review (May 31, p. 4): “Academics themselves are usually reluctant to reflect on how their intense, obsessional, and often very solitary interests affect those around them. And formal obituaries tend to draw a polite veil over the day-to-day structures and personal relationships that foster or undermine research projects. It is as if all those hours alone with books somehow take place in a social and emotional vacuum.” Amen! Written by Mary Beard.

July 13, 2013

Ballet matinee at SPAC with Alec and family. Two special surprises: (1) “Year of the Rabbit” choreographed by Justin Peck. How nice to be introduced to a truly imaginative new choreographer! (2) The Barber Violin Concerto with Arturo Delmoni as violin soloist in a bravura performance. He’ll be playing a Webster program at Kendal in April. Even Peter Martins’s choreography, which usually I find boring, was quite good.

July 27, 2013

In a review (TLS, July 5, p. 8) of work by Claude Lévi-Strauss: “The modern Western self is constructed from an individual interior perspective outwards; for the Japanese, the self is an internalization of the collective.” This reminded me, of course, of the visit to General MacArthur of Elizabeth Gray Vining when she arrived in Tokyo to tutor the emperor’s son. Apparently MacArthur told her to inculcate in the crown prince the essence of Americanism. “What is that?” she asked. He answered, “Individualism.”

July 29, 2013

Alec and family left today to return to Bangkok. Very emotional; they are all so exceptional. It’s so easy, and energizing, to interact with both Theo and Elena. A great pleasure.

August 7, 2013

Finished mowing the south field. I always say Και του χρόνου and this becomes increasingly problematic as I wonder, truly, whether I will be healthy enough, strong enough, to do the same job next year at age 84.

August 23, 2013

Each day as I walk out to my “office” I am overcome by the exquisite beauty of the south field, now completely mowed, and it is the same when I walk back viewing the cabin and pond. I marvel that somehow this has been granted to me to enjoy in this very deep manner each day.

September 27, 2013

Hanover

Finished the first draft of my Zorba translation and celebrated by having ice cream and hot fudge for dessert.

October 1, 2013

I sent the following letter to James McBride after finishing his novel The Good Lord Bird: Captain Brittles, I knowed something bout the Old Man caus once pon a tyme I were visitor to hisn farm near Lake Placid but I never knowed what I does now thanks to your book I sitted with it every mornin at brakefast and putted a shapter under my belt caus I does noh letters then I sitted agen with it over lunch and putted away another shapter but now darnation I aint got no more shapter to chew caus the Old Man they hanged him darn it but why why oh why the Onion she forgetted to deliver the password so all them bees dont get hived I thonk it were a mighty good book and my brakefast and lunch is not the same now caus the Old Man got hanged and that were no foolin the end.

October 4, 5, 6, 2013

Lovely weekend with Dan Seeger. We talked and talked, played our old duets, ate, visited with others, and on Sunday morning he spoke wonderfully at Meeting on the Book of Revelation in relationship to us today. He’s as bright and individualistic as always.

October 19, 2013

Terpni

Lovely day at the farm. I placed the new plastic sides on the White plus the new screw on its air cleaner. Earl rigged up a hideaway where we have our grape vines. He sits there hidden from the deer and shoots them while they’re comfortably grazing in the field. It’s hard to think of this as “sport.”

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

University of New Hampshire

To UNH for the first time, via Dartmouth Coach to South Station, Τ to North Station, AMTRAK to Durham, and by foot for a long distance through the huge campus to Three Chimneys Inn, built in 1649, where I stayed. Martin McKinsey met me for supper together with Katerina Kostiou, a woman who teaches at the University of Athens. Dino Siotis, Martin, and I were the speakers, all on Cavafy. I did my piece on translating “31 B.C. in Alexandria” with rhymed or unrhymed verse. Surprised to find a very large audience, full house, lots of students. It was fun.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

To New York City

Martin met me at 5:45 a.m., good soul that he is, to drive me to Portsmouth to catch a 6:30 a.m. bus to New York. This arrived an hour late but I managed to reach the Farm School offices in time for my Primary/Secondary Committee at 2:00 p.m. Sophia was there and spoke well about child molestation and the need for a compliance officer. Robert Uek was also very supportive. The Committee voted action on both the bullying document and the molestation plan. We’ll see what happens on Saturday. In the evening I went to my favorite theater, the Mint, and saw their revival of George Kelly’s excellent play Philip Goes Forth about a recent college graduate whose father wants him to join the family business whereas the son wants to write plays. They argue, the son goes off to Greenwich Village and, to make a long story short, discovers that he has no talent. Reconciled with the father after he agrees to return home, he enters the family business after all. A very honest ending for this play written in the early 1930s when Astaire and Rogers movies were giving the public the sentimentalized success stories that were welcomed during these depression years.

Friday, October 25, 2013

New York City

Higher Education Committee in the morning. Nice to see Mike Keeley there, walking with a cane but seeming otherwise fairly healthy. He sold his house in Princeton and is in a community, not like Kendal, where he has equity in his apartment and retains his own doctors. I then went to MoMA and through the Magritte exhibit very quickly because I had a luncheon date with Jeff Murphy at 12:30 at the premier restaurant at MoMA, one of the best meals I’ve ever had: small portions, lots of courses, repeated hors d’oeuvres, waiters changing silverware repeatedly and always scraping for crumbs (which did not exist). And Jeff paid, of course, for this probably very expensive meal. We sat by the glass wall separating us from the Sculpture Garden. A great pleasure. Leisurely, we sat and talked from 12:30 until 3:00. Then I walked quickly to the Frick Collection to see the special exhibit from Holland, a lovely Vermeer, several small Rembrandts—plus of course my favorite in the regular collection, El Greco’s “Saint Jerome.” 7:30 p.m. at Thalassa Restaurant on Franklin Street for an unexceptional Greek meal but chance to mingle informally with trustees, probably the last time I’ll do this.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

New York City

A very full, special day. At the meeting of the full board in the morning our statement on bullying passed with some misgivings and with a promise to let me see the Greek translation (which I suspect will include various changes). Our minute on pedophilia, however, did not pass, especially because of our call for the appointment of a compliance officer. But the administration promised to bring an adjusted proposal to the March meeting. All in all, Sophia and I were pleased and not too disappointed. For me, the most pleasant part was my “elevation” to Honorary Trustee. Mike Keeley and I now share this honor. John Cleave, of all people, had prepared an encomium, mentioning even my work in making Brenda Marder’s history readable and grammatical. All this was of course very pleasing. Fifteen years! Mike said privately that I’d done the right thing in stepping down.

Then a bit of an adventure taking the subway to Brooklyn, always a sort of foreign territory for me. But I managed to find the “Theater for a New Audience,” also called the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, and saw there a brilliant performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, marvelously inventive and humorous with the poetry excellently spoken, with Puck flying through the sky, scores of children playing angels, etc. An extreme pleasure. . . . Finally, Farm School banquet where I was invited (and treated) by Manita. She told me more about the granddaughter, who now admits that she was raped after being drugged at a Dartmouth fraternity. But she did not become pregnant, at least. I later sent the whole sad story to Dartmouth’s new president, who is meant to do something about our continuing “animal house.” It was nice to meet again the AFS graduate who is now attending Princeton (having been rejected by Dartmouth). He hopes to study architecture. Lucky boy, thanks to the Farm School, which found him in a small Macedonian village.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

New York City

By subway to 116th Street. To Morningside Meeting, chiefly to see Vince Buscemi. He’s fine but now walks with a cane. I introduced myself as usual there as “cofounder” of that Meeting. A man called Andy Von Salis came to say hello; he turned out to be the son of Jane Von Salis of Kendal. I went to see 414 West 121 Street. Still there but everything else has changed on the street because of new Columbia buildings. . . . Lots of good cheese purchased at Murray’s. Dartmouth Coach leaving for home at 4:30 p.m.

November 8, 2013

Finished the second draft of Zorba. But I’m going to read the whole thing over once more, quickly, before sending it to Niki. Leslie English and Nikos Mathioudakis also want to see it at this stage. And Joan Snell is still helping me with Mme. Hortense’s French accent.

November 22, 2013

Finished the re-reading but still haven’t done anything more with Mme. Hortense’s French pronunciation.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Baltimore

Leander and family met us at the train station and took us to the Ikaria restaurant in Baltimore’s “Greektown.” Long talk with the owner, whose mustache showed me how Zorba could always be twisting his. His sister, delightfully friendly, brought us desserts on the house and treated us as well to hugs and kisses when we left. Lovely atmosphere; authentic food. On Fridays they have the best bouzouki player one can ever hear, says Leander, but not on Sundays.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Leander’s

I went into town to the National Gallery to visit the Byzantine show there, quickly because I’ll go again tomorrow with Chrysanthi. Clearly the best presentation of Byzantium’s 1000 years that I’ve ever seen. Beautiful mosaic from Serres, lots about Thessaloniki’s Rotunda and sixth-century churches. Graphics showing the waxing and waning of the empire’s borders. Of course the Gallery building itself is impressive, especially the rotunda with its black columns, evocative, I suppose, of the glory and might of the USA. A room full of El Greco paintings was added pleasure, including a Saint Jerome, this time nude! Also the famous Laocoön. . . . I went down the street to the Archives afterwards and fought the crowds gaping at the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights. The small exhibits were not so crowded, thankfully. A video of Eisenhower speaking; movies of Teddy Roosevelt banging his fist to emphasize important points. On the subway both ways I read in Karen Armstrong’s In the Beginning, a liberal interpretation of Genesis—fascinating. She even stresses how mean and cruel God is to allow Noah to kill everyone, the innocent as well as the guilty. After supper, Leander played the Mozart four-hand F major sonata with me, the one I’m doing with Stan Udy, stressing that it’s Mozart’s masterpiece in this mode, and sufficiently difficult (as we well know). He showed me relationships between secondo and primo that I’d never noticed and that must be emphasized in the playing. Then we dashed to a nearby restaurant to hear Sophia and a dozen classmates, all in high heels and black dresses, sing a cappella for the school’s golf team’s end of season celebration. They do well, staying on pitch. Sophia received, earlier in the day, a letter from the University of Vermont accepting her. I read the essay she submitted on all applications, about how her experience in Honduras of abject poverty affected her: well written and well conceived, much better than Christina’s essay on why she wants to be a scientist.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Marina Hall fetched us for lunch. We both knew Kimon Friar and both received letters from him, hers mostly asking her to send vitamin pills, mine mostly literary. She sent me copies of hers and I presented her today with copies of mine, which I had forgotten about until she wrote earlier in the year about her association with Kimon. She and her friend Costas drove us to the interesting home in Chevy Chase near the Walter Reed Hospital and the National Institutes of Health where her husband, Dr. Hall, worked until he died of a stroke in his fifties. We had mousakas, wine, and full dessert: the works. Good conversation. Costas is quite sure that as a teenager in Nigrita he had some contact with Chrysanthi’s father. Small world. He came to university here and never returned, like so many. Marina filled in the story of her contact with Kimon, and of course with Thanasis Maskaleris, when she and her husband lived in San Francisco. We both elaborated on Kimon’s energy and κέφι as well as on his very bad luck in life. . . . Chrysanthi and I then continued to the National Gallery to see the Byzantine exhibit, I for the second time. This time I noticed a very helpful piece of information on one of the placards—namely that “Virgin” is a Catholic and Protestant designation for Mary, whereas Orthodox Christians say “All-Holy” (Παναγία), “God-bearer” (Θεοτόκος), or “Mother of God” (Μήτηρ Θεού). Thus I changed all instances of “Virgin” in my translation to one of the customary terms in Orthodoxy.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Played my Mozart four-hand sonata with Leander. What a difference! If only Stan Udy could come to Kinhaven and receive such superb coaching with me, we would utterly transform the piece. Then Leander and I went to a deli and had chopped chicken liver (for me) and pastrami (for him), the way it used to be: sandwiches three inches high. . . . An e-mail reminded me that I’m supposed to write a Kazantzakis article for the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts, and it’s due on Monday! . . . I took everyone out for supper, celebrating Sophia’s admission to UVM and also to Ohio Wesleyan, her top two choices.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Thanksgiving

Started writing my Oxford Encyclopedia essay based on a lecture I gave long ago on Kazantzakis’s religious vision. Another long session with Leander on the Mozart. The piece is so moving, so intellectually scintillating, one of Mozart’s best. Afterwards, inviting Chrysanthi, Deanna, and the children, we “performed.” Most was OK but I muffed some places yet nevertheless always got back in satisfactorily, without stopping. . . . Lovely turkey dinner, as always. Alec telephoned from Bangkok, Daphne from California.

December 7, 2013

Supper at Shawn Donovan’s to welcome Bob Schultz into Hanover Meeting. Lots of eager pleasant talking for three hours.

December 8, 2013

The ending of D. H. Lawrence’s poem on bats is memorable:

Creatures that hang themselves

up like an old rag, to sleep;

And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows

of disgusting old rags

And grinning in their sleep.

Bats!

December 12, 2013

Christina was rejected by Haverford. She’s weeping continuously. Waiting now to hear from Northeastern. . . . Leslie English has already copy-edited Zorba very helpfully but doesn’t like what I did with Hortense’s accent, and is probably correct in this.

December 18, 2013

Christina was deferred by Northeastern while Sophia was accepted by a third college, Lafayette, and offered $70,000 in scholarship aid. Daphne writes, “The nightmare continues.”

Last night the Quaker 8s were here. I gave them the following passage from the basket: “Schleiermacher defined religion as ‘feeling and taste for the infinite.’ . . . Surely a religious sense is something other than formally professed religion. [It is] devotion to the mystery of creation . . .” —Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus. This worked well. I elaborated, of course, on Kierkegaard’s brilliant analysis using the categories of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. I wanted to say, also, that I think my refusal to post my farmland derives ultimately from my “devotion to the mystery of creation” that tells me I really do not own this land but am merely a very temporary occupier along with the extraordinary number of other creatures, not to mention plants, on it.

December 24, 2013

Drove to the farm. Alec and family arrived two days ago. Their cabin is now comfortably warm. Leander and family arrived yesterday and their well-insulated house is, if anything, too hot. We checked in at the Goose Pond B&B in North Creek, a crazy place stuffed to the gills with everything imaginable, including two large parrots. Lovely dinner at Leander’s celebrating Chrysanthi’s birthday. I gave her adjustable ski poles. Deanna made a cake with a single candle. Lots of good cheer.

December 25, 2013, Christmas

Everyone (except me)—even Chrysanthi—went sledding down the slope to our frozen pond and across the pond. We played all sorts of word games at Alec’s and finally had a feast of turkey and all the trimmings around our ancestral Biedermeier dinner table, which seats ten people with ease. Earlier, exchange of presents, lots for each of the children, of course, and enough for each of the adults. I of course got a box of fancy dark chocolates.

December 26, 2013

Alec and Monica left early for Latham, New York, to get Monica fingerprinted for a renewed green card. We drove home in slight snow, nothing serious, and had a pleasant supper with Tom and Joan Wilson following lunch with Robert and Penny Binswanger, their son Morgan, and his luscious partner (or wife?).

December 27, 2013

I started re-reading my journal again, having finished Zorba. I’m up to 1953. Am spending more time practicing piano: Mozart’s four-hand sonata in F major, which Stan Udy and I are scheduled to perform in February; Bach’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” and Handel’s Sarabande, both for Len Cadwallader’s Interfaith Gathering on January 19th; first movement of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony for eight-hands to be performed in February, plus Bach and Haydn with Dick and Allan.

December 31, 2013

Mats Lemberger was here yesterday. We had him and Carrie Rosenblum for supper at Kendal (they’re dating). A lovely reunion. He is doing better now with machine-graded exams and expects to have A’s and B’s in all his courses. Carrie thinks, as do I, that he should do the full two-year course and end with an M.S., enabling him to teach science in a secondary school, instead of quitting after the first year and returning to medical school for the second or third try. But he dreams of doing family practice as a physician.

Today I had them both meet with Tom Pike, whom I am hoping to send to the Farm School as an intern next academic year. He has majored in Ancient Greek and Latin. They of course were able to give him a better picture of the intern’s life at the School. We’ll see now if he sends in his application.

No New Year’s party at the Rassiases this year. We had a fine supper at Kendal with the Spiegels and Powells. No snails, of course, but lobster and veal plus multiple desserts.

2014

Hanover

January 1–June 2

Feb. 25–27, New York City

May 17, Cambridge

May 19 Riparius

May 31–June 2, Toronto

Terpni

June 3–September 8

June 11–15, Santa Barbara, to Daphne’s

Hanover

June 8–December 31

October 19–20, New York City

November 9–16, Chrysanthi to Athens and Thessaloniki

November 24–28, Potomac, Maryland, to Leander’s

January 1, 2014

Another beautiful meal, at noon, with Lappins and Gilsons. Stuffed. Then at 5:30 to Ruth Stanton’s for her traditional chopped chicken liver and fellowship with various friends.

January 2, 2014

I found the following quote from Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World in my journal for 1955, January 16, on shipboard bound for England. “A single tree by itself is dependent upon all the adverse chances of shifting circumstances. A forest is the triumph of the organization of mutually dependent species. Each tree may lose something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival.” We should have this written out in beautiful script and mounted on our wall at the farm.

January 4–7, 2014

Wonderful visit here at Kendal by Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena. Everyone remarked on Alec’s resemblance to me. One woman even asked if Alec’s mother had not been Chrysanthi because, she avowed, he had no Greek features. Alec knew so many people at Kendal, it seemed, often because he’d gone to school with their children. He and his family all gained some appreciation of the wonderful life that Chrysanthi and I enjoy at Kendal, via numerous meals, attending the Professors’ Colloquium, interacting with friends like Weezie and Avery, etc. I gave them an extensive tour of Dartmouth, obviously also part of our lives. Three years from now, or four at most, Theo will be thinking of tertiary education. It seems clear that when Elena finishes Patana in six years, then enrolls in a university presumably in America, Alec and Monica will resign their positions and return to their Adirondack cabin at least at the start. I’ll then be 90 if I’m still alive, Chrysanthi 87.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

A full day. In the morning: Interfaith Gathering with Leonard Cadwallader as officiant and Peter Bien on piano playing “Wachet auf” as prelude and a Handel serenade as postlude plus two hymns, without nerves. Len spoke very well, and very appropriately for the Martin Luther King holiday, which is tomorrow. His text was Romans 13:10–12, as translated by me from the Greek. Then lunch with Len, Mary Ann, Carol Armstrong (who lost her husband two weeks ago), Dick and Margaret Powell. At 1:30 Simone Dinnerstein arrived with her husband and son. She prepared the piano for Crumb and at 3:00 began a spectacular recital introduced by me telling people to listen to the lower voice in counterpoint: Bach’s fifteen two-part inventions, a piece composed for Simone by Nico Muhly, George Crumb’s “Eine kleine Mitternachmusik” for amplified piano—plucking strings, banging with a mallet, counting 1 to 12 out loud in Italian. Long, a bit tedious, but a new experience for all of us. Finally, Beethoven’s last piano sonata, no. 32, opus 111, played better than I’ve ever heard it, exhibiting Beethoven the madman while still being rational. Then drinks followed by supper with Ruth and Fred Lappin and Rogers and Sung Elliott, very pleasantly. Then to the music room to practice our four-hand Mozart sonata with Stan Udy, which is getting better and better. I know the first movement well enough now to play it without counting. Finally, back to the apartment just before 9:00 p.m. in time for the Danton Abbey serial on TV. Last of all, tasting the σηκωτόπιτα that Chrysanthi made just for me.

January 20, 2014

Kazantzakis, cited in Elli Alexiou, p. 162: Ο άνθρωπος πρέπει προτού φύγει να κάμει τρία πράγματα: να φυτέψει τουλάχιστο ένα δέντρο, να γεννήσει τουλάχιστο ένα παιδί, και να γράψει τουλάχιστο ένα βιβλίο. Well, I haven’t done too badly judging from these three criteria.

January 21, 2014

I sent this letter to Stylianos: Τα νέα σου, πως υποφέρεις από depression και δε γράφεις ποιήματα, μας πικραίνουν πολύ. Θυμάμαι μια φορά που μου έλεγες πως μονάχα με το γράψιμο ποιημάτων κατάφερες να διατηρείς την πνευματική σου υγεία. Εμείς οι καθηγητές πανεπιστημίου πάντα διατηρούσαμε τη δική μας πνευματική υγεία επειδή μπορούσαμε να φύγουμε από την τάξη για τρεις μήνες κάθε καλοκαίρι. Μήπως κι εσύ θα μπορούσες να χαρείς ένα τέτοιο sabbatical μακριά από τη δολοπλοκία των λεγομένων Χριστιανών στους Αντίποδες, ίσως στην Κρήτη κοντά στα βουνά, θάλασσα, φρούτα, σταφύλια και φυσικά μεγαλεία των παιδικών σου χρόνων; Θα βοηθούσε μήπως αν μπορούσες να γράφεις ποιήματα πάνω στο θέμα της αθυμίας σου; Γνώρισα έναν διάσημο οικονομολόγο που, μαθαίνωντας ότι είχε καρκίνο άρχισε να γράφει κάθε μέρα ένα σονέττο πάνω στα συμπτώματά του και έτσι νίκησε την αθυμία. Θα προπαθήσω να βρω ένα αντίτυπο να σου το στείλω. Πάντως, σου ευχόμαστε με τη Χρυσάνθη τη δύναμη, το κέφι και το σθένος που χρειάζεσαι τώρα και που ξέρουμε ότι θα βρεις. Με αγάπη.

February 25, 2014

New York City

Arrived at the Yale Club at 11:30 a.m. via Dartmouth Coach. To MoMA. Saw the extensive Isa Genzken retrospective and also the show dedicated to the gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend, but most importantly the exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright’s view of the city: “density vs. dispersal.” Genzken, a sculptor, favors cheap, shiny materials and was especially motivated by the atrocities of 9-11. She’s what is called an “assemblage artist” and is clearly “unmonumental,” antiheroic, and assuredly feminine. Sonnabend, whose gallery was in Paris in the 1960s, made American pop art known in Europe. The best work on view was by Rauschenberg, whose retrospective in the National Gallery in Washington showed me how important and impressive he was. Once again, MoMA here was highlighting a woman whose taste affected art history. But the Frank Lloyd Wright show was the most interesting for Chrysanthi and me. He decried “density” in cities like New York and created a model for a city spread out, “dispersed,” with very few multistory buildings and lots of park space. On the other hand, he once dreamed of building a skyscraper one mile high! The many drawings by him on view gave evidence not only of his imagination and vision but also of his assiduity, so often an overlooked virtue of genius. . . . Then to 1230 6th Avenue, the very familiar seat of Simon and Schuster, the same that I frequented in the 1960s and Daphne in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Suzanne Donahue kept us waiting a half hour, being in a meeting, but we then had a cordial and informative visit. I introduced Chrysanthi to her as “Daphne’s mother,” since Suzanne, an old-timer, remembers Daphne and Fred Hills very clearly. I learned from her that Niki Stavrou does intend to pay me and indeed in the grand amount of $15,000. The delay has been caused by factors not really in Niki’s control, but the impediments will disappear and I will receive the money without fail. Hooray! Secondly, she informed me that the new Zorba will be published on February 18, 2015, this date of course being the anniversary of Kazantzakis’s birth in 1883. But S&S will advertise the book in 2014, its own 90th anniversary year. On February 18 there will be an “affair” in the Library of Congress. Suzanne has read some of my translation and finds a few places, very few, where she hopes the prose can be simplified. I’ll get all the details when the full copyediting is completed. So, things are clearer now than they were before. Also, she definitely wants my introduction in the front matter because I explain why this new translation was necessary. . . . Dinner across the street from Lincoln Center. Every seat taken, mostly by ballet and opera goers. Then to our first of three successive nights of ballet. These ballets this time with no orchestra in the pit. The first, called “La Stravaganza” with music by Vivaldi alternating with horrid squeaks and scratches, both “performed” electronically. Two groups of dancers, one dressed formally, the other slovenly. Strangely, the slovenly ones dance to Vivaldi, the formal ones to the squeaks and scratches. Not to my taste at all. But no. 2, with music by Leonard Bernstein (just clarinet and piano on stage) and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, was much better: a lovely pas de deux danced by Tiler Peck and her husband, Robert Fairchild, and dedicated appropriately to Jerome Robbins. No. 3, called “Todo Buenos Aires,” featured a band on stage playing tango music by Piazzolla. But the choreography, by Peter Martins, was what one expects from Martins, alas—namely mediocrity. So, our first night wasn’t the best to be sure, but it demonstrated the company’s bravery to do new ballets in an attempt, somehow, to get beyond Balanchine.

February 26, 2014

New York City

A very fine day in many ways. Worked in the library in the morning, vetting my journal, now up to 1994. At 11:30 Burt Pike came and we spent two hours together over lunch. He and I are both healthy in mind and body. He has just been teaching Proust to adults and will continue with various involvements. We both lamented the plight of Constance Tagopoulos in Athens. But he says that if she had remained at Queens College she would no longer have a job there either—just as in Greece. Then to the play that Chrysanthi kept urging me not to book because we had seen it so many times, Waiting for Godot. But, I told her, we haven’t seen it with an actor of the stature of Ian McKellen playing Estragon. And it was marvelous, she being the first to recognize this. It is of course natural to theater that every production is different and some better than others. The same with musical performances, of course. This production was continually funny together with the sadness. Both tramps were splendid, Potso and Lucky less so but still perfectly OK. The play, so obvious today, is extraordinarily brilliant not only in its overall conception but in so many of its details. Chrysanthi asked me afterwards what its meaning is. I replied that perhaps the best way is to remember that it was written just after World War II and Becket’s vicissitudes therein. Humans can be like Potso and Lucky, tyrants and slaves, or they can basically love each other despite all impediments, as do the two tramps, who stay together in mutual support despite life’s meaninglessness. . . . Supper this time more sensibly in the Food Court of Grand Central Station. Then to our second night of ballet, very different from last night, if only owing to a full orchestra in the pit. For me, the largest pleasure and surprise came from “Acheron,” with music by Poulenc and choreography by Liam Scarlett. The music was Poulenc’s “Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Timpani,” thus very different. Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild danced again, plus two other stellar couples. The whole was continually soothing, peaceful, perhaps hieratic owing to the organ. Then came “Afternoon of a Faun” to Debussy’s music, of course, and choreography by Jerome Robbins based on the famous Nijinsky original from 1912. Danced superbly this time by Craig Hall and Janie Taylor.

February 27, 2014

New York City

Nice long lunch with Michael Groden and also his wife, Molly Peacock, whom I had never met before. She’s very lively, and a published poet. Mike has just retired. He is writing his memoirs, how one becomes devoted to James Joyce, starting, he says, in my class at Dartmouth. We’ll visit them in Toronto. Then to Astor Place to the downtown Public Theater on Lafayette Street to see Antony and Cleopatra. Well acted, although perhaps Cleopatra’s infinite variety was a bit hidden in the Afro-American actress who played her. The plot is so familiar to me, but more owing to Cavafy than Shakespeare. Antony, insisting against all advice to fight by sea at Actium, is exasperating. Back to the Yale Club for our usual shared lambchop dinner there served by our friend Angela. Then to our final night of ballet. I neglected to note that last night we also saw Balanchine’s “Walpurgisnacht” to Gounod’s music, not very memorable, and the Ravel/Balanchine “La Valse,” which the company hasn’t performed for many years. Although the music thrills me, I was not especially thrilled by this ballet, half of which is not even danced to “La Valse” but rather to “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.” The “hit” last night remained “Acheron.” Tonight the “hit” was clearly the Verdi/Robbins “Four Seasons,” beautifully and sometimes humorously evoking winter, spring, summer, and fall in that order—winter with the corps all in white feigning coldness, spring in green, summer very languishly in yellow, and fall in the multicolor farrago of fallen leaves. This was preceded by “Bal de Couture” to uninspired choreography (as usual) by Peter Martins, and then by Wheeldon’s “Danse à Grande Vitesse,” which, like all of Wheeldon’s work, is truly different and imaginative. Of the three performances we attended, surely the most memorable single ballet was “Afternoon of a Faun.”

February 28, 2014

New York City

This morning was a real treat: the Futurism exhibit at the Guggenheim. I of course knew that Kazantzakis experienced Marinetti and his extravagances in Naples around 1924 but I never realized that Futurism produced many very fine painters in Italy, although they eventually seemed to align themselves with fascism, Mussolini, and war. They said, in effect, “Don’t’ paint flowers and sunsets; paint locomotives, paint speedy print machines.” And they did, with striking results. To see so many of these forgotten works all together, arranged chronologically, was a great pleasure.

March 2, 2014

Hanover

After so much culture in New York last week, we returned to the Dartmouth Symphony last night bravely doing “Firebird” and “Pictures at an Exposition,” and today Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” in the Met’s HD series. A surfeit of culture, to be sure!

March 17, 2014

Very nice visit from Taveephol Chardtumrong (alias Pong), who said that he traveled from DC to Hanover chiefly to see me. He is the Thai student who graduated from Patana, where he had studied since age 8, and then from Dartmouth six or seven years ago. I was impressed, knowing him while he was at Dartmouth, that he had twice served temporarily as a Buddhist monk. When children do this, they win “merit” for their parents in this life and the afterlife. Upon graduation he secured a job in banking in Hong Kong, doing corporate mergers. Tonight the first thing he told me was that he had resigned. He is now unemployed, enjoying an interim period (without financial worries, I imagine), making peace with an ex-girlfriend in Washington, and wondering what to do next in his life. Apparently the last place in which he expects to settle is Thailand. What he needs is a good wife and a few children.

March 18, 2014

Christina, who was so devastated by being rejected by Haverford, has now been accepted at Scripps, which is just as selective, and wait-listed at Colorado College, accepted at Northeastern and others. Sophia, accepted everywhere, is probably going to choose between Ohio Wesleyan and the University of Vermont.

March 20, 2014

James McBride is here with his band after being unable to come owing to snow on February 5—four musicians, his younger brother, a driver, a tech man. They set up amplifiers and microphones for an hour, then shared supper with about fifteen of us, including Becky Smith. One of them said the fastest grace we had ever heard, like a machine gun firing. I introduced James, reading the letter I had written him in dialect after finishing his book. He recited four or five different passages after each of which the band played and sang an appropriate spiritual, with James playing his sax. One of these caused Becky to shed tears because it recalled something in her early life. The music was deep but also joyous. Kendal rocked! He said very complimentary things about Chrysanthi and me and especially about our children. What a fine act of friendship, especially considering how little ($1750.00) I was able to pay him. Lots of book-signing afterwards, and a chance to talk at some length with Sheilagh Smith, also the child of a black father and a white mother, like James. James was entirely open about the sadness of his divorce and the burden of the large alimony payment he needs to transmit each month. His great pleasure is going each week to the project in Brooklyn where he spent his childhood and giving pro bono music lessons to the children there. In his retirement he hopes to move back to this lower-class all-black project. He also stated that whenever he finishes a book he has very little interest in it any longer. Thus all his forced interviews and talks about The Good Lord Bird pain him; indeed in order to decrease his speaking time on such occasions he developed this “show” with the band and spirituals, where he can play his saxophone instead of reading from the book. I feel the same way about Kazantzakis most of the time. I mentioned to him my chagrin owing to Leander’s failure to continue composing, because he does have a good talent in this area. He transferred this time to fatherhood, I mentioned. James replied, “And what is more important? Surely fatherhood!” Amen, I suppose.

April 12, 2014

Beautiful Webster Performance by Arturo Delmoni, violinist extraordinaire, and Nina Siniakova, pianist, both employed by the New York City Ballet, he as concertmaster, she as pianist for warm-ups before performance. It was like being in Carnegie Hall listening to a world-famous virtuoso. And he did the Bach Chaconne!

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Quite a morning. Felitsa Makedon telephoned last night. The only time we could see her was for breakfast this morning. So we sat most pleasantly with her and Otmar and a nephew who lives in the Philippines with his father, Felitsa’s brother. Felitsa is the same: garrulous, lively, very smart, very connected with everyone of importance, etc., etc. We joked about going to Greece only if she can provide us with business class tickets. Otmar in retirement is still helping the Chinese in Beijing. He told me that the E.U. was well aware in 1981 that all the Greek data were false but decided that they could fix things nevertheless and thus admitted Greece to membership. . . . Then we raced to Newport to attend the Palm Sunday service in the Greek church. Saw Helene Rassias there and Sandra and Dimitris Tselepidakis and Phidias Dantos and his wife, Alice, who greeted me with multiple kisses and started reciting the Greek she had learned from our book. The priest is a black Kenyan, very lively. His English sounded like Greek to me; apparently when he got excited he lapsed into Swahili. His overly long homily concerned why Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, not a horse! Afterwards, fish lunch and lots of talk from Phidias, who says he is becoming a pacifist in old age.

April 16, 2014

I’m about finished with Bill McGrew’s fascinating history of Anatolia College, which I’m reading for the prospective publisher. It makes me understand and appreciate for the first time what brave people the nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries were, and what they endured. It also makes me understand better the vicissitudes experienced by the American Farm School. In his Chapter Ten he nicely summarizes the nature of Greek governance, as follows: “Although the severe controls on private education introduced at this time [early 1980s] reflected the zeal of PASOK’s reformers, they also illustrate long-standing features of Greek governance. Upon its liberation from Ottoman rule, the country had adopted the continental European model, which concentrated vast authority in the state as the embodiment of nationhood and the paramount force for achieving goals of survival and expansion. The state mechanism evolved in subsequent decades to monopolize a wide range of powers and functions while also providing the primary source of employment. To the popular mind, the state’s broad authority was largely unquestioned, irrespective of how effectively it performed public services. Education, in particular, was viewed as a social good to which every citizen was entitled, not to be sold on the market but provided by the state. Public schools were entrusted to transmit Greece’s cultural heritage and shape the values and loyalties of its citizens. This outlook, of course, contrasted with the American concept of central government as a necessary but imperfect and even potentially harmful force requiring limitations on its power and functions and the entitlement of a host of private and regional agencies to serve the general well-being and to provide services such as education.”

April 26–27, 2014

A busy weekend. On Saturday Kesaya had us with fifty others to a catered supper at Kendal (which I arranged) to celebrate Chris’s seventieth birthday. Nice to meet his sister, who has been living in Dublin but says that she’s been unable to read Joyce’s Ulysses. I offered her the chart and my notes. At the same time, Jennifer Karsten, executive director of Pendle Hill, arrived. Rose Miller and Carol Armstrong took her to supper, thankfully, and we met afterwards and again at breakfast on Sunday. Then to Meeting, where Hope Rennie took charge of her and I retreated (after playing hymns) to Kendal because of Bill Benson’s Interfaith Gathering, very “formal” in Roman Catholic style, on doubting Thomas’s refusal to recognize the posthumous Jesus until he had touched the wounds. Drewry Logan played Schubert and Bach nicely. Then lunch with all concerned. Then hurried to the Black center for Così fan tutte, splendidly done by the Met. Jennifer got there in time; so did Chrysanthi, driven from an art class in Lyme. I arrived exactly as James Levine raised his baton. What a joyous opera, with Mozart’s miraculous music never faltering. Then to Kendal for a supper for Jennifer with fourteen other Quakers and her good account of Pendle Hill’s actuality and its future hopes.

April 28, 2014

Pleasant breakfast with Jennifer. I gave her my Harkianakis book as a remembrance. Then we visited with Margery Walker for an hour, so Jen could meet a previous executive director of Pendle Hill. Finally, a quick tour of the Orozco murals, of course. In the afternoon: dentist, two gold crowns. . . . Last Friday I finished dealing with the copyediting for Zorba. S&S objected to “paws,” “human,” “viscera.”

April 29, 2014

Harvey Cox spoke at Dartmouth about his meeting with Pope Francis and the recent sanctification of two former popes. In the question period I asked if sanctification might happen for Dorothy Day and he said, “Yes, it’s entirely possible although she wouldn’t want it.” I thought to myself, “That precisely is the nature of her sanctity.” Afterwards, Avery Post mentioned that Pope Francis might appoint a woman as a new cardinal (cardinals apparently are not required to be priests) and that a likely candidate will be Mary Robinson. This brought back, of course, our visit to Mary Robinson when she was president of Ireland and subsequently my pleasant contact with her when she visited Dartmouth a few years later. But probably, like Dorothy Day, Mary Robinson would not crave the honor.

May 17, 2014

To Cambridge for a marvelous production at the A.R.T. of The Tempest. Lunch previously with Tom Akstens and Suzanne Murtha. He is skin and bones after heart surgery and has been fired from his job at Sienna after decades of teaching there as an adjunct. Sad. She, too, is discouraged. Her yoga class had only three students. They contemplate moving to Rhode Island, selling the house in Bakers Mills if they can, and starting over, somehow. He applied for a position elsewhere and was shortlisted once but not hired. Not even shortlisted in most places. Such capable, decent people! So sad.

May 29, 2014

Chrysanthi completely forgot my birthday yesterday although all three children remembered, as did even Demetrios Yiannakos and Andreas, George, and various other friends who sent email messages. Andreas’s son Georgakis telephoned; he is applying to university. But the other day, to balance the sadness of Chrysanthi’s failure, I received an unexpected letter from a student who graduated in 1967, Ted Haynes. “I am writing to substantiate that you changed and enriched my life much for the better and to thank you for it these many years later. I came to Dartmouth planning to major in engineering but found, after two years, that the courses I enjoyed most were Professor Crawford’s course on Chaucer and your freshman introductory English course. I’ve always imagined that you yourself read my freshman essay on choosing between a rational approach to life and a romantic one, exemplified by the author’s description of his passion for Italy. My fantasy is that you recognized some budding talent or at least inclination in the essay and had me assigned to your course. There were certainly apt students in that class and some of them went on to graduate school in English. I became an English major and, though I went on to business school (Stanford) and a career in Silicon Valley, I continued to enjoy reading and discussing books. I told myself, not believing it 100%, that when I retired I would write. I have made it come true and have enjoyed the writing immensely. My books have received good reviews and respectable sales, at least in the State of Oregon. While I am proud of the stories in On the Road from Burns I don’t expect you to actually read them. But I hope you will accept the book as one fruit of the tree you planted and as a token of my heartfelt and lifelong appreciation.”

May 31, 2014

Toronto

Picked up at the airport by Spyros Parashis, from Zachinthos, long resident in Toronto, and his son, a first-year university student, looking somewhat oriental because his mother was half-Japanese. The city is being “developed” by numerous high-rise apartments and office buildings, with no care for new roads or other traffic aids, resulting in daily gridlock. Sad. Another “rape” of a once-livable area, like Thessaloniki. Imbroglio in the hotel because Voula, who arranged everything supposedly, didn’t do it with sufficient care so that she could pay the bill. Spyros took us to a lovely street (the old Toronto) six blocks away and we lunched in a sunny courtyard very pleasantly. We’d been up since 5:00 a.m. and were hungry. Lots of talk with Spyros half in Greek half in English about life here, the Greek community of 200,000, previous lectures—e.g., on the worldview of Kazantzakis’s Odyssey. Then we took a very long taxi ride to the apartment of Michael Groden and Molly Peacock, next door to a huge market like the Reading Market in Philadelphia, mobbed on this Saturday afternoon. Their flat is tiny, stuffed with books, one cat (the other cat died last Wednesday). They never had children. Separate study space for each of them; nice view over the city. Good talk for several hours, somewhat literary of course. Molly, like Mike, publishes, in her case both poetry and prose. Mike recited how ill at ease he had felt at Dartmouth as a non-athletic lower middle class intellectual among the usual blond blue-eyed he-men. But he received a good education, he affirmed, and switched from science to English literature on account of Dartmouth’s influence, including mine, of course, since he ended up specializing in Joyce. We then walked the short way to the lakefront, saw an artificial sandy beach created over concrete and filled with young folks in bathing suits. Then to a fancy hotel with a restaurant at the very top overlooking the whole city. But when we arrived there, on the 38th floor, Chrysanthi’s acrophobia convinced the rest of us to go back down again despite our reservation there for supper. So we piled into a taxi and went to another place near the Anglican cathedral, a lovely outdoor restaurant in which a wedding had just concluded and the exquisite bride was still visible in her finery. We all had marvelous pasta severed elegantly, with continued good fellowship and talk, after which we had the new experience of using the Toronto subway to the Museum station and then walking the short distance along Avenue Road to our hotel.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Toronto

A full, lovely day. I telephoned the Toronto Meeting and received full directions, just a fifteen-minute walk from the hotel. We left early and thus had time before the 11:00 a.m. service to stop at the Music School on Bloor Street West to listen to a choir singing “Adoramus Dei” beautifully and children scurrying to lessons holding their half-size violins. Also peeked into the adjacent Museum with the huge dinosaur skeleton in full view at the entrance. At Meeting I discovered that a woman was about to go to Woodbrooke as Friend in Residence. She told me that the rooms are now filled with diverse people who are wonderful partners at meals. In other words, Woodbrooke operates as a B&B, it seems. No more sleeping guests from the Selly Oak Colleges, which is the way we knew it. Meeting was basically silent. I discovered later that Keith Mattock, whom I had hoped to see, was not present although he usually comes every Sunday. A gentleman to whom I spoke remembered Liz Kamphausen with pleasure and admiration, and was well aware of her bad experiences in Toronto with a Lesbian partner who abandoned her. Walking back, we stopped on the same lovely street where we had lunched yesterday and again had an outdoor meal of bacon and eggs. All these restaurants seem to have an abundance of beautiful young girls in snappy uniforms as servers. Back at the hotel, met Voula, who had arranged my visit. Drove to Greektown, specifically to the Μακεδονικό Πολιτιστικό Κέντρο with its large murals and photos of Παύλος Μελάς everywhere, and of Thessaloniki’s White Tower in 1905, then in the water and surrounded by a fortress wall. I gave my lecture on Kazantzakis as letter writer, growing very moved (as usual) at the emotional spots. People seemed to like that, commenting afterward that they appreciated my involvement with the material and were relieved not to be subjected once again to the usual academic stink. Long, tasty supper afterwards in a Greek restaurant. A lovely young lady sitting opposite me told me that she was reading the Iliad in translation, but not the Kazantzakis-Kakridis version (of course), the Maronitis one. I’ll send her my Iliad notes and how to purchase Simone Weil’s pamphlet. Also Joyce’s chart, since she had tried without success to read Ulysses. Back to the hotel at 10:30 p.m. to welcome sleep.

June 7, 2014

Riparius

The John Deere started this morning on the first try. So did the Troy Bilt this afternoon. So I’ve been mowing. Better luck than with the old weed-wacker (Irv’s), which worked beautifully yesterday until I couldn’t extend the line—I took it apart and couldn’t put it back together again. Mowing on the tractor today I noticed that I’d reached 600 hours since I bought the machine in 1988 when Daphne finished Harvard and I had extra cash. That makes this the 26th year. Last year I finished 25 years, which means the average sitting on the machine each year is 600 ÷ 25 = 24 hours per summer. 24 hours well spent.

June 10, 2014

Leander arrived after another successful four-hand workshop although fewer students attended. Sorry to hear that Bill Ballard’s “upgrading” of Miss Mann’s piano, which I secured for Kinhaven, has—according to Leander—just about ruined it. He lacquered the hammers and now the tone is adversely affected. Leander in the faculty recital played the same Mozart four-hand sonata, the one in C major, that I am studying now (1st movement only, so far) to do with Stan Udy. All the recordings play it at breakneck speed but Leander says that it’s only allegro and needn’t be played presto.

June 11, 2014

Santa Barbara

Sixteen hours from door to door owing to delays but it’s nice to see Santa Barbara again after many years’ absence. We heard a full report of Christina’s progress at the rehab institute in Hawaii. Apparently she is happy and active. We resolved to give her a graduation present of 100 euros for use in Thessaloniki when she goes in September. Also, Greg suggested that Daphne take Chrysanthi with her to visit Christina during one of her breaks, just the girls. Chrysanthi, remarkably, did not say No. We also heard full news about Lucia, who is so demented that she remembers nothing from day to day but otherwise is “healthy” and active in a “safe house” with about eight other residents.

June 12, 2014

Practiced my Mozart on Daphne’s Steinway—a pleasure. Received word from Niki Stavrou that payment for Zorba will be coming tomorrow but she still does not say how much. Suzanne Donahue at Simon & Schuster led me to believe that it would be $15,000. Let’s hope. In the evening, went to a major graduation event staged by The Middle School in a museum high up overlooking the city, with a brilliant full moon overhead. At the museum’s entrance, a huge skeleton of a whale, something I’d never seen. The Head of School, Brian, spoke excellently about the school’s values especially as reflected by the trip program: to learn to cooperate in adversity, to seize the day, every day, carpe diem. Then two parents who went as chaperons on the latest trip also spoke about their experiences. Finally a very well-made film of the excursion in Oregon was shown, including walking the bicycles through mud and snow, and a 52-mile ride in a single day at the end. Campfires every night. Discussions, games, and Andrew’s famous “Tebbe-time” in which he stood before the 28 others and solicited questions, each of which he answered with humor, like a stand-up comic. I said that if I ever had the chance I’d ask him why Eve came after Adam and not before. The school is remarkable. Many of its teachers were former students. Its purpose is to change the lives of its students. One method is through repeated trips culminating in something as strenuous and difficult as this final one in Oregon.

June 13, 2014

Up at 6:00 a.m. to be in time for Andrew’s 7:00 a.m. swim in the Pacific ocean. Prior to this everyone—students, teachers, guests—formed a large circle on the beach. One of the teachers spoke about greeting each day with a “good morning.” Again, the school’s motto, carpe diem, “seize the day!” Then we all turned to the right and massaged the back and shoulders of the person opposite. After this, we turned to the left and massaged the back of the person who had previously massaged our back. These rituals completed, students and also a few teachers, ran into the water for a short dip. Coffee and donuts preceded. We were introduced to some of the teachers, and to several parents who enthused about Andrew’s Tebbe-times. The active graduation began at 1:00 p.m., outdoors in a park high up, with far-reaching views in all directions. It lasted four hours! Each of the 29 graduating students was bought forward and joined with an individual—teacher, father, mother, older sibling, uncle—who spoke about the student’s attributes for a maximum (all were forewarned) of two to three minutes. (The first went for ten minutes and frightened all of us, but the rest were admirably prompt.) Then the student and his or her sponsor were photographed. Then the student joined with Whitney Ingersoll, who read a poem she had composed for each, this becoming the graduation certificate. Andrew came as number 25 (the order being alphabetical), near the end. Eric Lehman, theater teacher, was his sponsor, stressing Andrew’s multiple virtues and ending, of course, with the now-famous Tebbe-times. Many of the commendations were very moving, especially when a mother or father spoke about their child. It was an ordeal owing to the length, but on the other hand admittedly different, making the ceremony truly personal for each graduate. It was amusing to see the huge differences in appearance, some of these 14- or 15-year olds looking like college students already, others looking like primary school youngsters. We shook hands afterwards with Brian McWilliam, Head of School, who said that he remembered me from our last time at the school four years ago. But I didn’t have a chance to speak again to the English teacher, Jesse Wooten, who is a Dartmouth graduate.

June 14, 2014

Visited a local retirement community called Casa Dorinda, very posh, very Spanish architecturally, planning like our Kendal to add new units that will be larger and more expensive. The biggest difference is that they have an activities director for the residential unit whereas we of course do not. They are more expensive than we are, and the apartment size seems a bit smaller. Otherwise much is the same, even a non-refundable entry fee. . . . I wrote the Memorial Minute for Peter Stettenheim, requested by Ministry and Council. . . . Niki Stavrou sent an e-mail on Thursday that she was ready to pay me via electronic transfer to my checking account. But so far nothing has arrived. . . . Went to the next village to see “aeroponic” growth of lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, peppers, etc. No soil. The seedling’s roots are washed over by running water fortified with nitrogen and other nutrients. No danger from rabbits or deer or whatever. The Greek is αερο- (air) + πόνος (labor). In the evening, went to the busy harbor where we had never been before. Hundreds of boats, both for commercial fishing and for private pleasure. Crowds—young, old, families. Ate fish and chips and shrimps. The ocean calm, gentle waves, infinite expanse to the south and west.

June 20, 2014

Terpni

Beginning to feel my age increasingly. Bending down to pick up sticks, etc. is slow, rising to full height again even slower. Aches on and off in ankle, legs, knee, shoulder. Mowing makes me tired, although the John Deere is sill quite easy. I managed to scythe around the pond satisfactorily, also to till the garden. So enough energy remains.

June 21, 2014

Dear Mike [Keeley],

Thanks again for sending me The Megabuilders of Queenston Park. I read it with interest because I had of course known your house on Littlebrook Road and had spent many happy hours there, but even more because, thanks to this novel, I realized for the first time that I, too, had been victimized by a mcmansion!

By the way, the two-bedroom apartment we now enjoy in Kendal at Hanover occupies exactly 1,107 square feet. (Of course we also have the run of the entire complex, including washer and dryer out in the hall, a ping pong table further down the hall, a library, dining room, exercise room, etc., etc. Thus we hardly feel cramped.) Here in the Adirondacks we live in a log cabin containing a living room of 320 square feet, a sleeping loft of the same size, a kitchen of 280 square feet and a bathroom of 100, totaling 1020 sq. ft. (Here, too, I must add, we have the run of 300 acres of woods, plus two barns, an Adirondack lean-to that serves as my semi-outdoor office, and a 10 × 16 “guest house” filled with books.)

Here’s what happened in Hanover. In 2001, in order to move to Kendal, we put our modest home on sale. It had a nice living room, kitchen, dining room, small guest room, and half-bath downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs, and a full cellar, all on a fairly large plot (1½ acres), with a small clearing in front and back, and a large patch of woods leading downhill to the street behind us—all this unbelievably just a seven-minute walk to the Dartmouth campus. We told the real estate agent that we wanted to sell to a youngish family with a child or children, to reproduce our own situation when we had purchased the house thirty-five years before. She produced an appropriate buyer, a woman who came to us for an interview accompanied by a husband and baby. She was eager, thus agreed to our price. Excellent! So we sold to her. Only much later did we discover that the husband and baby were fake—borrowed for the occasion. The new owner, now known as Hanover’s “slum lord,” never moved into the house. She turned our living room into her office for controlling the multiple dwellings she owns in town, and filled the bedrooms with five graduate students, which meant that their autos plus hers and a pick-up truck lined the driveway leading to our small one-car garage. But that was just the beginning. Eventually we discovered that the woods behind the house, every single tree, had been uprooted and removed. New construction had begun at the bottom of our land (our plot being large enough to allow a second dwelling). When the new cellar and first floor had been completed, our home was raised up, placed on steel beams, and moved down the hill to be situated on top of the new construction. Thus our front door (eventually removed) was raised to her second floor. Her construction then added sizable additions on both sides of our original building so that eventually our modest home was totally enclosed in what, thanks to you, I now realize is a mcmansion! And there it sits. However, she has applied to zoning authorities, etc. for permission to build a still larger dwelling, complete with a five-car garage (!), on the vacant spot where our home originally sat. Apparently permission has been granted, although the garage allowed will be only for four cars. Sounds just like Princeton, don’t you think? As for the town boards that allow such things to happen, I asked one of the members whom I knew and who voted for the woman’s original mcmansion, why he voted positively. He is a medical doctor, a surgeon. He answered, “Peter, I’d been in the hospital since 6:00 a.m., operating repeatedly. When the town committee met in the evening I was so tired I didn’t know what was going on, and I just raised my hand in order to bring things to a close so that I could go home and get into bed.”

Somehow I’d never thought of my enclosed former home as being part of a mcmansion, but now I do, thanks to your novel. If anything, my megabuilder was (is) more nefarious than your fictional father and son. In any case, I hope that your present quarters on Windrow Drive are larger than 1,107 square feet.

June 27, 2014

A propos, Mats Lemberger came to visit yesterday, stayed overnight, and this morning I took him down to see the beaver dams and pond, negotiating this quite well. Yesterday, mowing with the White, he broke the belt. I shouldn’t let guests use our machines. Luckily, Steve has a replacement belt and will presumably fix the machine on Monday. I’ve been “mowing” with the Stihl trimmer, having trouble as usual with the line always becoming too short to do anything and not lengthening when I bump the end of the machine against a rock. So I take the spool apart and reposition the line, which lasts until it hits a rock. Despite everything I’m probably ahead of usual in mowing this year, having finished the south field, all around the house, and all around the pond already. The growth over the power line is so dense that I had trouble finding our so-called path’s direction when I took Mats to the beavers. Mats, by the way, has been accepted to medical school again after having been expelled for academic failure. He completed another full year of biology courses in a graduate school, passed them, and was readmitted as a freshman with zero credits for previous work. He says that he has found some tricks to help him memorize data and thus pass exams. He is justifiably proud of his perseverance over three or four years. We compare him to David Noda, who was repeatedly refused admission to medical schools, gave up, went into banking instead (and presumably is now millionaire). Mats played guitar for us and sang some songs both popular and a few original ones, in a weak voice not very attractive. But he plays well. I reciprocated by playing the primo part of the Mozart C major four-hand sonata that I’m learning in order to paly with Stan Udy in September when we return to Kendal.

June 28, 2014

I sent this testimonial to be read at the ceremonial dinner for David Holton in Cambridge at his retirement.

I have known David Holton since 1975, when we were both in Birmingham; indeed in the spring term of that year I attended a seminar he gave on early Greek printing in Venice. In 1976 he was working there in an administrative post, not an academic one, and lived with Ann and their adopted baby Christopher at King’s Heath, Birmingham, in number 60 Taylor Road, which I noted in my journal resembled the house that Chrysanthi and I had endured in Bristol in 1958—namely “two up two down” with kitchen and loo out back. Ours had no provision for heat, except a coal grate in the “salon.” I hope that his was better. In 1979 he, Ann, and now two children, Christopher and Rosalind, came to tea, and I noted that he was presently “a kind of executive officer for the Faculty of Law at the university, having left Byzantine Studies.” But by 1985, happily, he was finally a veritable academic in Cambridge, where, as I could not help but marveling, “classics has its own building, with a huge library.” It was very special then to meet Alexis Vlasto there, the son of the admirable Πέτρος Βλαστός. Ten years later, in 1995, I was pleased to encounter daughter Rosalind again, now grown up and doing A levels in art history. In that same year, I lunched in hall with David at Selwyn, together with a mathematician, engineer, theologian, ancient historian, and political scientist. How different from Dartmouth, which does not even have a faculty club. My seminar to David’s graduate students elicited intelligent questions, everything in Greek of course. Five years later, in 2000, I was again at Cambridge for a seminar with his graduate students, followed by a lively discussion for an hour with this articulate, thoughtful group on questions of nationalism. David and Ann were better situated now in a town eleven miles distant, since it has a cohesive village life, which they missed in Cambridge. On my final visit, in March 2005, I spent an hour with David in his suite learning about his large project of five years’ duration (so he thought, then) with several collaborators: to create a proper grammar of the vernacular Greek spoken in medieval times. After my lecture came the obligatory visit to the bar followed by dinner in Grantchester, inevitably at the Rupert Brooke Restaurant, then a drive past the Grantchester Church on the way back, but we couldn’t see if the clock was still at 10 past 3. Spent overnight very comfortably at Selwyn.

1975 to 2005: thirty years of scholarly, intellectual, and personal exchange, not to mention the 20 issues of Kambos, running from 1993 to 2013, on my shelf at home. David’s hospitality at Cambridge was always gracious, his students always eager, gifted, and grateful for the care they were given by a mentor who, as one of them told me, was unlike so many other teachers because he seemed actually to care about his subject.

July 8, 2014

Alec fitted a new belt into the White, which now runs perfectly, just in time for Leander, who arrived last night, to reestablish his “golf course” on his front lawn. And I managed successfully to rivet in a missing knife on the Ford mower, which now performs better than ever.

July 9, 2014

Two large branches down from the ash tree next to the cabin. But apparently we missed a severe storm—an actual tornado—that devastated parts of North Creek, leading to long power outages. Lucky! . . . Alec is re-doing our south gable. The scaffolding is up. He has removed the old shingles and has applied a new layer of black paper over the layer I applied sixty-odd years ago.

July 10, 2014

Ballet at SPAC with Alec and family, a delicious, invigorating program beginning with Stravinsky/Robbins’ “Circus Polka” for little girls: three groups starting with the oldest, then younger, then still younger, all charming. Next came Gounod/Balanchine’s “Walpurgisnacht Ballet,” more traditional, balanced by Justin Peck’s new “Everywhere We Go” very imaginative and different although probably too long. Finally, the Gershwin/Balanchine “Who Cares,” with marvelous arrangements of Gershwin’s music. The pianist, who had lots to do, was possibly the one who’ll be coming to Kendal next January, Nina Siniakova. Maybe she can play a Gershwin medley for us.

July 27, 2014

Finished mowing the south field. Και του χρόνου (μακάρι)! Also finished the Introduction I was asked to write in Greek for the new edition of Ο φτωχούλης του Θεού. Chrysanthi says that it is very clear. Let’s see now what Nikos Mathioudakis says.

July 28, 2014

Evelyn Greene guided us to a trail off Route 30 along Indian Lake that led after about 1½ miles to a series of “erratic boulders” (laid down by the retreating glacier) enormous in size, each of which exhibited “tafoni,” which are indentations circular in shape, mostly, a sort of embroidery caused by unknown forces, amazing evidence of prehistoric processes. Chrysanthi negotiated the uphill path very well, as did I, and the children of course scampered with ease. Afterwards we ate our sandwiches at the boat-launch site where Warder Cadbury used to pick me up to go to Camp Backlog. Poor Don Greene is more incapacitated than last year. Evelyn says that he can walk from the house to the mailbox, that’s all. And he was a 46er! She lent us a privately published book recording the Schaeffer family’s accomplishment of the 46 peaks.

July 29, 2014

Alec’s birthday. I gave him two of the marvelous Tyrwhitt shirts that I had ordered from London. Beautiful supper prepared by Monica. Daphne and Greg came with Peter and Christina (Andrew is at a movie-editing camp at Yale University). Christina, alas, is still very psychologically sick despite the restorative time in Hawaii. I told her all about her future location in Thessaloniki and she showed no interest, asked no questions; indeed most of the time sat inertly and silently. Also she sleeps until noon typically. What a shame! But we all tried to ignore this and be lively. Lots of good food. I gained a few pounds owing to the donuts they brought.

July 30, 2014

I drove to Dave Whitty’s to reclaim my chain saw, whose gas line was injured by freezing moisture caused by ethanol, he told me. Went to the Marina to see if they sell ethanol-free gas. They do not, but the clerk—who turned out to be Dave Whitty’s daughter—told me of a place just off Route 8 on the way to Brant Lake. So I went and, lo and behold! there the 91 gas is ethanol free. So I brought home a gallon in a can, added the required oil, poured the ethanol-laden gas out of the Stihl saw, and replaced it with this ethanol-free gas. Now we can leave the saws, etc. over winter with full tanks instead of emptying them and hoping for the best. And, with luck I won’t have any more $75 repair bills owing to ethanol.

July 31, 2014

We repainted the porch—or, more accurately, Elena and Theo repainted the porch, although I did some and also replaced a rotted board. Monica did a second coat. It’s a bright blue, a bit lighter than before, and beautiful.

August 1, 2014

Up at 6:00 a.m. today to burn the brush pile. Also we collected about five large piles of brush left in various other areas—east field, pond, south field—and burned those also, including lots of slash brought down by Alec from his cabin, in the wagon pulled by the Jeep, miraculously running after Alec replaced the radiator and manifold with parts obtained via internet from Texas. I cleared much this summer, especially around the pond. It’s a good feeling. So is the clear, fully weeded garden. For supper, Tom and Suzanne came. Both are about to undergo life-style alterations, moving to Rhode Island, and changing jobs, Suzanne mostly by choice, Tom because of being fired, along with 28 others, by Siena College, which claims that it cannot pay for the required healthcare under the new “Obamacare” law. Tom and many of the others already have health insurance and do not want the government’s plan, but the law forces the college to provide it unless, of course, they fire all the people concerned. Horrors!

August 2, 2014

Dave Whitty again fixed my chain saw, this time gratis, because the “fixed” saw I retrieved a few days ago was impossible to start after it conked out while idling. He found a defect in the carburetor. This afternoon, with the Troy-Bilt, I trimmed around all the rocks in the south field that couldn’t be done well enough by the John Deere. Heavy work but helped by a fresh, cool breeze. At 4:00 p.m. I went to my “office,” which I had abandoned for well over a week. Nice to return to this journal.

August 3, 2014

Alec, Elena, Theo, Monica, and I all went down half of our southern border and half of Alec’s re-marking it because previous markings had faded. Hard to find where to mark but we did rediscover old markings most of the time and even some fence. I left them when the land descended very steeply to Vly Brook. They reported later that the beavers have started a new dam below their old triple dam and thus will eventually transform more of the stream into a lake. In the afternoon Chrysanthi and I, alone, marked the remaining portion of our southern border, up to the swamp, again with difficulty owing to faded markers but also with the assurance of re-discovering old fencing here and there. Lots of hard work. Supper at Pete’s Ah in North Creek, with the verdict that pizza at the revived “Chicken” in Chestertown is infinitely better. Then—of course!—Stewart’s, our ice cream refuge. Finally, really too late, when the children were too tired, some music: Theo transposing on clarinet some gypsy melodies, Elena playing half of a Vivaldi first movement, then breaking down in tears because she felt she had played so badly. Neither child exhibits any special talent for music, alas, but at least they do well enough to participate in ensembles at school.

August 4, 2014

The following arrived by post from Kinhaven, the result of an interview I gave several months ago: Conversation with Peter & Chrysanthi Bien, Two of our Silver Swans. For Peter and Chrysanthi Bien, their connection to Kinhaven includes their whole family. Each of their three children participated for years as student musicians, producing two violinists and one pianist. Their pianist, Leander Bien, still serves as the current Director of the Adult Piano Workshop. Peter’s work as a Board Member, during three terms and then as Chairman of the Board from 1988–89, was extremely significant. His Board service was during a critical time of transitions for Kinhaven, as they worked with the Dushkin family, after Mr. Dushkin’s passing, to take the school from a renter of the property to owners as an institution. We also have Peter and Chrysanthi to thank for securing two of our Concert Hall’s most important features—the fans that help cool the hall, and the concert grand Stein-way (which was recently refurbished thanks to a generous foundation grant and now plays and sounds better than ever—one great fit for another great gift). Peter retired from Dartmouth College as Professor of English and Comparative Literature in 1997, and today continues as an accompanist and playing for enjoyment. When asked what prompted him and Chrysanthi to include Kinhaven in their estate giving plans, he replied, “For us, it was a very natural act since a large part of our lives has come from music and specifically Kinhaven. This music school is unique in its mission, in that while it is not in the business of producing professional musicians (although it does do that), rather its focus is on nurturing students to become people who will continue to make music a loving part of their life. Through our giving we hope to ensure the longevity of this admirable mission.”

Alec and Monica invited Mike and Laura Gouthreau to supper and we joined them, all seated around my parents’ Biedemeier table, I in the matching chair for head of family I suppose. Before and after dinner Mike and I sat next to each other and engaged in unstoppable conversation, so easily and effortlessly. He is such an interesting man. Now they plan to move to a condo in St. Albans, Vermont, to be near his native Canada, and to be relieved of the chore of cutting and splitting enough wood to heat their Adirondack house all winter. They hope to sell the house. Both families look forward to visits. They can descend from St. Albans to White River Junction via AMTRAK; we can ascend in the opposite direction.

August 5, 2014

Monica’s Green Card has been renewed. We’re waiting for it to arrive. Today she went again to Homeland Security to be fingerprinted for a reentry permit next year. . . . I finished reading and proofing my journal for 2013. Now I will begin typing what I’ve written so far for 2014. Yesterday I corrected the faulty English translation of Stassinakis’s latest Synthesis. I still have lots to read for Dennis and also for Lewis Owens: a play on Shostakovich; in addition, a series of poems by Mathioudakis, one of which I attempted to translate. . . . Lovely dinner with Don and Maria Kurka, such talented people. She organized another show in Bogota and wrote the impressive catalogue. He has painted two large canvases, both disturbing—one of a contorted face, the other of two women terrified by an unknown object—reflections perhaps on aging. . . . Monica was fingerprinted again by Homeland Security and will receive permission to reenter the country. We are still waiting for her renewed Green Card, which was forwarded from Hanover.

August 6, 2014

Alec and the children went off to mark his northern border across from Vly Book and up to the corner with State land, but couldn’t find the corner.

August 7, 2014

I finished civilizing around my office, removing weeds but leaving all the tiny oaks east of the rock pile. Also repaired a gap in the rear wall, using two leftover cedar shingles. Extended the black paper along the south border of the garden. After supper we went for the children’s final “Stewart’s treat.” Returning, we found a bat flying around our kitchen, but we left the door open and it departed. Amazing, my MacBook Pro computer, which refused to work this morning, functioned perfectly tonight. Robien in Hanover says I need a voltage regulator.

August 9, 2014

All six of us squeezed into our Malibu to get Alec’s rental car in Queensbury, then visited Fran Shapiro quickly, bringing her some of our blueberries. She is 101 but looks and acts like 75. Then lunch together in Panera’s, very pleasantly. Shopping; chores; Alec finishing his closure when Elena, walking backward, fell into the cellar because the trap door was open, but luckily didn’t break anything—landed on her backside, which is sore, and bumped her head slightly. By suppertime she was part of the troupe again with a good appetite for our spaghetti.

August 10, 2014

Departure day for Alec and family. When they descended in mid-afternoon in their rental car, ready to leave, I was at the top of a ladder brushing mold off our porch roof. Alec jumped up onto the roof itself and did the job properly, dressed in his departure clothes, then stepped onto the steeper roof over our connecting room and brushed away more mold. Theo ran to the barn and brought some black paper to catch all these droppings. And then, after hugs and kisses, they drove off. Such excellent people, all of them! We went to Schroon Lake later and ate at Pittkin’s, only the two of us, of course.

August 11, 2014

To Warrensburg to fill the gas tank with the 60¢ per gallon discount obtained from yesterday’s shopping at Price Chopper. Bought five bags of cow manure to fertilize all of Chrysanthi’s gardens for next year. Also RV antifreeze, even though it’s still early. Later, while I was in the post office hoping that we could put a search on Monica’s lost Green Card post that was forwarded from Hanover and then disappeared, Chrysanthi captured and killed a mouse by herself in the kitchen. Quite an accomplishment!

August 14, 2014

Took down a dead tree near the south border. Chain saw working perfectly on ethanol-free gas. Chrysanthi and I are civilizing the ground floor of the barn, discarding lots from this fifty-year accumulation but also discovering items that we had forgotten were there. Eric from Eric and Eric came to look at our roofs and submit a proposal. The gently sloping one over porch and bathroom on the north side cannot take metal. He suggests “modified bitumen roll roofing heat applied,” which he says will be OK for the TV dish. We want to leave our home to the children without old roofs that need to be replaced. . . . Practicing all three movements of the Mozart four-hand sonata in C major, I’m amazed that I can actually do them (sometimes). . . . Monica’s letter, presumably with her new Green Card, has finally been delivered—to Missouri! She’ll need to contact Homeland Security to discover what went wrong.

August 15, 2014

I’m trying to read Mark C. Taylor’s “ERRING, a Postmodern A/theology.” Some of it is gobbledygook, some not. But the gobbledygook is not always postmodern. For example: “. . . when it is shown that what the subject is lies entirely in the attributes of the subject; that is, that the predicate is the true subject, it is also proved that if the divine predicates are attributes of human nature, the subject of those predicates is also human nature.” That’s a quote from Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841.

August 21, 2014

Today: (1) finished reading Zorba again, this time the first printed version, in order to catch the mistakes—many; (2) put the tractor up for the winter, not difficult except that the battery seems heavier each year; (3) ordered new metal roofing for our cabin from Eric and Eric.

August 22, 2014

I’m still bothered that I cannot understand statements such as the following (by Derrida, of course): “The history of presence is closed, for ‘history’ has never meant anything but the presentation (Gegenwärtigung) of Being, the production and recollection of beings in presence, as knowledge and mastery. Since absolute self-presence in con-sciousness is the infinite vocation of full presence, the achievement of absolute knowledge is the end of the infinite, which could only be the unity of the concept, logos, and consciousness in a voice without différance.” . . . Nice visit from Leonard and Mary Ann Cadwallader. Then we went to Queensbury to share supper with Fran Shapiro.

August 24, 2014

Sometimes Mark Taylor is helpful despite the gobbledygook. He notes that the term “encyclopedia” comes from εγκύκλιος παιδεία, the circle of arts and sciences that constituted the education of Greek youths. And he notes that “Kant’s critical philosophy effects a ‘Copernican revolution’ by placing the human subject at the center of the universe of knowledge. According to Kant, knowledge involves the conjunction of general a priori structures of cognition and particular a posteriori sense data. [However] . . . it is impossible to be certain that the cognitive forms with which the knowing subject is equipped disclose the way things ‘really’ are. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish the things-as-known from the things-apart-from-known (Ding-an-sich). The thing-in-itself is, by definition, unknowable and forms an absolute limit to all knowledge” (p. 83). That is well said, and easily understood by me. But when he moves on to Hegel and “the conviction . . . that Kant’s thing-in-itself does not designate extramental reality but is actually a cognitive construct that stands in critical tension with all determinate forms of knowledge, . . . the last vestiges of mimesis yield to thoroughgoing poiesis [and] . . . the locus of creativity shifts from the divine to the human subject . . .,” I begin to fog over, the major cause being, I presume, my ignorance of Hegel’s philosophy. . . . Later: This helps: “The return-to/of Hegel that deconstruction proposes is mediated not only directly by Nietzsche but also indirectly by Kierkegaard. . . . Kierkegaard’s relentless attack on Hegelian results foreshadows deconstruction’s critique of eschatology and denial of closure” (p. 99).

August 25, 2014

Taylor introduced me to Wallace Stevens’s marvelous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

The whole secret is the lineation, placing “barrow” and “water” on separate lines.

Taylor’s major thesis is clearly summarized on page 175: “The inescapability of erring calls into question the notion of truth that lies at the heart of the Western theological and philosophical network. . . . The dominant theological position in the West is, of course, monotheism. . . . Insofar as God is one, truth is one. From this point of view, the tone is never plural, multiple, and complex but always unified, single, and simple. . . . In contrast to ephemeral temporal flux, truth is believed to be eternal. . . . The monologism of truth is pre-scribed to ease the distress induced by the uncertainty that arises from the polymorphous play of appearance. Contrary to expectation, this ‘cure’ inevitably fails . . .” I am fortified by this in my feeling that Greek polytheism is superior to Hebraic-Christian monotheism. As Taylor says on p. 176, “impermanence . . . can actually liberate. . . . When it no longer seems necessary to reduce manyness to oneness . . ., it becomes possible to . . . take ‘eternal delight’ in ‘the enigmatical/Beauty of each beautiful enigma.’”

August 27, 2014

Washing my face this morning, I was able to watch a miracle through the bathroom window next to the sink—a spider industriously finishing its web, going round and round in the ever-diminishing circles. Our woodchuck has also been visible. The other day he (or she) was standing next to the outdoor pump. Seeing me through the window, he disappeared beneath the house, where apparently there is a burrow. But the other burrow, in our outhouse, which has been active for decades, clearly continues. One of its residents was feeding nearby in the field, standing up, as they do, every so often to survey the surroundings in case of danger, and of course the moment I made myself visible at the house he scampered back to safety beneath the outhouse. Recently, as well, two large families of wild turkeys, mothers and chicks, were feeding outside of Leander’s cabin.

August 29, 2014

My favorite spider’s web is a shambles—torn, dirty, a mess. But this morning Madame Spider repaired it systematically, one rung at a time. Now it is like new, perfect again, and she has retreated as usual to hide beneath the kitchen overhang, waiting for dinner. . . . Taylor concludes with two lines from Stevens’s poem “July Mountain”: “Thinkers without final thoughts / In an always incipient cosmos.” . . . We had “tea” this afternoon with Lou and Inge Curth in their house off River Road, built in the 1870s, he says. He told me about how happy he was to retire, although a captain, from the Rangers owing to an ideological battle with the governor and his minions wanting the Rangers to concentrate on law enforcement, and to be armed like policemen, whereas Lou and other “traditionalists” wanted the Rangers to continue enhancing the Adirondack wilderness with trails, lean-tos, etc. The traditionalists have already lost. He said, interestingly, that the change started with Garrow, the Waddell Road murderer about whom I was the one who first alerted the police. When Garrow was eluding state troopers because he knew how to live and hide in the forest and they didn’t, which led to the Rangers being called in to assist them, whereas the Rangers then demanded to be armed. And that has continued. The Curths have transferred ownership to a corporation in which their son, next year, will possess 51% of the stock. But it’s been a nuisance because a sister and brother-in-law, also stockowners, became drug addicts and had to be bought out with great difficulty and expense. Naturally, I give thanks to our family, the limited partners in Terpni, none of whom is a drug addict! . . . Marvelously tender porterhouse steak grilled perfectly by me on the open fire for supper. Watched Federer win again afterwards, in the US Open.

August 30, 2014

To the dump in the morning, one of our recurring pleasures.

September 4, 2014

Leander and I painted the northern border of Terpni successfully. Difficult to get through the bogs, places where we had to search for the line, always finding it eventually and even discovering bits of fencing. The northwest corner is clear; there is even a surveyor’s pin. Along the western border we noted our neighbor’s posting signs and his heavy logging, but always legally on his land, right up to the line sometimes, never across on our land. We bushwhacked back, following my compass eastward, and found a trail which led us to the end of the logging road made by Bill Heid so many decades ago. We toured a bit through another path made by Earl Millington, and got home by 11:30 a.m. Next year we must re-do the entire western border. . . . In the evening Don and Maria Kurka came for supper. Such good guests! Chrysanthi cooked us a delicious chicken Parmesan and we finished a bottle of wine after a bottle of beer for each of us. Leander was very talkative, as was especially Maria, who is so bright and genuine. Tom Akstens is offering Don’s former property for sale but at $395,000. They left around 10:00 p.m., early enough for Chrysanthi, Leander, and me to watch the amazing five-set match that Federer won in the US Open against Monfils.

September 16, 2014

At “Quaker 8s” tonight, I gave the following to everyone as the basis of our meditation: “Matthew Fox, in his The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, defines worship superbly: ‘The essential role of worship is to link together microcosm and macrocosm once again in the context of thanksgiving or praise for our amazing (and therefore reverential) existence in the universe. Worship is the microcosm (humanity) giving thanks for the macrocosm (the universe and all its creative wonders)’ (p. 213). He also appreciates Silence as a way of getting in touch with what there was before words. And he is scathing on the trivialization of worship that occurred in Protestant churches, and in Catholic ones after Vatican II, where mystery is removed.” Present were Anne Baird, Len and Mary Ann Cadwallader, Peter and Penny Wright, Hal Hamilton, Judith Pettingell, Chrysanthi, and myself. As so often happens in our meetings, the meditations were meaningful, coming from the heart as well as the mind. At the start, we treated everyone to a marvelous chocolate cake baked by Melissa, our new Kendal baker. . . . In the afternoon, Chrysanthi and I completed our business with Catherine Richmond, lawyer, adding a codicil to our wills to provide $50,000 donations to the American Farm School, Pendle Hill, and Kinhaven. I wanted $100,000 each but Chrysanthi reduced each to $50,000.

September 30, 2014

Terpni

After eight-hand piano practice (Rossini’s Barber of Seville overture), drove to the farm, expecting to see Eric & Eric’s roofing work completely finished. Instead we found the two workmen still very busy, trash everywhere around the cabin, one metal roofing piece missing over the porch because it had arrived damaged and needed to be replaced. Also, on entering the cabin, we found the kitchen full of bits of cement and rotten sheathing, covering Leander’s shining yellow floor. My window shutters upstairs were hampered by sheathing, in addition. In sum, it was very good that we came. The workers adjusted the sheathing so that the shutters can now be removed and then put in place. They helped us clean up the kitchen. We talked about the cedar shingles that they had for completing the sheathing that I had never done behind the electric wires upstairs, saying that they should be coated with clear preservative to hamper weathering, as we’d done with the new gable that Alec had placed on the south end. John, the “master carpenter” from the office, was attentive and helpful. So, everything will probably be finished next week, and we’ll make another trip to inspect before paying the final bill. Earl showed up with Stevie, now in first grade. No more instances of bullying, thankfully. Earl has a splendid buck and a large bear in photos and hopes to shoot them this year, having failed to do so last year. As always, the farm is beautiful, a tonic. And on the drive over in the morning we were regaled by the very best color we’d ever seen, at least east of Rutland. West of Rutland and into the Adirondacks was entirely different, with hardly any color, probably because of the preponderance of pines and other evergreens. . . . I stopped at the post office to alert Tom to the latest news in Monica’s difficult relationship with Homeland Security regarding her green card. They had neglected to do anything after the new card was returned to them instead of being forwarded. They promised to attend to it now. She needs to wait another 31 days before inquiring. The plan now is to have the card sent to P.O. Box 106, Riparius and for Tom not to forward it but to mail it to us disguised, after which I’ll dispatch it to Bangkok via Fed Ex or UPS, not US post. Let’s hope that this will work.

October 2, 2014

Andy Rangell telephoned to say that he was in Hanover and could we have lunch. Luckily I was able to join him at noon. We lunched at the Chinese restaurant for two and a half hours both enjoying this reunion after many years. He had just played two concerts in Vermont and is able now to perform in public up to a point, owing to the severe trouble he had in both wrists. He has concentrated, wisely, on recording, where he can play bits and pieces. He surprised me by saying that his eight years at Dartmouth were a beautiful time, at least until the end, when two tenured faculty members persecuted him and got him fired. But he adjusted to this and also to his mysterious wrist problem that no doctors seemed able to diagnose and treat. We also spoke about Beveridge Webster—or Bev Web as he was known to his students. Rangell loved his instruction and his person. He never saw any sign whatever of Bev’s alcoholism; obviously he was a functioning alcoholic. I asked if Andy considered Bev a genius. Well, compared to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, probably not. But he was “a giant,” Andy concluded. Could I book Andy for a recital at Kendal? Doubtful. But what a pleasure to see this friend again, who has dealt so serenely and successfully, it seems, with multiple adversities. . . . Returning, I found Chrysanthi back from the dentist’s with her new front tooth, an inlay costing about $6000 in total! “Aren’t we lucky to have enough money to pay for such expenses?” I queried. And she agreed.

October 3, 2014

Pendle Hill

To Philadelphia by air and then to Wallingford via Avis rental car, my first time after so many years’ absence from Pendle Hill. The other day, re-reading my journal for 1952, I found a brief entry concerning my first sojourn year—a week’s orientation before sailing to Holland to work in QIVS (Quaker International Voluntary Service). I noted the presence then of Henry Cadbury speaking in a New England twang, was sorry to miss Dorothy Day, and was forced to listen to someone pontificating on spirituality: the full Pendle Hill mixture. Today’s trip took five hours, but it was pleasant to arrive. Saw Doug Gwyn immediately. He has lost his job because the resident program is now abolished. But he was just hired as pastor in a “hybrid” Quaker Meeting in Durham, Maine. He hopes to continue writing, this time on exactly what Quaker pacifism was like at the start. And Caroline, his wife, will be starting a new job in the USA in a year, thus leaving England. I said that we hope to visit him in Maine. Lovely to see Paul Rasor also, a man I always admired, who is back now at PH temporarily after serving in various academic capacities since I last saw him. I promised Jen Kasten that if she succeeds in eliminating the deficit in two years, as she says she will, I’ll treat everyone to baklava! The place is mobbed with various groups—Quakers in Publishing, Quakers Caring for the Earth, AFSC, etc., etc., plus of course the reason I’m there: the Steering Committee for a projected capital campaign. We met over supper and afterwards. Lovely to see Kaye Edwards, who filled me in on Haverford. Also of course Henry Freeman, whom I greeted with “Here we go again!” Jennie Keith, with whom I played four-hand piano in the past, now serves on the board. Jen Kasten was of course the coordinator. An interesting man is Mark Myers, an important Philadelphia Quaker. Others were Anne Nash, one of Douglas and Dorothy Steere’s daughters, Gretchen Hall, and Wright Horne. After we adjourned, I spent an hour a half with Doug Gwyn, who told me sadly that Larry Ingle “trashed” his (Doug’s) new history of Pendle Hill, which also received only lukewarm reviews by other “experts.” He hopes to publish it “privately.”

October 4, 2014

Our working day. Henry Freeman, a marvelous professional, treated us to the inside methods of fund raising impressively. What’s crucial is to get substantial contributions from wealthy Friends before the campaign is even announced to the public. When we adjourned, Jennie Keith and I played the first and second movements of the Mozart C major four-hand sonata that we’ve both been studying, I sight-reading the secondo of the first movement because of course I’m doing the primo at Kendal and Stan Udy the secondo. Then another five hours to get home, including a treacherous drive in rain from Manchester to Hanover.

October 10, 2014

Riparius

To the farm to see the finished roof, meet Eric, and pay the final amount. Lovely color. The new “bridge” across Vly Brook on Waddell Road is finished minus the railings, except that it isn’t a bridge but rather a huge culvert over which one drives. Saw Earl, who told us that Dale and Monica are Harley-Davidson motorcycle freaks who’ll be driving to a huge pow-wow in the Midwest. Monica has her own bike but a smaller one. Dale’s is too heavy for her to manage; she sits in the back. Locked the gate and departed, sadly, probably until next May. But then stopped at the post office and happily found a letter in our box containing Monica’s green card. Tom, of course, never sent it to us, didn’t even know it was there. Thus this trip was a life-saver for Monica, since receiving this new green card has really been what we’re all calling a “saga.”

October 11, 2014

Sent the green card to Alec in Bangkok via Fed Ex. Let’s hope it arrives safely. . . . Treated Depy (Despina) Karalis to supper. She’s a Dartmouth freshman, a Greek now living in California because her parents escaped the Greek economic crisis. But she saddened us when we learned that she cannot afford to return to California for Thanksgiving and Christmas. No money. Her total cost for Dartmouth tuition, etc. is only $3000. I’m trying to help her in various ways—for example, to secure a Greek font for her computer, and perhaps an internship at Kendal since she aspires to become a medical doctor.

October 15, 2014

Stan and I practiced the Mozart duet an extra hour and a half today. It’s sloppy when we do it too fast. I changed fingering on several parts to enable me to play them with strong fingers, not the weak 4th. And I’m trying to emulate Richard Goode, whom we heard here last week, in his splendid use of diminuendos.

October 16, 2014

The green card arrived in Bangkok. Hooray! Practiced another hour and a half this morning with Stan. If we do it at 108 it’s sloppy; thus 100 is better. Also practiced our secondo part in the Rossini with Joan Wilson, making good progress.

October 17, 2014

Stan Udy and I performed the first movement of the Mozart C major duo sonata, I doing the primo. Surprisingly, I wasn’t at all nervous. Actually it went quite well although I made an error in a place that never caused me any trouble before, and we needed to stop and regroup. I think I skipped a line in reading the score. No matter, really. The sections where I’d changed the fingering just two days ago went well, thankfully. Then our team—Stan, Joan Wilson, Joan Snell, and I—played the eight-hand version of Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville better than we’d ever done it in rehearsal. For me to do something as difficult as the Mozart C major without frozen fingers and general jitters is really a new, and pleasing, development.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

New York City

Up at 4:45 a.m. 6:30 a.m. bus to New York, with Chrysanthi. After lunch at the Yale Club, we went to 15 East 84th Street to a small exhibition space belonging to New York University, to see a unique show called “When the Greeks Ruled Egypt,” 300 years from Alexander to Cleopatra VII. A chart listing each and every Ptolemy echoed, for me, a list of characters in Cavafy’s poems! Neither of us realized that the term “demotic” in Egyptology refers not to the Greek language but to a simplified version of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The show portrayed the Ptolemies as very cleverly amalgamating Greek ritual and practice with endemic practices, consistent with Alexander’s liberalism in this regard. . . . We then took the Ν train to Astoria and found the “Minoan Palace,” headquarters of the Pan-Cretan Society. Opposite is a large Greek Orthodox church that we entered. Every square inch is painted or in mosaic; light shines in; an attendant told us that it was filled with worshipers this morning. The Cretans’ headquarters is a large room plus kitchen. Saw Georges Stassinakis immediately; he brought Swiss chocolates for us, and I gave him the translation into English that I’d photocopied from the English edition of “Spain.” Things began slowly, as usual, with lots of photos being taken and a TV reporter interviewing me, but the program actually began only 15 minutes late. Lots of introductory messages by diverse officials and, of course, the local priest, who spoke in almost ancient Greek. The auditorium was full—over 200 people, some standees, everyone speaking and understanding Greek, even those born in the USA. Stassinakis spoke well, but at inordinate length (we were both meant to limit ourselves to 20 minutes; he went on for 50). I then gave my 20-minute version of Καζαντζάκης ο επιστολογράφος, getting lots of laughs where appropriate (always a good sign). Various questions followed, with the coordinator expertly diverting numerous “statements” and insisting on “questions.” Whereas Stassinakis presented the usual encomium (at length), I tried to show the real Kazantzakis, with self-doubt, anguish, anti-Greek feelings, etc., all so very evident in the letters. People appreciated this. Many in the audience were teachers in the Greek schools; they showed interest in Greek Today and for one of them I even recommended The Flying Telephone Booth. All in all, the cultural differences were totally apparent. “These people are crazy,” I kept telling Chrysanthi. I felt like the dour parents of the American bridegroom in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Having gotten up at 4:45 a.m. and having everything here in Greek didn’t help, of course. A jigger of raki did help. Finally, our host Demosthenes Triantafillou took Chrysanthi, Stassinakis, and me to a very Greek restaurant for an indifferent supper that gave Chrysanthi a bellyache overnight. He also paid for our taxi back to the Yale Club. It was a good experience in total. Chrysanthi said I delivered my lecture better than ever, because speaking slowly, looking up instead of into the typed pages, holding the microphone properly, and laughing along with the audience at appropriate times. Best of all, the whole thing took only 20 minutes.

Monday, October 20, 2014

A stimulating morning in New York City, since at 9:30 a.m. we were at MoMA for the quite amazing special exhibit of Matisse’s cut-out art, five or six galleries-full of it. His colors, applied to paper with gouache, are much brighter in all of these productions than they are in his actual paintings, also on display in the museum’s permanent collection. A video showed him wielding his large scissors expertly. The stained glass windows made from his cut-out designs were also shown, with light streaming through magnificently. We were able to see the entire exhibit comfortably in an hour, before the mobs began streaming into the museum after its opening to non-members at 10:30 a.m. . . . The 1:30 p.m. Dartmouth Coach got us back to Hanover by 6:15, in time to catch supper at Kendal. Mail included a new Netflix, the extraordinary film “Murder on the Orient Express,” that we turned off at midnight. So we still don’t know who committed the crime.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

My usual Tuesday morning eight-hand piano practice, but this time trying Mendelssohn’s Octet for the first time, slowly. Such mesmerizing music. I’ve photocopied my part in order to learn it and get it up to speed. Good Faculty Lunch at noon with the usual friends. Deposited an extra $10,000 from Merrill Lynch at the bank needed owing to added expenses for the farm roof and Chrysanthi’s new tooth, together totaling about $18,000!

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Dick, Allan, and I amazingly played three Bach sonatas (at least attributed to Bach) quite well tonight even though Dick never observes his rests. These are all BWV 1033. But of course we made mincemeat, as usual, out of the Debussy Sonata for flute, alto, and harp. . . . Nice supper with Penny and Robert Binswanger and Tom Wilson. Penny is of course the ultimate example of fortitude under hardship. Robert was able to take her to their home in Maine for a month and she loved sitting on the porch with binoculars gazing at the sea and all the human and other activity on the beach.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Stan Udy and I made good progress this morning from 9:00 to 10:30 on the third movement of the Mozart C major four-hand sonata. Like the first and second movements, it is extraordinary music: among the very best Mozart. . . . I enjoyed the following in a newspaper review of a pianist’s recital: “The sense of journeying from Anton Diabelli’s shabby little waltz—which Beethoven proceeds to mock, pull out of shape, overwhelm and finally elevate to transcendental heights—was given with a rare humanity.”

Reading in my Journal for 1952, when I was 22 years old, I dwelt on a few words of Carlyle’s which of course have a very different strength for me now, 84 years old: “Life: a little gleam of Time between two Eternities, no second chance to us forevermore!”

November 13, 2014

Chrysanthi left on November 9th for Greece—amazingly, after refusing so many times to go and saying after we returned in June 2013, “Never again!” But the incentive came from Daphne, who said “Let’s go, just the two of us, ladies only, no men, to visit Christina in Thessaloniki.” So I took Chrysanthi to the bus on Sunday, she met Daphne at Logan Airport, and off they flew to Istanbul via Turkish Airlines (!), business class, paid for by Daphne. Then, after a three-hour wait, to Athens. They slept comfortably in the Sofitel Airport Hotel (paid for by me), and on Tuesday went into town to the new Acropolis Museum and the Acropolis, followed by tea with Christos and a flight to Thessaloniki, where Takis and Brini met them at the airport. Other details I’ll learn when Chrysanthi returns on Sunday. Daphne’s brief e-mails, however, have assured me that everything has gone well. Chrysanthi even managed to cancel my Greek bank account, which I failed to do when I tried. And one evening when they invited Christina to supper at a taverna in town, Christina appeared with a dozen classmates to share the meal! . . . I’m doing well as a temporary bachelor. A few days ago I took John Rassias out to supper at the Canoe Club. We talked for two hours, but I sensed some hesitancy on John’s part, of speech, not of desire, and at the end he said, “I know there’s something wrong with my talking,” and I had to agree. He cannot drive any longer and does not go to the French Department. But he does go in to the offices of the Rassias Foundation in Blunt Hall, although Helene really does all the work. I sensed that he feels very lonely and without much sense of direction or purpose. Sad.

November 15, 2014

Another memorial for Pano Rodis, this time in Rollins Chapel. It started with two Russian Orthodox priests and some women chanting part of the Orthodox service in English, to give the audience some sense of Pano’s religious home. Joe O’Donnell spoke well, and cited Parker Palmer, which pleased me. A group performed a song, lyrics and music, composed by Pano. For me, the highlight was the chance to meet his second wife, also named Karen. She had clearly heard a lot about me, from what she said. She met Pano in psychology school; they had two children together. I asked about the two girls from the first Karen. The one who wrote the marvelous poem about 9-11 does not write poetry. Neither is married. One has a job; the other doesn’t. Neither was at the memorial. Everyone emphasized Pano’s ability to radiate love. The program printed a parting message from him: “I am glad and grateful to have known you, saddened that I cannot continue, but entirely hopeful about your own lives and what lovely, brave things you will do with them.”

November 16, 2014

Went to see Rachel Decker-Sadowski act in “Blue Stockings,” a play by Jessica Swale done extraordinarily well entirely by students. I found it extremely moving because it depicted the ideals and vicissitudes of the first girls in Girton College, Cambridge, in 1896, not too different from the situation at Dartmouth in the 1970s, believe it or not. Rachel’s mother was present. She recognized me, came up, and we had lots of time to talk about Rachel, the Tebbes, etc. Apparently Rachel, who’ll get her M.A. in Engineering in March, already has a splendid job. I’ll invite her for supper at Kendal next term.

At 6:00, I picked John Rassias up for another supper, this time at the Norwich Inn, his treat. He behaved very strangely, unable to choose something to eat from the menu, driving the waiter to distraction. And, at the end, he seemed unable to pay the bill with his credit card, to figure the tip, and sign, asking me to do it for him. We did, however, enjoy some rational conversation along the way. But he is clearly descending into a strange form of senility.

At 10:00 p.m. I met Chrysanthi as she descended the Dartmouth Coach, returning from Greece. She was wide awake, jubilant, full of stories about her adventures in travel, hotels, sightseeing, and of course fellowship with Daphne and Christina. The only difficulty was George, “who drove me crazy,” she said. Good visits with Odysseus and Lena, Takis and family, Nikos and family, and even Costas. Also Joann, Tasos, and Dora at the Farm School. And Christos in Athens, after seeing and greatly appreciating the new Acropolis Museum, plus the Acropolis itself, the Parthenon entirely encased in scaffolding now. They invited Christina for supper at a taverna and she arrived with a score of friends as well! Turkish Airlines were exemplary. In all, a trip without anything going wrong. And how nice that mother and daughter could do this together, thanks to Daphne’s initiative.

November 21, 2014

I performed the first and second movements of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony in eight-hand arrangement with Joan Wilson, Stan Udy, and Heywood Alexander in the Cary Room. It went well, except that I got lost briefly in a place that never caused me trouble before. All the troublesome places were fine. The other eight-hand group then played the third and fourth movements, so we did the entire symphony. In my introduction I mentioned that Mendelssohn himself had played the organ at the dedication ceremony for the Birmingham Town Hall.

November 24, 2014

Potomac, Maryland

Twelve and a half hours door-to-door Hanover to Potomac, owing to AMTRAK being an hour and a half late. Sophia was eager to describe her favorite class: English. It’s 100% writing, no literature, with students and the professor critiquing papers, which are then revised and resubmitted. Her current subject is the immigration dispute now so hot in America. She writes well, judging from previous compositions I have seen. In addition she was soloist in the a cappella choir; we heard a TV recording. The trouble, from my snobbish view, is that they sing such fifth-rate music. She is also pleased with Spanish. She had two years of it in high school and tested into Spanish 1 in college—two years of waste. But the college teacher has them actually speak in class, which never happened in high school, alas. And Nicholas will be going to California with a jazz band and doing a solo. Also he has agreed to coach a basketball team of nine-year-olds. Very nice.

November 25, 2014

Leander’s high count of triglycerides apparently hasn’t caused any harm. Good news. This morning we saw an eight-point buck in his back garden, just standing there, looking at me. Apparently the deer here are tame, not afraid of humans. We thought of Earl Millington, who waited all last winter in vain for a buck he hoped to shoot.

Lunched for two pleasant hours with Dennis Carroll in the District Chop House, our usual haunt. He helped me regarding Xlibris, which apparently, he feels, is still the best of the vanity presses. He recommends that I use 11-point type to get more on each page, and that I choose Xlibris’s “professional style.” They produce excellent paperback books but not very good hardbacks. I probably should consult with UPNE also regarding an arrangement like my classical colleague Bill Scott’s e-book on Homeric similes. I encouraged Dennis to write again on the Koran but this time pretending appreciation instead of damning it openly and exclusively, as he did in a previous essay.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Natural History Museum, which is fascinating especially in its extensive exhibits on human evolution. It was lovely to see so many children absorbed in various exhibits and not only in the dinosaurs. . . . Then to Tony Cheng’s Mongolian buffet on Η Street with the family, followed by Wizards vs. Hawks at the Verizon Center, an unexciting game accompanied by horrendously vulgar “entertainment.” I am truly a snob and do not plan to change.

November 26, 2014

Leander gave me an exhaustive and somewhat exhausting lesson on the second movement of the Mozart C-major four-hand sonata. He tells me that Mozart himself, in a letter, said that it is difficult. And it is. We went over fingering, phrasing dynamics, speed, the slurs, what are the editor’s marks in our edition vs. what are Mozart’s in Leander’s ur-text, possible retards, pedaling, and ideas not only for my part (secondo) but also for Stan’s (primo) especially in places that are causing Stan difficulty. What a pleasure! Tomorrow we’ll do the third movement.

November 27, 2014, Thanksgiving

Another lesson, two hours on Mozart’s third movement. I was puzzled by the very end until Leander exposed its extraordinary treasures—shifts from major to minor, plus an unexpected harmony in a part seemingly reproducing something from the beginning. . . . Alec and family telephoned. Theo displayed his gold medal in swimming. They’re off to Melbourne soon and will go to Philip’s Island to see the penguin parade. . . . Read a new revision by Lewis Owens of Act I of his play about the awarding of honorary degrees at Oxford to both Shostakovich and Poulenc. It’s better than the version I saw previously but still needs more work in ways that I tried to indicate. . . . I started re-reading “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” which Atul Gawande (in his Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, which I finished the other day while riding on the Red Line) says is the very best account of dying in fiction. (What about Thomas Mann’s in The Magic Mountain?). . . Daphne telephoned from Carl’s home in Portland, Oregon, where all the Tebbes are gathered. . . . We had our pleasant turkey dinner with an especially good apple pie. The ladies then went shopping (of course!); Leander and I took a very brisk walk for about two miles filled with continual conversation, which is so easy with Leander. We wondered about the long-term future of the farm, for example. Lastly, with the ladies back together with their purchases, we laughed heartily at “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” which is so brilliant. . . . I’m trying to get Atul Gawande to speak at Kendal, perhaps by convincing Dartmouth to bring him as a Montgomery Fellow.

Sent this to Lu Martin, who had lent me the book: “I finished Being Mortal yesterday on the Washington Metro and will return the book to you after we arrive back in Kendal at the end of the week. Thanks for alerting me to it and loaning it. Yes, it certainly is consistent with what you generously call ‘my vision’ for Kendal. If the vision belongs to anyone or ones, it is to the Quakers, who pioneered in our type of senior living beginning about fifty years ago. Dr. Gawande’s plea for allowing people to avoid so-called ‘heroic measures’ to prolong life and instead to accept their mortality is very much part of my own experience because of my sister’s battle with lymphatic cancer for four years. She endured the horrendous side-effects of chemotherapy repeatedly, did have some apparent remissions (which were only apparent, alas), and when the doctors recommended a new type of chemo that might prologue her life for six months, she and her husband chose hospice instead—just as Gawande recommends. She lasted six months in any case, at home, peacefully, surrounded by children and grandchildren until the end.

“It’s interesting that Dr. Gawande speaks of ‘a ferment’ in senior care by 2010 and describes on his pp. 129–30 a Boston community called NewBridge that sounds pretty much like our Kendal, which of course opened two decades earlier, in 1991, preceded by another few decades by ‘Mama Kendal’ in Pennsylvania. But he sums up very well our vision on his page 243, where he writes that ‘our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.’ In my own thinking for Kendal, I imagined a community able to function well because every individual in it shared the overriding factor of mortality. And it does seem to work, if only imperfectly.

“It would be fun to bring Atul Gawande here sometime, somehow. Should we try?”

December 1, 2014

Saw Dr. Chapman, dermatologist. He’ll remove the cyst on my back in January. But the chief reason for the visit was the discoloration and roughness on my lower lip, first noticed by Dr. Dacey here at Kendal. Chapman says that this is pre-cancerous and should be treated. He recommends “blue light,” which he says typically destroys about 80% of the offending cells. So I signed up for this treatment, which will probably also happen in January. It is coordinated by another doctor, Pamela Gangar. Chapman warned me that cancer of the lip is an extremely nasty variety. Scary.

Spoke to Mike Burton at the University Press of New England about my journal, perhaps doing an electronic version the way the Press and Dartmouth did Bill Scott’s book on Homeric language. He was encouraging, saying with a smile, “The only thing we need is to get paid.” He told me to speak to David Seaman in the Dartmouth Library’s administration.

December 2, 2014

So I spoke today to David Seaman, who was also encouraging. The plan is called “open access”; they hope to make it apply to the entire Dartmouth faculty. He’ll now speak with Burton about a collaboration. Of course the difficult part of my journal is its bulk. I figured about one and a half million words, or more. The typed pages now number close to 3000.

At eight-hand practice this morning we started the Mendelssohn Octet with me playing the primo part in Piano One. It’s gorgeous, but difficult. Happily, Joan Snell has returned after suffering from a bad back.

December 8, 2014

Bill Scott and I had a two-hour lunch at Lou’s. He advised me to get financial support from the Onassis Foundation. He has now published two books in “open access” and is very satisfied. He also thought that Haverford College might be interested and able to help financially.

December 13, 2014

Saw a mediocre feminist play at the A.R.T. preaching the reduction of garbage. Thus there were no programs for the performance, saving scores of trees, etc. The heroine makes dresses from apricot skins, seaweed, and prunes. Imaginative, but I wish it had been written by Oscar Wilde or G. B. Shaw. . . . I extended my stack pass in Widener until December 2015, but will I ever use it? I had so many good moments in that library in the past. Perhaps now, as in other pleasures, the appropriate word is “Nevermore.” . . . Highlight of the day was our tour of the new Harvard Art Museum incorporating the old Fogg with the Busch-Reisinger and the Sackler. An impressive building with natural light flooding in through the glass roof.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Such a full, varied day! To Kendal Quaker Meeting at 10:00 a.m. Nice to see Bob Metz there. Dick Powell ministered well. To Interfaith Gathering at 11:15 a.m. with Tom Wilson speaking on modes of compassion and Stan Udy playing a medley of Christmas carols as the prelude. To the Black Art Center at 12:00 noon for the Metropolitan Opera’s HD presentation of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which lasted until 6:00 p.m. I hated the first act, which seamed stuffed, everything twice as long as needed. But the conclusion of the second act was stirring, and the entire third act was miraculous. Strange to hear an opera where almost all the voices are male and the leading female part is so minimal. But Wagner’s music is stirring, inventive, deeply sonorous. And I didn’t find him an obvious fascist in this opera, as I had with some of the Ring. Yet the super-patriotic part praising Germany at the very end spoiled the marvelous finale for me.

December 16, 2014

Eight-hand practice, again, of the Mendelssohn Octet. We’re improving. The piece is so very beautiful, even at our slow speed, or perhaps owing to our slow speed. Mendelssohn was sixteen years old when he composed it! What a miracle, mostly because the music is so clearly “mature.”

December 20, 2014

Simon and Schuster erroneously sent my copies of the new Zorba to me at the Riparius address and UPS left the package on the ground next to the locked gate. Fortunately Earl noticed it, picked it up before rain or snow came, and telephoned me. So Chrysanthi and I got up at 6:30 this morning, left at 7:30, and arrived at the farm at 10:30, retrieved the package from Earl, left a few things in the house (including a new type of mouse inhibitor using batteries), and walked up to Alec’s and around to Leander’s in the deliciously white snow observing all sorts of animal tracks. Brilliant sunshine. Clear sky. By 4:00 we were back in Hanover (stopping of course at Stewart’s on the way for a milkshake). The new Zorba is tastefully designed and priced at $16.00 for the paperback.

December 21, 2014

Joint Hanover and Kendal Meeting at Kendal. I ministered for the first time in many months—on the miracle of the Solstice, today!—with the sun now going to be more visible each day instead of less visible, so beneficent unlike human beings, who seem always to be killing each other. Long leisurely lunch afterwards at EBAs, with Jack and Ruth Hunter. I congratulated the owner on giving a highly price-reduced meal every day to the students forced to remain in Hanover over the six week term-break. In the evening, practicing Mozart as usual with Stan, we discovered a trick to enable us to play joint sixteenth-note runs clearly, by means of a slight break at the top of the run before racing downward. Hooray! Previously, in the afternoon, Heywood Alexander and his daughter, who teaches flute, gave an hour-long concert, a beautiful interlude of peace with gentle snow falling outside. Such amenities are a recurring asset of our life here in Kendal.

December 23, 2014

Music with Dick and Allan. We actually did “Golliwogg’s Cake Walk” with everyone coming in on time—even Dick! Life’s little pleasures.

December 24, 2014

Chrysanthi’s birthday. She opened her presents in the morning. I gave her a jigsaw puzzle based on an aerial photograph of our farm. She’ll save that for summer.

December 25, 2014

When I ministered on the miracle of the solstice, last Sunday, I wish I had remembered Matthew Fox’s definition of worship: “The essential role of worship is to link together microcosm and macrocosm once again in the context of thanksgiving or praise for our amazing (and therefore reverential) existence in the universe. Worship is the microcosm (humanity) giving thanks for the macrocosm (the universe and all its creative wonders).” So, in speaking thankfully about the solstice, as I did, I suppose I was worshiping.

Last evening, Christmas Eve, I played about fifteen Christmas carols for singing at Meeting—real singing, on tune, not just mumbling. Tonight, Christmas, we went to Kesaya’s and Chris’s on Bean Road, as we used to go to Lafayette’s and Mayme’s. Fun and games, and food, but not Mayme’s extraordinary Japanese banquet. This is the first Christmas I can remember when we’ve been without any children or grandchildren. But it’s nice still to have true friends.

2015

Hanover

January 1–June 9

Jan. 24–25, New York City

Feb. 21, Cambridge, A.R.T.

Feb. 26–28, New York City

May 1, Terpni

May 8, Terpni

May 16, Cambridge, A.R.T.

May 19–20, Terpni

Riparius

June 10–September 11

January 3, 2015

I sent the following letter to Dimitris Gounelas after receiving a long, warm letter from him:

Αγαπητέ Δημήτρη,

Θερμές ευχές σε σένα και στη Ρουθ (και στην καημένη την Ελλάδα) για το νέο έτος!

Χάρηκα πολύ να πάρω και τα νέα και τις σκέψεις σου. Μονάχα δε μας έλεγες τα νέα της Αγγέλικας και του Φραγγίσκου. Βρίσκονται και τα δύο ακόμα στην Αγγλία;

Εγώ μόλις εξέδωσα την καινούργια μετάφρασή μου του Ζορμπά. Έτοιμος είμαι να σας στείλω ένα αντίγραφο αλλά θέλω πρώτα να εξακριβώσω τη διεύθυνση. Έχω Υπσιλάντου και Σκουφά, Πανόραμα 552 36· Είναι σωστή;

Συνεχίζω τώρα να ετοιμάσω τα ημερολόγια μου για ηλεκτρονική έκδοση. Πάνε από το 1948 ως . . . χθες. 3000+ σελίδες, αρκετές γραμμένες στα ελληνικά.

Δυστυχώς δεν προβλέπω κανένα άλλο ταξίδι στην Ελλάδα. Δε συνεχίζω να υπηρετώ σαν έφορος της Αμερικανικής Γεωργικής Σχολής, που στο παρελθόν ήταν πάντα μια πρόφαση να πηγαίνω στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Μα πάει αυτή πια. Και η Χρυσάνθη, παρόλη την οικογενειά της εκεί, δε αντιμετωπίζει ακόμα τις εκτεταμένες πτήσεις.

Για τα πολιτικά της Ελλάδας, τί να πω; Μονάχα ελπίζω ότι δεν θα χάσει το ευρώ για να ξαναπάει στη δραχμή. Και τι να πω για το δικό μας το πολιτικό τρελοκομείο;

Ευτυχώς είχαμε, εσύ και εγώ, καλές εμπειρίες στη Θεσσαλονίκη δυο-τρεις φορές όταν οι συνθήκες ήταν πιο σταθερές. Τώρα, όπως και σεις στο νησί, και εμείς στο αγαπημένο κτήμα μας, καλλιεργούμε τη γη και θαυμάζουμε τη γαλήνη των δέντρων.

Περιμένω επιβεβαίωση της διεύθυνσής σας.

Με αγάπη,
Πήτερ

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Nice visit from Henry Hart, who brought his daughter Maria to begin winter term. We exchanged books. I gave him my new Zorba. He gave me his latest collection of poems, “Familiar Ghosts,” and explained about his great-great grandfather, who was a Lutheran missionary in China when the Boxer Rebellion induced him to flee with his family to Mongolia. One of his poems is called “Lines Adapted from the Diary of a Missionary Written during China’s Boxer Rebellion.” Some of the lines are:

To them we were wolves with devils in our hearts.

They spared us so we’d lug omens by horseback and camel cart to

the land of Crosses.

On our long trek through Mongolia, sun branded our

foreheads with stigmata.

God sizzled on our tongues.

Night after night we drank the Gobi’s silence.

Licking the moon’s salt from dry wells, we learned the meaning of

slow crucifixion.

I told him how my first appreciation of missionaries came from Bill McGrew’s history of Anatolia College, especially the women, who endured so many reversals, hardships, catastrophes with endurance and the constant vision of a better future. He accompanied us to Meeting for Worship. Fortunately it was a very good one, truly gathered, and with excellent ministry. I didn’t minister (I rarely do any more) but I kept thinking of how this phenomenon of men and women sitting in silence simulates somehow the non-fragmented essence of divinity, uniting all of us in some ineffable fashion.

January 23, 2015

A week ago the pianist Nina Siniakova performed here brilliantly. We obviously spent time together including a long breakfast on Sunday in which she queried me about reactions to certain plans she has for organizing something like our Webster Performance Series in Flushing, Long Island. Yesterday I received the following rather extraordinary e-mail from her:

Dear Peter,

I wasn’t sure what would be the best way to send you these words—via email or just to call, but then I thought that if you have it in an email you can reread it.

I would like to tell you how much I am impressed with your personality and how much I am grateful for your invitation. That morning as we spoke in your cafeteria I realized how sharp-minded, intelligent, honest and open you are, how modern your attitude is and how warm-hearted you are. I had a feeling that I found a new friend. I could trust you with many things and get your “up-to-date” opinion on many subjects. I was a bit concerned about my appearance at your series since you mentioned a few very well known names, and, well, I am not a very well known person. So I truly appreciate your invitation and I am happy you were satisfied with my performance.

Thank you!

Sincerely yours,
Nina

Saturday, January 24, 2015

New York City

I had hoped to greet Arturo Delmoni playing string quartets on the promenade of the New York State Theater before the ballet matinee, but he wasn’t there, presumably still sick, as he was when he was visiting with us in Hanover last weekend in order to hear Nina Siniakova play her Webster performance. She did splendidly, as I noted earlier. Today was the celebration of the anniversary of Balanchine’s birthday. No jiggers of vodka this time, as had happened many years ago when we were at a previous celebration—just a small magnet for the refrigerator with Mr. B’s sketch of himself on it. The matinee program was lovely. First, “Donizetti Variations” starring Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz. Then my favorite, “La Valse,” with the orchestra splendid in part 2, which is actually “La Valse”—part 1 being “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” in which neither the music nor the dance interested me very much. But part 2 is spectacular, with the prima ballerina meeting death at the end. Ravel’s orchestration is remarkable; thus it’s such a pleasure to be able to see an orchestra doing this music. Finally, “Chaconne,” very traditional, expertly danced by Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle, plus of course the excellent corps. . . . I should add that a previous pleasure of this first day in New York was a lunch of oysters Rockefeller in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central.

Back to the ballet at 7:15 p.m. to listen to more string quartets first. Then an evening of spectacular dancing meant to show off Balanchine’s growth. “Serenade” was of course first. I love the way it opens, with the ballerinas standing motionless with feet pointed straight, which means that they are not yet dancers. Then, as the music plays, suddenly every pair of feet spreads into first position. Now they have become dancers! And off they go. This was Mr. B’s first ballet in America, premiered in 1935. Next in chronology came “Symphony in C,” premiered in 1947. Finally “Agon,” a landmark, of course, premiered in 1957 at the City Center, which means that perhaps we saw it in its first year or two since we went there so often (the balcony tickets costing only 75 cents). “Agon” was danced second tonight, out of order. We were in the second row, orchestra, because when I ordered the tickets the entire house was sold out except for these very expensive seats, center section on the aisle. And what a pleasure to be so close for the repeated displays of bravura dancing by both girls and boys—not to mention the especial pleasure of Stravinsky’s music. I watched the pianist, who usually had just single notes to play, but when to play them was the question. “Symphony in C” came last—traditional ballet (especially when compared to “Agon”) but with bravura dancing by Ashley Bouder (again), Chase Finlay, and two other amazing pairs. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I consider Balanchine the Shakespeare of our day. Of course contemporary choreographers need to escape Balanchine, just the way playwrights following Shakespeare needed to escape him and late twentieth-century novelists to escape Joyce.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Arrived at the Metropolitan Museum when it opened at 10:00 a.m. How nice to walk through its amazing galleries competing with almost no one else! We went to several special shows. First, El Greco, celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death (in 1614). A large room full of his paintings, most of which we had seen before because they are in the Met’s collection, but also some others borrowed for this occasion, including a very elongated Saint Andrew, a photo of which we hope to send to Andrew Tebbe. I especially liked the “Vision of Saint John,” a huge canvas with John ecstatic as he views the material for his Apocalypse. Also a strange “Holy Family” ca. 1585, with an ugly savior-baby suckling with puckered lips from the Virgin’s very attractive breast. Nearby was a small room devoted to Caravaggio and lute-playing. Only two canvases, but lute music in the background, some ancient instruments displayed. Nice to see eminently “civilized” paintings by this infamous murderer and reprobate. But in the American wing we found an eminently “uncivilized” figure—who but John Brown, screaming, in a evocation of his madness by John Steuart Curry, dated 1939. We’d come to this area to see Thomas Hart Benton’s mural “America Today,” done for the New School for Social Research and based largely on Benton’s many years in New York. So different from El Greco or Curry because so representational, even sociological (why not for a school of Social Research?). We passed quickly through the special exhibit of Cubism, admiring especially the polychrome canvases and not so much the monochrome ones. Finally to “Madame Cézanne,” more that 40 paintings of the artist’s wife, a not pretty middle-aged woman looking tired and overworked, with laundry most of the time. But how deeply this master entered her soul via the multiplicity of view! I forgot to add for the El Greco show that although I have always felt that our large print of “Toledo in the Storm” hanging in the Kendal hall outside our apartment is dull and that the original must be brighter, we found that the original—displayed at the Met—is just as dull. After all, Toledo is in a storm, not brightened by sunshine.

February 6, 2015

We went to a supper meeting at the Meeting House to discuss our views of money and how the Meeting should deal with the $168,000 in bequests we have received. During dinner, before the agenda began, I mentioned to Farzeen Mahmud, sitting across from me, my interest in hearing a retired US general being interviewed by Charlie Rose declare that the atrocities perpetrated by radical Moslem extremists can best be explained by the Koran. I wondered how she would react to this since she was raised a Moslem. But I had no forewarning of her extreme reaction. She broke into tears, could hardly speak, but did finally manage to say that since 9-11 the Moslem community has needed to defend itself against such accusations. She resented my question and we let it drop. My own reaction to all this was to feel a reaffirmation of my inability to share a Moslem’s attachment to the Koran, which I find almost impossible to read. Obviously, I need to be educated in it, as she has been. But right now I’d rather spend my time playing the piano.

February 15, 2015

I played the second movement of the Pathétique sonata as the prelude for an Interfaith Gathering and the first variation of the Diabelli as the postlude. . . . Yesterday Joe Mehling came and photographed portraits of Chrysanthi and me, gratis. He has been a good friend for many years.

February 20, 2015

Played the second and third movements of the Mozart four-hand sonata in C major with Stan in the Cary Room. Forgot to repeat, once, but went back and did the repeat. Stan made his usual error of entering too soon at the end of the second movement but somehow we concluded together. Parts of both movements went well. We were no worse than some of the other performers.

February 21, 2015

Cambridge

Good to spend an hour with Dia and Wim at Au Bon Pain. Dia is still trying to update her “Census”! We were enchanted by the A.R.T.’s performance of Father Comes Home from the Wars, a brilliant play by Suzan-Lori Parks splendidly acted especially by Jenny Jules, who has already received numerous prizes. I’d love to see her in Twelfth Night. She would be as good as the almost incomparable Cherry Jones.

February 27, 2015

To New York City

Up early to get the bus to New York. But strangely for me, just before waking I had a dream that I remembered. I was in Athens, but strangely on the outskirts, reached by a small road something like our trail at the farm to reach the beavers. My car, “Petrakis” (!) was still in the garage, abandoned. I suddenly remembered that I was meant to lecture at my course in the university, opening day. I had only twenty minutes to get there and hadn’t prepared, but figured I’d open the hour getting each of the students to introduce himself or herself. But how could I get there in time, or at all? I was dressing frantically when the alarm clock rang and I awoke.

We spent an hour or so in MoMA starting with the special exhibit of current art, most of which is ugliness and chaos par excellence yet with some few surprises of abstract beauty of color and design. Quiet dinner in the Yale Club served by Angela. It’s fun to be greeted “Hello, Professor.” Our first ballet was spectacular. Orchestra seats thanks to Nadia Stone in the Koch Theater administration, saving us from the next-to-last row in the top balcony, which Chrysanthi, with her acrophobia, would never have reached. Tonight was devoted to twenty-first century ballets, and every seat in the house was around $30.00 only. Afterwards, free beer and dancing for everyone on the Promenade. A festival. For me, the best of the three ballets tonight was choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky and created in 2014. His ability to make the dancers follow, exactly, the sudden changes in tempi, volume, mood, tonality of the music, Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” played on the piano by Cameron Grant, was extraordinary. The whole was an extended exposition of precision. Justin Peck’s choreography for Aaron Copland’s “Rōdē,ō” came next. Again fine, but I found the music more interesting than the dance: arhythmic, dissonant, always playful. But Tiler Peck and Amar Ramasar were perfectly matched in the pas de deux. This work was composed in 2015 and premiered only three weeks ago. Finally came Christopher Wheeldon’s “Mercurial Manoeuvres” to music by Shostakovich, premiered in 2000. Again—indeed in all three of tonight’s ballets—the music was just as interesting, perhaps more interesting, than the dance. This was Shostakovich’s “Concerto in C minor for piano, trumpet, and string orchestra.”

February 28, 2015

Met Jen Karsten at Lincoln Center at 12:30. She had read all my journal entries on Pendle Hill and had a list of questions to ask me. So we started in the Philharmonic Hall café, continued during ballet intermissions, and concluded over a Chinese supper on West 39th Street. She wanted to know about people I mentioned—e.g., Andy Towl, Janet Shepherd, Richard Barnes, Margery Walker, etc., etc.—and about my view of the Resident Program, which teachers had impressed me, which of my own courses went well, how the board dealt with, or neglected to deal with, Steve Baumgartner, why Dan Seeger was so resented, and so on and on. I had sufficient memory to answer most of these questions, probably because they were all generated by my journal. The entire procedure makes me feel, of course, that the journal can obviously interest other people besides myself, and that it contains (sometimes) information not available elsewhere. My lengthy account of the start of the colonels’ coup d’état is another example. We all went to the ballet, again seated nicely in the orchestra. Chrysanthi and I were both quite amazed to view two Balanchine works we had never seen before: “Square Dance” with music by Corelli and Vivaldi, and “Harlequinade” with music by Riccardo Drigo. The first didn’t seem to have anything to do with American square dancing, at least in this revised version (the original version included a caller shouting the steps). Very sedate and serene. It premiered in 1957 at the City Center. The second, in which Balanchine reworked Petipa, was a story ballet rich in scenery, costumes, slapstick, and of course spectacular dancing, not to mention solo violin bits (also in the Vivaldi-Corelli) played by Arturo Delmani. This sort of extravaganza makes us appreciate all the more Balanchine’s bravery to break with such displays entirely in “Agon.” . . . After supper we walked Jen to Penn Station, invited her to visit us at the farm in the summer when she and her husband and daughter drive north (he is a native of Montreal), and continued to the Mint Theater to see the revival of Ferenc Molnár’s play Fashions for Men, which premiered in New York in 1922, about a shopkeeper in Budapest who is so kind-hearted and ethical that he seems stupidly naïve. Pure fun, nothing serious, but very well acted. What impressed me the most was how well made this well-made play was. Tiny bits of conversation in advance, always compatible with the current context, always made later events, personalities, or conflicts comprehensible. Any young aspiring playwright hoping to use nineteenth-century technique would do well to study Molnár.

March 1, 2015

Ji Hyae Lee, for whom I did the medical application letter, notified me that she has been accepted by three medical schools. She is delighted, and very thankful. She is the one who labored to revive mediation at Dartmouth. She hopes to continue to sponsor mediation in medical school as well. A propos, another Korean female student, my favorite among those we interviewed last Wednesday for the Lewin Fellowship (she was our number 2, however), wants to meet with me. We’ll have lunch on Thursday. I was especially pleased because she had served for three years as a tutor in the composition tutoring program that I founded in the late 1970s, and has also been a War and Peace Studies fellow in the program that I co-founded.

March 14, 2015

Heard today from the Associate Dean for Humanities and Arts, Adrian Randolph, that he will subsidize the publication of my journal in the amount of $4000. Hooray! Mike Burton, president of the University Press of New England, will manage the whole process, but the actual work of setting the massive text in print will be done by Scott Cahoon of Passumpsic Publishing in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I’ve figured that the total length of the electronic text from 1948 to 2014 is 32 megabytes. The typewritten text comes to 2646 single-spaced pages.

March 16, 2015

Mailed the journal today, the whole monster on a single disk, to Scott Cahoon for setting in type. The electronic result, Mike Burton tells me, will be available for Kindle, Nook, etc., and perhaps listed on Amazon. Also, a printed version (which would probably require three or four volumes) could be done at extra cost. I have no idea how further entries in the journal will be added. I joked with Chrysanthi that now I have nothing to do, and she pointed to all the old files, etc. in my room that need to be sorted and (one hopes) discarded. But immediately the computer brought new jobs. Lewis Owens wants me to read his play again, in its newest version. Georges Stassinakis wants me to copyedit the latest number of “Synthesis.” Alessandro Falcetta wants my opinion on his thesis on Rendel Harris. Someone else wants my opinion of a play he wrote on “the life and times of Zorba the Greek.” And Dan Seeger sent his position paper called “Why Develop a Model Bill of Rights for CCRC Residents?”

Ella Erway encouraged me to add some clarification to recent discussions about the proper size for Kendal future. I wrote the following response, which will be distributed in the good “Forum” that Clinton Gardner manages here:

HOW MANY APARTMENTS?

There is much discussion here about the proper number of apartments. Should that number be 250, as at present, or perhaps 280, as has been proposed? Should the decision be based on some determination of how many people enhance a community, how many weaken a community, or whether a certain number of dwellings is appropriate for a particular terrain and acreage or inappropriate? I don’t know. But I thought it would be interesting to compare our real and suggested numbers with numbers elsewhere in the wider Kendal community. The first Kendal, at Longwood, now has 261 residences, an enlargement over its original number. Crosslands, the second Kendal to be built, has 275 residences. We were the third. Of the total number of Kendal Corporation facilities, currently 13, Granville is the smallest, with 134 residences, and Collington the largest, with 361. These ranges probably indicate that a viable community can exist given all the existing sizes, which might mean that a proper number of residences depends more on particular terrain and acreage or on considerations of recruitment—the existence of competing CCRCs nearby, the type and extent of the nearby population, etc. In our own case, I doubt that the magic number of 250 residences with about 400 people was chosen because it was determined to be perfect for a viable community. Our size had much more to do with the nature of the sloping land with its esker and ravines, compared for example to the sweetly rolling farmland of Longwood and Crosslands. Our main considerations in future expansion should be, in my opinion, those of needed or non-needed equivalent expansions in dining, healthcare, Gathering Room, etc., and those relating to the future cohesiveness of the community—that is, whether it will all fit together physically (not to mention economically, culturally, etc.) as it now does well enough despite the slope and esker, or whether one section will be a sort of distant annex removed from the whole. I do not have any magic answers to these considerations, but I do hope that they will be discussed.

March 17, 2015

Weezie Pietsch has invited us to a special dinner at a restaurant on March 28 to celebrate her 75th birthday. We’re delighted to be with this good friend’s family, who are traveling here from vast distances for the event. I composed a sonnet for the occasion:

A SONNET: WORRYING ABOUT THE NAME WEEZIE

Why did they reduce the dec’rous Louise

to that demotic soubriquet Weezie?

Louise is surely not a Portuguese

corruption or anything quite so sleazy;

without a doubt it puts us at our ease

while th’ other makes us so very queasy

even sneezy when we voice its uneasy

articulation, causing us to freeze.

But Louise is Santa de Marillac

while Weezie’s a spoof, great fun to be sure,

an open avenue, not a cul-de-sac;

quite the moniker for an epicure,

not for a snooty hypochondriac

but for our best friend, weeziely secure.

March 20, 2015

Going through my files yesterday in order to throw away masses of accumulation, I found another sonnet, this one written for George Draper when he retired from the presidency of the American Farm School in May 1999. It’s not in my 1999 journal. So why not record it here?

A SONNET FOR GEORGE DRAPER ON HIS (DUBIOUS) PASSAGE FROM PRESIDING TO PRESUMING

Presiding, George, is acting with authority

even when you do not know what to do.

Presuming is venturing with audacity

because something could or might be true.

Is this your passage from presiding to

presuming? Or do prexies presume more

than they preside? Is uncertainty taboo

in rules of administrative behavior?

Thessaloniki to Boston and Maine,

okhtapódhi tighanitó to cod

and baked beans, is a passage not to disdain,

nor to replace gallop with sluggardly plod.

Your (dubious) passage from presiding

to presuming is surely not backsliding.

March 28, 2015

I spent this entire week reading Alessandro Falcetta’s huge dissertation on Rendel Harris. I had helped him when we were at Woodbrooke together twenty years ago, introducing him to Bryer, for example. Now he has completed this 500-page exhaustive intellectual biography that I couldn’t put down because it touched so many things in my own life either directly or indirectly. If I’d been more assiduous I would have copied numerous passages into this commonplace book. I did type just a few into the computer, however:

“This was a mistake; for with years I am more and more clear that the significant man does more for a pupil by his mere personality than a dozen lectures full of useful information dictated by an ordinary person, however correct; and most College lecturers are ordinary people. For instance, I constantly think of two lectures by Rendel Harris that I heard—I might say that I watched; for his Woodbrooke audience, gathered from Britain, the United States, Holland and Norway, with stray people of other origins and abodes, was part of it. He took two hours (on separate days) to give us what a commonplace person would have told us in ten minutes or less; only in that case it would probably all have been forgotten; as it was, it was an experience, and a landmark. The whole class was enlisted, and there and then worked the matter out. The question was the date of Christ’s birth, and we all started calculating about Cyrenius and the year of the Greeks and so forth, the orthodox ones never guessing that they were engaged in Higher Criticism; it was all so natural, right and inevitable.” (p. 266)

“In Constantinople the Doctor was much impressed with the stout legs of the Greek girls. So he proposed this hopeless conundrum. Why are the Greek girls like the Prodigal Son? Because they go in for fatted calves.” (p. 450)

Rendel concluded with his ideas about paradise.

“Paradise, in the religious sense, has always been difficult to define: The ancients pictured it as a park, with a good water supply, and plenty of vegetables. I am not interested in gardening or greengrocery, and only remotely in irrigation. My earthly Paradise is a cross between the British Museum and a second hand bookshop. It is packed with first editions and radiant with lost authors. Prospero, in the Tempest, had something of a similar definition. Books, said he, that I valued above my kingdom.” (p. 468)

“As a good protestant, Rendel opposed merits to mercy. In one of his devotional writings he considered it to be wrong to believe that merits will take one to heaven. This was in his view a cheap way to reach the desired final destination. ‘Life-work is not sufficient. Judged by the Divine standard, there is not enough either of life or of work to form a justification for living or for working.’ In another devotional he observed: ‘one mark of sanctity, and a part of the price that must be paid for it, is anonymity.’” (p· 529)

Out for supper tonight to a restaurant for Weezie’s 75th birthday celebration. Lovely to meet her two sons and daughter and two grandsons. Lots of speeches about her supreme qualities as a mother, and I read my sonnet of course about Weezie vs. Louise. Sat with her youngest son, who lives in Seattle and went to Dartmouth and spends part of his summers in the Adirondacks, so we didn’t lack for subjects to talk about. Before dinner, standing for a long time and talking to two ex-New Yorkers about the Philharmonic and Russian Tea Room and Automat and Schraffts, my two legs turned numb but luckily there was a chair right next to me, so I didn’t collapse onto the floor the way I had many years ago at Pendle Hill owing to the same problem.

April 6, 2015

I’m the next speaker, in May, at the Professors’ Colloquium. My subject is Beveridge Webster, and I plan to play some recordings. Bob Sokol, who runs each event, always starts with a bio of the speaker. So I wrote one out for him today, as follows:

Peter Bien was born in New York City, where his mother brought him regularly to the Children’s Concerts of the New York Philharmonic. He was educated in the Bronx High School of Science, Deerfield Academy, Harvard College, Haverford College (B.A. in music), Columbia University (doctorate in English and Comparative Literature) and the University of Bristol in England.

After college, The American Friends Service Committee sent him to Holland to an international work camp aiding an institute for Down’s Syndrome patients. During the Korean War he did alternative military service in Rochester, New York as a surgical technician, co-directing two Quaker summer work camps in the Black ghetto there and studying piano for a year at the Eastman School of Music. Returning to Europe at age 24, he met Chrysanthi in England at a Quaker adult education center. They were married in Greece, where he lived for a year learning the language from elementary school textbooks supplied by his father-in-law, headmaster of the local school. Columbia and Bristol came next, followed by employment in 1961 by Dartmouth College, where he was active for 36 years, teaching in the English Department, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Classics Department, always playing chamber music, but not practicing for three decades until he and Chrysanthi came to Kendal in 2002.

They have three children. The oldest lives outside of Washington, D.C. He is a professional pianist and his wife is a violinist in the National Symphony. The middle child teaches music and conducts the string orchestra in the British International School in Bangkok, Thailand. The youngest, who worked originally with the Simon and Schuster publishing house in New York, is now busy with three children in California. The entire family has gathered regularly at the 120-acre farm that Peter bought in the Adirondacks in 1950 while a sophomore at Harvard, and where Chrysanthi has proved herself admirably skilled at chinking their log cabin.

Beginning in 1984, along with a group of Hanover Quakers, Peter was active in making Kendal a reality, and is especially happy to have played a role in bringing here the extraordinary musician Beveridge Webster, the subject of his talk today.

April 8, 2015

Having finally read material sent me a long time ago by Tasos Apostolidis, I wrote him the following letter:

2015-04-07

Αγαπητέ Τάσο,

Επιτέλους, ύστερα από μεγάλη καθυστέρηση, διάβασα το άρθρο στη «Θεσσαλονικέων Πόλις» για τους δυσκούρους των κόμικς, το οποίο μου το έστειλες προ πολλού. Είχα μια λίστα άρθρων, βιβλίων, μελετών από φίλους και συναδέρφους να διαβάσω, μα την έβαλα στο περιθώριο ώσπου να τελειώσω δύο τεράστια δικά μου σχέδια: (α´) να ξαναμεταφράσω στ’ αγγλικά τον «Ζορμπά» του Καζαντζάκη, (β´) να ετοιμάσω το ημερολόγιό μου, που αρχίζει από το 1948 και πάει μέχρι σήμερα, για ηλεκτρονική έκδοση. Η μετάφραση δημοσιεύτηκε προ λίγου—βρίσκεται κιόλας ένα άντιγραφο στη βιβλιοθήκη της Αμερικανικής Γεωργικής Σχολής. Χρειάστηκε να ξαναμεταφραστεί επειδή ο προηγούμενος μεταφραστής δε κατάλαβε νεαελληνικά κι γι’ αυτό χρησιμοποίησε μια μετάφραση του βιβλίου στα γαλλικά με το αποτέλεσμα ότι όλα τα λάθη και τις παραλείψεις της γαλλικής εκδοχής συνεχίσονται σ’ αυτή την πρώτη μετάφραση στ’ αγγλικά. Η δεύτερη, δική μου μετάφραση βασίστηκε αποκλειστικά στο πρωτότυπο κείμενο στην νεοελληνική γλώσσα, που σημαίνει ότι διαφέρει αρκετά από τη προηγούμενη εκδοχή. Όσο για το ημερολόγιο, η δυσκολία ήταν κυρίως το μέγεθος—κοντεύει σε 3·000 σελίδες. Έπρεπε να δουλεύω αρκετούς μήνες για να διορθώσω τα τυπογραφικά λάθη και να βελτιώσω άλλα ελαττώματα· τώρα όμως γίνεται η στοιχειοθεσία.

Περιμένοντας να τελειώσει αυτή η διαδικασία, αισθάνομαι για πρώτη φορά ότι δεν κάθεται τίποτα στο πιάτο μου (προσωρινά, ελπίζω) και συνεπώς ξαναβρήκα τη λίστα άρθρων, βιβλίων, μελετών που καθότανε τόσους μήνες στον υπολογιστή μου. Διαβάζοντας για τους δυσκούρους των κόμικς, έψαξα για τα αντίγραφα των κόμικς σου που αγόρασα πριν από πολλά χρόνια στη Θεσσαλονίκη, μερικά στ’ αγγλικά, μερικά στ’ ελληνικά, και τα ξανακοίταξα. Το ευνοούμενο για μένα παραμένει η «Λυσιστράτη», αλλά εννοείται ότι δεν κατέχω τα κόμικς που βγήκαν πιο πρόσφατα. Χαίρομαι που, τώρα που απαλλάχτηκες από τις ευθύνες της Σχολής, ξαναγυρίζεις σε αυτή τη τέχνη.

Χαίρομαι επίσης που είδατε με τη Ντόρα το Νοέμβριο τη Χρήσανθη και τη κόρη μας τη Δάφνη όταν ήρθαν για τρεις μονάχα μέρες στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Μακάρι να ξαναβρεθώ καμιά φορά κι εγώ εκεί, αλλά αμφιβάλλω αν θα ξαναπάω.

Πάντως, σας εύχομαι το κάθε καλό!

Εγκάρδια,
Πήτερ

He replied immediately:

ΠΗΤΕΡ,

Χάρηκα πολύ με το γράμμα σου! Χαίρομαι πολύ που είσαι πάντα ανήσυχος και δημιουργικός. Να συνεχίσεις έτσι πολλά πολλά χρόνια! . . .

Μέχρι το τέλος του 2015 θα βρίσκομαι στη Σχολή ως σύμβουλος Προέδρου. Έτσι πηγαίνω λίγες ώρες την ημέρα. Τις υπόλοιπες πράγματι ασχολούμαι με την Τέχνη μου.

Έχουν κυκλοφορήγσει 11 βιβλία—κόμικς μου στα αγγλικά, γαλλικά, γερμανικά και φέτος 2 και σε λίγο καιρό θα γίνουν 6 στα τουρκικά!

Έχω δε την τιμή να πωλούνται στο Μουσείο της Ακρόπολης και σε άλλα πωλητήρια κέντρων πολιτισμού.

Ήταν μεγάλη η χαρά μας που είδαμε τη Χρυσάνθη με τη Δάφνη και θα χαρούμε ακόμη περισσότερο αν ξαναβρεθούμε όλοι μαζί! . . .

ΦΙΛΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΧΑΙΡΕΤΙΣΜΑΤΑ ΣΕ ΟΛΟΥΣ ΑΠΟ ΤΗ ΔΩΡΑ ΤΗ ΖΩΗ ΚΙ ΕΜΕΝΑ. ΝΑ ΕΙΣΤΕ ΠΑΝΤΑ ΚΑΛΑ.

April 17, 2015

I’ve been cleaning, urged by Chrysanthi, and discarding many records of my previous academic life. Most recently: dozens of the small disks on which everything used to be stored from the Apple computer. I actually had an external device—indeed two of them—enabling these disks to be read on the massively evolved computers of today (with luck). So I went through all of these small disks, discarding many outright. Those left, about 75, I put into my external device yesterday. Perhaps ten of them showed up on the finder. And of those ten, only one was readable; the others required missing applications, or whatever. Yet the one-only readable text that I was able to save in this way was Chrysanthi’s memory of her mother, as follows:

MAGDALENE SAMARA YANNAKOU

by Chrysanthi Yannakou Bien

I remember my mother as a tall, beautiful lady. She wore a light chocolate color dress made of pure silk; it was long, down to her ankles, and was gathered at the waist and with a fitted bodice, and a large opening around her neck. A golden cross and golden chain decorated her beautiful face. On her head she had a lighter-colored kerchief with a bow on the side near her ear, and long elegant earrings matching her golden chain. She put very light power on her face and a very light blush, and always light lipstick. I think she wanted to look beautiful but naturally.

I still feel in my bones her smile, her modesty, and her kindness. She was the “lady” of the village. Because my father was principal of two schools, she had to entertain a lot. I remember the parties we had in our house. My father was very proud of my mother and included her in all his out-of-school activities.

My father, Demetrios Yannakos, was a sociable person. He loved to sing and to play the mandolin. He was obsessed with church psalms. He left home very early in the morning before we all got up. He made his own breakfast—usually eels cooked on charcoal, bread, and milk. Then he went on foot to his schools to light the wood stoves so the schools could be warm before the teachers and children arrived for class. He walked through fields and hills from one village to the other. I remember once he told us that he saw a wolf early in the morning.

My mother was from a rather wealthy family. She didn’t continue school because her father thought it was unnecessary for his beautiful girl to work so hard. “We will find a rich man. We have a good dowry,” he used to say. So my mother spent her time embroidering, sewing, knitting, cooking, and being a good girl for her father. But things turned out their own way. My father—a poor, educated, handsome young man—fell in love with my mother. He saw her on her balcony when he was sitting with his friends in a coffee shop across from her house. They flirted with each other from a distance. The next day he went again at the same time to the same coffee shop. He saw her again and instantly was determined to get to know her more, but he couldn’t. So he got very brave and went right to her home to talk to her father. Her father was very flattered to have the village’s teacher as his son-in-law, but even happier probably because this man (my father) did not ask for a dowry! My father was a man before his time. He used to say, “A man who demands a dowry is not sincere, nor is he a real man.” So my mother became the wife of the school principal.

She gave birth to four children and lived in the village very happily until my father announced that they had to go to the city so their children could continue their education (the village had no high school). What a sacrifice for both of them! They left their beautiful lives and we all squeezed into a very old taxi and went to Thessaloniki.

I remember the trip. I was almost five years old. I was very excited but very sad. I left behind all my friends. I wonder what my mother had in her mind. In Thessaloniki my mother felt out of place. The clothes she wore looked funny to the city people. Her beautiful kerchief on her head with a bow looked ridiculous. Her open décolleté with her golden cross and chain made her look like the city’s cheap women. The more I remember the first year in the city the more I appreciate my mother. I wonder how—dressed like a clown in a place where everyone else was dressed city-style—she continued to live in a small apartment with four misplaced children, and a husband who was away all day long in school. The neighbors laughed every time they saw my mother. It became so bad that one day my father said, “Loudha [my mother’s nickname], I arranged with a seamstress to come tomorrow to make your clothes like everyone else’s.” I remember that my mother cried. I don’t know whether she was happy or scared of the forthcoming metamorphosis. Was she thinking of her identity? Where did her pride go? Where had her beautiful, sociable, dignified life gone? Tomorrow she was going to be a transformed lady. But she did this in the way she did many other hard things. She was strong, with a loving husband.

The years went by. We went to school. We changed apartments. And as the children grew, so did the problems. The Germans occupied Greece in April 1941. We had poverty, famine, bombs, then civil war, arrests, prison, sickness. My mother’s life was full of ups and downs. I remember one New Year’s when all our neighbors were celebrating and our apartment was full of Gestapo torturing my father, abusing my mother, using their boots to kick my sister and myself out of bed to make us confess and tell them where my brother Odysseus was (a law student, he had joined the resistance against the Nazis). So the family had to suffer until he was captured. After that I didn’t see my mother, for she was arrested, as was my father, and sent to prison for eleven months on a deserted island where she was hungry, cold, and very sick. Many mothers in such prisons returned home sooner because they couldn’t tolerate any more torture and thus signed a paper saying, “I do not acknowledge my son as my son because he is a traitor to our country.” My mother could not make herself sign such a declaration, so she stayed on the island until the Germans were forced to leave Greece in October 1944. An amnesty was granted then, and she returned home. She had a sad smile and looked old and sickly, but tried to be courageous, strong, and protective, as always, and apologetic. Why apologetic? The last time we had seen each other was in prison where we were together for fifty days, after which we were suddenly separated without hugging and kissing each other. She was apologetic. Looking at me, she hugged me and asked me to forgive her for what I had gone through. Why did she do that? What did she mean? I didn’t understand, but now I do. It was because her son had made me suffer—so she took the blame on herself.

After that, we had happy times together, with marriages and grandchildren. But she always had a pain in her heart because of her lost son. Was he alive? Was he dead? Was he suffering? These questions tortured her for thirty years. When she was dying I fortunately was by her side. She opened her eyes and said, “I won’t see him home. Maybe in the other world. But you, Chrysanthi, go for a walk with your friends. You are too beautiful to stay here.” And she closed her eyes, murmuring, “The young with the young, the old with the old, the dead with the dead.”

Two weeks after her death, my brother Odysseus returned to Greece after thirty years as a political refugee in the Soviet Union, bringing with him a wonderful wife and two beautiful children.

April 26, 2015

Kendal showed the Zorba movie tonight with me giving an introduction for fifteen minutes beforehand, about the new translation and some experiences when I was on the film set in 1964. It’s interesting how many elements in the film I seem to recognize although I’ve seen it probably four or five times. It seemed so completely accurate to the Greece that I knew and experienced in the 1950s and 1960s. Also, I appreciated the elements of dialogue that Cacoyannis chose to preserve from the book, even though Stavridakis is nowhere nor is the Boss’s regeneration as a writer. A good crowd came and many seemed to find the movie very powerful. I emphasized a symbolic approach—Kazantzakis’s effort in the famine of 1941 following the German invasion when all was lost, to examine and project that element in Greece and Greeks that somehow survives.

Last week I got involved, and into a bit of trouble, at Kendal owing to its official expansion plans and an alternative plan offered to oppose the official one. The crux is the proposed construction of thirty new, elaborate, expensive apartments, income from which is meant to provide for renovation in the health center, Gathering Room, etc. The alternative plan eliminates the thirty new apartments and some of the other proposed changes, greatly reducing the total cost. I liked the alternative proposal and e-mailed its three proponents favorably, even suggesting that they encourage folks to vote No for expansion of residential units on the ballot at Town Meeting on May 12. Somehow, unknown to me and without my permission, this private letter got displayed on Clinton Gardner’s internet Forum (he later apologized for his thoughtlessness in doing this) and then, worse, as a page placed in everyone’s Kendal mailbox repeating the Forum letter from me and my suggestion about voting. This was very bad, since we do not want political messages in the mailboxes and also since I didn’t understand how the ballot worked. I subsequently learned that the question of added residential units was one of a total of seven items about CCRCs that needed to be voted Yes or No in the aggregate, and that the other six were innocuous and useful. I wrote a retraction, which Clint did not print in the Forum until I spoke to him three days later. Meanwhile many people, incredulous, asked me for explanations. Of course my sentiments were directly opposed to the “official” plans proposed by Becky Smith, Stan Pelli, the Board of Directors, and the Kendal Corporation. Chrysanthi reacted in dismay, somehow equating our present situation with that of her family under the Nazis in Greece. But, as so often happens, people begin soon to forget, so that now, nine days after the appearance of my sentiments in the Forum, I think that there really is no more problem.

April 27, 2015

But a real problem has developed, and one that may not go away so quickly. It seems that I am suffering from actinic cheilitis, pre-cancerous evidence in my lower lip owing, they say, to sunlight over many years. At the moment I am sitting in the hospital as I undergo my initial treatment with a cream called Levulan that will soon be activated by “blue light” for fifteen minutes and forty seconds if I can stand it. This is supposed to destroy the offending cells. We’ll see . . . and hope for the best. Apparently there will be three treatments each separated by six weeks. Later: the fifteen minutes and forty seconds under the blue light wasn’t bad. No real pain, just a strong tingling in the lip. And afterward in late afternoon and evening no discomfort at all, no trouble eating supper. It’s almost as if nothing had happened, but I do hope that the offending cells are dying . . . gently.

May 6, 2015

Very nice music tonight with Dick and Allan. We played the second Brandenburg quite well—it isn’t that difficult—and the fifth Brandenburg not so well, but it was still satisfying. With Stan Udy, Joan Wilson, and Joan Snell I am now preparing the overture to Don Giovanni to play in the Cary Room on May 15th.

May 8, 2015

Terpni

Last September, as an experiment, I left the tiller with its tank filled with 91 octane gasoline without ethanol. Today, happily, the tiller started immediately and easily, and worked well. So I purchased more 91 gas without ethanol and hope to use it everywhere to avoid the ethanol problem. Earl drove up. He shot two ten-point bucks last season, but is alienated from his wife’s family, the Morrises, down the road. That’s the news!

May 12, 2015

A very lucky day! In the morning I received word that I had won the MGSA translation prize of $500 for my Zorba. In the evening, at Town Meeting, I learned that the town, amazingly, had defeated the regulation permitting Kendal to build more apartments than its present 250, 637 votes to 548—in other words, by a comfortable margin. This delighted (and surprised) me.

May 15, 2015

Our eight-hand group played the overture to Don Giovanni truly well today in the Cary Room. It was real music, not just notes.

May 18, 2015

Bought a new car today, another Chevrolet Malibu. Chrysanthi figured that if we can drive perhaps another five years we ought to have a car that won’t cause us trouble during that period.

May 20, 2015

Drove to the farm last evening in our new car. Planted tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes today, tilled the entire garden, fixed the black paper that had been dislodged by wind, started the White using non-ethanol gas. Most important, a technician from Direct TV replaced our disk on the porch roof; thus we retired with “I Love Lucy” and Charlie Rose!

May 22, 2015

Worried about frost at the farm last night, when the prediction called for 28 degrees. But we were lucky: the lowest was 34 degrees.

Yesterday, at Kendal, I officiated at our monthly “Death Café” event. I was asked to do this by Barbara Taylor, who earlier this month called me to her apartment to announce that she had decided to end her life by starvation and thus would be dead before the event took place—as she was. So of course I announced it as a memorial to her. By her request, I read appropriate poetry: Milton, Shakespeare, Harkianakis, Cavafy, Marvel, Herrick, plus a paragraph from Montaigne’s “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die” and another from Lucretius’s “De Rerum Natura.” I had planned to end with some of Kenneth Boulding’s sonnets but did not, in order to leave time for discussion, which concentrated on the question of an afterlife—ignored totally by all the poetry I read. As Andrew Marvel says, “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.”

May 30, 2015

Memorial service today for Barbara Taylor with all four children speaking and Frank Logan playing Gershwin—all designed by Barbara herself, who insisted that the service “be not religious” although it was conducted by Weezie and Avery. Yet in its own way it was religious, because it had an integrity and was governed by love. Even the music, especially the Gershwin, was equal to Bach. One of the children read Cavafy’s “Ithaca,” which of course I included in the Death Café. Clearly it speaks to Barbara’s condition. In the section of the service where anyone could give testimony, I recounted how in my last interview with her when she told me about her decision to end her life through starvation, her personality then changed remarkably—it was no longer “commanding.” One of the service’s best moments was when the children attested that Barbara’s many years at Kendal were among the happiest of her life, affirming the power that Kendal certainly may have.

A week ago Dick Williamson broke his hip. He spilled water in his kitchen, then slipped on the same water as he bent down to wipe it up. The first time I visited him in the hospital I was frightened. He was totally irrational, with slurred voice as though drunk or drugged, and was accusing me of various imagined misdemeanors. I spoke with the nurses afterwards, who said he had been that way off and on all day. The next day he was much better. But the third day he still mixed rationality with totally fantastical moments. We all feel sorry for him because he is so totally alone—no family, no children, no wife, nobody. He always disparaged Kendal, where of course he would be so much better off at a time like this. On the second day I brought him his favorite roast beef sandwich from Stinson’s on Allen Street. Not even a thank you! Oh well . . . Now he is in restorative care in Lebanon. The only person who seems to be following everything is the Math Department secretary, whom he once described as mothering the entire department. Lucky Dick!

June 2, 2015

Read this about Trollope in the TLS (April 24, 2015, p. 3): “He did not fear death. . . . But what he did fear, to the pitch of sheer terror, was idleness. . . . He confided to his son . . ., ‘As long as I can write books, even though they be not published, I think that I can be happy.’” This struck me as applying to myself right now. For the first time in my professional life I have no writing to do.

June 4, 2015

Leander played here in our Webster series, four-hand piano with his fellow teacher at Kinhaven, Andrew Harley. They did the Mozart C major sonata especially for Stan Udy and me, since we had played it earlier in the year, followed by the Brahms sixteen waltzes and Schubert’s Fugue in Ε minor and, lastly, his Lebensstürme. Everything was beautifully musical and much appreciated by our audience.

June 8, 2015

To the hospital for the second of my treatments for actinic cheilitis. But Dr. Chapman said, “Your lip has no sign any longer of actinic cheilitis; thus there is no need now for treatment. But it may come back in a year or so. Thus I’ll want to keep seeing you every six months.”

June 9, 2015

Hanover to Riparius

In the morning, Chrysanthi, who is serving now on Council, attended her final meeting. In the afternoon we migrated, happily, to the farm. I’m eager now to get the tractor started and to begin another year of mowing at our amazing paradise where, on July 17th, all children and grandchildren will be present for our sixtieth anniversary dinner. But what will I be writing this summer and beyond? That remains a big question. Dr. Chapman told me that an eighty-five year old person in my good health usually lives another ten years. Can I remain productive during that time or at least part of it? If Chrysanthi dies before me, it will be as if my two arms or two legs have been amputated; conversely, if I die before her she will be bereft of all the ways in which each day I enable her to cope. The answer in both cases, fortunately, is Kendal, which pampers us totally—something increasingly evident now, since we are at the farm needing to care for ourselves. Most of my life has been nurtured by splendid institutions—Deerfield, Harvard, Haverford, Pendle Hill, Woodbrooke, Columbia, Dartmouth, Bristol, various Quaker Meetings, Kinhaven, the Farm School—and now, finally, definitively, Kendal, which (everyone keeps telling me) I founded. Nevertheless, I don’t want my remaining years to be increasingly pampered and empty.

APPENDIX

From 85 On

2015

Riparius

June 10–September 11

Hanover

September 12–December 31

Oct. 15–16, Atlanta, Georgia

Oct.23–24, Pendle Hill

Nov. 7, Riparius

Dec. 19, Cambridge

Dec. 20, East Greenwich, R.I.

June 13, 2015

Terpni

To town to meet Ed and Donna to attend a concert with a very good bassoonist plus a string quartet. Donna brought me their copy of The New Yorker with another piece, a very short one, by Daniyal Mueenuddin, about his amazing father, an Oxford-educated grandee in pre-partition India.

June 17, 2015

Long visit from Earl. Interestingly, when I mentioned that our beavers were building another dam south of the triple dam on Vly Brook, he said that beavers always do this as a way of teaching the young—together with the young they construct a new dam or at least part of one, mainly for instructional purposes. Amazing!

June 18, 2015

Working in my office this morning (final check on Journal 2014 for Scott Cahoon), I was accompanied by a loud gnawing noise, obviously from a mouse creating a nest in one of the beams overhead. And at one point I actually saw Madame Mouse with her mouth filled with chips of beam-wood climbing back to the site.

June 24, 2015

Another pleasing testimonial arrived from a former student—Daniel Daley, who studied Ulysses, Woolf, Kazantzakis with me in . . . 1968 (!) together with his friend Ed Levin. He writes that he and Ed “often spoke of the pleasure and excitement of being in your classroom and its impact on our thinking and appreciation for life.” He continues, “I read Ulysses three times in my early 20’s. Now after a life of work and family I am delving deeply into Beckett.” These testimonials perplex me because I had then, nor do I have now, no comprehension whatever of why I seemed to be effective in the classroom, at least for some of the students.

July 8, 2015

We’ve done lots on the farm. Repaired problems on my yellow birch over the office—large branches needing to be removed because rotted. Alec trimmed all around the south field and I started mowing except where wild blueberries exist (Monica is collecting). Also trimmed both willows of various dead branches. Alec and the children removed the hardware cloth around the Guest House, brushed away dust, etc. on the walls, and began to reapply brown stain. Afterwards we’ll repaint the gray trim and affix a new metal roof, probably colored green to match the door from 3902 47th Street, Sunnyside.

July 11, 2015

A beautiful matinee at the ballet with Alec and family. “Interplay” (Morton Gound/Robbins), “Tarantella” (Gottschalk/Balanchine) danced with verve by Ashley Bouder and Joaquin de Luz, “Symphony in Three Movements” (Stravinsky/Balanchine), and finally “Western Symphony” (Hershy Kay/Balanchine). Unbelievably, Chrysanthi and I had not seen any of these before. Of course the Stravinsky was the best music, but the others were OK and the Kay had two tuba solos! Marvelous dancing, as always. . . . Afterwards we had a date to meet for supper with Arturo Delmoni at the restaurant 50 South at 5:00 p.m. I thought I had directions but they were entirely wrong, taking us on Route 50 north instead of South. We telephoned and were given very circuitous directions to go to exit 12 on Interstate 87, then on route 67, again in the opposite direction. Finally we got Arturo himself on the telephone and arrived over an hour late. But he was so upbeat and gracious, full of good humor, enchanted especially by Elena, hoping that Alec can arrange for him to play with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra, etc. So we had a leisurely dinner filled with laughter and conversation until about 7:30, when he needed to return to play the evening performance.

July 12, 2015

Observed today a real miracle for the first time. Some large, very green oak leaves were protruding from beneath my metal valise in my office and I decided to pull them up. They came up intact with their stem, which issued from the acorn that I pulled out of the ground. So for the first time I saw a “generating” acorn. By some exquisite miracle, the slender stem issues from its insides, produces into open air, branches into immense green leaves and, if in the right location (obviously not inside my office) grows in thirty or forty years into a substantial tree. I’ve seen, of course, so many acorns simply on the ground, where they are often taken and stored by squirrels or chipmunks.

July 15, 2015

Painted the screen door of the Guest House a lovely shade of green, matching the grass outside. Alec, Monica, Theo, and Elena painted all the trim a dark gray. We’re waiting now for Murphy’s to deliver the metal for the new roof.

July 16, 2015

Daphne and family arrived. We are fifteen here now. They brought me donuts and canned Ιμάμ μπαϊλντί, and a beautiful photo memory of the Salonika trip last November for Chrysanthi. The photos of her and Daphne together in Athens make it difficult to tell who is the mother and who the daughter!

July 17, 2015

Our sixtieth! How lucky we both are to have had such a good marriage! In my case doubly good because, beyond the family success, it led to my major academic interest and success. A pleasure to see our three children who obviously like each other, and the grandchildren who—with the exception of Christina, alas—are vigorous and inquisitive and accomplished—even Nicholas, who seemed more approachable than I’ve experienced him previously. We all went out for a dinner at the Adirondack Café in Pottersville after taking family photos and listening to my 45-minute recital of nuggets from my journal pertaining to children and grandchildren.

July 19, 2015

Today I completed the extensive answers, in Greek, to Mathioudakis’s interview with me that will appear in a Greek literary periodical. It has been a good exercise.

July 20, 2015

Finished mowing the south field. Και του χρόνου!;

July 21, 2015

Alec, helped by Leander and me, completed the new metal roof on the guest House, which now has been completely upgraded on the exterior.

July 22, 2015

We went with Alec’s wagon, now fully legal because the non-blinking rear light was fixed, to the Nettle Meadow goat farm to get a load of manure. The owner, on our arrival, said a goat had been born 15 minutes ago and went and brought it to us. About seven pounds, with fur already, and able to walk. They pasteurize the mother’s milk to guard against disease and feed the newborn with bottles. The cash “crop” is cheese, made from goat’s and sleep’s milk. Thousands of pounds, all of which they sell mostly via internet. There is a huge barn with a marvelous vaulted roof. We shoveled the large amount of manure into a pile at the back end of our garden and hope to see improved plants and yields in the future.

I sent the following e-mail to Larry Ingle after finishing his book Nixon’s First Cover-Up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President. “Dear Larry, I read your book with interest and pleasure. When you first announced this project, decades ago, the general opinion of others (and yourself, too, I think) was that you would find very little relevant material. But the book proves otherwise since poor Nixon, despite all his hang-ups, was always clinging in some fashion to his mother’s ‘sanctity’. The major thing I needed to learn in reading the book was how different my own Eastern, liberal, silent Quakerism is from the Quaker Church that nourished (if that is the right word) Nixon. I have never participated in an evangelical Quaker service, although I did witness bits of one a few times when a Kenyan Quaker pastor at Pendle Hill organized the morning worship there. You are helpful in repeatedly emphasizing the important difference between liberal and evangelical Quakerism, and—contrariwise—remembering that both (up to a point) are pacifist. I was also interested in the book’s treatment of Herbert Hoover, not very extensive and yet helpful in enabling us to sense his difficult relationship to his religious origins. I once toured the Hoover Museum in Stanford University and came away with great admiration for this man, at least for the pre-presidential part of his career. I come away from your book with more positive feelings about Nixon than I had before. Previously for so many of us, he was the sort of crook from whom you wouldn’t even want to buy a used car. But your book shows him as intelligent, somewhat diverse (he played the piano), tortured, somehow desiring to be a force for good (including peace), but at the same time too emotionally precarious to succeed. Thanks!”

July 29, 2015

Alec’s birthday: 57 years old. We had a lovely dinner in their cabin and watched as gifts were unwrapped—lots of dress shirts as usual (needed for work in the Patana School). I gave him a set of six brackets to use in the barn to hang equipment, plus three battery-powered anti-mice devices to help protect his car during the winter. Then Mike and Laura Gouthreau came. I had a long talk, as always, with Mike. When he asked how I was doing I needed to reply that for the first time in my adult professional life, since 1956, I had no project, nothing to write! I get up in the morning and don’t go to the “office.” No nervous breakdown, however. I’m trying to practice the piano more, right now the Schubert “Fantaisie” in F minor, primo, which is of course much too hard for me ever to do cleanly up to temp. and the Samuel Barber “Waltz” secondo from his “Souvenirs,” both to do with Stan Udy when we return to Kendal. Of course there is always work here on the property, although mowing is now finished. But Alec and I cleaned up the south forest path the other day, and I’ve weeded the garden and will build Chrysanthi another large box for planting. Also painted the Guest House door green. But all this used to be merely the “accompaniment” to some form of productive writing. No more, it seems. Unless . . .?

August 2, 2015

I liked this, read over breakfast this morning: “Some theorists have likened translation to a palimpsest in which the original text, though erased, glimmers through the translated one like Archimedes’ theorems” (TLS July 17, 2015, p. 25).

Invited Earl, Kelly, and Stevie Millington for supper at 6:30. They arrived at 6:00 and stayed until 10:30. Kelly turns out to be intelligent and sophisticated, despite the restrictions of life on Waddell Road. Stevie actually fitted several pieces of Chrysanthi’s ongoing jigsaw puzzle. We learned more about the ten Morris children, seven girls, three boys, not a happy lot, alas, owing to disease, accident, failed marriages.

August 3, 2015

Chrysanthi is delighted with “Swann in Love” in Proust’s first volume and will read Justine next. I note Durrell’s definition of love therein: “a consuming and depersonalized friendship” (p. 110).

August 7, 2015

Dear Katherine Ebury,

I hope that this reaches you. I have just finished reading your book Modernism & Cosmology, which is brilliantly researched and presented. It was a special pleasure for me to learn so much more about Joyce’s Ulysses, Beckett’s Murphy, and his three Trilogy novels, all of which I taught repeatedly at Dartmouth College for over thirty years along with other modernist delights by Virginia Woolf and (in our Comparative Literature program) Thomas Mann, Kafka, Proust. I occasionally attempted, without much success, to do something with Finnegans Wake (which I studied with William York Tindall, my Ph.D. advisor at Columbia University). My pleasure in your devotion to literary modernism arises in part from my disappointment regarding what happened at Dartmouth when I retired in 1997 and the committee appointed to find my replacement decided to recruit in Colonial Literature instead of English Literature. Thus my successor had never read Ulysses; she replaced the wonderful modernist authors that you appreciate and understand so well with Das, Naipaul, etc. No one at Dartmouth now does Beckett’s prose; even Ulysses is not taught regularly.

I of course realized that the works you treat all belong to the “new physics” and even, somehow, to the legacy of one of my favorites: Bishop Berkeley. But I never acquired the understanding of Einstein’s world that you enjoy and describe so well. I kept telling my students that they were all nineteenth-century readers trying to comprehend post–nineteenth-century materials, and sometimes I did effect a slight change, perhaps, in a few of them. Ulysses, especially, which they approached with dread, occasionally changed a student’s life. I cannot say the same for Beckett, however. In 1995 the University of Birmingham (England) held a conference in my honor called “Greek Modernism and Beyond” (published in 1997) in which I contributed a short “Afterword” in which (if I remember correctly) I argued that pre-modernism (e.g. Conrad) continues the earlier novel’s adherence to realism whereas modernism projects meaning in a non-realistic manner via symbolism chiefly, and post-modernism denies meaning altogether. That is a long way from the expertise and complexity presented in your book, but perhaps it is not entirely simplistic.

I did post-graduate study for a year in your Bristol University, met my Greek wife in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and used to travel repeatedly to England, but at age 85 this delight has stopped, alas. If you ever find yourself in Boston, which is only two hours from us in New Hampshire, perhaps we could meet.

August 8, 2015

I learned from the Harvard Magazine’s obituaries that Steve Baran has died. Thus both he and John Harvey, my two Harvard roommates, are gone, and I, strangely, seem perfectly healthy and even sufficiently vigorous at age 85. Strange. But also in the Harvard Magazine, in an article on David Ferry, I encountered these lines he translated from sixteenth-century Scottish poetry after his wife died:

My married heart shall never turn from her

Unto another so long as my five wits

Shall last, whose whole consent is given to her

Until death’s rage shall cleave me to the root.

So shall I love her ever, in spite of what-

Soever circumstance can do to us.

God grant I go to the grave before she goes.

These beautiful words of course speak as well—so deeply—from me to Chrysanthi.

August 9, 2015

Finished Philip Kitcher’s Life after Faith: the Case for Secular Humanism. Disappointing. He argues most strongly not for secular humanism but instead for the liberal interpretation of Christian doctrine. His main point is summarized thus on page 122: “Religion is rightly seen as a corrective to the materialism of the age, not because it draws attention to any real ‘spiritual realm,’ nor because of the correctness of any specific religious doctrine . . . nor because religion is the source of values, but because of the importance to us of a multidimensional form of community life. For large swaths of contemporary affluent societies, that form of shared ethical life is in short supply, and religious communities are the principal places in which it can be found.” On pp. 61–62 he lists his three assumptions: “First, religion is not understood as primarily a collection of doctrines about the transcendent, but as a system of practices and commitments. Second, the doctrinal statements that figure in religious practices and in expressions of commitment are not interpreted through the lens of everyday implications—they are taken to have symbolic significance, to be allegories or to contain profound metaphors. Third, the fundamental commitments of religions are to values, and the thought of a ‘transcendent realm’ is important because of its role in articulating these commitments . . .” Certainly most liberal Quakers would agree with all three assumptions.

Chrysanthi’s excessive worrying was evident in full force this evening when Alec finally telephoned from a restaurant in New York. He hadn’t called last night or earlier today and she was in a fit. As usual, and as always happened to me when I was the delinquent person, she of course spoiled his day by accusing him of neglect. When I suggested that she had no cause for worry, she replied, “You are not a mother!” Well, no use in fighting this at this point. She concluded her talk with Alec by admonishing him repeatedly to “stay together” in Times Square, where they are planning to go after supper, because Times Square is so obviously dangerous.

August 10, 2015

This is the first time my “guru,” Don Cupitt, has disappointed me. The Revelation of Being is pure philosophy, not at all about religion. And the philosophy is gibberish largely, at least for me. But a few passages are worth recording here:

pp. 75–76: “Bernard Williams, in ‘The Makropulos Case: reflections on the tedium of immortality,’ decides that ‘an endless life would be a meaningless one’, and gives all the right reasons. He quotes Aristotle’s splendid saying about Plato’s form of the Good to the effect that it is not ‘any the more good for being eternal: that which lasts long is no whiter than that which perishes in a day’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1096b 4). What is precious is no more precious for being eternal, and, conversely, no less so for being transient. And in saying all this, Williams is unexpectedly close to Heidegger. . . . For Heidegger, it is our consciousness of our own mortality that acts like a religious vocation: it galvanizes us into realizing that we must make something of our lives while we have time.”

p. 88: “In the old religion, which reaches its culminating form in Islam and in Calvinism, everything was traced back to the omnipotent Will of a single Monarch. Faith involved submission and an unconditional commitment of the human will to be henceforth the instrument of the divine Will. . . . In the new religion, the world is an evolving co-operative product and the relation to the religious object does not involve submission so much as patient responsiveness and partnership.”

p. 99: “In Platonism, eternity is timelessness, and belongs only to God, the things of God and the eternal world. . . . In Existentialism, ‘eternal’ is said to be a quality, not an extension. In Romanticism and more recently, eternity is associated with the sublime, the Sun and everything that is solar.”

p. 105: “Spirituality: a vague and contested word now. Perhaps, the collection of regular practices and forms of expression through which we may seek to get ourselves together, represent our feeling for the human condition, and find personal happiness.”

August 17, 2015

Just finished a lovely visit by Don Seeger and—something new—his “partner” Tom Goodridge. They let us know from the start they wanted only one bed, to share. What a pleasure to have Dan here for two and a half days. Conversation flowed easily and continuously. Lots about NaCCRA, of which he is president. But he says the membership is divided. I’ll witness some of this on November 1st in Boston. He also showed me how to access Form 990 on the internet. This is submitted each year by all not-for-profit organizations, including Kendal, and shows its financial status, salaries of chief personnel, etc. Kendal looks quite OK, with a surplus of many millions, so far. Tom, the partner, is younger, a member of Morningside Meeting, which seems to be a sort of haven for gays. He is a professional aid for troubled pre-school children: autistics and the like. Very lively. Also very “green” and knowledgeable about wildlife. He was thrilled by the marvels achieved by our beavers when I took him and Dan down to Vly Brook. And he has a special affection for hemlocks, so we went up to see our lovely hemlock stand where I had done some thinning several years ago. Both evenings Dan and I played piano duets, and also some organ. He hasn’t touched a keyboard for years, but he can still sight-read anything that is familiar to him. So we did the entire Schubert Fantasia together . . . somehow. And Bach on the organ. What pleasure! Tom, being a compulsive swimmer, used our pond repeatedly and we drove him to the lovely Schroon Lake beach as well. They’re off now for a few weeks in Canada—always, I’m sure, with a single bed!

In the evening we had more guests for supper: Tom Akstens, Susanne Murtha, and Tom’s singing partner. They have just sold their house in Bakers Mills plus Susanne’s yoga studio and are about to begin a new life in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Tom will have one more year in the New York State on-line college; Susanne has interviewed for a local job as a health counselor and is waiting for the decision. Brave people! They want to meet us in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then to return to Greenwich and have us spend the night, after they get settled. We’ve had so many dinners and visits here in the Adirondacks for three decades, but both parties will try to maintain a portion, at least. With Laura and Mike Gouthreau moved to Vermont, Irv Shapiro dead, Fran in Queensbury aged 101 or 102, the Kurkas here only a few weeks each summer, Art Perryman’s ultra rightwing Republicanism difficult to stomach, our social life is diminished. But Inge and Lou Kurth are coming for supper next Monday, and we still feel very comfortable with Don Green and Evelyn. But the closest friends now are surely Donna and Ed Welch.

August 18, 2015

Helped by Chrysanthi, I’m doing something for the first time in our 65 years here: cleaning up the “islands” in the south field—namely, the three places where rock piles have allowed trees and brush to grow in and around them. And what a difference this makes! For supper, tired owing to so many guests around the table night after night, we decided to collaborate. Chrysanthi cooked bacon, I supervised poached eggs and did my specialty: hashed brown potatoes. Yum! Plus a tomato just picked from our garden, full of good taste.

August 19, 2015

From Don Cupitt, After God: the future of religion: “God has no body, parts, or passions. He has no structure. There is in God no differentia, no contrast, nothing that one might be able to single out or get hold of. Nor can one draw any ‘nearer’ to God because God is omnipresent in his whole reality everywhere, and yet also infinitely Other than us. We always already coincide with a God who is always unknowable. In contemplative prayer, God therefore is apprehended only as a naked, formless void infinite that may equally well be described as dazzling light or as deep darkness, as the plenitude of being or as absolute nothingness, as fullness or as emptiness. . . . And the state of resting in God may equally well be described as a state of absolute knowledge or as a state of the purest unknowing” (p. 54). “I am offering only religion as a toolkit, a small set of attitudes and techniques, by practicing which we can grow in self-knowledge . . ., learn to accept the transience and insubstantiality of ourselves and everything else . . ., and learn to say a wholehearted yes to life. . . . Another item is . . . a license to make whatever new use we can of the surviving scraps of vocabulary, ritual, and symbolism that are available to us” (p. 106).

August 24, 2015

One of the memorable moments in my intellectual life was when Ihor Ševčenko took me to lunch at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983 and sat me down next to the famous philosopher Quine. We had an easy, comfortable time together because it turned out that we had both known Tom Vance. Ihor told me afterwards that the “immortals” of the Academy treated me very well contrary to their usual behavior. I was reminded of all this at breakfast today by a TLS review of the book Ontology Made Easy by Amie Thomasson, where I read: “But what it means for a thing to ‘really’ exist will depend on whom you ask. One dominant approach, invented by the American philosopher W. V. Quine, is that what really exists is whatever is included in the proper formulation of the best complete scientific theory of the world. ‘Best,’ in this context, is understood in terms of scientific virtues such as simplicity. So when followers of Quine dispute the existence of things like tables, they are claiming that we could construct a simpler (and therefore better) complete theory of reality that does not mention them (for example, by talking only in terms of physical particles and their arrangements).” I had never suspected that Quine’s philosophy could be reduced to such a “simple,” completely comprehensible formulation.

September 1, 2015

I don’t know why I keep reading Stylianos’s lead article in each issue of the Φωνή της Ορθοδοξίας, which I keep receiving. The latest issue (vol. 37, no. 4–6) celebrates his fortieth year as archbishop. He is a poet, and sometimes his prose takes on a poetic quality. For example, in this issue: Ο θάνατος του Χριστού που ήρθε σαν θυσία για ολόκληρο το ανθρώπινο γένος δεν έμεινε ένα ξεκομμένο μυστηριώδες υπερφυσικό γεγονός του παρελθόντος. Φυτεύθηκε στο κέντρο της ζωής και της ιστορίας σαν αειθαλές δένδρο, του οποίου τους γλυκείς χυμούς σπεύδουν να γευθούν οι πιστοί, παίρνοντας θέση κλάδου που «ενοφθαμίζεται» στο δέντρο. The only words I didn’t know were of course the two most essential in his simile: αειθαλής = evergreen and ενοφθαλμίζομαι = to engraft.

Last Saturday we went to the headquarters of the Adirondack Mountain Club in Lake George for a seminar on the bug that threatens to kill hemlocks here, although it hasn’t reached the Adirondacks yet. A truly excellent professor from Cornell explained everything splendidly. Afterwards, talking to him, we both agreed that the crucial qualification for a good professor is that he actually enjoy his material, which he obviously does (and so did I). In the woods walk in the afternoon I learned how to identify hemlock—by the line and two white areas on either side on the underside of the leaf. And I also saw for the first time a cedar, which has a very distinctive leaf. Thus I can now distinguish hemlock, cedar, spruce, and balsam! Regarding the ash borer, he told me, alas, that Earl’s theory that large ash trees are not attacked is totally wrong. Thus we could lose the very huge ash right next to our cabin.

Jen Karsten, who visited last week, very pleasantly, just sent some photos she took. The most memorable, for me, is the one through the screen of the front door showing the immense, perfectly crafted spider-web directly outside, the one that Chrysanthi keeps destroying but that Madame Arachne keeps rebuilding immediately in all its glory.

September 12, 2015

Closing and leaving. It’s always sad, but much more this year because of fear that one of us, or both of us, will not be able to return next spring. On the other hand, I just paid $600 to On-star in our car for three years!

September 27, 2015

This evening from about 9:00 p.m. to midnight we watched a total eclipse of the moon, comfortably through a window across the hall. It reminded me of the statement I made years ago that I believe in rationality, which everyone pooh-poohed. I did it from my conviction that, despite the vagaries of human behavior, the solar system is deliciously rational, behaving according to plan year after year, as witnessed tonight in this solar eclipse.

October 15, 2015

Atlanta, Georgia

Flew to Atlanta in order to receive my MGSA Elizabeth Constantinides Translation Prize of $500 for my new Zorba. Arrival in Atlanta airport is frightening—so many people, so many African Americans, so many talking with southern accents. And the train you need to take to the exit. A black man pushing a black woman in a wheelchair took me in tow, telling me to follow him to the train, then where to get off, then how to find MARTA, the subway system. A twenty-minute ride takes one to Peachtree Street right at the corner for the Ellis Hotel. Nice to see Victor Papacosma at the check-in. Also Artemis Leontis, very cordial. I walked through the neighborhood, trying to find the site for the prize awards, but failed. The city struck me as unpleasant mostly, although I did encounter a small park. Finally, one of the symposium’s organizers accompanied me from the hotel to the site. I sat with Neovi Karakatsanis, the current MGSA president. Big auditorium in a local university, lots of people. I was asked to say a few words after being handed my check, and started by remembering Elizabeth Constantinides as a kind, graceful person who alas died all too young. Then I spoke about the translation of Zorba, why that needed to be done, and the problem of the words included in no Greek dictionary, explaining about Mathioudakis’s work and how, by combining what I found in his dissertation with Kimon Friar’s translation, I could arrive at an accurate definition almost every time. Neovi in her introduction had named this the twenty-fourth symposion, so I said that I could say a few words about the very first symposium, which made everyone laugh. I told about the meeting of seven of us in 1968 and our desire to found a scholarly society. (I add here the names of these seven founders: Constantine Mitsakis, Andonis Decavalles, Kostas Kazazis, Edmund Keeley, John Nicolopoulos, Byron Tsangadas, Peter Bien.) So each took out five dollars from his pocket and we formed the society’s first treasury in the amount of thirty-five dollars. Then we decided that a society needs to have a journal and that a journal, in order to acquire articles, needs to draw from symposia. Thus we organized the first MGSA symposium, with Mike Keeley and myself in charge. Zisimos Lorentzatos came, as did Mario Vitti, Angelos Terzakis, and Bertrand Bouvier. Other speakers were Thanasis Maskaleris, Peter Levi, Stavros Deligiorgis, Michael Antonakis, Byron Raizis, Andreas Poulakides, and Mike and myself. Chrysanthi, with John Rassias, demonstrated our oral/aural methods of teaching Modern Greek, using Princeton students as guinea-pigs. The year was 1969. Twenty-three subsequent symposia at two-year intervals = 46 years; 46 + 1969 = 2015! I concluded by congratulating the audience on maintaining the sequence without a break.

October 16, 2015

Full leisurely breakfast at the hotel with Victor Papacosma and a lady from France. Nice to see Vassilis Lambropoulos briefly; he amazed me by talking of retirement. Home in time for supper and a joyous reunion with Chrysanthi.

October 17, 2015

We went to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD movie of Verdi’s final opera, Otello, written when he was 71 years old. Such an amazing masterpiece, largely of course because of Shakespeare, but equally because of the dark music bringing this sad story to its dismal end.

October 18, 2015

A most unusual day owing to the arrival of two expert videographers—Tassos Rigopoulos from New York, and Skip? from the University of New Hampshire—to interview me just when half of Hanover’s roads were shut down owing to a five-mile marathon race for charity. Fortunately they arrived just minutes before the shutdown began. Chrysanthi and I had just heard Edie Gieg give probably the best talk I’ve ever experienced in the Interfaith Gatherings, beautifully combining personal and impersonal aspects in a sermon stressing the importance of giving. We then lunched leisurely at Kendal with Tassos and Skip, who had brought a bottle of wine and insisted on paying for their meals. Then the problems began. Route 10 was closed; so was Rip Road. We needed to detour probably more than five miles to the East, finally ending on Lebanon Street opposite the high school and unable to go further into town. So I suggested the good idea of doing the videotaping at the Quaker Meeting instead of in my Baker Library office, which was the original plan. We decided on the Meeting’s library-room. They adjusted the camera lens so that the books in back of me would be out of focus, thus not revealing their Quaker identity since all this was meant to be about Kazantzakis and especially about his epic Οδύσσεια (which I spell here correctly with the two sigmas of the 1957 reprint although Kazantzakis of course naughtily used only one sigma in the original publication in 1938). They needed to cover the southern window with large pieces of black cloth, which they had brought along for this purpose just in case, in order to exclude the bright sunlight. They did various sound checks with me, had me turn my head at a precise angle away from the lens, etc., etc. It was an education to observe these two obviously professional film experts at work. Tassos then read the questions that had been sent from Greece and I answered them as best I could. Everything was in English, which helped. Then they had me hold the new Zorba in front of me and raise it at their signal. Next, they decided that they still wanted to see my office and presumably do some videotaping there. It was 4:30 p.m.; the roads were now open. In the office they accomplished a provisional set-up, but still with tripod and artificial lighting. They wanted to photograph me sitting at my computer, which I did with a scan of a Kazantzakis letter on the screen. Then they wanted me to read a portion of the epic’s Greek text. I chose the juicy first lines of the first canto:

Σαν πια ποθέρισε τους γαύρους νιούς μες στις φαρδιές αυλές του, το καταχόρταστο ανακρέμασε δοξάρι του ο Δυσσέας και διάβη στο θερμό λουτρό το μέγα του κορμί να πλύνει. Δυο δούλες συγκερνούσαν το νερό, μα ως είδαν τον αφέντη μπήξαν φωνή, γιατί η σγουρή κοιλιά και τα μεριά του αχνίζαν και μαύρα στάζαν αίματα πηχτά κι από τις δυό του φούχτες· και κύλησαν στις πλάκες οι χαλκές λαγήνες τους βροντώντας.

Tassos then ran off to catch a bus to New York from Boston, and I returned to Kendal to share yet another lovely supper with Chrysanthi and friends. The whole experience of this videographing reminded me of Andrew Tebbe, who hopes to train in the same way in order to make and/or edit movies.

October 30, 2015

Chrysanthi and I flew to Philadelphia. Anne Harper met us at the airport and drove us to Pendle Hill in time for lunch. While I was eating, Henry Freeman came over tio extend a warm hello, as did Arnie Alpert, there with the entire Northeast ASFC staff for a conference. Then to the piano in the barn to practice with Jennie Keith the slow movement in the Mozart C major sonata and the Fauré Kitty-Valse, preparatory to playing tonight. Then the first meeting of the Campaign Steering Committee—Kaye Edwards, Mark Myers, Gretchen Hall, Jennie Keith, Anne Nash, myself, and Henry Freeman and Jen Karsten. We toured the campus with Lloyd Guindon and John Freeburg, learning about all the new roofs and new painting, plus the plans for the adjacent building recently purchased. Freeburg very impressive in his explanations and justifications: no more deferred maintenance! Jen then spoke rapidly for over an hour on the State of Pendle Hill. Deficit for FY16 is only about $25,000. Remarkable. Projected deficit for FY17: zero! I promised baklava for everyone to celebrate. After supper, Jennie and I played for the group. The Mozart went well, although I faked the thirty-second notes near the end. The Fauré not so well. More faking, which we both did rather well, we concluded afterwards. Strangely, as often happens, I faltered not in spots that had always been troublesome, but in spots that had never been troublesome.

October 24, 2015

Breakfast this morning with Henry Freeman and the couple from Wales who are Quakers in Residence. Amazingly, the conversation centered on Montaigne, Darwin, and Henri Nouwen—a typical Pendle Hill breakfast! Our committee considered 250 names of recent contributors, each of us seeing which ones we knew and then offering names that should be on the list but are not—e.g., Gay Berger. Jennie Keith expressed eagerness to play four-hand piano again despite my erros last nigiht. Home at 10:00 p.m., always a comforting feeling.

October 27, 2015

Heard a lecture by Wendy Sherwin, #3 in the State Department and chief negotiator for the treaty with Iran. My major reaction: I wish she were running for president of the United States!

October 28, 2015

Heard Renée Fleming at Hopkins Center. She started with the Schumann opus 42: Frauenliebe und –leben, the best part of which was the piano postlude at the very end.

October 29, 2015

I found the score today for the lovely piano postlude at the end of song #8, Nun hast du mit den ersten Schmerz getan, and hope to learn it. Also, Ruth Lappin wants to play more selections from Dolly with me, not just Kitty-Valse.

November 20, 2015

Stan, Joan Wilson, Joan Snell, and I played the 8-hand version of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, first movement, in the Cary Room this afternoon, with the usual mishaps, but satisfactorily. Then Ruth Lappin and I were meant to play Berceuse, Kitty-Valse, and Mi-a-ou from Fauré’s Dolly, but there wasn’t time. With luck we’ll do it in December. I’m amazed that I learned to play the primo of Mi-a-ou just about up to speed. Found another beautiful, slow Schumann, the final selection in his Kinderszenen, The Poet Speaks.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Chrysanthi and I took the 7:00 a.m. bus to South Station so that I could meet Katherine Ebury, the young English scholar whose book on Joyce, Beckett, Bishop Berkeley, and Einstein I read with such admiration and interest last summer. She was in Boston for the Modernist Studies Association’s conference. So we took the Τ to Back Bay (Copley Square), listened for a while to a rehearsal of the choir in the Episcopal church in the square (bad music, so-so singing, making me feel so glad to be a Quaker), then attended a conference session in which one of the speakers discoursed on Hasek’s “The Good Soldier Švejk.” I asked him if he knew of the opera and he said he did not. I’ll send him information about Robert Kurka’s opera, which we saw many years ago at Cooperstown, together with Don Kurka. Met Katherine at noon, together with her partner, an American born in St. Louis, now teaching in England. He told me that T. S. Eliot’s father was a St. Louis manufacturer of bricks, much needed in a building boom of the time. I told him of hearing T. S. Eliot recite in person at Columbia University and how lively the recitation was, apparently owing to the presence of an audience. Eliot’s recorded recitations, made in a studio, are generally lifeless. I gave Katherine a copy of my new Zorba translation plus a Xeroxed copy of my Cavafy pamphlet, to introduce her (at her request) to Modern Greek literature. It was good to hear that modernism studies are very alive, contrary to what happened to my position at Dartmouth when modernism was replaced by colonial literature. Regarding Joyce, she is very aware of Michael Groden’s work and also of William York Tindall’s. But she devotes only one week to Ulysses and has the students read only four or five episodes—which is shameful. The four of us lunched together in a good restaurant that she and her partner had discovered, very amiably. I was so pleased to talk with ease to this young scholar in my own field, which is now distant from me but obviously not to her.

We took the Acela express from Boston to Washington—seven hours, right on time. I finished reading the novel that Nikos Mathioudakis had sent me with such praise, Μάρτυς μου ο Θεός by Μάκης Τσίτας. It has gained all sorts of prizes, and is in a way remarkable as a 264-page monologue by a Greek man covering his childhood, upbringing, parents, lovelife mostly with prostitutes, employment, unemployment, various illnesses, etc., etc. ending in despair: a hallucination while in the Athens cathedral, where ο Παναγιότατος, together with Μητροπολίτες, Επίσκοποι, Αρχιμανδρίτες και Ηγούμενοι join the ψάλτες and all his former girlfriends, indeed όλο το εκκλησίασμα εν χορώ, chanting Άξιος! Άξιος! Άξιος, άξιος, άξι, άξι, άξι,άξιάξιάξιαάξιάξιάξιάξιάξιάξιάξιάξιαααααααααααααααααααααα. As the blurb on the back cover declares, this antihero γίνεται ο καθρέφτης που αντανακλά το εκτρωματικό είδωλο της ίδιας αυτής κοινωνίας η οποία τον εκβάλλει από τους κόλπους της. I was pleased to be able to read the 264 pages of Greek with ease, although of course stumbling on present-day slang.

Leander and Nicholas met us at Union Station so we wouldn’t need to travel the Red Line at 10:30 p.m. Ritual of B&B at home, reunion with Sophia, just back from Ohio Wesleyan, lots of conversation, and delicious sleep after this long day that had started at 5:00 a.m. in Hanover.

Monday, November 23, 2015

I went to town early on a very crowded Red Line train with someone offering me a seat (amazing!). Spent the entire day, more extensively and leisurely than ever before, in the marvelous National Gallery, punctuated by a two-hour lunch with Dennis Carroll at the District Chop House—our annual ritual. Dennis is super-productive, having just completed an interesting, innovative novel (I have read selections but not the whole) on sexuality: about a professor who dares to offer a course, amply illustrated, about healthy, beautiful sexual intercourse as opposed to pornography. It’s a continuation, more or less, of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published 87 years ago. Will he be able to find a publisher? Would Grove Press (if it still exists) do it (they issued an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley in 1959)? He gave me a copy of his novel Design of Darkness, published in 1910 but written considerably earlier. It’s about a gifted young woman reduced by encephalitis to mental incapacity versus a floundering young man who does everything right, ending as a millionaire. I hope to read it; perhaps it will be a better exploration of “darkness” than Μάρτυς μου ο Θεός. Dennis was also very open (not for the first time, however) about his parents’ failed marriage and especially about his mother’s disastrous health problems as a widow, with Dennis, the son, needing to cope somehow, again and again—an appropriate warning for those who fail to view a CCRC as an appropriate solution. He and I now consider our annual luncheon, always at the District Chop House, as a necessary ritual and thus look forward to another similar event next Thanksgiving.

I was lucky in the National Gallery today because they had a beautiful Vermeer on loan from Amsterdam entitled “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” (ca. 1663)—so simple, genuine, “unartistic”: just an ordinary woman wearing an ordinary dress, standing in an ordinary room absorbed in the words of the letter held in her hand. My other very special surprise was “Ginevra de’ Benci” by Leonardo Da Vinci (1474/1478), apparently the only Da Vinci painting in the United States. It portrays a sixteen-year-old, a very pale, worried-looking girl apparently about to be married to a man twice her age. The artist’s skill makes her completely alive on the canvas. Another special for me was Roy Lichtenstein’s series of increasingly abstracted bulls (1973), starting with one that looks like a bull if you don’t examine it carefully (it is already abstracted to small degree), then progressing to six or seven more that increasingly reduce the bull to just curves and lines, brilliantly. Other paintings that I noticed with especial pleasure although I remembered them from prior visits were Rembrandt’s “Apostle Paul” (ca. 1657), and the “Self-Portrait” from 1659 in which he looks so very tired; El Greco’s “Laocoön” (1610/1614, “Saint Martin and the Beggar” (1597/1599); Turner’s “Approach to Venice” (1844), Constable’s “Salisbury Cathedral” (1820), a whole gallery of Cézanne paintings but especially “At the Water’s Edge” (ca. 1890), Van Gogh’s “Roses” (1890), and PIssarro’s “Boulevard des Italiens” (1897). I also happened to be within earshot when a docent was explaining Saint-Gaudens’ “Shaw Memorial” (1883/1900), which she said had been rescued from its outdoor position at the Saint-Gaudens’ site in Cornish, New Hampshire, where the weather was greatly hampering it. I told her that the site, which I have visited, is beautiful especially in good weather. In the evening, we all went to Bethesda to an amazing place, Max Brenner’s Creating a New Chocolate Culture Worldwide—a café in which everything was made from chocolate. I had an exquisite milkshake, but the children had something like chocolate pizza!

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Deanna took us to an immense shopping place called Costco Wholesale where everything is purchased in bulk. I ended up with a 2½-pound bag of Starbuck’s French Roast coffee beans that cost $15.00, whereas a ¾-pound bag normally costs about $9.00. The place was mobbed, but we seemed just about the only Caucasians. Afterwards I practiced “Dolly” and the Mozart Allegretto that I’ll be playing with Stan and the two Schumann pieces that I’ll do for Stan’s Interfaith Gathering in February—namely, the final piece to Scenes from Childhood, and the piano conclusion to the song sequence “Frauenliebe und –leben,” opus 42, both amazingly beautiful. Leander gave me very helpful lessons on both of these, and we played Fauré’s “Berceuse,” “Kitty-Valse,” and “Mi-a-ou” for Chrysanthi, plus the Mozart. I think I’m beginning to control both Schumann pieces now, thanks to Leander’s fingerings and explanation of details. Finished the day with supper at a local Jewish delicatessen: matzo ball soup and chopped chicken liver on rye.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

More practice in the morning. Then we all drove to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate in Virginia, on the banks of the Potomac River. This productive plantation eventually reached 8000 acres (now 400) and needed 350 slaves to run it, all of whom were granted their freedom in Washington’s will. The 21-room mansion, carefully restored to match its décor in Washington’s lifetime, is very grand, furnished, decorated, and painted with material imported from England. The outhouses are called “Necessaries”! We were lucky to be there in mild weather and without too many other tourists.

In the evening, we were visited by Christina Tebbe and her boyfriend, named Marco. What a pleasure to see Christina as now an outgoing, talkative, smiling person instead of the morose horror she was as a teenager at home. And the boyfriend, Marco, was very presentable, son of an Italian-Swiss family, studying computer science. Christina’s study is psychology with a minor in criminology. In 2016 both will go off for the first of Northeastern’s work-programs, perhaps also in Boston. Because of these programs, the total undergraduate curriculum takes five years instead of four. They seem very pleased with college, so far. My hope, of course, is that morose Nicholas and still semi-morose Sophia will open up, as Christina has done, when they totally leave home. Sophia of course is much changed, much improved, but still generally looks bored and worried as she buries her nose in her i-pad. Nicholas is totally silent.

Thursday, November 26, 2015, Thanksgiving Day

Sausage and eggs in the morning, plus the Thanksgiving Day parade on television. Then the customary turkey will all the fixings in mid-afternoon, very pleasantly, with Leander giving emotional thanks for the entire family. A bracing walk around the pond where we usually go, plus our curiosity at what happens in a Talbots black Friday—people emerging with huge TV sets and even a ping pong table.

Friday, November 27, 2015

New York City

Train to New York. Business Class no longer provides newspapers in print form; they only enable you to read The Washington Post or the New York Times electronically on your pad or computer. Thank you so much! Taxi to the Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street, riding down through Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea, now both gentrified. Huge line outside the museum for tickets, so I went inside and took out a membership, which granted immediate entrance. We went directly to the 5th floor, devoted exclusively to Frank Stella, whose huge, colorful paintings and (more often) sculptures (three-dimensional paintings) are displayed expansively. It was easy to see various opinions in a recent review in The Economist. For example: “Mr Stella’s paintings left no room for personal expression and made no claims to transcendence.” “. . . elaborate variations . . . carried out with deadpan precision, . . . denied that art was anything but material form.” “Even when Mr Stella abandoned the classical austerity of . . . early works for the baroque profusion of his constructions, . . . the final product is the result of conscious decisions, problems to be solved, rather than spontaneous outbursts of an authentic self.” “By introducing the techniques and, even more crucially, the attitudes of industrial production into the realm of the fine arts, Mr Stella provided a road map to the digital age where the idea of the hands-on artist is increasingly quaint.” Perhaps. But this is still art, not industrial production, and as such it does lift the spirit. Descending to the 3rd floor to see some of the museum’s own paintings, I was pleased to find two by Thomas Hart Benton: “The Lord Is My Shepherd” (1926) and “Poker Night” (1948), not the best Benton in either case, but still . . . Benton.

Directly outside the museum is the High Line, the elevated walkway that goes from Gansevoort to 34th Street. We walked it to 14th Street, with pleasure and surprise that an abandoned eyesore had been transformed into a delightful promenade through Chelsea along the waterfront.

Burton Pike joined us for dinner at the Yale Club. He is hale and hearty, and the recent winner of a translation prize that paid $5000 (I joked with him about my $500 prize). He runs a reading group for Haverford alumni living in New York, still serves on the PEN board, etc. I of course asked about Peter Constantine and was told that he continues as always, managing by the skin of his teeth owing to translations from a slew of languages.

Then to “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” which required a bit of adjustment. By the end, however, we were fully enthusiastic. Tyler Lea, the young actor who played the autistic Christopher, was extraordinary. Probably the most memorable features, however, were the I.T. effects—something that Andrew Tebbe must have appreciated when he saw the show last summer. All in all—acting, message, lighting, electronic trickery—it was splendid, and very unusual. We had never seen that sort of theater before.

Saturday, November 28, 2015

To MoMA for the exhibit of Picasso as sculptor, showing hundreds of works generally unknown. He began with bronze but, during the war, when he remained in Paris under the Nazis, he of course could no longer obtain metal, and began large sculptures in plastic. Afterwards, he incorporated whatever he could find in the streets. None of these works could be called “beautiful”; however, some are “interesting” and all help to confirm this man’s unquenchable need to create in new and different ways.

We then walked to an excellent restaurant across the street from Lincoln Center, The Atlantic Grill, 49 West 64th Street, to meet Charlie Hamlen for lunch, passing tourists taking horse and buggy rides in the park on this festive day. Charlie explained at length his very serious leukemia and its cure owing to stem cells transferred to his bone marrow from his sister. Now, amazingly, he says that there is no longer a single sign of leukemia in his body. He is back at work at The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, which will be honoring him at its gala later in the year. He noted that Benjamin Hochman mentioned how pleased he was to meet us, but alas he was not entirely optimistic about Hochman’s cure. Apparently the right hand was never affected—only the left. Hochman is seriously studying conducting as a way forward. What a shame! My dream of having him play again at Kendal, this time using both hands, may never be realized.

Next: Balanchine’s Nutcracker at the NYC Ballet, across the street. Ashley Bouder was angelic.

In the evening, to the City Center’s Manhattan Theater Club for the utterly zany “Important Hats of the Twentieth Century,” all about New York City, with an audience of natives laughing out of control. Jokes like: “Did you look at the sky today?” “Of course not, I’m a New Yorker.” The star, a fashion designer, becomes maximally distressed when he sees a gentleman in black shoes wearing a brown belt!

Sunday, November 29, 2015

No. 1 local to 116th Street. Walking through the Columbia campus, Chrysanthi remembered that Leander first learned to walk on the steps up to the library. Our apartment house on West 121st Street is unchanged, but new buildings across the street replace the brownstones full of Puerto Ricans, and the single-occupancy monstrosity on the corner has been replaced with a Columbia dormitory. At Morningside Meeting we saw Vince Buscemi and Ernie—Ernie fine but Vince much reduced in body and spirit, alas, although he told me that he still manages to climb to his second-floor walkup in Greenwich Village. We came primarily to meet Dan Seeger and Tom Goodridge. After Meeting, lots of announcements, etc., including something by a black man who had been in prison and was now working to help others released from prison, plus a woman urging everyone to participate in the rally in front of Town Hall concerning the UN meeting on climate change to convene in Paris tomorrow. Dan left early to prepare the soup; Tom guided us to his apartment—in one of the “projects” between 121st and 125th, the first time I’d ever been inside one of these. His apartment is small, much like ours at Kendal, but very pleasant, on the first floor, with a garden and even a lawn outside. He enthused about our farm and the fact that I had actually built our cabin, the barns, etc. I hope that both will come back next summer. Worrying about catching the 4:30 Dartmouth Coach back to Hanover, we left, Tom accompanying us to the 125th Street station, which is elevated, rather than back to the 116th Street one. I’d never been on the elevated station, which now gives one a view of one of Columbia’s new north-campus buildings in Harlem. The train was mobbed with people who seemed to derive from deserts and Asian wildernesses—God knows where! We arrived in time to buy a sandwich in the Grand Central basement for supper and for me to race to the toilet in an adjoining hotel before the long trip (owing to traffic) back to the Hanover Inn.

December 2, 2015

Helene telephoned from Mexico City, tearfully, to say that John died this morning, peacefully. I told her that although part of Rassias family life had obviously been subtracted, John and I were so connected professionally, personally, and family-wise over half a century, starting with his arrival at Dartmouth in 1965 and his surprised discovery that I had translated Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis, that part of Bien family life had also been subtracted. My first entry on him in my journal is dated April 24, 1966. In 1967 Chrysanthi started using John’s Peace Corps techniques in her Modern Greek classes. In 1975 John and I were installed together in Athens College to evaluate how English was taught there; when Chrysanthi and I returned from Europe later that year we slept the first night in the Rassias’s Norwich home. How very many evenings he spent seated at our dining room table collaborating first on Demotic Greek 1, then on The Flying Telephone Booth. In December 1976 John and I were both in Birmingham making videotapes for Demotic Greek 1 with Paul Morby. That’s when John invented his brilliant solution for his deficiency in Greek—namely, help from Zeus on high whenever needed. We were housed in adjoining single rooms in a temperance hotel; early Sunday morning both doors were opened without knocking by hotel staff, to make sure that we hadn’t brought women in to spend Saturday night with us. (We hadn’t.) At Dartmouth commencements in the 1970s we sat together and hissed when the dean of the Medical School, instructing the graduating students to recite the Hippocratic Oath, always declared that it was written in a language no longer spoken! I remember marching to our seats with John being embraced and kissed by half the girls in the row of students we passed while the rest of us just continued solemnly forward. Later, when I was asked to proclaim part of the Oath in Greek at the Medical School ceremony, then separated from the Arts & Sciences commencement, I did so for a few years and eventually begged John to replace me, which he did with exaggerated pleasure year after year. Every New Year’s Eve we spent at the Rassias home gorging ourselves on escargot and lamb, with Chrysanthi carefully arranging the 25-cent piece in the βασιλόπιτα so that she knew which child would receive it. In 1987 John went to China with Mary without incident, then drove into a ditch on Cliff Street and had to be pulled out by a tow truck. He claimed that he had swerved to avoid an elk! (Maybe it was a gnu!)

And of course there was also Archbishop Spyridon’s Commission in 1998–99, with John in charge of a marvelous group: Jim Alatis, Dimitri Gondicas, Vasos Papagapitos, Bill Scott, Phyllis Franklin, Ernie Friedl, Sol Gittleman, David Millstone, Peter Patrikis, Constance Tagopoulos, and myself as “recorder.” We traveled far and wide, sent out hundreds of questionnaires, interviewed teachers, parents, administrators, students, and concluded that Modern Greek would die out in America unless massive changes were made in teaching methods, textbooks, teacher training, salaries, and parental attitudes. Our published report, entitled The Future of the Greek Language and Culture in the United States: Survival in the Diaspora, concluded its preamble with the statement “The Commission is convinced that, unless action be taken immediately, Hellenism’s survival in the American diaspora will be at risk.” After a fancy ceremony at the Archdiocese, Spyridon urged John to set up a group to oversee implementation of our many recommendations. John was eager and energetic in this endeavor, but everything came to a halt when Spyridon was removed from his post by the Patriarch.

December 10, 2015

Stan Udy and I performed the third movement of the Mozart C major four-hand sonata K 521 as part of the Winter Concert at Kendal, in the Gathering Room, on the stage, with the Yamaha piano, before a huge audience. There was the usual recorder consort first, boring, and the Chorale afterwards. Happily, I had no problems of nervousness at all, and played well enough despite some sloppiness in expected places. But Stan made a wrong entrance in a place he had failed more than once in rehearsal, stopped, said out loud “This is all messed up!” which caused laughter in the audience. So we began again and this time got satisfactorily to the end, although we were not together once again at one point, with Stan continuing thankfully until soon enough we regrouped satisfactorily. So it wasn’t bad, really. Lots of nice comments afterward from people in the large audience. One person even said it was the best part of the program. It helps to perform with other groups that are even worse than the two of us!

December 11, 2015

What a day! At 10:30 we arrived at Rollins Chapel for the funeral service for John Rassias. And there was Leander, who had left home at 4:00 a.m. and had flown here for the event. Huge crowd. Nice to see people we knew. The priest, from Boston, was young, perfect in both Greek and English, ingratiating. The psaltis, Damianos, our former student, was excellent. So we witnessed a full, traditional Orthodox funeral service, with John a wax doll in front in the open coffin. During the overly long sermon, Father Barbas had all of John’s grandchildren stand and tell their names, which was so nice. All this lasted an hour and a half. Then family and close friends were driven to the Norwich cemetery for burial. More assurances that John was now in Paradise eternally, our human life being like a single raindrop in all the earth’s oceans when compared with eternity. Reception at the Inn with former students describing John’s ministrations over a loudspeaker. Hungry, we grabbed a ham sandwich and then hurried Leander to his car to return to the airport, after he delivered to me the box of fancy chocolates he had brought as a present.

Back to Kendal at 3:00. Rehearsal with Ruth Lappin at 3:30! At 4:30 in the Cary Room concert I played Schumann’s “The Poet Speaks” and Ruth and I did Douglas Townsend’s “Fantasies on Christmas Carols” better than we had ever managed in rehearsal. Amazing! Supper with interesting new residents; Charlie Rose; sleep at midnight.

December 13, 2015

This morning in Meeting I ministered for the first time in many many months: about Sarah Baldwin, who died last week—how Chrysanthi was part of a rota after Sarah was born fifty years ago, exercising her legs and arms. Why? Perhaps because there is that of God in everyone, as Quakers say, but also perhaps because of the realization that we could have a similarly defective child. Then about my work in the home for Down syndrome in Holland where the staff cared so very well because of their belief in reincarnation (they were disciples of Rudolph Steiner): that these spirits could be reborn healthy, the staff people could be reborn with Down syndrome. I concluded by saying that I do not personally believe in reincarnation but I do believe in universal vulnerability, which should be an equal motivation to go seveal hours each week to exercise Sarah Baldwin when she was a nearly paralyzed baby.

December 14, 2015

I finally finished the marvelous 495-page book by Armand Marie Leroi, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. It is learned and also opinionated about Aristotle, acknowledging his invention of science but also, most of the time, acknowledging as well how utterly wrong much of his science was. There is so much that I would like to quote from the book in this journal. If I still had the energy and endurance that I possessed when an undergraduate at Harvard, I would fill as many pages now as I did then for William James, to cite just one name from those years. But I will limit myself to just a few paragraphs, beginning with one near the end of the book that could serve as a summary: “‘It has been said’, wrote Borges, ‘that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists.’ Philosophers may wince at the opposition, but I suspect it to be literally true. Plato invites us to the world of abstractions, Aristotole to the world of tangible things. You begin with particulars, a box of seashells, say; gather them together and rearrange them endlessly in order to apprehend their logic and order. This apprehension, Aristotle says, is the gift of reason and the beginning of science. It is also where true beauty lies” (378).

“Let’s accept, ex hypothesi, that the cosmos shows the signature of purposeful order, the hall mark of design. Where does it come from? There are three, and only three, possible answers. The first is to appeal, as Plato did and Christians still do, to a beneficent creator who arranged things just so. The second is to appeal, as Democritus did and Epicurus would, to an infinite universe—infinity solving all low-probability dilemmas. The first can be discarded; the second I have no views on, though some cosmologists believe it to be true. As a biologist, however, I like the third for it depends on the only known mechanism capable of creating order from disorder: natural selection. This is the reasoning behind Cosmological Selection Theory, which proposes the existence of a population of universes—a multiverse; that these universes reproduce, that they do so with unequal success, and that they transmit their physical constants, allowing for some mutation, to their progeny universes. It’s nothing more or less than cosmic Darwinism and an easy route to a universe which, depending on the fitness function, has any non-lethal combination of parameter values that you please. One multiverse theory holds that universes give birth to baby universes via black holes. In that case, the number of black holes in our universe (millions) would be a design feature. The plausibility of the physics need not detain us, but, granting them, or some similar scheme, it is clear that natural selection among universes will work. If it has, far from being the mere product of brute material necessity, some of the features of the universe would be as teleologically explicable as the parts of an elephant. Such a cosmos would have a purpose. In such a cosmos, Aristotle would surely be at home” (335).

“In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle discusses the best sort of life to lead. The good life is obviously one of active virtue, and there are many ways in which virtue can be achieved—in politics or in the army, say. But the virtue that derives from such things is entirely utilitarian. The best way that a man can spend his life is in contemplation for that has no utilitarian goal; it’s pleasurable in itself. Elsewhere he relates a story. Someone asked Anaxagoras what was the point of being born, to which the great physiologos replied: ‘to study the heaven and order of the whole cosmos.’ The answer rang true to Aristotle; he told the story at least twice. But he warns that none of us can ever achieve a life of pure contemplation. There are so many things, the mundane things of everyday life, and the human things—the sense is disparaging—that distract us from the divine life of the mind. Nevertheless we should ‘strain every sinew’ to ignore them and devote ourselves to pure reason. That is where true happiness lies” (340).

December 16, 2015

I sent the following Christmas message to Christos after receiving his card, most of which lamented the decline of civilization in Greece and worldwide:

Αγαπητοί Χρίστο, Έρη, Ασπασία-Μαρία,

Χαρήκαμε τόσο πολύ να δούμε την εξαιρετική ζωγραφική του Παύλου στην κάρτα σας. Στη δική μας βλέπετε μιαν χειμερινή όψη του κτήματός μας, από τη Χρυσάνθη. Λυπούμαι που δεν ερχόμαστε πια στην Ελλάδα να σας δούμε, αλλά στα γερατειά το ταξίδι γίνεται πιο προβληματικό. Σε λίγο όμως ελπίζω ότι θα μιλήσετε στο τηλέφωνο με το γιο μας τον Αλέκο, ο οποίος θα βρεθεί στην Αθήνα με την οικογένεια από 30 Δεκεμβρίου μέχρι 2 Ιανουαρίου. Η οικογένεια αποτελείτα από Monica (σύζυγο), Θεόδωρο (γιο, 15 χρονώ) και Ελένη (κόρη, 13 χρονώ). Θα μένουν στο Novotel, Μιχαήλ Βόδα 4, τηλέφωνο 210 820.0700. Μακάρι να τους δείτε.

Τι χρήμα, Χρίστο, που οι ελληνικές συνθήκες, όπως τις περιγράφεις, είναι τόσο αποθαρρuντικές. Εξακολουθώ να πληροφορούμαι για τα πολιτικά και οικονομικά της Ελλάδας, που φαίνονται χαώδη, αλλά υπάρχει τουλάχιστο μιαν εξαίρεση: η Αμερικανική Γεωργική Σχολή, για την οποία υπηρετώ ακόμα σαν honorary trustee. Παρ’ όλες τις δυσκολίες, πάει μπρος.

Χαίρομαι να γράψω πως βρισκόμαστε και η Χρυσάνθη και εγώ σε φυσική, νοητική και πνευματική υγεία, λίγο-πολύ. Η Αμερική πλησιάζει κι αυτή σε μιαν χαώδης κατάσταση, μα εδώ στην επαρχία, μακριά από πόλεις, δίπλα σ’ ένα μεγάλο ποταμό, περκυκλομένοι από βουνά και δάση, με τ’ άστρα και το φεγγάρι ακτινοβόλοντα αποπάνω, συνήθως αισθανόμαστε καλά. Εγώ όμως, για την πρώτη φορά σε 60 χρόνια, δεν έχω μπροστά μου κανένα σχέδιο για γράψιμο. Κάνω μικρά πράγματα για άλλους, παίζω πιάνο, διαβάζω ποιήματα σ’ έναν συνάδερφο που είχε διαδρομή εμβόλου, παίρνω μέρος σ’ ένα γρουπ για συζήτηση, κτλ. Ευτυχώς πηγαίνουμε ακόμα για τρεις μήνες στο κτήμα κάθε καλοκαίρι, εκέι που μεταμορφώνομαι σε θεριστή!

Ευχόμαστε ότι και εσύ, την Έρη και την Ασπασία-Μαρία θα περάσετε το νέο έτος γαλήνια, αταράξια, χαμογελαστά.

Με αγάπή
Peter

Yesterday at Quaker 8s at the Cadwalladers’, we discussed the following marvelous poem by Rilke, written in 1919:

Du Dunkelheit, aus der ich stamme

ich liebe dich mehr als die Flamme,

welche die Welt begrenzt,

indem sie glänzt

mich nicht so sehr verhinderte am Wachen—:

für irgend einen Kreis,

aus dem heraus kein Wesen von ihr weiβ.

Aber die Dunkelheit hält alles an sich:

Gestalten und Flammen, Tiere und mich,

wie sie’s errafft, Menschen und Mächte—

Und es kann sein: eine groβe Kraft

rührt sich in meiner Nachbarschaft.

Ich glaube an Nächte.

I brought along part of a passage from The Lagoon that I had entered in this journal two days ago: “One multiverse theory holds that universes give birth to baby universes via black holes. In that case, the number of black holes in our universe (millions) would be a design feature.” We also pointed out that in the Book of Genesis, before God says ‘Let there be light” “darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Here’s a translation by Robert Bly:

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes

a circle of light for everyone,

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them!—

powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy

is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

December 18, 2015

Peter Green in the TLS quotes W. H. Auden quoting George Orwell’s “So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” Amen.

December 19, 2015

Cambridge

We took the 7:00 a.m. bus to South Station, then the Red Line to Harvard using our “T” discount cards, then directly to the Harvard Museums using our Hood Museum membership to get free admission since the Harvard Museums are in the reciprocal system. I was especially impressed by their ancient Greek vases and coins, the coins most of all. I managed next to get my Harvard library card renewed for another year (Will I ever use it?) before meeting Connelly Akstens (the name that Tom now prefers) and Susanne Murtha at “their hangout,” the Japanese restaurant Wagamama on JFK Street, where Connelly can get food conforming to his dietary requirements. I had soba noodles for the first time since Tokyo in 1994. Next, to A.R.T. for the amazing show “Natasha Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812,” an electro-pop opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. As Diane Paulus says in the program, this employed “360-degree staging” and “new relationships between performers and audience members” as an exercise in “immersive theater.” Thus we were seated in the middle of everything, just behind the marvelous stage band, with actors sometimes directly in front of us as they wandered throughout the entire theater playing their parts. The central figures in the play as in the novel are Pierre Bezukhov, the perplexed philosopher, Countess Natasha Rostov, who is engaged to Andrey Bolkonsky but is seduced by the horrible Anatole and tries to commit suicide when she discovers that this rogue is already married. At the end, Pierre has an epiphanic experience viewing the great comet (actually brightest in 1811) that was supposed to portend Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. This was a splendid occasion for us of a new type of theater. Connelly then drove us to their new village, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, for supper and sleep in their new home. Connelly helped me with the Shakespeare sonnets that I want to read to Bill Cook on Tuesday, lending me his copy of the excellent collection edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Susanne revealed to Chrysanthi (and wondered if I knew, which I didn’t) that Connelly is a cross-dresser. I remember the bevy of cross-dressers we once saw in a show at the A.R.T.—beautiful women who, in the question period following the play, all turned out to be men.

December 20, 2015

East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts

By 7:30 a.m. we were already on the beach bordering Greenwich Bay. I was reminded a little of Atlantic Beach, with the jetty at the end and the sand filled with clams. Temperature about 30 degrees, blue sky, brilliant sunshine. The huge breakfast that followed kept us until suppertime. We spent four leisurely hours in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, viewing the special exhibit on Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer that displayed how very many portrait and landscape painters there were in this extraordinary seventeenth-century Holland that was so prosperous largely owing to its control of the East Indies (today’s Indonesia, of course). The show divided its subjects according to wealth: high, middle, and low. I especially admired Frans Hals’s “Regents of the St. Elisabeth Hospital of Haarlem” (1641) from the Hals Museum in Haarlem, and Vermeer’s “The Astronomer” (1668) from the Louvre, representative of high and middle classes. Pleasant supper in a Brookline restaurant. On the Dartmouth Coach bus back to Hanover, I completely planned my reading for Bill Cook, as follows, in this order:

65, only poetry can overcome decay

38, the fair friend will enable Shakespeare’s poetry

12, but the friend, too, will die; solution: procreation

17, a child plus a poem is still better

29, the friend cures the poet’s despondency

55, the friend lives on, owing to the poem

63, even when aged, the friend lives on in the poem

90, the friend abandons the poet

91, without the friend’s love, the poet is wretched 147, the poet’s love for the dark lady is a disease

138, self-deceived, the poet pretends that the dark lady is chaste while she pretends that he is young

130, she is dark, etc., yet he loves her

141, he loves her not with his senses but with his heart, the site of sin and suffering

134, the dark lady has now attracted the poet’s fair friend

144, the poet’s two loves: the fair friend and the dark lady now copulating, the friend eventually being infected with venereal disease

Very difficult, owing not only to certain words and expressions having a different meaning in Shakespeare’s time from our meaning, but also to Shakespeare’s frequent use of double meanings that hide the sexual content especially—for example “Till my bad angel fire my good one out,” line 14 of Sonnet 144, where “fire” can mean the dark lady’s “heat.”

December 25, 2015

Christmas today; Chrysanthi’s birthday yesterday. I gave her War and Peace in the new translation by Anthony Briggs (I have two copies of the old translation at the farm); she gave me a panful of συκωτόπιτα. No visit with children any more since Daphne and family do not come to South Salem. But she sent tulips, Leander sent Chrysanthi a warm vest, and Alec sent a photo of everyone with Takis and family in Thessaloniki, and telephoned from George’s apartment. We overate extraordinarily on both days and on Christmas, after a huge ceremonial lunch, went to a party at Kesaya’s with another large meal at which I just nibbled. At yesterday’s ceremonial lunch at Kendal, Melissa the baker made a cake for Chrysanthi with Χρόνια πολλά, Χρυσάνθη written beautifully in icing on top.

2016

Hanover

January 1–June 4

Jan. 29–30, Cambridge. Harvard lecture, A.R.T.

Feb. 27, Cambridge, A.R.T.

May 4-6, Princeton for archives, NY for ballet & museums

May 16–17, Riparius

May 26–28, Riparius

Riparius

June 4–September 12

June 29, Hanover

July 15, Hanover

Hanover

September 13–Dec. 31

November 5–6, Pendle Hill

November 7, Athens

November 8–9, Herakleion

November 10, Athens

November 22–24, Leander’s

November 25–27, New York City

January 2, 2016

A simplistic remark by Henry Kissinger is nevertheless worth remembering in this election year: “The philosopher deals with truth; the statesman addresses contingencies. The thinker has a duty to define what is right; the policymakers must deal with what is attainable.”

January 9, 2016

In a review in TLS (Dec. 18 & 25, p. 30) of Jon Miller’s Spinoza and the Stoics I was delighted to read “Both Spinoza and the Stoics identified God with Nature and believed it to be the unique, immanent causal source of all things. Spinoza, however, rejects the Stoic idea that this ‘divine’ power acts teleologically, and especially that it does what it does for the benefit of human beings. . . . Spinoza . . . makes it absolutely clear that God (or Nature) does not act to achieve any ends or purposes whatsoever. . . . In Stoicism, something is truly good if it helps a human being achieve the supreme goal of living according to nature—that is, leading the life of reason. . . . The most obvious and interesting point of confluence between Spinoza and the Stoics [is] how the acquisition of rational virtue in a world whose events lie outside our control will result in equanimity and tranquility in the face of those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” All this of course expresses and summarizes my own governing philosophy of life.

January 11, 2016

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety), by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”—H. L. Mencken

January 21, 2016

Eleni Yiannakou wrote to say that her uncle Odysseas, Chrysanthi’s brother, died this morning. He’d been very sick and the death was a release. What an amazing life that man led, owing to the war! His wife, Eleni, is totally demented now, confined to home, with Toula living there and caring. I remember when her mother, released from a long term in prison for political reasons, was in the same condition, hidden in the bedroom.

January 29, 2016

Received an e-mail from someone trying to write an appreciation of John Nicolopoulos. He says that John was the primary founder of MGSA, with much exaggeration, and tells about our gathering at the University of Maryland. I must check with Mike Keeley to verify that my memory of the founding does not put Nicolopoulos at the center.

To Boston on Dartmouth Coach, full of other Kendal folk. We’re in the Hotel Veritas thanks to Vassiliki Rapti. An hour in Widener thanks to my renewed stack pass. Then to Dia and Wim’s for tea. Dia fully alive as always, filled with memory of Steve Waite, Rassias program, etc. Wim very quiet, very negative about American academic life, which he insists is totally non-democratic. I replied that in Dartmouth’s English Department, at least, the chairman was not a dictator determining everything. We voted on all important matters, freely. Vassiliki, poor thing, for she must now leave Harvard after eight years—maximum—in her position teaching MG language, picked us up. I lectured in the seminar room on Arrow Street to a full house, people from BU and BC as well as Harvard, people studying with Greek Today, as well. I did the Bien-Arndt paper on translating rhymed verse as rhymed translation, with “31 B.C. in Alexandria” as the example; then my lecture on Ritsos’s painterly technique; then as an example “The Moonlight Sonata,” which I recited (abridged version) with the music in the background, as required, hardly able to control my emotions in order to see straight and enunciate clearly. Finally: the two letters that Ritsos wrote me so interestingly, about his poetic technique, which he wished I would pay more attention to in my essays, aside from the content of the poems. Someone asked how painterly technique could apply to today’s totally non-representational painting, music, or literature. Maybe not, but I hoped that even an immensely large and complicated sculpture such as those we saw at the Whitney Museum last November could be appreciated as a single entity, in space, as opposed to a multiplicity in time, and therefore acquire a characteristic of beauty even though one could never call it “beautiful” as the word was used in the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth. Finally, supper with four others in a jumping, noisy Cambridge restaurant, terrible food, but easy conversation, all in Greek. I haven’t lectured like this in a long time and was pleased to discover that I can still do it.

January 30, 2016.

Breakfast in Zoe’s across from the hotel, full of young mothers with their beautiful children. Walked through the Harvard Yard, full of memories for me, then to the Harvard Museums, where Connelly and Suzanne met us. Interesting to see portraits of John Adams in a proper wig when he presented his credentials in England, where he must have been amazingly hated owing to their loss of the Colonies. Also portraits of various Belmonts who made a fortune in mid-Atlantic trade, plus someone else whose fortune came from the slave trade and who left massive benefits to Harvard. A nice Monet, when he was young and hadn’t discovered impressionism yet; this landscape of a snowy road looks like a Winslow Homer. A splendid museum to which we must return. Lunch in Wagamama pleasantly. Then a delightful show at the A.R.T. called “Nice Fish” with bravura acting by Mark Rylance and Jim Lichtscheidl, a philosophical romp as they sit on the ice fishing through it. What a pleasure to see such good theater! Susanne, sitting next to me, was laughing constantly, as was I. We seem to have developed a ritual with Connelly and Susanne that we all hope will continue. Christina and Marco met us at South Station at 5:00. We went to a Chinese restaurant on Essex Street and spent good time together. Christina seems fully “cured” of past difficulties. She is talkative and charming. Ditto for Marco. She’s studying psychology, criminology, and business; he’s doing engineering and computer science. Both expect to go out on an internship within the next six or nine months. They would like to see “1984” with us at the A.R.T. in late February. What a relief and pleasure to see Christina now as a normal, energetic, approachable human being!

February 12, 2016

I voted with pleasure for Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary despite my wife’s vociferous opposition. She of course voted for Hillary Clinton because she views Bernie’s proposals as unrealistic and his general experience as much inferior to Hillary’s. I told her today that her arguments against Bernie are convincingly expanded by David Brooks’s op-ed column “Livin’ Bernie Sanders’s Danish Dream.” She read it and then asked if I agreed. “Yes,” I replied. “So why did you vote for Bernie?” “For two reasons,” I answered. “Because of my amazement that he can say what he does without being denounced as a Communist, traitor, etc., the way people were in the McCarthy period, and because if Bernie’s popularity continues although Hillary becomes president, she is likely to adopt some of his best ideas—in moderation.” I am still glad that I voted for Bernie’s “Danish dream” in the New Hampshire primary.

Helene sent me the following piece of writing by John, which must date after 1977 (sixth printing of Demotic Greek 1) and before 1982, when Ο ιπτάμενος θάλαμος was published:

One of my greatest joys at Dartmouth has been my friendship and collaboration with Peter Bien and his wife, Chrysanthi. The three of us wrote a text on Demotic Greek and, in its field, it has become a best seller going through six printings.

“We are now working on another volume of Greek at an intermediate level. It is cast in a science fiction mode and introduces Greek culture and literature to second level students, along with a review of grammar.

We are completely opposite in temperament and yet ideally complementary. We are both looking forward to doing a course in tandem on the Greek myth in English and French literatures. We will do it under the auspices of the Comparative Literature Department.

I first met Peter at a party given by Larry Harvey in the first year of my arrival at Dartmouth. I did not know who he was, and he did not know me. We somehow ended up in our host’s kitchen, where a mosaic of St. Francis was affixed to a wall. I gazed at the image and said to this man next to me that there is only one book I have ever read whose last two pages I shall never complete. ‘I do not,’ I continued, ‘want, by finishing the book, to bring to an official close the sheer pleasure of reading a powerful story and a perfect translation. I mean Saint Francis by Kazantzakis.’ Peter smiled and left the room. It was only later I learned that it was he who had rendered this flawless and inspired translation.

He is modest, totally honest, and deeply committed to the profession and to students. He is a completely authentic human being, serene in his wisdom, sensitive in his awareness of others. He is selfless and humble. He is open to learn and quick to admit a rare error he may make. As a good friend he is also a severe critic, challenging a myriad of insane ideas which come rolling from my mouth—but never discouraging me in anything I say or do.

I mention Peter last because his style of teaching is low key but intense. He is an impeccable lecturer: his dazzling thoughts are articulated with intensity; his voice dresses his interpretations with dramatic flair—he whispers, booms, insinuates, orates, dreams, converses. He commands respect by his thoughts, his delivery, and his total sincerity. He opens the minds of students and shows them what they are capable of accomplishing.

Peter has another way of doing things, but we are committed to the same principles. The differences between us vanish when we are engaged with students and that, ultimately, is all that matters. No one person can have all the answers, and I have always figured that two are better than one. We need all the effective styles we can get, we need all the commitment to the task we can get because it is already later than yesterday and close to tomorrow.

February 20, 2016

A long e-mail from Joe Morris to Alec, relayed to Leander, and finally to me, describing the illegal activities of Earl “and his crew”—apparently cutting trails on other people’s land (as he did on ours) reaching all the way from North Creek to the River Road, using the power line in part. Joe says that police and the DEC have been investigating. He also says that Kelley is living in a Roman Catholic “safe house” because she has been abused. Yet with us he has always been all sweetness and light, and we often see him with Stephen. Something is screwy. What to do, if anything, is certainly not clear.

Last night at Meeting to discuss what to do with the almost $300,000 we have been left by three bequests. I suggested keep ⅓, donate ⅓ to our sister meeting in Cuba, and split the remaining ⅓ between Pendle Hill and Woolman Hill.

Played the third and fourth movements of Haydn’s Military Symphony in the Cary Room yesterday (8-hand piano with Joan Wilson, Stan Udy, and Joan Snell) better than we had ever done it in rehearsal, even incorporating some of the terrace dynamics.

I visited Jack Hemenway in the health center. He stopped eating nine days ago, but is still drinking water, so his self-decided process of dying is prolonged. He was jolly, smiling, talkative (although with some difficulty), besieged by visitors including staff and even some of the workmen now here. He said that he and Dr. Dacey, about a year ago, agreed on this course of action but would wait until the timing seemed appropriate. Like so many, he feels immensely grateful to Kendal and is assured that there is a special section of heaven devoted to former Kendal residents!

February 25, 2016

Αγαπητέ καθηγητή Αλιβιζάτε,

Πήρα έιδηση στο κομπούτερ μου ότι θα μιλήσετε στην Αδελαΐδα (όπου μίλησα κι εγώ πριν από πολλές δεκαετίες) και ξαφνικά θυμήθηκα μερικές συμομιλίες που έιχαμε στην Αθήνα (πάλι πριν από πολλές δεκαετίες) και προπαντός πάνω στην προσάθειά σας να βοηθήσετε στο Ευρωπαπκό Δικαστήριο Δικαιωμάτων του Ανθρώπου στο Στρασβούργο τους ‘Eλληνες αντιρρησίες κατά συνείδηση. ὤραγε τι προστασία έχουν τέτοιοι άνθρωποι τώρα στην Ελλάδα; Μήπως αναγνωρίζει επιτέλους η κυβέρνηση τη θρησκευτική απάρνηση να σκοτώσουμε κανέναν συνάνθρωπό μας;

Και βρήκα στο ημερολόγιό μου κάτι που είπατε σ’ ένα συνέδριο στο Τορόντο—λόγια που θα είχαν ισχύσει και χθες: October 17, 2003, very good keynote talk by Nikos Alivizatos on what, if anything, Greece can contribute to the EU. His answer was that Greece, more than any other EU country, has been growing and changing according in part to EU directives, for example in the treatment of minorities. It can therefore teach others in the community that a nation can comply and conform without losing its own identity and integrity.

Όσο για μένα, συνταξιούχος στην ηλικία 86, πάω καλά. Πέρυσι δημοσίευσα μια νέα μετάφραση στ’ αγγλικά του Ζορμπά, που χρειάστηκε επειδή η προηγούμενη ήταν από τα γαλλικά από έναν μεταφραστή που δεν ήξερε τα ελληνικά. Τώρα μαζεύω τα συγγράματά μου σε περιοδικά να ξαναδημοσιευτούν σαν βιβλίο.

Σας εύχομαι το κάθε καλό στην Αυστραλία . . . και παντού!

February 27, 2016

An interesting day in Boston and Cambridge. First stop: the Bromfield Pen Shop to get a new ink plunger for my black fountain pen, the old one having fused tight from lack of use. Memories of going to the Park Street Church with Johnny Taylor. Then to the Zoe Greek café that we discovered last month next to the Hotel Veritas. This time—about 11:00 a.m.—it was totally full with lively Harvard students feasting on a late breakfast, as we did too. Then to the Harvard Museums. A strange exhibition on the third floor features work by Australian Aborigines, not to my liking. But then we went slowly through the splendid Ancient Greek collection of vases and coins plus the Egyptian, in which I had to try hard to convince Chrysanthi that Cleopatra was not a dark-skinned African. Finally we discovered the first floor collections, which are rich. I especially liked Cézanne’s “Study of Trees” (1904), really abstract even this early, and Picasso’s “Woman with a Chignon” (1901) because of her expressive face. Finally, to the A.R.T. for 1984, based of course on Orwell’s famous novel. I found it somewhat tedious, although very well acted. The protracted torture scene at the end was excruciating, making some of the audience get up and leave. I kept thinking of the Junta in Greece—the inability to trust anyone because supposed friends or even lovers would then betray you as a resistor. What a total difference between this sort of theater and the movie of As You Like It that we saw earlier this week—total fantasy and joy!

March 3, 2016

Lewis Owens, reading my journal, reports that it was Monica who abandoned him rather than he who abandoned Monica, as I report. Also that Queens’ College was founded by two queens and therefore cannot be written as Queen’s College. This makes me realize, of course, how many other errors, large or small, must be contained in those 1000+ pages.

March 7, 2016

I saw Naomi Hartov downstairs the other day as she was collecting the beautiful collages she had on exhibition here. It was a lovely reunion until—thoughtlessly—I mentioned that I had found Jean Brophy and had invited her to return for our twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. Naomi’s expression registered her disgust, and today I received the following letter from her.

Hi Peter,

It was lovely to see you and then Chrysanthi on Monday. I have to say, I was feeling very good during the hours I was visiting there and seeing so many people (staff and residents) with whom I used to work. However, I must tell you that, after some thought, I actually felt very, very badly and need to pass on my thoughts.

I know in my heart what kind and forgiving people you and Chrysanthi are, but I feel you still don’t “get” how many people were hurt by Jean’s 7+ year reign at Kendal and just how badly they were hurt by her. I can (but won’t) name any number of people who needed counseling after their experiences with her, but I openly include myself. Kendal did not pay for our counseling. Although I left Kendal of my own free will, I did it because I could no longer continue, day after day, to tell prospective residents that our philosophy was “to be a good place to live, it must be a good place to work.” It was the best job I have ever had, and I gave it up, not only to spare myself the dissonance of repeating what I felt was a lie, but to save other employees from suffering from Jean’s behavior by making it crystal clear to John Diffey and the Board how important it was for them to let her go. For me to hear that you had actually reached out to invite her to the 25th anniversary celebration, and in the process not even thought of inviting Carol Weingeist who actually paved the way for a successful opening. . . well, it just stunned me.

Perhaps you feel that Carol, me and others should just get over it and let bygones be bygones, but the wounds have been reopened and, though the deed is already done, I felt I couldn’t keep this to myself.

Best regards,—Naomi

I responded as follows:

Dear Naomi,

I watched your face fall when I thoughtlessly mentioned Jean Brophy. I of course knew well enough of how bad she was to you and Carol (among lots of others). We tried to “cure” her over a two-year period, hiring psychologists to train her to be pleasant, to smile, be considerate, etc. But it didn’t work, and eventually we fired her.

So why did I reach out to invite her? It’s because she never acted badly toward me and indeed in many respects was a good administrator—indeed in every respect except one: her inability to ingratiate herself with either colleagues or residents. I was hoping that my invitation would act in some respect as a healing potion. Of course you are totally correct that the first one I should have reached out to in this way was Carol, although in her case, as in yours, no healing is necessary because you were both exemplary in your ability to ingratiate yourselves with all concerned.

Well, she may not come at all, since we needed to change the date to a weekday, Wednesday, June 29.

Yes, it was lovely to see you and I’m especially glad that Chrysanthi found you as well. Jean Brophy did enough harm 20+ years ago; let’s not allow her to do more harm now in 2016.

March 27, 2016

Easter Sunday

Yesterday, looking for letters in file letter H, possibly for the Princeton archive, I found this following sonnet dated November 19, 2000, that I had written for Stylianos Harkianakis and had completely forgotten:

A BILINGUAL SONNET

FOR ARCHBISHOP STYLIANOS

ON HIS NAME DAY

Στυλιανέ, thy name itself’s a prop—

στύλος, στύλωμα—a mainstay, pillar

where Simeon legislated on top

to pilgrims arriving from near and far.

And how much better than “Your Eminence,”

since height for thee conveys a fatherly

concern both strict and loving, assurance

of στοργή ruled by faith, hope, and charity.

Therefore let the στυλ- in Stylianós

ring out in thy name-day’s celebration;

for pillars, props, and columns keep the roof

from caving in, sustain our Lord Χριστός

the Pantokratoras’s elevation,

and provide each pilgrim with living proof.

March 28, 2016

Visited Dick Williamson, who is again in hospital, having fallen for the third time. And what a horrible sight—covered with bloody bruises and with a clamp around his neck and partially covering his mouth owing to a fractured bone in the back of the neck. He was lucid, but I could hardly understand him owing to the clamp over his teeth. A nurse told me that last night he was fearfully agitated, striking out and trying to hit people. Such a sad case, so arrogant, so unable to accept the clear fact that he is failing. He insisted on living at home, never used any aid in walking or to help keep his balance. So, of course, inevitably, he fell yet again. The nurse told me that he must not try to live at home, alone, any more. I hoped that some legal constraints can be imposed; otherwise he’ll go right back again to the guarantee of another fall. I do sense, regretfully, that death at this point would be his optimum next step.

April 7, 2016

Robert Pinsky spoke here, beautifully, this afternoon. Among other gifts I heard from him for the first time this marvelous poem by Emily Dickinson:

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog?

April 12, 2016

I read excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Bill Cook this morning. I especially liked the following:

Great is language. . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences

It is the fullness and color and form and diversity of the earth. . . . and of men and women. . . . and of all qualities and processes;

It is greater than wealth. . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.

April 22, 2016

I received a letter from Charlie Hamlen today saying that Natasha Paremski had written him to declare how much she enjoyed her time with us here last Saturday when she came to perform. I responded as follows:

Dear Charlie,

We enjoyed Natasha immensely both as an abnormally gifted musician and as a normal, simple, friendly human being. Her program (Brahms Paganini variations, Beethoven opus 110, Rachmaninoff sonata no. 2) was all fire and brimstone (especially the marvelous Beethoven fugue in the last movement), played as though everything was as simple as pie! When she was here 3 years ago and did Pictures at an Exhibition, also fire and brimstone, she concluded with a Berceuse “to bring us back to normal” and probably ought to have done that again this time, for the Rachmaninoff was more fiery than the two previous works put together. In any case, it was a memorable recital. Her stamina is remarkable. She got up early on Saturday morning to catch the 8:30 a.m. bus on 42nd Street, didn’t have much breakfast, arrived here at 1:00 p.m., wanted only a cup of tea, rested a bit, then practiced vigorously from 4:00-ish until 7:00 p.m., refusing supper or any socializing, 15 minutes later began her demanding recital, and finally after all well-wishing and congratulating audience members has gone home to sleep, she proclaimed with a smile, “I’m hungry.” And, “Do you have any wine?” So she feasted on lamb chops in our apartment lubricated with Greek ouzo. Spying the music on our piano, Britten’s “Playful Pizzicato” and Mozart’s 4-hand sonata in F, she said, “Let’s play 4-hands” and sat down with me, beginning at a speed that of course left me lingering far behind. Finally to bed, but in the morning she reported that her boyfriend in Texas had telephoned her at 4:30 a.m. to make sure that she awoke in time for the morning bus back to New York (which of course she did). Thanks to you, once again, for making her visit (visits) possible.

If any of your wanderings bring you northward this summer, we’d love to see you at the farm, especially in July and very early August when Alec, Monica, and the two children will also be there.

April 29, 2016

We went to the Epitaphios service at Newport with Kesaya and Chris and also Carrie Rosenblum. It is so moving, so terribly sad the way the Virgin Mary mourns for her son. At the same time, it is so beautiful. We sang the three famous lamentation hymns at length, half in Greek, half in English. But when we returned at 9:00 p.m. we were shocked to learn via an e-mail that Allan Munck had died suddenly this morning. I played music with him ten days ago and we were eager to rehearse Beethoven and Mendelssohn for next time. He seemed so perfectly healthy in both mind and body—and now he is gone. Lucky for him, I suppose, but not for those he leaves behind. We had played chamber music quite regularly for forty or fifty years! Now with him gone and Dick Williamson so declined, my Wednesday evening music is finished.

Earlier today: mailed a new Parker fountain pen to Hussein Majeed in Turkey. Poor man, he has fled Iraq and somehow subsists, unemployed, in central Turkey. His Parker pen broke and he begged me to send him another. As a long-time devotee of Parker pens, I understood perfectly his need. (I now have two in working order here and one more at the farm!) Last Saturday: spent the entire afternoon with Mike and Laura Gouthreau, our former Adirondack neighbors who now live in St. Albans, Vermont. They said they were amazed at my stamina in leading them on tours of both Kendal and Dartmouth. What a pleasure to see these good friends again! We plan now to schedule a lunch sometime in Montpelier, which is halfway between us.

May 4, 2016

To Princeton via Dartmouth Coach and then Bus 100 to Princeton. Overnight in Nassau Inn, where we changed room because we heard the man in the next room speaking interminably on his cell phone, with his every word discernible. Kathy Crown, head of Humanities Sudies, took us for a good supper at the Mediterranean restaurant, where I had been before. Indeed as we walked through town beforehand noting various restaurants, it seems that we had eaten in just about all of them during our stay in Princeton and my many visits writing “Greek Today” with Dimitri. Kathy pleased us greatly by confessing that she had studied Greek with “Greek Today” and remembered receiving the book via post and groaning owing to its weight. Previously, also, we walked leisurely through the wonderful Princeton town library, now enlarged, with a beautiful children’s room on the third floor. How beautiful and upscale Princeton is, especially compared to the unrelieved ugliness one views from the bus traveling here.

May 5, 2016

In the morning, delivered the first part of my archive to Don Skemer. I felt bereaved of my spiritual and intellectual self. He received all the letters sent me by famous or otherwise notable people, plus about ¾ of the amassed photocopies of Kazantzakis’s letters that Chrysanthi and I collected in order to produce my volume of the Selected Letters. These ran from 1902 until 1939 because that’s how far I could go in producing a catalog listing each document. I must continue now with the letters, from 1940 to 1957. Don is paying me $2500 for the original letters, nothing for the thousands of photocopies. I must check with Dimitri Gondicas concerning what other things he wants included in the archives. He isn’t here now because he went to Greece for Easter and was there when his mother died on the following day. Being here now brings back so many memoires of my multiple visits to work on “Greek Today” with him and Mache Karanika, plus my term here as a visiting professor.

Walked at 11:30 to Prospect to view the formal garden with multicolored tulip displays. At noon Carol Oberto greeted us with hugs and kisses. So nice to see her again and so nice that she’s still working at the Modern Greek center. Then Mike Keeley came with his new “friend,” Anita, who lost her husband six years ago. She cooks breakfast for him every morning! He is writing a new novel, a murder mystery not connected with Greece. He finally sold his apartment in Kolonaki—for half price. We both expressed our deep gratitude for the ways in which marriage to a Greek changed our lives. Carol then announced that Dimitri, detained in Greece owing to his mother’s death and thus unable to be at this lunch, had sent a toast to be read. So we clinked glasses and she then declaimed a beautiful statement of his gratitude for what I contributed over so many years to Modern Greek studies.

We returned to Manhattan on the slow bus, walked with our three valises (two now empty) from forty-first and eighth to fifty-third and seventh, to the Sheraton Hotel, managed to get to our room on the forty-third floor despite Chrysanthi’s acrophobia, then walked to Lincoln Center and are now sharing a coffee (price $3.75) in Symphony Hall, awaiting our evening of Balanchine ballets. These were extraordinary. Two we’d never seen before and two old-timers still completely satisfying. The first two were “Bournoville Divertisements,” traditional, showing off nineteenth-century technique, and “Moves,” jagged and sexy, a “ballet in silence,” performed without music, yet with all the dancers perfectly coordinated. Next came the “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” which we’ve seen repeatedly, yet this time with Tiler Peck and Andrew Veyette it was athleticism at its most exciting. But best of all was the evening’s finale, Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements,” which, from its startling opening with the corps all in white lined up in a straight line across the stage until its frenetic end danced by the full cast, is a show-cage for Balanchine’s brilliance, not to mention, of course, the startling music.

Slept in the Sheraton New York on fifty-third and seventh, forty-third floor, Chrysanthi bravely overcoming her acrophobia as we ascended the mile-a-minute elevator. But I kept the shades down to mask the “splendid view” that Reception had promised us.

May 6, 2016

Took all our valises to the Yale Club and breakfasted there, then reached MoMA precisely at 9:30 to see the special Degas exhibit. This showed a totally different side of this artist from the usual one, which identifies him solely with the painting of ballet dancers. Now we learned that he had begun chiefly as a printer, engraver, often doing multiple prints, some light, some dark, some altered with pastel. But the highlight at the Met for us today was clearly the Pergamon show, a collection chiefly of sculpture brought here from the museum in Berlin. The treasures were discovered when some German archeologist observed a peasant pulverizing marble statues in order to make lime! Excavations then unearthed extraordinary treasures, even a huge Αθηνά modeled on the Athena cult-statue in the Parthenon. The whole story of Alexander’s conquests, the multiple kingdoms that then ruled them, and the end of this with the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra became totally clear. There was even a long composite sculpture depicting the battle of Actium. A wonderful education, all of this, and too much to digest all at once. So of course I purchased the catalogue. Lastly, after eating comfortably in the Met’s members’ dining room, we went to the Frick Museum’s show of Van Dyck. What interested me most were his multiple portraits of Charles I, long before the civil war and Charles’s bloody end, of course.

May 10, 2016

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that perhaps the Town of Hanover might honor Kendal at Town Meeting, much as it had honored Chrysanthi when she received the Vaughan Award. So I went to visit the town manager, Julia Griffin (Julie, as everyone knows her), together with Jeff Roosevelt of the Kendal administration. She of course greeted me as “Chrysanthi’s husband”! She immediately thought that our suggestion was a very good idea. “The town could give Kendal a tree,” she offered, but that didn’t appeal to me. “How about a bench?” I suggested. Immediately she smiled and revealed that one of the three benches directly outside the town offices was still unnamed, and declared, “It’s yours!” “Yes,” she continued, “we’ll make a nice declaration at the start of Town Meeting and will also give Kendal another present.” “Probably not the lovely glass bowl that you gave Chrysanthi,” I offered. “How about a very attractive clock to hang on the wall?” was her response. Thus today, at Town Meeting, the clock was presented and the declaration was read by the chair of the Select Board, Peter Christie, as follows:

A PROCLAMATION CONGRATULATING KENDAL AT HANOVER AS THE COMMUNITY CELEBRATES ITS TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY.

WHEREAS: Kendal at Hanover opened its doors to residents in July of 1991; and

WHEREAS: Since opening, Kendal has been home to 1,053 Hanover residents, enjoying life in 250 independent living apartments and a full service nursing home facility; and

WHEREAS: Kendal residents are vital members of the Hanover community, volunteering thousands of hours every year to dozens of area organizations, including supporting a partnership with neighboring Richmond Middle School; and

WHEREAS: Kendal’s Intergenerational Program with residents, staff and children in the Children’s Center is considered a model for other retirement communities throughout the country; and

WHEREAS: Kendal’s Inner Light Program, a resident-oriented continuous improvement process, received a regional award from Leading Age Maine and New Hampshire; and

WHEREAS: Kendal at Hanover is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities and has been awarded a five star overall rating by Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare; and

WHEREAS: Kendal has played a significant role in Hanover’s EPA Green Power Community designation, representing the second largest 100% Green Power user within the State of New Hampshire; and

WHEREAS: Kendal is a major employer in the region, providing jobs for 321 staff members; and

WHEREAS: Kendal continues to provide a wonderful retirement living option for many Hanover residents as well as many people from around the country that are attracted to this region and contribute to the intellectual, philanthropic and volunteer spirit of the Upper Valley.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT PROCLAIMED by the Town of Hanover Select Board that July 2016 will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kendal in our community. The Town of Hanover is immensely grateful for Kendal’s presence in our midst and the invaluable contributions made by so many of its residents to the benefit of our region.

Proclaimed this tenth day of May, 2016

TOWN OF HANOVER SELECT BOARD: Peter L. Christie, Chairman, Athos J. Rassias, Vice Chairman, William V. Geraghty, Nancy A. Carter, Joanna Whitcomb, Secretary.

I still haven’t seen the bench, but I’m told that its brass plaque is already in place!

May 15, 2016

Because our Gathering Room will soon be closed for six or more months for enlargement, Ruth Lappin organized an informal three-hour recital by Kendal’s amateur musicians. I played the following: Third movement from Mozart’s four-hand piano sonata in D major, K123a, written when he was 16 years old, and the first movement from the four-hand sonata in F major, K. 497, written when he was 30 years old, both with Stan Udy; Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto arranged for 8-hand piano, with Joan Wilson, Stan Udy, and Joan Snell; Ravel’s Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant and Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, from Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), and finally Britten’s Playful Pizzicato, all three with Ruth Lappin. Mistakes in everything, but nothing serious or perhaps even noticeable. Lots of practice paid off.

May 19, 2016

I spoke in the Gathering Room about how Kendal was founded, helped by Tim Thacher, Bob Belenky, Edie Gieg as “hecklers” and “abetters,” Rose Miller as introducer, and Carol Weingeist as an added resource in the question period (she told about the time when a moose walked into Kendal through the front door). The whole idea was Bill Benson’s but he, suffering from terminal cancer, alas, did not come on the stage, although he did attend. I had collected about 25 photos of the construction from the huge number lent me by Sherry Butler (Facilities) and had arranged them on Power Point with splendid help from experts at Dartmouth. Norm Porter helped the set-up beforehand, so that everything worked perfectly. I ran the slide-show of the photos at the start as people came in, turned them off during the talk, ran them again during the question period after the talk. This is the talk:

THE EARLY HISTORY OF KENDAL AT HANOVER

Peter Bien

Opening: ROSE. When you were very young, did you ever wonder about miracles? We all heard the word, no doubt. But could there really be such a thing? Tonight we will learn that there have been miracles. And, to our surprise, we live in one. Bill Benson realized that so many newer residents had not heard how this miracle happened and he thought to make this happen. Peter Bien knows all the details, from personal experience, and he will tell us about it. There may be interruptions, but for the rest of us, let’s be polite and save our short questions until the end. Peter . . .?

PETER: I will begin by stressing two things. The first is that Kendal at Hanover’s existence is a sort of miracle; we are here by a hair’s breadth. The second is that this facility was totally a Quaker initiative. I will elaborate on both of these elements. First: the miracle.

TIM: OK, tell us about the “miracle.” That’s a great big word. What do you really mean?

[Ad lib about the size of the word “miracle.”]

Our Kendal would never have even been conceived if Kendal at Longwood outside of Philadelphia, what I call “Mama Kendal,” had not first failed at Blue Hill, Maine. I do not know the full story of that failure. My understanding is that exceedingly antagonistic officials in both the state and the town made life so miserable for Kendal at Longwood’s managers that they decided to pull out.

What happened next was an accident that has a lot to do with Quakerism.

BOB: Whoops! Are you already on the Quaker initiative. Is there nothing more to say about the so-called miracle?

[Ad lib about more on the miracle, soon. However:]

The director of Mama Kendal at the time was a “weighty Quaker” named Lloyd Lewis, a businessman who had been in the steel industry and knew his way around. He and I were trustees of a Quaker study-center in suburban Philadelphia. I used to see Lloyd at the trustees’ meetings.

Lloyd was failing at Blue Hill; concurrently I was having a serious problem with my father, who was very ill. I convinced my parents to sign up for a new Quaker CCRC called the Quadrangle that was being developed in Haverford, Pennsylvania. But the Quadrangle never got built under Quaker auspices. So we have two failures that explain why Kendal at Hanover is here. At the next meeting of the Pendle Hill trustees, I said to Lloyd, “I need a place for my father and you need a location that might work better than Blue Hill. How about Hanover?” Lloyd’s first reaction was: “We can’t. Nobody’s going to retire in frigid New Hampshire!” But he was intrigued. So we began to ask people. He sent one of his administrators up here. Together we visited every church in town, the Rotary, Kiwanis, etc., and described what a CCRC is. We then asked people, “If a CCRC were built here, would you retire in Hanover despite the weather?” The typical answer was always: “Yes, yes! We don’t want to go to Florida; we don’t want to go to Arizona. All our life is here, our friends are here, everything else that we find familiar is here. Yes, we would retire here!”

That was encouraging. So we decided to try. Who were “we”? I noted above that Kendal at Hanover was totally a Quaker initiative. We were a small group of members of the local Friends Meeting in Hanover. The only ones still alive are Chrysanthi Bien and myself, Erica Brinton, and Tom Corindia. We asked ourselves, “Can we build such a place?” Not a single one of us had been trained in business. So we decided to involve Mama Kendal, which eventually became the Kendal Corporation. That brought Lloyd Lewis into the picture as the central figure.

Lloyd hired Carol Weingeist, a local Quaker whose parents were resident in Kendal at Longwood. [Introduce her.] We installed her in an office in the Quaker Meeting House. She began to recruit prospective residents interested enough to put some money down. We conducted numerous forums in various places. Many brave souls signed up. This encouraged us to begin to look for land. We wondered whether Dartmouth might collaborate. I remember meeting with President McLaughlin of Dartmouth. He asked about an admissions process in which Dartmouth people would receive priority. We deemed that contrary to the Quaker principle of equality. So the negotiations broke down. However, we remained friends with Dartmouth. When it came time to look for land, the College was very cooperative.

EDIE: Whoops again! This isn’t a very coherent talk. Now you’re suddenly off on a completely new topic: Land! You won’t forget about the miracle-business, we hope.

[Ad lib about more miracle to come plus more Quakerism.]

We went all over town with Gordie DeWitt, who was then in charge of Dartmouth land. The College owns numerous properties, many of which it was eager to sell. I remember going to a beautiful farm in Etna. Lloyd was there, and Alan Hunt, then chair of the Kendal Corporation’s board. Alan actually began to dance—“Oh what a beautiful view!” You could look right over into the Vermont mountains. But then, sobering up, we asked Gordie, “Is it on town water?” “No.” “Is it on town sewage?” “No.” Is this road ever likely to be paved?” “No.” It was steep. We contemplated all the autos of residents slithering out of control down this icy hill in winter and figured that maybe this beautiful view was not such a good idea. Then Gordie showed us another farm located not too far up Lyme Road. This was flat, nice, and much nearer. Interested, we began to talk to people about it, whereupon we discovered that this was the site where Dartmouth’s Medical School and Chemistry and Physics Departments had buried their radioactive wastes for decades! So we thought we had better not take that site either.

We began to look in Vermont. There’s another reason for that which I will come to later. We actually found a very nice property on Route 5, on the river. But everything else told us to stay in New Hampshire because there’s no income tax and because the hospital was very close (then it was right in Hanover). In any case, all these things were going on together. We were looking for land, holding forums, recruiting people, talking to Dartmouth. But the other aspect was the hospital. Would Hitchcock be interested? It was not clear at first that it would. We needed to discover some cooperative physicians. First and foremost among these was Dr. James Strickler. This leads to another unlikely circumstance.

We still had not found an appropriate piece of land. We got it finally thanks to Jim Strickler, only because he happened to be my father’s physician. One day he said to me, “I have a patient who wants to donate a beautiful farm; her name is Doris Ferguson, née Cummings. But she insists, ‘over my dead body it must not go to Dartmouth!’ How about Kendal?” This is where we are located: on the Cummings farm. We began to talk to the owner. Her daughter got into the act and said, “Well Mom, let’s not donate it, let’s sell it.” So we started talking price and things were not going very well. Then we found that she had a childhood friend—they had gone to school together here in Hanover. It was Lou Bresett of Lou’s Restaurant. So we brought Lou into the act. He brokered the deal in such a way that the part of her farm across the road was purchased by the Hanover Improvement Society and therefore will remain open. We paid Mrs. Ferguson over a million dollars.

At the same time, negotiations were continuing with the hospital. These were not easy. But some very cooperative physicians—Jim Strickler, of course, Bill Chambers, Ross McIntyre, Mike Zubkoff, Harold Rawnsley—argued that what we were doing was important not only for us but also for the medical community since we could constitute their geriatric laboratory. That was the breakthrough, leading finally to an agreement whereby Hitchcock would provide our physician and two nurse practitioners.

While these things were going on, we were also going through the State’s regulatory process. When we started all this, there was no CCRC north of Massachusetts. Nobody knew what a CCRC was. In New Hampshire and Vermont, as in Maine, there were no procedures—no way to regulate this sort of entity. So the first step on the State level was to decide whether a commission would be set up to draft the proper procedures for regulating CCRCs. That is where the trouble began, because the committee appointed was chaired by a gentleman called Hurley who was the owner of the largest chain of nursing homes in the State of New Hampshire. You cannot get a greater conflict of interest than that. But he was the chair. What Hurley brought to the committee were lurid stories of retirement communities that had gone bankrupt and of residents who had become charges of the State under Medicaid. Furthermore, the New Hampshire State government’s official in charge seemed determined to sabotage Kendal. That was the other reason that made us look for land in Vermont. We had a very good relationship there mostly because the governor at the time, Madeleine Kunin, was a dear friend of the late Barbara Gilbert, a former resident here and one of our original Quaker founders. The governor was eager to see us in Vermont. But we still preferred to be in New Hampshire.

Then some really strange things occurred, making me repeat that Kendal at Hanover is here by a miracle.

TIM: Ah, finally!

Yes, we are here by a hair’s breadth, owing first to the failure at Blue Hill, then to the Haverford CCRC’s failure, to Jim Stricker being the physician both of my parents and of Doris Cummings, and now to another serendipitous circumstance. For some reason, I was invited to a big affair at Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center. I never had anything to do with that center. On this occasion, however, I was asked to give a report because I was in charge of something that involved Rockefeller people. It just happened that at dinner I was seated next to Malcolm McLane, a distinguished lawyer in Concord, former mayor of that town, father of our present Congresswoman, Annie Kuster, and descendant of a former New Hampshire governor. We started talking; I told him about the problems we were having with the State. He looked me in the eye, pointed his finger, and blurted out, “You are so stupid, I cannot believe it!” When I regained my composure I asked why. “Don’t you realize,” he responded, “that nothing ever gets done in New Hampshire the way you are doing it? You are playing fair. That doesn’t work in New Hampshire.” I sheepishly inquired, “What works?” He answered, “It’s very simple. You need to spend a lot of money to hire an accomplished lobbyist who will go to all the individuals on the committee.” So I told Lloyd Lewis. Lloyd, being a good Quaker, said, “We cannot do that. We must do things properly, honestly.”

The situation got worse and worse, until finally Lloyd Lewis capitulated. We spent a lot of money; Malcolm McLane found us the proper man to do the lobbying, and the final vote on the committee deciding whether or not to set up regulatory procedures was five to four. We won because of a switch vote by a committee member who had been successfully lobbied. The essence of the story, I suppose, is that our Kendal at Hanover would not exist if I had not been seated next to Malcolm McLane at that fancy dinner. But we still were opposed by the State official who seemed intent on sabotaging us. That leads to another story. Lane Dwinell, a former New Hampshire governor, was on the Kendal priority list. We told him about our troubles. He said, “Leave it to me.” And he telephoned John. John was John Sununu, governor at the time. “John,” Dwinell explained, “there’s someone in your administration trying to destroy Kendal at Hanover.” “Kendal at Hanover? What’s that? Never heard of it.” Dwinell, who used to love to tell this story, filled in the details about Kendal and then exclaimed, “John, I’ve devoted my entire life to New Hampshire and I’ll be gol-darned if I’m gonna die in Vermont!” Amazingly, everything then changed. Sununu presumably spoke to our nemesis and from that time onward the procedures were fine. A commission was set up to develop regulations for CCRCs. The rest was not so threatening.

Bob: Well, that’s quite a story. The rest not so threatening? Do you mean that it was easy, comfortable?

[Ad lib on town difficulties, maybe even worse.]

Now we come to the town. The initial concern was traffic. They quizzed us and quizzed us. How many of your residents are going to have cars? How many times will they leave the premises and drive? In which direction will they turn? Will they park in Hanover? Obviously, we did not know any of the answers. But we assured the town that the traffic problem would be manageable, and somehow got beyond that concern. The real stickler was taxes. Our position was that we wanted to pay taxes, should pay taxes, did not expect a free ride. But we considered ourselves a charitable, not-for-profit entity and suggested that we pay, in lieu of taxes, a sum to be mutually agreed upon. The town replied, “You must be kidding. We will never do that. You will pay taxes just like everyone else, and we will tell you how much.” Nevertheless we did manage a bit of negotiation, with the result that the residential buildings would be taxed but not the health center or the community center. What remained, however, was how the tax was to be calculated. The town wanted to determine the amount according to resale value. We complained, “Who is going to buy this place?” and argued for cost as the basis. The town refused. When the assessments were published, we found to our dismay that a percentage had been added to the residences because of so-called “enhancement” by virtue of the health center and community center. Although these two facilities were not supposed to be taxed, they were clearly being taxed indirectly. The total tax was immense; we considered it unfair. What happened next stretched over several years but I will describe it now and backtrack afterwards to the subject of Kendal’s construction.

EDIE: Good! You’re trying to keep the development rationally coherent, as a professor should, of course.

There is a committee for tax adjustment in the town. Hoping for alleviation, we appeared before this group. I made a speech about how private entities relieve towns of their public responsibility. Like Queen Victoria, they were not amused. “You’re a nursing home,” they declared; “we will tax you like any other nursing home.” We objected: “We are not a nursing home.” “Well then, you’re a condominium, and we will tax you like any other condominium.” “We are not a condominium.” “What are you?” “We’re a CCRC, a Continuing Care Retirement Community.” “What’s that?” They had no idea. We could not make them understand that we were neither a condominium nor a nursing home. I took care not to reveal that we were more like a cruise boat on land—that really would have raised the tax to the maximum!

The local committee for tax adjustment found against us, of course. Then it got worse because we upped the ante by going next to the state-wide committee for tax adjustment. This group came back saying, “You are not a charitable organization. No way! Don’t fool us. And don’t fool yourselves.” Secondly, they said that it was illegal for the town not to tax the community building. Thirdly, they ruled that we must be charged not only in the future but also retroactively for the taxes that we had not paid. It was grim: millions of dollars. We did make an adjustment with the town whereby the retroactive part was forgiven. But these proceedings were extremely unpleasant.

Then we made a further mistake. We decided to go to the New Hampshire Supreme Court. “This issue is very important,” people told us, “because towns all over New England are strapped for money and they are trying to tax not-for-profit organizations and even churches. So you should take the lead by bringing your case to the Supreme Court.” We hired a fancy lawyer from Concord who had worked well for the hospital. He assured us, “This is going to be a key case, and I’m going to get you a dozen similar not-for-profit entities who will join you as amici curiae before the Supreme Court.”

In the event he got none. Other not-for-profit organizations were frightened that the decision would be negative and that they would then be the very first to be taxed; thus nobody joined us. We asked more people for advice, and they said, “Please do not go to the Supreme Court. It’s a big mistake. You’ll lose the case.” So, fortunately, we changed our minds, and we remain one of the three largest taxpayers in the Town of Hanover. The first is Dartmouth. Our payment to the Town one year ago was $1,308,243.00.

As I noted earlier, all of this took several years. Let’s go back now to the subject of Kendal’s construction.

TIM: Most of us know about the wall project and of course about the forthcoming master plan. You mean that there were construction problems and decisions even earlier?

[Ad lib: Oh my God, are you kidding? Concerning construction, let me start with the pleasant part.]

Our local Quaker group developed a wish list and a series of suggestions many of which related to the difference in climate between New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Have peaked roofs, we said, not flat roofs, which don’t do well in snow. Do not place roof groins over doorways; see the mistakes on Dartmouth’s Hood Museum, designed by a famous architect who knew nothing about snow and ice, which fall directly on one’s head at every entrance. Cap the chimneys because raccoons like to nest in open chimneys and then sometimes fall down them. Provide closed garages underneath the multistory buildings, and covered carports for the cottages. (They had intended to have all cars outdoors, unprotected, as in Pennsylvania.) Place garbage storage in closed areas to prevent coons, skunks, and bears from getting into the receptacles. Provide a place to store bicycles. . . . Amazingly, some of these suggestions were actually adopted.

There were other ideas, too: for example, a place for card games, special workrooms for music, carpentry, jewelry, painting, weaving, basketry, calligraphy, photography, sewing, and sculpture; unisex hairdresser; darkroom, photocopying machine, public computer terminals, big windows with southern exposure for plants needed to keep up people’s spirits during the long winters; multipurpose space for theatricals, concerts, dances, meetings; tables for ping-pong and billiards; indoor swimming pool—we fought very hard for that. The architects said, “We’ll build an outdoor swimming pool.” We replied, “Are you joking? In this climate?” We got an indoor one. Tennis courts: no luck. Cable TV: yes. Backup heating for times of power outages, which are frequent in this climate: yes. Effective soundproofing between apartment walls and ceilings: unfortunately a long story. For the grounds: allotments for gardening, and (this was really too much!) a green for bowls, British style. We did not get that, or the tennis courts. We did get the bank, hairdresser, and gift-shop placed as we desired in the Health Center, to deemphasize the difference between healthy residents and unhealthy ones.

The architectural firm, based in Philadelphia, was Ewing Cole Cherry Parsky, which had built Kendal at Longwood. A local firm, Fleck and Lewis, was brought in to teach the Philadelphians about north-country cold. The contractor was The Carlson Corporation/New England, a large Boston corporation owned by a still larger corporation in France. Civil Engineers were Bruno Associates. Landscape Architecture was done by Ertel Associates. The finances, handled ultimately by the Bank of Ireland, went very well. We had the priority list deposits; we asked those who planned to move in immediately to pay half their entry fee up front to help with construction; Lloyd obtained venture capital from the Revlon Corporation; and we floated $43,000,000 in tax-exempt bonds. I remember going down to New York for the dinner party on October 11, 1989, that marked the closing on the bonds. It was held at a private restaurant with no sign outside whose owner reminded us that that she usually served kings and prime ministers. There were a lot of speeches about money, interest rates, marketing. I actually got the Bank of Ireland people talking about James Joyce. For my speech I recited Shakespeare on the seven ages of man, which ends with the last scene of all being “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” They didn’t understand, but we had a splendid meal with countless bottles of champagne. The bonds sold quickly and well.

That’s the pleasant part. The rest is very different. The construction took two years, much of it through winter cold and snow. Unfortunately, we had major trouble with the clerk of the works, the individual who is supposed to supervise the process, making sure that everything is done correctly. The man we hired died quite soon after construction had begun. He was replaced after a long interval by one of the architects in the Fleck and Lewis firm who apparently spent most of his time keeping warm in the trailer instead of going around to look at things. Much was wrong. For example: the contractor put unskilled workers in skilled jobs such as building the brick tower, which went up so crooked that it had to be torn down and be re-done. Furthermore, there were workers on drugs. Then the new clerk of the works made a change in the specs for the sound insulation in the ceilings, the result being zero sound insulation. We had to rip out all the ceilings except those on the fourth floor and re-do them.

As if this were not enough, the sprinklers were put in incorrectly and more than once went off with no provocation, flooding people’s apartments. There were several poor souls for whom this happened twice. We moved people out; we put them in motels; we shifted them to other apartments. We discovered that not only had the sprinkler pipes been laid incorrectly, but also that faulty insulation in the roof was to blame. The valves would freeze up, which tripped the mechanism. Then as soon as they unfroze the water came rushing out. When we tore off the roofs we found that the contractors had taken the big 4 × 8 batts of fiberglass insulation and had cut them in half longitudinally so that they were now 2 × 8, covering twice the area with half the effect. Not only had they done that; they failed to place the batts touching each other, so everything—heat and cold—went through in-between. In sum, the roofs were criminally done. They leaked in addition, owing to ice buildup, having been designed for New Jersey instead of New Hampshire.

We entered into various lawsuits. The contractor said it was the architect’s fault, the architect that it was the contractor’s. We finally got some restitution, out of court, but not enough. Jean Brophy, our first executive director, was heroic throughout all this, mopping floors at 2 a.m., soothing people, mollifying anger. Marjorie Walker and I traveled down to Philadelphia to point our fingers at the Kendal Corporation’s board and accuse them of malfeasance. Our residents, although in some cases understanding and supportive, generally felt that Quakers were not good managers, and that our Board should be re-formed by adding non-Quaker residents and outside professionals experienced in management. This was the beginning of a long adjustment of governance concluding in the end of Quaker control.

BOB: Yes, we’ve heard that Quakers are good in founding charitable and similar enterprises but not in maintaining them, so I guess that Kendal is pretty “routine” in this respect.

[Ad lib to set up the conclusion.]

You’ve heard about various difficult elements characterizing Kendal’s early history (perhaps I should say its “Quaker history”). Yet other elements need to be added. The food director quit two weeks after we opened. Our health center, early on, looked as though it was going to be closed down by the State inspectors. We rallied, fixed various problems, and avoided closure by a hair’s breadth. That was very scary. Then came the question of accreditation. At first we decided not to apply; we were not ready. When finally we did go ahead, we discovered what a huge effort was required by way of preparation. But the adjudicators gave us high marks in every area, saying that ours was the first “literate” report they had ever encountered.

TIM: In closing we want to repeat that this wonderful facility, filled with extraordinary residents and staff, does exist by a miracle. We must not take it for granted. Secondly, we want to repeat that the original goals, principles, ideals, and effort were purely Quaker. This small Quaker group felt so blessed by living in Hanover that they determined to give something back to the community, and Kendal is the form it took.

BOB: Many thanks to all the residents, staff, administrators, and board members who have contributed over the quarter-century that we are now celebrating.

EDIE: at the ground-breaking ceremony, which occurred on September 5th, 1989, Peter concluded that Kendal, upon opening, would offer all of us the chance to continue to control our lives in their final third or quarter, instead of feeling increasingly controlled, and to do so in an environment that was healthy, beautiful, civilized, and temperamentally serene. If that has happened to some degree in our first twenty-five years, we should be pleased.

PETER: Indeed. And I hope everyone realizes now that this unlikely experiment, having begun in 1991 despite the failures I described at Blue Hill and the Quadrangle, despite the serendipitous circumstances of my serving on a board of trustees with Lloyd Lewis, of Jim Strickler being physician both to Dorris Cummings and to my parents, of my being seated next to Malcolm McLane in the Rockefeller Center, of our failure to obtain amici curiae, which saved us from a negative Supreme Court decision. Despite all this, and despite construction problems both at the start and later on, the reality that we’re still here and going strong after a quarter century truly can be described, I believe, as a sort of miracle.

May 21, 2016

Nina Siniakova came with her entire family: husband Kurt, a composer of classical music and lover of James Joyce, daughter Maria, son Theodore, another son, and a two-month old baby who either sleeps or cries! At supper the baby erupted. Nina nursed it and ate nothing, then performed her lovely program—Franck, Schumann, Beethoven (Moonlight Sonata, at my request), one of her own pieces, and Rachmaninoff—very credibly and with good commentary. We’d saved some salad fortunately for her afterwards. What a heroine she is!

May 22, 2016

Breakfast with Nina and family. Good to talk with Kurt about Joyce’s Portrait, Samuel Barber, Alban Berg, whom he greatly admires. Nina said she’d been refused two jobs the moment she revealed that she was married with a family. They live way out on Long Island, with his parents, near West Hampton. Two and a half hour commute to the City. I gave her two of my books, at her request, and she gave me a bar of Russian chocolate. I tried to show them Dartmouth’s wonders. Chrysanthi and I, after a two-hour lunch at EBA’s with Jack and Ruth Hunter, loaded lots of books and paraphernalia from my study to take to Kendal, enjoyed supper with Claire Munck, now a widow, alas, and the Houghtons, and played the Schubert Fantaisie with Stan, not at all badly, and then the exquisite Pas de deux by Samuel Barber, both of which we promise to practice all summer.

May 28, 2016

Happily at the farm. Chrysanthi’s beautiful birthday card started the day: “My dearest Peter, You are the best husband and I love you very very much. Please stay healthy and try to enjoy life as we grow old. Lots of love. Chrysanthi.” Actually felt quite healthy this morning as I crawled under the tractor in order to lower its wheels to the ground again. It started on the first try! So did the tiller. And yesterday Earl fixed our frozen water pipe, improving it with “bleeders” to remove each autumn to make sure that no water remains. Returned by suppertime to eat with Claire Munck and then go with her to a magnificently moving Dartmouth Symphony concert featuring Beethoven’s ninth.

June 11, 2016

Stig Abell, TLS editor, writes that it is “perhaps, easier to be an interesting critic than a wealthy one,” speaking of Oliver Goldsmith (May 20, 2016, p. 2). I thought of my own career as—in part—a critic. If I was interesting I certainly should be pleased.

June 13, 2016

“As a student at Cambridge, Keynes studied the philosophy of G. E. Moore and adopted Moore’s idea of the good life as his own: the ends of human existence are, in descending order of value, love and friendship, aesthetic experience, and the pursuit of knowledge. All people ought to have a life rich in such goods” (TLS June 3, 2016, p. 9). Amen!

June 15, 2016

“Professors in the West rarely have interesting lives. Their values are objectivity, solemnity, formality and—at least officially—self-effacement.”—Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries, pp. viii-ix.

July 1, 2016

I submitted the following account of my work camp experience for publication by AFSC, which will be celebrating its centenary next year.

My first two undergraduate years were at Harvard, where my roommate and I typically passed our Saturday nights at The Old Howard or some equivalent allure of Boston’s Scollay Square. My final two undergraduate years were at Haverford. What a difference! Soon I met Dave Richie and noted in my journal that he “radiates love and compassion.” Thus weekends were typically spent in Dave’s famous Philadelphia weekend work camps, where restoration of slum housing in black ghettos not only improved those dwellings but also bonded together those so engaged. As Haverford’s Professor Douglas Steere always preached, love is best manifested through work.

The following summer, after six weeks alone as a silent hermit in the Adirondacks, I suddenly immersed myself in loquacious companionship with 13 girls and 5 boys in AFSC’s Washington D.C. work camp three blocks from the Capitol—painting, plastering, and puttying decrepit slum tenements whose occupants sat on the doorstep shooting themselves with heroin. This was so significant (at least for the campers) that I applied to join Quaker International Voluntary Service (QIVS) immediately after graduation. Thus in late June 1952 I found myself at Pendle Hill for a week-long training program, the strongest part of which was simply that Pendle Hill itself, like any well-functioning work camp, is a community in the fullest sense, joining people of diverse nations and thoughts into a collectivity where everyone collaborates in mind, body—and washing dishes. I was the only American in the camp in rural Holland where I’d been sent by AFSC. Organized by Pierre Ceresole’s Service Civil International, it was located in a home for children mentally retarded owing to Down syndrome and encephalitis. The directors subscribed to Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of anthroposophy, which includes a belief in metempsychosis. Thus they ministered with loving care, convinced that each child’s soul would survive its currently deficient body and inhabit a normal body in the next incarnation. What I experienced there was an application of the pragmatic dictum “Whatever works is true.” Anthroposophy worked, giving the staff the devotion and patience necessary for a very trying endeavor that was eased for them by our camp’s help with sanitation, cleanliness, tidiness—and washing dishes.

My final work camp experience was with Dirk Spruyt as a co-director of camps in the black ghetto of Rochester, New York during the summers of 1953 and 1954. Getting started involved speeches at churches and the university’s Divinity School in order to win recruits. We were housed in the Baden Street Settlement, attended various black church services on Sundays, and were well known throughout the community, perhaps chiefly because I looked exactly like Mr. Peepers, star of a sitcom that aired on NBC from 1952 to 1955; indeed in my progress through the community I was typically trailed by a line of young boys shouting “Mr. Peepers! Mr. Peepers!” Did our repair of homes, especially windows that would not stay open, our fraternization at churches and at the Settlement, our occasional success in incorporating into our group one of Baden Street’s black residents—did any of that do any good? Apparently not, judging from the impassioned 1964 race riots in Rochester, based in part on squalid housing. Yet I also remember walking though the area several years after the camps had ended and suddenly being enveloped in the warm embrace of a woman who had run out of her tenement to greet me. Surely this was an expression of genuine love, since she was of the wrong age and sex to have been captivated by Mr. Peepers.

Talking to Steve Cary in 1991, I lamented the cessation of AFSC’S extensive work camp program. However, he was able to convince me that the decision had been proper. Alas!

July 15, 2016

To Hanover so that Theo could take the Dartmouth tour. He has already done the same at Haverford, Swarthmore, U of P, Drexel, Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and will be going to Middlebury, University of Vermont, and McGill. In addition I bought him a new Mac Book Pro at the Dartmouth Computer Store, which also gave, gratis, some excellent earphones. For the first time, I actually followed the tour, which I’ve been tempted to do often as I see the groups on campus. There was first an hour in a Silsby classroom, with students giving testimony on video, and an administration office staffer explaining, chiefly, that Dartmouth College, although really Dartmouth University, emphasizes undergraduate education, has 99% of its courses taught by professors, etc., although it also boasts a three-million-book library and three professional schools. Then we went outside to be greeted by four student leaders, all class of ’18 (sophomores doing their summer term). Thus the large group was divided into four smaller ones. Our leader spoke well, and loudly, and was able to answer questions with authority. Interestingly, neither he nor the staffer for the first hour said a word about “Greek life.” Instead, lots about the new cluster system about to begin in September. Nothing about the Dickey Center, but when I asked him to elaborate on it he did so very well indeed. Also almost nothing about the Outing Club and all it offers owing to Dartmouth’s rural location. But what first? Generally I was pleased. Before the tour we had a short lunch at Kendal with Alec’s old friend from Friends Select, Fairlee Gamble; on the way home a splendid Chinese feast in Rutland. At Kendal I collected our passports so that Chrysanthi could go to Montreal with Alec’s family, but she has changed her mind.

July 17, 2016

Our anniversary, the sixty-first. Monica gave us a feast for dinner, of Greek dishes. The family’s card is worth copying: From Elena: “I wish you many anniversaries to come. I love spending the summer with you and hope to spend more than six weeks with you in the future. Thank your for being wonderful grandparents! Lots of love.” From Theo: “I wish you the very best on this special day. Love.” From Monica: “Every day is a celebration here with you both. Best wishes for many more summers and anniversaries together.” And from Alec: “What a treat it is for us to be able to spend each summer with you on our beautiful land. Each day is a gift! Love.”

July 20, 2016

Finished mowing the south field, which I was able to do quite early this year owing to the lack of wild blueberries. Και του χρόνου—μακάρι! In my office I also finished preparing for Open Access publication all the Cavafy poems I translated years ago. An immensely enjoyable process.

July 21, 2016

Alec, needing some nails, opened the valise upstairs in the barn where I keep all nails and screws, only to find it occupied by numerous mice and very recent offspring, plus piles of nesting, excrement, etc. Also, the mice had eaten through the side creating an entrance hole. So we concluded that the valise, which had a CUNARD sticker outside and also a FULBRIGHT sticker, needed to be taken to the dump. Emptying it, we found pasted to the inside of the lid an article list for Brant Lake Camp still fairly intact. Of interest: 14 handkerchiefs! One heavy shirt–drinking! 9 books. 1 typewriter. 1 baseball glove. 10 T-shirts. 1 pair of rubbers. And of course 1 tennis racket.

July 22, 2016

We took Alec, Monica, and the children to The Place for the prime rib special—a huge slice, enough for two or even three people, for $19.99. Alec and I split one portion, Theo and Elena another. Antipasto for everyone first. A beautiful feast for a beautiful family.

July 23, 2016

To SPAC for the NYC Ballet matinee performance of Balanchine’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Mendelssohn music (with Arturo playing the solos) was stirring, the dancing imaginative, as always. Such a treat. Met Donna there with her daughter Shandra and granddaughter. She told me that Breck Trautwein is dying from emphysema at age 74. He was a heavy smoker all his adult life. Afterwards we met Arturo at 50 South, where last year we had kept him waiting for two hours because I turned right on 50 instead of left. Kim, the restaurant’s founder and owner, sat with us and ended by giving all of us multiple desserts on the house. Arturo in best of form especially after two martinis. We’re trying to convince Arturo to send full into to Alec so that he can try to book him with the Bangkok Symphony. And we’re hoping that both he and Kim will visit us at the farm this Sunday.

July 27, 2016

Long, lovely visit with Art and Kris Perryman, finally, after lapse of several years. They of course have clear memories of our entire life here, going back five decades at least. Entering the living room and viewing the massive staircase we now have to the second floor, Art remembered the original ladder! Of course we steered clear of politics. Interestingly, Art has kept a journal, as I have. But his is still in pen and ink. He doesn’t type. Mine could have stayed that way. I’m so glad that it is now all on line, enabling me to search in it with ease.

Yesterday Alec, Theo, and I went up to our western border and remarked it, which was very necessary since the previous marking were extremely faint. But we found them, plus fencing here and there, plus some Posted signs affixed by our neighbor. But as we neared the southern end we lost it because it had originally been under water. Now this was swamp—no water but lots of mud, more like quicksand. The beavers are gone.

July 29, 2016

Alec’s birthday, the fifty-eighth. Joined by Donna and Ed, we had our traditional feast in their cabin with blueberry pie (of course) for dessert. My presents for Alec this year were a pair of leather work-gloves, the marvelous glove-holder that hangs from one’s belt and keeps one from misplacing gloves, and a device from Forestry Supplies for storing implements with long handles—rakes, shovels, brooms. Ed marveled at the children, whispering to me: “They like each other!”

September 13, 2016

Returned two days ago to Hanover. Yesterday Leander telephoned, all excited and disturbed because Earl revealed that Roy and Hawk (Roy’s son) insist on obtaining a key to our farm and threaten to break down the gate if they are denied and also to do damage. Earl refused. Leander of course agrees with the refusal. So does Alec. The reason seems to be that all three of these Millingtons wish to kill the sixteen-point buck that apparently is on our land. What to do?

I never wrote anything here, strangely, about our wonderful adventure on August 2nd rafting down the Hudson River, eleven of us, everyone except Chrysanthi and Daphne, who stayed home, and Christina, who was working in Boston. I was the second oldest person our rafting company ever had, so I was treated with special care, dressed toe to neck in a wetsuit plus life preserver and helmet and a strap to secure my spectacles. And, as the eleventh person, I went free of charge. It was very exciting, even a bit scary. Thankfully we had an excellent professional at the helm, Chris, a third generation fireman in NYC who comes north on his days off to guide rafts down the Hudson. Saw the blue ledges finally. Lots of #4 rapids (#5 are the fiercest) plus #3s. Chris kept us off the rocks most of the time. No one fell out of our raft although Nicholas fell out of the other raft. I paddled with the others but felt very tired and stiff and was allowed to recuperate by sitting in the bottom of the raft, after which I rowed again, most of the time. Everyone immensely energized.

September 19, 2016

More on the Millingtons. Earl pulled Hawk out of his car, or was it that Hawk pulled Earl? How to tell, since the stories are always contradictory. Leander furious and unreasonable, shouting that they’re all barbarians, etc., etc. I keep writing to Roy that family dissention is the last thing we expected. On the contrary, hunting should unite family members in pleasure. Naïve! Yet today I received a conciliatory message from Roy saying he would no longer try to hunt when Earl was there and furthermore that both brothers now realize that they should sit down, talk, and put and end to their enmity. Hooray! Naïveté does have a kind of power.

September 23, 2016

Looking for Robert Frost poems to read to Bill Cook, I found this one that applies somewhat to our current situation at the farm:

TRESPASS

No, I had set no prohibiting sign,

And yes, my land was hardly fenced.

Nevertheless the land was mine:

I was being trespassed on and against.

Whoever the surly freedom took

Of such an unaccountable stay

Busying by my woods and brook

Gave me strangely restless day.

He might be opening leaves of stone,

The picture-book of the trilobite,

For which the region round was known,

And in which there was little property right.

’Twas not the value I stood to lose

In specimen crab in specimen rock,

But his ignoring what was whose

That made me look again at the clock.

Then came his little acknowledgment:

He asked for a drink at the kitchen door,

An errand he may have had to invent,

But it made my property mine once more.

November 6, 2016

I’m at Pendle Hill for a meeting of the capital campaign committee. But I asked Nina Siniakova to come after breakfast so that she could see PH’s beautiful Yamaha piano (which I played last night for an hour) and meet Jen Karsten. I’m trying to arrange a recital by her at PH and told Jen that I’d donate a special $500 contribution to make the honorarium possible. She’s a great friend, and I’m so happy that she has at last found a real—good—job as pianist for the Philadelphia ballet. But she is not happy with the school that her children are attending. I suggested that she investigate Friends Select, which surely will have financial aid available, plus a new headmaster since Rose, whom Alec so disliked, is finally retiring.

The capital campaign meeting was very expertly done. Now we have all been assigned a small group of people to contact about a possible contribution. To make this less frightening, we read a fine pamphlet by Henri Nouwen on the spirituality of soliciting, or something like that, reminding us that when we ask for money for Pendle Hill we are really asking for help with something that we believe in and that we hope and expect the donor will get to know better and also come to believe in. Thus instead of simply taking from donors, we are also giving. After the meeting I drove to see if I could find again the Armenian pastry shop that I always visited, and I did find it still very much in existence: Armenian Delight Gourmet Foods, 2591 West Chester Pike, Broomall, PA 19008. I have repeatedly promised Jen that if she truly goes through a fiscal year with a level budget—no deficit—, I will buy baklava dessert for everyone at supper! We’ll know this August. If the deficit is zero, it will be the first time in 20 years at least.

Then back to the airport to fly to London: the beginning of a quite amazing new development in my life.

November 7, 2016

A few weeks ago I received a telephone call from Greece informing me that I had just won, by unanimous vote, the “Nikos Kazantzakis Prize” awarded by the municipality of Herakleion, Crete, for someone who has contributed to the city’s cultural life. Apparently there were seventeen candidates. This came as a complete surprise. I was aware of the prize only because Nikos Mathioudakis had written several times to say how much he hoped that he would be selected. Of course I was also told that there would be a ceremonial awarding (απονομή) and that of course they expected I would be present. The date was set for November 9. At this event I would naturally make a speech! I had repeatedly told people that I would never again go to Greece, mostly because of Chrysanthi’s determination never to go again, and I had become reconciled to that negative future regarding such travel. But this seemed different. I was already scheduled to go to Philadelphia for the Pendle Hill committee. Thus instead of returning from there as previously planned, I booked a flight from there to London for last night, from London to Athens today, and from Athens to Herakleion tomorrow. Today, amazingly, although I didn’t arrive in Athens until about 6:00 p.m. local time, and had to book into the Sofitel Hotel at the airport, I managed to reach Victoria Square to visit with Christos and Eri by about 8:00 p.m. As so many times in previous years, we had supper together and talked talked talked (all in Greek of course) for hours. Christos also telephoned Meg so I was able to say hello to her as well. I left in order to catch the last train back to the airport, at 11:00 p.m. What a day! Since I’d traveled the previous night with some sleep, going steadily until midnight tonight (the train takes almost an hour to reach the airport) was somewhat irregular, but rather easy. Of course my marvelous feast-fast remedy for jet lag worked perfectly once again. I should have mentioned earlier that on the flight from London to Athens, about three and a half hours long, I sat next to a very interesting woman named Claire Vishik who travels the world because she’s an expert on cybersecurity. We shared a lot, which enabled our conversation to last literally for the entire journey. Thus: three hours of English conversation followed by two and a half hours of Greek conversation on my first day on this unexpected trip to Greece!

November 8, 2016

7:30 a.m. flight to Herakleion. Met at the airport by Kostas Mpournazakis, sent by the Mayor’s office, who deposited me at my στέκι in Herakleion, the Atrion Hotel, and then fetched me a bit later to go to meet the Mayor in the town’s beautiful offices in the Lions’ Square, in one of the remaining Venetian buildings there. About ten people attached to the office all congratulating me, photographers outside, photos photos photos. Also, previously, even while I was still in America, there had been numerous newspaper articles with my photo and headlines that I had won the prize, and biographical descriptions. With Andreas Lenakakis, another of the mayor’s associates, to a store where I was able to buy machlepi for next Easter’s tsoureki cooked by Meli at Kendal. Then I was able to meet Ben Petre by pre-arrangement at 1:00 p.m. for lunch in a restaurant near the harbor. Some of the newspaper articles describing me had noted, erroneously, that among the many books I had translated was also Captain Michael, which of course was an error, and I told Ben that he is clearly the one who should do such a translation if the possibility ever occurs, for he knows more about the language of that novel than anyone else does. He was pleased. We talked about his daughter as well, whom I might be able to help get an internship at the American Farm School. Next, amazingly, I had an hour and a half with Albana (now baptized as Anna) Fejzo in the hotel, also of course by pre-arrangement. What a pleasure for both of us! She is as attractive and vivacious as ever, and much happier too, for she has a steady job as manager-in-chief of an important resort in Crete and, most importantly, the Greek equivalent of what we call a “green card” in America: the right to live and work in this country. She hopes to take out Greek citizenship as well. She told me about her brother, who was so sick in Italy but is now much better, and her parents, both now retired. She returns to Albania once a year at most. She repeated what she has told me before, that she is eternally grateful for the help I gave her first at Perottis College and then at Anatolia College. I understood this in a new way owing to the Nouwen pamphlet read just a few days ago at Pendle Hill. At 5:30 I was picked up by Andreas and brought to the offices of Radio Crete, just outside the city, for an hour-long interview with Eleni Vakethianaki, all in Greek of course. I had feared this owing to my sense that I wouldn’t be able to express myself adequately in Greek, yet somehow it went well, without any real difficulties. But as if all this wasn’t enough, as I was waiting in the hotel lobby just before 5:30 to be picked up, in walked to the hotel Peter Buseck with his lady-friend, Cindy! He reminded me that months before he had asked me to recommend a hotel in Herakleion. He and Cindy, tourists, had just come from three days in Santorini. What luck that I’d been in the lobby at that moment. Thus, after I returned from the radio interview, we walked together up to the Lions’ Square “to see the sights,” which included a noisy demonstration against fascism in Turkey plus an art exhibition in the Basilika of St. Mark, where my event will take place tomorrow, and where the artist herself was present and insisted on taking photos with all of us and begging me to convince the mayor not to remove her exhibit temporarily owing to the απονομή. We found a restaurant overlooking the square and had a good meal (it was my “feast day” in the jet-lag program) with lots of wine.

November 9, 2016

My “big day,” as though the last two hadn’t been big enough. When asked, as I was repeatedly, if I had been enjoying myself, I replied Yes, but I felt I was in a τρελοκομείο. Today was the craziest of all. It started at 7:45 a.m. with a long taxi-ride to Cretan Radio again and yet another interview. On the taxi-ride back, the lively driver said that he’d been listening to the interview just before and planned to come to the ceremony tonight. Then I was picked up by Andreas again and brought to the Mayor’s offices because they needed all my boarding passes as proof of expenses. Then I was delivered to Cretan TV for an hour-long television interview with Rena Papadaki, the usual “anchor” on this program—a very presentable self-assured woman with a perfect face, perfect diction, etc. I had to be powdered a little beforehand. She had prepared well owing to information I had sent. Actually the interview wasn’t being broadcast live but will be broadcast in a few days, so I had to refer to the award and my speech as already having happened. No problem. By this time everyone was aware of Trump’s victory in the US elections yesterday. I was asked to comment, and said that I was “crying.” Apparently everyone in Greece was also crying owing to this unforeseen result. Rena covered lots of aspects of my work and of the Kazantzakis phenomenon, very well indeed. She’s clearly a real “pro.” Andreas and Kostas and someone else from the Mayor’s office then took me to a fine lunch (on my “fast day”) in a restaurant that I’ll be able to find again, because it’s on the same street as the Youth Hostel, a street that I know well. I should have mentioned that at various points yesterday and today I was also trying to get a new sim card for my overseas cell phone, which I finally did without having enough local currency (euros) to pay for it. Andreas kindly contributed the missing 10 euros. But in the hotel yesterday, and again today, I encountered Myron Zolotakis, the poet whose work I have begun to translate, plus his wife, who turns out to be a professional firefighter in Athens. I told her all about the man who guided our raft down the Hudson River and is a professional firefighter in New York. Myron kept insisting that he wanted then and there to pay me, even though so far I have done only two poems (which, by the way, he sent to Beaton who affirmed that they had captured the “poetic quality”). Myron seems to be rich; he told me that he has a περιουσία here in Herakleion. So, he gave me 10,000 euro in cash, which I have stowed in the bottom of my valise, beneath the dirty laundry. Finally, after lunch, which of course began at about 3:00 p.m., I had some off-time at the hotel: a chance to read over my lecture once again and practice a few difficult-to-pronounce words. Kostas came, Andreas came, we walked to the Basilika, in slight rain, also with Peter and Cindy. Peter had asked me previously if he and Cindy could come to the dinner following the ceremony, I had asked at the Mayor’s office, and the answer was an easy Yes. So nice to see friends and acquaintances at the ceremony: Gareth Owens and his wife, full of smiles, their children now amazingly 17 and 20 years old (I remember them aged 7 and 10 of course), various friends of Ava whom I had met when John Rassias and I came to do Rassias-method demonstrations, Barbara Tsaka of course from the Museum, Toula from the Museum, and best of all the wife of the famous Greek biologist Fotos Kafatos, Sarah Niles, whom I’d known in Thessaloniki fifty years ago before she married and who visited us in Hanover with him. He is now a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, living in his ancestral city, Herakleion. They sat me in the front row, between the Bishop and the Mayor. The Mayor spoke briefly, then introduced Tasoula Markomihelaki, professor at Thessaloniki, friend of Dia’s, who introduced me at great length and breadth, with photos of important publications, also of the entire extended family at the farm gathered around my green tractor. The Mayor then presented the official declaration of the award plus a check for three thousand euros. Then I delivered my talk, my Αναφορά στο Νίκο. I of course was hoping that laughter would sound when I tried to be funny, and it did sound, indeed very massively, especially when I recalled my first sentence in Greek: Η Νίνα παίζει με το τόπι της . . . But I didn’t hear any laughter, alas, when I said that I’d learned my Greek στο κρεβάτι. Afterwards, however, several people told me that they had indeed laughed at that, but “internally.” Apparently the talk went well. Among other things it was nicely short (about 35 minutes), followed by loud applause and by dozens and dozens of people coming up afterwards to give congratulations. The affair ended with a pianist and baritone performing songs based on Kazantzakis material from the novel “Captain Michael.” Then dinner for about 30 people with me at the head of the table, next to the Mayor, and Peter and Cindy opposite.

November 10, 2016

Faithful Andreas fetched me at 7:30 a.m. (every single appointment these last few days had been exact, nothing according to “Greek time”) to go to the airport. He has become a true friend. He teaches Latin and Ancient Greek in high school here, besides working in the Mayor’s office. Installed again in the Sofitel, I met Constance Tagopoulos for an early lunch at a really fine restaurant, the Athinaïkon, Mitropoleos 34. Her life is terrible, as always, owing to the permanent illness of her son, to her own lack of work (except some translating), and generally to the ongoing Greek “crisis.” But she still comes back to New York once a year, somehow. I said that when this happens next spring she, Burt Pike, Chrysanthi and I should meet together in New York; this pleased her greatly. By subway then to the new Acropolis Museum where I met Don Nielsen and suddenly realized my one and only severe mistake on this insane-asylum journey: I had brought him the Jergen’s lotion he desired for his wife and had left it in the valise in the Sofitel. I hope to mail it to them when I return. He turns out to have been very connected with the Museum, having formulated all the English translations for Greek labels on things, and also having narrated the English portion of the movie shown in the Museum about the Acropolis. For all of this, he mentioned, he has never been paid. We talked over ice cream in the café, after which he took me on a quick tour, including portions of this marvelous building that most visitors would not be aware of. I of course couldn’t spend leisurely time viewing specific exhibits, but I did get a very fine sense of the whole, which is remarkable. He went off to another appointment just as I met Nikos Mathioudakis at the Museum entrance. We sat in Plaka over coffee. He’s the one who wants me to give the first talk, entitled “Kazantzakis’s “politics of the spirit,” at the symposium scheduled for November 2017 here in Athens. His idea is that I should explain what I mean by this and then go from one specific novel, poem, or play to another, showing how the concept is projected therein. As I said to him, although a month ago I was still determined never again to travel to Greece, I will probably come again next November and offer this contribution. That means that I must (a) do Zolotakis’s poems, (b) continue with my Open Access project collecting my previous writings, (c) write a new speech in Greek for the November symposium. Why not?

November 11, 2016

Long trip home. Athens-London flight squeezed in a narrow seat next to a huge, fat man. Zero conversation. But it was over in three hours. The long flight over the Atlantic, once again, was comfortable, with the seat next to me vacant. And we had a special view of Greenland along the way. I have written this long description of my Athenian extravaganza in the plane on the way back to Philadelphia.

On Nov 10, 2016, at 2:37 PM, Andreas Lenakakis wrote:

Αγαπητέ φίλε Πίτερ,

Γνωρίζω ότι βρίσκεσαι ακόμα στην Ελλάδα και ότι δεν θα διαβάσεις αμέσως αυτό το μήνυμα. Επειδή όμως, όπως πιστεύω, η επικοινωνία δεν είναι θέμα τιπικό αλλά εσωτερικής ανάγκης, νοιώθω την ανάγκη να σου εκφράσω τώρα τις ευχαριστίες μου για τις πνευματικές εμπειρίες που μας προεσέφερες όλα αυτά τα χρόνια της μονήρους διαδρομής σου στο χώρο της ελληνικής λογοτεχνίας και, ειδικότερα, για την τελευταία αναφοράανάγνωση του Καζαντζάκη. Ειλικρινά σε ευχαριστώ από καρδιάς.

Η τελευταία επίσκεχή σου στην Κρήτη μας έδωσε τη δυνατότητα να γνωρίσουμε και τον άνθρωπο Μπιν. Μας σκλάβωσε όλους με την απλότητα και τη σεμνότητά του. Θέλω να γνωρίζεις ότι από τώρα και στο εξής έχεις έναν καλό φίλο στην Κρήτη για ό, τι χρειαστείς και μπορεί να σου το προσφέρει. Μην δυστάσεις να χρησιμοποιήσεις το τηλέφωνο ή την ηλεκτρονική διεύθυνση μου για οτιδήποτε.

Εύχομαι να έχεις υγεία και δύναμη εσύ και οι αγαπημένοι σου, για να συνεχίσεις απερίσπαστος τη δημιουργική σου πορεία.

με φιλικά αισθήματα και βαθεία εκτίμηση

πάντα στη διάθεσή σου (έτσι δεν λέτε εσείς οι αγγλόφωνοι;)

Ανδρέας

November 22, 2016

On the train from Boston to Washington yesterday, I read this interesting commentary by Peter Hainsworth in a TLS (Oct. 14, 2016, p. 8) review of new books “tracing the beauty and inconsistency in the work of Dante”): “The question then comes up of how it can be that desire that is in some sense erotic is also desire for God. Dante’s Persons by Heather Webb confronts the issue from a modern theological perspective. Dante’s journey is an education which transforms his (and potentially the reader’s) vision of what constitutes another person and hence transforms also what sort of relationship one should have with oneself, others and the divine. Hell is the realm of the deluded individual, who mistakes isolation and competition for reality. In Purgatory mutual recognition means the emergence of a different sort of social behavior modelled ultimately on the example of Christ. Then from the start of Paradiso Dante and the reader are in the realm of fulfilment in which desire and satisfaction, both of love and knowledge, circle each other much as do the three persons of the Trinity. This process is not so much a transcendence of the human as its realization, its becoming transhuman.”

Visited the recently reopened East Wing of the National Gallery today. The architecture is splendid: so open, so relaxing, without any of the squeeze of many museums. Wonderful early Picassos. And a surprise painting called “Cakes” by Wayne Thiebaud that depicts 5 or 6 different varieties. I was pleased to find it illustrating a collection of note cards, which I purchased to give as a present to Melissa, our wonderful cake-maker at Kendal. Leander, Deanna, and Chrysanthi met me at a restaurant after which we went to a production of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” at the Kennedy Center. The bridge in question is clearly the Brooklyn Bridge because the view if affords is of a very complex family in Brooklyn with the head of household, Eddie, keeping his niece (whom he secretly lusts after) from experiencing life or becoming trained enough to “cross the bridge” into Manhattan and a responsible job, not to mention the chance to meet a prospective husband. But into the household come some Italians who have jumped ship. The niece and one of them fall in love. Eddie informs the immigration service (compare those who cooperated with the McCarthy Committee) as a way of preventing the marriage. The immigrants’ hopelessness back in Italy and faith that America offered “work” speaks so clearly to today’s situation with so many refugees flooding into Germany, America, and other rich countries, yet at the same time being considered “unregistered aliens” and threatened now with deportation by the president-elect Donald Trump. Not a great play, but interesting in relation to current events.

November 23, 2016

Splendid lesson from Leander on Samuel Barber’s beautiful “Pas de deux” in which I’m playing the secondo and Stan Udy is doing the primo. Such a difference when an experienced musician like Leander approaches a piece! We concentrated on many things, especially pedaling.

November 24, 2016, Thanksgiving

Another splendid lesson, this time on Barber’s “Schottische,” which I’m also preparing with Stan to perform in the Cary Room at some point. Thanksgiving dinner, very pleasant and delicious, followed by our traditional walk around the lake. Leander and Deanna are gracious. The real problem is the two children. Impossible to talk with them. Sophia had an assignment to write an obituary for Obama—an imaginative topic assigned by her professor. Nicholas had to write something on Hamlet. Both compositions were completed, but neither child showed any interest in what they had done or any desire to communicate to us the slightest information or enthusiasm. We all watched the delicious movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” which was even funnier the second or third time than originally, but Sophia was buried in her i-pad immediately afterward, without a word. So it goes. Thank goodness for marvelous Theo and Elena!

November 25, 2016

AMTRAK to New York in the morning. Immediately to the Whitney Museum using a members’ card supplied by the Yale Club. Walked down the amusing Hi Line again. We were both quite amazed by the special show on the eighth floor: an exhibition focusing on “the development of Carmen Herrera’s signature hard-edge painting style from 1948 to 1978” and situating her work “within the history of twentieth-century abstraction.” Unlike other abstract paintings, even the full room of Rothko’s that we saw the other day in the East Wing in Washington, Herrera’s are uplifting, energizing, beautiful, varied enough to be surprising.

To “The Cherry Orchard,” starring Diane Lane as Madame Ranevskaya. Although I’d seen this marvelous play many times in the past, this time I identified so strongly with the forceful chagrin of Ranevskaya and her brother (but not of her daughter) over the possible—and then actual—loss of the orchard, which seemed to me something like Alec’s land across Waddell Road, which like the cherry orchard could easily become a site of summer villas instead, as it is now, a site of miraculous beaver workmanship.

November 26, 2016

At breakfast in the Yale Club, picking up the New York Times, we learned that Fidel Castro had died. Our waiter was jubilant; it turned out, of course, that he was from Cuba, where his 95-year-old mother still lived. He’s hoping now for the death of Raúl Castro followed by a coup d’état and the end of communism. I suggested that Batista wasn’t so good either and that perhaps some useful changes happened under Castro’s rule. He disagreed strongly, replying that things were just fine under Batista. We turned to American politics and he said proudly that he had voted for Trump. Of course! I told him that I voted for Bernie in the New Hampshire primary. “That’s OK,” he replied. “Now we all get along!”

Off we went to MoMA, stopping a moment to peek inside St. Patrick’s, now brilliant white after being cleaned for two years. MoMA’s special show was Picabia, a diverse genius who traveled from style to style from about 1900 until his death in 1953: impressionism, pointillism, cubism, dada, surrealism. He once wrote, “If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts.” This is what he did; thus this retrospective show of his work enabled us to pass through all these styles, remembering others, like Cézanne and Picasso, who excelled possibly in not so many of them. From here we rushed to the Met to see the Jerusalem show, remembering that we were once meant to start a Dartmouth Alumni College tour in Israel but couldn’t because of a terrorist incident there, and started instead in St. Paul’s first stop in Greece. Most interesting in this show were the books: illuminated manuscripts perfectly preserved from as far back as the third century, also the Temple in memory, and the dream (unfulfilled, alas) of the city where the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—could coexist in peace. Then via crosstown bus to Lincoln Center for an angelic two hours watching Balanchine’s “Nutcracker,” highlighted by Lauren Lovette and Chase Finlay as the Sugarplum Fairy and her cavalier. The long, gorgeous violin solo in Act 1 was played . . . of course . . . by Arturo Delmoni: perfectly.

Then No. 2 subway to Nevins Street, Brooklyn, Chrysanthi behaving as though Brooklyn were a foreign country. But we found the Theatre for a New Audience after walking the wrong direction for a bit and then a good German-style restaurant just one block away. The presence of BAM and a dance school plus the theatre and fancy restaurant convinced Chrysanthi that this small quadrant of Brooklyn was . . . well . . . civilized. We were then entertained by a splendid cast in Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, a hilarious commedia dell’arte, scripted and unscripted, utterly zany, a little like Karaghiozis.

November 27, 2016

Our Cuban waiter, this morning, asked me how I felt and I replied, “I feel happy—for you!” I had the full Sunday buffet breakfast, Chrysanthi had her usual bagel and cheese, and at the end the waiter announced, “Surprise! The breakfasts are on me!” We walked through the Columbia Campus, full of memories for us, and then confirmed that 414 West 121 Street is still there. Entering Riverside Church to ascend to floor 12 for Morningside Meeting, we noted that every person we passed was colored. Apparently the pastor is now an African-American woman. Lovely to see Dan Seeger and Tom Goodridge at Meeting, but not Vince Buscemi and Ernie—in the announcements I heard that Vince was again in hospital and I learned afterwards that he is now demented, too. In my own introduction I said that I had served on the Pendle Hill board for decades with Vince, who was always one of the most conscientious and most brave of trustees. As usual, I reminded Friends that I was a cofounder of this Meeting owing to the fifth day meeting I started with two others at Columbia in 1956. Lunch afterward in Tom’s fine apartment in the “project” nearby. He told me that Union Theological Seminary and also the Jewish Seminary across the street were going to erect multi-storied apartment buildings, as the Manhattan School of Music had already done. Tom, during lunch, was very excited by the reality of my building our log cabin on the farm. I concurred! Afterward, when he, alone, showed us the way to the subway station and I congratulated him on his marriage to Dan, he said that he had waited 65 years to have a true “relationship.” They both seem very happy.

November 29, 2016

I spent an hour with Julia Griffin, Hanover’s Town Manager, who is appalled at Trump’s victory. She informed me that getting an article on the Town Warrant for Town Meeting is very easy. The deadline is April 4. Before then what is required is a petition signed by 25 registered Hanover, NH, voters—that’s all. She felt that Town Meeting would probably pass a resolution to make the town a “sanctuary town.” She is very concerned about protecting undocumented students. She informed me, as well, that Hanover police NEVER inquire about an arrested individual’s citizenship status and are resolved to continue that practice. Furthermore, quite a few Hanover residents have already informed her that they would offer residence in their homes to undocumented students if that were required (I thought of the Anne Franck situation in Holland under the Nazis). Julia herself will take in several such students if necessary. All this is very positive, naturally. Her one and only hesitation to the sanctuary proposal is this: If the town were so designated, she is sure that it would become what she calls a “target” for the Republican NH legislature and governor, who are always out to “get” Hanover for whatever reason. In other words, they might direct federal agents to start their operations in Hanover. I’ve written to Jack Shepherd and Patricia Higgins apropos. Obviously, to get 25 signatures for a sanctuary petition would be extremely easy, but should we do it?

Earlier today I read poetry to Bill Cook, which I do routinely now on Tuesday mornings. Today the readings were all from Emily Dickinson, 23 poems chosen beforehand from the volume of her 1775 “Complete Poems,” and starting with my all-time favorite:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you Nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! They’d advertise, you know!

How dreary to be Somebody!

How public, like a Frog,

To tell one’s name, the livelong June,

To an admiring Bog!

December 2, 2016

Terrible shock this morning. Stan Udy and I were meant to meet in the Music Room at 9:00 a.m. to practice our two Samuel Barber pieces, applying all the good points made by Leander last week. We saw each other at supper last night and confirmed this appointment. I went a bit early to the Music Room and was practicing when Chrysanthi knocked on the door to inform me that Stan had died last night. Alas! Such a sweet personality, such a good 4- and 8-hand partner! With Allan Munck gone, too, my long-standing piano arrangements are finished. Only Dick Williamson remains, and with him I no longer want to play since he refuses to count. Maybe Ruth Lappin?

Saw Bob Donin yesterday—Dartmouth’s chief lawyer. He agrees with Julia that a sanctuary status for Hanover would make the town an immediate target. Why not wait a year, he advises, to see what the Trump government actually does, or fails to do, with undocumented students.

December 4, 2016

Finished reading through the complete poetry of Emily Dickinson, preparing my recitation this week to Bill Cook. So many excellent—and difficult—poems. Only one is on music (no. 1480):

The fascinating chill that music leaves

Is Earth’s corroboration

Of Ecstasy’s impediment—

’Tis Rapture’s germination

In timid and tumultuous soil

A fine—estranging creature—

To something upper wooing us

But not to our Creator—

What this perhaps means is that music stimulates our aesthetic sense but not ultimately our religious sense. Maybe.

I contacted Letitia Ufford, who is now coordinating the Professors’ Colloquia here, and said I’d like to do a session on Emily Dickinson. She signed me up for next October. Interestingly, I sort of suddenly feel academic again. Thus I also sent in a proposal to speak on Kazantzakis’s eschatological optimism at the MGSA Symposium next November. And I’m making good progress on my translations of Zolotakis’s postmodernist poetry.