Apartment in Athens

in the claustrophobic, despair-tinged encounter of gentle greek wisdom with nazi ideology, i was gripped by the immediacy of the events. the two tone cover of the modern book recaptures its initial urgent printing post-war on cheap paper. the war is still on between ideology and civilisation: a war between ideology - the sense that one's own particular partial truth can be made to apply everywhere (at whatever cost), and civilisation - taking one's knowing place in the flow of time and peoples. I'd love to see this novel become play. the ink is still wet.

This novel was published in 1945 and tells the harrowing tale of the Helianos family in Athens during the German occupation of Greece. Nikolas Helianos is a middle-aged part-owner and editor of a publishing house. He and his wife have a ten-year-old daughter Leda and a twelve-year-old son Alex. Their twenty-year-old son Cimon died in a battle at Mount Olympus in 1941. Mrs Helianos has reached the point of desperation of war when nothing else matters except the survival of her loved ones. Nikolas Helianos, a sedentary and philosophical man, does not participate in the underground or any sort of organised resistance to the occupiers of Greece. His relatives let him know that they consider him a coward and he is therefore particularly despondent when his family have to take a German officer, Ernst Robert Kalter, to live in their apartment. Nikolas sees that this is bound to bring disgrace as things stand between him and his kinsmen and he knows that it is the weak who are timid and conciliatory. Now in the actual physical presence of Kalter he is less than ever able to correct his character although he knows how deeply his wife hates the invaders of Greece since they took her first and best child's life. But little does Nikolas know how this forced confinement with the enemy is to turn out in fact and how the heroic Helianos' are later to speak of him, if not a true hero, at least a martyr. The serenity, moderateness and lack of sensation of the plot are worthy of a true Greek tragedy. The protagonists are conducting a psychological war against the enemy, building interior defences behind the mask of obedience and submission like walls to protect their lives.

Interpersonal and inner conflicts during wartime are so abundant that a reader might think the easiest way for a novelist to find material is to pick a war. But what turns a war novel into something timeless depends on the artistry of the writer; with Apartment in Athens we get World War II in Wescott's way. The genius of this novel is that only two shots are fired--one "off scene." In other words, Wescott does not use violence to move the plot forward; the brutality of war takes place all in the dialogue, that is, in the sensitive emotions and nuanced moods which transfer between people during conversation. On the surface, a Greek couple, Mr. and Mrs. Helianos, become domestic slaves in their own small apartment which they are forced to share with Captain Ernst Kalter, a Nazi. The conversations among them offer the finest details of human interaction under pressure. Numerous times while reading Apartment in Athens, I paused to marvel at Wescott's craft: his ability to ratchet up the tension between Kalter and the Helianoses and their young children, Alex and Leda. Wescott's novel is a "classic realist" text in that the moral choice is very clear: His readership will not side with people who have clearly chosen cruelty and domination, the Nazis. But no one in the novel is a stereotype. Kalter has a human side which leaves the reader breathless; in fact, the climax of the plot might very well be that the German officer could have saved himself if he had recognized his own humanity. Through Kalter's betrayal of Nikolas Helianos, Wescott shows us that the tragedy of war is best illustrated in the failure of individual personal relationships, a failure characterized by Kalter's blindness to the opportunity to exercise compassion for himself and others. Regarding the techniques a writer uses to raise the tension, Wescott made the Helianoses of above average intelligence and thus excruciatingly aware of what they face; Mr. and Mrs. Helianos have distinctly individual interior monologues which reveal their thought processes in realistic psychological flow. To craft Ernst Kalter, Wescott used the limited consciousness of the unreliable narrator in order to show the reader the full extent of Kalter's lack of insight into his own moral choices. To move the plot forward, and to blend the thoughts of characters with descriptive passages, Wescott only lightly employed the omniscient narrator's explanatory power.

What makes this small masterpiece trouble your sleep is the brilliant way in which Glenway Westcott portrayed marriage, intimacy, and the essential decency of the Helianos couple...each of which would prove their downfall. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos' profound misjudgement of their brutal guest originates in their belief in a certain threshhold of humanity below which real people do not fall. But people do, and the portrayal of the Nazi officer billeted in their house is chilling, to say the least. What keeps the reader up at night is the realization that he would have acted as the Helianos' did...and been just as wrong as they were. Ah, if this had been merely a war story, tragically told, it would be nothing--there are thousands. But Wescott's prose is a marvel. The Helianos marriage emerges as a series of compromises made first in resentment, later out of laziness, and lastly, with love. Their (and their children's) descent into semi-starvation is so subtly, so relentlessly portrayed. And Mrs. Helianos is the most complete female character to emerge from American literature during those war years--she's marvelously mediocre and whiney at the beginning of this nightmare, and a miracle when she emerges. We see her on that kitchen floor, the linoleum flooded with heat and light, as she pieces together her husband's smuggled toilet paper letter. When she rises with the little pieces in her hand, we are seeing a new creature, a truly Athenian goddess, descending from Olympus to avenge us all. Wescott was a genius.

His 1945 APARTMENT IN ATHENS may lack the dazzling structurations of his recently rediscovered and greatly celebrated novella THE PILGRIM HAWK, but it is told with the same crystalline prose and is perhaps a deeper study of character. Mr. and Mrs. Helianos are a couple living in Nazi-occupied Athens forced to share their apartment with a melancholy German officer; vaguely mistreated by him, they learn to bear up under their hardships for a good year. Then he leaves for a vacation in Germany and returns behaving suddenly much more gently and kindly towards them, a change of heart that signals disaster for the lives of all of them. The story, inspired by an anecdote told by a Greek freedom fighter to Wescott, is perhaps not as dense as you'd like on first reading (there are none of the sort of Jamesian twists we might expect), but the difficult ethical positions of the Helianoses become clearer the more you think about the work later. This short novel is a very sophisticated study of the problems and evils inherent in human sympathy during a time of war.