Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  To Nancy Mitford

  undated [April 1963]

  Easton Neston

  Northamptonshire [1]

  Darling Nancy,

  V. many thanks indeed for The Water Beetle, [2] which arrived, re-forwarded from Lismore, just before I left London. I’m taking it with me to the pub I propose to settle in for the next two weeks in Wales, for my livre de chevet [bedtime reading]. It looks lovely.

  Towcester races took place here Saturday and I made £7. Better still, after the captains and the kings had departed, [3] Kisty Hesketh, Molly Cranborne [4] & self stole out into the dusk on three magnificent horses and pounded round the entire course, these steeds sailing over the hurdles like swallows. It really was lovely.

  The pub I settle in tomorrow is an old steward’s house built into the ruins of Llanthony Abbey – an Augustinian Priory – in a wild and very remote valley of the Black Mountains in Monmouthshire, inhabited for a time by Walter Savage Landor, who was the local squire. It is one of the most romantic and odd places I’ve seen in England, and I expect great things of it.

  Thank you so much again for the book, dear Nancy, and tons of love from

  Paddy

  love to Eddy [Sackville-West]

  [1] . For Kisty Hesketh, see note 4 on page 98.

  [2] A volume of NM’s essays, articles and reviews, published in 1962.

  [3] A reference to Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ (1897).

  [4] Marjorie ‘Molly’ Olein Wyndham-Quin (b. 1922), Lady Cranborne, later Lady Salisbury.

  To Xan Fielding

  10 December 1963

  Katounia

  Limni

  Euboea

  Greece

  Ἀλέκο παιδί μου [Alex, dear boy],

  I’ve been meaning to write for such ages, but I just haven’t, as Tom Dunbabin might have put it, (a) to find out how you both are, though I know a bit from Joan’s having seen Daph in London and (b) to put you abreast of what I’m up to, because it concerns you a bit.

  A few months ago an American magazine called Holiday asked me to write a rather well-paid article on The Pleasures of Walking. I pondered the matter and decided to give a brief potted account of my youthful trudge across Europe. It was supposed to be 2,000 words. I started at full gallop, [1] and have now reached 60,000 words, and am still in Bucharest with the whole of the Black Sea Coast looming, then Turkey, Constantinople and The End. I should be through in about a month and another 20 or 25,000 words i.e., a normal length book. [2] I don’t know what it’s like yet. All of Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Transylvania, Bulgaria and Rumania are already done, and I think large hunks of it are all right. I can’t think what to call it. A Youthful Journey is my working title, but I’m not keen. I thought of Seasons and Castles after Rimbaud [3] and as touching on my rustic snobbish goings on in Mitteleuropa. But am not happy about that either. I wish you and Daph would think of something. Andrew [Devonshire] suggests Shanks’s Europe. . .

  But where you really come in is that I’d like, with your permission, to dedicate it to you and also kick off with a longish introduction, explaining the previous background etc., rather in the style of Cyril [Connolly]’s long letter to Peter [Quennell] at the beginning of The Rock Pool. There was so much in common between the years we both spent between leaving – ‘leaving’ in my case [4] – school and finally meeting at Yerakari, [5] that you are obviously the only person. Also, through interminable case-colloquys, you know so much of it already. Anyway, it would be appropriate and the greatest fun. I do hope you’ll like it.

  Joan and I settled here this summer as a scribbling stop-gap, in a hellish house belonging to Philip Sherrard. [6] Then I was alone a month or so in this ravishing house belonging to a nice eccentric man called Sir Aymer Maxwell – absent – whose brother [7] writes about otters. Joan came back three days ago (and sends love to both). All goes swimmingly and with any luck I’ll be out of the wood by Christmas. Maurice came here for a fortnight this summer and seemed to like it, and Eddy [Sackville-West], also Judy and Milton [Gendel] for a moment, and Janetta with her girls and Julian Jebb [8] once, and then again with the addition of Jaime [Parladé]. Since then it has been a perfect Greek autumn of clear, brilliant days interrupted every now and then by three-day monsoons. Now it is getting cold and snow is on the way, I think. Parnassus, 50? 100? miles away the other side of the Gulf of Euboea, is already white on top.

  No more for the present. I meant to write and suggest all this months ago. Do write, and please try and think of alternative names for this book.

  With tons of love to you both,

  Paddy

  [1] ‘Work goes on tremendously,’ PLF had written to Joan in November.

  [2] The book eventually expanded into a trilogy, the first volume being A Time of Gifts.

  [3] The refrain ‘O saisons, ô châteaux’ occurs several times in Rimbaud’s poem Happiness.

  [4] PLF means that he was asked to leave King’s School, Canterbury, after being discovered holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter.

  [5] In German-occupied Crete, during the summer of 1942.

  [6] Philip Owen Arnould Sherrard (1922–95), author, translator and philosopher, who settled in Greece after the Second World War. He lived in a house he had restored near the small town of Limni on the island of Euboea.

  [7] Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water (1960).

  [8] Julian Jebb (1934–84), journalist, then living in Rome and teaching English. In 1967 he joined the BBC, where he co-produced a succession of documentaries, with a mission to put writers on-screen.

  To Diana Cooper

  late December 1963

  Katounia

  Limni

  My darling Diana,

  Here I am, slogging away as usual in island seclusion. Not, thank God, for the last three months in the hell-hole that Judy may have mentioned, [1] but in a ravishing house on a hillside covered with lemon trees and cypresses belonging to a new friend, who has lent it out of pity, called Sir Aymer Maxwell, an eccentric and amusing half-absentee laird that you would like very much. He’s very good and inventive about games, and cottoned on to the ancient SS. Gregory and Augustine-at-twilight business [2] at once, and produced some beauties. Here’s one from just before his departure: the two saints are due to inspect the working of democracy in space. But when they join the queue boarding the rocket ship, they are turned back because of their cloth. What does the Pope turn to St Augustine and say? Answer: ‘This is not astral socialism but social ostracism.’

  I’ve been writing like mad, still on my great youthful trudge, which is nearly turning, though I didn’t mean it to, into a year’s autobiography. Thank God, I do believe it’s working out all right at last. (As a result of this frenzy, this is the first letter to anyone for months, and long overdue.) The only respite from this, and also escape from the horrors of our first habitat, has been odd bits of building, which I hope the inheritors of it like: first, a huge summerhouse out of rush mats and trellis work, supported on a vast tree-trunk-pillar bleached from the sea and hauled from the shore where it was the waves’ plaything. In one corner of this building, which is half neolithic temple, half emir’s pavilion, I built a lovely moorish fountain with the water gushing or plip-plopping, according to the subtle twist of an invisible tap, from a conch sticking out of an angle of white wall into a whitewashed cube surmounted by spikes, and thence, in two shell-splayed jets, into a bigger, C-shaped and spike-surrounded basin with a stone floor which I painted with the legend of the nereid-gorgon (see Mani). Also decorated the white wall above, and the fountain, with bas-reliefs of sea creatures: gorgon, whirlpool, gull, halcyon, sea-urchin, seahorses, octopus, Muraena [Moray] eel and squid, moulded out of gypsum. This has become a slight mania, and a hornblowing Titan now pounds across the wall of A. Maxwell’s house. I’ll try and find some snaps. If you want a unicorn or similar beast for your garden, I’m your man.

  It’s been pouring here some of the
time, and terribly cold, which gave poor Joan a bit of a surprise when she got back. But today it is winter Greece at its best: the gulf of Euboea sweeping away to the shore of Boeotia bright blue sea covered with white horses, and on the mainland, the soaring and glittering spikes of snow-covered Parnassus. A caïque tosses across these waves, hauling in its net, and a million gulls wheel round it in a private snowstorm; and the fish leap from the narrowing corral of the net only to vanish down these airborne red lanes. Dolphins may surface at any moment.

  Joan was told by Robin Ironside [3] that he was invited to the Droghedas’ box at Covent Garden, and his heart was in his boots at the gloom and hopelessness of everyone, when you suddenly appeared rather late, and changed everything, as if the Spirit of Spring had suddenly blown into that wilting company. Rather nice?

  It is awful, not writing such an age. This is really bread upon the waters, to learn all about you: and a happy Christmas darling Diana, and 1,000 fond hugs & love from

  Paddy x x x

  P.S. Also from Joan.

  P.P.S. Where’s Iris? Do please send me news about all.

  P.P.P.S. Who got the Duff prize? [4] I hate missing the only party I like.

  [1] See previous letter.

  [2] A play on words, deriving from Gregory’s quip to Augustine about the English slave boys: ‘Non Angli, sed Angeli.’

  [3] Robin Ironside (1912–65), painter, curator, writer, illustrator and designer.

  [4] The Duff Cooper Prize, awarded annually since 1956 for works of non-fiction. PLF had won it for Mani in 1959. The winner in 1963 was Aileen Ward, for her biography of John Keats.

  Almost a quarter of a century after writing the letter printed below, Paddy paid tribute to Aymer Maxwell in an obituary published in the Daily Telegraph. ‘He was a sensitive plant, and the smaller the company, the happier he was.’ Though he was shy and formal at first, ‘his flair for the comic and the absurd could make tears flow, and with his kindness and hesitation, his cumulative backlog of shared laughter is certainly one of the things his friends will most miss.’ His house on the steep shores of Euboea, ‘with its pine forest and the ghost of Mt Parnassus beyond a sweep of sea’ was ‘the background for much reading and late nights and endless talk . . .’ Like Paddy, Maxwell liked to surround himself with books, and could recite whole pages by heart. It was he who came up with the line from Louis MacNeice that became the title ‘A Time of Gifts’ – ‘he put me forever in his debt’.

  To Aymer Maxwell

  27 July 1964

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  Greece

  Dear Aymer,

  It was simply maddening to discover at the Olympic Palace, [1] when I got there on Thursday night, that you had been and gone the day before. I had been hoping, as the plane left the firmament from Paris, that I might strike lucky and lure you to a Tourkolimano [2] banquet. I dashed here in a rush, having heard that the elusive owner of the neighbouring, coveted plot with the water next door to ours, was here. Of course he is not, but may loom later; so I could have helped poor Joan drive out the vast Peugeot 404 station wagon, loaded with emigrants’ gear, tents, entrenching tools etc. She must be bowling along the Adriatic coast by now, arriving here in a week or so. I’m making a desperate attempt to decree a rustic pleasure dome [3] à la Katounia meanwhile, to have somewhere to overflow from our two Bedouin tents, until we know our fate about where, ultimately, to build. It will be a great blow if we don’t get the Naboth’s vineyard [4] next door, though what we have already got is lovely by any normal standards. We feel rather like two trappers about to pitch camp in the Yukon. Nothing but limestone, thistles, bushes and thorns now run riot under the olive trees where our future mansion (Doubting Castle? Blandings? Gatherum? Headlong Hall? No. 2, The Pines?) will one day soar like an emanation. Thank heavens there are excellent masons, lots of lovely stone as fissile as gorgonzola, old tiles from ruined houses, slabs etc. All one needs. I plan to assemble a jackdaw’s heap of all this during the next few days: rather fun.

  You must try and sail up this gulf in Dirk Hatterick [5] sometimes (even if all the prices go up in this primitive hamlet as a result). Will you be at Katounia for the next month or so, or away in the archipelago? It would be lovely to escape from our commitments here for a day or two, should you be invadeable. Joan and I walked right along Hadrian’s Wall a month ago, with Robin Fedden and Diana Campbell-Gray. [6] It was wonderful and very impressive, ending with a swoop south and a luxurious Chatsworth recovery sojourn; then wild shopping in London and an all too short Paris moment (where I left Joan); and here. I pine for news of developments on all the many fronts in the Katounia sector. Please give my greetings to all in their degree, and to all at the Taverna. No meatballs here, alas, tell Panayiota. How did G’s confrontation with his Pyrenean love go? [7] I do hope they hadn’t grown out of each other.

  No more for the moment, except we must all contrive to meet soon here, in Katounia or in Athens. I wonder how all the slab-laying in your garden went? It’s avga matia [fried eggs with tomatoes] time.

  Yours ever

  Paddy

  SCENE: A club. A clubman slumbers.

  VOICES (Pianissimo): We are the boys that make no noise. . .

  CLUBMAN (Waking abruptly): Who are?

  TWO TALLBOYS AND A DUMB WAITER: We are, sir.

  CLUBMAN (Relieved ): Thank heavens! You did give me a start! (dozes off again)

  P.S. Would you be impressed if I told you I was elected to Whites [8] last month? No? I feared as much.

  [1] An Athens hotel.

  [2] A small harbour close to the port of Piraeus, known for its seafood tavernas.

  [3] Cf. Kubla Khan: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .’

  [4] Naboth’s vineyard was coveted by Ahab, who was incited by his wife Jezebel to have Naboth executed. Ahab was rebuked by Elijah for his action.

  [5] AM’s yacht, named after the smuggler Dirk Hatteraick in Scott’s novel Guy Mannering (1815).

  [6] Diana Campbell-Gray (1909–92), née Cavendish, first married to the politician Robert Boothby, later Lord Boothby. Her second husband was Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. Ian Douglas Campbell-Gray. Later she would divorce him and marry Viscount Gage.

  [7] Aymer’s brother, Gavin; this sentence may refer to his beloved Pyrenean mountain dog.

  [8] White’s, the oldest and generally considered the most exclusive gentlemen’s club in London.

  The magazine Holiday was willing to commission another article from Paddy, apparently undeterred by his failure to produce ‘The Pleasures of Walking’. This offered an opportunity to visit Rumania, for the first time since before the war – and, more important, to be reunited with Balasha, whom he had last seen more than a quarter of a century earlier, though they had been in contact by letter. Her life since then had been hard. The Cantacuzène estates had been confiscated by the Communist regime. After trying and failing to escape from Rumania in 1947, Balasha, together with her sister Pomme and her brother-in-law Constantin, had been evicted from Băleni, with only fifteen minutes’ notice, and resettled, first in Bucharest, and then in the town of Pucioasa, where they shared an attic studio. Although it was dangerous for them to be seen with a foreigner, they agreed to meet Paddy.

  This letter was written before his visit. Paddy was nervous about what he would find. Five years before, he had plucked up his courage to ask the Greek foreign minister if he might use his influence to help Balasha come to the West, as he explained in a letter to Debo Devonshire. ‘She was over ten [sixteen] years older than me when I was twenty – so still must be! – which means over fifty-five (-six since last week). There was a faint chance of her getting out two years ago, but she didn’t want to, because, after prison for two years (for trying to escape) and living in utter hardship as a pauper for fifteen years in forced residence & little to eat in a remote village, she said she dreaded seeing anyone again – painfully thin, teeth and hair dropping out fast. It’s too awful.
Poor Balasha! But I’m sure something could be done about all this, and thank heavens, there are several old friends who will cough up something to begin with. And indeed go on. She’s a painter. She always adored Greece, and would probably want to settle here. How wonderful it would be if she did make it! We haven’t met for twenty-two years. She used to be so beautiful.’ A friend who had succeeded in getting out of Rumania had told Paddy that, ‘in spite of all these calamities, she’s quite unchanged in character, just as funny and intelligent and charming as ever’ (In Tearing Haste, pages 80–3).

  To Balasha Cantacuzène

  20 April 1965

  13 Chester Row, SW1

  Darling B,

  I’m so dreadfully sorry that you haven’t heard from me before this. I wrote a very long letter about a month ago, or more, at the same time that I sent the parcel, and I suppose it must have gone astray as the parcel very nearly did, because of my idiotic mistake about the address. It’s too sad! I do hope it turns up in the end. But never mind; with any luck I’ll be seeing you soon (if it’s not a nuisance, that is!), and I’ll be able to tell you everything by word of mouth. I leave for Germany, the source of the Danube, in three or four days’ time, to write a very long article about the history of the river for an American magazine, and will follow its course from Donaueschingen to the Delta, which takes me along a lot of the route of my early journey, and above all, to Rumania! I’m terrifically excited, and above all at the chance of seeing you all. I adored getting your marvellous letters (including Pomme’s note) and also one from Ins. [1] What a pity about mine. There is no chance of my getting an answer before I leave. The best thing is to write to me in Vienna, ℅ Sachers Hotel. (Why not? I won’t stay at that lordly establishment, but they would keep letters if labelled ‘to await arrival’.) I’ll write to you from there when I’ll know when I will be getting to Buc, [2] where I’ll write to Ins at once. Do let me know if there is anything I can bring that might be a help; nothing very bulky, as I’m travelling light, and I can send anything larger you need by parcel later – pullovers etc.