Last Testament

REPORT TO GRECO, by Nikos Kazantzakis. 512 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.50.

This century is likely to expire before qualified men find Nikos Kazantzakis' true place in the pantheon of literature. His claims on greatness must await the patient perspective of time. He wrote eight novels, of which three--Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion and Freedom or Death--are well known in the U.S.

As a scholar, he converted the classics of seven languages into Greek. As a philosopher, he absorbed Bergson, Nietzsche, Buddha and Lenin, and formed a derivative, somewhat nihilistic creed that seemed to sentence man to hopelessness and Western civilization to death. As a poet, he added 33,333 poetic lines to Homer's Odyssey--three times the master's output--and then dared to call it a modern sequel to that epic from the dawn of Western thought.

Unready Draft. Kazantzakis died eight years ago at 74. His heirs have spent the intervening years extending his legend with carefully doled out translations of unpublished texts. Report to Greco-is the latest entry in the lengthy procession, which is by no means over: his widow Helen and his friend Kimon Friar, who spent four years translating Kazantzakis' Odyssey, are both engaged in writing biographies. Neither can do the man, or the legend, more service than this awkward, graceless but powerful personal testament.

Kazantzakis himself would probably have refused to permit its publication. The manuscript was not ready; it is a first draft, rudely punctuated by death. It is all edges, untidy, angular, raw, the unpolished work of a perfectionist who invested 13 years on his Odyssey and put it through seven metamorphoses. It does not pretend to be an autobiography, mixes fact so thoroughly with myth that the only recognizable landmarks are the mountaintops of his life.

Peaks & Rinds. But mountaintops were Kazantzakis' habitat. He liked the ascent; it was to him the essential and never ending purpose of life. "We ascended," he writes in an epilogue addressed to Greco, "because the very act of ascending, for us, was happiness, salvation, and paradise." He preferred rarefied air and the panoramic view. "Rinds they were," he says, contemptuously discarding the "details of daily life."

The rinds are not missed, as the reader scrambles after the climber. There is the terrified Cretan youth, commanded by his father to kiss the feet of countrymen garroted by the Turks; the student in Paris, inflamed and impelled by Nietzsche's visions of the Superman; the pilgrim searching vainly for the future in Soviet Russia, for the past in Jerusalem, for the present in the clouds brooding over his native Crete.

Report to Greco illuminates Kazantzakis' life in the way that lightning illuminates the dark. A sudden flash, and there stands that lusty old goat Zorba, the flesh-and-blood model for Kazantzakis' most successful novel, who taught him "to love life and have no fear of death." Another flash reveals the writer in the throes of creation, dipping his pen into his own blood: "Writing may have been a game in other ages. Today it is a grave duty, to proclaim a state of mobilization, to urge men to do their utmost to surpass the beast."

Red Talons. Kazantzakis wrestled with God all his life, without ever quite determining who his adversary was. Some of his gloomy judgments have tempted critics to the conclusion that Kazantzakis was even more nihilistic than Nietzsche, and this book can support that view. God is variously defined as a bull, a "bluebird with red talons," the "supreme uncertainty." "Life's true face," says Kazantzakis, "is the skull." The place to build one's home is on the brim of the abyss.

But all the other influences on Kazantzakis' thought pale before the figure of Alexis Zorba, and Kazantzakis' final judgment of life coincides with his: "Greetings, man, you little two-legged plucked cock! It's really true (don't listen to what others say): if you don't crow in the morning, the sun does not come up!"

-The title pays Kazantzakis' respects to another dark and stormy Greek, born, like himself, on the island of Crete: Domenico Teoto-copulo, better known as the artist El Greco.

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