A poet caught between worlds

In February 1922 Sylvia Beach set out the first copies of an experimental Irish novel in the window of her Paris shop, festooned with blue-and-white Greek flags. A law student called George Seferiadis noticed the flags and the title -- “Ulysses” -- but did not buy the book. A few months later, his cosmopolitan hometown, Smyrna, was razed by Turkish troops after a Greek incursion into Asia Minor; many of its Armenian and Greek inhabitants were slaughtered. The Greek world shrank to fit the measure of the modern nation-state; the refugees who crammed into Athens were often horrified by their new motherland’s provincialism.

The poet George Seferis (Seferiadis’ nom de plume), who won the Nobel Prize in 1963, was formed in that conjunction. Modernist writers from Joyce to T.S. Eliot were drawing on classical texts to name and salve the sense of dislocation that followed Europe’s Great War. Seferis set out to bring that tradition “home” to modern Greece, reweaving it with his country’s more recent history while claiming it as the root of a universal, human-centered culture. The sense of a lost plenitude in his poetry -- what he called “the ‘Waste Land’ feeling” -- is often indistinguishable from the yearning for a lost Hellenic world, urgently visible in the traces that survive. Ancient fragments express modern anomie; Odysseus wanders through the 20th century as an ordinary exile, a man who has lost his way.

Seferis’ poetry is often compared to Eliot’s -- “We are having trouble translating you so that you don’t sound like Eliot,” said his friend Lawrence Durrell -- but it is far more personal and intimate. Seferis felt all his life that he remained a refugee, and many of his best poems explore the depths and subtleties of that increasingly common situation. His passion for space and landscape, his dreamlike merging of inner and outer worlds and his ability to drench material things with feeling are sometimes reminiscent of Rilke.

In Greece, Seferis’ work and his interpretation of his country’s past acquired the weight of literary orthodoxy: No serious poet can write without taking him on board. In Britain and the United States, modern Greek culture first became visible under his sign, through the writings and translations of friends such as Durrell, Henry Miller, Rex Warner and Edmund Keeley. The ironic, elegiac Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy -- in E.M. Forster’s phrase, “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe” -- is now perhaps more widely read. But the Greece of blue seas and white islands promising enlightenment through joy that became fashionable in the last century both as a destination and a state of mind owes at least some of its lineaments to Seferis’ poems, as read by his foreign admirers.

Seferis was also his country’s ambassador in the literal sense. As a career diplomat, he served the Greek government through decades of crisis and upheaval -- the Metaxas dictatorship of the 1930s, the Axis occupation of WWII and the civil war that followed, the Cyprus rising against British rule in the 1950s -- before finally speaking out against the military junta that ruled the country from 1967 until after his death in 1971. It is probably the thorny combination of his literary stature and his political accommodations, criticized by left and right, that has deterred Greek researchers from writing his life. Roderick Beaton, professor of modern Greek language and literature at King’s College London, has taken on the enormous task of tracing his double career with great sympathy and scrupulousness. If his exhaustively researched biography has a quiet agenda, it is to rescue Seferis from the simplifications of some of his detractors by clarifying what he actually said and did. Beaton glosses over none of the criticisms leveled at Seferis, especially by the Greek left, but takes pains to give a thorough, accurate picture of his whole political development so that his choices can be understood.

Seferis was by temperament and formation a liberal of the old European school. His father was a lawyer, closely involved with the irredentist aspirations of the early 19th century Greek state; his mother’s family owned land around the seaside village of Skala, the lost paradise that haunted Seferis until his death. His commitment to Hellenism was explicitly a matter of language and culture, not of race; he maintained all his life a slightly romantic, patrician faith in “the people”; he abhorred political violence and authoritarianism of all kinds; he placed freedom of thought at the heart of human aspiration.

He was also secretive, self-protective, cautious in the extreme. When the first husband of his future wife discovered their relationship, Seferis’ first response was to demand that his letters be removed from the house to protect his reputation. For much of his life, he kept separate diaries for his two careers, revising them later as necessary. Though he believed passionately in public service, he was at key moments strikingly unengaged; though political events lie behind many of his poems, their presence there is always veiled and indirect. He was, as he put it, the servant of two masters and had to find a way to live without betraying either. His diplomatic career demanded literary discretion; his aesthetic did not allow for explicit political commitments. The contentious marriage of liberalism and caution -- perhaps not unusual -- seems to have determined many of his decisions.

For anyone interested in Greek history or in the machinations of the British in the last century, Beaton’s behind-the-scenes account of Seferis’ diplomatic career makes gripping reading. Throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s, Seferis remained, despite pangs of conscience, an organization man. He worked in the press ministry of Metaxas’ authoritarian “New State,” which bore responsibility for censorship laws; after the German invasion, he made a special effort to leave Greece with the government, living out his country’s great crisis in Cairo, South Africa and Jerusalem (where he wrote some of his best poems about exile). At first sympathetic to the left-wing resistance, Seferis was outraged with the British for their high-handed meddling in Greek affairs and their insistence on the king’s return to Greece. But when violence broke out between left and right, he changed his position, in view of what he saw as the coming battle between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. As secretary to the British-supported postwar regent, Archbishop Damaskinos, he found himself working closely with the English officials he had hated, colluding by his silence with the campaign of violence waged by former collaborators and the security forces against the Greek left.

During the 1950s Cypriot uprising against British rule, Seferis rose to the post of Greece’s ambassador to Britain and was again caught between Greek popular feeling and British interests: he was condemned in Greece for being too conciliatory and in Britain as “rather a nuisance.” Beaton’s masterful dissection of this disastrous episode underlines Seferis’ foresight in opposing the settlement eventually negotiated between Greece and Turkey, which paved the way for the Greek colonels’ coup in Cyprus in 1974 and the Turkish occupation that followed.

Beaton’s account should also lay to rest the persistent libel, put about by the Greek right, that Seferis “sold out Cyprus to win the Nobel Prize.” His Nobel -- the first given to a Greek writer -- was awarded partly as a sign of sympathy between western Europe and the “civilized” Greece Seferis was taken to symbolize, “as the representative Hellenic poet, carrying on the classical heritage.” Many on the Greek left were not pleased that the honor had gone to such a pillar of the establishment. But the prize set Seferis up for the moment that redeemed him politically in the eyes of his compatriots: the decision, after two years’ hesitation, to speak out against the U.S.-supported dictatorship that took power in Greece in 1967. He was the only writer of his generation in his position to take such an action; because of it he became the focus for protests organized in Greece and abroad.

Seferis died in 1971; his funeral was the occasion for a passionate outburst of mourning and opposition. The streets of Athens overflowed with people following the coffin; spontaneously, they began to sing a verse from an early poem, set to a soaring tune by the banned communist composer Mikis Theodorakis: “Such heart we put into our lives, / such passion love and long / ing when we started: wrong! / And so we changed our lives.” For all his resistance to such uses of poetry, his work did, in the end, become a weapon wielded for freedom, in the public arena as well as in the reader’s mind.

Beaton’s biography is not only definitive but a labor of love, paying its subject the enormous tribute of careful, unprejudiced attention. The man who emerges is not always attractive but recognizably and fully human, caught between hope and pragmatism, wisdom and weakness. Readers contending with Seferis’ work will be better able to take on the formidable mind hovering reticently behind the printed page. For those who wish only to enjoy, the book should spark new interest in a great European poet of exile and longing, whose deep intelligence was matched by a phenomenal lyric gift.