*
The lunatic aspect of all this is that I seem to have taken over your last winter’s symptoms in the exact ratio at which you have been losing them – at least, visibly, because they had been incubating for a long time before: an absurd and unenviable predicament. I don’t propose to burden you with all this, it’s no longer any business of yours, alas. But when it’s over, we’ll be able to compare scars like Chelsea pensioners. It can’t be helped. Lots of splendid chaps have been in the same fix in the past, I stoutly tell myself.
*
Well, there’s my sad case history, darling Lyndall, told in my untutored way, and I fear it makes sorry reading. Please don’t worry about it; you’re in no way to blame. Sometime, when it comes naturally and without constraint and the lack of need for kindness (which you don’t need to use. It’s worse in the end) or self-defence, guarantee absolute truth, do please tell me yours in its entirety. I’m abreast of scattered fragments of it, but you have too much evidence of my hopelessness as a diagnostician to doubt that I’m still largely in the dark.
Again, please don’t be anxious about our comic reversal of roles. I do love you and I’m determined not to lose you as a friend as well as in every other way, and one of the things about loving people is, after all, to wish them well and want to help, comfort, befriend. My inherited distemper will pass. Lucky you being out of the wood! (Fine metaphors, I must say.) I long to see you, and I’m sure that we have countless delights of friendship ahead, trust, love and confidence on their thrones again and all tears dry. The whole miserable nightmare of the last month will evaporate. I’m equally determined not to let more recent hell blacken the radiance of last year, a secret and utterly happy time of music and poetry and of hearts and minds at rest. This is what I’m going to salvage and keep for life, and with endless gratitude.
God bless you, my darling Lyndall
with love from
Paddy
Just as I finished writing this, a gust of wind blew all these flimsy sheets down the terrace of the Sirene. [12] Heart in mouth, I managed to save them before they took wing over the balustrade down through the circling wood pigeons to lose themselves below among the ilexes and elderflowers. It would have been just my luck; but I won this time! P.
* The day she left, after, I fear, a rather sad stay, she said ‘I had such a queer dream last night. I dreamt I was waving goodbye to you in the street. It was nearly dark, you looked round and disappeared down a lane by the church of the Gesù.’
[1] Several years before PLF had rented rooms in the Casa Sabina in Tivoli from Miss Edwardes, an Englishwoman.
[2] The Sibilla restaurant in Tivoli incorporates two Roman temples.
[3] Countess Anna Laetitia ‘Mimi’ Pecci-Blunt (1885–1971), née Pecci, socialite, photographer and patron of the arts, married a wealthy American, Cecil Blumenthal. She was the niece of Pope Leo XIII, who made Blumenthal a Count as a wedding present, and they merged their surnames to Pecci-Blunt. Her son Dino was courting LB at the time.
[4] ‘Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
richer than all his tribe . . .’
Othello, V, 2
[5] A former monastery built over a Roman villa, believed to have belonged to the poet Horace; now owned by the Landmark Trust.
[6] Nathalie Perrone (1927–2014), née de Noailles, then married to Sandro Perrone, the owner and editor of Rome’s leading newspaper, Il Messaggero; and Graziella, one of the four daughters of ‘Mimi’ Pecci-Blunt, married to Henri de Beaumont.
[7] The other man with whom LB was now involved.
[8] LB had a small part in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which was lost in the editing.
[9] Jeffrey Selznick, who had fallen in love with LB when she was working for his father, David O. Selznick, over Christmas.
[10] Carla Thorneycroft (1914–2007), elder daughter of the Italian Count Guido Malagola Cappi, married the Conservative politician Peter Thorneycroft in 1949. She and PLF had been having an affair.
[11] Montagu married only months after breaking off his engagement from LB.
[12] The Hotel Sirene in Tivoli overlooks a gorge.
Paddy’s apology to Lyndall Birch was at least partially successful, as this letter suggests.
To Lyndall Birch
14 [?] June 1959
Ansedonia
Darling Lyndall,
What a good idea of yours it was leaving after dinner and driving through the night! I pelted along the empty Aurelian Way like smoke, and thought of you driving blissfully from Bologna at dead of night with the concert playing till the car dropped to bits; then slowed down for a while, smoking a terrible Tuscan cigar and watching the cross-eyed beam of my headlamps in the dark, the whitewashed tree trunks whizzing by. I felt my eyelids pricking a bit by the time I got to Civita [1] in an open-all-night café drinking coffee after coffee & eating two Crik-Croks [a brand of Italian snacks]; then set off again into the first glimmer of a wonderful dawn beginning with crimson and zinc and crocus colour in rags behind the dark towers of Tarquinia [2] then on through a slow apocalyptic awakening with a lightening sky and colour magically stealing back into the leaves and stone and mountains and a few early lorries appearing till headlamps were pale and useless and put out, and it was a wonderful unbreathed summer morning over the Tyrrhene sea and the Maremma cornfields. Down to the sea at Ansedonia [3] to bathe, then to bed. Driving into the dawn! A new experience. Sad one can only do something, for the first time in your life, once. I wonder how many exciting and unique maidenheads of experience lie ahead.
Woke up at midday longing for ping-pong [4] and sentimentally stroked the handle of your cast-down bat. I felt too restless for work so set off for Grosseto under a changing sky of gold and grey clouds – some of them raining over the distant mountains like leaking sacks of dark grain – sudden downpours, thunder and lightning, baroque sunbursts, rainbows and coloured puddles and foxes’ weddings, [5] the puddles fusillading the exciting shuddering, orgasmic roar. It was winter by the time I sailed in through the barbican of Grosseto. Found a very good trattoria under the arcade opposite what must be the southernmost Tuscan-striped, though restored, cathedral and read some very funny poems of Wyndham Lewis as I worked my way through a large meal, and found myself laughing out loud quite often at the poems under the stolid gaze of Grosseto’s grossest, munching all round in a ring. Paid the conto, picked my way through these Ghibelline [6] rotters at their meal, out into the downpour and found myself gazing thunderstruck at my own name a foot high (9’ to be exact . . .) Radici del Cielo! [7] Couldn’t resist it, so into a ghastly cinema for the last third of the film. My word, it’s been rottenly cut and miserably dubbed, no wonder you all scorn it so. It was never a good film, but ten times better than this.
It was a lovely summer afternoon when I got out: flashing & prismatic with raindrops; so I took an inland road through rolling hills, past rivers and bridges and woods, all quite empty, a sort of gentle Hereford or Shropshire full of wheat and poppies and mustard seed and hedges covered with white dog-roses and sleepy oak spinneys and here and there a green watery valley with dark woods . . . I swooped, sailed, glided, twisted, sank, surfaced, and spiralled through this soft and labyrinthine paradise for hours, sometimes looking down on a soft interlock of retreating hills shiftily islanded with the shadows of clouds, sometimes along the bottom of glades and dells with water rushing darkly under small bridges with tilted sunlit rafts of corn and half-shorn hayfields high above, beyond treetops, striped with windrows and dotted with haycocks, sometimes Piers Plowman peasants in green corduroy reaving those conical ricks that they slice away later, till by the autumn they are as thin as cigars. Some vines, plenty of flashing and ruffling wheatfields under dark olives that turned silver when the wind touched their leaves, like a shoal of minnows changing direction. Nothing on the roads but an occasional lorry nigh unto death, [8] a mule team, a flock of sheep, shorn like the hayfields, or a few moth-soft oxen. (This is the moment when the floc
ks, like the police, change into their summer drill . . .) I drifted through this consoling landscape in a quiet, all-passion-spent mood, not an unhappy one; still heavy with the happy mood of the day before and dinner and the strange ecstatic drive. There was an occasional indestructible old crone on the road picking herbs or gathering sticks and I gave one of them and her faggots a lift, and thought, suppose she’s one of those old women in fairy-tales – she might grant me three wishes! I’ve no idea what 2 and 3 would be. As to 1, propriety halts my ballpoint.
What a surprise the villages and little towns are! After curves and swellings and subsidences, and loops and parabolas, nothing but angles! Plumblines, perpendiculars, juts, jags, battlements, towers and crenellations, hard as iron though tamed to biscuit by the falling sun and the shadows; troglodytic palazzi, small piazzas the size of postage stamps. One above the other, up lanes that tilt into the sky like springboards, so steeply that when one gets to the top, a chariot ought to be waiting to whisk one, like Elijah, [9] up into the rainy clouds.
No more now, my darling angel Lyndall
except lots of love from
Paddy
P.S. If you possibly can, try and keep Wednesday night free. Castle business in the morning!
Love to Iris [Tree]. I’m so pleased about her car. xxx
[1] Civitavecchia, a sea port on the coastal road running north-west from Rome.
[2] An old city, a few miles inland from the coast, towering above a river valley.
[3] A small town, then consisting of little more than a few villas, on the Tuscan coast.
[4] A euphemism.
[5] Simultaneous rain and sunshine.
[6] In medieval times the Ghibellines and Guelphs were opposing factions in the city-states of central and northern Italy. Grosseto was a centre of Ghibelline support.
[7] The Roots of Heaven, for which PLF had written the screenplay.
[8] ‘For indeed he was sick unto death.’ Philippians 2: 27.
[9] Elijah was carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire: 2 Kings 2: 11.
To Lyndall Birch
27 July 1959
‘Da Ernesto’
Ovindoli
Abruzzi
Darling Lyndall,
Here’s a thought: imagine that it came about that you, Henrico, [1] and I were having dinner together and that H. fell wildly in love with me. We could start a clockwise chase round the table . . . getting faster and faster, like those tigers on the last pages of Little Black Sambo that turned into a ring of vapour round the trunk of a palm tree till they melted to butter and were devoured in the shape of vast heaps of pancakes by the hero. Alas, I think my days of gents falling in love with me are over (or jolly nearly. I had some very equivocal looks in Athens last year from an elderly American . . . Non-swanks!)
It’s lovely here. Cool, Alpine, innocent, [illegible] and un-Roman. It’s still spring, just about the phase Passerano was at two months ago: fields of standing corn, guileless-looking peasants scything away, huge mountains in the distance, and on the airy plateau all round, pretty conical villages perched on tiered stripes of brown, green, orange and amber meadows; spinneys of beech and hazel full of harebells & Canterbury bells and wild strawberries, valleys full of slanting evening shadows and a pure golden-grey light with just a touch of melancholy till all becomes a jagged blue-grey silhouette and it’s time for another thumping meal. The cattle are a fine body of cows. They assemble at immutable rendezvous when the Angelus tolls and set off for Ovindoli a hundred strong with nary a neatherd [cowherd] and trudge into the marketplace like a wild army of invaders. Here they break up and fan off in twos and threes down a warren of lanes, a gentle horn-tap, when a crone or a maiden emerges and lets them into a comfortable cellar for the night. All smells of hay.
We push off from here to the castle on Friday, to Rome on Saturday (where Godsend Adriana will have dragooned her plasterers into putting things to rights) and off, swayed by Iris’s rhetoric, to Ischia on Monday. You’ll probably be off bathing most of the weekend; if not, leave a note on the island – dinner Sunday night? If we find a haven in Ischia, bear it in mind for Ferragosto, [2] if all else fails.
I hate to think of you in emptying Rome.
Heaps of love, darling Lyndall, from
Paddy
[1] The handsome painter Enrico d’Assia, son of Mafalda of Savoia, sister of the king of Italy. PLF was mistaken in thinking that LB was in love with him.
[2] An Italian public holiday in mid-August.
The post-war restrictions on the export of capital from the UK were a repeated problem for Paddy, and he was always looking for ways to circumvent them.
To Jock Murray
15 August 1959
Presso Ristorante da Filipo
Forio
Ischia
Prov. di Napoli
Dear Jock,
Here are between 6 and 7,000 words of the beginning of Vol. II. At least, I think it’s about that, reckoning a page of typescript to be about 390 words. They have taken days to transcribe from the jungle of the original MS with my snail-pace one-finger typing. But the MS is such an impenetrable thicket that it was impossible to ask anyone else to hack a way through it.
I feel it’s a bit rash to send you this raw lump of prose. Please regard it as roughly shaped marble, to be finished, chiselled and polished when the whole book is completed. Better so than to hold up the progress of the book now. About double the typed part, as near as I can judge, has mounted up, and more every day. Well into Greek Thrace & Macedonia, and, I think, it’s unusual, odd and exciting. The Monasteries of the air which will come close to the end (10,000 words?) you already have.
Midwinter is what I’ve got in mind as finishing time. [1] With luck it might be earlier, if it goes on as well as at present.
As you see, I’ve removed to Ischia. The castle became unbearably hot and rats, owls, ants and scorpions had resumed their interrupted reign. We escaped to the Abruzzo which was perfect, but could only have rooms available for a week; so came here, and discovered a cool flat on the edge of Forio with a wide balcony looking out over orange-groves and the sea where I sit (as now) and scribble away under a wickerwork awning, charging down into the sea every few pages. I plan to stay on here for a bit – possibly another month or two – then, after liquidating the castle (it’s too sad in the evenings) either return to England or – perhaps – push on to Greece, where there are always havens (perhaps Hydra?), by car via Brindisi, Corfu & Yannina. Anyway, sufficient unto the day is my motto at the moment. Joan, alas, returns [to England] soon.
I wrote and asked my bank to try and get sanction from the Treasury for the despatch of £200. I thought I wrote to you at the same time, but have a lurking fear that I forgot. The funds, I explained (using a formula that would be more strictly applicable to a later occasion . . .), were necessary for travel in those parts of Italy which were formerly Magna Graecia, for research into ancient Greek and Byzantine vestiges in Apulia, Lucania and Calabria, both architectural and linguistic, for a companion volume to Mani, which, with any luck would, like its predecessors, bring in dollars in due course. Do, please, back me up in this suppositious excursion into the future!
It only remains to renew the rhetoric of my last letter about a magnificent advance, one that will wreathe Mr Teasdale and me with restful smiles. There are ways of getting funds here by cloudier channels than the one depending on the Treasury’s whim (where would I have been without them, indeed?) but the great thing is for the pennies to be there: safely in Pall Mall, I mean. Discretion halts my pen.
What news of America – or about the Violins?
No more for the present, except good tidings about the book. I hope and really do think that it will do us both credit. I foresee a smiling triumvirate. [2]
Much love from Joan, & all the best.
Yours ever
Paddy
P.S. I enclose snaps of Passerano.
[1] Roumeli, the follow-up to Mani, was publis
hed in 1966.
[2] i.e. PLF, JM and the bank manager.
To Lyndall Birch
25 October 1959
Presso da Filipo
Forio
Darling Lyndall,
I say, what excitements! I long to hear about your trip to England, what happened, who you saw and so on, and the progress of Tom’s lightning courtship. [1] I wonder how that would be. He was outstandingly nice, I thought, – but then, our approach can’t be quite the same, I do see . . . I’m very pleased that you are overcoming your long phobia about England, not for any creditable patriotic reasons, but because it’s a pity to be cut off from all the pleasure, stimulus, interest, friendship, fun, affection, oddity, unconventionality and charm which seem to thrive there in a more abundant crop than anywhere else I know, including Paris and Athens. (We won’t mention Rome and its delightful denizens.) Whatever happens, I can’t help feeling that your gauzy pinions are about to become unstuck. I can watch all this now with an affectionate detachment that will be much more use to all concerned than the obsessive and gloomy commitment which has dogged my footsteps most of this year. For, you will be relieved to hear, I appear to be out of the wood which we both foundered in at different times. The trees got imperceptibly scarcer, and here I am in the open. Hooray! (or boo-hoo.) The whole cycle for both of us seems to have been contained in the first year of the reign of John XXIII, [2] incubating during the conclave and expiring with the anniversary of the last fumata. [3] Tiaras and crossed keys have a new significance for me from now, especially the latter: one should be labelled IN, the other OUT. But I hasten to say, darling Lyndall, that in spite of this change or transposition of feelings, my bosom positively teems with fraternal fondness.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 22