Table Of ContentGLENWAY 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
