Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  In Guatemala City they met up with Costa, and set off westwards a few days later to Panajachel, which became their base for the first half of March. Here they hired horses, and rode through the villages that are strung around Lake Atitlan, and Paddy finished reading William Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico – ‘as stupendous as Gibbon’.28 They made an expedition to the north of the country to clamber up the vertiginous Mayan ruins of Tikal, smothered in roots and lianas and guarded by screaming monkeys swinging from branch to branch, ‘like furious black footballs of fur’.29

  Leaving Panajachel they went south once again, and crossed the border at Santa Anna into El Salvador. It was 21 March, Palm Sunday, and the streets were filled with palm-waving crowds. After three days they moved into Honduras and spent the rest of Holy Week in the capital, Tegucigalpa. ‘For the whole week the town was one enormous wound,’ Paddy wrote to Jock Murray, ‘and every itch in the palm seemed to herald the stigmata.’30

  From El Salvador they made their way through Nicaragua, sailing down the San Juan river; but the journey had become slow, hot and claustrophobic. At Barra del Colorado in Costa Rica, the air was almost solid with insects. Costa left while Paddy and Joan were out riding, having found a boat going to Puerto Limón. He hoped they would follow the next day, but they missed the boat – and Costa had all the traveller’s cheques. In Panama, waiting for money, they were saved from starvation by a Greek hot-dog vendor called Stavro. When the money finally arrived, he refused all payment – he had fed them purely for the pleasure of talking about Greece.

  Their passage home took about three weeks, on an Australian boat, the Rara Tiki, which docked at Tilbury on 20 May. On leaving the boat they bought a newspaper, where Joan was shocked to read that her friend Dick Wyndham was dead. He had been covering the Arab-Israeli War for the Sunday Times, and was caught in a burst of machine-gun fire just outside Jerusalem. It was a bitter homecoming.

  13

  Writing The Traveller’s Tree

  In the spring of 1948, Paddy found himself with almost too much work. From Panama he had informed Jock that ‘I have not written another word of the Greek book since leaving England, and have had a terrible time keeping up to date with notes and diaries about the Caribbean and Central American Balkans, and a series of articles. But as soon as I have sloughed off the literary commitments of the journey, I long to resume writing about Greece …’1 The articles were part of the agreement he had with Costa who wanted to place his photographs in as many magazines as possible. Since most magazines required a story to accompany the illustrations, Paddy found himself having to write articles for National Geographic, Contact magazine and Picture Post, among others; and once back in England, he could not put off the task any longer.

  So Paddy made no demur when, that August, Joan set off on a tour of south-western France with Cyril Connolly. They had always agreed that their relationship would never be fettered by possessiveness; freedom and friendship came first. Joan was above sexual jealousy, and so was he – unless it took the form of a joke, or a way of expressing how much he had missed her.

  Connolly was in a strange mood. He was beginning to tire of Lys (Mrs Ian) Lubbock, a member of the Horizon staff whom he lived with, relied on and had once loved. As for Horizon, he was disenchanted with the magazine and editing its pages was becoming a chore. When Harper & Row commissioned him to write a book about south-western France, he had asked Dick Wyndham to keep him company and take the photographs – but now Dick was dead. So he had asked Joan, ‘a person with whom I have almost everything in common – friends, tastes, intellectual interests – and very beautiful …’2

  As they walked and drove over the Massif Central and into the Dordogne, the ever-susceptible Cyril fell rapturously in love. ‘She was indeed very remarkable,’ he wrote of her in his unfinished novel ‘Happy Deathbeds’, in which she appears as Jane Sotheran. ‘She did what she liked, she kept moving, she had few possessions, no husband, a lover in several capitals, old friends, a good palate, a talent for photography, a love of art and exploration, a safe private income. Paying her share formed an intrinsic part of her character and contributed to the defeat of all her lovers …’3

  Joan did not enjoy the sexual tension, and felt that her bohemian values somehow obliged her to release it. ‘Why do these complications have to spoil things so often?’ she wrote to Paddy. ‘I feel like a boringly monogamous bourgeois bitch but I can’t do anything about it. It seems so easy to make everyone happy, but I can’t.’4 And when, in the wild gorge of Bramabiau, Connolly suggested that they perform a mock-wedding, she was willing to play along with him. Connolly felt that the stones loosened by a party of Boy Scouts high above them were the work of a Cyclops whom he called ‘Paddy-Phemus’.5

  After some time in England struggling with his articles, Paddy moved to Paris where he took a room in the Hotel Louisiane. He does not mention his fellow guests, but at this stage they included Simone de Beauvoir and Juliette Gréco. Around the corner were the Café Flore and the Deux Magots, where Jean-Paul Sartre and de Beauvoir worked and held court. Not far away was Le Bar Vert which stayed open all night, and Le Tabou, the hottest new nightclub in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In fact he had installed himself in the heart of existentialist Paris, and it is perhaps a miracle that he did any work there at all. Yet somehow he despatched all his articles from his room at the Louisiane, where the window looked out on to the backs of three gold horse’s heads belonging to the horse butcher below, which gave him the impression that he was riding a troika.

  Once the articles were out of the way, he took up an invitation to Gadencourt, near Pacy-sur-Eure in Normandy, and a farmhouse that would become a regular refuge in the future. His old friend Amy Smart, who had been so much a part of his life in wartime Cairo, had bought the property before the war with Allanah Harper, writer, muse, and founder of the Paris literary quarterly Echanges. It was set in an orchard, every room was stuffed with books; and while Amy and Walter Smart still passed their winters in Egypt, they spent much of the summer in Normandy. Paddy’s fellow guest that summer was Patrick Kinross, another old friend from Cairo.

  Here Paddy began writing the book that Costa had already entitled The Traveller’s Tree. He felt it was a good choice. This particular fan-like palm tree is found throughout the Caribbean, though its original home was the islands of Mauritius and Reunion; displacement featured in the history of every ethnic group to be found in the Antilles, all of whom (including the Caribs) had originated elsewhere. Paddy set to work on the book with application and enthusiasm. ‘I love this life’, he wrote to Joan, ‘and hate the idea of leaving it. I’ve discovered that I can write absolutely the whole day long with the utmost enjoyment, settled quietly in the country … How different writing a book is to writing articles! If ever the Muse flags, I nip into the dining room and swallow a coup de rouge …’6

  He stayed at Gadencourt as long as he could, and then returned to Paris and the Louisiane. When not writing, he was rereading Gide – Paludes and Les Caves du Vatican; and it was around this time that he discovered the work of J.-K. Huysmans, who was to have a profound effect.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) had been a follower of Zola and the Naturalists, until his novel A Rebours shocked Paris with its misanthropic decadence. He went on to plumb the darkest pits of depravity in Là-Bas, a fictional study of Satanism, and eventually returned to the Catholicism he had abandoned in his youth. Yet he held modern priests in contempt, with their veal-broth sermons and their bourgeois God, venerating instead the saints of the medieval church, who practised years of self-mortification in order to curb the cravings of the flesh.

  Huysmans’ works led Paddy into a study of French monasticism and religious ecstasy, which – in different form – he had witnessed in Haiti. Above all, he was exhilarated by the author’s style. Here was someone who could take eight pages to describe the effects of dawn breaking inside Chartres Cathedral, with an almost hallucinatory intensity; someone who, like Proust, use
d lists of things to build up layers of images; someone who could describe plainchant as architecture, just as (decades later) Paddy was to describe the Baroque architecture of Melk in musical terms.

  They had another bond; for Huysmans, like Paddy, struggled with bouts of depression. The confident start he had made on The Traveller’s Tree at Gadencourt had turned into a jumble of fragments: in fact he had so much material that he felt he could make a further two books of it, one on Central America and one on Mayan civilization. Part of his absorption with Huysmans and religion was, he knew, an escape. The pleasures of Paris at night were also becoming dangerously addictive. He had always resented going to bed, and revelled in the smoky world of tarts and nightclubs, all-night cafés, seedy bars and chance encounters. Nor had he lost his taste for pastrouma, the pungent dried meat he had first eaten in Bulgaria. ‘A lump of camel’, as he called it, was often on the menu of the small Cretan restaurant where he was a regular.

  Someone had told him that the abbey of Saint-Wandrille in Normandy took in non-paying guests, even if their reasons for staying did not include religious retreat or instruction. In late September, he took a train from Paris to Rouen. The abbey had been founded in the seventh century, and its periods of prosperity alternated with periods of pillage, destruction and fire. During the battle for Normandy in 1944, its seventeenth-century buildings had been partly destroyed; but it was still home to some sixty or seventy monks.

  When Paddy turned up on the doorstep unannounced one Sunday afternoon, he had no idea whether the monks would be willing to take him in or not. But he was allowed in and shown to a cell, a high seventeenth-century room overlooking a courtyard. It contained a bed, a prie-dieu, a crucifix and a table. Meals were taken in silence, in the enormous refectory hall. Working at the coalface of salvation, the monks spent several hours a day in church, and several more in study, private prayer and meditation. All that was required of the guests was to obey the rules set out for them.

  How different the Benedictines were to the raki-swigging, pistol-packing, ballad-singing monks he had known in the monasteries of wartime Crete. These pale cowled figures, who were never seen to smile or frown, seemed to him barely alive. It was impossible to work in this suffocating, tomb-like place. By nine o’clock – just when his friends in Paris were beginning to think about how to spend the evening – the whole monastery was asleep. Paddy slept badly the first few nights, falling into deep wells of hopeless misery. By day he was restless and tired. This was followed by a period of intense lethargy, when he found himself – for almost the first time in his life – spending more hours asleep than awake.

  He emerged from this period of narcolepsy feeling not only refreshed, but revitalized in a way that was quite new to him. He began to understand how the monastic rule conserved energies that, in real life, were dissipated in ‘conversations at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo … This new dispensation left nineteen hours a day of absolute and god-like freedom.’7 Paddy spent it walking in the autumnal forests around the abbey, while at night he worked in front of the pile of manuscripts, maps of the Caribbean islands, and photographs of the Central American jungle.

  Almost a month was spent at Saint-Wandrille, which went from being a sepulchre to a sanctuary. He felt he could not impose on the monks much longer, but work was progressing and he did not want to break the monastic spell. It could also be that he was rather nervous of the direction Joan wanted their relationship to take. ‘I got the curse so late this month’, she wrote in one letter, ‘that I began to hope I was having a baby, and that you would have to make it into a legitimate little Fermor. All hopes ruined this morning.’8

  He returned to Paris filled with resolution, but soon felt the need for another monastic immersion. This time he went to the great monastery of Saint-Jean-de-Solesmes on the river Sarthe, where the tradition of plainchant had been revived under its founder, Dom Prosper Guéranger. Again the monks welcomed him, but ‘I’m not enjoying Solesmes quite as much as I did Saint-Wandrille … There are many more monks here, everything is much more organized and impersonal.’ The long cold passages, and the swing doors with frosted glass panes, gave him that sinking feeling of going back to school. However, ‘I am working like anything at the moment, and in spite of Benzers [benzedrine tablets, sent to him by Joan] I feel absolutely exhausted.’ In between bouts of writing he read in the vast and well-catalogued library. The books included ‘a Flemish medieval mystic called Ruysbroek, and St Angela of Foligno, who even surpasses Marie de l’Incarnation …’9

  During his stay a nervous young English monk arrived at the monastery. His name was Henry Joseph Campbell, and Paddy described him in A Time to Keep Silence. ‘Shot down in the war in the bomber he was piloting, he had studied, after his release from a German prisoner-of-war camp, for the Anglican ministry. He had then gone over to Rome and plunged into the depths of a Trappist monastery.’10 His letter to Joan filled in the details of the young monk’s experience at Timadeuc, the most austere of the Trappist foundations in France. ‘It wasn’t the dead silence … that got him down, so much as the gruelling work in the fields … living the life of a navvy without a single moment’s solitude … He looks a nervous wreck, wild eyes, chapped hands and broken nails, talks the whole time … He has the most dreadful doubts every now and then, and careers into my cell to ask for advice.’11

  While Paddy was listening to this troubled young man, Joan was missing her lover. ‘I was beset with doubts and gloom at the thought that you must be concocting some appalling letter saying you never wanted to see me again … Darling Angel I am longing to see you again so much and I do think it would be lovely to get married awfully soon. I don’t think we will ever get anywhere the way we live at the moment and I’m sure we shan’t feel any more tied than we are already.’12 Paddy, struggling with his own demons and uncertain if he would ever succeed as a writer, was in no mood to respond.

  In the second half of December, he spent ten days in the monastery of La Grande Trappe in Normandy, home to the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance. The Trappist life is one of continual prayer and total silence. Even Huysmans, when he came to La Grande Trappe, warned his spiritual adviser that it would be a short visit: he had heard that the vegetables were cooked in nothing but water.

  Paddy was shown into a bare, freezing cell; he had no contact with the monks; his cheerless meals were eaten alone, listening to the reading from the refectory on a loudspeaker. The Trappists spent seven hours a day standing or kneeling in their Victorian Gothic church, which Paddy described as ‘a great, dark, north-Oxford nightmare’.13 Yet two days of low spirits gave way to a calmer mood, and ‘a kind of masochistic enjoyment of the sad charm of the Trappe’.14

  He understood that every monk’s life was one of perpetual penance and sacrifice, accompanied by titanic struggles with doubt and temptation – torments that no monk was ever free from. Thinking of Henry Campbell, Paddy wondered what damage such stress might inflict on the psyche. ‘Can so many human instincts be seized like a handful of snakes, tied up in a sack, and locked away, alive and squirming, for a lifetime?’15Yet the guest master and the Abbot, who were the only monks permitted to talk to him, seemed remarkably healthy and normal.

  It was almost Christmas when he left La Grande Trappe, and travelled back to Paris by bus with the Abbot. As the rain scuttled across the steamy windows, the Abbot spoke of his brief wartime service as an infantry officer and a POW, till he returned to his abbey at the armistice. ‘Everything in his face’, wrote Paddy, ‘and the slight Breton accent of his voice revealed a thoughtful and sober alacrity, leavened occasionally by a deep quiet laugh.’16

  In the articles he wrote about these three monasteries, Paddy’s own religious feelings are scarcely mentioned. He was grateful to the abbots, guest masters and librarians with whom he conversed for never raising so embarrassing a
subject, and silently hopes his reader will show the same tact. Almost none of his subsequent writings show anything like the same level of introspection, and certain passages seem to yearn for a deeper spiritual experience, like a thirsty man in the desert gazing at what might be an oasis or a mirage. For the monks the oasis was very real but for Paddy, in spite of his yearnings, it remained a mirage.

  Yet the weeks he spent in these French monasteries had made a profound impression. From time to time throughout his life he would re-immerse himself in their austere tranquillity, and something in his nature needed these retreats. He found the company of monks both restful and intellectually exhilarating, and he admired and respected the choice they had made. Above all, they made him aware of how much better he worked when away from the bright lights. From now on he would try and do all his serious writing in a quiet place, removed from bustle and temptation.

  In Enemies of Promise (1938), Cyril Connolly advised the ambitious writer to resist the temptation to find a day job, that sapper of creative energy, no matter how broke he was. It was never much of a temptation to Paddy. All his life he had lived on a shoestring, and he was not afraid of penury or discomfort. But over the next year or so, he was under great strain to complete his first book. At the same time he had no money coming in, and was relying on Joan to tide him over: it was not an easy time for either of them.