Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  As a brilliant letter-writer himself, he would have enjoyed this collection. It is impossible not to. All the letters are written to Robert Byron’s mother and the racy vigour, indiscretion and wit, and the feeling, even at school, of grown-up complicity, shadow forth, like the unheard half of a telephone conversation, an addressee of great intelligence, astringency, kindness and comic sense. He loved his parents and his two sisters, this collection has been made by one of them, and her editing, introduction and explanatory notes—apart from an unawareness of the meaning of ‘protagonist’ (a foible shared by her brother which would have evoked a groan from Fowler)—are impeccable.

  The earliest letters are from Eton, which he enjoyed in spite of getting into trouble over the ritual opening of an umbrella on an Officers’ Training Corps parade. He professed scorn for aestheticism, but went flat-out for Art and architecture and the company of fellow-addicts, and remained true to all of them for good. His closest friends were Henry Yorke, later the Henry Green of Living, Party Going and Loving— and Lord Clonmore, a charming, vague, Anglo-Irish Betjemanesque High Anglican. (Converts, Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics were among Robert’s pretended abominations, but he had close friends among all three, cf., later on, Christopher Sykes.) When he was sixteen, he and Brian Howard lured Sir John Rothenstein down to talk to the Arts Society; transported, Robert poured his theories into letters.

  In the old days [he wrote] Artists were given their subjects. They painted to order, more or less—set subjects, crucifixions or battle-scenes . . . The Renaissance broke away from this, but still set subjects were painted—portraits and classical legends; then the Pre-Raphaelites tried to break away from this again and to paint what they saw. But then others, breaking away even more, left entirely to themselves ever since the Renaissance, flew to light and abstract form—just as abstract philosophy never solidifies, so modern art, brought about by this process, is only to be regarded in the light of an interesting experiment . . .

  Similar pages, laced with anecdotes and amusing gossip, flew home to Savernake Forest in an unbroken stream. This house and forest, and the family, dogs, horses and trees, and the exciting friends his mother’s hospitality assembled there, became the haven he pined for on his travels. (In some bug-ridden Asian khan, he would dream that his dog had climbed on his bed and flung her forelegs round his neck or that he was pelting across country on his hunter Aubrey. These longings often recur.)

  The cast at Oxford—Harold Acton with megaphone and grey bowler in the lead and captured to a T by Evelyn Waugh—constitute one of the century’s riddles. Corks popped round the chief actors for much of the day, they were tight every night, ‘dressing up’ for party after party—Robert’s impersonation of Queen Victoria was famous—or hammering out jazz on the piano till dawn; hangovers left just time enough for buying a bowl of Victorian wax fruit next day or, in the case of David Talbot Rice, ‘for soaring over fences with the Heythrop like a heron in flight’; London was less than an hour away with its Great Houses and their glamorous denizens still inside them, and fascinating night-clubs dark as Tartarus beckoned; how, in the long run, could this enjoyable chaos turn out such a constellation of brilliant successes? In the short run, many came temporarily to grief. Robert Byron dispelled the fumes long enough to deliver lectures on Turner and filled the Cherwell with notions and theories; he read scores of learned, abstruse and extracurricular books; but he came down with a third-class degree he never bothered to collect.

  Foreign travel was suddenly vital. He had very little money; journalism was the Open Sesame; so, with no evidence of capacity but his compulsive vim, Monomarks and Coppers had to be talked round. For magic carpet, there were like-minded aesthete-hedonists with motor-cars and cash, and Europe was their oyster.

  The adventures and mishaps of the earliest journey were an intellectual Three Men in a Boat. The encounters and incidents are illustrated by lively and comic sketches which are much better than the rather over-finished formal pictures that appear in some of his books. The jaunt culminated in Greece where, for Robert at any rate, the discovery of the amazing and unspoilt beauty of the country, backed by the electrifying effect of his name on the inhabitants, set the stage for a life-long love affair. Preliminary reading had laid the way, Ravenna was the first visual hint, then the monasteries of Mistra, Daphni, St Luke and finally, St Sophia itself confirmed it.

  This in turn led on to a memorable examination of Mount Athos with David Talbot Rice and Mark Ogilvie-Grant and the results are concentrated and distilled in The Station. Packed with original insights and evocations of the history and treasures and, above all, with their journey and the strange life, and bursting with vitality and humour, the book came out when he was just twenty-three. (Its impact and effect on at any rate one reader remain vivid. When, ten years later, I was about to set off on European travels, the sudden discovery altered my whole itinerary and, one thing leading to another, perhaps the course of a lifetime.)

  These letters are the untreated raw material of his literary achievement and it is fascinating to see that none of the original verve was lost in the marvellously written final shapes. It is easy to forget how little about Byzantium, outside. archaeological circles, was known in the 1920s, at any rate in England. In his attacks on Ancient Greece, he hoped to lift the killing shadow into which the classical past, by comparison, plunged the Eastern Roman Empire; he was at war with many centuries of scholastic bias; Gibbon and Leckie and Fallmerayer were his enemies; and when, next year, The Byzantine Achievement appeared he was conducting us round a Byzantine Empire from which, he hoped, the classical incubus had been exorcized. More surprising than either of these, perhaps, was the vast illustrated tome he compiled with David Talbot Rice, The Birth of Western Painting It traces the descent and the flowering of a tradition to which Byzantium gave birth and which, in the West, breathed its last in Spain with the death of El Greco. He was at grips, in fact, with a resurgence of his old classical enemy, this time in the stately new trappings of the Renaissance. I reacted to this book years later, by hotly exhorting a hesitant reader:

  You will follow and perhaps disagree with his arguments. They explain how the same (Cappadocian Byzantine) trends blossomed simultaneously in Florence and Siena; where, short-circuiting Constantinople and Athos, Byzantine influence had already been at work in the pictures of Giotto, Duccio, Cimabue, Lorenzetti and Barna da Siena. You will be following the prominence and eclipse of Byzantine Art and enjoying some of the most spirited uncircumspect and powerful English prose of this century. It resembles a mettled horse. You may smile at the brio with which he deals with obstacles and opposition. Instead of evading or dismantling them, he points out the target, as it were with a sabre, and then with dazzling bravura, clears it in a bold leap or gallops over it roughshod, slashes and kicks it to matchwood and rides on.

  Obviously, I was under his spell; and, mutatis mutandis, still am; lost in admiration, anyway. ‘That some of his dragons long since turned out to be no more than windmills,’ writes Talbot Rice, ‘has, perhaps, to some extent been due to the violence of Byron’s attack.’

  The same pace carried him next year all over India and, most adventurously, deep into Tibet and then all over Russia in search of northern Byzantine traditions in the Slav world and the painting of Rublev. (He hated the regime but was fascinated by the country. One of the surprises of this remarkable book is the fact that the bias and rage that sometimes smoke from the page are often contradicted flat a score of pages on. These are private letters. It is as it should be.) Persia and Afghanistan, in pursuit of Timurid pre-Mogul remains with Christopher Sykes, was a protracted, hair-raising and wonderful adventure, richly rewarded by Yezd, Kabus, Herat, Balkh and Ghazni. They were worth all the snow-bound halts, the scarce or uneatable food—Byron hated hardship for its own sake—the vermin and the arrests on suspicion of espionage. Another bonus was the marvellous, page-long hilarious sequences of conversation with Shir Ahmed, the Afghan ambassador; they are scored
like an opera and noted diminuendo, piano, and crescendo, the fortissimo sometimes swelling into capitals; and they leave the reader feeling weak. The result, The Road to Oxiana, is his triumph. There was always something odd to notice: ‘The Russian consul here is not so austere as some comrades. He dresses in loud tweeds like Bloomsbury in the country’: and in one frightful Christmas in Meshed he thinks ruefully of his Sitwell fellow-guests at Polesden Lacey the year before: ‘I would enjoy a few minutes conversation with Sachie and Georgia!’ Crossing Siberia, he spent months alone to write in a friend’s house in Peking—Peiping then, before its jingo avatar—and suffered a breakdown of health and worked his way home through Japan and the United States.

  War overshadows the last few letters. (‘Ran says Sandy Macpherson at the Wurlitzer organ on the BBC is definitely lowering the morale of the fleet.’) After a long search, he found a slot in the conduct of the war where his knowledge of Asia could have been of tremendous secret use; but, heading for the Middle East, his ship was torpedoed by the Scharnhorst off the north coast of Scotland. It was 24 February 1941. He was thirty-six. He was never found; and we can never know how many brilliant unwritten sequels to The Station and The Road to Oxiana were also lost off Stornaway.

  Flotsam

  Gluttony

  from The Seven Deadly Sins (Sunday Times Publications, 1962)

  In 1962 the Sunday Times commissioned a series of articles by well-known authors on the Seven Deadly Sins. Angus Wilson wrote on Envy, Edith Sitwell on Pride, and Paddy on Gluttony. Covetousness fell to Cyril Connolly. Evelyn Waugh tackled Sloth, Lust was by Christopher Sykes, and Anger by W. H. Auden. The articles were later gathered into a small book with an introduction by Raymond Mortimer.

  ‘Gluttony. Yes. Let me see.’ Mr Vortigern paused in the pillared doorway to light a cigar, and his ruminative murmur was punctuated by puffs.

  ‘Voracitas. . . Γαστριμαργíα . . . Gola . . . Gourmandise . . . Yes . . .’ His cigar properly alight, he sailed down the steps to the sunlit street in an aromatic cloud. No one would have thought this hale and elegant figure was seventy-five.

  ‘I have been a martyr to it, in a mild way, all my life,’ he resumed as we headed for St James’s Palace. ‘So its presence among the Seven Deadly Sins has always bothered me. I console myself with the thought that Ambrose and Augustine—or was it St Clement?—had monks in mind more than laymen when the Deadly Sins first emerged; and, of course, they needed some corrective to late Roman excesses and barbarian disorder.

  You only have to read about the vomitoria and Trimalchio’s feast in Petronius to get the point. And what was the name of that senator who had slaves walking backwards in front of him to carry his paunch? And what about Pollio—Vedius, not Asinius—who lived in Naples in the time of Augustus? He used to punish his slaves by throwing them into the tank where he kept his fish because he thought that a diet of live humans improved the flavour. And barbarian banquets were filthy. Think of those raw slabs of meat the Huns used to strap between their saddle flaps and the flanks of their horses! Things had got out of hand.

  ‘There’s nothing against good living in itself. We have only to remember the Marriage at Cana. St Benedict allowed his monks a hemina of wine with their meals. And look at the distilling traditions of the monastic orders, and the description of the Abbot’s meal in Phtochoprodromos, the Byzantine poet. There has always been a port-drinking Horace-quoting tradition in Anglican cathedral closes, and all those paintings of cardinals clinking glasses must be founded on something.’

  Mr Vortigern’s humorous agate eyes caught mine for a moment. ‘Do you know the story the Romans are so fond of about a Pope—a fairly recent one too and a saintly man—at the gates of Paradise? You don’t? Well, there is a tradition that St Peter stands aside, when a supreme Pontiff arrives, to allow his successor to let himself in with his own keys. This one, who was famous for his appreciation of wine, was embarrassed to find himself, after a lot of twisting and turning, still locked out.’ Mr Vortigern laughed. ‘He had brought the keys of the Vatican cellar by mistake . . .

  ‘What are the five ways of sinning by gluttony . . .? Praepropere, laute, nimis, ardenter, studiose?’ Mr Vortigern ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, and making too much of a fuss. I am guilty on all points, alas; but at least I can be acquitted of St John of the Cross’s Spiritual Gluttony . . . Too much and too eagerly are the worst. I shudder to think of myself as a boy, reeling from the table stunned with toad-in-the-hole and sausages and mash and jelly and spotted dog, and steeped in sin. And the torments that followed! Hell on earth!

  ‘Mercifully, a glimmer of moderation came with riper years. For, now that Science has disarmed Lust of its retaliatory powers, Gluttony is the only one of the Deadly Seven which is visited by physical retribution this side of the tomb.

  ‘Its vengeance is far more convincing than Dante’s penalty for gluttons—permanent hounding by Cerberus in a non-stop hailstorm. Spiritual sins may rack the conscience, fill us with misery, lay the soul waste, and turn our hearts to stone. Alas, they do! But at least they don’t ruin our blood pressure or hobnail our livers. What are snarling and hailstones compared with the pangs of indigestion, palpitations, muck-sweats, heartburn, bilious attacks, d.t.s., real alcoholism, nicotine poisoning? The Fathers didn’t reckon with this.’ Mr Vortigern flourished his cigar. ‘What torments can match the agony of a chain-smoker short of tobacco? Surely these earthly pains and humiliations should shorten our sentences later on? And what about obesity, bottle-noses, bleary eyes, grog-blossoms and breath like a blowlamp? It is the only sin which turns us into monsters. I have got off lightly so far.’ Mr Vortigern glanced with satisfaction at his reflection in a gunsmith’s window. At least girth-control invites no anathema, if we can but practise it. Always remember that outside every thin man lurks a fat man trying to climb in.

  ‘The Germans are the worst, for sheer bulk. What miles of liver sausage, what oceans of beer: the quagmires of those colossal bellies! How appalling they look from behind; the terrible creases of fat three deep across solid and shaven napes! Necks wreathed in smiles, the stigmata of damnation; and delusive smiles, for when they turn round there is nothing but a blank stare and a jigsaw of fencing scars. If you are ever losing an argument with such a one you can always win by telling him to wipe those smiles off the back of his neck . . .

  ‘The outward effects of food are a sure guide. In England they are very noticeable. Prosperous Edwardians had an unmistakable ptarmigan sheen. There was beef and claret in the faces of the squirearchy, cabbage and strong Indian tea among Non-conformists, and limpid blue eyes in the Navy, due to Plymouth gin, and so on. Above all, a general look of low spirits that tells its own tale. Those puddings named after Crimean battles, that coffee that tastes like boiled horseshoes . . . !’

  Mr Vortigern shuddered. ‘Meals as joyless as a moth’s dark banquet in a cupboard. Everything tastes like a substitute. I think the flight from reality must have begun when Norman names superseded the Saxon after the Conquest—mutton for sheep, beef for ox, and so on—breaking into a gallop later on by the use of French in eating-houses. It culminates in those Bohemian little “Continental” restaurants whose walls are festooned with papier mâché chickens, dummy mortadellas and cardboard hams, all too emblematic of the phantom food below. The English seek escape from this ghost world in sporting preoccupations and foreign enterprise and occasionally in poetry. It’s the same with the Irish. Have you ever eaten an Irish meal? Their literature has nothing to do with oppression, religion or the twilight. It is flight from the cruel realities of the table.

  ‘These are effects by reaction; direct results are still more striking. Curry induces instability of temper and fosters discord; hot Mexican food leads to cruelty, just as surely as blubber, the staple of the Eskimos, spells torpid indifference. And look at the Belgians, the supreme exemplars of high living and low thinking! The rancid oil they cook with in Spain tastes
as though it was straight out of a sanctuary lamp; no wonder the country is prone to bigotry. Vodka turns Russian faces into steppes, featureless tundras with eyes like minute and uncharted Siberian lakes. And those extraordinary grey complexions of the Americans I attribute entirely to breakfast foods, jumbo steaks, soft drinks, milk shakes and ice-cream at all hours, washed down by conditioned air and crooning.’

  Mr Vortigern’s words had brought us to the Mall. We crossed into the park and he smoked thoughtfully for a minute. ‘The most convincing example of the influence of food on national character is Italy. Look at Italian art. Pasta wrecked it! Some say it was imported from the Orient by Marco Polo. Others that an old woman discovered it in Naples in the time of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, the stupor mundi. I favour the second theory. Cimabue and Giotto and Duccio lived on dried fish and polenta and beans and black bread and olives. And you can’t picture Dante eating spaghetti, or Amico di Sandro wolfing ravioli down. They lived on hard tack from the Trecento to the Renaissance, you mark my words.

  ‘Then pasta asciutta came. It must have taken a century or two to conquer Italy, spreading from the south like a clammy and many-tentacled monster, smothering Italy’s genius on its northward journey, and strangling its artists like the serpents of Laocoön. Thousands of seething and dripping tongues of macaroni squirming and coiling up the Apennines, gathering volume every mile, engulfing towns and provinces and slowly subduing the whole peninsula. The North held out heroically for a while—there is no pasta in those banquets of Veronese—and the last stand was at Venice. The rest of the country lay inert under its warm and slippery bonds—slippery, perhaps, but still unbroken today—while Tiepolo held out, and Longhi and Guardi and Canaletto, the last lonely frontiersmen of a fallen Empire.