Henry and Virginia [4] left a couple of days ago, to all our sadness. He was magnificently in, and true to, form. One evening, dining at Filipo’s with Iris, Joan (she got back a week ago) and me, she and Henry had a slight tiff. Henry flung his hands in the air and shouted at the top of his voice ‘Aha! No sex for me tonight, I can see that!’ He’s a splendidly reckless conversationalist, stuffed to bursting-point with what Castiglione in Il Cortegiano calls sprezzatura, the supreme dialectic attribute of a man of distinction and dash. [5] Friedrich [Ledebur] has been here several days, staying with Iris, towering over everyone on the island like a half-ruined and ivy-mantled Danubian castle, bat-and owl-haunted, the vaults rumbling every now and then with pythian, pessimistic and almost inaudible pronouncements. I’ve got a new pal here, a sixty-year-old, charming, sad, queer, tremendously well-read old boy called Neil Little who lives in a pretty house full of Greek and Latin literature, a great friend of Norman Douglas’s. [6] He has a passion for opera and Joan and I have had two agreeable musical sessions there, the first listening to Callas singing Bellini’s I Puritani, the second listening to the same in Lucia di Lammermoor. I’d never heard her before, and I must say, I was bowled over. It’s a kind of musical rape, leaving one’s virginal faculties in smithereens.
The weather gets more astonishing daily, bright, golden and glittering, driving away all one’s scirocco-borne debility. Half of this headachy malaise, I’ve determined, comes from the wine, which is so heavily doctored that pretty well an entire child’s chemistry set goes down with every gulp; which, with the south wind and the volcanic fumes that steam up through every cranny in the rocks, is a regimen designed to lame the sturdiest. But all that is over (back to Chianti!), one is surrounded by a russet and golden Virgilian vintage world, ringing blue skies and pure brilliant seas with the ghost of Ponza [7] hovering on the horizon. (The inhabitants claim it is the birthplace of Pontius Pilate; an odd boast, like a Cornishman from Liskeard bragging of Judas Iscariot as a fellow villager). Yesterday Friedrich, Iris, Joan and I went to the top of Mt Epomeo, and after stocking up on wine and salami at a hermitage-turned-bistro there, Friedrich and I came down the steep side to Forio through wonderful auburn beechwoods and clumps of Spanish chestnuts, leaping from rock to rock like ibexes – you would have done your glorious [illegible] horse gallop – then down a tortuous maze of lanes through layer on layer on layer of vineyard, all ablaze with autumn colours, till we were in a village full of women with baskets of grapes on their heads, vast waggon-loads of them, and that lovely heady reek of must and fermentation from many a wine-press.
No more now. Write and tell me all your adventures. Come here whenever you want, (if you can) and lots of fond love, darling Lyndall from
Paddy
P.S. Larry Durrell is staying in my room in London at the moment. I’ve just finished your Balthazar, [8] and find it astonishing.
P.P.S. Iris, Friedrich, J. & I are off to Capri for two nights. Whoopee!
[1] LB was being pursued by Thomas Egerton (1918–98), racehorse breeder, a friend of Princess Margaret.
[2] John XXIII was elected Pope on 28 October 1958.
[3] The puff of smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel that indicates the end of a round of voting during the conclave to elect a new Pope. Black smoke indicates an inconclusive vote; white smoke, successful.
[4] Henry Frederick Thynne (1905–92), 6th Marquess of Bath, and his second wife, Virginia (1917–2003). His first wife Daphne had married Xan Fielding in 1953.
[5] Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) was written by Baldassare Castiglione over the course of many years, beginning in 1508, and published in 1528 in Venice just before his death. It addresses the constitution of a perfect courtier, and in its last instalment, a perfect lady. Sprezzatura (‘nonchalance’, ‘careful negligence’, or ‘effortless and ease’) is described as one of the most important, if not the most important, attributes of the courtier.
[6] George Norman Douglas (1868–1952), novelist and travel writer, lived on Capri from 1946 until his death.
[7] The largest of the Italian Pontine Islands archipelago, about thirty miles west of Ischia.
[8] Lawrence Durrell’s novel Balthazar (1958), the second novel in his Alexandria Quartet. LB had lent PLF her copy.
Lawrence Durrell loved Ischia and had spent some time there in 1950.
To Lawrence Durrell
28 October 1959
Presso ‘da Filipo’
Forio
d’Ischia
Prov. di Napoli.
Larry, παιδάκι μου [dear boy],
What a shame, our not overlapping in London! I do hope you wrote something in the Justine series [1] when you were staying in Chester Row. It’s very exciting that they may make a film of it – mind you get a tidy sum out of 20th Century Fox if they do, as they are as rich as Croesus. Ivan Moffat, whom they will use for the script writing (why not you?) if the option is taken up, is in a trance about it; quite rightly. I wish you had contrived to meet. He’s an old pal of ours and brilliant on the job. When he left here, I gave him a few Cairo addresses: Georges Henein, Magdi Wahba, Samira W., Marie Rìaz etc. Samira was the only one he saw. I expect she talked about Addison’s essays or the poems of Christina Rossetti.
We’ve just been on a pilgrimage to Punta del Imperatore. [2] It was a grey autumn afternoon looking like a faded watercolour or a mezzotint, the leaves of the stripped vines all golden and infirm on their stalks, a shy wet wind blowing and huge Tennysonian waves [3] breaking in fans of spray on the rocks of Citara. [4] A long sooty loop of migrating birds was flickering southward about a mile out, geese I expect. We found your house at last – Don Vito was down in Forio – and it looked wonderfully Grimm-like among its tiers of dead vines, with that flying buttress of a staircase at the end of the yard, the very place, indeed, for a Stendhal–Lamartine encounter [5] over a cauldron of simmering broth. We trod reverently round the precincts, pondering where they will put the plaque in the fullness of time, then back through the dark, meeting nothing but a crone or two carrying sticks, and a rather good looking vineyard idiot hopping down the steps astride a very elaborate brushwood hobby horse he must have just made. . .
Where will you be later on?
Best love from
Paddy (also Joan)
[1] Justine (1957) was the first novel in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
[2] A bay in Ischia, not far from the Bay of San Montano.
[3] PLF is referring to Tennyson’s poem ‘Break, break, break’, written in 1835.
[4] A beach near Forio.
[5] Both Stendhal and Lamartine visited Ischia several times in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
After her mother died on Christmas Day 1959, Joan was in a position to give Paddy a large cheque, which he gratefully acknowledged.
To Joan Rayner
undated [February 1960]
Chagford
Darling,
I’ve been thinking so much about that tremendous sum of money. It really was an act of superhuman kindness and generosity and anything I could say about the extent of gratitude would be putting it mildly, especially now I know all the implications. I can’t tell you what a difference it makes, and will make, blowing away dozens and dozens of guilty, nagging and haunting worries, all utterly my fault through neglect, postponement, idleness and oblomóvshchina [1] (That’s the word. I asked Isaiah Berlin). It has coincided wonderfully with getting this well-omened sitting room back and to myself to make all seem hopeful, possible & promising; and, with luck and hard work – which I long for, now that the Greek incubus has been exorcised – I hope that I’ll be able to be someone. At least, I’ll know how not to be such a perfect fool as that time, over the ‘Roots of Heaven’. Anyway, thank you many, many times, my darling. I won’t go on for fear of embarrassing.
It’s a day of brilliant, cold, blue sunshine today. I’m hunting on Saturday on a lovely horse, and I do hope it holds on. I’ve
decided to chuck hunting on ‘in-country’ days, only the Moor. Those awful waits in fields and lanes not only bore one but fill one with guilt: why am I not at my desk, I keep thinking, instead of hanging about here? Also, I keep thinking of marvellous ideas & sentences, all of which evaporate by the time one gets home.
I forgot to tell you on the telephone a snatch of Henry Bath’s conversation on Saturday. (Don’t tell it to Janetta [Woolley], as I’ve just told her after giving her Iris’s address in Spain.) H. was talking about a conversation he’d had with his butler Donald, after reading about some awful crime in the papers, urging him to be sure to lock up all the doors tight at night.
‘“It’s not because of the burglars,” I told him, “because there’s bugger all in the house to pinch. Unfortunately! It’s just that I don’t want any of those blinking sex-maniacs to get in.” And do you know, the blighter looked me straight in the eye, in the most meaning way, and said, “I shouldn’t worry, my Lord. We’ve got one of those in the house already.” Well I mean to say . . .’
No more now, except lots & lots of love from P
P.S. I did my S.T. [Sunday Times] review in a flash the first day I was here, and telephoned it through (reversed charges).
[1] Slothfulness, a term derived from Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (1859).
Paddy had spent Christmas with the Devonshires at Chatsworth, beginning a habit that would last decades. Joan, who had less need of company, preferred to spend Christmas at Dumbleton with her beloved brother, Graham.
To Ann Fleming
1 February 1960
Chagford
Darling Annie,
You’re well out of this sodden kingdom today, it’s coming down in buckets. Here’s a riddle: Why is English country life in Britain as bad indoors as outdoors? [Answer written on inside of envelope. [1]
You’re done for if you’ve thrown it into the fire; but of course, lucky you, you can’t have. [2]] I long to see this printed on the back of a matchbox, anonymously.
You are sadly missed, so don’t stay away too long. The capital seems oddly filleted when Victoria Square is empty.
Christmas was glorious, and went on for ages, consisting of Andrew, Debo and children, Andrew’s mother, Nancy, and Mrs Hammersley, [3] for whom I developed a reciprocated passion. She strikes a wonderful note of bilious gloom about anything. The sight of Sophia’s new rocking horse made her positively cavernous: ‘It’s one of those new plastic ones – not like the old wooden dappled kind we used to have. If you notice, it’s made in two halves and stuck together length-ways; and not very securely, I suspect. It fills me with a sense of impending disaster . . .’ As a matter of fact, it was rather a forbidding thing, pinkish, with false eyelashes and tempestuous mane and tail of moulded, hollow rubber, which gives under one’s hand like a motor horn; bearing the same sort of relationship to a real horse as Lady Lewisham [4] does to an ordinary human being. The house [Chatsworth] looked lovely, I thought, with steep bare woods outside and rainy mermen, a golden blaze indoors and the feeling that there had been no break in habitation. It’s wonderful what forgotten knitting and a couple of seed catalogues will do for a bust of Diocletian. After this, a quietly tight New Year at Bruern [5] (I think Michael’s in love with me); then down here to my old literary break-down-haunt, and to work ever since. Thank heavens, all goes well.
Joan’s mother died over Christmas, alas, which meant endless gloomy tasks for her and Graham at Dumbleton. [6] They were oddly shattered, mostly I think, through feelings of filial duties left undone in the past; completely baselessly. If you didn’t see, do write two lines to Joan, as I overheard a conversation between them saying they wished they had always written to people in the past in like circumstances, because – against all their principles – it gives tremendous pleasure.
I adore this place, and write every waking second, alone nearly all the time, except a couple of visits by Joan, once with Janetta, who has buzzed off to Spain. My resurrected passion for hunting – if one can dignify these shaggy, almost prehistoric helter-skelters over Dartmoor by the name – has revived again, starting with the Master, Chas Hooley, a tremendous shit with carrot-coloured hair and sidewhiskers and a cast of countenance so vulpine that his winters are one long act of fratricide, down to the terrier man, an ex-burglar who has actually done time in Dartmoor, and feels quite queer when the gaunt shape of the jail heaves through the mist. Quite a pretty thin field on weekdays, if it’s raining. A fortnight ago I was the only grown-up male follower – not even ‘Bunny’ Spiller, of Spiller’s Dog-Biscuits, was there, and he seldom fails. The country is so moss-covered and primordial – either [illegible] with deep ravines, bracken and boulders and fast brooks foaming with Guinness (five million Guinnesses are enjoyed daily: five million and three, if you include Maureen, Aileen and Oonagh [7]), or a rolling wilderness of moor beset with bogs and tors and druidical stones. We might almost be out after dinosaurs. Last Saturday we met at a minute village called Spreyton. While they were drawing the first cover, I sneaked off 200 yards to have a look at a lovely late Plantagenet church. Maddeningly, I was followed by the entire field (you know what sheep people are) – about forty for once – who looked duped and angry when I dismounted and slunk through the lych-gate. But I’m glad I did, because there was a beautiful Perpendicular painted rood-screen inside and in the church-yard the grave of – guess who? ‘T. Cobley, gent of this parish, o.b. 1792’! [8] The actual one; Widecombe-in-the-Moor is only 15 miles away, well within grey-mare-range. Bill Brewer’s resting place is the next on my list.
I ended the day lost in mist, rain, rocks and swamp in the middle of the moor, miles from anywhere, and dusk falling, joining forces after a bit with another drenched, elderly, chubby and equally lost horseman. He was an odd-looking kind, with a round face as scarlet as his coat, heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and unruly corkscrews of silver hair sticking out under his hat, a sort of Lord Scamperdale. [9]
As we hobnobbed towards Postbridge through the downpour, he reminisced happily about Embassy life in St Petersburg, Constantinople, the Atlas Mountains and the absurd prices that Fabergé cigarette cases fetch nowadays. At a dolmen where our two paths forked in opposite directions, we said goodnight with gravely doffed headgear, and the mist and the dusk swallowed us up. I learnt afterwards that he was Harold’s elder brother, [10] who lives over towards Tiverton. An odd encounter.
Do send your news. I do envy you. Give my love to Ian and lots of love to you from
Paddy
[1] ‘Outdoors it rains cats and dogs while indoors dogs and cats reign.’
[2] Presumably because there was no need for fires at Goldeneye.
[3] The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire; the Dowager Duchess; the Duchess’s sister, Nancy Mitford; and Violet Mary Hammersley (née Williams-Freeman), known as ‘Mrs Ham’, then eighty-three years old.
[4] Raine, Lady Lewisham (b. 1929), née McCorquodale, daughter of the novelist Barbara Cartland. She later divorced her husband and married the 8th Earl Spencer, thus becoming stepmother to Diana, Princess of Wales.
[5] Bruern Abbey, the Oxfordshire house of the Hon. Michael Astor, fourth son of Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor, and formerly a Conservative MP.
[6] Dumbleton Hall, Worcestershire. The house was sold to the Post Office as a convalescent home for sick employees, and Joan’s brother Graham moved to a smaller house on the estate.
[7] The three vivacious daughters of the brewing heir Ernest Guinness, all ‘Bright Young Things’ in the inter-war years.
[8] As in the song ‘Widecombe Fair’, in which each verse ends in the refrain,
‘With Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney,
Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawke,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.’
With only a little encouragement, PLF would sing this in Italian.
[9] Master of ‘The Flat Hat Hunt’, in R. S. Surtees’s Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853).
[10] Frederick Archibald Nicolson (1883–1952), 2nd Baron Carnock, eldest brother to Harold Nicolson.
Pamela Wyndham, later Pamela Egremont, was another of PLF’s long-standing female friends. He wrote the following letter of thanks after staying with her and her husband at Petworth House in West Sussex. He was writing from Lismore Castle, where he and Joan were once again guests of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.
To Pamela Wyndham
20 May 1960
Lismore Castle
County Waterford
Eire
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 23