This is a second selection from the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor, a successor to Dashing for the Post, published in 2016. The title, like that of its predecessor, alludes to an expression often used by Paddy (as he called himself, and as almost everyone called him), ‘dashing for the post’. His letters suggest that he is always writing in a rush. ‘No more now, darling Diana, as I must pelt down the hill to the post,’ ends one typical letter to Lady Diana Cooper. Many of his letters are headed ‘In Tearing Haste’ – so many, in fact, that he felt able to use the phrase as the title for a volume of his correspondence with his intimate friend ‘Debo’, Duchess of Devonshire. This hurry appears to have been motivated by a sense of duty, or even guilt; his letters are peppered with requests for forgiveness for not having written earlier. After heading one letter ‘In Sackcloth and Ashes’, he continued: ‘The above should be the title of a published volume of my letters – if published one day in a hundred years’ time – as all my letters start with abject apologies for lateness in answering …’ In another he wrote that sackcloth and ashes were ‘my letter-writing uniform’. (The publishers of this volume felt that ‘In Sackcloth and Ashes’ would be a misleading title for a collection of such exuberant letters.)
Yet if some of his letters were written at speed, most were written with care. They are full of wit and sparkle. Some of them are long, and must have taken hours to write – indeed, some of the letters themselves show that he wrote them over a period of several days.
Letters mattered to Paddy for a number of reasons, both practical and personal. One was that he moved around a lot. He travelled widely throughout his long life, so letters were a means of informing his friends where he was and where to find him. When he did settle, it was in what was then a remote corner of the Peloponnese, where friends from England were unlikely to call unless invited to stay. Letters provided a lifeline from this isolated spot.
Paddy was a very sociable person who was often alone. Friends were important to him, and he kept his friendships in good repair by correspondence. Yet it went further than this. For him, letters were a means of reaching out to those whose company he enjoyed, of making convivial connections across the void. Paddy seems to relish the contact with those to whom he is writing, even if it is only on paper. He is psychologically and often emotionally engaged with his correspondent. He writes to give pleasure to the recipient. His prose is lively, sometimes effervescent. The warmth of his personality rises from the page. At times one senses that Paddy is writing to raise his own spirits, as if he knows that his imaginative construction of those of whom he is fond will bring him comfort and cheer.
Another reason why Paddy took so much trouble with his letters is his awareness that they might one day find their way into print. The letters themselves occasionally hint at this possibility – I have already mentioned one such hint, his suggestion that any volume of his letters, if published ‘in a hundred years’ time’, should be entitled ‘In Sackcloth and Ashes’.
Dashing for the Post received enthusiastic, even ecstatic, reviews. ‘It goes without saying that nobody writes letters like this anymore, and it’s a loss,’ wrote Charles McGrath, reviewing the book in the New York Times. ‘Here are descriptions and anecdotes equal to anything in his writing,’ wrote Colin Thubron, himself one of the finest travel writers alive. John Julius Norwich likened Paddy to the great letter-writers of the past, among them Byron, Horace Walpole and Henry James.
When first asked to make a selection of Paddy’s letters, I had little notion of what I would find. I did of course know that he and Debo Devonshire had maintained a delightful correspondence over more than half a century, which had been collected and published in 2008, skilfully edited by Charlotte Mosley. But I did not know then that those letters were matched by others – for example, his correspondence with Diana Cooper, from 1952 until her death in 1986. One could make an equally enjoyable book from their exchanges: arguably even more so, because Diana was a better writer than Debo. Paddy’s letters to her were just as entertaining, and there were so many first-rate ones that I found it necessary to ration them in Dashing for the Post.
One reviewer of Dashing for the Post likened reading the letters to ‘gobbling down a tray of exotically filled chocolates, with no horrible orange creams to put you off’. I crammed them in, resulting in a book significantly longer than my tolerant publisher had wanted, and even so I was obliged to leave out many tempting ones. As I wrote in the introduction, the 174 letters to thirty-seven correspondents included in Dashing for the Post were only the first gleanings from a hoard (scattered across six countries) containing at least ten times their number. In working on that book, I found an abundance of letters that seemed to me worthy of publication. Plenty of these I decided not to include – not because they were not good enough, but because it might have unbalanced the book to include too many letters to any one particular correspondent (such as Diana Cooper), or to have included too many written at one particular time or from one particular place. I decided too to adopt a policy (which I have continued here) of eliminating letters that to any significant extent duplicated the contents of those published elsewhere. As I was finalising my selection for Dashing for the Post I was already planning a second volume, so I was able to set aside a hundred or so of Paddy’s best letters without too much of a pang. These form the core of this further selection. But it is refreshed by a significant quantity of letters that have come to light only since the first volume was published. This new book contains 155 letters to almost sixty correspondents, more than half of whom went unrepresented in Dashing for the Post.
The letters in this volume span more than three score years and ten, from October 1938 to February 2010. The first, a flirtatious letter to a teenage girl, was written when Paddy himself was only twenty-three. The last was written when he was ninety-five, a widower, very deaf, his voice already hoarse from the throat cancer that would soon kill him. As the letter describes, he had recently fallen down a flight of stairs. Despite tunnel vision, which made it hard for him to read even his own hand, he continued to pen letters that are enjoyable to read – though hard to decipher. From first to last, his letters exude a zest that was characteristic. Often they are decorated with witty illustrations and enhanced by comic verse. Sometimes they contain riddles and cringe-causing puns. Paddy’s delight in language is everywhere in these letters, expressed both in a serious concern to use words correctly, and in a playfulness, showing off what he can do.
By the time Paddy had reached adulthood, one of the two achievements for which he is best known was already behind him. At the age of eighteen he had set out to walk to Constantinople (as he called it), after a premature exit from his boarding school (which would honour him later in life as ‘a free spirit’). The very last letter in this book recalls ‘Nellie Lemar, the wonderful looking cause of my scholastic downfall’.
Paddy left England early in December 1933, and arrived at his destination just over twelve months later, on New Year’s Eve 1934. In the course of this ‘Great Trudge’ across Europe, he slept under the stars and in schlosses, dossed down in hostels, awoke more than once with a hangover in the houses of strangers, sat round a campfire singing songs with shepherds, frolicked with peasant girls and played bicycle polo with his host. He observed customs and practices that dated back to the Middle Ages, many of which were about to vanish forever – swept away, first by the catastrophe of war and then by communism. As Paddy puts it in one of his letters, ‘a sudden Dark Age descended that nobody was ready for’. He would give an account of his experiences in what became a trilogy of much admired books, which remained incomplete at his death: A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and the posthumously published The Broken Road (2013).
He would spend the late 1930s oscillating between Greece, Romania, France and England. In the late summer of 1938, before departing for Romania, he left with a friend in London two trunks, which were subsequently lost with their contents, among them notebooks he had kept on his walk and letters home to his mother. The loss helps to explain why very few of his pre-war letters have survived; though two have recently been discovered and are included here. Nor do more than a handful survive from the war itself. Rather than going into the Guards, which had rated his capabilities as ‘below average’, Paddy had been snapped up by the Intelligence Corps, on the basis of the fact that he spoke German, Romanian and Greek; and after being evacuated first from mainland Greece and then from Crete as the Germans invaded, he had been infiltrated back onto Crete to operate under cover, liaising with the local resistance. It was during this period that Paddy planned and executed the abduction of General Kreipe, commander of the German occupying forces, a bold exploit that won him the DSO, and the other achievement for which he is best known. One letter in this book is written during this very operation, from a bitterly cold mountain hideaway in German-occupied Crete. It had started badly: Paddy had landed by parachute, but poor weather had prevented the rest of the team from making the jump, and after further unsuccessful attempts they eventually had to be infiltrated onto the island from the sea, more than a month later.
After the war Paddy worked for the British Council in Athens for just over a year – his only period of peacetime employment, as it would turn out, which ended in his dismissal. It became quickly apparent that he was ‘unfit for office work’. The rest of his long life was spent as a freelance writer. Before the war he was already pursuing literary projects, and had translated a novel from French into English; though he was unsuccessful in his attempts to persuade successive generations of the Murray family to publish it. (One letter in this volume, to the American bibliophile Heyward Cutting, discusses the particular difficulties of translation from French into English.) After leaving the British Council, he accepted an invitation to write the captions for a book of photographs of the Caribbean, a task that grew into a full-length book, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950. (Paddy would invariably exceed any word limit he was given, just as he could never keep to a deadline.) From then on, though his letters betray a gnawing anxiety about lack of money, he seems never to have considered any other form of work. His experiences in the Caribbean inspired him to write a novel (his only work of fiction), The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953). He was already working on a book drawing on his travels in Greece, part autobiographical, part ethnographical, which grew into two volumes: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966).
One of the surprises of his letters is to find how much he was preoccupied with his writing. His habitual procrastination, and his apparent readiness to allow himself to be distracted by the smallest thing, suggest a dilettante. But the letters tell a different story, of a writer always trying to steal time to write, anxious at his lack of progress, guilty at his failure to fulfil his commitments, and perpetually trying to do better. This is the refrain of Paddy’s letters to his publisher, ‘Jock’ Murray, over a period of more than forty years. At Christmas 1984, for example, Paddy tells two friends that he has deferred a visit to London because he cannot face Jock while his book remains unfinished. Even after Jock’s death, when Paddy was in his eighties, he felt it necessary to apologise to Jock’s son for his presence in England by marking his letter ‘NO SKULKING’.
One reason for his slow progress was that he was easily distracted. His friend George Seferis deplored his propensity for ‘Penelopising’, so that at night he seemed to undo what he had done in the day. (Seferis was qualified to make such a criticism, since he managed to combine a career as a diplomat with work of such a high standard that he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.) Paddy exhaustively rewrote and corrected what he had written, almost desperate to avoid errors. His torment at a mistake in Between the Woods and the Water is exhibited here in an agonised letter to his friend ‘Dadie’ Rylands.
At the beginning of his career Paddy had been encouraged to aim high, and he strove to produce the masterpiece that his admirers believed him capable of. Some thought that he achieved this in A Time of Gifts. Yet even the acclaim this book and its successor attracted was double-edged, because it called attention to the fact that the story was incomplete. There was public as well as private pressure on him to finish the trilogy; an article in Le Monde mocked him as ‘L’Escargot des Carpates’ (‘The Snail of the Carpathians’), a soubriquet that he ruefully accepted. The unfinished work hung around his neck to the end, weighing him down. Even in one of his last letters, written long since everyone else had given up hope of the third volume, Paddy reports that he was still ‘toiling away’.
Paddy’s domestic arrangements were unusually chaotic, even by the standards of a freelance writer. For one thing, he found it hard to resist the lure of society, and was capable of travelling across a continent for a party. (One of the earliest letters in this book mentions attending a party in Paris that had begun at one o’clock in the morning.) He seemed unable to concentrate on work in London, and sought out retreats in order to write free of distraction. He became adept at cadging houses from friends: Lady Diana Cooper’s house in Bognor, Niko Ghika’s mansion on Hydra, Barbara Warner’s cottage in Pembrokeshire, Sir Walter and Lady Smart’s manor house in the Eure. ‘Mr Sponge has fallen on his feet again!’ he writes in one of these letters. Being usually alone in such places, he wrote to his friends, often inviting them to stay (which somewhat defeated the object). After the war he formed a permanent bond with Joan Rayner, who became his lifelong partner, and, eventually, his wife; but they spent much of the time apart, even after they settled at Kardamyli, on the Mani peninsula. Paddy formed the habit of spending Christmas at Chatsworth, for example, while Joan, who did not share his appetite for company, preferred to remain alone, or with her beloved brother Graham. This of course meant that they often had reason to write to each other. Paddy called himself ‘Mole’ and Joan ‘Mite’ or ‘Muskin’. His letters to Joan reveal an aspect of his character that he normally kept hidden: his slides into gloom and depression. He depended on her, not only for encouragement and emotional support, but for practical and indeed financial assistance. Joan was unquestionably the most important woman in his life. After her death in 2003, he was bereft. ‘I constantly find myself saying “I must write – or tell – that to Joan”, then suddenly remember that one can’t, and nothing seems to have any point,’ he wrote in reply to a letter of condolence.
But before Joan, there was ‘Balasha’, whom he had met in Athens in the spring of 1935. Though sixteen years older than him, she was still in her prime, and they fell in love – or, as Paddy might have put it, became ‘terrific pals’. They were together almost five years, until separated by the coming of war: after 1939, they would not see each other again for more than a quarter of a century. By the time they were able to renew contact, Paddy was in love with Joan. Yet Balasha Cantacuzène had been his first love, and seems to have retained a special place in his heart. Balasha’s life after the war was hard. As ‘elements of putrid background’, she and her family were vulnerable to persecution by the new communist regime. She tried to escape from Romania with her cousin Alexander Mourouzi, but was detained and sent back, and soon afterwards she and her sister were brutally evicted from their ancestral home. None of Paddy’s letters to her at this time have survived, but a letter written to Mourouzi in 1948 expresses sympathy for the hardships they are enduring and his hopes that they may be allowed to come to the West. In 1965 Paddy was able to travel to Romania, and visited Balasha and her sister after dark, because it was dangerous for Romanians to be seen to consort with anyone from the West. Paddy, himself still youthful and vigorous at fifty, was shocked by Balasha’s appearance: she was now an old woman, losing her teeth and her hair, the wreck of her former self. His subsequent letters to her are written with gallantry and tenderness: one has the sense that he is trying to include her in his life, even at long distance.
Joan recognised the sentimental importance of Balasha to Paddy, and wrote to her affectionately, as if to a member of the family. She also tolerated Paddy’s lovers (‘terrific pals’), and even his casual encounters with prostitutes, confident that he would never leave her. His love letters to his younger girlfriends are quite frisky – particularly his letters to Ricki Huston, the much younger Italian-American (fourth) wife of the film director John Huston.
As well as such love affairs, Paddy maintained several close and long-term friendships with women, conducted largely by letter. Though platonic, there was an element of courtly love in them; it is significant that his lady pen pals were all well born – among them Lady Diana Cooper (twenty-three years his senior) and Ann Fleming, both of whom he always addressed as ‘darling’. In 1980 Paddy dug out his letters from Diana Cooper and re-read them, a correspondence that by that time had lasted almost three decades. He was very moved, he told her, ‘by this record of shared delights and trust, confidence, warmth and loving friendship, and can’t believe my luck, unfaltering for all these years, and still prospering in such a marvellous, happy and treasured bond, light as garlands, as lasting as those hoops of Polonius’. Another long-term correspondence was with Debo Devonshire, youngest of the lively Mitford sisters, five years his junior. Some believed that Paddy and Debo had once had an affair, but those who knew them best doubted this. To give a flavour of their epistolary relationship I have included in this volume a couple of his early letters to Debo from In Tearing Haste, as well as two late letters, previously unpublished.
In the late 1940s, when writing The Traveller’s Tree, Paddy sought sanctuary in a succession of monasteries in northern France, an experience which itself would provide a subject for a short book, A Time to Keep Silence (1957). From these he wrote a series of letters that give a vivid picture of monastic life. Writing the letters, and observing how the monks lived, prompted him into reflections on spiritual questions, unusual subjects for him, at least in correspondence. He would return to his favourite monastery, Saint-Wandrille, several times over the next decade. Another, more temporary refuge was the ‘stupendous’ castle of Passerano, inland from Rome (from its battlements the dome of Saint Peter’s was just discernible on the horizon), which he took for the summer of 1959. Paddy had sewn ‘a vast heraldic banner, several yards square’, to adorn one wall at the end of a large banqueting hall. He was tempted to fly it from the highest tower, as he admitted in a letter to Jock Murray: ‘Then, when the Black Castellan of Passerano displays his gonfalon from the battlements, the peasants of the valley can hide their cattle and douse their lights and bolt up their dear ones!’ To balance this attack of folie de grandeur, he explained that the living conditions were primitive, since the castle had not been inhabited for over five hundred years. ‘There is no sanitation at all. It’s all fieldwork under the trees, and the only lighting is by oil-lamp.’
Yet another refuge was Easton Court at Chagford, a hotel on the edge of Dartmoor run by an unconventional American woman and her English beau. Easton Court had been discovered by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote several of his books there; other writers had followed, including Paddy’s friends John Betjeman and Patrick Kinross. From the late 1940s until the early 1960s Paddy stayed often at ‘Chaggers’, from which he wrote several of the letters included here. He went there to write; though another attraction of the hotel was that it offered the possibility of riding to hounds over the moor with the local hunt three times a week. Here and elsewhere, are lyrical descriptions of nature – striding out in the fields, picking his way along mountain paths, driving into the sunset.
As all this suggests, Paddy rarely stayed in one place long. In fact, he did not have a permanent home until he was almost fifty, in 1964, when he and Joan bought a piece of land overlooking the sea in the Mani, beneath the towering Taygetus mountains near the village of Kardamyli, and began building a house. Letters included here describe the search for a site, negotiations to purchase the land, and plans for the house itself and the surrounding garden. For the first few summers at Kardamyli, Paddy and Joan bivouacked in tents as the land was cleared and the house was built. Paddy took a keen interest in every detail of the design and construction, a further distraction from his writing, as he complains in a long letter to Joan. Work on the house would not be complete until the end of the decade.
Some of their friends came to visit, bringing with them a whiff of the wider world to this remote region. But much of the time Paddy and Joan were alone at Kardamyli, with just each other and their cats for company, enjoying simple pleasures such as swimming and reading. One letter tells of walking in the mountains and being followed by goats, trying one device after another to shake them off.
These letters provide accounts of Paddy’s travels in Turkey and Tibet; Jordan and Syria; India and Sri Lanka; France, Italy, Spain and Portugal; Scotland and Ireland; Hungary and Romania; Central and South America, and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The incongruity of a film crew, headed by the maverick director John Huston, and a starry cast that included Trevor Howard, Juliette Gréco and Errol Flynn, on location in ‘darkest Africa’ is explored in two letters from a former French colonial territory, now Cameroon. Paddy was there in his temporary capacity as screenwriter, since he had adapted the novel for the screen. Another letter relates the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe’s abduction. On location in the French Alps, Paddy met a screen version of himself. ‘Dirk Bogarde turned out to be absolutely charming … everything that the most confirmed snob could pray for,’ he wrote to Joan.
It would be foolish to deny that Paddy had a romantic interest in aristocracy, and all its paraphernalia: genealogy, heraldry and the rest. Yet if this was snobbery, it was of a comparatively innocuous kind. There was nothing oleaginous in Paddy’s relations with his betters (except perhaps, in his attitude to Her Majesty the Queen). Nor was there any superciliousness towards the ‘lower classes’. Paddy was at ease in any company; he could walk into a simple taverna and soon have everyone singing. His letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a chance conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, when Paddy opens the wrong door, or a glass of ouzo under the pine trees with Harold Macmillan. They describe encounters with such varied figures as Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson. But Paddy also relates his adventures with the humble: a ‘picknick’ with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a drunken feast in the Cretan mountains with his old comrades from the resistance, most of them simple shepherds and goatherds.
‘He was the most English person I ever met,’ recalled Agnes ‘Magouche’ Fielding, second wife of Paddy’s close comrade, Xan: ‘Everything was ripping, and there was more talk of P. G. Wodehouse than of Horace or Gibbon.’ Indeed, Paddy himself was something of a Wodehouse hero, in his boyish manner, his innocence, his gentleness, his sense of fun, and his tendency to get into scrapes. (One letter included in this volume tells of a high-spirited brawl, alcohol-fuelled, in County Kildare, which Paddy had provoked.) His letters are dotted with amusing and usually affectionate anecdotes about the eccentrics he has known.
There is an absence of malice in his writing, and a related unwillingness to offend. Several of his letters express anxiety that casual comments made in private correspondence may wound if broadcast. Towards the end of his life he began to edit those of his own letters in his possession, censoring passages that might cause upset, and adding the occasional explanatory note for his biographer, Artemis Cooper. Both he and Joan were distressed to read two vicious poems about Paddy written by Maurice Bowra, who had been their guest on several occasions, and whom they considered a good friend. ‘I like[d] Maurice very much, which makes the whole thing even gloomier,’ Paddy wrote in a letter included here. He asked for the poems about himself to be suppressed, as well as his own disobliging anagram for Bowra, ‘Eroica Rawbum’.
Paddy was a philhellene, an Englishman who went to live in Greece, as Byron had done. Indeed, there was more than a little of Byron about him. Like Byron, he chose to swim the Hellespont, the treacherous strait between Europe and Asia. Byron claimed this swim as ‘my greatest achievement’, though he had been twenty-two when he undertook it; Paddy was sixty-nine.
In Athens after the war Paddy formed close and enduring friendships with Greek artists and intellectuals, especially the poet George Seferis, the painter Niko Ghika and the ‘Colossus’ of letters, George Katsimbalis; but in the mid-1950s some of these became strained by the Cyprus Emergency. This was ‘an argument among friends’: two nations, Britain and Greece, which had enjoyed a long history as allies. It was understandable that Greeks should feel a claim on British sympathies, since only a decade earlier, in 1940–1, they had been the only other people fighting Axis troops on the continent of Europe. Paddy felt a conflict of loyalties, between the country of his birth and the country he would make his home. The enmity was such that he felt obliged to quit Greece for a while.
In general, Paddy was not a political person. An instinctive, old-fashioned conservative, he took little interest in politics except when it touched him in some way. In a letter to Jessica Mitford (the communist sister) in 1983, he tells her that he has enjoyed her piece on Mrs Thatcher’s England ‘not so much for the sentiments – I rather fear that in terms of hands and bell I wring when you ring, and vice versa: too late for this old ocelot to do anything about his spots, I fear – but for the splendid jokes’. As a young man travelling through Germany in the mid-1930s he had disliked the Nazis he encountered because of their crudeness and their anti-Semitism, but he was indifferent to their rhetoric. In 1967 he reacted cautiously to the military takeover in Greece, the so-called ‘Colonels’ coup’. In a letter to Joan, who was in England at the time, he suggests that she may know more about what is happening than he does. ‘All my spontaneous sympathies (in spite of my official views generally) are against the coup,’ he wrote, ‘largely because those in the provinces who welcome it are … the people one likes least in Greece.’ In another letter to Jock Murray, cautiously worded to evade the scrutiny of the censor, he appeals for help to free the Greek publisher of Mani, who ‘has been roped into durance for some unstated reason, where she still vilely is’. During the regime of the ‘Colonels’ he became friendly with Tzannis Tzannetakis, then in political exile, and a prominent politician (briefly prime minister) once democracy had been restored.
Paddy’s magpie mind is evident in his letters. Before setting out on his ‘Great Trudge’ he had packed The Oxford Book of English Verse in his rucksack, and on the walk had committed much to memory, so that he could recite great chunks of poetry, more or less accurately, at will. He would continue to read widely throughout his life, and was able to retain much: repeatedly topping up a cornucopia of knowledge that overflowed into his correspondence. In a letter to Diana Cooper, Paddy points to ‘the enormous amount of buried quotation’ in Raymond Asquith’s letters to his wife, ‘which must mean a vast quantity of shared poetry which was in daily use, and pointless if the other correspondent couldn’t spot it’. There is an enormous amount of buried quotation in Paddy’s letters too, and one suspects that a significant proportion of this went unrecognised by their recipients. I daresay that some of it has gone unrecognised by the editor.
The letters themselves tell us something of the circumstances in which they were written. ‘I’m scribbling this in a glassed in loggia overlooking a dilapidated Tuscan farmyard and trellis,’ one letter explains; another that he is sitting in the garden of the British Embassy in Athens, with the head of an enormous Labrador on his lap. ‘The sun set some time ago, I’m writing outside the studio, and it’s getting darker and darker, bats wheel about among the cypresses, the sea is a fading zinc and lilac hue, and I bet this is getting less and less legible,’ he writes to Jock Murray. In a letter to Harold Acton, he apologises for the smudged ink. ‘I had put a glass of whisky and soda on my desk (during a thunderstorm), then all the lights went out, as they are prone to here. Fumbling for matches, I knocked the glass over, hence the frightful mess.’
Once Paddy was settled at Kardamyli, he seems to have developed a routine of rising early to work (with a half-hour swim at seven, so that he could lie on his back in the water and watch the sun come up over the Taygetus mountains), writing letters in the afternoon; often they refer to the need to curtail before the post departs. On several occasions he opens a sealed letter to add a postscript. Then he might begin work again. ‘I have several times – the first time in ages – got into that wonderful, oblivious and timeless trance where meals flash by like brief irrelevances – eleven o’clock last night before I thought of dinner (just in time) and then far on into the night,’ he writes in a letter to Joan.
Almost all of Paddy’s letters were written by hand, though a handful were then corrected and typed. Some of them – particularly those he wrote towards the end of his long life – are difficult to decipher. ‘Please tell me truthfully: could you read this letter or was it impossible work?’ he asked, as a postscript to one of his last letters to Debo Devonshire. In editing his letters, I have occasionally found it impossible, and have been obliged to resort to guesswork, deciding on the balance of probabilities which word is meant.
As I have already mentioned, some of Paddy’s letters are very long, ten tightly written pages or more. A rough estimate suggests that he wrote between 5,000 and 10,000 letters in his adult lifetime. That is an average of several letters a week – and of course, there would have been many weeks when he could not have written any, so the rest of the time he must have been writing more. When one reflects on this, what is most striking is the sheer amount of time and effort Paddy devoted to writing letters. Since many of them record his unhappiness at failing to fulfil his promises to his publisher (not to mention his bank manager), one is forced to conclude that writing letters took up time he could have spent writing books. But was this such a bad thing? Of course, it was regrettable that he never completed his trilogy, and perhaps sadder still that the evening of his life was darkened by anxiety about the unfinished work.
Yet we may take a different view. The letters may sometimes be penned in haste (or even ‘in tearing haste’), but they are written in a spontaneous, free-flowing prose that is easier and more entertaining to read than the baroque style of his books, which at times can seem overworked. I would argue that Paddy’s correspondence is part of his oeuvre, worthy to take its place alongside the work that he published in his lifetime. Now that we can read his letters at length, we can judge their worth. At their best, they are as good as any in the English language. They are utterly distinctive: Paddy’s sunny nature shines through them. His letters are exhilarating; to borrow an expression he liked to use, they are absolutely ‘tip-top’.