The Willing Spirit

NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS by Helen Kazantzakis. 589 pp. Simon & Schuster. $12.

For Nikos Kazantzakis, who died in 1957, the great temptation was asceticism. Drawn to the cold, solitary vigils of the spirit, the Greek poet and novelist struggled steadily to stay rooted to earth and passionately celebrated the vitality of life.

This enduring tension between worldliness and renunciation, so characteristic of Kazantzakis' novels, is persistently evident in his letters, which have now been collected by his wife and woven together into a very special sort of biography. More fragmentary than Report to Greco, Kazantzakis' autobiography, the book offers intensely personal footnotes to the life of a man who was alternately repelled and enraptured by the world he lived in.

"God, make a God of me!" Kazantzakis cried out when, as a four-year-old, he was first made aware of death. In his most popular novel, Zorba the Greek, he divided the human longing for a quiet, withdrawn existence and its counterpart, passionate involvement with life, into two separate characters, joyfully granting Zorba, who lusts for life, the final triumph. In his greatest novels, fictionalized versions of the lives of St. Francis and Christ, he portrayed both as men deeply drawn to the fleshly world but agonizingly aware that they must eventually transcend it. While he was writing The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis admitted in a letter: "I felt what Christ felt. I became Christ." God is "action," he wrote, "replete with mistakes, fumblings, persistence, agony. God is not the power that has found eternal equilibrium, but the power that is forever breaking every equilibrium, forever searching for a higher one."

A Worldly Eye. What kept this epic Greek from sailing off into the outer reaches of egomania was his sense of the concrete. His admiration for grand designs of the spirit was tempered, as the letters show, by a fine sensuous eye. "Imagine slender, tall Chinese women like snakes erected upright," he reported during his first visit to Singapore. "Never did the human body look so like a sword. And through the dresses slit open at the sides, at each step, the yellow blade of the leg glistens--slender, strong, irresistible--right up to the pelvis."

Retiring Revolutionary. Throughout his life, the letters make clear, Kazantzakis felt the impulse of the revolutionary. His signing of liberal manifestoes kept him in steady trouble with conservative Greek authorities. But ultimately he could accept neither the life-suppressing party discipline nor the brain-confining dogma of the principal revolutionary movement of his age. He never joined the Communist Party, and when, during World War II, he offered his services to the Greek partisans, they rejected him as unreliable. Kazantzakis derided the party's attempt to reduce life to a set of abstractions. Communists, he wrote, reminded him of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who took a prostitute to his room in Venice. "When they lay down in bed and she got undressed," Kazantzakis writes, "poor Jean Jacques began begging her to take the straight and narrow path."

In one of her perorations, Kazantzakis' widow points out that her husband has been compared with Victor Hugo, adding with feminine fondness, "He is closer to Homer." The remark is not quite as outrageous as it sounds. Kazantzakis' 33,333-line poem, also called The Odyssey, is a 20th century epic in which a contemporary Ulysses savors the world's sunny delights while heading inexorably for a polar night of the spirit. In the letters, however, Kazantzakis settles for a shrewder, certainly earthier judgment of himself. "I am not a Romantic in revolt," he wrote, "nor a mystic scorning life, nor an insolent belligerent against Substance. I do not feel possessed by any illusion. I enter into all traps--like some extremely elastic rat, which enters the trap, eats the mixture set to catch it, and then goes on to other traps, well aware that the last trap--the trap of Death--is there waiting for it."

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