Most tourists believe in love at first site. Hurrying and scurrying about, they rarely stop to court an insight. Three unhurried tourists currently grace the book counters with travel accounts that are wise, witty and uncommonly well-written. Laving their individual sensibilities in the "implacable light" of the Mediterranean littoral, these writers perceive and share the region's Antaeus-like grip on life for life's sake.
ATHENIAN ADVENTURE, by C. P. (for Clarence Pendleton) Lee (274 pp.; Knopf; $4), shuns the bearded ancient Greeks for the mustached moderns. A onetime professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Author Lee spent a year (1955-56) as a Fulbright professor at the University of Athens. Author Lee has brought home a lot of generalizations—largely accurate—about the Greek character, which form his book's most engaging part. Politeness demands that a Greek be asked three times before he accepts anything. However poor, he never begs, except for cigarettes. No one hawks pictures of the Parthenon or dirty postcards to tourists ("The Greek approach to sexual matters is so direct that perhaps they cannot imagine the possibility of vicarious lechery"). The tutelary Greek deity is Narcissus: a Greek cannot resist being photographed and will disgorge photos of himself on the slightest pretext.
"Every Greek expects to be cheated," and Author Lee was mildly embarrassed as his Greek friends checked the scales in grocery shops and counted and recounted their eggs. At home, the mistress of the house lays traps for her servants: "Pencil shavings in a corner, or under a table. Aha! The servant has not cleaned! The failure to clean, despite the Greek passion for surface cleanliness, is not the issue; it is the desire to know whether the servant has cleaned."
The Greek word for yes is neh, and in the main Author Lee is a great neh-sayer. He liked Hellenic warmth, individuality and liveliness (but not the oil-drenched cuisine). He was stirred by the keening, semi-Oriental laments known as Greek music and the sturdy acrobatics of the men's handkerchief dances in the tavernas.
He liked the Greek blend of reason and passion, the serene acceptance of humanity's lot coupled with a fierce resolution to better one's own. Out of genuine affection and twenty-twenty vision, Author Lee has fashioned the best of the few U.S. books about Greece, even including Henry Miller's dithyrambic tribute, The Colossus of Maroussi.