While praising the amenities of the Patras Cecil, Miller vividly conveys the schizophrenic effect of the hotel lobby décor in Nauplia and boasts about the exceptional currency exchange rate that affords him unprecedented amenities and comforts while inhabiting the cockroach-infested rooms of the Athens “Grand” (probably the now demolished and then old, dilapidated Grand Hôtel d’ Angleterre in Constitution Square, 1875-1961). On top of that, Miller’s harsh depiction of the unnamed Nauplia hotel lobby borders (epic) ridiculousness.
The hotel porters at the Athens “Grand,” for example, are simultaneously portrayed as exoticized orientals (Wills 81–107) and “sad relics of a glorious past” immured in the “stupidity of today” (Herzfeld 917). These sheltered hotel rooftop heroics and antics, across the vistas of the gulf of Patras foregrounding the sharply ironic proximity of Missolonghi in the horizon, find culmination in Miller’s effort “on the terrace of the Hotel Cecil” to dissuade “Lawrence Durrell from enlisting in the Greek army” (Roessel 3). Lawrence Durrell’s vicious fight with his wife at the terrace of the Patras Cecil stands out in that it (ironically) summons the heroic impulse entrenched in the very legacy of Philhellenism in the post–Byronic era, “A New Kind of Byronism” as per David Roessel’s formulation (252–84). Indeed, by consistently calling attention to the sad hospitality offered in Greek hotels, Miller’s Greek visions also seem, at times, to be a product of western, exceptionalist, and essentialist hermeneutic schemata.
Ranging from hyperbole to contempt, these indicative hotel scenes underscore Miller’s imaginative construction of Greece via the lens of hospitality. Henry Miller’s 1941 The Colossus of Maroussi, an impressionist travelogue that has become a classic in travel literature, features some scant hotel scenes that, much like the travelogue itself, seem to oscillate between fetishizing or idealization and utter disillusionment with the state of affairs in Greece at the onset of World War II.
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