The Pillars of Hercules

“That’s not very funny,” I said.

“No. And the writer complained that he was not being paid on time. His lawyer sent me a big long lawyer letter. I said to myself, ‘Hell with it,’ and took the line out. Writers.”

“That’s what I do for a living.”

“Know the story about the writer?” he said. “Writer makes it big in Hollywood and wants to impress his mother. So he invites her out to visit him. She takes the train and he goes to the station with flowers, but he doesn’t see her anywhere. Finally he goes to the police station to see whether they know anything, and he spots her there. ‘Ma, why didn’t you have me paged at the station?’ She says, ‘I forgot your name.’ ”

“That’s not funny either,” I said, but I was laughing.

“It’s odd, isn’t it, Brownie?” he said to his wife. “We’ve broken our rule. We’ve actually had dinner with another passenger.”

“I hope that wasn’t too painful for you,” Constance said to me.

“Tomorrow I’ll tell you how I made some lucky investments in the Arctic,” Jack said. “Frobisher Bay. Making a deal with some Eskimos while they ate a raw seal on the floor. I’m not joking.”

• • •

After a man has made a large amount of money he usually becomes a bad listener. Jack Greenwald was not a man in that mold, he was not in a hurry, and he was a tease, but with an air of mystery. “I happen to be something of an authority on Persian carpets,” he would say. Or it might be Kashmiri sapphires, or gold alloys, or oil embargoes. If I challenged him I was usually proven wrong.

These deals in the Canadian Arctic, this talk of “my carver,” “my goldsmith,” and the billiard room he was planning to build, with a blue felt on the billiard table, made him seem like the strange tycoon Harry Oakes, whom he somewhat resembled physically; but there was an impish side to him too, a love of wearing Mephisto sneakers with his dinner jacket, and a compulsion to buy hats, and wear them, and a tendency to interrupt a boring story with a joke.

“Hear the one about the eighty-year-old with the young wife?” Jack said, when the subject of Galaxídhion, our next port, was raised in the smoking room, where he had just set a Cuban cigar aflame. “His friend says, ‘Isn’t that bad for the heart?’ The old man says, ‘If she dies, she dies.’ ”

I had fled from Corfu after arriving on the boat from Albania. I had tried and failed to get to Ulysses’ home island of Ithaca. But there was only one ferry a week. The Seabourn passed south of it in the night and I felt I had returned to roughly where I had left off and was continuing my Mediterranean progress. I had felt a deep aversion to Corfu which even in the low season was a tourist island. The whole of Greece seemed to me a cut-price theme park of broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about Ancient Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket. That, and unlimited Turkophobia.

We had sailed south of the large island of Cephalonia, and passed Missolonghi, where Lord Byron had died, into the Gulf of Corinth, anchoring off the small Greek village of Galaxídhion, on a bay just below Delphi. Indeed, beneath the glittering slopes of Mount Parnassus.

Tenders took us ashore, where we were greeted by the guides.

“My name is Clea. The driver’s name is Panayotis. His name means ‘The Most Holy.’ He has been named after the Blessed Virgin.”

The driver smiled at us and puffed his cigarette and waved.

“Apollo came here,” Clea said.

Near this bauxite mine? Great red piles of earth containing bauxite, used to make aluminum, had been quarried from depths of Itea under Delphi to await transshipment to Russia, which has a monopoly on Greek bauxite. In return, Russia swaps natural gas with Greece. Such a simple arrangement: we give you red dirt, you give us gas. Apollo came here?

“He strangled the python to prove his strength as a god,” Clea went on, and without missing a beat, “The yacht Christina came here as well, after Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy, for their honeymoon cruise.”

Through an olive grove that covered a great green plain with thousands of olive trees, not looking at all well after a three-month drought, we climbed the cliff to Delphi, the center of the world. The navel itself, a little stone toadstool omphalos, is there on the slope for all to see.

“I must say several things to you about how to act,” Clea began.

There followed some nannyish instructions about showing decorum near the artifacts. This seemed very odd piety. It was also a recent fetish. After almost two thousand years of neglect, during which Greek temples and ruins had been pissed on and ransacked—the ones that had not been hauled away (indeed, rescued for posterity) by people like Lord Elgin had been used to make the walls of peasant huts—places like Delphi were discovered by intrepid Germans and Frenchmen and dug up.