Overwhelmed

Monday, May 2nd., Hotel Petit Palais, Athens.

Arthur Rubinstein

We left the yacht at 9.30 about, and after landing drove to this hotel. Not an attractive city; but a very good and very small hotel. The first person I saw was Arthur Rubenstein, in a bath-gown, just out of his bath. He joined us at lunch and talked all the time. Kommer called him a 'traveller in music', and enlarged on this definition very well indeed. 

We went to the National Museum. The pre-Phidias things were the best, especially some of the finds from Mycenae. I made up a theory out of this which I shall use. We then drove to the Acropolis. Dust. Great heat. The Acropolis and the Parthenon fully sustained their reputation. The spectacle was really overwhelming. Also the Anterior Room in the Parthenon Museum was equally overwhelming. The blue sky, and the seascape, and the sunshine were simply wonderful. What sensations! Extreme exhaustion. But after tea, despite this, Kommer and Dougherty and I went out shopping, but didn't get all the photos we wanted. They don't exist in Athens, being out of stock. We were recommended to get them in Florence!

Doughery did though manage to buy some pornographic postcards. One of the consequences I find in travelling with a group of men is that attention soon turns to women and sex. We were discussing the difference between pornography and eroticism. Between tea and dinner, as a sort of contribution to the debate I wrote the first chapters of a sensual, pornographic story. Only for fun. It is now destroyed. I made the point that it is really impossible, in my view, to write adequately about the sex act; simple description is not enough (just pornography), but any attempt to 'elaborate' simply becomes clumsy and embarrassing. Eroticism on the other hand is well within the scope of literature. I told them that my favourite example of eroticism came, surprisingly, from Thomas Hardy. His short story "On the Western Circuit". In that there is a scene where a young man is flirting with a ladies maid at a fair. The maid's mistress appears and they are thrown together in a press of people. The mistress finds her hand being grasped (in mistake for the maid's) and the young man slips two fingers inside her glove and strokes her palm. That, to me, is erotic!