Mediterranean Triptych

Most tourists believe in love at first site. Hurrying and scurrying about, they rarely stop to court an insight. Three unhurried tourists currently grace the book counters with travel accounts that are wise, witty and uncommonly well-written. Laving their individual sensibilities in the "implacable light" of the Mediterranean littoral, these writers perceive and share the region's Antaeus-like grip on life for life's sake.

ATHENIAN ADVENTURE, by C. P. (for Clarence Pendleton) Lee (274 pp.; Knopf; $4), shuns the bearded ancient Greeks for the mustached moderns. A onetime professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Author Lee spent a year (1955-56) as a Fulbright professor at the University of Athens. Author Lee has brought home a lot of generalizations--largely accurate--about the Greek character, which form his book's most engaging part. Politeness demands that a Greek be asked three times before he accepts anything. However poor, he never begs, except for cigarettes. No one hawks pictures of the Parthenon or dirty postcards to tourists ("The Greek approach to sexual matters is so direct that perhaps they cannot imagine the possibility of vicarious lechery"). The tutelary Greek deity is Narcissus: a Greek cannot resist being photographed and will disgorge photos of himself on the slightest pretext.

"Every Greek expects to be cheated," and Author Lee was mildly embarrassed as his Greek friends checked the scales in grocery shops and counted and recounted their eggs. At home, the mistress of the house lays traps for her servants: "Pencil shavings in a corner, or under a table. Aha! The servant has not cleaned! The failure to clean, despite the Greek passion for surface cleanliness, is not the issue; it is the desire to know whether the servant has cleaned."

The Greek word for yes is neh, and in the main Author Lee is a great neh-sayer. He liked Hellenic warmth, individuality and liveliness (but not the oil-drenched cuisine). He was stirred by the keening, semi-Oriental laments known as Greek music and the sturdy acrobatics of the men's handkerchief dances in the tavernas.

He liked the Greek blend of reason and passion, the serene acceptance of humanity's lot coupled with a fierce resolution to better one's own. Out of genuine affection and twenty-twenty vision, Author Lee has fashioned the best of the few U.S. books about Greece, even including Henry Miller's dithyrambic tribute, The Colossus of Maroussi.

SOUTH FROM GRANADA, by Gerald Brenan (282 pp.; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $4), turns back the time machine to 1920 to record the life of a remote Spanish town before its privacy and traditions were invaded by the automobile. Fresh from World War I and a British captain's uniform, Author Brenan hiked south from Granada seeking a kind of scholarly retreat. He found Yegen (pop. 1,000) perched on a windless plateau 4,000 ft. up in the Sierra Nevada and surrounded by olive trees, vineyards and an intangible air of timelessness. Author Brenan sent for his 2,000-volume library, but Yegen kept taking his eye off the printed page. His maid, he discovered, was the daughter of the town's leading witch, who was reputed to frequent the tops of poplar trees and fly about the town on moonlit nights. Among other articles of superstitious faith in the village: that the ninth consecutive son is especially blessed and possessed of healing powers; that a girl can discern the features of her husband-to-be if she breaks an egg in water and looks at the resulting mess through a silk handkerchief; that Protestants have tails.

The men of the village tilled their fields with plows pictured on classical Greek vases, their wheat-threshing boards were described in the Bible, and the sickles they used were fashioned identically to those found in Spain's Bronze Age tombs. Coping with reality through ancient ritual, the villagers made of life a kind of ennobling drama and brought to the simplest pleasures a touch of piety. Bread, for example, was not only good, but somehow holy. When Brenan jabbed his knife into a loaf one day, he was told that he was "stabbing the face of Christ."

To the Spaniard, who is fascinated by death as life's last experience, the cemetery is known as the tierra de la verdad, the place of truth. In a philosophical mood, he is given to brooding that "life is an illusion because it ends." Author Brenan (The Face of Spain, The Literature of the Spanish People), now lives in Malaga with his wife, is regarded by many critics as the finest living interpreter in English of Spanish life and letters. For him, the Iberian idyl has never ended. But the Yegen chapter was closed in the early '30s. On a nostalgic return visit in 1955, Brenan found the friends of his youth dead or aged "like pressed ferns in an album." The town had sampled the accessories of progress and was lusting after that U.S. holy of holies--modern plumbing.

A ROMAN JOURNAL, by Stendhal (354 pp.; Orion; $15), goes back even farther in time. A fictitious diary of 19 months (1827-29) ostensibly spent in Rome (Stendhal was later in Italy as a French consul), it was written in 1829, has now been translated into English for the first time. The great novelist (The Red and the Black) would not have been surprised by the delay, since he took the long view of fame ("I have taken a ticket in a lottery in which the winning number is 1936"). Eager to blot out the memory of a countess who had just jilted him, Stendhal (real name: Henri Beyle) plunged into a sunny remembrance of tours past--St. Peter's, the Colosseum, the Michelangelo frescoes, etc. To each he brings the touchstone of "the beautiful," of which the i gth century was overly fond and the 20th is unduly leary. Stendhal had a mind like a Catherine wheel, and in A Roman Journal it sparked anecdotes and aphorisms on many subjects. Samples:

P: "[In viewing ruins], imagine what is lacking and disregard what is there."

P: "Rome is more of a small town than Dijon or Amiens; not everything is told, but everything is found out."

P: "A young Frenchwoman brings to the exercise of her will a fire and petulance that amaze and exhaust the more prudent soul of a Roman woman. But this fire of straw lasts two days. The character of a tiger depicts Roman sensual enjoyment fairly well, if one add to it moments of absolute madness."

P: "One cannot swallow pleasure like a pill."

In their different ways, Messrs. Lee, Brenan and Stendhal do not proffer the pleasure of travel as a pill, but as a love potion, mixing memory and desire. It will induce in most readers a keen sympathy for the peoples of the wine-dark sea--those whom the gods wished to preserve and so first made sane.

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