A Room in Athens Read online

  Boys in white aprons ran by, swinging tripodic, long-handled trays of coffee and ouzo—messengers of the Greek carry-out. Occasionally, a cart rumbled by with a handsome young man standing up driving the horse, so like a charioteer I had to smile. Crowds poured into and out of the subway at Omonia.

  But she soon experiences a Greece quite different from the masculine land of the Holiday writers or of Miller—or of my father, away in the tavernas. Shortly after my parents reach Athens, after months of deep intimacy during their travels, their paths suddenly diverge. She figuratively walks off into another world: the Greece of women. Put in classical terms, she enters the ancient realm of Hera, goddess of marriage and family, and of her sister Hestia, goddess of hearth and home. Their dominion in modern Athens is the grocery, the apothecary, the obstetrician, the park-and-carriage, and of course, the home and the maternity clinic.

  The diary, although written a half-century ago, is by no means the first representation of “female” Greece by a Western woman, nor was my mother the first Western woman to travel to Greece or the Near East during pregnancy.5 The old British picture of Hellas had been inscribed not only by Western men, arriving as poets, scientists, journalists, officers, and diplomats, but also by the women who traveled with them—or alone. In the nineteenth century, an increasing number of British and American women ventured to the Aegean. Many were artists or professionals in their own right, or were seeking freedom or adventure away from the strictures of home.6

  In their depictions of Greece, Western women frequently provided a different viewpoint from that of men, referencing places, events, and relationships that we might consider traditionally “domestic” and “female”—beyond the interest of men or closed off to them. Though Western women’s views of their Greek counterparts varied widely, they commonly portrayed them as “docile” in their subjugation, in contrast to their view of themselves, as cultured, liberated, and educated. The diary in certain respects falls into this legacy. The continuity is especially notable in the description of the sequestered world of the maternity clinic—that gathering of Greek women and infants without men—which appears as a distant descendant of Lady Montagu’s famous eighteenth century visit to an Ottoman harem and of Lady Craven’s investigation of a Turkish bath in Athens in 1786.7 In one instance, my mother is chatting with the other women in a prosaic clinic room when she feels jolted back several epochs:

  I got a sudden, vivid picture of Frieda and the other girls (except perhaps Katie, with her copy of Jane Austen) in gossamer bloomers reclining on harem couches, giggling and eating Turkish delights.

  Here, she is abruptly, disconcertingly surrounded by the Ottoman Near East, as if a veil of illusion, the illusion of modernity, is being pulled from her eyes—with Jane Austen, the great English novelist of manners, serving, by artful happenstance, as a perfect emblem of the incursive West for the one culturally equivocal girl. Although Greek women in the sixties were increasingly educated and entering white-collar professions, and had gained the right to vote in 1952, these facts all vanish instantly before the enduring force of Old Greece.

  Still, my mother also challenges not only her own beliefs, but also those held by Americans. After denouncing swaddling, she concedes that “Seeing the baby’s arms move freely, aimlessly, was as much against their deepest knowledge and better judgment as restraint and wrapping were against mine.” And she has a habit of seeing herself as she believes the Greeks or Europeans see her—which is always to her disadvantage. In truth, she is being watched; the observations are a two-way street, and this intensifies her profound sense of being a stranger in a strange land. And it is, for her, a very strange land. It often leaves her “puzzled”—a word that appears frequently in the diary. She struggles continually to understand it; however, Greece, with its Mediterranean climate and food, its Christian Orthodox religion, its historical Balkan linkages, and its long Turkish occupation, evades a clear answer for her, as it has for travelers for centuries.

  It is not merely the country’s particularly multifaceted character that obstructs her. The difficulty she faces in her attempts to get a grasp on Greece is that which confronts all thoughtful travelers to other lands. Cultural differences among peoples do undeniably exist, and beg for explanation; but they are elusive. Myths, history, classifications, and stereotypes can all lead us into the weeds, yet can also hold some grain of truth. It is both a virtue and a hazard of the travel diary that it invites impromptu observations and cultural conjectures for the reader to contemplate. If her judgments are sometimes severe, she was, as Virginia Woolf wrote of Jane Austen, in a phrase that comes back to me as perfectly fitting for her, “biting of tongue but tender of heart.”8 Quick to find fault, she was just as quick to sympathize and to decry (at least in her diary) injustice, such as when she encounters a homely, overworked, thirteen-year-old maid who “should have been in school,” or malicious Athenian bureaucrats who “pick their teeth” and pointedly ignore petitioners, who wait patiently.

  Finally, though, cultural comparisons, while they form an integral part of the book, do not form its core. The diary’s gravitational center, around which all else revolves is, of course, the birth—or The Birth, as my mother wryly called it. It is the alpha and omega of her consciousness; it infuses every page, from the joyous opening sentence to the surprisingly warm retrospect of the last line.

  • • •

  If the original publisher’s title, Joshua Firstborn, is accurate in only the biological sense that I was a first child, it is, nevertheless, a key point: this book could only have been written by a young woman who had not yet had a child—for whom pregnancy and motherhood were still aglow with the promise of transformation and fulfillment.

  Unfortunately, the word firstborn carries weighty religious and historical baggage from the Bible and ancient laws of primogeniture, which makes the title not only misleading but amusingly grandiloquent: this firstborn son is not battling for a throne in an epic tale (despite an epic-worthy Greek birth certificate), but is rather an ordinary, demanding infant. Fortunately, the story itself is not about this infant but about a woman’s coming of age, her path to motherhood. The roads she takes through Europe become, literally, the road to motherhood, which culminates with the crucible of the birth, and more specifically, with natural childbirth.

  My mother had resolved to have natural childbirth, as she recalls in the diary, ever since chancing to read about it at age thirteen, when babysitting at a neighbor’s house in Cleveland. Probably, the book she found was by the British obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read, an early pioneer and proselytizer of natural childbirth. But a Midwestern girl’s accidental encounter with a volume about natural childbirth would have been unusual in 1950. Dick-Read’s teachings were far from prevalent in America. The medical establishment generally dismissed him and his followers as a sort of primitivistic cult. From their standpoint, modern medicine had bestowed the marvel of general anesthesia, eliminating the curse of pain that had accompanied childbirth from time immemorial. Early feminists had even demanded more widespread access to medicalized birth. Now, a little-known British doctor was arguing to turn back the clock based on far-fetched speculation about what was “natural.” As a result, Dick-Read’s arguments against anesthesia were met with “indifference” by his profession, as Dick-Read himself stated with some bitterness. Yet Dick-Read’s method gained followers, both within the medical community and among women, because it promised to return to women one crucial thing which anesthesia had taken away: consciousness during labor and birth.9

  In the years before epidural injections, only general anesthesia provided merciful oblivion to labor pain; but with relief came insensibility to the event of childbirth itself. The mother was reduced to a passive conduit for the newborn’s delivery, which the doctors guided and controlled. Afterward, the mother (and often the newborn) was groggy and weak. Anesthesia also posed health risks to mother and child.

  Dick-Read insisted that he did not oppose the use
of anesthesia in all situations, but claimed that drugs offered most women a needless devil’s bargain. Childbirth was not, in nature, unbearably painful. The pain women suffered was caused by artificially induced fear and tension. His method of “Natural Childbirth” (the name was his invention) promised women that they could not only stay awake but also conquer any discomfort through prenatal training in relaxation, and education about pregnancy, labor, and childcare. Dick-Read also urged that the father—long relegated to anxiously pacing the waiting room—be brought into the process as coach and guide for the mother. Childbirth would be returned to a more natural process and to the parents’ control, albeit under the physician’s authority.

  In the early fifties, Dick-Read’s work was augmented by that of another visionary of non-medicalized childbirth, the French obstetrician Dr. Fernand Lamaze. His ideas were derived from the work of doctors in the Soviet Union, as was the name he gave his approach, psychoprophylaxis (a name so elongated and so ostentatiously Greek-derived it might have been dreamed up by Stanley Kubrick for a Strangelovian satire of the medical profession).

  Lamaze shared Dick-Read’s belief that childbirth pain was a response conditioned by women’s expectations, and could be eliminated by relaxation and education—from this emerged the famous Lamaze breathing techniques, which were intended to both relax the mother and divert her attention. The two approaches were similar enough that as non-medicalized birth became more widely known across Europe and America, they became conflated in the public’s view as simply “natural childbirth.”

  In 1959, natural childbirth, and the Lamaze method in particular, got a substantial boost when an American woman, Marjorie Karmel, published a bestselling memoir about having her child born with Dr. Lamaze himself, titled, simply, Thank You, Dr. Lamaze. The next year, Karmel joined with physical therapist Elisabeth Bing to found the American Society for Psychoprophylaxis in Obstetrics, in order to bring the Lamaze method to the United States. (Bing, who died at age 100, in 2015, was famous as “the mother of Lamaze”; my mother was especially pleased that Bing had endorsed her book on the original dust-jacket as “delightful” and had written that she would “recommend this book to all my students.”)

  During the late sixties and seventies, natural childbirth would become entwined for women with the idea of wresting back control of the event from a perceived paternal medical establishment, and was absorbed, with some backlash, into the feminist and counter-culture movements. However, in the early sixties in America, it was still a controversial European innovation which was only starting to gain broader acceptance among women, if not among obstetricians. For my mother, natural childbirth had remained, since she first read about it in 1950, simply a girl’s romantic daydream of how she would become a mother.

  She was determined to have natural childbirth wherever the birth occurred. When my parents realized that her pregnancy would coincide with their European trip, she made sure to pack books not only by America’s foremost child-care authority, Dr. Spock, but also by Dick-Read—she was studying a chapter on self-delivery by Dick-Read as they drove along “roads of jagged rock” in Yugoslavia in her eighth month.

  As with so much that was changing in Greece in the sixties, the old ways surrounding women’s pregnancy and childbirth were yielding to the new. Traditional practices, by which women gave birth at home, cared for by midwives, almost as in the days of Hippocrates, were rapidly being abandoned for a modern, medicalized approach; women were going to new clinics and hospitals staffed with professionals who were determined to bring “modern” obstetrical methods to the country. Amid this countrywide shift, natural childbirth had made no real impact. There was only one natural childbirth clinic in Greece; it was here that my mother gave birth.

  The little clinic was run by a formidable Greek woman, Madame Kladaki, and an assistant, who practiced the Lamaze method. My mother never learned much about Mme. Kladaki—only that she was a doctor specializing in natural childbirth, had studied in Paris, and had struggled against the (overwhelmingly male) medical establishment to maintain her clinic. The clinic was about six years old and was tucked away on an upper floor of a building in a well-to-do neighborhood in the center of Athens; however, because natural childbirth was shunned by Greece’s medical profession, and was unknown to most Greeks or seen with suspicion as an alien practice, the clinic occupied a quasi-underground space in the city. (It was fitting, my mother comments, that the clinic was located on Bouboulinas Street, named after Laskarina Bouboulina, the famed woman fighter in the Greek War of Independence.) Mme. Kladaki’s establishment had only a half–dozen or so women enrolled, and they appeared, to my parents, to have fought hard to have their children born there, and had come mostly from Greece’s educated middle- or upper-middle class.

  My mother’s diary provides a detailed depiction of Mme. Kladaki, her assistant, Miss Elleadou, and their clinic, but my father’s diary portrayal complements hers and adds further reflections:

  Mme. Kladaki is a short, middle-aged woman. Her manner with the pregnant women who come is very gentle and smiling; but there is an angry, clipped manner in her relations with her staff, and her eyes have the hostile gleam of a feminist in a country where women are still pampered chattel. Her chief assistant is a big, husky, middle-aged Greek woman, full of muscle and bustle, who is giving Francie and me lessons. She, like many of Mme. Kladaki’s patients, is a convert. Her belief in the Lamaze method is religious. They defend the method against all other methods of natural childbirth. In certain details of preparation they are quite erratic, but they do seem to have a good grasp of the basic principles. They prescribe drugs and dietary restrictions liberally, many of which seem nonsensical. But some of their attitude apparently comes from the terror and ignorance surrounding childbirth here, which they must constantly fight.

  The Lamaze lessons show a great deal about life here, and the position of women. Apparently, large numbers are totally ignorant about their own bodies. Sometimes a little basic information is given in schools here, falling on a sea of ignorance. Childbirth is expected to be agonizing. Women are told to eat for two; they get immensely fat, which of course makes childbirth much more difficult. The patients at the clinic find themselves running counter to their families in everything—diet, exercise, attitudes. The clinic has an atmosphere of a missionary haven.

  As the time for the birth nears, my mother, who had arrived too late for complete prenatal preparation—she has only one week of instruction—is hastily taught through a comic jumble of Greek, French, and English. She then endures a prolonged agony on a birth-table. As she struggles through several pages, one wonders if this forward-thinking American in Athens had inadvertently angered Eileithyia, the Greek goddess of childbirth, and is being punished.

  At last, she is mercifully given oxygen—not anesthesia—but only after she’s suffered excruciating pain. Even my father disappoints her: he turns pale and flees. In the end, the brutal, all-too-real trial of giving birth, and my father’s flight, explodes her long-cherished girl’s fantasy of natural childbirth. She presents the episode with a raw and real candor that recalls Karmel’s memoir; both wrote unusually bold portrayals for their time. Depictions of childbirth in literature had been not only rare—notable accounts include those by Tolstoy, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing—but also were obscure, evading what were considered unseemly facts. She might have presented the birth more circumspectly, but she chose not to, showing herself naked, reduced by pain to a beast, crying out with bared teeth, feeling not joy but flashes of anger and, perhaps even more unsettling, indifference. Here, as throughout the book, she holds fast to the writer’s fundamental task, to describe the truth—“what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel,” as Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon.

  After the birth, she spends six days in the clinic’s recovery room, bundled like the other girls in the rows of beds. This room—the “room of Athens” of the title—is quite ordinary
, and she stays there for less than one week; nevertheless, it is the fulcrum of the book, as a sort of collective chrysalis: from here, she and the other young women will emerge into the world transformed, as new mothers.

  However, her time in this room is not all bliss. Unable to fully communicate with the others, neglected by her husband, she feels acutely alone in a foreign country. In America, she would have been encircled by celebratory family and friends. But the pre-Internet, pre-satellite-television world of 1964 still held remnants of the Homeric sense of distances and of isolation from home when traveling. Crossing the sea, even if soaring over it by jet engines in only a few hours, meant a real journey. Her only direct contact with family is from a few congratulatory telegrams and a shouted long-distance phone call from Philadelphia (followed in a week’s time by letters). America itself is linked only by the several days’ old New York Times my father leaves with her. She is isolated to a degree no longer possible for a middle-class American abroad, unless it is willful.

  • • •

  The rest of the book follows her first weeks as a mother. Often she is writing her diary in their apartment which, with my father’s absences and her lack of friends or family, becomes so much an Athenian room of her own that she once startlingly describes herself as feeling “like the first mother.” Sometimes, she is writing in Kolonaki Square, a neighborhood park, with me in a shabby, borrowed baby carriage. Interestingly, her habit of seeing things as she imagines they appear to others—such as viewing herself from the standpoint of the Greeks and Europeans—now extends to her infant: