Fate of a Hero

FREEDOM OR DEATH (433 pp.)--Nikos Kazantzakis--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

"Captain Michales gnashed his teeth." With this flat opening sentence, Greek Novelist Nikos Kazantzakis introduces his third memorable novel to reach U.S. readers in as many years. A pagan demiurge named Zorba goat-footed his Dionysian way through Zorba the Greek. In The Greek Passion, the peasant Manolios reenacted the Crucifixion as it might have happened in a 1920 Anatolian village. Captain Michales of Freedom or Death is a citizen soldier-patriot burning to set late 19th century Crete free from Turkish rule. These three heroes have nothing in common but the Kazantzakis touch--a gift for catching a man in mid-passion and life at full flood.

Set amid the massacres of 1889, Freedom or Death is a historical novel, but scarcely of the sort U.S. readers usually encounter. The first law of popular American historicals is that history is made in bed. Kazantzakis prefers to write the kind of history that is made among God, man and the devil.

Prometheus Bound. Proud of race and place, Captain Michales is a Prometheus bound who prays to God but worships his native Crete. His unsmiling face is a sword set against the Turk. He can spread two fingers in a wine glass and shatter it; his words are blunt, plain and few. He goes on broody, Homeric, eight-day binges, but "wine could never-bring him down." It is clear, as his horse's hoofs strike sparks from the streets, that he is riding for a more classic fall--the fall caused by hubris, the overweening pride of the Greek tragic hero.

In his headlong pride, Captain Michales, singlehanded, routs a band of Turkish agas (military overlords) from their favorite coffeehouse. For this scandal, a handsome, virile Turk named Nuri Bey takes revenge by killing Captain Michales' brother. But the brother, with the last dying thrust of his dagger, emasculates Nuri Bey. The unmanning of the Turk would scarcely disturb Captain Michales, except that Nuri Bey's wife, an almond-eyed Circassian beauty, is already in his blood as if he had drunk a love potion. Captain Michales smothers his desire, but smolders over his comrade-in-arms, Captain Polyxigis, who does not.

In the meantime, Michales' teen-age nephew has killed Nuri Bey's nephew, and the Turko-Cretan blood bath has begun. Kazantzakis is not one to blink the horrors of war. Eyes are gouged, heads are lopped, women are raped, priests are lynched, villages are burned.

The Fields of Praise. Among modern writers, Kazantzakis is a unique literary alchemist. As a master mythologizer, he constructs a plot not unlike an old-fashioned American western, and then fills it with a strange power and plausibility.

But if he holds his readers, it is because he gives his characters, even in the midst of death a rage to live. Sky and sea, bread and honey, woman and song, all are celebrated on "the fields of praise." Lying with his paramour Captain Polyxygis thinks: "There's nothing in this world above to equal woman." A young Greek asks Captain Michales' centenarian father: "How has life seemed to you during those hundred years. Grandfather?" "Like a glass of cool water, my child." replies the old man. "And are you still thirsty, Grandfather?" "The graybeard raised his hand . . . 'Woe to him,' he cried in a loud voice, as though he were pronouncing a curse, 'woe to him who has slaked his thirst!' " For Captain Michales himself there is only one thirst more unslakable than life --freedom--and at novel's end, he dies trying to quench it.

Novelist Kazantzakis, who was born in Crete 70 years ago, feels understandably close to Captain Michales, whom he modeled directly on his father. Says he: "Every line in this novel is authentic fact." His father's name was Michales.

Father was a prosperous Cretan merchant who skirmished with the Turks, wore black clothes and let his beard grow as a sign of mourning over the loss of Greek freedom. Though Nikos Kazantzakis was only four years old at the time, the massacres of 1889 are branded vividly on his mind: "Each morning on my way to school I had to pass near a tree where the Turks used to hang Cretan patriots. The first time I saw a corpse dangling from the tree I was almost sick with fright. He was half nude, his greenish tongue stuck out from an open mouth and he smelled very bad. As I tried to turn away, father took me by the hand and ordered me to 'keep my eyes open.' Father forced me to approach the dead man and to touch his cold foot. Tremblingly I obeyed. Then father said: 'This man died for freedom.' " 33,333 Lines. Nikos grew up to study law in Athens and philosophy in Paris. Returning to Greece in 1914, he published the first of his nine novels. He has traveled in Spain, Russia, England, Egypt, China and Japan, and written books on all of them, together with philosophical treatises on Nietzsche and Bergson, ten plays centering on such figures as Christ, Ulysses and Julian the Apostate, and his own 33,333 line Odyssey, which begins where Homer's leaves off.

For the past eight years, he has lived at Antibes, France, a lean, soldierly man who rises promptly at 6 a.m. for a two-hour walk before breakfast and surprises the Riviera crowd by never setting foot in the local bistros. For the past three years, Kazantzakis has been a front-running candidate for the Nobel Prize. Like Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello, a past Nobel winner, and Spanish Philosopher Ortega y Gasset, he is far from the operatic Mediterranean type; with them, he shares a dry, winy brilliance of mind. Under the harsh sun of Crete, neither brooding Teutonic mysticisms nor romantic self-deceptions can survive. The pages of a Kazantzakis novel reveal the secret of ancient Greek greatness--a ruthless and abiding taste for reality.

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