Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Some of their friends came to visit, bringing more than a whiff of glamour to this remote region. A letter here describes the arrival of the shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos by helicopter, which created a sensation when it landed in the Kardamyli market square. Twice Lady Diana Cooper whisked Paddy off for a cruise of the Aegean in Niarchos’s second best yacht, Eros II. Others came to stay, sometimes for weeks at a time, visitors ranging from John Betjeman to Bruce Chatwin. But much of the time Paddy and Joan were alone at Kardamyli, with just each other and their cats for company, enjoying simple pleasures such as swimming and reading. One letter here tells of surfacing after diving into the sea and almost colliding with a kingfisher, which Paddy watched from a floating position for twenty minutes or so. Another tells of losing his way on an evening walk in the mountains, fighting through the maquis and stumbling down a deep ravine as night fell, trying to stave off panic.

  Plenty of stories are recounted in these letters, often very funny ones: an evening with the eccentric Lady Wentworth, then in her eighties, who insisted that her young male guests join her at billiards, and trounced them; the hunt for Byron’s slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; a disastrous visit to Somerset Maugham’s Villa Mauresque. The incongruity of a film crew, headed by the maverick director John Huston, and a starry cast that included Trevor Howard, Juliette Gréco and Errol Flynn, on location in darkest Africa is explored in three letters from a former French colonial territory, now Cameroon. Paddy was there in his temporary capacity as screenwriter, since he had adapted the novel on which the film was based for the screen. Another letter relates the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe’s abduction. On location in the French Alps Paddy met a screen version of himself. ‘It was all pretty queer,’ he writes to Debo Devonshire. ‘Dirk Bogarde, the actor who is doing one in the film, is absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking-voice and manner, a super-gent, the ghost of oneself twelve years ago.’

  It would be foolish to deny that Paddy had a romantic interest in aristocracy, and all its paraphernalia: genealogy, heraldry, and the rest. Yet if this was snobbery, it was of a comparatively innocuous kind. There was nothing oleaginous in Paddy’s relations with his betters. Nor was there any superciliousness towards the lower classes. Paddy was at ease in any company: he could walk into a simple taverna and soon have everyone singing. He took delight in servants who spoke their minds to their masters, such as the Marquess of Bath’s butler, whose pointed remarks to His Lordship are repeated here in a letter to Joan. Paddy’s letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a walk in the woods with Harold Macmillan, or conversation over dinner with Camilla Parker-Bowles, for example; but also of the humble: a ‘picknick’ with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a day spent with a lonely chambermaid in Saint-Émilion. In a letter to Xan Fielding early in 1972, Paddy reports on a long ‘colloquy’ in a pub in the Bogside area of ‘Free Derry’, with a spokesman for the Provisional IRA (‘Don’t open your mouth on the way out, for Christ’s sake!’, were the IRA man’s parting words), before going on to spend a few days at Chatsworth. Two more different worlds could scarcely be imagined.

  ‘He was the most English person I ever met,’ recalled Agnes ‘Magouche’ Phillips, later Xan Fielding’s second wife: ‘Everything was ripping, and there was more talk of P. G. Wodehouse than of Horace or Gibbon.’ Indeed, Paddy himself was something of a Wodehouse hero, in his boyish manner, his innocence, his gentleness, his playfulness with language, his sense of fun, and his tendency to get into scrapes, particularly when driving. (Letters here describe a crash when his car turned over, bashing a wall to escape a head-on collision, and the car being destroyed by a bomb.) There is an absence of malice in his writing, and a related unwillingness to offend. Several letters in this volume express anxiety that casual comments made in private correspondence may wound if broadcast. Towards the end of his life he began to edit those of his own letters in his possession, censoring passages that might cause upset, and adding the occasional explanatory note for his biographer, Artemis Cooper.

  Paddy was a philhellene, who lived in Greece for most of his life. Among the letters here are accounts of exuberant jamborees with his old comrades from the Cretan resistance, most of them simple shepherds, with whom he felt the kind of kinship that can be formed only when men experience tragedy and danger together. In Athens after the war Paddy formed close and enduring friendships with Greek artists and intellectuals, especially the poet George Seferis, the painter Niko Ghika and the ‘Colossus’ of letters, George Katsimbalis; but in the mid 1950s these became strained by the Cyprus emergency. This was ‘an argument among friends’: two nations, Britain and Greece, which had enjoyed a long history as allies. It was understandable that Greeks should feel a claim on British sympathies, since only a decade earlier, in 1940–1, they had been the only other people fighting Axis troops on the continent of Europe. Paddy felt a conflict of loyalties, between the country of his birth and the country he had made his home. The enmity was such that he felt obliged to quit Greece for a while. His distress is expressed in agonised letters written at the time to his Greek friends, to Lawrence Durrell, and to others.

  In general, Paddy was not a political person. An instinctive, old-fashioned conservative, he took little interest in politics except when it touched him in some way. As a young man travelling through Germany in the mid 1930s he had disliked the Nazis he encountered because of their crudeness and their anti-Semitism, but he was indifferent to their rhetoric. In 1967 he reacted cautiously to the military takeover in Greece, the so-called ‘Colonels’ coup’. In a letter to Joan, who was in England at the time, he suggests that she may know more about what is happening than he does. ‘All my spontaneous sympathies (in spite of my official views generally) are against the coup,’ he wrote, ‘largely because those in the provinces who welcome it are . . . the people one likes least in Greece.’ During the regime of ‘the Colonels’ he became friendly with Tzannis Tzannetakis, then in political exile, and a prominent politician (briefly prime minister) once democracy had been restored.

  Paddy was certainly no xenophobe. In a letter written to Rudi Fischer in October 2001 after the attack on the twin towers in New York, he dissents from the description of the terrorists as ‘cowards’, and refers to President Bush’s call for a ‘crusade’ as a ‘gaffe’.

  Paddy’s magpie mind is evident in his letters. Before setting out on his ‘Great Trudge’ he had packed The Oxford Book of English Verse in his rucksack, and on the walk had committed much to memory, so that he could recite great chunks of poetry, more or less accurately, at will. He would continue to read widely throughout his life, and was able to retain much: repeatedly topping up a cornucopia of knowledge that overflowed into his correspondence. ‘I wonder if you fully realised that Harun-al-Rashid sent an elephant called Abulahaz as a present to Charlemagne in AD 802?’ Paddy began one letter to Diana Cooper. Perhaps she did realise this, but then again, perhaps she didn’t. In another letter to her, Paddy points to ‘the enormous amount of buried quotation’ in Raymond Asquith’s letters to his wife, ‘which must mean a vast quantity of shared poetry which was in daily use, and pointless if the other correspondent couldn’t spot it’. There is an enormous amount of buried quotation in Paddy’s letters too, and one suspects that a signifi cant proportion of this went unrecognised by their recipients. Undoubtedly some will have escaped the editor of this volume.

  The letters themselves tell us something of the circumstances in which they were written. The first of Paddy’s letters to Balasha in this volume was begun on Easter Saturday, sitting at a café by the waterside; the first letter to Joan was written at a desk in his bedroom at the monastery of Saint-Wandrille, and he stays up until 4.00 in the morning to finish it. Just as Paddy finishes a long letter to his lover Lyndall Birch on an hotel terrace, a gust of wind sweeps the sheets off the table, and he scrambles to save them, ‘before they took wing over the balustrade down throug
h the circling wood pigeons to lose themselves below among the ilexes and elderflowers’. Once Paddy was settled at Kardamyli, he seems to have developed a routine of rising early to work, writing letters in the afternoon; they often refer to the need to finish before the post departs (‘dashing for the post’). A postscript to a letter to Balasha tells how he had strolled into the village to post it and then reopened the envelope, after finding letters from her waiting there: he explains that he is ‘scribbling this in the kafeneion, but must stop it now and post it, as the postman is rolling his eyes and tapping his fingers in mock impatience!’

  Almost all of Paddy’s letters were written by hand, though a handful were then corrected and typed. Some are very long, ten tightly written pages or more; many of those included in this volume have been edited to remove ephemeral content or other material of little interest to the general reader. A few have been edited to half their original length, or even less.

  The 174 letters included in this volume have been selected from a hoard (scattered across six countries) at least ten times their number. The standard is such that another editor might have chosen 174 different letters to make a selection of equal quality – and perhaps more will be published in due course. Undoubtedly further letters survive which this editor has not seen, and of course many more must have been discarded or lost over the years. A rough estimate suggests that Paddy wrote between five and ten thousand letters in his adult lifetime. That is an average of several letters a week – and of course, there would have been many weeks when he could not have written any, so the rest of the time he must have been writing more. When one reflects on this, what is most striking is the sheer amount of time and effort Paddy devoted to writing letters. Since many of them record his unhappiness at failing to fulfil his promises to his publisher (not to mention his bank manager), one is forced to conclude that writing letters took up time he could have spent writing books. But was this such a bad thing? Of course, it was regrettable that Paddy never completed his trilogy, and perhaps sadder still that the evening of his life was darkened by anxiety about the unfinished work.

  Yet we may take a different view. The letters may sometimes be penned in haste (or even ‘in tearing haste’), but they are written in a free-flowing prose that is easier and more entertaining to read than the baroque style of his books, which can seem convoluted and overworked. I would argue that Paddy’s correspondence is part of his oeuvre, worthy to take its place alongside the work that he published in his lifetime. Now that we can read his letters at length, we can judge their worth. At their best, they are as good as any in the language. They are utterly distinctive: Paddy’s personality shines through them. His letters are exhilarating; to borrow an expression he liked to use, they are absolutely ‘tip-top’.

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to thank Patrick Leigh Fermor’s literary executors – Artemis Cooper, Olivia Stewart and Colin Thubron – for asking me to undertake this work. Each has helped me in various ways, and I am extremely grateful to all three of them. I am especially grateful to Artemis Cooper for her assistance throughout. As Paddy’s biographer she knows more about my subject than anyone else alive.

  I am also grateful to Artemis for reading the text of this book and providing me with her comments and corrections – as did John Julius Norwich. Since he was the first person to read this book in draft, his enthusiastic comments were particularly encouraging. Two other readers performed this invaluable service for me: Charlotte Mosley, editor of In Tearing Haste, Paddy’s correspondence with Debo Devonshire, answered some detailed queries and provided useful general recommendations; and my old friend Henry Woudhysen provided pages of detailed notes, demonstrating once again that he is not only a fine scholar but also an excellent editor. Colin Thubron and William Blacker read the proofs, and saved me from several blunders. I must state, however, that any mistakes in the book are my sole responsibility.

  In compiling a volume of this kind an editor incurs many debts. My hunt for Paddy’s letters has ranged across two continents, and taken me to locations I should otherwise never have seen – a castle perched on a cliff in Tuscany, an apartment overlooking the Tiber in Rome, a romantic Wiltshire garden, the terrace of one of England’s grandest houses; and many other interesting locations. I remember, in particular, a day in a Budapest flat with the late Rudi Fischer and his wife Dagmar, who fortified me throughout with strudel and Transylvanian schnapps (tuica). I also recall lunch at a taverna in Athens where the two of us consumed three carafes of retsina. I am grateful to all those who made me welcome, listed below. I am especially grateful to Myrto Kaouki and Irini Geroulanou of the Benaki Library for allowing me to stay at Paddy’s house at Kardamyli, and to Elpida Beloyannis for making my stay so comfortable.

  I want to thank the following individuals for supplying me with letters: William Blacker, Hugh and Gabriella Bullock, Max Egremont, Dagmar von Errfa, the late Rudi Fischer, Denise Harvey, Philippa Jellicoe, George Katsimbalis Jr., John Julius Norwich, Janetta Parladé, David Pryce-Jones, Avi Sharon, Ann Shukman and Petros Tzannetakis. A private collector in Scotland allowed me to transcribe a manuscript letter to Harold Nicolson in his possession. Lyndall Passerini-Hopkinson (Lyndall Birch) patiently answered my queries about Paddy’s letters to her. Dr Christine Kenyon Jones kindly gave me advice on Byron’s portraits.

  I am grateful to Ioanna Providi, former archivist at the Ghika Gallery in Athens and editor of a forthcoming volume of correspondence between Paddy and Niko Ghika, for showing me a selection of letters from the work, and for allowing me to print three of them in this book; and to her successor Ioanna Moraiti for facilitating this. I am grateful also to Anna Londou, stepdaughter of George Seferis, and to Professor Fotios Dimitrakopoulos and Vassiliki D. Lambropoulou, editors of a volume of correspondence between Paddy, Joan and Seferis published in 2007 by the Cyprus Research Centre, for permission to publish two letters from that volume.

  I particularly want to thank David McClay and his colleagues at the National Library of Scotland, where Paddy’s archive is kept, as part of the John Murray archive. David exudes energy and enthusiasm, and has been exceptionally helpful to me in all sorts of ways. I should like to acknowledge the work of David’s colleague Graham Stewart, who compiled the inventory of Paddy’s archive; and Simon Fenwick, who did much of the initial sorting and sifting. I should also like to thank the following archivists and archives for supplying me with copies of Paddy’s letters and giving me permission to publish them: John Frederick and the Special Collections and University Archives of the McPherson Library of the University of Victoria, for access to the papers of John Betjeman; the Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, for access to the Lawrence Durrell Papers; the estate of Enrica Soma Huston; Gayle Richardson of the Huntington Library in California for access to Patrick Kinross’s papers; Helen Marchant, James Towe and the Mitford Archive at Chatsworth for access to the papers of the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, and her sister Nancy Mitford; the Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, for access to the papers of Raymond Mortimer; Peter Monteith and the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, for access to the papers of Frances Partridge and ‘Dadie’ Rylands; and Elizabeth L. Garver of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, for access to the papers of Freya Stark.

  I want to extend special thanks to John and Virginia Murray for their hospitality at the John Murray building in Albemarle Street during the days when I was there. It seemed appropriate to be reading Paddy’s letters to John’s father in the very room where Paddy himself had often laboured on his own manuscripts. If I needed inspiration, his portrait by Derek Hill hung on the staircase outside.

  I am much indebted to Peter Mackridge, Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at Oxford, who translated all Paddy’s Greek and provided me with transcriptions.

  I also want to thank Ceri Evans for her stalwart help with the transcription. Mu
ch of what she typed might as well have been written in Rumanian in that it was so far from her own experience, but she did an excellent job all the same.

  I should like to thank Roland Philipps for his calm editorial guidance; Caroline Westmore for her assured and skilful handling of the mechanics of turning the typescript into a printed book; Juliet Brightmore for expert picture research; Hilary Hammond for copy-editing and making helpful suggestions; Jane Birkett for proofreading; and my old friend Douglas Matthews, for compiling the index. I also wish to thank my agent, Andrew Wylie, and Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency, for their steadfast support.

  Editorial Note

  Readers should be aware that Paddy’s letters are not necessarily reproduced in full: I have chosen to omit long travelogues and the more mundane passages which often refer to practical arrangements of ephemeral interest. Excisions are indicated by ellipses. I have taken it upon myself to correct Paddy’s spelling errors, particularly in the use of foreign words and names, though I decided to retain his delightful spelling of ‘picknick’. I have also standardised his somewhat erratic punctuation. As he himself would frequently lament, his handwriting is notoriously difficult to decipher, so I have sometimes been obliged to resort to guesswork, and no doubt my guesses have been wrong on occasion. A few words have remained stubbornly illegible. I have used square brackets for simple translations or other brief expository material, to avoid unnecessary annotation. Words that Paddy underlined are usually presented in italics, to conform to standard publishers’ practice. My own footnotes are listed numerically at the end of each letter; I have retained a few of Paddy’s footnotes, which are indicated with an asterisk and printed at the foot of the page.