The room is an extraordinary mixture of austerity and splendour – the tiles, the bare white walls, and then the four-poster, the arras, the peculiar column. It has some slight analogy to the disparate elements of some Guatemalan churches. It’s a wonderful room to wake up in. The sunlight streams in through all three windows, and from my bed, all I can see through them are layer on ascending layer of chestnut leaves, like millions of spatulate superimposed green hands, and then the pale crystalline October sky, framed by this reflected blue-white, or thick milk-white, or, where the sun strikes, white-gold surfaces of the walls and window arches or embrasures. A miraculous, feather-light, innocent, clear awakening!
My darling angel, I meant this to be a short, brisk letter, I see it’s straggled over several pages already. I’m so alone here at night, I can’t stop talking to you; it’s such a luxury. Darling, don’t feel ever obliged to write long letters, and put them off, in my way, because you haven’t got time to settle down to a whopper. You’re in a capital city, I’m in an abbey, don’t I know what it means! I do enjoy and look forward to your letters so, you’ve sent some lovely long ones. But do write often, even if terribly shortly. I wake up in a dither about the postman. And don’t you think these accounts of cenobitic [monastic] splendour mean I’m OK here alone! I miss you the whole time, my dearest angel, and launch armadas of kisses in the direction of Curzon Street, great hugs and feverish clinches, and long angelic tender and gentle ones as if we were on the verge of falling asleep tangled up together.
All my love to you, darling, mignonne sweet Joan, from
Paddy
[1] Regions of northern Asia Minor of significance in the early history of the Christian Church.
[2] ‘The Humanist’, PLF’s nickname for Cyril Connolly.
[3] Robin Fedden was the author of Syria: An Historical Appreciation (1946).
[4] Paddy is adapting Horace’s Epistle to the Pisones, which reads Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (perhaps punning on his nickname for Joan). This means, literally, ‘The mountains will go into labour, and give birth to a ridiculous mouse’, i.e. that huge efforts may amount to very little.
[5] Pomona was the goddess of fruit and nut trees; Ceres goddess of grain-crops.
From Saint-Wandrille (pictured above), Paddy moved on to the monastery of St Jean de Solesmes, and eventually to La Grande Trappe.
To Joan Rayner
undated [November/December 1948]
Abbaye de St Jean de Solesmes
Sablé sur Sarthe
( J-P) Sarthe [1]
My darling sweet angel,
I’m feeling so gloomy tonight, I don’t know why, and long to be with you so that we could just curl up into a ball together and snore our way through the night. It’s frightfully cold and lonely here, and I feel absolutely miserable climbing alone between these icy sheets. Boo-hoo.
I hoped there would be a letter from you this morning, and pelted down to the gate-house, but only got a bill from London. I’ve been monstrously bad about writing darling, and please forgive me. The trouble is the post goes at 3:30 in the afternoon, and as I’m writing like anything, I always think it’s earlier and the bloody thing has left by the time I get ready to write, so I put it off till tomorrow thinking ‘I’ll write the Rodent [2] a really long fruity one tomorrow-morning’ etc. After this, I’ll send you something every other day at the very least, and please, please darling, write to me absolutely constantly or I’ll only get terribly downcast, and you wouldn’t like that!
Darling, what an unmitigatedly happy time we had in Paris. Scarcely a moment of guilt or saturation or big-town-blues. Once or twice at the very most, but the rest of it sheer heaven. You were so sweet my angel. I really could eat you.
I’m not enjoying Solesmes quite as much as I did Saint-Wandrille, I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because it’s cold and wintry. But there are many more monks here, everything is much more organised and impersonal. And of course Saint-Wandrille was incomparably more beautiful. Here there are lots of long, cold, echoing, bare, clattery passages, and swing doors with frosted glass in, that give me a slight feeling of going back to school the winter term. The country round about is very pleasant, rather like flat English country, with plenty of hedges and little villages. The Sarthe flows just under my window, and falls over a weir, making a slight rushing noise all night. At first I was in a lovely big cell with an open fire in it that blazed all day; but an old country abbé came here with Parkinson’s disease looking so frail and shaky that I did a Philip-Sidney-at-Zutphen [3] act of abnegation and shifted into a smaller one without a fire, and alas the radiator has stopped working, so it’s jolly cold. Apart from all this, it’s a delightful place, with a great atmosphere of scholarship and serious meditation. The library is enormous, much bigger than the one at Saint-Wandrille, and wonderfully kept up with card indexes; but it is terribly difficult to get in, or take books out, it’s so efficient. No question of browsing all night by myself, as I did at St W., then locking it up with my own key. The great thing here, of course, is the liturgy, ceremonial and chanting. The church is a thin, high Gothic one, with perfect acoustics, so that the monks can really let themselves go. The vestments, and the quality of acolytes, cross-censer-candle-bearers, priests, deacons and sub-deacons that participate in a single office is unbelievable, and every detail is so studied and impeccable that a mass here really does look like a mediaeval illumination. . .
The nineteenth-century refectory is astonishing: stage Gothic-Norman-Saxon, with huge German-looking chimney pieces, fat granite pillars, cold in atmosphere and columns of Keats’s St Agnes Eve, Old Vic Macbeth, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Wm. Morris, Walter Crane and Corvo. The abbot, unfortunately, is away, presiding at the election of the Mother Abbess of a Benedictine convent in Holland. Solesmes is the chief of the Benedictine foundations for all Western Europe, and immensely powerful. No change can be made in any Gregorian music throughout the whole of the Church, unless Solesmes OKs it. But I long for the wonderful buildings of St-W., the less grand atmosphere, and those enormous damp beech-forests within two minutes of my cell.
Do you remember, darling, Mr Monk talking about an English Trappist, ex-RAF monk that he saw in Brittany? Well, he’s just arrived here three days ago, an extraordinary man, about my age, very slightly insane and absolutely enthralling. He got shot down at Danzig, imprisoned, studied for the Anglican church after his release, went over to Rome, and finally went to the worst Trappe of the lot, Timaduec in Brittany. He was there for a year, couldn’t stand it, and is on his way to the Benedictines in the Isle of Wight. It wasn’t the dead silence for twelve months that got him down, so much as the gruelling work in the fields, digging up carrots, smashing stones, sorting turnips, living the life of a navvy without a single moment’s solitude; and with monastic discipline from the Dark Ages. No meat, fish, only veg, for meals, scarcely any sleep. He looks a nervous wreck, wild eyes, chapped hands, and broken nails, talks the whole time – terribly well – and can’t believe he’s out of it. He’s a fascinating boy, extremely sensitive and well educated, an omnivorous reader, a sculptor & musician. He felt he had to go to the furthest extreme in the Catholic faith, ‘to do penance for the misery of the world’. His reading in Christian mysticism carries him to all kinds of miseries, and ecstasies. He is at the moment gobbling up the works of St Dionysius the Areopagite, [4] his lips mumbling away, and his eyes rolling. He has the most dreadful doubts every now and then and careers into my cell to ask for advice. He told me the dream he had last night: ‘I was in a stable somewhere, they were saddling up a horse for me. But the saddle hadn’t got any stirrups! And by God! I noticed the horse was getting smaller and smaller – shrinking and shrinking till it was the size of the dog that pulled the little milk-cart at the Trappe. I got on the thing, we set off at a gallop. No stirrups and the horse shrinking all the time. Hell of a job to stay on. Faster and faster! Then I noticed we were heading for a small hole, about the size of a mouse’s. I was still hang
ing on somehow, and we were going like the wind. The horse shoots through the hole and disappears, and BANG! I crash into the wall, knock myself silly, and wake up. What do you make of that?’ What do you? Has it got a psychiatrical or a mystical exegesis? Good old womb stuff, or heading for the mystic’s inner chamber of oneness with the Godhead, supported by a diminishing spark of faith?’
I am working like anything at the moment, and in spite of Benzers, [5] feel absolutely exhausted. The books I read in the intervals are a Flemish mediaeval mystic called Ruysbroeck, and St Angela of Foligno, [6] who even surpasses Marie de l’Incarnation. I would like to have a year doing nothing except read in an enormous library with you somewhere. I feel I might use it properly at last, instead of mucking about in the manner I have done all my life so far. The time I have wasted makes me shudder with horror. No hope, I’m afraid! Anyway, one would need five years.
I finished the Maya article before I left Paris. Only 300 words beyond the right length for once. The typescript hasn’t arrived yet, but when it does, I’ll send you a copy, and darling, I want them to reproduce a photo of the Young Corn God and a really good Copán Stela, [7] and the best and most representative modern Maya faces. Contact [8] probably won’t know which is which. Could you bear to go to Nicholson & Watsons (the publishers) and help choose the photographs which may not be labelled? I’m afraid they’ll make mistakes otherwise. I’ll tell Nigel Nicolson I don’t think the article is as bad as it might be (seeing how little I know!) I don’t know. It was a terrible sweat.
Darling, I’ll leave here at the end of the week, and go to the Norman Grande Trappe at Mortagne, but will wire you dates and addresses. I long to be with you, my own smooth little darling, and send you lots of hugs and stroke your ears and put a bow on your tail for you, my tiny muskin.
All my love to you my sweet darling from
Paddy
[1] PLF plays on the similarity between the place name and that of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
[2] i.e. Joan.
[3] Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), Elizabethan poet, courtier, scholar and soldier, was fatally wounded in the Battle of Zutphen, fighting for the Protestant cause against the Spanish. While lying wounded he is supposed to have given his water to another wounded soldier, saying, ‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.’
[4] St Dionysius, who lived in the first century ad, author of a series of writings of a mystical nature.
[5] Benzedrine tablets PLF used to sustain his concentration.
[6] John of Ruusbroec (1293/4–1381), Flemish mystic; and St Angela of Foligno, Italian mystic, founder of a religious order.
[7] Mayan monuments consisting of tall shafts of sculpted stone.
[8] The magazine that was publishing the Mayan article, started by George Weidenfeld, who employed Nigel Nicolson as assistant editor. Contact had no connection with the book publishers Nicholson & Watson, referred to in the next sentence.
Paddy and Joan discussed getting married, but they were very short of money, and for much of the time reliant on her small private income. This was an extra spur to his writing. ‘Darling we are absolutely broke,’ Joan wrote to him while both were in Italy trying to earn some extra money, ‘so do try to live for ages on what you have.’
Paddy was used to living on air. He was adept at borrowing friends’ houses, often for long periods of time. This letter was written from a house in Italy lent by ‘Mondi’ Howard.
To Joan Rayner
undated [February/March 1949]
Sant’Antonio
Tivoli
Provincia di Roma
My darling little pet,
Ζήτω! Ντὰν-ντὰν-ντὰν-ντὰν-ντάν! [Hurrah! Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding!] Your letter to Pienza and your telegram arrived within half an hour of each other, causing the postman two bicycle trips. My angel, I’m so relieved, as I was getting lonelier and more Ariadne-ish [1] every hour. I’ve missed you so frightfully all these days, thinking that you’d got nothing from me, didn’t know my address, and that we might lose each other for ages, as we almost did at Patmos. Δόξα τῷ Θεῷ! [Thanks be to God!]
What fun your Sicilian journey must be! I wish to hell I hadn’t got this appalling grind to get through, I can’t imagine anything better (quite apart from ourselves, my darling sweet) than doing it with you & Hamish [2] & Peter. [3] Do tell me all about it. Does Peter sit in the back? Any quarrels? None, I bet. I’m longing to hear every single detail. This is bound to be an absolutely idiotic letter, as I’m quite gaga with writing at the moment, and have reached a sort of saturation point where no further sense can come out. Darling, look out for some hospitable Duca or Marchesa with a vast castle, and try and get off with him, so that he could have us both to stay. I wish you could come and stay here, I wonder if you could? It’s so lovely. When you get to Rome, do go and see the Howards [4] with Hamish. He might, very tactfully explain the form, – you know, that we are good as married, and will be soon anyway, etc. I wish I knew him – Mondy – better. On paper he’s a pretty devout Catholic, but is certainly far from being a bigot. He has got a strange gentle kind of charm, and a rather unusual mind that obviously thinks things out carefully and deeply, and gives you a considered, often rather unexpected answer to any question. We met and became friends in Bari when I was waiting to be dropped into Crete. I know his brother Henry much better.
Darling, I like the glib way I talk about getting married; but I do hope you’ll still have me! I have been such a preoccupied empty bore these last weeks, that perhaps you are thinking better of it. Darling, please don’t! I’ll be all right again as soon as it’s finished, I promise! (I send yer lots of ’ugs.)
Oh dear. I got a terribly gloomy letter from Lindsay Drummond. It really is serious. [5] I’ve written to say that I can’t have the whole book ready by the end of this month, but have promised to let them have it by the first of May, if they can possibly still manage it then. Now, I can just, but only just manage that, I think, if I turn myself into a non-stop writing machine, and do nothing else. Darling, could you bear your Zombi-lover till then? I blame myself, rightly, for this mess, for my slowness, idleness, dilatations [sic], dilatoriness, scatterbrained-ness; the result of all this is that I feel miserable, fraudulent and guilt-haunted whenever I’m not working at the beastly thing. I really could strangle myself with remorse that this bloody business has come to a head while we are in Italy, Moloched, [6] and in spring. Darling angel, I really will be all right when it’s all over; please trust me. I was usually so diffident and secretive about the book not because you had broken my spirit by jeering at my early articles, but because there was so little of it, and so bad.
Thank heavens, I’m catching up here a bit – a lot in fact. There is nobody to talk to, and I haven’t got a single book to read, except my tedious old reference books – how I’m longing to put them all away forever! This is my day: I am called at 8 with coffee and bread, and am up by about 8.45. Then I walk along the edge of the Sabine hills till about 9.15, and work till 1. Lunch finishes about 1.30; then work till about 5, when I go for another half-hour walk, and work till 8. Then writing from 8.30, after dinner, till the small hours, 1 or 2 a.m. Alas, this bloody programme is what I’ve let myself in for now, every day till it’s over. Actually, once one has slipped into this rhythm, it is, in some curious way, terrifically stimulating, and at least, as one sees the sheets mounting up, guilt is at bay.
Darling little thing, don’t think that this is the sort of thing I’m condemned to for life! Living a settled life, a few hours a day – as long as it’s every day – will finish a book in two or three months easily. These shock-tactics are purely and simply the DAY OF RECKONING. I’m longing to organise my life so that there never are any: so far it has always been aimed purely and simply, one would say, at incurring them, though occasionally wars or luck have avoided or postponed them – and then living at breakneck speed to try and forget their existence.
Darling Joanàki, goodnig
ht, and hundreds of tons of love to you, my sweet, kind, adorable little love. Please don’t hate me, and write as much as you possibly can. I only get gloomy ideas if you don’t!
xxxxx JEMY [7]
P.S. Lots of love to Peter and Hamish. Don’t tell them about my problems!
[1] Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, was abandoned by her lover Theseus.
[2] James Alexander Wedderburn ‘Hamish’ St Clair-Erskine (1909–73), second son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn, Nancy Mitford’s first love.
[3] Peter Quennell. PLF and Joan had driven down through France and Italy with St Clair-Erskine before parting: while he worked on the text of The Traveller’s Tree, she accompanied Quennell and St Clair-Erskine to Sicily, where she was to take photographs for an article Quennell was writing.
[4] Edmund Bernard Carlo ‘Mondi’ Howard (1909–2005), writer, soldier and consular official, married to Cécile, née Cécile Geoffroy-Dechaume.
[5] Lindsay Drummond’s publishing firm, which had commissioned The Traveller’s Tree, was in financial difficulty. The book was eventually published by John Murray.
[6] PLF means that they have their car; he and Joan called the car ‘Moloch’ because of its thirst for fuel.
[7] PLF often signed his letters to Joan ‘JEM’ or ‘JEMY’, obviously an acronym.
Paddy would often stay at Gadencourt, the Normandy manor-house owned by Sir Walter and Lady Smart, friends from wartime Cairo days.
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