The relationship between literature and politics is necessarily fraught. This is especially true for writers engaged in matters of state. If writers try to articulate questions central to the human condition, diplomats must provide answers. The responsibilities of these vocations almost inevitably conflict, for the writer’s commitment to truth may test the diplomat’s instructions. But a precious few have managed to excel in both spheres. The tradition of literary diplomats reached its zenith in the early 1960s, when three Nobel Prizes for Literature were awarded to writers who had also served as diplomats—­Saint-­John Perse of France, Ivo Andric of Yugoslavia, and George Seferis of ­Greece.

War is the ultimate test of diplomatic skills and literary vision. And World War II, which for political reasons marked the end of the diplomatic careers of Perse and Andric, is the starting point for 

, Seferis’s account of his days and nights in Egypt with the Greek government in exile and then as ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Britain. Translated by Roderick Beaton, who published an acclaimed biography of Seferis, these selections from Seferis’s notebooks, from 1941–44 and 1953–56, offer a portrait not only of critical moments in places that continue to make headlines, but also of a singularly talented writer whose grasp of contemporary issues—the fallout from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, for example, or the consequences of Cypriot independence—was informed by his historical sensibility. A Levant Journal is that rare book that will appeal to aesthetes and politicos alike.

Writing was how Seferis maintained a difficult balance in diplomatic circles. In one entry Seferis bitterly notes, “Whether the entire population of my country is wiped out, or only half of it, will now de­pend upon the idiocies of the British generals.” Elsewhere he confides that “seriousness and politics are two perfectly separate things.” Yet in the poems that emerge in these pages, often from observations of simple things like water lilies, Seferis yokes his artistic insight and long experience in the drawing rooms of power. “Whatever the hands of man take up with love is holy,” he notes. His writings, for ­example.

What counters his despair at the progress of the Second World War is his determination to record without sentimentality his impressions and en­counters. Here is a delightful sketch of Churchill on a visit to Cairo in ­1942:

In the ballroom, . . . hunched up like Rodin’s 

, except for his head that was watching and following everything, sat Churchill. He wore mauve dungarees; held in his hand, like a stubby pencil, was a long cigar. With all this crowd around him, he looked somehow smaller, as though at the far end of an enormous ­lecture-­theater. Then he spoke and came closer. At the end, when it was time for questions, some reporter wearing a fez asked him what he thought of ­Rommel.

“That is the way of generals,” he replied, “sometimes to advance, sometimes to retreat. Why, no one knows . . .”

 is also lined with departures, sometimes hastily arranged, and in the pages devoted to the poet’s ambassadorial duties, which required that he be constantly on the move, he exhibits a keen understanding of history’s changing course. As befits a man whose life was marked by ­exile—­from his native Smyrna, when Greece and Turkey exchanged populations in 1923; from Athens during the German occupation, and again during the military junta that began in 1967—he had a better grasp than most of the consequences of the dislocations that would shape the region in which he ­served.

“Impossible to imagine the human capacity for making a mess of things,” he laments. But in these intimate writings, Seferis bears witness to our folly with such care and precision that we may begin to understand some of our own mad impulses. And if this is a liberating truth, it is of a piece with his life and work, which is why his funeral, in 1971, brought throngs of people into the streets of Athens, in defiance of the junta. They sang a forbidden song based on one of his poems, with the policemen looking ­on.

 directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and is the author of 

Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain

Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars

 by George Seferis, Translated and edited by Roderick Beaton, Ibis Editions, 2007. 

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Christopher Merrill appreciates the "intimate writings" of Greek diplomat George Seferis, whose Levant Journal offers "a portrait not only of critical moments in places that continue to make headlines, but also of a singularly talented writer."

Art and Statecraft

When historian John M. Barry set out to write a book examining the role of religion in modern American public life, his exploration took him instead back to the settling of New England and the unsettling figure of Roger Williams, the first colonist to cultivate the freedom of thought we regard as our birthright. Williams proposed a radical understanding of the relationship between the civic and the spiritual—what is owed to Caesar and what to God. Advocating liberty of conscience, he built a wall between the wilderness of the world and the garden of faith that has shaped our political discourse for the last 400 years.

Williams was born in England around 1603, the son of a shopkeeper in the burgeoning middle class. When he was hired as a teenager to take shorthand for Sir Edward Coke, the leading jurist of the age, he had the chance to witness, in the Star Chamber and Privy Council, battles over the issue of royal prerogative that laid the groundwork for civil war. He studied the foibles of all sorts of men, beginning with the monarch, and the perils of absolute power. The rivalry between Coke and his nemesis, Sir Francis Bacon, was likewise instructive. Barry argues that Williams adopted Coke’s reverence for the law and Bacon’s respect for empirical evidence, an uncommon mixture of intellectual traits that distinguished him from his countrymen—and launched him on a collision course with the authorities in England and America.

After attending Cambridge, a seedbed of Puritanism, Williams became chaplain to Sir William Masham, a Puritan leader in whose service he met many men destined to play large roles in the English Civil War, including Oliver Cromwell. He also fell for a woman above his station; rebuffed in his suit for her hand, he nearly died of a fever, and soon after his recovery he married another woman and sailed for the New World, possibly to escape imprisonment for his revolutionary views.

Upon his arrival in 1631, Williams impressed the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Yet when they offered him a teaching post in the colony’s church, he refused on the grounds that it had not separated from the Church of England. The colony was not a theocracy, strictly speaking, but its civil and religious powers were working hand in glove to dictate how individuals were supposed to think—anathema to Williams. “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” he wrote. And his clashes with the authorities led to banishment for his “dangerous opinions.”

He headed into the woods, in the dead of winter, eventually settling with his followers on Narragansett Bay. There he established the New World’s first democracy, which he called Providence. Beset by men from within and without who were avid for land, he mediated disputes between settlers and their native neighbors. (In the Indian war of 1637 he furnished Massachusetts Bay leaders with intelligence about the movements of the tribes in the area, whose motives he understood better than any other settler.) He traveled twice to London to secure patents for the plantation later known as Rhode Island. And he published important texts on religion and political theory, as well as a seminal work on Native American language and life. All this he did in the interest of creating the right relationship between the things of this world and those of the next.

Barry is no biographer—Williams does not really enter the story until a third of the way through the book; the opening chapters are devoted to historical background—but he does draw a vivid portrait of the time. Williams was a Zelig-like figure present at decisive historical events throughout his long life. (The exact date of his death in 1683 is unknown.) Barry is adept at connecting those events—the Puritan migration, the English Civil War, the Restoration, King Philip’s War—to Williams’s “lively” experiment in democracy, the results of which are still under review.

The achievement of this forgotten founding father is indeed a continuing challenge to every American: “For he knew,” Barry writes, “that to believe in freedom and liberty required faith in the freedom of thought, of conscience. And that was soul liberty.”

The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War

. He directs the University of Iowa's International Writing Program.

"Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty" 

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Advocating liberty of conscience, he built a wall between the wilderness of the world and the garden of faith that has shaped our political discourse for the last 400 years.