Patrick Leigh Fermor
Page 16
[1] At the Royal College of Art, organised to raise money for a charity supported by the Earl of Arran (‘Boofy’s beastly East End children’). See Mark Amory (ed.), Letters of Ann Fleming (1985), page 164.
[2] Graham Eyres Monsell (1905–94), later 2nd Viscount Monsell.
[3] This was optimistic. The book was eventually published in December 1958.
The most prominent of those calling for Enosis was Archbishop Makarios, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus and de facto leader of the Greek Cypriot majority on the island. On 9 March 1956 Makarios was taken into custody and exiled to an island in the Seychelles.
In the Sunday Times of 8 April 1956, PLF challenged the definition of Enosis advanced by Sir Richmond Palmer, a former Governor of Cyprus, in a letter published two weeks before, and repudiated the idea that the term implied the restoration of the Byzantine Empire, including Constantinople. The claim to the lands of Asia Minor inhabited by Greeks since ancient times had been discarded in the early 1920s, he wrote. ‘The fact that as high a former official of the Colonial Office can be in a muddle about so crucial a point as to the implications of “Enosis” will dishearten those who look forward to the clearing up of the Cyprus tangle and the re-establishment of Anglo-Greek friendship.’
Facing growing criticism in the United Kingdom about the methods he used and their lack of effectiveness, Sir John Harding would resign as Governor of Cyprus on 22 October 1957.
To Lawrence Durrell
14 March [1956]
c/o Amy
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
Dear Larry, παιδάκι μου [my dear boy],
I say, what is going on? I can quite imagine Gen. Harding, Maurice, [1] you (or me if I were there long enough) maddened by duplicity, blackmail, bullying, bombs, deceit, suddenly saying ‘to hell with it!’ and packing Makarios off to the Antipodes. But what I can’t understand is the Cabinet accepting such a cracked idea, knowing full well the damage it was going to do outside Cyprus, considerations which, after all, are nothing to do with Harding’s brief. The whole thing should have been fixed up years ago. Now the only hope is straightjackets all round for the Cabinet and a resumption of talks – but with who? – while – ideally – an exiled Eden works his way through Meredith and Trollope among the mangroves of Tristan da Cunha.
I wonder what feelings prevail in Cyprus. Away the British, I imagine, jubilation followed by a sort of post-coitum-triste – deflation and doubts beginning to creep.
I must say, there is something horrifyingly grandiose about it all, like setting light to a really large bonfire. What about Niko Kranidiotis [2] and Rhodis Rouphos? [3]
Did you read a wonderful book by Ommanney which appeared a few years ago, called The Shoals of Capricorn, about the Seychelles? [4] I’ve always longed to go there. (Should I send it to the Archbishop?) There is one island in the archipelago wholly populated by giant land-tortoises over a yard in height by two yards long. The entire atoll is covered with these bumps, like Byzantine cupolas or the roofs of an Arabian madrassah, the vast majority of them empty, containing nothing but complicated cobwebs and the delicate little skeletons of incumbents that died centuries ago. About one out of ten of these concavities is alive. They trot up to the rare travellers who land there, in hopes of company. There are also quantities of sea-turtles which are caught en masse, rendered down, and poured into tankers which set sail for Tower Bridge, where the stuff is hosed ashore into municipal water carts and off to the Mansion House for city banquets.
I had news of you and Maurice from Ed Stanley, [5] who I like in spite of the shocking balls he writes about Cyprus. How is Eve? [6] Also Maurice & Leonora? Do give them lots of love from me, also to Sappho. Do please, write and tell about Cyprus. I loved your recent short poem in the TLS, Spectator or Statesman. Important! You never sent me a copy of the Cyprus Review with my bit in, though I got the dough. Joan is here and sends her love; also lots, from
Paddy
Xan and Daphne arrive here in two weeks, on the way back to their Casbah. Wish you were too. We stay on in Smarties house [7] till May. The first vol. of my Greek book comes out in late summer.
P.S. Here is a sonnet I wrote for Roger Hinks, [8] who I like in spite of Geo. K’s dislike. It needs some explanation. He told me of a dream last year when, looking out of his window, he saw a steam roller driving up to the front door in which sat four black-faced, sinister, bolt upright Edwardian gamekeepers, gazing at him with dead eyes. Panic-stricken he made a dash for the back of the house, but there they were . . . He awoke in acute anguish. The Bergomask at the end of the octave is Caravaggio, who was born near Bergamo. Hinks has written a book on him, as well as on several other Italian painters: he’s a v. elaborate aesthetic figure.
‘Wall me with banquets, Titian; Tiepolo,
‘Roof me with rapes! The enemy’s at the door.
‘Minims and semibreves defend us! Floor,
‘Hide under Aubusson. Stop gaps, Palladio,
‘With trompe l’oeil vistas . . . Candlelight connives
‘To gild my golden eclogues by the fire . . .
‘Paint out the frontiers, Bergomask, with lyre
‘And luteplayers, dormitions and still lifes.’
But, e’er the fine can warm inside the glass,
Or spacecat fly a league, four baleful shapes
Glide up the drive, borne by a steamroller’s
Slow steam roll. The back door, quick! The grass!
Too late! The roller’s there, four Raglan capes,
And four deerstalkers on four gamekeepers.
[1] Maurice Cardiff (1915–2006), writer and cultural attaché, then working for the British Council in Cyprus; married Leonora Freeman in 1939.
[2] The diplomat, poet and writer Nikos Kranidiotis (1911–97) was Makarios’s right-hand man.
[3] Rodis Kanakaris-Roufos (1924–72), diplomat and writer.
[4] Francis Downes Ommanney, The Shoals of Capricorn (1952).
[5] See page 66 (letter to Joan Rayner, spring 1952).
[6] Durrell and his wife had separated in 1955 and would be divorced two years later.
[7] Gadencourt, owned by Lady Smart.
[8] Roger Hinks (1903–63), art historian with a particular interest in Caravaggio; director of the British Council in Athens, 1954–9.
To George Katsimbalis
Monday [? March 1956]
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
IN HASTE
Dear George,
Did you get my long letter, & the book, which I sent you two months ago? V. many thanks for the beautiful France-Grèce books, which arrived safe: also for Geo. Seferis’s collection [1] of [all] too prophetic poems.
The point of this hasty letter is to commiserate and let off steam about the dangerous lunacy of the British Government. I think the whole lot ought to be put in straightjackets before they can do any more damage. What possible good do they think is going to come of all this?
As I explained in my letter, I am 100% pro Enosis, and – I can’t help being – 100% anti the methods used by EOKA, as also the lunatics of Athens radio. But this last stuff beats anything. I wrote a very long answer – same length as an article really, which is probably why it wasn’t printed – in answer to critics of my Spectator articles and I will send you a typescript when I can get one. When I see more clearly what is going on about Makarios, I’ll write something else.
Things look black indeed. I have not seen or heard from anyone who approves of the exile of Makarios, and I think the reaction will be very violent in England, which may be to the good.
Anyway, dear George, all my love to you and Spatch, as always, and from Joan, καὶ καλὸ ξεμπέρδεμα. Νά τὰ χάλια μας! [and let’s hope we get out of this quickly. Such is our sorry state!]
love
Paddy
P.S. I heard from Philip yesterday that his book on Greek poets [2] is about to appear, and I hope to revie
w it for the Sunday Times.
[1] Seferis’s collection of poems inspired by Cyprus, entitled . . . Cyprus, Where it was Decreed for Me . . . (1955), later retitled as Logbook III; the title is a quotation from Euripides’ Helen.
[2] Philip Sherrard’s The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry (1956), reviewed by PLF on 22 April.
To Jock Murray
16 April 1956
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
My dear Jock,
No please don’t come here yet, because I simply can’t face you till I hand over the completed vol., for shame, confusion etc. I am working away very hard at the moment, and things have taken on a spurt which I hope is the home stretch, in bed with a minor un-painful come-back of lumbago (owing to a long bicycle ride in pouring rain) which is very conducive to writing. In about seven days’ time I fly to the corner tower of a castle in Ireland (Co. Waterford), and hope to present you with the whole thing when I get to London eight days later. Do come to Gadencourt then and we’ll talk about Vol. II and drink to a more propitious delivery.
I’m only too aware that my hopeless dilatoriness about the final stage of this vol. seems inexcusable and infuriating. I think I got rather jammed up by constant gloom about the Greek–Cyprus business in the back of my mind, a feeling that my book, in these circumstances, may appear unhelpful and trivial, wondering what I ought to do to change it (which would, of course, change the whole nature of the book!) etc., etc. Quite futile, of course. I wish I’d had the sense to finish the whole thing a year ago – or that the English & Greeks had postponed their deadlock for a year. Streams of letters and cuttings from Greece aren’t much help.
Here comes the postman. No more now, but many apologies and I really am working!
Yours ever
Paddy
Love from Joan
The following was Paddy’s response to a sad and angry letter from Seferis (20 March 1956: translated from the original Greek), which reveals the depth of feeling over the British handling of the Cyprus emergency. Seferis berated ‘Panty’ for his ‘infinite admiration for Mr Macmillan and Mr Eden’, and his ‘blind loyalty to English diplomacy’. He deplored the ‘gangster-like’ treatment of Makarios. ‘I know that you are pure and that you really love Greece,’ continued Seferis, ‘but this is not enough. You must be convinced that the English policy is criminal and sworn to ruin us.’ Seferis fulminated against the ‘lies and calumnies’ of the British government: ‘To hell with the Anglo-Saxon treachery and hypocrisy . . .’ Later in the letter he apologised for losing his temper. ‘Forgive me, Panty, my dear. My sorrow is great. An incurable sorrow. We all feel like deceived lovers, because we loved nothing more than England and the English people . . . Even after fifty or a hundred years the bitterness will always remain in the depth of our soul. And grandfathers will be telling their grandchildren how much we suffered because of our insidious and disloyal friend whom we had, once, so much loved.’
To George Seferis
25 May 1956
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
My dear George,
Very many apologies for not answering your card before. [1] I was away in Ireland, having got badly stuck here in Normandy, where I have been scribbling away, tant bien que mal [‘with difficulty’] all winter. Things are going a bit better now. George K. had sent me . . . Κύπρον, οὗ μ’ ἐθέσπισεν . . . [. . . Cyprus, Where it was Decreed for Me . . .] a few weeks before. I had been meaning to write to you about them. I like them immensely and have read them all several times. Some of them I knew. Did you have Φιλεντέμ [Filedem] [2] in mind in the Πραματευτὴς ἀπὸ τὴ ∑ιδῶνα [‘Peddlar from Sidon’]? (Τουρκοπούλα . . . ρόδα στὸ μαντύλι)? [‘A young Turkish girl . . . Roses in a kerchief ’] I hadn’t seen ∑τὰ περίχωρα τ ης Κερύνειας [‘In the outskirts of Kyreneia’] [3] before; it’s terribly good and quite pathetic. The English world there has exactly the stale and faded atmosphere of a nightclub in the morning, as in John Betjeman’s poem. ∑αλαμίνα τῆς Κύπρος [‘Salamis in Cyprus’] [4] is still my favourite. I’m keeping it for you to sign.
My book has swollen to such proportions that John Murray is going to publish in thirds, coming out at intervals, the first to appear being the one on the Mani. Although it is an extremely pro-Greek book as you can imagine, I tremble to think of the sneers and jeering and hatred that lie in wait for me in the columns of the Ἑστία, the Ἀκρόπολις and the Ἀπογευματινή [5] – ‘αὐτὸς ὁ δῆθεν “Φίλος” τῆς χώρας μας’ . . . ‘Προτιμοῦμεν τοὺς ἐχθροὺς’, κ.τ.λ., κ.τ.λ. [‘That so-called “friend” of our country’ . . . ‘we prefer our enemies’, etc., etc.] – I could write them myself. I know it so well. ‘It is obviously the intention of this agent of the Intelligence Service (a true representation of perfidious Albion masquerading as a friend) to discredit Greece in the eyes of the so-called “civilized” world by representing our fatherland as a race of poverty-stricken and illiterate peasants living by sheeptheft and the vendetta, believing in nereids, gorgons, werewolves, and vampire bats. May we, perhaps, remind this gentleman that when his own “civilised” country – a “civilisation” of which we can appreciate a shining example in Cyprus today! – were still barbarian savages dressed in wolf-skins and painted blue, the ancestors of the humble “peasants” he describes so patronisingly were . . . etc. etc.’ Oh God!
Not that the cheap English press is much better, and perhaps worse, mutatis mutandis. One of the many gloomy aspects of the present bloody situation is that it seems to have turned both Greece and England into enlarged caricatures of everything that their worst enemies have always pretended they were and both seem at the moment odious. Φουκαράδες! [Poor bastards!] The only hope lies with liberal opinion on both sides; but this, in moments of stress, as we know from Yeats, is the first thing to go. [6] What could be less reconcilable than the present situation – a just cause injudiciously applied, and an unjust cause applied with all the punctilio of legality? It might have made things more soluble in the end if the British government really did have a bit more of the Macchiavellicism [sic] attributed to it by the Athenian press. I’m certain Il Principe would have known better than to create a hagiography by exiling the ArchB [Makarios], and martyrology by hanging two Cypriots, however many poor devils get bumped off or killed by bombs. I absolutely disapprove of, and hate, the official British policy over Cyprus and am deeply convinced of the justice of Enosis; but I can’t think anything but ill of EOKA. None of us liked Gen. Grivas [7] – do you remember? when he commanded X, or approved either of his politics or his methods, and the latter seem to me no better now, when disguised by a heroic name and a noble cause. It seems to me that values have got dreadfully mixed up for newspapers to compare his activities to those of Greek resistance to Nazi occupation, at any rate, as I saw it in Crete. For one thing, the assassination of isolated Germans was strictly forbidden by a joint decision of the Cretans and the few Englishmen working with them because (a) the penalties were the lining up and machine-gunning of several hundreds of men, women and children, and the dynamiting of entire villages and (b) quite literally, because, though extremely easy, such assassinations seemed both pointless and cowardly. As, in Cyprus (a) (thank God!) doesn’t apply, (b) seems to me to apply with double force EOKA’s activities up till now would have resulted in the execution, not of two men, but of two or three thousand and razed a score of villages to the ground. Also, during the whole occupation, the Cretans bumped off very many less Cretan traitors than EOKA have so far killed among the Cypriots. The Germans in Crete were just as courageous, probably more efficient, four times more numerous and a hundred times more ruthless than the British in Cyprus – and yet we all managed to survive quite easily, having the entire population on our side, as, one must assume, EOKA has; and yet, nobody thought it phenomenally hero
ic or wonderful (quite rightly, because it wasn’t): also, it was rather fun. All this being so, it leaves one rather puzzled to read of the intrepid exploits of the second Digenis Akritas [8] against the ruthless and blood-thirsty tyranny of the blood-soaked butcher Gauleiter von Harding, whose μεσαιωνικὰ βασανιστήρια [medieval torture chambers] – βασανιστήρια [torture chambers] are always μεσαιωνικά [medieval] – outdo the Nazis a thousand-fold . . . All this bragging and exaggeration seems a terrible abuse of language and shows a great ignorance of what the German occupation really meant. I have never met him, but apparently all who know him think very highly of Harding as a just, well-intentioned and humane man – including (according to Francis Noel-Baker, [9] who was here the other day) Makarios himself and Niko Kranidiotis and quite a number of pro Enosis Greeks in Cyprus. After all, handing over Cyprus does not depend on his decision, but the government’s, and the job of keeping order is a ghastly one. I wonder how any other general of another nationality would have managed – supposing the whole situation were reversed. Would a Greek general have done better? (I don’t mean Grivas!)
Dear George, I hope you don’t mind me asking all these questions. The thing is that I spend my time putting the Greek side of the thing to any Englishmen I can get to listen, and in any periodical that will publish it, and all this is a sort of devil’s advocate’s argument. Things which I carefully omit and have rather on my conscience. I have become fairly expert at expanding the opposite of all I have just written, and have accumulated a considerable dialectical arsenal for the demolition of anti-Enosis arguments!