Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I’ve hung a lovely late eighteenth-century French papier-peint, bought three years ago at an antiquaire, I think in the Rue des Saints Pères, called Air de Chasse, and hung it at the end of the room next to my bedroom. It’s about three yards square, and represents a wonderful and mysterious Midsummer Night’s Dream forest of oaks and ilexes with a rocky glade full of flowers and creeper and bracken across which the hounds of Hippolyta are pounding, and in the far background, are some bluish mountains with dawn rising beyond them. It’s made a magical change to this room, especially after dark, suggesting unicorns and faraway French hunting horns.

  This letter never seems to finish.

  Friday afternoon! Still here, (the letter I mean). Darling, you did sound sad and upset over the telephone. I do know all those agonies, and exquisite torment they are. I wish I was there to help lick wounds and pull out thorns, and feel all the glummer at being stuck in this metropolis. There’s lots to say on this theme; but this much delayed letter must get off if it’s to catch you; so I’ll glue it up and charge down Eccleston St [the Post Office] with it before it’s too late, and ring you if I possibly can, on Sunday morning; if I can’t, it will not be because I haven’t tried, but because I can’t. I’ll write at once to the American Express. Meanwhile, preceding this, off across the Channel go several thousand hugs, embraces, kisses, and fond love, my darling Ricki,

  from Paddy

  [1] Observations and musings recorded by Sei ShMnagon during her time as ‘court lady’ to the Empress Consort during the late tenth and early eleventh century in Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002. The first of several English translations appeared in 1889.

  [2] A form of amphetamine or ‘speed’.

  [3] Toynbee had married his second wife, Sally (1916–2003), an American and, like Toynbee, an alcoholic, in 1950.

  [4] i.e. Longleat House.

  [5] PLF is referring to Macbeth; he means Duncan’s bedside, where Macduff discovers that the King has been murdered.

  [6] Reuel Wilson (b. 1938), son of the novelist Mary McCarthy and her second husband, Edmund Wilson.

  [7] The Hôtel des Saint Pères in Paris.

  To Ricki Huston

  2 September 1961

  13 Chester Row, SW1

  My darling Ricki,

  Mars has had it, I fear, though it beats me how he can sleep a wink with that little pest winding his conch into his ear; even though the field-telephone receiver, under the hand of the one crawling through his breastplate, is off. [1] As for the other brats horsing about with the lance, it’s obviously going to end in tears. And what about Venus? Those precious morning hours are slipping by, and nothing but snores now. I think that her left hand, in desperation, is straying inexorably forkwards, toying indeterminately with the folds of the embroidered muslin, with which she has prudishly re-draped herself (who would think it was round her neck five short minutes ago?). And if only that little beast would stop blowing that conch for a little while. And it’s no good Mars cutting those childish messages on the back of trees . . . ‘MARS!’

  Noises off. Sound of scenery being changed. CUT to Faringdon Hall, [2] a Georgian country house, not far from Oxford, embowered in gigantic trees. From the terrace, parkland rolls away in green waves. A lake in the middle distance. In a field, right, some black and white cows munch resentfully; in a second field, left, two horses chase each other over the sward in a carefree manner. There is a whirr of wings, and a flight of multicoloured pigeons, some purple, some Nile green, some shocking pink, some amethyst blue, take wing from the terrace and settle along the pediment in open order. A greyhound, collared with a string of pearls, minces disdainfully across a croquet lawn, avoiding a peacock. A notice, on the edge of a flower bed, admonishes the passer-by: BEWARE OF THE AGAPANTHUS. The trees drink from a recent downpour. From indoors can be heard the harmony of several clocks striking, one of them an entire tune on a musical box. A Plantagenet belfry quarter of a mile away begins to chime for Morning Prayer, scaring the jackdaws and a number of rooks. Indoors, in many a four-poster, highborn guests stir indolently; then their eyes close once more. It is eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 4th (?) of September, 1961. Invisible among the early autumn vapours above the house hovers Hangover, a baleful spirit . . . LAP DISSOLVE to the green room. Track to a vast safe green rococo bed containing a solitary figure writing, oddly enough, on sheets of foolscap bought in Larissa some months ago. Dolly Shot [3] of P. Leigh Fermor, agreeably tousled from slumber. A close-up reveals delicate pink veining in the whites of his eyes. He lights a cigarette, a faraway look suffusing his bloodshot orbs. CUT. . .

  *

  As you see, Ricki darling, there’s only one thing missing from what might have been a well-spent Botticelli forenoon . . . How sad that all these rustling safe green yards [of material] overhead should be pavilioning solitude; such an unsuitable canopy for austerity; I discern reproach in its folds . . . I adore this house. It used to be a great haunt of mine. I wonder if you know who I mean by Lord Berners? [4] He lived here for as long as I can remember, and died alas, leaving it to a very dotty relation, very good looking and rather wicked, he was in love with, called Robert Heber-Percy, [5] known as the Mad Boy, who now lives here, a half-queer, half-debauched, and half-foxhunting squire’s life, fortunately still with most of Gerald Berners’ old pals as guests. He – Gerald – was a brilliant, charming and eccentric man, a writer, painter, poet & composer of no small merit. He always wore dark glasses in Rome because he said that otherwise he got no peace from the beggars because his eyes were so kind. I think I recited, on our Greek journey, two of the funny poems to you . . . I’m glad that his invention of dyeing the pigeons different colours is still kept up.

  The inhabitants of the house for this weekend are the Mad Boy, Hugh Cruddas, [6] his hunting pal and bedfellow, Coote Lygon, a cousin of his called Letty Ashley-Cooper, and a thoroughly cracked, very attractive, very broke and v. young couple who live in a cottage nearby called Victor and Caroline Grosvenor. [7] The drinking before dinner was fast and furious, egged on by John Betjeman, who came for it with his wife Penelope. Then we settled in a decorative orangery, where Coote played all the Mickey Theodorakis ‘Epitaphios’ records, which made me think of Greece and you. Champagne mixed with brandy and peaches went down at lightning speed, also much singing took place and a tremendous hasapiko dance [a Greek folk dance] by me, I’m sorry to announce. Then, led by mad Caroline Grosvenor, the Mad Boy, Hugh, Victor and I charged down the lake, clothes were torn off, and in we plunged, Caroline, who is very pretty, doing a great deal of naked nymph-like showing off, charging about among the trees and reeds, and, I think, longing for either the Mad Boy or me to initiate some adulterous goings on – we both thought the other was the chosen one, and what with that and her husband being there, the woods remained unpolluted by any irregular congress, I’m happy to say . . . It was warm and starry with a half moon, and so many trees round it, all identically reflected, except when our ripples broke it all up, that we might have been in an impenetrable forest. There was a great deal of shouting, singing, splashing and poetry shouted at the top of our voices. When the fishermen arrived at dawn, I fear they must have found the pike, gudgeon, tench etc. so many bags of nerves. We trooped home stark [naked] through the dewy grass with a glimmer of dawn breaking, Caroline cartwheeling indefatigably over the sward, still thirsting for love and wine. The house seemed shadowy & mysterious and full of the smell of flowers and pot-pourri and the many clocks announcing daybreak. So to bed. I forgot to mention that, at the end of an alley of hornbeam outside my window, is an allegorical group of statuary. I can’t see what it represents, but would like to think that it is Alka-Seltzer trampling Headache underfoot.

  I woke up to the sound of a terrible thunderstorm, with real forked lightning rocketing across the sky, immediately followed by thunderclaps like the whole of Trafalgar and Waterloo on the roof. It was a comfort to realise it was an outside job. . .

  I don’t know what today holds in
store. Dawn tomorrow is the first cubbing of the season – the meet is here! – perhaps, if tonight is like last night, it would be more sensible not to go to bed at all and tittup wild eyed through the drizzling spinneys. Perhaps we will still be locked in bacchic slumber, as deaf to the horn as Mars to that little wretch’s conch in the picture, and for less good a reason.

  After that, back to London, and to work. Please forgive my awful slowness in writing, and, repaying evil with good, write to me at once. Forgive, too, this rather unedifying letter. I do envy you Greece, and long to hear all about it. I wish you could leave it this very second and whizz through the window here and under these heroic hangings and into a loving and endless embrace. In lieu of that, my dearest darling Ricki, billions of love, hugs & kisses to you, and a few sighs,

  from Paddy

  xxx

  [1] PLF is alluding to the Botticelli painting Mars and Venus, which hangs in the National Gallery, London.

  [2] Faringdon House.

  [3] A tracking shot, filmed while the camera is mounted on a ‘dolly’.

  [4] Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson (1883–1950), 14th Baron Berners, composer, novelist, painter, aesthete and eccentric. His pigeons were dyed in bright colours, and he drove around his estate wearing a pig’s-head mask to frighten the locals. PLF recalled notices at Faringdon House:

  ‘No dogs admitted’ at the top of the stairs and ‘Prepare to meet thy God’ painted inside a wardrobe. When people complimented him on his delicious peaches he would say, ‘Yes, they are ham-fed.’ And he used to put Woolworth pearl necklaces round his dogs’ necks and when a guest, rather perturbed, ran up saying ‘Fido has lost his necklace’, G said, ‘Oh dear, I’ll have to get another out of the safe.’

  A notice at the entrance to the tower near his house read ‘Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk’.

  [5] Robert Vernon Heber-Percy (1911–87), ‘a wild and pugnacious character’. He had married Jennifer Fry for a time and their union produced a daughter, Victoria, whose own daughter Sofka would eventually inherit the estate. Before meeting Gerald Berners he had a brief but hectic career in the Cavalry, acted as an extra in Hollywood, worked in a Lyons’ Corner House (until spilling soup over a customer), and helped run a nightclub.

  [6] Known as ‘The Captain’. His arrival at Faringdon prompted Evelyn Waugh’s comment to Diana Mosley: ‘The Mad Boy has installed a Mad Boy of his own. Has there ever been a property in history that has devolved from catamite to catamite for any length of time?’

  [7] The Hon. Robert Victor Grosvenor (1936–93), son of the 5th Baron Ebury, and his wife Caroline, née Higham (1936–2003).

  To Lawrence Durrell

  30 October 1961

  Poste Restante

  Loeronau

  Finistère

  DE PROFUNDIS [1]

  Dear Larry,

  This is in the nature of an SOS. Do you know of anywhere in your area where there is a huge and sympathetic room, with plenty of striding space, a large worktable, a shaded lamp, a bed, and a view (lasting as long as the sun) lunging away into the distance, and country to walk about in, costing practically nothing? I’ve got to finish Mani’s sequel – Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus & Thessaly – within the next three months, before tackling Mexico with Joan in February. Here, alas, is hopeless. Over twenty kilometres from where you are, but under fifty, would seem to me to be the ideal; beyond the nuisance radius for you, and within the one-cheerful-dinner-a-week radius for me. By next to nothing, I had £20 to £30 a month in mind, with a nice crone to make a bachelor’s breakfast and bed – Joan is in Greece, sniffing round the site of a possible house on the marches of the Mani, for the evening of life and a haven for all of us [2] – and a village with a bistro for grub within easy walking or motoring range. Do think! It’s a real emergency. I promise not to be a pest.

  Here, alas, where I’ve been for the last week or so, is no good. Brittany just now is too sad, and will get sadder. The end of a long time-wasting quest all over the duchy is the minute room where I’m now writing, in a pub called Le Fer à Cheval, with a window peering into the well of a granite backyard and a funnel of slate roofs streaming under the downpour. Clogs and Breton chat are never out of earshot. (I wonder what they are talking about? Miracles? Shrimp shortages? The danger to traffic of beetroots falling from farm carts?) Under other circumstances, I might have loved it here: Arthurian mists, the Forest of Brocéliande and lost Lyonesse next door, King Mark of Cornwall, Merlin, Viviane, [3] and living on shrimps, oysters, clams, cockles, mussels and so on, a merman’s regimen. But it’s no good now.

  Somebody ought to write an essay on the mystical preoccupations of the Celtic fringe. Amazing granite calvaries prong the entire peninsula – thieves, virgins, disciples, centurions, soldiers, jews, horsemen, politicians and piemen jut from the main stalk like several generations of acrobats in a strong-man-act – and holy wells riddle it. There’s not a village without a miniature Chartres cathedral with a jungle of flying buttresses, triforia, clerestories, gargoyles, crockets, finials, executed with an almost Easter Island uncouthness: Gothic with knobs on. They are nearly all dedicated to Irish saints, most of whom flew here, or floated in coffins or on mill-stones. My local – St Roman – came the hard way, on foot the whole distance from Cork, and worked wonders among the wolves and mad dogs of the area. I think the elaboration of the churches is an extension in granite of the prevalent lacemaking tendency. The denizens of these calvaries – built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – all wear contemporary clothes, the equivalent Joseph of Arimathea in evening tails, and Judas Iscariot with a Gladstone bag and a bowler.

  No time now, as I do want this to depart and reach you quickly. Do think, dear Larry!

  Much love to you and Claude [4]

  from Paddy

  [1] (Latin: ‘from the depths’), a reference to the letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to his lover ‘Bosie’ (Lord Alfred Douglas).

  [2] See next letter.

  [3] The Lady of the Lake in Arthurian legend.

  [4] Claude-Marie Vincendon, whom Durrell had met on Cyprus and married in 1961.

  The affair with Ricki Huston petered out around the end of the year. ‘I do miss the looming ahead of some dead-secret joint plan, which has played such a part in the last ten months,’ he wrote to her in February. ‘We’ll dissect all this sometime, and I fear I won’t come out of it too well. You do, impeccably.’

  Paddy and Joan had decided to settle in Greece, using money she had inherited from her mother. When this letter was written Joan was in the Mani, then a completely unspoilt region of the Peloponnese, investigating the possibility that they might convert one or more of the numerous towers around the coastal village of Kardamyli into a house.

  To Joan Rayner

  26 November 1961

  Nîmes

  Gard

  Darling Joan,

  It’s absolutely maddening my getting your letter and telegrams that fatal day too late. Of course I ought to have been there to help with those momentous decisions; the only thing is, I’m certain I would have agreed with you. It sounds absolutely marvellous. I have studied your plan for ages, and think I remember exactly where it is. Quite apart from the towers themselves, what sounds so wonderful is the space and the view – all the looking and striding room in the world, things which, in Western Europe, I’m beginning to realise, are becoming rarer than platinum. It seems to exist no longer, except perhaps for a few clever millionaires; most millionaires, however, aren’t happy unless there are at least another twenty millionaires’ houses in sight, and no one else’s. I really can’t quite believe it. Think of the hundreds of sunsets ahead, walks through olive groves, meals under trees, sleeping writing drinking reading with branches overhead. I do agree about the appalling time, labour and money involved in starting from scratch, and it seems to me that there’s endless elbow room for inspiration in what there is. I’m sure it
’s right, too, to get hold of as many towers near to each other, and, within reason, as much ground as we possibly can. What a near thing about the Swiss! [1] and I bet, as you say, it was all because of Mani. I feel sure you’ve sworn in all our families about not talking about it. (We must contrive, somewhere, a Yannina [2]-Hardwick [3]-more-glass-than-wall-bit.) I’m dreadfully sorry you’ve had to struggle with it all alone; and I feel a bit sad and jealous that I wasn’t in on all these initial labours. I do think you’ve been brilliant, darling. Of course, I’d have flown there, like a shot. But when we talked on the telephone, and you were off that second, it seemed hopeless. If there’s anything I can possibly be useful about at this late stage, out I’ll whizz, even if only for two or three days. But when we were talking over the telephone, it didn’t sound as if I could be. But only a word is needed!. . .

  What happened at Locronan was, I got more and more lonely and depressed and rain-sodden, a poste restante haunter, but no letters from anyone, not only you, till I began to feel that no letters ever could get there, an ill-fated, barren bureau. (Of course, the moment my back was turned, they must have come in like Niagara Falls, to judge by the crop waiting here.) If only I’d delayed there, I now realise, one more day, I’d almost certainly have been in Greece now. I began to feel rather like we both did in Athens last year, just after arriving. So I packed up and set off, coming the most direct way, I think, except for the first day, making a longer loop in eastern Brittany than was strictly necessary in order to see the castle of Fougères (mis-en-scène of Balzac’s Chouans) [4] and Madame de Sévigné’s Château des Rochers. The first day was intermittent rain and sunshine, a wonderful sequence of foxes’ weddings, driving towards rainbow after rainbow, like a series of hoops, curving over rolling and beautiful forests. Then down to the Loire estuary, through Chateaubriand, having a one star-lunch in Nantes, which is a marvellous town. I trudged round the Ducal Castle here, and round a lovely Gothic cathedral with a most beautiful tomb of recumbent last-duke-and-duchess-of-Brittany-but-one before it was merged with the French crown, at the turning point of the latest Middle Ages and the early Renaissance even more moving than Bourg-en-Bresse; went round a wonderful picture-gallery, a very important, huge treasure-crammed building. My solitary figure seemed to be the only one in any such place, all the way. So off, over the Loire bridge in the late afternoon, a wonderful pearly light with streaks of blue over this lovely river, and a dome or two giving it an almost Roman look – and into the dark Vendée, fetching up at La Rochelle, arcaded like Zante, [5] full of statues and harbour-scapes. After a bloody dinner, prowled into two or three bars, and in one of them picked up a charming and erudite, perfect English-speaking dilettante, who seems to know everyone in every country ( Julian P. R. [6] stays with him now and then on the way to and from Fons) called M. Eric Dahl. [7] We finally drank whisky in his vast and beautiful eighteenth-century house full of books and rather beautiful Fromentins – Fromentin, the town’s glory, is his great grandfather – and one or two Corots and a Delacroix, till 4 a.m., talking about painting, history, heraldry, Greek & Latin literature and kindred themes. He is curator of the wonderful Natural History and Ethnological museum there, which he took me over next morning, lots of skeletons of whales, dolphins, porpoises, some Greek, Roman and Etruscan things, a world-famous shell exhibition. Then a tour of this town, in pouring rain, during which a 400-year-old cedar-tree came crashing down a few yards away and the town’s electricity fused like a green sky-rocket from a telegraph pole. A morning of portents. I don’t expect you know who built the fine eighteenth-century arsenal there? It was Choderlos de Laclos, [8] town military engineer for twenty years! Then a tremendous lunch with M. Dahl in his house with a terrific bottle of Château Latour, that made me wish you were there even more. And away, south through the Saintonge, stopping to look at two amazing Renaissance churches recommended by M. Dahl, and suddenly found myself – all this in a downpour, going v. slow for fear of skidding, and by now after dark – in Blaye, and thought of P. G. Wodehouse: (‘You’re so chivalrous Bertie. Just like Rudel.’ ‘Who’s Rudel?’ ‘Rudel, Prince of Blaye-en-Saintonge, crusader and troubadour, who died for love of the lady of Tripoli.’ ‘Oh, ah . . .’), [9] so whisked up the rainy ramp of a vast castle, which had indeed belonged to him, and from the battlements, gazed down through the deluge at the huge sweep of the Gironde and the twinkling lights of Bordeaux the other side. So on to Bordeaux in a blizzard, and found it virtually an underwater city. Stopped here in an old-fashioned, slightly moth-eaten hotel, worn plush and brass and endless passages. Next morning the rain was even worse – the heaviest rains for many years, a Greek steamer in trouble in the Bay of Biscay and terrific destruction of the Arcachon oyster beds – so decided not to forge ahead that day, but asked the maid – a tall, sad, beautiful, fair girl, smiling so seldom her heir might have been lost in the White Ship [10] – about Montaigne’s tower. [11] She turned out to be from Paris, tremendously well read [12] and with a day off, so I went under her guidance, had lunch in Saint Émilion, a wonderful mediaeval hill town, then on to Montaigne’s tower. (It would have been perfect for me!) It’s a high ridge, overlooking green gardens, and a park and a comic neo-Gothic chateau, all the beams covered with Latin and Greek inscriptions put there by Montaigne himself. I get a tremendous kick out of places like this. I don’t quite know why. (I clean forgot to have a look at Montesquieu’s castle next day.) Annie, [13] the waitress, had a rather sad tale to tell, bad luck with men etc. – they only seemed to be after One Thing, so she always felt unsafe with them – ‘Not like with you!’ she finished with trusting eyes; which of course completely tied one’s hands should the idea of a Philip [Toynbee]-like lunge have ever drifted through the mind . . . I enjoyed all this, as bar Mr Dahl, it was the first person I’d spoken to, bar ordering a meal, for weeks; since Pont-Aven, indeed. She told me the happiest time she’d ever had was a solitary holiday near Arcachon last autumn. She has a passion for oysters, and about sunset, when everyone had cleared off, she dived into the oyster beds and swam back to the shore, where her basket, containing knife, bread and butter, was waiting on the sands. She also has a greyhound called Dick – ‘Deek’ – who is expert at spotting oysters when they are washed loose after storms, bounding across the sands, then pulling up panting over some scaly trove. I rather like to think of this pale, dune-wandering couple.