ABSTRACT

The effort to unearth and celebrate the achievements of contemporary Greek culture, buried under the suffocating prestige of its classical forebears, was a gargantuan task. It became the lifelong labour of G. K. Katsimbalis and was central to the rediscovery of Greece by English and American writers during and after the Second World War. This chapter focuses on Lawrence Durrell and Rex Warner as two representative examples of Katsimbalis' work as an 'Anglo-Greek Maecenas'. It describes some sense of what Katsimbalis was able to accomplish outside the bounds of any institutional role – as friend and literary gadfly for so many English writers of the period. There Katsimbalis founded the crucial organ of his renaissance, the journal Ta Nea Grammata, and set out on his cultural mission. As Durrell set out 'to make a new myth of Greece', he could not do so without the patron divinities of his own landscape, including Henry Miller, Eliot, Katsimbalis and George Seferis.