The Age of Incompetence Chapter XXXII

What Zorba the Greek could teach Obama
February 20, 2010

Nikos Kazantzakis  Quinn aka Zorba

Zorba the Greek is one of those novels that seems by design the kind we ought to read every five years or so to remind ourselves about certain truths of life. It is also one of those books which was converted to film so successfully that the film cast a shadow over the book itself. That in large part is due to the fact the late Anthony Quinn captured the spirit of Zorba so successfully that legions of book lovers neglected the book.

On the other hand no doubt there are legions of books lovers who've read the book who otherwise would not have read it without having seen the film first. Nikos Kazantzakis, its author, never lived long enough to see its film version in 1964, although the movie script kicked around Hollywood long enough that every studio had a chance to buy it and rejected it. Stars such as Burt Lancaster and Burl Ives turned down the part of Zorba. Then the script fell into the hands of Anthony Quinn and he saw it's potential. United Artists agreed to finance a low budget black and white film for about $400,000. Quinn kicked in some of his own money for the right of splitting the profits three ways with the third share going to director Michael Cacoyannis.

They thought they could shoot it on Crete in five weeks. They were wrong and quickly it was behind schedule and over budget. That could have been end of the story, but Quinn got on the phone with Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox, and pleaded for help. As the legend has it Zanuck sent the money the next day with his son on a plane. And as they say, the rest is history.

For all of the film's glory, it still lacks the richness of the book's narrative about the relationship between two entirely different kinds of men. For those who haven't read the book or seen the film, the narrator is a young Englishman, Basil, with a background of a professor, a man of high education, who happens to inherit an old mine on Crete and travels there to inspect it. Along the way he is
befriended by Alexis Zorba, a much older man who makes his living with his hands and is not above hiring out to any revolutions which might need able mercenaries. His formal education is sparse, but his knowledge of the wider world is vast. They are the ultimate odd couple. One knows books, the other knows life.

It is impossible to know what moral or even practical lessons an author intends in his work of fiction once the writer can no longer speak for himself. Nevertheless critics and academic types have established a cottage industry by telling readers what great writers actually tried to tell us and I suppose I fall into the same trap here. What we can know with some certainty about a great mind such as Nikos Kazantzakis is from reading their body of work what they invested their passions in writing about, even if the moral or practical lessons are less clear. Nikos Kazantzakis seemed to have spent the whole of his life trying to resolve the conflict between a man's spiritual and physical life.

Kazantzakis' high powered mind devoured in order a Doctor of Law degree, then six months in a monk's cell, the study of Buddha, Marx and Lenin, the study of philosophy and Nietzsche under Henri Bergeron in Paris, plus travels to Spain, England, Russia, Egypt, Israel, and Italy. Thus in 1948 he felt at the tender age of 65 he was seasoned enough to sit down and write novels. He wrote eight novels in the last nine years of his life! One biographer claims that in 1952 he came within one vote of being awarded a Nobel Prize - but in the same book it was claimed the year was 1951. Then on one page it claimed he was born in 1883 and a few pages later claimed he was born in 1885. So I take with a grain of salt

what others claim Kazantzakis' literary intentions were.

Kazantzakis' subjects in his novels ranged from St. Francis of Assisi to Jesus to Alexander the Great to Zorba. But most western readers know only Zorba because only Zorba seems to speak to the trials of the world most of us knew in the 20th century. Zorba on the one hand is a brawler, a man happy in the casbah or the boudoir and there seemed little distinction. Yet he had a sense of chivalry that predated his own time. Most importantly he had the blood of an instinctive rebel against artificial authority that others around him lacked, such as his English companion with the education from the best schools England could buy. It is hard to imagine that a man with Kazantzakis' education didn't set Zorba opposite someone of his own pedigree, the intellectual with an academic nature to expose the hollowness of the modern world.

For Zorba is somehow rooted in an older, even primitive, world that predates the 20th century. Yet at the same time he seems more morally modern than his well-educated English employer and confident, Basil. The moral contrast becomes clear both in the film and book when a young and sensuous widow in the village sets it against itself and its ancient tribal rituals. She is desired by all, including a lovelorn school boy, who commits suicide when she rejects his advances. She inflames the village by selecting the Englishman to offer her charms. This enraged the grieving father to extract an eye for an eye revenge in a mob attack upon her with a knife. Zorba happens upon the scene and find no one in the village willing to defend her. But he attempts to with his bare hands and appears to have succeeded, until the vengeful father cuts her throat in a sneak attack.

Kazantzakis reminds us how tribal mankind remains and how the innocent remain endangered by the jealousy and blood lust of the mob. He seems to be saying to us through Zorba, the educated too often are unable to protect us from the mob and we need the rare man with courage and instinctive nobility.

Kazantzakis crisscrossed Europe and

studied in its great universities, became infatuated with Buddha then Lenin and communism, then his native Christianity seeking some kind of answer to how 20th century man could find the path to resolve the conflicts between his physical and spiritual needs. He was called a modern Odysseus. He spent years translating such men as Bergson, Dawin, Nietzsche, and Plato. Yet today if the average reader knows him at all it is because of his creation of an uneducated man, Zorba.

For Zorba seems to know instinctively what another great 20th century intellect, Albert Camus, wrote: "There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man. Such wrenches are dreadful. But for a proud heart there can be no compromise."

Zorba at one point in the novel emptied his glass of rum and looked at the younger man, "What d'you lack? You're young, you have money, health, you're a good fellow, you lack nothing. Nothing by thunder! Except just one thing! - And when that's missing, boss, well...." I sense this will be the epitaph for the Obama experiment; he lacked one thing.

That one missing thing Zorba is referring to is the courage to act as a man. Obama seemed, like Basil, to have everything. But it turned out he is a prisoner of intellectual introspections. Thus the same mob which brought us Bush and then our economic and moral calamity has been given a new lease on life by Obama's dithering. If Obama has ever read Zorba the Greek it is clear he has not learned from it or learned the wrong lesson.

What the mob did to the helpless widow is what another mob has inflicted on millions of Americans today lacking health insurance and jobs and given them instead futile wars abroad they are unwilling to pay for. The times called for a leader with Zorba's DNA and instead we got a leader cut from the same cloth as Basil, who lacked nothing, except one thing.