All the Way from Rugs to Riches

By Michael Demarest

THE ANATOLIAN by Elia Kazan; Knopf; 436 pages; $15.95

In the small, squalid mind of Stavros Topouzoglou there seems not a scintilla of that diamantine nobility ascribed,to the Grecian soul. As his employer, an Armenian, says, "A fellow like you, here, has to be an anarchist, a boxer or a gangster." In fact, all Stavros ever wants to be is rich. Much has happened to him since he landed in New York in America America, published in 1962. The immigrant is now 32, the year is 1909, and Anatolian-born Stavros, or Joe Arness, as his American friends call him, has finally saved up enough money to bring his whole family: "Mommah," four brothers and three sisters to the U.S. He has laid a veneer of American-style street smarts on the skills of the hamal, or dock walloper, who learned survival on the wharves of Turkish Constantinople. Even more important, in the two decades since Stavros' first arrival on the bestseller lists, Kazan, the stage and screen director, has learned to write a novel. Under the surface of his adrenal prose style and a crowded, boiling plot, the author provides a cast of authentic substance and feeling.

Stavros' father Isaac, who was also to have made the trip to New York, died in Turkey as the clan was about to embark. This leaves the eldest son in the uneasy role of head of a reunited family that broods and sulks and squabbles even as it breathes the ennobling air of tenement America. His balky siblings gravely crimp this Broadway Joe's ambitions, sexual, social and financial. Has he not promised his father to keep the family together? Does he not search endlessly to find husbands for the dark-skinned sisters? Where, then, is his free time? How can his soul soar? Still, even with these burdens, the $40-a-week rug salesman (with a shoeshine parlor on the side) manages to realize a few grandiose immigrant dreams. With his employer, the mysterious, immensely rich Mr. Fernand Sarrafian, senior partner of the Sarrafian Brothers carpet empire, Stavros investigates new worlds, from race tracks to brownstone bacchanals.

On the way, he vengefully disrupts the lives of sundry upper-middle-class native-born Americans who have insulted him. Graduating from Saturday-night rental sex, he has a dizzy love affair with Althea Perry, a Vassar-educated poppet from Mount Ivy, N.J., whose allure is not at all dimmed by the fact that she is the daughter of Stavros' immediate boss and chief tormentor at the store. During World War I, Stavros has magnificent visions of a Greater Greece, when the wicked Turks will be laid low as the profits in rugs soar skyward. They almost come true. Meanwhile, the sisters grow older and unhappier. Of his favorite, Eleni, he remarks, "Her chest now was as flat as her back and the lines around her eyes had deepened . . . He remembered the soft-skinned, soft-eyed girl who'd arrived in America ten years before. The prettiest of them all she'd been that day, her skin the most delicate olive, lightly brushed with rose; that day she'd been a beauty." To keep the family busy, Stavros sets them up in their own rug business. But, in the great tradition of realized fantasies, it does not make them happy.

When his attention wavers from the buck, ape-neck Stavros is racked by culture shock. Women provide most of the tremors. He half-believes with his sister Fofo that "most American women were, or had recently been, prostitutes." Almost in wonder at his own creation, Kazan watches his protagonist devote "hours to a consideration of the nature of sexual relations in Western society," then come "to the conclusion he'd started with, that the only way to keep a woman in line was to do what the Anatolians do: run off a string of pregnancies, then dress the woman in black and beat her every time her eyes lifted from the ground."

He beats his grand amour Althea a few times; nonetheless, she keeps her eyes lifted in the same direction as Stavros: wealthward. In a hilarious set piece, she accepts the highest-bidding suitor and heads for the altar with Fernand's son. But at the last moment, Althea refuses to sign a marriage contract that provides $200,000 for her odious mother and nothing for herself. While her fiance rushes off to get drunk, the bride-to-be makes love to Stavros in her wedding gown and precipitates an unforgettable four-wall fray for all. Yet all's wealthy that ends wealthy. While his old flame marries on her own terms (he is not invited to the wedding), Stavros, now 42, lands a 40% interest in Sarrafian. At war's end he sets off for Greece in all the rugs-to-riches splendor of the returning immigrant.

Kazan, whose Greek immigrant father was a rug importer, may have shared some of his character's social trepidations as a student at Williams and Yale. His college nickname was Gadge, short for Gadget ("I was small, compact and eccentric"), but there is nothing mechanical in his development of The Anatolian. With humor and affection, as well as a bruised sense of the dark side of immigrant life, he has woven a saga as richly textured as a fine Kirman carpet. Or one of the great old Kazan films, for which The Anatolian would have made fine grist. --By Michael Demarest

Excerpt

"Stavros felt they should not have exhibited the body. Two hundred pounds had come down to one hundred and forty. As Stavros walked up to the casket, he remembered how Morgan Perry used to speak to him: 'You Greeks with olive oil in your veins instead of blood,' he used to say, 'you come here to see what you can get out of us, you and those other Mediterranean niggers. You grab what you can, then go back with our money. Make it here, spend it there; take everything, give nothing. Tell me what you've given this country? I know what you've taken--I pay you every Saturday. It's our generosity against your greed. Not just you, it's all the damned immigrants. But especially the Greeks, you're the worst. No wonder everybody in this country dislikes and distrusts you.'

Stavros used to resent it, but now a strange thing happened. . .he felt that the man's accusation was justified."

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