BiographyRoderick Beaton's new biography, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel, is a comprehensive and ground-breaking study, scholarly yet accessible, well-written, and enlivened by juicy anecdotes.
This is the ideal Christmas present for someone who has enjoyed Foster's Yeats.
"George Seferis" was a deliberately transparent pen-name. George Seferiadis, the man behind the name, was a Greek diplomat from his 20s to his 60s, finally serving as ambassador in London.
Seferis joined the foreign ministry from Paris, leaving his lover behind. The Smyrna of his childhood had been destroyed. His parents had separated. He had strong misgivings about the time swallowed up by his official duties in the cryptography department. Soon he wrote in his diary: "The most important thing isn't to change our life, dreaming of another more interesting one . . . it's in this life that belongs to us . . . that we've got to learn to see the miracle."
The "miracle" mentioned in George's diary is like the "angel" of the opening line in Mythistorema ("Novel"), published in 1935. Seferis's vision is of a land waiting for liberation:
We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs,
only a few cisterns . . .
And our marriages, the crowns of cool flowers, the traded rings,
inexplicable, enigmas to our soul . . .
As Mythistorema was published, George Seferiadis fell in love with Maria Zannou, a married woman with two young daughters. Political and personal factors contributed to his assignment, late in 1936, to the backwater of a Greek consulate in Albania. A year later George was on leave in Athens, parleying with Maria Zannou's husband. Maria ("Maro") married George, sustained him in his diplomatic and artistic work, overlooked his weaknesses, and lived to be 100.
George emerges as a dedicated and honest official, if not an idealist, against a backdrop of dictatorship, German occupation, and civil war.
"People are taxed in order to pay me", he writes to a friend, "I've worked harder at my public service than at least 90 per cent of my colleagues."
Why did the famous poet compete so hard in his career? George discussed early retirement with his hero, T. S. Eliot, who also had a busy job. One important factor was that George had no source of income outside the service. Beyond this, his political diaries, posthumously published, suggest that both he and Maro enjoyed being in the thick of things.
In the ministry George was seen by some as ruminative and aloof, a man "who could take two hours to down a cup of coffee". Fortunately his sister furthered his career by a number of devices, including (the hint is clear) sleeping with a "charismatic archbishop".
George flourished professionally and achieved public recognition as a writer through his involvement with Cyprus.
The nightingales don't let you sleep in Platres . . .
This refrain is from 'Helen', which draws on Euripides's idea that Helen sat out the Trojan War in Cyprus. Roderick Beaton's description of how Seferiadis, as ambassador in London, fell out with Averoff, his foreign minister, over independence for Cyprus, is one of the best things in the book and illuminates the subsequent history of the island.
In his poetry Seferis brought to life the whole Hellenic tradition - Makriyannis, folksong, Cretan poets, the New Testament, the ancient classics. More than Cavafy, his older contemporary, Seferis employed the non-literary language of the people. It was only a matter of time before a Greek poet would be awarded the Nobel Prize. Cavafy, Palamas, Sikelianos, Seferis, and Elytis were all worthy of consideration.
In 1963 Seferis was chosen first (Elytis eventually had his turn). Of all of them Seferis was possibly the greatest and certainly the most "national" writer. At times he gave shape, like Yeats, to the self- understanding of a modern European country.
Roderick Beaton is a worthy successor to Edmund Keeley and other leading interpreters of Greece to the English-speaking world. His Waiting for the Angel will be read by anyone who wants to encounter the poet Seferis:
The poem is everywhere. Your voicesometimes travels beside it,
like a dolphin keeping company for a while
with a golden sloop in the moonlight . . .
The book is also an intriguing study in how an artist responds to troubled times. Seferis had a sense of powerlessness in the face of recurring evil. Again like Yeats, he identified as a writer with ordinary people, the laos from whose way of life a poem can spring: "old sailors leaning on their nets" correspond to Yeats's Connemara fisherman.
Behind a mask of seriousness, there is another George, who learns to write limericks (from Lawrence Durrell) and describes a nightmare in which he leaps out of bed screaming because the Parthenon has been auctioned to an American toothpaste manufacturer, "its columns hammered smooth and shiny to represent giant tubes of toothpaste".
George Seferiadis was reluctant to speak out when the colonels took power. But speak out he did. Bouquets of flowers in the names of political prisoners turned up at a little church in the Plaka for his funeral. His coffin was halted by crowds. They sang his poem, 'Renunciation', to the forbidden music of Theodorakis. It hardly mattered, one feels, whether the people were moved by poetry, music, the goal of freedom, or by love of Greece.
Philip McDonagh is Ambassador to India. His collection of poems, Carraroe in Saxony ( Dedalus Press)is reviewd in W13
George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel: A Biography
By Roderick Beaton
Yale University Press, 512 pp. £25