Stratis Myrivilis A distinguished elderly Greek gentleman has been spending
his first visit to London in the Royal Free Hospital. He is Stratis Myrivilis, who at seventy may be described as the senior Greek novelist (and that country's candidate for the Nobel Prize when the committee gets round to Greece), and he has been here for an extended check-up. Myrivilis was born in the Isle of Lesbos in 1892 and he worked as a journalist there and in Athens. He also built up a certain reputation as a lyric poet. But it was not until he was thirty-six that popular fame came to him with the publication of a novel, Life in the Tomb, the first in a trilogy which includes The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes and The Mermaid Madonna. For all his renown in his native land, the rest of the world was slow to catch up, and his name was vir- tually unknown to the Greekless until 1959, when The Mermaid Madonna suddenly appeared in sixteen languages. This novel is set in his native island during and after the Turkish expulsion of the Greeks from the Anatolian coast, and in the chorus of praise that rose from all over Europe and America could be heard voices say- ing that as Verga was to Sicily, so is Myrivilis to Lesbos. Certainly its pages have an ampli- tude, an elegiac richness and a compassion which had long before gone out of fashion in Western European writing, and it is to the reviewers' credit that they did not dismiss the work as antediluvian. (It is only British and American novelkts who are not permitted antique virtues.) 1 am glad to hear that Hutchinson are busy arranging the translation of The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes. And I am also delighted, on behalf of his many admirers here, to send Mr. Myrivilis our respects.
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