To go on with these private perplexities – all this is largely prompted by a constant avalanche of lurid newspaper cuttings sent [to] me by the Colossus [Katsimbalis], all headed with the ironical comment Ζήτω ἡ Ἀγγλοελληνικὴ Φιλία! [Long live Anglo-Hellenic friendship!] in red chalk! – Let us admit – indeed, proclaim – that the initial fault lies with the British, in their unjustifiable (in view of Greece’s offers of bases etc.) retention of Cyprus, and proclaim still louder the blame due to Eden and the British Government for their insulting and destructive policy over the whole question, louder still their willingness to let non-existent Turkish claims strengthen their case (though I do not believe – it is part of my anti-Machiavelli theory – as all Greeks do, that this was actually engineered by the British; I think it was merely welcomed by the Government, with crocodile tears of regret, to bolster up a weak and unjustifiable line of argument). We must also admit that there have been faults on the Greek side, which seem to me to be the timing of the whole thing (in view of their old friend England’s difficulties and embarrassments all over the world and especially in the Levant), the campaign of hatred in the newspapers, incendiary broadcasts to Cyprus and the activities of EOKA. Of this, far the gravest seems to me to be the irresponsible and hydrophobic behaviour of the newspapers; the last two – broadcasts and EOKA – must be largely by-products of this. It seems to have cowed all voice of protest into silence. What I mean is, that at least half of the stuff appearing on Cyprus in the English press is opposed to Government policy, and most of this is not partisan journalism of the opposition, but private protest dictated by liberal sentiments. But any trace of self-criticism seems to have vanished from the Athenian press, leaving the field open for all the evils we’ve been talking about. Nothing but extremes remain, an hysterical world of fantasy only populated by saints, martyrs, heroes, tyrants, butchers and traitors. If I were a Greek peasant in Epirus, Acarnania, Mani or Crete (say), brought up with patriotism as a religion, my mind unencumbered by any reading except the newspaper, the kapheneion wireless my only link with Athens, and the priest, the proedros and the daskalos telling me every second of the day that England means the destruction of Greece and the massacre of Greek heroes – spiritual descendants of Lambros Katsionis, Athanasios Diakos, Archbishop Germanos, Kolokotronis and Pavlos Melas [10] – in enslaved Cyprus, I am convinced I would be a violent fanatic – there would be no opposition view to prevent me being so; and supposing you in Athens had written an article suggesting a different and milder policy towards the Cyprus question and hinting that all Englishmen were not the treacherous and blood-thirsty ogres the newspapers say, and supposing some paper had the guts to print it – I would probably be in the front of an indignant mob in ὁδòς Ύπερείδου [Iperidou Street], throwing sticks and stones at your window and shouting ‘’Έξω ὁ ∑εφεριάδης! Πράκτωρ του ̰ Δήμιου Φὸν Χάρντινκ! Προδότης! Χαφιὲς τω ̰ ν ’Άγγλων! Πουλημένος!’ [‘Out with Seferiadis! Agent of the executioner von Harding! Traitor! Stool-pigeon of the English!’], etc. That is exactly what the newspapers seem to have done to nearly all of Greece. How on earth will it ever unwind again? Because, presumably, it will have to, if the Greeks and the English are to settle anything about poor old Cyprus. I keep hoping and praying for a sudden change of policy in England that would make the unwinding process possible in Greece. But at the moment the English and the Greeks seem to have gritted their teeth in resolution to prove that the English are not to be cowed by gunmen, nor the Greeks by hangmen, a sterile competition that can only lead us all further into the dark . . . The real tragedy is that it is all so easy to solve, as we all know! According to the Colossus, it will take 100 years for Anglo-Greek friendship to be re-established. I wonder if he is right.
In arguing with anti-Enosis people, I always say, at this point, that without the activities of EOKA, nothing would have happened at all. ‘Never’ would never have become ‘sometime’. Alas, perhaps it’s the truth. The Turkish threat I regard as absolutely chimerical – as if they would attack the island if there was a British or NATO base on it! If only EOKA had behaved differently during the talks with Makarios, I really believe something at last [might] have come of it. I don’t know.
I rather regret having gone into all this. Poor George! Don’t bother to answer the Cyprus part, it’s too shattering, and I suppose, rather boring too. But this winter has been a nightmare & has practically stopped me writing. Most of the above, I think, must have been prompted by the Colossus’s letters & cuttings. He writes like a lunatic! I have tried to get him to come and stay here, so that we could have a gargantuan gastronomic tour of all the splendid Norman restaurants, but he’s been unable to get away. Joan is in Paris, & returns tomorrow, but asks me to send all love, to which I add mine!
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] Seferis had complained that PLF had not answered an earlier card.
[2] The title of a popular Cretan song: apparently such a favourite of PLF’s while he was in Crete that he was sometimes known to his Cretan comrades as ‘Filedem’.
[3] Another poem in the same book by Seferis, which takes the form of a dialogue between two British expatriate women living in Cyprus; one of the two epigraphs is from Betjeman’s poem ‘Sun and Fun: The Song of a Nightclub Proprietress’, published in A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954).
‘But I’m dying now and done for
What on earth was all the fun for?
For God’s sake keep that sunlight out of sight.’
Seferis’s purpose was to show how alien the British are to the Cypriot landscape.
[4] Another poem from the same collection, critical of the British for denying Cypriots their right to be reunited with their fellow Greeks.
[5] Hestia, Akropolis and Apogevmatini, all Athens newspapers.
[6] Seferis underlined these last few words in pencil. PLF refers to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1921):
‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
[7] Georgios Grivas (1897–1974), a Cyprus-born general in the Greek Army, leader of the EOKA guerrilla organisation.
[8] A legendary Byzantine hero.
[9] The Labour MP Francis Edward Noel-Baker (1920–2009).
[10] All heroes of the Greek national liberation movement against Turkish rule, except the last, who was commander of the Greek forces in the struggle for Macedonia.
To Debo Devonshire
26 August 1956
Aix-en-Provence
Darling Debo,
I’m terribly sorry not having written half a century ago, after telephoning you on the eve of leaving to join Xan and Daph in the South of France. Things there were such turmoil that I don’t think any of the hundred-odd people engaged on making that film wrote so much as a postcard the whole time. D, X & I talked it over and decided you would have hated it. I did, rather, and buggered off after about a week.
It was all pretty queer. First things first: Dirk Bogarde, the actor who is doing one in the film, [1] is absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking voice and manner, a super-gent, the ghost of oneself twelve years ago. He and Daph & Xan had become bosom friends by the time I got there, and he and his equally nice manager (rather a grand thing to have?) are going to stay with them for Christmas in Tangiers. We all lived – us, the other actors, directors, cameramen etc. – in a vast chalet, miles above the clouds in the French Alps, leagues away from anywhere and at the end of an immeasurable tangle of hairpin bends. The film itself, what I saw of it, is tremendously exciting – tremendous pace, action galore, staggering scenery, with the guns of whiskered and turbaned Cretan guerrillas jutting down from every r
ock and miles of peaceful French roads choked with truckloads of steel-helmeted Germans bawling ‘Lili Marlene’. It’ll certainly be a thumping success, and when it finally appears at the Odeon or elsewhere, I propose to sneak in and see it in a false beard night after night. Some bits – not yet filmed, fortunately – turn Bogarde–Fermor into a mixture of Garth [2] & Superman, shooting Germans clean through the breast from a dentist’s chair, [3] strangling sentries in an offhand manner – all totally fictitious! I’m having a terrific tussle getting them to change these bits in the film, not because I really mind, but because anyone who knows anything about the operation knows that it’s all rot. There are scores of small things dead wrong, & Xan and I are having a death struggle to get them put right, mostly for the sake of Greek and Cretan friends. It’s all v. rum. The main trouble is that once a filmscript is written, the authors themselves bow down and worship it as though it were Holy Writ. IT becomes the truth and anyone trying to change it (like X or me) incurs the horror of heretics trying to tamper with the text of the Gospel.
Well, I baled out of this mountain madhouse after seven days and retreated to a minute Provençal village called Auribeau, where I stayed in the pub and scribbled all day (against time) in the priest’s leafy garden overlooking a forested valley along which flowed a swift and icy river with deep green pools dappled with the shadows of leaves where I splashed and floated between paragraphs for hours among the dragonflies. There was never anyone there except occasionally a solitary fisherman with a straw hat and never a bite (perhaps because of the splashing I mentioned).
Then everything changed 100%, when Annie Fleming went to stay with Somerset Maugham [4] (not Willy to me) at Cap Ferrat, where he inhabits a gorgeous villa. It was a concerted plan that she should try and wangle my staying there for fun, for a few days. She duly got me asked there to luncheon, [5] and afterwards, as if by clockwork, Mr Maugham asked me to stay several days and everything looked like a triumph of Annie’s engineering and plain sailing. But there were rocks ahead. (Do you know Somerset Maugham? He is eighty-four, and his face is the wickedest tangle of cruel wrinkles I have ever seen and so discoloured and green that it looks as though he has been rotting in the Bastille, or chained to the bench of a galley or inside an iron mask for half a century. Alligator’s eyes peer from folds of pleated hide and below them an agonising snarl is beset with discoloured and truncated fangs, but the thing to remember is that he has a very pronounced and noticeable stutter that can seize up a sentence for thirty seconds on end.)
All went better and better – a sort of honeymoon – as the day progressed. But at dinner things began to go wrong. [6] Two horrible and boring guests arrived (publishers) called Mr & Mrs Frere. [7] Mr Frere made some sweeping generalisation and
ME: ‘I love generalisations – for instance, that all Quakers are colour-blind (you know the line) – or that all heralds stutter!’
MRS FRERE: ‘Stutter?’
ME: ‘Yes.’
MRS FRERE: ‘How do you mean, stutter?’
ME: ‘Stutter . . . you know, stammer . . .’
Later on, after that fatal eighth glass of whisky, I was in trouble again: –
SOMERSET MAUGHAM: ‘It’s a c-c-confounded nuisance t-t-today b-b-being the F-feast of the As-as-as-assumption. N-none of the g-gardeners have d-done a s-s-stroke . . .’
ME: ‘Ah yes! The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin! Just after the Pope gave out the dogma a few years ago, I was going round the Louvre with a friend of mine called Robin Fedden (who, by ill luck, has a terrible stutter) [8] and we paused in front of a huge picture of the Assumption by (I think) Correggio (ah, oui ) & Robin turned to me and said “Th-th-that’s what I c-c-call an un-w-w-warrantable as-s-s-sumption”.’
There was a moment’s silence, the time needed for biting one’s tongue out. When bedtime came my host approached me with a reptile’s fixity, offering me a hand as cold as a toad, with the words: ‘W-w-well I’ll s-s-say g-good-b-b-bye now in c-case I’m not up b-by the t-time y-you l-l-leave . . .’ [9]
Annie helped me pack next morning, and as I strode, suitcase in hand, to the door, there was a sound like an ogre’s sneeze. The lock of the suitcase had caught in the sheet, leaving a jagged yard-long rent across the snow-white expanse of heavily embroidered gossamer. I broke into a run and Annie into fits of suppressed laughter. As a result of bullying by Annie & Diana Cooper (who turned up in the area, where I had settled in a horrible millionaires’ hotel, soon after) I was asked by W. S. M. to a meal of reconciliation and amends, where we met as affable strangers. It was really a gasbag’s penance and I, having learnt the hard way, vouchsafed little more than a few safe monosyllables.
The rest of my short stay in that area was spent with D. Cooper, Annie, Robin & Mary [Campbell], [10] & Hamish [St Clair-Erskine] (who were all staying with Mrs Fellowes). [11] I hate it – the Côte d’Azur I mean – and will never set foot there again.
I’ve taken rooms here for a week – ending tomorrow – in a pretty, retired midwife’s house, in whose garden I write. This ravishing town, full of chimes of bells, fountains, peasants playing boules in the shadow of lime trees and splendid decaying palaces and churches, is a wonderful disinfectant after that revolting coast. All is splendid or dilapidated, nothing smart.
In two days’ time I set off on the great yacht Diana has borrowed, [12] with D [iana], Joan, Alan Pryce-Jones and a couple called Frank & Kitty Giles: [13] Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily. It really would be a kind act were you to write c/o British Consul, Cagliari, Sardinia. Meanwhile, please give my love to Andrew, to Emma & Stoker [14] (angels in human form) & to your Wife. [15]
Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] Dirk Bogarde (1921–99) was playing PLF in the film of Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), which was being shot in the French Alps.
[2] Muscle-bound hero of a strip cartoon which ran in the Daily Mirror from 1943 to 1997.
[3] In one scene, the PLF character pretends to be a patient in a dentist’s chair when two German military policemen come into the dentist’s surgery. One of them is suspicious: he pulls back the sheet covering PLF, revealing that PLF is holding a pistol. PLF pushes the German against a wall and shoots him in the gut.
[4] The novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), who had lived at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat since his divorce from his wife, Syrie, in 1927.
[5] ‘Paddy was invited for lunch and arrived with five cabin trunks, parcels of books and the manuscript of his unfinished work on Greece strapped in a bursting attaché case.’ Ann Fleming to Evelyn Waugh, 27 August 1956: Amory (ed.), The Letters of Ann Fleming, pages 184–6.
[6] ‘Paddy who never travels without a bottle of calvados appeared more exuberant than one small martini could explain’ (ibid.).
[7] Alexander Frere-Reeves (1892–1984), for many years head of William Heinemann, Maugham’s publisher. He was married to Patricia Wallace, daughter of the thriller writer Edgar Wallace. ‘The conversation turned to tropical diseases and Paddy shouted at length on the stuttering that typified the College of Heralds. I intervened with a swift change of topic and thought the situation saved, but Frere (nasty man) made us all angry by saying that no author wrote for anything but profit; this put my voice up several octaves as well as Paddy’s’ (ibid.).
[8] Some small excisions Paddy made when this letter was published in In Tearing Haste have been reinstated.
[9] ‘He then vanished like a primeval crab leaving a slime of silence; it was broken by Paddy who cried, “Oh what have I done, Oh Christ what a fool I am” and slammed his whisky glass on the table, it broke to pieces cutting his hand and showering the valuable carpet with blood and splinters’ (ibid.).
[10] Robin Francis Campbell (1912–85), soldier and painter, and his second wife Lady Mary Sybil, née St Clair Erskine (1912–93), daughter of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn (and sister of Hamish).
[11] Marguerite (Daisy) Decazes (1890–1962), the well-dressed, sharp-tongued d
aughter of the 3rd Duc Decazes, and heiress through her mother to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She owned the luxurious villa Les Zoraïdes on Cap Martin, near Monaco, and had married Reginald Fellowes, her second husband, in 1919.
[12] Diana Cooper had again been lent the Eros II by Stavros Niarchos.
[13] Frank Giles (b. 1919), foreign correspondent, married to Lady Katherine ‘Kitty’ Sackville.
[14] Debo’s husband, Andrew, and their two oldest children, Emma (b. 1943), and Peregrine, known as ‘Stoker’ (b. 1944).
[15] Lady Katherine (Kitty) Petty-Fitzmaurice (1912–95), Baroness Nairne: DD’s closest friend, whose nickname, ‘Wife’, originated from an involved family joke which began when a man repeatedly referred to his wife as ‘Kitty my wife’ in one breath. It was adopted by DD to describe any great friend of either sex. Married 3rd Viscount Mersey in 1933.
‘The first problem was, Where to write the book? I began in a little hotel on the edge of Dartmoor, run by Mrs Postlethwaite Cobb, the daughter of the chaplain at West Point, a firm friend; she had retired there after founding a home for superannuated donkeys in Algeria. Work was broken by fox hunting three times a week.’
To Diana Cooper
28 September 1956
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford
Devon
My darling Diana,
Pretty different here from our recent habitat! My muse and I are cloistered here, a gale howls down the chimney, cats and dogs come down on the sodden fields outside in an almost unbroken stream and a wind blows that would unhorn cows. I don’t think you’ve ever been here, but it’s a great retiring place for literary purposes, for E. Waugh, & Patrick Kinross and others – I first came here seven years ago with Patrick when we [were] both struggling with books, and have been back several times in extremis, as now (Saint-Wandrille was full, alas!). It is owned & run by an odd couple, Mrs Carolyn Postlethwaite Cobb, an elderly American of very improbable shape, now largely bedridden, and her middle-aged ex-lover Norman Webb, a Devonshire chap she met a number of decades ago running a team of donkeys in Biskra or Fez. Their youthful flame has burnt out I think but they remain loving and inseparable and Norman wanders about beaming and bottle-nosed and prone to cider-sprung meandering. Both are very nice, and, miraculously, in spite of the awe-inspiring fourteenth-century beams and inglenooks, fires blaze in hearths, water is piping hot, central heating leads its secret life and the food’s not bad at all.
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