You are clever to live in Rome. It’s cold and foggy here, but quite pretty in a misty, lamplit, muffin-man kind of way. A seagull flew up the street, from the Thames I suppose, this morning, probably bent on an island holiday: anything for a change.
I’ve got Josephine [Powell]’s lovely enlargement of the mosaic of the Marriage at Cana [3] pinned on the wall by my desk, and I like it more and more. Please give her my love and could you ask her, if she ever makes any enlargements of the kneeling figure of the Logothete Theodore Metochites [4] with his enormous headdress, also from the Kariyé Djami in Constantinople, please to put me at the top of the list of buyers. It really is a beauty.
I’m tremendously excited at the moment, as Mani, my new book, comes out in three days’ time, and I await the first reviews with my heart in my mouth.
Please write and tell me what you are up to. Also, how things are faring for Judy. [5] Between you and me, everyone is a bit anxious about her in London, her present imbroglio, and how well or ill she will take it if things go wrong. It’s hard to know what to wish for – that it should go well, and for Judy to be happy, for a while at any rate, or for it to go ill and for Judy to be well out of it, if she weathered the shock. It’s in this last clause that all the danger lies.
I adored my time in Rome and adored you, and greatly miss our secret conclaves. I keep on finding myself humming about the holly and the ivy and the running of the deer! So please write, darling Lyndall.
With lots of love from
Paddy
xxx
[1] Ivan Moffat (see note 1 on page 76). LB had become friendly with his mother, Iris Tree.
[2] David O. Selznick (1902–65), Hollywood film producer and film studio executive. LB was offered a job working for him.
[3] One of the mosaics at the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, in the north-west of Istanbul.
[4] Theodore Metochites (1270–1332), Byzantine statesman, author, gentleman philosopher, and patron of the arts. His political career culminated in 1321, when he was invested as Grand Logothete (‘grand chancellor’). He used his wealth to subsidise the church’s restoration after it had been damaged during the period of Crusader rule. This included not only repairing the building but commissioning mosaics and frescoes, many of which survived even though the church had been made into a mosque after the Islamic Conquest. Metochites’s portrait can still be seen in a famous mosaic in the narthex, above the entrance to the nave.
[5] Judith Venetia ‘Judy’ Montagu (1923–72), daughter of the Hon. Edwin Montagu and Venetia Stanley, with whom PLF had been involved a few years earlier. She had given up her London life and moved to Rome after falling for the American photographer and art historian Milton Gendel (b. 1919), whom she eventually married in 1962. PLF had been staying in her Rome flat on the Isola Tiburtina when he began his affair with Lyndall Birch.
After spending the winter in England, Paddy returned to Italy in the spring of 1959. ‘Back in Rome, I met a man who owned a castle in the Alban Hills, not far from Palestrina,’ he later recalled. ‘It had been fought over by the Colonna and the Orsini for centuries, then abandoned for a further hundred years. I had developed a passion for places like this and I asked him if I could rent a couple of rooms there. He laughed and said, “You must be mad! You can have the whole place free.” ’
To Jock Murray
10 [?] May 1959
Castello di Passerano
Gallicano nel Lazio
Provincia di Roma
Dear Jock,
I hope you are impressed by this new departure. [1] It’s not for serious writing but for doing a fair copy at the end of the day in order not to be too depressed as the weeks go by at the spectacle of the mounting pile of yellowing and dog-eared and erased and ballooned pages.
Now, my doings. The drive went off swimmingly. Got out of the aeroplane at Le Touquet, and reached Chantilly that night, then on to Avallon at end of next day’s driving. Grenoble the next night, through the Basses Alpes and the passes of the Vercors the next, sleeping chez the Smarts, on to Savona the next, along the Ligurian coast, La Spezia, inland to Pisa, slept at Siena, through Tuscany and Latium next day, reaching Rome at night. Drove straight up to the Capitol and drove a sort of triumphal dance about fifty times round the statue of Marcus Aurelius and only stopped when a bewildered-looking carabiniere sauntered onto the empty square; and down at last to Judy Montagu’s flat on an island in the middle of the Tiber.
Of course the option on the house at Anticoli had just elapsed so, based on the Tiber, I started raking Tuscany, Latium and Umbria and at last found this stupendous castle and contrived to borrow it. It stands on a forested hill and dominates a rolling fleece of treetops and freshly mown hay-fields. Millions of birds with the cuckoo well in the lead, except at night when scores of nightingales take over as well as owls, crickets, nightjars, frogs and the like. It looks from afar like Windsor, Carnarvon or Lismore with its turrets and the long sweep of its battlements, but it has actually only four rooms and none of them have been inhabited for five hundred years or so. There is a Colonna shield on one corner, to which august house it belonged at one time like most of this part of Lazio. It is girdled on three sides by the sweep of the Sabine, Praenestine and Alban hills tailing off to Mount Soracte and on the fourth by the Roman campagna with the dome of St Peter’s and great Rome itself just discernible on the horizon. I’ve managed to borrow some odds and ends of furniture from the Orsini palace and got some nuns and seamstresses in nearby Tivoli to sew a vast heraldic banner several yards square which adorns one wall at the end of a large banqueting hall. I’m tempted to fly it from the highest tower; don’t quite dare to yet but doubt if I’ll be able to resist for long. Then, when the Black Castellan of Passerano displays his gonfalon from the battlements, the peasants of the valley can hide their cattle and douse their lights and bolt up their dear ones!
To correct this slight attack of folie de grandeur, there is no sanitation at all. It’s all fieldwork under the trees, and the only lighting is by oil-lamp and very splendid it looks. But what I’m leading up to is that the second vol. is under weigh and going well. And about time too, I fancy I can hear you murmur!
All the best
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] This letter was typed.
Paddy had returned to Italy, excited by the prospect of resuming his affair with Lyndall Birch. But he had not considered her feelings. After his letter in November she had not heard from him again: humiliated and hurt, she had begun seeing another man. When she and Paddy were reunited in Assisi, she told him that their affair was over. In this ‘mea culpa’ letter he reflects ruefully on his mistakes.
To Lyndall Birch
undated [May 1959?]
Sibilla
Tivoli
My darling Lyndall,
I went out to the Castle again on the way to Tivoli and came into the valley in the later afternoon. The country looked less Canaanitish under the grey mackerel sky; more as though it were embedded in a remote, sad, silent dream. That troop of half wild girls helped me up with a few more folding tables I’d brought out in the back of the car. I made the two beds, put a table by each with an oil lamp on it as bits of half-corroborative detail in that inchoate interior, then sent the girls away that dogged my footsteps, all watchfully and bewilderedly at gaze; and mooched about the rooms with the sky fading beyond the still glassless windows like an interlock of grey angels’ wings with all the birds falling silent till it was completely dark; and felt as sinister as Giant Despair in Doubting Castle in The Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m not absolutely convinced that it is the perfect habitat for me in my present ludicrous state: that masonry is rife with rich potentialities of self-pity; but I’m resolved to live there for a bit, though I feel rather as though the dwindling obstacles between me and incumbency are so many mounting bricks of someone immuring himself. But there’s just a chance that its promises may be a kind of near-homeopathic device, the hair of a diffe
rent dog.
Of course, by the time I tore myself away and went spiralling up into the lights of Tivoli, it was far too late to knock up Miss Edwardes [1] in case she hadn’t got my letter (leaping at her offer), which I only sent off yesterday. She’s awfully old. So I took a neo-Gothic room in the Hotel Sirene and slouched off, rather imprudently perhaps in the circumstances to The Sibilla, [2] where you and Judy and I had luncheon under the Athenian Sybil’s rotunda when you and I had only just met and all that last autumn’s and last winter’s and this spring’s work was still to be done; munched my way through a rather tasteless trout and some gorgonzola, and here I am. Thank God the room’s practically empty, except for a group of Italians that I find myself looking at from time to time with totally unjustified scorn, wishing they were Greek and finding them, by comparison, and in spite of their handsome faces and their lively ways, like food with the salt left out. But I do realise that at the moment the poor sods couldn’t put a foot right as far as I’m concerned.
*
You must be in the heart of the Blunt world, [3] at the moment, with all our pals, and I hope it goes well.
I do see that there is a sort of comic justice in my present plight. I’m counting rather sanguinely on reserves of shallowness and resilience that seem, at the moment, quite beyond my grasp; those particular buffoons have gone on strike. The most irking thing of all is that every time that I think of you with anger or a hard-luck-hang-dog grimace – (which I do now and then, though most of the time I think of you with unconditional fondness and love and friendship and a respectable longing to be able to show it and do something about it, which has nothing to do – or very little to do – with ravening desire (I’ve managed, like Medea, to drag that dragon into a fitful slumber with little more than the occasional flicker of a scaly eyelid . . .), and nothing whatever to do with guilty feelings about past inadequacy – every time such thoughts come raging in, their brave flames are snuffed at once with the thought that, in our joint feat of flinging a pearl away richer than all our tribe, [4] I was well in the lead. Please pity my frustration in this! Think of the baulked scowl . . . It’s infuriating to be utterly in the wrong; unlike you, lucky!
I’m off to bed now, as they’re shutting up shop. More tomorrow.
Tuesday
I woke up with the sun pouring through the window, and, when I sat up, there was Sant’ Antonio, [5] my old Traveller’s Tree refuge [on] the other side of the ravine, under the wavering line of the Sabine Hills, and, immediately below, the Sybil’s temple and feathery-looking ilexes with the early sunlight appearing to stream horizontally through them and scatter a bright gold dust of lyrical wonder over everything, the tops of cypresses and what looked like young hazels. A waterfall swished down through the Courbet-looking rocks into a deep, blue-green and secret-looking pool. Wood pigeons wheeled under my window, with the light sliding over their wings and vanishing again as they sailed through the shadows. It was like a grove sacred to a benign sylvan god, and all spoke of sunlight and happiness, so unlike the tearful mediaeval beauty of the Black Bastardy [Castello di Passerano].
I found Miss Edwardes pottering about among the irises and snapdragons under her vine trellis beyond Sant’ Antonio, much more shrunken and old and brittle than I had remembered, her pallor and her wavering voice belied by her cheerful bright blue and rather small girlish eyes. We went shopping in Tivoli where she waved her lorgnette – so at variance with her almost peasant clothes and the handkerchief over her head – in many a hardly haggled bargain for the castle. I whisked her off there with a young glazier with a tape measure and we left him at work, so all will soon be well; then to the Sibilla, for a feast. My word, she was excited! I don’t think anyone can have taken her out for decades. As we were finishing Nathalie and Graziella [6] turned up and shocked and charmed her with their brisk metropolitan chat. (Nathalie had made a mistake about a called-off lunch with the Quennells.) After that, I wandered off in the car through the Sabine hills, lying for hours under the olive trees, thinking about the article I’m supposed to be writing and about you.
*
I do want you to be clear about last winter. We talked about it, rather unhappily (and why not, for Christ’s sake?) at Assisi, and now, alas, it’s probably only of interest for our sentimental archives. You know – you must know – how I loved our October life. But, in illogical contrast to my vanity and conceit in other ways, a sort of deep-rooted ill opinion of myself (linked, as far as I can make it out, with the almost subconscious knowledge of how little, as far as a lifetime goes, I have to offer anyone) makes me the most laggard of mortals in thinking anyone could be in love with me. This produces a kind of rhinoceros-hide obtuseness which is less a defence for me – though it can be – than for the extremely rare other ones the other side of the carapace i.e. a shield for them against my inadequacies. This sounds (quite wrongly!) almost noble, so I hasten to say that it is accompanied by a perfectly commonplace, and in no way estimable (and it seems to me now, very brutal) lack of sensitiveness and lack of twigging about what happens to others.
Anyway, the thing is this: this subconscious formula didn’t work in this case, if anything so diffuse and obscure can be called a formula. I trailed clouds of October glory all through the winter and thought of you constantly with devotion and excitement and the resolve to be in Rome again, and with you, constantly and far too overconfidently. I never deliver these feelings in precise words to myself, except as the memory and the prospect of magical happiness, and I found myself smiling with idiotic bliss whenever I thought of you; and your October self was constantly irrupting. I saw ourselves rushing into our temporarily suspended embrace and showering each other with rash unquestioning and uncalculating happiness. But (through the above mentioned obtuseness) I had no idea what harm and unhappiness I was unconsciously inflicting. Though now, when I think of your letters – so beautifully written, so kind and loving and undemanding, my darling Lyndall, I see that anyone but a savage would have understood the baleful possibilities of silence: silence caused by the thought that I would be in Rome again almost at once; and by the vanity of waiting for the inspiration to write a letter and then more letters, of immense length and loving tenderness and brilliant wit and imperishable splendour. Speed and more humility on my part could have saved on both. I know there is no defence for me here, and it’s no good striding about the room and kicking the furniture. But please believe that it wasn’t indifference. I don’t think you do. It is atrocious bad luck that my eleventh-hour letter (not such a wonder, I hasten to say, in case it turns up, but it might have changed things if the magic had not been too irretrievably dismantled by then) should never have got to you. You know how ashamed and sorry I am about all this; how bitterly furious with myself, you can’t know.
*
Our stars have been cruelly inauspicious since then.
My last days in London, ever since writing to you, then the journey to Chantilly and across France went by in a state of ecstatic excitement that increased as the leagues diminished between me and Rome. (You and the town had long since merged.) I had a guilty knowledge – not nearly guilty enough, I’m sorry to say! – that I had behaved pretty badly. But I had no idea how badly. I foresaw a few token reproaches which the joy of being together again would have ridden over roughshod and scattered in smithereens in the first five minutes. I also knew something about your complications, [7] didn’t blame you at all (I should hope not, indeed!) and felt supremely confident that I could send any ghastly intervener flying; chuckled at the prospect and tooled on singing merrily at the wheel through the French spring. You sounded so excited and breathless on the telephone at La Spezia, or so I thought, rashly attributing my own mood to you. There were nothing but golden prospects ahead. Not an inkling of how soon I would be smiling on the other side of my face. Admit you are a bit touched by the staggering absurdity of all this.
Then all started to go tragically awry. The first meeting on that beastly film set, [8] so disench
anting for you, but not for me. I ought to have understood the gloomy implications of your turning your head aside later on. I felt shattered and groggy after our talk in the bar in Assisi and only then began to understand how much I had so foolishly and idly thrown away, how much harm I had done and how desperately attached I was to you, just as you began to slide out of reach. But I still didn’t know how badly things stood for me. I hoped our enforced physical aloofness was a temporary thing, which you might recklessly and generously reverse; didn’t know whether it was an instinctive or a pondered veto. I certainly didn’t blame you for a fraction of a second, nor do I. These things are as merciless and ineluctable as the weather; but of course I hoped it would change. So, as I said earlier, I managed to lull that particular dragon asleep, though I knew it was ready to leap to life again with thrashing tail and jets of fire roaring down either nostril at a kind stroke on his poor old neglected head.
There were two things after that, which blinded me to what had really happened – after all, love takes many shapes, and I had to accept this one (no choice!). The first was your saying ‘please don’t go to Greece!’, and the other was: when I asked if you had taken a dislike to me, your answering at once, and with a kind of sad conviction ‘You are the only person in the world I do really care about.’ Then everything, all the factors which, from the start, seemed to be conspiring to lame and obstruct and turn things grey – that bloody film, troubles of eyes and throat, tiredness, the arrival of your American pal [9] – not as a competitor but as a further source of harassment and complication for you (another teacup to flounder in!) and of my Anglo-Italian one [10] (so utterly irrelevant and unwanted and untimely!),* money troubles, typewriters, tape machines, the depression of Lord Montagu’s marriage [11] – all of this seemed like a maddening procession of idiotic rivals which must come to an end soon. But they crowded in thicker and faster till I never saw you at all and when any invitation from people you said you despised and were ashamed of, any last-minute excuse seemed a valid reason for not seeing me, I began to feel really mystified and duped, miserable, angry, flouted etc. and that I was the last person in the world you cared about, and wished me not in Greece, but in Timbuktoo or Kamchatka. I am glad that my random remark about it being perhaps better not to meet till we had got over all this (of course it wasn’t true. You are the only person, unfortunately, that I want to see. It was a sort of thinking aloud, half an opening for a non-forthcoming argument from you against such a course, but I can’t blame you for not twigging this), I’m glad that, at long last, it brought out the stern (withheld till then, I suspect, out of kindness) truth that anyone less imperceptive and maladroit in such matters would have understood a month ago. I wish I had! It leaves you utterly free to do what you want to do – whatever that may be – and saddles me with an unwanted and extremely uncongenial liberty that I really don’t know what to do with yet. Boo-hoo.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 21