<p>Harry Mark Petrakis:</p>
<p><b>Back in the zone</b></p>
<p><b>It's all Greektown to this 81-year-old writer</b></p>
<p>March 31, 2005|By Patrick T. Reardon, Tribune staff reporter.</p>
<p>On an overcast Friday, Harry Mark Petrakis stands at the grave of his father and mother, tears welling in his eyes.</p>
<p>"I didn't expect it to affect me so much," he says, as if in apology. As if tears in a cemetery need to be forgiven.</p>
<p>He is 81 years old, and he has been talking about his middle name -- about how he came to include it in his byline on 20 novels, short story collections and other books, as well as scores of freelance pieces over a writing career spanning more than half a century.</p>
<p>"I'd always been Harry Petrakis," he says. And perhaps his biggest fan, during those many early years when no publisher would touch his writing, was his father, Mark, a Greek Orthodox priest who was born in Greece and knew little English. "He would keep a manuscript of mine -- it was a terrible manuscript -- in his drawer and show people who came to his office," Petrakis says. "He wasn't able to read it."</p>
<p>Mark Petrakis died in 1951. Five long years later, his son finally made his first sale -- a short story, bought by Atlantic magazine. "When the Atlantic asked me how I wanted my name on the story, I thought, 'Yes, I'll" -- here, his voice cracks -- "take his name too.</p>
<p>"All of his faith in me came from love, not anything in my work."</p>
<p>Shortly before noon, Petrakis steps out of the train station at 57th Street in Hyde Park. He had taken the South Shore from Dune Acres, Ind., where he and his wife, Diane, live.</p>
<p>"This year," he says, "it'll be 37 years in Indiana, and, yet, I've never written a story with a locale or background of Indiana."</p>
<p>Instead, nearly all of his novels and short stories have focused on the Greek neighborhoods in Chicago where, as a boy and young man, he lived and worked, particularly Halsted Street, the strip of restaurants north of the Eisenhower Expressway, also called Greektown.</p>
<p>"I identify so strongly with this city, and grew up here, and my formative years were spent here. These are areas I haven't been back into physically, but areas that I have never left as far as the writing is concerned."</p>
<p>Petrakis, a compact man with a bright white, closely trimmed mustache, has been a major figure on the city's literary scene since the 1960s. His most famous work, "A Dream of Kings," the tale of the larger-than-life Matsoukas who sacrifices everything, even his principles, in an effort to save his ailing son, was published in 1966.</p>
<p>By 1983, Petrakis had published seven novels -- but then the well ran dry. Over the next two decades, his only novel was "Ghost of the Sun," a sequel to "A Dream of Kings."</p>
<p>Neurological problems, causing intense pain in his feet and legs, led to fears of a permanent and degenerative disability, then to a deep, suicidal depression. After finding a better doctor and a good psychiatrist, Petrakis rose from those emotional depths, but he spent most of the 1990s writing two commissioned non-fiction books, a biography of industrialist Henry Crown and a corporate history of Motorola. It was a way, he says, of building up his savings.</p>
<p>"I'm conscious," he says, "that I may have lost two or three books of my own."</p>
<p>Indeed, when the commissioned works were finished, he says, "It was like a stopper had been pulled out of the bottle, and, in a year, I wrote `Twilight of the Ice,' and, while that was in the process of being published, I wrote `The Orchards of Ithaca.'"</p>
<p>The novels, published over the last two years by Southern Illinois University Press, focus on the Halsted Street neighborhood. They also represent an unexpected literary resurgence for Petrakis.</p>
<p>He has signed a contract with the publisher for his next novel, tentatively titled "The Shepherds of Shadows," a sequel to his earlier book about the Greek war for independence, "The Hour of the Bell." He has about 30,000 words on paper, and he has promised to complete the book by the summer of 2006.</p>
<p>He will be 83 then.</p>
<p>When Petrakis was growing up, his father was the pastor of Sts. Constantine and Helen Church on 61st Street.</p>
<p>"There was a Catholic school across the way," Petrakis says. "And it was mostly, at the time, populated by young black students, and we were at war. They were Christians, and we were Christians -- but we were Greek Christians, and that made us superior."</p>
<p>He laughs at the folly of youth: "We had terrible battles, vitriolic, vicious ones, that I look back on as deplorable. Yet, it was a time our bigotry was rampant."</p>
<p>The red-brick church with bright red-painted doors has been the home of St. Edmund's Episcopal Church since 1948, when the Sts. Constantine and Helen congregation moved to a new home.</p>
<p>Petrakis rings the bell, and Gloria Jackson, the church secretary, opens the door. "I was a boy here in the 1930s. My father, Rev. Mark Petrakis, was the parish priest here," he tells her.</p>
<p>Jackson opens the door wide, turns on some lights, and Petrakis finds an interior very much as he remembered it -- the pews, the ceiling painting of God the Father.</p>
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<p><b>Back in the zone</b></p>
<p><b>It's all Greektown to this 81-year-old writer</b></p>
<p>March 31, 2005|By Patrick T. Reardon, Tribune staff reporter.</p>
<p>"We drove past the church when my father died -- the funeral cortege drove by," he says of the last time he was here.</p>
<p>"This brings back ghosts."</p>
<p>As a storyteller, Petrakis has often rooted his novels and short stories in his own experiences. His two years of isolation at home recovering from tuberculosis, his short-lived career as a lunchroom operator, even his harrowing experiences with the neurologists -- he has dug into his own life again and again to create his fiction.</p>
<p>Yet, the one moment when he knew he was a writer -- the revelation that he could create as well as describe -- involved a tale that wasn't at all his own.</p>
<p>He was taking a course at Columbia College, and the assignment was to write a story of no more than a page and a half about Christmas, and read it to the class.</p>
<p>"I did a story of a waiter who worked in a restaurant, came home, found his wife missing, knew where she was, found her in a nearby bar -- drunk. Brought her home, slapped her, then washed her, put her to bed, and then went out to the back porch and brought in the small Christmas tree that he was going to decorate because, in the morning, when she woke sober, the tree would be decorated and things would be all right for a little while."</p>
<p>Petrakis says that, after he read the story, there was total silence. Finally, the teacher asked why no one had a comment. One student explained that he couldn't say anything because the story was so obviously autobiographical.</p>
<p>"I couldn't convince him that I wasn't that waiter with the drunk wife," Petrakis says, "and I knew that night -- it was snowing, and I walked afterward in Grant Park, and I remember feeling, `My God, if this is what I'm able to do in a page and a half . . . '"</p>
<p>Petrakis visited his parents' graves in Evergreen Cemetery and had a late lunch in Greektown, and now he's heading for Union Station to catch his train home.</p>
<p>"Somebody once said: `Where do you think you rank in the spectrum of literary people?' " he muses. "I said I never had any idea. All I know is that, in the world to come, they won't ask me why I wasn't Melville or Dostoevsky. They'll ask me if I was Petrakis -- to the best of my ability."</p>
<p>- - -</p>
<p>No trendy PhD material in his 'realist' novels</p>
<p>Harry Mark Petrakis is a frequent speaker on college campuses, and his short stories are often included in anthologies. But his work has rarely been the subject of a master's thesis or a doctoral dissertation.</p>
<p>That's not surprising, says Vassilios Lambropoulos, a classical studies/comparative literature professor at the University of Michigan, because Petrakis' straight-forward approach to writing is out of fashion among literary critics.</p>
<p>It is not experimental. It is not playful. It is not trendy PhD material," says Lambropoulos.</p>
<p>Petrakis is "a realist novelist who addresses all the important issues of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, identity, equality and ancestry that the average American reader-voter-worker cares about," Lambropoulos says. "He's more in the tradition of 'The Scarlet Letter' than 'Moby Dick.' "</p>
<p>Petrakis is more likely today to be included in an ethnic studies course than in a literature class. "He does not sugarcoat the immigrant experience in the United States," says Yiorgos Anagnostou, who teaches Petrakis' work in the modern Greek studies program at Ohio State University. "He does not hesitate to probe into the dark side of the American dream and show that hard work and good citizenship do not always translate into socioeconomic success."</p>
<p>Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist and author of "Greek Americans: Struggle and Success," calls Petrakis' writing very candid and truthful: "He's the Greek-American Saul Bellow."</p>
<p>-- Patrick T. Reardon</p>
<p>- - -</p>
<p>Petrakis feels at home enclosed in his perch</p>
<p>From the second-floor study of his home atop a squat, lakeshore sand dune, Harry Mark Petrakis can look out across the vast, expanse of Lake Michigan under a looming sky, shifting with the seasons.</p>
<p>But he rarely looks.</p>
<p>"Normally," he says, "the shades are down. I can't work because of the light on the [computer] screen. Also, the view becomes distracting."</p>
<p>For nearly half their lives, Petrakis and his wife, Diane -- chums from 1st grade on, spouses since 1945 -- have called this modest ramshackle structure in Dune Acres, Ind., some 44 miles from the Loop, their home. Residents since 1968, they raised two of their three sons here, and Petrakis has written novels, short stories, essays and remembrances in the study, his private preserve.</p>
<p>"I'm not allowed up there," Diane Petrakis says. "It's a holy mess," she whispers with a smile.</p>
<p>It is, no question, filled with piles of papers, old manuscripts, new manuscripts, books, mementos, paintings, posters, CDs and family photos.</p>
<p>"This room," Petrakis says, "has known my griefs and my joys. Nobody else has worked in it."</p>
<p>Yet, one particular joy has been his ability, during the course of his work day, to come down from his bookish aerie and share a cup of tea with Di, or perhaps a bit of lunch. To share, with the girl he courted in Hyde Park, a quiet moment watching the lake waves coming in, inexorably, yet ever changing.</p>
<p>"We've been married since we were 21," Petrakis says.</p>
<p>"We've been together so long that, when I inhale in one room, she exhales in the other."</p>
<p>-- Patrick T. Reardon</p>
<p>----------</p>
<p>preardon@tribune.com</p>