Homage to Byzantium : the life and work of Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis

Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis

HOMAGE TO
BYZANTIUM

The Life and Work of
Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis

By

GEORGE THANIEL
University of Toronto

A NOSTOS BOOK

North Central Publishing Company
1983

Copyright © 1983 Nostos

All rights Reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-60631

ISBN: 0-935476-13-X

This volume is number nine in a series of publications dealing with modern Greek
history and culture, under the auspices of Nostos, the Society for the Study of
Greek Life and Thought, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in collaboration with the
Modern Greek Studies Program at the University of Minnesota.

Theofanis G. Stavrou, General Editor

Cover and frontispiece photograph ofNikos Gabriel Pentzikis
Jacket flap photograph of George Thaniel

To Edward Phinney,
true friend of Greece

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ix

1 THESSALONIKI 1

2 A YOUNG MAN ALONE 7

3 MARRIED LIFE 36

4 THE FILING CABINET 67

5 INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 88

6 PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 114

7 CONCLUSION 138
INDEX 147

GEORGE THANIEL

George Thaniel was born and raised in Greece and received his
first university degree in literature from the University of Athens.
He has been a resident of Canada since 1964 and earned his M.A.
and Ph.D. in Classics at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
In 1971 he was assigned the task of organizing and teaching a
program of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Toronto,
Department of Classics, where he is now associate professor. In
1978-1979 Mr. Thaniel was awarded the Norwood travel prize
and spent several months in Italy for purposes of research and
study. He has written articles on Classical subjects but most of his
published work is in the area of modern Greek literature: a book
on the Greek-Canadian writer Nikos Kachtitsis, essays and reviews
in many journals. Mr. Thaniel is also a poet, published in both
Greek and English.

PREFACE

The life and work of the Greek writer Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis is
in many ways a refreshing as well as disturbing contrast to what is
normally expected from artists and writers by North American
readers. The Western world in general and North America in par-
ticular are noted for their aggressive progression into the future,
and for faith in the unlimited capacity of human beings to conquer
the environment and chart the inner universe. Pentzikis, on the
other hand, seems to belong in a world oriented toward the past.
His literary work shows a Protean character and bold experimenta-
tion with style. It rests, however, on Christian faith, and more
particularly Greek Orthodox faith. Its premise is that man is not an
independent and self-reliant being but one who cannot act or even
exist without the protection and guidance of God and his Saints
venerated in a multitude of icons. In a modern technological socie-
ty which has placed man on the moon, has photographed Mars, and
taken the temperature of Venus, pious intellectuals like Pentzikis
might seem out of place. Yet the dictum of Leibnitz "All is for the
better in the best world possible" can be questioned now. After
two world wars and continuing social and political unrest, human-
kind has lost some of its self-confidence. Many turn to religion,
exotic as well as traditional religions. Evangelism makes new con-
verts, and among the followers of Indian gurus one finds distin-
guished scholars as well as former Bohemians. Spiritual anxieties
equally disturb the sleep of the humble and the prominent. One
could cite among the latter Dag Hammarskjold, the late Secretary
General of the United Nations, whose personal diary published
posthumously under the title Markings is a case in point. Pentzikis
is a voice from the East, and the West has often throughout its
history turned toward the East for inspiration.

X HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

It follows from the above that North American readers con-
cerned with spiritual values will be interested in Pentzikis. But
there are also other factors for which Pentzikis would be meaning-
ful to Americans: his restless experimentation with new modes of
expression and the often jarring form which his work assumes; his
passion for the description and classification of all kinds of data,
from skin diseases to painting techniques; his interest in the func-
tional use of everything and anything. Some readers would be also
attracted by his discussions of Greek folk customs, tales, and tradi-
tions, as well as by his pronouncements on literature and art.

The present study starts with an introductory chapter on Thessa-
loniki, Pentzikis' native city and a recurrent subject in his writings.
The following three chapters discuss Pentzikis' development chro-
nologically, from the time of his first publication to his most recent
work in print. These chapters also discuss his evolution as a painter.
Chapters 5 and 6 deal with various aspects of Pentzikis' work, his
sources, and his relationships with other writers and artists, Greek
and non-Greek. Chapter 7, the last chapter, consists of an epig-
rammatic assessment of Pentzikis, the man and the artist.

The writing of this monograph, an overdue homage to a pioneer-
ing modern Greek writer, would have been very difficult without
the help of, first of all, Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis himself. He allowed
me to translate and quote from his published works, of which he
has all the copyrights, helped me with additional material, and was
always ready to answer questions or correct factual errors in the
earlier drafts of the book. Also helpful were discussions which I
have had with Professor John P. Anton of the University of South
Florida and with several friends in Greece who know the work of
Pentzikis. I would also like to thank Professor Kostas Myrsiades of
West Chester College, Pennsylvania, for lending me his taped in-
terview with Pentzikis, and Gabriel Nikos Pentzikis for translating
an earlier draft of this book for his father and for helping generally
with the project. Special thanks are due to Dr. Kostas Proussis,
Emeritus Professor of Hellenic College, Brookline, Massachusetts,
for reading the entire manuscript and for commenting extensively
on it, and to Professor Edward S. Phinney of the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, who also read the manuscript and
advised me on numerous points of style.

My transliteration of Greek names and titles of literary works

PREFACE XI

follows, as a rule, the current practice of transliterating phonetically
in order to suggest the sound of the original. The letter h is always
aspirated, that is, pronounced as in hat or his, even in words like
Arhion and Shina. Yet, when h follows mute consonants hke d and
g, it should not be pronounced; it is simply meant to render these
consonants softer: Dhimakoudhis, Ghrighorios. With better-
known words I deviate from transliterating phonetically and opt,
instead, for established forms such as Demetrius and Hesychasm;
similarly, proper names are spelled in English as preferred by the
person concerned (for example, Nikos Kachtitsis). Transliterated
words are not accented for reasons of aesthetics. The reader should
know, however, that no Greek word is stressed before the third
syllable from the end.

When first cited, the titles of Pentzikis' books, individual essays
and narratives, as well as the titles of Greek journals, are given both
in transliteration and translation. In subsequent citations, Pentzikis'
works are given only in translation and the titles of journals only in
transliteration. Titles of Pentzikis' paintings, as well as the titles of
literary and artistic works of others are cited only in translation.
Greek or other non-English words used in the monograph are
accompanied by their English equivalents in parentheses or ex-
plained in the notes, unless the non-English expressions are fairly
easy to understand, like Ficciones, or are commonly used in English
learned criticism, like magnum opus and horror vacui.

I have tried to be consistent in my use of religious, literary, and
other learned terminology, but have occasionally varied my prac-
tice by using alternate terms to designate the same thing: chronog-
raphers and chroniclers, neomartyrs and new martyrs, nouveau ro-
man and "new novel." In my translations from Pentzikis I have
resisted the temptation to tamper with or correct his style, or
embellish it in any way, and tried to render what he says and the
manner in which he says it faithfully. Wherever he is obscure, I add
words or explain in brackets. Finally, in discussing Pentzikis, refer-
ences to Greek sources have been inevitable, as very little on this
writer exists in other languages. Regarding more general sources,
however, my effort has been to cite books obtainable by the Eng-
lish-speaking reader.

George Thaniel
Toronto, Ontario.

CHAPTER 1

THESSALONIKI

Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis has identified himself so closely with his
native Thessaloniki that a monograph on his work may well start
with an introduction to this city of Northern Greece.^ Thessaloniki
represents Greece and, beyond that, the world of man which Pent-
zikis has come to accept with its shortcomings. In "Topio tou Ine"
(Landscape of being), which appears as chapter 7 of his 1970 book
Mitera Thessaloniki (Mother Thessaloniki), he identifies the parts
of his body with the areas and historical periods of Thessaloniki:
"Behind my left ear on the temple and at the base of the occipital
bone where our life beats in danger, there is the central cemetery
with its trees, the Jewish section, the Turkish one, and the sar-
cophagi of Hellenistic times" (p. 30).^ The head is also said to
represent the city's crossroads and teems with a multitude of im-
pressions which Pentzikis takes care to list in one and a half pages.

Unlike Athens, whose origins remain a matter of speculation for
the archaeologist and the student of mythology, Thessaloniki had a
start in known history and a fairly steady existence through the
centuries. Built in 315 B.C. by Cassander, the successor in Mace-
donia of Alexander the Great, the city was named after Cassander's
wife (and Alexander's half-sister) Thessaloniki, and became the
new imperial capital of Macedonia after Pella, the original capital,

' The identification, evident in most of Pentzikis' works, was restated with em-
phasis in an interview which Pentzikis gave to the Athens daily Ta Nea (The news)
(June 18, 1977). On Thessaloniki in general, see A. E. Vakalopoulos, A History of
Thessaloniki. Trans. T. F. Carney (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963).

^ Giles Watson, in "A Thessalonian — N. G. Pentzikis" (unpubUshed essay, in
Greek), p. 10, has observed that the writer Vassilis Vassilikos, in his book Photo-
graphs (Athens; Estias, 1964), p. 92, may have been inspired by Pentzikis in his
identification of his own hero with Thessaloniki, for here again we find the idea of
various parts of the man's body corresponding to various parts of the city.

1 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

had been silted over by the flow of the river Axios. From the early
period of the region we possess the oldest Greek papyrus manu-
script and many artistic treasures, some of which were shown to the
American public in recent years in a special exhibition called "The
Search for Alexander."

In Roman times the city of Thessaloniki grew in importance as it
had a key position on the trade route, the Via Egnatia, that linked
Roman Italy with the Eastern provinces. Cicero spent a few months
in Thessaloniki during his exile, and the place became the base of
the Pompeians during their struggle with Julius Caesar. Saint Paul
founded in Thessaloniki his second Christian church in Europe —
the first was in Philippi, near present Cavala — and two of his
Epistles are addressed to the Thessalonians. The city developed
and prospered as a trade and intellectual center, was visited by
Lucian and gave birth to poets like the epigrammatists Antipatros
and Philippos.

Thessaloniki's great period began in the fourth century of the
Christian era, when the Roman emperor Galerius settled there in
order to defend better the eastern part of the Empire from barbar-
ian invasions. The Via Egnatia, or what is left of it in the middle of
Thessaloniki, is still spanned by the triumphal arch which Galerius
built to commemorate his victory over the Persians. That emperor
also built a mausoleum, a round domed building on the model of
Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome, which was later converted into a
Christian church and is now known as the Rotunda of Saint
George. Particularly impressive is the dome of this edifice, while a
minaret still flanking the church reminds the visitor of the city's
Turkish occupation.

At the time of Diocletian and Galerius, Christians were still
persecuted, and it is under such circumstances that Thessaloniki
obtained her patron Saint, Demetrius, whom Pentzikis often in-
vokes in his writings. Demetrius was a Roman officer of noble birth
who became a convert to Christianity, preached his faith openly,
was arrested and suffered the death of a martyr, but not before he
had performed his first miracle. Through the bars of his prison cell
he blessed another Christian youth, Nestor, who subsequently
fought and vanquished the pagan bully Lieos in a public contest.
Popular tradition has it that Demetrius was buried in the dungeon

THESSALONIKI ^

where he had been originally confined, below the present church
that bears his name, and that he was called Myrovlitis (Exuder of
myrrh) on account of the therapeutic exhalations from his relics.
Pentzikis always refers to Saint Demetrius with reverence that bor-
ders on awe.^

During the Byzantine period, from the fourth to the fifteenth
centuries, Thessaloniki became the second most important city of
Byzantium after Constantinople. Historians of the time singled her
out as a "splendid city", "large and spacious", and "world-famous".
In fact, if Athens is mainly known for its ancient monuments —
above all the Acropolis — Thessaloniki, together with Constanti-
nople and Ravenna, are the richest centers of Byzantine culture.
Apart from the aforementioned churches of Saint Demetrius and
Saint George, Thessaloniki possesses the Byzantine churches of
Saint Sophia, Saint Catherine, The Holy Apostles, and the charm-
ing chapel of Our Lady of the Blacksmiths. Some of these churches
follow the basilica plan, while others are built in the shape of a
Greek cross. In his works Pentzikis often meditates on the
architecture and the symbolic ornamentations of these churches.

The prosperity of Byzantine Thessaloniki suffered repeated set-
backs after sieges and sackings by the Saracens and other enemies,
who would often leave with thousands of prisoners. In the period
of the Crusades the city fell to the Normans and the Venetians.
The White Tower, a landmark of the city and one of its most
photographed monuments, dates from the city's Venetian period,
and so do the remains of the city walls which include traces of other
fortification towers. But that was also the time of Efstathios,
Archbishop of Thessaloniki and well-known commentator on
Homer. Thessaloniki was eventually reconquered by the Byzan-
tines and grew into an important intellectual and spiritual center
dominated by the personality of Gregory Palamas. That was in the
fourteenth century. In 1430, however, Thessaloniki succumbed to
the Turks, twenty-three years before Constantinople had the same
fate.

The Turkish occupation of Thessaloniki lasted almost five hun-
dred years, and during this time the city declined in political signif-

^ Cf. chapter 3, p. 43.

4 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

icance but remained a main center of trade, a link between the
Balkan hinterland and the sea. Toward the end of the eighteenth
century the city was inhabited by motley races: Greek Orthodox
Christians, Moslems, Jews who had fled from Spain at the time of
the Inquisition, and others. The English traveler William Martin
Leake provides a graphic description of that period of Thessaloniki
as well as of the early nineteenth century in his Travels in Northern
Greece.'^ Thessaloniki showed an even greater cosmopolitan charac-
ter at the end of the nineteenth century, when the ethnic communi-
ties included Austrian, French, and German nationals. At that time,
the father of Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis was running a successful
pharmaceutical business that dealt with several of the Balkan cities.

Greek troops liberated Thessaloniki and made it an integral part
of modern Greece on October 26, 1912, the name-day of its patron
Saint Demetrius. Pentzikis recalls that he welcomed the Greek
soldiers as a child of four on his father's shoulders. A critical year
for Thessaloniki was 1917, when a conflagration destroyed the
largest portion of the inhabited area. Yet this allowed the creation
of a new well-planned city which enhanced rather than obstructed
the view of the surviving monuments. The old city, whose charm
has been steadily vanishing "like a betrayed revolution", as Dinos
Christianopoulos, a modern Thessalonian poet, has somewhat
romantically written,^ presents narrow streets that wind up to the
fortresses and battlemented gates and towers. The streets frame old
timbered houses with overhanging storeys, color-washed in pink,
white, or blue, and with flowers cascading over yard and garden
walls. Beyond the remains of the city walls, at the far distance, one
can see Olympus on a clear day, and on the other side, the Ther-
maic Gulf, fifteen miles deep.

Thessaloniki is oriented toward the sea, not only geographically
but also psychologically. In an essay which Pentzikis first published
in the forties, and which is included in Mother Thessaloniki, he has
evoked the ancient and Byzantine past of his native city, bringing
together pagan mythology, geography, and medieval history with
modern Greek literature that concerns itself with the sea. He views
the ancestral world with respect and love both as a treasure en-

'^ Vol. 3 (1835; reprint ed., Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1967).

' Piimata (Poems) (Thessaloniki: "Dhiaghonios", 1974), p. 96.

THESSALONIKI J

hanced by the ever-sdrring sea and as a throng of specters which
haunt this same sea:

The sea which you see when you open the window of your
small room looks to you like a most beautiful girl, although
you know that you are not going to marry the girl you love and
that you have to banish her to a monastery. You must live out
your heritage and exorcise the ghosts which the inurmur of the
water deposits on the shore, ever and ever leaving and return-
ing, (p. 118)

The moment of meditation contains the world of Homer — the
man described in the story seeks, like a sulking Achilles, to relieve
his feelings by looking out to the sea, his primeval mother — the
world of Byzantium and its monastic shelters, and the world of
nature. Much comfort comes to the writer from the thought that
nature renews itself while discarding nothing and that it is peopled
by the living as well as the dead.

Thessaloniki is a city of contrasts, environmental — it has hot
and humid summers and cold winters — and also historical and
cultural. It was established at the onset of the Hellenistic age with
its outward and inward propensities: dissemination of Greek cul-
ture, realism in art, and political expansionism, but also inwardness,
superstition, mysticism, and magic. In the early Christian centuries
the new faith initially preached by Paul fought with paganism and
finally triumphed over it, to be challenged in its turn by heresies
and later by Islam. The Byzantine chronographers, whom Pentzikis
has studied in depth, testify to the vitality, turbulence, and spiritual
crises of medieval life in Thessaloniki and other parts of Byzan-
tium, the struggle between body and soul, Christ and Antichrist,
good and evil.

Thessaloniki is a city of many ghosts, nameless as well as re-
nowned, whom Pentzikis often conjures up in his works. But it is
also a city of the living, men and women of flesh and blood who try
to assert their identities, as he points out:

Already, the street had been widened considerably in parts;
buses full of the increased population pass by. The woman
from the poor home across the street no longer recognizes her
neighborhood: "Where are the wealthy homes of old.-*", she
wonders, looking out of the narrow window at the edge of the

O HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

house, raising her head from her knitting now and then. The
world, she thinks, is deteriorating; ten famihes are now Uving
where one used to live in comfort. In the big park with the
trees there was a small chapel, subsequently torn down to free
the lot which, however, nobody has bought and built over.
The rich landowner's only son, who planned to have his wed-
ding there some day, died at the same time his house was being
demolished. On another spot, they ruined a bunch of sixty-six
majestic elm trees, "But for what purpose?", the knitting
woman wonders. She grows dizzy from the noise of the traffic
in the new street, (p. 15)

Here we get a hint of the great upheaval in the modern history of
Thessaloniki, caused by the settlement in the city and its environs
of thousands of refugees from Turkey after 1922. Otherwise, the
trivial details of the demolition and reconstruction works in the city
are meant to stand by themselves, devoid of any sentiment on the
part of the narrator. At the same time, all these details, hke the
baring of the insides of houses and the geometry of the changing
walls, provide a framework for the writer's search for identity.

Pentzikis believes that the resettlement of thousands of penni-
less refuges in Thessaloniki proved in the long run beneficial, for it
helped the city find its Greek face. He illustrates this by suggesting
that the University of Thessaloniki was built on cemetery land, and
that the so enhanced intellectual life of the city may be likened to
"a flower in a cemetery."^' The axis that holds together the whole of
Pentzikis' work is the death-into-life concept. Here, in the thought
about the University of Thessaloniki, he applies the concept to the
fortunes of his native city, which, as he claims, stands to gain even
by the damages which she sustained in the great earthquake of
1978.

^' Interview in Ta Nea, June 18, 1977.

CHAPTER 2

A YOUNG MAN ALONE

1. Beginnings

Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis belongs to the much discussed "genera-
tion of the thirties," a group of Greek writers and artists who took
modern Greek intellectual life out of the comparative inertia of the
twenties. The inertia was partly due to the unfavorable repercus-
sions of the First World War and above all to the impact which the
Asia Minor disaster, the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of
Greeks from their ancestral homes on the coasts of the Black Sea
and Western Turkey, had on the minds of the younger and more
promising writers and artists. Some of these espoused Marxism and
turned against the status quo, others resigned themselves to an
esoteric and melancholic type of expression, and others rejected
artistic expression altogether. In reaction to this situation, those
writers and artists who started publishing or exhibiting around
1930 felt the need to explore new areas of human consciousness.
They also wanted to attune their style to the novel forms already
tried in the countries of Western Europe, to which modern Greece
had been consistently looking for enlightenment. ^

The center of Greek intellectual life all these years had of course
been Athens. It is here that George Theotokas published his man-
ifesto of the new generation. The Free Spirit,^ here that George
Seferis brought out his first collection of poems with the significant
title Turning Point, here that the painter Ghika presented his
works, and here that enterprising and optimistic men launched

' A good discussion of the "generation of the thirties" may be found in Thomas
Doulis, Disaster and Fiction. Modern Greek Fiction and the Asia Minor Disaster of
1922 (Berkeley: University of Cahfornia Press, 1977).

^ For a discussion of Theotokas and his contribution to modern Greek letters, see
Thomas Douhs, George Theotocas (Twayne, 1961).

8 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

avant garde journals like Ta Nea Ghrammata (New letters) and To
Trito Matt (The third eye). To a smaller degree but with its own
features, the same phenomenon of renewal appeared in Thessaloni-
ki, the capital of Northern Greece. The initial impulse probably
came from a sense of competition with Athens in the effort to
introduce a fresh awareness into the Greek literary and artistic
world. Most of the younger Thessalonian writers in particular had
studied abroad or were well read in world literature, philosophy,
the still new field of psychology, and aesthetics. Their ambition was
to go beyond the modest achievements of their older colleagues,
who published mainly in newspapers and serial magazines. In-
terested in Freud and in authors like Gide and Proust, novice
Thessalonian writers like Stelios Xefloudhas, Alkis Yannopoulos,
and Yorghos Vafopoulos turned away from national and provincial
concerns to introspection or to its opposite, a precise and detached
description of the external world. ^

Pentzikis spent a few years in France. After visiting Austria in the
summer of 1925, he went to study pharmacology, first in Paris and
then in Strasbourg between 1926 and 1929. While in the French
capital, he used to visit, as he recalls, John Psycharis, the well-
known linguist and flag-bearer of Greek demoticism."* Pentzikis
had started writing poems in the early twenties and wanted to show
them to Psycharis, who always welcomed his young friend and had
only kind words about his literary protolia (first fruits). In 1929
Pentzikis had to return to his native Thessaloniki to run the drug-
store left by his father, who had died in 1927. He decided to
publish some of his writings in Thessalonian newspapers, but the
response of readers was not very encouraging. As a result, Nikos
Gabriel and his first cousin Miltiadhis Pentzikis, also a novice at
writing, burned their "first fruits" and started afresh. In his "Apol-
oghos" (Final assessrnent), which appears in Omilimata (Homilies)
(1972), Pentzikis refers to this holocaust and lists some of the sac-
rificed items: an essay inspired by Homer, verses modelled on
Greek folk songs, attempts at translation from the medieval ro-
mances, imitations of Rilke "who added to the routine of everyday

* See chapter 6, section 2.

"* The movement that helped to establish spoken Greek as the literary and also, by
now, the educational language of modern Greece.

A YOUNG MAN ALONE y

life the hemisphere of death," copyings from Ibsen and Jacobsen,
copyings from various poets who deal with the decline and decay of
old men in coffee-houses, and copyings from Dostoevsky
(pp. 95-96).

Five years later, in 1935, Pentzikis' cousin Miltiadhis took his
own life. He was an imaginative and learned young man who could
not reconcile his ambitions with the reduced social status of his
family. He scattered flowers on his bed and then lay on it after
taking poison. Nikos Gabriel was having similar frustrations but
resisted his own suicidal tendencies and, unlike both his cousin and
Andhreas Dhimakoudhis, the hero of his first book, who also killed
himself, survived in order to sublimate his frustrations and existen-
tial anxieties in a whole life's work of artistic expression.

2. A Modern Wert her

Pentzikis published his noveWdi Andhreas Dhimakoudhis in 1935
under the pseudonym Stavrakios Kosmas. This suggests a cautious-
ness which is understandable after his own rejection of his earlier
writings, but the assumed name also alludes to his preoccupation
with Byzantium and the religious roots of modern Greece. Stavra-
kios {stavros= cross) sounds like a monk's name, while Kosmas is
the name of a Greek Saint, unless we want to read in it Pentzikis'
concern with the world (^ojw^j= world). ^ In addition, the word
monahos (alone) of the subtitle of the book "Enas Neos Monahos"
(A young man alone) means "monk," if we stress it on the ultimate
syllable.

So much for the names and their potential symbolisms. The book
has been classified by some critics as essoterikos monologhos (interior
monologue). Yet its narrative line is clear and consistent, and it is
written in the third person. We could safely say that Andhreas
Dhimakoudhis continues a whole chain of such stories from the
romantic era, starting with Rousseau's Confessions and Goethe's
Sorrows of Young Werther.

Andhreas is a sensitive young Greek studying in a big city of

^ Pentzikis has revealed to me that the pseudonym Stavrakios Kosmas is really a
combination of the names of two black-market merchants who lived in Byzantium,
circa 900 A.D., during the reign of Leo the Wise.

10 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Western Europe, which may have been modeled on Strasbourg or
Paris, where Pentzikis had studied pharmacology/' Andhreas is in
love with Renee Saeger, a young lady who rents a room in his hotel.
He waits for her in the street, watches her coming and going, sends
her flowers and gifts, and muses on her for hours on end. His
attitude reminds one of Goethe's Werther and also of another
romantic figure, Adele Hugo, who pursued her unwilling lover, an
English officer, to the limits of the world and ended up in the
madhouse.^ Romanticism's logical conclusion is madness.

Pentzikis' young hero grows more and more desperate in his
passion for Renee. She is tolerant and even sympathetic at first, but
she never accepts his advances and finally becomes angry. He re-
nounces her in his heart several times, but to no avail. Andhreas
resorts to extremes: he cuts his finger with a razor to write her
name in his own blood and, in a tragicomic attempt to be near her,
he hides in a big basket of flowers which he orders sent to her.^ The
result of this "flower escapade" is that he gets thrown out and told
never to bother her again. He has reached the end of the road.
There is no return. He must die:

When outside, he started running. He felt overwhelmed again
with passions, the anxieties of the lonely heart. He knew that
by entering a cookshop and eating well he could laugh off all
those feehngs, could get rid of the proud image which he held
inside himself. But no, he would not betray himself this time.
He knew what was good and would stand his ground. He had
to shed his individuality and not allow himself a second one.
That was now his resolution. Three times he climbed the hill
behind which a river flowed; then he knelt down and prayed
for strength.

He was able to see from there the whole city. He under-
stood the sequence of human feelings. Whatever he was after,
he felt inside himself, in the inmost cells of his existence; he

'' Doulis notes that the Greek abroad is given pre-eminent place by several of the
Greek writers of the thirties like Theotokas, Petsalis, Nakou, and Kastanakis {Disas-
ter and Fiction, p. 175).

^ The story of Hugo's daughter was suggestively filmed by Francois Truffaut in his
Adele H.

" The episode echoes a real episode in the life of Pentzikis. In 1928 he sold about
three hundred books from his collection so that he could buy as a present to the girl
he loved a big doll dressed in a Greek country-style costume.

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 1 1

loved. Let death come as it should. He wanted it and knew its
meaning. Death is harmony. Without any fear, for the first
time, Andhreas Dhimakoudhis drowned happily in the current
of the big river, (pp. 157-158)

The identification of Pentzikis with the hero oi Andhreas Dhima-
koudhis is confirmed later by Pentzikis himself in, among other
places, To Mythistorima tis Kyrias Ersis (The novel of Mrs. Ersi)
(1966), where the writer suddenly comes upon a wall notice of his
own funeral, conducted many years earlier. The notice bears the
name "Andhreas Dhimakoudhis," (pp. 286—287). Andhreas be-
comes the prototype of the insecure and vulnerable young man
often presented in the works of Pentzikis, at times in traditional
garb; for instance, in his book Pros Eklissiasmon (Toward church-
going) (1970), we find Homeric Achilles crying alone on the sea-
shore; Shakespearean Hamlet with his agonizing "to be or not to
be;" Stephen Daedalus, the failed writer in Joyce's Ulysses, and
others (pp. 19-27).

The young man Andhreas remains in the forefront of Pentzikis'
novella, vacillating between complete surrender of himself and to-
tal possession of the woman he loves or thinks that he loves. The
digressions and asides that take whole pages in later books and
often grow into the main theme are comparatively few here. The
pace of the narrative is fast and animated. The story moves relent-
lessly to the end, the death of the hero.'^ On the other hand, Pent-
zikis, who also lost the girl of his dreams, chose to live. He fared
better than his hero, just as Goethe did better than his Werther.
Pentzikis overcame the shock of a love betrayed by circumstances
and sought to come to terms with the world. The death of
Andhreas may thus represent the writer's own surrender of his ego
for the quest of a higher life rhythm, which would encompass both
himself and his environment.

An attentive rereading of Andhreas Dhimakoudhis suggests that
this work — the first, simplest, and most conventional in style —
contains in germinal form virtually all the directions which Pent-
zikis will take in his subsequent books. The image of the anguished

"^ The nervousness and animation of the original Andhreas Dhimakoudhis were
toned down in the second edition of the work (see chapter 4, section 4).

12 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

young man is a constant, but we also get a glimpse into the truth
that the world is on the whole an entity independent of us and our
individual problems, dreams, or fallacies, and that its contempla-
tion as such will give rest to our disturbed souls. Pentzikis stresses
this truth again and again in his later books. He also stresses humil-
ity as a counterweight to pride, which explains his love of ascetics
and monks. Other typical themes in Pentzikis which are found
already in Andhreas Dhimakoudhis are: the love of plants and herbs
— after closely observing a leaf, Andhreas picks it and puts it in his
wallet, for he wants in this way "to make the tree his own;" the
hero's sentimental attachment to his native city and country; the
predilection for games with words and sounds; the devotion, both
aesthetic and religious, to pictures.

3. Formative Years

After the publication of Andhreas Dhimakoudhis, Pentzikis
strengthened his literary contacts and had various writings printed
in journals. His contributions included pieces of prose that fell
somewhere between the formal essay or article and the more per-
sonal or confessional composition, as well as poems and reviews of
painting exhibitions. Pentzikis also published an obituary for his
cousin, together with a sample from the dead man's unfinished
novel The House of Porcelain, ^^ a translation of a text by the Spanish
painter Juan Gris, and another translation from E. Dujardin, a
French writer of the nineteenth century, who was the precursor of
Joyce in the stream-of-consciousness technique, as well as other
items. ^^

The exchanges between Pentzikis and writers and artists who
shared similar views were also rich and varied. He contributed
regularly to the journal To Trito Mati, which was edited by his
friend Stratis Dhoukas between 1935 and 1937. One of these con-
tributions, "To Vradhi mias Syntrofias" (The evening of a group of

'" The excerpt was titled "The Clock-Maker of Petrograd." The novel was to tell
the story of two men, one old and one young, who conflict with reality.

" Pentzikis translated Dujardin's "Les lauriers sont coupes," a poem that
appeared in 1887 in Retue Independente. Dujardin never became famous but Joyce
confessed his debt to him and Mallarme had written him a letter.

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 13

friends), again printed under the assumed name of Stavrakios Kos-
mas, touched upon the problem of reading and assimilating what
one reads. In the third chapter of Toward Church-Going, Pentzikis
has described the contents of a special issue of To Trito Matt on the
subject of landscape and art, and in "Anapolissis Philologhikes"
(Literary recollections) which appeared in Nea Estia (New Hestia)
in the December 1, 1962, special issue on Thessaloniki, he has
reminisced about the writers and artists whom he met or with
whom he associated in Thessaloniki in the thirties. Mementoes like
a self-portrait drawing of Dhoukas, made "under the influence of
alcohol," and receipts from registered letters to the poet Yorghos
Sarantaris, were to inspire some of the poems of Ikones (Icons)
(1944).

In 1933, Pentzikis added painting as a means of artistic expres-
sion. He never had any formal training in this art, and while study-
ing in France he was not mature enough, as he says, to appreciate
most of the masters displayed in the Louvre. What mainly attracted
him at the time was religious painting of the type practiced by
Matthias Griinewald, while canvases of the romantic era, like Dela-
croix's The Destruction of Chios, stirred his patriotism. Later, he
appreciated the impressionists, above all Monet, who died in 1926
when Pentzikis was still in Paris. He now believes that the impres-
sionists in painting and the symbolists in literature, like Mallarme
and Maeterlinck, are the ones who taught him to accept his inner
world.

A decisive factor that turned Pentzikis to painting was the res-
toration and cleaning of the Byzantine churches of Thessaloniki.
Climbing on the scaffolds of the hagiographers, he was able to
inspect the Byzantine icons closely. There was still much that he
could not understand in the style and symbolism of Byzantine
painting. Yet his mind was impregnated with images of saints. He
had dreams of them and found a new eloquence in telling these
dreams to his friends. Moreover, several of the men he knew prac-
ticed more than one art, and Pentzikis felt at the time somewhat
like a Renaissance man who had to be good at everything.

It is under these circumstances and while he was recuperating
from an illness in Asvestohori — a village near Thessaloniki — that
Pentzikis made his first drawings, mostly of flowers, in pencil and

14 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

crayon. His break with the girl he loved motivated him to decorate
the walls of his room in water color; he registered his experiences
through a set of symbols, which he borrowed from nature and from
Byzantine painting. His room thus became a mausoleum of his lost
love, a depository of memories, a chapel meant to retain and pro-
ject, on a mythical level, the world as he had known it so far. That
was in 1935. The following year Pentzikis made the portraits of his
sister and other people.

Pentzikis did not paint much between 1937 and 1941. He
finished some drawings which he then sent to his friend Dhoukas,
but these were not of any great consequence, he says. He felt that
he could not handle watercolor well enough and in a manner which
would allow him to achieve special effects. So, in 1940, he started
using oil paints and during the war years he made numerous paint-
ings, mostly of landscapes from around Thessaloniki, flowers, and
similar subjects. 1943 was a specially productive year for Pentzikis.
He made and sold a good number of paintings, and recorded, again
symbolically, a new love affair in no fewer than twenty-two can-
vases. To these he gave relevant titles: The Embrace, The Kiss, etc.

Pentzikis also lost his grandmother in 1943. In a characteristic
painting he presented the dead woman and his new girlfriend. He
had the face of the girl emerge from the mirror of a wardrobe,
across from the bed where his grandmother's body lay, in order to
symbolize his favorite, death-into-life theme. Pentzikis held his
first exhibition with a group of other, mostly self-taught artists, in
1944 in a Thessalonian flower-shop!

The truth, however, was that Pentzikis had not caught the atten-
tion of the public. People called him at best peculiar — the adjec-
tive figured in the title of an interview about the cinema which
Pentzikis granted to a newspaper in 1937 — and at worst insane.
Also, most of the things he sent out for publication ended up in
garbage cans. Yet he continued writing and painting. He corres-
ponded and associated with fellow-writers and friends, while trying
to run, though not very efficiently, the family drugstore. The place
became a cultural center in Thessaloniki, attracting mostly the
younger writers and artists. Pentzikis would often give out his
medicines free. His generosity, along with the non-productive time
which he spent on literary discussions, meant a meager income. His

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 15

paintings eventually made more money than the pharmacy busi-
ness. Painting sometimes provided for basic needs, as when he
exchanged a series of canvases, among which •wz.s Jonas in the Sea,
for coal.

Financial and literary insecurity, compounded with his failure to
marry the woman he had originally loved, were responsible for the
morbid feelings that permeated the writings of Pentzikis. In
"Aidhiasma" (Disgust) the narrator is sensitive to the point of
hypochrondria, and it seems that the ill feeling which he gets in his
throat, stomach, and head are nervous reactions to a deeper dis-
satisfaction with himself. Several pieces of prose writing, collected
in Synodhia (Retinue) (1970), express these feelings:

The streetcar tracks end here. There are still more habitations
and people. I want to leave, to walk off. I fear the light. Oh, if
only there were no sun, if only darkness fell and I could hide
my shame inside the night, if only I could not see and could
not be seen. (p. 14)

The scene, in the same narrative, of a sister of mercy praying by the
side of a patient marks a moment of relief. This scene, however, is
quickly replaced by the scene of a sad and hungry patient whose
eyes command a small space through the open window.

Similar feelings pervade another narrative, "Moungos ke Piitis"
(The mute and the poet), from the same period. Here we get a
kaleidoscopic survey of moods, shades of questioning and despair-
ing, that lead to a new faith in life after the writer has accepted the
facts of transience and death. The spectacles of a consumptive
mother and a blind man with swollen eyelids induce the writer to
read prayers from a breviary. Things, he feels, do not really perish
but are transfigured. The title of the piece, "The mute and the
poet", suggests this very idea. Poetry, that is, creativity in the broad
sense — for the etymological meaning of the Greek piitis (poet) is
"maker" — is an answer to "muteness" (pp. 37—40).

Pentzikis explored the problem of literary composition in the
essay "I Poria ke to Stamatima" (The journey and the stop). In this
exploration he started from personal experiences. His work at the
family drugstore had been often interrupted by children asking for
empty boxes to play with, an occurrence also referred to in The

16 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Novel of Mrs. Erst (pp. 176—177), and by the unannounced visits of
customers and friends. These last would come not with the purpose
of promoting his business, but rather of sharing their personal
problems with him. Pentzikis reflected on all this and, eventually,
on the more serious problem faced by a modern writer in his
attempt to bestow unity to his writing (pp. 15—36).

Modern writers have no choice but to mirror the world which
they see around them. The world, however, is complicated and
fragmented. Pentzikis concluded that creative writing nowadays
has to assume some form of the absurd. The elusive unity was to be
achieved on a surreal level. How else? Nobody who rejected ab-
stractions and general concepts in order to perceive and express the
world from very close up could ever hope to acquire all the knowl-
edge, scientific and scholarly, necessary for such a task. The mod-
ern writer must dare to cut through the Gordian knot of literary
tradition and return to a stage where words preserve their
elemental force. The young man of "The Journey and the Stop"
compiles a list of various people and of their particular diseases.
The exercise sets his memory in motion. He becomes a child again
and succeeds in combining fantasy with the concrete by naming
everything that surrounds him and thus making it, in a magical way,
his own.

Writing and painting were indeed the chief methods by which
Pentzikis sought and at times achieved the mythical world of com-
pletion for which he yearned since his early youth. His growing
attachment to Thessaloniki and the Christian traditions of his
homeland on the one hand, and his insistent examination of various
aspects of the external, objective world on the other, were two
different but complementary ways of wrestling with the problem of
identity. The self-complacent, Werther-like idea that he was a
sensitive and refined individual, born in the wrong period of his-
tory and in an imperfect world order, was always strong in him. But
equally strong was his inclination to reach out.

4. The Dead Man and the Resurrection

The process of reaching out is exemplified in the 0 Pethamenos ke
i Anastassi (The dead man and the resurrection), which Pentzikis

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 17

wrote in 1938. The unnamed hero of the story dies, as Andhreas
Dhimakoudhis did earlier, but does not pass into the great un-
known. He dies in order to rise again into the world of God and of
the senses. Dhimakoudhis had been the victim of his own feelings.
Emotions had cut him off from the world. They had acted as a
screen of smoke that distorted his relationship with the "other," the
person outside himself. Away then with emotions! Economize on
psychology!

Here one recalls Natalie Sarraute and her famous as well as
startling dictum that modern writers will blush when they hear the
attribution of psychology to their works. Pentzikis has also said
many times that there can be no "human person" based on feeling
alone and that we cannot speak today of an "individual." A person
is an object, a self-observing object at most. This is the spirit of the
nouveau roman and also the spirit that motivates The Dead Man and
the Resurrection}^

This book, Pentzikis' second, marked a critical moment in his
development. By writing it, he discovered himself or rather
worked himself into a dialectic position with the world. This posi-
tion he was to cultivate, in various ways, through his later years.
That was also the moment at which Pentzikis asserted himself as an
original writer who published under his real name, Nikos Gabriel
Pentzikis.

Pentzikis confesses in the beginning of The Dead Man and the
Resurrection that he has attempted to write a novel about a young
man. We soon realize that Pentzikis describes himself — someone
approaching middle age, yet in many respects still an adolescent.
Anguished introspection interrupts long passages that describe the
external world, especially Thessaloniki: "I have lost all spirit. I do
not know. I cannot continue writing. My nature wavers all the time.
My form is lost in the vessels I fill". The narrator is conscious of the
things he misses, especially a home with a happy mother and a child
and himself as the father. He often dreams of this. The image of a
happy family recurs, vested in romantic and religious hues, but the
man realizes that it will remain for him fictional. He and the woman
whom he loves cannot unite. The feeling of loss yields to its denial,

'^ See chapter 6, section 1.

18 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

and the narrator eventually resolves to examine human weakness
more objectively and find some solution for his problem within the
wider spectrum of his city, the traditions of his land, and religion.
Pentzikis wrote The Dead Man and the Resurrection without any
chapter divisions, suggesting the duree reelle which is life, the con-
stant flow of time outside, but also inside the mind of the narrator
and through the channels of his memory. Sometimes he struggles
against this flow and other times he sails with it. The objective parts
of the story are no longer simple digressions from the main narra-
tive but tend to become the main narrative. The young man de-
scribes the interior of his room and what he is able to see from his
window, and tells stories — often bluntly and naturalistically —
about people he knows. This in turn leads to a sentimental crisis, to
be followed by the rejection of sentiment as a false guide and
another suppression of the emotional self:

Mass of things in confusion. Noise from the traffic of auto-
mobiles that go in parallel with, or make easier, lighten the
steps of people. A horse confined between the wooden leads,
near a motor that competes with it. Someone runs in a hurry
with a bunch of receipts in his hand. Discussions and argu-
ments. A barefoot boy brings on a metal tray the order of
coffee and sweets to the shops. On his return he swings the
empty tray, running by a ship anchor left onshore after it had
supported its ship against the currents that can drag you along.
The boy passes by and touches it with his finger. They are on
friendly terms, those two. (pp. 63-64)

The narrator takes his own life, but we are not given a descrip-
tion of the suicide. The implication is that the death is no longer
physical but figurative. The man surrenders that part of himself
which had difficulty identifying with his environment. The work
ends appropriately: "Then I remember hearing about a dream seen
many times by my maternal grandmother, that under our house
there was a church. She used to see a venerable figure commanding
us to demolish the house and find a church underneath."

The Dead Man and the Resurrection reveals Pentzikis as a writer
determined to embrace in his writing whatever is most modern in
creative writing, but also as one who will often turn and pray as a
child would in front of his patron saint's icon. The tension that

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 19

results from these two opposing views of the world, the objective
and the mythical, and the need to harmonize them have character-
ized Pentzikis all his life.

3. Byzantine Tension

The pious element in Pentzikis had been nourished, since his
childhood years, by the women of his home and his own familiarity
with the Byzantine background of Thessaloniki and Greece in
general. In "Literary Recollections," the 1962 Nea Estia article,
Pentzikis mentions that his sister Zoe Karelli, who eventually
distinguished herself as a poet and dramatist, placed the heroine of
her first attempt at a novel under the half-faded mural near a small
door of the church of Saint Nicholas Orfanos in Thessaloniki. The
heroine of this novel, which remained unfinished, was presented in
a contemplative mood that related to her Byzantine environment.
One also notes that Karelli's later work, though less religious than
the work of her brother, is definitely colored by the pious back-
ground of her family and city.

Pentzikis' own religiosity also had to do with his early visit to
Athos, the Holy Mount of Greek Orthodoxy. That first visit in
1933 and subsequent visits to Athos motivated him to study the
Byzantine writers, most of whom had a religious strain in their
work. He approached them at first, he says, with the curiosity of a
tourist. But gradually his affection for and reliance on church tradi-
tion grew stronger. Pentzikis' attitude strikes us as more or less
anachronistic when we consider the great influence that political
ideologies of a socialist, atheistic bent exercised on the minds of the
young in the thirties. We wonder whether eccentricity, an inclina-
tion to be different, drove him to the Church.

It may be partly so. His deeper motivation, however, may have
had to do with his perception of how far political credos can be
compromised in practice. Also, through observing himself and
others, Pentzikis knew that man was a weak and volatile creature,
often unable to reason out his deeper problems. Humility gener-
ated by that knowledge found expression in the sign of the cross:

I continue. Let no one accuse me for crossing myself first. This
is no superstition. I follow an old sanctified habit of ours in

20 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

order to express humility and the fact that I am full of doubts
about my own abilities. {The Dead Man and the Resurrection, p.
48)

In his book Toward Church-Going (1970), Pentzikis has included
a confessional essay, "Eros tis Eklissias" (Love for the Church),
which provides a lucid and moving account of his gradual accept-
ance of the Greek Orthodox Church as the spiritual treasury with-
out which he could not live. It is particularly interesting that Pent-
zikis defends the Church with hardly any help from abstract theolo-
gy or Greek nationalism.

Pentzikis had told his friends that a simple, genuine attachment
to the Church could solve all problems. They contradicted him
with arguments, which he thought were perfectly logical, argu-
ments based on the architectural and moral decHne of the Church,
the limited education of priests, and the narrow attitudes of his own
pious relatives and friends concerning the young lady he once
loved. Instead of challenging these arguments, Pentzikis supported
them further and even quoted from the Apocrypha of Prokopios
and from other Byzantine historians who give us gUmpses into the
seamy side of Christian Byzantium.

Yet the question which he finally put to them was whether the
Church was not, like existence itself, a gift from above which hu-
mans (including priests and monks) will often spoil. They were not
convinced, and the exchange of views on this matter fell through.
Pentzikis, however, had an almost tangible experience (the nature
of which is not specified) at Cavala (a city near ancient Philippi),
which acted as a protective shroud over and around his feelings,
and guided him again toward the road "that bears the epigraph of
God the creator and is divided vertically by the sin of the self-
determined creature."

For some time Pentzikis had feared that submission to the
Church might reduce his personality to "dust," for when he first
went to Mount Athos, he was still certain about the solidity of his
ego and considered nonsense the story found in Synaxaristis^^

'* Compendium of texts on the lives, sayings, and deeds of saints. The work
originated in early Byzantine times but was updated and variously adapted and
commented upon by Saint Nikodhimos the Athonian in the eighteenth century. The
name of the compendium comes from synaxis (assembly), as extracts or summaries

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 21

about a Saint who showed early signs of piety by refusing to suckle
his mother on Wednesdays and Fridays, customary days of fasting.
Later on, Pentzikis felt that in this, as well as in other religious
stories, there was some essential truth, which, nevertheless, he was
unable to prove logically. This upset him. He kept losing debates
with his friends, while the awareness and love of the absurd grew
inside him. It was some kind of death seeking a rebirth.

He started touring the Byzantine churches and little by little the
church architecture and ornamentation, the poetry and the music
of the rituals imbued his sense of the absurd and helped him com-
mune with another world. He felt that anyone could have a place in
the world and that it was a matter of choice, as he explained in
"Love for the Church":

From studying the monuments of our religious tradition, I
have drawn conclusions about the symmetrically unsymmetri-
cal and about the fact that an uneven square may be geometri-
cally more correct than an even one, about rhythm as the basic
element explaining the world and human life, about the im-
portance of choosing the smallest possible unit so that the total
be fair, about the limits of the personal, which can best be
expressed at times through copying, about the fact that beauty
can be felt by a sensitive agent, extracted and transferred out-
side its original source to another and another until it becomes
possible for someone today to invest himself with the mythical
gown of the Homeric epics and so dressed in old garments to
appear synchronized, in line with the most fashionable philos-
ophies. It is so that I came to understand the words of my
mother's mother when she changed my diapers: "Christ and
the All Holy Virgin change and my grandson puts on their
throw-aways". (pp. 64—65)

In the rest of this essay, Pentzikis reinforces his main point by
using various devices. He quotes from the church liturgy; remem-
bers Saint Mary of Egypt "who made herself worthy of holy com-
munion only after letting her solid ego dissolve into a cloud of
light"; and reminisces about Mighdhalia, a maid of his paternal
house, who strengthened in him the element of faith. His conclu-

from it are read by custom during "assemblies" or gatherings of monks at mealtime
and on other occasions. See also chapter 5, section 10.

22 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

sion is that one can achieve unity if he finds the courage to say "I am
another," and this can best be said in the frame of Christianity.

When it comes to basic, existential questions, Pentzikis seems to
reject rational answers. It is not, therefore, through rationality or
even common sense that he tries to justify his allegiance to the
Church. He believes with the simple and unalloyed faith of the
simple man, the faith which he sees as the main thrust behind the
Christian monuments and traditions of his land. His intelligence,
on the other hand, drives him to explore the deeper meaning of
this faith and of its material manifestations. Hence, the paradoxical
statements about the unsymmetrical symmetry and the personal
impersonality of the Christian traditions.

We understand this better when we know that a sense of humil-
ity compelled the typical architect or builder of a Byzantine church
to shun perfection and total symmetry in the construction and
alignment of walls and cupolas. His handicraft, which was the
church, had to suggest humankind's imperfection vis-a-vis its
creator. In ancient times the classical quest for symmetry and origi-
nality derived from humankind's faith in having the ability to shape
and express the world. The Byzantine architect and artist tried to
avoid such a quest which might lead to excessive pride, disunity and
fragmentation. Thus copying, imitating a tradition, and responding
with trust to forms handed down through generations do not,
according to Pentzikis, negate the true nature of humanity but
instead uphold it.

6. Homilies

The bulk of Pentzikis' collection of prose. Homilies, was written
in 1939-1940 and is akin to The Dead Man and the Resurrection,
which was written in 1938. In the first essay, Pentzikis deals with
the problem of a writer's identity, of success or failure to assert an
identity. Pentzikis' self-analysis cuts very deep and is often excru-
ciating. He plays various roles or imagines himself playing roles
that run back and forth through time and are not delimited by
geography. Both the first and the third persons are employed in the
narration, and the work ends on a religious note that involves
Mount Athos and Gregory Palamas.

Palamas, to whom Pentzikis refers, always with great reverence,

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 23

nearly as often as he does to Saint Demetrius, was the dominant
figure in the spiritual awakening of Thessaloniki in the fourteenth
century. He came from a princely family and might have had a
career in the Byzantine imperial service, but he elected a life of
religious study. He donned the simple habit of a monk, and spent
many years of meditation on Mount Athos. The particular move-
ment which he initiated was called Hesychasm (from Greek
hesychia, "being quiet," or keeping one's silence, or practicing the
life of a monk).

According to Father J. Meyendorff, a scholar who has methodi-
cally studied Orthodox theology, the term Hesychasm (also fre-
quently referred to as Palamism through association with its cham-
pion, Gregory Palamas), has four possible meanings. It suggests,
first and most importantly, the Christian monastic life — hermet-
ism and contemplation as well as "mental prayer"; secondly, in a
more restricted way, it denotes a psychosomatic method of prayer,
according to which one sits on a stool with the chin resting on the
chest and the eyes fixed upon the central point of the body, the
navel, and asks for God's mercy, intoning countless times, "Kyrie,
Eleison," (Lord, have mercy), until achieving illumination; thirdly,
Hesychasm is the theory that makes a distinction between the
transcendent nature of God, which is inaccessible, and the manifest
energies, through which God becomes known; it was reputed that
the Hesychasts had visions of the aktiston phos (uncreated light);
fourthly, the movement may be viewed from a political and social
point of view as an ideology that trusts in God and is skeptical
about humankind's capacity to regulate affairs by reason alone. ^"^

Hesychasm found a fierce opponent in Barlaam of Calabria, a
learned monk from the South of Italy, who, though he had gone to
Byzantium originally because of his opposition to the Western
Church, represented in his criticism of Palamas the scholastic tradi-
tion of the West. But Hesychasm was also criticized by Byzantine
savants like Nikiphoros Ghrighoras and was referred to pejora-
tively as omphaloskopia (navel-gazing). There were many public de-
bates, and the controversy involved even the imperial family.

Palamas, however, was not really initiating doctrines and prac-

'■^ J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Hesychasm (London: "Variorum reprints", 1974).

24 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

tices of his own. He was merely trying to clarify what earlier fathers
of the Church had said regarding the nature of divinity and the
ways in which man could comprehend and commune with it. Such
earlier fathers were Gregory of Nyssa, Maximos the Confessor,
and Symeon the Young Theologian (an eleventh-century mystic,
perhaps the greatest of the Orthodox Church). John of the Climax
also had recommended breathing practices, perhaps not very differ-
ent from the analogous exercises of the Yoga followers of today.
Others had intimated that the "uncreated light" was the same kind
as the light that had shone long ago on Mount Tabor and the light
sent to the Apostles at Pentecost. ^^

The fourteenth century of Byzantium, the age of Palamas, looks
in retrospect, as Pentzikis remarks elsewhere, like a long-drawn
death agony, with the weakened borders of the state being overrun
steadily by the Turks. The political insecurity of the times may in
fact have contributed to the introspective, not to say passive, theol-
ogy of mysticism and Hesychastic practices. Similarly, modern so-
cial unrest and family problems as well as the feeling of personal
contradictions must have encouraged in Pentzikis the conviction
that a human being is an essentially weak creature with delusions of
grandeur, who can find solace and sustenance only in forces outside
its own unreliable and shifting self.

Pentzikis' own colossal effort as a writer who knows that he will
never become popular may be likened to the Hesychast's fervent
pursuit of illumination through asceticism. Writing is Pentzikis'
own askissi (exercise in monastic life), which, like any other de-
votional practice, does not exclude anxiety and doubt. In the post-
script to the Homilies, the essay "Apology", Pentzikis reviews the
question of literary writing critically:

Brothers . . . it is a word which I learned to use at the end of
the Homilies. But I am not sure that I was right. I must excuse
myself whenever I use terms handed down to us from the
religion of Christ. I am quite different from the people of old
times. My intentions, purposes, dreams, words, nothing of
mine can draw authority from the established tradition.
One way of dealing with this problem is to write. This is

" See Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge Universi-
ty Press, 1968), pp. 128-158.

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 25

something which, in a way, allows me to feel that I commune
with the world of tradition and that I am not a stranger, spir-
itually, to anything. I need, then, to write so long as I breathe,
in a manner parallel to the Latin dum spiro spero}^' Writing is
my hope. But the problem is that I can write nothing that will
stand on its own, which others can read and say: "Bravo, I
understand you." Who will read me? (p. 87)

The above lines reveal Pentzikis as a man in the world and of the
world. He wants to be read and appreciated but feels that this is not
happening or is not happening in the way he would like. He then
draws comfort from the thought that writing is an act valuable in
itself, perhaps a world of its own:

Whatever I cannot achieve in action I try to reach by means of
writing. I sense that writing cannot be the simple description
or recollection but the very thing that exists and is lacking in
us. Writing is a contractual act, properly signed, with what is
absent; a testimony sealed forever.

The historian who makes a mediocre description of what
happens is inadequate. He watches from some distant watch-
tower, after deserting the present. He judges on the authority
of the four hundred dhramia^^ of his brain. He speaks of the
past and lives in the future.

The act of writing, however, ignores present and future
entirely. It exists only as an eternal and permanent moment. In
exactly the same way in which we must understand the line of
Saint Romanos the poet: "a newly-born child, the god annunci-
ated centuries ago." (p. 90)^^

These two passages suggest a curve in the mind of Pentzikis, a
curve through which he has undoubtedly been led numerous times.
It starts with the feeling of alienation from the world of tradition,
the world of Pentzikis' roots. Pentzikis perceives that a fragmented
twentieth-century man can only cross himself mechanically and use
the word "brothers" with a sense of guilt for being insincere. Writ-

'^' "So long as I breathe I hope." From an elementary Latin reader familiar to older
high school graduates in Greece.

'^ The equivalent of an oke, an old Turkish measure of weight (two and three
quarter pounds).

'^ From a hymn on the birth of Christ by the Byzantine religious poet Romanos
Melodhos, who lived in the reign of Justinian and Theodora.

26 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

ing is a solution, it helps restore Pentzikis' contact with the world,
brings close to him the people, the things, and the times about
which he writes. But writing presupposes readers, whom Pentzikis
felt he did not have. This realization marks a second critical stage in
Pentzikis' creative process. He overcomes the crisis by throwing
the question of readership overboard. In contrast to historical and
scholarly writing, creative writing can stand on its own. It is a kind
of breath or rhythm that governs the whole self and encompasses
not only the writer, but also the "other," reader and non-reader
aUke. It also cuts across space and time.

This is a mystical perception of writing that finds support in the
analogue of the incarnation of Christ, referred to in the verses of
Romanos. Writing is a kind of incarnation that fulfills its own pur-
pose.

7, Icons

The Icons is a series of poems in free verse which Pentzikis wrote
in 1943. They express his responses to letters, photos, and other
souvenirs kept in a carton. Much of what Pentzikis has written
starts with such cartons.

Although the Greek title, Ikones, is ambiguous, as it may refer to
several types of images (in the Orthodox tradition, "icons" are
religious representations, usually in color, which can be portable or
fixed to walls), critics found these poems cerebral in contrast to the
more descriptive and lyrical verses by Pentzikis of later years.

In his introduction, Pentzikis states that the first eight poems
were written while he was looking at a number of photos of sculp-
tures from the Louvre. He then takes great care to list all these
items in almost one whole page, but not before he expresses some
thoughts that seem to make the listing more meaningful:

My problem is the search of the other in the mythical depth of
the ego beyond any pretext of surface where antithesis as well
as opposition stretch out. I am an erotikos and try to find a way
for love after accepting the factor of distance, the loss of any
natural bond. I do not stand on what I feel. What I feel helps
me understand what was the motive of feeling in the life of the
other. I have no feelings that express me. My person is ren-
dered by chance, the incidental finding of an objective reality

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 27

where the flowing essence of my being can rest, for a moment,
in form, as in a bridal chamber, (p. 2)

Here one can note the tension, also found in passages quoted
earlier, between the two poles of Pentzikis' nature, the heart and
the mind. In his approach to the world, Pentzikis wishes to over-
come the curse of confused emotions on the one hand and the
abstractions of his reasoning part on the other. He feels that he
should go down to basics, that his reactions should be like those of
objects in all their purity, unclouded by emotions and thoughts,
which tend to compartmentalize and distort reality. This is the
modern element in the character of Pentzikis. At the same time,
the words which he uses in his discussion, erotikos and "bridal cham-
ber," give out his essentially warm, sentimental nature.

The Icons are not self-contained poems, based more or less on
mood, or offering a more or less particular message. They are
rather like stages in a process, ways of developing a long poem. The
poem is never really finished. It keeps its exploratory, tentative
character. Pentzikis negates feeling as a defining element in his
relationship with the world. He aims for the object:

By dying I myself become an object, a statue of life, a replica
like the face which I now hold before me admiring it, as the
artist of the Renaissance admired a vertebra of the human
body. The truth of the human body's fife with all its possible
variations excels over any idea. (p. 6)

The importance which memory assumes in Pentzikis' evolution
as a writer must be stressed at this stage. Working with a bunch of
mementoes before him, Pentzikis both challenges and surrenders
to his memory. He is deliberate when he extracts from memory its
secrets, but he also finds in memory an escape from actuahty — in
the case of the Icons the actuality of war and personal failure.

Only the first and last of the nine poems have their own titles; the
others are numbered.

The dual mechanism of memory is already discernible in the first
poem, "Dhidhahi" (Instruction):

I therefore think of myself as an educator

I must express the eternal and true side of life

the memory of senses is a faded rose inside of me

28 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

an intoxication full of thought embraces the characters

an embroidery that adorns and a thing caught separate

handkerchief full of sorrowful face

with the hair in which I comb the enclosed half-world

with all the masts and riggings the hair

of sentimental motions I am drenched through with sorrow

I know the fatal roads to which we return

the fatigued sterility which divides subject from object.

(vv. 24-34)

The impatient and charged lines suggest the struggle of the observ-
ing mind with memories. These, hke roses pressed between the
pages of an old book, preserve enough of their fragrance to chal-
lenge and obstruct the mind's resolution to break out into a state of
pure essence, of an indivisible objective reality.

The second poem starts emphatically on a note of pain. The poet
feels the pain when he realizes that he cannot relate to other peo-
ple. He would hke to have love for the other person. But this
seems impossible without the concomitant feeling of possession,
namely that he possesses and that he is also possessed. His senses
inform him well; he has eyes that can see and hands that can touch.
Yet he is like "a cork in the ocean of feeling." He will feel lost so
long as he gives in to his emotions. He must sacrifice them. He will
wake up a "victor", one morning, after he has surrendered part of
himself, seen and gladly joined the festive procession over the
tomb of "dead love."

This poetry is really much more angular than mere summaries or
descriptions of it can show. In its convolutions, however, one dis-
cerns Pentzikis' constant and insistent search for a rhythm. He
looks for a pattern, a method of living that will honor both the
complexity and the simphcity of life. The search is more explicit in
the sixth poem:

I must not fail anything

more of the components of being

in the matrix that is being put together

the beautiful in simple forms

simplicity and complicated structure

progressing all the time

developing the [various] species the [one] species

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 29

everything of the body is significant
on the throne she sits
the cushion that supports her back
the psychological folds of the clothes.

(vv. 16-26)

This is of course the flow, the vital flow — often undercut or
reversed by its own rashness but also persistent — of the subject to
the object, a movement which Pentzikis suggests more clearly in
these lines from the fourth poem:

Completely alone I do not understand

what is the use of my modesty

the meditation of my tight lips

the voluptuous look

the bending of the head in sadness

I think of every detail

until it can be seen in its own light

passages from the subject to the object

the object has its own value

if I love life I should not subdue it

its not coming to see me does not matter.

(vv. 33-43)

The ninth and last poem, "Rapsodhia Sheseon" (Rhapsody of
relationships) is a poem fleuve of five hundred and seventy-three
lines. In a brief note appended to the poem, Pentzikis informs us
that the writing of this piece was bracketed by two deaths, the
death of a cousin of his mother and that of an old lady who used to
clean his drugstore. One death heralds the poem and another
underscores it. But the poem itself also contains visions of death,
among which is the memory of the funeral of Pentzikis' own father.
Dryly descriptive scenes alternate with meditative parts, in which
the experiences of death are reevaluated under the light of religion:

The deluge, if you survive it, continues for a whole life
until the olive tree of peace springs up at the entrance
leaving behind all private knowledge on horseback
given to the cosmic motion which stars follow
a pilgrim with gold incense and myrrh
come to the cave where the earth touches the unreachable.

(vv. 165-170)

30 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

8. The Ways of the Snail

A kind of explosion in Thessaloniki's literary life, repressed by
the war years, was the publication in December 1945 of the journal
Kohlias (Snail). The editor of the journal was the writer Yorghos
Kitsopoulos, but its soul was Pentzikis. Other contributors to the
monthly Kohlias (the name aptly symbolized their introspective but
also sinuous style), ^'^ were the poets Zoe Karelli, Takis Varvitsiotis,
Yorghos Themelis; the prose writer Yorghos Dhelios and the
painter Yannis Svoronos.

Pentzikis placed in Kohlias much of the material that later found
a more permanent home in his books. This material included orig-
inal pieces, translations from writers like Joyce and Berdiaeff,
older ones like Kierkegaard, Shestov, Novalis, de Nerval, Rabelais,
the Byzantine chronographer Psellos, and the still older writers
Synesios and Plotin. In Kohlias Pentzikis also published his cri-
tiques of fellow poets and fellow artists. To give an example of the
contents oi Kohlias, one could cite the issue of June 18, 1947. It
includes a complete translation of Mallarme's Igitur and an article
on the French poet, both by Pentzikis, a drawing by the painter
Yorghos Bouzianis, a prose piece by Yorghos Kitsopoulos, another
by Henry Miller in translation, and Pentzikis' review article on the
poet Yorghos Themelis.^"

One of Pentzikis' own narratives, initially published in Kohlias 4
(1946), as "Mia Kori" (A maiden) and which appears in Retinue
with the title "Neara Kori" (Young maiden), is an exhaustive descrip-
tion of a young lady in motion — the narrator follows her to work
and then home. We recall Renee of Andhreas Dhimakoudhis, but
the lady here is no longer the individual beauty that absorbs,
sponge-like, the sensibility of the man, but rather a pretext for a
concrete and minute description of the space that contains her. The
young lady grows in size and significance, embracing the whole
world. Then she is fused with the world to the degree that the man
suddenly loses her from sight. But this is a transitional stage, out of
which he makes a "jump" to see her on another level, that of myth:

''^ The image of a snail shell was also projected in the spiral arrangement of the
journal's subtitle words: literature, poetry, visual arts, criticism, life. The word "life"
is significantly found in the very center of the spiral.

^" See chapter 6, section 5.

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 31

Who is she? I took her to be approachable but she is not.
Unconquerable castle with iron gates. You touch her, but she
eludes your touch. She has built a tower with the heads of the
young men who tried to win her. I wore out three pairs of iron
shoes following her day and night. I do not know what the
problem is. I have lost my speech. I find myself without knowl-
edge in an ocean of matter. I can make out many people only
from the waist up or only their heads, not the whole body. I
am shipwrecked in the mass of phenomena. I cannot find any
certain form. Beauty generates monsters. Horrible and ugly
results. In the darkness I grope for land, leaving behind me all
those things that inspire fright. Where is the bridge which
carries you to life? I cannot see but feel. Planted in my rib, you
accompany me since the time of Adam. Considering mankind,
I raise my eyes and recognize the land, familiar from ancestors
and forefathers. I let my body float. I am in the river
Aliakmon.^' The waters under me are illuminated. I can see
fragments of ancient reliefs, tiles and stones from churches. I
hunt a stag at the river bank, and across the river I can make
out a light. The river lets me cross it without wetting my feet. I
lean on humble vegetation, lichens and weeds covering the
rocks. I walk through branches with drying leaves, which drop
at my step. The light came from a naked skull. I take it up with
tenderness. I place it helmet-like on my head. I hear the mill
that turns and grinds the flour. My palms are filled with flour.
The birds come down and help themselves. My view has
changed. I talk with them. The mist is clearing from the
branches. I can see you. You are my river companion. I can see
your hand. A human form. Unique Maiden. {Retinue,
pp. 69-70)

Here again, Pentzikis is shown in the see-saw, up-and-down move-
ment of his unquiet nature. Initially attracted by a young lady, he
nevertheless resists being absorbed by her. He ponders her sur-
roundings and sets out to describe the organic frame into which she
fits. The effort results in his losing her from sight. This frightens
rather than reassures him. He feels compelled to search for the
vanished object of his attraction, for, after all, he is a lover of forms.
But he gets confused. Like Eurydice with Orpheus, the woman
eludes her man, and in her elusiveness she grows into someone

^' One of the big rivers of Greek Macedonia.

32 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

monstrous like the princess Turandot, immortalized by Puccini,
who played with the lives of the young men vying to win her. He
does find her again, but only after undergoing a purificatory de-
scent to the underworld, that is, the past of his homeland. The lady
reappears but in an idealized form. She is now a combination of the
great maidens of myth, the corn-goddess Persephone and the All
Holy Virgin.

After the demise oi Kohlias in early 1948, Pentzikis placed his
writings in journals like 0 Eonas mas (Our century) and Morphes
(Forms). In the former he published his articles on the painters
Yorghos Papaloukas and Ghika,^^ and in the latter his translation
into modern Greek of the Byzantine work Barlaam and loasaph (or
losaphat), an edifymg story commonly attributed to Saint John of
Damascus of the eighth century A.D.^^ Although this work seems
to be an adaptation to medieval Christianity of the legend of Bud-
dha, it must have attracted the attention of Pentzikis, as it glorifies
monasticism and the veneration of icons. Also woven into the
narrative are speeches with expositions of Christian doctrines, con-
fessions of faith, and quotations from early Christian writers, as
well as fables and parables. One of these fables, the so-called Tale
of the Caskets, occurs also in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

Barlaam and loasaph had enjoyed great popularity in medieval
times and generated other works, romances, sermons, and plays. Its
translation into modern Greek by Pentzikis — the longest that he
ever attempted — marks his firmer orientation toward the Byzan-
tine world. On the other hand, Pentzikis never finished his transla-
tion of Joyce's Ulysses, although he considered Joyce to be the
greatest prose writer of the twentieth century. In spite of his great-
ness, Pentzikis says, Joyce remained an individual who kept his
pride.2^

9. Knowledge of Things

The first creative period of Pentzikis was rounded out in 1950
with the publication in book form of Praghmatoghnossia (Knowl-

^^ See chapter 6, section 6.

^^ Barlaam and loasaph can be read in the Loeb Classical Library edition (London
and New York, 1914).
^^ See chapter 6, section 1.

A YOUNG MAN ALONE 33

edge of things), a series of essays originally printed in the journal
Morphes. The progression from the self-tormented hero of
Andhreas Dhimakoudhis to the unnamed man, aware of his Thes-
salonian environment, of The Dead Man and the Resurrection, is
here completed in what could be called a "total immersion" in the
objective world, the world outside. There is no longer a central
character or even an anonymous Lazarus resurrected from the
dead, but rather a world which contains man and his problems, just
as it contains plants, stones, and city streets. This is the existential-
ist's search in reverse — the writer's consciousness does not coil
around itself but spreads out like a network of veins into a mass of
objective phenomena.

Knowledge of Things signals a critical moment in the evolution of
Pentzikis as a writer. He later might have drifted into dryness. He
might have developed some sort of literary idiom devoid of senti-
ment, or he might have given up writing altogether. But Knowledge
of Things only represents a stage in a cycle of conduct, which a critic
has described as follows: Pentzikis tries to communicate effectively
with other people, but is hindered by social convention. He there-
fore retreats into himself, but he cannot stand loneliness. In order
to find an outlet, he turns to religion, on which he is unable to settle
entirely, because his rationality militates against the adoption of
transcendental solutions. Then he passes to an extreme abnegation
of the self through an objective apprehension of the world. The
bulk oi Knowledge of Things marks this last stage. What could have
been taken as pretensions of synthesis in the first two books of
prose are absent here. He describes people and their mundane
concerns, as well as external realities, topographical or otherwise,
in a paratactic manner. The secret wish of Pentzikis is to win the
obliteration of his tormented self in the quicksand of the senses,
and reach, beyond the senses, the world of objective reality.

Pentzikis is here like a reporter who goes around with a camera
and a tape recorder, into which he registers whatever he sees or
hears. He looks into the minds of passers-by and reads their
thoughts or records their heartbeats. He need not knock at doors,
for he has a master key that opens all rooms. He enters and keeps
on describing: names, movements, a balloon in the hand of a girl
with which the sea-breeze plays, the illuminations of an old manu-

34 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

script, books which a young character by the name Dhiamantis has
read, the false dream of Homeric Agamemnon. Memory inter-
venes, admits, grinds, and connects time. The writer pauses for
memory; then he follows his subject from room to room, charting
his gestures and pursuing his thoughts.

The breakthrough comes at the end of the book. The chapter
"Outis" (No Man) starts with a thought on hfe and death:

The flowers that adorn the dead in his coffin fade like the
chrysanthemums of autumn. Winter keeps nothing of its own
for Spring. The dead remain expressionless like silence. All
idols were disturbed and ruined by silence. How does man
remain alive? Is there in his form something uncorruptible?
What is that? I wonder. Yet, after the collapse of the values of
life, this humble wonder preserves solid ties with silence. It is
this relationship which bestows beauty to mourning. It is not
that the funereal dirge ceases to spring from life, but it is a
unique stage of life, a moment cut off from the time of vanity;
it can disturb the earth so that the dead may hear in his pit the
voice of the living, (p. 65)

The thoughts expressed in the passage above carry the middle-aged
character Outis to recollections of Greek folk traditions, reports of
neighborhood ghosts — the ghost of Hamlet's father is also men-
tioned — that suggest mysterious avenues of traffic between the
living and the immaterial specters. Outis was hurt in his school
days, when his fellow students made fun of his name and called him
"nobody." Now he feels happy with the name, which permits him
to hide his individuality behind it:

Oh! What a nice push forward didn't Odysseus give to the
human spirit by hiding his real name!^^ Sensing the annihila-
tion of time in its issue, thanks to this coincidence, forgetting
tomorrow and the time after tomorrow as well as yesterday and
the time before yesterday, indifferent to the swift flow of time,
Outis lived within the solid morning of the unforeseen, (p. 66)

From the sequence of the narrative, we understand this "solid
morning of the unforeseen" to be a child-like state of being. This

^^ In Homer's Odyssey, book 9, Odysseus introduces himself as "No Man" to the
Cyclops.

A YOUNG MAN ALONE

35

state is represented by the early morning or early evening; that is,
before either the sun or the moon have imposed themselves whole
on the world:

Inside this light Outis sees the window opening its glass panes
like pages in a book, mirroring the bed with its blankets, the
glass of milk on the small table, the pretty bouquet of the
bitter chrysanthemums, the arabesques of cigarette smoke that
half-conceal the door through which he can slip out. (p. 67)

In the two closing chapters of the book, the complete deperson-
alization of Outis seeks its sanction in religion. "Theophania"
(Theophany) takes its name from the annual festival of the baptism
of Christ and deals with the reactions of various characters to this
festival. The Church is said to be simple and make no sentimental
hypotheses; it opens man's eyes to reality without any interme-
diaries. A medical doctor offers an anthropological explanation of
Theophany, based on the theories of Freud and Adler, but the
young man of the group retorts that prayer and abstinence are the
true wisdom. The last chapter, "O Ghamos" (The wedding), com-
pletes the notion that salvation lies in Christ. Outis fishes the cross
out of the sea after it has been thrown there in a symbolic gesture
by the priest officiating at the Theophany ritual. Later, Outis mar-
ries the girl of his dreams and builds a church. ^^'

^^' Cf. with the end of The Dead Man and the Resurrection, as discussed on p. 18
above.

CHAPTER 3

MARRIED LIFE

1 . The Expanding Self

The word ghamos, which in Greek may refer to either "wedding"
or "marriage," is one of the key words in the writings of Nikos
Gabriel Pentzikis. He often uses it metaphorically to suggest his
harmonious and creative fusion with someone or something out-
side himself. The term pops up even in his dry descriptive passages
to remind the reader that he has to do with a human person who
acts and reacts lovingly to the world.

The real marriage of Pentzikis to Niki Lazaridhis in 1948 was
another sign of acceptance of himself and the world. This event, his
subsequent parenthood in 1952, and other developments in his
professional life,^ marked the beginning of another period in Pent-
zikis' life, which may be said to extend to his retirement year, 1968.
It is a period during which Pentzikis reached full maturity in paral-
lel with the making of great progress in the development of his
native city. Thessaloniki grew not only in population, but also in
the cultural trappings of a modern metropoUs. A society, Tehni
(Art), was organized in 1951 to promote the city's acquisition of a
symphony orchestra, a theater, museums, galleries, and exhibition
halls. These were indeed acquired in the following twenty years,
while a new generation of Thessalonian writers and artists com-
peted ably with their Athenian counterparts.

Pentzikis was often active in the efforts to develop Thessaloniki
culturally, but the city continued to interest him also in more
esoteric ways. In an important essay, "Thessaloniki ke Zoi" (Thes-

' In 1954, Pentzikis became the official sales representative in northern Greece of
the Swiss pharmaceutical company Geigy and traveled extensively inside Greece on
company business.

MARRIED LIFE 37

saloniki and life), which appears in Mother Thessaloniki, he dealt
with the problem which a painter finds in trying to reproduce in his
art the atmospheric nuances of the city — the cloud formations
over and near Thessaloniki have, according to Pentzikis, their own
unique character. The painter will have to take liberties, as El
Greco did in his painted views of Toledo. The object is expressed
through its "marriage" with the subject, the artist. This involves
letting the eye see, through the gauze of memory, beyond what it
actually sees. El Greco made the changes which he thought neces-
sary, says Pentzikis, because he had to obey "the aesthetic law
which stands as much above the natural law of immediacy as the
soul stands above the body." Pentzikis saw art as the metaphysics of
reahty and searched instinctively for the aesthetic discipline that
would give meaning to the different faces, often contradictory,
which Thessaloniki displays following its weather changes:

It has an azure sky like the islands, but its fogs remind you of
London. Her bay at the inmost part of the Thermaic Gulf,
where ships from all seas dock, recalls, very often at dusk,
continental lakes like that of Geneva. While it looks romantic
through the trees of the Sei-Sou forest, the view of its inhab-
ited quarters depresses you with its realism. The avenue of
Egnatia with the triumphal arch of Galerius suggests epic,
while you grow sentimental in the Queen Olga Street. There
are side-streets that remind you of the quiet petit bourgeois
poems of Francois Coppee, but elsewhere you get a headache
from the heavy air, polluted, you'd say, from some corpse.
There are interiors of houses that recall Dostoevsky settings,
while the rear view of many habitations take you to indi-
vidualistic Scandinavia. In Thessaloniki, everything starts,
wants to become something and nothing continues as it
started; everything is either interrupted or changes; classiciz-
ing tendencies mingle with arrivistic influences from the
West. ... At different levels, time uses one and the same
piece of property, which may have been originally a church,
then it became a mosque, a coffeehouse, a drugstore, a tele-
phone center, a storehouse for tobacco, a restaurant, an office,
a house of prostitution, a theater, (pp. 68—69)

Pentzikis painted much, mostly in tempera, during those years
and held several exhibitions of his work either alone or in groups.

38 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

He was awarded palmes academiques for his work by the French
government, guided French VIP's around Thessaloniki and to
Mount Athos in 1956, and traveled to Switzerland where he made
the acquaintance of the sculptor Hans Arp.^ Eventually, Pentzikis
became better known and was patronized by some critics and intel-
lectuals. He published in more places, and his paintings sold better.
The general reader, however, continued to ignore his writings. In
the sixties, Pentzikis met and had fruitful exchanges with George
Seferis, and delivered various lectures in and outside Thessaloniki.
His title of I'enfant terrible of Greek letters persisted and even
became ineradicable.

During this period, Pentzikis published both poems and prose
pieces, but did not come up with a book until 1963. Too busy! It is
a period in which he reached out to the world with greater confi-
dence and serenity than he did in the years 1930 to 1950. Instead
of being slowed down by advancing middle age, he seemed to
discover new resources inside himself balancing a more resolute
attachment to his native Thessaloniki with an enlarged awareness of
the world, Greek and non-Greek.

2. Painting

The title given to an international exhibition of Byzantine paint-
ing in Athens, Greece, about twenty years ago, "Byzantine Paint-
ing, a European Art," was not motivated by the snobbism of the
organizers but rather from their belief that there are strong bonds
between Byzantine iconography and pre- as well as post-
Renaissance painting, El Greco being the catalyst of this rela-
tionship. Pentzikis remarks that the Byzantines share with the
Moderns (especially the Impressionists) the theory of com-
plementary colors and likes to quote a French writer who has called
the modern painters martyrs.^ By analogy, Pentzikis' own style of
painting could be called Europeanized Byzantine or Byzantinized
European. Jacques Lacarriere called Pentzikis a "Byzantine Surreal-
ist" and found that his paintings present a "pointillistic realism" and
a "striking dream quality" Just as his books display a combination of

^ See chapter 6, section 6.

^ In the taped interview on his painting which Pentzikis granted to me in 1978.

MARRIED LIFE 39

"the liberating brazier of images" and "the flaming rigor of icons.'"*

Terms, however, can be misleading, and Lacarriere's "surrealist"
seems to be broadly used instead of "modern." In fact, restless
spirit though he has always been, Pentzikis has not experimented
with painting styles hke surrealism, futurism, and cubism. On the
surface, the visual level, his style remained through the years essen-
tially impressionistic. He was interested primarily in color and even
in his books terms that denote color occur much more frequently
than terms that suggest geometric design.^ So, also in the period
under discussion, design had a marginal importance in his paint-
ings. In the older of these he painted with small curvy brushstrokes
that dissolved the object into color unities. Sometimes the strokes
were very small, almost dot-hke, which created a pointillist kind of
impression; hence Lacarriere's impression of "pointillistic realism."

Before 1957 the colors which Pentzikis used were mostly white,
grey, and ocher. Later, he employed umber, blue, and red on com-
paratively small surfaces, 10 by 12 inches. He painted some por-
traits but concentrated mostly on landscapes and seascapes where
the human or animal figures, when they exist, are in small scale.
The man in the painting Phalara-Langadha (1953), for instance,
looks like another tree.

To an art critic Pentzikis confided that he painted from love of
concrete reality and that his painting exercised a kind of control
over his writing and vice versa. Another critic observed that the
poems of Pentzikis look like notations taken hurriedly on his tem-
peras. Further, one could take Pentzikis' painting to be the visual
link between his poetry and his prose. Finally, in all three activities,
poetry, prose and painting, Pentzikis satisfies his need for a kind of
rhythm which transcends him as an individual and suggests a
national, religious, and artistic tradition.

Eliot has justly pointed out that a national artist can be rejuve-
nated by influences that come from outside his own land. This
holds true for several modern Greek writers and artists who be-
came conscious of their heritage and sought to determine this same

■'Jacques Lacarriere, L'Ete grec. Une Grke quotidimne de 4000 arts (Paris: Plon,
1976), p. 340.

^ This observation is made by Elias Petropoulos in his pamphlet Nikos Gabriel
Pentzikis.

40 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

heritage from stimulations which they received outside of Greece.
George Seferis is a good example of such a writer. In the case of
Pentzikis as well, we notice a more profound awareness of his
native traditions during his second creative period. The impres-
sionistic character of his paintings is combined with a native Greek
and particularly Byzantine pictorial element which reminds one of
a long tradition. The portrait King Amyntas (now in the collection
of Professor George Savidis) shows, in frontal view, an introspec-
tive figure that suggests the spirit of both a fighter and an ascetic.
Pentzikis stresses the memorial character of his paintings.
Whereas impressionists like Renoir and Monet and symbolists like
Maeterlinck register in their works their immediate impressions,
Pentzikis paints and writes from memory. He records not direct
impressions but tries to resurrect on another level the dead bodies
of his experiences. The impressionistic strokes of his brush conceal
his struggle to go deep into the mythical core of memory. He is
metaphysical, a devotee of love beyond the grave. In pagan terms,
as he puts it, he is a devotee of Aphrodite of the lower world.

3. The Theology of Art

Pentzikis said to Lacarriere as they were examining together the
icons and murals of the Church of the Twelve Apostles in Thes-
saloniki:

All this, these icons and frescoes, the whirl of imagery, are a
controlled frenzy, the stigmata of a struggle between the
monk-painter and the invisible world. If there is such an aus-
terity in the composition, an imperial road in the choice of
themes on the walls, this is because one must control, pre-
serve, strangle the devouring devotion, the language of fire
transmitted from a superior power. Otherwise, there would be
no art but chaos. *^

The inspired comment on the inner tensions of Byzantine ico-
nography is only one of many statements Pentzikis has made over
the years on this subject, in his writings, lectures, interviews, and
private conversations. Many of these statements, like the following,

^'L'Eti grec, p. 341.

MARRIED LIFE 4l

are found in Mother Thessaloniki and usually involve a comparison
between the old and the new. The comparison exalts the old humil-
ity of the artist over the pride of the modern world:

In Byzantine art, poetry, painting, and music, life appears styl-
ized. In other words, the human body, clothes and ornaments,
furniture, inside and outside spaces, houses and streets, trees
and animals, are presented not for the value which they may
have in the present but as intermediaries that help us perceive
another life. Through the centuries we came to identify the
other life with the world of the ideas, which gave way, after the
French Revolution, to various monistic conceptions and has
become for us shadowy and ambiguous. . . . But the other
life is not a question of ideas; and if Europe has forgotten this
in its wasting of the moral resources of faith, we, who during
four hundred years of slavery {to the Turks], preserved
ourselves only by the conventions of our worship, after the fall
of vain ornamentation in Byzantium, are in a position to know
it, since we have witnessed the resurgence of our life as free-
dom, without any ideological rhetoric. By simply persevering,
our life was able to refill the framework which we received
from our myth. (pp. 61—62)

Here, Pentzikis reaffirms very strongly the validity of both the
Byzantine painting tradition and of the faith that underlies it. He
goes even further than that in saying that the fall of Byzantium as a
worldly state was a good thing, for it helped preserve the purity of
faith and saved Greece from the Renaissance and post-Renaissance
positivist thought.^ Art does not exist for art's sake or for pedagog-
ical reasons; instead, it is the concrete image of the other, the
metaphysical world. Even the smallest details in Byzantine painting
and the architecture of a Byzantine church treasure their own sym-
boHsms.

On the other hand, Pentzikis often stresses that the symbols of
Byzantine art and architecture are drawn from the world of the
senses and concretize rather than abstract the faith of the artist or
the architect. The fullness of the church architecture can be
grasped only through the comparisons which it evokes with the
sights of this world. The roof of the Twelve Apostles Church sug-

^ See chapter 6, section 7.

42

HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

gests, as Pentzikis observes in Toward Church-Going (p. 54), the
panorama of a whole city; the roof of Saint Catherine's Church,
with its various levels and shapes, looks like a bouquet of flowers.
On the walls, the setting of the tiles around the basic motif of the
cross reminds one of carpets. Pentzikis stresses, above all, the
rhythm that pervades and controls not only Byzantine art and
architecture, but also religious rituals — a rhythm and a symmetry
which spring from a mistrust of complete symmetry in the classical
sense.

4. The Poems

Between 1949 and 1953 Pentzikis published in successive issues
of the journal Morphes a series of poems which one may call "mid-
dle poems," as they fall between the Icons and the later series of
poems, Anakomidhi (Transferral of relics), and were given no
general name. The "middle poems" are more lyrical and topical
than the poems oilcans; they tell stories and evoke legends that are
associated mostly with Greek Macedonia, describe various geog-
raphical areas, and combine reality with myth, in an effort to en-
large the central theme by means of concrete detail. Commenting
on these poems a Thessalonian critic, Dinos Christianopoulos, says:

The poem is now written and not simply put together, as in the
past. It presents a strict unity of theme and its composition is
more normal. There are still problems, but, whereas earlier
many themes of great variety created a mosaic from which a
meaning had to be extracted, now one theme is developed in
the whole poem, combined with various details that give the
poem plasticity.^

"Topographia" (Topography) is in free verse, but the lines are
grouped in quatrains:

Higher than the houses hidden by mist

at the upper part of the square with the many

churches
(which are still visible from all sides
or were burnt and survive only as names)

" "Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis, as Poet," Dhiaghonios 4, no. 2 (1961), p. 96.

MARRIED LIFE 43

about the middle of the hill where the city climbs
at the level, almost, of the Worker's Center
close by the Great Church of our Patron Saint
across from the swings where children play

at the spot of the ancient athletic stadium
(where the martyr, heartened by the voice of his

teacher in Christ
which he heard through the prison bars,
stood his ground against the power of the king

who thought material wealth was the ultimate
and went on building palaces)

where the Church and Nestor's tomb may have been
there on the marble piece rolled down from its base,
my love is sitting.

The poem provides an exact topographical and historical descrip-
tion of a particular spot in Thessaloniki, but the description ends on
a sentimental note. This note is also the secret core of the whole
poem. Pentzikis does the opposite of what one would expect. Nor-
mally, he should start with the image of the sitting girl, the poet's
beloved, and then locate or describe the surrounding landscape
outwards. Instead, we have a progression from the borders to the
center of the scene. The description involves the story of Saint
Demetrius as well; the Saint's blessing through the bars of his
dungeon the Christian youth Nestor who, thus emboldened,
fought and vanquished the pagan bully Lieos; and the martyrdom of
the Saint. The image of the sitting girl at the end comes as a
revelation. It stikes a purely lyrical chord, but we recognize that the
image of the sitting girl and the sentiments it evokes have been
pre-colored and deepened by the girl's precise placement in a space
hallowed by time.

In the much longer poem "Symvan" (Event), a group of soldiers
on leave visits a country chapel. One of the soldiers narrates an old
story of the miraculous rescue of Thessaloniki by Saint Demetrius
from a hostile invasion from the North. The soldiers gain a vision
of the city not as a group of buildings but as a living person. The
past comes alive and the present becomes meaningful. We detect
the same process in the poem "Messa ston Paleo Nao" (In the old

44 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

church), where Pentzikis describes the interior of a church while
musing on the faith which motivated the church's builders.

Not all of these poems, however, structure and control the poet's
feelings around some historical or topographical reality. In the
poem "Strophi" (Turning point) exclamation seems to be the domi-
nant note:

I want to talk to you but I can't

0 houses of the world, why are you made of stone,
why doesn't creation rise like unleavened bread
feeling the breath of the creator in the heart's beat.-*

Open the windows for the sun to enter
tearing down the fences built by men
so that the simple, flower-garbed hope
may rise to the top, a sign of God.

1 want to sing of you, flowers of the earth
as I plunge my hand in the past of the race
through heaps of fallen dead leaves

to the stem that raises its head high.

The head that will be reaped at some moment
in the heartiest satisfaction of God —
reading it we are able to die
serene in our intimacy with another life.

The message is similar to that of the other poems, indeed of Pent-
zikis' entire work. The "other," truer, life can be gained via death.
Yet the manner of this particular poem is unusually lyrical, dance-
like. It expresses no doubts. Sentiments are not suppressed here.
Like the "Anastenaridhes" (fire-walkers) of Langadha, whom Pent-
zikis often defends against their more "enlightened" detractors, he
lets himself go on simple faith. '^

In the later series of poems, Transferral of Relics, ^^ Pentzikis
reverts to a more loose and abstract form. He no longer groups

'^ The Anastenaridhes (etymological meaning, "The sighing people") of Langadha
(a town near Thessaloniki) once a year tread publicly on a pile of live coals while
holding their family icons. The custom oi pyrorassia (fire-walking) is a remnant of
ancient orgiastic religions and is frowned upon by the Greek Orthodox Church, but
has popular support.

^^^ Anakomidhi (Transferral), printed in Dhiaghonios 4, no. 2 (1961), pp. 29-52.

MARRIED LIFE 45

lines in stanzas of four lines each but runs them consecutively.
Some lines are much shorter than others. These poems are very
much hke pieces of prose but they are also dense and allusive. They
remind us of the Icons, with which they are also linked by the
introductory poem "Horos Kimitiriou" (Space of cemetery). This
was written between 1944 and 1950. All the other poems are
grouped in two parts. The first part includes twelve poems num-
bered with Greek numerals, while the second consists of only one
long poem, "Synanastrophi Synehis" (Constant association). All of
these poems were written in 1960-1961 and they are Pentzikis'
responses to the transferral of his late mother's remains. ^^

The spade which unearths the bones of the dead stirs together
with the soil deep-buried memories and feelings. The poems are
like bones, so to speak, suddenly exposed to the light together with
the insides of the grave. Images, thoughts, impressions, sentiments
jostle against one another and at the same time struggle to cohere
with one another, as in "Dhiastavrossi" (Crossroads):

Heroic home of a spinster

a kiln hidden on the right

became a shelter for poultry

before the owners were reduced to ashes

while they were impaling him she dyed her hair

with the slippers on the red tiles

she learned about the cure of the sick

securing her happiness in advance

sat on the only couch of the house

shortly even the windows were gone

they buried the child who had been ill

the courtyard was filled with sights

the dredging machine worked for the excavation

the foundations were laid of a coop for

migratory birds
the vegetable garden was framed in gold
the bridge got electric lights
no more room for the couple to hide
the carpet knots multiplied in the loom
her daughter is near delivery

' ' These poems are discussed perceptively, within the frame of Pentzikis' total
oeuvre, by Kimon Friar in his Modern Greek Poetry, pp. 106-112.

46 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

her second child was a boy

"in fact I am dead," she said

"I felt alive only with him"

the town authorities left

the wooden rail of the bridge

the parapets are of cement

in front of the stranger's house

the asphalted road forms a curve

the widowed mother passes with her son

dazed in the labyrinth of the little streets

wonders whether her husband is still there

under the bridge

amidst the stones of the dry river bed

she is anxious when it rains

in case there is a flood in the yards and

basements
of the kindly wisdom of the old.

Pentzikis registers memories from his old neighborhood as they
come, with a minimum of empathy, found only in the adjectives
"heroic" and "kindly". The gradually changing landscape goes
together with the natural or unexpected changes in the destinies of
its humble population. Men blend with their environment, while
the dead do not vanish but continue to influence the living. The
voice of tradition enlivens this prosaic world of common destinies.
"While they were impaling him" echoes the death of Athanasios
Dhiakos (a hero of the Greek War of Independence), while the
reference to the dead husband who is probably still under the
bridge brings up associations with the well-known folk ballad "The
Bridge of Arta." This ballad treats of the very ancient custom
according to which a living person is buried in the foundations of an
important, public structure to make it strong.

All poems in Transferral of Relics are transpositions of things into
poetry, avenues of traffic between the present and the past, be-
tween life and what is wrongly thought to be dead and gone. This
theme is stated most explicitly in the last poem of the series, "Con-
stant Association," of which here are some lines:

his hand searches in the ashes to find the beauty
he thinks that he holds in his palm the rich hair

MARRIED LIFE 47

his heart gets a fright and a flock of birds spreads

its wings
the hundred stars hang from the sky
the young man finds himself in a crowded city
looking from high up he thinks "undoubtedly
dead and living walk here together."

3. Continuing Progress

Pentzikis did not put a book together between 1951 and 1962
but wrote and published much in journals. Thus, he accumulated
material which he brought out later in separate editions. Of the
various essays and narratives printed in journals, some circulated
also in offprint. After 1950 Pentzikis appears to concentrate more
on his own work. He does not translate, writes very few art re-
views, and has written only one literary critique, on George Seferis.

Several chapters of Retinue date from the early fifties. In one of
these, "Enas Dhaskalos sti Limni" (A teacher in the lake), we find a
duplication of Andhreas Dhimakoudhis or rather a composite por-
trait of Andhreas and the unnamed narrator of The Dead Man and
the Resurrection in the teacher who drowns in a lake. The man is
working in a poor community of northern Greece and develops the
habit of walking in the country, reflecting on worlds brighter than
his own. His deepest longing is to see Virtue come alive. He
searches for it everywhere, even in the little stones of the fields
which are reputed to help the growth of tobacco. He looks for it in
the trees:

The bare branches with their varied divisions and subdivisions,
or loaded with half-open eyes, the color of their rim dulled by
the green ramifications, the leaves, the tendrils, and their many
reproductive systems, which look like a fantastic feast, with
their white and rosy flowers, knitted around his eyes (the way
fishermen's wives do, sitting on the beach, and with the help of
their bare feet) a net which caught his vision like a wild
bird. ... (p. 87)

The man steps into the lake and drowns, thus entering the gate of
another world. Every year in the spring his pupils come and play by
the fallen trunk of the plane-tree under which he has been buried.

48 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

By drowning the teacher achieves a mystical identification with the
surrounding area.

A similar case is the young man of "To Onoma" (The name)
{Retinue, pp. 82-85), who looks for something solid behind the
images of things and tries to decipher the dry leaves which he lifts
from the ground. Another beautiful narrative from the same period
is "Vrohi" (Rain) {ibid., 78-81). The fall rain evokes in the writer's
mind happy as well as sad memories and stirs up his deep-seated
nostalgia for another, nobler world.

Among the essays on Thessaloniki, apart from "Thessaloniki and
Life," discussed earlier, one could note "Ghraphikotites" (High-
lights), originally printed in 1959, and found in Mother Thessaloni-
ki, (pp. 89-94), in which Pentzikis draws a distinction between
Athens and his native city. The light and dry climate of Attica,
where Athens is, encourages clarity; an object can be seen distinct-
ly there. In Thessaloniki nothing can be isolated: "There is a
coexistence of objects that creates successive fiery tongues of ex-
citement in the horizons of the spirit. This is exactly what we can
name, from an aesthetic point of view, color, in contrast to the
architectural line."^^ The painter and the metaphysician or theolo-
gian work together here, while at the same time there is no viola-
tion of the city's meteorological data in the description of Thessalo-
niki.

Other essays from Mother Thessaloniki carry out the common
theme: In "Apopsi apo ta Voriodhytika" (View from the northwest)
(pp. 77—82), Pentzikis describes the medieval walls of Thessaloniki
— or what is left of them. He notes the monotony of the wall
surface, broken effectively by the use of various decorative motifs
made with tiles, crosses, and occasional inscriptions. A blind win-
dow is made to look like an embroidery. The past and present life
of the city are also treated in "Panorama ke Istoria" (Full view and
history) (pp. 83—88). From the eighteenth century Pentzikis moves
backward to the traditions associated with the founding of the city
in 315 BC. In "Arhontikos AvIoghiros" (High-class yard) (pp.
16-22) the discussion centers around the not too distant past of the
city, when Jews and Levantine Franks lived and worked together

'^ There is a similar discussion in "Clouds and Reveries," ibid., pp. ll-ld.

MARRIED LIFE 49

with the Greeks. "Platia Eleftherias" (Liberty Square), (pp.
95-104), which provides snapshots from the well-known square of
the city, recalls the style of Knowledge of Things. The street and
shop signs are printed in capitals to make them look more au-
thentic; then, the capitals are extended to words that have some
special value. These are grouped with fragments from conversa-
tions, telephone exchanges, and radio songs.

All these and other publications exemplify in rich and intricate
ways the two basic forces in the writing of Pentzikis: to salvage on
paper whatever he can from the ephemeral world of time that flows
all around him — what the reader first sees in Pentzikis are the
floating objects of a shipwreck, some critic said — and to integrate
all this into some higher pattern which will not oppose tradition,
but rather validate it.

6. Architecture of the Scattered Life

Pentzikis launched this, his first book in many years, in 1963 on a
note of optimism: "According to what I have in mind, I hope that, if
I start a new piece of work, it will go well. This makes me optimis-
tic. Optimism or what I understand as optimism is something indis-
pensable to fife" (p. 7). The image of flowers on a dead body, which
we find at the end of the book's first chapter, is the visible equiva-
lent of the feeling of optimism. This leads, in the second chapter, to
the concept of unity or unifying rhythm among things like the
flower, the rocks, the sea, the trees, and then to a thought that
seems to echo Plato's theory of the archetypal ideas, which man
instinctively copies or imitates in whatever he does.

The book sprang from a box of souvenirs. Pentzikis often men-
tions this box in the pages of his book as a reminder to the reader
that the Architecture of the Scattered Life rests on a concrete founda-
tion. Pentzikis felt, however, that his memory ought to be relieved
from its material burden and turn into some kind of vapor which
would lift the objects like incense within the air of mythic general-
ity.

Started in 1953 under the provisional title Settling Down (later
changed to Trial), the book assumed its final title in 1955 — a title
that may serve as an indicator of Pentzikis' total output. "Scattered"

50 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

suggests disorder, shapelessness, loss or absence of unity, while
"architecture" points to order and the collaboration of parts to
make a functional whole. Tension between these two opposites
underlies all of Pentzikis' works. Architecture of the Scattered Life is
one of its author's easiest books to read. One is somewhat better
prepared for the digressions from the main themes than in other
works. The book was also competently discussed by at least two
reviewers, Stratis Tsirkas and Takis Sinopoulos.'^

Both reviewers stressed the nonconformist and antiliterary char-
acter of the writer Pentzikis, unique in modern Greek hterature,
and the remarkable vitality which he puts into his work. Pentzikis is
like Gide, whose ambition was to include everything in his Les Faux
Monnoyers, and like Proust in his reUance on memory. There are
certainly many differences between Pentzikis and the two French
writers, who are much more conservative and less aggressive in
their approach. But Pentzikis has something from each of these two
in his work. In another sense, Pentzikis is in search not so much of
ideas, but of myths that will carry the reader to a wholesome concep-
tion of life. He reminds us of Plato, who lets philosophy yield to
poetry at the crucial point in many of his Dialogues. The discovery
of a mythical architecture will show the meaning of a diffused and
confused daily life. We must look in the garbage, as Pentzikis says,
to find the treasures. The following passage from the first edition of
Architecture of the Scattered Life is revealing of the way Pentzikis'
mind works:

Life is full of forms. From the point of view of clear forms, I
get excited and pleased with the French theater as well as the
French parks. I remember walking one afternoon at the Ver-
sailles. The statues and buildings amidst the plants and waters
is a sufficient proof that the ancient Greek forms which — like
a Jacob's ladder — helped Plato ascend to reality, gazed at one
another in some new way that gave them life. Why then was I
so intolerably sad while crossing the oblong hall of mirrors, a
young student sent by my parents to learn and receive the best
possible education? Why did I come to close my eyes not
wanting to see.-* Why didn't my heart leap as I was walking

'^ In the weekly 0 Tahydhromos (The courier) (May 1, 1964), and in the literary
journal Epohes (Times) (September 1964), respectively.

MARRIED LIFE 51

through the park with the noble and beautiful court ladies in
marble a la Venus or a la Diane7 It is not long since I under-
stood the secret meaning of that sadness of adolescence, which
made me feel cold and button myself up. ... I believe that
the sea is salty because of the tears of men. I perceived that
human destiny dragged me along like a sea or a river. Swim-
ming in the water, I thought that I loved Plato, the Greek
ideas, believing that I saw and understood their forms. But
these were not fixed, crystallized forms, but fragments floating
on the water towards me. That explains my peculiar attitude as
a writer, my instability, that is, to let the stuff of my memories
evaporate within the particular space of some form or of a
group of interrelated forms. I am Platonic, not because I hold
and raise high in my hands a form of the Athenian philos-
opher, but because I am as though baptized in the everflowing
waters where the pebbles and shells of his ideas float. I cannot,
therefore, see truth as the description of a crystal, but rather as
a rhythm of the process which sticks together the fragments of
the vase, the crystal vessel of myth, which, when in Paris,
young as I was, I let, "imperceptibly,"''* fall from my hands
and break. This explanation accounts sufficiently, I think, for
the manner in which I work out the stuff which I draw from
the world.

1 can now safekeep, with an easy conscience, the things
which I have inspected: first, a fairly detailed guidebook on
Versailles; second, a series of postal cards from the same his-
torical site, from the city, the palace, and the park; third, two
volumes containing works by Racine; fourth, three plays by
Bourdelle, which I read recently, and one by Roger Fernand,
which I am reading today. In these, the great humanistic tradi-
tion of the Greco-Roman civilization expresses in mimes our
daily bourgeois life. Continuing the processing of the material
in my notebook I single out forty-nine people, of whom
twelve are women. Of these, thirty-six live in Athens, eleven
in Thessaloniki, one in Italy. Person number one spent four
years in Vienna; number two spent his early years in Milan;
number three traveled to Scandinavia and got acquainted in
Copenhagen with the young student with whom he corres-

'■^ "Imperceptibly" has been put in quotes by Pentzikis, probably to suggest the
concluding line of Cavafy's poem "Walls," which is "imperceptibly they have closed
me off from the outside world."

52 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

ponded for years until he got tired of expressing his feehngs in
letters; number seven won recognition and had a career in
Germany before Hitler, because of whom he had to return
home; number nine spent many years in Paris and married a
French woman; number twelve was born in a well-to-do family
in Constantinople; number thirteen was born at a sea town of
Asia Minor; number fourteen is in Larissa; number twenty-one
spent time recently in Switzerland; number twenty-four
travels often to European capitals; number twenty-five moved
from a district of Athens to Callithea;^^ number twenty-nine
was confined in Paris during the German occupation of the
city. I hardly know numbers eight, ten, eleven. Number
fifteen lives with number forty-three, who is his wife. I visited
them only once. This wasn't enough to make them think that I
was their friend, as it happened with number six, whom I
visited many times; yet I became indifferent after he had
annoyed me with his views. Since then — It must be six
months now — he left and I never saw him again.

I have heard a knock at the door, though I am not expecting
anyone. "Come in," I say. There enters a young man with
blond hair, unknown to me. A Leica camera is hanging from
his shoulder. He introduces himself, but I pay no attention to
his name. He comes on the recommendation of other friends.
Yes, he is wearing a black velvet jacket which catches the fancy
of my wife. I will busy myself with him, hoping to gain new
wings, as it happens every time I confront a new and unfamiliar
situation. I can forget myself while the other man is here,
(pp. 64-66)

The starting phrase, "Life is full of forms," finds its echo and at the
same time its verification in the sudden appearance of the young
photographer at the end of the passage. The man in the velvet
Jacket is a "form," the visible equivalent of the truth that the world
is wide and inexhaustible. The writer may have lost his sense of
personal order. Yet the world still preserves its full potentiality of
renewal, and it is still a meaningful and coherent whole.

As a young student in Paris, the writer had lost his sense of world
order and was unable, or rather, too honest with himself to find
solace in a philosophical or idealistic view of the world. He could

" "Pretty View," a district halfway between Athens and Piraeus.

MARRIED LIFE

53

not pretend to be holding a vase in his hands when what he had was
only a heap of fragments. He could only try to stick the fragments
together, or at least grasp, even for a short while, the secret rhythm
that governed them. How else could he achieve this unless he
recognized and named the fragments, and unless he held them up
to light? This is the meaning of his decision to enumerate some of
the contents of the carton, including a notebook that listed forty-
nine individuals apparently unrelated to one another.

The rhythm governing all those disparate elements was finally
grasped, but not in the way one expected. The catalyst in the search
for this secret rhythm encompassing not only the enumerated en-
tities but also the world beyond or around them was the miraculous
appearance of the young photographer. The break in the process of
reconstructing the fragmented "vase" was also its new and striking
completion. "I can forget myself," says Pentzikis, "while the other
man is here." Yes, because the climax of memory is Lethe.

It was observed in connection with the poems of Icons that the
memory of Pentzikis is both active, self-induced, and passive, set in
motion by external stimulations. A struggle takes place between
the forces of oblivion and confinement in time on the one hand and
memory on the other. ^"^ The product of the struggle holds the
concrete image in its core, but it also courts mysticism. Pentzikis
seeks to achieve a state of ecstasy through the monotonous, ritual-
istic repetition of religious formulas, or the monotonous and
seemingly dull enumeration of data.^^ Architecture of the Scattered
Life resembles all the other works of Pentzikis; it is a work-in-
progress that displays various degrees and modes of his self-
consciousness.

On the more personal level, this book often shows serenity and
optimism, the happy feelings of a husband and a father. Pentzikis'
wife, to whom he often refers with affection, is the "other" in the
way in which he uses the term at the end of his essay "Love for the
Church." ^^ She represents his measure of success in the world, and
she combats his feeling of aloneness:

I cannot beUeve in any happiness other than the acceptance of

'^' See chapter 5, section 2.
'^ Cf. chapter 5, section 10.
'«Cf. chapter 2, pp. 21-22.

54 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

the world which we see, complete acceptance, which makes
you secure, allows you to forget yourself; you do not doubt its
truth. The embraces and kisses which I exchange in such mo-
ments with my wife have a sincerity that touches my inmost
depths. I trust in her existence, her httle body dressed tightly
in her clumsily sewn everyday coat; it [her body} is the most
tender thing I can touch. I love it, I feel it is my own, and
experience the same yearning as when I see birds flying with
their swordlike wings and I want to catch them and caress their
feathers. . . . (pp. 149-150)

Existentialist anxieties and mundane concerns, however, often
give a dramatic character to the narrative of Architecture of the
Scattered Life. Pentzikis continued to be during his second creative
period a restless spirit, a centripetal as well as centrifugal human
being, someone oscillating, like a pendulum, between extremes in
his Aristotelian search for balance.

7. Mrs. Ersi

The Novel of Mrs. Ersi, one of the longest works by Pentzikis, first
pubhshed in 1966, follows on the optimism oi Architecture of the
Scattered Life and differs from the earlier book in that Pentzikis is
here less preoccupied with himself, at least in a direct way. This
suggests a parallel with the sequence Andhreas Dhimakoudhis-T he
Dead Man and the Resurrection from his first period, where one also
detects a movement from the subjective to the objective.

When still in school, Pentzikis read and hked the novella Ersi by
George Dhrossinis.''^ It was a simple story of an amiable young
lady, Ersi, and her husband, the archaeologist Pavlos Rodhanos.
Many years later, in the early fifties, Pentzikis thought of reworking
the novella freely, in his own style. He updated it by introducing
into his narrative descriptions of dreams and time sequences which
defied the linear concept of time. He also invented new rela-
tionships for many of Dhrossinis' characters. It took him many
years to finish his novel, which we could also compare loosely with
the Hellenistic and Christian Byzantine romances, those stories

''^ Dhrossinis has been primarily known as a poet, a "lesser" companion to his
contemporary Kostis Palamas. Both men were born in 1859.

MARRIED LIFE 55

that deal with the trials, separations, and happy reunions of two
lovers in lengthy strings of episodes interspersed with numerous
asides.^" In Pentzikis, Pavlos and Ersi stand as the ideal couple,
united spiritually, even after the death of the man.

"Monologhos para Thin'Alos" (Monologue on the seashore), in
the beginning of the book, recalls both Homer's Achilles and
Stephen Daedalus of Joyce's Ulysses. The characters stand at the
border of two worlds, the land and the sea. The latter represents
the "other" or "metaphysical world." ^' Then the border itself is
lost from view as the two worlds merge or blend together:

Picking my handkerchief from the bulrushes where it was
being bleached by the sun, I refreshen the dry bed of my eyes.
Now, above my eyes, on the forehead, a host of living organ-
isms open holes [from inside}. Will they come out? I don't
think so. So far, they are intolerably soft behind the claws. The
very opposite happens in fact. The holes fill with sea water.
The waves rise . . . slap, slap . . . dragging along with them
an old shoe. On the surface of the water a piece of cork is
tossed about, traveling to eternity, (pp. 12-13)

In the following section, Pavlos Rodhanos reflects on the intrin-
sic nature of the land of Greece while he and Ersi are at a Greek
summer resort. The narrator remarks that the two characters have
outlived their original creator, Dhrossinis; they are real people
about whom one feels compelled to write. The narrator meets
them also in his dreams. There is even a mutual exchange of eyes,
as his eyes are transposed to their faces and vice-versa.

The appearance of another character in the second chapter gives
the story an extra dimension. The man by the name of Ruit Horas
represents the foreign influences on Greece through the centuries
as well as the contemporary explorations in the Western world of
the problem of time. He is somewhat forbidding in appearance and
dress, has six fingers on his longer right hand, and is very fat and
very old, but the narrator accepts him as one of his own people.

The device of interchanging characters and personae is typical in
Pentzikis and allows Ruit Horas to turn into Dhimitris Mitropoulos

'^" Pentzikis' main source here was the Myrioiivlos of the ninth-century Patriarch
Photios, a commentary on the many books which that learned man had read.
^' Cf. chapter 2, p. 11.

56 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

(the late conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, prede-
cessor of Leonard Bernstein), who is also identified with Mr. Kal-
liadhis, an inspector of antiquities in Dhrossinis and a fellow travel-
er of Pentzikis' Ersi. The bus, on which Ersi and this other character
ride, makes a stop, and everyone gets off to pose for a photo. When
the passengers resume their seats, the mysterious character
vanishes from sight. Mrs. Ersi wonders:

Ah, it seems that their destinations were different. How many
passengers had already gotten off? The bus was almost empty.
"The gentleman sitting across from me, did he get off at Ayia
[a town in Thessaly}?" Mrs. Ersi asked the driver. But he gave
no answer. "The man must have been offended that I turned
my back to him in order to look outside," she thought; "he
must have gotten up and left without saying goodbye. Or is it
that he said goodbye without my hearing it? Strange!" She
kept wondering even after the first lively impressions which
she had at her arrival, (pp. 126—127)

Ruit Horas is of course Mr. Time {ruit hora, in Latin, means
"time rushes on"). He moves on and absorbs everything in himself.
Ruit Horas also takes the narrator out of his concern with the
couple Pavlos-Ersi to the world outside. At times he even makes a
direct appearance to speak to the narrator in a manner which recalls
somewhat the apocalyptic manner of Ehot's composite ghost in
Four Quartets}^ Ruit Horas says:

God's motion and action are timeless, while what we say and
do ourselves, what he allows us to see, happens within time.
Do you see the difference? A coincidence of two different
motions within time enables you to admire the small octopus
we've caught. No harm. You don't even feel the coincidence.
Now, tell me, do you love this animal enough to believe that
we've become one with it in the brief span of coincidence?
That is where the mystery lies. Love is the only mystery,
(pp. 149-150)

The one motion to which Pentzikis alludes is the temporal one:
catching the octopus either for the sake of the game or for the
practical purpose of cooking and eating it. This motion is defined

^^ "Little Gidding," II.

MARRIED LIFE 57

and delimited by the mortal or corruptible element in human na-
ture, the need to fish as well as hunt for food and the need to
consume many of the animal creatures. The other motion, or rather
a suspension of motion, God's time, permits human beings to rise
above their temporal characters, enabling them to contemplate and
acknowledge the deeper, universal rhythm or sympathy that gov-
erns the world beyond the narrow notions of life and death, hunter
and hunted, human and animal, now and after. This motion or
suspension of ephemeral motion is love, the capacity to pause and
admire the octopus which you have caught, see yourself in his
pulsations and realize that this sea-creature which you may con-
sume and digest is in fact another you, another link in the natural
chain.

In the second part of the book we do not see much of either Mr.
Ruit Horas or Pavlos and Ersi. Instead, a new character appears,
Sakoraphos (sack-stitcher), who is borrowed from a Greek folk tale
of the same name. The man has clogged by mistake the tap of his
own fortune, but a king helps him to unclog it. This is a parable of
the relationship between Pentzikis and the Byzantine emperor
Constantine Monomahos. Pentzikis found in Monomahos a model
of his own contradictory self and enjoys referring to the chronicle
of the historian Michael Psellos about that emperor of the eleventh
century. Monomahos was a rather careless monarch who trusted in
God and took no precautions for his safety.^ ^

Mrs. Ersi reappears to inform the narrator that the lower part of
his body has been turned into a phidhohorto, a bushy plant with
serpentine branches. ^'^ Pavlos dies and Ersi undertakes, in the nar-
rator's company, a journey around the places which the couple had
visited while Pavlos was still alive so that he, the narrator, could
write down the story of their life.

The third and last part of The Novel of Mrs. Ersi is called "Anapar-
astassi" (Representation) and starts with a description of the church
of Ahiropiitos (Not made by human hands) in Thessaloniki, of the
alley behind it, and the square on its south side. This is supposed to
take place before the journey with Ersi, during which the narrator

^' Cf. chapter 6, section 4.
^■^ See p. 61 below.

58 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

catches sight of a wall notice of his own funeral. ^^ This stresses the
unity of Pentzikis' work as a work-in-progress towards the "other"
world, as a study of death toward a new life. Time that rushes
forward, stringing everything behind it in memory clusters, now
becomes a needle with its thread that changes masters before it
becomes identified with the memory of the narrator. Conforming
to this, Mrs. Ersi calls the narrator by the name of Andhreas Dhi-
makoudhis. She will embroider a kerchief in memory of her hus-
band with this same needle and thread. As a consequence, the
narrator is in a position to describe and reconstruct what has hap-
pened:

When they dance, the women of Megara [a town near Athens}
imitate with their steps the sea and its waves. I am concerned
to explain how in the hands of Mrs. Ersi, the fingers that
pushed and pulled me gently through the piece of cloth, with
the long thread which I dragged behind me blindly (for I didn't
have any eyes to see what I was doing; she alone, bent over the
white cloud, the warp of her patience, could see), little by
little, just as the sea is completed by the simple steps of the
dance, so did her fingers embroider our entire journey,
(pp. 348-349)

The needle pierces the soft finger of Mrs. Ersi. The blood that
flows is said to be the faith which restores to the narrator his human
form. Perhaps Mrs. Ersi tried to embroider too much. The piercing
of the finger was the crisis which resulted in the transformation of
the narrator, his renewal, just as the sudden appearance of the
young photographer oi Architecture of the Scattered Life brought the
desired solution in another occasion of diligent but inconclusive
activity.

8. Seferis' Ersi.

"Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis is one of the very few fellow Greeks of
today who interest me; his writing presents zones of shade which
you feel tempted to explore." The words are George Seferis', from
the diary which the well-known poet and critic kept while reading

-^'Cf. chapter 2, p. 11.

MARRIED LIFE 59

Pentzikis' The Novel of Mrs. Ersi.^^ The interest of Seferis in Pent-
zikis probably started in 1961, after the appearance of Ghia ton
Seferi (For Seferis), a memorial volume of essays on the work of
Seferis by various hands, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the
publication of Seferis' first book, Strophi (Turning point). Pentzikis
is one of the contributors to this volume with a brief, but most
interesting essay called "Essoteriki Katathessis peri tou Piitou
Gheorghiou Seferi" (Intimate testimony about the poet George
Seferis).^ Pentzikis does not doubt the seriousness, honesty, and
craftsmanship of Seferis, qualities for which Seferis earned the
Nobel Prize in 1963. But he seems to censure him for lack of
courage, that is, readiness to surrender his individuality and mix
with the crowd, join in the "dance." Pentzikis felt that Seferis must
learn to humble himself and be reunited in myth with his
environment.

This brief but sharp essay must have struck some chord in Sefer-
is' heart. He took an interest in someone who challenged him, not
in the ways the small challenge the great, but with the authority of
someone who had agonized over the same existential problems and
had some important message to deliver. The diary which Seferis
kept in 1966 while reading The Novel of Mrs. Ersi was the fruit of
Seferis' effort to come to terms with the phenomenon Pentzikis.

The diary entries are meant to be random notations of Seferis'
thoughts while reading the book by Pentzikis, but they also record
(in imitation of Pentzikis' style) other impressions which Seferis has
from other sources during the period of the diary. The manner also
matches somewhat Seferis' own manner in his critical essays. It is
casual rather than systematic, penetrating, and to the point.^^'^

Seferis does not conceal his objections to the Byzantinism of
Pentzikis, especially to his assertion that the fathers of the church
are sufficient as a source of spiritual refreshment for modern man.

''' / Ores lis "Kyrias Ersis" (The hours of Mrs. Ersi), first printed pseudonymously
in 0 Tahydhromos (15 March 1967). The book-form edition of the work (Athens:
"Ermis," 1973) bears both the pseudonym, Ighnatis Trelos, and the real name of
Seferis.

~ For Seferis, pp. 152-154.

^" See chapter 6, section 5.

-'"' The interested reader may see the book George Seferis: On the Greek Style
(Boston; Little Brown, 1966).

60 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

He also detects a certain contradiction between Pentzikis' frequent
praise of the concrete and the abstract and confused manner in
which he often refers to mythology or the literature of the past,
even misquoting Mallarme. Seferis rightly asks whether the con-
crete should not be defined as that which is distinctive, seen in
separation from something else. In this sense, Pentzikis often
lapses into abstractions, perhaps without realizing it. The reader is
often lost in the bushy enclaves of Pentzikis' writings. "I feel", adds
Seferis, "as if I am walking on a darkened distant road in the
country, lit from time to time by the headlights of few passing cars:
I can't say yet whether I am awake or in a dream" {The Hours of
"Mrs. Ersi", p. 31).

True to his early expressed view, however, that the artist should
be judged on his own terms, Seferis wants to underplay the impor-
tance of his objections. Pentzikis must be accepted whole or not at
all. He is an unusual type of writer who has read and assimilated a
lot and has a "scaffold of faith" which rescues him from desiccation.
His Christianity is spacious enough to include Homer and Pan,
Saint Paul and the humblest monk of Mount Athos. History does
not evoke in Pentzikis the sense of corruption and chaos which it
evokes in many modern writers. His concept of time is like the
motion of waves between the open seas of dreams and the shores of
reality. His style, dreamlike rather than spontaneous or free, ex-
presses not only the waves of the surface but also the turmoils of
the deep.

Pentzikis' view of the world, as Seferis aptly observes, issues
often from a direct sense of form and can be illustrated by the
example of a Chinese classification of animals (reported in a book
by Jorge Luis Borges): the list includes various types of animals like
the embalmed ones, the ones painted with a very thin brush made
of camel hair, those that have just broken their drinking dish, and
others.

One of the final observations in the diary sums up the survey of
The Novel of Mrs. Ersi most fittingly: "The entire book oi Mrs. Ersi
is a fragmentation of the self, the place and time. But that is not the
important thing. What is important is that he (Pentzikis) was able to
produce a rising goddess out of the fragments" (ibid., p. 79).

MARRIED LIFE 61

The diary of Seferis on Pentzikis, a silent dialogue between two
writers so different from each other, the former a high product of
Uberal education, the other trusting in magic, is further enhanced
by a third voice, that of the late Nikos Kachtitsis of Montreal.
Seferis thought it proper to include in the book-form edition of his
diary a letter which Kachtitsis had sent him after he had read the
original publication of Seferis' diary in the weekly 0 Tahydhromos.
In his letter, Kachtitsis describes the unusual and amusing cir-
cumstances under which he met Pentzikis in the forties. He adds
significantly that he had been a follower of Pentzikis (meaning,
obviously, Pentzikis' style) before he actually knew him.^"

Seferis' The Hours of "Mrs. Ersi" is made even more attractive by
the printing in it of a few illustrations and photos, among which one
shows Pentzikis standing, with the lower part of his body hidden
behind a branch oi phidhohorto (snake-plant). The picture illustrates
a point, already alluded to in The Novel of Mrs. Ersi, at which the
narrator discovers that he has been transformed into a plant, when
Mrs. Ersi tells him "what a beautiful flower you have grown!" It also
represents the Ovidian process of metamorphosis, as well as the
concept of universal sympathy among the various species of nature
— motifs that occur very often in the works of Pentzikis.

9. Notes of One Hundred Days

In "Ghiro apo mia Zoghrafia" (Of a painting), printed in 1974,^^
Pentzikis relates how he set out to paint a portrait from a photo of
Constantine Caramanlis, the first Northern Greek to become
prime minister of his country. He felt like a Byzantine hagiog-
rapher who had to be clean from worldly passions before taking up
the brush. He went about his work in a ritualistic way. The twenty-
seven coats of paint which he applied and the number of brush-

^" Nikos Kachtitsis is one of the most interesting prose authors of the fifties and
sixties. His style differs considerably from that of Pentzikis, who said the hallucina-
tory world of Kachtitsis belongs in the psychology of the subconscious, while his
own is a "mythical" world. Although Kachtitsis spent most of his creative years
outside of Greece, he wrote mostly in Greek.

^' In the monthly journal Efthyni (Responsibility) (September 1974), pp.
406-411.

62 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Strokes were determined by a numerical transformation of words
from two sources, a religious book, Synaxaristis, and a secular one,
La Grece de Caramanlis, by the French Academician Maurice Gene-
voix, which deals with the first premiership of Caramanlis
(1956—1963).^^ The religious words were mostly the names of the
ten saints in the Greek Orthodox calendar year that share the name
Constantine. Pentzikis followed this method in order to balance
the monumental aspect of the picture with the secular aspects of
the subject.

But how did Pentzikis make up his mind to paint a living official
and indeed from a photo? His initial stimulus, he says, was a satiri-
cal poem, published pseudonymously, that made fun of Caramanlis
and his supposedly uncouth manners and rustic mentality. Pent-
zikis became upset over this and, since he knew himself incapable
of talking "on an objective basis without excitement and anger," he
decided to break relations with all those who spoke with derision
about the then ex-prime minister. Yet, after he read in the Neo
Martyrologhio (New Martyrology) of Saint Nikodhimos the Atho-
nian about the life of some neo-martyr, his ill feeling melted away,
and he understood that it was possible to reconcile the most contra-
dictory things through a sympathetic consideration of detail. In
other words, by giving love to each separate element of a whole,
even if these separate elements are in a state of conflict among
themselves, one could reach harmony in his life. In any case, the
result was the painting of Caramanlis as well as the book Simiossis
Ekato Imeron (Notes of one hundred days).

The book is in diary form and came out in a separate, revised
edition in 1973, but was written much earlier, between September
1965 and January 1966. Most of the Notes appeared first in serial
form in the journal lolkos (lolcus) in 1966 and 1967. The subtitle
reads: "Confessions aiming at the destruction of the [writer's] natu-
ral identity in an effort to acquire an identity in another form." In a
brief prologue Pentzikis requests that the reader be patient until
the last part of the book, when he will perceive the unity of the
scattered and pulverized phenomena described. Note 92 indeed
gives an insight into the character and purpose of the work:

*^ Maurice Genevoix, La Grece de Caramanlis (Paris: Plon, 1972).

MARRIED LIFE

63

When I started writing, I told myself that I might go on writing
indefinitely. I had no prescience of what I could compose. I
started relying solely on an enthusiasm which I felt inside me.

The problem of writing emerged later.

First of all, the heaping up of material with daily spadefuls
got organized gradually and the grass started taking roots, just
as the edges of roads cease to be bare very quickly during
excavations. Wondering often as to the nature of the growth, I
began to perceive that I would soon get tired and hastened to
set myself as a limit one hundred installments. I thought that
one and a half pages per day would not tire me. I ended up by
writing, however, four and in some cases, six, eight and nine
pages.

The number 100 didn't occur to me arbitrarily, as I knew my
weakness concerning a formal composition, and I thought of
using as an alibi, an apology, the arrangement by hundreds of
chapters found in religious scriptures. Although it looked ex-
ternal, an imitation strange to the essence of the matter, the
association with the church fathers strengthened my morale
and flattered me.

Yet, anguish over a multitude of questions which I had
about the project did not take long to appear. Was I going to
obtain enough material of sufficient quality to fill the One
Hundred Days.-* And what uniformity was the material going
to have?

My criterion in the selection of my material was that what-
ever I reported should conserve and give further impetus to
my initial enthusiasm. It was this enthusiasm which prevented
the flow of time from scaring me. On the contrary, this enthu-
siasm allowed me to view time as construction material. I built
with time, not with the meanings of my context.

It often happened that I would stop writing from a sense of
duty. Yet, this mood would soon change, as I kept thinking on
how, by ordering things, I would reach again that all powerful
enthusiasm.

When I wasn't successful, I tore the written pages and felt
disgusted. The result was a kind of cramp of the soul, analo-
gous to the so-called spasm of the scribe, whose hand and
fingers get numb and can't write anymore.

Let this suffice concerning the completion of One Hundred
Days of writing.

64 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Now, my mind is occupied with the problems of synthesiz-
ing what was said in the name of ideas which become harder
and harder to dehver, as it is necessary that each idea not
break, by any means, the impetus of enthusiasm.
(pp. 164-165)

The passage suggests that, in his late fifties, Pentzikis was still
agonizing over the problem of expression, as he had done thirty
years earlier. Spontaneity yielded to self-consciousness and doubt,
although Pentzikis wrote more than he first thought he would. The
magic number on this occasion was 100, not 3 or 7. Inspiration had
to be harnessed and controlled somehow. On the other hand, the
attempt at synthesis should not stifle inspiration. Apollo must come
to terms with Dionysus. Pentzikis' writing rose and fell many times
until it stopped with the hundredth entry. It stopped there simply
because everything must stop at some point, in the world of human
time.

Notes of One Hundred Days shows a rhythm that has to do with the
recurrence, in specific incidents, of several characters with distinct
personalities. The main character, apparently a double for Pent-
zikis, is Mr. Posnatonpoum (How-shall-we-call-him), who often
wonders about his identity: is he a man, an animal, a farm, a garbage
dump, or a sea creature? Is he married or a dissolute Don Juan? In
any case, he feels that he is only half of what he should be, "as if he
belonged only to one of the two worlds which complete reality."
Other characters are Mrs. Hamenmoliv (Lost-pencil), the young
Aoos, Miss Ino, and many others, overplayed with symbolisms of
various kinds amid varied references to literary figures like Ibsen's
Mrs. Alwing (from Ghosts), Plato's Diotima (from the Symposium),
and the scientist Darwin.

The tension is always between this world and the "other," which
is represented in Notes of One Hundred Days by the more recent
martyrs and saints of the church. These are called "source and axis"
of the work and are graphically shown in the geometric illustrations
across the title page. Pentzikis wants to pay tribute to both worlds
and he suggests the interconnection between them by a drawing
which he has placed in the middle of his book: it looks like an
overcast sky at night or a night sea with the stars gone. The caption
reads: "Effort of gathering the essence, fluid like the sea, of the

MARRIED LIFE 65

phenomena of the world described in this book, into the shape of
our Lady's gown."

There are other such drawings which, together with the designs
of the book covers and some other technical data of the publication

— products of Pentzikis' method of combining numbers and words
together with the use of religious and secular sources — abridge his
second and third creative periods. Thus, the front cover design of
Notes of One Hundred Days is a rough map of Greece with darker
and lighter spots that show the frequency of occurrence, in the
pages of the book, of Greek geographical names. The area around
Thessaloniki and the peninsula of Chalkidhiki is much darker than
other parts. The sea is shown by the use of wavy lines, while the
map edges are filled with circles, broken lines, little squares, dots

— the usual fare in the Pentzikis drawings of his latter period. The
back cover has a design made of rectangles of various sizes. The
rectangles contain lists of geographical terms that relate to Europe,
Asia, Africa and America, terms which occur in the book. Below
those, Pentzikis has listed place names in Greece, including the
names of parishes, hotels, and others. On the right, the names are
from religious sources, on the left, from secular ones.

CHAPTER 4

THE FILING CABINET

The third creative period of Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis can be
dated from 1968, the time of his retirement from active service
with Geigy. During this period, which extends to the present, one
notices an even stronger hterary and artistic activity. Pentzikis has
also continued to make new friends, like the young philologist and
artist Athina Shina, who eventually helped him with the editing of
his publications and exchanged with him ideas in drawing and
painting.^ Pentzikis has been active in the neo-Christian move-
ments of Synoro (Frontier) and Efthyni (Responsibihty), has pub-
lished several of his narratives in the latter group's journal of the
same name, and has lectured extensively at the University of Thes-
saloniki and at various cultural associations throughout Greece.

In 1973 Pentzikis received prize money from the Greek State
for his work and was also honored with the award of the Cross of
the Phoenix. A representative selection of his poems was translated
into English,^ and, on the whole, he has received in recent years
considerably more of the well-deserved recognition which he may
have desired secretly but for which he never compromised himself.

The "mischievous child" has surfaced, however, in several of his
encounters with other people. Pentzikis has continued to upset
persons with neat and orderly minds, as for example at the first
Panhellenic Congress of Writers, which was held in Athens in
November 1975. His behavior there drew this reaction from a lady
delegate: "The interventions of Mr. Pentzikis create an unaccept-
able kind of mirth." Pentzikis was quick to answer that, according

' Athina Shina had been the only student in her high school class to opt for
Pentzikis in a questionnaire in which students were asked to declare their favorite
Greek writer.

^ See chapter 3, n. 11.

THE FILING CABINET

67

to some physiologists, laughter was the best exercise and that he
was not going to dispute that.^

I had first met Pentzikis in 1958 at the time of his first painting
exhibition in Athens. There was an exchange of letters in the sixties
and early seventies and then a second meeting in Thessaloniki in
the summer of 1976, when Pentzikis was sixty-eight years old.
Though of failing health, he seemed to overflow with energy of
both the spirit and the heart. Two more meetings, in 1978 and
1980, confirmed this impression. Pentzikis shows a lively interest
in all things around him, writes and paints, keeps revising, expand-
ing, and reprinting his works, exchanges letters, visits with his
friends — the monks of Athos — and gives interviews. He is still
moving upward to a mythical heaven, as well as stretching outward
into the world of the senses. He is still trying, as he has put it, to
make up for the fragmentation of his personality by religious faith,
the "mantle of salvation in which the mortal body cloaks itself." In a
Greek television program, Pentzikis was shown making a religious
offer of his books, scattering them around a fountain named after
some neo-martyr. It was a characteristic gesture that suited and
expressed his personality.

1. Tidying Up

After he freed himself from his non-literary and non-artistic
duties, Pentzikis set out to collect, organize, and publish in book
form whatever of his past work he considered worthy of reprinting,
together with new material that continued pouring from the tip of
his pen. The immediate result was the publication of four books in
1970, including the reprinting of The Dead Man and the Resurrec-
tion.

The book Mother Thessaloniki — a predictable homage by Pent-
zikis to his native city — includes various writings and essays on
Thessaloniki, some of which have been discussed or mentioned
earlier. The arrangement of the chapters seems to be thematic and
topographical rather than chronological, although the earlier essays
tend to be in the first part of the collection and the later ones in the

^ Praktika tnu Panelliniou Synedhriou Syngrapheon (Proceedings of the Panhellenic
Congress of Writers) (Athens: "Estias," 1976), p. 197.

68

HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

second. The cover pages of this small paperback show roughly
sketched maps of the Thermaic Gulf and Thessaloniki on its north-
eastern side. Mother Thessaloniki is a varied study of Thessaloniki,
its geography and history, its people — the dead and the living, the
famous and the unknown — its beauty and its ugliness, its air, often
heavy, and its reflections on the mind and soul of the unnamed
narrator.

The narrator feels a stranger in his own city and hates speaking to
anyone, for "speech, the highest gift to man, is also a convention
that ruins itself and causes misunderstanding." But he also recog-
nizes himself in this same city, graced by the presence of her patron
Saint, Demetrius. Thessaloniki may have started in known history,
yet for Pentzikis it is also a metaphysical phenomenon, thanks to
that Saint. It is Demetrius who redeems the city of its imperfec-
tions and gives it identity. The title of the first chapter of the book,
"Prossopo ke Poli" (Face and city), suggests a dichotomy which is
gradually resolved: the titles of Chapters 5 and 15 are "Mnimi
Nekron" (Memory of the dead) and "Platia Eleftherias" (Liberty
Square), while the last two Chapters, 16 and 17, are titled "Mitera
Thessaloniki" (Mother Thessaloniki) and "O Naos tou Poliouhou"
(The Church of the Patron Saint).

The final image of the book, that of the Saint Demetrius Church,
seems to foreshadow the second collection of narratives. Toward
Church-Going, which Pentzikis brought out in the same year,
1970."* In it he combined older publications of the fifties and sixties
with the texts of some public lectures which he gave in Thessaloni-
ki in 1968—1969 as well as in other cities of Northern Greece. The
book was sponsored by the Patriarchal Foundation of Patristic
Studies, based in Thessaloniki, and can be seen as an acknowledge-
ment of Pentzikis by the official Church, represented in this case by
the Director of the Foundation, Father Stylianos (now Archbishop
of the Greek Orthodox Church in Australia), a man of literary
predilections. The Patriarch of Constantinople also awarded to
Pentzikis the honorific title of the Great Myrepsos (from
OTj/ro= myrrh), because of Pentzikis' association with herbs and
medicinal drugs.

' The essay "Love for the Church" from Toward Church-Going is fully discussed
in chapter 2, section 5.

THE FILING CABINET 69

The nine essays of Toward Church-Going are printed in the
chronological order in which they were written and effect a varied
and thorough presentation of their author's theology and spiritual
quests. The mode is confessional and the tone often lyrical. As in
the other writings of Pentzikis, the organizational rigor of the for-
mal essay is sacrificed to other considerations. These essays are,
however, less randomly written than most of Pentzikis' other
essays. Faith gives a free vent to feelings and we often notice a
"letting go," a flight into a rhythmic dance:

I recall vividly the rather large mural in the small graveyard
chapel of the Holy Monastery of Ghrighorios on Athos. The
painted figures of men and women look as if they are dancing
the kalamatianos,'^ jumping along, with hands joined together
through colored kerchiefs. . . . While our body dances, our
whole being must forget itself absolutely in a lofty kind of
nostalgia, (p. 32)

In the sixth essay, "Klironomika" (Of our inheritance), we hear
more about Synaxaristis and its treasures. The more than one
thousand pages of this work have been for many years both the
delight of the reader Pentzikis and his main aid in the effort to
understand the exterior and interior architecture of the Byzantine
churches. In this architecture he finds the flight of human souls, of
the builder as well as the sponsor of the building. By analogy, the
old leather bound covers of Synaxaristis remind him of church
walls overgrown with moss. But this work of Byzantine prove-
nance, which has gone through various stages of expansion and
updating between its initial creation and today, is much more than
that. It is a treasury of the popular wisdom of Christian Greece and
a good introduction to the Greek Orthodox Church and its sacra-
ments. In his own way, Pentzikis is the last so far of a series of men
(including Symeon the Young Theologian of the eleventh century,
and Saint Nikodhimos the Athonian of the eighteenth) who tested
themselves on Synaxaristis. Through his writings, Pentzikis infor-
mally updates that work and keeps it alive for those who will find
meaning in it.

^ The kalamatianos derives its name from the city of Kalamata but is considered
the Greek national dance par excellence.

70 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Pentzikis' knowledge of Synaxaristis also generates new and in-
teresting concepts, as when, in the seventh essay of Toward
Church-Going, "Dhynatotites Mnimis" (Potentialities of memory),
he likens the copying memory of a child with the knots in a monk's
rosary and explains or illustrates the notion that excess of memory
yields to Lethe, by finding a parallel in the energy which an artist
spends to create and polish his work of art. He will be able to finish
his work — be it the so-called "axion esti" (worthy it is) icon of the
Virgin in Athos, the "Duino Elegies" by Rilke, or Eliot's The Waste
Land — only by divine intervention on his behalf, and this in-
tervention is equated with the blissful oblivion which excess of
memory brings.

This belief in the artist's need of God to finish his work runs
against the demythologization of man brought about by the Ren-
aissance. Pentzikis views the revolution in the arts of the last
100—150 years in Europe as a positive reaction, existentialist in
character, to the flattening of the human mind under the illusion of
progress. He thinks of Chateaubriand as the first leader in the new
direction, although Chateaubriand indulges too much in feeling for
Pentzikis, who rejects a purely romantic escape from the problems
that afflict humankind. He then thinks of Gerard de Nerval and the
other, so-called "accursed poets," who tried to reach a spiritual
world through the cultivation and refinement of memory. In their
effort, these artists touch the unknown, the probable nothingness.

This unknown can be represented by the wind, the mysterious
and intangible, yet very real element of life. Pentzikis reinforces his
argument with a reference to Vardharis,^ the strong north wind
that sweeps Thessaloniki clean in winter. During the Panhellenic
Congress of Writers, Pentzikis was more specific on this point.
Arguing against a speaker who deplored what he thought to be the
excessively negative and pessimistic character of so much modern
writing, Pentzikis said that nihilistic literature must not be rejected
on principle, since the writer is a single digit, a "one" that needs a
zero to become ten. Vardharis, the cold and obnoxious wind that
blows in Thessaloniki, can be graphically likened to a zero, yet

'' Pentzikis also calls it Amphalos, conforming to the Greek tendency of Helleniz-
ing non-Greek terms found in Greek popular speech, with the purpose of stirring
the historic memory of his readers.

THE FILING CABINET 71

Thessaloniki could not possibly survive as a city of many thousands
of people without the purifying effect of that wind. We cannot
breathe without air, which, though insubstantial and therefore
comparable to nothingness, is also a life-giving element and the
main carrier of light — of heavenly and universal light, as Pentzikis
adds.

The last chapter of Toward Church-Going bears the numeral 9,
and Pentzikis might have accounted for the numeral by saying that
9 is, according to the Christian tradition, the number of the angelic
orders. This chapter is titled "Synkekrimeno ke Ghamos" (The
concrete and marriage), and in it Pentzikis explores more analogies
between hteral and metaphorical marriage. An interesting observa-
tion is that the darkness in which a marriage is usually consum-
mated reflects the original sin and represents a consciousness of
death, but also of new life. In marriage one descends to the deepest
level of one's repressed memories and ascends, with procreation, to
a new human form. Pentzikis weaves such thoughts around a de-
scription of the city of Cavala, whose mythical and geographical
associations suggest marriage. He enlarges his discussion by refer-
ence to the myth of the corn goddess Demeter who, though pa-
troness of marriage, loses her daughter Persephone for part of the
year.

Pentzikis also refers to the story of the Byzantine maiden Kassia,
who cloistered herself in the darkness of the convent and became
thus known as the nun Kassiani who defends the holy side of
womanhood. Kassia was beautiful as well as educated, the obvious
choice for the emperor Theophilos when he looked for a wife
among the daughters of Byzantine nobility. But he decided to test
her first by asking: "Oh woman, is it not true that the worst for
mankind came from a woman?" He was thinking of Eve. But Kassia
was prompt to answer: "True, but also the best", thinking of the
Holy Virgin. The intelligent response cost Kassia the throne. Yet it
mattered little, since she was eventually wedded to Christ by
assuming the nun's habit.

The overall message is that darkness, whether elected or im-
posed from the outside, may be a necessary means of purification
from sin as well as the onset of a new life for an individual or even a
whole nation. The grain has to die and be buried before it can

72 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

produce new life, as the Gospel says. Pentzikis started from this
belief when he wanted to remind the delegates of the Panhellenic
Congress of Writers that they should not pass over in silence or
reject the dark spots in the history and intellectual growth of their
country, for these were also necessary.

The third book to come out in 1970, Retinue,^ contains a miscel-
lany of narrative material written between 1936 and 1968, the
unity of which is not as obvious as that of the narratives in Mother
Thessaloniki and Toward Church-Going. The dedicatory inscription
that faces the title page is "gift of gratitude to Goddess Athena,
well-armed Virgin, our head and leader in life, night bird in Hades,
huntress of mice, teacher of wisdom, protectress of trees, light,
garb of shipwrecked people." Both this and the front cover page of
the book are designed and decorated in the Pentzikis manner: small
squares, dots, curvy and broken lines and circles.

The eighteen chapters of this collection range from four to twen-
ty-two pages, and some have been quoted or mentioned earlier. A
key piece is the middle chapter called "To Onoma" (The name). It
provides a concise description of Pentzikis' creative style, the con-
tinuity of his thought that leads him to writing and restores his faith
in life. The narration here is in the third person:

In his room he tries to warm his fingers with memories. In the
brazier of his poverty he stirs the ashes looking for some
hidden spark. With smiles drawn from nature, the burial and
resurrection of the dead, he tries to preserve in his mind, in a
period of bad weather, the erotic fire. He apprehends the
meaning of what is hidden, knowing that the sky, though
draped by castles and ramparts of clouds, goes on embracing
his wife [that is, the earth}, even though the wedding gowns
have turned into death shrouds, (p. 82)

Other chapters are not as explicit. The piece "Vorofryni, dhi-
ladhi i Kyria Marigho" (Vorofryni, that is, Mrs. Marigho)^ comes
out as a surrealist prose work in a style that recalls Breton and

The Greek title of the book, Synodhia, may be also translated as "Procession,"
"Companionship," and "Accompaniment."

"Originally printed in Dhiaghonios 2, no. 1 (1959), pp. 22-24.

THE FILING CABINET 73

surrealist paintings. But this also has a place in the collection, just
as does the long list of diseases which afflicted fifty-two people in
"The Journey and the Stop.'"'' Pentzikis provides this list in order
to suggest that there is unity or universal sympathy between the
healthy and the sick, the fortunate and the unlucky of this world:

We are poor in results when we are counted separately. Man is
mankind, not each one separately. Don't be afraid to be taken
for weak and be pushed aside. Don't fear tribulations. Pre-
serve constant inside yourself the common characteristic of
man, pain, until you are transformed and divine the moral,
(p. 25)

The moral is of course that pain, ours or another's, once sustained,
leads to catharsis.

The 1972 publication oi Homilies is dedicated to the memory of
Pentzikis' parents, Gabriel and Mary, and supplements the
1939-1940 material with the texts of two lectures: "I Krini" (The
lihes) and "Spongos ke Loghos" (The sponge and the word).^"
These texts bracket a rehandled poem, originally written in 1937.
"The Lilies" starts from the unhappy love affair of Pentzikis, but
passes on to the subject of his literary writing. "The Sponge and the
Word" investigates various aspects of the sponge organism — the
sponge is the only living creature which is uniform in all its parts.
We also recall that a sponge was raised to the lips of the thirsty
Christ on the Cross.

Pentzikis added the two lectures to the earlier material in order
to abridge or lessen the distance traveled between 1939—1940 and
the time of the book's publication. With them he also provides a
more serene and sober counterpart to the anxious and sometimes
feverish character of the earlier, longer material and prepares us for
the more solid reconstruction of his forty creative years in the book
Arhion (Filing cabinet).

Before surveying that awesome work, however, we may examine
Pentzikis' painting habits of the last decade or so and enlarge on the
relevant discussion found in the previous two chapters.

''' Cf. chapter 2, section 3.
'" Cf. chapter 2, section 6.

74 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

2. Painting

Since 1967 Pentzikis has been drawing and painting in a style
more or less his own, which, roughly speaking, derives from a
mixing of chance with minute calculation. Both approaches are
found behind much of twentieth-century art. On the one hand,
many modern paintings (of those treasured in public and private
collections) are for the suspicious onlooker probable creations of
the artist's pet monkeys or at best his pre-school children. We need
only remember the so-called splash technique paintings. On the
other hand, many modern paintings — cubist works, for example
— have issued from painstaking and minute measurements of
space, weighings and balancings of color, and careful consideration
of many other factors.

Pentzikis is original in his use of the words-and-numbers
method, the psipharithmiki methodhos, by which the drawing or
painting hand follows the ritual of combining letters {psiphia) and
Arabic numbers {arithmi) in determining the coats and brush
strokes of paint or in determining pencil lines in a drawing. He
selects words from both religious and secular texts, mostly geo-
graphical and historical, then he draws their numerical value by
adding up the individual numerals assigned to each letter of each
word — the number for each letter being the numerical position it
has in the Greek alphabet: for example, dhelta is 4 and lamdha is 1 1.
Most of the cover illustrations and drawings in books by Pentzikis
published in the last ten years have resulted from this method.

This method is also a link between the work of Pentzikis and the
stylistic and symbolic habits of folk artists as well as Byzantine
iconography, and it is one further step from the impressionist's
avoidance of solid design which we noticed in Pentzikis' earlier
paintings. Pentzikis seems to have a horror vacui now. The empty
spots in his drawings are often filled up, horizontally and vertically,
with crabbed writing. Pentzikis likens this technique to the silvery
double tracks of a snail. ' ^

He has continued painting landscapes, portraits, saints,
archaeological objects, and mythological themes, mostly in tem-
pera, which suits his temperament particularly well, as he says. His

"Cf. p. 84 below.

THE FILING CABINET 75

human figures are, as a rule, framed by birds, flowers, fountains,
and columns, in the fashion of medieval manuscript illuminations.
He tries to transform the visual reality of his painting or drawing
into an icon. In The Mystical Bush (1975) Pentzikis offers a new
chromatic interpretation of the old Mosaic theme. In Avrokomis and
Anthia we notice a lack of perspective (typical of Byzantine paint-
ing), but also many geometric formulations and rich colors that
recall the Hellenistic romance of the same name. In Ghalatista of
Chalkidhiki (1976), the town Ghalatista, of the peninsula of Chal-
kidhiki, seems to dance in the embrace and protection of the
mountain that rises behind and above it on either side. In the
mask-hke P re-historical Figure (1976) the heavy make-up of the
painted face suggests ritualistic and magical preoccupations. All
these paintings conceal behind them the battle or alliance between
words and numbers, drawn, as noted, from both religious and secu-
lar sources.

Thus the painting On Love (1976), in the form of a solid cross,
contains within itself three chapters from the Byzantine theologian
Maximos the Confessor. Similar is the background of the First
Panhellenic Congress of Writers (1975), a picture that depicts this
congress as a holy synod. The head of the delegates are like the
tops of pins. Every brush stroke equals a unit, a square is a six, a
lozenge is a saint of the Greek Orthodox Calendar. Nothing is lost.

Page 88 oi Notes of One Hundred Days reproduces the ink draw-
ing of a mysterious round figure, said to be "the figure of Mr.
How-Shall- We-Call-Him emerging from the data of the present
text." This alias of the writer seems to issue through or from behind
a web of countless small lines or daubs of ink, which may also
suggest the soot that blackens with time the old Byzantine icons.
Another web of round, white and dark strokes veils Cinderella's
Shoe, a tempera made in 1975. There is a happy impression of
snowflakes, the white confetti of festivals or the dance at which
Cinderella met her prince, as well as the sugared almonds of Greek
weddings. And yet the painting is actually the outline of the Greek
province of Cavala, which looks on the map like a woman's high-
heeled shoe. The shape was used as a matrix into which Pentzikis
poured, in successive coats of paint, his impressions and feelings
after a lecture he had given at the town of Serres in October 1975

76 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

and his subsequent journey to Cavala through the town of Dhrama.

In more recent years Pentzikis has successfully exhibited his
paintings in Athens and has produced many more paintings and
drawings: landscapes, seascapes, saintly and human figures on rug-
like backgrounds. Two works of special interest are the temperas
Olive Tree and Girl and With a Return Ticket. The olive is a vener-
able tree in the Greek tradition, for its extract nourishes not only
the body but also the eye, through the oil lamp. In the Pentzikis
painting a sturdy olive tree dominates the faintly painted figure of a
young lady, whom we may identify with the young lady of "Synki-
noniaka" (Matters of traffic). ^^ In that essay, the lady and her male
friend riding a bus bring up the subject of the olive, particularly the
so-called olive tree of Plato. The other painting is a remarkable
piece of chromatic variations, a pointillist gallery of illusions. It may
represent a thick hedge of flowers on dark tree twigs, a landscape
with its network of roads seen from an airplane, the bottom of a sea
bank, or rocks with their overgrowth of grasses. Its transparent
lushness would strike one as the best visual representation of the
entire work of Pentzikis.

It is interesting to hear Pentzikis enumerate the colors which he
used in this painting and their letter values. He chose white and
turquoise for the dual vowels; yellow, lemon yellow, and pink for
the short; lilac for the long; natural sienna and burnt sienna for the
labial consonants; orange for the guttural; mauve and cobalt violet
for the dental; cobalt blue and ultramarine blue for the nasal; olive
green, pine green, and emerald green for the liquid; and deep and
light Vermillion for the sibilant. The successive coats of paint re-
sulted in a number of mainly white and yellow or light blue flowers
with interspaces of earthy gray, or greenish colors of vegetation.

The final result in the paintings of Pentzikis is like an embroidery
that issues out of detailed calculations. Pentzikis does not want to
reach a rigid, classical symmetry — the pattern of brush-strokes
according to the chapter arrangements in his books could have been
different without any fundamental change in the whole work — but
aims at a suggestion that it is the invisible hand of God, the Muse,
or chance which guides his hand. This allows him to incorporate

'^ See p. 86 below.

THE FILING CABINET 77

into a painting a blue strawberry, originally drawn by a student who
was unaware that blue strawberries do not exist. No matter, says
Pentzikis. The blue strawberry adds a heavenly touch to the paint-
ing, for heaven is the only place where blue strawberries grow.^^

3. Filing Cabinet

The magnum opus of Pentzikis in the seventies, Arhion (Filing
cabinet), is ostensibly the result of a certain "researcher's" study
and ordering of the contents of a chest of drawers, or better, of a
set of twelve cupboards or cabinets that correspond to the twelve
months of the year. This book is, therefore, a kind of calendar. It
starts with September, the onset of the religious year in the Greek
Orthodox tradition, and ends with May, the regenerative month.
The ordering of the months in between follows a complicated pat-
tern of criteria, which is explained here and there in the text and
also in the detailed table of contents. ^"^

Pentzikis started the book in 1943, after the death of his grand-
mother and as a means of consolation for her death, under the
provisional title "Proghrammata ke Issitiria" (Programs and tick-
ets). He kept working at it for the next thirty years, and it was only
after 1971 that he gave its seventh and final form the title Arhion.
This voluminous work is, according to its writer, a tribute of love.
The dedication set in the usual framework of crosses, lines, and
dots reads: 'Tiling cabinet, book of eros, that is love granted as
universal light by the lord."

According to Byzantine custom, the ninth hour of the day falls in
the early morning, the time of morning prayers, if one counts the
hours from sunset. That is why Pentzikis starts the first chapter of
Filing Cabinet with Cabinet 9, September. One step back brings
him to Cabinet 8, August, the time before. Any beginning is always
loaded with the immediate past. Then comes Cabinet 4, April, the
month of lies. April symbolizes the superficial or false present.

'^ "Mia Chalazia Fraoula" (A blue strawberry) in Eft by ni 44 ( 1975), pp. 41 1-412.

''^ More on this matter is heard in a taped interview which Pentzikis granted to
Professor K. Myrsiades of West Chester College in 1974. Myrsiades also published
a perceptive review of The Filing Cabinet in the quarterly Books Abroad 50, no. 1
(1976), p. 214.

78 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

There follows Cabinet 1, January, the start of the secular year,
month of education, since the thirtieth of the month is dedicated to
the three hierarchs of the Greek Church, Basil, Gregory, and John
Chrysostom.

Next is Cabinet 6, June, the maturing, self-reliant month, fol-
lowed by Cabinet 10, October, when things are in decline. Then we
pass to Cabinet 2, February, the month of the Carnival, when the
other side of man, his irrational or Dionysiac nature, is expressed.
Cabinet 4 returns as the true April, the month of Easter, followed
by Cabinet 11, November, the true fall, when seeds are put into
the earth, and then Cabinet 3, March, when the seeds sprout.
There follows Cabinet 12, December, the last month of the secular
year, which is also the month of Christmas.

Pentzikis breaks the sequence of months with a survey of mate-
rial in rolls, wrapped not in paper, but in aluminum foil, and hidden
in some secret place of the filing cabinet, the crypt. Then, the
survey of months ends with Cabinet 7, July, month of maturity, and
Cabinet 5, May, month of rebirth and new hfe. The ordering of the
months seems rigorous as well as arbitrary or unpredictable, and, as
it happens in the other books by Pentzikis, this strict arrangement
is meant to compensate for the otherwise amorphous style of his
writing.

It is true that Filing Cabinet contains the elements of a possible
story about a man and a woman, Antonis and Anna, the ultimate
descendants of Adam and Eve, who, however, go through a long
series of metamorphoses — Anna, whose numerical value is 28, the
same as the numerical value of the word aghapi (love), gets con-
fused with the eighteen saints of the same name commemorated in
the Greek Orthodox Calendar. Pentzikis wants to depersonalize
the two characters and often turns them inside out, true to his
belief that in our times the contours of an individual are too blurred
and that, in fact, we cannot speak of an individual. George Seferis,
who once heard Pentzikis speak in this spirit, spent (according to
Pentzikis) a few sleepless nights trying to digest what he had
heard. '^

'^ The relationship between Seferis and Pentzikis is explored in chapter 3, section
8, and chapter 6, section 5.

THE FILING CABINET 79

The description in Filing Cabinet of wars and other destructive
acts further expresses the depersonahzation of our times. Pentzikis
juxtaposes these with the meaningful deaths of Christian martyrs,
which he also describes, sometimes in gruesome detail. The pano-
ramic views of violence, conflict, and destruction reminds one of
the Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine, while, on the other hand,
these may be seen as reflections of the violence in today's media,
movies, and television, as well as in much of the press.

To receive an idea of the method which Pentzikis follows in
Filing Cabinet, one may consider, say, his description of the con-
tents of Envelope Two, which is one of eight envelopes from
Cabinet 10, October. In this envelope are fifteen items or packets
ranging from bundles of used but empty envelopes, a visiting card,
receipts, a candy wrapper, and touristic souvenirs, to memoranda
with summaries from Synaxaristis:

1. Nineteen empty envelopes of five different sizes. Three are
yellow. Three are white. One has red and blue stripes at the
edges. The stamps are missing, obviously taken by some stamp
collector. One envelope is intact, as no stamps were stuck on
it. The name Anna is marked as the sender oh eighteen of the
envelopes. There is no sender's name on the nineteenth en-
velope, but the style in which the receiver's name, Antonios or
simply Antonis or, twice only, Antonakis, is written, makes
the identity of the sender quite clear [in other words, it is
Anna].

2. An album of a series of stamps, Greek and foreign. All
date from the pre-war period, between 1933 and 1937.

3. A telegram envelope, empty. It is scribbled on it that the
receiver was not at home and was notified to hurry and pick up
the now missing contents of the envelope.

4. A visiting card, apparently of the aforementioned Anna,
which bears warm greetings on the occasion of some
anniversary. On the card there is still pinned a white silk rib-
bon, which probably held a subsequently faded bouquet of
flowers.

5. A small box filled with dried wild flowers, hard to iden-
tify. One is certainly the so-called "Poet's Carnation".
Another, the flower of the creeping plant Tecoma Radicans,
which children are wont to wear around their fingers, in the

80 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

fashion of gloves, thinking that they are thus transfigured to
monsters of hell.

6. A note of a telephone conversation.

7. Receipt of payment for a long distance call.

8. Thirty-five receipts of registered letters from 1933 to
1936. Name of sender: Antonios Ninis. Name of receiver:
Anna Elkomenou.

9. Wrapping paper from candies of German origin for small
children. They are advertised by the French phrase Double Joie.
On the cover there is a picture of Snow White. The dark head
of the girl emerges out of a high collar in the form of a heart,
(pp. 121-122)

Most of the objects and torn papers which Pentzikis describes
are meaningless in themselves. Yet, together, they invite the reader
to see through their randomness to the higher order that permeates
and arranges them. A number of envelopes and postal receipts
attest to a correspondence between one Antonios Ninis and his girl
Anna Elkomenou. The pair evidently maintained a relationship for
some years, as the dates on the receipts for registered mail,
1933—1936, indicate. One of the envelopes from Anna is ad-
dressed to Antonios by his pet name, Antonakis. Other items in
Envelope Two are less amenable to immediate deduction of an
associated story, although many of them, like the candy wrapper or
a pretty photograph or an empty sugar packet (described later) are
easily associated with the happiness of romance. The pretty photo-
graph of a votive relief from the Acropolis shows "a woman gently
bending her beautiful head over her right shoulder." The empty
sugar packet, a remnant of some hotel breakfast, has a note written
on it:

How many such envelopes of sugar should be poured into the
lake so that its water can turn sweet enough for Kyra
Frossyni?'*^ How many of these should be consumed so that
his mouth, which I hear telling me his love, will always be
sweet? (pp. 123-124)

'^' A beautiful Greek woman who was unjustly executed on the grounds of im-
morality around 1800. On the orders of Ali Pasha, she was drowned in the lake at
Yannina along with several other women. Pentzikis thinks here of some Greek folk
songs commemorating that event.

THE FILING CABINET 81

Even an anomalous eraser, shaped like a bear, is said to be popular
with school children "when they still perceive life as a paradise."

Notes copied from Synaxaristis and a religious calendar trans-
mute the themes of play and romance into higher ethical concerns.
Monks who surrender their will to that of their superiors are likely
to become angels of a very high order. Children who obey their
parents can be compared to this same high angelic order. Other
notes describe two different holy men who sublimate their love of
women into salvation for either themselves or the women. The
monk Avramios instructed his niece, the later Saint Marina, in a
desert cell. When Marina ran away to a brothel, Avramios retrieved
her and instructed her in spiritual matters so effectively that she
became worthy of sainthood. The philosopher Cyprian renounced
idolatry for the love of the beautiful Christian Justa. When later
they faced martyrdom together, "they confessed forthrightly the
true faith."

Finally, there falls from Envelope Two a note on the calendar
page for the last day of October. Twelve anonymous virgins, who
were hanged for their witness for Christ, swing in the positions of
hours on a clock face and thus help us "understand where we are
exactly in time."

When he has concluded enumerating the contents of Envelope
Two, the researcher proceeds with the survey of Envelope Three
and so on. The dry enumeration of data, secular and religious, with
a minimum of comment may also be likened to an auction. The
writer is the auctioneer and the readers are the potential bidders.
But the bids are kept secret or are irrelevant, for (as it is hinted in
Item 1 1) what starts as a worldly possession proves in the long run
to be vain and corruptible. Nobody possesses in fact anything. We
can only name and recognize the things of this world in parallel
with, and in the halo which they receive from their intimacy with
the things of the other world.

This is the spirit of Filing Cabinet, a work which one could also
compare with the beads or knots of a rosary or the stages of a
religious service, with the writer praying, kneeling at intervals, and
burning incense, or further with an oratorio or a symphonic piece
of music on the months of the year, like Vivaldi's Four Seasons. In
the latter case, the composer has orchestrated the twelve months in

82 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

predictable but also original sequences, contrapuntal variations,
major and minor keys, high and low tones. The aim of all this is to
grasp the hidden unity of the world, which Pentzikis identifies with
the rhythmic frequencies of things. '

4- The Restoration of Andhreas

Forty-two years after its first publication, Andhreas Dhima-
koudhis was reissued in 1977 in Thessaloniki, with stylistic revi-
sions but no drastic change in its story line, together with sixteen
essays (some of them drastically revised) from various periods. The
full title of the new edition is Andhreas Dhimakoudhis ke Alles Mar-
tyries Hamou ke Dhefteris Panoplias (Andhreas Dhimakoudhis and
other testimonies of loss and of a second armor), which suggests
again the progression of Pentzikis from darkness to light, from
helplessness to confidence, from doubt to security.

The very last narrative, a short one, "I Synehia" (The continua-
tion), originally written and printed in 1948 in Kohlias, is a kind of
epilogue to Dhimakoudhis, a happy end, in metaphysical terms, to
the story of the young suicide. An unnamed woman who reminds
us of Renee and who has lost in the war her husband, her child, her
father, and her brother, reconsiders the past, when some crazy
young man had drowned for her love, and scratches in French on a
sherd of broken pottery the words: "I want to tell you that I truly
love you and that I send you many kisses." She stops at the edge of
the river where he has drowned and honors his memory by throw-
ing into the water some flowers and the pottery sherd.

There is a complementary image, of a man ill in bed, who is cared
for by a woman. The image, however, is not quite clear. The man
may be in fact dead and brought back to life only after a memorial
service is held on his behalf. The nursing woman seems to merge
with the double of Renee, and the message of the brief and elusive
narrative may be that the man's marriage to a living woman (Pent-
zikis married in 1948) was made possible only by the belated recip-
rocation of his love by a double of Renee; that is, Renee Saeger had

'^ Pentzikis makes this identification in the interview given to Myrsiades (n. 14
above).

THE FILING CABINET 83

become mature and worthy of his love through another woman.
For Pentzikis, all women are one. Niki who accepted Nikos
Gabriel as her husband did so not only on her own behalf, but also
on that of Renee oi Andhreas Dhimakoudhis.

The narratives that fall in between the revised story of Dhima-
koudhis and its happy afterword cover a wide range of subjects.
Some are more akin to short stories or landscapes, some are
pleasant narratives in the third person, portraits of named and
unnamed people. The portrait of a girl who reconciles herself to
the idea of a difficult mother; the story of a poor but handsome
young man who sees in a boat the woman he thinks he could have
loved, and the story of another man, an idiosyncratic reporter, who,
true to his name, Jonas, dreams that he is in the sea. Other narra-
tives describe the inside and outside of a coffeehouse, the problems
which "clocktime" causes to people, a car accident at which a child
loses his life. The child ends up in the arms of our Lady, while the
survivors discover her miraculous icon. In another narrative, a
monk becomes ecstatic not before the icons of his church but
before nature, when he goes to fetch water from the fountain.

The more essay-type texts, with their many learned references
and critical judgments, date from the last ten years or so. "Shima
Loghou" (Figure of speech) is inspired by the theme of walking. A
pleasant walk generates visual observations and memories leading
to a strange conclusion, that such a walk is but the paring and
gathering of the Virgin's fingernails.'^ "Kopela sto Stathmo" (Girl
at the station) illustrates the notion of immobility containing mo-
tion. The still face of a young lady waiting for the train becomes the
focus of the narrator's perambulating perceptions:

Waiting, which is like time without end, stretched in all possi-
ble directions, makes the girl's face look like the geographical
map of an entire region. Thought crosses it only in a narrow
sense like the train tracks on the map. The further searches
into the vertical and horizontal divisions of the earth's surface
[which one sees mirrored on the face] during the indefinite
time of waiting, constitute a myth. A tale with water birds,

'** As Pentzikis explains, "The Virgin's fingernails" is the Greek popular name of
the plant Ornithogallum Montanum of the family of Liliaceae.

84 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

white butterflies, water snakes, and greenish frogs who, sitting
on the round leaves of the water-HHes, help a princess find an
auspicious end to her cares, (pp. 166—167)

Then, Pentzikis compares the face of the waiting girl with the
shell of a snail and the train tracks with the twin silvery tracks which
a snail leaves behind in its slow progression on stones and leaves.
Far-fetched and idle similes, some readers would say. Yet, apart
from establishing a connection with the journal Kohlias, the simile
of the train and snail tracks is also one of the most meaningful for
Pentzikis. It hints at the theme of transfiguration. It also exem-
plifies the double process of depersonalization and impersonaliza-
tion which characterizes all the work of Pentzikis. The girl, patient-
ly waiting at the train station, trusts in time. Her face ceases to be a
human face. It is enlarged as well as depersonalized into a map.

The out-going, silvery tracks of the snail pressupose the snail
shell. Similarly, the train tracks assume whatever meaning they
have from their association with the waiting girl. Pentzikis restores
to the girl her human face, but it is a much brighter and broader
face. She is now Nausicaa, Homer's maiden, who, by transcending
the limitations of time "which distinguish between youth and old
age, the expected joy of the welcoming kerchief, and the sorrow of
the last farewell," is ready to welcome the old shipwrecked Ulysses
as a long-expected person. The strength of the metaphor is also a
key to the writer's own freedom from the prison of the self.

The exploratory twin tracks of the snail are as solid in their
fragility as the steel tracks of the train. Both sets of tracks are
means of reaching out. Waiting is also a kind of reaching out. In this
sense, the train does not come to the girl, but is caught in the net of
her perception. The same happens with the narrator.

3. The Expanded Knowledge of Things

In December 1977, Pentzikis published in Thessaloniki a
second, revised and enlarged edition of his 1950 book. The full
title this time was Praghmatoghnossia ke Alia Epta Kimena Mytho-
plassias Gheoghraphikis (Knowledge of things and seven other essays
of geographical myth-making). One of the reasons for the reissuing
of this work is that the 1950 edition (offset also in 1974 in fifty

THE FILING CABINET 85

copies) had not been satisfactorily proofread and printed. As in the
case of the restored Andhreas, the new text oi Knowledge of Things
has been tidied up and made smoother in style. Many of the origi-
nal sentences, which had been impulsively jotted down on paper,
have been recast more logically and with regularized punctuation.
More radically revised and lengthened is the last chapter, "Gha-
mos" (Marriage). The revision makes clearer the miraculous renew-
al through Christianity of the pagan element, incarnate in the
figures of Ulysses and Nausicaa.

The other essays in this edition, ordered chronologically, are
forays into the geography and history of Greece. In "Mia Ekdhro-
mi" (An excursion), a man runs the risk of falling into the sea and
drowning while he tries to catch a newspaper snatched by the
breeze. This happens during a recreational trip which the man takes
with his family by boat. While reading his newspaper, he is assailed
by memories and grows oblivious to his surroundings. At the criti-
cal moment, however, he is saved by the nymph Leucothea, who
had also helped the hero Odysseus in mythical times. The nymph
represents here the beneficent side of memory. "Me t'Aftokinito"
(By car), originally printed in Dhiaghonios under another title, is a
brief account, almost in surreal or Dantesque terms, of a car drive
that ends up at the seaside with a hearty meal of fresh fish. "Peri
Limnou" (On Limnos) is a learned examination of the land and
history of this solitary island in the Northern Aegean, to which a
crippled Philoctetes dragged himself alone in the Sophoclean play
of the same name.

Pentzikis investigates the metaphysical significance of carrying
loads around in "Peri Metaphoron" (Matters of transportation),
while he provides a rich excursion into the past of the three-
tongued peninsula of Northern Greece and its Christian associa-
tions with "Ena Simadhi se Spitia tis Chalkidhikis" (A sign on
houses of Chalkidhiki). The sign is the cross found on the walls of
many Chalkidhikian houses. The peninsula has been hallowed by
the presence on its Eastern tongue of the Athos monasteries. The
essay abounds in free associations and eye-catching digressions
from the main topic, similarly to "Enas Kalos Peripatos" (A good
walk) which follows it.

"A Good Walk" is a learned survey on the theme of the solitary

86 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

walk in art as well as in ancient and modern literature. Some
Homeric verses that describe a flight of the goddess Hera are
quoted for the occasion and subjected to detailed lexical scrutiny.
The purpose is to show the elements of motion and action involved
in a walk. The discussion continues with historical and topographi-
cal data and examples of characteristic walks. Pentzikis rounds out
the theme oddly with the claim that a monk's stillness in prayer and
contemplation is also a kind of walk. In this weightless stillness,
which one could liken to the levitation of a yogi, the obliterated self
is like a powder, light enough for the wind to lift and carry over the
sea.

The last essay, "Matters of Traffic", may be read as an analogue
to the essay "The Girl at the Station" of the new Andhreas Dhima-
koudhis. Here the key vehicle is not a train but a bus which a young
couple rides among other passengers. When the crowd gets off to
eat at a restaurant, the bus — a miniature of the world — is left
alone to wait for the continuation of its journey. It may be signifi-
cant to the Pentzikis reader that the new Knowledge of Things ends
with this simple observation of the waiting bus, of the unfinished
journey.

6 . The New A rchitecture of the Scattered Life

The text oi Architecture of the Scattered Life, reissued in 1978 in
Thessaloniki, has been also retouched stylistically. The volume
contains additional narratives, among which are five extended nota-
tions on the first five days of November. In these Pentzikis has
combined material from Synaxaristis and other religious texts with
information on the lives of some acquaintances and other contem-
poraries of his, whom he conceals under the names of saints. At the
end of each notation Pentzikis prays that Christ may have mercy
upon those whose names are so disguised.

In "Penihri Askissi" (Humble exercise) the reality of joy is iden-
tified with "the possibility of visual distinction of the white among
the other colors and their nuances." The rain causes mutations in
the coloring of things and may also affect, in noxious ways, the
nerves of humans and animals. The rheumatic pain given to the
writer by dampness, however, is eased by the thought that person-
ifies the rain as the "nymph of heaven".

THE FILING CABINET 87

In "I Kyra Thalassini" (The lady of the sea) someone called Zizis
— the word is etymologically connected with Zoi (Life) — dreams
that his dear wife has left him. He writes her name in the sand on
the beach, but corsairs disembark and step on it. A humble flower
tells him that his lost mate is on the other, the white shore, "by the
salty water which cannot be drunk." In his search for the woman,
whom he eventually sees from the distance lying on "the white
sheet of the beach," the man meets a butterfly, an olive tree, and a
little shrimp. This last creature asks for his identification papers and
forbids him to go further. He experiences great suffering:

The eyes of the man in love started shedding abundant tears.
Sorrowing greatly about the division of his existence into body
and soul, he kept asking himself, in the very depths of his
heart, when he would join at last the Lady of the Sea. Could
this happen at the waning phase of the moon, when the sea
organisms empty their shells, or when they grow into savory
food, at the time the disk of Selene waxes.'' Would this take
place on the hither, familiar side of the Helios's mirror, or
behind, in the mysterious area of Phoebus's and Hecate's
mythical love encounters? King Apollo and his Lady travelled
once in harmony with each other. But they came to quarrel
very badly. He beat his wife angrily. The beatings of Lord
Helios left on the Moon's face bruises black like the soul of
Cain, which can be still seen even today, when the two figures
of God's creation travel separately, (p. 44)

Pentzikis identifies the humble man and his lost mate with the sun
and the moon, here referred to variously by their ancient mythical
names, Helios/Apollo/Phoebus and Selene/Hecate. This is typical
of his "mythical" mind. One also notes that "The Lady of the Sea" is
quite lyrical, a narrative resonant with echoes from Greek songs,
tales, and older literature. It hearkens back to its author's early
days, a time when he was most fascinated by tales and romantic
legends. Mr. Zizis is none other than Pentzikis himself, who, pre-
vented once from uniting with the woman of his dreams, set out to
preserve the "salt" born out of his tears in a lifetime's work.

CHAPTER 5

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT

1 . The Reality of Myth

Plato's well-known definition of myth as fiction that depicts truth
has remained the best definition of myth and apphes to Nikos
Gabriel Pentzikis' work perfectly. It is the concept of mythical
reality, or reality of myth, which weds together the general with the
particular, the subject and the object, the flesh and the spirit, the
earth and heaven. On the contrary, human reason tends to destroy
the essential unity of the universe: "Reason dissects and dissolves
myth, bequeaths unbelief, reduces existence to zero, ruins form,"
Pentzikis observes in his critique on the French poet Mallarme, and
adds: "We salute the dead, while we do not believe in the reality of
their shades. It is only through this salutation that they assume
identity." ^

Myth is a surreal or absurd solution for unbelievers, but the true
and ultimate reahty for believers; it is the "other," the truly objec-
tive life, which does not deny the world of the senses but rather
embraces and sanctions it. This is the very reason for which Pent-
zikis insists on what he calls the "concrete." He is so emphatic on
this point of acceptance of concrete reality, substance, volume and
form, that one is tempted to call him a sensual rather than a visual
writer to the extent that all senses are extensions or refinements of
the basic sense of touch. ^ The need to go back to basics is highlight-
ed in the narrative "Humble Exercise" in the revised edition of

' "Ghia ton Mallarme" (About Mallarme), Kohlias (June 1947), p. 84. See also
Chapter 6, section 5.

^ Elias Petropoulos calls Pentzikis a visual writer, in his pamphlet Nikos Gabriel
Pentzikis.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 89

Architecture of the Scattered Life: "... I had the great desire to lie
down on the all-white sheet of myths, suckling like a baby the
maternal bread of each thing's individual shape" (p. 195). Also, in
the response which Pentzikis gave to a question by a reporter for
the Athens daily newspaper / Kathimerini, on October 6, 1976:

Pentzikis: Ideas are false.

Interviewer: Even the idea of freedom.-*

Pentzikis: Yes, the ancients made a statue of freedom and the
people who came close noted its pretty feet. They had a sensual
concept of freedom, thus doing away with the idea.

Plato, the first great idealist of the Western world, was not differ-
ent in his concept of the archetypal ideas (or forms), each one of
which was supposed to have a tangible equivalent in the concrete
world: "The ideas which Plato suggested to me had dimensions,
had the truth of hand and touch. Those ideas emerge from within
us and explode like flowers in the outside world" (Revised
Architecture of the Scattered Life, p. 12).

Pentzikis believes that man can become aware of true reality only
if he surrenders his ego, his individuality, that part of his nature
which alone perishes. He can gain a glimpse of eternity, of timeless
time, if he seeks, finds, and acknowledges the metaphysical or
mythical world. In Homilies, Pentzikis states that it is in that world
where "the subject functions as the lighting of the object" (p. 182),
or as he says in Retinue, it is in such a world where there can be a
sense of unity among human beings "through the mythical projec-
tion of the object within the subject" (p. 23). So Pentzikis accepts
phenomenal reality fully but views it as a mirror or a vessel of an
unworldly truth.

The incarnation of the divine in Christ gives sanction to the
world of the senses. Iconography and, more broadly, painting, sym-
bolize the "other world" and at the same time give a seal of approv-
al to the realities of design and color. The light which the Hesy-
chasts saw after long hours of meditation and prayer was "uncre-
ated," but manifest nevertheless. Blue strawberries do not exist.
Yet, they are possible in painting, one of heaven's mirrors. Like-
wise, creative writing makes it possible, again through the interac-
tion of myth, to fraternize with an octopus and commune with a

90 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

bear.^ Finally, Pentzikis' "mother," Thessaloniki, lives its fuller life
within the myth of her patron, Saint Demetrius.

2. Memory

Pentzikis feels that the magic key to the reality of myth is mem-
ory. From Retinue: "We have all been evicted from a better world.
The meaning of life is that we remember" (p. 28). In Homilies
Pentzikis observes: "1 remember means that I see that I exist at
once with what has been and what will be" (p. 42). Memory will
keep alive the image and the promise of a lost Eden. It will chal-
lenge, but also take care of the imperfections of this world. The
young man of Retinue enters a church where he finds corruption
and decay: chipped walls, sooty icons, holes, spiders, cracks in the
ceiling. He tries to overcome the impression, but he cannot. He
feels as though the man who stands outside the church door is not a
beggar looking for charity, but a famished wolf, his fur ravaged by
winter. The garden of his childhood is filled with nettles, and the
town beyond is an incoherent conglomeration of stones or a mass
of tired bodies. He wishes that he could deny the existence of the
world. Yet something inside informs him stubbornly that the world
exists beyond its apparent depravity or confusion. It exists, he
feels, in the very bones of his fingers, the double bone of his calf,
the liquid parts of his entrails, the cells of his nervous system. He
finds relief in examining the bones of some dead person and con-
templating what is perishable and what lives on, as Saint Sisois is
said to have done over the bones of Alexander the Great.

In the instance above, the man's morale is raised by the automat-
ic activation of his racial or national memory. The rundown church
is accepted as an integral part of the whole town, together with
some cripple whom the young man meets every day on the street-
car. Through memory he integrates himself into myth that surpass-
es his shaken individuality {Retinue, pp. 28-32). At other times,
memory will be deliberately aroused through the handling of

^ In Angelos Sikelianos' famous poem "The Sacred Road" (in Kimon Friar, Mod-
ern Greek Poetry, pp. 215-218), the poet identifies his own pain with that of a mother
bear enslaved to a gypsy.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 91

souvenirs, the fetishes of time. In The Dead Man and the Resurrec-
tion he says: "I try to include in my writing small details which I
have noted, because I feel that it is only in this way that my life,
fragmented by daily contradictions, can assume a certain unity"
(p. 52). In the essay "The Sponge and the Word", Pentzikis defines
memory as that energy which "straightens the spiral array of the
particles of living matter" (Homilies, p. 193). One could also liken
Pentzikis' memory in action to a garbage-collector (he often calls
himself a garbage-dump), a spherical or cylindrical garbage-
collecting machine that works its way, in a linear fashion, through
space and time. It mixes together all that it picks up, shapes this
garbage into a ball and recycles it into the world. Transforming and
recycling its material, the ever-turning machine of memory sug-
gests the non-linear but spherical time, the open-ended eternity
which we can call "the world of myth."

In Filing Cabinet Pentzikis represents memory symbolically by
the tears of regret that connect the past with the future. One could
associate this juncture between past and future with another
thought found in the same work: faith in the Cross permits us to
view life as a forward performance, an acting out of man's nature,
and as a backward movement, the reverse road of repentance
(p. 167). The identity of forward with reverse movement helps us
understand the startling statement, which Pentzikis often makes,
that the present is the past of memory. The ongoing or eternal
domain of memory is ahead of all linear time. The present is the
point from which the road of repentance starts; hence, the present
becomes the past of memory. So viewed, memory can be also
identified with T. S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world" or with
the very opposite of memory, Lethe, the oblivion of all that annoys,
divides, and fragments man's life and his vision of God (Toward
Church-Going, p. 110).

3. Style as Labor

The road of memory may lead to the light, but it has first to cross
darkness, where all sorts of dangers lurk. It is because of his
memories that Mr. Pipis of "An Excursion" loses his sense of the

92 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

environment and almost falls into the sea and drowns. ' Memorializ-
ing the past is not an easy, but a laborious process.

In trying to follow Pentzikis' progression through the years, one
cannot fail to notice his struggle with the art of writing. It is not in
fact surprising that someone like him, well-read in world literature,
came often to grieve at his own inability or lack of confidence in
finishing off a story or rounding out his thoughts aesthetically and
with gusto. The secret desire of Pentzikis was early to be a great
hterary craftsman. Yet, he ended up fleeing the pure and aesthetic
form as a sin. In this he resembles Giacometti who suppresses the
flesh under the angular structures of his statues.

Pentzikis came to feel that too many have labored too much in
the aesthetic representation of the world; he says in Homilies:

Neither the old style of fiction nor the new one, Joyce's, are
capable of helping me. Possibly, because I do not know these
well enough. I hesitate to be an imitator, though I am used to
wearing strange clothes and I put on an old shirt discarded by
someone richer than I. The thought that it was not made for
me does not make me comfortable. The shirt is so large that
every now and then I have to tighten my belt. I therefore dare,
now that I am alone, to take off my body whatever is strange. I
will not miss the opportunity. Not that I look very handsome
in the nude. I do not, but it does not matter. As I have gotten
used to showering every day, I can clean myself from my sins,
(pp. 10-11)

Literary composition is deprecated more openly in The Dead

Man and the Resurrection:

In the final analysis, what is the use of literature? Isn't it in fact
a sickly consequence of the times, an outlet to boredom, a
passion unknown to great ages, when expression flowed effort-
lessly from action.'' With the help of this or that ideology we
keep searching for stimulants to our feelings, which we value
too much and are afraid to forsake, (p. 19)

Withdrawal from inherited beauties, however, cannot be pain-
less. Stripping off strange clothes, the mortification of good taste
acquired from education, meant difficult sacrifices on the part of an

" Cf. chapter 4, p. 85.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 93

ambitious writer like Pentzikis. But he had no choice. He per-
ceived that by aspiring to an ideal synthesis of his experiences, he
would have to be selective. He would have to leave out much of
what he felt was worthy of inclusion in his writing and also be
imitative of his favorite authors. In our time of fragmentation and
uncertainty, true synthesis was not possible for someone like him.
Therefore, everything had to be admitted into his ark, the finished
product of his pen, for the creation of a "non-style that is the man,"
as Kimon Friar put it in his Modern Greek Poetry (p. 1 10).

A simple way of paying tribute to the world at large is to handle a
bunch of souvenirs. It makes no difference that the souvenirs are
more or less personal, for originally it was chance that made the
selection. Indeed, the writer feels that he himself is a product of
chance, and this same chance may communicate to him its deeper
meanings if he is not too selective; observe this passage from The
Architecture of the Scattered Life:

Arranging souvenirs made me feel that in some way I com-
muned in a lively way with those things that were but dead
matter. In the name of such a strong sentimental need I denied
myself any logical method. I preferred to appear insane — that
is what they called me — rather than deny that darkness full of
sensations, where I felt I could move about seeking hope.
There is nothing more voluptuous than that. I could walk
forward in that small but soothing light, color of honey, that
showed me the way far ahead in the distant horizon, (p. 43)

A writer like Pentzikis who writes not for the sake of literary
form, not in the service of a literary tradition, not for making
money — a Somerset Maugham who writes for the millions in
order to make millions — nor for some political or social reason,
must by necessity write to satisfy more fundamental needs, as fun-
damental as breathing or moving about.

The deeper necessities or impulses which underlie the writing
(and also painting) of Pentzikis are: the need for play; the need to
know and treat the world as an object that can be learned best
through observation, experiment, and rational thought; and the
need to have and cultivate a myth which will sanction and harmo-
nize the other two needs. These three needs, impulses, or aspects
of Pentzikis' psyche are usually expressed in his works in juxtaposi-

94 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

tion, alternation, or even conflict with one another. Inside Pent-
zikis the child constantly fights with the adult, the rational man, as
well as with the seer or prophet. Hence, the feehng of hard, relent-
less labor that emanates most often from his writing.

Pentzikis' incapacity to write pleasingly — something which he
himself often deplores — comes, to a large extent, from a deeper
honesty. He does not want to achieve artifice of order, falsify real-
ity, and disguise the fact that today the world appears to be chaotic.
Ezra Pound's Mauberley was distracted by aesthetics and missed
"the mottoes on sundials."^ A host of writers in the thirties were
captivated by the politics of the left, only to recant or reconsider
them later. Others, hke Pentzikis' fellow-Greek, Nikos Kazant-
zakis, pushed their romanticism to its logical conclusion, nihilism.

An open-eyed child of his era, Pentzikis has sensed, hke his
contemporaries Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky, that the primary
function of the artist today is to dig deep into the areas of the
human soul which lie beneath ordinary consciousness and to dis-
cover or rediscover some unifying myth. Pentzikis rediscovered
and reembraced Greek Orthodoxy, the myth that nourished both
his youth and, for long centuries, his entire nation. Yet he is much
more than a Greek Orthodox who reaffirms his faith.

4. In the Whirl of Sources

The laborious side of Pentzikis' writing also appears in the num-
ber and variety of his sources. It has been shown already that
Pentzikis is open to the world and stimulated by all types of data. It
would take long hours to sort out and order, for example, the little-
or well-known figures of people from the past, whom he discusses
or merely mentions in one book. Filing Cabinet. The same is true
of the books and art works which he cites in particular contexts, of
scientific and cultural phenomena, customs, points of history, anti-
quarian details and modern trivia, religious rituals, features of
architecture, and others. There is no end. In fact, it might take
many hundred pages to study Pentzikis' sources methodically. For
this reason, we will discuss two of his sources, folk tradition and

' "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)," in Ezra Pound: Selected Poems
(London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 173.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 95

botany, and then we will examine Pentzikis' relationship with the
modern media of communication, from where many writers of
today draw, consciously or unconsciously, much of their material as
well as stylistic devices.

It will not do to see Pentzikis as a detached but sympathetic and
appreciative observer of the traditions of his land. His interest in
coloring his narratives with folk tales and bits of information that
relate to folk arts and crafts is not merely aesthetic. He feels that
folklore has an inherent value; that it harbors an age-long wisdom
and a deep-seated faith in life. In The Dead Man and the Resurrection
the alienated hero notices on a trunk the embroidery — still found
in some Greek houses — of a cross, an anchor, and a heart, that
symbolize faith, hope, and mercy. This boosts his morale.

Plato blamed the weakening of memory to the invention of writ-
ing. By analogy, one might say that Pentzikis is attracted by the
folklore of his people because in folklore memory works in its
purest form. It is an archetypal, collective, and unifying memory
which enlarges or reinforces personal experience. Pentzikis found
it significant, for instance, that on the day recounted in Homilies
(p. 173), on which he broke relations with the young lady whom he
loved, the drinking glass he used broke into two whole pieces. The
superstitious association of the two probably unrelated events sug-
gests both the popular mentality which Pentzikis wants to honor as
well as his own essentially symbolic or mythical mind.

Tales are freer vehicles of imagination than personal reminis-
cences, and Pentzikis easily passes from the latter to the former.''
The spontaneous creativity of the primitive mind appeals to him
very much. The young man of "The Journey and the Stop" walks
several miles in order to recapture his childhood and "find shelter
in his memories." He recalls that as a child he and a friend had
given names — many of them borrowed from books — to the
things that surrounded them. In Retinue he reminisces:

They were fond of whatever they saw and they would name it
in order to preserve its memory. They even gave a name to the
swift and light step of a shepherd, who, treading ahead of them
on leaves of holly trees one evening that they had gotten lost,

'' This was also noted by Watson in his essay "A Thessalonian — N. G. Pentzikis"
(see chapter 1, n. 2).

96 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

led them to the right path. They sought and found the scanty
rivulets of water with the eagerness of the explorers that
reached the Victoria Falls in the Zambezi river, the smoke that
thunders, as the natives of Rhodesia called it. (pp. 20—21)

The onomatopoeic and mythopoeic qualities of the folk mind
overcome easily the limitations of space and time. Greek folk tradi-
tion has identified the Odysseus of Homer with the Christian
prophet and saint Elias, whose small chapels stud most of the
Greek mountain tops. Both men, according to this tradition, were
fed up with the sea and its perils. They shouldered an oar and set
out to find and mark a spot of land, as far removed from the sea as it
could be, where they could settle. For Pentzikis, who mentions the
story more than once, this is more than a colorful piece of folklore
or another example of religious syncretism. There is a soul, an
anima, in the Greek landscape; a spirit which has undergone many
transformations through the centuries, but has remained basically
the same. It stresses continuity and suggests the eternity of myth.

Several of the narratives which Pentzikis has written in recent
years, like those appended to the revised editions of his older
books, are pointedly mythopoeic. "The Lady of the Sea," partly
summarized earlier, is the best example.^ But also in "Epetios"
(Anniversary) events from the Synaxari (Life story) of Saint Clem-
ent are recast in the manner of a fairy-tale. The former sinner
Clement wears out six pairs of shoes on his way to the "other
shore," is given his directions by animals of the land and the sea, is
eaten up by birds of prey while the "luggage" of his sins is con-
sumed by fire. Next, we see him lying on the shore, invested in the
rustle of the Virgin's cast-away clothes, and finally lighting his can-
dle and paying reverence to the holy icons in the Virgin's church.

In "Phaini ke Nikodhimos" (The Luminous One and Nicodem)
Pentzikis reworks the story of the beautiful maiden under a curse
who is rescued by a handsome and valiant man. The maiden and the
man, who are anonymous, go through a series of transformations
before they redeem each other through love and faith and assume
their proper names. Her name, "The Luminous One", is self-
explanatory, while his is meant to honor Saint Nikodhimos the

' See chapter 4, p. 87.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 97

Athonian. Pentzikis reworks the traditional story with many new
associations and colorful details.

Botany is a science which Pentzikis has studied professionally
and of which he has an extensive knowledge. He will often mention
in his writings particular plants and herbs, quoting as a rule both
their scientific and popular names. He brings these up as items of
curiosity or in order to illustrate some point. But most interesting
are those cases where Pentzikis suggests mystical connections be-
tween his heroes and the vegetation of this earth. We may recall the
gesture of Andhreas Dhimakoudhis treasuring a tree leaf in his
wallet and the photo of Pentzikis behind a branch of the "snake-
plant" shown in Seferis' The Hours of "Mrs. Ersi", the identification
of the Greek Macedonian teacher with the trees of his land in "A
Teacher in the Lake," and also the comparison of the gradually
emerging Notes of One Hundred Days with grass taking root.

Pentzikis carries the mystical identification between man and
plant much further in a passage oi Homilies, where he observes that
at Pentecost people kneel by custom upon walnut tree leaves and
pray for the dead. A walnut looks like a human brain, while its shell
may be likened to a boat. The wood is good for furniture and
coffins and for the chests where maidens keep their trousseaux.
Kneeling on these leaves is like wedding yourself to your dead
(pp. 139-140).

Quite attractive are some of Pentzikis' comparisons of people
with plants and flowers. The girl Helen of "Anixi" (Spring) from
the revised version o{ Andhreas Dhimakoudhis has a body slim and
tall Uke a new tree before they take it out of the greenhouse (p.
128), while cripples are like flowers preserved only by the generos-
ity of the soil. The latter simile precedes this passage from Notes of
One Hundred Days:

On discovering on Olympus, the seat of the ancient Twelve
Gods, some rare kind of plant that protruded from inside the
cracks of the rocks like a violet sun, a botanist thought of how
many millions of years of life and efforts of adaptation to the
constant geo-architectural disturbances in the outer shell of
the earth were represented by that monument of a flower, and
bent dpwn to kiss it. (p. 93)

98 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

It is finally botany that suggested to the poet Nikos Karouzos the
title for his brief but perceptive critique "O Polyvotanos Pentzikis"
(Pentzikis of 'many herbs').^ Karouzos sees the work of Pentzikis as
a field of many herbs, some of them rare and exotic. As for Pent-
zikis himself — who was once seen walking in the street and read-
ing a newspaper in the light of a candle fixed in the little pocket of
his jacket — Karouzos considers him as the projector of a new, yet
also old and simple style of life.

3. Influence of the Media

Pentzikis is mainly a reading and writing animal. Numerous
times he alludes or refers to written sources, old and new, while he
mentions the modern media of the radio, television, and the cine-
ma in an off-handed way. In the latter cases, he either draws a
contrast between modern times and the realities of the past or uses
references to the modern media as details in his descriptions.

A sensitive receptor like Pentzikis, however, was bound to pay
honor somehow to the machine age and the proliferation of the
modern communications media. This he does through his style. His
idiosyncratic style cannot be explained simply by the influence of
the loose and anecdotal manner of his beloved Byzantine chrono-
graphers, his impatient character, and his decision to shun traditional
aesthetic form. Jumping with agility from one thing to the other in
his narratives is like turning the knobs of a radio or television set.
This is a more drastic procedure than moving one's eyes across and
down the page of a newspaper.

The futurists spoke of the "suffering of an electric lamp which,
with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heart-rending expres-
sion of color.'^ Pentzikis has not gone so far as to personify modern
technological realities in this fashion, although he often personifies
plants and geographical areas. Taken in its totality, however, the
work of Pentzikis presents the typical characteristics of the elec-
tronic media: spontaneity of sound and image; percussive and re-
petitive projection of the same; the spoiling of the illusion and
interruption of the dramatic sequence by, let us say, commercials.

** Dhtaghonios, Second Series, 10 ( 1967), pp. 1 18-1 19.

'' In Jane Rye, Futurism (London: "Studio Vista," 1972), p. 23.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 99

The equivalent in Pentzikis of this latter device is not so much his
occasional reference to real commercials which have intrigued or
amused him, but his frequent "advertising" of his faith in incanta-
tions and religious formulas. These elements project something
magical in their repetition. The aim of this sort of memorialization
of reality is to achieve a new unity and a feeling of total relatedness
which the electronic media pursue.

Comparisons cannot be pressed too much. Yet particular works
by Pentzikis can be juxtaposed with particular works of the modern
stage or cinema, like Einstein on the Beach (an "opera in four acts"
by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass) and the film on the expression-
ist painter Edvard Munch by British filmmaker Peter Watkins. The
former opens and closes with two so-called "knee plays," three
more of which link the acts of the opera together. In these "plays"
two actors repeat constantly certain phrases and gestures to the
accompaniment of a droning electronic organ. There is no apparent
coherence in the content of the opera, no discernible plot or action.
The sets and the music are equally baffling, so much so that some
critic likened the whole thing to an invitation for dinner where the
china, the silverware, and the flowers briefly hide from the guests
the fact that they were to bring their own food.'^' This criticism
resembles similar criticisms levelled at Pentzikis, whose symme-
tries of divisions and subdivisions in his works are also perplexing.
"Patterns we deny, and that is part of a pattern," the authors of that
opera might say together with G. Bowering, author of the line
quoted. ^^ Pentzikis would endorse the statement, but boldly add:
"The pattern of God."

Without his faith Pentzikis might have been like the moody artist
Edvard Munch, whose famous painting The Shriek matches some of
the desperate passages oi Andhreas Dhimakoudhis. In the Watkins
film, Munch slashes and gouges at his canvas the way Pentzikis does
at times with his paper. The actors look into the camera as the
Pentzikis characters often turn around — so he wishes them to do
— and spoil the illusion of distance and the feeling of security

'" F. J. Spieler, "Adrift among Images" (a review oi Einstein on the Beach), Harpers
(March 1977), p. 112.

' ' G. Bowering, in Fifteen Canadian Poets, eds. G. Geddes and Ph. Bruce (Toron-
to: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 226 (poem "Circus Maximus").

100 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

which distance can breed. Watkins wants to involve his audience
and Pentzikis his readers. The movie takes the viewer to many
places; the true setting, however, seems to be inside the artist's
head. The meticulous dissection of the creative process in the
movie parallels the attempts of Pentzikis, in the Architecture of the
Scattered Life and elsewhere, to perform surgery on his own subcon-
scious.

6. Style as Play

Play comes naturally to a child, but a playful adult is often so with
a vengeance. Pentzikis will often trivialize life in order to ward off
the demons of self-righteousness and false pride, his own and those
of others. The more he ponders his existence, the more mysterious
and baffling it seems, and play is a kind of response to unanswer-
able questions. During a visit he made in 1940 to some chapels in
the Macedonian city of Kastoria, he let himself become a child
again on meeting a group of real children that wondered about his
identity and whether he was a Greek or a foreigner. He asked them
for a ladder with the thought that, if he managed to climb it and
have a look at the surroundings from on high, God might help him
solve his problems! The children brought the ladder, but he gave
up chmbing it at the second step for reasons which he does not
specify. Then the children told him about their school life and
Pentzikis bought bread and halvah for them. They all stepped bare-
foot into the river nearby. Shortly after, some of the children
accepted their new friend's proposition to carry water to a chapel
and wash off the dirt from the (presumably glass-cased) icons. He
was finally called by the children trelakias (crazy), which he did not
mind {Homilies, pp. 157-160).

The playfulness of Pentzikis can be also seen as a Christian
euphoria which springs from his conviction that beyond good and
evil all things find their harmony in Christ. For it was he who
summoned the children to himself and blessed those who were
prepared to be like children. Pentzikis has seemed to many to
display signs of arrested childhood. Yet he has continued to act like
a child over the years, and the image of a child in play would be his
favorite one.

The playful attitude of Pentzikis informs his writings with the use

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 101

of puns. Watson notices that puns are also found in Synaxaristis,
especially in the epigrams of the saints of the day.'^ These innocent
games with words relieve the gravity of whatever is discussed. They
also serve a higher purpose, as they associate magically among
themselves things and ideas which are not interconnected on first
view.

The idea that Christianity need not be gloomy is suggested to
Pentzikis by the scene of the dancing faithful in a mural from the
monastery of Ghrighorios in Athos.^^ A certain abbot's name,
Ghelassios (The laughing one) provokes the same reaction {Knowl-
edge of Things, revised edition, p. 155). The word for a writer of
prose in Greek is pezoghraphos, in which pezo indicates "prose" and
ghraphos "writer". Divided differently, pe-zoghraphos, the word sug-
gests "child" in pe and "painter" in zoghraphos {Homilies, p. 206).
For the reader of Pentzikis, the pun may also signify an essential
feature in this writer's personality, the writer of prose containing
the innocent or primitive painter.

Filing Cabinet is particularly rich in puns and word-plays. An
apartment house, polykatikia, is deliberately misspelled poulikati-
kia, to suggest a set of pigeon holes {pouli means "bird"). Else-
where in the same work an apocryphal story about a Thessalonian
to whom they serve milk at Ghalaxidhi, a town in Southern Greece,
explains the etymology of the town's name: ghala (milk) and xidhi
(vinegar). Further, the word ghalaxias is said to mean choice-milk
{axia means "choice", "value"), while the Latin word vates (seer,
poet) is jokingly associated with Greek vates (paddings). ^'^

7. The Game of Numbers

At the bottom of all play is magic, and Pentzikis' trust in magic
manifests itself mostly in his fascination with and symbolic use of
numbers.

The narrator of Retinue is led to the game of numbers through
deprivation:

'^ In "A Thessalonian — N. G. Pentzikis." (See chapter 1, n. 2).
'^Cf. chapter 4, p. 69.

'"^ Filing Cabinet, pp. 267, 145-148, and 330, and Proceedings of the Panhellenic
Congress of Writers, p. 64.

102 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

He realizes that all possibilities and transformations depend on
numbers. It is a question of mathematics since he has over-
spent himself, or his money. By spending you learn the num-
bers: one, two, three, to nine. While zero, indispensable to the
logistical completion of the decimal system, lies in the bottom
from where you pull it after you reach extreme poverty. In
other words, poverty is like a dive into the sea; you reach the
bottom and catch sand. (p. 44)

Here zero is compared to sand. Elsewhere, it symbolizes the in-
tangible yet very real element of the wind.^^ By analogy, any letter
of the alphabet is a source of countless possibilities. Each letter is
the initial of numerous names. Names may be transformed into
numbers and vice-versa. A telephone number corresponds to
someone dear to us, and his or her name may be represented also
by another set of digits. It depends on the value which we assign to
each letter of the name.^^

The original source of the mysticism of numbers is Pythagoras,
who is alleged to have said that number is the wisest thing in the
world. ^^ Numerology or number mysticism was central in the
Pythagorean system, a mixture of cosmology, philosophy, and reli-
gion. Other Greek philosophers, like Anaximander, had tried to
explain the earth-sun and earth-moon relationship in terms of num-
bers and mathematical symmetry. But Pythagoras went so far as to
claim that the universe could not only be expressed in terms of
numbers, but was itself number. '^ His theory, which also spoke of
the limited/unlimited-odd/even balance of the One, source of ev-
erything, was criticized by Aristotle. ^'^ Yet it held a fascination for
thoughtful men through the centuries and passed on to the Chris-
tian writers by way of Neoplatonism. Pentzikis thus drew his let-
ters-and-numbers method from Synaxaristis and the Byzantines,

"Chapter 4, p. 70.

"^ Cf. chapter 4, p. 74.

'The statement has been also attributed to Hippasos. See Aug. Nauck, ed.,
lamblichi. De Vita Pythagorica Liber (Amsterdam; Hakkert, 1965), p. 60.

'" Similarly. Pentzikis stresses that the equation, 0 (representing the element of
the wind) + 1 (representing the individual) = 10, is not a simple metaphor but a
"solid metaphysical phenomenon."

''^J. A. Phihp, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1966), p. 79.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 103

rather than from the early sources. By adopting this method "it is as
though Pentzikis wants to counter God's own cryptography in na-
ture with one of his own," remarked Kimon Friar in his Modern
Greek Poetry (p. 1 10). The method with numbers releases and at the
same time directs Pentzikis' imagination.

Envelope number four of Cabinet Six (for June) in Filing Cabinet
includes among other things, a study of the first nine numbers, in
which symbolism runs rampant. One is cited as the final remnant of
phenomena, when these are studied in the full oblivion of their
external form: the result of uniting the void with love. Love is
Christ, who wedded heaven with the underworld after he released
the dead from their bondage. One is death restored to life after
receiving the gift of love. Two may be identified with a cross. In the
heart's depth this cross is the result of a union of two straight lines
of different origin. Without the "on earth as it is in heaven" the
cross remains unfulfilled (pp. 109—110).

Anna of Filing Cabinet amuses herself and at the same time puts
to good profit the time which she spends waiting for the return of
Antonis. She does this by knitting a sweater for him on the letters-
and-numbers method:

She determined the knots in her knitting by numerically trans-
forming the names of the Saints honored within the second
half of March. Tens of stitches that crossed one another
shaped heavenly figures in the garment which was going to be
worn one day by her beloved. Twenty-eight stitches com-
memorated Saint Anna, who was burned to death on the 26th
of March, one in a group of twenty-six martyrs to die the same
way. She was the first Anna to start knitting. Then came Anna
mother of joy [the mother of the Virgin], who held inside her
the uncontainable light; then Anna herself who had tears in
her eyes as she felt that her name matched numerically the
word love [Greek aghapi'\ on the knitting which her man was
to wear. (pp. 235-236)

In his turn, Antonis, who is reported to be an accountant aban-
doned by his wife, follows the letters-and-numbers method in turn-
ing the word eftyhia (happiness) into a numerical sum of 96. "He
then got into the habit of summing up the various totals of his
calculations by correcting those that did not end up in the above

104 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

number, symbolic of happiness. The result was that he lost his job
after losing his wife." (p. 113)^^ Here Pentzikis seems to smile at
the game with numbers, as he also does when he relates the story of
a grandmother playing backgammon with her grandson. When she
loses, she has to surrender to her young playmate as many spoon-
fuls of sweet confection as the number of his ancestors counting in
generations from the birth of Christ {The Novel of Mrs. Ersi, pp.
172-173). The smiles are also part of the style as play.

8. The Poetic Impulse

The tortuous as well as the playful moods in Pentzikis are two
extremes. They are the obverse and the reverse of his askissi (prac-
ticing of the monk's life), of his self-mortification and humility. In
between these two extremes, however, we find another, more po-
etic Pentzikis, the writer of passages like the following, from Notes
of One Hundred Days, where the shell of thought seems to enclose
most fittingly the stirrings of the heart:

The lamp went off and its glass broke into one thousand
pieces. But there emerged a new sun from the Holy Relics,
lighting on the daily orderly hfe of the faithful in their slavery.
It was as though he could make out that light from afar, he who
was but a human garbage-dump, when he opened the door and
went out into the streets, walking towards one man or another
as if they were mystical receivers of light. His lips desired to
kiss these people, were burning with desire, and that fire of
desire allowed him more and more to appropriate the light to a
degree that in the depths of the sea the Cucumaria^^ overcame
its envy for the other sea creatures that have a lamp. For she
felt that she also had her own cool light, her own lamp of
unspent light, (pp. 55-56)

A comparable sense of balance between the tangible and the
mystical is evident in many passages of The Novel of Mrs. Ersi. For

^" Pentzikis himself also confesses to have made arbitrary calculations in order to
match his words with his numbers in the essay "Mystikistikes Apopsis pano stin
Tihopiia ton Eklission tis Artas" ("Mystical views on the wall — construction of the
churches of arta"), in the revised edition oi Andhreas Dhimakoudhis, pp. 248-265.

^' Cucumaria Planci, a spineless creature of the family of echinoderms which
includes also the sea-urchin.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 105

example, in the episode that describes the contemplation by Mrs.
Ersi of a painting, a still life which shows the interior of a bakery:

"Let him rejoice seeing the beauty and splendor of the hall."
The line from a Christian epigram of the Palatine Anthology
could describe the impression of Mrs. Ersi, when she entered
the bakery and the home attached to it. Everything was clean
and orderly in there, as one advanced from the modest and
small entrance of the front to the adjoining rooms, where
shone, in a well-selected place, the icons with the lighted lamp
before them. Everything in there imposed itself on the viewer,
not by its material aspects but because he saw it transfigured,
domesticated, in order to be useful as a sheath, as a place that
could contain man. You could not think of that space without
its human dweller nor could he exist outside it. The calm and
order generated from that relationship was suggestive some-
how of death. But at the same time you associated that im-
pression with paradise. What else could a paradise be, deeper
in, than a living death? Ceasing to worry, ceasing to think,
without at the same time ceasing to feel the world, your inner
rhythm synchronized perfectly with the moment, the general
rhythm of life. You feel this as something incomparably richer
than a sea bath in which your body is assimilated to the sea.
(p. 83)

In the first of the above two passages one can detect lingering traces
of both the tortuous and the playful elements in the style of Pent-
zikis. The man, whose reactions the passage describes, is called a
human garbage-dump, while the personified sea creature at the end
strikes a funny note. On the whole, however, both passages evoke a
similar kind of serenity and confidence born by what has been
called "the poetic impulse" in Pentzikis; that is, his instinct to
transfigure his sensual or visual experiences by an infusion of im-
agination. And this works no less in his prose than in his poetry.
The mark that distinguishes artists from metaphysicians and
theoretical philosophers is that the former metaphorize concrete or
tangible reality without losing this same reality from sight. This
explains also Pentzikis' unequivocal rejection of the iconoclasts of
Byzantium who ruined many icons with the erroneous purpose of
purifying faith. Pentzikis has many a harsh word for them, as his
whole poetic self revolts at abstract and cold thought. Likewise, he

106

HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

admires the monks for their self-imposed deprivations, but he feels
much closer to them when he catches them being human. He is
touched when a monk seems to yield to the temptations of the
senses, be it the distraction of his ear by the chirping of birds or the
overembellishing of his monastery church. Pentzikis wants spir-
ituality to stay rooted in the world of the senses, the world of
poetry.

9. The Strength of Metaphor

The capacity of Pentzikis to metaphorize may be illustrated by
the following examples, which must be added to the other instances
of felicitous metaphors and similes already seen.

He sees the ivy leaves shaking under the autumn rain like a
sobbing maiden who does not know the world, while the successive
raindrops on the dried leaves sound like drums that announce a
death sentence. Another simile is more homely: a man yawns on a
bus, and the hand which he places before his mouth looks like the
cotton stuffing of an old doll. Even more homely, not to say bizarre,
is the image of some Christian martyrs who trust to the eternal life
and urge their executioners to fry them from both sides the way
one does with meatballs {Retinue, pp. 78, 96).

Antonis of Filing Cabinet is sad; he feels incapable of uniting
with his beloved: "The love arrows of women, he feels, have turned
him into a sieve full of holes, similar to the perforated jar of the
Danaids that could hold no water. Seeking solace in the church, he
lights a candle in veneration of the Christian martyr Voussiris who,
pierced with shuttles by women, was woven into a new fabric to the
glory of God {ibid., 293). A similar image is that of the little boy
who pulls the hair of his girlfriend as Alexander the Great, impa-
tient for an oracle, did with Pythia, the priestess of Delphi who was
not in the mood for prophesying.

In The Novel of Mrs. Ersi Pentzikis asserts quite aptly that hate
does not exist as a separate entity in the world, but rather is a
simple transformation of love which has lost its head and drags
itself blindly like a headless serpent. In "I Erotiidha" (The daughter
of Eros) the middle notched rail of a funicular train is likened to a
shark's teeth, while the chirping of a cicada that invades the train
sounds as if "it interprets the hieroglyphics of all the folds in the

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 107

outer skin of the earth" (Revised edition o{ Architecture of the Scat-
tered Life, p. 271). Another imaginative simile, however, is checked
in its course like a paper kite flying too high: "I am carried away and
it is a ship's sight that cleanses me, taking away all dirt. I am but a
white scarf in the wind. I may rise high, become a seagull. But I am
afraid of the barking dog" {The Novel of Mrs. Ersi, pp. 17—18). A
spell of self-consciousness and a touch of humility!

10. An Interview

In the summer of 1978, I was granted an interview with Pent-
zikis. The discussion touched mainly on the Byzantine world and
Pentzikis' Byzantine sources. Pentzikis as a conversationalist
matches the writer and the artist. His randomness of thought goes
hand-in-hand with his flashes of emotion and sharp aphorisms. The
self-consciousness and slight hesitation of the first few minutes —
particularly before a tape-recorder — soon go away. Pentzikis is
absorbed by the subject which he discusses; he gesticulates or
raises and at times slows down his voice to emphasize a point. His
tone is always lively, tender, and pious in the narration of some
religious story, rapturous in the description of some miracle or of
some aspect of his dear "concrete" reality, sarcastic in reference to
the enlightened stupid.

Answering a question on the origins of Synaxaristis, Pentzikis
adds a colorful detail:

P. You must keep in mind this. The martyrdoms of Christians
were attended by many people and short-hand writers noted all
that took place. In fact, we know the name of one of those short-
hands.

T. Interesting! I was not aware of this.

P. Yes, indeed. Just as it happens today, when you come to me
and ask: "What are your impressions of . . .". It is so [that is,
through accounts which witnesses of Christian martyrdoms have
left} that we know that the martyrs suffered a little at first, but then
they ceased suffering. They lost the sense of their own bodies and
thought only of the others. You should also know that the martyr-
doms of saints differed, depending on whether they occurred in the
West or, let us say, in Persia, whether they were in Greece, in

108 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Egypt, or in Syria. The Greek martyrdoms are comparatively mild;
as for those in Persia, you cannot stand them. Terrible! On the 29th
of September the Church honors the memory of the royal prince
and holy martyr Ghovdhela. Well, Ghovdhela experienced great
pain at first, for they pierced his head and inserted spikes into his
ears, but then he lost the sense of pain and kept comforting others.
This is a characteristic point.

Immediately after this comment, Pentzikis amplifies on the point
made earlier about the original Synaxaristis being a compilation of
material written or orally transmitted from the previous centuries:

P. Just as we say that it is impossible for Homer alone to have
composed [his epics] but that he rather copied other texts . . .
those who copy other texts must, through faith, submit to becom-
ing beggars, blind, stupid. . . . You see, that is why tradition re-
ports that Homer was born in seven cities. The Neoplatonic phi-
losophers, who try to reach back to the mythical roots of man,
explain all this very nicely.

In his reference to Homer, Pentzikis pays no tribute to the talent
of the individual poet who has given to his epics an unequaled unity
and starkness of vision. This is understandable since Pentzikis
spurns literature as literature. Yet he is in general agreement with
much of modern scholarship on the poetry of Homer, thought to
be a true mirror of the orally transmitted epic songs of the archaic
Greek ages, with its formulaic character and standard heroic motifs.
Pentzikis is interested in the Homer who "copies," who tries to
treasure in his epics the oral tradition of poetry and, more broadly,
the reality of the world, and who is thus "compelled," as Pentzikis
says later, "to write the catalogue of ships." "^

Pentzikis goes further when he mentions, with obvious approval,
the Neoplatonic metaphysical interpretation of the claim of seven
different cities in antiquity to have given birth to such a great poet
as Homer. The rationalist will dismiss the claim of those seven

^^ Homer provides his catalogue of Greek cities that sent ships in the expedition
against Troy in Iliad 2. pp. 494-709. This is a passage in which Homer was "called
upon to organize highly heterogeneous material without the support of plot or
action," as Barry B. Powel observes in his "Word Patterns in the Catalogue of Ships
(B 494-709): A Structural Analysis of Homeric Language," in Hermes 106, no. 2
(1978), p. 255. Most readers of Homer would find this particular passage of the ///W
valuable from a historical and antiquarian point of view, but not poetic enough.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 109

cities (of which Chios and Smyrna were the strongest contestants)
as impossible. Pentzikis, however, sees in the claim a reflection of
the universality of Homer, of his submission to be everybody and
copy the world as he had found it.

Copying, then, is defined a little more accurately, so that we
come to realize that Pentzikis does not claim for everyone the right
to steal literary material and use it for gain.

P. The greatest originality of the intellectual man is copying, and
in a lecture which I had planned about Papadhiamantis^^ ... I
stressed that he is a first-class writer, because he is like Klee in
painting, who adopted the copying memory [technique]. ^^ What is
the copying memory? It is to have before you a text like a matrix,
into which you will pour your own stuff. . . . Copying is a general
phenomenon in Byzantium and later the tradition [concerning
Synaxaristis] is continued by Nikodhimos, who adds his own com-
mentary and says, for example: "He [that is, the earlier compiler]
incorrectly includes those saints here, as he has referred to them
and their epigrams also on that other date." You see, he checks the
text for errors. Well, apart from that, Saint Nikodhimos writes a lot
himself and inserts footnotes, drawing from other books, beautiful
things. . . . Here, in Nikodhimos, we have all the Saints. The
majority of Saints are anonymous. For example, there are entries
that mention 147 or 7,000 or 20,000 martyrs. . . . These are
anonymous but numerically known Saints. We find the citation [of
the name of a Saint] and "those with him," that is, his students or
people who simply shared his martyrdom . . . Then, sometimes,
we do not know the name, because it was the executioner who
became a convert, after he saw the miracles performed by the
Christians under torture, and who was executed on the spot.

T. Nikodhimos, has he . . .

P. Saint Nikodhimos . . .

T. Pardon me. Has Saint Nikodhimos dealt also with the new
Saints.'*

P. Certainly. This he does in his New Martyrology. But there he

^' See chapter 6, section 2.

^"^ Cf. Paul Klee, The Inward Vision. Watercolors-Drauings-Writings. Trans. N.
Guterman. (New York: Abrams, 1958), where Klee explains in short pithy aphor-
isms his creative philosophy.

110 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

often mentions the name of the person who wrote this "Life" or
that "Life." We find there many Thessalonian Saints. My book
Notes of One Hundred Days — you have it — is based on the New
Martyrology. . . . On its cover I calculate what I saw as a man of
the world and what I saw reflected in the New Martyrology. . . }'^

T. Is there a continuous process of canonization of saints?

P. Yes. . . . This is what convinces us today when we are all
unbelievers; it is those neo-martyrs that convince us. Most beauti-
ful is the story of a young man of about twenty, who went with his
father from Chios to Psara^*^ to carve the wooden iconostasis of the
Church of Saint Nicholas — he was in other words a taliadhouros }^
Well, when they finished their work, the boy said "Father, will you
let me go.-*" A boat was passing by Psara on its way to Cavala. At
Cavala . . . have you been to Cavala?

T. Yes, I have.

P. Have you seen . . . beyond the city center the promontory
of the All Holy Virgin? There are some lush gardens. It seems that
the lad went there and stole some fruit from a Turkish garden. You
see, he was an ordinary person like you and me. All Saints are like
that. Well, he was caught and the Turkish judge told him that he
had a choice of either becoming a Moslem or dying. He chose to
become a Moslem, but in forty days he returned and was martyred
willingly. . . . Or take the "Life" of the martyr John from Thessa-
loniki, whose real name was Nanos, a shortened form of loannis
{John}. He went with his father to Smyrna to earn some money. He
[the father} was a trader in shoes, and a Turk ordered some shoes,
which the man sent with his son, for whose return he waited in
vain. For forty days the young man was a Turk [that is, a convert to
the Moslem religion]. And suddenly he came back to die a martyr.
He understood that he belonged elsewhere. All of us say: "Oh,
how beautiful the world is. This is the world which we have . . .
why should I take the trouble?" Yet, what happens in the sou! . . .

The discussion, then, touches on how Pentzikis deals with the
religious texts and how he draws inspiration from them:

■^^ Cf. chapter 3, p- 62.

■^'' A small island of the Aegean, near the bigger island of Chios. Psara was laid
waste after a Turkish invasion during the Greek War of Independence.
^^ "Sculptor." The word which Pentzikis uses is of Italian origin.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 111

T. How do you go about reading Synaxaristis^

P. At first I perused it with a notebook by my side where I
summarized what I read. Then, I wanted to see, to make other
summaries, shorten the text and adapt it to today's way of thinking.
Then, I made other summaries of the actions described. . . .

T. Do you check who is the Saint of the day, and do you consult
to find out about his life?

P. Every day I read the summary, either the long summary or
the summary of the actions. Or, again, another summary which is
more literary [here Pentzikis laughed], in which I have made an
effort to reflect today's spirit, and sometimes the summary that
gives only the title and the epigram [of the Saint}. Some epigrams
are real masterpieces. Well, the majority of my paintings are based
on the summaries of the epigraphs and epigrams. . . .

T. Since 1967 you have read religious texts almost exclusively.
Isn't it so?

P. Yes, I read Synaxaristis every day. I wake up. I say the Lord's
prayer and then I read Synaxaristis.

T. But you do not avoid secular texts.

P. On the contrary. But I read those at other hours. You see, if I
avoided the secular works, then I would become empty and the
struggle would cease. A work is alive and offers living examples,
because the living man fights with tradition . . . Well, I read these
[the religious texts], but I also want to read other, secular texts, to
see, to know, to be able to relate the two together, to struggle, to
be defeated by the secular texts and be able to restore myself
through the reading of the religious ones.

T. Do you think that the monks also should read secular texts?

P. No, because their salvation stems from the fact that they
belong in another world. The Church and the monastery are
another world. It cannot be done. If the monk starts reading secular
works, how will he find the time to chant in the church or go to put
flowers before the icon of the Saint whose memory is honored on a
particular day? You know, they have to do this very often. . . .
Then, how will they clean and prepare for cooking, let us say, vlita
[a green, leafy vegetable] or artichokes, if they do not intone at the
same time church melodies? . . . The deprivation of worldly
things is their [the monks'] own source of struggle, while mine is

112 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

different. If I read only religious works, I would become some kind
of theologizing pedant. Instead, I keep myself in life and fight,
while the monk will go to clean the toilets [of his monastery]. . . .
That is why the poems of Theodhoros Stoudhitis are of immense
importance . . . for those who are in charge of various tasks in a
monastery. ^*^ The professor of Byzantine literature at the Universi-
ty of Thessaloniki before the war dealt with these poems in ten
minutes . . . "prosaic stuff," he said. You see, they do not under-
stand one thing. That Homer is also prose and everything else is
prose, when they show such a great rapport with the world. . . .
The best part of Homer is the "catalogue of ships." ^''^ Look, in your
memory you confuse feelings with objects, but it is the objects that
weigh most. If you can "freshen up" an inventory of items used, let
us say, in the army . . . here I am referring to something that did
occur. I had a friend who was killed at the battle of Crete. He told
me once: "My dear Nikos, I can read and understand Elytis^" and
all the others, but I cannot understand you. Why don't you write
like the others.'' You know that I like you very much, I see and hear
you and feel that you are an inspired person, but . . ." "Well, for
me the best kind of poetry," I said, "is this." And I pointed to a hst
of clothing articles used in the army service — where he had been
posted so that he could have a rest before returning to his unit. He
was from Thessaloniki and I mention him in Filing Cabinet. He
died during the war. Well, that list contained shoes, tsarouhia,''^
army boots . . . such. "It is for these that we work, for these that
we live and these which we invent," I said; "if you can accept these
as your own and develop a great love for life and for the world, you
hardly need anything else." Theodhoros Stoudhitis praises [in his
epigrams] the work which one does within the world of the world
which is a monastery.

^" Theodore, of the monastery of Studium in Constantinople, was active in the
early ninth century. In his epigrams addressed to the humbler servants in a monas-
tery, he wants to remind them of the equally humble occupations originally held by
the Apostles.

^'' See n. 22 above.

^*' Odysseus Elytis is one of the best-known modern Greek poets and was the
recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature.

*' Greek country-style shoes, tasselled, now worn only for ceremonial purposes
by the evzones, a special unit of the Greek army that guards the presidential palace
and the tomb of the unknown soldier in Athens.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFT 113

We should not hasten to infer a double standard in Pentzikis'
candid confession of reading secular works in order to keep himself
in hfe, while admiring the monks' way of life, which, however, he
did not adopt for himself. He says that he must be seduced and
defeated by the world in order to regain his spiritual sanity through
the reading of religious works. But we must view these and other
similar statements which he has made as the innocent rationaliza-
tions of someone who cannot resist living. Pentzikis belongs to life
and the struggles which a life of action involves. "Fate will lead the
man who follows it willingly, while it will drag by force the man
who refuses," said Seneca. ^^ The lot of Pentzikis has not been the
monastery, but a life of action. He has been intelligent and honest
enough to acknowledge and pursue his lot willingly, while he keeps
in sight that ideal "other" world of monks and anchorites. His fight
with the world and in the world is his own askissi, his own practic-
ing of the solitary life. Singlemindedly he has followed a path which
promises no literary glories and very few material rewards.

Pentzikis' stress of the value of the mundane and the prosaic,
elements which he finds in Homer as well as in the Byzantine
Theodhoros Stoudhitis, springs from the same deep interest in the
world of the senses and the hfe of action. The inspired bard Homer
and the practical theologian Stoudhitis show a similar preoccupa-
tion with the reahties of this world. Pentzikis seems to find a bridge
between the supernatural and the natural in that preoccupation, as
well as in the preparation of vegetables for cooking by a simple
monk and in his cleaning of toilets. This makes us understand
better Pentzikis' own praise of an inventory of military items. Prose
is poetry and poetry is prose.

'^ "Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt." Epist. ad Lucilium 107. 11.

CHAPTER 6

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS

1 . The Ambiguity of Comparisons

The content and scope of Pentzikis' work are so vast that we can
compare him to a host of writers, old and new, from the chroniclers
and moralists of past centuries to the exponents of the "new novel,"
sophisticated reporters of actuality, writers of travel books, and
anthropologists. Rousseau's and Thoreau's love of nature, Poe's
romantic and occult inclinations, the stress on memory and the
all-inclusive vision of life by Proust and Gide, are only some of the
links of Pentzikis with other non-Greek writers. Of these writers
the most frequently mentioned in the books of Pentzikis seems to
be Joyce. The Irish pioneer of the modern novel lends Pentzikis
also specific literary motifs from his Ulysses,^ the work which is
chiefly in the mind of Pentzikis when he refers to Joyce.

One should be careful, however, not to label Pentzikis a Greek
Joyce, for in terms of style at least there is a great difference
between the two. In spite of his modernity, Joyce presents in Ulys-
ses, as has been noted in Kimon Friar's discussion of Pentzikis'
poetry, "an architectural framework of myth, consistent symbol-
ism, reference, and parallelism that distinguish Ulysses and give it
homogeneity" {Modern Greek Poetry, p. 109). This of course one
cannot say about the books of Pentzikis, vast and varied canvases of
learning of all shades, unless one isolates his recurrent Christian
themes and symbols and see them as the limbs of a skeleton or
parts of a solid framework which give it homogeneity.

' Apart from the solitary-walk-on-the-beach motif, which we find in both Joyce's
Ulysses and in several places in Pentzikis — the motif derives originally from Homer
— Watson notes, in his essay on Pentzikis (see chapter 1, n. 2), the scene in The
Novel of Mrs. Erst (p. 108), in which the narrator explores the more private parts of
Ersi's body by looking through her robe as she sits on the bow of a ship. There is a
similar scene in Ulysses.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 115

Pentzikis considers Joyce to be the writer most representative of
our times because he suggested the dissolution of the individual
man and the collapse of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance idea
of the human species as the center of the world. An analogue of this
idea in pre-Christian times is found in the famous lines from the
Antigone of Sophocles: "many are the wonders of this world but
none is greater than man himself." Joyce as well as other modern
writers like Kafka, Sartre, and Camus have questioned the classical
definition of an individual, and most of their characters are people
uncertain of themselves, lost in a penumbra of guilt and existential
anxiety. This is exactly the starting point of most works of Pent-
zikis.

Writers like Faulkner and the French exponents of the anti-
roman or nouveau roman fuse the characters of their stories with the
form of these same stories. They favor images that dehumanize
their subjects, for they often compare people to animals and inani-
mate objects. Similarly, Pentzikis sees writing as a process which
must render the whole person, or, at least, all those physical and
moral activities that characterize, together with his environment,
what we call a human being. We can hardly say that Pentzikis
copied any of these writers, many of whom have in fact published
later than he. It is also a mere coincidence that the "new novel's"
chief theoretician, Robbe-Grillet, sounds like Pentzikis when he
points out the difficulty of writing today a complete novel like
Flaubert's Madame Bovary, with identifiable characters, plots, and
settings; or when he defends the choppy style of contemporary
writers and their use of the present tense as a reaction to the linear
concept of time and the cause-and-effect linking devices of which
older writers made so much use.

Pentzikis does not copy but simply falls in with these modern
writers in their common response to the realities of our time,
technological and otherwise, and in their use of intertextual struc-
tures. Pentzikis would have accordingly endorsed Dos Passos'
words: "In relation to style and methods of writing, I hardly think
of the past in chronological order. Once on the library shelf Juvenal
and Dreiser are equally 'usable'."^ Everything can be blended with

^ A. Hook, ed., Dos Passos. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.:
Prentice Hall, 1974), p. 13.

116 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

the present, a present "immeasurably amplified" in the words of
Natalie Sarraute, a time of perpetual actuality which, according to
Robbe-Grillet "continuously invents itself . . . repeats itself, dou-
bles itself, transforms itself, belies itself."^

The similarities between the above non-Greek writers and Pent-
zikis are, however, too general for one to compare Pentzikis in any
detail with any one of them. But an exception could be made with
Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinian luminary is certainly a very
different kind of writer from the northern Greek who is little
known outside his own country. Pentzikis is the artist as reporter
who registers and recycles whatever comes his way. Borges is,
instead, the writer as alchemist, meticulous in his style. In his
famous Ficciones, at least, he manages to vanish completely behind
his writing. Yet, there are some striking affinities between Borges
and Pentzikis.'' Both were born in well-to-do and educated families
and both are conservative in politics because they share an inner
skepticism about the possibility of human betterment through so-
cial change. Most characteristically, both have identified them-
selves with their respective native cities. The long, informative
walks which Borges has taken around Buenos Aires with visiting
friends are like the guided tours which Pentzikis offers his own
friends in and around Thessaloniki. Jacques Lacarriere, who calls
Pentzikis the genius loci, the protective spirit of Thessaloniki, says
that he owes his best times in that city to him. One could compare
this with the statement by another Frenchman, Drieu La Rochelle,
that Borges was worth a trip to Argentina.^

More significantly, both Borges and Pentzikis were blamed by
their respective critics for their manners of writing, which, though
essentially different, have seemed equally evasive and operative in
a purely verbal dimension. They are considered verbal gymnasts,
along with writers like Joyce, Kafka and Beckett, whose work is

* Natalie Sarraute, L'Ere du soupcon (Pahs: Gallimard, 1956), p. 2; Alain Robbe-
Grillet, Pour uu nouveau roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 168.

' Borges has been compared with another Greek writer, Cavafy, by Willis Barn-
stone in "Real and Imaginary History in Borges and Cavafy," Comparative Literature
29, no. 1 (Winter 1977), pp. 54-73.

'J. Lacarriere, VEte grec, p. 340. The statement by Drieu La Rochelle, "Borges
vaut le voyage," is quoted in G. Sucre, Jorge-Luis Borges. Trans. Pierre de Place.
(Paris: Seghers, 1971), p. 12.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 117

built solely on the vertiginal theme of its non-existence. The last
criticism echoes a view of Octavio Paz on Borges in connection
with the other named writers, but can be applied to Pentzikis as
well. Other critical statements on Borges also appear to fit Pent-
zikis perfectly. The latter tends to mortify his mind and reassert
misery and helplessness as necessary in the overall plan of creation.
Thus he is like Borges, "a man who clings to his unbelief in the
belief that only in unbelief can certainty be found." ^' Borges him-
self has said that a writer must be somewhat innocent and that
creation must be realized as though in a dream. Pentzikis would
have said the same. But he would add at the same time a meta-
physical or theological side to the dream which the non-believer
Borges does not seem to imply.

2. Relationship with Other Greek Writers

The connections of Pentzikis with other Greek writers are much
deeper and more pervasive than his links with non-Greeks. It is
indeed the writers of his land with whom Pentzikis identifies best.
Ancient annalists, antiquarians, and moralists like Plutarch are very
much in the literary baggage of Pentzikis. This baggage, however,
includes above all the Byzantine theologians, historians, and chron-
iclers of events great and small in medieval times, the Golden Age
of faith.

Many modern Greek writers are also mentioned by Pentzikis in
passing or lend him characteristic passages, motifs, images, and
support of various kinds. These are writers whom he often com-
mends, as for example Alexandhros Papadhiamantis, the so-called
Saint of Greek Letters. Pentzikis likes Papadhiamantis for the inno-
cent and humble nature of his characters and the simple unalloyed
faith which inspires his many short stories and novellas. What par-
ticularly attracts Pentzikis to that, as well as other Greek writers
like Andhreas Karkavitsas and Yannis Vlahoyannis, is their insular
attitude toward ideological and literary influences from the West,
coupled with a stress on national Greek traditions. They have

^'J. M. Cohen, Jorge Luis Borges (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973), p. 1.
^ Quoted in Sucre, Jorge-Luis Borges, p. 15.

118 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

showed him, as Pentzikis asserts, that the traditional ways of hfe
and thought are still possible and productive.

Pentzikis also shares certain attitudes with some of his contem-
poraries among Thessalonian writers. He is first of all linked with
those writers of prose, like Stelios Xefloudhas, Alkis Yannopoulos,
and Yorghos Dhelios, and poets, like Yorghos Themelis and Yor-
ghos Vafopoulos, who, in the thirties, gave the first impetus to the
creation of a more or less distinctive Thessalonian literature.^

A group of intellectuals gathered around the journal Makedho-
nikes Imeres, first published in 1932.'^ In addition to the already
mentioned Xefloudhas, whom critics generally think to be the first
ever to write "interior monologue" in Greece, the group included
the student and later teacher of philosophy Vassilis Tatakis and the
critic Petros Spandhonidhis. The manifesto of the new journal was
drafted by Spandhonidhis, who pointed out the absence, until that
time, of any serious literary tradition in Thessaloniki and promised
the birth of one through the publication of the journal. New talents
would be discovered and encouraged and the new literary trends of
Europe would be transplanted and tried in Thessaloniki.

Pentzikis found himself in a somewhat ambiguous position with
regard to the group of Makedhonikes Imeres. He shared with these
writers a new consciousness, an inclination to explore the inner
space of man. In his June 18, 1977, interview given to the Athens
daily Ta Nea, Pentzikis said that introspection, in general, seemed
to be habitual with Thessalonian writers, in contrast to the greater
extroversion of the Athenian writers. Yet the former, again accord-
ing to Pentzikis, felt no compelling need to go back to their Byzan-
tine roots or even explore the origins of their European counter-
parts. It was he who started ruminating and "metabolizing," in his
own peculiar ways, the mental and spiritual nourishment which he
received from the world of tradition.

The more unorthodox treatment of literary form and the affirma-
tion of his Byzantine roots brought Pentzikis into contact with
Athenian writers like George Sarantaris, his senior by one year,

" Cf. chapter 2, section 1.

'•* Makedhonikes Imeres had been preceded, a decade earlier, by the publication of a
more conservative journal, Makedhonika Ghrammata (Macedonian Letters), edited
by the poet Vafopoulos.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 119

who died in 1941. Sarantaris was one of the first to notice and write
about Pentzikis. He showed, Hke him, impatience with literary
form, used no punctuation in his poetry, and searched for essences.
He also shared Pentzikis' faith in Greek Orthodoxy, but was an
idealistic Christian whose masters were Kierkegaard and Berdiaeff.

Religious mysticism related Pentzikis also to two other Greek
writers and artists, several years his seniors: Stratis Dhoukas, who is
mainly known for his writing, and Photis Kontoghlou, better
known for his Byzantine-style murals and portable icons. Dhoukas'
few narratives are liked for their sincerity of feeling and a religious
kind of anxiety. Kontoghlou fought frantically against Western in-
fluences. As a religious painter he exemplified Pentzikis' idea of
meaningful "copying." He continued the Byzantine tradition of
painting with complete and rigorous adherence to the rules of the
genre. Yet there is a capital difference between him and Pentzikis
with regard to the concept of meaningful "copying." For Kontogh-
lou, preserving the tradition of Byzantine iconography meant the
faithful reproduction of finished icons, whereas Pentzikis wanrs
memory to penetrate beneath the surface of the icon to the level of
the fundamental impulses which generated the icon.

The Byzantine element, at least in diction, also appears in the
work of Pentzikis' sister, the poet Zoe Karelli. Like her younger
brother, Karelli is inclined to self-biting psychological analysis and
mysticism, but is on the whole more rational. Much of her poetry
ends on notes of doubt. The poet Vafopoulos also uses words from
the church language, but is less effusive than Pentzikis. His self-
scrutiny often yields to, or shields itself in self-irony.

A cosmopolitan and at the same time Thessalonian self-
consciousness marks the work of several post-war writers like Tile-
mahos Alaveras, Yorghos loannou, Yorghos Kitsopoulos, the
poets Klitos Kyrou and Panos Thassitis, the idiosyncratic Dinos
Christianopoulos and Kostas Taktsis, Vassilis Vassilikos and Yor-
ghos Himonas, Yorghos Stoyannidhis, Nikos Alexis Aslanoghlou,
and Sakis Papadhimitriou. Most of these still remain, write, and
publish in Thessaloniki. Of the others, Vassilikos has carried his
restlessness around the world, while loannou, Taktsis, and Himo-
nas are now based in Athens. The new element in these writers
results from the impact on them of the Second World War and the

120 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

accelerated rhythm of postwar life. The inner conflicts of their
fictional characters or masks — variations of a self-scrutinizing self
— are less ambiguous than those described by the writers of the
previous generation. They are also presented more realistically.
New literary journals in the fifties, like Nea Poria (New course)
and Dhiaghonios, which are still going, and the short-lived Kritiki
(Criticism) and Dhialoghos (Dialogue) broadened the scope of
Thessalonian creative writing and literary criticism.

None of the younger writers of Thessaloniki imitate the style of
Pentzikis, which is after all too peculiar to be imitated with impun-
ity. It is certain, however, that Pentzikis has influenced and inspired
several of them in one way or another. The lonely young man who
broods over the question of his identity and his rapport with his
city — a figure that recurs in the works of Pentzikis and never
vanishes completely — is also found in the prose of Yorghos loan-
nou, Sakis Papadhimitriou, and in the early works of Vassilikos.
Thessaloniki operates as both a defining and a confining element of
action. Both Vassilikos and loannou try to salvage the individuality
of their heroes by darkening their environment. Yet this environ-
ment is never lost from sight completely. In The Plant by Vassili-
kos, the young character wants to create a world of his own in his
room, away even from his friends and relatives. He brings in a pot
with a leaf (we may recall Andhreas Dhimakoudhis treasuring a leaf
in his wallet), that grows and spreads outwards, ultimately en-
croaching on the lives of the others, who attack and destroy it with
axes.i"

The figure of the alienated and self-conscious young man who
takes refuge in his memories and fantasies persists also in Papadhi-
mitriou and loannou. On the other hand, the realism of Taktsis'
The Third Wedding — a novella which is partly set in Thessaloniki
and has had a succes de scandale due to its peppery style — reminds
one of Pentzikis' Knowledge of Things and other works that describe
the life of the poor Thessalonian folk. The problems of the Thes-
salonian plebs and its struggle for survival also figure in some more
socially conscious works by Vassilikos.

None of these writers, however, has projected Pentzikis' feeling

'" Vassilikos' The Plant is part of a trilogy, The Plant. The Well. The Angel. Trans.
Edmund and Mary Keeley (New York: Knopf, 1964).

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 121

of a historical and mythical Thessaloniki. They recollect or de-
scribe, impressionistically and expressionistically, the city of their
childhood or its present life, while Pentzikis moves back and forth
across the centuries and across the tangible and metaphysical reali-
ties of Thessaloniki.^^

3. Pentzikis and his Critics

Various named and unnamed critics and reviewers of Pentzikis
were quoted or simply cited in the foregoing chapters. Here, an
attempt will be made to complete the discussion of the impact that
Pentzikis has made on his contemporary critics and theoreticians of
literature and art. These last naturally mirror the impressions Pent-
zikis has made on the reading public.

The majority of Greek literary critics have either ignored Pent-
zikis or treated him with hostility and derision. This can be under-
stood. His work is seemingly incoherent in both form and spirit,
and the routine newspaper and journal critic is too indolent to treat
it properly. He finds it difficult to place Pentzikis in a familiar
context; therefore, he bypasses him or singles him out with dis-
approval as a model to be avoided. One unsympathetic critic, in
fact, went so far as to assign his own views to Seferis in a review
which he wrote on Seferis' The Hours of "Mrs. Ersi" by isolating and
making a case of a few critical hints found in the book.^^

Of those who have taken an interest in Pentzikis and showed
sympathy for what he has been trying to realize, most limit them-
selves to restating with slight variations the staple information
about his work: its originahty, its obsession or identification with
Thessaloniki, the peculiar brand of Christianity that inspires it;
Pentzikis' learning and particular erudition in Byzantine literature

The writers of Thessaloniki are discussed in some detail by A. Arghyriou, in
"The Literary Life of Thessaloniki in the Last Thirty Years," Epitheorissi Tehnis
(Review of the arts), 94-95 (October-November 1962), pp. 390-415; in the
special issue of Nea Estia (see chapter 2, p. 13); by T. Alaveras in Prose Writers of
T/7«Wo«;^/ (Thessaloniki: Konstantinidhis, n.d.); by T. Kazantzis in "A Continuing
Controversy: 'School of Thessaloniki'," in the Athens daily / Kathtmerini (Decem-
ber 8, 1977); and by Mario Vitti in his book The Generation of the Thirties. Ideology
and Form (Athens: Ermis, 1977).

'^ A. Sahinis, in Nea Poria, 263-264 (January-February 1977), pp. 28-29.

122 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

and theology at a time when only professional scholars deal with
these; finally, Pentzikis' eccentricity.

There are indeed a handful of critics or men of letters, apart from
Seferis, who have made an effort to explore not only the surface,
but also the inner regions of Pentzikis' works and chart its less
obvious merits. Dinos Christianopoulos, Stratis Tsirkas, Takis
Sinopoulos and Jacques Lacarriere have been already quoted or
mentioned. Others who have placed Pentzikis more or less correct-
ly within the spectrum of Thessalonian literature or modern Greek
literature are Pentzikis' fellow-Thessalonian poets Yorghos
Themelis and Takis Varvitsiotis and the critics Spandhonidhis,
Alaveras, Pittas and Meraklis. To these may be added the names of
Brother Vassilios (abbot of the Stavronikita monastery in Athos),
the art critic Chryssanthos Christou, professor at the University of
Thessaloniki, and Elias Petropoulos, author of an already cited
pamphlet. In this pamphlet Petropoulos assesses Pentzikis as a
writer and a painter through a close, Pentzikis-like, statistical con-
sideration of his language and colors and themes in his painting.

A man who early took a lively interest in Pentzikis, wrote and
lectured about him, and acted as patron for his work over the years
is Professor George Savidis. "All men are or were at least born
unique," Savidis has said in speaking about Pentzikis, "but most
men spend their lives trying, consciously or unconsciously, to hide
their uniqueness and become either 'like the others' or 'better than
the others.' Instead, Pentzikis is one of the very few people who
have devoted their lives to the effort of becoming more and more
themselves, of gaining their souls." '^ There is much truth in these
remarks, although they disguise (unintentionally) the fact of Pent-
zikis' humility and denial of his own uniqueness. Pentzikis denies
to the individual man the right to say "I" and feel comfortable
about it.

The most concise critique in English of Pentzikis so far was
contributed by Kimon Friar in his Modern Greek Poetry}'^ Friar
compares the prose of Pentzikis with that of Sir Thomas Browne
and William Butler Yeats. The comparisons are a bit forced, as

'Mn a review of Pentzikis' writing and painting, in 0 Tahydhromos (22 March
1958).
" See chapter 3, n. 11.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 123

inevitably would be any comparisons of Pentzikis with others. Friar
also observes that the Christian faith of Pentzikis keeps him free
from the tensions of existentialist doubt and of a split personality
between the real and the unreal — a rather hurried observation, for
not only are such anxieties very real in Pentzikis, but they also give
his work its special dynamism. But the remarks which Friar offers
on the style and writing methods of Pentzikis are quite apt, as, for
instance, his statement that Pentzikis attains through his work "an
ecstasy not of tension nor of harmony but of rhythmic repetition, as
in the dervish dance of a million veils that embellish the body of
non-existence."

So far, the longest essay in Greek on Pentzikis, a forty-page
typescript of a university term paper, is the already mentioned "A
Thessalonian — N. G. Pentzikis" by Giles Watson.'^ Though
sketchy, this is a useful introduction of Pentzikis as the offspring of
a particular, religious and literary environment. The goal of Wat-
son, whose essay has been used here and there in this study, is to
show the unity underscoring the personality and work of Pentzikis
through an investigation of his topography, his Byzantine sources,
and his interest in myth and folk traditions.

4. Pentzikis as Memorializer of Literature

Pentzikis emerges as a literary critic in the few independent
essays or reviews which he has published on other writers and in
the pronouncements on literature which we find in his works.

Hundreds of writers, Greek and non-Greek, old and new, pa-
rade through the books of Pentzikis, particularly those that
appeared zhev Knowledge of Things. Frequently, Pentzikis provides
only a simple citation of the writer's name or of a literary work or a
brief description of its content or theme without any evaluative
comment. Sometimes he quotes from literary works. These quota-
tions may be exact or sometimes slightly inexact, since Pentzikis
quotes largely from memory and is not above changing the word
order of a quotation in order to match it, as he says, with the matter
he is discussing. More rarely Pentzikis offers evaluative comments
on the spirit or style of literary works.

'^ See chapter 1, n. 2.

124 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

In the first chapter of Part Two of The Novel of Mrs. Ersi, for
example, Pentzikis alludes to some eighteen literary authors, pas-
sages or works. These include authors and works from antiquity
like Homer in the Iliad, and Porphyrios the Neoplatonist, Byzan-
tine chroniclers like Michael Psellos and Theophanis, western
European writers like Mallarme and Joyce, and many modern
Greek writers. Some of these, like Lorenzos Mavilis, Alexandhros
Moraitidhis, Stratis Myrivilis, and Dionysios Solomos, are compara-
tively well known. Others, like Themis Potamianos, who wrote
about fishing, or the poet Anthoula Stathopoulou,^^' are somewhat
obscure. In addition, Pentzikis alludes to two holy men, Saint
Isidhoros Piloussiotis^^ and Symeon the Young Theologian, and to
the emperor Constantine Monomahos.

The ancients are mined for images like Achilles offering a lock of
hair to the shade of Patroclus or for injunctions like Porphyrios'
warning against the pleasures of the flesh. Pentzikis thinks that the
account by Psellos of the life of Constantine Monomahos is lacking,
since Psellos did not appreciate the emperor's trusting, basically
childUke nature, nor the solemnity of his paternal office as Byzan-
tine monarch. Psellos was unable to penetrate through the mass of
contradictory, seemingly immature actions of Monomahos in order
to describe "the unity of the paternal role." In a dream-passage,
Pentzikis assumes the character of the emperor's buffoon and talks
an exalted sort of gibberish, a mixture of rustic Greek and the
language of the Karaghiozis shadow-puppet theater. The king and
the hunchback buffoon manage to identify with each other by ac-
knowledging man's essential helplessness and his need to rely on
God.

The Europeans, Mallarme and Joyce, are likened by Pentzikis to
children. Mallarme, despite his subtle games of description, de-
spaired at the tyranny of fate and the inability of books to dispel his
personal weariness. The "devilish Irish prose-writer" Joyce also
manifested a playful nature that had once been repressed during
the harsh years of his seminary education. "By shedding his indi-

'^' First wife of the poet Yorghos Vafopouios.

'^ Isidore of Pelusium, who died about 450 A.D.; a monk and a theologian,
admirer of Saint John Chrysostom, but enemy of several other high-churchmen of
his time.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 125

viduality," Pentzikis comments, "almost in the same way in which
the ancient Egyptian embalmers emptied corpses, so as to salvage
the likeness [of the human body}, or dwelling of the Ka, Joyce
arrives at guessing the meaning of true beauty — though he com-
plains that he never had a chance to play — by recommending
warmly the study of the Greeks, who, as is known, were always like
playful children."

In modern Greek writers, Pentzikis alludes mainly to striking
poetic images: Mavilis' image of dusk and a breeze blowing through
the rose trees, Myrivilis'^^ description of twilight at Perama, suburb
of Piraeus, or Solomos' own descriptions of a breeze in his dramatic
poem Lambros or in his lyrical poem "The Moon-clad Maiden".

On Symeon, Pentzikis observes that the saintly man was criti-
cized for venerating the picture and memory of his spiritual mentor
before this man had been formally consecrated as a saint by the
Church. Yet Symeon, Pentzikis writes in his defense, "who had so
much love in his heart that his disciples saw him with their own
eyes levitating several meters above the ground as if he were a
cloud of tears surely could not wait for special permission to ex-
press his adoration. He triumphed by becoming an icon himself."

This summary of Pentzikis' literary allusions in a single chapter
of The Novel of Mrs. Erst is typical of the author's style elsewhere.
His method, which he compares to making koureloudhes,^"^^ is to skip
back and forth across the ages to various writers who either can
illustrate a point in his argument or bear a close or even tenuous
connection with his discussion. In the passages summarized above,
Pentzikis treats the authors as casually as he does all other items in
his memory, but here he seems to dwell on the Byzantine chroni-
cler Psellos and his portrait of the emperor Constantine Monoma-
hos. The juvenile tendencies of the emperor mirror the playful
element in Pentzikis' own character. ^° Pentzikis reveals here also
certain insights into the playful qualities of Mallarme or of Joyce. In

'** One of the important modern Greek writers of fiction, whose principal novels
are available in English translation.

''^ Koureloudhes are coarse fabrics woven from rags and used as floor mats.

^" Monomahos (one of the two Byzantine emperors whom Pentzikis likes most —
the other is Leo the Sixth, or Leo the Wise of the late ninth century) is also featured
in the narrative "Mia Ptissi" (A flight) in the revised edition oi Architecture of the
Scattered Life, pp. 238—240, and mentioned in many other places in Pentzikis' works.

126 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

the latter, Pentzikis notes elsewhere, playfulness was a mixed bless-
ing because the serious purpose of his mature work sometimes
exhausted itself in irony.

Many of Pentzikis' literary allusions group themselves around a
dominant theme, namely, that writing is a form of play. The mean-
ing of play is broadened to include all life under the watchful eye of
God, and the new definition receives its mythical sanction in the
author's dream about Constantine Monomahos. Pentzikis affirms
the worth of that emperor's contradictory life by citing the chroni-
cler Theophanis, who gave greater weight to the holiness of the
king's office than to the vagaries of his character. In short, these
passages suggest again that for Pentzikis literature, like life itself, is
an act of grace rather than the result of conscious effort.

3. Pentzikis as Critic of Literature

Pentzikis' perceptiveness as a critic of other writers is remarkable
and of the intuitive kind. Of his separate essays or reviews that fall
into this category we shall investigate the three most important,
which suggest also the deeper unity of Pentzikis' thought. The first
two appeared in the same issue of Kohlias and they are on Mallarme
and Themehs.^^

The essay on Mallarme starts with some general thoughts on
myth, which are the most explicit on the value of myth that we
know in Pentzikis. Mallarme turned away from the positivist
thought of his time and tried to resurrect myth, but his mythical
domain starts and ends with his art. Mallarme or poets like Mal-
larme have no religion other than their art. Pentzikis, finds, howev-
er, in the creative fervor of these poets something similar to the
religious fervor of the mystic: "the thorough interior examination
of all folds and creases of the individual soul, which leads to purity,
is not that much removed from the visions of the mystics; the
exaltation of the mind, the greater cerebrality, courts madness."

The mythical persona of Mallarme, Igitur ("therefore" in Latin),
may be compared to Homer's Outis (No Man), persona of Odys-

■^' "Ghia ton Mallarme" (On Mallarme) and "O Themelis ke ta Shimata" (Themel-
is and the forms), in Kohlias Qune 1947), pp. 84-86 and 94, and 94-96 respectively.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 127

seus. Pentzikis explains all those elements which he finds in Igitur
and continues with a placement of the French poet vis-a-vis other
writers. Like Baudelaire, Mallarme learned much from Edgar Allan
Poe, who defined poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty" and
found the first element of poetry in "the thirst for supernal beauty."
Mallarme neither yields to a Joycean type of irony nor to an aris-
tocratic attitude about art (commonly expressed in the "art for art's
sake" doctrine) and the concept of the ivory tower.

Mallarme may have originally attracted Pentzikis because of the
latter's secret wish to become a writer like Mallarme and because of
his admiration for French literature. The high standards of that
literature, as Pentzikis observes, made the existence of a writer like
Mallarme possible whereas the less developed state of Irish letters
made it impossible for someone like Joyce to stay in his home
country. Hence, Joyce's self-protective irony in Ulysses. Mallarme
did not need that. Yet Mallarme also remained an individual, and
for Pentzikis no individual, however refined, can define or repre-
sent a whole society. Pentzikis has translated and made Igitur his
own in order to surpass its spirit and overcome its charm.

A Thessalonian by naturalization if not birth, Yorghos Themelis
grew, intellectually, in parallel with Pentzikis and faced the same
existential questions. He eventually became known as an educator
and critic of literature as well as a neo-symbolist poet of some
distinction.

In his review of Themehs, Pentzikis tries to identify himself with
Themelis and see the world with his eyes by first paraphrasing his
book Men and Birds. Themelis sings the essential beauty and kind-
ness of nature: things for him are soft, clear, and restful. There is no
shadow, no inner struggle in the world: "the first form which the
poet offers us, of life secure in the flesh and of the individual body,
free from demons and without hell, shows the solidity of a square
with its inflexible, awesome angles that deny expansion."

Pentzikis accords a numerical value of seven to each side of the
square — seven are the days of the week and seven the Sages of
antiquity. The size of the square is then 49 (7x7) and its perimeter
28 (7x4). The very center of the square is the point of intersection
of four lines, which we trace from angle to angle (diagonal lines)

128 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

and from side to side (forming a cross), and it is this center which,
according to Pentzikis, Themeiis has in mind when he says "it is for
you that I love the light."

This center is the pivot around which the poet traces his moods
or circles of the sentimental part of his nature, his thymikon. The
circles are two and are concentric. The smaller one is enclosed
entirely in the square; it touches the square's four sides from the
inside and thus excludes from itself the four angles of the square,
while the other circle contains the square which it touches at the
angles from the outside. In the inside circle whose ray is "the three
and a half of desire" (three and a half being half the value [seven] of
a side of the square) the poet exhausts his "worldly" or "earthly"
self. No light or radiation can penetrate into the four corners of the
square which are cut off from the circle, so that these four corners
represent experiences of lonehness, lifelessness, emptiness, and
darkness. The dichotomy, so painfully felt at times, between life
and death is solved by the second, outer circle. This is the meta-
physical circle, as it were, which embraces and illuminates both the
inner circle of human sentiment and the entire square, including its
dark edges:

[The poet] reflects on what is coming beyond what happens.
. . . He sheds the old, now dead skin of the animal and garbs
himself in the nakedness of angels . . . awful beauty of loss,
presence of absence, expression of the mystical, ineffable and
concealed infinite. ^^

This outer circle, that of myth which defeats reason, is neverthe-
less an area into which Themeiis and other modern Greek poets do
not dare to venture. They remain confined in the ephemeral bliss of
the inner circle and the square with the dark corners. Their world is
at best idealistic, subject to disappointment or uncertainty. As Mal-
larme said, "A throw of the dice will never abolish chance."

Many years after the writing of the review on Themeiis, Seferis
was also taken to task for a similar lack of nerve in Pentzikis'
"Intimate Testimony about the Poet George Seferis. "^^ This essay,
with its mock-legalistic title, strikes the only dissonant chord in a
concert of praise for Seferis. Not that Pentzikis denies Seferis his

^^ See chapter 3, section 8.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 129

worth as a craftsman or serious thinker. On the contrary, he notes
with appreciation the self-discipHne of Seferis' work and his critical
acumen. At the same time he seems to attribute to Seferis excessive
pride, an exaggerated preoccupation with reason, and a fastidious-
ness which prevent him from communing with the rest of the
world. Seferis does achieve a rhythm in his work. Pentzikis won-
ders, however, what will happen when this rhythm is disrupted.

Pentzikis compares Seferis' poem "An Old Man at the River
Bank" with poems of others (Rimbaud, Cavafy, and Eliot) on the
theme of old age. He finds that, unlike the old men in those other
poems, the old man of Seferis remains unchanged after his experi-
ence of death; he does not acquire new "metaphysical" eyes:
"Seferis' poetry does not end with otherwordly interests. He does
not overcome anxiety by accepting ugliness." Pentzikis seems to
censure in Seferis the fussy, self-corroding quality of mind that
found its classical expression in Valery's Une Soiree avec Monsieur
Teste, which Seferis translated into Greek early in his career. The
fire-walkers of Langadha, adds Pentzikis, are different. For them
the world does not end in the "real" but is completed in the "sur-
real."

The acceptance of the "surreal" enables man to dance off the
storms of life. Seferis does not dare to dance; his ego is too strong
for that. "And yet," Pentzikis says, "the whole thing is no more
complicated than an inoculation." The simile aptly expresses what
Pentzikis has in mind. A man receiving an injection surrenders
himself to a doctor or a nurse, someone outside himself. The medi-
cine injected into his veins with the purpose of restoring him to
normal health is again something that comes from the outside. It
comes from revelation, as it were. Seferis' highly developed mind
was also his weak spot. It was myth-proof. No myth could pene-
trate and wash it clean. Catharsis did not come easy to Seferis.
Hence, the persistent, almost morbid pessimism that marks his
poetry and critical thought.

One could challenge Pentzikis' position on Seferis. The latter's
honesty of thought, thoroughness, and self-discipline are commod-
ities most precious in a world so easily swayed by myths — all sorts
of myths — of a religious, political, social, economic, and even
aesthetic character. Seferis never became really arrogant in the

130 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Splendid isolation of his mind, never did he come to argue, as
Cavafy had somewhat defensively argued before him, that art can
be a substitute for life. Instead, he tried to reach out to other
people, not only through his poetry which, though obscure, aims at
the concrete image, but also through his essays. In these essays,
regardless of whether he talks about Pirandello or the Greek folk-
painter Theophilos, Seferis searches for the human person, the indi-
vidual soul beyond the categorizings and generalizings of so many
critics.

All these are valid arguments supported by the solid body of
Seferis' work. Yet Pentzikis is on target when he suggests that
Seferis would not surrender himself to dance, and that the orderly,
Apollonian element of his nature would tend to suppress at all
times the Dionysiac instinct, an instinct that gets man easily into
trouble but also purges him from his internal cares.

As a literary critic Pentzikis displays an intuitive capacity to dis-
sect and analyze the work of other writers in his effort to find the
essential principles that govern their work. But true to his belief in
the non-aesthetic but metaphysical, or mythical, salvation of man,
he ultimately has to reject even the writers whom he most admires,
if they are overly bent on rationality. Joyce is a frequent target, and
to a sophisticated poet like Seferis Pentzikis prefers the simple
monk or the fire-walker of Langadha. Pentzikis' attitude is similar,
though antithetical in other respects, to that of D. H. Lawrence.
Both writers trust the vital instincts of man and reject intellectual-
ism and sophistication. Pentzikis seems to have traced a full circle
from the mythical world of his youth through the mature years of
doubt to the adoption of Tertullian's credo quia absurdum ("I believe
because it is absurd to believe"), ^^ and this inevitably colors also
the ways in which he sees other writers.

6. Pentzikis as Critic of the Arts

A fierce Christian like Paulinus of Nola saw sin in the very look
of this world: "Not only pagan literature, but the whole sensible

^' Pentzikis commented to me, however, that the simplicity of the Athonian
monks and of the fire-walkers of Langadha who keep crossing themselves signals a
truth, which surpasses the intellectuality of the TertuUian statement.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 131

appearance of things {omnes rerum temporalium species) is the lotus
flower," he said.^'* On the other hand, Pentzikis reminds us that
another pious man, Paulus Silentarius, used the term ekphrasis (ex-
pression) as title of his description of the Saint Sophia Church in
Constantinople in Toward Church-Going (p. 115). This famous, still
standing church is only one example of God's presence in the world
of the concrete. Metaphysics can wed with aesthetics. The incarna-
tion of the divine in the figure of Christ is a valid proof of that.
Pentzikis accepts the world of forms and colors not only in his
drawings and paintings, but also in what he says or writes in his
books about the fine arts.

The fascination of Pentzikis with concrete images and visible
colors as symbols of "other" realities is foreshadowed in some of
the hero's actions in Andhreas Dhimakoudhis. Andhreas misses Re-
nee and traces her name on a public wall, inexplicably, by drawing
two vertical lines and a dot in the middle. When he feels empty, he
cuts his finger with a razor blade in order to prove to himself that
he exists; he needs to see a bright color, something red.

The books of Pentzikis abound in references to works of art,
especially paintings. In the span of a short chapter, "Oniro ke
Asthenia" (Dream and disease), from Knowledge of Things, he refers
to a Danish painting of a moonlight scene; Byzantine mosaics and
paintings that depict the Transfiguration of Christ; a cross with the
inscription IC XP NK (initials of the Greek words "Jesus Christ
Conquers") in the Argos medieval castle, where there is also a
mural depicting hell; an icon of the Virgin; the paintings of the
Greek impressionist painter Parthenis; Picasso and Delia
Francesca; and the painting Abundance of the Flemish artist Jor-
daens.

Pentzikis is a perceptive but casual art critic. In his review of
some Hans Arp sculptures, he is concerned with the notion "mem-
ory is knowledge," with the energy which the sculptures them-
selves radiate from within, in contrast to the views which their
creator may have about them, with volume in contrast to the titles
given to the sculptures. He observes that the art of Arp may be

^^ Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. 61, Epist. 16.

132 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

viewed as a set of stratified archaeological remains which bear wit-
ness to the variety and succession of time periods. ^^

As with Arp, in whose work Pentzikis finds a balance between
matter and spirit, so in the case of the Greek painter Bouzianis he
detects a balance between subject and object and between the
background of the paintings and the human figures in them. More
particularly, he finds that Bouzianis' sensualist preoccupations in
his art show the value of ugliness and associate the artist with the
French "damned poets. "^^'

Pentzikis will often praise the modern artists for restoring to
artistic creation resources lost in Academic art. He cites with
approval Cezanne's defense of impressionism, the notion that the
artist has to transmit, through the depiction of natural objects and
their mutability, the pulse of their duration, without intruding into
the process with his logical and organized self. He also thinks
highly of Picasso, who copied and recopied, like a Byzantine artist,
the older masterpieces before embarking upon his own creations.
Picasso, who has said that art expresses man's conception of what
nature is not,^^ also shared Pentzikis' belief that there is no real
evolution in art, no past or future, and that variations do not mean
evolution. That sounds like Pentzikis' concept of memory, which
lifts everything out of conventional time into the realm of an eter-
nal present.

The timelessness of creative time is found, according to Pent-
zikis, not only in Byzantine and modern art, but also in primitive or
folk art. Accordingly, in his review of fellow-Greek painter Spyros
Papaloukas, Pentzikis tries to place the artist within the limits and
discipline of Greek popular or folk tradition. He stresses the sohd-
ity, ethos, and humility of the art of Papaloukas: "He gives you the
impression of a manual worker, unless you catch his blue eye where
the child, unsuspecting any externality, reigns in the virginal whole-
ness of his own world." Pentzikis relishes enumerating the thematic

^' In "O Hans Arp: Ghenikes Plirofories.-Entypossis apo Merika Ghlypta tou"
(Hans Arp: General information.-Impressions from some of his sculptures), Mor-
phes Guly-August 1952), pp. 177-181.

^'' In a review of a group exhibition of paintings, in Morphes (April 1951), pp.
105-107.

■^' In John Wilson, ed., The Faith of an Artist (London: George Allen, 1962), p.
175.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 133

variations in the art of Papaloukas, but warns the viewer not to see
the artist as a mere landscape painter or nature-lover. Papaloukas
analyzes the impressions which he receives and searches for the
factors that create the beautiful; and "light is the main factor. Noth-
ing seems to be black or can be black (which denies the light).
Shadow is a color."^^

Papaloukas shuns individualism; his art is a social art with the
house as its main symbol: "In dreams a house signifies a tomb. The
tomb is the shell around the grain, it represents the resurrection of
the body, which is dissolved, in an unchangeable symbolic repre-
sentation, in the world of ephemeral elements." The critique goes
on to describe the art of Papaloukas in a way which manages to
convey an almost concrete feeling of the various paintings.

The essay by Pentzikis on Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika is un-
doubtedly one of the most penetrating into the work of this world-
known artist, who has assimilated several modern trends into his art
while keeping an eye on the Greek landscape and Greek folk
artistry. ^^ Pentzikis points out the emphasis on the detail and the
geometric inclinations in Ghika's art. Ghika's brave experimenta-
tions with painting style fascinate Pentzikis, who attempts to follow
Ghika's hand as it moves around, explores, and solves problems.

Ghika is like Pentzikis, with a fragmented sensibility that tries
and succeeds in reunifying itself in art, while Papaloukas and, to a
lesser degree, Athina Shina (Pentzikis' young friend) suggest to
him the unspoiled innocence of the unsophisticated mind. Both
types of artists seem to him to be looking for the same thing,
although they follow different methods and techniques.

7. Pentzikis as Social Critic

In continuing the 1978 interview I conducted with Pentzikis, a
remark I made (somewhat in jest) that the emphasis which
Theodhoros Stoudhitis places on manual work in his religious epi-
grams seems to have a Marxist ring about it elicited this reaction
from Pentzikis:

^** "O Zoghraphos Spyros Papaloukas" (The Painter Spyros Papaloukas), in 0
Eonas mas (December 1947), pp. 301-306.

^'^ "O Zoghraphos N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas" (The painter N. Hadji-
kyriakos-Ghika), 0 Eonas mas (May 1948), pp. 82-88.

134 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

P. Yes, but the difference is that the Marxist has to be proud for
his work. They cannot kill in themselves the pride of the individual.
Consequently they become "good" and "bad" and the former reject
the latter. This is the difference. Otherwise, I would have no objec-
tion to Communism, if it could satisfy man spiritually in all his
personal needs. . . .

T. Yet, there may be among them a small number of people who
live their faith with such intensity, a faith which is of course be-
trayed in practice: we see this every day . . . cruelty, Stalinism,
concentration camps . . .

P. No, no . . . let us think of the individual . . .

T. Yes, an individual, let us say, who persists in spite of every-
thing, in the way a Christian persists, who sees that Byzantium is
sinful, Byzantium also . . .

P. Well, yes. The whole world is sinful.

T. Yes, the whole world, and he [that is, the individual Marxist]
goes on believing, having this vision that in the future there will be
brotherhood . . .

P. He does not have such a vision.

T. . . . equality . . .

P. No, it [that is, the Church] asks you: "Are you a sinner.''" You
reply: "Yes, I am." — "Then, come inside the Church and find the
road through which you many obtain even a hint of God's grace.
And this is comfort for whatever may happen to you in your life."
Do you see? While here [that is, in Marxism] you are told to act,
there you may be saved even in inaction. That is why they [that is, the
Christians] copy, while there [in Marxism] they want original ideas
[mocking tone]. I recall that when the Germans withdrew from
Greece, some Communists told me: "We need writers; not even
406 of them would suffice to express the things that are happen-
ing." And what were those things.-* One single proverb can express
them [obscenity deleted]. You see?

Pentzikis misses or deliberately bypasses the point which I have
tried to make on whether a Marxist, who keeps on believing in the
future triumph of his ideal of social equality in spite of what his
knowledge of history tells him, is not in fact like a Christian, who
persists on the strength of simple faith, despite his awareness that
the world is and will remain sinful. Then, the contrast which Pent-

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 135

zikis sees between the "copying" Christian and the Marxist pursuit
of originality is odd. We know that the pohtical struggle for the
establishment and preservation of Marxist or so-called Marxist re-
gimes, from Lenin to Mao Tse Tung, has been marked by the mono-
tonous repetition of few slogans and the handling and rehandling of
a few simple thoughts, meant to catch the imagination of the masses
and make them operative. In other words, the typical Marxist
copies his predecessors no less than the Pentzikis Christian copies
his own.

Yet we must make an effort to understand what Pentzikis really
means when he talks like that.

The social stand of Pentzikis, rejection of the possibility that man
can succeed on his own, that is, without God, is diametrically oppo-
site to the stand of another Greek writer, Kostas Varnalis. The
latter gave himself wholeheartedly, in his middle age, to Marxism
for reasons, in the present writer's view, similar to those for which
Pentzikis espoused and affirmed the faith of the simple Christian:
the need to reach mankind at large and also make a name for
himself in an area where he would have less competition from
others. But eccentricity is the lesser motive in Pentzikis' orienta-
tion toward a metaphysical rather than political, sociological, or
aesthetic apprehension of life. His ideal state is Byzantium, ^° but it
is a mythical rather than a historical Byzantium. It is a religious but
not theocratic state, in the sense of a strong and dogmatic church
that regulates or strongly influences the governance of the com-
munity.

It seems, in fact, that the conservatism of Pentzikis is a hberalism
in religious garb. When it comes to contemporary politics, Pent-
zikis does not take sides and has never declared absolute faith in
one or other of the Greek governments which he has seen in his
time, nor has he viewed the kings of the Hellenes in the same light
in which he views those of his mythical Byzantium. His attention to
Constantine Caramanlis, whom he painted under the circumstances
described earlier, is not a partisan act. In Caramanlis he saw an
essentially honest man who took seriously his role as father of his
country, a fellow-Greek from Macedonia, whose family had made

^" An analogy may be found in Yeats's poem "Byzantium," which, however,
Pentzikis has not read.

1 36 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

sacrifices in the struggle for the liberation of northern Greece, and
one who was unjustly criticized by those that claimed superiority
over him on purely human terms.

Filing Cabinet abounds in descriptions of war and other acts of
violence, and echoes of the political upheavals of our times. Yet
Pentzikis makes no appeal for human or political rights, the main
concern of modern-day liberals. At the Panhellenic Congress of
Writers, Pentzikis remarked that freedom and slavery are relative
things, that "freedom in man is a case of myth."^^ People like
Solzhenitsyn, who appeal for the liberalization of their country on
purely human and social terms, from the point of view of the
educated man of the West, tend to bother Pentzikis. ^^ We under-
stand this better if we recall that Pentzikis denies that the individual
man — cornerstone of liberal and democratic thought — can stand
alone on his own two feet without sustenance from some external
cause, which for him is God. Modern man, he adds, must learn
again to die with joy and in proud deprivation. This is the sole kind
of pride permitted him.

This attitude is peculiar to many and strongly negative to some,
but Pentzikis can defend it on several grounds. He can point out
the emptiness and purposeless existence of whole segments of
modern society — the world depicted, for instance, in the plays of
Edward Albee — which stresses the gratification, material or other-
wise, of the individual. He can also direct attention to the violence
that has accompanied modern wars of liberation, undertaken on
purely economic, racial, and social grounds; in other words, on
reasonable or what are called reasonable grounds.

Such experiences make Pentzikis suspicious of man's pride in the
authority of his mind, as they have affected Ehot and Borges in
their own social attitudes. In the case of Pentzikis and Eliot, we
notice that both men are neo-Christians. Both return to Christian-
ity through the purgatorial paths of modern life, with the difference
that while Eliot is a High Anglican and represents the mysticism of

^' Proceedings of the Panhellenic Congress of Writers, p. 196.

'^ It may be worth noting here that, similarly to several American writers and
artists who joined the Communist party during and after the Second World War in
recognition of the Soviet contribution to the struggle against Nazi Germany, Pent-
zikis accepted Communism briefly in 1943 when Stalin allowed Russian churches to
function again with some freedom.

PENTZIKIS AND OTHERS 137

the West, Pentzikis espouses the mysticism of the East and particu-
larly its naive or popular kind. And both have seen in the artistic
revolution of the last one hundred years or so a healthy reaction,
existentialist in nature, against Positivism, that train of thought
which originated, according to Pentzikis, in the Renaissance and
was given a new impetus by the French Revolution. Marxism is the
natural outcome of these individual-centered trends in the de-
velopment of the West, and it is in the light of such considerations
that we should read Pentzikis' contrast between the "copying"
Christian, bound by tradition, and the arrogant Marxist pursuing
illusions of novelty, "originality," as Pentzikis has put it.

It is true that Pentzikis seems occasionally to go too far, as, for
example, when he claims that the bulk of the Greek people
accepted their four hundred years of slavery to the less civilized
Turks willingly, for the purificatory character of this slavery and for
the sake of preserving their faith. In this he makes a virtue of
necessity. He also explains, rather oddly, the prosperity of the
rocky island of Hydra at the time of the Greek War of Independ-
ence as a direct product of its population's faith, visible in the
numerous churches and chapels of the island. A more credible
explanation of this multitude of churches would be to see them as
proof of a material prosperity achieved by the hard-working Hy-
drians through a successful sea trade.

Human reason, whatever its limitations, may still be the main
hope for humankind. I believe that it is. I feel, however, that
humanism should be large enough to accommodate the whole
world, including Pentzikis. After all, Pentzikis is, deeper in, a liber-
al person who accepts humankind with its contradictions, sorrows,
angers, regrets and repentance and sees in a person a being who
eats and drinks and reaches out to the world, who fears and shuns
abstractions or coercions, who enjoys looking at pictures and tell-
ing stories. In other words, Pentzikis has a realistic view of people
and of the world. Yet he wants a sanction for this view from above,
from God.

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

In our modern, cosmopolitan world, where cities are becoming
more and more impersonal, Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis is one of a few
writers who have come to reaffirm the importance of one's ties with
his native land and, more particularly, his native city. The varied
and colorful history of Thessaloniki appears to be synopsized in the
work of Pentzikis, a work that combines strong interests in the
concrete world and in the achievements of the human intellect.

The two patron Saints of Thessaloniki, Demetrius (the Roman
officer converted to Christianity) and Gregory Palamas (the Byzan-
tine prince who elected to live the monastic life) embody the
idealistic fervor of youth with the wisdom of old age, both of which
elements are found in the work of Pentzikis. One could also say
that another Thessalonian, the commentator on the epics of Hom-
er, named Efstathios, finds a worthy successor in Pentzikis, since
the latter is inclined to comment or inform his readers copiously
about things of the past.

The early Pentzikis emerged naturally out of the intellectual
climate that nourished most of the Greek writers who started pub-
lishing in the thirties and were concerned with reinterpreting
Greek realities and traditions through the use of new writing tech-
niques imported from Western Europe. The main hero of Pent-
zikis' first book, Andhreas Dhimakoudhis — largely di persona of the
writer himself — is a young man attached emotionally to his land,
but suffering from the pangs of first love in a Western European
capital. His death prefigures and underlies the decisive turn of
Pentzikis to the Greek Orthodox faith and the national traditions
of Greece, a theme which Pentzikis reworks in a new fashion in The
Dead Man and the Resurrection.

Religious and Greek folk values become the axis of Pentzikis'

CONCLUSION 139

thought and feehng. Yet his interest in non-Greek writers like
Joyce continues and results in select translations and essays printed
in Kohlias and other journals. His paintings extend his urge to
conquer and make the surrounding world his own. The first crea-
tive period of Pentzikis is a time of great uncertainties and emo-
tional upheavals, professional disappointments and failures in the
area of human relations. His style of writing, anxious and discur-
sive, reaches a point of crisis in the almost desperate impersonality
of Knowledge of Things.

In the fifties, Pentzikis finds himself happily married, successful
professionally, and productive in writing and painting. He appears
more confident of himself as a Thessalonian and a devotee of the
Greek Orthodox faith. Yet, deeper in, Pentzikis is still an anxious
searcher for both existential and objective realities. Architecture of
the Scattered Life justifies its title, as it shows Pentzikis' effort, suc-
cessful to a considerable degree, to structure the data of his mem-
ory and current life, harness the flow of time and give it meaning.

With regard to painting, Pentzikis grows more confident that
Byzantine painting, which had been considered a static art, has
much to teach the modern artist. He eventually develops the view
that art should not try to capture the beautiful, but reflect the true
and holy. The words-and-numbers method which he espouses in
his work is his way of ensuring that, both as a painter and a writer,
he is not carried away by purely aesthetic notions, but that he relies
on the will and the grace of God, whose hand governs all phe-
nomena.

The Novel of Mrs. Ersi forms a climax in Pentzikis' mythopoeic
writing. Here he loses and finds himself in the plots and subplots of
an imaginative reworking of someone else's story, after which there
is a return to a stricter handling of reality with Notes of One Hundred
Days.

In the late sixties and through the seventies, Pentzikis becomes
absorbed in reediting, correcting, and broadening his written work.
His compulsive urge to tidy and set things and memories in order is
amply evident in the formidable Filing Cabinet. He also continues
to paint on a resolutely religious basis and shows readiness to talk
to people and expound on the ways in which he sees the world.

Looking at the work of Pentzikis from various angles, one is

140 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Struck by the versatility of his spirit around a solid nucleus of faith.
Pentzikis believes in myth, yet he rejects abstractions. He stresses
the value of memory, which helps man integrate his fragmentary
experiences into a meaningful whole and recapture a lost Eden.
Writing is one way of making memory work, but it is no easier than
a pregnancy followed by the labor of birth. Pentzikis abnegates the
value of writing for purely literary purposes. Writing must be as
large as life. Hence, Pentzikis' sources are numerous and varied.
Among those of special interest are the Greek folk traditions, reh-
gious and secular, as well as botany, a science which Pentzikis
studied professionally.

Conservative though he is, Pentzikis has not been insensitive to
the modern media of communication such as films, radio, and tele-
vision, whose influence can be detected in the very style of his
writing. The playful element in Pentzikis' style may be due partly to
that influence, but its origin is in his religious sources and in his
conviction that faith in God need not be gloomy. The puns which
Pentzikis so much likes are meant, like his numerology, to establish
a direct contact among the various levels of reality and help him
and his readers to break the limitations of rational thought.

Pentzikis often avoids the lyrical element in his writing, for, as he
says, he is suspicious of sentiments that carry him away. Being
sentimental by nature, however, he cannot suppress entirely his
more "poetic self," which surfaces now and then in passages of
great beauty and imagination. Remarkable also, from an aesthetic
point of view, are many of Pentzikis' metaphors. In general, the
literary "lapses" of Pentzikis are sanctioned by his belief in the
concrete representation of divine reality.

The speaker Pentzikis is consistent with the writer Pentzikis.
Transcripts of interviews which he has given read like parts of his
books. This shows the essential unity of his mind.

The personality of Pentzikis, his vision of life, and his writing
style become apparent also through an examination of his work
vis-a-vis the work of other writers, Greek and non-Greek. Joyce
has impressed Pentzikis considerably, while Pentzikis' style also
recalls the French and American writers of the "new novel," their
stream-of-consciousness manner and use of intertextual structures.
In some respects Pentzikis is also similar to Jorge Luis Borges, who

CONCLUSION 141

has identified himself with his city, Buenos Aires, while he keeps
his eyes open to the world at large.

Of Greek writers, apart from the Fathers of the Church and the
Byzantine chronographers, Pentzikis shows affinities with some
moderns who stressed native Greek traditions over the values of
the West. He is also connected with many of his contemporaries
who welcomed the importation and assimilation of writing tech-
niques and new modes of looking at life from the West. With the
latter Pentzikis has taken part in publishing ventures and many
private and public coUoquia, but eventually he followed a road of
his own. The younger generation of Thessalonian writers seems to
have taken notice of Pentzikis and in some cases to have borrowed
specific motifs from his work. Greek critics have on the whole been
hostile to the works of Pentzikis. A few have shown considerable
appreciation and tried to discuss and place him within the frame of
modern literature.

Pentzikis' own views about other writers and literature in general
are voiced in essays and random comments made in his books. The
idea that underlies many of his pronouncements on these matters is
that writing is ultimately an act of grace rather than the result of
deliberate effort on the part of the writer.

Of non-Greek writers, Mallarme inspired Pentzikis to write an
essay, which is both a perspicacious treatment of the work of Mal-
larme and an attempt at overcoming Mallarme's charm. Pentzikis
also wrote sharp essays on his fellow-Greek poets Themelis and
Seferis.

Pentzikis is intuitive rather than methodical in his criticism of
other artists, mainly painters. He values the metaphysical aspect of
the works of art, but also takes delight in their concrete appear-
ance. He considers Byzantine painting as the acme in the history of
art, but also believes that modern experiments in painting and
sculpture deserve attention, as they manifest the existential anxiety
and spiritual thirst of modern society.

On political and social matters Pentzikis will strike some as a
reactionary or enemy of progress, but this is a false impression. His
over-all stand on society reflects his experience of people as crea-
tures who are easily deluded in the effort to reach or create a better
society on the basis of human reason alone. To an existence of

142 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

emptiness or cynicism or political expediency, he prefers one of
creative myth and has chosen for himself the role of the simple
Greek Orthodox Christian.

Graham Greene has defined his hfe as moments of faith diver-
sified by doubt and moments of doubt diversified by faith. The
restless spirit of Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis follows a similar rhythm,
up into the realm of myth and down into the world of doubt and
despair, the world of perishable things, which he rediscovers and
reembraces only in the light of myth. Thus, for Pentzikis a human
being is both insignificant, a particle of dust or a "garbage can," but
also a vehicle of memory and a reflection of the Godhead. In short,
the life and work of Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis reaffirms belief in the
mystery and essential worth of creation.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The bibliography is based partly on the booklet by Sophia Skopetea,
Viilioghraphia N. G. Pentziki (Bibliography of N. G. Pentzikis),
1935—1970. Athens: Ermis, 1971, which, however, lists no secondary
sources on Pentzikis or translations of his work. Skopetea follows an elabo-
rate system of divisions and subdivisions in her listing of the writings of
Pentzikis, which has been avoided here. Only uncollected essays that have
been discussed or mentioned in the present study appear in the category
"Essays." Secondary Sources include only items that touch directly upon
the work of Pentzikis, most of which have appeared in the footnotes.

PRIMARY SOURCES
I. THE WORKS OF NIKOS GABRIEL PENTZIKIS

A. POETRY

Ikones (Icons). Athens: Kromidhas, 1944. Second revised edition in
Paleotera Piimata ke Neotera Peza (Older poems and more recent prose
pieces). Thessaloniki: Ase, 1980.

"Middle Poems." Printed in several issues oi Morphes between 1949 and
1953. Reprinted partially in Dhiaghonios 4 (1961), pp. 98-101.

Anakomidhi (Transferral of relics), ibid., pp. 29—52.

B. Prose

1 . Books

Andhreas Dhimakoudhis (Andhreas Dhimakoudhis). Thessaloniki: Niko-
laidhis, 1935. Second revised edition in Andhreas Dhimakoudhis ke Alles
Martyries Hamou ke Dhefteris Panoplias (Andhreas Dhimakoudhis and
other testimonies of loss and of a second armor). Thessaloniki: Ase,
1977.

0 Pethamenos ke i Anastassi (The dead man and the resurrection). Athens:
Kromidhas, 1944. Second printing from corrected proofs under the
same title in Thessaloniki: Eghokeros, 1970.

144 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Praghmatoghnossia (Knowledge of things). Thessaloniki: "Morphes", 1950.
Photographically reprinted in Thessaloniki, 1974. Second revised edi-
tion in Praghmatoghnossia ke Alia Epta Kimena Mythoplassias Gheographi-
kis (Knowledge of things and seven other essays of geographical myth-
making). Thessaloniki: Ase, 1977.

Arhitektoniki tis Skorpias Zois (Architecture of the scattered life). Athens:
Ikaros, 1963. Second revised edition in Arhitektoniki tis Skorpias Zois ke
Alia Metaghenestera Kimena (Architecture of the scattered life and other
later essays). Thessaloniki: Ase, 1978.

To Mythistorima tis Kyrias Ersis (The novel of Mrs. Ersi). Athens:
Tahydhromos, 1966. Second edition without changes and under the
same title in Thessaloniki: Ase, 1978.

Mitera Thessaloniki (Mother Thessaloniki). Athens: Kedhros, 1970.

Pros Eklissiasmon (Toward church-going). Thessaloniki: Patriarhiko Idhri-
ma Paterikon Meleton, 1970.

Synodhia (Retinue). Athens: Ikaros, 1970.

Omilimata (Homilies). Athens: Ekdhosis ton Filon, 1972.

Simiossis Ekato Imeron (Notes of one hundred days). Athens: Astir, 1973.

Arhion (Filing cabinet). Athens: Ekdhosis ton Filon, 1974.

2. Essays

"To Vradhi mias Syntrofias" (The evening of a group of friends). To Trito
Mati 1 (1935), pp. 28-29.

"Anapolissis Philologhikes" (Literary recollections). Nea Estia (1 Decem-
ber 1962), pp. 1731-33.

"Essoteriki Katathessis peri tou Piitou Gheorghiou Seferi" (Intimate tes-
timony about the poet George Seferis). In Ghia ton Seferi (For Seferis).
Athens: Private publication, 1961.

"Ghiro apo mia Zoghraphia" (Of a painting). Efthyni 33 (1974), pp.
406-411.

"Mia Ghalazia Fraoula" (A blue strawberry). Ibid., 44 (1975), pp. 411-412.

"Ghia ton Mallarme" (On Mallarme). Kohlias Qune 1947), pp. 84-86, 94.

"O Themelis ke ta Shimata" (Themelis and the forms). Ibid., pp. 94—96.

"O Hans Arp: Ghenikes Plirofories.— Entypossis apo Merika Ghlypta tou"
(Hans Arp: general information.-Impressions from some of his sculp-
tures). Morphes (July-August 1952), pp. 177-181.

"O Zoghraphos Spyros Papaloukas" (The painter Spyros Papaloukas). 0
Eonas mas (December 1947), pp. 301-306.

"O Zographos N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas" (The painter N.
Hadjikyriakoj-Ghika). 0 Eonas mas (May 1948), pp. 82-88.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 145

C. TRANSLATIONS

Bouvier, B., and Constantinides, Y. Poetes Contemporains de Salonique.
Geneva: Institut Frangais d'Athenes, 1961. A bilingual (Greek-French)
book which contain (on pp. 13—16) Pentzikis' "Stous Peripatites tou
Erota" (Aux promeneurs de I'amour), "Strophi" (Detour), and "I Thaias-
sini" (Marina), from the "Middle Poems."

Les Lettres Nourelles (March— April 1969). A special issue of the journal on
Greek writers, which contains (on pp. 258—261), in French translation
by Jacques Lacarriere, the first chapter of Pentzikis' Knowledge of Things.

The Palimpsest (Spring 1967). It contains (on pp. 7—8), in English transla-
tion by Fred Reed, chapter 6 of Pentzikis' Architecture of the Scattered
Life.

Friar, Kimon. Modern Greek Poetry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
It contains (on pp. 467—478), in English translation by Friar, the narra-
tive "O Monahos sti Vrissi" (The monk at the fountain), from the
second revised edition of Andhreas Dhimakoudhis: the poems; "Petal?
Petai?" (Does it fly.-* Does it fly?), "Skorpia Phylla" (Scattered leaves),
"Paralies Skepsis" (Seaside thoughts), and "Synanastrophi Synehis"
(Constant company), from Transferral of Relics; and "Lixiarhikos"
(Documentary), from Mother Thessaloniki.

Sengigho, C. G. Album di Poesia greca d'Oggi. Milano: Ceschina, 1971. It
contains (on pp. 33—38), in Italian translation by Sengiglio, the poems: "I
Thalassini" (Marina), "Strophi" (Svolta), from the "Middle Poems"; and
"Horos Kimitiriou" (Luogo di cimetero), from Transferral of Relics.

II. INTERVIEWS

Athens daily / Kathimerini (The daily) (6 October 1976).
Athens daily Ta Nea (The news) (18 June 1977).
Athens monthly Dhiavazo (I read) (May 1978).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Alaveras, Tilemahos. Dhiighimatoghraphi tis Thessalonikis (Prose-writers

of Thessaloniki). Thessaloniki: Konstantinidhis, n.d.
Arghyriou, Alexandros. "I Loghotehniki Zoi tis Thessalonikis ta Teleftea

Trianta Hronia" (The literary life of Thessaloniki in the last thirty years).

Epttheorissi Tehnis 94-5 (1962), pp. 390-415.
Christianopoulos, Dinos. "O Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis os Piitis" (Nikos

Gabriel Pentzikis, as poet). Dhiaghonios 4, no. 2 (1961), pp. 93-98.
Doulis, Thomas. Disaster and Fiction. Modern Greek Fiction and the Asia

Minor Disaster of 1922. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Friar, Kimon. Modern Greek Poetry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

146 HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

Kachtitsis, Nikos. Letter to George Seferis included in The Hours of "Mrs.

Erst" (see below).
Karouzos, Nikos. "O Polyvotanos Pentzikis" (Pentzikis of 'Many Herbs').

Dhiaghonios 3, no. 2 (1967), pp. 118-119.
Kazantzis, Tolis. "Ena Dhieonizomeno Thema: 'Sholi Thessalonikis'" (A

continuing controversy: 'School of Thessaloniki'). / Kathimerini (8

December 1977).
Lacarriere, Jacques. L'Ete grec. Une Grke quotidienne de 4000 ans. Paris:

Plon, 1976.
Meraklis, Mihalis. / Synhroni Elliniki Loghotehnia. I. Piissi (Contemporary

Greek literature. I. Poetry). Thessaloniki: Konstantinidhis, n.d.
. /. Synhroni Elliniki Loghotehnia. II. Pezoghraphia (Contemporary

Greek literature. II. Prose). Thessaloniki: Konstantinidhis, n.d.
Myrsiades, Kostas. Review of Filing Cabinet, in Books Abroad 50, no. 1

(1976), p. 214.
Petropoulos, Elias. Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis. Pamphlet. Thessaloniki:

"Dhiaghonios," 1958. Second revised edition, pubhshed in Athens:

"Ghrammata," 1980.
Pittas, Triantafyllos. Review oi Architecture of the Scattered Life, in lolkos 2,

no. 1 (1966), pp. 38-40.
Sahinis, Apostolos. Review of The Hours of "Mrs. Ersi" (see below) in Nea

Poria 263-4 (1977), pp. 28-29.
Savidis, George. "I Pinakes tou Ine san Oramata Mikrou Pedhiou pou

Krivoun mesa tous Oh tin Sophia tis Ellinikis Psyhis" (His [Pentzikis']

paintings are like visions of a little child that hide all the wisdom of

the Greek soul). 0 Tahydhromos (22 March 1958).
Seferis, George (pseud. Trelos, Ighnatis). / Ores tis "Kyrias Ersis" (The Hours

of "Mrs. Ersi"). Athens: Ermis, 1973.
Sinopoulos, Takis. Review of Architecture of the Scattered Life, in Epohes 17

(September 1964), pp. 64-67.
Thaniel, George. Review of Seferis' The Hours of "Mrs. Ersi." in Books

Abroad AS, no. 2 (1974), p. 406.
Themelis, Yorghos. "I Neotera Piissis. 'I Dhiavghia ton Praghmaton'"

(Modern poetry. 'The transparency of things'). / Kathimerini (1 and 2)

April 1963).
Tsirkas, Stratis. Review oi Architecture of the Scattered Life, in 0 Tahydhro-
mos (1 May 1964).
Varikas, Vassos. Review of The Novel of Mrs. Ersi, in the Athens daily To

Vima (The Tribune) (19 March 1967).
Vitti, Mario. / Ghenia tou Trianta. Idheologhia ke Morphi (The generation

of the thirties. Ideology and form). Athens: Ermis, 1977.

INDEX

Achilles, 5, 11, 124

Acropolis, 3

Adam, 31,78

Adler, Alfred, 35

Agamemnon, 34

"Aidhiasma" (Disgust), 15

Alaveras, Tilemahos, 119, 12 In, 122

Albee, Edward, 136

Alexander the Great, 1, 90, 106

"The Search for Alexander," 2
Aliakmon (river), 3 1
Ali Pasha, 30
Anakomidhi (Transferral of relics), 42,

44-47
"Anaparastassi" (Representation), 57
"Anapolissis Philologhikes" (Literary

recollections), 13
Anastenaridhes ("Fire-walkers"), 44,

44n, 129-1 30n,
Anaximander, 102
Andhreas Dhimakoudhis, 9-12, 17, 30,

33, 47, 54, 58, 82-85, 97, 120, 131,

138,
"An Excursion," 91
"Anixi" (Spring), 97
Anna, Saint, 103
Antichrist, 5
Antipatros (poet), 2
Anton, John P., x
Apollo, 64, 87
"Apologhos" (Final assessment), 8, 24,

25
"Apopsi apo ta Voriodhytika" (View

from the Northwest), 48
Aphrodite, 40
Apocrypha, (Prokopios), 20
Argentina, 116
Arghyriou, A., 121
Argos, 131

Arhion (Filing cabinet), 77-82
Arhitektoniki lis Skorpias Zois

(Architecture of the scattered life). See

Pentzikis: Works — Prose
"Arhontikos Avloghiros" (High-class

yard), 48
Aristotle, 102
Arp, Hans, 38
Arta, 46, 104n
Asia Minor, 52
Asia Minor Disaster, 6, 7
Aslanoghlou, N. A., 119
Asvestohori, 13
Athena (Goddess), 72
Athens, 1, 3, 7,8,66-67

compared to Thessaloniki, 48,
Athos, Holy Mount, 19-20, 22-23, 38,

67,69, 101, 102
Attica, 48
Austria, 4, 8
Avramios (monk), 81
Axios (river), 2
Ayia, 56

Barlaam and loasaph, Pentzikis'

translation of, 32
Barlaam of Calabria, 23
Basil, Saint, 78
Baudelaire, Charles, 127
Beckett, Samuel, 116
Berdiaeff, N., 30, 119
Bernstein, Leonard, 56
Black Sea, 7
Books Abroad, 11 n
Borges, Jorge Luis, 60, 116, 117, 136,

140-142
Bourdelle, 5 1

Bouzianis, Yorghos, 30, 32
Bowering, G., 99, 99n

148

HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

"Bridge of Arta, The", 46
Buddha, 32

Buenos Aires, 116, 141
Byzantium, 3, 5, 9, 19, 24, 41, 54, 71,
102, 105, 134-135
Byzantine church architecture, 14,

21-22,41-42
Byzantine art, 13, 14, 38, 40-41, 61,
105, 107, 118, 119, 131-132,
139, 141
Byzantine writers and sources, 5,
19-20,98, 117, 124, 141

Callithea, 52, 52n
Camus, Albert, 115
Caramanlis, Constantine, 61, 135

La Grece de Caramanlis (M.
Genevoix), 62, 62 n
Carney, T. F., translator, In
Caskets, Tale of the, 32
Cassander, 1

Cavafy, Constantine, 5 In, 116, 129-130
Cavala, 2, 20, 71,75, 110
Cezanne, 132
Chalkidhiki, 65, 75, 85
Chateaubriand, 70
Chios, 109, 110
Christ, 5, 21, 24-26, 35, 71, 73, 79,

81,86,89, 103, 104, 109, 131
Christianity, Christian, 2, 4, 22, 54,

107, 119, 134-135, 137
Christianopouios, Dinos, 42, 119, 122
Christou, Chrysanthos, 122
Cicero, 2

Clement, Saint, 96
Cohen,J. N., 117n
Communism (see also Marxism), 136n,

137
Comparative Literature, 1 1 6n
Constantine Monomahos, 57, 124,

125, 126
Constantinople, 3, 52, 112n, 131
Copenhagen, 51
Coppee, Francois, 37,
Crete, 112
Cross, the, 19, 35, 42, 73, 75, 91, 128,

131
Crusades, 3
Cyprian (philosopher), 81

Danaids, the, 106
Darwin, 64

Delacroix, Eugene {The Destruction of

Chios), 13
Delia Francesca, Pietro, 131
Delphi, 106
Demeter (Goddess), 71
Demetrius, Saint, 2, 3, 4, 23, 43, 68,

90, 138
Demoticism, 8
Dhelios, Yorghos, 30, 118
Dhiaghonios, 42n, 72n, 85, 98n, 120
Dhiakos, Athanasios, 46
Dhia/oghos (Dialogue), 120
"Dhiastavrossi" (Crossroads), 45^6
"Dhynatotites Mnimis" (Potentialities

of memory), 70
Dhiavazo, 145

"Dhidhahi" (Instruction), 27-28
Dhoukas, Stratis, 12, 13, 14, 119
Dhrama, 76

Dhrossinis, George, 54-56
Diocletian, 2
Dionysus, 64
Don Juan, 64
DosPassos,J. R, 115
Dostoevsky, 9, 37
Doulis, Thomas, 7nn., lOn
Dreiser, Theodore, 115
Dujardin, Edouard, 12, 12n

Eden, 90, 140

Efstathios (Archbishop of Thessaloniki),

3, 138
Efthyni, 6n, 77n

Efthyni (Religious organization), 66
Egnatia. Via, 37
Egypt, 21, 108,
Einstein on the Beach, 99
Elias, Saint, 96
Eliot,T. S., 39, 70, 91, 129, 136

Four Quartets, 56
Elytis, Odysseus, 112, 112n
"Ena Simadhi se Spitia tis Chalkidhikis"

(A sign on houses of Chalkidhiki), 85
"Enas Dhaskalos sti Limni" (A teacher

in the lake), 47
"Enas Kalos Peripatos" (A good walk),

85
"Enas Neos Monahos" (A young man

alone), 9
"Epetios" (Anniversary), 96
Epitheorissi Tehnis, 12 In
Epohes, 50n

INDEX

149

"Eros tis Eklissias" (Love for the

church), 20
"Essoteriki Katathessis peri tou Piitou

Gheorghiou Seferi" (Intimate

testimony about the poet George

Seferis), 59, 128
Eve, 71, 78
Evzones, 112n

Europe, European, 7, 10, 41, 70
Eurydice, 31

Faulkner, William, 115
Fernand, Roger, 51
"Fire-walkers" (see Anastenaridhes)
Flaubert, Gustave, 115

Madame Bovary, 115
France, French, 4, 8, 13, 38
Franks, 48
Free Spirit. The, 7
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 35
Friar, Kimon

Modern Greek Poetry, 45n, 90n, 93,
103, 114, 122-123, 145
Frossyni, (Kyra Frossyni), 80
Futurism; Futurists, 98n

Galerius, Arch of, 37

Galerius, Emperor, 2

Geigy, 66

Generation of the Thirties, 7

Geneva, 37

Genevoix, Maurice, 62

Germany, German, 4, 52, 134

Ghelassios, 101

"Ghia ton Mallarme" (About

Mallarme), 88n
"Ghia ton Seferi" (For Seferis), 59
Ghalaxidhi, 101
"Ghiro apo mia Zoghraphia" (Of a

painting), 61
Ghika, Nikos Hadjikyriakos, 7, 133,

Pentzikis' essay on, 133n
Ghnossiologhia (Knowledge of things),

120
Ghovdhela, martyr, 108
"Graphikotites" (Highlights), 48
Ghrighoras, Nikiphoros, 23
Giacometti, 92
Gide, A., 8, 114
Goethe

Sorrows of Young Werther, 8—1 1,
Greco, El, 37, 38

Greece, Greek:

Artists, 39-40

Folklore, 34, 94-95, 132, 138

Folksong, 8, 46

Northern Greece (Macedonia), 1

History, 19, 107

Language, Literature, 70n

Writers, 39^0, 140-141
Greek War of Independence, 46, 1 lOn,

137
Greek Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodox

Church, ix, 2, 13, 23, 41, 44n, 62,

69,75,77-78,94,96, 119, 138-139
Greene, Graham, 142
Gregory of Nazianzos, Saint, 78
Gregory of Nyssa, Saint, 78
Gris,Juan, 12
Griinewald, Matthias, 13
Guterman, N., 109n

Hadrian, 2

Hamlet (Shakespeare), 1 1

Hammarskjold, Dag, ix

Harpers, 99n

Hecate (Goddess), 87

Helios, 87

Hellenistic times, 1, 5, 54, 75, 135

Hera (Goddess), 86

Hesychasm, 23-24, 89

Himonas, Yorghos, 119

Hippasos, 102n

Hitler, 52

Homer, 5, 8, 34, 55, 60, 84, 86, 96,

108, 109, 112-113, 126, 138

Wad, 124

Odyssey, 34n
"Horos Kimitiriou" (Space of

cemetery), 45
House of Porcelain, The {Gvis), 12
Hugo, Adele, 10
Hugo, Victor, 10
Hydra, 137

Ibsen, 9

Ghosts, 64
Icons, 18,26,40,70, 105, 119
"I Erotiidha" (The daughter of Eros),

106
I Kathimerini, 89, 12 In
Ikones (Icons), 13, 26-29, 42-45
"I Krini" (The lilies), 73

150

HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

"I Kyra Thalassini" (The lady of the

sea), 87
"I Synehia" (The continuation), 82
Impressionism, 38, 132
Inquisition, the 4
loannou, Yorghos, 119, 120
loikos, 62
"I Poria ke to Stamatima" (The journey

and the stop), 15, 73, 95
Isidhoros Pilousiotis, 124, 124n
Islam, 5
Italy, Italian, 51

Jacob's ladder, 50
Jacobsen,J. P., 9
Jews, 4

in Thessaloniki, 1, 48
John of the Climax, Saint, 24
John Chrysostom, Saint, 78, 124n
John of Damascus, Saint, 79
John the Divine, Saint, 79
John from Thessaloniki (Neomartyr),

110
Jordaens, Jacob, 131
Joyce, James, 11, 12, 12n, 30, 92, 94,

114, 115, 116, 124, 125, 127, 130,

139

Ulysses, 114, 114n
Julius Caesar, 2
Justa (Christian martyr), 81
Justinian, 25

Kachtitsis, Nikos, 61, 6ln

Kafka, Franz, 115, 116

Kalamata, 69n

Kalamatianos, 69, 69n

Karaghiozis (theater), 124

Karelli, Zee, 19, 30, 119

Karkavitsas, Andhreas, 117

Karouzos, Nikos, 94

Kassia, (Kassiani), 7 1

Kastanakis, Thrassos, 10

Kastoria, 100

Kazantzakis, Nikos, 94

Kazantzis, T., 121n

Keeley, Edmund and Mary, 120n

Kierkegaard, Soren 30

Kitsopoulos, Yorghos, 30, 1 19

Klee, Paul, 109

"Klironomika" (Of our inheritance), 69

Kohlias, 30-32, 82, 84, 88n, 126, 139

Kontoghlou, Photis, 119
"Kopela sto Stathmo" (Girl at the

station), 83-84
Kosmas, Saint, 9
Kosmas, Stavrakios (pseudonym of

Pentzikis), 9, 9n, 13
Kritiki, 120
Kyrou, Klitos, 119

Lacarriere, Jacques, on the art of
Pentzikis, 38-40, 116, 122
L'Ete grec, 39n

Langadha, 44, 129-130, 130n

Larissa, 52

Lawrence, D. H., 130

Lazarus, 33

Leake, W. M.

Travels in Northern Greece, 4

Leibnitz, W. G., ix

Lenin, 135

Leo the Wise, 9n

Lethe, 92
Leucothea, 85
Lieos, 2, 43
Limnos, 85
London, 37
Louvre, the 13, 26
Lucian, 2

Macedonia (see also Greece), 1, 31, 42
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 13, 40
Makedhonika Ghrammata, 1 18n
Makedhonikes Imeres, 118
Mallarme, Stephane, 12, 12n, 13, 60,

124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 141

Igitur, Pentzikis' translation of, 30

Pentzikis on, 88
Mao Tse Tung, 135
Marina, Saint, 81

Marxism (see also Communism), 7
Mary, Saint (the Holy Virgin), 21, 71,

83,96, 131
Mary of Egypt, Saint, 2 1
Maugham, Somerset, 93
Mavilis, Lorenzos, 124, 125
Maximos the Confessor, 24, 75
Megara, 58

Melodhos, Romanes, 25n, 26
Meraklis, Mihalis, 122
Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 32

INDEX

151

"Messa ston Paleo Nao" (In the old

church), 43-44
Meyendorff, Father John, 23
"Mia ekdhromi" (An excursion), 85, 91
"Miaghalazia Fraoula" (A blue

strawberry), 77
Milan, 51
Miller, Henry, 30
Mitera Thessaloniki (Mother

Thessaloniki), 3, 4-6, 7, 41, 48
"Mitera Thessaloniki," 68
Mitropoulos, Dhimitris, 55
"Mnimi Nekron" (Memory of the

dead), 68
Myrovlitis, 3, 55

Monastery of Ghrighorios, 69, 101
Monet, Claude, 13, 40
Monks, Monasticism, 24, 86, 105-106,

111, 113
Moraitidhis, Alexandhros, 124
Morphes,ii,A2, 132nn.
Moslem, 4, 110
"Moungos ke Piitis" (Mute and the

poet), 15
Munch, Edvard, 99
Myrivilis, Stratis, 124
Myrsiades, Kostas, x, 77n, 82n

Nakou, Lilika, lOn

Nausicaa, 84-85

NeaEstia, 13, 19, 12 In

Nea Porta, 120, 12 In

"Neara Kori" (A maiden), 30

Neoplatonism, 102, 108, 124

Nerval, Gerard de, 30, 70

Nestor, 2, 43

New Martyrology (see Nikodhimos the

Athonian)
Nicholas, Saint, 1 10
Nikodhimos the Athonian, Saint, 20n,

69, 97, 109ff

New Martyrology, 62, 109

Synaxaristis, 109
Normans, 3
Novalis, Friedrich, 30

Odysseus (Homer), 34, 85, 95,

126-127
0 Eonas Mas, 32, 133n
"'O Ghamos" (The wedding), 35
Olympus, 4, 97

Ow/7/OTtf/^ (Homilies), 73, 100, 101
"Oniro ke Asthenia" (Dream and

disease), 131
"O Naos tou Poliouhou" (The Church

of the Patron Saint), 68
0 Pethamenos ke i Anastassi (The dead

man and the resurrection)
Orpheus, 31
0 Tahydhromos, 5 On, 61
Outis (No Man), 34, 126

Palamas, Gregory (see also

Hesychasm), 3,22-24, 128
Palatine Anthology, the, 105
Pan (God), 60
Panhellenic Congress of Writers,

66-67, 67n, 70, 72, lOln, 136, 136n
"Panorama ke Istoria" (Full view and

history), 48
Pantheon (Rome), 2
Papadhiamantis, Alexandhros, 107,

109, 117
Papadhimitriou, Sakis, 119-120
Papaloukas, Yorghos, 132, 133,

Pentzikis' essay on, 133n
Paris, 8, 10, 51, 52
Parthenis, Constantine, 131
Paul, Saint, 60
Pauhnus of Nola, 130
Paz, Octavio, 117
Pella, 1
"Penihri Askissi" (Humble exercise),

86
Pentzikis, Gabriel (father of Nikos

Gabriel Pentzikis), 29, 48, 73
Pentzikis, Gabriel Nikos (son of Nikos

Gabriel Pentzikis), x, 36
Pentzikis, Mary (mother of Nikos

Gabriel Pentzikis), 73
Pentzikis, Miltiadhis (cousin of Nikos

Gabriel Pentzikis), 8-10, 12
Pentzikis, Niki Lazaridhis (wife of

Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis), 36, 83
Pentzikis, Nikos Gabriel, 2

on art, 37

awards and recognition, 38, 68

botany, 12,95,97-98

Byzantinism, 77, 107, 121

as critic of art, 130-133

as critic of literature, 30, 47,
126-130, 141

152

HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

and critics, 77, 121-123

drawing and painting, 14, 38—40, 61,

65,67,73,74-76
grandmother of, 14, 77
interviews with, 38n, 77n, 107-112,

133
numerology, 63-64, 74, 101-104,

140
and other writers, 120
pharmacology, 8, 14, 16
politics of, 135-137
readers of, 14, 25—26
religion of, 16, 20, 22, 24, 60,

66-67,70,99, 107, 119, 121,

123, 138, 142
style, 28, 33, 92-94, 100, 139
and Thessaloniki, 1, 16, 68, 90, 121
translations by, 30
translations from, 66, 66n
WORKS— ART

Avrokomis and Anthia, 75

Cinderella's Shoe, 75

The Embrace, 14

First Panhellenic Congress of
Writers, 75

Ghalatista ofChalkidhiki, 75

King Amyntas, 40

The Kiss, 14

Jonas and the Sea, 1 5

The Mystical Bush, 75

Olive Tree and Girl, Id

On Love, 75

Phalara-Langadha, 39

Pre-Historical Figure, 75

With a Return Ticket, 76
WORKS— POETRY

"Constant Association," 45—47

"Crossroads," A^-A6

"Event," 43

Icons, 13,26-29,42-45

"Instruction," 27

"Middle Poems," 42-47

"Space of Cemetery," 45

'Topography," 42

Transferral of Relics, 42, 44^7

'Turning Point," 44
WORKS— PROSE

"About Mallarme," 88n, 126n

Andhreas Dhimakoudhis, 9—12, 17,
30, 33, 47, 54, 58, 82-84, 104n,
120, 131, 138

"Apology," 24

Architecture of the Scattered Life,

49-54, 58, 86-87, 93, 100, 107,

139
"A Blue Strawberry," 77
"By Car," 85
"The Church of the Patron Saint,"

68
"Clouds and Reveries," 48n
The Dead Man and the Resurrection,

16-19, 22, 33, 35n, 47,54, 67,

91,92,95, 138
"Disgust," 15
"Dream and Disease," 131
"The Evening of a Group of

Friends," 12
"Face and City," 68
Filing Cabinet, 77-82, 91, 94, 103,

106, 112, 136, 139
"Final Assessment," 8, 24, 25
"Full View and History," 48
"The Girl at the Station," 86
"Hans Arp: General Information

— Impressions from Some of

His Sculptures," 132n
"High Class Yard," 48
"Highlights," 48
Homilies, 8, 22-26, 89, 90-92, 95,

97, 100, 101
"Intimate Testimony about the

Poet George Seferis," 59, 128
"In the Old Church," 43-44
"Journey and the Stop," 15-16, 95
Knowledge of Things, 32-35, 49,

84-86, 120, 123, 131, 139
"The Lady of the Sea," 96
"Landscape of Being," 1
"Liberty Square," 49, 68
"The Lilies," 73
"Literary Recollections," 1 3
"Love for the Church," 21, 68n
"A Maiden" (Young Maiden), 30
"Matters of Traffic," 76, 86
"Matters of Transportation," 85
"Memory of the Dead," 68
"Monologue on the Seashore," 55
Mother Thessaloniki, 1, 67-68
"Mother Thessaloniki," 68
"Mute and the Poet," 15
"Mystical Views on the

Wall-Construction of the

Churches of Arta," 104n
•The Name." 72

INDEX

153

Notes of One Hundred Days, 61—65,

75,97, 104, 110, 139
"No Man," 34

The Novel of Mrs Ersi, 11, 15-16,
54-61, 104, 106, 107, 114, 121,
124, 125, 139
"Of a Painting," 61
"On Limnos," 85
"The Painter Spyros
Papaloukas,"133n
"The Painter N.

Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas," 133n
"Rain," 48

"Representation," 57
Retinue, 15, 31, 47, 89-90, 95,

101, 106
"Rhapsody of Relationships," 29
"The Sponge and the Word,"91
"A Teacher in the Lake," 47
"Themelis and the Forms," 126n
"Thessaloniki and Life," 48
Toward Church-Going, 11, 13,42,

68-69, 68n, 70-72,91, 131
"View from the Northwest," 48
"The Wedding," 35
"Young Maiden" (A Maiden), 30
"Peri Limnou" (On Limnos), 85
"Peri Metaphoron" (Matters of

transportation), 85
Persephone (Goddess), 71
Petropoulos, Elias, 39n, 88n, 122
Petrograd, 12n

Petsalis-Dhiomidhis, Thanassis, 1 lOn
"Phaini ke Nikodhimos" (The

Luminous One and Nicodem), 96
Phinney, Edward S., x
Philip,;. A., 102n
Philippi, 20
Phoebus (see Helios)
Philoctetes, 85
Picasso, 94, 131-132
Piraeus, 125
Pirandello, 130
Pittas, Triantafyllos, 122
"Platia Eleftherias" (Liberty Square),

49,68
Plato, 49, 50, 76, 88-89, 95

Symposium, 64
Plotin (see also Neoplatonism), 30
Plutarch, 117

Poe, Edgar Allan, 114, 127
Porphyrios, the Neoplatonist, 124

Potamianos, Themis, 124
Pound, Ezra, 94

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, 94, 94n
Praghmatoghnossia (Knowledge of

things), 84-85, 101
Prokopios, 20
Pros Eklissiasmon (Toward

church-going), 1 1
"Prossopo ke Poli" (Face and city), 68
Proussis, Kostas, x
Proust, Marcel, 8, 1 14
Psara, 110

Psellos, Michael, 30, 57, 124, 125
Psycharis, John, 8
Pythagoras, 102
Pythia (Delphi), 106

Queen Olga Street (Thessaloniki), 37

Rabelais, 30

Racine, 51

"Rapsodhia Sheseon" (Rhapsody of

relationships), 29
Ravenna, 3
Renoir, 40
Rennaisance, 115
"Renee" (see Saeger, Renee)
Revue Independente, 12n
Rhodesia, 96
Rimbaud, 129
Riike, 8, 70
Romanos Melodhos, (see Melodhos,

Romanos)
Rosseau's Confessions, 9, 1 14
Rome, Roman, 2
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 115, 116
Rochelle, Drieu La, 116
Runciman, Sir Steven, 24n
Rye, Jane, 98n

Saeger, Renee, 10, 30, 82-83, 131

Sahinis, A., 12 In

Saracens, 3

Sarantaris, Yorghos, 13, 118, 119

Sarraute, Natalie, 17, 116

Savidis, George, 40, 122

Sartre, 115

Scandinavia, 37, 51

Seferis, George, 7, 38, 40, "Ighnatis

Trelos," 59, Pentzikis on, 47, 78n,

128-130, 141

Diary of Mrs. Ersi, 58-61, 97, 121

154

HOMAGE TO BYZANTIUM

On The Greek Style, 59n

Turning Point, 7
Sei-Sou, forest, 37
Selene (Goddess), 87
Seneca, 113
Serres, 75
Shakespeare, 1 1

"Shima Loghou" (Figure of speech), 83
Shestov, Lev, 30
Shina, Athina, 66, 66n, 133
Sikelianos, Angelos

"The Sacred Road," 90n
Silentarius, Paulus, 131
Simiossis Ekato Imeron (Notes of one

hundred days), 61—65
Sinopoulos, Takis, 122
Synoro (religious organization), 66
Sisois, Saint, 90
Smyrna, 109
Solomos, Dionysios, 124

Lambros, 125

"The Moon-Clad Maiden," 125
Solzhenitsyn, A., 136
Sophocles, 85

Antigone, 115
Spandhonidhis, Petros, 118, 122
Spieler, F.J. ,99n
"Spongos ke Loghos" (The Sponge and

the word), 73,91
Stalin, 134

Stathopoulou, Anthoula, 124
Stoudhitis, Theodhoros, 112, 113, 133
Stoyannidhis, Yorghos, 119
Strasbourg, 8, 10
Stravinsky, 94

"Strophi" (Turning Point), 44
Stylianos, Father (Archbishop of

Australia), 68
Surrealism, 39
Svoronos, Yannis, 30
Symeon the Young Theologian, 24, 69,

124, 125
Synesios, 30

"Synkinoniaka" (Matters of traffic), 76
"Symvan" (Event), 43
Synaxaristis (see also Nikodhimos the

Athenian), 20-21, 62, 69-70, 79,

81,86, 101, 102, 107-111
Switzerland, 38, 52
"Synanastrophi Synehis" (Constant

association), 45-47

"Synkekrimeno ke Ghamos" (The

concrete and marriage), 71
Synodhia (Retinue), 48, 72, 72n
Syria, 108

Tabor, Mount, 24
Taktsis, Kostas, 1 19

The Third Wedding, 120
TaNea, In, 6n. 118. 143
Ta Nea Ghrammata, 8
Tatakis, Vassilis, 118
Tehni (cultural society), 36
TertuUian, 130, 130n
Thassitis, Panos, 119
Themelis, Yorghos, 30, 118, 122,

126ff, 141

Men and Birds, 127-128
Thaniel, George, viii, 146
Theodora, 25

"Theophania" (Theophany), 35
Theophanis (Byzantine historian), 124,

126
Theophilos (Byzantine emperor), 71
Theophilos (folk painter), 130
Theotokas, George, 7, 7n, lOn

The Free Spirit, 7
Thermaic Gulf, 4, 37, 68
Thessaloniki (Alexander's half-sister), 1
Thessaloniki, City of, x, 1-6, 8, 13, 17,

19,36-37,67, 116, 138

climate, 5, 48, 70-71, 121, history,
3—5, monuments and churches,
2-3, 40^3, 57, intellectual hfe,
13, 36, writers of, 36, 1 19-120,

121, University of, 6, 66, 112,

122, 141, White Tower of, 3,
population, 3

"Thessaloniki ke Zoi" (Thessaloniki

and life), 36-37
Thoreau, 114
Toledo, 37

"To Onoma" (The name), 48
"Topographia" (Topography), 42
"Topio tou Ine" (Landscape of being),

1
ToTritoMati,8, 12, 13
"To Vradhi Mias Syntrofias (The

evening of a group of friends), 12
To Vima, 145

Transliteration explanation, x-xi
Troy, 108n

INDEX

155

Truffaut Frangois, lOn

AdeleH., lOn
Tsirkas, Stratis, 24,41, 122
Turkey, Turks, 2, 3, 6-7

in Thessaloniki, 1

Ulysses (see also Odysseus), 84—85

Vafopoulos, Yorghos, 8, 118, 119,

124n
Valery, Paul, 129

Une Soiree avec Monsieur Teste, 129
Vakalopoulos, A. E., In
Vardharis (wind), 70
Varnalis, Kostas, 135
Varvitsiotis, Takis, 30, 122
Vassilios of Stavronikita, 122
Vassilikos, Vassilis, 119, 120

Photographs, In

The Plant, 120
Venetians, 3
Versailles, 50-51
Via Egnatia (see Egnatia, Via)
Victoria Falls, 96
Vienna, 51
Vitti, Mario, 121

Vivaldi

Four Seasons, 8 1
Vlahoyannis Yannis, 117
Vorofryni, dhiladhi i Kyria Marigho"

(Vorofryni, that is, Mrs. Marigho),

72
Voussiris (Christian martyr), 106
"Vrohi" (Rain), 48

Watkins, Peter, 99-100
Watson, Giles, 101-1 I4n, 122
"A Thessalonian — Nikos Gabriel
Pentzikis," 95n, lOln, 122
Werther (see also Goethe), 16
Wilson, John, 132n
Wilson, Robert, 99
World War I, 2
World War II, 119, 136n

Xefloudhas, Stelios, 8, 1 18

Yannina, 80

Yannopoulos, Alkis, 8, 1 18
Yeats, W. B., 122
"Byzantium," 135n

Zambezi River, 96

NOSTOS BOOKS ON MODERN
GREEK HISTORY AND CULTURE

1. Yannis Ritsos, Eighteen Short Songs of the Bitter Motherland. Translated
from the Greek by Amy Mims with illustrations by the poet. Edited
and with an Introduction by Theofanis G. Stavrou.

2. Kimon Friar, The Spiritual Odyssey of Nikos Kazantzakis. Edited and
with an Introduction by Theofanis G. Stavrou.

3. Kostas Kindinis, Poems: Reinvestigations and Descent from the Cross.
Translated from the modern Greek with a preface by Kimon Friar.

4. Andonis Decavalles, Pandelis Prerelakis and the Value of a Heritage.
Including Rethymno as a Style of Life by Pandelis Prevelakis, translated
from the Greek by Jean H. Woodhead. Edited and with an Introduc-
tion by Theofanis G. Stavrou.

5. John Anton, Critical Humanism as a Philosophy of Culture: The Case of
E. P. Papanoutsos. Edited and with an Introduction by Theofanis G.
Stavrou.

6. loanna Tsatsos, My Brother George Seferis. Translated from the original
Greek by Jean Demos with a preface by Eugene Current-Garcia.

7. Donald C. Swanson, Vocabulary of Modern Spoken Greek (English-Greek
and Greek-Englishl.

8. Nikos Kazantzakis, Two Plays — Sodom and Gomorrah and Comedy: A
Tragedy in One Act. Translated from the modern Greek and with an
Introduction to Sodom and Gomorrah by Kimon Friar. Including an
Introduction to Comedy: A Tragedy in One Act by Karl Kerenyi, trans-
lated by Peter Bien.

9. George Thaniel, Homage to Byzantium: The Life and Work of Nikos
Gabriel Pentzikis.

10. Theofanis G. Stavrou, Angelos Sikelianos and the Delphic Idea. Includ-
ing Life With Angelos Sikelianos by Anna Sikelianos. Forthcoming.

11. Theofanis G. Stavrou and Constantine Trypanis, Kostis Palamas: A
Portrait and an Appreciation. Including lambs and Anapaests and
Ascraeus by Kostis Palamas. Forthcoming.