Writing the Greek Revolution: Harry Mark Petrakis’s The Hour of the Bell

the siege of Tripolitza (33), although in this case he does not use Howe’s description of her as “old and ugly, and fat and greedy” (79). Petrakis’s novels about the Greek Revolution are the most significant efforts by an American author, in this case a Greek American author, to place the narrative of the struggle in front of an American public. This paper uses the journal that Petrakis kept while writing The Hour of the Bell to examine his thoughts and motives in the composition of the book, with close attention to Petrakis’s reading of the American philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe’s contemporary history of the war. The ways Petrakis uses Howe, and the ways he does not, offer insight into Petrakis’s own goals and conflicts in writing his version of the Greek Revolution for an American public.

During that salubrious evening we discussed a series of novels I had contemplated writing. I spoke of a book I had been interested in for years, a novel on the Greek War of Independence. As with most people who were not historians or of Greek descent, Sandy [Richardson] knew little about the epic struggle that took place between 1821 and 1830 and that freed Greece from 400 years of bondage to the Turks. He remembered vaguely the involvement of Lord Byron in the Greek cause. (Journal 2) 3 In the journal, as part of the rationale for the project, Petrakis states: "To my knowledge there has never been a major novel in English written on that conflict" (Journal 10). 3 He then adds the following comment: But by the time of my meeting with Sandy Richardson, I had lived long enough to understand that a darkness as well as a divinity existed in all human beings irrespective of nationality or race. I suspected that any effort to write a novel about the conflict would produce revelations for me that might scar the gilded, untarnished legends of childhood. Perhaps that apprehension had been among the reasons for the delay. No one longs to lose his myths. (Journal 3) 4 The author seems to have set himself two somewhat conflicting narrative goals. On the one hand, he wanted to offer the public a book on the Greek Revolution because, as he himself said, "few people besides the Greeks know anything about that struggle" (Journal 10). In an interview, he repeated that his goal was to combat the fact that, in the United States, "most people are notoriously uninformed about this War of Independence" ("Song" 115). Greeks in Greece, of course, were informed, so he realized that he had to write the book in English in order to increase awareness ("Song" 116). On the other hand, however, he wanted to engage with, and challenge, the myths that he had grown up with about the Greek Revolution and its heroes. Peter Bien, using a distinction made by George Orwell, called Petrakis's refusal "to label all Greeks 'good' and all Turks 'bad'" brave, and called the sequel to The Hour of the Bell, The Shepherd of Shadows, "patriotic but not nationalistic" (xi). Patriotism here is the celebration of the Greek spirit and the culture and places which give it life; nationalism is the desire for power over others. When Greek American readers objected that he had been too hard on the Greeks and too easy on the Turks, he responded that "it signaled to me that I had achieved my intention of remaining fair. There is no humanity in war" (Journal 218). 5 Petrakis's perception that there is no humanity in war is also found in the journal in relation to the war in Vietnam, a conflict that figured prominently in his previous novel In the Land of Morning. It should not be surprising that Vietnam seeps into the historical novel that Petrakis wrote as he watched contemporary events unfold on television. On December 23, 1972, he writes that "the war overshadows everything these days," adding that "the war today makes me understand something of the pain of the war" (Journal 20, 21). In the entry for February 13, 1973, Petrakis notes: Today the P.O.W.'s started home from Hanoi. The TV cameras invaded the homes of their families, showing the faces of wives, parents, children when the faces of their loved ones flashed across the screen…. Even though I resent the intrusion-I feel like a voyeur-perhaps the years when we shared nothing but the grief and anguish make it mandatory now that we share the joy of those few who gain some happiness from that dreadful war. (Journal 37) 6 And, on April 30, 1975, as he nears completion of The Hour of the Bell, he records: Saigon surrendered today. The war in Vietnam is over after almost thirty-five years, a senseless calamity that our own ignorance and arrogance prolonged. Now, on the eve of the 200 th anniversary of our own revolution, we must accept the responsibility of having tried to thwart the aspirations of another people. After 150 billion dollars expended and 55,000 thousand Americans lives lost, their revolution has triumphed. And tomorrow I return to my own bloody revolution. (198) 7 In the next months, Petrakis would write his account of the siege of Tripolitza by the Greeks in 1822 with "the massacre and its aftermath" (Journal 212). A further complication for Petrakis, then, is looking at the Greek War of Independence through Vietnam, and the question of who now represents the Ottoman empire. Some of the myths of his youth that Petrakis must lose in writing this story are American myths. He started a book about the Greek Revolution just after the 150 th anniversary of that struggle, but, while he anticipated the 200 th anniversary of the American revolution, he distinguished between "our own revolution" and "my own bloody revolution." It could be argued that the act of writing The Hour of the Bell was a personal rebellion that complicates the narrative.

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The importance of the Vietnam War in the composition of The Hour of the Bell is enhanced by comparison to two other contemporary events connected to Greece that occurred during the writing of the novel. On August 4, 1974, he remarks that he "was caught by the tragic coincidence that he is writing about Greek-Turkish battles in a time when Greek and Turkish blood is being spilled again on Cyprus." He then notes that the "Junta fell" and for a while there was jubilation, which "turned to frustration" as the "agony of Cyprus continued" (Journal 123,124). Yet, these events in the Greek world do not have the same resonance in the journal as Vietnam. When exactly Petrakis decided to end the book with the Greek capture of Tripolitza and the subsequent massacre of the Turks is not clear, but it seems relevant that he asserts that this will be the book's conclusion on May 12, 1975, two weeks after the fall of Saigon.

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A successful historical novel entails a lot of research and, for the most part, must get the history right. In the journal, Petrakis comments that "dealing with the American Civil War provides a writer with a mass of material, diaries, memoirs. There is so much less available material on the Greek War for Independence. Still that was the war I chose and I must fill the canvas with the drama of events and the heroism of individuals" (128). While it may be true that there is more primary material for the American Civil War, there is hardly the dearth of material for the Greek War of Independence that Petrakis appears to suggest. No artist, of course, wants to start work on a canvas that has most of its elements already filled in, but his comment does raise questions about what sources he did use in the composition of his novel. The journal does not provide a great deal of guidance on that point, a point that will be returned to later. 10 In the journal, Petrakis says that "If I had chosen a smaller canvas, perhaps telling the story of a single family or concentrating on one phase of the revolution, I might be finished by now. But I am sure that I would not feel nearly as elated as I am with the canvas I have assembled" (86). In fact, while The Hour of the Bell concerns itself only with the first years of the War of Independence, from 1820 to 1822, the journal makes clear that Petrakis had completed the book even if, like The Iliad, it does not reach the end of the conflict. The entry for August 9, 1974, at 10:55 pm, declares: "I am finished!" (216). In a later passage in the journal, however, he comments that the character of the scribe Xanthos "will be an important guide if I ever write a sequel to this book" (214). And in an interview after the publication of the novel, he states that he had "deliberately left the stories unfinished in The Hour of the Bell because I plan to return to them" ("Song" 114). does not extend the story to the end of the war. Petrakis left, deliberately or not, the stories of the characters unfinished. For Petrakis, finishing a novel about the Greek Revolution does not mean completing the history of the conflict in either The Hour of the Bell or The Shepherds of Shadows. The reader, of course, knows that the Greek Revolution was successful, and, just to be sure of that, Petrakis provides a "Calendar of the Greek War of Independence" at the start of both novels that extends to 1833 and the arrival of King Otto. 11 The Hour of the Bell shows events in Greece through a variety of characters, a village priest, a Klephtic leader and his band, a ship captain, a monk modeled on Papaflessas, a clan on Crete, and the Greek leader Kolokotronis. Petrakis refers to his compositional technique as a patchwork quilt, "arranging the patches in patterns without sewing them into place, so they might be moved around to make a better design" (Journal 18, see also 36). This seems a good analogy, as the connections between the patches are stitched together by a chronological timeframe, such as "Spring 1821." While some of the main characters encounter one another over the course of the two novels, there is no attempt by Petrakis to tie the patches together with strong threads.
12 But, when the patches are laid out beside each other in the completed text, the eye does make out a cohesive whole that gives us a sense of the war if not a complete account of it. And with this structure, one can, as Petrakis later did in The Shepherds of Shadows, add more patches to the quilt to augment the picture but still not "finish" the story of the Revolution. There is no central character in the patchwork quilt, but one character stands out for comment. The scribe Xanthos, from the island of Zakynthos, joins the cause on the side of Kolokotronis and provides an eyewitness account of the revolution as it happens, just as Petrakis himself was able to watch the war in Vietnam on television. It is clear in the journal that Petrakis comes to identify with Xanthos and he is something of an alter ego. Xanthos, an alter ego for the ancient Greek writers Xenophon and Thucydides, is also an eyewitness of the events they recount. At one point in the journal, Petrakis notes: Most of my days are now spent reading and making notes, writing trial pages in an effort to develop Xanthos, assimilating the writing of Xenophon, Plutarch, and Thucydides. I have not yet unraveled the scribe's character or his relationship to other characters…. There must be in the hundred odd-pages of two chapters dealing with Xanthos' development of his vision. (154) 13 Near the end of the journal, Petrakis states that Xanthos "has become in so many ways the character that I feel closest to" (214). Xanthos learns exactly the same lesson that Petrakis himself had learned: The actual experience of war changes him. Through witnessing and sharing suffering and death, he develops a greater humanity. At the same time he comes to understand the capricious, unpredictable elements and cross-purposes of the revolution, reflected in the captains and chieftains…. His tragic vision will lead him to understand that in any war there is cruelty and inhumanity on both sides.  (Zakynthos), so that, like the three foreigners, he had some distance from the conflict and could be an observer as well as a participant. But Xanthos, like Petrakis, whose family came from Crete, was by birth and upbringing Greek.
15 Of the three philhellenic historians mentioned in the journal, only one was an American who had written about the Greek Revolution for an American audience, which was the task that Petrakis had set for himself. Samuel Gridley Howe, the great American philhellene, who served as a physician for the Greek forces and as a leader in the American relief effort in Greece starting in 1827, was also the first director of an American school for the blind and a prominent abolitionist. Howe is the hero of the James Greenleaf Whittier poem titled simply "The Hero." 4 16 Howe's volume, An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution, was published in 1828, so his narrative, like the fiction of Petrakis, did not get to the end of the struggle and the creation of the Greek state. The two philhellenic British historians, Gordon and Finlay, continued their narratives to that point, and in Finlay's case, beyond. It might seem odd that Howe calls his book a "historical sketch" as the text runs to 450 pages. In his preface, Howe explains his use of the term "Sketch:" The Author had hoped leisurely to digest the mass of historical information concerning the revolution, which he had collected during his three year's service to Greece, to combine with it statistical accounts, remarks on soil, climate, productions, and geographical and commercial advantages of the country; with observations on the religion, language, manners and customs, virtues and vices, of the modern Greeks in such a way as to form a volume that should contain both interesting, and useful knowledge (v).
17 But Howe thought it was more important that he dedicate his efforts to relief work: "Necessity therefore obliges him to throw his book before the American public without claiming for it the name of history; it is what it professes to be, merely a Sketch. The information may be depended upon, but it is not all that is wanting" (v).
18 It is worth noting that two of the most prominent attempts, indeed arguably the most prominent, to acquaint the American public with the Greek War of Independence, written in different centuries and about a hundred and fifty years apart, are selfdescribed as a "sketch" and a "patchwork quilt." The narrative of the Greek revolution has had difficulty being viewed as a complete picture by those whose stated aims were to make it known to the American public.
19 Petrakis had a genuine American model for his Xanthos. Why does he avoid mention of Howe except for one brief entry in the journal? One reason seems to be that Petrakis wants his American readers to witness the struggles of the Greeks and their accomplishments independent of foreign advocates, and this may be one reason The Hour of the Bell ends before the arrival of either Byron or Howe. Byron gets significant attention in the Shepherds of Shadows, but Howe just gets a single mention on page 253 as one of the "generous souls from around the world coming to assist us." There may be He is about fifty years of age: he has bulky, clumsy figure; to which is united by a brawny bull neck, an immense shaggy head; with a face strongly, but coarsely marked; indicating cunning, presumption, and dogged resolution; which are in fact attributes of his character. Enjoying a high reputation for courage, he seemed to think any demonstration of it unnecessary; and there is hardly an instance of his exposing his person during the war. As profoundly ignorant of politics, as of letters, he seemed disregardful of his reputation, and his actions have been uniformly directed by his ruling passion, avarice; and, as subservient to this, a desire of military supremacy in the Morea. (Hour 49) 21 In Petrakis, the first impression of Kolokotronis by the wife of Petrobey Mavromichalis "was of a huge, clumsy-bodied man, an immense shaggy head united to the brawny neck of a bull." The passage concludes, "she imagined him coarse and profane, a predator desiring to engrave his deeds on history with a sword dipped in blood" (Hour 80-81). There is a distinction between what Petrakis's character sees, which is exactly what Howe sees, and how she imagines and assesses his importance. Petrakis makes Kolokotronis the main hero of The Hour of the Bell; the only one who always puts Greece ahead of personal gain: Of all the chiefs, Xanthos felt the most potential for greatness lay with Kolokotronis. Perhaps not as sophisticated in political administration as the Prince Ipsilanti, not as instinctive a fighter as Niketaras, he had a rudimentary force and wisdom. In addition to his ability to cleave decisively to the heart of an argument, he also understood the dimensions of the struggle beyond the scope of their own theater of action (Hour 183-84). 22 Howe, like Byron, leaned toward Alexandros Mavrokordatos as the person to lead the Greek in their struggle despite his flaws: There is but one opinion in Greece about the talents of Mavrocordatos; all will allow them to be very great, but this is not the case with respect to his virtues. His friends ascribe every action to his disinterested patriotism, but his enemies hesitate not to pronounce them all to have for their end party or private interests, and say that he would sooner subject his country to the Turks than have his political opponents get the credit of saving her. But here, as is often the case, the truth lies between the two extremes: let his enemies avow that he loves his country and has labored hard to benefit her, and his friends confess that that he is ambitious and has always had a considerable regard for his own political interest, and a nearer approach to his character will be had. (70) 23 Howe provides the following description of the man: Alexander Mavrocordatos is about 36 years of age, rather below middling height, but perfectly well made: his fine olive complexion looks darker than it is, from the jetty blackness of his hair, which hangs in ringlets about his face, and from his large mustachios and sparkling black eyes. His manners are perfectly easy and gentlemanlike; and though the first impression would be, from his extreme politeness and continual smiles, that he was a good-natured silly fop, yet one soon sees from the keen inquisitive glances which involuntarily escape him, that he is concealing under an almost childish lightness of manner, a close and accurate study of his visitor. (70) man in his late thirties, with a fine olive complexion and jet black hair hanging in ringlets about his eyes, above large mustachios and bright, black eyes. His extreme politeness and continual smile convinced many of the captains that he was a silly, shallow, fop. But Xanthos felt an undeniable quality of strength in the man, a keen mind and a sharp wit. He thought this might be the leader to unify the bickering of the captains and the primates, giving a more coherent direction to the conduct of the war. (311) 25 This somewhat favorable opinion will change in The Shepherds of Shadows, when Kolokotronis and Mavrocordatos become political opponents, since for Petrakis the heroic, unselfish, leader of the Greeks remains Kolokotronis. 26 Howe had said that "he may appear to have dwelt much upon the characters of the principal Greeks; but he flatters himself, that the authenticity may apologize for this; as he has not ventured to speak of any, whom he has not known personally" (v). Howe also noted that, although he had offered just a sketch "the information may be depended upon, although it is not all that is wanting" (v). Petrakis takes Howe as a trusted eyewitness source when he describes a person's features-not to plagiarize but to get his description as close as possible to what an actual eyewitness saw. But Petrakis does not accept Howe's analysis of the character of the Greek leaders, and their role in the struggle. For Howe, Kolokotronis is an impediment to any useful strategy to oppose the Turks, while for Petrakis he is the one Greek leader who has such a vision. In essence, the scribe that Petrakis creates serves to correct the errors of judgment of the actual eyewitness source that is closely used for description.
27 It should be clear that The Hour of the Bell is entangled in a narrative web with An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution that will take time to unravel. 5 As noted above, Petrakis said that he had delayed writing a book about the War of Independence because in the process he might lose the myths of his youth, and no one likes to lose their myths. At another point where he references taking part in the March 25 th ceremonies as a child, he speaks of those "myth-laden giants who dwell in ornate frames on the walls of the Historical Museum. I remember their names from the holiday programs of my childhood, Kolokotronis, Botzaris, Diakos, Kanaris…. We recited the epic poems without understanding what we were saying. But that poetry must have left a resonance inside me then, for I have the task to save them now by returning them to life" (Journal 10). While some of the gilded, untarnished legends of Petrakis's childhood were scarred during work on The Hour of the Bell, at least one survived the process of composition, and that was Kolokotronis. He will return years later as the Greek hero of the sequel, The Shepherds of Shadows. The scribe Xanthos attaches himself to Kolokotronis because he sees him as the man who will lead Greece to freedom, as the man who puts Greece before himself. So, one has to ask, if Petrakis leans on Howe for other material, why does he reject the American's view of Kolokotronis? Why does not a little bit of tarnish get on the image of Kolokotronis?
28 The answer would seem to be that, while Howe was useful for descriptive material, Petrakis's guide to the Greeks and their spirit was Kazantzakis. The final scene in The Hour of the Bell, when Xanthos hears the song of a thrush and realizes that "the thrush was Greece" (356), is taken directly from a tale in Kazantzakis (Journal 38). As he worries that he might not understand the fighters that he is writing about, he observes: "Perhaps my concern was also the concern of Kazantzakis who felt that Alexis Zorbas was a 'true man' and that he, Kazantzakis, was simply a 'pen pusher.' But the image of In his foreword to The Shepherds of Shadows, Peter Bien posed a question that is equally relevant for The Hour of the Bell: "What is Petrakis saying about Greece through this patriotic rather than nationalistic reenactment of its struggle for freedom?" (xiii). It is a question that needs to be addressed in these bicentennial years, not only because The Hour of the Bell has been neglected and Petrakis deserves more attention as an author, but also because the novel has a place in the discussion of the transatlantic link between Greece and America contained in the phrase Greek American. I hope to have shown that this text has layers that need more exploration and that the complications in writing about the Revolution that exist in The Hour of the Bell are relevant to how we discuss the ways to convey that struggle to an American public during this bicentennial year.