Eric Ambler’s Literary Sub-Texts and the Greece-Turkey 1923 Population Exchanges: The Past as Eternally Present

Literary legacies, 100 years since the Asia Minor Catastrophe

Today’s article was inspired by a recent academic event (on a historic event), and three books:

One Book was published, but unread (at a certain time);

A second book was written (at a certain time), but not yet published;

The third book was written, but burned by its author, thus allowing an empty space for the first book to be written by its author, who was inspired by the same historical event to which the recent academic event was devoted.

Before covering this event-on-an-event… a prophetic quote from 2015.

“Our leaders tell us they are shaping the future, and most of us want to believe them,” philosopher John Gray wrote on 1930s British thriller author Eric Ambler, in a long BBC article. “Ambler's stories are disquieting because they suggest that no one is finally in control. They leave us with a lingering suspicion that we're not shaping the future at all.”

The Athens Event: Refugees and International Humanitarian Relief, 1918-1924

The chaotic tragedies of post-WWI Europe would inspire numerous literary settings and plots, both at the time and later. The case of Ambler will be explored  below. First, though, the history: I enjoyed a more sobering and factual hybrid event on 16 March, held in Athens. It focused on a humanitarian crisis- one that also would later effect the development of international law, travel practices, philanthropy and even America’s transition from isolationist to globalist power.

The Athens event scrutinized the humanitarian and relief efforts of international organizations before, during and after the 1922 ‘Asia Minor Disaster,’ as the Greeks recall it, and population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923. This collective upheaval of whole populations had traumatic effects across the Balkans, Caucasus and Middle East too.

The event was co-organized by the Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Foundation of the Hellenic Parliament. It was titled, “The Asia Minor Disaster and the Humanitarian Response: International Philanthropic Organizations and the Arrival of the Refugees in Greece, 1918-1924” (In Greek: Η Μικρασιατική Καταστροφή και η ανθρωπιστική απάντηση.  Διεθνείς φιλανθρωπικές οργανώσεις και η άφιξη των προσφύγων στην Ελλάδα, 1918-1924).

The relative responses and jurisdiction of international aid and refugee institutions, failure of early-warning mechanisms and political rivalries and squabbles apply equally from 1922 to 21^st-century humanitarian crises. In 1923, in the shadow of WWI, relief was overseen by the short-lived League of Nations, though the American Red Cross and Near East Relief commission played crucial and semi-independent roles, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

As international human rights law would not be more completely defined until the UN came into existence after WWII, the efforts to aid Greek, Turkish, Armenian and other refugees were more ad-hoc. Groups like the Red Cross had valuable field experience due to previous similar humanitarian disasters in Turkey, Russia, Eastern Europe and generally in Europe during WWI.

The colloquium began with comments from the leading Greek expert on 20^th-century British-Greek relations, Athens University Professor Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, and ASCSA archivist Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan.

For me, particularly helpful was Davide Rodogno’s presentation, “The Context, Limits and Purposes of International Humanitarian Associations' Work: Comparing and Contrasting the Work of European and American Organizations.”

Greek refugees at Moudania port in Annatolia, 28 August 1922

Among other talks I enjoyed was Antonis Klapsis’ speech, “Transatlantic Philanthropy: The American Red Cross and the Relief of Greek Refugees, 1922-1923,” as well as Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan’s “Assimilation of Refugees Astonishingly Extent”: Fake News in the Fall of 1923,” which examined the rivalries between pro-aid and pro-withdrawal leaders in and around the American government and Red Cross at the time. An innovative look at medical aid, and the role of female doctors and nurses, came with Francesca Piana’s “Encounters in Medical Aid: The Early Work of the American Women’s Hospitals for Greek Refugees.”

Among other notable papers was Eleftheria Daleziou’s presentation on orphans under care of the Near East Relief in Greece, 1922-1924. This provided an intriguing glimpse into a relief organization, showing the specific realities faced by different groups of orphans.

The financial aspects of refugee-philanthropy were covered in Dimitris Kamouzis’ paper, “Save the Children Fund’ and the Greek Refugee Crisis of 1922.” The American political insiders of Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, and their business interests in overseas aid and ideology, was covered by Jack L. Davis in his presentation, “Lest We Perish”: The $30,000,000 Campaign of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East.”

You can watch the ASCSA/HPF seminar on Youtube here:

Some takeaways include the overarching strategic interests (beginning even earlier, with US President Wilson and his close advisors) in reversing America’s traditionally insular nature with WWI, and its humanitarian aftermath. At the same time, there were disagreements within not only the American government and American community in Greece (not to mention with the British) about aid, and the specific personalities who were involved in administrating key agencies like the American Red Cross. These individuals played important roles in decisions, for better and for worse, and the scholars did a great service by illuminating the tenor of their activities.

The remarkable fact that Greece (with a population then of over 4 million) embraced a refugee wave of 1.5 million, while itself being nearly bankrupt, was also pointed out by speakers. Professor Hatzivassiliou, who expressed his “awe” of both the aid workers and everyday Greeks who helped the newcomers in a time of mutual hardship, also pointed out that over time, Greeks seem to be losing touch with the memories of this seminal part of their past; for example, he cited the northeastern port town of Kavala, which for decades had a street named ‘American Red Cross Street.’ However, it now lives under another name, and most of the former refugee camps and spots associated with the population exchanges are either vanished or not associated with their transient post-war purpose.

Literary Aspects: How the Scholarly Event Reminded Me of Ambler

A certain dusty, dog-eared paperback novel sat to my left back on the shop desk back in 2000, when I was briefly sitting in at a souvenir store in a Southern Crete village.

I ignored the book, since I had already been given Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and was reading that, as it accompanied my writing of the ever-unpublished metafictional novella, the Third Emperor of California. Anyway to judge from the title of the old paperback – A Coffin for Dimitrios – I assumed it was probably just more mass-produced pulp fiction from some unknown Greek-American author of fifty years ago…

Little did I know then that this unread paperback was, of course, a reprint of English author Eric Ambler’s 1939 classic, originally published in the UK as The Mask of Dimitrios. Aha! That’s where I first came across the odd term ‘Nansen Passports’ that some of the scholars in Athens were mentioning the other day….

This was the popularized unofficial name of League of Nations-authorized travel documents for stateless persons, issued after WWI (the moniker comes from the Norwegian statesman and polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. The ‘Nansen passports’ (and stamps) were given to refugees and other stateless persons to enable travel by the League’s Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees between 1922 and 1938. Post-war Europe experienced refugee crises and internal displacement widely.

Ambler’s Arrival and Authorial Tendencies

From 1935 to 1940, Ambler published six novels that, according to philosopher Gray’s article cited above, “changed the thriller forever.” Of these, The Mask of Dimitrios was the most famous (and arguably the best), adapted as a film soon after. Ambler’s writing style embraced a new gritty but intellectual realism that would influence authors like Graham Greene and John le Carré.

A ‘Nansen passport’ issued by the League of Nations

Ambler’s works were generally set in ‘real’ countries and referred to real world events, though some novels took place in easily-identifiable ‘created countries’- such as The Dark Frontier’s ‘Ixania,’ somewhere within the nebulous Balkans.

Still, Ambler’s combination of a journalistic and novelistic approach, along with a trademark terse style, adds to the tension and drama of his narration. As I was reminded by some of the Athens event speakers, the prevalence of newspaper, radio and film coverage was key towards setting global perceptions of events during the 1922-23 crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ambler (who was born in 1909) certainly thus read about these events, but also he may have based some of the plot on discussions with Turkish refugees in Montparnasse. He drew, however, on a wider range of sources, as his awareness of international business, crime and revolutionary movements of the early 20^th century, as The Mask of Dimitrios reveals.

Parts of the plot show Ambler’s view of multinational crime and conspiracy, drawing on the chaos of the 1922 destruction of Smyrna, and the ensuing population exchanges. But there is a new sophistication regarding world events in Ambler’s work that makes earlier genre titles like Conrad’s The Secret Agent seem like misappropriated imitations of Dickensian storytelling, where expressions of actual secret-power dynamics within structures was limited and secondary to stories of simple familial relationships.

Without giving away the story (since the book is certainly worth a read), it’s interesting to note that Ambler opens against the Asia Minor disaster, and the whole infrastructure of the international philanthropy and legislative framework discussed in last week’s conference in Athens. But the story he develops is entirely fictional, and indeed no more than an anonymous incident that could have occurred in such a chaotic situation. As we will see, the moral ambiguity of the worlds of war and relief must have been contemplated by Ambler, and are reflected in his novel.

The only thing relatively ‘flat’ about the characters is Ambler’s unlikely hero, the predictably upright and moral English mystery writer, Charles Latimer. In the novel, Latimer meets Turkish police Colonel Haki, concerning a notorious Greek criminal named Dimitrios Makropoulos. He was allegedly involved in a murder, and had used the chaos of the Smyrna fire and refugee expulsion to escape to Greece, Latimer learns.

Later, while traveling in Athens, Latimer comes across the detail I mentioned concerning Nansen passports, as the crafty Dimitrios had used different identities and surnames to hide himself. Then, apparently, he gets involved with multi-national finance and criminal networks, of a sort that will be much more familiar to readers of modern thrillers than those of works published before Ambler. Latimer’s subsequent train trip northwards through the Balkans and into Northern Europe leads to the book’s exciting conclusion.

Qualities (and Identities) of Ambler’s Villains, and His Sort-of Heroes

Writing in the run-up to WWII, Ambler warns tersely of the dangers of Hitler while recalling both the humanitarian catastrophe and corruption of the early 1920s in the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, Ambler based his ‘Dimitrios’ character on a real-life notorious arms dealer, Sir Basil Zaharoff (1849-1936).

Sir Basil Zaharoff, 1928

Born under the name Vasilios Zacharias in Muğla in southwestern Anatolia, Vasilios was the descendant of Greeks who had fled to Russia after the anti-Greek sentiment during the 1821 Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire. The family later returned from Russia under the Slavicized new name ‘Zaharoff.’ He became a shrewd businessman based on his participation in the failing empire’s corruption; one early example was helping the Istanbul fire department commit arson at wealthy properties in order to extort a payment to extinguish them from the owners.

Zaharoff went on to become an arms dealer, famously working with all sides, developing high-level political connections across Europe, and even playing a role in Greece’s initial submarine program, around 1912. Even in his time, Zaharoff was controversial (despite his awareness of the need for positive PR). Aside from the honorary knighthood he eventually learned, he most ironically donated to hospitals and orphanages for refugees and war victims. It was this calculated immorality that captivated authors like Ambler.

As philosopher John Gray wrote in the BBC article of 2015, “Ambler's heroes are ordinary people - often unemployed engineers, freelance journalists or jobbing writers - who, while struggling to make a living, stumble into a danger zone whose existence they hardly suspected.”

Dimitrios – that is, Vasilios Zacharias, or Basil Zaharoff – was indeed someone from this nether—world. Already wanted in London for irregular exports in his mid-twenties, Zaharoff was befriended in Athens by a political journalist (and a future banker and future prime minister), Etienne Skouloudis.

The latter helped Zaharoff replace a Swedish captain representing arms dealer Thorsten Nordenfelt, on 14 October 1877. Thus began Zaharoff’s rise as an intermediary and international man of mystery between conflicts, politics and populations in an increasingly turbulent Europe. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and following sale of Cyprus to the British Empire by the defeated Ottomans all influenced European powers to arm themselves. Zaharoff was simply the right man in the right place at the right time.

But arms dealing was not his main trade at first; after relocating to the UK, he went on to Galway in Ireland, of all places, in 1883 (where he served as a shipping clerk) and to St. Louis in the  US (where he worked for a railcar business two years later). This colorful rogue courted a Philadelphia heiress, claiming to be a European prince, and married her; he was then followed to England by detectives who discovered he’d married an Englishwoman in 1872.

Zaharoff sold weapons to countries from the US to Japan and numerous European states, and was involved with important British-Swedish automatic weapons technologies, naval weapons, and the aforementioned Greek submarine. From 1897 to 1927, when he was pressured to burn his memoir instead of publishing it, he worked for Britain’s major munitions firm, Vickers, as its European representative. When donating to war hospitals and orphanages, the con man and arms dealer was clearly also one of the world’s upstanding and respectable public figures at the same time.

The Literary Imagination of Such Historical Events and Figures

Authors like Eric Ambler wrote, and write, novels based on their perception of big-picture world events and the people who, like Zaharoff, are fascinating because while being extremely historically important, they are now just as forgotten as the long-vanished refugees of 1923 Greece.

Had Zaharoff not burned his memoir, we would certainly have known more about the facts of his life; as it is, he lives on through literature (and not only Ambler’s- he is also considered the prime inspiration for Ian Fleming’s villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld).

“Ambler's villains aren't devilish figures,” Gray contrasts. “They're doing no more than apply profit-and-loss accounting to the business of overthrowing governments.”

Eric Ambler

Citing The Mask of Dimitrios, Gray describes how protagonist Charles Latimer, “reflects on the career of a master criminal he believed had been murdered,” Dimitrios in Istanbul. The reason for meeting with Colonel Haki is in order to gain data for a fictional thriller, the reader understands.

However, Latimer “discovers that Dimitrios Makropoulos – ‘the drug pedlar, the pimp, the thief, the spy, the white slaver, the bully, the financier’ is alive and prospering:

Three human beings (Latimer went on) had died horribly and countless others had lived horribly in order that Dimitrios might take his ease. If there were such a thing as Evil, then this man…

But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good and bad business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michelangelo's David, Beethoven's Quartets and Einstein's physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler's Mein Kampf.”

This same sense of an all-pervasive positivist system logic was evident, in various ways, in the archives and other testimonies from the early 1920s that I heard the researchers from the recent Athens conference on 1923 speak about. The seeds of social disintegration were planted well before the time Ambler wrote, and to some extent he was, like Zaharoff but in a different way, a man blessed with being in the right place at the right time to carry out his particular life’s mission.

Still, both seem equally accidental; Zaharoff came from an obscure background that could have led to any and all varieties of nothing, whereas Ambler was the son of entertainers who studied engineering and worked for a bit in an ad agency.

What I find most intriguing about Gray’s depiction of Ambler’s 1930s Europe, however, is the extent to which it could be applied to our current condition.  Indeed, at a time of unexpected bank failures, institutional instability in many countries, apathy, protests, war and population dislocation, numerous scenarios for a darker future exist. And that is not even factoring in changes coming from technology… Not all of which will be benevolent. As Gray wrote in the 2015 article about the detective writer:

“Ambler's Europe is a continent in a process of disintegration. Economies are stagnant, banks fragile or failing, currencies shaky and markets manipulated. In many countries, large sections of the population languish without hope of employment or opportunity. Mainstream politicians seem unable to do anything to change the situation. Power seems to lie with forces they cannot control, such as the sinister Eurasian Credit Trust that lies behind the events portrayed in The Mask of Dimitrios.”

At very least, one can safely conclude, the continuing unpredictability of the world, will continue to provide inspiration for new literature, and new takes on old literature, and the crises which like 1923 inspired them.