Edmund Keeley will read from Borderlines at Princeton Public Library.
By:Josh Appelbaum
The rocky terrain of Salonica in Macedonian Greece is a familiar setting for enthusiasts of Edmund Keeley’s fiction, but the author’s memoir, Borderlines (White Pine Press, 2005), is a personal story of how his own experiences in the pre-World War II Balkans shaped his life in the United States.
The Princeton University Professor Emeritus, whose novels include A Wilderness Called Peace (Simon & Schuster, 1985) and The Imposter (Doubleday, 1970), will read from and discuss his memoir, which follows him from the glorious polyglot villages of Greece to his estranged homeland, at Princeton Public Library Nov. 15.
Dr. Keeley, who received bachelor’s degrees in American literature and civilization from Princeton and English literature from Oxford University, as well as a doctorate in comparative literature from Oxford, and led programs in Hellenic studies, comparative literature and creative writing at Princeton as a professor, expects constituents from all camps to turn out at the library. "There are going to be people who are Philhellenes and Hellenes from the Hellenic Studies Program here," Dr. Keeley says.
Dr. Keeley says he hopes those interested in the history of Princeton in wartime will attend. "Another section (of ‘Borderlines’) that I want to talk about is the Princeton experience," Dr. Keeley says. "Everybody has some sense of the university here."
But Borderlines isn’t simply about narrowly defined places like the mountains of Thessaloniki or the courtyards of Nassau Hall the memoir finds itself in the indefinite spaces where cultures and values overlap or clash. Through his formative years, Dr. Keeley felt less comfortable in the U.S. as a citizen than as a foreigner in Greece, where he lived a sublime village life with his parents James and Mathilde, older brother Bob and younger brother Hugh. "I had friends of all different nationalities," Dr. Keeley says. "They were Greek, Armenian, Jewish."
Dr. Keeley split his time between a German private school run by political missionaries of the Third Reich in the daytime, and American Farm School, an institute that sought to bring modern farming techniques to Greek agriculture, at night. It was between these two places that he first recognized the conflicting cultural values that shaped his existence. "The Farm School was an American oasis," Dr. Keeley says.
The Keeley family lived in a house at the farm school, and that is where Dr. Keeley fell in love with the land and the people of Greece but not without personal conflict.
At the German school, he had difficulty learning the language and was troubled by the militarism of both Nazi and Greek youth movements it housed. "I found it a rather strange environment for people of democratic leanings," Dr. Keeley says.
Not being German or Greek, Dr. Keeley was excluded from the Hitler Youth and the Greek youth defense movement. "They went off to do their marching and we went off to play marbles," Dr. Keeley says.
For Dr. Keeley, American life posed its own challenges after his father was recalled to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1939. That fall, he was enrolled at Powell Junior High, where he felt alienated from the social mores and attitudes that prevailed. "A young kid wants to feel at home where he is," Dr. Keeley says. "I had to learn to be American, and I overdid that."
Dr. Keeley says he turned to sports and, later in high school, "juvenile delinquency" which meant joining a fraternity, swilling beer and smoking a scarce cigarette in those days to fit in. At the same time, he found Washington, D.C., to be contradictory as the capital of a free, democratic nation. "Washington was a typical Southern city," Dr. Keeley says. "In those days white residents of the city were separated from the black communities."
Dr. Keeley says that during his time in Washington, he kept up the hope of returning to Greece after the war, but could never have imagined war would last almost eight years. He said he turned to the Greek culture and language hoping he would one day return to Thessaloniki. "There was this guy at what you’d call a greasy spoon, where you’d get hamburgers," Dr. Keeley says. "He was Greek, and it was like two villagers talking in Greek, of course. I spoke Greek with him just to keep it alive."
Dr. Keeley says he intended to join the foreign service when he entered his freshman year at Princeton in 1944, but his personal experiences changed his ultimate path. "Part of what ‘Borderlines’ is about is the border between history and English," Dr. Keeley says. "I got all kinds of flack about my table manners not being good enough to be in the foreign service, that my use of slang was excessive for somebody going into the foreign service. Somehow, psychologically, I said, ‘To hell with the foreign service.’"
But Dr. Keeley discovered poetry in his sophomore year at Princeton, and later joined the Navy to be part of the war effort, which eventually brought him back to Greece and the American Farm School.
Dr. Keeley said his time away from school led him to the decision to pursue writing and education as his career.
The author decided to embark on Borderlines to retrace this path and the transitions in his early life, which marks a departure from the objective narrative structure he uses for novels. He said it was first difficult to face his own life directly early on in the writing process. "I’ve written fiction out of things in my own life and they were somewhat autobiographical," Dr. Keeley says. "But they were always translated in one sense were objective through characters and masks and through history to get away from the personal."
Although he usually polishes off a novel in a year’s time, Borderlines took him almost three. Dr. Keeley says he struggled with keeping the story personal but representative to the readers. "There are things you have to cut out that are of no real interest to the story you’re developing," he continues. "My impulse was to learn what I could about my education in all senses. On the social side, on the sexual side and on the intellectual side." Wanting to challenge himself, Dr. Keeley set out to face himself and explore his origins. "I found it difficult," he says.
When Dr. Keeley’s younger brother, Hugh, read an early draft of Borderlines, he suggested his older brother refocus the book around his parents. Dr. Keeley took his younger brother’s advice and says the finished book seeks to "settle accounts" with his parents. He discovered just how much his parents positively shaped his life. "It’s about origins in some sense," Dr. Keeley says. "Learning about the borderlines they had to cross, all while raising three boys in so many different countries and in the context of the war must have been a major strain."
The Keeley children had a characteristically frayed and somewhat distant relationship with their parents the three boys often addressed them in the third person. Dr. Keeley says in Borderlines that this put him and his siblings at an "odd grammatical distance" from his parents which prevented them from speaking directly and personally to them.
But writing Borderlines mended some of those fences, especially with his late mother. "It gave me a link to the kind of forgiveness you have to give to your parents," Dr. Keeley says. "I think I gained that from writing this book."
Edmund Keeley will read from and discuss Borderlines at Princeton Public Library, 65 Witherspoon St., Princeton, Nov. 15, 7:30 p.m. For information, call (609) 924-9529. On the Web: www.princetonlibrary.org

