Villa Seurat: street of artists
I would never have set foot in Villa Seurat had it not been for Betty Ryan . Betty Ryan (aka Elizabeth Gordon) Photo: Popaganda.gr Yes, I'm paraphrasing the opening sentence of Henry Miller's book, The Colossus of Maroussi : “I would never have gone to Greece had it not been for a girl named Betty Ryan who lived in the same house with me in Paris.” But it's true. I – or, more precisely, my daughter, Irene – would never have looked for Villa Seurat , a short dead-end street in the 14 th arrondissement, had it not been for Betty Ryan . Betty Ryan was a friend of my wife's family. When her parents met her, in Maine in the late 1940s, she was married to Harry Gordon and so was known to them as Elizabeth Gordon. That's how I was introduced to her when I met her in Athens in 1972, on my first trip to Greece. She seemed old then, slight with gray hair and thick glasses, but I was only 22. She was 58, I now know. At the time, she was living in Kifissia,...