Our travels took us thence to Samos, Chios, Mytilene, Kavalla, Salonika, and all western Macedonia to the Serbian and Albanian frontiers, where the villages are inhabited by Greeks, Macedonian-Slavs, gypsies, Sephardic Jews, Koutsovlachs, Karakatchamis, Albanians, an occasional Pomak or Turk, and refugees from the Pontus – Trapezuntines and Anatolians, and Caucasians. In the same kafenion [coffeehouse] you hear Greek, Lázika [Pontian], Rumanian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romany, Ladino [ Judaeo-Spanish], Russian, Georgian and Gheg [an Albanian dialect]. I hadn’t been in those parts since the Albanian war, and long to go again. It is wild, muddy, snowy and Balkanic; and quite unlike anywhere else in Greece. No time now to talk about the klephtopólemos [guerrilla war].
I’m leaving in about a fortnight, feeling angry, fed up, and older than the rocks on which I sit. Fucking shits. [5] But I am writing quite a lot, and enjoying it enormously. I have, not very originally, written a long thing about the islands, which I am sending you for criticism. [6] Please do so, could you Larry, if it is not too much of a bore for you. Write here if it will get me before the new year, if later, to the Travellers Club, Pall Mall, London SW1, Xan’s and my address. Have had two letters and some sample poetry, very good, from him.
Here are the photos, and very funny they are. Xan as Eros is brilliant. Don’t forget copies of the ones you took.
I am writing this from the stove-side in Joan’s room. We both think nostalgically of you and Eve among your turbaned monoliths, and send love and kisses and every kind wish for Christmas. Write quickly.
Love Paddy
[1] Yvette (Eve) Cohen, the model for the character of Justine in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet novels (1957–60), whom he would marry in 1947 after his divorce from his first wife.
[2] Nausicaa’s father is Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians (Odyssey, Book VII).
[3] The magician is counting up to ten.
[4] Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician (1929) is an allegory of the rise of fascism. The sorcerer Cipolia uses his hypnotic powers to mesmerise the people into subjugation.
[5] The British Council had decided that it no longer needed PLF’s services. Durrell would begin working for the British Council in 1947.
[6] This ‘long thing about the islands’ may never have been published.
The publisher ‘Jock’ Murray took an early interest in Paddy’s writing. Late in August 1947, Paddy called on him at the firm’s offices, No. 50 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly, to discuss the possibility of a book based on his travels in Greece. ‘There is no doubt that he can write though somewhat incoherently,’ Murray wrote in an internal memorandum afterwards. ‘The main problem will be to get such a book into some shape and give it a sense of purpose.’
First Paddy had another task to complete: he had agreed to write the captions and text for a book of photographs by his friend Costa Achillopoulos. As was often the case with Paddy, he exceeded his brief, captions usurping pictures, so that the work would eventually become a long travel book with accompanying photographs, published in December 1950 under the title The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands. This letter was written while Paddy was travelling in Central America with Joan Rayner to collect material for the book.
To Jock Murray
4 May 1948
El Vale
Panama
My dear Jock,
It was a lovely surprise, getting your Christmas greetings, and thank you so much for them. Owing to our erratic itinerary they arrived in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, in Holy Week: a wonderful baroque capital entirely, while we were there, populated by the images of saints, moving slowly along the streets on the shoulders of thousands of Indians, followed by the Doñas de Maria [devotees of the Virgin Mary], half-Indian, half-Spanish girls in black mantillas, thousands of them, smelling of camellias and incense, the young ones all doe-eyed and beautiful, but the older ones Goya abortionist hags. For a whole week the town was one enormous wound, and every itch in the palm seemed to herald the stigmata.
In Nicaragua, we sailed across the enormous lake of the same name, dotted with volcanic islands, and then for 200 miles down the Rio San Juan, running through a loathsome forest full of jaguars and parrots and toucans, to the Mosquito Coast, where, owing to the Costa Rican civil war, [1] we were marooned in a sodden little village of the delta called Barro de Colorado. This was beastly, the air was almost solid with insects, and we felt quite lost in the remote, desolate, sharky place. Joan and I found two horses, and went for rides along the reefs between the jungle and the sharks, splashing through the inlets and longing for the spikes with which the White Knight equipped his charger’s fetlocks, [2] indispensable for horsemen in these parts. We compared ourselves to Byron and Trelawny tittupping through the sedge of the Lido in mid-winter, quarrelled as to who was which, and ended up in furious silent gallops, speechless with affronts . . . Costa slipped away down the Caribbean coast while we were on one of these ausflugs [excursions], thinking we would follow next day. But the civil war stopped all sea-traffic, and his launch was kept out to sea by the revolutionary guns at Puerto Limon, while we made our way to the capital of Costa Rica for the last days of the war, and then to Panama, where we re-agglomerated for a day before he flew home. We leave on an Australian ship in three days’ time, and should be in England within three weeks.
Alas, 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 America Balkan [s] and a series of articles. But as soon as I have sloughed the literary commitments of this journey, I long to resume writing about Greece, and will certainly do so.
We must meet and dine as soon as we get back. Joan sends her love, and every kind wish to you both from me and to Peter upstairs. [3] Hoping to see you soon,
Yours ever
Paddy L. F.
[1] Approximately two thousand people are estimated to have died in this civil war, which lasted for only six weeks (12 March–24 April 1948).
[2] Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 6.
[3] As editor of the Cornhill magazine, PLF’s friend Peter Quennell had an office in the John Murray building.
Paddy had first met Joan Rayner in Cairo during the war. He was not the first to be struck by her beauty, and impressed by her calm, her good sense, and her intelligence. ‘Like all adorable people Joan Leigh Fermor had something enigmatic about her nature which, together with her wonderful good looks, made her a very seductive presence,’ wrote the artist John Craxton in an obituary published after her death in 2003 ( Independent, 10 June 2003). ‘She was also naturally self-effacing. Even in a crowd she maintained a deep and private inner self.’ She did not share Paddy’s love of society, often choosing to stay with her beloved brother Graham rather than join Paddy in house parties. ‘Paradoxically, she loved good company and long and lasting friendships,’ continued Craxton. ‘It was her elegance, luminous intelligence, curiosity, understanding and unerring high standards that made her such a perfect muse to her lifelong companion and husband Patrick Leigh Fermor, as well as friend and inspiration to a host of distinguished writers, philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians.’
Easily distracted, Paddy found it difficult to write in London, and sought out a succession of retreats where he could work in isolation. The next three letters are written from the monastery of Saint-Wandrille, the first a few days after his arrival there.
To Joan Rayner,
11 October 1948
Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille
Rancy
Seine Inférieure
My own darling,
Two lovely letters from you, hotfoot on each other’s traces! Aren’t these absences curious? The agony of waiting for letters, and, when they arrive, the sudden bomb-like detonation of delight. In a heautontimorumenos [1] kind of way, it’s almost worth it; but not quite. Darling are you really coming soon? Your first letter was awfully depressing, as if you were go
ing to let the Channel have its way forever, but things look better in today’s . . . Keep it up, darling! My sweet little bewildered thing, I really could eat you. . .
For some miraculous reason, and without my doing anything to remove its causes or exorcise it, my guilt has been evaporating this last week. I think it must be because I’m doing some work. Anyway, it’s put the roar of the chariot-wheels [2] temporarily out of earshot. Also because my nerves have become tremendously quiet, through silence, absence of stimulus and hangovers, and immediate causes for guilt. It seems to have cleared my mind, so that it is like the stillness of a room that has suddenly been evacuated by a hideous gang of urchins that, year in year out, do nothing but fight and scream and pull each other’s hair and sulk and fall over and blub and break things, so that the solitary grown-up in the corner has been capable of nothing but hiding his eyes and blocking up his ears. Drink and idleness and my bogus dogma of excess are to blame. Now that the surface is temporarily clear, ideas, letters, poems, books, even consecutive trains of thought, float to the top one by one . . . I almost feel at moments, that with an effort, my life need not necessarily be a failure. Then, like a distant, just-audible rumble over the horizon, I remember towns, ‘alcoholic my dear’, noctambulism, whorish anxieties about being liked, delights and disappointments about fifth-rate things, and the sort of general urban nervous frenzy of excitement and remorse that can, in twenty-six hours, smash up and bury a mood like my present one for months. Isn’t it idiotic? At times like this, I even feel capable of making you really happy, my darling, and covering you with sunshine as I always thought I could. At any rate, whatever happens, I can’t do without you, and I know, absolutely quietly and soberly, that I do love you, really, deeply and completely. For the last week or so, ever since passing through the miserable transition period, I have gone to bed, tired with work, at about midnight, and fallen asleep almost at once with my mind full of thoughts like these, longing for you to be here, but in a lovely calm, happy, confident way that I had forgotten all about; and slept with scarcely a dream crossing my mind; a miraculous light, innocent kind of sleep, as if my brain were a boat gliding across the deepest and smoothest of lakes, waking up as easily and inevitably as the faint touch of the keel on the sand of the opposite bank. My darling sweet Joan, I send you this quiet mood as present here and now. Please remember it when you go to bed, and imagine we’re curled up utterly happy and trusting and quiet, and that you are being kissed and looked after, and that I’m smoothing out your poor little tormented forehead, my poor angel. And then sink into sleep, and slide through the Horn Gate of happy dreams or dreamlessness. You have nothing to be guilty about me, indeed, 1,000 times the reverse. That’s a start for you! But don’t try and fight all these night-time tormentors. I’m sure it’s what they want – resistance, torture, turmoil. Lie down and feign dead, and let the whole loutish procession go storming and brawling over you, and way into the dark. . .
NON TIMEBIS A TIMORE NOCTURNO
[‘Do not be frightened by nightmares’]
The abbot [3] and I have become great friends. He is about sixty, and, in a frail way, very handsome. He speaks a little English, but fortunately very seldom, as his French is the best I’ve heard for ages, rather complicated and antique, in what they call a deep musical voice and scarcely ever a gesture, except, very occasionally, a slow marking time to his discourse with his right hand, out of an innocent kind of vanity, I suspect, because of his very long white fingers and enormous ring. His other hand vaguely toys with the gold cross round his neck. He is a doctor of philosophy, and has spent many years in Rome. Occasionally he lapses into Latin as if it is quite a normal procedure. It is the first time I have ever heard it spoken as a living language, and while he does this, I flog my brains to construct a sentence, feverishly trying to get the syntax right, usually a question that at last I enunciate with as much nonchalance as I can muster, to keep going the flow of this silvery monologue about the nature of Divine Grace, or how every action is ontologically good, and only morally good or bad . . . All this sounds as if he is an elaborate, perhaps affected creature, but he is, as a matter of fact, rather diffident and shy until he gets interested. These conversations take place walking from urn to urn under the beech-trees, in the library or walking round the cloisters. His theory about Marie de l’Incarnation [4] is that her writings look like love-letters because there is no vocabulary to express the intensity of divine or spiritual love, so all the mystics have been forced, by the violence of their feelings to resort to this equivocal kind of language, as there is no other. I suppose that is true, and may apply to Saint Teresa; but Marie de l’Incarnation! And if it’s true, what an appalling poverty in Christianity, not to have hacked out a convincing terminology for their most pressing needs. There is so much in Christianity that is unconvincing for the same reason. For instance, in its symbolism how vague and boring and unconvincing heaven, the prize and mainspring of the whole thing, is! Cities with jewelled streets, clouds, harps, angelic choirs – it doesn’t sound like a place one could tolerate for more than a week; and ‘oneness with God’, ‘the inexpressible felicity of the Divine Countenance in Eternity’ is not, except for a real mystic, much of a draw either. How very much better the Buddhists have managed here. And, to a certain extent, the wretched Mohammedans. And yet (in spite of the lameness and insipidity of the terms of reference) for religious people, the monks for instance, heaven is a real, infinitely desirable thing, and not just a non-hell. There has certainly been no fumbling about the terminology and the symbolism here; in fact hell is so real and charming that celestial symbolism, and all we can grasp about heaven, is, next to what we feel about hell, as pale and unreal as a toy ship beside a blast furnace. I suppose this is why death is always represented by scythes, skulls, hourglasses, flames, devils and pitchforks. Because the threat of hell carries weight for everybody who believes in the whole set-up, while the promise of heaven, except for an initiate, doesn’t. How negative and sloppy a predicament for a religion of love! It is this lame inadequate terminology that has turned so much of Christianity into a sad and forbidding thing.
Does the possibility of spending Eternity in the arms of your Maker excite you? Not particularly, as I understand it. Does burning forever in a lake of brimstone frighten you? Yes, yes, yes!
Saint Teresa and Marie de l’I, and people like that are positive, are on a better track, obviously: anyway, for a more exciting religious life in this world than the overwhelming mass of negative hell-funks. But after death they are swallowed up in the same nebulous ‘peace which passeth all understanding’ as any bourgeois who manages to skip hell, purgatory or limbo. Needed: somebody to make heaven as real as hell.
A thing that strikes me as really new and noble, and, as it were, aristocratic, is Saint Teresa in her absolute refusal to bargain with God. She did good and led a saintly life, not for the boring reason of doing good for good’s sake, nor above all, to stake a claim in heaven and avoid hell, but out of love for her divine sweetheart because good pleased Him, and [she] simply didn’t want to discuss or hear about what the rewards and risks were. Nor is there any of the tacit ‘I’ll leave it to you, and I’m sure you’ll behave handsomely and do the right thing by me when the time comes’ – to such an extent, that one almost feels she would feel happier if Hell, or intense suffering, or a sort of long-drawn-out Harikiri, would be the price of her love. Vivent les âmes bien-nés [‘Long live the noble souls’]. . .
Life in La Grande Trappe [monastery] sounds pretty odd. Their day starts at 1 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m. Only five hours’ sleep. They sleep on two planks in minute cubicles with two blankets and pillows stuffed with hay, and are forbidden to undress. They work in the fields all day, and are not allowed to put on extra, or remove a garment, in snow or mid-summer. The rule of silence is absolute. They eat standing up, and never have meat, eggs or fish, but live entirely off roots, salads, potatoes etc. They dig their own graves when they join, and live to tremendous ages. Wh
en they are in the infirmary, on the point of death, they are lifted from their beds onto a heap of straw scattered on the ground, as a final gesture of humility. All the monks come to assist at the last rites, and watch over the corpse in chapel all night, lowering it into a nameless grave with ropes round the shoulders and feet; no coffin. Chateaubriand wrote a tremendous description of ‘la Mort d’un Trappiste’. I’d rather like to go there for a day or two as an adventure in masochism [5] . . . There’s not enough Mortification here!
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 5