To Joan Rayner
‘Thursday’ [May 1949?]
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
Eure
My darling pet,
Thanks for your lovely Greek postcard (there’s a pretty picture for you at the end of this letter) and telegram. You write Greek beautifully! Darling Amy [Smart] has got other people coming here for the weekend, so Patrick [Kinross] and I have got to leave. Shall I really come and find you at Bordeaux? At the Chapon Fin? [1] I might do that, or I might, if that was difficult, manage to stay with somebody in PariS. L. de Vilmorin [2] vaguely asked me to stay; she sounded as if she meant it then, but she might have just been being charming. But I can always go to La Petite Boucherie! But I’d much rather come and find you than anything. Do telegraph at once!
I love this life, 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. I only move from my desk – a heavenly malampia [cornucopia?] of books and papers now – from 9 a.m. till 9 p.m., for mealtimes, which I never thought, seriously, I could do. How different writing a book is from articles! If ever the Muse flags, I nip into the dining room and swallow a coup de rouge, and pause for a moment in the sitting room on the way back, where one’s morale is finally restored by the huge Narcissist’s looking glass there. The shutters are closed in the daytime, and all one can see is a dim figure, vague, noble and contemplative, against a background of enormous volumes of Molière, Tacitus, Racine and Corneille, exactly, in fact, what one would like to be! It’s tremendously invigorating. All writers should be equipped with these auxiliaries. This retirement for writing purposes makes me feel a bit like Saint Jerome in the desert finishing the Vulgate, with Amy as one’s major feline [3] . . . Smartie is better again, and he, Amy, Patrick and I spend hours talking after dinner. He (Smartie) is such a beauty, I never get tired of looking at him. He’s half Holbein’s Erasmus and half Voltaire at Ferney, with a curious dash of Peter Q [uennell], somewhere, an older and more distinguished one. Last night he talked for hours about life at the Persian Court at the beginning of the century at Teheran and Shiraz, the clothes, the mammoth turbans, the imperial receptions in colonnaded courtyards in the evening, tanks full of water-lilies and the emperor on a peacock throne smoking a narghiléh while the court-poets competed . . . He wrote an essay on existentialism last month that he sent to Cyril [Connolly], but C. must have been in France by then.
We went to a village fête on Sunday in a barn. There were wonderfully bad ballets by the schoolchildren, some of the best clowns I’ve ever seen, and a one-act-play acted by the grocer and his wife. The Pacy string band played, without rehearsal, with the Gadencourt brass band, the latter completely drowning the former with deafening sequences of farts down huge battered lumps of plumbing, while the former twanged bravely but furiously at their absolutely inaudible pizzicato . . . Fon-fon, the bistro-keeper’s wife, had a buvette on a trestle table outside, and everybody was rolling by the end. A lovely afternoon.
There is one of those enormous Norman cart-horses opposite, quite alone in a meadow and looking ten times the normal size. If it didn’t move about now and then, you would take it for the Trojan Horse, or part of a colossal equestrian group by Verrocchio or Della Robbia (!) mysteriously abandoned there riderless in the long grass.
It positively screams for a vast condottiere [4] in plate-armour.
I have reread (in bed, in the day) Paludes and Les Caves du Vatican. [5] I wonder how many times I’ve read them now and how many times I will again? [illegible] How good they are! When I have finished writing these two books [The Traveller’s Tree and another, never-published travel book about Central America], I think I’ll translate them into English, if it hasn’t been done already. I can’t think of anything easier and more pleasant. In ‘Les Caves du V’, there is another glâbre–hirsute, eugène–mortimer group antithesis I had forgotten about: les subtils et les crustacés.
I say, I hate the idea of going back to jail, don’t you? I wish we hadn’t got to ever again! I must finish this now, darling, to catch the post. Write – or rather wire – at once about the Chapon Fin.
A million hugs & kisses and love from
Paddy
Love to Cyril.
[1] One of Bordeaux’s oldest and most highly regarded restaurants.
[2] Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin (1902–69), novelist, poet and journalist, and heiress to a great family fortune. She had a slight limp that became her trademark. As a young woman she had been engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but the engagement had been called off. She was a notorious femme fatale, with many lovers, and was for some years one of Duff Cooper’s mistresses.
[3] St Jerome (c.347–420), author of the translation known as the Vulgate Bible, was supposed to have tamed a lion in the wilderness by healing its paw.
[4] Leader of a band of mercenaries engaged to fight for the Italian city-states in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.
[5] Paludes (1895) and Les Caves du Vatican (1914), by André Gide, were favourites of Balasha’s before the war. Les Caves du Vatican distinguishes between two categories of people: the subtle, who recognise each other, and the ‘crustaceans’, or normal people, who do not recognise the subtle.
Paddy had discussed his idea for a book based on his Greek travels with Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), who as well as being a fine writer himself was a regular book reviewer. On 8 December 1950 Nicolson wrote to tell Paddy that he had read The Traveller’s Tree ‘with the greatest interest and pleasure’. He revealed that he was reviewing it for the Observer, ‘so you will see what I feel about it. I think that you have really written a most vivid and human account of those (to me) rather dull islands . . .
‘I think you have a truly excellent style which combines all the architectural qualities of classical French with the exuberance of your Celtic ancestry, together with a little tough touch that is all your own.
‘I do hope that when you start upon the Greek book you will not allow yourself to become overburdened by your material, and plan the thing in definite themes and chapters. Your “Traveller’s Tree” (why you chose such an absurd title I cannot think) suffers a little from the feeling that it grew too luscious in the tropical air and that you decided to give us only branches of it which were lopped and chopped all anyhow. You really are such an excellent stylist that I feel your planning in the next book should be very careful and that you should be very fussy about the actual shape it takes . . .
‘As you drink your resin wine and consume immense quantities of ouzo, murmur to yourself the words, “shape, shape, shape”.’
To Harold Nicolson
20 December 1950
Poros
Dear Harold,
Thank you very many times for the magnificent review of my book in The Observer, and for the kind and invaluably helpful things you wrote in your letter. I got the letter a week ago, on returning slowly to Athens via Arachova and Hosios Loukas, and, owing to some hitch in the mail, the Observer came well over a week after it had appeared. You can imagine my agony and impatience and final delight when a copy turned up at last. I’m certain it’s the kindest, friendliest and most encouraging review a first book could possibly receive. And I feel specially grateful that you could have written such a long and wise and valuable letter as well. I’ve reread it several times, and thought hard about your advice, and feel spurred, sobered and on my mettle about the Greek book. I would very much like to ask you more about the shape and planning of a book when I get back. Your final words have burned their way into my brain, and not a drop of ouzo or retsina now passes my lips without a silent invocation of ‘μορφή! μορφή! μορφή!’ [‘shape! shape! shape!’]
I’m delighted to have got those wretched [Caribbean] islands out of my system and to be in the right archipelago once more. I’m spending ten days in the first Greek Island I ever came to, fifteen years ago, to do some work. Nothing see
ms to have changed except a few more wrinkles on the islanders’ faces, one or two deaths and a rather older reflection of my own face in the barber’s looking glass when I went to get my hair cut. The rest I can remember off by heart. The forest of caïque masts, the departure of the sponge-fishing boats, the miraculous smoothness of the air and the sea, the lemon forests that surround my watermill, the olive and cypress trees and the clear outline of the Argive mountains. I wish I could send these all to you as a present for Christmas.
I’m deep in the Claudel–Gide correspondence. [1] Phew! It’s a real mill-stone book all right. I’m three-quarters of the way through, and it looks so far as though Gide will win easily. I like je préfère être vomi que vomir . . . [‘I prefer to be rejected than to be the one rejecting’].
This will miss you for Christmas, so every kind wish for New Year and to Ben and Nigel, [2] and 1,000 thanks again, dear Harold, for help and kindness and counsel. Je tâcherai de les mériter [I shall strive to deserve them].
Yours ever
Paddy
The storms threatening last fortnight have blown away. There is not a cloud in the sky, and it’s warmer than spring. Bright sunlight. I’m writing this under a plane tree in shirtsleeves.
[1] Letters between the diplomat Paul Claudel and the writer André Gide written between 1899 and 1926, edited by Robert Mallet and first published in Paris in 1949.
[2] Nicolson’s two sons.
Jock Murray’s decision to take on the publication of The Traveller’s Tree was the beginning of a lasting association with Paddy. Murray’s forbearance would be tested by Paddy’s habitual procrastination, his perfectionism, and his requests, which went far beyond those usually asked of a publisher. After Murray’s death in 1993, Paddy would add a personal tribute to Nicolas Barker’s obituary in The Times (24 July 1993), and gave the address at the service of thanksgiving held at St James’s Piccadilly on 26 October 1993. ‘The kindness, the comic sense, the wisdom, the thoughtful response to life, the enthusiasms, and the good repair in which he kept his friendships can never be replaced,’ wrote Paddy. ‘He was the ideal, the quintessential publisher, and his success was rooted in his total and passionate devotion to literature in general and to books in particular, and hence, to the people who wrote them. “I don’t mind tuppence about the overshot deadlines,” he said to an author long overdue with the last volume of a sequence, “I just want to see how it ends before I die.” ’ The unnamed author was Paddy himself.
To Jock Murray
February–March 1951
Monastery of Panagia Faneromeni
Salamis
My dear Jock,
Many apologies for any slowness in answering your two letters. I’ve been on the move in Attica and Boeotia lately, and scribbling away hard, and feel very remiss as a correspondent.
Lovely news about the reprint coming through so soon (any chance of the Voodoo picture? It’s becoming a slight obsession!) How many are you doing? Good news, too, about the Americans, but I wish the cautious wretches would start manufacturing on their own account. [1]
I knew it would take some time before I actually got any royalties, what with advances, Costa’s advance, the 50–50 split and so on. Actually, I’m getting awfully low [illegible] about pennies. I was wondering if you could manage to scrape together £100 for me, as I really do need it. It will only be a matter of time before we cover that by sales, and well beyond, won’t it? Do see what you can do, Jock. I wouldn’t have suggested it if it wasn’t a bit of an SOS. If it could be arranged, I’m sure my bank (Hambros, Pall Mall) could arrange for it to be released as future bait for dollars, which the arrangement with Harper’s apart from anything else would bear out! [2]
I’m so glad you liked Joan’s photographs and the Cappadocian articles. I’m preparing some more, as well as preparing the book, here in Salamis, where I’m staying in a sort of Hermitage belonging to Sikelianos, the great poet of Modern Greece. [3] The book on Greece (I keep racking my brains for a title. It’s got to be a really good one) is steadily taking shape in my mind. Lack of shape was the only serious criticism that Harold made about the Tree in a letter sent at the time of his review, and I think of scarcely anything else now.
It was lovely seeing Peter [Quennell] the other day. I went to meet him with Louis MacNeice [4] at the airport, and saw a lot of him. We had luncheon in the old quarter on the day of his lecture, then wandered about the Acropolis, then down through a maze of tavernas, having a swig in each, almost till zero hour. The lecture was excellent.
A tremendous film tycoon called Michael Powell [5] came out here a month ago, on his way to explore Crete with a view to making a film of the capture of General Kreipe. [6] I sent him to all my old mountain friends, who dragged him all over the mountains, filling him with wine and playing the lyre and firing off rifles. He came back after three weeks foot-slogging wild with excitement, and determined to start ‘shooting’ in May. It’s going to be a sort of superfilm, apparently!
When I came here three or four days ago, on the advice of a friend who hasn’t been since the War, I was astonished to find the monastery inhabited not by monks, but nuns. There’s been a changeover after the liberation. Dear little mousy black-clad things. Anyway, they violated their rule by letting me stay for two days, then I telephoned to Sikelianos in Athens, who let me stay here, under the abbey walls. A nun trots along three times a day with bread, rice, cheese etc. They’re sweet. This vast paper belongs to Sikelianos – reams of it, covered with pentameters, litter the house. It must be a sort of decoy for the Muse! No more now.
Write soon & all the best, yrs ever
Paddy
[1] Books manufactured were usually sold to American publishers royalty-inclusive, resulting in a lower earning per copy for the author.
[2] Murray obliged with a further advance of £100, which Joan brought out to Greece in late March.
[3] Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951), lyric poet and playwright. This refuge would not long be available to PLF because Sikelianos would be dead within a few months, after drinking a proprietary disinfectant, mistaking it for medicine.
[4] The poet Louis MacNeice had just been appointed British Council representative in Athens.
[5] Michael Latham Powell (1905–90), film director, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger.
[6] Based on the book by W. Stanley (‘Billy’) Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950).
To Jock Murray
18 March 1951
Zitza
near Yannina
Epirus
Dear Jock,
Thank you so much for your letter, and forgive my long speechlessness, due to wandering about Thessaly for the past two weeks, too tired to do anything except keep my diary up to date. The arrangement with Joan sounds fine, and thank you for fixing it up. I’m sure we’ll manage. Also, I forgot to thank you for letting me collect your bookseller’s debts in Athens. It was wonderfully handy, and I almost bought a bowler before calling on him. He says, could you let him have half a dozen copies of The Tree on approval. They will be sold at once.
I’m writing from rather a momentous place, the terrace in front of Zitza monastery, where Byron and Hobhouse stayed twice in Oct. 1808 (see Childe Harold). [1] It’s a very beautiful, derelict thing, on top of a hill north of Yannina near the Albanian border, surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Pindus. The region teems with memories of Byron, some rather disconcerting. I came here from Yannina this afternoon, after having come across the Metsovo pass, staying with Vlach villagers and exploring Thessaly. Yannina looks wonderful at the moment – brilliant spring weather, with Ali Pasha’s domes and minarets reflected in a bright blue lake. I leave here for Souli and Parga, then south to Lidoriki & Missolonghi, and back to Athens to meet Joan. No more now! Write soon.
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] ‘Monastic Zitza! from thy shady brow, Thou small, but favour’d spot of holy ground!’
Canto II, Stanza 4
8
To Jock Murray
5 August 1951
Skopelos
My dear Jock,
Thanks for the letter. Both Joan and I are delighted with the appearance of the Meteora [1] article – I’m so glad the corrections weren’t too late.
Well, the notes for the Greek work are assembled at last! I will be heading for home at the end of this month, after getting back to Athens and spending a few days winding things up and a day or two in the National and Gennadius [2] Libraries. I’ve got a formidable amount of material, and all of it fascinating. I hope to be able to borrow Amy & Walter Smart’s cottage in Normandy to do the writing in – it’s only a few hours from Victoria – but, in case that falls through, you couldn’t ask all your pals about a pleasant and cheap cottage for the winter, suitable for a hermit embarked on a major literary enterprise, could you? I send the same request in all letters home!
Important. Could you ask your bookkeepers to forward as soon as poss. the Meteora fee (£30, he said) to Messrs Hambros, Pall Mall, for me (as all odd monies that may crop up in future). Thanks very much, Jock for deputising for me at the R.S.L., and sending the dough to the right place. [3] Eddie Marsh, [4] the Secretary of the Soc., and Rab Butler [5] (who wrote me a friendly note) said you did it ‘charmingly’! Will there be any pennies for me from The Tree when I get back? I’ll be rather low. I’ve hopes of a flash article being printed about the Cyclades with Joan’s photos, which will be a great help. Otherwise, bar Ian Fleming’s [6] thing, there’ll be nothing much in the kitty.
I’ve forgotten where I last wrote to you from, but I think Kardamyli, in the Mani, after trudging over the Taygetus mountains. Well, it proved (the Mani) better and better as we went on. Blood feuds everywhere, and the only music, rather beautiful strange poetical dirges, a number of which I collected, and will translate. It’s absolutely barren mountain country and every village is a conglomeration of sky-scraper towers (never written about or photographed as far as I know), far stranger than San Gimignano, where the feud-haunted clan chiefs would immure themselves, secretly importing cannon and mounting them after dark, to bash away at their adversaries across the street for decades on end, who were similarly armed. (It gives one a hallucinating impression of village life.) Thence we struck north to Sparta and Tripoli again, then through Arcadia, and along peculiar gorges, past the monasteries of Kalavryta and Magaspilio (burnt by the Germans, now restored like blocked-concrete Park Lane luxury flats on dizzy crags). So, along the Gulf of Corinth to Athens again. I’ve retired to these queer little islands (Skiathos, Skopelos, Skyros (where Brooke [7] is buried) – ‘The Sporades’) to attack the book proper, and am actually embarked. I’ll be more detailed about movements when I get back to Athens next week.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 8