George Solomos

George Paul Solomos (September 16, 1925 – November 8, 2010), also known as Themistocles Hoetis from 1948 to 1958, was an American publisher, poet, filmmaker and novelist.

Family background

G. P. Solomos was born in Detroit in 1925, the youngest of five children of Greek-born Christian parents.

The Solomos family were descendants of tobacco tycoon Count Nicolas Solomonee from Venice. They were olive oil producers who settled in Greece before the end of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829).
They were relatives of the Greek poet Dionysios Solomos who had lived on the Greek island Zante ( Zakynthos) most of his adult life; his most famous poem "Hymn to Liberty" is the Greek National Anthem.

His father had left Sparta because of a family tragedy when he was still a teenager. Having been educated in the English language he decided to make his way to the USA.
His mother – also from Sparta – was taken to the States by her two older brothers for similar tragic reasons as his father.
His parents were introduced on landing in New York about 1910, and decided to marry and stay in the United States for a while.

George Solomos published and wrote under the name ''Themistocles Hoetis'', the surname of his mother's family, from 1948 to 1958, after being advised by some relatives that his views could attract trouble for his family.

Early life

George was born and raised in Detroit; an American city which became known as Motor City – the center of the US car industry – as well as a wellspring of much great popular music; from soul to heavy metal and techno.
Prior to Motown, jazz had moved from up from the clubs of Chicago to Detroit in the 1920s, and George spent much of his teenage years in jazz clubs. His father ran a large Mediterranean delicatessen and general food store on Vermont and Henry Street, right near to Michigan Avenue.

George Solomos joined the USAF at the age of 17 after changing his birth certificate with his father's permission. After a short period of training, he was almost immediately shipped to Britain, where he became a radio operator in an American B-17 Flying Fortress bomber based in an airfield in East Anglia. After his plane was shot down on his eleventh bombing mission to Germany; the crew bailed out of the burning bomber and George ended up landing tangled in the branches of an apple tree in North East France, near to the Belgian / Dutch border. He was rescued by a French grandmother and her granddaughter. After a night in the farmhouse he was passed to the French Resistance.
He was taken on a journey of over 200 miles to a little village north of Paris called Evereux. He stayed in the village with the caretaker of Château de Beaufresne, which had belonged to the famous impressionist painter, Mary Cassatt. The chateau was being used as a residence for German officers. At this point he was given a new – fake – ID card with a swastika stamp. George Solomos was then passed to other members of the Resistance who helped the young airman cross Occupied France and eventually enter Spain, from where he was sent to Gibraltar, and then back to his airbase near Ipswich.

Later life

From 1948 to 1958 George Solomos used the pen-name ''Themistocles Hoetis''. A relative had warned him that he could bring shame to the family with his outspoken political views, which had developed in response to both the war and the de-programming that he received back in the United States – a standard "treatment" for all servicemen who had been in close contact with Communists. Under this name he and Albert Beneviste published and edited a magazine called ''ZERO: A Review of Literature and Art''. The first issue contained the famous attack on Richard Wright by James Baldwin, followed by a short story by Wright. Among the prominent writers featured in the magazine were Samuel Beckett, Paul Bowles, Christopher Isherwood, Kenneth Patchen, and Thomas Mann's eldest son, Klaus Mann. ''Zero'' Press from 1956 also published novels and a collection of stories by Gore Vidal. The magazine ''Zero'' ran from 1949 to 1956. Its first two issues were published in Paris in 1949, the rest in Tangiers, Mexico City and in New York.
A first anthology of Zero was published in 1956, another without his involvement in 1974 by ''The New York Times''.
An additional number was issued in Philadelphia in 1980. It reported on the very violent action taken by the Philadelphia Police Department against the black revolutionary commune MOVE.

He married Gidske Anderson in London in 1952. She had been with the wartime resistance in Norway. She met Solomos in Paris after the War. They both shared a love of jazz and, as a neighbor, she had asked to borrow some of his records. She was then working for the Norwegian newspaper '' Arbeiderbladet'' and later became deputy chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. She died in 1993.

Having published his novel ''The Man Who Went Away'' in 1952, George received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1953 to live and write in Mexico City, where he completed his still unpublished book ''Thermopylae'', a novel about war and the ideals of ancient Sparta.

In 1958 at Detroit Town Hall George legally changed the name he had used for the last ten years while publishing ZERO – ''Themistocles Hoetis'' – back to his birth name of George Paul Solomos.

From 1958 to 1960, George was asked by Dr. Bascilius (Head of Humanities) at Wayne State University, where he had completed a one-year course after the war ended in 1945 – which was his entitlement as a US veteran – to propose and edit work for publication by the Wayne State University Press (WSU Press). The first book he designed for the WSU Press was ''The Poems of William Blake'', which won the award of Best Poetry Anthology of the year 1958 from the Poetry Society of America. The next year, 1959, he had prepared a version of the anti-nuclear tract by Bertrand Russell, ''Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare'' which the WSU Press had already proofed and printed. It was withdrawn under threat from large industrial sponsors who threatened to withhold funding. Solomos left the United States soon after this and returned to Europe.

Films

George made two films in Italy (1961–63).
The first that he made was a 20-minute film called ''Echo in the Village'', which was shot on two 35mm cameras over 5 days in a small village called Cappadocia. It is in black and white and stars the town's inhabitants. It is based on his original story about a grandfather helping a boy learn English so that he can leave the village and go to America.

George Solomos was re-united with many of the people who had featured in the film, including the boy who had played the young shepherd, when he returned to Cappadocia in 2002, on the fortieth anniversary of the film.

A public screening was arranged in the village and a programme about the event was broadcast on the State TV channel.

The second film is called ''Natika'', and stars John Drew Barrymore, who was at the time living in Rome; and a young Welsh woman called Maureen Gavin for whom this was to be her only major film appearance. It was made on a larger budget than ''Echo in the Village'', and was written and directed by George Solomos, as well as using the same personnel as his previous film.

The film concerns a destructive romance between a young harpist studying in Rome, and a louche playboy and heir to Europe's wealthy corporate and governing class, played by J. D. Barrymore.

The film was largely financed by a rich young American, Gray Frederickson, who was based in Tehran tending his Oklahoma father's oil wells but was attracted to Rome to break into the movie business. After taking the film to be re-edited before its completion, Fredrikson presented it at various film festivals as his production debut and went on to become a major Hollywood producer (e.g. Apocalypse Now).

George was also a mentor to the young George Moorse, who was one of the directors of radical German cinema in the 1960s. Moorse's first film ''In Side Out'' (1964) – with playwright Tom Stoppard in the cast – was made with Gérard Vandenberg, the cinematographer who worked on George Solomos' two films.

Travels and further projects

Tangier and Morocco

George was a regular visitor to Morocco, where his friends Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles had lived for many years. He had first gone there in 1950 with Irving Thalberg, Jr., the son of the famous film producer of the same name, who later became a professor of philosophy.
An article in the fashion magazine ''Flair'', which was aimed at the New York literati, published with a transparent cover by the Condé Nast Publications heiress Fleur Cowles

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