Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  All this we know from his writings. But I shall have failed badly if I have not conveyed how strongly Roger’s friendship and affection were returned and with what a feeling of loss his friends look back: not only to the achievements of scholarship and diligence and flair, but to the pessimism and prejudice and foreboding, and the inventiveness and fun and exhilaration that came so surprisingly to the rescue.

  * I think he mentions the two Norman towns because Vernon had come into the landscape article apropos of nearby Giverny, where Monet’s Nymphéas was painted; and Les Andelys is Poussin’s birthplace.

  Iain Moncreiffe

  from Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk: An Informal Portrait, ed. John Jolliffe (Stourton Press, 1986)

  Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk (1919—85) was interested in genealogy and history from a very early age. After the war, spent in the Scots Guards where he saw much active service, he joined the Court of Lord Lyon King of Arms (the Scottish equivalent of the Royal College of Heralds). He wrote several books on heraldry and the clans of Scotland.

  Iremember as though it were yesterday a drizzling November evening in 1939 in Codrington Block at the Guards Depot at Caterham. The Coldstream were taking on the training of thirty recruits who aspired to commissions in the five regiments of the Brigade and, one by one, in plain clothes for the last time, these lost figures mooched into the grim barrack-room out of the dusk, despondently drinking in that Caterham atmosphere of Potsdam, Dartmoor, and I Carceri of Piranesi, compound of carbolic, Brasso, bathbrick, Ronuk, pipeclay and Blanco which a distant whiff of drains touched like the hint of garlic in a perfect salad. The barked orders and the rhythmic stamping had died away outside and all was silent now except for bugle-calls. The last to arrive was a thin, dark-haired boy in a yellow waistcoat and the sparse beginnings of a moustache, Chatterton-pale in the twilight; and, in a few minutes, the mood had begun to change: he was talking about the Radziwills and the Colonna, and everyone started to cheer up. The windows of snowy castles seemed to come alight, banners unfurled, wolves pursued the sleighs of fur-clad magnates, Teutonic Knights sank spiralling through the ice; and then we found ourselves skirmishing with the Orsini across the Campagna or seated by proxy almost within earshot of Michelangelo’s sonnets to great-aunt Vittoria under the ilex trees of Tusculum.

  This was the first glimpse of Iain Moncreiffe. Considered a great innovation, the Brigade Squad we had joined was the first of its kind, a tough apprenticeship full of surprises for everyone; the new recruits must have seemed unusual and rather bewildering to the Depot staff, the squad sergeant and the trained soldier, and Iain was certainly the strangest. Slightly built, and not strong, I think he found the rigours of the course were more exacting to him than to the rest, and the guardsmen admired this, and he charmed them with his stories and his teasing. When we groaned about these months of Spartan initiation, his grumbles invariably took a comic turn; anyway, he would rather have been cut in pieces than miss going through the war with the regiment he had set his heart on.

  The only things to enliven the barrack-room bleakness were the scarlet fire-buckets full of sand and adorned with the Coldstream battle-honours on painted scrolls—Talavera, Vittoria, Toulouse, Waterloo—a long muster of victories. The guardsmen knew them by heart as it was part of their training. But so did Iain, even the lesser known—Nivelles, say, or Fuentes de Onoro—together with the dates and the weather, the names of the commanders on both sides, that one had red hair, say, and the other a limp . . . The astonishment was general. This wasn’t the result of special mugging up, but part of a wide-ranging concern in the things he cared about.

  And so for miles around the wonder grew

  That one small head could harbour all he knew.

  A mixture of rum card and bloody marvel was the guardsmen’s verdict.

  Iain’s grasp of history was wide and firmly based, and, as we know, in one or two branches unsurpassed. I knew he had been an only child and I had visions of him alone in a Scottish country-house library or under a tree in Kenya, reading feverishly and forgetting nothing. In one way his studies were as methodical as a university professor’s, in another as romantic as Quixote’s, and the two were sometimes at loggerheads, don against Don; but though he was a born romantic, the scholar kept Quixote under firm control and this struggle between facts and temperament made his search for historical fairness all the more creditable. His passion for continuity made him a lover of tradition, a legitimist, a stickler for ancient loyalties and an opponent of revolutionary notions, and his respect for the tribal evolution of law turned him into a tiger for the constitution. His genealogical studies were a by-product of his search for a particular aspect of historical authenticity, a feeling akin to the passion of all collectors; but where a more usual antiquary goes full tilt for Norman fonts, the specimens Iain pursued were flesh and blood rather than stone and dating as far back as documents could lead him, and if descendants still existed, they were live evidence of this continuity and, as it were, scored double. The epigoni might be rather battered or run to seed—‘Plenty of weeds like me,’ Iain said, after a protracted clubland luncheon, years later—‘but not all. Look at that chap,’ and he pointed across the room at a tremendous grandee like a recumbent fragment of Stonehenge, faintly snoring: ‘He’d be all right with a mace or a kirtle-axe.’ He liked to think of the original rough begetters of tribes and dynasties, the mormaers, athelings, thanes, rhinegraves, voivodes, krals, kniazes, khans and kagans, and their ancient styles, not to mention later figures, comparable to Charlus as the Damoiseau de Montargis—who had issued from the barbarian half-darkness and scattered the re-emerging continents with their progeny. To these were added the paladins who jousted at Aspromont or Montalban and those who perished at Fontarabbia when Charlemain with all his peerage fell; and, with his eponymous ancestral hill in mind, he thought fondly of the first shaggy Moncreiffe looming out of the primordial bracken in this hoary forest of begetters.

  But the range of his pursuits abolished all trace of parochialism; it carried him far beyond the Flodden Roll, clean across Europe and Christendom, the worlds of Islam and the Bible and a score of shamanistic barbarian invasions, all the way to the Great Wall of China and beyond; and it simultaneously performed another task: as he would like to have carried his researches back to Adam and Eve—as, with the fallacious help of biblical family trees, it can be done—it meant that the entire world was related: they were all umpteenth cousins and fellow members of a cosmic clan; and this feeling, together with his rather old-fashioned good manners, may have been the halfsubconscious root of his friendly address and his interest in people; it was a sort of classlessness that remained unchanged whoever he was with. It put him on level terms with everyone at the Depot and it explained, years later, a long discourse on Gillean of the Battle-axe and Gregor of the Golden Bridles to the fascinated driver of the stationary cab which had brought him to White’s, who switched off the engine half-way through and listened to the end.

  Back to Caterham. Iain was deeply versed in symbols and emblems even then, and as I had had a sneaking craze for heraldry ever since The Talisman and Ivanhoe, this was a great bond. On the scrubbed table, or over mugs of cocoa in the Naafi, we had great fun covering sheets of foolscap with shields, helmets and mantelling. A fellow-recruit, finding us at it, teased us by quoting Chesterfield’s comment on heralds—‘silly fellows who don’t even know their own silly business,’ and Iain, looking up with his mandarin smile, said: ‘Oh, but we do Just look at these lovely tressures flory-counterflory! Anyway, it’s better than teaching your son the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.’ Another link was Iain’s interest in eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary, Transylvania, and the old Rumanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The hazards of travel had taken me exactly to these parts in the years before the war and, for the last two of them, I had been staying with a family in an old and rambling house on a broken-down estate in High Moldavia, and he couldn’t he
ar enough about it and them.

  This seems oddly prophetic now. He told me that, in spite of his passion for tracing descents, there was one quite recent one on his own distaff side that he couldn’t follow for lack of documents: ‘It might lead to a long line of mole-catchers or pickpockets or pew-openers for all I know.’ Then one day, years later in clubland, I found him beaming. He took me aside with a drink, and the news that research had made a triumphant breakthrough; and across snatches of our neighbours’ comments on death duties, cricket scores and wire, he unfolded how, via what he called a legitimacy hiccup and a Croatian serf, the lost line had been traced. It led straight back to all that was most resonant and august in Hungarian history, and, among others, to the great Transylvanian house of Báthory, which had reigned in Transylvania and Poland. ‘And what’s more,’ Iain went on with a rapturous expression, ‘we descend directly from Elizabeth Báthory, the Monster of Csejthe, sometimes known as “The Blood Countess”! This fiend of wickedness or folly,’ he explained, ‘was convicted in 1610 of the slow murder—in order that their blood might magically preserve her beauty—of more than six hundred girls. Her servant-accomplices were tortured to death and she perished in her grim castle after being four years immured in the dark.’ Iain’s eyes were sparkling as though he were leading in a Derby winner.

  Anyone who knew Iain even slightly was aware of the warmth of his character and his deep kindness, and if he seemed to relish the deeds of monsters like the horrible countess, or of Vlad the Impaler (whom he insisted on calling Dracula), this was not due to any answering streak in his own nature. It was the survival into riper years of the sort of boyish gusto that revels in the rack in historical novels, the thumbscrew and the Scavenger’s Daughter and the torments that Sioux and Hurons inflict on captured palefaces. Now and then, during Iain’s stories, the fat boy in The Pickwick Papers seemed for a moment to climb into his lean frame uttering his famous words, ‘I wants to make your flesh creep!’; and in his writing, these rare Pickwickian intrusions and an occasional mild facetiousness are the only literary foibles one could wish away. Otherwise, it is all fascination, originality, illuminating anecdote and strange lore. I never tired of listening to the results of his historical delving. But to the uninitiated, it may sometimes have been a little bewildering. I remember Iain sitting at luncheon in a club next to a tall, thickset and purplefaced stockbroking fellow-member who munched in silence while Iain unfolded to him an urgent dissertation on allodial fiefs, seizin, gavelkind and free-warren. During a digression on deviant usages in the Soke of Peterborough and a few wapentakes in the Danelaw, with parallels among the Salian and Ripuarian Franks driven home by snatches of Low Latin, Gaelic, Norman French, Old Norse and Frisian, his interlocutor’s eyes began to project. Iain’s voice was sinking to staunchless near-inaudibility while the other grasped fumbling at passing straws of meaning in the unfamiliar drift; and by the time Iain had moved on to soc, sac, scutage and infangthief, with outfang-thief looming and pit and gallows to follow, his companion’s occasional grunts had fallen silent; a stunned fixity veiled his glance and his brow was dewed, as though he were about to dissolve or explode. Had Iain merely gone into overdrive, as he sometimes did, reversing full-tilt, and in the teeth of audience response, into the heart of the twelfth century? Or was he simply seeing how far he could go? I think it was mostly the former; but the flicker of eyebrow and a wicked Fu Manchu spark in the eye hinted, just hinted, that some of it might be the latter. It was this lure and the tempting glitter of thin ice which sometimes—and once in Rome, when we were together at the end of a dinner party of Judy Montagu’s where much wine had flowed—inspired him, on the brink of disintegration, to murmur inventive and unorthodox suggestions into a hitherto unknown neighbour’s ear, evoking great surprise. Next day oblivion had effaced all recollection: but, recalling it later, he would ruefully say: ‘Ah yes! That was the night I behaved so well . . .’

  Two years ago, and almost the last time I saw him, I was in Sister Agnes for twin operations on both big toes, which seemed to be turning to marble. (‘Comes of living in Greece,’ Iain said.) It was December and snowing heavily and Iain entered in an Inverness cape and a peaked travelling cap of the same challenging tweed as though he had bowled round from Baker Street in a growler. The passage of forty-five years had added a few creases and puckers, grizzled his hair and salted a moustache that pointed dejectedly down one side and musketeerishly up on the other like the Spanish sign that turns a canon into a canyon, but he was so unmistakably the same figure as the pale yellow-waistcoated recruit of half a century earlier that these additions might have been the illusory make-up of a guest in the last pages of Le Temps retrouvé. It was lamplighting time; the snow was muffling Beaumont Street in white; and suddenly, at the same moment, we remembered a similar evening many years earlier that neither of us had thought of since.

  We had been allowed out of Caterham for short leave. It was a blank, bitter day and we went to earth in his aunt’s house just north of the park. To make up for the abstinence of the Depot, we fell on her grog-tray as though we were dying of thirst, and, snug by the fire, Iain talked of clan customs; this led on to the pipes and to pibrochs, and he hummed a couple; I think they were called MacCrimmon’s Lament and Lochaber No More. ‘But the best of the lot,’ he said, ‘is the one they always play at Highland funerals, The Flowers of the Forest. Marvellous words too.’

  ‘Do sing it.’

  ‘I can’t. It must never be sung or played indoors. It brings down a curse.’

  ‘Let’s go outside, then.’

  We opened the front door; it had started snowing hard as we toped by the fire, so we struggled into our huge slate-grey greatcoats. ‘I warn you,’ Iain said, buttoning up his collar (a cross-saltire on his buttons, a crowned harp on mine), ‘it always makes me cry.’ In a minute we were on the doorstep. Iain sang the words and I joined in the refrain, croaking and quavering like carol singers with short back-and-sides under the whirling flakes:

  ‘. . . But now they moaning on ilka green loaning,

  The flowers of the forest are all wede awa . . .’

  It was very moving. Back by the fire, I said that I thought that his eyes were a bit misty. ‘I know,’ Iain said, his face crumpling into a Pictish smile as he tipped the last of his aunt’s decanter into our glasses. ‘Highland Mist, I’m afraid.’

  George Katsimbalis

  from The New Griffon, n.s., no. Ill (Athens: Gennadius Library, 1998)

  George Katsimbalis (1899—1978) dedicated his life and his private income to the advancement of Greek literature, and he has had an enormous influence on modern Greek letters. He created and financed Ta Nea Grammata, the most respected literary magazine of its day. He encouraged and supported many writers and poets, and he devoted himself to the study and bibliography of the Greek poet Kostes Palamas. He is the subject of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, a book which celebrates his particularly Greek genius.

  George Katsimbalis used to say that he looked like Raimu, the French film-actor, and a fleeting resemblance there certainly was; but the comparison was not wholly satisfactory: something was missing. Surely there was a closer likeness, vaguely remembered, somewhere? When I discovered it at last in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, recognition was instantaneous: ‘The Triumph of Federigo da Montefeltro Duke of Urbino (1422—82) by Piero della Francesca.’ There is a commanding and incisive look about Federigo’s triumphant profile that is lacking in the film-actor’s. Here, too, are those keen eyes that can be either sharp or hooded or twinkling, and the full cheeks, the erect carriage of the head, the small firm mouth and the jutting chin; and when the years drove George’s hair into retreat (he bewailed their flight), and turned the rearguard to silver, later portraits by Piero in Rome and Milan show Federigo at a similar stage and both men display the same bold shining hemispheres packed with energy, originality and brains. There, too, in the Duke’s picture, is the nose like a bird’s beak; a nose, indeed, that seemed at a se
cond glance almost too fiercely aquiline . . . I learnt that the eagle-bend in the painted nose was caused by the point of a lance in a tournament; without it, the two men would have been identical. (An accident! How suitable! It calls to mind at once the bad leg which forced George, however fast he walked, always to carry a stick; or a broken lance one might say; or a magic wand . . . ) The comic and dramatic part of George’s idiosyncrasy, reflected by Raimu, is suddenly balanced and reinforced by the dash and the splendour of the great condottiere, who was simultaneously the most enlightened of the Renaissance tyrants, humorous, kind to everyone, hospitable and generous—and, above all, a great humanist, a lover and collector of books, a friend and protector of painters and writers and poets and a man who inspired affection in all who knew him.

  Those memorable features first came my way in Athens, in the smoke and the noise of the Argentina night-club in the winter of 1940, where everyone went to watch La Bella Asmara dance. I was a lieutenant with a deceptively heroic-looking bandage round my head, and, because of it, the barman, and several others, had offered me drinks; then a tall and interesting-looking man in a Greek artillery captain’s uniform turned up and did the same. Where had I been wounded, he asked. In Africa perhaps? When I told him that I had merely been overturned by a drunk driver in a truck of the British Military Mission, he laughed and said: ‘Splendid! But don’t tell anyone, or you’ll get no more free drinks.’ Friends at once, we sat up talking, working our way through that long procession of glasses till the place closed; and we forgot to exchange names. I left for Albania next day. The Colossus of Maroussi had not yet appeared, but I knew I had been listening to somebody extraordinary.

  Meeting in Athens again in 1946, we recognized each other at once and it seems to me in retrospect that ever since, whenever I was in Athens, we saw each other almost every day: sometimes in Yannaki’s but more frequently in the old Apotsos, before they both came to an end; at Saiti’s and Xynou’s and Zvinggos and Barba Zafiris; above all at Psara’s, high as a bird’s nest at the very top of the Anaphiotika steps; or lower down in the still virgin Plaka under the wide leaves of the Platanos taverna in summer or, in winter, upstairs under the interlocking whitewashed beams, often with Seferis, Rex Warner, Captain Antoniou or Niko Ghika, or all together; ending up, as often as not, among the billiard players and the nargilehs and the surrealist orders shouted by Babi the waiter, in the extinct Vyzantion. There were evenings in his house with Aspasia; and, most often, perhaps, with Joan (whom I later married) in a score of tavernas among the pines and the vineyards of Attica; and each one of these places became the mise-en-scène for an expanding golden cloud of wonderful stories.