The Colossus of Maroussi 2e (New Directions Paperbook)

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There's a famous story about a lawyer who's been getting sniped at by a judge over and over for meaningless trivialities. Finally, after running afoul of the rules for the umpteenth time, the judge raps his gavel on the podium and says, "I am fining you five hundred dollars for contempt of court!" The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being.” Miller attributes to his friends and their work many characteristics that he considers quintessentially Greek. Katsimbalis, the “Colossus” of the title, is passionate, a bon vivant with a strong sense of the tragic. As he talks “unhurried, unruffled, inexhaustible and inextinguishable”, he grows out of his human proportions, becoming a Colossus. Ghikas is a “seeker after light and truth”. Seferis is, according to Miller, the man who has caught and embedded in his work “the spirit of eternality which is everywhere in Greece”. Seferis’ passion for his country is, for Miller, a special and thrilling peculiarity of the intellectual Greek who has lived abroad. Marvelous things happen to one in Greece—marvelous good things which can happen to one nowhere else on earth. Somehow, almost as if He were nodding, Greece still remains under the protection of the Creator. Men may go about their puny, ineffectual bedevilment, even in Greece, but God’s magic is still at work[,] and…no matter what the race of man may do or try to do, Greece is still a sacred precinct—and my belief is it will remain so until the end of time.

No, this is not your grandmother's travel writing, with its propriety, politeness, and "realistic" depictions, but word-pictures of an emotional landscape. That's the essence Miller strives to show: his subjective, experiential, inner reality. The subject here is Henry Miller, and what matters most is how these objects--the world--affect him. As a result, this 1941 literary bombshell, ostensibly about Greece, documents Miller's memories of New York inspired by a view of Athens, provides a lengthy disquisition on jazz when he's confronted by a French woman who disdains the chaos of Greece, and paints a disquieting, mad, and ominous picture of Saturn when he climbs to an observatory and views it through a telescope. He tells us his dreams and daydreams and what he wished he would have said. Everything is fair game; the seeming digressions frequent and fabulous.We followed the blue-collar dogs to the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the National Gardens. Inspired by what I had seen, the casts of the missing Parthenon marbles, I felt the strength of the argument for their return. The experience of the actual Acropolis, windswept, expensive, hustled by tour gangs, is grim: far better to stroll the floors of the museum, to take coffee in a room with a view. Police cars screech around the tight curves of the Acropolis ascent, and the peddlers, Asians with cheap guidebooks and concertinas of photographs, scatter into the bushes to regroup in time for the next coach. One of those travel books that is as much about the traveler as the country traveled to. It's a paean (and there's no other word for it) to Greece on the part of Henry Miller, better known for his "Tropic" books even though he considered this one his best. Maybe that's because his personality and opinions play such a large role. He can be cynical and no-nonsense, for sure, and favors simplicity and genuineness over, um, all things American. Other countries don't stand up to Greece's near-perfection, either. This quote, near the end, about sums it up:

urn:oclc:876234922 Republisher_date 20120228184408 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120228123137 Scanner scribe1.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2011-12-19 21:56:40 Boxid IA175401 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor talking of cities, of how he had gotten a mania for Haussmannising the big cities of the world. He would take the map of London, say, or Constantinople, and after the most painstaking study would draw up a new plan of the city, to suit himself … Naturally a great many monuments had to be torn down and new statues, by unheard-of men, erected in their place. While working on Constantinople, for example, he would be seized by a desire to alter Shanghai … It was confusing, to say the least. Having reconstructed one city he would go on to another and then another. There was no let up to it. The walls were papered with the plans for new cities … It was a kind of megalomania, he thought, a sort of glorified constructivism which was a pathologic hangover from his Peloponnesian heritage. How can one escape the gloom and dejection that dominate modern literature? Why, by reading Henry Miller of course. We are told that happiness writes white and perhaps it does, but isn Miller’s case it’s a supernal, brilliant white and I could use more of it. As the second World War erupted, pushing 50 and fancying a break after two decades of writing, Miller travelled to Greece to visit his young friend Lawrence Durrell. The luminous, blissful book that resulted from his transformative time there was Miller’s favourite of his own works and it may be mine too.

The Water and the Wine by Tamar Hodes

Yes," I said, "I'm crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs. And I also believe that if you have light, such as you have here, all ugliness is obliterated. Since I've come to your country I know that light is holy: Greece is a holy land to me." I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener's imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end. But it was Miller the poet and peacemaker who, I now think, made me reflect most. The fight, he said, was not against disease or poverty or even tyrants. These were just the symptoms of bad thinking. I don't miss anything," I said, pressing the point home. "I think this is marvellous. I don't like your gardens with their high walls, I don't like your pretty little orchards and your well-cultivated-fields. I like this …" and I pointed outdobrs to the dusty road on which a sorely-laden donkey was plodding along dejectedly. "But it's not civilized," she said, in a sharp, shrill voice which reminded me of the miserly tobacconiste in the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire. Miller drew his Colossus from events that occurred and landscapes he encountered while living for nine months in Greece. His portrayal of poet Katsimbalis and the country is tempered by the outbreak of the Second World War, which forced him to leave for the United States in December 1939. [2] Miller wrote the book in New York, and it reflects his resentment at having to return to America, as well as his feeling of isolation there. [2] Content [ edit ]

Henry Miller’ı müstehcen olduğu gerekçesiyle uzunca bir süre yazıldığı dönemin yasaklı kitapları arasında olan Yengeç ve Oğlak Dönencesi ile tanıdım. Kesinlikle doğru, kitaplar fazla müstehcen olmakla beraber edebi değeri ise paha biçilemez bana göre. Aradan geçen bu sürede Marousi’nin Devi’yle karşımda bambaşka bir Hery Miller buldum. Kitabının son sayfalarında da bunu doğrulayan bir cümlesi var; ‘gözlerim bağlı, bocalayan, kararsız, adımlarla yürümüştüm;gururlu, kibirliydim...’ Fortunately her husband reappeared at this point with the post-cards which he had given a dry-cleaning.” This is still nonfiction, but Miller's imaginative life at the time of his travels is real, and thus an important part of his narrative. In the end it all hangs together like a sumptuous tapestry woven by an inspired madman--which perhaps it is. We come away understanding more about the taste of Greek water, the quality of Greek light, and the magnificence of the Greek spirit than from reading all the objective reporting on Greece in the Library of Congress. He captures it all as it arrests him. One might say that Miller wanted to preserve an image of a paradise that he worried would soon be lost. But it wasn’t a paradise: Greece, as he mentions only once, was under a military dictatorship at this time. Should he have written about that? I can’t say. Not necessarily. But I can’t help but be reminded of another book, Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, set during Pinochet’s coup, in which the artsy-fartsy folks sit around and talk about art and aesthetics while there’s a torture chamber in the basement. Note: "Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips..." William Shakespeare, Richard II.)

After his life-changing journey to Greece, Miller returned to the United States. The Colossus of Maroussi was published in 1941. It was his third book and his favorite.

I would set out in the morning and look for new coves and inlets in which to swim. There was never a soul about. I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind, empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania—it was constantly staring me in the eyes—and you say to yourself, yesterday it was Greek, today it's Italian, tomorrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be. When you're right with yourself it doesn't matter what flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it. Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don't need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease of life. We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades -even or cellophane or cigarettes or money. This is a pipe dream, I know. People only go on strike for better working conditions, better wages, better opportunities to become something other than they are.“ Miller, Henry (18 May 2010). The Colossus of Maroussi (Seconded.). New Directions Publishing. p.210. ISBN 978-0-8112-1857-3 . Retrieved 31 May 2013. Into this heady political and social mix came Miller's hilarious and breathtaking demolition of the stupidity, greed and hypocrisy of those who had wrought continuing poverty, war and despair on Europe and the world. His emotional investigation of the wild Greek spirit was not just a spit in the eye of the European establishment – who, if they had read Maroussi would have dismissed him as patently dislodged, inflamed, surreal and even mad – but a giant gob in the face of all that was curmudgeonly and mean. There was no hint of objectivity, balance or fairness. This joyful rant expressed the rage and the hopes of mine and every other generation. Newspapers got short shrift for spreading lies, hatred, greed, envy and malice; lawyers, technologies, capitalism, communism and Catholicism were all excoriated. He dismissed Christmas as "sour, moth-eaten, bilious, crapulous, worm-eaten and mildewed" and denounced America for its obsessions with wealth and power. His passions burst at the seams, his prose streamed in long paragraphs, words falling over themselves in their haste to be read.A great book, made greater by my travels. Athens is one of my new favourite European cities. Efcharistó Miller. I'll probably write some more stuff here once the holiday has brewed a little longer.