Apartment in Athens

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

Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction

APARTMENT IN ATHENS
Dedication
Chapters
1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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11
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12
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13
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14
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15
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16
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17
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18

Copyright and More Information

F
ROM 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:

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:

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”: