Darling, I’m going to break off now, without rereading this, and get it off and continue almost at once, rather than hold things up by continuing. . . . No more now, till this evening darling angel Joan, except 1,000 congratulations again about your great Maniot feat. My telephone number is Nîmes 4346.
Love hugs
P. xxx
[1] Joan’s inheritance had been in a Swiss bank account, and was received free of UK taxation.
[2] PLF seems to be thinking of a Turkish-style alcove surrounded by low windows and lined with divans, where one can recline and admire the view.
[3] The exceptional amount of fenestration in the Elizabethan house Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire gives rise to the expression ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.’
[4] Balzac’s Les Chouans (1829), part of his great sequence of novels La Comédie humaine, is set in Brittany.
[5] Perhaps a reference to Miss Crowe’s house (see pages 18–20).
[6] Julian Alfred Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001), anthropologist and ethnographer, then living in a chateau in Fons, near Figeac, in the Lot.
[7] Eric Dahl (d. 1986), son of the Norwegian-born fishery owner Oscar Dahl, and cousin of the novelist Roald Dahl.
[8] Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803), author of the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782).
[9] A slightly misquoted passage from The Code of the Woosters (1938).
[10] The White Ship sank off Barfleur on 25 November 1120. Only two of those aboard survived: among those drowned was Henry I’s son and heir, leading to a succession crisis and a period of civil war in England. The King was said never to have smiled again.
[11] The southern tower of the Château de Montaigne, the only vestige of the original sixteenth-century castle.
[12] As she helped him with his luggage, he quoted two lines of Verlaine (from ‘Il pleure dans mon couer’):
‘Ô bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits!’
which she continued,
‘Pour un cœur qui s’ennuie
Ô le chant de la pluie!’
[13] Annie the waitress and ‘the tall, sad, beautiful’ maid were the same person. In contemporaneous letters to Debo Devonshire and Ricki Huston, PLF revealed that they had spent the next day together. On leaving the following morning he had found a Bach record slipped into the car, with a letter from Annie saying the time they had spent together had been some of ‘the happiest hours of her existence’.
To Jock Murray
9 March 1962
The Mill House
Dumbleton
CATS AT NIGHT
Dear Jock,
1. I write to you with my left arm (thank God, and no excuse pending!) in plaster of Paris owing to a hunting smash-up ten days ago, on the hardest bit of Dartmoor – possibly the part left by Freya to her little godson. A very odd feeling, concussed blithering for ten mins, then a return to sense streaming with blood from two black eyes and forehead and ribs feeling (but not!) like a broken shopping basket. Long live bowlers, which I have always despised; mine’s in smithereens, but not me.
2. I enclose Miss Masvoulás’s [1] letter. It seems marvellous to me and my feeling is that we shouldn’t take any money from it – it would only be 2d anyway. I’ve only answered by a congratulatory telegram so far. Can you let her have the plates, or whatever she needs, of the Mani photographs? That’s what she means by the word κλισέ (clichés!) in her last paragraph. Do write to her and wish her well.
3. Dear Jock, I’ve done just what you warned me against, and which I didn’t mean to do – five brisk pages is what I had in mind – and that is, getting bogged down in Byron’s slippers. The whole thing’s got out of control and covers many pages. But I hope it will make an odd and unusual chapter; it’s full of things I’ve been longing to write for years, especially about Lord Byron, and I’ve enjoyed doing it like mad – far more excited than I’ve been for a long time, and that’s usually a good sign. It’s when you begin to bore yourself that you’ve probably been boring your neighbour for the last ten pages. I hope to finish this tomorrow. It was meant to be a lead-in to the Kravara – i.e. beggar – chapter, [2] which is only about fifty miles further along the N. coast of the Gulf of Corinth; but this business has expanded too much to be anything but a chapter on its own; and Miss Johns [3] should have it within the next three days.
4. Remains the beggar chapter, let’s wash out the phallic one at the moment, and use the beggars to complete our revisited interior vol. Now, Joan’s and my plan is to push off for Sicily to see all the Greek things there – at last – after getting back to the Metropolis the day after tomorrow, viz. Monday. Work will be cut out, I foresee, preparing the work in hand for Miss J., and preparing for departure. What I plan is to make a halt somewhere quiet and wonderful, and write the missing chapter clean through there. What do you think of this?
I feel in such an optimistic mood at the moment, it’s the elation of forging ahead, even if it’s in the wrong direction, or a deviation from plan. It was that great khaki obstacle of Macedonia that has been holding me up, as I believe bunkers do people who play golf.
After all, one of the things about writing is that one should enjoy what one’s writing. Otherwise no one else will, and one might as well be down a mine.
5. We’ll have to start thinking about titles and covers on different lines now, I suppose.
6. No more that I can think of, except let’s communicate next week. Be of good cheer, I think all’s well!
Yours ever
Paddy
P.S. What marvellous news from those American agents! Bless them. Money plucked from the sky.
P.P.S. Pity the lame and the halt.
[1] She had translated Mani into Greek.
[2] The Kravara region, on the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth. ‘Its fame springs from the prevalence, real or supposed, of professional mendicancy’ (Roumeli, page 187).
[3] PLF’s typist.
The plan to convert a tower in the Mani into a house came to nothing, but another possibility arose, as Paddy explained in a letter to Debo Devonshire ( In Tearing Haste, page 92). ‘I’ve spent the last two months trying to find somewhere to live in S.W. Greece, and, the trouble is, I’ve found it: trouble, because I don’t think we’ll be able to get it; owned by too many people, scattered all over the globe, who, though none of them live there, are unlikely to want to sell it; but I live in hopes. It’s in the Mani, a peninsula in the middle of a steep deserted bay, pointing S.E., E., S.W. and W., with a great amphitheatre of mountains which turn a hectic red at sunset. The peninsula descends like a giant, shallow staircase of olive groves, plumed with cypress trees, platform after platform dwindling to a low cliff thirty feet above deep blue-green glittering sea, with trees and wild sweet-smelling shrubs to the very brink, full of beehives, olives, woodpigeons, and with a freshwater spring. The cliff is warrened with a great sea cave into which one swims, under stalactites and strange mushroom limestone formations. Not a house in sight, nothing but the two rocky headlands, an island a quarter of a mile out to sea with a ruined chapel, and a vast expanse of glittering water, over which you see the sun setting till its last gasp. Homer’s Greece, in fact. But I’ve not given up hope. It would mean building a rambling peasant house, with huge airy rooms, out of the local limestone, on one of those ledges of olive-trees. . .’
To Joan Rayner
30 June 1962
Kallirhoë 12
Athens
Darling Joan,
Got back from Kardamyli with Tony [Massourides] and his girl Rania at 1.00 last night and hasten to write. In view of all the difficulties, I was secretly hoping that I would be disappointed in Kalamitsi. Alas, alas, when we got there and looked through the trees at the sea under a third moon, it was worse, or better than ever.
Same next morning, when we bathed off the rocks! Tony and Rania saw in a flash what all the fuss was about, and why nowhere else, after
seeing K, will quite do.
(a) The day before we set off – on Friday – Tony talked to Phikouras by telephone, and suggested 180,000 [1] as the outside price – including sale tax – 20,000 less than the sum we had thought of, as giving us, if necessary, something to retreat to. BUT NO FURTHER. He sounded interested. Will he be able to get hold of his wicked uncle?
(b) Tony and I, the justice of the peace and the town clerk of Kardamyli, spent hours in the ‘town hall’, looking up titles, deeds of sale etc., in the town records. It emerges from all this that there are four people who will have to agree to a sale – uncle Geo. Stephanéa, old Angela Phikoura, who lives in the hut, another eighty-five-year-old brother who lives in the US, and a seventy-to eighty-year-old sister, also for the past forty years in America. Any sale without their consent would be invalid (Steph never mentioned them!). Tony is going into all this, and it may take time.
(c) On Saturday night we had a long moonlight chat with old Angela Phikoura, the hut-dwelling old girl who lives on the spot. She repeated that we could build there as much as we liked free but she wouldn’t sell the land (not that it is all hers); she said sadly, ‘money’s just bits of paper. It flies away like birds. But if you have land and olives and vegetables and chickens, you’ll never starve. I’ve been all my childhood here, I live a solitary – ἀσκητική [ascetic] – life, away from the village.’ She told the nice peasant couple, all on our side, who are farming it that, once we bought it, we might turn her out in her old age with a handful of banknotes, in spite of all my reassurances to the contrary. Next day, we approached her with the suggestion that we should buy the whole property, but in the contract lay down by law that she could not only live there for the rest of her days, but have the usufruct of the olive trees and kitchen garden too (which turn out to be worth a great deal less than I thought, at the moment, but could have a profitable yield when properly tended). She seemed favourably impressed by this, and swayed in her resolution. Both the two peasants and Tony urged the sense of this. If the others assented, there would be no difficulty here. I like her very much, and can’t help seeing her side of things. Her little hut is far from where the house would stand, rather a nice little enclave of chickens, beehives and tethered goats and two strong horses. She is a sort of [illegible] Mary Herbert-faced old [illegible] in patched clothes, often barefoot, and in a huge Mani straw hat. On her death, all the usufruct would fall to us. The two peasants, who are angels, are dead keen to look after everything for us, and pine for it. They are one of the major attractions of the place.
(d) I asked Tony how he thought the extent of the property compared in size to the garden of Niko’s house in Hydra. He said ten times as big; I, five times. In spite of only being four stremmata, [2] perhaps because of the variety of levels and trees, the impression is very large and spacious. It seems vast and airy and full of surprises, all nice ones.
(e) Tony is going to tackle the possibilities of plot B., without me, as a foreigner always sends the price up alas. Soc. Phaliréa thinks there will be little difficulty. One old man owns it all, and there is no water. He never goes there. The two operations, plot A & plot B, will be kept separate.
(f) I can almost certainly get the ready money here from Geo. Athenogenis who has large interests in both Athens and London; in fact, he said it would come in useful to him in the latter.
(g) As the negotiations (if they proceed at all!) will certainly take some time, we ought to give Tony power of attorney to deal with it for us when I have left. . .
(h) What do you think about the Athens house? If you wanted to dispose of it who should deal with it – Zanis or Tony? Shall I ask Tony what the etiquette is?
(i) I keep on having a presentiment we’ll get this heavenly place; but all seems against it! ( j) It would be a lovely place to live in a large tent and bathe, read and walk while the foundations were being laid.
(k) Should one, in such a case, sacrifice a cock? I asked Tony. He thought, yes.
(l) Your telegram has just arrived. The first part agrees with all the foregoing. I’m not quite happy about the fifty years’ lease idea, rather absurdly, because of the possibility of descendants, unless my absolute idiocy has done for this! [3] Too difficult to go into now, but not being married seems steadily more ludicrous – and the very possibility of this paradise brings this out in sharper and sharper relief. No more about this now, darling, except I ought to have my head looked at. Even failing these descendants (how they would bless one in 100 years’ time!) it would be lovely for people one adored, to inherit.
This must get off! Loving hugs and kisses, darling from Paddy
I made Tony take lots of snaps. To be forwarded as soon as developed.
[1] 180,000 drachmas was about £2,150 (the equivalent of more than £30,000 in 2016, adjusted for inflation).
[2] A Greek unit of land, equivalent to 1,000 square metres. Four stremmata is about one acre.
[3] Joan was fifty at the time of this letter.
The purchase of the land in the Mani proceeded slowly and was not completed until March 1964. In the meantime Paddy continued to oscillate between resting-places in England and Greece. This letter was written while he was staying as a guest of Kisty Hesketh, at the Hesketh family seat, a glorious Hawksmoor house, not far from the racecourse at Towcester.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 27