My book was written, in its essence, by Mr Lascaris. When a man is alive, he belongs to his body; after his death, his thoughts resurrect his existence. Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris is written in my voice, but it captures his way of thinking and conveys his view of things. The authentic text is written in Greek, as a Platonic prototype somewhere in the realm of final reality: it is a Greek text written in English. Almost everything was said in Greek; I struggled to maintain its oral character. On many occasions I thought of Joseph Conrad, in others of Lafcadio Hearn. English sentences arranged on Greek tunes: what a stylistic impasse!

Mr Lascaris’s Greek was of a very peculiar nature: unlocatable in time and place, it sounded like a palimpsest of phrases from different periods and by various hands. His words moved freely from Homer’s language to the dialect of Alexandrian wharfies, from Plato to the idioms of court poets in twelfth-century Constantinople, from the urban dialects of modern Athens to pretentious Gallicisms used by European colonial aristocracy at the beginning of the previous century. His language was an astonishing experience of paradoxical juxtapositions. The man himself has to be seen as part of the paradox of his language.

The most important part of the text is found in its silences and its omissions – these dialogues frame the meta-linguistic character of human communication. I tried to create an ‘individual cultural plot’ in order to locate the man and to enter the atmosphere of his thinking: the underlying theme is the need to think his thoughts and, as Mary Warnock argued, to try ‘to understand how it was to be him’. My book is about presence and the ambivalent feelings we experience each time we are next to a human being with an active introspective conscience.

I could never claim that our discussions had any unity; Mr Lascaris passed from one topic to another, introducing an irrelevant detail, proffering an unexpected innuendo, returning to an earlier reference, speculating about what might happen when things got better or reverting to another previous discussion. He was a genuine Socrates who stated, with immense clarity and simplicity, the fruits of his experience, as if plucking them out of an insatiable memory. I repeatedly asked him: ‘Why haven’t you written anything, Mr Lascaris?’ ‘Every time I tried,’ he replied, ‘I was becoming my non-being. It was really abysmal. On the other hand, I never understood myself and I don’t think that this is the purpose of living.’

He liked mentioning Goethe (‘who is a matter of class’), especially the dictum with which he begins his autobiography: ‘The person who does not get thrashed does not get educated.’ He pondered this statement; ‘Yes, you have to be thrashed in order to situate your self.’ ‘We need stability, Mr Lascaris,’ I said. ‘No, no, no,’ he replied. ‘We need new Odysseys. We don’t have a permanent city,’ he added biblically.

He confused me when I was trying to make a new beginning. The uneventfulness of his life led to his continuous immersion into thought. He was the humble sage abhorring the ‘exoterics’ who look for details and gossip. He gave them a lot of both: ‘They are so profane. It is the only way to keep them satisfied,’ he told me once. ‘They are petty, self-indulgent and curious. They never make an effort to see through what I say – yet what I say is, occasionally, stupid, I must admit.’

I met Manoly Lascaris after Patrick White’s death. I saw somebody who wanted to tell the tale of his life. He was alone, full of complaints about Patrick’s posthumous financial arrangements, critical of many old friends, and longing for the ‘old language’. His ‘old language’ belonged to an ancient world. When I dared to mention a verse from Sappho of Lesbos, he corrected me impatiently with his usual finesse: ‘You are ruining the poem,’ he shouted, ‘by using the wrong edition!’ When he was talking in Greek, it was as if language had taken possession of him. I was hypnotised by his ability to weld together such an incredible array of linguistic expressions that might well, I thought, have been forgotten after so many decades of living with the English language. I started taking notes then. ‘This is so rude,’ he exclaimed in utter despair. ‘Buuuut (allaaaa) it seems that you never received proper education.’ That made me sad. I had to practise stoic self-control. I was younger then and could not concentrate or exercise any. Probably this led to our gradual estrangement. It was also an aesthetic pleasure: his hands conducting an orchestra of ideas.

In the beginning I was annoyed, and later amused. At the end, only after we had stopped talking, I realised that his negativity was the only way he could ask for help, the only way he knew to talk about himself. His negativity concerned his vanished throne in an imagined history of Byzantium; it was about absence, loss and exile. Byzantium was his own personal myth against which he grounded his own soul. But was he really negative? He lived in abeyance, suspended over centuries and continents. Did that process start after Patrick’s death or before? I never dared ask him. Why didn’t he try to talk about this? And why didn’t he simply say, ‘I want to talk! Pay attention.’ He wanted to build, at last, an autonomous existence in his own right – but he didn’t know how to do it.

I cannot forget our long phone calls. Although he was saying that he didn’t like talking on the phone, I couldn’t make him stop. He wanted to bring to light certain conclusions of his about what he called ‘the transfigurable aspects of human life’.

He was a remarkable man who had shared his life with a great writer. Their symbiosis was complex. I met only one of them, the embodiment of a mutually challenging exchange in an intellectual quest. Memory resists order; it does not permit linear unfolding and causal explanation. It restructures the past and recreates it in a condensed and compressed way; then its existential truth emerges. How do we relate to such remarkable men?

I tried to depict the condensed time of intellectual tension around our meetings. Being with Mr Lascaris meant losing any notion of time. Time was the last enemy that his conscience had to overcome. In the beginning, the discussions were slow and indifferent and evasive; he was exploring me. When he understood that I was not inquisitive or intrusive, or not up to his level, he led me deeper into his world. These recollections refer to the history of his mind. They delineate the final chapter of his intellectual biography. It was the energy in the inner life of a man in full maturity that led me to write down what he said and my reactions.

One could say that Mr Lascaris gave the impression of an adolescent who grew old overnight. He thought of old age as something strange, unexpected and annoying. At times it was as if he believed that by opening the front door of his house he could walk in the streets of Alexandria and meet his relatives and friends.

As long as Patrick was there, he loved this life, but after his death he came to resent it and felt angry and frustrated. He asked himself for the first time, ‘Where am I, what have I done, where am I now?’ Such questions unsettled him and made him feel confused, incomplete, which he was indeed.

I met him alone. I depicted him as I met him. Sometimes I thought that his very wisdom protected him from life and from his own conscience. Mr Lascaris didn’t want us to know who he was: ‘My self belongs to me and to the moments I shared with Patrick,’ he said repeatedly. Indeed, how can we talk about the life of a human being who never left anything behind except blurry memories in the minds of others? Mr Lascaris was someone who had obliterated his self behind his commitment to another human being. He was always the addendum, the background, the penumbra. I tried to read the letter from the postscript.

Finally, this is a book about an immigrant, nostalgic and displaced. He was a storyteller, yes, but his stories went beyond the art and the act of narrating. He told me once that he would have liked to have recorded his dreams. I still remember the beginning of one of them: ‘I saw my mother in a crocodile’s body swallowing me up as I was struggling to get out.’ The dream ends here; I have lost the pages from my notebook. Indeed, the most vivid and haunting passages in this book are his dreams: I wish I had written down more of them.

But this is also a book about an immigrant in a state of remembering things and individuals as a magical reconstruction of their existence. The real protagonist in the episodes was the house in Martin Road. Walking around the house, along Martin Road and in Centennial Park was a rare transforming experience: it was an exit to the strange world of unexpected occurrences. Urban space was some kind of a labyrinth for Mr Lascaris: he felt drawn towards the many minotaurs lurking everywhere in familiar places.

In every corner around their neighbourhood, he recounted incidents, funny or serious, which stayed in his mind since the first day of their life in the house. ‘Are you really interested in these things?’ he asked me once. ‘Do you really care?’ How sad it must feel not to be taken seriously, or to feel one isn’t taken seriously. Did anyone ask Mr Lascaris how he felt, or what he thought about Australia, about his origins, about his life? So many books written on Patrick White, so many unorgasmic platitudes about god, mandalas and his mother! Was even one question addressed to him? And what of reflections on the quality of their relationship?

Domesticity represented the most profound initiation ritual for Mr Lascaris: so my book is not simply about exile but also about home. It is about the exit from the warm unity with culture and about the entrance to the embodied time of another human, the person you love and hate simultaneously. The uncertainties and the ambiguities we feel when confronted by someone else’s mystery and the perplexing ambivalence we all feel towards each other – that’s home and exile. We build our home only when we are lost. Everything we lose is our home.

I have tried to erect a cenotaph to Mr Lascaris so that his mind, his sensibility, could lead readers into a dialogue about ‘the transfigurable aspects of human life’.