Now, Ricki darling, my plans are these: back to London on Monday, staying there till Friday night, when I go alone to Michael Astor’s for the weekend (℅ Hon. M. Astor, Bruern Priory, Churchill, Oxon. tel: Shipton-under-Wychwood 327). These details are in case you come to this island. If you did, I was wondering whether I might suggest to Michael your making a dash there too. If there’s any hope, do wire me ℅ Travellers Club (Whitehall 8688), and I’ll see if I can wangle it. It’s a lovely HQ, and he’s an old friend and a discreet one.
No more now, my dearest darling Ricki, except 1,000 hugs & love from
Paddy
xxxx
Write at once!
Lots more to talk about. . .
[1] After Dumbleton Hall had been sold, Joan shared The Mill House at Dumbleton with her brother Graham; she became its sole owner after his death in 1993.
[2] The Duchess’s sister-in-law, Lady Anne Evelyn Beatrice Tree (1927–2010), later a prison reformer.
[3] Professor Derek Ainslie Jackson (1906–82), nuclear physicist and a jockey who rode in the Grand National three times. Among his six wives were Pamela Mitford, Janetta Woolley and Barbara Skelton. He left Janetta for her half-sister, Angela Culme-Seymour.
[4] Lady Lettice Mildred Mary Ashley-Cooper (1911–90), daughter of the 9th Earl of Shaftesbury.
[5] PLF refers to the story of Androcles and the Lion.
To Ricki Huston
17 June 1961
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Derbyshire
Ricki darling,
Here’s the first letter with my lovely grey stolen pen.
This is an extraordinary place. I’ve settled to write in a huge room magnified and reflected into infinity by vast acreages of looking glass. Every now and then I get up and stroll round the room for an Aubusson-muffled furlong or two. Nobody ever seems to come here but me; nevertheless, two giant amphorae, big enough to hide an Arabian thief apiece, are stuffed with freak white roses. [1] A Rembrandt, 3 Titians, 5 Tintorettos, 2 Canalettos, 4 Holbeins, a Ruysdael, a Poussin and a Claude are doing their best for me, glad of the company, I like to feel. A Bronzino peers down, frowning slightly, scenting rivalry; no Mars and Venus, thank God, to reproach me with a mis-spent morning: ‘Why aren’t you up and doing?’ A twin cherub-borne clock tinkles the wasted quarters away, with nary a helmet to try on or a breastplate to crawl through, poor little buggers, tampocos both. Sealed away and muted by a series of closed double doors, I can just hear Joan Drogheda [2] tinkling away at some cheerful barcarolle. Outside, a circular lake is followed by an oblong one about half a mile long, with plenty of jovial fish-tailed stone horses living it up in the middle of the first one, and burly Tritons blowing fountains out of their conches. In the middle of the second an immense plume of water soars high above the surrounding treetops, placed there in the nick of time, several dukes ago, for Tsar Alexander II’s visit. [3] The others here, bar hosts, Joan and self, are Garrett & Joan Drogheda, Maurice Bowra, Annie Fleming & Ian (recovering from a stroke, poor chap, and rather un-James Bond-ish at the moment), and Ronnie & Marietta Tree. [4] I sat next to Marietta last night, and we hobnobbed matily about John, among other themes, and I made her laugh with a spirited imitation of the death of the croc, [5] which was adroitly capped by several others from her.
LAP DISSOLVE to Cliff Cottage, Fforest Farm, Dynas, Newport, Pembrokeshire, Wales. June 22nd.
This letter got unaccountably held up by all sorts of things and, on returning to London two days before yesterday and setting off on the next for here, your lovely letter from the Coopers arrived, or rather, was waiting. How I wish I’d finished this one, and got it off days ago! I’m sorry. It’s ghastly to have been off the air all these days; but everything seems to have conspired to intervene, mostly changes of plan and rapid movement. What happened was this: wracked with guilt about how little work I’d been doing, I managed to borrow Barbara Warner’s cottage here for two or three weeks, and set off with Joan (in a two-car convoy as she will be going and coming) pausing for a meal with Philip Toynbee near Gloucester, then on into the wild heart of Wales, to this odd little cottage on the edge of a cliff overlooking a deep coombe full of gulls and guillemots and puffins, and, they say, though I have not seen any so far, seals. The place hadn’t been lived in for a year and smelt like a deed-box as we stole in at dead of night and cows mooed dejectedly all round among the thistles, with gulls Ibsening [6] about in the dark overhead. Rather forbidding at first. Everything seems better now. We have to feign wedlock here, on Barbara’s request, for the benefit of the puritan Welsh, and of B’s old daily woman. A bit of [a] bore. But how nice they seem, the Welsh I mean; I’m fascinated by their Eurasian accent in English, and wish I knew some of their language, which they all talk among themselves here.
I do hope this reaches you, Ricki darling, before your wicked assignment in London . . . This seems such miles from anywhere. The only thing is, this village is only four miles from Fishguard, the sea route to Ireland, and presumably there are airports (Fishguard to swim, boids got to fly); [7] and, this cottage, an ideal habitat, is impracticable as an H.Q. The rest of the Welsh coast isn’t. It would be glorious if we could contrive a secret summit conference somewhere in this Welsh void, should the omens on both sides prove propitious. There is a telephone here, Dinas Cross 244, nr/ Newport, Pembroke, but best only used at the right moments. The thing is, to keep in close touch about movements. I think I’ll be alone here quite a lot, salving my literary conscience.
How odd about Magouche and Bruern! I wonder how that leak occurred. I sat up later after dinner with her last week and, on purpose, only mentioned you in the vaguest, if very affectionate, terms. Perhaps that’s pretty fishy in itself. Anyway, to hell with it. I think she was pining to ask questions, and felt rather frustrated by my studied vagueness. . .
This is a rotten, disjointed letter. Please don’t follow my bad example, but write at once. I think back constantly on all the aspects of recent encounters and long to be planning future fixtures; and send heaps of love and hugs, my dearest darling beautiful one. The Irish steamer from Fishguard is heading for the Irish horizon at this very moment.
Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat Zu
Mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest Du? [8]
as Tristan said, and T. S. Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’ after him.
All love
Paddy
xxxx
[1] PLF alludes to the folk-tale ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’.
[2] Joan Drogheda (1903–89), a concert pianist, married to Charles Garrett Ponsonby Moore, 11th Earl of Drogheda (1910–89).
[3] PLF is mistaken. It is true that the fountain was installed in anticipation of a visit by Tsar Nicholas I (not Alexander) in 1844, but as it turned out he never came to Chatsworth.
[4] Arthur Ronald Lambert Field Tree (1897–76), a Conservative MP from 1933 to 1945. He met his second wife, American co-worker Marietta Peabody Fitzgerald, while both were working at the Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Marietta had been the lover of John Huston, who had given her a role in his 1960 movie The Misfits.
[5] Shot by John Huston while on location for The Roots of Heaven.
[6] Possibly a slip for Chekhov?
[7] PLF refers to a line from the musical Show Boat (1927), ‘Fish got to swim, birds got to fly’.
[8] ‘The wind blows fresh
To the Homeland
My Irish Girl
Where are you lingering?’
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, act 1, lines 5–8;
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘The Burial of the Dead’.
To Ricki Huston
undated but postmarked 11 August 1961
The Mill House
Dumbleton
My darling Ricki,
1,000 thanks for your Paris letter, and apologies for delay. Barbara & Niko [1] came for the weekend, and I had to go to London when they left, with the result that now – Tuesday even
ing! – just back, I can only get this off express to Paris tomorrow morning. Damn, damn, damn.
Triple damn indeed, and sixfold & 100-fold because alas! I’ve committed myself, only yesterday, too, to devoting myself to my mama in the country this weekend, and I’m such a neglectful and intermittent son that I can’t put it off now. Bless you for trying though, Ricki dear, and hell and blast at my inadequacy. I’m longing to see you and hate the thought of your vanishing out of reach for what seems such an age, all unembraced! Bugger (cubed).
I say, what gloomy tidings about the CRABS! Could it be me? I’ll tell you why this odd doubt exists, instead of robust certainty one way or the other: just after arriving back in London from Athens, I was suddenly alerted by what felt like the beginnings of troop-movements in the fork, but on scrutiny, expecting an aerial view of general mobilisation, there was nothing to be seen, not even a scout, a spy, or a despatch rider. Puzzled, I watched and waited and soon even the preliminary tramplings died away, so I assumed, as the happy summer days of peace followed each other, that the incident, or the delusive shudder through the chancelleries, was over. While this faint scare was on, knowing that, thanks to lunar tyranny, it couldn’t be from you, I assumed (and please spare my blushes here!) that the handover bid must have occurred by dint of a meeting with an old pal in Paris, [2] which, I’m sorry to announce, ended in brief carnal knowledge, more for auld lang syne than any more pressing reason. On getting your letter, I made a dash for privacy and thrashed through the undergrowth, but found everything almost eerily calm: fragrant and silent glades that might never have known the invaders’ tread. The whole thing makes me scratch my head, if I may so put it. But I bet your trouble does come from me, because the crabs of the world seem to fly to me, like the children of Israel to Abraham’s bosom, a sort of ambulant Canaan. I’ve been a real martyr to them. What must have happened is this. A tiny, picked, cunning and well-camouflaged commando must have landed while I was in Paris and then lain up, seeing me merely as a stepping stone or a springboard to better things, and, when you came within striking distance, knowing the highest when they saw it, they struck (as who wouldn’t?) and then deployed in force, leaving their first beachhead empty. Or so I think! (Security will be tightened up. They may have left an agent with a radio who is playing a waiting game . . .)
I wonder if I have reconstructed the facts all right. I do hope so; I couldn’t bear it to be anyone but me. But at the same time, if it is me, v. v. many apologies. There’s some wonderful Italian powder you can get in France called MOM, – another indication of a matriarchal society, – which is worth its weight in gold dust. It is rather sad to think that their revels now are ended, [3] that the happy woods (where I would fain be, wandering in pensive mood) [4] where they held high holiday will soon be a silent grove. Where are all their quips and quiddities? [5] The pattering of tiny feet will be stilled. Bare, ruin’d choirs [6] . . . Don’t tell anyone about this private fauna. Mom’s the word, gentle reader.
I’ve got to write a full-page article for the Sunday Times on Gluttony. The other six of the Deadly Sins have been allotted to Edith Sitwell, Wystan Auden, Cyril Connolly, Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh and Eliot. I was given the choice between Gluttony and Lust, and chose the former, because Lust is too serious a matter. I’m rather looking forward to writing it. Have you any inspirations? Apart from this, I have been, thank heavens, in the throes of creative frenzy, and the pages are mounting up as thick as leaves in Vallombrosa. [7] This is a great relief, as I was beginning to suffer from faint unavowed despair about this book; I’d left it too long and it was beginning to go cold on me; but I seem to have breathed it back again to life at last.
I got a terribly nice letter from Tony [Massourides] at the same time as yours, thanking me for Encounter, [8] and saying he has translated ‘Sounds of the Greek World’ into Greek, and will be sending it. I’m very pleased about this, and I know you will be too, being the angelic person you are, fortunately.
No more now, my darling Ricki, as I must leap into my faithful Standard Companion and dash to the post with this, hoping and praying it gets you in time. No need to say how much I’m going to miss you; you know I will. Not only the moon’s a rival now, but the sun and Greece as well, and I know what potent allies they are. But no moping! We’ll make some glowing plan when you get back, and see what magic the mysterious north can offer. Anyway, bless you a billion times, my dearest darling Ricki, and lots of love hugs and kisses
from Paddy
[1] Barbara Warner and Niko Ghika had fallen in love, and would soon marry.
[2] Unidentified.
[3] ‘Our revels are now ended’: The Tempest, IV, 1.
[4] An allusion to Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’.
[5] In Act 1, scene 2 of Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff and the Prince enjoy a punning exchange. ‘How now, how now, mad wag! what, in thy quips and thy quiddities? what a plague have I to do with a buff jerkin?’ asks Falstaff; and the Prince replies ‘Why, what a pox have I to do with my hostess of the tavern?’
[6] Sonnet 73 (see pages 246–8).
[7] Paradise Lost, lines 302–4:
‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallombrosa where Etrurian shades
High over-arch’d embower.’
[8] See note 2 on page 112.
To Ricki Huston
26 August 1961
13 Chester Row, SW1
My darling Ricki,
Don’t be horrified by this red ink – it doesn’t mean murder or a death pact or anything, it’s just a lovely new pen I’ve bought for correcting typescript with in red, and it writes so beautifully I must go on with it for the moment. However, no chance of it usurping your lovely grey one.
I began Sei ShMnagon’s pillow-book [1] last night, with my head, appropriately, on the pillow, and have been transported ever since, and feel I’m the inhabitant of a tenth-century Fujiwara palace with snow on the ground outside, or returning from an expedition to listen to the cuckoos in a carriage covered with blossom, trying to think of a poem for the Empress when I get back. It’s a marvellous book, and many, many thanks for it.
The trip to Cardiff was very odd, really. It’s rather a dreadful town, except for the docks, which go on for miles, endless sad streets along which turbaned sikhs and pakistanis shuffle, and lascars and a few Greeks, also quantities of negroes sit shooting craps for hours on end among the old fag ends and fish and chip-smirched Daily Mirrors on the pavements of Tiger Bay. But, inside a dingy and flyblown hotel called The Windsor, in this stricken area, is hidden the best restaurant in the West of England, run by a secretive Frenchman who toils away in some smoky vault, unseen, at wonderful scarlet steaks and soles awash with fragrant liquid beige through which chopped mushrooms peep, rather sadly munched by the sad leading citizens of Cardiff. At the end of dinner here we were astonished to see the three plump jolly and middle-aged waitresses, in their caps and aprons, doing a highly trained tap dance to the tune of a portable wireless, and purely for their own amusement. We made friends with two of these, called Joanna and Rhoda, who took us to an after hours drinking and dancing hell in the bowels of a jet black warehouse on the waterfront, where we sat up till three in the morning, hobnobbing with their various coloured friends, and particularly a young burglar living almost entirely on Preludin tablets, [2] to the detriment of his stern calling. Next day we spent the morning in the Museum where there is an astonishing collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, then motored to a pretty village called Usk, to have lunch there in a pub with Philip Toynbee, [3] who lives not far off, and his wife, who has greatly improved. Then to a wonderful late mediaeval castle at Raglan shooting straight out of a green field and surrounded by oak trees. It is an absolute marvel, and I would have liked to move in and hoist my banner at once. It seemed so wasted on the jackdaws. A not too bad Chinese meal finished that day, followed by the waitresses’ nightclub, and then back to London next day,
halting for lunch at H. and Virginia Bath’s. [4]
My hands are scarlet with leakage from this pen, as though hot from a particularly brutal murder, e.g. Macduff ’s bedside. [5]
I’d rather planned to treat empty August London like the country; but it’s not quite empty enough, and, after a short initial lull, meals are beginning to mount up, the people involved being Niko & Barbara, Stephen Spender & Natasha and a rather nice chap staying with them called Ru Wilson, son to Edmund W. and Mary McCarthy, [6] Annie Fleming & Ian F., P. Kinross and P. Quennell, with C. Connolly looming. But I’ve managed to get a lot of work done all the same, both on my book and on Gluttony. The awful thing about getting typescript back is one can’t leave it alone; I keep pulling it to pieces again, like Penelope at her loom; all this time my suitor – Jock Murray – waits . . . The thing about gluttony is: if it’s a mortal sin, entailing hell-fire, it’s a case of the condemned man eating thousands of hearty breakfasts.
I say! I ought to have begun this letter with loud cheers for the completed script. How I envy you, and would I could say the same. Darling Ricki, I’m so sorry about the post coitum triste feeling. I’ve got it a bit today, and I’ve just tried to telephone you at the Saints Pères, [7] but, alas, you were still away in the country. I rather hoped we might pool our melancholies and exorcise them. I’ll try tomorrow. How I wish I was at Saints Pères, too, or some other hotel well within bowshot with a bistro and a delicious meal ahead, then the clash of curtain-rings meeting, and lamplit drowning in delight with the towers of St Germain, Notre Dame, St Thomas Aquinas just off the Rue du Bac, Saint Guillaume and the Gare d’Orléans softly tolling the night hours away like bell-buoys.
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