One spur to completing the work was the prospect of joining Diana Cooper, who had been lent the Eros II: Stavros Niarchos’s second-best yacht, that is, with a crew of eight to take Diana and her friends anywhere she wanted to go. For this Diana had to thank her friend Pamela Churchill, who was having an affair with Niarchos (after her break-up with Elie de Rothschild, and before her marriage to Leland Hayward). Diana had asked Paddy to help her construct the itinerary and join the party, and he was very keen on the idea. ‘I have hopes of being finished by then, and ceasing to be a bore to you, Joan and all one’s friends. It has been really intolerable … I’ve got to shed my burden (like Christian after the Slough of Despond) before being free again. I wish I wrote faster.’16
Paddy had been based in Hydra now for over a year. The Ghikas begged him to stay on but he was beginning to feel stale there, and the Cyprus situation was poisoning everyday life. When an official in the Greek Aliens Office attempted to have him and several other British nationals expelled, he took the matter straight to his old friend Panayiotis Canellopoulos, then vice-premier. Canellopoulos ‘was furious. So all is well now. But it was awfully worrying and humiliating and angering and illogical while it lasted.’17
On 12 September, the voyage of the Eros II began. On board were Diana; her son John Julius, a young diplomat recently posted to Belgrade, and his wife Anne; Paddy and Joan; and Frank and Kitty Giles, who had known Diana in her embassy days when Frank had been Paris correspondent for The Times. Paddy’s itinerary took them through the Cyclades and the Dodecanese, to Chios and Psara off the west coast of Turkey, and, Syros, Skopelos and Skiathos in the northern Sporades. For John Julius, Paddy’s company was a revelation. His knowledge of Greece was encyclopaedic, but ‘nobody has ever carried his knowledge so lightly, nobody has ever seemed less like a scholar.’18
The English visitors were not always welcome as they toured the islands, for the problem of Cyprus was entering a new and darker phase. In late August Harold Macmillan, the new Foreign Secretary, had called a conference on Cyprus with Britain, Greece and – for the first time – Turkey at the table. By including Turkey, Macmillan hoped to internationalize the discussion and weaken the Greek position. In the end, it weakened the British position too, and created a new set of tensions. The cordial relations that had existed between Greece and Turkey between 1930 and 1955 turned to ashes in the wake of savage anti-Greek riots in Istanbul in September, where Greek churches were singled out for destruction. Meanwhile, anti-British resentment in Greece rose to new levels of bitterness.
Sometimes, as they entered a taverna, people would stop talking and a chill would fall around the strangers. On one or two occasions, a lone voice would start singing the ‘Hymn to Freedom’, and every Greek would stand up and join in. The Greek national anthem consists of the first two verses of this long poem by Dionysios Solomos; but when Paddy joined in, he sang a great many more verses – belting them out with his hand on his heart as everyone lapsed into uncomfortable silence. Did this emphatic display of support for Greece make the English interlopers more popular? John Julius, a devoted fan of Paddy’s, thought it did; Frank Giles thought the opposite.
Cyprus had also come between Paddy and Katsimbalis, who were now embroiled in what Seferis called ‘Homeric quarrels’.19 In one particularly heated exchange, Paddy supported, if not the British government’s position, then at least its good faith. But Katsimbalis was outraged by his ‘infinite admiration for Mr Macmillan and Mr Eden, and your blind loyalty to English diplomacy. It was impossible for you to accept that … the Foreign Office planned and provoked the Turks to act against us so they can hide behind them and never solve the Cyprus problem.’20 Another bone of contention was the EOKA rebels. Paddy considered them terrorists, whilst Katsimbalis thought they had as much right to use violence as Paddy and the Cretans had during the German occupation. Seferis agreed: he believed that EOKA was ‘a resistance movement of the pure type which has been experienced by Paddy and so many others when we were fighting together’.21 Even Crete seemed anti-British now. Paddy had given a friend of his, the diplomat Fred Warner, a letter to open doors as he walked around the island: ‘Apart from the villages where I sent him, where they were polite and hospitable, there was coldness, suspicion and hostility all the way.’22
Joan poured out her misery to Seferis: ‘I am in such despair about it all, I find it almost impossible to write to you and anyway you may tear the letter up unread. George Katsimbalis refused to dine with Paddy and me on my last night in Athens, which upset me dreadfully … What are we to do? I can’t think about it any more without bursting into tears …’23
Seferis did not tear up her letter. ‘All of us in Greece have been through very difficult moments since September,’ he wrote back, ‘and the despairing thing is that the situation does not improve. I have never felt more than now the need of friends, and you are Joan, one of my best.’24 Paddy too could think of little else. As he wrote to Jock, ‘the mess we have both (but mostly we) made of it begins to develop into a kind of obsessive and paralyzing compound of anger and gloom. I find myself struggling with a long article (I don’t know who for) about Cyprus – roughly, a plea that we should change our entire policy there – I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything until it’s off my chest.’25
The article appeared in two parts, on 9 and 16 December 1955, in the Spectator. It was the most passionately political article that Paddy ever wrote. He argued that the British position in the eastern Mediterranean would be far stronger with Greece on our side, and Britain’s refusal to discuss the matter ‘seemed evasive, graceless and insulting’. He deplored the ‘incendiary broadcasts’ made from Athens to Cyprus, which had raised the level of anti-British hatred.
But it was depressing, at the trial in Paphos last year, to see that the caique-skipper, the sailors and the shore party in the dock for running explosives into the island for use against the British were exactly the same hardy type of Greek … that used not only to help us run guns and agents against the Germans … but befriend and shelter the straggling remnant of our defeated army at appalling risk.26
Evidently Seferis and Katsimbalis had gone some way to revising his opinion, if not of EOKA’s methods, then of the purity of its intentions. The only just and sensible way out was to cede Cyprus to Greece without further ado. Yet his condemnation of the bloodshed and destruction caused by current British policy in Cyprus suggests to the reader that it was perhaps too late for such a civilized solution.
He stayed on a week in Athens after the Eros party broke up, and made up his quarrel with Katsimbalis. They lunched together three times: ‘he a bit hangdog and ashamed of his outburst’, Paddy reported to Diana in October 1955. Paddy also had to supervise the return of his books to England. He had several crates made, including one to contain his most recent purchase: the twenty-seven quarto volumes of the Great Greek Encyclopaedia. With this unwieldy luggage he now planned to cross Europe by train, and soon he was feeling like ‘a man carrying a grand piano across the Gobi desert’. The packing cases caused nothing but trouble and went astray in Belgrade, where John Julius was left to sort out the tangle of paperwork and send them on.
The article on Cyprus was written from Gadencourt, where he had settled down to what he hoped would be a long and productive bout of writing. He was cheered by the fact that the Rank Organization had finally bought the film rights to The Violins of Saint-Jacques – up to now they had only purchased options. This brought a windfall of about £1,000, which meant he could contribute more towards his mother’s maintenance – although as he explained to Vanessa, ‘a lot goes in taxes, and arrears of income tax of which I’ve never paid a penny, and debts which have been haunting me for years.’27
Despite the attention it received when it first came out, The Violins of Saint-Jacques was never made into a film. But a decade later its dramatic possibilities inspired the composer Malcolm Williamson, who turned it into an opera with a libretto by William Chappell. Paddy w
as very excited, and implored Diana to come and keep him company on its first night, at Sadler’s Wells, on 29 November 1966. ‘After all, it’s dedicated to you … which sort of makes you a sort of part-owner. I do wonder what it’ll be like.’28 The music critic Paul Conway described the score as ‘one of the composer’s most enjoyably eclectic, ranging from Brittenesque seascapes and Bergian Expressionist to Sullivan-like melodies’, which gives one an idea. It has never been revived.29
In the spring of 1956, Paddy made his first visit to Lismore Castle in Ireland, a romantic fortress that dominates a stretch of the river Blackwater in County Waterford. Built by King John and lived in by Sir Walter Raleigh, Lismore was the Irish country seat of the Dukes of Devonshire.
He had been invited to stay by his new friend, the young Duchess (Andrew Cavendish became the 11th Duke on the death of his father in 1950, his elder brother, William, having been killed in action in 1944). Born Deborah Mitford and known as Debo, it was said by her sister Nancy that she was stuck at the mental age of nine. Debo did not mind. The youngest of seven children, her siblings had given her no reason to believe that growing up made one any wiser. Paddy was to become a great friend of both Devonshires, but he did not appreciate the full range of Debo’s originality till he came to stay at Lismore.
He described her as ‘funny, touching, ravishing and enslaving … With all this, there was another quality that I like better than anything, a wonderful and disarming unguardedness in conversation, and an intuitive knack … for people’s moods and feelings.’30 Since she was five years younger than Paddy and as pleased with him as he was with her, many people have wondered whether they were lovers at some point, but the balance of informed opinion seems to doubt it.
From Lismore he returned to Gadencourt, where he set to work revising the text of A Time to Keep Silence. Jock Murray wanted to republish this the following year, since Paddy was still so embroiled in Mani that there was no hope of that book coming out in the spring. He had also been working on two other pieces. One was a long essay on Nico Ghika, in what Cyril Connolly would call the Mandarin style, which was published in Encounter the following year as ‘The Background of Ghika: Thoughts on a Greek Landscape’.31
The other was called ‘Sounds of the Greek World’, a long prose poem which he had begun in Hydra. Every city, island, mountain and valley that Paddy can think of holds a ‘sound’: not just something heard, but an image or an allusion to something read or experienced:
Salonika is an argument over a bill of lading, a Ladino greeting outside a synagogue; Volo, the smack of backgammon counters, Patras, the grate of cranes unloading, Samos, the bubbling of a narghilé. Kalamata is the heel slapped in the Romaïc dance …
Bassae and Sunium are the noise of the wind like panpipes through fluted pilars, Nemea the rumble of a column’s collapse. Naoussa is the thud of a falling apple, Edessa a waterfall, Kavalla the drop of an amber bead. Metsovo is a burning pine cone, Samarina a voice in Vlach, Tzoumerka a wolf ’s howl.
The climax of the poem is a list of linguistic, semantic and metrical terms that reflect the richness of the Greek language:
for the flexibility of accidence,
the congruence of syntax
and the confluence of its crasis;
for the fluctuating of enclitic and proclitic,
for the halt of cæsuræ and the flight of the digamma,
for the ruffle of hard and soft breathings,
for its liquid syllables and the collusion of dipthongs,
for the receding tide of proparoxytones
and the hollowness of perispomena stalactitic with subscripts,
for the inconsequence of anacolouthon,
the economy of synecdoche,
the compression of hendiadys
and the extravagance of its epithets,
for the embrace of zeugma,
for the abruptness of asyndeton, for the swell of hyperbole
and the challenge of apostrophe, for the splash and the boom and the clamour and the echo and the murmur of onomatopæa …32
All find their echo in the million different sounds of the sea as it washes over the stones and pebbles, rocks and chasms of the Greek coastline. And yet, although the poem is filled with human songs and sounds and activities, it is devoid of people: as though he was describing Greece with his eyes closed, looking at an inner landscape filled with fragments of experience, poetry, books, myths – a landscape of memory, in other words. A Greek landscape that existed before the Cyprus débâcle left its bitter taste on everything, and might exist again.
17
In Africa and Italy
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had bought the rights to Ill Met by Moonlight and wrote the script in tandem, but it was always Powell’s project. He was passionate about the story, and very disappointed that they had been forbidden to make the film in Greece, because Cyprus was still poisoning Anglo-Greek relations. Instead they decided to shoot it in the Alpes Maritimes, in the rocky country above Menton.
Paddy was flattered that Dirk Bogarde was chosen to play the part of Major Leigh Fermor, and gratified that the job of technical adviser had, on his recommendation, gone to Xan Fielding. Xan, his wife Daphne (who was ‘a bit gone on Dirk’, as Paddy reported to Debo1), with Dirk Bogarde and his life-long partner Tony Forwood, made an inseparable quartet that summer.
In mid-August Paddy joined the film set, and was rather alarmed when Powell told him what was being planned.
Some bits – not yet filmed, unfortunately – turn Bogarde-Fermor into a mixture of Garth [strip-cartoon hero in the Daily Mirror] and Superman, shooting Germans clean through the breast from a dentist’s chair, strangling sentries in an off-hand manner – all totally fictitious! I’m having a terrific tussle getting them to change these bits in the film, not because I really mind, but because anyone who also knows anything about the operation knows that it’s all rot.2
After a week he moved south-west to Auribeau-sur-Siagne, to a little inn where he had worked on The Traveller’s Tree. When it grew too hot, he would plunge into the dark pools of the river Siagne that curled below, but most of his waking hours were involved in what he called ‘the death-grapple with my book’.3 This burst of industry was brought to an abrupt end by a telephone call from Ann Fleming.
Ann had been invited to stay at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat by Somerset Maugham, then in his eighties and living in retirement with his partner, Alan Searle. On her arrival she found a letter from Paddy, urging her to arrange an invitation. Paddy was duly invited to lunch, and arrived (according to Ann) with ‘five cabin trunks’ (according to Paddy, all he had was one zippered holdall), ‘parcels of books and the manuscript of his unfinished work on Greece strapped in a bursting attaché case’.4 Paddy made himself very agreeable at lunch. He and Maugham exchanged memories of the King’s School, Canterbury, and Maugham asked him to stay on for a few days. All went well until dinner that night.
Maugham had lived with a pronounced stammer since childhood. In his novel Of Human Bondage, which deals with the misery of his schooldays, the stammer is turned into a limp. Paddy knew the book and had been hearing the stammer all day, but neither sufficed to stop him from putting his foot in it. The first jokey reference to stuttering passed without comment, but the second was more serious. Maugham had just staggered through a sentence to the effect that all the gardeners had taken the day off because it was the Feast of the Assumption. At this point, Paddy recalled being in the Louvre in front of a painting of the event, with his friend Robin Fedden (who also had trouble getting his words out): ‘and Robin turned to me and said “Th-th-that’s what I c-c-call an un-w-w-warrantable assumption.” There was a moment’s silence – the time needed for biting one’s tongue out.’5
The evening was wrecked. When the other guests left, Maugham turned to Paddy and said, ‘G-goodbye, you will have left by the time I am up in the morning.’ After their host had retired, Ann described Paddy breaking the silence with a cry of
anguish, as he slammed his whisky glass on the table ‘where it broke to pieces and showered a valuable carpet with blood and splinters’.6 Ann helped Paddy pack the following morning, and as he picked up his bag and walked to the door, Paddy heard ‘a sound like an ogre’s sneeze’. The monogrammed linen sheet had caught in the zip, leaving a great tear a yard long.
Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper, who was staying nearby, persuaded Maugham to have Paddy back to lunch to make up. ‘It was really a gasbag’s penance and I, having learnt the hard way, vouchsafed no more than a few syllables.’7 Maugham was perfectly polite, but he had had enough of Paddy. He was later heard to describe him as ‘that middle-class gigolo for upper-class women’.
Stavros Niarchos had once again lent Diana his yacht, the Eros II. This time the party consisted of Diana, Paddy and Joan, Frank and Kitty Giles, and Alan Pryce-Jones, editor of the Times Literary Supplement who had briefly been engaged to Joan. The Eros took them into a part of the Mediterranean that Paddy had never explored: to Corsica, Sardinia, Elba and the little islands in between. In Corsica he visited the village of Cargese which had been colonized by emigrants from the Mani in the seventeenth century, and he was very excited to find two old women who still spoke fluent Greek. ‘A number of Corsican words had crept in but it was unmistakably Maniot, with many rustic turns of phrase that have been lost in the Mani.’8
The filming of Ill Met by Moonlight was finished that autumn at Pinewood Studios, which he visited from Devon where he had gone to write. He made light of it to Diana and Debo: ‘I’ve just spent two days trying to teach Cypriots … to talk Cretan dialect (which involved changing the syntax of the whole dialogue) with a Cretan accent, which is like teaching someone from Lincolnshire to speak in the accent of Co. Galway.’9 He also had to do ‘all the Greek-speaking bits done by Dirk, i.e. he makes the shapes with his mouth, laughs superciliously, lifts his eyebrows or shouts at the top of his voice – all in dead silence – while I, concealed in a bush, make all the noises …’10
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 34