Apartment in Athens Read online

  GLENWAY WESCOTT (1901–1987) grew up in Wisconsin, but moved to France with his companion Monroe Wheeler in 1925. Wescott’s early fiction, notably the stories in Goodbye, Wisconsin and the novel The Grandmothers (in which Alwyn Tower, the narrator of The Pilgrim Hawk, makes his first appearance), were set in his native Midwest. Later work included essays on political, literary, and spiritual subjects, as well as the novels The Pilgrim Hawk (published by NYRB Classics) and Apartment in Athens. Wescott’s journals, recording his many literary and artistic friendships and offering an intimate view of his life as a gay man, were published posthumously under the title Continual Lessons.

  DAVID LEAVITT’s Collected Stories was published last year. His novel The Body of Jonah Boyd is due out in May 2004. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida.

  APARTMENT IN ATHENS

  GLENWAY WESCOTT

  Introduction by

  DAVID LEAVITT

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  APARTMENT IN ATHENS

  Dedication

  Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  FROM A COMMERCIAL STANDPOINT, APARTMENT IN ATHENS, Glenway Wescott’s last novel, was also his most successful. Published by Harper & Brothers in 1945 on the low-quality paper that the war effort demanded, it was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection (together with Richard Wright’s Black Boy), sold more than half a million copies during its first year in print, and won the approbation of, among others, Eudora Welty, who wrote in The New York Times that its “moderateness, lack of exaggeration, serenity are as admirable as the Greek ideal they reflect and honor.” Edmund Wilson (in The New Yorker) also took note of the novel, while in the Chicago Sun Book Week the remarkably named A. C. Spectorsky forecast that twenty years hence, it would be recognized “as the finest book whose roots were in World War II.”

  Spectorsky was wrong, of course—critics usually are when they try to predict the future—and almost sixty years hence, Apartment in Athens, far from being lionized, is hardly remembered at all. Instead it is an earlier novel, The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), with which most readers associate Wescott’s name, thanks in no small part to Susan Sontag’s championing of it in an essay published in The New Yorker. The two novels could not be more different. With its easy-going, commodious first-person narration, The Pilgrim Hawk is a masterpiece of compression and psychological acuity, reminiscent in tone of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and set amidst a circle of wealthy American expatriates much like the one in which Wescott himself traveled. Apartment in Athens, by contrast, is written in a sparse, unfussy third person (“All this happened to a Greek family named Helianos,” the first chapter begins), and takes place in a poor neighborhood of Athens during the German occupation. It contains not a single American or British character. The dialogue, though written in colloquial English, is presumably spoken in a mixture of German, Greek, and French. Especially when compared to The Pilgrim Hawk, with its reflective amplitude and luxurious observational detail, Apartment in Athens comes off as brisk and no-nonsense, as if Wescott were engaging in the literary equivalent of rationing: obeying the sumptuary laws of war much as his publisher had by printing the book on such cheap paper.

  As Jerry Rosco explains in his biography of the author, Wescott was living in New York and working on another World War II novel, set in France and tentatively titled A Fortune in Jewels, when in 1943 he met Alex Melas, a Greek resistance hero. Melas inspired him to abandon the French novel and undertake a book based upon “a little anecdote of a Greek family which [Melas] mentioned in passing. . .” At first the new novel—tentatively titled The Change of Heart—was to be narrated by Alwyn Tower, Wescott’s alter ego and the hero of both The Pilgrim Hawk and The Grandmothers (1927); but after experimenting with an opening chapter in which Tower gathers a group of friends and allies in his apartment to hear the resistance hero’s tales of war, he gave up on that idea, opting for a third-person voice that would brook neither sentimentality nor melodrama. Framing devices distance readers from the events taking place in a novel, and this distancing was exactly what Wescott did not want. Instead his intention was to plunge his readers directly into the story, as swimmers into a cold, harsh element. Nor would he make any concessions to squeamishness.

  The novel took shape quickly, the only trouble spot being the title, which went from The Change of Heart to The Children of Wrath, with detours along the way at The Dead of Night, The Blind Alley, The Death Watch, and The Land of Misgiving. Wescott was on the verge of publishing the novel as The Children of Wrath when his lover, Monroe Wheeler, hit upon Apartment in Athens rather at the last minute. That title was the one that stuck, perhaps because it so perfectly captures the novel’s claustrophobia. Wescott may be our greatest poet of confinement. The Pilgrim Hawk, after all, never once leaves the grounds of Alexandra Henry’s restored house in Chancellet (and plays out over the course of a single day), while the action of Apartment in Athens plays out entirely within the “four pleasant but small rooms in the center of town” to which the Helianos family, late of a villa in suburban Psyhiko, must remove themselves after Nikolas Helianos' publishing business goes under.

  Helianos himself is a gentle, slightly muddle-headed intellectual whose medium is “thoughtfulness, talkativeness, philosophy and history in dialectic form.” Mrs. Helianos, weak-willed and bourgeois, suffers from angina. Their eldest son, Cimon, has been killed in the battle of Mount Olympos, while their two younger children—twelve-year-old Alex, who dreams of killing a German, and ten-year-old Leda, who rarely speaks, and whom her parents think of as “backward“—puzzle and disappoint them. Meanwhile Mrs. Helianos' brother may have gone over to the German side, while off in the hills various Helianos cousins lurk, including Petros Helianos, the leader of a band of renowned saboteurs and snipers.

  From the beginning, Wescott makes it clear that the apartment is a powder keg, and when the Helianoses are ordered by the German military to billet Captain Ernst Robert Kalter of the quartermaster’s corps, the tension only intensifies. Recalcitrant and bigoted (“All you Greeks have venereal diseases,” he remarks), Kalter takes over the family’s sitting room, master bedroom, and bathroom, forcing Mr. and Mrs. Helianos to sleep on a cot in the kitchen. Not only must they house Kalter, they must wash his clothes, cook for him, and serve him. Helianos worries that his cousins will think him a coward for submitting to the Germans, while his wife fears lest Kalter, on a whim, should have them shot. Meanwhile the children—rebellious Alex and mysterious Leda—are left to go hungry while Kalter feeds the leftovers from his copious suppers to an elderly bull terrier.

  Although Wescott is unsparing in his depiction of war-ravaged and famine-stricken Athens (“There is one advantage in our children’s not having enough to eat and not growing as they should,” Mrs. Helianos tells her husband. “They can go on wearing the same old garments longer than normal people“), his focus here is less on the larger political drama of occupation and resistance than on the petty particulars of the Helianoses' private enslavement. Thus even as “the city around them, and Greece as a whole,” go “from bad to worse,” the Helianoses remain “so absorbed in their domestic situation, afraid and angry, tired and hungry, that others' lives and the general plight and the long process of the war” lose all reality for them. More pressing than the tales that wander up from the street—tales of mass executions, torture, a child sucking blood from its own hand for sustenance—is ordinary misery:
/>   Daily and hourly their own slight circumstances were nightmarish too, and, alas, of a more intense interest: hurt feelings and fatigue and aching entrails, the body sore and the soul sore, and the round and round of domestic difficulty; the tired mind moving from one little trouble to the next with a little jerk like the minute-hand of a clock.

  When Kalter beats their son on a pretense, they hold their tongues. They iron his uniform even as their own clothes fall apart, give up hot water to him even as lice infest Leda’s hair. He sleeps in one of their comfortable beds, while they lie on the cot that Mrs. Helianos will later liken to the bed of Procrustes, so uncomfortable that she fears lest they should “wake up one morning and find themselves misshapen forever.”

  Kalter himself, with his “lardy” smell and oddly impersonal temper, soon begins to exert a bizarre fascination over the family. Leda in particular grows to adore him, while her parents find themselves feeling increasingly grateful to him simply because he isn’t as bad as he might be:

  a difficult, mysterious, but, after all, prosaic figure. Whereas the others who were worse seemed to fancy themselves in some barbaric poetic drama or terrible opera from morning to night, year in and year out.

  An avatar of Prussian efficiency and ruthlessness, not to mention idealism, Kalter is more than once likened to sculpture—“not Greek sculpture, of course; Gothic sculpture. . .” Then one day he goes off on a two-week vacation in Germany, and when he returns, he has changed not only his rank (he is now a Major) but his personality. The Helianoses are baffled. Suddenly he treats them with kindness. He invites Helianos to sit and talk with him in the evenings, speaks politely to Mrs. Helianos, ceases to beat Alex. Kalter’s transformation from petty tyrant to benevolent dictator is the fulcrum on which the novel turns, especially as it dawns on the family that both its roots and its ramifications are far darker than they previously guessed.

  Apartment in Athens is a swiftly paced novel, and, given its limited arena, one surprisingly rich in incident and drama. Despite all the terrible things that happen to the Helianos family, though, Wescott refuses to treat their story as a tragedy. “It is not easy to tell this kind of domestic ordeal and do it justice, without either exaggerating it or making a mockery of it,” he writes early on. “It has to be understated or else it will be lifted by one’s words above that triviality, ignominy, which is one of its worst aspects.” In its daily detail, the Helianoses' experience is “only harrowing, not tragic.” Still, they are Greeks, and from her kitchen window, Mrs. Helianos can see the Parthenon, “nothing but rock, rock, with no nerves, and no flesh on its bones, no soft vulnerable bosom, and no veins or arteries.” Leaning out, she is compelled by this vision of ancient Athens to assume “an attitude which in physical sensation corresponded to her thought, her spirit”:

  It was an attitude prompted perhaps by unconscious memory of ancient sculpture that she had seen all her life (although without caring for it especially), or perhaps merely exemplifying a racial habit of body from which that style of sculpture derived in the first place—a classical attitude: her fatigued thickened torso drawn up straight from her heels and from her pelvis; her head settled back on her fat but still straight neck, her soiled, spoiled hands lifted to her loose bosom, through which went just then a little of the bad thrill of her palpitations, anginal pain like the stitches of an infinitely strong and invisible seamstress.

  Mrs. Helianos' subsequent evocation of the Fates, “the frightful trio,” ties her inexorably to Greek myth and Greek drama, even as it lays the groundwork for her evolution into one of literature’s most unlikely heroines, possessed of a resilience, a resourcefulness, and a courage that surprise even her.

  The novel may have surprised Wescott as well. Describing his own oeuvre in 1942, he characterized himself as an autobiographical writer, noting:

  For a number of years it seemed to me that my ability had vanished into thin air; nothing that I could do was satisfactory.. . . Among other disabilities very grave for a novelist, I ceased to be able to take a real interest in anything fictitious. On mankind’s account I believe in nothing but the truth, the naked truth; no other remedy or religion or dialectic. But can a novelist tell it? I myself have no exact knowledge of much of anything except sexual love and family relationships, and practically all in the first person singular. Is that worth telling? I now believe that it must be, if only to exercise the reader’s sense of exactitude.

  Considered in retrospect, this cool self-appraisal is as startling for its lack of foresight as for its honesty: clearly Wescott did not see Apartment in Athens coming. Yet the strengths to which he admits here—the feel for family life (The Grandmothers), not to mention the rare talent for delineating the complexities of intimacy (“A Visit to Priapus”)—are displayed with as much virtuosity in this novel as in any of his earlier fictions. Among other things, Apartment in Athens is a portrait in miniature (more powerful for its restraint, more disturbing for its reticence) of two particular cultures and one particular war, yet if the novel succeeds on these terms, it is to a great extent because it keeps its attention so rigorously fixed on the private ruination of one not very happy family and one not terribly successful marriage. The “nightmare of Greece in general” gives the Helianoses'

  particular lives a background, historical and, as you might say, anthropological and psychological. Only it seemed a distant background, out of focus and in false perspective.

  Meanwhile in the foreground humans suffer and love until suffering becomes quotidian, and love of questionable worth. No resolution is offered, and hope is withheld so judiciously that one cannot help but leave the novel saddened, chastened, and a little afraid.

  Also in awe—both of Mrs. Helianos and her creator. Though not as fine a novel as The Pilgrim Hawk, Apartment in Athens is both a more severe and a more compassionate one. With its portrayal of a world remote from Wescott’s own (and from the first person singular), it provides eloquent testimony not only to the endurance of his vision, but to its breadth.

  —DAVID LEAVITT

  APARTMENT IN ATHENS

  TO MY BROTHER’S WIFE

  1.

  ALL THIS HAPPENED TO A GREEK FAMILY NAMED Helianos.

  Nikolas Helianos was part-owner and editor of a reputable publishing house in Athens; a middle-aged man with a wife a little older than himself, and a ten-year-old daughter and a twelve-year-old son. They had lost another son of nineteen or twenty, Cimon, in the battle of Mount Olympos in April, 1941. A brother of Mrs. Helianos' had also made his home with them; but when the invaders reached Athens he disappeared or fled, they had no notion where.

  The invasion of course was ruinous for publishers —the firm of Helianos had not a chance, as it was small and conservative, specializing in schoolbooks and scholarly treatises—and although Mrs. Helianos had inherited a little income, their standard of living had to be reduced to bare necessity. With the two young men gone, their dwelling in the suburb of Psyhiko was larger than they needed; so they moved into an apartment vacated by Helianos' chief printer, four pleasant but small rooms in the center of town.

  Naturally they were not a happy family, but they had good hearts, and did their best to console each other in their bereavement and impoverishment. Helianos was not quite what one thinks of as a typical Athenian, but rather like some Frenchman of the superior middle class, such as a college professor or a civil servant; soft-spoken, with a mind perhaps over-cultivated, discursive and discerning, seeing both sides of a thing. He was a small man, with sloping shoulders, with no paunch but no waistline either. He had a cheerful look, in spite of something heavy and drooping about his face. He had fine friendly eyes. Even in the lean years, 1941, 1942, 1943, he still kept his stoutness, formed by years of good nourishment and good life.

  Mrs. Helianos, who had been beautiful in her girlhood, with the wide eyes and pouting lips and strong rotund throat of the women of antiquity, suffered from heart-trouble, to which was added a certain hypochondria; and she had gro
wn indolent and stout. A shadowy freckle had strewn itself throughout her ivory skin. Her mouth drew down tight, and her eyes protruded and had pouches under them. She was an orphan, adopted and very indulgently educated by two uncles who were wealthy merchants. Helianos, taking up where they had left off, had gone on spoiling her. It made everything more troubling and difficult for her when the bad time began. The first year of the disaster of Greece seemed to bring out only the weaknesses of her character.

  Their twelve-year-old, Alex, was a bright but strange little boy. He had great over-excited eyes, a nose straight from his forehead, turned-up lips, and a precocious fixed hard expression; but if you looked at him or spoke to him, his lips parted, his eyes danced. He had adored his elder brother, and when the war began, only hoped that it would go on a long time, until he grew old enough to enlist in the army. He had taken the news of his brother’s death on Mount Olympos very quietly, but after that, when Greece no longer had a proper army, he began to talk only of growing strong enough to kill at least one German, himself, without waiting to grow up. Every few days he asked his parents whether in their estimation he had grown taller or gained weight; and many of his games were tests of his strength, experiments, for vengeance’s sake.

  In fact he was not strong. His father was afraid that he had inherited the mediocre health which ran in Mrs. Helianos' family. Although they had somewhat more to eat than the average household in Athens, he seemed to be shrinking, not growing; and between his sharp hipbones he was developing the little pot-belly of famine.

  His ten-year-old sister Leda had the physical stamina that he lacked, but the Helianos' worried about her too, because her mind was backward. She had never been a clever child, though they had thought nothing of it until after the fall of Greece. Then in the terrible year her infant character took on a strange aspect, as if she drew all the confusion and intimidation in with her breath, absorbed it through the pores of her skin in an unwholesome damp or an icy chill.