Darling Pamela,
What hell it was getting back to London. ‘Leave me among the stags and the bluebells’ was my inward cry, and jealous meditations about the Bakhtiari. [1] I did love it, and many, many thanks for letting me come and wallow in the wonder of it all.
It was a grey and gloomy day in London when we set off yesterday but turned into midsummer halfway across the Irish channel, and, when we landed, all was ablaze. I’m scribbling away in a tower with lots of treetops under the window, and under them, the Blackwater, with occasional salmon glittering as they go about their morning business. Debo is running across a lawn in another direction, followed by a rogue’s gallery of ill-matched dogs, all barking fit to bust; Joan roams under some flowery trees beyond, redundantly poring over Greek Self Taught: and, every hour or so, a donkey cart clip-clops sleepily over the bridge. All is so soft and relaxing that, if we go on this way, we’ll all seize up in a green trance.
A thousand thanks again, dear Pamela, to you and John, [2] and much love from
Paddy
[1] A tribe in south-west Iran, which perfoms an immense annual migration. PW had been on it.
[2] Pamela’s husband, John Edward Reginald Wyndham (1920–72), long-serving Private Secretary to Harold Macmillan.
Soon after his affair with Lyndall Birch petered out, Paddy became involved with Enrica ‘Ricki’ Huston, the fourth and much younger wife of the film director John Huston. The couple lived at St Clerans, an eighteenth-century mansion in the west of Ireland. Their marriage was troubled, not least because Huston was so often absent from home making movies.
To Ricki Huston
undated but postmarked 20 July 1960
13 Chester Row, SW1
Darling Ricki,
1. Don’t be surprised if my writing, which is normally elegant but illegible, is now beset by a Neanderthal uncouthness. Tooling across Oxfordshire two days ago in Andrew Devonshire’s enormous motor car (a sharp lesson not to motor above one’s station) I got my right index finger stuck between the automatically rising upside down guillotine of a window-pane and the frame work, and it is now nail-less and mangled and cobbled with many a stitch and scabbarded in plaster of Paris, and penmanship has become as exacting and fatiguing as tossing the caber must be. It is almost like incising one’s thoughts on marble or granite with a chisel.
The Tourist Hotel in Thasos sent me a copy of the letter they sent you. Is that any good? Would you like me to do anything about the smaller hotel at Arkouda, the sparkling beach at the other side of the island?
2. Was it you who sent me that wonderful gramophone of imaginary conversations? [1] Boss & typist, Dylan Thomas, etc.? It’s amazing, one of the most exciting and strange things I’ve ever heard, certainly the only true dialogue reproduced. I’ve played it thirty times or more with ever growing wonder. If it was you, and I feel sure it is, 100,000 thanks.
I did enjoy your brief sojourn in London and felt downcast and deprived when I had to leave the metropolis. You seemed marvellous to me, blindingly beautiful and funny and adorned with every possible grace, charm intelligence and fun, and I do wish you lived in London, instead of lurking in those western mists like Deirdre of the Sorrows. [2] I do hope we meet soon.
I’m planning my great Germano-Austro-Jugoslav pilgrimage to Greece, and leave about the 4th of August. I got a card from Magouche [3] today, setting off with her nymphet brood on mules across the wilds of Arcadia on a rash hijra [journey] which I managed to talk her into. Perhaps we’ll all meet in Hydra at the end of next month, or the beginning of the one after.
Anyway, bless you dearest Ricki, and fond love
from Paddy
[1] Rayner Heppenstall’s Imaginary Conversations: Eight Radio Scripts (1948).
[2] In J. M. Synge’s play Deirdre of the Sorrows, first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1910, Deirdre lives happily on a remote island.
[3] Agnes Phillips, widow of the Armenian-American artist, Arshile Gorky, who bestowed on her the name ‘Mougouch’, an Armenian term of endearment. (She was known variously as ‘Magouche’ or ‘Magoosh’.) At the time of this letter she was the girlfriend of Michael Astor, having separated from her second husband.
To Joan Rayner
13 January 1961
Athens
My darling Joan,
Now comes a sad tale, but one which could have been far worse. Last week I set off to Delphi on Saturday, taking Coote [1] (Mark [Ogilvie-Grant] couldn’t come), and settled into the little rooms next to the Kastalia. We had a very lively and funny evening in Amphissa and wandered about the rainy ruins all next morning. Then, in the afternoon I drove Coote into Arachova to catch a bus for Athens, and returned to Delphi in the rain. About a mile outside the village, when I was approaching a curve, a white car with two women in it suddenly shot round the corner right over on my, right, side of the road. I braked and turned as close in towards the right edge of the road as I could, the other car streaking towards its proper side of the road. I just missed it but skidded into the ditch at the roadside, banging hard against the rock face, damaging the right front of the car badly, and the windscreen breaking in a shower of crystals, also a hard bang on the right shoulder, but nothing serious or bust. The other car stopped. The two women got out and looked at my damage, then I pointed to the tell-tale evidence, very politely (all this in French, which they spoke well. They were Greek) of the tracks on the wet road, showing clearly our relative positions, and a very wary look came into their eyes. At that moment a charabanc pulled up and everyone got out to see if they could help. In the chat and movement of all this, the two women sneaked back to their car and drove away, with no exchange of numbers, names, insurance companies or anything. One of the charabanc people spotted them just as they were haring round the next bend, let out a shout and, fortunately, took their number. Everyone was outraged, and stopped the next car, two minutes later, coming from the Arachova direction, telling the driver to dash into Delphi and report the number to the police. The driver, a very nice man, said he would, and all the more willingly as the two women had barred his way by driving on the wrong side, and nearly sent him into the rocks like me. The Delphi police turned up five minutes later, after having telephoned to Delphi and Levadia, to stop the other car. The police, and everyone else, were 100% on my side, and the very nice young police chief vowed he’d summons them for dangerous driving and for making off without the usual exchanges of details. Lots of names were taken – the charabanc people, all crowding in with their telephone numbers, and the driver of the second car. Then we hauled the poor Sunbeam out of its rocky ditch, hammering the crumpled wing out to free the front right wheel, and I drove it sadly and slowly into Delphi. Fortunately the steering and the engine were untouched, but the buckled mudguard and door and the broken windscreen made it a heart-breaking sight. Next morning we learnt that the other car had been stopped by the police in Levadia, and the women held till 10.30, and all details taken. She is a Mrs Despoina Anagnostou, a bacteriologist in Athens, who had been week-ending at the Tourist hotel . . . I decided that it would be best to put the whole car on a lorry and take it back to Athens like that, rather than drive with a broken windscreen, and, perhaps, something wrong with the engine that would be increased by driving; so went miserably back to Athens that afternoon with the car roped and tarpaulined at the back, delivering it at the BP Garage to have it examined and the damage assessed. I had also rung Coote, and got her to put it into Tony Massourides’s [2] hands. He has contacted her insurance company; also, very politely, Mrs A. Apparently, it would have been much better if I had banged into the other car (which, of course, has not got a scratch) instead of avoiding it, and mashing up yours . . . The summonses have gone out, and Tony hopes that this will eventuate in the thing being settled out of court, when she sees the way things shape. The great things on my side are (1) her furtive disappearance and (2) her near collision immediately afterwards. The BP Garage say they can have the car as good as new within twenty days. There is nothing org
anic damaged, and it’s all coachwork. Fortunately the Athens agency has got some Sunbeam windscreens. BP assess the coachwork repairs at the appalling sum of 15,000. Tony, when he heard this, was appalled, and has found a coachwork genius who fixed his car up last year after an awful crash so that it looks now, as I have seen, straight out of the factory, and he is undertaking it for 8,000, and is already at work on it. He is, Tony assures me, absolutely sound and a brilliant technician. . .
I want to spare you a maudlin wallow in all the distress, shame and misery I felt and feel that this should have happened when your lovely car was in my hands. I am sorrier than I can possibly express. I know I’m in no position, as a rule, to cast stones about driving; but I have been tremendously careful of the car and the other one was irretrievably in the wrong. I was well on my side of the road and driving at an extremely reasonable speed, because of the rain and the road – there’s not much temptation, anyway, to hug the appalling precipice on the wrong side of that particular one! . . . The case, when it comes up, will be in Amphissa. The fact that one of the Delphi gendarmes is Geo. Hrissakis, in whose parents’ house at Kastamonitza, the whole party hid for a week on the way to capturing Gen. Kreipe, has done no harm.
No more for the moment, darling. I do hope the car will be glittering and perfect by the time you return. Again, I’m dreadfully sorry about this calamity, and could tear my hair out in handfuls!
Lots and lots of love from
your very woebegone
Paddy
[1] Lady Dorothy Lygon, otherwise known as ‘Coote’.
[2] PLF’s Greek lawyer.
To Ricki Huston
18 January 1961
12 Kallirhoë Street [1]
Makriyannis
Athens
Darling Ricki,
It’s too unfair, it looks as if someone has put an evil spell on our correspondence, because your lovely letter got idiotically sent on to Nauplia the very day I left it, and has reached me only today. Can you beat it for callousness and idiocy on the part of the hotel people there? What makes it doubly vexing is that I have been wandering about Greece alone by car, on solitary and slightly desolate pilgrimages to places I am writing about, and you would have been the perfect companion & company and cheer and fresh-eyed commentator and fellow guzzler and swigger in dozens of remote and smoky taverns. Can you think of greater fun? I feel so maddened with retrospective frustration and disappointment that I would like to blow off steam in some rash and violent act – but how, when, and on whom? It really is too sad. Now, alas, alas, conditions are far less ideal. (1) I’ve got to remain static somewhere and write like a fiend for all waking hours out of the twenty-four; (2) Joan returning here from England within the next fortnight, possibly a bit less, which is no hindrance to anything, as I’m sure you’d like her and she you, but it makes things a bit more unwieldy for plans, movements, decisions; and (3) the car’s out of action for three weeks. (4) All this would interfere with my monopolising you, which I would rather (indeed, v. much) like to have done. I hasten to say, dear Ricki, that if you did come out here, I’d do everything I could to help and make it a happy time, and modify plans to do so as much as I could, and I’m sure you would love it (I certainly would); it’s only that the circumstances are so much less perfect than they would have been if I’d got your letter in the normal time. Could you dash here for a bit the moment you get this? Otherwise, alas, the ideal would be to postpone it for a month or so. Do write back at once about all this, and, if you can manage any bold and precipitable action, wire.
How sad the first part of your Paris letter was. I’m so sorry about LOVE (your caps) going wrong. I do hope it’s gone right since, or some other anodyne has turned up. I wish it were a more reliable apparatus, it’s like some ill-starred bit of machinery always breaking down, and one doesn’t know what plumber, mechanic, joiner or electrician to summon. Have you read Stendhal on the theme, the crystallisation process as he calls it, [2] and the Spaniard, Thingummy y Gasset? [3] You probably have, but if not, they’re well worth tackling. I had a lot of trouble from the same source in Rome last year, a lunatic tangle, and I’m still pulling out thorns.
I do envy you seeing Ivan and the evening at Rosy’s Red Banjo. Iris too? Do give me more news. I wish he’d come to Europe more. Janetta came out here in December and she and Joan and I went on slow and glorious travels in the Peloponnese, and when Joan, miserably, had to return to England, we were about to depart to Delphi and Olympia on a lovely platonic ramble, when a telegraph boy rolled up on a bike just as the car was switched on, announcing Ralph Partridge’s death (Frances P. is her greatest friend, as was Ralph), so we had to head for Athens airport instead of Mount Parnassus. It doesn’t seem a very lucky winter for me. Yes, I do wish she and Ivan could somehow cleave, as I dearly love them both, and can’t help feeling they would both be wasted on any alternative choices.
As I write, it’s suddenly begun to snow, eddying down in great gusts of wind. The high mountains have been covered with it for some time. I do hope it stays. I’ve only seen the Acropolis once under snow, and it was amazing, and as unnatural somehow as a sandstorm in Lapland. Did you know that reindeer graze off moss all the year round, in the arctic tundras? I thought, once, that their antlers were also covered with moss, like those of other deer at certain times: it always looks like it in photographs. But I’m told it’s not so; only that they will fidget so when being snapped . . . When Diana came through Athens before we got there last summer, she somehow managed to break in, and deposit on the mantelpiece, as a house-warming present, two stuffed hoopoes with pearl necklaces round their necks and a huge dove-grey and snow-white seagull, a glorious bird. The trouble is, the smoke from the fire has covered the poor bird with soot and now it’s not fit to be seen, a very dirty gull indeed. How should I clean it, I wonder? A lot of my seaside childhood was spent sponging oil off the wings of protesting guillemots gummed up by passing steamers; but this isn’t quite the same.
So write or wire at once, darling Ricki, depending on whether it’s in a month or so, or immediate action. Of course, in spite of all my seeming discouragements, I secretly hope it’s the latter. But if it is, let it be today!
fond love
from
Paddy
If you do manage to come, I won’t alas, be able to put you up here because of the smallth [4] – Joan and I are continually troubling over each other with objurgations – but I would get a terribly nice room with a terrace for you in the little hotel where Janetta stayed, only about eight minutes’ walk away.
[1] Joan had bought this small house in Athens with her inheritance.
[2] Stendhal’s On Love (1822) describes or compares the ‘birth of love’, in which the love object is ‘crystallised’ in the mind, as being a process similar or analogous to a trip to Rome.
[3] José Ortega y Gasset, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme (1957).
[4] The Athens house was tiny, barely more than two rooms.
To Ricki Huston
undated but postmarked 28 May 1961
The Mill House [1]
Dumbleton
Evesham
My darling Ricki,
I peered through the window of that aeroplane to see if I could spot a red and black blazer anywhere, but nothing but alien tweed was to be seen; then sleep felled me like a lurking malefactor with a mallet. I opened a bleary eye at London airport, closed it again in the bus, opened it once more as the taxi drew up in Chester Row, closed it again for a couple of hours behind drawn curtains in my bedroom, thinking of the curtained alcove across St George’s Channel cooling down now, with both its denizens fled; buoyed contentedly into semi-oblivion with remembering all that had been done, and by happy thoughts of all that remained still to be done. There is a sort of duality about these post-facto reflections; one re-lives the encounters half as protagonist, half from the ringside, going over knockouts and fouls and scissor strokes and blows below the belt, and yearns for a return match, to
be over the ropes again in a jungle of straight lefts, upper cuts, right hooks and clinches that there’s no umpire to break up . . . strange contests in which, when all’s over, each acts as the other’s second, mopping each other’s wounds and exchanging glasses of water, smoothing out battered and slithery limbs, now sleeping intertwining as gently as nurses, heartbeats and eyelids sinking in a twin cataleptic-trance until a faraway gong-note sets them sleepily turning and feinting once more and fumbling for an opening . . . Enough of this pugilistic rot for the moment. Except that such, gentle reader, were the Dublin-sick thoughts that hovered round my couch till it was time to dress & pick up Debo and Anne Tree [2] and head for D. Jackson’s [3] banquet at the Ritz. I was between Magouche (I said I’d seen you at St C.’s [St Clerans] with a stern friendliness that quelled all eye-rolling) and Lettice Ashley-Cooper, [4] who gassed away all through dinner about Nigeria, from which she had just returned. I was bored by the entire meal and listened with languid fork and day-dreamed – as who will not? – of a different kind of supper. . .
I went for a long walk in the woods this afternoon on the edge of the Cotswolds with cloud shadows moving across the Vale of Evesham below, dotted with tall and pinnacled Plantagenet belfries, one of them the scene of a bell-ringing marathon, to judge by the permutations of chimes that followed each other across the fields non-stop. The woods are rather sinister, choked with brambles, bugloss, willow-herb and ragged robin. At the bottom of a rather gloomy dell I came across a young fox with one pad caught in a trap. I tried to let it out but it snapped and glared so that in the end I caught and pulled it by the brush with one hand and opened the trap with the other. Free at last, it paused for a moment and fixed me with a glance of implacable hatred and limped off, wisely enough, into a clump of foxgloves . . . If it had been a lion, far from saving my life years later in the Colosseum, it would have swallowed me on the spot. [5]
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