CHAPTER 3

A PHILHELLENE IN ATHENS

In 1931, a twenty-eight-year-old William Plomer described himself as an Englishman, “not South African”, who had been “a trader in Zululand”, “an apprentice farmer in the (rugged) mountains on the Basutoland border”, “unemployed in Japan”, “a tourist in Russia”, “an alleged Λόρδος [Lord] in Greece”, and someone who had never “pretended to be a poet”, not even to himself.1 Caught between the desire to belong and the restrictions imposed by what he called “insular complacency”, Plomer was constantly finding himself an outsider, a tourist, and an alienated visitor, using his writing to criticize the British Empire’s sovereignty in South Africa in Turbott Wolfe (1925), the corruption of Africans in “Ula Masondo” (1927), or the Japanese “nationalistic paranoia”.2 Early in 1930, Plomer set off with his friend Anthony Butts for a European tour and, after stops in Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Milan, Verona and Venice, they ended up in Athens, where they spent half of their five months in Greece before moving to Corfu. “I can’t tell you how much I like this country”, Plomer wrote to Stephen Spender in July 1930, “the sun always shines. There are more men than women, & whereas England is a land of male women, Greece is a land of female men.”3 In the “fierce bristly, brigand-like aspect” of a peasant he once noticed in a country bus, he saw a

1 The description is from a letter sent to John Lehmann when the latter was preparing for the Hogarth Press the publicity for Plomer’s novel about Japan, Sado (1931). See John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery: Autobiography I, London: Longmans, Green, 1955, 190. 2 “I admit that I am an admirer of the Japanese, for I can respect and love individuals. But I disbelieve in their tendency to nationalistic paranoia and their particular politico-religious superstitions” (see William Plomer, Paper Houses, London: Hogarth Press, 1929, xiii-xiv). 3 Quoted in Peter F Alexander, William Plomer: A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 168. 56 Conversing Identities

“mixture of fierceness and gentleness” that seemed “essentially Greek, and more manly than the assumed ‘toughness’ so common (in every sense of the word) among the English and the Americans”.4 His “lotus-eating” memories from Greece included euphoric images of sensual pleasure combined with an antidote to the precociousness of someone who has missed the “steadying, ripening effect of a fixed environment, a single tradition, and a homogeneous society”. He wrote: “to be alone with that one other person very late, when there was velvet silence and a moon, and soft dust among the rocks, and a consciousness of very old surfaces of marble, and of layers of lost secrets stratified in the air of Attica for two or three thousand years, was to be as if under the unimaginably agreeable influence of a drug.”5 In Greece, haunted by a sense of “not belonging anywhere”, as his biographer Peter F. Alexander notes, and feeling insecure about his sexual orientation, he could see the capital’s “howling cliché” from his window and spend time with a blond sailor behind closed shutters.6 “And so to Athens”, Plomer wrote in his autobiography, “but there are other things in Athens besides the Parthenon”: “See now, the Acropolis is still unsunned. / Forestall dawn with yet one more kiss” (“Three Pinks”).7 Born in Pietersburg, South Africa, in 1903, Plomer spent most of his childhood and adolescence between South Africa and England, publishing his first novel Turbott Wolfe in 1925. He left South Africa for Japan in 1926 and returned to England in 1929, where he felt “displaced”.8 “One of the effects of having left England when very

4 William Plomer, The Autobiography of William Plomer, London: Jonathan Cape, 1975, 278-79. 5 Ibid., 279-80. 6 Alexander, William Plomer, 171. In his Autobiography, 275, Plomer noted that a writer in The Times Literary Supplement had lately made some “sharp comments on the canting ecstasies of travel writers about Greece; even the Parthenon, he said, had become a ‘howling cliché.’ But there are other things in Athens besides the Parthenon.” 7 Plomer, The Autobiography, 25. “Three Pinks” is one of the poems from Part IV of Plomer’s poetry collection The Fivefold Screen, London: Hogarth Press, 1932, 51, which included a series of poems inspired by Greece. 8 During 1926, Plomer wrote and edited, together with the poet Roy Campbell and the Afrikaner journalist Laurens van der Post, the bilingual South African literary and political magazine Voorslag. From 1926 until 1929 he taught English in Tokyo, and from 1937 he was a manuscript reader for Jonathan Cape, which also published his