Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Visually, Auberon’s aesthetic sense was not highly developed, but he wrote with feeling and verve and great skill and he should have written a great deal more. Dispersal and restlessness were his enemies here. His ear for the run of a sentence was faultless, a part of his astonishing gift for languages; and I shall always remember a brilliant disquisition—in the small hours in Normandy, fittingly enough—on the double English language heirloom and the importance of keeping a proper balance between words of Anglo-Saxon and Latin root; how a Latin preponderance endangered one’s themes and sent them ballooning away in abstract drifts of Ciceronian rotundities that could only be rescued by tethering them to the ground and reality with short Anglo-Saxon pegs. He had an equal fondness for classical and for liturgical Latin: it was a sensibility on which vernacular innovations were bound to jar and the recoil led him far afield—all the way, eventually, to the Old Slavonic liturgy, hallowed by thirteen centuries of use in Eastern Europe, of SS Cyril and Methodius. It was an ingenious solution, triumphantly characteristic of Auberon’s unusual turn of mind. Those hoary Slavonic sounds consoled him for the Latin cadences he had revered and lost; they effaced the memory of their contemned replacements; they were an added bond with the Ukrainians and Ruthenians whose causes he had made his own; above all—and this was crucial for someone with Auberon’s overmastering sense of loyalty—his new fellow-worshippers had for three centuries been in union with the Holy See: a fact which left the allegiance of a lifetime intact. (Perhaps the ancient Mozarabic rite of Visigothic Spain—which, after weathering the centuries of Moorish suzerainty, is celebrated daily in one of the side-chapels of Toledo Cathedral, and always in Latin—might have suited him. Liturgical rock-pools antedating the Tridentine Mass by seven centuries, only half a dozen Mozarabic parishes survive, all of them in Castile. The scarcity and the abstruseness would have been more of a lure than a deterrent.)

  All the auspices conspired to make our last encounter a memorable one. Taking wing for this headland on a sudden impulse he arrived at the very moment when a beautiful yacht—a rare apparition in this wilderness—came ruffling into the small bay. She was the Dirk Hatterick, belonging to Aymer Maxwell, who in a minute hailed half a dozen of us on board. Then, turning her about, he pointed her bowsprit south. We glided through the brilliant spring morning, past the succeeding promontories and the deep ravines and the towers that clustered in sheaves along the inland sierras; under the gull-haunted, perpendicular walls of Cape Grosso; past the legendary cave leading to Hades, until we had left Cape Matapan far astern. Gazing northward from the open sea, we could descry, faintly looming, the three great peninsulas of the Peloponnese. On the way back, we dropped anchor and swam to the shore on which the ruined palace of Petrobey Mavromichalis was reflected at the end of its long, still gulf. It was an apposite halt. Auberon’s great-grandfather was one of the few early travellers to venture into the Mani when it was still a fastness of the vendetta and piracy and revolt. He had been the guest of Petrobey here: of the last of the irredentist Beys of the Mani, that is, and one of the great leaders in the Greek War of Independence. Though geography had given me the linguistic advantage for once—not that Auberon was by any means tongue-tied in Greek—he had somehow stolen a march by proxy During the last century and a half his far-wandering family had spread a wide net over the Balkans and the Levant. One had explored the vampire-haunted canyons of the Morea and the strongholds of the Jebel Druse; another was captured and cut down by bandits on the Boeotian shore; another had met his death by the freshly opened tomb of Tutankhamen. Yet another—indeed, Auberon’s father—had toiled across waterless Arabian wastes and ridden through the passes of the Anatolian hinterland and been acclaimed at last as a saviour in a hundred Albanian glens. (The name of Aubrey Herbert emerges again and again, in many remote and widely separated regions of the Near and Middle East, and always with wonder. ‘Antres vast and deserts idle’—these were his haunts. How far they seem from the streams and hills of the West Country.)

  As we skimmed homewards, flying corks saluted the sunset off our port bow and at lighting-up time we climbed up the cliff and feasted by candlelight among the cypresses there. Auberon had to leave at dawn. When everyone else had stolen off to bed, we sat up, sending our voices across the all but inaudible water as we spanned the remainder of the night with talk and laughter—not for the first time, but alas, for the last—until the constellations became less distinct and a giveaway pallor began to spread beyond the ridge of the Taygetus.

  Roger Hinks

  from A Portrait Memoir in The Gymnasium of the Mind: The Journals of Roger Hinks, 1933—1963, ed. John Goldsmith (Michael Russell, 1984)

  Kenneth Clark described Roger Hinks (1903—63) as ‘one of the most learned and perceptive art historians of his generation.’ Appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum, he was forced to resign in 1940 following the uproar over the cleaning of the Elgin Marbles. After the war Hinks joined the British Council, and was Representative in Rome, The Hague and Athens.

  There are older and closer friends who perhaps should be writing instead of me, but few can have liked him more, and at least our first meeting was a respectably long time ago. It happened on the evening of 12 August 1934, when I was trudging across Europe at the age of nineteen. Stained with travel, I had ordered a drink in the Boulevard Tzar Ozvoboditel in Sofia. There was only one other foreigner in the Café Bulgaria, who turned out to be Professor Whittemore, the famous Bostonian authority on Byzantium. We automatically plunged into talk and were soon joined by two of his friends, Steven Runciman and Roger Hinks: it was an international congress of Byzantine experts and art historians which had gathered these scholars under Mount Vitosha. They were impeccable in Panama hats and suits of cream-coloured Athenian raw silk and their bi-coloured shoes were beautifully blancoed and polished. Both were in their early thirties and they belonged much more to the deck of an Edith Wharton yacht or to the cypress-alley of a palazzo in Henry James than to this hot little Balkan capital. We met several times; their conversation was dazzlingly erudite and comic; then the end of the conference scattered them again. ‘I’m off to stay in a Tuscan villa with one of those delightful Italian gardens,’ I remember Roger Hinks saying. ‘You know, solid mud all winter and in the summer nothing but dust.’

  Later, in London or Rome or Paris, I came across Roger several times in rooms full of people, by chance and for moments only, but always with pleasure; and each time I was puzzled by a fugitive resemblance to someone; but whom? The touch of episcopal aplomb, the gravity, when he was seated, of a monumental bust; the full, pale cheek, the exorbitant eye that could change so quickly from diffident aloofness to kindness and amusement . . . ? He was too well-covered to be in any sense good-looking but there was about him something infinitely civilized and urbane. Years passed before I hit on the identity of his alter ego, and I found it at last in an engraved frontispiece by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the 1809 edition of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He was Gibbon! Later on I sought corroboration and found it in a picture by Henry Walton in the National Portrait Gallery. Roger had the underside of his chin under much more stringent control than the famous historian, but, once again, he struck me as the spitting image. This revelation happened in the fifties during his tour of duty in Athens as Representative of the British Council, when we finally got to know each other well and became firm friends. We often met later on but most of this memoir belongs to that Athenian interlude.

  Roger had a pronounced foible about capital cities. He complained bitterly about each one that he happened to be living in: everything was wrong—the food, the drink, the language, the architecture, the inhabitants, the weather—and he cast his mind back unceasingly to his last habitat, however uncongenial it had seemed at the time, and sighed as though he had been expelled from Paradise. Amsterdam, Stockholm, Rome, Paris—they all went through the same perverse sequence of indignity and rehabilitation and Athens confo
rmed to this process through damaging and, of course, unfair comparison to the Rome he had just left. But this time his feelings went deeper, indeed they never quite emerged again. The architectural disparity meant much to someone with his ruthless optical awareness; but there were other reasons for his disfavour. The charm of Athens was just beginning to succumb to the indiscriminate concrete and the thickening skies which a decade or two later were to steep the city in real ugliness. Worse still, his time there coincided with the acutest period of the Cyprus trouble. These years of intemperate feeling on both sides inflicted great distress on Greeks who were attached to England and perhaps even more on their English equivalents, of which I was one: more so, because they felt that the policy of their country was at fault. A newcomer to all this, Roger was comparatively uninvolved, but he was in an official position and the isolation imposed by strong feelings nearly brought his work at the Council to a standstill. Many passages in the diaries reveal his thoughts about mass opinion, propaganda and organized outcry: they are akin to Dr Johnson’s dictum about patriots; and all these things—unjustly, I think, but understandably—deeply coloured his attitude to this unhappy time. Exasperation was his prevailing mood, coupled with pitying resignation.

  We were living in the painter Niko Ghika’s house on Hydra and the amazing surroundings had prompted me to write a long article on the influence on a painter of his native landscape,’ the Greek in this case, comparing its spare and bony nobility with the facile and accessible softness of Italy. Roger devoted several diary pages to it and, predictably and rather convincingly, took the opposite view. He put it much more succinctly on a postcard:

  Excellent, your piece: it brought out all the amaurotic, blue-sclerotic, cleido-cranial, dysostotic, epidermolytic, filthy, grimy, haemato-chromatic, ichthyotic, jaundiced, ketonuric, Laurence-Moon-Niemann-Oguchi-Pelizaeus-Merzbacher-syndromic, radio-isotopic, schizophrenic, telangiecstatic, ugly, vicious, web-toed, xerodermic, yawy and zymotic quality of the Greek landscape to a T. But give me the men of Vernon and Les Andelys every time.* Et in Arcadia Ego . . . R.

  He raised the writing of postcards—with his perfect spacing, lack of erasure, studied prose and sometimes verse—to a minor art and many of those that have survived strike a note of homesickness and exile from western Europe. My own postcard of George Sand’s house, posted to him from Bourges, brought the answer:

  How nice to think of you at Nohant: did the ghost of Madame d’Agoult pacing up and down in the garden while Franz played the Erlkönig Fantasia haunt you? Oh, how commosso I should have been . . . Our favourite claveciniste is now Padre Narciso Casanova. R.

  Whatever the depth of his prejudices, which he sometimes exaggerated in order to tease or to stoke up an argument, they were always entertainingly conveyed. He thought—or pretended to think—that everyone, especially ‘Philhellenes,’ and even, retrospectively, his old friend Robert Byron, made too much of a fuss about the different schools of Greek ikon-painting. (Secretly, they interested him very much.) He arrived for luncheon one day with a smile of triumph: ‘I’m off to Italy to look at some proper painting for a change! And by painting,’ he said, fixing me accusingly, ‘I don’t mean the daubed planks that masquerade under the name in this part of the world. Nobody here has ever had an inkling of the meanings of chiaroscuro or morbidezza.’ This at once gave rise to a song, to the tune of Giovinezza, beginning ‘Morbidezza morbidezza! Chiaroscuro, che bellezza!’ Nancy Mitford, who was there, joined in joyfully and many verses were improvised. He loved this sort of thing; he was as good at being teased himself as he was at teasing. There was a mild hint of the latter—on the principle that all Grecophiis are supposed to be Turcophobes—when he wrote: ‘I am thinking of going to Ankara for the Orthodox Easter to escape all the crackers and candlegrease, and I am practising my domes and minarets in my sketch-book.’

  Questioning accepted notions is one of the characteristics of his writing; its conversational equivalent, the pinpointing of clichés, was salutary but quelling. I once described someone as bright as a button and he dampingly observed that some buttons were bright, others not. He often gave his contradictory bent free play, and once, when the conversation had wandered to Lapland and from there to reindeer, I remarked on the thick moss that seemed to grow on their antlers.

  ‘No,’ Roger said. ‘They graze on moss. Sphagnum moss, I believe.’

  I’m talking about the moss their anders are covered with.’

  He shook his head with a smile.

  ‘But Roger, you can see it quite clearly in photographs.’

  ‘Reindeer are very nervous animals,’ he said. ‘When they see someone pointing a camera, they start fidgeting.’ He shook his own head quickly from side to side. ‘So the antlers always come out blurred on the snaps.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Lapland, Roger?’

  ‘No.’

  In spite of a certain austere touch, he loved pleasure. The diaries talk with some freedom of heterodox affections. He enjoyed food and drink, and, as one would expect, sought them out with appetite and discernment. It was not for any specific defect that Greek tavernas brought out in him a certain reluctance, it was more the custom (which I like very much) of choosing one’s meal by peering into the pans in the kitchen that worried him. (‘Do go down and haruspicate.’)

  Asked how he had enjoyed the weekend at a hotel in Nauplia, he said:

  I had a little trouble with the people in the next room. They kept the wireless on at night, full blast, even when I banged on the wall. I saw there was nothing for it, so I gave them that noisy song of Scaramuccio and Truffaldino out of Ariadne auf Naxos, even louder. They turned their wretched machine up, so I sang louder still until the management imposed silence and I had a perfect night.

  He also mentions dreams now and then in the diaries. One of them I find impossible to forget. He was in a house near Cambridge; Royston perhaps. Looking out of the window, he saw, coming up the drive, a steamroller on which four Edwardian gamekeepers were sitting in gaiters and deerstalkers, their hatchet faces staring fixed and unblinking to the front. Seized by fear, he dashed through the house and opened the back door, only to see the same steamroller and the identical expressionless gamekeepers advancing up the kitchen path, and woke up.

  I assemble these scattered fragments, hoping they might counterpoint the solemnity of the text with a lighter and more spontaneous side of Roger’s character than we are usually allowed to see; but, looking back over the diaries, I think I was wrong—they are not solemn at all. But they are serious, even though the seriousness is leavened with enough wit and humour for the reader to get a pretty clear idea of what Roger was like. The thoughtful disquisitions scattered through the book played only a small part in everyday conversation, except, perhaps, with companions as erudite as he. But the range of knowledge which gave rise to them, the familiarity with everything beautiful in Europe, the command of several languages, and of their literature and poetry, the love of music, the absorption in every manifestation of painting and sculpture and architecture, the assiduous travel, the pilgrimages and observation and memory—all this gave a wide range and much stimulus and charm to his society. His passionate devotion to the world’s rare and precious things and his awareness of their fragility filled him with justifiable dread for the future of civilization. He thought deeply on great problems, shunned fashionable signposts in the process, and arrived at his conclusions by arduous and solitary paths; and his seeming detachment while he did so was always a red rag to zealots. Most creditably, he left his written opinions as he set them down at the time.

  It is true that his devotion to the arts, to literature, to travel and writing and study—indeed, to the sifting of his thoughts in these diaries—may have limited his contact with some pursuits which others prize. A fastidious shudder intervened; or so he maintained. He professed, for instance, not to care for the country; unadulterated nature meant little; it had to be a setting for some beautiful or famous building or associated with a
painting, a figure or a passage of music which stirred him. Yet no one who has read his discourse on the trees of the different parts of Europe or the marvellous description of the fields and leaves and branches at Balleroy—even if there is a château at the heart of them—or wandered by proxy round other French castles all set about with ‘that ghastly gravel that enters the very soul,’ can ever allow him the purely urban character he sometimes claims for himself; he tacitly confutes it, too, by preferring to all the rest of the story those descriptive passages of A la recherche du temps perdu, sometimes hurried through by the less percipient, where the plot is made to mark time for twenty or thirty pages while the detailed splendours of the sea and the landscape and the vegetation and the birds and the clouds are unfolded in such slow and magnificent pavanes. His own gift for description is discerning, exact, imaginative and often funny: inside Siena Cathedral ‘one feels as if one were in the belly of a gigantic zebra’; and people, when he touches on them, are before us in a flash: ‘. . . Like all French poets, [he was] small, swarthy, restless and cross. He was dressed in uncompromising black and had a curious green stone in a narrow platinum setting on the little finger of his left hand. He kept nervously twiddling it round so much that one expected him to appear and disappear intermittently. . .’ His self-imposed limitations, if such they were, cleared the decks for his elected pursuits. Above all, they left time and room for the other most important thing in his life, which was the company of his friends.