He was a strange mixture of vagueness and gentleness; and his great unassuming physical beauty made one sit up, as if in the presence of the Marashi. Nor was he foreign to the most endearing absurdities. One hopes that there will soon be a biography to enshrine the many anecdotes born of his flamboyant life and thought. One that Martine particularly enjoyed was concerned with death, for old Sikelianos believed so firmly in the absoluteness of poetic power that he went so far as to declare that a great poet could do anything, even bring a dead man to life by the power of his mind and vision. He was rather belaboring this theme while sitting in a little taverna, having dinner with Kazantzakis and, I think, Seferis, when the waiter, who had been listening to him with sardonic disgust stepped forward and informed him that someone had just died on the second floor, and if he wished to prove his point he had a subject right under his hand. Everyone smiled at this but Sikelianos appeared enchanted with the chance to show, not his own greatness, for he was a modest man, but the greatness which resides in poetry. Moreover, he believed in what he said, he could bring the dead man back to life as he had promised. They did not ask how he proposed to do such a thing. But anyway, the poet rose and asked to be taken to the room where the corpse lay. In a resigned mood the others continued their dinner; they were not entirely unconvinced that the old poet might, by some feat of magic, actually be as good as his word and make the dead man breathe again. But he was a long time gone. They listened but there was no sound of poetic declamation. He must have chosen some other method of raising the dead. Well, after quite a time a crestfallen Sikelianos made his appearance once more, deeply disappointed. Pouring himself a glass of wine he said: “Never have I seen such sheer obstinacy!” He was very sad about the failure of the Muse to come to his aid. This was the delightful man whom once Seferis brought to meet me — indeed it was to chide me for a bad translation of one of his great poems. I was terrified, but he rapidly put me at my ease by his gentleness. He had just come from the doctor where he had been informed that he was in danger of a thrombosis. A vein in the brain.… But far from being despondent he was wild with elation. “Think of it,” he said to Seferis, “a little gleaming swelling in there, shining like a ruby!” And he placed his long index finger upon the supposed place in his skull where the swollen vein was situated. He should have disappeared into Etna like Empedocles, or have been found half eaten by the Minotaur in Crete, or suffocated by the Pythean fumes at Delphi. But his death was the more tragic for being so banal. He suffered from a chronic sore throat and to soothe it drank quantities of a glycerin mixture the name of which differed by one letter from that of Lysol. He sent a boy out to the pharmacy for a bottle of his medicine and by a tragic mishearing the boy bought instead a bottle of the poisonous detergent. Without thinking the poet raised the bottle as he had always done with his throat mixture and half drained it before he realized the full horror of what he had done. By then it was too late.
I could not sleep, with all these thoughts fluttering about in my mind. I lay for a while on the balcony quietly breathing in the warm unmoving night air; it was strangely light, too, as if from somewhere offstage there was a bronze moon filtering its light through the vapors of the night. But before I realized it the dawn had suddenly started to come up, the distant sea lines to separate from the earth like yolk from white of the cosmic egg. The hills with their soft chalk tones rose slowly, tier upon tier, to where the city stood once more revealed with its two baleful skyscrapers. But an infinity of pink and fawn light softened every outline; even the huge boxlike structures looked well. I slipped down and coaxed the night porter to open the changing room door; the pool was delicious, not a tremor of coolness. I was swimming in something the temperature of mammals’ blood.
Yes, Sikelianos belonged to that old assured classical world where only great men wrote great poetry — there was an assumed connection between the power to write and orate great verse and the power to be morally and psychically superior to one’s fellow men. Greatness, though thrust upon one by the Muse, did not absolve one from being a great example to one’s fellows. An epic grandeur of style was believed to match an epic grandeur of insight and thought. They were another race these men — they were bards, whose sensibilities worked in every register, from uplift to outrage. The poet was not cursed, but blessed in his insight; and his themes must be equal to his mighty line. It is probably a fallacy to imagine that with the Symbolistes, with Baudelaire, there comes a break and the poet becomes a passive object of suffering, a sick man, a morally defective man like Rimbaud, like Leopardi. His work comes out of sickness rather than an over plus of health. Swinburne, Verlaine.… No, this is donnish thinking, for Sikelianos existed side by side with Cavafy, just as Mistral lived in the epoch of Apollinaire. But we should avoid these neat ruled lines between men and periods. The distances are much vaster than that and the poetic constellations move much more slowly across the sky. I betook myself to the coffee room where the majority of my fellow travelers were hard at work on breakfast, and where Deeds had emerged in some magical fashion with a brand new Times. This always made him vague, and over his coffee he was repeating “Sixty-three for five — I can’t believe it.” It seemed that a disaster had overtaken Yorkshire, and that Hampshire….
It was by far the hottest day yet, and brilliantly invigorating; there was no wind, the sea had settled into long calms like a succession of soft veils. Agrigento glimmered up there on the sky and Mario in some mysterious fashion had succeeded in giving the bus a wash and brush up for the floors were still moist from his mop.
The temples were bathed in an early morning calm and light, and there were no other tourists at the site, which gave us the pleasant sense of propriety, the consciousness that we could take them at our ease. Drink them in is the operative tourist phrase — and it wasn’t inapposite, for the atmosphere on this limestone escarpment with its sweeps of olive and almond, and its occasional flash of Judas was quite eminently drinkable. The air was so still one was conscious that one was breathing, as if in yoga. The stolid little temples — how to convey the sense of intimacy they conveyed except by little-ising them? They were in fact large and grand, but they felt intimate and life-size. Maybe the more ancient style of column, stubby and stolid, conveys this sense of childishness. It was not they but the site as a whole which conveyed a sense of awe; the ancients must have walked in a veritable forest of temples up here, over the sea. But one slight reservation was concerned with the type of light tufa used in the Sicilian temples; it was the only suitable material available to the architect, and of course all these columns were originally faced with a kind of marble dust composition to give the illusion of real marble. In consequence now when they are seen from close to the impression is rather of teeth which have lost their glittering dentine.