Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  We must go back to 28 May 1941, seven days after Pendlebury’s death and the night of the evacuation. The British troops were lining up to board the ships that were to carry us to Egypt. I was interpreter. Everyone felt downhearted at leaving the Greek friends who had fought beside us for the last eight days. The battered and silent town smelt of burning, explosions, smoke and fresh decay. All at once, an old Cretan materialized out of the shadows. He was a short, resolute man, obviously a distinguished kapetan, with a clear and cheerful glance, a white beard clipped under the chin like a Minoan and a riflebutt embossed with wrought-silver plaques. He said he would like to talk to the ‘General.’ The Brigadier was a tall man and an excellent commander, tanned by a lifetime’s soldiering in India. The kapetan reached up and put his hand on the Brigadier’s shoulder and said, ‘My child,’—‘paidi mou’ in Greek—‘we know you are leaving tonight; but you will soon be back. We will carry on the fight till you return. But we have only a few guns. Leave us all you can spare.’ The Brigadier was deeply moved. Orders were given for the arms and a Black Watch lieutenant led away the kapetan and his retinue. As we made our farewells, he said, in a kind but serious voice, ‘May God go with you, and come back soon.’ Meanwhile, escorting destroyers from HMS Orion and HMS Dido were stealing towards the jetty.

  It was only later, looking at photographs, that the old man was identified as Pendlebury’s friend, Kapetan Satanas. He died the next year, after handing his gun to a descendant, saying, ‘Don’t dishonour it.’

  Looking back, he represents the innermost spirit of Crete. Ever since, the two men have seemed to symbolize the brotherhood-inarms that brought our two countries so close together and made us feel that this season of desolation would somehow, against all the odds, end in victory and the freedom they were all fighting for.

  Books

  Early Reading and Desert Island Books

  from The Pleasure of Reading, ed. Antonia Fraser (Bloomsbury, 1992)

  TWANG.” A clothyard-shaft struck the banqueting-board and stood quivering. A message was twisted round it, and, starting up, the Sheriff and the barons looked at each other aghast . . .’ (It would be an insult to the reader to name the legendary tales this exclamation comes from, and most of the books mentioned later need no author’s name. With less familiar books, especially foreign ones, I hope that the absent names, when they are unknown, will prove that exciting treasure-hunt and stimulus to curiosity which always lead us on to literary exploration and further delights.)

  Pretending to read, I was really reciting by heart—

  I had followed the words often enough, after badgering people to go through that particular page aloud; for, though I was six, reading was still beyond me. I was ashamed that others could manage at four, the whole thing was a sham, I was unmasked when told to turn over and sighs of pity and boredom went up. It wasn’t the first time.

  Books, on one’s own, still meant pictures. It had been all right earlier on. Jemima Puddleduck could do without the text, so could the contemptible Chicks’ Own and Little Folks and the sophisticated ‘Bruin Boys,’ and my hero Little Black Sambo too. (I gazed for hours at Henry Ford’s illustrations in the Coloured Fairy Books; those wide-eyed kings’ daughters, ice-maidens and water-sprites were exactly the sort of girls, later on, that I would pine for and pursue.) Luckily, there was a lot of maternal reading aloud: all Kipling’s books for children, Treasure Island, Black Beauty, The Heroes, Alice, Wet Magic, Three Men in a Boat, The Midnight Folk, The Forest Lovers, Somerville and Ross, Surtees, scenes from Shakespeare and Oliver Twist. (Dulac and Rackham illustrations moved on to Phiz, Cruikshank, Tenniel and Du Maurier and then, downhill, to Shepard and Hugh Thomson.)

  When the miracle of literacy happened at last, it turned an unlettered brute into a book-ridden lunatic. Till it was light enough to read, furious dawn-watches ushered in days flat on hearth-rugs or grass, in ricks or up trees, which ended in stifling torchlit hours under bedclothes. Book-ownership was the next step. To assuage a mania for Scott, I was given four Collins pocket Waverley novels every birthday and Christmas and my father sent sumptuous works about animals or botany from India, wrapped in palm-leaves and sewn with a thousand stitches by Thacker & Spink in Calcutta or Simla. When the Scott craze died, I tried Thackeray, loved Vanity Fair but failed with all the rest. Dickens became a lasting passion and there was no looking back with Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. Moments of illumination followed fast: falling scales and initiations—epiphanies unloosing journeys of discovery that rushed away and branched and meandered all through the years between six and eighteen.

  Untimely ripped from school at sixteen and a half and sent to an Army crammer in London, I read more in the next two years than ever before or after: but, instead of Sandhurst, I suddenly longed for Constantinople, caught a boat to Holland and set off.

  My literary state of play on departure is best approached through contemporary poetry. I knew nothing about Pound or Eliot, and of Yeats only ‘Innisfree,’ one sonnet, and ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’—which, anyway, belonged to singing—and nothing at all about younger poets now venerable. My favourites were Sacheverell, Edith and Osbert Sitwell and, in prose, Norman Douglas, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. I judged earlier poets now by whether I knew anything they had written by heart that I could recite as I slogged along the roads of Swabia and Bavaria. At home and at school there had been much learning by rote, both compulsory and by choice. The young learn as quick as mynahs, at an age, luckily, when everything sticks: and the list starts with two or three Shakespeare sonnets, a few speeches and choruses from Henry V, some Marlowe (‘Ah, Faustus . . .’), Milton (Lycidas), and Spenser’s Prothalamion (‘Sweet Thames! runne softly . . .’). Then came stretches of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge, bits of Shelley’s ‘West Wind,’ most of Keats’s odes (no Byron; Keats was still the yardstick), and fragments of Gray and Pope. Some of Scott’s verse survived, with Rossetti as a medieval aftermath, though fading fast. Several border ballads were next, then ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna,’ patches of ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ and Hound of Heaven, ‘Cynara,’ The Dead at Clonmacnois from the Irish, a lot of Kipling, Hassan’s serenade of Yasmin, plenty from A Shropshire Lad, and (part of a recent metaphysical addiction) passages of Donne, Ralegh, Wyatt and Marvell. Carroll and Lear abounded, but, for some reason, not Chesterton or Belloc. Horatius and most of the Battle of Lake Regillus were the longer pieces: Granchester, and, more or less in sequence, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I loved French, but the entries are soon over: one poem of de Banville (‘Nous n’ irons plus au bois’), two of Baudelaire, a bit of Verlaine (‘Les sanglots longs des violons’), Ronsard’s original of the famous Yeats sonnet, and another by du Bellay (‘Heureux qui comme Ulysse . . .’ etc.), and finally, Villon, starting with the Ballads of the Dead Ladies and the Hanged Men; a recent and all-absorbing mania.

  Moving back and changing step, tracts of Virgil, hammered into my head by countless impositions at school, now boomed out over the snow, a few odes of Horace and some Catullus, including a bit of the Attis, six lines of Petronius and Hadrian’s five lines to his soul. Next, two Latin hymns, remnants of a spasmodic religious mania, and some recently learnt verses from the Archpoet and the Carmina Burana. I ended with snatches from Homer, two or three epitaphs of Simonides and two four-line moon-poems of Sappho.

  Roughly speaking, the date of this giveaway rag-bag is the winter of 1933, when I was just short of nineteen. The general intake is approached through verse because the inevitably larger prose corollary, by a shadowy logic, automatically suggests itself. Now, with an unknown language and shifting scenery, something quite different was on the way. The language assault was through village talk and Schlegel and Tieck’s Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark, Austrian inns, Vienna, and a Schloss or two in Slovakia; German poets were turning into something more than names. It was a season of inklings; I was put on the track of Hölderlin, Rilke, Stefan George and Morgenstern; and by the time I got to Tra
nsylvania that summer, I could arduously and very slowly hack my way through Tod in Venedig They were haymaking in Hungary, the dactylic canter of Magyar was mettlesome and stirring, yet little remained; but Rumanian, a Latin tongue with some of the vowels Slavonically fogged, seemed much easier and enough of it stuck to help with the poems of Eminescu and Goga later on. Across the Danube that autumn a Bulgarian smattering and a grapple with Cyrillic came and went with the speed of measles: and over the next border, the agglutinative harshness of the Turks, laced with genteel diaereses, sounded like drinking out of a foeman’s skull with a raised little finger.

  Suddenly it was winter again. Constantinople was already astern, snowflakes were falling fast, and I was landing in Mount Athos, impelled there by the books of Robert Byron. (I had met him, before setting out, in a nearly pitch-dark Soho night-club where everyone was clouded by strong drink.) I knew by instinct that Greece was going to mean much in the coming years; but, in Cretan caves during the war, it was David Copperfield—read and reread and falling to bits—which kept us going. The other resources—literature without letters—were complex Cretan mountain songs and their spontaneous fifteen-syllable rhyming couplets to the notes of the three-stringed rebeck. Sometimes, for strange smoky hours, as we lay round on brushwood under the stalactites, our old shepherd hosts intoned a few miles of the marvellous Erotokritos myth. It is longer than the Odyssey and, like iron age Dorians reciting Homer before the alphabet, they could neither read nor write. But there was never a falter.

  These two years of wandering ended with a backward loop to Rumania. I settled there for a long time in a rambling country house where the dales of Moldavia sloped away to Bessarabia and the Ukraine. As in the Russia of Tolstoy and in pre-war Poland, some Rumanian families, often to their regret, spoke French more readily than their own language and so it was here.

  An octagonal library held the whole of French literature; encyclopaedias and histories beckoned in vistas; and, during two winters with snow to the windowsills and miraculously cut off except for horses and sleighs, I tried to advance deeper into this transplanted French world than earlier steps had allowed. It was a dominant and—or so I felt—somehow a debarbarizing passion. Books were a paperchase. Le Grand Meaulnes, left invitingly open, led to haunting new regions where Le Potomac and Le Bal du Comte d’ Or gel were landmarks, until, totally at random, I would find myself up to the neck in Le Lutrin, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Bajazet or Illusions perdues—or, indeed, in Arsène Lupin; or Giono or Panait Istrati: Charles d’Orléans, Hérédia, Mallarmé, Verhaeren, Apollinaire and Patrice de la Tour du Pin followed, and many others, and thanks to the fluke of my whereabouts, Russian literature first impinged in French translations. Matila Ghyka, the author of Le Nombre d’or, often came to stay, bringing the latest issues of transition, Minotaure and Verve; also fascinating gossip about Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, Paul Morand, Saint-Exupéry, Eugène Jolas and his other friends in Paris: he pointed the way to Là-Bas, Axel, Les Diaboliques and Sylvie and let the names of Corbière and Laforgue hang in the air. L’ Aiglon was read aloud and Les Fourberies de Scapin; and now and then, to change from analogies and bouts rimés after dinner, somebody would take down the literary parodies of Reboux et Muller, the glow of shaded petroleum lamps lit the faces of the readers and the listeners. The four chief English-language milestones of that time were D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf (Orlando), Hemingway and Joyce. Paludes and Les Caves du Vatican were the break-in to Gide: very excitingly, many people in Rumania seemed to have been friends of Proust. Once I had begun, allegiance was immediate and for good.

  This house, then, resembled a chaotic and abounding waterfall. I was there when war broke out in September 1939, so there was plenty to think about, at the Guards’ Depot two months later over the buttons ticks and the Bras so. (When I went back to Moldavia recently, the house had completely vanished. Some industrial buildings, already abandoned, had taken its place, and the trees had been cut down long ago.)

  ‘The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fowler, Brewer, Liddell and Scott, Dr Smith, Harrap, Larousse, Lemprière, Duden, the whole DNB, Hobson-Jobson, a battery of atlases, concordances, dictionaries, Loeb classics, Pléiade editions, Oxford Companions, Cambridge Histories, anthologies, and books on birds, beasts, plants and stars—’ I was looking through a list made years ago, when planning a house on a remote headland of the Morea: ‘If you are settling in the wilds, ten reference shelves are the minimum.’

  All right for a house, perhaps, but not for a desert island. Not under the present rules. Curiosity is half the pleasure of reading, so what’s to be done? As I brood, my lids begin to sink . . . and my faculties lose hold . . . If it were Prospero’s island, a wave of the wand could float an illicit and watertight trunk ashore, enough to fill ten sand-proof shelves in the hut . . . but if that’s the way things are, Danaë might emerge, holding Perseus . . . I shake myself. There will be no trunk, no Danaë, no Perseus, no Miranda, no Calypso, no Man Friday even, and no puff of smoke on the horizon.

  We are allowed Shakespeare and the Bible as well as the choice of ten books; but how many actual volumes? I plan to start with Auden’s five-volume, brilliantly chosen Poets of the English Language: it runs from Langland to Yeats. No Eliot, of course, and, indeed, no Auden: but Maurice Baring used to savage a dozen books to glue in reams of extra pages, and I shall do the same . . . In goes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all seven volumes, with Bury’s notes, followed by Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. (But what about Vile Bodies, Black Mischief Scoop and Put Out More Flags? I’ve got to have them. Perhaps they could be microfilmed or stitched together. If this won’t do, it will have to be the first on the list and the same applies to Antic Hay, Crome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves.) Old Calabria goes in without a shadow of doubt; it’s a particular style and cast of mind here that one can’t do without, so Cyril Connolly follows. Next comes the Temple Classics Dante, with its crib, [and] Kim, read about every two years; the habit is too old to break. The Odyssey, certainly (glued to the Iliad?). No good without a parallel text, alas, so I’ll get them stapled to Robert Fitzgerald’s translations, or Richard Lattimore’s. Ulysses comes next, and lastiy À la recherche du temps perdu. When I finish the last page, I can start all over again.

  Later.

  I stack them on the locker.

  As it turns out, the crew are lenient about the definition of ‘book,’ and indulgent about staples and glue, but they are inflexible about number: ‘There are eleven here, I’m afraid, sir.’ At this moment the siren goes and a voice shouts, ‘Island in sight!’ All eyes turn to the porthole and with a conjuror’s speed a slim volume flies into my bush shirt pocket: The Unquiet Grave is safe! And all goes well at the recount. The books are tidily arranged in the portmanteau, zipped up, padlocked and carried on deck.

  A desperate moment! What about Saki, Bleak House, Walpole’s letters, Burckhardt, Sheridan, Horace, Nightmare Abbey, Raby’s Christian and Secular Latin? I’ll never learn about Hisperica Famina now; (For a second I think I catch the faraway, accusing, millionfold moo of the unread; then it fades . . .) Gerard Manley Hopkins, Browning, Pius II’s Memoirs, War and Peace, Plutarch, la Rochefoucauld, Les Fleurs du mal, Chaucer, Donne and Montaigne—there they lie higgledy-piggledy on the bunk. (‘Five minutes now’; I stroke The Wings of the Dove for the last time.) They remind me of St Augustine’s lifelong sins on the eve of his conversion: they plucked at his garments and twittered: ‘What! Are you leaving us now? All your old friends? And for ever?’ (‘Stand by.’) Tristram Shandy? Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour? Huckleberry Finn? Boswell? Torrents of Spring? Phineas Redux? Far from the Madding Crowd? (‘Steady there.’) Lorca? Uncle Fred in the Springtime? Urn Burial? Tintin . . .?

  ‘We’ll have to look sharp, sir. They are putting the boat down now. Oh, thank you, sir!’ (I shan’t need it) ‘and the best of good luck to you, sir.’

  The Strange Case of the Swabian Poet

  The Spectator, 28 September
1996

  An image like a god’s I gazed on as I slept,

  Which a resplendent throne full richly, did upraise,

  While foolish multitudes, from need or pleasure, crept

  To serve, or stand on guard there; and my gaze Saw how, in the true God’s despite, it did accept Hungry, but never fill’d—vows, offerings and praise,

  And how its lightest whim spared some, but others reaped,

  And joy’d in punishment, revenge, and wickedness.

  To smite this ingrate image down did Heaven oft-time Assemble all its stars in many a sign and wonder,

  Yet still this idol’s voice rang out more loud than thunder,

  Until at last, when pride did the high zenith climb,

  A flash of lightning struck the shining form asunder

  And all vainglory chang’d to worms and stink and slime.

  Years ago, chancing on this sonnet in an anthology, I was fascinated by the metre—the extra foot at the end of each line—and by the strange and ambiguous vision it conjured up. ‘Dream: on the D. of B.,’ it was called, or rather ‘Traum: von dem H. von B.,’ for the poem was in German, and a footnote explained that the initials meant ‘H(erzog) von Buckingham).’ I made an immediate dash at translating it, so the creaks, the faulty rhymes and the Wardour Street syntax are not the poet’s fault, but mine. (The poem in its original is given at the end of these pages.)

  Ever since reading The Three Musketeers, we have all been haunted by the Duke of Buckingham; haunted and dazzled by the satin and the diamonds and the strings of pearls, the starched lace zigzag ruff, the preposterous splendour and the panache; and when we learnt later on how this Phoebus Apollo had been stabbed to death at Portsmouth with a tenpenny knife, the horror, eerily laced with relish, was almost too much to take in.