The letters in this volume span seventy years, from February 1940 to January 2010. The first was written ten days before Patrick Leigh Fermor’s twenty-fifth birthday, when he was an officer cadet, hoping for a commission in the Guards. He had hurried back to England from Rumania in September 1939, expecting to die within weeks of being sent into action, like a junior officer in the First World War. The last two were written on the same day in 2010, when Paddy (as he called himself, and almost everyone else called him) was ninety-four, a widower, very deaf, and suffering from tunnel vision, which made it hard for him to read even his own handwriting. His voice was already hoarse from the throat cancer which would kill him seventeen months later. But these last letters, like the first and most of the others printed here, exude a zest that was characteristic. From first to last, Paddy’s letters radiate warmth and gaiety. Often they are decorated with witty illustrations and enhanced by comic verse. Sometimes they contain riddles and cringe-causing puns.
Although, as I have mentioned, he was only twenty-four when he wrote the first letter in this volume, one of the two achievements for which he is best known was already behind him. Paddy had set out at the age of eighteen to walk to Constantinople (as he called it), after a premature exit from his boarding school (which would honour him later in life as ‘a free spirit’). He left England early in December 1933, and arrived at his destination just over twelve months later, on New Year’s Eve 1934. In the course of this ‘Great Trudge’ across Europe, he slept under the stars and in schlosses, dossed down in hostels, awoke more than once with a hangover in the houses of strangers, sat round a campfire singing songs with shepherds, frolicked with peasant girls and played bicycle polo with his host. He observed customs and practices that dated back to the Middle Ages, many of which were about to vanish for ever – swept away, first by the catastrophe of war and then by Communism. As Paddy puts it in one of these letters, ‘a sudden Dark Age descended that nobody was ready for’. He would give an account of his experiences in what became a trilogy of much admired books, which remained incomplete at his death: A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and the posthumously published The Broken Road (2013).
Paddy would spend the late 1930s oscillating between Greece, Rumania, France and England. In the late summer of 1938, before leaving for Rumania, he left with a friend in London two trunks, which were subsequently lost with their contents, among them notebooks he had kept on his walk and letters home to his mother. The loss helps to explain why there are no pre-war letters in this volume. Nor are there more than a couple from the war itself. Rather than going into the Guards, which had rated his capabilities as ‘below average’, Paddy had been snapped up by the Intelligence Corps, on the basis of the fact that he spoke German, Rumanian and Greek; and after being evacuated first from mainland Greece and then from Crete as the Germans invaded, he had been infiltrated back on to Crete to operate under cover, liaising with the local resistance. It was during this period, as Paddy made regular clandestine visits to German-occupied Crete from his base in Cairo, that he planned and executed the abduction of an enemy general, the other achievement for which he is best known. The second letter in this volume, written to the mother of his second-in-command, Billy Moss, refers to this daring exploit, albeit discreetly.
After the war Paddy worked for the British Council in Athens for just over a year – his only period of peacetime employment, as it would turn out, which ended in his dismissal. It became quickly apparent that he was ‘unfit for office work’. Included here is a letter written during a lecture tour of Greece undertaken on behalf of the British Council, and another to Lawrence Durrell in which he complains at being let go, prompting a rare lapse into profanity.
The rest of his long life was spent as a writer. Before the war he was already pursuing literary projects, and had translated a novel from French into English; after leaving the British Council, he accepted an invitation to write the captions for a book of photographs of the Caribbean, a task that grew into a full-length book, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950. (Paddy would invariably exceed any word limit he was given, just as he could never keep to a deadline.) From then on, though often short of money, he seems never to have considered any other form of work. His experiences in the Caribbean inspired him to write a novel (his only work of fiction), The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953). He was already working on a book drawing on his travels in Greece, part autobiographical, part ethnographical, which grew into two volumes: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966).
One of the surprises of these letters is to find how much recognition mattered to him. In a letter to Colin Thubron, written towards the end of his life, Paddy admits to feeling ‘rather gloomy’ at not being included in a list of the greatest writers since the war. His habitual procrastination, and his apparent readiness to allow himself to be distracted by the smallest thing, suggests a dilettante. But the letters tell a different story, of a writer always anxious at his lack of progress, guilty at his failure to fulfil his commitments, and perpetually trying to do better. This is the refrain of Paddy’s letters to his publisher, ‘Jock’ Murray, over a period of more than forty years. At Christmas 1984, for example, Paddy tells two friends that he has deferred a visit to London because he cannot face Jock while his book remains unfinished. Even after Jock’s death, when Paddy was in his eighties, he felt it necessary to apologise to Jock’s son for his presence in England by marking his letter ‘NO SKULKING’.
At the beginning of his career Paddy had been encouraged by Harold Nicolson to aim high, and he strove to produce the masterpiece that Nicolson (and no doubt others) thought him capable of. Some thought that he achieved this in A Time of Gifts. Yet even the acclaim this book and its successor attracted was double-edged, because it called attention to the fact that the story was incomplete. There was public as well as private pressure on him to finish the trilogy; an article in Le Monde mocked him as ‘L’Escargot des Carpathes’ (‘The Snail of the Carpathians’), a soubriquet that he ruefully accepted. The unfinished work hung around his neck to the end, weighing him down. Even in the last letter reproduced here, written long since everyone else had given up hope of the third volume, Paddy reports that he has recently resumed work on it ‘after a long pause’.
Paddy’s domestic arrangements were unusually chaotic, even by the standards of a freelance writer. For one thing, he found it hard to resist the lure of society, and was capable of travelling across a continent for a party. He seemed unable to concentrate on work in London, and sought out retreats in order to write free of distraction. He became adept at cadging houses from friends: Lady Diana Cooper’s farmhouse in Bognor, Niko Ghika’s mansion on Hydra, Barbara Warner’s cottage in Pembroke-shire, Sir Walter and Lady Smart’s manor-house in the Eure. Being usually alone in such places, he wrote to his friends, often inviting them to stay (which somewhat defeated the object). After the war he formed a permanent bond with Joan Rayner, who became his lifelong partner, and, eventually, his wife; but they spent much of the time apart, especially in the first two decades of their relations. This of course meant that they often wrote to each other. Paddy called himself ‘Mole’ and Joan ‘Muskin’. His letters to Joan reveal an aspect of his character that he normally kept hidden, his slides into gloom and depression. He depended on her, not only for encouragement and emotional support, but also for practical and indeed financial assistance. Joan was unquestionably the most important woman in his life. It is appropriate that there are more letters in this volume to her than to any other correspondent.
But before Joan, there was Balasha, whom he had met in Athens in the spring of 1935. Though sixteen years older than him, she was still in her prime, and they fell in love – or, as Paddy might have put it, became ‘terrific pals’. They were together almost five years, until separated by the coming of war: after 1939, they would not see each other again for more than a quarter of a century. By the time they renewed contact, Paddy was in love with Joan. Yet Balasha Cantacuzène had been his first love, and seems to have retained a special place in his heart. His earliest post-war letter to her, written over the Easter weekend of 1946, may never have been sent, for reasons we can only speculate about; but it is known that he sent her a letter the following year. She tried to escape from Rumania, but was detained and sent back, and soon afterwards she and her sister were brutally evicted from their ancestral home. Her life afterwards was hard. In 1965 Paddy was able to travel to Rumania, and visited Balasha and her sister after dark, because it was dangerous for Rumanians to be seen to consort with anyone from the West. Paddy, himself still youthful and vigorous at fifty, was shocked by Balasha’s appearance: she was now an old woman, losing her teeth and her hair, the wreck of her former self. His subsequent letters to her reproduced in this volume are written with gallantry and consideration: one has the sense that he is trying to include her in his life, even at long distance.
Joan recognised the sentimental importance of Balasha to Paddy, and wrote to her affectionately as if to a member of the family. She also tolerated Paddy’s lovers, and even his casual encounters with prostitutes, confident that he would never leave her. Included in this volume are love letters (some quite frisky) to two younger girlfriends, Lyndall Birch and Ricki Huston. One hilarious letter to the latter refers to the potentially awkward subject of infestation with ‘crabs’ (pubic lice).
As well as such love affairs, Paddy maintained several long-term friendships with women, conducted largely by letter. Though platonic, there was an element of courtly love in them; it is significant that his ladies were all well born. Among his best letters are those to Lady Diana Cooper (twenty-three years his senior) and to Ann Fleming (twenty-nine years), both of whom he always addressed as ‘darling’. In 1980 Paddy dug out his letters from Diana Cooper and reread them, a correspondence that by that time had lasted almost three decades. He was very moved, he told her, ‘by this record of shared delights and trust, confidence, warmth and loving friendship, and can’t believe my luck, unfaltering for all these years, and still prospering in such a marvellous, happy and treasured bond, light as garlands, as lasting as those hoops of Polonius’. Another long-term correspondence was with Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire (‘Debo’), youngest of the lively Mitford sisters, five years his junior. Some believed that Paddy and Debo had once had an affair, but those who knew them best doubted this. In 2008, the correspondence between them over the previous half-century was published as In Tearing Haste, edited by Charlotte Mosley. In one of the two subsequent letters published here for the first time, Paddy tells her that he has been ‘dipping furtively into In Tearing Haste, and enjoying it almost as if it was a total stranger and laughing at all the jokes’. Also included are three letters from that book – apart from the two letters to George Seferis, the only letters in this volume that have been previously published in full, though extracts from some of them have been quoted in Artemis Cooper’s authorised biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2012). The witty parody of John Betjeman’s verse on pages 85–6 has appeared in a specialist journal, but this is the first time it has been made more widely available.
In the late 1940s, when writing The Traveller’s Tree, Paddy sought sanctuary in a succession of monasteries in northern France, an experience which itself would provide a subject for a short book, A Time to Keep Silence (1957). Reproduced here is a series of letters from these monasteries which gives a vivid picture of monastic life. Writing the letters, and observing how the monks lived, prompted Paddy into reflections on spiritual questions, unusual subjects for him, at least in correspondence. He would return to his favourite monastery, Saint-Wandrille, several times over the next decade. Another, more temporary refuge was the ‘stupendous’ castle of Passerano, inland from Rome (from its battlements the dome of Saint Peter’s was just discernible on the horizon), which he took for the summer of 1959. Paddy had sewn ‘a vast heraldic banner, several yards square’, to adorn one wall at the end of a large banqueting hall. He was tempted to fly it from the highest tower, as he admitted in a letter to Jock Murray. ‘Then, when the Black Castellan of Passerano displays his gonfalon from the battlements, the peasants of the valley can hide their cattle and douse their lights and bolt up their dear ones!’ To balance this attack of folie de grandeur, he explained that the living conditions were primitive, since the castle had not been inhabited for five hundred years. ‘There is no sanitation at all. It’s all fieldwork under the trees, and the only lighting is by oil-lamp.’
Yet another refuge was Easton Court at Chagford, an hotel on the edge of Dartmoor run by an unconventional American woman and her English beau. Easton Court had been discovered by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote several of his books there; other writers had followed, including Paddy’s friends John Betjeman and Patrick Kinross. From the late 1940s until the early 1960s Paddy stayed often at ‘Chaggers’, from which he wrote several of the letters included here. He went there to write; though another attraction of the hotel was that it offered the possibility of riding to hounds over the moor with the local hunt three times a week. Here and elsewhere, are lyrical descriptions of nature – riding home at dusk, striding along a ridge, driving into the dawn.
As all this suggests, Paddy rarely stayed in one place long. In fact, he did not have a permanent home until he was almost fifty, in 1964, when he and Joan bought a piece of land overlooking the sea in the Mani, beneath the towering Taygetus mountains near the village of Kardamyli, and began building a house. Letters included here describe the search for a site, negotiations to purchase the land, and plans for the house itself and the surrounding garden. For the first year or two at Kardamyli Paddy and Joan bivouacked in tents as the land was cleared and the house was built. Paddy took a keen interest in every detail of the design and construction, a further distraction from his writing, as he acknowledges in an apologetic letter to Jock Murray. Work on the house would not be complete until the end of the decade.
Letters provided a lifeline from this isolated spot. In an era when international telephoning was difficult and expensive, Paddy and Joan kept their friendships in good repair by correspondence. And, at least for Paddy, it went further than this. Letters were a means of reaching out to those whose company he enjoyed, of making convivial connection across the void. Paddy seems to relish the contact with those to whom he is writing, even if it is only on paper. He is psychologically and often emotionally engaged with his correspondent. At times one senses that Paddy is writing to raise his spirits, as if he knows that his imaginative construction of those of whom he is fond will bring him comfort and cheer.
Some of their friends came to visit, bringing more than a whiff of glamour to this remote region. A letter here describes the arrival of the shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos by helicopter, which created a sensation when it landed in the Kardamyli market square. Twice Lady Diana Cooper whisked Paddy off for a cruise of the Aegean in Niarchos’s second best yacht, Eros II. Others came to stay, sometimes for weeks at a time, visitors ranging from John Betjeman to Bruce Chatwin. But much of the time Paddy and Joan were alone at Kardamyli, with just each other and their cats for company, enjoying simple pleasures such as swimming and reading. One letter here tells of surfacing after diving into the sea and almost colliding with a kingfisher, which Paddy watched from a floating position for twenty minutes or so. Another tells of losing his way on an evening walk in the mountains, fighting through the maquis and stumbling down a deep ravine as night fell, trying to stave off panic.
Plenty of stories are recounted in these letters, often very funny ones: an evening with the eccentric Lady Wentworth, then in her eighties, who insisted that her young male guests join her at billiards, and trounced them; the hunt for Byron’s slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; a disastrous visit to Somerset Maugham’s Villa Mauresque. The incongruity of a film crew, headed by the maverick director John Huston, and a starry cast that included Trevor Howard, Juliette Gréco and Errol Flynn, on location in darkest Africa is explored in three letters from a former French colonial territory, now Cameroon. Paddy was there in his temporary capacity as screenwriter, since he had adapted the novel on which the film was based for the screen. Another letter relates the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe’s abduction. On location in the French Alps Paddy met a screen version of himself. ‘It was all pretty queer,’ he writes to Debo Devonshire. ‘Dirk Bogarde, the actor who is doing one in the film, is absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking-voice and manner, a super-gent, the ghost of oneself twelve years ago.’
It would be foolish to deny that Paddy had a romantic interest in aristocracy, and all its paraphernalia: genealogy, heraldry, and the rest. Yet if this was snobbery, it was of a comparatively innocuous kind. There was nothing oleaginous in Paddy’s relations with his betters. Nor was there any superciliousness towards the lower classes. Paddy was at ease in any company: he could walk into a simple taverna and soon have everyone singing. He took delight in servants who spoke their minds to their masters, such as the Marquess of Bath’s butler, whose pointed remarks to His Lordship are repeated here in a letter to Joan. Paddy’s letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a walk in the woods with Harold Macmillan, or conversation over dinner with Camilla Parker-Bowles, for example; but also of the humble: a ‘picknick’ with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a day spent with a lonely chambermaid in Saint-Émilion. In a letter to Xan Fielding early in 1972, Paddy reports on a long ‘colloquy’ in a pub in the Bogside area of ‘Free Derry’, with a spokesman for the Provisional IRA (‘Don’t open your mouth on the way out, for Christ’s sake!’, were the IRA man’s parting words), before going on to spend a few days at Chatsworth. Two more different worlds could scarcely be imagined.
‘He was the most English person I ever met,’ recalled Agnes ‘Magouche’ Phillips, later Xan Fielding’s second wife: ‘Everything was ripping, and there was more talk of P. G. Wodehouse than of Horace or Gibbon.’ Indeed, Paddy himself was something of a Wodehouse hero, in his boyish manner, his innocence, his gentleness, his playfulness with language, his sense of fun, and his tendency to get into scrapes, particularly when driving. (Letters here describe a crash when his car turned over, bashing a wall to escape a head-on collision, and the car being destroyed by a bomb.) There is an absence of malice in his writing, and a related unwillingness to offend. Several letters in this volume express anxiety that casual comments made in private correspondence may wound if broadcast. Towards the end of his life he began to edit those of his own letters in his possession, censoring passages that might cause upset, and adding the occasional explanatory note for his biographer, Artemis Cooper.
Paddy was a philhellene, who lived in Greece for most of his life. Among the letters here are accounts of exuberant jamborees with his old comrades from the Cretan resistance, most of them simple shepherds, with whom he felt the kind of kinship that can be formed only when men experience tragedy and danger together. In Athens after the war Paddy formed close and enduring friendships with Greek artists and intellectuals, especially the poet George Seferis, the painter Niko Ghika and the ‘Colossus’ of letters, George Katsimbalis; but in the mid 1950s these became strained by the Cyprus emergency. This was ‘an argument among friends’: two nations, Britain and Greece, which had enjoyed a long history as allies. It was understandable that Greeks should feel a claim on British sympathies, since only a decade earlier, in 1940–1, they had been the only other people fighting Axis troops on the continent of Europe. Paddy felt a conflict of loyalties, between the country of his birth and the country he had made his home. The enmity was such that he felt obliged to quit Greece for a while. His distress is expressed in agonised letters written at the time to his Greek friends, to Lawrence Durrell, and to others.
In general, Paddy was not a political person. An instinctive, old-fashioned conservative, he took little interest in politics except when it touched him in some way. As a young man travelling through Germany in the mid 1930s he had disliked the Nazis he encountered because of their crudeness and their anti-Semitism, but he was indifferent to their rhetoric. In 1967 he reacted cautiously to the military takeover in Greece, the so-called ‘Colonels’ coup’. In a letter to Joan, who was in England at the time, he suggests that she may know more about what is happening than he does. ‘All my spontaneous sympathies (in spite of my official views generally) are against the coup,’ he wrote, ‘largely because those in the provinces who welcome it are . . . the people one likes least in Greece.’ During the regime of ‘the Colonels’ he became friendly with Tzannis Tzannetakis, then in political exile, and a prominent politician (briefly prime minister) once democracy had been restored.
Paddy was certainly no xenophobe. In a letter written to Rudi Fischer in October 2001 after the attack on the twin towers in New York, he dissents from the description of the terrorists as ‘cowards’, and refers to President Bush’s call for a ‘crusade’ as a ‘gaffe’.
Paddy’s magpie mind is evident in his letters. Before setting out on his ‘Great Trudge’ he had packed The Oxford Book of English Verse in his rucksack, and on the walk had committed much to memory, so that he could recite great chunks of poetry, more or less accurately, at will. He would continue to read widely throughout his life, and was able to retain much: repeatedly topping up a cornucopia of knowledge that overflowed into his correspondence. ‘I wonder if you fully realised that Harun-al-Rashid sent an elephant called Abulahaz as a present to Charlemagne in AD 802?’ Paddy began one letter to Diana Cooper. Perhaps she did realise this, but then again, perhaps she didn’t. In another letter to her, Paddy points to ‘the enormous amount of buried quotation’ in Raymond Asquith’s letters to his wife, ‘which must mean a vast quantity of shared poetry which was in daily use, and pointless if the other correspondent couldn’t spot it’. There is an enormous amount of buried quotation in Paddy’s letters too, and one suspects that a signifi cant proportion of this went unrecognised by their recipients. Undoubtedly some will have escaped the editor of this volume.
The letters themselves tell us something of the circumstances in which they were written. The first of Paddy’s letters to Balasha in this volume was begun on Easter Saturday, sitting at a café by the waterside; the first letter to Joan was written at a desk in his bedroom at the monastery of Saint-Wandrille, and he stays up until 4.00 in the morning to finish it. Just as Paddy finishes a long letter to his lover Lyndall Birch on an hotel terrace, a gust of wind sweeps the sheets off the table, and he scrambles 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’. Once Paddy was settled at Kardamyli, he seems to have developed a routine of rising early to work, writing letters in the afternoon; they often refer to the need to finish before the post departs (‘dashing for the post’). A postscript to a letter to Balasha tells how he had strolled into the village to post it and then reopened the envelope, after finding letters from her waiting there: he explains that he is ‘scribbling this in the kafeneion, but must stop it now and post it, as the postman is rolling his eyes and tapping his fingers in mock impatience!’
Almost all of Paddy’s letters were written by hand, though a handful were then corrected and typed. Some are very long, ten tightly written pages or more; many of those included in this volume have been edited to remove ephemeral content or other material of little interest to the general reader. A few have been edited to half their original length, or even less.
The 174 letters included in this volume have been selected from a hoard (scattered across six countries) at least ten times their number. The standard is such that another editor might have chosen 174 different letters to make a selection of equal quality – and perhaps more will be published in due course. Undoubtedly further letters survive which this editor has not seen, and of course many more must have been discarded or lost over the years. A rough estimate suggests that Paddy wrote between five and ten thousand letters in his adult lifetime. That is an average of several letters a week – and of course, there would have been many weeks when he could not have written any, so the rest of the time he must have been writing more. When one reflects on this, what is most striking is the sheer amount of time and effort Paddy devoted to writing letters. Since many of them record his unhappiness at failing to fulfil his promises to his publisher (not to mention his bank manager), one is forced to conclude that writing letters took up time he could have spent writing books. But was this such a bad thing? Of course, it was regrettable that Paddy never completed his trilogy, and perhaps sadder still that the evening of his life was darkened by anxiety about the unfinished work.
Yet we may take a different view. The letters may sometimes be penned in haste (or even ‘in tearing haste’), but they are written in a free-flowing prose that is easier and more entertaining to read than the baroque style of his books, which can seem convoluted and overworked. I would argue that Paddy’s correspondence is part of his oeuvre, worthy to take its place alongside the work that he published in his lifetime. Now that we can read his letters at length, we can judge their worth. At their best, they are as good as any in the language. They are utterly distinctive: Paddy’s personality shines through them. His letters are exhilarating; to borrow an expression he liked to use, they are absolutely ‘tip-top’.