The Athens editor, critic and bibliographer who ran the journal that carried Greek modernism, and the man whose talk Henry Miller turned into The Colossus of Maroussi.
George Katsimbalis was an Athens editor, critic and bibliographer who published very little under his own name and did a great deal to get other people published under theirs. He ran the journal that carried Greek writing into modernism in the 1930s, and he compiled the bibliographies that Greek literary scholarship still works from. Outside Greece he is known for a book he did not write: The Colossus of Maroussi, which the American writer Henry Miller assembled largely out of listening to him talk during the months Miller spent in Greece in 1939. The colossus of the title is Katsimbalis. Maroussi is Amaroussion, the town outside Athens where he lived.
He was born in Athens in 1899, the son of the scholar Konstantinos Katsimbalis, and grew up among his father's books and his father's friends. The closest of them was Kostis Palamas, then the dominant figure in Greek poetry, and Palamas would occupy Katsimbalis as a subject for the rest of his life. He went to Paris and took courses at the university's law faculty without graduating, then came back to Athens and into its literary and artistic circles instead.
He had served on the Balkan front in the First World War and came out of it with a wounded arm. The detail reaches English through Miller, who heard about the war from Katsimbalis himself and from a doctor on Corfu who had been in the trenches with him.
The Athens journal Ta Nea Grammata, or New Letters, began in 1935, and Katsimbalis directed it until 1944. It was the platform of the writers Greek criticism calls the Generation of the '30s, the group that brought European modernism into Greek writing, and it is where George Seferis published his literary criticism. Katsimbalis also printed translations of European writers who had not yet reached Greek readers at all.
After the war he directed a second periodical, the Anglo-Hellenic Review, from 1945 to 1952. It was published in Athens, and it sat where the Greek and the British literary communities in the city overlapped.
His own published work is almost entirely about other people's. He took up his father's study of Palamas and carried it on, edited an anthology of contemporary Greek poetry, and compiled bibliographies of writers Greek scholarship had never properly catalogued. The subjects:
He also worked in the other direction, putting Palamas into English. A version of The King's Flute came out under the imprint of the Kostis Palamas Foundation in 1982, four years after his death.
Miller sailed for Greece in 1939 at the invitation of Lawrence Durrell, and heard the name Katsimbalis on Corfu before he met the man. He was introduced to him in Athens, followed him around the country for most of the rest of the trip, and went home with a book. What Katsimbalis mainly did in it was talk: about the Balkan front, about a casino he had once run at Loutraki, about his liver and his taxes, and about his private habit of redrawing the street plans of cities he had never visited. Miller admits in the closing pages that he has enlarged the man well past his real proportions, and then says he has never met anyone more human.
The book closes on a letter from Durrell describing a drunken night on the steps of the Acropolis, when Katsimbalis walked to the edge, threw his head back and crowed like a cockerel until the roosters of the whole Attic plain answered him.
Everything the book records about him, scene by scene, read against the text.
He and Seferis wrote to each other from 1924 until 1970. The Athens publisher Ikaros brought the exchange out in two volumes in 2009, under the title Seferis used to open his letters: Αγαπητέ μου Γιώργο, My dear Giorgos. Katsimbalis died in Athens on 25 July 1978.
There is no English biography of him, and the Greek reference entries are short. They agree that he was born in Athens in 1899 and died there, and none of them records the day he was born; the date of his death comes from library authority files rather than from any of the literary sources. A man who spent his working life establishing other writers' dates is himself thinly dated.
Born in Athens, son of the scholar Konstantinos Katsimbalis.
Ta Nea Grammata begins in Athens under his direction, the journal of the Generation of the '30s.
Henry Miller arrives in Greece and follows him around the country for most of the trip.
Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi is published in San Francisco, naming him in its title.
Directs the Anglo-Hellenic Review in Athens.
Dies in Athens on 25 July.
How George appears in its pages: The Greek talker of the title. A real man from Amaroussion, a town outside Athens, whose monologues Henry Miller followed around Greece in 1939. Miller says he wrote the book for him.
Read the character guide
Met
The central friendship of both men's working lives: Seferis published his criticism in the journal Katsimbalis directed, and the two wrote to each other from 1924 until 1970. Ikaros published the correspondence in Athens in 2009.
Met
Durrell was living in Greece before Miller arrived and was in the party for much of the 1939 trip. It is his letter, printed whole, that Miller uses to close the book.
Met · 1939
They met one evening in Athens as Katsimbalis was heading home to Amaroussion. Miller ranked the meeting with two others in his life, Blaise Cendrars and Lawrence Durrell, and spent most of the rest of his stay in Greece listening to him.
A Greek editor, critic and bibliographer (1899–1978) who directed the Athens journal Ta Nea Grammata from 1935 to 1944 and the Anglo-Hellenic Review from 1945 to 1952, and who compiled the bibliographies of modern Greek writers that scholarship still uses. Henry Miller made him the subject of The Colossus of Maroussi.
Because Henry Miller called him that. Maroussi is the town of Amaroussion outside Athens, where Katsimbalis lived, and Miller meant the scale of the man's talk rather than his stature.
Yes. The Colossus of Maroussi is a travel memoir, not a novel, and nobody in it is invented. Katsimbalis was a working figure in Greek letters for four decades before and after Miller's visit, and his correspondence with the poet George Seferis was published in Athens in 2009.
Very little under his own name, and almost all of it about other writers: bibliographies of Alexandros Papadiamantis, Kostas Krystallis, Angelos Sikelianos and C. P. Cavafy, studies of Kostis Palamas continuing his father's work, an anthology of contemporary Greek poetry, and English translations of Palamas.
An Athens literary journal, founded in 1935 and directed by Katsimbalis until 1944. It was the main platform of the writers known in Greece as the Generation of the '30s, the group that brought modernism into Greek literature, and George Seferis published his criticism in it.
No. The English-language record consists of Miller's book, the letters of the writers around him, and library authority files. The fuller entries are in Greek, in the Archive of Greek Authors and in the standard literary dictionaries, and they are brief.
Met
The central friendship of both men's working lives: Seferis published his criticism in the journal Katsimbalis directed, and the two wrote to each other from 1924 until 1970. Ikaros published the correspondence in Athens in 2009.
Met
Durrell was living in Greece before Miller arrived and was in the party for much of the 1939 trip. It is his letter, printed whole, that Miller uses to close the book.
Met · 1939
They met one evening in Athens as Katsimbalis was heading home to Amaroussion. Miller ranked the meeting with two others in his life, Blaise Cendrars and Lawrence Durrell, and spent most of the rest of his stay in Greece listening to him.
Depicted in
The book is named after him and built out of his talk. He appears throughout under his own name, and Miller says he wrote it for him.