Patrick Leigh Fermor
Page 15
[c/o Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, Hydra]
Dear George,
Niko [Ghika] has just been here for a few days, the first time for ages. It was great fun. He and Joan played endless games of chess, out of which Joan came slightly the winner, in the end, and we went on a hilarious pleasure journey to Spetsai with Nancy Mitford, who was also staying. [1]
The meltemi [2] has started. Also a small plague of horseflies. As there are no horses in Hydra, they console themselves on us, riddling us like colanders, as we emerge defenceless from the waves, each armed with a proboscis sharper than a bradawl for puncturing the withers of a carthorse (I’m afraid it’s softening them). There are also, at the moment, large numbers of centipedes about, and always in trouble: falling off walls they are attempting to scale, getting trodden on and being washed down drains. One would have thought that, with all their advantages, they would have got further. It makes one proud of being a biped.
Not only are there no horses in Hydra, but it is as empty of wheels as America before the conquistadores arrived. The islanders boast rather loosely about the presence of a barrow somewhere. But nobody has set eyes on it. . .
Many thanks again, dear George, and best love to you both from
Paddy
(also from Joan)
A butterfly has just flown in through the window. You will not be surprised to hear that it is a Red Admiral. [3]
[1] ‘I made great friends with Paddy Leigh Fermor,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to Christopher Sykes after this holiday. ‘He is a shrieker and how rare they get.’ Charlotte Mosley (ed.), Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford (1993), pages 342–3.
[2] The strong, dry north winds of the Aegean, which blow from about mid May to mid September.
[3] A pun (PLF’s father was a lepidopterist). Several of the ships used in the Greek War of Independence and their admirals came from Hydra.
Paddy left Hydra for France in the autumn of 1955. He felt he was becoming stale there; as perhaps he was, because his book based on his Greek travels was still unfinished. ‘I’m afraid he is too much Penelope-ising with that book,’ George Seferis confided to Joan.
Moreover, the ill feeling engendered by the situation in Cyprus was poisoning relations between Britons and Greeks. Greek opinion had long regarded the island of Cyprus, a British colony, as rightfully theirs. A nationalist popular movement named EOKA agitated for unification with Greece (‘Enosis’). The situation was complicated by the presence of a substantial Turkish Cypriot minority on the island. Impatient with the lack of progress, EOKA had declared an armed struggle against British rule. In response, the new governor of the island, Sir John Harding, formerly Chief of the Imperial General Staff, adopted stringent measures to improve the security situation.
An official at the Greek Aliens Office on Hydra attempted to have Paddy and several other British nationals deported; and though this attempt came to nothing, it unsettled him. There was a heated exchange between Paddy and his old friend George Katsimbalis on the subject of Cyprus. ‘I am in such despair about it all,’ Joan wrote to Seferis. ‘George Katsimbalis refused to dine with Paddy and me on my last night in Athens, which upset me dreadfully,’ she continued. ‘What are we to do? I can’t think about it any more without bursting into tears.’
After leaving Hydra Paddy wrote from France to Ghika and his wife Antigone.
To Antigone (‘Tiggie’) and Niko Ghika
1 November 1955
c/o Diana Cooper
Château de Saint-Firmin
Vineuil
Oise
Darling Tiggie and Niko,
Everything, to my eyes adjusted for Hydra, looks very peculiar in France. All this green gives one the sensation of living in the heart of a giant lettuce. It’s a lovely autumn evening, with bonfires burning under trees in the park, a constant flutter of falling leaves, dew, a thin mist over the lake, and, the other side, in front of the big chateau, the dim silhouette of the Connétable Anne de Montmorency equestrian, in full armour, stirring up the evening air with a huge sword. . .
I found Joan in Normandy, staying with the Smarts – I don’t know whether you know them – who live there in summer, Egypt in winter. I’m going to camp in the house for three months (c/o Lady Smart, Gadencourt, Pacy-sur-Eure, Eure. Tel: Gadencourt 6) – I send these details hoping that you will write or telephone when you get to France and stay a weekend or something . . . Niko, would you ask Boukas [1]
to get in touch with me about the photographs as I will have a great conference with Stephen [2] about the timing and layout of the article, etc.
I think with immense nostalgia & gratitude of Hydra, where most of my book will have been written – in fact 1954–5 is a great étape dans ma vie [stage of my life]. I didn’t need to tell you both how we loved it and how valuable and important it was, because I think you know. I really felt I had to vanish from the raw material of my work for a few months, like Niko into a cellar with his sketches. But I am certain that without Hydra, the book would never have been written, and can never thank enough! Do, please, make a sign when you come here.
Meanwhile, fond love to you both from
Paddy
[1] Philip Boukas, photographer.
[2] Stephen Spender, poet and critic, co-editor of Horizon and Encounter. Earlier in the year Spender and his wife Natasha had come to stay on Hydra with PLF and Joan. PLF was writing a piece for Encounter, as he explained in an undated letter to Diana Cooper. ‘I’ve written a long thing in my book (which Stephen Spender is printing in one of the next two months’ ‘Encounter’ – the new Horizon) evoking all the different parts of Greece – mountains, towns, rivers, islands etc.’ PLF’s article ‘Sounds of the Greek World’ would appear in Encounter in June 1956.
George Katsimbalis was the central figure in the group of Greek writers and intellectuals whom Paddy came to know in Athens after the war. The two men had met briefly in 1940, in an Athens nightclub. Paddy’s head was wrapped romantically in a bandage, and this deceptively heroic appearance had earned him several free drinks. To Katsimbalis, who happened to be there, he admitted that the wound had been the result of nothing worse than a car accident. Katsimbalis laughed and advised him not to tell anyone else.
Katsimbalis was a tremendous talker, whom Paddy nicknamed ‘the Gas-Bag of Attica’ – though of course he was quite a talker himself. In the spring of 1955 the two men travelled together round the Peleponnese by bus; after-wards Paddy remarked on ‘George’s unstaunchable and, I must say, wonderful storytelling’.
This letter was written after Paddy and Katsimbalis had been reconciled, following their heated quarrel over Cyprus.
To George Katsimbalis
5 November 1955
Château de Saint-Firmin
My dear George,
I tried to ring you up before leaving (the day of Papagos’s funeral) [1] but couldn’t get through, alas; so set off in the pouring rain with a mound of luggage, and that bloody crate with the Μεγάλη Ἑλληνικὴ Ἐγκυκλοπαίδεια, [2] which turned out to be a terrible nuisance. Half a ton of untapped knowledge! I felt like Sisyphus. What a job it was getting it across the frontier at Gevgeli, into Serbia, and trundling it up the Vardar valley. Thank God, I lost it temporarily at Belgrade, but the Embassy have found it, and it follows me by goods train to Paris.
Belgrade is awful. I got a sleeper fortunately, and there was an uncouth Serbian airman in the lower bunk whose hand appeared beside my pillow every quarter of an hour with a bottle of slivovitz followed by his only word in a Western language ‘Disinfectant’. We crossed Croatia and Slovenia in a trance . . . Returning to my compartment at Milan after a kilometre of macaroni in the Wagon-restaurant, I found his place had been taken by a Japanese businessman with teeth twice the normal length, each alternately edged with gold and lead and revealed in a perennial smile. Between these old ivory gnashers all night a succession of double-Coronas were stuck, which embowered me, in my top bunk, in a buoyant cloud of a
potheosis, and wafted me, shrouded thus across the Lombard plain, under the Alps, through the Simplon and, next day into the smiling plains of France and along the Valley of the Yonne. Who could have thought that those fragrant leaves, rolled on dusky thighs in Cuba, would one day, in contact with those Nippon tusks and Fujiyama nostrils, achieve a combustion that would float me, enclouded like Zeus when visiting Semele, [3] westwards across Transalpine Gaul? Inscrutable destiny. . .
Lovely weather in Paris! I met Joan for a drink at the Brasserie Lipp, and then we went and had a formidable meal at the Roi Gourmet, in the Place des Victoires, out of doors under the front hoofs of Louis XIV’s rearing mount: foie gras, chateaubriand with béarnaise, perfect brie, a bottle of Château Margaux followed by several Marc de Bourgogne; then reeled around the Etruscan exhibition at the Louvre. After this we went to Normandy to stay with the Smarts (friends of George S [eferis]’s), till Joan went to England and I came here for a few days (Diana Cooper’s house). Do write the address down as – usual style! – I’ve managed to [illegible] for the winter: c/o Lady Smart, Gadencourt, Pacy-sur-Eure, Eure. It’s very comfortable, half cottage, half farmhouse, & full of books. The Smarts, my benefactors, spend the winter in Egypt. If you come to France, do come and stay. There are several important relais gastronomiques [4] in the neighbourhood – Conches, La Roche Guyon and Vernon, where I ate a remarkable poularde with a cream sauce and morels – those little black mushrooms – the other day. The meals are so copious they can only be managed by burning holes with a swig of calvados between the courses; the trou normand as they call it.
I came across a small book called Recits Byzantins by Pierre Almanachos at Gadencourt, rather fun. Is it the same chap who got into trouble for you-know-what . . .? There are nice tales of Nik. Choniates, Michael Akominatos, the Fall of Constantinople etc. George, please see if you can possibly find a decent, authoritative book or pamphlet on the Sarakatsans, [5] as it’s an awful gap. I’ve got sheafs of notes on them, but nothing really solid on their background. I lie awake for hours at night, conceiving what exactly I ought to write about Cyprus and for whom, and think I am onto the right track at last. [6] It’s not at all easy.
The villagers are enormous blond brutes, obvious kinsmen of William the Conqueror & of Tancred, Bohemond etc. who destroyed the Empire. If you come and stay, we might lay on a little massacre; you as a Byzantine, me as a Saxon . . . I return there tomorrow, then to England (Travellers) for two to three weeks, and back to Normandy.
It’s lovely here at Chantilly, with lawns sloping down to the big park and the lake of the Condé castle, vistas of trees leading to an equestrian statue of the Connétable Anne de Montmorency waving a huge sword in the evening mist. [7] Crimson leaves falling everywhere, silver frost on the grass, a tissue-paper-thin pane of ice on the lake. Dew! Lovely-smelling smoke of bonfires everywhere.
Write and tell me your news, and kiss Spatch, [8] & give her my love. Καὶ ὁ Θεὸς νὰ μᾶς ποντικοδυναμώνει! [And may God strengthen our muscles!]
love from
Paddy
[1] Marshal Alexander Papagos (1883–1955), commander of the Greek Army in the Second World War and in the latter stages of the Greek Civil War (1946–9). On retiring from the army he founded a new political party, which he led to victory in two elections, becoming prime minister from 1952 until his death.
[2] The Great Greek Encyclopaedia, published in twenty-four quarto volumes. PLF had a special crate made to transport it across Europe.
[3] Semele, princess of Thebes, who burst into flames when Zeus appeared before her in his full glory.
[4] An association of hotels and restaurants formed in 1954, setting high standards in cuisine and luxury.
[5] Ethnic Greek shepherds, who move with their flocks between higher pastures in summer and lower valleys in winter. Historically centred on the Pindus mountains of northern Greece, they are also present in the neighbouring countries of Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania.
[6] In a two-part article for The Spectator (‘Friends Apart’ and ‘Friends Wide Apart’, 9 and 16 December 1955), PLF condemned both the incendiary broadcasts from Athens and the British government’s refusal to hold talks on the future of Cyprus, which he criticised as ‘evasive, graceless and insulting’.
[7] Born in Chantilly, de Montmorency resurrected the medieval castle there.
[8] Katsimbalis’s wife Aspasia, known as ‘Spatch’.
To Jock Murray
undated [November 1955?]
c/o Lady Smart
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
Dear Jock,
Thank you so much for your two letters, and 1,000 apologies for my delinquency as a correspondent. I’ve been meaning to write daily.
Our stay in Greece ended in a glorious hol on a yacht [1] skilfully borrowed by Diana Cooper, on which I was allowed to have almost entire charge of the itinerary (Mykonos – Delos – Amorgos – Ios – Rhodes – Symi – Kos – Kalymnos – Chios – Psara – Skyros – Skopelos – Skiathos), and to fill in my chaplet of the archipelago with several missing beads. Everyone vanished when we got back to Athens. I stayed on a week to fix everything up, buying books etc. I finally ruined myself by buying the Great Greek Encyclopaedia for £45; a wonderful thing which I’ve longed for for twenty years – twenty-four colossal quarto volumes. Crated, it weighed half a ton, I should think; several hundred weight, anyway, of compact ratiocination, which proved like the Stone of Sisyphus to trundle across the Balkan frontiers. I finally left it in Belgrade to follow me in its own time, trusting love and knowledge to find a way.
I was quite glad to leave Greece – though I hated quitting Niko’s lovely house – for two reasons: (1) New stuff kept piling up every day so that it was impossible not to notice and absorb, and if I stayed on, it would have been like trying to pay off the interest on a debt which kept mounting up at compound interest; and (2) The political situation in Greece, the mess we have both [2] (but mostly we) have made of it began to develop into a kind of obsessive and paralysing compound of anger and gloom that departure may exorcise. Now, (luck of luck!) our old friends the Smarts have lent me this house! I shall stay here these winter months and finish all. I came to stay skulking this side of the Channel, I hoped, to have something complete to cover the shame of delay with you on my return. Since arriving, 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 before it’s off my chest. My plan is to return sometime next week (℅ Travellers). I’ll get in touch with you at once.
Thank you so much for news of Freya. I’ll try and get in touch with her (a) for the fun of seeing her and (b) to bully her a bit about her famous Turks.
Must dash to post!
Yours ever
Paddy
So pleased about George [Psychoundakis]’s dough.
P.S. You must come and stay here.
[1] Eros II, a yacht belonging to Stavros Niarchos.
[2] i.e. Britain and Greece. The British authorities in Cyprus declared a state of emergency on the island in November 1955, following the assassination of five soldiers.
To Ann Fleming
7 January 1956
c/o Lady Smart
Gadencourt
Darling Annie,
It’s too late for Christmas greetings, and New Year and even Epiphany & probably premature for Sexagesima, but anyway; Happy 1956! I tried to telephone you several times (in vain, alas; all occupied, and then you were gone) to say thank you 1,000 times for that lovely dinner and classical ball. [1] I wish you hadn’t left so early. I stayed for ages and ages, enjoyed it at a steadily increasing ratio, and swallowing immeasurable amounts of all kinds of delicious drinks. In fact, I’m not quite clear about the end of the evening. The mists of the Dark Ages set in, mimicking in a lesser degree the talk of Rome when the hoofs of Alaric splintered the Capitoline marbles . . . Wh
en the mists of Oblivion parted, I found myself, at high noon next day, light-headed and unshaven in the middle of Knightsbridge, a lady’s overcoat over my tarnished armour, still trailing that bloody trident and waving for a taxi in vain.
It’s all very different here, and heaven in its way: no sound but the industrious scratching of nibs, long-playing records in the evenings and the patter of Norman rains. Lovely and warm, thank God. If you come to France, please for heaven’s sake telephone (Gadencourt 6, ‘près de Pacy-sur-Eure’. Please write down). It’s only an hour from Paris. Joan’s brother Graham [2] was here for Christmas & New Year, and we made many a gastronomic pilgrimage to the starred restaurants of Normandy, & left not a truffle unturned. Joan returns sometime towards the end of the month, and I think we go to Chantilly next weekend on Diana’s way to Switzerland.
Do please write a short chronique scandaleuse of metropolitan life, and bear France in mind. I feel very excited at the thought of one vol. of my Greek rigmarole appearing in late spring, [3] and am busy clipping, brushing & polishing. V. many thanks again, Annie darling, and best love
from
Paddy
P.S. I must record a curious phenomenon. I am writing this letter in bed, & the garden outside is white with frost. The only two occupants of it are a large tabby cat belonging to the house and a robin fidgeting about on the branches of an apple tree, and it’s so cold and frosty that their breath streams into the air in great clouds of vapour. It looks most odd. They survey each other from a safe distance like two chain-smokers. . .
Beyond, in an indistinct field, a number of surly looking black and white cows (many of them with crumpled horns, I’m sorry to say) float about in the mist. I often single one out on my afternoon walks and try to hypnotise her by gazing into those great idiot eyes and willing her to (1) lie down, (2) shake her head three times and (3) moo. So far, alas, with no success at all.