Paddy was twenty-four years old, and on a mushroom-gathering picnic in Rumania, when he heard the news that Germany had invaded Poland. He hurried back to England to enlist. Many years later he told his biographer that he came home in 1939 expecting to die. ‘I had read somewhere that the average life of an infantry officer in the First World War was eight weeks, and I had no reason to think that the odds would be much better in the Second. So I thought I might as well die in a nice uniform.’ Claiming Irish descent, he inveigled his way into the Irish Guards. ‘I joined “the Micks” in the ranks in 1939, same day as Iain Moncreiffe and other friends, though he was in the Scots Guards,’ he later explained (PLF to Rudi Fischer, 2 February 1982). ‘It was the first time future Guards officers went through the ranks, and a very good idea, though it was tremendously tough. We were all from the five Guards regiments – Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, Irish and Welsh – trained in a squad of thirty at the Gd’s Depot at Caterham by the Coldstream. All had been fixed up before joining through mild pull etc., I’m sorry to say.’

The letter that follows was written to a fellow recruit while Paddy was in hospital recovering from a bout of severe pneumonia which had almost killed him. Adrian Pryce-Jones (1919–68) was the younger son of a colonel in the Coldstream Guards. His brother Alan, later a travel writer and journalist, had been briefly engaged to Joan Eyres Monsell, Paddy’s post-war companion and, eventually, his wife.

To Adrian Pryce-Jones

1 February 1940

Redhill County Hospital

Earlswood Common

Redhill

Surrey

My dear Adrian,

I liked your letter, and it really was kind of you to write at such a moment of stress. God, how pleased you must have been to have escaped from that jail. My fate is positively tragic. Apparently, as I have missed over five weeks’ training through illness, the authorities are regretfully obliged to backsquad me; that is, I am to wait till they are at the six and a half weeks (the next Brigade Squad), finish with them and proceed with them to Sandhurst for the April intake. Isn’t this wretched? I am more vexed and disappointed than I can say; obviously, because it means the Depot for three weeks, and a long pointless wait before that, but still more because I would have so loved being at Sandhurst with you and our other friends. A still graver reason for concern presents itself: as the Irish Guards have only twelve vacancies, all being competed for in your course, my commission with them may be jeopardised, as there are fifteen candidates, and I don’t suppose they can very well hold one up for me, as there is such a crush. It may turn out all right, but if it doesn’t it will be very sad and disappointing. I can’t think of any other regiment I would like to join; and anyway, it would be wretched to be gazetted out of the Brigade. Why did I ever fall sick?

Really, you know, owing to those butcher boys at the Depot hospital, I very nearly died. I felt myself all through one night at the brink of turning into a lump of carrion. Luckily, all goes well now, and I am feeling very well, though I must remain here [1] another fortnight. . .

But that is enough about the horrid Depot, which you are probably beginning to forget. I want to know all about Sandhurst, if you can extricate yourself for half an hour from the maelstrom and write a fruity letter – uniform – who is there – juicy bits of scandal etc. – other candidates for our Regiments etc. Are you enjoying it? It must be silk and satin after Caterham. Please tell me all.

Here, life flows by in a mild lotus-eating atmosphere. Lots of books and fruit and flowers, in the middle of which I lie pale and endearing, with an attendant chorus of surprisingly personable and charming nurses. I have invented a fascinating brave, hurt, bittersweet expression, with eyebrows wrinkled up over a twisted smile, and I use this on them whenever I want some special favour. (Lights on late, drink etc.). It works every time. Family have been here several times, also sweet Prue Branch and Guy, [2] the ones I told you about. Last night something marvellous happened. I am just being tucked up for the night, when I hear strange foreign noises outside the door, which opens, and in bursts Anne-Marie Callimachi, [3] followed by Costa. [4] She was dressed in black satin and dripping with mink, with pearls and diamonds crusted at every possible point, topped by the maddest Schiaparelli hat I’ve ever seen. Then Costa, who is very dark, with a huge grin, and quite white hair at the age of thirty. He was dressed in a bright green polo jersey over which he wore a very long black new coat with an immense astrakhan collar: both laden with huge presents. The nurses were struck dumb. Shrill squeals burst from us all, and then we were gabbling the parleyvoo like apes. The nurses fled in disorder. Then of course, they couldn’t get a taxi as Anne-Marie had left Rolls Royces etc. in London; but they had their luggage, and stopped the night at the hospital! We all pretended they were married, so the Sister, with girlish squeaks, got their room ready, with screens coyly arranged between the beds. By this time Costa was telephoning the Ritz to say Her Highness wouldn’t be back that night, his voice echoing down all the passages. The sensation in the hospital was absolutely phenomenal. Huge princely coronets on the luggage – such nighties! Slippers! Oh!! The hospital hasn’t recovered yet, and my glamour-value among the nurses is at fever pitch.

It was great fun. We talked and laughed idiotically late into the night, Anne-Marie narrating her latest experiences, which, as usual, were quite extraordinary. I dramatised the Depot to them. I told them about you, and as they know your brother Alan well, Anne-Marie was very curious to know what you were like. I said you were just a naughty little jazz-baby. Nothing could have intrigued her more.

They left this morning, Anne-Marie leaving a munificent cheque for the Hospital Fund, which I tendered with a languid gesture to the head doctor. Their passage will not be forgotten for ages!

Alors, mon petit Adrien, te voilà déjà presqu’un petit officier dans la Garde Galloise! Ce que vous devez rigoler là-bas, vous autres. Oh la la! Je me rouge de jalousie. Je vous emmerde! Et royalement! [5]

My address during my sick leave is at my sister’s: c/o Mrs Fenton, St Arild’s House, Kington, near Thornbury, Gloucestershire. Don’t forget to send your civilised address when you write. I will be a day or two in London before going to my bucolic retreat. We might meet and make whoopee. Helen Hardinge [6] suggested I might go and stay a bit at Windsor, but it isn’t supposed to be frightfully healthy there, so I don’t think I will. May go to the Sitwells for a bit. [7]

Remember me affectionately to Desmond and Trevor and Iain [8] and Hal & Michael, Nevill, Douglas, Jeremy, and all the boys. I can’t tell you how I will miss being with you all there. Pity Holland [9] & the wicked Baron aren’t there too!

Every kind of good wish to yourself, mon petit, and very much luck for a successful course at Sandhurst.

Love Paddy

[1] In hospital.

[2] Flying Officer Guy Rawstron Branch (b. 1913) and his wife, Lady Prudence, née Pelham, daughter of the 6th Earl of Chichester. They were married the previous March. PLF and his Rumanian lover, Princess Balasha Cantacuzène, had stayed with Branch’s family when they visited London in 1937. Just over six months after this letter was written Branch would be dead, killed in action over the English Channel during the Battle of Britain.

[3] The Rumanian Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi, a cousin of PLF’s lover, Balasha Cantacuzène.

[4] The Greek photographer Costa Achillopoulos, later PLF’s collaborator on The Traveller’s Tree (1950).

[5] ‘Now, my dear Adrian you are already almost an officer in the Welsh Guards. What fun you lot must be having down there. Oh la la! I am red with envy. Up yours. And royally!’

[6] The wife of Sir Alec Hardinge, Private Secretary to King George VI. The Hardinges had an apartment in Windsor Castle. It was through them that PLF had wangled his way into the Irish Guards.

[7] After PLF had been introduced by Costa Achillopoulos to Sacheverell ‘Sachie’ Sitwell and his wife Georgia in 1937, he spent many happy weekends at Weston Hall, their Jacobean house in Northamptonshire.

[8] Iain Moncreiffe (1919–85), later Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, MP and genealogist.

[9] Antony Holland (see note 5 on page 92).

It is in time of war that the public school system that so many of you laugh at, is really put to the test. You may scoff at Latin and Greek, Virgil and Homer, but its value is character training . . .

On his recovery, Paddy expected to become a regular officer with the Irish Guards. But it did not turn out this way. ‘When I was finishing my recruit time at the Depot, I had tempting promises of future exciting intelligence work in Greece, and like a fool, talked about it.’ The Intelligence Corps was very interested in the fact that he spoke French, German, Rumanian and Greek, despite his ‘below average’ record. ‘The Col. of the Micks, who I knew quite well (Tom Vesey), had me up to Birdcage Walk (Wellington Barracks) and asked me if this was true. I said it was, and he was very cutting about it. “What’s the point of us training you as an ensign if you go buggering off on some ghastly Intelligence rubbish?” I was given a week to decide. If I hung on with the Micks as an officer, I would, morally, have been bound to eschew all tempting “I” offers. So, most reluctantly, I went into the Intelligence Corps. Very unhappy, because I loved the Irish Guards. But I was much more use where I went, as it turned out, than I would have been as an ensign in the Brigade’ (PLF to Rudi Fischer, 2 February 1982). Paddy was posted to Greece, and, after the Axis invasion, to Egypt, from which he was infiltrated on to the island of Crete, to work with the resistance against the German occupiers.

Natalie Moss was the mother of Paddy’s wartime comrade Billy Moss, his second-in-command in the daring and successful operation to capture General Kreipe.

To Natalie Moss

15 November 1944

In the Wilds [1]

Dear Mrs Moss,

I do hope you got a letter I wrote to you this summer in hospital, [2] and thank you very much for your kind telegram. It was nice of you to send it, and I do hope Billy thanked you for it as I asked him to, as I couldn’t write at the time.

Unfortunately, when I was let out of hospital, Billy had left on a fresh adventure, that we had planned to carry out together, but which I was too ill to take part in. He carried it out most brilliantly and bravely, and, as you will have heard, has been recommended for a very well-deserved bar to his MC. Meanwhile, I went to stay with Lady Spears, our minister to Syria’s wife, [3] in the cool mountains near Beirut, and just as I was finishing my stay, who should arrive by plane but Billy, just arrived back from our island hunting-ground, [4] where he had ambushed a German column, knocked out ten trucks, killed forty Germans, and taken fifteen prisoners. Finally an armoured car appeared, which Billy put out of action by climbing on the back and throwing hand-grenades down the turret until the cannon stopped firing. It was a really splendid and brave achievement.

From Beirut we drove off to Damascus together, and spent a very happy and gay five days there and in Beirut, after which we flew back to Cairo, and returned to our home – ‘Tara’ [5] – of which you must have heard so much! We share it with Sophie Tarnowska, [6]

Billy McLean [7] and David Smiley. [8] But Bill had to leave soon, and I a month later, so now poor Sophie is holding the fort all alone. She is a most charming girl and looks after our comic household of rather wild young men like a very responsible younger sister. I left for the place where Bill and I caught the Hun General three weeks ago, and am writing from there. Billy is absolutely all right, and will probably be back in ‘Tara’ soon. I hope to meet him there for Christmas.

Billy is a really magnificent chap, and it would be hard to think of anyone more universally loved in the Middle East. He is one of the few really great friends I have made during the war, and this island seems very bleak without his gay company.

You must not get worried if you hear from him only irregularly, as posts are sometimes difficult from these out of the way places. Perhaps you have news of him already. If not I’m sure you very soon will. Thank you again for your kind sympathy while I was ill, and every kind wish.

Yrs very sincerely

Paddy L-F

[1] Soldiers on active service were forbidden to reveal their location.

[2] ‘The rigors of a year and a half of Cretan cave life, it seems, suddenly struck me with an acute rheumatic infection of the joints, akin to paralysis. After two months in a Cairo hospital – where King Farouk once kindly sent me a magnum of champagne – I was sent to convalesce in Lebanon.’

[3] Lady Spears (1886–1968), the American novelist Mary Borden. Known as ‘May’, she was married to Major-General Sir Edward Spears (1886–1974), diplomat, army officer and MP, noted for his role as a liaison officer between British and French forces in two world wars.

[4] Crete.

[5] A spacious villa on Gezira Island, inhabited by a group of high-spirited Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers and named by them ‘Tara’ after the title used by the High Kings of Ireland. ‘With its ballroom and a piano borrowed from the Egyptian Officers’ Club, and funded by our vast accumulations of back pay, it became famous – or notorious – for the noisiest and most hilarious parties in wartime Cairo. At one of these, fired by the tinkle of a dropped glass, everyone began throwing their glasses through the windows until not a pane was left.’

[6] Countess Zofia Roza Maria Jadwiga Elzbieta Katarzyna Aniela Tarnowska (1917– 2009), known as ‘Sophie’, later Mrs Billy Moss. She and her first husband, a cousin, had been forced to flee their native Poland after the German invasion in 1939. She lived at Tara with a fictitious chaperone, Madame Khayatt, who supposedly suffered from ‘distressingly poor health’ and thus was always indisposed when visitors called.

[7] Lieutenant Colonel Neil Loudon Desmond ‘Billy’ McLean DSO (1918–86), SOE officer, and later an MP.

[8] Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley MC and Bar (1916–2009), special forces and intelligence officer.

In 1935, at the age of twenty, Paddy had fallen in love with Marie-Blanche Cantacuzène, known as ‘Balasha’. Sixteen years his senior, Balasha was a princess from one of the great dynasties of eastern Europe, married to a Spanish diplomat, who had left her for another woman. She and Paddy met in Athens, and spent the next eighteen months in Greece, before making their way by steamer to Constant, a, on the Black Sea, and thence by train and coach inland to the dales of eastern Moldavia, where Balasha’s family owned ‘a rambling, down-at-heel country house’ called Băleni. ‘It was surrounded by hills and trees and full of books, there was snow on the windowsills all winter, and outdoors meant sleighs or horses: a Tolstoy or Turgenev kind of life. The family were Moldavian Cantacuzènes, and, as in certain spheres in pre-revolutionary Russia, French was the language used. They were civilised, warm-hearted, amusing people, and devoted to literature . . .’

‘It was a magical house, and the time I spent in it seemed to take the place of the university I was missing; I read more there, and in several languages, than anywhere else in my life. I don’t think it is entirely the decades of patina which may have accumulated between now and my early twenties which makes me say that the charm, intelligence, humour, fun, and range and stimulus of conversation at Băleni equal anything I can remember since.’

Paddy wrote the letter that follows on a table by the water’s edge, overlooking the narrow channel that flows between the Greek island of Poros and the mainland of the Peloponnese; on the other side of the channel a path runs uphill to the watermill of Lemonodassos, where he had spent two ‘blissful summers’ with Balasha ten years before, reading, painting and swimming. The two lovers had last seen each other in September 1939. Now, almost seven years later, he was in love with another woman, though he still felt loyal towards Balasha. This letter tries to make sense of his conflicting feelings. It seems probable that it was never sent.

To Balasha Cantacuzène

Easter Saturday 1946

Poros

My own darling,

The clock has suddenly slipped back ten years, and here I am sitting in front of our café in the small square, at a green-topped iron table on one of those rickety chairs. The marble-lantern, with its marine symbols – anchors and dolphins – is within reach of my arm; the drooping tree has been cut down. But the same old men, in broad shady hats, snowy fustanellas [skirt-like garments traditionally worn by men in southern Europe] and moustaches, sit conversing quietly over their narghiléhs [shisha pipes]. They all bowed and greeted me warmly, but soberly as if I had seen them only yesterday; my hand still aches from the iron grasp of Christo, the smiling Mongolian kafedzi [café-proprietor] – ‘Where’s Kyria Balasha? How is she?’ they all cry. – Mitso the boatman, Spiro’s coumbáros [god-brother] at the grocer’s shop, the man at the zacharo-plasteion [shop selling sweet cakes], the barber, the chaps in the little walled restaurant, and a dozen whiskered friends – especially Tomás, the one armed forest-guard, all down here for the Easter ceremonies. Loud shrieks of delight from Uncle Alcibiades’s daughter, married now. Best of all, three tall young men – guess who? Niko, Yanni and Andrea, and a strapping Tasso in his teens. Spiro is up at the mill, with thirteen-year-old Kosta and Katrina, and, isn’t it amazing?, ten-years-old Evtychia! Devout Marina is across the water at Galata, busy at her religious observances. Stop! Who do you think has just come and sat at my table, flinging an affectionate arm round my shoulders? Yanni, our boatman, who taught us the names of the winds, and always rowed us to Plaka. His brother Mitso told him I was here. He is a sailor now, veteran of countless battles, and as charming and gay and simple as ever and sends heaps of love to you. Ἔ! Ἡ Μπαλάσσα! Ἡ Μπαλάσσα! Τι καλὴ γυναίκα! [‘Ah! Balasha! Balasha! What a nice lady!’] They all adore us both here, and are real friends.

I arrived last night, and have not been to the hill yet. I am going today with Yanni and tomorrow for Easter Sunday, where Spiro is going to roast a huge lamb, and all our friends will assemble from the lemon-forest to eat it. I’ll take a camera with me, and send you lots of photographs.

A caïque brought me here – the Hydra, the Pteroti, and Avli were sunk by the Germans – and it was very beautiful. I missed you dreadfully, Balasha darling, as we slid over those silk-smooth waters between dreaming islands: the same soft air caressed our arms and hands and temples, the same light wind carried the smell of pine-needles and thyme to one’s nostrils, and I had the same argonaut plus conquistador feeling of being the first traveller to cross these ancient waters and gulfs and lagoons. The moment the caïque anchored at the quay, I jumped ashore, and walked to the monastery, along that lovely road winding under the pines overhanging the steep timbered cliffs, and the broken rocks half sunk in blue-green water, the lulling sound of whose splash and murmur reached us through the pine-branches. All at once the white monastery came into sight, and I was walking past the trickling spring, and the ravine full of plane-trees and fig-trees, and up the worn steps to the terrace with its one cypress, the sea, the sphinx-rock and the castle island beyond, and the vounò [mountain], with the mill glimmering palely in its cloud of olives and lemons and cypresses and walnut-trees. The courtyard of the monastery, with its thick round arches and cypress-shaded church and luminous walls, snowy and cream-coloured and blue in shadow, was heavy with the scent of orange-blossom. As I left, the first cuckoo, alarming and strange, called from the woods above. The light failed along the road back . . . You divined more than saw, the trees and rocks, and the poppies in the young grass. The streets were empty in Poros – the whole village was in church for the Entombment, and the streets and stucco houses and white staircases were quiet under thousands of low and bright stars, the lights sinking still reflections into the windless water. Later, from the window of the Averoff Hotel – where the toothless crone used to cackle us a welcome – I watched the hundreds of candles of the Epitaphios procession [1] crawl along the sea-path from Galata, the reflections of fireworks flowering and fading and the drone of chanting, faintly crossing the water.

It is seven in the morning now, and all glitters and dances under a clear sky. Through the masts of the caïques, the Argive mountains unfold, the fleece of the olive trees grey-green and silver and gold where the sun touches them, the hollows and branching stream-beds a cloudy purple. Gulls float idly over the caïque sails.

Easter Sunday

Darling, I am again at the narghiléh café, quiet, happy, sun-drenched, and filled with the most terrific ‘dor’ [longing] for you. Yesterday, I got Yanni to row me to the bay of Artemis, and lay in the sun all the afternoon, watching the shadows change on the island. Towards dusk, I shook myself, and walked through the wood where the white horse used to gallop aimlessly, and I used to talk of half-submerged vessels. Then through that sloping golden glade to the minute church, the narrow path till the place where the donkey used to pace round and round, drawing up the water, and up through the lemon-groves, to the mill. My darling, it was a moment I had been aching for, and, of course, dreading, for the last six years but, Boodle, [2] there it was, as if nothing had changed; I stood and watched through the branches: Marina busy at the oven, Spiro, cheeks puffed with feigned and endearing exertion, emptying lemons into huge baskets – τὰ καλάθια – and a boy and a girl that I recognised as Kosta and Katrina, helping him. You can imagine the cries of welcome when I ventured onto the terrace, Marina smiling with her hands crossed on her apron, Spiro laughing and gesticulating with clownish glee. Evtychia is a thoughtful little girl of ten with dark bobbed hair and a mauve jersey. When kisses and greetings were over, all the talk was of you. ‘When is she coming?’ I said, Soon. We sat on the wall and talked for hours, (Kosta, still with those affectionate eyes and sweet smile, holding my hand proprietorially in his) of our old life: your pictures, my illness, the rat-bite, the night Hector got lost, climbing the walnut-tree, the Panegyri of St Panteleı˙˙mon, the autumn storm. The magazí [shop] is closed, as Spiro can get no wine, and as it got dark, I reluctantly said goodbye to them till the morrow, Easter Sunday, and wandered down through the trees to the Plaka where Mitso was waiting with his βάρκα [boat], and over the still water to Poros. On the way down under the lemon leaves, I kept looking back for your long shadow, in blue trousers, white shirt and bélisaires, asking me to sing the Raggle Taggle Gypsies. Yanni our boatboy was waiting at the quay, and we went out fish-spearing with a carbide lamp on the front of the boat for a few hours, across that stretch of water between the Dragoumis and Tombazi houses. The bottom of the sea looked fascinating in the bright glare of the lamp – rocks feathered with anemones and prickly with urchins, octopuses and cuttle-fish coiled in the rock crevices, silver troops of fish lying silent two fathoms below, or darting off in alarm at the sudden lunges of Yanni’s long, bamboo-shafted trident. He speared masses of them, and each catch was greeted with shrieks of delight by the two barefooted boys who were rowing. I got one barbouni [red mullet]. We got back in time to brush our hair, and join the swarm of Poriots [inhabitants of Poros] in the church for the Anástasis. There must have been 1,000 people in the square up the hill for the Resurrection, each eager face lit by its own candle. At the ΧΡΙ∑ΤΟ∑ ΑΝΕ∑ΤΗ! [‘Christ is risen!’] a great jangle of bells broke out, and the sputter and swish of fireworks, cannons firing at the fort, and all the candles danced up and down. Adevărat a înviat! [‘Truly he is risen!’] [3] Then to Yanni’s house at the end of the village, a giant meal with clashing eggs, and back to bed, a bit drunk and very happy.

Today has been perfect too. I got to the hill early in the morning, having drunk two okes [carafes] of retsina with Yorgo and Stamatina, the shaggy little shepherd couple from the Vonnò, at the Plaka. We talked of our boiling day in that high desert, of all the water we drank as we lay panting under the plane-tree by the spring and the oleander bushes. They are as shaggy and small and brown and sly as ever, Yorgo with awkward hands resting on the shaft of his crook, Stamatina’s pretty wrinkled face smiling out of its black headdress. She has a new papoose slung in a sort of leather sling from the saddle of her mule. They are as scorched and penetrated by the sun as a couple of cicadas.

At the mill, we had a huge banquet under the vine-trellis – paschal lamb and retsina and πατάτες φούρνου [baked potatoes] and onions and more retsina, and sang for hours. I made a fresh entry in our big white book ( jealously hidden throughout the occupation, now the mill’s pride and future heirloom), your health was most feelingly drunk by us all, Marina sang ‘Kolokotrones’ in her thin, true little voice, blushing like a girl at our applause. We danced terrific Syrtos and Tsamikos [traditional folk dances] (my hands still ache from the foot-slapping!), and all the time, the sun slanted down on us through the young vine-leaves overhead, and through its frame of vine and fig-leaves, our amphitheatre of orange and cypress and olive wavered down to the glittering sea and the island and monastery, and remembered bits of rock – lionlike and smoky as ever – on the blue looking glass that stretched away till it melted hazily with the sky.

I dived overboard and swam for a while in the cold sea on the way back and now sit at the old table, with the caïque masts thick in front, the salt flaking on my new-burnt arms, the sunlight still warm in my relaxed limbs and bones. This is where I wrote that first sonnet when you went to Athens, and I almost feel that tomorrow I will see you walking down the gangway of the Pteroté, in your grey wool Athens suit, silk shirt, blue-and-white tie, and small round white hat. The night is still and warm, friendly figures cross the golden light of the café windows like Karagosi men in their crisp fustanellas, and a mandoline and a zither sound their small tinkling cascade of music into the quiet air, answered by a lazy half audible amané [an improvised song in the Turkish style] from the steep white arched and staircased labyrinth of houses behind.

This is a kind and happy and simple corner of the world. All the misery and murder and pumpute [upheaval?] of the last seven years have shed themselves away like a hateful dream, and I am back for a few precious days in a glâbre [innocent], beautiful world inhabited by people like you and Pomme and Constantin [4] and the two Alexanders [5] and Guy and Prue [Branch]. I send you, darling, all this. We must continue to hide here sometime, and feel that love and friendship are something separate after all, impregnably so, from the passage of time and its horrors and cruelties and callousnesses. I got your lovely letter, and am answering it when I get back to Athens tomorrow – many pages are already written. This is a parenthesis in it, designed to bring you the smell of the sea and of lemon-trees, and the love and greetings of all your friends in the island and Lemonodassos, and mine.

Hugs and kisses and gouffis [6] to Pomme and Constantin and Ins [their daughter Ina], and quite special bessonnades and hugs to Alexander M.; and to Alexander V., and all, all that and more to you, my dearest darling, from

Paddy

[1] The Good Friday custom of priest and congregation processing around the parish carrying a bier upon which is an icon of Christ (often in the form of a cloth) adorned with spring flowers.

[2] A term of endearment.

[3] This is a standard form of Easter greeting and response in the Orthodox Church, except that PLF has provided his response in Rumanian.

[4] Balasha’s younger sister Hélène (1900–83), always known as ‘Pomme’, and her husband Constantin Donici.

[5] Balasha’s cousin, Alexander Mourouzi, with whom PLF had explored the Danube delta in 1936; unidentified.

[6] A term of endearment – as is ‘bessonnades’.

This letter was written after Paddy had visited Corfu as part of a lecture tour on behalf of his employers, the British Council. In 1946 Greece was volatile, and would soon ignite into civil war between left and right. Paddy’s tour was part of a policy to counter the anti-Western propaganda of the Communists. To the delight of his audience, he had spoken not on cultural subjects, but instead about the wartime operation to kidnap General Kreipe.

Paddy and his companion Joan Rayner had been staying with Marie Aspioti (1909–2000), a writer, poet and publisher who ran the British Council Institute in Corfu, an island with strong British links. (From 1815 it had been a British protectorate, until sovereignty was transferred to Greece in 1864.) According to one of those who knew her, Aspioti ‘loved England’, and ‘gave her whole life to the Institute’. Like Paddy, she would be dismayed by British policy in Cyprus in the mid 1950s.

Almost thirty years later, on 5 August 1973, she wrote to tell him that ‘your letter of July 1946 brings me back with a rush those delightful times and is as fresh and alive as when you wrote it. Only the ink has faded.’

To Marie Aspioti

12 July 1946

Zante

British Council

Corfu

Marie dear,

Here we are still wandering your sleepy seas, malingering in island after island, as if delayed by those spells that always hindered travellers ’round the coasts of Greece; here in Zante, our Circe (or Nausicaa, Ariadne, Calypso) is Miss Crowe, and I am writing from her terrace at (guess what time?) seven in the morning, under a huge mulberry tree, overlooking the bay, and it’s surrounded by trees and churches and palazzos, and sprinkled with ships. Miss Crowe is a magnificent old English woman of about seventy, and comes of one of those families that remained behind after the Heptanese was returned to Greece. [1] She looks like a retired British Admiral in an eighteenth-century picture, with high-bridged nose, husky frowning eyebrows and severe blue eyes; an array of telescopes hang among the prints on the walls, and as she paces the terrace – which becomes the quarter-deck of a frigate – stick in hand, only slightly stooping, and followed by a rippling wake of old and half-blind dogs, you can almost hear the distant booming of broadsides. She sits up late drinking her wine and chain-smoking with a dog on her lap, telling long travel stories in a racy Edwardian idiom. She is a die-hard Tory, and has long arguments every day with Mr Chronopoulos, who lives in Solomos’s house next door, a violent Whig who has spent most of his life in England. He is 84 years old, thin and wiry as a hawk, but alert and argumentative and charming, though I believe he is a tyrannical demon to descendants that vaguely surround him in an awed and much less intelligent swarm. He reminisces, and gets angry about, parliamentary debates that he attended in his youth, at which the speakers were Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, Parnell and Sir Charles Dilke, and Miss Crowe rattles testily on the ground with her walking-stick.

Huddling into the crowded caïque at three in the morning, with you shuddering and waving on the quay in evening dress, and all of us the worse for drink, was the perfect way to leave Corfu after that perfect fortnight. We fell asleep in the bows among coils of rope, waking long after dawn, feeling gloomy at having left Corfu, but excited about Cephalonia.

There was nothing very welcoming about it – No Marie, no Dicky! – but the [Anglo-Hellenic] League is run by a very nice old man called Mr Alevizatos. I gave one lecture, it went fairly well, I think. A very po-faced and irritating old English woman said ‘So charming. You must get more lecturers to come in the winter, when we have nothing to do in the evenings. We get so tired of bridge . . .’ Masses of eager boys and girls were crowding in the doorways, too shy to come in, during the lecture, and when Joan suggested they should come and fill the empty places, she said, with a vinegary smile: ‘I don’t believe in pampering children’. . .

There was quite a rough sea on during the passage here, and a great gale. To the admiration of the caïque captain, Joan and I were the only passengers who didn’t get sick. We felt smug and Britannic and could almost feel bulldogs’ ears growing. . .

love Paddy

[1] The seven Ionian Islands are traditionally known as the Heptanese. British rule in the Ionian Islands came to an end in 1864.

Towards the end of Paddy’s lecture tour, he and Joan were joined by his wartime comrade, Xan (Alexander) Fielding. The three of them visited Lawrence Durrell, then living in Rhodes in a little house with a tangled garden which concealed a Turkish graveyard. ‘We sat up in my churchyard until three every morning reading aloud,’ Durrell recalled. ‘It was an amazing sojourn, spent in talk and music and feasting,’ wrote Paddy in a memoir of Durrell. ‘Strange things always happened in his company and one afternoon, in the ruins of ancient Camirus, wine-sprung curiosity sent the four of us crawling on hands and knees through the bat-infested warren of underground conduits. We climbed out covered in droppings and dust and cobwebs.’ As their clothes were torn and filthy, they decided to continue their exploration naked, while Joan recorded their japes in photographs. Dared to jump on to the top of a twelve-foot column, Xan made a tremendous leap, maintaining his footing though the column rocked alarmingly; he then struck a pose as Eros for a photograph.

In a letter written around this time to his regular correspondent Henry Miller, Durrell referred to Paddy as ‘a wonderful mad Irishman [sic]’ who ‘speaks five languages really well . . . quite the most enchanting maniac I’ve ever met.’ He had spent ‘a lovely week’ with Paddy and Xan, he told Miller. ‘Can’t tell you what a wonderful time I had talking books – first time for years.’

To Lawrence Durrell

18 December 1946

Athens

My dear Larry,

I’m very ashamed of myself and live for the days we spent virtually as your guests in Rhodes. With you, Eve, [1] Joan and Xan altogether, it was [the] perfect ending of a lovely summer. But it was the end, and it has been autumn and winter weather till we got back to Athens last week, except for a week or so of the καλοκαιράκι τοῦ Ἁγίου Δημητρίου [Indian summer] in the islands.

I found Joan a week after leaving you, entwined like a sleeping beauty in the island of Patmos, and stayed there several days, rainy and thunderous ones like those described in your story. I thought very seriously of settling down there this winter. It is one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever seen. We left for Samos by caïque, but a storm blew up, and we were forced to put in at a tiny island called Arki. As Joan and I stepped ashore, our bags were grasped in silence by a fisherman, who led us up a winding path through laurels to a large white house, quite alone among vineyards, but with all chimneys smoking. An old gentleman with white whiskers welcomed us gravely on the threshold, as though he had been expecting us, and led us into a great flagged kitchen, where in the shake of a lamb’s tail, we were seated with ouzos and mezés. A huge handsome old wife was clanking pots over the fire aided by an army of daughters of outstanding beauty, the son of the house cleaning his fowling-piece with a bunch of partridges beside him. Dogs and cats were everywhere. Any amount of shepherds and fishermen were sitting about talking or eating, and we were soon given a delicious meal – avgolemono [egg yolk and lemon juice] soup, fish, jugged hare, and a splendid wine. All this with scarcely an enquiry as to where we had come from. In fact we were addressed by our names with a gentle, incurious courtesy. It was very strange, and a bit eerie, like the arrival of Odysseus at the palace of Nausicaa’s father, [2] or the way-laying and entertainment of travellers by lonely magnificoes in Hungary. It turned out that ships are washed up there so often that their entertainment had become a matter of course. ‘One day last year,’ Mr Kalantakis said (he’s a Cretan) ‘the sea brought us seventy-two guests’. We stayed there four days, living in lovely rooms and eating and drinking like heroes, and when the wind changed, said goodbye to our charming and munificent host with real intentions to return another summer. One of our fellow naufragés [castaways] was a Karaghioziman [shadow-puppeteer], unfortunately without his gear, but [he] gave quite a good conjuring display to a kitchen crammed with neighbours and dependants, ending up with the most frightening bit of magic I’ve ever seen. He made us clench our hands tightly together, saying he would turn them to wood; shouted ONE! TWO! THREE! Up till ἑννέα! [nine!] Τὰ χέρια σας εἶναι ξύλο – δὲν λύονται πιά! . . . ΔΕΚΑ! [‘Your hands are stiff as wood! – you can’t bend them! . . . TEN!]’ [3] And well over half of the company remained with their hands glued palm to palm, tugging and straining till the sweat poured down them, till at last they fell apart when he touched their knuckles with his forefinger. He did it again and again, on my insistence, and once linked a daisy chain of half-frightened, half-giggling peasants helplessly together arm in arm. It had all the excitement, and all the unpleasantness of Mario and the Magician.  [4] It had to be stopped in the end because the children were screaming.

Our travels took us thence to Samos, Chios, Mytilene, Kavalla, Salonika, and all western Macedonia to the Serbian and Albanian frontiers, where the villages are inhabited by Greeks, Macedonian-Slavs, gypsies, Sephardic Jews, Koutsovlachs, Karakatchamis, Albanians, an occasional Pomak or Turk, and refugees from the Pontus – Trapezuntines and Anatolians, and Caucasians. In the same kafenion [coffeehouse] you hear Greek, Lázika [Pontian], Rumanian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romany, Ladino [ Judaeo-Spanish], Russian, Georgian and Gheg [an Albanian dialect]. I hadn’t been in those parts since the Albanian war, and long to go again. It is wild, muddy, snowy and Balkanic; and quite unlike anywhere else in Greece. No time now to talk about the klephtopólemos [guerrilla war].

I’m leaving in about a fortnight, feeling angry, fed up, and older than the rocks on which I sit. Fucking shits. [5] But I am writing quite a lot, and enjoying it enormously. I have, not very originally, written a long thing about the islands, which I am sending you for criticism. [6] Please do so, could you Larry, if it is not too much of a bore for you. Write here if it will get me before the new year, if later, to the Travellers Club, Pall Mall, London SW1, Xan’s and my address. Have had two letters and some sample poetry, very good, from him.

Here are the photos, and very funny they are. Xan as Eros is brilliant. Don’t forget copies of the ones you took.

I am writing this from the stove-side in Joan’s room. We both think nostalgically of you and Eve among your turbaned monoliths, and send love and kisses and every kind wish for Christmas. Write quickly.

Love Paddy

[1] Yvette (Eve) Cohen, the model for the character of Justine in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet novels (1957–60), whom he would marry in 1947 after his divorce from his first wife.

[2] Nausicaa’s father is Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians (Odyssey, Book VII).

[3] The magician is counting up to ten.

[4] Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician (1929) is an allegory of the rise of fascism. The sorcerer Cipolia uses his hypnotic powers to mesmerise the people into subjugation.

[5] The British Council had decided that it no longer needed PLF’s services. Durrell would begin working for the British Council in 1947.

[6] This ‘long thing about the islands’ may never have been published.

The publisher ‘Jock’ Murray took an early interest in Paddy’s writing. Late in August 1947, Paddy called on him at the firm’s offices, No. 50 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly, to discuss the possibility of a book based on his travels in Greece. ‘There is no doubt that he can write though somewhat incoherently,’ Murray wrote in an internal memorandum afterwards. ‘The main problem will be to get such a book into some shape and give it a sense of purpose.’

First Paddy had another task to complete: he had agreed to write the captions and text for a book of photographs by his friend Costa Achillopoulos. As was often the case with Paddy, he exceeded his brief, captions usurping pictures, so that the work would eventually become a long travel book with accompanying photographs, published in December 1950 under the title The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands. This letter was written while Paddy was travelling in Central America with Joan Rayner to collect material for the book.

To Jock Murray

4 May 1948

El Vale

Panama

My dear Jock,

It was a lovely surprise, getting your Christmas greetings, and thank you so much for them. Owing to our erratic itinerary they arrived in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, in Holy Week: a wonderful baroque capital entirely, while we were there, populated by the images of saints, moving slowly along the streets on the shoulders of thousands of Indians, followed by the Doñas de Maria [devotees of the Virgin Mary], half-Indian, half-Spanish girls in black mantillas, thousands of them, smelling of camellias and incense, the young ones all doe-eyed and beautiful, but the older ones Goya abortionist hags. For a whole week the town was one enormous wound, and every itch in the palm seemed to herald the stigmata.

In Nicaragua, we sailed across the enormous lake of the same name, dotted with volcanic islands, and then for 200 miles down the Rio San Juan, running through a loathsome forest full of jaguars and parrots and toucans, to the Mosquito Coast, where, owing to the Costa Rican civil war, [1] we were marooned in a sodden little village of the delta called Barro de Colorado. This was beastly, the air was almost solid with insects, and we felt quite lost in the remote, desolate, sharky place. Joan and I found two horses, and went for rides along the reefs between the jungle and the sharks, splashing through the inlets and longing for the spikes with which the White Knight equipped his charger’s fetlocks, [2] indispensable for horsemen in these parts. We compared ourselves to Byron and Trelawny tittupping through the sedge of the Lido in mid-winter, quarrelled as to who was which, and ended up in furious silent gallops, speechless with affronts . . . Costa slipped away down the Caribbean coast while we were on one of these ausflugs [excursions], thinking we would follow next day. But the civil war stopped all sea-traffic, and his launch was kept out to sea by the revolutionary guns at Puerto Limon, while we made our way to the capital of Costa Rica for the last days of the war, and then to Panama, where we re-agglomerated for a day before he flew home. We leave on an Australian ship in three days’ time, and should be in England within three weeks.

Alas, I have not written another word of the Greek book since leaving England, and have had a terrible time keeping up to date with notes and diaries about the Caribbean and Central America Balkan [s] and a series of articles. But as soon as I have sloughed the literary commitments of this journey, I long to resume writing about Greece, and will certainly do so.

We must meet and dine as soon as we get back. Joan sends her love, and every kind wish to you both from me and to Peter upstairs. [3] Hoping to see you soon,

Yours ever

Paddy L. F.

[1] Approximately two thousand people are estimated to have died in this civil war, which lasted for only six weeks (12 March–24 April 1948).

[2] Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 6.

[3] As editor of the Cornhill magazine, PLF’s friend Peter Quennell had an office in the John Murray building.

Paddy had first met Joan Rayner in Cairo during the war. He was not the first to be struck by her beauty, and impressed by her calm, her good sense, and her intelligence. ‘Like all adorable people Joan Leigh Fermor had something enigmatic about her nature which, together with her wonderful good looks, made her a very seductive presence,’ wrote the artist John Craxton in an obituary published after her death in 2003 ( Independent, 10 June 2003). ‘She was also naturally self-effacing. Even in a crowd she maintained a deep and private inner self.’ She did not share Paddy’s love of society, often choosing to stay with her beloved brother Graham rather than join Paddy in house parties. ‘Paradoxically, she loved good company and long and lasting friendships,’ continued Craxton. ‘It was her elegance, luminous intelligence, curiosity, understanding and unerring high standards that made her such a perfect muse to her lifelong companion and husband Patrick Leigh Fermor, as well as friend and inspiration to a host of distinguished writers, philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians.’

Easily distracted, Paddy found it difficult to write in London, and sought out a succession of retreats where he could work in isolation. The next three letters are written from the monastery of Saint-Wandrille, the first a few days after his arrival there.

To Joan Rayner,

11 October 1948

Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille

Rancy

Seine Inférieure

My own darling,

Two lovely letters from you, hotfoot on each other’s traces! Aren’t these absences curious? The agony of waiting for letters, and, when they arrive, the sudden bomb-like detonation of delight. In a heautontimorumenos [1] kind of way, it’s almost worth it; but not quite. Darling are you really coming soon? Your first letter was awfully depressing, as if you were going to let the Channel have its way forever, but things look better in today’s . . . Keep it up, darling! My sweet little bewildered thing, I really could eat you. . .

For some miraculous reason, and without my doing anything to remove its causes or exorcise it, my guilt has been evaporating this last week. I think it must be because I’m doing some work. Anyway, it’s put the roar of the chariot-wheels [2] temporarily out of earshot. Also because my nerves have become tremendously quiet, through silence, absence of stimulus and hangovers, and immediate causes for guilt. It seems to have cleared my mind, so that it is like the stillness of a room that has suddenly been evacuated by a hideous gang of urchins that, year in year out, do nothing but fight and scream and pull each other’s hair and sulk and fall over and blub and break things, so that the solitary grown-up in the corner has been capable of nothing but hiding his eyes and blocking up his ears. Drink and idleness and my bogus dogma of excess are to blame. Now that the surface is temporarily clear, ideas, letters, poems, books, even consecutive trains of thought, float to the top one by one . . . I almost feel at moments, that with an effort, my life need not necessarily be a failure. Then, like a distant, just-audible rumble over the horizon, I remember towns, ‘alcoholic my dear’, noctambulism, whorish anxieties about being liked, delights and disappointments about fifth-rate things, and the sort of general urban nervous frenzy of excitement and remorse that can, in twenty-six hours, smash up and bury a mood like my present one for months. Isn’t it idiotic? At times like this, I even feel capable of making you really happy, my darling, and covering you with sunshine as I always thought I could. At any rate, whatever happens, I can’t do without you, and I know, absolutely quietly and soberly, that I do love you, really, deeply and completely. For the last week or so, ever since passing through the miserable transition period, I have gone to bed, tired with work, at about midnight, and fallen asleep almost at once with my mind full of thoughts like these, longing for you to be here, but in a lovely calm, happy, confident way that I had forgotten all about; and slept with scarcely a dream crossing my mind; a miraculous light, innocent kind of sleep, as if my brain were a boat gliding across the deepest and smoothest of lakes, waking up as easily and inevitably as the faint touch of the keel on the sand of the opposite bank. My darling sweet Joan, I send you this quiet mood as present here and now. Please remember it when you go to bed, and imagine we’re curled up utterly happy and trusting and quiet, and that you are being kissed and looked after, and that I’m smoothing out your poor little tormented forehead, my poor angel. And then sink into sleep, and slide through the Horn Gate of happy dreams or dreamlessness. You have nothing to be guilty about me, indeed, 1,000 times the reverse. That’s a start for you! But don’t try and fight all these night-time tormentors. I’m sure it’s what they want – resistance, torture, turmoil. Lie down and feign dead, and let the whole loutish procession go storming and brawling over you, and way into the dark. . .

NON TIMEBIS A TIMORE NOCTURNO

[‘Do not be frightened by nightmares’]

The abbot [3] and I have become great friends. He is about sixty, and, in a frail way, very handsome. He speaks a little English, but fortunately very seldom, as his French is the best I’ve heard for ages, rather complicated and antique, in what they call a deep musical voice and scarcely ever a gesture, except, very occasionally, a slow marking time to his discourse with his right hand, out of an innocent kind of vanity, I suspect, because of his very long white fingers and enormous ring. His other hand vaguely toys with the gold cross round his neck. He is a doctor of philosophy, and has spent many years in Rome. Occasionally he lapses into Latin as if it is quite a normal procedure. It is the first time I have ever heard it spoken as a living language, and while he does this, I flog my brains to construct a sentence, feverishly trying to get the syntax right, usually a question that at last I enunciate with as much nonchalance as I can muster, to keep going the flow of this silvery monologue about the nature of Divine Grace, or how every action is ontologically good, and only morally good or bad . . . All this sounds as if he is an elaborate, perhaps affected creature, but he is, as a matter of fact, rather diffident and shy until he gets interested. These conversations take place walking from urn to urn under the beech-trees, in the library or walking round the cloisters. His theory about Marie de l’Incarnation [4] is that her writings look like love-letters because there is no vocabulary to express the intensity of divine or spiritual love, so all the mystics have been forced, by the violence of their feelings to resort to this equivocal kind of language, as there is no other. I suppose that is true, and may apply to Saint Teresa; but Marie de l’Incarnation! And if it’s true, what an appalling poverty in Christianity, not to have hacked out a convincing terminology for their most pressing needs. There is so much in Christianity that is unconvincing for the same reason. For instance, in its symbolism how vague and boring and unconvincing heaven, the prize and mainspring of the whole thing, is! Cities with jewelled streets, clouds, harps, angelic choirs – it doesn’t sound like a place one could tolerate for more than a week; and ‘oneness with God’, ‘the inexpressible felicity of the Divine Countenance in Eternity’ is not, except for a real mystic, much of a draw either. How very much better the Buddhists have managed here. And, to a certain extent, the wretched Mohammedans. And yet (in spite of the lameness and insipidity of the terms of reference) for religious people, the monks for instance, heaven is a real, infinitely desirable thing, and not just a non-hell. There has certainly been no fumbling about the terminology and the symbolism here; in fact hell is so real and charming that celestial symbolism, and all we can grasp about heaven, is, next to what we feel about hell, as pale and unreal as a toy ship beside a blast furnace. I suppose this is why death is always represented by scythes, skulls, hourglasses, flames, devils and pitchforks. Because the threat of hell carries weight for everybody who believes in the whole set-up, while the promise of heaven, except for an initiate, doesn’t. How negative and sloppy a predicament for a religion of love! It is this lame inadequate terminology that has turned so much of Christianity into a sad and forbidding thing.

Does the possibility of spending Eternity in the arms of your Maker excite you? Not particularly, as I understand it. Does burning forever in a lake of brimstone frighten you? Yes, yes, yes!

Saint Teresa and Marie de l’I, and people like that are positive, are on a better track, obviously: anyway, for a more exciting religious life in this world than the overwhelming mass of negative hell-funks. But after death they are swallowed up in the same nebulous ‘peace which passeth all understanding’ as any bourgeois who manages to skip hell, purgatory or limbo. Needed: somebody to make heaven as real as hell.

A thing that strikes me as really new and noble, and, as it were, aristocratic, is Saint Teresa in her absolute refusal to bargain with God. She did good and led a saintly life, not for the boring reason of doing good for good’s sake, nor above all, to stake a claim in heaven and avoid hell, but out of love for her divine sweetheart because good pleased Him, and [she] simply didn’t want to discuss or hear about what the rewards and risks were. Nor is there any of the tacit ‘I’ll leave it to you, and I’m sure you’ll behave handsomely and do the right thing by me when the time comes’ – to such an extent, that one almost feels she would feel happier if Hell, or intense suffering, or a sort of long-drawn-out Harikiri, would be the price of her love. Vivent les âmes bien-nés [‘Long live the noble souls’]. . .

Life in La Grande Trappe [monastery] sounds pretty odd. Their day starts at 1 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m. Only five hours’ sleep. They sleep on two planks in minute cubicles with two blankets and pillows stuffed with hay, and are forbidden to undress. They work in the fields all day, and are not allowed to put on extra, or remove a garment, in snow or mid-summer. The rule of silence is absolute. They eat standing up, and never have meat, eggs or fish, but live entirely off roots, salads, potatoes etc. They dig their own graves when they join, and live to tremendous ages. When they are in the infirmary, on the point of death, they are lifted from their beds onto a heap of straw scattered on the ground, as a final gesture of humility. All the monks come to assist at the last rites, and watch over the corpse in chapel all night, lowering it into a nameless grave with ropes round the shoulders and feet; no coffin. Chateaubriand wrote a tremendous description of ‘la Mort d’un Trappiste’. I’d rather like to go there for a day or two as an adventure in masochism [5] . . . There’s not enough Mortification here!

The library has a mass of stuff about Stylites, [6] which I am devouring. It’s too enthralling and insane; all the details of their life, food, sanitary arrangements, fasts, mortifications, hair shirts, flagellations, etc. There were lots of them – St Symeon Stylites the Ancient, S. Sim. Styl. the Younger, St Daniel, St Alypius, St Luke, St Lazarus the Galiziote. Then there were Dendrites that lived in trees, with a chain round their ankle, in case they fell, sometimes for 60 years. The Stylites used to stand nearly all the time, with or without a leaning post, and never left their pillars even in the snowiest winter, with nothing except a goat-skin tunic to protect them, though some built a little shelter, in the Decadence. St Symeon was nearly blind from the Sun. There was one who hung in mid air by a rope under his armpits from the cupola of a church. This is something I would like to write an article about – ‘The Stylites, and certain extremes of Oriental Christian Monasticism’, for instance. I knew a very old woman in Athens whose father had been alive when a Stylite was living on top of one of the pillars of Olympian Zeus.

Darling, I’m afraid you wouldn’t be allowed to take photographs here, as no women are allowed actually inside the precincts of the abbey. Only in the chapel, the ruins and a part of the gardens. I would like to write something about this abbey, though, and must try and get some photographs from somewhere. One gets so used to ‘life in a monastery’ being something conventionally strange, that one files it away in one’s mind and leaves it at that. I had very little idea of what it was going to be like, how very individual and odd and disconnected from ordinary life. What I would like to do (but it would take months) would be a short biography of each monk – age, position in secular life, married or single, education, age on taking vows, reason for vows etc., for all sixty. [7] I can’t do it, because they are so shy and inaccessible, and would close like oysters if I set about it at all briskly. But what interesting material it would be at the end.

All the monks I have dared to touch on the subject with so far are beatifically happy, and their only regret is that they waited so many years in the world. Most of them began as oblats seculiers – ‘secular offerings’, as civilians, meaning that even then they dedicated themselves to God. The next step is joining the monastery as a postulant for a period of months, then becoming a novice for two or three years. A novice is ceremonially invested with a black habit, hood and scapular (a sort of long black oblong with a hole in the middle for the head, reaching the ground at the back and in front). And their hair is cut short but not tonsured. Then they are either accepted as frères convers or trained as priests – ‘choir monks’ able to administer the sacraments. These are all tonsured, leaving a thick band of hair round their shaven crowns to represent the crown of thorns. Two postulants were accepted as novices yesterday, one aged twenty, the other twenty-eight, recently returned from ten years soldiering in Indochina. It was a very striking ceremony, in the seventeenth-century rococo chapter house, a vast room with a painted ceiling, twirly grey panelling, black and white chequered marble floor. The abbot sat on an elaborate throne with a white stole over his flowing black robes, wearing a tall white mitre, and holding a long gold crozier in his left hand, the ringed one resting on his pectoral cross, and his right foot on a purple velvet footstool. The monks sat round the walls in their stalls. The two young men, one in tweeds, the other in pin-stripe, were led in, and fell flat on their faces on the marble, where they remained while the abbot delivered a homily over them in Latin. After a while they were allowed to kneel up. Their coats were removed (one wore a belt, the other braces) and, in the middle of an outburst of chanting, black habits were slipped over their heads, a rope round their middle, then the scapular and at last the hood. After this the abbot gave another sermon in French, describing the rigours of monastic life. Rien ne change dans la vie monastique, mes chers enfants. Chaque jour est exactement pareil à l’autre chaque année comme celle qui la précédait, et ainsi jusqu’à la mort [‘Nothing changes in monastic life, my dear children. Every day is exactly the same as any other, each year like the one that went before, and so on until death’] . . . I had a sudden intuition of what the sermons of Fénelon or Bossuet [8] must have been like, the voice, décor, atmosphere, mood etc. Then we all processed out into the cloisters, leaving the two hooded figures still kneeling there. That evening in chapel, their hair had been cropped level with the scalp. They were indistinguishable.

*

The curé of the village is an impassioned royalist. Signed photographs of the Duc de Guise and the Comte de Paris [9] everywhere. He never refers to the latter except as Sa Majesté Henri VI and his son as Monseigneur le Dauphin. He used to be a frequent contributor to l’Action Française, [10] and I suspect was a near-collaborator during the war. His favourite pastime, when not writing erotic poems about Sicily or composing on the harmonium, is to work out the quarterings of the Comte de Paris, proving how many times he is descended from Hugh Capet, Saint Louis, Henri IV, Louis XIV etc., and marshalling his arms in their full achievement, on yard after yard of artistic deckle-edged paper. Ten years too late for me, whatever you pretend!

The whole of this part of Normandy was very heavily occupied, and collaboration was pretty generaL. Five women had their heads shaved in Caudebec, by the Maquis, such as it was (two miles away).

Apart from the werewolves, the region, it seems, is troubled by Wills o’ the Wisp.

Darling, I’ve suddenly heard the bells ring, it’s 4 o’clock! (in the morning!) I’m nearly asleep, in a sort of trance, and if I don’t stop now, I’ll go on gently raving till dawn. 4 a.m! It’s just about now the Inspector [11] might be dropping in. Wish I was there to help lock him out. I’ve made you out a little charm, which I’m sure ought to work.

Goodnight my darling, darling angel. All my love to you sweet little mite, darling heart, small portable figure and pet,

from Paddy

I’m so sleepy, I can hardly get up out of my chair, let alone get undressed. I won’t reread this letter, do forgive me if it is unintelligible.

P

xxxxx

[1] Heauton Timorumenos (‘The Self-Tormentor’), a play written in 163 bc by the Roman dramatist known as Terence.

[2] ‘But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’

Marvell, ‘To his Coy Mistress’

[3] Dom. Gabriel Gontard, the Lord Abbott of Saint-Wandrille.

[4] Marie of the Incarnation (1599–1672), French nun whose passionate visions were described in published letters. She referred to God as her ‘divine spouse’.

[5] PLF would spend ten days there in the second half of December 1948.

[6] The Stylites were Christian ascetics. The first of them, St Simeon Stylites (c.388–459) lived for thirty-seven years on a small platform on top of a pillar near Aleppo. Several later Stylites followed his example.

[7] Rereading this letter in 2005, PLF added ‘a terrible idea!’ in the margin.

[8] François Fénelon (1651–1715), Archbishop of Cambrai, theologian, poet and writer; Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Bishop of Meaux, preacher and writer.

[9] Jean Pierre Clément Marie d’Orléans, Duc de Guise (1874–1940), and his son Henri d’Orléans, Comte de Paris (1908–99), successive pretenders to the defunct French crown.

[10] An extreme right-wing political party in France which reached its apogee between the wars, despite being condemned by Pope Pius XI.

[11] In a letter to PLF, Joan had referred to a nightmare in which she was visited by ‘the Sanity Inspector’.

‘My darling Paddaki,’ wrote Joan while Paddy was at Saint-Wandrille, ‘I find your life very hard to imagine – I try to think of you tucked up in your cell at night or sitting silent & undrinking among the monks, but it is difficult & makes me feel v far away from you.’ She had hoped that she might have been pregnant, which might force him to marry her, but ‘all hopes ruined this morning. I think perhaps you had better rape me one day when I am all unprepared . . .’ In her letter she returned several times to the subject of marriage: ‘I do think it would be lovely to get married awfully soon.’

To Joan Rayner

12 October 1948

Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille

Darling Angel,

I’ve been wondering what can be done about these silent meals in the Refectory, and am just beginning to see daylight. In the library, piled up in a dark corner in a trunk and covered with dust, I’ve discovered a mass of tenth-to sixteenth-century folios bound in vellum, all dealing with the point where mysticism and necromancy merge. Chaldean magic, [1] the Cabbalah, [2] Hermes Trismegistus, [3] astrology, the Rosy Cross, [4] etc. I think that within a fortnight by dint of reading these books, by fasting and prayer, and resort to the abbey’s arsenal of flails and hair shirts, I ought to have mastered certain powers. I shall then initiate some of the likelier monks, beginning with the ones that look like Philip [Toynbee], Brian [Howard], Maurice [Bowra] and Cyril [Connolly] (no doubt more tractable in their monkish shape than I’ve found them in real life). Then, at a prearranged tap of the abbot’s mallet, we shall all levitate ourselves three yards in the air, and no sharp words will bring us down, in fact nothing will, until we obtain a number of concessions: no more reading aloud from the Doctors of the Church, an end to the rule of silence, half a bottle of wine with each meal and a glass of Benedictine afterwards: all very reasonable demands. It might be the beginning of a reform for the whole order.

I got up at 6 this morning, and went for a long walk in the beech forest above the abbey. The whole valley was full of mist and only the ruined arches and gables and chimneys of the abbey stuck out. There are romantic rides running through the forests, carpeted already with rotten leaves, and something damp and autumnal like your description of the banquet of Haut-Brion. Every now and then, where the rides cross, there is a pillar supporting a grey stone seventeenth-century arch; or there is a rococo archway crowned with a scallop shell containing the lilies of France, or the mitred arms of the abbey. Squirrels are everywhere. I haven’t drunk anything for three days and feel wonderfully clear-headed and light, the whites of my eyes are becoming as clear as porcelain, and bones are slowly emerging. I can’t quite remember what a hangover feels like.

My darling pet, don’t stay in England forever, and above all, don’t run away with anyone, or I’ll come and cut yer bloody throat. This is on the road between Havre and Rouen. You might come and pick me up here, or we might meet at Amy’s, [5] or in Paris.

All my love, dear little Joan, & kisses & hugs, from

Paddy

P.S. I brought the 130 Journées [6] here by mistake, but sent it back to Paris by registered mail before actually entering the abbey. If I hadn’t, either the suitcase and I would have gone up in a sulphurous cloud, or the abbey would have come crashing down like Jericho.

[1] The Chaldeans were a Semitic people, said to possess occult knowledge, who emerged in Mesopotamia in the tenth century bc, and disappeared from history four centuries later.

[2] An esoteric method, discipline, and school of thought originating in Judaism.

[3] Purported author of the Hermetic Corpus, a series of sacred texts written in ancient Hellenic times, popular among alchemists.

[4] A symbol associated with Rosicrucianism.

[5] Amy, Lady Smart, the Egyptian wife of the British diplomat Sir Walter (‘Smartie’) Smart, who had a house at Gadencourt, Normandy.

[6] Possibly Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage, written in 1785 by the Marquis de Sade.

To Joan Rayner

13 October 1948, 10 p.m.

Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille

Darling,

I’ve just had such a shock. After compline, I went to the library to make some more notes about Stylites, and stayed there till a few minutes ago, all the monastery being in bed and asleep. I put all the lights out, locked it up, felt my way through the dark refectory (full of the noise of rats gnawing and scuttling,) and out into the cloisters, a square pool of icy starlight. At the other side of the cloisters is a dark Gothic doorway opening onto a passage that leads to my part of the abbey. Still thinking about the deserts of Chalcedon and Paphlagonia, [1] I walked through the archway, and happening to look to my left, saw a tall monk standing there, his face invisible in his cowl, his hands folded in his sleeves, quite silent. It was so frightening, I nearly let out a scream, and can still feel my heart thumping. Phew!

Sweet darling, thank you so much for your telegram, about the broadcast. I managed to hear it on the Curé’s wireless set – there are none in the Abbey. I would never have recognised my voice, if I hadn’t known who it was. Does it really sound like that? I thought it sounded rather affected and la-di-da and frightfully gloomy, as if I were about to collapse in floods of tears. Did you manage to hear it? I don’t expect you did in London. You didn’t miss a great deal. Oh, darling, in case it came gobbled by telegram, the Cephalonian Saint is St Gerasimos.

Joanaki, about these Stylite saints. I have got the material in the utmost detail for a history of column-dwelling ascetics from St Symeon Stylites the Elder down to modern times (they only came to an end in the last century), with absolutely enthralling racy sidelights on their way of life, deaths, beliefs, biographies, sores, mortifications etc. I would very much like to write an article about them. The only two publications I can think of that are suitable, and that I would like to publish it in, are Horizon and Cornhill. Now if the H. [2] really wants the Voodoo article, he obviously won’t take another, so I think I ought to write to Peter, and suggest it. What do you think, darling? I don’t want to write it blind, as it were, without knowing where to place it, because it means quite a lot of work and I’ve got masses already; and one knows far better how to write something if you know what it’s destined for. If you see Robin Fedden, could you ask him if he knows anything about the base of Symeon the Elder’s column, still in existence at Quala’at Sema’an in Syria? Does he mention it in his book? [3] Also – I’m sure Cyril has got it – are there any details in E. M. Forster’s Guide to Alexandria about Pompey’s Column in that city? It was apparently a Stylite’s perch at one time. An Arab climbed up it in the eighteenth century, by shooting an arrow on a string through a loop in the moulding of the capital, hauling a rope up, and then himself. Some British sailors also managed to get up it by somehow attaching a rope to the top by flying a kite, in 1773. The top is hollowed out, they discovered, and there is room for eight people there with ease, which is enormous. . .

You won’t forget the paper, my angel, will you? The best place for it is Rymans, in Albemarle Street. If they say they’ll take ages to get the holes punched in the right places, don’t worry, and I’ll do it myself with a machine the librarian has. . .

A curious thing que je constate [that I notice] is that the Humanist’s devotion to you makes him much more sympathetic to me than before. It’s about our only thing in common. But, please, my darling, I think it’s absolutely essential – I’m studying his interests, as a writer – that it should be an unrequited devotion . . . I wonder how it’s all going. Any obstacles can be overcome by dogged perseverance. Parturit ridiculus mus et nascuntur montes. [4] And if not the Humanist, what about the unknown [illegible] stranger? Eh? Do tell me all about your London life. I’m afraid it’s dreadfully exciting . . . Oh, oh, oh! . . . And tell me all about your new clothes. I wish you were in France. . .

I forgot to tell you, my friendship with the abbot bore, about a week ago, the most magnificent fruit: I was changed from my cell to an enormous room across the passage, a really splendid one, about fourteen yards long, with three tall eighteenth-century windows, rounded into gracious cockle-shells at the top; one overlooks the courtyard, the library, the well of the cloisters and the Gothic ruins, the two others the sloping garden and the village, whose beamed cottages I can just see through the leaves of a dozen mammoth chestnut trees; a ‘charmille’ [an alley formed by hedges] with a Louis XV figure in its green alcove – actually the Virgin, but looking more like Pomona or Ceres; [5] and the abbey wall, pierced by a stately, armorial rococo gateway surmounted by a carved stone Pelican in its Piety, pecking its breast to feed its three craning chickens. The room itself is the sort of thing you would expect a cardinal to inhabit, except for the tin wash-hand stand. The lit à baldaquin [four-poster bed] is enormous, curtained with rather threadbare gilt-fringed crimson velvet, and the wall it backs onto is covered by a tapestry, where Actaeon is being devoured by the hounds of Diana. The ceiling is high and moulded with every possible volute, while the white walls, apart from the usual crucifix, are adorned with two sooty oil paintings, one (how nice!) of Saint Teresa, a skull, and a lot of shadows – a bad Murillo, it might almost be – the other (school of Luini) of Christ dripping with blood, crowned with thorns, his head flung back, stripped to the waist, with his hands tied together holding a bullrush; but both so dim and smoky as to be almost effaced and quite un-depressing. The rest of the furniture is a big metal stove with its tin tunnel piercing the plaster, a pontifical looking prie-dieu [prayer-stool], and two tables, one of them a giant escritoire on which I am writing now, seated in a high-backed embroidered armchair. And lastly, standing inexplicably in the middle of the pink tiled floor, a wooden fluted Corinthian column, supporting nothing, exploding three yards up in a riot of carved acanthus leaves. It looks as though it were awaiting a minute Stylite. I wonder what on earth it’s doing here. It must be part of the canopy of some enormous high altar. No curtains on the windows which is all the better, because it bares the lovely shelving white planes through the thick walls and the elliptical moulding at the top. Occasionally a monk comes in and talks for a bit, a pale waxy figure lost in his black robes and cowl. They are restful company – they have soft voices and beautiful manners, and are as gentle as girls.

The room is an extraordinary mixture of austerity and splendour – the tiles, the bare white walls, and then the four-poster, the arras, the peculiar column. It has some slight analogy to the disparate elements of some Guatemalan churches. It’s a wonderful room to wake up in. The sunlight streams in through all three windows, and from my bed, all I can see through them are layer on ascending layer of chestnut leaves, like millions of spatulate superimposed green hands, and then the pale crystalline October sky, framed by this reflected blue-white, or thick milk-white, or, where the sun strikes, white-gold surfaces of the walls and window arches or embrasures. A miraculous, feather-light, innocent, clear awakening!

My darling angel, I meant this to be a short, brisk letter, I see it’s straggled over several pages already. I’m so alone here at night, I can’t stop talking to you; it’s such a luxury. Darling, don’t feel ever obliged to write long letters, and put them off, in my way, because you haven’t got time to settle down to a whopper. You’re in a capital city, I’m in an abbey, don’t I know what it means! I do enjoy and look forward to your letters so, you’ve sent some lovely long ones. But do write often, even if terribly shortly. I wake up in a dither about the postman. And don’t you think these accounts of cenobitic [monastic] splendour mean I’m OK here alone! I miss you the whole time, my dearest angel, and launch armadas of kisses in the direction of Curzon Street, great hugs and feverish clinches, and long angelic tender and gentle ones as if we were on the verge of falling asleep tangled up together.

All my love to you, darling, mignonne sweet Joan, from

Paddy

[1] Regions of northern Asia Minor of significance in the early history of the Christian Church.

[2] ‘The Humanist’, PLF’s nickname for Cyril Connolly.

[3] Robin Fedden was the author of Syria: An Historical Appreciation (1946).

[4] Paddy is adapting Horace’s Epistle to the Pisones, which reads Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (perhaps punning on his nickname for Joan). This means, literally, ‘The mountains will go into labour, and give birth to a ridiculous mouse’, i.e. that huge efforts may amount to very little.

[5] Pomona was the goddess of fruit and nut trees; Ceres goddess of grain-crops.

From Saint-Wandrille (pictured above), Paddy moved on to the monastery of St Jean de Solesmes, and eventually to La Grande Trappe.

To Joan Rayner

undated [November/December 1948]

Abbaye de St Jean de Solesmes

Sablé sur Sarthe

( J-P) Sarthe [1]

My darling sweet angel,

I’m feeling so gloomy tonight, I don’t know why, and long to be with you so that we could just curl up into a ball together and snore our way through the night. It’s frightfully cold and lonely here, and I feel absolutely miserable climbing alone between these icy sheets. Boo-hoo.

I hoped there would be a letter from you this morning, and pelted down to the gate-house, but only got a bill from London. I’ve been monstrously bad about writing darling, and please forgive me. The trouble is the post goes at 3:30 in the afternoon, and as I’m writing like anything, I always think it’s earlier and the bloody thing has left by the time I get ready to write, so I put it off till tomorrow thinking ‘I’ll write the Rodent [2] a really long fruity one tomorrow-morning’ etc. After this, I’ll send you something every other day at the very least, and please, please darling, write to me absolutely constantly or I’ll only get terribly downcast, and you wouldn’t like that!

Darling, what an unmitigatedly happy time we had in Paris. Scarcely a moment of guilt or saturation or big-town-blues. Once or twice at the very most, but the rest of it sheer heaven. You were so sweet my angel. I really could eat you.

I’m not enjoying Solesmes quite as much as I did Saint-Wandrille, I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because it’s cold and wintry. But there are many more monks here, everything is much more organised and impersonal. And of course Saint-Wandrille was incomparably more beautiful. Here there are lots of long, cold, echoing, bare, clattery passages, and swing doors with frosted glass in, that give me a slight feeling of going back to school the winter term. The country round about is very pleasant, rather like flat English country, with plenty of hedges and little villages. The Sarthe flows just under my window, and falls over a weir, making a slight rushing noise all night. At first I was in a lovely big cell with an open fire in it that blazed all day; but an old country abbé came here with Parkinson’s disease looking so frail and shaky that I did a Philip-Sidney-at-Zutphen [3] act of abnegation and shifted into a smaller one without a fire, and alas the radiator has stopped working, so it’s jolly cold. Apart from all this, it’s a delightful place, with a great atmosphere of scholarship and serious meditation. The library is enormous, much bigger than the one at Saint-Wandrille, and wonderfully kept up with card indexes; but it is terribly difficult to get in, or take books out, it’s so efficient. No question of browsing all night by myself, as I did at St W., then locking it up with my own key. The great thing here, of course, is the liturgy, ceremonial and chanting. The church is a thin, high Gothic one, with perfect acoustics, so that the monks can really let themselves go. The vestments, and the quality of acolytes, cross-censer-candle-bearers, priests, deacons and sub-deacons that participate in a single office is unbelievable, and every detail is so studied and impeccable that a mass here really does look like a mediaeval illumination. . .

The nineteenth-century refectory is astonishing: stage Gothic-Norman-Saxon, with huge German-looking chimney pieces, fat granite pillars, cold in atmosphere and columns of Keats’s St Agnes Eve, Old Vic Macbeth, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Wm. Morris, Walter Crane and Corvo. The abbot, unfortunately, is away, presiding at the election of the Mother Abbess of a Benedictine convent in Holland. Solesmes is the chief of the Benedictine foundations for all Western Europe, and immensely powerful. No change can be made in any Gregorian music throughout the whole of the Church, unless Solesmes OKs it. But I long for the wonderful buildings of St-W., the less grand atmosphere, and those enormous damp beech-forests within two minutes of my cell.

Do you remember, darling, Mr Monk talking about an English Trappist, ex-RAF monk that he saw in Brittany? Well, he’s just arrived here three days ago, an extraordinary man, about my age, very slightly insane and absolutely enthralling. He got shot down at Danzig, imprisoned, studied for the Anglican church after his release, went over to Rome, and finally went to the worst Trappe of the lot, Timaduec in Brittany. He was there for a year, couldn’t stand it, and is on his way to the Benedictines in the Isle of Wight. It wasn’t the dead silence for twelve months that got him down, so much as the gruelling work in the fields, digging up carrots, smashing stones, sorting turnips, living the life of a navvy without a single moment’s solitude; and with monastic discipline from the Dark Ages. No meat, fish, only veg, for meals, scarcely any sleep. He looks a nervous wreck, wild eyes, chapped hands, and broken nails, talks the whole time – terribly well – and can’t believe he’s out of it. He’s a fascinating boy, extremely sensitive and well educated, an omnivorous reader, a sculptor & musician. He felt he had to go to the furthest extreme in the Catholic faith, ‘to do penance for the misery of the world’. His reading in Christian mysticism carries him to all kinds of miseries, and ecstasies. He is at the moment gobbling up the works of St Dionysius the Areopagite, [4] his lips mumbling away, and his eyes rolling. He has the most dreadful doubts every now and then and careers into my cell to ask for advice. He told me the dream he had last night: ‘I was in a stable somewhere, they were saddling up a horse for me. But the saddle hadn’t got any stirrups! And by God! I noticed the horse was getting smaller and smaller – shrinking and shrinking till it was the size of the dog that pulled the little milk-cart at the Trappe. I got on the thing, we set off at a gallop. No stirrups and the horse shrinking all the time. Hell of a job to stay on. Faster and faster! Then I noticed we were heading for a small hole, about the size of a mouse’s. I was still hanging on somehow, and we were going like the wind. The horse shoots through the hole and disappears, and BANG! I crash into the wall, knock myself silly, and wake up. What do you make of that?’ What do you? Has it got a psychiatrical or a mystical exegesis? Good old womb stuff, or heading for the mystic’s inner chamber of oneness with the Godhead, supported by a diminishing spark of faith?’

I am working like anything at the moment, and in spite of Benzers, [5] feel absolutely exhausted. The books I read in the intervals are a Flemish mediaeval mystic called Ruysbroeck, and St Angela of Foligno, [6] who even surpasses Marie de l’Incarnation. I would like to have a year doing nothing except read in an enormous library with you somewhere. I feel I might use it properly at last, instead of mucking about in the manner I have done all my life so far. The time I have wasted makes me shudder with horror. No hope, I’m afraid! Anyway, one would need five years.

I finished the Maya article before I left Paris. Only 300 words beyond the right length for once. The typescript hasn’t arrived yet, but when it does, I’ll send you a copy, and darling, I want them to reproduce a photo of the Young Corn God and a really good Copán Stela, [7] and the best and most representative modern Maya faces. Contact  [8] probably won’t know which is which. Could you bear to go to Nicholson & Watsons (the publishers) and help choose the photographs which may not be labelled? I’m afraid they’ll make mistakes otherwise. I’ll tell Nigel Nicolson I don’t think the article is as bad as it might be (seeing how little I know!) I don’t know. It was a terrible sweat.

Darling, I’ll leave here at the end of the week, and go to the Norman Grande Trappe at Mortagne, but will wire you dates and addresses. I long to be with you, my own smooth little darling, and send you lots of hugs and stroke your ears and put a bow on your tail for you, my tiny muskin.

All my love to you my sweet darling from

Paddy

[1] PLF plays on the similarity between the place name and that of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

[2] i.e. Joan.

[3] Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), Elizabethan poet, courtier, scholar and soldier, was fatally wounded in the Battle of Zutphen, fighting for the Protestant cause against the Spanish. While lying wounded he is supposed to have given his water to another wounded soldier, saying, ‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.’

[4] St Dionysius, who lived in the first century ad, author of a series of writings of a mystical nature.

[5] Benzedrine tablets PLF used to sustain his concentration.

[6] John of Ruusbroec (1293/4–1381), Flemish mystic; and St Angela of Foligno, Italian mystic, founder of a religious order.

[7] Mayan monuments consisting of tall shafts of sculpted stone.

[8] The magazine that was publishing the Mayan article, started by George Weidenfeld, who employed Nigel Nicolson as assistant editor. Contact had no connection with the book publishers Nicholson & Watson, referred to in the next sentence.

Paddy and Joan discussed getting married, but they were very short of money, and for much of the time reliant on her small private income. This was an extra spur to his writing. ‘Darling we are absolutely broke,’ Joan wrote to him while both were in Italy trying to earn some extra money, ‘so do try to live for ages on what you have.’

Paddy was used to living on air. He was adept at borrowing friends’ houses, often for long periods of time. This letter was written from a house in Italy lent by ‘Mondi’ Howard.

To Joan Rayner

undated [February/March 1949]

Sant’Antonio

Tivoli

Provincia di Roma

My darling little pet,

Ζήτω! Ντὰν-ντὰν-ντὰν-ντὰν-ντάν! [Hurrah! Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding!] Your letter to Pienza and your telegram arrived within half an hour of each other, causing the postman two bicycle trips. My angel, I’m so relieved, as I was getting lonelier and more Ariadne-ish [1] every hour. I’ve missed you so frightfully all these days, thinking that you’d got nothing from me, didn’t know my address, and that we might lose each other for ages, as we almost did at Patmos. Δόξα τῷ Θεῷ! [Thanks be to God!]

What fun your Sicilian journey must be! I wish to hell I hadn’t got this appalling grind to get through, I can’t imagine anything better (quite apart from ourselves, my darling sweet) than doing it with you & Hamish [2] & Peter. [3] Do tell me all about it. Does Peter sit in the back? Any quarrels? None, I bet. I’m longing to hear every single detail. This is bound to be an absolutely idiotic letter, as I’m quite gaga with writing at the moment, and have reached a sort of saturation point where no further sense can come out. Darling, look out for some hospitable Duca or Marchesa with a vast castle, and try and get off with him, so that he could have us both to stay. I wish you could come and stay here, I wonder if you could? It’s so lovely. When you get to Rome, do go and see the Howards [4] with Hamish. He might, very tactfully explain the form, – you know, that we are good as married, and will be soon anyway, etc. I wish I knew him – Mondy – better. On paper he’s a pretty devout Catholic, but is certainly far from being a bigot. He has got a strange gentle kind of charm, and a rather unusual mind that obviously thinks things out carefully and deeply, and gives you a considered, often rather unexpected answer to any question. We met and became friends in Bari when I was waiting to be dropped into Crete. I know his brother Henry much better.

Darling, I like the glib way I talk about getting married; but I do hope you’ll still have me! I have been such a preoccupied empty bore these last weeks, that perhaps you are thinking better of it. Darling, please don’t! I’ll be all right again as soon as it’s finished, I promise! (I send yer lots of ’ugs.)

Oh dear. I got a terribly gloomy letter from Lindsay Drummond. It really is serious. [5] I’ve written to say that I can’t have the whole book ready by the end of this month, but have promised to let them have it by the first of May, if they can possibly still manage it then. Now, I can just, but only just manage that, I think, if I turn myself into a non-stop writing machine, and do nothing else. Darling, could you bear your Zombi-lover till then? I blame myself, rightly, for this mess, for my slowness, idleness, dilatations [sic], dilatoriness, scatterbrained-ness; the result of all this is that I feel miserable, fraudulent and guilt-haunted whenever I’m not working at the beastly thing. I really could strangle myself with remorse that this bloody business has come to a head while we are in Italy, Moloched, [6] and in spring. Darling angel, I really will be all right when it’s all over; please trust me. I was usually so diffident and secretive about the book not because you had broken my spirit by jeering at my early articles, but because there was so little of it, and so bad.

Thank heavens, I’m catching up here a bit – a lot in fact. There is nobody to talk to, and I haven’t got a single book to read, except my tedious old reference books – how I’m longing to put them all away forever! This is my day: I am called at 8 with coffee and bread, and am up by about 8.45. Then I walk along the edge of the Sabine hills till about 9.15, and work till 1. Lunch finishes about 1.30; then work till about 5, when I go for another half-hour walk, and work till 8. Then writing from 8.30, after dinner, till the small hours, 1 or 2 a.m. Alas, this bloody programme is what I’ve let myself in for now, every day till it’s over. Actually, once one has slipped into this rhythm, it is, in some curious way, terrifically stimulating, and at least, as one sees the sheets mounting up, guilt is at bay.

Darling little thing, don’t think that this is the sort of thing I’m condemned to for life! Living a settled life, a few hours a day – as long as it’s every day – will finish a book in two or three months easily. These shock-tactics are purely and simply the DAY OF RECKONING. I’m longing to organise my life so that there never are any: so far it has always been aimed purely and simply, one would say, at incurring them, though occasionally wars or luck have avoided or postponed them – and then living at breakneck speed to try and forget their existence.

Darling Joanàki, goodnight, and hundreds of tons of love to you, my sweet, kind, adorable little love. Please don’t hate me, and write as much as you possibly can. I only get gloomy ideas if you don’t!

xxxxx JEMY [7]

P.S. Lots of love to Peter and Hamish. Don’t tell them about my problems!

[1] Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, was abandoned by her lover Theseus.

[2] James Alexander Wedderburn ‘Hamish’ St Clair-Erskine (1909–73), second son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn, Nancy Mitford’s first love.

[3] Peter Quennell. PLF and Joan had driven down through France and Italy with St Clair-Erskine before parting: while he worked on the text of The Traveller’s Tree, she accompanied Quennell and St Clair-Erskine to Sicily, where she was to take photographs for an article Quennell was writing.

[4] Edmund Bernard Carlo ‘Mondi’ Howard (1909–2005), writer, soldier and consular official, married to Cécile, née Cécile Geoffroy-Dechaume.

[5] Lindsay Drummond’s publishing firm, which had commissioned The Traveller’s Tree, was in financial difficulty. The book was eventually published by John Murray.

[6] PLF means that they have their car; he and Joan called the car ‘Moloch’ because of its thirst for fuel.

[7] PLF often signed his letters to Joan ‘JEM’ or ‘JEMY’, obviously an acronym.

Paddy would often stay at Gadencourt, the Normandy manor-house owned by Sir Walter and Lady Smart, friends from wartime Cairo days.

To Joan Rayner

‘Thursday’ [May 1949?]

Gadencourt

Pacy-sur-Eure

Eure

My darling pet,

Thanks for your lovely Greek postcard (there’s a pretty picture for you at the end of this letter) and telegram. You write Greek beautifully! Darling Amy [Smart] has got other people coming here for the weekend, so Patrick [Kinross] and I have got to leave. Shall I really come and find you at Bordeaux? At the Chapon Fin? [1] I might do that, or I might, if that was difficult, manage to stay with somebody in PariS. L. de Vilmorin [2] vaguely asked me to stay; she sounded as if she meant it then, but she might have just been being charming. But I can always go to La Petite Boucherie! But I’d much rather come and find you than anything. Do telegraph at once!

I love this life, and hate the idea of leaving it. I’ve discovered that I can write absolutely the whole day long with the utmost enjoyment, settled quietly in the country. I only move from my desk – a heavenly malampia [cornucopia?] of books and papers now – from 9 a.m. till 9 p.m., for mealtimes, which I never thought, seriously, I could do. How different writing a book is from articles! If ever the Muse flags, I nip into the dining room and swallow a coup de rouge, and pause for a moment in the sitting room on the way back, where one’s morale is finally restored by the huge Narcissist’s looking glass there. The shutters are closed in the daytime, and all one can see is a dim figure, vague, noble and contemplative, against a background of enormous volumes of Molière, Tacitus, Racine and Corneille, exactly, in fact, what one would like to be! It’s tremendously invigorating. All writers should be equipped with these auxiliaries. This retirement for writing purposes makes me feel a bit like Saint Jerome in the desert finishing the Vulgate, with Amy as one’s major feline [3] . . . Smartie is better again, and he, Amy, Patrick and I spend hours talking after dinner. He (Smartie) is such a beauty, I never get tired of looking at him. He’s half Holbein’s Erasmus and half Voltaire at Ferney, with a curious dash of Peter Q [uennell], somewhere, an older and more distinguished one. Last night he talked for hours about life at the Persian Court at the beginning of the century at Teheran and Shiraz, the clothes, the mammoth turbans, the imperial receptions in colonnaded courtyards in the evening, tanks full of water-lilies and the emperor on a peacock throne smoking a narghiléh while the court-poets competed . . . He wrote an essay on existentialism last month that he sent to Cyril [Connolly], but C. must have been in France by then.

We went to a village fête on Sunday in a barn. There were wonderfully bad ballets by the schoolchildren, some of the best clowns I’ve ever seen, and a one-act-play acted by the grocer and his wife. The Pacy string band played, without rehearsal, with the Gadencourt brass band, the latter completely drowning the former with deafening sequences of farts down huge battered lumps of plumbing, while the former twanged bravely but furiously at their absolutely inaudible pizzicato . . . Fon-fon, the bistro-keeper’s wife, had a buvette on a trestle table outside, and everybody was rolling by the end. A lovely afternoon.

There is one of those enormous Norman cart-horses opposite, quite alone in a meadow and looking ten times the normal size. If it didn’t move about now and then, you would take it for the Trojan Horse, or part of a colossal equestrian group by Verrocchio or Della Robbia (!) mysteriously abandoned there riderless in the long grass.

It positively screams for a vast condottiere [4] in plate-armour.

I have reread (in bed, in the day) Paludes and Les Caves du Vatican. [5] I wonder how many times I’ve read them now and how many times I will again? [illegible] How good they are! When I have finished writing these two books [The Traveller’s Tree and another, never-published travel book about Central America], I think I’ll translate them into English, if it hasn’t been done already. I can’t think of anything easier and more pleasant. In ‘Les Caves du V’, there is another glâbre–hirsute, eugène–mortimer group antithesis I had forgotten about: les subtils et les crustacés.

I say, I hate the idea of going back to jail, don’t you? I wish we hadn’t got to ever again! I must finish this now, darling, to catch the post. Write – or rather wire – at once about the Chapon Fin.

A million hugs & kisses and love from

Paddy

Love to Cyril.

[1] One of Bordeaux’s oldest and most highly regarded restaurants.

[2] Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin (1902–69), novelist, poet and journalist, and heiress to a great family fortune. She had a slight limp that became her trademark. As a young woman she had been engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but the engagement had been called off. She was a notorious femme fatale, with many lovers, and was for some years one of Duff Cooper’s mistresses.

[3] St Jerome (c.347–420), author of the translation known as the Vulgate Bible, was supposed to have tamed a lion in the wilderness by healing its paw.

[4] Leader of a band of mercenaries engaged to fight for the Italian city-states in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

[5] Paludes (1895) and Les Caves du Vatican (1914), by André Gide, were favourites of Balasha’s before the war. Les Caves du Vatican distinguishes between two categories of people: the subtle, who recognise each other, and the ‘crustaceans’, or normal people, who do not recognise the subtle.

Paddy had discussed his idea for a book based on his Greek travels with Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), who as well as being a fine writer himself was a regular book reviewer. On 8 December 1950 Nicolson wrote to tell Paddy that he had read The Traveller’s Tree ‘with the greatest interest and pleasure’. He revealed that he was reviewing it for the Observer, ‘so you will see what I feel about it. I think that you have really written a most vivid and human account of those (to me) rather dull islands . . .

‘I think you have a truly excellent style which combines all the architectural qualities of classical French with the exuberance of your Celtic ancestry, together with a little tough touch that is all your own.

‘I do hope that when you start upon the Greek book you will not allow yourself to become overburdened by your material, and plan the thing in definite themes and chapters. Your “Traveller’s Tree” (why you chose such an absurd title I cannot think) suffers a little from the feeling that it grew too luscious in the tropical air and that you decided to give us only branches of it which were lopped and chopped all anyhow. You really are such an excellent stylist that I feel your planning in the next book should be very careful and that you should be very fussy about the actual shape it takes . . .

‘As you drink your resin wine and consume immense quantities of ouzo, murmur to yourself the words, “shape, shape, shape”.’

To Harold Nicolson

20 December 1950

Poros

Dear Harold,

Thank you very many times for the magnificent review of my book in The Observer, and for the kind and invaluably helpful things you wrote in your letter. I got the letter a week ago, on returning slowly to Athens via Arachova and Hosios Loukas, and, owing to some hitch in the mail, the Observer came well over a week after it had appeared. You can imagine my agony and impatience and final delight when a copy turned up at last. I’m certain it’s the kindest, friendliest and most encouraging review a first book could possibly receive. And I feel specially grateful that you could have written such a long and wise and valuable letter as well. I’ve reread it several times, and thought hard about your advice, and feel spurred, sobered and on my mettle about the Greek book. I would very much like to ask you more about the shape and planning of a book when I get back. Your final words have burned their way into my brain, and not a drop of ouzo or retsina now passes my lips without a silent invocation of ‘μορφή! μορφή! μορφή!’ [‘shape! shape! shape!’]

I’m delighted to have got those wretched [Caribbean] islands out of my system and to be in the right archipelago once more. I’m spending ten days in the first Greek Island I ever came to, fifteen years ago, to do some work. Nothing seems to have changed except a few more wrinkles on the islanders’ faces, one or two deaths and a rather older reflection of my own face in the barber’s looking glass when I went to get my hair cut. The rest I can remember off by heart. The forest of caïque masts, the departure of the sponge-fishing boats, the miraculous smoothness of the air and the sea, the lemon forests that surround my watermill, the olive and cypress trees and the clear outline of the Argive mountains. I wish I could send these all to you as a present for Christmas.

I’m deep in the Claudel–Gide correspondence. [1] Phew! It’s a real mill-stone book all right. I’m three-quarters of the way through, and it looks so far as though Gide will win easily. I like je préfère être vomi que vomir . . . [‘I prefer to be rejected than to be the one rejecting’].

This will miss you for Christmas, so every kind wish for New Year and to Ben and Nigel, [2] and 1,000 thanks again, dear Harold, for help and kindness and counsel. Je tâcherai de les mériter [I shall strive to deserve them].

Yours ever

Paddy

The storms threatening last fortnight have blown away. There is not a cloud in the sky, and it’s warmer than spring. Bright sunlight. I’m writing this under a plane tree in shirtsleeves.

[1] Letters between the diplomat Paul Claudel and the writer André Gide written between 1899 and 1926, edited by Robert Mallet and first published in Paris in 1949.

[2] Nicolson’s two sons.

Jock Murray’s decision to take on the publication of The Traveller’s Tree was the beginning of a lasting association with Paddy. Murray’s forbearance would be tested by Paddy’s habitual procrastination, his perfectionism, and his requests, which went far beyond those usually asked of a publisher. After Murray’s death in 1993, Paddy would add a personal tribute to Nicolas Barker’s obituary in The Times (24 July 1993), and gave the address at the service of thanksgiving held at St James’s Piccadilly on 26 October 1993. ‘The kindness, the comic sense, the wisdom, the thoughtful response to life, the enthusiasms, and the good repair in which he kept his friendships can never be replaced,’ wrote Paddy. ‘He was the ideal, the quintessential publisher, and his success was rooted in his total and passionate devotion to literature in general and to books in particular, and hence, to the people who wrote them. “I don’t mind tuppence about the overshot deadlines,” he said to an author long overdue with the last volume of a sequence, “I just want to see how it ends before I die.” ’ The unnamed author was Paddy himself.

To Jock Murray

February–March 1951

Monastery of Panagia Faneromeni

Salamis

My dear Jock,

Many apologies for any slowness in answering your two letters. I’ve been on the move in Attica and Boeotia lately, and scribbling away hard, and feel very remiss as a correspondent.

Lovely news about the reprint coming through so soon (any chance of the Voodoo picture? It’s becoming a slight obsession!) How many are you doing? Good news, too, about the Americans, but I wish the cautious wretches would start manufacturing on their own account. [1]

I knew it would take some time before I actually got any royalties, what with advances, Costa’s advance, the 50–50 split and so on. Actually, I’m getting awfully low [illegible] about pennies. I was wondering if you could manage to scrape together £100 for me, as I really do need it. It will only be a matter of time before we cover that by sales, and well beyond, won’t it? Do see what you can do, Jock. I wouldn’t have suggested it if it wasn’t a bit of an SOS. If it could be arranged, I’m sure my bank (Hambros, Pall Mall) could arrange for it to be released as future bait for dollars, which the arrangement with Harper’s apart from anything else would bear out! [2]

I’m so glad you liked Joan’s photographs and the Cappadocian articles. I’m preparing some more, as well as preparing the book, here in Salamis, where I’m staying in a sort of Hermitage belonging to Sikelianos, the great poet of Modern Greece. [3] The book on Greece (I keep racking my brains for a title. It’s got to be a really good one) is steadily taking shape in my mind. Lack of shape was the only serious criticism that Harold made about the Tree in a letter sent at the time of his review, and I think of scarcely anything else now.

It was lovely seeing Peter [Quennell] the other day. I went to meet him with Louis MacNeice [4] at the airport, and saw a lot of him. We had luncheon in the old quarter on the day of his lecture, then wandered about the Acropolis, then down through a maze of tavernas, having a swig in each, almost till zero hour. The lecture was excellent.

A tremendous film tycoon called Michael Powell [5] came out here a month ago, on his way to explore Crete with a view to making a film of the capture of General Kreipe. [6] I sent him to all my old mountain friends, who dragged him all over the mountains, filling him with wine and playing the lyre and firing off rifles. He came back after three weeks foot-slogging wild with excitement, and determined to start ‘shooting’ in May. It’s going to be a sort of superfilm, apparently!

When I came here three or four days ago, on the advice of a friend who hasn’t been since the War, I was astonished to find the monastery inhabited not by monks, but nuns. There’s been a changeover after the liberation. Dear little mousy black-clad things. Anyway, they violated their rule by letting me stay for two days, then I telephoned to Sikelianos in Athens, who let me stay here, under the abbey walls. A nun trots along three times a day with bread, rice, cheese etc. They’re sweet. This vast paper belongs to Sikelianos – reams of it, covered with pentameters, litter the house. It must be a sort of decoy for the Muse! No more now.

Write soon & all the best, yrs ever

Paddy

[1] Books manufactured were usually sold to American publishers royalty-inclusive, resulting in a lower earning per copy for the author.

[2] Murray obliged with a further advance of £100, which Joan brought out to Greece in late March.

[3] Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951), lyric poet and playwright. This refuge would not long be available to PLF because Sikelianos would be dead within a few months, after drinking a proprietary disinfectant, mistaking it for medicine.

[4] The poet Louis MacNeice had just been appointed British Council representative in Athens.

[5] Michael Latham Powell (1905–90), film director, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger.

[6] Based on the book by W. Stanley (‘Billy’) Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950).

To Jock Murray

18 March 1951

Zitza

near Yannina

Epirus

Dear Jock,

Thank you so much for your letter, and forgive my long speechlessness, due to wandering about Thessaly for the past two weeks, too tired to do anything except keep my diary up to date. The arrangement with Joan sounds fine, and thank you for fixing it up. I’m sure we’ll manage. Also, I forgot to thank you for letting me collect your bookseller’s debts in Athens. It was wonderfully handy, and I almost bought a bowler before calling on him. He says, could you let him have half a dozen copies of The Tree on approval. They will be sold at once.

I’m writing from rather a momentous place, the terrace in front of Zitza monastery, where Byron and Hobhouse stayed twice in Oct. 1808 (see Childe Harold). [1] It’s a very beautiful, derelict thing, on top of a hill north of Yannina near the Albanian border, surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Pindus. The region teems with memories of Byron, some rather disconcerting. I came here from Yannina this afternoon, after having come across the Metsovo pass, staying with Vlach villagers and exploring Thessaly. Yannina looks wonderful at the moment – brilliant spring weather, with Ali Pasha’s domes and minarets reflected in a bright blue lake. I leave here for Souli and Parga, then south to Lidoriki & Missolonghi, and back to Athens to meet Joan. No more now! Write soon.

Yours ever

Paddy

[1] ‘Monastic Zitza! from thy shady brow, Thou small, but favour’d spot of holy ground!’

Canto II, Stanza 48

To Jock Murray

5 August 1951

Skopelos

My dear Jock,

Thanks for the letter. Both Joan and I are delighted with the appearance of the Meteora [1] article – I’m so glad the corrections weren’t too late.

Well, the notes for the Greek work are assembled at last! I will be heading for home at the end of this month, after getting back to Athens and spending a few days winding things up and a day or two in the National and Gennadius [2] Libraries. I’ve got a formidable amount of material, and all of it fascinating. I hope to be able to borrow Amy & Walter Smart’s cottage in Normandy to do the writing in – it’s only a few hours from Victoria – but, in case that falls through, you couldn’t ask all your pals about a pleasant and cheap cottage for the winter, suitable for a hermit embarked on a major literary enterprise, could you? I send the same request in all letters home!

Important. Could you ask your bookkeepers to forward as soon as poss. the Meteora fee (£30, he said) to Messrs Hambros, Pall Mall, for me (as all odd monies that may crop up in future). Thanks very much, Jock for deputising for me at the R.S.L., and sending the dough to the right place. [3] Eddie Marsh, [4] the Secretary of the Soc., and Rab Butler [5] (who wrote me a friendly note) said you did it ‘charmingly’! Will there be any pennies for me from The Tree when I get back? I’ll be rather low. I’ve hopes of a flash article being printed about the Cyclades with Joan’s photos, which will be a great help. Otherwise, bar Ian Fleming’s [6] thing, there’ll be nothing much in the kitty.

I’ve forgotten where I last wrote to you from, but I think Kardamyli, in the Mani, after trudging over the Taygetus mountains. Well, it proved (the Mani) better and better as we went on. Blood feuds everywhere, and the only music, rather beautiful strange poetical dirges, a number of which I collected, and will translate. It’s absolutely barren mountain country and every village is a conglomeration of sky-scraper towers (never written about or photographed as far as I know), far stranger than San Gimignano, where the feud-haunted clan chiefs would immure themselves, secretly importing cannon and mounting them after dark, to bash away at their adversaries across the street for decades on end, who were similarly armed. (It gives one a hallucinating impression of village life.) Thence we struck north to Sparta and Tripoli again, then through Arcadia, and along peculiar gorges, past the monasteries of Kalavryta and Magaspilio (burnt by the Germans, now restored like blocked-concrete Park Lane luxury flats on dizzy crags). So, along the Gulf of Corinth to Athens again. I’ve retired to these queer little islands (Skiathos, Skopelos, Skyros (where Brooke [7] is buried) – ‘The Sporades’) to attack the book proper, and am actually embarked. I’ll be more detailed about movements when I get back to Athens next week.

Love from Joan, and all the best –

Yours ever

Paddy

[1] ‘The Monasteries of the Air’, published in the Cornhill magazine, summer 1951.

[2] The Gennadius Library in Athens, owned by the American School of Classical Studies.

[3] On PLF’s behalf, Jock Murray received the Heinemann Foundation Prize for The Traveller’s Tree at the Royal Society of Literature on 26 June 1951.

[4] Sir Edward Howard Marsh (1872–1953), poet, translator, patron of the arts and senior civil servant.

[5] Richard Austen ‘Rab’ Butler (1902–82), politician and President of the Royal Society of Literature. He would be appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Conservatives were returned to power in October 1951.

[6] Ian Fleming, then working for the Kemsley newspaper group, had proposed a limited-edition volume containing two articles PLF had written about life in the monasteries.

[7] The poet Rupert Brooke died on active service in 1915, on his way to the landings in Gallipoli, after developing sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He is buried on Skyros.

To Joan Rayner

undated [ January 1952]

c/o Mrs Batt

Britcher Farm

Egerton

Kent [1]

My darling pet,

Thank you so much for your heavenly letter from Dublin. It was absolutely maddening, I had to go to London in the middle of the week to do another recording of my Maya talk, and stayed on next day to hear Pallis’s lecture about the Greek War of Independence. [2] Your letter, meanwhile, had been forwarded to Kent, where the idiotic Batts [3] sent it to London, where I got it, thank heavens, the second I was leaving, but too late to catch you at the Shelbourne [4] before you set off for London or Paris. . .

I dashed back to Chesham Place by taxi, and collected the guidebook, but of course, your bus had just left when I got back! Wasn’t that bad luck? When I got back again, I lay down on the bed and finished the last page of Patrick’s book, [5] and as I shut it, the telephone went, and a female voice asked for you. It turned out to be Angela ex-K., [6] asking you and me to a party that evening. I went, of course, and wish you’d been there, because there were Patrick and Angela laughing away in front of the fire with their arms interlocked like the most inseparable friends. It was a problem to know whether to press her hand in silent commiseration or to wring Patrick’s in congratulation. [7] I also had a drink at Diane’s [8] who sends her love. Peter Rodd [9] was there, extremely drunk and boring, so I retreated to the Travellers where Harold Nicolson was dining alone, so we went to Pratt’s together, and sat drinking port and talking till it closed. Very agreeable.

The day I came to London for the recording (they had scratched the disc or something), I dined with a posh friend of Georgia’s & Sachie’s [10] called Dottie Beatty, [11] for Georgia’s last evening before sailing for Canada. Company half sympathetic, half hirsute: Alan Hare’s sister called More O’Ferrall, Seymour Berry, Joan Aly Khan, Georgia, Sachie, Lizzie [12] etc. I do believe my snobbish days are over, and about time. Drinking afterwards at Joan’s vast new house, and a lot of talk with Sachie, who suggests I take some work to Weston for a few days sometime, as he’ll be alone. Nothing I’d love more, but I doubt if anything will come of it, as he’s so shy and dilatory about independent decisions. Lunch next day with Daphne & Xan, [13] then to the French pictures again with D., where I again saw Patrick, with his Mum, who (P) wants to see us both. Then here. I saw Ronald Storrs [14] in the Travellers who told me he’s sent you an invitation to a tremendous Handel concert in St Paul’s. I think he’s in love with you. He always asks after that beautiful, splendid girl, and pumps away at my hand with vicarious ardour. Roger Senhouse [15] has asked me to translate Julie de Carneilhan by Colette, for Secker’s. It’s apparently Raymond’s responsibility. [16] So I’m doing that, which is rather boring but absolutely potty, [17] and as the book is only about 40,000 words, it will be over in no time, – two weeks? and will produce £80 or so (£2 per thou. words).

My dear little thing, I’m longing to hear all your adventures. Do wire me the moment you get to London. Are you taking Barbara’s house. [18] Tell me when I can telephone you.

Lots and lots of love, my darling sweet, and lots of hugs and kisses from

Old Mole

x x x x

P.S. I’ve got a new pen.

[1] Written on Travellers Club notepaper.

[2] Given at King’s College London by A. A. Pallis, Anglo-Greek author and head of the Greek Office of Information in London, 1945–52.

[3] PLF was a paying guest of a couple called Batt at their farm in Kent.

[4] A well-known Dublin hotel.

[5] Patrick Kinross’s The Orphaned Realm: Journeys in Cyprus, which PLF reviewed in the Observer on 13 January 1952. ‘The light and readable manner of this excellent book proves an apt instrument for tackling the more serious, as well as the light-hearted, aspects of Cyprus.’ The book was published under the name Patrick Balfour, though the author had inherited the title Lord Kinross on his father’s death in 1939.

[6] Angela Culme-Seymour (1912–2012), Kinross’s ex-wife, described in a Daily Telegraph obituary as ‘a dazzling feature of smart society before and after the Second World War, changing husbands and lovers with bewildering regularity; they included, but were not limited to, Churchill’s nephew, an English peer, a French count, an Army major and a professor of atomic physics who was married to her half-sister.’

[7] Kinross was homosexual.

[8] Lady Diane Abdy (1907–67), daughter of 5th Earl of Bradford, who married Sir Robert Abdy, Bt.

[9] Peter Rodd (1904–68), the estranged husband of Nancy Mitford. He is said to have been the model for Evelyn Waugh’s character Basil Seal in his novel Black Mischief (1932).

[10] Sacheverell (‘Sachie’) and Georgia Sitwell.

[11] Lady Dorothy Beatty, the American ex-wife of the 2nd Earl Beatty.

[12] Elizabeth Cecilia More O’Ferrall (1914–90), daughter of the 5th Earl of Listowel and older sister of Alan Hare, an officer in SOE who had been a frequent visitor to Tara during the war; John Seymour Berry (1909–95), politician and newspaper proprietor, who would succeed his father as 2nd Viscount Camrose in 1954; his mistress the Hon. Joan Aly Khan, ex-wife of Loel Guinness and Prince Aly Khan, son and heir apparent of the Aga Khan; the Sitwells; unidentified.

[13] Xan Fielding and his first wife Daphne (née Vivian), who had previously been married to the Marquess of Bath.

[14] Sir Ronald Storrs (1881–1955), a retired Foreign and Colonial official.

[15] Roger Senhouse (1899–1970) was himself a translator, and co-owner of the publishing house Secker & Warburg.

[16] Knowing PLF to be short of money, Raymond Mortimer had suggested him for this task.

[17] PLF apparently means that the work will be easy for him.

[18] Joan’s friend Barbara Warner had given Joan the use of a flat in Charlotte Street belonging to her mother.

Paddy first met the writer Patrick Balfour in the 1930s, at the Gargoyle Club in London. The two men shared an interest in Islamic history and culture, and became close friends. Kinross stayed several times with Paddy at Gadencourt, and later at his house in Greece.

To Patrick Kinross

17 February 1952

Gadencourt

Pacy-sur-Eure

My dear Patrick,

Thank you so much for your letter. I’m so glad you liked the review – I enjoyed The Orphaned Realm immensely, and do hope the one on Turkey is going strong. I’m struggling with an opus on Greece, and hope to have it finished by early summer.

I don’t think Percival Marshall [1] are doing all that they should about shoving The Orphaned Realm about. The Observer never got a copy sent to them, and I had to show it to the editor and ask to review it. Surely a paper like that ought to have received it automatically? I imagine they have made the same omission elsewhere, which is really scandalous. I think you ought to write quite a stiff letter to them.

What do you think about the Egyptian goings on? Thank heavens Amy, Smartie, Eddie etc. were OK. [2] They frightfully kindly let me live here for the whole winter. Why don’t you come and move in on your way home? It’s been raining and snowing like mad for the last week or so. I listened in most of yesterday to the Royal Funeral, [3] and for someone like me, who reacts to these things exactly like a scullery-maid, it was almost too much – a knot in the throat for six hours on end, bosuns’ pipes, cannon booming, the sound of horses’ hoofs, clink of bits, muffled drums and distant pibrochs [4] . . . Phew! The mention of the emerald Henry V had worn at Agincourt glittering on the crown on the bier was a dangerous moment. You’ll have to be shaking the moths out of your ermine soon, if, as I hope, you are taking part in the Coronation. You really mustn’t miss it. Xan is in Crete preparing a vast book. [5] Daphne went to stay with him for two months before Christmas, and is going back next month. I’d love to see her trudging over the rocks with an escort of lovesick brigands. Joan alternates between here and London, and will be back in a couple of weeks. Do let me know how you are getting on. I think you’re very brave living in Kyrenia after roasting the inhabitants so! Rose Macaulay [6] is going to Cyprus soon, writing a book on ruins. Do you know her? I think she’s a heavenly person. No more now, as the facteur [postman] is at the gate,

love

Paddy

[1] A publisher specialising in technical books and magazines, many about locomotives, with a sideline in country sports.

[2] There had been widespread rioting in Egypt in protest against corruption and the general belief that King Farouk was a puppet of the British.

[3] The funeral of King George VI had taken place on 15 February 1952, and was broadcast on the BBC World Service.

[4] A form of music played on the Highland bagpipes only, by a solo piper.

[5] The Stronghold: An Account of the Four Seasons in the White Mountains of Crete (1953) is 316 pages long.

[6] Rose Macaulay (1881–1958), novelist, biographer and travel writer.

Paddy had agreed with the publisher Derek Verschoyle to write a chapter for a book with the arresting title Memorable Balls; but as was often the case with him, this task outgrew its original function and became a full-length book, Paddy’s only work of fiction. The following letter was written while he was still working on the book, and was staying with his new friends, the writer, politician and diplomat Sir Alfred Duff Cooper and his wife Lady Diana at the Château de Saint-Firmin, the exquisite eighteenth-century house that they rented in the grounds of the Château de Chantilly.

To Joan Rayner

undated [Spring 1952?]

Chantilly

My own darling little Muskin,

Here’s a fine thing, my not writing for all this time, and please forgive me, darling. I simply don’t know how it happened – specially after your lovely long and juicy letter. Well this is what has been happening to me roughly. I stayed on in the forest of Compiègne almost a fortnight, indeed until the place shut up for the end of the winter season. I was the only person staying there in the end, and I gradually, by bits of conversation overheard from the kitchen, gathered that the ancient old girl who kept the place was an ex-semi-tart of the Paris music hall stage. She was Belgian and slightly deaf and conversing eternally with two other contemporaries that had formerly been colleagues on the boards round about 1900. They were always talking about the tremendous offers they had had from South American admirers in the good old days – des messieurs vraiment bien [‘true gentlemen’], possessing ten or twenty thousand, or once, two hundred thousand heads of cattle on the pampas! The last day I was there it rained cats and dogs without stopping, and these old girls played an endless game of belote [1] over the kitchen fire, all croaking with laughter like witches; and, when I left next day, the proprietress told me, that as I was the only man in the house, they had been playing for me! L’enjeu, était vous, Monsieur! [‘The stake was you, Monsieur!’] I think it very delicate and considerate of her only to have told me the day after. . .

I got to Paris, and found a room in the Louisiane, [2] that gloomy little one next to our old circular one, where you have to have the light on even in the daytime. I met Desmond Ryan and Mary Rose Pulham [3] (she had my coat, and I felt rather a pig taking it off them, as it had obviously been a godsend to the whole family. But I had to as I was absolutely shuddering by then). I had one or two nice meals with them.

I’ve forgotten to tell you that, except for two paragraphs, I have at last finished the story of the Antillean ball, and feel terribly excited about it. It’s twenty thousand words long, I’m afraid, instead of four, and I would like it to be printed as a small book. I don’t know what it’s like, really, but I think it is exciting and alive and rather odd. Did I tell you that it is called The Violins of Saint-Jacques – do you like that as a title? A day or two after, I got letters from Annie and from Ian, [4] who had got the address from you, saying they were arriving and bringing the proofs of the monastery book to be corrected and (bugger it) added to. So I waited on in Paris, wandering about by myself, drinking too much and getting into a fearful state of depression. It will be a great day when I realise when I’m being bored. . .

I rang Annie up the day she arrived and appointed a rendezvous at the Deux Magots, but when I got there, found Pierino, the Coopers’ chauffeur, waiting for me, who drove me off to that house in the Rue de Lille (Tanis Dietz’s) where the Coopers live [5] and where Annie was staying. The Coopers were there too – tremendously friendly greetings, and a lot of mock scolding of you and me for going through/being in France without going to Chantilly. Annie I thought nicer & friendlier than ever before, but pretty ill. I had supper with her while Duff and Diana [6] wandered about dressing for a first night, to which I accompanied them & John Foster, [7] of Henry Bernstein’s [8] [play] called Evangeline. Horribly boring. Afterwards to Maxim’s and a lovely supper with lots of champagne and talk, getting pleasantly tipsier, till very late, and laughing a great deal. I was planning to go and stay with Amy [Smart], but Diana persuaded me to go to Chantilly, saying Rowley and Laurian [9] were coming through on their way back. So went on Friday, party consisting of Coopers, me, and to my sinking heart, Ed Stanley, [10] who I’ve always disliked. But he was so funny over dinner and so much more intelligent than I had thought and so much friendlier (always difficult to resist) that I ended by liking him. He is hoping to get a job as Speaker of the House of Representatives in Lagos, capital of Nigeria, which I think is rather funny. Next day the Flemings turned up, also Liz v. Hofmannsthal [11] for a long stay. Odd people turned up. I managed to do a lot of work (finished The Violins!), correcting & adding to Monasteries etc., in my room and under the big tree at that round stone table, where I am writing at the moment. The first day I felt rather awful and shaky, slinking about like False Sextus who wrought the deed of shame; [12] but soon recovered and felt regenerated and reborn by this heavenly place.

On Saturday, over luncheon, the conversation was almost entirely about Cyril’s ‘Missing Diplomat’ articles, [13] and was a regular tempest of anger and indignation, led (naturally) by E. Stanley, and seconded by Duff, who, though he likes Cyril very much, grew red in the face till the veins stood out about C’s exposing his friends as drunkards, traitors, sadists, buggers, bolsheviks etc. etc., cashing in on friends’ failings etc. I may say that I was the only one to take the opposite view, which I did with some vehemence, till there was practically a free fight and danger of being knocked down with a decanter. I actually meant it too, as I thought the articles very good, though they told us nothing new – but they did establish, and in a way, I thought, rehabilitated them both as human beings, fallible etc., but not the shifty and guilty shadows that have emerged in the press so far. What do you think about all this? It was a real shindy. For heaven’s sake don’t mention it to Cyril (unnecessary injunction).

Apparently Ian had heard how much longer I’d made my memorable ball than was planned (via Peter Q. [Quennell] from you) and suggested printing it as an illustrated special book like the monasteries. If Derek Verschoyle doesn’t want it, I suppose one might. The ideal would be to have it done as a £4 book with a limited circulation and a cheap one for general circulation, if both publishers would agree, and get paid for both. I’ll put this to Derek & Graham when I hand it over, as it all depends on them. American Vogue are reprinting the Jamaica article on the fifteenth of this month, which seems odd. I hope it means extra pennies. I wish they’d do the Greek one with your snaps.

There has been great fun here planting narcissus and daffodil bulbs, in which pursuit Diana presses anyone who comes near the house. You punch holes with a tubular instrument like a spade, and I have usually been allowed charge of this, and have laid them out in all sorts of sentimental messages, transfixed hearts, great bears, Pleiades, Orion’s belts [14] etc., which will look very odd when spring comes round, and perhaps awful. Lovely walks in the woods and trips into Chantilly to buy moules and chestnuts and things. The trees are a wonderful mixture of autumn tints, and there is a constant rustle of falling acorns. I do wish you were here, my darling love, and so does everybody else, especially Duff, several times a day. They really seem (and other people have told me so ‘quite unsolicited!’) very fond of us both indeed, so we can come absolutely any time. I propose to go back this afternoon to Paris with the Coopers, Liz & their maid, stay a night in J. de Bendern’s flat [15] (which may be rash), then go to Amy’s for three to four days, and either come back to England or to St W. for a bit. I’m longing to see you again, Muskin darling, and miss you quite horribly. I also feel rather guilty hanging about like this, and being so slow in writing, but please don’t be cross, I don’t know how I’ve contrived to indulge so . . . Well there it is, and no draggle-eared rabbit nonsense either. My capacity for solitude is dwindling fast and gloom and loneliness and homesickness for being with you sets in almost at once, coupled with sleeplessness and bloody dreams. It’s raining now, late afternoon, the autumnal park outside, the plunging ducks, the statue of the Constable de Montmorency, [16] and the sheet of water looking romantic, solitaire et glacé, and I’m scribbling in the room near the bar – lovely and warm in here, fire blazing. I wonder how Cape Palinuro is looking now under the autumn rain, and Tarquinia, the pale waves of Nar, San and the Volsinian mere? [17] I think so much of our last two months (Cimbrone [18] has quite disappeared, strangely enough) and what an unusual and oddly enriching (not financially) and rewarding time it has been, and how happy, in spite of my ghastly procrastination over writing. I’ve had two charming & funny cards from Peter [Quennell], and think of him with great fondness. Do let’s wander about the Basilicata [19] sometime in search of Greek stragglers, it would be a wonderful quest. I must learn to drive.

Gadencourt, Tuesday (eight days later)

It looks as if this letter will never depart! I scribbled you a letter, which I sent off yesterday, roughly telling you what plans were, unless you thought I’d fallen under a bus or lost the use of my right hand.

Of course, everything turned out differently from what I’d expected. Drove to Paris with Diana and Liz, left my luggage at the Travellers where I was to meet J. de Bendern later to be given the keys of his flat, and went with Liz to Dessès [the fashion designer, Jean Dessès] and saw Lilia Ralli [20] for a moment. Then to the Travellers, where I found John de B. & Ed Stanley in an advanced state of intoxication, and positively reeling. John’s life is extremely complicated. You remember that tale about the gypsy flower-girl he picked up on the Champs Elysées? Well, she was now established in John’s flat in the Rue Surcouf, just off the Invalides. There she was, a tremendously attractive creature with a husky voice and an unbelievably gavroche accent. The thing is, she wasn’t sleeping with John (though I think they actually curled up in the same bed), at least, so they both explained to me at length; he was in love with her but not she with him. Meanwhile he was busy getting engaged to a Catalan girl – ‘a lady’ – called Mercedes who was terribly in love with him. This and John’s drunkenness and absences with flash tarts all night finally had become too much for Thérèse the gypsy, who did a bunk while I was there, and Mercedes came in to clear up the mess. All very complicated. I telephoned Amy, who couldn’t have me till Sunday as the house and bistro were full. Also Xan and Daph., on their way to Capri, had announced their passage through Paris, calling at Chantilly on the way. Another wait. On Thursday I went to a first night, with the Coopers, of a film called Sound Barrier, [21] presented by Alexander Korda, who took us to a horrid nightclub afterwards, from which Duff, Diana & I escaped and went and drank several bottles of Alsace wine at the Brasserie Lipp till it closed, and I went down to Chantilly again next day, till Amy could have me – a lovely quiet time of the sort we had this spring, including a heavenly walk to that deserted Cistercian monastery by the green trout stream, where we sat and drank wine under a willow tree. I came here to Gadencourt on Sunday night – just Amy & Smarty, both very sweet and friendly, not, I believe, quite as ruined by the Naguib reforms in Egypt [22] as I had feared, but still hard hit. No suggestions so far about letting us have Gadencourt for the winter! I’m getting a free lift back to England in D’s car the day after tomorrow, being picked up at Pontoise [23] on the way, which will be fun. So darling, I’ll probably arrive hotfoot on the tracks of this, so, unless there is something wonderful you’ve planned, please keep Friday free!

My darling little Muskin, many many hugs and kisses

from your old Mole

[1] A popular card game in France.

[2] An hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés which PLF had used before as a place to write. ‘From my bed I looked out onto the tossing manes of three gilded metal horses’ heads above the shop front of a horse butcher; it was like waking up holding the reins of a troika. The Deux Magots, the Flore, and a half-dozen other existentialist gathering places were just round the corner.’

[3] Desmond Francis Ryan (1910–76), soldier, and his wife Mary Rose Pulham (?–1991).

[4] Ann Fleming and her husband Ian.

[5] No. 69 rue de Lille was owned by Loel Guinness, who lent Duff Cooper and his wife Diana the first-floor flat on the front. His sister Tanis and her husband Howard Dietz lived in another part of the building.

[6] Duff and Diana Cooper.

[7] John Galway Foster (1904–82), barrister, Conservative MP and Under Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations,1951–4.

[8] Henri-Léon-Gustave-Charles Bernstein (1876–1953), French playwright. Evangeline was his thirtieth and final play.

[9] Rowland Denys Guy Winn MC (1916–84), soldier and Conservative politician, eldest son and heir of the 3rd Baron St Oswald, had been one of the habitués of Tara during the war. He married Laurian, daughter of Sir Roderick Jones, in 1952. PLF was best man.

[10] Edward John Stanley MC (1907–71), 6th Baron Sheffield.

[11] Diana Cooper’s niece.

[12] PLF is quoting from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842):

‘By the right wheel rode Mamilius, prince of the Latian name, And by the left false Sextus, who wrought the deed of shame.’

Sextus Tarquinius was the third and youngest son of the last King of Rome. His rape of Lucretia precipitated the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Roman Republic.

[13] The diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had disappeared the previous year, and there would be much public speculation about what had become of them until they surfaced in Moscow in 1956. Cyril Connolly’s Sunday Times articles, which revealed some of the personal qualities of the missing men, were thought by some to be in poor taste; they were subsequently re-published as a booklet by Ian Fleming’s Queen Anne Press.

[14] These are all constellations of stars.

[15] Count John Gerard de Bendern (1908–97), private secretary to Duff Cooper 1946–7, who had recently divorced his wife, Lady Patricia Sybil Douglas, daughter of the 11th Marquess of Queensberry.

[16] Anne, Duc de Montmorency (1493–1567), soldier, statesman and diplomat. As Connétable [‘Constable’], he was commander-in-chief of the army, outranking all the other nobles and second-in-command only to the King of France.

[17] PLF is quoting again from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (‘The fortress of Nequinum lowers o’er the pale waves of Nar’; ‘Best of all pools the fowler loves the great Volsinian mere’).

[18] The Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, owned by Lord Grimthorpe, whose nephew Martyn was a friend of Joan and PLF

[19] A region of southern Italy, the ‘instep’ of the Italian boot.

[20] Jean (Lilia) Ralli (1901–78), an Alexandrian Greek who worked for a Paris fashion-house and was a close friend of Cecil Beaton.

[21] The Sound Barrier, directed by David Lean and written by Terence Rattigan, had just been released by Korda’s production company, London Films.

[22] In July 1952, a group of disaffected army officers led by General Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the government of King Farouk. Naguib became prime minister, and legislation was passed to enact a land redistribution programme.

[23] A Parisian suburb.

As one of the first Europeans to travel through the southern Arabian deserts, Freya Stark was already well known as an explorer and travel writer when she met Paddy in Egypt during the war. She was one of the stars of John Murray’s list; in all, she wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as several autobiographical works and essays. In 1950 she spent a day with Paddy and Joan as guests of the British Ambassador, Clifford Norton, and his wife Noel Evelyn (known to friends as ‘Peter’), at their cottage near Piraeus. ‘Yesterday we had a cheerful party down here with Paddy Leigh Fermor and Joan,’ she wrote afterwards to her husband, Stewart Perowne: ‘Paddy looking in this wine-dark sea so like a Hellenistic lesser sea-god of a rather low period, and I do like him. He is the genuine buccaneer’ (Freya Stark to Stewart Perowne, 27 August 1950).

To Freya Stark

8 June 1953

Castello della Rocca di Port’Ercole

Orbetello

My dear Freya,

1,000 congratulations on the CBE! I’ve only just read about it in a very belated newspaper, and am absolutely delighted, as everyone else must be. A jolly well-deserved one and about time too!

Thank you very much for your kind postcard which I got weeks and weeks late, as I was trudging about in Umbria with Peter Q [uennell]. The ‘Violins’ story is coming out as a book soon, which I’m very thrilled about, as it’s a first attempt at fiction, which was something I’d always looked on with superstitious awe. It was certainly easier than the last phases of the travel book about Greece that I’m struggling with at the moment.

I’m longing to hear all about your adventures in Asia Minor with Fn Balfour, [1] and envy you them very much. I wonder what it was like when there were Greek villages dotted all over Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pontus [2] etc. – at least one would have been able to converse. Did you learn Turkish at all? I admire their undoubted stirling qualities – honesty, courage and so on – but have never managed to like them, or be amused by them. Reports of the Turkish celebrations for the quincentenary of the fall of Constantinople [3] make very irritating reading, though I suppose one can’t blame them. I had a plan to go to Constantinople and, for as long as the mafficking went on, drive round and round the city in a hearse, with six black horses in sable housings and feathers, and with a long crape round my stove-pipe hat, in mourning for the death of Constantine XI Dragatses Palaiologos, [4] who fell on the battlements on that horrible Tuesday. . .

I am established in a damp and ruined Aragonese fortress on the edge of the Tuscan Maremma, a sort of Zenda, really. I don’t know how Joan, who appears in a few days, will like it; but it’s wonderfully cheap – 1,000 lire a day for two rooms and an immense mileage of pasta twice daily. This is supplied by the owner, an ex-schoolmistress dwarf from Pesaro who acquired the huge ruin in payment of a debt fifteen years ago. It’s triumphantly gloomy, like something out of Mrs Radcliffe or Sheridan Le Fanu – especially at the moment, with a downpour and ear-splitting thunderstorm raging all round it – but fairly good for work.

Will you be coming to this part of Italy at all? If not, we must try and make a sprūng [leap] in your direction on the way back if you are still there! I long to hear all your news. How has drawing been going?

Many, many congratulations again, dear Freya, and love from

Paddy

[1] The Arabist and former political officer Frank Balfour, a friend of FS’s since the 1930s.

[2] Provinces of Asia Minor.

[3] Constantinople fell to an Ottoman army on 29 May 1453, following a seven-week siege.

[4] PLF is referring to the last emperor of Byzantium, Constantine XI Palaiologos (1405–53).

Paddy’s next refuge was a mansion – a ‘fine family ziggurat’ – belonging to the artist Niko Ghika on the island of Hydra. ‘He was seldom there, and, with boundless generosity, he lent it to Joan and me for two years,’ recalled Paddy. ‘It was an inviolate island, as empty of wheels as pre-Columbian America. Many of our friends came to stay – Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper, Cyril Connolly, Dadie Rylands, Maurice Bowra, Freya Stark, and others.’

To Jock Murray

30 July 1953

c/o Niko Ghika

Island of Hydra

My dear Jock,

Many apologies for my remissness in writing. I got yours of the 30th of June about ten days ago, but have been on the move constantly since, and procrastination, I’m ashamed to say, set in.

First of all, thank you so much for sending £50 to Hambros. It’s a real stitch in time, and v. kind. Secondly, I’m sure you’re right about films, birds in hand etc. I wonder how your chat with Ivan Moffat [1] went. These glowing suggestions, when it comes down to it, are often very like the bit out of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. . .

‘A thousand guilders?’ the Mayor looked blue; (So did the Corporation, too)’

. . . ending up with ‘Come! Take fifty!’ Anyway, I’m sure you’ll manage everything for the best.

So glad the galleys turned up all right, and a duplicate set sent off to America. I’ve had another very nice letter from Canfield, [2] who really does seem keen on the ‘Violins’ project. What is the projected publishing date?

I’ve just got a rather sad letter from George Psychoundakis, [3]

saying how hard up everyone is in his village, and notably his own family. He says, inter alia, ‘I wonder if the remainder of the £75 of which Mr Murray sent 40 could be sent, if it were not too difficult, if some friend were coming out who could bring them . . . Forgive me for asking, but things are pretty bad.’ I see authors’ letters don’t vary much! I enclose the original, for the records. It ends up ‘with love to you (P.L.F.) and all our friends Mr Murray, Aleko (Xan), Ioanna ( Joan), Daphne (Mrs Xan) etc.’

What are your views on his book? I think with cutting and polishing and our trimmings & pictures, it could be first rate. I wish now, I’d brought the typescript with me, instead of leaving it at Taffy Rodd’s [4] flat in Rome, as I am static again for a few weeks. But Greece soars forwards.

The Greek venture [5] has been a tremendous success. We went by road to Brindisi (across Apulia, via Lucera, Bari and those queer domed villages, Casa Rotonda and Alberobello), shipped the jeep from Brundisium to Corfu, and from there over to the Epirote coast at Igoumenitsa, and along the Kalamas valley to Yannina. Did a certain amount of Ali Pasha research, had a good look at the remains of Byron’s house, and went to the Monastery at Zitza (‘Romantic Zitza, on the shady brow . . .’ etc. see Childe Harold) where Byron and Hobhouse stayed twice, on way to and from Tepelen. [6] Then up into the Pindus, to revisit the Vlachs of Metsovo. Then south to Preveza and from Preveza over the mountains and the Acheron & Cocytus rivers to Parga, which I’d never seen before: wonderful, surrounded by steep, Albanian-speaking villages. Then over the Thesprotian mountains to Paramythia, up into the Cassiopeian range to Souli, where I left the others and trudged for two days over the mountains to the rock of Zalóngo, where the Souliot women leapt dancing into the void, in flight from the Arnauts of Ali Pasha. [7] Collected lots of splendid material from old kilted and whiskered chaps, whose grandparents can almost remember these great events. So, on to Arta, round the Ambracian gulf, through Vonitza to the island of Levkas (Santa Maura), then south through the Acarnanian mountains to Astakos and Ætolikon, & so to Missolonghi by sea. (Nearly all these places come into Childe H. & the Notes, which is fun.)

Here the great search for Byron’s shoes began. I hadn’t got Lady Wentworth’s [8] letter with me, containing the address, and of course, she had lost it, she writes. I asked all over the town – mayors, local bigwigs etc. – for an old man who had a pair of Byron’s shoes. They all said they’d never heard of them or him, and he must be an impostor. But I tracked him down in the end, a very decent wall-eyed old man called Charalambi Baïgeórgas or Kotsákaris, descendant of a family that played a considerable part in the siege. Along with a lot of scimitars, yataghans [short Ottoman sabres], pistols, powder horns etc., he produced a parcel, already addressed, on the strength of my letters last year, to ‘the Baroness Wentworth, Crabbet Park, Sussex’. Since then, though, he seems to have fallen in love with them, and (rather understandably) wants to leave them to his children. (Lady W. would probably have had them turned into nosebags for Arab colts.) Before opening the parcel he told me the following tale.

Byron, when he was in Missolonghi, often went out duck-shooting in the lagoon in the boat of a fisherman called Yanni Kazìs. (It was, Baïgeórgas states, on one of these outings that the fatal ‘pneumonia’ was caught. Mavrocordatos, [9] on the enclosed ‘mourning order’, calls it a ‘flaming rheumatic fever’ – ‘φλογιστικὸς ῥευματικὸς πυρετός’.) Byron died, and, in due course, Kazìs, leaving three daughters. Two of them married, but the youngest went away to Jerusalem, and became a nun. She returned to Missolonghi, a very old woman – eighty or ninety – in 1921. As she was penniless and had nowhere to stay, Baïgeórgas gave her a little room in his house where she lived a few years, and then died, handing over an old box to Baïgeórgas, containing a few mouldy religious books, some odds and ends, Mavrocordatos’ ‘Mourning Order’ (enclosed – they are quite common), and – Ld Byron’s slippers, which, she said, he used often to wear about the house when he returned from riding or from these duck-shooting trips. He gave them to her father, who kept them previously, leaving them to her when she died.

Old Baïgeórgas then undid the parcel, and produced a pair of slippers that looked more Turkish or Moroccan or Algerian (or Burlington Arcade oriental) than Greek, to my surprise, as I had expected an ordinary pair of pom-pommed Evzone tsarouchia [wooden clogs worn by palace guards]. I enclose a sketch and a description of the colours. They are leather-soled, turned up at the tip, and with uppers of cotton and embroidered silk, rather faded. The age looks just about right. I made a tracing of both of them, also of the parts of the soles where the criss-cross tooling is worn smooth, in case it should corroborate, or conflict with, known facts about Byron’s malformation. Also, the size might be a help. I made enquiries about Kazìs – everyone knows about him. Also it is true that his daughter died in Baïgeórgas’s house. Baï himself makes the impression of an absolutely straight man. Personally, I’m inclined to think they really are Byron’s shoes. There was something wonderfully convincing about them. Could you ask Harold [Nicolson] & Peter [Quennell], showing the tracing? They are boat-shaped and roughly symmetrical, but one must bear in mind that they were traced sole downwards on the paper, and the worn parts copied down by holding them sole upwards, if you follow me. The worn parts are notably different on each – but so, quite often, are the shoes of normal people . . . Please don’t mistake all this for ghoulish Trelawny-like inquisitiveness – I’d just like to know if there is any possible chance of corroborating the old boy’s story. Joan took a photograph of them, also enclosed.

Well, after that, on to Nafpaktos (Lepanto), where I again left the others, and went for three days up into the Aetolian mountains, to the Kravara – the remotest villages in Greece, where all the villagers used to be trained from childhood to feign lameness and distortion, in order to go begging all over the world. I collected some amazing stories, also a vast glossary of their very peculiar thieves’ cant. Then to Athens. All this was a revisiting of places I had been to two years ago, but about which I had lost the notes. I got very much more this time, and it was well worth it. After a few days in Athens, I came out here, to the painter Niko Ghika’s house – quite empty, very romantic and beautiful, on a headland of the island of Hydra opposite the Argolid peninsula of the Peloponnese.

No more now. I’m working hard on this new stuff, and will be here certainly, for three weeks: so would you write me any news ℅ Poste Restante, Hydra, Greece, and, if in any doubt about time, duplicate to the British Consulate, Athens.

Γειά σου, γειά σου, καὶ ἡ Παναγία μαζί μας! [Goodbye! Goodbye! And may the Virgin be with us!]

Yours ever

Paddy

[1] Ivan Moffat (1918–2002), screenwriter and film producer. It seems likely that he had expressed interest in making a film of one of PLF’s books.

[2] Publishing executive Cass Canfield (1897–1986), president and publisher of Harper’s.

[3] George Psychoundakis (1920–2006), shepherd, writer and war hero. During the Second World War he served as a dispatch runner between resistance groups and SOE units in occupied Crete. Afterwards he wrote his memoirs, which PLF translated into English and helped to arrange their publication by John Murray under the title The Cretan Runner (1955).

[4] The Hon. Gustaf ‘Taffy’ Rodd (1905–74).

[5] PLF was collecting material for his book on Greece.

[6] PLF misquotes Childe Harold. He had apparently forgotten that he had already described a visit to Zitza in another letter to JM written more than two years before, in March 1951.

[7] In 1803, the women of Souliot climbed the bluff above the convent, performed their national dance, and then leapt with their children into the void in order to escape capture by ‘the red-shawled Arnauts’, the Albanian followers of the notoriously cruel Albanian brigand, Ali Pasha.

[8] Judith Anne Dorothea Blunt-Lytton (1873–1957), who was known as Lady Wentworth, lived at Crabbet Park in Sussex. She was the only surviving child of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) and his wife Lady Anne King, the daughter of the 1st Earl of Lovelace and granddaughter of Lord Byron.

[9] Alexandros Mavrocordatos (1791–1865), statesman and diplomat involved with Byron at Missolonghi.

To Freya Stark

August 1953

Island of Hydra

c/o Niko Ghika

Dear Freya,

Thank you so much for your nice letter & invitation. As La Mortola [1] is bang on the way home, I think I’d love to stay one or two nights there when my parole away from England expires. How ungracious that sounds! But what I meant was, even if dead broke & crippled one would be able to do it so easily, while Asolo [2] would need a bit more planning: though, I must say, not much!

I’m longing to hear more about Ionia. What is the best book about the Greeks of Asia Minor? Old Prof. Dawkins [3] knows a lot about them – I go and stay with him sometimes at Oxford, he’s eighty-two and quite tireless. I long to know more too, about the modern (up till 1922) Greeks of Turkey – especially the Lazi of Pontus & Caucasus and the Turkish-speaking (but Greek and Orthodox) Karamanlis of the interior.

Tom Dunbabin, [4] my old Cretan colleague, has written a first-rate book The Western Greeks on the Greek colonies – up till circa 500 bc – of Sicily, Campania, Apulia & Calabria. [5] But I long for a book about the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Greeks of southern Italy, from when Robert Guiscard [6] overthrew the Katapan of Bari till today. Do you know of any? They still speak a kind of Greek, I believe, in villages near Taranto and Lecce, and I would like to go there – also to Cargèse in Corsica, where there is an eighteenth-century Greek refugee colony from the Mani.

I very much want to hear more of your theory of Byzantine tradition among the Turks – it was obviously enormous, and I’ve been touching on it from time to time in the book I’m on at the moment, but rather nebulously, as I don’t really know much about it. I wonder where to look. Von Hammer? [7] Yes, the honest Turks are heavy and dour, aren’t they, as though the leaven had been forgotten when the dough was being kneaded in central Asia. But I do resent their presence in Byzantium!

Joan – who is here, & sends love – leaves in a few days to drive about in Italy (central) with Maurice Bowra & a friend, while I stay on here two to three weeks or so, perhaps reuniting with her, perhaps both returning separately. But it would be lovely to halt at La Mortola on the way back. I’ve just been trudging through Epirus, Acarnania & Aetolia, – trois fois vainqueur j’ai traversé l’Achéron, [8] swimming in it each time!

Hoping to see you in about a month, & love from

Paddy

[1] FS’s family home at La Mortola, on the Italian coast not far from Ventimiglia and five minutes from the French border.

[2] FS recovered from the exertions of her travels at her villa in the hamlet of Asolo, in the Veneto.

[3] Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871–1955), Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford; Director of the British School at Athens, 1906–14; Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature, 1920–39.

[4] Thomas (Tom) James Dunbabin (1911–55), Australian classicist and archaeologist. During the war he held the rank of lieutenant colonel and served as an SOE field commander on Crete, where he played a key role in organising the local resistance and earned his DSO. He used the Greek codename Yanni and was also known to locals as O Tom. He died in his mid forties from pancreatic cancer.

[5] The Western Greeks: The History of Sicily and South Italy from the Foundation of the Greek Colonies to 480 bc (1948).

[6] Robert Guiscard (c.1015–85), Norman adventurer, captured the city of Bari in 1071, after a three-year siege. For the previous century the city, on the Italian Adriatic coast, had been ruled by the Byzantines and administered by a katapan (governor).

[7] Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), author of Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (10 vols., 1827–1935).

[8] ‘I have overcome death three times.’ The Acheron is a river in Epirus, believed by the Greeks to be a branch of the underground River Styx, across which Charon transported by boat the souls of the dead to the underworld.

‘Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron; Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la fée’

Gérard de Nerval, The Chimera (1854)

The vivacious society hostess Ann Fleming would become one of Paddy’s close friends and most regular correspondents.

To Ann Fleming

undated [October/November 1953]

c/o British Consulate

Athens

Darling Annie,

I say, what a lovely and cheering letter! Very many thanks for it, coupled with apologies for delay in answering. I got it just on the brink of leaving for Crete fresh from quake-struck Cyprus. [1] Joan suddenly appeared, just in time to nip a fearful cafard [bout of melancholia] in the bud, and off we went to Crete, trudging over rocks like scimitars or jolting about in mule-saddles, drenched to the skin half the time, eating a dozen meals a day, lest Cretan village hospitality should be offended, and putting down raki and wine by the hogshead – expanding, as you might guess, like dirigibles, our breath deteriorating and our eyes dwindling and turning scarlet, and finally vanishing. Phew! But there were lots of compensations, lovely dances by booted mountain thugs bristling with daggers, every one blazing off feu de joie [2] and some tremendous singing. On the last night we sat up till eight in the morning, to the tunes of a Cretan lyre, a lute, a fiddle, and a zither, and were loaded on board with egos boosted a mile high, several stone heavier, and completely drunk. For a day or two, our hangovers will be so real and positive, it will seem almost as though we were four people instead of two . . . But they will gradually fade away, leaving nothing but a fragrant memory. We only got back to Athens this morning, so our footsteps are still dogged by our ashen, accusing and malodorous doubles. . .

Clarissa was quite invisible here, shrouded in dazzling ministerial convalescence; [3] but I saw lots of Bridget [4] who thought Greece was really tremendous. Another white ladyship, Baba Metcalfe, [5] came later, vying in marble blankness with Pallas Athene herself. It’s been a lovely summer, full of movement, excitement & fun, and justifying a minimum of work as a guilt-remover . . . Joan is planning a wonderful party when we are back, in about three weeks, which will be nice for all of us. I’ve got to stop in Rome to collect my luggage there (I’m shivering in tattered and filthy summer drill, having come here for three weeks and stayed nearly four months), then I hope, in about ten days’ time, Chantilly for two to three days, & London. I do hope you won’t have vanished to Goldeneye? [6] Love to Ian – we’ll all be meeting almost at once; and thanks again for writing that nice letter!

Love from

Paddy

(also from Joan)

[1] In September 1953 the Paphos district of Cyprus suffered a destructive double earthquake.

[2] A rifle salute fired by soldiers on a ceremonial occasion.

[3] Clarissa Eden, wife of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden.

[4] Lady Mary Bridget Parsons (1907–72), daughter of the 5th Earl of Rosse.

[5] Lady Alexandra ‘Baba’ Metcalfe (1904–95), daughter of the Marquess of Curzon. Her husband ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe had been best man when the former King, Edward VIII, married Wallis Simpson.

[6] The Flemings’ house in Jamaica.

Paddy came to know Lady Diana Cooper in 1951, and would maintain a correspondence with her until her death almost four decades later. According to her granddaughter, ‘each discovered that the other was the sort of person they liked best’. His letters were written to amuse and entertain her; they were affectionate and not a little flirtatious, despite the twenty-three-year difference in age between them. ‘Being alone with you is what I like best, a delight of which I can never tire,’ he had written to her in March 1953. Paddy usually addressed her as ‘darling’; she addressed him as ‘Paddles’.

The letter reprinted below was written after Duff Cooper’s death on 1 January 1954.

To Diana Cooper

11 January 1954

Birr Castle

Co. Offaly

Ireland

My darling Diana,

I’m so phenomenally and abnormally bad at writing letters at times like this – and the greater the loss and the fonder I am of the people involved, the more hopelessly pen-tied I become – that I rather cravenly put off doing so until it was almost too late, hoping to replace it with cables and the telephone. But, darling Diana, you have been in my mind, quite literally, practically every minute of the last eight days, and I can still think of little else. Vain regrets, but I wish I’d managed to fly to Vigo [1] – poor Diana, I hate to think of you coping all alone, and still more dread the loneliness you must be feeling, but was also a bit afraid of intruding. I wonder how much of a help it is to know how much you are adored, by people who also want to share in this and help and console, however clumsily? I keep on thinking of Duff talking away by candlelight dinner, and having to stop reading Vile Bodies out loud by the fire afterwards, to mop away the helpless tears of laughter that were streaming down his face. None of the obituaries I’ve seen quite get the point – all the vigour and fun and enjoyment and wit and irascibility and kindness. The Times I thought hopeless: priggish and lame and not very well disposed. It was lucky having Daph and Xan near at the time as fellow mutes to hold hands and send off massed waves of love and sympathy to you through the air.

They left Luggala [2] (where we all stayed for Christmas & New Year) four days ago, and I came on here. Christmas was quite extraordinary there: a mixture of nightclub, the Hons’ Cupboard [3] and the Charge of the Light Brigade, so tremendous was the pace, even for me, all day and night – hell for leather, with many a riderless chair at luncheon each day, but everyone miraculously in the saddle by sunset and streaming across the country once more, along the bottle-strewn valleys of the night . . . Here, staying with Michael and Anne Rosse, [4] all seems astonishingly quiet and mild, though all the nobs of western Ireland are assembled and blazing away, while the pyramids of dead pheasants mount up. Do you know it? Lovely rushing streams under one’s window and pretty willow-pattern trees under a rainy Irian sky; and pleasant evenings drinking round peat fires, with Bridget’s brow growing blacker with each succeeding flutter and pout from Anne . . . (mine too, a bit, I must say . . . )

Diana, I’m so glad you’ve gone to stay with David [5] in Tangier. Far, far best. Do, please write as detailed a programme as you can of your plans, in case I might make a getaway and come and see you somewhere for a few days. [6] (I’ll be at Travellers again at the end of this week.) No more now, but do write as soon as you possibly can; and remember, dearest Diana, that you are being thought of with love absolutely every instant.

With devotion, hugs, etc. from

Paddy

P.S. Bien des choses [‘best wishes’], as they say, to David.

[1] Duff Cooper had died aboard a French liner bound for the Caribbean, which put in to the Spanish port of Vigo.

[2] The house of Oonagh Oranmore and Browne, née Guinness, then romantically involved with Robert Kee.

[3] PLF refers to the linen cupboard where the Mitford sisters – all ‘Hons.’ because daughters of a peer – would gather to gossip, plot and keep warm.

[4] Lawrence Michael Harvey Parsons (1906–79), 6th Earl of Rosse, Irish peer whose family seat was Birr Castle, brother of Lady Bridget Parsons; and his wife Anne, née Messel, mother from her first marriage of Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), who in 1960 married Princess Margaret.

[5] The Hon. David Alexander Reginald Herbert (1908–95), referred to by Ian Fleming as ‘the Queen of Tangier’.

[6] PLF joined DC in Rome for a fortnight.

From Rome, Diana Cooper went on to Greece, while Paddy returned to England to write, bearing an envelope filled with her letters of thanks to those who had sent her messages of condolence. This letter was written while he was staying with John and Penelope Betjeman in Berkshire. Penelope’s recent conversion to Catholicism had put their marriage under strain.

To Diana Cooper

‘Sunday’ [February/March 1954]

c/o John Betjeman

My darling Diana,

I wonder if you are in Athens yet? Anyway, here goes, a provisional letter just in case you are. Before I start, darling, there is a shaming disaster to report. When, on getting to Charlotte Street on Wednesday, I made a dive into my ragged bag for that envelope with your letters in – nothing there! I didn’t by any chance give them back to you or anything, did I? I’m convinced not, I would have remembered. Could they have fallen out, I wondered, in the aeroplane or customs, or ‘bus’ when I dug out a book? I’ve made a thousand enquiries, all with no result so far, which is the cause of my delay in writing till now, as some needed a day or two’s delay, the air people said. I can’t think how they vanished, unless someone pinched them through the torn top of my bag (in lieu of traveller’s cheques) . . . They may appear, but I’m not sanguine. I should have had them in my pocket. This is simply ghastly and I feel very ashamed, especially after your disaster over letters with Norah, [1] the Augean stables of correspondence you have to cope with, and in view of the sacredness of letters etc. I do hope there was nothing tremendously vital and irreplaceable in any of them . . . Can I, if you send me the names of the addressees, ring them up and explain why they have not heard from you? Take (quite rightly!) the blame? Most abject apologies again. It’s totally mysterious and profoundly humbling. . .

It started snowing last night, and there is a North Pole landscape outside the window this morning. It’s still snowing slightly, and the cold goes straight to the bone if you stick your nose outside. But it’s rather a nice vicaragy frowst indoors: vast log fire, millions of books, strong drink appearing any moment. We had great fun last night looking up obscure poets – South Africans, Australians, Canadians, etc. – and reading them aloud in turn in the appropriate accents. We also drank a great deal of whisky, until everything we read seemed uproarious. I had to read, in an Australian voice, the following line:

‘And lo! The sward was pocked with wombats’ holes!’

We found drunken tears streaming down our cheeks, and had to chuck it for the night. . .

Penelope’s Catholicism has obviously split the household. [2] There is a certain amount of doctrinal bickering and smart rejoinders, surreptitious reading of the Catholic Herald (quickly stuffed under a cushion if John comes into the room), and sudden withdrawals by Penelope into her bedroom, of which I caught a glimpse – a grotto of images, rosaries, crucifixes, and sacred hearts. It’s a sort of microcosm of Reformation England inside out.

London, next day . . .

The fortnight in Rome was one of my happiest for ages. You are more fun to be with, travelling about, exploring etc., than you can possibly imagine, and turn everything to magic. Do let’s do it again . . . Darling Diana, try not to be so desperately lonely and miserable, and, if you find yourself becoming so, remember how passionately adored you are by so many people, and think of happy times to come. You seem a miracle of guts & stoicism to me, and one could weep at the idea of you being unhappy and lonely. I really do adore you, and you are far too precious to everyone for the idea to be at all bearable. . .

Many, many thanks now again, Diana darling, for being such a heavenly companion in Rome and Florence, and please take tremendous care of yourself, for all our sakes! Also, if poss., do write almost at once.

Fondest love, hugs, devotion, etc.

Paddy

[1] Norah Fahie, Lady Diana Cooper’s ‘secretary-gardener’.

[2] Betjeman became attached to Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, sister of the Duke of Devonshire, whom Betjeman’s daughter Candida Lycett Green would describe as her father’s ‘other wife’.

The visit to Betjeman inspired Paddy to write this parody of his style, first published in the Cornhill magazine in the summer of 1954.

‘In Honour of Mr John Betjeman’

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Eagle-borne spread of the Authorised Version!

Beadles and bell ropes! Pulpits and pews!

Sandwiches spread for a new excursion

And patum peperium [1] under the yews!

Erastian peal of Established church bells

(Cuckoo-chimes in Cistercian towers!)

Bugloss and briony border our search. Bells

Toll the quarters and toll the hours.

Unscrew the thermos! Some village Hampden

Swells the sward. Fill the plastic cup

For a toast to Brandon, to Scott and to Camden,

To dripstone and dogtooth, with bottoms up!

Herringbone-tweed (one more? Shall we risk it?)

Mimics the moulding from neck to knee.

(Ginger beer, and a Peek Frean biscuit?)

Then here’s to Pugin with three times three!

Basketed bikes on the lych-gate leaning

(Headlamp and rearlamp, pump and mac!)

Bask in the sunshine, the privet screening

Raleigh and Rudge [2] till we both get back;

Back from the church where the rood screen false is

Bogus both squint and architrave.

Lord! Let an Old Marlburian’s Dolcis [3]

Quicken the echoes of the nave!

Let an Old Marlburian Veldstchoen [4] waken

Ghostly incumbents along the gloom,

And the rattle of anthracite long since shaken

Out with the slag in the boiler-room.

Raven-black sway the phantom cassocks,

Ruby the silk of an M. A. hood;

Sweet is the incense of fragrant hassocks

And tiger-lilies and Ronuk’d [5] wood . . .

Sarum-chants of celestial cities,

Rustic anthems in harmony

Quavering rune of the Nunc dimittis,

Gaslit groan of Abide with me!

Back to the lamplight, back to the crumpets

Under the cliff by the seaside path

An Old Marlburian treads through the limpets

Home through the sunset’s aftermath.

The 7.10 whistles, and helter-skelter

Wild foam flies by the wayward sea;

Bladderwrack pops under Lotus and Delta [6] . . .

Holy Saint Pancras, pray for me!

[1] Anchovy paste, traditionally spread on toast, marketed as ‘The Gentleman’s Relish’.

[2] Bicycle manufacturers.

[3] Shoe retailers. Betjeman had been educated at Marlborough.

[4] A form of welt used to make shoes weather-resistant.

[5] Brand of wax used on floors.

[6] More shoe retailers.

While Diana Cooper was in Athens, Paddy based himself in her house by the sea near Bognor Regis. The letter that follows describes a visit to Lady Wentworth, the eccentric châtelaine of Crabbet Park (see note 8 on page 77). An account of this visit appears in his book Roumeli, though there it is conflated with an earlier visit.

To Diana Cooper

22 March 1954

West House

Aldwick

Bognor Regis

Darling Diana,

I bought 200 of these titanic sheets of paper at Lechertier Barbe [1] in Jermyn Street last week, as nib-coaxers when pen paralysis seems imminent, and I must say it seems to work like magic – you just glide along like a figure-skater on a perfect rink, leaving a wonderful track of conceits, tropes, paradoxes, thrusts, sallies and apophthegms . . . It’s a pity most of it has to be pruned away next morning.

Your catalogue of places in Greece turns me green with envy, nostalgia, and feelings of frustration at not being there too, trudging along among the rocks and asphodel (which must be smothering everything by now – marvellous in the mass, a sort of pale haze over the country, but so disappointing individually), and knocking off after culture for delicious retsina under plane trees. I think that, after olives & cypresses & vines, which are more symbols than plants, plane trees come next on my list of favourites. It always means there’s water near – emblems of salvation in August! – and, in a village they are the heart of everything, sheltering those little colonies of rush-bottomed chairs and round, tin tables where all the old boys wile their days away over coffee and amber beads. Often, several yards of their circumference, right up to the first branches, are whitewashed, which looks marvellous. Then, a labyrinth of huge peeling branches patched and mottled like pythons, and millions of those complicated leaves producing a Marvellian [2] penumbra, and all on such thin and flexible threads of stem that the faintest suspicion of a wind sets up a liquid mysterious whispering. You ought to be there in mid summer to see them really come into their own as public benefactors. Do you know the first thing the old boys under them ask you when you’ve arrived in a muck-sweat, had a drink, lit a cigarette and come to after some appalling climb? It’s: ‘What do you think of our water?’ They go on about it like Connolly or Waugh over Cheval Blanc. [3] I had a French guidebook once which said in the preface – ‘C’est surtout l’eau qui excite la gourmandise des Grecs.’ [4] It’s the same throughout the Levant. I believe that the Turks used to have tremendously grand water-parties in the past. They would settle on carpets and cushions in the cool of the evening in the garden of some palace on the banks of the Bosphorous with hookahs and tchibooks – those cherry wood pipes with straight stems six or eight feet long – and a Circassian or Caucasian girl playing the baglama (a sort of dulcimer suitable for damsels) while beautiful youths of equivocal status carried round trays laden with blood-red and gilt cut-glass carafes from Prague filled with different waters, which the Vizir would offer in turn to the beys and pashas beside him on the grass: ‘Try this one, Selim – it’s from the snows of Bithynian Olympus!’ or ‘One of the Sweet Waters of Asia . . .’ ‘And this one, Cadi Effendim, is a rather rare one from the Taurus mountains.’ ‘This little fellow arrived by caravan last week from Azerbaijan.’ ‘That’s just an ordinary Armenian.’ ‘What do you make of this, gentlemen? It’s one of the Bulgarian tributaries of the Danube, a spring called Studena Voda . . .’ Just think of all the water snobbery that must have gone on, the expertise and beard-stroking and rumblings and kissed fingertips and cries of Bismillah! [‘In the name of Allah!’] and gurks of approbation! The gatherings would go on till moonrise, when the guests would be helped to their little private caïques by turbaned negroes and rowed reeling home, lulled by the sound of flutes, to the Golden Horn. . .

Last weekend I went to stay with an old friend called Antony Holland, [5] who lives between Brighton and London, in a very agreeable tumble-down, vicaragy kind of house full of books. (He’s a great-great nephew of Sydney Smith’s, [6] a fact which sets all my historico-snobbish fibres a-tingle.) Do you remember I told you all about the adventure with Lady Wentworth & Byron’s slippers in Missolonghi last year? Well, we drove over again to Crabbet for luncheon on Sunday; the Hollands are the only people who are allowed to go there – she’s quarrelled with everybody else in the world except her squash-partner (ex. All-England champ), now head groom and putative ex. conc [ubine]. Antony H. tells me that another of Wilfrid Blunt’s mistresses, a Mrs Carleton, still lives in a cottage, not far away; always referred to by Lady Wentworth as ‘that woman’; do you know anything about her? [7] We first bowled past the Catholic convent [8] where Wilfrid Blunt had ‘Skittles’ [9] buried, then past sleek cavalcades of Arab steeds galloping under the chestnuts, with KEEP OUT! NO TRESPASSING! notices everywhere, suggesting mantraps and spring-guns; then the burnt-out royal (real?) tennis court where the Souls’ tournaments were said to occur, [10] and up to the house, where she is looked after by two nonagenarian female twins – ‘my twins’. The house is untidy as a barn – trunks trussed, and excitingly labelled ‘LD BYRON’S papers – LDY BYRON’S papers’ in chalk, pictures stacked, piled furniture, wallpaper, curtains etc. exactly the colour and shape of coloured Phiz or Leech: illustrations to Ask Mamma, Hawbuck Grange, or Mr Sponge [11] – gilt, faded plum and canary; v. grand and dusty. We had rather a mouldy luncheon, ending up with spotted-dog, in a room as full of papers, pictures, horsey accoutrements and favours as a jackdaw’s nest. Lady Wentworth was wearing, as usual, gym-shoes from playing squash, a Badminton skirt to the ground, a woollen shawl, a gigantic and very dishevelled auburn wig that looked as though made of strands from her stallions’ tails gathered off brambles, and on top of this a mushroom-like, real Sairey-Gamp mob-cap, [12] but made of lace and caught in with a Nile-green satin ribbon. Rather a fine, hawky Byronic face under all this, but scarlet patches on the cheeks as from a child’s paint-box; I think she’s eighty-two or eighty-three [13] – and a very thin, aristocratic, bleak voice – ‘have some more spotted-dog?’ sounding like a knell. The house is full of pre-Raphaelitish pictures of her by Neville Lytton, [14] many of them in elaborate Arabian clothes. She must have been a knockout except for those alarmingly suspicious eyes: a real vixen or Medusa glint. We had another look at Byron’s Greek costume & sword (which the British Council are asking for, to send to Sr. Chas. Peake’s Philhellene exhibition. [15] We exhorted her a lot about this) and managed to find, after a long search among draped furniture, a fascinating portrait of Byron which has never, to my knowledge, been reproduced. [16] It’s rather amateurish (unsigned), but he is so young and charming-looking in it – eighteen at the most, and full face, I do think the Peakes ought to ask her for it for the exhibition. I’ll write to them, but do mention it, if this gets you while you are still there.

After luncheon she led us, all three grasping a whiskey and soda, up some stairs to a long billiard room, where she drew the curtains, and switched on the lamps over the table, poked up a vast log fire, began chalking a cue and said, with no preamble, ‘Would you like spot or plain?’ So we began playing, and she beat us hollow, one after the other, again and again, scoring breaks of 50, 70, 90, and once, 108. It began raining and blowing hard, the wind making strange noises among the elms outside and down the chimney. No other sounds except, occasionally, a falling log or the hiss of the syphon, the click of the balls or the plop! into the pocket, with Lady Wentworth working away in silence except, now and then, ‘Put the red in its place, would you?’ or ‘Hand me the rest please . . .’ On and on it went, like something in a terrifying Norse legend, gambling for one’s life with a man-eating witch in a dim, shadowy cave at the bottom of a fjord. As the hours passed, the illusion grew. I could see Antony was thoroughly rattled too. We were losing by larger and larger margins with each successive game, and still the grim work went on, our whole life centring on the bright rectangle of green: click! . . . click-click! . . . and the wind outside blowing up to a gale. Lady Wentworth’s eyes under the lace fringes of her cap were kindling with ever more alarming sparks of triumph. It was ghoulish. At last, after twenty defeats, at 7 o’clock, Antony managed to say, in a strangled voice, ‘Lady Wentworth, I think we ought to be leaving . . .’ It must have been the counter-charm. The spell was broken! She just said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry . . .’ and all the glint died from her eyes. But if she’d said, ‘Oh, but you’re staying to dinner!’ I know one of us would have screamed, for it would have been all up. The double doors would have leapt open and ‘The Twins’ [17] magnified and reproduced a hundredfold – centuplets! would have come galloping in howling with choppers and skewers and cauldrons and faggots . . . We drove off through the blizzard with pounding hearts.

It’s a successful sunny spring day, but pretty cold. I’m writing at that pillared writing table with the let-down flap by the fire. Two crows, looking enormous, one poking about for worms on the lawn. On the other side of the house Artemis peers over the edge of her pram like a Ribston Pippin. [18] Work soars ahead. Mrs Wakefield [19] came over two days ago, and we sat over the fire drinking sherry. She was awfully nice, and I enjoyed this irruption into my bachelor solitude. She said there was some idea of you collecting and publishing old letters. Diana darling, why on earth don’t you? I’m red-hot for this! I guard your vast and wonderful coronation letter as though it were the Codex Sinaiticus, [20] and there must be masses more knocking about the place. Surely it would be enormous fun to do? If you did, and needed any kind of a fag to help, do ask me to unless you’ve got someone else. . .

I’m wildly intrigued by the extraordinary building estate that rears its portals opposite your humble wicket. The houses are incredible, John Betjeman rampant – Stratford-upon-Avon, Sandringham, Arundel, South Carolina, Uppark, [21] West Wycombe; [22] what can go on inside? Surely not just TV, for which they are all whiskered? Overcoming my natural diffidence, I had a drink in an unbelievably depressing place called the Tithe Barn Club there – it’s not a real club, you just wander in. The denizens looked boring and usual enough – retired overdraft-refusers [i.e. bank managers] for the most part I should say – but still waters run deep. I’m terribly tempted to do some anthropological fieldwork there, if only I weren’t so busy with other things. Do you think there’s a vice-ring? or smuggling? And what about all that bungalow-life at Pagham? [23] What goes on in those converted railway-carriages? I’m afraid we’ll never know.

A thrush has just started singing like mad from the direction of those beehives. He really does do it twice over, too. [24] Do come back soon, but not before having filled eyes, ears, lungs, heart with Greece, as I think it has a therapeutic quality which is close to magic, more than anywhere else in the world. I long to hear every detail of places, people etc., impressions. Even if long accounts must wait (owing to the pending pyramids of answers, whose height I’ve done so signally little to reduce!) Don’t let me languish without news of movements etc. Must stop now. God Bless you, my dearest Diana, and fondest

love from

Paddy

xxx

P.S. Two people came to look at the house yesterday, with a view to renting it. I could tell Miss W. [25] hated this by the rather skittish grimaces of collusion she made me from behind their backs. They didn’t want it though, ‘too cold’, they said, the idiots. It’s warm as toast in here. They looked frightful. Miss W. & I decided afterwards that they were ‘a couple of real miseries’. Would it be all right if I hang in here two weeks more – that is, if nobody turns up? I’m having luncheon with JJ [26] at Joan’s on Friday.

[1] An artists’ suppliers founded in 1851 and located at No. 95 Jermyn Street, SW1. The paper itself was A3, soft and creamy.

[2] A reference to ‘The Garden’, by the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell (1621–78).

[3] One of the finest Saint-Émilion wines.

[4] ‘It’s water above all which excites the taste-buds of the Greeks.’

[5] Antony James Holland (1913–82), who lived at Old Lullings, Balcombe, in West Sussex. Paddy had known Holland since they were officer cadets together at the beginning of the war. He and Antony’s father, Michael James Holland, had visited Lady Wentworth at Crabbet the year before.

[6] The Reverend Sydney Smith (1771–1845), celebrated wit, about whom Hesketh Pearson wrote his classic biography, The Smith of Smiths (1934). His eldest daughter married the physician and travel writer, Sir Henry Holland.

[7] The Scottish artist Dorothy Carleton had in fact been dead twenty years at the time of this letter. Though younger than Blunt’s daughter Judith, she had become his mistress. When Blunt moved her into Crabbet Park, supposedly as his ‘niece’, his long-suffering wife asked for a legal separation.

[8] Actually a Franciscan monastery.

[9] Catherine Walters (1839–1920), courtesan. Her nickname ‘Skittles’ is thought to have originated from her employment at a bowling alley near Park Lane. Her classical beauty was matched by her skill as a horsewoman: the sight of Catherine riding along Rotten Row in Hyde Park drew huge crowds of sightseers. She counted among her many lovers the Marquess of Hartington (later the 8th Duke of Devonshire); Napoleon III; and the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII). She was also Blunt’s first love, and he remained infatuated with her for the rest of his life.

[10] ‘The Souls’, a loosely knit but nonetheless distinctive salon that flourished in the late nineteenth century. Its members included many of the most distinguished English politicians and intellectuals. They enjoyed playing stické, a form of real tennis. Diana and Duff Cooper were members of ‘The Coterie’, many of whom were children of the original ‘Souls’.

[11] Three novels by R. S. Surtees (1805–64): Ask Mamma (1858), Hawbuck Grange (1847), and Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853). Many of Surtees’s novels were illustrated by John Leech.

[12] Sarah or Sairey Gamp, the sloppy, dissolute, and usually drunk nurse in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. ‘She wore a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl and bonnet to correspond.’

[13] She was eighty-one.

[14] Lady Wentworth’s former husband, Neville Bulwer-Lytton, 3rd Earl of Lytton (1879–1951), soldier and artist. They had divorced in 1923.

[15] Sir Charles Peake was British Ambassador to Greece, 1951–7.

[16] Probably one of the miniature portraits by George Sanders known to have been in the possession of Lady Wentworth, at least one of which has never been reproduced. There is some evidence that Lady Wentworth may have overpainted one of these portraits, not necessarily to its advantage. See Annette Peach, Portraits of Byron.

[17] Two Irishwomen, identical twins, domestic servants at Crabbet Hall, who earlier had served tea.

[18] Diana Cooper’s granddaughter Artemis, who would eventually write Paddy’s biography. PLF compares her to a variety of apple with a distinctive orange and russet red colouring.

[19] Lady Diana’s secretary.

[20] The oldest substantial book to survive antiquity, a manuscript containing the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament.

[21] A seventeenth-century house, now owned by the National Trust, set high on the Sussex Downs.

[22] A Palladian house, built in the Georgian period, also now owned by the National Trust.

[23] A village on the West Sussex coast, now effectively a suburb of Bognor Regis.

[24] ‘That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!’

Robert Browning, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad, 1845

[25] Miss Wade, Lady Diana’s maid.

[26] Diana’s son, John Julius. He had inherited the title Viscount Norwich on the death of his father.

To Ann Fleming

22 June 1954

Poste Restante

Hydra

Greece

Darling Annie,

It’s very exciting to think you may be here in about a month. Joan got a letter a few days ago from Eroica Rawbum, [1] and he seems very keen. Joan wrote to Eroica, painting rather a primitive picture, not to discourage him, but as a sort of insurance policy against disappointment. But the truth is it’s getting better and better every day, and I’m sure you’ll love it. It’s a large house on a steep slope with descending terraces like a Babylonian ziggurat, a thick-walled, whitewashed empty thing surrounded by arid reddish rocks and olive and almond and fig trees, and the mountainside goes cascading down in a series of tiled roofs and a church cupola or two to the sea, which juts inland in a small combe ten minutes’ walk below (quarter of an hour up!). About three miles of the Aegean sea separate Hydra from the Argive coast of the Peloponnese – succeeding stage wings of mountain on the skyline, each one a paler blue than the one in front. The sun sets in the most spectacular way over these mountains and the sea, and every night Joan and I watch it from the top terrace drinking ouzo, then eating late – about 9, when it is dark – by lamplight at the other end of the terrace. There has been a full, then a waning, moon the last few nights, making everything look insanely beautiful. A great scraping of cicadas all day. So do come! I know we’ll have the greatest possible fun.

I spent three days at Chantilly on the way out: Diana was more adorable than ever, a saint in helping to organise tickets, visas etc. in Paris like a tremendously responsible sister. I do worship her, I must say. She’s got a heavenly broad-brimmed hat with a huge black satin bow hanging down the back. My train’s pace was slower than a slug’s, creeping across North Italy and then through Yugoslavia (which seems inhabited by a gloomy lot of brutes) and at last into Macedonia and Greece. I found Joan in Athens, hotfoot from Beirut, Damascus and Cyprus, and brown as a berry, as the saying goes. We are both turning mahogany at a great rate; but I suppose it’ll all peel off, leaving one pink as a baby’s bum once more . . . There’s lots of lovely swimming and goggling (the fish, I must admit, are the size of tiddlers compared to Goldeneye) and lying about in the sun; also sitting about in the harbour drinking retsina at night. I’ve got a marvellous empty studio to work in, where I write away all day like a fire hydrant. Cyril and Baby [2] may come next week – I wonder how Hydra will stand up to the Skelton blight?

Do make serious plans about coming here. Meanwhile, heaps of love from

Paddy

Best love to Ian, also to both from Joan.

[1] PLF’s anagram for Maurice Bowra.

[2] Barbara Skelton (1916–96), novelist and socialite, married to Cyril Connolly. They divorced in 1956.

To Ann Fleming

18 September 1954

c/o Niko Ghika

Hydra

Darling Annie,

Very many apologies indeed from both of us (1) for neither having answered your lovely long letter, full of exactly the sort of thing one wants to hear – it was a masterpiece, and by far the best of any ex-Hydriot [1] so far; and (2) for being such laggards in saying ‘thank you’ for The Dynasts. [2] It really was kind of you to remember it. Joan is now in the thick of the first vol. – the second, which is reprinting, will follow soon, your bookseller says. It arrived just as we were about to run out of books. That green detective one, The Gilded Fly, [3] which vanished so mysteriously, miraculously materialised on the hall table yesterday!

You were missed a great deal by everyone, including the servants, who still talk affectionately of Kyria Anna. Soon after you went, I got a letter from Kisty Hesketh, [4] introducing her brother called Rory McEwen [5] and a pal called Mr Vyner. [6] You probably know the former, v. good looking, and a champion guitar player it seems, and probably very nice. They both seemed wet beyond words to us, without a spark of life or curiosity, and such a total lack of conversation that each subject died after a minute’s existence. We had sixty subjects killed under us in an hour, till at last even Maurice and I were reduced to silence. Joan did her best, but most understandably subsided into a bored scowl after the first few hours.

We heaved a sigh when they vanished after two days that had seemed like a fortnight . . . Your fortnight, I must say, passed with the speed of a weekend. Joan saw Maurice off in Athens, another sad wrench.

Diana, JJ and Anne [7] finally turned up on the 2nd September. The last two left four days ago and D. is still here. They were not nearly such a handful as we feared, in fact very nice and easy and resourceful, Anne painting away industriously, or wandering off independently with JJ, who gave us lots of splendid guitar playing – always stopping in time & not boring at all. I think they enjoyed it very much. Diana, who is in your old room, seems as happy as she is anywhere now, and is very easy and unfussy, enjoying everything, loos, odd food, garlic, ouzo, retsina, etc., mooching about in the port, darting off to Athens, once to see Susan Mary Patten [8] off a caïque (but she wasn’t there), once to see the Norwiches off, returning both times laden with Embassy whisky and so on, which was gratefully lapped up. We had a very entertaining old Greek friend for last weekend, Tanty Rodocanachi, [9] which was a great success, lots of funny stories and old world gallantry . . . But Diana’s presence proved a magnet for other yachts, first of all Arturo Lopez [10] in a very sodomitical-looking craft, done up inside like the Brighton Pavilion, a mandarin’s opium den and the alcove of Madame de Pompadour. Chips [11] was on board, le Baron Redé, a horrible French count called Castéja [Lopez-Willshaw’s son-in-law] and a few other people who looked unmitigated hell, but I didn’t quite manage to take them in during our two hours on board. We all felt a bit bumpkin-ish as we clutched our weighty cut-glass whisky goblets and perched on the edge of satin sofas. We were put down at the little restaurant down the hill, to the wonder of the assembled crowds; and the Balkan dark swallowed us up. They were off for the Cyclades and Beirut.

But this was nothing compared to five days ago, when a giant steam yacht (with an aeroplane poised for flight on the stern) belonging to Onassis [12] came throbbing alongside. It was followed by an immense three-masted wonder ship with silk sails, miles of corridor, dozens of Impressionist paintings, baths to every cabin and regiments of stewards, belonging to his brother-in-law, Niarchos. [13] They have made 400 million quid between the two of them, and own, after England, USA and Sweden, the largest merchant fleet in the world, all under Panamanian flags; and all, it seems, acquired in fifteen years. We only saw Niarchos, who is young, [14] rather good looking, very drunk and tousled, not bad really. On board were Lilia Ralli, several blondes, a few of the zombie-men that always surround the immensely rich, Pam Churchill & Winston Jr. [15] Sailing beside it was another three-masted yacht, gigantic by ordinary standards, but by comparison the sort of thing one sees inside bottles in seaside pubs. This was also Niarchos’s, a sort of annexe for overflow, soi-disant, lent to Lord Warwick, though he is plainly some kind of stooge. [16] He looked like a Neapolitan hairdresser run to fat. We did a certain amount of drinking and social chat on the big one (spurning Lord Warwick’s cockleshell) and wandered through labyrinthine corridors gaping at the fittings. I gathered from Pam C. next morning – the focus of all eyes on the quay in pink shorts, gilt sandals and a-clank with gems – that it’s pretty good hell aboard: no sort of connecting link between all the guests, disjointed conversation, heavy banter, sumptuous but straggling meals at all hours, nobody knowing what is a test. Diana, Tanty, and the Norwiches got a lift in this to Athens (D. returning next day), and Joan and I trudged up to fried salt cod and lentils and garlic. We learnt on Diana’s return that the massed blast of our five breaths nearly blew the whole party overboard. There is something colossally depressing about contact with the very rich. What I want to know is: why the hell don’t they have more fun with their money?

Modiano’s Cyprus article was the best I have seen so far. [17] After you left Athens, I accompanied the whole of the demonstration: oaths in front of the Unknown Warrior’s tomb, the burning of the Cyprus sedition proclamation, also of bundles of Union Jacks, cries of ‘Down with the English! Down with the Barbarians!’, then, from the steps of the University, an awful incendiary speech from the Rector that overstated the case so much (he ended with an undying curse and anathema to the English!) that nearly all the sensible Greeks feel ashamed. What a bore it is, and so foolishly unnecessary.

Niko G [hika] comes back next week, but may not be able to stay on, as he is a lecturer in Athens. Joan returns sooner than me, so I’m going to keep my teeth into Hydra till the last possible moment. In spite of all the goings on, I’ve managed to keep on scribbling. I hate the idea of another uprooting and would like to stay till winter starts.

Thanks again, dearest Annie, for The Dynasts, and do please write another London newsletter! Lots of love from Joan and Diana, also to Ian, and from me. All wish you were here.

Love

Paddy

[1] i.e. their guests in Hydra.

[2] An ambitious verse-drama in three parts (1904, 1906 and 1908) by Thomas Hardy, set in the Napoleonic Wars.

[3] Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944).

[4] Christian Mary ‘Kisty’ McEwen, Lady Hesketh (1929–2006), politician, journalist and educationalist. After the early death of her husband, she was left a widow with three young sons at the age of only twenty-five. In the 1950s she organised the annual charitable fancy dress ball of the Royal College of Art, where PLF was a regular guest. Among her remarkably varied activities was a stint as rugby correspondent of The Spectator.

[5] Rory McEwen (1932–82), Scottish artist and musician.

[6] Henry Vyner (1932–96), a neighbour of the McEwens in the Borders.

[7] Diana Cooper and her son John Julius, with his wife Anne.

[8] Susan Mary Patten (1918–2004), one of Duff Cooper’s mistresses and later a leading political hostess in Washington. She had her hair done daily on the chance of a sudden invitation to the White House.

[9] Constantine Pandia ‘Tanty’ Rodocanachi (1877–1956). Before the war PLF translated his novel Ulysse, fils d’Ulysse into English. It was while visiting Tanty and his wife in the spring of 1935 that PLF had met Balasha Cantacuzène.

[10] Arturo Lopez-Willshaw (1900–62), homosexual Chilean millionaire, who lived with his lover Oskar Dieter Alex von Rosenberg-Redé, aka Alexis, Baron de Redé (1922– 2004). Lopez settled $1 million on Redé shortly after they became a couple in 1941, when the latter was nineteen years old. Their parties were famous; the world of Lopez and Redé has been described as like a small eighteenth-century court. Nevertheless, Lopez continued to maintain a formal residence with his wife, Patricia, in Neuilly.

[11] Henry ‘Chips’ Channon (1897–1958), homosexual, American-born Conservative MP and diarist.

[12] Aristotle Socrates Onassis (1906–75), billionaire Greek shipping magnate and businessman, who amassed the world’s largest privately owned shipping fleet.

[13] Stavros Spyros Niarchos (1909–96), another Greek shipping tycoon.

[14] He was then forty-five.

[15] Niarchos’s mistress, Pamela Churchill (1920–97) (later Harriman), ex-wife of Randolph Churchill and mother of Winston Churchill, Jr.

[16] Charles Guy Fulke ‘Fulkie’ Greville (1911–84), 7th Earl of Warwick, lived abroad for much of his adult life. He became the first British aristocrat to star in a Hollywood movie, and was nicknamed ‘the Duke of Hollywood’ by the local press.

[17] ‘A Quarrel between Friends’, The Times, 19 August 1954, written by Mario Modiano, Athens correspondent. Nationalist agitation for an end to British rule in Cyprus and union with Greece had led to an upsurge in anti-British sentiment. See page 111.

To Freya Stark

25 October 1954

c/o Niko Ghika

Hydra

Dearest Freya,

Very many thanks indeed for having ‘Ionia’ [1] sent to us. It arrived yesterday, after what must have been a delayed journey. I have only darted about in it, and the bits I have alighted on have been entrancing, and make me long to follow your and Herodotus’s tracks. The quotations from the Greek anthology are beautifully chosen, and seem to turn up so fortuitously and casually, as a delightfully uninsistent proof of all you are saying. It’s going to be a great treat, I can see.

I think Jock has made a fine job of it. It’s beautifully printed and bound, and your photographs are jolly good. There is one that I turn back to often, as it seems to symbolise the situation (to me, that is, who hasn’t been there) in the former Greek parts of Asia Minor: the one of your guide, a heavy, rather oafish, empty-handed lout planted as inertly as a sack of potatoes on the capsized capital of a broken Greek column. An agreeable bumpkin, I feel, with quite a nice smile; but he oughtn’t to be there . . . The picture is almost heraldic in the simplicity and directness of its message, like the Red Heart of the Douglas [2] or the Bloody Hand of Ulster. [3]

It seems very quiet here now, with just Joan and me in the place, and all the summer visitors have migrated elsewhere. Diana, with John Julius and Anne, stayed about three and a half weeks. She seemed very happy, as much as she is capable of, that is, and one has never seen less of a fusspot about the comparatively ungracious living of the place. The rains have begun intermittently, and all is quiet and perfect for work, and the pile of MSs grows like a ziggurat. I wonder how you are getting on at Asolo. I’m going to keep my teeth into Hydra as long as possible, all winter if Niko Ghika will let me, as it is the perfect workshop.

Thank you again, dear Freya, for your lovely present, which will provide many happy hours. I’m longing to see the next volume!

With love from

Paddy

(also from Joan)

[1] Freya Stark’s Ionia, A Quest (1954) was followed by several more books on Turkey: The Lycian Shore (1956), Alexander’s Path: From Caria to Cilicia (1958) and Riding to the Tigris (1959).

[2] As he was dying, the Scottish King Robert I (‘Robert the Bruce’), is said to have asked his ally and friend Sir James Douglas (c.1286–1330) to carry his embalmed heart to Jerusalem, where it would be presented to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Douglas set out for the Holy Land, but was killed fighting the Moors in Spain, and the embalmed heart was returned to Scotland. Later Douglas lords attached the image of Bruce’s heart to their coat of arms, to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies and to exhibit the prowess of their race.

[3] The Red Hand of Ulster, originally a Gaelic symbol with its roots in ancient Fenian culture, has been appropriated by Northern Ireland’s unionists and loyalists.

Since 1953 Lawrence Durrell had been living on British-controlled Cyprus, working as an information officer and editing the government-funded Cyprus Review. For Durrell, this was an increasingly testing time, given his philhellenic sympathies and the deteriorating situation on the island.

To Lawrence Durrell

24 November 1954

Οἰκία Χατζηκυριάκου-Γκίκα ἐν Ὕδρᾳ

[c/o Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, Hydra]

My dear Larry,

. . . I felt very jealous of Joan’s adventures with you and Maurice [Bowra] early this summer, and long to see you both. Joan left last week alas, but I’m sticking on in Niko’s house as long as he’ll let me – it’s the best bit of high-level cadging I’ve done for years, a real haul. I wish you’d come over and stay for a bit. It’s a perfect Shangri-la for work, and at last I’m getting a move on, and feeling excited. How are you getting on? I imagine the Cyprus Review takes one hell of a lot of work – do send a copy or two. I’m so glad they got you to do it – I first learnt by that nice bit about it in The Spectator. It must be a very delicate business. I do wish the whole thing was settled. It makes both the English and the Greeks conduct themselves like complete lunatics, and grotesque caricatures of themselves.

I’ve just got Xan’s new book Hide and Seek, a very lively and dashing account of wartime adventures in Crete; also Daphne’s autobiography Mercury Presides (good title!) [1] which is rattling, splendid stuff, not a bit the niminy-priminy society memoir you would think, but hell for leather, a mixture of lyrical charm and touchingness with a clumsy, rustic tough edge to it which is most engaging and terribly funny. Rather like the letters of Lady Bessborough or Caroline Lamb, [2] half-sylph, half-stablehand.

I’m so glad you met Xan and my old friend Arthur Reade. [3] I’m terribly attached to him, though I haven’t seen him for years. The book which I translated from the Greek of our shepherd-guide in Crete [4] will be coming out soon (The Cretan Runner, Murrays). I think it’s tip-top, a real primitive, [illegible] Douanier Rousseau [5] kind of war-book.

No more now, but I’ll write again as soon as the stuff arrives. Lots of love to Eve and Sappho. [6] [George] Katsimbalis is due back any moment from phenomenal adventures in America, France and England that I burn to hear. They should be quelque chose!

love

Paddy

[1] Her memoir of life as one of the ‘Bright Young Things’, reviewed by Evelyn Waugh: ‘The childhood is admirable. The adult part is rather as though Lord Montgomery were to write his life and not to mention that he ever served in the army.’

[2] Henrietta Ponsonby (1761–1821), Countess of Bessborough, had numerous lovers. Among her admirers was William Lamb, later Viscount Melbourne, who married her daughter Caroline (1785–1828). Lady Caroline Lamb conducted a scandalous affair with Lord Byron.

[3] The SOE officer Arthur Reade, who served with PLF and Xan Fielding behind the German lines in occupied Crete. His son Patrick was PLF’s godson.

[4] George Psychoundakis.

[5] The naive French artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was known as Le Douanier Rousseau, a reference to his job as a customs officer.

[6] Durrell’s daughter by his wife Eve.

To Diana Cooper

3 January 1955

Hydra

ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΠΟΛΛΑ ΚΑΙ ΑΓΑΠΗ ΚΑΙ ΧΙΛΙΕ∑ ΕΥΧΕ∑ ΔΙΑ ΤΟ ΝΕΟΝ ΕΤΟ∑ 1955

[‘Many happy returns (as they say here), love and 1000 wishes for the New Year 1955’]

Diana darling,

It was lovely to find your Betjeman booklet [1] when I got back here from the Peake fleshpots of Athens, and thank you so much for them. One or two are rather hell, I think – have you read them yet? – rather embarrassing jaunty high Anglican stuff (. . . it gives a chance to me, To praise our dear old C. of E. etc.), one or two of them charming. Very pretty Piper drawings. But there’s a terrible note of the headmaster beginning a confirmation class with the words ‘Now do remember, God is such FUN!’ (I say, talk about gift horses in the mouth. Especially when I haven’t sent you one yet, because of being out of touch with contemporary literature! I’ve been cudgelling my brain for a month and feel inspiration will come soon.)

I’m terribly distressed by one thing in your letter – that you seem to have dropped the Persian Gulf Plan. I’d got so used to the idea of your stopping off in Athens on the way, and was already looking forward like anything to jaunts in Attica together, – even to a wintry descent to this now verdant isle – as if they were certainties. Because alas, I don’t quite see how I can get to Italy in the middle of this month. It’s a terribly tempting thought, though, and I haven’t absolutely chucked it. I won’t bore you with enumerating what the difficulties are, they’re too tedious to go into, but pretty prohibitive none the less. Thank heavens, dough for once is not one of them, as I’m wildly solvent for once (for me that is) except Italian currency. But, Diana darling, is Athens absolutely ruled out for you? Do please write again as soon as poss. and tell how plans have matured.

I got back from Athens on Christmas Eve, after staying with the Peakes [2] for a week, which, I must say I simply loved, though I seemed to be out of the building and on the tiles most of the time. (The point of my stay was arranging about the unveiling by the King of a monument all the English-who-were-in-Crete are putting up, and, Cyprus willing, it is to take place some time in May.) They really are the most wonderful kind and hospitable couple – tremendous fans of yours (which I think is really why they asked me) as you know. We had lots of sitting up talking about poetry, scanned by the soft hiss of the soda syphon (my favourite noise, I’m beginning to realise, and one that has been silent in ouzo-ridden Hydra for many a long month). And the baths, – I turned on those resplendent taps with some of the rustic wonder of a Red Army corporal in the Imperial quarters of Peterhof – meat; delicious, almost Chantilly standard breakfasts in bed; ironed clothes; glittering shoes. They asked me to stay for Christmas, but I thought it would be overdoing it, so crept back to Hydra with an alibi, but even so, a day later than I meant to, as on the last night, I went to a party which ended at 6. The butler came to wake me up at 7 for the 8 o’clock Nereid, [3] shook me and put a sponge on my brow – all no go. Stalwart young maids were called in to shake [me] but apparently it was like trying to raise a fallen dolmen. One of them managed to prise open a single bloodshot eye, and fled in terror . . . So I went to a dinner party of Niko Ghika’s with the tolerant Peakes, which was absolutely delicious, based on some marvellous quenelles made of thousands of mussels, and got off safely next morning, though the time of the boat had been put off to 2.00 p.m. because of fêtes. I spent happy hours wandering round that hideous but absorbing port [Piraeus], where there are not only quarters inhabited by Cretans, Maniots, Epirots, Thessalians and Macedonians, but by refugees from all the biblical region of Asia Minor – Pisidia, Paphlagonia (as in The Rose & the Ring) [4] Cappadocia, Pontus & Bithynia & from the borders of Kurdistan, all with their customs & dialects intact. You only have to march into the right café to be spiritually in the heart of Caesarea, Iconium or Trebizond. The place was looking very queer that day, because all the children were holding balloons twice their size shaped like colossal space cats with jutting whiskers and eyes like round towers. Other children – the equivalent of ‘waifs’ – were prowling from shop to shop holding antediluvian gramophones with petunia horns the size of a man-eating convolvulus and playing eardrum-splitting and cacophonous carols on records scratched beyond recognisability. They would take up positions with this apparatus outside cafés and shops till they had tortured the owners into giving them danegeld.

I got to Hydra grasping a wonderful turkey (a dead one) under my arm, like a golden goose, a present from Catherine Peake. Yanni roasted this on the great day, and I had a banquet in the drawing room, the big dining room table with lots of candles and a star-shaped pattern of uprooted sea-squills and pink geraniums in the middle, which looked nicer than it sounds. Gladys [5] and Tanty had originally been coming for Christmas, but both had cried off at the last moment (the cold? Actually it’s as warm as anything with both stoves roaring). So I had Russian Lil Heidsièck (who you never met) with her Lost Boys, an English couple called the Goschens, [6] and two people from the Art School. Over New Year the island filled up with Young Intellectuals from Athens, some of whom stayed with me, and we had a great party of about twenty-seven, starting at 9, going on till about 5 also up here. They were very nice indeed, and the thing was really kept together by a very talented art student with a guitar which he played and sang to with an almost JJ virtuosity. A girl, eating a stewed mussel (which had actually come out of a tin) found a minute pearl. Isn’t that strange? I had a great success with all the songs I cribbed off JJ this summer. They’ve all vanished now, the island seems rather bleak and deserted and life goes on with the faint gloom of an anti-climax.

I have been very much cheered up by something I have discovered today. It’s rather elaborate. From the Middle Ages till the beginning of the last century, Piraeus was known as Porto Leone, after a large, ancient, marble lion standing at the entrance to the harbour. (It had some Nordic runes carved on its shoulder by Harald Hardrada, [7] when he was in the Mediterranean.) The lion was looted and carried off to Venice by Doge Francesco Morosini in 1687 and placed outside the Arsenale where it still stands. In 1750, an Englishman from Bristol called Bill Falconer, second-mate of the brig Britannia, was wrecked off Cape Sunium. When he got back to England, he wrote a splendid long poem about his adventures and impressions of Greece called The Shipwreck. About Piraeus he says:

The wandering traveller sees before his eyes

A milk-white lion of stupendous size!

Now of course, the traveller does nothing of the kind, and what’s more, neither did he, the old fibber – the lion had been in Venice for sixty-three years! Talk about piling it on! I am positively haunted by this robust couplet, and have been repeating it aloud to myself all the morning. Do try it – in a deep voice, if possible in a West Country accent, if not, cockney, and very loud. It grows on you.

Next Day, Epiphany (written outside The Poseidon, waiting for the letter to catch the slow Pindus, which has now taken over from the Nereid) Thank heavens, it’s a lovely sunny spring day, as this is one of the great feasts of the Orthodox Church. All the shops are shut, and everyone in their Sunday best. The hideous Hydriot girls wear plastic high-heeled shoes and blinding satin dresses of apple green, scarlet, royal blue and petunia (often a combination of all four), and reek of attar of roses. They look exactly like boiled sweets. The old men, with their wicked old Albanian faces, look magnificent. Nearly all of them limp from sponge fishing mishaps: a shark bite in the thigh off the Libyan reefs in 1896, a leg carried off at Mersa Matruh in 1904, an arm at Benghazi in 1911 . . . There was a huge procession, headed by dozens of boys carrying candles and lanterns in red silk dalmatics from which socks and gym-shoes projected, and little black skull caps, their cheeks downy with the sort of moss that reindeer graze on all through the winter in Lapland. (One of them, oddly enough, was a man of seventy with a piratical black patch over one eye.) Then sailors carrying ikons of Our Lord’s Epiphany before the Wise Men of the East, and also of the Baptism (as today is also the Vigil of the Feast of the Baptism). Then a swarm of cantors groaning Byzantine anthems in quarter tones, grass-green deacons with censors, a swarm of priests in vestments every colour of the rainbow, black veils on their cylinder hats, a court of prelates, and finally the Archbishop of Spetsai & Hydra, a wicked old man of stupendous size (odd that such a tiny see should have an archbishop), a pillar of gleaming cloth of gold and chains & plaques and pectoral crosses, beard a yard long, flowing white hair down his back, wearing a colossal, onion-shaped mitre of gold and silver studded with enormous jewels and diamonds, his gold crozier topped, like the caduceus of Hermes, with two gold and twirling serpents. He’s got an appalling reputation.[1] (But one must remember that preferment in the Eastern Church goes entirely by height.) The procession wound up the hill to bless and asperge the island’s only freshwater spring, then back to the quay and along to the end of that mole that runs out across the harbour, where the Archbish settled on a throne at the heart of a dazzling galaxy. The liturgy went on, His Beatitude leaning back like a figure from [El] Greco, exchanging heavy banter, quite loud, with the other prelates. One almost expected him to take out a double Corona and slowly light it . . . Then his eyes kindled with approbation as a caïque-load of naked boys, all shuddering with cold, sailed up and dropped anchor a few yards away. The chanting soared and His Beatitude stood up and threw a cross into the sea. A huge splash, and all the boys plunged into the icy main and started swimming like tadpoles. Meanwhile all the bells began pealing, the sirens honked, and the old War of Independence cannon fired salvos. A terrific tussle in the water, till at last one of the boys splashed ashore, put the cross in the Archbishop’s lap, and drenched everyone by shaking himself like an otter-hound. His Beatitude, with eyes ablaze, kept patting his wet shoulder with a large, horny and mottled hand, repeating ‘Bravo! . . . bravo, my boy!’ again and again. The procession returned to the church, the ceremony was over, and everyone made a dash for the unshuttering tavernas and ouzo.

[1] The Archbishop of Spetsai & Hydra Condemned bestial vice ex-cathedra. (But he rogered a bay-horse Outside the pronaos And a skewbald inside the exedra).

I must stop now, Diana dearest, and get this off. Please write at once with full plans and please try and make them include Greece!

with love and hugs from

Paddy

xxxxx

[1] Poems in the Porch (1954), an anthology of verse originally written for broadcast on a weekly BBC radio programme. Betjeman himself had misgivings about whether the poems were worth publishing.

[2] The British Ambassador Sir Charles Peake and his wife Catherine.

[3] The ferry to Hydra.

[4] William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1854) is set in the fictional countries of Paflagonia and Crim Tartary.

[5] Gladys Stewart-Richardson, who kept a shop in Athens.

[6] John Alexander Goschen (1906–77), 3rd Viscount Goschen, and his wife Alvin.

[7] Harald Sigurdson, known as Harald Hardrada (c.1015–66) spent fifteen years in exile as a mercenary before becoming King of Norway in 1046.

Paddy first spotted Deborah (‘Debo’) Mitford – as she then was – at a regimental ball in the 1940s, though she did not notice him at the time. They came to know each other as acquaintances at London parties in the early 1950s; but their friendship took off in the mid 1950s, when they began to correspond regularly. By this time she was married to Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, with a family of young children. Their correspondence would continue until Paddy’s death, more than half a century later. Over the years Paddy was often a guest at one of the Devonshire houses, Chatsworth in Derbyshire or Lismore Castle in Ireland.

Paddy sent inscribed copies of each of his books to Debo. ‘Look here, honestly, it’s awfully good, frightfully good,’ he would say; and she would reply, ‘All right, Pad, I will try one day,’ but she never did.

There was speculation that ‘Debo’ and Paddy had once been lovers, but those who knew them best doubted this. Their relationship has been described as ‘a deep, platonic attraction between two people who shared youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity, and an unstinting enjoyment of life’ (Charlotte Mosley (ed.), In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, 2008).

As their correspondence has been published separately, only a few introductory letters have been included in this volume, with a couple of late, previously unpublished letters towards the end.

To Debo Devonshire

26 April 1955

c/o Niko Ghika

Kamini

Hydra

Dear Debo,

I’ve just heard from Daphne on the point of departure to stay with you. Why does everyone go to that castle [1] except me?

My plan is this: there is a brilliant young witch on this island (aged sixteen and very pretty), sovereign at thwarting the evil eye, casting out devils and foiling spells by incantation. It shouldn’t be beyond her powers to turn me into a fish for a month and slip me into the harbour. I reckon I could get through the Mediterranean, across the Bay of Biscay, round Land’s End and over the Irish Sea in about twenty-eight days (if the weather holds) and on into the Blackwater. I’m told there’s a stream that flows under your window, up which I propose to swim and, with a final effort, clear the sill and land on the carpet, where I insist on being treated like the frog prince for a couple of days of rest and recovery. (You could have a tank brought up – or lend me your bath if this is not inconvenient – till I’m ready to come downstairs. Also some flannel trousers, sensible walking shoes and a Donegal tweed Norfolk jacket with a belt across the small of the back and leather buttons.) But please be there. Otherwise there is all the risk of filleting, meunière etc., and, worst of all, au bleu. . .

Please give my love to Daphne if she’s with you. You can let her in on this plan, if you think it is suitable, but nobody else for the time being. These things always leak out.

Love

Paddy

P.S. Please write & say if this arrangement fits in with your plans.

[1] Lismore Castle, County Waterford, overlooking the Blackwater River, has been the Irish home of the Dukes of Devonshire since 1753.

Among the Greek friends Paddy made while working for the British Council in Athens after the war was the poet George Seferis, whose work would be recognised in 1963, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation noted ‘his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture’.

To George Seferis

22 June 1955

Οἰκία Χατζηκυριάκου-Γκίκα ἐν Ὕδρᾳ

[c/o Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, Hydra]

Dear George,

Niko [Ghika] has just been here for a few days, the first time for ages. It was great fun. He and Joan played endless games of chess, out of which Joan came slightly the winner, in the end, and we went on a hilarious pleasure journey to Spetsai with Nancy Mitford, who was also staying. [1]

The meltemi [2] has started. Also a small plague of horseflies. As there are no horses in Hydra, they console themselves on us, riddling us like colanders, as we emerge defenceless from the waves, each armed with a proboscis sharper than a bradawl for puncturing the withers of a carthorse (I’m afraid it’s softening them). There are also, at the moment, large numbers of centipedes about, and always in trouble: falling off walls they are attempting to scale, getting trodden on and being washed down drains. One would have thought that, with all their advantages, they would have got further. It makes one proud of being a biped.

Not only are there no horses in Hydra, but it is as empty of wheels as America before the conquistadores arrived. The islanders boast rather loosely about the presence of a barrow somewhere. But nobody has set eyes on it. . .

Many thanks again, dear George, and best love to you both from

Paddy

(also from Joan)

A butterfly has just flown in through the window. You will not be surprised to hear that it is a Red Admiral. [3]

[1] ‘I made great friends with Paddy Leigh Fermor,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to Christopher Sykes after this holiday. ‘He is a shrieker and how rare they get.’ Charlotte Mosley (ed.), Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford (1993), pages 342–3.

[2] The strong, dry north winds of the Aegean, which blow from about mid May to mid September.

[3] A pun (PLF’s father was a lepidopterist). Several of the ships used in the Greek War of Independence and their admirals came from Hydra.

Paddy left Hydra for France in the autumn of 1955. He felt he was becoming stale there; as perhaps he was, because his book based on his Greek travels was still unfinished. ‘I’m afraid he is too much Penelope-ising with that book,’ George Seferis confided to Joan.

Moreover, the ill feeling engendered by the situation in Cyprus was poisoning relations between Britons and Greeks. Greek opinion had long regarded the island of Cyprus, a British colony, as rightfully theirs. A nationalist popular movement named EOKA agitated for unification with Greece (‘Enosis’). The situation was complicated by the presence of a substantial Turkish Cypriot minority on the island. Impatient with the lack of progress, EOKA had declared an armed struggle against British rule. In response, the new governor of the island, Sir John Harding, formerly Chief of the Imperial General Staff, adopted stringent measures to improve the security situation.

An official at the Greek Aliens Office on Hydra attempted to have Paddy and several other British nationals deported; and though this attempt came to nothing, it unsettled him. There was a heated exchange between Paddy and his old friend George Katsimbalis on the subject of Cyprus. ‘I am in such despair about it all,’ Joan wrote to Seferis. ‘George Katsimbalis refused to dine with Paddy and me on my last night in Athens, which upset me dreadfully,’ she continued. ‘What are we to do? I can’t think about it any more without bursting into tears.’

After leaving Hydra Paddy wrote from France to Ghika and his wife Antigone.

To Antigone (‘Tiggie’) and Niko Ghika

1 November 1955

c/o Diana Cooper

Château de Saint-Firmin

Vineuil

Oise

Darling Tiggie and Niko,

Everything, to my eyes adjusted for Hydra, looks very peculiar in France. All this green gives one the sensation of living in the heart of a giant lettuce. It’s a lovely autumn evening, with bonfires burning under trees in the park, a constant flutter of falling leaves, dew, a thin mist over the lake, and, the other side, in front of the big chateau, the dim silhouette of the Connétable Anne de Montmorency equestrian, in full armour, stirring up the evening air with a huge sword. . .

I found Joan in Normandy, staying with the Smarts – I don’t know whether you know them – who live there in summer, Egypt in winter. I’m going to camp in the house for three months (c/o Lady Smart, Gadencourt, Pacy-sur-Eure, Eure. Tel: Gadencourt 6) – I send these details hoping that you will write or telephone when you get to France and stay a weekend or something . . . Niko, would you ask Boukas [1]

to get in touch with me about the photographs as I will have a great conference with Stephen [2] about the timing and layout of the article, etc.

I think with immense nostalgia & gratitude of Hydra, where most of my book will have been written – in fact 1954–5 is a great étape dans ma vie [stage of my life]. I didn’t need to tell you both how we loved it and how valuable and important it was, because I think you know. I really felt I had to vanish from the raw material of my work for a few months, like Niko into a cellar with his sketches. But I am certain that without Hydra, the book would never have been written, and can never thank enough! Do, please, make a sign when you come here.

Meanwhile, fond love to you both from

Paddy

[1] Philip Boukas, photographer.

[2] Stephen Spender, poet and critic, co-editor of Horizon and Encounter. Earlier in the year Spender and his wife Natasha had come to stay on Hydra with PLF and Joan. PLF was writing a piece for Encounter, as he explained in an undated letter to Diana Cooper. ‘I’ve written a long thing in my book (which Stephen Spender is printing in one of the next two months’ ‘Encounter’ – the new Horizon) evoking all the different parts of Greece – mountains, towns, rivers, islands etc.’ PLF’s article ‘Sounds of the Greek World’ would appear in Encounter in June 1956.

George Katsimbalis was the central figure in the group of Greek writers and intellectuals whom Paddy came to know in Athens after the war. The two men had met briefly in 1940, in an Athens nightclub. Paddy’s head was wrapped romantically in a bandage, and this deceptively heroic appearance had earned him several free drinks. To Katsimbalis, who happened to be there, he admitted that the wound had been the result of nothing worse than a car accident. Katsimbalis laughed and advised him not to tell anyone else.

Katsimbalis was a tremendous talker, whom Paddy nicknamed ‘the Gas-Bag of Attica’ – though of course he was quite a talker himself. In the spring of 1955 the two men travelled together round the Peleponnese by bus; after-wards Paddy remarked on ‘George’s unstaunchable and, I must say, wonderful storytelling’.

This letter was written after Paddy and Katsimbalis had been reconciled, following their heated quarrel over Cyprus.

To George Katsimbalis

5 November 1955

Château de Saint-Firmin

My dear George,

I tried to ring you up before leaving (the day of Papagos’s funeral) [1] but couldn’t get through, alas; so set off in the pouring rain with a mound of luggage, and that bloody crate with the Μεγάλη Ἑλληνικὴ Ἐγκυκλοπαίδεια, [2] which turned out to be a terrible nuisance. Half a ton of untapped knowledge! I felt like Sisyphus. What a job it was getting it across the frontier at Gevgeli, into Serbia, and trundling it up the Vardar valley. Thank God, I lost it temporarily at Belgrade, but the Embassy have found it, and it follows me by goods train to Paris.

Belgrade is awful. I got a sleeper fortunately, and there was an uncouth Serbian airman in the lower bunk whose hand appeared beside my pillow every quarter of an hour with a bottle of slivovitz followed by his only word in a Western language ‘Disinfectant’. We crossed Croatia and Slovenia in a trance . . . Returning to my compartment at Milan after a kilometre of macaroni in the Wagon-restaurant, I found his place had been taken by a Japanese businessman with teeth twice the normal length, each alternately edged with gold and lead and revealed in a perennial smile. Between these old ivory gnashers all night a succession of double-Coronas were stuck, which embowered me, in my top bunk, in a buoyant cloud of apotheosis, and wafted me, shrouded thus across the Lombard plain, under the Alps, through the Simplon and, next day into the smiling plains of France and along the Valley of the Yonne. Who could have thought that those fragrant leaves, rolled on dusky thighs in Cuba, would one day, in contact with those Nippon tusks and Fujiyama nostrils, achieve a combustion that would float me, enclouded like Zeus when visiting Semele, [3] westwards across Transalpine Gaul? Inscrutable destiny. . .

Lovely weather in Paris! I met Joan for a drink at the Brasserie Lipp, and then we went and had a formidable meal at the Roi Gourmet, in the Place des Victoires, out of doors under the front hoofs of Louis XIV’s rearing mount: foie gras, chateaubriand with béarnaise, perfect brie, a bottle of Château Margaux followed by several Marc de Bourgogne; then reeled around the Etruscan exhibition at the Louvre. After this we went to Normandy to stay with the Smarts (friends of George S [eferis]’s), till Joan went to England and I came here for a few days (Diana Cooper’s house). Do write the address down as – usual style! – I’ve managed to [illegible] for the winter: c/o Lady Smart, Gadencourt, Pacy-sur-Eure, Eure. It’s very comfortable, half cottage, half farmhouse, & full of books. The Smarts, my benefactors, spend the winter in Egypt. If you come to France, do come and stay. There are several important relais gastronomiques [4] in the neighbourhood – Conches, La Roche Guyon and Vernon, where I ate a remarkable poularde with a cream sauce and morels – those little black mushrooms – the other day. The meals are so copious they can only be managed by burning holes with a swig of calvados between the courses; the trou normand as they call it.

I came across a small book called Recits Byzantins by Pierre Almanachos at Gadencourt, rather fun. Is it the same chap who got into trouble for you-know-what . . .? There are nice tales of Nik. Choniates, Michael Akominatos, the Fall of Constantinople etc. George, please see if you can possibly find a decent, authoritative book or pamphlet on the Sarakatsans, [5] as it’s an awful gap. I’ve got sheafs of notes on them, but nothing really solid on their background. I lie awake for hours at night, conceiving what exactly I ought to write about Cyprus and for whom, and think I am onto the right track at last. [6] It’s not at all easy.

The villagers are enormous blond brutes, obvious kinsmen of William the Conqueror & of Tancred, Bohemond etc. who destroyed the Empire. If you come and stay, we might lay on a little massacre; you as a Byzantine, me as a Saxon . . . I return there tomorrow, then to England (Travellers) for two to three weeks, and back to Normandy.

It’s lovely here at Chantilly, with lawns sloping down to the big park and the lake of the Condé castle, vistas of trees leading to an equestrian statue of the Connétable Anne de Montmorency waving a huge sword in the evening mist. [7] Crimson leaves falling everywhere, silver frost on the grass, a tissue-paper-thin pane of ice on the lake. Dew! Lovely-smelling smoke of bonfires everywhere.

Write and tell me your news, and kiss Spatch, [8] & give her my love. Καὶ ὁ Θεὸς νὰ μᾶς ποντικοδυναμώνει! [And may God strengthen our muscles!]

love from

Paddy

[1] Marshal Alexander Papagos (1883–1955), commander of the Greek Army in the Second World War and in the latter stages of the Greek Civil War (1946–9). On retiring from the army he founded a new political party, which he led to victory in two elections, becoming prime minister from 1952 until his death.

[2] The Great Greek Encyclopaedia, published in twenty-four quarto volumes. PLF had a special crate made to transport it across Europe.

[3] Semele, princess of Thebes, who burst into flames when Zeus appeared before her in his full glory.

[4] An association of hotels and restaurants formed in 1954, setting high standards in cuisine and luxury.

[5] Ethnic Greek shepherds, who move with their flocks between higher pastures in summer and lower valleys in winter. Historically centred on the Pindus mountains of northern Greece, they are also present in the neighbouring countries of Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania.

[6] In a two-part article for The Spectator (‘Friends Apart’ and ‘Friends Wide Apart’, 9 and 16 December 1955), PLF condemned both the incendiary broadcasts from Athens and the British government’s refusal to hold talks on the future of Cyprus, which he criticised as ‘evasive, graceless and insulting’.

[7] Born in Chantilly, de Montmorency resurrected the medieval castle there.

[8] Katsimbalis’s wife Aspasia, known as ‘Spatch’.

To Jock Murray

undated [November 1955?]

c/o Lady Smart

Gadencourt

Pacy-sur-Eure

Dear Jock,

Thank you so much for your two letters, and 1,000 apologies for my delinquency as a correspondent. I’ve been meaning to write daily.

Our stay in Greece ended in a glorious hol on a yacht [1] skilfully borrowed by Diana Cooper, on which I was allowed to have almost entire charge of the itinerary (Mykonos – Delos – Amorgos – Ios – Rhodes – Symi – Kos – Kalymnos – Chios – Psara – Skyros – Skopelos – Skiathos), and to fill in my chaplet of the archipelago with several missing beads. Everyone vanished when we got back to Athens. I stayed on a week to fix everything up, buying books etc. I finally ruined myself by buying the Great Greek Encyclopaedia for £45; a wonderful thing which I’ve longed for for twenty years – twenty-four colossal quarto volumes. Crated, it weighed half a ton, I should think; several hundred weight, anyway, of compact ratiocination, which proved like the Stone of Sisyphus to trundle across the Balkan frontiers. I finally left it in Belgrade to follow me in its own time, trusting love and knowledge to find a way.

I was quite glad to leave Greece – though I hated quitting Niko’s lovely house – for two reasons: (1) New stuff kept piling up every day so that it was impossible not to notice and absorb, and if I stayed on, it would have been like trying to pay off the interest on a debt which kept mounting up at compound interest; and (2) The political situation in Greece, the mess we have both [2] (but mostly we) have made of it began to develop into a kind of obsessive and paralysing compound of anger and gloom that departure may exorcise. Now, (luck of luck!) our old friends the Smarts have lent me this house! I shall stay here these winter months and finish all. I came to stay skulking this side of the Channel, I hoped, to have something complete to cover the shame of delay with you on my return. Since arriving, I find myself struggling with a long article (I don’t know who for) about Cyprus – roughly, a plea that we should change our entire policy there. I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything before it’s off my chest. My plan is to return sometime next week (℅ Travellers). I’ll get in touch with you at once.

Thank you so much for news of Freya. I’ll try and get in touch with her (a) for the fun of seeing her and (b) to bully her a bit about her famous Turks.

Must dash to post!

Yours ever

Paddy

So pleased about George [Psychoundakis]’s dough.

P.S. You must come and stay here.

[1] Eros II, a yacht belonging to Stavros Niarchos.

[2] i.e. Britain and Greece. The British authorities in Cyprus declared a state of emergency on the island in November 1955, following the assassination of five soldiers.

To Ann Fleming

7 January 1956

c/o Lady Smart

Gadencourt

Darling Annie,

It’s too late for Christmas greetings, and New Year and even Epiphany & probably premature for Sexagesima, but anyway; Happy 1956! I tried to telephone you several times (in vain, alas; all occupied, and then you were gone) to say thank you 1,000 times for that lovely dinner and classical ball. [1] I wish you hadn’t left so early. I stayed for ages and ages, enjoyed it at a steadily increasing ratio, and swallowing immeasurable amounts of all kinds of delicious drinks. In fact, I’m not quite clear about the end of the evening. The mists of the Dark Ages set in, mimicking in a lesser degree the talk of Rome when the hoofs of Alaric splintered the Capitoline marbles . . . When the mists of Oblivion parted, I found myself, at high noon next day, light-headed and unshaven in the middle of Knightsbridge, a lady’s overcoat over my tarnished armour, still trailing that bloody trident and waving for a taxi in vain.

It’s all very different here, and heaven in its way: no sound but the industrious scratching of nibs, long-playing records in the evenings and the patter of Norman rains. Lovely and warm, thank God. If you come to France, please for heaven’s sake telephone (Gadencourt 6, ‘près de Pacy-sur-Eure’. Please write down). It’s only an hour from Paris. Joan’s brother Graham [2] was here for Christmas & New Year, and we made many a gastronomic pilgrimage to the starred restaurants of Normandy, & left not a truffle unturned. Joan returns sometime towards the end of the month, and I think we go to Chantilly next weekend on Diana’s way to Switzerland.

Do please write a short chronique scandaleuse of metropolitan life, and bear France in mind. I feel very excited at the thought of one vol. of my Greek rigmarole appearing in late spring, [3] and am busy clipping, brushing & polishing. V. many thanks again, Annie darling, and best love

from

Paddy

P.S. I must record a curious phenomenon. I am writing this letter in bed, & the garden outside is white with frost. The only two occupants of it are a large tabby cat belonging to the house and a robin fidgeting about on the branches of an apple tree, and it’s so cold and frosty that their breath streams into the air in great clouds of vapour. It looks most odd. They survey each other from a safe distance like two chain-smokers. . .

Beyond, in an indistinct field, a number of surly looking black and white cows (many of them with crumpled horns, I’m sorry to say) float about in the mist. I often single one out on my afternoon walks and try to hypnotise her by gazing into those great idiot eyes and willing her to (1) lie down, (2) shake her head three times and (3) moo. So far, alas, with no success at all.

[1] At the Royal College of Art, organised to raise money for a charity supported by the Earl of Arran (‘Boofy’s beastly East End children’). See Mark Amory (ed.), Letters of Ann Fleming (1985), page 164.

[2] Graham Eyres Monsell (1905–94), later 2nd Viscount Monsell.

[3] This was optimistic. The book was eventually published in December 1958.

The most prominent of those calling for Enosis was Archbishop Makarios, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus and de facto leader of the Greek Cypriot majority on the island. On 9 March 1956 Makarios was taken into custody and exiled to an island in the Seychelles.

In the Sunday Times of 8 April 1956, PLF challenged the definition of Enosis advanced by Sir Richmond Palmer, a former Governor of Cyprus, in a letter published two weeks before, and repudiated the idea that the term implied the restoration of the Byzantine Empire, including Constantinople. The claim to the lands of Asia Minor inhabited by Greeks since ancient times had been discarded in the early 1920s, he wrote. ‘The fact that as high a former official of the Colonial Office can be in a muddle about so crucial a point as to the implications of “Enosis” will dishearten those who look forward to the clearing up of the Cyprus tangle and the re-establishment of Anglo-Greek friendship.’

Facing growing criticism in the United Kingdom about the methods he used and their lack of effectiveness, Sir John Harding would resign as Governor of Cyprus on 22 October 1957.

To Lawrence Durrell

14 March [1956]

c/o Amy

Gadencourt

Pacy-sur-Eure

Dear Larry, παιδάκι μου [my dear boy],

I say, what is going on? I can quite imagine Gen. Harding, Maurice, [1] you (or me if I were there long enough) maddened by duplicity, blackmail, bullying, bombs, deceit, suddenly saying ‘to hell with it!’ and packing Makarios off to the Antipodes. But what I can’t understand is the Cabinet accepting such a cracked idea, knowing full well the damage it was going to do outside Cyprus, considerations which, after all, are nothing to do with Harding’s brief. The whole thing should have been fixed up years ago. Now the only hope is straightjackets all round for the Cabinet and a resumption of talks – but with who? – while – ideally – an exiled Eden works his way through Meredith and Trollope among the mangroves of Tristan da Cunha.

I wonder what feelings prevail in Cyprus. Away the British, I imagine, jubilation followed by a sort of post-coitum-triste – deflation and doubts beginning to creep.

I must say, there is something horrifyingly grandiose about it all, like setting light to a really large bonfire. What about Niko Kranidiotis [2] and Rhodis Rouphos? [3]

Did you read a wonderful book by Ommanney which appeared a few years ago, called The Shoals of Capricorn, about the Seychelles? [4] I’ve always longed to go there. (Should I send it to the Archbishop?) There is one island in the archipelago wholly populated by giant land-tortoises over a yard in height by two yards long. The entire atoll is covered with these bumps, like Byzantine cupolas or the roofs of an Arabian madrassah, the vast majority of them empty, containing nothing but complicated cobwebs and the delicate little skeletons of incumbents that died centuries ago. About one out of ten of these concavities is alive. They trot up to the rare travellers who land there, in hopes of company. There are also quantities of sea-turtles which are caught en masse, rendered down, and poured into tankers which set sail for Tower Bridge, where the stuff is hosed ashore into municipal water carts and off to the Mansion House for city banquets.

I had news of you and Maurice from Ed Stanley, [5] who I like in spite of the shocking balls he writes about Cyprus. How is Eve? [6] Also Maurice & Leonora? Do give them lots of love from me, also to Sappho. Do please, write and tell about Cyprus. I loved your recent short poem in the TLS, Spectator or Statesman. Important! You never sent me a copy of the Cyprus Review with my bit in, though I got the dough. Joan is here and sends her love; also lots, from

Paddy

Xan and Daphne arrive here in two weeks, on the way back to their Casbah. Wish you were too. We stay on in Smarties house [7] till May. The first vol. of my Greek book comes out in late summer.

P.S. Here is a sonnet I wrote for Roger Hinks, [8] who I like in spite of Geo. K’s dislike. It needs some explanation. He told me of a dream last year when, looking out of his window, he saw a steam roller driving up to the front door in which sat four black-faced, sinister, bolt upright Edwardian gamekeepers, gazing at him with dead eyes. Panic-stricken he made a dash for the back of the house, but there they were . . . He awoke in acute anguish. The Bergomask at the end of the octave is Caravaggio, who was born near Bergamo. Hinks has written a book on him, as well as on several other Italian painters: he’s a v. elaborate aesthetic figure.

‘Wall me with banquets, Titian; Tiepolo,

‘Roof me with rapes! The enemy’s at the door.

‘Minims and semibreves defend us! Floor,

‘Hide under Aubusson. Stop gaps, Palladio,

‘With trompe l’oeil vistas . . . Candlelight connives

‘To gild my golden eclogues by the fire . . .

‘Paint out the frontiers, Bergomask, with lyre

‘And luteplayers, dormitions and still lifes.’

But, e’er the fine can warm inside the glass,

Or spacecat fly a league, four baleful shapes

Glide up the drive, borne by a steamroller’s

Slow steam roll. The back door, quick! The grass!

Too late! The roller’s there, four Raglan capes,

And four deerstalkers on four gamekeepers.

[1] Maurice Cardiff (1915–2006), writer and cultural attaché, then working for the British Council in Cyprus; married Leonora Freeman in 1939.

[2] The diplomat, poet and writer Nikos Kranidiotis (1911–97) was Makarios’s right-hand man.

[3] Rodis Kanakaris-Roufos (1924–72), diplomat and writer.

[4] Francis Downes Ommanney, The Shoals of Capricorn (1952).

[5] See page 66 (letter to Joan Rayner, spring 1952).

[6] Durrell and his wife had separated in 1955 and would be divorced two years later.

[7] Gadencourt, owned by Lady Smart.

[8] Roger Hinks (1903–63), art historian with a particular interest in Caravaggio; director of the British Council in Athens, 1954–9.

To George Katsimbalis

Monday [? March 1956]

Gadencourt

Pacy-sur-Eure

IN HASTE

Dear George,

Did you get my long letter, & the book, which I sent you two months ago? V. many thanks for the beautiful France-Grèce books, which arrived safe: also for Geo. Seferis’s collection [1] of [all] too prophetic poems.

The point of this hasty letter is to commiserate and let off steam about the dangerous lunacy of the British Government. I think the whole lot ought to be put in straightjackets before they can do any more damage. What possible good do they think is going to come of all this?

As I explained in my letter, I am 100% pro Enosis, and – I can’t help being – 100% anti the methods used by EOKA, as also the lunatics of Athens radio. But this last stuff beats anything. I wrote a very long answer – same length as an article really, which is probably why it wasn’t printed – in answer to critics of my Spectator articles and I will send you a typescript when I can get one. When I see more clearly what is going on about Makarios, I’ll write something else.

Things look black indeed. I have not seen or heard from anyone who approves of the exile of Makarios, and I think the reaction will be very violent in England, which may be to the good.

Anyway, dear George, all my love to you and Spatch, as always, and from Joan, καὶ καλὸ ξεμπέρδεμα. Νά τὰ χάλια μας! [and let’s hope we get out of this quickly. Such is our sorry state!]

love

Paddy

P.S. I heard from Philip yesterday that his book on Greek poets [2] is about to appear, and I hope to review it for the Sunday Times.

[1] Seferis’s collection of poems inspired by Cyprus, entitled . . . Cyprus, Where it was Decreed for Me . . . (1955), later retitled as Logbook III; the title is a quotation from Euripides’ Helen.

[2] Philip Sherrard’s The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry (1956), reviewed by PLF on 22 April.

To Jock Murray

16 April 1956

Gadencourt

Pacy-sur-Eure

My dear Jock,

No please don’t come here yet, because I simply can’t face you till I hand over the completed vol., for shame, confusion etc. I am working away very hard at the moment, and things have taken on a spurt which I hope is the home stretch, in bed with a minor un-painful come-back of lumbago (owing to a long bicycle ride in pouring rain) which is very conducive to writing. In about seven days’ time I fly to the corner tower of a castle in Ireland (Co. Waterford), and hope to present you with the whole thing when I get to London eight days later. Do come to Gadencourt then and we’ll talk about Vol. II and drink to a more propitious delivery.

I’m only too aware that my hopeless dilatoriness about the final stage of this vol. seems inexcusable and infuriating. I think I got rather jammed up by constant gloom about the Greek–Cyprus business in the back of my mind, a feeling that my book, in these circumstances, may appear unhelpful and trivial, wondering what I ought to do to change it (which would, of course, change the whole nature of the book!) etc., etc. Quite futile, of course. I wish I’d had the sense to finish the whole thing a year ago – or that the English & Greeks had postponed their deadlock for a year. Streams of letters and cuttings from Greece aren’t much help.

Here comes the postman. No more now, but many apologies and I really am working!

Yours ever

Paddy

Love from Joan

The following was Paddy’s response to a sad and angry letter from Seferis (20 March 1956: translated from the original Greek), which reveals the depth of feeling over the British handling of the Cyprus emergency. Seferis berated ‘Panty’ for his ‘infinite admiration for Mr Macmillan and Mr Eden’, and his ‘blind loyalty to English diplomacy’. He deplored the ‘gangster-like’ treatment of Makarios. ‘I know that you are pure and that you really love Greece,’ continued Seferis, ‘but this is not enough. You must be convinced that the English policy is criminal and sworn to ruin us.’ Seferis fulminated against the ‘lies and calumnies’ of the British government: ‘To hell with the Anglo-Saxon treachery and hypocrisy . . .’ Later in the letter he apologised for losing his temper. ‘Forgive me, Panty, my dear. My sorrow is great. An incurable sorrow. We all feel like deceived lovers, because we loved nothing more than England and the English people . . . Even after fifty or a hundred years the bitterness will always remain in the depth of our soul. And grandfathers will be telling their grandchildren how much we suffered because of our insidious and disloyal friend whom we had, once, so much loved.’

To George Seferis

25 May 1956

Gadencourt

Pacy-sur-Eure

My dear George,

Very many apologies for not answering your card before. [1] I was away in Ireland, having got badly stuck here in Normandy, where I have been scribbling away, tant bien que mal [‘with difficulty’] all winter. Things are going a bit better now. George K. had sent me . . . Κύπρον, οὗ μ’ ἐθέσπισεν . . . [. . . Cyprus, Where it was Decreed for Me . . .] a few weeks before. I had been meaning to write to you about them. I like them immensely and have read them all several times. Some of them I knew. Did you have Φιλεντέμ [Filedem] [2] in mind in the Πραματευτὴς ἀπὸ τὴ ∑ιδῶνα [‘Peddlar from Sidon’]? (Τουρκοπούλα . . . ρόδα στὸ μαντύλι)? [‘A young Turkish girl . . . Roses in a kerchief ’] I hadn’t seen ∑τὰ περίχωρα τ ης Κερύνειας [‘In the outskirts of Kyreneia’] [3] before; it’s terribly good and quite pathetic. The English world there has exactly the stale and faded atmosphere of a nightclub in the morning, as in John Betjeman’s poem. ∑αλαμίνα τῆς Κύπρος [‘Salamis in Cyprus’] [4] is still my favourite. I’m keeping it for you to sign.

My book has swollen to such proportions that John Murray is going to publish in thirds, coming out at intervals, the first to appear being the one on the Mani. Although it is an extremely pro-Greek book as you can imagine, I tremble to think of the sneers and jeering and hatred that lie in wait for me in the columns of the Ἑστία, the Ἀκρόπολις and the Ἀπογευματινή [5] – ‘αὐτὸς ὁ δῆθεν “Φίλος” τῆς χώρας μας’ . . . ‘Προτιμοῦμεν τοὺς ἐχθροὺς’, κ.τ.λ., κ.τ.λ. [‘That so-called “friend” of our country’ . . . ‘we prefer our enemies’, etc., etc.] – I could write them myself. I know it so well. ‘It is obviously the intention of this agent of the Intelligence Service (a true representation of perfidious Albion masquerading as a friend) to discredit Greece in the eyes of the so-called “civilized” world by representing our fatherland as a race of poverty-stricken and illiterate peasants living by sheeptheft and the vendetta, believing in nereids, gorgons, werewolves, and vampire bats. May we, perhaps, remind this gentleman that when his own “civilised” country – a “civilisation” of which we can appreciate a shining example in Cyprus today! – were still barbarian savages dressed in wolf-skins and painted blue, the ancestors of the humble “peasants” he describes so patronisingly were . . . etc. etc.’ Oh God!

Not that the cheap English press is much better, and perhaps worse, mutatis mutandis. One of the many gloomy aspects of the present bloody situation is that it seems to have turned both Greece and England into enlarged caricatures of everything that their worst enemies have always pretended they were and both seem at the moment odious. Φουκαράδες! [Poor bastards!] The only hope lies with liberal opinion on both sides; but this, in moments of stress, as we know from Yeats, is the first thing to go. [6] What could be less reconcilable than the present situation – a just cause injudiciously applied, and an unjust cause applied with all the punctilio of legality? It might have made things more soluble in the end if the British government really did have a bit more of the Macchiavellicism [sic] attributed to it by the Athenian press. I’m certain Il Principe would have known better than to create a hagiography by exiling the ArchB [Makarios], and martyrology by hanging two Cypriots, however many poor devils get bumped off or killed by bombs. I absolutely disapprove of, and hate, the official British policy over Cyprus and am deeply convinced of the justice of Enosis; but I can’t think anything but ill of EOKA. None of us liked Gen. Grivas [7] – do you remember? when he commanded X, or approved either of his politics or his methods, and the latter seem to me no better now, when disguised by a heroic name and a noble cause. It seems to me that values have got dreadfully mixed up for newspapers to compare his activities to those of Greek resistance to Nazi occupation, at any rate, as I saw it in Crete. For one thing, the assassination of isolated Germans was strictly forbidden by a joint decision of the Cretans and the few Englishmen working with them because (a) the penalties were the lining up and machine-gunning of several hundreds of men, women and children, and the dynamiting of entire villages and (b) quite literally, because, though extremely easy, such assassinations seemed both pointless and cowardly. As, in Cyprus (a) (thank God!) doesn’t apply, (b) seems to me to apply with double force EOKA’s activities up till now would have resulted in the execution, not of two men, but of two or three thousand and razed a score of villages to the ground. Also, during the whole occupation, the Cretans bumped off very many less Cretan traitors than EOKA have so far killed among the Cypriots. The Germans in Crete were just as courageous, probably more efficient, four times more numerous and a hundred times more ruthless than the British in Cyprus – and yet we all managed to survive quite easily, having the entire population on our side, as, one must assume, EOKA has; and yet, nobody thought it phenomenally heroic or wonderful (quite rightly, because it wasn’t): also, it was rather fun. All this being so, it leaves one rather puzzled to read of the intrepid exploits of the second Digenis Akritas [8] against the ruthless and blood-thirsty tyranny of the blood-soaked butcher Gauleiter von Harding, whose μεσαιωνικὰ βασανιστήρια [medieval torture chambers] – βασανιστήρια [torture chambers] are always μεσαιωνικά [medieval] – outdo the Nazis a thousand-fold . . . All this bragging and exaggeration seems a terrible abuse of language and shows a great ignorance of what the German occupation really meant. I have never met him, but apparently all who know him think very highly of Harding as a just, well-intentioned and humane man – including (according to Francis Noel-Baker, [9] who was here the other day) Makarios himself and Niko Kranidiotis and quite a number of pro Enosis Greeks in Cyprus. After all, handing over Cyprus does not depend on his decision, but the government’s, and the job of keeping order is a ghastly one. I wonder how any other general of another nationality would have managed – supposing the whole situation were reversed. Would a Greek general have done better? (I don’t mean Grivas!)

Dear George, I hope you don’t mind me asking all these questions. The thing is that I spend my time putting the Greek side of the thing to any Englishmen I can get to listen, and in any periodical that will publish it, and all this is a sort of devil’s advocate’s argument. Things which I carefully omit and have rather on my conscience. I have become fairly expert at expanding the opposite of all I have just written, and have accumulated a considerable dialectical arsenal for the demolition of anti-Enosis arguments!

To go on with these private perplexities – all this is largely prompted by a constant avalanche of lurid newspaper cuttings sent [to] me by the Colossus [Katsimbalis], all headed with the ironical comment Ζήτω ἡ Ἀγγλοελληνικὴ Φιλία! [Long live Anglo-Hellenic friendship!] in red chalk! – Let us admit – indeed, proclaim – that the initial fault lies with the British, in their unjustifiable (in view of Greece’s offers of bases etc.) retention of Cyprus, and proclaim still louder the blame due to Eden and the British Government for their insulting and destructive policy over the whole question, louder still their willingness to let non-existent Turkish claims strengthen their case (though I do not believe – it is part of my anti-Machiavelli theory – as all Greeks do, that this was actually engineered by the British; I think it was merely welcomed by the Government, with crocodile tears of regret, to bolster up a weak and unjustifiable line of argument). We must also admit that there have been faults on the Greek side, which seem to me to be the timing of the whole thing (in view of their old friend England’s difficulties and embarrassments all over the world and especially in the Levant), the campaign of hatred in the newspapers, incendiary broadcasts to Cyprus and the activities of EOKA. Of this, far the gravest seems to me to be the irresponsible and hydrophobic behaviour of the newspapers; the last two – broadcasts and EOKA – must be largely by-products of this. It seems to have cowed all voice of protest into silence. What I mean is, that at least half of the stuff appearing on Cyprus in the English press is opposed to Government policy, and most of this is not partisan journalism of the opposition, but private protest dictated by liberal sentiments. But any trace of self-criticism seems to have vanished from the Athenian press, leaving the field open for all the evils we’ve been talking about. Nothing but extremes remain, an hysterical world of fantasy only populated by saints, martyrs, heroes, tyrants, butchers and traitors. If I were a Greek peasant in Epirus, Acarnania, Mani or Crete (say), brought up with patriotism as a religion, my mind unencumbered by any reading except the newspaper, the kapheneion wireless my only link with Athens, and the priest, the proedros and the daskalos telling me every second of the day that England means the destruction of Greece and the massacre of Greek heroes – spiritual descendants of Lambros Katsionis, Athanasios Diakos, Archbishop Germanos, Kolokotronis and Pavlos Melas [10] – in enslaved Cyprus, I am convinced I would be a violent fanatic – there would be no opposition view to prevent me being so; and supposing you in Athens had written an article suggesting a different and milder policy towards the Cyprus question and hinting that all Englishmen were not the treacherous and blood-thirsty ogres the newspapers say, and supposing some paper had the guts to print it – I would probably be in the front of an indignant mob in ὁδòς Ύπερείδου [Iperidou Street], throwing sticks and stones at your window and shouting ‘’Έξω ὁ ∑εφεριάδης! Πράκτωρ του ̰ Δήμιου Φὸν Χάρντινκ! Προδότης! Χαφιὲς τω ̰ ν ’Άγγλων! Πουλημένος!’ [‘Out with Seferiadis! Agent of the executioner von Harding! Traitor! Stool-pigeon of the English!’], etc. That is exactly what the newspapers seem to have done to nearly all of Greece. How on earth will it ever unwind again? Because, presumably, it will have to, if the Greeks and the English are to settle anything about poor old Cyprus. I keep hoping and praying for a sudden change of policy in England that would make the unwinding process possible in Greece. But at the moment the English and the Greeks seem to have gritted their teeth in resolution to prove that the English are not to be cowed by gunmen, nor the Greeks by hangmen, a sterile competition that can only lead us all further into the dark . . . The real tragedy is that it is all so easy to solve, as we all know! According to the Colossus, it will take 100 years for Anglo-Greek friendship to be re-established. I wonder if he is right.

In arguing with anti-Enosis people, I always say, at this point, that without the activities of EOKA, nothing would have happened at all. ‘Never’ would never have become ‘sometime’. Alas, perhaps it’s the truth. The Turkish threat I regard as absolutely chimerical – as if they would attack the island if there was a British or NATO base on it! If only EOKA had behaved differently during the talks with Makarios, I really believe something at last [might] have come of it. I don’t know.

I rather regret having gone into all this. Poor George! Don’t bother to answer the Cyprus part, it’s too shattering, and I suppose, rather boring too. But this winter has been a nightmare & has practically stopped me writing. Most of the above, I think, must have been prompted by the Colossus’s letters & cuttings. He writes like a lunatic! I have tried to get him to come and stay here, so that we could have a gargantuan gastronomic tour of all the splendid Norman restaurants, but he’s been unable to get away. Joan is in Paris, & returns tomorrow, but asks me to send all love, to which I add mine!

Yours ever

Paddy

[1] Seferis had complained that PLF had not answered an earlier card.

[2] The title of a popular Cretan song: apparently such a favourite of PLF’s while he was in Crete that he was sometimes known to his Cretan comrades as ‘Filedem’.

[3] Another poem in the same book by Seferis, which takes the form of a dialogue between two British expatriate women living in Cyprus; one of the two epigraphs is from Betjeman’s poem ‘Sun and Fun: The Song of a Nightclub Proprietress’, published in A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954).

‘But I’m dying now and done for

What on earth was all the fun for?

For God’s sake keep that sunlight out of sight.’

Seferis’s purpose was to show how alien the British are to the Cypriot landscape.

[4] Another poem from the same collection, critical of the British for denying Cypriots their right to be reunited with their fellow Greeks.

[5] Hestia, Akropolis and Apogevmatini, all Athens newspapers.

[6] Seferis underlined these last few words in pencil. PLF refers to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1921):

‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.’

[7] Georgios Grivas (1897–1974), a Cyprus-born general in the Greek Army, leader of the EOKA guerrilla organisation.

[8] A legendary Byzantine hero.

[9] The Labour MP Francis Edward Noel-Baker (1920–2009).

[10] All heroes of the Greek national liberation movement against Turkish rule, except the last, who was commander of the Greek forces in the struggle for Macedonia.

To Debo Devonshire

26 August 1956

Aix-en-Provence

Darling Debo,

I’m terribly sorry not having written half a century ago, after telephoning you on the eve of leaving to join Xan and Daph in the South of France. Things there were such turmoil that I don’t think any of the hundred-odd people engaged on making that film wrote so much as a postcard the whole time. D, X & I talked it over and decided you would have hated it. I did, rather, and buggered off after about a week.

It was all pretty queer. First things first: Dirk Bogarde, the actor who is doing one in the film, [1] is absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking voice and manner, a super-gent, the ghost of oneself twelve years ago. He and Daph & Xan had become bosom friends by the time I got there, and he and his equally nice manager (rather a grand thing to have?) are going to stay with them for Christmas in Tangiers. We all lived – us, the other actors, directors, cameramen etc. – in a vast chalet, miles above the clouds in the French Alps, leagues away from anywhere and at the end of an immeasurable tangle of hairpin bends. The film itself, what I saw of it, is tremendously exciting – tremendous pace, action galore, staggering scenery, with the guns of whiskered and turbaned Cretan guerrillas jutting down from every rock and miles of peaceful French roads choked with truckloads of steel-helmeted Germans bawling ‘Lili Marlene’. It’ll certainly be a thumping success, and when it finally appears at the Odeon or elsewhere, I propose to sneak in and see it in a false beard night after night. Some bits – not yet filmed, fortunately – turn Bogarde–Fermor into a mixture of Garth [2] & Superman, shooting Germans clean through the breast from a dentist’s chair, [3] strangling sentries in an offhand manner – all totally fictitious! I’m having a terrific tussle getting them to change these bits in the film, not because I really mind, but because anyone who knows anything about the operation knows that it’s all rot. There are scores of small things dead wrong, & Xan and I are having a death struggle to get them put right, mostly for the sake of Greek and Cretan friends. It’s all v. rum. The main trouble is that once a filmscript is written, the authors themselves bow down and worship it as though it were Holy Writ. IT becomes the truth and anyone trying to change it (like X or me) incurs the horror of heretics trying to tamper with the text of the Gospel.

Well, I baled out of this mountain madhouse after seven days and retreated to a minute Provençal village called Auribeau, where I stayed in the pub and scribbled all day (against time) in the priest’s leafy garden overlooking a forested valley along which flowed a swift and icy river with deep green pools dappled with the shadows of leaves where I splashed and floated between paragraphs for hours among the dragonflies. There was never anyone there except occasionally a solitary fisherman with a straw hat and never a bite (perhaps because of the splashing I mentioned).

Then everything changed 100%, when Annie Fleming went to stay with Somerset Maugham [4] (not Willy to me) at Cap Ferrat, where he inhabits a gorgeous villa. It was a concerted plan that she should try and wangle my staying there for fun, for a few days. She duly got me asked there to luncheon, [5] and afterwards, as if by clockwork, Mr Maugham asked me to stay several days and everything looked like a triumph of Annie’s engineering and plain sailing. But there were rocks ahead. (Do you know Somerset Maugham? He is eighty-four, and his face is the wickedest tangle of cruel wrinkles I have ever seen and so discoloured and green that it looks as though he has been rotting in the Bastille, or chained to the bench of a galley or inside an iron mask for half a century. Alligator’s eyes peer from folds of pleated hide and below them an agonising snarl is beset with discoloured and truncated fangs, but the thing to remember is that he has a very pronounced and noticeable stutter that can seize up a sentence for thirty seconds on end.)

All went better and better – a sort of honeymoon – as the day progressed. But at dinner things began to go wrong. [6] Two horrible and boring guests arrived (publishers) called Mr & Mrs Frere. [7] Mr Frere made some sweeping generalisation and

ME: ‘I love generalisations – for instance, that all Quakers are colour-blind (you know the line) – or that all heralds stutter!’

MRS FRERE: ‘Stutter?’

ME: ‘Yes.’

MRS FRERE: ‘How do you mean, stutter?’

ME: ‘Stutter . . . you know, stammer . . .’

Later on, after that fatal eighth glass of whisky, I was in trouble again: –

SOMERSET MAUGHAM: ‘It’s a c-c-confounded nuisance t-t-today b-b-being the F-feast of the As-as-as-assumption. N-none of the g-gardeners have d-done a s-s-stroke . . .’

ME: ‘Ah yes! The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin! Just after the Pope gave out the dogma a few years ago, I was going round the Louvre with a friend of mine called Robin Fedden (who, by ill luck, has a terrible stutter) [8] and we paused in front of a huge picture of the Assumption by (I think) Correggio (ah, oui ) & Robin turned to me and said “Th-th-that’s what I c-c-call an un-w-w-warrantable as-s-s-sumption”.’

There was a moment’s silence, the time needed for biting one’s tongue out. When bedtime came my host approached me with a reptile’s fixity, offering me a hand as cold as a toad, with the words: ‘W-w-well I’ll s-s-say g-good-b-b-bye now in c-case I’m not up b-by the t-time y-you l-l-leave . . .’ [9]

Annie helped me pack next morning, and as I strode, suitcase in hand, to the door, there was a sound like an ogre’s sneeze. The lock of the suitcase had caught in the sheet, leaving a jagged yard-long rent across the snow-white expanse of heavily embroidered gossamer. I broke into a run and Annie into fits of suppressed laughter. As a result of bullying by Annie & Diana Cooper (who turned up in the area, where I had settled in a horrible millionaires’ hotel, soon after) I was asked by W. S. M. to a meal of reconciliation and amends, where we met as affable strangers. It was really a gasbag’s penance and I, having learnt the hard way, vouchsafed little more than a few safe monosyllables.

The rest of my short stay in that area was spent with D. Cooper, Annie, Robin & Mary [Campbell], [10] & Hamish [St Clair-Erskine] (who were all staying with Mrs Fellowes). [11] I hate it – the Côte d’Azur I mean – and will never set foot there again.

I’ve taken rooms here for a week – ending tomorrow – in a pretty, retired midwife’s house, in whose garden I write. This ravishing town, full of chimes of bells, fountains, peasants playing boules in the shadow of lime trees and splendid decaying palaces and churches, is a wonderful disinfectant after that revolting coast. All is splendid or dilapidated, nothing smart.

In two days’ time I set off on the great yacht Diana has borrowed, [12] with D [iana], Joan, Alan Pryce-Jones and a couple called Frank & Kitty Giles: [13] Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily. It really would be a kind act were you to write c/o British Consul, Cagliari, Sardinia. Meanwhile, please give my love to Andrew, to Emma & Stoker [14] (angels in human form) & to your Wife. [15]

Lots of love from

Paddy

[1] Dirk Bogarde (1921–99) was playing PLF in the film of Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), which was being shot in the French Alps.

[2] Muscle-bound hero of a strip cartoon which ran in the Daily Mirror from 1943 to 1997.

[3] In one scene, the PLF character pretends to be a patient in a dentist’s chair when two German military policemen come into the dentist’s surgery. One of them is suspicious: he pulls back the sheet covering PLF, revealing that PLF is holding a pistol. PLF pushes the German against a wall and shoots him in the gut.

[4] The novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), who had lived at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat since his divorce from his wife, Syrie, in 1927.

[5] ‘Paddy was invited for lunch and arrived with five cabin trunks, parcels of books and the manuscript of his unfinished work on Greece strapped in a bursting attaché case.’ Ann Fleming to Evelyn Waugh, 27 August 1956: Amory (ed.), The Letters of Ann Fleming, pages 184–6.

[6] ‘Paddy who never travels without a bottle of calvados appeared more exuberant than one small martini could explain’ (ibid.).

[7] Alexander Frere-Reeves (1892–1984), for many years head of William Heinemann, Maugham’s publisher. He was married to Patricia Wallace, daughter of the thriller writer Edgar Wallace. ‘The conversation turned to tropical diseases and Paddy shouted at length on the stuttering that typified the College of Heralds. I intervened with a swift change of topic and thought the situation saved, but Frere (nasty man) made us all angry by saying that no author wrote for anything but profit; this put my voice up several octaves as well as Paddy’s’ (ibid.).

[8] Some small excisions Paddy made when this letter was published in In Tearing Haste have been reinstated.

[9] ‘He then vanished like a primeval crab leaving a slime of silence; it was broken by Paddy who cried, “Oh what have I done, Oh Christ what a fool I am” and slammed his whisky glass on the table, it broke to pieces cutting his hand and showering the valuable carpet with blood and splinters’ (ibid.).

[10] Robin Francis Campbell (1912–85), soldier and painter, and his second wife Lady Mary Sybil, née St Clair Erskine (1912–93), daughter of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn (and sister of Hamish).

[11] Marguerite (Daisy) Decazes (1890–1962), the well-dressed, sharp-tongued daughter of the 3rd Duc Decazes, and heiress through her mother to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She owned the luxurious villa Les Zoraïdes on Cap Martin, near Monaco, and had married Reginald Fellowes, her second husband, in 1919.

[12] Diana Cooper had again been lent the Eros II by Stavros Niarchos.

[13] Frank Giles (b. 1919), foreign correspondent, married to Lady Katherine ‘Kitty’ Sackville.

[14] Debo’s husband, Andrew, and their two oldest children, Emma (b. 1943), and Peregrine, known as ‘Stoker’ (b. 1944).

[15] Lady Katherine (Kitty) Petty-Fitzmaurice (1912–95), Baroness Nairne: DD’s closest friend, whose nickname, ‘Wife’, originated from an involved family joke which began when a man repeatedly referred to his wife as ‘Kitty my wife’ in one breath. It was adopted by DD to describe any great friend of either sex. Married 3rd Viscount Mersey in 1933.

‘The first problem was, Where to write the book? I began in a little hotel on the edge of Dartmoor, run by Mrs Postlethwaite Cobb, the daughter of the chaplain at West Point, a firm friend; she had retired there after founding a home for superannuated donkeys in Algeria. Work was broken by fox hunting three times a week.’

To Diana Cooper

28 September 1956

Easton Court Hotel

Chagford

Devon

My darling Diana,

Pretty different here from our recent habitat! My muse and I are cloistered here, a gale howls down the chimney, cats and dogs come down on the sodden fields outside in an almost unbroken stream and a wind blows that would unhorn cows. I don’t think you’ve ever been here, but it’s a great retiring place for literary purposes, for E. Waugh, & Patrick Kinross and others – I first came here seven years ago with Patrick when we [were] both struggling with books, and have been back several times in extremis, as now (Saint-Wandrille was full, alas!). It is owned & run by an odd couple, Mrs Carolyn Postlethwaite Cobb, an elderly American of very improbable shape, now largely bedridden, and her middle-aged ex-lover Norman Webb, a Devonshire chap she met a number of decades ago running a team of donkeys in Biskra or Fez. Their youthful flame has burnt out I think but they remain loving and inseparable and Norman wanders about beaming and bottle-nosed and prone to cider-sprung meandering. Both are very nice, and, miraculously, in spite of the awe-inspiring fourteenth-century beams and inglenooks, fires blaze in hearths, water is piping hot, central heating leads its secret life and the food’s not bad at all.

Now for the brief and not very exciting saga that connects goodbye to you on the deck of the Eros in Portofino and these dank pastures: dinner on the train with Stuart Hampshire, his/Freddie’s son, [1] and Isaiah’s stepson, [2] travelled through the night in luxurious wagon-lit parcel post, out into a bright but colder Paris, dinner with Nancy, then two days at Gadencourt where the Smarts were Normandy-logged by Nasser, [3] and Russell Page & his wife [4] were staying, back to Paris, & luncheon with Kitty & Frank [Giles] (I am amused and pleased to see how Joan has taken to the former, & to the latter also. I must say, the trip has drawn my fangs, too. I think all this gorgeous matiness may be the cause of much of the defence mechanism of facetiousness melting – or has custom merely equipped one with shock-absorbers?) At the airport we met and flew with Vivien Leigh & Mr Beaumont [5] (she clutching a neatly packed shrub hot-root from Portofino) with happy & cheering news of you installed in the castelletto. How nice she is. A hilarious dinner with Peter Q, Sonia [Orwell] & Cyril Connolly, then to that curious nightclub I took you to for a moment after that dinner at Scott’s, where I saw ‘Rock ’n Roll’ for the first time; it looks exactly like ordinary jiving.

Joan’s house, [6] which we went over next morning, looks tip-top, and could be made charming – you must come and see it and advise. Joan thinks aubergine stair carpets. It will be wonderful to have somewhere for both of us to assemble scattered books, clothes, papers etc. and a proper base to be nomadic from. It’s rather demoralising, always returning to improvisation.

I set off here the day after arriving in London, and have immersed myself in an Augean accumulation of work, only sneaking out for a couple of hours every day, whenever the rain stops, to tittup round the moors and lanes on an amiable black horse that lives hard by, usually getting soaked by sudden showers or by crashing along overgrown rides where each of the millions of leaves one collides with seems to shed a couple of table-spoonsful of rainwater. There are very steep hills separated by swift tree-arched streams running with water as dark as Guinness, overgrown with red rowan berries, Lords and Ladies run to seed, ragged robin & willow herb dribbling with the spit of cuckoos long flown, and dank woods thick with lichen, so that the branches are like green coral where many a fox could be decadently gloved in magenta. [7] Primitive stone bridges, as uncouth and angular as in early heraldry, span these streams, ringing hollow underhoof, and the dampness, darkness and greenness of the woods give them a submarine and legendary feeling, as though one should be dressed in full armour under shoals of green-haired mermaids drifting through the oak branches on slow and invisible currents to the sound of harps.

Dartmoor, which starts a mile or two away, is dotted with druidical stones – dolmens & cromlechs in gap-toothed rings or slanting monoliths jutting from a sea of red bracken – and above this bracken, like chessmen and T’ang objects, peer the heads of wild ponies, the size of large dogs, gazing as though mesmerised as one approaches cautiously at a walk. Most of them are bay, but others are black, chestnut & roan, white & grey, dappled, skewbald or piebald, in bold geographical designs, one or two practically striped like zebras, many of them with blond flapperish manes and tails, one raffish grey stallion, obviously of authoritative standing, has a mad eye surrounded by a piratical black patch. Up you creep till, with a sudden mass decision, they are off helter-skelter in a flurry of flying manes & hoofs, the burglarious stallion taking advantage of the disorder by trying to inflict the last outrages on minute mares at the gallop, the foals pounding anxiously after them and so small that only a ripple over the top of the bracken indicates them. At a safe distance, they freeze again, as in grandmother’s steps. Most have been apprehended at some time during the last few years, branded and let loose again by various local people with some claim on them, and expeditions are now in progress to round them up for the annual pony-fair that takes place in Chagford later this month. The ones caught are then broken & sold as pets, for children or for circuses, formerly to costermongers, and alas! too awful to think of after this free & dashing life on the moors – dimgloomed in northern coalmines, or worse still, it is rumoured, shanghaied onto tramp steamers for Belgians to munch. The molars of Madame Lambert and Father de Grunne and André de Staercke closed on them . . .  [8]

I went out on one of these raids yesterday with a local stable-owner with a Devonshire accent almost as incomprehensible as that of his Dumnonii ancestors who fought the Romans here; also eight farm boys on horses of various degrees of culture, a ragged equestrian troop of the kind one seldom sees out of Ireland. It was a long job, because, as the leader warned me, these ponies are contrary and artful buggers. It was a mixture of stealthy encircling advances through the bracken, long waits in the howling wind stuffing with blackberries, and sudden gallops, cracking whips like mad while the boys made shrill noises like dogs barking and owls hooting, till we had about a hundred of them cornered in a lane at the moor’s edge, kicking, leaping and whinnying and trying to clamber over each other. Thirty were picked out by their brands and off we set home in a miniature stampede, along a ten-mile labyrinth of trough-like lanes as the sun was setting, horsemen going forward to block escape routes at crossroads. Night had fallen as we drove these artful buggers through the lamplit streets of Chagford, aborigines emerging glass in hand from pubs to watch the bewildered pigmies pound by. It was past ten when we herded them galloping into a field in which three sleek elderly giants were already grazing. They stopped and raised their heads in amazement as though a horde of teddy boys stunted with gin or cigarettes had suddenly rocked and rolled into the Athenaeum. (What lies ahead of these problem ponies? Will they settle down?) I’m glad to say that by the time we left them there, in the dark, one of these fogeys was diffidently rubbing noses with a shaggy newcomer about the size of a dachshund, which I thought particularly decent.

Darling Diana, I’ve not said a word so far about the trip, but you know how I adored it, and a trillion thanks. In its very different way it was as heavenly as last year, if not more. Every single inch of it was unknown to me, and I’m still thinking hard and assimilating & digesting all we saw. I do hope you loved it too – I heard a few sighs, but perhaps there were so few out of stoicism! I know Joan loved it, and I think – indeed, I’m sure – everyone else did.

Do write quickly and tell your plans. I’ve got to stick in the kingdom, mainly because of work but also because this is the critical time for the wretched Crete film, and I want to watch it like a hawk and steer them, as much as I’m allowed to, from disaster. God, the rain!

Lots of love, darling sweet Diana

and tremendous hugs

from

Paddy

xxx

P.S. I think the Cap Ferrat chapter of future reminiscences should be called: ‘How to win friends and influence people.’

[1] The philosopher Stuart Hampshire was married to Renée, ex-wife of his colleague A. J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer; her son from her first marriage was widely believed to have been fathered by Hampshire, so that he was known jokingly as ‘Julian Ayer-shire’.

[2] Earlier in the year the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) had married Aline Halban, daughter of the Baron de Gunzburg, and the mother of three sons by her two previous marriages.

[3] Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal had prompted a diplomatic crisis.

[4] Montague Russell Page (1906–85), garden designer and landscape architect, married to Vera Milanova Daumal, widow of poet René Daumal and former wife of the poet Hendrick Kramer.

[5] Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont (1908–73), successful and influential theatre manager and producer.

[6] JR had bought a small house in Pimlico, No. 13 Chester Row, SW1.

[7] A play on the word ‘foxglove’.

[8] All Belgians: Austrian-born Baronne Joanna ‘Hansi’ Lambert (1900–60), née Reininghaus, hostess of a literary salon who married into a prominent Belgian banking family; Jean-Dominique de Hemricourt de Grunne (1913–2007), elegant, sophisticated and worldly Roman Catholic priest at Oxford University in the 1950s, who left the priesthood after his mother’s death; André de Staercke (1913–2001), former political adviser to the Belgian Prince Regent. PLF is commenting on the Belgian liking for horsemeat.

To Billy Moss

1 October 1956

Easton Court Hotel

Chagford

Dear Billy,

Back from foreign parts, & have scuttled down here to hide until I dare meet two publishers, one with a book one and a half years overdue, the other with a preface a mere six months. [1] My life story could be entitled ‘The Case of the Overshot Deadline’.

I missed Powell & Pressburger [2] in London as they are off in Corsica, shooting the Brian Coleman [3] shots, but Micky [Powell] assured me by letter that he was ‘able to put right nearly all the things I was afraid about’. I wonder how much that covers. During, & after, the days I spent watching the shooting, I wrote them three interim reports containing comments & advice and criticism, some of it very severe. They sent me typed copies of them – perhaps they did you too, I hope so. If not, let me know and I’ll send you mine & you can give me them back in London. They are posterior and additional to going over the script and bringing up all the points we raised together, in great detail. You and Manoli [4] now leap on the sentries and truss them hand & foot, but my fucking dentist’s chair, alas, remains. They seem to be in love with the scene, and it is impossible to either bully or shame them out of it. With this glaring exception, I somehow feel it won’t be too bad. By some miracle, you and I work out all right. Xan says that it’s Marius Goring [5] (who I liked v. much) who hams it up by being a sort of caricature Prussian. I tremble to think what it might have turned into without interference.

In spite of all this, I can’t help liking this curious couple. I really do think they want to make us and the Cretans happy about it as much as in them, & the awful conventions of the film-world, lies; and others might have been far more ruthless and unscrupulous. They will get in touch with me on return & I will keep you posted on everything. Micky has a very bad-mannered little son called Columba, who was crawling all over the location – he never answers anyone who speaks to him. One morning Emmerich [Emeric Pressburger] said ‘Good morning Columba’ and Columba spat at him full in the face. Very wittily, I think, Emmerich then produced his handkerchief and said ‘You are the spitting image of your father.’

With lots of love for Sofe & love from

Paddy

[1] The first is PLF’s Greek book, published by John Murray as Mani in 1958; the second is probably The World Mine Oyster by Matila Ghyka (trans. from the French by the author), which was published by Heinemann in 1961, with an introduction by PLF.

[2] Emeric (‘Imre’) Pressburger (1902–88), Hungarian-born screenwriter, who collaborated with Michael Powell on thirteen major films made between 1943 and 1955.

[3] Lieutenant Brian Coleman was captain of the motor-launch which spirited General Kreipe off Crete.

[4] Manoli Paterakis. ‘He was my guide and closest Cretan friend in the island,’ PLF wrote to Debo Devonshire after Paterakis’s death, ‘hand in glove in all sorts of risky ventures, a man in a million, two years older than me, v. funny with a hawk nose, piercing eyes, and vast knowledge of the mountains’ (In Tearing Haste, page 235).

[5] The English actor Marius Goring (1912–98) played General Kreipe.

To Jock Murray

9 October 1956

Chaggers

[Easton Court Hotel Chagford]

Dear Jock,

Many thanks for your nice letter. I’m delighted about A Time to Keep Silence. [1] The only change I would like to put in is in the Acknowledgements and thanks bit – after thanking you for permission to reprint (or perhaps this is redundant in this case) I would like to insert a bit thanking ‘the Hon. Graham Eyres Monsell [2] for suggesting the title’. I haven’t a copy here, but I’m sure it will fit in easily.

Heaven be praised, the neurotic literary paralysis of months has broken up at last, & dissolved into a spate of prose and I feel confident & optimistic for the first time for ages. The only thing that will wrench me from here until the Mani is finished will be that there is a chance of seeing the Bolshoi Ballet, in which case I’d come straight back next day. But there is not much hope, thank God.

Carolyn & Norman [3] have gone to Denmark for two weeks, & the hotel is comparatively empty, which is nice. I’ve rather high-handedly grabbed the small sitting room and entrenched myself there behind an inexpungeable palisade of books which frightens away all invaders. I break off for two hours’ rural ride every afternoon, back to a vast tea and the waiting foolscap.

Joan is getting a small house in Pimlico, mainly as a place for both to keep our scattered books & papers, a base for departures & caravanserai for returns, so I ought to be assembling my dispersed chattels. Would it be possible to get hold of the ones I have inflicted on you, in about a week? I’m afraid it has been a bit of a nuisance – see you soon,

yrs ever

Paddy

[1] John Murray had agreed to issue a new edition of this small book, originally published in a limited edition in 1953 by Ian Fleming’s Queen Anne Press.

[2] Joan’s brother.

[3] The proprietors of the hotel.

To Ann Fleming

November 1956

Easton Court Hotel

Chagford

Darling Annie,

I ought to have written days ago to say that, after delivering you safe home, I had another terrific hunt through the taxi and all over the floor and in and out of the upholstery of that nightclub, and not a sign of the truant earring, alas! I do hope it has turned up, or not been too grave or irreparable a loss.

How nice Cecil [1] was, cool and bland with his lemon-drop smile. Robin & Mary [Campbell] too, but a bit overcast I thought.

The trees are turning extraordinary colours, and riding along these lanes is like penetrating a cool furnace; until one gets onto the moor, where all is bleak, stricken & damned, it can be very sombre & forbidding at dusk. I almost expect, as I trot along, to be addressed by a hideous and toothless crone bent double under a load of sticks, who, if I befriended her, would be able to grant me three wishes not yet formulated. But such an event presupposes that two churlish elder brothers should have already ridden that way, and not only refused help, but derided her age and infirmity. My mind’s eye depicts two members of the Berry family, [2] so perhaps I’m well out of it.

The horse I rode (‘Flash’) stopped dead at a gate on the way home this evening and a cart-horse the size of a mastodon came pounding over the grass to rub muzzles. They then placed their nostrils end to end and blew – it was no kind of a fit, owing to the newcomer’s size – filling the frosty air with clouds of steam; but they obviously liked this so much that I’m thinking of taking it up.

MORE EQUINE INTELLIGENCE

I was woken up at 2 a.m. this morning by the hoof-beats of a cavalcade under my window sounding as eerie as smugglers, highwaymen or a troop of hired assassins making for an ambush with dark lanterns. I leapt out of bed and craned out like Old Mother Slipper-Slopper, [3] but there was nothing but darkness, wind and rain. I told all this to Barbara the housemaid this morning, who said it must be ghosts or (rather wittily) night-mares. But she came back in a minute or two, and said others had heard it – it was merely a pack of wild ponies driven off the moor by the weather. (‘It must be terrible cold up there for them, poor mites.’) It seems that in really cold weather they range through the villages in gangs, and have even been known to clatter through the streets of Exeter and whinny in the cathedral close, making many a citizen and many a minor-canon sit bolt upright and gaze into the darkness with wild surmise . . . But it really wasn’t cold enough last night for these doings to be attributed to anything but instability –

lots of love

Paddy

[1] Cecil Beaton (1904–80), fashion, portrait and war photographer, interior designer and stage and costume designer. He kept diaries. ‘In the published diaries, opinions are softened, celebrated figures are hailed as wonders and triumphs, whereas in the originals, Cecil can be as venomous as anyone I have ever read or heard in the most shocking of conversations,’ wrote his biographer, Hugo Vickers.

[2] The Kemsley Newspaper Group, owned by the Berry family, owned the Sunday Times, which employed Ian Fleming as Foreign Manager. PLF wrote regular book reviews for the Sunday Times.

[3] ‘Then Old Mother Slipper-Slopper jumped out of bed

And out of the window she pop’t her head.’

From the folk-song ‘The Fox’

In the spring of 1957 Paddy returned to the Abbaye Saint-Wandrille to work on his still-unfinished Greek book.

To Joan Rayner

undated [April 1957]

Abbaye Saint-Wandrille

Seine Inférieure

Darling,

All goes splendidly. This extraordinary place really does seem to do the trick. I think it is partly the atmosphere of activity, and cramming so much into the day, of the monks that shames one out of one’s selfish and brooding sloth. They get up at 5 and go to church, for longer or shorter periods, about seven times a day. Yet a moment before each office, and immediately after, the whole monastery is dotted with toiling figures in boiler-suit habits covered in dirt, oil, earth, flour or shavings. But all of a sudden, there they all are, tooling up the aisle in spotless black habits with the precision of slow marching guardsmen, followed by splendidly arranged figures in gleaming vestments, carrying candles, censers etc. – as if their only plot was the perfection of ritual & gregorian chant. The second it’s over, off they scutter. So it is from 5 a.m. to 8.30. I got off to a whizz-bang start, and have done more in three days than any ten in London. I really am sanguine about finishing soon. I’ll stay on over this weekend, then make my way back via Dieppe. It was a false alarm about having to find rooms in the village. The guest house is full of lyceéns [schoolboys] from Le Havre, but the Père Hôtelier has put me into a colossal room, usually kept for the Archbishop of Rouen, half as large again as the drawing room at Tumbledown [Dumbleton Hall], full of dix-huitième furniture, with a washing place in one curtained alcove, the bed in another, and, above the vast desk, a cloudy oil painting of Clement XIV, the Pope who dissolved the Jesuits – a charming sign of their feud with the Benedictines (they hate each other). They really are kindness itself here, and have been so warm & welcoming. Everyone remembers Eddy [Sackville-] West with great affection. I keep on remembering my first visit, and my almost daily voluminous letters to you on which AT to KS [1] was based. It really is a case of Le jardin n’a rien perdu de son charme, ni le presbytère de son éclat. [2] It’s 8 in the morning, a brilliant day, hundreds of white chestnut-candles on the great trees outside, and lilac everywhere, a cuckoo hard at it. It’s like writing in some delicious room in a remote chateau, peopled by figures called Celimène and Clitandre, instead of le Père Prieur, le Père Hôtelier, l’Hôtelier Bibliothécaire. . .

No more now, darling Mushy, except heaps and heaps of love from

JEM

[1] A Time to Keep Silence, published on 29 May 1957.

[2] From Gaston Leroux’s Le Mystère de la chambre jaune, one of the first works of ‘locked room’ crime fiction. It was first published in France in periodical form in 1907, then in novel form the following year.

The peace of Saint-Wandrille was shattered by an unexpected telephone call from the American film director John Huston, who asked Paddy to write a screenplay (though usually he wrote his own). Paddy’s task was to adapt a novel by Romain Gary, Les Racines du ciel (1956), which became the film The Roots of Heaven (1958).

To Debo Devonshire

5 August [1957]

Hôtel Prince de Galles

33 Avenue George V

Paris

Darling Debo,

Everything’s fixed. I only finished reading the book three minutes before meeting Mr Zanuck, [1] but it didn’t matter, because he burst into his suite at the Savoy like a rifle bullet saying: ‘Swell to see you, Mr Feemor, it’s really swell. I’m off to the Belgian Congo in three days, and I’ve just taken two yellow pills & three injections and don’t make much sense, so you mustn’t be sore at me if I talk a whole lot of boloney.’

He’s tiny, with bright blue minute eyes glinting with mad intensity, a ragged sandy moustache and his injections had clearly incapacitated him from judging distances, as the colossal cigar in his mouth – as irremovably there as part of his anatomy – was snapped in the middle, one half hanging at right angles and belching volumes of smoke, like the funnels of one of those Thames steamers going under Chelsea Bridge. He must have charged into a door or a wall or perhaps a mirror.

I can’t remember if I told you that the whole of the book is a plea against elephant shooting, in case the species becomes extinct. The villain of the book goes berserk and shoots them by the score in a sort of demon’s passion. This is obviously the bit Mr Zanuck likes best, because when I met him next day he said: ‘It’s a swell book, Mr Feemor, a wonderful book. The best bit is when they bump off all those elephants. But we’ll run into difficulties here because of all that goddam humanitarian hooey in England and America. I’d like to do the thing properly, and shoot a whole lot of them, a whole lot . . .’ his blue eyes kindled dreamily. ‘I doubt if I get permission to shoot more than a dozen.’ He looked rather dejected for a second, but then said, cheering up, ‘I tell you what we’ll do! We’ll only shoot a dozen or maybe fifteen, but I’ll put lots and lots of cameras about at different angles so it’ll look as if it were killing hundreds! But what a book!’

There never seemed to be a second’s question of my not doing the thing, so now I’ve got to start work full steam ahead and hope for the best. It’s rather an alarming, but v. exciting assignation. I had luncheon with the old French authoress [2] the day before yesterday and with Mark Grant, [3] and there was much loving talk of you, and swapping of Athenian for Irish tales. Otherwise, Paris seems stripped of all my friends and has become one of the major tropical cities of the world. The policemen are in shirtsleeves and khaki solar-topees, as though it were Khartoum. I wandered around by myself till 7 a.m. in Montmartre the first night in countless bars full of negroes, soldiers, sailors, toughs and tarts of all colours and a few noseless pimps, and on the second night till 8 a.m. in Montparnasse and Les Halles. Here, very strangely, I fell in with two Australian nurses who seemed a bit lost, and fed them onion soup as day broke, surrounded by porters and butchers in blood-stained smocks as though they had just been helping at the guillotine. I am writing this in the mosaic courtyard of this luxurious hotel, with a bogus Spanish fountain tinkling in the middle. The Frogs and Americans here look awful, exactly like pigs, with tiny pig’s eyes. I have just caught a sobering glimpse of my own reflection, and so, alas, do I. Circe has done a thorough job. How I wish you had been here! Just think of the night prowling and dark dancing, all the fun. I long for you like anything, and yearn and gaze towards the dividing Channel with hate.

Meanwhile, a billion tons of love, Debo darling, and promise to write hourly.

Paddy

[1] Darryl Francis Zanuck (1902–79), American film producer and studio executive.

[2] DD’s older sister, Nancy, who lived in France.

[3] PLF’s wartime comrade Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who lived in Athens.

To Joan Rayner

31 December 1957

L’Arche de Noé

Îles de Porquerolles

Var

My darling Muskin,

Lots of adventures to tell! First of all the Chasse à Courre from Chantilly. [1] I thought I was pretty smartly turned out with my new coat, boots, velvet-cap and all, but I can’t tell you how quiet and modest I appeared – like a female quetzal [2] as opposed to a male – when I went to have breakfast with M. de Souza Lage (I’ve got to chuck this horrible Biro) across the road from St-Firmin. (No, here’s another that actually writes.) He was dressed in a long-tailed blue coat with enormous gold and silver buttons and masses of pockets, a yellow waistcoat with gold buttons, white buckskin breeches and huge glittering jackboots like the Blues or the Life Guards. When we set out, he put on a belt with a silver-hilted sword about a foot and a half long, and one of those enormous horns over one shoulder and under the other. We had a great breakfast of omelettes and fried mushrooms washed down with a bottle of claret and then set off. The meet was at Royaumont, with Max Fould (Alan’s brother-in-law) [3] doing the honours, half in his house, half in the courtyard of the Abbey, now full of other splendidly dressed men and women in tricornes trimmed with gold lace, while haughty steeds led by smart grooms & second horsemen neighed and stamped under coronetted blankets and huge black and white hounds, leashed together by the half dozen and flogged and held back by glittering and bottle-nosed hunt-servants, slavered and bayed. It was a bright, slightly frosty morning and it looked glorious. The Master was a splendid old boy called le Marquis de Roüalle. Lots of handshaking and flourishing of doffed caps, assembling and mounting, then a terrific fanfare. All the male members of the hunt blow these, not only the hunt servants. How they manage to ride with these orchestral instruments and above all, continue to learn and remember the 200-odd most complex tunes that mark the different stages of the chase is a mystery.

Off we tooled into the woods opposite, escorted by fanfares, and were hanging about in a field covered with haycocks when the hounds started kicking up a great fuss in the undergrowth, and out of the wood, with enormous leaps, came two stags, one of them a ‘royal’ with twelve points like an enormous scaffolding, the other with six: intelligence which was at once blown down the horns. They were just the opposite side of a stream, leaping along in great parabolas through the haycocks against a background of forest – it was just the kind of tapestry-vision I was longing for. We jumped over the stream (not a big one) – de Souza Lage and I, that is; I stuck to him like a limpet all the time, on a lovely mare called Herodiade – and we set off full tilt through the woods after the stags (the hounds and everyone else taking a different route) and followed them through a sort of petén [4] for about two miles, tormented by brambles & roots and ducking under low branches – I see the point of those caps now – till we lost them. All this sounds odd, but de S. L. is considered one of the crack chaps in this queer society, so I was in good hands. We were soon quite lost, and made our way back to the nest by listening for horns, and found everyone again in a built-up area like Welwyn Garden City, our horses thick in sweat as though preparing for a shave in a barber’s shop. The ‘royal’ was lost, but we pounded about for another hour after the six-pointer, by no means always sticking to the rides as I had imagined, but through the underbrush half the time, till we came to some swampy country with enormous tufted reeds ten feet high like the upper reaches of the Amazon, with the hounds making a great noise somewhere. De S. L. and I were alone again. We gave our horses to a girl to hold, dismounted, and plunged into the middle of this. Most of it was several inches deep in swamp, and trotting through in boots and spurs was no joke. It became less of one when S. L. gave me his crop as well as his horn, scabbard & belt to carry, and advanced brandishing the naked blade in order to plunge it into the stag’s breast if it broke in our direction. It nearly did for me! After half an hour of this hell, we came on the stag aux abois [‘at bay’], surrounded by hounds. It broke through them at our approach, galloped off, and was shot (as it was in the outskirts of a village) a mile off by one of the hunt servants with a special gun, as there were lots of people and children about, and, if they attempt to despatch it with their long daggers in such circumstances, there is danger of the stag goring a bystander (A piqueur [whipper-in] was killed last year – more than you can say of fox hunters!). The poor quarry was put in a truck and taken back to Royaumont. We followed it, and, while it was being cut up and the venison distributed to the innumerable peasants who help in the hunt, we drank whisky & white wine and ate smoked salmon & caviar sandwiches, then gathered round the remainder of the stag, – all the innards, etc., which were wrapped in its skin – for the curée as it is called: i.e. a grizzly banquet when the hounds eat up all this: three-quarters of an hour of antiphonal hornblowing, recounting all the different – phases? – of the day, the members of the hunt divided into two orchestras, as it were, the hunt servants into a third, each playing in turn, sometimes all together, in elaborate obsequies. The impression of something ancient and mediaeval – almost Merovingian – was overpowering. All was over by 3.30, rather early, as it often goes on long after dusk. D. S. L. – a jolly, hirsute, good-looking, half-Brazilian – then suggested that we should sneak off and drive over to another forest, send for two more of his horses, and follow another hunt, a much rougher one, belonging to a Comte de la Béraudière; so off we set, only to discover that they hadn’t even found; so we went back to this house and drank maté [5] – it’s rather good – then lots of gin & tonic. Patrick [Kinross] turned up that evening, Alan & André de Staercke next day; a huge lunch, then dinner at Cécile de Rothschild. [6] It was a nice weekend, except that poor Diana had a dreadful cold, which she seemed to master towards the end. The hunt was the highlight for me. I managed to come out without disgrace, thank God, & Souza Lage is very eager that we should do lots more of it – horses any time! – and promises to take me to a boar hunt, which is fast and furious. Here the quarry is killed with a spear, often wreaking havoc first with its tusks. Their speed and fierceness is apparently quite something. Last year a boar was marked in north-east Poland and killed in the Camargue a fortnight later! Think of all the countries, frontiers, forests and rivers it must have crossed! The Vistula, the Elbe, the Oder, the Rhine, or the Danube, the Saône, the Rhone delta, with all its tributaries, perhaps the Etang de Vaccaris and the moat of Aigues Mortes!

I caught the night train to St Raphael on Monday, catching the bus thence to St Tropez next morning. And it was raining! Miles of vineyards under water, long detours caused by overflowing rivers – one bridge washed away! – and St Tropez, when I got there, a steep labyrinth of cascading streets and a wicked criss-cross of gushing gutters overhead. Françoise [Germaine Tailleferre’s daughter] and Jean-Luc were waiting in ground-sheets, Wellingtons & Sou’Westers. For some reason, we were not staying in the villa 3 miles from the town, but in a large gloomy palazzo-like building in the middle of the town; huge, but not big enough for the quantity of people staying there – my two, three children, two crop-headed lesbians smoking cigars and a shifting troop of friends and hangers-on and an enormous and very funny Provençal femme de ménage who sat down to table with us. All this revolves round Germaine Tailleferre. [7] She’s not at all brilliant, as Freddie G. said, but funny, charming, friendly, kind and nice. Philippe Soupault [8] caught influenza at the last moment and couldn’t come, alas! I think it would have killed you, the noise and the lack of privacy, and I thought I would expire too – for the first day; then I seemed to slip into the general lunatic atmosphere and enjoyed it a great deal. It’s the most bohemian thing I’ve had anything to do with for ages. Nobody seemed to have a bean, & lived like Elijah fed by ravens, but it was all very gay and happy. G. Tailleferre is a wonderful mimic and raconteuse, full of funny & scandalous tales of Cocteau, Morand, Radiguet, Charlie Chaplin, Les Six, etc., Boeuf sur le Toit, [9] Ernst, Jacob etc. She played us the first two acts of the opera she is writing to P. Soupault’s libretto, of Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid. It seemed awfully good. She kept forgetting the words, and when this happened, improvised ones of such startling and inventive indecency that all were very soon in tears. But after three days I baled out, as it was quite impossible to do any work, and escaped here, where I set to like a madman, and I’m already two-thirds of the way through the proofs, and feeling much happier.

It is simply heavenly here, rather like the forested part of Spetsai, rocks and pine-needle-covered pathways, jagged cliffs, calanques and inlets, and ilex, arbutus, thyme, marjoram, bay, μαλοτήpα [mountain tea] and φασκομηλιά [sage] everywhere, smelling exactly like Greece. I bathed this afternoon, and my word it was cold! But there has not been a cloud or a drop of rain since I arrived: long walks in shirtsleeves and two glorious sleeps in the sun under an ilex. This hotel is delightful – Odette P. R. [10] told me about it – and I have a lovely room down three steps with a red-tiled floor and a window overlooking a tiled roof, reeds, bamboo, trees, masts and the sea. The food is lovely – urchins, lobsters, brandades, rouille, bouillabaisse, calamares, all washed down with a terribly good vin-rosé from the island, or a red wine from opposite called Pradet. My room and full pension costs 2,200 francs a day. [11] I was going to end this letter by begging you (reinforced by a telegram) to fly out at once to Marseilles or Toulon, where I could have met you and then, after a few days here, go and see Larry [Durrell] and then Amy [Smart]. [12] But, alas! this morning (New Year’s Day) I got a telegram saying (a) John Huston absolutely delighted with script and (b) that I’m urgently needed in Paris on the 3rd; so, alas, I’m catching the night train tomorrow, back to St James & Albany. [13] I hope it is only a meeting or something. If so, I’ll come straight over to London afterwards. I’ve got some surprises that I do hope you’ll like.

Darling, you were a saint when I left, and I do feel guilty leaving you with all these things unreturned. I’m sending some pennies towards the telephone bill, as most of it must have been mine, and it’ll be coming in soon. Do let me know (St J & A) if I can do or get anything in Paris.

I am reading, and am absolutely fascinated by, Valery Larbaud [14] – don’t get him, as I’ve got his complete works. I long to know what you think of him. No more now, my own darling Musk, except a happy New Year and heaps and heaps of love from

Paddy

We must come here together some time. Between New Year and Easter is best. From Easter to October, it seems, is infernal. This hotel, I’ve just discovered, has one star, and no wonder.

[1] PLF gave a more worked-up version of this episode in a letter written to Debo Devonshire the next day (In Tearing Haste, pages 39–41).

[2] A species of bird found in tropical forests; the males are strikingly coloured, while the female plumage is brown or grey.

[3] Baron Max Fould-Springer, whose sister Thérèse (‘Poppy’) married Alan Pryce-Jones, lived at Royaumont, a Palladian abbot’s palace near Paris.

[4] A heavily forested region of Guatemala, visited by PLF and JR in 1948.

[5] A traditional South American caffeine-infused drink.

[6] Baroness Cécile de Rothschild (1913–95), expert golfer and friend of Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo. Her country house was nearby at Noisy-sur-Oise.

[7] Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), composer: the only female member of the group of composers known as ‘Les Six’.

[8] Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), poet, novelist, critic, and co-founder of the Surrealist movement.

[9] A celebrated Parisian cabaret bar.

[10] Odette Pol Roger, Grande Dame of the champagne family; a friend of Winston Churchill’s.

[11] The equivalent of about 50 euros in 2016.

[12] The Smarts were now living in south-eastern France.

[13] The St James and Albany hotel in the rue de Rivoli, opposite the Jardin des Tuileries.

[14] Valery Larbaud (1881–1957), French writer, translator and critic.

To Xan Fielding

1 April 1958

Marona

Cameroon

Ξάν, χρυσό μου [Xan, dear boy],

I’m so sorry being such a sluggard. I ought to have written to you and Daph ages ago. But, like poor Tom Dunbabin, I just didn’t. . .

I say, what’s all this about settling in Portugal? It does sound exciting, and I’d got a very faint impression that Tangier was beginning to get you down. I loved Portugal when I crossed it by bus a few years ago and liked the Portuguese. Do write more details, especially about the farming.

I like Corsair Country, [1] and many thanks for sending it. I’ve got several criticisms, all constructive ones I think, and long to see you to go into it. My Greek book is due out soon and I’m very anxious.

My life has taken a queer temporary turn. John Huston got hold of me soon after we broke up at Lismore last year, to do the script of Romain Gary’s Prix Goncourt book, Les Racines du Ciel [The Roots of Heaven], a queer, diffuse, bulky, rather brilliant book about a sort of Jean-Gabin-esque ἀντάρτης [partisan] who leaps to the defence of elephants in French Equatorial Africa. I was put up in an hotel in Paris – St James and Albany – for most of the winter, and scribbled away like a wild cat, conferring every two days, sometimes more, with Darryl Zanuck, who is the owner & producer of the film. A very strange man with a pepper & salt moustache, bright blue eyes and a colossal cigar, which he mashes to a pulp between irregular teeth, a barrier for a loud and rasping voice. We got on very well, and eventually out I flew to F.E. Africa [2] with him & J. Huston, arriving at Fort Archambault, [3] on the banks of a winding crocodile-haunted river, the savannah around being full of elephants, lions, panthers, jaguars, giraffes & buffalo. We lived here in a huge stockade containing scores of huts inhabited by the 100-odd members of the unit & there was a stone bungalow in the middle in which dwelt Zanuck, Huston, Juliette Gréco (leading lady), Trevor Howard, Errol Flynn [4] and me . . . All pretty odd. The camp is a seething mass of cliques, largely based on nationalities, and I compatriotically belong to the French one – Juliette, a girl called Anne Marie Cazalis, a pansy actor called Marc Doelnitz, a journalist called Hedny and me. It is by far the most fun, full of secret languages and jokes and, I fear, cordially hated by all and sundry, who – like last year – hate to see one group having such a good time. Juliette is the most interesting by far – oddly beautiful, utterly bohemian, erratic, very well read and brilliant, and with a tremendous sense of humour. We became great pals at once. The life of this clique is not plain sailing by any means, as Juliette is supposed to be living with Zanuck, but gives the impression of shuddering with horror at his touch. He is blinded with violent and pathetic jealousy, and two days ago knocked her out clean, and then sobbed for two hours. I know she must be an infuriating girl for a rejected lover; but God, God spare us all this.

We are now in the Cameroon. Marona is a labyrinth of conical huts inhabited by jet-black Moslem horsemen with sabres and spears, sometimes chain mail, vast turbans wound round their heads so that only their fierce eyes peer forth. Their horses are caparisoned to the fetlocks in bold black and white checked housings. The surrounding mountains and savannah are inhabited by fetish-worshipping animists who live in caves, wear not one stitch of clothing and never sally forth without an assegai, a bow and a quiver full of long arrows.

John Huston is very amusing and very odd – as you know – and needs to be watched like a hawk. The only way of dealing with him is to diagnose his weak points and hit very hard and again and again. This establishes a humorous and rather friendly modus vivendi. We both know from the glint in each other’s eyes what we are up to and it’s rather stimulating. Thin ice work.

To my astonishment, Errol Flynn and I have become great buddies. He is a tremendous shit but a very funny one and we sally forth into dark lanes of the town together on guilty excursions that remind me rather of old Greek days with you. In fact, Juliette and he are my real standbys. Otherwise I loathe the whole atmosphere of the film world. Everything in it seems counterfeit except the money, of which, fortunately, there is a lot. I think, nevertheless, that the film stands a chance of being terrific.

What are your and Daph’s plans? Do write at once, giving full details. I have none – can’t have any, because of the film – in the immediate future, except going to one of the Greek islands – Paros, perhaps – with Joan & Maurice Bowra in June. I long to feel those waters washing away the last traces of all this rubbish. Will you write to The Rock Hotel, Bangui, Oubangui Chari, French Equatorial Africa, whither we move in a few days? It’s close to the Equator, on the edge of the great rain forest that follows the basin of the Congo.

I long to see you both again soon. Give Daph lots of hugs from me, and lots of love to you.

Γειά σου, γειά σου! [Goodbye! Good health to you!]

Paddy

[1] Corsair Country: The Diary of a Journey along the Barbary Coast (1958).

[2] French Equatorial Africa, a federation of French colonial possessions which included Cameroon, Gabon, Chad, Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville.

[3] The French colonial name of the city now known as Sarh.

[4] Juliette Gréco (b. 1927), bohemian French actress and singer; Trevor Howard (1913–88), English actor who became a star after appearing in Brief Encounter (1945); Errol Flynn (1909–59), Australian-American actor known for his swashbuckling roles.

To Joan Rayner

Easter Monday [7 April] 1958

Marona

Cameroon

Darling,

Χριστòς ἀνέστη! Χρόνια πολλά! [Christ is risen! Long life and happiness!] I gave a lovely Easter party last night, about twenty people, outside the little house I’ve taken here. It was terribly pretty, with lamps shaded by carved Fulbé [1] half-calabashes, all on straw mats, sitting and lying under the lamplit leaves of two enormous mango trees. Zanuck was ill, thank God – poor chap! – so couldn’t come and ruin it. I had two stark naked animists turning a lamb on a spit – a ‘meshoui’ such an occasion is called here – and a vast cauldron of very strong iced sangria. Gréco and two other Frogs came early and we cut and spread lots of caviar sandwiches. Most of us, for fun, wore the thin flowing embroidered baggy trousers that the local grandees wear, and we lolled happily talking away under the leaves till the small hours – Gréco, Flynn, Huston, Trevor Howard, Friedrich Ledebur, [2] Grégoire Aslan [3] and the local governor, who is a charming lonely white Russian called Sarkisoff, and a few more. I do wish you had been here. It was lovely and strange and gloriously different from the usual awful film atmosphere, which I grow to detest more and more.

The day before yesterday the French High Commission [er] flew from the capital in the south – Yaoundé – to decorate half a dozen powerful Fulbé Lamidos [4] of this area, ‘our’ Lamido – ‘Marona’ – and the Lamidos of Bogo, Mirdif and Foumban. Each Lamido was enthroned under a vast coloured umbrella which gyrated and hovered up and down by his court, with vast retinues of draped horsemen behind them with spears, rifles and scimitars. Each had a storyteller and jester and a swarm of splendidly clad swaggering minor potentates and his team of drummers and trumpeters. The noise was deafening – hundreds of drums hammering away, across which cut the sound of ear-splitting fanfares every now and then, as the trumpeters put their long thin instruments to their lips. They are of brass, four or five yards long, exactly like the ones displayed on Egyptian bas-reliefs. When each légion d’honneur was pinned on, there was a pandemonium of firing, drumming & trumpeting, and the whole thing ended up by swarms of horsemen galloping and caracoling [5] past in a whirl of dust, brandishing their sabres and spears. The best of all was the queer and beautiful young Lamido of Bogo – jet black, distinguished and nourished on all that is rarest and most decadent in French literature, lolling in sober and grand robes at the heart of the most glittering and martial court of all and escorted by a fluttering troop of fan-bearers.

We push off to Rock Hotel, Bangui, Oubangui-Chari, French Equatorial Africa, in three days’ time.

All my love, darling

JEMY

[1] The Fulbé of Central Africa (also known as the Fula or Fulani) are a pastoral, nomadic people.

[2] Friedrich von Ledebur (1900–86), Austrian-born character actor who gained international recognition after playing the role of the South Sea islander Queequeg in John Huston’s film Moby Dick (1956).

[3] Grégoire Aslan (1908–82), known as ‘Coco Aslan’, was an ethnic Armenian actor and musician.

[4] Local ruler, the African equivalent of the Arab title ‘Emir’.

[5] A caracole is a half-turn executed by a horse and rider.

To Joan Rayner

25 April 1958

Rock Hotel

Bangui

Oubangui-Chari [1]

French Equatorial Africa

My darling Musk,

What a long delay, caused by our deracination from the Cameroons and the shift to the Oubangui-Chari, and by various misadventures and the grind of script writing. I’m so sorry, darling.

Marona became an inferno of heat and anger and anguish before we left it. Ice became more precious than diamonds, as a glass of water left standing for half an hour practically reached boiling point. Great dust-devils a mile high whirled over the plains and the dried-up riverbeds. But there were lovely moments, and perhaps the best of these were early morning and evening rides, with Friedrich Ledebur – who rides like a saint – or alone. The horses all have saddles rather like Guatemala and Nicaragua, and no doubt they are of identical Moorish origin. They try to canter all the time and the Fulbé never seem to move at any other gait. Some of these rides were wonderful. One sometimes got mixed up in a whole troop of Fulbé tittupping along in clouds of dust. It was specially nice in the evening, with wonderful red sunsets behind mountains like groves of thunderbolts and long streams of ibises and crested cranes homing overhead with sad cries. I went on one of these evening rides on a black half-broken Arab that behaved more and more queerly and, the moment the sun set and it began to get dark – you know how quick it is – broke into an unhaltable gallop across the plain. Terrifying! No stopping him. On and on he went for half an hour till he suddenly stopped dead outside the walls of a Fulbé village, banging me against a tree with terrific force. I only stayed on by grasping the pommel like mad; and somehow managed to get home without disaster, aching like hell. My left elbow was scratched and bloody, so I put some iodine on, but a week after getting here it swelled up double the size and went an awful shiny dark red, so I was stuffed with antibiotics and put to bed. After two days of hell they cut it open in the hospital and let out the flags of all the nations – it was almost as if they had removed an alarm-clock, it throbbed so. All’s well now, but it was awful while it lasted. Everything seems to go septic here.

We flew here by relays over endless tracts of semi-desert and then over endless tracts of petén-like forest. Bangui is rather a gay little town – a bit like Scarborough in Grenada – on the banks of the Oubangui river, which is the same sort of thing as the Rio San Juan, except that it has great rocks and islands jutting from it. The other bank is the Belgian Congo. There are pygmies in the forest, and, it is hoped, elephants. I have got a lovely studio here, over a restaurant, a huge L-shaped room which I have curtained and hung with glorious lengths of cloth which the women wear here – all from Manchester, France or Japan, but specially made for the African market, and very odd and strange (I’m bringing lots back, which you can have made into washing dresses or cushions or something).

My French chums were saints while I was laid up, arriving with loads of pawpaw, flowers, soursops, mangoes etc. Also, I must say, John Huston & Zanuck. John H. has been joined by Suzanne Flon, the French actress he is in love with, who is charming, unspectacular, funny and quiet. [2] I’ve got to like him a great deal better. It’s all much better when he realises that one is fully aware of what a wicked old scoundrel he is. He is in no doubt about this now, and all is fine.

Two lovely letters of yours – one to Marona and a much older one to Fort Archambault – arrived just as I was getting better from the arm, but still bedridden. What a lovely account of your French trip, it did sound fun. I felt like crying at the news of all our friends, they seemed so far away and remote and so utterly different from the fifth-rate world I’m surrounded by here – there are only about three people I would ever like to see again – and as inaccessible as Olympians. I realised how outstanding and what exceptions they all were from ordinary life, how spoiled one is. Starting with you, they all seem more rare than black pearls.

I don’t know how the film will be. But I think very good. It’s exciting work and maddening at the same time – John H. is such a last-minute changer, utterly empirical on the surface, but perhaps with a dash of underlying genius which will make the whole thing cohere. The changes in the script can be either an exciting challenge to one’s talents and skill in marquetry; or deadening, heart-breaking mortician’s work, rouging and curling a corpse, when one goes over a scene for the fifth or sixth time. Apart from the pennies, I think it’s an utter waste of time, or almost. There may be some lessons about concision and dexterity in manipulating plots which might conceivably be of use.

There are terrific tornadoes here, whirling El Greco skies that turn black and break to smithereens with forked lightning and thunderclaps, all the branches thrashing together and splitting and the pouring clouds and the seething Oubangui joining in a palisade of water. They make the town seem cowering and fragile and pathetic and the forest appears to make a threatening leap forward, with its disturbing content of fierce fauna and strangling vegetation and arrows and drums and pygmies and fetishes and ritual murders. The Rock Hotel is a ghastly modernistic Corbusier smart building. I went into it after one of these tornadoes, and found it cloudy with flying termites and moths & bats, the floor two inches deep in drifts of termites’ wings and hundreds of frogs leaping hither and thither, with Juliette Gréco’s mongoose running wild among them, killing frog after frog, and, when he could take no more, vomiting frogs’ feet and heads onto this eerie carpet of broken-off wings. It was like the last gasp of Babylon or Nineveh.

I wandered off into the forest some nights ago and slept under a tree, rather like the Negress in D. Rousseau’s picture [3] hoping a lion might come and rub muzzles and move on. When I woke up I was soaking wet and lashed to the ground by thousands of strands of gossamer, like Gulliver waking up in Lilliput.

I’ve had a case of local butterflies made for you by a woman who became expert in such matters in Indo-China, they look very pretty & strange and I hope you like them.

I’ve no idea what’s to become of me. We may go to the Belgian Congo – or we may go back to Paris for the studio shots in a week or so. So alas! no good writing. I’ll keep you in touch. I do miss you darling, and long to be in Chester Row planning more sensible journeys than this!

lots and lots of love from

JEMY

xxx

oxo

[1] Known since 1958 as the Central African Republic.

[2] Huston described Flon as ‘the most extraordinary woman I have ever known’.

[3] A reference to Henri Rousseau’s painting The Sleeping Gypsy.

Joan allowed Paddy to pursue other women, secure in the knowledge that he would never leave her. In October 1958 he went to stay in Rome with his friend and former lover, Judy Montagu. There he met Lyndall Birch, who was working as a proofreader for the Food and Agriculture Association (FAO), while she tried to write a novel in the tiny flat in the Via del Gesù she shared with the photographer Josephine Powell. Still in her mid-twenties, she was beautiful but shy and unconfident. Earlier in the year she had played a small part in the film The Nun’s Story, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Audrey Hepburn. When she met Paddy she was secretly engaged to the bisexual Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, though both were experiencing doubts and this engagement was broken off soon after. Her liaison with Paddy was the first of what she would later describe as ‘a chain of disastrous affairs’. This letter was written after Paddy had returned to London for the publication of the first volume of his long-awaited book on Greece, entitled Mani; he enclosed a photograph of himself in the same envelope.

To Lyndall Birch

23 November 1958

13 Chester Row, SW1

Darling Lyndall,

I packed off a whole bundle of deathless prose [i.e. Mani and earlier books] to you a few days ago, something to get your teeth into! But it probably takes ages for parcels to reach the Via del Gesù, and up all those stairs. But at least they won’t have to sneak in on tiptoe, like their author! I did love that. It gave everything a wonderful feeling of conspiracy and romance – not that the latter was lacking anyway. I loved those coffees and rolls, too, in different cafés, in a lovely, early morning unbreathed Rome, and walking on air back to the Tiber island along a labyrinth of palaces. I played through the whole of Don Giovanni last night, and felt very homesick for your pretty room and heavenly hours.

I saw Ivan [1] several times in Paris, and he seemed pretty keen on the Zurich idea. I cracked you up like anything to David O. Selznick, [2] backed by Ivan, pointing out that you had a jolly good, steady and well-paid job in Rome, so it would have to be a pretty good offer to prise you out of it. Could you leave your Rome job for say, six months, make a vast quantity of money, and return again? That would be the ideal.

You are clever to live in Rome. It’s cold and foggy here, but quite pretty in a misty, lamplit, muffin-man kind of way. A seagull flew up the street, from the Thames I suppose, this morning, probably bent on an island holiday: anything for a change.

I’ve got Josephine [Powell]’s lovely enlargement of the mosaic of the Marriage at Cana [3] pinned on the wall by my desk, and I like it more and more. Please give her my love and could you ask her, if she ever makes any enlargements of the kneeling figure of the Logothete Theodore Metochites [4] with his enormous headdress, also from the Kariyé Djami in Constantinople, please to put me at the top of the list of buyers. It really is a beauty.

I’m tremendously excited at the moment, as Mani, my new book, comes out in three days’ time, and I await the first reviews with my heart in my mouth.

Please write and tell me what you are up to. Also, how things are faring for Judy. [5] Between you and me, everyone is a bit anxious about her in London, her present imbroglio, and how well or ill she will take it if things go wrong. It’s hard to know what to wish for – that it should go well, and for Judy to be happy, for a while at any rate, or for it to go ill and for Judy to be well out of it, if she weathered the shock. It’s in this last clause that all the danger lies.

I adored my time in Rome and adored you, and greatly miss our secret conclaves. I keep on finding myself humming about the holly and the ivy and the running of the deer! So please write, darling Lyndall.

With lots of love from

Paddy

xxx

[1] Ivan Moffat (see note 1 on page 76). LB had become friendly with his mother, Iris Tree.

[2] David O. Selznick (1902–65), Hollywood film producer and film studio executive. LB was offered a job working for him.

[3] One of the mosaics at the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, in the north-west of Istanbul.

[4] Theodore Metochites (1270–1332), Byzantine statesman, author, gentleman philosopher, and patron of the arts. His political career culminated in 1321, when he was invested as Grand Logothete (‘grand chancellor’). He used his wealth to subsidise the church’s restoration after it had been damaged during the period of Crusader rule. This included not only repairing the building but commissioning mosaics and frescoes, many of which survived even though the church had been made into a mosque after the Islamic Conquest. Metochites’s portrait can still be seen in a famous mosaic in the narthex, above the entrance to the nave.

[5] Judith Venetia ‘Judy’ Montagu (1923–72), daughter of the Hon. Edwin Montagu and Venetia Stanley, with whom PLF had been involved a few years earlier. She had given up her London life and moved to Rome after falling for the American photographer and art historian Milton Gendel (b. 1919), whom she eventually married in 1962. PLF had been staying in her Rome flat on the Isola Tiburtina when he began his affair with Lyndall Birch.

After spending the winter in England, Paddy returned to Italy in the spring of 1959. ‘Back in Rome, I met a man who owned a castle in the Alban Hills, not far from Palestrina,’ he later recalled. ‘It had been fought over by the Colonna and the Orsini for centuries, then abandoned for a further hundred years. I had developed a passion for places like this and I asked him if I could rent a couple of rooms there. He laughed and said, “You must be mad! You can have the whole place free.” ’

To Jock Murray

10 [?] May 1959

Castello di Passerano

Gallicano nel Lazio

Provincia di Roma

Dear Jock,

I hope you are impressed by this new departure. [1] It’s not for serious writing but for doing a fair copy at the end of the day in order not to be too depressed as the weeks go by at the spectacle of the mounting pile of yellowing and dog-eared and erased and ballooned pages.

Now, my doings. The drive went off swimmingly. Got out of the aeroplane at Le Touquet, and reached Chantilly that night, then on to Avallon at end of next day’s driving. Grenoble the next night, through the Basses Alpes and the passes of the Vercors the next, sleeping chez the Smarts, on to Savona the next, along the Ligurian coast, La Spezia, inland to Pisa, slept at Siena, through Tuscany and Latium next day, reaching Rome at night. Drove straight up to the Capitol and drove a sort of triumphal dance about fifty times round the statue of Marcus Aurelius and only stopped when a bewildered-looking carabiniere sauntered onto the empty square; and down at last to Judy Montagu’s flat on an island in the middle of the Tiber.

Of course the option on the house at Anticoli had just elapsed so, based on the Tiber, I started raking Tuscany, Latium and Umbria and at last found this stupendous castle and contrived to borrow it. It stands on a forested hill and dominates a rolling fleece of treetops and freshly mown hay-fields. Millions of birds with the cuckoo well in the lead, except at night when scores of nightingales take over as well as owls, crickets, nightjars, frogs and the like. It looks from afar like Windsor, Carnarvon or Lismore with its turrets and the long sweep of its battlements, but it has actually only four rooms and none of them have been inhabited for five hundred years or so. There is a Colonna shield on one corner, to which august house it belonged at one time like most of this part of Lazio. It is girdled on three sides by the sweep of the Sabine, Praenestine and Alban hills tailing off to Mount Soracte and on the fourth by the Roman campagna with the dome of St Peter’s and great Rome itself just discernible on the horizon. I’ve managed to borrow some odds and ends of furniture from the Orsini palace and got some nuns and seamstresses in nearby Tivoli to sew a vast heraldic banner several yards square which adorns one wall at the end of a large banqueting hall. I’m tempted to fly it from the highest tower; don’t quite dare to yet but doubt if I’ll be able to resist for long. 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 correct this slight attack of folie de grandeur, there is no sanitation at all. It’s all fieldwork under the trees, and the only lighting is by oil-lamp and very splendid it looks. But what I’m leading up to is that the second vol. is under weigh and going well. And about time too, I fancy I can hear you murmur!

All the best

Yours ever

Paddy

[1] This letter was typed.

Paddy had returned to Italy, excited by the prospect of resuming his affair with Lyndall Birch. But he had not considered her feelings. After his letter in November she had not heard from him again: humiliated and hurt, she had begun seeing another man. When she and Paddy were reunited in Assisi, she told him that their affair was over. In this ‘mea culpa’ letter he reflects ruefully on his mistakes.

To Lyndall Birch

undated [May 1959?]

Sibilla

Tivoli

My darling Lyndall,

I went out to the Castle again on the way to Tivoli and came into the valley in the later afternoon. The country looked less Canaanitish under the grey mackerel sky; more as though it were embedded in a remote, sad, silent dream. That troop of half wild girls helped me up with a few more folding tables I’d brought out in the back of the car. I made the two beds, put a table by each with an oil lamp on it as bits of half-corroborative detail in that inchoate interior, then sent the girls away that dogged my footsteps, all watchfully and bewilderedly at gaze; and mooched about the rooms with the sky fading beyond the still glassless windows like an interlock of grey angels’ wings with all the birds falling silent till it was completely dark; and felt as sinister as Giant Despair in Doubting Castle in The Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m not absolutely convinced that it is the perfect habitat for me in my present ludicrous state: that masonry is rife with rich potentialities of self-pity; but I’m resolved to live there for a bit, though I feel rather as though the dwindling obstacles between me and incumbency are so many mounting bricks of someone immuring himself. But there’s just a chance that its promises may be a kind of near-homeopathic device, the hair of a different dog.

Of course, by the time I tore myself away and went spiralling up into the lights of Tivoli, it was far too late to knock up Miss Edwardes [1] in case she hadn’t got my letter (leaping at her offer), which I only sent off yesterday. She’s awfully old. So I took a neo-Gothic room in the Hotel Sirene and slouched off, rather imprudently perhaps in the circumstances to The Sibilla, [2] where you and Judy and I had luncheon under the Athenian Sybil’s rotunda when you and I had only just met and all that last autumn’s and last winter’s and this spring’s work was still to be done; munched my way through a rather tasteless trout and some gorgonzola, and here I am. Thank God the room’s practically empty, except for a group of Italians that I find myself looking at from time to time with totally unjustified scorn, wishing they were Greek and finding them, by comparison, and in spite of their handsome faces and their lively ways, like food with the salt left out. But I do realise that at the moment the poor sods couldn’t put a foot right as far as I’m concerned.

*

You must be in the heart of the Blunt world, [3] at the moment, with all our pals, and I hope it goes well.

I do see that there is a sort of comic justice in my present plight. I’m counting rather sanguinely on reserves of shallowness and resilience that seem, at the moment, quite beyond my grasp; those particular buffoons have gone on strike. The most irking thing of all is that every time that I think of you with anger or a hard-luck-hang-dog grimace – (which I do now and then, though most of the time I think of you with unconditional fondness and love and friendship and a respectable longing to be able to show it and do something about it, which has nothing to do – or very little to do – with ravening desire (I’ve managed, like Medea, to drag that dragon into a fitful slumber with little more than the occasional flicker of a scaly eyelid . . .), and nothing whatever to do with guilty feelings about past inadequacy – every time such thoughts come raging in, their brave flames are snuffed at once with the thought that, in our joint feat of flinging a pearl away richer than all our tribe, [4] I was well in the lead. Please pity my frustration in this! Think of the baulked scowl . . . It’s infuriating to be utterly in the wrong; unlike you, lucky!

I’m off to bed now, as they’re shutting up shop. More tomorrow.

Tuesday

I woke up with the sun pouring through the window, and, when I sat up, there was Sant’ Antonio, [5] my old Traveller’s Tree refuge [on] the other side of the ravine, under the wavering line of the Sabine Hills, and, immediately below, the Sybil’s temple and feathery-looking ilexes with the early sunlight appearing to stream horizontally through them and scatter a bright gold dust of lyrical wonder over everything, the tops of cypresses and what looked like young hazels. A waterfall swished down through the Courbet-looking rocks into a deep, blue-green and secret-looking pool. Wood pigeons wheeled under my window, with the light sliding over their wings and vanishing again as they sailed through the shadows. It was like a grove sacred to a benign sylvan god, and all spoke of sunlight and happiness, so unlike the tearful mediaeval beauty of the Black Bastardy [Castello di Passerano].

I found Miss Edwardes pottering about among the irises and snapdragons under her vine trellis beyond Sant’ Antonio, much more shrunken and old and brittle than I had remembered, her pallor and her wavering voice belied by her cheerful bright blue and rather small girlish eyes. We went shopping in Tivoli where she waved her lorgnette – so at variance with her almost peasant clothes and the handkerchief over her head – in many a hardly haggled bargain for the castle. I whisked her off there with a young glazier with a tape measure and we left him at work, so all will soon be well; then to the Sibilla, for a feast. My word, she was excited! I don’t think anyone can have taken her out for decades. As we were finishing Nathalie and Graziella [6] turned up and shocked and charmed her with their brisk metropolitan chat. (Nathalie had made a mistake about a called-off lunch with the Quennells.) After that, I wandered off in the car through the Sabine hills, lying for hours under the olive trees, thinking about the article I’m supposed to be writing and about you.

*

I do want you to be clear about last winter. We talked about it, rather unhappily (and why not, for Christ’s sake?) at Assisi, and now, alas, it’s probably only of interest for our sentimental archives. You know – you must know – how I loved our October life. But, in illogical contrast to my vanity and conceit in other ways, a sort of deep-rooted ill opinion of myself (linked, as far as I can make it out, with the almost subconscious knowledge of how little, as far as a lifetime goes, I have to offer anyone) makes me the most laggard of mortals in thinking anyone could be in love with me. This produces a kind of rhinoceros-hide obtuseness which is less a defence for me – though it can be – than for the extremely rare other ones the other side of the carapace i.e. a shield for them against my inadequacies. This sounds (quite wrongly!) almost noble, so I hasten to say that it is accompanied by a perfectly commonplace, and in no way estimable (and it seems to me now, very brutal) lack of sensitiveness and lack of twigging about what happens to others.

Anyway, the thing is this: this subconscious formula didn’t work in this case, if anything so diffuse and obscure can be called a formula. I trailed clouds of October glory all through the winter and thought of you constantly with devotion and excitement and the resolve to be in Rome again, and with you, constantly and far too overconfidently. I never deliver these feelings in precise words to myself, except as the memory and the prospect of magical happiness, and I found myself smiling with idiotic bliss whenever I thought of you; and your October self was constantly irrupting. I saw ourselves rushing into our temporarily suspended embrace and showering each other with rash unquestioning and uncalculating happiness. But (through the above mentioned obtuseness) I had no idea what harm and unhappiness I was unconsciously inflicting. Though now, when I think of your letters – so beautifully written, so kind and loving and undemanding, my darling Lyndall, I see that anyone but a savage would have understood the baleful possibilities of silence: silence caused by the thought that I would be in Rome again almost at once; and by the vanity of waiting for the inspiration to write a letter and then more letters, of immense length and loving tenderness and brilliant wit and imperishable splendour. Speed and more humility on my part could have saved on both. I know there is no defence for me here, and it’s no good striding about the room and kicking the furniture. But please believe that it wasn’t indifference. I don’t think you do. It is atrocious bad luck that my eleventh-hour letter (not such a wonder, I hasten to say, in case it turns up, but it might have changed things if the magic had not been too irretrievably dismantled by then) should never have got to you. You know how ashamed and sorry I am about all this; how bitterly furious with myself, you can’t know.

*

Our stars have been cruelly inauspicious since then.

My last days in London, ever since writing to you, then the journey to Chantilly and across France went by in a state of ecstatic excitement that increased as the leagues diminished between me and Rome. (You and the town had long since merged.) I had a guilty knowledge – not nearly guilty enough, I’m sorry to say! – that I had behaved pretty badly. But I had no idea how badly. I foresaw a few token reproaches which the joy of being together again would have ridden over roughshod and scattered in smithereens in the first five minutes. I also knew something about your complications, [7] didn’t blame you at all (I should hope not, indeed!) and felt supremely confident that I could send any ghastly intervener flying; chuckled at the prospect and tooled on singing merrily at the wheel through the French spring. You sounded so excited and breathless on the telephone at La Spezia, or so I thought, rashly attributing my own mood to you. There were nothing but golden prospects ahead. Not an inkling of how soon I would be smiling on the other side of my face. Admit you are a bit touched by the staggering absurdity of all this.

Then all started to go tragically awry. The first meeting on that beastly film set, [8] so disenchanting for you, but not for me. I ought to have understood the gloomy implications of your turning your head aside later on. I felt shattered and groggy after our talk in the bar in Assisi and only then began to understand how much I had so foolishly and idly thrown away, how much harm I had done and how desperately attached I was to you, just as you began to slide out of reach. But I still didn’t know how badly things stood for me. I hoped our enforced physical aloofness was a temporary thing, which you might recklessly and generously reverse; didn’t know whether it was an instinctive or a pondered veto. I certainly didn’t blame you for a fraction of a second, nor do I. These things are as merciless and ineluctable as the weather; but of course I hoped it would change. So, as I said earlier, I managed to lull that particular dragon asleep, though I knew it was ready to leap to life again with thrashing tail and jets of fire roaring down either nostril at a kind stroke on his poor old neglected head.

There were two things after that, which blinded me to what had really happened – after all, love takes many shapes, and I had to accept this one (no choice!). The first was your saying ‘please don’t go to Greece!’, and the other was: when I asked if you had taken a dislike to me, your answering at once, and with a kind of sad conviction ‘You are the only person in the world I do really care about.’ Then everything, all the factors which, from the start, seemed to be conspiring to lame and obstruct and turn things grey – that bloody film, troubles of eyes and throat, tiredness, the arrival of your American pal [9] – not as a competitor but as a further source of harassment and complication for you (another teacup to flounder in!) and of my Anglo-Italian one [10] (so utterly irrelevant and unwanted and untimely!),* money troubles, typewriters, tape machines, the depression of Lord Montagu’s marriage [11] – all of this seemed like a maddening procession of idiotic rivals which must come to an end soon. But they crowded in thicker and faster till I never saw you at all and when any invitation from people you said you despised and were ashamed of, any last-minute excuse seemed a valid reason for not seeing me, I began to feel really mystified and duped, miserable, angry, flouted etc. and that I was the last person in the world you cared about, and wished me not in Greece, but in Timbuktoo or Kamchatka. I am glad that my random remark about it being perhaps better not to meet till we had got over all this (of course it wasn’t true. You are the only person, unfortunately, that I want to see. It was a sort of thinking aloud, half an opening for a non-forthcoming argument from you against such a course, but I can’t blame you for not twigging this), I’m glad that, at long last, it brought out the stern (withheld till then, I suspect, out of kindness) truth that anyone less imperceptive and maladroit in such matters would have understood a month ago. I wish I had! It leaves you utterly free to do what you want to do – whatever that may be – and saddles me with an unwanted and extremely uncongenial liberty that I really don’t know what to do with yet. Boo-hoo.

*

The lunatic aspect of all this is that I seem to have taken over your last winter’s symptoms in the exact ratio at which you have been losing them – at least, visibly, because they had been incubating for a long time before: an absurd and unenviable predicament. I don’t propose to burden you with all this, it’s no longer any business of yours, alas. But when it’s over, we’ll be able to compare scars like Chelsea pensioners. It can’t be helped. Lots of splendid chaps have been in the same fix in the past, I stoutly tell myself.

*

Well, there’s my sad case history, darling Lyndall, told in my untutored way, and I fear it makes sorry reading. Please don’t worry about it; you’re in no way to blame. Sometime, when it comes naturally and without constraint and the lack of need for kindness (which you don’t need to use. It’s worse in the end) or self-defence, guarantee absolute truth, do please tell me yours in its entirety. I’m abreast of scattered fragments of it, but you have too much evidence of my hopelessness as a diagnostician to doubt that I’m still largely in the dark.

Again, please don’t be anxious about our comic reversal of roles. I do love you and I’m determined not to lose you as a friend as well as in every other way, and one of the things about loving people is, after all, to wish them well and want to help, comfort, befriend. My inherited distemper will pass. Lucky you being out of the wood! (Fine metaphors, I must say.) I long to see you, and I’m sure that we have countless delights of friendship ahead, trust, love and confidence on their thrones again and all tears dry. The whole miserable nightmare of the last month will evaporate. I’m equally determined not to let more recent hell blacken the radiance of last year, a secret and utterly happy time of music and poetry and of hearts and minds at rest. This is what I’m going to salvage and keep for life, and with endless gratitude.

God bless you, my darling Lyndall

with love from

Paddy

Just as I finished writing this, a gust of wind blew all these flimsy sheets down the terrace of the Sirene. [12] Heart in mouth, I managed to save them before they took wing over the balustrade down through the circling wood pigeons to lose themselves below among the ilexes and elderflowers. It would have been just my luck; but I won this time! P.

* The day she left, after, I fear, a rather sad stay, she said ‘I had such a queer dream last night. I dreamt I was waving goodbye to you in the street. It was nearly dark, you looked round and disappeared down a lane by the church of the Gesù.’

[1] Several years before PLF had rented rooms in the Casa Sabina in Tivoli from Miss Edwardes, an Englishwoman.

[2] The Sibilla restaurant in Tivoli incorporates two Roman temples.

[3] Countess Anna Laetitia ‘Mimi’ Pecci-Blunt (1885–1971), née Pecci, socialite, photographer and patron of the arts, married a wealthy American, Cecil Blumenthal. She was the niece of Pope Leo XIII, who made Blumenthal a Count as a wedding present, and they merged their surnames to Pecci-Blunt. Her son Dino was courting LB at the time.

[4] ‘Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

richer than all his tribe . . .’

Othello, V, 2

[5] A former monastery built over a Roman villa, believed to have belonged to the poet Horace; now owned by the Landmark Trust.

[6] Nathalie Perrone (1927–2014), née de Noailles, then married to Sandro Perrone, the owner and editor of Rome’s leading newspaper, Il Messaggero; and Graziella, one of the four daughters of ‘Mimi’ Pecci-Blunt, married to Henri de Beaumont.

[7] The other man with whom LB was now involved.

[8] LB had a small part in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which was lost in the editing.

[9] Jeffrey Selznick, who had fallen in love with LB when she was working for his father, David O. Selznick, over Christmas.

[10] Carla Thorneycroft (1914–2007), elder daughter of the Italian Count Guido Malagola Cappi, married the Conservative politician Peter Thorneycroft in 1949. She and PLF had been having an affair.

[11] Montagu married only months after breaking off his engagement from LB.

[12] The Hotel Sirene in Tivoli overlooks a gorge.

Paddy’s apology to Lyndall Birch was at least partially successful, as this letter suggests.

To Lyndall Birch

14 [?] June 1959

Ansedonia

Darling Lyndall,

What a good idea of yours it was leaving after dinner and driving through the night! I pelted along the empty Aurelian Way like smoke, and thought of you driving blissfully from Bologna at dead of night with the concert playing till the car dropped to bits; then slowed down for a while, smoking a terrible Tuscan cigar and watching the cross-eyed beam of my headlamps in the dark, the whitewashed tree trunks whizzing by. I felt my eyelids pricking a bit by the time I got to Civita [1] in an open-all-night café drinking coffee after coffee & eating two Crik-Croks [a brand of Italian snacks]; then set off again into the first glimmer of a wonderful dawn beginning with crimson and zinc and crocus colour in rags behind the dark towers of Tarquinia [2] then on through a slow apocalyptic awakening with a lightening sky and colour magically stealing back into the leaves and stone and mountains and a few early lorries appearing till headlamps were pale and useless and put out, and it was a wonderful unbreathed summer morning over the Tyrrhene sea and the Maremma cornfields. Down to the sea at Ansedonia [3] to bathe, then to bed. Driving into the dawn! A new experience. Sad one can only do something, for the first time in your life, once. I wonder how many exciting and unique maidenheads of experience lie ahead.

Woke up at midday longing for ping-pong [4] and sentimentally stroked the handle of your cast-down bat. I felt too restless for work so set off for Grosseto under a changing sky of gold and grey clouds – some of them raining over the distant mountains like leaking sacks of dark grain – sudden downpours, thunder and lightning, baroque sunbursts, rainbows and coloured puddles and foxes’ weddings, [5] the puddles fusillading the exciting shuddering, orgasmic roar. It was winter by the time I sailed in through the barbican of Grosseto. Found a very good trattoria under the arcade opposite what must be the southernmost Tuscan-striped, though restored, cathedral and read some very funny poems of Wyndham Lewis as I worked my way through a large meal, and found myself laughing out loud quite often at the poems under the stolid gaze of Grosseto’s grossest, munching all round in a ring. Paid the conto, picked my way through these Ghibelline [6] rotters at their meal, out into the downpour and found myself gazing thunderstruck at my own name a foot high (9’ to be exact . . .) Radici del Cielo! [7] Couldn’t resist it, so into a ghastly cinema for the last third of the film. My word, it’s been rottenly cut and miserably dubbed, no wonder you all scorn it so. It was never a good film, but ten times better than this.

It was a lovely summer afternoon when I got out: flashing & prismatic with raindrops; so I took an inland road through rolling hills, past rivers and bridges and woods, all quite empty, a sort of gentle Hereford or Shropshire full of wheat and poppies and mustard seed and hedges covered with white dog-roses and sleepy oak spinneys and here and there a green watery valley with dark woods . . . I swooped, sailed, glided, twisted, sank, surfaced, and spiralled through this soft and labyrinthine paradise for hours, sometimes looking down on a soft interlock of retreating hills shiftily islanded with the shadows of clouds, sometimes along the bottom of glades and dells with water rushing darkly under small bridges with tilted sunlit rafts of corn and half-shorn hayfields high above, beyond treetops, striped with windrows and dotted with haycocks, sometimes Piers Plowman peasants in green corduroy reaving those conical ricks that they slice away later, till by the autumn they are as thin as cigars. Some vines, plenty of flashing and ruffling wheatfields under dark olives that turned silver when the wind touched their leaves, like a shoal of minnows changing direction. Nothing on the roads but an occasional lorry nigh unto death, [8] a mule team, a flock of sheep, shorn like the hayfields, or a few moth-soft oxen. (This is the moment when the flocks, like the police, change into their summer drill . . .) I drifted through this consoling landscape in a quiet, all-passion-spent mood, not an unhappy one; still heavy with the happy mood of the day before and dinner and the strange ecstatic drive. There was an occasional indestructible old crone on the road picking herbs or gathering sticks and I gave one of them and her faggots a lift, and thought, suppose she’s one of those old women in fairy-tales – she might grant me three wishes! I’ve no idea what 2 and 3 would be. As to 1, propriety halts my ballpoint.

What a surprise the villages and little towns are! After curves and swellings and subsidences, and loops and parabolas, nothing but angles! Plumblines, perpendiculars, juts, jags, battlements, towers and crenellations, hard as iron though tamed to biscuit by the falling sun and the shadows; troglodytic palazzi, small piazzas the size of postage stamps. One above the other, up lanes that tilt into the sky like springboards, so steeply that when one gets to the top, a chariot ought to be waiting to whisk one, like Elijah, [9] up into the rainy clouds.

No more now, my darling angel Lyndall

except lots of love from

Paddy

P.S. If you possibly can, try and keep Wednesday night free. Castle business in the morning!

Love to Iris [Tree]. I’m so pleased about her car. xxx

[1] Civitavecchia, a sea port on the coastal road running north-west from Rome.

[2] An old city, a few miles inland from the coast, towering above a river valley.

[3] A small town, then consisting of little more than a few villas, on the Tuscan coast.

[4] A euphemism.

[5] Simultaneous rain and sunshine.

[6] In medieval times the Ghibellines and Guelphs were opposing factions in the city-states of central and northern Italy. Grosseto was a centre of Ghibelline support.

[7] The Roots of Heaven, for which PLF had written the screenplay.

[8] ‘For indeed he was sick unto death.’ Philippians 2: 27.

[9] Elijah was carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire: 2 Kings 2: 11.

To Lyndall Birch

27 July 1959

‘Da Ernesto’

Ovindoli

Abruzzi

Darling Lyndall,

Here’s a thought: imagine that it came about that you, Henrico, [1] and I were having dinner together and that H. fell wildly in love with me. We could start a clockwise chase round the table . . . getting faster and faster, like those tigers on the last pages of Little Black Sambo that turned into a ring of vapour round the trunk of a palm tree till they melted to butter and were devoured in the shape of vast heaps of pancakes by the hero. Alas, I think my days of gents falling in love with me are over (or jolly nearly. I had some very equivocal looks in Athens last year from an elderly American . . . Non-swanks!)

It’s lovely here. Cool, Alpine, innocent, [illegible] and un-Roman. It’s still spring, just about the phase Passerano was at two months ago: fields of standing corn, guileless-looking peasants scything away, huge mountains in the distance, and on the airy plateau all round, pretty conical villages perched on tiered stripes of brown, green, orange and amber meadows; spinneys of beech and hazel full of harebells & Canterbury bells and wild strawberries, valleys full of slanting evening shadows and a pure golden-grey light with just a touch of melancholy till all becomes a jagged blue-grey silhouette and it’s time for another thumping meal. The cattle are a fine body of cows. They assemble at immutable rendezvous when the Angelus tolls and set off for Ovindoli a hundred strong with nary a neatherd [cowherd] and trudge into the marketplace like a wild army of invaders. Here they break up and fan off in twos and threes down a warren of lanes, a gentle horn-tap, when a crone or a maiden emerges and lets them into a comfortable cellar for the night. All smells of hay.

We push off from here to the castle on Friday, to Rome on Saturday (where Godsend Adriana will have dragooned her plasterers into putting things to rights) and off, swayed by Iris’s rhetoric, to Ischia on Monday. You’ll probably be off bathing most of the weekend; if not, leave a note on the island – dinner Sunday night? If we find a haven in Ischia, bear it in mind for Ferragosto, [2] if all else fails.

I hate to think of you in emptying Rome.

Heaps of love, darling Lyndall, from

Paddy

[1] The handsome painter Enrico d’Assia, son of Mafalda of Savoia, sister of the king of Italy. PLF was mistaken in thinking that LB was in love with him.

[2] An Italian public holiday in mid-August.

The post-war restrictions on the export of capital from the UK were a repeated problem for Paddy, and he was always looking for ways to circumvent them.

To Jock Murray

15 August 1959

Presso Ristorante da Filipo

Forio

Ischia

Prov. di Napoli

Dear Jock,

Here are between 6 and 7,000 words of the beginning of Vol. II. At least, I think it’s about that, reckoning a page of typescript to be about 390 words. They have taken days to transcribe from the jungle of the original MS with my snail-pace one-finger typing. But the MS is such an impenetrable thicket that it was impossible to ask anyone else to hack a way through it.

I feel it’s a bit rash to send you this raw lump of prose. Please regard it as roughly shaped marble, to be finished, chiselled and polished when the whole book is completed. Better so than to hold up the progress of the book now. About double the typed part, as near as I can judge, has mounted up, and more every day. Well into Greek Thrace & Macedonia, and, I think, it’s unusual, odd and exciting. The Monasteries of the air which will come close to the end (10,000 words?) you already have.

Midwinter is what I’ve got in mind as finishing time. [1] With luck it might be earlier, if it goes on as well as at present.

As you see, I’ve removed to Ischia. The castle became unbearably hot and rats, owls, ants and scorpions had resumed their interrupted reign. We escaped to the Abruzzo which was perfect, but could only have rooms available for a week; so came here, and discovered a cool flat on the edge of Forio with a wide balcony looking out over orange-groves and the sea where I sit (as now) and scribble away under a wickerwork awning, charging down into the sea every few pages. I plan to stay on here for a bit – possibly another month or two – then, after liquidating the castle (it’s too sad in the evenings) either return to England or – perhaps – push on to Greece, where there are always havens (perhaps Hydra?), by car via Brindisi, Corfu & Yannina. Anyway, sufficient unto the day is my motto at the moment. Joan, alas, returns [to England] soon.

I wrote and asked my bank to try and get sanction from the Treasury for the despatch of £200. I thought I wrote to you at the same time, but have a lurking fear that I forgot. The funds, I explained (using a formula that would be more strictly applicable to a later occasion . . .), were necessary for travel in those parts of Italy which were formerly Magna Graecia, for research into ancient Greek and Byzantine vestiges in Apulia, Lucania and Calabria, both architectural and linguistic, for a companion volume to Mani, which, with any luck would, like its predecessors, bring in dollars in due course. Do, please, back me up in this suppositious excursion into the future!

It only remains to renew the rhetoric of my last letter about a magnificent advance, one that will wreathe Mr Teasdale and me with restful smiles. There are ways of getting funds here by cloudier channels than the one depending on the Treasury’s whim (where would I have been without them, indeed?) but the great thing is for the pennies to be there: safely in Pall Mall, I mean. Discretion halts my pen.

What news of America – or about the Violins?

No more for the present, except good tidings about the book. I hope and really do think that it will do us both credit. I foresee a smiling triumvirate. [2]

Much love from Joan, & all the best.

Yours ever

Paddy

P.S. I enclose snaps of Passerano.

[1] Roumeli, the follow-up to Mani, was published in 1966.

[2] i.e. PLF, JM and the bank manager.

To Lyndall Birch

25 October 1959

Presso da Filipo

Forio

Darling Lyndall,

I say, what excitements! I long to hear about your trip to England, what happened, who you saw and so on, and the progress of Tom’s lightning courtship. [1] I wonder how that would be. He was outstandingly nice, I thought, – but then, our approach can’t be quite the same, I do see . . . I’m very pleased that you are overcoming your long phobia about England, not for any creditable patriotic reasons, but because it’s a pity to be cut off from all the pleasure, stimulus, interest, friendship, fun, affection, oddity, unconventionality and charm which seem to thrive there in a more abundant crop than anywhere else I know, including Paris and Athens. (We won’t mention Rome and its delightful denizens.) Whatever happens, I can’t help feeling that your gauzy pinions are about to become unstuck. I can watch all this now with an affectionate detachment that will be much more use to all concerned than the obsessive and gloomy commitment which has dogged my footsteps most of this year. For, you will be relieved to hear, I appear to be out of the wood which we both foundered in at different times. The trees got imperceptibly scarcer, and here I am in the open. Hooray! (or boo-hoo.) The whole cycle for both of us seems to have been contained in the first year of the reign of John XXIII, [2] incubating during the conclave and expiring with the anniversary of the last fumata. [3] Tiaras and crossed keys have a new significance for me from now, especially the latter: one should be labelled IN, the other OUT. But I hasten to say, darling Lyndall, that in spite of this change or transposition of feelings, my bosom positively teems with fraternal fondness.

Henry and Virginia [4] left a couple of days ago, to all our sadness. He was magnificently in, and true to, form. One evening, dining at Filipo’s with Iris, Joan (she got back a week ago) and me, she and Henry had a slight tiff. Henry flung his hands in the air and shouted at the top of his voice ‘Aha! No sex for me tonight, I can see that!’ He’s a splendidly reckless conversationalist, stuffed to bursting-point with what Castiglione in Il Cortegiano calls sprezzatura, the supreme dialectic attribute of a man of distinction and dash. [5] Friedrich [Ledebur] has been here several days, staying with Iris, towering over everyone on the island like a half-ruined and ivy-mantled Danubian castle, bat-and owl-haunted, the vaults rumbling every now and then with pythian, pessimistic and almost inaudible pronouncements. I’ve got a new pal here, a sixty-year-old, charming, sad, queer, tremendously well-read old boy called Neil Little who lives in a pretty house full of Greek and Latin literature, a great friend of Norman Douglas’s. [6] He has a passion for opera and Joan and I have had two agreeable musical sessions there, the first listening to Callas singing Bellini’s I Puritani, the second listening to the same in Lucia di Lammermoor. I’d never heard her before, and I must say, I was bowled over. It’s a kind of musical rape, leaving one’s virginal faculties in smithereens.

The weather gets more astonishing daily, bright, golden and glittering, driving away all one’s scirocco-borne debility. Half of this headachy malaise, I’ve determined, comes from the wine, which is so heavily doctored that pretty well an entire child’s chemistry set goes down with every gulp; which, with the south wind and the volcanic fumes that steam up through every cranny in the rocks, is a regimen designed to lame the sturdiest. But all that is over (back to Chianti!), one is surrounded by a russet and golden Virgilian vintage world, ringing blue skies and pure brilliant seas with the ghost of Ponza [7] hovering on the horizon. (The inhabitants claim it is the birthplace of Pontius Pilate; an odd boast, like a Cornishman from Liskeard bragging of Judas Iscariot as a fellow villager). Yesterday Friedrich, Iris, Joan and I went to the top of Mt Epomeo, and after stocking up on wine and salami at a hermitage-turned-bistro there, Friedrich and I came down the steep side to Forio through wonderful auburn beechwoods and clumps of Spanish chestnuts, leaping from rock to rock like ibexes – you would have done your glorious [illegible] horse gallop – then down a tortuous maze of lanes through layer on layer on layer of vineyard, all ablaze with autumn colours, till we were in a village full of women with baskets of grapes on their heads, vast waggon-loads of them, and that lovely heady reek of must and fermentation from many a wine-press.

No more now. Write and tell me all your adventures. Come here whenever you want, (if you can) and lots of fond love, darling Lyndall from

Paddy

P.S. Larry Durrell is staying in my room in London at the moment. I’ve just finished your Balthazar, [8] and find it astonishing.

P.P.S. Iris, Friedrich, J. & I are off to Capri for two nights. Whoopee!

[1] LB was being pursued by Thomas Egerton (1918–98), racehorse breeder, a friend of Princess Margaret.

[2] John XXIII was elected Pope on 28 October 1958.

[3] The puff of smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel that indicates the end of a round of voting during the conclave to elect a new Pope. Black smoke indicates an inconclusive vote; white smoke, successful.

[4] Henry Frederick Thynne (1905–92), 6th Marquess of Bath, and his second wife, Virginia (1917–2003). His first wife Daphne had married Xan Fielding in 1953.

[5] Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) was written by Baldassare Castiglione over the course of many years, beginning in 1508, and published in 1528 in Venice just before his death. It addresses the constitution of a perfect courtier, and in its last instalment, a perfect lady. Sprezzatura (‘nonchalance’, ‘careful negligence’, or ‘effortless and ease’) is described as one of the most important, if not the most important, attributes of the courtier.

[6] George Norman Douglas (1868–1952), novelist and travel writer, lived on Capri from 1946 until his death.

[7] The largest of the Italian Pontine Islands archipelago, about thirty miles west of Ischia.

[8] Lawrence Durrell’s novel Balthazar (1958), the second novel in his Alexandria Quartet. LB had lent PLF her copy.

Lawrence Durrell loved Ischia and had spent some time there in 1950.

To Lawrence Durrell

28 October 1959

Presso ‘da Filipo’

Forio

d’Ischia

Prov. di Napoli.

Larry, παιδάκι μου [dear boy],

What a shame, our not overlapping in London! I do hope you wrote something in the Justine series [1] when you were staying in Chester Row. It’s very exciting that they may make a film of it – mind you get a tidy sum out of 20th Century Fox if they do, as they are as rich as Croesus. Ivan Moffat, whom they will use for the script writing (why not you?) if the option is taken up, is in a trance about it; quite rightly. I wish you had contrived to meet. He’s an old pal of ours and brilliant on the job. When he left here, I gave him a few Cairo addresses: Georges Henein, Magdi Wahba, Samira W., Marie Rìaz etc. Samira was the only one he saw. I expect she talked about Addison’s essays or the poems of Christina Rossetti.

We’ve just been on a pilgrimage to Punta del Imperatore. [2] It was a grey autumn afternoon looking like a faded watercolour or a mezzotint, the leaves of the stripped vines all golden and infirm on their stalks, a shy wet wind blowing and huge Tennysonian waves [3] breaking in fans of spray on the rocks of Citara. [4] A long sooty loop of migrating birds was flickering southward about a mile out, geese I expect. We found your house at last – Don Vito was down in Forio – and it looked wonderfully Grimm-like among its tiers of dead vines, with that flying buttress of a staircase at the end of the yard, the very place, indeed, for a Stendhal–Lamartine encounter [5] over a cauldron of simmering broth. We trod reverently round the precincts, pondering where they will put the plaque in the fullness of time, then back through the dark, meeting nothing but a crone or two carrying sticks, and a rather good looking vineyard idiot hopping down the steps astride a very elaborate brushwood hobby horse he must have just made. . .

Where will you be later on?

Best love from

Paddy (also Joan)

[1] Justine (1957) was the first novel in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

[2] A bay in Ischia, not far from the Bay of San Montano.

[3] PLF is referring to Tennyson’s poem ‘Break, break, break’, written in 1835.

[4] A beach near Forio.

[5] Both Stendhal and Lamartine visited Ischia several times in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.