Hobby-O

Book Review

In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination
by David Roessel
385pp.  Oxford 2002.  0 19 514386 9

Nothing is more baffling than people’s capacity to stare fixedly at a black surface and to swear that it is white.  It was John Cam Hobhouse who, after only a limited acquaintance with the Greeks, agreed with Thucydides that what they excelled at, in modern as in ancient times, was robbery and piracy.  Yet, as David Roessel’s excellent book makes clear, albeit at some cost to our patience, Greece ancient and modern could only be, for many nineteenth-century writers, a golden world, with a people “to whom I owe every excellent, every generous, every just sentiment” (quoted p.15).  The words are put by Landor into the mouth of Trelawny, brother-in-law and accomplice to the murderous warlord Odysseus Androutses.  Shelley’s famous statement, from the Preface to Hellas, “We are all Greeks now”, was only a hyperbolical extension of the way many felt on the subject; and if he, too, wished to imply by “Greeks”, “dishonest rogues” (probably he didn’t, I admit) then the Upholsterers of Bath would only, in his case, agree.

From Felicia Hemans (who never went there) to James Elroy Flecker (who did) Greece was a place “Where Freedom triumphed or where Wisdom taught” (Hemans, quoted p.48) “… from [whose] lofty lanterns sweeping the dim hills and the nocturnal sea / Pour[s] out the fire of Hellas, the everlasting fire!” (Flecker, quoted p.176).  Romantic Philhellenism was no vision, for it enabled nothing to be seen, and virtually no decent poetry to be written.  Rather it provided its adherents with a set of “ideological blinders” (a phrase occurring three times on p.21) from behind which the real Greece – that of both Thucydides and Mavrocordatos – could be blanked out.

The question implicit in Roessel’s title, however, is one which he does not properly address: “Is Byron responsible for this nonsense?  Are these people writing in his shadow?  Can an interpretation of Greece as a perfectly proportioned paradise be derived from Childe Harold, The Curse of Minerva, The Giaour, The Corsair, The Siege of Corinth, or from Don Juan?”  Roessel offers little by way of detailed reading, and what he does offer is sometimes confused.  Twice he quotes Jerome McGann to the effect that in Childe Harold (“Byron’s first narrative poem” – p.15) “the political regeneration of Greece is the objective correlative of a renewal of the personal integrity of the individual” (pp.15, 56).  Yet on p.287 he concedes that “Byron did not suggest that contact with the modern Greeks aids in a moral rejuvenation”.  Either he or McGann must be wrong.

On pp.51-2 he does a good job contextualising Byron’s most famous philhellenic text – The Isles of Greece from Don Juan III.  He recognises that, coming from the mouth of the Southey-surrogate who sings it, it is at the very least ambiguously staged.  What he doesn’t acknowledge is what a half-hearted revolutionary anthem it would be, whoever delivered it:

This is not a cry for revolt.  The song is a drinking-song, and there’s no reason why, having dashed down one cup, the man needn’t fill up another.  That’s what you do with wine-cups.  But readers only remembered the famous stanzas, about Marathon and the sea and the Persian’s grave.

It seems to me that in Childe Harold II Byron deploys several contradictory themes, that he slips from one to another with the most abrupt and confusing transitions, and that while some lend themselves to a philhellenic interpretation, others do not.

One the one hand, the poem glorifies extreme cruelty and violence, in no way resembling the deeds of Marathon or Thermopylae:

I think Ali Pacha’s men spared few lovelies when Previsa fell.  The gross romanticisation of the klephts, the Greek mountain bandits – well-documented by Roessel – is given ample foundation by Byron in such passages.  Criminals who in any civilised country would not be tolerated were turned by the ideological blinders into something rich, strange and Robin-Hoodish.  Yes, of course the Greeks were predatory – but with what style!

An objection might be that the passage refers not to Greeks but to Albanians: but how many nineteenth-century readers read the poem carefully enough to differentiate?  In any case, only eight lines later, Byron makes a massive gear-change, and writes, as though it emerged naturally from the Albanian war-song:

The second line here sums up the problem, for a people may be at once great and fallen, but a people who are no more were never immortal.  Byron has it both ways.  The ancient and the modern Greeks co-exist, in the poem, in an eternal and unredeemable present – along with, in the two lines following, the Hebrews in their Babylonian and / or Egyptian captivity.  The still, spine-tingling evocation of Leonidas and the Spartans, awaiting death in the pass at Thermopylae – two of the poem’s most powerful lines, which would convert anyone to philhellenism – seem only tenuously linked to the rhetoric in the rest of the stanza (especially to the ludicrous “whilome” which precedes them); “that gallant spirit” is pompous and patronising when juxtaposed with “bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait”.  Either Byron doesn’t know when he’s created a good effect, or the demands of the Spenserian stanza make it impossible for him to sustain a tone.

His own prose notes bring it all down to earth:

But it was not from Byron’s deflationary prose notes that romantic philhellenism thought it took its inspiration.

Roessel seems to have read all the books ever written about Greece (though see below), and he has unearthed one or two which sound fascinating.  My guilt at still not having read either Wright’s Horæ Ionicæ or Hope’s Anastasius is redoubled; and I certainly intend to look at Edmund About’s 1857 satirical novel Le Roi des Montagnes (King of the Mountains) which features “a bloodthirsty Greek brigand who banks at Barclay’s” (p.121).

More variety, at least, comes into the book after Roessel’s laconic account, on pp.208-9, of the horrible destruction of all the non-Turkish parts of Smyrna by Ataturk’s troops in 1922, and the exodus of a million and a half Greeks from what would from now on be exclusively Turkish territory.  A Canadian journalist described it as “the end of their second siege of Troy” (p.209), and after such an Armageddon it was impossible to go on writing of Greece in the nineteenth-century manner.  Greece is portrayed in wholly new ways by John Dos Passos, William Plomer, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, John Fowles and other twentieth-century writers (including – for Roessel is a mite over-eclectic in his range of texts – the chiming pair, Dennis Wheatley on p.328 and Fiona Pitt-Keithley on p.333: neither of these will be found in the index.  Pitt-Keithley “reported that the Greeks were the least priapic men she found” in the Mediterranean; obviously she never bonked a klepht).

The absence of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – too late for inclusion, perhaps – is a huge gap.

Another book eludes Roessel, which was available to him, and, if he was prepared to glance at Dennis Wheatley, it might have been given a mention.  It seems to me to be quite different from most of the rest:

By his own account, the young Gerald Durrell (for the book is My Family and Other Animals – Penguin, pp.39-40) had no hang-ups about Thermopylae, klephts, Byron, Pan, or the Quai at Smyrna, to interfere with his discovery of Greeks and of Greece.  His innocent, instinctive determination to enter their world on their terms – not his – is a standing rebuke to many of the writers whom David Roessel so skilfully catalogues; and the Greece he discovers is quite different from that of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Some character called “Hobhouse, George Cam” appears in the index.  His pages seem to be out.  Another called “Cochrane, Peter” appears in the bibliography.